Russian police ninjas.  Must not have many donut shops there...

The media managed, as always, to get nearly everything wrong in early reporting on the Navy Yard shootings.

Obama's useful idiots.  It's a wonder to me that more of them haven't figured out that they're being used mercilessly.  Oh, that's right – they're idiots!

I cherish them more as the years go by: the Craftsmanship of Simple Things.

It's a more incremental change to drug policy than the upheaval I'd like to see, but it's certainly better than the status quo.

Frozen lake roulette.  I hope I don't know anyone who would do this...

Oh, ouch!  That's all I'm going to say...

Let's just be glad there isn't one ring to rule them all...  When Jonah Goldberg starts a piece like this:

As a conservative resident of Washington, D.C., where registered Republicans are outnumbered by about 9 to 1 and where truly conservative Republicans are outnumbered on a scale comparable to the predicament faced by Frodo and Sam when they sneaked into orc-infested Mordor, I find such statements hilarious.

You know it's going to be good!

Leftist logic on display.  Robert at Small Dead Animals makes a lovely point...

Our military bases are more vulnerable than most people think.  Here's an analysis that comports with my own experiences in the U.S. Navy.  I saw some crazy security issues back then.  Two come to mind immediately. 

First, I frequently stood watch on the “after brow” (one of the gangplanks used to board the ship) when we were in port.  We were armed with .45s – but we were not issued ammunition.  Apparently the brass were afraid of arming enlisted men :) 

Second, our radio room had a combination lock on the door, intended to keep out people who weren't cleared to see the classified teletype traffic laying about all over the room.  But it was darned inconvenient to remember that frequently-changed combination, so each time it was changed, someone would tape a piece of paper with the new combination on it – directly over the lock. 

Not quite what you might call a “fortress”!

How would you answer this question?

Would you rather have Congress avoid a government shutdown by authorizing spending at existing levels or would you rather have a partial government shutdown until Democrats and Republicans can agree on what spending to cut?

Rasmussen says that 53% of likely voters polled were for the partial shutdown, and just 37% for Obama's preference of continuing spending at current levels.  That smells like hope to me.  Faint, perhaps just barely detectable, but there...

A flying pig moment...  The Detroit Free Press – not exactly known for their conservative bias – has published an excellent analysis of why Detroit went broke.  In particular, it stabs all sorts of Democratic sacred cows in places where it hurts.  It also generally faces up to the fiscal realities in a way you wouldn't expect a liberal rag to do.  Too bad they didn't start behaving this way back when it would have done some good, like back in the '70s...

The progressives call this progress.  I call it indoctrination.  The Second Amendment, as it appears in the actual Constitution:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

A new U.S. history textbook:

The people have the right to keep and bear arms in a state militia.

That is not an accurate description of the Second Amendment, nor does it reflect the way the Supreme Court has interpreted it.  But it does comport with the way progressives would like the Second Amendment to be understood.

The progressives effectively own our public schools and almost all universities.  This has consequences, not a single damned one of which is to my liking...

Ahmed Akkari is sorry.  I sure wish we would see a few more radical Islamic fundamentalists like that.  And when I say “a few more”, I mean like a few million.  Even better would be to throw in a few million radical Christian fundamentalists, too.  Just think how much saner the world would be!

Evil is running for Governor of Massachusetts.  And I don't mean Evil Kneival, either – I mean the real thing.

Jaguar 1, caiman 0.  Dramatic photos and story...

Disney war bonds, from WWII.  I'd never heard of these before, or of Disney's involvement...

Foot-long, inch-wide tubes of earwax.  Scientists collect these from whales.  Turns out they have rings, much like tree rings.  And these rings contains traces of pollutants and other environmental chemicals.  Science never loses its capacity to surprise me!

$1.7 billion dollars in 2013.  That's how much Los Angeles County alone is spending on illegal aliens this year.  Both our immigration system and our welfare system are badly broken.  Where they intersect, it's a disaster...

The Concordia is vertical and floating.  Parbuckling was involved, along with a lot more practical marine engineering.

Pragmatism vs. theorism: the U.S. military gets practical answers to a classic problem...

