Read it.

The publishing house of my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), will soon issue a promising new hymnal. Naturally the hymns had to pass theological muster, but the range of styles and themes in this collection is wide—newer hymns, global music, praise songs, spirituals, Taizé melodies and rousing old favorites. And once again, for the third hymnal in a row, Presbyterians will not find “Onward Christian Soldiers” in the mix.

Good riddance. This hymn, with its “hut-two-three-four” tune and its warring call for Christians to raise the battle flag, has long outlived its usefulness. Recently, one of my friends threatened to resign her role as church school assistant because the lead teacher insisted on having the children sing, “Christ the royal Master, leads against the foe. Forward into battle, see his banners go!” I stand with my friend.

And you will die with her, too, when Muslims bent on jihad come to cut your heads off. You will not be missed.

Economist Bryan Caplan applies some common sense to an age-old question.

The deserving poor are those who can’t take – and couldn’t have taken – reasonable steps to avoid poverty. The undeserving poor are those who can take – or could have taken – reasonable steps to avoid poverty.  Reasonable steps like: Work full-time, even if the best job you can get isn’t fun; spend your money on food and shelter before you get cigarettes or cable t.v.; use contraception if you can’t afford a child.  A simple test of “reasonableness”: If you wouldn’t accept an excuse from a friend, you shouldn’t accept it from anyone.

If I sound harsh, notice: by my standards, many of the poor are clearly deserving: low-skilled workers in the Third World, children of poor or irresponsible parents, the severely handicapped.  Still, on reflection, many people we think of as “poor” turn out to be undeserving.

This is in marked contrast to the politically fashionable position that no ‘poor’ person is ever undeserving, and that includes some people that you might not think are actually, you know, poor.

Steve Sailer pulls something back out of the Memory Hole.

Bill Clinton appointed black lesbian Democrat Barbara Jordan, a former Congresswoman who gave a famous keynote address at the 1976 Democratic convention, to head the in-depth study of immigration policy.

Barbara Jordan was one of the most sensible politicians in the Democrat party during her day. Of course, even being a black female lesbian couldn’t save her from obscurity with that sort of a disability.

Mark Bittman, the official Food Fascist for the New York Times, explains why all you Little People are a bunch of idiots about food.

A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.

In other words, according to this study, it’s not just obesity that can cause diabetes: sugar can cause it, too, irrespective of obesity. And obesity does not always lead to diabetes.

The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”

THE SCIENCE IS IN! GLOBAL WARMING TOXIC SUGAR IS REAL! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN! OR AT LEAST SEND THEM TO A GOVERNMENT SCHOOL WHERE THEY WILL BE FED ACCORDING TO GOVERNMENT GUIDELINES AND THEREBY SAVED FROM THEIR STUPID PARENTS!

But as Lustig says, “This study is proof enough that sugar is toxic. Now it’s time to do something about it.”

The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

Only 14 years after the park opened, the space age that Walt Disney had imagined was becoming a reality. Before President Eisenhower had signed the Interstate Highway legislation, Autopia allowed riders to experience Disney’s interpretation of what the system would one day be like. Autopia accurately envisioned the future of America’s soon to be multilane limited-access highways.

Another addition to Tomorrowland was the Monsanto House of the Future, added in 1957. Items such as picture phones, television remote controls and a microwave oven familiarized many visitors with these ideas for the first time. Tomorrowland continued to prove itself as an innovative predictor of the near future.

Ah, yes, the heady days of optimism, before the Counterculture Left ruined everything.

The oldest members of today’s world lived through the invention or development of the airplane, skyscraper, suspension bridge, radio, television, antibiotics, atomic bombs, and interstate highways. The mid-life individuals went through the first moon landing, the popularization of personal computers and invention of search engines, biotechnology, and cellphones. Participants of the younger generation have seen much up- tuning of these devices, but are greatly lacking in brand new revolutionary inventions.

Read it.

Mayor Bloomberg was booed yesterday as he walked in the annual St. Patrick’s Parade in the hurricane-ravaged Rockaways.

The jeers grew so loud toward the end of the Queens parade that mayoral candidate and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn appeared to break away from the mayor to march separately.

Heh.

Read it.

Soft-drink companies have spent huge sums retrofitting their assembly lines to accommodate Mayor Bloomberg’s new soda crackdown, according to industry insiders.

The law, which kicks in March 12, forbids hundreds of city eateries from selling soda in containers larger than 16 ounces.

Few drink makers in New York put beverages in that size bottle — and none is a soda. They include Snapple, Pom and Sunny Delight.

But the 16.9-ounce bottle is a popular size for Coke, Pepsi and other carbonated beverages.

