Read it.

Au contraire — I would, and he needn’t bother with the hoodie.

Bieber represents the ideal quisling in the War Against Men, the Titless Girl Masquerading as a Male, and ought to be removed from the gene pool, not because there’s any danger of it reproducing, but just on general aesthetic grounds.

Read it.

Many of the Royal Warrant holders date back centuries and have fascinating stories to tell about their progress from the past to the present – and even the future.

Read it.

Something interesting is taking place in Western religion.  Although the waves are small, one is witnessing the rise of identitarian religion.  What is identitarian religion?  It’s ethno-religion, basically the religious norm for 99% of human history.  In fact, the extreme universalism of Christianity over the past few centuries is the historical aberration. So, when I say “religion 2.0,” this religion is really nothing new, but a return to a traditional concept of religion.

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The present condition of America owes much, for example, to the struggle between the proponents of limited government and the proponents of statism — a struggle that began in earnest with the onset of the “progressive” movement in the latter part of the 19th century. The Great Depression and World War II solidified the devotion of most Americans — and especially over-educated elites — to the cult of the state. Relief from the privations of the Great Depression, when it finally came after World War II, fostered the cult of the child and financed the growth of institutions whose denizens (politicians, bureaucrats, professors, and purveyors of entertainment) grew increasingly detached from the vicissitudes of daily life and increasingly attached to utopian schemes for the betterment of the unwashed masses from who they eagerly distance themselves.

Read it.

Wait a minute… the ‘family farm’ has robots? When did that happen?

Robots are perfect for tedious and boring tasks, and they seem to be well-suited for the repetitive labor of farming. More and more robots are getting into the farming industry, with the potential to displace a lot of human labor. It might take some time before robots are growing a significant portion of our food supply, but farming technology could solve a lot of problems (and create a few more labor problems as well). Here are just a few more farming robots that might take over our farms.

Read it.

Although America’s arguably most liberal Protestant denomination and consequently likely fastest declining, the United Church of Christ is not very concerned about evangelism. Instead, the UCC, or at least its elites, is always searching for a new leftist cause to animate the true believers in progressive religion. At their recent General Synod, the distant descendants of the Pilgrim Fathers targeted the Devil’s great tool for subverting the planet: fossil fuels.

Oh, no! Fossil fuels!

Read it.

“Cancer cells grow and divide much more rapidly than normal cells, meaning they have a much higher demand for and are often starved of, nutrients and oxygen,” said Chris Proud, Professor of Cellular Regulation in Biological Sciences at the University of Southampton in U.K..

“We have discovered that a cellular component, eEF2K, plays a critical role in allowing cancer cells to survive nutrient starvation, whilst normal, healthy cells do not usually require eEF2K in order to survive.

“Therefore, by blocking the function of eEF2K, we should be able to kill cancer cells, without harming normal, healthy cells in the process,” Mr. Proud said.

Read it.

 Computers and cyborgs aren’t about to render the American worker obsolete. But they’re tilting the nation’s economy more and more in favor of the rich and away from the poor and the middle class, new economic research contends.

The rich — like Barack Obama and his cronies, including those who own and operate the Washington Post. Yeah, those rich. Which is what make thumb-suckers like this one so … well, rich.

Despite rising fears of technology displacing huge swaths of the workforce, there remain huge classes of jobs that robots (and low-wage foreign workers) still can’t replace in the United States, and won’t replace any time soon. To land the best of those jobs, workers need sophisticated vocabularies, advanced problem-solving abilities and other high-value skills that the U.S. economy does a good job of bestowing on young people from wealthy families — but can’t seem to deliver to poor and middle-class kids.

Well, to begin with, wealthy families (including government employees like the Clintons and the Obamas) don’t send their kids to government schools, so they actual get an education. You’d think that the parents of ‘poor and middle-class kids’ would connect the dots and quit voting for these bozos, but they never do. So it’s pretty much a matter of Own Damned Fault.

It’s a challenge other countries are solving better than America, Levy and Murnane say.

