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Freedom of speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ freedom of speech….

Gavin MacInnes speaks truth to power.

As a Canadian immigrant by way of Britain, I am constantly surprised by the soft bigotry of low expectations blacks in America are awarded. I don’t care about slavery. America got 3% of the slaves Africa sold the New World and Americans lost 650,000 men abolishing the practice (the equivalent of 7M today). I heard they had it rough in America, but where I’m from “No Blacks, No Dogs” included “No Irish,” and they were slaves too. When a black person says something completely insane, I laugh my head off and go, “That’s idiotic.” In America, they say, “It’s complicated.” So a concussed entertainer such as Kanye West can go gallivanting through life like something out of a children’s book and the response is usually positive.

I’ve always wondered about that, too.

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Forget oil, the real problem is water.

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Remains of at least 100 dismembered prisoners and visitors have been found in drain pipes at a jail in Colombia’s capital, investigators said on Wednesday.

The jail houses drug traffickers, Marxist rebels and paramilitaries.

Well, then, that explains it. All of these types have nagging body-disposal problems.

“Remains of prisoners, visitors and others were thrown in the drainage system.”

Think of it as evolution in action.

Mark Steyn underscores some inconvenient truth.

If you notice, fewer and fewer young people are even willing to pay lip-service to a “marketplace of ideas”. I used the phrase to no great effect among the audience and panelists of the ABC’s “Q&A” on Monday night and found few takers. If you put the “marketplace of ideas” up against the strict enforcement of correct views on gays, climate change, transgender rights, Islam, etc, on virtually any campus in the western world and took a vote, the “marketplace of ideas” would lose.

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Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that’s not a failure of science; it’s just the reality of how tough the problem is.

Predictions are made by building models using the smartest simplifications we have thought of and running them on the most powerful computers ever built. Basically, it’s the best we can do right now.

But there is a major failure of science going on.

The failure is the lack of transparency and honesty about how feeble these models are and how much we should stake on their all-too-fallible forecasts. Thus the same problem continues: climate science has once again botched a prediction that its models were underequipped to make.

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A convicted murderer who was released Friday after 30 years in prison was arrested Sunday for allegedly beating his mother to death in her home.

Black lives matter … except to black people.

Think of it as evolution in action.

My, what a surprise!

In principle, mens rea—Latin for “a guilty mind”—means the government must prove not only that a crime was committed, but also that the perpetrators knew they were breaking the law. In practice, this important component of due process has been ignored by federal and state lawmakers who have created numerous exceptions in the criminal code. Laws criminalizing sex with underage minors, for instance, often have no mens rea test: a person can be found guilty of having sex with a minor, even if he had every reason to believe the minor was of consenting age (even if, for instance, she lied and said she was older, as was the case for Zach Anderson).

One might expect the ACLU to cherish mens rea and advocate its application in more cases. If the government was universally required to prove that defendants understood the criminal nature of their acts, fewer people would be convicted. Fewer young, poor, and minority defendants would be railroaded for petty offenses, drug crimes, and zero tolerance weapons violations.

Steve Sailer reviews the scene.

Outright made-up-data fraud is hardly unknown in academia, but the double disasters have more to do with shortcomings in how contemporary researchers analyze relatively honest data. I suspect that the systemic failures stem more from researchers being allowed both too many and too few of that evocative (if actually rather dry) technical term: “degrees of freedom.”

…

In contrast, in what I’ll dub the Repetition Crisis (a.k.a. the Explanation Crisis), academics hamstring the interest and usefulness of their findings by ruling out ahead of time any explanatory factors other than the same tiny number of politically correct concepts that were exhausted decades ago.

…

For example, in discussing crime or poverty, social scientists are allowed to imply that the dirt that white people live upon is inherently magic while the dirt under black people is obviously tragic. But anything smarter and more interesting could get them furiously denounced by angry know-nothing students (or Watsoned out of their jobs if they lack tenure). So it’s safest just to blame everything and anything on white people.

Still, as the generations roll by, that’s increasingly sounding like a senile conspiracy theory. In 2016, blaming white privilege for everything you don’t like isn’t quite as lame as blaming the Bavarian Illuminati, but the gap is closing.

