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The U.S. government rented “85 single rooms, five office suites, five sleeping suites, and one conference room for 14 nights” at the Sofitel Angkor Phokeethra Golf and Spa Resort for Michelle Obama’s two-day visit to Cambodia, the Washington Free Beacon reports. The estimated cost to U.S. taxpayers for this adventure was $242,500, which seems like a lot of money to me, but I’m not used to traveling on a government budget.

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It’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.

Read it.

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The Register tries to be the tabloid of the tech press and sometimes tries a bit too hard. Still, it’s entertaining.

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You can get anything at Ikea.

I see these as emergency barracks in combat zones.

The Other McCain is on the case.

“Affordable housing” is one of those phrases, like “social justice” and “sexual equality,” that sounds like a good thing, until you realize it’s a license for totalitarianism. For most of us, “affordable housing” means living someplace where we can afford the rent. The advocates of “affordable housing,” however, always want to live someplace we couldn’t afford to live — a trendy urban location — and demand a system of taxpayer subsidies and/or burdensome regulations to force others to allow them to live in a high-rent community at below-market rates. To put it as simply as possible, they’re moochers and “affordable housing” is about protecting their right to mooch.

The enemy of affordable housing is “gentrification,” which is what happens when people with actual jobs who can afford to pay rent at market value start moving into a trendy urban location where the moochers live.

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Who knew?

It looks like there are two ways to get countries to reduce their dependence on the American military umbrella. One way is the calculated, tough-love approach: point out that to other governments that they’re capable of fighting their own fights, set a timetable for them to assume responsibilty for defense matters, and stick to it. The other approach is to act so nuts and untrustworthy that allies sense an implosion of crazy and reluctantly take on new responsibilities. This second technique seems to be working miracles in the Middle East as some sort of unified Arab self-help emerges from an anguished watching of whatever the hell it is the United States is up to.

Let’s try NATO next. Imagine how much economic trouble Europe would be in if they had to pay for their own national defense against Putin.

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Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy announced on Twitter that he would issue an executive order later today prohibiting state-subsidized travel to Indiana. In practice, this would prevent state employees from taking trips to Indiana on the taxpayer’s dime, even for official government business.

If any taxpayers in Connecticut want to thank the Governor of Indiana for blocking of a section of the government trough, I’m sure it would be appareciated.

If Connecticut is going to prohibit government-subsidized travel to RFRA states, perhaps they should respond in kind and prohibit travel to Connecticut? (A libertarian can dream, I suppose.)

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That’s like saying ‘Man Poses as Doctor, Saves Lives’. If she can do the job well enough to make partner in a law firm, she is in fact a lawyer, and a damned good one, no matter what the government sas.

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Hence the name ‘Affordable Care Act’. Government laws are always dependably named the opposite of the effect they will have.

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Just from looking at him I suspect that Indiana won’t miss him — or his people — all that much.

I wish to hell the Social Justice Warriors would boycott Texas. Save us a lot of work and improve the neighborhood, I can tell you.

Read it.

A good example of how far The Narrative has penetrated even sites nominally devoted to tech subjects, such as TechCrunch; needless to say, there isn’t a shred of tech angle to it.

Notice the Crustian bases touched in the first three paragraphs, just to make sure you know who’s on the side of the righteous:

It’s hard to believe, after how far the gay rights movement has come, that we’re still doing this. But here we are.

Translation: Let’s all stamp our feet and make the bitter beer face because there are still people who don’t embrace our political agenda.

Republican Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has signed into law a bill that allows private businesses to discriminate against gay and lesbian consumers, according to CNN. The “Restoration of Religious Freedom Act” is meant to allow businesses and corporations to cite “religious beliefs” as a defense, should they be sued by a private party for discrimination.

CNN, of course, is an utterly unimpeachable authority as to What Things Mean and Why They Happened. OF COURSE the law was deliberately crafted to discriminate against one of our politically fashionable groups; what other possible motivation could there be?

This of course means that Gov. Pence and the state of Indiana are prioritizing the religious beliefs of a company or corporation (after all, corporations are people!) over the basic human rights of a gay person.

So getting a cake made for your ‘wedding’ and having it held wherever you want to is a ‘basic human right’, but freedom of religion is not. Glad that we cleared that up. The U.S. Constitution? A scrap of paper — feel free to ignore it.

Fortunately, this gives me a perfect excuse to drop TechCrunch from my RSS feed, which has too many tech sites on it as it is. Thanks, guys.

Read it.

Fly the friendly skies. Think of that the next time you get to the airport two hours ahead of your scheduled flight time in order to be sure to make it through the TSA chokepoint and maybe make your flight. Not that they care.

