Chicago style persists even when the Obamassiah has moved to Trantor.

Many opponents to the meters worry about the type of data the smart grid will collect, opening up a potential for hackers and criminals to know when residents are home or not. Also, because the meters work on a wireless RF system, some are concerned about health safety in their home. Reports of health risks due to the meter’s wireless transmitter’s emission of electromagnetic frequencies surfaced in 2011. People with the meters installed on their homes reported symptoms such as headaches, insomnia, tinnitus, and DNA breakdown.

C’mon, Big Brother knows best! Give up on this individual liberty thing and get with the program!

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Mamet points out that this is just more ‘progressive’ feel-good Security Theater.

Mamet describes it as a “hoax”– a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, because “assault weapons” are used in few crimes, and the very designation “assault weapon” is based on a gun’s cosmetics–i.e., does it look menacing?

Going after such guns makes some people feel safer because they have slowly, and perhaps unknowingly, traded their independence for a “government knows best” mentality.

Think about Ronald Reagan’s 10 most dangerous words in the English language–“Hi, I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Reagan saw these words as dangerous because they were indicative of an encroaching government that had taken unto itself the role of determining what was best for you and for me: a role for which our government simply was not designed.

Matthew Yglesias, Voice of the Crust, lays out the next step in the program: Repeating past mistakes.

They actually pay him to write this drivel. How can I get a job like that? Perhaps changing my name to Emilio Garbanzo would help.

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They can tell you about torment. They can describe long, frustrating hours sitting in dark, stinky basements and caves, pen in hand, trying to get the flow of the words just right.

They can tell you, too, about how it feels to be engulfed in a blaze of inspiration. They’ll describe the delirium of bliss when the right lines come. Like all writers, they are keenly aware of the competition, and envy eats away at them when they detect, in one of their comrades, a candle-flicker of genius.

We speak, naturally, of cheesemongers.

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Every year, people complain that we’re soon going to reach ‘peak oil’. No more oil. The world comes tumbling down. And what happens? Every so often we find massive new reserves of oil, some of which are new, some of which technology now makes usable. ‘Peak oil’ has been coming now for about fifty years by my count, and somehow it never seems to arrive.

I suspect that ‘peak jobs’ will work the same way. ‘But where will the jobs come from?’ I don’t know — and I don’t care, because people are clever and they’re always inventing new shit that make jobs (if the government doesn’t get in the way).

Charlie Stross, award-wining speculative fiction author and knee-jerk socialist, has some interesting thoughts.

Our ability to exchange extended phenotypic traits without genetic exchange (thank you, language faculty!) makes us, as Dawkins pointed out in the 1990s, exceptional.

Because of this ability, we don’t have to invent everything for ourselves, individually; we can borrow one anothers’ good ideas. So we only need to be smart enough to understand and use the cognitive tools created by our most intelligent outliers.

This is a sharp insight. What follows?

The evolutionary pressure selecting for general intelligence (to the extent that general intelligence exists) breaks once a species develops language.

Hmmmm. There’s food for thought. This would certainly explain the conjunction of Charlie’s superb writing skills with his moronic political opinions. I have a theory that the reason most people who write for a living are Liberal Fascists is that they are so accustomed to being able to control every aspect of their stories (whether what they do reflects Real Life, or is even feasible in Real Life) inclines them into an intellectually lazy acceptance of the notion that some wise central authority should surely be able to take action and obviate whatever aspect of Real Life is currently chapping their butts. What is especially amusing, in an ironic way, is that they are the first to claim membership in the ‘Reality-Based Community’, much the same way that totalitarian Communist regimes are fond of naming their concentration camps ‘Democratic Republic of Supressistan’.

Not a source of optimism. But Real Life seldom is.

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Borlaug is an eighty-two-year-old plant breeder who for most of the past five decades has lived in developing nations, teaching the techniques of high-yield agriculture. He received the Nobel in 1970, primarily for his work in reversing the food shortages that haunted India and Pakistan in the 1960s. Perhaps more than anyone else, Borlaug is responsible for the fact that throughout the postwar era, except in sub-Saharan Africa, global food production has expanded faster than the human population, averting the mass starvations that were widely predicted — for example, in the 1967 best seller Famine — 1975! The form of agriculture that Borlaug preaches may have prevented a billion deaths.

