As predicted, the Crimea (which was only given to Ukraine by Khrushchev within my lifetime) has decided it wants to return to Russia.

As might be predicted, the head of the American Democrat Party (Barack Hussein Obama. Um, um, um.) won’t accept any such expressions of democracy. Nor will the EU, although their commitment to democracy has long since died a lingering death.

Under pressure, the Crust cracks and reveals its true nature for all to see. He who has ears to hear, let him hear.

And it would appear that the Cossacks are back.

Read it.

But of course we want gay Scouts and gay Scout leaders. It’s only fair.

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I could see this in Georgia, or Texas, but Connecticut? What kind of an idiot parks a car where falling ice can damage it? She must be one special snowflake.

Joseph Allen takes a peek at the man behind the curtain.

Of all the millions of ways to be an asshole, the status quo regards “racism” as the most alarming. Put on your X-ray specs and you’ll see the contagion everywhere. According to a recent study, 10,000 “racist and ethnic slur terms” are hurled on Twitter daily. Imagine all the tender sensibilities withering in the heat of those Tweets.

As it turns out, the most commonly used term is “white boy,” which comprises a full 48.9%, followed by “paki” at 11.7% and “whitey” at 7.9%. “Coon” and “nigga” came in at a paltry 3.2% each. So much for affirmative action.

Read it.

One problem for the scientific community is that much of it seems to have thrown in its lot with liberalism, but then wonders why its members experience high levels of distrust.

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They hadn’t actually played the game. The union reps, the line managers, the HR goons. It didn’t matter. They sat him down and fired him anyway, for creating a game that none of them bothered to play.

For David S. Gallant, this is the single most egregious factor in his unhappy journey from the land of employment and stability to the rough country of uncertainty. In retrospect, a month after the event, he understands that writing a game about his crappy job as a call center “meat popsicle” might not have made him friends in high places at the Canadian Revenue Agency. He knows now that talking incautiously to the Toronto Star about why he made I Get This Call Every Day was an act of naiveté.

Looking back, he can regard the grinding political machine that generated an angry comment from the Canadian Minister of National Revenue, no less, and he can appreciate the inevitability of his own termination.

He knows that if he’d instead posted a song or a poem or a comedy routine on YouTube, the bosses would have watched that, and might have understood what he was trying to say to them. If he’d created something that told the same story through a more traditional form than a game, he’d probably still be in a job.

But he still wishes they’d at least taken the time to play his game.

Read it.

The tax increase is buried on page 879 of Rep. Dave Camp’s (R-Mich.) 979-page tax reform bill. The bill is considered unlikely to become law, but Camp is chairman of the powerful, tax-writing Ways and Means Committee, and his draft legislation is likely to provide a road map for tax reformers in years ahead.

The tax, as outlined in Section 5206 of the legislation, is called an “excise tax based on investment income of private colleges and universities.” It begins, “there is hereby imposed on each applicable institution for the taxable year an excise tax equal to 1 percent of the net investment income of such institution for the taxable year.”

The draft legislation goes on to make clear that the proposed new tax would apply only to private colleges and universities, not state colleges or universities. So Harvard’s $32 billion endowment would be fair game for the tax collector, but the University of Texas’s $20 billion endowment would remain tax exempt. The proposed tax would also only applies to the richest of the private colleges — those with endowments of at least $100,000 per full time student. That would exempt private colleges such as Georgetown or George Washington University, which are reportedly not as well endowed on a per student basis.

Even with those carve-outs, however, the tax adds up. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates that the tax would raise $1.7 billion over the decade from 2014 to 2023. Harvard alone would pay roughly $30 million in tax for a single year in which a $30 billion endowment earned a ten percent return. Yale would pay a $20 million federal tax for a year in which its roughly $20 billion endowment earned a 10 percent return.

