Read it.

The title of this study is based on one of the most interesting characteristics video games can generate. Not only a possible past, that can be altered virtually, but even the divine and omnipotent position from which the player (including all categories of video player) has the opportunity (the power) to do anything in this virtual setting: from managing worlds to planning the life and the death of the characters. In fact, the common denominator is manipulating (in the literal sense of handling) something until now impossible, namely time and events that have already happened, taken as events with a beginning and an end.

Read it.

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

200 undergraduate students participated in a game testing researchers’ theory

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

Being a British newspaper, the Independent Doesn’t Quite Approve, but it’s hard to argue with the facts.

Tim “Nailer” Foley was more than 5,000 miles away from Paris when Isis terrorists launched a series of coordinated attacks throughout the French capital, killing 130 people and injuring hundreds more. But Foley — a former construction foreman who now spends his days with a band of heavily armed civilians, voluntarily patrolling the some of the most remote and dangerous stretches of the U.S.-Mexico border — wasn’t surprised.

…

“We have pictures from trail cameras that show Somalis and Middle Eastern guys with beards and everything else, but nobody is listening,” Foley told The Washington Post this week. “We’re going to have something like Paris had. It’s not a matter of if, but when.”

…

The link between immigration and terrorism is still up for debate. Although the Paris terror attacks appear to have been coordinated by Isis operatives in the Middle East, all of the identified assailants are so far citizens of European Union countries.

And yet, officials say, the threat of an Isis operative slipping into the United States from Mexico is a real one: Last week, the FBI confirmed that five men from Pakistan and one from Afghanistan were captured near Arizona’s border with Mexico, according to ABC affiliate KNXV.

Do tell.

To join Arizona Border Recon, volunteers must fill out an application, pass a background check and abide by strict rules of engagement, Foley told The Washinton Post. “We want to make sure you’re not a sexual predator or prohibited possessor, and by doing this it shows the Border Patrol agents that we have a sense of professionalism and they don’t have to sit there and wonder, ‘Who are these guys?’” he said.

…

“There’s that scene in ‘The Matrix,’ where Morpheus offers the blue and red pill,” he said. “I’ve taken the red pill, and I’ve woken up, and I can’t go back to sleep. I’ve seen the truth. How can I turn my back on it and go get another 9-to-5 job, pay my taxes and pretend it isn’t happening?”

Becoming a Democrite seems to work.

I am thankful for the robust firewall at The Washington Post, so that no matter how strongly tempted I am to post something from their site, I am prevented. God looks after us even when we can’t help ourselves.

Read it.

A little bit of history for your Thanksgiving delectation.

Steven Hayward sees Onions everywhere.

Oh, good grief. The New Yorker is trying to give the New York Times a run for its money as the most pathetic attempt to put The Onion out of business….

There’s a lot of competition these days for that space, unwitting though it might be.

As has been noted, funny how climate change doesn’t seem to cause Lutherans, Hindus, Jews, or Zoroastrians to become terrorists or start wars, though as we have seen climate change caused Hitler and Nazism, so there’s that. If the climate-Syrian war connection is “uncontroversial,” it’s because it is . . . completely idiotic. Is it really the case that if it were four degrees cooler in Syria there’d be no civil war? Gosh, why are we wasting all of this time on peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians? Just send air conditioners and tankers full of Evian to Gaza.

Read it.

As this is Thanksgiving week, I thought I’d take a break from Muslim terrorists and social justice warriors and all the other negative stuff to give thanks for something positive that happened in 2015. In two separate but similar criminal cases that were resolved this year, a precedent was established that will possibly, hopefully, influence prosecutors in the years to come: Elderly white guys are not legally mandated to play by the “Chuck Norris rule” if they believe their lives are at risk.

What is the ‘Chuck Norris Rule’? Read the whole thing.

