(1) You won’t be seeing much of this anymore, if the anti-tobacco nuts have their way. The only hitch in their plans is that cigarette taxes now pay for children’s health care, so they might not have much of an audience among Democrat politicians.
(2) Jack Hunter over at Taki Theodoracopulos rips into Mark Levin’s hypocrisy, for supposedly supporting “liberty,” but then turning right around and supporting American imperialism, which always seems to have a deteriorating effect on American domestic liberty. I could add one more thing — Levin claims he is against mass immigration, but us right wingers don’t call the American Empire “invade the world invite the world” for nothing. The flip side of Levin’s “invade the world” is “inviting” the very people we invaded. Sure as sunrises, death and taxes.
(3) Most of the citizens of Bolgatanga, Ghana weren’t thrilled about the visit by President Barack Obama. Their main beef seems to be that so much money was used to decorate and spruce up the town, while they’re practically starving and living in filth. That makes me wonder — were they any less mad at Lizz Brown?
(4) A historically black fraternity voted to admit former President Bill Clinton as a member at their meeting in New Orleans last week. I give this frat this much — they want to remain all-black, and by golly, they did just that.
(5) Hate crimes or hate speech charges in the UK will no longer apply to Muslims. The reason is that charging them with such offenses might drive them into a world of hate. I’ve got a bright idea — let’s not charge anybody with any crime, because doing so would give them a rap sheet.
Where is this mentality when it comes to white Britons? Oops, I forgot. They don’t count.
(6) From sandals to sandals: Ruth Madoff is now using coupons. Though she has not yet grasped the concept that many coupons have expiration dates.
(7) Of course the All-Star Game events in Downtown St. Louis have been crime free. That’s because every person with a badge and a gun for any jurisdiction within 100 miles of Downtown is on the beat Downtown. The only downside is that for every cop Downtown, there isn’t a cop in North St. Louis.
(8) New Labour’s England: There was a 76% rise in robberies committed by those ages 10 to 17 from 1997, when Labour took over, to 2007.
Chris Grayling, the shadow Home Secretary, said: “I think this is a consequence of the Government’s complete failure to get to grips with anti-social behaviour. We let young troublemakers get away unpunished with anti-social behaviour and so many think they can get away with it and move on to something worse.”
(snip)
Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “This is dramatic evidence that the countryside is in the grip of a credit crunch crime wave.
“These young thugs are clearly not deterred by political posturing about prison sentences. We need more police on the beat catching more criminals, not cuts in police budgets and officers.”
The “credit crunch” has only been over the last year at most, yet these crime stats cover 1997 to 2007, a time period before the credit crunch. How does that figure, Chris?
I wonder why they’re “not deterred by…prison sentences.” It’s because British prisons are practically resorts, based on Britian’s “tolerance” for the “human rights” of thugs. (No “human rights” for robbery victims, though.) And British prison sentence lengths are on paper only — like the American justice system about two decades ago, you can multiply the bid by 10%, and the convict would be out of the joint by then.
Absent this discussion is the non-white elephant in the room, race.
(9) A British fabric and hat shop turns away nine out of ten job applicants because they cannot do simple mental math without a calculator. This riddle isn’t much harder to figure — on both sides of the pond, primary and intermediate mathematics education relies too much on calculators. And it’s not much better in secondary education — the AP Calculus test allows the use of a graphing calculator (the TI-89) that can do derivatives and integrals for you, and by that I mean you can ask it to integrate x^2 and it will give you (1/3)*(x^3). If you want to figure the area between the x axis, y=1, y=2 and y=x^2, you could use good ole pen and paper to arrive and the answer of two and one-thirds square units. On lesser TI calculators, you can do the function fnint (x^2,x,1,2) and get the answer of 2.333333333. On the TI-89, you can do a similar function and get 2 and 1/3 shown on the screen as you would write it on paper.
Ray Kurzweil thinks that human beings are going to become so dependent on increasingly advanced computers that there will be some inflection point, or singularity, in the not too distant future where the machines will come to rule us by default. In terms of mathematics, we’re almost there.
