Not as much as you might think.

THE gold medals that will be awarded in London this year will be the biggest and heaviest handed out at any summer Olympics. At 400 grams (14 ounces), the equivalent of having a large tin of baked beans hanging round your neck, they will be more than twice as heavy as the average of the previous five games, and almost 17 times heavier than at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm.

On the other hand, the 1912 games were the last one where gold medals were made entirely of gold. Now they consist mainly of silver with a thin coat of gold. Winners in London are advised not to bite too hard on their medals, as they will have a gold content of only about 1.5%. Host cities’ organising committees decide the exact design and composition of medals but the International Olympic Committee sets certain rules: gold medals must have a 92.5% minimum silver content and contain at least six grams of gold. In London, copper will make up the rest.

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Taking the lift could be the least memorable part of your journey to work, but Dr Lee Gray of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte has made it his business to scrutinise this overlooked form of public transportation. People refer to him as “the Elevator Guy”.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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A Tunisian children’s magazine “Kaws Kouzah” has recently published a detailed step-by-step instruction of how to make a Molotov cocktail.

The piece, published under the “knowledge corner” subsection, contained a detailed instruction on the assembly of the deadly mix.  The article, employing colorful illustrations, read a “Molotov cocktail – is a home-made incendiary weapon which consists of a glass bottle and a folded cloth dipped in a flammable liquid – oil, alcohol, petrol.”

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?

Paul Miller discovers that there is life offline.

If you’ll recall, there was a time I could not mail things. But now I can mail things. I mail renewal slips for magazines, insurance claim forms, self-addressed stamped envelopes requesting photos of my new nephew, personal letters to close friends, personal letters to new friends.

Perhaps I ought to change this blog to a newsletter. That would certainly keep out the riff-raff….

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The Obama administration’s unraveling story of the deadly September 11 attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya has not finished unraveling. A State Department official yesterday confirmed that there was no mob outside the Benhazi compound prior to the Al Qaeda attack that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others. And a former security officer at the embassy told Congress that officials on the ground had spent months prior to the attack requesting more protection for the site.

The President wouldn’t lie to us, would he. Apparently he would.

The Secretary of State wouldn’t lie to us, would she? Well, she is a Clinton….

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 A man dressed in a bulletproof vest and fire-resistant pants was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport after a smoke grenade, gas mask, leg irons and other weapons were discovered in his luggage.

Hey, be prepared, you know?

Steve Sailer is never afraid to ask the discomforting questions.

So what could be more obviously important to America’s future than the quantity and quality of births?

And yet while newspapers run routine articles on the quantity of births, there is negligible coverage of the quality.

On the face of it, this is rather strange because most other aspects of 21st-century American culture are obsessed with quality over quantity. Tiger Mothers, for instance, aren’t impressed that Arizona State has more students than Princeton. Nor does anybody win at fantasy football by having the most players on their roster.

And what does that mean for the rest of us?

One insight is found in the opening scene of the Bush Era’s signature film, Idiocracy. Sitting next to her husband Trevor (138 IQ), Carol (141 IQ) explains, “There’s no way we could have a child now, not with the market the way it is.” Meanwhile, Clevon (84 IQ) has impregnated much of his trailer park.

When home prices increase much faster than income, the prudent abstain from family formation. In contrast, the spurious prosperity of a debt bubble appears to ignite the animal spirits of the less thoughtful.

In other words, the facts of life on the ground encourage low quality people to reproduce and high quality people not. Marxists coined a term for it: ‘proletariat’, those whose only product is offspring.

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Michelle Dunaj says screeners checked under bandages from recent surgeries and refused to give her a private search when she requested one.

Dunaj, who is dying of leukemia, carried a large amount of prescription drugs through Sea-Tac to head to Hawaii for what would be one of the last trips of her life.

Of course, they wouldn’t dare do that to somebody wearing a burqa.

A machine couldn’t get a reading on her saline bags, so a TSA agent forced one open, contaminating the fluid she needs to survive.

She says agents also made her lift up her shirt and pull back the bandages holding feeding tubes in place. Dunaj needs those tubes because of organ  failure.

Yet another reason not to fly until they get rid of this shit.

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The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack on ninth-grader Malala Yousafzai, who officials said was shot in the head by at least one gunman who approached a school bus in Mingora, a city in the scenic Swat valley in the country’s northwest.

Yousafzai was flown by helicopter to a military hospital in Peshawar, where officials said a bullet was lodged near her spine. Surgeons were unable to operate immediately because of swelling in her skull.

My, what peaceful friendly people! Wouldn’t you just like to have some for your neighbors?

