Read it.

The American left has spent the past few weeks trying to tell us that they believe in free speech, but…—and the “but” is that anything that offends the sensibilities of Islamic fanatics is unnecessarily provocative, hateful, and possibly racist. Therefore, such “hate speech” shouldn’t be allowed.

Now they’ve gotten a taste of their own medicine.

An anti-censorship benefit scheduled for next month in New York City has been cancelled after the managers of the venue, the Sheen Center, “suggested that we alter the title of Neil LaBute’s play”—charmingly titled Mohammed Gets a Boner—”and alter the content of some of our panelists’ speeches.”

That’s right, folks. They tried to censor an anti-censorship event.

Read it.

Chelsea Clinton is so unpleasant to colleagues, she’s causing high turnover at the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation, sources say.

Several top staffers have left the foundation since Chelsea came on board as vice chairman in 2011.

“A lot of people left because she was there. A lot of people left because she didn’t want them there,” an insider told me. “She is very difficult.”

Onetime CEO Bruce Lindsey was pushed upstairs to the position of chairman of the board two years ago, so that Chelsea could bring in her McKinsey colleague Eric Braverman.

“He [Braverman] was her boy, but he tried to hire his own communications professional and actually tried to run the place. He didn’t understand that that wasn’t what he was supposed to be doing,” said my source. “He was pushed out.”

Bill’s efficiency, Hillary’s charm.

The Other McCain waxes philosophical.

It takes a lot of money to learn how to disregard — or condemn as “oppression” — ordinary common sense about human nature.

…

What nearly all of these books have in common is that they are either written or edited by Women’s Studies professors or else, as in the case of Adrienne Rich, are by authors whose works are included in the Women’s Studies curricula. As readers of Sex Trouble know, the book focuses on academia — the Feminist-Industrial Complex — because it is by institutionalizing their power in colleges and universities, with Women’s Studies departments as the engine of their influence, that radical feminists have gained hegemonic authority within elite culture.

Read it.

Citizen scientists are playing an increasingly important role in experiments, but there may be a place where certain experiments are less than welcome: Wyoming.

The term ‘citizen scientists’ is, of course, a euphemism for ‘busybody enviro-Nazis who suspect you are doing something with your own property that they don’t like’.

A new law passed earlier this year criminalizes the collection of data on “open land” if the collector doesn’t receive permission in advance and eventually shares that data with the government.

If the enviro-Nazis don’t choose to pester you, the taxpayer-funded enviro-Nazis want to make sure they get their turn at the piñata.

As Slate points out, the move sounds like a modest proposal until almost any of those terms — “collection,” “data,” or “open land” — are defined. And although other states have passed similar laws, Wyoming’s seems especially broad: photographs are specifically covered by the law, while the land could mean any place outside of a town or city.

Privacy? What’s that?

One example: under the law, collection of data could mean taking soil samples to demonstrate an environmental problem in a state park — an act that could be seen as a violation of the law if shared with the government, and ultimately inadmissible in a lawsuit.

Oh, I’m sure somebody’s worried about ‘an environmental problem in a state park’ rather than some rancher or natural resources extraction company.

Why would the Wyoming government want that? At Slate, Justin Pidot, citing a recent case where citizen scientists found high levels of E. coli in streams, argues that it’s a way for the government to crack down on environmental dissent. You can either keep that information to yourself, or risk a year in jail.

Oh, I’m sure the worry is about ‘a way for the government to crack down on environmental dissent’, which it’s never shown any inclination to do.

If you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

I’ll be you didn’t know that it was Armed Forces Day, did you?

You wouldn’t know it from reading the ‘news’.

You wouldn’t know it from watching TV.

You wouldn’t know it from listening to the radio.

You wouldn’t know it from the special ‘doodle’ that Google uses for special days, since there isn’t one today, although they can celebrate every SWPL happening that pops up in the the fevered brains of the Chattering Class.

But we veterans remember — and celebrate.

Read it.

A California hacker who has become an expert in cracking locks has invented a 3D-printed machine that can crack a rotary combination lock in around 30 seconds – and he’s released the plans, 3D models, and code as open source.

Isn’t that special.

Single-Serve Food Pod machine.

Read it.

