Read it.

We experimentally vary white foreigner presence in dictator games across 60 villages in Sierra Leone, and find that the simple presence of a white foreigner increases player contributions by 19 percent. To separate the impact of the white foreigner’s race and nationality from other characteristics, we test additional predictions. First, the white foreigner’s presence may heighten demand effects, prompting players to try to impress the white foreigner by being more generous. This should make behavior in the game less indicative of true generosity. Consistent with this, we find that game contributions are no longer predicted by real-world public good contributions when the white foreigner is present. Second, those more familiar with aid may perceive the games as a form of means-testing, and therefore give less to signal that they are poor. Consistent with this, in the presence of the white foreigner, players in more aid-exposed villages give less, and are more likely to believe that the games are testing them for aid suitability. Together, these results suggest that players’ giving decisions respond to the white foreigner’s race and nationality. Behavioral measures are increasingly used to infer cross-national differences in social preferences or to assess aid effectiveness—our results suggest that we should be cautious in these uses.

For extra credit, identify this quotation: ‘Porgy, you’re a white man, you have to help us….’

Read it. And weep.

While the rest of the country is hung up on the necessity of maternity leave — or even the newly coined “meternity” — one group continues to be overlooked when it comes to paid time off from work: new pet owners.

“Paw-ternity” leave is already a reality in the UK — the US pet-insurance provider Petplan found that nearly 5 percent of new pet owners in the UK were offered time off to care for their four-legged kids. (Not surprisingly, the UK is also light-years ahead of the US when it comes to maternity leave, offering up to 39 weeks of paid leave for new mothers.)

It’s time for the US to hop aboard the “paw-ternity” train.

The Other McCain is on the case.

We know that women directors can make box-office hits — Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle, You’ve Got Mail), Amy Heckerling (Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Look Who’s Talking, Clueless) and Penny Marshall (Big, A League of Their Own), for example — but I have no idea what the overall profit picture looks like on female-directed films. However, the feminists complaining about award nominations for women directors at Cannes don’t give a damn about profit, do they? Neither do feminists give a damn about audiences (the people who pay to see movies, and are thus the source of profit) and they don’t give a damn about the actual work that a director must do to deliver the product on time and under budget.

What feminists care about is an idea of “equality” that actually results in favoritism — quotas for women, or else they’ll file a lawsuit or organize a boycott or just protest and complain until somebody gives them what they want. And what do feminists want? More.

This constant demand — “More!” — is characteristic of totalitarianism.

Read it.

Environmental alarmists are worse than pit bulls with a bone when it comes to refusing to let go of any random myth or misinformation they happen to pick up. Sometimes it appears that their chief targets are any modern technologies that are particularly useful to humanity. Last month, a really stupid Moms Across America study reported that it had found parts per billion (ppb) of the herbicide glyphosate in organic wines. Basically, the chemophobes found the presence of glyphosate that was between 10 and 3,000 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold. And never mind that drinking alcohol is a considerable risk factor for developing many kinds of cancer.

So a new set of environmentalist pit bulls calling themselves the Alliance for Natural Health USA is reporting that they tested a bunch of commercial brands of cereals, some eggs, bagels, and coffee creamers. What horrors did they uncover? Take corn flakes, for example. AHA-USA reports that the glyphosate was detected at less 75 ppb which even they acknowledge is 66 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold of 5,000 ppb. Their highest detection was for an instant oat meal which was 22 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold for oats 30,000 ppb. The AHA-USA did manage to find organic cage free eggs in which glyphosate residues were double to triple the EPA’s very low threshold of 50 ppb.

Read it.

Hundreds of thousands of Californians may have mistakenly registered as members of a far-right political party with segregationist roots, which opposes same-sex marriage and abortion and has called for the construction of a Trump-style wall along the US-Mexican border.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that that as many as three in four supposed supporters of California’s American Independent Party (AIP) believed they were registering as independent voters, free of party affiliation. Their mistake could prevent them casting potentially crucial votes in the Golden State’s primary on 7 June.

