Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws or the place would look like Texas.

Read it.

And about fargin’ time, too.

More here.

Freeberg has the scoop.

John Scalzi, author of Redshirts & other fine science-fiction works, has engaged in some Internet bragging about — um — not being able to press as much as his daughter. Somehow, “revoking the Man Card” doesn’t seem adequate for this.

Let it be known that my daughter can lift more than I do. Because she’s on her school’s weightlifting team, and also because she’s awesome.

I’ve seen John Scalzi, and it doesn’t surprise me a bit that his daughter can lift more than he can.

Ah, well. John is more sensible than most.

Read it.

If you were searching for a Christmas gift for the President, look no further.

Read it.

My kind of woman.

Read it.

At a hearing in San Francisco federal court, Federico Buenrostro Jr., the former chief executive of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, consented to the government’s filing of a new complaint that described his receipt of cash bribes from Alfred J.R. Villalobos, a former pension fund board member and former deputy mayor of Los Angeles.

Yet another corrupt Democrat. Quelle surprise.

Jim Goad embraces the Dark Side.

If you’re generally a busy bumblebee like I am, you don’t have time to sit around all day socially constructing things. Thus, I am so glad that there are volunteers who do this work for me—and at no charge to boot! Merely keeping up with the latest culturally acceptable semantic terms is a full-time job in itself, and I am truly grateful there are people out there who tell me what to say and how to think. I am also in awe of their ability to make shit up while believing it’s true. Hats off to them—and I say that as a man who owns about twenty hats.

So for those of you who are far more socially conscious than I am, please be patient with me, because I’m just trying to keep up here—at least as I’ve been led to understand it, according to the latest science from The Global Science Foundation or whatever it’s called—homosexuality is genetically hardwired, but race and gender are only ideas, right? Is that the latest science? Got it. Bookmarked and filed. I will pick that, lick that, stick that, and flick that.

Read it.

Press reports now state that the U.S. tax code is more than 77,000 pages and growing at a rapid rate. Obviously, no one individual or even teams of lawyers and accountants can fully understand all of this, including people at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). When laws are too complex and increasingly subjective in their interpretation, it inevitably leads to corruption. All but the willfully blind now understand that the IRS has both become corrupt and incompetent.

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In downtown Detroit, at the headquarters of the online-mortgage company Quicken Loans, there stands another downtown Detroit in miniature. The diorama, made of laser-cut acrylic and stretching out over 19 feet in length, is a riot of color and light: Every structure belonging to Quicken’s billionaire owner, Dan Gilbert, is topped in orange and illuminated from within, and Gilbert currently owns 60 of them, a lordly nine million square feet of real estate in all. He began picking up skyscrapers just three and a half years ago, one after another, paying as little as $8 a square foot. He bought five buildings surrounding Capitol Park, the seat of government when Michigan became a state in 1837. He snapped up the site of the old Hudson’s department store, where 12,000 employees catered to 100,000 customers daily in the 1950s. Many of Gilbert’s purchases are 20th-century architectural treasures, built when Detroit served as a hub of world industry. He bought a Daniel Burnham, a few Albert Kahns, a Minoru Yamasaki masterwork with a soaring glass atrium. “They’re like old-school sports cars,” said Dan Mullen, one of the executives who took over Quicken’s newly formed real estate arm. “These were buildings with so much character, so much history. They don’t exist anywhere else. And it was like, ‘Buy this parking garage, and we’ll throw in a skyscraper with it.’ ”

…

In the process, the Motor City has become the testing ground for an updated American dream: privateers finding the raw material for new enterprise in the wreckage of the Rust Belt. Whether or not they’re expecting to profit, Gilbert and other capitalists — large and small — are trying to rebuild the city, even stepping in and picking up some duties that were once handled by the public sector. Shop owners around the city are cleaning up the blighted storefronts and public spaces around them. Only 35,000 of Detroit’s 88,000 streetlights actually work, so some owners are buying and installing their own. In Gilbert’s downtown, a Rock Ventures security force patrols the city center 24 hours a day, monitoring 300 surveillance cameras from a control center. Gilbert is proposing to pay $50 million for the land beneath the county courthouse and a partly built jail near his center-city casino, with the intention of moving the municipal buildings to a far-off neighborhood; his goal is to clear the way for an entertainment district that flows south, without interruption, from the sports arenas past his casino and into downtown. Detroit’s new mayor, Mike Duggan, told me he had no problem with the private sector doing so much to shape his city: Other metropolises had their entrepreneurs and deep-pocketed magnates who built and bought and financed things. With a state-appointed emergency manager overseeing various aspects of Detroit’s operations, with many civic services inoperable for years and with a dire need for investment, Duggan said he felt lucky that his town was getting its turn.