Barack Obama says he is a Christian. The rest of us can only take him at his word, but for a believer, he seems remarkably ignorant of both Christians and Christianity. At the Weekly Standard, Mark Hemingway writes on “Obama’s Casual Slander of American Christians.”

…

Obama’s comments are odd. They certainly aren’t based on his own experience; the only church Obama has belonged to is the one run by Jeremiah Wright. Did Wright devote a lot of attention to abortion? I doubt it. To be fair, though, Wright’s congregation may not have done much about poverty, either, other than complain (“God damn America!”).

So Obama sounds like all he knows about Christianity is what he reads in the newspaper.

Read it.

Students at Aberystwyth University, the former university of Prince Charles, voted to ban Bibles being automatically placed in their accommodation, ending a tradition going back generations.

Read it. And watch the video.

Confirms everything I’ve always known about avocado…. Out of the mouths of babes.

The Other McCain lays it out.

The oxymoronic phenomenon of the “male feminist” is an endless source of amusement. If groveling self-abasement were an Olympic sport, “male feminists” would win the gold medal every four years.

Modern feminism is basically about three things:

1. Killing babies;
2. Hating men;
   and
3. Lying.

A common feminist lie is to deny that they hate men. This is exactly the kind of shameless dishonesty we must expect from fanatics who assert that killing babies is women’s most basic “right.”

Hateful bloodthirsty liars are not the kind of women that normal men find attractive, yet there are always enough abnormal men in the world that some of them actually want to have sex with feminists. Inspired by twisted masochistic neuroses or other perverse impulses, these pathetic males declare themselves feminists and, while not all “male feminists” end up in the lunatic ward like Professor Hugo Schwyzer, they always meet a sorry end, groveling for the approval of sadistic women whose raison d’etre is their contempt for men.

Read it.

“Environmental Correctness” (EC) is just as authoritarian and mindless as standard-issue “political correctness,” and for the same reason. Leftist orthodoxy needs to suppress dissent, or it will collapse.

The latest example of EC in action comes from Australia, where the University of Western Australia has pulled the plug on a new research center at its business school because of its connection to Bjorn Lomborg.

Read it.

Still, the city of Boston is growing as Millennials and Boomers alike look for walkable, dense places to live. Boston needs more transit, but the state can’t help much: Governor Charlie Baker has proposed cutting $26 million from the state Department of Transportation and $14 million of MBTA funding.

So when athletic company New Balance decided to expand its headquarters and build retail, a hotel, a track, and skating rink in one Boston neighborhood not served by public transit, it didn’t wait for the city to agree to build new train stations or add bus routes, which could have taken years. Instead, it decided to build a commuter rail station itself.

Today, the company is breaking ground on the new Boston Landing station, starting a process that will add another stop on the commuter rail line between Boston and Worcester by the fall of 2016. New Balance is paying to build the station, which will cost between $14 million and $16 million, and will then pay for its maintenance costs for at least the first decade after the station opens.

And if you don’t think they’re going to get their money’s worth in government favors, you don’t know how politics works on the Other Left Coast.

Charles Murray lays it out.

It was our boast that in America, unlike in any other country, you could live your life as you saw fit as long as you accorded the same liberty to everyone else. The “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, was one “which shall restrain men from injuring one another” and “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Americans were to live under a presumption of freedom.

That was then, this is now.

We now live under a presumption of constraint. Put aside all the ways in which city and state governments require us to march to their drummers and consider just the federal government. The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves.

A useful distinction that nobody remembers any more. The worst thing you can say about any activity in these degenerate modern times is that it is ‘unregulated’.

It gets worse. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.

And God help you if you don’t get with the current political program.

Workers in government offices are often governed by such strict job descriptions that chipping in to help out a co-worker or to take the initiative breaks the rules—and can even get them fired, as in the case of a Florida lifeguard who rescued a person who was drowning just outside the lifeguard’s assigned zone.

Read it.

How about that government-provided health care in Britain! Don’t you wish we had a system like that In the U.S.? Hillary Clinton does, as does Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and the other Usual Suspects.

Read it.

Well, New York is run by Democrats, and billionaires tend to be Democrats, so that would appear to be the sweet spot for them.

