Read it.

A ringing endorsement. What else do you need?

Can’t say that I blame him God knows I wouldn’t vote for my brother for President, the communist….

Read it.

The greatest minds of humanity used to believe in a static universe, phrenology, and many more things that we might find ridiculous today. So if skepticism is so demonstrably useful and deserved, why do people demonize each other for failure to follow the herd?

It’s politics, stupid.

Like basically anything today, science often finds itself mired in the ostentatious game of political signaling. Opinions and interpretations of scientific research are as much a part of political identity as a bumper sticker or a lawn sign. This is hugely unfortunate because it leads people to adopt dogmatic approaches to a process that should be objective.

Politics ruin science (and pretty much everything else) because everything is reduced to a zero-sum game: an us versus them scenario where concession is likened to defeat. They also reduce diversity of opinion and promote groupthink.

‘Progressives’, of course, don’t have a problem with groupthink; their whole world depends on it.

Diane Ravitch blows the whistle.

FOR 15 years, since the passage of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, education reformers have promoted standardized testing, school choice, competition and accountability (meaning punishment of teachers and schools) as the primary means of improving education. For many years, I agreed with them. I was an assistant secretary of education in George H. W. Bush’s administration and a member of three conservative think tanks.

But as I watched the harmful effects of No Child Left Behind, I began to have doubts. The law required that all schools reach 100 percent proficiency as measured by state tests or face harsh punishments. This was an impossible goal. Standardized tests became the be-all and end-all of education, and states spent billions on them. Social scientists have long known that the best predictor of test scores is family income. Yet policy makers encouraged the firing of thousands of teachers and the closing of thousands of low-scoring public schools, mostly in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

As the damage escalated, I renounced my support for high-stakes testing and charter schools. Nonetheless, I clung to the hope that we might agree on national standards and a national curriculum. Surely, I thought, they would promote equity since all children would study the same things and take the same tests. But now I realize that I was wrong about that, too.

Six years after the release of our first national standards, the Common Core, and the new federal tests that accompanied them, it seems clear that the pursuit of a national curriculum is yet another excuse to avoid making serious efforts to reduce the main causes of low student achievement: poverty and racial segregation.

Read it.

A super-hard metal has been made in the laboratory by melting together titanium and gold.

The alloy is the hardest known metallic substance compatible with living tissues, say US physicists.

The material is four times harder than pure titanium and has applications in making longer-lasting medical implants, they say.

Read it.

The police has confirmed the attacker was a 21-year-old Syrian refugee but have not released his name. The motive for the attack is unclear.

Read it.

Archaeological digs in the Mideast have uncovered thousands of small clay objects, dating from as far back as 7500 BCE. These objects, referred to as “tokens,” have specific shapes and markings indicating a designated, but until recently unknown, purpose. This mystery was solved by the art historian Denise Schmandt-Besserat who began researching these items in 1969. The extraordinary results of her research were published in a number of articles and books, including How Writing Came About (University of Texas Press, 1996).

Her conclusion? The tokens were counters. Their use evolved over thousands of years from simply shaped tokens (see Figure 1) to more complex tokens bearing markings (see Figure 2). Each counter shape represented a specific quantity of a specific commodity. For example, a cone stood for a small measure of grain and a sphere for a large measure of grain. Using different shapes of counters to count different commodities is evidence of concrete counting, meaning that each category of items was counted with special numerations or number words specific to that category. There is a hint of concrete counting in our own society in our preference for phrases such as “a pair of shoes” or “a couple of days” over “two shoes” or “two days.” However, we almost always use abstract counting with our abstract numbers “two,” “three,” “four,” … that can be used to count any item. After 3300 BCE, the tokens were sometimes stored in clay envelopes with their imprints made on the envelope’s surface to make visible the number and shapes of tokens enclosed (see Figure 3). According to Schmandt-Besserat, the transformation of three-dimensional tokens to two-dimensional signs to communicate information was the beginning of writing. Eventually, the tokens were replaced by signs made by their impressions onto solid balls of clay, or tablets (see Figures 4 and 5). The impressed signs evolved to become cuneiform writing.

Slow news day.

Read it.

