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Late last week the EPA launched an investigation in to the nation’s federal ethanol mandates. It described the move as “discretionary” and, in its own words, intended to “ensure public health and the environment are protected.” The government agency has been spurred to action by mounting evidence that the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS)—the ethanol program first enacted by President Bush and eventually championed by the Obama Administration—isn’t the unalloyed “green” policy it is often sold as. Now, as Clean Technica reports, a new study from a team of scientists at the University of Tennessee has confirmed that the RFS has been, on balance, bad for the environment….

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

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For those of you with too much time on your hands.

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The most interesting thing about Henry Kissinger’s analysis and rescue plan for American foreign policy, A Path Out of the Middle East Collapse, is the how little hope and optimism it excited.  Few appear to regard the article’s recommendations as feasible, and it has been received with the passivity air of a beaten boxer hoping only for a rematch.

This fatalism is especially depressing in the light of Kissinger’s diagnosis that Obama has basically unwound every foreign policy achievement of the last 40 years.   His considered belief that an outside chance of survival of the American position is still possible have struck not a spark.  The atmosphere is as funereal as the locker room of a team down 40 points at halftime after the failed pep talk of a former winning coach that has only served to remind the players of what an invidious contrast there is to their present one.

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Nevertheless, we’re all going to die when the sea covers the land because all of the Antarctic ice has melted. it’s a consensus! The Science Is In! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Gates of Vienna provides us with a valuable checklist, since you can’t always tell what’s going on in a news story.

Steve Sailer discusses the unspeakable.

Historically, much effort was put into the obvious challenge of developing IQ tests that are stable across space, from culture to culture. In contrast, nobody until Flynn paid all that much attention to the question of IQ tests being stable across time.

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Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old fake clock-maker who caused such a stir at his Texas high school, is expected to meet President Obama at the White House this weekend. Obama holds the lad out as a victim of anti-Muslim prejudice even though, as John has argued, his “invention,” which resembled the timing device of a bomb and was placed in a suitcase dummied up to look like a bomb, reasonably triggered concern.

In advance of his meeting with Obama, Mohamed met with another president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan. Bashir is quite a guy. In the 1990s, he harbored Osama bin Laden for five years. He has an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for orchestrating genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Darfur. His country is under a variety of U.S. sanctions, and there is evidence that he may have secretly stolen $9 billion in oil money.

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I know that law is usually boring to non-lawyers, but every now and then an important case comes along that ought to concern everybody.

Foster involves a criminal trial in Georgia that led to a death sentence for Timothy Foster, an 18-year-old African-American who was accused of robbing and killing an elderly white woman. The prosecution used peremptory challenges, which permit parties in criminal or civil trials to remove potential jurors during jury selection, to eliminate every black prospective juror from Foster’s trial. Although the prosecution stated that it exercised its peremptory challenges for entirely race-neutral reasons, the record contains overwhelming evidence of purposeful—and therefore unconstitutional—racial discrimination. Examination of the prosecution’s own notes reveals that black jurors were singled out in at least five ways.

Increasingly these days we hear outraged claims of racism and racial bias in circumstances where such bleatings are obvious horseshit, but cases of bias do happen and this would appear to be one of them — not on the part of the jury, but on the part of prosecutors. Far too often prosecutors see their job as nailing somebody for a crime without caring too much which somebody gets nailed. This guy may be guilty — if I had to bet, that’s the way I would bet — but that doesn’t justify cutting corners on the way there.

I remember fondly a famous contributory negligence case we studied during my time in purgatory in which a drunk man wandered down the street in a frontier town and fell into a hole where workmen had been repairing the street. Of course, he sued the city. The city argued that he was at least partially to blame because he was drunk. The court ruled that a drunk man had as much right to a safe street as a sober man, and more need of one. We might extend that principle here to say that a guilty man has as much right to a fair trial as an innocent one, however cut and dried things might seem.

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In the long run, it’s probably smart to think strategically about ways we can all optimize our roles in the future economy. But for now, before the robots arrive and outsmart us all, let’s appreciate the fact that we’ve still got them beat when it comes to some tasks requiring fine motor skills, spatial awareness, and manual dexterity.

I’m sure opponents of the motor car thought the same thing about horses. That was then, this is now. And the ‘now’ keeps advancing.

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You have to be willing to revert to a Paleolithic pattern of sleep — and that means turning off your electric lights at dusk and leaving them off until dawn. Do that, and in about three week’s time, beginning around six hours after sunset each evening, you will find yourself experiencing a period of serene wakefulness that was once a nightly meditation retreat for all Homo sapiens on Earth. It’s a guarantee. It’s encoded in your genes.

