Read it.

Yeah, well, the problem is that they take their blue-state socialist thought patterns with them.

Assimilation is not just a problem on the southern border.

Read it.

He is, as you can see, a Person of Color.

D.C. has gun control laws that are among the strictest in the nation. Glad to see that they are working so well.

Read it.

A major schism looms over the United Methodist Church (UMC) as the denomination’s international conference grapples with whether or not to allow homosexual clergy and same-sex marriage.

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It’s the usual RINOs, plus a new recruit. I don’t know who Thom Tillis is, but he’s at minimum a cuck.

A major push is needed to primary these clowns.

Thank God McCain is dead, or he and his Sancho Panza, Graham, would be in this donkey-cart with the rest.

Read it.

This is why Republicans qualify as The Stupid Party.

The Other McCain runs up against totalitarianism.

What does knitting have to do with politics? Nothing that I can think of, except that everything is political to “social justice warriors” (SJWs) who constantly patrol the Internet in search of something to be angry about.

Read it.

This is a good read on how much totalitarian progressivism is being promoted by ostensibly ‘neutral’ tech companies.

This doesn’t affect me at present, because I don’t use Twitter. But the trend is clear.

The problem is the proglodytes can’t every stop; they can’t ever say, okay, we can quit now, this is far enough — because without change there is no progress and so not-changing is a betrayal of the better future we all could have if we continue to change.  They can’t ever stop pushing change. Not ever.

Read it.

What everyone may not know is that climate science is an industry, and the product is the global warming scare.  If the global warming scare is discredited, the huge industry will collapse.  Climate scientists used to be unimportant academics in an unimportant academic field.  The global warming scare made them into celebrities jetting around the world.  They won’t give up the glory without a fight.

…

Climate science has gone off the rails. President Eisenhower nailed the problem in his 1961 farewell address. He expressed the fear that because science had become heavily dependent on federal financial support, scientists would color the science in order to increase the flow of federal money. Nothing works better for increasing the flow of federal scientific money than predicting a future disaster. If scientists predict a disaster, we have to give them more money to research methods of preventing the disaster.

Read it.

‘Bulwark’ is the new turncoat operation by Bill Kristol (who only coincidentally looks like Mussolini).

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Perhaps Congresswoman Occasional-Cortex could help — after all, she is ‘the boss’ now.

Read it.

Democrats return to their roots: The party of explicit racism.

That didn’t take long.

Read it.

On Google, I just typed in “top races Republican,” and the word “races” got a squiggly underline suggesting I had misspelled the word. Beneath it ran Google’s helpful correction: “top racist Republican.” With “top races Democrat,” no such veering into the gutter. No squiggly line. The word “racist” did not insinuate itself into my field of vision. Oh, and before I completed the phrase, with just “top races Democra,” two lines below ran the following little hint: “best Democratic races to donate to.” Huh? Who said anything about donating? I’ve never donated to a political candidate in my life, and if I did, I wouldn’t donate to Democrats. Again, no parallel on the Republican side. No steering me to fundraisers.

How is that going so far? The Creepy Line, a terrifying and important 80-minute documentary now streaming on Amazon Prime, is an attempt to answer that question.

Read it.

For the same reason it’s oppressing its Tibetans. They aren’t Han.

An additional reason is that Islam, like Communism, is an oppressive totalitarian ideology. Two such cannot co-exist. The Chinese recognize this and are taking the appropriate steps to extinguish Islam in their territory.

Read it.

Points to ponder:

1. New York has some of the most strict gun control laws in the nation. Yet it has a ‘growing number of murders’.
2. The victim was apparently specifically targeted. There has evidently been no investigation of why.
3. The streets were full of people going about their business, and yet (a) nobody intervened, (b) nobody tried to stop or apprehend the shooter or his companion, (c) everybody just stood by passively and hoped not to be noticed.

Read it.

