Thursday, September 5, 2013

Links of the Day...

N.J. “Weedman” on his acquittal via jury nullification.  I haven't made up my mind on the use of jury nullification, but this is a great example of how it can be a positive force in America...

Thomas Sowell, on Obama's foriegn policy team: “They're all bozos on that bus!” Well, that's not exactly what he said, but that's what he meant...

Ace notes: an actual culprit in the Benghazi disaster is named – by Al Jazeera America.  The Obama-worshipping lamestream lapdog media continues to ignore the entire incident, as it most inconveniently shows The One and his minions to be bumbling fools...

Just what we need for Washington politicians: “Rats spent hours in a state of chilly suspended animation after researchers injected a compound into the animals in a cold room.  The animals’ heart rates slowed, brain activity became sluggish and body temperature plummeted.”

Mark Steyn, The Blasphemy Police: “It's creepy and unnerving how swiftly the West's chattering classes have accepted that the peculiar sensitivities of Islam require a deference extended to no other identity group.”  Indeed it is.  Equally unnerving to me: the manner in which the multi-culti crowd manages to cheerfully ignore all the manifest conflicts between the Islamic world and their cherished ideals of tolerance and moral equivalence...

Snapshots from space history, an online collection of space images.  At right is an image of the surface of Venus, returned by the Soviet's Venera 14 in 1982...

Yesterday I posted about my experience with Acxiom's About The Data site, showing the data collected about me on the web.  Looks like Megan McArdle (Big Brother Apparently Needs Glasses) and Ron Miller (Marketers may think they know all about me, but they don't) had basically the same experience...

The EPA raids a gold-mining town in Alaska, looking for dirty water – with a force of nearly a dozen heavily-armed, body-armored on an EPA SWAT team.  What the hell is happening to my country?

Math test: 3 times 4 equals what?  Anything you want it to, so long as you can explain how you got it.  After you get out of school, though, those completely unreasonable employers are going to insist that 3 times 4 equals 12...

Siskiyou County votes to secede from California.  My household did, too.  Unlike Siskiyou County, we can actually act on our vote – we're headed for much-less-wacky Utah one of these fine days...

Scientists surprised when a chemical reverses the effects of Down syndrome in mice.  They're surprised because the chemical normalized the growth of the cerebellum, and reversed the Down syndrome symptoms of learning and memory deficits – which nobody knew the cerebellum had anything to do with.  It's amazing to me how little we know, even today, about how the brain actually works...

James Taranto, in the excellent The Buck Stops Here:
Of course we could be wrong. Maybe Obama really didn't set a red line. It could have been a case of mistaken identity. Perhaps on Aug. 20, 2012, the world sneaked into the White House, donned an Obama mask, strode into the press room and took questions.

If so, the world did a bad thing and will need to be punished. But we hope that whoever has authority over such matters will have a little compassion for the world's predicament. It isn't easy carrying the weight of Barack Obama on your shoulders.
Stephen Hayes' lead in The Hawk's Case Against Obama on Syria: “Perhaps historians will provide a clear understanding of Barack Obama's head-snapping decision to pause his administration's urgent case for military strikes in Syria to seek the formal authorization he says he doesn't need from a Congress he disdains.”  Perhaps.  More likely, I think, is that history will settle on the story of Obama the Fool...

In the WSJ's editorial today, The Beltway Choom Gang: “Not since Nixon have we seen a Presidency so disdainful of the law, but at least Nixon had enough respect for legal appearances to break the law on the sly. This Administration simply declares it won't enforce the laws it doesn't like and calls it virtue. The media then give this a pass because Mr. Obama's decisions mesh with their own policy preferences. ”  Just another manifestation of The One's assumption of royalty...

Heathkit: the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.  Really?  I'd love to see “real” Heathkits come back.  I'd buy at least one just for the nostalgic rush it would provide...

A crack in the wall of NSA's secrecy.  Good...

School is a prison, and damaging our kids.  I have a lot of sympathy for this position.  My memories of school are dominated by boredom and bullying.  I learned almost nothing useful in the classroom – I attended school, but mainly taught myself – and dreamed of being elsewhere.  My professional career (hardware and software engineering) was entirely based on self-taught math, science, and technology – and my school experiences were more of an impediment than an enabler...

The weird, wacky world of x86 processors...