Japanese Engineer: That’s not a Robot, that’s my Girlfriend (+video)

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Photo Credit: Aubrey BelfordRobotics in many parts of the world is driven by military aims. Pacifist Japan takes a different approach: This is a digital love story.

Osamu Kozaki’s life in Tokyo is, by his own admission, often a lonely one. The 35-year-old, an engineer who designs industrial robots, has had few relationships with women in his life. Those few have almost always gone badly.

So when Kozaki’s girlfriend, Rinko Kobayakawa, sends him a message, his day brightens up. The relationship started more than three years ago, when Kobayakawa was a prickly 16-year-old working in her school library, a quiet girl who shut out the world with a pair of earphones that blasted punk music.

Kozaki sums up Kobayakawa’s personality with one word: tsundere – a popular term in Japan’s otaku geek culture, which describes a certain feminine ideal. It refers to the kind of girl who starts out hostile but whose heart gradually grows warmer. And that’s what has happened; over time, Kobayakawa has changed. These days, she spends much of her day sending affectionate missives to her boyfriend, inviting him on dates, or seeking his opinion when she wants to buy a new dress or try a new hairstyle.

But while Kozaki has aged, Kobayakawa has not. After three years, she’s still 16. She always will be. That’s because she is a simulation; Kobayakawa only exists inside a computer.

Watch video here:

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How to Win in 2014: Stop Obama’s Legislative Agenda, Promote the Farm Team

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Photo Credit: GARY LOCKENearly four months after the election, most everybody seems to agree that something is amiss with the GOP. This consensus has provoked a stream of free advice for how Republicans can get back on their feet. Some of it is constructive and helpful. For instance, commentators like Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Michael Gerson of the Washington Post have persuasively argued in various ways about why and how the Republican party needs to update its policy offerings. But much of the “advice” amounts to a victory lap by liberal Democrats and their friends in the media, many of whom seem to think that a successful Republican party would be one that closely resembles the Democrats.

Helpful political advice should first of all be practical, taking into account what can and cannot be done. What, for instance, can the Republican party accomplish between now and the next election? To do that, we should first take a political inventory, to see where the GOP stands. On the plus side of the ledger, we have the party’s strength in the states. Republicans control 30 governorships, including in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. What’s more, the GOP holds a majority of state legislative seats, roughly 52 percent nationwide. All told, Republicans have unified control of 25 states, with 53 percent of the nation’s population. Compare that with the Democrats, who control 13 states with 30 percent of the American public.

Republicans also control the House of Representatives and retain enough seats to filibuster in the Senate. Not only that, but the 234 House Republicans still constitute a larger caucus than at any point during the Republican “revolution” of the mid-1990s. While this number is down from 2010, the last two cycles have produced the strongest GOP House majority since the Great Depression.

Finally, the Republican coalition is reasonably united. Naturally, there are fissures — notably, the divide between the so-called establishment wing of the party and the Tea Party “opposition.” Nevertheless, historical perspective is appropriate here. While the media like to play up today’s divisions, the party remains generally united around a set of policy goals — tax reform and sensible deregulation to jump-start the economy, entitlement reform to solve the debt crisis, the expansion of domestic energy production, and so on. One could not say the same of the Republicans after Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 or Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964.

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Rich Hollywood Movie Producers Love Subsidies (That Would Pay For Teachers, Firefighters, And Police Officers)

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Photo Credit: Dreamworks At the Democratic National Convention last year, actress Eva Longoria called for higher taxes on America’s rich. Her take: “The Eva Longoria who worked at Wendy’s flipping burgers—she needed a tax break. But the Eva Longoria who works on movie sets does not.”

Actually, nowadays an Eva Longoria who flipped burgers would probably qualify for the Earned Income Tax Credit and get a check from the government rather than pay taxes. It’s the movie set where she works these days that may well be getting the tax break.

With campaign season over, you’re not likely to hear stars bringing up taxes at this weekend’s Academy Awards show. But the tax man ought to come out and take a bow anyway. Of the nine “Best Picture” nominees in 2012, for example, five were filmed on location in states where the production company received financial incentives, including “The Help” (in Mississippi) and “Moneyball” (in California). Virginia gave $3.5 million to this year’s Oscar-nominated “Lincoln.”

Such state incentives are widespread, and often substantial, but they don’t do much to attract jobs. About $1.5 billion in tax credits and exemptions, grants, waived fees and other financial inducements went to the film industry in 2010, according to data analyzed by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Politicians like to offer this largess because they get photo-ops with celebrities, but the economic payoff is minuscule. George Mason University’s Adam Thierer has called this “a growing cronyism fiasco” and noted that the number of states involved skyrocketed to 45 in 2009 from five in 2002.