Are they coming after your house of worship or ministry? And who are “they?’

If you live in Iowa, up until two weeks ago “they” would have been your own state government, in the form of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, a body empowered to interpret, apply, and enforce state civil rights laws and assess penalties for offenders.

Alarmingly, the Commission originally indicated that the state had a right to dictate how churches teach, preach, and operate regarding important doctrines such as gender and sexuality. First Liberty attorneys stepped in. For now, the Commission has admirably revised its application of the law and the Iowa problem seems to be corrected.

But the larger problem is not corrected. The larger problem is a lot of powerful “theys” across the country who are still infringing on churches or synagogues, or at least would like to do so in the right circumstances.

The aggressors are a small but powerful elite of legal activists, radical lawyers, government officials, and influential law professors. They question whether your First Amendment right to “free exercise” is even protected within the four walls of your house of worship.

Bad news for Iowa.

Read it.

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

Separated at birth?

Read it.

I had the privilege of carrying out field research among the Baluchi tribes of Iran.

However, anthropologists, including those studying the Middle East, gradually moved away from a scientific perspective toward a more subjective and politicized view. They were influenced in part by Edward Said, who in Orientalism (1978) argued that Western accounts of the Middle East were fabrications invented to justify imperialist invasion, colonial imposition, and oppression of local peoples. This “postcolonial” view blames Western imperialism for myriad problems worldwide, a view that neglects the cultures and agency of people around the globe.

This intellectual revolution has infected anthropology (among many fields) with a dangerous, self-contradictory nihilism that rejects the possibility of objective Truth toward which we may move and posits many different truths held by different peoples — all equally valid. Yet they behave as if their belief in many truths must be treated as The Truth that must not be questioned.

Read it.

SOCOM is ordering Toyota and Ford SUVs and trucks, with options to improve their armor and add-on other features that turn the civilian vehicles into covert military machines. Known collectively as “technicals,” civilian vehicles converted for war use are so common there’s even a Twitter account documenting them under the name “Toyota Wars.”

George Forman five-portion family grill.

Clear padlock for lock pick practice.

Sutcase attachment for your butt.

Taki doesn’t much like modern Europe.

France was once a very great country, both a military as well as an intellectual powerhouse. It is now just a tourist attraction where one may or may not get killed by an Islamist.

Read it.

The history of American close air support is a tale of learn, master and forget. Institutional focus on strategic bombardment led the U.S. Army Air Forces to enter World War II with no concept of CAS or any organization to support it. Despite the bloody growing pains of early operations in the Mediterranean theater, the lessons learned by airmen of the Ninth Tactical Air Command, under the visionary leadership of Maj. Gen. Pete Quesada, enabled the delivery of masterfully effective close support amidst the chaos of Normandy’s beaches and Patton’s relentless advance across France. Merely six years later, Quesada’s innovations were completely forgotten as the strategically-focused USAF entered the Korean War with no professional close air support community. Tragically, U.S. troops were overrun by unopposed North Korean armor, while the Air Force struggled to reinvent CAS. The cycle repeated only a decade later in the jungles of Vietnam, and the USAF relied on Special Air Warfare units flying World War II–vintage A-1 Skyraiders to effectively recreate the mission. This pattern of learn, master and forget haunted the U.S. military in three consecutive wars, because it lacked a force-in-being of dedicated CAS professionals.

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A police press conference was held just after midnight, and the police chief said there was only one gunman, an Iranian-German with dual nationality. He killed nine people and wounded at least twenty others before killing himself.

Just your ordinary garden-variety Muslim terror attack. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

Read it.

That’s a win in my book. Now he knows how we feel about the prospect of a Hillary Clinton Presidency.

Torture has returned to Turkey under Erdogan – and he can’t just ‘opt out’ of his promises on human rights

Beheadings and Accountability in Syria

Brazil police arrest at least 10 in possible ISIS-linked Rio Olympics attack plot

Saudi Arabia ‘executes 99th person this year’ to overtake 2015 rate

Turkey suspends European Convention on Human Rights in wake of coup

ISIS’s Plan to Terrorize India

Genocide in homeland exposes rift in Iraqi-American Christian community

Turkey Coup: Erdogan declares three-month state of emergency

US investigates video in which Syrian rebels ‘decapitate’ young boy

Pokemon Go: Saudi clerics issue fatwa on ‘un-Islamic’ game

Turkey Coup: Erdogan bans all academics from leaving country as government crackdown intensifies

U.S. Airstrike in Syria Reportedly Kills At Least 60 Civilians

Turkey’s Road to Totalitarianism

Turkey’s Absurd Coup

Is Peace in Syria Finally Within Reach?

