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I’ll bet you didn’t know that there even was an Australian Rhino Project.

It’s good to know that they don’t have anything better to do with their time and money.

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Heaps of unworn clothes are being discarded in the Chilean desert, adding to a swiftly swelling graveyard of fast-fashion lines past.

According to a report from Agence France-Presse, the massive mound of clothes consists of garments made in China and Bangladesh that make their way to stores in the US, Europe, and Asia. When the garments are not purchased, they are brought to Chile’s Iquique port to be resold to other Latin American countries.

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McDonald’s McPlant, a burger with a plant-based meat patty, is now available at select locations in the U.S. for a limited time.

Notice how nobody ever tries to make a meat-based plant substitute.

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Hard luck, Madonna, your lovingly assembled rainbow family is no longer the most cutting-edge crew on the showbiz block. If you want to excel as an A-list parent these days, you need a trans child to show off on social media.

Jamie Lee Curtis has revealed that her child, born Thomas, now answers to the name of Ruby. The 62-year-old actress has declared to a waiting world — via People magazine — that the most difficult thing about adjusting to this unforeseen circumstance is calling them by their new name.

Fortunately the kid is adopted and so won’t screw up the succession to the Haden-Gust barony. The heir-presumptive only has daughters, so presumably the title will die with him.

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It’s in the blood of any decent charlatan to solve problems that don’t exist, rather than face the full horror of their in-tray. Sadiq Khan (no stranger to blood) wants to outlaw misogyny – wolf-whistling you understand, not FGM, Sharia courts or segregation. Health secretary Sajid Javid, wants blood donations to be more inclusive (because worrying about HIV is just silly). Keir Starmer meanwhile, is prepared to ‘Sweat blood to win voters’ respect’ just as soon as he’s finished playing hunt the cervix.

When it comes to non-issues however, my personal preference remains the LGBTQwerty attack, aka ‘the world is not gay enough’ (and if that’s not the title of the next James Bond film, there’s no justice in the world). Indeed the ostensive lack of gayness is a conundrum worth pondering as you mince across London’s permanent gay crossings, sip your Starbuck’s gay coffee, or get run over by the Old Bill, too focused on painting their nails in their gay ‘hate crime cars’.

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One of my favorite pastimes is reading those alternate-lifestyle essays that the left-wing media loves to publish unironically. You know the sort: Why I quit my job at a high-powered social media firm to become a minimum-wage pansexual. Or: How my open relationship with three maple trees and a rhinoceros helped me find inner peace.

The august New York Times rarely indulges such deviancy, if only because the cardinal rule of that paper’s op-ed page is to never let down one’s guard lest one accidentally say something interesting. Yet recently the Times did make a modest exception. Last week it ran an essay by Lara Bazelon titled ‘Divorce Can Be an Act of Radical Self-Love’. And while the piece didn’t feature any gender-neutral throuples, it did mount a defense of the far more traditional institution of broken marriage.

Read it. And watch the video.

Democrats correctly see Ron DeSantis as a potential presidential nominee in 2024, and are doing all they can to discredit him. This video is by an anonymous left-wing group (“Remove Ron”) and closes with the slogan “Remove Ron” and the hashtag #Florever Purge.

The makers of the video are banking on the idea that for most people, freedom is terrifying. Many have found the video funny and some have interpreted it as a parody, but it is for real.

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When the staff at Kunsten Museum of Modern Art in ??northern Denmark opened boxes last week from artist Jens Haaning, they expected to see pieces featuring the half-million kroner they lent him for the works of art, the director told a Danish radio show host.

The new name for the artwork: “Take the Money and Run.”

Sounds as if they got what they paid for.

CNN.

All it needs is the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

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“I’m just born to be in it,” failed Senate candidate Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke told Vanity Fair before he announced his failed campaign for president in 2019. He dropped out a few months later, after a series of Democratic primary polls showed him getting blown out by alternative options such as “None” and “Not Sure.”