Yet although he has led one of the century’s most accomplished lives, and done so in a meritorious cause, Borlaug has never received much public recognition in the United States, where it is often said that the young lack heroes to look up to. One reason is that Borlaug’s deeds are done in nations remote from the media spotlight: the Western press covers tragedy and strife in poor countries, but has little to say about progress there. Another reason is that Borlaug’s mission — to cause the environment to produce significantly more food—has come to be seen, at least by some securely affluent commentators, as perhaps better left undone. More food sustains human population growth, which they see as antithetical to the natural world.

In other words, the Enviro-nazis and their krewe hate him because he stands in the way of their turning the world into a human-free zone.

Imagine how much better life would be if all of those who worry about too many humans being on the planet decided to Do The Right Thing and subtract themselves from the gene pool. The world would have fewer people and we wouldn’t have to put up with all of their whining. Win-win!

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The picture’s conceit is that Hansel and Gretel, having survived their childhood encounter with the kiddie-baking cottage witch, have grown up to become a semi-sullen Jeremy Renner and foxy Gemma Arterton. They’re now freelance witch-hunters, outfitted in stylish black leathers and armed with formidable steampunk weaponry. (Gretel’s complicated crossbow can fire in two lateral directions at once; Hansel’s huge scattergun could blow a hole in the moon.) For reasons they don’t understand (a key plot point), they’re immune to witchy spells and curses. This makes their job a little easier, and it’s not brain surgery to begin with. “If you’re gonna kill a witch,” Hansel says, “set her ass on fire.”

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Hint: Yes.

Basically people were schlepping leaky packages of meat and other foods in their canvas bags, then wadding to the bags somewhere for awhile, leaving bacteria to grow until the next trip, when they tossed celery or other foods likely to be eaten raw in the same bags.

Washing your bags reduces the risk, but let’s be honest: who does that?

Environment theater, to match the security theater we get in the airports. The ‘progressive’ vision, in which posturing substitutes for achievement, and appearance is more important than reality, proceeds apace.

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People already can be blocked from naturalization for affiliating with totalitarian groups, or engaging in or advocating violence to overthrow the U.S. government. The report argues that the totalitarian prohibition can apply to adherents of radical Islam.

“Why totalitarianism? Because under radical strains of Islam, such as Salafism, it is impossible to reconcile separation of church and state,” the report says. “All civil authority bows to the wisdom of religious clerics in a theocracy. The best existing example (if one can use that descriptor loosely) of such a theocracy in action is the Islamic Republic of Iran. The worst example in recent memory is the Taliban when it ruled Afghanistan. Can one doubt that both examples point clearly to a totalitarian form of government in which no form of peaceful dissension or religious liberty is tolerated? In fact, dissension and religious differences are dealt with brutally.”

Under the proposal, someone could be barred from becoming a citizen if he or she is a follower of radical Islam to the extent that Islam and sharia law should supersede secular law and liberty in the United States. And citizenship can be stripped if it later is determined the person failed to disclose those beliefs.

This would seem to be a no-brainer — an elementary precaution recognizing that Muslims owe an overriding allegiance to the Islamic umma over any country in which they happen to be living.

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In recent decades it has become the tradition for the monarch to abdicate.

Queen Beatrix’s mother Juliana resigned the throne in 1980 on her 71st birthday, and her grandmother Wilhelmina abdicated in 1948 at the age of 68.

I guess she just got tired of all the bullshit.

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Hey, this stuff is important.

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I got yer culture, right here.

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A collection of vampires is called a ‘scourge’. Just thought you’d like to know.

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Here’s a brief rundown of some of things graphene represents:

• The best electrical conductor, at room temperature
• The best thermal conductor, even more so than carbon nanotubes
• The strongest material, despite being the thinnest
• The stiffest material, despite being the most ductile

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Scientists analysing ancient ice samples say that the Greenland ice sheet withstood temperatures much higher than today’s for many thousands of years during a period of global warming more than 120,000 years ago, losing just a quarter of its mass. It had been widely suggested – by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for instance – that any such warming would melt the entire sheet, leading to massive sea-level rises.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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No doubt much will be lost if we abandon cursive completely. Without it, how will we be able to understand the full historical significance of Sarah Palin’s motorhome? If we stop practicing looped descenders, will our fine motor skills be honed enough to thread needles and assemble motherboards in hellish Chinese factories? And what will we use to teach our kids the efficacy of valuing style over substance? As Vanderbilt education professor Steve Graham points out in the Journal, “People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting.” According to at least one study he cites, visually impressive handwriting can elevate a “generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile” while sloppy penmanship “could tank it to the 16th.”

