Gosnell Case Goes to the Jury

Jack McMahon, Kermit Gosnell’s defense attorney, told the jury during closing arguments in the abortionist’s trial that the description of Gosnell’s clinic as a “house of horrors” is a “political press fabrication.”

According to the Associated Press, McMahon showed jurors pictures of a neat waiting room and other areas of Gosnell’s clinic, providing them as proof that the “house of horrors” designation was a misnomer.

McMahon also repeated what he said in his opening remarks that the case against his client is an elitist and racist prosecution against Gosnell, 72, who is black.

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The Coming ObamaCare Shock

In total, it appears that there will be 30 million to 40 million people damaged in some fashion by the Affordable Care Act—more than one in 10 Americans. When that reality becomes clearer, the law is going to start losing its friends in the media, who are inclined to support the president and his initiatives. We'll hear about innocent victims who saw their premiums skyrocket, who were barred from seeing their usual doctor, who had their hours cut or lost their insurance entirely—all thanks to the faceless bureaucracy administering a federal law.

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Dem resolution: Global Warming Will Force Women Into Prostitution

via Gateway Pundit: Congressional Democrats are calling on the House to recognize that climate change is dangerous and forcing women into prostitution.

The Hill reported:

Several House Democrats are calling on Congress to recognize that climate change is hurting women more than men, and could even drive poor women to “transactional sex” for survival.

The resolution, from Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and a dozen other Democrats, says the results of climate change include drought and reduced agricultural output. It says these changes can be particularly harmful for women.

“[F]ood insecure women with limited socioeconomic resources may be vulnerable to situations such as sex work, transactional sex, and early marriage that put them at risk for HIV, STIs, unplanned pregnancy, and poor reproductive health,” it says.

Climate change could also add “workload and stresses” on female farmers, which the resolution says produce 60 to 80 percent of the food in developing countries.

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Enormous Bedpan Collection

That's an enormous collection of bedpans, not a collection of enormous bedpans.  via Weird Universe.

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Hamlet's Cat's Soliloquy

It's been a long time since I posted this, and my daughter-in-law's annoying cat reminded me of it this morning:

To go outside, and there perchance to stay
Or to remain within: that is the question:
Whether 'tis better for a cat to suffer
The cuffs and buffets of inclement weather
That Nature rains on those who roam abroad,
Or take a nap upon a scrap of carpet,
And so by dozing melt the solid hours
That clog the clock's bright gears with sullen time
And stall the dinner bell. To sit, to stare
Outdoors, and by a stare to seem to state
A wish to venture forth without delay,
Then when the portal's opened up, to stand
As if transfixed by doubt. To prowl; to sleep;
To choose not knowing when we may once more
Our readmittance gain: aye, there's the hairball;
For if a paw were shaped to turn a knob,
Or work a lock or slip a window-catch,
And going out and coming in were made
As simple as the breaking of a bowl,
What cat would bear the household's petty plagues,
The cook's well-practiced kicks, the butler's broom,
The infant's careless pokes, the tickled ears,
The trampled tail, and all the daily shocks
That fur is heir to, when, of his own free will,
He might his exodus or entrance make
With a mere mitten? Who would spaniels fear,
Or strays trespassing from a neighbor's yard,
But that the dread of our unheeded cries
And scratches at a barricaded door
No claw can open up, dispels our nerve
And makes us rather bear our humans' faults
Than run away to unguessed miseries?
Thus caution doth make house cats of us all;
And thus the bristling hair of resolution
Is softened up with the pale brush of thought,
And since our choices hinge on weighty things,
We pause upon the threshold of decision.
~by Henry Beard, “Poetry for Cats”

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Francis Crick's letter to his 12 yr old son describing his and James Watson's discovery

In 1953, English biologist Francis Crick wrote a letter to his 12-year-old son Michael, describing a discovery he and his colleague had recently made.

In the letter, Crick sketches what is now perhaps one of the most famous scientific diagrams in world—the structure of DNA.

19 Portugal Place Cambridge
19 March ’53

My Dear Michael,

Jim Watson and I have probably made a most important discovery. We have built a model for the structure of de-oxy-ribose-nucleic-acid (read it carefully) called D.N.A. for short. You may remember that the genes of the chromosomes — which carry the hereditary factors — are made up of protein and D.N.A.

Our structure is very beautiful. D.N.A. can be thought of roughly as a very long chain with flat bits sticking out. The flat bits are called the “bases”. The formula is rather like this.

See the whole thing at Nat Geo.

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Big Brother Has A New Face, And It's Your Boss

Read the whole article by Dr. Paul Hseih, writing at Forbes:

Recently, the CVS Caremark Corporation began requiring employees to disclose personal health information (including weight, blood pressure, and body fat levels) or else pay an annual $600 fine. Workers must make this information available to the company’s employee “Wellness Program” and sign a form stating that they’re doing so voluntarily.

CVS argues this will help workers “take more responsibility for improving their health.” At one level, this makes a certain sense. Because the company is paying for their employees’ health insurance, they naturally prefer healthier workers. But at a deeper level, CVS’ action demonstrates a growing problem with our current system of employer-provided health insurance. If our bosses must pay for our health care, they will inevitably seek greater control over our lifestyles.

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Why is The Sky Blue? How Do Bees and Butterflies See?

Dr. Joe Hanson of It's OK To Be Smart has a new Youtube Channel.

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Star Wars BDSM toys

Lightsabers aren't just for defending the galaxy; when used correctly (with a safe word), they can provide hours of sexy fun. Etsy seller Geek Kinkturns to lightsabers and other trappings of the Star Wars universe to create enough whips, restraints, and paddles to keep BDSM aficionados sore and still through the entire saga.

Geek Kink doesn't trade just in Star Wars sex toys. The shop also sells TARDIS-handled canes, Harley Quinn restraints, and enough My Little Pony tail-shaped paddles to swat the bums of a small, horse-loving army.