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Unspoken subhed: Women and minorities hardest hit. (Hey, it’s the New York Times and they used the dog-whistle word ‘elite’.)

Tell the truth: When was the last time you saw a black racecar driver? I know of only two women who are pro drivers; one is Danica Patrick, and the other isn’t (which is how I keep them distinct).

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This is news? What else is he going to do with it, take it with him? He’s homosexual, so it’s not as if he’ll have any kids to leave it to.

This is the most non-new news I’ve come across in a long time.

My suspicion is that it’s a pre-emptive strike against some Social Justice Warrior group who think he’s not gay enough.

Read it.

Autodoc, here we come.

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A special service from Voice of the Crust the Atlantic to make sure that low-information voters stick to the Narrative and vote for the Peter Pan Party.

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Now that’s comedy.

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Well, they already rent their vaginas — it’s not that much of a stretch.

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When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of “I walked into a doorknob,” it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further.

Heather MacDonald points out some inconvenient truth.

The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers.

Detroit is America’s most violent city.  Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies—that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery—is 2%.  Its rape rate is 0.05%.  A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of.  Not even in Africa’s most brutal civil wars has anything been experienced in human history like a 20% crime rate.  And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in.

The frenzy of college admissions begins earlier and earlier each year.  Here in Manhattan, parents are paying $200 an hour for tutoring for prekindergarten, all in the hope of getting their little darlings into Harvard 14 years later.

The White House Council on Women and Girls says that the survivors—and be sure to use the word survivors—of sexual assault on campus suffer lifetimes of post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts.  What are we seeing in fact?  Girls graduate at 23% higher rates than men on campus, and go on to lead highly lucrative careers.  If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed, we wouldn’t merely have rape administration Title IX bureaucracy sprouting up on campuses because there would be no more campuses.  You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning.  Why hasn’t that happened?  Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.

Steve Sailer ponders the Narrative.

For years, I had been pointing out that two world-beating sectors of the American economy, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, paid relatively little attention to the panoply of anti-discrimination regulations that weigh down the performance of America’s less globally competitive sectors, such as Detroit.

Recently, however, the Eye of Sauron has finally turned in the direction of Silicon Valley, with glances at Hollywood, too. In the New York Times, reporter / feminist crusader Claire Cain Miller explains that what Silicon Valley needs to cure it of its disease of entrepreneurial men innovating rapidly is lots of stifling bureaucracy. Silicon Valley needs to become more like Detroit.

Claire Cain Miller was the Voice of the Crust who led the charge in support of gold-digger Ellen Pao. Her message is quite clear: We lost this one, but we never forgive and we never forget — get with the program or you’ll wind up crushed.

Oh, and there’s a reason Apple and Microsoft spend millions in Washington freshening the trough, so you’d better start shelling out; nice tech industry you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it….

Read it.

The notion that words such as “civility” and “divisive” have clear definitions is under attack by academic moral relativists who grant themselves the right to twist words to mean whatever aids their quest for power. A recent Stanford University lecture co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and titled “Academic Freedom in the Context of the Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Talk by Steven Salaita,” illustrated the point.

Salaita—the former Virginia Tech professor and author of Israel’s Dead Soul currently suing both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and unnamed donors after his offer of a tenured professorship in American Indian studies was withdrawn due to his vitriolic, Israel-bashing, anti-Semitic tweets—delivered another in a series of nationwide lectures in which he portrayed himself as a martyr, valiantly battling the forces of “civility.”

The Other McCain adds a dose of reality to the soup.

A California jury on Friday rejected the claim by Silicon Valley executive Ellen Pao that her rights had been violated by her former employer, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer. And this verdict is a teachable moment.

The modern concept of employee “rights” is antithetical to economic liberty. Employment in a free-market system is always a matter of voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit. You need a job. You apply to an employer. Among many applicants for the job, the employer chooses you. This is the basis of a contractual agreement: You do the work, the company pays you. It’s simple.

If you subsequently become dissatisfied with your job, you can quit and go work someplace else. If the company becomes dissatisfied with your work, they can fire you. This is also simple.

Oh, but you’ve got “rights,” you say. So if you don’t get a promotion you want, or you don’t think you’re treated fairly otherwise, you’re going to file a discrimination lawsuit.

Might as well get the word LOSER tattooed on your forehead.

That would certainly make it easier for the rest of us.

Winners don’t file lawsuits. Winners don’t whine about “discrimination.” You know why? Because winners win. Even if, in the course of a lifelong career of winning, the winner suffers an occasional defeat, the winner just grins and moves on with his life. Company X doesn’t treat him right? They don’t appreciate his valuable skills? Fuck Company X.