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For one month, beginning at dusk and ending at dawn, Wehr’s subjects were removed from every possible form of artificial light. During the first three weeks, they slept as usual, only for about an hour longer. (After all, he reasoned, like most Americans, they were probably sleep deprived.) But at week four a dramatic change occurred. The participants slept the same number of hours as before, but now their sleep was divided in two. They began each night with about four hours of deep sleep, woke for two hours of quiet rest, then slept for another four.

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Shrapnel dug into his head, back, arm and legs, and the concussion from the explosion tossed him into the air and down a hill. Mr. Webb kept fighting, throwing a grenade into the bunker and destroying it.

Mr. Webb was evacuated with serious injuries. Later, he was awarded the Navy Cross, which the Department of Defense describes as the second highest military decoration that can be awarded to Marines or members of the Navy, “for extraordinary heroism,” as well as the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

The shrapnel is still embedded at the base of Mr. Webb’s skull and in a kidney. He given medical retirement from the Marines, and after the war, Mr. Webb went to law school, served as secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, wrote books, and served a term in the U.S. Senate.

I think he’d make a fine Republican Presidential candidate. Oh, wait….

Gene Wolfe lays out some insight.

There is one very real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms. The king might rule badly, but everyone agreed as to what good rule was. Not only every earl and baron but every carl and churl knew what an ideal king would say and do. The peasant might behave badly; but the peasant did not expect praise for it, even his own praise. These assertions can be quibbled over endlessly, of course; there are always exceptional persons and exceptional circumstances. Nevertheless they represent a broad truth about Christianized barbarian society as a whole, and arguments that focus on exceptions provide a picture that is fundamentally false, even when the instances on which they are based are real and honestly presented. At a time when few others knew this, and very few others understood its implications, J. R. R. Tolkien both knew and understood, and was able to express that understanding in art, and in time in great art.

Compare these Degenerate Modern Times, where every pervert feels entitled to be considered normal.

It is said with some truth that there is no progress without loss; and it is always said, by those who wish to destroy good things, that progress requires it. No great insight or experience of the world is necessary to see that such people really care nothing for progress. They wish to destroy for their profit, and they, being clever, try to persuade us that progress and change are synonymous.

This captures the essence of the ‘progressive’ — change for the sake of change, for that will inevitably lead to progress. Trust us.

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I asked More Guns Less Crime author John Lott about it and his answers were disappointing. Empiricists are no fun. “I don’t know,” he replied. “We don’t have the data.” He did concede that America has an intense prison culture with “38% of black males having a felony background.” He also backed up Bill Whittle’s claim that the remarkably gun-heavy Plano, Texas has pretty much the lowest crime rate in the world (0.4 homicides per 100,000).

My home town.

Lott is a human Google machine when it comes to guns and crimes and I learned a lot from our conversation. I learned the black family was far more intact in the 1950s and their propensity for crime back then was actually similar to whites. I learned almost nobody gets arrested simply for marijuana possession (0.3% in Arizona) and the vast majority of drug offenses involve trafficking.

And what happened from that time to this? The War on Poverty. If you want to screw something up, give it to the government.

If you had told anybody in 1969, the year we landed on the moon, that by 2015 every teenaged girl in the First World would be carrying around a computer more capable than an IBM S/360, nobody would have believed you.

For those worried about the ‘lack of women in tech’, suggest that they have the means to be ‘in tech’ in their pockets and purses; what they do with it is up to them, and not any supposed oppression by ‘the patriarchy’.

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If you want a sense of what Democrats are likely to be up to for the foreseeable future, look no further than Hillary Clinton’s campaign. The former Secretary of State has rolled out proposal after proposal detailing, or at least sketching, all the ways she’d change federal policy through executive action or urge Congress to legislate. And in doing so, she’s defined the current state of the liberal agenda—and its likely path in coming years.

That’s in case you were wondering. Some of us are quite familiar with the ‘liberal agenda’.

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I can’t ever tell the difference, myself.

You have to admit, though, it would make an awesome cover group.

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So what do standardized tests actually predict? I know of only one correlation: Your belief in the validity of standardized tests is strongly correlated with how well you did on them. I did very well on the SATs, so I think they’re a great predictor of college performance. Although I’m still annoyed about my math score.

Been there, done that. And I’m still annoyed about my math score.