Among those thought to have ticked the AIP box on their voter registration forms, under the erroneous impression they were declaring themselves independents, are actors Demi Moore and Emma Stone; former boxer Sugar Ray Leonard; Mark Pincus, founder of tech firm Zynga; and Patrick Schwarzenegger, the son of former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Talk about your Low Information Voter … and their vote is just as good as yours. Think about it.

Steven Hayward of Powerline is on the case.

Really, I don’t mean to pick on vegans relentlessly. I actually know a couple of conservative vegans, and hey, if you want to deprive yourself of tasty animals, it’s a free country. But of course there are the other kind of vegans who, following most leftist enthusiasms, would like to make it mandatory for everyone.

The first step is integrating veganism fully into the current mode of identity politics, thus providing a pretext for Bruce Springstein to boycott cattle-ranching states or something. Behold this Ph.D abstract from Durham University:

Queering Veganism: A Biographical, Visual and Autoethnographic Study of Animal Advocacy.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

Everything you need to know about the 2016 race for the Democratic presidential nomination can be found in a single moment in one of the early debates, when Bernie Sanders was asked for his thoughts on banks. His face creased in pharisaical rage.

“They trample on the middle class, they control Washington, and why do they chain all their pens to the desks?” he demanded. “You gotta break up the banks into little pieces and then flush the pieces down the toilet so you can never put the banks back together. Then you just make the bankers pay for college for everyone, and America’s fixed!”

People used to scratch their heads over how the Nazis could be democratically elected to govern so civilized a country as Germany. Well, Bernie Sanders is demonstrating that it isn’t as hard as you might suppose.

Read it.

German soldiers were forced to leave a four-week Nato military exercise in Norway after 12 days after using up all their overtime.

Currently, military personnel are allotted a 41-hour working week where overtime cannot be compensated by additional income but with corresponding free time.

Soldiers have complained to the German parliamentary watchdog that they are spending entire days doing nothing due to the country’s working restrictions.

Read it.

The sort of people who would do a Yelp review of a church are the sort who are looking for a ‘church home’.

Any resemblance between them and real Christians is only in their own minds, if I may so stress the language.

Read it.

It should be awesome, we figure: our first sighting, not only of the She-Deity, but also of her millionaire internet-drone advance guard – boyish CEO putti of Cupertino and Mountain View, who have begun (it is rumoured) to flutter Democratically about her. Young-Titan Tesla guys with entrepreneurial dream-teeth and a no doubt healthy obsession with other men.(They’re good boys at heart: their artisanal leather wallets are made from 100 per cent organic Niman Ranch grain-fed beef.) The rail-thin wives should be there, too, of course: agile, urgent, newly hatched Clintonistas, vaguely dissatisfied with everything, but keeping it real enough with teal-green silicon eyeballs and pricey MRS degrees from Stanford. Not to mention the usual klatsch of ruling-class hangers-on: radical Botoxers; Pilates Instructors for Peace and Zero Body Fat; members of the pedicure-rights community – all Teetering-for-Hillary in black sheath dresses and fuck-me pumps.

Read it.

Susanne Schötz, a phoenetics researcher from Lund University, is collecting samples of sounds made by cats from Lund, in Sweden’s far south, and Stockholm, almost 400 miles to the north.

By analysing the melodies and tones of cat vocalisations, she hopes to find out whether they vary based on where the cats live.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Jacques Hyzagi in a delightful piece that is nominally about interviewing a fashion designer but covers so much more.

By 3:45 the meeting was suddenly back on in a bar in the West Village. Then by 3:30 the location was changed to the East Side. By 4:00 as I just crossed town it was cancelled again and back on by 4:15 at a different place but Anne had to go pick up her young kids by 5 so the meeting would be short. Although Anne had my phone she was sending these directives via CDG as if I was working for them and they were then relaying them to me by phone. I had more luck meeting that Hezbollah leader in downtown Beirut for an interview.

Read it.

… a federal lawsuit claims that the Seattle-based coffee giant deliberately underfills its lattes by approximately 25 percent.

The horror! The horror!

Read it.

