Weblog -June 10, 2011

Ypsilanti neighborhood degenerating into violence, chaos (Tom Perkins, annarbor.com/)
Sleazy liquor store surrounded by abandoned cars and houses two blocks from public housing. What could go wrong?

Flint-area Goodwill store customer finds full funeral urn for sale on their shelves (David Harris, MLive/Flint Journal)
Sad and funny at the same time, eh?

Disgraced Rep. Wiener won't resign; He needs the paycheck (Chuck Bennett, New York Post)
Likely the first honest thing Wiener has said about himself to date and esp. on this matter.

Senators target Bitcoin currency, citing drug sales (Don Reisinger, Cnet)
Senators Shumer and Manchin just can't stand people being able to spend money that the government can't trace, control or regulate. Can't have that much liberty now can we?

The HK416—The gun that (probably) killed bin-Laden (Joe Pappalardo, Popular Mechanics)
Typical of high-end German engineering. Precise, efficient, perfectly executed and very expensive. Just like their cars.

Iceland's citizens are writing its new constitution online  (Clay Dillow, Popular Science)
It will be interesting to see how this works out. However Iceland has some distinct advantages. No racial/ethnic or religious minorities. A single homogenous group will likely work out better assuming this can be done at all. All previous attempts at constitution drafting have been done by constituent assemblies, well connected local elites or imposed by a foreign power.

Outgoing US SecDef castigates NATO countries for not pulling their weight in global security ops (Matt Welch, Reason)
Bottom line: "It might be worth beginning to consider whether intervening in far-flung civil wars really qualifies as 'defense'." Indeed.

Extra Gene Copies May Trigger Some Cases of Autism (John Timmer, Ars Technica)
"Overall, the new studies strengthen the argument that autism is primarily a genetic disorder, and help explain why it has been so hard to identify the genes: most mutations are rare or completely unique to the affected individuals."

The future of tribalism: 
“For a state to be considered legitimate by most of its citizens it must be the political embodiment of their national, communal, historical and, perhaps, religious desires.”

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Glen Greenwald's hit-piece on a hit-piece in The Nation.
It has bothered me for a while that American progressives and their fellow travellers in Left-wing  America have completely abandoned the championing of liberty, privacy and autonomy. Unless of course it is for the sexually deviant or regarding abortion rights. On every other issue the progs want more government, less privacy, oppose self-determination and genuine little "d" participatory democracy.
 The Nation seems to think that that because I don't want TSA guards squeezing my or my family's gonads that I'm part of some vast Right-wing conspiracy funded by the Koch brothers. Mark Ames and Sasha Levine should've stayed in Russia. You'd think being censored and then booted from Russia for being critical of Putin and his ilk would have taught then a little more respect for civil liberties, the rule of law and some appreciation for personal liberty. Sadly, it seems that it didn't.

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Toronto election illustrates the problems of a megalopolis concocted by elites.
"Clearly this result shows that the concerns expressed by the opponents of amalgamation were largely valid. Amalgamation failed to create cost savings, and has created a dysfunctional megacity. Rather than having six municipalities where voters are focusing on solving local problems, we have one gigantic city with the core and the suburbs fighting for their share of the public purse. This leads to the schizophrenic policy decisions we see today." 

An analysis of the "pass-over syndrome" gripping self-hating white elites
"If a large-scale Day of Racial Reckoning ever comes, Passover Syndrome sufferers will find that when it comes to hating whites, nonwhites truly don’t discriminate. Rather than the sweet scent of compassion, those with the disorder emit the rancid smell of fear. If a real race war were ever to pop off in America, they’d be the first to perish.
The only mystery is which side would kill them first."

Somali-born naturalized American citizen arrested in car bomb plot in Portland.

Serbian-born California man arrested for running an explosives factory in his suburban LA home.