Steve Sailer.

Because the ASHG values genetic diversity, it insists that all groups are genetically identical.

Or something.

Okay, let’s try that again: All races are diverse, but some races are more diverse than others.

Check it out.

I am not making this up.

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To be chosen as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people is usually an accolade worth fighting for. Yet this year, it seems to be the celebrity equivalent of the booby prize. Cockburn imagines that it was put together by various subversive elements within the publication who hoped to see the mass ridicule that its various choices, both of subjects and of writers, have led to. They will not be disappointed.

That an airbrushed photograph of Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, takes pride of place in the ‘Icons’ section says all that you need to know. He, poor boy, looks as if he has been captured by a militant group and is being made to put out a hostage video, while she — quite literally — is wearing the pants. But it is the text about them by a celebrity chef named José Andrés beggars belief. ‘They turn compassion into boots on the ground…they give voice to the voiceless through media production.’ Dear God. Chef Andrés would be best advised to remain in the kitchen, sharpening his knives, if this is the level of his insight.

Steve Sailer.

Fighting climate change via green energy is the most important thing in the world, except, of course, for hiring more black women to climb up hundreds of feet in the air to repair windmill turbines in the name of equity.

C’mon, people, priorities!

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In the two hectares of land he bought, he has already built his first house, where he lives with his family, in hobbit clothes, and his doors are also open to visitors. Here, the pastry chef, who has a degree in geology, plans to build the caravan of the dwarves, the green dragon inn and a large version of Bilbo Baggins’ house. His goal is to transform this piece of Abruzzo into a hobbit village, with an adjoining farmhouse, where visitors will be able to live in a magical world, which, according to Gentile, is not too far from the way people live in Bucchianico.

Yeah, I’m sure that all of us, when we hear ‘hobbit’, think ‘Italian’.

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I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

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A New Zealand terrorist attack that left six people injured has prompted a supermarket chain to remove all its knives and scissors from its shelves.

One general manager of the supermarket chain Countdown said the store was also considering not selling knives in the future.

One would think that a more … focused solution would be to remove “a Sri Lankan national who was said to be aligned with the ISIS ideology” rather than inconveniencing EVERYBODY ELSE by removing knives and scissors from the store would be the way to go. But I guess not.

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There’s a pleasure in the downfall of sages, gurus, and moralists that is, unfortunately, part of the makeup of Man. Those whom we delight to place on a pedestal we delight equally to pull down. When a stern reader of lessons to humanity is found egregiously to have broken the very lessons that he has read the rest of us, we feel a sense of relief. He is just like us after all; we therefore need to feel a little less ashamed of our own conduct.

I doubt, then, that anyone who read of the current scandal concerning the research into human dishonesty by Dan Ariely of Duke University will not have taken some slightly shamefaced pleasure in it. Some of his research into dishonesty has proved to be dishonest: what, in fact, one might call meta-dishonest.

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I know there’s a live argument over the Oxford comma, and whether to use one or two spaces after a period. But these are so 20-teens: did you know that capitalization is—somehow—oppressive?

That’s what we’re told by Dr. Linda Manyguns, I mean, dr. linda manyguns, who is “associate vice president of indigenization and decolonization” at Mount Royal University in Alberta.

Apparently capitalization (except of ‘Indigenous’) is raaaaaaysis. Who knew?

I know what you’re thinking, and I checked: this is not a Monty Python skit.

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Shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a ‘vaccine’ that doesn’t prevent someone from getting the disease and doesn’t prevent someone from spreading the disease. After COVID, how hard could it be?

Severian speaks for all right-thinking people.

And then there’s the weird schizophrenia of it all. I mean, as Nikolai put it the other day, half the time you want “your” countrypersyns to lose, to deny them the opportunity to wipe xzheyr asses with the flag on the podium… and half the time you want them to win, precisely because you know they’d wipe their asses with the flag on the podium, thus giving the CivNats in the audience (who are probably the only ones watching) a good, long, hard look at what civic nationalism hath wrought. The idea that I’d cheer for any of them for the old fashioned reason of “one American supporting another” is a sick joke — this is Clown World; xzhey are citizens of Clownlandia; xzhey are NOT AMERICANS, whatever it might say on their official government paperwork.

