Read it.

Although not for lack of trying.

Obviously headlining a story “Meet the Gay Libertarian Gun Nuts” is designed to be deliberately inflammatory clickbait. So it goes at Vice (not a judgment, just an observation). But beyond the headline, writer Cecilia D’Anastasio is one of those folks who is amazed to discover that coming out of the closet doesn’t include an application to register as a Democrat.

Read it.

To set the stage for why the country needs Hillary Clinton to be the next president, Democrats are trying to force-feed Americans a “war on women” pablum, when such a war–as they present it–does not exist. For the real “war on women,” however, Democrats might turn to Hillary Clinton herself and her husband, former President Bill Clinton.

Read it.

Climate change may be causing alpine goats to shrink in size, according to biologists at Durham University.

Researchers analysed records of alpine animal sizes to discover that Chamois goats now weigh 25 per cent less than they did back in the ’80s.

Let me make a note to worry about that….

Read it.

A former Maryland Transit Administration bus driver is facing several charges after a family claimed she got several teens to beat them up after one of the victims got into an argument with her.

…

“She actually let these children get off of this bus and beat me and my family for at least three minutes, then let them get back on, get weapons, get back off and back on again, and then took off with every one of them that did it,” victim Kristina Gibson told 11 News reporter Lowell Melser.

The video makes clear that the bus driver is black and the victims are white. The story doesn’t mention that, of course, because that would be Noticing.

Read it.

For the past four years, the Obama administration and its friends on the Left were careful to claim that they still strongly support religious liberty while arguing that Hobby Lobby’s Green family, Conestoga Wood Specialties’ Hahn family, and others like them must lose. Principally, they contended, religious liberty protections could not be applied to Hobby Lobby because (1) It is a for-profit corporation, (2) It isn’t a church (and thus not a true “religious employer,” and (3) It is wrong on the science—Plan B, a copper intrauterine device, et cetera, they claimed, do not cause abortions. They implied, if not claimed outright, that they would surely support religious freedom in another case, but Hobby Lobby was unworthy to claim its protections.

The State of California is now calling their bluff. California’s Department of Managed Health Care has ordered all insurance plans in the state to immediately begin covering elective abortion. Not Plan B. Not contraceptives. Elective surgical dismemberment abortion.

Time to leave the Left Coast. All the good weather in the world won’t make up for the shitty people.

Steve Sailer looks at the ‘wrong side of history’.

As in every quasi-Marxist revolution, though, the old Bolsheviks are in danger of being chewed up and spat out by the new. For example, consider the unintentionally hilarious New York Times Magazine article “When Women Become Men at Wellesley,” by Ruth Padawer. At women’s colleges today, the lesbians who were long the engineers of human souls are getting shoved aside for being on the wrong side of history by even butcher “trans-men” juicing on prescription testosterone….

Jim Goad is perplexed.

Come to think of it, aren’t lesbians always trying to protect women from men? Why would these canyon-yodelers want hairy, disgusting males stinking up women’s bathrooms by flashing their wee-wees, anyway? Oh, right—because they’re not really men as long as they don’t believe they are, and to claim anything to the contrary makes one a bigot. I’ll tell you, they make it so hard to keep up with their ever-swelling definition of what constitutes “hate,” it’s hard not to hate them. They keep revising the script more often than my iPhone gets software updates.

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

In “The New Class Conflict,” I describe this alliance as the New Clerisy, which encompasses the media, the academy and the expanding regulatory bureaucracy. This Clerisy already dominates American intellectual and cultural life and increasingly has taken virtual control of key governmental functions, as well as the educations of our young people.

The Clerisy’s ascendency was predicted more than 40 years ago by the great sociologist Daniel Bell. The rise of knowledge-based industries, he predicted in his landmark 1973 book, “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” would establish the “pre-eminence of the professional and technical class.” This new “priesthood of power,” he suggested, would aim for the rational “ordering of mass society.”

Although usually somewhat progressive by inclination, the Clerisy actually functions much like the old First Estate in France – the clergy – helping determine the theology, morals and ideals of the broader population.

Nowhere is this function clearer than in the university itself, from which Barack Obama sprang, and which has become an essential part of his political coalition.

Read it.

The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.

“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”

Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Mr. Obama.

It’s all about the power.

Read it.

