Read it.

The spirit that made America what it is today. Sort of.

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

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While polls consistently show that Americans overwhelmingly favor the tech industry’s #1 legislative goal, comprehensive immigration reform, I wondered if I could also get them to agree to a horribly xenophobic plan that was the opposite of the proposed bill: deporting all 11 million undocumented immigrants. We conducted a CrunchGov poll with Google Surveys to find out and the results, you’ll find, are surprising.

Not to those of us who understand that what people say on polls is typically what they feel they ‘ought’ to say, rather than how they really feel.

The truth is that most people wish illegal immigrants to be removed.

In our poll, a majority of all Americans (53%) and a whopping 74% of Republicans want to kick out every undocumented immigrant.

An entirely reasonable position, except to those who feel that laws they disagree with are somehow to be freely ignored.

Bear in mind, no one, not even the most anti-immigrant members of Congress, are proposing any remotely close to this idea.

Perhaps that’s why the popularity of Congress is at an all-time low. Just maybe.

At most, Congressmen disagree over whether current undocumented immigrants should be permitted to become citizens, not whether they can stay in the country.

And that’s what’s wrong with Congress — their debates are always about to which extent they will do the wrong thing, not whether anybody is interested in doing the right thing.

Read it.

Checking Facebook made people feel worse about both issues, and the more they browsed, the worse they felt, the University of Michigan research said.

Hah! That’s what you get for being social, you communists.

Read it.

A court clerk who helped exonerate a man wrongly imprisoned for rape was fired in June, and now she’s speaking out about the ordeal. Robert Nelson was convicted of rape in 1984. After two previous motions for DNA tests that could clear his name were rejected, 70-year-old clerk Sharon Snyder decided to step in and better his odds. She provided Nelson’s sister with a successful DNA motion from another case, giving Nelson a better idea of how to properly seek the tests. His third request was granted, and ultimately Nelson was cleared of a 1984 rape conviction; he’d been serving time for the crime since 2006.

But for her good deed, Snyder was fired from her position nine months before she was due to retire. Jackson County Circuit Judge David Byrn said Snyder had gone too far in assisting Nelson, violating a number of court rules in the process. Specifically, by providing Nelson’s sister with a motion that could help her brother’s case, Snyder was found to violate Canon Seven, which the judge said “warns against the risk of offering an opinion or suggested course of action.” Thankfully Snyder’s pension remained intact despite the forced exit, and in an interview on MSNBC, she says she’d do it all over again. “I think that the law should be changed, that judges should be taken out of the mix on deciding these DNA motions, and they should automatically be granted.”

No good deed goes unpunished.

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British scientists have achieved a ‘profound’ breakthrough in the fight against cancer that could lead to new treatments and possibly even its prevention.

They have unlocked the DNA secrets of 30 of the most common forms of the disease, bringing us closer to understanding their causes.

Read it.

Oh, maybe because you don’t live in New York, Boston, or some other coastal city with good legacy public transportation. That’s just a guess, you understand.

Read it.

Assuming, of course, that that’s what you want to do.

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What does a tin can containing a 12-course meal look like? All In One has the answer. It’s the creation of designer Chris Godfrey; a fresh take on gourmet dining that also serves as a commentary on the quality of mass-produced food. “Contemporary culture means on every trip into town you’re bombarded with gimmicks galore,” explains Godfrey. “Gimmicks often diminish their products to turn a profit, downgrading on the content but selling you something that’s ’50 percent more.'”

So it’s actually Just Another SWPL Snooty-Fest.

Read it.

There’s been another round of Drudge-linked articles about how record numbers of Americans are giving up U.S. citizenship out of frustration over new tax laws requiring financial cavity-searches on the estimated 6 million U.S. expatriates.

Read it.

According to a report from Eric Holder’s Department of Justice, nearly 1/3 of the immigrants making asylum claims last year who were released on bond or their own recognizance never even bothered to appear in immigration court.

Hey, they’re not that stupid.

Good thing that the border is secure … oh, wait….