Steamy eight- or nine-figure sales were always the dream of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend,” then-Mayor Bloomberg told The New York Times back in 2013. “Because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.”

Bloomberg was a rich Democrat before he was a RINO (which move was made so that he would have less competition for the Mayor’s office). Most rationales for giving rich people tax breaks are based on ‘we want them here rather than there so that their spending will boost our economy’ — which, when Reagan said it, was derided as ‘trickle-down economics’ — but apparently when Democrats say that it’s okay.

Jim Goad looks at the scandal du jour.

Despite the ceaseless yippety-yap one hears about “white privilege,” the glaringly obvious privilege currently denied to white Americans is the privilege to feel OK about their racial identity. Unless you wear your skin as if it were a guilt-laden hairshirt, and unless you frame white history as nothing more than one giant unpardonable sin against humanity, you will be hounded and mocked and derided and demonized. The way things stand in the modern mainstream narrative, there is no such thing as a “self-hating white person.” Instead, those are known as the “good” whites. The remaining whites—the ones who either take pride in their racial identity or really don’t give a fig about it either way—are witches in the process of being rounded up and burned at the stake.

…

White pride is the only sort of ethnic identity whose expression is all but legally forbidden. It’s certainly the biggest cultural sin you can currently commit.

This was all made howlingly clear last week after a Colorado barbecue joint announced that it had designated June 11 as a “White Appreciation Day” during which a 10% discount would be offered to all white customers.

Read it.

Ritu Shah Burnham says she doesn’t want to close her pizza shop. But she says Seattle’s new $15 an hour minimum wage makes it impossible for her to make a profit. She’ll close the shop in August, leaving 12 employees without a job.

Read it.

I know it’s a favorite saying around here that if liberals didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any standards at all.  But seriously—the Clintons really abuse the liberal privilege.

Read it.

Two police officers, one white, one black, shot and killed by two black men and a black woman.

How does this fit into the meta-story about white cops keeping the black people down and preventing them from becoming medical doctors or college professors?

Read it.

“Britain First” is one of those groups found in any polity that finds itself in the throes of fracturing and breakdown. This sudden “unity” under Prime Minister Cameron may be surprising, but it is not the result of a vigorous electorate or a free public sphere.

We have groups like Britain First here in America, too, and for the same reasons. These are the disaffected who have had the temerity to speak up, only to find themselves kicked to the curb (kerb) or ejected into the outer darkness where they are supposed to stay and — above all — shut up. If I remember correctly, BF was one of those groups which grew out of the screws being turned on the British National Party until it finally cracked under the strain. Britain excels at these tactics; perhaps because all the ornery DNA has either left for colonial lands or has been killed off in two utterly ruinous “world” wars. Those who followed after them don’t appear to value the same things as those whose places they took. Remnants of England are merely that: remnants.

Read it.

As ‘No Child Left Behind’ is achievable only by letting no child get ahead, so ‘social equality’ is only achievable by everybody being equally distressed. No surprises here. And of course the new clerisy are on the bleeding edge.

Perhaps the term ‘philomorons’ rather than ‘philosophers’ would be more appropriate.

Read it.

Austin is where everybody in Texas who wants to be in California but can’t afford it goes to live … plus it has the state University and the legislature, which just makes it worse.

Read it.

Hint. Not.

Sorry, I’m just not used to seeing ‘objective’ and ‘Robert Reich’ in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence.

Read it.

He explained that the migrants did not want to come to Malta because that would make it difficult for them to proceed to Northern Europe.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the Med.

Read it.

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

The saga of Abortion Barbie continues. Do a Google Search for ‘Democrat’ and ‘ethics’ and try to find a return that doesn’t include ‘violation’.

Read it.

A record 1,335 people renounced their U.S. citizenship or long-term residency during the first quarter of 2015, according to a list released by the Treasury Department on Thursday.

The total is the highest quarterly number of expatriates since a law requiring the publication of their names was enacted in the 1990s, according to Andrew Mitchel, a lawyer in Centerbrook, Conn., who tallies the lists of names. The previous quarterly record was 1,130 for the second quarter of 2013, he says.

The new figure puts 2015 on pace to exceed the total of  3,415 renunciations in 2014, which was itself a record. That was up 14% from 2,999 individuals in 2013, the previous record.

