The Other McCain nails it.

It’s not merely that they steal money from taxpayers. Democrats are just generally dishonest and untrustworthy….

David Warren blows the whistle.

Here is a “thought experiment” for my remaining journalistic friends. It is an attempt to cast light by means of analogy. (“Now is the time when we juxtapose,” as the adored Kate Macmillan likes to write at Small Dead Animals.) And let me remind the journalist-entertainers of the mainstream, that they do indeed have influence, in the aggregate, over the tenor of our society.

The area and population of the territory the “Caliphate” now controls in Syria and Iraq being currently roughly equal to that controlled by the government of Israel, let us imagine what the “coverage” would be, had the Israelis told all Muslims to run for their lives; had they announced that everything Muslims owned now belonged to the Israeli government; and that any Muslim still found within Israel’s de facto borders after twenty-four hours would be put to the sword. Questions:

Do you think this story might make the front page?

Do you think the media would seek more information?

Do you think the matter might remain news for more than one day?

Read it.

This month marks forty-five years since men first left planet earth and set foot on another world. The last man to walk on the moon did so in December, 1972, over four decades ago. It’s a good moment to ponder what we haven’t done since.

Read it.

Scientists say they have turned thin air into an “optical fibre” that can transmit and amplify light signals without the need for any cables.

In a proof-of-principle experiment they created an “air waveguide” that could one day be used as an instantaneous optical fibre to any point on earth, or even into space.

The findings, reported in the journal Optica, have applications in long range laser communications, high-resolution topographic mapping, air pollution and climate change research, and could also be used by the military to make laser weapons.

Read it.

Did you expect any less?

Read it.

“Victims! Get your unarmed victims here!”

Read it.

A Maryville, Tennessee restaurant owner says her business has only increased since she posted a “Guns Are Welcome” on the front door.

Owner Sharma Floyd said she posted the sign after a restaurant in Durham, North Carolina posted a “No Weapons, No Concealed Firearms” sign and was subsequently robbed at gun point.

According to CBS Charlotte, Floyd said: “And that got me to thinking. I lost a whole group of motorcyclists because they thought I didn’t allow weapons. But I believe it’s okay to carry as long as you have a permit.”

Read it

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

Read it.

Officials at Iowa’s Marshalltown High School suspended Blair Van Staaldiune after they saw a picture online of him dressed all in white and forming a “W” with his fingers. Staaldiune’s mother says that the principal accused him of being a racist. She tried to explain that her son was dressed in white because the photo was taken during spirit week when school officials asked each class to dress only in one color and Blair’s class was told to dress in white. Instead of accepting her explanation, she says the principal called her a racist, too. School officials have declined to comment on the matter, citing student confidentiality.

Read it.

Remember the Twin Cities light-rail line that was supposed to average 17 mph but, after testing, was scheduled for just 13-3/4 mph? It turns out that, in actual operation, it averages less than 12.5 mph. That means it takes 53 minutes to go from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, 36 percent longer than the 39 minutes originally promised and more than twice as long as the 26 minutes required by a bus.Remember the Twin Cities light-rail line that was supposed to average 17 mph but, after testing, was scheduled for just 13-3/4 mph? It turns out that, in actual operation, it averages less than 12.5 mph. That means it takes 53 minutes to go from downtown Minneapolis to downtown St. Paul, 36 percent longer than the 39 minutes originally promised and more than twice as long as the 26 minutes required by a bus.

Read it.

General Electric has a bright idea for keeping the lights on even when the electrical grid short-circuits. The 122-year-old company wants to bring clean, reliable, affordable energy to the masses with hyper-efficient fuel cells , and in a rare move, is launching a startup to do it.

On Tuesday, the energy and electronics conglomerate unveiled GE Fuel Cells, an internal startup that’s working to commercialize fuel cell technology that runs on natural gas, creating energy that’s not only cleaner than dirty power plants, but more energy efficient, too. In the race to create a more environmentally sound alternative to power plants, fuel cells have emerged as a viable option, alongside solar and wind power. But unlike solar and wind power, fuel cells can provide steady, nonstop energy that doesn’t fade when the sun goes down or when the wind stops blowing.

Read it.

How can that be? Harry Reid said that the Democrats don’t have many billionaires.

Read it.

Beretta USA, one of the nation’s largest firearms manufacturers, will move its manufacturing and approximately 300 jobs out of Maryland because of the state’s new gun control laws, the company said in a statement Tuesday.

Rick Perry’s phone number is (512) 463-2000. Just sayin’.