And they’d say that even if it weren’t true, because it’s part of The Narrative that foreigners do everything better and America would suck less if we just became foreigners.

It’s one that U.S. policymakers will need to solve if they hope to keep their global economic edge and to keep lower-income Americans from falling further behind.

Which ain’t gonna happen while U.S. policymakers are in the pockets of the teachers’ unions whose votes them depend on for their cushy government jobs.

Read it.

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

Activist Mark Dice walked up and down a beach in California that he thought would be thick with Obama voters. He carried a clipboard with a petition to repeal the Bill of Rights and asked passers-by to support Obama by signing the petition. He kept up a patter about how the Bill of Rights is outdated and Obama has been doing all he can to get rid of it. Almost everyone he stopped signed the petition….

Read it.

See what you’re getting for your money.

Tim O’Reilly is not a Voice of the Crust  but he plays one on the Internet.

The Crustian clichés I enjoyed most in this article:

‘The Sunday Times is a gathering of fascinating minds reflecting on the issues of the moment; it’s a conversation well worth being a part of.’ (In fact, the Sunday Times is a gathering of politically-correct chattering-class locksteppery that is well worth ignoring; you won’t miss anything important.)

‘While I think there is a lot to like in Obamacare, I totally agree that we could do way better if we scrapped the current system in favor of more profound change.’ (In fact, there is nothing to like in Obamacare, being a hideous amalgam of semi-socialist bureaucratic jobbery bolted onto the existing dysfunctional system that in turn arose in response to fascist price controls instituted during Roosevelt’s war. The profound change we need is for everybody to pay for his own health care/health insurance and make the cost tax-deductible, as now happens with employers. But they’ll never do that, because it allows people their own choice, instead of making them dependent on the choices of government employees and vote-purchasing megacompanies.)

‘Too bad politicians are so lacking in courage, and have such a hard time actually enacting sensible policies!’ (In fact, our political system is set up neither to reward politicians for courage nor to encourage them to actually enact sensible policies, but to keep them in power as they walk the high wire of voting block politics.)

‘I have a big interest in reforming corporate governance.’ (Of course, ‘reforming corporate governance’ means saying to a corporation ‘do it my way rather than your way’ and making ‘corporate governance’ even more divorced from economics and under the thumb of politics than it already is.)

‘There is a myth that public corporations are managed for the benefit of their shareholders; the reality is that they are most often managed for the benefit of insiders.’ (The ‘progressive’ problem with that is that the wrong insiders are in control; they’d be much happier if it were their insiders. AlGore is the poster child here, with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama carrying his train.)

‘We need fresh approaches to making our world more livable.’ (In fact, we need a return to the old approaches that worked; the fresh approaches that have been made since Teddy Roosevelt have invariably made things worse.)

‘Has “Caucasian” lost its meaning?’ (In fact, it never had a meaning; like ‘Aryan’ and ‘capitalist’, it was created by people with a political agenda who wanted to sound scientific.)

‘It’s bizarre origin will quickly convince you that this euphemism for “white” exists to make racism a little less obvious.’ (More politically-correct I’m-white-but-I-hate-white-people-please-don’t-beat-me-uppery from someone who, given the choice, still wouldn’t choose to be non-white, but will forevermore wring his hands until they bleed about it nevertheless. ‘White’ doesn’t need a ‘euphemism’ except for people who regard being ‘white’ as sinful per se; the technical term for such people is ‘racist’.)

‘As they used to say, “How many times do we have to make the rubble bounce?”’ (Until it stops moving on its own. One of the flaws of democracy is that it give people with slogans for brains as much input into the political process as rational adults who bother to inform themselves on a subject. The reason we have ‘overkill’ on nuclear weapons is the undoubted truth that [a] nothing every works first-time-every-time and [b] this isn’t an area in which we can afford to skimp.)

Read it.

