Read it.

Fox News has two related stories regarding State Department and CIA employees who reportedly have information they wish to offer about the Obama administration’s conduct in relation to the Benghazi attack. According to a lawyer for one of these whistle-blowers, the information pertains to (1) the State Department’s failure, prior to the attack, to provide proper security despite warnings that should have led to a security beef-up (2) the government’s response (or non-respone) during the attack, and (3) the Obama administration’s inaccurate and/or misleading statements about the attack after it had occurred.

Those of us who remember the media feeding-frenzy during the so-called ‘Iran-Contra scandal’ in Reagan’s second term are not surprised at all that this isn’t getting any attention from the Usual Suspects.

Read it.

 A special operations member who witnessed the attack on the U.S. Mission unfold in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 last year, as well as debriefed those who took part in the response, spoke with Fox News’ Adam Housley on Monday night and revealed information that directly contradicts the administration’s insistence that there was not enough time nor resources to send to Benghazi to help State Department employees, contractors, and intel operatives who were under a terrorist attack. FNC kept their source’s identity hidden, as witnesses to the Benghazi attack have reportedly been intimidated  by the administration into silence. The assault left four Americans dead, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens.

“I know for a fact that C110 was doing a training exercise not in the region of northern Africa but in Europe and they have the ability to react and respond,” the special ops member told FNC.

Read it.

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

Read it.

It’s a surprisingly rare treat to see inside a very expensive and very unique timepiece. Although the video below is a render, it shows almost every important part of this wild watch including something called the chain-and-fusee, a method used for centuries to improve the accuracy of watches by ensuring constant force is applied to the balance wheel over time.

First World Problem.

There is no molehill so small that some humorless retard can’t make into a mountain. Feminists have a particular talent in this regard. (You can tell they’re feminists because they think that wearing the traditional tin-foil hats is a surrender to patriarchy.)

Read it.

Donald Kagan, Yale’s great classicist gives his final lecture, fighting as ever for Western civilization.

I had the privilege of taking Professor Kagan’s intro Classical Civ course as an undergraduate. He was an amazing guy. (Of course, his finest hour was as Big Julie in the Timothy Dwight College production of Guys & Dolls.)

Steve Sailer is not impressed.

 I don’t know what kind of name Shaun Raviv is, but Vipul Naik is a polite and intelligent young graduate of Chennai Mathematical Institute in Tamil Nadu, India.

I admire his ethnocentric loyalty. His people have overpopulated their own country, with dire consequences. He strives to talk Americans into allowing his people to come to America in vast numbers to overpopulate our country.

Read it.

Earlier this year Capella University and the new College for America began enrolling hundreds of students in academic programs without courses, teaching professors, grades, deadlines or credit hour requirements, but with a path to genuine college credit.

Read it.

Hey, if it was easy, anybody could do it.

The Economist returns to the reservation and builds a McMansion.

Although the groups covered by affirmative action tend to be poorer than their neighbours, the individuals who benefit are often not. One American federal-contracting programme favours businesses owned by “socially and economically disadvantaged” people. Such people can be 87 times richer than the average American family and still be deemed “disadvantaged” if their skin is the right colour. One beneficiary of South Africa’s programme of “Black Economic Empowerment” is worth an estimated $675m; he is also the deputy president of the ruling party. Letting members of certain groups charge more and still win public contracts is nice for the few who own construction firms; less so for the many who rely on public services. The same goes for civil-service quotas. When jobs are dished out for reasons other than competence, the state grows less competent, as anyone who has wrestled with Indian or Nigerian officialdom can attest. Moreover, rules favouring businesses owned by members of particular groups are easy to game. Malaysians talk of “Ali-Baba” firms, where Ali (an ethnic Malay) lends his name, for a fee, to Baba (a Chinese businessman) to win a government contract.

Read it.

Not something that you’d expect to find in the Washington Post.

In my years as a journalist, I have written and spoken a great deal about women’s lives and struggles, and wrote a book about the conflicts facing successful female professionals. But today, 16 years into life as a working mother and 23 years into a marriage, I’ve come to question many of the truths I once held dear. The woman I wanted to be at 22 is not the woman I wanted to be at 38 — not even close — and she is certainly not who I am now at 55.

When life meets ideology, ideology tends to lose.

The debate has become twisted and simplistic, as if we’re merely trying to figure out how women can become more like men.

That has defined the core of ‘feminism’ since the 60s. Kinda late to the party….

During my high school years in the early 1970s, revolution was in the air. Across the bay was Berkeley, the home of free speech. Twenty miles up the road was Haight-Ashbury, the home of free love. And almost everyone I knew was protesting Vietnam and embracing civil rights.

