Read it.

Boffins investigating a find of ancient stone blades over 70 thousand years old argue that it was possession of advanced ranged weapons – and the organisation to make and use them – which allowed humanity to defeat its early rivals and spread out to conquer the world.

Read it.

The visually stunning field of tilt-shift photography became a fairly big thing in the Web a couple of years ago. It uses a special lens that gives a real-world scene the illusion of being a miniature model.

This looks rather strange, but hey, we have the technology….

John Hinderaker is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I don’t understand why anyone would vote for four more years of unemployment and poverty, but that is what the American people voted for, and that is what they are going to get.

After 50 years of left-wing teachers spending their time on left-wing indoctrination rather than actual education, I’m surprised that he’s surprised.

Obama will now have to reveal his agenda for a second term, heretofore a closely-guarded secret. In particular, what is he going to do about the nation’s $16 trillion debt? Obama’s answer during his first term was “nothing.” His budget, incorporating any number of optimistic assumptions, called for the debt to rise to $20 trillion. I don’t see how Obama can get through his second term without articulating some plan, however half-baked, for dealing with the debt.

I do. He’ll make a lot of mouth-noise but effectively ignore it, just as he did during his first term. So the country goes broke: What’s that to him? He’ll be making Clinton-level money as the Magic Negro, and there are a lot of golf courses he hasn’t hit yet. His daughters will go to Ivy League schools and marry well, like Chelsea Clinton, and he and Michelle will spend their ‘golden years’ in Aspen and Malibu and Martha’s Vinyard and Georgetown.

Tom Smith at The Right Coast has an interesting take:

I really feel that Obama has revealed a bug in our constitutional system. Some would say it’s a feature, but it’s a bug. The idea was (see Federalist Papers) to make it very unlikely that a demagogue could get himself elected by appealing the the lowest passions (e.g., “revenge”, free stuff) of the electorate. This elaborate system was supposed to protect individual rights, including property, among other things. Doesn’t seem to have worked out that way. Turns out that by using, for example, the latest computationally driven techniques, you can micro target voters in very specific places, appeal to their specific desires (“factions” doesn’t even capture it — micro-factions maybe)and get yourself elected, while a whole bunch of other people don’t even vote. Then you spend out the credit of the country to all friends and sundry, and when the lemon is squeezed out, fly off to be an international celebrity. I believe our Framers would have called this a monarchical abuse and a form of corruption of course. It would not baffle them; they would recognize it. It just turns out our system has evolved into something that does not prevent it very well. I realize this account is comically crude but some more sophisticated version of it is, I think, essentially correct. I think what we probably need is some sort of constitutional reform, something that makes us not prone to fiscal implosion via massive rent seeking and benefits-for-votes systems.

Our system has been coming apart ever since the ‘progressives’ captured the government under Teddy Roosevelt. His ‘trust-busting’ created the demagogue-favorable atmosphere that allowed Wilson (with an assist from Teddy’s ego) to become President, and Wilson gave us the constitutional amendments that introduced the federal income tax (an ever-increasing spigot of money that made it profitable to hold federal office) and direct election of Senators (which destroyed a key bulwark of federalism). That power would become more and more concentrated in Washington, and that ‘States’ would become just a money-wasting intermediary layer of bureaucracy, became simply a matter of time.

Unfortunately, I don’t see any effective way of ‘turning the clock back’. Too many profit from the existing system, and too few understand and appreciate that correcting it requires undoing stuff they’ve learned in school were Milestones to Progress, to get it done. We may have to continue on through to the traditional fascist dictatorship and collapse before any opportunity arises to fix things.

Read it.

This is news?

I’m just glad that I don’t have any children to get stuck with the debt that this President and his cronies are going to rack up during the next four years.

Read it.

After a brilliant century and a terrible decade, the United States, in this important election year, has reached a point in its history when the obvious can no longer be denied: The reality of life in America so greatly contradicts the claim — albeit one that has always been exaggerated — to be the “greatest nation on earth,” that even the most ardent patriots must be overcome with doubt.

Even the Germans are noticing.

Read it.

As Stalin said, it doesn’t matter who votes, what matters is who counts the votes.

Read it.

In Pakistan, so many minorities are threatened by homicidal extremists that travelling the country can feel like hopping across an archipelago of communities under varying degrees of siege.

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. And watch the video.

