Gavin MacInnes asks an obvious question.

“Nothing is more indicative of white supremacy than the fact that the phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is controversial,” opines regular CNN guest Marc Lamont Hill. The obvious response to this is that the group wasn’t particularly controversial until they started demanding “dead cops…now” and, soon after, got plenty. Last weekend, the allegedly uncontroversial #BlackLivesMatter doubled down with “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” a couple of days before a manhunt began for the murder of a Chicago cop.

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Thomas Sowell turned 85 years old this summer, which means he has been teaching economics to Americans through his books and articles for some four decades. So it seems like a natural question: Have we learned anything? Has the level of economic thinking in political debate gone up at all?

“No—in fact, I’m tempted to think it’s gone down,” Mr. Sowell says, without much hesitation. “At one time you had a lot of people who hadn’t had any economics saying foolish things. Now you have well-known economists saying foolish things.”

Hear, hear.

Why do we never seem to learn these economic lessons? “I think there’s a market for foolish things,” Mr. Sowell says—and vested interests, too. Once an organization such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is created to find discrimination, no one should be startled when it finds discrimination. “There’s never going to be a time when the EEOC will file a report saying, ‘All right folks, there’s really not enough discrimination around to be spending all this money,’ ” he says. “You’re going to have ever-more-elaborate definitions of discrimination. So now, if you don’t want to hire an ax murderer who has somehow gotten paroled, then that’s discrimination.”

Funny how that works.

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Don’t laugh; it could happen.

But it also augurs the possibility of a nuclear war coming far sooner than one could have imagined under conventional wisdom worst-case scenarios. Following the US’s betrayal of Israel and its de facto detente with Iran, we cannot expect Israel to copy longstanding US doctrines of no-first-nuclear-use and preferences for conventional-weapons-only war plans. After all, both were premised (especially after the USSR’s 1991 collapse) on decades of US nuclear and conventional supremacy. If there ever were an unassailable case for a small, frighteningly vulnerable nation to pre-emptively use nuclear weapons to shock, economically paralyze, and decapitate am enemy sworn to its destruction, Israel has arrived at that circumstance.

Why? Because Israel has no choice, given the radical new alignment against it that now includes the US, given reported Obama threats in 2014 to shoot down Israeli attack planes, his disclosure of Israel’s nuclear secrets and its Central Asian strike-force recovery bases, and above all his agreement to help Iran protect its enrichment facilities from terrorists and cyberwarfare – i.e., from the very special-operations and cyber forces that Israel would use in desperate attempts to halt Iran’s bomb. Thus Israel is being forced, more rapidly and irreversibly than we appreciate, into a bet-the-nation decision where it has only one forceful, game-changing choice — early nuclear pre-emption – to wrest back control of its survival and to dictate the aftermath of such a survival strike.

Would this involve many nuclear weapons? No – probably fewer than 10-15, although their yields must be sufficiently large to maximize ground shock. Would it produce Iranian civilian casualties? Yes but not as many as one might suppose, as it would avoid cities. Most casualties would be radiological, like Chernobyl, rather than thermal and blast casualties. Would it spur a larger catalytic nuclear war? No. Would it subsequently impel Russia, China and new proliferators to normalize nuclear weapons in their own war planning? Or would the massive global panic over the first nuclear use in anger in 70 years, one that would draw saturation media coverage, panic their publics into urgent demands for ballistic missile self-defense systems? Probably the latter.

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In this sharply divided country, there surely is also strong disagreement about the extent to which government ought to be protecting citizens from self-harm. But I presume that a broad spectrum of the public on both sides of the aisle would agree there is an appropriate government role in protecting citizens from being harmed by one another. So if we leave aside self-inflicted deaths, the average car is 1.8 times as risky as the average gun. That is, my owning a car is 80 percent more likely to result in the death of another person my owning a gun.

Most of the gun deaths in this country are caused by young black males, yet there’s no call for ‘young black male’ control; on the contrary, the call is for letting them out of jail once they get locked up.

