Read it. (autoplay video)

I guess one dead nonagenarian Arab is worth more than a dozen slaughtered Frenchmen in Obama-land.

If Obama actually were a Muslim, what (if anything) would he be doing differently?

Read it.

Just think of all the maritime superpowers threatening their borders. Oh, wait….

They’d do better to keep an eye on Putin.

Read it.

Undiscussed: The fact that they’d be fools not to. Lobbying Congress is like installing a sprinkler system in a factory; only idiots don’t.

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The flashpoint for the gentrification conversation along Portland’s North Williams revolves around the bicycle. The cultural appetite for what the creative class likes and enjoys is in stark contrast to that of the African-American community. “North Williams Avenue wasn’t hip back in the late 1970s. There was no Tasty n Sons. No Ristretto Roasters. No 5th Quadrant. Back then, it was the heart of the African American community. It was wonderfully colorful and gritty.” As the black community saw their own businesses close down through economic disinvestment, they weren’t replaced with new businesses that they regarded as desirable. In the several hours I spent today at Ristretto I have seen roughly a hundred patrons come in and go out, plus others sitting outside on the patios of one of several nearby restaurants. Only three were African-American. As I mentioned earlier, the buildings that surround this coffee shop are home to many African-American families. And yet these new businesses do not appeal to their cultural tastes.

Welcome to the Left Coast. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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The refusal of social democrats, liberals and leftists to stand up to Islamofascism in the democracies of Europe, North America, India and South Africa, has also had an unintended consequence. It has paved the way for an anti-immigrant backlash against all non-whites, in which the left are portrayed as apologists for religious fanaticism. An unnecessary rise of xenophobia that could have been avoided, had the left led the struggle against Islamofascism, is now entrenched.

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Fake engine noise has become one of the auto industry’s dirty little secrets, with automakers from BMW to Volkswagen turning to a sound-boosting bag of tricks. Without them, today’s more fuel-efficient engines would sound far quieter and, automakers worry, seemingly less powerful, potentially pushing buyers away.

Softer-sounding engines are actually a positive symbol of just how far engines and gas economy have progressed. But automakers say they resort to artifice because they understand a key car-buyer paradox: Drivers want all the force and fuel savings of a newer, better engine — but the classic sound of an old gas-guzzler.

“Enhanced” engine songs have become the signature of eerily quiet electrics like the Toyota Prius. But the fakery is now increasingly finding its way into beefy trucks and muscle cars, long revered for their iconic growl.

Read it.

I work at colleges of last resort. For many of my students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, but a place they landed in. Those I teach don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions. Mine are the students whose applications show indifferent grades and have blank spaces where the extracurricular activities would go. They chose their college based not on the U.S. News & World Report rankings but on MapQuest; in their ideal academic geometry, college is located at a convenient spot between work and home. I can relate, for it was exactly this line of thinking that dictated where I sent my teaching résumé.

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Scientists at the University of Rochester have used lasers to transform metals into extremely water repellent, or super-hydrophobic, materials without the need for temporary coatings.

Super-hydrophobic materials are desirable for a number of applications such as rust prevention, anti-icing, or even in sanitation uses. However, as Rochester’s Chunlei Guo explains, most current hydrophobic materials rely on chemical coatings.

Read it.

Those must be the kids getting a Real Liberal Arts Degree.

The test, which was administered at 169 colleges and universities in 2013 and 2014 and released Thursday, reveals broad variation in the intellectual development of the nation’s students depending on the type and even location of the school they attend.

On average, students make strides in their ability to reason, but because so many start at such a deficit, many still graduate without the ability to read a scatterplot, construct a cohesive argument or identify a logical fallacy.

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With Austin’s light-rail ballot measure going down in flames last November due to its high costs, rail transit advocates have conceded defeat, folded up their tents, and gone home. Ha, ha, just kidding; actually, now they are talking about subways.