It’s become a media cliché to say that the white population in the U.S. is “rapidly aging,” but clichéd though that claim may be, it’s not inaccurate. Like all elderly people, aging whites will become increasingly susceptible to crime, and matters relating to self-defense will become more and more important. Which is why I consider it a small victory that this year, two separate attempts to penalize old white men for not abiding by the Chuck Norris rule failed miserably. If you didn’t read about these two cases in the news, it’s almost certainly because, since all the participants were white—the good guys and bad guys alike—neither story got Trayvonified into a national cause célèbre involving rioters, burned-out CVS stores, and presidents waxing poetic about hypothetical sons.

Somehow it didn’t surprise me when Obama identified a drug-dealing teen thug as somebody who could have been his son. Although he would have had to learn his aggressiveness from Michelle.

Steven Hayward connects the dots.

The New York Times editorial page (insert guffaws here) has just discovered, a few days after the brightest and best at Princeton, what conservatives have known for decades: Woodrow Wilson was a racist! They still haven’t been able to connect the dots between Wilson’s racism and his progressive ideology, nor grasp the irony that Wilson was merely aiming to provide blacks with a “safe space,” as we say nowadays. We know liberals are slow learners, but this is embarrassing, unless the Times is planning to announce tomorrow that it has in fact decided to compete with The Onion.

Fisking the New York Times is both easy and fun, so far be it from me to point out that the editorial board that endorsed Woodrow Wilson for President is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same as the editorial board that condemns him today. However, since the New York Times shows no reluctance in ignoring such historical changes when it chooses to smear some venerable American institution or movement, turnabout is certainly fair play.

Read it.

Because the people who are talking most about Islam are not honest talkers.

Steve Sailer looks things over.

Syria was basically ruled by a Coalition of the Minority Fringes (Alawite on top, Shiite, Christian, Yezidi, Kurd, etc.) over the Core (the Sunni majority). That’s not very democratic in the old-fashioned Andrew Jackson sense of the Democratic Party that emphasized majority rule. But it’s rather like the new-fangled Barack Obama sense of the Democratic Party that emphasizes minority rights.

The happy ending would have been if the majority Sunnis had matured into a well-educated, reasonable, pragmatic people ready for the responsibilities of self-rule.

That actually has happened a few times in history. To take a local example, my very vague impression is that the Kurds have been maturing politically and have been acting in this century with restraint and intelligent purpose in a neighborhood where those commodities have been unfortunately rare. (Warning: Optimism about any aspect of the Middle East usually turns out to be unwarranted.)

Unfortunately, judging by the rise of ISIS there’s not much evidence that the Sunnis are on a similar trajectory. And that’s what has made disastrous Obama’s call for the overthrow of the internationally recognized Syrian government and its replacement by Moderate Islam, an outdated delusion of the Obama-Dunham-Soetoro clan.

Read it.

More than 30 “White Student Union” pages have recently sprung up over the last several days on Facebook, pages that affiliate themselves with various universities around the nation.

If black people get into a serious pissing contest with white people, as a group, the black people will lose. Be careful what you wish for.

More here:

Linking to a student-run blog addressing diversity issues at New York University, the union’s Facebook admin mused, “What does ‘diversity’ mean other than ‘not white’? I’m not sure there is an answer to this. Is the word ‘diversity’ itself a discriminatory term against whites?”

Read it.

Yeah, Turkey so totally borders the North Atlantic.

This morning’s downing of a Russian jet underscores the problems with Turkey’s NATO membership and EU accession. It is perhaps not the worst example of how Turkey is not fit to be in a formal military alliance with the United Kingdom and the United States, but it underscores the point that the country is simply not ready – not even as ready as it was pre-2000. The country has regressed in three key areas as far as Europe and the United States should be concerned: on security matters, on human rights matters, and as a hub for mass migration into Europe.

Actually, the reason to have NATO at all any more escapes me. It was designed to keep Communism out of Europe; it failed to do that, merely managing to keep the Soviets out. There are not more Soviets, so it’s basically an excuse for the Europeans to shuffle off their defense spending onto the U.S. If they’re scared of Russia, let them spend their own damned money.

