What are the prospects for political reform in California? [City Journal, New Geography]

Gamer keeps same session of Civilization II game going for 10 years [Slashdot]

Jews in America love open immigration; Israeli Jews, not at all. [Foreign Policy]

What can you do when kooks want to join the "Adopt A Highway" program? [Slate]

With Euro Instability, Can Bitcoin Now Compete with Hard Currency? [Vice]

"Don't give panhandlers money", says the [Ann Arbor] Mayor's Task Force [AnnArbor.com]

Cops bust into prepper's survival bunker after a siege lasting less than a day

Twenty-two hours to be exact, says this report. It took Mr. Survivalist eight friggin' years to dig out and equip his redoubt in the hills of Washington state too. Presumably Mr. Survivalist intended this bunker to enable him to survive nuclear war, economic collapse, or whatever other form TEOTWAWKI takes.  But it took a police SWAT team under a day to bust inside. And according to the news story from the Seattle P-I the cops spent a large amount of that 22 hours surrounding the place and trying to get him to surrender.  Of course they did have to use explosives to enter and all, but still I would have expected this guy's own personally constructed Alamo to hold out a lot longer than that. Instead he just gave up and shot himself.

weblog

How do you deal with a house full of homemade explosives?
The Escondido, California fire department's answer: Stay out, build a 16ft. tall firewall around it, and then burn it to the ground. No really.

weblog

More grist for the tin-foil-hat brigades to grind through. The JFK murder in 1963 (AKA "the mother of all conspiracy theories") now has even more obscure and convoluted "evidence" for researchers to pick through.