Marinade Infusing Meat Tenderizer. Or interrogation implement. We report, you decide.

Wide Coverage LED Pain Reliever. No indication of whether it’s useful for revealing secret writing in ancient esoteric texts, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Seat of Power. Me want.

Crib Dribbler. Hey, it works for your hamster.

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Officials in three Illinois counties have announced that they will no longer enforce the state’s ban on concealed carry.

They justify their decision by pointing to the Chicago-based 7th Court of Appeals Decision that found the ban unconstitutional in December 2012.

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News, perhaps, but hardly unexpected.

The three-day LA Pride parade that ended Sunday in West Hollywood had an unfortunate ending for a resident of the city- a giant mastiff.  The huge sculpture of a hot pink dog was stolen from its 5 compatriots. The mastiff, situated on La Cienega Boulevard, a major thoroughfare, was part of a group of 6 dogs, three of which were pink and three red, that were sculpted by an artist named William Sweetlove as a part of his exhibit titled “Cloned Bulldogs With Water Bottle.”

Paid for by the taxpayers, of course.

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And that’s not a good thing to be.

Paul Mirengoff fisks the Other Left Coast’s favorite ‘conservative’.

Brooks provides no evidence that illegal immigrants fit this definition to an appreciable degree. Nor would such a claim be justified. The former illegal immigrants who took advantage of the last amnesty overwhelmingly support the Party of big government.

Their successor illegal immigrants would almost certainly follow suit. This low skilled, poorly educated cohort perceives little interest in limiting the government’s ability to intervene on its behalf.

Brooks concedes that “immigrant areas” sometimes “go bad.” But he blames this on “America” for having “infected [immigrants] with bad values already present.”

I suppose, then, that if we toured Mexico City or San Salvador we would find no bad areas.

The only people who could possibly believe that David Brooks was a conservative would be the New York Times (because, of course, compared to them, he is).

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And about fargin time.

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I never believed half of this stuff, anyway.

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Dozens of lawmakers and aides are so afraid that their health insurance premiums will skyrocket next year thanks to Obamacare that they are thinking about retiring early or just quitting.

The fear: Government-subsidized premiums will disappear at the end of the year under a provision in the health care law that nudges aides and lawmakers onto the government health care exchanges, which could make their benefits exorbitantly expensive.

God forbid that the Ruling Class should have to live like Ordinary Folks.

Steve Sailer clues you in.

 My dad and I drove around Mexico City in 1975. One day we tried to get to the Palace of Fine Arts, a vast marble theater so heavy it had sunk two dozen feet into Mexico City’s dry lakebed since it was built in the mid-1800s. We could see it looming over the lesser buildings, but the randomness of the street layout made it hard to approach. Finally, we discovered a six lane boulevard leading directly to the Palace. As soon as my dad turned on to it, a policeman blew his whistle. Suddenly, six cars abreast came roaring at us — it was a one-way street.

The traffic cop was standing right under where the One-Way sign should have been. He, or a predecessor, probably took it down to increase business. Police sergeants auction off the most lucrative corners in Mexico City, so the lowly patrolmen who win the rights to a tourist-heavy spot like this have to be enterprising just to break even on bribe rake-offs, much less turn a profit.

Sure, we really need more of these people in this country, in addition to the 11 million who have already snuck in illegally.

Read it.

Two high-profile Obama White House alums are joining forces to start a communications business called The Incite Agency.

Makes you wonder what sort of ‘communications’ they plan to foster.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, explores some more of the modern world.

My son, who has his own way of getting to the essentials, asked how old the girl was, and the conversation went off on a tangent. I believe I got the main point across, though: Guys have our way of thinking, women have their way. There’s a lot of overlap, of course—I mean, we can both do crossword puzzles and so on—but some key areas of the female brain are wired differently from ours.

This is rank heresy under the reigning dogma of Absolute and Unquestionable Human Equality. Even as you read this I am probably being denounced somewhere by agents of our Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice as an unfit parent and a corrupter of the young.

