Read it.

Not that that’s really news.

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In America today, an expanding network of surveillance cameras tracks our bank deposits, our shopping expeditions, and our workplace trysts in the supply closet. When we venture online, hundreds of companies diligently note the websites we consume, the files we download, and the comments we make. Our smartphones are even worse stool pigeons than our computers, constantly keeping tabs on our precise geographic coordinates. If you grow weary of such oppressive attention, if you long for a little Waldenesque solitude outside the crosshairs of our panoptic culture, there is still one place you can go to get away from it all: the borderlands of California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.

Read it.

Manufacturing fetishism – the idea that manufacturing is the central economic activity and everything else is somehow subordinate – is deeply ingrained in human thinking. The perception that only tangible objects represent real wealth and only physical labour real work was probably formed in the days when economic activity was the constant search for food, fuel and shelter.

Karl Marx, we’re lookin’ at you.

Physical labour incorporated in manufactured goods is a cheap commodity in a globalised world. But the skills and capabilities that turn that labour into products of extraordinary complexity and sophistication are not. The iPhone is a manufactured product, but its value to the user is as a crystallisation of services.

William Jacobson fisks Nicholas Kristof of the NYT (granted, not a high bar).

I just visited relatives on Long Island for Thanksgiving, and the stumps of downed trees were everywhere.  There was a failure — most likely of prophylactic tree trimming, lack of emergency planning by LIPA, and failure to coordinate outside help – but none of that has anything to do with federal spending on the national grid.

Moreover, a back-up generator is like insurance, there when you need it, not a substitute for the grid.  Why would someone like Kristof consider it a bad thing for individuals to self-insure against the next Sandy?

But most of all, where is the link between marginal tax rates and (a) the percentage of total taxes actually paid by top income earners, which has risen in the last 50 years, and (b) the electric grid.  Assuming the false arguendo that higher marginal rates would have resulted in more tax revenue, where is the evidence it would have been spent on the national electric grid, rather than pork projects and giveaways for political constituencies?

The column goes on with a long list of similar non-sequiturs involving police services and gated communities, schools systems and private schools, and so on.

Completely ignored is that government spending is going through the roof, including on police and schools, yet we have little to show for it.  The answer for Kristof, more of the same.

Read it.

Don’t know whether this stuff is available in the U.S.

Read it.

CONFIRMATION as to how seriously some companies are taking additive manufacturing, popularly known as 3D printing, came on November 20th when GE Aviation, part of the world’s biggest manufacturing group, bought a privately owned company called Morris Technologies. This is a small precision-engineering firm employing 130 people in suburban Cincinnati, Ohio. Morris Technologies has invested heavily in 3D printing equipment and will be printing bits for a new range of jet engines.Morris Technologies uses a number of 3D printing machines, all of which work by using a digital description of an object to build it in physical form, layer by layer. Among the 3D printing technologies used by Morris Technologies is laser sintering. This involves spreading a thin layer of metallic powder onto a build platform and then fusing the material with a laser beam. The process is repeated until an object emerges. Laser sintering is capable of producing all kinds of metal parts, including components made from aerospace-grade titanium.

Chip Can Blooms Into A Bowl

The Shot Flask

How to Survive a Horror Movie

Can Grip

Finger Sporks

minibru Coffee Mug

Radiation Detecting Watch

Anti-Mosquito Air Conditioner

And how did that work out for them?

Read it.

But is there any loud clamor about this sexual imbalance? Of course not.

Now, imagine the outcry if there were a courthouse that was 100% male … you’d be hearing it in Chicago.

Read it.

One caveat: Rates go up as income goes up — but only to a point. Once you hit a certain magic number among super-high earners, your tax rates start to fall slightly.

…

So the millionaires who pay the highest average tax rates in America are those who make between $1.5 million and $2 million. That $2 million could be called the “Top Turning Point” on the income ladder, where rates reverse.

Which just demonstrates what I’ve always said: Really rich people just love high tax rates on income, because it doesn’t bother them all that much; the people whose face it stomps are the semi-rich who they want to keep off of the top shelf.

