DYSPEPSIA GENERATION

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That politicians regularly talk about “job creation” is a strong signal that most have never created any. It’s lost on the political class, but jobs are most plentiful in business sectors where they’re most readily being destroyed.

True dat. Especially ones who have never had a real job in their lives, like AlGore or Jesse Jackson or most of those named Kennedy or Rockefeller.

Put simply, the mass destruction of farming jobs allowed for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work.

And even today people aren’t comfortable with that, as all the hand-wringing about ‘family farms’ makes plain. Similarly, the mass destruction of conventional manufacturing jobs will allow for the redirection of precious human capital toward more productive, higher value work — although, again, people aren’t comfortable with that, as all the handwringing about ‘off-shoring’ makes even plainer.

Sure, a lot of low-IQ people are going to starve or spend their lives in drug-induced coma, but — tell the truth — are the rest of us really going to miss them? If everybody who voted for Obama disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, we’d see exponential growth rates in the economy and science that would catapult us into the next stage of human existence.

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Picky eaters don’t pick off, scrape off, or “eat around” foreign objects. Take the basic example of a sandwich. If a picky eater likes a plain tuna sandwich with nothing added other than mayonnaise, don’t give them tuna salad and shrug that they can just “pick out” or “eat around” the celery, pickles, capers, relish, or whatever other highfalutin ingredients you shoved in there. My childhood bologna sandwiches were bread, bologna, and French’s yellow mustard. If my mother momentarily lost her head and tried to sneak in a layer of mayonnaise or a blandly innocent leaf of iceberg lettuce, that sandwich was trash- bound. And there was no sense in telling me I could just remove the lettuce and continue eating. I could still taste lettuce sweat on my bologna slice, and it was the taste of evil. (It didn’t matter that I’d eat iceberg lettuce in a salad. It didn’t belong on a sandwich. Ever.

An eternal truth. Read & heed.

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Good thing they banned guns. Just imagine how worse it would be if they hadn’t.

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Waters will be the ranking member on the committee that deals with banking issues. Last year, the House Ethics Committee investigated Waters, one of the most partisan members of the Congressional Black Caucus, for allegedly using her position in Congress to bail out a bank in which her husband owned $350,000 worth of stock.

I guess that constitutes qualifications for Democrats. Cheat on your taxes? Become Treasury Secretary! Use your power as Congresscritter to arrange for your own bank to be bailed out? Get put in charge of bank bailouts! Have a long history of unsafe driving? Be in charge of driving safety for the entire state!

I suppose next we can anticipate a crook being named Attorney General. Oh, wait, we’ve already got one….

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The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) has teamed up with Mini Cooper in New Zealand to teach three dogs how to drive.

Gotta love Australians … Kiwis, though … well….

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Officially, that is — he’s always been a Democrat at heart, as his record makes plain.

Electronic Deer Deterrent

Checkon.me

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The federal government suffered a major defeat today at the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States. In their unanimous decision, the justices rejected the government’s sweeping claim that a series of recurring floods induced by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers did not qualify as a taking of property under the Fifth Amendment because the flooding was only temporary in duration.

At last.

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With six-vote margins in both chambers, the House and Senate approved measures prohibiting private unions from requiring that nonunion employees pay fees. The Senate was debating a similar bill, with Democrats denouncing it as an attack on worker rights and the GOP sponsor insisting it would boost the economy and jobs.

Yeah, nothing says ‘Land of the Free’ like forcing a worker to join a union — or just pay for it — in order to keep his job. ‘You’re being oppressed by not being forced to join our union!’ That makes perfect sense.

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He won’t win, of course — the Crust takes care of its own — but I like to see that somebody has the fortitude to do some pushback on these jerks. They’ve been getting away with slanting their coverage for years. Time for somebody to call them on it.

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Well, I guess that gives us something to look forward to.

That ‘Arab Spring’ seems to have given summer and fall a miss and dived right into winter.

Of course, they’d be oh so very upset if Christians announced that they were going to re-conquer North Africa, Anatolia, and Mesopotamia and return it to the Christians from whom it was stolen from them by the Muslims.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

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The fact that the Senate wasn’t in recess might have something to do with it.

Not that Obama cares about the Constitution, of course, but there are those pesky judges who refuse to get with the Obamassiah’s program….

