Read it.

It’s certainly less disturbing than a tattoo.

Steve Sailer does an entertaining fisking of Yet Another NYT Thumbsucker.

In “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” in the new NYT Magazine, we see another tribute to the golden oldie study by economist David Card that because wages in Miami didn’t fall relative to four other cities from 1980 to 1984 despite the Mariel Boatlift of May 1980 increasing Miami’s supply of labor, ergo that proves that the law of supply and demand doesn’t apply to immigration.

But, was ceteris truly paribus in Miami in 1980-84 relative to Card’s control group of other American cities? Or was there anything else boosting the economy of Miami from 1980 to 1984 that wasn’t happening on the same scale elsewhere?

To research this apparently extremely obscure topic in economic history, I spent a half hour on Youtube. I’ve interleaved some video evidence regarding the unique source of Miami’s early 1980s prosperity above and below.

Read it.

Washington Post. The sky is falling. Women and minorities hardest hit. *Yawn*

If you’re going to phone it in, it might as well be a bomb scare.

Read it.

Yeah, by rubbing their noses in a little reality.

Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) has a new study out finding urban charter schools outperform traditional public schools (TPS) in urban areas.

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

Read it.

Hillary Clinton told a crowd of journalists that she wants a new beginning in her relations with the press. Then, to prove her sincerity she entertained questions for 20 minutes.

Just kidding. Clinton did talk of a new beginning, but she took no questions, according to the National Journal.

The assemblage of hard-nosed reporters was clearly put off by Clinton’s unwillingness to take questions. Accordingly, Clinton received only polite applause when she finished her remarks.

Just kidding. Charmed by Clinton’s one-liners (almost certainly written by someone else), the journalists gave her a standing ovation.

In her remarks, Clinton offered the reporters tough love, or something. She called on them to focus on “serious” and “substantive” journalism going forward.

Translation: Don’t burden my presidential campaign by discussing anything that goes to my character or integrity.

Read it.

Important attention has been drawn to the shameful condition of middle income housing affordability in California. The state that had earlier earned its own “California Dream” label now limits the dream of homeownership principally to people either fortunate enough to have purchased their homes years ago and to the more affluent. Many middle income residents may have to face the choice of renting permanently or moving away.

However, finally, an important organ of the state has now called attention to the housing affordability problem. The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has published “California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences,” which provides a compelling overview of how California’s housing costs have risen to be by far the most unaffordable in the nation. It also sets out the serious consequences.

..

These causes result from conscious political decisions. While California’s coastal counties do not have the vast stretches of flat, appropriately developable land that existed 50 years ago, building is increasingly  prohibited on that which remains (for example, Ventura County, northern Los Angeles county and the southern San Jose metropolitan area).

Demonstrating an understanding of economic basics not generally shared by California policymakers or the urban planning community, LAO squarely places the blame on the public policy limits to new housing construction:

Read it.

And ya gotta love that.

From a cocoa tree to a candy bar, chocolate undergoes a radical transformation. Workers pick pods from the cacao tree, then remove the bitter seeds from inside the pods to be fermented, then dried in the sun. The dried seeds are then roasted and combined with sugar, milk and other ingredients to create the final product.

The delicious stuff loses some of its nutritious components during this process, such as polyphenols, which have antioxidant properties that have been shown to help stave off cancer and heart disease. To preserve more antioxidant activity, the researchers decided to add one extra step to the chocolate production process: storing the pods for a few days after they’re harvested but before removing the seeds to be fermented and dried. This isn’t traditionally done, and they didn’t know what effect this step would have on the nutritional content, so the researchers tested different storage times for 300 pods. They found that the ideal storage time was seven days; when the seeds were then processed as usual after that storage time, they maintained more antioxidants than seeds that were not stored or were stored for more time. The researchers believe that the stored beans were higher in antioxidants because they had the time to absorb more nutrients from their outer husks, but not so much time that they started to break down.

Almost worth it….

Read it.

Enter The New York Times. America’s so-called “newspaper of record,” the once proud Gray Lady, has seen better days. Its circulation is dwarfed by that of its crosstown rival, The Wall Street Journal. Founded merely 33 years ago, USA Today’s circulation and influence has skyrocketed. And The Economist, a weekly British newspaper, has grown to become perhaps the most influential print publication in the world.