The European Community bureaucracy, meanwhile, has readied sanctions against Israel. One remonstrates in vain. The Gaza War should have taught the world that Israel cannot cede territory to Mahmoud Abbas, now in the 10th year of a 4-year term. Hamas has the support of 55% of West Bank Palestinians vs. just 38% for Abbas, and Hamas openly brags that it could destroy Israel more easily from firing positions in the West Bank. Only the Israeli military keeps Abbas in power; without the Israelis Hamas would displace Abbas in the West Bank as easily as it did in Gaza; and a Hamas government in the West Bank would make war on Israel, with horrifying consequences.

To propose immediate Palestinian statehood under these circumstances is psychotic, to call the matter by its right name. The Europeans, along with the United Nations and the Obama administration on most working days, refuse to take reality into account. When someone tells you that Martians are transmitting radio waves into his brain, or that Elvis Presley really is the pope rather than an Argentine Jesuit, one doesn’t enquire into the merits of the argument. Rather, one considers the cause of the insanity.

Scott Johnson is pessimistic.

John Kerry provides an element of continuity in Democratic politics going back to the fall of Saigon. He rose to prominence as a player in the Democratic production leading to our abandonment of South Vietnam. Kerry’s contribution was the dissemination of a demoralizing set of lies asserting the routine commission of war crimes by American forces. I bought his act at the time, but I was a sophomoric student who didn’t know any better. What is our excuse now?

John Kerry makes Neville Chamberlain look like George Patton. Barack Obama makes Jimmy Carter look like a President.

Read it.

The attackers — described as black men, perhaps 25 years old, wearing dark clothes — rambled around an area in Champaign, tackling various innocent and unsuspecting people to the ground and kicking them in the head.

Police say five students suffered injuries in four different instances. Three of the students received treatment for bruises, cuts and facial wounds, notes WLS. One student also had a cell phone stolen.

Ask your local ‘journalist’ why this isn’t on the news.

Read it.

On October 15, an armed man wearing a skeleton mask robbed a bank inside a Cincinnati Kroger, and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America responded by calling the robbery “a wake up call to Kroger’s leadership to prohibit the open carry of firearms in its stores.”

I’m curious whether they thought that a ban would have been more effective at preventing the robbery than, oh, say, one guy with a pistol on his belt.

Where do these people come from? Is it something in the water?

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

A commenter recently speculated that the future history of political parties in the U.S. would likely follow the Central American model where they are superstructures for dynastic families to wage war on each other. For example, in the 1990s I read a fellow’s dissertation on Nicaraguan politics in the 1920s, and most of the family names of leading politicians from way back then were the same as the ones I was reading in newspaper accounts of Nicaraguan politics at present.

For further evidence, see Nunn vs. Perdue: An Awkward Political Rivalry

The Nunn and Perdue families have long been intertwined in Houston County in central Georgia. They had farms and went to many of the same churches and schools and the country club. Each had a famous politician: former Democratic Senator Sam Nunn and former Republican Gov. Sonny Perdue. Despite their being from different parties, there was never much of a schism among residents.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Anita Sarkeesian (@femfreq) and Brianna Wu (@Spacekatgal) are feminist critics of the videogame industry who seem to be trying to cash in on the fact that they are feminist critics of the videogame industry. This involves portraying themselves as victims of horrific harassment and criminal threats. Who is engaging in this harassment? Who is making these threats? We don’t know, because it seems to be coming from a lot of anonymous online accounts, and I strongly suspect that some of these threats are fake. But whether it’s fake or real, the harassment is being blamed on the gamers who, using the Twitter hashtag #GamerGate, have been blowing the whistle on some of the sleazy tactics by which feminists have been trying to turn gaming into a Political Correctness Zone and — oh, just by the way — cut themselves in on a slice of the multimillion-dollar videogame industry pie.

I find it amusing that Anita Sarkeesian had to cancel an appearance somewhere because of death threats. Welcome to the world that ‘conservatives’ live in all the time; be careful not to step in the diversity.

Freeberg is not pleased.

Of course, it’s not a new thing for a Democrat politician to share a car with notorious criminals and not do anything about it.

Read it.

In 2012, seven scientists and engineers were convicted of manslaughter for things they said and did not say in the days before a major earthquake struck the mountain town of L’Aquila, killing more than 300 people. (Editor’s note: For more, see the author’s riveting feature story detailing the whole episode.) The first-level appeal is now underway, and here is what we know.

Read it.