A good point. Why would I, an American, want to watch a competition between people representing countries that aren’t America and people who allegedly represent American but actually don’t? It’s insane.

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We document appearance effects in the economics profession. Using unique data on PhD graduates from ten of the top economics departments in the United States we test whether more attractive individuals are more likely to succeed. We find robust evidence that appearance has predictive power for job outcomes and research productivity. Attractive individuals are more likely to study at higher ranked PhD institutions and are more likely to be placed at higher-ranking academic institutions not only for their first job, but also for jobs as many as 15 years after their graduation, even when we control for the ranking of PhD institution and first job. Appearance also predicts the success of research output: while it does not predict the number of papers an individual writes, it predicts the number of citations for a given number of papers, again even when we control for the ranking of the PhD institution and first job. All these effects are robust, statistically significant, and substantial in magnitude.

Name a field where looks don’t matter (but don’t hold your breath waiting to find one).

I guess this is another case of Tenure Doesn’t Grow On Trees You Know.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Longtime readers will remember Barrett Brown, the former “Anonymous” spokesman who went to federal prison after a September 2012 incident in which he threatened an FBI agent’s family in a bizarre 13-minute video rant on YouTube. That episode went down while I was trying to cover the 2012 presidential election, but Barrett had been threatening me (and also Patterico) in connection with some of the weirdness swirling around Neal Rauhauser, which is a very long story.

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Janet Woodcock, acting commissioner of the FDA, published a letter Friday asking the federal government’s top inspector to investigate if FDA staff worked inappropriately with biotech company Biogen to approve the new drug.

“To the extent these concerns could undermine the public’s confidence in FDA’s decision, I believe that it is critical that the events at issue be reviewed by an independent body such as the Office of the Inspector General, in order to determine whether any interactions that occurred between Biogen and FDA review staff were inconsistent with FDA policies and procedures,” she wrote in the open letter.

The drug in question, Aduhelm, was approved by the agency last month and has caused an uproar in the scientific community. Three of the agency’s scientific advisors resigned following the decision.

Deep state, anyone?

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Former news anchor Kari Lake announced her candidacy in June, positioning herself as the “only conservative, America First Trump Republican in the race.” But instead of spending the opening weeks of the campaign touting her conservative bona fides, Lake has sparred with local media over her donations to liberal politicians.

Gee, I guess she lied. How unexpected….

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Not everyone will have heard of Oli London, a British social media influencer who made news for two reasons last week. The first was that London came out as plural. Which is to say that he came out as a nonbinary person. Which is very 2020 and something so un-noteworthy that I’m sure you’ll agree it is hardly worth remarking upon. The other thing London did was more unusual. Which was that he came out as Korean.

You might guess from his name that Oli London is not Korean, but he has spent some time there (in the South rather than the North apparently) and enjoys the language and culture. So in his coming-out message London revealed some rather extreme plastic surgery to his face and announced that he wished to be known as Korean. ‘People might not get it, it’s a new concept, whatever,’ he said, demonstrating that whatever his proficiency at Korean, he retains that millennial urge to mutilate the English tongue.

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The leftist bull is finally spilling over into the real world and normal Americans are not okay with it. One woman in a viral Twitter video, found herself fighting for her basic rights while at a spa trying to relax. The unnamed woman was at Wi Spa in Los Angeles, California, when a naked biological male entered the women’s section. She then recorded her reaction and conversation with the employees on her phone.

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Classified Ministry of Defence documents containing details about HMS Defender and the British military have been found at a bus stop in Kent.

One set of documents discusses the likely Russian reaction to the ship’s passage through Ukrainian waters off the Crimea coast on Wednesday.