Most successful chemical weapons attack evah?  Doug Feith, writing in the WSJ:

Bashar Assad may have pulled off the most successful use of chemical weapons in history. For the two years leading up to the Aug. 21 Damascus sarin gas attack, President Obama was saying that the Syrian dictator "must go." No longer. In one month, Assad has risen from outlaw butcher to partner in disarmament.

Why would a company walk away from a $541 million investment, writing it all off?  Two words: Obama's EPA.

WSJ editors observing the House Republicans: “Kamikaze missions rarely turn out well, least of all for the pilots.”  The editors want the House Republicans to start using their majority of 218 votes to accomplish something useful.  Trouble is, very few Republicans have a position that I like much better than the Democrats' positions, so I'm not too excited about the Republicans learning to use their House majority effectively...

So we just ran “down the hill” to drop off my truck for a smog inspection, at Rancho Jamul Auto Care (where Dave and his crew deliver top-notch auto maintenance at fair prices, with old-fashioned honesty and integrity).  Out here in Lawson Valley, it's wall-to-wall blue sky and bright sunshine – but when we went over the last hill before Jamul town, we entered the fog zone.  Thick fog dropped visibility down to a hundred feet or less, within a quarter mile of topping the hill.  To our astonishment, we saw many cars – perhaps a quarter of everyone we saw – driving in this pea soup with no lights.  Just to be clear: I have no objection at all if someone wants to demonstrate evolution at work by doing something stupid and taking themselves out.  But when they do something stupid that could take us out, I object strenuously!  Turn your damned lights on, you morons!

The erstwhile socialist paradise of Venezuela is falling apart.  Strategy Page leads with:

In Venezuela annual inflation hit 45 percent, the highest it has been in five years. This sort of thing is making the country increasingly unstable. Venezuela is supposed to be a socialist paradise by now. But like every other attempt at this use of centralized economic planning and control it has only resulted in more poverty and growing shortages of basics. Some newspapers have had to stop publishing, or go with much smaller papers, because of a widespread shortage of newsprint. Some states in Venezuela are introducing rationing and more aggressively going after hoarders (and blaming the shortages on them although, if you do the math, hording is obviously a result of the shortages not the cause.) Unemployment is climbing because the attempts at centralized economic control make it very difficult to run a business and create new jobs. Businessmen and entrepreneurs continue to flee the country, many going to neighboring Colombia where the economy is booming. About a third of Venezuelans still believes in the Chavez dream of a socialist paradise and blame the continuing failure of the plan on internal enemies and plots by the United States. But as the economic problems get worse and neighboring nations (like Colombia and Brazil) prosper under free market policies, more and more Venezuelans reluctantly change their minds.

The U.S. has two big potential calamities that are both quite close to home: Venezuela and Cuba.  Both of them are likely to implode, though I wouldn't care to make a prediction other than “within the next 50 years”.  When they do, there will be refugees by the millions, and aid by the billions.  And a lot of liberated people, thoroughly indoctrinated in the failures of socialism...

High speed missile interceptions.  These are amazing feats of engineering.  When President Reagan first proposed developing these systems, he was derided as a deluded, starry-eyed technophile.  Plenty of his detractors are still around, and still pontificating – I'd say some apologies are in order.  I'm not holding my breath, though...

I've long been fascinated by the sense of touch.  Long ago I noticed that I could feel things like the print on a laser-printed page, or the difference in the texture of a piece of wood sanded glass-smooth and a piece of glass.  Researchers are starting to figure out how that sense actually works.  Good vibrations are involved...

Product recommendation: If you're interested in the English language, whether from simple curiosity or from need, then I recommend the computer version of the Oxford English Dictionary, version 4.0 (aka “OED”).  It's listed on Amazon today at $218.50, though I paid considerably less a few months ago when I bought it on sale.

I've been using the OED for many years now.  First I used the enormous printed version found in libraries.  Then I used the one printed in tiny type that comes with a magnifying glass.  Then I used the first computer version (2.0).  The current version beats them all. 

I am addicted to its research capabilities, which are extensive – something you simply can't do with the printed version.  For example, suppose I wanted to know all the English words derived from Estonian words.  I can do that (answer, in 4 seconds: just two words - loaf and rye).  Or suppose I want to know all the words containing “dak” (answer, in 2 seconds: 44 words including didakai, fondak, and pradakshina).

