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In 2014, we’ve been repeatedly informed of the urgency of blacks seizing the control of the municipal government of obscure Ferguson, MO, even though that didn’t seem to be a priority of many of the black people who actually lived in Ferguson. An instructive comparison is Detroit, which enjoyed black mayors for four decades until it finally became so depopulated that it now has a white mayor.

Unfortunately, ‘black rule’ means kleptocrat Democrat rule, with results as you see them.

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You first.

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‘The idea occurred to me straight away,’ says Ferroni from his home in Umbria, Italy, having just made a return trip to Mali. This idea was, in essence, a simply constructed, transportable light post. The principal materials are largely re-purposed items: a bicycle wheel, a water pipe, an aluminium stand, a solar panel and a 15-watt rechargeable LED module, the only piece that needs to be imported. The water pipe becomes the lamp’s telescopic post, while the bicycle wheel provides portability, one of the design’s main assets. Constructing the unit can take a couple of days or months, depending on the availability of materials and the disposition of the local craftsmen.

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Producing usable penicillin from Penicillium notatum mold was no easy feat, says PBS: “In spite of efforts to increase the yield from the mold cultures, it took 2,000 liters of mold culture fluid to obtain enough pure penicillin to treat a single case of sepsis in a person.”

Pencilin production couldn’t happen nearly fast enough to match rising demand. To make up the shortfall, writes Rebecca Kreston for her Body Horrors blog at Discover Magazine, researchers came up with a novel way to get the penicillin they needed: extracting and isolating it from patients’ urine.

Not all of the penicillin given to a patient is broken down. Some—in fact, most—of the penicillin passes through the body unchanged.

Lefty rag Business Insider actually has some worthwhile information for a change.

It may be 2015 already, but in 2014 we saw some truly amazing scientific discoveries. We landed a probe on a comet, discovered new particles that further our knowledge of the physics of the universe, and learned more about the properties of the wonder-material graphene, which could eventually transform everything from fuel cell technology to battery and computing power and more.

2014 was a great year.

Cryptex USB Flash Drive.

Butterfly Spring Door Closer.

Headgehog Multitool.

Wall Outlet Space Heater.

Potato-chip Flavored Chocolate. I am not making this up.

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That spatial concept described the until then nameless megalopolis straddling the European continent, stretching from the industrial cities in the northwest of England to their counterparts in the northern part of Italy, also including densely populated, highly industrialised areas in the Benelux countries, France, Germany and Switzerland.

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George P. Bush was sworn in Friday as Texas land commissioner. The 38-year-old political newcomer sat next to his father in the Texas Senate while formally taking the reins of the state agency that oversees vast oil and mineral rights.

The next generation of Bush volunteers to serve as the butt of ‘progressive’ straw-men for the rest of his life.

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The political system, as described in civics textbooks (to the degree the public schools still teach civics) and by Capitol legislators, is a temple of democracy, where elected officials solve problems and do the public’s work. But Buchanan realized that people who work for government are as motivated by economics as those who work outside of it.

They seek power and money within their organizations, just like everyone else.

This not-so-glamorous theory helps explain why most of California’s long-term financial problems are tied to one source — the unsustainable levels of compensation paid to state and municipal workers. Sacramento budget issues revolve around underfunded public-employee pensions, unfunded retiree medical care and the like.

As Jerry Pournelle likes to say, ‘The object of government is to hire and pay government employees.’

James Pethokoukis connects the dots.

Taxes on businesses aren’t paid by businesses, they’re paid by their customers — it’s just a roundabout sales tax with the business acting as a conscripted collection agent for the IRS.

No corporate income tax, no million-dollar lobbyists in Washington buying legislators (and their staff) to carve out billion-dollar tax breaks for their cronies … which is the real reason why it will never happen. Nevertheless, people deserve to know the truth, even if they ignore it as they cast their votes for King Putt and the inhabitants of the Democrat Klown Kar.

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I can find no record of any baby being taken from a hospital because its birth was announced right after midnight on New Year’s Eve. But that doesn’t stop the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children—funded, in part, by government dollars—from turning a joyous event into one requiring new oversight and worry.