I had similar experiences. But I never liked those people. I suspect that history has proven me right — they weren’t really very likeable.

Read it.

The ridiculous overreaction of the day is brought to you by a school in Cupertino, California.

The Land of Fruits and Nuts lives up to its reputation.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

We spend one third of our lives sleeping, it’s crucial for muscle recovery, fact retention and preparing the body to operate at full speed the next day, sleep is one of the most important things when it comes to day-to-day happiness. From students studying late into the night reducing the amount of information they retain to athletes sleeping in warm and loud environments missing out on crucial muscle and immune system recovery.

Read it.

Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of the health policy and management school at Emory University, estimates that 95 percent of spending in Medicare goes to patients with one or more chronic conditions — with enrollees suffering five or more chronic conditions accounting for 78 percent of its spending. “This is the Willie Sutton rule,” he says. “If 80 percent of the spending is going to patients with five or more conditions, that’s where our health-care system needs to go.”

Health Quality Partners is all about going there. The program enrolls Medicare patients with at least one chronic illness and one hospitalization in the past year. It then sends a trained nurse to see them every week, or every month, whether they’re healthy or sick. It sounds simple and, in a way, it is. But simple things can be revolutionary.

Most care-management systems rely on nurses sitting in call centers, checking up on patients over the phone. That model has mostly been a failure. And while many health systems send a nurse regularly in the weeks or months after a serious hospitalization, few send one regularly to even seemingly healthy patients. This a radical redefinition of the health-care system’s role in the lives of the elderly. It redefines being old and chronically ill as a condition requiring professional medical management.

Health Quality Partners’ results have been extraordinary. According to an independent analysis by the consulting firm Mathematica, HQP has reduced hospitalizations by 33 percent and cut Medicare costs by 22 percent.

Others in the profession have taken notice. “It’s like they’ve discovered the fountain of youth in Doylestown, Pa.,” marvels Jeffrey Brenner, founder of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.

Now Medicare is thinking of shutting it off.

Read it.

Read it.

With land prices at a premium in Singapore, vertical farms with rotating vertical racks present a sustainable solution while cutting down pollution.

Read it.

A government watchdog group has discovered that the United States government is advising Spanish-speaking residents that they need not declare their immigration status to qualify for food stamps.

A statement on the flyer—emphasized in bold and underlined—reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”

So come on down! ‘It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!’

Read it.

Researchers at the University of Wyoming have discovered a new lithium reserve that could radically alter where the US sources a key component of the li-ion batteries used in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and other technology. Currently the United States imports a vast majority of its lithium, but the newly-unearthed reserve — located at Rock Springs, Wyoming — could transform the US from “a significant lithium importer to an independent lithium producer” according to experts at the university’s Carbon Management Institute.

Tell the apparatchiks in China they can suck on it.

Read it.

Some researchers from Vanderbilt have developed a new app and hardware module that will help you find the direction of gunfire. The research team used the sonic signatures associated with firing to pinpoint its location, and put this on an Android smartphone map.

Read it.

Having turned harsh words between kids into grounds for formal legal action, New Jersey officials are now astonished that children and families on the receiving end of bullying charges are actually making use of the tools at their disposal to defend themselves. In application, this means that judges, attorneys and educrats are wasting time in court parsing the offensiveness of calling a classmate a “fat ass.” Actual quote from the Ridgewood school board attorney during a courtroom proceeding: “There is no evidence she condoned being called a horse.”

Yet another step toward the Obama future in a police blue state.

Read it.

If you take three ordinary gears and put them together so that each gear meshes with the other two, then none of the gears can turn because neighbouring gears must turn in opposite directions. Triple gear avoids this problem by having the three “gears” arranged like linked rings – the gears then rotate along skew axes, and the opposite direction rule no longer applies (although see also Oskar van Deventer’s Magic Gears for another possible solution).

Astonishing. I don’t see anyway to make such a gear except with 3D printing.

Steering Wheel Drum Set

Talking Hand Strengthener (Sometimes the hand talks back….)

Golf Will Drive You To Drink

Talking Star Wars Pizza Cutter

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

… recent studies show that the use of ethanol and biodiesel does not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. For many years, proponents of decarbonization assumed that the burning of biofuels would be “carbon neutral.” The carbon neutral concept assumes that as plants grow they absorb carbon dioxide equal to the amount released when burned. If true, the substitution of ethanol for gasoline would reduce emissions.