Scott Johnson at PowerLine blog is delightfully dyspeptic today.

As President Obama enters the stretch closing out his second term, he is dedicating himself to sealing his reputation as the worst president in American history. He long ago blew by President Carter. He’s blowing by President Buchanan. He’s taken the lead and he’s putting distance between himself and the rest of the field.

Yesterday he deepened his hold on the laughingstock element of his performance in office. How to combine suffocating arrogance with gut-busting stupidity? See the man doing his thing side by side with President Hollande who was looking for something better than this Bartlett’s-worthy laugh line (video below): “[N]ext week, I will be joining President Hollande and world leaders in Paris for the Global Climate Conference. What a powerful rebuke to the terrorists it will be, when the world stands as one and shows that we will not be deterred from building a better future for our children.”

Read it.

According to Udo Ulfkotte, the waves of “Syrian” “refugees” now flooding into Austria and Germany are being used as cover for the organized importation of weapons, underage sex slaves, and other criminal activities.

Read it. And watch the video.

Another video of witnesses to the event has now emerged, and it tells a quite different story. These witnesses say that the three men were trying to film the demonstrators and their camp. A group of protesters that considerably outnumbered the three approached them and demanded that they take off their masks. (Some of the protesters were also wearing masks.) The three men refused, and the protesters continued to confront them. The witnesses describe punches being thrown by the protesters on, if I understand them correctly, four occasions. The three men retreated, but the protesters chased them. One of these witnesses saw one or more of the three men reach for a weapon, and warned the others that the men were armed and they shouldn’t pursue them. But the mob continued to chase the three, and at some point one or more of the three men opened fire on the protesters.

This, of course, is what you won’t see in the Drive-By Media, who have a Narrative to push.

Was it self-defense? It certainly could be. As far as I know, no information has emerged about the state of affairs immediately before the shootings. But it is plausible that the three men could reasonably have feared that the mob would inflict great bodily harm, in which case they were entitled to use deadly force in self-defense. Of course, we know nothing about whether any or all of the three men had permits to carry firearms. And the men did not help their case by fleeing the scene.

Not that I blame them a bit.

Another obvious question is, where were the police? One of the oddities of this case is that the original assault and the altercation with Jamar Clark occurred within a block or two of the 4th Precinct station. Likewise, the events of last night occurred in close proximity to the station. Apparently having a lot of policemen around doesn’t confer as much security as one might have thought.

Sure, they intervene and get fired for racism. Yeah, that’s going to happen. This ain’t Baltimore.

Steve Sailer notes a European wake-up.

In other words, the government of Sweden didn’t have a clue how many poor people there are in the world who’d like to move to Sweden and collect welfare. But you can’t blame Sweden’s leaders for their ignorance. How could the government of Sweden possibly have known that many poor foreign countries have large populations? Those are HateStats!

Read it.

The IRS recently proposed a rule to weaken the effectiveness of non-profits. Under this proposal, the IRS would give 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, which includes charities, religious groups, and educational foundations, the option to collect the social security numbers of donors giving more than $250 so that they can be sent to the IRS. While optional at the moment, it is obvious that the rule is simply a way for the IRS to transition to mandatory collection of social security numbers. This rule should frighten all Americans because it opens up a whole pandora’s box of security concerns. Additionally, the IRS can use this to further their political agenda, targeting not only conservative non-profits but also individual supporters of these groups.

Read it.

Between the battle of Marengo and today, the so-called fifth taste, which is the subject of a book by Mouritsen and a Danish chef named Klavs Styrbaek, has come far. In 1908, a Japanese chemist, Kikunae Ikeda, first set out to analyze just what made seaweed broth — the dashi that forms the basis of much Japanese cooking — so delicious. In his laboratory at the University of Tokyo, Ikeda brewed 26 pounds of dried kombu seaweed into broth, and looked at each chemical component of the broth in turn. He was able to isolate about an ounce of one particular crystal that embodied the unique flavor of the dashi. The crystal was monosodium glutamate, and Ikeda’s coinage to denote its distinctive sapid taste, “umami,” stuck.

