Read it.

In the United States failure appears to be a profit opportunity. Several  American friends have unaccountably offered me exactly  the same piece of sage advice.  ”Richard, never trust anyone who hasn’t failed.”  In their view anyone who hasn’t been flat broke at least once in his life has some kind of character defect. One acquaintance  wistfully recalled the time he lost his fortune and had to live out of his car, and how that motivated him to even greater wealth.  Maybe his last conscious thoughts when the time comes to cross the river will not be of the yacht anchored off the Riviera, or of starlit nights and steel guitars in Rio, but fond memories of a shower and shave at the CITGO rest room.

The downside to this laudable impulse to self-help is that very few American politicians are ever punished for their blunders.  The population apparently finds it easier to adapt.  It is easier to invent a new industry than start a political movement.

…

Megan McArdle notes the reason Vermont gave up on Single Payer was it would cost as much as everything the State was now spending. The problem isn’t how to divvy up the bill. The problem is the bill. Nobody can make the unaffordable affordable any more than guys at a clip joint can pay for the bottle service when the dollars in their pocket come up short. Asking the waiter for single or separate bills is irrelevant. The reason health care is so expensive is it already consists of a mass of workarounds.

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We’ll see that, in the North, the invention of the police was just one part of a state effort to manage and shape the workforce on a day-to-day basis. Governments also expanded their systems of poor relief in order to regulate the labor market, and they developed the system of public education to regulate workers’ minds. I will connect those points to police work later on, but mostly I’ll be focusing on how the police developed in London, New York, Charleston (South Carolina), and Philadelphia.

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With the smartphone revolution, an increasingly powerful new set of tools—from attachments that can diagnose an ear infection or track heart rhythms to an app that can monitor mental health—can reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care and give more power to patients. Digital avatars won’t replace physicians: You will still be seeing doctors, but the relationship will ultimately be radically altered. (I consult for several companies on many of the issues discussed here.)

All of this raises serious issues about hacking and personal privacy that haven’t yet been addressed—and the accuracy of all of these tools needs to be tested. People are also right to worry that the patient-doctor relationship could be eroded, diminishing the human touch in medicine. But the transformation is already under way.

Read it.

Of course, that ought to read ‘… that ought to have …’, but nobody teaches grammar in the schools these days.

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The WarkaWater tower is an unlikely structure to find jutting from the Ethiopian landscape. At 30 feet tall and 13 feet wide, it’s not half as big as its namesake tree (which can loom 75 feet tall), but it’s striking nonetheless. The spindly tower, of latticed bamboo lined with orange polyester mesh, isn’t art—though it does kind of look like it. Rather, the structure is designed to wring water out of the air, providing a sustainable source of H₂O for developing countries.

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Frankly, everything about the career, the business of science, is constructed to impoverish and disenfranchise young scientists, delaying the maturation of their careers beyond practicality.

I don’t know why this comes as news to so many people.  It certainly came as news to my parents, who never finished college and who thought that getting a PhD would put me on the fast track to stability and financial freedom.

If I stay in science, it won’t.

Good thing none of us plan on doing that, then….

Read it.

…merely trying to keep your email secure is now viewed in Spain as evidence that you are a terrorist.

This sort of thing is why you don’t want to be a European.

Richard Fernandez looks at government in the modern world.

At a time when Medicaid payments to doctors are being slashed because federal funds are drying up; when insurance premiums are being raised to provide “subsidies” for others, when the Armed Forces Budget is being cut to the bone and beyond, it is astonishing that people at the highest levels of government can still talk about giving people something for nothing.

The shocking thing isn’t that Obama would propose a free lunch.  What is really scandalous is that he may actually think the thing exists.

But that’s the world we live in. Venezuela is a country where nobody in authority knows where things sold in stores come from.  Washington is a town where nobody knows how anything is paid for.  The New York Times is a paper where nobody knows what anything is called.  The FBI is probably the best off of the bunch.  All they have to do is figure out what to charge David Petraeus with.

