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The 2009 epidemic and stirrings of a potential H7N9 epidemic have mobilized Fedson and other public health experts to look for new ways to decrease the effects of seasonal and pandemic flu. And according to Fedson, one surprising group of drugs, called statins, might serve just that purpose. Typically used to reduce cholesterol, they might also turn down the body’s immune response to the virus responsible for many flu-related hospitalizations and deaths.

Statins are cheap, safe, and widely available even in developing countries, which gives them a huge advantage over traditional vaccines and antivirals. Preliminary studies have hinted that people who take statins are less likely to die from influenza complications. But not everyone is convinced. Other scientists have pointed out flaws in the studies and say sufficient data doesn’t yet exist.

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The supercomputer made its debut as a chef at a Las Vegas tech conference last week, and so far has produced gourmet, fusion fare like a Swiss-Thai asparagus quiche, an Austrian chocolate burrito, and a pork belly moussaka.

I am not making this up.

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I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now––except for white people, of course.

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The monocle, of course, is just an affectation, almost as much trouble as contacts and far less useful. But that sort of describe hipsters in general.

“I got it just to have my own style, bring something new to the table,” said Jose Vega, 23, an aspiring Miami rap musician who can be seen sporting a monocle on his SoundCloud page. “Also, I’m nearsighted.”

I’ll vouch for that.

Toby Miller, a cultural historian, said: “Monocles have always marked people out as beyond the crowd, slightly different. On one hand you have the Prussian officer, on the other you have the effete English lord, and then you also have the New York and London lesbian in the 1920s.”

Yeah, there’s a target demographic if ever I’ve seen one.

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Billionaire Walmart heiress Alice Walton, billionaire philanthropist Jon Stryker, and billionaire progressive global financier George Soros were among the wealthy donors who helped raise over $4 million last year for the “Ready for Hillary” super PAC, newly released public filings reveal.

Walton, Stryker, and Soros were joined by 32 others in chipping in the maximum $25,000 super PAC donation, including Steve and Amber Mostyn’s law firm, Clinton 2008 bundler Bill Rudin, and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary under Clinton Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis.

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When friends complain about evil government (e.g., NSA surveillance), I tell them “never underestimate the stupidity of government employees” — by which I mean their stupidity outweighs their self-interest. The Obamacare website fiasco is a good illustration. Everyone has heard “power corrupts” but closer to the truth is power makes you stupid.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

But as it turned out in Kiev, a street battle attracts a different demographic than does a gay pride parade. The triumph of brave far-right brawlers in Ukraine horrified the Russians into acting like Russians.

Russia has long been a baleful state, the biggest, toughest flatheads out on the Eurasian plain. You always hear about two times Russia was attacked—by Napoleon in 1812 and by Hitler in 1941—but Russia didn’t get that big through diplomacy.

Bryan Caplan lays down some inconvenient truth.

1. Claims about desert and poverty are meaningful.  Asking, “Does he deserve to be poor?” can be rude, but that doesn’t mean the answer is “No.”

2. A person deserves his problem if there are reasonable steps the he could have taken to avoid the problem.  Poverty is a problem, so a person deserves his poverty if there are reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his poverty.

3. Common sense can usually resolve whether reasonable steps to avoid poverty were available to a particular person.  A good rule of thumb: If you wouldn’t accept an excuse from a friend, you shouldn’t accept it from anyone.

4. The fact that a person deserves his poverty does not imply that it is morally wrong to help him.

5. However, the fact that a person deserves his poverty is (a) a strong moral reason to give him low priority when weighing how to allocate help, and (b) a strong moral reason not to force a stranger to help him.

6. The fact that a person does not deserve his poverty does not imply that it is morally wrong not to help him.

7. However, the fact that a person does not deserve his poverty is (a) a strong moral reason to give him high priority when weighing how to allocate help, (b) an extra moral reason for individuals morally responsible for his poverty to cease and remedy their wrongful behavior, (c) a moral reason to force these morally responsible individuals to cease and remedy their wrongful behavior, and (d) a plausible though not totally convincing moral reason to force strangers to help the deserving person if the benefits heavily outweigh the costs.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Don’t laugh–– she’s got tenure.

