Read it.

Even before Ebola, Ammo Grrrll only flew under extreme duress. Funerals. Emergencies with sick parents. For business, I have driven from Minnesota to West Virginia, Maryland, and Texas. I enjoy long road trips. There is nobody to complain when you play the same Toby Keith disc for 3 hours, followed by Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto and then The Best of Bread ($1.99 in a bin). Eat your heart out, Brahms. Here comes “Baby, I’m-A Want You”.

Flying itself is wretched enough, but nowadays the TSA Experience begins the fun. It apparently is my karma always to be singled out for the full wanding and gunpowder residue tests on my hands. Tests I am terrified I am going to flunk because of the frequency of my shooting, despite Lady Macbeth-level scrubbing.

A woman after my own heart.

Steve Sailer reflects.

First, I had never heard until very recently that the murderer, Winston Moseley, was black. A historic black crime wave was washing over New York City in 1964, but the race of the confessed killer wasn’t mentioned in the famous NYT article. In fact, I don’t recall the killer’s race ever being mentioned in the 1960s/1970s. As a child, I just assumed he looked like all the muggers in cartoons then. I can see now that mentioning that the killer was black would have been distracting from the political lessons White America was supposed to be draw at the climax of the Civil Rights era.

As feminist Susan Brownmiller pointed out in the 1970s, sex crimes tended to have political connotations. The big increase in black-on-white sex crimes in New York City, Brownmiller suggested, wasn’t unrelated to black liberation. But that’s complicated and distasteful, so let talk about Apathy.

…

Second, Moseley was a serial killer, a sex maniac who confessed to murdering two other women. He wasn’t just some complete loser: he had a white collar job, a wife, two kids, a mortgage, and a 3 digit IQ. He was just evil. The jury gave him the death penalty, but an appeals court let him off with life, at which point he escaped from prison and kidnapped and raped another woman before being recaptured.

Read it.

Riffing off a survey conducted earlier this year by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), the conservative American Action Forum (AAF) estimates that upwards of 214,000 doctors are declining to serve patients covered by Obamacare exchange health plans. AAF gets that number by extrapolating the MGMA’s survey responses across the full population of practicing physicians, so take that number as seriously as you like. But there’s no doubt that physicians have real concerns about the president’s signature Affordable Care Act (ACA), and that exchange customers are having trouble finding doctors willing to take their business.

Obamacare, the gift that keeps on giving.

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But requiring voter ID would be raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

When three anonymous women allegedly have kinky sex with radio celebrity Jian Ghomeshi and are allegedly physically and/or verbally assaulted by him, the country goes into a tizzy.

However, when three anonymous Toronto girls are recruited by Islamic State to marry ISIS fighters overseas who are warring against Canada, and are subsequently rescued by our security agencies and released back into the community, Canada yawns.

Read it.

Russian bombers could be conducting nuclear strike drills over the Atlantic Ocean and North Sea, United States Air Force officials warn.

In a period of 24 hours this week, Russia sent 19 combat aircraft to test NATO defenses and also test-launched a ballistic missile in the Barents Sea, north of Sweden. The incidents follow a trend of military activity, as this year NATO has scrambled fighter jets to intercept Russian jets more than 100 times, three times more than all of last year.

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

Watch it.

But voter ID laws are raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

But voter ID laws are raaaaaaacist.

Read it.

CurrentC, the mobile payments system being pushed by some of the biggest retailers in the US, has been hacked – before the system is even fully up and running.

“Within the last 36 hours, we learned that unauthorized third parties obtained the e-mail addresses of some of our CurrentC pilot program participants and individuals who had expressed interest in the app,” a spokeswoman for the Merchant Customer Exchange (MCX) told El Reg.

Read it.

