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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.

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Due to the government mandated coal phase-out, 11 coal-fired power plants with a total capacity of 4.7 GW were shut down on January 1, 2021. But the coal phase-out ended up lasting only 8 days, after which several power plants had to be reconnected to the grid due to a prolonged low-wind period.

The line for ‘I Told You So’ forms on the right….

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Apparently GQ is now officially a gay magazine. No surprises here.

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French tacos are tacos like chicken fingers are fingers. Which is to say, they are not tacos at all. First of all, through some mistranslation or misapprehension of its Mexican namesake, the French tacos is always plural, even when there’s only one, pronounced with a voiced “S.” Technically, the French tacos is a sandwich: a flour tortilla, slathered with condiments, piled with meat (usually halal) and other things (usually French fries), doused in cheese sauce, folded into a rectangular packet, and then toasted on a grill. “In short, a rather successful marriage between panini, kebab, and burrito,” according to the municipal newsletter of Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon in which the French tacos may or may not have been born.

Surely there is a Geneva Convention regarding Crimes Against Food.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine.

First up, the New York Times—a former newspaper, as Andrew Klavan likes to remind us—has run an “explainer” about the growing universe of potential personal pronouns. The first expansion took us up to something like 60 or so, but now we have moved on to “neopronouns” (seriously), which takes us way beyond “nonbinary” pronouns to a domain that appears infinitely expandable, as this chart suggests….

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A life-sized likeness of the Swedish climate-rescue maiden Greta Thunberg is coming to the University of Winchester in England. Despite severe economic hardship, a bronze simulacrum of Greta the Great that cost about $31,000 (£24,000) will be erected in front of the “climate-smart” West Downs Centre at the University.

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Portland Public Schools’ Board of Education delayed a vote to approve an evergreen mascot over concerns that the symbol is connected to lynching and could be misperceived as “a tree of death.”

Students and faculty at Ida B. Wells-Barnett High School overwhelmingly selected an evergreen tree to replace its former Trojans mascot in a recent survey. Board director Michelle DePass delayed the board’s approval vote on the mascot over concerns that evergreens could evoke ties to lynchings, the Portland Tribune reported.

Uh, guys? Nobody was ever lynched from an evergreen tree. The branches aren’t strong enough.

You’d think that somebody in Portland would know that.

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Perhaps you are amazed at the millions of people who have bought into the idea that the gradually increasing level of a trace atmospheric gas (CO2, currently about 0.04% of the atmosphere) is going to bring about world climate doom a hundred or so years from now. You may be even more amazed at the similarly large numbers of people who seem to think that the salvation from this doom is to be found in bringing lawsuits against various companies that produce fossil fuels and getting some court somewhere to order that the companies do . . . what exactly? And that is going to avert the climate doom . . . how exactly?

I can’t answer those questions. But the posing of the questions has led me, as a service to readers, to try to follow some of these ridiculous lawsuits, which I have dubbed the “stupidest litigations” in the country.

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Like in the US, the debate on whether hydroponic grown vegetables can be classified as organic is ongoing in Europe. That’s partly because of the surcharges organically certified produce yields, but there’s more. Growing hydroponically is truly sustainable, industry suppliers and growers say. “There are wonderful sustainable initiatives, they are just not organic,” is the answer of the organic industry.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was an ‘organic industry’.

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I was raised Christian and the more I’ve thought about it, the more curious something about my upbringing seems. My church was constantly denying it was ‘religious’. By any objective social-scientific measures, the community was decidedly religious. Maybe we weren’t that organized (there was no website), but we recited historic creeds, we submitted to the authority of a sacred text and we practiced ancient rituals. We identified with the worldwide institutional expression of the body of Christ, yet we still liked to say we weren’t ‘religious’. Throughout my childhood I was reminded in sermon after sermon that we were ‘Spiritual but not Religious’.

Salad-bar Christianity in all its apathy.

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Attempting to give airplanes that classic railroad feel.

I’ll pass.