…

What’s the solution to Austin’s increasing congestion? asks economist Angelos Angelou. His answer? “Subways.” In other words, if you can’t afford light rail, then build something that (as Texas A&M transportation engineer Curtis Morgan points out) is five times more expensive. That makes economic sense (in Bizarro world).

Austin is the blue carbuncle on the butt of Texas.

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Roosevelt, for all his fluent mastery of democratic counter-words, democratic gestures and all the rest of the armamentarium of the mob-master, had no such faith in his heart of hearts.  He didn’t believe in democracy; he believed simply in government.  His remedy for all the great pangs and longings of existence was not a dispersion of authority, but a hard concentration of authority.  He was not in favor of unlimited experiment; he was in favor of a rigid control from above, a despotism of inspired prophets and policemen.  He was not for democracy as his followers understood democracy, and as it actually is and must be; he was for a paternalism of the true Bismarckian pattern, almost of the Napoleonic or Ludendorffian pattern – a paternalism concerning itself with all things, from the regulation of coal-mining and meat-packing to the regulation of spelling and marital rights.

— H. L. Mencken

Read it.

To which I would add: 1. Lies; 2. Evasions; 3. Bragging; 4. Higher taxes; 5. Race baiting.

Read it.

At the end of World War II, nearly 10 percent of the entire U.S. population was on active military duty—which meant most able-bodied men of a certain age (plus the small number of women allowed to serve). Through the decade after World War II, when so many American families had at least one member in uniform, political and journalistic references were admiring but not awestruck. Most Americans were familiar enough with the military to respect it while being sharply aware of its shortcomings, as they were with the school system, their religion, and other important and fallible institutions.

Now the American military is exotic territory to most of the American public. As a comparison: A handful of Americans live on farms, but there are many more of them than serve in all branches of the military. (Well over 4 million people live on the country’s 2.1 million farms. The U.S. military has about 1.4 million people on active duty and another 850,000 in the reserves.) The other 310 million–plus Americans “honor” their stalwart farmers, but generally don’t know them. So too with the military. Many more young Americans will study abroad this year than will enlist in the military—nearly 300,000 students overseas, versus well under 200,000 new recruits. As a country, America has been at war nonstop for the past 13 years. As a public, it has not. A total of about 2.5 million Americans, roughly three-quarters of 1 percent, served in Iraq or Afghanistan at any point in the post-9/11 years, many of them more than once.

And that is a very sad story.

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Alabama sits proudly at the top of the US teacher-pupil sex league, with one school employee per 193,975 residents being “accused or convicted” of engaging in illicit relations with a student during 2014.

That’s according to a enlightening study by Terry Abbott – “a former chief of staff of the U.S. Department of Education” – whose team trawled the media for “every available report of teacher-student sex nationwide”.

They demonstrated that of 781 such cases last year, 25 occurred in the Yellowhammer State, which boasts a population of roughly 4.85 million.

Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi and Vermont complete Abbot’s top five, but if the figures are viewed on sheer weight of numbers alone, rather than an “outrage per capita” basis, then Texas actually tops the chart on points, clocking up 116 of the 781 cases.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

One of the interesting questions in recent years is why when the respectable media decides to go all in on some story about evil white men murdering black baby bodies or raping coeds on broken glass, it so often turns out to be a humiliating factual fiasco, such as the White Hispanic or Ferguson or Haven Monahan. (And then, unsurprisingly, the blood libels lead to Nights of Real Broken Glass.)

You would think that in this giant country there’d be, by the Law of Large Numbers, unembarrassing actual injustices to overemphasize. No doubt there are, but The System isn’t good at focusing upon them.

So, it’s interesting to see how The System works. What we find in one case is a pretty hilariously out-of-touch-with-each-other alliance between an octogenarian Budapest billionaire with an Esperanto surname and a Ph.D. in philosophy and the Undocumented Shoppers.

George Soros and Michael Brown — not actually on the same wavelength.

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Before Columbus everyone lived in happy villages buying each other a coke.  After Columbus everyone wanted — but couldn’t get — a job in Los Angeles.  Now the ruination will spread further afield. So far as we know never before has Pluto known hate, or for that matter love.  But henceforth it may, at least in principle. Man, having lost paradise once, has found it again, in superabundance on the planets and is for the second time in sacred history poised to ruin everything.

