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Not enough Magic Dirt, apparently.

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Since its founding in 1910, 130 million American boys participated in Scouting. Tuesday this week, the Boy Scouts of America declared bankruptcy. Like the Roman Catholic Church, Joe Paterno and his Penn State Football Program, one more conspicuous source of traditional masculine values has been scapegoated and deemed worthy of extraordinary punishment being culpably responsible for failing to prevent homosexual access to adolescent boys and sleazy lawyers and opportunistic inverts are lined up to sue for alleged damages.

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Gee, you’d think that all of those illegal aliens were depressing wages in this country.  Seems as if I heard Trump talking about that.

The Washington Post is a firm advocate of our modern fake economy.

‘Cash’ once referred to a silver Chinese coin. That, of course, was a while ago.

Back in the Good Old Days, when ‘money’ meant silver (and gold) — it’s amazing how many languages use ‘silver’ for ‘money’ — if you damaged money, it didn’t care; ‘damaged’ silver was still silver, ‘damaged’ gold was still gold. That, of course, was a while ago, too.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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A chronicle of today’s fight over housing in California.

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The fast-breeding desert locust has invaded Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, creating a state of emergency.

…

Yet, instead of rallying around African nations in this time of great peril, more EU-funded NGOs have descended on the Kenyan parliament to demand that the government disarm itself in the battle against locusts. They want the Kenyan government to outlaw the pesticides used to fight locusts, the only effective tool that can stop these insects, and prevent the crisis from spiraling out of control.

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I wouldn’t have thought that stealing bees was a big thing, but apparently it is.

Steve Sailer.

Crime isn’t hugely high in Southern California at the moment *, so the local police blotter tends to be dominated by news of aspiring rappers doing in expiring rappers, such as last year’s World’s Most Important Man Nipsey Hussle and now Pop Smoke.

A group of people, including one wearing a mask and armed with a handgun, burst into a posh Hollywood Hills home early Wednesday and fatally shot up-and-coming rapper Pop Smoke, police said.

One reason the crime rate isn’t all that high is because Los Angeles County has a black lady district attorney Jackie Lacey. So the Soros folks are trying to do something about that by importing white male San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon to run against Lacey.

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Since 2015, Police Scotland has logged more than 3,300 “hate incidents.” These are jokes, statements, or behaviors that do not involve any criminality, but which someone else perceives to be motivated by hatred (usually on account of race, religion, or — what else? — gender identity). “An offensive joke may be reported by someone, but not amount to any criminality, so we would log this as a hate incident,” Police Scotland explained.

But how, exactly, do the police decide what constitutes “hate”? According to official guidelines, that doesn’t matter. “Hate incidents” should be filed “irrespective of whether there is any evidence to identify the hate element.”

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Anyone who has thought about identity politics—the great intellectual disorder of our age—must conclude that the term obfuscates more than it illuminates. Identity politics is first and foremost not a politics of identity, but an obsession with oppression and victimization. Only those who claim to be victimized get to have their identity recognized, affirmed and honored.

Where we once bestowed on monuments, civic buildings, and streets the names of great generals, statesmen, and authors, now only those who claim to be victimized get to have their identity recognized, affirmed, and honored. They get museums, holidays, commemorative stamps, movies, and books sanctifying their suffering and celebrating their accomplishments, both real and fake (George Washington Carver did not invent peanut butter). Their purported oppressors—men, heterosexuals, and above all, white people—are denied this privilege. They must atone in perpetuity for the sins of their fathers.

Steve Sailer reviews a new book about race denial.

In contrast to Angela Saini’s acclaimed but dismal 2019 work of science denialism, Superior: The Return of Race Science, Adam Rutherford’s 2020 book How to Argue With a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality benefits from Rutherford’s lively prose style. The British science writer likes to illustrate his arguments with interesting examples, a stratagem that wouldn’t seem too much to ask of an author, but which is increasingly difficult to find these days as conventional wisdom (which Rutherford labors hard to embody) becomes ever more anti-empirical.

Despite blustering on his Twitter bio, “Back off man, I’m a scientist,” Rutherford appears to have largely transitioned from being a geneticist to being a science pundit in the mode of Neil deGrasse Tyson and Richard Dawkins. But that’s not a dishonorable career path.

But neither is it one to inspire confidence. At best it is merely monetizing a reputation.

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The Egyptians had better keep an eye on their firstborns….

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New York Times reporter Katie Rogers used the wedding of White House immigration advisor Stephen Miller to Katie Waldman, press secretary to VP Mike Pence, to show Trump staff as purposefully isolating themselves from D.C. society in Tuesday’s “Pairing Off in Trump’s Political Bunker.” Rogers ignores the left-wing groups and outraged individual lefties mobbing Trump staff (including Miller himself) and Trump supporters as they go about their lives in the city.

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One of the disadvantages of having the government provide your health care is that if the government doesn’t approve of you, you get no health care. if the government doesn’t like Jews and you’re a Jew, well….

