Read it.

I thought this was one of the things that the school was supposed to teach. Are they getting rid of the books because the students can’t read them?

Read it.

Obama got rolled. But you knew that.

Read it.

Black Lives Matter is just another Swamp Creature out there spreading hate.

Read it.

Well, well, now, we wouldn’t want to point any fingers….  It is, after all, the Party of Hate.

Read it.

Apparently not all Canadians are as polite as they pretend to be.

Read it.

Read it.

As most inhabitants of totalitarian societies soon learn, the way to make yourself safer is to denounce somebody else.

The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners marches on.

Lileks.

Okay, here’s my question for the hopeful hippies, then: if this marvelous free tool that broke down all the rules empowered the dolts and crazies and jerks, would it have been so bad if civility had been held up as a virtue and profanity discouraged? It would’ve broken down eventually, because there are always elements of the culture that want to break old norms for the joy of it, or because they are tools of existing power structures. But the lefty side of the culture spent the last half-century demeaning all the “phony” rules of decorum and applauding the poke in the sternum, the F word, the humiliation of the ideal of self-restraint, and this is what you got. You thought everyone would be hippies and hippies would be mellow. You got a hundred million Abbie Hoffmans. Great job!

Read it.

Last night I went with my oldest child to see the latest Avengers movie, Avengers: Infinity War, and was struck by the villain of the piece: Thanos. Up until this point, Thanos has been more of a background, shadow villain; someone who supports the active villainy of others through advice and henchmen but refusing to get his hands dirty. (Mild spoilers ahead.)

Now, in this latest installment, his long-game strategy is revealed: he wishes to save the universe by murdering half of its inhabitants, thereby decreasing the demand on all the resources so that the surviving group will have an easier time of it. I have heard this argument before, both in fiction and reality, but this time the rationality of Thanos stood out in a new way to me. As the megalomaniac explained his rationale for his actions, he reminded me of nothing else so much as Great Britain’s National Healthcare Service, especially as concerns Alfie Evans.

The NHS has argued repeatedly that it acted in the best interests of 22-month-old Alfie Evans. How did it choose to act? By overruling the rights and desires of his parents and Alfie’s own right to life by removing this little boy from his respirator and nutrition. Thus, he died, over days, gasping and starving.

The NHS’s officials claim they had the right to let Alfie die because they could not see a way to treat or cure him. It could think of no better way of dealing with this “problem.” Instead of taking up other countries’ (such as Italy’s) offer to take over Alfie’s care, they preferred that if he was going to die, he had better do it on their terms. Not on his terms, since Alfie was too little to ever have an opinion on this serious topic. Not his parents’ terms, when they were begging the doctors not to do this and visiting the Pope personally to implore his help. Not in the worldwide community’s terms, which echoed the same offers of help they proffered before when Charlie Gard, another little boy who also died at the behest of the NHS, was struggling for life. No, it is purely on the NHS’s own terms. They claim, however, that this decision really was in his best interests.

‘Believe us, Comrade, it’s in your own best interest.’

Read it.

Of course he is.

Read it.

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

Read it.

A prime example of an organization that keeps hanging on long after its original objective has been accomplished.

Read it.

As you might expect, she is a Person of Color.

Read it.

This looks at the Left Coast but it’s still pretty startling.

Scott Adams lays it out.

“The Left defines itself by its hatred of individuals for their ideas.”

Read it.

The innate totalitarian nature of the Democrat party often comes out in surprising ways.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

I suspect that if you examine his wallet you’ll find that Cuomo is plenty green enough.

Read it.

The Clintons have been money-launderers with respect to illegal foreign campaign contributions since at least 1996.

Read it.

The case of Alfie Evans once again brings to light the ethical and moral landmines that are promulgated as governments intrude further and further into the personal lives of its citizens.

Young Alfie suffers from a so-far unknown and undiagnosed congenital ailment that has left him in a near-vegetative state since late 2016. As such, the officials of the UK’s National Health Service have brought it upon themselves to hasten the death of the child … for his own well-being.

If you think that is sarcasm … it is not. The Royal College of Pediatrics literally made that argument this week. And that would be bad enough except for the fact that there is no medical or moral reason for their conclusion. So far, there is little to no medical evidence that the child has been suffering at all.

Well, that is not totally the case. The child did suffer over the last 24 hours … after NHS physicians removed his ventilator and then for hours refused to provide any ancillary support to reduce his difficulty as he was gasping for air and suffering from dehydration. In short, the physicians themselves have caused more suffering than any decision the parents have recently made.

