The Other McCain looks deep into some pretty ugly places.

One thing you notice if you pay close attention to the autobiographical details that feminists let slip as they’re telling their narratives (because “the personal is political,” y’know, and feminism enthrones extreme subjectivity as “the authority of experience”) is that many of these women have psychological damage they channel into political belief because they can’t come to grips with it any other way.

Her misfortunes can never be chalked up to mere bad luck, nor can the source of her hurt feelings be accepted as “the way of the world.” Still less can any feminist look at her problems and ask to what extent she is responsible for her own failures and unhappiness. Instead, her ideology offers her ready-made rationalization that seem to explain her problems: Whatever is wrong with her life, somehow it can be blamed on men and the patriarchal system of male domination. In any other context, we recognize this as blame-shifting and scapegoating, but when women explain their personal miseries by yelping that they are victims of oppression by the patriarchy, we dignify their rationalization by calling it a political philosophy.

Steve Sailer looks at some history.

In the optimistic days after WWII, big cities built giant urban housing projects to accommodate the poor. For example, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was designed by Yamasaki, architect of the World Trade Center, on the most advanced principles of modernism. Obviously, taking poor blacks out of their lead paint-encrusted tenements and raising them in advanced Bauhaus designs would prove the bigots wrong.

Yeah, that worked great, didn’t it?

Poor blacks are the biggest Hot Potato in modern America. Liberal white urbanites realize today that their ancestors made a terrible mistake in the Postwar era by ceding much of the most valuable urban land in America to poor blacks. So they are offloading poor blacks on the less powerful, such as residents of second rate suburbs and of undistinguished small towns. But for this process, in which trillions of dollars of real estate values are at stake, to proceed smoothly without complaints from the less well connected about what is coming their way, it’s important to Control Discourse, to periodically demonize various minor league white people for engaging in pattern recognition.

If you think intelligently, while everybody else had had crimestop pounded into their heads so all thought shuts down when the topic of race comes up, you can make a lot of money in real estate.

Read it.

Looters in Ferguson, Missouri, were “met with little police resistance” as business owners say they “were forced to protect their businesses with their own guns” on Friday.

A reporter from Fox2Now even said “police cars were seen driving past some of the stores being looted and did not respond.”

Makes you wonder where all that tax money is going. If the police are being militarized, it’s hard to figure out what military they’re emulating.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine gives a lawyer’s  perspective.

The Perry indictment also fits a pattern of harassment via the legal process of prominent Republican governors: Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and now Perry.

What do these four have in common? Why, they all are (or were) potentially viable candidates for the national office.

Invocation of the legal process against Christie may well be warranted. (So too with Bob McDonnell, whom I didn’t include in my list because, although once vaguely mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, his prospects never approached those of the other four). In the cases of Palin, Walker, and Perry, the charges seem plainly to have been ginned up in the hope of derailing the governors’ prospects for national office.

This sort of thing is standard operating procedure in countries like Russia and China. Now it is becoming part of the Democrats’ playbook.

Read it.

It is only logical that it is a bad thing to have a state official whose job is to investigate corruption charged with drunk driving. Yet because she is a Democrat and the governor is a Republican, Lehmberg refused to resign for strictly partisan reasons. The governor then exercised his prerogative in an effort to force Lehmberg to do the right thing — and Democrats then decided that the governor’s exercise of lawful authority was a crime.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

In the prestige press, Saturday has seen much clucking with distaste over Ferguson police releasing more information to the public than was optimal for the national media’s Narrative Maintenance purposes.

Read it.

The Department of Justice compelled a Dearborn, Michigan, high school district to hire more translators and teachers to accommodate Arab students who are not proficient in English.

According to USA Today, the “31-page agreement with the Department of Justice” calls for the Crestwood School District, which is in an area with “a growing Arab-American population,” to “‘take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal and meaningful participation by’ students with limited English skills.” USA Today noted that the agreement “doesn’t specify Arabic, but given that the agreement centered around complaints from Arab-Americans, it will probably include that.”

