#OCCUPYFAIL: Showdown at Occupy Portland, western camps.

#OCCUPYFAIL: Occupy Harvard Day 3: 2 photographers, 2 cops, 0 occupants. Now that’s “exclusive,” even for Harvard.

IN BRITAIN, A BORDER FIASCO: “All but the most cursory checks were abandoned on passengers on British-registered coaches as they arrived at Dover, Britain’s biggest port. Instead of passports being scanned electronically, border guards checked that the picture matched the holder. It means they were not cross-checked to a computer database to establish if the holder was a wanted terrorist, criminal or immigration offender. The policy was in place for four years after being introduced when Labour was in power, but never disclosed to Parliament.”

Labour hasn’t been very good on immigration enforcement. Remember this?

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and “rub the Right’s nose in diversity”, according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour’s relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to “open up the UK to mass migration” but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its “core working class vote”.

So they’re consistent, anyway.

#OCCUPYFAIL: 19 arrested as police clear Occupy Salt Lake from park.

KEEPING CLEAN WITH A superhydrophobic spray.

SHOCKING NEW DISCOVERIES FROM SCIENCE: “Research suggests that when men see a woman wearing very little they focus on her body and less on her mind.”

CHANGE: NASA Hitches a Ride on a Russian Craft, and Begins a New Dependent Phase.

UPDATE: Rand Simberg: NASA is not “hitching a ride.” “‘Hitching a ride’ implies that we are getting it for free. We are paying for taxi services, and because they are a monopoly provider, we are paying too much. But the problem isn’t buying rides, it’s that we’re paying too much for them, and not purchasing them from American providers. This is something that could be fixed within three years, but the Congress is cutting the funding to do so so that it can build a giant (in both size and cost) unneeded rocket that won’t fly for at least a decade.”

BUMMER: New Clot Drug From Merck Flops In Huge Trial.

VIDEO: What Occupy Wall Street Looks Like Now.

MATT RIDLEY: Is That Scientific Heretic A Genius — Or A Loon?

PRIORITIES: Amid ailing economy, members of Congress delve into sports issues.

WHAT AMERICA NEEDS: A tactical sandwich. “In the midst of the post-apocalyptic wasteland, you have a tasty sandwich that stays fresh for up to five years.”

WELL, THIS EXPLAINS A LOT: Joe Biden: The First Guy We Called For Economic Advice Was Jon Corzine.

HOW’S THAT D.C. GUN-CONTROL WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? Shots heard near White House; appears unrelated to Obama. “An AK-47 assault rifle was recovered from a car near the Roosevelt Bridge shortly after police started pursuing two vehicles fleeing from a section of Constitution Avenue near 16th street, where the shots were heard.” I wonder if it was one of those ATF guns. . . .

INVESTMENT ADVICE: “The only really safe investment is wine, at times like these. If it goes up, you make a profit; and if it goes down you can drink it. Whereas when your shares or your nickel futures crash, that’s that.” Plus: “The key to understanding the Eurozone crisis is this: the ECB aren’t incompetent; they are sadists.” Hmm. That seems improbable, but it does have a certain explanatory power . . . .

MORE ECONOMIC EDUCATION from Gene Simmons. “Capitalism is the best thing that ever happened to human beings. The welfare state sounds wonderful but it doesn’t work.”

ROGER KIMBALL: Where I’ve Been, And How Newt’s Doing.

KOCH BROTHERS strike back.

BLUE-STATE POLITICOS: Raise taxes, but not on our constituents:

Jerrold Nadler, a Democratic representative whose district includes parts of the West Side and other affluent sections of Manhattan, introduced the Tax Equity Act in 2009, which proposed “to amend the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to provide for adjustments in the individual income tax rates to reflect regional differences in the cost of living.”

The bill mustered eight co-sponsors, all from New York except for Representative Jim Himes, who represents Fairfield County, Conn. It went nowhere.