In a city where a government based on machine politics and cronyism is collapsing, the inhabitants are learning that you can do for yourself what the government promised and can no longer deliver, if you’re clever enough.

Michael Ignatieff is afraid that the answer is ‘Yes’.

For the first time since the end of the cold war, the advance of democratic constitutionalism has stopped. The army has staged a coup in Thailand and it’s unclear whether the generals will allow democracy to take root in Burma. For every African state, like Ghana, where democratic institutions seem secure, there is a Mali, a Côte d’Ivoire, and a Zimbabwe, where democracy is in trouble.

In Latin America, democracy has sunk solid roots in Chile, but in Mexico and Colombia it is threatened by violence, while in Argentina it struggles to shake off the dead weight of Peronism. In Brazil, the millions who took to the streets last June to protest corruption seem to have had no impact on the cronyism in Brasília. In the Middle East, democracy has a foothold in Tunisia, but in Syria there is chaos; in Egypt, plebiscitary authoritarianism rules; and in the monarchies, absolutism is ascendant.

In Europe, the policy elites keep insisting that the remedy for their continent’s woes is “more Europe” while a third of their electorate is saying they want less of it. From Hungary to Holland, including in France and the UK, the anti-European right gains ground by opposing the European Union generally and immigration in particular. In Russia the democratic moment of the 1990s now seems as distant as the brief constitutional interlude between 1905 and 1914 under the tsar.

Read it.

Older enterprises like Ford and younger ones like Google that form the manufacturing and technology economy of the 21^st century need more tech-savvy workers than universities and community colleges provide. However, even if enough liberal arts and business programs could retool to produce all the science, math, technology, and engineering graduates needed, the remaining programs would still produce many more non-STEM graduates than the economy could absorb.

Similarly innovators often don’t need a lot of money to create valuable new enterprises or expand established businesses. Consider that many young people create profitable apps and marketing platforms on their laptops, and major corporations are flush with billions in cash and too few opportunities to deploy it.

Consequently, established companies and individual investors bid up prices for young enterprises, whose owners wish to cash in on their initial success, and pay astronomical sums for the initial public offerings of companies like Facebook. They bid up prices for stocks, bonds, and collectables, and drive down yields on dividend-paying stocks and interest rates on bonds and CDs.

To generate enough jobs, the economy must create lots of service businesses beyond the ecosystems of manufacturing and technology — everything from restaurants to retirement homes, but government regulations dictating wages, sick leave, and health benefits drive many services offshore. That’s why credit card call centers and even some back office legal services are in Asia.

Modern businesses increasingly need highly intelligent, highly educated workers. Government regulations act as a tariff on employing domestic workers who are less intelligent and less educated, which is why domestic businesses are outsourcing such work overseas where such workers don’t cost more than they’re actually worth economically. Government attempts to make sure that the Underclass make a ‘living wage’ merely ensure that they don’t have any jobs at all.

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AFSCME’s relationship with the UNCF revolved around their Union Scholars Program, in which sophomore- and junior-year college students could work with AFSCME during the summer and receive scholarship support aftwerward [sic].

That program will cease on Sept. 1.

“We must hold ourselves to the same standards that we promote through the Union Scholars Program,” [union president Lee] Saunders wrote. “To practice what we preach, to fight for social justice, and to stand up for what we beleive [sic]. I cannot in good conscience face these students or AFSCME’s members if I looked the other way and ignored your actions.”

I’m sure Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton will get right on that. (snort)

Read it.

In a neglected speech by Calvin Coolidge entitled “The Limitations of the Law,” given to the American Bar Association in 1922 (but not available online that I’ve been able to find), Coolidge offers the following observation on one of the inherent defects of the Progressive theory of the Administrative State:

Under this weight [of ever larger government] the former accuracy of administration breaks down.  The government has not at its disposal a supply of ability, honesty, and character necessary for the solution of all these problems, or an executive capacity great enough for their perfect administration.  Nor is it in possession of a wisdom which enables it to take in great enterprises and manage them with no ground of criticism.  We cannot rid ourselves of the human element in our affairs by an act of legislation which places them under a jurisdiction of a public commission. . .  Its attempt must be accompanied with the full expectation of very many failures. . .