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A former Alcoa City School District employee who oversaw federal funds took nearly $500,000 in taxpayer money to use for herself, according to an audit Tennessee Comptroller Justin Wilson released Tuesday.

Prediction: She is not a ‘person of pallor’.

The former employee spent the money on her home mortgage, food, jewelry, clothing and iTunes songs, Wilson said. She even invested some of that money in a local gym, according to the audit.

Look for … The Union label….

Had wrist surgery yesterday so blogging may be lighter than usual. Sorry.

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What’s the use of power if you can’t abuse it?

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Our mission while at the orphanage was to build a library. Turns out that we, a group of highly educated private boarding school students were so bad at the most basic construction work that each night the men had to take down the structurally unsound bricks we had laid and rebuild the structure so that, when we woke up in the morning, we would be unaware of our failure. It is likely that this was a daily ritual. Us mixing cement and laying bricks for 6+ hours, them undoing our work after the sun set, re-laying the bricks, and then acting as if nothing had happened so that the cycle could continue.

[snort]

It turns out that I, a little white girl, am good at a lot of things. I am good at raising money, training volunteers, collecting items, coordinating programs, and telling stories. I am flexible, creative, and able to think on my feet. On paper I am, by most people’s standards, highly qualified to do international aid. But I shouldn’t be.

I am not a teacher, a doctor, a carpenter, a scientist, an engineer, or any other professional that could provide concrete support and long-term solutions to communities in developing countries. I am a 5? 4? white girl who can carry bags of moderately heavy stuff, horse around with kids, attempt to teach a class, tell the story of how I found myself (with accompanying powerpoint) to a few thousand people and not much else.

And reality intrudes into the fantasy word of an offspring of the Crust.

Before you sign up for a volunteer trip anywhere in the world this summer, consider whether you possess the skill set necessary for that trip to be successful. If yes, awesome. If not, it might be a good idea to reconsider your trip. Sadly, taking part in international aid where you aren’t particularly helpful is not benign. It’s detrimental. It slows down positive growth and perpetuates the “white savior” complex that, for hundreds of years, has haunted both the countries we are trying to ‘save’ and our (more recently) own psyches. Be smart about traveling and strive to be informed and culturally aware. It’s only through an understanding of the problems communities are facing, and the continued development of skills within that community, that long-term solutions will be created.

We’ll make this kid a conservative yet….

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Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending 2010 film Inception was a box office hit, entertaining audiences with a fantastical world of subconscious alternate realities. Could that work out as a board game? Board games company Pilot Study has taken a crack at it with Inceptor, a game that takes some of the core concepts of Inception’s world, and filters them into a mission-oriented multiplayer game. Players take turns rolling the dice and drawing mission card to navigate on a board that takes them through various “dream levels.”  The ultimate goal is to plant your idea and get out before time runs out, all the while avoiding the attacks from the cards and your fellow players.

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I am not making this up.

Stubble-challenged guys are forking over up to $8,500 for the beard-boosting procedure, which has spiked in popularity in recent months, plastic surgeons told The Post.

“Brooklyn is probably the nucleus of the trend, it’s the hipster ‘look’ guys want. If you have a spotty beard, and you let it grow out, it looks sloppy, ” said Dr. Jeffrey Epstein, a Midtown-based plastic surgeon.

“[Clients] want full beards because it’s a masculine look. Beards are an important male identifier,” he added.

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4 AXYZ’s printing method involves adapting an existing German woodworking machine to operate in 3D. It works by combining small, uniformly cut pieces of wood. Shah actually prefers to put the manufacturing technique under the broader term of “additive manufacturing,” as there is at no point any liquid “ink” involved, as is generally the case in 3D printing.