A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

The Other McCain doubles down:

Making equality into a moral principle and a political objective always has the result of  of inflaming irrational resentment. People ask why feminists are always so angry; it is because the egalitarian mind sees injustice everywhere. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If the only ideology you have is feminism, every problem looks like patriarchal oppression. Any attempt to placate feminists is as doomed as Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler. Feminists are totalitarians who crave unlimited power and can never be satisfied with partial success or compromise. Grant feminists every demand they make today, and tomorrow they will return with a new list of demands. One day it’s “peace for our time,” the next day the Stukas are dive-bombing Warsaw.

Read it.

Some of these are pretty entertaining. The chief objection on the part of the Washington Post, of course, is that gerrymandering is beneficial to Republicans. (No mention, of course, that it was invented to benefit Elbridge Gerry, member of the precursor of the Democratic Party.)

Unlike some people, I have no problem with gerrymandering — absent a system in which one could sign up for the candidate of one’s choice, and that candidate had exactly as much power in the legislature as the number of his constituents, it’s the closest thing to pure representation (everybody is represented by somebody who agrees with him) as we are going to get. From the standpoint of democratic representation theory, it’s far better to have a bunch of districts in which the winner gets 90% of the vote than a bunch of districts in which the winner only gets 53%. (News organizations hate gerrymandering because it shoots the ‘horse race’ right in the butt and leaves them with nothing to report on election night; they’d much rather have a bunch of cliff-hangers that keeps the proles glued to their sets.)

Read it.

Award-winning videographer Sean Malone had a raygun belt buckle confiscated recently by the good folks at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You know, because all of the 9/11 hijackers were packing rayguns or something.

Security theater strikes again.

Read it. And watch the video.

Several voters in Rock Island County have already claimed publicly about similar problems with local voting machines in early voting. One local voter, Christina Kirk, told local NBC News affiliate KWQC 6 last week: “When I went to cast my vote and touch the screen for my Republican candidate, the Democrat candidate was the one that would pop up with my x, even though I pressed the Republican candidate.”

The YouTube footage is the first visual report of the alleged problem with the voting machines. The error appears to occur when the voter’s finger is slightly off center in the Republican box, which appears below the Democrat box. It is apparently still possible to vote for the Republican candidate, and it is possible for a vigilant voter to correct the mistake and vote again, but a voter in a hurry might easily register a mistaken vote for the Democrat by mistake and fail to notice. The problem seems to recur throughout the ticket of races. (No test involving a voter trying to choose the Democratic candidate and selecting the Republican instead is shown.)

But there isn’t really any vote fraud; just ask King Putt.

Pro and con.

Read it.

Merchants aren’t blocking Apple Pay to collect data on us. They aren’t doing it to spite Apple, or to pressure Apple into giving them a split of the profits. While those might be factors, the real reason is a deep-seated, and possibly well-deserved, hatred of credit cards.

Unfortunately, none of this has anything to do with improving the customer experience.

Read it.

Next up: A law to require kids to eat their vegetables. (Oops, sorry, Michelle Obama has that one in hand….)

Read it.

Everyone from network CEO Les Moonves to “Evening News’’ anchor Scott Pelley to former “Evening News’’ Executive Producer Patricia Shevlin ignored repeated phone calls and e-mails from The Post seeking comment on the bombshell claim by ex-CBS investigative ace Sharyl Attkisson.

In her new book, “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington,” Attkisson charges that CBS higher-ups quashed her reporting on the deadly attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, as well as reports on the federal “Fast and Furious’’ gun-running scandal and the president’s ObamaCare debacle.

Read it.

Sardinians want to become part of Switzerland. And who could blame them?

Read it.

Over the weekend, it came out that two giant pharmacy chains, Rite Aid and CVS, had started blocking Apple Pay, the massively hyped new payment system from Apple that has received much praise for its ease of use. The product had worked for about a week before the two companies started blocking such near field communication (NFC) payments (which also takes out other NFC payment options like Google Wallet). While Rite Aid gave a vague and slightly ridiculous explanation — that it is “still in the process of evaluating our mobile payment options” — pretty much everyone knows the truth. A bunch of retailers, led by Walmart, have been creating their own mobile payment system called CurrentC, which cuts out the credit card companies. But, it also builds in all the tracking and spying features of store loyalty cards, expanded across all merchant partners. Apple Pay lets people remain anonymous.

