Read it.

Oops.

(Let me just mark that down….)

Read it.

Living on a ranch, we have numerous types and styles of shovels: plastic shovels to push snow off our steps; strong but lightweight shovels strapped onto snowmachines; short, narrow shovels to dig up weeds; wide, curved shovels for firefighting; manure shovels; and traditional wooden-handled shovels in every ranch truck. Each shovel is best-suited for specific tasks, as each firearm we wield.

…

When major media in our nation talk about guns, the discussion involves speakers in metropolitan areas, usually after a horrendous tragedy. They aren’t airing interviews of people who take their children out with gundogs to hunt birds; elk hunters preparing for mountain trips they’ve dreamed about for years; former military members who enjoy competitive shooting sports; women who train to never become victims; gun collectors dedicated to preserving history; or ranchers who use firearms as tools, to name a few.

ZMan peeks behind the curtain.

n modern America, there are two things that are on display simultaneously in the realm of public debate. One is the celebration of the fact that white people and the interests of white people are in sharp decline. The other is a growing fear of white people. It is a strange combination at first glance, as this should be a time for the coalition of the ascendant to celebrate their looming hegemony. Instead, they endlessly talk about themselves, but in the context of a prophesized white backlash.

The root of this is the strange obsession with racism that has become a religion of its own over the last two decades. The anointing of Obama as the completion of the Second Founding, the event that was supposed to wash the stains of slavery, segregation and racism from America, instead ushered in an era of race panic. The Left is in a near frenzy over racism, which they now see everywhere. It is an obsession to the point where even the so-called Right is infected by it.

Read it.

Considering that AntiFa consists predominantly of white ‘men’ (stretching the term a bit), I agree.

Read it.

Read it.

A Monday night “Cuomo Prime Time” segment went completely off the rails after CNN commentator Angela Rye took issue with a GOP campaign strategist’s “interesting word choice” after the strategist said that two Muslim Democratic Reps. had “hijacked” the Democratic Party.

Read it.

Snopes’s creation of a new fact-check label and publication of a study suggesting satire is a “problem for democracy” has escalated the outfit’s feud with the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire website.

Claim: Staying Positive After A Weather Disaster Impedes Climate Action

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup # 372

Feeding the future: Fixing the world’s faulty food system  There is no problem that woke journalists cannot fix. Just ask them.

The Greening Earth

Renewable energy is a blackout risk, warns National Grid after chaos during biggest outage in a decade

Royals, Climate Change, and Private Jets

G7 must ban detergents that cause sea pollution, say French campaigners

CNN Invites 9 Democratic Candidates To Climate Town Hall. Here’s The Line-Up

See how climate science becomes alarmist propaganda

Read it.

Funny how that works.

Read it.

A certain American professor – of sociology, naturally – called Matthew Desmond has decided to pleasure us with the ignorance of his knowledge of the subject under discussion, economics. I’m not the first to note this and doubt I shall be the last. But in his introductory paragraphs in the New York Times Magazine – a place where the editors clearly don’t know enough to catch such errors – he tells us that:

“Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods…..

If the price of goods is constantly being depressed then what is that doing to the real wages of the workers? Good, excellent, you now know more economics than a professor of sociology. Actually, than two such professors plus the editorial team of the New York Times Magazine. For, just to explain for those who might be sociology professors or editors, if the price of things declines then you can buy more things with your labour. That’s what declining prices means. And, equally true and equally obviously so, being able to buy more things with the rent of your labour means that your wages have just risen.

Babylon Bee.

No fatted calf for you, racist.

ZMan looks at Nicholas Taleb.

Taleb is a bit of gasbag and he certainly likes himself a lot. On the other hand, he could simply be a great example of someone with one good insight and not much else. Intellectual history is littered with people who had one great insight and a bunch of crackpot ideas. There were a lot of brilliant physicists in the last century, who were convinced international communism was the future.

Regardless, Taleb is a good reminder that smart people are right about things more often than dumb people, but they are still wrong about a lot of things.

Read it.

Apparently not.

Two years ago, we compared the opioid epidemic to the mortgage crisis that nearly cratered the global economy, noting how both were caused by corporate greed. Recent reporting in the Washington Post and other media outlets reveals an important difference between the two: unlike the regulators who were blithely ignorant of what was happening in the financial markets, officials at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) knew exactly how many opioid pills were being distributed in the U.S. and where they were going. They simply chose to do nothing about it even though DEA investigators and line attorneys were pushing to hold at least one major drug manufacturer responsible for fueling the deadly epidemic.