This is one of the more stupid ideas ever to come out of Congress. I guess, since Camp is from Michigan, he figures that if the Democrats can use the tax system to punish people they don’t like, then Republicans ought to be able to do likewise.

Read it.

The study used data from the Bureau of Labor statistics to measure how many times more money the top-earning income bracket of a state made than bottom earners. Researchers compared the top 25th percentile earner to the bottom 25th percentile earner and divided the sums into each other, then ranked states by number. California, in which a top 25th percentile earner makes 2.55 times more than a bottom 25th percentile earner, is by far the most unequal state, followed by New York, New Jersey, Michigan, and President Obama’s home state of Illinois.

In Washington, D.C., however, a top 25th percentile earner makes 2.6 times the amount of money a bottom 25th percentile earner makes, which represents the biggest gap in the nation. Maryland and Virginia both make the top ten group of biggest gaps in income, and Maryland experienced the largest gap increase in the past decade of any state: 12.05%. Breitbart News has previously reported that eight of the 13 wealthiest counties in the U.S.A. are in the D.C. region. Texas and Louisiana are the only red states in the top ten.

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On one hand you have an upper-middle class and upper class who go to good colleges and have skilled jobs. These people tend to have healthy family values – they get married and stay married, they pay a lot of attention to their kids. They are civically engaged and physically healthy. On the other hand you have uneducated masses, who tend not to stay married, to leave child-raising to single mothers, and to neglect the kids. They are overweight, bedraggled, and disengaged from the community. The former he calls “Belmont”, the latter “Fishtown”, after two semi-imaginary neighborhoods where they cluster.

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To give Campbell his due, he is not calling for a forced state solution to his problem of wanting other people to take care of him, merely that he hopes to find them somewhere out there. Best of luck.

Read it.

They have the technology.

Joel Kotkin blows the whistle.

Rather than a beacon for upward mobility, the Valley increasingly represents a high-tech version of a feudal society, where the vast majority of the economic gains go to a very select few. The mostly white and Asian tech types in Palo Alto or San Francisco may celebrate their IPO windfalls, but wages for the region’s African American and large Latino populations, roughly on third of the total, have actually dropped, notes a recent Joint Venture Silicon Valley report, down 18 percent for blacks and 5 percent for Latinos, from 2009-11.

Meanwhile, the poverty rate in Santa Clara County since 2001 has soared from 8 percent to 14 percent; today one of four people in the San Jose area is underemployed, up from a mere 5 percent just a decade ago. The food-stamp population in Santa Clara County, meanwhile, has mushroomed from 25,000 a decade ago to almost 125,000 last year. San Jose, the Santa Clara County seat, is also home to North America’s largest homeless encampment, known as “the Jungle.”

What the Valley increasingly offers America is an economic model dominated by the ultrarich, and generally well-educated, with few opportunities for working-class people, women and minorities. As Russell Hancock, president of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, recently acknowledged, “Silicon Valley is two valleys. There is a valley of haves, and a valley of have-nots.”

And, not surprisingly, the place is overwhelmingly ‘progressive’.

Read it.

This is exactly as I predicted a year ago, “the rich will return to the old ways of having a large staff working for them so that they have more time to self-actualize”

I’ve also previously pointed out that providing personal services for the rich will become an increasingly common middle-class jobs as other jobs are replaced by automation and robots.

Read it.

Replacing the US Constitution of 1787 began in the 1930s, slowly and imperceptibly, always with bipartisan support. Now it rushes to completion, unmistakably. Democrat President Barack Obama’s proclamation: “I can do anything I want,” only exaggerated the reality of the 2014 constitution, which the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives re-confirmed quickly by effectively tossing yet one more part of the 1787 Constitution onto the dead-letter pile — the provision that the US government may borrow money only as authorized by law. In short, simply by ignoring the Constitution, our ruling class is imposing a new one on us. Insofar as we suffer it, we deserve it.