Thar’s gold in them there data.

I’d hate to stop shopping at Walmart, but if they don’t take Apple Pay, it could happen.

Read it.

It is remarkable to hear Western political leaders — who are not Muslims, do not speak Arabic, and have no training in Islamic law — make such confident declarations about the true nature of Islam.

Why should we take David Cameron’s word on what constitutes “true Islam”? Why does John Kerry have any credibility when he pontificates on the nature of Islam?

Read it.

Of course; where else would it be?

Researcher Jean Thie said Wednesday he used satellite imagery and Google Earth software to locate the dam, which is about 850 metres (2,800 feet) long on the southern edge of Wood Buffalo National Park.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

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Combine Jerry Pournelle’s dictum ‘The purpose of government is to hire and pay government employees’ with Rahm Emanuel’s giveaway ‘Never let a crisis go to waste’, and voila — DHS.

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As many as they can, obviously. ‘Democrat’ is, after all, a synonym for ‘political machine’.

There’s a bombshell academic study out on this issue right now that the media is mostly ignoring (the only exception being the Washington Post’s very fine wonky MonkeyCage blog), in part because it appears in an obscure academic journal, Electoral Studies, that is behind an expensive subscription paywall, and in part because any reporter who does a story about it will be called a racist. Since I’m an academic these days, I’ve got access to the article, “Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?”, by Jesse T. Richman and Gulshan A. Chattha of Old Dominion University and David C. Earnest of George Mason University.

Read it.

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “More Recent Evidence on the Effects of Minimum Wages in the United States,” concludes, “We see the evidence as still pointing to disemployment effects for low-skilled workers from raising the minimum wage.” Further, “we conclude that the best evidence still points to job loss from minimum wages for low-skilled workers — in particular for teens.”

Perhaps somebody ought to send a copy of this paper to Hillary Clinton. She seems to be a common-sense-denier.

Read it.

A central tenet of government finance is that money borrowed over the long term should be spent on projects that will outlast the debt – things like buildings, bridges or other essential infrastructure.

That’s not what upstate New York’s Niagara County did with much of its money from tobacco bonds.

Golf carts. Computers. Defibrillators. Portable radios. Even a grease trap for the jail’s kitchen. The list of goods or projects with just a few years’ useful life goes on – all paid for with debt that will last decades.

Nor did the money go toward the health care costs of smoking – as hoped by framers of the 1998 legal settlement with tobacco companies that has paid billions to states, counties and other governments.

Since then, Niagara County repeatedly borrowed against its share of the settlement, about $3.5 million a year. For some of this debt, it borrowed at nearly 8 percent interest and used the proceeds to pay down debts charging half as much.

Niagara’s experience shows how “securitizing” the tobacco money – and the windfall of upfront cash it puts at politicians’ disposal – creates pressure to spend quickly and with less regard to long-term costs.

It also highlights a weakness in IRS rules, which are meant to rein in the use of long-term, tax-exempt debt for items with a short, useful life but still allow many to slip through.

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

Read it.

It’s an idea echoed everywhere from “Friends” to “Girls”: Young people want to live in cities. And, we’re told, a lot of them (at least the cool ones) do.

It’s a common assumption. But it’s also wrong.

Between 2010 and 2013, the number of 20- to 29-year-olds in America grew by 4 percent. But the number living in the nation’s core cities grew 3.2 percent. In other words, the share of 20-somethings living in urban areas actually declined slightly.

This trend has occurred in supposedly hot cities like San Fransisco, Boston, New York and D.C., notes demographer Wendell Cox. Chicago and Portland, Ore., both widely hailed as youth boom-towns, saw their numbers of 20-somethings decline, too.

Funny how facts keep putting sand in the gears of the Narrative.

Only 17 percent of Millennials identify the urban core as where they want to settle permanently. Another survey, by the Demand Institute (funded by the Conference Board and Neilsen), found that 48 percent of 20-somethings hoped to move to the suburbs one day. And contrary to popular myth, they hoped to own a single-family home. Sixty-one percent seek more space.