Read it.

The U.S. military made impressive gains on the battlefield and covertly in countering Islamist terrorists since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But the military and government at large so far have failed to strike the religiously motivated ideology behind al Qaeda and other Islamic extremists.

That’s the conclusion of a new book, “Fighting the Ideological War: Winning Strategies From Communism to Islamism, by a group of specialists urging the U.S. government to apply the lessons of the Cold War defeat of the Soviet Union to Islamist terrorism.

The problem for the U.S. government is “political correctness” toward Islam that has the prevented accurate identification of the enemy’s threat doctrine. For example, the Obama administration’s insistence on calling the Fort Hood, Texas, terrorist attack by Army Maj. Nidal M. Hasan “workplace violence” is crippling efforts to strike at the ideology Mr. Gorka calls “global jihadism” – defined as both the violent and nonviolent theory and practice of imposing Islamic supremacy globally.

“Although we have proven our capacity in the last 10 years kinetically to engage our enemy at the operational and tactical level with unsurpassed effectiveness, we have not even begun to take the war to al Qaeda at the strategic level of counter-ideology, to attack it at its heart – the ideology of global jihad,” he states.

The West won the Cold War by realizing that the enemy wasn’t just Communists but Communism as an ideology. Anti-Communist strategy involved not only countering the aggressive activities of Communists but also by countering the ideology of Communism by education and persuasion. (Even then, the victory was only partial: Communist proclivities in our political, communications, and educational establishments are stronger now than when the Iron Curtain fell.)

The problem nowadays is that people aren’t yet willing to admit that the problem isn’t just Islamists but Islam itself, a totalitarian ideology that is just as hostile to our civilization and way of life as Communism ever was. The fact that Islam masquerades as a religion has gotten it a pass from our multi-culti Kumbaya-singing every-way-is-as-good-as-every-other-way ruling class, but eventually they’re going to wake up to the fact that just because an ideology looks like a religion doesn’t mean that it isn’t our mortal enemy. Westerners realized it in times past when the Turks were on their way to Vienna, and they will eventually come to realize it again; it’s just a matter of time, as things get worse and worse and worse while Muslims rub their noses into the dirt year after year after year.

Eventually enough of their sons will get beheaded, enough of their daughters will get gang-raped, and enough of their children will get blown up; they will have to face the fact that, hey, we live in the Dar al-Harb, and if we don’t want to wind up dhimmi-slaves in the Dar al-Islam, we’re going to have to do a little work.

When there are two incompatible sides to an issue, if one side wants a war, a war there will be; and if only one side is fighting that war, then that side will win.

Wakey-wakey!

Read it. And watch the video.

A sail-powered boat has cracked 100 km/h for the first time, thanks to a ‘Wing-Sail’ designed by a British consultancy that specialises in wind turbine design.

Read it.

Some things never change.

After one of the imagined helicopter landings, when a clumsy recruit dropped his rifle, the sergeant walked up to him and simply held out his fist, against which the recruit proceeded to bang his head.

Read it.

ARISTOMENIS, Greece—For decades, Panagiotis Triantafyllopoulos worked in Athens as a printer and graphic designer, most recently making slick packaging for multinational drug companies.

Now the 54-year-old spends his days gathering firewood, tending chickens and preparing for the olive harvest in this hillside village in southwestern Greece.

Unable to find a job more than two years after he was laid off, Mr. Triantafyllopoulos felt he had little choice but to return to his birthplace here this past summer and try to survive on what he can glean from his family’s small plot of land.

“I’m a nouveau poor,” said Mr. Triantafyllopoulos, who went to Athens as a teenager in 1975, part of a wave of young people moving from Greece’s agricultural hinterland to its cities. “It was a difficult decision to come back. We had dreams of something bigger.”

The future of Detroit, perhaps? Maybe Los Angeles?

Read it.