“She considers President Obama as her ideal. Malala is the symbol of the infidels and obscenity,” Ihsan said.

It’s great to see that President Obama has restored America’s reputation in the world after all of the enmity generated by that evil George W Bush. Wouldn’t we be in a sorry pickle if he hadn’t been elected?

UPDATE:

The Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) which attacked National Award Peace winner Malala Yousafzai on Tuesday have said that they will target her again if she survives because she was a “secular-minded lady”.

Well, we certainly can’t have that.

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 A set of “master keys” to the infrastructure of New York City popped up on eBay last month, leaving many public commentators and city officials alike concerned for the safety of the metropolis.

The thing I find amusing is that the blog post (echoing the newspaper article) published a convenient photograph showing the keys and a legend describing what they do.

Wouldn’t it be fun to make a set for yourself? The two Yale keys appear to be standard models. From the published specs and the photograph it wouldn’t be at all difficult to create a set with the proper measurements from metal stock using appropriate tools (utter the magic work ‘Dremel’….).

I wonder whether any of this occurred to the person who wrote the blog post? Or the newspaper article?

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Why not? It makes as much sense as whatever it is Ben Bernanke is doing … if, indeed, he is doing anything at all.

I’d rather have a dollar coin with Bilbo’s face on it than whoever is the feminist-icon-of-the-moment.

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1. The economy is in the toilet, and the Democrats are repeatedly pulling the flush lever.

2. Our civilization faces an existential threat (as it has for the last 1400 years) from an aggressively expansionist oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion, and our government is treating it as if it were a skin rash.

3. Our political system is so arranged that the surest way to get elected is to be more narcissistic and corrupt than your opponent.

What is the chief focus of the Libertarian Presidential candidate? The ‘war on weed’ — as if there were people out there who will certainly die unless they are allowed to smoke cannabis.

Tom Clancy once said that the reason truth is stranger than fiction is because fiction has to be believable.

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Unless the Department of Energy gets involved, then it could take forever.

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 “The younger deaf community doesn’t use these old signs because of a clear process of political correctness.”

Control language and you control thought. We can’t have people thinking — or saying — improper things, now can we?

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A New Hampshire judge has ruled that students in New Hampshire can vote there despite being unable to prove residency in the state.

Even though the college vote for Obama has diminished, this was a victory for liberals.  In a state which is expected to be close, the student vote could make a difference.

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Soldiers were ordered not to open fire on Taliban fighters planting mines in case they disturb local people, it has been claimed.

U.S. military chiefs ordered troops to exercise ‘courageous constraint’ and even warned them they could be charged with murder if they shot any Taliban without permission from above.

No wonder we’re losing.

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Perhaps they’ll think better of it next time.

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Their call came following an outcry over the gang-rape and subsequent suicide of a 16 year old girl, Sharmila, in Sacchakhera village, Haryana, close to the capital New Delhi. According to relatives, she was gang-raped by neighbours, while members of a neighbour’s family watched, including a local policeman. Several of them have been arrested but the policeman has been reported missing.

Shortly after the attack, the girl poured kerosene on her body and set fire to herself. She was taken to a local hospital which declined to treat her, and died shortly after reaching another.

Because, of course, it would just be too much effort to create a society in which 16-year-old girls didn’t get raped. Who has time for that?

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 An unnamed man who was paid to slaughter civilians in Darfur will remain in the UK indefinitely because a British judge has ruled his life would be in danger if he returned to Sudan.

Of course. The fact that Britain no longer has the death penalty means that it has to impose that same decision on wherever crimes are committed, if the perpetrator has the good sense to come to Britain before he is caught.

1. Thank God you don’t live in Britain, a country where criminals have more rights than  victims.
2. Without eternal vigilance, it could happen here — and already is, in Democrat-run places like California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and wherever fine racial preferences are sold.

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About 200 Occupy Oakland activists held a march which turned into a roving vandalism spree through downtown. Billed as a protest against the war in Afghanistan, protesters smashed the windows of banks, businesses and BMW’s along their route. Marchers also smashed glass doors at City Hall.

Of course! Random acts of vandalism by low-rent young slackers will convince our government to get out of Afghanistan far more effectively than will our having lost 2000 highly (and expensively) trained troops with no apparent result! Why didn’t we think of that before?

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

There’s a broader, ugly truth that as the last traces of purple fade from the electoral map, whoever wins will have little reason to take care of much of the country that rejected them.

At least since the dissolving of the “solid South” in the late ’50s and early ’60s, both parties have competed to extend their reach to virtually every region. As recently as 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton could compete in the South, winning several states in the mid-South and even in the heart of Dixie, including Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky, and Tennessee. President Obama has about as much chance of winning these states this year as Abraham Lincoln did in 1860—giving him little reason to consider them in a second term.