Deep beneath the Bohai Sea, Chinese engineers may soon begin boring the longest submarine tunnel on the planet. At an estimated 76 miles (123km) long, it would surpass the combined length of world’s two longest underwater tunnels—Japan’s Seikan Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel between the UK and France. To connect the bustling northern ports of Dalian and Yantai, the engineers will have to tunnel through two fault zones that have caused a slew of deadly earthquakes in the last century. And the project will cost a whopping $42.4 billion, nearly three times as expensive as Boston’s Big Dig.

Well, Big Dig cost what it did because of corruption and incompetence on the part of successive Taxachussetts Democratic administrations, and however bad Chinese authoritarianism might be, they still have a ways to catch up to the Democrats.

Read it.

Surely, if you’ve watched a few Pixar films, you’ve noticed at least one of the many easter eggs that Pixar includes—they always reference other Pixar movies. It’s a staple. Most of the films, for example, include the “Pizza Planet Truck” from Toy Story.

At first glance, you might think it’s just Pixar having fun and giving nods to their other work. Nothing that, you know, means something. But if you look close enough—as Jon Negroni does here—you might start noticing that there are threads that can theoretically tie all the films together somehow in a single timeline.

I hear the ghost of Steve Jobs cackling in the background….

Read it.

For too long, basic biology research has been constrained to academics at universities and professionals at commercial labs. That needs to change, according to Joseph Jackson, co-founder of the Bio, Tech and Beyond community lab, in order to expand the industry. His biotech hacker space opens today in Carlsbad, Calif., just north of San Diego.

Bio, Tech and Beyond intends to “bootstrap” the traditional research model and provide a space for professionals and advanced amateurs to conduct independent research. For a fee that ranges up to $600 a month, they can access equipment and other resources that would usually be inaccessible to an individual. They will also offer classes that range in skill level from student to professional.

Read it.

International students play a critical role in sustaining quality science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduate programs at U.S. universities, a new report from the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) argues.

Majors Americans won’t do?

It will come as no surprise to observers of graduate education that the report documents the fact that foreign students make up the majority of enrollments in U.S. graduate programs in many STEM fields, accounting for 70.3 percent of all full-time graduate students in electrical engineering, 63.2 percent in computer science, 60.4 percent in industrial engineering, and more than 50 percent in chemical, materials and mechanical engineering, as well as in economics (a non-STEM field).

Well, economics pretends to be a STEM field, so that’s understandable.

The report also emphasizes the value that international students can bring to the U.S. economy after graduation as researchers and entrepreneurs. Measures that would make it easier for STEM graduate students to obtain visas to work in the U.S. after graduation – measures that many in higher education see as crucial to the U.S. maintaining its edge in attracting international graduate students — are pending in Congress (and are included in the comprehensive immigration bill recently passed by the Senate).

Sorry, Congress is more concerned with importing uneducated crop-pickers and day-laborers than people who will actually support themselves and so not be dependent on the government and the Handout Party.

Read it. And watch the video, it’s well worth your time.

Basically, with the introduction of small steel wool fibers, Self Healing Asphalt is capable of repairing micro-cracks and significantly extending the service life of roadways by self-healing through induction heating. Similarly, Schlangen is leading the research on Self Healing Concrete, where by infusing concrete with a harmless limestone-producing bacteria that feeds off of calcium lactate – a component of milk – the material has the potential to self-heal micro-cracks in the presence of rainwater.

Read it. Salon, of course; Yet Another Reactionary ‘Progressive’ Hand-Wringer.

Fancy Hands founder Ted Roden told me that his company often provides “a better opportunity than is offered locally. For example, a number of people have left jobs at gas stations and Domino’s pizza to work with us full-time because (they’ve told me), the work is better and the pay is better. One even visited us at the office and brought gifts … It’s actually a surprisingly good deal for them.”

That may well be true, but at this stage it’s difficult to get reliable numbers on what the average wages for Fancy Hands or Task Rabbit contractors are. What we can be reasonably sure of, however, is that these services are perfect examples of what Lilly Irani, a researcher at the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and her co-author Six Silberman have described as “the fragmentation of labor into hyper-temporary jobs … an intensification of decades-old US trends toward part-time, contingent work for employer flexibility and cost-cutting.”

