Example #15437.
The cop should be charged with false arrest, and the school officials should be sued within an inch of their lives. This kind of idiocy will continue until it causes pain for the idiots.
“Affirmative” “Action”
SCOTUS has stricken a blow against decades of institutionalized racism by the Left.
Earth II?
My thoughts on the latest discovery from the Kepler data, over at PJMedia.
A “Tenuous Grasp Of Science”
That’s certainly a polite way to describe these fools:
A half-liter of urine dumped in a 143 million-liter reservoir would get a urea concentration of about 3 parts per billion, according to Slate. (We calculated it would be a 50 nanoMolar solution.) Meanwhile, the EPA allows concentrations of arsenic in drinking water up to 10 ppb. Salt water has a salt concentration of around 35,000,000 parts per billion, or 600 milliMolar.
Do these morons have any idea how many birds poop in that lake every day? In drought-stricken California, that wouldn’t be just a firing offense — they’d be strung up. But I’ll bet he’s all on board with battling climate change.
As Glenn says, the nation is increasingly being run by chuckleheads.
Cats
What are they thinking?
Miklósi, I was surprised to learn, had also conducted the pointing test with felines. Like Agrillo, he had a hard time getting cats to cooperate in his laboratory—so he went to their homes instead. Even then, most of the animals weren’t interested in advancing science; according to Miklósi’s research paper, seven of the initial 26 test subjects “dropped out.” But those that did participate performed nearly as well as dogs had. Cats too, it appears, may have a rudimentary theory of mind.
But when Miklósi took the study a step further, he spotted an intriguing difference between cats and dogs. This time, he and his colleagues created two puzzles: one solvable, the other impossible. In the solvable puzzle, the researchers placed food in a bowl and stuck it under a stool. Dogs and cats had to find the bowl and pull it out to eat. Both aced the test. Then the scientist rigged the exam. They again placed the bowl under a stool, but this time they tied it to the stool legs so that it could not be pulled out. The dogs pawed at the bowl for a few seconds and then gave up, gazing up at their owners as if asking for help. The cats, on the other hand, rarely looked at their owners; they just kept trying to get the food.
Now before you conclude that cats are dumber than dogs because they’re not smart enough to realize when a task is impossible, consider this: Dogs have lived with us for as many as 30,000 years—20,000 years longer than cats. More than any other animal on the planet, dogs are tuned in to the “human radio frequency”—the broadcast of our feelings and desires. Indeed, we may be the only station dogs listen to. Cats, on the other hand, can tune us in if they want to (that’s why they pass the pointing test as well as dogs), but they don’t hang on our every word like dogs do. They’re surfing other channels on the dial. And that’s ultimately what makes them so hard to study. Cats, as any owner knows, are highly intelligent beings. But to science, their minds may forever be a black box.
As another recent study showed, cats recognize our voices. They just don’t care.
The Left’s War On Women
Taking a page out of the Clinton playbook in the nineties, the left is attacking Sharyl Atkisson (as they do anyone who tells the truth about them), as “crazy.” Hope she understand what she’s letting herself in for her multiple crimes of committing acts of journalism in a Democrat administration.
President Asterisk
Some thoughts from Roger Kimball:
Barack Obama has been lying — lying, not “mis-stating,” not somehow getting it wrong because he was misinformed, ill-advised, out to lunch — no, he has been lying to the American public public since 2009. Here is a little recap of 36 times he promised that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan, period.” It’s less than 3 minutes long. Watch it a couple of times. Then ask yourself — especially if you voted for Barack Obama — ask yourself, was he telling the truth?
That’s the thing about credibility. Its loss is infectious, corrosive. Lose it here, and you find that you’ve lost over there as well. The Examiner is quite right, “it has been increasingly difficult for many Americans to continue accepting at face value his statements on other major public issues. In both the Benghazi and IRS scandals, for example, Obama claimed to have known nothing about them until they were reported in the national media.” Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain! (Quoth Dorothy: “If you were really great and powerful, you’d keep your promises.”) Flap, flap, flap: here they come! If it were true (don’t you love the subjunctive?), if, I say, it were true that Obama was just as ignorant as you or I about what happened in Benghazi or the IRS until the media told him then why the huge cover up? Why, as the Examiner asks, “has the president’s attorney general and so many other of his most prominent appointees withheld thousands of documents subpoenaed by Congress and requested by journalists under the Freedom of Information Act? Are there passages in those withheld documents that make it clear Obama knew much more than he has admitted?” What do you think? (While were at it, why can;t we see Barack Obama’s Occidental College records? Are there items there that prove he applied to the college as a foreign student, thus committing fraud? What do you think?)
Come to think of it, it would still be nice to see the Khalidi birthday-party video.
There is no reason to believe this administration about anything it says, on any subject. And there is good reason to believe that his reelection, if not indeed his first one, was illegitimate.
Earth-Like Planets
by a researcher who says that planets that can accommodate LAWKI aren’t as common as some are saying.Base Camps
Derek Webber writes that in order to advance into the solar system NASA needs to take some lessons from Everest climbers.
Not to mention be willing to lose folks occasionally.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jeff Foust notes that there seems to be an emerging consensus that Mars is the goal, though none on how to do it.
Meanwhile, John Strickland says we need an integrated approach, with robots and humans. to get to Mars. He seems to be focusing on Mars surface water, though. I think we need to trade that with manufacturing propellants at Phobos or Deimos.
My take, as always, is that destinations are less important than capabilities. Put an off-planet space-transportation infrastructure in place, and the entire solar system (including Europa and Enceladus) is opened up to us. But Congress would rather build big rockets.
The Middle Class
Stop favoring speculators and investors over them.
That applies to both parties. The Republicans could make this an electorally popular strategy, but too many of their donors would object.
I would note, though, that if you’re going to tax capital gains more, you need to provide a way to factor out inflation, because a devaluation of the currency doesn’t provide a true capital “gain.”