Turkey’s Coup Would’ve Crushed Democracy. Democracy Is Getting Crushed Anyway.

Brazil terror sect aligns with ISIS as Olympics approach

The war on Christians is extending into Turkey

Another Instance of Knife Jihad, This Time in the Maritime Alps

French woman and her three daughters’ stabbed by Moroccan man in Alpine resort

Vast Purge in Turkey as Thousands Are Detained in Post-Coup Backlash

Isis claims Germany train attacker as ‘soldier’ for Islamist group. Of course it does.

Culture-Enricher Runs Amok Near Würzburg

Syrian forces besiege rebel-held parts of Aleppo

One dead after Muslim mob attacks Christian priests in Egypt, officials say

President Erdogan could be using the coup against him to turn Turkey towards full-scale Islamisation

Istanbul deputy mayor shot in the head in city hall

Kazakhstan police station attack: Suspected Islamist militants kill five in Almaty

Syrian forces besiege rebel-held parts of Aleppo

Turkey coup: Disturbing picture shows soldiers ‘bound naked’ as Turkish President is warned over ‘purges’

Text message from Nice attack killer reveals he may not have been acting alone

Fears 300,000 people could starve to death after President Assad seizures control of road to Aleppo

Qandeel Baloch’s brother admits to drugging and strangling her: ‘Girls are born only to stay at home’

Bouhlel Had Help

Teenager reveals she became pregnant after being raped during Cologne sex attacks

Isis is feeling threatened in Syria – and that is why its reign of terror is spreading

Turkey coup: Soldier ‘beheaded by government supporters’, pictures shared on Twitter suggest

Qandeel Baloch dead: Pakistan’s answer to Kim Kardashian reportedly strangled to death in ‘honour killing’

Islamic State says ‘soldier’ responsible for Nice, France terror attack

“28 Pages” of Congressional Report Alleging Saudi Involvement in 9/11 Finally Released

Read it.

The first human trial of cells that have been tweaked by the genome-editing technique CRISPR will begin in China in August, Nature reports. The group will take white blood cells, which are part of the immune system, from people with a type of lung cancer and edit them using the CRISPR technology so they hunt cancer. Then, the lab-altered cells will be infused back into the patients.

The approach is similar to another trial in the U.S., which will test edited immune cells in several kinds of cancer. Trials with modified white blood cells, called T cells, have been run before. But scientists haven’t used the CRISPR technique to make the edits, relying instead on a virus to insert the sequences into the cells’ DNA. CRISPR, which is essentially a genetic copy-and-paste tool — makes modifying the cells at certain spots easier. That means the scientists can make the cells grow and multiply more rapidly, in addition to inserting instructions to kill cancer on sight.

Read it.

Despite steady job growth over the past six years, the U.S. labor market—by some accounts—has become a stagnant place where fewer people switch jobs and workers linger in the same roles for longer.

Recent research exploring the causes of this declining labor-market dynamism has focused on supply restrictions, such as state-based occupational licensing regimes, which make it harder for licensed workers to relocate across state borders, or prohibitively high rents in job-rich cities, which impede mobility. A drop in labor-market fluidity reduces overall employment rates, affecting younger and less-educated workers most of all, research by economists Steven Davis and John Haltiwanger shows. White House economist Jason Furman has also cited occupational licensing as a barrier to job fluidity.

A new paper says the problem is not supply. It’s that firms just don’t have enough demand for labor.

Read it. And watch the video.