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

 Where’s my bacon, Obama?  That’s the attitude of Councilwoman JoAnn Watson, who said that in appreciation for Detroit having voted for the president, Obama should bail out the financially insolvent.

In fact, Watson says, “that’s what you do” when your friends help you out.  Alas, the country sees the incompetence and the entitlement that has ruined Detroit.  Just because you helped get the president re-elected, doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed loans to save your city.  In fact, if such a list existed, I’d bet that most of California’s municipalities are probably in front of you, Ms. Watson.

I’m waiting for the Obamassiah to declare Detroit’s condition the ‘moral equivalent of a hurricane’ and get FEMA involved.

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Entrepreneurship is the heart of America.

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A Transportation Security Administration screener has been arrested on charges he swiped iPads and other electronic devices from passengers’ luggage at John F. Kennedy Airport.

Boy, I feel more secure. Don’t you feel more secure?

The 10-year veteran of the federal agency was arrested on charges of grand larceny and official misconduct.

You’d think, after 10 years, he’d be better at it.

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Egypt’s embattled Muslim Brotherhood regime is paying gangs of thugs to rape women and beat men who gather in Tahrir Square to protest the power grab of President Mohamed Morsi, say activists.

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A British mother who beat her 7-year-old son to death after he failed to memorize excerpts from the Koran was found guilty of murder.

Sara Ege, 33, was convicted of beating her son Yaseen to death with a stick at their home in Wales, then burning his body to hide evidence. Police originally thought Yaseen died in a house fire.

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According to the Press Trust of India, the Darul Uloom Deoband has issued a fatwa against the appointment of Muslim women as receptionists. The seminary issued the fatwa after a Pakistan-based company submitted a query on Nov 29 regarding the appointment of Muslim women as receptionists, said the report.

Darul Uloom said that a Muslim woman working in offices as receptionist was un-Islamic because Muslim women were not allowed to appear before men without wearing a veil, as ordained by Islam.

Well, I’m certainly glad we cleared that up.

Steve Sailer gets philosophical.

One counterintuitive reason for the tumult of the mid-to-late 60s was the evaporation of the long-simmering Protestant-Catholic divide which had provided a stable multigenerational anchor for social tensions.

The instant enshrinement of the martyred Catholic president in the pantheon of American heroes did much to mollify Catholic resentments over being considered fringe Americans. (Back then, being thought a normal American was praise, not denigration.) Meanwhile, the enthusiastic adoption by Catholic women of oral contraceptives (which the FDA approved in 1960) reassured Protestants that they weren’t going to lose the War of the Cradle to the Vatican.

Bet you didn’t know that.

It turned out that JFK had been murdered by a communist whose father-in-law was a KGB officer. When Jackie Kennedy learned the unwelcome truth, she lamented, “He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. It had to be some silly little communist. It robs his death of any meaning.”

How sad.

But that wasn’t a popular realization, so everybody who was anybody mostly ignored Lee Harvey Oswald and went on acting as if it had been Strom Thurmond up in the Texas Book Depository with the mail-order rifle.

An attitude that persists to this day, especially since Thurmond played along by becoming a Republican.

President Johnson announced his Great Society in May 1964 and signed the Civil Rights Act in July. The era’s first black riot followed a couple of weeks later. LBJ won by a landslide in November, and vast riots ensued in Watts in 1965 and Detroit in 1967. Rates of homicide and illegitimacy turned upward, too.

And Obama wasn’t even on the scene yet. What were they thinking?

In war, the victors rape the losers’ women.

Which would explain what’s going on in Sweden these days.

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It seems intuitively obvious that not everyone has a wireless phone, and hence there is still a residual ‘demand’ for pay public telephones. On the other hand, it seems plain that, in light of the theft and vandalism to which they would undoubtedly be subjected in the low-rent areas in which they would be most useful, no commercial company is going to be interesting in throwing money down that particular rat-hole. This would therefore appear to be a perfect opportunity for those so inclined to engage in a government-has-to-meet-this-public-need-because-the-free-market-will-fail program. #OccupyPhoneBooth?

 A review.

I’m about two-thirds of the way through, and highly recommend it.

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A grant program administered by the Department of Homeland Security has morphed from a fund designed to fight terror into a pork-barrel program that pads local governments’ budgets, according to a report to be released Wednesday by Sen. Tom Coburn (R., Okla.).

