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Digesting yeast is no mean feat. Yeast surround themselves with a difficult-to-digest structure called a cell wall. Yet common gut bacteria called Bacteroides thetaiotaomicron are able to munch their way through a complex carbohydrate, called alpha-mannan, that appears in the cell walls of bread and brewer’s yeast, researchers have found. A team of biologists and chemists from research centers in Europe and the U.S. ran the study by growing different gut bacteria species in a lab and feeding them only yeast-made mannan. Those bacteria that didn’t die must have been surviving on the mannan, the team concluded. Further tests revealed the complex chemical processes the bacteria used to break down alpha-mannan, a molecule that few other micoorganisms are able to digest.

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Worse than Hillary? Whoa, that’s cold.

But just think of what a great President he would have been!

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This line is the first of its kind, making Kingsman the first film where you can buy every outfit you see in the movie. In fact, this project has been in works since day one of the film’s production. In a recent promo video, the film’s costume designer talks about how they designed the actors’ clothes with the intention of being able to market them later (the film’s original title, The Secret Service, was even changed to Kingsman: The Secret Service after the second was deemed more marketable as a clothing label).

…

Now, we have Kingsman, where you can buy exactly what the actors are wearing, and the film’s producers get a cut.

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Apparently Obama is an unconscious white supremacist. Who knew?

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

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The story begins, as ever, with a small group of social justice-minded community elites who sought to establish themselves as the arbiters of social mores. This group would decide who deserved a presence in SFF and who deserved to be ostracised.

Their victims are littered across the SFF community. In 2013, the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) were targeted by a shirtstorm-like cyber-mob of digital puritans after one of their cover editions was deemed to be “too sexual.” The controversy did not die down until two of its most respected writers, Mike Resnick and Barry Malzburg, were dismissed from the publication. This occurred despite a vigorous counter-campaign by liberal members of the sci-fi community, including twelve Nebula award winners and three former presidents of the SFWA. 

Unfortunately, the current crop of elite figures in the SFF community have become either apologists or out-and-out cheerleaders for intolerance and censorship. Redshirts author John Scalzi, a close friend of  anti-anonymity crusader Wil Wheaton – was head of the SFWA at the time of the controversy and quickly caved in to activist pressure. This was unsurprising, given that he shared many of their identitarian views.

But Scalzi is, if anything, merely the moderate ally of a far more radical group of community elites. He hasn’t gone nearly as far as former SFWA Vice President Mary Kowal, who handles political disagreement by telling her opponents to “shut the fuck up” and quit the SFWA. Or former Hugo nominee Nora Jemisin, who says that political tolerance “disturbs” her. Or, indeed, the prolific fantasy author Jim C. Hines, who believes that people who satirize religion and political ideologies (a very particular religion, and a very particular ideology, of course) should be thrown out of mainstream SFF magazines.

Read it.

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

Read it.

And guess whose pocket is being picked to buy these particular votes?

Read it.

A few decades ago, if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds. If you saw a barbarian swinging an axe? You were going to get a rousing fantasy epic with broad-chested heroes who slay monsters, and run off with beautiful women. Battle-armored interstellar jump troops shooting up alien invaders? Yup. A gritty military SF war story, where the humans defeat the odds and save the Earth. And so on, and so forth.

These days, you can’t be sure.

The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation, with interplanetary or interstellar trappings?

There’s a sword-swinger on the cover, but is it really about knights battling dragons? Or are the dragons suddenly the good guys, and the sword-swingers are the oppressive colonizers of Dragon Land?

A planet, framed by a galactic backdrop. Could it be an actual bona fide space opera? Heroes and princesses and laser blasters? No, wait. It’s about sexism and the oppression of women.

Finally, a book with a painting of a person wearing a mechanized suit of armor! Holding a rifle! War story ahoy! Nope, wait. It’s actually about gay and transgender issues.

Or it could be about the evils of capitalism and the despotism of the wealthy.

Do you see what I am trying to say here?

Apparently ‘progressives’ are taking over the Science Fiction and Fantasy genre and turning it into another Voice of the Crust.

Fortunately, we have our Baen to keep us warm.

Read it.

Obama’s and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new attack on Alaska oil production can have a consequence that extreme environmentalists have dreamed about all along—shutting down all remaining production bringing oil from the Arctic coast.

This would happen because the giant Alaskan pipeline must have minimal flow to function. Otherwise it must be totally dismantled in accord with the law allowing for its original construction. After years of delaying new production and causing billions of dollars of losses for the companies involved, Obama’s new attack may be the final blow. Already the pipeline is carrying only some 25 percent of its capacity of two million barrels a day. Less input will allow corrosion and other damages, making it impossible to operate.

