Read it.

Pretty cold.

On the other hand, this gives her a chance to marry somebody who isn’t a bozo, so she comes out ahead.

Few husbands are that amenable to Natural Selection.

ZMan brings the truth.

This is an iron law of economics. All goods and services are rationed. This is true for health care too. There are no exceptions to this law. Thus, the First Truth of Health Care: No health care plan or system can ever be taken seriously unless it addresses, up front, how it will say “No, you cannot have it” to people who want it. At some point, someone has to tell the patient they cannot have whatever it is they want or need.

In America, rationing is mostly done by price, but increasingly the state is taking over this role. In Britain, most people are denied services by the long lines for those services. The long wait times for basic services is a form of rationing. If you can deliver X per day and the demand is for 2X, you solve this by giving people numbers and having them wait a long time until their number is called. This is socialized medicine in nutshell.

And that says it all, about as simply as it can be said.

Read it.

How about that great government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Lileks.

Let’s keep sending e-mails, and see what happens.

Watch it.

Scott Adams is the last bastion of common sense in America.

Be sure to hang on to his comments about Kid Rock.

UPDATE: Democrats dismiss Kid Rock’s bid to run for Senate as ‘bizarre publicity stunt’

Yeah, well, they’re the party who ran Al Franken, and we see how that turned out.

Democrats: The Clown Party.

Read it.

This is why you never post a picture of one of your keys in public.

Read it.

I know this will come as a shock to some people.

Read it.

Not really a surprise for those of us who have been paying attention.

The fact that not everybody caught in Hiroshima and Nagasaki died ought to have provided a clue.

The further fact that those are both thriving cities today ought to have been another hint.

The ability of human technology to Destroy All Life On Earth, be it by nuclear war or ‘climate change’, is vastly overrated, chiefly by those who want an excuse to steal your money and spend it their way.

Read it.

Actions have consequences.

Read it.

Read it.

The consensus in Iqaluit seems to be that everyone with a credit card has an Amazon Prime membership. That’s because people can often find groceries cheaper online than in local stores, despite government food subsidy programs.

“Amazon Prime has done more toward elevating the standard of living of my family than any territorial or federal program. Full stop. Period,” a local principal, who declined to speak further, said on Facebook.

I love the term ‘food security’. That’s a politician’s term if ever I’ve heard one.

Read it.

We should all encourage people who read the Grauniad or worry about climate change to have fewer children.

Like, none. Zer0. If you have children already, smother them with a pillow. Do the planet a favor.

UPDATE: Having children is one of the most destructive things you can to do the environment, say researchers

I would encourage these researchers to have fewer children as well.

Read it.

I knew it had to be something.

But we can still blame it on Global Warming.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Once again, Trump’s historical role appears to be to act as a catalyst accelerating existing trends, inciting his enemies to declare what’s really been on their minds all along. Thus, even cohesion in Western Europe, which is favored by Trump’s Polish hosts, is now viewed as a racist plot against People of Color, denying them their rightful right to migrate en masse to Europe.

ZMan waxes delightfully dyspeptic today.

Full disclosure: I read (and like) both Tyler Cowan and Raihan Salam (who writes for NR).

That said, I agree with this:

One of the reasons many of us gave up on conventional politics is that in the mainstream, guys with weird, unpronounceable names, from foreign lands keep demanding we change our country to suit their needs. That would be tolerable if the response was “shut up and learn how to be Americans.” Instead, the political class goes out of its way to celebrate these people. Our rulers make it clear that the opinions of newly arrived boat people count for more than the opinions of the natives, who made the country possible.

Read it.

Amazing how that just keeps happening.

Read it.

The center compiled data on donations made from faculty to presidential, Senate, and House campaigns. Clinton received the most money from each school, with her donations often totaling more than 10 times the amount contributed to the second-most highly funded candidate.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

A new data source became available in April, at the U.C. Berkeley SDA archive, and that’s the American National Election Studies (ANES) 2016. This provides a cornucopia of information not available in the exit polls.

I ran this report selecting only non-Hispanic white voters.

In this dataset, among this demographic, Trump beat Clinton by 52.5% to 40.2%

However, the breakdown by income clearly shows that those with the top incomes swung decisively for Clinton. Trump’s support came from whites with income below than $110,000/year. Note that study asks for “family income.”

Income below $110,000: Trump beats Clinton 55.7% to 36.7%
Income $110,000 and above: Clinton beats Trump 50.3% to 43.3%

Democrats, party of the rich.

Read it.

Satellite temperature data still shows about 40 percent less warming than the average climate model trend, despite more warming being added to the satellite record after researchers corrected for decaying satellite orbits.

These are the climate models that the Chicken Littles are using to predict catastrophic rising seas and mass extinctions.

AlGore must be speaking somewhere about ‘climate change’.

I’m still waiting for the apocalyptic Global Warming holocaust he predicted in 1997 would occur within 10 years.

Read it.

Let’s hear it for the $15 minimum wage.

Read it.

A new study found adjustments made to global surface temperature readings by scientists in recent years “are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

…

The peer-reviewed study tried to validate current surface temperature datasets managed by NASA, NOAA and the UK’s Met Office, all of which make adjustments to raw thermometer readings. Skeptics of man-made global warming have criticized the adjustments.

Climate scientists often apply adjustments to surface temperature thermometers to account for “biases” in the data. The new study doesn’t question the adjustments themselves but notes nearly all of them increase the warming trend.

Read it.

And we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Two words: Franklin Mint.

Read it.

Since the rich are mostly Democrats these days, I have no problem with it.

Read it.

Canada’s socialized health care is driving more than 63,000 Canadians out of the country for medical assistance — largely to the U.S.