The Obama administration’s decision to let drug company CEOs and managers off the hook runs parallel with its refusal to prosecute the big bank and brokerage officials who ignited the mortgage crisis. This eagerness to place Wall Street above Main Street is the key to solving the mystery that has confounded pundits, pollsters, and prognosticators since November 8, 2016: why did so many blue-collar and working class voters abandon the Democratic Party and vote for Trump?

Read it.

Congress may be almost evenly divided these days, but not on the liberal cable news networks. A new study by the Media Research Center finds that CNN and MSNBC host Democratic Representatives and Senators seven times more frequently than their Republican counterparts, and most often use Democratic talking points to question members of both parties.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

But it shows Trump’s ability to think outside the box and suck all the air out of the room, news-wise.

When did Joe Biden ever have an original idea? Kindergarten, maybe.

Read it.

Democrats decry Trump administration plans to reject asylum seekers and separate families. (I made that part up.)

Beef Tax Ahead? UK Government Announces a Major Climate Change Review of British Food Production

The water is so hot in Alaska it’s killing large numbers of salmon

Doh! Climate Messiah Greta Thunberg’s Plastic Boat Trip Will Require Four Transatlantic Flights

Where Do They Put the Thermometer, When They Measure the Temperature of the Earth?  Up Michael Mann’s butt is my guess.

Inside The Sausage Factory

New York Times Laments Enviros As Movie Villains, Wants More Climate Lectures

Fighting the Blacklist

John Hinderaker at Power Line is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

f Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar had made their visit to “Palestine,” their time would have been devoted exclusively to bashing Israel. Their attacks would have combined American-style leftism with Palestinian religious solidarity. And yet, as Scott has pointed out more than once, there are obvious tensions between Islam and the contemporary Left, as embodied by the Squad. What branch of Islam is it, exactly, that celebrates abortion, homosexuality and transgenderism?

The common thread is, of course, anti-Americanism.

Read it.

Even as she demonstrates why she is a leading candidate for the party’s nomination, Ms. Warren is facing persistent questions and doubts about whether she would be able to defeat President Trump in the general election. The concerns, including from her admirers, reflect the head-versus-heart debate shaping a Democratic contest increasingly being fought over the meaning of electability and how to take on Mr. Trump.

The tension between ideological purity and supposed electability is constant in any electoral political system. Do you vote for the person you want and let the chips fall where they may? Or do you settle for the least objectionable candidate that can actually win?

And, of course, sometimes they can’t actually win, as Republicans found out with Romney and McCain and Dole and Ford. Most Republicans, I suspect, are passing the popcorn watching Democrats impaled on the horns of the dilemma that Republicans so frequently face.

The agony will be acute for the Republican establishment anti-Trumpers. From now until November 2020 will not be a good time for them.

Read it.

Right now they have backup humans on board, but eventually they will have a sufficient track record to go to the politicians and ask for permission to do without the people.

Audacious Epigone  runs the numbers.

That the sentiments of Jewish Republicans towards contemporary migration into the US is about the same as that of gentile white Democrats would seem to explain a lot about why conservative outlets like The Daily Wire, National Review, and Prager University are consistently at odds with their putative readership over issues surrounding immigration:

Read it.

I think this takes being British to an unwarranted extreme….

Read it.

I’ve always thought it was because I was bone-lazy, but I could be wrong.

Read it.

I’ve always wondered.

ZMan talks about money.

One way of looking at the mortgage crisis is as a form of currency devaluation. The global financial system is based in credit. That’s the base unit of value. Government debt and to a slightly lesser degree, corporate debt, is the foundation of the global financial system. Government issues debt, which increases the supply of money in the system, as that debt is used as collateral in the system. Central banks can buy and sell debt to control the supply of money in the system.

What no one thought much about, it seems, is how players in the system could devalue credit, in the same way governments devalued currency. That’s exactly what the mortgage brokers were doing. By lowering credit standards for borrowing, they were debasing a fundamental unit of currency in the system. This went unnoticed for a long time until everyone started noticing at the same time. The panic to unload the debased currency – those bad mortgages – set off the mortgage crisis of 2008.