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As Attorney General Eric Holder is about to leave office, Senator Ron Wyden has sent him a letter more or less asking if he was planning to actually respond to the various requests that Wyden had sent to Holder in the past, which Holder has conveniently ignored. Wyden notes, accurately, that the government’s continued secrecy on a variety of issues “has led to an erosion of public confidence that has made it more difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to do their jobs.”

I’m thinking that the answer is No.

Read it.

Next step: Chaotic Well-Intentioned.

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A bioengineer and geneticist at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have successfully stored 5.5 petabits of data — around 700 terabytes — in a single gram of DNA, smashing the previous DNA data density record by a thousand times.

Read it.

Four months ago, Demeteriya Nabire was killed by a crocodile when she went to the lake near her home to fetch water. The animal later came back to the area but found Nabire’s husband waiting, ready to take revenge.

Not something you read about every day.

Tim Worstall at The Register discovers that, yes, government employees are pretty much all socialists.

“Whenever regulators gather to discuss market failures…”

The subject under discussion is the ownership of data and EULAs and all that stuff that so excites a certain sort of techno-pessimist. And that’s what leads to the spraying: the assumption being made that people who are trading something they don’t value much for something they value more is a market failure.

To an economist this is what markets do: people don’t seem to value that data, that information, about who they are, where they are or what they do – or not very much. They certainly don’t seem to value it as much as the things they get by allowing access to it: the Facebooks, Googles and so on of this world.

That’s not the usual definition of a market failure, that’s the efficient working of a market. The data, the thing being valued, is moving from a place where it isn’t highly valued to one where it is more valued. Moving something from a lower valued use to a higher is the very definition of wealth creation.

The piece he’s sputtering about appeared in The Guardian, which is pretty much all socialists too. Funny how that works.

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Three University of California, Davis, students placed a community refrigerator on their lawn and invited neighbors to use it and share food. At the end of the first month, people were not only sharing food but books as well. Then the Yolo County health department stepped in. They said the fridge was an unregulated food facility and shut it down.

Well, what do you expect from a county named Yolo?

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Be the first on your block to use it in the title of a hit song.

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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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If you don’t know anything about the SCA, that’s alright — they don’t know anything about you, either.

Try it.

(The one for the 16th Amendment, by choice.)

Apparently I was at the Battle of Kursk. They don’t say which side I was on, although they do say that I ‘helped stop Hitler’ … so I’ve got that going for me.

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Bill Ayers, call one of your politicians.

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The effect on my potential ingestion of salami? Not so delightful.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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The American Academy of Pediatrics has also weighed in, urging 8:30 a.m. or later for high schoolers. Ignoring the evidence on school start times is the equivalent of ignoring the evidence on the harmful effects of lead paint exposure, asbestos or second-hand tobacco smoke.

I’ve been pushing this for years. Not that anybody listens. ‘You don’t have any kids so we don’t even see you.’

Read it.

President Obama’s new budget plan doesn’t just propose spending a historic amount of money over the coming decade. It also seeks to jack up the amount of tax revenue, all in the name of Mom, apple pie, and the great American middle class.

Read it.

When my father worked a Post Office job during college, there was a four-person crew in the local black hole of correspondence to which he was assigned in the Bronx. Well, two of them were actually in the office at any given time—the other two were down the street at a bar. They took turns, which is only right. Given that context, reports of increasing customer dissastisfaction and lousy management from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General don’t seem that bad after all.

Jerry Pournelle often says that the aim of government is to hire and pay government workers. I suppose that if they ever get around to doing some actual work, that’s gravy.

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President Obama released his FY 2016 budget yesterday. It contains dozens of tax increases that go on for page after page. Buried in there is a series of tax increases on U.S. employers who also do business abroad. Because the U.S. has a “worldwide” tax regime, any further U.S. taxation of overseas income represents a double tax on that income. By definition, these overseas profits have already faced taxation in the country where they were earned. The United States should instead move to a “territorial” tax system, where the IRS only taxes profits earned inside our borders. That’s what the rest of the developed world does, and it’s time to modernize the code to reflect current best practices.

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Let that be a lesson to us all: Groundhogs are rodents -> rodents have teeth.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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A new study from Lund University in Sweden indicates that inherited viruses that are millions of years old play an important role in building up the complex networks that characterise the human brain.