The winner will find a job at Company Y or, perhaps, he’ll walk out and start his own company. Life’s too short to waste time working for a bunch of losers who don’t appreciate quality work.

If Ellen Pao was such a hotshot in the venture capital field, don’t you think there would have been other companies eager to hire her away from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byer? It’s a very lucrative field, and if Ellen Pao was such a goddamned rising star, it stands to reason that some other firm would have jumped at the chance to hire her. So if she felt she was a victim of discrimination, all Ellen Pao would have had to do is to talk to somebody at a rival VC company, “Hey, Kleiner passed me over for promotion. You guys hiring?” Boom — they’d leap at the opportunity to have this young genius Ellen Pao on their payroll.

That’s didn’t happen, did it?

Hell, no, it didn’t happen, because Ellen Pao is a loser.

In the Good Old Days, such women were despised as adventuresses, which has gone out of fashion, although the closely-related gold-digger, while deprecated, is still available for use.

The world doesn’t owe you a living. No employer is obligated to hire you or give you a promotion. Ellen Pao’s claim that she was a victim of “gender discrimination” was just a typical loser’s way of rationalizing her own failure. And the lawyers who thought they could get rich off her case are nothing but greedy parasites exploiting “equal opportunity” nonsense. Pao and her lawyers sued for $16 million and they’re walking away without a nickel, and if they’d gotten a nickel that would have been five cents more than what they deserved. Fuck you, losers.

Amen to that.

Steve Sailer points out the incongruity. (Which is in a box in the corner, with the ambiguity, which has not yet put on weight.)

It turns out that the real killer was … the black street criminal. What kind of Law & Order episode would that be? Dick Wolf made a fortune putting on countless “Law & Order” episodes in which the killer turned out not to be the Rudy Guede-like thug, like most of the time in real life, but actually an affluent white person. Life would be so much more entertaining if well-to-do, good-looking white people like Amanda Knox, Haven Monahan, and John Doer were going around murdering, raping, and discriminating all the time.

So, we need a new term: Great White Defendant Privilege. The definition of Great White Defendant Privilege is that when the wheels of the justice system finally get done grinding, it often turns out that the Great White Defendant tried and convicted in the press didn’t actually do it (or, as in the case of the Night of Broken Glass fraternity gang rape at UVA, didn’t actually exist), and the justice system lets them go just because they are innocent (or nonexistent).

Read it.

Welcome to YourMorals.org, where you can learn about your own morality, ethics, and/or values, while also contributing to scientific research. We are a group of professors and graduate students in social psychology at the University of Virginia, The University of California (Irvine), and the University of Southern California. (See us here.)

I have my doubts about people who are ostensibly ‘professors and graduate students’ but who apparently fail the grasp the distinction between ‘morals’ (what a community considers good and bad) and ethics (what an individual considers good and bad). No individual, except perhaps a castaway on a desert island, has morals — morals belong to a social group, as the etymology of the word makes clear.

However, I’ve given up expecting precision of either thought or speech out of the modern clerisy, so I suppose this is the best that can be expected.

Read it.

Jeff Gerth and Sam Biddle at Gawker write that Hillary’s private email server acted as portal to a private intelligence network that included retired members of special operations, former CIA clandestine personnel and foreign informers.  Acting in some indeterminate capacity over it was Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to president Bill Clinton and now apparently a retainer to the family dynasty.  It was the compromise of Blumenthal’s emails by the Romanian hacker Guccifer that in part led to journalists to discover Hillary’s private email account.  Publicly available sources describe Guccifer as a taxi driver who penetrated the email accounts of the Bush family, Colin Powell and of course Sidney Blumenthal by sheer persistence.

…

All in all the emails provide a glimpse into the world of a great political family, conducting what at times appears to be a private policy and rewarding loyal individuals with access to governments who were influenced or indeed installed in power by the actions of the United States. “At least 10 of the memos deal in whole or in part with internal Libyan politics and the government’s fight against militants, including the status of the Libyan oil industry and the prospects for Western companies to participate.”  There is nothing overtly illegal described in the emails.

In medieval times, each great family depended on its ‘household’ (employees) and ‘affinity’ (supporters, retainers, relatives, and friends) in order to gain and exercise political power. For all their public displays, ‘progressvies’ prove with their every action that they are actually throwbacks to a more primitive time, and ought to be called ‘regressives’ instead.

Read it.

