Read it.

The report uses the unfortunate term “Billionaire’s Club” to describe the funders who give groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club Foundation millions of dollars a year. In fact, in most cases it would be more accurate to describe it as the “Dead Billionaire’s Club,” as most of the money comes from foundations set up by wealthy people who were often fairly conservative, but their foundations are now run by their liberal children and/or left-wing staffs.

Read it.

Why do we have a crisis in health care costs today? Because government “solved” the last one.

Read it.

Finally, the mainstream media are beginning to acknowledge the poisonous fruits of multiculturalism. For years journalists have been afraid to speak the truth about what is happening in Britain, just as the council workers in Rotherham who were responsible for child welfare were afraid to speak the truth. And what is the truth they have been so afraid to give voice to? Multiculturalism is a failure, both as a political theory and as a matter of fact.

When the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany joined forces at the beginning of the war, Time magazine referred to the enemies of civilization as “Communazis”. Each had their final solution to the question of how human beings should live together on earth, and they were both willing to employ absolutely any means in order to achieve that end. We have seen the same mindset in government, both at a national level and in local councils up and down the land for many years now. Their final solution to the question of how we are to live is “multiculturalism”, and woe betide anyone who questioned that unproven, impossible theory.

Read it.

In India, the common Muslim practice is to kidnap young Hindu women, forcibly convert them to Islam, and then marry them (or turn them into sexual slaves). The process is known as the “Love Jihad”, and it bears a strong resemblance to the “grooming and pimping” epidemic in the UK.

Nicholas Kristof, Voice of the Crust, pushes the Narrative.

So let me push back at what I see as smug white delusion.

Never mind that this entire article is ‘smug white delusion’, as demonstrated by ‘progressives’ in the media.

• The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)

Perhaps that’s because white people tend to work and black people tend to live off of government benefits. It’s not as if there’s some government agency out there (much as people like Kristof might wish for it) assigning people incomes and not giving black people Their Fair Share.

• The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.

Welcome to the War on Poverty, which (as with most government programs) merely makes things worse. All done by the sort of people that Nicholas Kristof votes for — many of which are white people, true, but their deficiency is not in their melanin level but in their politics.

• A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.

That’s because black boys (and men) tend to shoot other black boys more often than white boys shoot other white boys. Why is that? You won’t find out by reading the writings of Nicholas Kristof, much less this one.

• Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students. They are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled, setting them up for educational failure.

That’s because black people are on average less intelligent than white people, a fact that is well documented however much it is ignored by whites, like Kristof, who ‘just don’t get it’. That doesn’t tell you anything about individual black people, of course, but it does indicate how blacks as a group will do compared to whites as a group, which is what we’re talking about here. This isn’t rocket science; it just takes the ability to notice certain facts, an ability in which people like Nicholas Kristof are notoriously deficient.

• Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.

Don’t you just love that term ‘experiment in mass incarceration’, with its suggestion that police are wandering around just picking up black men at random and sticking them in prison? The prospect that these people might have actually, you know, committed a crime or something never appears on the radar. Another area in which Nicholas Kristof ‘just doesn’t get it’.

All these constitute not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem. When so much talent is underemployed and overincarcerated, the entire country suffers.

And when people who are paid to write for national publications can get away with pushing these absurd fantasies, the entire world suffers. But they’ll never notice, because they live in a world of rainbows and unicorns in which wishing makes it so, reality never intrudes, and facts are whatever you read in the New York Times.

Read it.

Obviously, she was thinking that the rules don’t apply to her. Don’t they know who she is?

She also may have been thinking that Louisiana (‘flyover country’) is a place to be from, not in. You’ll note how much time the Clinton’s spend in Arkansas.

Read it.

The writer, Voice of the Crust for the Guardian in Britain, appears to need to get out more – and read a little bit of history; socialism is always for the rich, in the sense that it allows the apparatchiks to live like rich people and forces everyone else to live like poor people.