Read it.

“The next time some academics tell you how important diversity is, ask how many Republicans there are in their sociology department.”
— Thomas Sowell, 1998

Read it.

Private spaceflight company Blue Origin, helmed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, says it has landed its main rocket, New Shepard, back on Earth after launch. That would make it the first rocket ever to have gently landed and remained intact after taking off into space. It also means that Blue Origin has beaten SpaceX in the race to make the first reusable rocket; the Elon Musk-led space venture has been trying to soft-land its main rocket, the Falcon 9, for the past year.

Read it.

Boy, it sure didn’t take him long to ‘assimilate’ to modern-day America, did it?

They could have the kid whacked for $50,000 + expenses. (Tell ISIS that he’s Shi’a and they’d do it for free.) A financially responsible city government would at least consider it.

Read it.

I question whether they would piss their pants this way if some film about Stalin put Communist symbols all over the NYC subway.

Somehow I think not.

Read it.

This weekend, a 41-year-old rhino named Nola died. She had been living in the San Diego Zoo Safari Park for close to 27 years. Her death means that there are only three northern white rhinos left on the planet.

Perhaps when they’re all gone, these gurgle-mutts will stop whining about it.

Yes, that was insensitive — intentionally so. If there are people in the world who weep for the Northern White Rhino, I have no problem with that. What I do have a problem with, is their blithe assumption that (a) I must, simply must care as much as they do, and (b) they are justified in pursuing me to the ends of the earth in pursuit of getting me to do so.

They don’t care about the stuff I care about, so how come am I obliged to care about the stuff they care about? The world is overly full of people who, simply because they care very deeply about something, feel entitled to inconvenience the rest of the human race in that regard.

I am not a bad person for not caring; YOU are a bad person for being a self-righteous pain in the ass. Piss off.

Janey Stephenson goes the last mile.

This is a sobering week for women’s liberation in the UK. Tomorrow, our Chancellor will announce further austerity measures on the UN International Day to End Violence Against Women. This coincidence would be darkly funny if it wasn’t so devastating. Make no mistake: austerity is state violence against women.

I am not making this up.

We use words like ‘cut’ and ‘slash’ to describe austerity, so how can we deny that it is economic violence? And when it is women’s services at the receiving end of such brutal assaults, austerity becomes state violence against women that reinforces interpersonal violence against women. What better way to assist perpetrators than make it almost impossible for their victims to receive the support they need to flee?

The staff of the Onion must be jumping out of windows; how could you possibly parody this stuff?

Mark Steyn sounds the alert.

The official line from Obama and Kerry is that the world is safer than it’s ever been – except for a few pockets here and there. You’ll recall that, when I spoke at the Danish Parliament seven weeks ago, the US State Department issued a travel advisory warning US citizens to steer clear of me and that particular neighborhood of Copenhagen. All very specific, and leaving plenty of other places for Americans to visit. However, the State Department has now expanded its area of concern and issued a “Worldwide Travel Alert”, advising Americans basically to steer clear of the entire planet until February 26th. Claudia Rosett says reassuringly that travel abroad is still safe for Americans if you can “teleport into rural New Zealand”. Absent that, shelter in place for the next three months.

As Obama, Biden et al crowed only three years ago, the terrorists are on the run, and they’ve apparently run everywhere. Is this all the President’s fault? Well, he is “the leader of the free world”. Which sounds like a demanding job. But happily, in terms of places it’s safe to visit, the free world seems to be getting a lot smaller.

Read it.

A peanut glut “threatening to hand American taxpayers a near $2-billion bailout bill over the next three years”….

Aren’t we lucky.