The Daily Mail added a little further down in its story: “Some members of the South High School community said that the violent incident was the culmination of ongoing tensions between the eight per cent of Muslim students of Somali de[s]cent and the 20 per cent who are African Americans.” See also the local CBS news report (quoting a South High student: “I know it’s a pride thing between Muslims and black people. They want their pride back for something. I don’t know.”) and the local NBC news report (“students claim this brawl was more than just a food fight, telling KARE 11 racial tensions have been boiling between Somali and African-American students for some time.” On the other hand, the CBS story also quoted another student: “A big riot. It was all types of races.”)

I guess it’s not enough to be African-American, you have to be the right kind of African-American.

Read it.

They couldn’t get ‘diversity’ in there because it would make the title too long, but there is ‘diversity’ in it nevertheless.

It’s  like Homecoming for trendy memes.

Read it.

How reliable is academic research? Not very, it seems, after noting that the Journal of Vibration and Control, a reputable academic publication, had to retract 60 different papers over the summer.

…

Just how bad is the problem? It’s not just that few academics voted for Mitt Romney. At a recent meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Haidt asked the audience by show of hands to identify themselves by their political orientation.

He estimates the resulting ratio of liberals to conservatives at 267:1. If anything, it was probably worse, since many conservatives don’t want to be “outed” to their colleagues.

Read it.

Of course … that’s where the victims are….

Freeberg lays out some inconvenient truth.

My personal experience supports the thesis. Which made it a bit awkward when I learned about this, by way of a Facebook FOAF I don’t know myself, who put up a post making use of the militant-feminist cadence of “Oh how much I hate this thing, come gather around and help me hate it.” Does that mean the FOAF is a mil-fem? Probably not; knowing what I do know about our mutual friend, I count that as unlikely, albeit possible. But regardless, I don’t think my participation was any more welcome in that circle, than it is in a typical mil-fem round-table.

Michelle Malkin blows the whistle.

Last week, Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital revealed in a statement that a procedural flaw in its online health records system led to potentially deadly miscommunication between nurses and doctors. The facility sent Ebola victim Thomas Duncan home despite showing signs of the disease—only to admit him with worse symptoms three days later.

Hospital officials, who came forward “in the interest of transparency,” initially cited workflow and information-sharing problems for the botch. “Protocols were followed by both the physician and the nurses,” the statement noted. “However, we have identified a flaw in the way the physician and nursing portions of our electronic health records interacted in this specific case.”

Mysteriously, after taking special care to get their facts straight before releasing the statement, the hospital backed off a day later. The very specific communications flaw in the medical records software—which apparently had prevented some staff from accessing Duncan’s travel history from Liberia—suddenly disappeared.

Read it.

Chickens coming home to roost….

Read it.

The political double standard for speakers on campus is reaching a tipping point. Many more people than you think are fully aware that a convicted cop killer is speaking at Goddard College while a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist has now been told he can’t speak at Scripps.

Read it.

Robinson was fired from his head basketball coaching job in Oregon State in May with three more years remaining on his contract.

ESPN coordinating producer Chris Farrow praised Robinson as a “credible” voice to the cable giant’s college basketball coverage, citing his “experience at the Division I coaching level,” as well as his “insight and understanding of the game.”

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

In a marriage based society, getting sexual access to the most attractive women requires men to work hard to signal provider status.  After the wedding, men feel the responsibility which comes with the position of head of the household.   Both of these are extremely powerful incentives for men to work hard and maximize their earnings.  However, we have moved from a marriage based/incentive structure for men to a quota/coercion based society.  As a result, we are seeing a shift in men’s attitudes about work.

Pretty soon only homosexuals will bother getting married.

Freeberg connects the dots:

Progressives have done the same thing with fatherhood that they’ve done with charity: Taken the spirit out of it, made it into a system of obligatory payments to some agent that may or may not have the trust of the person making the payments; but, they’re obligatory so what does it matter.

But as I was sitting there listening to them, I realized that there were certain things that no one would dare to say out loud in front of that group. Everyone in the room was white, so as a thought experiment, I imagined myself saying in a conversational manner, “You know, I really prefer the company of white people.” Fortunately, I never act on such foolish impulses. If I had, I almost certainly would have been asked to leave.

Yet a black person who an expressed a preference for his own race would not have been sanctioned. His statement wouldn’t even draw much attention. It’s racist for a white person to prefer white people, but not for blacks to feel the same about their own race. There’s no symmetry to the rules.

