Read it.

I have seen no evidence that Bourdain ever did an unselfish thing. From divorcing his high-school sweetheart after 20 years of marriage once he became a star to monetizing everything he could get his hands on, his life shows a fairly consistent Me First approach.

More: Another Dead Cishet White Male

Heh: Obama Remembers Anthony Bourdain By Posting Picture Of Himself

Read it.

Slate is, of course, a Voice of the Crust. That’s the sort of thing with which our Ruling Class is comfortable.

And if you’re going to try bribing IT people, do it with something other than those brown plastic washers from Krispy Kreme. Have some pride.

Read it.

The report is compiled in compliance with an executive order from President Donald Trump shortly after taking office in January 2017.

The report said that of the 183,058 inmates in the custody of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, 38,132—or 21 percent—were “known or suspected aliens.”

Of that 38,132, the report said, 55 percent were illegal immigrants subject to a final order of removal, and almost one-third remain under Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigation.

The U.S. Marshals Service detained 19,688 identified as “confirmed aliens under ICE investigation,” 70 percent of whom were subject to a final order of removal.

“Every crime committed by an illegal alien is, by definition, a crime that should have been prevented,” Attorney General Jeff Sessions said in a statement.

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

Read it.

Zuckerberg embraces the hate.

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Your tax dollars at work. Aren’t you proud?

Read it. And there’s a video.

I find it very hard to get upset when bad things happen to bad people.

Read it.

They can get tetchy like that.

Read it.

Boy, that gun ban in Britain is really effective, isn’t it? Maybe we should try that in, say, Chicago.

Oh, wait….

Read it. And watch the videos — if you dare.

These have confirmed my long-established policy of not watching TV.

Never missed it.

Not even once.

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that over here?

Maybe we could have the Post Office run it. I hear they’re looking for something to do.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

The Other McCain ‘splains a bit of history.

One of the favorite harassment tactics of the Left is a variation on an illegal labor-union tactic known as a secondary boycott — “a boycott of an employer with which a union does not have a dispute that is intended to induce the employer to cease doing business with another employer with which the union does have a dispute.” This tactic is outlawed under the National Labor Relations Act, but the Left uses it habitually in its efforts to silence opposition. An obvious contemporary example is the so-called “BDS” (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel, which promotes protests against any person or organization that is associated with support for Israel, however indirectly. Tales of BDS harassment against Jewish students on American university campuses are an alarming testimony to how the “secondary boycott” principle makes targets of innocent people. A protest movement against the policies of the Israeli government ends up promoting hatred of American Jews who bear no responsibility for those policies. Hate must have a focus, a demonized human face as a symbol of the scapegoated enemy, and the soi-disant “progressive” Left is always seeking such targets.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Culling the herd. Think of it as evolution in action.

Hm. Wonder what percentage of these are Republican. Not many, I think.

Read it.

Saw that comin’.

Read it.

Heh.

And let’s not get started on man-buns….

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‘Social media’ appear to be the new battleground for the culture wars.

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Many people have noted the bizarre number of former Obama Administration DOJ, FBI and Intelligence Community officials who have gone to work within the U.S. media apparatus in order to protect their interests.

Former CIA Director John Brennan now working for NBC; former DNI James Clapper now working for CNN; former FBI Chief Legal Counsel James Baker now working for Lawfare blog; former FBI Supervisory Special Agent Josh Campbell now working for CNN; former Obama adviser Ben Rhodes now working for MSNBC…. the list goes on. All motives transparently political.

Read it.

That the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) is now the principal opposition party in the most powerful country of the European Union has produced remarkably little reaction in Britain. In September of last year the then German foreign minister and vice chancellor, Sigmar Gabriel, told Der Spiegel that if AfD made it into the Bundestag, Nazis would speak in the Reichstag for the first time in more than 70 years. The German political system was constructed after the end of the Second World War to make any such recurrence impossible. It has now happened, and yet liberals in this and other countries seem largely unmoved. Last year Angela Merkel was being celebrated as the leader of the Western world, and the dull stability over which she presided lauded as a model that Britain would do well to emulate. More than any other European country, we were assured, Germany had rid itself of the ugly nationalism that had disfigured the continent in the past.

AfD are not, of course, Nazis, unless you look at them through the pink lenses of SJW Social Democracy. What they are is a natural reaction to having a government that is attempting to change Germany into some melting pot of Middle Eastern welfare state on the backs of hard-working Actual Germans; that Angela Merkel spent her impressionable years growing up in East Germany is highly relevant.