Star Wars BDSM Toys

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Off-Duty US Sailor Knocks Out Dubai Rapist With Her American Thighs

An off-duty US navy sailor wrestled a bus driver to the ground and beat him into submission after he attempted to rape her at knife point, a court heard yesterday.

Prosecutors said that she knocked the knife from his hand, broke it in two, bit him in the hand, forced him to the ground and locked him between her thighs.

The woman, 28, was on 24-hour shore leave in Dubai and was attacked as she returned to the port where she was based after a day shopping.

Update: Hm. It turns out she wasn’t a US Navy sailor, but may have been a civilian mariner.

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Diane Feinstein’s husband’s company lands big high-speed rail contract

Sister Toldjah:

Because, at nearly $35,000,000 per mile, they surely had to be the cheapest:

Out of the entire universe of those who could have won the first phase construction contract for California’s high speed rail boondoggle, who would stand out as the last person who would win it if there were no political patronage.

Put another way, who is the most likely person to win it if there is political patronage?

Both questions have the same answer: Richard Blum, the husband of California senator Diane Feinstein.

So, who won the contract? Blum, of course, as the principle owner of Tutor Perini, the lead firm in the three-firm consortium selected by the California High Speed Rail Authority.

Yes, Diane, it really does look that bad to us little people.

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Gutsy Call on That Miranda Warning: Method of Detonation May Suggest 3rd Bomber At Bombsite

Links and more comments at Ace:

They seem to believe that the bombs were detonated line of site, by radio remote control.

I'm not sure why they conclude this next part: Ergo, the Tsarnaev's themselves could not have detonated them, and so there is a third party who manned the RCs.

I do not get that last leap, though, as I thought that last picture of the murderous brothers leaving the bomb site had them pretty close to the bombs. Not so close to be hit, but close enough to be moving with the fleeing crowd (and not even out in front of the fleeing crowd).

But it's worth keeping an eye on. I await the explanation for that Step 2 in the logic that seems to be missing at the moment.

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Is Chocolate Good for You? Or Bad?

Read the whole thing at Bon Appetit.  Exerpts:

In 1988 alone, chocolate was scientifically accused of causing itching, causing migraines, and causing indigestion. In 1989, science found that the fat from cocoa butter is good for you, but since most chocolate also has milkfat in it, it's bad! And a 1990 article called "New Insights on Why Some Children Are Fat" continued the chocophobic trend, with a Dr. Stunkard noting that "no one binges on hard candies, which are pure sweetness...ice cream and chocolate are more often the villains."

Harsh words. And things weren't getting any better. In 1992, science found that chocolate makes you fatter than alcohol if you're an alcoholic (but failed to mention if the inverse holds true for chocoholics), and followed up in 1993 with the painful finding that a chemical found in chocolate might give you kidney stones.

But soft! What light through yonder science breaks? It is 1996, the year that things started looking up for chocolate again! First, science found that chocolate definitely does NOT cause acne outbreaks (though it can still get stuck in your braces). Then, in what might be the best chocolate-related study of all time, science also discovered that chocolate could be used not only as a shock absorber in cars but as a quick way to fill potholes.

Keep reading, there's lots more to come.

Also, wine's up-and-downs.

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Elevator Riders Stand in Mini Social Hierarchies

Too small a sample to mean anything, but interesting:

Do you ever pay attention to where you stand when you ride an elevator?

Rebekah Rousi, a Ph.D. student in cognitive science, does. She conducted an elevator study in two of the tallest office buildings Adelaide, Australia, and after 30 rides, found that more senior men stand in the back, younger men stand in the middle and women of all ages stand in front.

Not only did people tend to stand in certain locations, but they also directed their gaze in particular areas. Men checked out the other riders as well as themselves, while women did not and only looked in the mirrors when another women was in the elevator car.

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Hostess looking to get back in business, sans the union employees

More at HotAir:

Last fall, Hostess tried to readjust their struggling business model and keep the company (along with its 19,000-strong workforce) going strong by closing a few factories and downsizing workers’ wages and benefits — and the bakers’ union to which a big chunk of the Hostess workforce belonged didn’t like that all. Their resulting strike turned out to be a suicide mission, however; the Bakery, Confectionary, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union might have thought they were calling the company’s bluff, but Hostess really could not afford to keep up the bloated pay structure, and the settlement failure meant liquidation and a whole lot of layoffs.

Now, a buyout firm is looking to put Hostess’s bankrupt assets back into business; Ed mentioned yesterday that at least one plant should be up and running by July, and they’re planning on re-opening several other plants in short order — but they’re trying to do it without the union contract this time.

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NYT: Breitbart was right about Pigford

More comment, and links, at HotAir:

It’s rare to get this kind of vindication, so let’s enjoy it in memory of Andrew Breitbart for as long as possible. For more than two years, Andrew and Lee Stranahan have investigated the Pigford settlement and the fraudulent claims that not only have cost taxpayers billions, but have left the original black farmers who sued the USDA over discrimination in the lurch. Today the New York Times reports what Andrew and Lee have been saying all along — that the Pigford settlement was a political hack job by Tom Vilsack’s Department of Agriculture, and that it’s a magnet for fraud.

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Do different kinds of alcohol get you different kinds of drunk?

First off: alcohol is alcohol – which is to say that the alcohol in wine is the same as the alcohol in beer is the same as the alcohol in the unholy red-cup concoction at a dormroom game of King's Cup. That alcohol is ethyl alcohol, aka ethanol, and it'll get you drunk. The fact that liquor tends to contain higher concentrations of ethanol than wine, and wine higher concentrations than beer, means that the same volume of different alcoholic beverages will get you more/less drunk, ergo the "standard drink" rule, as defined by the National Institutes of Health:

In the United States, a "standard" drink is any drink that contains about 0.6 fluid ounces or 14 grams of "pure" alcohol. Although the drinks below are different sizes, each contains approximately the same amount of alcohol and counts as a single standard drink.

