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A brief reminder, since such needs to be supplied regularly, that Muslims don’t cease to be Muslims just because nobody is watching.

Joel Pollak is disappointed.

You had to feel just the slightest tinge of jealousy watching the members of the Canadian parliament give a lengthy standing ovation to Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, the 58-year-old who killed a terrorist and defended democracy on Wednesday. Imagine if we in the United States still had the self-confidence to celebrate our heroes. Imagine if we could, even for just a moment, cheer for them–and each other. For who and what we are.

When President Barack Obama announced in May 2011 that Osama bin Laden had been killed, there were no such celebrations–at least among the country’s leaders.

Sure, students gathered spontaneously in front of the White House, waving American flags and shouting “U-S-A!” Yes, the midshipmen ” target=”_blank”>whooped through the night.

But our politicians–even while taking political credit–would not celebrate America, lest someone take offense.

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All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. — Benito Mussolini

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The video resumes during a confrontation with an individual the videographer identified to Campus Reform as Dr. Miller’s graduate assistant. The assistant, who was seated directly behind the attendee, accused him of suppressing people’s rights. When the attendee asked how he was suppressing people’s rights by filming, Andrea Jenkins jumped in.

“She’s not saying you are suppressing people’s rights, but that you are exerting your white privilege,” Jenkins said.

“I went up to Andrea after the event and informed her that I found what she said offensive, because I am the son of a Syrian immigrant,” the attendee told Campus Reform.

“You guys are instilling the same racial division that you are supposedly trying to combat,” the attendee claims he said.

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Although not for lack of trying.

Obviously headlining a story “Meet the Gay Libertarian Gun Nuts” is designed to be deliberately inflammatory clickbait. So it goes at Vice (not a judgment, just an observation). But beyond the headline, writer Cecilia D’Anastasio is one of those folks who is amazed to discover that coming out of the closet doesn’t include an application to register as a Democrat.

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Of course they do. And that baby was an American citizen, not that anybody in the Obama administration gives a damn.

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No problem, said the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). They’ll just declare all sorts of bonuses to be part of their base pay and force them right back into the pension calculations. CalPERS voted to have 99 bonuses sometimes given to certain public employees for various tasks that most of us would classify as expected job duties (like officers directing traffic) as part of their base pay. And so California’s multi-billion-dollar pension crisis gets worse.

And the suicide of California proceeds on schedule.

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To set the stage for why the country needs Hillary Clinton to be the next president, Democrats are trying to force-feed Americans a “war on women” pablum, when such a war–as they present it–does not exist. For the real “war on women,” however, Democrats might turn to Hillary Clinton herself and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

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Marcin Jakubowski, the owner of a small farm in northwestern Missouri, is an agrarian romantic for high-tech times. A forty-one-year-old Polish-American, he has spent the past five years building industrial machines from scratch, in a demonstration of radical self-sufficiency that he intends as a model for human society everywhere. He believes that freedom and prosperity lie within the reach of anyone willing to return to the land and make the tools necessary to erect civilization on top of it. His project, the Global Village Construction Set, has attracted a following, but among the obstacles he has faced is a dearth of skilled acolytes: the people who show up at his farm typically display more enthusiasm for his ideas than expertise with a lathe or a band saw.

Catherine Shu shows some serious claw.

Mark Zuckerberg may only own one hoodie, as far as we can tell, but he is multilingual. The Facebook founder was interviewed at business school Tsinghua University today and answered all questions in Mandarin, to the delight of the audience and the relief of Renee Zellweger, who is probably happy that the Internet now has something to talk about besides her face.

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Climate change may be causing alpine goats to shrink in size, according to biologists at Durham University.

Researchers analysed records of alpine animal sizes to discover that Chamois goats now weigh 25 per cent less than they did back in the ’80s.

Let me make a note to worry about that….

Steve Sailer asks an inconvenient question.

At Rice U., there used to be a jock-only major called Commerce. But, in a bout of post-Sixties idealism, the professors revolted and made Rice get rid of the phony, non-academic Commerce major. During my four years at Rice in the late 1970s, the football team won 7 games and lost 37. Cause and effect?

But what if instead of Commerce, jocks were channelled into, say, African-American Studies? What kind of vicious racist hater would complain about the academic worthiness of African-American Studies?

Read it.

A former Maryland Transit Administration bus driver is facing several charges after a family claimed she got several teens to beat them up after one of the victims got into an argument with her.

…

“She actually let these children get off of this bus and beat me and my family for at least three minutes, then let them get back on, get weapons, get back off and back on again, and then took off with every one of them that did it,” victim Kristina Gibson told 11 News reporter Lowell Melser.

