Read it.

An official arm of the Democratic party is behind a planned demonstration against Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Thursday outside the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City.

The Mexico chapter of Democrats Abroad — “the official Democratic Party arm for the millions of Americans living outside the United States,” according to the group’s website — is organizing the demonstration against Tillerson, who arrived in the Mexican capital on Wednesday.

Advertising for the demonstration on The Action Network, a website for left-wing activists, says that “Democrats Abroad Mexico and other progressive organizations like the Women’s March and Bridges to Understanding have created a petition” that demands Tillerson “meet with U.S. citizens who hold opposing views while he visits Mexico City to talk with Mexican government officials.”

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

Read it.

Now is not a time to work at Apple, at least if you need to go to the bathroom.

(Need to know which bathroom to use? No doubt there’s an app for that….)

Read it.

And, of course, it’s all Trump’s fault because this guy was a looney.

Surprising how many people have bought into the progressive notion that you don’t have to obey laws you disagree with.

On the other hand, maybe it isn’t.

Woman asks people to fund her ‘$10k spiritual journey around the world’

Read it.

How about that government-provided healthcare, eh? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Tom Smith of The Right Coast summarizes a piece in The Week.

America. Trump. Problems! Crisis! Dislocation, poverty, bad stuff, personal stuff. Loneliness. French stuff. De Tocqueville. No De Tocqueville quote though. Civil society stuff. Boy Scouts! Baseball! Lodges! Lodges? Lodges! Bowling Alone. Putnam. NSF study. Distrust. Anger. Anger! Lonely white working class people. On drugs! No, not on drugs. African-Americans. Church! Substance abuse. Depression. African-Americans. Lonely people support Trump. Mormons don’t support Trump. Mormons aren’t lonely. Grievance. Anger. Fear. Fear of other! Church. Russia. Common sense. Shouting. Republicans. No one listens.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Read it.

All run by Democrats. Maybe there’s a connection there.

Venezuela: 75% of population lost 19 pounds amid crisis

In the survey, researchers found that most Venezuelans substituted red and white meats with vegetables and tubers — such as potatoes. According to the survey, 82.8 percent of Venezuelans are considered poor due to their income.

Venezuela is facing a political and economic crisis in which basic goods such as food and medicine are in short supply, unavailable or unaffordable. The United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean predicts Venezuela’s gross domestic product will decrease 4 percent in 2017, while the International Monetary Fund estimates inflation will increase 1,600 percent.

Apparently socialism cures obesity. Who knew?

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The National Health Service (NHS), which runs hospitals and public health services in England, Scotland and Wales, has experienced problems with long wait times for services and crowded emergency care for years, but the problems are getting worse, according to a report from the British Medical Association (BMA).

And they didn’t even have a Magic Negro pushing it.

NHS is deep in debt, and it could be running on a nearly £1 billion deficit ($1.2 billion) by the end of this year. The Department of Health is planning an influx of cash into the trust fund “backed by the NHS’s own plan for the future with an extra £10bn [$12.5 billion] by 2020,” the spokesperson told The Guardian.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

Welcome to our world, eh.

David Freer fisks the advent of ‘sensitivity readers’ at publishers.

Let’s be real: most of the vocal angry perpetually ‘triggered’ and ‘micro-aggressed’ are impossible not to ‘offend’: ergo the bribe, to get them to go away – which means the next ten will arrive the next shakedown, before the words are cold. Secondly: in real demographic terms most of the perpetually offended make up a tiny proportion of the population, and in many cases an even smaller proportion of target readership. My wilderness survival novel is of no likely interest to urban Wiccan vegans. If I mention them in an insensitive way, most of the target audience wouldn’t give a shit. In fact they might like the book more. That’s reality, not PC.

Read it.

Nothing that happened in Barack Obama’s presidential administration was a scandal. Not the gun-walking, not the ambassador killed by terrorists, not the pay-to-play green-energy stuff, not the weaponization of the IRS, not the Bowe Bergdahl swap, not the inspector general’s firing — none of it. Obama wanted it that way, and that was enough to make it so.