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Perhaps they ought to rename themselves ‘Science Denier American’.

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Emily Ratajkowski is one crazy lefty. The supermodel, actress and political activist just had her baby, but no one, not even her, is going to know what gender it is. No, it doesn’t matter what Ratajkowski’s child features in terms of anatomy. Only the baby knows what gender it is and we will all find out in due time.

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There are two women leaning against a railing overlooking the medieval armor exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on a Sunday afternoon. Both have shoulder-length, proudly gray hair, are resplendent in wooden jewelry and draped in clashing layers of flowing tapestry ranging from clay to marigold to topaz, some with vaguely ethnic-inspired patterning.

The two women are in conversation, six feet apart down to the inch and laughing. They’re having a good time. The tableau is a sort of variation on a theme, an aesthetic we might call Santa Fe Art Mom and they are exactly the sort of person you’d expect, as they are, to be wearing two face masks, each.

These two women were numbers four and five out of six people I counted sporting two face masks, one directly top of the other, on a recent cold and drizzly afternoon trip to the Met. The double face mask is a queer, late-stage coronavirus grotesquerie. Just as America’s trifling, paper-pushing dictators sensed skepticism metastasizing in the peasant flock, they needed to make things a little more frightening. Turns out, the one mask you’ve been wearing for an entire year was never good enough.

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Under single-party rule, the internecine battles are generally more interesting than their debates with their opposition. Partially because corruption is so easy and rampant under single-party rule. But also because, with no meaningful opposition, the ruling party can do whatever it wants. So under these circumstances, you really find out who these people are and what motivates them.

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As Widdowson reports in a newly published book, these efforts at Indigenization (sometimes referred to as “decolonization”) comprise a combination of symbolic gestures, ramped-up affirmative-action programs, mandatory anti-racism courses, and demands that Indigenous folklore be accorded epistemological stature on par with science. At Concordia University in Montreal, for instance, a dozen researchers are collaborating on a project called “Decolonizing Light,” whose aim is to “investigate the reproduction of colonialism in and through physics and higher physics education.” Our scientific understanding of light as constituting electromagnetic radiation perceptible to the human eye, these scholars explain, is the historical product of “a white male dominated field [i.e. physics] disconnected from social life and geopolitical history. [Its] narrative both constitutes and reproduces inequality.”

Not the Babylon Bee. I checked.

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Presumably it will have a dependable supply of electricity — until it catches on fire.

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The ‘gender reveal’ trend appears to be counter-evolutionary. The kid will discover the challenges of being an orphan.

The Other McCain points and laughs.

Timothy Wilks had a great idea for a YouTube prank — fake a robbery by charging at people with a giant knife. The result wasn’t funny.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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The best way to get a book deal these days is to be dysfunctional and well-connected.

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Taking the liberal media’s relief that they know have an ally in the White House to another level, CNN Newsroom host Brianna Keilar dedicated a lengthy segment to fawning over how the design for the Oval Office under his administration represented science, truth, and one of dignity that, unlike Trump’s, would bring honor to America. Keilar began by informing viewers that how the President decorates the Oval can tell us much about the occupant.

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It was entirely predictable that incoming vice president Kamala Harris would appear on the cover of the latest issue of Vogue magazine. Few, however, could have foreseen the backlash it would unleash among her adoring liberal fans.

It is easy to see why Vogue would choose a cover image featuring Harris’s signature Converse sneakers. Despite warnings from liberal activists that highlighting a female politician’s fashion choices amounted to “sexist” reporting, professional journalists repeatedly demonstrated an unhealthy obsession with Kamala’s trendy footwear.

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On Sunday night’s PBS NewsHour Weekend, they bizarrely decided to discuss the “truth” and misinformation with… disgraced CBS News anchor/fake news purveyor Dan Rather, selling his old book What Unites Us that came out in 2017 (even the paperback is from 2019). His fraudulent smears of  George W. Bush in 2004 never came up.

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Hammer tech.

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Get your barf bags out….

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I am not making this up.

Check it out.