Finding clothes that fit just right is surprisingly tough for a sizable amount of the population, especially when shopping online. E-tailers have used everything from 3D scanners to mailable mannequins to ensure that customers find the best sizes for them, and the truly picky have probably had a friend break out a tape measure to get some exact numbers. A whole team of researchers is looking the simplify this process however, and put the power to easily get the right size at your fingertips. A group, including developers from the London College of Fashion, and experts from the University of Surrey and Guided, have come together to turn practically any camera into a virtual tape measure, including your smartphone or webcam. Since the image you capture has to be taken in your underwear, we wouldn’t suggest doing this in public, though. All you have to do is fire up the software, take the pic and punch in your height — the computer does the rest. With funding from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council the coalition is working to bring the system to market, with hopes of launching within the next two years.

Read it.

Not bad for a congenital liar and sexual predator. Who says crime doesn’t pay? You just have to be slick enough.

Read it. And watch the video.

Goodness, that didn’t take long.

I think Republican consultants are mostly very stupid. I think they have no education. I think they have no sense of history. … If I throw away African Americans, and then I throw away Latinos, and then I throw away suburban women, and then I throw away people under 40, and then I throw away everything north of Philadelphia — there’s a morning where Republicans can’t get to a majority.

— Newt Gingrich, 2007

Read it.

Six years ago, we wrote about Andy Kessler’s fascinating book, The End of Medicine, which got me to totally rethink how nearly every society approaches healthcare today. Even though the book is years old, I recommend it frequently. The key issue is that we still tend to treat healthcare as something driven by two key industries: pharmaceuticals and insurance. However, the book is based around the idea that, in pretty much every other industry, technology tends to (1) get better and (2) get cheaper. But that doesn’t happen much with healthcare — and that’s because it’s all about insurance and drugs. That means it’s really about treating the symptoms, rather than actually trying to prevent problems.

Drugs are incredibly expensive. The reason drugs are incredibly expensive is that government regulations make sure the it costs big bucks and takes a long time before a drug can be sold lawfully. So thank the government.

The reason insurance pays a major role in health care is because during WWII, when there were wage controls imposed by the government, companies had to bid for workers based on fringe benefits — a major one of which was employer-paid medical insurance. This was compounded by the fact that health insurance is a business expense for a business, and hence deductible on its taxes, but not for an individual. So thank the government.

And of course the government is wringing its hands and pissing and moaning that the incredible cost of health care (which it caused) means that we need government-provided health care. So thank the government.

Or maybe not….

Read it.

Only one of 479 DHS employees surveyed by the inspector general’s office was actually able to use the common channel, according to the report. Most of those surveyed—72 percent—didn’t even know the common channel existed. Another 25 percent knew the channel existed but weren’t able to find it; 3 percent were able to find an older common channel, but not the current one.

The investigators also found that more than half of the radios did not have the settings for the common channel programmed into them. Only 20 percent of radios tested had all the correct settings.

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

Of course, as we all know, the real problem is that taxes are too low.

Read it.

Pennsylvania’s Community College of Allegheny County (CCAC) is slashing the hours of 400 adjunct instructors, support staff, and part-time instructors to dodge paying for Obamacare.

“It’s kind of a double whammy for us because we are facing a legal requirement [under the new law] to get health care and if the college is reducing our hours, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said adjunct biology professor Adam Davis.

Guess they ought to have thought about that before they passed the law, huh? (Nah, that trick never works….)

These guys pass these stupid laws, and they assume that everybody will just suck it up and shell out more money without changing their behavior. Our government is stocked with morons.

Read it.

To mimic nature, Sorenson layered a surface with hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings, used a fan to pass air over the surface, and eventually managed to get water to condense. This eventually led to the design of a self-filling water bottle.

Read it.

Just in time for the Thanksgiving travel rush, the Boston Globe has a news article about a surplus store that resells items surrendered by passengers at airport security checkpoints….

The first thing I thought of was the SS troops assigned to pull the gold fillings out of the teeth of the gassed Jews before they went into the crematoria. But that’s me.

Read  it.

