SPACE: Private Company To Put A Telescope On The Moon. But not just any telescope: “Moon Express, a private ‘lunar commerce’ startup, and the International Lunar Observatory Association, a nonprofit devoted to moon observation, have teamed up to put the International Lunar Observatory, a 2-meter radio antenna, on the Moon to observe the galaxy without the interference of Earth’s atmosphere, which absorbs some kinds of radiation.”
Archive for 2013
July 20, 2013
NATIONAL JOURNAL: More Top Obama Officials Have Graduate Degrees From Oxford Than Any Public University in the United States: Is The Obama Administration Elitist? “The case that the Obama administration is elitist isn’t helped by a map of where the officials grew up. Even more so than in the first term, Obama’s administration comes mainly from the Northeast. Relatively few are from redstates, with only 18 percent growing up in a state that voted for Mitt Romney. Texas is severely underrepresented in the sample. It’s the second-most populous state, but only four (1.6 %) of those surveyed grew up there.”
We need a cabinet that looks like America!
AT AMAZON, deals and markdowns in the Sunglasses Shop.
Also, Swimsuits. And Sandals.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 72.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Sex is Better for Headaches Than Painkillers.
SCIENCE: A Genetic Component to Obesity? “The mice were eating their usual chow and exercising normally, but they were getting fat anyway. The reason: researchers had deleted a gene that acts in the brain and controls how quickly calories are burned. Even though they were consuming exactly the same number of calories as lean mice, they were gaining weight. So far, only one person — a severely obese child — has been found to have a disabling mutation in the same gene. But the discovery of the same effect in mice and in the child — a finding published Wednesday in the journal Science — may help explain why some people put on weight easily while others eat all they want and seem never to gain an ounce. It may also offer clues to a puzzle in the field of obesity: Why do studies find that people gain different amounts of weight while overeating by the same amount?”
UPDATE: Reader Mitzi Perdue emails: “As someone in animal agriculture, I’ve always been puzzled that human geneticists don’t seem to know what virtually all cattle or poultry geneticists know: that you can breed for efficient feed conversion. Translated into English, that means animals can be bred to gain weight on fewer calories. In the animal agriculture world, this concept has been around for 35 years that I know of, and probably much longer than that.”
SEBASTIAN THRUN ON the future of learning. “Even at the top-notch institutions you find that students often take the courses that are the least work. Some people are in there for learning, but some people are in there to say we want to have a certificate.” Education, as they say, is the only consumer product where the consumer is out to get as little as possible for his money. Not always true, but . . .
RADLEY BALKO IN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: Rise of the Warrior Cop; Is it time to reconsider the militarization of American policing?
His new book is Rise Of The Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces.
LIFE IN THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: “My child is gifted. He’s also 29, unemployed, and living in my basement.”
IN THE MAIL: From C. Blake Powers: A Different View: Travels to Al Qa’im and Beyond.
BILL WHITTLE: Afterburner: The Lynching.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Chicago Blues: Tenured Teachers Laid Off.
It’s an interesting web the union has spun for itself: its power to negotiate lavish pensions for teachers has helped bankrupt the city, which is now forced to sack teachers. And with Chicago’s budget deficit at $1 billion and revenue declining, there’s no end in sight, and no tenure and no pension is safe. How teachers react to the declining ability of unions to secure their interests in one of America’s great blue cities will tell us a lot about the blue model’s current bill of health.
The immediate impact on children and families of Chicago’s fiscal failure is obvious enough, but the long-term impact is perhaps even more grim. The city’s budget cuts, harrowing crime rate, and broken politics are forcing people out: Chicago’s population has declined to numbers not seen since before the 1920s, with the black population falling by almost a fifth in the past decade alone.
This trend means even less revenue for the city, even fewer children to fill the classrooms, and even more talent and potential lost.
Detroit is a warning. For those who choose to heed it.
THE ECONOMIST: The Curious Case Of The Fall In Crime. I credit videogames and Internet porn.
AT AMAZON, the Back To School sale, for K-12 and College.
