Read it.

But  how do we distinguish between transgendered and transabled? What makes one a case of BIID while the other is not? Is it only the bizarre obsession of the secular world with pelvic issues, that no appetite should go unslaked provided only that it is sexual? Compare the reaction of the world to indulgence in the reproductive act to indulgence in the digestive act. In the latter case, we have an “epidemic” of obesity and have declared war on fast food. In the former case, it’s Wahoo! and Nellie, bar the door! Yet is it any coincidence that obesity and single motherhood have run up in parallel or that bulemia and abortion track? Both digestion and reproduction belong to the vegetative powers, and these are the most susceptible to “slip the leash” when reason loosens the reins.

Read it.

Oh, sure, that will work.

Maybe we ought to give up on building a fence along the Mexican border and just post signs saying ‘No Trespassing’.

Actually, come to think of it, they ought to ask EU migrants to take the same pledge. That would eliminate a lot of problems.

Read it.

Remind me again why we supposedly need more Mexicans in this country.

I’m really curious as to how they fit so many bodies in one report. As attachments?

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The body of Russian Sergey Lykhvar, 37, was discovered in the Raja Ampat islands of West Papua four days after he was reported missing.

He was last seen on Friday 25 March, a day after he left to snorkel around the remote Minyaifun island.

…

He said: “We believe he was killed by a crocodile judging from the missing body parts and the extent of his injuries.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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More than 300,000 Chicago children are missing school today because their teachers’ union wants taxes to rise. Unfortunately, this is not an April Fools’ prank. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is actually striking for higher taxes.

Unions are all about ensuring well-paid secure jobs for their members. If the actual job for which those members have been hired gets done as well, that’s a fortunate coincidence.

Chicago Public Schools (CPS) does not have a record of success. One-third of the district’s students fail to graduate. This happens despite the district paying some of the highest teacher salaries in America. Rising pension costs have now pushed the district into a major deficit. Teacher pension benefits have quintupled over the past 30 years — well over twice the inflation rate. The average career teacher in CPS can now expect over $2 million in lifetime retirement benefits. To close this deficit, CPS offered the union major concessions. It offered to cap enrollment in (largely non-union) charter schools and relax teacher evaluation standards. In exchange, the district wanted educators to contribute more toward their pensions and health-care benefits. The Chicago Teachers Union considered that unacceptable. It wants state legislators to raise taxes instead. So the union called the one-day strike to pressure them to do exactly that.

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

Guess how much of the UN budget is provided by the US.

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At best.

Urban dwellers know the plastic owl. In an effort to scare pigeons from roofs, ledges and window sills, they strap and screw them in place hoping that the appearance of a predator might yield the same results as the real thing. In the suburbs, plastic owls are conscripted to watch over backyard gardens warding off four-legged pests. But birds are smart. Once they learn that a predator look-alike poses no real danger, they resume their perches in bold and fearless defiance where they defecate on city buildings with impunity. Mammals too know that an owl that never moves is not an owl, so across America they eat vegetables in the shadows of fake predators.

The last two decades of diplomatic fiascos at the United Nations (especially concerning Iran) have made it clear that the UN is now little more than a plastic owl – able to muster only the appearance of a wise lookout, alert and ever vigilant. Meanwhile rogue nations and dictators, like birds and rodents, have learned that the UN, like a plastic owl, poses no real danger. Consequently, they defy it with impunity.

Read it.

Both Japan and South Korea possess sophisticated nuclear weapons capability, they’ve just chosen not to assemble any nuclear bombs.

This is especially true for Japan which has a huge stockpile of plutonium and could build a massive arsenal of nuclear bombs in less than a year. South Korea is a lot more limited in how quickly they could produce a large number of bombs.

Remember that nuclear weapons are 1950s technology (or 1940s technology if you are talking about simple enriched uranium bombs), and we are talking about countries producing the most sophisticated 21st century electronics like computer chips, LCDs, etc. The reason why countries like Iran find it so difficult to build a nuclear bomb is because their technology is still in the 19th century. Stuff that Iran has to sneak into the country, the government of South Korea can just order from Samsung or Hyundai.

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Or until they get government jobs (like Bernie Sanders), which aren’t real jobs.