These findings may actually understate the suburban preference. As people age, particularly entering the child-bearing period between 30 and 50, they long have displayed a distinct tendency to move to suburban areas.

Well, there goes the neighborhood….

Steve Sailer looks behind the curtain.

As I’ve joked before, when I became interested in the quantitative literature on educational achievement in ninth grade in 1972, the racial rankings went:

1. Orientals
2. Caucasians
3. Chicanos
4. Blacks
Today, the order is:

1. Asians
2. Whites
3. Hispanics
4. African-Americans

…

What I hadn’t guessed in 1988 was that the powers that be in Chicago would simply unload their unwanted public housing project residents on the rest of the Midwest via Section 8 vouchers, with the federal government ready to persecute for discrimination any two-bit burgh that tried to resist. That seemed a little too cynical for even me to imagine in 1988.

Read it.

Two guys behind the YouTube channel lifehunterstv sliced McDonald’s McNuggets and burgers into bite-size pieces and served them with toothpicks on a white platter. They told the conference attendees that the food was a sampling from their “high-end” restaurant’s menu.

…

One attendee called the food “nice and firm” and said it had “a good bite.”

Another said it “rolls around the tongue nicely,” and “if it were wine, I’d say it’s fine.”

There are times when ‘Heh’ seems inadequate.

Read it.

Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson’s belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

…

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”

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The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been trying to investigate the Fast and Furious scandal for years, but has been stymied by the Obama administration’s stonewalling. The House committee was willing to narrow its request for Department of Justice documents to an extraordinary degree; ultimately, the committee asked only that the Obama administration produce documents after February 4, 2011, relating to the false letter to Congress that bore that date, and the process by which Eric Holder’s DOJ decided to withdraw that letter. Notwithstanding this narrow scope, the Obama administration has stiffed the House committee for three years, asserting executive privilege over virtually all of the documents encompassed by the committee’s request.

Read it.

Read it.

Much like the artificial noise that some regulators want to impose on electric cars because they’re ‘too quiet’ and therefore unsafe.

The world is full of people who think they know better than you how you ought to live.

Read it.

MANY people think that the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook. This belief in the power of positive thinking, expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, informs everything from affirmative pop anthems like Katy Perry’s “Roar” to the Mayo Clinic’s suggestion that you may be able to improve your health by eliminating “negative self-talk.”

But the truth is that positive thinking often hinders us. More than two decades ago, I conducted a study in which I presented women enrolled in a weight-reduction program with several short, open-ended scenarios about future events — and asked them to imagine how they would fare in each one. Some of these scenarios asked the women to imagine that they had successfully completed the program; others asked them to imagine situations in which they were tempted to cheat on their diets. I then asked the women to rate how positive or negative their resulting thoughts and images were.

A year later, I checked in on these women. The results were striking: The more positively women had imagined themselves in these scenarios, the fewer pounds they had lost.

Read it.

Honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is a well-known Chinese herb. In Traditional Chinese Medicine, it has been used to effectively treat influenza infection for centuries.

…

Now, a team of researchers headed by Dr Chen-Yu Zhang of Nanjing University in China has identified MIR2911 (honeysuckle-encoded atypical microRNA2911) as the first active component directly targeting various influenza viruses, including the swine flu H1N1, highly pathogenic avian H5N1 and H7N9 infections.

MIR2911 represses influenza viruses by targeting PB2 and NS1, two genes that are known to be required for influenza viral replication.

Read it.

Conspicuous by its absence is any mention of law-enforcement agencies; I guess only self-appointed progressive busybodies are entitled to encouragement.

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The problem is that tattoos are indicia of stupidity; this is essentially fraudulent, like hymen reconstruction surgery.

Read it.

Some of these are pretty interesting.

Read it.

In the realm of cancerous diseases, tumors affecting the brain can be particularly difficult to cure. Many are fast moving and take hold of key sections of the body’s most fundamental organ, rendering surgical removal extremely difficult or impossible.