Making students learn to execute similar operations using three different kinds of notation – as in the case of exponents, logarithms and roots – is a bit like asking them to learn to say the same thing in three different languages for no good reason. With such counterintuitive and redundant standardised notation systems, it’s easy to understand why many students become overwhelmed by mathematics and choose to pursue fields where complex calculations aren’t necessary. This video by Grant Sanderson, who makes films under the moniker 3Blue1Brown, looks at how expressing exponents, logarithms and roots could be made simpler by using one elegant notation system, and makes a broader case for how maths could be made more accessible by developing cleaner – and perhaps even artful – notation.

An interesting notion.

Note that the signs are in English.

Read it.

Military procurement bureaucrats are historically the source of epic misconduct and incompetence. This sort of thing goes back thousands of years and continues today even in the most technically advanced nations. An example of this, a dispute between SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and U.S. Army procurement officials, over a about computer software has become a classic example. It has gotten so bad that the publisher of the software preferred by the troops (Palantir) is suing army procurement officials who block the use of their software.

Palantir is the creator of a superior intel analysis system favored by troops allowed to use it. Unlike the troops, who have to follow orders and back off, Palantir refuses to quietly let the army spend billions on a less efficient software system that still does not work. In June 2016 Palantir Technologies told the army it was taking the dispute to court. This could get really ugly because there has already been a lot of testimony from troops who had used Palantir but were then forced to switch to the less effective (and not yet complete) DCGS (Distributed Common Ground System). Worse for the army a confidential Government Accountability Office investigation sided with Palantir.

Steve Sailer deconstructs the Narrative so that you won’t have to.

White people, of course, are responsible for everything bad in the world, especially when they aren’t even present.

Now, cops say things like, “I’m going home tonight,” meaning: “I’m not getting myself killed over this.”

Can’t say that I blame them.

Read it.

American liberals trumpet a “wage gap” between men and women, notwithstanding reams of social science data demonstrating that men’s higher average earnings reflect life choices, not discrimination. White House salaries are published, so analysts have shown that Barack Obama’s own staff manifests the same “pay gap” that Obama and Hillary Clinton decry in private industry. Democrats have no response; as usual, they count on voter ignorance.

It is entertaining to see the same drama play out in the United Kingdom….

‘Progressives’ are the masters of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

Politicians love to impose burdens, sometimes impossible burdens, on others, especially business people, but they are much more understanding when it comes to their own conduct. In 1994, Newt Gingrich and his colleagues drafted a Contract With America, a key provision of which was that Congress should live by the same laws it imposes on the rest of us. That proposal was wildly popular, given that Congress had made a regular practice of inserting an exception for itself in legislation.

Homework exercise: Look up whether Congress and its staffers have to use the same Obamacare insurance they dump on everybody else.

Read it.

The “refugees” keep pouring into Germany, and the cultural enrichment news keeps pouring out.

An Iraqi enricher told the court in Regensburg that when he strangled his wife, he was simply exercising his right under the law. Sharia law, that is — not German law. Or maybe Germany has revised its laws by now to include sharia provisions for the “New Germans”. His sentencing is tomorrow — that should tell us.

Read it.

Prosecutor François Molins held a news conference today in which he updated reporters on the investigation into Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel’s terrorist attack in Nice. Molins said the investigation has revealed that Bouhlel plotted his attack over a considerable period of time, and had accomplices, several of whom have been arrested.

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

Read it.

Really, if Obama were a secret Muslim, what would he do that would be any different?

Bloomberg Business Week, Voice of the Crust, carries the water.

When Peter Thiel has the first move in a chess game, he lifts his e2 pawn, the fifth from the left and the one directly in front of his king, and advances it two spaces. It’s an aggressive tactic, putting the bishop and queen into play, which is why Thiel likes it.

Note that this traditional ‘pawn to King 4‘ move is how an overwhelming majority of chess games start. Warning! Thumbsucker ahead!

His status as ringleader of the PayPal Mafia, the network of former employees and co-founders that includes SpaceX’s Elon Musk and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, makes him one of Silicon Valley’s most influential and admired figures; his iconoclastic politics make him a subject of amusement. Not coincidentally, and disconcertingly to many of those close to him, Thiel is also one of Donald Trump’s most prominent backers.

When he was just another gay tech CEO, presumably fashionably progressive, he was one of the crowd; endorsing Trumjp, however, makes his politics ‘strange’. All Hail the Narrative!

