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Gone, but not forgotten.

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In his superb new book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, Thomas C. Leonard of Princeton University tells the story of the “progressive scholars and activists who led the Progressive Era crusade to dismantle laissez-faire, remaking American life with a newly created instrument of reform, the administrative state.” It’s a fascinating and frequently depressing story. As Leonard documents, while the progressives did introduce a number of helpful, legitimate reforms, they also threw their weigh behind some of the most destructive government policies of the era, from race-based restrictions on immigration (justified in the name of protecting U.S. workers from degrading competition) to the South’s racist Jim Crow regime (justified on the grounds that state officials should have broad leeway to control economic affairs). The progressives were “so convinced of the righteousness of their crusade to redeem America,” Leonard observes, “that they rarely considered the unintended consequences of ambitious but untried reforms.” I would also add that the progressives didn’t just bestow vast new authority on the government, they also undermined many traditional checks on government power, such as judicial review. It was a foolproof recipe for the state-sanctioned abuses that followed.

‘Progressives’ have a lot of skeletons in their closets.

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

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Now the backers of the global warming alarm will not only be called upon to debate, but will face the likelihood of being called before a highly skeptical if not hostile EPA to answer all of the hard questions that they have avoided answering for the last eight years.  Questions like:  Why are recorded temperatures, particularly from satellites and weather balloons, so much lower than the alarmist models had predicted?  How do you explain an almost-20-year “pause” in increasing temperatures even as CO2 emissions have accelerated?  What are the details of the adjustments to the surface temperature record that have somehow reduced recorded temperatures from the 1930s and 40s, and thereby enabled continued claims of “warmest year ever” when raw temperature data show warmer years 70 and 80 years ago?  Suddenly, the usual hand-waving (“the science is settled”) is not going to be good enough any more.  What now?

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Even in Texas, the Democrats run the big cities (because that’s where all the slackers settle), with the results that you might expect.

Dallas, by contrast, has been one of the fastest-growing American cities in recent years. Becoming a magnet for investment and opportunity, however, hasn’t protected the Texas city from experiencing its own Detroit-style financial crisis. Dallas’s retirement system for cops and firefighters combines many of the features that have nearly sunk state and local pension plans around the country. Things got so dire over the summer that retirees began pulling their money out of the system. It’s the first run on a government pension plan in recent memory.

To be strictly accurate, most of that growth has not been in Dallas per se but in the surrounding suburbs, like Richardson and Plano and Frisco, which are typically run by Republicans and have a good environment for business. The City of Dallas … not so much.

Dallas created the police and fire plan in 1916. The system’s trustees eventually persuaded the state legislature to allow employees and pensioners to run the plan. Not surprisingly, the members have done so for their own benefit and sent the tab for unfunded promises—now estimated at perhaps $5 billion—to taxpayers. Among the features of the system is an annual, 4 percent cost-of-living adjustment that far exceeds the actual increase in inflation since 1989, when it was instituted. A Dallas employee with a $2,000 monthly pension in 1989 would receive $3,900 today if the system’s annual increases were pegged to the consumer price index. Under the generous Dallas formula, however, that same monthly pension could be worth more than $5,000. No wonder the ship is sinking.

As in any Democrat-run polity, the Unions elect the Government in order to gain access to the  taxpayers’ money, and the Government shovels money to the Unions in order to stay in power. (Washington runs on the same method.)

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So many things have completely changed in just one short month. The Russians are the bad guys again. Questioning the results of an election is patriotic again. Our time-tested system of checks and balances is sacred again. And a president meeting with a celebrity is, at long last, bad again.

There goes that Trump, meeting with black people again, the racist.

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A new documentary, “Hate Spaces,” exposes the epidemic of campus intolerance favoring Muslims and anti-Israel activists over Jews and Israel supporters when it comes to free speech, academic freedom, and protection from abuse.

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But it was more important to have a corrupt liar in the White House just because she was a woman.

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A “Marxist” “collectivist” “worker-run” restaurant in Grand Rapids, Michigan, closed its doors this week after customers complained that they could no longer tolerate the bizarre hours, high prices and long lines.

That sounds like every Marxist administration ever.

Read it. And listen … if you dare….

Because your day wasn’t annoying enough.

