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A fascinating project is making the rounds this weekend that could change the way we think of 3D printers. The Filabot is a robot that can turn scrap plastic into 3D printer filament, thereby allowing an almost endless supply of material for prototyping and manufacturing.

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There’s only one door and it costs you at least $300 to get in.

The Other McCain is on the case.

    “It’s a little fat girl . . . and she keeps taking her clothes off and . . . I don’t want to see that. . . . I learned that this little fat chick writes the show and directs the show and that makes sense to me because she’s such a camera hog that the other characters barely are on.”
– Howard Stern

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President Obama has signed a law that will give himself and all presidents Secret Service protection for life, reversing a law passed during the Clinton administration that gave former presidents a security detail for only 10 years after leaving office.

What does he know that you don’t, hmmm?

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We recently covered the fact that some students were selling their eggs to fertility clinics in an effort to fund their education.

I don’t see how you can call it ‘donation’ when you’re getting cash for your body part.

One individual, understanding the new market dynamics, placed an ad in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s student newspaper that requested  a donor who met specific requirements.  This act generated a response typical of feminist groups from two of the campus’ activist organizations.

Saw that coming. As in other fairy kingdoms of ‘progressive’ never-never land, for feminists, some choices are more equal than others.

‘I thought feminism was about choice?’
‘It was never about THAT choice!’

Joe Biden.

“We know that there is no silver bullet,” to stop gun violence, Biden said, ahead of a Friday meeting with video game manufacturers and retailers. He did not elaborate further.

The gift that keeps on giving. If any of the primetime TV shows were as entertaining as Joe Biden, their ratings wouldn’t be in the toilet.

Sign the petition.

As expected, David Gregory has been given a pass.

OAG has made this determination, despite the clarity of the violation of this important law, because under all of the circumstances here a prosecution would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust.

In other words, rich important white people aren’t subject to the same laws that everybody else is.

If he were a Republican — Rush Limbaugh, say — he’d already be in jail with the entire national media and Washington establishment baying for his head.

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The Buckeye Firearms Association (BFA) announced in a January 9 release that over 1,000 educators have applied for its partner foundation’s Armed Teacher Training Program first publicized December 20, 2012. Applications are still being accepted via online survey.

If I had a kid, that’s the kind of teacher I would want him to have.

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Roll Call has estimated Mr. Rockefeller’s personal wealth at $83 million, making him the fifth wealthiest person in the House or Senate, based on his financial disclosures. His Washington residence, for its part, is a 1920s mansion on more than a dozen acres of land just off Rock Creek Park just four miles north of the White House. The property was assessed at $16.5 million by the D.C. government in 2012, and Zillow currently estimates its value at about $17.7 million.

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In 2002, Seth Norton, a business economics professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, published a remarkably interesting study on the inverse relationship between prosperity and fertility. Norton compared fertility rates of over 100 countries with their index rankings for economic freedom and another index for the rule of law. “Fertility rate is highest for those countries that have little economic freedom and little respect for the rule of law,” wrote Norton. “The relationship is a powerful one. Fertility rates are more than twice as high in countries with low levels of economic freedom and the rule of law compared to countries with high levels of those measures.”

And so….

Economic freedom and the rule of law produce prosperity which dramatically lowers child mortality which, in turn, reduces the incentive to bear more children. In addition, along with increased prosperity comes more education for women, opening up more productive opportunities for them in the cash economy. This increases the opportunity costs for staying at home to rear children. Educating children to meet the productive challenges of growing economies also becomes more expensive and time consuming.

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As just one example, below are some of the taxes that will impact the purchase of dental braces….

And the hits just keep on comin’….

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The British regular forces are to receive their first new pistol since World War II, as the long-serving Browning 9mm sidearm is replaced by a new weapon from the well-known Austrian firm Glock.

At that, they’re still ahead of the American armed forces, which has used the 9mm Biretta M9 since 1980. There are plans afoot to pick a newer standard pistol — in fiscal year 2013-14 … if there are funds available to pay for the study.

The Glock has triple safety mechanisms which mean that its firing pin will not move forward unless the trigger is back, the trigger cannot be moved back unless a finger is pressing on its front and the weapon will not fire if dropped. The weapon’s hammer is internal, and as such cannot snag on clothing or be bumped inadvertently into a different position.