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Since AB5 took effect on January 1, hundreds of thousands of Californians are finding their businesses in tatters. Musicians can’t join bands for a one-night gig, chefs can’t join forces with caterers, nurses can’t work at various hospitals, and writers must cap their submissions per media outlet to 35 per year. Under the law, these freelancers can no longer conduct the same business-to-business transactions they have for years or even decades. Clients with whom they fostered valuable relationships are gone—as are their successful careers and incomes. An overwhelming majority of professionals in fields affected by AB5 identify as liberals and have generally voted along the blue line. Today, however, many are so disillusioned with their representatives that they’re changing political loyalties.

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Like most modern ‘journalism’, this doesn’t have the old-fashioned newspaper recite-the-facts style but starts out with a tear-jerker story intended to ‘personalize’ things but succeeding merely in pushing whatever point of view the writer has decided is the ‘correct’ one.

I miss the good old days.

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Current cultural and political developments in the U.S. are so weird that I tend to assume we must be unique. But not so: in the United Kingdom, too, “wokeness” operates as an explicit threat to freedom. The situation is even worse there than here, in fact.

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Still no indication that it is killing people other than Han Chinese.

Media reports won’t specify the ethnicity of these ‘foreign’ occurrences, presumably because that would be waaaaaaacist. So getting accurate information is problematical.

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Covid-19’s effect on global energy markets has been disastrous. OPEC slashed its oil demand forecast last week, and Goldman Sachs doubled down on its bearish oil take and has cut its oil price target by $10 to $53 for the year, as a result of a “demand shock” that is set to collapse Chinese oil consumption by 20%, or as much as 4 million barrels per day.

The sharp decline in demand in China, which by the way, is the world’s largest oil importer, is now stranding oil cargoes off the country’s coast and across Asia.

Modern ‘just-in-time’ production processes are easily jammed.

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OK, if you’re a naïve rube like me you might ask yourself what is a “throuple?” It turns out it’s a relatively new word formed by the blending of “three” and “couple” and it means “a long-term sexual relationship between three people” per a new entry into the Macmillan Dictionary. They must be ahead of the cultural curve from Webster’s.

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‘Rashaun Weaver’ tells you everything you need to know.

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At the turn of the twentieth century, the surgeon Dr. John H. Girdner started to notice something peculiar about his Manhattan patients. Girdner had left his home state of Tennessee to study at New York University and worked his way up the medical ranks, even attending to President James A. Garfield when he was shot. After twenty-five years of treating patients in the big city, Girdner decided to write his findings in a book. “A very large percentage [of people] lead an artificial life here,” he warned. “This manner of life has brought about a condition of mind, body, and soul, which I have endeavored to describe under the title of Newyorkitis.”

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Beset by high housing costs, crippling taxes, astronomical gas prices, wildfires, and rolling blackouts, Californians are heading for the exits. That’s sparking anxiety in places where these Golden State migrants are relocating. A mayoral candidate in Boise, Idaho, recently suggested building a wall to keep out Californians, who account for 60 percent of domestic migration into the growing state. The election of increasingly progressive candidates in Colorado sparked talk there of the “Californication” of the Centennial State.

Early last year, the Dallas News described the “California-ing” of North Texas, citing a study showing that 8,300 Californians move to the area yearly. Texas governor Greg Abbott launched a petition titled “Don’t California My Texas.”

We don’t mind them coming here so long as they leave their crazy ideas back on the Left Coast.

Veronique de Rugy.

The New York Times published this excellent argument why we shouldn’t break up Amazon. It boils down to this: Amazon is a genius at giving consumers what they want, and because it faces a ton of competition, the company innovates like crazy. All that’s missing from this piece is the argument that government’s ineptitude at running Amtrak and the postal service, along with a great deal of other evidence of political operatives’ failure to achieve their goals, should make us skeptical of the ability of bureaucrats to break up Big Tech.

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Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

Kevin Williamson has some insight.

The problem with ‘democratic socialism’ is that it is both.

…

But the socialism that reduced the United Kingdom from world power to intermittently pre-industrial backwater in the post-war era was thoroughly democratic. The policies that turned the lights out in London were not imposed on the British people by a repressive junta. And that is part of the problem with democratic socialism even as notionally presented by Sanders et al.: It is both of those things. In the United States, we use the word “democratic” as though it were a synonym for “decent” or “accountable,” but 51 percent of the people can wreck a country just as easily and as thoroughly as 10 percent of them. That is why the United States has a Bill of Rights and other limitations on democratic power.

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Haters gotta hate.

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Hammer tech.

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Africa is home to about 1 million Chinese, the Associated Press reported Saturday. Many of these people are in Africa there as part of China’s efforts to extract African mineral resources, according to the Institute of Developing Economics. However, the threat of Chinese workers bringing coronavirus with them into Africa has officials gravely concerned, AP reported.