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When Carly Guthrie was running HR for Per Se, one of the hottest restaurants in New York, the general manager gave her a piece of advice: “You know, Carly,” he said. “If we’re doing our job as leaders, a performance review should only be two columns: Column A is what you do great and Column B is what you do not-so-great. Now, here’s how we move things from Column B to Column A.”

That makes too much sense to ever happen.

Sarah Hoyt does some heavy lifting.

My first thought about this was – and this is paraphrased, because I can’t find the precise book and quote – PJ O’Rourke’s view on Arabs vs. the US. After being told, in the same breath, that someone hated the US and was waiting for a student visa, he said something like: they hate us and they love us. We are a ravishing 20 year old girl and they’re a pimply 13 year old boy. They want to punish us and they want to have us. Every minute of their waking lives is filled with thoughts of us, and they can’t stand that we rarely give them any thought at all.

The loves part might seem odd, but the more I turned this idea in my head, the more it made sense, in the same way the Arabs “love” the US. They want to live here and make us like them. It’s the love of an abusive spouse who wants to control you.

In the same way, we know how the left acts about minority and women who don’t toe the line. They “love” us in the abstract and can’t imagine why we will not let them “love” us for our own good. (Gee, no wonder these people inflate rape statistics in colleges. This is their idea of love and support.)

Further, like a 20 year old woman has ideas an concerns beyond the realm of a 13 year old boy, we have ideas and concerns beyond them. Once we’d exploded the Marxist lies, a whole world was open to us that those clinging to the safe “narrative” they were taught and afraid of their peers derision can’t imagine.

Further, just like most Arab societies are prisoners of the dictates of Islam that retard scientific (and other) development, these people are prisoners of dictates, such as the hierarchy of victims, which neither allow them to think nor to create freely. And they can’t imagine why or how we do what we do? Can’t we understand this makes us “apostates” from polite society? How can we NOT care?

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Modern terrorism is in many ways just a revival of customary tribal retaliation or the application of ‘guilt by association’. The September 11 hijackers had no particular beef with the individuals in the World Trade Center. They were out to slaughter anyone in New York. None of the people in New York had to be individually guilty of anything. They were simply the most handy targets available to expiate the collective Western guilt for its real or imagined offenses against Islam.

The participants of the Jihad see it as a matter of “them” against “us”. Even though Western politicians are at pains to deny there is any “them”, “they” know who “they” are, despite the fact that “we” do not acknowledge who “we” are.  ’Us’ versus ‘them’ pervades everything. When the Taliban could not strike at the Pakistan military directly it struck at the Pakistani Army Public School in Peshawar.  The hand-wringing articles asking why innocent children were attacked miss the point completely.  To the Taliban there are no “innocent children”.  In a world of collective guilt there is naturally only collective punishment.

…

In the Western legal model it  is illegitimate to impose “collective punishment” and being unable to do so, nothing is done.  There is a strict  injunction against profiling Muslims and other groups precisely because group guilt is forbidden.  And that is as it should be, if the taboo is to be maintained. Collective punishment is a very destructive and blunt model which arises from a lack of information and a conviction that discrimination is a hopeless task.

But the prohibition does not run the other way.  There is no strong taboo among ISIS or al-Qaeda, for example, against punishing individual Jews for the collective guilt of Israeli existence. It is enough to kill a Jew, any Jew. It doesn’t matter who.  Their model of punishment doesn’t require detailed information.

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Cancer immunotherapy comes in several forms. The drugs sparking the most interest are called checkpoint inhibitors. They work by releasing the natural brakes on the immune system, enabling its foot soldiers, called T cells, to attack tumors.

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Despite what the name may suggest, New College is one of Oxford’s oldest. Founded in 1379, at its heart lies a dining hall that features expansive oak beams across its ceiling. About a century ago, an entomologist discovered that the beams were infested with beetles and would need replacing. The College agonized over where they might find oaks of sufficient size and quality to make new beams. Then, as Stewart Brand recounts,

One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some worthy oaks on the College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country which are run by a college Forester. They called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked him if there were any oaks for possible use.

He pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”

‘Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks had been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for over five hundred years saying “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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This isn’t a case of a protein going rogue. It seems to be part of the recycling process that occurs when there’s a mistake in a protein being built. When an error is introduced, the ribosomes stall and call in a group of quality control proteins, including Rqc2. In observing this process, the researchers saw how Rqc2 links up with the transfer RNA and tells it to insert a random sequence of two amino acids into the chain (out of 20 total amino acids).

The researchers believe that Rqc2’s seemingly aberrant behavior might be an integral part of keeping your body free of faulty proteins. It’s possible that it is flagging the protein for destruction, or that the string of amino acids could be a test to see if the ribosome is working properly. People with disorders like Alzheimers and Huntingtons diseases have defective quality control processes for their proteins. Understanding the exact conditions where Rqc2 is triggered, and where it fails to trigger, are the next step in this research, and could be important for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

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One hundred years ago today, a lethal jihad attack was staged against New Year’s Day picnickers in Broken Hill, Australia. This attack and the recent Martin Place siege, events separated by almost exactly a century, show striking similarities.

Yet another centennial.

Lion of the Blogosphere has the solution.

Why have crime rates fallen so much during the last two decades?

I say that a major contributor is that teenagers are busy at home playing videogames, or using social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. Teenagers at home addicted to videogames, computers and iPhones means that they are not out on the streets getting themselves into trouble.

This means that the government could help nudge crime even lower by providing free videogames and internet access to poor families.

This is the ‘circuses’ half of the ‘bread & circuses’ formula. Coupled with Food Stamps, it gives us the same solution that the Romans discovered 2,000 years ago. And look how it worked for them!

The Other McCain is on the case.

In what was slated as a peaceful “March to the Arch” by Ferguson demonstrators, more than two dozen people were arrested and pepper spray was used by police. The melee unfolded as protesters tried to storm the St. Louis Metropolitan Police headquarters building.

Sounds like Iraq or Afghanistan. Perhaps we ought to send in some snipers.

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Paul Rozin, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in our taste for heat in the 1970s, when he began to wonder why certain cultures favor highly spicy foods. He traveled to a village in Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, to investigate, focusing on the differences between humans and animals. The residents there ate a diet heavy in chili-spiced food. Had their pigs and dogs also picked up a taste for it?

“I asked people in the village if they knew of any animals that liked hot pepper,” Dr. Rozin said in an interview. “They thought that was hilariously funny. They said: No animals like hot pepper!” He tested that observation, giving pigs and dogs there a choice between an unspicy cheese cracker and one laced with hot sauce. They would eat both snacks, but they always chose the mild cracker first.

Next, Dr. Rozin tried to condition rats to like chilies. If he could get them to choose spicy snacks over bland ones, it would show that the presence of heat in cuisine was probably a straightforward matter of adaptation. He fed one group of rats a peppery diet from birth; another group had chili gradually added to its meals. Both groups continued to prefer nonspicy food. He spiked pepper-free food with a compound to make the rats sick, so they would later find it disgusting—but they still chose it over chili-laced food. He induced a vitamin-B deficiency in some rats, causing various heart, lung and muscular problems, then nursed them back to health with chili-flavored food: This reduced but didn’t eliminate their aversion to heat.

Actually, ‘we’ don’t like spicy food — I avoid it in the same way that I avoid cigarettes, whisky, hip-hop, and other Stupid Stuff People Do.

Instapundit turns over a rock.

“What if I told you,” asks a Matrix-themed photo-meme that has been circulating on Facebook, “that you can be against cops murdering citizens and citizens murdering cops at the same time?”

Judging by the past few weeks, this really is a Matrix-level revelation, obvious as it may seem. We have Americans protesting because of police shootings, and we have police turning their backs on New York City’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio over lack of support after two police were assassinated by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, a gunman from Baltimore who said he was seeking revenge for the choking death of cigarette-tax evader Eric Garner.

And, as blogger Eric Raymond notes, the response has been divided: “Because humans are excessively tribal, it’s difficult now to call for justice against Eric Garner’s murderers without being lumped in with the ‘wrong side.’ Nor will Garner’s partisans, on the whole, have any truck with people who aren’t interested in poisonously racializing the circumstances of his death.”