The standard drink model suggests that when it comes to behavioral effects, the only difference between a can of beer and a shot of whiskey is the mode of delivery. Ounce-for-ounce, an 80-proof shot of MaCallan's is a much more efficient ethanol-delivery system than a can of Bud Light. If you down a few shots of the former really quickly, you'll experience a rapid spike in your blood alcohol level, and, presumably, a rapid drop in your inhibition, sense of propriety, and so-forth. But any perceived difference between the drunk you feel from the liquor and the drunk you feel from beer has to do with the rate at which you consumed the ethanol, not the beverage via which you consumed it.

But what about hard alcohols that are comparable in ethanol concentration, and therefore equally efficient at getting you drunk? According to the Alcohol Is Alcohol argument, 80-proof tequila should have the same effect on you as 80-proof vodka, rum, gin or whiskey. Yet we all know someone who insists that tequila makes them wild, that whiskey makes them angry, or that gin makes them sad. Why is that?

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Friday links

Wild Men of Europe: Animal Costume Traditions.

Infographic: time travel in the movies.

Eyeball Shaving in China.

What is the longest possible sunset you can experience while driving?

Gallery: stone bridges.

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Need a smile? Watch this Evian "baby & me" video

And here are the Evian roller babies:

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The Gonorrhea Doomsday Is Nigh

Gonorrhea, one of the the smartest of all the bacterial STDs, is on the rise. From Wyoming to Utah to Minnesota, there are reports of cases increasing, some by 74 percent—all on the heels of the first incurable strain hitting North American genitalia back earlier this year. And now, British doctors who devote their careers to studying The Clap are warning that the disease could be completely untreatable sooner than the U.S. elects a new president. "[T]here is a possibility that if we don't do something then it could become untreatable by 2015," professor Cathy Ison, head of the National Reference Laboratory for Gonorrhea in the U.K., told the BBC Wednesday.

"Untreatable," as Dr. Ison sees it, would be a nightmare scenario not only for patients bound to suffer complications like infertility and ectopic pregnancies, but also for doctors who could no longer break transmission, becoming unprepared to deal with more complex infections. And though Ison's warning of a gonorrhea doomsday is a hypothetical worst-case scenario, the troubling signs of growing cases and incurable strains are already here.

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Infographic: time travel in the movies

Click here to see full size.

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It's Anzac Day - the Battle of Gallipoli was 98 years ago

Ship after ship, crammed with soldiers, moved slowly out of the harbour, in the lovely day, and felt again the heave of the sea. No such gathering of fine ships has ever been seen upon the earth, and the beauty and the exaltation of the youth upon them made them like sacred things as they moved away... These men had come from all parts of the British world... They had said good-bye to home that they might offer their lives in the cause we stand for. In a few hours at most, as they well knew, perhaps a tenth of them would have looked their last upon the sun, and be a part of the foreign earth or the dumb things that tides push. Many of them would have disappeared forever from the knowledge of man, blotted from the book of life none would ever know how, by a fall, a chance shot in the darkness, or alone, like a hurt beast, in some scrub or gulley, far from comrades and the English speech and the English singing.
- John Masefield (1878-1967)* (Gallipoli)

Damn the Dardanelles. They will be our grave.
- Admiral Sir John Fisher (1841-1920) (to the Dardanelles Committee, 1915)

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives... You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land, they have become our sons as well.
- Mustafa Kemal - Atatürk (1881-1938) (tribute to the ANZAC dead, 1934)

Today is celebrated in Australia and New Zealand as ANZAC Day, commemorating the key participation 98 years ago of the Australia-New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) in the ill-fated Allied assault on the Turkish-held Gallipoli Peninsula in 1915 during World War I. This was one of the first large-scale amphibious invasion of modern times and the first major military operation in which Australia and New Zealand participated on behalf of the British Empire. As a result, the Gallipoli campaign was perhaps the key  defining event for Australia's nationhood, as it was in a sense for Turkey's also. Turkish Lieutenant-Colonel Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli's successful defense, later became the founder of modern Turkey, adopting the name "Atatürk" - father of the Turks.

Today much of the Gallipoli Peninsula is a Turkish national park with over 20 cemeteries lovingly tended by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. The visitor can not help but be struck by the stark, natural beauty of its steep, scrubby, deeply-gullied terrain and sadly moved by the remembrance of the tens of thousands of men on both sides who lost their lives there in a futile clash of empires - only a few miles across the "wine-dark sea" from the ruins of ancient Troy. Of that earlier struggle, Homer wrote in book XIII of the Iliad,

"It is not possible to fight beyond your strength, even if you strive.")

* N.B. John Masefield was the Poet Laureate of England from 1930 until his
death. He served as a medical orderly on the Western Front in World War I and later wrote Gallipoli to counter German propaganda seeking to exploit the British defeat there.

The most readable account of the Gallipoli campaign remains Alan Moorehead's venerable history, Gallipoli, from the late 1950s. Also, the more recent Australian movie of that same name, starring the young Mel Gibson, is an excellent evocation of both the horror and exhilaration of those times.

The ANZAC landing on Gallipoli, 25 April 1915:

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How Urine Can Be Used to Make Gunpowder (and Other Interesting Pee Facts)

It turns out that something that is (usually) flushed down the toilet can actually be recycled into a number of useful products. Comprised of water, calcium, chloride, potassium, sodium, magnesium, urea, creatinine, nitrogen, uric acid, ammonium, sulphates and phosphates, urine’s beneficial ingredients can be separated from its waste, and used to make fertilizer, medicine, brain cells and, yes, gunpowder.

Throughout history, some smart and adventurous people with strong stomachs have devised a number of ingenuous uses for their pee.