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Hint: All government programs and agencies eventually turn into a vehicle for pork. This is what Democrats live for, and Republicans sell out for.

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She is incapable of reading an intelligent article other than through the lens of ‘progressive’ ideology.

You do not want your children to carry these defective genes.

People like these must be encouraged not to reproduce.

Fortunately, it appears to be a self-correcting problem.

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The past 24 hours have taught me more about the media than all my years working for Presidents Nixon, Ford and Reagan, or contributing to Fox News. A conversation that began in jest and that led to a passing comment at the end of my interview with General David Petraeus has turned into a firestorm of speculation and an attempt to denigrate Fox.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Why was an audiotape created of what was supposed to be an off-the-record interview with just four people in the room, which General Petraeus himself said several times was off the record? I certainly saw no recording device, nor did I give my permission for the interview to be taped.  So who taped the interview? Why did they keep it hidden away for the past 18 months? Why was it released at this time to a Washington Post reporter?  That is surely more interesting than two people, neither of them politicians, joking around about the presidential campaign.

Indeed. Can you say ‘more Democrat dirty tricks’? I’m sure you can.

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It’s tempting to blame Fedophilia, or what Larry White calls “status quo” bias in monetary research, on the Fed’s direct influence upon the economics profession. According to White, in 2005 the Fed employed about 27 percent more full-time macro- and monetary (including banking) economists than the top 50 US academic economics departments combined, while disseminating much of their research gratis through various in-house publications or as working papers. Perhaps not surprisingly, despite a thorough review of such publications White could not find “a single Fed-published article that calls for eliminating, privatizing, or even restructuring the Fed.” That professional monetary economics journals are not much better may in turn reflect the fact, also documented by White, that Fed-affiliated economists also dominate those journals’ editorial boards.

But I doubt that a reluctance to bite the hand that feeds them is the only, or even the most important, reason why most economists seldom question the Fed’s desirability. Another reason, I suppose, is their desire to distance themselves from…kooks. Let’s face it: more than a few persons who’d like to “End the Fed” want to do so because they think the Rothschilds run it, that it had JFK killed because he planned to revive the silver dollar, and that the basic plan for it was hatched not by the Congressional Committee in charge of monetary reform but by a cabal of Wall Street bankers at a top-secret meeting on Jekyll Island.

Oh, wait: the last claim is actually true.

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Theme song of the Millenial generation.

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The sea turtle drone is called Naro-Tartaruga. (Tartaruga is “turtle” in Italian and Portuguese.) It’s being developed and tested by researchers at ETH Zurich University with the goal of eventually developing a robot that can swim underwater autonomously. The researchers are also interested in studying fin propulsion and the energy consumption of fin-propelled systems.

Well, you know, when you’ve got no coastline to speak of, a sea turtle done makes perfect sense. Artificial robot dolphins will probably be next.

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Just another silly politically fashionable Crustian buzzword, apparently.

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What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

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To say that Google’s high-speed Internet and television service has been warmly received in Kansas City is probably an understatement. But why didn’t the search giant take a stab at disrupting phone service, as well? As it turns out, it wasn’t due to lack of vision. A report from the Kansas City Business Journal reveals that Google thought long and hard about rolling out VoIP service to go with its Fiber data service before eventually balking at the regulatory headache it would have to deal with.

“We looked at doing that. The cost of actually delivering telephone services is almost nothing,” said Milo Medin, Google’s VP of Access Services at a conference in Kansas City. “However, in the United States, there are all of these special rules that apply.”

And that’s the flavor of the Obamanation: ‘Company X was going to do Y but decided not to, because of the regulatory headaches it would involve.’

Way to get the economy moving, guys. Forward into the past….

NBC News just can’t understand it.

The lack of enthusiasm about hiring is surprising in some ways. Businesses have built up hoards of cash in the last five years and have largely been running their businesses with minimal staffs who are being asked to work harder. Worker productivity grew at a 1.9 percent annual rate from July to September, which some experts say is a sign that employers are reaching the limits of how much they can squeeze out of their existing workers.

…

“You would think that businesses would be salivating,” said Joel Naroff, economist with Naroff Economic Advisors. “What more messages could you get that this economy is turning (and) that you should start doing things? And instead, they’re running around like Chicken Little.”