As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney observed yesterday on Twitter, President Barack Obama has secured the endorsement of a well-known crony capitalist: the rap star Jay Z. As a part-owner of the New Jersey Nets basketball team, Jay Z profited at taxpayer expense when the state of New York abused its eminent domain powers to seize privately-owned homes and business and then handed that land over to fellow Nets owner and real estate tycoon Bruce Ratner, who built a new arena for the Nets to call home.

A few months before the state-sanctioned bulldozers came through, Reason.tv visited Freddy’s Bar, one of the many local establishments that was demolished for the economic benefit of folks like Jay Z and Ratner.

Read it.

You know, everybody used to say about Bill Clinton that he was the first African-American president, but I think that Barack Obama is the first gay president.

I cannot disagree.

Read it.

These Inspectors are election officials – again, court appointed — and are reportedly being thrown out by the Head Judges of Elections (these Judges are elected Democrats) .

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

Read it.

Who beat Microsoft and Google billionaires this year as the top contributors to Barack Obama’s re-election campaign? None other than professors up and down the state of California.

Employees and faculty affiliated with the University of California system came in as the top Obama donor in the 2012 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

Pigs will vote for a bigger trough ever time. Depend on it.

Read it.

Because Muslims are like Communists in that whatever came before them is of no interest and no value.

We saw this in the dynamiting of the ancient Buddha statues by the Taliban, and the bulldozing of Sufi shrines in Africa by Salafists.

Yet another reminder that Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Today’s fashion is to throw away the textbook and to teach kids to think like mathematicians. The problem? They’re not learning how to do actual math.

No shit. The problem with the theories being taught in Ed schools these days is that they’re trying to teach teenagers skills that are appropriate to college and graduate students. As a result, kids graduate from High School not knowing basic facts and skills.

Read it.

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

That ol’ debbil Unintended Consequences raises it’s ugly head — just as minimum wage laws cause unemployment, mandated benefit laws tend to shrink the pool of the fully-employed to the bare minimum of those who are absolutely essential to a particular firm’s operations. Good news for them, bad news for everybody else who might want, you know, a job.

Much like unions, come to think of it.

Read it.

Just in case you were thinking of doing that.

Read it.

Think about it. When you go to visit a doctor each appointment starts with getting weighed, getting your blood pressure taken and checking your heartbeat. All of these sensors are now available (some in the Runkeeper store). I could essentially skip this step by printing out my own data or giving my doctor access to all of the data I’ve been collecting.

And we are long overdue for some such efficiency.

Women and Minorities Hardest Hit

The New York Times isn’t happy with any social trend, not even those of its own side, until it can find — and exploit — a group of Victims.

Unfortunately, this proposal has some serious problems. First, “privatizing” marriage will not cause it to disappear — it will just leave it to be regulated by private institutions, especially religious and ethnic ones. For many centuries, marriage has been the primary mechanism by which people who are not related “by blood” become relatives, and it is unclear that civil unions will acquire this social power. Many families will then be structured and governed primarily by private marriage customs and practices now freed of state regulation. Because of the deep and rich cultural significance of marriage, in many cases marriage arrangements will take precedence over the terms of civil unions. When these arrangements exist in tension with widely shared public values — like those that subordinate wives and daughters and limit their opportunities — privatizing and deregulating marriage will curtail the government’s ability to promote gender equality within families structured by marriage. In other words, privatizing marriage will give private organizations, including inegalitarian ones, more influence over the institution of marriage without giving individuals negatively affected much protection by having access to civil union status.

In other words, if we get rid of government control of marriage, the Crust will no longer be able to use the power of government to fiddle with social relationships. God forbid that our ruling class give up any of their coercive power to regulate individual lives, even if it clashes with their public propaganda narrative.

Read it.

Rather than a coldly elucidated set of principles in a Benthamite fashion modern social liberalism is fundamentally a movement of justice rooted in feeling. That everyone get a fair-go, that everyone can engage in their own personal project of self-actualization. But at some point this universal principle is going to hit diminishing marginal returns. In the 19th and early 20th century progressives argued for women’s suffrage. About half of the population. In the 1960s in the USA they argued for civil rights for racial minorities, and blacks in particular. On the order of 10 percent of the population of the day in the United States. Over the past generation they have argued for civil rights for homosexuals who identify as gay or lesbian. Being generous, this is probably on the order of 5 percent of the population (I am willing to accept the proposition that the self-identified ~2 percent value may be an underestimate).

Last year the center Left publication The New Republic published a story, Transitions, which had the cover lead “America’s Next Great Civil Rights Struggle.” As a matter of numbers this is farcical on the face of it. Transgender people do face a great deal of discrimination and are the objects of hate, to the point of violence. But the reality is that they are far less than 1 percent of the population. As a matter of numbers it seems that modern social liberalism is running out of victims to uplift if it has to target such a small segment of the population.

