HEH: Dear Sanctimommy: You’re Not The Perfect Mom. “Sanctimommy.” I like that.
Archive for 2016
March 23, 2016
HMM: Car enthusiasts shouldn’t fear arrival of self-driving vehicles. You know, he’s got a point: Those super-smart autonomous cars of the future should have no trouble staying out of my way when I’m driving 120 mph.
BLUE ON BLUE: Cash-Strapped Connecticut Wants to Tax Yale Endowments. “Yale University’s endowment earned $2.6 billion in investment gains in fiscal 2015. A proposed bill in the Ivy League school’s home state of Connecticut is eyeing a share of the bounty as a source of revenue. Schools with funds of $10 billion or more — affecting Yale only — could face a tax on endowment income, according to legislation introduced this month. Yale’s record $25.6 billion fund is the second largest in U.S. higher education, behind Harvard University’s $37.6 billion.”
This seems fair. Look at all the other schools that have less. Fight inequality!
XENOPHILIA: Ancestors of Modern Humans Interbred With Extinct Hominins, Study Finds.
The ancestors of modern humans interbred with Neanderthals and another extinct line of humans known as the Denisovans at least four times in the course of prehistory, according to an analysis of global genomes published Thursday in the journal Science.
The interbreeding may have given modern humans genes that bolstered immunity to pathogens, the authors concluded.
“This is yet another genetic nail in the coffin of our oversimplistic models of human evolution,” said Carles Lalueza-Fox, a research scientist at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology in Barcelona, Spain, who was not involved in the study.
The new study expands on a series of findings in recent years showing that the ancestors of modern humans once shared the planet with a surprising number of near relatives — lineages like the Neanderthals and Denisovans that became extinct tens of thousands of years ago.
Before disappearing, however, they interbred with our forebears on at least several occasions. Today, we carry DNA from these encounters.
If they could interbreed, how different were they? And if their genes are still around, are they really extinct?
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Caltech celebrates ten years of Scaffolded DNA Origami.
USA TODAY EDITORIALIZES: Hey, Obama, Stop Picking On Nuns! “If the Obama administration had thought long and hard about the meaning of religious freedom, one of the nation’s most fundamental rights, it would not have ended up in the Supreme Court on Wednesday doing battle over free birth control with Little Sisters of the Poor and other religious non-profits. But while writing rules for Obamacare in 2012, the administration decided to compel religiously affiliated groups to assist in offering health care plans that violate a central tenet of their faiths.”
To be fair, that was basically because they hate those groups and wanted to punish them.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Sure, Superman Has X-Ray Vision. But How Would It Actually Work?
IT’S COME TO THIS: AP: Obama Administration Officials say Guantanamo transfers have killed Americans. “Americans have been killed by prisoners released from the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a senior Obama administration official told lawmakers Wednesday, triggering sharp criticism from Republicans opposed to shuttering the facility.”
SKYNET SMILES: Skydio’s Camera Drone Finally Delivers on Autonomous Flying Promises. “A Silicon Valley company called Skydio, founded by a team of researchers from MIT and Google X’s Project Wing, have posted a video that shows a drone following people jogging and biking while autonomously avoiding tree trunks and branches. In other words, it’s what other drone companies have been promising to be able to do for years, except Skydio actually delivers—or at least it shows real progress (and footage) toward that goal.”
EPA EXECS ROUTINELY FLOUT ACCOUNTABILITY LAWS, USE PRIVATE EMAIL FOR PUBLIC BUSINESS: It’s all but impossible to see why a federal official would use a private email account to conduct government business except that private email can be more easily hidden from public view, which might be especially vital when one of the correspondents is a lobbyist for special interest groups. But they just keep right on doing it.
The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton reports that lobbyist, Michael J. Brady, asked in a private email for a little favor of EPA General Counsel Joe Goffman, his insider friend at EPA: “Joe, would you please send this email to Gina for me? I would have sent it to her directly with a cc to you but I don’t have a private email address for her and would prefer to not use an office email address.” (Emphasis added) Brady represents a number of green energy groups that want to support EPA’s Cross-State Pollution Rule. Goffman
The casual tone of the email exchange shows “that it is a regular practice of senior officials of this EPA to use private e-mail accounts and other ‘off-book’ techniques to craft rules with ‘green’ activists with clear financial and political interests is now clear beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Chris Horner, the man who exposed former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson’s “Richard Windsor” email moniker. Horner’s group, the Energy and Environment Legal Group, obtained the Brady/Goffman email via the FOIA.
HEINLEIN WINS AGAIN! So in Stranger In A Strange Land, we have the institution of the Fair Witness, people who are trained and sworn to observe and report accurately, because images and recordings are so easy to doctor.
And now we have this in real life: This system instantly edits videos to make it look like you’re saying something you’re not. “The short version: take a YouTube video of someone speaking like, say, George W. Bush. Use a standard RGB webcam to capture a video of someone else emoting and saying something entirely different. Throw both videos into the Face2Face system and, bam, you’ve now got a relatively believable video of George W. Bush’s face — now almost entirely synthesized — doing whatever the actor in the second video wanted the target’s face to do. It even tries to work out what the interior of their mouth should look like as they’re speaking.”