Read it.

Not only do you not have to know the first thing about libertarianism to cover it for major news outlets, it is perfectly fine to a) decline to ask anybody who does know, b) make up your own version of what it is, and then c) lament the terribleness of this terrible philosophy or people you have just created.

Yeah, well, they do that with everybody with whom they disagree. They’re equal-opportunity haters.

Read it.

It may be hard for some to believe, given the endless attacks on the Jewish state today, that in the not-too-distant past, Israel was as beloved as it is now widely reviled. More remarkable, it was especially loved on the left, where now it is scorned. The process by which Israel turned from paragon into pariah is the subject of Joshua Muravchik’s well-argued new book Making David into Goliath.

Read it.

In a stunning revelation this week, it was disclosed that former IRS official Lois Lerner told colleagues, “we need to be cautious about what we say in emails” and then proceeded to ask the IRS IT department, in an e-mail, “if [instant messaging] conversations were also searchable.” When she was told they were not, she e-mailed back, “Perfect.” This is a smoking gun e-mail in that it makes plain she had a cover-up in mind. There is no other plausible explanation.

Read it.

As Watchdog Wire reported in late June, local Colorado school districts are collecting detailed educational and psychological data on their students for use by private companies and the federal government. Parents, however, are having a hard time getting their hands on their own children’s information.

Ft. Collins parent Cheri Kiesecker, for example, has written to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE), asking for her children’s data, but was told the CDE cannot share that data with parents.

“The Colorado Department of Education does not have a mechanism for verifying parent/guardian relationships to students — and the release of student information to an unauthorized entity would be a violation of Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA),” replied Dan Damagala, CDE’s CIO of Information Management Services.

Read it.

Malaysia is one of those countries that have been cited, along with Indonesia and Turkey, as evidence that a predominantly Muslim country can have a secular government and can, in general, be modern. A prominent commentator wrote some years ago that the Arab world may be hopeless, but the Islamic world isn’t. That didn’t sound overly optimistic at the time, but with hindsight, it may have been.

We all know what has been happening in Turkey. In Malaysia, Reuters reports that Islamic Sharia courts are increasingly coming into conflict with secular law. You can guess who is winning. Reuters begins with a story about a Hindu family in which the husband, after leaving his wife, became a Muslim and purported to convert his children. This resulted in his gaining custody of them, contrary to orders of the “regular” Malaysian courts.

Check it out.

ORBIS: The Stanford Geospatial Network Model of the Roman World reconstructs the time cost and financial expense associated with a wide range of different types of travel in antiquity. The model is based on a simplified version of the giant network of cities, roads, rivers and sea lanes that framed movement across the Roman Empire. It broadly reflects conditions around 200 CE but also covers a few sites and roads created in late antiquity.

The model consists of 632 sites, most of them urban settlements but also including important promontories and mountain passes, and covers close to 10 million square kilometers (~4 million square miles) of terrestrial and maritime space. 301 sites serve as sea ports. The baseline road network encompasses 84,631 kilometers (52,587 miles) of road or desert tracks, complemented by 28,272 kilometers (17,567 miles) of navigable rivers and canals.

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Starbucks’ recently announced partnership with Arizona State University to help its employees pay for an online degree will be funded by the taxpayer, rather than from the global coffee chain itself.

While it was billed as “free tuition” by some when the partnership was first announced, in reality ASU is offering Starbucks employees a reduced tuition rate, while the students are expected to cover the rest of the cost with federal student aid or from their own pockets.

The “scholarship” portion in the form of a discount is essentially funded by taxpayers, as the university is funded by public coffers.

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Billionaires Warren Buffett, Sheldon Adelson and Bill Gates have teamed up to call for amnesty for America’s illegal immigrants as a solution to the ongoing crisis at the border as President Barack Obama mulls granting amnesty to millions via executive power.

“The three of us vary in our politics and would differ also in our preferences about the details of an immigration reform bill,” Buffett, Adelson and Gates wrote in the New York Times.

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

Wherever two Democrat billionaires are gathered together, they can always find a ‘moderate’ Republican to kiss their asses.

Read it.

Congressional candidate Mike Dickinson (D-VA) is offering $100,000 to anyone who can provide him with a nude photograph of Texas Tech Cheerleader Kendall Jones.