Whatever: I shall proceed on the understanding that the reigning dogma of A&UHE is a stinking, wormy pile of intellectual dog crap that contradicts all human experience and scientific evidence. Everyone on board with that? Excellent.

Undeniable Truth #1:

I really don’t see how teenage boys can learn anything with girls in the classroom.

Undeniable Truth #2:

If healthy young adult males and females are assembled in units dedicated to a common purpose, in sex proportions much different from 50-50, and walled off from the general population, then strong sex-related emotions—notably sexual jealousy—will inevitably manifest themselves, corroding unit effectiveness.

Undeniable Truth #3:

Women are strongly attracted to higher-status men. If male officers are in command of units containing women, human nature is placed under severe strain.

Undeniable Truth #4:

Men who join the military are responding to widespread, innate male urges—the urge to break things and kill people, for example. Women who join the military are, by contrast, outliers in their sex. They are eccentric and prone to behave eccentrically. As a designated victim group, they are especially susceptible to the associated pathologies, e.g., victim hoaxes for attention, spite, or cash reward.

Four excellent reasons not to have women in the military at all, much less in combat units.

Read it.

As if the silly hoops that Google and Facebook and Microsoft put you through weren’t enough already….

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A new blog analyzing the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV) minute by agonizing minute.

Read it.

Don Mattrick, the head of Xbox at Microsoft, explained to GameTrailers that Microsoft built a system that’s future-proof and if you don’t like it, there’s another option: the eight-year-old Xbox 360.

This is Microsoft’s stance and the company doesn’t care if you complain. That message came through loud and clear during the company’s E3 press conference. Take it or leave it. Microsoft doesn’t care. They know they’ll sell millions of boxes and a group of vociferous web trolls won’t change that – or will they?

Read it.

In a revealing column at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall (pictured) voices doubts about Edward Snowden (and Bradley Manning before him) less for the details of their leaks of government information than for why he thinks he did it. To Marshall, Snowden is “some young guy I’ve never heard of before who espouses a political philosophy I don’t agree with.” That philosophy, he believes, is one that views that state as “essentially malevolent.” That’s enough to put the columnist and the whistleblower in different tribes, and it’s a good start at explaining why so many Americans have lined up behind government officials on the matter of leaks and surveillance, while many others have cheered leakers and denounced the peeping-tom state.

Read it.

Remember, the Cathedral (aka, political correctness / universalism / Cultural Marxism) is a religion; people who violate it are seen as heretics; the truth value of their statements is irrelevant.

Political correctness today is anti-science, which is why any unbiased seeker of truth will ultimately oppose it.

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Colorado state Senator Angela Giron (D-Pueblo) says that democracy in our republic is racist. Colorado citizens, angry over her votes to further restrict their Second Amendment civil liberties, have gathered thousands of signatures to force a recall election.

Democrats just say this sillly shit and nobody blinks an eye. And ‘minority’ elected officials are the worst of the idiots — just think of all the wacko pronouncements issuing from members of the Congressional Black caucus.

“I know it’s partially about me being a Latina and being in this position of authority,” said Giron.

Yeah, I’m sure that’s it — the fact that you have the IQ of a carrot certainly has nothing to do with it.

Carefully ignored is the fact that three other Hispanics, both Republican and Democrat, male and female, opposed a number of gun bills this session.

Republican Latina Clarice Navarro opposed all the gun bills.

Democrat Latinos Ed Vigil and Leroy Garcia opposed the Mag Ban, and Vigil also opposed the background check bill.

No recall campaigns have been initiated against any of those Hispanic politicians.

Hey, don’t confuse us with facts…

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Now that he’s exited HP, former Palm CEO Jon Rubinstein has opened up a bit about his thoughts on how and why webOS failed. In an interview with Fierce Wireless, Rubinstein said that if he had it to do over again, he wouldn’t have sold to HP, “Talk about a waste. … If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company?”