It’s only a coincidence, I’m sure, that both examples in this illustration are Republicans: George W. Bush and Donald Trump.
CONTROLLING DIABETES with a skin patch.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: 60 American Law Profs Condemn Anonymous Student For Posting ‘All Lives Matter’ On Prof’s Door.
Cost of attending American University’s Washington College of Law: $76,704 per year.
AND IT DOESN’T MAKING READING NEWSWEEK ANY MORE PALATABLE, EITHER. Newsweek: No, Moderate Alcohol Consumption Won’t Help You Live Longer.
TOM FRIEDMAN BEGINS TO WONDER IF OBAMA KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING:
But sitting here also makes you wonder if Obama hasn’t gotten so obsessed with defending his hand’s-off approach to Syria that he underestimates both the dangers of his passivity and the opportunity for U.S. power to tilt this region our way — without having to invade anywhere. Initially, I thought Obama made the right call on Syria. But today the millions of refugees driven out of Syria — plus the economic migrants now flooding out of Africa through Libya after the utterly botched Obama-NATO operation there — is destabilizing the European Union.
“Utterly botched” is putting it mildly.
UPDATE: Friedman link was wrong before. Fixed now. Sorry!
INDEED: Belgium attacks renew focus on Europe’s Muslim enclaves.
Belgian intelligence has long been short of funds and personnel and above all any political will to do anything substantive about the country’s vast jihadist problem. Belgium’s chronically dysfunctional politics have played a toxic role, as has the general Western European tendency to avert eyes and hope for the best regarding the growing radicalism of whole swathes of young people in the Muslim ghettos that exist in most of their cities now.
As I’ve explained before, there is no intelligence solution to this problem. Although more funds and better information sharing will surely help prevent some terrorism—and especially catch terrorists after they kill innocents—the threat is now so great, with Europe possessing thousands of homegrown radicals bent on murder, that mere spying cannot prevent all attacks “left of boom” as the professionals put it.
Maintaining 24/7 human and technical surveillance on just one target requires something like two dozen operatives, and even the larger European security services can effectively watch only a few handfuls of would-be terrorists at one time. Even then, mistakes will be made. To say nothing of the alarming progress made by Europe’s jihadists recently in communications security—this was a big reason why November’s Paris attackers were not stopped in time—that is blunting the effective Western counterterrorism methods that have been honed since 9/11. The depressing bottom line is that even the best intelligence cannot compensate for political failings on an epic scale.
Simply put, Europe has imported a major threat into its countries, one that did not exist a couple generations ago. It can be endlessly debated why this problem has grown so serious so quickly—for instance, how much is due to Europe’s failures at assimilation of immigrants versus the innate aggression of some of those immigrants (and their children)?—but that the threat is large and growing can no longer be denied by the sentient.
Just a couple of years ago, people who said this were alarmists, and probably racists, too.
Plus:
We should expect more guerrilla-like attacks like Brussels yesterday: moderate in scale, relatively easy to plan and execute against soft targets, and utterly terrifying to the public. At some point, angry Europeans, fed up with their supine political class, will begin to strike back, and that’s when the really terrifying scenarios come into play. European security services worry deeply about the next Anders Breivik targeting not fellow Europeans, but Muslim migrants. . . .
When that violence comes, a practically disarmed Europe will be all but powerless to stop it. To take the case of Belgium, at the Cold War’s end a generation ago, its army had seven brigades with 18 infantry battalions, plus some 30 more battalions in the reserve. Today, Belgium’s army has only two brigades and six infantry battalions, some 3,000 bayonets in all. That tiny force would have trouble exerting control over even one bumptious Brussels neighborhood in the event of serious crisis.
Back in 2012, Switzerland conducted military exercises premised on conditions in Europe getting out of control, between migration, radicalism and economic decline. They repeated those exercises the following year, and since then the Swiss, who have a knack for preparing for all contingencies, have warned that Europe’s burgeoning interlinked crises may result in major war. Such warnings were pooh-poohed by EU bien-pensants at the time; now they seem prescient.
Funny how so many things that were pooh-poohed by EU bien-pensants now seem prescient.
And: “It’s difficult to miss that Central Europe, whose illiberal leaders have been castigated by Brussels for their unwillingness to accept Muslim migrants, singularly lack the terrorism and radicalism problems of their EU neighbors to the West. Their standing fast on the migration issue seems wise now.”
MORE: Belgian security official named “Mohamed N.”: Kill Each And Every Jew. ““The word Jew itself is dirty. If I were in Israel, frankly, I would do to the Jews what they do with the Palestinians — slaughter each and every one of them.”
Actually, the Jews haven’t done that with the Palestinians. If they wanted to, they would have done it and succeeded.
IN THE MAIL: Security Mom: An Unclassified Guide to Protecting Our Homeland and Your Home.
Plus, today only at Amazon: 60% Or More Off Spring Dresses.
And, also today only: Save up to 50% on Philips Sonicare and Phillips AVENT.
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1049.
SILENCE IS DEATH: THE DEMISE OF FREE SPEECH. Video of Mark Hemingway at Hillsdale.