#WordCrimes:Good Grammar from Weird Al Yankovic

Weird Al Yankovic has a cheery video ditty exposing sloppy just-about-everything written and spoken.  I have fond memories reading Fowler's "The King's English" and loving English spoken well and not so well. There's even an appearance of the Oxford comma. 
h/t Instapundit. published by VEVO.

Israel is Winning.

Short term, Israel will win a war of attrition with Hamas.  As David Goldman writes, there wasn't a free table on the terrace at hundreds of Tel Aviv restaurants at the same time as Hamas, out of weakness, was lobbing rockets their way.

There will be no Intifada on the West Bank: the Palestinian Arabs are older, more resigned and less inclined to destroy their livelihoods than in 2000. Syria and Iraq continue to disintegrate, Lebanon is inundated with Syrian Sunni refugees (weakening Hezbollah’s relative position), and Jordan is looking to Israel to protect it against ISIS. Egypt is busy trying to survive economically.

Medium term, Israel is winning in the market place and becoming a regional power.

Medium-term, the boycott and BDS threat become irrelevant. “Startup nation” is becoming market-cap nation as hundreds of Israeli firms exit the venture capital stage and become profitable, mature enterprises. There’s never been anything like this. India and China beckon with a combined market of 2.5 billion people. To the extent that the Europeans threaten Israel with sanctions, the term “Middle East” gradually will be replaced by “Western Asia.”

Israel is becoming worldwide the go-to place for military tech since their enemies have forced them to excel.  Think India, Algeria and Egypt, the UAR, Pakistan, Turkey, both the US and China.

Brain waves help smart traders. MRI proof.

In lab games with pretend risky-money deals, the few smart traders with big wins were picked and some got an MRI.  The pros seemed to follow Warren Buffet's advice: "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy only when others are fearful".  Everyone got a turn-on in one part of their brain (nucleus accumbens where reward processing happens) when sudden rises or falls in trading showed up.  The weak ones bought into rises with "irrational exuberance".  The pros had a low buzz from this risk-reward signal but they also had a signal from a second part of the brain, the insula, which is linked to risk aversion.

Source

Extracted from the story at Science Daily News about Professor Camerer at Caltech.
There's an interesting footnote: The game regularly generated pricing bubbles even though "some economists .. have held that bubbles are rare or are caused by misinformation or hype".

Skin can smell and incense may have healing power.

Skin has one scent receptor tuned to the smell of Sandalwood.  When those smell cells are turned on, skin will heal quicker. Think: Sandalwood incense.

The source for this is a Science Daily article:
Some 350 different kinds of smell receptor have been found in noses but a few show up elsewhere including intestines, prostate, sperm and now, the skin.

The technical report: The research team from Bochum found the olfactory receptor OR2AT4 present in keratinocytes that form the topmost layer of our skin and it triggered a calcium-dependent signal pathway which typically facilitates wound healing.

Scoop on Democrats' Tame But Secretive Funding Group: Democracy Alliance is the Inner Circle.

Lawyer Hinderaker of Powerline has a political scoop that approaches Climategate in scale.  Democracy Alliance convention memos (that were supposed to be kept secret) reveal a hundred moneybags are being shepherded by Democrats to fund the funders of progressive causes. You can do some original research by scrolling down through the documents.  Their strategy is shifting from funding organizations to funding movements and parking money appropriately within movements.  At a meet-up in Chicago, Valerie Jarrett, Debbie Wasserman Schultz  and others took time to address this select little bunch.  Each name has been personally recruited and is being assessed as a fund-raising target which no doubt flatters the targets. Members have duties that go beyond paying the stiff membership and attending a convention. They are expected to do their own "private" funding of progressive groups using the Democracy Alliance template.

" It is striking how seamlessly the Democracy Alliance, with its far-left tint,
meshes with the Obama administration. Thus, the DA partners were treated to
appearances by David Axelrod and Debbie Wasserman Schultz".

I am struck by two points in the documents:

-There's a patter about fairness and inclusiveness that sounds noble and remains unexamined. It's actually about being unfair and exclusive.

-These big shots who are flattered to join DA are being shamelessly micromanaged. The organizers are focused on lining the people up and getting tailored commitments and money from each one, like cows getting the best dairy mash and then milked by machine to the last drop.  Policy decisions are made elsewhere.