Ummm … cash out while it was still worth something, rather than ride it into the ground? That’s just a guess, you understand….

Steve Sailer puts things in perspective.

 If you had access to all of DSK’s electronic communications, what kind of data mining algorithm would you craft to ferret out DKS’s greatest vulnerability? How could you best sift through terabytes of data to find DSK’s Achilles heel?

Well, you wouldn’t. You’d just call up your press secretary and ask, “What’s the gossip about DSK?”

Underlining the distinction between ‘data’ and ‘information’.

 The more general point is that a lot of the information that the public assumes must be secret is actually common knowledge among the tiny percentage of people who are paying attention. To find out about it, you often just have to ask.

And most people who worry about the government having access to their personal data are the sort of people in whom the government has no possible interest.

Jim Goad is lovin’ it.

There are numerous examples of such seemingly insoluble liberal dilemmas, all of them hilarious to me.

Do you protect the environment, or do you allow the Third World to continue breeding like dusky hamsters?

Do you support Islam or the women who are getting their clits sliced off?

Do you come down on the side of unions or illegal-alien scab laborers?

Do you support Greenpeace or Injun whalers?

Do you oppose censorship or rape jokes?

Black female activists or Jews?

Such constant squabbling usually devolves into pissing contests about who is more oppressed and who exactly is bullying whom.

Read it.

Nick Meaney has a better reason for believing that the stars are overpaid: his algorithm tells him so. In fact, he says, with all but one of the above actors, the studios are almost certainly wasting their money. Because, according to his movie-analysis software, there are only three actors who make money for a film. And there is at least one A-list actress who is worth paying not to star in your next picture.

Read it.

Chunks of prawn cracker are flying through the air, next comes an ominous crash. It’s not the best start, but this, I am told, is the latest innovation in food delivery – service by drone.

Read it. And watch the video. I dare you.

Dress up like Elvis and climb aboard.

Freeberg nails it once again.

If gay marriage were all about providing equal rights, I’d be all for it. But it isn’t about that. Just like “raising the minimum wage” isn’t about raising anybody’s wage, when you really think about it you see it’s all about outlawing jobs that pay below a certain amount — “gay marriage” is a proposal to muck up a definition. That’s what it is, it’s an attack on definitions of things.

Read it.

Affirmative action is hard.  So many racial sub-groups, so little room.

Sad but true.

A fascinatng new report urges colleges and other education groups to rework the classification schemes for Asian-American students, and says current practices to aggregate data hide inequities.

Yeah, Southeast Asians are pissed that they’re in the same category as Chinese. And don’t get the Indians started on that….

Barry loves the little victims,
All the victims of the world;
Tan and umber, brown and black,
They just want to get some slack —
Barry loves the little victims of the world!

Read it.

We know what happened in the case of QWest before 9/11. They contacted the CEO/Chairman asking to wiretap all the customers. After he consulted with Legal, he refused. As a result, NSA canceled a bunch of unrelated billion dollar contracts that QWest was the top bidder for. And then the DoJ targeted him and prosecuted him and put him in prison for insider trading — on the theory that he knew of anticipated income from secret programs that QWest was planning for the government, while the public didn’t because it was classified and he couldn’t legally tell them, and then he bought or sold QWest stock knowing those things.

This CEO’s name is Joseph P. Nacchio and TODAY he’s still serving a trumped-up 6-year federal prison sentence today for quietly refusing an NSA demand to massively wiretap his customers.

Read it.

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

If Mussolini came back as a Democrat, he’d be President today.

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Britain’s efforts to change the law of succession across the 16 Commonwealth countries where the Queen is head of state could now be thrown into disarray.

If the challenge succeeds, it means a firstborn girl could lose the right to succession to a younger brother.

The changes to the law brought about by the Coalition had been agreed by all 16 of the Queen’s realms, led by Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

But professors Genevieve Motard and Patrick Taillon, constitutional experts at Laval University in Quebec City, lodged a case in Quebec Superior Court on Friday.

