Read it.

I’m a sucker for infographics.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Nearly 30% of children in India (ages 6-14) attend private schools and in some states and many urban regions a majority of the students attend private schools. Compared to the government schools, private schools perform modestly better on measures of learning (Muraldiharan and Sundararaman 2013, Tabarrok 2011) and much better on cost-efficiency. Moreover, even though the private schools are low cost and mostly serve very poor students they also have better facilities such as electricity, toilets, blackboards, desks, drinking water etc. than the government schools.

…

Caste discrimination in the government schools is also one of the reasons why the private schools focus on teaching English. Among the Dalits, English is understood as the language of liberation not just because it offers greater job prospects but even more because Hindi, Sanskrit and the regional languages are burdened by and interwoven with a history of Dalit oppression. As one Dalit put it, “No one knows how to curse me as well as in Tamil.”

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, wants to sell out, if only he can find a buyer.

I want to believe that diversity is our strength; that Islam is a religion of peace; that the Republican Party is a force for conservatism; that if George thinks he is a woman, then by golly he is a woman—his cock, balls, beard, and 37.2 trillion Y-chromosomes notwithstanding; that my personality will survive when my brain is destroyed; that if not for the cruel legacy of colonialism, black African nations would by now have Mars colonies and world-conquering commercial enterprises; that poverty causes crime; that gay is just as good as straight; that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle; that I have free will; that importing one-quarter of the population of Guyana has been good for the U.S.A., and for Guyana; that IQ tests measure nothing of life-history significance, only the ability to pass IQ tests; that there is no such thing as race; that a loving invisible god is watching over me and listening to my mumbled preferences, when not attending to necessary maintenance chores elsewhere in the Virgo Supercluster; that women’s sports are interesting for non-lesbians to watch even when not conducted in skimpy bikinis; that 10,000 hours of dogged practice will make me a first-class tennis player; that Guatemalan gangbangers will become family-values conservatives once they have touched the magic soil of the U.S.A.; that invoking “culture” (which means: the customary behaviors of a people) as an explanation for the customary behaviors of a people increases our understanding; that black kids will do just as well as white kids academically as soon as we fix the schools; that some person somewhere knows how to fix the schools …

I want to believe the pretty lies. I’ve had enough of depressive realism. I want to take the blue pill. Where’s the nearest retail outlet?

Read it. And watch the video.

This video is a nice, four-minute summary of some of the basics of the global warming debate. It was shot at the Heartland Institute’s 9th International Conference on Climate Change, between July 7 and July 9. If you have followed the science closely, you won’t learn anything you didn’t already know. But it is a good introduction for those who are new to the science, and an enjoyable overview for anyone.

Read it.

According to a new report from the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a “club of billionaires” including Tom Steyer and Hank Paulson has effectively hijacked the Environmental Protection Agency for its own purposes – to grow the EPA and regulate the economy from stem to stern.

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While most of the documented experiments with tractor-beam technology so far have involved light waves, the team from Dundee used sound waves to manipulate a half-inch triangular prism made of metal and rubber, successfully pulling the target toward the source of the acoustic beam. Half an inch may not sound like much, but it’s a vast improvement on fifty nanometres. The experiment was part of a larger project across four U.K. universities—Bristol, Southampton, Glasgow, and Dundee—and took nine months to complete. The results have been published in Physical Review Letters.

Read it.

For those of ye not of the Crust. You know who you are.

Read it.

Recall, for a moment, how health insurers were treated by Democrats in the Obamacare debate. They were the bad guys, in no uncertain terms. “They’ve been immoral all along,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), then the House Majority Leader said in July 2009, as the debate over the government-run public option raged. “They [insurers] are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way.”

Democrats found some success in casting insurers as the antagonists, and made a show of targeting health insurers. “It is well known to the public that the health insurance companies are the problem,” Pelosi said in October as she warned insurers how much the health law would cost them.