Read it.

The victims said they were just trying to express their support for Israel when an angry mob of pro-Palestinian demonstrators surrounded them, began shouting anti-Semitic slogans, and then proceeded to aggressively beat the family, which included a 22-year-old girl and a 52-year-old woman who had recently had stomach surgery.

Read it.

The Occupy Wall Streeter who once sobbed in court because she had to appear in the same dress twice also threatened to kill two cops’ families, court papers show.

Couture-crazed protester Cecily McMillan — who became a poster child for OWS indignation after socking a cop in the eye in 2012 — was arrested again in December 2013 during a subway scuffle.

She was busted after allegedly urging two turnstile jumpers not to cooperate with a pair of cops in the Union Square subway station — and then made death threats against the officers, according to the papers.

Read it.

Explain to me again how it’s the business of the Federal government to conduct job training.

Read it.

The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure that floats on water. When sunlight hits the structure’s surface, it creates a hotspot in the graphite, drawing water up through the material’s pores, where it evaporates as steam. The brighter the light, the more steam is generated.

The new material is able to convert 85 percent of incoming solar energy into steam — a significant improvement over recent approaches to solar-powered steam generation. What’s more, the setup loses very little heat in the process, and can produce steam at relatively low solar intensity. This would mean that, if scaled up, the setup would likely not require complex, costly systems to highly concentrate sunlight.

Read it.

A wealthy venture capitalist and major Obama donor is fighting tooth-and-nail to prevent others from accessing his private Northern California beach, according to Bloomberg News.

Vinod Khosla’s support for Obama has paid off in the form of millions in taxpayer subsidies for green energy companies in which he has invested.

A prominent environmentalist, Khosla nevertheless cherishes his control over a private beach alongside his 56-acre property near San Francisco—which he bought for $32.5 million—Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Read it.

New York City politicians—including Mayor Bill de Blasio—want to change the admissions system for the city’s nine highly-selective premiere public high schools, including nationally-renowned Stuyvesant High School. The schools currently use a single exam, the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, to determine admittance. Less than three percent of applicants are admitted to Stuyvesant.

The problem, in the eyes of some, is that black and Latino students are increasingly underrepresented at the elite schools. So are white students. When a test score is the only criteria, it seems that Asian Americans are more likely than other racial groups to gain admission to Stuyvesant.

Some minorities are fashionable, and some ain’t.

Read it.

United Nations officials handed Hamas missiles found last week in a U.N.-run school in Gaza to the Palestinian government, according to a Western diplomat familiar with the case who spoke to the Washington Free Beacon.

At least 20 rockets were discovered last week in a Gaza school run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which operates several schools in Gaza and elsewhere.

I am convinced that U.N. stands for Utterly Nuts.

Read it.

If Guillermo Cecchi wants to figure out if you’ve taken MDMA or meth, all he needs is a computer and a recording of your voice. Cecchi is a computer scientist at IBM, and part of a growing community of scientists who think our voices can reveal far more than our sex, age, or cultural origins. He thinks it can also unlock the mind — and the various psychological and neurological states our brains may be experiencing at any given time.

“This is exactly what psychiatrists do every day: they talk to the patients,” Cecchi says, “but we used machine learning and mathematics to replicate it.”

Pretty creepy.

Read it.

Words fail me.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) is a front for the Marxist revolutionary Workers World Party. This is simply a fact, but a fact routinely omitted from media coverage of ANSWER protests. This was the case in California, where the local CBS affiliate deliberated ignored the communist orientation of this weekend’s “march against police brutality” in Anaheim….

Just, you know, remember.

Read it.

For those who’ve always thought that Siberia was the asshole of the world — here’s proof.

Read it.

Every now and again, something in the New York Times is worth reading. This is one of those rare events.

In the last few years, unable to hold a list of just four grocery items in my head, I’d begun to fret a bit over my literal state of mind. So to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test.

And yet he is paid to write for the New York Times. ’nuff said.

Seriously, this is yet another recommendation for the position staked out by Scott Adams in his life-changing book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Read it.

An odd article that contains a great deal of inconvenient truth. Most people would profit from having this pasted on their bathroom mirror where they would be forced to read it every damned day.

Don’t allow where you work or what you do become who you are.
There’s more to you than your job. There’s more to you than the title on your business card, the name of the corporation that employs you – while we’re at it, there’s more to you than where you live, what you drive or how much you earn. Sure, there may be some prestige associated with a certain employer or type of work, but one thing is certain: at the end of your life, it’s sure as heck not going to be the most important thing you remember or cherish. Who you are is who your family and friends love; who contributes back to society – not what you do or where you work. What are your talents, what do you love to do, what other roles do you play in your life? Father, Mother, Son, Daughter, Friend – WHO are you – not what do you do.