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

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The Daily Princetonian reports that during the 2012 presidential campaign, 157 Princeton University faculty and staff members donated directly to the presidential candidates. Two of them gave to Mitt Romney; the rest gave to President Obama. The amount donated to Obama exceeded $169,000. The two donations to Romney amounted to $1,901.

Who were the two renegades that gave to Romney? One was James Shinn, a visiting lecturer at the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. The other was Mark Oresic, a custodian.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to Princeton unless you — and your kid — are already socialists. It will end badly.

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Almost one year ago to the day, however, at the same Council of Foreign Relations gathering, Brennan did explain what makes Muslims from all around the world join the Islamic jihad (then under the rubric of “Al-Qaeda”). After assuring all in attendance that al-Qaeda’s ideology is “a perverse and very corrupt interpretation of the Qur’an”; that “al-Qaeda has hijacked” Islam; that “they have really distorted the teachings of Muhammad”—Brennan still confirmed that, even so “that ideology, that agenda of al-Qaeda has gained resonance and following in many parts of the world.”

When asked why such a “perverse and very corrupt” understanding of Islam—one that has “distorted the teachings of Muhammad”—so resonates among Muslims, the CIA responded by saying that it was being “fed a lot of times by, you know, political repression, by economic, you know, disenfranchisement, by, you know, lack of education and ignorance, so there—there are a number of phenomena right now that I think are fueling the fires of, you know, this ideology.”

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An examination of the server that housed the personal email account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used exclusively when she was secretary of state showed that there are no copies of any emails she sent during her time in office, her lawyer told a congressional committee on Friday.

After her representatives determined which emails were government-related and which were private, a setting on the account was changed to retain only emails sent in the previous 60 days, her lawyer, David Kendall, said. He said the setting was altered after she gave the records to the government.

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

And those missing 18 minutes on the tape? Just a mistake, I swear.

Read it.

I guess it’s the Atlantic‘s turn to start the inevitable round of ‘journalistic’ hit-jobs on any Republican candidate to the right of Hillary Clinton. The subhed tells the tale:

The former Texas governor turned a constitutionally weak office into a source of tremendous informal power.

He can’t get around the fact that the office is ‘constitutionally weak’, so Perry can’t be a real ‘caudillo’ (he’d have used ‘fuehrer’ if he’d thought he could get away with it, but he dimly perceived that everybody would just laugh at that one), but Perry has to be somehow painted as a ‘caudillo’, so he’s going after Perry’s ‘informal’ power. (How dare you have informal power, you fascist!)

Being a Voice of the Crust means that sometimes you can just phone it in. (I want Richard Parker’s job. I want a job where you don’t have to think in order to be paid for writing.)

Pre-Threaded Sewing Kits. For people who do their own plumbing and wind up flooding the neighborhood. You know who you are.

LED Dog Vest. Two words: phone number.

Fold-Flat LED Solar Lantern.

McDonald’s French Fry Gloves. Make you a real good target.

See-Through Sun Visor.

Read it.

Austin is pretty much the San Francisco of Texas, the low spot toward which all of the SWPL hipsters in the South and West drain if they can’t make it to one of the Left Coasts or don’t want to suffer from those areas’ anti-growth attitudes (an inchoate feeling that they can’t articulate because it would make their heads explode but which motivates them at the subconscious level).

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San Diego police responding to a domestic disturbance call went to the wrong address, where one of them killed the homeowner’s service dog. Ian Anderson said that when he opened the door after the officers knocked, his dog came up behind him. One of the officers reached down to pet the dog. The other stepped back, drew his weapon and shot the dog.

Read it.

The Washington Post reveals what the new Party Line will be.

So these words are now off the table: “polarizing,” “calculating,” “disingenuous,” “insincere,” “ambitious,” “inevitable,” “entitled,” “over-confident,” “secretive,” “will do anything to win,” “represents the past,” and “out of touch.”

Read it.

The prospect of large parts of New York and Washington under water fills me with giddy anticipation. Sadly, few of these Chicken Little angst-bombs come true. But I can dream….

Read it.

How bad must it be for Amnesty International to call out a group that isn’t Western White People?

Read it.

Never trust a teacher named “Mrs Porter”.

Read it.

Culture-enrichers throughout the West are adept at gaming the system in their host countries. Wherever there is mass immigration into white countries, there are immigrants lined up waiting to grab government handouts, taking from their naïve hosts whatever they can get, by fraudulent means if necessary.

The following investigative report from Channel 7 in Australia reveals a perfect child care scam — perfect for the culture-enrichers, that is. Dishonest companies (run at least in part by immigrants) take massive quantities of money and pay it out to people who watch other people’s kids, while other people get paid to watch theirs. That is, all these people have well-paying full-time jobs watching each other’s kids. Furthermore, the companies that issue fraudulent qualifying “certificates” to the caregivers are the same ones that receive the government money to pay for the child care.

