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Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.

Softer-sounding engines are actually a positive symbol of just how far engines and gas economy have progressed. But automakers say they resort to artifice because they understand a key car-buyer paradox: Drivers want all the force and fuel savings of a newer, better engine — but the classic sound of an old gas-guzzler.

“Enhanced” engine songs have become the signature of eerily quiet electrics like the Toyota Prius. But the fakery is now increasingly finding its way into beefy trucks and muscle cars, long revered for their iconic growl.

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I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

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A trial to determine whether U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson’s wife committed bigamy when she wed the congressman has been delayed because she required emergency surgery to remove breast implants.

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And there you have it.

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Funny how that works. Guess the sky isn’t falling after all.

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Researchers have found a key that may unlock the only library of classical antiquity to survive along with its documents, raising at least a possibility of recovering vanished works of ancient Greek and Roman authors such as the lost books of Livy’s history of Rome.

The library is that of a villa in Herculaneum, a town that was destroyed in A.D. 79 by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that obliterated nearby Pompeii. Though Pompeii was engulfed by lava, a mix of superhot gases and ash swept over Herculaneum, preserving the documents in a grand villa that probably belonged to the family of Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus, the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

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Scientists at the University of Rochester have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent, or super-hydrophobic, materials without the need for temporary coatings.

Super-hydrophobic materials are desirable for a number of applications such as rust prevention, anti-icing, or even in sanitation uses. However, as Rochester’s Chunlei Guo explains, most current hydrophobic materials rely on chemical coatings.

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Those must be the kids getting a Real Liberal Arts Degree.

The test, which was administered at 169 colleges and universities in 2013 and 2014 and released Thursday, reveals broad variation in the intellectual development of the nation’s students depending on the type and even location of the school they attend.

On average, students make strides in their ability to reason, but because so many start at such a deficit, many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.

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You could do a lot worse than have your kid spend his spare time at Khan Academy.

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With Austin’s light-rail ballot measure going down in flames last November due to its high costs, rail transit advocates have conceded defeat, folded up their tents, and gone home. Ha, ha, just kidding; actually, now they are talking about subways.

…

What’s the solution to Austin’s increasing congestion? asks economist Angelos Angelou. His answer? “Subways.” In other words, if you can’t afford light rail, then build something that (as Texas A&M transportation engineer Curtis Morgan points out) is five times more expensive. That makes economic sense (in Bizarro world).

Austin is the blue carbuncle on the butt of Texas.

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The usual scenario is as follows: an arson is started, a shooting or stabbing is reported, some cars are incinerated or similar cultural enrichments take place. The fire brigade or the paramedics stop at the gates and wait for the cavalry to arrive — and then things calm down. Until next week. So far only one incident of shooting at the police has been reported.

Maybe our Muslims are smarter than their French brothers?

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Next up: One for blood alcohol?

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Last year, AT&T and the online educational organization Udacity teamed up to offer a “nano-degree” that directly trains students for a job with AT&T. This move is in line with a new government report that suggests that more cooperation between universities and businesses is the key to economic success in the future. However, Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is skeptical of nano-degrees. The degrees, he claims, are no substitute for a liberal arts degree.

Indeed not. Unlike a liberal arts degree, they will actually help you get a real job.

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“Sugar daddies”—the official moniker granted to these wealthy men—and the microcosm they occupy aren’t anything new, but they’ve become more mainstream in recent years. That they’ve emerged as a noteworthy group during America’s student-debt crisis is indicative of their growing prevalence—as well as that of “sugar babies,” the ones entrenched in that crisis. And the subculture—”daddies” and “babies” alike—appears to be expanding rapidly. 2014 saw a huge spike in sugar babies nationwide, especially in the southern states, according to new data from SeekingArrangement, a site where “babies” and “daddies” sign up and connect. The trend itself, let alone writing about it, might seem frivolous or demeaning. But the data could clarify what’s going wrong with the system and where those problems lie.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

Edward Luttwak explains how the Muslim Caliphate was no golden age.

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Archaeologists digging just outside of the castle gate have found traces of buildings from the 16th and late 15th centuries. Previously, it had been believed a town was built next to Dunluce Castle from 1608 – it was destroyed during an Irish uprising in 1641.

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A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine is adding to the evidence the CDC’s sodium advice is basically a superstition, that is to say, a belief or practice resulting from ignorance, fear of the unknown, trust in magic or chance, or a false conception of causation. In this case, the CDC and lots of physicians are buying into what has turned out to be a false conception of causation.

HAH!

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As 2015 legislatures swing back into action, several states are considering decreasing regulation of small-scale food producers, making it easier for residents to buy and sell homemade, farm-fresh products. Bills making their way through Connecticut, Virginia, and Wyoming statehouses would release “cottage foods” and products like raw milk from rules currently prohibiting direct kitchen-to-consumer sales.