On July 5 Breitbart News reported Jones was receiving death threats and had become the object of a “Kill Kendall Jones” Facebook page because of photos she posted from African hunts. On July 9, Facebook removed all Jones hunting photos and later that day, after public outcry, also shut down the “Kill Kendall Jones” page.

And the feminist say … [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

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The Clinton Foundation and the terror group Hamas share a key donor: The government of Qatar, a leading backer of terror groups that has emerged in recent years as Hamas’ chief financial lifeline.

Qatar, which has been designated by the State Department as a “significant terrorist financing risk,” has pledged more than $400 million to Hamas since 2012 and has long harbored one of the terror group’s senior leaders, Khaled Mashaal.

And yet a prominent labor union can stop its support of the United Negro College Fund because they took money from the Koch brothers. Interesting priorities these Democrats have.

Read it.

State-licensed marijuana stores, which began serving recreational customers in Colorado at the beginning of the year and in Washington this week, are criminal enterprises under federal law. But as Al Capone could have told you, Uncle Sam still wants his cut: Selling marijuana is a felony, and so is failing to pay taxes on the money you earn by selling marijuana. The government does not make it easy to comply with federal tax laws, however. Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, for example, bars marijuana merchants from deducting standard business expenses (although they are, rather counterintuitively, allowed to deduct the “cost of goods sold,” including the cost of growing or obtaining marijuana). And when a business pays federal taxes withheld from employees’ paychecks, along with the employer’s share of payroll taxes, the Internal Revenue Service insists that it be done via the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS), which requires a bank account. Cannabusinesses have trouble obtaining bank accounts, what with being criminal enterprises under federal law. The IRS does not consider that a good excuse, so when marijuana merchants pay the monthly taxes in cash, they are charged a 10 percent penalty. That is how Allgreens, a Denver dispensary, ended up owing the IRS more than $20,000 in penalties.

Once again, tReason magazine airs its core philosophy that legal weed is a much more important issue than, oh, the government’s promotion of followers of an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion. In this case, however, they may have a point.

It’s not a rare thing for someone acquitted of a crime at the state level to be subject to double jeopardy by zealous prosecutors under some Federal ‘civil rights’ law. (‘Oh, that’s not real double jeopardy; it’s an entirely separate crime!’) This would appear to be a similar case where regulations (not law, regulations, which under the Imperial Presidency are even better than laws because they don’t have to go through that messy stuff with Congress) criminalize behavior that is in conformity with the law on a different level.

This is a classic situation in authoritarian states, in which doing something makes you a criminal and not doing the same thing also makes you a criminal. Our legal system is rapidly becoming such a system.

Bed Bug Registry.

Victorinox SwissCard.

Electric Peel MicroCar.

MultiPurpose Kitchen Tool Kit.

Golden Mean calipers.

Tea buttons.

PyroPet Candle. Surprise!

Scott Adams’ time-saving tips.

Fonhandle handle for your iPhone.

Read it.

The Torah-writing robot was developed by the German artists’ group robotlab and was presented for the first time Thursday at Berlin’s Jewish Museum. While it takes the machine about three months to complete the 80-meter (260-foot) -long scroll, a rabbi or a sofer—a Jewish scribe—needs nearly a year. But unlike the rabbi’s work, the robot’s Torah can’t be used in a synagogue.

I have always found fascinating the strictures around writing a Torah scroll.

Read it.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal found that “data from immigration courts, along with interviews with the children and their advocates, show that few minors are sent home and many are able to stay for years in the U.S., if not permanently.”

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

Read it.

Put down that burger you irresponsible carnivores! Why? Because munching steaks, burgers, and chops significantly increases the carbon footprint of meat-eaters and thus their contribution to man-made global warming. So says a new study, “Dietary greenhouse gas emissions of meat-eaters, fish-eaters, vegetarians and vegans in the UK,” in the journal Climatic Change.

Oh noes!

Gavin McInnes has the scoop.

When Nicolas Sarkozy banned the burqa, the feminist reaction was “How dare he?” To the left, multiculturalism trumps all other -isms, so if nonwhites insist that women walk around in black polyester bags all summer, all the girl power to them.