When the full nature of these rules is teased out and exposed to the light of day, the irrational absurdity of the whole business is plain for all to see. It must remain a Thing That Cannot Be Said, because saying it brings the reigning cultural paradigm to full consciousness, where everyone can realize just how stupid and harmful it is.

Read it.

A Saturday morning debate between Rep. David Valadao (R-CA) and his Democratic challenger, Amanda Renteria, was hosted in Spanish, the Fresno Bee reports.

The debate, hosted by Univision Fresno at Fresno State in Bakersfield, Calif., the Fresno Bee wrote, was “conducted entirely in Spanish.”

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

Remember that next time elections roll around, people. This isn’t rocket science.

Read it.

ONE of the most notable demographic trends of the last two decades has been the delayed entry of young people into adulthood. According to a large-scale national study conducted since the late 1970s, it has taken longer for each successive generation to finish school, establish financial independence, marry and have children. Today’s 25-year-olds, compared with their parents’ generation at the same age, are twice as likely to still be students, only half as likely to be married and 50 percent more likely to be receiving financial assistance from their parents.

A Voice of the Crust argues, as you would expect, that the prolonged immaturity that modern culture fosters (conveniently feeding as many people as possibly into dependency) is actually a good things. Any resemblance to the introductory sequences of The Hunger Games is purely coincidental, of course.

This is too pessimistic. Prolonged adolescence, in the right circumstances, is actually a good thing, for it fosters novelty-seeking and the acquisition of new skills.

For ‘novelty-seeking’, read ‘circuses’. For ‘new skills’, read ‘the constant search for something, anything, that will allow us to get a job’. The problem with the ‘new skills’ mirage is that success in life depends on some very old skills indeed, skills that today’s prolonged adolescents aren’t getting.

Studies reveal adolescence to be a period of heightened “plasticity” during which the brain is highly influenced by experience. As a result, adolescence is both a time of opportunity and vulnerability, a time when much is learned, especially about the social world, but when exposure to stressful events can be particularly devastating. As we leave adolescence, a series of neurochemical changes make the brain increasingly less plastic and less sensitive to environmental influences. Once we reach adulthood, existing brain circuits can be tweaked, but they can’t be overhauled.

So the Clerisy want to keep young people as plastic as possible for as long as possible, in the hopes of producing the New Soviet Man, or at least a sufficiently reasonable facsimile that will support, rather than challenge, the Crust.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, does what he does best.

A mere lifetime ago George Orwell could write of England having “a culture as individual as that of Spain.” Today’s England—and the rest of the British Isles is very little better—has a culture about as individual as that of an airport departure lounge.

Read it.

You will note that there were no cases of Ebola before the anti-smoking bigots took over the Clerisy. Coincidence? I think not.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

Here are five indicators that despite the rosy picture being painted of the Obama economy, things still aren’t booming for the average American:

Read it. And watch the video.

For everyone who presumes that democratically elected governments are generally manned by people who would recoil at the mere thought of committing gross injustices against innocent people, watch this short video on civil forfeiture from the Institute for Justice to test the robustness of your presumption.

Read it.

I can hear the chorus of ‘BURN THE WITCH!’ in the background.

Read it.

Investigators are looking into threats reportedly made against the children of members of the board of education of Jefferson County, Colorado (JeffCo), where thousands of students have walked out of classes to protest what they have been told is an attempt to teach them patriotism and citizenship and discourage civil disobedience.

The forces of tolerance and inclusion strike again.

Read it.

When Dario Guerrero, an illegal immigrant who found out about his status in high school, told Harvard that he was in the country illegally, the school encouraged him to apply–and gave him a full scholarship after he was accepted.

Writing in the Washington Post, Guerrero, who is currently a junior at the university, said after an MIT official recommended that he not apply to the school during a trip to visit college, he “left the office in a daze” because MIT had been his dream school. He started walking down Massachusetts Avenue” and, “without really planning it, I found myself in the middle of Harvard.” A Harvard admissions officer told him, “If you are admitted to Harvard College, we will meet your full financial need without regard to your legal status.”

He eventually got in, and “they gave me a full ride. This meant I wouldn’t have to worry about student loans or quarterly tuition payments; that I always had a place to stay away from home; that I could travel every semester, on Harvard’s dime, back to California; that my parents would never have to worry whether I’d finish school. Those are luxuries few people, documented or not, ever have.”

