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New research into the way viruses invade human cells through their outer membrane has thrown up the possibility of blocking many kinds of viral infections before they become dangerous, scientists said.

Researchers have found a key human gene that plays a central role in determining whether a virus is able to penetrate a cell. The finding could be used to develop drugs that work against viral infections as diverse as yellow fever, dengue and flu, they said.

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An up-and-coming Detroit rapper has reportedly shot and killed outside a strip club.

Reports said rapper Dex Osama was killed outside the Crazy Horse strip club on Detroit’s south-west side. WXYZ-TV said the shooting followed an argument inside the club.

Prediction: By another black male, not by a white policeman.

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After nearly a year of deliberation, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late Friday afternoon that charter schools are unconstitutional, creating chaos for hundreds of families whose children have already started classes.

The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.

More Left Coast madness.

In the ruling, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen wrote that charter schools aren’t “common schools” because they’re governed by appointed rather than elected boards.

Therefore, “money that is dedicated to common schools is unconstitutionally diverted to charter schools,” Madsen wrote.

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

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Used to be, if people were hungry, attempts would be made to feed them and therefore keep them from starving. Nowadays, that’s apparently not enough.

It is, of course, a fact universally acknowledge that the government has a legitimate right and power to supervise every waking moment, and hence is morally culpable (even if legally bulletproof) for any aspect of one’s life that fails to suit — not the person, but any busybody external collective that feels entitled to dictate to other people (which is all of them).

Jim Goad turns over a rock.

I’ve seen such behavior from African, Indian, Mexican, and Asian immigrants to America, and it only seems to be intensifying. What’s baffling is the fact that even though I’m supposed to be a rude insensitive xenophobic intolerant racist dick, it would never occur to me to move to Africa, India, Mexico, or Asia and act with anything beyond respect, gratitude, and even caution. I certainly wouldn’t start running my neck about how the culture of my new host nation sucks and how it needs to be tossed into the dustbin of history and how the majority needs to quickly become a minority or justice will never be served. I simply can’t find it within myself to be that much of an asshole. And I certainly wouldn’t expect my new hosts to tolerate five seconds of such behavior.

Yet many if not most native-born white Americans not only put up with this nonsense, they feel it’s their moral duty to be as obsequious, masochistic, and suicidal as possible. It doesn’t matter if their standard of living is noticeably worse than it was for their parents. Doesn’t matter if full-time jobs with benefits are harder to come by. Doesn’t matter if their country’s media and educational institutions insult them incessantly and openly gloat about their demographic extinction. You’re supposed to suck it up and smile while they’re laughing and kicking you in the teeth, or else you’re a bad person.

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Unlike modern Europeans, Jews breed for intelligence.

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The way to keep black people from being shot is to get guns out of the hands of young black males. But, of course, nobody dares say it.

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Qualifications? We don’t need no steenkin’ qualifications.

First, dropping the SAT while handwaving about “diversity” is often simply a politically convenient way for colleges to serve their own narrow interests, without doing anything to actually admit more low-income or minority students. Stephen Burd has reported on two ways test-optional policies can boost a college’s selectivity profile: (1) by increasing the number of applications (and, incidentally, the number of hefty application fees) it receives each year, and (2) by increasing a the average SAT score for admitted students, because applicants with higher scores are more likely to send them in. It’s ironic, but not surprising, that colleges are still self-conscious about their students’ average scores on a test they claim is useless and discriminatory. It’s also not particularly surprising that, as Burd notes, a 2014 University of Georgia study “did not find any evidence that test-optional colleges had made ‘any progress in narrowing these diversity-related gaps after they adopted test-optional policies.’”

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Banks are sending notices of account closure out to small businesses across the country, to clients they’ve done business with for years, even decades. The reason? They often don’t provide one.

But a growing number of business owners believe they know why they’re being cut off from the financial system. It’s Operation Choke Point, ostensibly an attempt to crack down on fraudulent businesses, but in reality a dragnet that has ensnared innocent entrepreneurs unfairly classified as “high-risk” players.

Earlier this year, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) chairman Martin Gruenberg told Congress that Choke Point was over, but many business owners believe the FDIC and the Department of Justice have passed enforcement duties along to a newly created independent agency: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the brainchild of progressive senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The CFPB operates under the guidance of the Federal Reserve and doesn’t rely on Congress for funding, which critics say allows it to operate without any meaningful checks on its power.

