Read it.

Within weeks of the Obama administration’s announcement last December that it would resume diplomatic relations with Cuba, the Internet nearly sank under the weight of new pages urging everybody to “see it now before it changes.” Because, apparently, a poverty-ridden, one-party police state teeming with cheap hookers and expensive mojitos would quickly be vulgarized by an influx of American tourists once U.S. travel restrictions eased.

The new fascination with all things Cuban (except, of course, its boorish political prisoners, still ignored in polite progressive society) has now been officially enshrined in American popular culture with the inclusion of Tiburones: Sharks Of Cuba in the Discovery Channel’s venerable Shark Week programming. You will know the trend has run its course and become unhip when the Syfy network announces production on Sharknado 4: Fidel Bites.

Read it.

There are two kinds of ice ages; they are fundamentally different and therefore require different methods of mitigation: (i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically.  (ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1000-1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun.  The current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent — hence there may be urgent need for action.

Read it.

Nathan Collier and his wives Victoria and Christine applied at the Yellowstone County Courthouse in Billings on Tuesday in an attempt to legitimize their polygamous marriage. Montana, like all 50 states, outlaws bigamy — holding multiple marriage licenses — but Collier said he plans to sue if the application is denied.

“It’s about marriage equality,” Collier told The Associated Press Wednesday. “You can’t have this without polygamy.”

We told you so….

Don’t.

Just … don’t.

All it does is raise awareness that you’re too much of a slacker to do anything beyond a token effort, getting credit for ‘good intentions’ without actually being productive — a great Yeah Me Too.

Really, just don’t.

Read it.

Moral: Don’t steal shit in a country that has a legal right to keep and bear arms.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Read it.

The Other McCain makes sure it doesn’t slip our minds.

How many times do I have to explain this? You let enough kooks run around loose — as has been the policy in this country since we de-institutionalized the mentally ill in the 1970s — and people adjust their expectations. People become accustomed to encountering weirdos, freaks and lunatics, jabbering madness to themselves on street corners or posting deranged nonsense on Tumblr blogs. You’re not even supposed to notice there is anything strange about these wild-eyed nutjobs roaming around with facial piercings, tattoos and purple hair. I’ve been denounced as an “ableist” for pointing out that a Tumblr feminist is mentally ill, even though her “about” page listed a long litany of psychiatric diagnoses and her writing was self-evidently crazy.

Well, you can’t call them “crazy” anymore, because then you’re stigmatizing the mentally ill, and stigma is bad. Probably not as bad as getting bashed in the face with a hammer, however.

Read it.

And that tells you everything you need to know.

Read it.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Read it.

Americans are in a fog about how marriage equality will lead to more central planning and thought policing. This is partly because the media and Hollywood only provide slogans to regurgitate while academics and judges push politically correct speech codes to obey.

Read it.

First, it is now officially ludicrous to say that the Supreme Court just interprets the law.  The majority in the King v. Burwell decision essentially rewrote the law to give their decision some twisted justification.  Their opinion showed that the desire among six of the Justices for there to be an Obamacare is greater than their desire for our Constitution to work as designed.  As Justice Scalia said in his dissent, even though Congress specifically wrote a law that says subsidies are only for “exchanges established by the state,” “This Court…concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped.  So it rewrites the law.”   This type of judicial activism has been in the works for a while, but for it to have carried the day in such a high-profile, consequential case means no one knows where the limits are anymore. The unelected few assuming this much power is new and dangerous.

And that decision, in turn, gives twisters like John Roberts no leg to stand on when the leftist faction on the Court, with its pet Kennedy, turned around and did the same with the Constitution on ‘gay marriage’.

None of this bodes well for our democracy.  It’s not partisan wrangling that turns people off; it’s the complete dysfunction and hypocrisy combined with deceit and malfeasance that voters have seen becoming routine, like it is all part of a game and no one is held to account. And I do blame the Democrats more for perpetuating this culture of dishonesty and lack of transparency.

