Read it.

Under pressure from the NAACP, the state Democratic Party will scrub the names of the two presidents from its annual fundraising dinner because of their ties to slavery.

Watch tail wag dog. Feel free to point and laugh.

“It is a sad and short-sighted decision based upon tragic ignorance,” said Turner, who has written extensively about Jefferson’s legacy.

Yeah, come to think of it, ‘tragic ignorance’ pretty much sums up the Democrite party.

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust makes its bid for Moral Superiority in an Identity Politics world.

Color film was invented quite a bit later. The principle was basically the same: take impressions of different wavelengths of light as separate photographs, and combine them into a full-color photo. The difference was they were able to take these “separate” photos in the different layers of chemicals on the same square of film; essentially a single photograph, and a single exposure (press-of-the-button.)

The proportion of the different colors in the photo — the photo’s color balance — was partially determined by the concentrations of chemicals in the film; and partially by the various chemicals used in processing the film and printing from it. This underwent a lot of fine-tuning. For example: the first color film was two-color, i.e. only in red and green. In the US, where this technology was being pioneered, most of this fine-tuning was done by affluent white men. And, as it turns out, the race of these men had implications: they were operating under a very particular assumption about whom and what their product was meant to capture.

Can’t get much more ‘progressive’ in tone than that.

The main gain of modern man has been the weakening of governments.  Unfortunately, that process is now reversed, not only in Europe, but also in America.  There is a constant accession of government authority and power.  It works inevitably toward the disadvantage of the only sort of man who is really worth hell room, to wit, the man who practices some useful trade in a competent manner, makes a decent living at it, pays his own way, and asks only to be let alone.  He is now a pariah in all so-called civilized countries.

— H. L. Mencken, Minority Report

Read it.

In 2013 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement let 36,000 illegal aliens out of its custody. Of the 87,000 criminal convictions committed by the aliens, 15,635 were for drunk driving. These are offenses that the U.S. government doesn’t consider “serious crimes.”

Most of these crimes take place in sanctuary cities—that is, cities where the local government has given up enforcing the law. These sanctuary cities look like Latin America: a white upper class nominally in control while a brown, dumbed underclass services them while running on slave labor.

Read it.

On the radio, one of the top-of-the-hour news blurbs was that Planned Parenthood dismissed all allegations from an unnamed video as being fraudulent, an attempt to scare women and hinder their reproductive rights.

Nothing more was said. That was given as straight news, as if it were a newsworthy item. There was no context, no explanation, and the other side of the story was simply “pretended”out of existence.

The unnamed video, of course was the one where a top officer for Planned Parenthood (as Murder Incorporated is called on the cubicular bizzaro world, where all things are backward) was dickering for money over how much for each organ harvested from late term abortions. She described how the forceps would grasp the dismembered baby body in the proper spot, so as to not damage the expensive kidneys, lungs, or other juicy bits that bring a fine price on the medical meat market.

The Other McCain continues his trip through the swamp.

Feminist gender theory, explained by Professor Salih in her synopsis of Professor Butler’s influential 1990 book, Gender Theory: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, is totalitarian in two senses of the word. First, it is a political invention, a belief system that claims to define reality in order to advance the claims of a group to exercise complete power. Second, feminism is a totalitarian movement in that its adherents employ methods of terroristic intimidation to silence those who dissent from feminist ideology. This is most evident in academia. On those rare occasions when any critic of feminism appears on a university campus, they are met by angry mobs of feminist protesters.

Read it.

A 14-arm, automated harvester recently wheeled through rows of strawberry plants here, illustrating an emerging solution to one of the produce industry’s most pressing problems: a shortfall of farmhands.

Harnessing high-powered computing, color sensors and small metal baskets attached to the robotic arms, the machine gently plucked ripe strawberries from below deep-green leaves, while mostly ignoring unripe fruit nearby.

Such tasks have long required the trained discernment and backbreaking effort of tens of thousands of relatively low-paid workers. But technological advances are making it possible for robots to handle the job, just as a shrinking supply of available fruit pickers has made the technology more financially attractive.

…

“This is the least desirable job in the entire company,” she said. With machines, “there are no complaints whatsoever. The robots don’t have workers’ compensation, they don’t take breaks.”

Winter is coming.

Read it.

Reintroduce yourself to Texas A&M, CEO maker!?

Read it.