The public stage is filled with the sound and fury of people who still think they are in charge.  Most have risen to the pinnacles of their professions according to an insular set of rules which signified something once, but which have become vestigial without anyone noticing. “Who sent you?” And so it goes. None of them have realized they’ve become passengers on a vast ship they’ve forgotten how to sail. For them things just seem a a little different lately, and are even a little worried, but they can’t tell you why.

Meal Snap. (phone app)

Plastic Storage Caps for Wide Mouth Canning Jars.

Lasers in the Service of Ending Baldness.

SkyBell doorbell.

Cryptex USB drive.

Subzero Warm Breath Balaklava. Perfect for robbing a post-Apocalypse bank.

Poop Emoji Pillow. We all know someone for whom this is the perfect gift.

Lockpick School in a Box.

Compleat FoodBag.

Anti-Paparazzi Clothing Collection.

Read it.

Perhaps because the government is trying to do the job of a free market, and failing badly.

Of course, the Guardian can’t say that — indeed, they (being socialists) can’t even see that — so it’s no wonder they’re puzzled.

Steve Sailer has good commenters.

The Left is an amorphous religion from which one cannot claim religious freedom, because the Religion of Political Correctness has never been formally declared. But it has its own dogma – racial and gender quality, etc. It has its own scriptures – poems like “The New Colossus,” and plays like The Crucible. It has its own hymns – “Imagine.” It has its own deities, including one – The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Junior – with his own holiday. “Public schools” are now effectively parochial schools owned and run by the Religion of Political Correctness.

Read it.

Your guilt is the main weapon wielded by the politically correct. Take it away.

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The first duty of any government is to protect its people.

John C. Wright reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

Islam is Shariah Law. Shariah Law is Islam.

As impossible as it is for the Western mind to grasp this, Islam is a theopolitical party first and foremost, not a political party supporting an established church. There is no church in Islam.

That this theocratic political party has broken into aristocratic and populist camps, as political parties are wont to do, Sunni and Shiite, but this does not make them what we in the West call a denomination. Theocracy certainly has political elements, but it would be wrong to call “Theocracy” a religious sect or denomination.

So when we ask why the moderate Muslims do not check the excesses of the unorthodox radicals among them, the answer is that the violent Muslims are the orthodox and moderate wing, and the moderates are the radicals far from the mainstream of Muslim official teaching, Muslim history, Muslim thought and Muslim practice.

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Raif Badawi was sentenced to 1,000 lashes – he received the first 50 in a public square in Jeddah Friday – along with 10 years in prison and a fine equal to $266,666, Reuters reports. His crime? Creating a website called “Free Saudi Liberals,” which advocated greater religious freedom. Saudi Arabia found this “insulting to Islam.”

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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Send your kid to a government school
And he will turn out a fool.
That’s the way
things are today;
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

Another thumb-sucker from the Washington Post.

Most of America’s richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country’s most financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” America’s least financially secure, meanwhile, vehemently disagree — nearly 70 percent say the poor have hard lives because the benefits “don’t go far enough.” Nationally, the population is almost evenly split.

Note that the poor think their lives are hard because they don’t have it easy enough. Cry me a river.

Why the surprising lack of compassion? It’s hard to say.

But he’s going to pull something out of his ass anyway, ignoring the plain truth that people who have to work for a living don’t have a lot of affection for those who don’t have to work for a living.

At the very top, the sentiment is likely tied to conservatism, which traditionally bemoans government programs that redistribute wealth, calling them safety nets.

Sorry, but ‘the very top’ are more likely to be liberal than conservative — look at political contributions and public utterances (but that would disturb The Narrative, so shhhh….) And don’t spend a lot of time trying to make sense of that sentence grammatically, because it can’t be done; ‘conservatism’ doesn’t call government attempts to redistribute wealth ‘safety nets’, but theft — it’s ‘progressivism’ that calls such programs ‘safety nets’, in order to escape the thought that they’re, you know, theft. (Maybe the author thinks people like Obama are conservative; that’s the only explanation that makes sense grammatically, if not intellectually.)