Read it.

Warning: Not in a good way.

Future holiday meals might not emerge steaming from an oven but from the heated platform of a 3D printer. The machines have already begun to make food more sustainable, more individualized, and more interesting.

“Today, food and software are very big, but very separate pieces of our lives,” says Hod Lipson, a 3D-printing pioneer at Columbia University. “There is a lot of potential in combining them.” Before long, printers might be a staple in every modern kitchen, like the microwave, or the stove before it.

Freeberg fisks Hillary Clinton … and a whole lot more.

After seven or eight years of man-crush on Emperor Obama, an entire generation has figured out a new way of “thinking” and it isn’t healthy. You can’t create anything that will actually help anyone, thinking this way. You can’t grow turnips, or rice, or tomatoes, or slaughter some beef, pork or chicken, thinking this way. “This soil is good for growing grapes! Not only is it good for growing grapes, but it is the best soil for growing grapes on the WHOLE planet! And if you do not agree, unhesitatingly, my friends and I will all get together on Facebook, and mock you!” Just like “survivors of sexual assault deserve to be believed.” As is the case with sophistry, the conclusion has nothing to do with whether the soil is really good for growing grapes, or whether the survivor of a sexual assault really did survive a sexual assault.

 

…

The sophists of millennia ago who aroused the enmity of Socrates and Plato, would have stopped short of this. There is no “moral virtue” involved, cosmetic or genuine, in claiming to have been named after Sir Edmund Hillary. What there is, is a weird sort of group cred. Just like sophistry, it ignores truth, or rather makes a fair-weather friend out of truth, showing support for truth only when truth happens to take the side of the superior goals. But its goals are unique.

Read it.

Two senior Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials accused of scamming the agency for personal financial gain were demoted on Friday, according to a statement released by the VA.  Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves, formerly senior executives, are now “general workers” within the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) as a result of an investigation that concluded the duo had “misused their positions of authority for their own personal benefit.”

…

According to Stars and Stripes, a House committee staffer said “the VA is not taking steps to recoup the relocation benefits and both executives will continue to earn well over $100,000 a year.”

As Jerry Pournelle says, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

Read it.

Researchers at Linköping University in Sweden have merged electronic circuitry with the vascular system of living plants for the very first time.

I find this vaguely disturbing.

Steve Sailer digs into the past so you don’t have to.

The first American IQ test, the Stanford-Binet, was created just before World War I by Lewis Terman, who went on to do the first long-term tracking study of high IQ individuals, The Genetic Studies of Genius or Terman’s Termites. (Future Nobel Physicist William Shockley famously just missed scoring high enough to qualify.)

Lewis Terman’s son Fred Terman, Stanford’s longtime Dean of Engineering, is often called the Father of Silicon Valley. Fred Terman, the mentor of Hewlett & Packard, devised both the high tech start-up model for Silicon Valley and brought in huge amounts of Cold War aerospace spending to build the Valley’s tech infrastructure.

The other main candidate for the role of the Father of Silicon Valley, physicist / eugenicist William Shockley, was hired as a Stanford professor by his friend Fred Terman.

It’s almost as if there’s a pattern that Stanford and Silicon Valley believe that intelligence matters and that it’s not wholly malleable through social engineering … But of course that has all been discredited, as demonstrated by Silicon Valley’s lavish hiring of non-Asian minorities for engineering jobs.

*Snort*

Read it.

The latest Fox News poll of 1,000 registered voters is pretty stunning. To begin with, nearly every Republican tested beats Hillary Clinton in the presidential race. Marco Rubio does best at 50%-42%, but Donald Trump, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush and Chris Christie also lead her. Carly Fiorina ties Hillary at 42%-42%.

Read it.

Well, it may be new to the Wall Street Journal, but it’s not new to those of us who have been paying attention. Talk radio has been a force in politics since the Reagan years.