They allege that the ­Canadian government acted unconstitutionally by failing to seek the approval of each of the ­country’s 10 provinces before agreeing to the changes.

They also say the new succession laws would still prevent a Catholic or other ­non-Anglican from becoming the monarch, in breach of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It’s always something.

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All of these definitions matter; they’re used by various agencies to parcel out $37 billion-plus in federal money for “rural development.” And each one is different.

In one program, for instance, “rural” is defined as any place with fewer than 50,000 residents. So Lenoir is rural, and eligible for money. But in another, only towns smaller than 2,500 residents are “rural.” So Lenoir isn’t, and isn’t.

And so on. There are 11 definitions of “rural” in use within the U.S. Department of Agriculture alone.

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At least 436 Department of Health and Human Services employees–and possibly more at the White House Office of Management and Budget–received advance notice of an $8 billion Medicare decision that sent private health insurers’ stocks soaring.

Sometimes it is good to be Minions of the Crust.

Grassley says potentially market-moving government information “should be available to everyone at the same time, not handled loosely in a way that allows special access to some individuals.”

Good luck with that.

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The engineered vein was created with donated human blood vessel cells, which are implanted onto a tubular, biodegradable scaffold. The scaffold supports those cells as they grow into a fully-formed vessel. Once the process is complete, the new vein is “scrubbed” of cellular properties that might trigger an immune response — and subsequent rejection — in a patient. Where kidney disease is concerned, the vessels could replace synthetic grafts used to link an artery to a vein for the process of hemodialysis. Such synthetics are accompanied by serious risks, including clotting and infection.

Read it.

They’re dropping like flies.

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Of course, I’ve been saying that for years.

Low-Information Voters would be puzzled by this: Why are rich people affiliating with the anti-rich party? But, propaganda aside, the Democrats aren’t anti-rich; they just say they are. Democrats are the biggest group of talk-the-talk-don’t-walk-the-walk hypocrites on the face of the planet. This is how AlGore can sputter and bluster and get Nobel Prizes for being pro-environment and anti-global-warming while his estate in Tennessee uses more electricity than a small town.

RossDouthat reveals some inconvenient truth.

As the security expert Bruce Schneier wrote recently, it isn’t that the Internet has been penetrated by the surveillance state; it’s that the Internet, in effect, is a surveillance state.

…

It is at least possible to participate in online culture while limiting this horizontal, peer-to-peer exposure. But it is practically impossible to protect your privacy vertically — from the service providers and social media networks and now security agencies that have access to your every click and text and e-mail. Even the powerful can’t cover their tracks, as David Petraeus discovered. In the surveillance state, everybody knows you’re a dog.

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What is the real issue brought up by this whole PRISM debacle? It’s not that the government is willing to overstep its role using national security as an excuse. That’s been going on for thousands of years. It’s not that companies in a position of power are willing to throw those that rely on them under the bus in order to get ahead. Again, that’s nothing new. And it’s not that the institution of journalism has crumbled into a dismal wreckage of its former glory. Possibly true, but beside the point.

The issue central to all of these is that the fundamental balance of power when it comes to control of information has been allowed to shift unthinkably far away from the individual and towards a set of institutions with motives that are at best mercenary. It’s about time we fixed that, don’t you think?

To address the PRISM scandal itself briefly, I think we will be less surprised at the existence of such a program than, as I think will inevitably transpire, the incompetence and inefficiency that almost certainly define its methods and usage. Allegations of a massive conspiracy that goes so deep that the most powerful tech companies in the world are muzzling themselves and spitting lies out of fear and legal obligation assume, as other theories often do, that this shadow government pulling the strings is both massively effective and operates totally in secret, two things that are highly incongruous with the likely reality of incompetent civil servants, out-of-date methods, and bureaucracy choking everything in sight like the inextinguishable weed it is.

Don’t hold back — tell us how you really feel.

‘Jesus loves you, everyone else things you’re an asshole.’