What has gone so wrong for the NYT? Many things are to blame. The paper’s leftish editorial page is out of step with a large portion of the American public. A high-profile scandal, in which journalist Jayson Blair was caught fabricating articles, damaged its credibility. The biggest factor, however, is the rise of credible challengers — both print and digital — that simply do better journalism. There is little incentive to spend money to read the NYT when superior news coverage (and more sensible editorializing) can be found elsewhere.

The NYT’s science coverage is particularly galling. While the paper does employ a staff of decent journalists (including several excellent writers, such as Carl Zimmer and John Tierney), its overall science coverage is trite. Other outlets cover the same stories (and many more), in ways that are both more in-depth and more interesting. (They are also usually free to read.) Worst of all, too much of NYT’s science journalism is egregiously wrong.

Read it.

The Democratic Party appears to take the sacramental view of abortion. Any act that might tend to deter an abortion is to be resisted. It’s the abortion equivalent of the positive good school of slavery. If the party as a whole doesn’t subscribe to this view, its funders certainly must.

Thus the dramatic turnaround in Democratic support for the Justice for Victims of Sex Trafficking Act of 2015. It passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with broad bipartisan support. Yet even the bill’s Democratic supporters in committee, such as Minnesota’s own lighter-than-air Senator Amy Klobuchar (a cosponsor of the bill) and angry former comedian Senator Al Franken, turned against it.

One of the core principles of the Peter Pan Party appears to be that nothing must be allowed to impede taxpayer funding of abortions.

Committee Democrats claim that they were shocked, shocked to discover the Hyde restriction on abortion funding in the bill. They didn’t know what they were doing when they voted for it! They didn’t mean it.

Klobuchar and other committee Democrats blame their staffers for failing to inform them that the bill included the language. Beyond that Klobuchar has not strayed.

I wonder if that would have worked at Nuremberg. ‘Honestly, judge, our subordinates failed to inform us that Jews were being killed! It’s not our fault!’

Read it.

Here’s a new way to make fuel from sunlight: starve a microbe nearly to death, then feed it carbon dioxide and hydrogen produced with the help of voltage from a solar panel. A newly developed bioreactor feeds microbes with hydrogen from water split by special catalysts connected in a circuit with photovoltaics. Such a batterylike system may beat either purely biological or purely technological systems at turning sunlight into fuels and other useful molecules, the researchers now claim.

“We think we can do better than plants,” says Joseph Torella of Boston Consulting Group, who helped lead the work published February 9 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read it.

Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory.

Read it.

As he works toward a deal blessing Iran’s nuclear program, President Obama has undertaken a full-throated assault on Israel. The Obama administration treats America’s enemies as friends and friends as enemies. It is Obama’s version of “the world turned upside down.”

Read it.

The claim arose in a lawsuit (pdf) filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has tried unsuccessfully to get the TSA to release documents on its SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) [pdf]) program through the Freedom of Information Act.

SPOT, whose techniques were first used in 2003 and formalized in 2007, uses “highly questionable” screening techniques, according to the ACLU complaint, while being “discriminatory, ineffective, pseudo-scientific, and wasteful of taxpayer money.” TSA has spent at least $1 billion on SPOT.

The ACLU, of course, would be opposed to any screening program that treats, oh, say, young Middle Eastern males differently from white grannys from Iowa. (Although I’m fully prepared to believe that anything run by the TSA is based on junk science; I’d just like the analysis to come from a credible source.)

‘Behavioral screening’ is the method that Israelis use for their airline, so obviously it doesn’t work worth a darn — look at all those Israeli airline planes being hijacked and blown up.

Read it.

Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama (um, um, um…)

Question: If Obama were actually a secret Muslim, what would he be doing differently?

Jim Goad examines the dark underbelly of the coffee problem.

Since this article is about the intersection of race and coffee, is there truly a whiter brand of coffee than Starbucks? I mean “white” not in the Viking-warrior sense but in the Stuff White People Like sense. Starbucks, that Seattle-born corporate caffeine giant that makes the shittiest coffee in world history and charges credulous customers ten times its value, may employ the occasional dark-skinned so-called “barista”—I hate that term—but finding a black customer in a Starbucks is like finding a unicorn at a 7-Eleven.

