Archive for May, 2014
31st May 2014
Gavin McInnes points out the news that isn’t the news because it isn’t on the News.
Last month, Ohio’s Peg and Jeffrey Schoebert were bludgeoned to death by a black teenager because they thought he’d be a terrible boyfriend. The story is very hard to find outside of local news sources but Britain noticed. I got the story through friends in Ohio who met Peggy’s sister. Apparently, the rich, white Schoeberts adopted an East Indian girl who later identified as black. She thought her upbringing was too square and wanted a “more ghetto experience” (the sister’s words), so the parents allowed her to leave private school and go to a public school in a bad area. She hooked up with Shawn Eric Ford, Jr. and soon after, found herself in a knife fight. Her parents decided that was enough ghetto experience for one lifetime and forbade her from seeing Eric. He retaliated by bashing in their skulls with a sledgehammer, and he wasn’t alone. Has anyone heard this story?
Well, you have, now, but without reading it here, would you? I think not.
What about the white couple in Knoxville, Tennessee who were raped and murdered by five black people (including a woman) back in 2007? Christopher Newsom was shot in the back of the head after being raped with an object but his girlfriend Channon Christian was violated for much longer. Then they poured bleach down her throat and left her to suffocate in the garbage. These stories don’t make the major news outlets.
Perhaps because they would reflect poorly on a fashionable minority. Or perhaps it’s because it would be a ‘dog bites man’ story — too ordinary to be news.
A happy suburban family destroyed by murder like Scott and Laci Peterson is a good story. We want to hear about Jon Benet Ramsey if you promise to leave out the gruesome details. A missing plane can pay CNN’s bills for months, and juvenile accusations of sexism and racism are even more lucrative. Here in NYC, there is about a murder a day. If the paper showed each one in all its gruesome details, it would make you want to kill yourself.
…
Trayvon Martin was assassinated by a racist Charles Bronson. That’s a cool action movie. To get into the part where most young blacks are killed by young blacks is depressing and that doesn’t sell papers. If it bleeds, it leads but if it bleeds too much, the paper disintegrates in your hand and you can’t read it. Neil deGrasse Tyson loves to whine about the racist odds he overcame to become a scientist. The real narrative should be the unified family that raised him and the horrible future most children of single mothers are faced with. The narrative he’s chosen is like a cool, black version of Bad News Bears. The truth is more tedious than being audited. We’d rather hear about a Mozilla executive who lost his job for opposing gay marriage. That can be debated in a bar. Hearing about gays being legally executed in Iran can go suck a bag of dicks. I don’t mind talking about fat kids being bullied, but if you change the subject to albinos being ripped apart in Tanzania because they’re believed to have magic blood, I’m outta here.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on A Tailgate Under the Hanging Tree
31st May 2014
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Life-hacking wouldn’t be popular if it didn’t tap into something deeply corroded about the way work has, without much resistance, managed to invade every corner of our lives. The idea started out as a somewhat earnest response to the problem of fragmented attention and overwork—an attempt to reclaim some leisure time and autonomy from the demands of boundaryless labor. But it has since become just another hectoring paradigm of self-improvement. The proliferation of apps and gurus promising to help manage even the most basic tasks of simple existence—the “quantified self” movement does life hacking one better, turning the simple act of breathing or sleeping into something to be measured and refined—suggests that merely getting through the day has become, for many white-collar professionals, a set of problems to solve and systems to optimize. Being alive is easier, it turns out, if you treat it like a job.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Secret History of Life-Hacking
31st May 2014
Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
Something I haven’t seen mentioned in all the discussion of Piketty: Near whom would you rather live, the rich or the poor?
And there it is in a nutshell. Say what you will about Donald Trump — and who doesn’t? — I’m pretty confident that, if I bump into him on the street, he’s not going to stab me and steal my wallet and cellphone.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Curse You, Supply and Demand!
31st May 2014
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Must have gotten their signals crossed or something. It’s so hard finding good help these days….