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The Thatcher-Gorbachev Conversations transcripts posted online

Washington, D.C., April 12, 2013 – Margaret Thatcher, the former British prime minister who passed away this week, built a surprising mutual-admiration relationship with the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s – including behind-the-scenes agreement against the reunification of Germany, and profound disagreement about nuclear abolition – according to translated Soviet records of key meetings between the two leaders, posted online today for the first time by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (www.nsarchive.org).

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How to hide small items inside a door

via BoingBoing: In the latest issue of MAKE (Vol 34) Sean Michael Ragan shows you how to create a fantabulous doorstop stash out of a cigar tube, so you can hide things that Obama wants to take away from you (bullets, tiny Bibles) or the next Republic president wants to take away from you (RU-486 tablets, tiny copies of Origin of the Species).

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Mark Steyn: The ‘Co-exist’ Bombers

In America, all atrocities are not equal: Minutes after the Senate declined to support so-called gun control in the wake of the Newtown massacre, the president rushed ill-advisedly on air to give a whiny, petulant performance predicated on the proposition that one man’s mass infanticide should call into question the constitutional right to bear arms. Simultaneously, the media remain terrified that another man’s mass infanticide might lead you gullible rubes to question the constitutional right to abortion, so the ongoing Kermit Gosnell trial in Philadelphia has barely made the papers — even though it involves large numbers of fully delivered babies who were decapitated and had their feet chopped off and kept in pickling jars.

The politicization of mass murder found its perfect expression in one of those near-parodic pieces to which the more tortured self-loathing dweebs of the fin de civilisation West are prone. As the headline in Salon put it, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber Is a White American.” David Sirota is himself a white American, but he finds it less discomforting to his Princess Fluffy Bunny worldview to see his compatriots as knuckle-dragging nutjobs rather than confront all the apparent real-world contradictions of the diversity quilt. He had a lot of support for his general predisposition.

It’s very weird to live in a society where mass death is important insofar as it serves the political needs of the dominant ideology. A white male loner killing white kindergartners in Connecticut is news; a black doctor butchering black babies in Pennsylvania is not.

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Mark Steyn: Media will downplay Boston bomber-Muslim link, same as Ft. Hood, underwear bomber

“As we now know, these guys are Muslim,” Steyn said. “One of them was Muslim. He’s dead — he died in the early hours this morning. The other guy, still on the lam, is Muslim — Muslims from Chechnya. And so, as usual, any moment now we’ll start to hear, ‘Oh well, these are just lone wolves,’ as Rush said. ‘They’re not typical of anything.’ None of these guys are ever typical of anything."

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Friday links

The History of Cheese.

America's 10 Most Alcoholic Beers.

Cheating Their Way To Fame: The Top 9 Adventure Travel Hoaxes.

Why do humans cry? 

If you happen to be the first person to make contact with aliens, here’s a handy guide.

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Today is National High Five Day- a brief history

A Brief History of the High Five: Since 2002, the third Thursday of April is recognized as a National High Five Day—24-hour period for giving familiars and strangers alike as many high fives as humanly possible. A few University of Virginia students invented the day, which has since evolved into a “High 5-A-Thon” that raises money each year for cancer research. Here are a few more facts to get you in the celebrating spirit.

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Blue tits provide insight into climate change

I would guess they mean it's really cold out.

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Xbox players better in bed than Playstation and Wii rivals, study finds

The study, by VoucherCodesPro, polled 1,747 partners of gamers in the UK, as part of research into the effect playing games has on relationships.

After establishing which console was used by the respondents’ partners to play videogames, the study asked, ‘How would you rate your partner in the bedroom?’

The results saw just 11 per cent respond ‘excellent’, while most - 27 per cent said their partner was ‘good’, 26 per cent said their partner was ‘average’ and a disappointing 20 per cent branded their partner’s bedroom skills as ‘below average’.

When the results were broken down, it emerged that Xbox players had been rated the highest by their partners, with 54 per cent of Xbox gamers being described as ‘good’ or above and 22 per cent being regarded as ‘excellent’.

Wii players also fared relatively well, with 47 per cent of them being described as ‘good’ or above.

In contrast, PC gamers performed badly in the bedroom study, as only three per cent were described as being ‘excellent’ and eight per cent as very good.

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The Boy Scouts of America: Then and Now — A Comparison of the 1911 and Modern Handbooks and Merit Badges

Interesting article at Art of Manliness - read the whole thing. This struck me:

"Perhaps most striking is the different way in which the two guides address the idea of good character. The original didn’t shy away from strong admonitions like, “It is horrible to be a coward. It is weak to yield to fear and heroic to face danger without flinching,” and “The honor of a scout will not permit of anything but the highest and the best and the manliest. The honor of a scout is a sacred thing, and cannot be lightly set aside or trampled on.”

In contrast, the modern version frames its discussion of character in terms of its inoffensive modern equivalent: leadership and personal development. Instead of being couched in the absolute language of moral virtue, doing the right thing becomes a matter or “making the most of yourself” and “getting along with others.”

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Mayor: 35 killed in Texas fertilizer blast

WEST, Texas - Around 35 people, including 10 first responders, were killed in the Texas fertilizer company explosion, West Mayor Tommy Muska said in an interview with USA TODAY.

Those killed include five members of the West Volunteer Fire Department who were trying to put out the initial blaze, four EMS workers and an off-duty Dallas firefighter who pitched in to help, he said. Not all the bodies have been recovered but all are assumed dead, he said.

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FBI website down - here are the bombing suspect images

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T'was the eighteenth of April in seventy-five: The midnight ride of William Dawes and Samuel Prescott

Revere never actually finished that "famous ride", and in fact warned the British that the Americans were coming.  Dawes and Prescott were left out of the poem and subsequently most history books. More here.

Listen my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
'Twas the eighteenth of April in seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
- William Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) ("Paul Revere's Ride," stanza 1)

I am a wandering, bitter shade,
Never of me was a hero made;
Poets have never sung my praise,
Nobody crowned my brow with bays;
And if you ask me the fatal cause,
I answer only, "My name was Dawes."