A new report from the Fraser Institute, a conservative think-tank, estimates that more than 63,459 Canadians traveled to find the health care that is often unavailable in Canada, usually due to long wait times for operations. That number is a 40 percent increase from the previous year, CTV News reports.

How about that great government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Only we wouldn’t have a United States to escape to when it failed, as it always does.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Theodore Dalrymple talks to Parisian taxi drivers.

Most revealing, however, were two Parisian taxi drivers of African origin who said they were planning to return to Africa for the sake of their freedom. To return from Europe to Africa in search of freedom might seem at first a quixotic thing to do, completely counterintuitive, for is not Africa associated in our minds with tyranny, oppression, corruption, and poverty? It is true that the immediate inheritors of colonial power, the bizarre dictators who were the principals in what Byron called (and said that he longed to see) “Africa’s first dance of freedom,” are now of the past, having gone the way of all flesh; but even if tyranny has become a little less evident than it was formerly, arbitrary rule, official exactions, and so forth are still prevalent on the continent, and only a few countries have what we think of as proper elections.

…

In Africa, by contrast, they could start a business straight away, the only requirement being a little capital. They had already started: shops, hotels, cinemas, bars. They had needed no one’s permission; they simply bought premises or land upon which to build them and started their businesses as they saw fit. It was easy to square any interfering official, much easier than dealing with an “honest” bureaucracy. They hired whom they chose and paid them what the market would bear. They themselves could work as much or as little as they liked; the risk was entirely theirs, and if their enterprises failed, there was no one to rescue them and no one upon whom they could fall back other than their families (but they had chosen countries other than those of their descent). Paperwork was almost nonexistent and the government a long way off. In Africa, they felt they were free men in a way that they never would be free men in France.

Watch it.

Winter will be here before you know it. Be prepared.

Read it.

The Athenians did it.

Read it.

It’s from Harvard so it HAS to be true, right?

Perhaps exposure brings home the reality that poor people are typically that way for a reason, and the reason isn’t that rich people are rich.

ZMan has an interesting take.

One of the themes here is that the American Left is a different thing from the European Left in that it was not born out of the French Revolution. It was born out of the English Civil War and the religious radicalism of the prior century. American Progressives are the spiritual children of the Puritans and Public Protestantism. Their primary motivation is communal salvation. To that end, their focus is on rooting out sin and naming the sinner, rather than the material egalitarianism we associate with the European Left.

Is there anything that we can’t blame on Cromwell?

Read it.

Oil-eating microbes ate most of the oil BP spilled into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, according to new research by scientists with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The study discovered and sequenced the DNA of a new type of natural oil-eating bacteria. Knowing how oil-eating bacteria behave will help prevent future oil spills from doing as much damage to the environmental as the BP spill.

So all of the OMG WE’RE DOOMED people are, as usual, full of shit.

Read it.

It’s nearly incontrovertible that a slow-motion coup d’etat is now taking place. Since November 9, 2016, forces within the U.S. government, media, and partisan opposition have aligned to overthrow the Electoral College winner, Donald Trump.

To achieve this they have undermined the institutions of the Fourth Estate, the bureaucratic apparatus of the U.S. government, and the very nature of a contentious yet affable two-party political system. Unlike the coup d’etat that sees a military or popular figure lead a minority resistance or majority force into power over the legitimate government, this coup d’etat is leaderless and exposes some of the deepest fissures in our system of government. This coup d’etat represents not the rule of one man or even many, but by the multitude of our elites.

There is an old English proverb, ‘He who draws his sword against the king must throw away the scabbard’, and that’s what we’re seeing now.

Read it.

As cities and states raise minimum wages to as much as $15 an hour, companies that rely on unskilled labor are cutting labor costs. Of course they are, though those like McDonalds with low-income customers will never tell you why. But businesses don’t spend a dollar when they can spend 50 cents. Employees who contribute less than their pay don’t stay employees for long.

Duh.

Read it.

Whether it’s the deployment of special forces against ISIS or firing Tomahawk missiles against Bashar al-Assad, regardless of which faction is eliminated or who is removed from their position of power, the likelihood of stabilizing Syria is low. The country has traveled too far down a path that no amount of international goodwill can bring back. “Syria,” as it was previously known, is dead. Investing in an attempt to revive the pre-war status quo of a unitary state is a fool’s errand, which will drain immense resources, drag out the suffering of the people and distract the international community from seeking more achievable goals. The limited capacity of the international community (both resources and will), the conflicting geopolitical interests, and the depth of animosity among people on the ground mean that a strategy premised upon a return to the Syria that once was is bound to fail.

,,,

Our argument for the breakup of Syria isn’t a call to revisit the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the subsequent Treaty of Sèvres—in which Western nations mapped out the current Middle East, ignoring what the local people wanted—but rather to recognize that borders are not immutable and are a function of an ever-evolving history, culture and politics. The century-long map of the Middle East, for better or worse, served the region during the interwar period and the subsequent postcolonial transitions, but the internal pressures that had been contained by strongman dictatorships, with the support of various foreign governments, can no longer be held back. Persisting with the status quo in Syria without acknowledging these challenges and realistically considering the likelihood of a sustainable peace will lead to a far worse situation.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

No doubt Trump is to blame.

Read it.

A series of strong storms late last year brought warm winds down to Antarctica that melted a South Carolina-sized chunk of sea ice every day, leading to the lowest sea ice coverage on record for the South Pole.

And it likely had nothing to do with man-made global warming, according a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“There’s no indication this is anything but just natural variability,” John Turner, a climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, told the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) blog Friday.

DENIER! THERE’S A CONSENSUS!