Sometimes it is good to be the Magic Negro.

Everything that happens in Donald Trump’s administration will be a scandal. Every Tweet, every denial of the obvious, every course change, every refusal to change course, every leaked internal disagreement, every assertion that some word or action is not a scandal. Trump is breathing, and that is enough to make it so.

Media bias? What media bias?

The Democrats, the media and the squalling children with their protest signs will never let this month go. It’s going to be Groundhog Month. No matter how much Trump and his acolytes learn, and they can learn; no matter how much good they do, and they may yet do good; no matter how different his administration may look at the end from how it looks today, today is what the public will hear about forever.

Who are you going to believe, the Left or your lying eyes?

Read it.

I am not making this up.

The essence of ‘progressivism’, like Communism and fascism (its Siamese siblings), is that it is totalitarian — it must pervade every aspect of life, from cradle to grave. The key intervention stage is with children, because if you can brainwash the children so that they literally have never had an opportunity for free thought, then you’re home free. (This isn’t new – the Jesuits figured it out a couple of centuries ago.) If you take a look at modern government schools, especially the early grades, you can drop them next to the old Soviet and Nazi schoolrooms and the techniques are the same: all state-approved political messages all the time.

Read it.

Twitter has launched a new way to punish users for bad behavior, temporarily “limiting” their account.

Some users are receiving notices their accounts are limited for 12 hours, meaning only people who follow them can see their tweets or receive notifications. When they are retweeted, people outside their network can’t see those retweets.

Some speculate these limitations are automatic based on keywords, but there is no hard evidence.

This would be fine if this was used uniformly to clamp down on harassment, but it appears to be used on people, simply for using politically incorrect language.

All of this can be avoided, of course, simply by not using Twitter. (Duh.)

Read it.

Unregistered schools! ThoughtCrime! IngSoc is threatened!

Steve Sailer unmasks the scam.

One reason that there is so much competition on campus these days to be the Single Most Offended Student is that that seems like a way to try out for one of the growing, but still limited, number of paying gigs as Social Justice Jihadis.

…

So that could be the next battleground, with young SJWs protesting that artists are hiring as their Sensitivity Readers excessively reasonable and helpful members of each Official Victim Group instead of fire-breathing puerile Social Justice Jihadi know-nothings like they are supposed to.

Steven Hayward turns over a rock.

The Standing Rock/Dakota Access Pipeline protesters are becoming the Meryl Streep of leftist protests, winning multiple awards for Worst Performance in a So-Called Protest. We awarded them a coveted Power Line Green Weenie a couple weeks ago for leaving so much trash around that it had become an environmental threat to the very same river they claimed to be trying to protect.

…

But here is my favorite single sentence of the story:

Relevant personnel are combing the site for dead bodies rolled up in tarps, as well as weapons that could be used against Morton County police officers. They are using bulldozers and earth-moving equipment to scrape the area clean of debris.

…

Young males who live at home are used to having their mothers pick up after them. Especially when they’re off protesting. Now they’ll have an extra Green Weenie statuette to pick up.

Read it.

Once again, Crustian parents make sure that their spawn are properly indoctrinated.

Read it.

That pesky old First Amendment….

Read it.

I’d be more impressed if those writing all of these bleeding-heart tear-jerkers about people in this country illegally weren’t the same who wouldn’t think twice about killing an unborn child for the sake of convenience.

Granted that people who were brought here as children aren’t to blame for their illegal status, the people who actually are to blame are their parents, not Donald Trump.

ZMan lays it out.

When I was a teenager, abortion was one of the big issues in politics and social policy. Bill Buckley used to say it was one of three issues that told you everything about a man’s politics. It turns out he was wrong about that, as so many of his tribe were pro-life for effect, as a part of the Frank Meyer “fusionism” strategy. Putting that aside, for normal people, abortion was the issue that defined you politically. Liberals were pro-abortion and non-liberals were pro-life. The latter emphasized the sanctity and uniqueness of each life while the former rejected that entirely.