So, how did Obamacare end up punishing the big, bad insurance company villains? By creating a federal program to help cover their costs in the event of higher than anticipated spending—and then expanding that program at the request of the insurers following the launch of the health law’s exchanges last year.

They just wanted them on board. The National Socialists had this “join us or die” tactic down to a science.

Read it.

When billionaires get into something, it’s because there’s money in it. That, you can depend on. Somehow, some way, they will gain an advantage by it.

Think about that next time you hear Warren Buffet or Bill Gates calling for the government to increase their taxes.

Read it.

Hint: Yes. The more expensive the government makes it to hire actual people, the more we approach the point where it will be cost effective to use robots instead.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to. Statists keep forgetting that they’re shooting at a moving target.

Read it.

As I was cycling home the other night I came across a few of my fellow students from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Several of them asked me: Where is your bike helmet?

I get this question a lot. I have made a careful and conscientious choice to not wear a helmet when I’m cycling in urban areas because I strongly believe that it will help improve the overall safety of cycling in the long run.

It’s an unintuitive position to take. People have tried to reason with me that because I’ve spent so much money and time developing my brain, and the cost of an injury would be so devastating, it’s clearly more important to wear a helmet. But if we start looking into the research, there’s a strong argument to be made that wearing a bike helmet may actually increase your risk of injury, and increase the risk of injury of all the cyclists around you.

Read it.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist.

The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopedia.

I’m a sexist, you’re a sexist, he’s a sexist, she’s a sexist, wouldn’t you like to be a sexist too?

Read it.

Did the script have the boy scouts tell their co-religionists that Allah says they can only vote for another Muslim?

The kids know what’s in their Islamic school textbook “What Islam Is All About”:

Allah says in this ayah [verse in the Quran] not to take non-Muslims as protectors. (3:118,4:144) Only fellow Muslims you can rely on should have authority or power over you. Because in the end, a non-Muslim who knows you, and who doesn’t accept Islam, is a rebel against Allah’s way of life and will harm you in the end or try to make you like him or her.

Republican candidate Aljabbary’s other mosque member Drost Kokoye, is all about identity politics and says, “I really don’t even like being called an American.” She was even willing to abet voter registration fraud.

Read it.

Kidnapping Europeans for ransom has become a global business for Al Qaeda, bankrolling its operations across the globe.

While European governments deny paying ransoms, an investigation by The New York Times found that Al Qaeda and its direct affiliates have taken in at least $125 million in revenue from kidnappings since 2008, of which $66 million was paid just in the past year.

In various news releases and statements, the United States Treasury Department has cited ransom amounts that, taken together, put the total at around $165 million over the same period.

These payments were made almost exclusively by European governments, who funnel the money through a network of proxies, sometimes masking it as development aid, according to interviews conducted for this article with former hostages, negotiators, diplomats and government officials in 10 countries in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. The inner workings of the kidnapping business were also revealed in thousands of pages of internal Qaeda documents found by this reporter while on assignment for The Associated Press in northern Mali last year.

In its early years Al Qaeda received most of its money from deep-pocketed donors, but counterterrorism officials now believe the group finances the bulk of its recruitment, training and arms purchases from ransoms paid to free Europeans.

Read it.

Where do you think?

On the last day of May, a surface-to-air rocket was signed out of a military base near Moscow where it had been stored for more than 20 years.

According to the ornate Cyrillic handwriting in the weapon’s Russian Defence Ministry logbook, seen by Reuters, the portable rocket, for use with an Igla rocket launcher, was destined for a base in Rostov, some 50 km (31 miles) from the Ukrainian border. In that area, say U.S. officials, lies a camp for training Ukrainian separatist fighters.

Three weeks later the rocket and its logbook turned up in eastern Ukraine, where government troops seized them from pro-Russian separatists.

The logbook, which is more than 20 pages long, records that rocket 03181 entered service on May 21, 1993, and had regular tests as recently as 2005 to make sure it was in fighting form. The seal of the Russian Defence Ministry has been stamped over the signature sending the weapon to Rostov.

