Check it out.

Note that the biggest generators of carbon dioxide are the rain forests and several patches of ocean. Yeah, China’s bad, but not as bad as Brazil, and anybody who claims that Brazil has industrial air pollution to match China’s is smoking and not sharing.

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What makes the system so appealing is how it combines the rapid fire action of an assault rifle with a programmable, multipurpose 20mm grenade launcher. While the computerized targeting system, underslung assault rifle and the 20 mm “smart” grenade launcher gives the ZH-05 a passing resemblance the cancelled American XM-29 and South Korean K-11 smart grenade launchers, it’s actually a whole different beast. For starters, the ZH-05 weighs at about 5 kg, compared to the K-11, which weighs 7.2kg. The ZH-05 uses a simple digital camera for targeting, though it would be a simple matter to switch in a night vision capable infrared scope. A 5.8mm assault rifle is based off of the QBZ-03 assault rifle, while the grenade launcher has a 700m range.

What did we get? More bullshit from Obama.

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In the United States they have already made allowance for this state of affairs. Given that email and texting have replaced snail mail, and that students take notes on their laptops, “cursive” writing – in which the pen is not raised between each character – has been dropped from the Common Core Curriculum Standards, shared by all states. Since 2013 American children have been required to learn how to use a keyboard and write in print. But they will no longer need to worry about the up and down strokes involved in “joined-up” writing, less still the ornamental loops on capitals.

…

But experts on writing do not agree: pens and keyboards bring into play very different cognitive processes. “Handwriting is a complex task which requires various skills – feeling the pen and paper, moving the writing implement, and directing movement by thought,” says Edouard Gentaz, professor of developmental psychology at the University of Geneva. “Children take several years to master this precise motor exercise: you need to hold the scripting tool firmly while moving it in such a way as to leave a different mark for each letter.”

Operating a keyboard is not the same at all: all you have to do is press the right key. It is easy enough for children to learn very fast, but above all the movement is exactly the same whatever the letter. “It’s a big change,” says Roland Jouvent, head of adult psychiatry at Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital in Paris. “Handwriting is the result of a singular movement of the body, typing is not.”

Read it.

The Crust takes care of its own — the rhetoric is for the rubes who vote for them.

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Ever notice how all of these corruption scandals happen in cities run by Democrats? Wonder why that is?

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Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

After months of the White House, the Democratic Party, and the prestige press trying to angry up the black vote, things like this were bound to happen. So what if the Democrats’ 2014 campaign strategy has come home to roost. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, can you? Too bad Lu, Ramos, and Begic had to die for the crime of being non-black, but it was all in the good cause of trying to boost black turnout to benefit Democratic politicians.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, connects the dots.

As the dust from the Ferguson outrage-a-thon settles, we enter a lull in what I have dubbed the Cold Civil War: that is, the conflict between whites who see things like this and whites who see things like that, with colored auxiliaries recruited by one of the sides to groom the horses and dig field latrines.

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The University of Virginia rape case profiled in Rolling Stone has fallen apart. In doing so, it joins a long and distinguished line of highly-publicized rape cases that have fallen apart. Studies often show that only 2 to 8 percent of rape allegations are false. Yet the rate for allegations that go ultra-viral in the media must be an order of magnitude higher than this. As the old saying goes, once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.

The enigma is complicated by the observation that it’s usually feminist activists who are most instrumental in taking these stories viral. It’s not some conspiracy of pro-rape journalists choosing the most dubious accusations in order to discredit public trust. It’s people specifically selecting these incidents as flagship cases for their campaign that rape victims need to be believed and trusted. So why are the most publicized cases so much more likely to be false than the almost-always-true average case?

Read it.

Much the same way as one’s tongue explores the hole where a tooth used to be, I trust.

Read it.

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

(Look for … the Union label….)

Read it.

Omar Mahmood is a student at the University of Michigan. He considers himself a political conservative and a Muslim. And until recently, he enjoyed writing for both of the campus’s newspapers: the institutional, liberal paper, The Michigan Daily, and the conservative alternative paper, The Michigan Review.

After penning a satirical op-ed for The Review that mocked political correctness and trigger warnings, The Daily ordered him to apologize to an anonymous staffer who was offended and felt “threatened” by him. He refused and was fired.