Lying behind this confidence is a faith in global convergence. Despite many regressions and diversions, most societies are moving towards a Western model of liberal democracy. As Tony Blair told this magazine in November 2016: “Of course, history has a direction. There is progress, we are making progress…” Blair is distinctive in affirming explicitly an assumption that was tacitly accepted across the political spectrum throughout the post-Cold War era. Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, François Mitterrand, Gordon Brown and David Cameron all believed a type of “democratic capitalism” was spreading throughout the world. If it is now in retreat, these liberals tell themselves, the reason is not that it is somehow flawed. Provided the model is pursued consistently and single-mindedly, history will soon be back on track.

Blair is, of course, a ‘progressive’, and this is the abiding faith of the proglodyte left. History has a direction, movement in that direction is inevitable (just see Marx), and we socialists are in the first-class seats.

Nearly all liberal regimes are confronted by a two-headed internal threat. On the one hand are the forces usually described as populist – movements on the far-right and left that challenge the post-Cold-War model. Corbynite Labour falls into this category, as well as the alt-right in the US and the neo-anarchist Five Star movement in Italy. On the other hand there is what might be called alt-liberalism – a mutant version of liberal ideology that repudiates the Western civilisation that gave birth to a liberal way of life. Embedded chiefly in universities, where they shape teaching in the humanities and social sciences, alt-liberals may appear an insignificant force in politics. But while they cannot command a popular majority in any democratic country they shape the agenda on sections of the left, and weaken parties of the centre to which many voters were attached in the past.

We see this being played out daily in the DemLegHump Media.

The denial by liberals of any responsibility for the conditions that have fuelled rising anti-liberal movements is the cardinal fact of contemporary politics. What this denial presages is not any higher phase of history – a revamped liberal order, or some purer version of socialism – but a new authoritarian era. The world has reverted to a condition not dissimilar to that which prevailed towards the end of the 19th century. Harnessing unchanging human needs for security and identity, great powers are deploying new technologies in the pursuit of primacy and survival.

When people feel their lives, fortunes, and culture threatened, they respond, and one of the strongest responses is a reversion to tribalism. The longer the threat is embraced by their ruling class, the stronger the response.

Read it.

A day spent in the kitchen is a day well spent. I will never be as great a cook as my Mom was, but I do love to cook, and I manage to do a pretty good job. Even though I have a couple of bookcases full of recipe books, I still like to look at recipes on the internet to see if there is something new, or to get ideas for adding to old recipes. A couple of nights ago a recipe for a carrot, zucchini, and apple cake showed up in my Facebook time line, so I clicked on it.

After reading the recipe, I decided to look at the comments on the post (I should never do that). One gal said, “Just because it has veggies in it doesn’t mean it is good for you. Don’t make this.” And, another gal shrieked, “Flour and sugar will kill you!” (Emphasis added) Wow. I’ll bet the neighborhood potlucks with Debbie Downer and Morticia are a real hoot.

Sadly, these militant, angry foodies run rampant throughout our society. They seem to think that they are the only people on earth who should decide what everybody else eats. Looking down their snoots at the rest of us who just want to enjoy our food, they try like crazy to shame us into a diet that would make us as unhappy as they are. It would be funny if it wasn’t so sad.

The world is full of people who are convinced way down in their soul that they have the right to tell you how to live your life. Resist them, steadfast in the faith.

Read it.

One of the more pernicious effects of ‘free’ health care is massive (and often illegal) ‘health tourist’ immigration.

Econ 101: When the price of something is zero, the demand is for all practical purposes infinite, and the cost of providing it not far short of that.

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Because the Crust takes care of its own. Duh.

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That’s a pretty major knife the cyclist was ‘just happening’ to be carrying. I guess when guns are outlawed, the outlaws will have knives.

Oh, look. He appears to be a Person of Color. What are the odds?

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that over here?

Feel the Bern….

We could let the Post Office run it. They appear to be looking for something to do; it’s not as if they’re delivering the country’s mail any more.

Read it.

Australians won’t be able to purchase goods from Amazon’s international websites after July 1 thanks to a sales tax on overseas purchases, leaving room for competitors to take advantage of Amazon’s smaller presence in the country.