As Eric S Raymond warned us.

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Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

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Hammer tech.

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Long Island authorities on Wednesday implied that a man set to testify against MS-13 gang members was killed as a result of criminal-justice reforms requiring prosecutors share witnesses’ identities with defendants.

Nassau County officials, including the police commissioner and county executive, announced the death of 36-year-old Wilmer Maldonado on Wednesday — while also decrying the discovery laws that took effect Jan. 1.

Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your state.

Steve Sailer comments:

Witness-murdering is a major cause of low closure rates for homicides in areas with gangs. LA Times homicide reporter Jill Leovy estimated about a dozen witnesses per year were murdered in South-Central L.A. in the first decade of this century, more than enough to discourage the other witnesses from cooperating too much with the cops.

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Math is hard!

Especially for Democrats.

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Mitt Romney’s decision to convict President Trump on the impeachment charge of abuse of power was “motivated by bitterness and jealousy,” according to former Romney spokesman Rick Gorka, who added that President Trump has “accomplished what he [Mitt] has failed to do multiple times.”

He’s decided to fill in for John McCain.

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Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

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Well. There it is.

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Repeat after me: COM U NIST DIC TA TOR SHIP.

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Blue State Proglodytes hoist with their own victim-loving petard.

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The coronavirus outbreak that is raging all over China right now has been making headlines on a daily basis all over the globe, and rightly so. At this point we don’t know if it will ultimately become a horrifying global pandemic that will affect tens of millions of people, but what we do know is that the virus spreads very easily and the number of cases has been rising at an exponential rate. Meanwhile, three other plagues have also been marching across Asia, and most people in the western world don’t even realize that this is happening. What I am about to share with you in this article is quite chilling, and the months ahead will be very dark if these plagues continue to spread.

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This is God telling you that smoking is a very bad idea.

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No ordinary citizen can legally carry a gun in New York City, yet shootings are up 59.6 percent over this time last year. On Sunday, a pregnant woman was shot while sitting in her own car in front of her home in Queens. This is becoming the new normal in New York after the memo has gone out to criminals in the city that politicians fear growing the prison population more than they fear crime.

According to NYPD crime data, in addition to the 59.6 percent spike in shootings over this time last year, robberies increased 32.8 percent and grand larceny auto crimes were up a whopping 62.8 percent. Burglaries rose by 17 percent. This is just for the first 26 days of 2020.

Well, that’s what you get when Democrats run your city.

Read it.

Have you noticed that these shootings tend to happen in Blue states like California?

And I don’t know what I’m supposed to do…
Din’t know I had it when I gave it to you…
Just got that old-time Wuhan flu….

With apologies to Bob Seeger — stolen from the NO AGENDA podcast, which I can highly recommend.

I hear whispers that not only is the coronavirus hitting East Asians hardest, but specifically Han Chinese.

There are indications that Africans may have the same special lung structures that make Chinese especially vulnerable to the coronavirus, so it will be interesting to see what happens if it spreads to the extensive Chinese colonies in Africa.

Joel Kotkin watches the slow-motion train wreck.

For generations the Democratic Party has survived as an amalgam of competing factions: the labor-oriented party Middle American mainstream, the assorted billionaires and grandees from the coasts and the rising “clerisy “ of educated, credentialed professionals.

This coalition has shattered as the old unionized working-class base, at least among whites, has all but disappeared, replaced by the less settled precariat of unorganized, often temporary and increasingly non-white workers.

If white people ever get together and start voting as if they were an ethnic group, Democrats are in serious trouble.

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Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

Why anyone would want actually to live in New York City, when it’s possible to live outside of it and just travel there for what you want, always escapes me. I suppose it’s the same mind-set that prompts people to stay in an abusive marriage.

Triumph of hope over experience, indeed.

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Many major U.S. cities run by liberal Democrats are in rough shape. They are afflicted by the problems of homelessness, violent crime, gangs, and unemployment to a far greater degree than the country as a whole.

Well, that’s what you get when Democrats run your city.

UPDATE: Tech giants have turned San Francisco into a dystopian nightmare

Ace of Spades blows the whistle.

It has also exposed what so many of us have suspected for many years; our federal legislature is a fundamentally unserious body. It is filled with vain, arrogant, profoundly unintelligent and incurious apparatchiks whose only foci is the pursuit of the front-and-center position in front of the media’s microphones or cameras, followed closely by the frantic charge into every pocket with the least hint of cash. Whether those pockets belong to constituents, donors, foreign despots or enemies of America is of very little importance.

…

Donald Trump’s appearance on the national stage has done a few things, but perhaps his most important and long-lasting success is the pulling back of the curtain. We see in its naked, pus-filled and evil glory the deep state, the corruption of our central government and the embarrassing lack of gravitas and wisdom among those who preen and crow and brag about how special and wonderful and elite they are.

Concur.

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I’m glad they banned all the guns and made the streets safe.. Just think of what would have happened if they hadn’t.