This story might make you want to point a wand at your computer screen and shout Avada Kedavra: Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has come under fire for appropriating Native American culture in recently released stories that build on the mythology she created.

…

Is something wrong with this? No. There is an entire genre of fiction, in fact, built around “secret histories,” where authors use real historical events or legends but retell them with revisionist or fantastical elements.

But Rowling has run afoul of the people who shout “cultural appropriation” whenever someone borrows from an ethnic tradition to which they do not belong. As was the case with Renee Bierbaum—the yoga instructor who was shut down by the county government after a Native American activist accused her of culture theft—a militant defender of Native traditions is asserting that Rowling is taking “a living tradition of a marginalized people.”

“That’s straight up colonialism/appropriation,” wrote Dr. Adrienne Keene, an academic and member of the Cherokee Nation, on Twitter.

Somebody needs to tell these people to get over themselves.

Read it.

In a country where one-third of teenagers are regular smokers, the risk of an attack on a group of students amassed on the street was deemed greater than the well-documented dangers of tobacco usage. The BBC reports that the union of school administrators first suggested a change in the policy banning smoking at schools immediately after the attacks, but was flatly rebuffed by the health ministry.

Regardless, schools have begun allowing smoking on their property even without permission from the national government, which Deputy Secretary General Michel Richard of the administrators union justified by saying, “Students massing on the street constitutes a very high risk, one that is certainly greater than that posed by the consumption of tobacco.”

Read it.

Student activists at Western Washington University—a public university in Bellingham, Washington—have published their demands, which easily trump Oberlin College students’ demands in terms of sheer absurdity. WWU students want an entire academic college dedicated to breeding social justice activists, separate residential safe spaces for racial groups, and a student committee charged with policing offensive speech.

It’s no exaggeration to say that if students got their way, WWU would essentially become an indoctrination camp. The proposed College of Power and Liberation would teach a very narrow far-left ideology, and the proposed Office for Social Transformation would investigate professors and students who are accused of microaggressions.

Read it.

And Hitler was all the Jews’ fault. It’s perfectly clear to me now.

Oberlin College professor Joy Karega, a social justice writing instructor at the Ohio-based liberal arts college, has published a series of posts on social media that largely blames the 9/11 attacks and the rise of the Islamic State and Charlie Hebdo attacks on Israel, according to a report in the campus newspaper that included numerous screenshots of the scholar’s comments.

What is a ‘social justice writing instructor’? And why does an educational institution (outside of a Communist state) have one?

A campus spokesperson told The Tower in response to the revelation of Karega’s comments that “Oberlin College respects the rights of its faculty, students, staff, and alumni to express their personal views. …The statements posted on social media by Dr. Joy Karega, assistant professor of rhetoric and composition, are hers alone and do not represent the views of Oberlin College.”

But if anyone had published similar screeds against Muslims, it would have been Hate Speech Hell for whoever was involved: Fired, expelled, sued, and pilloried in the media.

#BlackLiesMatter. Never doubt it.

Read it.

In 2014, the University of Vermont became the first school to allow students to select their preferred pronouns, like xe or zir, in a campus-wide database. Harvard University, the University of California system and the University of Tennessee, among others, have since followed suit.

But for those unfamiliar with gender-neutral pronouns, using them properly can prove confusing, sometimes simply due to the abundance of terms available

Some widely used pronouns include, but are not limited to, they, ne, ze (singular)/hir (possessive), ze (singular)/zir (possessive), spivak, ve and xe. Each pronoun has first-, second- and third-person conjugations plus plural versions.

Be the first on your block to be so open-minded that your brain falls out.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine dishes it up.

Some times one thing leads to another, and you end up going down a rabbit hole of campus crazy. Wait—isn’t “rabbit hole” a speciesist metaphor? I’m sure it is somewhere. Will Rogers used to say that it’s no trouble being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you; my paraphrase is that who needs joke writers when you have most of the professoriate working for you.

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

[Okay, that ties junk science in with class warfare — if we can only get racism or homophobia into the mix as well, we’ll have the perfect progressive platform.]

Read it.

