"Soylent Green is people!"

Charlton Heston's character famously said "Soylent Green is people!" at the end of the film of the same name. And so is this stuff, apparently.

China's educrats to cancel college majors that don't lead to ready employment

It's all about the Benjamins, yo!

What even makes people want go into majors where they are likely to be unemployed two years after graduating? The heart wants what it wants I suppose but the cost for that indulgence is enormous. The Chi Com educational bureaucracy is now studying how to cut back on college majors that leave over 40 percent of their graduates unemployed or employed outside their fields after two years. Mao Zedong's Year Zero concept from the Cultural Revolution days being applied here albeit with less pain and blood.

Is China’s One Child Policy Affecting Military Readiness?

Sure. It gives the PLA plenty of cannon fodder for military adventures all over the world if need be. The Chinese birthrate is so skewed in favor of males that a large percentage of these millions of men coming into adulthood will very likely never have wives. There simply aren't enough women.

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China's threat to America is economic not military (Mark Thompson, Battleland blog)
"Military relations are fundamentally altered, he argues, when the prospective foe is making 90 iPhones a minute for the U.S. and world markets, and American Walmarts are crammed with its goods...".

If  the US Gov would just balance its budget (and so quit borrowing money from the PRC) they'd be more vulnerable to Americans than we'd be to them. Just a thought.

Ex-Democratic Party goon "operative" charged with planting bomb in St. Louis attorney's car (St. Louis Today)
"A former political operative with a history of gun and drug charges has been indicted in the 2008 bombing that seriously injured a Clayton, MO lawyer."

WTF is does being an "operative" mean in this context? This guy worked on some Dem campaigns and stuff but his criminal convictions as well as this indictment was all strictly personal stuff unrelated to politics. Or so it seems anyhow. But the Reps would say, "but what if it was a Republican"? And they have a point. You'd never hear the end of it from the mainstream media types.

Someone super-gluing protractors all over Pittsburgh (Rob Beschizza, BoingBoing)
"One of the oddest things I've seen since coming to Pittsburgh was a protractor superglued to the stone in my neighborhood. It turns out that there are hundreds of them cropping up, sealed to surfaces so securely that authorities intend to charge whoever is doing it with a felony. Each is penned with a unique number, and tracking them down is becoming a local mystery."

One person's vandalism is another person's street art I guess. I doubt if the cops and property owners  see it that way though.

A documentary film on the Earth Liberation Front  (via Outside)
"For years, the ELF—operating in separate anonymous cells without any central leadership—had launched spectacular arsons against dozens of businesses they accused of destroying the environment: timber companies, SUV dealerships, wild horse slaughterhouses, and a $12 million ski lodge at Vail, Colorado."

One person's "environmentalist wacko" is another person's freedom fighter. But the feds don't see it that way at all though.  The ELF terror campaign compared with the much bally-hooed Weather Underground in the '70s didn't kill anyone and caused much more damage to their enemies. Weather Underground did just the opposite. Just sayin'.

Swedish doctors grow trachea from patient's own stem cells and then transplant it into him (Popular Science)
Kind of amazing. The best thing about this is that the patient can recover without the harsh regimen of anti-rejection drugs.

Revenge of the wage slaves: A movie review of Horrible Bosses (Kurt Loder, reason.com/)
Everybody (who is a wage slave) secretly yearns to kill their bosses.

Tips for talking to the police about your electronic devices (Adam Pash, Lifehacker.com)
A tip sheet from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Congress Whines, But Won’t Defund Libya War (Spencer Ackerman, Danger Room)
Gutless losers with no spine or integrity at all. At least 229 of them anyhow. Sheesh.

Sign of the times: Demographics is destiny

This blog post from the U.K. Guardian speculates that the increasing imbalance in male to female birthrates is going to cause problems in the Turd World soon. The use of modern medical technology that allows parents to know the sex of their fetus and if it turns out to be a female to abort it and try again for a boy has been going on for decades. The natural ratio of male to female is 100 females to 105 males. That's nature. But when some of these countries like China and India to name just the two biggest countries where this practice is done start to get really big imbalances between the sexes and so not every man can have a wife social instability may well ensue. I'm not sure what the consequences of  having all those millions of wifeless men are gonna be. But it doesn't sound promising.

News of the world

QBZ-95 service rifle

China set to deploy a replacement for the Type 56 service rifle (a Chinese-made AK-47 variant). The QBZ-95 supposedly will be deployed to front line troops this year.

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The rise of the Hans - New Geography (Joel Kotkin)
"With China's new prominence in global affairs, the Han race, which constitutes 90 percent of the Chinese population, is suddenly the most dominant cohesive ethnic group in the world -- and it is seeking to remain that way through strategic alliances, aggressive trade policy, and attacks on racial minorities within the country's boundaries. The less tribally cohesive, more fragmented West is, meanwhile, losing out."