The new constitution is best understood by asking, in the light of the many new powers that a Democrat president has asserted and to which the Republican leadership has assented, what may the president of the United States NOT do, so long as at least one third of the Senate protects him from being removed from office. The answer is: “not much.” This amounts to a not-so-constitutional monarchy in which the king rules unless and until he is replaced by another, just like him.

Steve Sailer calls Bullshit!

 Yesterday, David Coleman of the College Board announced a new SAT that will go into use in early 2016. Some of the ideas sound pretty good, some not so hot, but my big question is: Is Coleman just making this up as he goes along? Or have they actually tested these planned changes and found they work as hoped?

The usual practice with the SAT is to slip experimental questions into real SATs. The unvalidated new questions don’t count for the students’ scores, but ETS checks to make sure they aren’t worse than the old questions. I don’t see much evidence that this has been done with Coleman’s reforms yet.

…

So, the College Board won’t be able to tell you whether a 500 on the new SAT is better or worse than a 500 on the old SAT until after hundreds of thousands of kids take the new one for real in April 2016.

Is Coleman just making this up as he goes along and is hoping the psychometricians can eventually come up with data to support his intuitions? My guess is that Coleman’s intuitions are less stupid than those of most figures in the education reform biz, but still …

Read it.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now––except for white people, of course.

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The monocle, of course, is just an affectation, almost as much trouble as contacts and far less useful. But that sort of describe hipsters in general.

“I got it just to have my own style, bring something new to the table,” said Jose Vega, 23, an aspiring Miami rap musician who can be seen sporting a monocle on his SoundCloud page. “Also, I’m nearsighted.”

I’ll vouch for that.

Toby Miller, a cultural historian, said: “Monocles have always marked people out as beyond the crowd, slightly different. On one hand you have the Prussian officer, on the other you have the effete English lord, and then you also have the New York and London lesbian in the 1920s.”

Yeah, there’s a target demographic if ever I’ve seen one.

Read it.

Billionaire Walmart heiress Alice Walton, billionaire philanthropist Jon Stryker, and billionaire progressive global financier George Soros were among the wealthy donors who helped raise over $4 million last year for the “Ready for Hillary” super PAC, newly released public filings reveal.

Walton, Stryker, and Soros were joined by 32 others in chipping in the maximum $25,000 super PAC donation, including Steve and Amber Mostyn’s law firm, Clinton 2008 bundler Bill Rudin, and former U.S. ambassador to Hungary under Clinton Eleni Tsakopoulos Kounalakis.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Had wrist surgery yesterday so blogging may be lighter than usual. Sorry.

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Christopher Nolan’s mind-bending 2010 film Inception was a box office hit, entertaining audiences with a fantastical world of subconscious alternate realities. Could that work out as a board game? Board games company Pilot Study has taken a crack at it with Inceptor, a game that takes some of the core concepts of Inception’s world, and filters them into a mission-oriented multiplayer game. Players take turns rolling the dice and drawing mission card to navigate on a board that takes them through various “dream levels.”  The ultimate goal is to plant your idea and get out before time runs out, all the while avoiding the attacks from the cards and your fellow players.

Read it.

There is only one Crust; the labels are merely there to give the illusion of hope to the dimwitted.

The Other McCain is on the case.

This touches upon a common-sense criticism of birth control that is not addressed often enough: Birth control pills (and other types of hormone-based contraception) require women to add synthetic hormones to their system in sufficient quantities to alter their normal reproductive function. If a woman only uses the pill for a few months, maybe a year or two, the long-term health impact might be minimal. However, most women who use the pill are on it for many years, and it seems just common sense that altering the body’s natural hormonal balance on a long-term basis by adding artificial hormones could have serious ramifications.

“Experts” may dismiss such concerns, and I don’t have any “scientific research” to offer you, but if a known side effect of “third generation” contraceptives is deadly blood clots, I’ll count that as validating my common-sense hunch.

Sarah Hoyt is delightfully dyspeptic.