Here we are 30 years later and abortion is not much of an issue for our politicians. There are some who make it a centerpiece of their politics, but they are rare exceptions. The so-called conservatives that we see in the commentariat wince when the topic is raised. You get the sense they look at it like public professions of faith, something the Dirt People still do, but unbecoming of a Cloud Person. They go through the motions, as we will see with the court nominee, but the result will be that a “conservative” judge will swear to never ever think about altering abortion law.

…

“Once unthinkable” basically means last week. In the Bush years, we had big fights about the use of embryonic stem cells for use in experiments. Now, we’re about to start experimenting on actual humans, without really knowing the result. This is, of course, eugenics. The Cloud People will not use the word, because they believe they killed that word and the bad juju that comes with it, but that’s just the nature of magical thinking. Once you step onto the path of designing humans, you are in the world of eugenics.

Read it.

Suppose for the past half century or so you’ve been forced to pay the Acme Swamp Company to engorge all lakes, caverns, rivers, streams, and puddles with effluents, along with enough reptiles to put Jurassic Park to shame. Then, after you’ve discovered that the Acme Company has also supplied Wile E. Coyote with Roadrunner-catching equipment since the Truman Administration, you decide to “drain the swamp.” And then—surprise! surprise! —you’re devastated to learn that the swamp you tried to drain simply filled up again from tributaries that cannot be shut off. And you’ve been paying for those tributaries, too, for a long, long time. In fact, you’ve discovered that these streams are not only exorbitantly pricey, but frequently destructive, parasitic, and virtually impregnable. Question is, what can you do?

Read it.

There may be a looming environmental disaster in North Dakota, but the problem isn’t the Dakota Access Pipeline. It’s the people protesting it.

After the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released a statement demanding that the Oceti Sakowin Camp be closed by February 22 over concerns of flooding, many protesters packed up and departed. Left behind was their trash and waste, NBC News reported.

Oceti Sakowin Camp sits in a lowland area where the Missouri and Cannonball Rivers converge, making it a prime location for flooding. The record winter snowfall heightens the chances as spring arrives. And with flooding comes the risk of water contamination as trash and human waste could be swept into the nearby rivers.

There’s irony for you — the threat to the environment comes from the enviro-Nazis’ rent-a-mob.

Read it.

Chinese students at a California university are protesting over the institution’s refusal to adhere to the Communist Party of China’s bottom line on the Tibetan spiritual leader — the Dalai Lama.

The University of California, San Diego (UCSD) has invited the exiled Tibetan leader to deliver the keynote address at this year’s commencement ceremony, and Chinese students are outraged, Inside Higher Ed reports. In a rather peculiar turn of events, these Chinese students, who would not be permitted to protest in China due to government regulations, are using the growing trend of campus activism in the U.S. to pressure UCSD to accept the Chinese government’s official position on the Dalai Lama.

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

Read it.

Tarrant County prosecutors say jurors made clear they value voting rights, but Birdsall said he believes Ortega would have fared better in a county with fewer “pro-Trump” attitudes.

…

Got that? Voter fraud never happens, and when it does, it’s Trump’s fault.

Ortega started voting illegally in 2005, so technically, it’s George W. Bush’s fault. But Bush is no longer an impediment to the Democrats, so okay, let’s blame Trump. Everything’s his fault until the Dems elect another president, whenever that is.

Read it.

Which is why these things keep happening — college students get a free pass.

This is also why we’re seeing increasingly violent protests and demonstrations — college students are accustomed to getting a free pass.

Steve Sailer lays bare the roots.

Contemporary white progressives cater to the most regressive tendencies of the various Others.

Anybody who can get themselves classified as an official Other-American is today repeatedly encouraged to play the race card, the religion card, or the sex card in the most intellectually crude, bigoted manner possible. Open-mindedness is only an obligation for American-Americans.

You can see it in the Establishment’s hunt for ever more Other Others, such as the transgendered and Muslims. A few years ago, for example, Mexicans were the great beige hope of the Establishment. Yet you’ll notice that Mexicans have proved disappointing and been displaced by Muslims in the elite’s dreams of demographic avengers.

Read it.

It’s getting pretty silly out there.

The Other McCain lays out some inconvenient truth.