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reportedly “ruled that the Crestwood district had violated federal civil rights laws” last year. The settlement, which was reportedly released in English and Arabic, “requires the district to provide school documents in both English and foreign languages such as Arabic and to promote a more diverse staff” and that all “teachers must be rated on how effectively they administer” various diversity programs.

Steve Sailer does the math.

It’s quite a list.

Looking at this list, what stands out is how idiotic most of them are. Veteran investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein wonders if the Dominique Strauss-Kahn brouhaha wasn’t engineered by Sarkozy’s intelligence service to cripple his archrival, which would at least be a classy conspiracy. But most of these are just moronic … and yet the national media fell for them.

Read it.

How’s that Global Warming coming along?

Waterfall bathroom faucet.

iPhone laser pointer. I am not making this up.

Floppy tube garlic peeler. Can double as an enhanced interrogation device in a pinch. (That’s not on her copy, of course.)

Pile of Poop Emoji Mask. You know who you are.

Chocolate Lego Blocks.

Best Butt Exercises for Women (Android app).

Ron Radosh looks behind the curtain.

Hillary Clinton’s recent Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg has produced a storm, both by comments from the usual pundits as well as among the ranks of the left-wing of the already very liberal/left Democratic Party. Many conservatives have responded by calling attention to Hillary’s obvious failures, to write off what she has had to say as of no consequence except for revealing her hypocrisy. No one put it better than Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. He dubs her arguments as nothing but her “self re-invention as a hawk,” made because she “belatedly needs to disavow the consequences of the policies she once advocated,” and possibly because “she believes in whatever she says, at least at the time she’s saying it.”

I fully understand Stephens’ reaction to what Hillary Clinton said in the interview, but I think he neglects to take into consideration evidence that indicates she, while serving as his secretary of State, privately fought him tooth and nail, and presented advice that Obama rejected.

Read it. And watch the video.

When it comes to media management, Mudallal knows what she is talking about. It’s her job. In the video she explains a key element of Hamas’s media strategy: Hamas deported foreign journalists who filmed Hamas missile launches. I believe that among the film crews Hamas had no trouble with were those from CNN, FOX News et al. Apparently having steered clear of Hamas missile launches, they’re still reporting live from Gaza.

Gavin McInnes blows the whistle.

Today’s youth are sitting on the couch in the basement because they can’t find work in their field. “Gender and Film” is a degree that cost them $60k to get but nobody cares if Star Wars is sexist. They avoid blue-collar work because their parents always hired illegals for those tasks and it instilled within them a kind of 18th-century classism. Menial labor isn’t beneath anyone. It builds character, gets you in shape, and makes you a successful entrepreneur.

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

Economic theory suggests that the ultimate goal of any monopolist would be “perfect price discrimination” in which each customer is charged the maximum they would possibly pay. To ensure they know exactly how much that is, student by student, colleges require parents of applicants to perform a financial colonoscopy upon themselves via the federal FAFSA form, accompanied by signed 1040 forms. And many require the even more intrusive CSS document.

Of course, colleges aren’t a monopoly, but they appear to be a pretty successful cartel, at least as far as I can tell from noticing their Augusta National-level landscaping budgets. It’s been decades since I’ve seen a college campus that looked as dried out as Pinehurst No. 2 at the U.S. Open last June.

Read it.

The topic in itself is fairly interesting, in a grim sort of way, but Mr. Joshi fastidiously avoids the most obvious explanation for the Islamic practice of beheading infidels: it is permitted (and mandated) by the Koran, the hadith, and the sira. Mentioning that aspect of the issue presumably borders on “Islamophobia”, and we can’t have that, can we? Not under the banner of a respected outlet such as The Telegraph!

Read it.

By hook or by crook, they will.

Read it.

I have a question: Why are teachers’ unions always run by obese women?

Maybe teachers union presidents who live in luxurious glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at the one percent. Chicago Teachers Union boss and generally unpleasant person Karen Lewis recently criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel, calling him a corporate tool and “Mayor 1%.” (She has previously joked about killing rich people.)

