Read it.

At least the Communist Chinese won’t come whining to us to kiss it and make it better.

Read it.

And many of them occupy elective office.

Read it.

The Guardian, of course, is determined to call upon government to solve a problem that government action caused, by land use restrictions and greenbelt requirements. When you lower the supply of something and the demand remains the same, prices go up, sometimes a lot. This is a concept to which people whose notion of economics begins and ends with Marx are impervious.

“Every day I cry,” says an activist on a stall in Stratford, east London, that is shared by housing campaign Focus E15 and the Revolutionary Communist party. “How many thousands of people are suffering?”

Personally, I think that anything that makes an activist cry probably has much to recommend it. But that’s me.

Read it.

I guess the ‘progressive’ hipsters in Seattle want to get rid of all those underclass dweebs that are cluttering up their city.

Read it.

Fitness apps are all the rage. A raft of new companies and products want to track your steps and count your calories with the aim of melting that excess blubber. There’s just one problem — most of these apps don’t work. In fact, there is good reason to believe they make us fatter.

Read it.

Large American tech companies hire armies of lobbyists to convince politicians that there is a shortage of United States–based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates, and hence companies need lower-wage foreign workers.

That is the lie.

A 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute showed that American universities graduate 50 percent more students in computer, information science, and engineering each year than are hired in those fields. Of computer-science grads not entering the information-technology workforce, one-third say it is because such jobs are unavailable. Inflation-adjusted tech wages remain at 1990s levels. “The data strongly suggest that there is a robust supply of domestic workers available for the [information technology] industry,” concludes the Economic Policy Institute.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers projects that the starting wage for new computer-science graduates will drop 9 percent to $61,287 this year. Says the journal Science, “Ordinarily, rapidly falling salaries indicate a glut, not a shortage.”

Read it.

Hint: New minimum wage law.

Hey, regressives, be careful what you wish for, you might get more than you intended.

Steve Sailer sets the record straight.

The World’s Most Important Place™ is fraternity row at the U. of Oklahoma. I realize that some of you may feel you have a vague recollection that it was some other place that was in the news a lot, maybe some place in a state bordering Oklahoma, but we have always been at war with Oklahoma. And, no, TWMIP™ was never fraternity row at the U. of Virginia. You are completely deluded about that.

C’mon, people, focus: fraternity row at the University of Oklahoma.

Read it.

A report compiled by Ernst & Young comparing U.S. corporate tax rates to the rest of the developed world has found that America’s inefficient corporate tax regime is hurting U.S. competitiveness – namely through double taxation on economic decision making.

According to the report, the U.S. has the second highest top integrated tax rates amongst 38 developed countries, including the 34 members of the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) along with Brazil, Russia, India, and China (BRIC). The report calculates integrated tax rates by combining corporate-level taxes with investor-level taxes on dividends and capital gains at national and subnational level.

Most developed countries (but not the U.S.) provide some form of relief from double taxation on corporate profits. Double taxation is a drag on the economy because it distorts important economic decisions, including discouraging capital investment which can lead to the misallocation of resources. It also encourages firms to favor debt over equity financing which can leave them vulnerable during periods of economic weakness.

Read it.

The Export-Import Bank has been in the news a lot in the last week. That’s because for the first time in its 80-year history, freedom has a chance of winning over rampant cronyism, and Congress may kill the New Deal era agency. Understandably, the bureaucrats at Ex-Im are in panic mode. They have been super active on the lobbying front for months, but in the last few weeks they have doubled down on their “outreach” (translation: special interests’ political pressure) to Congress.

Steve Sailer is on the case.

We hear a lot these days about how we must reduce the number of black men in prison. Here is a reform that I think would reduce the number of black men thrown into prison for extra-long terms by judges and juries: don’t let megalomaniacal black guys with two digit IQs and poor spelling fire their court-appointed attorneys and represent themselves, because they often wind up getting longer terms from annoyed juries and judges.

My idea for a reform to reduce the number of black men in prison is for black men to quit committing so many crimes. But that’s me.