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Why are “school shootings” a thing? The Sandy Hook shooter had no strong connection with Sandy Hook Elementary, and the Roseburg murderer had little or nothing to do with Umpqua Community College. Nor did the Aurora, Colorado murder have anything in particular against the movie theater he shot up. It seems blindingly obvious that deranged would-be mass murderers might be crazy, but they aren’t stupid: they go for the gun-free zone nearly every time. As my son once observed while we were leaving a local shooting range, no one ever tries to shoot up a Gander Mountain store.

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Is it really “hotly disputed” that if someone starts trying to commit mass murder, it would be good to have armed citizens on hand to stop him? What else are policemen? How can anyone deny that “good guys with guns” are the antidote to murderers? That is what stopped the Roseburg murderer, and virtually every other mass shooter, although, sadly, in many instances too late, because no one on the scene was able to fight back. That is the nature of a “gun-free zone.”

I recommend the Glock, because it has no external hammer to catch on clothing and a trigger safety that is quite convenient when time is of the essence.

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Scratch the 1%, and a lot of Democrites spill out.

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I know, I know — facts; who has time for that?

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Forbes took a close look at the most recent data on domestic migration — that is movement within the U.S. between metro areas — between 2010 and 2014. We ranked the nation’s 53 largest metropolitan areas based on their annualized rates of population change attributable to migration. What we found is that to a remarkable extent, Americans still seem to be whistling Dixie. Eight of the 10 fastest gainers were in the former Confederacy, led by Austin, Texas, which gained 126,296 more migrants over that time span from other parts of the country than it lost in outmigration, accounting for an annual increase in its population of 1.69%. No other metro area in the country enjoyed anything like this rate of in-migration.

Funny thing about that: Nobody is moving to Michigan. Not that I blame them, you understand….

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Inquiring minds want to know.

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Nuclear war isn’t the end of the world. Ask the people in Hiroshima.

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Sometimes the old ways are best.

I’d have included the Tres Riches Heures of Jean, Duc de Berry, but it’s really a matter of taste.

Steve Sailer can’t help but notice.

Of course, if they had been white, this would be widely denounced by the Usual Suspects as institutionalized racism.

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The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, established in 1949, has 28 members devoted to the idea of collective security. Prediction: By the time President Obama leaves office in 2017, the NATO pledge of mutual defense in response to aggression will have been exposed as worthless. Objectively the alliance will have ceased to exist. The culprits? Vladimir Putin—and Barack Obama.

Color me indifferent. The reason for NATO went away once Communism disintegrated in Eastern Europe. All it does now is make Russia feel threatened, and drag the U.S. into situations that are none of our business, and allow Eurotrash to piggyback on our defense spending so they can use their budgets to buy votes through social programs. I see a lot of pain and not much gain by continuing NATO.

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I used to joke that it costs as much to house an inmate in the California state prison system as it would to send the same person to Stanford, but that sending the inmate to Stanford (at least in the humanities) would be bad for the inmate.

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Why were elite Harvard students “caught off guard”? The simplest explanation is that they suffered the defect of an elite university education, whereas the prison inmates had the challenge of thinking for themselves. Golly—the private sector might do a better job of educating kids? Yes indeed, that is an unheard-of idea at Harvard. I think there’s a broader lesson here about how ideologically monochromatic universities do a great disservice . . . to liberals.

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Hint: Unions + Democrite Politicians

Steve Sailer asks a question of which I had not thought but to which I would love to know the answer.

The fine 1990s parody of the Star Trek phenomenon, Galaxy Quest, had a lot of fun with how random casting events set extremely actorly actors on the path to sci-fi stardom. For example, the 1984 sci-fi cult film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai appears to have launched John Lithgow and Jeff Goldblum into being regulars in sci-fi films, even though I doubt they have much more than a professional interest in the genre. Actors tend to be extreme People Persons, while sci-fi tends to attract readers at the other end of the spectrum.

Daniel Hannan reminds us that fascism is indeed a left-wing thing.

Why do we downplay that memory? Largely because it doesn’t fit with what happened later. When Hitler attacked the USSR – to the utter astonishment of Stalin, who initially ordered his soldiers not to shoot back – it was in everyone’s interest to forget the earlier phase of the war. Western Communists, who had performed extraordinary acrobatics to justify their entente with fascism, now carried out another somersault and claimed that the Nazi-Soviet Pact had only ever been a tactical pause, a moment when Stalin brilliantly stalled while building up his military capacity. Even today, the historiographical imprint of that propaganda lingers.