A new study indicates that Marine Corps officers’ intelligence has consistently declined over a 35-year period, and researchers are placing the blame on the “democratization of college,” that is, an ever-expanding pool of college graduates.

Brookings Institution researchers Matthew F. Cancian and Michael W. Klein looked at General Classification Test (GCT) scores from 1980 to 2014, finding a steady decline, which is troubling since the GCT predicts success in the military.

Officer scores dropped by 8.8 points, moving from an average of 130.9 in 1980 to 122.1 in 2014.

Not good news.

Read it.

Certification as the liberals’ official angry black man is a lucrative gig. The market is upscale, but the job is only temporary. Fashions change, or rather remain subject to a cycle. The job isn’t easy; it requires high attainment in the art of performance. Black rage must be precisely matched to liberal guilt.

James Baldwin provides the original model, in the essays originally published in the New Yorker and then collected in The Fire Next Time. Baldwin was a deeply literary man working at an elevated height, but the descent from Baldwin was steep. The sixties and early seventies served up new models on an almost annual basis. Before long we had Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, and, lest we forget, George Jackson.

Read it.

I’m always struck by the irony that the same kind of people who say government should stay out of your bedroom have no hesitation about getting into your bathroom, and have mandated such splendors as low-flow shower heads and toilets (or commodes that are no longer commodious). And then they moved on to light bulbs and clothes washers and dryers.

Read it.

TWO illegal immigrants have been seriously injured after falling from a lorry and another 10 are on the run in the English countryside as Britain’s migrant crisis continues to spiral out of control.

…

The pair are thought to have climbed under a lorry at Calais, clinging on for a further 60 miles after reaching Dover before succumbing to tiredness and tumbling onto the motorway.

 

Welcome to the wonderful world of illegal immigration. Be thankful that you only have a hundred miles of ocean to watch, rather than a thousand miles of desert.

There are almost 4,000 migrants, mostly from Africa, living in squalid camps in and around Calais waiting for their chance to make the crossing to Britain.

And what are the French doing about that? Why, nothing. It’s what the French do best. God forbid that they should send them back where they came from.

Attracted by a generous benefits system and an abundance of black market work, many are going to increasingly dangerous lengths in an attempt to enter the country.

My, that certainly sounds familiar.

Read it.

This is one of the reasons why I don’t drive an American-brand car. There’s more to Detroit being a disaster area than just a penchant for electing black Democrats.

Steve Sailer has the answer.

With the Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley being shouted down at a progressive convention for not abasing themselves fully enough to a Black Lives Matter rent-a-mob, it’s worth taking a look at what some cities could quite feasibly do to hire better policemen.

Read it. And watch the video.

Selling the organs of aborted babies is big business and Planned Parenthood can deliver most organs intact chirped Dr. Deborah Nucatola between mouthfuls of food a few days ago. Nucatola, a high placed executive at Planned Parenthood, unwittingly exposed the grisly work of her organization in an undercover video released by the Center for Medical Progress, a pro-life group.

The video is disturbing. Nucatola’s demeanor, her perfunctory manner about manipulating an abortion to preserve the quality of particular body parts for resale, her eagerness to cultivate the client reveals no shred of conscience about trafficking in the harvested organs of unborn children. She talks like a salesman selling a cell phone upgrade.

Evil enters the world when a man puts his hands in service to a lie. Evil enters because the man has to restructure reality to conform to the lie, lest reality reveal that the lie is indeed a lie.

The lie operating in Nucatola’s glib descriptions about fetal parts is that the aborted baby is not a baby. It takes titanic self-deception to deny the humanity of a fetus (Latin for “little one”) but in the battle between avarice and charity many choose the cash. That’s one reason why they lie.

Diplomacy, of course.

Read it.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform act turns 5 today. It was signed into law by President Obama on July 21, 2010. In the two years immediately following its passage, violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) nearly tripled.

Think those two things are unrelated? Think again.

Read it.

Yet more reasons to avoid California.

“Together we will peacefully, powerfully gather, share the news that the deforestation plan will INCREASE fire danger in the hills, and then create a dramatic fine art photograph with TreeSpirit founder Jack Gescheidt,” stated the environmentalists on their webpage.

And you can’t get any hipper or trendier than that.

Read it.

Last week residents of the Italian town of Quinto di Treviso, near Treviso, protested angrily about the resettling of immigrants in their neighborhoods and residences. After two days of protests, the town’s mayor ordered the unwanted migrants moved elsewhere.

