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And who are still in charge of our foreign policy today.

War makes for strange bedfellows. Among the oddest pairings that World War II produced was the bringing together of William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS) — a precursor to the CIA — and a group of German Jewish Marxists he hired to help the United States understand the Nazis.

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Voter ignorance and elite ignorance are in fact closely related. If the voters were more knowledgeable, they could select candidates who demonstrate a deep understanding of policy issues and, to paraphrase Kaiser, “know and care more about substance than politics.” But in a world where most people don’t even know the name of their representative, they are unlikely to be able to evaluate his or her knowledge of policy issues. Moreover, evaluating that knowledge would require the voters themselves to know more about policy than most of them actually do. In this way, voter ignorance helps produce political leaders who are often ignorant themselves, albeit not quite to the same degree.

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

‘They may have all the jobs, but WE’ve got a Living Wage Rule!’ The only thing you can say about the people of D.C. is that they get the government they deserve.

‘Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer. The maxim is so perfectly self-evident that it would be absurd to attempt to prove it. But in the mercantile system the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.’ — Adam Smith

So much for ‘intellectual property’.

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“Despite the fact that it’s one of the greatest health measures ever invented by man or woman, there seems to still be a small residue of humanity that objects to the very idea of immunization,” Welsh doctor Dai Lloyd told the Journal. “If you go around the cemetery you can see the historical evidence of childhood slaughter from pre-immunization days.”

We had the same trend in the U.S., mostly pushed by bubble-headed Hollywood Obama voters. (Hey, it’s not as if they have any problem with killing children, after all….)

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Assuming, of course, that you want to do that.

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I.e. people deciding that they don’t have to obey the law because, well, they don’t want to.

Let’s see them try that in a Muslim country….

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These findings weren’t new. Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world’s greatest quack.

Why take a chance? That’s all I’m saying….

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In some areas, they still do.

It’s tempting to think of sacred tombs and ancient monuments as our best window into other cultures. But archaeologists have long known that if you really want to understand a civilization, to know its people’s passions, weaknesses, and daily rituals, look no further than their garbage.

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Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups. This competition becomes more severe as the destruction of distance intensifies the confrontation of states.

Will & Ariel Durants’ The Story of Civilization was one of my first purchases after I acquired gainful employment, and I’ve never regretted it. They flourished before Political Correctness gained its stranglehold on academia, so their opinions tended to be fact-based rather than steeped in Identity Politics.

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I would have thought that ‘snoutfair’ meant a gathering of feminists, but I guess not.

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In order to identify America’s worst companies to work for, 24/7 Wall St. examined employee reviews at jobs and career community site Glassdoor. Based on the reviews, Glassdoor scores companies on a scale of one to five with an average score of 3.2 for the over 250,000 companies measured. 24/7 Wall St. identified the nine publicly traded companies that received scores of 2.5 or lower.

Oh, yeah, that’s a statistically valid sample…. These guys need to look up the definition of ‘selection bias’ on Wikipedia.

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Libertarians find themselves attracted to doctrines that would wipe out libertarianism if implemented. In other words, they are suicidal.

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The use of version control by programmers leads to profound changes in the practice of programming. I suspect that the same would be true for writers and publishers, too.

If This Then That

FOAAS

HireMyFriend

Kite Patch

Nifti

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In back-woods America the government isn’t too popular, but the tiny town of Deer Trail, Colorado (population 546 – deer not included) may be taking this sentiment to extremes with a proposal to open an official hunting season on government drones.

“We do not want drones in town,” said the proposed ordinance’s author David Steel told ABC7. “They fly in town, they get shot down.”

Steve Sailer tells it like it is.

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It would certainly explain Nancy Pelosi.

Steve Sailer spells it out.

 But being right is racist.

That’s one of the causes of the current vast eruption of liberal white rage — out of all the screwed up stuff that happens on the streets of America every year, the mainstream media picked this incident out to put all their chips on in their condemnation of profiling.

But then, it turned out that Zimmerman’s suspicions were highly accurate. As one commenter says, Trayvon Martin turned out to be a petty criminal with violent tendencies and an apparent history of burglary.

Oops.