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The ‘fake news’ is all coming from the DemLegHump Media.

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Ethnicity is central to China’s national identity. It is the Han, 1.2bn of them in mainland China alone, that most people refer to as “Chinese”, rather than the country’s minorities, numbering 110m people. Ethnicity and nationality have become almost interchangeable for China’s Han, says James Leibold of La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. That conflation is of fundamental importance. It defines the relations between the Han and other ethnic groups. By narrowing its legal labour market almost entirely to people of Han descent, ethnicity is shaping the country’s economy and development. And it strains foreign relations, too. Even ethnic Han whose families left for other countries generations ago are often regarded as part of a coherent national group, both by China’s government and people.

Waiting for the Social Justice Warriors to take an a REAL raaaaaaacist society — Red China.

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And the browshirts of the Left are on the march….

Yet Trump is the New Hitler.

If Republicans had done that to Hillary Moore would be one of the first to scream bloody murder.

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At an extraordinary meeting of the normally staid State Lands Commission on Tuesday, a series of lawyers, local residents and surfers lined up to encourage the commissioners to follow their staff’s recommendation and use the extraordinary power of eminent domain to force Vinod Khosla to sell a parcel of land that covers the only entrance to Martins beach in San Mateo county.

The Sun Microsystems cofounder, who is worth $1.5bn, bought a 90-acre plot of land alongside the popular surfing spot in 2008 for $32.5m before closing public access in 2010. It has been tied up in legal disputes ever since.

Despite the state of California passing a specific law designed to force Khosla to open up access or sell the relevant piece of land (and bypass his novel legal strategy), he has refused to back down during two years of negotiations and talks have gone nowhere. That finally led the commission’s staff to make the extraordinary recommendation to the commission that it use its power to force a compulsory purchase. If voted on, it would be the first time in 78 years of existence that the commission would have done so.

But after 90 minutes of testimony and nearly an hour in closed session, the commissioners backed down and instead asked staff to “report back on the specific steps and process elements associated with the condemnation.”

In Hillary Country, he who has the gold makes the rules. Democrats talk a good fight about ‘power to the people’, but when the chips are down the guy who has the chips gets his way.

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Pistols and shotguns hung frozen in the air, their blunt ends aimed at various persons, who remained as still as, well, mannequins. One man was prostrate under the back of a car, as if for cover, the barrel of his shotgun peeking out. Another hid behind a plastic trashcan, flimsy protection if this were a real battle.

Gee, they all appear to be black. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

It was a version, albeit an edgy and ultimately inadvisable one, of the mannequin challenge – that Internet craze of filming a scene of stark-still people, generally with the song ‘Black Beatles’ by Rae Sremmurd playing over it. It has become so popular that everyone from Taylor Swift to NFL players to Alabama inmates have recorded a version.

Show biz for stupid people.

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Part of the reason I got embroiled in this [gender identity] controversy was because of what I know about how things went wrong in the Soviet Union. Many of the doctrines that underlie the legislation that I’ve been objecting to share structural similarities with the Marxist ideas that drove Soviet Communism. The thing I object to the most was the insistence that people use these made up words like ‘xe’ and ‘xer’ that are the construction of authoritarians. There isn’t a hope in hell that I’m going to use their language, because I know where that leads.

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The Whitechapel Bell Foundry, based in London’s Whitechapel, has long been the international centre for bespoke bells but the family run business has announced it is now set to close due to the “changing realities” of running a niche business.

Listed in the Guinness World Records as the oldest manufacturing firm in Britain, the company was formed in 1570 in the reign of Elizabeth I.

UPDATE: More here.

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Another day, another hate hoax.

The culprit in what was initially believed to be a pro-Trump, anti-black act of vandalism in South Philadelphia earlier this month turns out to be a 58-year-old black man.

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, William Tucker faces four charges related to the case. Police say that on Nov. 9, the day after Trump was elected, Tucker sprayed “Trump Rules” and “Black Bitch” on a white SUV owned by his 62-year-old neighbor, a black woman.

Read it.

Eight years of Obama will do that to you.

Too bad they didn’t think of starting a ‘green energy’ company that would get massive government subsidies and then go bankrupt, leaving them all with golden parachutes. But I guess Obama can’t get to everybody.