One of the most characteristic tropes of left ‘journalism’ these days, and indeed lefty ‘intellectual’ concern in general, is the ‘That may very well be true, but…’ formula. The obvious point of view is ‘these mental midgets just think they’re happy, it takes a well-educated socially-aware terribly-concerned politically-correct liberal like myself to perceive how truly miserable they really are’. This concern for people who are too stupid to be properly concerned for themselves is signature, and the visible expression of the congenital ‘progressive’ itch to stick one’s nose into everybody else’s business, which in turn is a specific expression of the general Liberal Fascist conviction that We The Anointed know best how YOU ought to conduct YOUR life.

Read it.

The future of work looks bleaker than it needs to for one simple reason: we bring consumption sensibilities to production behavior choices. Even our language reflects this: we “shop around” for careers. We  look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names.  This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder.

Read it.

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

As part of The Children’s Defense Fund’s “Protect Children, Not Guns” campaign, some Chicago children are writing letters to President Obama asking him to save their lives from gun violence.

Let’s have the Magic Negro wave his magic wand and all our problems will be solved.

The program is being sponsored by the Trinity United Church of Christ–the church in which Obama sat listening to Jeremiah Wright and others for 20 years.

Of course — hating America will lead to less gun violence. Makes perfect sense.

CBS Chicago printed an example from the letters in which a 10-year old wrote: “When I go to sleep at night, I’m afraid, because I have fear of dying from all this gun violence and stuff, and I’m afraid that someone could come in and make sure I don’t wake up in the morning.”

And what color would that ‘someone’ likely be? Careful what you answer….

A different excerpt from the same letter said, “I live in Chicago, Illinois, and I want to live.”

Not a problem. Move to Texas.

Tell you what: We’ll have Barry send you one of his right-hand men, Rahm Emmanuel, to be Mayor of Chicago. That will certainly fix everything up.

Despite strict gun control laws, Chicago is one of the deadliest cities in America for children.

Or maybe not….

Read it.

I am not making this up.

In Connecticut, selling Obamacare involves airplanes flying banners across beaches. Oregon may reel in hipsters with branded coffee cups for their lattes. And in neighboring Washington, the effort could get quite intimate: The state is interested in sponsoring portable toilets at concerts.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

 It’s funny, though, how blacks keep migrating to states like Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. You might almost think that blacks find they do better in Republican-run states that are pro-jobs and pro-affordable family formation than in liberal Democratic states like Vermont, where prices are high and the economy shackled. Isn’t it time for Vermont to start a strong affirmative action campaign to rid it self of its shame of being the least diverse state in America?

It’s all that maple syrup, makes them racist. Aunt Jemimah, you know, all that sort of thing.

Read it.

Hey, what’s the use of ‘crony capitalism’ if you can’t capitalize your cronies?

Some people, seeing a fresh corpse, don’t feel the urge to suck the blood out of it while it’s still warm. It’s safe to say that such people don’t live in Detroit.

Read it.

Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi is a loyal Republican, a decent guy, and generally a good senator. He also needs to retire from the Senate because he is not good enough, and I don’t care if that makes him sad.

The New York Times probably thought it was helping him recently when it ran an article about how Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz is planning to challenge him in the 2014 Republican primary. The Times hailed him as “a studious, low-key legislator who worked well with Senator Edward M. Kennedy,” and Enzi probably thinks that’s a compliment.

For that reason alone he needs to go.

He needs to go because we can do better. It’s not about Mike Enzi or any other Republican politician. It’s about winning this war against progressivism, and if you aren’t leading the fight then bow out and make room for someone who will.

Read it.

“These documents detail the extraordinary intervention by the Justice Department in the pressure campaign leading to the prosecution of George Zimmerman,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “My guess is that most Americans would rightly object to taxpayers paying government employees to help organize racially-charged demonstrations.”