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Hillary ought to be highly embarrassed.

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Entirely ignored: How this is any of the British P.M.’s job, or indeed any of Britain’s business at all.

The let’s-butt-into-everybody-else’s-business fetish of the Left is one of its least attractive personality flaws.

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The mob as Thought Police. Now that’s comedy.

Anyone who would want to smell like Rihanna has more serious problems to worry about than fur.

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Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

How would it work? On top of the usual credit check, banks might ask you a series of questions testing applicants’ sense of integrity, honesty and their general beliefs about society.

Applicants would be asked how much they agree with statements like ‘I believe others try to do the right thing’, ‘I pay attention to small details’ or ‘ I find it hard to make change’. Lenders could then score each answer and feed it into software that would predict how likely the person is to miss payment. It would then be up to them to decide whether the borrower is trustworthy or not.

Anybody who can’t game that system is too stupid to be a good lending risk, I suspect.

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I can understand that. He certainly acts like one.

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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Gavin MacInnes asks an obvious question.

“Nothing is more indicative of white supremacy than the fact that the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is controversial,” opines regular CNN guest Marc Lamont Hill. The obvious response to this is that the group wasn’t particularly controversial until they started demanding “dead cops…now” and, soon after, got plenty. Last weekend, the allegedly uncontroversial #BlackLivesMatter doubled down with “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” a couple of days before a manhunt began for the murder of a Chicago cop.

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And why should they? Those nations are already Muslim.

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Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?

“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”

Hear, hear.

Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.”

Funny how that works.

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As Puerto Rico grapples with crippling debt and double-digit unemployment, a far-fetched idea to tackle the US territory’s economic woes may be gaining modest traction – one that would see Puerto Rico break off from the United States to re-join Spain.

“By returning to Spain, we’ll have autonomy,” said José Nieves Seise, who in 2013 founded the group Reunification of Puerto Rico with Spain. “With autonomy Puerto Rico could have sufficient powers to boost the economy and attract foreign investment.”

I like it.

Better yet, give it to Cuba.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

The New York Times complains about Australia’s ‘brutal treatment’ of migrants.

Said ‘brutal treatment’ consists of shipping them back where they came from.

Gotta love Australians.

If the Europeans don’t fix their borders, well, This Will Be Why We Can’t Have Nice Things like the Australians have. You can make up your own list of Nice Things Europe won’t be able to have anymore, but obvious candidates include generous social insurance, high wages, and freedoms for women, such as enjoying public swimming pools alongside men.

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Don’t laugh; it could happen.

But it also augurs the possibility of a nuclear war coming far sooner than one could have imagined under conventional wisdom worst-case scenarios. Following the US’s betrayal of Israel and its de facto detente with Iran, we cannot expect Israel to copy longstanding US doctrines of no-first-nuclear-use and preferences for conventional-weapons-only war plans. After all, both were premised (especially after the USSR’s 1991 collapse) on decades of US nuclear and conventional supremacy. If there ever were an unassailable case for a small, frighteningly vulnerable nation to pre-emptively use nuclear weapons to shock, economically paralyze, and decapitate am enemy sworn to its destruction, Israel has arrived at that circumstance.

Why? Because Israel has no choice, given the radical new alignment against it that now includes the US, given reported Obama threats in 2014 to shoot down Israeli attack planes, his disclosure of Israel’s nuclear secrets and its Central Asian strike-force recovery bases, and above all his agreement to help Iran protect its enrichment facilities from terrorists and cyberwarfare – i.e., from the very special-operations and cyber forces that Israel would use in desperate attempts to halt Iran’s bomb. Thus Israel is being forced, more rapidly and irreversibly than we appreciate, into a bet-the-nation decision where it has only one forceful, game-changing choice — early nuclear pre-emption – to wrest back control of its survival and to dictate the aftermath of such a survival strike.