And yet, millennials don’t like what socialism actually is: government ownership of production, or government running businesses. Like other generations, they prefer a free-market economic system, especially as they get older and begin to earn more money. A wide margin, 64-to-32 percent, favored a free-market system when it was explained to them.

Socialism: The political system for ignorant people.

Ekins suggested that, to millennials, socialism means an expansion of social welfare programs. Fifty-two percent of millennials favor big government that provides services. But, favoring “a Scandinavian social democracy” may not last. Again, people want to keep their money rather than see it redistributed.

They don’t mind picking other people’s pockets, but object to their own pockets being picked.

Read it.

Just in case you were having a good day.

I have a question: Why do we still have troops in South Korea? When South Korea was a war-devastated Third World hellhole, that made some sense; but that no longer applies. South Korea is prosperous and can afford the best arms and equipment money can buy, and they can call on the American fleet and air forces in a pinch. So why do we need troops there?

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I suggest expelling these students on the grounds that they obviously aren’t grown up enough to attend university.

Watch it.

White people trying to look like black people merely wind up looking stupid, so this is a trend I intend to encourage.

Read it.

Ben Batterham, 33, says that he found Richard James Slater, 34, in his young daughter’s bedroom at his home in New South Wales, Australia, at around 3:30am on Saturday. A scuffle between the two men ensued, in which Mr Batterham says that he was trying to perform a citizen’s arrest on the intruder. Mr Batterham says he was assisted by a friend who helped retain Mr Slater in a chokehold until police arrived.

By the time that police came to the scene, Mr Slater had suffered a broken neck and was unconscious. He was taken to nearby John Hunter Hospital but could not be revived and his family decided to turn off his life support on Sunday, AU News reports.

Mr Batterham was initially charged with recklessly inflicting grievous bodily harm but the charge was upgraded to murder once the life machine was switched off.

In Texas, he’d be getting an award.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

No connection, of course; none whatsoever.

You know, this outburst of black on black killings isn’t some random fluke like the weather, it’s a direct result of last fall’s BlackLivesMatter agitation in Chicago and Obama Administration anti-police interventions, just like the pattern in St. Louis and Baltimore.

I’m sure we’ll soon see more learned articles about how there is no Ferguson Effect because, while homicides were up almost 17% overall in the fifty biggest cities from 2014 to 2015, crime wasn’t up in El Paso. So that proves there’s no general Ferguson Effect. Instead, the only thing that’s up significantly is black-on-black homicides in heavily black cities where there has been Soros-funded anti-law & order agitations. Science!

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No rose without a thorn.

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“After hearing the truth about the false charges brought up against [me] by Diana Jimenez, my fellow senators decided to vote against my impeachment,” Jacob Ellenhorn told Campus Reform in a statement. “That said, while they have voted against removing me from office, they have decided to still punish me for my political views, and for exercising my First Amendment right to speak with members of the press. As part of this official punishment the last $250 installment of my $2 thousand stipend will be withheld.”

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Often enough over the years I’ve heard my humanities confreres say that a liberal education makes us finer people, more sensitive, more concerned, more humane, even more human. Pretentious shibboleths such as these, expressed in our egalitarian age, are an excellent way to lose one’s audience. And that’s exactly where the liberal arts are today.

Liberal arts has not been killed by parental or student philistinism, or the cupidity of today’s educational institutions whose excessive costs have made the liberal arts into an unattainable luxury. In too many ways the liberal arts have died not by murder but by suicide.

…

But why would any student spend tens of thousands of dollars and, rather than see the world in all its aspects, instead spend his time being indoctrinated and immersed in the prejudices of the current culture and the opinions of his tendentious professors? The job of teachers is to liberate minds, not capture them.

Read it.

An Easter egg hunt descended into chaos on Saturday after parents in Orange, Connecticut, stormed the field. 

Children as young as four were trampled by adults in a rampage to steal buckets and grab as many of the 9,000 hidden eggs as possible from the third annual free event at the PEZ headquarters.

One four-year-old son was left ‘bloody’ on the sports field and a two-year-old girl was shoved into the mud, witnesses claimed.

A horrified parent described the scene as ‘an angry mob of chaos’ with ‘not one toddler hunting for eggs’ among the crowds of adults.

Decades of rule by Democrats will do that to you.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Not every narcissist is a sociopath, but all sociopaths are narcissists. Like every other manifestation of identity politics, feminism is ultimately about narcissism, a celebration of selfishness masquerading as “social justice” in which identifying yourself as suffering from oppression serves not only as a rationalization of one’s personal failures, but also as a justification for antisocial attitudes and behaviors.

