Read it.

To mitigate this and other environmental issues affecting Africa such as land degradation, the effects of climate change, and a loss of biodiversity, Senegal is leading a 20-nation initiative known as the Great Green Wall. Most notably, this initiative involves erecting a wall of trees across the southern edge of the Sahara desert, which will be 14 km wide and 7,600 km long. When completed, it will be the largest horticultural feature in history. The initiative will also focus on establishing sustainable farming and livestock cultivation, and improving food security.

Read it.

Yeast. Is there nothing it can’t do? Scoop it up from nature and it makes alcohol. Fiddle with the genes and you can coax it to produce gasoline. Useful, but such synbio projects tend not to be cost-effective. Now, though, biochemists are genetically modifying yeast and algae to produce stuff with good enough profit margins that you could find it in the grocery store (or on the street corner).

Read it.

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

Read it.

Gawker‘s J.K. Trotter recently made the decision to publish the name of the person he now presumes to be Lena Dunham’s alleged rapist. That was irresponsible of him. Several journalists have dedicated considerable time to investigating the sexual assault that Dunham chronicled in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl; their reporting, and all information made available by Dunham in response, suggests that the attacker in the story may be a composite character based on her impressions of several dfferent people. Indeed, the person Gawker outed was not even a Republican activist—the key identifying detail attributed to the attacker in the memoir.

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

Read it.

Legally speaking, human rights have proliferated over the last 40 years. Only 20 human rights were listed by treaty in 1975. Today there are around 300, including the right to privacy, the right to freedom of movement, the right to join a trade union, and the right to an interpreter in official proceedings. With so many human rights recognized by so many countries, we clearly are moving toward a more just and humane world.

Or perhaps not. In his new, short, drily pessimistic book The Twilight of Human Rights Law, University of Chicago law professor Eric A. Posner meticulously, and with a touch of glee, pours cold water on the hopes of the international human rights regime.

Heh.

You might think that the solution here is to reduce the number of rights to a bare minimum—say, the rights to free speech, free elections, and fair trial. But such a reduction would never receive international assent, in part because it might actually be enforceable. With tons of human rights laws available, the United States can say that it needs to spy on its citizens, despite the right to privacy, because otherwise it will violate the right to security. China can say it needs to limit the right to free expression in order to ensure the right to development. One right is at least potentially legally meaningful. Hundreds aren’t.

Dress those windows! The world is watching!

Taki turns over a rock.

There is nothing more venomous than the hate-hype vipers, slithering far and wide, thus posing a danger nearly everywhere. Any speech they hate is “hate speech,” and any group they hate is a hate group. Given their totalitarian mentality, it is not surprising that they obsess over “hate crimes.” (A crime is by nature a hate crime, but these pedants insist on separating the two in order to score brownie points where P.C. is concerned.) If we continue down the way we’re now going, soon all speech and associations the P.C. Nazis deplore will be matters for the police to handle. Welcome to George Orwell’s 1984.

Read it. And watch the video.

Mahmoud al-Zahar is a co-founder of Hamas and the Foreign Minister of the Palestinian National Authority. He is said to be Khaled Mashal’s rival for the leadership of Hamas, now that the latter is running his Gaza fiefdom from exile in Doha.

The following BBC interview with Mahmoud al-Zahar was originally conducted in English, and then dubbed into Farsi. As far as I know, the English version was never made available by the Beeb.

Read it.

Read it.

And it doesn’t matter a damn, because the people who decide whether or not employees use open offices are all people who have private offices, so they don’t have to suffer along with the peons.

Read it.

The Obama administration’s preferred method of dealing with the illegals was release pending administrative hearings. How are the hearings going?

At NRO, Mark Krikorian notes that the investigative unit at Houston’s KPRC decided to find out (video below). The Daily Signal’s Natalie Johnson also picks up the story. Krikorian jumps to the story’s major finding” “Looking at the completed cases of people who snuck over the border and were released over a three-month period, the reporter found that more than 90 percent of them didn’t show up for their immigration hearings and joined the illegal population.”