Read it.

Sure, why not? Everybody else is doing it.

It’s not as if it would be a first.

Read it.

A Wall Street Journal reporter says Department of Homeland Security agents tried to confiscate her cell phones, even though they knew she was a journalist, after she disembarked from a flight at Los Angeles International Airport last week.

Maria Abi-Habib, a Mideast reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote in a Facebook post Thursday that she was going through customs and immigrations when she was approached by a DHS agent who said she wanted to “help you get through the line.” But instead, she was ushered into a room and interrogated for an hour before the DHS agents tried, unsuccesfully, to get her to turn over her cell phones.

Read it. And watch the video.

Scotland Yard cancelled all leaves for bobbies after a riot by youths chanting “black lives matter” in Hyde Park in the poshest part of London left a policeman stabbed.

Read it.

As we reported on Monday, a young culture-enricher ran amok with a knife and an axe on a train in Bavaria, severely wounding several people before being shot dead by police. New details have emerged since then: the youthful miscreant had declared himself a soldier of the Caliphate, pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, and recorded a martyrdom video.

Read it.

And yet the Obamanation still can’t figure out what his motive might be. What a puzzler!

Read it.

Black Lives Matter activists occupied police union offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City on Wednesday morning for what protesters say is the unions’ role in defending police violence against minorities and opposing police reform legislation.

In D.C., activists with the local chapters of the Black Youth Project 100 and Black Lives Matter blocked the entrances to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) legislative headquarters and the nearby intersection.

Meanwhile, the New York City chapters of the BYP100 and Million Hoodies occupied the lobby of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, which represents New York City Police Department officers.

Standing outside the FOP’s legislative office in D.C., local Black Youth Project 100 activist Clarise McCants called the FOP “the most dangerous fraternity in America.”

“We’re here today to make sure that no legislation that will continue to criminalize black people and protect killer cops is created,” McCants said. “When police officers kill us, they call their police union rep first, so the unions, especially the Fraternal Order of Police, are one of the main hindrances to keeping police accountable.”

If these guys are trying to start a race war with the police, I know who I’m betting on.

Read it.

Professor Gregory Jay’s personal website is devoted almost entirely to questions of whiteness and racism, with some whole essays on topics of “whiteness studies” addressing questions like “who invented white people?”

Needless to say, the guy is himself white. One is strongly tempted to say ‘You first’.

Imagine what the reaction would be to someone advocating the ‘abolition of whiteness’. Then find the racist in this picture.

Read it.

The Polar Ocean Challenge is taking a two month journey that will see them go from Bristol, Alaska, to Norway, then to Russia through the North East passage, back to Alaska through the North West passage, to Greenland and then ultimately back to Bristol. Their objective, as laid out by their website, was to demonstrate “that the Arctic sea ice coverage shrinks back so far now in the summer months that sea that was permanently locked up now can allow passage through.”

There has been one small hiccup thus-far though: they are currently stuck in Murmansk, Russia because there is too much ice blocking the North East passage the team said didn’t exist in summer months, according to Real Climate Science.

Oops.

Read it.

When Trump, Sr. speaks unscripted and un-telepromptered at his campaign rallies, he speaks the way that blue-collar white concrete pourers and sheetrock hangers would talk to each other on their lunch break. And this is why the elites hate Donald Trump, Sr., because the elites hate white proles. The adjectives they assign to Trump, Sr. like “racist,” “misogynist,” “xenophobic,” “narcissistic,” “autocratic,” are politically correct ways that the elites slam prole-white speaking patterns. But when prole whites see Trump speak, instead of seeing the evil that elites see, they merely see someone who sounds just like themselves, someone they can relate to. Unfortunately for elites, the proles far outnumber the elites at the voting booths. As Trump, Sr. might say, it’s not even close.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens?

Read it.

Perhaps he knew something we don’t.

Appearing in court in the small city of St. Pölten, where the incident occurred, the man was asked by the judge why he had drawn the penis, to which he replied: “Just because.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Never underestimate the POWER of PORK.

Read it.