Well, probably not, given recent history. It’s truly astonishing what ‘most Americans’ will put up with these days.

The Other McCain reacts here.

Law Professor Walter Jacobson reacts here.

Read it.

The U.S. military has wasted $34 million on a vast new headquarters in Afghanistan which will most likely never be used by U.S. forces. The 64,000 square foot monument to government incompetence stands vacant at Camp Leatherneck, Helmand province, Afghanistan.

Uh, I don’t think that this was the military’s idea. I think it was the Obama Administration’s idea. So don’t blame the military for following orders, especially stupid orders:

The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it. Commanders in the area, who insisted three years ago that they did not need the building, now arein the process of withdrawing forces and see no reason to move into the new facility.

Just another example of tReason magazine’s biases. Granted, the article was written by an intern, but still, where is the adult supervision? Sadly lacking.

Read it.

Consider this:

· About one in every four individuals who are eligible for Medicaid in this country has not bothered to enroll.

· About one in five employees who are offered employer-provided health insurance turns it down; among workers under 30 years of age, the refusal rate is almost one in three.

Think about that for a moment. Millions of people are turning down (Medicaid) health insurance, even though it’s free! Millions of others are turning down their employers’ offers. Since employees pay about 27% of the cost of their health insurance, on the average, millions of workers are passing up the opportunity to buy health insurance for 27 cents on the dollar.

You almost never read statistics like these in the mainstream media. Why? Because they completely undermine health policy orthodoxy: the belief that health insurance (even Medicaid) is economically very valuable, that it improves health and saves lives, and that the main reason why people don’t have it is that they can’t afford it.

Welcome to the huge disconnect in health reform. On the one hand there are the people who are supposed to benefit from health reform. On the other hand there are the people who talk about it and write about it. I think it’s fair to say these two groups almost never meet.

But wait, there’s more.

I have described before the experience of emergency room care in Dallas:

“At Parkland Memorial Hospital both uninsured and Medicaid patients enter the same emergency room door and see the same doctors. The hospital rooms are the same, the beds are the same and the care is the same. As a result, patients have no reason to fill out the lengthy forms and answer the intrusive questions that Medicaid enrollment so often requires. At Children’s Medical Center, next door to Parkland, a similar exercise takes place. Medicaid, CHIP and uninsured children all enter the same emergency room door; they all see the same doctors and receive the same care.

Interestingly, at both institutions, paid staffers make a heroic effort to enroll people in public programs ? working patient by patient, family by family right there in the emergency room. Yet they apparently fail more than half the time! After patients are admitted, staffers go from room to room, continuing with this bureaucratic exercise. But even among those in hospital beds, the failure-to-enroll rate is significant.

And why is that?

Under ObamaCare, similarly situated individuals are going to be expected to pay a monthly premium the way they pay their utility bills. But with this difference. When people don’t pay their electricity bills, the utility cuts off their electricity. When they don’t play their rent, the landlord throws them out in the street. But when they don’t pay their health insurance premium, what happens then? Not much.

Let’s see: Do a lot of work, get health care. Do no work, get pretty much the same health care. Well, the choice seems clear.

Read it.

This is all dependent, of course, on Zimmerman not getting a ‘consolation prize’ conviction for SOMETHING, as the prosecution is now desperately hoping.

Read it.

Coal slurry pipelines, which carry ground-up coal mixed with water, have been the focus of considerable attention since the mid-1970s because advocates claim they can carry coal more cheaply than railroads.

However, these pipelines require relatively clean water since saline water would mix with the coal powder and cause corrosion and problems when the coal is burned. This is a major problem in the semi-arid West where the pipelines would begin. Here water allocation is handled by complex legal agreements, and proposals to divert large amounts of fresh water over state lines is highly controversial.