The video makes clear that the bus driver is black and the victims are white. The story doesn’t mention that, of course, because that would be Noticing.

Steve Sailer looks at urban living.

One reason people moved in large numbers to the suburbs after WWII was because they were quieter for sleeping, especially in summer when you needed to keep your windows open. Lower density means less noise means more hours of sleep per night means happier, more productive days.

Before suburbanization, really rich families simply went some place cool for the entire summer. Affluent families sent the wife and kids away for the summer while the husband stayed home, as in The Seven Year Itch.

For example, in the 1920s, my father lived in Oak Park, Illinois, just west of Chicago. Oak Park is about as famously suburban as any place in America — the house next door was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and native son Ernest Hemingway derided Oak Park for its broad lawns and narrow minds.

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The product of interest is Freescale’s new MHT1003N, a 250 watt LDMOS transistor for 2.45 GHz that provides a power-added efficiency (PAE) of 58%.  Another device targeting RF heating applications is the MHT1002N for 915 MHz that can deliver 350 watts at 63% PAE.  Using the MHT1003N, manufacturers can use from one to eight of these 250 W units to build a microwave oven with the desired power level.  And the magnetron’s 4 kV power supply goes away in place of a supply of 28 to 50 volts.  Furthermore, the crude on-off control of the magnetron can be replaced with full variable power control.  Using multiple antennas, one per amplifier, provides better coverage of the cooking chamber.  This allows food to be cooked more precisely while the unit operates more efficiently.  And the product lifetime is significantly greater.

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The dastards.

Read it.

For the past four years, the Obama administration and its friends on the Left were careful to claim that they still strongly support religious liberty while arguing that Hobby Lobby’s Green family, Conestoga Wood Specialties’ Hahn family, and others like them must lose. Principally, they contended, religious liberty protections could not be applied to Hobby Lobby because (1) It is a for-profit corporation, (2) It isn’t a church (and thus not a true “religious employer,” and (3) It is wrong on the science—Plan B, a copper intrauterine device, et cetera, they claimed, do not cause abortions. They implied, if not claimed outright, that they would surely support religious freedom in another case, but Hobby Lobby was unworthy to claim its protections.

The State of California is now calling their bluff. California’s Department of Managed Health Care has ordered all insurance plans in the state to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not Plan B. Not contraceptives. Elective surgical dismemberment abortion.

Time to leave the Left Coast. All the good weather in the world won’t make up for the shitty people.

Read it. And weep.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has published his fifth installment of Wastebook, an annual tragicomic testimony to the power of diffused costs and concentrated benefits. The catalog of 100 asinine government expenditures is wholesome fun for the whole fiscally conservative family—especially your earnest Republican aunt who sends you chain emails with that Mark Twain quote we’ve all seen a million times.

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And why not?

“It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean,” Stoddard said. “They’ve made that abundantly clear every possible opportunity and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that.”

Sounds like a  plan.

Steve Sailer looks at the ‘wrong side of history’.

As in every quasi-Marxist revolution, though, the old Bolsheviks are in danger of being chewed up and spat out by the new. For example, consider the unintentionally hilarious New York Times Magazine article “When Women Become Men at Wellesley,” by Ruth Padawer. At women’s colleges today, the lesbians who were long the engineers of human souls are getting shoved aside for being on the wrong side of history by even butcher “trans-men” juicing on prescription testosterone….

Steve Sailer goes through a thumbsucker by Voice of the Crust Ray Mark Rinaldi, ‘Fine Arts Critic’ for the Denver Post, whose chief objection to the new Denver rail station is that there aren’t enough black people wandering around to suit him.

We should just blow up all the beautiful buildings of the past. That way no nonwhites will be made uncomfortable by ever being reminded of what their ancestors didn’t accomplish.

Read it.

Straight from the horse’s … mouth.

Asked whether terminating the ability to register to vote on the day that someone casts a ballot impacts blacks disproportionately, the DOJ’s witness, Charles Stewart, testified in court that it does. He reasoned that (1) people who register at the last minute “tend to be less sophisticated voters, tend to be less educated voters, tend to be voters who are less attuned to public affairs” and (2) “people who correspond to those factors tend to be African Americans.”

Does the Holder Justice Department really believe that African Americans are less sophisticated voters than whites? Does it really believe they are less attuned than whites to public affairs?

To be sure, blacks vote overwhelmingly in favor of Holder’s party. Other than that, I see no reason to conclude that they are less “sophisticated” and “less attuned to public affairs” than whites.

If a conservative were to so conclude, Eric Holder would be the first to condemn him as a racist. Yet the Holder DOJ is paying a witness to advance this position in a court of law on behalf of the United States of America.