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All of them popular with Democrite politicians, of course.

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In late July, the Senate Appropriations Committee approved a 2016 federal agency funding bill that came with instructions to the Internal Revenue Service to vastly expand the paperwork for the Earned Income Tax Credit.

This buried provision adds a layer of red tape for which the tax-preparation company H&R Block has lobbied heavily for more than a year, in letters and hearings. H&R Block and other tax-prep companies stand to benefit handsomely, while taxpayers who are unable to navigate the complicated new forms will face two costly alternatives: Pay a tax preparer to parse the forms, or give up the EITC, a crucial tax break for low-income families.

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Most explanations for the rise of hookup culture focus on, well, culture—the steady ascent of social liberalism since the 1960s, especially among the upper classes, and the decline of traditional norms surrounding courtship and dating.

Mixed in with this cultural story, however, is a more straightforward demographic one. According to the writer Jon Birger, one reason a certain slice of today’s young people—well-off college graduates in urban centers—is having so much casual sex is that there is shortage of men among their ranks. The female-heavy gender ratio among the yuppie elite makes it easier for men to find sexual partners, and thus less likely to take the time and effort to court them.

No need to respect the cow when milk is free; no need to even think about cows when milk is free.

In a world in which children are an expensive luxury or an unfortunate byproduct, the formation of a family is of no importance. Hence marriage is of no importance, despite the noise the issue generates; and women are on their own, the end for which ‘feminists’ have been striving for half a century. ‘Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it.’

Richard Fernandez looks under the media radar.

The news spotlight is on the US electoral drama.  Everything outside the circle of media brilliance is momentarily in shadow, most especially Obama administration’s governance record.  They persist in a singular state of invisibility.  Scandals, domestic crises, foreign conflicts — none have been resolved.  It is just that the newspapers don’t talk about them any more.   Matthew Continetti of the National Review thinks that the normally raucous anti-war groups, even Obama himself, have fallen deliberately silent.

…

The War — if one can call it that — exists without being acknowledged.   China, South America, Russia, the border, inhabit the same limbo.   These, like massive shadowy cliffs,  have faded into an out of focus background under shallow depth of field coverage of the media lens.  All we see sharply are the tiny, minutely defined candidates under a harsh glare. Occasionally actual events intrude in the form of attention-grabbing tragedies that have inexplicably multiplied.

We shudder at the sight of drowned Syrian children washing up on Libyan beaches; shake our heads at asphyxiated truckloads abandoned by people smugglers who took the money and ran; wonder at what the meltdown in China might portend.  But we shudder without much understanding; these tragedies seem to have a kind of meteoric quality, arriving from parts unknown and vanishing to the same distant parts of the media solar system.

The more widely read know these portents are merely the tip of the iceberg, visible simply because they ride above the water.  There’s a vague realization that what really matters is under the surface; inside the imploding countries of the Middle East, unfolding in Eastern Europe, or hatching in Beijing.  We know the real reservoirs of broken humanity pools are in regional sumps, too poor and exhausted to run any further.  The size of Syrian refugee camps in Jordan defy belief; literally stretching out of sight.  But that’s all it is, a picture on a page.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

It’s not uncommon down through history to have a farm population scratching out a marginal living using traditional means off land that a few bright guys then figure out can more profitably be repurposed for other uses. The peasants are driven to emigrate by insiders cashing in on the value of the land. The most famous example were the Enclosures in Britain, but NAFTA’s destruction of small corn farmers in Mexico is a more recent instance.

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You can lead a kid to Political Correctness, but you can’t make him drink.

The course is part of the portfolio for the new vice president of diversity programs, Jabar Shumate, a former press secretary to President David Boren (an ex-U.S. senator) who will be making between $200,000 and $250,000 a year, the Associated Press reported.

The Crust take care of their own.

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I’m on it.