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But what about the people who claimed on social media that they saw Scott step out of his car unarmed? According to Murray, these people later recanted. Three people who made the claim told State Bureau of Investigation agents in interviews that they hadn’t actually seen the shooting.

What about the claim that Scott had a book, not a gun, when he was shot? No such book was found in the vicinity of Scott’s van.

In other words, the anti-police narrative that became the pretext for two nights of rioting — during which 16 police officers and a number of civilians were injured — was a pack of lies. But this won’t stop the left from adding Scott’s name to the list of “victims” who have been “executed” by “racist” police officers. Michael Brown, the “gentle giant” who assaulted a police officer in Missouri, still graces that list.

Read it.

And the browshirts of the Left are on the march.

Somehow I suspect that the Southern Poverty Law Center won’t be including this in its master list of ‘post-Trump hate crimes’. Funny how that works.

Read it.

Haters gotta hate, and Hillary’s Haters are more persistent than most.

Steve Sailer looks at the ongoing efforts to root out ThoughtCrime.

We read constantly in the press about about efforts by the Establishment to hunt down and exterminate the last redoubts of male dominance. For example, the New York Times is currently worked up over astronomy departments being too male. As we all know, he who controls the astronomy department controls the world!

But in reality, the Big Three of powerful professional schools — law schools, medical schools, and business schools — opened up to women students a long time ago, with near sex equality occurring in enrollments with relatively little resistance over the course of the 1970s.

Read it.

Beware of geeks bearing gifts?

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Hint: Yes.

“It is not good enough for someone to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough,” said Sanders. “What we need is a woman who has the guts to stand up to Wall Street, to the insurance companies, to the drug companies.”

In response, Quentin James—former head of Ready for Hillary’s outreach efforts to people of color—had this to say, “I like U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders but his comments regarding identity politics suggest he may be a white supremacist, too.”

Sanders. A white supremacist. For daring to suggest that the most obvious sort of race-and-gender tribalism was not a winning strategy for the left.

You can’t make this stuff up.

Kevin Williamson deconstructs the Democrat party.

American progressives have a long and genuine commitment to mass democracy, having supported not only various expansions of the franchise but also many instruments of direct democracy such as the ballot initiative, but they also have a long and genuine commitment to frustrating democracy when it gets in the way of the progressive agenda, which is why they have spent the better part of a century working to politicize the courts, the bureaucracies, and the non-governmental institutions they control in order to ensure they get their way even when they lose at the ballot box. Democrats did not pay much attention when they started suffering losses at the state level, because they were working against federalism and toward a unitary national government controlled from Washington. And they did not fight as hard as they might to recover from their losses in Congress while Barack Obama sat in the White House, obstructing Republican legislative initiatives and attempting to govern through executive fiat — an innovation that the Democrats surely are about to regret in the direst way.

David French enters the twilight world.

I didn’t realize how many Americans actually hate their own country until I talked about Fidel Castro at Harvard Law School. I had no idea how many Americans despise democracy and have no problem with tyranny – so long as they’re in charge – until I talked about Castro in Manhattan. And I had no clue how many Americans believed that sins committed in the name of socialism weren’t sins at all until I talked about Castro in Ithaca, New York.

Read it.

I’ll be the first to admit I was surprised by Trump’s win, but the denial of the First Female President® into the White House will be the cause du jour for every jilted woman who believes she’s a “professional”. Even if Clinton had won the mainstream would’ve been inundated with how ‘we still have a long way to go’ stories, however, with Trump in the Presidency the same tired narrative of systemic male sexism will get reinvigorated in the coming years.

Read it.

Television actor Ron Glass, who was best known for his roles as Shepherd Book on Firefly and as Detective Ron Harris on Barney Miller has passed away yesterday, according to TV Line. He was 71 years old.

A tragic and irreparable loss.

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Some of us remember.

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The next radical environmental tactic is now evident for eyes to see: block all infrastructure projects—especially oil and gas pipelines—with criminal trespass and obstruction. Having killed the Keystone pipeline (only temporarily, now that Trump is going to approve it once he takes office), the red-greenies are trying to stop the Dakota Access pipeline that has received all of its regulatory permits.