'Tis all very well for the children to hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere;
But why should my name be quite forgot,
Who rode as boldly and well, God wot?
Why should I ask? The reason is clear --
My name was Dawes and his Revere.

When the lights from the old North Church flashed out,
Paul Revere was waiting about,
But I was already on my way.
The shadows of night fell cold and gray
As I rode, with never a break or a pause;
But what was the use, when my name was Dawes!

History rings with his silvery name;
Closed to me are the portals of fame.
Had he been Dawes and I Revere,
No one had heard of him, I fear.
No one has heard of me because

He was Revere, and I was Dawes.
- Helen F. Moore (1851-1929) ("The Midnight Ride of William Dawes," Century Magazine, 1896)

Today, 18 April, is the 238th anniversary of that evening in April 1775 when
General Thomas Gage, the British commander in Boston, dispatched a contingent of troops to seize a supply of arms and powder that the colonial insurgents had stored at Lexington and Concord, as well as to arrest two leading patriots, Samuel Adams and John Hancock, who were also hidden in the area. As every schoolchild knows, Paul Revere's ensuing midnight ride called the local militia to arms, and the battles of Lexington and Concord followed the next day. Largely obscured by the great renown of Longfellow's poem, "Paul Revere's Ride" (included in his Tales of a Wayside Inn of 1863), is the fact that two other men - William Dawes (1745-1799) and Dr. Samuel Prescott (1751-1777) - also rode that night to spread the alarm. Moreover, it can be argued that Revere was the least successful of the three, because although he and Dawes were both captured by the British, Dawes escaped to arouse Lexington, and then Prescott carried the word to Concord. Helen Moore's rejoinder attempts to correct the historical record.

William Dawes:


A strip from "They'll Do it Every Time" by Jimmy Hatlo (1897-1963).  Note the reference to Shakespeare's disputed authorship:

      

Remember the kerfuffle when Sarah Palin mentioned that Revere actually told the British that the Americans were coming and the "intellectuals" on the left, who got their history from the poem, made much of what an idiot she was?
During Paul Revere’s ride he was stopped by British soldiers, which Revere recounts in a 1789 letter maintained by the Massachusetts Historical Society, in his original language:

I observed a Wood at a Small distance, & made for that. When I got there, out Started Six officers, on Horse back,and orderd me to dismount;-one of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me, where I came from,& what my Name Was? I told him. it was Revere, he asked if it was Paul? I told him yes He asked me if I was an express? I answered in the afirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston? I told him; and aded, that their troops had catched aground in passing the River, and that There would be five hundred Americans there in a short time, for I had alarmed the Country all the way up. He imediately rode towards those who stoppd us, when all five of them came down upon a full gallop; one of them, whom I afterwards found to be Major Mitchel, of the 5th Regiment, Clapped his pistol to my head, called me by name, & told me he was going to ask me some questions, & if I did not give him true answers, he would blow my brains out. He then asked me similar questions to those above. He then orderd me to mount my Horse, after searching me for arms.He then orderd them to advance, & to lead me in front. When we got to the Road, they turned down towards Lexington. When we had got about one Mile, the Major Rode up to the officer that was leading me, & told him to give me to the Sergeant. As soon as he took me, the Major orderd him, if I attempted to run, or any body insulted them, to blow my brains out. We rode till we got near Lexington Meeting-house, when the Militia fired a Voley of Guns, which appeared to alarm them very much.

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Officials' Bright New Idea: Fighting Terrorists By Taking Away Trash Cans

Indianapolis reacts to the Boston bombing:

The Indiana Pacers, after consulting with the Department of Homeland Security, will remove all trash cans outside of Bankers Life Fieldhouse for all events, said Greg Schenkel, vice president of public relations for the Pacers.

It's the athletic equivalent of making people take off their shoes before they get on a plane, and it's a lousy idea for pretty much the same reason.

via Reason.

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Elephant Poop Beer

Read about it at Neatorama.

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Day before yesterday was the day Marty McFly arrived in the future

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If you happen to be the first person to make contact with aliens, here’s a handy guide

First Contact: Don’t F**k This Up For Us. via It's OK To Be Smart.

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Why Are Monkey Butts So Colorful?

Popular Science takes on the tough questions.

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When we read on dead trees, do we retain more?

This Is Your Brain on E-Books.

Interesting piece at Technology Review, discussing this:

Scientific American takes a look this week at the differences between reading on paper versus reading electronically, from a scientific standpoint. When we move from dead trees to ones and zeroes, do we retain the same amount of information? Does the text and its meaning penetrate as deeply? “The matter is by no means settled,” writes author Ferris Jabr. Nonetheless, there is evidence that indicates that e-reading fails to replicate the “intuitive and satisfying” ways of navigating through longer texts, and that “[i]n turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension.”

I agree with his conclusion, "But I readily concede that the next generation may read protestations like mine bemusedly; I do feel like an old man in my insistence that something is lost with the death of the physical book. I do appreciate the care that researchers are taking to quantify the benefits some feel in a physical culture of reading, even if they be few. We should have a firmer sense of just what it is we’re giving up, when we welcome all the conveniences of e-reading."

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7th Circuit OKs $25K student-loan discharge for ‘destitute’ paralegal

At ABA Journal:

A "destitute" paralegal who has made reasonable efforts to repay her student loan debt is entitled to a bankruptcy discharge of the remaining $25,000 or so despite the fact that she never enrolled in a federal income-contingent repayment plan, a federal appeals court has ruled.

Reinstating a bankruptcy court's determination that Susan M. Krieger is entitled to the discharge and reversing a federal district court's decision to the contrary, the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the bankruptcy court had discretion to decide whether requiring Krieger to repay the student loan debt would be an undue hardship.

In a Wednesday opinion (PDF) authored by Judge Frank Easterbrook, the 7th Circuit also said that requiring Krieger to enroll in the income-contingent repayment plan as a show of good faith, was contrary to the purpose of bankruptcy law.

via Instapundit.