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Class is back. Arguably, for the first time since the New Deal, class is the dominant political issue. Virtually every candidate has tried appealing to class concerns, particularly those in the stressed middle and lower income groups. But the clear beneficiaries have been Trump on the right and Sanders on the left.

Class has risen to prominence as the prospects for middle and working class Americans have declined. Even amidst a recovery, most Americans remain pessimistic about their future prospects, and, even more seriously, doubt a bright future (PDF) for the next generation. Most show little confidence in the federal government, although many look for succor from that very source.

To understand class in America today, one has to look beyond such memes as “the one percent” or even the concept of “working families.” As Marx understood in the 19thcentury, classes are often fragmented, with even the rich and powerful divided by their economic interest and world view. In our complex 21st century politics, there’s a big divergence among everyone from the oligarchic classes to those who inhabit, or fear they will soon inhabit, the economic basement.

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More than 350 colleges assigned a book to their freshmen last summer. That is, each college picked one book as a common reading. That book was sent on a large mission. Its first job was to create community among the students by giving them something beyond social networking as a shared experience. The book is also meant to introduce pre-freshmen to college-level reading. Behind this lurks a third hope: engaging the half-hearted so they don’t drop out.

The books college pick, however, often betray these purposes. That’s because the common readings are dull and predictable. When I wrote the National Association of Scholars’ new report, Beach Books: 2014-2016: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?, I found that the typical assignment is a recent memoir with a simple story told in an even simpler style. This year’s most assigned book was Wes Moore’s The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (2010). It tells how Moore, a poor black kid on the streets of crime-ridden Baltimore, overcame the odds to become a Rhodes Scholar, a decorated army officer, and a White House Fellow. He discovers a namesake in Baltimore who instead became a crack dealer and convicted murderer. Moore challenges the reader to do something for all the Wes Moores who weren’t as fortunate as he.

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Many colleges encourage students to seek mentors, frequently among the faculty. But soon, networking that extends beyond campus will become mandatory at Muhlenberg, and every student will learn this terminology. As part of a required course typically taken during freshman year, students will use a database of alumni and parents to practice networking and recruit mentors who share their interests. The program will begin this fall with a pilot of 80 students.

“The whole idea here is to engage our alumni and parents who have gone through life’s passages,” Williams said. “We’ll have mentors at varying stages of life’s journey available to stimulate our students’ thinking about who they are, who they aspire to be.”

The term ‘institutionalized cronyism’ comes immediately to mind. Not to mention the fact that this seems cleverly designed to replace parents as the go-to source for advice, yet another attempt to detach parents from students’ lives and connect them with institutional substitutes.

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In celebration of Black History Month, the entire student population of a Virginia high school was assembled together in early February and forced to endure the collective guilt-whipping of a four-minute cartoon called “Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race.”

Produced by the African American Policy Forum—which is not a racist organization, because, duh, African Americans cannot possibly be racist—the crudely animated propaganda piece depicts four runners pitted against one another in a track race. A white male, a white female, a brownish male, and a full-blown coal-black dreadlocked female poise crouched at the starting line.

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Yoav Frommer, a leftist who teaches American history in Israel, argues in the Washington Post that Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism might well become the mainstream view of the Democratic Party before long. I think he’s right. And if he is, it’s likely that the natural course of politics will produce a Bernie Sanders style president and congressional majority in the not too distant future.

And why not? It has happened throughout Western Europe. Great Britain, the nation most akin to ours, descended into socialism pretty rapidly.

Moreover, the attraction of socialism is easy to understand. In effect, it offers the promise of taking wealth from people who, by and large, have earned a lot of it and giving the proceeds to people who have not. Because the latter group vastly outnumbers the former, the mass appeal is obvious.

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President for life Robert Mugabe wants the UN (meaning America) to provide $1.5 billion per year, to feed Zimbabwean people who are currently going hungry, thanks to his government’s decade long policy of looting and trashing productive farms. Naturally he blames his country’s problems on “climate change”.