Freeberg at his best. This whole essay is worth carving on a wall somewhere. Most of it is an extended fisking of a recent essay by Paul Graham regarding the utter necessity of expanding the number of H1-B visas that allow places like Google and Facebook to skim the cream of foreign tech schools and bring them home to the U.S. like safari trophies. My favorite:

4. What Congress is being asked to do, by these tech firms, is to assist them as they give up hope in the country. You can say the situation is not that simple, but you’d be wrong. And this is a significant point, since Congress is the country. This country has a legacy of inventing new things, thinking up new ideas, then making them happen. If that’s nothing more now than an echo in the ash bin of history and the snapshot of the present is some approximate reverse of that, the concerned patriot should be asking why. If his attention is not focused there, he forfeits any claim of concern about the country’s future.

Read it.

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

Read it.

This is the method the nuns taught me in school. Of course, I eventually traded up.

I learned how to type in high school, and it’s the single most useful skill I took into adulthood.

The Other McCain does a little venting.

When Jake Brewer complains about “noise” on the Internet, he doesn’t mean that he is unable to find what he wants online. No, he is an educated person, very sophisticated in his use of Internet tools, and has no problem accessing the information he seeks. What Jake Brewer is complaining about is that the online audience he wants to reach with his message — whom he presumes to be less educated and less sophisticated than himself — is distracted by “noise,” which he defines as information less important than the message Jake Brewer is sending.

Guess what, Jake? It’s called democracy. Idiots who spend all day sending each other cute puppy videos on Facebook? Democracy.

Read it.

Are your children safe at school? That depends on if you’re worried about bullies or administrators.

Ain’t that the truth. The problem with the government providing the schools is that it makes governance of the schools a political process rather than a market process, and so puts everyone’s posterity under the thumb of the mob — and just because people drive a Mercedes and live in a million-dollar house doesn’t make them any wiser than a tree stump.

Read it.

Yes, apparently because there have been IIRC 250 deaths (since 1980) in the US which have fallen away to 1 per year… Nanny needs to pass new regulations, which will, inevitably be expensive, onerous and um… put the price of Christmas lights up. Maybe make it impossible for Joe Sixpack to waste his money on pleasing the kiddies. Now, the chances Joe will be struck by lightning and die are (on this year’s stats) 26 times higher than your chances of death-by-Christmas lights. With even the chances of death by lightning at 26/about 350 000 000, make the odds on a Darwin-award Christmas Decorator about as likely as a Hugo Awards going to anyone but yet another set of outspoken PC far leftists SJW this year (yes, they’re approaching infinite improbability). Yet, most certainly the regulations have only a slightly lower chance of occurring than the usual situation in the ‘It’s absolutely fair and un-politically unbiased’ Hugo awards.

Dave Freer is a dyspeptic science-fiction writer, in case you couldn’t tell. (He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, so you can tell he’s pretty sound.)

Read it.

Not all the problems with the M16 can be blamed on the Army. Buried in the M16’s, and now the M4’s, operating system is a flaw that no amount of militarizing and tinkering has ever erased. Stoner’s gun cycles cartridges from the magazine into the chamber using gas pressure vented off as the bullet passes through the barrel. Gases traveling down a very narrow aluminum tube produce an intense “puff” that throws the bolt assembly to the rear, making the bolt assembly a freely moving object in the body of the rifle. Any dust or dirt or residue from the cartridge might cause the bolt assembly, and thus the rifle, to jam.

In contrast, the Soviet AK-47 cycles rounds using a solid operating rod attached to the bolt assembly. The gas action of the AK-47 throws the rod and the bolt assembly back as one unit, and the solid attachment means that mud or dust will not prevent the gun from functioning. Fearing the deadly consequences of a “failure to feed” in a fight, some top-tier Special Operations units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six use a more modern and effective rifle with a more reliable operating-rod mechanism. But front-line Army and Marine riflemen still fire weapons much more likely to jam than the AK?47. Failure to feed affects every aspect of a fight. A Russian infantryman can fire about 140 rounds a minute without stopping. The M4 fires at roughly half that rate.