Read it.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., the former Congressman and son of Jesse Jackson, is scheduled to be sentenced on Wednesday for misspending $750,000 in campaign funds. Jackson’s wife Sandi is also scheduled for sentencing at the same time for her failure to report as much as $600,000 in income to the IRS.

Two down, two to go.

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You might look at my Caucasian features and wonder why I am claiming to be an African American.  I may not be a natural descendent of African American lineage, but I feel black and have thus decided to identify as African American. Since I identify as African American, I am African American, and you must accept me as such. Because I claim my identity as an African American, I demand that the law recognize me as such and afford me all the rights and obligations of that ethnicity.

You may think that my decision to claim an African American identity is ridiculous. You would be right. Ethnicity is determined by ancestry and genetic lineage, not by someone’s identified perceptions and “feelings.” But it’s no more ridiculous than the latest craze from the left concerning something they call “gender identity.”

Read it.

One of the pivotal innovations in the way we prepare and package ready-to-eat foods came with the invention of the puffing cannon, a machine for heating up and pressurizing starchy foods to the point where they would explode into substantially larger, puffier shapes. It was, in effect, applying the familiar popcorn-making technique to the full range of other starches: rice, wheat, corn, lentils, and the like. The puffing gun was later superseded by more advanced machinery, but it’s now being brought back — on the basis of a Kellogg brothers patent filed near the turn of the century — by Dave Arnold, the founder of a new Museum of Food and Drink in New York City.

I blame Obama.

Read it.

Progress in regenerative medicine has been coming fast and furious in recent months: scientists are now using far-out tissue engineering techniques to restore liver function in mice, regrow human muscle, and even implant bioengineered blood vessels into ailing patients. Now, a team at the University of Pittsburgh has managed to grow human heart tissue that can beat autonomously in a petri dish — an exciting step towards devising transplantable replacement organs.

The NPR Ombudsman takes a ‘journalist’ to the woodshed.

The series committed five sins that violate NPR’s Code of Standards and Ethics. They were:

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;

2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;

3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;

4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;

5. No response from the state on many key points.

No doubt the investigative team was driven by the history of injustices suffered by Native Americans. There is much to be outraged about. But good intentions are not enough. Specifically, there is no whistleblower, no document — no smoking gun even — to support the unmistakable allegation that for nearly the last 15 years, state social workers have been so evil as to take Indian children from their families as a way to reap federal funds for the state government. The charge is so shocking and such a potential insult to many dedicated social workers that the burden of proof should have been especially high.

NPR’s stories are biased? Not news.

NPR employee calls them on it? Now that’s news….

Read it.

Now: Imagine what would have been said by the Usual Suspects if a Republican President (even … dare I say it? … a Bush) had done something like this.

Read it.

A group of Swiss researchers has demonstrated using lasers to control magnetisation at extremely high speed, a line of research they hope will one day will help speed up hard drives.

Read it.

Remember that they next time you see a lot of hand-wringing over ‘family farms’.

Read it.

Meet the new coyotes: immigration attorneys and government rule-writers.

According to the clear guidelines published on the Internet and updated by the Obama administration in mid-June, there’s an easier way to cross to gain entrance to the United States: simply step right up to a border crossing and tell the officials that you have a “crediblee fear” of persecution or torture. Use that exact phrasing and you may be able to enter the USA while you await a hearing before an immigration judge…a process that could take years.

As Breitbart News reported yesterday in a story that swept through the Internet, that’s exactly what’s been happening recently with a flood of new asylum requests that seem designed to overwhelm the system.

Because it’s too much to expect them to honestly enforce a law that they disagree with,  all that oath-of-office stuff to the contrary notwithstanding.

Read it.

A statistical analysis from England suggests that a woman’s IQ is inversely proportional to her desire to breed. This, in turn, suggests that the world will grow dumber with every new day.

Perhaps this is why men are so attracted to airheads–they want their genes to be propagated, not wasted.