Read it.

This is completely and utterly absurd, and shows how far toward totalitarianism we have progressed.

Karen Cates, Professor at Nortwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, tells it like it is.

The idea that college is appropriate—essential, even—for all Americans is a myth. We’ve been told there are no decent jobs without a college education. While unemployment among recent college grads is 8.5 percent, according to the Economic Policy Institute, if you dig into the numbers you’ll find that 46 percent of them consider themselves “mal-employed.” Translation: They’re working largely in retail and entry-level hospitality, jobs that do not require their college degree.

One folktale that’s been spun from this is that you’ll never earn a living wage unless you have a college degree. This is patently untrue. Our trade professions are clamoring for quality employees to keep up with the demands of a recovering economy. “The homebuilding industry faces a chronic shortage of skilled workers,” laments Jerry Howard, chief executive of the National Association of Home Builders. In many professions, workers can earn as much or more than someone with a degree in marketing or advertising.

Giant Hamster Wheel for cats.

Camelbak Eddy Bottle.

Cloud Lamp. Just in case you have small children the require entertainment.

Read it.

For seven years now, the European Union has paid regular salaries to Palestinian terrorists serving time in Israeli prisons for murder. The way it works is simple: the more Jews each terrorist murders, the harsher the sentence; the harsher the sentence, the higher the pay. It’s a repulsive system, rewarding Jew-killers for the lives they take, and paying financial reward to terrorism.

Now the Dutch, at least, have had enough of it. Earlier this month, Holland’s Parliament passed a motion to end subsidies to the Palestinian Authority, which had openly used these funds to provide financial rewards to former officials convicted of terrorism – including, as one Dutch report pointed out, the murder “of a Dutch family with three young children in a pizzeria in Jerusalem in 2001.”

Read it.

The daughter of Sen. Joe Manchin (D.-W.Va.) is taking her giant generic drug-making company based outside of Pittsburgh to the Netherlands for a favorable tax rate, and according to the New York Times, Heather Bresch remains a “patriot” and made the decision “reluctantly.”

Ron Fournier at National Journal took issue with the Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin’s characterization of “Bresch as a helpless victim of a system that has made her wealthy and her father powerful.”

Bresch is the chief executive of Mylan, a generic drug maker with profits that “come largely from Medicaid and Medicare, which means her nest is feathered by U.S. taxpayers,” according to Fournier.

Read it.

A mogul spent six figures to win lunch for two with Bill and Hillary Clinton at a charity auction benefiting the Clinton Foundation — but when the winner asked to bring his two kids along, he was told he’d have to double his bid to $1 million.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Read it.

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) reportedly sent illegal immigrant children with communicable diseases on planes to sites around the country that are being forced to house them.

According to an ABC News report, HHS has admitted to “a breakdown of the medical screening processes” at an Arizona facility. While the illegal immigrant children were clear of symptoms during their initial screenings, they were not “re-screened and cleared for travel and placement at a temporary shelter.”

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it.

NBC’s Richard Engel, reporting from Gaza, said that only two hours after Israel and Palestine agreed to a humanitarian cease-fire, Hamas fired three mortar shells into Israel.

Muslims, like Communists, think of a truce as a pause to let them rest until they are ready to attack again. There’s even a term for it: hudna: ‘The historical legacy of the hudna concept also drive home a salient point: it was always intended as a way for a losing party to get time and regroup before rising to victory over its enemies.’

Scott Johnson blows the whistle.

What is the reason for the wave of Central American illegals infiltrating the United States through the Rio Grande Valley in the past few years? It’s past time to get a clue, as the wave shows no signs of abating.

I think the wave reflects an astute understanding of our immigration law and of the enforcement preferences of the Obama administration (they’d prefer not to).

Read it.

You scream, I scream, we all transform an off-the-shelf Cuisinart soft-serve maker to extrude super-cooled and 3D-printed shells of ice cream! Three students at MIT, Kyle Hounsell, Kristine Bunker, and David Donghyun Kim, have created a homemade ice cream printer that extrudes soft serve and immediately freezes it so that it can be layered on a cooled plate.

Read it.

Nothing generates that sweet, sweet digital ad revenue quicker and more effectively than calling something “racist,” then reverse engineering the why and wherefore. It’s cheap and trite, but so is the rest of American culture.

