Read it.

Aside from a congenital propensity to lie, of course.

Hillary Clinton claimed that, at the moment she and her husband were signing up for $18 million in book deals, they were “dead broke.”

Harry Reid (who lives in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel) said liberals are getting bullied by Republican billionaires but the Democratic Party “doesn’t have many billionaires” behind it.

Joe Biden (family earnings: $407,000 last year plus a free house, driver, meals, etc.) claims, “I don’t own a single stock or bond. . . . I have no savings accounts . . . I’m the poorest man in Congress.” (Triple fail: Joe isn’t poor, isn’t in Congress and wouldn’t be the poorest member of it if he were.)

Right here in New York, we’ve learned that City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, the daughter of a wealthy doctor who left a $6.7 million inheritance, took advantage of a no-interest loan intended for underprivileged New Yorkers to buy a Harlem townhouse. Then she forgot to declare the rental income on required city disclosure forms. The townhouse you and I helped buy her for $240,000 is today worth $1.2 million.

The more Democrats insist on their proletarian cred, the more absurd it gets. They’re no longer just holier than thou: Now they’re prolier than thou.

Read it.

A big problem with graphene, a super-strong, atom-thick material that could soon be used to build a new generation of thin and flexible electronics, is that it constantly conducts electricity. Electronics need to be able to turn the flow on and off, which is not currently possible with a pure sheet of graphene.

Stanford researchers wrote in Nature Communications Tuesday that they have come up with one of a growing number of alternatives. It might not be as strong or thin as graphene, but the three-atom-thick material they modeled has the unusual feature of being able to switch between two different atomic structures, allowing it to turn the flow of electricity on or off like a light switch.

Eric Raymond, more famous as a computer geek than as a literary critic, nevertheless has some firm and well-argued opinions on my favorite form of writing.

It is not fashionable these days to be so normative about any kind of artistic form, let alone SF. The insistence that we should embrace diversity is constant, even if it means giving up having any standards at all. In a genre like SF where the core traditions include neophilia and openness to possibility, the argument for exclusive definitions and hard boundaries seems especially problematic.

I think it is an argument very much worth making nevertheless. This essay is my stake in the ground, one I intend to refer readers back to when (as sometimes happens) I’m accused of being stuck on an outmoded and narrow conception of the genre. I will argue three propositions: that artistic genres are functionally important, that genre constraints are an aid to creativity and communication rather than a hindrance, and that science fiction has a particular mission which both justifies and requires its genre constraints.

Steve Sailer wonders what Peter Beinart has been smoking.

But every four years during the World Cup, white American liberals project their status strivings onto soccer and their convoluted ethnic resentments onto traditional American sports. Even though the World Cup embodies nationalist chauvinism at its most frenzied, liberal whites in this country see it as a repudiation of patriotic Americans. For example, former New Republic editor Peter Beinart trumpets in The Atlantic: “Ann Coulter Is Right to Fear the World Cup: America’s growing coalition of soccer fans looks a lot like the coalition that got Obama elected.”

This might come as news to the core of the Obama coalition, African Americans. The key to Obama’s reelection in 2012 was the unexpectedly high turnout among blacks, especially older women. And church ladies who like Tyler Perry movies aren’t hugely excited by the World Cup, much less FC Barcelona.

…

The reality is that soccer, like most major sports in today’s world, is a triumph of WASP cultural imperialism.

Read it.

Planned Parenthood claims its business is “women’s healthcare,” but its recent award certificate to a Colorado abortion clinic for “exceeding abortion visits [in the] first half of FY12 compared to the first half of FY13,” affirms that its most valued business is abortion.

Read it.

Like the U.S. government, the New York Times isn’t sensitive enough to Latino culture to use terms like “mestizo” or “mulatto.” They can’t even use the words in this article, much less in one about George Zimmerman. But Latin Americans use those terms: for example, here’s an article about mestizo Bolivians protesting that they should be be allowed to check “mestizo” on the Bolivian census. (Leftist President Evo Morales is a member of a specific Amerindian tribe elected on a tribal rights platform, and he wants everybody in Bolivia to officially identify with a specific Amerindian group rather than with the mestizo majority: classic divide and rule politics on Evo’s part.)

…

It has always been absurd that only Hispanics get an ethnicity, so now Arab activists are trying to cash in on that absurdity by getting a second official ethnicity for themselves. (Can we get the neocons upset over the Arab ethnic preference push? They still swing some weight.)

John Hinderaker at PowerLine has a new game for us to play.

One of the few things that interest Barack Obama, other than golf, is the annual NCAA basketball tournament bracket. So reader Brad Mirakian came up with the Obama Scandal Bracket. He did a good job of it too; he probably left off a scandal or two, but he also wisely left one blank for the scandal yet to come.

More fun than the world cup.

Read it.

The 38th annual Jalsa Salana hosted by Ahmadiyya Muslim Jama’at of Canada was held recently at the International Centre in Mississauga, Ontario. Justin Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party, was the guest of honor for the occasion.

Read it. And watch the video.

Carl M Cannon draws up a hit list.

Irritating phrases and words are not confined to political circles, or solely to Washington, although here in the nation’s capital they burrow in and proliferate like obsolete, but entrenched, government programs. This is a call to arms to fight them—but only metaphorically.

Read it.

Speaking as someone who hasn’t bought a physical book in a walk-in bookstore in about ten years, I find this unsurprising.

Read it.

One of the biggest problems with printing human meat was the creation of blood vessels and ventricles. Making a solid mass of flesh was easy but adding a way to pump blood and other nutrients through the flesh was more difficult. Now researchers at the University of Sydney, Harvard, Stanford and MIT, have solved some of these problems by creating a skeleton of vessels and then growing human cells around them. Once the vessels are stable, they are able to dissolve the 3D printed material.

Read it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, but at the end of the day, nobody will get fired, and nobody will go to jail. So this is all a circus act to entertain the Democrat base Great Unwashed.

Read it.

The Crust take care of their own. When Obama said, ‘We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for’, he didn’t mean you an me, he meant him and the rest of the Establishment.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you  want to do.

Read it.

A black Mississippi pastor has emerged to claim Sen. Thad Cochran’s (R-MS) campaign paid “thousands” of Democrats $15 each to vote in the June 24 GOP runoff – and that he was part of the scheme.

Rev. Stevie Fielder, an associate pastor at First Union Missionary Baptist Church in Meridan, Mississippi, says Cochran’s campaign “told me to offer blacks $15 each and to vote for Thad.”

Fielder, who was paid by freelance journalist Charles C. Johnson for the story, provided a new outlet launched by Johnson—GotNews.com—with four text messages from a person purporting to be Cochran campaign staffer Saleem Baird.

The messages cite an official Cochran campaign email address—Saleem@ThadForMs.com—and include detailed discussions of the campaign providing envelopes of money to distribute to people who vote.

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