Gee, I wonder why?

But the campaign has made the financial lives of more than seven million Americans living abroad more difficult, because the U.S. taxes nonresident citizens on income earned anywhere in the world, and U.S. tax liabilities can apply to the children born to Americans abroad. In many cases, there are only partial offsets available for double taxation.

…

A new survey conducted by a Hong Kong-based company that specializes in tax preparation for American expats found that 27% of the 1,840 Americans who responded were “seriously considering” renouncing their U.S. citizenship. That’s a jump from the 18% who said the same thing in the company’s 2014 survey.

Steve Sailer can’t resist saying ‘I told you so’.

Remember when in 2002 George W. Bush and Teddy Kennedy got together and hammered out federal legislation mandating that every public school student in America test above average by 2014?

Hey, I just remembered, it’s 2015 now. Did the No Child Left Behind law work?

Similarly, in 2005, the Los Angeles School Board decreed that by 2017 every student in Los Angeles must rank in the top third.

And whatever happened with that War on Poverty thing? Have we gotten rid of poor people yet?

Read it.

Well, that’s what happens when you keep electing SWPL Democrats. You’d think people would learn after a while, but they never do.

Lion of the Blogosphere has the skinny.

I have been saying for a while that the moderately well off are Republican but the rich are Democratic. People didn’t believe me, but a new CNBC poll of Americans with a net worth of at least $1 million (which represents approximately the top 5% of the population) shows that 53% would vote for Hillary and 47% would vote for Jeb Bush, if they ran against each other.

Among millionaires 48 and younger, there is MASSIVE support for Hillary over Jeb with 70% supporting Hillary, while Jeb leads among millionaires 70 and older. You should note that millionaires tend to be older than the general population because it takes time to accumulate a million dollars, unless you are lucky enough to inherit it. The old guard still votes Republican, but the people who will be the rich of the future are very strongly Democratic.

We see that despite the Republicans presenting themselves as championing low taxes, Americans who are in the highest tax brackets prefer to vote Democratic. This makes you wonder why Republicans continue to go out on a limb to help people who vote for the other party and apparently who want to have their taxes raised.

Read it.

And the myth of ‘intellectual property’ descends into self-parody….

Read it.

Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey chief executive and husband of Facebook operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, died Friday after falling from a treadmill at a gym at the Four Seasons Hotel in Punta Mita, Mexico, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office of Nayarit state said Monday.

The spokeswoman, who didn’t wish to be named, said Mr. Goldberg had gone to exercise alone at one of the hotel’s gyms around 4 p.m. Friday. He appears to have lost his balance and fallen, hitting the back of his head, the spokeswoman said.

This is God telling you not to exercise. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

This is the sort of juvinilia that passes for political discussion in These Degenerate Modern Times.

If some Republican had bought ‘barackobama.com’ and loaded it up with anti-Obama stuff, there would be a non-stop media circus ranging from cries of RACISM! to calls for government action to seize it and return it to Its Rightful Owner.

Since the target is a nominal Republican, all our Chattering Class can do is notice what a Really Funny Joke it all is.

David Cole gives us a peek behind the curtain.

I first encountered leftists using the goalpost shift technique while attending a majority-black public high school in L.A. in the early ‘80s. “They might let us have Eddie Murphy or Michael Jackson,” some of my angrier black friends would lament regarding how much territory “the man” was willing to cede, “but you’ll never see a black Miss America.” When Vanessa Williams was crowned Miss America in ‘83, the perpetually outraged moved the goalposts. “Well, okay, but she’s light-skinned. You’ll never see a dark beauty as Miss America.”

And then it happened, two dark-skinned Miss Americas, two times in a row (‘90 and ‘91). So of course that previously important goal was immediately superseded by a new one: “Miss America? That don’t mean nothing. Who cares? What you’ll never see is a black president!”

Read it.

Not free trade, mind you, but trade favoritism.

The textile industry is suddenly very chummy with the White House on trade, thanks to a geeky concept known as “yarn forward.”

As part of negotiations over the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes the U.S., Japan and South Vietnam, the U.S. is insisting that only fabric produced from yarn made by a TPP country would be eligible for duty-free trade.

Why does that matter?