Clueless media droning to the contrary notwithstanding, it’s not surprising at all. A new employee is like an iceberg: The public numbers — salary, benefits — are only about 10% of the true costs once you factor in the tangled web of government regulations and mandates (which is not a trivial exercise). Also, in the Obamanation, there is no predicting what sort of she-it will be coming down the pike in the near future; Obamacare is just the first blast of the trumpet. Employers are like anybody else, they wait for things to settle down before they take a step.

As a result, businesses that want to expand are attempting to do so as much as possible in ways that don’t require adding headcount — this means increased automation, putting tools in place that will make existing employees more productive rather than just throwing bodies at a problem in the traditional way.

Modern software systems make this increasingly easier. The ability to have a machine do it rather than a person is expanding as the machines become vastly more capable. People are less and less working the assembly line and more and more supervising the production process and doing exception management.

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They say editors doing an audit of Karen Jeffrey’s work can’t find 69 people in 34 stories going back to 1998. They say Jeffrey admits inventing people and using fake names.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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The graphic photo of Zimmerman, taken the night of his fateful confrontation with Florida teen Trayvon Martin, shows the accused murderer with a bloody face. Zimmerman’s legal team released the photo, which was taken by police, after prosecutors substituted it in for a black and white photocopy that had been submitted earlier.

What did he expect? It didn’t fit the media myth of a ‘white Hispanic’ foully murdering some harmless black kid.

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And they’re all totally Republicans and conservatives, the h8ters!

Actress and comedian Roseanne Barr led the charge, claiming that “the pope is just another man in a dress telling women what to do.”

Oh, wait….

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“I was put on YouTube, I was put on everything without permission. What do I get?” he said. “This went around the world, and I want a piece of the pie.”

And that tells you everything you need to know about the Obamanation.

Victor Davis Hanson calls out the left-o-crites.

I didn’t think much of Al Gore or John Kerry, well before the “he lied!” vein-bulging fits and the wind-surfing spoofs. I was not surprised when Susan Rice just disclosed that she is worth considerably over $30 million — and has money in Keystone no less. Are they all part of the “one percent”? Did they pay “their fair share”? Do they “spread the wealth”? At what point in his life did Al Gore know that he had made enough money (before barreling ahead and making more)?

Why do a Timmy Geithner and John Kerry preach about raising taxes while trying their best to break the law to avoid them? I remember the Clintons seeking write-offs for the donation of their underwear, Tom Daschle not counting limo service as income, and Hilda Solis with a lien on her husband’s property. Why wouldn’t the above pay too much rather than too little? If Barack Obama did not get free government everything, and made several millions on his serial memoirs, with his mansion, prep schools, and Martha’s Vineyard vacations to pay for, would he still preach that guys like him need their taxes raised?

Probably. It’s what they do — say a lot that never somehow seems to apply to them. Look at Warren Buffett and Bill Gates. But they operate more like Leona Helmsley: ‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.’

An Informative Chart.

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For at least a year now, Sunni extremist gunmen have been methodically attacking members of the Hazara community, a Persian-speaking Shiite minority that emigrated here from Afghanistan more than a century ago. The killers strike with chilling abandon, apparently fearless of the law: shop owners are gunned down at their counters, students as they play cricket, pilgrims dragged from buses and executed on the roads.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

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And about time, too.

We’ve been thanklessly making this same argument since forever: The idea that we’re “afraid” of gays is laughable, but more importantly, allowing the elites to categorize unpopular opinions as mental illnesses is the sort of Stalinesque junk science that criminalizes common sense and ruins lives.

Unfortunately, while there is a popular Greek-based suffix for ‘irrational fear of’, there isn’t (so far as I have discovered) a convenient Greek-based suffix for ‘justified contempt for’ (although perhaps ‘homoligoria’ might work). Disappointing.

“Islamophobia” will prove a tougher demon to exorcise. After all, as annoying as they are, angry gays (unless they’re serial killers) typically limit themselves to direct or indirect suicide. Pissed-off Muslims vastly outnumber homosexuals (not incidentally because they keep killing them) and aren’t averse to murdering others to get their own way.

Food for thought.

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Some school lunchroom cooks in Oregon say a new federal law designed to get young people to eat better is having unintended consequences.