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They’ll need Chris Hemsworth for the opening, of course.

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Mayor Dean refers to the two out of three groups that have brought political Islam and sharia law to Nashville; Kurds and Somalis. They have been brought to Nashville through the federal refugee resettlement program.

Immigrants-turned-advocates talk about “Nashville for all of us” but instead choose to live like the Mayor’s office said, in enclaves. They complain about being treated as “the other,” but through self-segregation, guard against assimilating into and adapting to the American culture.

When they self-segregate its called preserving their culture. When native-born Tennesseans self-segregate, it’s called racism.

Kurdish Islamist agitator Remziya Suleyman whines endlessly about being thought of as “the other.” However, she was quick to appropriate Nashville’s generous spirit for her community’s political purposes, calling it “Little Kurdistan.”

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America spends tons of money on education even though the final product isn’t very impressive. If children are indeed the future, then they’re certainly an expensive one: Of the $3.2 trillion in total expenditures for local and state governments in 2012, education accounted for nearly 28 percent, or $869.2 billion, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. That figure topped government spending in any other sector, almost doubling the second-largest recipient of taxpayer dollars—public welfare.

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The Sino-American relationship may be in decent shape. It’s other countries we should be worried about.

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President Barack Obama’s latest budget is his most populist ever, seeking big tax hikes to pay for ambitious new spending on education and infrastructure in a dare to Republicans to find common ground.

The ‘Vote For Us And Get Free Stuff’ Democrat program has to be paid for somehow.

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Feel free to barf at the thought. I did.

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I guess it wasn’t Walmart after all.

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For six consecutive years, Ann Legra’s performance as a teacher has been declared “unsatisfactory.” Yet Washington Heights in New York City cannot seem to get rid of this arguably worthless first-grade instructor. Their most recent attempt to dump her from P.S. 173, the city’s second try, has failed.

Where is the Mafia when you really need them?

Administrators apparently found her classroom in chaos, with students running around, getting into fights, and attempting karate moves on a door, while she was off in the corner at a table, apparently “re-sharpening pencils” that were too sharp, in order to prevent accidents. In one school year she was absent 27 times and late 37 times.

…

According to the New York Post, Legra has responded to her punishment by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the city’s Department of Education of discrimination on the basis of her race, gender, national origin, and medical disability (asthma). She’s not going anywhere without a fight.

Read it.

The Obama budget calls for a stealth increase in the death tax rate from 40% to nearly 60%. Here’s how it works:

Under current law, when you inherit an asset your basis in the asset is the higher of the fair market value at the time of death or the decedent’s original basis. Almost always, the fair market value is higher.

Under the Obama proposal, when you inherit an asset your basis will simply be the decedent’s original basis.

Example: Dad buys a house for $10,000.  He dies and leaves it to you. The fair market value on the date of death is $100,000. You sell it for $120,000. Under current law, you have a capital gain of $20,000 (sales price of $120,000 less step up in basis of $100,000). Under the Obama plan, you have a capital gain of $110,000 (sales price of $120,000 less original basis of $10,000).

There are exemptions for most households, but this misses the larger point: the whole reason we have step up in basis is because we have a death tax. If you are going to hold an estate liable for tax, you can’t then hold the estate liable for tax again when the inheritor sells it. This adds yet another redundant layer of tax on savings and investment. It’s a huge tax hike on family farms and small businesses.

Not to mention everybody else.

Read it.

The more one knows of its peculiar history, the more one realizes that wilderness is not quite what it seems. Far from being the one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation—indeed, the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history. It is not a pristine sanctuary where the last remnant of an untouched, endangered, but still transcendent nature can for at least a little while longer be encountered without the contaminating taint of civilization. Instead, it’s a product of that civilization, and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made. Wilderness hides its unnaturalness behind a mask that is all the more beguiling because it seems so natural. As we gaze into the mirror it holds up for us, we too easily imagine that what we behold is Nature when in fact we see the reflection of our own unexamined longings and desires. For this reason, we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world, for wilderness is itself no small part of the problem.

The same person who would never trust an optometrist to repair her car’s transmission, or trust an automobile mechanic to prescribe contact lenses to correct her myopia, routinely trusts strangers who specialize in winning popularity contests called “elections” to interfere into her and her neighbors’ lives in many intimate and expansive ways.