Not that it will stop them….

Read it.

In July, 15 people were killed in raids on churches in Garissa, and suspicion fell on the al-Shabab militant group.

Read it.

As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by “The Wire” — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.

Life on the Other Left Coast. You voted for it — you own it. (Hey, you could always move to Detroit….)

Read it, but it’s all hot air.

DNA is information, and there is no legitimate property right in information, because the essential nature of property is that it is ‘proper’, i.e. if one person has it, another is deprived of it, and that is not the case with information — never has been, never will be.

The entire function and significance of ‘property rights’ is to determine, with regard to a thing that everyone cannot have at the same time, who gets it. Information, by its very nature, is something that anyone can have without depriving someone else of it, and so falls outside of the ambit of property.

Treating information as if it were property is one of the ugliest aspects of this extremely ugly world.

Read it.

Last week, we warned of the impending “Million Puppet March,” a pro-public-broadcasting and anti-Mitt Romney demonstration whose goal “is to preserve the inalienable right of Big Bird, Cookie Monster, Ira Glass, and other folks to receive federal subsidies that are simultaneously so small as to be meaningless and so vast as to be irreplaceable.”

The protest happened yesterday and drew “hundred” of folks, many clad in Sesame Street-themed garb. The semi-inspired chant, “El-Mo, We Won’t Go!” rang through the air. “We’re just making it clear that public media matters and it’s something that we want to see supported and we still want to see federal funding of,” said one of the organizers.

Read it.

More useful targets might be those apparently minor players with key connections, according to a complexity analysis approach that could help Colombia – the world’s largest producer of cocaine – investigate and prosecute cartel members.

Complexity analysis depicts drugs cartels as a complex network with each member as a node and their interactions as lines between them. Algorithms compute the strength and importance of the connections. At first glance, taking out a central “hub” seems like a good idea. When Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993, for example, the Medellin cartel he was in charge of fell apart. But like a hydra, chopping off the head only caused the cartel to splinter into smaller networks. By 1996, 300 “baby cartels” had sprung up in Colombia, says Michael Lawrence of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation in Canada, and they are still powerful today. Mexican officials are currently copying the top-down approach, says Lawrence, but he doubts it will work. “Network theory tells us how tenuous the current policy is,” he says.

Read it.

It’s the latest cruel tactic in the Pakistani Taliban’s battle to stop girls and women from getting an education: acid thrown in their faces to scar them for life and deter others from following in their footsteps.

Gates of Vienna, who have more time than I do to track down what’s happening, have some interesting speculations. I shall be posting links to the relevant articles as they become available.

Simon Kuper, Brit, writing in the Financial Times (think: the Wall Street Journal run by the staff of The Nation) is seriously disappointed that the U.S. hasn’t gone down the same lefty road that Europe has.

When I went to study in the US in 1993, I did what we members of the “transatlantic generation” were supposed to do: I fell in love with America. I liked how you could talk to someone at a bus stop without their thinking you were a serial killer. I liked living in a rich, optimistic country. I liked brunch. Yet the US also seemed reassuringly familiar. I felt I’d known it for ever, and not just thanks to Archie comics. In politics, both candidates in the 1992 election, Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush, could have slotted seamlessly into the European political scene. Indeed, in Britain the right instinctively backed Bush and the left Clinton.

Yeah, many of us felt the same way. (That is not a compliment.)

After I left the US, it took me a year to get over it. But now, viewing the elections from Europe, the US feels like an alien land. “The Atlantic seems to have got a bit wider,” says Daniel Keohane, head of strategic affairs at the European think-tank Fride. It’s become hard to say “our shared western values” without smirking.

That’s because we kept them and you abandoned them. It takes two to share.

Simon: It’s not us; it’s you.

Read it.

An excellent analysis of the coming showdown between the Corpocrats and the Crust.

The middle class, we’re frequently told, decides elections. But the 2012 race has in many ways been a contest between two elites, with the plutocratic corporate class lining up behind Mitt Romney to try and reclaim its position on top of the pile from an ascendant new group—made up of the leaders of social and traditional media, the upper bureaucracy and the academy—that’s bet big on Barack Obama.