Last week, he became the victim of what The College Fix has described as a “hate crime.” The doorway of his apartment was vandalized in the middle of the night; the perpetrators pelted the door with eggs and scribbled notes like “shut the fuck up” and “everyone hates you you violent prick.” They left copies of the offending column and a print-out picture of Satan.

The column that caused such a controversy, “Do the Left Thing,” was published in The Review last month. It’s a first-person narrative in which Mahmood pretends to be a left-handed person who is offended by the institutional patriarchy of right-handedness.

Read it.

At the largest amnesty workshop to date in Los Angeles, government officials from Mexico and El Salvador advised illegal immigrants, some of whom had criminal records, on President Barack Obama’s executive amnesty program.

And who could blame them? They love that their criminals are moving to the U.S.

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Of course, if the Democrats want to base their 2016 campaign on anti-bank populism, they will have to deal with the fact that the financial industry contributed more money to Barack Obama’s campaigns than any industry has contributed to any candidate in the nation’s history. Why might that be? The Democratic Party is, and has been for a long time, the party of Wall Street. The congruence between the Obama administration’s policies and Goldman Sachs’s interests is almost perfect. Will Elizabeth Warren really disrupt that alliance? Or will banks fund the Democrats’ demagogic attacks on themselves? The latter, I suspect. Wall Street will assume that Warren is a hypocrite, whereas I think she is just a liar.

Read it.

In connection with the UN Climate Change conference in Peru (Ronald Bailey writes about that here) Greenpeace activists marched across the off-limits Peruvian site of the world-famous Nazca Lines, near its iconic hummingbird, leaving foot marks which the Peruvian government says marred the site, in order to lay out huge yellow cloth reading “TIME FOR CHANGE The Future is Renewable Greenpeace.”

Greenpeace is composed of people whose universe didn’t exist until they were born, and  who consider themselves the crown of creation.

Gomez and Uncle Fester divide up the world.

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Case in point: Obama supporter Catherine Keefe. On Wednesday, the Washington Post published an essay by Keefe lamenting the ways “Obamacare has hurt my family.” Keefe says her husband Jim was recovering from open-heart surgery when Obama was elected and that she was “elated” that Obama’s promise of health care reform would benefit she and her husband–a hope that never came to fruition.

First came the cancellation of both Keefe and her husband’s insurance plans, a pain experienced by nearly 5 million Americans whose plans were canceled by Obamacare. Keefe says Obama’s now-infamous broken promise–“If you like your plan, you can keep your plan”–was her and her husband’s “biggest disappointment.”

Next came the realization that another Obama promise–“If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”–was also untrue.

Finally, Keefe says the endless hassles, higher premiums, and bureaucratic hoop jumping leaves her and her husband with nagging doubts and worries about what the future portends.

Be careful what you vote for.

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Kosta Karageorge, a fifth-year senior, had missed practice Wednesday and hadn’t been seen since.

Sgt. Richard Weiner, with Columbus police, said that Karageorge died from what appears to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

His body was found inside a Dumpster and identified at the scene through tattoos, Weiner said.

There you go. Those tattoos are actually useful. (We’ll pass over the part about a ‘fifth-year senior’….)

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Not while Joe Biden is still breathing, anyway.

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Some 3,000 Americans gave up their citizenship last year, a tiny number that’s nevertheless been soaring. Yes, a few expatriates may be trying to avoid future taxes, as Senator Charles E. Schumer accused the Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin of doing two years ago, when Mr. Saverin, who lives in Singapore, surrendered his passport ahead of the company’s initial public offering.

But most, like me, are not tycoons. We’re responding to the burden and cost of onerous financial reporting and tax filing requirements that are neither fair nor just. (Living and working in London, I pay higher taxes, to Britain, than I would in New York.)

Some 7.6 million Americans live abroad — expats would be the 13th most populous state, if we were a state. Many are overseas temporarily, for work or study. But many others marry foreigners, start companies or have long-term overseas assignments. We are just like ordinary Americans — except that we lack representation.

The United States is an outlier: Its extraterritorial tax laws apply to American citizens and companies no matter where they are. We are the only country (except, arguably, Eritrea) that taxes all of its citizens on worldwide income rather than where the income is earned. Expatriate Americans have to pay taxes once, wherever they live, and then file again in the United States.