LA Farmer's Market for Medicinal Marijuana. Lefty pet causes = good.

From Instapundit comes this video link to LA's first ever farmer's market for marijuana.  The lineup was down the street and around the corner for a chance to meet the "growers of their medicine" and an opportunity for growers to get a better dollar.  Apparently many of the growers are patriotic veterans who raise a bit of medicine at home and share with others in need. Admission was restricted to people who had documentation that they could legally purchase pot.  (Yesterday Washington state began allowing pot sales to all and sundry.)  (Related:  Mexican farmers planting less pot thanks to Colorado law)

Leaning libertarian, this doesn't offend me as much as the hysterical blindness the left shows for causes they don't support.  They have an outraged NO and Dirty Tricks for anyone with religious scruples about funding abortion, celebrating homosexuality, or offering votes and immigration to an unpatriotic victim class from afar.

Nostrodamus of 2008 predicts the curse of Obama

I thought Levin's musings were a joke, a re-write pretending to date from one week before the Light Bringer's election in 2008.  Clairvoyance or logic?  "While America will certainly survive, it will do so .. as a different place". The full article is available here:.

"I sense what’s occurring in this election is a recklessness and abandonment of rationality that has preceded the voluntary surrender of liberty and security in other places. ... Some conservatives are caught in the moment as their attempts at explaining their support for Barack Obama are unpersuasive and even illogical. ...Others, reach for the usual platitudes in explaining themselves but are utterly incoherent. Even non-conservatives with significant public policy and real world experiences, such as Colin Powell and Charles Fried, find Obama alluring but can’t explain themselves in an intelligent way. 

There is a cult-like atmosphere around Barack Obama, which his campaign has carefully and successfully fabricated, which concerns me. The messiah complex. Fainting audience members at rallies. Special Obama flags and an Obama presidential seal. A graphic with the portrayal of the globe and Obama’s name on it, which adorns everything from Obama’s plane to his street literature. Young school children singing songs praising Obama. Teenagers wearing camouflage outfits and marching in military order chanting Obama’s name and the professions he is going to open to them. An Obama world tour, culminating in a speech in Berlin where Obama proclaims we are all citizens of the world. I dare say, this is ominous stuff.  Even the media are drawn to the allure that is Obama. Yes, the media are liberal. Even so, it is obvious that this election is different. The media are open and brazen in their attempts to influence the outcome of this election".

It’s as if the media use the Obama campaign’s talking points — its preposterous assertions that Obama didn’t hear Wright from the pulpit railing about black liberation, whites, Jews, etc., that Obama had no idea Ayers was a domestic terrorist despite their close political, social, and working relationship, etc. — to protect Obama from legitimate and routine scrutiny. And because journalists have also become commentators, it is hard to miss their almost uniform admiration for Obama and excitement about an Obama presidency. So in the tank are the media for Obama that for months we’ve read news stories and opinion pieces insisting that if Obama is not elected president it will be due to white racism.

The question is whether enough Americans understand what’s at stake in this election and, if they do, whether they care. Is the allure of a charismatic demagogue so strong that the usually sober American people are willing to risk an Obama presidency? After all, it ensnared Adelman, Kmiec, Powell, Fried, and numerous others. And while America will certainly survive, it will do so, in many respects, as a different place.

America will survive but how good a neighbour shall it be.  Will Canada have to fence it out?

The ocean has thousands of slow-moving mega-whirlpools moving along watery superhighways.

This discovery up-ends the models of ocean transport and its influence on climate.  There's a video.
The vortices, some sixty miles across and half a mile deep, move along pathways in the ocean about 3 miles per day.  They dip about 20 inches towards the middle and today's satellites can detect this.  They move about thirty times as much water as all the rivers of the world contribute daily to the oceans and are on a scale approaching the Gulf Stream.  The movement of heat, salt, carbon and pollution has to be re-thought.

The video is coded red for clockwise and blue for counter-clockwise.  Note there is motion in both directions within the Gulf Stream and east-to-west in many places.

The information is gleaned from Wired.com's larger article.

By The Book: Islam's "Protestant Reformation" Is Underway. Jihad And Reading skills.

From Raymond Ibrahim:

Islam has been reforming. What is today called “radical Islam” is the reformation of Islam. It follows the .. logic of the Protestant Reformation— prioritizing scripture over centuries of tradition and legal debate—but with antithetical results that reflect the contradictory teachings of the core texts of Christianity and Islam.