…

The $500 million to $700 million AUD ($376 million to $527 million USD) that Australians spent on all Amazon websites represented about 10 percent of all online overseas spending, Australian Financial Review reported Thursday.

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The Crust think that the Filling are so stupid that merely filing the serial numbers off of a bad idea and slapping on a coat of paint is sufficient to reboot their schemes. Of course, with Europeans they may be right; after all, Europeans voted for this monstrosity in the first place.

That ‘artists’ are leading this effort ought to come as no surprise. (‘They may have won all the battles/But we had all the good songs!’)

Read it.

It is against the law to discriminate against workers older than 40 in hiring and recruitment. But using material provided by our readers through a ProPublica crowd-sourcing effort, we found dozens of companies who bought Facebook ads aimed at recruiting workers within limited age ranges. Some companies said these ads were not representative of their wider recruitment strategies. Others said targeting workers by age was a mistake, and vowed to stop doing it. To see the ads and each company’s response, click on the company names below. To join our crowd-sourcing effort, download our tool for Firefox or Google Chrome.

This would disturb me if I were on Facebook (or would even touch it with a ten-foot pole).

Read it.

This is why we need a wall.

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On average, 2.3 million tons of Styrofoam end up in landfills every year in the United States. That is less than 7 percent of the nearly 33.54 million tons of plastic Americans discard annually. Additionally, replacing Styrofoam products with paper alternatives often creates more waste (in volume and energy use) and generates more air and water pollution. The environmental impact of paper manufacturing is worse than foam manufacturing.

…

Banning Styrofoam creates other problems. The material is used widely in the food and packaging industries and such industries typically provide ownership and employment opportunities for minorities. In 2014, New York City collected an estimated 28,500 tons of plastic foam, about 90 percent of which came from single-use containers for the customers of food vendors and restaurants.  Vendors using foam containers are less able to absorb the costs of switching to more environmentally friendly materials because many are small businesses that operate on thin profit margins. Bans also impose costs on the foam manufacturing industry. The direct and indirect impacts of prohibiting EPS manufacturing in New York could eliminate 2,000 jobs and $400 million in economic activity. In California, an estimated 8,000 jobs could disappear.

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Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, or the place would be like Texas.

Eight people are dead and 30 more wounded after Memorial Day Weekend carnage in Chicago. As ABC affiliate WLS reports, Chicago police say the shootings killed one more person than the seven who died over last year’s Memorial Day Weekend.

Those killed represent a cross-section of the city, from a 20-year-old mother who died at her front door to a 31-year-old man who died after receiving gunshot wounds to the chest and head following an altercation.

None of it was white kids at a school, however, so it wasn’t considered newsworthy by the DemLegHump Media.

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On Friday, British free-speech activist and Islam critic Tommy Robinson was acting as a responsible citizen journalist — reporting live on camera from outside a Leeds courtroom where several Muslims were being tried for child rape — when he was set upon by several police officers. In the space of the next few hours, a judge tried, convicted, and sentenced him to 13 months in jail — and also issued a gag order, demanding a total news blackout on the case in the British news media. Robinson, whose real name is Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, was immediately taken to Hull Prison.

Read it.

Any suggestion that political correctness amounts to “just being polite” is bonkers. Today, it’s a weapon deployed by capricious neurotics from Planet Grievance to ruin perfectly normal people who display normal Earthling behavior such as “joking.” Since when does a mention of “ladies lingerie” constitute a hateful attack?

Much of the nuttiest stuff in the thought-policing world continues to happen on campus. Robby Soave, who has covered college protests against speech extensively for Reason, writes that students generally tell him they support the First Amendment BUT “They also tell me some combination of the following: Hate speech isn’t free speech; if marginalized people feel threatened by the speech, the speech is actually violence” and angry mobs that shut down speakers are not behaving unethically because they’re not the government.

Read it.

Thousands of unborn children will die. I should have thought that would be obvious.

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided healthcare! Don’t you wish we had a system like that over here?

Feel the Bern….

Read it.

Another … wait for it … Democrat.

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If you want to get shot to death, Chicago is the place to be. So far this year, 157 people have been shot to death in Chicago, and another 810 people were wounded.

Gee, that’s more than all of the ‘school shootings’ in the last ten years. And yet nobody is trumpeting it in the news, there are no hordes of marching school kids screaming about the NRA, etc. etc. Wonder why.

Read it.

How about that GREAT government-provided healthcare? Don’t you wish we had a system like that over here?

Feel the Bern….