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If you get an outfit, you can be a beta-male slacker too.

Mark Steyn is living the vida loca.

As Eugene Volokh tells it, if you want to kill someone’s speaking career, just take out a fatwa on them. Then every public-safety-conscious police chief will rule it’s too dangerous to allow them through the door….

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There is only one Crust; the labels are merely there to give the illusion of hope to the dimwitted.

The Other McCain is on the case.

This touches upon a common-sense criticism of birth control that is not addressed often enough: Birth control pills (and other types of hormone-based contraception) require women to add synthetic hormones to their system in sufficient quantities to alter their normal reproductive function. If a woman only uses the pill for a few months, maybe a year or two, the long-term health impact might be minimal. However, most women who use the pill are on it for many years, and it seems just common sense that altering the body’s natural hormonal balance on a long-term basis by adding artificial hormones could have serious ramifications.

“Experts” may dismiss such concerns, and I don’t have any “scientific research” to offer you, but if a known side effect of “third generation” contraceptives is deadly blood clots, I’ll count that as validating my common-sense hunch.

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Join the club. Mo, join the club.

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For some time now, it has been customary to label those who write about grammar and usage as either prescriptivists or descriptivists. The former think there are “right” and “wrong” ways to say or write, while the latter claim that we can only record how people actually use language, since any widespread successful usage is, ipso facto, “right.” But as soon as we probe a little further, these two categories start to dissolve. In fact, there are two complementary pleasures to be had from reading contributions to this ever-popular genre. The first is that of watching the most beady-eyed prescriptivist waving through usages that would have put their prescriptivist ancestors in intensive care with advanced apoplexy. The other is the sight of the most laid-back descriptivists casually laying down a range of arbitrary diktats and prohibitions. And this is not accidental or just a matter of personal weakness. In reality, neither of these positions is sustainable in its pure form. Those who think anything goes and those who think that that means it goes to the dogs turn out to be not so far apart after all.

The truth is, not to put too fine a point on it, that every prescriptivist is screwed by history. They can’t avoid knowing that, on so many of the hot topics of grammar and meaning, what used to be right is now wrong and vice versa. But the descriptivists are caught in their own cleft stick without a paddle, too. In theory, their position might be summed up as, “If folks say it like that, then that’s how folks say it.” But just as no one is in practice a thorough-going relativist about knowledge or morals, however committed they may be to relativism as a theoretical position, so no descriptivist can, for example, stand by and watch foreigners mangling the language without invoking the category of “mistake.” In fact, the teaching of English as a foreign language is an interesting testing ground for all the general ideas put forward in these books. In that setting, there certainly are “rules” and there are “right” (and therefore “wrong”) ways. For TEFL teachers, saying “more tastier” can’t just be a matter of taste.

Read it.

Printing page numbers (something that appears quite necessary and obvious today) only became common typographic practice from the second quarter of the sixteenth century. And prior to the printed book, ‘foliation remained rare till the end of the Middle Ages’**; and of limited indexical or citational use as manuscripts were very rarely identical.

You had to have printing that made uniform pages before page numbers were of any real use.

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Where does the Democratic Party get the people who work for it? I suppose from the same vast sea of unknowing where they get their voters.

Perhaps beta-male Pajama Boy is doing an unpaid internship at the White House.

Read it.

As a matter of economics, why not consider the option of hiring a single professor to teach a first-year curriculum to a small number of students? At the level of the individual student, it may make sense to some families. Rather than spend $50,000 for a year of college at a selective private institution, one could hire a single Ivy League-trained individual with a doctorate and qualifications in multiple fields for, say, two-thirds the price (far more than an adjunct professor would make for teaching five courses at an average of $2,700 per course).

The idea becomes more attractive with multiple students. A half-dozen families (or the students themselves) could pool resources to hire a single professor, who would provide all six students with a tailored first-year liberal-arts education (leaving aside laboratory science) at a cost much lower than six private-college tuitions, and at the level of a real salary for a good sole-proprietor professor.