Naturally environmentalists have to lie about the whole matter, whipping up claims that sacred native American grounds are being harmed by the pipeline, or that groundwater is at risk. (The first claim reminds me of a joke I heard in Australia 30 years ago: how do know when you’ve found sacred Aboriginal grounds? When you find uranium or other valuable minerals underneath.) Naturally the usual Hollywood idiots show up to join the war whoop.

Read it.

A conservative effort to organize a protest against Target’s transgender bathroom policies was shut down by the company hosting its website Thursday, in an effort to oppose “hate” and support “diversity.”

Funny how this never works against the various web sites organizing protests against, say, Donald Trump.

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

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The Stanford researchers behind the study evaluated 7,804 students from a very wide variety of backgrounds in 12 U.S. states. Some students attended hardscrabble city schools in Los Angeles, for example. Others attended schools in middle-class Minnesota suburbs. Some were enrolled at Stanford, an elite university with an acceptance rate under 6 percent.

“When it comes to evaluating information that flows through social media channels,” the researchers behind the study wrote, these kids today are “easily duped.”

With results as you see them. Some never grow out of it, and wind up being employed by the DemLegHump Media.

Read it.

What better way to protest racism than by being racist?

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

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And yet Trump is the new Hitler.

Nazi is as Nazi does.

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Lena Dunham has become the latest high-profile name to double back on her pledge of moving to Canada in the supposedly unlikely event Donald Trump became elected.

Well, shucks.

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Isn’t that government-provided health care system great? Don’t you wish America had a system like that?

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Well, that would do it.

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I don’t pay a lot of attention to spices, but my wife, being a terrific cook, does. So she pointed out that following the election, a Wisconsin-based spice company called Penzeys has announced that it only wants customers from one side of the aisle.

…

It turns out that I am (or rather, my wife is) a pretty substantial Penzeys customer. She took this photo of Penzeys spices from our cupboard, which she says she will return to a local Penzeys store and explain that since they don’t want our business, she is returning their products.

Well done.

Where to go for future spice needs? It turns out that a competing spice company, The Spice House, is now promoting the fact that it stays out of politics and welcomes everyone’s business.

Read it.

A black man attacked a white man in a New York City subway Wednesday, attempting to shove him into the path of a train while shouting “I hate white people,” police sources tell local media.

A 51-year-old black male named Gary Weeks reportedly confronted a 28-year-old white man at a subway station. Weeks then tried to push the man on the tracks, anonymous police sources recounted to the New York Daily News.

They told me that if I voted for Trump there’d be racist hate-crimes out the wazoo, and by God so there are.

Read it.

Democrats are having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that they lost the presidential election. Now they are threatening to kill Republican electors unless they switch allegiance and vote for Hillary Clinton when the electoral college meets on December 19.

Boy, that sounds pretty fascist to me. And yet Trump is the New Hitler.

Nazi is as Nazi does.

Read it.

And yet Trump is the new Hitler.

(Would they have kicked out people wearing BLM hats? You know they wouldn’t.)

Read it.

I suspect it wasn’t a Republican who did it.

Jim Goad reminds us that the default for the Left is lying.

According to Nevada Senator Harry Reid—who is retiring from politics to pursue a career as a Roy Orbison impersonator—Donald Trump’s election “has sparked a wave of hate crimes across America.” Almost as if they were in an echo chamber together with Reid, the passionately white-hating website Salon confirms Reid’s assertion that ever since Trump schlonged Hillary Clinton in the electoral count, there have been “hate acts reported across the country.”

…

Unfortunately—or fortunately, I guess, depending on how you feel about these things—it appears that many of these reported pro-Trump hate crimes simply did not occur.

Hate crime hoaxes have been “a thing” at least since the very notion of “hate crimes” was invented. To my knowledge, they were first documented extensively by Laird Wilcox in the early 1990s. In the late 1990s, I even found myself on the receiving end of an attempted hate-crime hoax.

Read it.

San Antonio police officer Benjamin Marconi was writing a traffic ticket outside police headquarters earlier today when a motorist pulled up behind him, got out of his car, approached Marconi and shot him twice in the head. The murderer got back into his car and drove away.

Read it.

The Left is not accustomed to being treated the way it treats others.