Another details plans for a possible UK military presence in Afghanistan after the US-led Nato operation there ends.

The government said an investigation had been launched.

Well, that’s all right, then.

The documents, almost 50 pages in all, were found in a soggy heap behind a bus stop in Kent early on Tuesday morning.

A member of the public, who wishes to remain anonymous, contacted the BBC when he realised the sensitive nature of the contents.

Note: The BBC. Not the Ministry of Defence. (If you had found classified documents behind a bus station, would you have notified the Washington Post rather than the DOJ?)

This is why we can’t ever have nice things.

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Notice how nobody is developing meat-based vegetarian food. Guess why that might be.

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The latest news out of radical racial justice land would be terrifying if it weren’t so damn funny. BET studios actually dropped a trailer for a new movie titled “Karen,” a flick about a terrifying “entitled white woman” who terrorizes her new African American neighbors.

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Have you ever notice that nobody is trying to make fake vegetarian products out of meat?

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Babylon Bee.

The New York Times called The Babylon Bee dangerous far-right misinformation but has now retracted that claim and issued a correction after reviewing the data and admitting The Babylon Bee actually has a really high accuracy rate in predicting the future.

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The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops this week are expected to discuss if pro-choice Catholic politicians should be able to receive Holy Communion.

The mere fact that this is considered to need discussion underlines the extent to which the Roman church in the U.S. has become corrupt.

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A conservative columnist raised $104,153 on GoFundMe for the grandmother of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in Puerto Rico, but the family is refusing the help after AOC called out former President Donald Trump not doing enough to help.

After the Squad member posted on Twitter, lamenting the condition of her grandmother’s home in Puerto Rico following 2017’s Hurricane Maria, conservative Daily Wire columnist Matt Walsh set up a GoFundMe page that raised $104,153, only to be told the family is refusing the donation.

So this is all just a  political stunt. I thought AOC was n aberrations but apparently it’s genetic.

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This story reminds me of the facility that the Minnesota state government purchased last year at the start of the Coronamadness: $7 million for a former produce warehouse which was refitted as a refrigerated morgue for an expected wave of corpses of victims of the Wuhan Coronavirus. The building was never used. I think the state later asked the federal government to reimburse them for the cost, but I don’t know if the feds ever ponied up.

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I am not making this up.

The film is Reichardt’s eighth feature and if you’ve seen Meek’s Cutoff, a sort of western, or Wendy and Lucy, possibly the best dog film ever, you will know she is a singular filmmaker whose characters always serve as plot rather than serve the plot, which is a joy. It opens in modern-day Oregon as a dog digs up something in the woods. And I don’t need to be cagey about what the dog finds as it happens in the first few minutes. It discovers a pair of human skeletons positioned in such a way that you understand that whoever they were, they were close.

This is the first evidence I’ve seen that magazines, like radio stations, can suddenly change format.

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1 Muslim + 1 RPG + 1 ‘sky pool’ = you do the math.

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n St. Louis, Mo., the worst-in-country murder rate is at a 50-year high, the police department has nearly 100 unfilled jobs, and the mayor wants to defund the department and shut down a city jail.

St. Louis’ Tishaura Jones, who became the city’s first Black female mayor last month, had campaigned on a promise to enact progressive criminal justice reforms.

Time to leave.

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Black Hammer, a small, “anti-colonial communist” organization based largely in Chicago, blends an off-beat Marxist ideology with explicit racial hatred. Despite their limited numbers, recurring Facebook bans, and general disconnection with the rest of the hard left, their commitment to creating a colonized people’s paradise in the Rockies appears unshaken. Although they’re not taken seriously by other activist groups on the left, they take themselves seriously. It’s unclear whether that self-belief will be enough to sustain them in their latest project.

Hammer City, which was announced to widespread mockery on Twitter, will be situated on an undisclosed 200-acre plot in Colorado. The compound will last thousands of years, say the Black Hammers: “After 600 years of struggle against colonialism, genocide, torture, and ecocide, the land is in the hands of The Colonized Working Class.”