“Cottage foods” are homemade items, such as baked goods and jams, deemed not especially hazardous from a food-safety perspective. The Connecticut General Assembly is considering a bill to legalize cottage food sales. “Under existing rules, specialty food companies must use licensed commercial kitchens, except in cases where food is sold to raise money for charitable causes, such as school bake sales,” notes the Stamford Advocate.

Rollin’ back the Nanny State.

The Wall Street Journal does its own variant on SOTU Bingo.

I’ll start: ‘White people suck. Raise taxes.’

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Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts.  He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.  His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority.  He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen.  He was not for democracy as his followers understood democracy, and as it actually is and must be; he was for a paternalism of the true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic or Ludendorffian pattern – a paternalism concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights.

— H. L. Mencken

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Just in case a mere Bingo card is not enough….

Cards Against Humanity is a party game for horrible people. Unlike most of the party games you’ve played before, Cards Against Humanity is as despicable and awkward as you and your friends.

The game is simple. Each round, one player asks a question from a black card, and everyone else answers with their funniest white card.

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You could have done that in Excel, you know….

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According to the Brandeis student newspaper, The Justice, Professor Donald Hindley will step down from the position he has held for over half of a century because, as he said, there are “far fewer … let me call them, activist, liberal-minded people” at Brandeis University.

Hard to know how to respond … good riddance? the system works? Of course, at Brandeis ‘too many conservatives on campus’ means some guy with a Real Job managed to wander onto the campus before he realized he was in the wrong neighborhood and escaped. But still.

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To which I would add: 1. Lies; 2. Evasions; 3. Bragging; 4. Higher taxes; 5. Race baiting.

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At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.

Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.

And that is a very sad story.

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Every recipe has both instructions and ingredients. So does the human genome. An error in the instructions can raise the risk for disease.

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Nice to learn that not sitting will let you live forever. Oh, wait….

Eric Raymond is Armed & Dangerous.

The problem is, maradydd’s attempt requires the feminists and social-justice warriors she is addressing to be fundamentally be about justice and inclusion, enough so that it is possible to change their behavior by appealing to those values. But that’s not what I see what I look at those people. What I see is thin rationalizations over bullying, dominance games, and an endless scream of monkey rage.

That sums up the Left better than anything else I’ve read.

Richard Fernandez provides some inconvenient truth.

Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute believes there should be a National Museum of Government Failure.  He argues that the displays at the Smithsonian would pale into insignificance if set beside the awe-inspiring sight of such things as the “$349 million on a rocket test facility that is completely unused“, the Superconducting Collider whose ruins include  nearly 15 miles of tunnel and the ex-future Yucca Mountain nuclear waste site.  Yet these artifacts, whose scale would surpass many a Lost City, are far from the worst failures.  The biggest fiascos by dollar value are the various government programs designed to win the war on drugs or poverty which after having spent trillions of dollars fruitlessly, lie somewhere in an unmarked bureaucratic grave.

Were Chris Edwards a distinguished economist he would realize at once that pointless activity is the best sort of government activity there is.  John Maynard Keynes couldn’t recommend it highly enough.  The great economist said that the best use of government effort was to bury money in a deep hole and employ the idled to dig them up again.

Read it. And watch the video.

Bilal Merhi is a prominent “Australian” scholar and intellectual whose kiddie jihad presentation last year made him (in)famous.

Well, he’s back. In the following news clip from Australian TV, you’ll see Mr. Merhi talking gleefully about the formation of a Muslim army in Australia that will subdue the coward kuffar and establish the rule of sharia Down Under.

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

If Obama actually were a secret Muslim, would he be doing anything differently?

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Be prepared.

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Alabama sits proudly at the top of the US teacher-pupil sex league, with one school employee per 193,975 residents being “accused or convicted” of engaging in illicit relations with a student during 2014.

That’s according to a enlightening study by Terry Abbott – “a former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Education” – whose team trawled the media for “every available report of teacher-student sex nationwide”.

They demonstrated that of 781 such cases last year, 25 occurred in the Yellowhammer State, which boasts a population of roughly 4.85 million.

Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Vermont complete Abbot’s top five, but if the figures are viewed on sheer weight of numbers alone, rather than an “outrage per capita” basis, then Texas actually tops the chart on points, clocking up 116 of the 781 cases.

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This Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Arizona, an important free speech case. Garrett Epps, a prominent law professor and contributor to the Atlantic, is deeply concerned that the Court will decide it in a way that leads to increased protection for speech that he does not like. Those who believe that the First Amendment should not be trumped by the subjective preferences of law professors should not fall under Epps’ spell.