This is why it’s a sharp pointy pinnacle of irony that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz—yes, he’s Jewish, because a dozen of you would have mentioned it in the comments anyway—recently launched a publicity blitz encouraging his baristas to engage their customers in an ongoing dialogue about race relations in America.

Right. OK, then, I’ll take a Venti Americano. While you’re preparing my hot beverage, let’s chat about The Bell Curve.

“We’re not in the business of filling bellies,” Schultz told 60 Minutes in 2006. “We’re in the business of filling souls.” Yeah, well, you’re filling my soul with bullshit right now and I’m politely asking for you to stop.

Francis Fukuyama has some advice for us.

The starting point for a sensible policy rests on the realization that the U.S. and other democratic countries have no reason to favor one religious sect over another in the Sunni-Shiite war.

Yup. We want them both to lose.

Read it.

The Antiplanner once wrote that “the definition of a socialist is someone who doesn’t understand that subsidizing something is not the same thing as making it affordable.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has often been called a socialist, and seems to fit the mold, proposing to make some housing “affordable” by confiscating money from others.

Specifically, de Blasio’s administration has demanded that, in order to get a permit to build a new school building, Collegiate School–a private school that traces its roots back nearly 500 years–must contribute enough money to build 55 units of “affordable housing.” Worse, those 55 units are estimated to cost at least $50 million (nearly $1 million per unit is affordable?), and if they cost more, Collegiate has to pay the difference. (If they cost less, the city pockets the difference.)

Steve Sailer does an extended Fisking of an article in the New York Times by a typical SWPL academic.

Granted that New York Times articles are low-hanging fruit, it’s still a great example of the art. Recommended.

Read it.

According to the Tunisian interior ministry and private security sources, approximately 3,000 Tunisians have joined the Syrian civil war, the overwhelming majority of them aiming to fight against President Bashar al-Assad. Soufan Group, a security consultancy firm, notes that this number is starkly disproportionate to the country’s 11 million inhabitants, and suggests that Tunisia has contributed more fighters to IS than both Saudi Arabia and Turkey. It may seem surprising that the Arab Spring’s only democratic success story has produced so many extremists. In fact, the country’s shaky democratic transition may itself be a primary cause. Lacking the heavy-handed security apparatus of an authoritarian state, but not yet strong or prosperous enough to offer its citizens a better life, Tunisia has become fertile territory for extremist recruiters — as demonstrated by this week’s bloody terrorist attack in the center of Tunis, for which IS has claimed responsibility.

Gee, that ‘Arab Spring’ really turned out great. Wonder what Obama’s next magical trick will be.

Read it.

And why not? He’s been a good friend. Republicans … not so much.

House Democrats fighting for leverage in the GOP Congress are hoping they can empower an unlikely ally: Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

‘Unlikely’? Only if you haven’t been paying attention.

By banding together in veto-sustaining majorities against conservative proposals demanded by Boehner’s right flank, Democrats hope to both sink those GOP measures and grease the skids for more moderate compromises.

Which makes you wonder why Boehner is being such a pal.

Read it.

The same group of state lawmakers that have staunchly opposed expanding insurance coverage to low-income people under Medicaid expansion just unanimously approved a measure that subsidizes dairy cow insurance for farmers.

She says that as if it’s a bad thing.

Possible reasons:

1. They can afford it but not the expansion to Medicaid. Oddly enough, that’s even mentioned in the article; editor must have missed it.

2. Farmers make campaign contributions and low-income people typically don’t.

3. Cows contribute to the economy more than low-income people.

Feel free to add your own.

Read it. Futher discussion of the way that the Peter Pan Party, journalist strain, mistake their fantasies for the real world.

Urban theorists, such as Peter Katz, insist that millennials (the generation born after 1983) have little interest in “returning to the cul-de-sacs of their teenage years.” Manhattanite Leigh Gallagher, author of “The Death of Suburbs,” asserts with certitude that “millennials hate the suburbs” and prefer more eco-friendly, singleton-dominated urban environments.