In September, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said that “$250,000 makes you really rich in Mississippi, but it doesn’t make you rich at all in New York, and there ought to be some kind of scale based on the cost of living on how much you pay.”

Living in New York is a consumption decision.

UPDATE: Reader Jeff Brown writes:

Perhaps someone should ask the good Congressmen why their districts have such high cost of living.

I had a friend who, while working for Matson in Hawaii, calculated how much shipping a container of toilet paper to Hawaii added to the price. It was 2 cents per 4-pack. But it as 30-50% more costly in Hawaii than the mainland. The cost came from warehousing, etc. But NYC doesn’t have the warehousing problem, they can keep all they need in Pennsylvania until it is just-in-time.

Real Estate costs? That does impose a threshold of entry higher than Mississippi, but there are already home price-based tax deductions. And the real estate cost is held high by difficulty and cost of building new housing.

So what could drive this COL difference? Labor costs in service industries, which are driven more by regulation than market? What about taxes and regulatory takings? But they already get a tax deduction of state and local taxes paid.

So the people in these districts deserve a cost of living tax break because they impose higher cost of living on themselves through their regional, state and local governance?

What should we call this tax break? The “Too stupid to govern themselves locally” adjustment?

I think we should end the deductibility of state and local taxes. Why subsidize inefficient governance?

21ST CENTURY ATTITUDES: Study finds women still prefer to take husband’s last name; 50 percent of those surveyed also supported a law requiring women to take their husband’s name. “The researchers found that more than two-thirds of Americans in the study said that it’s best if a woman takes her husband’s name upon marriage. The researchers expected that a majority of Americans would feel this way, Powell said, but they were more surprised to find that 50 percent supported a law requiring women to take their husband’s name.”

CNN PHOTOJOURNALISTS lose jobs in the face of competition from Amateurs.

UPDATE: Reader Eric Beeby writes:

That’s an interesting letter. First, it took them 3 years to assess and take an action?

In the real world (and surely the MSM is not the real world any more than academia is the real world) businesses looked at the crisis and took action 3 years ago in 2008. Second, some interesting language there: “They leave with our respect…”. They leave? How about, “We’re shoving them out the door with our respect…”

A fine and revealing example of the bureaucracy, lack of leadership, paralysis and hand wringing of a typical MSM. No wonder they resonate so well with the Big Government crowd.

Heh. Indeed.

CHANGE: China Adds a Spyglass in Space, Hints at More to Come.

THE EUROZONE DEBT CRISIS, risk, and regulators. “One possible story about the financial crisis is that an unusually rosy period of growth in the west taught us to expect–no, to need–an unsustainably high rate of low-risk return on assets. We made a whole lot of unsustainable promises during the boom years, most of them involving permanent increases in the ratio of non-workers to workers. Those promises required a very steady cash flow, but also (because of demographics) a very high rate of return.”

THE EUROPEAN UNION’S PROXY WAR:

It turns out that various politically active, generally far left-wing Israeli NGOs, some of which deny the very legitimacy of the Israeli government, get funding from various European governments (see this detailed NGO Monitor Report). Some of these organizations, for example, support the international “Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions” efforts against Israel. (Exactly why European governments fund NGOs whose views diametrically oppose the governments’ official policies vis a vis Israel is an interesting question that we’ll leave to another time).

These NGOs are often given special legitimacy in the international media because they are purportedly Israeli NGOs. NGO Monitor’s investigations show that many of them are, in fact, organizations with little if any domestic base within Israel and instead represent the views of the international far left with a fig leaf of Israeli leadership drawn from its domestic far left.

Israelis, tired of this rather subtle form of ideological warfare emanating from their purported friends among governments in Europe, are now considering a measure that would ban foreign government funding of political NGOs above a certain low level. Whether this particular measure is workable, and whether it’s the best way to deal with the situation, I’ll again leave for another time.

What’s striking, however, is the EU’s reaction.

Read the whole thing. And here’s some Proxy War background.