Such populist screed is undoubtedly groundwork for an eventual mayoral run. It is also hypocritical. Lewis isn’t nearly as wealthy as Emanuel, but she’s no vagrant either. Her two union salaries bring her total compensation north of $200,000 a year, only about $15,000 less than the mayor’s salary. She owns three homes and vacations in Hawaii every year. She doesn’t quite crack the one percent, but her earnings put her in the top five percent of all Americans, according to the Chicago Sun-Times….

John C. Wright lays out some inconvenient truth.

Originally the word had a very specific meaning. It was coined by Mussolini, a socialist, to describe how his heresy of socialism differed from orthodox Marxist socialism.

The word itself comes from the fasci which is the Roman symbol of a magistrate called a Lictor, that is, the authority of the state to punish dissent and nonconformity. The fasci is a bundle of rods surrounding an ax. You can see it in the architectural decorations of statehouses and courts of law. The bundle of rods represents the truism that any one stick can be broken in isolation, but when gathered together, cannot be broken. If put into words, it is a symbol of the motto that unity is strength.

The two main differences of doctrine are, first, that Mussolini socialism operates factories and large businesses as public utilities, where the owners are allowed to keep their businesses in name only, but in fact are reduced to mere managers under direct state control, or quartermasters. This is distinct from Marxism in that it does not consider businessmen and workingmen to be two separate species of mankind, as Marxism does, locked in a Darwinian struggle to the death for racial survival.

The second difference and related to the first is that Mussolini considered the nation, that is, a racial and cultural group sharing a language, to be the fundamental collective to which the individual was to be subordinated, and the state to be the apotheosis of the collective Will. This is distinguished from Marxism who selected the rather more abstract (and irrational) group of persons engaged in categories of economic activity to be the fundamental collective.

The short answer is that a Fascist is a Nationalist Socialist whereas a Marxist is an International Socialist.

Mike Munger, a Real Economist, uncovers a rock.

It may have come as a shock to the parents of these liberal students that they had learned everything they needed to know…in high school! Having memorized a kind of secular leftist catechism, they were free to wander around the quads of Duke and enjoy themselves.

Once we realize that the problem with our educational system is that we’re short-changing students on the left, denying them an education just because they happen to agree with the professor, then we have a path forward.

Read it.

Grunlan says surgeons would heat a chunk of the polymer in salt water until it becomes pliable, then mold it into the exact shape of the missing bone section. Once in place, the polymer would cool and stiffen. “After the foam is in place, bone cells come in and replace the foam, which is absorbed into the body and naturally excreted,” said Grunlan.

In lab experiments, she and her colleagues coated the PCL with another biodegradable polymer, called polydopamine, that is known to stimulate bone growth. They seeded the polymers with human bone cells, and after a few days saw that the cells were not only multiplying, but producing important bone-forming proteins.

Steve Sailer shows us the man behind the curtain.

Mexico in the 20th Century was a good example of corporatism under the PRI or Institutionalized Revolutionary Party that emerged over the course of the 1920s when the caudillos got tired of getting shot by each other and announced rules under which every organized power group in society would get a payout if they just waited their turn. Mexico had kind of a left-of-center non-charismatic fascism.

…

This discussion of corporatism reminds me of something I’ve never seen mentioned: here in America we are supposed to be becoming more multicultural and not so ethnocentric, more sensitive to the diversity of cultural traditions that the changing face of America brings to the national conversation, etc etc. There are now 35 million people of Mexican background in the United States. But how often do you read in the press a discussion of the political ideologies that Mexicans bring with them from Mexico?

Not very often. I read a lot in the media about political ideologies in Israel and Britain, and there’s some coverage of France, but even French ideological concepts, despite their immense fame, are hard for Americans to grapple with. Mexico elicits very little interest, despite being a country of 120 million with a 1,950 mile border with the U.S.

Mark Steyn is on the case.

Who is Yasmina Haifi? She’s an official at the Dutch Ministry of Justice who serves as project leader at the Netherlands’ National Cyber Security Center. And she thinks Isis is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad.

You can’t make this stuff up.