Such assessments thrill the likes of real estate speculators, such as Sam Zell, who welcomes “reurbanization” as an opportunity to cash in by housing a generation of Peter Pans in high-cost, tiny spaces unfit for couples and unthinkable for families. Others of a less-capitalistic mindset see in millennials a post-material generation, not buying homes and cars and, perhaps, not establishing families. Millennials, for example, are portrayed by the green magazine Gris as “a hero generation” – one that will march, willingly, even enthusiastically, to a downscaled and, theoretically, greener future.

In reality, these views reflect more fantasy than reality, as a host of surveys of millennials demonstrate. When asked – in a 2010 survey by Frank Magid and Associates – where would be their “ideal place to live,” more millennials identified suburbs than previous generations, including boomers. Another survey, published last year by the National Association of Homebuilders, found that 75 percent of millennials favor settling in a single-family house, 90 percent preferring the suburbs or even a more rural area but only 10 percent the urban core.

This, not surprisingly, is not what you read about regularly in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. Young reporters, virtually all of whom live in dense, expensive places like New York or Washington, instinctually believe the world they know first-hand, the one in which they and their friends reside, epitomizes their generation. Most Americans, however, are not young, highly educated or likely to ever be Manhattan or Brooklyn residents. Indeed, only 20 percent of millennials live in urban core districts; nearly 90 percent of millennial growth in major metropolitan areas from 2000-10 occurred in the suburbs and exurbs.

Read it.

We find that industrial robots increase labour productivity, total factor productivity, and wages. At the same time, while industrial robots had no significant effect on total hours worked, there is some evidence that they reduced the employment of low skilled workers, and to a lesser extent also middle skilled workers.

Told you so.

Read it. The picture is of Yale, of course, with Harkness Tower in the distance.

Frank Bruni’s new book, Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be, argues that the college you attend doesn’t really matter so much. The coveted Ivy League—and the wider range of elite schools—have more applications than ever before, but Bruni recommends that anxious students and their status-obsessed parents caught up in the admissions madness should calm down and relax—the school you go to cannot define you.

And, of course, that’s not an argument anybody’s making. The school you go to opens — or closes — doors, and that can be of inestimable value.

Which is, of course, both trite and true. In life, you are what you make of each opportunity. Yet Bruni himself, an influential New York Times columnist and prominent member of the US elite, makes an argument that somewhat contradicts his own educational history. After all, he graduated from a top public institution—The University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill—and an Ivy League graduate school—Columbia University.

Would he be where he is today if he had just chosen a college or graduate school at random?

Doubtful.

To Bruni’s credit, he does conduct some research to support his point. For example, he examined the American-born chief executives of the top 100 companies in the Fortune 500 and noted that roughly 30 went to an Ivy League school or equally selective institution.

However, why stop at 100? Why not examine the entire Fortune 500? That is, in fact, what I did in my research (pdf), published two years ago. And in an extended analysis from 1996 to 2014, I uncovered that roughly 38% of Fortune 500 CEOs attended elite schools (see the paper for the full list) for the last two decades.

Of course, that depends on how many schools are on your list of ‘elite schools’. Still, I doubt if it’s more than 25, in which case that 38% looks pretty impressive.

Based on census and college data, I estimate that only about 2% to 5% of all US undergraduates went to one of these elite schools. That makes all these US elite groups well above what you would expect in the general population. And this doesn’t even include the percentage who went to a “non-elite” graduate school.

And that’s puts things in perspective. When 5% of your candidates wind up with 38% of the top slots, there’s something going on.

But among people similar to Bruni’s social and family circle, who appear fixated on which college to go to, perhaps their hunch is not wrong. This is likely because many of these people know that where they went to school opened doors for them, regardless of the quality of the education they received—and that is why they want their kids to have those same opportunities. As members of the US elite, they want their kids to at least match if not surpass them, to have an advantage in life, and to reap the enormous benefits that come with that privilege. As my research shows, if you want to become a member of the US elite, an elite school (or grad school) appears to improve your chances.

And that’s what it’s all about. This is especially the case in the academia cohort of the modern clerisy. It is a truth universally acknowledged that your chances of a tenure-track position are far greater at Midwestern State University if you graduated from Princeton than at Princeton if you graduated from Midwestern State University.