Would this involve many nuclear weapons? No – probably fewer than 10-15, although their yields must be sufficiently large to maximize ground shock. Would it produce Iranian civilian casualties? Yes but not as many as one might suppose, as it would avoid cities. Most casualties would be radiological, like Chernobyl, rather than thermal and blast casualties. Would it spur a larger catalytic nuclear war? No. Would it subsequently impel Russia, China and new proliferators to normalize nuclear weapons in their own war planning? Or would the massive global panic over the first nuclear use in anger in 70 years, one that would draw saturation media coverage, panic their publics into urgent demands for ballistic missile self-defense systems? Probably the latter.

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In this sharply divided country, there surely is also strong disagreement about the extent to which government ought to be protecting citizens from self-harm. But I presume that a broad spectrum of the public on both sides of the aisle would agree there is an appropriate government role in protecting citizens from being harmed by one another. So if we leave aside self-inflicted deaths, the average car is 1.8 times as risky as the average gun. That is, my owning a car is 80 percent more likely to result in the death of another person my owning a gun.

Most of the gun deaths in this country are caused by young black males, yet there’s no call for ‘young black male’ control; on the contrary, the call is for letting them out of jail once they get locked up.

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Naguib Sawiris, an Egyptian telecom mogul, the country’s third richest man, and one of the founding members of the Free Egyptians Party, says he wants to buy an island from Italy or Greece to house refugees fleeing war-torn Syria and other countries in the region. He made the announcement on Twitter, asking one of the two countries to sell him an island so that he could declare its independence and help refugees build a “new city” there.

And then when they sell him one he’ll ask for another one. And so the Ummah grows apace.

Why not settle them in Egypt? Because Egypt is already Muslim.

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So Quartz might be overstating it slightly with the headline “There is literally a U.S. government conspiracy against vegan mayo.” But emails uncovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ryan Shapiro do show that the American Egg Board (AEB)—an egg promotion group with members appointed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture—hired public relations professionals to help bring down vegan-mayo maker Hampton Creek, and advised the bigwigs behind Hellmann’s mayonnaise to report the California startup to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

‘Progressives’ will immediately go off on their ‘SEE! SEE! CORPORATE GREED!’ without pausing to think that if the government didn’t have power over food markets then food producers wouldn’t be spending billions trying to have government exercise that power in their favor. You can’t game the system unless there’s a system to game, and that system is the result of ‘progressive’ agitation.

In August, the FDA sent a warning letter to Hampton Creek about possible “misbranding.” Among the FDA’s complaints: Hampton Creek’s “Just Mayo” line doesn’t meet the legal requirements for labeling something mayo. Only products containing vegetable oil, eggs, and vinegar and/or lemon juice may use the term, providing they don’t stray beyond these and a few additional ingredients, like salt and sugar. The lack of eggs and presence of beta-carotene and pea protein puts Just Mayo at odds with federal condiment rules.

WE DO NOT NEED a world in which there are ‘federal condiment rules’. At least in a Zombie Apocalypse you can shoot the zombies.

BedBot.

UN-SKRU.

Furoshiki Wrap Shoes.

‘Werewolf’ Dog Muzzle.

FireSleeve.

“The secret to happiness is low expectations.” — Patrick Rothfuss

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A useful piece of journalism from the Huffington Post. I guess even a blind pig can find an acorn now and then.

Can the government treat some people differently than others on the basis of sheer favoritism? It seems like an obvious question, but decades’ worth of unwarranted judicial deference in constitutional cases have made the answer uncertain. This week, a federal judge gave a rousing negative answer, holding that the Secretary of Health and Human Services could not exempt organizations designated as “religious” by the government from an Affordable Care Act mandate to provide contraceptive coverage without also exempting non-“religious” groups that object to certain contraceptives on the basis of their moral convictions. In refusing to treat the so-called rational basis test–the default standard of review in constitutional cases–as a “rubber stamp” and invalidating a government classification that made “no rational sense,” Judge Richard Leon demonstrated the kind of judicial engagement that is necessary to protect all Americans from regulatory favoritism.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Has the Presidential candidate’s wife learned English well enough in her 40 years of marriage to be interviewed in English without pre-arranged questions?

I, personally, have never found video of the former First Lady of Florida being interviewed in English. I have found video of her uncomfortably reading a two-minute speech in English. But that’s all I’ve found so far.

It’s often said of Columba in the media that she’s a very shy person, and that’s why she avoids giving interviews in English. Yet, I’ve found video of her being charming in a Spanish-language interview. I’ve found video of her giving a speech on national television on the floor of the Republican National Convention … in Spanish. I’ve found video of her doing a TV commercial with her father-in-law, with her speaking Spanish.