A decade ago, Republicans touted conservative talk radio as a foolproof medium to communicate directly with their most ardent supporters. Democrats and liberal groups tried to replicate that success by building their own left-leaning television and radio stations, with far less success.

That’s because (a) a neoliberal on the radio isn’t entertaining; poster child here is AlGore; (b) the Left can get all the ‘talk radio’ they want from tuning in the Drive-By Media — they don’t need a special format in broadcasting. I guess Patrick O’Connor at the Wall Street Journal just arrived in America from Not Around Here.

Now, the tables have turned. Republican leaders in Washington are under siege from their own activists, in part, because conservative radio hosts are almost as likely to rail against the party brass in Congress as they are to lament Mr. Obama’s failings in the Oval Office.

Is this a great country or what?

Republican presidential contenders would be unwise to write off this bloc; roughly a third of Republican primary voters strongly identify with conservative talk radio, about 10 percentage points higher than the share of GOP primary voters who consider themselves moderate or liberal, according to the survey conducted by the Democrats at Hart Research Associates and the Republicans at Public Opinion Research.

Of course, Republican presidential contenders are unlikely to do so — because they, unlike Patrick O’Connor of the Wall Street Journal, happen to keep up on what is going on in their party.

Read it.

There are many reasons why Belgium has become a hotbed of radical Islamism. Some of the answers may lie in the implanting of Saudi Salafist preachers in the country from the 1960s.

Keen to secure oil contracts, Belgium’s King Baudouin made an offer to Saudi King Faisal, who had visited Brussels in 1967: Belgium would set up a mosque in the capital, and hire Gulf-trained clerics.

Not a good idea. But money often blinds those to whom religion is merely a hobby that others take it more seriously.

Although the mosque was treated as the official voice of Muslims in Belgium, its radical Salafist teachings came from a very different tradition to the Islam of the new immigrants. Today, there are around 600,000 people of Moroccan and Turkish origin in Belgium, a country of 11 million.

And, I suspect, they are now regretting it. But maybe not — Europe is not what it was.

Still, perhaps there is hope that people there are starting to wake up, as this article in a British newspaper suggests might be happening.

Read it.

Such explicit racism is, of course, de rigueur for the race hustlers in academia.

Read it.

The editorial contains the inevitable slash at the greed and deceptiveness of Wall Street, but that part feels tired and pro forma.Even the NYT can’t fail to observe that this dynamic involves failures of governance on the part of the trustees of public pension funds. Either the trustees are stupid and credulous, or they are “willfully blind”—they choose to ignore the risks and odds because they need to throw Hail Marys to get the kind of returns they need to meet their unrealistically aggressive growth targets.

This is another way of saying that public sector unions—and state and municipal governments—have made promises to workers about their pensions without setting aside enough money to fulfill those promises when they came due. As a result, pension managers are forced into the casinos to make risky bets. But because they tend to be among the stupidest players in the financial market, they all too often end up getting hosed.

Funny how that works.

Over and over again, the answer is large but unfunded pension promises. Union leaders can posture to their members about all the lovely bacon they are bringing home, and politicians can posture to the taxpayers about how fiscally prudent they have been. The game depends on the unions shutting up about the underfunding of the pensions. If the politicians had to fund the pensions at the real level of these promises, they couldn’t make the promises.

Oops.

The Gray Lady, to her credit, realizes that something terrible has happened, and she is doing what she does best: sounding the alarm. But she is still doing her utmost to pretend that there is no real cause for this terrible, multi-trillion dollar hole in the pension system. She sees no systemic flaw in the way that the modern progressive city and state are both designed, no structural defect that produces these terrible consequences in cities as different as Houston, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and in states ranging from tiny Rhode Island to giant California, New York, and Illinois.

That would require … oh, what was the word … oh, yeah, journalism.

Sarah Hoyt discovers the terrible sin of Cultural Appropriation.