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on The Biter Bit: Protesters at Laney College Disrupt Commencement Speech by Janet Napolitano
31st May 2014
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‘Green energy’ — it’s not just for birds any more.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Small Plane Crashes Into Wind Farm Covered in Fog, Killing Four
31st May 2014
Travel Alarm Clock with Dual LED Flashlight.
eCool Geothermal Beer Cooler.
Pepper-Spray-Plus-Camera.
This Glass Toaster Costs $1,000—But It Can Cook Steak.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on USEFUL STUFF SATURDAY
30th May 2014
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Not that anyone really needs a reason.
The video explains that bacon’s smell is the result of a process known as the Maillard Reaction, in which sugars break down and combine with amino acids to form any of 150 different organic compounds.
Among those compounds, researchers say, is a collection of aldehydes, hydrocarbons, and nitrogen-containing pyridines and pyrazines which humans (and most other carnivorous or omnivorous species) find so enticing. That collection of compounds is unique to bacon and is not produced when other types of pork are fried.
Posted in News You Can Use. | 1 Comment »
30th May 2014
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Yet Another Fascist wants you to do it her way — by law, if necessary.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 2 Comments »
30th May 2014
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on White House Seeks Mentors for Black and Latino Youth
29th May 2014
Amanda Green doesn’t much like our school systems.
Schools today have abdicated their role as institutes of learning. It didn’t happen overnight. It was a slow process. I can’t even say where it started, not for the nation as a whole. Here in Texas, it started when state and federal mandates made it impossible for teachers to teach. Lesson plans suddenly had to be approved first by the department chair and then by the administration. Now, in many districts, lesson plans come from Admin and are filtered down.
Oh, the supporters of this say it is a way to guarantee all our children get the same education. The problem with this is that our kids aren’t all the same. They don’t learn the same ways and they don’t learn at the same rate. That, in essence, is the heart of the first problem of education. Teachers can no longer adjust the curriculum to meet the needs of the individual students. Oh, technically they can, but they have to go through so many administrative hoops that, by the time the deviation from the plan is approved, the harm as has been done. Either it is too late and the semester is over or the kid is so bored or so lost that there is no hope of getting him back.
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The food police rode in. Students are expelled for bringing peanut butter sandwiches to school because someone might be allergic. The First Lady has made it her mission to make all our kids into “healthy eaters”. I’m sorry, not her job. I repeat: That is not her job. I remember the days when my son wouldn’t eat anything but peanut butter or pizza or any one of several other items. If I didn’t have the option of sending what he’d eat with him to school for lunch, well, he just wouldn’t have eaten. He didn’t care if the First Lady said something was good for him. All he wanted was what tasted good and I guarantee you that wasn’t a salad or broccoli.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Save Me From the New York State of Mind
29th May 2014
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Stupidest Idea Ever.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Coke Designs a Friendly Bottle That Can Only Be Opened by Another Bottle
29th May 2014
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It sounded simple enough. A second-grade teacher at Colorado’s Talbott Elementary School asked her class to go outside, look at the clouds and then draw what they saw. Kody Smith thought the cloud he saw looked like a gun, so that’s what he drew. His teacher filed a bad behavior report on him.
You’re never too young to escape the notice of the Thought Police.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
28th May 2014
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Everybody wants to know what the next bubble is, and there’s an easy way to tell: Just watch where Harvard grads are going. Then short the hell out of that.
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Harvard is a magnet for Organization Kids who excel at coloring between the lines. After graduation, they want to do something prestigious, something remunerative, but mostly, as Kevin Roose points out, something that gives them new lines to color between. That might be Silicon Valley, or it might be Teach for America — or it might be Wall Street, if, that is, the getting looks good.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Want to Spot The Next Bubble? Look at Where Harvard Grads Work.