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Extremely strange: Gallery of Victorian post-mortem photography

Go to io9 and see the whole thing.

After the invention of daguerrotype, the memorializing habits of people have changed: they've chosen the cheap, higher quality photographs instead of expensive and not so lifelike paintings. Painting dead people was common for centuries, so it's no surprise that, in the Victorian Era, post-mortem photos also came into fashion. Here are some of the strangest ones.

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Dog picture of the week

This wonderful photograph was submitted to National Geographic Magazine Photo Contest by Julie Pavletich, in 2008.

(image credit: Julie Pavletich, National Georgaphic)

via Dark Roasted Blend.

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The White House pulls a switcheroo on retirement savings accounts

Be careful how much you save.

Mr. Obama proposes to "limit an individual's total balance across tax-preferred accounts to an amount sufficient to finance an annuity of not more than $205,000 per year in retirement, or about $3 million for someone retiring in 2013."*

The feds may think $3 million is all you need after a lifetime of work, but that's roughly the value of a California police sergeant's pension if she works for 30 years, retires at age 50 and lives to normal life expectancy.
Out in the private economy, people generally have to work longer than that before they retire, and some of them do manage to save significant amounts. We're talking about people who work for decades and abstain from buying the bigger house or the new car so they can contribute the maximum to their 401(k)s or IRAs. The people who defer gratification and build a nest egg to avoid becoming a burden on their kids or their fellow taxpayers. The people whose savings finance productive enterprise. You know, the bad guys.

*That seems to be assuming a risk-free 7% annually, unless you're spending down the principal, which you can't do because you don't know how long you'll live.  Where do you find a low risk 7% return indefinitely?

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4th grade class assignment: 'I Am Willing to Give Up Some of My Constitutional Rights...to Be Safer'

Harvey’s son wrote the note in January. After a local attorney came to speak to his class at Cedar Hills Elementary, his teacher, Cheryl Sabb, asked her class to copy the sentence down.

“There’s no way he knew how to write that on his own free will. He likes to use some big words to flourish -- [but] if he was going to put together a sentence that political I’m sure it would be more jumbled than a nice sentence like that,” he told the news outlet.

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Friday links

Andrew Lloyd Webber will adapt the movie School of Rock into a Broadway musical.

Researchers: women are better off without their bras.

Why Do We Get Emotional When We Drink?

Man tries to take photo of beaver; it kills him.  In related news, Hero beavers stop oil spill with their dam.

Gallery: Photos of Sport Balls Replaced With Cats.

The Cicadas are Coming (to the Northeast).

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The Cicadas are Coming (to the Northeast)

Certain groups of cicadas only rise to the surface to breed every 17 years.  I remember a huge group several years ago, and here comes another.  When the soil temperature begins to steady in the mid-60’s, “Brood II” magicicada nymphs will hatch underground and crawl to the surface by the billions.

While not every cicada species hatches in 17-year patterns, these particular “broods” may follow the pattern to avoid predators predicting their arrival or to keep from going extinct during long periods of cold weather. For many of you, this may be the first time in your life that this group has hatched.

Let Cicada Mania (yes, that’s a real website) tell you how to see this year’s “periodic cicadas”, 

some theories of cicadas and prime numbers, and 

what years other periodic cicada broods will hatch in your area.

Help WNYC and Radiolab track soil temperatures with home-made cicada thermometers, and follow the Swarmageddon in real-time.

Teachers: Make the cicada brood arrival part of your lesson plan with this activity.

via It's OK to be smart.

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Perils of a politically correct pentagon

Read the whole thing.  Excerpts:

One of the core functions of government is to defend the nation from all enemies, foreign and domestic — that’s part of the oath of enlistment that all service personnel take. But only a flinty, clear-eyed — and politically incorrect — assessment of all threats can enable the military can do its job.

Today, however, the brass at the Pentagon seems hell-bent on turning the world’s most powerful military into an arm of the PC Police, a fresh field for “politically correct” bureaucrats on which to push their morally blind relativism.

Take the recent Defense Department briefing document that classified Catholics and Evangelical Protestants as “extremists” — the moral equivalent of al Qaeda and the Ku Klux Klan. It also lumped Christians together with free-floating “Islamophobia,” Hamas, Sunni Muslims, the Jewish Defense League and the backwoods Hutaree militia as potential threats to the Republic.

Religious extremism is not limited to any single religion, ethnic group, or region of the world,” the briefing paper notes, which is true: The military must prepare for every eventuality, however remote, which is why we have plans for war with Canada and France, should the need arise.

But including half the country’s population on a list of potential terrorists does seem a bit extreme — especially when some 40 percent of active-duty military self-identify as evangelicals.

Last year, then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told an environmentalist group that “climate change” is a national-security threat, a claim that the Pentagon’s PC desk jockeys have been banging on about for years.

“Rising sea levels, severe droughts, the melting of the polar caps, the more frequent and devastating natural disasters all raise demand for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief,” said Panetta.

Too often, though, PC has serious consequences in the real world. One lethal example is Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the self-proclaimed “soldier of Allah” and spontaneous jihadi who opened fire on his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood in 2009, killing 13 and wounding 32.

Incredibly, Hasan’s still awaiting trial for his religiously inspired rampage — but that’s not the worst of it.

The Army immediately insisted that the rampage had not been a case of Islamic extremism — and never mind that Hasan reportedly shouted “Allahu akbar” as he emptied his gun into his unarmed victims at the inaptly named Soldier Readiness Processing Center.

In fact, PC had kept the rest of the government from even keeping a closer eye on Hasan — though it knew he’d been receiving “spiritual guidance” from Yemen-based al Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki

Because he was a Muslim officer, the Army treated him with kid gloves — and is still giving him favored treatment today.

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Man tries to take photo of beaver; it kills him

A fisherman in Belarus was bitten to death by a beaver, and all he was doing was trying to take its picture, Sky News reports.