My wife was on a jury once in the trial of an “aspiring rapper” for welfare fraud for collecting welfare for his children while they lived with his parents. But he appeared to be spending most of the welfare checks on his kids, and he didn’t have any history of violence (he seemed more histrionic than thuggish, and if he didn’t have a couple of kids you’d probably guess he was gay), so an adept attorney probably could have plea-bargained him off with a light sentence.

However, craving his moment in the spotlight, the defendant had fired his court-appointed attorney and conducted his entire defense himself, which prominently featured cross-examining his mother over various grievances he had with her going back to childhood. The judge kept trying to remind the defendant that the jury was there to determine his guilt or innocence, not to render judgment on his mother.

The jury was outraged over having to sit through this sub-reality TV for a week and a half and wanted to instantly return a verdict that the defendant should be sentenced to about life plus 500 years.

My wife made her fellow jurors laboriously go through each charge in detail. And sure enough, he was guilty as sin, although the jury probably would have let him off on some of the counts if he had had a professional attorney. Thus, he’ll be in jail longer because he chose to represent himself.

So, if you want to reduce extremely long sentences and prison overcrowding, don’t let egomaniacal black criminals fire their court-appointed attorneys.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

A DH-10 land attack cruise missile (LACM) launches out of its canister, heading for parts unknown. Weighing about 1-1.5 tons (about the same size as the American Tomahawk cruise missile), it can be launched from land on a three missile transport erector launch (TEL) vehicle, as shown here. Shortly after ejection from the canister, the DH-10’s two retractable wings, four tailfins and belly mounted engine air intake will all unfold as it flies as far as 2,500km away. Reportedly able to hit a garage door sized target, In addition to carrying a 500kg high explosive warhead toward a target with accuracy the DH-10’s payload can either be a 500kg high explosive warhead or submunitions for attacking fighters on runways and tank columns, nuclear warheads and fuel air explosives. Notably, DH-10s use several guidance modes, including satellite navigation, inertial navigation, and terrain following, making it hard to jam or deceive.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

Sadly, efforts to protect farmlands in Hawai’i are something of a joke considering that Hawai’i’s land-use laws–the strictest in the nation–were supposedly passed to protect farmlands and yet in fact are responsible for destroying Hawai’i’s agricultural industry. The land-use laws made Hawai’ian housing so unaffordable that farmers can’t pay workers enough for them to be able to live there. As a result, the state has lost most of its pineapple, sugar cane, and other crop production to other Pacific islands such as Fiji.

As soon as the government gets involved, things go to shit. Oh, wait, isn’t Obama from Hawaii? Well–there it is.

Watch it. (Ignore the first one, with the commercial. Page down for the real thing.) Oh, and read the article.

Read it.

How do we fight back against cops and child protection workers who think parents that let their kids walk outside are negligent?

By flooding the streets with kids.

Busybodies who dial 911 the instant they see an unsupervised child are not going to do that when they pass a park filled with 15 kids. (Well, most aren’t.)  And when masses of moppets take to the sidewalks after school, no one is going to call the cops to report, “Tons of children are walking home!”

Works for me.

Read it.

Absolute belief renders ISIS’ atrocities not only explicable but seemingly almost mandatory. After all, if you hold the keys to the perfection of life on Earth, then anyone who stands in your way is actively depriving everyone else of that outcome and thereby ensuring the continued suffering of millions. Eliminating such people therefore serves the good of all mankind. (And the grisly beheadings, crucifixions, immolations? They can be justified on the same grounds as the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were: They will shock and awe the enemy into an earlier surrender, and thus save lives in the end. Mercy becomes a justification for cruelty.)

None of this is new. A century ago another Utopian movement behaved very much the same.

The communist revolution led by Vladimir Lenin committed a reign of terror just as heinous and unbridled as the Islamic State’s. The Cheka—a secret state police force created by Lenin and a precursor of the KGB—was tasked with liquidating all those suspected of opposition, including clergy, the children of military officers and the well-to-do. It butchered thousands of innocents and inflicted ghastly tortures, from skinning victims alive to tying them to boards and pushing them slowly into furnaces.