Some 40 percent of the financially secure are politically conservative, according to Pew.

Which means that 60% aren’t … there goes the ‘likely tied to conservatism’ canard. Really, does anybody read this stuff before it gets published?

And conservatives are even more likely to say the “poor have it easy” than the rich — a recent Pew survey found that more than three quarters of conservatives feel that way.

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

More broadly, the prevalence of the view might reflect an inability to understand the plight of those who have no choice but to seek help from the government. A quarter of the country, after all, feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don’t work hard enough.

‘No choice’? There’s an assumption you could drive a truck through, loaded with taxpayer dollars. And if a quarter of the country feels that the poor don’t work hard enough, then three-quarters of the country don’t feel that way, so another paragraph bites the dust.

I’ve seen more intellectual rigor come out of the Miss America contest.

Lileks has some comments to make.

One of the murdered French cops was Muslim, and it seems a shame this has been swamped by the discussion of the murder of the magazine’s staff. It is not Islamophobic to note that he was killed by a co-religionist for being on the wrong side of the ledger at that particular moment; it is revelatory of the narrow definitions the murderers apply. I hope France reveres his memory as much as the cartoonist who didn’t share his beliefs.

And that’s important to note: Not even being Muslim oneself will protect one from the more-Muslim-than-thou crowd.

To see people who enjoy the benefits and diversions of Western Civ nod with understanding when illustrators are shot in the head for inappropriate drawings – it suggests that there are people who respond to such events as though a tuning fork had been struck. It is impossible to know how many people heard the resonance of the note. It is impossible to know how many first felt understanding but immediately, or subsequently, revised their emotions. It’s a case of “the cartoons were wrong BUT” vs. “the murders were wrong BUT”. Who knows how that played out in the minds of millions, and at what pace? It’s not a question you can answer, but that doesn’t mean it’s a question you can’t ask.

…

If there is pride in Europe among these people, it is a nonexistent state they believe they can will into existence, a version cleaned of its historical sins by the elimination of its national (i.e. sectarian) divisions. Okay, okay,: you had a bad experience with nationalism a hundred years ago. Get over it.

Read it.

I’m surprised it’s that high.

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Dean’s formula is consistent with the syllogism we have heard many times from American politicians: Islam is a religion of peace; terrorists aren’t peaceful; therefore the terrorists are not “true” Muslims.

The problem is that someone forgot to tell a great many of the Prophet’s followers. A poll taken by ICM in August, for example, found that 16% of French respondents have a positive opinion of ISIS. Among French youth, ages 18-24, a whopping 27% said they have a positive view of ISIS. This is a little mystifying, as there are reported to be five million Muslims out of France’s population of 66 million, or around seven percent. It is hard to see where the remaining support for ISIS, as reported by ICM, would come from.

Read it. And watch the video for some laughs.

You didn’t watch it, did you? You totally didn’t. It’s only three minutes! How could you not possibly want to watch Boxer, 74, answer staged questions from her own grandson in what looks like a Marriott timeshare condo somewhere?

The Other McCain dishes the dirt.

Most people don’t know what Islam actually teaches, and those who tell the truth about Islam are often denounced as warmongers, bigots and even “racists.” Islam is a religion not a race, of course, and Muslims of every race murder non-believers of every race. Some of the most dreadful savagery committed in the name of Islam has been perpetrated against Africans. The claim that critics of Islam are “warmongers” is even more absurd: Islam is at war with us, whether we fight back or not.

The most influential Muslim leaders are determined to annihilate every Jew in Israel and, because the United States is Israel’s strongest ally, America has been branded “The Great Satan.”

Nothing we say or do as Americans — no policy of our government — can ever appease our Islamic enemies. Even if we were to abandon our alliance with Israel, the resulting slaughter of every Jew in Israel would only be the prelude to our own slaughter. Islam commands this, it requires this, and we should be grateful to the editors of USA Today for allowing Anjem Choudary to tell us the truth….

