Good morning. 0 (F) this morning … expecting -10 or less tomorrow. Cool, eh? (heh)

1. Regulation.
2. Mr Krugman talks more on climate. Oops.
3. High in the Coptic government. Some more here from Japan.
4. A book noted.
5. How to jump to a really bad example to (not?) demonstrate a point. The question is asked, in sports, does firing the coach help win championships. If it didn’t why do they keep doing it over and over and over?
6. Speaking of sports, a good example.
7. More sports talk here.
8. Liberals sounding like “right wingers”.
9. How that budget neutrality works, by moving it to kill state budgets … oh, and your budget too.
10. All the hypocrisy that’s fit to print.
11. You can choose your ideology … or not. Perhaps by choose he meant change.
12. Of Cairo and Chicago.

Good morning.

1. Inability to express something in words, alas, doesn’t mean it’s incoherent. You can’t, for example, use words to describe how you even ride a bike.
2. Talking about the Coptic situation.
3. Mr Wilders.
4. Stupid economics tricks … a prime example to counter the notion that skepticism and IQ don’t go hand in hand.
5. Stealth drone. More fun tech toys here.
6. And it won’t be sold in the US.
7. 2/14 geek giftery.
8. On Mr Christie and the trains and that tunnel thing.
9. Some suggestions on how to find happiness.
10. Religious freedom and blasphemy laws.
11. One “shocking” ad banned from the Superbowl in most markets.
12. Heh.
13. A long piece on suggesting anti-semitism and (some) new atheists.
14. A “cool” contest noted.
15. Hmm. My first impulse is not to side with the injured party. 
16. Maths and the world.

Hmmmm…
Dance the night away, I guess.

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$4.65B profit? Corporate greed!
Yet, no outrage? Oh, right – they aren’t “Big Oil”.

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College = Time to party?
Despite what some of my acquaintances think, I still posit that this is a relatively new phenomenon (i.e., within the last 30 years). When I attended university, in the late 70s, we knew where the party schools were and which majors were party majors. And “Spring Break” was not the orgy it is now. However, the party / socialize mentality seems to be quite ubiquitous nowadays.

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Do you really have 1,538 friends?
Facebook may ask you to identify your friends, via FB photos, for security access to your account. Better check the mug of the friend of your cousin’s kid that you met last summer while on vacation. I’m just sayin’.

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Kids and technology
Yes, preschoolers are more adept at using technology than tying their shoes (unless their shoes lace with velcro). Homeschoolers have long known that kids are capable of learning at a very young age (though they may not be ready).

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Ink from the Cloud
Cool!

Good morning.

1. Abstinence and condom vouchers? Apparently the left things those things are really really expensive.
2. Freedom and the Middle East (and North Africa).
3. The PC movement and consequence.
4. An administration like no other … or not.
5. Breaking new ground on the “Open” front too.
6. Heh.
7. Of economics and regulation.
8. A book recommended.
9. Regime change, here and here.
10. Three Presidents.
11. Beltway spending practices and a comparison noted.
12. The regrettable SEC.

In more Civil Discourse Watch, here’s folks on the Left calling for riots, or at least pointing to rioting as a good example.

The failure of the repeal of ObamaCare can be laid at Democrats feet. We’ll see how well that works for them in 2012. (Didn’t work so well in 2010.)

In which country in the Middle East do Arabs have the greatest civil liberties? Click here to find out.

We keep hearing this refrain.

Shortly after taking office, President Obama traveled to Cairo to declare a new day in U.S. relations with the Muslim world – saying there was "no straight line" to building democratic societies in the Middle East.

The June 2009 address was in part intended to show a clean break from a George W. Bush-era "freedom agenda" of promoting electoral democracies across the region. Yet Obama now finds himself forced to move much closer to that world view as he escalates pressure on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to make immediate changes.

Regarding national defense and now foreign policy, Dubya had it right. Slowly, but too slowly, Obama is realizing this.

Law enforcement could have stopped the Fort Hood shooting by Major Hasan if political correctness hadn’t prevented them.

And finally, some bad investments. Click for a larger version.

Good morning.

1. Two links on the PP sting, here and here.
2. The (do you believe in) the sanity clause returns.
3. The individual mandate.
4. The crux of why power to tax isn’t used as a defense of the mandate but the commerce clause is.
5. An Orthodox man and the Super Bowl.
6. Speaking of Orthodoxy … some notes regarding the East and evolution.
7. Kodachrome no more.
8. Someone is forgetting that the left prefers social entitlements to science programs.
9. Some notes on the Coptic situation.

The discussion of whether or not Mr Obama is “smart” came up again in a conversation. I thought I’d lay out a few thoughts on that. Before I begin I want to emphasize that I don’t know whether or not he is smart or not. People say he is … and I think they have no real good way of knowing that. The reason I say I don’t know is that I don’t have the background or experience to judge whether or not largely because I really have no instincts or experience of lawyers who are or are not considered, in their field, smart.  Read the rest of this entry

The eeevil rich, aren’t just rich; they’re Nazis.

Showing no concern for the new civility push that followed the Arizona massacre, a group of leftist activists from groups including Code Pink, Common Cause and jewel of liberal think tanks, the Center for American Progress, turned into a loud mob complete with Nazi imagery outside a conservative gathering in Rancho Mirage, California.

But the media only ever really complain about it from the Right.

If this is okay
then,

this should be as well…

and this too…

and, lastly, this also.

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Be careful how you hold your cellphone when you’re in public
It just might be considered a weapon.