As do I, although Republicans are perhaps even more culpable because they know the truth and yet turn from it.

The Other McCain tells you the truth that you aren’t getting from Voices of the Crust.

In addition to Margaret Thatcher’s famous maxim about socialists eventually running out of other people’s money, there is also Stein’s Law. This was coined by Herb Stein, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Richard Nixon’s presidency: “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.” And the problem of the Eurozone’s weaker nations expecting bailouts from their rich neighbors obviously cannot go on forever. So what happens when it stops? We don’t know.

Read it.

Crowds of young men were filmed yesterday using crowbars to break into lorries queuing to get into the Channel port.

French police found 350 migrants hidden in cars and trucks in just four hours.

…

Tensions continued to flare yesterday, with two truckers clashing with migrants after one tried to break into a stationary lorry.

One migrant was seen to climb on to a lorry’s roof, while two others managed to break into the back of a slow-moving HGV with the help of a third migrant.

Another migrant declared: “I need a better life in England and I will do whatever it takes.”

…

The UKIP MEP for Wales Nathan Gill, whose Eurostar train was forced to return to Brussels on Tuesday afternoon, said: “These are economic migrants. They have travelled across Europe to get to Calais.

“It is the duty of the French Government and police to deal with this. But the only French police you see are directing traffic. They ignore the migrants walking up and down the road and just let them keep on trying to get through.

LAZY cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

Read it.

Yeah, yeah, I know … but, Jeez — sand?

Read it.

And the government of France does … nothing.

And the government of Britain does … nothing.

Read it.

The new president (Muhammadu Buhari) has been in charge for 26 days and Boko Haram has responded with attacks killing about 200 people. Buhari’s biggest problem is not Boko Haram but the endemic corruption that led to Boko Haram and lawlessness all over the country. While the people of the northeast see Buhari (a Moslem) as a man who will do more to crush Boko Haram, most Nigerians see Buhari as the cure for corruption. When it comes to battling corruption Buhari is considered the underdog. Not because he does not have position and power, and the support of most Nigerians, but because the corrupt politicians, businessmen and gangsters have lots of money, gunmen and determination to keep their corrupt practices functioning. Based on past experience in Africa, defeating Boko Haram will be easier than making a serious dent in corruption.

Read it.

Well. There you have it.

Read it.

But won’t. So they import them from overseas on H-1B visas.

This is how employment is supposed to work. Companies hire broadly educated workers, invest in appropriate training, and reap the profits of a specialized work force.

Increasingly, however, employers have discovered a way to offload the nettlesome cost of worker training. The trick is to relabel it as education, then complain that your prospective employees aren’t getting the right kind.

“Business leaders have doubts that higher-education institutions in the U.S. are graduating students who meet their particular businesses’ needs,” reads the first sentence of a Gallup news release issued last year. Barely a third of executives surveyed for the Lumina Foundation agreed that “higher-education institutions in this country are graduating students with the skills and competences that my business needs.”

Read it.

I recommend that people stay out of Los Angeles. Indeed, stay out of California altogether.

Read it.

Which woman will supplant Hamilton? Treasury Secretary Jack Lew doesn’t know. He wants to hear from the public on the matter.

You can’t blame Lew for not knowing. There isn’t a woman who contributed remotely as much to America as Hamilton did. Indeed, there are only a handful of men who can be said to have done.

This is a classic case of a “set aside.” A spot has been earmarked for a woman. Suitable (we hope) candidate to follow.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Feminist Tumblr attracts strange people with strange ideas, which they feel compelled to share with the world. Megan is 20 years old and her Tumblr profile begins by telling your her Myers Briggs personality type: INTP — introversion, intuition, thinking, perceiving. Why do so many Tumblr feminists list their Myers Briggs type? I don’t know. It’s a thing.

Read it.

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

Read it.

And they complain about Texas being overgunned….

The Economist indulges in the Aggregation Fallacy.