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The biggest loser in the latest demographic analysis is the city of Chicago. Of all the metropolitan areas that lost population in the last year, it lost the most—more than the greater Los Angeles area, more than Boston, more than Minneapolis.

On March 25, 1949, the Soviet Union began mass deportations from the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The chief difference between Communism and National Socialism is the songs that they sing and the color of the uniforms.

Remember that the next time Bernie Sanders starts bloviating about ‘democratic socialism’. Socialism is slavery, even though they don’t call it that.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

The unintended but entirely predictable consequences from the UK’s disastrous Counter-Terrorism and Security Act keep on a-coming. You will recall that this handy piece of legislation tasked teachers with weeding out possible future-terrorists amongst the young folks they are supposed to be teaching. This has devolved instead into teachers reporting children, usually children that would be peripherally identified as Muslim children, to the authorities for what aren’t so much as transgressions as they are kids being kids. It has even turned some teachers into literal grammar police, because the universe is not without a sense of humor.

Read it.

On Tuesday Diana West reported on the case of Ivar Mol, a Dutch-speaking Belgian man (or, more accurately, a Fleming). Not long after the massacres at the airport and the Metro in Brussels, Mr. Mol posted a tweet about Muslim children who celebrated the atrocities in school. For his temerity in discussing such provocative issues on Twitter, Mr. Mol was visited later the same day by three police officers.

This is how they do things in Belgium. Belgium doesn’t have anything like our First Amendment.

We have the First Amendment, Thank God every day that you do not live in Belgium.

Read it.

The hope is that fortified superbananas could help prevent such malnutrition. To test their efficacy, Iowa State students were offered $900 to eat the bananas for four days during three trial periods, then have their blood tested to measure vitamin absorption. The research is led by ISU professor Wendy White, an expert on vitamin A-enriched crops.

But some of the healthy, well-fed college students in America’s heartland were outraged. In February they delivered a petition with more than 57,000 signatures to the university to oppose the so-called human feeding trials. The petition was also delivered to the Seattle headquarters of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which is investing more than $2 billion to improve agriculture in the developing world, including through the banana project.

“While we can all support the rights of Ugandans to have access to safe, nutritious, and culturally appropriate food, Ugandans have expressed increasing concern that genetically-modifying bananas are not meant to serve that purpose,” a group of students wrote in the Ames Tribune. “Instead, many suspect the GM bananas to be an attempt to corporately capture the domestic seed market.”

And these are college students, supposedly highly intelligent and highly educated young people. They can’t all be affirmative-action admits.

They sound like they’re trying to save an organic garden in Berkeley. “Those students are acting out of ignorance,” Jerome Kubiriba, the head of the National Banana Research Program in Uganda, tells me. “It’s one thing to read about malnutrition; it’s another to have a child who is constantly falling sick yet, due to limited resources, the child cannot get immediate and constant medical care. If they knew the truth about the need for vitamin A and other nutrients for children in Uganda and Africa, they’d get a change of heart.”

Or maybe not. Compassion rarely wins out over regressive moral outrage; they’ll hold a candlelight vigil and feel that they’ve done their part. Meanwhile African babies die.

Read it.

The study’s authors do recognize, however, that not all of these jobs will be automated. They explain that “a job is considered to be ‘exposed to automation’ or ‘automatable’ if the tasks it entails allows the work to be performed by a computer, even if a job is not actually automated.”

The jobs in question are mainly low-skilled positions, including jobs in transportation and logistics, office support and manufacturing.

Almost all of whom are Democrats. Welcome to the UnderCrust.

Read it.

Police arrested a Longwood, Florida, 12-year-old girl for pinching a male classmate’s butt during school hours. Breana Evans has been charged with misdemeanor battery and was temporarily placed in juvenile detention.

Everybody involved in this story—Breana, her father, the cops, her alleged victim—thinks the arrest is an overreaction. Everybody, except the boy’s mom, who alerted police and demanded that they prosecute.

Her mother, gender aside, is a dick.

The school resource deputy—that’s the police officer who patrols the school—didn’t charge her with a crime because the boy didn’t want to press charges. Instead, Breana was suspended.