She could be right. On the other hand, maybe Yasmina Haifi is a Zionist plot to make Islam look bad – or at any rate deranged. Presumably the many Dutch Muslims out on the streets holding pro-Isis demonstrations would disagree with her – because they surely wouldn’t be demonstrating in favor of a Zionist front group, would they? Unless, of course, they’re also in on the Zionist plot…

Look at Yasmina Haifi in the photograph at right – she’s not a burqa-wreathed crone, but a modern western career woman in a foxy red jacket with just a hint of cleavage. And yet she cannot bear the truth about her religion and what is done in its name. So she takes refuge in the laziest conspiracy of all. In the Netherlands, an “extremist” Muslim supports Isis because it’s chopping the heads off infidels, but a “moderate” Muslim opposes Isis because it’s a Zionist front group.

Steve Sailer continues his chronicle of those attempting to pass as non-white.

Of course, not everyone is race-obsessed:

“Then there are people who don’t want to rock the boat, who are like, ‘I’m fine; I consider myself American,’” he said.

That attitude is unacceptable. It risks depriving one’s fellow MENAs of the cash benefits that come from being non-white. When Benjamins are at stake, it is no time to be noble.

…

One thing about MENA: the Middle East includes Jews and Iranians, two of the highest-income ethnic groups in the U.S. Does that matter? Perhaps not. Victimhood isn’t what it used to be. Why shouldn’t the most prosperous among us get their slice of government preferment? I am still waiting for us Norwegian-Americans to get a little special consideration.

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

As all the talk in the media about the benefits of White Privilege reaches a crescendo, various groups of white people are acting as if they don’t actually believe it. Instead, they are looking for ways to stop being white in the eyes of the government.

I guess all that White Privilege isn’t worth as much as it used to be.

Having white people call you white is the most insidious kind of racism.

Read it.

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

Read it.

The report comes as the Department of Education has made it clear that illegal immigrant students are “entitled to” public eduction and the southern border is in crisis with tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally — many of whom are later placed with a sponsor in the U.S. as they await immigration hearings.

Read it.

Stealing from non-Muslims is not contrary to the Koran. Go ahead, look it up.

Read it.

Electoral democracy shorn of constructive leadership in an environment of degraded institutions and appalling ethical standards is a recipe for unaccountable government, unimaginable levels of corruption and the exacerbation of conflict and divisions.

Iraq? Sounds like the Obamanation to me.

Read it.

The specificity of CRISPR-based immunity in recognizing and destroying invading viruses is not just useful for bacteria. Creative applications of this primitive yet elegant defense system have emerged in disciplines as diverse as industry, basic research, and medicine.

Mark Steyn jerks back the curtain.

Consider, for example, the photograph above. It’s a Tweet from Syria reprinted in The Australian, and neatly sums up the dead end of diversity:

Khaled Sharrouf’s son, a child raised in the suburbs of Sydney, struggles with both arms to hold up the decapitated head of a slain Syrian soldier.

He is a seven-year old boy, Australian born and bred. But he’s proudly holding up the latest severed head in his dad’s collection. “Diversity is our strength”, as they say. A family that raises their seven-year-old to participate in the decapitation celebrations certainly adds to the diversity of the Sydney suburbs. Whether it adds to their “strength” is another matter.

Read it.

Portland’s first light-rail line is only 28 years old, but it is already wearing out. Moreover, the most worn-out part happens to be a segment that all of Portland’s light-rail lines use. Shutting down this segment means shutting down the entire system.

TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, planned to have shuttle buses move passengers around the work, but the plan apparently didn’t work very well. To make matters worse, Portland temperatures rose above 90 degrees, leading TriMet to issue slow orders for all of its trains to avoid damage to wires or derailments due to kinks in the tracks. Funny; buses don’t have to slow down when the mercury rises.

Read it.

This man can pick up a 70-pound lump of metal like it’s bag of groceries. But it’s not because he’s Iron Man—he just happens to be wearing a robotic suit that grants him immense strength.

Read it.

It looks male from here. But what do I know?

Read it.

Jeez, that’s all we need, sticky bioengineers….

Read it.