Texas cops arrest men for DUI while riding a horse and a mule - KVUE TV
About anything can happen in Austin.

Congressman and civil rights-era hero decries continuing exodus of white males from Democratic Party base - Rick Moran

Ann Arbor's Huron High School boys basketball team beats Michigan Class A state champ Kalamazoo Central 61-52
The same team that beat them last season for the title. Makes this alum proud. Go Rats!

Sign of the times...

Sign on the wall of a men's room in China:
“Use of [Communist] Party Newspapers and Magazines as Toilet Paper Is Strictly Forbidden”

Heh. Today's Chinese Communist party would repel Karl Marx. They are a state-capitalist parasitical class who exploit their own people as rapaciously and ruthlessly as any foreign capitalists could. Marx, Engels, and the rest of the founders of the communist ideology would be the first use their publications for ass-wipes.

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Chinese missile could shift Pacific power balance - Yahoo! News

An end to the US government's gunboat diplomacy. Makes me happy & sad at the same time.

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When China's bubble bursts, the global impact will be severe for all of us. - Christian Science Monitor

"Remember the 1994 movie “Speed”? A young cop (Keanu Reeves) had to save passengers on a bus that would explode if its speed dropped below 50 m.p.h. Well, China is like that bus with 1.3 billion people aboard. If the Communist Party can’t keep the economy growing at a fast clip, the result will be catastrophic."

Warehouse 13 cast talk about Season 2 - io9

"Obama is psychologically fragile, and thus self-medicates a lot with cigarettes, golf, and exercise." -iSteve blog

Aren't we all? Don't we all?

More homeowners are opting for 'strategic defaults' - LA Times
"Americans are fed up with hearing how they're supposed to honor their debts while businesses operate by another set of rules."
Iceberg Forensics: Predicting the Planet's Future With Antarctic Ice - Popular Science

Another reason vitamin D is important: It gets T cells going - Scientific American

Toshiba ends incandescent light-bulb production after 120 years. - Good Gear Guide

Pandering, groveling, and obsequiousness do breed contempt. - Taki's Magazine

Pat Buchanan explains why Israel treats America the way it does.

Twitter decides to be a "force for good". - TechCrunch (Michael Arrington)

"...it’s basically impossible to balance a profit motive with a goodness motive."

ISPs that facilitate malware, phishing, and other bad stuff are coming under scrutiny - Technology Review (Brian Krebs)

Just like Elvis - Wall Street Journal online

The other King of Pop is worth more dead than alive too.

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Original 1938 Superman comic book sold for $1 million USD - BBC
Some people just have too much time on their hands and money in their bank account.






Keeping your DNA private in today's era of personal genomics. - Ars Technica
What's in your code sequence? Who else knows or has access to that info? Hmm....
Remnants of Nazi nuke program discovered in Dutch landfill -The Register
For a lustrous and healthy head of hair stop using shampoo. - Boston Phoenix
Been hearing this a lot lately. Some say ditch the soap too.
The MZB Threat: Are you prepared? - Life After The Oil Crash Forum
Mutants, zombies and bikers. The latest survivalist worry. These guys never lack for things to worry about do they? But they do have a point here though. About criminal gangs and mob violence that is.
"The dynamic of the petulant and angry underclass rearing a rather violent head once the social controls are gone is precisely what happened in places like Yugoslavia and Russia."- Survival Blog
A new app makes it possible to identify people and learn about them just by pointing your phone. - Technology Review
Not So Jolly Old England - Taki's Magazine
"But the Brits are also a bit like Taki, stupid and easy to sway. Both the Iraq war and the ten years of unrestricted immigration were foisted on them by deceit, yet the architects of these great lies, the Blairs and Browns and Straws are still prancing around using official limos and getting on the telly to tell us how great their plans are for our future. How idiotic can a race get? These people would have been hanged and quartered in a more civilized time, but now they are still running for office. This is what Orwell’s Big Lie was all about."
The Arrogance of the Chinese ruling elite - Der Spiegel
"The West hopes that China's growing prosperity will also lead to political liberalization. But the reverse is likely to be true."
Ex-IMF economist predicts several sovereign states will default on their debt. - Bloomberg
Wow.

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Ex-New Republic, Slate Editor says: Newspaper stories are too long, boring, etc. - The Atlantic
Kill a Communist Official And Become a Local Hero - newser.com
Why Did Air America Fail? - Hot Air
"Listening to Air America was a tedious chore without much payoff..."
NASA's New Space Suit - MIT Technology Review
Getting ready for the return to Luna in 2020.
Secrets of How Meditation Works - Scientific American