Who are the real scroungers? Free-marketeers decry ‘big government’ yet the City and big business benefit hugely from the state – from bailouts to the billions made from privatisation. Socialism does exist in Britain – but only for the rich.

Apparently the writer, who mistakenly equates ‘free-marketers’ with ‘the city and big business’, is as ignorant of economics and politics as he is of history.

The remarkable thing is that they pay people money to write this. Any middle-school student could grind these out like pancakes, and for a lot less remuneration.

Read it.

WHO runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company.

A variant of this, polished to a fine art by Willy Brown while he was Speaker of the California legislature, is to introduce a bill that would destroy a company’s business, and then withdraw it once one’s campaign coffers had been adequately ‘topped up’ by the potential victim(s).

Read it.

Fruta Feia, formed in 2013 by Isabel Soares, is a co-op that’s fighting both inane EU food regulations and the food waste those regulations cause. The group pushes back against regulations that dictate the size and shape of fruit that can be sold throughout the EU. If fruit is misshapen, irregular, or fails to meet certain color guidelines, then the regulations state that it’s not fit for sale. The rules, published in 2008, state that apples, for example, may not be sold if they have certain cosmetic “defects” in “shape” or “coloring.”

At a time when the economic downturn means fresh fruits and vegetables are harder to come by for many—with small farmers struggling to make ends meet—and with food waste an enormous problem, these regulations couldn’t be more idiotic and infuriating.

The biter bit. Pass the popcorn.

For-ghetti spaghetti fork.

ButterUp butter knife.

Hugo’s Amazing Tape.

Beer stein for cans.

Leather beer caddy for bikes.

Compact folding bow. This baby can save your life if you’re suddenly cast back into the Middle Ages. Hey, it could totally happen.

Batman branding iron. You know you want one.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Why is there this kind of windfall available to bestow on about 20% of tenants of new luxury buildings? Because getting the political permission to build in NYC is a goldmine because the right to build is so restricted that anybody who does get all the permits approved is guaranteed a big profit, so the city makes the developers kick back some of their profits in terms of these crazy Fairy Godmother deals for some small fraction of all the people in New York. It seems like there ought to be about 10 better ways to do things, but that’s the current system, and the new mayor wants to crank it up.

Read it.

With the rise of “cashless” turnpikes, where tolls are collected via a device such as EZ-Pass rather than at tollbooths, rental car companies have found two ways to pass those costs on to their customers, both unpopular: Customers can choose to rent a pass for as much as $20 a day, which they’ll pay whether or not they pass through a toll plaza, or they can pay the fines for going through the lanes without a pass, plus a hefty processing fee tacked on by the rental company.

Customers are ticked at what seems like yet another charge, like fees for checked baggage. After a Florida Dollar Rent a Car added $30 in administrative fees to a bill for $2.74 in tolls, Roxanna Usher of Redwood Valley, Calif., vented her spleen on the entire state. “I’m angry beyond belief and can’t even imagine coming back to your state,” she wrote in a Jan. 13 complaint to Florida’s attorney general. “Talk about a corrupt state! It’s disgusting what you’re doing to tourists—the mainstay of your economy.”

Read it.

Artificial flavours are more complex and interesting than first appears. Chris Baraniuk discovers a world of sensory trickery – and a curious myth about fake banana.

Check it out.

What’s next? A “full-scale” house. The castle is large enough to walk around in, but it seems that the builder has bigger plans. Also the next building will likely be built someplace warmer. Why warmer? Concrete sets at only so quick a pace — if you can help it cure, you can probably build more quickly.

Read it.

A new survey from human-resources services firm Aon Hewitt found that companies are spending a record share of their payroll on performance-based bonuses, signaling a shift away from longer-term salary increases.

We are all CEOs now.

Read it.

This is a very odd piece that will tell you more than you ever really wanted to know about Switzerland.

