Read it.

The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing last week on the international tax competition in 2016. Various distinguished witnesses revealed severe consequences on small businesses and community structures when a corporation moves overseas. Under the present global tax laws, American businesses are not able to compete in the global economy.

The problems with double taxation and corporate inversions are not confined solely to the federal government and large corporations- the ripple effects are seen in our neighborhoods and communities.  International tax reform is being recognized as a bipartisan effort.

Read it.

When the higher ed bubble bursts, it’s going to make the last housing bubble look small.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following video from German TV investigates the black market in passports that flourishes in Athens. If you have €300, you can become a “refugee” from any country you prefer. And for €3,000 you can get a chipped passport plus ID card that can pass through the scanners at the border checks without any problem.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following video discusses the plight of Christians in German “refugee” accommodations, which are dominated by Muslims. Christian residents are persecuted — harassed, beaten, and threatened with death — for wearing crosses or otherwise practicing their faith. Some of them have been forced to leave the asylum centers and find refuge in churches.

Read it.

There’s a scene in an old Pogo book in which Owl and Pogo are playing the parts of comrades living under Soviet rule. Pogo is a peasant, and Owl is a minor functionary, an apparatchik. Owl tells Pogo he once yelled “Down with the government!” — into a paper bag. To prove his story, he fetches the paper bag and opens it. Out of the paper bag bursts a speech balloon that says: “Hooray for the government!”

Owl says sheepishly, “I disguised it a li’l bit.”

That’s what the video below reminds me of. It was recorded during Hijab Day last week in Ottawa, which was one of those festive feminist occasions when right-thinking Canadian wymyn show their solidarity with their Muslim sisters by wearing the hijab in a defiant gesture against male domination and the oppressive patriarchy.

The Afghan woman featured in the video was asked if she would also show solidarity with the young Syrian woman in a Flemish asylum center who refused to wear a hijab, which resulted in a violent brawl between the Syrians and the other culture-enrichers in the camp. The Afghan woman said that yes, she would show solidarity — by wearing her hijab.

Freedom is slavery, baby!

Joel Kotkin raises the alarm.

The next culture war will not be about issues like gay marriage or abortion, but about something more fundamental: how Americans choose to live. In the crosshairs now will not be just recalcitrant Christians or crazed billionaire racists, but the vast majority of Americans who either live in suburban-style housing or aspire to do so in the future. Roughly four in five home buyers prefer a single-family home, but much of the political class increasingly wants them to live differently.

Theoretically, the suburbs should be the dominant politically force in America. Some 44 million Americans live in the core cities of America’s 51 major metropolitan areas, while nearly 122 million Americans live in the suburbs. In other words, nearly three-quarters of metropolitan Americans live in suburbs.

Yet it has been decided, mostly by self-described progressives, that suburban living is too unecological, not mention too uncool, and even too white for their future America. Density is their new holy grail, for both the world and the U.S. Across the country efforts are now being mounted—through HUD, the EPA, and scores of local agencies—to impede suburban home-building, or to raise its cost. Notably in coastal California, but other places, too, suburban housing is increasingly relegated to the affluent.

Read it.

An imam named Muhammad Zulkifal is on trial in Italy for murdering two of his fellow Pakistanis for the crime of wearing bathing suits at the beach. At least one of the victims, a woman, was dismembered.

The case has a Mohammed Coefficient of 100%.

One of the chilling side-notes in this article from Il Giornale is the fact that Mr. Zulkifal’s terror cell, which is based in Italy, has significant influence in Pakistan — the opposite of what you’d normally expect. Does this mean that AQO (Al Qaeda in Olbia) will use their Italian stronghold as a base from which to launch terror attacks in Pakistan?

Allahu akbar, y’all.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine dishes it up.

Some times one thing leads to another, and you end up going down a rabbit hole of campus crazy. Wait—isn’t “rabbit hole” a speciesist metaphor? I’m sure it is somewhere. Will Rogers used to say that it’s no trouble being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you; my paraphrase is that who needs joke writers when you have most of the professoriate working for you.