Here’s the part I find most entertaining:

We underestimated the effect of the opposition’s distortions and overestimated the intelligence and integrity of local elected officials.

That’s American politics in a nutshell.

Read it.

If walls don’t work, why all this destructive activity?

Read it.

After Zimbabwe, it was only a matter of time before the WaBenzi kleptocracy came to South Africa.

Taki is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Apparently socialism is on its way, hence the partying as the Titanic begins to tilt. Let’s face it: There were millions of educated people who fell for communism even after the gulag and the show trials had become public knowledge. So why should they not fall for the lesser evil of socialism? As Orwell once observed, “There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.” There is a new congresswoman in that place west from here who wants to abolish flying in order to save the planet. I’m all for it. First-class passage on a liner is much more fun than being squeezed inside a steel tube and being in close proximity with smelly but rich proles up front. Possibilities of shipboard romance flicker through my memory. Let’s get rid of airplanes, save the planet, and all find romance on the high seas.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

The left would have you believe that America is a sea of hate from deplorable Trump voters, and on campus especially we hear endlessly that dissent from the party line is “literal” violence to vulnerable peoples. Strangely, actual violence on campuses (and elsewhere) seems to be the monopoly of the left. Such as this incident at Berkeley today, where a student with a table on Sproul Plaza promoting Turning Point USA was assaulted. Notice that the leftist thug says the Turning Point person is “promoting violence,” while he is the only one throwing punches.

George Leef turns over a rock.

A book that happened to catch my attention long before I was working in the field of higher-ed policy was Rita Kramer’s 1991 Ed School Follies. In it, she showed how many of America’s schools of education — the training grounds for future teachers — had been overrun with leftist ideology. And how do things stand 28 years later?

Read it.

A Person of Color behaving badly. What are the odds?

Read it.

On today’s show we get deeper into the 2020 Democratic field as crazy Uncle Bernie tosses his hat in the ring. To celebrate, video of a 1985 interview with Bernie has resurfaced in which he celebrates communism and bread lines while complaining about then-President Ronald Reagan. Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to make child care a right, and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand wants the government to create a new third gender. It’s a woke-off.

The conventional wisdom about political campaigns is that the candidate runs to one side to get the nomination and then runs back toward the middle to do as well as possible in the election. It will be interesting to see, in a field that starts practically on the edge of the world already, how any eventual candidate is going to make it back to the fringe, much less the center.

I don’t think Trump will have anything to worry about, should he choose to run for re-election. Mike Pence could beat any of this crowd.

Read it.

I remember these. When I was a kid, I was taken to Indianapolis to get some new shoes. Spiegel, famous for its mail-order catalogs, had an actual brick-and-mortar store there, and I got to look at my feet in the new shoes.

Read it.

If you weren’t scared of USB cables before, you should be now. The O.MG cable (or Offensive MG kit) from [MG] hides a backdoor inside the shell of a USB connector. Plug this cable into your computer and you’ll be the victim of remote attacks over WiFi.

Read it.

The horror! The horror!

Read it.

If you ever doubted that government schools run on the batch-process factory model, here’s your proof.

Unionized teachers, like all union members, are more concerned with their pay, benefits, and job security than the quality of their product.

Read it.

Boy, those strict gun bans in Britain sure cut down on the murder rate, didn’t they.

Read it.

No good show goes uncanceled.

To be fair, The Punisher went all PC/SJW for the second season and people understandably bailed.

UPDATE: Jessica Jones and The Punisher cancelled – what went wrong for Netflix and Marvel?

Read it.

Most people don’t spend much time thinking about Algeria, but the problems that they are experiencing are much the same as those that other ‘hird World countries are experiencing. Their governmental institutions are sufficiently defective that there is almost no economic opportunity for anyone outside of the golden circle of those who can leech off of government office. Any one with any talent, and certainly anyone who manages to get some sort of education, is faced with the choice of sitting at home and rotting or leaving the country for opportunity in a First World nation. As a result, the homeland never makes any progress.