That’s because 16.9 fluid ounces is one-half liter, and can be sold internationally (in, say, Canada and Mexico). So Nanny Bloomberg is forcing vendors to stock two slightly different sizes, one that fits his fascist sensibilities, and one slightly larger that fits the natural market.

If ever there were an example of the negative consequences of heavy-handed government interference with the free market, this is it.

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Amazon is good at sorting and ranking things—we understand that. It knows exactly how many boxes of diapers my kids have ever used. It knows every book I’ve considered. It’s also clear that Amazon doesn’t care about what it sells; it just cares about the selling. To Amazon, a book isn’t really a book. It’s the result of a database query that Amazon will seamlessly transmit over its Whispernet or via USPS to your doorstep, if that’s still your thing. To the shopper, Amazon, with its records of browsing and buying, is not a store nor a website, but more like a ghost limb, for grabbing whatever is needed or wanted.

Which is one of the reasons I own stock in the company. They make my life (and the lives of a lot of other people) much easier.

Evidently this puzzles some people. Like Walmart, Amazon is one of the favorite whipping boys of the Voices of the Crust and their politically activist cousins, who would much rather reduce American shopping to the era of The Music Man, where the epitome of modern times was riding your Model T Ford to the county seat. Cheap prices that help the poor stretch their dollars? What’s up with that?

“Everything about them,” said one indie publisher of Amazon in a Salon article, “is still evil.” But that view is countered by people like Will Wiles, who took to the Huffington Post to describe the process of publishing his novel, Care of Wooden Floors, with New Harvest. “Ascendant companies always seem most threatening,” he wrote, “at the moment when they’re becoming indispensable parts of the scenery of an industry.” He had reason to show his loyalty, of course. But consider: When he was promoting his book after the birth of a child, Amazon did something that few publishers would. They sent him a box of diapers.

And that pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Amazon — and its critics.

Taki’s Magazine takes a look at government doing what it does best.

Lord Acton’s famous maxim that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely” is such a nakedly accurate observation of human nature that one might assume no one ever needed to articulate it, much less keep reminding anyone about it.

But a cornerstone of the Grand Leftist Delusion is the notion that when you give human beings the power to legally extort a significant chunk of other human beings’ productive income, this will bring out their best behavior rather than their worst.

And yet, as luck and magic would have it, wherever there is government on Earth, there is corruption. And it’s almost an inviolable law of physics that the bigger the government, the bigger the corruption.

Read it.

Described by some as “the Rosa Parks of the constitutional currency movement,” Mr. von NotHaus managed over the last decade to get more than 60 million real dollars’ worth of his precious metal-backed currency into circulation across the country — so much, and with such deep penetration, that the prosecutor overseeing his case accused him of “domestic terrorism” for using them to undermine the government.

The Other McCain pulls back the curtain on the Great and Powerful Oz.

The point he made, however, is that some journalists have an obnoxious tendency to assume readers are too stupid to spot their attempts at the “Jedi mind trick” of constructing a narrative framework within which carefully selected facts are construed in such a way that only one (narrowly biased) conclusion is possible.

You usually only notice that trick when (a) you’re sufficiently familiar with the facts to know that the selection and emphasis are not exactly neutral, and (b) you don’t share the writer’s narrow bias.

While this Let-Me-Tell-You-What-to-Think stuff is particularly annoying when it occurs as reporting, the same kind of sneaky highhandedness can also be observed in some opinion writing.

Read it.

 Most readers of The New York Times probably subscribe to what Paul Tough calls “the cognitive hypothesis”: the belief “that success today depends primarily on cognitive skills — the kind of intelligence that gets measured on I.Q. tests, including the abilities to recognize letters and words, to calculate, to detect patterns — and that the best way to develop these skills is to practice them as much as possible, beginning as early as possible.” In his new book, “How Children Succeed,” Tough sets out to replace this assumption with what might be called the character hypothesis: the notion that noncognitive skills, like persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence, are more crucial than sheer brainpower to achieving success.

Read it.

Traditional education focuses on teaching, not learning. It incorrectly assumes that for every ounce of teaching there is an ounce of learning by those who are taught. However, most of what we learn before, during, and after attending schools is learned without its being taught to us. A child learns such fundamental things as how to walk, talk, eat, dress, and so on without being taught these things. Adults learn most of what they use at work or at leisure while at work or leisure. Most of what is taught in classroom settings is forgotten, and much or what is remembered is irrelevant.

Read it. And watch the video.

Automatic doors have been around for so long that we barely even think of them as technology, but maybe it all comes down to the execution. Alex Shakespeare certainly thinks so — he’s rigged his kitchen with a Star Trek-style pneumatic sliding door, complete with “whoosh” sound. The device is controlled by an Arduino microcontroller, a pneumatic arm, and an air compressor, and can be remotely opened and closed by sliding a magnetic puck across the kitchen surface. Alternatively, IR sensors handle automatic operation for fans of supermarket-style activation

Read it.