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The Digestion Song

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Magician dresses as a chair, then scares the crap out of people who sit on him

via Geekpress.

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Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet

Unlike Google, which crawls the Web looking for websites, Shodan navigates the Internet's back channels. It's a kind of "dark" Google, looking for the servers, webcams, printers, routers and all the other stuff that is connected to and makes up the Internet. (Shodan's site was slow to load Monday following the publication of this story.)

Shodan runs 24/7 and collects information on about 500 million connected devices and services each month.

It's stunning what can be found with a simple search on Shodan. Countless traffic lights,security cameras, home automation devices and heating systems are connected to the Internet and easy to spot.

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Mark Steyn: The tolerance enforcers will not tolerate dissent

Read the whole thing.

Not having a strong feeling is no longer permitted. The Diversity Celebrators have their exquisitely sensitive antennae attuned for anything less than enthusiastic approval. Very quickly, traditional religious teaching on homosexuality will be penned up within church sanctuaries, and “faith-based” ancillary institutions will be crowbarred into submission.

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US Army Labeled Evangelicals, Catholics as Examples of Religious Extremism

Mark Steyn: This is one for the “too stupid to survive” files:

When I first saw the headline, I assumed it must all be a little less obviously bone-crushingly stupid or at any rate more nuanced once you got into the story. But I invite you to look at the accompanying poster for the Equal Opportunity training brief issued by the Army Reserve in Pennsylvania. It lists “extremist” groups, starting with “Evangelical Christianity” at Number One, “Al Quaeda” (misspelled under any Roman rendering of Arabic) at Number Five, “Hamas” at Six, and “Catholicism” rounding out the Top Ten.

Think of the number of people involved in the creation, printing and distribution of this graphic – and along the way not one of them stopped to say, “Hey, this is totally dumb.”

At the beginning of America Alone, I quote Arnold Toynbee: “Civilizations die from suicide, not murder.” The urge to suicide is always there; the trick is keeping it confined to the outer edges: In the Cold War this kind of moronic false equivalence was the province of leftie professors and fringe playwrights, who spent three decades failing to notice nobody from West Germany was climbing over the Berlin Wall to get into the East. Now this false equivalence is peddled by the politically correct eunuch bureaucracy of the US military.

When Major Hasan got a case of Pre-Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and opened fire at Fort Hood standing on a table yelling “Allahu Akbar!”, it was just the luck of the draw: He could have been shouting the Angelus. Best to prepare for all eventualities.

As Robert Spencer says, this is not going to end well.

He adds this: Too Stupid to Survive (cont.):

I see that Fleet Street is doing the job American journalists won’t do and reporting further fascinating details of this story. From the slide presentation. we learn that, having been told Evangelical Christianity and Catholicism are “extremist”,

America’s fighting men are then warned:

Soldiers are prohibited from the following actions in support of Extremist Organizations…

*Creating, Organizing, or Taking a Visible Leadership Role in such an Organization.

A Russian officer famously described British troops in the Crimea as lions led by asses. That barely begins to cover the descent of America’s military bureaucracy into the armored wing of the Berkeley faculty lounge.

More here from Ed Driscoll.

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New Cookbook, 'Semenology,' Provides Recipes, Storage Tips And More

In his new book "Semenology: The Semen Bartender's Handbook," Bay Area author Paul "Fotie" Photenhauer details the benefits of bartending with, you guessed it, human semen.

A follow-up to his first book, "Natural Harvest: A Collection of Semen Based Recipes," "Semenology" is what Photenhauer describes as "the ultimate handbook for mixologists looking for ingredients that go beyond exotic fruit juices and rare spirits."

via Instapundit.

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Gallery: Dogs Wearing Pantyhose

This is actually kinda disturbing.  Via Neatorama:

What's that? Oh, just another day on the Interweb, folks, brought to you by the good people of China, where they have elevated dogshaming to a whole 'nother level: Behold, dog wearing pantyhose!

Brian Ashcraft of Kotaku wrote:

According to Chinese site Sina, "bored" people on Weibo started the meme. Apparently, Weibo user Ulatang, who noted that the pets rolled their eyes after getting dressed in pantyhose, uploaded the first "dogs wearing pantyhose" pic (above). That image has been commented on over 16,000 times in China.

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DIY cardboard rifle can fire paper pellets up to 25 yards

Developed by a team of designers that includes former Nerf engineers, the Paper Shooters kit comes with all the tools needed to build the working gun. Apart from the plastic firing mechanism the gun is pretty much all cardboard.

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Kim Jong-Un and the North Korean Navy set off to invade the US

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Powder your eggs for home storage - just add water and sperm.

New Scientist:  "You can keep the powder at room temperature forever – and just add water to bring it back to life," says Amir Arav of Core Dynamics in Ness Ziona, Israel, who developed the method.

via Instapundit.

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Friday links

12 Largest Church Buildings In The World.

25 Things You Didn't Know About Beer.

Strange Eye Exam Charts.

A NASA scientist claims to be on the verge of faster-than-light travel.

The Fascinating History of Birth Control.

Chess: how kings and queens and rooks and knights and pawns came to look the way they look.

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Public schools in 9 states sharing every conceivable personal detail of their students with 3rd parties

Who is Stockpiling and Sharing Private Information About New York Students?

inBloom, a Gates-funded non-profit to harness data to improve grade school education, has partnered with New York and eight other states to encourage the development of apps to "further education" by using intimate data about students, without parental consent and with no ability for parents to opt out.

Among the data shared are name, address, phone numbers, test scores, grades, economic status, test scores, disciplinary records, picture, email, race, developmental delay... just about everything conceivable, and all specific, none of it anonymized. inBloom has arrangements with nine states (New York, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Colorado, Illinois, North Carolina, Georgia, Delaware and Kentucky) to do this.