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Adam Perkins is a Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at Kings College, which probably means the old Institute of Psychiatry, world centre of psycho-research, where half an hour in the canteen with other researchers is better than most post-graduate courses.

Perkins has put together an interesting thesis: welfare states are shaping up dependency behaviours, generating an increasing number of employment-resistant persons, who contribute very little, soak up resources, and are likely to have more surving work-shy children.

…

The central thesis of the book is that the benefits of a generous welfare state erode work ethics, and that the longer people live under welfarism, the more they depend on those benefits, and the more likely they are to cheat to obtain them. Dependent households have more children: for every 3% increase in UK benefits the number of children born to claimants rises by 1%, mostly due to discontinuing contraception. Perkins lays great stock on the findings of Heckman, Pinto and Savelyev 2013 that childhood disadvantage promotes anti-social behaviour. He argues that welfare dependency increases the number of children likely to be brought up badly, eroding human capital from generation to generation.

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In the company’s original office, with its 1855 safe, overlooked by a photograph of the firm’s founding father, the general manager of parchment and vellum makers William Cowley receives a steady stream of phone calls from sympathisers and customers.

Paul Wright tells them how parchment and vellum are “the earliest writing materials, in use since man stepped out of a cave, wrapped some skins round a few sticks to make a tepee, and started scribbling on his tent walls”. He added: “All of humankind’s history is on parchment and vellum. Magna Carta was written on parchment. The Dead Sea Scrolls: parchment, in 435BC.”

Today, he says, William Cowley, based in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, may be the only company in the world making “proper” vellum in the proper way – “without any harsh chemicals, by hand and hard, pigging work”.

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It would be helpful if there were another word for “infrastructure”: it’s such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not) and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers of information, in particular broadband (if one is connected to it), and other unreliable structures. The word “crisis” is also overused, applied to the unimportant as well as the crucial. But this country has an infrastructure crisis.

The near-total failure of our political institutions to invest for the future, eschewing what doesn’t yield the quick payoff, political and physical, has left us with hopelessly clogged traffic, at risk of being on a bridge that collapses, or on a train that flies off defective rails, or with rusted pipes carrying our drinking water. Broadband is our new interstate highway system, but not everyone has access to it—a division largely based on class. Depending on the measurement used, the United States ranks from fourteenth to thirtieth among all nations in its investments in infrastructure. The wealthiest nation on earth is nowhere near the top.

A mashup review of six books that will convince you it’s time to buy a missile silo in Wyoming and convert it to a survivalist bunker.

Steve Sailer holds up the fetid corpse of Political Correctness to public view.

Of course, the various certified minorities don’t have much in common and don’t much like one another. The only thing that can keep them on the same page is stoking hatred of the majority.

Naturally, the Flight From White continues. The Census Bureau is seriously considering breaking out a Middle Eastern/North African racial category to save Arabs from the ignominy of being counted as white.

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He really looks like a rapist, doesn’t he?

The Purdue Students for Life group has been facing a heavy backlash this week after its members put up posters around campus that focused on how the abortion industry targets black women and their unborn babies for abortions. In coordination with Black History Month, the campaign posters read “Hands Up, Don’t Abort” and “Black Children are an Endangered Race” and included the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

On Monday, a small group of pro-abortion students and faculty held a sit-in protest during the pro-life club’s meeting and demanded an apology, LifeNews reported.

Then on Wednesday, the team at Students for Life reported the discovery of a violent threat against pro-lifers by Purdue staff member Jamie Newman. Newman reportedly called for the rape of pro-life women in an online comment on Live Action News.

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I must point out that the city of Elsinore, in which this odious judgment was handed down, is the same that prompted Marcellus to say (in Hamlet): “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” To add insult to injury, the legendary Holger Danske, the Danish hero who will awaken to save his country in its time of greatest need, sleeps in the cellars of Kronborg Castle at Elsinore. Surely at least one of Holger’s eyes is now blinking open …?

Reality? We don’t need no stinkin’ reality….

