Read it.

The Monastery of Stoudios, also known as the ?mrahor Monument, will be turned into a mosque and be titled ?mrahor ?lyas Bey Mosque. The renovation of the mosque, which forms part of the Hagia Sophia Museum, will follow the same fate as that of Hagia Sophia churches in Trabzon and ?znik, which had been already turned into mosques.

What would happen if anyone anywhere wanted to turn a mosque into a church? The screaming would blanket the globe.

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Hey, we wouldn’t want to have any dangerous shit wandering around out there.

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In a thought-provoking story, Time magazine recently explored ?the real reason new college graduates can’t get hired. It’s not because they lack STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) training, and the recession is only partly to blame. Young people who have bad manners (now called “social skills) and dress eccentrically drive high youth unemployment. Time quoted a global study by Talent Shortage Survey from ManpowerGroup that found that one in five employers worldwide can’t find qualified young people to fill jobs.

“Specifically, companies say candidates are lacking in motivation, interpersonal skills, appearance, punctuality and flexibility,” Time noted. Such sloppiness shows us that the values of Skunk Hollow have gone mainstream. And if a young person gives off a vibe of believing a job is just another entitlement, he is less likely to get it. It’s also not a bad idea to dress appropriately when seeking work.

Read it.

In the case of the D.C. bill, Walmart often already does pay a $10 or $11.50 wage. According to Payscale.com, Walmart’s cashiers on average make between $7.50 and $10.77 and sales associates make between $7.63 and $11.83. Overall, its wages are just five percent below the retail industry average.

It is a different story for D.C.’s small neighborhood stores — which already face the daunting prospect of competing with Walmart. “Small businesses are the least able to absorb … a dramatic increase in their labor costs,” notes the National Federation of Independent Business.

This is why rich people say they’re not taxed enough … it’s not the money; they could just cut a check to the government if that were the case. They want taxes increased because it increases their relative advantage over people who aren’t as rich as they are.

Read it.

Imagine, if you will, a thin layer of ‘bureaucrat’ spread overall like frosting on a wedding cake.

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Not that there’s any such thing as ‘race’, oh no, or that it has anything to do with intelligence, perish the thought.

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Scientists have drawn on nearly 1,000 brain scans to confirm what many had surely concluded long ago: that stark differences exist in the wiring of male and female brains.

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

So much for the ‘gender is a social construct’ people. Not that it will shut them up any….

Read it.

Yeah, everybody’s having a good time:

Soon to be a major motion picture, no doubt. Pixar, are you listenin’?

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A pointed reminder that, no matter how bad the American Nanny State might get, foreigners have it worse.

An Italian woman, who wasn’t named by media, is fighting to keep British social services from placing her baby for adoption. Last summer, the woman, who was then pregnant, came to England for a Ryanair training course. While there, she had a panic attack and called for help. When police arrived, she was on the phone with her mother who told them her daughter was bipolar and hadn’t been taking her medicine. Cops took her to a mental hospital where social services had doctors forcibly sedate her and remove her baby by caesarian section. The woman has fought a legal battle since to get her child back, but social services and British courts have refused to turn the child over to her or to its father.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Read it.

A pointed reminder that, no matter how bad the American Nanny State may get, foreigners have it worse.

(I especially like the clever use of scare-words like ‘tainted’ and ‘laced with’, as if shadowy figures were sitting there with spray cans of Nasty just waiting for your food to roll by….)

The Antiplanner points out where rhetoric trips over reality.

One of the many inane things about Obamacare is the Cadillac tax, which punishes employers who provide their employees with “too much” health insurance. The Democrats who supported this are now having to deal with the fact that the employers most guilty of providing Cadillac health insurance are public agencies. Of these, transit agencies have some of the most expensive plans of all.

Oops. There’s problem with ‘socking it to the rich’ when ‘the rich; are your own guys. Oops.

The unions, of course, want to repeal the Cadillac tax. Democrats in Congress are no doubt reluctant to open that can of worms which would likely lead to calls to repeal much of the rest of Obamacare.