‘Fat is bad for you!’ ‘No, fat is good for you!’ Makes you wonder about the ‘scientific consensus’ alleged to be behind ‘climate change’.

Steve Sailer lays it out, so to speak.

The New York Times Magazine has a giant article on tennis player Serena Williams by Claudia Rankine (pictured at right) that serves as yet another illustration of my observation that while many female journalists routinely crusade on the surface against sexism, racism, etc., a close reading of their most passionate articles suggests that their highest priority in demanding a cultural revolution to overturn society’s oppressive values is that they want to wind up being considered hotter-looking.

In most cases, it doesn’t work.

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As the world population grows, we have a pressing need to eat better and farm better, and those of us trying to figure out how to do those things have pointed at lots of different foods as problematic. Almonds, for their water use. Corn, for the monoculture. Beef, for its greenhouse gases. In each of those cases, there’s some truth in the finger-pointing, but none of them is a clear-cut villain.

There’s one food, though, that has almost nothing going for it. It occupies precious crop acreage, requires fossil fuels to be shipped, refrigerated, around the world, and adds nothing but crunch to the plate.

It’s salad, and here are three main reasons why we need to rethink it.

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California once showed the world how a state could guarantee a college education for nearly every resident, but then it failed to provide the long-term funding to do it, said Martha Kanter, a former U.S. education undersecretary and California community college leader.

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The fundamental contradictions, as Karl Marx would have noted, lie in the collision of interests between a group that has come to epitomize self-consciously progressive megawealth and a mass base which is increasingly concerned about downward mobility. For all his occasional populist lapses, President Obama generally has embraced Silicon Valley as an intrinsic part of his political coalition. He has even enlisted several tech giants – including venture capitalist John Doerr, LinkedIn billionaire Reid Hoffman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla – in helping plan out Obama’s no-doubt lavish and highly political retirement.

Silicon Valley is full of stinking rich Politically Correct granola-crunchers, the Democrites natural core.

“They don’t like Sanders at all,” notes researcher Greg Ferenstein, who has been polling Internet company founders for an upcoming book. Sanders’ emphasis on income redistribution and protecting union privileges and pensions is hardly popular among the tech elite. “He’s an egalitarian liberal,” Ferenstein explains, “These people are tech liberals. Equality is a nonissue in Silicon Valley.”

But not in San Francisco, where the Underclass doesn’t really appreciate the tech elite and their effect on the cost of living. And the Underclass is a core Democrite constituency, too.

Some conservatives, such as pollster Scott Rasmussen, see Republican backing for Uber as an opening for the GOP. Yet Ferenstein’s poll of Internet founders reveals that barely 3 percent say they are Republicans; 18 percent are libertarian, while nearly half are Democrats. Republican operatives peg the tech donors to be 9-1 in favor of Democrats. Talk about unrequited love!

The problem is that these tech whizzes were raised ‘progressive’ and that’s the way they’ve stayed, politically; they don’t appreciate that Republicans are the true supporters of entrepreneurship, while Democrites would really like to expropriate all that ‘undeserved’ wealth.

Overall, the hotbeds of the tech and information economies, including media, have become the financial bedrock of the Democratic Party. The 10 leading counties for Democratic fundraising in 2012 included, for the first time, Santa Clara, as well as San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. Given their domination of the ranks of wealthy people under age 40, one can expect that this power will only increase in the years ahead.

Unless they are rudely introduced to reality, which tends to happen to people as they get older.

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More fun than watching the Hillary meltdown and the Democratic Party rage against the results of the Obama regime is to cast your gaze over to Britain, where the Labour Party seems to have forgotten the lesson of their 1983 election platform (which included a call for unilateral nuclear disarmament) which UK political junkies referred to as “the longest suicide note in history.”

Labour was crushed in that election, and having not been chastened by the recent election rout at the hands of the Conservatives and the Scottish nationalist party seems to be hankering for a repeat of 1983. By all accounts, the Labour Party is set to choose as its next leader Jeremy Corbyn, a deep-left radical who is generally regarded as completely unelectable if he indeed heads the Labour Party into the next election.