Glocks have been available commercially since 1982.

One of the most amusing aspects of all of these ‘CIA plot to do something nefarious’ movies (yeah, Jason Bourne, I’m lookin’ at YOU) that Hollywood keeps cranking out is the firm belief on the part of moviemakers  that government agencies not only have the latest and greatest toys to play with, but even better toys than civilians are allowed to have. Any government employee (and military service members are government employees) know that this is ludicrous nonsense — rare is the government organization that gets equipment that is only ten years behind what is available to civilians, much less better than.

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Volcanos. Lasers. Just sayin’.

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Apparently, it’s working on a way to make a gift purchase from a clueless friend or relative convert according to rules that you set up to something that you like and will use.

I wish this had been in place when I was a kid the time I got that ugly sweater from my aunt for Christmas.

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Yet if the author Nathan Lean is to be believed, Americans today are caught in the grip of an irrational fear of Islam and its adherents. In his short book on the subject, Mr. Lean, a journalist and editor at the website Aslan Media, identifies this condition using the vaguely medical sounding term “Islamophobia.” It is by now a familiar diagnosis, and an ever widening range of symptoms—from daring to criticize theocratic tyrannies in the Middle East to drawing cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad—are attributed to it.

In reality, Islamophobia is simply a pejorative neologism designed to warn people away from criticizing any aspect of Islam. Those who deploy it see no difference between Islamism—political Islam and its extremist offshoots—and the religion encompassing some 1.6 billion believers world-wide. Thanks to this feat of conflation, Islamophobia transforms religious doctrines and political ideologies into something akin to race; to be an “Islamophobe” is in some circles today tantamount to being a racist.

Think of some of the other tendentious terms that partisans have enlisted in pursuit of what are essentially political programs: ‘software piracy’ (sorry, if you’re not armed and boarding a ship, it’s not piracy), ‘gay marriage’ (sorry, marriage has never in the history of the planet referred to relationships between people of the same sex), ‘black market’ (black in this case being a pejorative substitution for free, is if free were a bad thing), ‘price gouging’ (as if people were forced to buy something they didn’t want; oddly enough, never applied to prices set by the government, which actually has that power), and so on.

‘Islamophobia’ is another such, an intellectual bait-and-switch that assumes that any hostility to Islam is irrational and therefore ridiculous, as if Islam didn’t have a historical record as black as that of communism or fascism and twenty times as long.

Individual Muslims can be perfectly decent and reasonable people, just as individual Communists and Nazis can be perfectly decent and reasonable people. But the problem is that the ideology (and Islam is an ideology, make no mistake about its Clever Plastic Disguise of being a religion) to which they subscribe is inherently oppressive and totalitarian, and completely contrary to the fundamental principles of Western Civilization. That’s the bottom line.

The problem with the term ‘Islamophobia’ is that fear of Islam is perfectly rational, justified by both history and current affairs, just like fear of fire or flood or high wind. That’s the bottom line.

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Well, think about it for a bit.

I guess that would make the Indians of NeverLand the British.

Hmmm. There’s irony for you.

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This year’s Razzies look set to be a head-to-head between Battleship and Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2 to see which movie can walk away with the most gongs for serious celluloid undertainment.

I must confess I haven’t seen either one. Apparently my native indolence is the path of wisdom in this case.

The annual celebration of the cinematically dire sees seven nominations for Battleship, including Worst Picture and a well-deserved Worst Supporting Actress nod for Bajan warbler Rihanna.

The latest outing in the teen bloodsucker Twilight franchise, meanwhile, is up for Worst Picture, Worst Actress (Kristen Stewart), Worst Actor (Robert Pattinson), Worst Supporting Actress (Ashley Green), Worst Supporting Actor (Taylor Lautner), Worst Screen Couple (you guessed it, Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart, or Mackenzie Foy and Taylor Lautner, if you prefer), Worst Director (Bill Condon), Worst Screen Ensemble (“The Entire Cast”), Worst Remake, Rip-Off, or Sequel, and Worst Screenplay.