Now, researchers at Harvard Stem Cell Institute have come up with a new method for battling these deadly brain tumors — by taking them apart from the inside out. In a new study, the scientists have engineered stem cells to secrete cancer-killing cytotoxins that degrade the tumor from within its core.

Michelle Malkin lays it out.

Everything you need to know about Beltway nepotism, corporate cronyism and corruption can be found in the biography of Robert Hunter Biden. Where are the Occupy Wall Street rabble-rousers and enemies of elitist privilege when you need them? Straining their neck muscles to look the other way.

Hunter Biden, Scion of the Crust, is the poster boy for the way that our new ruling elite is turning America into Britain of, say, two hundred years ago, where who your parents are and who your parents know determine what opportunities you get and how little work you have to do to get them.

Scott Johnson sums it up:

How unqualified was Hunter Biden? He was too old to join the Naval Reserve at age 43. He sought an officer’s commission for which he didn’t qualify. He received waivers to fill a part-time position in public affairs for which he wasn’t needed. After navigating these shoals, Biden was discharged within a month because he flunked a drug test.

Read it.

Minneapolis has become a focal point for testing out policies designed to force people to eat healthier. Or else.

The problem with living in a Blue state is that the more the government intrudes into your life, the more that intrusion is considered a precedent for further intrusions into your life. That’s a hole with no bottom.

Read it.

And you were wondering why Gates, Zuckerberg, et al. are so hot for more H-1B visas.

John Hinderaker blows the whistle.

In this one-minute clip, trying to shore up the floundering Coakley campaign in Massachusetts, Hillary Clinton displays her ignorance of how the world works not once, but twice. First she assures her audience that raising the minimum wage doesn’t cost jobs, it leads to job gains. (“Our entry-level employees will now cost $15 an hour? Great! Let’s hire two!”) Of course, no one ever asks: if that’s true, Hillary, then why are you so cheap? Why not raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour?

…

“Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Where do they come from, then? Does the stork deliver them? Are they legislated by Congress? Two equally plausible alternatives.

Watch the video of Hillary sticking her foot in her mouth if you have the stomach for it.

Read it.

An upcoming study to be published in the publication Electoral Studies has its authors positing the question “Could non-citizens decide the November election?”
Writing in the Washington Post, Old Dominion University political science professors Jesse Richman and David Earnest preview some of the results of their findings, using data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

According to the author’s preview published Friday, more than 14 percent of non-citizens in 2008 and 2010 “indicated” they were registered to vote and some did.

“Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010,” wrote Richman and Earnest.

They note that non-citizens tend to be Democratic voters and that in their 2008 sample, 80 percent of non-citizens cast ballots for Obama. Given that, they conclude that non-citizen participation “was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.”

And it must be true! Because professors!

Read it.

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

Read it.

John Coleman, the founder of Weather Channel, has written an open letter to UCLA, in which he claims the theory of anthropogenic climate change is no longer scientifically credible.

Read it.

Hint: Power and money.

Glenn Reynolds once commented on the seeming paradox of liberals who are terrified at the prospect that libertarians might take power and leave them alone. Actually, liberals probably do want to be left alone; they just don’t have any intention of leaving you alone. Liberals hunger for power so that they can enrich themselves, in many cases, but more generally, so they can remake the world according to their own preferences. This doesn’t mean that they will have to change, but it does mean that you will have to change. As long as liberals’ hunger for power is stronger than conservatives’ desire to be left in peace, the Left will continue to dominate our public life.

Read it.

A law enforcement source told NBC News that the gunman Friday used a small pistol. Doug Dawson, special agent in charge of the Seattle office of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said the weapon was legally acquired.

Thank God it was a ‘gun free zone’, or who knows how many bodies they would be carting out.

Read it.

I rather suspect that Wall Street could come up with 100 insane things that NBC News believes, with not much effort.

BottleLoft.

Darth Vader toaster.

Seek Thermal Camera.