28th May 2014
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When you damage a tooth, your dentist usually uses a filling or a crown to patch it up. But eventually, researchers say that your dentist might just point a laser at it, encouraging the tooth to regrow on its own. While it’s no surprise that light causes reactions in the human body, some researchers have been trying to determine whether specific wavelengths of light might be able to trigger specific healing properties when focused on a certain area of the body. In this case, the researchers pointed an infrared laser at a hole drilled into a rat’s tooth and found that it encouraged dentin — the material that makes up a tooth’s core — to grow back more than it otherwise would have.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Lasers Can Help Damaged Teeth Grow Back, Researchers Say
28th May 2014
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I am not making this up.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Sir Christopher Lee Releases Heavy Metal Album Inspired by ‘Don Quixote’
28th May 2014
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A number of iOS owners in Australia have lost access to their devices courtesy of a digital hack, according to The Age. The first incident appeared on an Apple support forum on Monday and was soon followed by dozens more. Owners of the iPhones and iPads are finding that their devices are locked and will only be unlocked if they send money to a specific PayPal account. While the original issue was constrained to Australia, a U.S. iOS device owner claimed to be hacked in the same manner on Tuesday.
This is God telling you to get an Android phone. Just sayin’.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Hackers Demanding Ransoms by Locking iOS Devices Through Find My iPhone
28th May 2014
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What is remarkable regarding Piketty’s work, is that he backed his work with comprehensive data and thorough analysis. Unfortunately, like too many people, Piketty used speadsheets instead of writing sane software. On the plus side, he published his code… on the negative side, it appears that Piketty’s code contains mistakes, fudging and other problems.
In other words, he skipped a key element of any software design process: code review.
Simply put, spreadsheets are good for quick and dirty work, but they are not designed for serious and reliable work.
- All professional software should contain extensive tests… how do you know that your functions do what you think they do if you do not test them? Yet spreadsheets do not allow testing.
- Spreadsheets make code review difficult. The code is hidden away in dozens if not hundreds of little cells… If you are not reviewing your code carefully… and if you make it difficult for others to review it, how do expect it to be reliable?
- Spreadsheets encourage copy-and-paste programming and ad hoc fudging. It is much harder to review, test and maintain such code.
UPDATE: An opposing viewpoint here.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on You Shouldn’t Use a Spreadsheet for Important Work (I Mean It)
28th May 2014
Mark Steyn is upset.
It’s not just Obamacare. In many other areas of life, Americans now enjoy considerably less freedom of maneuver than Europeans do. If it doesn’t seem like that, it’s because we’ve come up with a more cunning form of statism. In France a third of a century back, Mitterrand nationalized the banks. That’s what socialists do. And people would kick up a fuss if Washington tried anything like that. So instead we’ve wound up with a kind of third-party statism, in which the zombie husks of private industry are conscripted as the front men for de facto nationalization. Except for the check design and debit-card color, it doesn’t make any difference whether you go to the First National Bank of Deadsville, the Deadsville Savings Bank, or the Deadsville Community Bank: The answers are all the same, because they’re all just operating the federal guidelines. It’s like going to the North Deadsville DMV and thinking you’ll get a different answer from the South Deadsville DMV.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Eric Holder’s Money Shot
28th May 2014
Scott Johnson is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
It’s been a while since the leftover left took ownership of every nook and cranny of the city of Minneapolis. The city has therefore signed on to multifarious left-wing causes expressing hatred of the United States over the past many years.
In the Cold War, for example, municipal authorities wanted to make it clear that they were on the other side. In 1988, just in time to catch the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Minneapolis adopted a Soviet sister city. The relationship might actually have come in handy in subsequent years. Unfortunately, the powers-that-be in Minneapolis never took advantage of the opportunity to seek advice from our Soviet sister city on the establishment of a multiparty system in a one-party town. Now it’s probably too late for the authorities of Novosibirsk to weigh in constructively.
In the current struggle over the enforcement of immigration law, municipal authorities are of course on the other side. Since 2003, Minneapolis has declared itself a sanctuary city. International sex traffickers have found it a congenial environment. They call it home.