Freeberg nails it again.

What is the implied plan, with turning your shopping receptacle into a projectile, possibly hurting someone? Someone is supposed to notice you’re upset? Who? For an explanation, all I can think of is a chemical imbalance in the brain, or poor upbringing. It’s not just him. Something is just a bit off today. One of these days, I need to learn to do my shopping here when the professionals do it; seems when they’re there, I have a lot of trouble parking, but when everybody else is there I have problems with everything else. People don’t understand what they’re there to get, which is excusable, but they also don’t seem to understand how to move around other people. Which is not. C’mon, you’re not five anymore. High traffic areas, low traffic areas, these things are not the same. You need to check your bearings, figure out what’s next on your list, have a quick conference with your spouse…where do you do that? In the way, or out of the way? You should have to pass a test like this before being allowed entrance.

…

Here’s the fascinating part. I would bet good money that this is an Obama voter. But there’s no use heading over to Social Media to say so, it would just start needless arguments, butt hurt, and a LOT of rebuttal. That’s the advantage of having taken the time to argue with liberals, you learn things. And the fascinating part is, Obama voters, while being seen in this light by normal people, look at normal people this way too. No really. They think when normal people think about high taxes the way normal people think about high taxes — high, therefore questionable at least, and certainly very taxing — we’re being the asshole who gives a cart a mighty shove, thereby contributing to the congestion problem that he is simultaneously announcing to the world is too much for him to tolerate. They think that guy is us. You hear them say so all the time. Who among us has not heard the endless litanies about how we have to have a tax system so we can pay for police departments, fire departments, park benches, et al. They’re so cute when they work so hard to avoid saying anything good about the military. Also, traffic lights are like this. Part of the price we have to pay to live in a civilized society is that we have to follow rules, much like stopping for a red light and waiting for it to turn green. Yes, that must be the problem. I’m opposed to more public debt because I’m a red-light runner.

Watch it.

A good shot, right on the turret — not a great shot, which would have aimed for the junction of the turret and the hull; but perhaps they wanted the guys inside to escape, as you see one do in the final frames.

I doubt that it did much damage, since TOWs have shaped charges and a jet of red-hot copper that actually penetrated would have made it impossible for that guy to get out less than a minute later — but it probably scared the shit out of the crew and they bailed. So, mission accomplished.

Read it.

Approximately thirty faculty, staff, and members of the Intercultural Center (IC) at Swarthmore College met last week to discuss new course requirements dedicated to, get this — gender, race, class, and sexuality.

That’s right — requirements. Who would have guessed, eh?

Read it.

Most of that legacy was invading Christian countries and reducing them to slavery.

Are they going to have a similar ‘tourist trail’ to celebrate Hitler’s romp through Eastern Europe?

Read it.

While the West debates the humanitarian problem of Syrian refugees flooding across its borders, the discussions repeatedly turn to the dangers they might pose: what if there are terrorists among them? How can we be sure? How can we save those in need of saving and still be safe ourselves?

Yet for many of these refugees, married off against their will, the terror has already begun. They are 11 and 13 and 14 years old. Some of them are pregnant. Some are already mothers at 14. Their husbands are 25 or 38 or 40. And there is no escape.

And the feminists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Read it.

Current technologies already have the potential to automate a surprisingly large percentage of most tasks performed by human workers today, and advances in the field could have devastating effects on occupations across the board.

Rice University computer scientist Moshe Vardi believes that we are rapidly approaching a point where machines, and artificial intelligence, will be able to perform virtually any task just as well as, or even better than, a human.

According to a press release available from Phys.org, Vardi has postulated that, within 30 years, advances in artificial intelligence could leave more than 50 percent of the world unemployed.

Read it.

“As smoking gives us something to do with our hands when we aren’t using them, Time gives us something to do with our minds when we aren’t thinking,” Dwight Macdonald wrote in 1957. With smartphones, the issue never arises. Hands and mind are continuously occupied texting, e-mailing, liking, tweeting, watching YouTube videos, and playing Candy Crush.