Cooks are spending more time on the paperwork that reports the nutritional content of their meals and less time at the stove.

Well, duh. Government = paperwork.

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Prominent gender and media studies professors from across the country converged recently to help host what was dubbed by organizers as a “Feminist, Anti-Racist Wikipedia Edit-a-thon” to create or influence dozens of entries on the online encyclopedia.

A Claremont Graduate University endowment fund sponsored the effort, which promoted creating and “improving” entries dedicated to: feminists; feminist theories; science studies; science, technology and society; human sexuality; artificial intelligence; and film theory; according to an email that announced the event to the Claremont Colleges community, as well as the “Edit-a-thon Wikipedia Page.”

God forbid that anyone, anywhere, should get information that wasn’t approved by the thought police.

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Welcome to the Obamanation.

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President Obama’s bid to control what your children learn in school is surely one of the most important and disturbing of his many transformative plans. Not only is Obama’s attempt to devise what is in effect a national K-12 school curriculum arguably unconstitutional and illegal, the fact that most Americans have no idea that the new “Common Core” (aka Obamacore) even exists may be the most troubling thing about it.

As Stalin well knew, control of the schools was essential to controlling the minds of the population.

Not coincidentally, this new education war is hitting less than a month after Obama’s re-election, just in time to prevent the public from taking the most effective step it could have to block the changes. You have to get nearly to the end of today’s Post article even to get a hint of the fact that Obama is the real force behind the new curriculum. Following that link takes you to an article that more frankly lays out Obama’s role in commandeering the substance of what’s taught in the nation’s schools. The print version of this September 21, 2012 article featured a more revealing headline than the web version: “Education overhaul largely bypasses Congress.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Some, however, are not fooled — George Will, for example.

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A funny thing often happens on the way to soaking the rich: They don’t stick around for the bath. Take Britain, where Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs service reports that the number of taxpayers declaring £1 million a year in income fell by more than 60% in fiscal 2010-2011 from the year before.

That was the year that millionaires became liable for the 50% income-tax rate that Gordon Brown’s government introduced in its final days in 2010, up from the previous 40% rate. Lo, the total number of millionaire tax filers plunged to 6,000 in 2010-2011, from 16,000 in 2009-2010.

Amazing how that works.

The new tax was meant to raise about £2.5 billion more revenue. So much for that. In 2009-2010 British millionaires contributed about £13.4 billion to the public coffers, or just under 9% of the total tax liability of all taxpayers that year. At the 50% rate, the shrunken pool yielded £6.5 billion, or about 4.4%.

All that hope and the change is in the wrong direction.

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In conversations with POLITICO, some of the left’s most influential voices in media said that, with the concerns of re-election over, they intend to be more critical of the president’s performance and more aggressive in urging him to pursue a progressive agenda as the clock ticks on his last four years in office.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

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There’s just no pleasing some people.

The posters were designed to foster conversation about the domestic use of drones by law enforcement. Instead, it looks like we will be having the same old conversation about the limits of free speech.

Better not do it with posters.

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One of the more outlandish-sounding startups I met in Helsinki last week was Valkee, a company that makes a device that shines lights onto your brain cells through your ear canals.

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Khaira Arby, one of Africa’s most celebrated musicians, has performed all over the world, but there is one place she cannot visit: her native city of Timbuktu, a place steeped in history and culture but now ruled by religious extremists.

One day, they broke into Arby’s house and destroyed her instruments. Her voice was a threat to Islam, they said, even though one of her most popular songs praised Allah.

“They told my neighbors that if they ever caught me, they would cut my tongue out,” said Arby, sadness etched on her broad face.

What peaceful, friendly people! Wouldn’t you just love to have some for neighbors?
That’s some fine Religion o’ Peace™ you got there, Mohammed.
Of course, as we all know, the real problem is Islamophobia.

Read it.

Scientists at the Wake Forest University have created a new type of light bulb that promises to be just as efficient as LED equivalents, but without any of the drawbacks. The new field-induced polymer electroluminescent bulbs — FIPEL for short — produce light when an electric current is passed through the nano-engineered plastic layers. The team says that the new type of bulbs are malleable, allowing them to take any shape like compact fluorescent lamps. They also won’t shatter like traditional bulbs, nor will they generate the same hum or flicker.