A not uncommon reaction when something like this happens is to say, “Well, we’re just as bad.” In this case it was the Daily Show drawing parallels between Muslim garb and high-heeled shoes. They’re just as sexist, all right? The fact that women wear them on girls’ night out, when they rent a karaoke room with the gals and no boys are allowed, is irrelevant. So is the part where we don’t cane or beat women who refuse to wear them. We just sigh. Chuck Taylors may not be racist but high heels are definitely sexist.

Read it.

The world’s largest retailer, best known for low prices on everything from detergent to dining room sets, has become a significant player in the financial services market by doing what it does best: cut costs and appeal to budget-conscious shoppers.

Cue Democrat angst.

“It’s cheaper than anything out there and there are no overdraft fees,” he said of Walmart. “I’ve never had a problem.”

But bank executives do. They say that Walmart can offer low prices on financial services because the chain has cherry-picked services not subject to the layers of regulation that banks face.

Unlike check-cashing services, banks are required to lend in urban and suburban communities, provide direct insurance on deposits, and make detailed reports to several federal and state agencies, said Richard Holbrook, chairman of the Massachusetts Bankers Association and chief executive at Eastern Bank.

“We’re not afraid of competition,” Holbrook said. “We just want to make sure the rules are the same.”

Future of Capitalism can read between the lines:

The line “we’re not afraid of competition” from that banker made me chuckle. Of course he’s afraid of competition, which is why the banks are working to get regulators to prevent Walmart from competing with them. The regulators will probably do what the banks ask, and pile more rules on Walmart, because the competition from Walmart demonstrates that competition works better for consumers than regulation does, which is not a point regulators are eager to make. Notice that when people say “we just want to make sure the rules are the same,” they usually aren’t talking about reducing rules, but increasing them.

Read it.

A very odd thing to appear in the New York Times.

To Americans in their 20s and early 30s — the so-called millennials — many of these problems have their roots in George W. Bush’s presidency. But think about people who were born in 1998, the youngest eligible voters in the next presidential election. They are too young to remember much about the Bush years or the excitement surrounding the first Obama presidential campaign. They instead are coming of age with a Democratic president who often seems unable to fix the world’s problems.

“We’re in a period in which the federal government is simply not performing,” says Paul Taylor of the Pew Research Center, the author of a recent book on generational politics, “and that can’t be good for the Democrats.”

Good to see more recognition that Democrats are the party of big government.

It has always astonished me that anyone could possibly think that the same government that gave us the Post Office and the Transportation Security Administration could be safely entrusted with running our economy and our health care.

Read it.

As Wergin wrote in a New York Times op-ed on July 8, he found himself increasingly unable to distinguish the rhetoric of Washington, D.C., from the rhetoric of Brussels. Last year, when the United States threatened military action against Syria, only to reverse itself overnight and become partners with the Assad government in the destruction of the tyrant’s declared stocks of chemical weapons, Wergin was struck by an insight. “I suddenly understood the problem with this American president and his foreign policy,” he wrote. “He sounded just like a German politician: all moral outrage, but little else to help end one of the most devastating civil wars of our age.” The recognition left him with a feeling not of elation but of disappointment. “President Obama, I thought with a sigh, has become a European.”

Dude, he always was a European. He was raised to be a European, offspring of a white Leftist and a Third World parasite.

Read it.

One of the largest U.S. labor unions cut ties with the United Negro College Fund this week, accusing the organization of “betrayal” after it accepted a $25 million grant from the billionaire Koch brothers, the union said Thursday.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, or AFSCME, said President Lee Saunders wrote to UNCF President Michael Lomax Tuesday, saying in the letter that he was “deeply troubled” by the grant and then “stunned” when Mr. Lomax later spoke at a Koch brothers summit in California.

I guess supporting the Democrat political agenda is more important than educating black kids. Glad we got that cleared up.

Read it.

The New York Times issued a correction today to fix a demonstrably false editorial that claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent “days of near silence” before condemning the murder of Arab teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Netanyahu had, in fact, called the killing an “abominable murder,” and on the day of the killing issued a statement instructing his minister for internal security to investigate the crime. Three Israeli suspects were arrested and have since confessed to the murder.

Even with a correction, the editorial in question was a mess from the top down. The New Republic has a good rundown of other egregious errors and misleading points that won’t be getting much-needed corrections. It’s likely that the editorial page was simply relying on the news side to feed its preconceived biases (though one story had already reported on Netanyahu’s comments), which is a mistake considering the NYT’s reporting exhibits absolutely no journalistic standards when it comes to the topic.