What is the case about? The Town of Gilbert, Ariz., has a sign code that categorizes temporary signs and restricts their size, duration and location. Under the sign code, the Good News Community Church’s temporary signs promoting church services are subject to far greater restrictions than temporary signs promoting political, ideological and various other messages. That is, the sign code facially discriminates on the basis of the content of the messages communicated by the signs, effectively enabling government officials to act as censors.

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Last week the government commenced its prosecution of former CIA official Jeffrey Sterling for violation of the Espionage Act. The government alleges that Sterling leaked the details of a program intended to undermine Iran’s nuclear program to New York Times reporter James Risen. The program was subject to a security classification indicating its extreme sensitivity.

Sterling did not publicly disclose the details of the CIA program; he laundered them through Risen (with a promise from Risen’s to protect Sterling’s identity as the source). So the government alleges.

The government subpoenaed Risen to testify in the case. Risen declined, and the government has abandoned its efforts to compel him to testify. He works for the Times, and the Times is, after all, on Obama’s team. The case therefore continues without the benefit of Risen’s testimony.

…

If Sterling violated the Espionage Act, as the government alleges, it is even clearer that Risen did so too. He is subject to the same criminal liability as Sterling and other citizens for violation of the Espionage Act, but the government has confined the prosecution to Sterling and now it has also abandoned its claim to Risen’s testimony.

Selective prosecution is a hallmark of tyrannous regimes everywhere. When friends of those in power can ignore the law with impunity, then there is no justice, just a fight for power and influence, which is what we have in America today.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

One of the interesting questions in recent years is why when the respectable media decides to go all in on some story about evil white men murdering black baby bodies or raping coeds on broken glass, it so often turns out to be a humiliating factual fiasco, such as the White Hispanic or Ferguson or Haven Monahan. (And then, unsurprisingly, the blood libels lead to Nights of Real Broken Glass.)

You would think that in this giant country there’d be, by the Law of Large Numbers, unembarrassing actual injustices to overemphasize. No doubt there are, but The System isn’t good at focusing upon them.

So, it’s interesting to see how The System works. What we find in one case is a pretty hilariously out-of-touch-with-each-other alliance between an octogenarian Budapest billionaire with an Esperanto surname and a Ph.D. in philosophy and the Undocumented Shoppers.

George Soros and Michael Brown — not actually on the same wavelength.

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Mosheh ben Maimon, better known in the west as Maimonides, was one of the most famous Jewish philosophers and physicians of the Middle Ages. One of his many works was On Poisons and the Protection against Lethal Drugs, which he wrote up as a quick guide on dealing with animal bites and poisoning. The treatise was written in 1199 at the request of Saladin’s secretary, and proved to be very popular for centuries afterwards. Here is some of the advice that Maimonides gives on poisons.

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Last Friday, Badawi received the first 50 of his 1,000-lash sentence in front of a large crowd at the Al-Jafali mosque in the Saudi Arabian city of Jeddah. He was due to receive the next fifty lashes of his sentence on Friday this week, but the beatings have been suspended until next week as he is not medically fit for more lashes, doctors have ruled.

…

Good news, if it means a reprieve or reduction in sentence for Badawi. But he’s going to need a new legal adviser – because his former lawyer (and brother-in-law) Waleed Abu al-Khair was sentenced to more time prison by the Saudi authorities this week.

Last year, al-Khair was given a 15-year sentence for such diverse crimes as “insulting the judiciary and questioning the integrity of judges,” “harming the reputation of the state by communicating with international organizations,” and “preparing, storing and sending information that harms public order”.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

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Since this is NPR, they have a behind-the-scenes political agenda that comes out in the writing as if by accident. A good example is this paragraph:

This last point is crucial because it suggests that a choice-based system all by itself won’t necessarily increase equity. The most economically disadvantaged students may have parents who are making decisions differently from other families. These parents appear to be more interested in factors other than academic quality as the state defines it. Maybe they have access to different, or less, information. If this is true, choice could actually increase, rather than diminish, achievement gaps within a city.

The first sentence is striking: What does ‘equity’ have to do with anything? A choice-based system isn’t striving for ‘equity’ but for quality of education. That ‘economically disadvantaged’ (great PC style, there) parents make different decisions from ‘other families’ ought not to come as a surprise to a moderately intelligent individual, nor the fact that these parents like schools that are close, have extended hours, and lots of extracurricular activity — poor people use public schools as free day-care, a though that not only doesn’t occur to somebody writing for NPR, but which is a thought they are carefully trained not even to think.

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How about even one?

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

After all, those golf vacations at government expense don’t come cheap.