I think I have just watched the Church of England commit suicide. It was a very long and very boring process. But at the end of nine hours’ rehearsal of stale arguments made in bad faith the General Synod took a decisive turn into fantasy, or stumbled over its own rules, and failed, by a very small margin, to gain the complicated majorities required to make women bishops.

Well, it had to happen sooner or later, as it eventually will to all ‘Protestant’ bodies. Really, when people 1500 years after the fact decide that they know better than the Apostles and those taught by the Apostles what Christianity is all about, it is inevitable that they will wander off into their own fantasy world and wind up sharing nothing with historical Christianity except the label.

Kinda like ‘gay marriage’ that way. Sorry, folks; terms have histories, and you aren’t allowed to just up and re-do what they mean to fit what’s Hip And Trendy.

The Other McCain is on the case, and it is not a pretty sight.

Gotta say I agree with Stacy’s sentiments here. But it does raise a question: Where do you draw the line? Or, more precisely, what is the exact rationale that would justify firing this particular person for this particular action? I don’t think I see one, other than on a strictly tendentious Who?…Whom? basis.

I don’t know the details, and if this is an incident where she was with a company group and was caught being a jerk, well, that’s one thing. But I get the impression that this was deliberately staged so that she could put it on her Facebook page, and that if she hadn’t done that, no one would have ever known about it.

Stupid? Yeah. Crass? Yeah. Rude, crude, and socially unacceptable? Undoubtedly. Justify getting fired? Well…. I can’t say that I’m comfortable with that. On what basis could that action be distinguished from ‘Hey, you voted against Obama, so you must be a racist, so we’re going to can your ass, because mama don’t allow no racists rednecks around here.’ Eh? Not sure I want to start that particular game.

Read it.

The Service International Employees Union – the same union that will be shutting down traffic around Los Angeles International Airport on Thanksgiving Eve – has admitted that a staffer requested that union members stack a legal petition with fake names to sink it. The petition is the brainchild of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who wants to put a measure revising public service employee union pensions on the ballot.

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

Read it.

Every person in this phot0 except the geek from Canada is entitled to check the ‘black’ box on every form, every application, every place where Affirmative Action reigns.

Oh, Colin Powell’s son Michael? He’s Officially Black too.

Steve Sailer reacts:

 Think of it from the point of view of a college admissions office or an HR Department. They have rules and guidelines about who they can take, but they also know perfectly well that even if Susan Rice’s kids are lazy nimrods, they still want them because they are plugged into the highest levels of the Global Power Elite. They’re connected. Affirmative action gives admissions offices and HR departments an excuse to favor Susan Rice’s children — in the name of Diversity and Fighting Racism — over the children of random unconnected losers.

Lots of people assume that just because it’s absurd and unfair for Susan Rice’s children to get special racial privileges, somebody will organize to take those privileges away. But, the more power quasi-non-whites like Susan Rice get, the harder it will be to take their racial privileges away from them and their descendants unto the seventh generation.

Read it.

I want one of these for my front porch. Trick or Treat! Heh heh heh….

Read it.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

It sounds like something from a bad libertarian parody of government. But it turns out that the Director of the Massachusetts state highway safety agency has a long record of traffic accidents and moving violations. She apparently got the job through political connections, even though she had no relevant expert qualifications for the job.

What’s your guess — Republican? Or Democrat?

Answer: Obviously Democrat, because if she had been a Republican, it would have lead the evening news from her appointment to her inevitable resignation.

Read it.

Last spring, my wife and youngest daughter and I spent a week in California. We were reminded of the extraordinary natural wealth and beauty that were showered on that uniquely blessed state. For a century or so, guided by brilliant private sector leadership, California was a beacon to the world, a land of opportunity such as never had existed in human history. Unimaginable wealth was created. Yet it required only 40 years of liberal governance to bring the whole thing crashing down.

Today, California is the most spectacular failure of our time. Its government is broke. Productive citizens have been fleeing for some years now, selling their homes at inflated prices (until recently) and moving to Colorado, Arizona, Texas and even Minnesota, like one of my neighbors. The results of California’s improvident liberalism have been tragically easy to predict: absurd public sector wage and benefit packages, a declining tax base, surging welfare enrollment, falling economic production, ever-increasing deficits. Soon, California politicians will be looking to less glamorous states for bailout money. Things have now devolved to the point where California leads the nation in poverty….