Such savagery was not an aberration; it was policy. “Freedom is a bourgeois prejudice,” Lenin declared.

Islam is really just an older and more successful model. Bother are oppressive totalitarian ideologies with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Setty is paraphrasing Minnesota planner Charles Marohn who argues that transportation planners need to change the emphasis from increasing people’s mobility to reducing the amount we “force them to drive.” This is hardly new: the notion that some mysterious conspiracy has forced Americans to drive has underlain a lot of urban planning for the past several decades. It is pure baloney.

No one forced automobiles on Americans. Instead, automobiles liberated Americans. Not counting the war years, transit ridership peaked in 1926 at an average of just 147 trips per year. Close to half of all Americans lacked any access to transit, and even many who lived near transit lines couldn’t afford to use them very often. Most of those who couldn’t ride transit were limited to foot travel. At an average trip length of 5 miles, transit travel was less than 750 miles a year.

Crustian mythology accepted as fact by our ruling class are at the root of much of the bad policy that finds its way into our lives.

Americans in the 1920s could see the huge advantages provided by cars. When an Indiana woman was asked why her family bought a car when their home still lacked indoor plumbing, she answered, “you can’t go to town in a bathtub.”

Indeed. For somebody who wants to work for a living, a car is right behind some place to live in the priority of needs.

When Marohn says we should stop forcing Americans to drive, he means we should design urban areas to allow people to use transit, walk, or bicycle more: in other words, higher densities, mixed uses. But there’s a good reason why urban areas are designed the way they are: people prefer the privacy and lack of noise (not to mention lower land prices) that come with low densities and separated uses. Certainly, there may be a limited market for high-density, mixed-use developments, but if there is, let developers build for the market. Don’t try to impose it based on the idea that doing so will lead people to drive less.

The problem with ‘urban planners’ is that they think it appropriate to force other people to live in the way the planners thing appropriate — something that those very same planners would denounce as fascism if it were applied to themselves.

Read it.

Over the years, we have been struck repeatedly by how often President Obama is wrong. Not how often we disagree with him, but how often he is just plain wrong, on matters of history, science and so on. Obama has a blithe willingness to assert false propositions of fact, apparently without fear of correction. I suppose that is because the Democratic press has little incentive to point out his errors.

Hey … he won.

Read it.

Suppose a doctor told a two-pack-a-day smoker not to worry about his tobacco addiction because smoking another half-pack per day would shorten his life expectancy by only six weeks. What would you think of that physician? The physician may have been telling the literal truth; the additional damage done to the health and life expectancy of smoking an additional 10 cigarettes per day on top of the 40 (two packs) already consumed is relatively small.

But this ignores well-documented evidence that consuming two packs per day reduces life expectancies by more than 10 years. Any doctor focusing solely on the additional (marginal) negative impact of smoking could be accused of incompetence and medical malpractice. Yet this is precisely what economists do whenever they assess the damage done by minimum-wage legislation. Their analysis focuses on the additional harm done by an increase in legislated wages; it completely ignores the impact that existing minimum wages impose upon society’s most vulnerable.

And what might that be?

Economic analysis focuses almost exclusively upon what will happen to unemployment with an increase in the minimum wages; ignored is the harm that current levels create. Minimum wages deprive the mentally and physically disabled, the least skilled, least educated and most inexperienced workers a chance to compete with more able, skilled, educated and experienced workers for jobs by working for lower wages.

The “low” wages the disadvantaged are paid do not reflect the dollar value of the additional training, skills, education and experience they receive. Focusing solely on money wages obscures economic reality; the disadvantaged receive both money and additional human capital that only comes from being employed.

Benefits that don’t come from being on the government dole. But of course having more people depending on Free Stuff From The Government is the whole point of the exercise, all the sentimentalist bloviation notwithstanding.

Read it.

There’s a headline you don’t want to see.

Read it.

A female developer at the heart of a debate over sexism in gaming has a message for those gathered at a prominent industry conference this week: You’re not doing enough to combat misogyny.