Read it.

For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to theHarvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

The biter bit, so to speak. Like Pseudolus being completely impervious to pain (other people’s).

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With great fanfare, Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown and a host of other politicians signed a rail in Fresno as a symbolic gesture toward starting construction of California’s high-speed rail project. But, despite what they say, California can’t afford to build it, and the plan they can’t afford won’t really be high-speed rail all the way from Los Angeles to San Francisco anyway.

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Republicans and Fox News viewers are more likely to hold false beliefs about the president and the war in Iraq, according to a new poll.

…

Overall, 42 percent still believe that troops discovered WMDs, a misleading factor in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It was later found that Iraq did have individual stockpiles of chemical weapons, but there was no active WMD program in the country.

Then I guess it’s not a ‘false belief’, then, is it? There’s a world of difference between ‘no WMDs’ and ‘no active WMD program’.

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Antibiotic resistance is spreading faster than the introduction of new compounds into clinical practice, causing a public health crisis. Most antibiotics were produced by screening soil microorganisms, but this limited resource of cultivable bacteria was overmined by the 1960s. Synthetic approaches to produce antibiotics have been unable to replace this platform. Uncultured bacteria make up approximately 99% of all species in external environments, and are an untapped source of new antibiotics. We developed several methods to grow uncultured organisms by cultivation in situ or by using specific growth factors. Here we report a new antibiotic that we term teixobactin, discovered in a screen of uncultured bacteria. Teixobactin inhibits cell wall synthesis by binding to a highly conserved motif of lipid II (precursor of peptidoglycan) and lipid III (precursor of cell wall teichoic acid). We did not obtain any mutants of Staphylococcus aureus or Mycobacterium tuberculosis resistant to teixobactin. The properties of this compound suggest a path towards developing antibiotics that are likely to avoid development of resistance.

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California lawmakers approved the law in 2004, but it wasn’t until 2012 when it took effect. It requires the state to “prohibit a person from force-feeding a bird for the purpose of enlarging the bird’s liver beyond a normal size” and bans sales of out-of-state foie gras. While vendors faced fines of up to $1,000, residents were still allowed to possess the delicacy and eat it.

Two out-of-state foie gras producers, and a California restaurant that was forced to gut foie gras dishes from its menu, sued the Golden State to get it overturned.

In his ruling, U.S. District Judge Stephen V. Wilson held that the foie gras ban was preempted by a federal law regulating the distribution and sale of poultry products.

Read it.

An online auction to join a man on his honeymoon after he split with his fiancée has reached £1,800.

Instead of cancelling his holiday for two to the Dominican Republic, John Whitbread decided to offer the chance to join him to the highest eBay bidder.

After an “overwhelming” response from 65 bidders, he has said he will donate some of the money to charity.

Read it.

Four of France’s most revered cartoonists – Stephane Charbonnier, Georges Wolinski, Bernard ‘Tignous’ Verlhac and Jean Cabut – were among 12 people executed by masked gunmen in Paris today at the offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Two masked men brandishing Kalashnikovs burst into the magazine’s headquarters this morning, opening fire on staff, also shooting dead revered economist and contributor Bernard Maris, 68.

Police officers were involved in a gunfight with the ‘calm and highly disciplined men’, who escaped in a hijacked car, speeding away towards east Paris. They remain on the loose, along with a third armed man.

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“Several men in black cagoules were heard to shout ‘the Prophet has been avenged'”, wrote Pierre de Cossette, a broadcast journalist with Europe1 News.

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

Read it.

TrackingPoint is an Austin startup known for precision-guided firearms and has also experimented with Google Glass, letting you shoot from behind cover. The company, which is here at CES Showstoppers, has just announced ShotView, an iOS and Google Play app that lets a hunter stream video from his or her gun to anyone in the world. And the press release is very clear about its place in the tech world:

Watch it. And feel free to laugh.

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Top-level boffins say they have discovered a valuable new tool for mapping the genetic history of sheep: namely, the extraction of DNA from old documents, which are generally written on parchment made from the skin of sheep or other animals.