Below the Boat

Pillow With Built-In Speakers

America’s Unhealthiest Fast-Food Items

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The device is the brainchild of Australia’s Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation , which runs a Weeds Research and Productivity Program. Dr Graeme Brodie from Melbourne University, who works on the program, has led a team that created a trailer on which four horn antennas are mounted. Those antennas beam out microwaves into the rows of dirt between crops.

When the beams – each of which emit two kilowatts of power, thanks to the presence of a generator – strike a plant for as little as one second Brodie says the effect is akin to placing an egg in a domestic microwave oven.

“The microwaves superheat the water inside the plant, which explodes the leaves and stem,” he says. “In our experiments that was always fatal, because it damages the mechanism that gets nutrients around the plant and if a plant can’t process food it won’t be very happy.”

Sign me up.

Oh, ya think?

A lawsuit recently filed in the United States Court of Claims may shed further light on the corruption of the Obama administration’s “green energy” programs. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of XP Vehicles, Inc. and Limnia, Inc., companies that competed for Department of Energy loans under a Congressionally-authorized program. The owners of XP eventually realized that there was no real competition, and that the whole Department of Energy program was a scam intended to funnel money to Obama and Democratic Party campaign contributors and political allies. They allege in addition that DOE misappropriated proprietary technology that they submitted in connection with their loan applications, and gave that technology to Obama administration cronies.

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

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Due to the declining birth rate and the number of immigrants decreasing, the economy of California will suffer. The number of older-age natives will put an immense burden on the younger generations to support them.

I guess there aren’t enough Republicans in the state to make up for the fact that Democrats consider children just another inconvenience.

The decline in children is not unique to California; New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan also have the same problem.

Them Blue State blues….

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The Affordable Care Act will flood the resource-strapped national emergency room system with 30 million more insured citizens, increasing already-long wait times to see a doctor. A new hospital-in-a-box, HealthSpot, aims to alleviate congestion with medical stations capable of treating emergency room visits for minor inflictions by beaming in idol doctors via video conference. “Emergency rooms and the urgent cares are being crushed because they’re being used for convenience,” says CIO Dave Sebenoler, who helped launch the product at the International Consumer Electronics Show.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Scott Richard Swirling, 61, thought he was discussing plans to meet a District man who was offering to let him have sex with his preteen daughter, authorities said.

It turns out Swirling was dealing with an undercover D.C. police officer.

…

Swirling was once executve director of the National Family Planning & Reproductive Health Association.

Well, it seems to me that if one is interested in having sex with pre-teen females, one has a certain interest in making sure that abortion is safe, legal, and paid for by the taxpayer, without any messy requirement for parental notification. No hypocrisy here, so the lamestream media will undoubtedly give it a pass.

Swirling may be a pervert, but because he is a pro-choice pervert, he’s still a liberal in good standing.

Like, say, Barney Frank, fated to occupy the Kerry Seat in Massachusetts. Hmmm. ‘Occupy Kerry Seat’. Sounds like something that Barney could get behind.

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The 2nd Amendment wasn’t given to us to protect our right to duck or deer hunt but to defend our lives and our property and to repel tyranny, period.

When the left twists the 2nd Amendment to make it about hunting, they do so to effectively cut all non-hunters out of the equation, which lessens the size of the opposition by lopping off those who own guns for other purposes (self-defense). And this also gives them grounds to limit guns and gun-types based on hunting applications.

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Even Elaine Chao, former labor secretary for President George W. Bush, agrees that Obama ”can do better,” than he has in regards to diversity. “In an America that is so diverse these days,” Chao recently told Charlie Rose, “We should have a cabinet that looks like America.”

Obama doesn’t want a cabinet that ‘looks like America’, he wants a cabinet that looks like The Obamanation — and he’s got one.

When leftists squeal about “diversity,” what they are really talking about, of course, is skin color and gender. This focus on the outside is highly instructive of the progressive worldview, which sees people as categories (rather than individuals), defined by qualities that are quite literally skin deep. (It is a worldview that both perpetuates and necessitates the statist policies that so enamors the left.)

Content of your character? Not so much.

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Astroboffins poring through data from NASA’s Kepler telescope have spotted what they think might be the most Earth-like planet yet discovered.