If I had sufficient spare time and a wholly warped sense of priorities, I think I could trace the boundaries of the wars of religion by driving around and listening to regional radio. As far as I can tell, Catholic cantons really go for snare drum backbeats and 2/4 time – if Mumford and Sons aren’t huge in Vaud, they are really missing an opportunity. Protestant cantons are much more into generic AOR. Everywhere in Switzerland gets a signal for the Europop collossus that is RTL2. However, the country does not seem to have any local attempts at hip-hop, for which I greatly respect them.

All in all, though, it’s a fascinating country, and if I hadn’t been born American I wouldn’t have minded terribly much being Swiss.

Read it.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Democrats.

Charles Krauthammer finds that his bullshit detector has gone off.

Democrats used to wax indignant about having one’s patriotism questioned. Now they throw around the charge with abandon, tossing it at corporations that refuse to do the economically patriotic thing of paying the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

Odder still because Democrats routinely ridicule the very notion of corporations as persons. When Mitt Romney suggested that corporations were people in 2011, Democrats mocked him right through Election Day. In the Hobby Lobby case, they challenged the very idea that corporations can have religious convictions. Now, however, Democrats are demanding that corporations exercise a patriotic conscience. Which is it?

Read it.

“We can’t have them in the cafeteria for sale, period,” said Scott Teaman, food services director with Sodexo Inc., the district’s contracted food provider. “The guidelines for snacks are very strict, and there is no wiggle room.”

Remind me when the Federal government was granted authority to dictate what meals are served in local schools. Oh, yeah, they take Federal subsidies so they have to dance to the Federal tune. And of course no one is crazy enough to suggest that they not take money from the Federal government — after all, it’s Free Government Money!

“The [school] district has received at least 100 calls and emails from Illinois, Hawaii, Minnesota, New York, Montana and Canada from people who want to taste or have something to say about” the cookie, according to yesterday’s Telegram.

The district is now trying to figure out the logistics of shipping the cookies around the country, but won’t begin baking until after Labor Day. They’re also thinking about making the cookie smaller, so that it contains less calories, and can be reintroduced at the school.

Read it.

To all the whiners about learning cursive: It could be worse.

Read it.

I wonder what it’s like to live in a country with a real President? We haven’t had one for a while.

Read it.

Maybe that’s why they talk so funny.

Read it.

According to an alarming “climate change” article in yesterday’s NY Times, “Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points, the report found, and that could grow much worse if emissions continue unchecked.”

But in the same NY Times, there was the article about how there’s so much grain in North Dakota that there are no train cars available to transport it.

And in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

China’s grain cupboard is overflowing.

As the harvest looms next month, the country is on track for an 11th year of bumper grain crops. But production is too much, even for the world’s most populous nation, with warehouses bursting at the seams and posing a dilemma for policy makers.

So it seems that the contention that there is an alarming lack of grain production is completely bogus. The exact opposite seems to be happening. What else can’t be trusted in “climate change” reports?

Read it.

Many of Her Majesty’s shopping habits are a matter of public record, thanks to the Royal Warrant Holders Association, a prestigious group of 800 or so companies selected as official suppliers to the Royal Household.

If you could afford the best of everything, from whom would you buy it?

Read it.

Fifty percent of marriages are still ending in divorce, and women continue to be the gender that initiates those endings. In the past, their reasons for leaving most often had to do with infidelity, neglect, or abuse. Now they’re dumping men who are faithful, attentive, and respectful, the very men they said they have always wanted. Why would women who have accomplished the female dream suddenly not be satisfied with it? Why are they leaving these ideal guys, and for what reasons?

I am currently dealing with several of these great husbands. They are, across the board, respectful, quality, caring, devoted, cherishing, authentic, and supportive guys whose wives have left them for a different kind of man. These once-beloved men make a living, love their kids, help with chores, support aging parents, and support their mate’s desires and interests. They believe they’ve done everything right. They are devastated, confused, disoriented, and heartsick. In a tragic way, they startlingly resemble the disheartened women of the past who were left behind by men who “just wanted something new.”