Spain is dying. The total fertility rate — average number of lifetime births per woman — is 1.49 in Spain, and this is nearly 30% below replacement level. In December 2015, demographers noted that Spain had passed a crucial milestone — more deaths than births, a harbinger of population decline. Before a nation dies, it first grows old, and the graying population of Spain creates a heavy burden on the country’s pension and health care system, as there are fewer and fewer younger workers to pay taxes.

What Spain is now facing is demographic winter, and a Spanish businessman named Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe has created an organization called Renacimiento Demografico (Demographic Renaissance) to spread awareness of this looming social problem.

David Benkof points out some inconvenient truth.

Of course straight people suffer and die from HIV-related illness, just as about 200,000 Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis. But “AIDS is not a gay disease” was a situational political strategy, not a scholarly consensus. It was an epidemiological and historical obfuscation designed to gain sympathy and funding for the illness in an era when gays were outsiders. Yet it remains in 2017, repeated almost as a mantra anytime someone “outrageously” links AIDS with homosexuality.

But of course AIDS is linked with homosexuality. Even today, gay men receive more than two-thirds of HIV diagnoses, and earlier in the epidemic that number was even higher. Gay men are maybe 2 percent of the American population, but 55 percent of Americans living with HIV. Men who have sex with men are more than 60 times more likely to contract HIV than those who don’t.

Like calling Tay-Sachs a Jewish disease, or sickle-cell anemia a black disease, calling AIDS a gay disease is a rhetorical shortcut, not finger-pointing.

ZMan brings the heat.

We live in a strange age, probably not a lot different from the late feudal period, when the ruling class was largely unaware of the storm that was brewing. If you were an aristocrat, you may not have a lot of money, but what you had was social distance from the people who were not aristocrats. That distance was your currency. The provincial lawyer or merchant may have been accumulating money and lands, but he was never going to be you and never be in your circle. Making that clear was of the highest importance.

The main difference is that the sword nobility was also a defender of the old order, while the Dirt People of the day were looking to topple over the old order. Today, our sword nobility is hell bent of toppling over what’s left of the old order, simply to prove to one another they are not a part of the old order. Highlighting the distance between them and us is their primary fixation. It’s why Trump is so hated despite being a billionaire New Yorker. It’s because he is a man much more comfortable among the Dirt People because he respects them and crossing that class line is the great sin among the others.

Read it.

BLUF: They’re smart but ignorant where it counts.

Read it.

In a novel approach to defending terrorists, Yale University political science professor Andrew March argues that the U.S. should not designate the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a terrorist organization because it could subject researchers to prosecution for providing material support for a terrorist organization. In March’s bizarre logic, terrorists should not be labeled as such to avoid the possibility that a scholar might be falsely charged with helping them.

Jim Goad scratches his head.

During the campaign season and after the election, nearly all of the political violence has come from the left, and it shows no signs of abating. What’s most distressing to me is that in many cases, the police are told to sit down and let it happen.

Despite the fact that the alleged “Nazis” aren’t being violent in the least, the waves of endless violence against them are justified by claiming that Nazis have been violent in the past, and if you don’t keep beating them unconscious, they will certainly be violent in the future, so this isn’t really violence at all, it’s direct action to preemptively quash the remote possibility of any future Nazi violence, even if the Nazis being beaten don’t identify as Nazis and have never advocated violence against their political opponents. Besides, everyone knows that punching Nazis is OK because they saw it in a Steven Spielberg movie, and who could possibly be more all-American than Steven Spielberg?

Read it.

I’ll bet, I’ll just bet they aren’t Republicans. Or Trump supporters.

Read it.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Read it.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams announced on his blog recently that he will stop donating to his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley. Maybe it’s time for you to do the same.

Mr. Adams stated “…I’m ending my support of UC Berkeley, where I got my MBA years ago. I have been a big supporter lately, with both my time and money, but that ends today. I wish them well, but I wouldn’t feel safe or welcome on the campus. A Berkeley professor made that clear to me recently. He seems smart, so I’ll take his word for it.”

I’ve never given a cent to Yale, and I never will.