“Investing in Texas was an easy decision,” said CEO Iver Mossberg. “It’s a state that is not only committed to economic growth but also honors and respects the Second Amendment and the firearm freedoms it guarantees for our customers.”

Come on down!

Read it.

No doubt Jesse Jackson is already there.

Read it.

Man, I’m telling you, if someone who is both a government employee and a union member can be fired, who is safe?

Read it.

The clash has raised deep concerns at home and abroad about Iraq’s teetering stability. Ominously, Maliki reminded the country in a televised address Monday of his position as head of the armed forces and assured soldiers that the “error” will be rectified.

People keep forgetting that in Muslim countries democracy is just a slogan, not a reality.

Read it.

Headlines have focused on the atrocities committed by ISIS on the northern Iraqi front. The leading stories seem almost expressly written by the Onion to make fun of political correctness. Crucified by the Caliphate monsters: Iraq descends into apocalypse as Islamic State fanatics seize towns and tell terrified Yazidi ‘Become Muslims by noon today… or we kill all of you’. Then there’s Islamic militants ‘buried alive Yazidi women and children in attack that killed 500?. Try topping: Anglican Vicar of Baghdad: ‘Child I baptized cut in half by ISIS’.

How about this lead paragraph? “BAGHDAD (AP) — Hundreds of women from the Yazidi religious minority have been taken captive by Sunni militants with “vicious plans,” an Iraqi official said Friday, further underscoring the dire plight of Iraq’s minorities at the hands of the Islamic State group.” Vicious plans is the 21st century journalistic equivalent of the Victorian phrase, “a fate worse than death”.

…

The Middle Eastern crisis is no longer a regional crisis. It has now become part of a global crisis, a link in a great chain of blunders engineered by the Great Golfer, whose most profound utterance is now, ‘who me?’ That explosive sequence includes but is not limited to the tensions in Eastern Europe, the continuing crisis in Southwest Asia and the ever-growing danger in the East as the Chinese dragon stirs. That clamor can now be heard even in Western streets, yet it beats like noiseless rain upon the glazed glass panes of the White House. The most amazing sight is not the catastrophe itself but the seeming paralysis of the Western institutions. Prominent newspapers may issue warnings, former high military officers might wring their hands, congressmen even threaten impeachment, yet but only momentary awareness flits across the dull countenances of the bovine LIVs as they await their next dose of spectacle and reality TV.

Rich Lowry shows the man behind the curtain.

“You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he told crowds during his re-election campaign. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”

Anyone can end a war by surrendering. The fact that you declare victory and go home doesn’t mean that you won, despite ‘progressive’ attempts to alter the nature of reality by loudly exclaiming ‘LALALALALALALALALA’ and putting their hands over their ears.

J. D. Tuccille attempts to be persuasive.

Are libertarians just Ayn Rand-obsessed pot smokers who want to hide their money from the tax man?

Yeah, pretty much — at least the ones who write for tReason magazine. When our civilization is faced with an existential threat from a billion people whose totalitarian ideology was crafted in the 7th century by a mass-murdering brigand, worrying about whether smoking pot is legal is a perspective problem that makes such ‘libertarians’ irrelevant. If ‘libertarian’ means anything, it means a devotion to liberty, and worrying about what people can smoke here rather than spending full time about how basic liberty is being suppressed there (and here as soon as they can make it happen) is impossible to characterize as other than juvenile.

Jim Goad lays out some inconvenient truth.

If you start with the premise that people are equal, then disparities in income and intelligence between groups will be blamed on the phantom demon known as “injustice,” and all your political energies will be spent trying to, as the tiresome saying goes, “level the playing field.”

But if you start with the premise that they aren’t equal, nearly all inequalities can be explained by, well, inequality—in other words, the idea that the playing field started out level, and inequalities began emerging when certain groups and individuals proved more adept than others. You will therefore view any attempt to “level the playing field” as artificial and essentially contradictory—to achieve equal results, one must instead tilt the playing field so that all the players appear to be the same height. The chief goal of “diversity” is, ironically, to make everyone the same.

Read it.