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Plano, based in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area, is the best-run city in America. Among households in the city, 14% earned over $200,000 in 2011, the fourth-highest proportion of all cities. Meanwhile, a mere 1.9% of households earned under $10,000, which was the second-lowest of all cities. The city’s 1.62 violent crimes per 1,000 people is the second-lowest of all large cities. Plano is home to many corporate headquarters, including J.C. Penney and Dr. Pepper Snapple Group. These companies are among the 10 largest employers in the city. The city appears to be largely unaffected by the housing crisis. The median home price rose by more than 5% between 2007 and 2011, while the national median price fell by more than 10%.

Funny thing, I don’t notice any Michigan cities in the ‘Best Run’ list. Probably an oversight.

Oh, look, there’s Detroit at #4 on the ‘Worst Run’ list. I knew Michigan would make the scoreboard somewhere.

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The attack, which also left 75 people wounded, struck at the Sayid al-Shuhada mosque in Tuz Khurmatu, 175 kilometres (110 miles) north of Baghdad, and targeted the funeral of a relative of a politician who was killed a day earlier.

No group claimed responsibility, but Sunni militants often launch attacks in a bid to destabilise the government and push Iraq back towards the sectarian violence that blighted it from 2005 to 2008.

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.

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Living in a Communist country is a major factor.

Being black in a city run by Democrats is another.

Neither of which you will find mentioned in an article on the NPR web site, such as this one.

Just sayin’.

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Until, as with auto radar detectors, they’re made illegal.

Engineers are like ‘progressives’ — they believe that the way things are now will never change.

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‘Where we’re going, we won’t need … minimum wages?’

 No longer will they say, “He’s going to end up flipping burgers.” Because now, robots are taking even these ignobly esteemed jobs. Alpha machine from Momentum Machines cooks up a tasty burger with all the fixins. And it does it with such quality and efficiency it’ll produce “gourmet quality burgers at fast food prices.”

Steve Sailer asks an obvious question.

That exposure to this heavy metal can be dangerous to humans has been recognized since the days of Hippocrates and Pliny the Elder. But lead was so useful in so many ways that more than a few American municipalities proudly named themselves after their lucrative lead resources. Leadville, Colorado is America’s highest elevated incorporated city. There are several Galenas, one of which is a tourist town in Illinois. There’s a Smelterville, which sounds like a city made up for The Simpsons but is actually a real place in Idaho.

And here I thought he was talking about the music.

Known side effects of lead poisoning include lower IQ and reduced impulse control, which are in turn associated with poor decision-making, such as becoming a criminal or a single mom.

That’s the 60s, alright. Let’s check it out.

The problem is coming up with ways to test the theory. A half-dozen years ago, I blogged (”Lead Poisoning and the Great American Freakout”) about the research that Drum finds so convincing today. One reality check immediately suggested itself: Back in the late 1960s, densely populated Japan was notorious for automobile-induced air pollution. Yet crime didn’t rise in Japan. The country remained an orderly, intelligent, non-impulsive culture.

Oops. Another Jared-Diamondian theory bites the dust.

John Hinderaker joins the NRA.

The day may come when the childish ignorance of Obama and his ilk reigns, but in the meantime, if you subscribe to American Rifleman or visit the SIG Sauer web site, you can buy an M400. Assuming they aren’t sold out.

I personally refuse to buy a weapon that is so delicate as to require a forward-assist. But that’s me.

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‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’re not Tony Stark.’

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But you knew that.

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Former president Nicolas Sarkozy could become the next wealthy Frenchman to flee to Britain over his country’s looming tax hikes on the rich.