Multipurpose tables.

Peggy Noonan speaks truth to power.

We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.

I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?

In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.

‘Normal’ people, of course, have no access to the corridors of power; no Congressmen in their Contacts list, no children at Sidwell Friends School, no pundit gigs on MSNBC, no pixel-inches in Slate or the Huffington Post, no gangs of kids hanging out on their street-corners whose first language comes from another continent.

There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.

The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful—those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.

I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.

The ‘protected’, of course, include fashionable minorities — and those who ‘identify’ with the new Ruling Victims.

They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them—in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union—literally have their own security details.

Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.

Read it.

The reign of margarine is almost over. Sales of margarine—a plant-based spread that was once immensely popular because of its purported health benefits—have been rapidly declining and is now a cause of huge concern for Unilever, the world’s largest margarine producer and the parent company of brands that include Promise, Imperial, and Country Crock. The butter-substitute has a long history at Unilever—the company was founded through a merger between a soap maker and a Dutch company that began making margarine in 1872.

But, the truth is that butter has made a comeback: new reports argue that it’s not as unhealthy and artery-clogging as once thought, which has pushed margarine into quick decline. In response, Unilever last year created a separate business unit for its margarine operations, a move that its chief executive compared to “putting a sick child in a separate room from siblings, and showering extra care on them.” But the results have remained the same.

My, what a surprise!

Of the 11 remaining health insurance co-ops created under Obamacare, eight of them could collapse in less than a year. Moreover, the 11 remaining are less than half of the original twenty-three that were established in 2012 to compete with for-profit, private insurance companies. This from Mandy Cohen, one of the top federal health officials in charge of overseeing the implementation of Obamacare. As COO of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Cohen’s responsibilities not only cover the physical presence of Obamacare throughout the country but its disastrous virtual presence in the form of healthcare.gov.

In addition to the possible collapse of the healthcare co-ops, Cohen hinted that there was much more at stake than just the loss of insurance for consumers.

Read it.

Now THAT’s a scary thought.

Read it.

But of course Obama’s background check can figure out that he’s actually a wacko.

He is, after all, the Magic Negro.

Read it.

As reported by Reuters, 40 Iranian news outlets have kicked in roughly $600,000 to add to the millions of dollars already pledged to the 27-year-old bounty on Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie’s head.

The fatwa, or religious ruling, was originally decreed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who deemed Rushdie’s novel “blasphemous” in 1989. Though a previous reform-minded Iranian president declared the fatwa “completely finished” in 1998, Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei reasserted the standing death sentence on the British author in 2005.

I wonder what the reaction would be if the U.S. government put up a bounty for killing Edward Snowden, and the New York Times, Washington Post, and L.A. Times kicked in another half-mil?

Read it.

ThoughtCrime is always punished, even in the Brave New World.

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

[Okay, that ties junk science in with class warfare — if we can only get racism or homophobia into the mix as well, we’ll have the perfect progressive platform.]

Read it.

Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.

Read it.

Political irony is the best irony: while many millennials are flocking to vote for Bernie Sanders, a man who brashly argues in favor of raising taxes, the same constituency seems to fear tax-season.

USA Today reports “a survey of 1,600 U.S. adults found that 80% of taxpayers’ ages 18-34 (the millennial generation) who filed taxes last year and plan to file this year say they’re fearful about some aspect of preparing their taxes. That’s the highest of all the age groups.

Perhaps it’s because millennials have never learned basic If-This-Then-That in school.

There are some serious reasons why millennials fear tax-season, as the USA Today continues: “Almost a quarter (22%) of those nervous Millennials say their biggest worry is making a mistake on their returns.” As they should, one mistake on your tax forms and you could be audited, jailed, or labeled as a good-for-nothing-tax-dodging-cheat who should be burned at the stake in one of Sanders’ next stump speeches. Who can handle that type of pressure?

Well, I can, but then I’m an MBA.

Read it.

