Read it.

Discrimination against China and Chinese people have erupted since the Covid-19 outbreak in January. Anxieties are high as many are avoiding Chinatowns across the world for fear, they might contract the deadly virus.

From Australia to New York City to Toronto to England to San Francisco, Chinatowns in many regions of the world have transformed into ghost towns. We noted this phenomenon last week.

Read it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement leaders are flagging an internal audit that found the rise of sanctuary jurisdictions is negatively affecting how the agency apprehends and deports criminal illegal aliens.

Read it.

You know things are bad for Tesla’s “autopilot” when regulators are not only blaming Tesla, but turning on other regulators. This is what happened on Tuesday, when the NTSB criticized Tesla’s “lack of system safeguards” during a fatal 2018 Autopilot crash in California. They also faulted the “scant oversight” of U.S. regulators, according to Reuters.

The chairman of the NTSB, Robert Sumwalt, said that Tesla ignored safety recommendations issued in 2017 by the agency. “It’s been 881 days since these recommendations were sent to Tesla. We’re still waiting,” he said.

“Industry keeps implementing technology in such a way that people can get injured to killed, including this board’s recommendations intended to help them prevent such tragedies,” Sumwalt continued.

Since 2016, the company’s Autopilot has been tied to at least 3 fatal accidents. And why would Elon Musk rush to correct its behavior or pay attention to NTSB recommendations when there is no negative consequence to ignoring them?

Hammer tech.

Read it.

Incidents were reported on Lesbos and Chios, outlying Greek islands that sit on the front line of a migration route for refugees and asylum seekers. Authorities announced this month they would expedite the creation of centres on five Greek islands, angering locals who say they are bearing the burden of the refugee crisis and that more asylum seekers should be transferred to the mainland amid severe overcrowding.

Witnesses said about 500 people attempted to block the unloading of heavy machinery overnight to break ground at a construction site on Lesbos.

Clashes on the streets followed, with residents attempting to block access to the construction site, and police using tear gas. Similar tensions were reported on Chios.

Read it.

The London Times reports on the discovery of a major spy ring in Australia. The guilty country is not named, but obviously is China.

Kevin Williamson calls for a time-out.

As we abandon moral language for clinical language, we run into technical difficulties. Writing in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman describes the 2020 presidential election as one that may be a contest between “a self-proclaimed socialist and an undiagnosed sociopath.”

There is no such thing as an “undiagnosed sociopath” because there is no such thing as a “diagnosed sociopath”—“sociopath” is not a clinical diagnosis. It is, like much of the psychological jargon that infests our journalism and our public discourse, less a medical term than a pop-culture trope, something that people pick up from watching too many police procedurals and reading too much self-help literature. (Any self-help literature is too much.) Like “empathy,” “sociopath” is really a literary conceit. The same holds broadly true for “psychopath.” Some terms, such as “narcissist,” straddle the line between medicine and pop culture. We love to engage in amateur diagnosis and to pathologize our rivals, family members, romantic disappointments, etc.

Read it.

A monument to people with more money than taste.

Read it.

The lucrative ‘book deal’ is one of the modern variants of the classic ‘no-show job’ with which Useful Idiots are paid off for their services. There is always a stable of ghost-writers standing by to make sure that the product is not too embarrassing, and a sea of low-information proles standing by to shell out the appropriate contribution.

Read it.

There has been remarkably little clarity, however, on the key question: What’s really driving the homelessness crisis in West Coast cities? For the past decade, progressive political leaders, activists, and media organizations have insisted that housing costs are the primary cause of homelessness. There is some truth to that: It’s obvious that in the largest West Coast cities, where a one-bedroom apartment rents for at least $2,000 a month, it’s more difficult for low-income individuals to afford stable housing.

However, as an emerging body of evidence shows, homelessness in America’s West Coast cities—particularly unsheltered homelessness—is not driven primarily by high housing costs, but rather by three interrelated phenomena: addiction, mental illness, and permissive public policies.

Read it.

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

UPDATE: Cut thru myths to see facts about COVID-19

Read it.

Not enough Magic Dirt, apparently.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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….

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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.”

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Haters gotta hate.

Read it.

Hammer tech.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Hammer tech.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Math is hard!

Especially for Democrats.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

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

Read it.

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