Mr Sarkozy – who famously snubbed the Prime Minister’s attempt to shake his hand after Mr Cameron vetoed changes to the EU treaty in 2011 – is reportedly planning to move to London to set up a £800million investment fund.

The 57-year-old, who was ousted from office last June, has amassed a fortune from £150,000-an-hour public speaking engagements and is now said to be trying to raise capital from investors.

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Officials at Pennsylvania’s Mount Carmel Area Elementary School suspended a 5-year-old kindergarten student for making terroristic threats. The girl allegedly threatened to shoot another girl and herself with a pink Hello Kitty soap bubble gun. The girl’s family says police interrogated her for three hours without their knowledge after she made the “threat.”

I am not making this up.

Their police force must be recruiting from the extreme far left of the intellectual bell curve.

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 WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court threw out a federal rule on renewable fuels on Friday, saying that a quota set by the Environmental Protection Agency for incorporating liquids made from woody crops and wastes into car and truck fuels was based on wishful thinking rather than realistic estimates of what could be achieved.

At last, some good news.

Magnetic Light Switch Covers

How to Tie a Eldredge Necktie Knot

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How this happened is anyone’s best guess, since routes for government-sanctioned parades are designated gun-free zones by Louisiana law.

I guess they really work, huh….

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Welfare has become a major political issue in the United Kingdom. During the 13 years when Labour was in power, it seems not to have occurred to most Britons that Labour’s open-door immigration policy, combined with the U.K.’s liberal welfare benefits, were likely to lead to abuse. Now, people are starting to notice.

Will we learn from their mistakes? Not bloody likely.

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A new polymer developed at the Eindhoven University of Technology and Hong Kong Polytechnic University could be used to enable cheap cotton to provide water in deserts and other arid regions. Researchers write that at low temperatures, cotton treated with the polymer becomes super-absorbent, and can hold up to 340 percent of its own weight in water (compared to just 18 percent without the polymer). As the treated cotton gets hotter, it automatically releases “totally pure water,” and completely releases all absorbed water as it reaches 34 degrees Celsius.

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For an academic organization based on language and the study of English, the Modern Language Association seems to have only one thing on its mind and it isn’t language.

What’s language got to do with politics? Well, the MLA seems to think it does.

• Queer Theory without Antinormativity;
• Postqueer? Postrace? The Political Stakes of Queer;
• Queer Theory in a Post Colonial World;
• Queerness as Form;
• Transgender France;
• Movements, Incantations, and Parables of Queer Performance
• LGBTQI Graduate Students and Academia;
• Queer Sexualities in African Literatures and Film;
• Queer Occupations;
• Gay Culture in Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union;
• Racing, Queering and Psychoanalysis;
• Queer Times: Affect, Phenomology, Temporality; and
• What is Post-AIDS Literature?

Hey, English teachers get bored with their day jobs and surf the net just like everybody else….

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We’ve already seen folks at MIT’s Research Labs working on ways to 3D print the frame of a home in a day, as opposed to the month it would take a construction crew to do the same. But it isn’t just geeks taking an interest; a Dutch architect is interested in 3D printing a home, with the hopes that it’ll be ready by 2014.

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Be the first on your block….

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TYPICALLY, the taller the tree, the smaller its leaves. The mathematical explanation for this phenomenon, it turns out, also sets a limit on how tall trees can grow.

And here I thought it was because Obama wouldn’t let them. Shows how much I know.

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Legislators pass entitlements out to as much of the population as they can get away with, i.e., as close to 50% of the population as they can, so they that they are able to ensure themselves re-election. They are paid back by crony lobbyists, who provide them with soft-dollar payoffs for votes, and when the time is right, crony corporations provide revolving door opportunities outside of Congress (or dark cellar opportunities if they stay in Congress).

Which results in this. The crony military-industrial complex still exists, but it is quickly becoming second fiddle to the Entitlement-Crony Complex. From Social Security, to Medicare to food stamps and free cell phones, the voting public is being manipulated for its vote. At the same time the crony elitists have expanded well beyond the military, and include Big Pharma and crony insurance, among many others. And, of course, the banksters always collect their fees.

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That’s because academics won’t get you on national TV, nor the cover of USA Today.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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Why are Americans working less? While there are a number of factors, the phenomenon is due mainly to a variety of public policies that have reduced the incentives to be employed.