And now, as of late last week, Columbus Day is no more. Minneapolis has declared the holiday Indigenous Peoples Day.
Once again, ‘progressives’ take a celebration of progress and turn it on its head. Presumably they would prefer that ‘native Americans’ continued their former ways of using stone tools, high infant mortality, and endemic internecine warfare.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Are You Indigenous?
28th May 2014
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Daycare for an infant is now more expensive than the average cost of in-state tuition and fees at public colleges in 31 states, according to a recent report. Childcare in the U.S. sets a family back $15,000 a year per infant on average. It is more expensive than rent in 22 states. But while many poor women are dropping out of the workforce in part due to these costs, well-to-do families skirt the problem by exploiting loopholes like the U.S. au pair program and by illegally employing undocumented domestic workers to obtain good-quality childcare at below-market prices.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Why Rich Women Have Great, Low-Cost Childcare, And Poor Women Pay Out the Nose
28th May 2014
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Last month, as the Senate was busy negotiating the final details of its Ukraine aid package, Majority Leader Harry Reid became temporarily distracted with a campaign finance issue. Since winning re-election in 2010, Reid’s campaign had purchased gifts for supporters and donors from vendors like Bed Bath & Beyond, Amazon, Nordstrom, and the Senate gift shop, among others. But one round of spending was directed to a less recognizable firm: Ryan Elisabeth, a jewelry line.
In 2012 and 2013, the campaign spent $31,267 purchasing gifts from the company, which is owned by Reid’s granddaughter, Ryan Elisabeth Reid. All told, she took in nearly seven times more cash than all vendors of donor gifts combined during that period of time.
Veteran Nevada political journalist Jon Ralston first reported the news after receiving a tip about the expenditures. (Ryan Elisabeth’s last name did not appear on the FEC reports, and the senator’s office initially failed to confirm her identity.) While Sen. Reid does not appear to have broken the law, he understood that the purchases created a perception of favoritism. Lamenting the unwanted attention heaped on his granddaughter, he decided after the news broke that “it would be best to pay for her work out of my own pocket.”
This was not the first time that Reid had mixed family and politics — or potentially run afoul of ethics rules.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Harry Reid’s Long, Steady Accretion of Power & Wealth
28th May 2014
Steve Sailer illumines a disturbing new trend.
Earlier this week I pointed out that an increasing number of the identity politics brouhahas in Silicon Valley don’t seem to involve traditional victims, but instead revolve around attractive young women who hand the press a prefab narrative about the horrors of “alpha-male culture.” Large concentrations of money have traditionally attracted that type of woman formerly known as the adventuress. Some Internet searching suggests that the term “adventuress” is no longer used in polite society, although it remains a popular title for pulp novels for women. It’s considered sexist to say that Bonaparte was an adventurer while Lola Montez was an adventuress. So, the word and, increasingly, the concept are forgotten.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on World War A: Another Adventuress Plays The Identity Politics Card
28th May 2014
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Does Obama Have Any Foreign Policy Successes?
27th May 2014
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Yesterday Google disdained offering a special banner for Memorial Day. Today they compound this insult with a banner marking the birthday of Rachel Carson, author of the deeply wrong Silent Spring. Few books since Das Kapital have done more damage to humans—especially poor children in Africa—than Silent Spring, and yet she—and her dreadful book—continues to be honored by the Left.
And that tells you everything you need to know about Google — in which (full disclosure) I do not own any stock.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Not So Happy Birthday
27th May 2014
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BLUF: No.
Many explanations have been offered to make sense of the here-today-gone-tomorrow nature of medical wisdom — what we are advised with confidence one year is reversed the next — but the simplest one is that it is the natural rhythm of science. An observation leads to a hypothesis. The hypothesis (last year’s advice) is tested, and it fails this year’s test, which is always the most likely outcome in any scientific endeavor. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong hypotheses for every right one, and so the odds are always against any particular hypothesis being true, no matter how obvious or vitally important it might seem.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Do We Really Know What Makes Us Healthy?