[Modified to remove an embarrassing remark that I ought to have known better than to make. We have good commenters here.]

Jim Goad is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Public discourse—if you can call it that—has devolved into a ghastly assembly line of vapidity, vanity, shaming, shamelessness, stunted thinking, and arrested emotional development. We are served up the same puke-worthy dish daily—a smarm casserole baked in snark, fricasseed in smugness, and sautéed in intellectual cowardice.

Sometimes I wish you all had one face so I could vomit on it.

Read it.

Don’t read this if you ever have an urge to go into politics.

Freeberg nails it again.

Years ago I had learned, along with many other people interested in the subject I suspect, that the forces at work in an economy are supply and demand. My learning was that they are like at opposite ends of a seesaw. If one is in ascension then the other will be in a state of descent, both of these have some effect on the price of a product or service, and eventually things will stabilize — supply, demand and price. If we’re looking at a commodity on the stock exchange, then this search for supply/demand/price stabilization will be renewed daily. Also, an abundance of the one will intensify the power exerted by the other: If many people are demanding a certain item, and there is a limited number of suppliers of it, then the price will go up. If there are many suppliers and only limited demand, conversely the price will go down. This results in signaling. An “economy,” when you study it awhile and think about it awhile, turns out to be nothing more than a network of those signals. Because of this signaling, the tendency is toward benefit for all because the supply will respond to the signals; people will labor toward creating whatever it is that other people need. They’ll move their vocations around, away from the products and services declining in price due to this signaling, toward the products and services that are becoming more precious, so that abundances are relaxed and scarcities are cured.

My new word describes, essentially, a newer economy in which this circuit is being shorted because the whims of the suppliers are unnaturally affecting the nature of demand. Retail consumer technology has devolved to become a good example of this. When a new phone comes out and people line up around the block to get hold of it, there is no tug-of-war between supply and demand because the supply is the demand. Apple made something; I want whatever it is. Have no clue what it does. I just want it.

Read it.

And she was a batshit-crazy socialist, so what’s your excuse?

Read it.

Davutoglu’s Putin-Medvedev-style master, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is notorious for his Sunni supremacist (and anti-Alevi) views. During his election campaign in 2011, he reminded tens of thousands of party fans at rallies in seven different cities that his political rival and main opposition leader, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, was an Alevi. “You know, he is an Alevi,” Erdogan told crowds in a cynical way while thousands booed “the Alevi Kilicdaroglu.” In that election, Erdogan’s votes in all seven cities rose from the previous election.

Only three weeks before Davutoglu’s speech, a professional German-Turkish footballer, Deniz Naki, announced that he decided to leave his club and Turkey following a religious and racist attack. Naki, who in the past was the victim of abuses and insults for being a Kurdish Alevi and carrying a tattoo revealing his faith, had been attacked by unknown assailants in Ankara and suffered minor injuries. “This is the first warning,” the assailants told him. The footballer said he now feared to go out alone in Ankara and had decided to leave Turkey for Germany.

Tolerance in Islam is an aberration, not a virtue.

Read it.

Yves Francoeur, the president of the police union in Montreal, has gotten himself in trouble for publicly pointing out certain facts about mosques and Muslims that everyone knows, but no one is allowed to talk about.

Read it.

Just in case you were feeling happy.

Read it.

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who repeatedly make poor decisions.

Every Democrat in Congress.

Read it.

You have been warned.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

For years I’ve been pointing out that two bulwarks of Democratic Party campaign fundraising and prestige, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, don’t have to play by the Diversity rules that most of the rest of American business is supposed to play by.

Every few years since the 1990s, Jesse Jackson would try to shake down the Tech Industry and he’d be laughed out of town. Silicon Valley and Hollywood were too liberal, too rich, too powerful, too successful in the global marketplace (America can only wish we had as big a share of jetliners, much less cars, as Silicon Valley and Hollywood have of their respective markets) to let Jesse Jackson throw a wrench in the works.