Concretely history has already started on the moon. Lawyers are already arguing over who owns it. And when that happens you know that Paradise is over.

Read it.

That may be because public schools are so shitty that anybody who can possibily afford to will send their kids to private schools (Catholic schools are a bargain) or homeschool them. I suspect that a lot of public school parents are single working people who use the public schools as a sort of free day care.

Of course one has to realize that ‘poor’ in America isn’t poor as the rest of the world sees it — color TVs, mobile phones, air conditioning, and both parents and kids clinically obese. ‘I want to come to America. I want to see a country where the poor people are fat.’ (Think I’m kidding? Walk into any welfare office in a major city. There will be a lot of corn-fed people sitting in the seats.)

Read it.

100 years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: you walked across it.

Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.

100 years ago, if you were a pedestrian, crossing the street was simple: you walked across it.

Today, if there’s traffic in the area and you want to follow the law, you need to find a crosswalk. And if there’s a traffic light, you need to wait for it to change to green.

‘Jaywalking’, like ‘price gouging’, ‘black marketeering’, and ‘hoarding’, is one of those made-up nasty-sounding terms the people create when you do what you want to do rather than what they want you to do. The Left are experts at this sort of propaganda (cf. ‘Islamophobia’ and the plethora of ‘-isms’ that normal people are presumed guilty of in these degenerate modern times). Governments like them, too, especially when they’re trying to abridge freedoms that in a saner time people would take for granted.

Read it.

Last summer, the American Federation of Musicians hit videogame composer Austin Wintory (Monaco, Journey) with a $50,000 fine for working on The Banner Saga in violation of its (nonexistent) game music contract. Thanks to the union’s own stubbornness and greed, none of its members were allowed to compose music for videogames. A contract put together in 2012 without the input of AFM’s members was so skewed towards the union that no videogame producers were willing to agree to it. (It wasn’t until 2014 that Microsoft agreed to the terms of AFM’s revamped contract. It remains the sole company to do so.)

When Wintry worked on the game without its permission, AFM got angry and threw its toys out of the crib. Its own Local 47 (Los Angeles) took issue with the union’s BS and issued a resolution supporting Wintory in October. Perhaps due to this internal pressure, the AFM reduced Wintory’s fine to $2,500. Now, it’s threatening to expel Wintory because he hasn’t paid up.

…

So, who’s working for who? Unions are supposed to represent their members. That’s why members pay fees. AFM seems to genuinely have no concern about the well-being of its artists. (It doesn’t care much for the general public either.) It fines them when they seek to do work they’ve been locked out of by a contract they never wanted and it keeps its negotiations with other entities secret until the ink has dried on all the signatures — none of which belong to the members supposedly being “represented.”

Whatever use they once had, labor unions are now only about hiring and paying union officials.

Read it.

You, too, can look like a beta male hipster.

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Overall, the labor participation rate in the United States has been tanking since 2000. So while the financial crisis plays a big role, especially among older workers who took buyouts and retired, it’s not the whole story. Neither is the general aging of the population, which tends to lower the participation rate.

Indeed, the real issue is the very long-term participation rate of men, which has been on the downslope for generations now.

…

Disability claims skyrocketed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, not because more people were suddenly injured but because such a program represented a way to get money as unemployment and other benefits ran out.

And over the long haul, it’s become easier and easier to claim disability and effectively opt out of the work force (other well-meaing programs add to the trend too). For many people, work is effectively optional if they can scratch together a bare minimum of revenue from other sources. As the grandson of an Irish immigrant who quit working as soon as he could live off his wife’s and children’s earnings, I can recognize that impulse as a dark mirror of the American Dream.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

‘For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.’ — Rudyard Kipling

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At least 69 people died after drinking poisonous beer at a funeral in southeastern African country Mozambique, health authorities confirmed. The beer was locally brewed and is believed to have been poisoned with crocodile bile during the funeral.