The pessimist in me says No. The fact that Labour gets any votes at all indicates that there is a deep streak of stupidity in the British electorate that will pull its fat out of the fire once again.

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

The graduate seminar will “explore the biographies and narratives of a diverse array of scholar activists, examine the sociopolitical and economic forces shaping their work, and consider what they have achieved and why,” according to the syllabus.

Raise your hand if you have any notion of how this has any bearing on a University education; I must confess I see none.

Hypothesis: I suspect that ‘Caitlyn Jenner’ will need to dredge up a hyphenated surname from somewhere if it intends to be taken seriously.

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Looks like the open-borders Eurocrats are getting a little pushback.

Remember what happened the last time the Germans thought their government stabbed them in the back….

Freeberg nails it again.

A movement to outlaw all jobs that pay less than $15 an hour, would never attract enough support to survive. A movement to destroy the work ethic in children by awarding participation trophies, would suffer the same problem; it would eventually wither away and die. A movement to spare women from any and all responsibility, and help them blame men for all their problems in life, grant them legal authority to kill their unborn children no questions asked, ditto. All of these “movements” would need — have needed — a hook. A way to reel in those who care more about moral posturing than about politics, the ones who don’t pay attention, the ones who can be easily deceived.

It’s got to be about raising workers’ wages, building childrens’ self-esteem, empowering womens’ choices and demanding equal pay. Those “hooks” sell. Sure they are dishonest as expressions of the ultimate objective, but they’re being expressed to people who don’t have time or inclination to assess their sincerity, or lack thereof. So they have their hooking power. The clumsy-moderate sees the advertising, believes it if only on a tentative basis, starts to make an ego investment in it. That’s the hook. Once the ego is invested, good luck talking them out of it.

David Cole blows the whistle.

Leftists truly understand the power of labels. They know that labels, properly utilized, have the ability to stigmatize and marginalize. “Cisgender” is a perfect example. The left has persuaded millions of people to use a term that essentially means “I’m normal.” To understand how ridiculous that is, consider this: By most accounts, there are far more people in the world who have some form of dwarfism than there are people who self-identify as “trans.” Yet there is no special label for those of normal height. Imagine if “little people” demanded that everyone of normal height had to use a label to define themselves as “not a dwarf.” Such an idea would be ridiculed from the get-go, and justifiably so.

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The Clinton political machine, like all machines, ultimately runs on money. Somebody has to pay the apparatchiks and loyal technicians who keep the wheels turning. In traditional machines, the money came out of the rough and tumble of local politics: You stroke City Hall, and City Hall strokes you. Private contractors who depend on city contracts, public sector unions, law firms, and Wall Street banks who manage city pension funds and peddle the city’s bonds: There is an army of special interests whose businesses do well when the Mayor is a friend. But the Clintons don’t do it that way anymore; they figured out something better.

The Clintons stand where money, influence, and celebrity form a nexus. When Hillary Clinton was running the State Department and Bill Clinton was shaking down contributors to the Foundation, the donors knew, or thought they knew, what they were getting. Now that Hillary is running for President, the donors have an even better idea of what good things might come to them—or what problems and complications could develop if they cut the Clintons off.

…

The machine gathers the cash that provides perches and incomes to Clinton loyalists; the loyalists keep the publicity machine pumping, keep the networks of contacts and patronage refreshed throughout the vast Clinton network, and staff what amounts to a permanent campaign. This is what party machines used to do: provide incomes for the army of operatives who would jump into action to make sure the machine stayed in office.

But the cash doesn’t come from a system of payoffs that go all the way from the cop on the beat up to the Board of Aldermen and the Mayor. The cash comes from donations and speaking fees. When the husband of the Secretary of State or potential next President calls about a special charity project, most people, even if they happen to be CEOs of major companies or senior government officials, take the call. More than that, there will be times when government and corporate officials will reach out and make the call themselves, rather than waiting passively to hear that the Clinton machine has an ask.