Also, today only: “The Ultimate Matrix Collection” on Blu-ray, $24.49 (62% off).
REASON TV: Detroit’s Tragedy and How to Fix It. “In fat times and lean, the city’s pols and power-brokers chose to focus their energy, and the residents’ tax dollars on gigantic, big-ticket development scams while ignoring the basics that let cities thrive – or at least survive. Detroit’s leaders poured money into a never-ending assembly line of sad-sack projects such as the Renaissance Center, the Fox Theater, Comerica Park, Poletown, the People Mover, and Ford Field. . . . Detroit can stage its own comeback by reducing crime and picking up garbage; by freeing kids, parents, and property values from an abysmal school system; and getting the government out of everything that isn’t essential. In other words, Detroit’s leaders only need to do what they should have been doing for the past 50 years.”
Plus: “By the President comparing himself to Martin 35 years ago, is he saying he would have responded as Martin did, and physically attacked someone for following him? I hope not because our laws do not allow such conduct. It is not illegal for a private citizen to follow someone. It is illegal to physically assault another person who has not threatened him with the imminent use of force. I am very disappointed that the President has chosen to endorse those who have turned a case of assault and self-defense into a referendum on race and civil rights.”
DISTRACTION: Why Obama staged his Impromptu Presser on Trayvon in three images.
UPDATE: Related: “A part of me cannot help but think that the only reason President Obama addressed this story so personally today was to get these other headlines off the table, and thrown down into the memory hole.” Ya think?
TOM BLUMER: Offensive Expectations: “Since when is 6.5 percent unemployment two years from now a tolerable target?”
#NARRATIVEFAIL: Under Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law, Black and White Defendants Fare Equally Well.
Related: Heather MacDonald: The Post-Zimmerman Poison Pill.
The idea that the criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks — and that this bias explains blacks’ disproportionate presence in custody — is a staple of civil-rights activism and of the academic Left. Every effort to prove it empirically, however, has come up short. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Alfred Blumstein has found that blacks are underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their arrest rates. A meta-analysis of charging and sentencing studies showed that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms, according to criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen.
Criminal-law professors across the political spectrum agree that the Zimmerman verdict resulted from prosecutorial overkill, not juror bias. . . . Close on the heels of the “biased justice system” conceit, however, is the preposterous implication that the primary homicide threat faced by young black males comes from honorary whites such as George Zimmerman. “Our children are targeted. Our community is targeted,” Martin Luther King III told the NAACP national convention on Wednesday. Protesters at the Orlando, Fla., courthouse this week held signs proclaiming “Endangered species: young black men and boys.” The New York Times ran an article today about the “painful talks” black parents are having with their children about how not to get gunned down by whites. A nurse’s assistant in Missouri told the Times: The whole situation ‘“would just make me skeptical about what crowd of white people I put [my son] around.’”
In fact, if a black parent wants to radically reduce his son’s chance of getting shot, he should live in a white neighborhood.
Read the whole thing.
ROGER KIMBALL: Mitch Daniels vs. Howard Zinn. Daniels Wins. “The AP story is a sort of hit job, intended to discredit Daniels who is coming up for his six-month review as head of Purdue University. Its actual effect, on me, anyway, was to increase my already high esteem for the man. Here is a chap that not only saved the state of Indiana from the fiscal nightmare that leftist-run states like Illinois and Michigan are suffering (remember Detroit?), but he is also someone who can spot a Communist fraud at 100 paces and isn’t afraid to say that left-wing propaganda is not the same as history and should not be purveyed as such on the taxpayer’s dime. Zinn’s book, wrote Daniels in one of those emails, ‘is a truly execrable, anti-factual piece of disinformation that misstates American history on every page.’ That’s exactly right.”
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, WE’D HAVE AN AMERICA WHERE THE ELITE LIVED BEHIND WALLS AND GATES, WHILE THE POOR WERE EXILED TO URBAN WASTELANDS. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Should Hamtramck Erect A 12-Foot Wall To Keep Out Detroiters?