Fun exercise for the reader: Compute out what percentage of Supreme Court Justices graduated from just Harvard Law, Yale Law, Columbia Law, or Stanford Law.

Read it.

I wrote about President Obama’s March 19 statement on the Persian new year in “Our Supreme Leader is a Supreme Fool.” In the statement Obama asserted: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has said that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon.”

Obama’s assertion follows closely on Secretary of State Kerry’s assertion to the same effect. I quoted Kerry’s citation of the fatwa in “Of fatuity and fatwas.”

The fatwa, however, doesn’t exist. It has never been seen. As Andrew McCarthy explains, the fatwa is a patent hoax. Andy writes (emphasis in original): “The invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has done extensive research into compilations of Khamenei’s published fatwas…No such fatwa has ever been published.” Andy links to MEMRI’s two 2013 posts in search of the fatwa in the omitted sentence.

Democrats are the Peter Pan Party — they refuse to grow up, and think that if they believe something hard enough, it comes into existence.

Read it.

The recent bulldozing by the Islamic State (ISIS) of the ancient cities of Nimrud, Hatra, and Korsabad, three of the world’s greatest archaeological and cultural sites, is just this group latest round of assaults across the large area under its control. Since January 2014, the flamboyantly barbaric ISIS has blown up Shi’i mosques, bulldozed churches, pulverized shrines, and plundered museums.

Worse, the ISIS record fits into an old and common pattern of destruction of historical artifacts by Muslims.

Read it.

Put all this together, and we can start to see why many people think a big shift is about to come in the impact of computing and technology on our daily lives. Computers have got dramatically more powerful and become so cheap that they are effectively ubiquitous. So have the sensors they use to monitor the physical world. The software they run has improved dramatically too. We are, Brynjolfsson and McAfee argue, on the verge of a new industrial revolution, one which will have as much impact on the world as the first one. Whole categories of work will be transformed by the power of computing, and in particular by the impact of robots.

…

Frey and Osborne’s conclusion is stark. In the next two decades, 47 per cent of employment is ‘in the high-risk category’, meaning it is ‘potentially automatable’. Interestingly, though not especially cheeringly, it is mainly less well-paid workers who are most at risk. Recent decades have seen a polarisation in the job market, with increased employment at the top and bottom of the pay distribution, and a squeeze on middle incomes. ‘Rather than reducing the demand for middle-income occupations, which has been the pattern over the past decades, our model predicts that computerisation will mainly substitute for low-skill and low-wage jobs in the near future. By contrast, high-skill and high-wage occupations are the least susceptible to computer capital.’ So the poor will be hurt, the middle will do slightly better than it has been doing, and the rich – surprise! – will be fine.

Read it.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that someone out there writing for The Economist has a problem with the looks of our bosses.  Leftists have been waging a war against nearly every personal advantage for years: if they aren’t upset because your parents are rich, they’ll insult you because your parents are white, or maybe because you have a penis.  In their most unreasonable moments, they might even be upset that you deserve your own job.  It seems only reasonable to expect that sooner or later, they would be complaining about whether or not our bosses keep themselves in shape.

This is because at the heart of all leftism lies an unreasonable envy of all advantage (disguised as an advocacy of the disadvantaged) and an unhealthy hatred of actual diversity (disguised as an appreciation of difference).  They call life a meritocracy when your successful parents raise you to win, which is a lot like complaining that your parents raised you at all.  It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether they loathe the laws of cause and effect.  In the fight against all odds – not his, but everyone’s – the leftist hasn’t only forgotten that different people breed different people; he’s forgotten that different people are diversity itself, and that diversity, the thing he claims to be championing, means that someone is going to have natural advantages.

Betty Friedan (you remember her, right?) discusses ‘climate change’ — in 1958.

As Ewing and Donn read the evidence, an Ice Age will result from a slow warming and rising of the ocean that is now taking place. They believe that this ocean flood — which may submerge large coastal areas of the eastern United States and western Europe — is going to melt the ice sheet which has covered the Arctic Ocean through all recorded history. Calculations based on the independent observations of other scientists indicate this melting could begin, within roughly one hundred years.