It's a wonderful thing to have this tool on my desktop.  I keep it open all day long...

The earth's core super-rotates eastward.  The main evidence is provided by subtle changes in propagation speed of sonic waves made by earthquakes, a tour de force of scientific measurement.  What's being touted here isn't so much that discovery (which happened a while back), but the successful creation of computer models that match the observations.  That's an example of models being used well in the furtherance of a deeper understanding – unlike their primarily investigative use in climatology, where there seems to be no shame in promoting models that don't even come close to matching those pesky, politically-incorrect, non-grant raining actual observations.  Reality bites, if you're a climatologist like Mann or Hansen...

Drones are the next big thing.  We're going to see a lot of ideas like this one: a drone that can carry a defibrillator (quickly!) to someone who needs it.  Some of the ideas will work, some won't.  Some will make a lot of money, some will lose a lot.  Sounds like the last big thing (can you spell dot com?), doesn't it?

Jamul Casino news: The San Diego Daily Transcript reports:

Improvements along state Route 94 associated with the proposed Jamul Indian Village casino are scheduled to be discussed during a Caltrans-sponsored meeting from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Cottonwood Country Club Tuesday.

The Jamul Band of Mission Indians, which has a six-acre reservation, plans to develop a 203,000-square-foot gaming facility.

The casino building is expected to also include a bank, administrative facilities, food and beverage service, a child-care facility, an arcade area, some retail, a tribal center, a human resources facility and about 2,000 mostly structured parking spaces.

The casino, which will have 2,000 slots along with assorted table games, is projected to employ about 1,800 people. Penn National Gaming will be managing the facility.

The development is also expected to house a new fire station, a wastewater treatment plant and a catch basin system for stormwater.

Proposed highway improvements include widening highway 94 to four lanes between Melody Road and the band's property line and a new traffic signal may be installed at the Highway 94/Lyons Valley Road junction. New turn lanes would be also be added at Highway 94 and Jamacha Boulevard.

Here we go again!

Speeding tickets are for the little people.  Definitely not for Washington politicos...

Not as bad as the press made it look...  Big surprise there, right?  Friend Aleck L. alerted me earlier today to the news reports about “lots of people” making racist tweets about the selection of an Indian-American for Miss America.  Reason's Shikha Dalmia (self-proclaimed “Indian American in residence” at Reason) has a sober and positive take on it.  Big take-away: the “lots of people” reported in the press turns out to be exactly 16 people.  Just 16 tweets out of hundreds of thousands...

Excellent illusion!

You just never know... what you're going to find on Amazon.  They have entire product categories I had no idea existed!  I stumbled across this article and went looking for the product on Amazon to see if it was for real.  I couldn't find it – but I did find this at the top of my search.  My favorite review:

Thanks to this product my anus now actually glows in the dark. It helped me find my way during a black-out, though I had to walk backwards and bent over.

California, boldly going where nobody else is stupid enough to go – enabling illegal immigrants to become licensed lawyers.  As if our lawyers weren't problem enough already!

Strange ghost towns, all around the world.  I'd never heard of most of them...

What's wrong with the NSA, and what we need to do about it.  Bruce Schneier's roll – and leadership – continue...

“Trapped in their porcelain prison.”  I have conflicting responses to watching this.  Part of me wants to roll around on the floor, laughing.  Part of me admires the clever ad.  Part of me wants to claw out my eyes.  Part of me marvels at the entrepreneurial spirit that's obviously still alive.  And yes, it's a real product...

How Obama should have replied to Putin.  But he didn't, so Jim DeMint did it for him.  Thanks, buddy...

For some reason, I'll bet he didn't vote for Obama.  And I'll bet his wife is darned happy about that!

California is at the forefront again.  Of idiocy, that is...

This pretty much sums up the situation, says friend, former colleague, reader, and Idaho real estate mogul Doug S.  Yup, sure does.

A hidden message.  The two graphs at right, from a WSJ article, tell an interesting story about union membership.  On the left, you see that overall union membership has declined to almost half the level it was just 20 years ago.  On the right, you see steep declines in the private sector, while public sector union membership rates are basically flat.  I read this as evidence that unions no longer serve a compelling purpose in the private sector, but in the public sector they've got a very effective racket going – and their members know it.