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They don’t like the police? Fine. Pull the police out of their neighborhood and see how long they survive.

Read it. And watch the video.

“My generation of boys is f**ked,” says Rupert, a young German video game enthusiast I’ve been getting to know over the past few months. “Marriage is dead. Divorce means you’re screwed for life. Women have given up on monogamy, which makes them uninteresting to us for any serious relationship or raising a family. That’s just the way it is. Even if we take the risk, chances are the kids won’t be ours. In France, we even have to pay for the kids a wife has through adulterous affairs.

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The group’s preference for pragmatism over ideology makes it a potential ally for any president—even a liberal Democratic one. It has proven it by backing the administration’s position, not that of tea party Republicans, on issues such as comprehensive immigration reform and avoiding government shutdowns and debt crises.

Translation: ‘So long as you stay bought, we don’t care what party you belong to.’

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Sounds like a win-win to me.

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Which is most of us, I think, to be honest.

Consider: When before in human history has it been a laudable thing to be defective?

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And that’s exactly what Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, wanted to happen.

Be careful what you wish for.

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What do you make of the attempt to bar Bill Maher from speaking at Berkeley for his riff on Muslims?

Well, I love Bill, but I stopped playing colleges, and the reason is because they’re way too conservative.

In their political views?

Not in their political views — not like they’re voting Republican — but in their social views and their willingness not to offend anybody. Kids raised on a culture of “We’re not going to keep score in the game because we don’t want anybody to lose.” Or just ignoring race to a fault. You can’t say “the black kid over there.” No, it’s “the guy with the red shoes.” You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.

When did you start to notice this?

About eight years ago. Probably a couple of tours ago. It was just like, This is not as much fun as it used to be. I remember talking to George Carlin before he died and him saying the exact same thing.

Steve Sailer keeps trotting out facts that undercut The Narrative.

As you’ll recall, one cause of the rage of the privilege class in the prestige press is that in recent years, Americans have been able to increasingly watch on sites like World Star Hip Hop clips of blacks behaving badly. The national media have responded by turning the volume on the Megaphone up to 11: “Do Not Believe Your Lying Eyes! White Privilege! Black Bodies! Intersectionality! Invisible Knapsacks! Microaggressions!”

The convenience store where Michael Brown began his fatal crime spree had a security camera. The Obama Administration sure didn’t pay attention to that video.

Read it.

The race problem is usually defined in terms of black versus white. But it’s not really that simple. I asked one South African Indian what life was like before and after apartheid. He answered that  ”during apartheid the problem of South African Indians was that they weren’t white. Afterward their problem was that they weren’t black.”

Racism — it’s not just for white people any more.

It’s like the Indian convenience store managers in Ferguson, it’s not that the ‘reconciled’ Ebola fatalities don’t exist; it’s just that we don’t see them due to reporting problems. Yet the victims are as dead as the stores are burned. But it’s not just a problem of Potels or individuals with the Wong name. Oblivion can happen to white guys too. Chuck Hagel has disappeared from the news, which is remarkable because he’s still Secretary of Defense. But we have to rely on the ever retentive Joe Biden to recollect this forgotten man.

…

Do the Indians in Ferguson matter? Does Chuck Hagel really exist? You tell me.

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These darkies obviously don’t know as much as white progressives, so they have to be helped out.

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In San Francisco, flaunting your wealth has been elevated to new lows, if you will. The labels aren’t the usual lineup of foreign design houses; rather, we pay $300 for simple denim jeans or $200 for plain black yoga pants. We don’t go to the opera; we overspend on the simplest facets of life.

…

Good toast and a plain cup of coffee shouldn’t cost $6. But I can’t imagine the tech community putting the brakes on this trend any time soon. We’re obsessed with false ideas of quality. We fetishize the precious processes and benchmarks and prices that, in reality, have no bearing on how good something is.

Actually, it ought to read ‘how’ rather than ‘why’, since the author doesn’t really get into the ‘why’, but it’s still an interesting read.

In a word, we want to look smarter. Ours is an intellectual economy and one that prizes polyglotism. We want to show each other that we are amateur audio engineers and brewers and bakers, that we’re not only wealthy but also knowledgable to an unlikely extreme.