27th May 2014
Christopher Hart lays down some inconvenient truth.
But people do have a hierarchy of preferences: always have and always will. They prefer people like them. Most English people would rather live next door to their own. They can converse over the garden fence in English, the wife isn’t hidden under a burqa, and they get the allusions to Monty Python sketches. So those who can afford it live in areas of Britain where this is likely to be the case.
If not English, Dutch or Danish neighbors would probably be OK—or German, despite one or two little misunderstandings over the past century. They behave much as English people would behave. This isn’t prejudice. Prejudice means pre-judging, without evidence. This is informed opinion. If the family is Romanian, they may well be gypsy too—or “Roma,” as we are now obliged to say. And they are factually more likely to steal. Romanians are now the fifth largest group of foreigners in our jails, squeezing in between Jamaicans and Pakistanis. The cost of our Eastern European prison population is now £73 million a year, kindly paid for by the British taxpayer whom they went to jail for robbing in the first place.
If our next-door neighbors are Somalian, Afghan, Nigerian, or Pakistani, they are statistically more likely to remove their wives’ clitorises, to murder their daughters for being seen with a white English boy, to think that 9/11 or our own 7/7 bombings were a fine idea, or to behead a British soldier in a London street (see “Drummer Lee Rigby, death of”). Not all Muslims are terrorists, no; but almost all terrorists these days are Muslims.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A Stick in the Eye for the Soft Invasion
27th May 2014
Bryan Caplan is always worth reading.
Within economics, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely right-wing. Why? Because economists realize that this premise undermines the textbook efficiency case for governments’ massive education subsidies.
Outside economics, however, the idea that education has a larger effect on income than productivity is vaguely left-wing. Why? Because non-economists realize that this premise undermines the legitimacy of the status quo – which they think of as “capitalism.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch, Think about it. | Comments Off on Frankly Signaling
26th May 2014
Jim Goad sees behind the curtain.
After endlessly bemoaning the fact that blacks haven’t reached economic parity with whites in America, he writes:
In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—and enduring twice as much.
I’d like to believe that, but first I’d have to see Barack Obama’s school records while ignoring the fact that he was raised by relatively affluent whites.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on A Reparations Plan That Makes Sense
26th May 2014
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BLUF: The government is shitty at running things.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on What the VA Scandal Tells Us About Government Health Care
26th May 2014
Mark Stein, in addition to being a brilliant political commentator, also reviews movies.
Twenty years ago, the Rwandan genocide was, machete-wise, in full swing: They were about halfway through their seven-figure mass murder. There being no hashtags in those days, President Clinton, the Pain-Feeler-in-Chief, had to slough off the victims with a rather brusquer soundbite nixing international intervention: “The UN has to learn how to say no.” And so 20 per cent of the population of Rwanda was slaughtered, a number so huge that the world chose to hold it at a big, woozy, blurry distance. To mark the tenth anniversary, the editors of the Economist asked, ‘How many people can name any of the perpetrators?’ I’d say it’s more basic than that. How many could tell you whether it was the Hutu killing the Tutsi or the Tutsi killing the Hutu? C’mon, take a guess, without looking it up.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Hotel Rwanda
26th May 2014
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We said it couldn’t be done. We said that there would never be a more incompetent President than Jimmy Carter.
We were wrong.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | 1 Comment »
25th May 2014
Steve Sailer reacts much as you might expect.
Anyway, the point is that in 1989 the American Establishment (e.g., Goldman Sachs) loved Japan because investors had been getting rich off it. Shortly thereafter, the absurd Japanese real estate and stock bubble popped. Now, the American Establishment despises Japan because they haven’t made money off it in decades, so they are constantly trying to think of ways to fix Japan. For example, Wall Street has prospered in America as the illegitimacy rate goes up up up, so, obviously, that would fix Japan too.