It is this melting of Arctic ice which Ewing and Donn believe will set off another Ice Age on earth. They predict that it will cause great snows to fall in the north — perennial unmelting snows which the world has not seen since the last Ice Age thousands of years ago. These snows will make the Arctic glaciers grow again, until their towering height forces them forward. The advance south will be slow, but if it follows the route of previous ice ages, it will encase in ice large parts of North America and Europe. It would, of course, take many centuries for that wall of ice to reach New York and Chicago, London and Paris. But its coming is an inevitable consequence of the cycle which Ewing and Donn believe is now taking place.

So ‘global warming’ will lead to a new Ice Age. Who knew?

Of course, Betty Friedan has moved on since than and so has the rest of the ‘progressive movement’, but this certainly accounts for all of the AlGore-come-to-town blizzards we’ve been seeing.

Just sayin’.

Read it.

White privilege — the concept that whites benefit from structural racism in ways that similarly situated nonwhites don’t — has been hotly debated among academics for decades. But recent events — from the riots and protests in Ferguson, Mo., to the closure of a University of Oklahoma fraternity over its racist chants, to this week’s beating of a black University of Virginia student by campus police — have reinvigorated that debate, along with calls for teachers to talk directly with their students about white privilege.

For professors inclined to answer those calls, just how should they do it, particularly in a writing class? That was the topic of a popular session Thursday at the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The session was led by Ersula Ore, an assistant professor of writing at Arizona State University who found herself at the center of a debate about police racism on that campus last year, when she was body-slammed by campus police after they stopped her for jaywalking and she refused to show her ID. (Ore is African-American.)

The new clerisy is on the march through the institutions, leaving no mind unmowed.

Analog Memory Desk,

Blue Freedom Portable Hydropower Plant.

Briefcase Barbecue.

Pick-Pocket-Proof Pants.

eTape16 digital measuring tape.

Nite Ize Gear Tie.

Read it.

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

Steve Sailer does the news behind the news.

Read it.

Of course, ‘goes bold’ is Voice-of-the-Crust for ‘sells out’.

Headline you’ll never see: ‘Democrat President defies liberals, goes bold on budget’.

Read it.

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

Read it.

With state cigarette taxes at $4.35 per pack and the Big Apple piling another $1.50 on top of that, New York has become a major destination for smuggled smokes. Up to 60 percent of all cigarettes sold in the state are smuggled from elsewhere (The Mackinac Center, which tracks these things, puts the number at 56.87 percent for 2012). By contrast, Virginia’s taxes per pack are only 30 cents, which makes it an excellent source for all of those smokes headed up I-95 to the Empire State. Logically enough, at least in the context of the political world, New York officials are concerned and think Virginia should do something.

Okay, let’s reduce the tax to 10 cents. Entrepreneurship ought to be rewarded.

The Other McCain documents the derangement.

The phenomenon of “Tumblr Feminism” really has to be seen to be believed. In the 1950s, women with mental illness were treated with psychoanalysis, tranquilizers or electroshock therapy. Now, all the crazy women just log on and post their deranged gibberish on Tumblr, where thousands of other crazy women tell them how awesome they are.

Read it.

All across Europe, Islamic and radical right-wing scum are strangely allied in their belief in the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the persecution of Jews is hitting its stride again. The exodus from France is only the tip of the iceberg. Anti-Semitic insults and smears have long since become “normal” again — including in Austria. The threshold for physical violence is sinking steadily. Smug European citizens look the other way (in irritation?) — like that other time in Vienna when Jews were allowed to clean the streets with toothbrushes. And the oh-so-humane Left chants anti-Semitic mottos in their demonstrations against Israel, but say nothing about this new mega-scandal.

Read it.

It didn’t start with global warming: environmentalists have been distorting (and sometimes fabricating) facts for a long time. As a result, most people have learned to view environmentalists’ claims with skepticism. Here is a case in point.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, discovers that his Bullshit Meter has gone off.

California has plenty of water…just not enough to satisfy every possible use of water that people can imagine when the price is close to zero. As David Zetland points out in an excellent interview with Russ Roberts, people in San Diego county use around 150 gallons of water a day. Meanwhile in Sydney Australia, with a roughly comparable climate and standard of living, people use about half that amount. Trust me, no one in Sydney is going thirsty.

Read it.