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

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A provision of the Affordable Care Act, which is one reason Allegheny Technologies locked out more than 2,000 union workers last week at 12 plants in six states, also could be a stumbling block in negotiations involving two other major steel producers whose contracts covering about 30,000 union workers expire in less than two weeks.

The federal legislation subjects employers to a 40 percent tax if premiums for health care coverage exceed prescribed limits starting in 2018.

The tax was imposed to pay for the premium and cost-sharing subsidies, Medicaid expansion, and other provisions designed to make health care coverage more affordable for more people. It was dubbed the “Cadillac tax” because many believed it would apply only to gold-plated coverage provided to high-paid workers.

However, 48 percent of companies are likely to be subject to the tax in 2018 and 82 percent could be liable by 2023, according to benefits consultant Towers Watson.

“We’ve been calling it the ‘Chevy tax,’” said Anna Fendley, a legislative representative with the United Steelworkers union. “This is a tax that’s really falling on the backs of working people.”

Every government employee ought to be required to recite the definition of ‘unintended consequences’ before receiving a paycheck.

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This is why God gave us cats.

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North Korea has developed an elaborate underground missile complex at its Sohae missile and space launch facility near the northwestern border with China, according to U.S. officials. The underground complex includes both facilities for preparing missiles for launch and storage areas that are connected by rail lines, according to officials familiar with intelligence reports of the complex.

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Hey, these things happen.

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The industry could be ready for another jolt as a ballot initiative to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour nears in the District and as other campaigns to boost wages gain traction around the country. About 30 percent of the restaurant industry’s costs come from salaries, so burger-flipping robots — or at least super-fast ovens that expedite the process — become that much more cost-competitive if the current federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is doubled.

“The problem with the ­minimum-wage offensive is that it throws the accounting of the restaurant industry totally upside down,” said Harold Miller, vice president of franchise development for Persona Pizzeria, who also consults for other chains. “My position is: Pay your people properly, keep them longer, treat them right, and robots are going to be helpful in doing that, because it will help the restaurateur survive.”

…

“The miracle is, the wage increase is driving the interest,” Brewer said. “But the innovation and the automation, they’re going after it even before the wages go up. Why wait?”

Hey, low-information voters! Be careful what you wish for — you might just get it, and it might just cost you your job.

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Like all lies uncorrected, the #BlackLivesMatter movement has become a religion with evangelists, disciples, heretics, opportunists, and enforcers.

First, the media spread the Word. Those outlets that couldn’t afford to send reporters were helped by Twitter—that blackest of the social networks—and the well-equipped, well-credentialed rioters descended en masse to proclaim it. Some of these “reporters” were child molesters and criminals, but CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Brian Stelter didn’t mind. After all, their network’s ratings increased and postponed the inevitable reckoning all media companies must one day confront in the digital age.

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A Democrite paradise.

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Hugo Chavez, deceased President of Venezuela, is still revered on the international left. Chavez was a vicious socialist: The rich are evil! The rich are lazy! Confiscate their money! Now we know what he did with it. Diario las Americas, as translated and reported by the Daily Mail, says that Chavez’s daughter Maria Gabriela Chavez has stashed away a cool $4 billion….

…

If you want a world in which a few obscenely rich jet-setters lord it over a sea of poor people, socialism is the ideology for you.

Lord Ridley hits the nail on the head.

Making dire predictions is what environmental groups do for a living, and it’s a competitive market, so they exaggerate. Virtually every environmental threat of the past few decades has been greatly exaggerated at some point. Pesticides were not causing a cancer epidemic, as Rachel Carson claimed in her 1962 book “Silent Spring”; acid rain was not devastating German forests, as the Green Party in that country said in the 1980s; the ozone hole was not making rabbits and salmon blind, as Al Gore warned in the 1990s. Yet taking precautionary action against pesticides, acid rain and ozone thinning proved manageable, so maybe not much harm was done.