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One cause of the fragility is a weak parent-child relationship. Many teens would be the first to tell you that they love their parents. But they are not seriously concerned with what their parents think. Or more precisely, some are more concerned about what their peers think than what their parents think. Others are more concerned about their inflated self-concept than about what their parents think. Kids need to value their parents’ opinion as their first scale of value, at least throughout childhood and adolescence.

If parents don’t come first, then kids become fragile. Here’s why. A good parent-child relationship is robust and unconditional. My daughter might shout at me, “I hate you!” But she would know that her outburst is not going to change our relationship. My wife and I might choose to suspend some of her privileges for a week if she were to have such an outburst, but she would know that we both still love her. That won’t change, and she knows it.

Peer relations, by contrast, are fragile by nature. Emily and Melissa may be best friends, but both of them know that one wrong word might fracture the relationship beyond repair. That’s one reason why Emily is so frantic about checking her text messages every five minutes. If Melissa sends a text and Emily does not promptly respond, Emily is afraid that Melissa may misinterpret her silence as indicating a lack of enthusiasm. In peer relations, everything is conditional and contingent.

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Not long ago, I watched a woman set a carton of Land O’ Lakes Fat-Free Half-and-Half on the conveyor belt at a supermarket.

“Can I ask you why you’re buying fat-free half-and-half?” I said. Half-and-half is defined by its fat content: about 10 percent, more than milk, less than cream.

“Because it’s fat-free?” she responded.

“Do you know what they replace the fat with?” I asked.

“Hmm,” she said, then lifted the carton and read the second ingredient on the label after skim milk: “Corn syrup.” She frowned at me. Then she set the carton back on the conveyor belt to be scanned along with the rest of her groceries.

The woman apparently hadn’t even thought to ask herself that question but had instead accepted the common belief that fat, an essential part of our diet, should be avoided whenever possible.

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Bring it on. We won the last three.

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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They appear on the sand like any piece of sea detritus. Sometimes they’re found, amid the candy wrappers and cracked shells, by volunteers cleaning up the area. Other times a vacationer might glimpse the grisly discard from the corner of her eye, a serene walk along the beach interrupted just like that.

…

Sixteen of these detached human feet have been found since 2007 in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington state. Most of these have been right feet. All of them have worn running shoes or hiking boots. Among them: three New Balances, two Nikes and an Ozark Trail.

Perhaps there’s a James Bond villain in his Secret Island Lair out there somewhere who is disciplining his Minions.

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Today, the African American Studies Department at the University of California-Irvine is hosting a talk by Sekou Odinga, aka Nathaniel Burns.

Odinga was a member of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party who spent 33 years in prison for attempted murder and for assisting convicted murderer Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) escape from jail. (Shakur remains in exile in Cuba.)

If black people are some separate and hostile polity, then by all means let us treat them as one.

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I guess Black Lives Matter … except to black people.

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But that’s okay because Climate Change. You can’t save the planet without breaking a few kids.

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As so many times happens, the ‘green’ solution is worse for the environment than the ‘problem’.

I am entertained, however, by various flavors of eco-nazi going after each other like Sunnis and Shi’ites.

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And it is what all the angry brouhaha about Citizens United is about: Politicians trying to limit the circumstances under which Americans can band together in certain legal structures and say bad things about them. That is the principle that Clinton and her fans cheer: that government should have more power to make it illegal to criticize politicians.

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In late December 2015, Rwandan President Paul Kagame confirmed that he will seek a third presidential term. In doing so, Kagame became the latest member of sub-Saharan Africa’s “Third Term President Club.”

If this notional “club” sounds like a joke, it is not. The “Club” represents the near-permanent retention of personal and near-authoritarian political power.

In sub-Saharan Africa, where tribal rivalries can quickly escalate into savage civil wars, the club is a threat to peace. The Great Congo War (1998-2003) killed somewhere between three and five million people. If Democratic Republic of Congo President Joseph Kabila seeks a third term, that horror may well reignite. Unfortunately, it appears Kabila is dead set on seeking a constitution breaking third term.

You’d think they’d just cut to the chase and establish a monarchy.