Read it.

Have our health authorities been spouting unscientific nonsense for the last few decades?

Ya think?

The rationale is that saturated fats are associated with obesity and risk factors for cardiovascular disease. This is effectively the consensus opinion from government health agencies across much of the world, not just the UK and US.

Does the evidence support this advice? The obvious point is to ask what evidence there is for the core idea that reducing dietary saturated fat intake makes a difference to health. The answer is that there’s not much.

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

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Sheriff Clarke is a black Democrat politician (sheriffs are elected), and a refreshingly outspoken law enforcement officer. The whole speech at the Press Club, of which this is an excerpt, concerns his observations about the “vultures” who flew into Ferguson Missouri in order to take full advantage of the crisis there, even perhaps hoping to have a hand in creating the resulting conflagration. At the time of this speech the grand jury had yet to reach a decision regarding the lawfulness (or not) of the actions of the Ferguson police officer who shot the young black man, Michael Brown.

Read it.

In this predictably difficult year for the Democrats, the party of the people is turning, of all people, to its plutocrats. However much the party stigmatizes right-wing billionaires like the Koch brothers, a growing proportion of America’s ultra-rich have become devoted Democrats, giving them an edge in fund-raising. Indeed, an analysis of billionaire contributors this year by Politifact found that 13 supported liberals while only nine backed Republicans.

…

All this reflects a changing class system far more nuanced than the overworked meme about the “1 percent” arrayed against the toiling masses. Instead, we have a plutocracy increasingly divided, mostly along regional and industry lines, among themselves. It’s no surprise voters, notes columnist John Kass, are confused by this recent headline in the Chicago Tribune: “Obama decries income inequality in speech after $50,000-a-person fundraiser for Quinn.”

Read it.

I wonder if her talk included anything about income inequality.

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A select group of cities elected black mayors during the brief and tumultuous Black Power Era, seeking to implement an activist social justice platform.  These cities – notably Cleveland, Gary, Newark and Detroit among large cities — became stigmatized in a way that few have been able to recover from.   A negative narrative was developed about most of them that stuck, despite considerable efforts to dispel them.  Cities that elected “first black mayors” after the Black Power Era, during a period of relative calm, were able to adapt as the political skill set grew in the African-American community.  However, the Black Power Era’s near-toxic combination of heightened white racism, black disenfranchisement and disillusionment – and ill-prepared black political leadership – accelerated the downfall of these select cities.

If the cities that elected black mayors during this tumultuous period are ever to move forward, to achieve their potential, they must be released from the purgatory they inhabit.

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Obama was wrong, at least in the case of Darren Wilson. In viewing thousands of pages of FBI interviews and grand jury testimony, it becomes eminently clear that many members of the local community did make up the story about Michael Brown being executed by Wilson – and pressured others to lie to police or keep silent.

According to the St. Louis County Police Investigative Report, the mob mentality took root almost immediately after the shooting. By the time detectives arrived at the scene of the incident, there was “a large crowd of bystanders and a large uniformed police presence at the scene when detectives arrived.” That crowd included both Brown’s mother and his stepfather, according to witness testimony. The police report states, “Many individuals were clearly upset and were expressing their frustration, by at times yelling obscenities and threats, and attempting to encroach on the crime scene itself.”

‘Black Lives Matter’? More accurately, Black Lies Matter.

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The man, who uses an oxygen tank, was talking to Jaye Perry, 52, of Ferguson in the parking lot of the Faraci Pizza as they watched the rioters. He turned to her and said, “Only in America do you see stuff like this,” then returned to his car to retrieve a new oxygen tank so he could breathe.

Two men collared the man at his car, proceeding to steal it, though the man tried to hold on to his steering wheel. His effort was unfruitful; the men ran over his body as they fled in the car. He called for the tank as he lay on the ground, and was later taken away by ambulance.

I guess Black Lives Matter more than Elderly Lives.

Read it. And watch the video.

What goes around, comes around.

Read it. And watch the video.