But 2014 was the year in which liberal ideology overwhelmed liberal hypocrisy.

Read it.

Well, that grand government program worked out about as well as any grand government program.

The Other McCain focuses our attention.

If you think it’s a good idea to send your children to public schools, you probably aren’t really paying attention to what’s happening in public schools and who is in charge of public schools.

Sending your child to a government school is, in my view, prima facie evidence of child abuse.

John C. Wright waxes philosophical.

I have previously expressed doubt about the R/K theory of Anonymous Conservative that Conservatives exhibit typical carnivorous behavior of pack-hunting animals like wolves (including such things as having few young and lavishing resources on training each one) and Progressives exhibit herbivorous behavior (including such things as having many young and devoting little or no care to them). However, as time passes, I confess the explanatory power of the theory makes it more and more attractive.

Check it out.

Note that the biggest generators of carbon dioxide are the rain forests and several patches of ocean. Yeah, China’s bad, but not as bad as Brazil, and anybody who claims that Brazil has industrial air pollution to match China’s is smoking and not sharing.

Darn Tough Socks.

Read it.

In Berlin, Reda Seyam was a very diligent Mohammedan: As welfare recipient he sired one child after another (after all, the unbelievers paid out plenty of booty for them); and on top of that, he then named one of the children “Jihad”, or “holy war” (photo above). As well, the completely idiotic Berlin Superior Court awarded him the right to do it. Wonderful, so he is allowed quite officially to raise fighters who will later be obliged to wage war against us and subjugate us. But Reda Seyam will no longer bring Jihadists into the world, for now he has ridden off to the 72 virgins.

Read it.

What makes the system so appealing is how it combines the rapid fire action of an assault rifle with a programmable, multipurpose 20mm grenade launcher. While the computerized targeting system, underslung assault rifle and the 20 mm “smart” grenade launcher gives the ZH-05 a passing resemblance the cancelled American XM-29 and South Korean K-11 smart grenade launchers, it’s actually a whole different beast. For starters, the ZH-05 weighs at about 5 kg, compared to the K-11, which weighs 7.2kg. The ZH-05 uses a simple digital camera for targeting, though it would be a simple matter to switch in a night vision capable infrared scope. A 5.8mm assault rifle is based off of the QBZ-03 assault rifle, while the grenade launcher has a 700m range.

What did we get? More bullshit from Obama.

Read it.

And, surprise, surprise, the social mobility of communist China, including the Mao years, and the previous nationalist years, is very similar to that of England (and to all the other countries in the list.) Maybe you are thinking that, yes, of course, there was an elite in communist China, there is one everywhere—but surely they would be different names and people from those that formed the pre-communist elite. After all, as Clark and Cummins note, a million mainland Chinese fled to Taiwan when the communists defeated the opposing Nationalists—most of them members of the elite. Under the communist agrarian reform in the late 1940s and early 1950s the land owned by the landlord class was seized and redistributed—amounting to 43% of all the land in China; in the process, 800,000 landlords were executed. Then, in the 1960s and 1970s, about 10 million of the relatives of former landlords, businessmen, and apparent bourgeois were killed during the Cultural Revolution. All in all, the communists killed about 60 million people on the excuse that they were bourgeois. This included teachers, intellectuals, professionals and anybody that sniffed at being a member of the previous elites. Large numbers of students in the urban regions were sent to the countryside and denied education—to facilitate the equalization of society.

…

Surprisingly, he did not. The authors identified 13 surnames that appear with unusual frequency in the Qin examination system—the Chinese test to identify who will become a member of the highest elite in the country, the state bureaucracy. They selected them from more than 50,000 successful candidates (the most successful) in the Yuan, Ming, and Qin dynasties, starting in 221 BCE (we are talking China). These surnames are overrepresented in the modern imperial era and in modern Chinese elites—the high officials in the Nationalist government from 1912 to the triumph of the communists in 1949; professors at the ten most prestigious universities in the country in 2012; chairs of the boards of companies listed in 2006 as having assets of $1.5 million and above; and members of the (still communist) central government administration in 2010.