Almost 40 percent of the millennials surveyed by Mintel for its 2015 report said cereal was an inconvenient breakfast choice because they had to clean up after eating it.

Read it.

James Bond loves his Sony smartphones; Jurassic World is outfitted entirely with Mercedes vehicles. All facts we wish we didn’t know about our favourite movies but which, unfortunately, have crept depressingly into our consciousness thanks to the thriving practice of product placement.

And here I always thought that James Bond using a Sony phone was just another instance of government employees being stuck with using products from the lowest bidder.

Read it.

According to the paper, students and faculty members held a wound-licking gathering at a cultural center on campus, where students described “feeling scared, hurt, and discriminated against.”

“A variety of different organizations and departments were present to listen, answer questions and show support” to the apparently weak and vulnerable students, who just a few days prior had disrupted Yiannopoulos’ event by smearing fake blood on their faces and chanting protest slogans.

One student at the event told the Targum that they “broke down crying” after the event, while another reported that he felt “scared to walk around campus the next day.” According to the report, “many others” said they felt “unsafe” at the event and on campus afterwards.

“It is upsetting that my mental health is not cared about by the University,” said one student at the event. “I do not know what else to do for us to be heard for us to be cared about. I deserve an apology, everyone in this room deserves an apology.”

God help these kids when they get out of their parents’ basements and into the Real World.

Read it.

I, for one, am fully prepared to believe it.

Read it.

What’s next? Missing pet pictures on milk cartons?

As if we weren’t already consumed with fear when it comes to our kids, now the pet industry wants in. There’s big money in making us believe we need to monitor our kids’ every move and guard against kidnapping, and Big Pet can smell it.

Read it.

Because ISIS totally operates in the North Atlantic. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Isn’t it time we got rid of NATO, and let the Europeans pay for their own defense?

Read it.

We the People [not ALL the people] of the United States [U.S.-centric!] in Order to form a more perfect Union [singles’ therapy and anatomy-neutral gingerbread persons available to uncoupled undergrads] establish Justice [students unfairly punished for “wrong” answers on organic-chemistry exam should join the Tweet for A’s study group], insure domestic Tranquility [teaching assistants who are married but still exploring their socio-sexual identities advised to stop reading now], provide for the common defence [those who have ever felt intimidated by campus security, please gather in the cafeteria, Thursday at 2 P.M., for Stoning ‘n Donuts] promote the general Welfare [warning: could cause distress to anyone not happy all the time], and secure the Blessings [anti-atheistic] of Liberty [full disclosure: I’m going outside now to dumpster-dive for lunch and do community service—it’s a beautiful day, though I mustn’t forget that the fine weather is a serious indicator of global warming] to ourselves [the Committee of Apologies feels shame that the Founding Parents used such a possessive, exclusive, and egomaniacal pronoun] and . . . [The length of this Preamble, which consists entirely of one complex sentence, is discriminatory to those suffering from A.D.D., as well as other learning issues, so we are skipping ahead to Article I, Section 1; not that we’re implying that there’s anything wrong with a disorder, or even learning, as long as it is consensual.]

Read it.

Students at Vassar College have struck a critical blow against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian: they signed a resolution calling on the college to divest from Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. Without a doubt, the hour of Palestinian liberation has finally arrived.

Forward, the Revolution, for all freedom-loving peoples!

The resolution calls on Vassar to disallow students from consuming Ben & Jerry’s during official functions. I scream, you scream, we all scream because it never stops.

Steve Sailer finds such things so you don’t have to.

Bucks TV analyst Marques Johnson says he was called into a conversation player DeMarcus Cousins was having with the Kings operations team over the controversial shirt.

‘I walk into the building and DeMarcus Cousins calls me over to an animated discussion he’s having with Kings operations people. He [asks] me, “Olskool, what you think about this T-shirt? Told him a little insensitive on first day of Black History Month.” They pulled the shirts,’ said Johnson on his Facebook page.

Read it.

From segregation to segregation in only 50 years. That’s progress.

Watch it.

Not something you see every day.

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame them. We wouldn’t want him to give Lenin a bad name.