You may think that these women are ruthless and inconsiderate. Those I know are far from that. More often, they still love their husbands as much as they ever did, but in a different way. They tell me how wonderful their men are and how much they respect them. They just don’t want to be married to them anymore.

Check it out.

From the point of view of the people providing the maps, of course. Your mileage may differ, depending upon your ideological bent.

The Other McCain is on the case.

Cathy Brennan’s Twitter account @GIDWatch got suspended Tuesday because Brennan, a radical lesbian feminist, began “naming names” of those who had signed a petition to end the women-only policy of the Michigan Womyn’s Festival. Transgender activists have been attempting to take over feminist events and organizations, claiming that the fact that they were born with penises and XY chromosomes should not prevent them from being accepted as “lesbian feminists” even if they have not undergone surgery.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

I remember Zumwalt. He was all hip & trendy and put the Navy into a crack that it took about ten years to get out of.

Let’s hope the ship does better.

Read it. And ponder the picture.

So Burger King is going to acquire the Canadian Tim Horton’s donut chain, in yet another tax inversion that causes so much cranial-rectal inversions among liberals. I sure hope we get a donut Whopper cheeseburger out of this merger. With bacon. That would be more awesome than a deep-fried Twinkie. (Lo and behold, turns out the genera already exist.)

The Other McCain jerks back the curtain.

There seems to be some confusion about President Obama’s “foreign policy.” At times, it has been alleged that he actually has a policy, but these allegations have never been substantiated.

Read it.

The storm of controversy erupted when the Army Corps of Engineers, which managed the land where the bones had been found, learned of the radiocarbon date. The corps immediately claimed authority—officials there would make all decisions related to handling and access—and demanded that all scientific study cease. Floyd Johnson protested, saying that as county coroner he believed he had legal jurisdiction. The dispute escalated, and the bones were sealed in an evidence locker at the sheriff’s office pending a resolution.

“You can count on your fingers the number of ancient, well-preserved skeletons there are” in North America, he told me, remembering his excitement at first hearing from Chatters. Owsley and Dennis Stanford, at that time chairman of the Smithsonian’s anthropology department, decided to pull together a team to study the bones. But corps attorneys showed that federal law did, in fact, give them jurisdiction over the remains. So the corps seized the bones and locked them up at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, often called Battelle for the organization that operates the lab.

Your tax dollars at work.

Owsley and his group were eventually forced to litigate not just against the corps, but also the Department of the Army, the Department of the Interior and a number of individual government officials. As scientists on modest salaries, they could not begin to afford the astronomical legal bills. Schneider and Barran agreed to work for free, with the faint hope that they might, someday, recover their fees. In order to do that they would have to win the case and prove the government had acted in “bad faith”—a nearly impossible hurdle. The lawsuit dragged on for years. “We never expected them to fight so hard,” Owsley says. Schneider says he once counted 93 government attorneys directly involved in the case or cc’ed on documents.

And working hard.

I asked Schneider why the corps so adamantly resisted the scientists. He speculated that the corps was involved in tense negotiations with the tribes over a number of thorny issues, including salmon fishing rights along the Columbia River, the tribes’ demand that the corps remove dams and the ongoing, hundred-billion-dollar cleanup of the vastly polluted Hanford nuclear site. Schneider says that a corps archaeologist told him “they weren’t going to let a bag of old bones get in the way of resolving other issues with the tribes.”

It’s like something out of a bad spy novel.

During the trial, the presiding magistrate judge, John Jelderks, had noted for the record that the corps on multiple occasions misled or deceived the court. He found that the government had indeed acted in “bad faith” and awarded attorney’s fees of $2,379,000 to Schneider and his team.

“At the bare minimum,” Schneider told me, “this lawsuit cost the taxpayers $5 million.”

And these fools want to be in charge of your health care.

Read it.

