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."

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A deconstruction of Ayn Rand & Objectivism from the Right - Claremont Institute (Charles Murray)
An Appreciation of the life & work of sci-fi author Robert A. Heinlein - LvMI (Jeff Riggenbach) podcast
A simple urine test for autism coming soon - ScienceBlog
Illegal trailer park turning into a legal community - LA Times
Georgia's monument to Stalin - Reason
Whites in California breeding at below replacement level - SF Chronicle

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Pentagon shooter was nutty anti-Bush, 9/11 "truther". - Patterico's Pontifications
Look who's talking -Technology Review
"Microsoft CEO: Google merits regulatory scrutiny."
The rise of cyber-vigilantism in China - Slashdot.org/
They hunt down miscreants found on the web and give them a meat-space beatdown for their transgressions. Hmm....

Meet the real 'Uptight Seattleite' - Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Monica Guzman)
Interview with the author of US. Funny as hell. Spot-on accurate too.
A month after the keystone paper proposing a link between a common childhood vaccine series and autism was retracted, the debate rages on. - Scientific American online (Katherine Harmon)
The scientifically illiterate conspiracy types just won't give it a rest.
The story of a fatal coyote attack in eastern Canada - Outside online (Elizabeth Royte)
These things do happen but still... less than 200 attacks in 50 years compared to 4.5 million domestic dog attacks during the same period tells me this isn't as much of a problem.
Are Sperm Donors Really Anonymous Anymore?-Slate (Rachel Lehmann-Haupt)
Nope.
Mars does have canals after all. They're just filled with ice. - i09 (Analee Newitz)

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Smith & Wesson's "Extreme Ops" pocket knife - Hahn's World of Surplus
$20. Best pocket knife (for the money) I've ever owned.


"...[T]here tends to be a lot of autism around the tech centers . . . when you concentrate the geeks, you're concentrating the autism genetics."- Wall Street Journal
German solar energy industry is about to collapse. - MIT Technology Review
“The rapidity with which the U.S. is being transformed into a police state is astonishing.” - Paul Craig Roberts @ Taki's Mag
Better eating through chemistry: Monsanto "invents" tearless onions - St. Louis News
California Supreme Court chief says initiative process has," ...become the tool of the very types of special interests it was intended to control..." - SF Chronicle

Hawaiian cane toads damaging Australia's Eco-system. - Seattle Post-Intelligener
Introduced by sugar plantation owners decades ago they are killing off native species.

Uncharged anthrax-letter suspect "hated NYC" say feds. - NY Post

Dr. Bruce Ivins was never charged with anything though. He was "about to be busted" say the feds but he offed himself first. Hmm...?
Margot Adler reads 75 vampire novels and develops a theory about why people like them. - NPR
"...[O]rdinary workers pay taxes at a 25 percent marginal rate, [but] many of Wall Street's highest paid dealmakers get to pay tax at just a 15 percent rate. They get this lower rate because of the special treatment of 'carried interest,' also known as the fund managers' tax break." - Beat The Press (Dean Baker)
RIAA Defendent to Court:$675,000 Damages Award For $21 In Lost Profits Is Unjust - Ars Technica
It ain't about the money, kiddo.
Killing For Tenure - American Thinker
"What's so different about Amy Bishop's existential meltdown that it doesn't get the 24/7 coverage that a mass shooting usually garners? For starters, she's a woman, rare in killings of this type. She has a Ph.D. ...from Harvard. There you go. She got her Ph.D. from the same place where Obama got his law degree."

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It's hard to talk about the dangers of cell-phone radiation without sounding like a conspiracy theorist.- GQ
Publishers continue pummeling Amazon over e-book prices. - Ars Technica
Dr. Temple Grandin - YouTube
A high-functioning autistic life.
LA area mudslides surprise some...but not others. - LA Times
George Packer thinkst Twitter et. al. are time-sucking vampires. - The New Yorker
Anatomy of a wilderness rescue: What went right & what went wrong. - Outside.com/
Lessons learned.