A low-cost, high-value first-year education would allow students to transfer into a traditional degree-granting institution at a second- or third-year level, saving a year or more of tuition. Home-colleged students would have a year of personal attention to writing skills, research skills, oral-presentation skills, and the relationship of disciplines in the liberal arts.  The attention to oral and written skills may be particularly valuable to non-English-speaking students looking to succeed at an American college or university.

Everything old is new again.

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For a Socialist Rag (or whatever is the Internet equivalent), Business Insider occasionally has some interesting stuff.

The picture is obviously from an SCA event.

Sarah Hoyt is delightfully dyspeptic.

These aren’t the crazy years.  These are the completely insane, run around with your pants on your head, saluting weasels years.

No, listen to me – there is a great mental illness striding the land.  Almost everyone is interested in things they shouldn’t give two hoots about.  And at least half the people want to live in a society of clones.

Look, I’m not talking just the government.  The government is forever sticking its nose in things that logically shouldn’t be of interest to them.  Part of the reason I’m so opposed to the governmental take over of our health care is that I know here it will be done with unique American-puritan zeal.  And I’m not wrong.

Ayuh.

But that’s something we sort of know about.  WHEN hasn’t government taken power it’s not supposed to have, if a people are so supine as to let them?  Right – never.  And when hasn’t a government initiative gotten insane-silly?  Anywhere in the world?  Right. Never.  I mean, sure, this is a unique American brand in that the things they’re obsessing about is stuff like what you eat and what you drink and whether you might perhaps be having a little mild fun (a bottle of wine a week is mild fun anywhere else in the world) on the side.  Which would be okay if they weren’t basing this on the “latest studies” bound to be reversed in a decade.  (But ah, once it’s in law, it’s forever.)

True dat.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, explains it all to you.

So what’s it all about? The Second Machine Age is an addition to the growing pile of books about the vanishing middle class, books such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s the message: Great swaths of the pen-pushing middle classes are about to lose their jobs to smart machines.

The authors offer TurboTax as an illustration. Why use an H&R Block tax preparer when, for much less money (the basic version costs $29.99) and a modest investment of time, TurboTax will do the job for you? You get a better service at a lower price. The creators of TurboTax get rich—one is a billionaire. Tens of thousands of tax preparers lose their jobs.

This has been going on for a while. You could ask a travel agent; or, much easier to find, an ex-travel agent.

Gee, there’s an echo in here.

Fred Reed is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Things don’t work like they spoza. A cause of this dysfunction is the notion that criminals can “pay their debt to society” and then be all better, as if crimes were purchases made on a credit card. Say that a marginal human wielding a bolo knife crawls through a window, burglarizes the house, and gets caught and sentenced to five years. He gets out some time later having “paid his debt”—actually the citizenry have paid $20K a year to keep him fed and comfortable. He is now thought to have been cleansed and ready to make a fresh start.

Not a chance.

Read it.

Gene therapy to modify immune cells makes them attack leukemia very effectively. 88% success rate against leukemia.

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In a world run by robots in which few things are scarce, we can probably depend on government to create scarcity where there’s no reason for it. After all, that’s what government does best.

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As with the case of the Holy Roman Empire, the SPLC is not southern, has nothing to do with law, and nothing to do with poverty — it’s basically a well-funded group of finger-pointers who exist to label those ‘progressives’ don’t like as ‘extremists’. As with every other such group, their paychecks depend on there being such extremist groups hiding under every sofa — so (what a surprise!) they keep finding them.

Read it.

The budget resolution, which Congress is required to enact each year, provides a framework for appropriators to produce a detailed spending blueprint for the government. The appropriations committees work within the limits set by the resolution to prioritize spending for every government agency and program.

“Senate Democrats are required by law to produce a budget,” Budget Committee ranking member Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) said Friday. “Our nation is in enormous financial distress, and workers and families are suffering. Senate Democrats have produced only one budget in the last five years. This Senate and, more importantly, the American public, deserve to see a detailed ten-year financial plan to contain our dangerously rising debt and revitalize our dismal economy.”