Message: ‘I am unhappy and it’s your job to fix it!’

Grow up, girl. Life is full of hardship. You want real hate, try living with being called a Nazi all of your adult life by people who (a) don’t know what the term means and (b) don’t know you well enough to make an accurate judgment about whether it applies.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Even after Obama switched identities in the mid-1980s from multicultural to black, he was attracted to the Islamic aspect of black power. For example, he regularly read the Nation of Islam newspaper put out by Minister Farrakhan, but eventually decided that there was more money in getting white people to put up money for blacks than in Farrakhan’s economic black nationalism. As late as 1994, he attended Farrakhan’s Million Man March in Washington rather than visiting his dying mother, but he seems to have found Farrakhan’s speech embarrassing.

Eventually, he joined Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s megachurch to connect him to the community he hoped to be elected to represent. Obama detailed in his first memoir his thoughts as he joined. His feelings are racial rather than religious.

But, let’s also note that it’s not surprising that Wright had been a Muslim for awhile and that Wright’s church is part of the post-Puritan United Church of Christ, linking Wright to Hiram Bingham I.

So, “secular Unitarian with Muslim sympathies” sounds about right.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, speaks for all right-thinking folks.

We really need to retire the epithet “The Stupid Party” for the GOP. The DHS funding fiasco plainly shows that “stupid” is too mild an adjective to describe the Congressional Republican leadership.[John Boehner ends stalemate, Politico, March 3, 2015]

I turned to my thesaurus in hopes of finding something more apt. Alas; in this age of microaggressions, of mimosa-like sensitivity to offense, the stronger adjectives—“retarded,” “moronic,” “imbecilic,” “cretinous”—are out of bounds.

“Idiotic” is borderline acceptable, and it brings with it a helpful mental image of the gibbering snaggle-toothed Village Idiot; so I’ll take a venture on “idiotic” for the GOP congresscritters.

Hear, hear. Although ‘chickenshit’ does recommend itself.

One thing we learn is the mighty power of a Democratic President. Mass Amnesty for low-skilled illegal aliens is of great importance to the future of the Democratic Party.

On an issue of that nature, a Democratic President can rely on well-nigh solid support from his party in both houses of Congress, as well as—of course—from the Main Stream Media, the universities, the law schools, Hollywood, etc., etc.

There are no patriotic qualms in any of those areas of support. This is now the transnationalist post-American party. Blue Dog Democrats are a fading memory.

As is America, as it was until recently. The increasing scope of the Welfare State, coupled with the capture of the institutions of education and communication by the Crust, has explosively grown the Dependent Underclass that will keep them in power for as far as the eye can see or the mind contemplate.

Mark Steyn looks at Congressional Republicans below the fold.

John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are so good at folding Obama should hire them as White House valets.

I think he did. But don’t worry. We’re now being told: hey, relax, this whole illegal-executive-action amnesty thing can be left to the courts – just like Obamacare.

Hmm. The impressively rubber-jointed contortions of a constitutional court are one of the differences between America and most of the rest of the west, and they are not without their entertainment value. But they seem less and less relevant as the ruling party’s contempt for law grows ever more open. At the dawn of the Obama era, Americans used to be warned that, if they weren’t careful, they’d wind up like Europe. But, whatever one feels about it ideologically, the Swedes come by their Big Government more or less honestly. America seems to have bypassed Continental social democracy and gone full-blown Latin-American banana republic.

Read it.

Individuals and organizations highly vested in disaster scenarios have relentlessly attacked scientists and others who do not share their beliefs. The attacks have taken a threatening turn.

As to the science itself, it’s worth noting that all predictions of warming since the onset of the last warming episode of 1978-98—which is the only period that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempts to attribute to carbon-dioxide emissions—have greatly exceeded what has been observed. These observations support a much reduced and essentially harmless climate response to increased atmospheric carbon dioxide.