The toll of the people affected did not stop there. At least another 169 victims remain at the hospital according to Paula Bernardo, the district director for Health, Women and Social Action, quoted in Reuters.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

In a groundbreaking study, researchers have shown why a chemical once thought to be a safe alternative to bisphenol-A, which was abandoned by manufacturers of baby bottles and sippy cups after a public outcry, might itself be more harmful than BPA.

University of Calgary scientists say they think their research is the first to show that bisphenol-S, an ingredient in many products bearing “BPA-free” labels, causes abnormal growth surges of neurons in an animal embryo.

Read it.

Well, that didn’t take long.

According to Teamsters Local 853 International vice president and secretary-treasurer Rome Aloise, a majority of drivers working for Compass Transportation have signed union authorization cards, reports USA Today. Compass currently employs about 120 full-time and part-time drivers to shuttle workers at Apple and other tech companies back and forth between work and home.

Note that the initiative came from the union, not the bus drivers.

At the heart of the matter is a huge wage disparity between workers with non-skill jobs, like drivers and security guards, and tech employees earning six-figure salaries. Also an issue is the so-called “gentrification” of San Francisco, where longtime residents are being displaced by wealthy tech workers.

In other words, envy leading to extortion — and that’s what unions are all about.

Read it.

That’s ‘people’ as in ‘people’s republic’.

Meet a kinder, gentler Google bus — not the sleek and occasionally despised charter service that transports thousands of Googlers to the company’s suburban headquarters each morning, but a free public shuttle that launched here this week.

The electric-powered Mountain View Community Shuttle is Google’s gift to a hometown still grappling with the weight of being the corporate hub for a global Internet giant. The two-year pilot program also helps the company sustain its do-gooder image amid rising anxiety over the Bay Area’s real estate prices and economic inequality, both frequently blamed on the meteoric incomes of tech workers.

Lesson: If you’re rude and noisy in public, and your target is not a Fashionable Minority, you will get paid to shut up.

Since you always get more of what you pay for, look for more of this sort of thing in the future.

Read it.

Another evidence of Moral Retardation, aside from an utter inability to distinguish between opposites, is an utter inability to distinguish between differences of magnitude, as when, for example, the Moral Retard equates an insulting act, such as throwing a harmless metal baseball called a practice grenade into a mosque, with an act of war, such as having trained commandos attack the offices of a satirical magazine and kill the civilians in a grisly mass murder.

The favorite game of the Moral Retards is the game of ‘Moral Equivalence’ where any criticism of any of the favored allies or mascots of the Moral Retards is answered by saying the crimes of the mascots are no worse than the crimes of whatever group the critic is (or can be said to be) a member of.

Read it.

Tom Wolfe once observed how curious it was “that the dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe”.  That maxim must have been on Jonah Goldberg’s mind when he Tweeted, following the attack on a supermarket in Paris, that “the anti-Muslim backlash in France that many people were expecting this week seems to have somehow resulted in the murder of Jews.”

But as anyone who remembers the Three Stooges will know, retaliating against an innocent party is perfectly natural. When Curley Joe wants to hit back at Moe, he swats Larry instead.  To strike Moe would be too dangerous because Moe would hit back.  When you’re not with the one you long to strike, strike the one you’re with.

…

When politicians are stumped they often do what doctors without a cure occasionally try: treat the symptoms and hope for the best.  What the state knows how to do is restrict, rule and regulate and therefore they’ll increase our doses of that.

Read it.

Frankly, everything about the career, the business of science, is constructed to impoverish and disenfranchise young scientists, delaying the maturation of their careers beyond practicality.

I don’t know why this comes as news to so many people.  It certainly came as news to my parents, who never finished college and who thought that getting a PhD would put me on the fast track to stability and financial freedom.

If I stay in science, it won’t.

Good thing none of us plan on doing that, then….

Read it.

…merely trying to keep your email secure is now viewed in Spain as evidence that you are a terrorist.