…

The great thing about this is that legal documents are normally exactly dated and carefully preserved. Unlike bones, for instance, you don’t need to dig them up – they’re already in archives ready organised.

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And we wonder why the government sucks so badly.

Matt Forney turns over a rock.

With the war between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD escalating to DEFCON 2, you’d think the people who need the police the most would stop biting the hand that protects them. But no one ever went broke overestimating the ungratefulness of the corn-fed hipsters who dominate the Big Apple’s media megaphone. Case in point: Gawker’s Andy Cush decries the force as “pathetic crybabies” and “an embarrassment to the city of New York.”

After trying to mentally calculate how much cheese Cush would need for his whine, I decided to do a little research into the guy. To the surprise of no one, he lives in Brooklyn and is not a New York native. According to his Facebook profile, Cush hails from the Baltimore suburb of Severna Park, confirming my belief that any town that has “park” in the name is a worthless cultural void.

Read it.

THE North and South Poles are “not melting”, according to a leading global warming expert. In fact, the poles are “much more stable” than climate scientists once predicted and could even be much thicker than previously thought. For years, scientists have suggested that both poles are melting at an alarming rate because of warming temperatures – dangerously raising the Earth’s sea levels while threatening the homes of Arctic and Antarctic animals.

But the uncertainty surrounding climate change and the polar ice caps reached a new level this month when research suggested the ice in the Antarctic is actually growing.

And there could even be evidence to suggest the polar bear population is not under threat.

Ted Maksym, an oceanographer at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, conducted a study in which he sent an underwater robot into the depths of the Antarctic sea to measure the ice.

His results contradicted previous assumptions made by scientists and showed that the ice is actually much thicker than has been predicted over the last 20 years.

Dr Benny Peiser, from the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF), said this latest research adds further proof to the unpredictability of the supposed effects of global warming.

Heh,

Read it.

ARNHEM, Netherlands—Two dozen scruffy skateboarders launched perilous jumps in a soaring old church building here on a recent night, watched over by a mosaic likeness of Jesus and a solemn array of stone saints.

This is the Arnhem Skate Hall, an uneasy reincarnation of the Church of St. Joseph, which once rang with the prayers of nearly 1,000 worshipers.

It is one of hundreds of churches, closed or threatened by plunging membership, that pose a question for communities, and even governments, across Western Europe: What to do with once-holy, now-empty buildings that increasingly mark the countryside from Britain to Denmark?

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

But why do these nonsensical accounts get perpetuated?

The study of the workings (and failures) of the Megaphone is one of the central subjects of our time, but we lack even a word for the subject. Perhaps Megaphonics will do?

It’s a sprawling topic, so I’m only going to cover a few elements of Megaphonics here.

…

For example, the hammer murder of Bosnian immigrant Zemir Begic in St. Louis last week for the offense of being white after midnight terrified the local establishment into a paroxysm of lying. The mayor and police chief explained how the minority mob, which shouted “Kill the white people,” couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with the mob violence in nearby Ferguson.

Why? Although Bosnian Muslims are not terribly tough by Balkan standards—back home in the 1990s they got shoved around by Serbs and Croats the way the poor little Ferguson shopkeeper got shoved around by Michael Brown—they are still much more likely to respond to communal violence in kind than are American-born whites.

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My grandfather spent most of his life in Diyarbakir, a garrison town in southeastern Turkey. Magnificent old walls surround the city; built of black volcanic rock, they were begun by the Romans and then added to by Arabs and Ottomans. In 1915, the Ottomans turned the city, the surrounding province, and much of modern-day Turkey into a killing field, in a campaign of massacres and forced expulsions that came to be known as the Armenian genocide. The plan was to eradicate the empire’s Armenians—“a deadly illness whose cure called for grim measures”—and it was largely successful. The Ottomans killed more than a million people, but, somehow, not my grandfather.

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After mounting legal fees and media scrutiny, the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority (PRA) dropped its case to seize artist James Dupree’s Mantua-based studio and turn the property into a grocery store.