The Other McCain is on the case.

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

Read it.

Reuters reported that “a cargo train” nicknamed “the Beast,” which is “used by Mexicans and Central Americans to travel toward the U.S. border,” derailed on Wednesday in Oaxaca, Mexico.”

About 1,300 migrants, many of whom were “young people,” were reportedly stranded but not injured while riding what others have referred to as “El Tren de la Muerte,” or Death Train.

As Breitbart Texas has reported, “children who travel via Death Train must jump onto a moving freight car” and “minors who cannot successfully pull themselves onto the traveling cars fall onto the tracks” and “many are left with extreme injuries,” like losing arms and legs.

Read it.

According to an OSC press release announcing the settlement, “when fielding taxpayers’ questions on an IRS customer service help line, the employee repeatedly urged taxpayers to reelect President Obama in 2012 by delivering a chant based on the spelling of the employee’s last name.”

I predict that he will eventually be promoted. The Crust take care of their own.

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Global warming alarmists should be comforted that they have a lot more to be happy about and should not be fretting that global catastrophe is knocking at the door.

But, of course, they aren’t.

Freeberg lays down some inconvenient truth.

“It’s funny how so many far-left posers get a hard-on for violence and smashing stuff.”

…

But what kind of grown-ups do kids become after watching “don’t kill that bad guy, bring him to justice instead” movies? Non-vengeful, angelic types? Or, are they taught to de-value human life, to see it as not worth avenging, or for that matter, much of anything else. The latter, I think. For that reason, and some others, after watching the recent Star Trek installment I always come away with the same aftertaste as the closing credits roll: I don’t want to see the “don’t kill the bad guy” trope, ever again. Let’s go back to Han shooting first again. It isn’t that I entirely disagree with the point, that the desire for vengeance should be checked. The problem is that it’s bland, boring, reeks of lazy writing and that’s probably what it is. My impression is that the writers never even bothered to contemplate the other problem with vengeance, that those who crusade against it may have as many problems as those who crusade for it. They may pose just as grave a threat against what we think of as “civilization,” which, if it relies on anything at all, must rely on the idea that humans are worth something. Also, that actions have consequences.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, considers George Orwell and Evelyn Waugh.

As both writers foresaw, meritocracy has come upon us. We don’t, thank goodness, have it in the pathological form that Orwell described, although some elements of the current political correctness regime strongly resemble Orwell’s vision. Those of us who write commentary on social topics, especially on matters of race and sex, have to keep checking ourselves to stop overusing phrases out of Nineteen Eighty-Four: “Thought Police,” “crimestop,” “Two Minutes Hate,” and so on.

Read it.

On July 2 Breitbart News reported that interim Target CEO John Mulligan “respectfully” asked law-abiding citizens not to bring their guns in Target stores.

Since then, Gainesville, Georgia, police have arrested three over a Target parking lot robbery and are looking for another man who punched a woman and stole her Mercedes at a Decatur, Georgia, Target as well.

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

Within two weeks of asking law-abiding citizens to leave their guns home, two Jack in the Box stores were robbed, and a shooting took place at a third.

Boy, the world is just full of surprises.

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The Obama administration is prohibiting anyone from asking for the immigration status of the parents or family members who are picking up illegal immigrant children from detention centers.

At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Health and Human Services Acting Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families Mark Greenberg said that even if Obama administration officials knew illegal immigrant children were being released to other illegal immigrants, they would consider the “totality of the circumstances” and release the children to them.

But when pressed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Greenberg admitted, “We do not verify the immigration status of the individual.”

Better keep your hands off our potential new Democrat voters.

Read it.

Bell Labs has pumped more data than ever before down antiquated copper wiring. The boffins used a frequency modulation system that they claim will be perfect for hooking up aging telco cables to future broadband fiber networks.

The technique is based on the G.fast standard being considered by the International Telecommunications Union; it’s a DSL standard designed to sustain 500Mbps connections over legacy copper cable networks using a 106MHz frequency range.

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Arizona State University, perennial favorite for “nation’s least prestigious school,” is showing America why: students can now earn extra credit in a Women and Gender Studies class for being female and not shaving their armpits. One student—whose parents no doubt consider this either $6,000 (in-state tuition) or $10,000 (if she’s out of state) a year well spent—called her 10 weeks of stubble cultivation a “life-changing experience.”