Read it.

The brownshirts of the Left are on the march.

The Alliance For Educational Justice claimed,  “Today, families, residents and community leaders joined to block U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from disrupting learning at Jefferson Academy.”

Looks to me as if the protesters were the only people disrupting anything. Where’s the ‘Justice’ in that?

And yet Trump is the New Hitler. Go Figure.

Read it.

One of the most unnerving aspects of the Great Democrat Freakout has been the astonishing level of nastiness unleashed. Like lynch mobs everywhere, the larger the audience, the more unhinged the behavior of individuals in the crowd. An aging, has-been singer shrieks her fantasy of blowing up the White House. Later, she walks it back, saying she was quoted “out of context,” though her words are perfectly clear. That was not particularly surprising since she had also welshed on her promise of Bill Clinton’s favorite form of sex to anyone voting for Hillary on November 8th. Had she kept her word, she would have missed the Pink Hat Rally because she would have been far too busy. And unable to speak clearly.

A multimillionaire actress/talk show host not only pretends to believe that Republicans want to return her race to picking cotton, but now wonders aloud just how different we Trump voters are from the Taliban. Gosh, isn’t that Islamophobic comparing the mostly-peaceful Taliban to deplorable, irredeemable Trumpers? I guess the slavery thing wasn’t harsh enough.

Read it.

The small German town of Limburg an der Lahn in Hesse is changing the musical lineup for its town hall glockenspiel after a local vegan said she was offended by “hostility toward animals” in one song.

Before, the town’s bell tunes included a song called “Fox, You Stole the Goose.” It describes how theft puts the fox in the crosshairs of a local hunter with a big, long shotgun.

The Limburg glockenspiel played only the melody, not the lyrics. But the unnamed vegan woman was bothered by the song’s imagery about a hunter with a gun, so she complained to city officials, who yielded to her request.

Q. How do you tell a vegan?

A. You don’t tell a vegan, she tells you.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

The Big Reveal.

Read it.

‘We’ll show you! We’ll KILL our children!’

Uh, okay. So eventually there will be more of us and less of you.

That works for me, but it’s still not clear in what fashion that works for you.

For decades the Looney Left and their agents the Democrat party and the DemLegHumpMedia have been telling the world that white people are racist just because they are white people (they can’t help it, and often don’t even know it) and that men are rapists just because they are men (they can’t help it, and often don’t even know it), white people and men have gotten the message and are now acting on it.

‘If I’m going to be insulted because I’m white and/or male, which I can’t change, then I’m going to feel free to be as much of a jerk to colored people or women as I please, because there is no downside; what happens to me is independent of my behavior, so I might as well indulge myself.’

And the Looney Left is shocked and amazed, much as the Tsarist nobility were shocked and amazed when the peasants, who had been told that they were revolting, actually revolted.

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

Read it.

From Huffington Post, a Voice of the Crust, so you know it must be true.

Read it.

While I long ago ceased to be surprised by people’s naiveté about the motives and abilities of government officials – such naiveté, after all, is the norm, even among many of those who outwardly profess to be suspicious of the motives and abilities of government officials – I will never understand such naiveté.  The notion of empowering strangers to run your life, even if those strangers promise to improve your lot in life with resources and freedoms seized from other people who allegedly deserve to have their resources and freedoms seized, has always struck me as about the dumbest notion that any human being can embrace.

Not a Democrat, then.

Read it.

Reported by the New York Times, a Voice of the Crust, so you know it has to be true.

More than any other industry, tech companies depend on the 85,000 foreign workers allowed into the United States annually under the H-1B visa program. The H-1B is a temporary visa intended to bring in foreign professionals with college degrees and specialized skills to fill jobs when qualified Americans cannot be found. Technology giants like Microsoft and Google have pressed for increases in the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with the skills they need.

But for tech workers like Mr. Tan, the program has had very negative consequences.

“I thought the purpose of H-1B visas was to give America a competitive edge, not help companies ship American jobs abroad,” said Mr. Tan, who had worked for the university as an information technology systems administrator for 20 years. “This is now standard practice in the technology industry.”