The XML schema used are downloadable here. Anyone can register as a developer and start using "sample" data, but "real" data is supposedly only available to developers with contracts with a school board. But this includes for-profit, third party developers, such as, say, Amplify, a News Corp subsidiary with a contract with New York. And it doesn't appear there are any constraints on their use of this data.

via BoingBoing.

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25 Things You Didn't Know About Beer

24 Things You Didn't Know About Beer infographic

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Why More People Are Eating Guinea Pigs

South American restaurants on both coasts seem to be pushing the trend, answering to demand mostly from Andean expats for what is considered a fine and valuable food in Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. Middle-class foodies with a taste for exotic delicacies are also ordering, photographing and blogging about guinea pig. The animals — called cuyesin Spanish — are usually cooked whole, often grilled, sometimes deep fried. Many diners eat every last morsel, literally from head to toe.

But there may be more to gain from eating guinea pig than bizarre foods bragging rights. According to activists, eating guinea pig is good for the environment.

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Watch these guys disassemble and rebuild a Jeep in under 4 minutes

This is a standard issue WWII type Willys Jeep, designed for simplicity. Here's some history.

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Cell Phone Inventor Talks of First Cell Call, 40 Years Ago Today

It's 40 years ago today, April 3, 1973. Martin Cooper, then a senior engineer at Motorola, made a cell phone call — the first one ever.

Cooper, now age 85, tells the story of this call in an interview with the BBC, available at the link below. The call, in the presence of a journalist, was to his chief competitor Dr. Joel S. Engel, who was head of Bell Labs: "Joel, this is Marty. I'm calling you from a cell phone, a real handheld portable cell phone."

Yes, the first cell phone call was for the purpose of gloating. Cooper says that Engel tells him he doesn't remember the call.

He got $1 from Motorola for signing away the rights to all his inventions.

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Free Range Kids has the continuing story of the 6-year-old detained by the cops for walking outside

Day 41: We are served with a complaint alleging neglect and dependency. The County wants to take Emily into “protective supervision” or “temporary custody.” The complaint contains many factual errors and inaccuracies.

There is also a motion for “pre-dispositional interim orders.” As I understand it, this is a mechanism by which CPS can intervene even before the merits of the case against us for neglect are even heard, but less decided. It is scheduled to take place more than a month before the hearing on the neglect charge. It asks the court to force my wife and I to “allow ______ County Children Services to complete an assessment with the family. This is including allowing the agency access in the home, allowing the agency to interview the children, and participate openly in the assessment process.” In other words, they want to search our house, interrogate the children, and force us to testify.

We are trying our best to raise Emily to be responsible, curious, and capable. We have chosen to include teaching her about using the library, navigating the neighborhood, and mailing letters as elements of her homeschooling. Needless to say, this entire ordeal has been quite distressing for the entire family, and we view it as a threat to our homeschooling her, our parental rights, and both my and Emily’s civil liberties. Since our family is being threatened by legal action, I have tried to confine my comments to a dispassionate statement of known facts.

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Why Women Started Shaving Their Legs and Armpits

Both sexes have a love-hate relationship with removing body hair. We’ve been pulling, plucking, burning, tweezing and ripping out undesirable hair since the dawn of time. It’s believed that as far back as 4,000 B.C., women were using dangerous substances like arsenic and quicklime to get the job done. Meanwhile, the Egyptians, who never did anything halfway, removed all of their body hair from head to toe. They really liked the sleek look, but it also had a practical purpose. Being hairless discouraged the spread of disease and vermin such as lice and other icky creepy-crawlies. By 500 B.C., Roman ladies had learned how to use pumice stones and even a primitive version of the razor.

Let’s fast-forward to more recent times. When did our modern-day obsession with silky-smooth armpits and legs first take hold? As far as armpits are concerned, we can pinpoint it almost to the day. In May of 1915, the upscale magazine Harper’s Bazaar ran an ad featuring a young model in a sleeveless, slip-like dress posing with both arms over her head.

There's much more at Today I Found Out - read the whole thing.

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Tuesday links

WWII Stamp Forgeries Used as Psychological Warfare.

How to Resuscitate a Drowning Victim in 1916.

5 Things You Can Do Right Now to Become Instantly Smarter.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Dinosaur Sex.

The Arms Race to Grow World's Hottest Pepper Goes Nuclear.

Famous Works of Art Recreated on Toast.

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David Stockman's excellent op-ed on the failing American economy

At the NYT of all places:

Since the S.&P. 500 first reached its current level [above 1,500], in March 2000, the mad money printers at the Federal Reserve have expanded their balance sheet sixfold (to $3.2 trillion from $500 billion). Yet during that stretch, economic output has grown by an average of 1.7 percent a year (the slowest since the Civil War); real business investment has crawled forward at only 0.8 percent per year; and the payroll job count has crept up at a negligible 0.1 percent annually. Real median family income growth has dropped 8 percent, and the number of full-time middle class jobs, 6 percent. The real net worth of the "bottom" 90 percent has dropped by one-fourth. The number of food stamp and disability aid recipients has more than doubled, to 59 million, about one in five Americans.

Less than 5 percent of the $800 billion Obama stimulus went to the truly needy for food stamps, earned-income tax credits and other forms of poverty relief. The preponderant share ended up in money dumps to state and local governments, pork-barrel infrastructure projects, business tax loopholes and indiscriminate middle-class tax cuts.

via American Thinker, which has more links and comments, including this:

Using the numbers from recovery.gov, the website that explains, sort of, how the ARRA stimulus money was spent, we find that the state of New York had created 5,856 "recipient reported jobs" at cost of $14.321 billion. That's about $2.4 million per job.

California had 14,079 "recipient reported jobs" at a cost of $27.254 billion. About $1.9 million per job.

The state of Washington used $3.3 million for each job. Ohio ran $1.7 million per job, and thrifty Florida spent only $1.1 million on each job created with the ARRA stimulus funds. Will you be remembering these numbers as you pay your Federal taxes on April 15th this year?

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