Islamic literacy rates have risen above 40% (See Ibrahim) and the Koran is now as available to Muslims as the Bible once was to Europe's first Protestants.  The "Back to the Quran" movement (Sola Scriptura) finds plainly stated teaching:

The Koran and Hadith call for war, or jihad, against all non-believers, until they either convert, accept subjugation and discrimination, or die.
Islam's prophet himself decreed, “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him.”
The Koran allows polygamy—up to four wives—and the possession of concubines, or sex-slaves.
The Koran permits lying; the prophet himself often deceived others, and permitted lying to one’s wife, to reconcile quarreling parties, and to the “infidel” during war.

Related:  The Protestant Reformation Is Coming To Islam And You Won't Like It.

Coming for the first time in the original language
to millions of new readers.

News from Outer Space, June 2014

Some asteroids appear to be comets

Rare and massive storm on Saturn

Partial success reactivating 1978 International Sun/Earth satellite using amateurs.

Tidal forces on the moon give it a 20" bulge that jiggles about, presumably because the earth's ocean is sloshing against barriers as it strives for the moon.  It's not exactly news but there's been progress getting a measurement.

Solar wind strips electrons from objects without atmospheres.  A NASA computer model takes this to a new level, predicting what parts of an oddball shaped asteroid will have positive charges dangerous to human explorers.  There's a 20 second video.








The Higgs boson had been making news.   CERN has found quite a few more examples and is upgrading to check further.   Proof has been gathered that Higgs can decay into fermions as well as  bosons, further establishing the standard model of particle physics.  Why do we care?  From the same article in Nature.com:  

The Higgs boson is thought to be related to an invisible Higgs field that pervades all of space. As particles travel through that field, their interactions with it give them mass. The original finding that Higgs particles decay into other bosons confirmed the Higgs field can interact with bosons. Now the latest results show that the field can interact with fermions as well. The finding supports the idea that a single, Standard Model Higgs boson explains how all particles get their mass.

Key point: "Explains how all particles get their mass".
While we're on the topic, some scientists are puzzled that the universe didn't end as soon as it began, crushed upon itself because of the strength of that Higgs field mentioned above.
Connected to this is the apparent detection of gravity waves embedded in the cosmic microwave background,  left over from the first moments of our universe.

Gravity waves!  Or maybe dust.

(Mentioned in March issue) Gravity waves mapped:   "Gravitational waves .... propagate at the speed of light through 3-dimensional space. They are theorized to be generated by the collisions of black holes and are thought to have been generated in abundance by the inflationary period just after the Big Bang nearly 13.8 billion years ago.
Einstein’s equations of general relativity predict their existence.
CAVEAT:Dustiness of the galaxy is irregular and may dampen or even invalidate the signal of gravitational waves that is mentioned above.




Black holes were a fairyland concept to me in high school days but they are everywhere.  Hubblesite.org says there are about 100 million in our galaxy alone.   The discovery of the third triple black hole was reported in June.  They orbit about each other.  Great photo attached of a super-massive black hole with evidence of gravity waves.

Jupiter's famous eye has been resizing quickly.

And lastly, news that turns out to NOT be from outer space.  On earth, a major glaciation and climate shift happened 2.6 million years ago.  The sun gets blamed for most of the big stuff but this one appears to be caused by the land bridge emerging between the Americas, changing salinities, winds and circulation profoundly.

The earth seems to have been formed from the collision of two similar sized objects about 150 million years after the solar system formed instead of just 30 million.  A second planetary body within the earth still has some distinct blob signature.

March issue of News From Outer Space.

O Canada - bright and lively. UPDATE

I love my country but can't abide our anthem's melody which drags and has no clear chord to end upon.   My suggestion for July 1st is that we sing it to the tune of Jingle Bells:


The chorus:

O Ca-na da, O Ca-na-da\
Our home and native land\
True patriot love, in all thy sons\
Command in us today.\
With glowing hearts we see thee rise\
The True North strong and free.
From far and wide, O Ca-na-da\
We stand on guard for thee\

And the verse:

God keep us glorious, free\
We stand on guard for thee\
We stand on guard for thee\
From East to Western sea!

The official lyrics.
And a link to a stirring presentation of the original at an Edmonton Oilers game, beginning just after the 2:35 mark..