But a 2011 opinion from the Science Committee of the European Environment Agency pointed out what it called a “serious accounting error.” The carbon neutral concept does not consider vegetation that would naturally grow on land used for biofuel production. Since biofuels are less efficient than gasoline or diesel fuel, they actually emit more CO2 per mile driven than hydrocarbon fuels, when proper accounting is used for carbon sequestered in natural vegetation. Further, a 2011 study for the National Academy of Sciences found that, “…production of ethanol as fuel to displace gasoline is likely to increase such air pollutants as particulate matter, ozone, and sulfur oxides.”

Read it.

Note the subhead: ‘That would be a miracle–and a nightmare.’ The ‘nightmare’ is that of the eco-nazis, whose campaign to cancel the 20th century can only succeed if it can persuade — or force — the rest of society to give up the energy-dense fossil fuels that have driven progress ever since the internal combustion engine was invented.

Slate has the dirty.

Wait long enough and everything bad for you is good again. Sugar? Naturally better than high-fructose corn syrup. Chocolate? A bar a day keeps the doctor away. Caffeine? Bring it on.

Lard, however, has always been a ridiculously hard sell. Over at least the last 15 years, it’s repeatedly been given a clean bill of health, and good cooks regularly point out how superior this totally natural fat is for frying and pastries. But that hasn’t been enough to keep Americans from recoiling—lard’s negative connotations of flowing flesh and vats of grease and epithets like lardass and tub of lard have been absurd hurdles. But no longer. I’m convinced that the redemption of lard is finally at hand because we live in a world where trendiness is next to godliness. And lard hits all the right notes, especially if you euphemize it as rendered pork fat—bacon butter.

‘Bacon butter’. I like that.

(Peasant food has cachet only if you are not forced to live on it.)

Truth.

Gavin MacInnes reports.

I quit smoking weed because when you have kids, you need to be on call in case someone has a nightmare. You can’t tell your daughter monsters don’t exist when you’re starting to think that maybe they do.

Read it.

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

The why of this flight from the legal protections and relative security of the above-ground economy isn’t a huge mystery. Surowiecki tries to emphasize cultural changes that have companies and workers both preferring contactors and temp work, but many of those shifts seem likely responses to taxes and regulations that make traditional employment more expensive and less attractive than it once was. As Surowiecki concedes, “Feige points to the growing distrust of government as one important factor. The desire to avoid licensing regulations, which force people to jump through elaborate hoops just to get a job, is another.”

Ya think?

Read it.

Modern Farmer has an in-depth look at the “pig bomb,” a population explosion of wild boars that is devastating crops, destroying natural terrain, and spreading disease around the world. The animals cause $1 billion in damage every year in the US alone. The exact causes of the pig bomb are uncertain and vary by country, but the population in the US has been increasing ever since European wild boars were imported sometime around the nineteenth century.

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

John Derbyshire gives us a little political incorrectness.

White people love ethnic diversity, but only as it relates to restaurants.

Zip code 02116 is in congressional district 8, which went for Obama 58-41 last November. That’s Barack Obama, the guy whose political career was launched in the living room of terrorist bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. There’s your irony.

Irony. The prole-hating white Tutsi classes were of course on their knees praying to saints Abraham, Martin, and John that the Boston bombers would turn out to be white clingers.

Read it.

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

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the man suspected of being a co-conspirator in the Boston Marathon bombings, was mirandized after only 16 hours of questioning. According to Fox News, FBI officials were “stunned” when federal District Court Judge Marianne Bowler arrived at the hospital and read Tsnarnaev his rights. Sources told Fox News that this premature action might have hurt the investigation.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has its roots in the October 27, 1993 conference at a Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia that was attended by 25 supporters and members of Hamas. The 1993 conference had as its purpose the subversion of the Oslo Accords. Israel had to be destroyed, not accommodated. Among those in attendance was Nihad Awad.

The FBI monitored and recorded the meeting. The evidence derived from the meeting played a key role in the (successful) prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation as a Hamas front group.

CAIR holds itself out as civil rights group, but it is the public relations arm of the jihad waged by the Muslim Brotherhood and its various offshoots in the United States. Awad is now the executive director of CAIR. For additional background on CAIR, see, for example, Daniel Pipes and Sharon Chada’s “CAIR: Islamists fooling the establishment” and Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad (I’m drawing from chapter 8 for this post).

Islam is a more serious existential threat to civilization than Communism ever was. The only thing that has saved us so far is that they don’t have nuclear weapons. But the Obama administration is doing the best that it can to see that they do.

If Obama were a Muslim, what would he be doing differently?