Read it.

The home creating space is increasingly moving from the garage to the desktop, and the latest evidence is Carvey, a CNC machine the size of a microwave that can carve pretty much anything you want out of wood, metal and other materials.

It’s a bit like 3D printing, where you start out with a design file on your computer. But instead of building an object from the bottom up, Carvey carves it out of a solid block of material.

And you thought computerized sewing machines were bad.

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Join us then, as we review all 22 terrible reasons to go to law school….

Fisking dreck from a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

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

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Fortunately, my son is now homeschooled—or, technically, attends a private online school. He uses online lessons and offline texts and workbooks to learn, coached by his mother and me. The lessons are means to an end; he takes them as needed, and can take as much or little time as necessary, until he demonstrates his mastery of a topic in a unit assessment test. Then he moves on. Find your vocabulary set a breeze? Then skip the review lessons. Stumped by long division? Then spend a few hours working it out.

Funny how that works.

Read it.

Last week, California’s Supreme Court reached a controversial 5-2 decision in People v. Diaz (PDF), holding that police officers may lawfully search mobile phones found on arrested individuals’ persons without first obtaining a search warrant. The court reasoned that mobile phones, like cigarette packs and wallets, fall under the search incident to arrest exception to the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

California’s opinion in Diaz is the latest of several recent court rulings upholding warrantless searches of mobile phones incident to arrest. While this precedent is troubling for civil liberties, it’s not a death knell for mobile phone privacy. If you follow a few basic guidelines, you can protect your mobile device from unreasonable search and seizure, even in the event of arrest. In this article, we will discuss the rationale for allowing police to conduct warrantless searches of arrestees, your right to remain silent during police interrogation, and the state of mobile phone security.

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Recent news articles from Syria report that members of biker gangs from several European countries have joined the battle against the Islamic State in the besieged Kurdish city of Kobani.

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Former Secretary of Labor Bob Reich, on behalf of MoveOn, warns Democrats what will happen if Republicans take control of the Senate: they may use a “tricky, little-known maneuver” to “ram through” their “right-wing policies” with only 51 votes, instead of the 60 votes “usually required” in the Senate.

…

Reconciliation has never been a partisan issue; it has been favored by both Democrats and Republicans for budget matters. But the most controversial use of the procedure, by far, took place in 2010 when the Democrats relied on it to pass Obamacare without a single Republican vote, and without having 60 votes in the Senate.

Interesting how that works. Democrats can use any rules maneuver they choose, but if it looks as if Republicans will do the same, it’s the end of the world.

Read it.

Everything bad is good for you.

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Another day of school, another Common Core horror story. Parents in Royal Palm Beach, Florida complained to administrators that their children are languishing under Core-aligned instruction and standardized testing. One parent reported that her third-grade son comes home from school every day thinking he is stupid because he can’t pass his tests. “Mommy, please home-school me,” he begged, according to The Palm Beach Post.

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You want Merlot with that?

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Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

Read it.

In the latest issue of the journal Science, researchers at MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics — together with colleagues at Harvard University and the Vienna University of Technology — describe the experimental realization of an optical switch that’s controlled by a single photon, allowing light to govern the transmission of light. As such, it’s the optical analog of a transistor, the fundamental component of a computing circuit.

Jim Goad is perplexed.

Come to think of it, aren’t lesbians always trying to protect women from men? Why would these canyon-yodelers want hairy, disgusting males stinking up women’s bathrooms by flashing their wee-wees, anyway? Oh, right—because they’re not really men as long as they don’t believe they are, and to claim anything to the contrary makes one a bigot. I’ll tell you, they make it so hard to keep up with their ever-swelling definition of what constitutes “hate,” it’s hard not to hate them. They keep revising the script more often than my iPhone gets software updates.

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

In “The New Class Conflict,” I describe this alliance as the New Clerisy, which encompasses the media, the academy and the expanding regulatory bureaucracy. This Clerisy already dominates American intellectual and cultural life and increasingly has taken virtual control of key governmental functions, as well as the educations of our young people.

The Clerisy’s ascendency was predicted more than 40 years ago by the great sociologist Daniel Bell. The rise of knowledge-based industries, he predicted in his landmark 1973 book, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” would establish the “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” he suggested, would aim for the rational “ordering of mass society.”

Although usually somewhat progressive by inclination, the Clerisy actually functions much like the old First Estate in France – the clergy – helping determine the theology, morals and ideals of the broader population.

Nowhere is this function clearer than in the university itself, from which Barack Obama sprang, and which has become an essential part of his political coalition.