This debate could have been avoided if the UK had taken up the Italian government’s offer to fly Alfie to Rome and provide him with any care he required. With the blessings of the Pope himself, Italy even granted Alfie citizenship on Monday. Italian diplomats further offered to evacuate him by military air ambulance to an Italian hospital for treatment and, if needed, end-of-life care.

The UK government said “No thanks.”

The key fact here is that when government provides your health care, government makes your medical decisions, even to the point of deciding whether you live or die. When government provides your health care, health care has become what economists call a ‘public good’ (think military defense or law enforcement) and, as with other public goods, attempts to enforce a government monopoly on the provision of such goods. When government provides a service, the constant inclination is to make it a government monopoly and to de-legitimize other potential providers, even when the ‘good’ in question has historically been adequately supplied by non-government providers. Look at the history of homeschooling — in some countries, like Germany, it is actually illegal to homeschool your children.

UPDATE: The Sad Case of Alfie Evans: A Sordid Lesson in Government-Controlled Health Care

UPDATE: The Lesson of Alfie Evans

Read it.

You knew it was coming.

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

Read it.

Lest we forget.

Walter Williams is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Here are my questions to you: If only 37 percent of white high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 70 percent of them? And if roughly 17 percent of black high school graduates test as college-ready, how come colleges are admitting 58 percent of them?

Read it.

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

Read it.

Am I the only one in my spinning class at Equinox in Manhattan who’s fed up paying $200 every month for a gym with clean showers, $3,000 in rent every month for an apartment without cockroaches and $8 every morning for a cup of coffee? Am I the only one moving through the greater part of New York City boroughs and seeing an inexorable march of urban decay matched with the discomfort of crowding and inexplicable costs? I know I am not.

New York is the most expensive city in America. Its lower-cost neighborhoods are riddled with crime and homelessness. Its public schools, some of which are among the worst in the nation, look more like prisons than places of learning.

Y’all come to Texas. Plenty of room. I’m paying less than $2000 a month for a house with 2850 square feet in a Dallas suburb run by Republicans.

Read it.

A reminder to proglodyte dreamers everywhere that not everybody in California is a woke SWPL hipster.

Read it.

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

ZMan is delightfully dyspeptic today.

If you read Donald Kagan’s account of the The Peloponnesian War, the politicians of Athenian democracy come in for some rough treatment for their dishonestly, stupidity and fecklessness. Kagan is especially tough on Alcibiades, who he mostly blames for the disastrous Sicilian Expedition. Whether that is fair or not is debatable, but Kagan’s description of Alcibiades as a duplicitous and egotistical politician, with a penchant for snapping penises off of statuary, strikes a chord with anyone who follows politics today.

Look around Washington, and with few exceptions, the place is full of the worst sorts of people. It’s not just the dishonestly, which is a permanent feature of politics, regardless of the system. That’s a self-correcting feature, for the most part. The main issue in our politics is that our system attracts the worst people. It is nearly impossible to find an elected official who has ever done honest work. Most are phenomenally stupid, outside their reptilian ability to fool voters and cozy up to the billionaires that bankroll them.

The problem is that politicians will say whatever it takes to get them elected. Once they’re in office, the people who are in a position to give them money and votes to help them stay in office get priority, and to Hell with what would actually benefit the people.

It is tempting to say that this is just the natural result of democracy. There is a lot of truth there, as this was the result of Athenian democracy, as well. The standard critique of democracy is that it brings together a bunch of not so smart and wise people, expecting them to be collectively what they are not individually. Dumb people do not become smart when their numbers increase. Therefore, the antidote to the defects of democracy is limiting the franchise to the best people. That’s the argument for a representative republic.

The counter to this is the public is almost always choosing between two terrible choices when they go to vote. It’s not that they are choosing poorly, so much as they can only choose poorly. At election time, you get to select between two degenerate sociopaths, so the result is fixed. It’s hard to blame the public for bad choices, given what we see on display in our elections. The reason Trump is in the White House, despite his long list of liabilities, is he was the most honest guy on stage. Think about that for a second.

Amen to that.

Read it.

Banning guns didn’t reduce crime, it redirected it to knives.

It turns out that when you pass laws disarming people in an attempt to prevent violence, criminals who habitually disregard all laws don’t make exceptions for the new rules. In London, crime still thrives despite the U.K.’s tight gun controls and the British political class is now desperately turning its attention to restricting knives.