Read it.

Federal law prohibits the admission of aliens to this country who are “likely at any time to become a public charge.” This is one of many statutes that the scofflaw Obama administration brazenly flouts. Rather than ensuring that immigrants will not become liabilities to the public purse, the Obama administration explicitly lures them to the U.S. with promises of lavish welfare benefits–a policy that is both illegal and perverse. This web site promoting federal welfare benefits, now the largest item in the federal budget, mirrors information that is included in packets given to new arrivals in the U.S.:

From the web page: ‘Government assistance programs can be critically important to the well-being of some immigrants and their families.’

Message: ‘It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!’

Steve Sailer looks at some correlations.

 This suggests a refinement to my basic theory that voting Republican rather than Democratic correlates with belonging to the core rather than to the fringes of American life.

…

In contrast, elite groups who vote less heavily Republican, such as Episcopalians and Jews, tend to find aspiring to belong to the core of America déclassé.

Read it.

It’s not just millionaires and billionaires who are fleeing the economic madness in California. Even cows are starting to depart for greener pastures. That’s right, 400 bovine refugees shuffled off to Kansas just this month, with more expected to follow as over 100 dairy farms in California close their doors.

As we watch the Left Coast economy slide slowly into the sea….

It’s hard to find a government program as insane as the complex web of price supports, market orders, direct payments, diversion programs, herd reductions, import barriers, export subsidies, and stacked-to-the-rafters cheese warehouses that characterize Uncle Sam’s efforts to “rationally manage” the dairy market. If you really want to understand how crony capitalism works to create market conditions only a Soviet commissar could love, take a look at what happens when byzantine federal regulations collide with state interventions.

Can you say ‘Obamacare’? I’m sure you can. Hey, let’s put these guys in charge of our health care system. What could go wrong?

George Will draws attention to one of Obama’s prot0-fascist setups.

There can be unseemly exposure of the mind as well as of the body, as the progressive mind is exposed in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a creature of the labyrinthine Dodd-Frank legislation. Judicial dismantling of the CFPB would affirm the rule of law and Congress’s constitutional role.

The CFPB’s director, Richard Cordray, was installed by one of Barack Obama’s spurious recess appointments when the Senate was not in recess. Vitiating the Senate’s power to advise and consent to presidential appointments is congruent with the CFPB’s general lawlessness.

The CFPB nullifies Congress’s power to use the power of the purse to control bureaucracies because its funding — “determined by the director” — comes not from congressional appropriations but from the Federal Reserve. Untethered from all three branches of government, unlike anything created since 1789, the CFPB is uniquely sovereign: The president appoints the director for a five-year term — he can stay indefinitely, if no successor is confirmed — and the director can be removed, but not for policy reasons.

One CFPB request for $94?million in Federal Reserve funds was made on a single sheet of paper. Its 2012 budget estimated $130?million for — this is the full explanation — “other services.” So it has been hiring promiscuously and paying its hires lavishly: As of three months ago, approximately 60?percent of its then 958 employees were making more than $100,000 a year. Five percent were making $200,000 or more. (A Cabinet secretary makes $199,700.)

Read it.

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

And so is the Congressional Budget Office, which ‘scores’ financial legislation on a ‘static’ basis, as if it would have absolutely no impact on people’s behavior.

And so is Congress, which has this insane notion that it can raise and lower taxes like the water level in a swimming pool, as if it would have absolutely no impact on people’s behavior.

Read it.

Under the current Don’t Mess With The Mouse Copyright Law, the length of a copyright extends to the heat death of the universe. Under the prior law, however, stuff from 1955 (and before) would be coming into the public domain.

Read it.

This could actually be quite entertaining.

Check it out.

Read it.

The Association of Pennsylvania State College and University Faculties has been working without a contract since June 2011. Unions and negotiators for the Pennsylvania state college system have met 40 times but have been unable to reach an agreement.