The future of education.  The story of a Mongolian boy genius who is learning electrical engineering by taking (free) online courses by MIT.  If education is the true goal, this is the way to do it.  Combine this with certification decoupled from university attendance (IOW, prove you know your stuff and you can get a degree without even attending a university) and you've got something industry would slaver over.  Which means, of course, that they'd help pay for it, if someone can figure out how to organize it...

Like you've never seen it before...  Here's a short movie of our moon, rotating so that you can see the entire thing.  You can't see this from Earth (because the same side of the moon always faces us), so NASA made this with images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) satellite.  Make it full screen and you'll get a nice 3D effect.  Via APOD, of course.

You think this would work with politicians???  Man fends off a grizzly bear by punching it.

Summers out, markets up.  I'm writing this 15 minutes before the markets open, and the Dow futures are up over 150 points – mainly on the news from last night that Summers has withdrawn as possible replacement for Ben Bernanke.  Apparently the Wall Street crowd didn't think much of Summers, either!

Ta da!  Martin Kleppe gives us the world, spinning – in ASCII, rendered via JavaScript...

Rope. Tree. Some assembly required.  Emails from Lois Lerner show that she was very involved in targeting Tea Party non-profit applications.  Both the original skulduggery and the subsequent coverup are jail-worthy events – but just think how much more effective my solution would be!

That might just be Obama's desired outcome.  Assad is the big winner in the U.S. – Russia chemical weapons deal...

Bruce Schneier is starting to sound like a leader: Take Back the Internet and How to Remain Secure Against the NSA, both excellent (and classically Schneieresque) pieces.  Bruce is working with the Guardian on the Snowden disclosures, which is somehow quite comforting to me.  I would love to see him take the helm of a non-governmental, well-funded effort to guard our online liberty – that would be even more comforting...

It's a brave new world: a Chicago woman forces a man to have sex with her girlfriend.  They robbed the poor bastard, too.  Is it really that hard for a girl to get laid these days?  Or was that just an added bonus for the ladies, who were primarily robbers?

Obama thinks he's playing chess, but Putin is playing poker.  And winning.  This sounds right to me, but I'd take it one level further: Obama is playing chess poorly, and Putin is playing poker like a champ...

It won't be Summers.  Good.  Unfortunately, that still leaves a lot of room for Obama to make a bad choice to replace Ben Bernanke...

What scares me most is just how many people think this is a good idea...  “Drink up!”, says The One's better half.  I have no plans to change my behavior on her advice.  One would be better off seeking counsel from a retarded dead squirrel than from her...

I wish the leader of my country was half as clever and effective...  An imaginary encounter with “Vlad” (Putin, not the Impaler)...

She's thankful now, but at first she didn't like the idea of having a gun in the house.  Her husband insisted that they get the gun, and that she learn how to use it.  That gun, and her knowledge of how to use it, came in awfully handy when two men broke into her house...

“Listen to me, goddamnit!”  Charles Cook, writing at NRO, has a great piece up on the recent successful Colorado recall elections.  The lead:

Despite the media’s insistence that the Colorado recalls were the first skirmish in a new proxy war between the National Rifle Association and New York mayor Michael Bloomberg, the simple truth is that Tuesday’s stunning elections were prompted and won by forces on the ground. At the Stargazers Theatre last night, I sat with those forces as a famous victory unfolded. Speaking after Senator Morse conceded, the recall’s founder, Tim Knight, told the crowd that “you must own your freedom in order to protect and pass it on to your children.” He has spent the last few months doing just that.

Amen, brother.  Indications in Washington are that the progressives are taking careful, if dismayed, note of the events in Colorado...

It's the cycle.  For some people, the traditional seasonal cycles of farming are comforting and attractive.  As an engineer, I'm more into creative destruction :)

Water changes everything.  A photographer finds beauty in the myriad ways that humans have affected our planet using water...

Wings of a Butterfly.  Nice name for a beautiful nebula, officially known as M2-9.  Via APOD, of course...

Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year.  Really!  “High noon” is when the sun (wherever you happen to be) is at its highest point in the sky.  The time between one high noon and the next day's high noon is the “apparent solar day”.  The length of that day varies during the year, depending on where the Earth is in its orbit, and (especially) on how fast the Earth is moving.  Because the Earth is in an elliptical (not circular) orbit around the Sun, these things vary.  And tomorrow is the shortest day of all!