…

But it isn’t just that environmental threats have a habit of turning out less bad than feared; it’s that the remedies sometimes prove worse than the disease.

Read it. And watch the video.

Now that’s comedy.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Imagine an election—a close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.

In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”

As Steven Hayward says:

I have no idea if there’s much to this, but beyond the techniques of “data mining” implied here, it should be filed away that Silicon Valley, and Google in particular, leans to the left, and even when not consciously left, tends toward an authoritarian elitism that is troubling. If Google could swing an election, there’s no doubt which way they’d swing it.

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The Climate Change Business Journal has calculated that global warming is now a $1.5 trillion a year industry. The Business Journal’s report is not available for free online, but its findings are reviewed by the Insurance Journal.

…

What is striking about the global warming industry is that its growth is driven more or less entirely by “policymaking,” i.e., government mandates and other policies. This is why “green” businesses contribute so lavishly to the political campaigns of politicians who drink the global warming Kool-aid.

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Socialism fails every time it’s tried. Funny how that works.

Steve Sailer has a loooong memory.

It’s amazingly hard for progressives to remember that they’ve been in charge of large aspects of life for a half-century or so, that the failures of society they constantly complain about actually have been happening on their watch for the last couple of generations.

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to find pictures.

For example, remember the unisex fashion fad that accompanied the feminist and gay revolutions of the late 1960s?

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Socialism must be the number one folly in the history of the human race. People keep trying it, and it keeps collapsing ignominiously. Yet leftists never give up. It is as though a guy stood in his yard throwing a ball into the air over and over, hoping that next time it won’t come back down.

Peggy Noonan looks behind the curtain.

I have read the Peter Schweizer book “ Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” It is something. Because it is heavily researched and reported and soberly analyzed, it is a highly effective takedown. Because its tone is modest—Mr. Schweizer doesn’t pretend to more than he has, or take wild interpretive leaps—it is believable.

By the end I was certain of two things. A formal investigation, from Congress or the Justice Department, is needed to determine if Hillary Clinton’s State Department functioned, at least to some degree and in some cases, as a pay-for-play operation and whether the Clinton Foundation has functioned, at least in part, as a kind of high-class philanthropic slush fund.

I wonder if any aspirant for the presidency except Hillary Clinton could survive such a book. I suspect she can because the Clintons are unique in the annals of American politics: They are protected from charges of corruption by their reputation for corruption. It’s not news anymore. They’re like . . . Bonnie and Clyde go on a spree, hold up a bunch of banks, it causes a sensation, there’s a trial, and they’re acquitted. They walk out of the courthouse, get in a car, rob a bank, get hauled in, complain they’re being picked on—“Why are you always following us?”—and again, not guilty. They rob the next bank and no one cares. “That’s just Bonnie and Clyde doing what Bonnie and Clyde do. No one else cares, why should I?”

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On July 21, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced some “modifications” to the Oath of Allegiance that immigrants must take before becoming naturalized. The original oath required incoming citizens to declare that they will “bear arms on behalf of the United States” and “perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States” when required by the law. Now the USCIS says that “a candidate [to U.S. citizenship] may be eligible to exclude these two clauses based on religious training and belief or a conscientious objection.”

The new changes further add that new candidates “may be eligible for [additional?] modifications based on religious training and belief, or conscientious objection arising from a deeply held moral or ethical code.”

Unless you’re a Christian, of course.

Question: If Barack Obama were secretly a Muslim, what (if anythong) would he do differently?

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What use have the Dutch for soldiers? It’s not as if they’re doing anything about the Muslims who are taking over their country.

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I have muttered around here more than a few times about the various idiocies of the Blood in the Mobile campaign. This was the idea that we could stop the appalling (and true) levels of violence in Eastern Congo’s mining trade by making American companies fill out lots of documents.

The idea was that if they all had to say whether they used conflict minerals, they’d all prefer to be able to say “no” and therefore there wouldn’t be the violence over the minerals trade that happens today.