Since China isn’t a TPP member, Chinese-made fabric wouldn’t qualify. That’s important because Vietnam, a clothing-export powerhouse, often uses Chinese-made fabric—and that clothing wouldn’t be eligible for lower tariffs in the U.S. Vietnam would either have to develop its own fabric industry or import cloth from another TPP country to reap TPP benefits.

U.S. textile makers figure the yarn-forward rule could help keep China and Vietnam at bay when it comes to the U.S. market. The rule could also make Vietnam a more attractive place for U.S. textile-industry investment.

Yarn-forward is a “great start” for a TPP deal, says Jeff Price, president of a textile division at Milliken & Co., a big U.S. textile maker. Mr. Price also is chairman of the National Council of Textile Organizations, the U.S. textile-industry trade association.

For years Milliken considered yarn forward to be insufficient protection. The rule was developed to garner textile-industry support for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. The company opposed Nafta and most every other trade agreement the U.S. proposed until its former CEO, Roger Milliken, died in 2010, as described in a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal.

“We wanted no Nafta,” says Milliken’s former chief Washington lobbyist, Jock Nash. “We didn’t see how we could benefit.”

This White House is all about cronyism, and American businesses are fine with that.

Next time you hear a Leftist wail about ‘corporate greed’, hold up a mirror.

Read it.

Sounds as if the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ works just the same as every other sort of dictatorship.

Makes you wonder why all of the batty old white politicians are so keen on pushing this system onto their own countries. Are they really that stupid? Or is there something in it for them that they aren’t telling about?

Read it.

There are some thing s Man was not meant to know.

At first, I left messages on the lab’s billing office voice mail asking for an explanation. A few months ago, when someone finally called back, she said she could not tell me what the codes were for because that would violate patient privacy. After I pointed out that I was the patient in question, she said, politely: “I’m sorry, this is what I’m told, and I don’t want to lose my job.”

…

Bills variously use CPT, HCPCS or ICD-9 codes (more about those later). Some have abbreviations and scientific terms that you need a medical dictionary or a graduate degree to comprehend. Some have no information at all. Heather Pearce of Seattle told me how she’d recently received a $45,000 hospital bill with the explanation “miscellaneous.”

…

“Medical bills and explanation of benefits are undecipherable and incomprehensible even for experts to understand, and the law is very forgiving about that,” said Mark Hall, a professor of health law at Wake Forest University. “We’ve not seen a lot of pressure to standardize medical billing, but there’s certainly a need.”

Read it.

As of today, May 1, [Brian] Hibbs is required by law to pay his employees at Comix Experience, and its sister store, Comix Experience Outpost on Ocean Avenue, $12.25 per hour. That’s just the first of four incremental raises that threaten to put hundreds of such shops out of business. …

Hibbs says that the $15-an-hour minimum wage will require a staggering $80,000 in extra revenue annually. “I was appalled!” he says. “My jaw dropped. Eighty-thousand a year! I didn’t know that. I thought we were talking a small amount of money, something I could absorb.”

Raising the minimum wage doesn’t force employers to pay their employees a ‘living wage’, it forces them to lay people off, and in many cases to close, laying everybody off. How’s that for screwing the people you’re trying to help? Stupidity + Government = Poverty. Happens every time it’s tried.

Taki mourns the greatness of the past.

How have we come to this, you may well ask. How can Time sink so low as to put such an obscenity as Kanye West on its cover and even have him rap his obscenities during the gala dinner? I suppose it’s because we live in a world in which lies trump the truth, ugliness beauty, and evil goodness. West is a black man and he can do no wrong. By putting him on the cover as the most influential man in America Time wants to show its coolness and anti-racist credentials. Pop culture is what counts, not culture, and the Luces and their original creation are products of a white racist society that no longer has any say in America. Well, if you think the Time people got it wrong, what about one Sarah Blake? She’s written a book about the attention-grabbing rapper and has compared him to – yes, I ain’t kidding – to Jesus Christ. “Kanye is 33. If he were Jesus, he would die this year and be resurrected.” Nurse, help.

Read it.

The first is reflected in the title of this entry:  Will the mob tolerate an acquittal? The calls in recent days have been for “justice.”  I have considerable doubt whether those doing the loudest calling have even a slight interest in justice.  I think they want to see policemen and policewomen punished simply because of who they are.  If that is true, then the riots we have seen up to now will pale in comparison to the ones we’ll see in the event of an acquittal.