This sort of thing is why you don’t want to be a European.

Richard Fernandez looks at government in the modern world.

At a time when Medicaid payments to doctors are being slashed because federal funds are drying up; when insurance premiums are being raised to provide “subsidies” for others, when the Armed Forces Budget is being cut to the bone and beyond, it is astonishing that people at the highest levels of government can still talk about giving people something for nothing.

The shocking thing isn’t that Obama would propose a free lunch.  What is really scandalous is that he may actually think the thing exists.

But that’s the world we live in. Venezuela is a country where nobody in authority knows where things sold in stores come from.  Washington is a town where nobody knows how anything is paid for.  The New York Times is a paper where nobody knows what anything is called.  The FBI is probably the best off of the bunch.  All they have to do is figure out what to charge David Petraeus with.

The public stage is filled with the sound and fury of people who still think they are in charge.  Most have risen to the pinnacles of their professions according to an insular set of rules which signified something once, but which have become vestigial without anyone noticing. “Who sent you?” And so it goes. None of them have realized they’ve become passengers on a vast ship they’ve forgotten how to sail. For them things just seem a a little different lately, and are even a little worried, but they can’t tell you why.

Read it.

Perhaps because the government is trying to do the job of a free market, and failing badly.

Of course, the Guardian can’t say that — indeed, they (being socialists) can’t even see that — so it’s no wonder they’re puzzled.

Read it.

Send your kid to a government school
And he will turn out a fool.
That’s the way
things are today;
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

I’m surprised it’s that high.

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For years, Harvard’s experts on health economics and policy have advised presidents and Congress on how to provide health benefits to the nation at a reasonable cost. But those remedies will now be applied to theHarvard faculty, and the professors are in an uproar.

The biter bit, so to speak. Like Pseudolus being completely impervious to pain (other people’s).

Read it.

ARNHEM, Netherlands—Two dozen scruffy skateboarders launched perilous jumps in a soaring old church building here on a recent night, watched over by a mosaic likeness of Jesus and a solemn array of stone saints.

This is the Arnhem Skate Hall, an uneasy reincarnation of the Church of St. Joseph, which once rang with the prayers of nearly 1,000 worshipers.

It is one of hundreds of churches, closed or threatened by plunging membership, that pose a question for communities, and even governments, across Western Europe: What to do with once-holy, now-empty buildings that increasingly mark the countryside from Britain to Denmark?

Read it.

In 2014, we’ve been repeatedly informed of the urgency of blacks seizing the control of the municipal government of obscure Ferguson, MO, even though that didn’t seem to be a priority of many of the black people who actually lived in Ferguson. An instructive comparison is Detroit, which enjoyed black mayors for four decades until it finally became so depopulated that it now has a white mayor.

Unfortunately, ‘black rule’ means kleptocrat Democrat rule, with results as you see them.

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‘The idea occurred to me straight away,’ says Ferroni from his home in Umbria, Italy, having just made a return trip to Mali. This idea was, in essence, a simply constructed, transportable light post. The principal materials are largely re-purposed items: a bicycle wheel, a water pipe, an aluminium stand, a solar panel and a 15-watt rechargeable LED module, the only piece that needs to be imported. The water pipe becomes the lamp’s telescopic post, while the bicycle wheel provides portability, one of the design’s main assets. Constructing the unit can take a couple of days or months, depending on the availability of materials and the disposition of the local craftsmen.

Sarah Hoyt does some heavy lifting.

My first thought about this was – and this is paraphrased, because I can’t find the precise book and quote – PJ O’Rourke’s view on Arabs vs. the US. After being told, in the same breath, that someone hated the US and was waiting for a student visa, he said something like: they hate us and they love us. We are a ravishing 20 year old girl and they’re a pimply 13 year old boy. They want to punish us and they want to have us. Every minute of their waking lives is filled with thoughts of us, and they can’t stand that we rarely give them any thought at all.

The loves part might seem odd, but the more I turned this idea in my head, the more it made sense, in the same way the Arabs “love” the US. They want to live here and make us like them. It’s the love of an abusive spouse who wants to control you.