We were told that this would cost some $10m originally, one cent on the price of each mobile phone. By the time the legislature got at it, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it would cost $4bn in the first year alone.

…

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If you’ve ever seen written Finnish, I suspect you’ll agree with me that this comes as no surprise.

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As more and more New York politicians find themselves in handcuffs, some lawmakers have questioned whether the criminal justice system is giving them a fair shake.

But one advantage that the elected officials have over a lot of other criminal defendants is a pool of money they can tap to hire seasoned pros to represent them in court.

Whether lawmakers are facing charges of drunken driving or political corruption, they’ve been aided by campaign war chests that have doubled as criminal defense funds, reports the New York Times, which tallied up the scandal-related legal fees.

Sometimes it is good to be the Crust.

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Newly released tax returns from Hillary Clinton, disclosed in a Friday evening news dump last week, suggest she has been using a Death Tax avoidance strategy. Through the creation of an “Article 4 trust,” the Clintons appear to be engaging in legal but hypocritical measures to avoid paying the Death Tax Hillary Clinton has spent a career defending.

Clinton has consistently voted for the Death Tax throughout her time in public office and forcefully condemned attempts to lower it. But when it comes to her own finances, it is a different story. The newly released tax returns buttress earlier reports outlining the ways Clinton uses financial planning strategies that shield her Death Tax liability.

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

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Food? We don’t need no stinkin’ food!

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Another 1,800 migrants were rescued in the Mediterranean by the Italian coast guard over the weekend, bringing the number of migrants received by Italy to some 90,000 so far this year (it handled 170,000 for the whole of last year). As Italy still hasn’t been able to get Europe to implement fully a redistribution plan, both the situation there for migrants and the financial strain on Italians continue to worsen.

Meanwhile, with or without permission, many of the migrants keep making their own way to the more economically vibrant north. This in turn creates the kind of dysfunctional political dynamic on display between France and England in recent days, where the migrant crisis festering in Calais has seen as many as 5,000 migrants each day for the last six days try to force their way across the Eurotunnel by hiding in trucks and boarding trains. Eurotunnel authorities warned over the weekend that increased security at Calais, promised by both French and British ministers, would only displace the problem to other, less well-guarded ports. “There are smaller ports in Belgium such as Ostend and in France such as Dieppe, Le Havre and Cherbourg, which are not as secure as Calais. The migrants are desperate. They are likely to look elsewhere.”

The would-be migrants risking their lives to sneak from France to Britain show many uncomfortable truths. First, they are indeed migrants and not, as European rhetoric often has it, refugees. The movement is driven not by acute dangers of a war or natural disaster, but by global inequality; people born in some countries are willing to chance everything to get to a place where, even as illegals suffering every kind of discrimination, they can enjoy much better lives than would be possible at home.

One of the classic tropes of science fiction is the nuclear war alert where the people who thought ahead and built/stocked a bomb shelter are besieged by neighbors who now demand entrance and safety — whereas of course there is neither room nor supplies for all those people.

This is the situation that Europe — and soon America — will face. I don’t have any faith that the governments involved will be able to face the pressure of their own bleeding-heart ideology; so it will come down to where the trigger point is for the populace involved. And that point will come, as predicted by Enoch Powell his famous Rivers of Blood speech in 1968.

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

— George Orwell

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Poor women more likely to have abortion than rich women.

Black women more likely to have abortion than other races.

There’s a myth among comments in conservative blogs that abortion is something that rich white women are doing, when in reality poor black women have a twelve-times higher abortion rate than middle-class white women in 2008. If the link included statistics for wealthier white women, I suspect their rate would be even lower. Wealthy white women are very good at avoiding unplanned pregnancies so they rarely need abortion.

It’s not surprising that abortion leads to less crime. The demographic with the highest crime rate (poor blacks) also has the highest abortion rate.

Margaret Sanger, take a bow.