These aren’t the crazy years.  These are the completely insane, run around with your pants on your head, saluting weasels years.

No, listen to me – there is a great mental illness striding the land.  Almost everyone is interested in things they shouldn’t give two hoots about.  And at least half the people want to live in a society of clones.

Look, I’m not talking just the government.  The government is forever sticking its nose in things that logically shouldn’t be of interest to them.  Part of the reason I’m so opposed to the governmental take over of our health care is that I know here it will be done with unique American-puritan zeal.  And I’m not wrong.

Ayuh.

But that’s something we sort of know about.  WHEN hasn’t government taken power it’s not supposed to have, if a people are so supine as to let them?  Right – never.  And when hasn’t a government initiative gotten insane-silly?  Anywhere in the world?  Right. Never.  I mean, sure, this is a unique American brand in that the things they’re obsessing about is stuff like what you eat and what you drink and whether you might perhaps be having a little mild fun (a bottle of wine a week is mild fun anywhere else in the world) on the side.  Which would be okay if they weren’t basing this on the “latest studies” bound to be reversed in a decade.  (But ah, once it’s in law, it’s forever.)

True dat.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, explains it all to you.

So what’s it all about? The Second Machine Age is an addition to the growing pile of books about the vanishing middle class, books such as Charles Murray’s Coming Apart and Tyler Cowen’s Average is Over. If you haven’t been paying attention, here’s the message: Great swaths of the pen-pushing middle classes are about to lose their jobs to smart machines.

The authors offer TurboTax as an illustration. Why use an H&R Block tax preparer when, for much less money (the basic version costs $29.99) and a modest investment of time, TurboTax will do the job for you? You get a better service at a lower price. The creators of TurboTax get rich—one is a billionaire. Tens of thousands of tax preparers lose their jobs.

This has been going on for a while. You could ask a travel agent; or, much easier to find, an ex-travel agent.

Gee, there’s an echo in here.

Read it.

Well, we can only do what we’re capable of doing.

The Obama administration has responded, so far, in a manner that is pathetic even by its own standards. After issuing stern warnings to Russia not to invade Crimea, the administration, confronted with the actual presence of Russian troops on the ground, philosophized about whether it was really an invasion, suggesting that a more apt term might be an “uncontested arrival.”

Wonder what it’s like to have a Real President, rather than an affirmative-action hire? Maybe we ought to ask the Russians.

Read it.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reveals that 71.67 percent of babies aborted in Mississippi are black, while 26.6 percent are white–an outcome that stands in sharp contrast to the fact that whites outnumber blacks in that state by nearly two to one.

Margaret Sanger would be so proud….

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According to NBC News, police chief Randy Johnson said the guns would help officers with “rapid response” to emergency situations. He said time is of the essence when an attack on a school is underway: “If we don’t get in and stop the shooter, more people are going to die.”

In the old days, the kids and teachers would be packing, and there wouldn’t be a problem. Nowadays, however, schools (and some offices) are merely storehouses of unarmed victims, ripe for the plucking by any wierdo who is willing to ignore ‘gun-control’ laws.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

I’d be curious as to how many of them were about Global Warming.

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If Mama ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy….

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The reason that Mathieu — and many other coaches across most Olympic sports — make certain they always have a specific amount of cash on hand is that if they want to protest an official decision during competition, they need more than just a strong opinion and an angry yell.

They also need money.

Unlike major professional sports like soccer, baseball or football, protests are relatively common in Olympic sports, and each sport’s governing body has strict rules about the protocol. There are time restrictions. There are guidelines on whether the protest can be oral or must be in writing. And there is, ultimately, the bill.

And don’t try to pull out a credit card at the protest table.

Read it.

This dearth of opportunity extends even into Portland, the state’s dominant city. One recent study showed that earnings for educated male in the city are among the worst in the country. Portland, the land of Ph.D.’s driving cabs and working in coffee shops, notes geographer Jim Russell, “attracts talent for the sake of attracting talent” but does little with them once they arrive. No surprise then that the place has become widely described the “slacker capital of the world.”