Read it.

His old race-pimp extortion targets must be all tapped out.

Read it.

For whenever you are minded to complain about your day….

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

One factor in the rapid triumph of World War T is the opportunity it gives some powerful men to rack up massive Diversity Points by publicizing their friendships with trans “women.” For a male politician, friendship with a trans “woman” comes with about 100X times the Pokemon Points of a normal woman; and, even better, the trans don’t chatter on and on about boring girl stuff like real women do.

Read it.

While shopping with her husband in Quincy, Florida, on July 19, 2010, Mickey Goodson stopped by a Winn-Dixie drugstore to pick up some allergy pills. The pharmacist on duty suggested she buy two boxes of Sudafed, which she did. Thus began Goodson’s entanglement with the criminal justice system, which featured searches of her car and home, along with drug charges that were not dropped until September 2011.

My advice: Avoid Florida.

Read it.

Shipping oil by train is much more dangerous than shipping by pipeline. But the federal government has a number of regulations that slow or even prevent building of pipelines. One intervention–preventing the construction of pipelines–leads oil to be carried in more hazardous ways. In response, the government does not reduce the regulation that slows the building of pipelines. Instead it regulates shipping by train.

High taxes motivate businesses to move their operations overseas. The government’s response is not to improve the tax climate, but rather to make it illegal to move operations overseas. Same principle.

Read it.

 How can we get rid of excess CO2? Geologist Juerg Matter of the University of Southampton, U.K. is a principal investigator of the Iceland-based project CarbFix, whose recent results show it has safely stored nearly 170 tons of carbon dioxide underground by reaction with minerals—stashing it in rock so it can’t leak out again. The next step is to go big.

Read it.

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

I have always been fascinated by Stirling engines, and I must confess that (like hydraulic rams) no matter how many times I read the explanations of how they work, I still don’t have a clue.

Read it.

These enviable youngsters appear to be the winners in the race we have made of childhood. But the reality is very different, as I have witnessed in many of my own students and heard from the hundreds of young people whom I have spoken with on campuses or who have written to me over the last few years. Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

When I speak of elite education, I mean prestigious institutions like Harvard or Stanford or Williams as well as the larger universe of second-tier selective schools, but I also mean everything that leads up to and away from them—the private and affluent public high schools; the ever-growing industry of tutors and consultants and test-prep courses; the admissions process itself, squatting like a dragon at the entrance to adulthood; the brand-name graduate schools and employment opportunities that come after the B.A.; and the parents and communities, largely upper-middle class, who push their children into the maw of this machine. In short, our entire system of elite education.

The Children of the Crust don’t want the competition.

Read it.

Hint: Quite possibly.

A $137 million three-mile train is coming to a nearly deserted avenue in a bankrupt city.

Read it.

SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.

But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.

Read it.

Miller-Young, who teaches feminist and black cultural studies courses — which includes classes on pornography, sex work, and a specialization in “queer theory” — reportedly confronted the young girls by loudly talking over them at first, then she ridiculed them and called them names. The professor’s behavior escalated when destroyed some of the pro-life group’s signage and physically assaulted Thrin, inflicting minor injuries on the young girl.

The Short sisters took video of Miller-Young physically pushing and swinging her arms at the teen, and posted it to YouTube.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Is your daughter a victim of male oppression? Blame Aladdin – as well as The Little Mermaid, Pocahontas, The Lion King and Toy Story 2.

Disney cartoons and other G-rated children’s movies are full of “gendered sexuality,” subjecting women to the male “objectifying gaze,” as “heterosexuality is constructed through hetero-romantic love relationships as exceptional, powerful, magical, and transformative.”

These were the conclusions of Women’s Studies professors Karin Martin and Emily Kazyak in their 2009 research paper, “Hetero-Romantic Love and Heterosexiness in Children’s G-Rated Films.” The sociologists examined “all the G-rated films grossing $100 million dollars or more between 1990 and 2005? and found that these movies convey what feminists call “heteronormativity”….