And then, when a skeptic of the pretensions of politicians (and of their entourages) suggests that these politicians (and their entourages) address the problems they diagnose, not with government force, but by themselves risking only their own money and effort toward correcting the alleged problems, the response is one of utter dismissal.  ”Ha!  We don’t know anything about actually running actual businesses.  We have no experience at hiring and managing workers.  We haven’t the training or business connections or professional demeanor to, say, profitably employ the low-skilled workers who we nevertheless assure you are currently underpaid.  We have no ability, say, to persuade private investors to risk their funds on alternative-energy projects that we nevertheless assure you will be amazingly profitable.  We have no practical abilities at all!  Yet because we’ve won the most recent election, or because we’ve earned PhDs and read lots of books and academic-journal articles and know what a chi-square test is, we are uniquely qualified to force people to act in ways that we prescribe but which we, on our own, would never dare undertake.  We are paid to rule, not to risk; we are paid to demand of others, not to do of ourselves.”

The fact that such people continue to be called “Progressive,” continue to be considered to be unusually humane and (amazingly) empathetic, and continue to be taken seriously baffles me to no end.

— Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist

The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, finds the Next Crisis.

More people with low incomes now live outside of cities, and some areas are ill-equipped to deal with the influx of the poor.

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

Read it.

The thinking went – not so very long ago – that little by little, with the bumps of age and lifestyle, this initial stash of neurons died, taking our brain function along with them. Yet, strange as it may sound, canaries, video games, and young blood are finally putting that punishing prospect to rest. Studies involving bird song, gaming, and the rejuvenating factors of young blood have shown not only that neurons can be generated throughout adulthood, but also that the maddening aspects of aging, such as memory loss and slower processing speed, can be partially reversed.

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Last century, William Stanley Jevons, the famous economist who was in part responsible for the marginal revolution, reasoned that because the easy-to-get coal was already gotten, what was left was coal that was harder and harder to reach. Therefore, he argued, we would reach a point where coal would be much scarcer and much more expensive.

As I wrote in my bio of Jevons, here was his error:

Jevons failed to appreciate the fact that as the price of an energy source rises, entrepreneurs have a strong incentive to invent, develop, and produce alternate sources. In particular, he did not anticipate oil or natural gas. Also, he did not take account of the incentive, as the price of coal rose, to use it more efficiently or to develop technology that brought down the cost of discovering and mining (see natural resources).

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A team of researchers led by Harvard geneticist George Church at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and Harvard Medical School (HMS) has made big strides toward a future in which the predominant chemical factories of the world are colonies of genetically engineered bacteria.

In a new study, scientists at the Wyss Institute modified the genes of bacteria in a way that lets them program exactly what chemical they want the cells to produce — and how much — through the bacteria’s metabolic processes. The research was reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

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I refuse to eat anything that looks like dog barf. Sorry.

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Somebody alert Shatner and Connery.

We have things that are supposed to be illegal that “really” are not, like sneaking across our national border, and we have things that are supposed to be allowed but are “really” against the “law,” like for example forming a Young Conservatives group on a college campus, smoking cigarettes, or wearing a “Proud to be American” tee shirt to a high school on Cinco de Mayo.

It is dangerous, living under two sets of laws like this. It’s not an Obama problem, it’s a baby-boomer problem. The hippies have reached the age where they’re expected to be in charge of things, but they still want to rebel against authority when they are the authority. Their generation has manufactured a contradiction which, I’m afraid, is not finished with doing all its damage yet.

— Morgan Freeberg

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According to Budweiser, a “true patriot” drinks beer from flag-embossed cans. WWE wrestling would have us believe that the spirit of the United States lies in roided-out biceps, scantily-clad women, and cut-off t-shirts. But above all else — ice cream, baseball, and hot dogs included — we take great pride in being “as American as apple pie.”

…

But there’s just one little problem with all this: apple pie really isn’t all that “American.”

I must confess that I’ve never been very fond of apple pie; mince is my favorite, with blueberry in second place, followed closely by pumpkin and cherry.

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

Over the last half-century, enormous efforts have been expended by individuals to get their groups, such as blacks, women, Jews, homosexuals, and Hispanics, certified as authentic victims of society. Just since 2013, the “transgendered” have achieved cultural validation as designated victims, while other potential identity politics groups, such as left-handers and the working class, seem to be fading ever further from the limelight of concern.

But what about nerds? Will they be able to use the enormous wealth and cultural influence they’ve created over the last few decades to achieve recognized protected status? Or will they be increasingly demonized as “hyperwhite”?

…

Because they are better at thinking about ideas than about people, nerds are particularly prone to misinterpreting women by taking what they say at face value. Nerds don’t know much about what women like, so they use logic, which fails.