Nobody said Mother Nature was fair.  Some tentative indications that having tooth cavities protects against head and neck cancers...

It's an asymmetrical war, but this asymmetry favors us.  A peek at how al Qaeda sees American UAVs (drones)...

How the world sees Putin and Obama...

There are useful idiots, and there are useless idiots.  The latter are in the majority.  Students create a memorial to the people killed on 9/11 by planting 2,977 flags in the ground.  Five protestors then come along and remove the flags, falsely claiming desecration of Native American burial sites.

Well, progressives would call this progress.  In public policy, the scientifically verifiable facts don't matter any more...

I thought they meant The One and his Obsequioids!  White House full of vermin.

Soyuz landing on September 10.  This is the same landing pictured above, but this time in video.  There was a glitch, but the crew wasn't endangered.  Chuck Yeager would hate the Soyuz – monkeys in a can, he'd say...  

Clinging to the teats.  David Thompson on Australian scientists reacting to the news that the newly elected (relatively) conservative government is going to cut off their grant money...

Well of course not!  It's for the little people...  Federal workers don't want Obamacare.  For thee, but not for me (if I'm a Federal employee)...

Well, if I were a Jew in Syria, I'd have left long ago!  Almost all the Syrian Jews are gone...

Sad sushi scoop.  The best sushi near Jamul is at Yuki Sushi, in the Rancho San Diego Target shopping center.  Jenny (the owner) tells us that she's losing her lease there (for reasons she's not sure about), as of September 30th.  We're going to go back there as often as we can before then; I hope you will too.   Jenny's not sure what she's going to do after that.  She looked so sad as she relayed this news to us. BTW, for those of you who remember Tatsu's, where Ranch Feed is now – Mr. Tatsu, the former owner, now works for Jenny a couple of days a week. We've seen him there the past couple of Fridays; very nice to see our old friend...

Baby sea lion makes itself at home.  Cute.  Via my lovely bride!

Bravo Cafe is the best!  Just sayin'...  Manoli, Rosio, and their kids are a joy to meet and talk with – a true family business, even in this day and age.  And of course the food – simple, good, honest fare ... in stunningly huge portions.  I took a quick look around, and I'm glad to see that others share our opinion: here, here, and here.  Go grab a (giant) bite to eat there, and tell 'em we said hi!  Debbie just had a Caesar chicken salad, and I had a beef brisket sandwich.  I don't think I'll be hungry until around Thursday...

Tiny little gyroscopes.  They're at the heart of inertial guidance systems in modern rockets, satellites, weapons, and many other places.  They're also in your iPhone and other smart phones.  They're made of silicon, using processes much like integrated circuits – so they can be manufactured cheaply in high volumes.  They're also quite beautiful under a microscope...

Sharp shadows...  I was looking at some of the recent photos from the Curiosity rover on Mars, and noticed the shadow of the rock looked extraordinarily sharp.  The apparent diameter of the sun causes a fuzzy edge to shadows (the “penumbra”), and there wasn't much of one there at all.  But the apparent size of the sun on Mars is substantially smaller than it is on Earth.  So I did the math: from Earth, the sun's apparent diameter is about 32 arc-minutes, while from Mars it's about 21 arc-minutes.  That's enough to make shadows visibly sharper on Mars than they would be on Earth.  It's also enough to make the sun look considerably smaller...

You just gotta love our soldiers.  The finest in the world, bar none.  But sometimes I wonder what they think of the citizens they're defending!  Via friend and reader Simon M...

Don't park in the driveway!  Not if you live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, anyway.  It's an old law they've decided to start enforcing again.  They'll say it's “for the children,” but of course it's really for the money.  It's always for the money...

World parrot rescue headquarters.  In Jamul, thanks to Jamulian Brooke Durham.

Tequila – is there anything it can't do?

See where the rich people live.  It's no surprise that many of them are in the Washington D.C. area, living off the federal teats (there are lots of them!).  Move the income slider bar at the bottom of the map...

The wrong Texan.  These thugs got more than they bargained for...