It might be easier, honest to Bob, if they had children or, for the few of them who DO have children, if they’d paid any attention to their kids’ development instead of to the weird movie going on in their heads which leads them believe things like that a baby recoiling from unfamiliar appearance means the baby is racist.

I’ve always thought babies were racist. Perhaps I ought to reconsider.

But innate tendencies do not a culture make.  Innate tendencies might dictate whether you leap out of bed with a song on your lips and incite murder in the mind of your roommate who drags self out of bed with groan and crawls till noon by the grace of coffee, but it does not dictate what language you speak, what attire you wear, or whether you think women look best when disguised as sofas.  Those are things you learned from your relatives/guardians when you were too young to think.  They might be filed under “must do” at a level where you have never examined them, but that doesn’t mean you can’t examine them. And change them.  It just means it takes time, is painful, and no one is going to do it without major upheaval requiring it.

…

Cultural appropriation?  Flummery.  It’s called being human.

The Other McCain reviews Bernie Sanders.

His economic ideas are as obsolete as Eugene V. Debs, his foreign policy proposals can be summarized in two words — unilateral disarmament — and yet the socialist senator from Vermont inspires orgasmic enthusiasm from Generation Selfie….

Including my younger brother, sad to say, but I guess God used up all the brains in the family on me and he got caught short.

Read it.

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

After an initial burst of interest spurred by CBS’s big-bucks saturation advertising campaign for “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” the show’s ratings have tanked and it is now running third in late night behind NBC’s Jimmy Fallon and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel, who rarely has managed second place before.

The reason? A survey by the Hollywood Reporter found that conservative viewers are turning off Colbert in droves. Nearly twice as many Republicans are watching Kimmel as Colbert, who has turned “Late Night” into a sort of wannabe MSNBC show.

The pattern is familiar: When a Democrat is the guest, Colbert is Barbara Walters. When a Republican is on, he turns into Tim Russert.

Gosh, whoever could have predicted that?

I, for one, have never found Colbert all that funny. He gets laughs from the people who are delighted by snide treatment of the sort of people that Colbert gives snide treatment to.

Read it.

Apparently the most commonly-used phrase in Administration commentary about Obamacare is ‘unexpectedly’. This article explains why it wasn’t unexpected at all … if you were paying attention.

ObamaCare co-ops were supposed to provide lower cost health insurance alternatives because they weren’t driven by the profit motive. Now, just a couple of years after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was implemented, 12 out of 23 co-ops have failed, costing taxpayers $1.2 billion in defaulted loan repayments. The failure rate even outstrips the Labor Department’s 2011 projections of 36 percent, and as The Carpenters used to sing, “We’ve Only Just Begun.”

The impact on 100,000 New York state users of the failed Health Republic Insurance of New York co-op means they will have to find new health insurance. The New York Post writes, “Add 250 New York cancer patients to the long list of victims of ObamaCare’s lies — just one more snapshot of the program’s ongoing death spiral.”

The reason cancer patients are now scrambling for healthcare? The collapsed co-op was the only insurance provider that covered treatment at the world-renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and now with the co-op gone, cancer patients need to find new insurance, new doctors, new treatment centers all at the most vulnerable time in their lives. The naive idea that the co-op could offer premium coverage at non-premium pricing and survive has left patients stranded and taxpayers stuck with the price tag.

But failing co-ops are only a small part of the problem for the ObamaCare house of cards. The largest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealthcare, just announced that they are unlikely to participate in the ObamaCare health exchanges in 2017 and are limiting their marketing for customers through exchanges in 2016.

Read it.

A self-correcting problem. I love it.

Now if we can only get journalist and politicians to pick it up….

Read it.

Many things in life — like landing a job at some Wal-Mart locations — are harder to achieve than getting into that prestigious university.

Despite much of the bloviation you hear about the origins of the Thanksgiving Day holiday, it’s origin is very simple — it was the traditional English harvest feast of Martinmas, the feast day of St Martin of Tours, held traditionally on November 11 each year. (The Puritans didn’t call it Martinmas, of course, because saints’ days were ‘papist’.)