In the same way, we know how the left acts about minority and women who don’t toe the line. They “love” us in the abstract and can’t imagine why we will not let them “love” us for our own good. (Gee, no wonder these people inflate rape statistics in colleges. This is their idea of love and support.)

Further, like a 20 year old woman has ideas an concerns beyond the realm of a 13 year old boy, we have ideas and concerns beyond them. Once we’d exploded the Marxist lies, a whole world was open to us that those clinging to the safe “narrative” they were taught and afraid of their peers derision can’t imagine.

Further, just like most Arab societies are prisoners of the dictates of Islam that retard scientific (and other) development, these people are prisoners of dictates, such as the hierarchy of victims, which neither allow them to think nor to create freely. And they can’t imagine why or how we do what we do? Can’t we understand this makes us “apostates” from polite society? How can we NOT care?

Read it.

Modern terrorism is in many ways just a revival of customary tribal retaliation or the application of ‘guilt by association’. The September 11 hijackers had no particular beef with the individuals in the World Trade Center. They were out to slaughter anyone in New York. None of the people in New York had to be individually guilty of anything. They were simply the most handy targets available to expiate the collective Western guilt for its real or imagined offenses against Islam.

The participants of the Jihad see it as a matter of “them” against “us”. Even though Western politicians are at pains to deny there is any “them”, “they” know who “they” are, despite the fact that “we” do not acknowledge who “we” are.  ’Us’ versus ‘them’ pervades everything. When the Taliban could not strike at the Pakistan military directly it struck at the Pakistani Army Public School in Peshawar.  The hand-wringing articles asking why innocent children were attacked miss the point completely.  To the Taliban there are no “innocent children”.  In a world of collective guilt there is naturally only collective punishment.

…

In the Western legal model it  is illegitimate to impose “collective punishment” and being unable to do so, nothing is done.  There is a strict  injunction against profiling Muslims and other groups precisely because group guilt is forbidden.  And that is as it should be, if the taboo is to be maintained. Collective punishment is a very destructive and blunt model which arises from a lack of information and a conviction that discrimination is a hopeless task.

But the prohibition does not run the other way.  There is no strong taboo among ISIS or al-Qaeda, for example, against punishing individual Jews for the collective guilt of Israeli existence. It is enough to kill a Jew, any Jew. It doesn’t matter who.  Their model of punishment doesn’t require detailed information.

Instapundit turns over a rock.

“What if I told you,” asks a Matrix-themed photo-meme that has been circulating on Facebook, “that you can be against cops murdering citizens and citizens murdering cops at the same time?”

Judging by the past few weeks, this really is a Matrix-level revelation, obvious as it may seem. We have Americans protesting because of police shootings, and we have police turning their backs on New York City’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio over lack of support after two police were assassinated by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, a gunman from Baltimore who said he was seeking revenge for the choking death of cigarette-tax evader Eric Garner.

And, as blogger Eric Raymond notes, the response has been divided: “Because humans are excessively tribal, it’s difficult now to call for justice against Eric Garner’s murderers without being lumped in with the ‘wrong side.’ Nor will Garner’s partisans, on the whole, have any truck with people who aren’t interested in poisonously racializing the circumstances of his death.”

Taki turns over a rock.

There is nothing more venomous than the hate-hype vipers, slithering far and wide, thus posing a danger nearly everywhere. Any speech they hate is “hate speech,” and any group they hate is a hate group. Given their totalitarian mentality, it is not surprising that they obsess over “hate crimes.” (A crime is by nature a hate crime, but these pedants insist on separating the two in order to score brownie points where P.C. is concerned.) If we continue down the way we’re now going, soon all speech and associations the P.C. Nazis deplore will be matters for the police to handle. Welcome to George Orwell’s 1984.

Read it.

And it doesn’t matter a damn, because the people who decide whether or not employees use open offices are all people who have private offices, so they don’t have to suffer along with the peons.

Read it.