In addition, there is experimental support for the increased importance of variations in solar radiation on climate and a renewed awareness of the importance of natural unforced climate variability that is largely absent in current climate models. There also is observational evidence from several independent studies that the so-called “water vapor feedback,” essential to amplifying the relatively weak impact of carbon dioxide alone on Earth temperatures, is canceled by cloud processes.

There are also claims that extreme weather—hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, you name it—may be due to global warming. The data show no increase in the number or intensity of such events. The IPCC itself acknowledges the lack of any evident relation between extreme weather and climate, though allowing that with sufficient effort some relation might be uncovered.

Read it.

Let’s suppose the United States had to pay off its accumulated debt in gold. How much gold would that be, based on today’s market prices?

A standard gold bar that weighs a kilogram measures 80mm × 40mm × 18mm, or 3.15? × 1.58? × 0.71?.

The spot price of gold is about $1,200 per ounce, which is $19,200 per pound, or $38,400,000 per ton.
A ton is approximately 907 kilos, so there would be 907 one-kilogram bars in a stack of gold weighing a ton.

The national debt is over $18,000,000,000,000 and climbing rapidly, but I’ll peg it at $18 trillion, just to make the calculations easier.

When I looked into how much gold would be needed to add up to $18 trillion, the scale of the resulting graphic would have been too exaggerated to make visual sense — the astronaut standing next to the gold bar would have been too tiny to be recognizable in a normal-sized image. The calculations below are based on paying off one quarter of the national debt, or $4,500,000,000,000 ($4.5 trillion).

To determine the number of tons of gold needed for the payoff, we divide $4,500,000,000,000 by $38,400,000 per ton, arriving at an approximate figure of 117,188 tons. At 907 kilos per ton, 106,310,712 one-kilo gold bars are required.

The bars in the resulting pile would be stacked 474 long, 474 wide, and 474 high. Using the dimensions of each individual bar as given above, the rectangular solid formed by the whole pile would be 37.9m × 19m × 8.5m, or 124 feet long, 62 feet wide, and 28 feet high.

That’s as big as a McMansion, but remember: it represents only 25% of the national debt. Four of those piles taken together would be as big as the Ritz.

Read it.

Did she lose her job? No.

Will she go to jail? No.

Will anything at all bad happen to her other than perhaps some criticism should she run for President? No.

“You do not need a law degree to have an understanding of how troubling this is,” Gowdy told reporters at a news conference. “One should also be concerned about the national security implications of former secretary Clinton using exclusively personal e-mail accounts for the conducting of official U.S. foreign policy.”

I got yer ‘troubling’ … right here.

Welcome to the world of the Crust.

Mark Steyn sums it all up for you.

Our leftie friends at Mother Jones put it this way:

Benjamin Netanyahu just mansplained Iran to Obama

Er, okay. Glad you said that because there’d be no end to it if some rightie guy sneered that Obama was our first female president.

For what it’s worth, I prefer mansplaining to ‘Bamsplaining, where he peddles a lot of gaseous pap interrupted by cheap digs at straw men and all delivered in that set-your-watch-by-it left-right prompter-swivel. (To stick with the Mother Jones shtick, real men don’t use prompters.)

Steve Sailer brings up some inconvenient truth.

One distinction that I haven’t seen made is the potential legal distinction in university responsibility between the actions of run-of-the-mill male students admitted en masse and of large, strong, aggressive athletes personally recruited by the university’s highest paid employees under lowered academic and behavioral standards.

What the media wants is to crucify the Haven Monahans lurking under every bed, but instead it keeps coming up with real scandals involving black jocks.

For example, consider the case of basketball player Brandon Austin *, who was suspended for a year from the Providence’s basketball team after being accused of sexual assault. Austin was immediately recruited by U. of Oregon basketball coach Dana Altman, who has a seven year contract with the U. of Nike paying almost $2 million per year.

But a few weeks after showing up at the Oregon campus, Austin was accused of sexual assault again.

Read it.

Faking orders, or “brushing,” as it is called in China, involves paying people to pretend to be customers. It lets vendors pad their sales figures and, in theory, boost their standing on online marketplaces, which often give more prominence to high-volume sellers with good track records.