This is where Aquatrain would be different. By bagging 3 to 4 tons of coal in thin plastic bags 15 feet long by 30 inches in diameter, W. R. Grace believes it should be possible to pump these coal-filled capsules through a 36-inch pipeline using saline water. Not only would this reduce the cost, but such a pipeline would be likely to pay for its water. That makes such a project far more politically palatable here.

I have my doubts.

”Once you get over laughing at the idea of shipping coal in giant Baggies, the concept has a lot going for it,” says Ira E. McKeever Jr., president of W. R. Grace & Co’s Western Mining Operations, which came up with the novel concept only nine months ago.

Well, I haven’t gotten over laughing at the idea yet, so I’ll let you know.

Read it.

Airman 1st Class Mary Howe is one of the few women qualified as an aerial gunner aboard Air Force special operations AC-130 gunships — the warplanes with accurate cannons unleashed in Iraq and Afghanistan to support troops on the ground.

Airman Howe is the daughter of retired ArmyMaster Sgt. Paul Howe — featured prominently in the best-selling book “Black Hawk Down” about a Delta Force operation in Somalia — and Connie Beckwith Howe, a former Army Reserve major and one of the colonel’s three daughters.

Read it.

In a public relations coup, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transportation Authority (Metro) gave a certificate of appreciation to a man who voluntarily planted flowers in flower boxes that the agency had been neglecting for years at the Dupont Circle MetroRail station. I’m sorry, did I say “certificate of appreciation”? I meant a letter threatening him with “arrest, fines and imprisonment” if he planted any more flowers or tended any of the more than 1,000 flowers he has already planted.

Read it. A reaction to the D.C. city council’s shooting theirconstituents in the wallet.

Washington DC’s city council has “tentatively” passed an ordinance that would raise the minimum wage from $8.25 ($1 more than the federal minimum wage) to $12.50 per hour. But this ordinance only applies to “non-union shops that are at least 75,000 square feet and whose parent companies gross above $1 billion annually.” Guess what company fits that description.

Oh, gee, let me scratch my head and think…. This is effectively what we lawyers call a ‘bill of pains and penalties‘, in which a legislative body just decides to poop on somebody they don’t like without bothering to go through the normal legal rigamarole. Historically this has been held to be unconstitutional as a violation of the ‘no bill of attainder’ clause, but nowadays nobody bothers with or cares much about the Constitution, especially in Democrat strongholds like D.C.

The left excuses this discrimination by calling it a “living wage” ordinance. But why is it that only employees of WalMart, and not employees of smaller retail shops, supermarkets, restaurants, or other businesses?

Well, maybe they lied….

Ironically, over the last decade three successive Washington DC mayors worked hard to attract WalMart to build stores in inner-city neighborhoods. WalMart was reluctant to build in those areas due to crime, but finally agreed to open six stores in the district. “We’ve been praying for food in this neighborhood for about 40 years,” said the resident of one neighborhood where WalMart was planning to build.

Sounds like another case of Lucy and the football to me.

Meanwhile, the left-wing Grist magazine chortles over a requirement in Cape Cod, Massachusetts for any big-box retailers to do an “economic impact analysis” before receiving a permit to build. The retailers will presumably be denied permits if the analysis shows that existing businesses might be harmed by the lower prices and wider selection of goods offered by new superstores.

And of course ‘progressives’, being the Party of the People, can’t have that.

Read it.

Of course, while it’s all very well to piously state that correlation doesn’t imply causation, it does leave us with a conundrum: under what conditions, exactly, can we use experimental data to deduce a causal relationship between two or more variables?

Read it.

 D.C. lawmakers gave final approval Wednesday to a bill requiring some large retailers to pay their employees a 50 percent premium over the city’s minimum wage, a day after Wal-Mart warned that the law would jeopardize its plans in the city.

If it were truly a ‘living wage’, everyone would be required to pay it. It’s just a blatant attempt to pick the pocket of Walmart. All the politician hot air can’t disguise what everybody knows.

“The question here is a living wage; it’s not whether Wal-Mart comes or stays,” said council member Vincent B. Orange (D-At Large), a lead backer of the legislation, who added that the city did not need to kowtow to threats. “We’re at a point where we don’t need retailers. Retailers need us.”