But the boy’s mother insisted to police that he was the victim of battery, and so they had no choice but to arrest Breana. She was Mirandized and put in a patrol car. They took her mugshot and booked her into juvenile detention.

The state attorney said that Breana will have to complete community service, submit to drug tests, and take classes. If she does all those things, the charges will eventually be dismissed.

Your tax dollars at work, at the behest of mentally deficient person whose vote counts every bit as much as yours.

So much for democracy.

Read it.

For San Francisco’s many discontents, tech is a boogeyman, an “inescapable” presence, per The New York Times. But the tech monster is only an agent of chaos. The real fright-feature is the lack of housing. And the nightmare behind it is other people.

Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan has a wake-up call for San Francisco: Responding to David Streitfeld’s story in the Times, Nolan says that tech isn’t the problem, at least not the way that the Times paints it. The problem is that San Francisco won’t build housing, and making matters worse, residents work tirelessly to prevent more housing from being built.

“Acting in a way that prevents everyone else from living in your pretty little city because you already have a place that you like does not make you a progressive,” he writes. “It makes you greedy.”

Well, really, the two are hardly incompatible. Most ‘progressives’ are pretty damned greedy, in my experience.

It was not a pretty sight.

AND AS I STARED I COUNTEHHHD

THE WEBS FROM ALL THE SPYDURRRS

CATCHEENG THEENGS AND EATING THEIR INSYDES

LIKE INDECISION TO CALL YEUUUWWWW

AND HEAR YOUR VOICE OF TREEEZAWNNN

WILL YEW COME HOME AND STOP THIS PAIN TUHNYTE

STOP THIS PAIN TUHNYTE

I called up a few linguists and music historians to try to get at the heart of the pop-punk voice. But it turns out that when you make a linguist listen to a Blink-182 song, you get more than you expected. Pop-punk vocals are on the forefront of shifting regional dialects and, especially, a major vocal change happening in California in the past few decades. The three-minute pop-punk song, one of the dumbest forms of music ever conceived (in a good way, I’d say), maybe isn’t so dumb, after all.

Sort of like listening to Hillary Clinton giving a speech.

Read it.

Clinton and Obama tout a 1996 “gun buyback” that was actually a compensated confiscation of self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns, and pump-action shotguns in response to the Port Arthur mass shooting. The seizure took around 650,000 firearms out of civilian hands and tightened the rules on legal acquisition and ownership of weapons going forward.

As a result, concluded one academic assessment, “Suicide rates did not fall, though there was a shift toward less use of guns, continuing a very long-term decline. Homicides continued a modest decline; taking into account the one-time effect of the Port Arthur massacre itself, the share of murders committed with firearms declined sharply. Other violent crime, such as armed robbery, continued to increase, but again with fewer incidents that involved firearms.”

I guess the guns weren’t killing people all by themselves after all — although you wouldn’t know it to hear ‘progressives’ talk.

What the law couldn’t do—what prohibitions can never accomplish—was eliminate demand for what was forbidden. And demand has an inescapable habit of generating sources of supply. If that demand can’t be legally satisfied, it will be met through black market channels.

In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia estimates compliance with the “buyback” at 19 percent.

The problem with democracy is that people often don’t shut up and do what they’re told by ‘democratic’ politicians.

“Police admit they cannot eradicate a black market that is peddling illegal guns to criminals,” the Adelaide Advertiser conceded a few years ago. “Motorcycle gang members and convicted criminals barred from buying guns in South Australia have no difficulty obtaining illegal firearms – including fully automatic weapons.”

Mission accomplished, I guess. You’d think America didn’t find out from Prohibition what happens when governments ban things that people want: crime and violence as ‘black markets’ take over. (‘Black market’ is, of course, a Ruling Class scare-term designed to denigrate free markets where government doesn’t want free markets to be.)

Read it.

Why does South Africa need armed forces to begin with? The country is a regional hyper-power. There is no earthly way in which any of South Africa’s neighbors—the microscopic Lesotho, impoverished Mozambique and Swaziland, starving Zimbabwe, and sparsely populated Namibia and Botswana—could ever threaten its national security.

…

Three reasons come to mind. First, the nation’s military is a massively inefficient jobs program that soaks up some of the country’s unemployed and a patronage system that provides sinecures to the lackeys of the ANC government. Second, it offers marvelous opportunities for self-enrichment to the country’s corrupt elite, which negotiates arms purchases from foreign suppliers.  Third, it is a status symbol. All serious nations have a military and so must South Africa—whether it needs one or not.