Obviously, ‘the world’ isn’t running out of food, however much certain parts of the world may be ‘running out of food’.

Peer into any case where a district is ‘running out of food’ and you will find government policies (including those of wannabe-governments like the U.N.) that prevent people from growing or buying enough food.

Read it.

(This is the journalistic ‘we’, in which a dork assumes that we’re all dork’s, too.)

Instead of being thought of as a part of a family unit or as a supportive parent, Dad is more often associated with bad, embarrassing jokes; socks with sandals; and unironic use of a fanny pack. Many of the characteristics that make someone good at being a parent — frugality, responsibility, selflessness — have become punchlines for an entire generation when it comes to talking about dad.

Theodore Dalrymple decries the modern age.

When a Nobel Prize winner can be hounded from his university chair by the harridans of the Internet (or any other self-constituted group of fanatics), the outlook for freedom of speech is not good. The West, having undergone its own Cultural Revolution, has taken up the baton of Maoist self-criticism.

Read it.

Affinity has become primary.  It’s not the people who murder in the name of their identity that feel they must explain themselves any more.  It is those who for some quaint reason are stubbornly patriotic to that most lost of causes, the nation of memory or the brotherhood of man, that are called upon to justify themselves. When people are willing to renounce an American, Australian, British or German passport for the privilege of killing strangers in the name of their hyphenated prefix it clearly raises the question of whether the glue that Western society is counting on to hold things together has any more adhesive power.

Read it.

Read it.

Peter Szijjarto, the Hungarian foreign minister, claimed the 13ft tall fence would not contravene international law and was necessary to “defend” his country.

“The Hungarian government is committed to defending Hungary and defending the Hungarian people from the immigration pressure,” he said on Wednesday.

These aren’t Serbs or other Europeans; they’re Iraqis, Somalians, Turks, Syrians, and such like.

The Western Balkan route is used by migrants moving out of countries in the region and refugees coming from further afield who entered the EU from Turkey via Bulgaria or Greece.

…

The Serbian government had already asked for help stopping people arriving over its southern borders.

Read it.

In recent years, the Eye of Soros has been bored with racial disparities in public school teacher hiring, but that grace period may be coming to an end.

…

The general pattern relating to disparate impact enforcement is that our society can’t afford to impose this logic on all parts of society at once. For example, back five or six years ago when liberals were all worked up over not enough black firemen, I frequently pointed out that Silicon Valley seemed to be immune to denunciations for discrimination. Eventually, that changed and right now the SJWs aren’t interested in fire departments and are obsessed with Silicon Valley. But ten years from now the SJWs might be all worked up over, say, Hollywood film crews and sullenly aware that you can’t just hire a bunch of Michael Browns to write code.

Read it.

In theory, Middle East studies programs are a good idea. One of the biggest impediments to countering modern jihadism has been the lack of historical knowledge about the region and Islam. But even the attention and urgency that followed the terrorist attacks on 9/11 have not led to such knowledge. The result has been policies pursued both by Republicans and Democrats that are doomed to fail, as the current chaos in the region attests.

Rather than enlightening citizens and policy-makers, Middle Eastern studies programs have darkened our understanding. As Martin Kramer documented in his important 2002 study Ivory Towers on Sand, most programs have become purveyors not of knowledge but of ideology. Under the influence of literary critic Edward Said’s historically challenged book Orientalism––”a work,” historian Robert Irwin has written, “of malignant charlatanry, in which it is hard to distinguish honest mistakes from willful misrepresentations”­­––Middle East studies programs, Kramer writes, “came under a take-no-prisoners assault, which rejected the idea of objective standards, disguised the vice of politicization as the virtue of commitment, and replaced proficiency with ideology.” The ideology, of course, comprised the old Marxist narrative of Western colonial and imperial crimes, a Third Worldism that idealizes the dark-skinned, innocent “other” victimized by Western depredations, and the juvenile romance of revolutionary violence.

Read it.