But of course Harry Reid assures us that there aren’t many billionaires in the Democrat party. I think Harry needs to read something other than Democrat talking points for a change.

Read it.

Thank God for all those strict gun control laws, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

(None of the shootings were by white police, which is why they didn’t make the evening news.)

Read it.

A legal challenge involving congressional districts devised by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature offers a perfect illustration of why politicians should not be in control of drawing their own legislative districts.

Note that such complaints only arise when it’s Republicans who are allegedly loading the dice — the constant attempts by Democrats to gerrymander themselves into permanent power are perennially overlooked. (And this is the Wall Street Journal — can you imagine what it’s like at the New York Times?)

John Hinderaker turns over a rock.

What is the point of being in power if you can’t help your friends and screw your enemies? That is the Democratic philosophy. Thus, the Democrats hand out massive tax breaks, subsidies and mandates to their “green energy” supporters like Tom Steyer, who in turn pledge tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to help the Democrats maintain control of Congress. So they can continue to subsidize the businesses that make Steyer a billionaire. Same thing with Wall Street, which supports the Democratic Party almost monolithically.

And, of course, while both parties use cash to “buy control of Congress”–i.e., try to persuade voters by putting ads on television–the Democrats always have more money to “buy control of Congress” than the Republicans.

Read it.

Yet there is one arena in which misleading the public not only is abided but is the norm: politics. In fact, much of what constitutes political discourse in this country is now built on a foundation of dishonesty. One of the most effective — and perfectly legal — ways to win votes and influence public policy these days is to pour millions of dollars into deception-based campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion.

And of course they cite an instance of Republican misfeasance, as if there weren’t ten times as many Democrat goings-on, starting with the Obama administration.

Read it.

BLUF: Government regulations.

LA’s deep-rooted culture of NIMBYism makes matters worse. If developers could build more high-rise or high-density housing, rents would fall. But thanks to restrictive zoning laws, they find this extremely hard.

The zoning code hasn’t changed much since the 1940s. More than 78% of the city’s residential land is currently zoned for single-family dwellings, according to the LA Department of City Planning. By comparison, only 24% of San Francisco and 25% of New York City is zoned exclusively for one- and two-family homes.

Some of California’s green rules drive up rents–and hurt the environment, too. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970, allows almost anyone to sue to block any development, and is used by the slow-growth lobby to thwart vertical expansion. “The irony is that CEQA is now preventing us from building high-rises near public transit, which would improve the environmental quality by allowing people to walk more and not use their cars,” says Richard Green of the University of Southern California.

Developers seeking to build in LA today find that they have to scale back their projects to get them built at all. Construction began on Ponte Vista, a cluster of 676 homes near the Port of LA, earlier this year. The original plans called for three times as many units, but the project was cut back after neighbours protested about the extra traffic it would bring.

In February a judge struck down what he called a “fatally flawed” plan to build taller, denser buildings in some parts of Hollywood, after community groups sued under CEQA, complaining that the plan would “Manhattanise” Hollywood.

Veronique de Rugy blows the whistle.

In the little time she’s been in Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made a name for herself as a populist who talks tough about Wall Street and other large corporations. But is she going to do more than just talk about it?

Recently, Warren confirmed that she is renewing her support for the Export-Import Bank — an agency that lends money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods and services. This may sound good on paper; however, Warren’s endorsement of the Ex-Im Bank is inconsistent with her otherwise populist stand.

The biggest Ex-Im Bank beneficiaries are giant corporations like Boeing, General Electric, Caterpillar and their very wealthy foreign buyers. These companies don’t need the bank, but they love it. It increases their profits and transfers onto taxpayers the risk that the companies should be shouldering since they pocket the benefits.

Read it.

A lot of fast-food joints have been doing this effectively for years — what is an Egg McMuffin but a breakfast cheeseburger, only with ham or sausage, plus an egg? — but BK has decided to come out of the closet.

Read it.