I guess obeying the Constitution is only for the Little People.

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On January 1, a building in a predominantly Somali neighborhood in Minneapolis exploded and burned, leaving three people dead and another thirteen injured, some of them grievously. There was no obvious investigation of the cause of the explosion, only a rush by city and federal authorities to declare that no bomb was involved and that there was no connection with “terrorism”. The damaged building was razed in less than 72 hours.

As we reported here last week, the owner of the demolished building, Garad K. Nor, had previously been on the U.S. Treasury’s interdicted list for allegedly running a hawala transfer business (the traditional and informal Arab/Muslim way of conducting long-distance financial transactions) that laundered money for the al-Shabaab Islamic terror outfit in Somalia.

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Well, we can only do what we’re capable of doing.

The Obama administration has responded, so far, in a manner that is pathetic even by its own standards. After issuing stern warnings to Russia not to invade Crimea, the administration, confronted with the actual presence of Russian troops on the ground, philosophized about whether it was really an invasion, suggesting that a more apt term might be an “uncontested arrival.”

Wonder what it’s like to have a Real President, rather than an affirmative-action hire? Maybe we ought to ask the Russians.

Read it.

That’s why they call it the ‘Affordable Care Act’. Oh, wait….

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Well, they’re not really panicking — Democrats are about as easy to panic as a cow — but they ought to be.

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ElweterStrictly speaking, Maryland lawmakers aren’t overtly planning a gift to cigarette smugglers, but that’s certainly going to be the ultimate result of a proposal to massively hike taxes on all sorts of tobacco products. The share of cigarettes supplied in the state by the black market more than doubled from 2006 to 2011 under the pressure of politicians’ appetite for other people’s money. That can only continue to grow if SB 589 becomes law and gives the state the fourth highest cigarette tax rate in the country.

…

According to estimates by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which tracks tobacco taxes and smuggling, 25.76 percent of Maryland’s cigarettes come from the black market, up from 10.38 percent in 2006 (the state doubled cigarette taxes in 2007).

“Politicians = Stupid people who can’t think things through” seems to be a universal physical constant, like gravity or the speed of light.

Mother Jones lives up (down?) to its fine, fine reputation.

Global warming isn’t just going to melt the Arctic and flood our cities—it’s also going to make Americans more likely to kill each other.

That’s the conclusion of a controversial new study that uses historic crime and temperature data to show that hotter weather leads to more murders, more rapes, more robberies, more assaults, and more property crimes.

“Looking at the past, we see a strong relationship between temperature and crime,” says study author Matthew Ranson, an economist with the policy consulting firm Abt Associates. “We think that is likely to continue in the future.”

Just how much more crime can we expect? Using the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warming projections, Ranson calculated that from 2010 to 2099, climate change will “cause” an additional “22,000 murders, 180,000 cases of rape, 1.2 million aggravated assaults, 2.3 million simple assaults, 260,000 robberies, 1.3 million burglaries, 2.2 million cases of larceny, and 580,000 cases of vehicle theft” in the United States.

This is the sort of pseudo-science that our ‘progressive’ ruling class swallows without a tremor.

Read it.

NPR has a story about how The Jones Act, a 1920 law designed to protect the U.S. shipping industry from foreign competition, has made it difficult for New Jersey to get large shipments of road salt this winter. The Garden State could have brought 40,000 tons of salt down from Maine on a single ship, saving time and money during one of the toughest winters in memory, but instead has to ferry a barge capable of handling shipments of under 10,000 tons back and forth, adding costs and delays.

…

It’s not just folks in frigid New Jersey who are suffering because of a dumb old law. The NPR story touches on how The Jones Act screws over Hawaii especially. Thanks to this form of protectionism, residents of America’s furtherst-flung state routinely pay 15 percent to 20 percent more for goods that come from the mainland.