The intergenerational correlation of status between the Nationalist period (just before the Communists escalated power) and 2006 (that is, covering almost thirty years of Maoism and then the current variety of communism) was 0.9 for professors in 2006, 0.8 for company board chairs and 0.74 for central government officials. This means that if you predict that the surname of a member of the elite in 1912-1949 would still be a member of the central government elite in 2006, you would be right in 74% of the cases in each generation. Other names come and go, but these ones stay. That is staying power. And it happened under a communist regime that killed scores of millions of people suspected of being members of the elite.

Read it. And watch the video.

Houshi Ryokan was founded around 1,300 years ago and it has always been managed by the same family since then. ?It is the oldest still running family business in the world.

Read it.

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

In what has been called one of the largest fraud investigations in the history of the organic industry, The Cornucopia Institute, a Wisconsin-based farm policy research group, announced filing formal legal complaints against 14 industrial livestock operations producing milk, meat and eggs being marketed, allegedly illegally, as organic.

After years of inaction by the USDA, Cornucopia contracted for aerial photography in nine states, from West Texas to New York and Maryland, over the past eight months. What they found confirmed earlier site visits: a systemic pattern of corporate agribusiness interests operating industrial-scale confinement livestock facilities providing no legitimate grazing, or even access to the outdoors, as required by federal organic regulations.

Dude, those regulations are there to punish the little guys, not the deep-pocket campaign donors. Selective enforcement is one of the oldest tools in the book of corrupt politicians, as our President doesn’t even bother to pretend any more.

Read it.

Misleading health news stories are surprisingly widespread. One survey by Gary Schwitzer, who runs the watchdog website HealthNewsReview, looked at 500 health stories published in large newspapers over two years. Many of the stories were awfully flawed, he found, overplaying the benefits and underplaying the harms of various treatments, exaggerating the prevalence of diseases, and leaving out discussion of alternative options.

And these stories are a real health hazard. Lots of people make decisions every day based on the things they read in the media. A number of studies have documented the ways media coverage influences people’s health choices, from whether to get screened for breast cancer or go in for a colonoscopy.

Ask any physician about the number of patients who have come into their offices, requesting some test or treatment based on something they saw in the media. I’ve heard from many of them. I’ve also heard from health ministers who say they rely solely on journalism to inform themselves about the latest science. I don’t need to tell you again about the alarming hold a certain TV doctor has on his audience — no matter how dubious his advice.

Read it.

The answer is so simple that we sometimes forget to give it, but it matters. We teach students to do research because it’s one powerful way to teach them to understand and appreciate the past on its own terms, while at the same time finding meaning in the past that is rooted in the student’s own intellect and perspective. Classrooms and assigned readings are necessary to provide context: everyone needs to have an outline in mind, if only to have something to take apart; and everyone needs to know how to create those outlines and query them constructively. Reading monographs and articles is vital, too. To get past the big, generalized stories, you have to see how professional scholars have formed arguments, debated one another, and refined theories in light of the evidence.

Read it.

Yet another reason to avoid exercise.

Read it.

In the United States they have already made allowance for this state of affairs. Given that email and texting have replaced snail mail, and that students take notes on their laptops, “cursive” writing – in which the pen is not raised between each character – has been dropped from the Common Core Curriculum Standards, shared by all states. Since 2013 American children have been required to learn how to use a keyboard and write in print. But they will no longer need to worry about the up and down strokes involved in “joined-up” writing, less still the ornamental loops on capitals.

…

But experts on writing do not agree: pens and keyboards bring into play very different cognitive processes. “Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills – feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought,” says Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva. “Children take several years to master this precise motor exercise: you need to hold the scripting tool firmly while moving it in such a way as to leave a different mark for each letter.”

Operating a keyboard is not the same at all: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast, but above all the movement is exactly the same whatever the letter. “It’s a big change,” says Roland Jouvent, head of adult psychiatry at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. “Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”

Read it.