Typically, vendors pay brushers the cost of the products they are ordering, plus a fee. The brushers place the orders and make payments using that money. The vendors then ship boxes that are empty or full of worthless trinkets, while the brushers write glowing reviews.

The practice is considered a form of false advertising, which is prohibited in the U.S. and China. Chinese sellers found doing so face fines and restrictions on their business. But Mr. Cui, who asked to be identified only by his last name, said he relied on fake orders because he felt there was no other way for his products to be seen.

Brushing puts Alibaba at risk of further regulatory scrutiny following its $25 billion initial public offering in September, and calls into question the volume of transactions actually conducted on its platforms, a metric analysts cite in saying it is the world’s largest e-commerce platform. Alibaba says it doesn’t condone fake transactions and that it scrubs them from reporting on merchandise volume, which amounted to 1.68 trillion yuan ($274 billion) for its two main shopping platforms, Taobao and Tmall, in the fiscal year ended March 2014.

Note the Crustian logic: Merchants engage in fraud, but it’s Ali Baba that gets ‘further regulatory scrutiny’. For the Crust, any bad thing is just another excuse to increase their meddling.

Read it.

There are an absurdly large number of people who refuse to grow up. And they are increasingly taking over the modern world.

Read it.

Boris Nemtsov’s assassination in Moscow’s center resembles something out of the times of Stalin’s Great Terror. The authorities’ reason for sanctioning the killing must not be made too mysterious to the people. The significance of the death must be clear to all, and his death must serve as a lesson. His bullet-ridden body plastered all across Russian newspapers yesterday was a warning: “Look, even a man like that cannot feel safe.” Nemtsov was one of those opposition leaders who visited the West often, who attended various conferences, acting like an informal foreign minister of this “other Russia”. Cynics used to say that talks held in hotel lobbies in Zurich don’t bother the Kremlin. Boris’ crumpled body, beamed into every television set across Russia yesterday, is a clear message to all opposition leaders, journalists and independent activists in Russia: “Don’t think that abroad you can say what you want. The authorities keep an eye on you whether you are in Warsaw or Washington. Enough is enough: time to choose sides.”

Read it.

Whether Xi Jinping is confronting corruption, engaging in just another CCP purge, or some of both, the PLA is stuck dangerously in the middle.

Things could get interesting.

Read it.

Remember Occupy Wall Street, when thousands across the country took to the streets, sleeping in tents to protest the ultra-rich 1 percent? The occupiers’ frustration was real, but their ire was misdirected. They should have launched an Occupy the AARP movement instead.

Government policies that transfer cash from the relatively young and poor to the relatively old and wealthy are the real scandal. In 1970, Social and Medicare accounted for 20 percent of federal spending. They have since grown to 40 percent; by 2030, they will be more than half. And these numbers understate the level of federal spending for the elderly. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, some 28 percent of spending on Medicaid, a program designed to offer health care to families in poverty, goes to older Americans.

Not to mention the crushing Federal debt that they will have to pay off — if it ever does get paid off and not just shucked, which is what governments have historically done.

Read it.

Former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson asks herself how the media would treat a given behavior if it were practiced by a Republican. If the media would go ballistic, Attkisson suggests, the same behavior ought to be deemed newsworthy when a Democrat practices it. As she explains in her memoir Stonewalled, she calls it The Substitution Game.

…

Now comes the wretched Democratic Rep. Raúl Grijalva to give us the opportunity of playing The Substitution Game. Grijalva has sent letters to seven university presidents based on his concerns about the heterodox climate-related testimony of professors at the institutions. He seeks “detailed records on the funding sources for affiliated researchers who have opposed the scientific consensus on man-made global warming,” as the Washington Post’s Joby Warrick puts it in “House Dems: Did Big Oil seek to sway scientists in climate debate?”

Read it.

Voices of the Crust, come here and get flesh.

Richard Fernandez turns over a rock.