As recently as 2008, the Wall Street plutocrats were divided, as Obama deftly managed to run as both the candidate of hope and change and the candidate of the banks. But this year, the vast majority of the corporate ultra-rich have backed Romney, who after all is one of their own, his top five sources of donors all financial giants: Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse, and Wells Fargo. As The Wall Street Journal memorably noted, in 2008, no major U.S. corporation did more to back Obama than Goldman Sachs—and in 2012, none has done more to help defeat him. Those titans, along with the powerful and well-heeled energy sector, have placed most of their bets on the Republican.

Read it.

Black Chicagoans from the south and west sides took their message to what they say is the source of the problem when they converged outside of a fundraiser held by Mayor Emanuel for Barack Obama and then marched to the studios of ABC News.

Their message, “let us work in our own community,” was made all the more poignant as the ABC News crew ignored the news event outside their very studious. Not one camera was sent to cover the news that was, literally, placed at their doorstep.

Media bias? What media bias?

Gates of Vienna, who have more time than I do to track down what’s happening, have some interesting speculations. I shall be posting links to the relevant articles as they become available.

Gates of Vienna, who have more time than I do to track down what’s happening, have some interesting speculations. I shall be posting links to the relevant articles as they become available.

Read it.

As a rapper, Denis Cuspert was a bit player, but as a propagandist for jihad he is a star in some circles. He has gained considerable prominence since 2010, when he transformed himself from a Berlin hip-hop artist named Deso Dogg into the Islamist Abu Malik.

Yeah, whenever I see a black guy named ‘Denis Cuspert’ (much less ‘Abu Malik’), I think, ‘Oh, yeah, German.” I’m sure you do the same.

Read it.

“Unisex Bathrooms for Diversity” sounds like the title of an article at The Onion but this is real. Anyone would sympathize with someone who needs a bathroom but can’t find one. That’s not what’s happening here though.

UT Arlington is one of those bright blue pustules that deface the map of Texas wherever there is a publicly funded institution of higher education. In that, Texas cannot escape the degeneration that has afflicted the educational field in the rest of the country.

Laser-Guided Scissors

Calibrated Musical Wine Glasses

Motion-Activated Screwdriver

Read it.

Thousands of Iranians chanting “Death to America” burnt US flags on Friday to mark the 33rd anniversary of the seizure of the US embassy in Tehran, just days before the American presidential election.

Far be it from me to criticize any expression of hatred for Obama, but … they seized the American embassy — an act of war, although Jimmy Carter was too much of a pussy to do anything about it — and so they’re protesting America? How does that work, exactly? Can we expect the Japanese to start burning American flags and protesting on Pearl Harbor Day?

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.

Slow news day.

Read it.

A potentially steep hike in the capital gains tax rate is prompting some business owners to sell their companies before the end of the year.

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

Gates of Vienna, who have more time than I do to track down what’s happening, have some interesting speculations. I shall be posting links to the relevant articles as they become available.

Gates of Vienna, who have more time than I do to track down what’s happening, have some interesting speculations. I shall be posting links to the relevant articles as they become available.

The recent Middle East crisis (and the domestic political blowback in the USA) is a case in point. There are so many aspects of it that don’t make any obvious sense. Just to list a few:

How to explain the sudden appearance of “spontaneous” demonstrations protesting the Mohammed movie in Cairo, followed almost immediately by similar eruptions in other parts of the Muslim world?
The demo in Cairo began as a demand that the Blind Sheikh be released, and then morphed into an attack on the American embassy within the space of a couple of hours ostensibly over the movie. What’s going on here?
The “demonstration” in Libya never actually happened — there was only a well-planned Salafist terrorist attack on the consulate, which was in part made possible by collaborators within the local gunsels employed to protect an almost undefended consulate. What’s going on here?
Why were there such confused, incoherent, and contradictory responses and explanations by the American government, from the highest levels of the Obama administration?
Why was the movie, Innocence of Muslims, unnoticed and unremarked before the day of the incidents in Egypt and Libya?
Why would a habitual criminal and fraudster decide to expose himself to death fatwas by making a cheesy movie?
Why was there an initial attempt to pin the making of the movie on an Israeli-American Jew?
Many commentators in the Counterjihad believe that President Obama has been doing the bidding of the Muslim Brotherhood and is in collusion with them. Why, then, did the current crisis seem to catch the administration completely off guard?

Those are just a few of the questions that could be asked about puzzling aspects of the Long Hot Arab Summer. But one more needs to be appended, on a seemingly unrelated topic:

With the exception of Fox News, all major American news media have given fawning coverage to Barack Hussein Obama. For more than four years they have been his obsequious cheerleaders. What, then, explains the recent incidents — during the home stretch of Mr. Obama’s campaign for re-election — of disrespect, negativity, and outright opposition shown by the MSM to the erstwhile Messiah?