I am not making this up.

[Recap for the dimwitted: Unions arise when a particular occupation has a skillset that is easily subject to substitution on the part of management because supply vastly exceeds demand, hence collective coercion on the part of workers is the only way to raise (or sustain) their price over what the market-clearing amount would be.]

Think how clever the American higher-education system is. They have arranged it so that they can generate an oversupply of PhDs and thereby drive down the price that they pay for faculty, and the silly buggers pay them to do it, often in the process incurring crippling debt in amounts that an old-time Company Store could only dream about.

Insensitive Politically Incorrect Analogy: ‘Hey, Pedro, for the low, low price of $1000, I’ll be happy to help you sneak a hundred of your relatives over the border so that I’ll never have to pay more than $1.00 an hour for labor ever again. What do you say?’ ‘Gracias, Senor, that is very white of you.’

Isn’t it just.

Read it.

I must confess that I’ve always thought that Williams-Sonoma was a neurological disorder, like Creutzfeldt-Jacob, or perhaps an accounting firm. But I guess I was wrong.

While certain retailers like Hammacher Schlemmer are almost intentionally ludicrous (“Buy this personal hovercraft for $80,000!”), there’s no wink to be found in a Williams-Sonoma catalog. The people at W-S aren’t the least bit self-conscious about getting you to pay $35 for mailed gravy. So I thought I would go through this holiday season’s catalog, which has spent a solid week atop my shitter, and point out some of the more ridiculous items. Because there are people out there who buy this shit. The question is … who? And why? Let’s try to figure that out now.

Down the alimentary canal with gun and camera….

Can you imagine George Washington or Abraham Lincoln doing this? I can’t.

An Informative Chart.

Santa Claus and Liam Neeson: The hidden connection.

Read it.

Got super powers? Better keep ’em under wraps.

Is Stark Enterprises liable for damages caused by CEO Tony Stark in his Iron Man guise? Should a villain stay in jail for murder if the victim later comes back to life, as Ben Grimm (“The Thing”) did a few years back? In the movie “Superman III,” the hero crushes coal into a diamond he gives to Lana Lang. “This iconic gift has become closely associated with the Superman character,” the author writes, “but because we are attorneys we have to ask: Does someone have to pay tax on that?”

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The Chicken Little Movement suffers another disappointment. Poor babies.

Read it.

Besides an increase in freedom and justice, that is.

After Prop 209, graduation rates of minorities increased by 4.4%.

No wonder liberals hate it — fewer minorities dependent on government preference programs. Can’t have that. They might vote for a Republican, and the world would end.

Read it.

I wondered what it was. I guess that’s why none of that stuff ever happens in India.

Good to clear that up.

The Other McCain explains it all to you.

What we are supposed to believe, according to political correctness, is that all problems experienced by homosexuals can be attributed to the hateful bigotry of homophobes. In much the same way, all problems experienced by black people are the result of racism, and all the problems of women are blamed on the oppressive sexist patriarchy. So when we encounter a black lesbian terrorizing her black lesbian ex-girlfriend, this is somewhat difficult for the politically correct to explain. However, if you dare to point out the seeming contradiction — the victims victimizing their fellow victims, without any prompting from straight white male oppressors — the politically correct will say that the mere fact that you noticed this makes you a sexist, racist homophobe. Heads, they win the argument. Tails, you lose. Never argue with a liberal. You’re only wasting your breath.

I predict a bright future collecting unearned benefits from her awesome victim status. Is this a great country, or what?

Read it.

A lesbian requested a manly haircut at a barbershop in Toronto, but was turned down by the Muslim proprietor on religious grounds. Now she has taken her case to — surprise! — the Ontario Human Rights Commission.

The HRC spokesbeing in this news report says that there is no hierarchy of rights, and no one class of right can trump another. But I think she’s wrong: experience has shown that ethnicity trumps women’s rights, gay rights, and all the others. Since Islam has deliberately and deftly converted itself into a “race”, the rights of Muslims trump everything.