Read it.

When the Ivy League opened itself up to co-education in the sixties, I don’t think that this is what they had in mind.

Read it.

Chicago police have confirmed that a high-end Burberry store on the city’s central Michigan Ave. was robbed no less than two times this week, with the second break-in coming early Thursday morning. The first instance was Tuesday morning, with the burglaries being especially brazen given they took place in daylight hours, or just before dawn. The Tuesday incident involved five men in a White SUV, but apparently with no other leads or identifiers. So naturally they hit the same site again, plus others.

But as CWB Chicago details of the second break-in, it appears the criminals are positively boasting about the ease of mass theft in a seemingly “lawless” windy city: “A group of armed burglars broke into two Lakeview convenience stores, dumped their stolen cash registers in front of Gov. JB Pritzker’s home, and then burglarized the Burberry store on Michigan Avenue early Thursday.”

Check it out.

I am not making this up.

New York Times.

New York’s attorney general is investigating the death of a 29-year-old man who was badly burned when he was shot with a stun gun after dousing himself with hand sanitizer during an altercation with police officers, officials said on Thursday.

I rejoice that the Attorney General of New York State has nothing more important to do than investigate the death of a crazy person in a small town upstate.

(Think of it as evolution in action.)

ZMan does a review.

Politics in a liberal democracy is first and foremost performative. Getting attention is the first goal for political types and they do that by comporting to familiar roles. How well they play those roles, as in any type of theater, establishes their status in the hierarchy of the political theater. Some actors, of course, take a short cut and play one of the various fools or jesters in the political drama. If done well this is a fast-track to attention, but the role itself is always on the periphery of the main show.

If most people were operating from self-interest and had a reasonable sense of their self-interest, political theater would not exist. For example, why would people line up to vote when they know their votes will be ignored? Most people know this to some degree and the science bears it out, but people still vote. In fact, voter participation has gone up as the effectiveness of voting has declined. The theater of democratic politics blinds people to the futility of it for some reason.

Refusal to wear a mask says more about you than your face ever could (The Guardian) Indeed it does.

Marjorie Taylor Greene wonders why we never closed schools or businesses because of cancer (Daily Kos)

Fauci calls Ron Johnson’s AIDS comment ‘preposterous’: ‘I don’t have any clue of what he’s talking about’ (The Hill) Almost certainly true.

Fauci dumbfounded by GOP senator’s false accusation (CNN)  False!

Face masks and omicron: Should you upgrade from cloth to N95s? Double mask? (SFChronicle) In any event, you need to PANIC!

Omicron: More Transmissible, Less Severe Due To ‘Common Cold’ Mutation?

Questioning School Madness and Vaccine Mandates

Fauci Downplays Severity Of Omicron Strain

Krazy Krugman: GOP ‘Apparatchiks’ Trying ‘To Keep Pandemic Going’

Huge New Study Shows Zero COVID Deaths Among Healthy German Kids

New York Will Require Full Vaccination To Access Restaurants, Gyms And Entertainment; 5-Year-Olds Need At Least One Shot  Time to leave.

Moderna President Warns Vaccines May Struggle To Protect Against Omicron

Doctor Banned For Questioning Efficacy Of Masks Wins High Court Case

Biden Surgeon General: Even Tripled Vaxxed Still Have To Wear Masks Indoors  Don’t forget to PANIC!

De Blasio Announces NYC Will Mandate Vaccines for Private Sector Workers  Time to leave.

Oregon Moves To Make Indoor Mask Mandate Permanent  Time to leave.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

ZMan attempts to read the witch-hunt tea leaves.

Lost in the rush into the holiday season is the Charlottesville monkey trial concluded last week with a verdict for the plaintiffs. The jury had no verdict on some of the claims but agreed there was some sort of conspiracy by the defendants. They also decided that the plaintiffs suffered no harm as a result of it, but the defendants were doo-doo heads who deserved some sort of punishment. As a result, they awarded the plaintiffs eleventy billion bars of gold-pressed latinum in punitive damages.

The jury did not fall into Star Trek jargon, but they may as well have, given the structure of their decision. According to lawyers who followed the case, the punitive damages are symbolic due to rules governing the relationship between punitive and compensatory damages in civil cases. Typically, courts limit the ratio to a single digit. That is, punitive damage awards are capped at something less than ten times the compensatory damages, which in this case were one dollar.

This reality is of no consequence as the trial was always political activism on behalf of the ruling class. In a sane society this never would have been in a courtroom and the lawyers who brought it would be deported. Ours is a society in crisis, so ridiculous things like this are common now. The lawyers got their win and regime media was happy to promote it as a great blow against free speech. For a day, the blue-checks on Twitter were celebrating the win.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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’.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

“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.

Read it.

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!

Read it.

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’.

Read it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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?

Read it.

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….

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.