Although the media is desperate to keep the false narrative alive that the family of Michael Brown is only calling for peace, the fact is that on Monday night, just before all hell broke loose in Ferguson, while Michael Brown’s mother stood silently by, Brown’s stepfather repeatedly ordered the mob surrounding him to “Burn this bitch down!”

The next morning, the Brown family church was one of about a dozen or so buildings burnt to the ground. Worse still, a 20 year-old man was found dead.

Michael Brown was trash and he came from trash, as is becoming increasingly obvious.

Steve Sailer critiques the Ferguson ‘protesters’.

Months of egging on the mob in Ferguson, Missouri by the Obama Administration, the Democratic Party, and the national media in order to goose turnout in this month’s midterm elections have culminated in the Night of Undocumented Shopping.

Read it.

And most of the rioters weren’t ‘protesters’, they were just thieves — and thieves always prey on the weakest targets they can find, because they are basically lazy.

Read it.

But only if you’re stupid.

“As the head tilts forward the forces seen by the neck surges to 27 pounds at 15 degrees, 40 pounds at 30 degrees, 49 pounds at 45 degrees and 60 pounds at 60 degrees,” Hansraj writes.

Those loads are rather larger than one experiences in conventional postures, and that’s not good because “people spend an average of two to four hours a day with their heads tilted over reading and texting on their smart phones and devices.”

Much like AIDS, this strikes me as a self-correcting problem. Think of it as evolution in action.

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“There’s no evidence of any way, shape, or form that there’s a shortage in the conventional sense,” says Hal Salzman, a professor of planning and public policy at Rutgers University. “They may not be able to find them at the price they want. But I’m not sure that qualifies as a shortage, any more than my not being able to find a half-priced TV.”

I guess tech companies lie to us as much as old Rust Belt companies do. Who knew?

Read it. And watch the video.

Bassem Masri, a pro-Palestinian activist who is live-streaming the violent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, had his smartphone stolen as he was live-streaming the action (at 2:34 in the video below). The thief’s escape was broadcast to some 90,000 viewers around the world as he retreated, breathless, to a park. The video was captured and reposted to YouTube.

Now that’s comedy.

Masri himself has blamed police for the theft, suggesting they are trying to suppress his coverage.

I believe it was a police agitator that stole my phone #ferguson

Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Sarah Hoyt points out the intellectual inversions characteristic of Crustian propaganda.

One of the most fascinating conceits of our ruling powerful elites — be they in entertainment, politics, governance, jurisprudence or news reporting — is the often repeated assertion of being some kind of underdog “speaking truth to power.” This comes with the concomitant illusion that anyone opposing them is paid by powerful interests.

Never mind that the ones making the accusation are usually in positions of power and receive recognition all out of proportion to their achievements, (no, really, Mr. Obama failed to deliver his first book, so they contracted for a second with an exponentially bigger advance. When he delivered an auto-biography instead of a book on race relations, it was taken and lionized. I challenge any writer/personage not of the establishment to replicate this feat.) Never mind that the dissenting voices often have to come out in less respected and far less rewarding channels, it is against those of us who speak the actual truth against those who yield actual power that the finger of mercenary interest is pointed.

Read it.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Two men suspected of buying explosives they planned to detonate during protests in Ferguson, Missouri, once a grand jury decides the Michael Brown case, were arrested on Friday and charged with federal firearms offenses, a law enforcement official told Reuters.

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

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As news reports announced 31-year-old Florida State University alumnus Myron May drew a handgun and opened fire “in or near” the FSU library on November 20, one aspect of the story was conspicuously missing—namely, that FSU President John Thrasher played a key role in defeating a bill to allow students with concealed carry permits to carry guns on campus for self-defense.

It’s more important to be In With The In Crowd (to be fair, the guys who pay his salary) than protect your students against killers.

Gavin McInnes tells it like it is.

Killing sexism also leaves women unsafe. When you tell girls they’re as tough as men, they go out and get wasted with no escort to make sure they get home safe. They strut down the street in the middle of the night through the bad part of town, almost daring criminals to attack them. When a black thug pulled a gun on Nicole duFresne in NYC in 2005, she said, “What are you going to do now, shoot us?” So he shot her. And her beta male boyfriend had an African funeral ceremony for her to promote peace and tranquility. How wildly unnatural.

…

Girls don’t rule the world. Evil does.