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The USDA is now touting “government-approved” school lunches as a “model” for the family dinner menu. The Obama administration is informing Americans, yet again, that the government knows what is best, and we probably can’t serve a decent meal when left to our own devices. So, the USDA will help us out by moving in with the idea that dinner should be modeled after the “healthy” food the government is already serving for lunch in the public institutions we call school.

This is the same ‘progressive’ fascist mindset that moved government teachers to punish Indian kids for speaking their own language rather than English — all for their own good, you understand.

Indeed, if this were being done to any ethnic group other than Middle-Class White Kids, the government would be the first to go all multi-culti Civil-Rights-suit on their asses.

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Western industrial civilisation is eating itself stupid. We are living in the Age of Food. Cookery programmes bloat the television schedules, cookbooks strain the bookshop tables, celebrity chefs hawk their own brands of weird mince pies (Heston Blumenthal) or bronze-moulded pasta (Jamie Oliver) in the supermarkets, and cooks in super-expensive restaurants from Chicago to Copenhagen are the subject of hagiographic profiles in serious magazines and newspapers. Food festivals (or, if you will, “Feastivals”) are the new rock festivals, featuring thrilling live stage performances of, er, cooking.

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Thousand of tin-foil hats go in the trash….

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Shorter Warren: “I felt Cherokee, and feeling is being.”

Look: they have DNA testing now. Put up or shut up.

He’s got a point.

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When even a left-wing rag like Wired notices that foods are one day bad, next day good, well….

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Some of the higher fees and higher unbanked numbers surely is due to the recession.  But some of the rise in the number of unbanked and underbanked consumers is directly the result of the rising bank fees, which has pushed marginal consumers out of the banking system and deterred bringing in new consumers.  And the rising bank fees are primarily the result of Dodd-Frank, the Durbin Amendment’s price controls on debit card interchange fees, and new rules on overdraft fees.  Of course, both of these phenomena were entirely predictable (and predicted).

The problem with attempts to constrain the workings of economic markets through government regulations rarely work as intended, because markets almost always find a way around them. This is because markets arise when two people want to trade, a fact that politicians and their entourages never seem to grasp intellectually. If two people want to trade, they will find a way to trade, whatever the law might say; and those who make laws need to take this into account if their laws are to work, which they never do.

It’s really depressing living in a country run by stupid people. Unfortunately, that appears to be almost all of them.

Nicholas Kristof thinks that life is a kindergarten, where Teacher is in charge and the supreme achievement is Play Nicely With Others.

The problem: Reality isn’t a place in which all of the toys are already provided and the chief worry is a fair ‘distribution’.

The tragic flaw of Kristof and his fellow Crustians is that they all read Rawls in college and actually believed it.

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Border Patrol Agent Nicholas Ivie was murdered near Naco, AZ while investigating a tripped sensor. He and two other agents were on horseback, because the area is federal land and no vehicles are allowed on wilderness lands.

The environment is apparently more important to our government than allowing our Border Patrol agents easy access to known smuggling lands. It also makes them open targets without an easy getaway.

Of course. Law enforcement can break down your door and trash your house and pistol-whip your kids because they got the wrong apartment on a drug bust, but God forbid they use vehicles in federal wilderness lands.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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What does it do? Make Democrats move somewhere else, as they keep threatening to do?

A review.

Goldsmith also presents two theses. The first is that pushback against Bush’s anti-terrorism policies produced a consensus about what tools the President can use in fighting terrorism, which explains why President Obama retained so many of Bush’s policies as they stood in 2009. The second is that we should be relatively sanguine about the process that produced the current consensus, and about that consensus itself.

…

“Lawfare” refers to the relatively recent phenomenon of law and lawyers affecting the conduct of war. Lawyers, Goldsmith shows, are now at the heart of the military decision-making process. They not only review operational plans in advance, but also participate in the field, providing counsel to commanders regarding proper targets, for example.

…

Goldsmith finds that “lawfare” constraints have impeded our military operations and increased the number of U.S. casualties. They even enabled Mullah Omar, the leader of the Taliban, to escape after a lawyer dissuaded the military from striking a building because civilians were probably present. As Goldsmith explains, “[S]urrounded by law and under the gaze of many potential retroactive critics, it is entirely rational for soldiers up and down the chain of command to hesitate before acting.” Such hesitation is sometimes incompatible with waging effective warfare.

Oh Noes!

Electric cars might pollute much more than petrol or diesel-powered cars, according to new research.

Imagine that.