They didn’t come for work, they came for benefits; that’s why they’re desperate to get to Britain.

Bet you forgot, didn’t you?

Read it.

And yet he’s ahead in the polls. Perhaps he knows something that Kiran Moodley (‘editorial video manager at The Independent’) doesn’t.

‘You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.’

Read it.

For decades, China’s government has tried to limit the size of Beijing, the capital, through draconian residency permits. Now, the government has embarked on an ambitious plan to make Beijing the center of a new supercity of 130 million people.

Guess they bought the regressive ‘density’ argument. Always knew that was a Commie plot.

The planned megalopolis, a metropolitan area that would be about six times the size of New York’s, is meant to revamp northern China’s economy and become a laboratory for modern urban growth.

The technical term for that is ‘behavioral sink’.

“The supercity is the vanguard of economic reform,” said Liu Gang, a professor at Nankai University in Tianjin who advises local governments on regional development. “It reflects the senior leadership’s views on the need for integration, innovation and environmental protection.”

In other words, if they’re all in one place, they’re easier to control.

But the new supercity is intended to be different in scope and conception. It would be spread over 82,000 square miles, about the size of Kansas, and hold a population larger than a third of the United States. And unlike metro areas that have grown up organically, Jing-Jin-Ji would be a very deliberate creation. Its centerpiece: a huge expansion of high-speed rail to bring the major cities within an hour’s commute of each other.

I want to know where they’re going to get the water. And where they’re going to put the sewage.

But some of the new roads and rails are years from completion. For many people, the creation of the supercity so far has meant ever-longer commutes on gridlocked highways to the capital.

Ah, yes, reality is what happens while you’re making plans….

Read it.

I thought we had pretty much covered the entire waterfront on the Rachel Dolezal fraud last month, but who knew that she’d show up for an encore, granting an interview to a clearly skeptical (but in this case how appropriately named) Vanity Fair magazine.

Read it.

“Finding Zero” is Dr. Aczel’s story of his quest for the origins of the most elusive of numbers: zero. It is zero, Dr. Aczel points out, that makes our place-value number system possible. Without it, there is no way to distinguish among 48, 480 and 4,080. Zero is indispensable for our familiar arithmetical operations, and it is half of the binary language of modern computers.

And yet, even though we can hardly imagine life without it, Europeans had no concept of zero until the 13th century, when they referred to it as and Indian or Arabic numeral. Where then did this epoch-making concept originate?

Alex Tabarrok uses an analogy.

Some restaurants offer burgers without fries and a drink. These restaurants cater to low-income people who enjoy fries and drinks but can’t always afford them. To rectify this sad situation a presidential candidate proposes The Happy Meal Act. Under the Act, burgers must be sold with fries and a drink. “Burgers by themselves are not a complete, nutritious meal,” the politician argues, concluding with the uplifting campaign slogan, “Everyone deserves a Happy Meal!”

But will the Happy Meal Act make people happy? If burgers must come with fries and a drink, restaurants will increase the price of a “burger.” Even though everyone likes fries and a drink they may not like the added benefits by as much as the increase in the price of the meal. Indeed, this must the case since consumers could have bought the meal before the Act but chose not to. Requiring firms to sell benefits that customers value less than their cost makes both firms and customers worse off.

The Happy Meal Fallacy is fairly obvious when it comes to happy meals but now let’s consider the debate over the gig economy and the hiring of employees versus contractors. Employees are entitled to benefits that contractors are not. Thus the standard conclusion is that classifying workers as contractors “is great for employers but potentially terrible for workers.” Wrong. Employees get their wages with fries and a drink while contractors get wages only. Would a law requiring firms to provide all workers with fries and a drink help workers?

The only way that democracy can be made bearable is by developing and cherishing a class of men sufficiently honest and disinterested to challenge the prevailing quacks.  No such class has ever appeared in strength in the United States.  Thus the business of harassing the quacks devolves upon the newspapers.  When they fail in their duty, which is usually, we are at the quacks’ mercy.

— H. L. Mencken, Minority Report

Read it. And watch the video.

“I don’t have an opinion on every single issue out there. To me, that’s, I don’t know,” Walker answered. “I don’t know the answer to that question.”

Whoa – an honest politician. That gets my vote.

Read it.