Perhaps we could ship them some of ours — after all, we’ve got more than we really need. And surely, surely Japan would appreciate the increase in ‘diversity’; after all, look what it did for us!
Oh, wait….
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | 1 Comment »
25th May 2014
Steve Sailer brings us up to date on the latest darling of the Left.
I’m always fascinated by the dynamics of reputation. For example, when Christopher Foote and Christopher Goetz demonstrated in late 2005, a half year after the publication of Freakonomics, that Steven D. Levitt’s most famous theory — that legalizing abortion cut crime — was the result of Levitt’s sloppiness in writing Stata code (not Excel, by the way), the impact on Levitt’s career was negligible. His reputation only started to decline a few years later with the publication of SuperFreakonomics in which Levitt didn’t demonstrate complete fidelity to the climate change orthodoxy.
Basically, there was no money to be made in showing that the facts didn’t support Levitt’s conclusion. In contrast, there is a lot of money arrayed against Piketty, so we’ll hear more about it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Problems with Piketty
25th May 2014
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On May 11 Breitbart News reported that Jack in the Box told law-abiding customers it would “prefer” they not bring guns into its restaurants any more.
Since then, there have been three incidents at Jack in the Box restaurants involving armed men who prey on unarmed ones.
My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Two Robberies and a Shooting at Jack in the Box Since Law-Abiding Citizens Asked to Leave Guns at Home
24th May 2014
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It would be helpful for the Energy and Commerce and future proceedings to address what are faulty premises of net neutrality:
- “Market failures” matter, government failures do not exist.
- Infrastructure companies and content companies are naturally and inherently at odds.
- Infrastructure companies should not control content; however, content companies, special interests and regulatory bureaucracies like FCC should control infrastructure.
- Compulsory net neutrality spawns openness; Market impulses do not.
- Infrastructure companies’ interest lies in withholding rather than selling access. Therefore network competition requires political or regulatory force to exist.
- Discrimination is bad, and non-discrimination exists; Net neutrality is not itself a form of discrimination or of picking sides
- Communications flows (video, information, voice, future innovations like holograms) are maximized by preventing property rights in infrastructure.
- Networks best exist as passive husks; they cannot be a competitive unit. Only the movement of bits from point A to point B on an existing network counts as competition.
- Wall Street, rivals, advertisers, shareholders, consumers and the media are passive and cannot react to inefficient network management
- Capital markets cannot be engaged to generate new infrastructure.
- Neutrality is the highest value: User ownership of grids; liberalization of non-telecom network industries to enable wide-scale, cross-industry infrastructure consortia; “splintering” into and out of the public net by private carriers–all have no role to play on tomorrow’s Internet and may safely be ignored.
Government monopoly worked so well for mail service, telephone service, electrical service, trash service, and trash service, not to mention health care for veterans, that we need to extend crony capitalism regulation to Internet service as well. After all, what could go wrong?
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The Truth About ‘Net Neutrality’
24th May 2014
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‘The right to buy weapons is the right to be free.’
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on How 3-D Printed Guns Evolved Into Serious Weapons in Just One Year
24th May 2014
Sarah Hoyt rather dislikes internationalism.
The point is that the UN without universal values that all the world agrees on is a sheep and ten wolves arguing what is for dinner. It has become a vehicle for countries that would otherwise be totally disregarded – and which by culture should be. I mean, Iran is in charge of women’s status in the UN – to hit out at bigger, more successful countries. Also for countries to cadge Dane Geld from bigger, richer countries (mostly the US.)
One wonders how long the scam can go on, when it’s obvious that this is not a way to create universal peace, which is how it was billed. Instead it’s a rent seeking organization with a side order of “make the US feel guilty” which is necessary, of course, for rent seeking.
But the Crust makes money, and when the Crust makes money, the U.S. taxpayer pays the piper.
I’m going to come back to the idea of the UN, of a world body that can stop wars, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.
Not only is that impossible, unless we agree on one culture (Be fair to the soviets. Their internationalism was SANE. They wanted a one-world government, and that government soviet.) but is it really desirable?