The fossilised remains of stone age people recovered from two caves in south west China may belong to a new species of human that survived until around the dawn of agriculture.

The partial skulls and other bone fragments, which are from at least four individuals and are between 14,300 and 11,500 years old, have an extraordinary mix of primitive and modern anatomical features that stunned the researchers who found them.

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 Meat glue is a powder officially known as transglutaminase. Originally, the natural enzyme was harvested from animal blood. Now it’s primarily produced through the fermentation of bacteria. Added to meat, it forms a nearly invisible and permanent bond to any other meat you stick it to.

Hmm.

 Terje took powder and dusted it liberally over the meat pieces. The coated stew meat then went into a circular tin to give it a nice, round filet mignon shape. He was also able to make a New York strip out of thin cuts of round steak. Adding water makes a soupy glaze, and an easier way to coat the meat.

Yuck.

Twenty-four hours later, the humble $4-a-pound stew meat now looks like a $25-a-pound prime filet.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration lists transglutaminase as “generally recognized as safe.” It’s OK to eat cooked meat that’s been glued.

But here’s the problem: the outside of a piece of meat comes in contact with a lot of bacteria making its way from slaughterhouse to table. Usually cooking a steak on the outside will kill all that off. The center of a single cut of steak is sterile, that’s why you can eat it rare. But glued pieces of meat could contain bacteria like E. coli on the inside.

Read it.

Check it out.

Dedicated to government employees and Union members everywhere. Do not think that your efforts are unappreciated.

Read it.

Grand Rapids has discovered beer tourism.

Those tourists come there because it’s where many of their favorite beers come from. Fifteen of the 21 craft breweries in West Michigan are in metro Grand Rapids.

Watch it.

The crime? Wanting to choose for themselves whom they would marry.

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.

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

Read it.

Read it.

Gay students claimed that they even felt threatened by the mere sight of students and faculty carrying bags with the Chick-fil-A logo on them.

Poor babies.

Read it.

Spoof  “vote for Turkson” posters have popped up in Rome along walls still plastered with campaign posters from Italy’s general election on Sunday and Monday. Campaigning for the papacy is officially forbidden and even suggesting one is a candidate is usually enough to end any cardinal’s chances of ascending to the throne of Saint Peter.

Ghana’s Cardinal Peter Turkson is the Irish bookmakers’ favorite to replace Pope Benedict, putting a non-European in pole position to lead the 1.2 billion-member Roman Catholic Church for the first time in more than a millennium.

Actually, that’s kind of funny.

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WikiHouse, the “print your own open source pad” project, has called for contributors and cash to help it establish an online archive of downloadable dwelling designs.

The site’s aim is nothing short of the democratisation of the construction industry: to allow, in short, “anyone to design, download and ‘print’ CNC-milled houses and components which can be assembled with minimal formal skill or training,” according to British architect and WikiHouse co-founder Alastair Parvin.

Steve Sailer feels somebody’s pain.

 I can totally relate to complaints about how great-grandpa wasn’t allowed to join the Los Angeles Country Club, so he had to make do with joining Hillcrest CC instead (Hillcrest had the better dining room, but LACC had the better golf course). But, I’m fascinated by how Sen. Schumer (D-NY, 1600 SAT score, Harvard BA, Harvard JD, youngest New York legislator since Teddy Roosevelt, never lost an election) is hurt that when his ancestors 700 years ago were invited by the nobles to move to Poland they weren’t allowed to become serfs but had to go into finance instead.

Senator Chuck Schumer is an anti-Semite’s wet dream. Having lived all his life in the loving arms of the Crust, he has dedicated that life to making sure that no taxpayer dollar remains unspent, no wealth remains untaxed, no issue remains undistorted or unexploited, and no television camera remains focused anywhere other than on him.

‘O villain, villain, smiling, damnèd villain!
My tables—meet it is I set it down
That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain—’

Read it.

Green tech boffins at Osaka University have developed new highly efficient solar panel “paper” technology made from wood pulp, and says it is lighter, more flexible and eco-friendly than traditional clunky solar energy collectors.

The solar paper can be less than one millimetre thick thanks to its basic components: transparent cellulose fibres just 15 nanometer thick produced from wood pulp and a thin film of silver wiring.

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They mean ‘journalism based on information gathered by aerial drones’, which is news, not ‘journalists are drones’, which is not news.

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As the federal budget goes off the rails, Joe Biden’s getting back on — with Amtrak.

The looming sequester is forcing the veep to once again take the train — as opposed to military aircraft — to his weekend trips home to Delaware.

Poor baby.