Read it.

Democrats love to cast Republicans as the party of big money, beholden to the out-of-touch billionaires bankrolling their campaigns.

But new numbers tell a very different story — one in which Democrats are actually raising more big money than their adversaries.

Democrats, Party of the Rich.

John Hinderaker discusses the elephant in the room.

Until recently, the totalitarian impulse has been blessedly absent from American politics. Now, however, the American left has caught the totalitarian bug that infected Lenin, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, and so many others. A case in point: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the drug-addled son of the former Attorney General. Kennedy thinks it is a shame that he isn’t able to jail or execute the Koch brothers and other conservatives, like–for example–me….

Read it.

This week in New York City somewhere around 400,000 litterbugs descended on the Big Apple, and not to celebrate the wonderful news that the planet hasn’t warmed in 18 years. Instead they gathered to do, uhm, whatever this is, and to pretend Global Warming is real and dire, so that those pushing this phony crisis can tell the rest of us what to do and how to live our lives.

You would think that the one thing environmental fanatics and those of us who are not fascists could agree on is that only arrogant scumbags are litterbugs. Unfortunately, as the pictures below show (gathered mostly by Twitchy), we can’t even enjoy some common ground on that one point. Climate fanatics are indeed arrogant litterbugs. But when you know the mainstream media will cover for your piggish behavior, why not?

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

Jim Goad points to some inconvenient truth.

There was something pathetically nostalgic at the specter earlier this month of fast-food workers demanding compensation to the tune of $15 an hour for performing jobs that require almost no skills beyond not being in a coma. It recalled a halcyon age very long ago when management depended on menial labor, when a general strike of unskilled workers could bring bosses to their knees.

But now a company called Momentum Machines is touting a device that can allegedly can shoot out 360 custom-ordered and fully wrapped burgers per hour, rendering the very idea of an exploited and undercompensated “fast-food worker” a quaint relic of a musty bygone age. According to the company’s website, “It does everything employees can do except better.” The machine will also presumably never call in sick, never get an order wrong, and will not tamper with food due to spite or boredom. It will also never demand a raise. According to the company’s co-founder, “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

Read it.

Well, shucks.

Read it.

May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

Read it.

Even as the administration has received congressional backing for its strategy, with the Senate voting Thursday to approve a plan to arm and train Syrian rebels, a series of military leaders have criticized the president’s approach against the Islamic State militant group.

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

Paul Mirengoff of Powerline weighs in here.

Read it.

Liver damage and cancer is bad. Period. But obviously I’ve got some issues, at least that’s what everyone tells me. I hate the “scale-up game” between rats and humans. It just doesn’t work. Rats and humans aren’t the same, and we don’t metabolize things the same. With that said, to just give you an idea of the magnitude we’re talking about, if I wanted to consume 0.5 grams/kg of safrole, and assuming I can extract out 0.04% safrole from Sassafras root chunks in water, I’d need to boil up 170 pounds of sassafras root…in about 400 gallons of water. If I had to dig up 170 pounds of Sassafras root every day for 2 months I’d die from exhaustion long before the cancer got me. Now obviously you don’t want liver damage. Or cancer. I don’t even want an LD1, let alone an LD50. But hopefully you can see how ridiculous this is. But the best part is that hepatocarcinogenic metabolite, 1?-hydroxysafrole. Remember that one, the one that messes with the DNA? Well, it’s not even found in humans (4). Really? Seriously.

Steve Sailer reveals a dirty little secret.

Portland has the whitest “core city” in America, so it continues to attract young liberal white people who want to live an urban life without many blacks and Mexicans around. This is continuing to happen even though there aren’t many jobs in Portland.

Read it.

More and more, the key to being a prosperous state is, find out what California’s doing and don’t do that.

Read it.

There’s an old line that environmentalists are “watermelons”—green on the outside, red on the inside. A lot of environmentalists will take great offense if you say this: No no! We like economic growth and capitalism just fine! We just want it to be “sustainable,” whatever that means. And don’t ask for specificity about what “sustainability” means in detail, unless you have a lot of time and a full bottle of hootch handy. Before long you’ll figure out that “sustainable” is just a code word for green things we like, and that it has no rigor whatsoever aside from old-fashioned factor-efficiency, which economists figured out over a century ago at least.