Kanazawa is widely known as a “controversial” researcher, which is coded speech meaning that his results cause significant discomfort among those who swallow the reigning cultural dogma. In the past he has faced approbation, ridicule, and even job dismissal for publishing studies that claim black women are less attractive than women of other races due to their higher testosterone levels, sub-Saharan Africa’s poverty is caused by low IQ, intelligent men are less likely to cheat on their partners, and attractive people are more likely to produce female offspring. He also wrote that if Ann Coulter had been president in 2001, she would have dropped nuclear bombs on the Middle East and won the War on Terror “without a single American life lost.”

Yeah, Ann is pretty focused; more so than most men in government.

Western sophisticates claim that the world already has enough people, and many tend to see it as a matter of conscience to not breed. The problem is that hordes of Third Worlders suffer no such ethical qualms. Paradoxically, the pampered First World utopian ideal that the world should be intelligent, sustainable, and filled only with children who are wanted could backfire and create a planet crammed almost exclusively with emotionally, financially, and intellectually deprived Third World bastards.

Cue The Marching Morons.

TakiMag has some fun with some very fun people.

As the story goes, Oprah was ogling a $38,000 handbag at a Zurich boutique a month or so ago when a Swiss clerk allegedly told her it would be “too expensive” for her to purchase. The former queen of daytime talk shows, who’s now doing publicity for her film The Butler and apparently can use some press hype, threw an old-school Congo conniption and blamed the incident on—what else?—racism. Although the store clerk disputes crucial details, the Associated Press deemed the event a “racist encounter” and Switzerland’s national tourism office proffered a slobbering apology.

Looking at her skin color, weight, and gender, it’s obvious that Oprah belongs in Congress.

 In what is perhaps the most disjointed and nonsensical essay ever to appear on the Internet, a female Yahoo! scrivener took talk-show host Chelsea Handler to task for not, er, um, properly handling the fact that her grandfather owned a book with a swastika on it, even though he “probably wasn’t a full-blown Nazi.” Handler is commended for being Jewish and scolded for failing to realize that “this is, you know, HITLER. Slow. It. Down.” Is. It. Wrong. To. Think. That. People. Who. Put. Periods. After. Every. Word. Like. That. Should. Be. Exterminated?

I’m in.

Read it.

Soon college students all over America will be trundling to their advisers’ offices to choose a major. In this moment of financial insecurity, students are naturally drawn to economics, business, and the hard sciences. But students ought to resist the temptation of those purportedly money-ensuring options and even of history and philosophy, marvelous though they may be. All students—and I mean all—ought to think seriously about majoring in English. Becoming an English major means pursuing the most important subject of all—being a human being.

And that will totally help you get a job and support yourself once you leave the womb of academia.

An English major is much more than 32 or 36 credits including a course in Shakespeare, a course on writing before 1800, and a three-part survey of English and American lit. That’s the outer form of the endeavor. It’s what’s inside that matters. It’s the character-forming—or (dare I say?) soul-making—dimension of the pursuit that counts. And what is that precisely? Who is the English major in his ideal form? What does the English major have, what does he want, and what does he in the long run hope to become?

And how is it that only the Magic English Major can work this remarkable transformation? Sadly, a question that is never answered….

The author is, as you might suspect, a Professor of English.

Read it.

 Professor Edward Cocking, Director of The University of Nottingham’s Centre for Crop Nitrogen Fixation, has developed a unique method of putting nitrogen-fixing bacteria into the cells of plant roots. His major breakthrough came when he found a specific strain of nitrogen-fixing bacteria in sugar-cane which he discovered could intracellularly colonise all major crop plants. This ground-breaking development potentially provides every cell in the plant with the ability to fix atmospheric nitrogen. The implications for agriculture are enormous as this new technology can provide much of the plant’s nitrogen needs.

Watch the eco-nazis freak out and get it banned.

Freeberg points to some inconvenient truth.

Only a true-believing liberal can see his precious theories bump up against and enter into a conflict with reality, and declare reality to be the loser.

…

One may wish to pay attention to how the conclusions are reached. I’ve noticed before that one of the things that make liberal articles — blogs too, not just newspapers — hard to read is that it takes so long to get to the nuts & bolts of the story. It seems you always have to drill through twenty paragraphs about how disgusting something is and what all you’re supposed to think about it, before you get to the facts.