Mexican Farmers Suffering Under New Drug Law. Or: "Legal Pot in the US Is Crippling Mexican Cartels"

"The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that pot farmers in the Sinaloa region have stopped planting due to a massive drop in wholesale prices, from $100 per kilo down to only $25. One farmer is quoted as saying: “It’s not worth it anymore. I wish the Americans would stop with this legalization.”"

O'Hara's story continues:

Former DEA senior intelligence specialist Sean Dunagan told VICE News that, although it’s too early to verify the numbers: “Anything to establish a regulated legal market will necessarily cut into those profits. And it won’t be a viable business for the Mexican cartels — the same way bootleggers disappeared after prohibition fell.”

More at the O'Hara link (VICE news) where she touches on the DEA's cash flow which depends in part on pot being illegal.

The biggest rewards in society come from directing the whole thing.  That's why the state ends up with a monopoly of violence and the citizens trade it for a measure of peace.  When government jacks up the market in marijuana by making it illegal, the profits become so good that the state surrenders some of its monopoly. That control of violence migrates to cartels and street gangs to protect their market, a market that depends on a government law to make it illegal.   Distribution of goods depends on rationing or markets.  Laws that outlaw pot are the extreme form of rationing.   The response is an extreme pot market with guns and murder.

Prohibition poster of the slippery slope 

The Washington Post story says the Mexican farmers are switching to heroin  because government law still locks in high profits for them.  Appalled as I am at the thought cheap heroin everywhere, I think it's better than subsidizing criminal gangs with anti-heroin laws.  Hell, "subsidizing" is the wrong word, try "creating".

Parting thought from Dunagan's quote:

"Bootleggers disappeared after prohibition fell".

Obama joke: Guy walks into a bar with an orange for a head. Alternate lede: The Perversity of Human Nature.

Andrew Klavan reports the ultimate joke about Obama. 
The Canadian version would mention the Northern Gateway pipeline.
The opening line:

A man walks into a bar. He has an orange for a head. The bartender pours him a drink and says: “So—you want to tell me about it?”

It's a three wishes story.

First wish: A million bucks.

Second wish:  Sex with Playboy pinups.

"I went back to the genie a third time,” says the man with an orange for a head, “and I think this may have been where I made my mistake.”“What did you do?” says the bartender.

“I wished to have an orange for a head.”

Andrew explains it:

Andrew Klavan

"Consider .. the earth....., presenting us with the Promethean gift of fuels that elevate us beyond the imaginations of our ancestors. Our response? We nurture a superstitious dread of oil and coal and promulgate pseudoscientific disaster scenarios meant to teach panic and to quench the very fire of our freedom. Or consider ... that we were born into the freest, strongest, and wealthiest nation that mankind has ever known—and elected as our president a man who promised to “fundamentally transform” it."

When you shake you head at what the American electorate goes for, it's human nature you're quibble is disputing.  Remember a third of America thinks Obama didn't go far enough.   We don't have Obama but we have Canadian voters.  I'm not smarter than them.

BC has almost no private property. Rentseekers' Paradise

The Supreme Court decision expanding property rights to native bands and money going into Stop-the-Pipeline fervour makes sense because BC is 95% crown land.  It's easy to lobby one Liberal institution instead of thousands of landholders who don't agree with you.  The Ministry of Lands and Forests brags about this state-control on their crown land page.  They should be ashamed, instead.

Source. Click to expand

Overreaching control of land assures misallocation of resources in BC.  Our private areas are strips along rivers, the Fraser delta, some farmable country in the Peace River and a pleasant chunk of Vancouver Island. The owned lands look like flecks of paint on this map of BC.


Compare crown land in Ontario.  The settled south is mostly owned by individuals.  There will be no large scale exclusion or give away here.  Northern Ontario is a different story.

Monkey on your back: How to hunt wild pigs in Africa

If you look up the expression, "monkey on your back", its origin is unknown.  No longer.  These little critters jump up on the boars as if sucked up by magnets and slow the boars down just enough that runners on foot with small hand nets can catch dinner.  The monkeys must be well paid and are obviously adapted for such mischief.  


h/t smalldeadanimals

"No hand on the f-ing tiller" Hillary's candid opinion of Obama. UPDATE.

Edward Klein's party scoop sounds plausible but should be checked.