This whack-a-mole will continue until politicians get a clue (i.e. forever).

The mayhem that’s closed London’s homicide gap with its trans-Atlantic rival appears to be largely the result of violent criminal gangs. Firearms are strictly restricted in the U.K., including a near-total ban on handguns. Nevertheless, “[i]n the 12 months to October 2017, there were 2,500 offences involving guns: a 16 per cent increase on the previous year and a 44 per cent increase on 2014,” the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee noted in January. Criminals, it seems, are not averse to committing crimes—including the illegal acquisition of tools that help them commit more crimes.

Couldn’t have any connection to the importation of thousands of tribal Muslims, oh no.

Read it.

Senator Whitehouse looks like the dimwitted scion of a rich family who was sent into politics because they couldn’t think of any place else to put him.

Oh, wait, he really is….

He also appears to be a classmate of mine, although I don’t remember running into him.

Read it.

Sky is falling, women and minorities hardest hit, give us your money and go live in a cave, etc. etc.

Note that they are depending on the Low Information Reader to hear that ‘could’ as a ‘will’ and panic.

I’m still pulling for New York City to be under 3 feet of water. That would make me smile.

Read it.

The subject comes to mind because today is Earth Day, a quasi-religious day of observance for (mostly) irreligious types who claim to revere science but wouldn’t know it if it bit them in the hindquarters. It leads the list of irrelevant and concocted “holidays” that are mainly occasions for silliness (sometimes serious silliness, as on Earth Day), filling air time, selling greeting cards, and pandering to political correctness.

Others of its kind include Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Kwanzaa, Rosa Parks Day, Harriet Tubman Day, Malcolm X Day,Juneteenth, African New Year, Groundhog Day, National Girls and Women in Sports Day, International Women’s Day, April Fools’ Day, Arbor Day, May Day, Cinco de Mayo, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day, Helen Keller Day, Father’s Day, Women’s Equality Day, Grandparent’s Day, German-American Day, and Leif Erikson Day.

I have nothing against Washington’s Birthday, which honors a man who should be honored. But I object strenuously to its popular name, Presidents’ Day, which submerges Washington in a presidential pool that includes the anti-patriotic likes of Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama. Presidents’ day belongs with the list in the preceding paragraph; it has become an occasion for selling automobiles, appliances, and furniture.

Concur.

I would go farther and bar Congress and the President from establish bogus National ‘Days”, “Weeks”, and “Months”, starting with Black History Month and such rot. This sort of political posturing and virtue-signalling fills mind-share that would more profitably be devoted to actual substantive reforms.

Who needs National Pig Day? Certainly not the pigs.

Read it.

The term is probably a shortening of “software engineer,” but its use betrays a secret: “Engineer” is an aspirational title in software development. Traditional engineers are regulated, certified, and subject to apprenticeship and continuing education. Engineering claims an explicit responsibility to public safety and reliability, even if it doesn’t always deliver.

The title “engineer” is cheapened by the tech industry.

Software developers have no more right to the term ‘engineer’ than medical doctors. Engineers build things whose behavior after being built is precisely calculable; that ain’t software. Software above the level of ‘Hello, world’ is a complex system that interacts with the complex system software hosting it, and none of those interactions are precisely calculable, any more than the biological processes in a body are calculable. The best you can do is say ‘well, well think it will act this way, mostly’.

If there were a convenient term for ‘software physician’, that would be best. Unfortunately, I can’t think of one.

Read it.

The brownshirts of the Left are on the march. The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace.

Severian is not afraid to ask the hard question.

Borrowing a phrase from Marx, the early 21st century West is the only place with the “objective conditions” that allow a “displaced Southern queer millennial womanist organizer/writer” to exist.  Everything about this… being… and They’s partner-being exist, and can only exist, thanks to the culmination of decades of unprecedented material prosperity and its consequent mental enstupidation.  In my time in a college town I met quite a few people who make up their own pronouns, and trust me, they should be required to talk in footnotes — everything they say or think is lifted wholesale from Jezebel, Feministing, or the Guardian.  If they were my students, I could fail their entire lives for plagiarism.

Read it.

The woman whose book Silent Spring resulted in the banning of DDT and consequently thousands of deaths from malaria in Third World countries is refuted by an actual scientist.

Feel the Berne….

Michelle Malkin brings the heat.