Read it.

A few years ago, Ellen Pao’s discrimination lawsuit against a Silicon Valley venture capital fund was heavily promoted in the national press as proving that the only reason most tech founders are male is because of bias. But then she lost bigly.

Now Pao is divorcing her gay black disgraced financier husband Alphonse “Buddy” Fletcher. After all these years, I still can’t find a photo online of these two in the same picture where they weren’t photoshopped together.

Read it.

The core element of political correctness is killing free speech. The political correctness police view any speech they don’t agree with as hate speech and by the political correctness rules, such speech must be condemned first and then eliminated, even if by force. The college campuses of America have been the laboratory for this anti-American lunacy. Political correctness is censorship and a direct violation of the First Amendment. These censorship threats and name-calling are designed to compel the opposition to shut up.

…

The laws we currently have has not stopped the mass killings. The laws we have has not stopped the killings in Chicago, Baltimore, or Los Angeles. So, more laws are not the answer. We need a gut check on our culture.

Read it.

They must think that Obama is still President.

Hurricanes? Get Serious

Germany to close all 84 of its coal-fired power plants  What could possibly go wrong?

The Bigotry of Environmental Pessimism

NYT: Lawns are Symbols of Racism and Bad for Global Warming

Read it.

They ought to let Apple handle the airports.

You could only go where they wanted you to go, and it would cost you, but they would Just Work.

Read it.

long-running voucher program boosted college graduation rates among low-income students, a recently released study shows, providing powerful evidence for the continuing positive effects of voucher-based approaches to education.

The study, a collaboration between two researchers at the University of Arkansas and one at the University of Missouri, examines data from the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program, the oldest voucher program in the United States. First enacted in 1990, the MPCP offers private school vouchers to low-income Milwaukee kids using a lottery system. Just 341 students participated in the program’s first year. Today, that figure is nearly 30,000 across 126 public schools.

Read it.

Some people have entirely too much time on their hand.

With thanks to Debby Witt, a kindred soul.

Read if.

Of course, this is from BuzzFeed so they see this as Not A Good Thing. Example:

(SJW is the initialism for “social justice warrior,” a pejorative term for people concerned with feminism, civil rights, and liberal ideology.)

Read it.

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

According to Lifehacker, every meal plan on Budget Meal Planner can be made for less than $5 a day—which is roughly equivalent to the average food stamp allotment in the United States. Every meal plan includes grocery lists and recipes for seven days worth of breakfasts, lunches, and dinners. The plans on the site are broken down into different themes, including mushroom, Thai, Tex-Mex, potato, and Mediterranean. The recipes listed may be cheap and healthy, but they don’t skimp on flavor. With Tex-Mex, you’ll get chicken tacos, stuffed bell peppers, and chili. Choose Thai and enjoy Thai chicken cabbage wraps with peanut sauce and Thai yellow chicken curry.

The site includes meat-free options as well. Just select “vegetarian” beneath the “meal plans” tab for vegetarian versions of Budget Meal Planner’s recipes lists. The vegetarian take on the Thai meal plan, for example, uses tofu instead of chicken and mushrooms instead of beef.

Read it.

Since the intelligence test was invented more than 100 years ago, our IQ scores have been steadily increasing. Even the average person today would have been considered a genius compared to someone born in 1919 – a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect.

We may have to enjoy it while we can. The most recent evidence suggests that this trend may now be slowing. It may even be reversing, meaning that we have already passed the summit of human intellectual potential.

Read it.

News reports are pointedly not mentioning his ethnicity so I suspect that he belongs to a Fashionable Minority.

I’m curious as to how the DemLegHump Media are going to spin this to make it the fault of the police.

UPDATE: Apparently, this is the suspect:

Read it.

The news media reported relentlessly on all matters relating even remotely to the horrific murders in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. Fair enough.

But I haven’t heard much from the mainstream media about the shooting in Philadelphia of six police officers by a felon who wasn’t permitted by law to possess a firearm. Maurice Hill is believed to have fired more than 100 rounds during his standoff with police. Reportedly, he was armed with an AR-15-style weapon and a handgun.

How many people die every week in places with rigidly strict gun control laws, like New York, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and D.C.?

If gun control worked, those cities ought to be havens of safety. Instead, they’re free fire zones, especially for young black males.

Read it.