Can an entire state fit into a parents’ basement?

Read it.

Or, more accurately, the Global Warming Scare.

Other than AlGore, that is.

Theodore Dalrymple reflects on one of the least charming aspects of modern life.

People who were charged with a crime in England used to be told by the police that they did not have to say anything, but that anything they did say might be taken down and used as evidence against them. I think we should all be given this warning whenever we use a mobile telephone.

I remember the last days of Ceau?escu’s Romania. If you went to someone’s home, he immediately put a cushion over the telephone because he assumed that it was bugged by a microphone. In embassies diplomats would speak to you only in basements deep in the ground that they believed had been cleared of all electronic apparatuses. But surveillance under Ceau?escu was crude and sporadic by comparison with the surveillance that we all undergo nowadays in free countries.

Read it.

    In order to hire an H-1B worker in place of a U.S. citizen or green card holder, the hiring company must show that there is no “minimally qualified” citizen or green card holder to take the job.

Recruiting such minimally qualified candidates is generally done through advertising: if nobody responds to the ad then there must not be any minimally qualified candidates.

It helps, of course, if nobody actually sees the ads — in this case reportedly hundreds of them.

When Mr. Cvjeticanin was confronted with his alleged fraudulent behavior,  his defense (according to the indictment) was, “So let them litigate, I’ll show everyone how bogus their immigration applications really are.”   Nice.

Read it.

In 2012, there were more black babies killed by abortion (31,328) in New York City than were born there (24,758), and the black children killed comprised 42.4% of the total number of abortions in the Big Apple, according to a report by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Well, then, we’ll just wait until Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson come by with the protest march.

Read it.

‘Green’ technology turns out to have some teeth. Funny how the people who are right there on the spot to retard any hint of progress, like rice genetically modified to give people more vitamin A, but never think things through when it comes to their pet enthusiasms.

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Clearly nobody remembers the last time they pulled that trick….

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The question is raised yet again with news that hedge fund billionaire turned environmental activist Tom Steyer wants to make “climate change” a key issue in the 2014 midterm elections by funding a $100 million ad push.

Half the money will come from his own pocket, funneled through his San-Francisco-based NextGen Climate Action group; half from fellow liberal billionaires.

As the HuffPo salivatingly reports, this is part of Steyer’s ongoing masterplan to turn the US greener than a green-themed St Patrick’s Day party thrown by Shrek, Kermit the Frog, and the Jolly Green Giant.

Kathy Shaidle tells us a story.

It’s Black History Month, but gays are the new blacks, so let’s dip into some timely homosexual lore….

Read it.

In a chilling interview with The Criterion, former Planned Parenthood worker Marianne Anderson revealed the horror and greed that pervaded the institution where she served for two years.

A nurse whose job was to serve at Indiana’s largest abortion facility by partially sedating women who gave more money for the privilege while they aborted their children, Anderson said many women were urged to have abortions they didn’t want. Some of them were minors.

Anderson confessed, “One young girl came in with her mom. She was about 16. Her mom had made the appointment. That’s not supposed to be how it works. It’s supposed to only be the patient who makes the appointment. I checked her in, and she thought she was there for a prenatal checkup. The mom was pushing it. She blindsided her own daughter.” She told another story that was terrible: “This guy brought in a Korean girl. I had no doubt in my mind this girl was a sex slave. This guy would not leave her side. They could barely communicate. He wanted to make all the arrangements. During the ultrasound, she told one of the nurses that there were lots of girls in the house, and that the man hits them. She never came back for the abortion. I always wondered what happened to her. One of my co-workers said, ‘You’re better off to just let it go.’”

Read it.

Makes sense — after all, who would want to condemn an innocent child to life as a Belgian?