Double divorces have come to prominence in recent months thanks to the case of millionaire Ecotricity founder Dale Vince, whose wife Kathleen Wyatt has been given permission by the Supreme Court to seek a payout 30 years after they divorced.

Without a financial order severing their respective finances, an ex-spouse can bring a new claim against their former partner, even years after the marriage was dissolved. Many couples fail to obtain a court order to formalise their financial agreement when they divorce, often because they have reached their own informal settlement.

Moral: DO YOUR PAPERWORK.

Read it.

“America is the land of opportunity,” “There is only one race, the human race” and “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” are among a long list of alleged microaggressions faculty leaders of the University of California system have been instructed not to say.

Actually, this is perfectly consistent with their ongoing efforts to make sure it is no longer a land of opportunity. They’re just being honest.

These so-called microaggressions – considered examples of subconscious racism – were presented at faculty leader training sessions held throughout the 2014-15 school year at nine of the 10 UC campuses. The sessions, an initiative of UC President Janet Napolitano, aim to teach how to avoid offending students and peers, as well as how to hire a more diverse faculty.

A very good reason to avoid California, especially the schools (if you can still call them that).

Read it.

Hillary attempts to justify her position by claiming the bank is vital for American exports. According to Clinton, Ex-Im is “a tool for us to be competitive in order to support our businesses exporting.” In reality, the bank’s financing goes to major corporations that do not need loans to be competitive. Over three quarters of Ex-Im loans benefit ten well-connected corporations.  Less than one percent of one percent of US small businesses benefit from Ex-Im.

So why does Hillary Clinton support Ex-Im? Well, as the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney points out, a more appropriate name for Ex-Im bank may be the International Bank of Clinton. During a 2012 Ex-Im Conference, Bill Clinton said that “this audience is full of people who once worked for me.”

Most notably, Ex-Im President Fred Hochberg was a Clinton appointee and in 2008 he was a “Hillraiser”, meaning he helped raise six figures for Hillary’s failed Presidential campaign. Hochberg also donated a five figure sum to the Clinton Foundation, the non-profit that has come under scrutiny for – among other things — accepting donations from foreign leaders while Clinton was Secretary of State.

Read it.

Guess he misses the old Soviet Union.

Read it.

Get a perm and a tan and pretend to be black. Wear sunglasses.

Read it.

Can you imagine having to listen to 72 speeches at your high school graduation? Kill me now….

Read it.

Some people in the media say stuff like “why would she want do to that, it sucks be black,” but that time ended back in the 1960s. Today, it’s awesome to be black. You get the benefit of affirmative action, plus every SWPL/bobo wants you as a friend so they can demonstrate that they aren’t racist. Rachel had to make up fake hate crimes because there are no longer any real hate crimes being committed.

Read it.

There’s a question I’d like to see the Chattering Class answer. Won’t happen, of course, just a lot of hand-waving.

Read it.

Privilege rhetoric offers an absurdly simplistic view of complex social dynamics. A widely cited essay by pro-“social justice” sci-fi writer John Scalzi seeks to explain privilege to geeks by arguing that being a straight white male is akin to playing a videogame on “the lowest difficulty setting.” Does the white son of a poor single mother have it easier than the daughter of a wealthy black couple? As a minor afterthought, Scalzi mentions that “players” in other groups may be better off if they start with more “points” in areas such as wealth. But generally, the “social justice” left strenuously avoids the issue of socioeconomic background, which, despite upward mobility, is surely the most tangible and entrenched form of actual privilege in modern American society. Rather, the focus is on racial, sexual, and cultural identities.

Writers are by their natures socialist because few of them would have the opportunity to ‘pursue their passion’ unless funded by somebody else. The preferred Santa Claus is, of course, a government, however construed, although parents and spouses also get their pockets picked in this Noble Cause.

Read it.

Gee, that kinda happens when you demonize the police. Not very difficult to see that comin’.