Read it.

When the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, some who objected to the ruling opined that this will lead to legalizing polygamy or even group marriages (where two or more couples marry each other). What they didn’t mention was a new kind of marriage trend which also goes against the biblical definition of marriage being between one man and one woman. The new trend is called Sologamy, which defines marriage between one man or one woman – otherwise known as marrying one’s self.

I am not making this up. On the other hand, I have no confidence that the writers aren’t. But it’s fun to read.

Read it.

The USS Stockdale, a guided-missile-launching destroyer, has set sail powered by an unusual fuel – waste beef fat.

The ship, deployed this week in the USS John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group, is part of the Navy’s Great Green Fleet initiative, which is trying to make swabbies more environmentally friendly by using alternative fuels for power.

“The Navy’s use of renewable energy in the Great Green Fleet represents its ability to diversify its energy sources, and also our nation’s ability to take what would be a waste product and create homegrown, clean, advanced biofuels to support a variety of transportation needs,” said US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

“Today’s deployment proves that America is on its way to a secure, clean energy future, where both defense and commercial transportation can be fueled by our own hardworking farmers and ranchers, reduce landfill waste and bring manufacturing jobs back to rural America.”

This might sound like environmentalism gone mad but don’t have a cow, man, because there’s method to the Navy’s madness. The beef fat was purchased from ranchers in the Midwest at competitive rates, Vilsack said, and rendered into fuel by a California company at a cost of $2.05 per gallon.

Mark Steyn ponders the irony.

Canadians are dead, and so is satire. Six Quebeckers get slaughtered by Islamic terrorists in Burkina Faso, and to honor their memory Prime Minister Justin Trudeau leads a moment of silence …at a mosque.

And probably didn’t think twice about it. It would have been hilarious if a jihadist had cut his head off, but you can’t have everything.

Speaking of prime ministers, having spent his entire premiership assuring us that whatever happens in the news headlines is nothing to do with Islam, David Cameron has suddenly discovered a few things that are to do with Islam. The opening paragraph from Mr Cameron’s column in the London Times:

Where in the world do you think the following things are happening? School governors’ meetings where male governors sit in the meeting room and the women have to sit out of sight in the corridor. Young women only allowed to leave their house in the company of a male relative. Religious councils that openly discriminate against women and prevent them from leaving abusive marriages.

The answer, I’m sorry to say, is Britain.

Ah, right. And who in Britain bears responsibility for letting a parallel self-segregating society incubate and grow these last 20 years?

Check it out.

I’d like to see these on the street.

Read it.

It is against the law to sell homemade baked goods in Wisconsin. Cookies, brownies, muffins, whatever. Those who violate the law potentially face up to $1,000 in fines and up to six months in jail.

…

Wisconsin’s GazetteXtra notes that the Wisconsin Bakery Association also lobbied against the bill, saying that commercial operators “don’t need more competition; we need cooperation from our government!” Well, there wasn’t even a mask to slip off, was there? They are simply saying that the government should protect them from the marketplace, and it doesn’t even occur to them that this is wrong and unconstitutional, or they just don’t care.

Read it.

Swedish police will no longer be able to give descriptions of alleged criminals for fear of being seen as racist.

According to an internal letter, police in capital city Stockholm are instructed to refrain from describing suspects’ race and nationality, according to news website Speisa.

…

The crimes “involve everything from lighter traffic accidents to serious crimes like muggings, beatings and murder,” the paper reported.

The letter specifies that, for everyday crimes such as burglary, basic information such as ethnicity, nationality, skin colour and height should not be given.

Read it.

I wonder whether he used the classic line ‘Round up the usual suspects.’

Read it.

Let us descend into the depths of SWPL-dom on the Left Coast….

The people in Bea’s baby yoga class are split down a social fault-line between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. In a sensible society, parents would heed their doctor’s advice. Here, the hierarchy of perceived wisdom tends to be reversed: the one who knows best how a baby ought to be reared is the baby itself, followed by his or her parents, who’ve read at least three baby books and a bunch of persuasive unsourced articles that they found on the internet.