Read it.

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

Feel the Bern….

Read it.

All Democrats. Just ask them.

Read it.

Parents are creative in finding new and even more pungent ways for their children to suffer during their school years.

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I am not making this up.

How long before the Democrats try that in this country? Not long, I’m thinking. Probably in California.

Read it.

Yet another thing for hipster hand-wringers to worry about.

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According to the SF Chronicle, Cupertino is looking to pass a similar proposal as the one in Mountain View, California, which would rake in roughly $5.4M from giants such as Google. Cupertino is currently polling residents about the new tax proposal and how money from it should be spent.

Apple did not immediately return a request for comment. The company has more than 25,000 employees in the Bay Area. Specific numbers for Cupertino — where it is by far the largest employer — were unavailable.

Cupertino isn’t the only city exploring this, however. Seattle, Amazon’s hometown was looking at a similar proposal that would charge $275 per employee for businesses that make at least $20M a year, just last week.

Google’s hometown Mountain View is planning similar moves as it wants to raise its head-count tax to $10M, where Google will only pay half, if the city could use the revenue towards transportation and housing.

No politician anywhere is capable of seeing a pile of money and resisting dipping both hands into it. You would think that the enormous property taxes that Apple is undoubtedly paying, and they business that they bring to the community, would be enough. But NOOOOOOO….

Read it.

Authorities in Australia revealed that almost 200 athletes and officials who visited for the Commonwealth Games have sought asylum— a sharp increase from numbers at other recent events.

Since the games in the Gold Coast ended last month, there have been various sightings and reports of missing athletes around the country, mostly involving competitors from African countries such as Rwanda, Uganda, Sierra Leone and Cameroon.

Australia issued 13,600 visas to athletes and team officials for the event. Immigration authorities told a parliament committee that 8,103 people arrived on the visas but only 7,848 have since left. Of the 255 who appear to have remained in the country, 205 are on temporary bridging visas after applying for other visas.

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It’s those spandex pants. Even the cougars can’t stand ’em.

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Wow. What a shocking development. That’s investigative journalism at its finest. Ida Tarbell would be SO PROUD.

Read it.

Saw that comin’. Guess they discovered that you can’t be rich hipsters without being evil.

Charles C.W. Cooke cuts through the spittle spray from the DemLegHump media.

What do we know about the guns? Well, while all the eyewitnesses thus far seem to have mentioned only a shotgun, Governor Abbott has announced that he also had a revolver. Unless he was given permission to acquire these weapons from his parents, at least someone has broken the law here. Federal law prohibits the commercial transfer of a handgun to anyone under 21, and the private transfer of a handgun to anyone under 18. Because the shooter was 17, he was federally ineligible to be gifted, sold, or leased such a weapon, other than on a temporary basis for “legal sporting purpose.” Long guns are a different story federally—there is no federal law prohibiting the private transfer of a long gun to a minor—but more complicated at the state level. While there is no minimum age to possess firearms in Texas, it remains illegal in the state for to sell, lease, rent, or give a firearm to a person under 18 years of age without a parent’s permission. Again, the shooter was 17. Bottom line: Unless his parents agreed to let him have the guns, someone broke the law. That may seem a little obvious given that he concealed-carried a handgun (illegal at his age), took weapons into a school (illegal under federal law), and then committed murder (illegal). But it’s helpful to know what is and what is not allowed when debating what to do in response.

…

It will be interesting to see what gun-control measures are proposed in response to this incident. Shotguns are almost never included in the lists of weapons that the gun-control movement hopes to prohibit — except, obviously, by those who covet a full ban on the private ownership of firearms — and, because they hold only six rounds and do not take magazines, .38 caliber revolvers fall well within the limits that even heavily regulated states such as California have seen fit to impose. Indeed, shotguns and revolvers tend to be held up as the “reasonable” guns that “nobody wants to ban.” Famously, Joe Biden told Americans who want to protect themselves to eschew modern sporting rifles and instead “buy a shotgun.” Likewise, I am asked constantly why I’d need a semi-automatic pistol for home-defense when I could buy a six-shooter instead. Whether this will be reflected in the coverage remains to be seen. If I were a betting man, I’d predict that it will not.

Read it.

A University of Akron professor in Ohio tried to award higher grades to his female students based on their gender, and school officials promptly prevented him from doing so Wednesday.

Pretty soon a college degree will be nothing more than a participation trophy.