It amuses me that those who agree on “diversity” in everything are unable to see that diversity of culture and thought might be desirable. At least they are unable to see it when it violates their sacred cows.
Diversity in everything except thought. That sounds familiar.
The glittery hoo ha and the rot in science fiction developed because the structure of publishing became centralized and a mono-culture and that culture Eastern Seaboard Liberal. This didn’t fit even the rest of the country and has been a resounding commercial failure. And meanwhile they, isolated from all criticism, became ever more crazy and started drinking their own ink. Which is why we have a field already dominated by women crowing about “kicking patriarchy in the balls” by giving awards the outer world ignores to people on the basis of their genitals.
THAT is what happens to cultures that are isolated and get their own feedback loop.
Pretty scary. Do we really want One World that is run by the likes of George Soros and Barack Obama? I think not.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Stop the Harmony
24th May 2014
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Here’s a fun fact: In 1975, some people were worried about global cooling. Not only that, there was concern that not enough was being done about it.
“Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change,” science journalist Peter Gwynne reported. Statements like that are uttered all the time these days, but for the exact opposite reason. One outlandish suggestion for the perceived crisis involved “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot.”
These quant tidbits come from a short article penned by Gwynne and printed on Page 64 of Newsweek’s April 28, 1975, issue. Titled “The Cooling World,” it argued that global temperatures were falling—and terrible consequences for food production were on the horizon. Meteorologists “are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century,” Gwynne wrote. “The resulting famines could be catastrophic.”
The story, and others like it, has been cited by people who like to challenge current climate science and global warming. In 2009, for example, George Will referenced it in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, incorrectly describing it as a cover story, and using global cooling as an example of a global disaster that didn’t happen (and implying that global warming is also on that list).
Nearly 40 years later, that brief article is in the news again. In fact, Gwynne has just written a do-over of sorts, correcting the record in an article on Inside Science addressing his 1975 story. The purpose? So that “deniers of human-caused global warming” can’t use his story “as ammunition against the consensus of today’s climate scientists.”
‘Never mind!’
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Newsweek Rewind: Debunking Global Cooling
23rd May 2014
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The Congressman’s 49-year career was threatened with a sudden ending if he did not make the primary ballot, but Conyers can now breathe a sigh of relief as a federal judge has stepped in to challenge state authorities.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Leitman, an Obama nominee who has only been on the bench for two months, is now insisting that some of the state’s findings are incorrect.
Citing Conyers’s “good intentions,” Judge Leitman said in his Friday afternoon ruling, “There is evidence that their failure to comply with the Registration Statute was the result of good faith mistakes and that they believed they were in compliance with the statute.”
‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’ — Luke 16:9
The Crust take care of their own.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Federal Judge Rejects State Election Law, Puts John Conyers Back on Primary Ballot
23rd May 2014
Read it. And watch the video. And wonder who might be next.
During World War II, the U.S. government interned tens of thousands of Japanese Americans who had been convicted of no crime. To put a friendly face on the proceedings, the Office of War Information made a film about it. “Neither the Army nor the War Relocation Authority relished the idea of taking men, women, and children from their homes, their shops, and their farms,” narrator Milton Eisenhower claims. “So the military and civilian agencies alike determined to do the job as a democracy should: with real consideration for the people involved.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Our Friendly Government Explains Why These Concentration Camps Are in Everyone’s Best Interests
23rd May 2014
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Presented here pro bono publico because it’s been that kind of a day.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Awesomely Gross Medical Illustrations From the 19th Century
23rd May 2014
Read it.
‘You’re workmen! You should be working! That’s what you get for not having an education!’ — Professor Hathaway, Real Genius
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How Education Drives Inequality Among the 99%
23rd May 2014
Read it.
‘Hey, we’re tax-eaters, not taxpayers!’
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Thousands of Federal Workers Owe Billions in Back Taxes
22nd May 2014
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It’s not a joke, they really believe this stuff.