Or, in other words, ‘normal’. But normality is the thought-crime that feminists hate, because it interferes with their artificially constructed ideologically based world-view that they seek to impose on Reality.

Read it.

A fable for our times.

Read it.

Assassin’s Creed has always made it easy to pull off incredible acrobatic moves with little more than a tap of a button, but those video game leaps are nothing compared to seeing real parkour practitioners weave their way through the urban jungle.

Read it.

For years — since before he was NY State’s governor — we’ve raised questions about Andrew Cuomo’s activities. When he was Attorney General, he often used that position to grandstand around various issues that sounded good politically, but were real world disasters. He browbeat ISPs into policing the internet, when they had no legal obligation to, with bogus threats of lawsuits — even pushing them to install spyware to snoop on everyone’s traffic. He was among the leaders of the group of Attorneys General who wanted to blame high-profile internet companies for the way consumers used them, and he tried to broker a “3 strikes” system to kick file sharers offline. Since becoming governor, he’s been embroiled in a bunch of scandals, including having staffers use private email accounts to hide their work from Freedom of Information laws.

Now, however, things are heating up. The NY Times has reported that Cuomo’s greatly hyped “corruption commission” appeared to be nothing more than a front group for Cuomo himself. That is, he seemed fine with it investigating “corruption” of others, but if it came anywhere near him or his friends, Cuomo’s people ordered the commission to back away — and they did.

Yet Another Corrupt Democrat Politician. Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

This is pretty slick. And anything that can be done to decrease the ugliness of the typical parking garage is a step in the right direction.

Actually, what I’d like to see is a giant map of the parking spaces showing what’s empty and what’s occupied, that you can see on your way in. Now THAT would be useful.

Read it.

The NS Savannah, which cost $50m, was launched 55 years ago this week. It was to be an ambassador of sorts – the world’s first nuclear-propelled merchant ship and a symbol of safety and faith in the fuel of the future.

I remember the Savannah, and always wondered what happened to it.

Read it.

Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University professor who flies around the world in pollutant-spewing jumbo jet airliners to proclaim that climate change is a terrible menace, has co-written another book warning about the planet’s dire environmental situation.

Nothing reveals the truth behind the ‘climate change’ racket more directly than looking at the lifestyles of those who push it. It rapidly becomes clear that they don’t believe their own nonsense; it’s just a slogan with which they can scare power and money out of the gullible — who, unfortunately in these degenerate modern times, all have the vote and use it to put thieves and demagogues into power.

Read it.

And about fargin’ time, too.

New companies are going around the traditional “front door” of FDA approval, insurers and healthcare institutions by launching ‘Healthcare 2.0’ companies that target consumers and self-insured employers, upending the health sector through the use of innovative digital and social technologies.

If you don’t subscribe to Savage Chickens, you’re missing one of life’s great pleasures.

Read it.

President Obama famously failed to act when warned that ISIS was preparing to mount an offensive in Western Iraq. This left ISIS free to conquer, with virtually no resistance, city after city in the defense of which American soldiers have shed blood.

Now Obama is receiving new warnings, this time from the Kurds in Northern Iraq. In fact, according to the Washington Post, the Kurds are “pleading for U.S. military aid.”

…

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Obama administration has rejected Kurdish pleas for arms with which to fight ISIS. Its rationale is that assistance must come through the central government.

But the central government is (a) dysfunctional and (b) unwilling to lift a finger to help the Kurds in any case. In fact, the Iraq government’s unwillingness to “play nice” with the Kurds has been part of the Obama administration’s rationale for not doing more to help the government.

Watch that will project time on your wrist.

The Swash machine.

Cordless Ultrasonic Rodent Repeller. Let’s set one up on Capitol Hill….

Chainmail running shoes. I am not making this up.

Read it.

Hey, he stole that money fair and square.