Ace of Spades boils it down.

Good morning kids. Start of a new week and the lead story continues to be immigration and border security in the wake of the President’s signing of the CR monstrosity that allowed the government to remain open (G-d forbid it shouldn’t, right?) while providing some funds for the building of the border wall, along with his simultaneous declaration of a national emergency to use his executive authority to appropriate funds from other agencies. Except within the over 1,100-page monstrosity are thousands of tiny time pills that actually prevent even a shovelful of dirt from being dug, adequate funds or not. I don’t know; Trump is boastful as ever that it’s going to get done but frankly, I don’t see how. From a political standpoint, I would have preferred him vetoing the bill and then forcing Congress – Democrats and GOP-e alike – to override him and then letting them take full blame for this. Beyond that, the insanity of our national debt as well as the size and scope of the feral Federal government are travesties in and of themselves, as well as the lifeblood of the very swamp that the President set out to drain.

That pretty much sums it up. The ‘compromise’ funding provision for the Border Wall had, as a number have pointed out, two poison pills: one giving each of the communities along the southern border (almost all of which are Democrat to their core) an effective veto over whether any barrier gets built in their area, and one that effectively requires catch-and-release for any illegal immigrant that can with a straight face claim ‘sponsorship’ of an unaccompanied illegal immigrant child. That very clever Democrat legislators inserted these into the provision in order to render it useless is pretty obvious; that Republicans were either too stupid or too lazy to excise them is also pretty obvious.

The reason that Democrats, for all their flaws, keep winning is because the Republicans keep living down to their reputation as The Stupid Party, at least as reflected in the people that wind up in Washington. Is it any wonder that those who are inclined to vote Republican after a while just throw up their hands and say, ‘Why bother’?

Read it.

That’s the real problem.

Read it.

Sure, open up the borders! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

Read it.

The reason this isn’t All Over The News is because he isn’t a white guy.

Boy, those gun-control laws really work, don’t they?

Read it.

“Knitting is just so white. Let’s hope it gets better.” I overheard this puzzling remark in my local yarn store in Edinburgh, Scotland, last week. The store is in the affluent area of Marchmont, just outside the city centre. Its Edwardian and Victorian tenement flats, adjacent to huge green spaces, are popular with students and families alike. Two customers were chatting to the store owner: “It’s about time we had the conversation,” one of them offered. Her companion nodded in solemn agreement.

Read it.

I guess they win.

In the U.S. that would be a HUGE wrongful death action–don’t know how they handle it in Londonistan.

Read it.

Actually, it’s about controlling what Americans do everywhere.

It’s about controlling how Americans travel.

It’s about controlling where Americans live.

It’s about controlling how much money Americans are allowed to make and how much they are allowed to keep.

It’s about controlling what Americans are allowed to say and eventually what they’re allowed to think.

Ultimately, it’s about a boot stepping on an American face … forever.

Joel Kotkin is delightfully dyspsptic today.

For a decade, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley and Puget Sound worked overtime to win over progressives. For the most part, they enthusiastically back the Left on its immigration, environmental, gender, and racial agendas. The merger of the tech oligarchs with the Democrats went swimmingly—until the contradictions became too obvious. Even as they muzzled conservatives both inside and outside their companies and donated heavily to President Obama and other Democrats, they have remained at their core ruthless capitalists, determined to crush competition and shape society to their liking.

As Amazon has discovered, though, progressives now seek to limit the power and influence of these monopolistic behemoths. The Left’s new firebrands, including New York’s freshman representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, much as Bernie Sanders did in 2016, openly regard both tech oligarchs and Wall Street billionaires as class enemies. The progressives’ alliance with private-sector unions, whose presence has shrunk in tech-driven urban economies like San Francisco and Seattle, has drawn attention to Amazon’s non-unionized warehouses and fulfillment centers, where widespread claims of low pay, brutal management practices, and an accelerated search to replace workers with robots have energized labor advocates. The new scrutiny is especially critical because an increasing number of millennials—soon to be the nation’s largest voting bloc—say that they prefer socialism to capitalism, threatening the future profits of even the most “woke” Silicon Valley plutocrats.