Recently, economists at Purdue and the University of Copenhagen made a clever attempt to clear up the question. They looked at Danish manufacturing companies where overseas sales increased unexpectedly because of changes in foreign demand or transportation costs between 1996 and 2006. These constituted a set of natural experiments. At firms where exports spiked, there was suddenly a lot more work to do, a lot more things to sell. This put the squeeze on employees, who became measurably more productive — but also started to have more health problems.

“The medical literature typically finds that people who work longer hours have worse health outcomes — but we try to distinguish between causality and correlation,” said Chong Xiang, an economics professor at Purdue and co-author on the paper, along with David Hummels and Jakob Munch. A draft was released this week by the National Bureau for Economic Research.

So come be a slacker and vote for Hillary, who will give you free stuff and tax those assholes who expect you to work for a living.

This kind of study could only be done in a place such as Denmark, where the single-payer health care system keeps track of everyone’s doctor’s visits and drug purchases.

One of the best arguments against single-payer health care systems I’ve ever seen.

Read it.

The proponents of the War on Sugar – those fighting to eliminate —  or at least sharply reduce the amount of – sugar from the American diet have painted sugar as bad – have made sugar into a villain – because it is  too popular – people like it and, in the opinion of the anti-sugar advocates,  eat too much of it. We should additionally note that sugars are one of the carbohydrates that the body breaks down into glucose – also known as blood sugar. This illogic – sugar is bad because we eat too much of it —  is then used to vilify food producers who use sugar in their products – positioned as unnecessary, too much, wrong kind – an endless attack on a substance that is not only innocent, but is a necessary part of the human diet and the main source of quick energy for most higher life forms on earth.

Read it.

As always, near the end of the course I cover foundational public-choice economics – including an introduction to Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem.  Summarizing the conclusions of this literature as succinctly as my meager writing skills permit, Arrow’s theorem – made famous by Nobel laureate economist Kenneth Arrow (and often explained using examples from the work of the Scotsman Duncan Black) – says that it is impossible for any collective decision-making mechanism or procedure to generate outcomes that reflect only the preferences of the choosers.  The outcomes of all collective decision-making mechanisms or procedures – including majoritarian voting – necessarily are determined in part by the manner in which those mechanisms or procedures are used to settle upon outcomes.  Put differently, Arrow proved that it is impossible to devise any collective decision-making mechanism or procedure that generates results free of the influence of arbitrary factors (that is, factors that reasonable people believe should not play a role in determining the outcome of decision-making procedures).

The short conclusion for majoritarian voting is this: the preferences of the voters are not the only factors that determine the outcomes of elections.  If the manner in which the vote in conducted is changed, the outcome of an election will change even if no voter’s preferences change.

Put even more succinctly: in almost all elections, there isn’t only one correct outcome.  There isn’t one outcome that reflects the individual-voters’ collective “preference” better or more accurately than some other possible outcomes.  Stated differently, in almost all collective-decision-making settings, there is no “will of the people.”  It’s a mistake to anthropomorphize a group of people.  Each individual has preferences; a collection of individuals has only a collection of individual preferences and not a separate and determinate group preference.

Democracy is a means, not an end, and sometimes not a very good one.

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Housing Secretary Julian Castro violated federal law when he expressed support for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in an interview with Yahoo News in April, an investigation has found.

Castro, who Clinton has mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate, told reporter Katie Couric in the interview that “Clinton is the most experienced, thoughtful, and prepared candidate for president that we have this year.”

That violated the Hatch Act, according to an investigative report submitted to President Obama Monday by the Office of Special Counsel. That law, first passed in 1939, forbids anyone in the executive branch — other than the president or vice president — from using his or her official position to engage in political activity.

Prediction: Nobody will get fired. Nobody will go to jail.

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In Berlin, a robot has been given tongs and access to a hot grill, and taught to cook sausage.

Just like any of us in the summer months, it locates empty spaces on the grill and places bratwursts as needed, eyes them and turns them to ensure even crisping of the skin, and plates them when they’re done, with a waggle of its moustachioed tablet face.

The machine, created by nonprofit research center FZI, cooked and served 200 sausages at an event this month.

Read it.

As it was clearly intended to do.

‘Index I took from old Vladivostok telephone directory.’