Former Los Angeles Councilman Richard AlarcónCredit: SEIU International / photo on flickrRichard Alarcón’s was convicted of four felonies this week, including voter fraud and perjury. It turned out he lied about where he lived in 2007 and 2009 in order to represent the city’s District 7. His wife was also convicted of three counts.

But he will keep his pension, which totals $116,000 a year for that short stint on the City Council.

Read it.

And he was a Jew, too, just like Baby Jesus! Wow, what an amazing coincidence!

Read it.

Well, that’s all right, then. After all, it’s not as if Jews were Muslims or anybody important.

Read it.

At a fundraiser in Chicago, First Lady Michelle Obama complained that there was too much money in politics before asking for the “biggest, fattest check” from each of her donors.

And she didn’t even blush when she said it. (Of course, how could you tell?)

What she really meant is that there’s too much of the wrong kind (i.e. non-Democrat) money in politics, but of course it wouldn’t do to say that; anyway, her listeners knew what she meant.

Read it.

Hint: Obesity is worse. So if you smoke to keep your weight down, you’re ahead of the game.

Read it.

Ibrahim, pregnant at the time, was jailed after authorities in Sudan were alerted that she converted to Christianity in order to marry her husband, a crime that is punishable by death.

Read it.

“We have new evidence that the Russians intend to deliver heavier and more powerful multiple rocket launchers to the separatist forces in Ukraine, and have evidence that Russia is firing artillery from within Russia to attack Ukrainian military positions,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said.

Read it.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has persuaded San Francisco brokerage firm Charles Schwab to bring 1,200 jobs to El Paso and Austin with nearly $6 million in cash grants from a state investment fund.

Read it. And watch the video.

But as reluctant a prophet as Jonah was, his purported tomb in Mosul, Iraq, is a holy site for Muslims – even though it’s not likely the final resting place of a man purported to live in a fish’s tummy for three days. Instead, wrote Columbia University Near Eastern history PhD student Christopher Jones, the tomb is a sacred place “to meditate on the questions raised by the story of Jonah: questions of justice, obedience, providence, fairness and divine mercy.”

Until this month, when it was destroyed by the Islamic State.

As is traditional, the chief victim of Muslim idiocy is other Muslims.

Read it.

It wouldn’t have prevented him from being the child of an idiot.

Joe Biden, speaking at the Urban League conference in Cincinnati, reflected, “I should have had one Republican kid to go out and make money.”

The crowd burst into laugher.

“You know,” Biden continued, “so when they put me in a home, I get a window with a view.  You know what I mean? But my daughter is a social worker.”

So Democrats are parasites who don’t produce but live off of taxes paid by productive people? Well, that certainly fits what we know of his family. Besides, with his Senatorial and Vice-Presidential pension, I doubt that he’ll be living hand to mouth when he gets old and … I was about to say ‘senile’ but I think he’s achieved that stage already.

The Other McCain has a great idea.

 Joseph R. Wood III was 30 when he murdered his ex-girlfriend, Debbie Dietz, 29, and her father, Gene Dietz, 55, in Tucson in 1989. Because our legal system has been encumbered by federal court concessions to the “rights” of murderers, it took 25 years to impose justice on this cowardly hateful killer. Also, because of concessions to the Murderers’ Rights Movement, effective methods of capital punishment — the noose, the firing squad, the gas chamber, the electric chair — have been outlawed, replaced by lethal injection drugs, so that those who callously take human life can be dispatched in a “humane” manner.

This is the guy concerning whom all of the Special Snowflakes are upset because it apparently took him a couple of hours to die. I have no sympathy for him, and nothing but contempt for those who ignore the victims and weep for the victimizer.

Read it.

At least five times in the past week in Gaza, Israeli tanks equipped with a revolutionary defense system have deflected anti-tank missiles fired at them by Hamas fighters, according to the Israeli army.

The success of the Windbreaker system, as it is called in Israel, augments on the ground the technological achievement in the air of the Iron Dome anti-rocket defense system which Israel credits with neutralizing the intensive rocketing from Gaza of the past two weeks.