Natural selection among humans is making a long-overdue comeback:

A meteorologist who has covered weather for the Wall Street Journal tweeted that he has decided not to have children in order to leave a lighter carbon footprint, and is considering having a vasectomy. (Eric Holthaus) also stopped flying….”I’ve never cried because of a science report before.”

For god’s sake, man, get out of the gene pool, dry yourself off, and keep spreading the good news:

According to another tweet from Holthaus, the Dutch artist known as Tinkerbell, who calls attention to animal rights issues through works that use the remains of dead animals, had herself sterilized last week for a similar reason.

Keep hope alive.

No blood on her hands, just a bit of ringing in his ears.
h/t

The headline says it all: Detroit Spent Billions Extra on Pensions.

Detroit has nearly 12,000 retired general workers, who last year received pensions of $19,213 a year on average — hardly enough to drive a great American city into bankruptcy. But the total excess payments in some years ran to more than $100 million, a crushing expense for a city in steep decline. In some years, the outside actuary found, Detroit poured into the pension fund more than twice the amount it would have had to contribute had it paid only the specified benefits.

Joseph Harris, Detroit’s independent auditor general from 1995 to 2005, described the extra payments this way:

“It was like dandelions. You just accept them. They were there, something you’ve seen all your life.”

Referring to the U.N.-sponsored IPCC’s declaration that it is “extremely likely Global Warming caused by humans.” 204 comments so far.
The Daily Mail: World’s top climate scientists told to ‘cover up’ the fact that the Earth’s temperature hasn’t risen for the last 15 years
Michael Campbell on the way the report is assembled and how that lead the embarrassing 2007 report. Also, despite the disagreement between sides in this debate the one thing everyone agrees on.

It’s never been harder to find a decent job making something real. The American middle class, like the American economy in general, is ailing. Labor-force participation has hit a 35-year low. Median household income is lower than it was five years ago. Commuters are paying more than twice as much for gas as they were in 2008. Victor Davis Hanson on how Obama facilitated its decline.

A televised debate between a Salafi Muslim and a more secular-minded Egyptian.

Campus Reform:

Brown University is set to host a weeklong “nudity” event featuring nude student performances starting next Monday, Campus Reform has learned. The event, named “Nudity In the Upspace,” is a weeklong program which is set to feature nude body painting, nude yoga, nude theater, and nude cabaret.

Brown is an Ivy League school founded in 1764.

…the six-day program will include a clothed event called “Stripping Privilege: Undressing the Isms” on Wednesday which will include discussion on “power, privilege, race, class, gender, ability, and other isms how (sic) they intersect with nudity, body image, nudity in relation to (de)sexuality, etc.”

Related.

Larger than Modern Civilization that was forged in the factories of the Industrial Revolution after the invention of the Steam Engine.
James Dines, who has become legendary for having made correct forecasts that were in complete contradiction to the rest of the financial community, says that this is the biggest thing he has ever seen.
Dines says it is already occurring on one level in the way that virtually every business is being redefined as the internet evolves. Yelp has made Yellowpages obsolete, Amazon has driven retailers to do something else with the space they had devoted to selling books, and Kindle has forced publishers into layoffs. If not outright bankruptcy. Indeed, while internet continues to transform business on an accelerating pace, that is not what has Dines really excited.
No, it is the transformation of manufacturing and Society, and the marvels that will occur from the invention of the 3D Printer.
Very soon 3D Printers, or the ideas they have spawned, will have developed to the state where they will be producing in everything from metal, carbon fiber, ceramic cellulose, even food. Soon you will just push a button and that part you needed for your car, or the hearing aid your Doctor prescribed to you at noon that day will be printed layer by layer, atom by atom overnight. In the morning you’ll just pick it up off the family 3D Printer. The 3D Printer that every household has since society will have become built around its abilities in the way that it became built around automobiles.
More here in this Michael Campbell interview with Dines.

Susan Carroll at the Houston Chronicle:

Consumer advocates and parents who accidentally backed over their children plan to sue the federal government, forcing it to issue a long-anticipated rule requiring automakers to help drivers see behind their vehicles.

Thank god no one ever gets run over and killed by cars traveling in forward gear – one can only imagine the death toll.
One of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, a New York paediatrician who backed over and killed his son in 2002, says –

There are so many children running around that are about to be backed over and killed by the parents because they can’t see them.

Or maybe the children are backed over and killed by people who are driving too fast in reverse gear while not paying attention.
h/t