Nine years ago, Badische Staatsbrauerei Rothaus AG was struggling with production bottlenecks that weighed on its profits. Workers couldn’t package and crate the company’s beer quickly enough to stock bars and supermarkets, prompting customers to buy other brands.

Since introducing an ABB Ltd. IRB7600 robot in 2005, however, the company has sped up its delivery times, particularly at peak holiday periods. The robot does the heavy lifting, sorting through 30,000 bottles an hour, allowing the company to reassign its human employees to its bottling and packaging operations.

Go ahead, raise that minimum wage. ABB Ltd appreciates it.

Read it.

The Crust takes care of its own — the rhetoric is for the rubes who vote for them.

‘We have heard charmingly goofy criticisms of the idea that Neanderthals were competitively inferior to modern humans. It has been suggested that such a position is racist. Somehow, saying that a population that split off from modern humans half a million years ago (one generally considered a separate species) had some kind of biological disadvantage is beyond the pale, even though we’re here and Neanderthals are not. For that matter, we’ve seen people argue that the idea that some genes were picked up from archaic humans is racist, while others have argued that the idea that humans didn’t pick up Neanderthal genes is racist.’

— Cochran & Harpending, The 10,000 Year Explosion, p. 28

Ammo Grrrll points out that you have it easy.

Sometimes I think my life’s story could be called “A Life Full of Microaggressions.” What with “The Audacity of Hope” already taken and all. And it would be the same for every hapless human. I will mention a very few “slings and arrows” from my life. For example, In 7th grade I brought my adorable six-year-old sister to a school basketball game and a cool girl classmate said, “That’s your little sister? But, she’s so cute! She looks nothing like you.” Ouch.

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Whether responding to genuine necessity or not, a new aqueduct itself was a statement of a city’s power, grandeur, and influence in an age when such things mattered greatly. Its creation also glorified its sponsor. Trajan—provoked, in part, by the unfinished projects of his grandiose predecessor, Domitian—seized the opportunity to build his own monumental legacy in the capital: the Aqua Traiana (“Aqueduct of Trajan” in Latin). The aqueduct further burnished the emperor’s image by bringing a huge volume of water to two of his other massive projects—the Baths of Trajan, overlooking the Colosseum, and the Naumachia of Trajan, a vast open basin in the Vatican plain surrounded by spectator seating for staged naval battles.

Read it.

Four of the five reasons are, of course, the result of government activities.

For the truly adventurous, the U.S./Australian dollar rate has greatly improved over the last year, Ward adds.

I’m thinking, I’m thinking….

French driver reportedly heard yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’ slams pedestrians, injures 13

Pakistan makes arrests in Taliban school massacre

Mastermind of Pakistani school massacre identified (autoplay video)

Malmö Bombed Again

Isis Mines Compound Hidden Killer That’s Plagued Iraq For Decades

Activists Detail Abuse Of Women At Hands Of Isis

Second France car attack on pedestrians in as many days injures 11

Satellite Images Show 290 Heritage Sites In Syria Damaged By War

Mastermind of Pakistan school attack ID’d as militant known by ‘Slim’

Jihad by Truck in Nantes

Iraq crisis: The last Christians of Dora

The End of Tolerance? Anti-Muslim Movement Rattles Germany

Grisly finds in Iraqi Yazidi village taken back from ISIS militants

ISIS ramps up persecution of Christians in Middle East (autoplay video)

Taliban attacks complicate US drawdown in Afghanistan, raise 2015 concerns (autoplay video)

Popular Science shows us a glimpse of the future.

As military strategists look ahead, the days of asymmetric warfare and the uncontested airspace that comes with it seem to be drawing to a close. “There are no active area defenses run by insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq or, for that matter, Syria,” says defense analyst Phil Finnegan, of the Fairfax, Virginia–based Teal Group. “But the next generation of UAVs will have to confront potential threats like China. They’ll need to be much more capable—faster, with greater autonomy in case communication links are disrupted, and stealthier so they are more difficult for an adversary to detect.”

That’s what Andy Ihnatko calls Christmas … and who can say he’s wrong?