I would hope she’s learned English well enough to converse in it in her 40+ years of marriage to Jeb. But I just don’t have evidence of that yet.

The most fundamental issue in politics is “Whose side are you on?” Jeb, who is not a particularly slippery individual, has given us much evidence that primarily he’s on the side of Mexicans, not Americans.

That strikes me as an honorable position, just not one I’d want in my President.

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In 2013, more than 200,000 people on net fled states with Democrat governors for ones run by Republicans, according to an analysis of newly released IRS data by Americans for Tax Reform.

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

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You may be wondering why Syrian and Iraqi refugees are pouring into Europe rather than into, say nearby Saudi Arabia. Well, Saudi officials planned ahead.

Although the Israelis are the most renown anti-immigrant border fence builders, which is why Hungary and Bulgaria are negotiating with Israel right now, it’s really not that arcane an art. For example, if you can build an airliner, you can build a really good fence, like Airbus is building for Saudi Arabia. In fact, fence-building is one of the oldest and most developed crafts and there are no doubt perfectly fencing contractors with a few miles of you right now, wherever you are. When people tell you it’s practically impossible or unbelievably expensive to keep out economic immigrants, they are either lying or ignorant or both.

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As has been noted frequently in this space, the odious 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which requires foreign banks in U.S.-friendly countries to cough up information about and sometimes money from their American customers, has led to the predictable result of said financial instituions treating Americans like radioactive lepers. It’s not much fun to live in a country where you can’t open a bank account, and so record numbers of U.S. citizens—more than 14 per day, at last count—are simply turning in their passports.

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The researchers had been studying squids’ ring teeth, which are uniquely strong and can change phase from liquid to solid in the presence of water. After testing ring teeth samples from several species of squid found all over the world, the researchers uncovered the genetic code for the proteins that allow the teeth to heal themselves when broken. They then engineered bacteria to produce the proteins so they could conduct more tests.

Even the BBC recognizes the truth.

Officially, Syrians can apply for a tourist visa or work permit in order to enter a Gulf state.

But the process is costly, and there is a widespread perception that many Gulf states have unwritten restrictions in place that it make it hard for Syrians to be granted a visa in practice.

In other words, local Muslim countries don’t want them, either.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

There’s much discussion in the press about where it would be best for Arab refugees from Syria to settle: Would they be best off in Munich? London? Reykjavik? Or Minneapolis? Which white people most need the blessings of diversity provided by Sunnis and Shi’ites? (Obviously, Syrian Arabs couldn’t go to other Arab countries like Qatar. Don’t be silly.)

The sophisticated reasoning of 2015 is that if you and your countrymen blow up your own country through your sheer mutual bloodymindedness, you therefore have an unassailable moral claim to inhabit the nicest countries on other continents. If you are a young fellow in your prime, why should you have to settle for a refugee camp in neighboring Turkey when there are Swedish girls unmolested in Malmo and English girls unpimped in Rotherham?

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Harvey Mansfield remarked a while back that “the job of conservatism is to save liberalism from liberals.” The left may be giving us an unintended assist with this project.  One of the best things to happen to political discourse in recent years is that many leftists stopped calling themselves “liberal,” and adopted “progressive” instead. Even Hillary Clinton for a time, back around 2007, said “I’m not a liberal—I’m a progressive.” And on the leading edge of the left, as on college campuses and other dens of Naomi Klein books, “neo-liberalism” is the avowed main enemy, which can’t be good for un-hyphenated liberalism. Welcome to a world where even John Rawls isn’t left enough.

The Other McCain intrudes science into what was a nice political argument.

Feminists have been fighting this war for more than four decades, and you will be accused of misogyny (woman hating) if you express skepticism about their project of creating an androgynous “equality” by eradicating male/female differences. These arguments about gender roles show how, in so many ways, feminists are trapped in the past, forever fighting battles rooted in the adolescent frustrations experienced decades ago by women who never successfully adjusted to normal adult roles that most people take for granted. The tomboy, the lesbian, the awkward bookish girl who felt marginalized in the high-school popularity competition — we may grant that their grievances against the “system” are real without endorsing their intellectual assault on the social order.