Read it.

This copy of the Eighth Grade Exam for Bullitt County Schools in 1912 was donated to the museum. We thought you might like to see what the test looked like a hundred years ago. Obviously it tested some things that were more relevant at that time than now, and it should not be used to compare student knowledge then and now.

Because that would just highlight how much our elementary education system SUCKS compared to what it was 100 years ago, despite the fact that we have computers and all sorts of wonderful toys and are spending more per pupil than we ever have.

Steve Sailer lays out the economics of amnesty.

Even more than they love taxing and spending, politicians adore a giveaway that doesn’t show up in the budget. Stumped by how to get minorities to earn more money, for instance, George W. Bush announced at his 2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership his plan for letting minorities borrow more money: Reduce requirements for down payments and documentation on mortgages. What could go wrong?

Even better from the modern Senator’s standpoint is frittering away the scarcity value of your citizenship on various ethnic and business lobbies. In part, that’s easy to do because the notion that American citizenship has a cash value is not a concept that comes readily to the minds of idealistic Americans.

It sure does to foreigners, however. Randall Burns calculated in 2005 from Indian-arranged marriage ads that an H-1B visa adds $50,000-$70,000 to dowries. The gold standard of citizenship is worth even more. Similarly, Chinese birth tourism websites are extremely informative about all the advantages that accrue from glomming onto birthright citizenship.

Read it.

I AM NOT A MEMBER OF THE National Rifle Association, nor do I collect rare firearms, attend gun shows, or subscribe to gun magazines. I am not, in other words, a “gun nut” and, in fact, can sympathize to a degree with the views of those who detest all such weapons and want them regulated. You can’t have lived in a large American city for any length of time, as I have, without seeing that such people’s opinions may have a certain amount of validity.

But I grew up in a time and a region that almost automatically sparked interest in not only guns but also the hunting of birds and beasts, in which pursuits such weapons were and still are central components. Nor did a war experienced in the U.S. Marine Corps and a functional country life during most of the past forty-odd years do anything to hamper the affinity.

Texas would be perfect if it weren’t so beastly hot during the summer.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, makes pessimism a high art.

It’s not clear that American democracy, as it has developed to the present, really is so wonderful. One of our big political parties somehow manages to market itself as the party of the Little Guy while owning the allegiance of all the Big Guys in town. (The biggest of them all is second-largest shareholder in the party’s main propaganda organ.) The other party is heavily favored by non-Hispanic white voters yet is in financial thrall to donors and interest groups determined to drown that voter segment in a sea of cheaper immigrants.

Been there, said that. Speaking of China:

    Of the 25 Politburo members before the 18th Party Congress [last November], 19 had run provinces larger than most countries in the world….A person with Barack Obama’s pre-presidential professional experience would not even be the manager of a small county in China’s system.

What do they know that we don’t?

The drift of our own political culture seems to be confirming the Founders’ intuition that representative government can only work in a population possessed of some minimum level of virtue—thrift, restraint, industriousness, stoicism in the face of misfortune, willingness to defer gratification, and concern for the common good.

No wonder the country is headed down the drain.

Read it.

 Practitioners of parkour, a daring pastime born in the streets, have long seen public spaces as their playground, and parkour as the ultimate rebel’s game, one with no rules, league, equipment or winners. It started in France (the name is derived from the French word for “course”) and has spread around the world: Gaza, Tokyo, Rome and Miami are parkour towns.

One thread binds them all: parkour takes place outdoors. Bringing it inside, purists argue, would be like asking swimmers to perfect the breaststroke on grass.

But now, parkour has grown up, traded the pavement for padding and turned into a big business.

Parkour gyms have opened across the country, from Los Angeles to Rochester, featuring juice bars, private classes and children’s birthday parties that cost $450 (cake not included). Specialized apparel companies sell tailored gloves for $34.50 and shoes for $60. An international organization offers special parkour insurance policies and charges $295 for teacher certification courses.

Jerry Pournelle speaks the truth that politicians dare not think.