Are your children safe at school? That depends on if you’re worried about bullies or administrators.

Ain’t that the truth. The problem with the government providing the schools is that it makes governance of the schools a political process rather than a market process, and so puts everyone’s posterity under the thumb of the mob — and just because people drive a Mercedes and live in a million-dollar house doesn’t make them any wiser than a tree stump.

Read it.

Yes, apparently because there have been IIRC 250 deaths (since 1980) in the US which have fallen away to 1 per year… Nanny needs to pass new regulations, which will, inevitably be expensive, onerous and um… put the price of Christmas lights up. Maybe make it impossible for Joe Sixpack to waste his money on pleasing the kiddies. Now, the chances Joe will be struck by lightning and die are (on this year’s stats) 26 times higher than your chances of death-by-Christmas lights. With even the chances of death by lightning at 26/about 350 000 000, make the odds on a Darwin-award Christmas Decorator about as likely as a Hugo Awards going to anyone but yet another set of outspoken PC far leftists SJW this year (yes, they’re approaching infinite improbability). Yet, most certainly the regulations have only a slightly lower chance of occurring than the usual situation in the ‘It’s absolutely fair and un-politically unbiased’ Hugo awards.

Dave Freer is a dyspeptic science-fiction writer, in case you couldn’t tell. (He doesn’t have a Wikipedia page, so you can tell he’s pretty sound.)

Read it.

Not all the problems with the M16 can be blamed on the Army. Buried in the M16’s, and now the M4’s, operating system is a flaw that no amount of militarizing and tinkering has ever erased. Stoner’s gun cycles cartridges from the magazine into the chamber using gas pressure vented off as the bullet passes through the barrel. Gases traveling down a very narrow aluminum tube produce an intense “puff” that throws the bolt assembly to the rear, making the bolt assembly a freely moving object in the body of the rifle. Any dust or dirt or residue from the cartridge might cause the bolt assembly, and thus the rifle, to jam.

In contrast, the Soviet AK-47 cycles rounds using a solid operating rod attached to the bolt assembly. The gas action of the AK-47 throws the rod and the bolt assembly back as one unit, and the solid attachment means that mud or dust will not prevent the gun from functioning. Fearing the deadly consequences of a “failure to feed” in a fight, some top-tier Special Operations units like Delta Force and SEAL Team Six use a more modern and effective rifle with a more reliable operating-rod mechanism. But front-line Army and Marine riflemen still fire weapons much more likely to jam than the AK?47. Failure to feed affects every aspect of a fight. A Russian infantryman can fire about 140 rounds a minute without stopping. The M4 fires at roughly half that rate.

[Modified to remove an embarrassing remark that I ought to have known better than to make. We have good commenters here.]

Jim Goad is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Public discourse—if you can call it that—has devolved into a ghastly assembly line of vapidity, vanity, shaming, shamelessness, stunted thinking, and arrested emotional development. We are served up the same puke-worthy dish daily—a smarm casserole baked in snark, fricasseed in smugness, and sautéed in intellectual cowardice.

Sometimes I wish you all had one face so I could vomit on it.

Read it.

Just in case you were feeling happy.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

For years I’ve been pointing out that two bulwarks of Democratic Party campaign fundraising and prestige, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, don’t have to play by the Diversity rules that most of the rest of American business is supposed to play by.

Every few years since the 1990s, Jesse Jackson would try to shake down the Tech Industry and he’d be laughed out of town. Silicon Valley and Hollywood were too liberal, too rich, too powerful, too successful in the global marketplace (America can only wish we had as big a share of jetliners, much less cars, as Silicon Valley and Hollywood have of their respective markets) to let Jesse Jackson throw a wrench in the works.

But 2014 was the year in which liberal ideology overwhelmed liberal hypocrisy.

The Other McCain focuses our attention.

If you think it’s a good idea to send your children to public schools, you probably aren’t really paying attention to what’s happening in public schools and who is in charge of public schools.

Sending your child to a government school is, in my view, prima facie evidence of child abuse.