It was just over a century ago when the nation changed the process for selecting U.S. senators. The 17th Amendment gave voters the power to elect senators, who had previously been elected by their state legislatures.

Regret for that constitutional amendment has lingered with some Americans, particularly among conservatives. Among its critics was the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia. And in Utah on Wednesday, a debate that may seem obscure or obsolete was live on the state legislative floor.

The Utah Senate passed a resolution urging the state’s congressional delegation and “all the members of the United States Congress” to propose a repeal of the 17th Amendment.

Read it.

And took their own sweet time about it.

Read it.

On February 8, 2016, the FBI launched its “Don’t Be a Puppet” website. Designed to resemble a video game, the website is an interactive tool for the nation’s schools to prevent susceptible youth from getting recruited online by terrorists. Unfortunately, the released version appears to have suffered from politically-correct retooling that blunts its original purpose of protecting teens from Islamist recruitment.

The website had been scheduled for release last November, but was delayed by complaints from the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and others. By asking about participants’ religious beliefs, according to CAIR, the program reinforced anti-Muslim stereotypes and promoted bullying of Muslims students. CAIR’s subtext, which it has repeated many times, is that Islam has nothing to do with ISIS/Islamist violence.

So we are attempting to keep Muslims from being recruited as terrorists but can’t refer to Muslims or Islam.

Your tax dollars at work.

Yeah, it’s been that kind of a day.

Freeberg has some thoughts.

Second thing is what has happened to the liberals. They still want to get even for the “Florida debacle” of 2000. Before that, they were about ending prejudices, and feeding and clothing the hungry. True, a lot of their measures achieved the opposite of these things and the liberals didn’t very much care. But afterward, getting even with conservatives is an objective that has stolen the limelight. The shift is subtle, but it is there. There’s a difference between — “I want to get these people health insurance, and I must defeat conservatives because they’re getting in my way of doing that” — and — “I want to make these conservatives look bad in the public view, and to do that I can get the word out that they, for some reason, don’t want these people to get health insurance.” Those are actually two different things. One is overly simplistic but determined, like a dog chasing a car that wouldn’t know what to do if it caught the car. The other is just plain vengeful.

And the third thing is what’s happened to conservatives. They still don’t have time for all this fighting-about-politics stuff. They have work to do. In fact, very often The Futility sets in, and they say to themselves…well, fuck this, this dime-store idiot liberal guy has all the time in the world to throw his cherry-picked statistics at me, his Mother Jones articles, maybe troll conservative blogs all day, but I have customers counting on me and I have to get back to work. And then after awhile the other thought enters the conservative cranium, yet again…I’m doing this to set up my retirement, get my kids headed to a brighter future, not be a burden to my family when I’m older. If only the liberal dipshits have influence on our politics, they get to shape our politics, and that will render these local efforts of mine entirely futile. The Counter-Futility. Back and forth the conservative goes, like a ping pong ball..it’s futile to do this, it is futile not to do this…

Read it.

Not the sort of thing you expect to see in the New York Times.

Colonel Qaddafi overthrew King Idris, the country’s founding leader, in a 1969 coup, but that was not all. He also abolished the monarchy; scrapped the royal flag; banished or jailed the king’s relatives; and turned the gold-domed palace into office space, a library, and after 2009, a lavish private museum for classical antiquities.

Yet the popular memory of King Idris, who died in Cairo in 1983, has quietly endured in Libya. And now, after Colonel Qaddafi’s own fall and the years of violent turmoil that have followed, the country’s closet royalists have emerged with a radical suggestion: Restore a form of monarchy, at least temporarily, to let Libyans rally behind a respected father figure and begin to rebuild their splintered nation.

Read it.

The DOJ has persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant for a thing that does not exist, by forcing Apple to create a key that the FBI is incapable of creating..

Read it.

BLUF: The Black Panthers were a criminal gang, thugs, rapists, and murderers (listen to the tape).