To the modern reader, George Orwell’s depiction of how enmity alternates between Eurasia and Eastasia seems far-fetched; but when he published his great novel in 1948, such things were a recent memory. It suited Western Leftists, during and after the War, to argue that Hitler had been uniquely evil, certainly wickeder than Stalin. It was thus necessary to forget the enthusiasm with which the two tyrants had collaborated.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

I am not at all susceptible to white guilt myself, but I know people that are.  It’s obvious to me from observing them that white guilt delivers great psychic rewards.

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Twenty or thirty years from now we shall have figured out how reading Ta-Nehisi Coates or denouncing racial crimethink sets off floods of pleasure-inducing neurotransmitters in so many white people’s brains.  Until then white guilt will wax strong, whatever happens with demographics.

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Indeed it could.

Texas has always divided opinions. It prides itself on being the best, brashest and most bloody-minded slice of America, a cowboy state easy to caricature that is loved and loathed in equal measures. “I hate that place,” said a New Yorker friend of mine when I mentioned I was going to spend some time there. “It’s the asshole of our country.”

His view typifies that of liberal America, which finds strong echo in Europe. The Lone Star state is seen as callous and corrupt, the backward birthplace of a virulent form of crony capitalism filled with bible-bashers. It is infamous for poverty and poor schools, for locking up people and unhealthy enthusiasm for executions. No wonder it produced George W Bush and his disastrous presidency.

The reality is rather different. Those cartoon stereotypes hark back to nineteenth-century roots when an independent republic sought annexation by Washington, which originally rebuffed the overtures. It is the second biggest state in the union; it is also the most misunderstood. Far from exemplifying the worst aspects of the world’s most powerful nation as critics claim, Texas is in many ways a model of success and modernisation.

Dallas has been called ‘the buckle of the Bible Belt’. Yet I discovered the city is home to the country’s sixth biggest lesbian, gay and transgender population after arriving there on the weekend of its pride parade – although in typical Texan style, the celebrations are at a different time of year to the rest of the US. The current sheriff of Dallas County is a gay Latina woman while three hours down the road in the oil capital of Houston, often seen as a haven for ultra-conservatives, a thrice-elected lesbian mayor was the first openly-gay person to run a major American city.

Yeah, well, we don’t put that in the brochures.

Sacramental: An outward sign of inward grace.

Tattoo: An outward sign of inward disgrace.

Can’t get more symmetrical than that.

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Comment Volkswagen, one of the world’s biggest car groups, is in serious trouble this week as it turned out that millions of its diesel engines have been emitting vast, prohibited amounts of polluting nitrogen oxides (NOx).

The fact is, however, that the Volkswagen story is only a small part of the NOx story – in which the human race is busily poisoning itself in a pretty much pointless quest to cut back on emissions of carbon dioxide.

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In short, Barratt finds that:

1. speakers born before about 1970 hardly use on accident at all;
2. speakers born between 1970 and 1995 use on accident and by accident (sometimes even an individual speaker will use both);
3. speakers born after 1995 use on accident to the near exclusion of by accident.

This is not just speakers in one region; she surveyed speakers in Indiana, Michigan, California, and Georgia, from different socioeconomic classes.

Gavin McInnes is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Westerners used to just barge into countries, take them over, and make them better. Before the British invaded, India was just a really hot homeless shelter. The U.K. left in 1947 after trying to sort out India’s Muslim problem and the infrastructure they built immediately began to crumble. The same happened to Haiti after 1804 and Jamaica after 1962. It was obvious the West was the best. Today, however, when foreigners fly planes into our skyscrapers and rape our children, we apologize. What the fuck happened?

I remember on September 12th, 2001, in NYC’s Union Square there were people holding signs that said “Justice Not Revenge.” The first instinct for much of the country seemed to be avoiding Islamophobia. To this day we have a crippling fear of it. Islamophobiaphobia is so severe, any Muslim circus clown can send his kid to school with a fake bomb and instead of charging the father with child endangerment, we invite the boy to the White House. When this first happened, I assumed Obama was duped. Now I’m not so sure. I don’t think he cares if the clock looks like a bomb. He saw #IStandWithAhmed trending and decided he’d like to be part of it. It’s like black people still wearing T-shirts that say “Hands Up Don’t Shoot.” They don’t care about the truth. They just like the story.

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It’s trickier than you might think.

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Mr. Brewer, whom the president described in a statement as having a “brilliant mind, a big heart, and an insatiable desire to give back,” was participating in a Ride to Conquer Cancer fundraiser on Saturday when the accident happened. He lost control of his bike at a turn in Mt. Airy, Md., north of Washington, crossed a double yellow line and collided with an oncoming car, police said.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Son of Your Father

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I know I am.