The giant waste that is the South African military is not new. It was a massive burden on the country’s economy under apartheid and, shock and horror, under Nelson Mandela. In fact, a comprehensive revamping of the country’s military was the first (yes, first) large spending project embarked upon by the newly-elected African National Congress government in 1994. One of the main beneficiaries of that titanic boondoggle was South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma.

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

Read it.

The movie Brooklyn portrays the type of housing many of our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in when they emigrated to the United States. People of very little means could afford to live in cities with the highest housing demand because they lived in boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments, most of which are illegal today. Making housing affordable again requires not only permitting construction of more new units, but also allowing existing housing to be used in ways that are illegal under today’s codes.

Young adults living in group houses with several roommates have found a way around these regulations, but low-income renters were better-served when families and single people could pay for housing that was designed to meet their needs at an affordable price. Alan During explains the confluence of interest groups that successfully eliminated cheap, low-quality housing:

Read it.

And be thankful you don’t live in Britain.

Read it.

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

Want to know why people at Trump rallies punch out protestors? Look no further.

Lileks.

Pronounce this sentence out loud: “There may be a schism about this, but my forte is not to err; people are pronouncing ‘Sriracha’ incorrectly.”

If you said skism, for-tay and urr, you’re right, and you probably correct people or silently judge them. “Err” is one of those words that makes you sound like a moron if you say it right; people think it’s derived from “error,” when it really comes from the Ole English uyr, meaning “to fall on one’s face into a dung heap.” (Note: If you believed that, you urred.) But you got Sriracha right, right? Sree-racha.

No. It’s See-rah-cha. The first R is silent. You may ask: Why is it there, then? Am I mispronouncing other foods that have Rs in them? Hand me some ed seedless gapes, please. No adishes, but I will try some of that utabaga ganish.

…

I don’t know why the R is silent. Perhaps it’s on advice from its attorney. But it’s one of those words that people think sound a certain way, and so you sound dumb when you’re right.

This doesn’t matter, though. We’re entering the last stage of Sriracha’s reign as the hip thing to know about.

Being hip and trendy these days is getting to be a full-time job.

Read it.

Thirty-seven percent of companies say they hire college graduates for positions that in the past were primarily held by people with only high school degrees [sic], and 26 percent say they hire people with master’s degrees for jobs that used to go to candidates with bachelor’s degrees.

Asked why, 60 percent of the employers hiring college grads over high school grads said skills for those positions have evolved, requiring more highly educated workers. More than half said a tight labor market has allowed them to attract college grads to jobs that traditionally haven’t called for higher education.

My theory is that requiring a college degree is the only way employers can be sure of finding someone with what used to be a high-school education. It’s not that the work is more difficult, it’s that the schools these days suck.

Read it.

Lately I’ve been arguing with lefty acquaintances of mine who say, “Isn’t it terrible for the Republicans to play tit-for-tat over Court nominations” that surely they don’t seriously expect Republicans never to reciprocate for the shameful treatment of Republican judicial nominees, starting with Bork. Over 50 Bush judicial nominees were never given a hearing, let alone a vote—and not just in the final year in office. Democrats blocked a hearing for Miguel Estrada for several years (because a conservative Hispanic terrified Democratic Party racial uniformity enforcers). And let’s not forget Obama’s willingness to filibuster each of George W. Bush’s two Supreme Court nominees. Obama has no standing to complain about the treatment of Judge Garland.

Moreover, if you consult the basic literature of game theory, you’ll see that “tit-for-tat” is exactly how you should respond to a second party who is trying to gain advantage over you: only through a taste of their own medicine will the first party moderate its behavior.

Democrats pretty much own hypocrisy in public life; the Clintons are only the pustule that symptomizes the deeper disease.

Read it.

Mike Masnick understand the dialectic.

Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people who think that power that cannot be trusted to individuals or corporations can nevertheless be safely left in the hands of government employees, despite thousands of years of historical experience to the contrary.

Read it.