Kagame has the woof and warp of a president for life. In several hard corners on our planet, presidents who are not term-limited have a tendency to remain presidents for life, which is another way of saying dictator. Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe is an example.

Burundi, bordering on Rwanda and Congo, may be providing a bloody sneak preview of Congo’s club-caused collapse.

In April 2015, Burundian President Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would seek a third term. His decision violated the 2005 Arusha peace agreement that ended Burundi’s 12-year long civil war — a war that resulted in an estimated 300,000 deaths. A substantial plurality of Burundi’s citizens erupted in anger. But last July, Nkurunziza held a referendum ratifying a constitutional amendment allowing him to seek and hold a third term.

However, turmoil and violence continue to afflict Burundi.

Funny how that works.

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What happened when new research undercut the prevailing justification for the public panic about serial rapists on college campuses? Psychologists deeply invested in their discredited theory launched a crusade of retaliation against the people who proved them wrong.

“There’s been a scientific misconduct case filed against us,” Mary Koss, a professor of public health at the University of Arizona and a critic of the serial predator assumption, told Reason. “It’s frustrating.”

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

Freeberg points to some inconvenient truth.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but 01/08 was when Obama took office.

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Yet another major U.S. company is “renouncing its corporate citizenship,” said Andrew Ross Sorkin at The New York Times. Auto parts supplier Johnson Controls announced last month it is merging with Ireland-based Tyco International to take advantage of Dublin’s lower corporate tax rate. The fact that Johnson Controls is joining a “tidal wave of corporate migrants” is all the more galling because the company has been on the receiving end of plenty of U.S. largesse, including at least $149 million in tax breaks between 1992 and 2009 from Michigan alone — and, indirectly, the $80 billion auto bailout. Given that history, it’s tempting “to cue the national anthem and argue about the need for corporate patriotism,” but shaming companies into staying isn’t going to be effective. At least a dozen other so-called inversion deals are currently in the works. It’s high time we figured out how to make it “more attractive for American companies to be American companies.”

“The solution isn’t complicated,” said Ike Brannon in Real Clear? Markets. Our corporate tax rate is among the highest in the world — nearly 40 percent when state and local taxes are included. And unlike most other countries, the U.S. taxes every dollar earned, whether the profits are made at home or overseas. So, if a firm earns money in, say, Germany, it has to pay German taxes, and then U.S. taxes when it brings that cash home, a double penalty that makes U.S. businesses less competitive. To avoid this double whammy, American companies are sitting on $2 trillion in profits earned overseas — money that could be invested in the U.S.

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Last fall, the Colorado School of Mines believed it would run afoul of the Constitution’s Establishment Clause after a donor to its athletic complex wanted a nameplate with a — gasp! — Bible reference on it.

As a result, it refused the reference. The donor, Michael Lucas, responded by filing a lawsuit.

The school has now countered — by deciding to remove all nameplates from its football locker room.

Not only that, but CSM has terminated the nameplate fundraising program entirely, and as such puts the kibosh on the lawsuit brought forth by Lucas.

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The number of people renouncing their U.S. citizenship or abandoning green cards has soared to record levels for the third consecutive year, US Treasury Department data reveal.

The surge is likely the result of stringent U.S. tax policy, officials told the Wall Street Journal.

‘Cause I’m the tax-man, ooooo, I’m the tax-man, yeah…..

The underlying cause behind the massive increase in renunciations is believed to be the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which came into force in 2010. The law imposes harsh penalties for non-compliance, even if people aren’t dodging it on purpose, Andrew Mitchel, an international lawyer who analyzes IRS data, told the Wall Street Journal.

“An increasing number of Americans appear to believe that having a U.S. passport or long-term residency isn’t worth the hassle and cost of complying with U.S. tax laws,” he said.

Some of us here at home are thinking the same thing.

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If you’ve ever soldered or welded, you’ll know that things get pretty hot. MesoGlue intends to fix that. It’s a room-temperature metallic glue that lets you stick parts together with reckless abandon and electrical control. The most interesting part of the entire system is that it allows us to solder parts onto boards without heat which will lead to press-fit electronics which, in short, is an amazing development.

