Read it.

Find the black woman in this picture:

For reference, here is a picture of a real black woman, Princess Elizabeth of Toro:

Check it out.

There’s still interest in the Middle Ages out there.

Read it.

The reporters covering developments in the ongoing special counsel investigation conducted by Robert Mueller are so excited by the prospect of President Trump’s removal from office impeachment that they can barely keep their tongues from hanging out of their mouths. They demonstrate what it’s all about even if they don’t have a clue what’s going on.

It is a striking fact that the charge to which Michael Flynn pleaded yesterday involves lying about conversations that were not themselves illegal. Flynn was not charged with any substantive criminal offense under the Logan Act or anything else. Rather, he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI.

Andrew McCarthy has distinguished himself among the observers commenting on the case. An experienced former federal prosecutor himself, he knows what he is talking about. He is familiar with the ground rules that are to govern such matters. He reviews them in his weekly NRO column today as he has before, finding once again that Mueller has undertaken an essentially unlimited criminal investigation in the guise of a counterintelligence probe.

None of the ground rules applicable to a special counsel criminal investigation have been followed. Mueller’s investigation partakes of the wrongs committed by special counsels in past cases — wrongs reflected in the Department of Justice Procedures that are to govern these matters, but that have been thrown out the window.

The chief difference between this situation and all other previous Special Prosecutor situations is that there is no underlying crime. Even if Mueller finds that Trump ‘colluded’ with one or more Russians, that’s not a crime. Flynn, for example, is being prosecuted for lying, which is the same reason as why he was fired. So far, there is nothing to implicate Trump in anything illegal or even unethical. This is all make-believe.

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There would be some serious partying in Flyover Country.

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Judging by the illustration, looked a lot like Bill Clinton.

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Reporter and writer Joshua Green met Thomas Begay, one of the code talkers honored Monday, on his way out of Washington, D.C. Green asked him about the event. Begay said he was “puzzled” about the comment but not offended.

Then Begay dropped a very non safe-space one liner:

“The Marines made us yell ‘Geronimo’ when we jumped out of planes and that didn’t offend me either.”

Check it out.

Sort of a metaphor for modern life.

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Vivian Yee of the New York Times has written an account of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration in Atlanta, a non-sanctuary city. Yee reports that the regional ICE office in Atlanta made nearly 80 percent more arrests in the first half of this year than it did in the same period last year, the largest increase of any field office in the country.

It has done so with cooperation from local sheriffs and the police, who are working with federal agents to identify and detain immigrants. Yee correctly calls this “the model of cooperation that the Trump administration is rapidly trying to expand throughout the country.”

But we have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

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It certainly ought to facilitate it. That’s what the whole ‘trophy wife’ thing is about. (Ever wonder why you don’t read about ‘trophy husbands’?)

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All the ways that Texas rocks and California sucks.

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Somehow, I do not see this as a bad thing.

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And they’d none of them be missed;
No, they’d none of them be missed….

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But never forget that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

Don’t let reality distract you from the Narrative.

Read it.

Hey — if we’re going to have a pointless click-bait quiz, let’s have a good one.

Read it.

My guess was ‘Get over it’, but I was wrong.

My second guess was ‘Alright, be that way’, but that was wrong, too.

It’s discouraging how often I get these clickbait-article-title-questions wrong.

Yet: I persist.

Read it.

But you have to keep in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office. Never lose sight of the Narrative.

Read it.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times last August, the cofounder of Black Lives Matter, Patrisse Cullors, stated that BLM would not sit at the table with President Trump, because he “is literally the epitome of evil, all the evils of this country – be it racism, capitalism, sexism, homophobia”.

Trump’s views and actions aside, calling capitalism evil and conflating it with racism is noteworthy. The same goes for the increasing tendency among racial justice advocates to embrace the left-wing economic agenda.

Pure Trump Derangement Syndrome.

On the other side of the Atlantic, Natalie Jeffers, who cofounded BLM in the United Kingdom, urged her followers to: “Fight racism with solidarity. Fight capitalism with socialism. We must organize – dedicate ourselves to revolutionary politic power.”

So it’s Just Another Left Wing Victim Group. *yawn*

But you’ll learn. You’ll learn….

Kevin Williamson brings the heat.

The Republican tax plan may be kind of dumb, but if it were three times as dumb as it is, it would only be half as dumb as the Washington Post’s analysis of it.

Don’t hold it in, Kevin, tell us how you really feel.

Paul Mirengoff sums up my position on the Roy Moore kerfuffle very efficiently.