Riots and looting in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer represent just the latest spate of race-based mass violence to break out in President Obama’s post-racial America. When Obama was elected in 2008, many Americans hoped that racial conflict in the country would calm. Instead, precisely the reverse seems to have occurred.

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

Read it.

I love Manhattan’s skybridges, the kind that connect two buildings over busy streets. They’ve always reminded me of a future New York as imagined in the early 1900s, a time when it seems everyone expected the city’s thoroughfares to ascend with the tallest skyscrapers.

Read it.

One of the most interesting emerging treatments for certain types of cancer aims to starve the tumour to death. The strategy involves destroying or blocking the blood vessels that supply a tumour with oxygen and nutrients. Without its lifeblood, the unwanted growth shrivels up and dies.

One way to do this is with drugs called angiogenesis inhibitors which prevent the formation of new blood vessels that tumours rely on for sustenance. But there is another approach as well?—?physically blocking the surrounding blood vessels so that blood can no longer flow into the tumour.

Read it.

The news crew’s vehicle was burglarized while they were working on a story about a controversial app that alerts people to “sketchy” neighborhoods, WUSA reports.

The crew had locked their news van on a street in Petworth in Northwest, D.C. while they were out in the neighborhood conducting interviews. When they returned they found the lock had been popped out of the door of their news van, and that most of the crew’s gear had been stolen.

No better testimonial for an app will you ever see.

John C. Wright blows the whistle.

One drawback is that perpetual victims give up on attempting to be virtuous and hardworking. The only thing they are taught to think and to do to get ahead in life is roll in the mud shrieking and whining for attention, kicking their legs in the air, and threatening violence they are rarely in a position to carry out. They are not just brats, but brats without boundary, reason, pause, or cease. They are infinite brats, because the whole of the endless universe is so very unfair to them.

The Infinite Brats are eternal losers. They do not want to be winners, because all winners are cheaters, so they adopt the behaviors which make them losers.

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

In ways not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, America is becoming a nation of increasingly sharply divided classes. Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict breaks down these new divisions for the first time, focusing on the ascendency of two classes: the tech Oligarchy, based in Silicon Valley; and the Clerisy, which includes much of the nation’s policy, media, and academic elites.

Both of which constitute key components of the Crust.

Perhaps nothing reflects the descent of the yeomanry than the fading role of the ten million small businesses with under 20 employees, which currently employ upwards of forty million Americans. Long a key source of new jobs, small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth from 50 percent in the early 1980s to 35% in 2010. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report, revealed that small business “dynamism”,  measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century.

Gradually being crushed out of existence by government regulations and bureaucracies that are much more comfortable dealing with the Fortune 500.

Read it.

“Our device isn’t meant to make employees more efficient,” cofounder Alexandros Vardakostas has said. “It’s meant to completely obviate them.”

That’s what increasing the minimum wage gets you. Simple economics, so simple that intellectuals can’t grasp it.

The Momentum burger-bot isn’t remotely humanoid. You can forget visions of Futurama’s Bender. It’s more of a burger assembly line. Ingredients are stored in automated containers along the line. Instead of pre-prepared veggies, cheese, and ground beef—the bot chars, slices, dices, and assembles it all fresh.

…

Burger robots may improve consistency and sanitation, and they can knock out a rush like nobody’s business. Momentum’s robot can make a burger in 10 seconds (360/hr). Fast yes, but also superior quality. Because the restaurant is free to spend its savings on better ingredients, it can make gourmet burgers at fast food prices.

…

By replacing human cooks, the machine reduces liability, management duties, and, at just 24 square feet, the overall food preparation footprint. Resources once dedicated to preparation can instead fund better service.

Better burgers through automation.

Read it.

Liberalism has been on a hair-trigger for several decades now about “blaming the victim” for any misfortune or ill-circumstance that they may be suffering—sometimes with good reason, but often not.  The irony is that liberals never seem to notice their symmetrical sin of blaming everything on racism, the “System,” the class structure of oppression, the Judean People’s Front, etc.  Like the apocryphal story of Bertrand Russell and turtles, for the left it’s always white people all the way down.