He reports on a May 2013 dinner party in his book Blood Feud:

“When her friends asked Hillary to tell them what she thought — really thought — about the president she had served for four draining years, she lit into Obama with a passion that surprised them all,” ...... “The thing with Obama is that he can’t be bothered, and there is no hand on the tiller half the time. That’s the story of the Obama presidency. No hand on the f–king tiller,” according to the book. “Obama has turned into a joke,”

“The IRS targeting the Tea Party, the Justice Department’s seizure of AP phone records and [Fox reporter] James Rosen’s e-mails — all these scandals. Obama’s allowed his hatred for his enemies to screw him the way Nixon did,” she raged, the book says, adding that she called the president “incompetent and feckless.”

(Selections from Powerline article by Paul Mirengoff.)

UPDATE: Review from Roger Simon:

Blood Feud, Ed Klein’s new book on the Clintons and the Obamas currently rocketing to the top of the Amazon best seller list even before its official publication day, is a lurid, irresponsible work of yellow journalism filled with suppositions, inaccuracies, myriad anonymous sources, made-up dialogue and (often extreme) bias. In other words, it is essentially like your average front page story in the New York Times. But unlike the Times, Klein gets it essentially right about his subject — the Clintons and the Obamas despise each other. And unlike the Times, Blood Feud is a compulsive read.

Presbyterian Presbyopia: Netanyahu Scores Against BDS Folly.

On Meet The Press, David Gregory asks:

"The Presbyterians in the United States have just passed a decision voted to divest its holdings in companies that do business with Israel, that sell parts to Israel that they claim are used in the course of the occupations of the Palestinians. How troubling is this to you?" 

Israel's Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu responds:

"It should trouble all people of conscience and morality because it's so disgraceful. You know, you look at what's happening in the Middle East, and I think most Americans understand this: They see this enormous area riveted by religious hatred, by savagery of unimaginable proportions.  Then you come to Israel and you see the one democracy that upholds basic human rights, that guards the rights of all minorities, that protects Christians. Christians are persecuted throughout the Middle East. So most Americans understand that Israel is a beacon of civilization and moderation.              You know, I would suggest to those Presbyterian organizations to fly to the Middle East, come see Israel for the embattled democracy that it is, and then take a bus tour. Go to Libya, go to Syria, go to Iraq, and see the difference. And I would give them two pieces of advice: One is make sure it's an armor-plated bus. And, second, don't say that you're Christians."

From the comments at smalldeadanimals which linked the story:

"Netanyahu suggested the Presbyterians visit and tour Israel and then go tour Libya, Syria, Iraq. If the Presbyterians do it in that order, when the Arabs see the new Israeli visitation stamps on their passports, they'll be thrown in prison so fast it'll make their heads spin.
LOL"  Oz

The Critics of Plenty.

In the sixties, I got to tag behind archaeologist, Clyde Kennedy, on a dig by Pembroke, Ontario. I'll never forget the throw-away food bones in the dirt of that Archaic camp by the rapids.  Bones no thicker than a bowling pencil or old-style straw had all been cracked to get at the marrow.

Clyde Kennedy at the Morrison Island
site near Pembroke, early sixties.

For comparison, here's my scarcely-gnawed leftover from a T-bone supper.   I'll take the latter while those who glorify the noble pre-industrial savage
(They had iphones, didn't they?)
can go back in time and take the former.
Good riddance.  Plenty is better.

Live hack attack video for the world

The security firm, Norse, has a honeypot worldwide network that attracts a tiny fraction of the hacking assaults.  The tiny honeypot attracts hundreds of probes in a minute and mirrors what's happening across the internet.  Watch for yourself.  Most originate in China or the USA and most are directed at the USA.   USA targets are internal or scattered about the globe.  China's targets have tunnel vision and are mostly in one place, the USA.  There is a separate category for attacks attributed to military and state institutions.  If you hover over any one country source or target or type of attack, the display immediately filters for those results. (Hat tip to Engadget). (If nothing shows, try a different browser).  I happened to catch a large outbreak with the screen shot below.

Click Here for the Live Version.

Dirty belts - Hygiene loophole.

We're a clean society with hand sanitizers and daily showers but there's a big loophole.  Who ever washes a belt?   Gentlemen apply the wipe, pull up the trousers, buckle the belt and then  (the better sort) wash their hands.   Belts go years without a wipe-down.