The main reason why health care costs are so high in this country is that more than 80 percent of the population have been insured, so they have little reason to reign in costs. The Cadillac tax is meant to discourage insurance that doesn’t require people to at least co-pay part of their costs. But the fundamental basis of Obamacare, which is that health care can be made more affordable by insuring the other 15 to 20 percent, is completely backwards.

Read it.

The report looks at the January 1997 “handgun ban in England and Wales” to substantiate this.

Between the time of that ban and 2012, the “homicides rates” rose, exponentially at times, and fell, but they only fell to a level lower than 1996 rates in one year–and that was 2010. Studies that claim “success” for the handgun ban are frequently an outworking of crime numbers that have been manipulated to make the ban look effective.

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

Read it.

Jeff Bezos revealed something that truly would revolutionize e-commerce and online ordering, should it become widely used: automated air delivery drones that could deliver 86 percent of the goods Amazon ships to customers today (packages under 5 pounds), in less than 30 minutes in many cases. That would be a huge change to business as currently conducted by the Amazon giant, and it would mean the end of retail as we know it.

…

When I do still shop retail instead of Amazon, the only real reason that I do so is because I need (or think I need) the item immediately. Amazon’s pricing is better in almost every case, and there’s no worry about whether something is in stock or not, and there’s no compromising about models or the type of item you’re after. If Amazon can promise all of that, combined with a delivery system that essentially beats a round-trip journey by car to the nearest Walmart, then consider it bye-bye brick-and-mortar for me, and, I suspect, for a considerable portion of the population, too.

I bought stock in Amazon when it was 187, heh heh heh….

On the other hand….

Let’s ignore, for a moment, all of the obvious problems with a drone-based Amazon Prime delivery system. Let’s ignore the fact that you can get free stuff if you’re a good shot with a rifle. And let’s ignore the fact that a 10-mile range isn’t much when it comes to underserved rural areas and is a jungle of potential snags and snares in urban, populated areas. Let’s ignore the fact that, unless you’re having Amazon deliver something to your secluded place on Martha’s Vineyard, having a robot drop paperback books on your house sounds like a mess.

Let’s ignore the possibility that a drone falls on a person and gives him or her an Amazon Prime haircut…..

Read it.

The complexity and incoherence of our government often make it difficult for us to understand just what that government is doing, and among the practices it most frequently hides from view is the growing tendency of public policy to redistribute resources upward to the wealthy and the organized at the expense of the poorer and less organized. As we increasingly notice the consequences of that regressive redistribution, we will inevitably also come to pay greater attention to the daunting and self-defeating complexity of public policy across multiple, seemingly unrelated areas of American life, and so will need to start thinking differently about government.

Read it.

If you’ve followed science news over the past decade then you’ve probably heard about epigenetics, a field that’s caught fire in the minds of scientists and the public, and understandably so. Epigenetic studies have shown that changes in an organism’s external environment — its life experiences and even its choices, if you want to get hyperbolic — can influence the expression of its otherwise inflexible DNA code. Epigenetics, in other words, is enticing because it offers a resolution to the tedious, perennial debates of nurture versus nature.

But some scientists dispute the notion that epigenetic changes have much influence on behavior (see this Nature feature for a great overview of the debate). Even more controversial is the idea that epigenetic changes can be passed down from one generation to the next, effectively giving parents a way to prime their children for a specific environment. The key question isn’t whether this so-called ‘transgenerational epigenetic inheritance’ happens — it does — but rather how it happens (and how frequently, and in what contexts and species).

Read it.

“(University of) Idaho is a land grant university. Part of the land grant mission is to respond to the needs of the constituent industries and otherwise in your state,” Coats said. “I’m doing this bioplastics research. To make bioplastics, I need a lot of carbon. I need a lot of electrons. Well, they’re in manure. It works out perfectly.”

We have the technology.

Put this in place in D.C. and our need for petroleum would shrink amazingly.

Read it.

I never learnt how to take notes properly. In retrospect, note-taking should be part of a grade-school curriculum, much like typing. But I didn’t attend any such course so I don’t know how to manage a notebook well.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

    What perhaps puzzles the reader is why [Census] race statistics are so terribly important that they are announced simultaneously with the population figures mandated for reapportionment. You may also be puzzled that the census form dedicates so much of its space to the race and Hispanic question but has no space for education, health, employment, or marital status questions.