Dupree and his supporters welcomed PRA’s announcement on their blog: “After years of fighting the system, we have finally received written notice that the deed to our property is finally being returned!”

…

In their release statement PRA says, “the inability to acquire Mr. Dupree’s property puts the prospect of bringing fresh food to this community at serious risk,” such as “obesity, heart disease, [and] diabetes.”

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While lauding a tool that facilitates incomplete success may seem absurd, such a tool is essential to getting successful systems built. Access allowed users to actualize the systems that they wanted, and those systems that passed subsequent peer review created user demand and demonstrated efficacy. This situation was no cul-de-sac, as many such systems were eventually re-implemented by specialists using more professional tools. Without Access, arguably, those systems would not have been implemented at all.

In other words, don’t let The Best be the enemy of The Good.

Read it.

Fuck your trauma.

Yes, fuck your trauma. My sympathy for your suffering, whether that suffering was real or imaginary, ended when you demanded I change my life to avoid bringing up your bad memories. You don’t seem to have figured this out, but there is no “I must never be reminded of a negative experience” expectation in any culture anywhere on earth.

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A fine example of what I call ‘horseshit social science’ — basically, an extended example of confusing correlation with causation. (No good reason is given for restricting the treatment to ‘white non-farm U.S.-born men’ except the obvious: that’s the data he had available.)

An example crap conclusion:

College-educated men and women are the privileged players in our transformed economy: They can pool two incomes and provide a solid financial foundation for a marriage. In contrast, we have seen declines in marriage among high school graduates who are stuck in the middle of the labor market, where they can no longer find the kind of steady, decently paying employment that supported their grandparents’ marriages.

While it’s true that having two professional incomes is a Very Good Thing, people rarely marry on the basis of their partner’s contribution to the family wealth pool. If it were, and two such instances of homo economicus were looking at marriage, surely it would be obvious that for those whose income is uncertain pooling endeavors is far more advantageous than going it alone; hence we would expect non-rich people to marry with greater frequency than rich people, just out of a desire for self-preservation. Yet that is not the conclusion.

And this guy works at Johns Hopkins, a premium U.S. university. A more glaring example of the decline in intellectual standards in modern academia would be difficult to find, except that it’s depressingly common.

And why would a respected publication like The New York Times print such a thumbsucker? Because it supports the ‘progressive’ Narrative, of course; All The News That Fits Our Rants is the new motto.

Read it.

One can always tell what’s fashionable by what sort of things get covered by the Usual Suspects. To see the New Yorker cover a canal in MesoAmerica is certainly suggestive of the Next Big Thing with ‘progressives’.

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Devising a way to one day land astronauts on Mars is a complex problem and NASA scientists think something as simple as a child’s toy design may help solve the problem. Safely landing a large spacecraft on the Red Planet is just one of many engineering challenges the agency faces as it eyes an ambitious goal of sending humans into deep space later this century.

Read it.

Governor Palin, for whatever reason, continues to be catnip to liberals. I can’t explain it; the only observation I can offer is that there is something about attractive conservative women–Palin, Michelle Malkin, Michele Bachmann, younger generation conservatives like Dana Loesch–that causes liberals to take leave of their senses.

Read it.

More important that you might think.

According to Prana, there is a vast difference between breathing through your belly and chest breathing. The way you sit affects which way you are most likely pulling air into your lungs. Persidsky says this affects everything from back problems to overall stress levels. “Think about when stress is elevated. You are sitting in your office with a million things to do, you slump down, you start with short, shallow breaths. You need to sit up and breath in a way to counteract that,” he says.

From the diaphragm! From the diaphragm!

The Other McCain does a fisking.

Lisa Bonos (@lisabonos) has published a column headlined “How to find a feminist boyfriend” that reads like an Onion parody….

Read it.

An infrared laser pulse briefly modifies the structure of a high-temperature superconductor and thus removes its electrical resistance even at room temperature.

This is HUGE.