…

A movement that began in rebellion against society as it existed in 1968 is ill-suited to address the problems facing young women in 2015 and it may be added that, insofar as feminist ideology originally had any basis in science, that science is now as obsolete as Ozzie and Harriet.

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The success of Uber and other ride-booking companies in New York City has highlighted just how antiquated the services of the taxicab industry, a municipally enforced monopoly, are. It’s also demonstrated riders’ preference for choice in transportation.

But yesterday a new rule from the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) that gives riders and drivers less choice in yellow cabs went into effect. The TLC now mandates that all new and replacement yellow taxis, with limited exceptions for alternatively fueled and handicap-accessible vehicles, be the same Nissan van for the next 10 years.

The nice thing about being a government is that you can create monopolies, and the nice thing about government monopolies is that you can force people to spend their money your way.

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The local Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets again in St. Paul yesterday. The marchers, some 40 in all, marched by the Governor’s mansion on Summit Avenue to protest Governor Mark Dayton’s disparagement of their State Fair protest this past weekend as “inappropriate.”

That’s stern stuff coming from a liberal Democrat; the Black Lives Matter crowd is not used to that kind of disrespect. Indeed, that is precisely what protest leader Rashad Turner had to say according to the Star Tribune photo caption: “It was disrespectful to call protesting inappropriate. The governor needs to realize he’s in a position to help people.”

And by ‘people’, of course, he means ‘black people’. After all only Black Lives Matter.

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At your expense, of course. (See Democrite Playbook p. 3)

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In recent years, three American public school districts have provided taxpayer-supported lunches meeting Muslim students’ dietary standards. They have not similarly provided lunches satisfying any other students’ religious standards. The halal foods purchased with public funds are costlier than comparable non-halal foods.

I guest Muslims Are Special.

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Apparently this is the political version of the corporate conference in Aspen or Maui, a convenient excuse to take a vacation at somebody else’s expense.

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Another navel-gazing thumb-sucker from the New York Times.

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And reflect.

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Exercise — no matter how many gym memberships you buy or how often you wear your Fitbit — won’t make you lose weight.

…

A growing body of scientific evidence shows that exercise alone has almost no effect on weight loss, as two sports scientists and I described in a recent editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. For one, researchers who reviewed surveys of millions of American adults found that physical activity increased between 2001 and 2009, particularly in counties in Kentucky, Georgia and Florida. But the rise in exercise was matched by an increase in obesity in almost every county studied. There were even more striking results in a 2011 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that people who simply dieted experienced greater weight loss than those who combined diet and exercise.

…

It’s calorie intake that is really fueling the obesity epidemic. But it’s not just the number of calories we’re eating as how we’re getting them. The sugar calories are particularly bad. Stanford University researcher Sanjay Basu recently led an analysis of 175 countries that evaluated the amount of sugar in each nation’s food supply. As sugar availability increased by 150 calories per person per day (the equivalent of a can of cola), there was a 1.1 percent rise in the prevalence of Type 2 diabetes in the population — an increase that was 11 times larger than if people consumed 150 more calories from nonsugar sources — independent of average body mass index and physical activity levels. The experience of Timothy Noakes, a leading sports and exercise medicine scientist, exemplifies those results. Despite being an almost daily runner and completing more than 70 marathons in his lifetime, Noakes developed Type 2 diabetes in his late 50s, which he attributes to his excessive consumption of sugar and other refined carbohydrates.

Two words: Eat. Less.

If it’s longevity you’re after, note that elite athletes in high-intensity sports don’t live any longer than top golfers.

And they have much less attractive tans.

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“Cancer therapies that attack the lipid composition of the cell membrane would be an entirely new class of anticancer drugs,” says co-senior study author Paul Beales, of the University of Leeds in the UK. “This could be useful in developing new combination therapies, where multiple drugs are used simultaneously to treat a cancer by attacking different parts of the cancer cells at the same time.”

MP1 acts against microbial pathogens by disrupting the bacterial cell membrane. Serendipitously, the antimicrobial peptide shows promise for protecting humans from cancer; it can inhibit the growth of prostate and bladder cancer cells, as well as multi-drug resistant leukemic cells. However, until now, it was not clear how MP1 selectively destroys cancer cells without harming normal cells.