It’s time for us to open the closet door and see what may be crouching there amongst all the pinafores and the frocks.

Read it.

An essential life skill.

Read it.

Perhaps he was anticipating an Obama victory and his receipt of a job with the TSA.

As Phyllis Schlafly so famously said, No wonder liberal women think men are pigs — their men are pigs.

Read it.

Better insulation and more-efficient heaters did not reduce energy use because people spent the gains on bigger, warmer houses. Another example: When cars get more mileage per gallon, driving becomes cheaper, so people tend to drive more. An indirect rebound occurs when efficiency improvements raise the productivity of other goods, thereby boosting the demand for energy. The demand for tires, for example, goes up as people wear out tires driving their energy-efficient cars more, so the tire industry uses more energy. Embedded energy is the extra power used to produce, distribute, and maintain energy-efficient goods such as high-efficiency insulation. And economy-wide rebounds, which include indirect and embedded rebounds, result from the ways in which people use their savings on energy to purchase other goods and services that also require energy to produce.

I’ve decided to shave especially closely this November — only barbarians wear hair on their faces.

Heather MacDonald presents some inconvenient truth.

But Sandy is also a reminder of the ongoing necessity of blue collar workers—all those hard hats trying to repair power lines and pump the water out of miles of homes, tunnels, and subway tracks.  A universal population of college graduates, the desideratum of nearly all Democrats and far too many Republicans, composed as it inevitably would be of marketing and ethnic studies majors, would be of little use in rescuing the tri-state area from its catastrophic blow.  Yes, more engineers are also needed–in the long run, to try to design more resistant infrastructure, and in the short run, to diagnose the current ruptures and plan a strategy of attack.  But manual labor is a crucial component of the current recovery.  To be sure, many of these hard hats belong to recalcitrant and budget-breaking public employee unions.  But their power is slight compared to the teachers unions.   And unlike teachers, who enjoy regular paeans of praise from politicians and advocates, utility workers rarely are the object of aspiration and admiration.

Read it.

Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein was arrested on Wednesday while attempting to deliver supplies to activists in Texas who’re camping in trees to block construction of the Keystone XL pipeline.

A Presidential candidate who puts her money where her mouth is. How rare is that? Too bad it’s one of the lunatic fringe candidates.

Tom Smith has the lowdown.

    That Lucas struck a deal in 2012 may be no accident either, advisers say. Long-term capital gains tax from the sale of assets held more than one year are taxed at a rate of 15% for investors in the 25% income tax bracket or above (Lucas’s level), and zero for investors in the 10% or 15% bracket. Those rates are set to jump to 20% and 10%, respectively in January. “He probably wanted to take advantage of the lower rate on long-term capital gain while it’s certain,” says Bill Smith, managing director at CBIZ MHM, a national accounting and professional services provider.

Thinking of his tax liability he is. That he votes Democratic and wants the rest of us to pay higher taxes I have no doubt.

Read it.

 The US has made its boldest public intervention in the Syrian civil war by demanding a major shake-up of the rebel leadership.

Yeah, that’s pretty bold, all right. We expect action on that right away, yup, first thing.

Our government is in the hands of morons … incompetent morons….

Read it.

Joelle Fishman, who chairs the Connecticut chapter of Communist Party USA, has endorsed Democrat Chris Murphy for the U.S. Senate.

Writing in People’s World, Fishman praised Murphy’s votes in favor of ObamaCare, Planned Parenthood funding, and pro-union issues. Referring to Murphy’s opponent, moderate Linda McMahon, as a “tea party extremist,” Fishman accused McMahon of investing “$77 million of her own money to buy this Senate seat.” She praised Murphy for his stance on higher taxes for the rich.

Yes, there still is an American Communist Party. Failure is not an option, so they just ignore it.

We’ll let you know when next they endorse a Republican. Warning: Don’t hold your breath.

Read it.

However wrong Michael Levin might be, I dearly love the characterization of publishers as ‘English majors wearing Daddy’s work clothes’.

Steve Sailer fisks the NYT, rings the bullshit alert.

 It’s fascinating how little college development there has been over the last century. Brandeis, for example, is a good faith effort by liberal Jews to build a Jewish university on the model of all the various kinds of Christian but not exclusive universities. But as quotas on Jews fell at the older schools, Jewish donors lost interest in creating more Brandeises. Asian Americans have shown negligible interest in starting up their own Brandeises.