The object has a radius 1.5 times that of Earth, which lumps it into the class of extrasolar planets known as “super Earths.” That’s not so unusual, in and of itself; scientists estimate that about 25 per cent of known star systems feature similarly sized worlds. What makes this one special, however, are all of the other ways in which it resembles our own planet.

Great. Let’s go. This one sucks.

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A gripping tale of love and death, betrayal and deliverance at the Consumer Electronics Show. Or maybe not.

For two years in high school I was a cashier at Whole Foods. We were at a busy intersection right in the middle of three fancy prep schools, so we maintained a pretty steady flow of soccer moms doing wheatgrass shots or going really hard at the salad bar with each other all day long. My supervisor, the Front End Team Leader Eric, was one of those smart middle-aged Whole Foods dudes who seemed like he could be doing much more but had gotten fucked over in life somehow and was now a powerful combination of grateful that he had any job at all and murderously spiteful that he had to wear an apron to work every day. He taught me a lot of lessons, from the practical (where to find the just-expired burritos before they went to the landfill) to the subtly profound. During the lulls in traffic when his team was prone to long bathroom breaks and back-alley bonghits, he’d saunter, clipboard in hand, down the row of cashiers. He’d stop right at the end of your station, lean in, and look you in the eyes. “If you’re not busy,” he’d say in a low rumble, a half-evil grin twisting up into his face, “look busy.” Then he’d slowly moonwalk towards the door, keeping his eyes locked, clicking his pen like a mental patient, until he got outside, where he’d do a spin and casually collect all the misplaced shopping carts in the parking lot. Fuckin’ Eric, man. I wonder if he’s on facebook.

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Starting in New York, of course … even back then, people were fleeing the Blue States.

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Two years ago, Defense Secretary Robert Gates killed off the Marines’ Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle — a $13 billion misfire of an attempt to build an armored boat that could make landfall and still get around on the beach. But on Monday, the Department of Defense will give you the chance to design something better.

The DoD’s forward-thinking Darpa group plans to release open-source software that will let anyone design and run virtual tests on their own swimming tank. And more than that, it will kick off the first phase of a contest where you can pit your amphibious tank design against everyone else’s. The prize: $1 million.

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Starting at $17,000, TrackingPoint is launching a range of Precision Guided Firearms (PGFs) that use a Linux-powered scope and other advanced technologies to provide shooters with real-world auto-aim.

I want one.

According to Ars Technica, the built-in Linux computer automatically accounts for temperature, humidity, wind speed/direction, the age of the barrel, and more, to ensure that your shot hits the target.

Gimme two.

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The incident, which occurred on December 14th, was caught on surveillance video and shows a white man pulling a knife on a female clerk as she began to ring him up for a small purchase.

After the attempted robber pulled his knife and began to yank at the cash register, the female clerk pulled out a handgun from under the counter, causing the attacker to cower to the floor. He then ran out of the store, leaving the cash behind in his haste.

You go, girl.

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I’m glad I don’t give a shit about sports, or this would piss me off big time.

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Didn’t know that this was a puzzle. Seems fairly obvious to me….

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After you pay $29 a ticket, the first thing that happens when you enter the Titanic exhibit (at Philadelphia’s Franklin Institute through April) is that you are given a boarding pass. It’s the size of the original boarding passes to the ill-fated ship, and it is a copy of the exact ticket of someone who was a passenger on Titanic. At the end of the exhibit, you’re told, there’s a listing of all the ship’s passengers, and you can find out if your passenger survived the sinking of the ship.

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So much has been written — some of it by me — about how poor Al Gore was all but forced to follow in his daddy the senator’s footsteps, eventually succumbing to pressure to take up his line of work, and take on his unfulfilled ambitions.

Yet now that the former vice president is without any question writing his own script, and can follow any path he likes, the one he’s chosen with the sale of his Current TV network to Qatar-funded Al Jazeera is not just hypocritical, but awfully familiar to those who remember what his father did after leaving public life.

Of course, had he been named ‘Bush’ he’d have been crucified in the press and investigated by the Justice Department.