In its 2012 study “State Film Studies: Not Much Bang For Too Many Bucks,” the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities found that film-related jobs tend to go to out-of-staters who jet in, then leave. “The revenue generated by economic activity induced by film subsidies,” the study notes, “falls far short of the subsidies’ direct costs to the state. To balance its budget, the state must therefore cut spending or raise revenues elsewhere, dampening the subsidies’ positive economic impact.”

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Boy Scouts Should Not Backtrack On Values

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Photo Credit: National Library of NorwayA national uproar apparently caused the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America to postpone until May a vote on whether to allow homosexual Scouts and Scoutmasters among their ranks.

After more than 100 years as a private organization with the highest of moral standards, top scouting officials had initially floated the idea of rescinding the prohibition on homosexual members and leaders after reaffirming their policy last summer.

This reaffirmation followed just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Scouts to set their own membership policy in regards to homosexuals in the 2008 case, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

Rather than resolving to uphold the Scout Law, which says that Scouts are to keep themselves “morally straight,” some members of the executive board began a covert campaign to change the policy. Two members of the executive board in particular were instrumental in pressuring their fellow board members to reconsider the ban.

Reportedly the strongest advocates for changing the common-sense policy were board members Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, and Jim Turley, CEO of Ernst & Young. Pro-family groups have called for their resignation from scouting, as well they should.

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Extreme Alaska: Snow-Kiting, Skijoring (Dog-Powered Cross-Country Skiing), And More

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Photo Credit: Tara Todras-WhitehillThe wind came from the northwest. It blew down from the glacier-studded peaks of the Alaska Range, through the icebergs of Turnagain Arm and across the frozen expanse of the Twenty Mile River. It was an unrelenting wind, the kind that fells trees, shapes mountains and drives people to their firesides. And there I was among the sculptured snow ridges and frozen grass on the banks of the Twenty Mile, attached to a giant kite, wearing a pair of skis.

When I signed up for snow-kiting in Alaska, I didn’t think about how it would feel to be bracing myself against a 25-mile-per-hour wind as I watched my kite flutter in the snow a hundred feet off, threatening to whip up into the air at any moment. All that kept it down was my hand on the rope “brake,” tight against my hip. I could barely hear Tom Fredericks, my upbeat instructor, shouting in my ear, “Now, it’s going to pull real hard when it first comes up,” before the rest of his words disappeared into the wind. Frankly, I was scared.

But then, I hadn’t come to Alaska in winter to take it easy. I let go of the brake. Seconds later, I was flying.

Colorado, Utah, Wyoming — these are the places one thinks of as winter sports paradises in the United States. But Alaska? Too dark, you might say. Too cold. Too, well, extreme. One imagines frostbite temperatures, cloud-scraping mountains and tundra too inhospitable for trees. The numbers bear out the prejudice: in the spring and summer of last year, close to 1.2 million people visited Alaska for vacation; in fall and winter, that number was just 34,000.

But as March approaches, average highs creep up to a balmy 34 degrees in Anchorage, and the daylight hours are as long as anywhere else. Conveniently for winter-sports enthusiasts, most of the 600 inches of snow the Chugach Mountains see each year remains. Still, few people go, leaving one of our country’s largest snowy playgrounds unvisited by any but locals and the few who are savvy enough to make the trip.

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Obama Threatening Veterans’ Gun Rights

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In an apparent threat to Second Amendment rights, some American military veterans have received a letter from the Veterans Administration warning that their competency to handle their own affairs is under review, and if determined by government bureaucrats to be “incompetent,” they would be barred from possessing weapons.

The issue is being raised by the United States Justice Foundation, which defends civil and religious rights.

In a statement on the organization’s website, Executive Director Michael Connelly said his organization is pursuing a Freedom of Information Act demand to the Department of Veterans Affairs to “force them to disclose the criteria they are using to place veterans on the background check list that keeps them from exercising their Second Amendment rights.”

“Then we will take whatever legal steps are necessary to protect our American warriors,” he wrote. He said he’s been approached by a significant number of veterans who have received letters from the VA.

An image of a letter dated Dec. 20, 2012, has been posted online at Red Flag News. The letter states that the Department of Veterans Affairs has “received” information about the veteran that “because of your disabilities you may need help in handling your Department of Affairs (VA) benefits.”

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FBI Agents Caught Sexting And Dating Drug Dealers

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Photo credit: ALAMYDisciplinary files from the Bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility record an extraordinary range of transgressions that reveal the chaotic personal lives of some of America’s top law enforcers.