 The Martin-Zimmerman story should be an occasion for national reflection about the perniciousness of today’s dominant stereotypes, specifically:

— White liberals’ favorite stereotypes about blacks as the eternal victims of the violent white racists hiding under every bed

— Black males’ favorite stereotypes about themselves as bulletproof tough guys who are morally justified by their victimhood in responding to being dissed with violence.

These two stereotypes have the peculiar disadvantage of being both not true individually (unlike the majority of less socially reputable stereotypes) and interacting with horrible consequences. White liberal hatred for white conservatives and black love of gangsta rap interact very, very badly.

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The first design, modeled after a paper plane, is created from a cellulose sheet that has electronic circuits ink-jet printed directly onto its body.  Once the circuits have been laid on the plane’s frame, the craft is exposed to a UV curing process, turning the planes body into a flexible circuit board.  These circuits are then connected to the planes “avionics system”, two elevons attached to the rear of the craft, which give the UAV the ability to steer itself to its destination.

I find this vaguely disturbing.

The second design from Dr. Pounds’ lab is named the Samara.  It’s an odd looking UAV designed to mimic a maple seed. The Samara is built from a rigid circuit board with sensors housed on a tiny round PCB at its leading end.

The proposed use for the Samara is to drop a huge number of them from a larger vehicle to survey a vast swath of land. Because of its unique design the Samara would fall gently to the ground, rotating like a helicopter’s blades, collecting valuable environmental information on its way back to Earth.

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No, it’s not what you think.

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Readers who are familiar with the work of Gavin Boby will remember the jihadist Muslim tactic known as the “Parking Jihad”, in which infidel residential neighbors of mosques are harassed, inconvenienced, and intimidated by mosque-goers, who park their cars aggressively and illegally on private property or in no-parking zones. Coupled with other strategies, it is part of a process in which non-Muslims are gradually driven out of Islamic enclaves so that believers may move in and replace them.

According to Right Side News, a Parking Jihad is now being waged against the neighbors of the Islamic Center of Richmond who live on a private road. This map will help readers familiar with the Commonwealth — and especially those who live in the Greater Richmond area — orient themselves:

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At the forefront of organizations pressuring the USDA is the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS).  Many people believe that HSUS is a friendly organization that raises money for pet shelters through sappy commercials featuring abandoned dogs and cats.   In reality, HSUS is a radical animal organization with an agenda similar to PETA.

Despite what their commercials lead unsuspecting donors to believe, remarkably, only 1% of HSUS donations go to animal shelters of any kind.  The lion’s share is funneled into a massive animal rights lobbying organization, buying off politicians in order to pass regulations that make raising livestock or purebred pets prohibitively expensive.  Ultimately, HSUS would like to see a meat-free America with all pets being adopted from shelters and all hunting and fishing prohibited by law.

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

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The Ford Motor Company has been making some big plays lately to bring the automobile up to speed with consumers used to touchscreens and on-demand content. But one of its flagship efforts in this regard, the MyFord Touch dashboard system introduced in new Ford and Lincoln cars starting in 2011, has not had a smooth ride so far — plagued with glitches and freezing menus, which Ford tried to fix with UI updates and a return to some analog buttons. But it’s about to get worse. MyFord Touch is the target of a class action lawsuit filed against Ford in California earlier this week. The lawsuit, which was brought to our attention by Automotive News, alleges that MyFord Touch “has been an unmitigated disaster for Ford” and accuses the company of “unfair, deceptive, and/or fraudulent business practices” and “failure to disclose defects in the MyFord Touch system” that led auto owners to “[suffer] losses in money and/or property.”

Look for … the Union label….

The Lion of the Senate’s first victim died today in 1969.

When Democrats whine about the ‘War on Women’, remind them that their heroes were right there on the front lines. (Bill Clinton, are you listenin’?)

Steve Sailer need do no more than quote.

     For example, since moving to a majority black city ten years ago it is the case that 100 percent of the people who randomly assaulted me on the street were African-American. And yet that was a single incident on one day out of thousands. The overwhelming preponderance of black men I walk past on the street on a day-to-day basis—even the young ones, even the ones wearing hoodies—aren’t committing any violent crimes.

Perhaps he just needs to be beaten up a few more times. Or shot, which is too often how black teenagers wind up in D.C, and Chicago, and Detroit….

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Al Sharpton? Missing. Jesse Jackson? Not here. Congressional Black Caucus? Silent.