(Not to mention the absence of a citizenship question, which would ask about a simple yes-or-no legal distinction far less murky than race or ethnicity.)

Ask Willie Sutton: ‘That’s where the money is.’

An old-fashioned nice white Protestant liberal, Prewitt, who is now Carnegie professor of public affairs at Columbia University, expresses befuddlement at how a job he apparently assumed would be suitable for a technocratic good government Progressive like himself wound up plunging him into the maelstrom of modern racial politics. Thus his proposals for technical improvements in the Census quite unexpectedly (to him) degenerated into a donnybrook over race, complete with angry charges of, guess what, “racism.”

Prewitt points out that, from the disinterested perspective of promoting the commonweal, the federal government’s racial preoccupation synchronizes poorly with the lack of informed public discussion over the purposes of all this categorizing of people. Instead, the crucial process of drawing official racial and ethnic boundaries tends to be either hijacked by interest groups or is the remnant of bureaucratic inertia and lack of foresight.

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

Read it.

Not least in sampling their own toxic wares….

“If you take into account the risk of being shot by rival gangs, ending up in jail or being beaten up by your own hierarchy, you might wonder why anybody would work for such a low wage and at such dreadful working conditions instead of seeking employment at McDonald’s. Yet, gangs have no real difficulty in recruiting new members. The reason for this is that the prospect of future wealth, rather than current income and working conditions, is the main driver for people to stay in the business: low-level drug sellers forgo current income for (uncertain) future wealth. Rank-and-file members are ready to face this risk to try to make it to the top, where life is good and money is flowing,” wrote Alexandre Afonso, a lecturer in political economy at King’s College London.

He cites the work of the economist Steven Levitt and the sociologist Sudhir Venkatesh in understanding drug gangs. “With a constant supply of new low-level drug sellers entering the market and ready to be exploited, drug lords can become increasingly rich without needing to distribute their wealth towards the bottom,” he writes. “You have an expanding mass of rank-and-file ‘outsiders’ ready to forgo income for future wealth, and a small core of ‘insiders’ securing incomes largely at the expense of the mass. We can call it a winner-take-all market.”

Then he turns to academe and finds very similar conditions.

Paul Mirengoff connects the dots.

In 1996, when Obama went into electoral politics as a candidate for the Illinois state Senate, he did so as the hand-picked successor to Alice Palmer, an avowed socialist. (Palmer, however, decided to fight Obama for the seat after she lost a special election for Congress; Obama kept her off the ballot by successfully challenging her petition signatures). Palmer is the author of such articles as “Socialism Is the Only Way Forward.” And she attended the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1986.

Palmer would not have hand-picked Obama if she did not have good reason to believe that he shared her socialistic vision.

In 2000, when Obama ran for Congress against the prominent leftist incumbent Bobby Rush, the Democratic Socialists of America, though not endorsing either candidate, spoke of Obama in glowing terms while describing Rush as a disappointment to the left.

The Democratic Socialists of America would not have praised Obama if it did not have good reason to believe that he shared its socialistic vision.

Obama served in the U.S. Senate from 2005-2008. As Kurtz notes, one prominent index rated him the most liberal member of the Senate during that period — more liberal than even Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist.

Would Bill de Blasio have compiled a more leftist Senate voting record than Barack Obama did? It’s difficult to see how.

Steve Sailer takes a look.

 As I mentioned in the post below, the Atlantic has a long article about Silicon Valley start-ups attempting to use Big Data for job hiring testing. In the post-WWII era, the article says, American corporations did lots of testing of job applicants, but that fell out of fashion because science. Or something. So for the last generation, firms mostly rely upon resumes and interviews and try to avoid putting much in writing where it can get subpeonaed.

But now in 2013, instead of giant corporations like P&G doing the testing themselves, it’s going to be done for the giant corporations by cool little start-ups with cute names like Knack, Evolv, and Gild. So the New Testing won’t be like the bad Old Testing of the 1950s when the racist, sexist white male power structure was building a giant middle class with secure jobs and pensions. Or something.