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The Christian Science Monitor reports that 5% of households on food stamps are headed by college graduates.

Meanwhile, a recent news report out of the University of North Carolina, bemoans the plight of the school’s grad students–many of whom now rely on government welfare assistance in order to live. Increasingly, students are applying for food stamps even while they are still enrolled in degree programs.

One UNC PhD student, Releta Summers, said she wound up homeless last semester–sleeping in her car and living off food stamps: “From the outside looking in, most people wouldn’t believe me if I told them I receive benefits,” Summers said. “I still get up every day, and I comb my hair and put on real clothes and go into my office.”

Yet nowhere does the UNC report call into question the ethics of students who are able-bodied adults, and who could work to support themselves, but choose not to. Nowhere does it question whether they ought to be allowed on food stamps while choosing not to work a job the offers a living wage.

Of course not. College is a right! So that they can get a good-paying job! Oh, wait….

Read it.

Of course. Like New York, San Francisco is rapidly becoming a ‘bracket’ city comprising the Upper Crust, who can afford the prices, and the Lower Crust, who live ‘in the cracks’ and can’t afford to go anywhere else.

Read it.

As her 11-year-old son Ethan lay in a coma dying, the Florida Education Department was forcing Andrea Rediske to prove that he wasn’t able to take the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test. During his last month in hospice his homebound teacher came everyday, which the family appreciated, and was required to document the progress he was making on his sixth-grade curriculum, which left them upset and baffled.

Read it.

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

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

The rhetoric of Socialism/Communism has intrinsic appeal to certain groups of people and some members of each group are always likely to fall under its spell: the guilt-ridden wealthy and/or their even-more-guilt-ridden spawn, the poor who feel they’ve been screwed by society, the politically and economically naive intelligentsia who feel they know better than others, the religious and/or idealistic who want everyone to be loving and good and selfless, and those who just like the idea of power and control over others and plan to be the ones in charge.

Combine all that natural appeal with the undeniable propagandist skill of many on the left—including their willingness to lie in the most brazen manner—and you have an even greater effect. And then combine all of that with ignorance of history and economics, our culture’s reluctance to teach the young our good points and its eagerness to harp on our bad ones, and the fact that people only tend to really learn something through bitter and personal experience.

The wonder is that more people don’t believe that socialism/Commmunism is the answer to the world’s prayers, not that so many succumb to it in the first place. Never imagine that the fight, especially in the intellectual and educational and propaganda spheres, can be over. It would be too bad if each generation had to learn the lesson through personal suffering rather than in the realm of ideas.

Read it.

I guess it’s a good thing he didn’t have a gun.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now — except for white people, of course.

Read it.

Can you say ‘collectivist’? I’m sure you can.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

Even as the tech companies extend their global reach and jostle to own the future, their hometown is turning from admiration to anger. The buses, which illegally use city stops, have become an unlikely rallying point. First, people were priced out of their homes, activists say; now they are being pushed off the streets.

I’m curious as to how busses can ‘illegally’ use ‘city stops’. A government bus has special privileges? Nobody gets to intrude into their sacred personal space? Even for three minutes? Who are these Drones of the State that feel entitled to resent people using mass transit? I suppose they would feel better if each used a personal car? But no … then they’d whine about that. There’s no pleasing some people, using the term loosely.

The group that stalked Anthony Levandowski, an engineer at Google X, the company’s clandestine research laboratory, calls itself the Counterforce, after a Thomas Pynchon novel. About a dozen members, all dressed in black, gathered outside the Berkeley house where Mr. Levandowski lives with his partner and two young children.

They unfurled a banner and handed out fliers detailing the engineer’s work on Google’s driverless car technology, Street View and Google Maps. The flier read: “Anthony Levandowski is building an unconscionable world of surveillance, control and automation. He is also your neighbor.”

When the Luddites start to organize into mobs, then it’s time to decamp. Come to Texas. You’ll never look back.