I guess some animals are more equal than others.

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Salon.com, which does not have a staff that looks like America, continues its branding as the place to go for lectures on White Privilege, Whiteness, and how race drives almost everything in America.

Hey, it’s serious business being a Voice of the Crust.

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Be the first on your block….

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Operate outside of your box, and the government will get you.

The bus industry has been subject to an onslaught of new regulations in recent years—a reaction by government to a few tragic accidents that drew widespread media attention. While horrific accidents occur periodically, buses are not only orders of magnitude safer than passenger cars, they’re safer than they’ve ever been thanks to engineering and manufacturing advances. There are about 34 fatal intercity bus accidents annually as compared to 23,000 fatal passenger car crashes. An unintended consequence of the regulatory onslaught is that higher ticket prices will lead fewer travelers to forgo their cars for the bus, making them far more likely to die on the highway. What safety-anxious parent would prefer their college offspring to catch a ride home in a car driven by a fellow student rather than take the bus?

For all that they love to waste money on trains, the bureaucrats don’t seem to have much affection for mass transit that actually works.

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The team calls it the iKnife (intelligent knife), and by analyzing vapors created during electrosurgical dissection in real time, it takes only seconds to distinguish healthy flesh from affected tissue.

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“Lyme disease is the only infection I know of where we have a safe and effective vaccine, but it’s not available to the public,” says Dr. Allen Steere, the physician who uncovered the disease. Steere was 33 years old back in 1975 when he was sent to the Connecticut town of Lyme to look into a mysterious cluster of kids who had gotten arthritis.

Wait for it….

Introduced in 1998, the vaccine sold well at first. But then opponents spoke out: self-described ‘vaccine victims’ — perhaps similar to people today who claim the MMR vaccine causes autism. Back then, they said that the Lyme vaccine gave them arthritis.

“And this sort of got into popular lore,” Poland recalls. “It got on the Internet. There were a number of East Coast lawyers who started putting together class-action lawsuits. There were anti-vaccine advocacy groups that were formed.”

And there were threats against the scientists who had worked to help protect people against the disease. Poland had to hide where he lived. Steere got a security detail.

This is why we can’t ever have anything nice.

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning. The fact that there is no TWA any more makes it feel very alternate-universe, like watching the Pan-Am markings on the spaceship in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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“MY TWIN did it” might seem like the perfect defence, but it won’t work for much longer. A computer program that can pick out small differences in identical twins’ facial features as they age can distinguish them 90 per cent of the time.

It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage.

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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was a difference.

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I rather suspect that Senator Warren would consider any profit at all to be ‘obscene’. She’d rather that all government money come from robbing taxpayers.

Isn’t it amazing that the people who are always first to put the government in charge of something are always the first to complain that it’s acting like a Real Business?

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Couldn’t happen to a bunch of nicer guys.

Hey, dudes, you voted for him. Chickens, meet roost.

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Ponder the number of UAW jobs that didn’t get created. When they say ‘pro-choice’, I don’t think that’s the kind of abortion they had in mind.

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The “wood” is actually microscopic wood fibers that are fashioned into thin sheets. The sheets are then coated with carbon nanotubes and packed into small metal discs.

The wood batteries use sodium ions, rather than the lithium ions that are found in the batteries of cellphones and laptops. In this case, the charged particles move around in the wood fibers, creating an electric current. It turns out wood is a good medium for sodium ions to move around in.

We have the technology.

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Perhaps the avant garde has gotten a bit too avant. You can only go so far into left field until you’re entirely out of the park.

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The claim that no Jewish temple ever existed in Jerusalem and that Jews have no rights whatsoever on the Temple Mount is part of the “temple denial” doctrine that has been increasingly internalized in Palestinian academic, religious, and political circles since the 1967 Six-Day War. Others, both Jews and non-Jews, believe that a temple did exist but indicate that the Jews abandoned the area soon after the destruction of the Second Temple nearly two thousand years ago. From that time onward, Jews lost all direct contact with the Temple Mount and relocated their central worship site to other locations, such as the Mount of Olives and later the Western Wall.

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Hear, hear.