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But was 2012 really the warmest year on record in the U.S.? It may have been, but the truth is that we don’t know. There are two reasons for this. First, the historical data sets published by NCDC and NOAA lack integrity. Those organizations, which receive many millions of government dollars to promote global warming theory, do not publish raw data. Rather, as we explained here, they first adjust the data. How do they adjust it? They depress the temperatures that were actually recorded in past decades, in order to make today’s temperatures look warmer by comparison….

…

Then there is the fact that weather stations in the U.S. are generally sited in areas that are getting warmer for reasons having nothing to do with global warming, i.e., urbanization. Moreover, Anthony Watts’s research found that no less than 89% of weather stations in the U.S. fail to comply with the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements because they are located too close to heat sources.

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How did it get to be “OK” for people to be late for everything?

Because as far as I am concerned, it’s not OK.

Hear, hear.

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In times past, someone like Evgenia wouldn’t bother having a job. Back then, work was something unpleasant that poor people had to do so they wouldn’t starve to death.

But times have changed. Poor people no longer have to work because they collect government handouts. Work is now a privilege to be enjoyed by the rich so that they can achieve self-actualization.

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

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Words fail me.

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Rather, it is the mediocre to poor authors who nevertheless sell tons of books that best serve this purpose.  Your shades of grey, or twilights, or malnutrition for fun and profit, or even your tales about zombies are what shed light down into the recesses of the oversized societal gut.

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For many years, watching Congress has been like watching a football game where both teams punt every play.  The beginning of 2013 has continued to prove the rule.  More recently however, every time the Republicans punt, the President grabs the ball, spikes it, and acts as if he’s in the end zone.  The media cheers right along with him, no flags are thrown, and the country is left thinking that he’s scored a touchdown regardless of his field position.  If we have learned anything over the past few months, it’s that the Republicans need to keep the ball and go on offense.  As legendary Georgia football coach, Erk Russell, would have said, “GATA.”

Good luck with that.

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I blame George W. Bush.

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Two remarkable legal proceedings are currently wending their way through the federal criminal courts. The cases involve very different parties: Conrad Black, one of the most consequential public intellectuals and businessmen of our era, and James “Whitey” Bulger, a Boston-based alleged racketeer and serial murderer. But both cases highlight some of the same profound problems with the way federal prosecutorial business is done these days.

In both cases, as in countless others, the feds have used certain techniques that virtually assure convictions of both the innocent and the guilty, the wealthy and the poor, the violent drug dealer and the white collar defendant, indifferent to the niceties of “due process of law,” particularly the right to effective assistance of legal counsel. In order to prevent a defendant from retaining a defense team of his choice, federal prosecutors will first freeze his assets, even though a jury has yet to find them to have been illegally obtained. They then bring prosecutions of almost unimaginable complexity, assuring that the financially hobbled defendant’s diminished legal team (or, as is often the case, his court-appointed lawyer) will be too overwhelmed to mount an adequate defense.

Your tax dollars at work.

These techniques are the rule, not the exception, when the Department of Justice really wants to win a case. When federal drug enforcers decide to go after physicians who recommend drugs for the alleviation of chronic pain in quantities or for conditions that roam outside of drug warriors’ notions of the “good faith” practice of medicine, they indict the doctors under statutes aimed at drug dealers, then freeze their bank accounts.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

When corporate executives are investigated and charged, the Department of Justice has been known to pressure their employer corporations to refuse to live up to contractual agreements to pay attorneys’ fees for indicted executives. This practice was immortalized in a series of Department of Justice directives, one of which, signed June 16, 1999, is known as the “Holder Memorandum” in honor of its drafter, the current attorney general, at that time the deputy attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division at the DOJ. (In 2006, United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan declared the DOJ’s practice unconstitutional, a decision affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Kaplan wrote that the corporation only “refused to pay because the government held the proverbial gun to its head.”)

Welcome to the Obamanation. Leave your wallet at the door; you won’t need it in jail.

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I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the thought of a chick with blue nail polish and a tattoo on her hand owning an ‘assault weapon’….

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Sorry, but Brendan Greene-Walsh looks like the poster child of a SWPL beta male. At least we can be confident that they’ll have at most one child, whose name will no doubt sound like a fashionable disease.