Two years ago, left-wing billionaire George Soros wrote a $1.45 million check to Larry Krasner’s campaign for district attorney of Philadelphia. This is a gigantic sum to spend on a local election, and enabled Krasner to defeat six rivals in the 2017 Democrat primary, then coast to a landslide victory in the general election. Krasner ran as the anti-police candidate, and has made it his official policy to turn dangerous criminals loose on the streets of Philadelphia. One of the beneficiaries of Krasner’s policies, Maurice Hill, had an extensive criminal record — drug charges, aggravated assault, perjury, fleeing and eluding, escape and weapons offenses — before he engaged in a shootout Wednesday in North Philadelphia that wounded six cops.

The latest travesty in ‘consensus enforcement’

Contraception is the answer to climate change  Fewer progressives is the key.

Gore Says His Global Warming Predictions Have Come True? Can He Prove It?  We aren’t all dead yet, so I doubt it.

Enlisting peer-reviewed science in the climate crusade  Far too often, ‘peer reviewed’ merely means ‘agrees with everybody else’

Steve and John Make the Climate Blacklist!  Two Power Line stalwarts achieve fame.

Iceland grapples with the prospect of a future with no ice  Polar bears and minorities hardest hit.

Why Is Hollywood So Scared of Climate Change?

Earth Stopped Getting Greener 20 Years Ago

Read it.

The Democrat response: Basically, Abbot ought to be letting Democrats run his state.

“However, let’s be clear this was white nationalist terrorism and Governor Abbott needs to diversify the people whom he listens to. The task force completely lacks any real form of diversity, as it stands, it is comprised of only law enforcement individuals and Republicans. The same Republicans who have been fanning the flames of white supremacy and criminalizing immigration for political profit for years,” Texas Democratic Party Executive Director Manny Garcia said.

So, for Democrats, the problem isn’t terrorism, it’s white people and Republicans. Never let an atrocity go to waste, and all that.

The Other McCain says what all people know.

Monday, I noticed an unexplained surge of traffic to my April 14 post with the simple title “Max Boot Is an Idiot,” in which I described the Trump-hating former Wall Street Journal writer as “one of the most overrated neocon gasbags in Washington.” What could have caused this increase of interest in Max Boot’s idiocy? I had no idea, and because I spent Monday driving back from Georgia, there was no opportunity to investigate this mysterious phenomenon. Who cares about Max Boot? Certainly, I never have, even when he was an influential advocate of our ill-fated invasion of Mesopotamia. Once the Bush era ended, so also did Max Boot’s influence, and no one paid any attention to him for the next eight years, but then Boot jumped on the #NeverTrump bandwagon as the vehicle by which he intended to return to relevance. Still, I have made a habit of ignoring him, as every conservative should, so what could explain this week’s sudden uptick of search traffic for Max Boot?

Read it.

Perhaps they would like to visit Guantanamo instead.

UPDATE: Israel PM Netanyahu: You’re Damn Right We Ordered the Code Red on These Terrorist-Sympathisizing, Antisemitic Agitators

Read it.

Left to its own devices, California’s Republican Party would be ready to be embalmed for display at the Museum of Natural History. But there’s one last hope for the state GOP: the growing lunacy among Democrats.

Read it.

One of the most interesting threads left dangling in the curious case of Ilhan Omar is the one hanging from Wilecia Harris. Harris signed the 2009 marriage certificate for Omar’s marriage to Ahmed Elmi. With Harris’s signature the clock strikes 13 (or higher) in the Omar saga. As I noted in “Whence Wilecia?,” I posted the certificate and commented in it in part 3 and part 7 of my “mixed-up files” series.

The Daily Mail’s Martin Gould has sought to contact Harris for clarification. He reports the results of his inquiry this afternoon in “‘It’s not going to happen, not now – and not never!’ Christian minister Wilecia Harris, who officiated at ceremony of Ilhan Omar’s wedding to her ‘brother,’ refuses to shed light on what she knows.”

Harris’s husband, Marcus Harris, responded on Mrs. Harris’s behalf: “he rebuff[ed] all attempts to shed light on how she — a Christian minister — got to perform the marriage for two Muslims.” He quotes Harris’s response in a Facebook message: “It’s not going to happen, not now and not never.” This is the modus operandi of the protagonists in the curious case.

Read it.

If you can eat just five olives, kudos to you. I can’t.