The University of Minnesota and several affiliated Usual Suspects are presenting something called “The Black Panthers: A Love Story”, at which the people who tortured and murdered Alex Rackley will be honored guests.

Read it.

Taxpayers deserve a transparent, accountable government, starting with Commissioner John Koskinen’s complacency in uncovering the truth in the Lois Lerner conservative targeting scandal. The agency has continually displayed extraordinary lack of responsibility.

Koskinen has also proven to be incapable of correctly handling taxpayer dollars, protecting them from identity theft, fraud, and even lied to the American people and Congress. Clearly, the agency is in desperate need of reform and new leadership.

My, what a surprise!

A report co-sponsored by JPMorgan Chase in 2014 speaks of the problem in similarly biblical terms: “Roughly 75 percent of the world’s poor — 2.5 billion people — do not have a bank account or otherwise participate in the mainstream financial system.” The lack of access to “secure, affordable financial products and services severely limits the global poor’s financial security and opportunities.”

Yet when bankers and regulators debate the travails of the unbanked or underbanked — effectively euphemisms for poor and lower-middle-class Americans — they usually avoid two key questions: Why is this cross-section of society so marginally attached to the banking system in the first place? And who is behind the provision of “alternative” services — high-cost loan sharks, payday lenders, cash checking stores, pawnshops — the poor turn to instead of banks?

In reality, it is the banks themselves that appear to have cut off and driven away the low-income consumer, not the other way around. Wall Street won’t make loans to the poor — at least not directly. But large banks, it turns out, are behind many of the predatory nonbank, high-cost lenders that notoriously prey on poor communities. Most recently, the same JPMorgan Chase that’s working with the White House to reach the unbanked partnered with OnDeck Capital, an online lender that approves loans in a flash and charges eye-popping interest rates that averaged around 54 percent as of 2014.

Read it.

The University of Michigan’s libertarian and conservative students held a debate on free speech and feminism featuring conservative media personality Milo Yiannopoulos and leftist activist Julie Bindel last night. Their views are apparently so terrifying that the campus’s Spectrum Center—an LGBT awareness group—provided a safe space for students who felt “threatened” by the debate.

It’s a tad ironic that a gay group would feel the need to protect gay students from Yiannopoulos and Bindel—both of whom identify as LGBT. While it’s certainly true that venomously anti-gay gay people exist, humoring the idea that Yiannopoulos and Bindel represent some kind of existential threat to anyone is indulging in hysteria.

Watch it.

I guess there’s not a lot to occupy your time in New Zealand.

Read it.

 A possible hidden chamber within the ancient tomb of Tutankhamun is “full of treasures,” Egypt’s tourism minister has promised.

When was the last time an Arab kept a promise?

“We do not know if the burial chamber is Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures,” he told the newspaper. “It will be a ‘Big Bang’, the discovery of the 21st century”.

The code name for this project is ‘Al Capone’s Safe’. Geraldo is in discussions with the network.

Read it.

Why? Because they’ve got all this taxpayer money and if they don’t spend it before the end of the year their budget will get cut.

Did we mention that these were government employees? We probably didn’t have to.

Watch it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

My, what a surprise!

The federal government has failed to properly monitor enrollee eligibility for Obamacare, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). As a result, the government has made billions of dollars in Obamacare subsidy payments to individuals that may have been committing fraud.

As the report notes, the system used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) relies on data sent by three government agencies – the IRS, SSA, and DHS – to check eligibility for Obamacare. However, the system used by CMS is unable to verify many inconsistencies in the data.

This inability to properly verify enrollment has meant billions of dollars have been sent out to enrollees without verifying whether the applicants were fraudulent.

Read it.

Caitlyn Jenner is a little too white and Republican for some college students.

Steve Sailer explains the truth that dare not say its name.

When Nosek et al. did an initial experiment with white respondents, asking them to judge whether students are worthy of inclusion in a (hypothetical) honor society based on GPA, test scores, and photos:

…we unexpectedly observed a social judgment bias favoring blacks over whites. In 5 subsequent studies, we established that this effect is robust, replicable, and appears to occur partly outside of awareness and control.