That really is amazong. One of the constant dangers of hot solder is ruining adjacent components because of heat.

Read it. And watch the video.

This fron  CNN, the ‘Clinton News Network’, a certified Voice of the Crust.

Anybody who think that Hillary’s ‘thoughts’ on any subject are worth over half a million dollars needs to be removed from the gene pool as too stupid to live.

I notice that neither Bernie nor Barry have proposed a special tax on speaking fees. Wonder why.

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The “refugee” situation in Germany has become so dire that even the rank-and-file of the Socialist Party felt compelled to take to the streets to protest current migration policy. So that made political leaders sit up and take notice, right?

Wrong!

The word went out through the party hierarchy ordering the cessation of such demonstrations. Local activists, being good little socialist apparatchiks, dutifully complied and retired from the streets.

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We keep track so that you don’t have to.

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Ah, yes, Democrats, the party of machine politics and election fraud.

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Recent polls suggest that almost 60% of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, “don’t identify with what America has become.” According to Cliff Young and Chris Jackson, these “nativist” Americans are older, whiter, and less educated than the rest of the population – more working-class, in other words. For some middle-class professionals, this “nativism,” exemplified in support for Donald Trump’s racial comments, simply reinforces the assumption that the white working class is inherently racist and foolish. They conveniently ignore the way racism is resurfacing among the middle class as they, too, feel resentment over their economic displacement. As Barbara Ehrenreich warns, “Whole professions have fallen on hard times, from college teaching to journalism and the law. One of the worst mistakes this relative elite could make is to try to pump up its own pride by hating on those — of any color or ethnicity — who are falling even faster.”

The focus on racism and xenophobia ignores an essential reality: precarity is bringing working-class and middle-class voters together politically. As Guy Standing has argued, the emerging precariat is a political class in the making. We see this in the “Fight for $15.” The struggle to increase the minimum wage seeks economic improvement for both the non-college and college educated.

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It’s an axiom of Washington politics in the age of Citizens United and Super PACs that corporations and the very rich can channel almost unlimited amounts of money to candidates for high office to pave the way for later favors. According to the public service website Open Secrets, in the 2016 campaign, as of October, in addition to direct campaign contributions, Jeb Bush had at his disposal $103 million in “outside money”—groups such as PACs and Super PACs and so called “dark money” organizations that work on behalf of a particular candidate. Ted Cruz had $38 million in such funds, Marco Rubio $17 million, and Chris Christie $14 million.

Yet few have been as adept at exploiting this big-money politics as Bill and Hillary Clinton. In the 2016 campaign, as of October, Hillary Clinton had raised $20 million in “outside” money, on top of $77 million in direct campaign contributions—the highest in direct contributions of any candidate at the time. But she and her husband have other links to big donors, and they go back much further than the current election cycle. What stands out about what I will call the Clinton System is the scale and complexity of the connections involved, the length of time they have been in operation, the presence of former president Bill Clinton alongside Hillary as an equal partner in the enterprise, and the sheer magnitude of the funds involved.

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A man who tried to eat a cheeseburger in one mouthful choked to death, an inquest has heard.

Darren Bray, a father-of-three from Barry, died from an obstruction of the airways after a ball of food measuring 8cm by 5cm lodged in his throat.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Sure! Open the border! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

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Alexander Orekhov, one of the most promising ice hockey players in Russia of his age, died in a Novosibirsk hospital on Tuesday, three weeks after being hit by the puck during a match.

Orekhov was competing in a match for Metallurg Novokuznetsk’s junior side in the KHL on Thursday, 14 January when the incident happened. The shot hit Orekhov in the neck, and the impact had enough force that it “damaged the carotid artery and broke several bones” in his neck.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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It had to happen.

It won’t go anywhere, of course — being contrary to the Official Narrative that only women can be oppressed and only men can be oppressors — but it’s the sort of situation that Identity Politics has shat upon us.

On this date in 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified.

Without the magic money machine of the income tax, and the everybody-is-guilt-of-something tax code, the modern administrative state would not be possible.