Hop on the grift.

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Today, we look at some of the most outrageous celebrity quotes of 2020.

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Good luck with that.

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Send it a voter registration form, already filled out for Biden.

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Like the obedient lap dogs they are, MSNBC immediately took up Barack Obama’s call for the mainstream media to fight conservative media misinformation when Joe Biden is in the White House. That directive came not only from the former president’s new book but also a series of interviews this week where he warned our democracy was in peril because many Americans reject the mainstream media’s “set of facts.”

On Monday, MSNBC Live host Hallie Jackson gushed over Obama’s warning about the conservative media and movement with one of his former press secretaries, Robert Gibbs at the end of the 10am EST hour. She quoted from an Atlantic interview but didn’t include the more blatant parts where Obama essentially called for social media platforms to censor conservatives.

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The marsupials’ bums are made up of four plates fused together and surrounded by cartilage, fat, skin and fur. Alyce Swinbourne, an expert in wombat bottoms from the University of Adelaide, says wombats will use their backside to “plug” up their burrows, stopping predators entering and protecting softer areas of their anatomy.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees.

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

Kevin Williamson.

The New York Times has really outdone itself, managing to write a full news story about a mob of blackshirts attacking Jews in New York without characterizing the events in question as a mob of blackshirts attacking Jews in New York.

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Truer than they know.

In the clip posted on YouTube from The Creative Coalition, stars like Jason Alexander, Mayim Bialik, Tim Daly, Jon Cryer and Yvette Nicole Brown appear as chickens having a Zoom call while they discussed how for the first time ever a fox is running for president of the hen house against a fellow chicken.

I thought Henhouse was the name of a bordello in Nevada.

You learn something new every day.

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Well, then, we have something to look forward to.

Let’s hope it hits between China and India. They could use the distraction.

Charlie Cooke.

If I’m reading this correctly, the Democratic candidate for Senate in South Carolina believes that Tim Scott, who is already a senator from South Carolina, intends to vote for a Supreme Court nominee, who herself has two black children, who will put him back in chains? In what, one of those 13th Amendment cases we get regularly? Our politics is really rather stupid sometimes.

Democrat lies don’t have to make sense, they just have to push the Narrative.

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

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I’m surprised it wasn’t the other way around — because I’ve had that impulse.

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Proglodytes have no sense of humor and so don’t recognize humor when they see it.

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At least according to a magazine called Behavioral Scientist. (This is an interpretation of ‘scientist’ with which I am unfamiliar.)

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When they’re not avoiding anything that makes them late for dinner, they’re pilfering ancient artifacts, accepting age-ending quests, sticking with their friends through thick and thin to the bitter end, testing the patience of wizards, getting kidnapped by Orcs, befriending tree-shepherding giants, sitting on the edge of ruin while discussing the pleasures of the table, swearing their service to kings, stabbing smack-talking lords of carrion and voracious giant spiders…and even carrying their masters up the faces of active volcanoes. Hobbits are, when it comes down to it, just a bunch of irrepressible lads and lasses going off into the Blue for mad adventures.

And a lot of people are very fond of them. Accordingly, on September 22nd, the in-world birthday of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, we celebrate Hobbit Day. It’s Tolkien Week, in fact, which has been a thing since 1978. Far too short a time.

I am not making this up.

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Two weeks ago, Princeton University’s president, Christopher Eisgruber, issued a letter to the Princeton community in which he admitted that the institution he has run for seven years is plagued by “systemic racism.” This is quite an admission for a number of reasons.

One of them, as I pointed out, is that it confesses to a violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Title VI provides that “No person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.” Those who attend a “systemically racist” college are, by definition, subjected to discrimination by the college.

I wasn’t the only one who spotted this problem. The U.S. Department of Education has spotted it, too.

When confessing your sins, anything you say may be taken down and used in evidence against you.

I thought that the requirement that the President of Princeton identify every individual student that has been harmed by Princeton’s ‘systemic racism’ and specify the damage done is especially humorous.