…

The Atlantic’s claim rests upon the supposed fact that no one of the black persuasion has ever held the WWE’s top title. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson—with his Essence and Ebony cover appearances and father Rocky “Soulman” Johnson—doesn’t count, because he’s half Samoan and comes from a wrestling family, which makes him “not black” through some manner of social justice wizardry.

Read it.

When Barbie appeared in Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue earlier this year, it ignited newfound controversy over Mattel’s 50-year-plus tradition of using the doll to prop up absurd body image standards. Lost in the debate was the indisputable fact that her typical outfits are entirely inappropriate for storming a castle — but thanks to 3D designer Jim Rodda, that’s been resolved. Rodda has created the “Faire Play Battle Set,” comprising three full sets of 3D-printed battle armor for the iconic figurine. The designer has previously designed a number of 3D-printable items of a medieval persuasion, including functional miniature ballistae and catapults for tabletop gaming.

And nary a chain-mail bikini in sight.

Read it.

English speakers across the globe are getting a real-time glimpse of what it is like to live under the constant threat of terrorist rocket attacks thanks to a hugely popular smartphone app that sends out a “red alert” whenever Israel is targeted.

As Israeli citizens struggle to shelter themselves from a near-constant barrage of rockets fired by the terror group Hamas, those living outside of the Jewish state are experiencing the same sense of panic via the Red Alert: Israel app, which “provides real time alerts every time a terrorist fires rockets, mortars, or missiles into the State of Israel.”

Read it.

Last Sunday a large group of Jew-hating pro-Palestinian rioters attacked the Don Yitzchak Abarbanel Synagogue in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. There were only a few policemen guarding the entrance at the time, and the attack took them by surprise. If civilian guards posted by the Jewish Defense League had not been on hand to help hold off the rock-throwing mob, the rioters would almost certainly have broken into the synagogue, where two hundred worshippers were trapped.

A second synagogue was attacked the same day in another part of Paris.

Read it.

The Chaplain–Medic massacre was a war crime that took place in the Korean War on July 16, 1950, on a mountain above the village of Tunam, South Korea. Thirty unarmed, critically wounded United States Army soldiers and an unarmed chaplain were killed by members of the North Korean army during the Battle of Taejon.

Remember that when thinking about dealing with Communists.

Read it. And watch the video.

Lance Corporal Brandon Dieckmann says on their first day, his team took the robot through some thick brush, which an internally transported vehicle could not go through.

“A lot of people don’t think it will be able to handle the terrain that it does, I’d see about 70 to 80 percent of what we can go through it can actually get through,” Dieckmann said.

Read it.

The primitive folk assessed by many archaeologists as being the original native Americans – that is, the Clovis people – killed and ate the lovable prehistoric elephants that inhabited the continent alongside them, scientists say.

Read it.

An unusual article recently appeared in the magazine of the Royal Statistical Society and American Statistical Association.

It featured web-like diagrams of lines connecting nodes, a hallmark of research that analyzes networks. But each node, rather than being a plain dot, was the head of a burly, red-bearded Viking sporting a horned hat, his tresses blowing in the wind.

This whimsical-seeming piece of scholarship went on to describe the social network of more than 1,500 characters in the Icelandic Sagas, epic tales about the colonization of Iceland around a thousand years ago that were first written down a few hundred years after that. It was the work of a pair of statistical physicists, Ralph Kenna of University of Coventry in the UK and his graduate student Pádraig Mac Carron, now at Oxford, who are applying the tools of their trade to works of epic literature, legend, and myth.

Read it.

“The idea that microscopic textures can impart a material with water-repellent properties has its origins in nature,” explained Brookhaven physicist and lead author Antonio Checco. “For example, the leaves of lotus plants and some insects’ exoskeletons have tiny-scale texturing designed to repel water by trapping air. This property, called ‘superhydrophobicity’ (or super-water-hating), enables water droplets to easily roll off, carrying dirt particles along with them.”

Mimicking this self-cleaning mechanism of nature is relevant for a wide range of applications, such as non-fouling, anti-icing, and antibacterial coatings. However, engineered superhydrophobic surfaces often fail under conditions involving high temperature, pressure, and humidity-such as automotive and aircraft windshields and steam turbine power generators-when the air trapped in the texture can be prone to escape. So scientists have been looking for schemes to improve the robustness of these surfaces by delaying or preventing air escape.

Read it.

I don’t know why there should be any problem, plenty of public universities offer in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Don’t veterans deserve as much if not better?

You would think….