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One soldier, with a knife, against 40 armed thieves
Result: Thieves – 3 dead, 8 injured. Soldier – a serious wound on his hand. This is one reason why the notion that banning objects, such as 30 round magazines, with the intention of curbing acts of evil, is flawed. Humans have the uncanny ability to utilize available tools, combine them with courageous virtue – or evil desire – and act.

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Why you should be concerned about something like Pod Slurping.

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Abortion and the Argument from Inhuman Sociopathy
Joe Carter pulls no punches in this critique.

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Geek News: 25 years since Voyager 2 passed by Uranus
From JPL,

“The Uranus encounter was one of a kind,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager, based at JPL. “Voyager 2 was healthy and durable enough to make it to Uranus and then to Neptune. Currently both Voyager spacecraft are on the cusp of leaving the sun’s sphere of influence and once again blazing a trail of scientific discovery.”

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ID Theft not all it’s cracked up to be?
From Consumer Reports,

You have a low likelihood of becoming a victim of true identity theft, and even if you are unlucky, your finances will probably not suffer. Don’t waste money on expensive services offered by credit-reporting bureaus and other ID theft protection companies. Most of their products are unnecessary or ineffective, or they duplicate things you can do yourself, for free.

Another Middle East dictator long-time ruler is stepping down.

Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh says he will not seek another term after three decades in power. This comes as violence and protests continue in Egypt, even after the country’s President Mubarak announced that he himself will step down before September’s elections.

Depending on who fills all these power vacuums, this could be really good or really bad. For those of us who believe end-times prophesies about Israel, we’re watching closely.

Skin cells turned directly into heart cells.

Scientists have successfully converted adult skin cells directly into beating heart cells efficiently without having to first go through the laborious process of generating embryonic-like stem cells.

The powerful general technology platform could lead to novel treatments for diseases and injuries involving cell loss or damage such as heart disease, Parkinson’s, and Alzheimer’s disease, according to researchers at the Scripps Research Institute.

In 2006, Japanese scientists reported that they could reprogram mouse skin cells to become pluripotent simply by inserting a set of four genes into the cells dubbed induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. But creating iPS cells itself is a time taking procedure.

Hence, lead author Sheng Ding and colleagues tweaked the process by completely bypassing the iPS stage and going directly from one type of mature cell (a skin cell) to another (a heart cell).

Amazing. This is almost the biological equivalent of alchemy.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg evidently feels the need to patrol outside his jurisdiction, not only leaving the confines of NYC limits, but outside his home state. Not content with snooping around his northeast locale, he’s ventured to the American Southwest, taking on Arizona.

From CNN, Undercover investigators buy guns without background checks,

Undercover investigators purchased semiautomatic weapons at an Arizona gun show, despite telling vendors that they probably could not pass background checks, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg told reporters Monday.

“We have demonstrated how easy it is for anyone to buy a semiautomatic handgun and a high capacity magazine, no questions asked,” Bloomberg said.

One has to wonder what Arizona law enforcement thinks about New York City investigators conducting sting operations in Arizona?

Perhaps Arizona Governor Jan Brewer should organize sting operations to find out how easy it is for a New York State Attorney General and Governor to be linked to a prostitution ring, or for a physician (in neighboring Philadelphia) to kill unborn children, or… how easy is it to take down a couple of skyscrapers?

Better yet, why doesn’t Bloomberg just mind his own business in his own jurisdiction?

Good morning.

1. Talking about abortion, alas starting with the regrettable Jarvis thing.
2. Antisemitism (or not) of one of the three great church Fathers.
3. Talking about Vinson. So is inactivity a commercial act? Are there any conceivable limits to Constitutional authority in the liberal view?
4. And an application of inactivity and the law.
5. And on that topic, Mr Obama’s campaign rhetoric returning to bite him.
6. Are those the two legal alternatives, of which Mr Obama is not to follow choosing either?
7. A water/land switch.
8. Holding one’s heart aflame.
9. America’s poor in context.
10. Snow meets Plato.
11. To counter the “snow a result of global warming nonsense.” 
12. Payoffs and transparency.
13. Multipliers and crowding.
14. Humor meets the pizza.
15. Meta-conceptual notions.
16. Heh.

When George W. Bush went into Afghanistan and Iraq, the Left predicted that the "Arab street" would erupt in protest against America. Other than the timing, under which US President, and the reason they would protest, they got it absolutely correct. >grin<

In Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan, the "Arab street" is indeed flooding the streets in protest, but years after the Left predicted it, and against their own governments. The Jordanian government has been dissolved, and it’s not at all sure that Egypt’s Mubarek will survive this uprising.

And what needs to change? King Abdullah II of Jordan put it this way.

The king also stressed that economic reform was a "necessity to provide a better life for our people, but we won’t be able to attain that without real political reforms, which must increase popular participation in the decision-making."

More democracy. Turns out, the Arab street wants to be more like America. Or even (heh) Israel. The human rights records of all these countries are pretty bad as well.

Part of this depends on who fills the leadership void, especially in Egypt. If it is radical Muslims, this could turn into another Iran. But that is not a foregone conclusion, so let’s pray for the best for the Arab people.

Good morning.

1. Repair work in house and self.
2. Irony alert.
3. Culture wars.
4. One way in which Mr Obama can truly be thought really really smart (or why he selected Mr Biden as running mate?).
5. Some aphorisms: here and here.
6. Coptic links.
7. The judge makes a ruling.
8. Yah think?
9. Artwork, oil on canvas I think.
10. A child is ill.