Better than anything on TV.

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Astonishing scenes this week, whereby the Tory government announces a White Paper to re-nationalise the railways. The union bosses and Guardianistas who have called for such policy for decades immediately decided that actually it’s a terrible idea, or that this doesn’t count as re-nationalising because it’s the Conservatives doing it, or that calling the new entity “Great British Railways” just because it will run Great Britain’s railways is so offensive that the entire project should be called off. It’s all very tribal, and very silly, and very 2021, alas.

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A member of the House of Lords in England is currently under investigation for refusing to participate in a mandatory anti-sexual harassment training.

Lord David James, Baron of Blackheath, said that if he took part in the training it would be an act of “treason” against the Queen, according to Insider. James is one of four Lords who are under investigation for not taking part in the program, which was due to be completed by April 1.

…

James, a life peer, said he took an oath to uphold the Queen’s coronation oath and that he thinks the training would breach said oath. He said the training threatens the principle of free speech under the Privilege of Parliament Act 1512.

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A photograph of Canada’s Justin Trudeau shows him using a HP Windows laptop, which wouldn’t be remarked upon, but it sporting an Apple sticker will be.

Fake, but accurate.

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

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For normal people, today is Mother’s Day. It may be a marketing conspiracy between flower-mongers, Hallmark Cards, and the premium restaurant industry, but it’s pretty straightforward and celebrates something intelligible.

Unless you are a leftist Democrat in thrall to the Pronoun Police, in which case the world needs to be made unintelligible. The left’s war on human nature, which is the main thing that stands between them and their fever dreams of utopia, produces idiocies like this from Congressperson Ayanna Pressley, proud member of “The Squad.” She thinks “mothers” should be rendered “birthing people” because people with a penis can be women and can. . . give birth? I’m still trying to figure out how that end of the transitive pronoun spectrum works.

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I’d submit that the most important political observation of our time is James Poulos’s theory of the pink police state. A pink police state, as Poulos understands it, is a regime that abandons political freedoms in exchange for interpersonal ones — a regime that exists not to preserve political liberties as conventionally understood, but to guarantee social entitlements. The pink police state isn’t concerned so much with whether the trains run on time or whether would-be invaders are kept at bay. No, what really matters is whether the citizens are being sufficiently “nice” to each other.

Steve Sailer looks at your tax dollars at work.

Some people like to imagine that the CIA is an ultra-competent organization of master spies concocting and implementing vast world-historical plots. But now the CIA has, once and for all, disproven all such conspiracy theories.

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Apparently the Biden Boom consists of people with enhanced unemployment compensation and stimulus checks deciding to Just Stay Home and let the government support them.

You always get more of what you pay for.

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A New Hampshire man has turned himself into the police after setting off eighty pounds of explosives as part of a ‘gender reveal’ party. NBC reports that the explosion, which was apparently caused by a legal explosive called Tannerite, led to fears of an earthquake and cracked the foundations of nearby homes. ‘Are you kidding me?’ said one local, ‘I’m all up for silliness and what not, but that was extreme.’

Extreme? Yes. Unique? No. ‘Gender reveal’ parties, for those who are unfamiliar, involve the announcement of whether a couple’s new child is a boy or a girl through the release of blue or pink smoke or other substances. Sounds innocent? Sure. But the elaborate risk-taking that goes into these events has escalated to frightening, fascinating levels.

LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!

I can’t imagine giving a shit about the gender of my own kid (if I had one , which fortunately I don’t), much less someone else’s.

Stupidity is usually a capital crime. Think of it as evolution in action.

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You might be woke if: you call a guy a bigot because he doesn’t want to date a “girl” who has a penis.

You might be woke if: you think people are racists because of the color of their skin.

You might be woke if: you think transvestites should host children’s reading events but it’s “cultural appropriation” for a woman to wear hoop earrings.