The other day we noted the tenured professor of sociology from Penn State, Karen Halnon, who ranted about Venezuela while lighting up a cigarette on an airplane. Surely she deserves to be Entry Number 1 in Power Line’s Worst Professors in America roster.

And barely three days later, we have out second distinguished professor to add to the roster: Pancho Savery of Reed College in Portlandia.

Read it.

The Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration has repeatedly warned that illegal immigrants are collecting billion of dollars in refundable tax credits to which they are not legally entitled. This outrageous situation can be corrected rather easily, by requiring tax filers to supply a valid Social Security number in order to claim the Additional Child Tax Credit. Today in the Senate Budget Committee, Jeff Sessions proposed an amendment that would do exactly that, thereby saving American taxpayers billions of dollars that are flowing improperly to illegal aliens.

Incredibly, the ten Democrats on the committee voted in lockstep to keep the illegal money flowing. It is hard to believe, but you can see it for yourself….

No surprises here. Their eventual goal is to give these criminals ‘a path to citizenship’,and when they become voters they’ll remember the Party that gave them Free Stuff.

Read it.

Islam has made serious inroads into South America. Hezbollah is know to be active there, particularly in the Tri-Border Area, and Venezuela has been working with Iran for decades. Narco-terrorists and Marxist groups in the region reportedly cooperate with Al Qaeda and other Islamic terror outfits to help smuggle pseudo-Latino operatives across the border between Mexico and the United States.

Read it.

The punchlines write themselves on this one, and that’s exactly what’s happening. Hillary Clinton, soon to announce her candidacy for president, spoke last night before the American Camp Association in New Jersey. In an effort to try to connect with her audience, she said, “We really need to have camps for adults. … None of the serious stuff. None of the life challenge stuff. More fun. I think we have a huge ‘fun deficit’ in America.”

I guess laughing at the Clintons isn’t enough.

Nick Gillespie isn’t afraid to ask the easy questions.

What is it that Don Draper tells Peggy in that episode of Mad Men when she gives birth to an unintended baby? Something like “Don’t look back, there’s nothing for you there. Keep moving forward.”

I thought of that moment while reading Thomas Friedman’s column about the Islamic State and the Middle East in The New York Times.

…

Oddly, Friedman is absolutely uninterested in pausing for a second and asking his assistants to rummage through his own archives. There, he would find voluminous words from the man himself pushing for the very courses of action he now tut-tuts.

Read it.

“It would be transformative if everybody voted,” he said. “That would counter money more than anything.”

No, it wouldn’t, not really. Well, first of all, let’s backtrack to the idea. Mandatory voting is a violation of our civil rights, just as denying a citizen a right to vote is a violation. Casting a vote is speech. It is showing support or opposition to a candidate or proposal. Making voting mandatory means voting is no longer a right. It’s an obligation. It’s forced speech. If we were forced to attend a church, but had a choice of several churches, we would still (most of us, anyway) recognize that this is a violation of our freedom to decline to practice religion at all. Not voting isn’t just an expression of apathy. It’s also a form of protest.

One of the purposes of not voting is to express the notion that ‘none of the above are correct’. If they would add that choice to every ballot, then my objections to mandatory voting would shrink amazingly. (But still not make them go away. The legitimate functions of government all involve making one not do something. Every time the government attempts to make one actually do something is an usurpation.)

Elizabeth Nolan Brown peeks behind the curtain.

Lawmakers want one type of eatery, one offending beverage, one no-no nutrient that, if abolished from American diets, will reverse the course on this whole obesity trend. Because what we actually need is a lot more nuanced and a lot tougher sell: widespread shifts in cultural atittudes toward food; increases in nutrition knowledge; and overhauling of food policies that kill innovation and subsidize the foods that are killing us. You can see why lawmakers prefer to focus on limiting the number of McDonald’s.

“Researchers agree that even without an empirical effect, policies can start conversations that change societal norms,” the Times states. Gwendolyn Flynn, nutrition policy director for Community Health Councils, “has noticed that at community meetings in South L.A., there is often fruit and water among the pastries and soda. ‘That’s huge,'” she said.

It might sound radical, but perhaps community meetings could provide fruit and water without a banning economic activity from South L.A.?