More leftist drivel from Time magazine, which has fallen on hard times, intellectually speaking.

Sorry, Virginia, but there is no Santa Claus, and (Joseph Blasi’s triumphalist vaporings to the contrary notwithstanding) the rich haven’t been converted to your ‘progressive’ fantasy.

What they have discovered is that mouthing the correct leftist clichés and devoting a minimal amount of money and posturing allows them entry to the Upper Crust and the levers of power.

Read it.

Over the years, I’ve met with several foreign speaking partners. Through conversation, I learn their language — Spanish, Korean, Japanese — and they learn mine — English. Many of them first got serious about their study of that more-or-less-international tongue with the goal of completely eliminating their native accent which, while demonstrably possible, takes so much additional effort as an adult that I’ve always advised them to just spend that time learning another language (or two) instead. Many, of course, come to that conclusion themselves, realizing that English speakers all over the world have created a legitimate culture of speaking English in all kinds of different ways, with all kinds of different accents, whether or not they learned the language from childhood. But it still makes one wonder: how many different accents do people speak it in? And what do they all sound like? Wonder no longer, for we have The Speech Accent Archive, created by Steven H. Weinberger of George Mason University’s Linguistics department, who introduces it in the video above.

Read it.

The history of telecommunications is a long story of progressives and populists demanding “public interest” regulations that produce and protect monopolies, followed by progressive and populist demands for regulations to fix the problems that their earlier regulations created. At each step, activists were coached and coaxed by the political and business interests in question.

…

Progressives today are traveling the well-worn policy path of trying to fix old mistakes by making new ones. They demand competition while promoting municipal public utility broadband systems. “Open access creates competition,” they claim, never minding that the unbundling requirements that force providers to lease their systems to competitors only create “competition” by turning an existing provider into a de facto monopoly. The goals of the modern net neutrality movement—which in effect seeks to prevent Internet Service Providers from providing anything but lowest-common-denominator service—might as well adopt the same early slogan of monopoly-era AT&T: “One System, One Policy, Universal Service.”

Read it.

In Baldwin County, Alabama, an award-winning plan to provide guidance for private-sector developers was spiked—it was, constituents complained, part of a United Nations plot to end property rights, impose communism and force locals onto rail cars heading to secret camps. When the blueprint was voted down, residents cheered and sang “God Bless America.” Every member of the zoning commission resigned in disgust.

The whole concept of ‘zoning’ is fascist, and people who sit on zoning boards are fascists in their hearts, if not openly. Baldwin County dodged a bullet there; not every zoning commission is lucky enough to have members who conveniently quit when their plans are thwarted. Note the tone of this Voice of the Crust: The plan was award-winning (what award? awarded by whom? bet: some group of ‘urban planners’, i.e. closet fascists), so the rubes ought to shut up and listen to their betters.

A federal proposal that would have paid physicians for time spent discussing elderly patients’ medical and personal priorities in their final days of life was shelved.

What business is it of the federal government to pay physicians for elderly medical care? Note the assumption that every old person is on the government dole, and if the government doesn’t pay for it, it won’t happen.

Some conservatives, led by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, slammed the idea as creating “death panels” of bureaucrats to decide who would live and who would die.

If the government pays for your old-age health care, it gets to make the decisions about what care you get. And, as we have seen with the National Health Service in Britain, eventually that comes down to bureaucrats deciding that person X doesn’t get treatment because it would be a waste of government money. That sure sounds like a ‘death panel’ to me. I see no indication that the time spent discussing ‘medical and personal priorities’ would be spent with the patient.

With the rejection of the plan, which had been supported by geriatricians, oncologists and advocates for senior citizens, the aged in the United States now only hear their options for resuscitation, pain control and religious support if their doctors provide the counseling for free.

Again the assumption that if the government doesn’t pay for something, it won’t get done. (Of course the plan would have been supported by the people who would be getting paid taxpayer dollars for their services, and just who elected these ‘advocates for senior citizens’? Typically ‘advocates for’ are people whose goal in life is to get government funding for their target group, and they’re almost always self-appointed.)