Gavin MacInnes lightens the mood.

I can’t tell you what Hasidic Jews are like or even if I like them, but I can tell you what it’s like to be around them. Here are 10 things I’ve noticed over the past quarter-century.

Read it.

Read it again. It’s important.

Gates of Vienna is one of the pillars of resistance against the continuing Muslim campaign to take over the world. This explains what they do and how they do it. I support their work whenever I can; they are a prime source of knowledge about the Great Jihad, especially the stuff that doesn’t get into the Lamestream Media.

They do good and important work, and I wish that God grant them both many years.

Freeberg nails it once again.

It occurred to me recently that, when it comes to tax money, progressives never grow out of this rapacious mental stage. Tax monies are there primarily for their personal gratification — to fund untested pet projects, to dole out more pork products than a salumeria to the usual suspects, and presumably these days to wiretap every man, woman and child in America. And if any’s left over, it gets laundered and finds its way into their bank accounts. The idea that these monies are not inherently theirs never seems to cross their minds, nor does the concern that they should first take care of their constitutionally mandated responsibilities. They want Disneyland and they want it now!

And if you dare try to curb their spending, they’ll threaten to shut off the water, power and telephone so they can keep paying for Disneyland. In fact, they do this so consistently that it’s become something of a cliche.

The Other McCain isn’t afraid to ask the hard questions.

In what amounts to self-parody, an elementary school in California will hold a toy gun exchange — similar to the real gun exchanges run by police departments for real guns — in order to remove the, er, threat of toy guns at school.

Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

Iain Banks was a big noise among speculative fiction writerdom not only because he was a good writer (which he was) but also because he envisioned a universe in which socialism has triumphed through technology and therefore actually works, a setup that he called The Culture, the sort of world that Lenin et al. thought they would get by force-industrializing the Soviet Union (with results as you see them).

A significant number of ‘writers’ are drones who would really prefer that someone else support them while they Devote Their Time To Art, and so are by inclination socialist (except when they hit it big, in which case what’s theirs is theirs and keep your hands off. Stephen King comes immediately to mind.)

Because speculative fiction attracts a large number of bright but impractical people, it has a larger percentage of socialists than most genres — as one can tell by listening to many of them blather about political issues (which, in the modern world, can include where the coffee in your cup came from). Think English majors who really wanted to be engineers but discovered that it required a lot of math. (‘Math is hard!’)

And that’s not when they’re avowed Marxists, like Steven Brust. But most of them are conventional ‘progressives’, like Isaac Asimov.

Of course, there are a significant minority who actually apply their intelligence to understanding the real world and hence are on the conservative-to-libertarian side of the aisle. Publishers tend to attract people of a compatible bent: lefties gravitate to Tor, and righties to Baen. If you want to know what a writer’s politics are, see by whom s/he is published.

But don’t take my word for it; here’s Charlie Stross, another excellent writer and socialist:

However, I’d like to pause for a moment and reflect on my personal sense of loss. Iain’s more conventional literary works were generally delightful, edgy and fully engaged with the world in which he set them: his palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity shone through the page. And in his science fiction he achieved something, I think, that the genre rarely manages to do: he was intensely political, and infused his science fiction with a conviction that a future was possible in which people could live better — he brought to the task an an angry, compassionate, humane voice that single-handedly drowned out the privileged nerd chorus of the technocrat/libertarian fringe and in doing so managed to write a far-future space operatic universe that same human beings would actually want to live in (if only it existed).

‘Palpable outrage at inequity and iniquity’ is usually the spoor of the ‘progressives’, ‘if only it existed’ is their epitaph.

Steve Sailer reveals all.

     For many decades, Chinese testimony was not accepted in California courts, an Alien Land Law discouraged Asian land purchases, the Chinese Exclusion Act (not repealed until 1943) prevented Chinese immigration, and a Gentlemen’s Agreement, signed in 1907, required Japan to cut back sharply on passports issued to Japanese who wished to emigrate to California. When World War II began, the Japanese were sent to relocation camps at great personal cost to them.