When wealthy Americans brought home the practice of tipping from their European vacations in the late 19th century, their countrymen considered it bribery. State legislatures quickly banned the practice. But restaurateurs, giddy at the prospect of passing labor costs directly to customers, eventually convinced Americans to accept tipping.

We had it right the first time. Tipping is a repugnant custom. It’s bad for consumers and terrible for workers. It perpetuates racism. Tipping isn’t even good for restaurants, because the legal morass surrounding gratuities results in scores of expensive lawsuits.

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No, it’s not Orrin Hatch. Although there is a resemblance….

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More evidence of how the government screws up daily life for the rest of us.

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Hey, if you had to cope with modern feminism, you’d be infertile too.

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

While popular arguments focus on supposed “monopolists“ such as big cable companies, it’s government that’s really to blame. Companies can make life harder for their competitors, but strangling the competition takes government.

Broadband policy discussions usually revolve around the U.S. government’s Federal Communications Commission (FCC), yet it’s really our local governments and public utilities that impose the most significant barriers to entry.

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 While there’s been plenty of attention over the last month or so concerning the revelations from Ed Snowden about NSA surveillance, there have been a series of important ongoing lawsuits that tried to challenge the various aspects of the surveillance efforts. Unfortunately, most of these have ended badly, leading some to wonder if there even is any way at all to legally challenge these programs. At the end of 2011, for example, in a case testing the legality of the telcos helping the government with warrantless surveillance, Hepting v. AT&T, one of the key reasons why the court rejected the challenge was because it basically said, “well, you can always sue the government, but the government has the right to absolve companies of such wrongdoing.” Except that, as the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year, because the government keeps the program a complete secret, no one has standing to sue. That is, unless you can prove that you were spied on via this specific program, you can’t sue because there’s been no harm.

The Supreme Court Justices were clearly troubled by the idea that the government could implement a secret surveillance program that could never be challenged in court, and homed in on that key point in questioning the Solicitor General of the US (and former top RIAA litigator), Donald Verrilli. As the NY Times notes, Verrilli insisted that it simply was not true that no one would ever have standing, because if the government ever used information from such surveillance programs in a court case against someone, the government would have to reveal that the info came via that program.

Since both are Democrast, I choose all of the above.

How many types of ‘moms’ do we have these days?

We’ve all heard of ‘soccer moms’ and ‘working moms’ and ‘single moms’ and ‘stay-at-home moms’, but the list appears to be expanding day by day.

This morning on the radio I heard a talking head refer to pro-abortion activist Wendy Davis as ‘drawing support from cul-de-sac moms’.

Ponder what sort of creature a ‘cul-de-sac mom’ might be.

Scientific American looks at the conventional wisdom.

Considering that our cells depend on sugar for energy, it makes sense that we evolved an innate love for sweetness. How much sugar we consume, however—as well as how it enters the body and where we get it from in the first place—has changed dramatically over time. Before agriculture, our ancestors presumably did not have much control over the sugars in their diet, which must have come from whatever plants and animals were available in a given place and season. Around 6,000 BC, people in New Guinea began to grow sugarcane, chewing and sucking on the stalks to drink the sweet juice within. Sugarcane cultivation spread to India, where by 500 BC people had learned to turn bowls of the tropical grass’s juice into crude crystals. From there sugar traveled with migrants and monks to China, Persia, northern Africa and eventually to Europe in the 11th century.

…

Because fructose metabolism seems to kick off a chain reaction of potentially harmful chemical changes inside the body, Lustig, Taubes and others have singled out fructose as the rotten apple of the sugar family. When they talk about sugar as a toxin, they mean fructose specifically. In the last few years, however, prominent biochemists and nutrition experts have challenged the idea that fructose is a threat to our health and have argued that replacing fructose with glucose or other sugars would solve nothing. First, as fructose expert John White points out, fructose consumption has been declining for more than a decade, but rates of obesity continued to rise during the same period. Of course, coinciding trends alone do not definitively demonstrate anything. A more compelling criticism is that concern about fructose is based primarily on studies in which rodents and people consumed huge amounts of the molecule—up to 300 grams of fructose each day, which is nearly equivalent to the total sugar in eight cans of Coke—or a diet in which the vast majority of sugars were pure fructose. The reality is that most people consume far less fructose than used in such studies and rarely eat fructose without glucose.

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Well, that’s a relief.