The paediatrician, meanwhile, is considered a corporate shill who just wants to poke needles in your child and pump it full of toxins, diphtheria and non-organic baby formula. A doctor’s recommendations must always be filtered through a Facebook forum for concerned local moms. And what do doctors know, anyway? Only what they’ve gleaned from a decade of medical training and their years of subsequent experience, backed up by the full weight of modern science.

If I were to ask my parents whether they raised me according to Attachment, Tiger or Parisian principles, they’d wonder what on earth I was on about. Middle-class child-rearing across most of the developed world has become increasingly demented: consumerist, competitive, ideologically charged. And LA’s “crunchy” moms and dads are pioneers, way out west at the crossroads of celebrity and new-age culture.

Read it.

Well, he’s a socialist, so he’s accustomed to thinking that wishes will come true.

Every time I see a picture of Bernie Sanders, I keep hearing ‘You kids get off my lawn!’

Read it.

The Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Harvard University distributed what it is calling “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice” on campus to help freshmen students navigate difficult conversations when they return home for Christmas break.

An alternative title might be ‘DoubleThink for Dummies’.

Some prankster ought to paint ‘SWPL’ on all the roofs of Harvard buildings, just to keep things clear.

Read it.

Which is like saying that you don’t believe in biology — Politically Correct but essentially stupid.

‘Nothing about whiteness describes who I am’

Except the fact that she’s, like, white.

Now after losing her job and reportedly having to live on food stamps, she told the Guardian she will not apologise for how she identifies.

Of course not. Delusional people are delusional for a reason.

“If somebody asked me how I identify, I identify as black. Nothing about whiteness describes who I am… For as long as I can remember, I saw myself as black.”

I always saw myself as Green Lantern — didn’t mean I could fly.

She disputes those who tried to defend her actions by calling her ‘transracial’ – a term which implies similarity to transgenderism, in that you were born one race but identify as another.

In other words, her fantasy ought to trump your reality. In the Good Old Days they locked people up for that sort of thing.

Read it.

Approximately 50 student protesters from the University of Arizona and local high schools showed up Thursday evening to voice their displeasure at the opening of the Illegal Pete’s restaurant in Tucson, Arizona.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

The U. of Arizona Chicano-rights group M.E.Ch.A. says the term “illegal” is a racial slur.

Uh, what race is ‘illegal’? Or ‘Pete’? Perhaps they could change the name to ‘The Hypersensitive Hispanic’.

Read it.

Poor babies.

Read it.

Harvard College plans to change the title of its heads of residential housing from “house master,” the traditional term, to a new term that will better reflect “the 21st-century needs of residential student life,” according to a letter to students from the college dean, Rakesh Khurana.

The change, announced in an email sent out Tuesday, comes after long discussion over whether the term “master” has connotations of slavery, and in the wake of recent protests at Harvard and other colleges over racial bias, from the real to the symbolic

I suggest ‘Head Coddler’ as being an accurate reflection of the position’d duties.

Read it. (Well, watch the video.)

Darwin Award nominee.

Read it.

A suspected burglar who became stuck in the chimney of a house in California has died after the homeowner lit a fire without realising anyone was inside.

Think of it as evolution in action.

(Ponder the fact that British newspapers often have better coverage of interesting American news than the Drive-By Media.)

Read it.

A government commission avoiding blaming a government department. That’s news.

I like a conspiracy theory better than most, but this is a stretch — and not the sort of tabloid-fodder you expect to find in the Telegraph.

Read it.

Israeli researchers, writing in the journal Cell this week, have found that different people’s bodies respond to eating the same meal very differently — which means that a diet that may work wonders for your best friend may not have the same impact on you.

Lead authors Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science focused on one key component used in creating balanced diet plans like Atkins, Zone or South Beach. Known as the glycemic index or GI for short, it was developed decades ago as a measure of how certain foods impact blood sugar level and has been assumed to be a fixed number.

But it’s not. It turns out that it varies widely depending on the individual.

But that doesn’t men that Global Warming isn’t a thing! Not at all!