But I’ll bet American Unions love it, like the Davis-Bacon Act.

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Beyond that, we should enjoy the irony of environmentalists suddenly discovering property rights after cheering on every erosion of property rights in favor of unlimited government regulatory power for decades.  In fact Steyer will lose his legal challenges because of precedents over 100 years old for projects like Keystone—the same precedents that determined the outcome of the now-infamous Kelo case in 2004. See, for example, Strickley v. Highland Boy Gold Mining Company from 1906, or Dayton Minnig v. Sewall, a Nevada Supreme Court case from around the same time.  Both held that it was in fact okay to take private property from A to give to B if B’s private enterprise had some kind of public benefit.  Not to mention Berman v. Parker in 1954, which argued that private property could be taken because “The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive.”  Well, that’s nice.  (See also the 1981 Michigan case, Poletown Neighborhood Council v. City of Detroit.)

Read it.

Bitcoin is naught but a toy for rich white libertarian men, says Annie-Rose Strasser at Think Progress, as she thinks about the ways she doesn’t like progress if she doesn’t like the type of people she associates with it, or the ideas she thinks are behind it, no matter what its actual uses are or might be, for rich, poor, or in-between.

Read it.

I suppose the readiness of TV audiences to accept such absurd situations as less depressing than the fact that supposedly sober businessmen paid ad agencies more money than I’ll ever see in my life in the belief that anybody is persuaded by such drivel.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

David Friedman lays out some inconvenient truth.

It’s a widespread view, but true in only a narrow sense. People who say they are against teaching the theory of evolution are very likely to be Christian fundamentalists. But people who are against taking seriously the implications of evolution, strongly enough to want to attack those who disagree, including those who teach those implications, are quite likely to be on the left.

Consider the most striking case, the question of whether there are differences between men and women with regard to the distribution of intellectual abilities or behavioral patterns. That no such differences exist, or if that if they exist they are insignificant, is a matter of faith for many on the left. The faith is so strongly held that when the president of Harvard, himself a prominent academic, merely raised the possibility that one reason why there were fewer women than men in certain fields might be such differences, he was ferociously attacked and eventually driven to resign.

Yet the claim that such differences must be insignificant is one that nobody who took the implications of evolution seriously could maintain. We are, after all, the product of selection for reproductive success. Males and females play quite different roles in reproduction. It would be a striking coincidence if the distribution of abilities and behavioral patterns that was optimal for one sex turned out to also be optimal for the other, rather like two entirely different math problems just happening to have the same answer.

The Wolfram Locker.

Scented Necklaces.

Inconspicuous Handcuff Key. For those times when, you know, you just gotta go.

Post It Labeling Tape.

Scooba.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Justice has not only successfully sued Apple for arguably non-existent anti-trust violations in the e-book market. It has even demanded – and gotten – a court-appointed “monitor” placed inside the company to supervise the company’s pricing decisions.

This is a company that went from an $18 billion market value in 2000 to a $455 billion market value in 2013. During the same period, Microsoft’s market value fell from $603 billion to $290 billion. Should anyone expect the success story to continue now that the government is meddling with all the company’s pricing?

Apple appealed the anti-trust judgment this Tuesday but was unable to get the government “monitor’s” work suspended while the case is under appeal. Among the interesting facts that have come out about the “monitor,” Michael Bromwich, it has been revealed that he bills for his time at $1,100 an hour and charged $138,432 for his first two weeks of “work.”

Apple has labeled Bromwich’s appointment “unprecedented and unconstitutional.” We wish it were unprecedented. This form of government price interference and intimidation has become increasingly common.

Joseph Covington, who headed the Justice Department’s Foreign Corrupt Practices Act Division in the 1980s, told Forbes, in reference to monitors appointed to enforce that act, “This is good business for Justice Department lawyers who create the marketplace [for monitors] and then get… a job there [after they leave government].”

‘Hm. Over $100 billion in cash. Ought to be a way we could get a taste of that.’