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

Compare 2010 with October 2012, the last month for which food-stamp data have been reported. The unemployment rate fell to 7.8% from 9.6%, and real GDP was rising steadily if not vigorously. Food-stamp usage should have peaked and probably even begun to decline. Yet the number of recipients rose by 7,223,000. In a period of falling unemployment and rising output, the number of food-stamp recipients grew nearly 10,000 a day. Congress should find out why.

When you pay for something, you get more of it. When you pay people for being unemployed, you get more unemployed people. Economics 101.

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Something’s amiss at the Department of Interior. Eight government scientists were recently fired or reassigned after voicing concerns to their superiors about faulty environmental science used for policy decisions. Which begs the question, “Are some government agencies manipulating science to advance political agendas?”

Oh, ya think?

The Other McCain decides to vent.

Being clever and funny about the stupidity of one’s elders is one of the more vicious habits of youthful ingrates, and it’s generally impossible to appreciate one’s elders until you are yourself compelled to cope with the burden of responsibility and authority. Even then, some people are so smugly satisfied with their own superiority that they can’t recognize maybe they owe a little bit of respect to their ancestors.

Part of the problem of modern Youth Culture is that it teaches young people that they are smarter than their parents because . . . Well, mainly because old people are always stupid and young people are always smart. This is the basic theme of every network sitcom, and it’s also the basic lesson that smart kids learn in school, because (a) everybody with an IQ over 110 knows that being a teacher is the crappiest job in the world, which is why (b) if your kid has an IQ above 110, it’s only a matter of time until they realize they’re smarter than nearly all their teachers.

Radley Balko blows the whistle.

Prosecutors have enormous power. Even investigations that don’t result in any charges can ruin lives, ruin reputations, and drive their targets into bankruptcy. It has become an overtly political position — in general, but particularly at the federal level. If a prosecutor wants to ruin your life, he or she can. Even if you’ve done nothing wrong, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it.

Reda it.

Wangfujing is the latest area of Beijing to have its Chinglish tidied up, after Dongcheng district chengguan (urban management officers) helped foreign affairs officers to inform store owners of their errors in translation Tuesday.

Forty stores in the famed shopping street were found to have problematic English in their signs and labels, according to Beijing Speaks Foreign Languages (BSFL), a program launched by the municipal government to promote the use of English.

“The way they translated the signs was so literal, so word by word, they can hardly be understood by foreign travelers,” BSFL wrote on its website.

Well, we can’t have that.

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Interesting speculation, but moot — the office of tomorrow is your living room.

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In my column this week, I asked why police officers should be allowed to have so-called high-capacity magazines if they have no defensive value. Since “no one needs” to fire more than X number of rounds before reloading (and assuming that “need” should define what people are allowed to possess), why not apply the same limit to everyone? It looks like the New York legislature, which this week reduced the state’s magazine limit from 10 rounds to seven, did take an evenhanded approach—but only by accident. According to DNAinfo.com and WABC, the ABC station in New York, legislators were in such a rush to impose new gun restrictions that they forgot to exempt active-duty and retired law enforcement officers from the new magazine rule. Whoops.

Legislators apparently lost sight of the basic Crustian principle that some animals are more equal than others. Uh-oh.

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No doubt with his marketing honchos standing over him, tapping blackjacks into their palms, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey has been busy walking-back comments he made to NPR in which he described Obamacare as an example of a fascist enterprise. While still critical of the administration’s controversial healthcare scheme, which is heavy on government mandates, he now regrets his choice of words. That’s a damned shame, since he was dead-on with his original description.

 

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In all areas of personal health, we see prominent media reports that directly oppose well-established knowledge in the field, or that make it sound as if scientifically unresolved questions have been resolved. The media, for instance, have variously supported and shot down the notion that vitamin D supplements can protect against cancer, and that taking daily and low doses of aspirin extends life by protecting against heart attacks. Some reports have argued that frequent consumption of even modest amounts of alcohol leads to serious health risks, while others have reported that daily moderate alcohol consumption can be a healthy substitute for exercise. Articles sang the praises of new drugs like Avastin and Avandia before other articles deemed them dangerous, ineffective, or both.