When exposed, the immigrants know exactly how to press the right politically correct buttons with white people: they call the TV crew “racists”.

Read it.

Obama revenge for Netanyahu’s Congress talk? 1987 report on Israel’s top secret nuclear program released in unprecedented move.

In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel’s nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.

Obama is sort of the anti-Marine: ‘No worse friend, no better enemy.’

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

European voters are tiring of anti-Semitic massacres by Muslim youths. The odds of a major crackdown on immigration to Europe from the Muslim world are steadily increasing, with, for example, France’s National Front getting Strange New Respect even from liberal but ethnocentric American journalists such as Jeffrey Goldberg, William Saletan, and Stephen Erlanger.

That raises the question, however: if Europe clamps down on immigration, where will the Muslim masses head next? Australia and Canada are possibilities, but the Big One is, of course, the United States of America. Will this be good for the Jews?

Steve Sailer casts an eye on the Other Left Coast.

Here’s another installment in my continuing series Learning from New York. For my entire life, the residents of New York City have instructed the rest of America on what to believe. During the first half of my life, New Yorkers themselves seemed to more or less believe what they were telling the rest of us, and thus their great city deteriorated. During the second half of my life, however, New Yorkers stopped worrying about the disconnect between the advice they were ladling out for the hinterlanders and how they actually ran their own city. And New York City has consequently ascended to new extremes of safety and luxury.

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And about damned time, too.

Read it.

And, really, who could do it better?

John Stossel turns over a rock.

From the 1930s to 1960s, as rich white people moved into New York City, urban planner Robert Moses got city bureaucrats to condemn and destroy busy black neighborhoods. The city called the neighborhoods “blighted” and moved many of the poor into rent-subsidized apartment complexes called “projects.” Many quickly became slums.

Now times have changed. Some rich, white people want to move into poorer, non-white neighborhoods because they like diversity (and cheaper real estate). So today the newcomers are attacked by liberals because they cause “gentrification.”

Guilty of being white and not-poor! Off with their heads!

Read it.

Your DNA genome has “on/off” chemical switches that collectively are known as your epigenome. So your epigenome is unique and changes every time a switch is flipped. Because your epigenome’s switches are considered reversible when they are passed from parent to child, many scientists view this to be “soft evolution,” i.e., not guaranteed to be as enduring as when a mutation arises in the core DNA genome.

The epigenome can be passed on, sometimes reversed, sometimes reinforced. Unlike in classic Mendelian genetics, it is hard to predict and quantify, so you can just imagine how this variation in experimental outcomes has driven many careful, traditional scientists who believed the DNA code was the be?all and end-all of heredity completely crazy. They would try to eliminate all the variables, use genetically identical rats, and sometimes get completely different results. So it is no surprise that for decades epigenetics was ignored or pooh-poohed by funders, senior biologists, and science magazines. There was no reliable way to trace the precipitating event and no way to easily predict which individuals would be affected in future generations.

So how do our epigenomes become informed about life around us, particularly the epigenome of a fetus or a yet?to?be?conceived child? Most of the science points to our neural, endocrine, and immune systems. Our brains, glands, and immune cells sense the outside world and secrete hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters, and other biological signaling molecules to tell every organ in the body that it needs to adapt to a changing world.

Read it.

“It’s a great challenge,” said Gordon Gill, a Chicago architect. “Everybody wants the daylight; nobody wants the glare, and you only want the heat when it’s cold outside.”

Charles Murray points out some inconvenient truth.

Spring is here, which means it’s time for elite colleges to send out acceptance letters. Some will go to athletes, the children of influential alumni and those who round out the school’s diversity profile. But most will go to the offspring of the upper middle class. We all know why, right? Affluent parents get their kids into the best colleges by sending them to private schools or spending lots of money on test preparation courses. Either way, it perpetuates privilege from generation to generation.

The College Board provides ammunition for this accusation every year when it shows average SAT scores by family income. The results are always the same: The richer the parents, the higher the children’s SAT scores. This has led some to view the SAT as merely another weapon in the inequality wars, and to suggest that SAT should actually stand for “Student Affluence Test.”

It’s a bum rap. All high-quality academic tests look as if they’re affluence tests. It’s inevitable. Parental IQ is correlated with children’s IQ everywhere. In all advanced societies, income is correlated with IQ. Scores on academic achievement tests are always correlated with the test-takers’ IQ. Those three correlations guarantee that every standardized academic-achievement test shows higher average test scores as parental income increases.