A surprising thing about Japan.  It's a tech-crazy culture, and the people are well-educated and wealthy.  What the hell is up with these ads?  They seem completely out of character to me, which I suspect means there's something about Japanese culture that I am profoundly ignorant of.  I used to think they were a spoof until I saw them myself on a Japanese cable channel...

An ode to Claude Shannon, by Charlie Martin, who calls him “The greatest genius no one has heard of.”  He's fairly well known in my field, especially to anyone working with error-correcting codes or data compression.  My favorite Claude Shannon quote: “Information is the resolution of uncertainty.”

More NSA scandal fallout: a font designed to be hard to scan to text, yet still be readable by humans.  I don't think this accomplishes anything useful from a technical perspective, but it does raise some attention...

In debt.  Listen to why George Will says he owes his happiness to Barack Obama...

Successful launch.  Japan's newest rocket – the Epsilon – was successfully launched for the first time, putting a research telescope payload into orbit.  Of note: no complex, expensive “command center” was needed for the launch.  Instead, a couple of engineers with ordinary laptops did it.

Dialing back.  Matt Ridley got a preview of the upcoming IPCC report, and he says it dials the global warming alarm rhetoric way back.  Perhaps preparing for a walk-back down the line?

Lucky dog!  A stray for at least 10 years, Sonya has been rescued, and has a home where she's happy and cared for...

Boys would be boys, if only they could...  A good roundup of the painful – and dangerous – consequences of the feminization of American schools.  Progressives just love to deny actual gender differences, despite the clear evidence that it exists.  My own field is a great example: computer science is dominated by men, worldwide, despite widespread availability of computer science education for women...

A shattering experience.  What happens when you freeze flowers in liquid nitrogen, then shoot them with a bullet.  Martin Klimas wanted to know this.  What I want to know is this: what did someone do to Martin when he was a kid, that caused him to wonder things like this?

Incremental ensnarement.  Millions of drivers use E-ZPass when they travel on toll roads or bridges.  Electronic readers see that they pass by, and their credit cards are automatically charged.  Very convenient.  But ... now administrators are setting up E-ZPass readers in New York City (and maybe other places as well) to collect information for other purposes – we don't know exactly what.  But what is alarming to many is that one can easily see how this could turn into a network that knew where you were, all day long.  Anyone with access to that system could find you anytime they wanted to.  Much more like this is coming, as location technologies mature and are dispersed.  Mobile phones, nearly all of which have GPS, are a major security concern for some...

Touchdown!  The photo at right shows the recent landing of a Russian Soyuz spacecraft with three astronauts on board, on the plains of Kazakhstan.  To cushion the landing, small retro-rockets fire very briefly when the craft is one meter (3 feet) off the ground.  U.S. capsules always splashed down in the ocean, whose soft embrace eliminated the need for the retro-rockets.  When Soyuz was developed, the Soviets were afraid of landing anywhere other than their own territory – enough so that the cost and trouble of developing the retro-rocket system seemed worth it.  I wonder how the Russians would make that decision today?

Syria agreement: Russia and the U.S. agree on a plan to relieve Assad of his chemical weapons – but they explicitly leave out the possibility of backing up the demand with military force.  Obama reserves the right to intervene militarily, unilaterally – but not right now, sometime down the road.  If you were Assad, how would you be feeling all this?  I suspect he's spending more time laughing at the bozos in Washington and Geneva than anything else...

Dilbert is awesome!  And so is his mom...  Scott Adams makes me think, makes me laugh ... what more could an Internet citizen ask?

I'm experimenting with some layout changes.  If you see something you don't like, or that doesn't work, please let me know.  Of course, I'd always be happy to hear about it if I managed to accidentally get something right :)

Links of the Day...

Syria roundup: indecisive, holding fire, and the global joke (us).  Mark Steyn on Putin: “In reality, Putin finds his thrill by grabbing Obama’s blueberries and squeezing hard.”  Summary: bad, and trending worse.  Winners: Iran and Pooty-Poot.

Obama administration obeys the law – unexpectedly!  Robert Zimmerman has this exactly right: the big surprise here is that the Obama administration didn't simply ignore the Obamacare law to do what would make their supporters (the unions) happy.   The details are interesting.  But I'm not buying the notion that Obama did this simply because he thought it would be illegal not to.  That's never stopped him before...