Yet today Californians of Asian ancestry are viewed by Caucasians with comfort and even pride. In spite of their distinctive physical features, no one crosses the street to avoid a Chinese or Japanese youth. One obvious reason is that they have remarkably low crime rates.

Read it.

(Full disclosure: Andrei was a classmate of mine at Yale.)

If the bias of today’s journalism is to be bemoaned, one ought to describe that bias properly. It would be all right if politically it was on the left, provided there were in abundant evidence all the gradations of liberalism, say, from John Stuart Mill to Herbert Marcuse. If these, moreover, were complemented by at least a minority press biased to the right, say, from G. K. Chesterton to Anders Breivik, then all would be well with the world.

Yet such is not the case. You can say what you like about Stalin or Pol Pot, but just try saying something nice in print about Hitler, or even Mussolini. Thus, as a journalist, I cannot think of an organ of opinion—not even the one you’re presently reading—that would encourage me to describe, say, the neoconservative intellectual David Frum as “a dirty Jew.” No similar hindrance, however, inhibited a university professor once describing me in The New York Times as “an intellectual thug.”

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From the 1999 Columbine shooting to Sandy Hook Elementary to the June 7th shooting in Santa Monica, CA, an overarching narrative from public shootings in gun-free zones is the demeanor of the shooter(s)–they are confident their victims will not be able to fire back and therefore feel little reason to stop their rampages.

We saw this in the way the Columbine shooters moved through the cafeteria; we saw it again in various reports on the June 7th shooting in Santa Monica, where the shooter was described as “calm” and “methodical.”

Read it.

A sandwich shop owner in Little Rock, Arkansas, has posted signs in the front windows of his two shops announcing guns are welcome, although he asks that they remain holstered unless a need for self-defense arises.

A perfectly reasonable expectation.

Read it.

The new captain jumped from the deck, fully dressed, and sprinted through the water. A former lifeguard, he kept his eyes on his victim as he headed straight for the couple swimming between their anchored sportfisher and the beach. “I think he thinks you’re drowning,” the husband said to his wife. They had been splashing each other and she had screamed but now they were just standing, neck-deep on the sand bar. “We’re fine; what is he doing?” she asked, a little annoyed. “We’re fine!” the husband yelled, waving him off, but his captain kept swimming hard. ”Move!” he barked as he sprinted between the stunned owners. Directly behind them, not 10 feet away, their 9-year-old daughter was drowning. Safely above the surface in the arms of the captain, she burst into tears, “Daddy!”

How did this captain know—from 50 feet away—what the father couldn’t recognize from just 10? Drowning is not the violent, splashing call for help that most people expect. The captain was trained to recognize drowning by experts and years of experience. The father, on the other hand, had learned what drowning looks like by watching television. If you spend time on or near the water (hint: that’s all of us) then you should make sure that you and your crew know what to look for whenever people enter the water. Until she cried a tearful, “Daddy,” she hadn’t made a sound. As a former Coast Guard rescue swimmer, I wasn’t surprised at all by this story. Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for is rarely seen in real life.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, gently weeps.

In a society such as the modern West, where intelligence is declining, where fertility trends are dysgenic, where cognitive elites enforce assent to feel-good ideological claptrap and the mass of citizenry is absorbed in frivolities, science hovers always on the edge of extinction. Saint Leibowitz was martyred following a nuclear Armageddon; on present evidence the Armageddon won’t be necessary. We’ll be barbecuing scientists for the fun of it when reality TV and smartphones begin to pall.

Read it.

But it was an expedition he undertook in 2000 that really put him on the map, so to speak: He managed to locate Thonis-Heracleion, an ancient port city (built circa 800 B.C.!) that’s now completely submerged off the coast of Egypt. The hyphenated name hints at its cosmopolitan nature: The Egyptians called it Thonis, the Greeks, Heracleion after a massive temple to Heracles that once stood at the site.