Oh, sure, they’re supposed to fund tax breaks for the ‘middle class’ but you know how long those last.

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“They picked them up by their arms and legs and held them over the brick furnace until their clothes caught fire. And then they threw them [alive] inside the furnace.” — Javeed Maseeh, family spokesman, concerning a Christian couple in Pakistan murdered on rumors they had burned verses from the Qur’an.

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No chance of it passing, of course — to0 much money is made from any government mandate for it to be killed — but they get credit for trying.

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Before Columbus everyone lived in happy villages buying each other a coke.  After Columbus everyone wanted — but couldn’t get — a job in Los Angeles.  Now the ruination will spread further afield. So far as we know never before has Pluto known hate, or for that matter love.  But henceforth it may, at least in principle. Man, having lost paradise once, has found it again, in superabundance on the planets and is for the second time in sacred history poised to ruin everything.

Concretely history has already started on the moon. Lawyers are already arguing over who owns it. And when that happens you know that Paradise is over.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, invites our attention to the Middle Kingdom.

The thorny tangles of identity, ethnicity, nation, and race, are made thornier under a state ideology based on utopian fantasies and the denial of reality.

Sound familiar? It should; it’s what we write about here at VDARE.com.

And very well, too.

The Communist Party’s policy towards the “nationalities question” has followed Lenin’s, as described in Book Two of Kolakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism. Their ethnicity is officially recognized (and recorded on personal i.d. cards). It is also to be celebrated, for example with minority dance troops showcased in TV spectaculars on national holidays. Their home regions, if big enough, are declared “autonomous.” They send representatives to regional and national legislatures. They enjoy some minor social privileges, notably exemption from the one-child policy.

The autonomy, however, like the legislatures, is perfectly bogus. Even to advocate self-determination for minorities is both an ideological sin (“splittism”) and a serious crime (Article 103). The Party center makes all significant political decisions, and it is totally Han Chinese.

…

(The January 11th “Unity March” in Paris following the Charlie Hebdo massacre, with a slew of world leaders at the head of the march, has raised much indignation on Chinese blogs. “Where’s our unity march?” they are asking, with reference to the Kunming incident. Short answer: Same place as the rest of your civil freedoms, pal. You live in a communist dictatorship.)

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Kent Ekeroth, a member of parliament for the Sweden Democrats, asked some pointed questions of the government about the its policy of allowing mujahideen to return “home” to Sweden from the jihad in Syria and Iraq.

Deputy Prime Minister Åsa Romson gave a telling response. Notice that she doesn’t want to interdict the jihad warriors because that would not prevent all terrorist attacks. In other words, it’s better to let a hundred Swedes die at the hands of terrorists than prevent the death of ninety of them via sensible border controls.

Welcome to Modern Multicultural Sweden!

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The administration has acknowledged that it erred by not participating in a meaningful way in the giant pro-free speech demonstration in Paris, so it has tried to make amends by sending John Kerry to France. Apparently thinking that he needed reinforcements to convey a full sense of the administration’s symbolic support, Kerry brought along…James Taylor.

…

God only knows what the French made of this. Maybe James Taylor is still popular there, like Jerry Lewis.

As Tom Lehrer said when describing the ‘Folksong Army’: ‘They may have won all the battles — but we had all the good songs!’

(Now just think about what kind of President Kerry would have been…. America really dodged a bullet there.)

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That may be because public schools are so shitty that anybody who can possibily afford to will send their kids to private schools (Catholic schools are a bargain) or homeschool them. I suspect that a lot of public school parents are single working people who use the public schools as a sort of free day care.

Of course one has to realize that ‘poor’ in America isn’t poor as the rest of the world sees it — color TVs, mobile phones, air conditioning, and both parents and kids clinically obese. ‘I want to come to America. I want to see a country where the poor people are fat.’ (Think I’m kidding? Walk into any welfare office in a major city. There will be a lot of corn-fed people sitting in the seats.)

Bee’s Wrap.

Stayhold.

Inexpensive Bluetooth Car Diagnostic Scanner.

Night Glow Toilet Seat.

FlicFloc Flaker. I am not making this up.

Seated Strider. My kind of exercise machine.

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100 years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: you walked across it.

Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.

100 years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: you walked across it.

Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.

‘Jaywalking’, like ‘price gouging’, ‘black marketeering’, and ‘hoarding’, is one of those made-up nasty-sounding terms the people create when you do what you want to do rather than what they want you to do. The Left are experts at this sort of propaganda (cf. ‘Islamophobia’ and the plethora of ‘-isms’ that normal people are presumed guilty of in these degenerate modern times). Governments like them, too, especially when they’re trying to abridge freedoms that in a saner time people would take for granted.