Sarah Hoyt breaks the news.

Which is a problem, because while we’re not all going to die of Ebola, Ebola has revealed how far gone we are in lack of civic trust.

Read it.

The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.

“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”

Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Mr. Obama.

It’s all about the power.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Dr. John Deasy, Ph.D., has been shoved out as boss of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second largest, temporarily denting his ambition to become Secretary of Education under Obama or Hillary.

Deasy ranks with Arne Duncan as the classic White Male Empty Suit of the Education Reform Era. Until this setback, Deasy had overcome his stale pale maleness to forge a fabulous career of job hopping by aggressively mouthing all the cliches about Closing the Gap beloved by philanthropic billionaires currently dabbling in education, such as Bill Gates and Eli Broad.

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The European Community bureaucracy, meanwhile, has readied sanctions against Israel. One remonstrates in vain. The Gaza War should have taught the world that Israel cannot cede territory to Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 10th year of a 4-year term. Hamas has the support of 55% of West Bank Palestinians vs. just 38% for Abbas, and Hamas openly brags that it could destroy Israel more easily from firing positions in the West Bank. Only the Israeli military keeps Abbas in power; without the Israelis Hamas would displace Abbas in the West Bank as easily as it did in Gaza; and a Hamas government in the West Bank would make war on Israel, with horrifying consequences.

To propose immediate Palestinian statehood under these circumstances is psychotic, to call the matter by its right name. The Europeans, along with the United Nations and the Obama administration on most working days, refuse to take reality into account. When someone tells you that Martians are transmitting radio waves into his brain, or that Elvis Presley really is the pope rather than an Argentine Jesuit, one doesn’t enquire into the merits of the argument. Rather, one considers the cause of the insanity.

Read it.

Let me know when Ebola’s death toll matches that of militant Islam. Until then, STFU about ‘disaster of our time’.

Freeberg is delightfully dyspeptic today.

There’s something peculiar going on here with the modern American left, and separating people. They take their sharpest and quickest departures off the plane of reality, when common sense says there is a partition in place, or if there isn’t one then there ought to be one. In these situations, they pretend all kinds of things even when they’re repeatedly reminded that pretending is all they’re doing.

…

The crisis won’t go away, so: Day 1, think about maybe interrupting golf game. Day 2, give a speech blaming Republicans. Day 3, in response to the simplest and most sensible solution, murmur a bunch of nonsensical homilies about why it’s completely out of the question. Day 4, invent a fancy title and give it to a lawyer. It doesn’t even matter what the problem is, that’s the Obama road map for all of it.

Scott Johnson is pessimistic.

John Kerry provides an element of continuity in Democratic politics going back to the fall of Saigon. He rose to prominence as a player in the Democratic production leading to our abandonment of South Vietnam. Kerry’s contribution was the dissemination of a demoralizing set of lies asserting the routine commission of war crimes by American forces. I bought his act at the time, but I was a sophomoric student who didn’t know any better. What is our excuse now?

John Kerry makes Neville Chamberlain look like George Patton. Barack Obama makes Jimmy Carter look like a President.

Work Sharp WSKTS Knife and Tool Sharpener.

Handy Paint Pail.

Air Umbrella.

Cat Ear Headphones. It helps to be Japanese, female, and have magenta hair.

Portable Cardboard Standing Desk. This is really slick.

Read it.

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

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Well, to start with, they don’t pretend that everybody and his dog needs to go to college.

The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent of young people train as apprentices, the overwhelming majority in the construction trades. In Germany, the number is closer to 60 percent—in fields as diverse as advanced manufacturing, IT, banking, and hospitality. And in Europe, what’s often called “dual training” is a highly respected career path.

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Today President Obama announced the appointment of Ron Klain as his administration’s “ebola czar.” Mr. Klain is a lobbyist and long-time political operative who is currently an Obama aide and has served as chief of staff to both Al Gore and Vice-President Biden. Klain also served as Chief of Staff or Staff Director for Attorney General Janet Reno, the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was a debate preparation advisor to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as Al Gore and John Kerry. Klain was General Counsel for the Gore Recount Committee in 2000, and was deeply involved in the Solyndra scandal. He has no experience or expertise relating to public health, infectious diseases or health care.

Which, of course, is why he was picked.

Read it.

The attackers — described as black men, perhaps 25 years old, wearing dark clothes — rambled around an area in Champaign, tackling various innocent and unsuspecting people to the ground and kicking them in the head.

Police say five students suffered injuries in four different instances. Three of the students received treatment for bruises, cuts and facial wounds, notes WLS. One student also had a cell phone stolen.

Ask your local ‘journalist’ why this isn’t on the news.