A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

I wonder how many ‘fake black people’ these records will contain. I suspect that the ‘one drop test’ will get a new lease on life.

Read it.

Hey, it’s not as if they were black people killed by police or something significant like that.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following video was recorded at a town council or board of supervisors meeting in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota on July 7, 2015. The gentleman speaking — a concerned local citizen — has a good handle on the “refugee” scam being foisted on Minnesota by the federal government.

As he notes, the Somalis being unloaded on the state bring no skills and will generally be unable to support themselves for the indefinite future. Local welfare agencies will be picking up the tab, yet the “stakeholders” — unelected citizens, mainline churches, and NGOs — are making big money off the deal. After a few months the federal subsidy will expire, leaving the state holding the bill. In ten years or so the municipalities of Minnesota will be facing bankruptcy as their culturally enriched neighborhoods slide into Third World conditions:

Read it.

Read it.

In a speech to be delivered to an audience of Muslim men and women in Birmingham, David Cameron is expected to announce that only those in the Muslim community willing to take a stand against jihadist violence will be supported and those who “walk up to the border of illegality” will be denounced.

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one.

Mark Steyn speaks truth to power.

A fifth victim of the Chattanooga jihad boy has died: Petty Officer Randall Smith, US Navy.

I’m afraid the makeshift memorials of flags and other patriotic memorabilia that have sprung up on the edge of the police tape depress the hell out of me. A no doubt sincere veneration for the military apparently can only express itself with a feeble passivity that is a large part of the problem. This isn’t a time for the bumper-sticker bromides of “We salute our heroes/Thank you for your service/We support our troops”. Among the dead are men who waged a bloody and hard-fought battle to retake Fallujah …only to come home and die unarmed in a crappy shopping mall at the hands of a halfwit fanatic whose family had been under the leisurely money-no-object scrutiny of the bloated security apparatus for years.

A Chinese-made teddy bear from Wal-Mart is not an appropriate reaction. Righteous anger is. And there’s not a lot of evidence of that. At that parking-lot memorial, the public seems to discern that such anger is no longer an approved sensibility – whereas a teary generalized sadness gets plenty of media coverage. This is the same media, by the way, that, after a couple of perfunctory questions about Chattanooga, asked Josh Earnest for more details about the “father-daughter weekend” President Obama is currently enjoying in New York. Golly, you’d almost get the impression they’re really not that sad at all.

Screw the cakes and balloons. We who did not know them cannot mourn them: That is for their friends and family. The nation’s duty is to avenge them – so that they did not die in vain.

Read it.

Air-filled (pneumatic) tires give our vehicles comfortable, cushiony rides. (Thanks tires, we appreciate that.) Looking at it from another perspective, pneumatic tires are containers of pressurized gas that are being subjected to constant abuse, and when something happens to them, it can result in a situation that falls somewhere between a minor annoyance and a deadly catastrophe. We’ve ridden on these things for about 130 years now, and while they’ve improved substantially since John Dunlop invented them to keep his kid from getting headaches while riding his bike, it seems that we can still do better. Hankook is trying to make better happen with a consumer-oriented airless tire.

Slapsee Sunglasses. These are very clever.

Make Your Own Pocket Laser Engraver. When tattoos just aren’t narcissistic enough.

Thermos Stainless Steel Can Insulator.

Transparent Padlock to practice picking locks.

Read it.

Having empowered Iran’s criminal regime and all but ensured its long-term survival, President Obama is turning his attention to doing what he can for American criminals. In one day this week, he commuted the sentences of 46 criminals, the most presidential commutations in a single day since at least the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, according to the White House.

The president also took the time to write a personal letter to each of the 46 criminals. He has not, however, contacted the family of Kathryn Steinle who was murdered in San Francisco by an illegal alien and convicted felon who was released from prison earlier this year.

Read it.

Those signs at the Naval reserve center and the armed forces recruitment station are the greatest outrage of the Chattanooga jihad story. Or rather, they should be, but — given the universal government and media devotion to “gun-free zones” — they won’t receive enough attention to dial up public opinion to the point of outrage.

Read it.

In January, Marilyn Tavenner stepped down from her position as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).Tavenner was one of the administration officials most involved with the flopped launch of Obamacare’s federal health insurance exchange—the administration sent her to Congress to apologize—and her agency crafted thousands of pages of regulations ordered up under the law.