One male agent was sacked after police were called to his mistress’s house following reports of domestic incident. When officers arrived they found the agent “drunk and uncooperative” and eventually had to physically subdue him and wrestle away his loaded gun.

A woman e-mailed a “nude photograph of herself to her ex-boyfriend’s wife” and then continued to harass the couple despite two warnings from senior officials. The Bureau concluded she was suffering from depression related to the break-up and allowed her to return to work after 10 days.

But the sexually explicit picture was only one of what FBI assistant director Candice Will described to CNN as a “rash of sexting cases”. The network was the first to obtain the logs.

Two other employees, whose genders were not specified, sent sexually explicit messages to fellow members of the Bureau, one a work Blackberry during office hours.

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The Feds Want Your Retirement Accounts

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerQuietly, behind the scenes, the groundwork is being laid for federal government confiscation of tax-deferred retirement accounts such as IRAs. Slowly, the cat is being let out of the bag.

Last January 18th, in a little noticed interview of Richard Cordray, acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Bloomberg reported “[t]he U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they have put into retirement savings, a move that would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.” That thought generates some skepticism, as aptly expressed by the Richard Terrell cartoon published by American Thinker.

Days later On January 24th President Obama renominated Cordray as CFPB director even though his recess appointment was not due to expire until the end of 2013.

One day later, in the first significant resistance to President Obama’s concentration of presidential power, a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington DC unanimously said that Obama’s Recess Appointments to the National Labor Relations Board are unconstitutional. Similar litigation testing the Cordray appointment to the CFPB is in the pipeline.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) created by the 2,319 page Dodd-Frank legislation is a new and little known bureau with wide-ranging powers. Placed within the Federal Reserve, a corporation privately owned by member banks, the CFPB is insulated from oversight by either the President or Congress, its budget not subject to legislative control. It is not even clear that a new President can replace the CFPB director on taking office.

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The ObamaCare War On Marriage

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Photo Credit: Human Events“Companies have a new solution to rising health-insurance costs: Break up their employees’ marriages,” says the Wall Street Journal’s MarketWatch:

By denying coverage to spouses, employers not only save the annual premiums, but also the new fees that went into effect as part of the Affordable Care Act. This year, companies have to pay $1 or $2 “per life” covered on its plans, a sum that jumps to $65 in 2014. And health law guidelines proposed recently mandate coverage of employees’ dependent children (up to age 26), but husbands and wives are optional. “The question about whether it’s obligatory to cover the family of the employee is being thought through more than ever before,” says Helen Darling, president of the National Business Group on Health.

But… but… “if you like your plan, you can keep your plan.”

Such exclusions barely existed three years ago, but experts expect an increasing number of employers to adopt them: “That’s the next step,” Darling says. HMS, a company that audits plans for employers, estimates that nearly a third of companies might have such policies now. Holdouts say they feel under pressure to follow suit. “We’re the last domino,” says Duke Bennett, mayor of Terre Haute, Ind., which is instituting a spousal carve-out for the city’s health plan, effective July 2013, after nearly all major employers in the area dropped spouses.

MarketWatch cites anecdotal evidence that some people are dropping their personal coverage so they can migrate to joint coverage provided by companies that do continue to offer it. That’s a nice near-term solution… if you happen to be married to someone who works for such a company. In the longer-term, what happens to the remaining plans that offer spousal coverage, after they’ve attracted all of those expensive spouses?

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Former Security Officials to Obama: Cancel Nuke Cuts

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Photo Credit: APA group of 18 former military and national security officials wrote to President Barack Obama on Friday urging the administration to cancel plans for further cuts in United States nuclear warheads, warning that new arms reductions would undermine U.S. security.

The ex-officials, including two former members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated in the letter to Obama that North Korea’s recent underground nuclear test, and concerns about growing Pyongyang-Tehran nuclear arms cooperation, undermines any further disarmament sought by the president.

“In our professional judgment, born of decades of experience with national security policy and practice, America’s ‘triad’ of nuclear-armed land-based and submarine-launched missiles and bomber-delivered nuclear weapons have promoted strategic stability and discouraged proliferation,” the former officials stated.

“Steps that raise uncertainty about the viability, reliability and effectiveness of our deterrent will have the opposite effect.”

The letter followed a report this week that the new strategic arms cuts with Russia will be announced soon. U.S. officials said the president is preparing for a new round of arms reduction talks with Russia that will seek a one-third cut in U.S. nuclear warheads, beyond the levels set in the 2010 New START arms treaty. The treaty requires cutting the U.S. arsenal to 1,550 warheads.

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