More Islamophobia

Three British men have been jailed at the Old Bailey for engaging in conduct in preparation of acts of terrorism.

Yeah, when I see names like ‘Imran Mahmood’ and ‘Jahangir Alom’ I immediately think ‘British’.

Police discovered fragments of text on Dart’s laptop that revealed that the pair had used the computer to have a “silent conversation” to avoid possible surveillance bugs.

They would open a word processor document and take it in turns to type, before deleting the text and mistakenly assuming none of it would be stored on the machine.

However forensic experts were able to plough through 2,000 pages of computer code to decipher fragments of what was said.

Allah is apparently not tech-savvy.

Read it.

Aren’t you glad the government is on your side? Imagine what life would be like if it were not.

Hm, no, you’re right, I don’t see much difference, either….

Read it.

What MSNBC fails to realize is that Obama hasn’t diverted from the Bush Doctrine one iota. Sure, maybe he’d rather call Republicans ‘enemies’ than terrorists and uses drones more than Bush, but: He kinda mostly continued with Bush’s policy in the context of prevention. Obama began withdrawal from Iraq on Bush’s schedule, he called for a Bush-esque surge in Afghanistan, he never closed Gitmo like he promised, he extended the scope and duration of the Patriot Act, he ordered drone strikes without due process (Bush called it preemption) — revive? Obama has never stopped Bush’s approach to the war on terror. What’s more, Obama ordered interrogation before Miranda which drew bipartisan criticism.

Read it.

A newly discovered mechanism for cooling the planet – potentially, according to its discoverers, more significant even than the well-known chilling effects of volcanic eruptions – has now been further investigated.

The mechanism in question is the action of difficult-to-study atmospheric molecules known as “Criegee intermediates”, whose existence was first theorised in the 1950s by German chemist Rudolf Criegee but not confirmed until recent years by boffins using methods which have only lately become available.

So — how’s that whole Global Warming thing working out for you?

Steve Sailer is tracking the Thought Police so you don’t have to.

… It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.I would presume the motivation for this would be for the convenience of English / Womyn’s Studies majors and the like. (I could look it up on the Talk page, if I were interested enough.) It sounds like a bad idea, but one that my sources at Sexism Central tell me was not on their radar for implementation in the 2013 Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy.

And thank God for that….

Bryan Caplan gives you the news.

Here’s what the CBO found:

1. After adjusting for education, occupation, work experience, and other observable characteristics, federal salaries are only 2% higher than in the private sector.

2. HOWEVER, federal workers’ fringe benefits are 46% higher than in the private sector.  As a result, total compensation (salary + benefits) is 16% higher for federal workers than comparable private sector workers.

3. Overcompensation is highest for the least-educated federal workers – +36% if you’ve got a high school diploma or less.  As education rises, the federal worker premium falls.  Federal workers with professional or doctoral degrees actually earn 18% less than private sector counterparts.

And why would they do that? The power, my friend, the power.

Steve Sailer points out how a British newspaper is doing a job American (‘journalists’) won’t do.

 As I mentioned yesterday, Tavon is the head of the Black Guerilla Family prison gang inside a Baltimore jail, where he fathered five babies by four lady prison guards.

I’m not sure why the Washington Post and other American outlets hadn’t posted Tavon’s picture. Perhaps they were trying to battle racial stereotypes. After all, without pictorial evidence, how could anyone have guessed that Tavon White is black? Or maybe they couldn’t find a picture of Tavon at age 12 like they found of Trayvon?

Steve, the check is in the mail.

Read it.

I looked hard at the 60 MBA students and said “President Bush is smarter than almost every one of you.”

More silence.

I could tell they were waiting for me to break the tension, laugh, and admit I was joking.

I did not.

Read it.

If you think 3D printers have given would-be gun controllers the vapors already, just wait until you hear the latest from Cody Wilson, the head honcho of Defense Distributed. He told reporters at the Inside 3D Printing Conference in New York City that the group’s latest project — a gun made entirely with 3D-printed parts (except for a metal firing pin) — is just weeks away from success. If Wilson and company can deliver on the promise, it would be an important step beyond their already impressive accomplishments in producing functioning AR-15 lower receivers and “high-capacity” magazines for AR-15s and AK-style rifles. It would also be an unmistakable message to government officials that gun control laws are becoming ever-more unenforceable.

Steve Sailer looks at a Blue State.

     The indictment described a jailhouse seemingly out of control. Four corrections officers became pregnant by one inmate. Two of them got tattoos of the inmate’s first name, Tavon — one on her neck, the other on a wrist.