This is what we need to face:  The evidence will not make any difference to those most inflamed (and I use that word advisedly) about this case.  We’ve all seen this before  —  most recently with Darren Wilson in Ferguson and the fraternity falsely accused of hosting gang rape at the University of Virginia.

The facts are not the point.  The narrative is the point.

Read it.

So now we can see why the national press has been so tactically vague for all these weeks about the precise races of the Baltimore officers involved, while allowing the public to assume it was all about Straight White Males run amok again.

Well, then, what’s the problem?

Read it.

The government of Egypt is composed of Egyptians, and of Egyptians who are not starkly different in terms of class or creed from ordinary citizens. Yet these Egyptians do not know how to provide adequate education, jobs, health care, or decent housing for large numbers of citizens. They do not know how to balance the budget or curb corruption or pay for the pension obligations they have amassed. Above all, they do not know how to create a sense of confidence, loyalty, and community between those who govern and those who are governed despite at least rudimentary forms of accountability. And they do not know how to control the police.

The municipal government of Baltimore is composed of normal people from Baltimore, and both the present and previous democratically elected Mayors of the city are black women. Three of the past four Mayors have been black. Much of the city council and school board is composed of black members, too—as is about 40 percent of the police force. Yet these leaders do not know how to deliver quality education to the children of the city, especially those from poorer families. They don’t know how to deal with anxiety-ridden children growing up without a father, amid neighborhoods infested with gangs. They don’t know how to provide adequate nutrition to children so that they are ready to learn in school. They don’t know how to make landlords paint their lower-rent properties so that little kids like Freddie Gray don’t eat lead paint chips, or how to make heroin-addicted mothers (like Freddie Gray’s mother) sweep the floors to prevent their kids from eating lead paint chips. They don’t know how to control the trade in illegal drugs (Freddie, at age 25, had been arrested 22 times for drug-related crimes), to balance a budget, to pay pension obligations, to inspire confidence—or to control the police. You need not have watched The Wire to know all this, but it certainly would have helped.

What am I trying to say here? Simply this: Cairo and Baltimore suffer from serious structural social dysfunctions. The problems in each are not the same, but both sets of problems have multiple and compound sources that are varied, engrained, poorly understood for the most past, and largely immune to fast-working policy fixes from on high. Leaders cope with problems if they can, manage them if they are very lucky; they cannot solve them, either because they lack the power, or because they don’t know how, or both.

Lessons from Baltimore:

1. Don’t live in a city that has a large number of black Underclass in it.
2. Don’t live in a city run by Democrats.
3. Avoid any combination of 1 and 2.

Richard Fernandez points out some inconvenient truth.

The Baltimore mayor was unconcerned about property destruction because she was convinced that “someone” would rebuild it.   The same “someone” who will pay for the deficit and ransoms to al-Qaeda, as well as the bribes to Iran.  The identical “someone” that will cough up the reparations to the inmates of Guantanamo.  The “someone” who will man the ships to fight the Iranian boghammers, should it come to that.

“Someone” is the source of other people’s money.  He is like the tooth fairy who makes the wreckage of looted streets and houses go away.  In fact four pastors in the revival tent of the Left  advocate sending prayers known as tax collection letters to “someone” — who is not from earth, not from MSNBC anyway  – to pay for all their wishes as they don’t pay any themselves.

“Someone” is the Leftist equivalent of God; responsible for all the good and bad in the world, something to fear as much as  need. This mysterious deity, when loosed from control, is the cause of the failure of all their schemes, he makes the crops go bad, ruined Detroit, hexed foreign policy, inspired the riots in Baltimore and caused the drought in California.

…

Lenin called imperialism the final stage of capitalism, but he always assumed that Communism would be the highest phase of socialism. That’s where he was wrong. What Lenin didn’t realize was that prayerful piety is the ultimate stage of Leftism.  It’s when you are in a line praying there is still toilet paper, or bread or a job left for you at the end; it is when you are on your knees before al-Qaeda begging them to reduce the ransom from $2 to $1.85 million because that’s all your house, car, jewelry and life savings are worth.  It is when your arms are raised in rapturous hope at the coming of Obama, Warren, Sanders — or Hillary.  That’s the last vision of heaven you will see as you rush to one side of the boat.