Ground zero for the latest outbreak? The headquarters of The New Yorker magazine. This week’s issue online features the bigoted lament of writer Daniel Piepenbring, who decries the fast-food chain’s “creepy infiltration” of the Big Apple and warns against the company’s “pervasive Christian traditionalism.” Chick-fil-A opened its fourth location in the city last month. The largest franchise in the country, it seats 140, employs 150, and along with the other NYC locations, donates an estimated 17,000 pounds of food to a local pantry for the homeless and hungry. The company is reportedly on track to become the third-largest fast-food chain in the world.

What are the Chick-fil-A-phobes so afraid of?

A private business succeeding in the marketplace based on its merits, without coercion or cronyism.

An enterprise that values hard work, honesty and integrity.

A family-owned American Dream come true that creates jobs, pays taxes, satisfies customers of all backgrounds and gives back to the community.

Horror of horrors, what menaces these sandwich-sellers of faith be!

The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace. The problem is that the Left has Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals and the Right has no equivalent; it’s always easier to destroy than to build.

UPDATE: Some entertainment — Fisking the New Yorker in Defense of Delicious Chicken

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Perhaps they ought to bash themselves in the head.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

I am not making this up.

I don’t know which is worse — the entitlement mentality that proglodytes are cultivating among the black underclass, or the cowardice that they are cultivating among their white dhimmis.

Read it.

I suppose it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Read it.

This was billed as “New at Reason” but it is about as far from ‘new’ as Hillary Clinton. The only message out of tReason magazine more constant than ‘taxes suck’ is maybe ‘legalize weed’.

Still, it’s a good reminder.

Read it.

Socialism: Fails every time it’s tried.

Read it.

Women’s March co-president Tamika Mallory on Tuesday called for a boycott of Starbucks over the coffee company’s partnership with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a mainstream Jewish civil rights group.

The ADL previously criticized Mallory’s support of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, a notorious racist and anti-Semite. Mallory accused the ADL of “attacking black and brown people” on Tuesday and demanded Starbucks end its partnership with the group.

One of the chief problems with Identity Politics is that it shoehorns people with different interests onto the same bus and often drives that bus over a cliff. Nobody is allowed to be an individual any more; you have to line up with the other people of your color/’gender identity’/ethnicity or be tagged as a Heretic and a Sinner.

Read it.

Indiana just has that effect on some people.

Read it.

Still living the proglodyte dream. The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace.

I guess they really do miss those rallies at Nuremberg.

Read it.

He will be missed.

Read it.

TurboTax is an evil, parasitic product that exists entirely because taxes are confusing and hard to file. Worse than that, Intuit is one of the loudest voices on Capitol Hill arguing against measures that make it easier to pay taxes. Years ago, the Obama administration proposed a system of automatic tax filing, in which the IRS uses income information it already has to fill out your tax return for you. That would save millions of Americans considerable time and energy every year, but the idea has gone nowhere. The main reason? Lobbying from Intuit and H&R Block.

Don’t give Intuit money. Don’t give H&R Block money. To do so is to perpetuate the status quo in which you have to file your own taxes in the first place. The best way to escape this trap is for millions of taxpayers to start doing their own taxes in hopes of weakening Intuit and H&R Block and depriving them of money they could use to lobby against auto-filing. This requires privileging your own long-term interests ahead of your short-term ones; it’s mildly annoying to do your taxes by hand for now, but in the long run, if the plan works, you won’t have to do your own taxes at all.

There is no reason that the government oughtn’t to do your taxes for you — all of the relevant documents are sent to the IRS, and they will re-do your return anyway just to make sure you haven’t made any mistakes.

This isn’t a purely hypothetical proposal. Countries like Denmark, Sweden, Estonia, Chile, and Spain already offer “pre-populated returns” to their citizens. The United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan have exact enough tax withholding procedures that most people don’t have to file income tax returns at all, whether pre-populated or not. California has a voluntary return-free filing program called ReadyReturn for its income taxes.

You can imagine what the lobbyists had to say about that.

So why hasn’t return-free filing happened yet? The short answer is lobbying, and in particular lobbying by companies like Intuit.

My, what a surprise.

They haven’t stopped; in 2014, Day reported that Intuit was involved with an astroturfing effort meant to manufacture the appearance of grassroots opposition to automatic filing. Intuit spent $13 million lobbying Congress from 2011 to 2015, with 41 lobbying reports relating to taxes in 2015 alone. Most of the reports reference lobbying to “enhance voluntary compliance” — a euphemism for opposing automatic filing.

These companies are NOT your friends.