Steve Sailer takes note.

One of the biggest buttresses of the current ideological regime, broadly defined, is the widespread assumption that dissenters, even tenured economics professor David Brat (victor over former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor), can’t be very smart.

This appeals especially to people who don’t seem exceptionally smart themselves.

One of the funnier example of this phenomenon is the urge, which I’ve noted before, to cite Brat’s work on Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant Work Ethic as evidence that Brat isn’t smart (at least not by the high standards of Members of the House and spergy economists).

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The Democracy Alliance is not a famous organization, but it deserves to be. The Alliance consists of approximately 100 rich liberals who have taken upon themselves the task of coordinating America’s many left-wing organizations to promote a single radical agenda. The Alliance does not publicize the names of its members, but it held a conference for its “partners” and membership prospects in April, at the Ritz Carlton Hotel (naturally) in Chicago. Someone who attended the conference unfortunately (heh) left his or her copy of the documents passed out by the Democracy Alliance behind, and they eventually fell into the wrong hands. Ours.

What do you know — there actually is a vast Left-wing conspiracy. No wonder they keep accusing the Right of being one.

There is always a certain dissociation when leftists gather at a Ritz Carlton hotel to discuss their commitment to the poor. It is impossible not to laugh at this invitation to a dinner with Katrina vanden Heuvel, the heiress who bought and now runs the Nation magazine, a Communist publication, and New York’s newly-elected mayor Bill de Blasio. They will discuss “New York’s path to social and economic equality.” Sure: in the world to come, the hedge fund manager will share his income equally with the doorman, and Miss vanden Heuvel will divide her inheritance with New York’s poor.

…

Politicians like Harry Reid have denounced Charles and David Koch and others who contribute to conservative causes as “shadowy,” “secretive” people who infest politics with “dark money.” In that context, it is worth noting that most of the groups to which the Alliance and its elite liberal members contribute are 501(c)(4)s that do not disclose their donors. In fact, this question is addressed in a “FAQ” in one of the DA documents:

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“The one thing we are going to do during this work period, sooner rather than later, is to ensure that women’s lives are not determine by virtue of five white men,” Reid said. “This Hobby Lobby decision is outrageous and we are going to do something about it. People are going to have to walk down here and vote.

He also thinks that the Democrat Party doesn’t have a lot of billionaires.

Wonder what the weather’s like on his planet?

Read it.

It’s generally assumed that it would mean a disaster for the planet if the rainforests of the Amazon were to be replaced with farmland. But it turns out that, actually, much of the area was indeed farmland just a few thousand years ago.

We learn this from new research just published in the august Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A team of mainly British-based scientists carried it out, seeking to explain the presence of various large human-dug ditches and earthworks criss-crossing today’s thick Amazon jungles – and pre-dating them.

Some in the paleo-boffinry community suggest that the ditches mean that the pre-Columbian civilisations of South America had slashed and burned the immemorial rainforests to create large intensively farmed areas home to dense populations. Others contend that actually the jungles remained largely intact, with just a few incursions by small communities of people.

Neither of these scenarios are true, apparently.

“We went to Bolivia hoping to find evidence of the kinds of crops being grown by ancient Amerindian groups, and to try to find how much impact they had on the ancient forest,” explains Dr John Carson of Reading uni. “What we found was that they were having virtually no effect on the forest, in terms of past deforestation, because it didn’t exist there until much later.”

Read it.

It’s common knowledge that insider trading is illegal. In fact, we have an entire government agency in place to regulate trading and to investigate insider trading allegations. Executives have been sentenced to months (sometimes even years) in plush, well-appointed hellholes for participating in insider trading.

Members of Congress, however, were exempt from insider trading rules until 2012. An 2011 expose by 60 Minutes let millions of Americans know that members of Congress had plenty of access to market-changing information and were acting on it.

In a rare (ha!) show of self-preservation, a united House full of Congresspersons facing reelection battles passed the STOCK Act, which basically made Congress and its staffers play by the same trading rules as every other American.

In 2013, with Congressional members safely re-elected, the House decided to roll back its previous legislative effort in order to get back into the insider trading business. It tore out the stipulation demanding disclosure of trading activity — the one thing citizens could use to verify adherence to the “no insider trading” rule — stating that these disclosures were a “security risk.” This sailed through with unanimous consent late on a Thursday afternoon (the end of the Congressional work week) and was signed by the President the following Monday.