The flip side of fame is often fear. Take the fate of Jonathan Gruber. In 2006 president Obama told an audience that he had “stolen ideas liberally” from Gruber, “one of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles”.  Gruber once had multiple contracts worth millions to supply economic modeling to the president’s signature healthcare program.  He was riding high.

Then Rich Weinstein an investment adviser from Philadelphia found a series of videos taken at small forums in which Gruber confided to audiences the less than flattering inside dope on Obamacare.  It portrayed an administration laughing at ignorant voters for believing in the promises of the program.  After the videos were publicized Gruber’s world began to fall apart.

…

If you really want to understand what holds the liberal establishment together the one-word answer is fear. Fear among the rich has a different flavor from fear among the poor. The poor are often so used to deprivation and insecurity that it holds no special terrors for them. When you’re already a bum and a good day is when you can eat the whole box of macaroni and cheese; when you’ve been unemployed for longer than you can remember, then “you’ll never work in this town again” can be answered by “so what?”

High flyers on the other hand, have an awful long way to fall. Nobody wants to finish up like the fictional Stanton Carlisle, who descends from the heights of the entertainment industry, fleeing police trouble and winds up working in a carnival freak show, eating live chickens for a living. And therefore media will be paying very close attention to the fate of Jonathan Gruber, formerly “one of the brightest minds from academia and policy circles”.  If there’s one thing you don’t want, it’s to wind up like Gruber.

The chains of patronage are hard to avoid in exalted circles. According to Elias Groll writing in Foreign Policy, Rudy Giuliani is a consultant for Qatar. That’s nothing. The Clintons have collected over two billion dollars from foreign governments and lobby groups through their foundation.

‘Chain of patronage’ is an elegant term for the wind beneath the wings of the Crust.

You haven’t arrived until everyone is offering you job; and once hired you don’t make waves with money like that at stake. The great and the good are bound together by chains of gold.  Some will argue this is a good thing. The Clintons were perhaps the first prominent American politicians to understand that Globalization made it possible for an international elite to settle all disputes by means of cash payments or penalties.  Once the top men had reached an understanding, the elites could jointly rule over the international taxpayer, thus abolishing conflict forever.  In today’s world no longer are patronage relationships limited to national borders, as was formerly the case.  Today, political deal-making is global.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

Yesterday, I pointed out that Patricia Arquette’s Academy Award acceptance comments sounded like a trial run of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 argument for electing her President: it’s the white moms’ turn, and all the trendier minorities need to return some favors. From the New York Times today, an article detailing how accurate that was.

…

You know, Margaret Thatcher was became leader of the Tory Party on February 11, 1975, more than 40 years ago and was elected Prime Minister 36 years ago.

If Hillary wins a couple of terms, in 2023 we will still be reading the same articles about glass ceilings.

Steve Sailer will never lack for material.

The basic idea behind Hillary Clinton’s run for the Presidency in 2016 is that while she’s kind of old and mediocre at politics, she is a woman, and it’s about time for a woman to be elected, and Hillary’s been waiting a long time, so who else are you gonna give it to?

At the 2015 Oscars, the Hillary stand-in role was played by Patricia Arquette. Patricia is a middle aged white mom lady, and she’s been doing this acting thing for a long time, and so it seemed like it’s about time she won something.

One of the reason I have no interest in the Oscars.

What’s wrong with Democrats?

Well, you know what’s wrong with Democrats. It’s that certain other Democrat, the one you spent so much to defeat in the 2008 primaries, who decided in 2012 to unleash the crazies to get himself re-elected. It’s getting harder and harder to stuff the nuts back in the jar.

Read it.

A basic truth of the modern world, which is why you don’t hear much from the Malthusians and Zero Population Growth chicken-littles these days.

The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been characterized by a massive decline in fertility, beginning in rich western countries and spreading all over the world. It is a transformation that is still underway in poor countries today.

Except that it’s not a decline in fertility — people are just as fertile now as ever, if not more so — but a decline in people exercising their fertility … which they can more easily do because of improved baby-prevention technologies and the feminist cult of abortion-on-demand.