\The court martial trial of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan drags on, and no one can understand why. The constitution provides a definition of treason – levying war on the United States – which certainly fits the action of an armed man shooting military men and women while crying “Allah Akbar!” on a military base. What else could that be but treason? Major Hasan should have been ceremonially stripped of his rank in the presence of representative troops, then either hanged or shot, wheel chair and all, and this done last year. The wounded should get their purple hearts. This was no workplace incident, this was an act of war by a Muslim against the armed forces of the United States of America, and it should be treated as such.

Read it.

 Steven P. Lanza, reporting in The Connecticut Economy, published quarterly by the University of Connecticut, found that “excessive regulation plays a role in hamstringing business owners and entrepreneurs who simply don’t have the resources of larger firms to cope with these constraints.”

Former U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern learned all this the hard way.  In 1988, he bought, renovated and operated a 150-room hotel and conference center in Stratford, Connecticut.  The business went bankrupt two years later.  McGovern reflected on his experience in the Wall Street Journal: “My business associates and I lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never have doubted the worthiness of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: ‘Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.”

…

Connecticut’s tax base is eroding as more and more people conclude there’s a better future someplace else.

Read it.

Long past time, really.

The Kurds outnumber Palestinians several times over, and unlike Palestinians, have a real ethnic and cultural distinction from surrounding Arabs (and in Turkey, Turks). But for Europeans drawing lines on maps and Turkish national ambitions, there should have been an independent nation for the Kurds decades ago.

But, then, Muslims have never been all that fond of other Muslims.

The Kurds are the world’s largest stateless nation, numbering well over 30 million spread across Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, according to figures in the CIA Factbook, though exact population numbers are hard to pin down. Iraq’s 6 million Kurds have achieved the greatest measure of independence; they run the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, within the federal Iraqi system since 2005 (though de facto autonomy began after Saddam’s army was forced out of the region during the 1991 Gulf War). But despite a booming economy and striking freedom of action, the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq still has presented no concrete plans for independence.

Read it.

They’re the modern Brownshirts, the street fighters of the Crust. Of course they’re funded with taxpayer dollars.

Read it.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo bagged $100,000 in campaign donations from a developer that, two days later, received tax breaks that will cost New York taxpayers $35 million in revenue over 10 years.

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

Read it.

More government nonsense. Sorry: If you’re not sweating, you’re not an athlete. (No, palms don’t count. And there’s more to ‘sweating’ than body odor.)

Read it.

Hey, I’m all for that.

‘If you think as we do,” says Ben Nelson, “Harvard’s the world’s most valuable brand.” He doesn’t mean only in higher education. “Our goal is to displace Harvard. We’re perfectly happy for Harvard to be the world’s second most valuable brand.”

Uh, no. It’s the second most valuable brand. If you can’t get that right, you’ve got no future.

Mr. Nelson founded and runs the Minerva Project. The school touts itself as the first elite—make that “e-lite”—American university to open in 100 years. Or it will be when the first class enters in 2015. Mr. Nelson, who previously led the online photo-sharing company Snapfish, wants to topple and transcend the American academy’s economic and educational model.

And why not? Higher education’s product-delivery system—a professor droning to a limited number of students in a room—dates back a thousand years. The industry’s physical plant (dorms, classrooms, gyms) often a century or more. Its most expensive employees, tenured faculty, can’t be fired. The price of its product (tuition) and operating costs have outpaced inflation by multiples.

In similar circumstances, Wal-Mart took out America’s small retail chains. Amazon crushed Borders. And Harvard will have to make way for . . . Minerva? “There is no better case to do something that I can think of in the history of the world,” says Mr. Nelson.

Yeah, and everybody brags about how they shop at Walmart. Sales are the only measure when it comes to education.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

The brief report below from French television concerns the cultural enrichment of Norwegian schools. The father interviewed in the clip describes what happened to his children in school when the number of “children of Norwegian background” dropped below 50%. When the number of enriched students reached a certain critical mass in the classroom, non-Muslim children were no longer able to bring ham sandwiches to school in their lunches.