Oh, I sure hope so!  Will McCain retire in 2016?

You tell 'em, Rush!  When you want to educate a receptive mind about American Exceptionalism, Rush is the big gun.  He's in fine form here...

Polarization...   This time, we're talking about rural vs. urban.  We see it out here in rural San Diego County.  Physically we're just 35 miles from the big city.  Politically and culturally, we're a million miles apart.  We often feel like we're traveling to a foreign, unfriendly country when we go “down the hill” into town...

Someone found a use for Jerry Brown's California: a place to dump people with mental health issues.  Dave Blount: “Not only will they feel perfectly at home in a state that would react to an economic crisis by putting Governor Moonbeam back in power, but it is suitable revenge for the previously sane parts of the country that have been infected with moonbattery by Californians escaping the mess their liberalism made of their own state.”

Cats and dogs...  Hackers and the FBI – it's getting more difficult to tell them apart.

The inverse-square law rules!  Two big radio-telescopes have imaged Voyager I, whose transmitter emits a mere 22 watts.  Despite being over 11 billion miles from Earth, Voyager's transmitter still looks very bright compared with anything nearby it in the sky.  That's the inverse-square law at work!

Klepto Kitty.  I hear it's applied for a job with the IRS...

More like minimum jobs, you idiots!  Reason's Scott Shackford takes note of California's new $10-an-hour minimum wage, and notes that it's likely to let out what little steam our “recovery” has...

Some speech would be more free than the rest...  A Senate panel yesterday approved a bill that would establish a special class of citizens: journalists.  Without knowing anything more, that's already terrifying!  The bill goes on to enshrine special protections for journalists, most especially protecting the identity of their sources.  That necessarily implies that all us non-journalists won't enjoy such protections.  But ... who, exactly, would be considered a “journalist”?  Well, that's not clear at all.  Some reaction: James Lileks, Matt Drudge, and James Taranto.  They're no happier about it than I am.

The climate models need decades of work, says the National Academy of Science.  But the science is settled?   Maybe they're just trying to figure out how to keep the taxpayer-funded grant money coming.  In which case we need to figure out how to make it stop!

Not good.  NIST is telling people not to use it's elliptic-curve based random number generator standard.  Random numbers matter.  Given the Snowden revelations about the NSA, my first thought is: “What else has been compromised?” 

I can't decide.  This is either the best campaign ad evah, or it's an unambiguous sign that the end times are nigh.  Jeff Wagner is running for mayor there, and he wants you to “Wake the fuck up!”

It's a map-a-palooza!...  Go here and click on“PROJECTS” to get started; lots of good things to waste some time with...

Mainstream media to Republicans: “You're obsessed with Obamacare!”  I've got news for you, lamers: it's not just Republicans – we libertarians and independents think it's a crock of bovine fecal material, too...

There, but for the NRA, go we...  Two burglars walk into a jewelry store in Nice, France and threaten the owner with a gun.  The owner pulls out his own gun, chases them off and shoots one in the process.  The burglar dies on the scene.  The jewelry store owner is arrested and charged with voluntary homicide. This is controversial even in France, but it's not at all clear how things will turn out...

They're a good thing – abusers, addiction, and social problems notwithstanding, the doc proclaims.  Our own family doc has much the same attitude, much to our relief.  Of course, Obamacare may change all this.  Just ask any Canadians how easy it is for them to get pain killers.  Unless they come to the U.S., of course...

Well, duh!  What did you think would happen when you hire a bunch of high achievers and put them to work teaching?

Progressive hypocrisy?  Color me totally unsurprised.  Progressive media queen Tina Brown's charity collects millions in donations, then makes a single grant of $10,000.  They're better than us, though.  Don't forget that.

“Get ready.”, said the judge, to release some NSA-related FISA court proceedings.  Basically, he's calling bullshit on government assertions about the need for secrecy in all these matters.  About time!

You feel lucky, punk?  Then go invest in the Twitter IPO, says Megan McArdle (the world's tallest female economics blogger)...

Oh, goody.  The Obamacare health insurance exchanges aren't even open for business yet, and already there's a security breach that exposed private information for 2,400 insurance agents.  But that's ok.  You ain't seen nuttin' yet, buddy...