In the modern world, children are an economic drain, not an economic benefit; rather like a very expensive pet. Only where children are an economic benefit, such as qualifying single women to claim government benefits and establish their own households, do we see levels of childbearing that compare with historical norms.

Read it.

Dmitry Muratov, the editor of Novaya Gazeta, the scrappy investigative journal that is perhaps best known in the West for regularly publishing pieces by the late Anna Politkovskaya, says he has in his possession a strategy document drafted and accepted by the Kremlin which outlines in broad strokes just what Russia’s long game in Ukraine may be….

…

He said the overall strategy included plans on how to break Ukraine into automonmous sectors, immediately attaching now war-torn southeastern Ukraine to Moscow’s tax union, with a longer term plan for annexation.

The plan suggested “the main thrust should be Crimea and the Kharkhiv region, with the aim of initiating the annexation of the eastern regions.”

Read it.

The average amount of space per office worker in North America dropped to 176 square feet in 2012, from 225 in 2010, according to CoreNet Global, a commercial real estate association. Though more recent figures are not available, real estate experts say there is no doubt that workers are being shoehorned into even less space.

This means that everyone will get to hear those loud calls about how long your mother-in-law will be staying or why the $1,500 medical bill the collection agency insists you owe should really be covered by insurance.

The problem is that the savings by putting everyone in one big room is easy to quantify, and the loss of productivity and morale is not.

Read it.

China’s new aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, has a 14,700 square meters flight deck that allows a wide array of uses. But it’s a safe bet that a setting for a music video was not on the radar screen of either its original Ukrainian builders of recent US Office of Naval Intelligence threat analyses.

Steve Sailer looks at the sordid underbelly of the Crustian Narrative.

As I’ve been pointing out for a couple of years, we constantly read news stories out of Silicon Valley about male chauvinist brogrammers oppressing women whose only dream in life since they were little girls has been to code. And yet, upon inspection of the details, another word often comes to mind: adventuress.

…

Keep in mind that Ms. Pao broke it off after Mr. Nazre failed to divorce Mrs. Nazre. You might think that Ms. Pao’s predation upon Mrs. Nazre’s marriage might be an issue, but that’s missing the point, which is that John Doerr is a deep-pocketed rich white man and therefore must pay. Woman v. woman conflicts, while fascinating to other women, don’t fit well within the dominant feminist legal and media frameworks, so they are of no serious interest.

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(That’s when they’re not indoctrinating kids for a world that cannot ever exist.)

We “learn,” and after this we “do.” We go to school and then we go to work.

This approach does not map very well to personal and professional success in America today. Learning and doing have become inseparable in the face of conditions that invite us to discover.

Read it.

If you break into admission statistics to elite colleges and universities you discover a pattern of “disparate impact” (as the civil rights term of art goes) against Asians. It appears Asians are being actively discriminated against just as Jews were for decades.

Read it.

If the Soviet Union had possessed this comprehensive an indoctrination system, it would still be with us today.

Steve Sailer connects the dots:

I think that’s key to understanding what’s going on. Start with the premise that couples who spend $40k per year in tuition per child aren’t doing that to have their child lose his privileges, they are doing that to augment their scion’s privileges. Indoctrinating your child in the dominant rhetoric of the era he will live in not only makes him less likely to make a career-damaging slip up, it makes him more cunning at how to attack and destroy his white rivals whenever they make rhetorical slip-ups as he claws his way to the top. You don’t need to be fair to the people you meet on the way up if you’re never coming back down.

Mark Steyn says what I’ve been saying for a while now….

I’m not a conspiracy theorist, because conspiracies are generally a comforting illusion: the real problem with Obama is that the citizens of the global superpower twice elected him to office. Yet one way to look at the current “leader of the free world” is this: If he were working for the other side, what exactly would he be doing differently?

Read it.

Since its creation in 2001, the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation has raised close to $2 billion from a vast global network that includes corporate titans, political donors, foreign governments and other wealthy interests, according to a Washington Post review of public records and newly released contribution data.

Sure, foreigners are all in with the Clintons’ efforts to do whatever it is that the Clinton Foundation does.