The children were compelled to accommodate their classmates “because others think that [eating ham] is illegal”. That is, the perception of the illegality of ham forced the de facto enforcement of non-Norwegian law in a Norwegian school. That law is, of course, Islamic law, and Norway is in the process of becoming a sharia state.

Without  eternal vigilance, it could happen here. Probably in Michigan.

Read it.

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

The protest was organized by the Chicago Federation of Labor in collaboration with the Chicago Teachers Union, the SEIU, Action Now (formerly ACORN), and were accompanied by a large contingent of anarchists.

‘Anarchist’ being a media code-word for ‘violent mob’.

One protester told Breitbart News they were angry with ALEC because, “ALEC is an organization that helps to create state legislation and encourages state legislators to introduce that legislation in their home states.”

Dude, in this country we call it democracy; what do they do in your country?

Ah, well; unions and democracy have never really gotten along.

Read it.

The world is full of busybodies, whose goal in life is to force you to live your life they way they want you to.

Health activists, nutrition nannies, medical paternalists, and just plain old quacks regularly conjure up a variety of menaces that are supposedly damaging the health of Americans. Their scares ranging from the decades-long campaign against fluoridation to worries that saccharin causes cancer to the ongoing hysteria over biotech crops to fears of lead in lipstick. The campaigners’ usual “solution” is to demand that regulators ban the offending substance or practice. Here are five especially egregious examples.

Any time you get somebody whose claim to fame is the ability to look good in front of a camera supporting an issue, you can safely bet money s/he’s on the wrong side.

Read it.

City officials would use eminent domain — i.e., the power to take property by force, upon the payment of “fair compensation” to the owner — to wrest control of hundreds of mortgages held by private-equity firms. They’re not taking the actual property, mind you, but grabbing the notes held by those who financed the homes.

Read it.

A month after saying New Jersey has “enough gun laws” already,  Governor Chris Christie signed 10 of 13 new gun control bills into law on August 8.

I predict that he’ll be the next guy to lose a Presidential election for the Republicans.

Read it.

A native of Suzhou, China, who enjoys rock climbing and ballroom dancing, Xu earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2009, and arrived at MIT in September of that year. Since coming to MIT, Xu has studied queuing networks that include stochastic, or random, dynamics with his advisor, John Tsitsiklis, the Clarence J. LeBel Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

In work beginning with his master’s thesis, Xu has shown that having even a little flexibility in resources drastically improves wait times. For example, Xu says, “In call centers, you just need to train your staff so that each person speaks a few languages or knows a few disciplines. If they are mixed and matched in a smart way, then together they are very powerful.”

Read it.

Up to 90% of the energy used in crop cultivation is wasted on dealing with the damage caused by the cultivation equipment itself.

Read it.

Carter’s Pills, here we come….

Read it. And watch the video.

Most people are familiar with the footage of bogus victims and staged suffering that emerges periodically from Gaza and the West Bank. Israeli “atrocities” are carefully faked for the cameras and then retailed to gullible (or complicit) Western media outlets, who tend to swallow them hook, line, and sinker. The most famous Pallywood production was the Mohammed al-Dura hoax, but there have been innumerable others.

Now Pallywood seems to have packed up operations and moved to Egypt. The following behind-the-scenes video shows a pretend demonstration of Muslim Brotherhood supporters, including grievously wounded victims being aided by their devoted comrades. At the beginning the action seems to be intended for video cameras, and then all the actors freeze their positions and pose for stills as cameramen wander among the participants:

Read it.

Last month, the United Kingdom announced that it was investing $90 million in what was being billed as the most groundbreaking aeronautical development since the jet engine. The public investment would be used along with private funds to build a prototype of a SABRE engine, a propulsion system that would make the world’s first true “space plane” possible.

Read it.

As part of the climate change agenda he unveiled this year, President Obama made a commitment to significantly reduce the federal government’s dependence on fossil fuels. The government, he said in a speech in June at Georgetown University, “must lead by example.”

But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation’s capital and a concrete example of the government’s inability to green its own turf.

Obama lied? Obama says one thing and does another? Obama can’t carry through on his promises? None of that is news.

But it’s all the Republicans’ fault, of course….