This is the newest twist on an ancient game. It has long been customary for rich politicians to launder their wealth through ‘progressive’ demagoguery (see Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or really almost any Democrat in national politics), but Actual Rich People are discovering that they can get in on the fun without the fuss and bother of running for office. But they’re discovering that there are a lot of ankle-biters flopping around who actually believe this stuff. I think that it was in anticipation of this that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post — it’s not as if it was a profitable enterprise.

Tucker Carlson scratches his head.

One thing that every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They’re happy in their sinecures and getting richer. In a culture like this, there’s no penalty for being wrong. The talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the way. It happened to the Ottomans. Max Boot is living proof that it’s happening in America.

…

The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic, tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done with it 40 years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.

I would have phrased the headline ‘Why Are These Pretend Conservatives Still Around?’, but it wasn’t my article.

Read it.

After all, the two greatest successes when it comes to nuclear energy are Sweden and France, two nations held up by democratic socialists for decades as models of the kind of societies they want.

It is only nuclear energy, not solar and wind, that has radically and rapidly decarbonized energy supplies while increasing wages and growing societal wealth.

Read it.

What goes around comes around.

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And because it’s ‘described’ that way, that makes it true.

Uh, no.

Operation will see heavy metal waste dumped in fjords and put reindeer at risk.

If you believe the people who always oppose such operations, and they wouldn’t lie to you, would they? Or exaggerate?

Opponents fear it will lead to mining and drilling projects in other fragile ecosystems in the Arctic, which has become the latest frontier in the quest for rapidly depleting mineral and fossil fuel reserves.

No actual evidence of whether, or even if, that will happen — apparently ‘fear’ is good enough.

This ‘article’ tells you more about the political agenda of the author than it does any ‘news’.

Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, does a look-see.

Every now and then, a few apparently random news events come together and influence how you see the world. My most recent lesson is that blackmail and blackmail risk are a lot more common than I had thought.

The first relevant news event is the allegation by Jeff Bezos that the National Enquirer has been blackmailing him with the threat to release photos of his private parts (there is much more detail to this story). Several other people have since alleged that the Enquirer has engaged in additional unscrupulous extortion tactics. This could be part of a broader pattern, involving other media and intelligence services.

Read it.

Democrats: Party of Fear – Party of Hate – Party of Death.

Read it.

As if the Occasional-Cortexites even care.

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How about that GREAT government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Well, I don’t.

Read it.

What goes around comes around.

Julia Beck, a lesbian activist kicked off a Baltimore LGBTQ Commission for using the “wrong” pronoun to refer to an alleged male rapist who considers himself a female, defended “biological reality” while lamenting the fact that, in today’s environment, men can easily “gain access to single-sex spaces” simply by calling themselves female.

Welcome to our world, sweetheart.

Read it.

The problem with having only one health-care provider for everybody is that everybody suffers if a mistake is made.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Think of the DMV or Post Office in charge of your health care. You want to know how ‘Medicare For All’ would work. look at the V.A. hospital system.

Read it.

Like cockroaches crawling out of the woodwork.

Read it.

Silicon Valley is full of opportunities for political donations. But a Soros-funded organization wants to make sure any support goes to the correct side of the political spectrum.

Politico reported on February 9 that major tech companies, such as Google and Facebook, offered “the same technical assistance,” as well as financial aid, to the Republican party as they did to the Democrat party in 2016. George Soros-funded Color of Change objected to tech giving the GOP any support. “It’s no longer acceptable for these companies to play both sides like they’re equal,” said the group’s President Rashad Robinson.