Kimberly Morin of Manchester Political Buzz Examiner reports that teacher David Pook, who claims to have “helped write the standards,” said during a recent Common Core debate at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, New Hampshire, that Common Core was necessary because of “white privilege.”
From Wiktionary: “From Old French privilege, from Latin privilegium (“an ordinance or law against or in favor of an individual”), from privus (“private”) + l?x, legis (“law”).”
So where is the private law in favor of white people? It actually runs the other way, but of course nobody dares speak of ‘black privilege”.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Teacher: White ‘Privilege’ Makes Common Core Necessary
22nd May 2014
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I don’t care who you are, that’s funny.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on The Biter Bit: Restaurant With ‘No Weapons, No Concealed Firearms’ Sign Robbed at Gunpoint
22nd May 2014
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I’ll bet the Koch Brothers have something to do with it, and that ultimately it will be found to be all George W. Bush’s fault.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on DISCRIMINATION: University Caught Awarding Scholarships on Basis of Race
22nd May 2014
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Israeli Arab Knesset member Hanin Zoabi, a Muslim, said that separating a Christian Arab youth from other Arabs endangered him by changing him “into an enemy of his people and assisting his true enemies [Israel].” Christian Arabs, she added, “are part of the weave of our Arab Palestinian people.”
Notice that this is an Arab member of the Israeli legislature calling the country in whose legislature she sits her enemy.
Posted in Living with Islam. | 2 Comments »
22nd May 2014
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Billionaire Tom Steyer’s environmental group, NextGen, revealed the seven major races it is targeting this fall, drawing on the $100 million that Mr. Steyer has pledged to raise to tip midterm elections toward environmental-friendly candidates.
Democrats, party of the 1%.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Billionaire’s Climate Group Targets Seven Races
22nd May 2014
NPR tells the truth for once.
Janet Mcdonald
I was going to the movies with a friend of mine from Yale who is black also. And there was a long line. And we were like, let’s jump the line. These white people, they’re going to be scared of us. We’ll just go and jump the line. We’ll get to the front of the line. So, of course, you know, we walked up to the front of the line, like, yeah, you want to try me? I’m black. That usually works in New York.
These people were ready to rip our hair out. And they were white. I couldn’t believe it. And they were like, in French, what are you doing? The line starts back there. You can’t just walk to the front of the line. They were, like, ready to kick our butts. I was shocked. I’m like, these are white people, and they’re not scared of us?
That’s when I realized I wasn’t in Kansas anymore. And I liked it. I mean, of course, it was kind of humiliating, because you know, we’re supposed to be the intimidating, scary ones. And then all these French bitches in high heels were threatening us. And they were in our faces. And it made me realize that the whole black-white game just doesn’t work outside of the United States.
Because white people aren’t afraid of you here. And at the same time, they don’t hate you, because that sort of goes together. So I’ll take it. I’ll wait on line. Now I don’t dare jump lines. So that opened my eyes.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Americans In Paris
22nd May 2014
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Imagine if you could be expelled from your dorm, or a class, just because someone accused you of something — even if the accusation was so weak or thinly-grounded that it never even led to a disciplinary hearing against you, or the complainant was unwilling to even let you have the opportunity to clear your name. Such “interim measures” by colleges seem to be what the Education Department recently required of Tufts University in Massachusetts, as a condition of settling a Title IX investigation against it after it found a student not guilty of sexually assaulting a classmate who denied those charges, after he convinced it that the complainant was not credible and had clearly lied about her medical history. If Tufts didn’t agree to the settlement, the Education Department could have cut off all federal funds to the University — millions of dollars — and all federal financial aid to its students could have been terminated. So the settlement was not exactly voluntary. (Tufts tried to back out of the settlement, but knuckled under due to adverse publicity and the risk of huge financial losses.)
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Punishment First, Trial Later, or Never: The Education Department’s Investigation of Tufts University