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Bees at a cluster of apiaries in northeastern France have been producing honey in mysterious shades of blue and green, alarming their keepers who now believe residue from containers of M&M’s processed at a nearby biogas plant is the cause.

…

As for the M&M’s-infused honey, union head Frieh said it might taste like honey, but there the comparison stopped.

“For me, it’s not honey. It’s not sellable.”

There it is. Faced with something new, the French panic; in America this would be seen as a business opportunity, and this varicolored honey advertised as the Next New Thing.

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Plans for Titanic II, a replica of the ill-fated ship, will be unveiled in New York in December, it has been announced.

Any resemblance to Obama’s economic plan for a potential second term is purely coincidental.

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Earlier in the week, Arutz Sheva reported on a large Arab riot that greeted Jews who attempted to visit the Temple Mount on the first day of Chol Hamo’ed, the intermediate days of Sukkot. “When we went up on the Temple Mount, we were greeted with cries of ‘Allah is Great,’” said Asaf Fried, one of the members of a group that visited the Mount Tuesday. “The police again did nothing, even towards the end of the visit when the Arabs really came close to us and blocked our exit, shouting, ‘We will expel the Jews in blood and fire and will butcher Jews.’ The police still did nothing,” and the group of Jews escaped without harm, Fried said.

What peaceful, happy people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?

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My, what peaceful, pleasant people. Don’t you just wish you had some for neighbors?

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 “The fusion fuel we’re focusing on is deuterium [a stable isotope of hydrogen] and Li6 [a stable isotope of the metal lithium] in a crystal structure,” Txchnologist quotes team member and aerospace engineering Ph.D. candidate Ross Cortez saying. “That’s basically dilithium crystals we’re using.” Let’s pause and savor that for a moment. Dilithium crystals. Awesome.

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The Dear Leader passes through Flyover Country. You may think you’re there to study, but this is more important.

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Worth noting that this is about serving customers by helping them avoid high shipping costs — not something every company cares about. Notice, too, that Teenage Engineering explicitly encourages people to print as many replacement parts as they want — no attempt to limit this to “one-offs” through stupid licensing agreements, for example.

Check it out.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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After all, what sane person would want a job that destroys your privacy, makes it impossible for you to go out on the street, subjects your family to intrusive media scrutiny, forces you to watch everything you say, and drives some people to want to take a shot at you? Apparently someone who feels that the power that comes with the office is worth the attendant indignities.

“Great men are almost always bad men,” Lord Acton famously said. “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.” Indeed, good men rarely run for president. And when they do, they rarely win. An honest man stands no chance against a Lyndon Johnson or a Richard Nixon. Yes, one slips through the cracks now and then. We could use Grover Cleveland’s restraint in handling the economic crisis today. I have a particular fondness for Calvin Coolidge, who conspicuously lacked the pathological need for attention that characterizes most officeholders.

And, of course, I’ve been saying for years that our political system is set up to encourage corruption and make sure that the people who get elected are the wrong sort of people to be in public office.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Academics who study Islamic antisemitism are risking career advancement and younger scholars are shying away from the subject as a result, said Montreal native Charles A. Small, who headed a Yale University program in antisemitism until it was shut down last year amid controversy.

…

“If you are critical of a reactionary social movement, somehow you are a racist, a neo-con fascist,” said Small. “The academy in the West is permeated [with this attitude.]”

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For Obama and the left, the law is merely a suggestion for what they can do. Can’t get something through Congress? Simply issue an executive order. Can’t get an appointment through the Senate? Simply “declare” the Senate in recess and appoint away. Act now and let the judges sort it out later.

For the past few weeks, several defense contractors made it clear they would have to send out layoff notices to thousands of workers due to automatic budget cuts set to take effect in January. The cuts are triggered by the debt ceiling “deal” hatched last year. The layoff notices are required under federal law.

Understandably, the Obama Administration was panicked by this. The notices would hit in the last month of his reelection campaign and have a huge impact in the critical swing state of Virginia, home to hoards of defense contractors. What to do? Simple. Ignore the law.

Yesterday, Lockheed Martin, a massive contractor, announced it had reached a “deal” with the White House and would not send out the legally required layoff notices. The Obama Administration had “interpreted” the law and found it would be “inappropriate” to send out the layoff notices.

More amazingly, the White House promised to pay any fines or penalties that might be leveled against the company for violating federal law. Read that again.

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About 60 percent of physicians would quit today if they had the chance, according to new research.

The Physicians Foundation commissioned the national survey of 13,575 doctors.

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Darwin Award nominee.

I suppose it’s too much to ask the admission committee why they let this guy in….