Chesterton was right. When people stopped believing in God they didn’t believe in nothing, they started believing in anything.  ”Lock them in the hold! Lock them in the hold!!”

Read it.

Presumably without people in them, although with the E.U. you never know.

Read it.

Somebody (or more likely, bodies) managed to lug a bunch of construction blocks into a railway station and painstakingly glue them together to seal off a door on an S-Bahn train. Many initially thought the wall was fake, but now police and railway authorities have confirmed the ballsy action.

I’m sorry, but I think this is hilariously funny.

Read it.

There are surprisingly few recollections under way today of the final ignominious chapter of our Vietnam agony, when the U.S. was chased out of Saigon.  I wonder if there isn’t a larger subtext here.  We not only seem to be re-running the 1960s at home right now (Ferguson, Baltimore, etc), but we seem to be trying to re-run 1970s foreign policy too, with American retreat leading to chaos, instability, and increasing the threat of new wars.

Maybe a few people recall how wrong the left was about what they predicted would take place after the U.S. finally bugged out of southeast Asia.  (We didn’t just bug out; we also cut off aid to our friends and allies in the region, degrading their own chances for self-defense and survival.)  Let’s recall what leading liberals had to say at the time, especially about Cambodia.  Anthony Lewis wrote in the New York Times: “What future possibility could be more terrible that the reality of what is happening in Cambodia now?”  It was, Lewis wrote a few weeks later, only our “cultural arrogance” that led us to believe that “our way of life must prevail.”  New York Times reporter David Andelman wrote that the vast majority of Cambodians “do not voice any concern about such issues as the shape of a peace or possible postwar reprisals,” while another Times reporter, Sydney Schanberg, wrote that “it is difficult to imagine how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” Sen. Alan Cranston said that “the ‘bloodbath’ that some people fear after the fighting stops if the [Khmer Rouge] insurgents take over is only conjecture.”  The Los Angeles Times said the aid cutoff was “for the good of the suffering Cambodians themselves.” Columnist Joseph Kraft asked, “Does it really matter whether Cambodia goes Communist?” And after South Vietnam followed Cambodia’s fall, the New York Times carried a news story, datelined Phnom Penh, with the headline: “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, a Better Life.”

I remember that date. It was not a happy time.

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The Washington Post reports that a prisoner who was in the police van with Freddie Gray says he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed he “was intentionally trying to injure himself.” According to the Post, the prisoner’s statement is contained in an affidavit that’s part of an application by the police for search warrant seeking the seizure of the uniform worn by one of the officers involved in Gray’s arrest or transport.

Once again, the ASSUME bug appears to have bitten a lot of people.

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President Obama called on Americans “to do some soul searching” in the aftermath of the rioting that occurred in Baltimore on Monday. Obama offered a perfunctory condemnation of the rioters, but then, as the Washington Post reports, criticized “Americans, including the news media and some politicians, for failing to address the chronic problems of men, women and children who live in poverty and find their opportunities limited because of poor schools or long stints in prison” (emphasis added).

Of course. He doesn’t dare admit that the riots were the simple result of Underclass black people acting badly, so he has to draw some sort of moral equivalence to scape the goat.

The people who need to do some soul-searching are Democrats: Guys, these people are your Base. What does that say about YOU?

Jon Gabriel points out some inconvenient truth.

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A Georgetown University administrator has a deeply troubling message for the campus’s College Republicans: scrub video footage of the recent Christina Hoff Sommers talk, or else.

The hour-long video shows Sommers—a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and individualist-feminist—giving her classically liberal take on gender issues while several left-leaning students hold signs accusing her of being a rape apologist.

According to Lauren Gagliardi, an assistant director of student services at Georgetown, the protesters did not consent to appear on camera, and so the College Republicans and the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute (which sponsored Sommers’ talk) have a responsibility to edit them out of the video. In an email to the group obtained by The Washington Examiner and published at Legal Insurrection, Gagliardi promised consequences if her demand was not met swiftly….

The suppression of free speech in academia continues at an accelerating pace.