In 2008, no one in America caught measles and 13,278 people contracted whooping cough. By 2013, measles infected at least 276 people in the U.S. and there were more than 24,000 cases of whooping cough. Medical experts attribute this trend to declining numbers of people being vaccinated, in large part fueled by a belief that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are hiding the dangers of immunizations to protect profits, even though earnings in this niche are so comparatively small that six out of seven companies have dropped out of the business in the past 35 years. Now, because of this false belief advanced by scientific frauds and celebrities, vaccine-preventable diseases that were once on the brink of extinction are roaring back.

I wouldn’t say that 276 cases of measles or another 7000 cases of whooping cough, in a population of 350 million, qualify as ‘roaring back’. That this is a ‘false belief’ is supported neither by evidence nor argument; it is just assumed.

Further fisking of this expression of the Crustian Narrative is left for the reader. Go ahead, it’s good exercise. (Truth in Advertising would require them to change the name to Newsweak.)

Read it.

Simple decency and respect for Foley’s horrified parents should have been enough to sober him. If that didn’t do it, the realization that the Islamic State had declared war on America in the most gruesome fashion imaginable should have sounded a call of duty in his head.

Instead, Obama continued with his vacation and was photographed looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Suddenly, that megawatt smile that often charmed voters wasn’t so charming. It was vacuous.

He looked like an empty-headed frat boy, numb to the world.

Maybe that’s not just an appearance. Maybe it’s the truth. Maybe that’s all there is.

Theodore Dalrymple lays down some inconvenient truth.

Strangely enough, my experience of being a foreign correspondent, if that is what it was, has never caused me to doubt the veracity of what I read in the newspapers, which I swallow as a boa constrictor swallows a goat.

However, I have followed riots around the world vicariously ever since, and it seems to me that the principal precondition of such events in the modern world is clement weather. The association is much stronger than with, say, injustice, partly because there is complete agreement as to what constitutes clement weather, whereas what constitutes justice has been in dispute since at least the time of Plato. We all recognize good rioting weather when we see it, but injustice—well, we could go on arguing about it for days. Everyone can contain his anger in the rain.

…

But to hate injustice is not necessarily to love justice; and one might have supposed that the first duty of those who claim to hate injustice was themselves to act justly. Virtually by definition, those who riot violently (as did a small number of the protesters) do not act justly, for almost always they do damage, sometimes much damage, to the interests of those who have not caused the injustice against which they supposedly protest, and therefore commit an injustice against those who are unknown to them. Such is the case of the crimes against property, or rather, as my friend the economist Peter Bauer used to insist, against the owners of property, in Ferguson (property cannot suffer, but its owners can). Two injustices do not make righteousness.

Read it.

On the northern edge of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard in Maine, past the security checkpoint and high-tech stations for refurbishing nuclear submarines, is a derelict warehouse that once doubled as a sawmill. Building 129’s corrugated metal exterior is rusted and overgrown with bursts of ivy. Broken glass in some of the windows has been replaced with clear plastic. Inside, it takes a moment to adjust to the cavernous silence and dim orange lighting, but one immediately senses the hulking presence of the hangar’s inhabitant: a vessel called Ghost.

Read it.

Surgeons in Beijing, China, have successfully implanted an artificial, 3D-printed vertebra replacement in a young boy with bone cancer. They say it is the first time such a procedure has ever been done.

Read it.

The mask comes off.

Read it.

Below is the checklist of rationality habits we have been using in the minicamps’ opening session.  It was co-written by Eliezer, myself, and a number of others at CFAR.  As mentioned below, the goal is not to assess how “rational” you are, but, rather, to develop a personal shopping list of habits to consider developing.  We generated it by asking ourselves, not what rationality content it’s useful to understand, but what rationality-related actions (or thinking habits) it’s useful to actually do.