Even if that were true, it’s still stupid. A ‘living wage’ doesn’t mean a damned thing to somebody who doesn’t have a job, and can’t get a job because of all this politician posturing. These guys are doing it so that they can fell self-righteously virtuous, a distinguishing characteristic of ‘progressive’ assholes.

Read it.

Isn’t it amazing how women get upset when there are men’s parking spaces but men don’t get upset when there are women’s parking spaces?

Read it.

Envir-nazis cry ‘NO! THAT’S NOT WHAT GAIA WANTS!’

Read it.

 Built in the early 15th century to treat plague victims, the hospital was demolished in 1854 to make space for the existing square that stands above its buried walls. A church bearing the same name was found next to the site in June 2009 during construction of a light rail station. That project was halted for 10 months as archaeologists studied and preserved the ruins.

Read it.

… the US Navy’s next-generation autonomous drone, the X-47B, successfully landed on the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush today during a milestone test run off the coast of Virginia. Following another historic test which took place in May, the feat makes the drone the first unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to both take off and land on an aircraft carrier, opening up frightening new horizons for the world’s most powerful military.

Read it.

The researchers found that while math and science majors drew the most interest initially, not many students finished with degrees in those subjects. More students dropped out of math and science majors and fewer students switched into them than any other area of study, including professional programs, social sciences, humanities and business.

Funny thing about that. I started out as an economics major at Yale, until I got a D in calculus. That was the finger of God pointing.

Read it.

Some brief background is probably in order. See, apparently there’s something of a trend in Thailand for taking well-known cultural icons and changing their images just enough to represent history’s most dasterdly megalomaniac. As a result, you’ll get teletubbies with Hitler’s face on them, or a cute little panda with a toothbrush mustache and a glare that says, “Those bamboo stalks better not be Jewish.” And the latest victim of this Hitler-ization is of the KFC spokesman.

Read it. And watch the video.

An Oklahoma City surgery center is offering a new kind of price transparency, posting guaranteed all-inclusive surgery prices online. The move is revolutionizing medical billing in Oklahoma and around the world.

Dr. Keith Smith and Dr. Steven Lantier launched Surgery Center of Oklahoma 15 years ago, founded on the simple principle of price honesty.

“What we’ve discovered is health care really doesn’t cost that much,” Dr. Smith said. “What people are being charged for is another matter altogether.”

Read it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

The Other McCain is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Let’s start with the obvious: If Glenn Greenwald is a “serious journalist,” I’m a McChicken sandwich with a side order of fries.He’s an emotionally unbalanced weirdo who knows as much about national security as Andrew Sullivan knows about vaginas.

Read it.

 A high-powered rifle lost in the ATF’s Fast and Furious controversy was used to kill a Mexican police chief in the state of Jalisco earlier this year, according to internal Department of Justice records, suggesting that weapons from the failed gun-tracking operation have now made it into the hands of violent drug cartels deep inside Mexico.

Thank you, Eric Holder.

Read it.

The Pentagon has wonderful news for the inmates at Guantanamo who are refusing to eat: It will not infringe on their religious beliefs by force-feeding them during the daylight hours of the upcoming holy month. Their right to decline food will be scrupulously respected until nightfall, when, writes Steve Chapman, the routine will resume.

Why not let ’em starve? Individual choice is what America is all about. Dump the bodies at sea to help create a coral reef and foster local marine life — win/win. What’s not to like?

Read it.

Gee, the U.S. has dozens of them — we call them ‘submarines’ and ‘aircraft carriers’.

Read it.

Homosexuals pounced upon the word “gay” decades ago and seized it as their own, gradually changing its meaning from “happy” and “carefree” toward something that now denotes “angry” and “intolerant.”

Read it.

Considering how poorly public-school teachers carry out their core function of educating the nation’s children, I wouldn’t trust them with guns either.