The latter part of Nosek’s findings—“outside of awareness and control”—is important within the academic world because in recent years a party line has developed that white racism works on autopilot outside the conscious willpower. Since few whites will admit these days to believing that blacks and whites tend to behave differently on average, the rationalization has emerged that white racism is such a powerful mind-warping force that it works its evil whiles outside of human control. The academic mainstream assumes that white racism operates much like the CIA mind-control beams that crazy people pick up via their dental fillings.

But Nosek’s original study and his five follow-up studies found the opposite. White people of all political persuasions tend to bestow honors upon blacks even when they are less deserving than whites. In a half-dozen studies, with a total sample size of 4,359 white people, whites consistently rewarded blacks for meeting lower standards.

Read it.

Record numbers of refugees from Fidel Castro’s failed communist experiment are streaming into the United States — not just across the Florida Straits, but especially over the U.S.-Mexico border. During the last three months of 2015, more than 12,000 Cubans knocked on our southern door. This year’s migration is on pace to double the previous high.

In stark, resentment-sowing contrast to other migrants from Latin America, Cubans are greeted in the U.S. with cash, access to welfare and a path to citizenship. That’s all thanks to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. But now many politicians are asking whether, during this period of Washington-Havana thaw, it’s time to revamp this Cold War-era preference.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, is delightfully dyspeptic today.

The successful politician no less than the successful whore adorns himself or herself with whatever costume, no matter how tawdry or embarrassing, is thought to be most alluring to the greatest number of customers.  But unlike the successful whore, who gives something of genuine value in return to each and every person who pays for her services, the successful politician gives value only to a small handful of his or her customers, and this politician finances these transactions with funds and freedoms forcibly confiscated from others.  In short, when ranking different professions according to the principles held and adhered to by their members, whores rank much, much higher than politicians.

Read it.

It sounds like an old argument for the allegedly uplifting effects of imperialism, though in this case she’s calling not for colonizing territory but for colonizing time. In Clinton’s worldview, what the disadvantaged need is to have “structure” imposed on them, and the way to impose that structure is to compel them to spend more time in institutions. (Notice that she isn’t arguing here for, say, offering after-school or summer programs for families who want them. To “expand the school day and the school year” is to expand the hours and days that kids are coerced to be in school.)

Read it.

In order to host a Beach Volleyball World Tour tournament, the Iranian government promised the sport’s organizing body that it would allow women to attend the event. But when the event began, women were turned away at the gate.

Sounds like the Obama administration. Are we sure he’s not a secret Muslim?

Read it.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) is in a race against time, and it is a race that is relevant to how other Western powers will also deal with the rise of radical, armed, Islamic groups proliferating across the Middle East.

As the IDF’s commanders look around the region, they see heavily armed, hybrid, Islamic sub-state foes that are replacing states. The traditional threat of hierarchical armies is fading quickly away, into obscurity.

Read it.

Bill Gates thinks we need a miracle to solve the world’s energy needs, a safe, reliable, non polluting form of energy which could bring electricity to the rural poor of Africa. The odd thing is, such a “miracle” is within our grasp; but nobody seems to be interested.

…

There is a nuclear fuel source which fits this description – Plutonium 238.

Plutonium 238 is ridiculously safe. Unlike other isotopes of Plutonium, Pu238 is a prolific alpha emitter, but it emits very little dangerous penetrating radiation. This almost eliminates the need for shielding – a sheet of stainless steel would block all the alpha radiation.

Pu238 is so safe, it used to be used as the core of nuclear pacemakers; people had Plutonium nuclear batteries implanted in their bodies. This procedure was only discontinued, when cheaper, long life chemical batteries became available.

Plutonium 238 is also very energy dense – it emits around half a watt per gram. A kilogram of Plutonium 238 generates 500 watts of energy. With a half life of 87 years, a few kilograms of Pu238 could produce more than enough energy to power a few simple household appliances, for several decades, without needing a refuel.