Her allegations may be true. But based on what has been reported so far, I think her most serious allegations — the ones that, if true, would constitute criminal conduct — are more likely false than true.

Read it.

Genuine play exhibits all the classic characteristics of flow. For the child at play, time seems to distort, self-consciousness disappears, and attention is absorbed. In play, there is no fretting, reluctance, or inhibition, so the activity feels effortless, even though the player may be putting forth strenuous effort, say, to beat a video game level. A player might even have a pained look on his face as he pushes up against the limits of his current ability, and yet will later report having had the time of his life.

…

For the school-minded, any activity freely chosen by the child, no matter how growth-inducing, is considered “mere play” in the denigrated sense. An activity is only deemed “work” and “learning” if it is involuntary and assigned by adults.

Wisdom. Attend.

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I agree.

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The Echo has to be listening at all times in order to respond to the “Alexa” command. So the only question is whether Amazon or some friendly member of the surveillance state is recording then too.

Matches my thinking on the subject.

Cory Doctorow is one of those people who appear to have an opinion on everything.

I was there when “lifehacking” was born. It was the 11th of February, 2004, at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, held in a giant conference hotel in San Diego. I was on the committee for ETech (as we called it) and I had lobbied hard for the inclusion of a talk called “Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks” by Danny O’Brien, a technology columnist and former standup comedian who is also a good friend (I am now godfather to his daughter, Ada). I’d watched Danny compiling his research for the talk and I knew it would be a great one.

Joe Bob Briggs does food.

Two weeks ago I’m in Orlando, and my colleague suggests we Uber over to Winter Park for a restaurant that gets rave reviews on the internet. I love barbecue, so yeah, The Ravenous Pig, cute name, let’s hit it.

I should have thought about it for ten seconds first. Because why is it a ravenous pig instead of a hungry pig? A name like The Hungry Pig or The Hungry Hog would imply fat slabs of pork, whereas The Ravenous Pig is a red flag indicating we’re entering the Neverland of Food Disinformation, like one of those episodes of Iron Chef where the guy with the bow tie says, “I’m impressed that the sriracha doesn’t overpower the wine-shallot reduction, but the pilaf is a bland choice.”

Been there, done that.

I first encountered Ed Gillespie when he worked for Dick Armey, back in the day. He was a Republican Establishment apparatchik then and remains a Republican Establishment apparatchik today.

Virginia has been turning more and more blue as the Washington environs attracts more and more bureaucrats and hangers-on. The surprise here is not Gillespie losing but how close he came to winning — he barely won the primary, so the Republican party was far from unified behind him.

The DemLegHump Media will, of course, be spinning this as a ‘referendum on Trump and the Trump program’, despite the fact that Gillespie’s campaign was run by never-Trumpers from the start. Trump’s name was not on the ballot, and Gillespie’s campaign didn’t make any attempt to grasp Trump’s coat-tails, in any respect.

Nevertheless, even though this guy Northam won, all of the talk will not be about him but about Trump. That demonstrates who is still the 800-pound gorilla in the room.

UPDATE: REPORT: Bannon Offered To Campaign For Ed Gillespie But Was Denied

Read it.

Apparently nobody has clued in these people to the fact that there are more PhDs out there than can find jobs.

The best students, the ones who ought to be going for these degrees, will get scholarships. That’s what scholarships do. Subsidizing the worse students through easy cash lending guarantees does neither them nor the rest of us any good.

(Hint: The children are NOT ‘all above average’.)

Victor Davis Hanson commits the crime of of Noticing.

The English has been clear and exact for nearly a century: illegal alien (cf. Latin alienus) was a descriptive term for any foreigner who crossed the US border without coming through customs to obtain proper legal sanction.

Illegal alien, then, was a politically neutral, exact, and descriptive term: one used by both the Supreme Court and Internal Revenue Service.

But open-borders advocates did not like the adjective and noun because they accurately emphasized both illegality and the foreignness of those arriving into the United States from another country.

What followed was a slow Orwellian devolution. Illegal alien initially was reinvented as “undocumented alien,” as if the violation became one of simply forgetting (rather than never having) one’s supposed legal documents at home. But the noun “alien” still implied arrivals were somehow separate from US citizens by virtue of their illegal resident status. So next the noun changed to immigrant, as if undocumented immigrant gave the impression that forgetful visitors had just strayed innocently across the border.

The Left is very fond of distortion-through-adjective. ‘Justice’ isn’t good enough; it has to be ‘social justice’, ‘racial justice’, ‘distributive justice’, etc. — which is to say, injustice.

Victor Davis Hanson observes the phenomenon.

Read it.

These things happen. Those horns are there for a reason.