‘But wait’, I hear you say. ‘Thanksgiving isn’t on the 11th.’ Of course not. In the 1600’s, England was on a Julian calendar; it didn’t start using the ‘papist’ Gregorian calendar until 1752, more than a century after the first ‘Thanksgiving’ feast. The key thing to know about the Julian calendar is that it’s a number of days behind the Gregorian calendar; by 2015 this difference is 13 days. So in order to know what Julian date is for November 11, you have to add 13 days to the Gregorian date. I’ll leave you to do the math.

Read it.

A government commission avoiding blaming a government department. That’s news.

I like a conspiracy theory better than most, but this is a stretch — and not the sort of tabloid-fodder you expect to find in the Telegraph.

Read it.

This is amazing stuff.

Identifying the materials used in medieval illuminated manuscripts gives us an insight into the techniques and skills of the scribes and illuminators, as well as the sometimes complex trade routes of the times. Also, knowing what materials are present gives modern day conservators information about the materials they may encounter. The challenge is to be able to identify materials on a delicate sheet of parchment, typically a folio of a bound manuscript that does not open readily, without contact, sampling or causing any damage. Ideally the technique should give an unequivocal identification of pigments with high spatial resolution and selectivity: a challenge indeed!

At Durham we have used Raman spectroscopy combined with hyperspectral imaging and diffuse reflectance spectroscopy to this end, and have embarked upon a study of the pigments used in manuscripts produced in the British Isles and northern Europe between the 7th and 15th centuries. By studying books of well-established provenance and time and place of origin we are building a map of pigment use, creating a valuable resource for conservators and historians. The changes in pigment choice and use reflect changes in technology transfer, e.g. as book production moved from the monastic to the secular, and of societal change, e.g. the changes in pigment use arising from the Norman conquest.

There are many areas of historical research where investigation of remnant artifacts is hampered, sometimes crippled, by the fact that actual physical samples of the things being analyzed can’t be used. This is a tremendous step forward.

Read it.

I wrote earlier today about the liberal media attacking Donald Trump’s statement that on 9/11, “thousands and thousands” of American Muslims in Jersey City celebrated the successful terrorist attacks. Another Democrat who got into the act was the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler. He addressed Trump’s claim here, and, calling it “outrageous,” awarded it four Pinocchios.

…

This assertion is astonishing, because it means that Kessler is ignorant–or pretends to be–of his own newspaper’s reporting. As I wrote in the earlier post, the Washington Post, on September 18, 2001, wrote:

In Jersey City, within hours of two jetliners’ plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.

Somebody at the Washington Post lied? Say it ain’t so!

Did Kessler know about his own paper’s September 18, 2001 news story or not? If he didn’t, he is a lousy fact checker. If he did, his column was deceitful, to put it politely. So far, Kessler has refused to answer that question. I he does respond, I will publish an update. In the meantime, I award Kessler four Pinocchios.

Sounds fair.

Read it. And watch the video.

Several years ago we featured a four-part Israeli documentary about Islam in Europe. Immediately after the November 13 massacre in Paris, the same outfit put out another documentary about the hijra — the migration of mujahideen from Europe to Syria, and then back again to Europe.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

One of the weirder trends in American discourse these days is the decline in any sense of how long ago specific dates in the past were when asserting theories of historical causality. Black students at Princeton are oppressed by Woodrow Wilson, while Genius T. Coates blames everything on FDR’s FHA.

Read it. And watch the video.

A Syrian jihadess (jihadette?) used a fake passport and bribed customs officials at the airport in Bogota in order to be able to catch a flight to France just before the massacre in Paris. According to the following news report from Colombia, the case of Seham Al Salkhadi is just one of many instances in which Syrian mujahideen have used fake or stolen documents to travel from Latin America to destinations in the United States or Europe.