LinkedIn is riddled with so-called Dark Patterns which basically means it’s continuously trying to trick me into doing things I don’t actually want, such as uploading my address book, or spamming my existing contacts (whether they are or are not already on LinkedIn). These practices were recently actually deemed illegal by a Californa judge. Almost every action I do presents me with a screen that I’ll immediately want to close. That is: if I’m focused, because sometimes I’m not, and I end up spamming people again. LinkedIn is a giant opt-in spam engine masquerading as a directory and address book.

Read it.

While socialism’s goals may be lofty, its means are inherently at odds with democracy. In the end, “democratic socialism” makes no more sense than “voluntary slavery.”

Read it.

They have more than twice as much to cry about, I suspect.

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Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump have recently held out Eaton Corp.  as being a corporate ingrate that has abandoned its Cleveland headquarters for a low-tax haven and is now moving manufacturing operations to Mexico.

‘Ingrate’ apparently means ‘won’t stand still and be robbed’.

Should five percent appear too small,
Ah ah, Mr Wilson…
Be thankful we don’t take it all.
Ah ah, Mr Heath…

Read it.

Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Drawing on data from the US, Germany and the UK, Alexandre Afonso looks at how the academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders.

Read it.

In the early twentieth century, progressives displayed an open contempt for individual rights.

Still do.

In a 1915 unsigned editorial at this magazine, the editors ridiculed the Bill of Rights as a joke. “They insist upon invoking abstract principles, instead of trying to determine for concrete cases whether social control should supersede individual initiative…how can we discuss that seriously?” The doctrine of natural rights will “prevent us from imposing a social ideal.”

I don’t think that anyone would be surprised to hear this come out of either Bernie or Hillary.

The progressives were able to unite idealism and pragmatism via science and the administrative state. What good was democracy if people voted against their collective interest? What expertise did the average American have in managing a state or a race? Black Americans in particular could not be trusted with the ballot. “The progressive goal was to improve the electorate,” Leonard writes, “not necessarily to expand it.” Jim Crow laws suppressed turnout in the South, but it fell in the North as well. New York state’s participation went from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920.

Read it.

If Hillary Clinton were the leading GOP candidate for president, the story of her email server would never get a rest. It is a subject of her bold and never-ending lies. It demonstrates her unfitness for public office. It demonstrates her fitness for an orange jumpsuit.

As it is, however, Clinton is the leading Democratic candidate for president and one has to be a news junkie to discover that yet another State Department employee has clammed up.

Read it.

Doesn’t surprise me none.

Steve Sailer points out some things you won’t see in the Drive-By Media.

With President Obama in Kenya meeting Kenyan supremo Uhuru Kenyatta, son of Jomo Kenyatta, the American newsmedia are full of think pieces on the Meaning of It All, almost none of which mention that Barack Jr.’s dad was the anchor witness in the trial of the hired gunman in the most traumatic assassination plot in Kenya’s history, the murder of Luo statesman and Obama Sr.’s mentor, Tom Mboya, an assassination many Luo believe may have been ordered by Uhuru’s dad.

This is back from July and I’m just getting around to it. But that sure gave the Drive-By Media plenty of time to cover it. Which they didn’t.

Read it.

How about that National Health Service there in Britain! Don’t you wish we had something like that in the U.S.?

Obamacare is certainly taking its best shot….

Read it.

The term “mafia state” was pioneered by Bálint Magyar, a sociologist in Hungary, Russia’s closest ally in Europe. Magyar and his colleagues have elaborated on the concept in the last decade, as Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán has amassed power, eliminated political and economic rivals, and turned the institutions of his state into instruments of personal power. So important is this concept to Hungarian intellectuals’ understanding of what has happened to their society that an edited collection of twenty sociological articles on the topic sold 15,000 copies there—an almost unheard-of figure for an academic volume anywhere, especially in a country of 9.8 million people. The concept is little-known outside of Hungary, though Magyar believes it describes the regimes in three other post-Communist states: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Russia. (Magyar’s own book, Post-Communist Mafia State: The Case of Hungary, has just been translated into English.)

This is what the Democrats in the U.S. aspire to.

Read it.

A Portland man finally has his driver’s license after a nine-month appeal for a religious exemption. The man, who goes by Bishop, wanted to wear a fox hat in order to honor his spirit animal.

I am not making this up.

The Left Coast: Where a weirdo can wear a stupid hat in an official ID picture but nuns have to provide health insurance that pays for abortions. There is indeed something in the water.