Wonder how they’d cope if all of their police quit and moved somewhere else? That would be amusing.

Read it.

If the 20th century proved that democracy could beat totalitarianism, the history of 21st so far suggests that dedicated totalitarians can beat the living daylights out of half-baked ones.   All over the world, countries have put their trust in elites.  Now, in the globalized world of 2015,  when every economy aspires to be a crony capitalism — a “mixed economy” to you, the deciding factor in international contests appears to be whether my totalitarian is better than your totalitarian.

…

Fortunately the ignorant and bigoted masses are being retired from any real role in decision making.  In every part of the world the Enlightened are in taking charge.  They even meet occasionally to exchange notes at Davos and in Climate Change events. The rise of the few was inevitable since Marxist-democracy and Islamic-democracy are alike contradictions in terms where nothing after the hyphen can contradict what came before.  Ideologies are jealous; there’s no elite like an ideological elite.

Read it.

You cannot reason someone out of a stance he was not reasoned into.

A Leftist is not someone who has an alternative political philosophy to yours, or different reasons. He is someone who, in the realm of politics, has decided to eschew philosophy and abandon reason.

Leftism is what you get when you stop reasoning, kill it dead, and substitute word fetishes instead.

John C. Wright lays it out.

Hatred is the emotion that accompanies a desire to abominate and destroy the object of hatred. Hence, without being a mind reader, the hatreds of the Left can be rightfully deduced by their acts and their rhetoric. They do not hide what they believe.

…

The cult of darkness variously known as Leftists, Liberals, Progressives, Brights, Socialists, Pinkos, Late Moderns, Collectivists, Traitors, is controlled by a Seven Bad Ideas around which their various emotions and interjections orbit.

Read it.

Hah. I knew it.

Read it.

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

When you put a bunch of third-world military ‘peacekeepers’ into a third-world country, you get third-world behavior. This Is Not News.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Businesses in Connecticut have understandably been critical of this latest tax increase in what is already one of the most heavily taxed states in the union. General Electric (GE), which employs 5,700 workers in Connecticut, immediately voiced their concern about the new taxes. In a letter sent to GE workers, CEO Jeff Immelt made clear that, as a result of this new $1.2 billion tax increase, the company is looking to relocate to a state that is less hostile to employers.

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

GE is not the only company that may flee the state. Another major employer, AETNA, is “looking to reconsider the viability of continuing major operations in the state” according to a company statement. Boehringer-Ingelheim, Travelers, and many businesses have also blasted the tax hike.

Yup. Hard to increase your take of the wool when the sheep you’re planning to fleece flee the neighborhood.

Read it.

By now it is evident even to honest liberals that Title IX is an out of control monster that makes old fashioned political correctness and speech codes look like a John Stuart Mill seminar. The Laura Kipness episode at Northwestern University might prove a tipping point, but I doubt it: between the determination of the will-to-power left, the cravenness of most college administrations (including Northwestern’s feckless president Mort Schapiro—I’ve got a file on him, as this isn’t his first epic failure in academic leadership), and the push from the Alinskyites in the Obama Administration, the Title IX campus brownshirts are likely to roll on.

…

The thing to note here is that the Clinton Administration’s “guidance” on Title IX was what is known in the regulatory trade today as an “informal” rule-making: the regulatory regime does not go through the normal Federal Register notice, public comment period, and judicial review that is intended by the Administrative Procedure Act. This is not an accident: activist liberals know that many of the regulations they want to foist in the world wouldn’t survive this formal process. So they rely on “Dear Colleague” letters that say, “If you don’t do what we say, we’ll investigate you for civil rights violations, and possibly cut off your federal funds.” The Obama Administration ran the same drill with a “Dear Colleague” letter demanding that universities set up investigations of harassment and intimidation claims with a lower evidentiary standard—i.e., without proper due process rights.

Read it.

Feminism isn’t about standing up for women, it’s for hating America and destroying American culture.

Realize that, and it all falls into place.