Sounds like they ought to have been called mistaken officers, not corrections officers.

 Have you ever noticed that white prison gangs are always described as “white supremacist,” but black prison gangs and Mexican prison gangs are never described as “black supremacist” and “Mexican supremacist?”

Even those that belong to organizations like La Raza, ‘the race’, which would be denounced as an explicitly racist organization were it not in Spanish, so of course it doesn’t count.

 Five kids fathered by an attempted murderer in prison. Anybody want to bet whether these five will turn out to be, on the whole, net taxpayers or tax consumers?

And, of course, if these malefactors were white, that would be explicitly mentioned right at the start. But it wasn’t, so we are left to read between the lines.

     According to an affidavit for search warrants for the homes of the prison guards, who were arrested Tuesday, gang leaders strategically recruited female officers who they thought had “low self-esteem and insecurities.”

Oh, ya think?

 George Gilder wrote a book, Visible Man, about a charming young inner city black man who idled his days away in low brow stupidity, except for when he was in prison. Suddenly, he would turn into a King Rat-style business mastermind, only to relapse into a layabout sponge as soon as he was freed to return to the company of women he could exploit with his looks and personality. (Of course, they didn’t have gender-integrated prison guard staffs back in the 1970s, so we’re more advanced now.)

They call that ‘progress’, which is another way of saying ‘we are screwed’. Which leads to natural speculation about the meaning of the word ‘progressive’….

     Officers can be fired for associating with inmates, but the women in this case are suspended and still employed.

Read it.

The benefits ran out in 2012 after Russell started earning enough to disqualify him for benefits, apparently working some 80 hours per week as a home health aide while Tamerlan hung out at home and cooked up plots to bomb things. Welfare was a way of life in the Tsarnaev household; both parents received it as well. Massachusetts will not say what sort of benefits the Tsarnaevs received, and stonewalled until late on Tuesday evening after the Boston Herald began questioning local lawmakers on the matter.

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

Read it.

You know how it is — sometimes Starbuck’s just gets your order wrong, and you have to strike out.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, tells you some inconvenient truth.

 Many errors are made by assuming that things scale linearly when they don’t. For example, if you triple your speed on the highway (from 35 mph to 105 mph), you probably won’t triple the mileage you cover in an hour. You’ll likely spend plenty of time parked on the shoulder, explaining to a police officer why you were driving so fast.

One of the most frequent and unfortunate failures to understand that things don’t always scale linearly involves democracy. Too many people assume that what holds true for their book club or homeowners association holds true for democratic polities of millions of people.

That last may not be a good example — most homeowner’s associations are as rigidly fascist in their outlook as the Congressional Black Caucus. But I take his point.

 The U.S. Capitol building in Washington might be called “the People’s House,” but in reality, I am no more welcome into the inner chambers of that building than I am welcome into the boardroom of IBM or into the office of the CEO of Disney. And what’s true for me is true for 99.99999 percent of other Americans.

Actually, being an economics professor, he’s likely far more welcome there than would be, say, a truck driver or a plumber. The Crust don’t like to rub elbows with proles, after all.

Read it.

I’ll keep repeating it until it sinks in: There Is No Such Thing As Intellectual Property. Property is stuff that, when you have it, nobody else does. This ain’t that. The term ‘intellectual property’ is like ‘gay marriage’, a category mistake. I tell you three times.

Read it.

It’s a legitimate question. We know Tamerlane Tsarnev claimed to not have any American friends, is suspected of killing the only one he made, and judging by his own social media accounts was incredibly hostile towards America. His younger brother was the same.

Meet the Greenest Home in America

In the surrounding hills of Silicon Valley stands the impressive Tah.Mah.Lah, the “Greenest house in America.” The home is also the brainchild and abode of Foundation Capital partner and longtime VC Paul Holland and his wife, Linda Yates. We were lucky enough to be invited into their home to hear about why and how they built the most sustainable home in the country.

There’s that work ‘sustainable’ again.

Ron Radosh lays out some inconvenient truth.

Let us no longer speculate about the motive for the actions of the Tsarnaev brothers: despite growing up in the United States, both became adherents of radical Islam. This truth, in our politically correct age, we are not supposed to mention. To do so in liberal circles is to be accused of Islamophobia. Ignoring the truth, however, is no protection against the consequences of an extremist radical ideology.

Read it.

But what exactly happens to your once-beloved iPod once you relinquish it to the recycling bin?  We spoke with three e-Stewards certified recyclers from coast to coast to get some insight into the last moments of our abandoned gadgetry and where our old devices go to die.