Essentially, Tavenner played the role of Obamacare’s caretaker within the administration, helping to craft its many tedious rules and procedures while serving as a public face when implementation failed.

Earlier this week, news broke that Tavenner would be joining America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the health insurance lobbying group, as chief executive. Tavenner, in other words, will continue to be Obamacare’s caretaker—only now she’ll be operating from the private sector.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

‘And I say to you: Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.’

Read it.

We don’t know Abdulazeez’s story yet. However, we do know the story of Carlos Bledsoe (aka Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad), another Islamist terrorist from Tennessee who killed a soldier at a military recruiting center. We know Bledsoe’s story because his father told it to the House Committee on Homeland Security in 2011. Unfortunately, as Americans for Peace and Tolerance said in a press release yesterday, the warning offered by Bledsoe’s father has not been taken to heart.

Read it.

Shocking, we know: the Saudis are none too pleased with the Iran deal, and after biting their tongues for a few days they’re letting their displeasure be known in public.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The Saudis, who know more about Islam than Barack Obama, more about Iran than Barack Obama, and more about what’s going on in the Middle East than Barack Obama, probably know whether this was a good deal or a bad deal. And they apparently think it was a bad deal.

Maybe they know something Barack Obama doesn’t….

Read it.

Ivar Giaever, a scientist who shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physics, challenged Mr. Obama in a July 1 speech at the 65th Lindau Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany.

“I say this to Obama: ‘Excuse me, Mr. President, but you’re wrong.’ He’s dead wrong,” Mr. Giaever said in a video of his 30-minute speech posted on the website Climate Depot, which first reported the story.

But the Science Is Settled! I read it in the New York Times!

Read it.

“Why can’t America have great trains?” asks East Coast writer Simon Van Zuylen-Wood in the National Journal. The simple answer is, “Because we don’t want them.” The slightly longer answer is, “because the fastest trains are slower than flying; the most frequent trains are less convenient than driving; and trains are almost always more expensive than either flying or driving.”

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AH: We’ve had school milk programs and milk in schools since the beginning of the century. During World War II, we needed to boost milk production in order to make processed dairy products to send to soldiers overseas. But farmers weren’t producing enough to meet this demand because they weren’t getting paid enough. So the government decided, “Great, we’ll create demand for milk by giving milk to our kids, and that way we’ll have a demand for the fluid milk and we can make the processed products we need for soldiers.”

So war was part of it. Convenience is also part of it. As people moved to the city and women started working away from home, cow’s milk became seen as a convenient way to give babies nutrition if women weren’t able to be home breastfeeding all the time. And as the dairy industry grows, farmers have an incentive to try to boost demand with government subsidies of dairy.

I can’t say which one of these many different forces did it, but it’s just a combination that has led to this health halo around milk. I think what’s more troubling is how deeply ingrained the idea has become and how inaccurate many of our assumptions about milk are.

Read it.

THE Big Mac index was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services (in this case, a burger) in any two countries. For example, the average price of a Big Mac in America in July 2015 was $4.79; in China it was only $2.74 at market exchange rates. So the “raw” Big Mac index says that the yuan was undervalued by 43% at that time.

Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment, merely a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible. Yet the Big Mac index has become a global standard, included in several economic textbooks and the subject of at least 20 academic studies. For those who take their fast food more seriously, we have also calculated a gourmet version of the index.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

Heh. Best laid plans of progs and commies….

Richard Fernandez show us what’s behind the curtain.

In the last 24 hours the news has been dominated by president Obama’s outrage at an newsman for asking him about four US hostages left in Iranian custody despite his deal.  Someone was raining on his parade, ruining his moment of historic achievement and legacy.

But in other news, ISIS sank an Egyptian naval vessel, attacked France which thwarted a second attack on a military base, the Philippines has reopened the old US Naval base at Subic, the Japanese armed forces are now authorized for combat for the first time since World War 2.  Meanwhile, a person identified as Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez attacked a military recruitment depot in Chattanooga, killing four and wounding a police officer, before being killed himself. A website reports that an ISIS related site is tweeted “Chattanooga” at the same time as the attack.

Read it.

In other words, he wasn’t Just Another Redneck Racist, but a nutcase from the get-go.

(Actual journalism from the New York Times … I can  hear the pigs flying even as we speak….)

Read it.

Or even – gasp! – be given back to the people who actually earned.

Naw….