‘Democracy, alas, is also a form of theology, and shows all the immemorial stigmata. Confounded by uncomfortable facts, it invariably tries to dispose of them by appeals to the higher sentiments of the human heart. An anti-democrat is not merely mistaken; he is also wicked, and the more plausible he is the more wicked he becomes.’

— H. L. Mencken

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That’s what happens when regular business attire is hoodies and jeans.

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Ostensibly, it was a merry event. A week before Passover, hundreds of Turkish Jews from Istanbul gathered in the western city of Edirne for the reopening of the Great Synagogue, which had closed its doors in 1969 and had remained a ruin since then, until it was recently restored.

In the days after the high-profile ceremony, the Great Synagogue would go back to its quieter days, as there are no longer Jews in Edirne, and only 17,000 in the whole of Turkey.

Turkey’s notoriously anti-Semitic and Islamist government did its best to entertain the congregation by sending two bigwigs to the ceremony. One of them, Deputy Prime Minister Bulent Arinc, made a speech that, otherwise, could have caused bursts of laughter at the synagogue. “Thank God,” he said, “There is no anti-Semitism in Turkey.” His next remarks showed even darker humor. He said: “There is no racism in Turkey; it has never found a base for its roots. When we look at Europe and other countries we see how far behind us they are, and we feel really sorry.”

Megan McArdle shares some history.

My grandfather worked as a grocery boy until he was 26 years old. He married my grandmother on Thanksgiving because that was the only day he could get off. Their honeymoon consisted of a weekend visiting relatives , during which they shared their nuptial bed with their host’s toddler. They came home to a room in his parents’ house—for which they paid monthly rent. Every time I hear that marriage is collapsing because the economy is so bad, I think of their story.

By the standards of today, my grandparents were living in wrenching poverty. Some of this, of course, involves technologies that didn’t exist—as a young couple in the 1930s my grandparents had less access to health care than the most  neglected homeless person in modern America, simply because most of the treatments we now have had not yet been invented. That is not the whole story, however. Many of the things we now have already existed; my grandparents simply couldn’t afford them.  With some exceptions, such as microwave ovens and computers, most of the modern miracles that transformed 20^th century domestic life already existed in some form by 1939. But they were out of the financial reach of most people.

If America today discovered a young couple where the husband had to drop out of high school to help his father clean tons of unsold, rotted produce out of their farm’s silos, and now worked a low-wage, low-skilled job, was living in a single room with no central heating and a single bathroom to share for two families, who had no refrigerator and scrubbed their clothes by hand in a washtub, who had serious conversations in low voices over whether they should replace or mend torn clothes, who had to share a single elderly vehicle or make the eight-mile walk to town  … that family would be the subject of a three-part Pulitzer prizewinning series on Poverty in America.

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

Next the’ll find that there are preferences given for non-white people. Where will it all end?

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Win-win.

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Ah, but will it be in time to save the Left Coast?

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You are in a large room. There is a basket in the northeast corner and a door to your right. It is paved in cobblestones and there is blood on the stones in the center of the room. Your party enters from the south. Suddenly, from off of the room’s ceiling of comes a Hook Horror! What do you do?

If you said “Stop for a few minutes to download and 3D print most of the D&D Monster Manual in order to up the realism of your dungeon crawl” then you made the right choice. You see, a designer named Miguel Zavala has been modeling all of the D&D Monster Manual monsters in 3D and putting them up for all to download. His alphabetical collection features creatures like the Owlbear, the Ettin, and even Tiamat, the many-headed dragon that haunted the dreams of many a Saturday morning cartoon watcher.

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You mean it isn’t?

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The latest reports suggest that Islamic State fighters have largely withdrawn from the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmuk, on the outskirts of Damascus.

The jihadis have returned to the district of Hajar al-Aswad, from where they launched their assault into the camp on April 1; the strongest element in the camp now is Jabhat al-Nusra, the Syrian franchise of al-Qaida.

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Geez, you’d think they were still Communist or something.

You can always learn stuff from the comics.

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Even the smartest people can be fools.

Ain’t that the truth.

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Funny how that works.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Watch it.

‘Save the trees! Save the bees! Save the whales! Save the snails!’

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The picture worth a thousand words.

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I’m surprised it’s that high.

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In a world in which an incompetent slacker gets elected President because of his skin tone, anything is possible.

Steve Sailer has little patience for The Narrative.

The argument over who is privileged is pretty much one that nobody sensible can win because the peas keep getting shifted under different shells. When the CEO of Apple bullies an Indiana pizza maker, Tim Cook gets to claim disprivilege for being gay.

Yeah, Tim Cook is sure a member of an oppressed minority.

And the most definite outcome of all these prejudices is that our world becomes ever more pro-billionaire, anti-middle class. In other words, the more we hear denunciations of privilege the more privileged the privileged become.

…

How real justice, rather than social justice, works is not that complicated: Cartoonists shouldn’t be slaughtered and adolescent girls shouldn’t be gang raped. Why not? Because murder and rape are wrong. We don’t need to debate whether the criminals are more or less privileged than their victims. It’s irrelevant.

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Officials with the South Bend, Indiana, school system have postponed college field trips for some third-graders. The trips were originally to include only black students, but after local media reported that students of other races would be excluded, many parents began to complain. The trips are reportedly being changed to include all students who qualify for free and reduced lunches as well as any who would be first-generation college students.

In other words, a way to ensure that they are predominantly black students without appearing to arrange it so.

It would be interesting to check back later and see how many of those students actually, you know, went on to graduate from college.

Antiplanner speaks for all right-thinking people.

So what’s so humiliating about Japan’s maglev? As an American, the humiliating thing is that there are other Americans who fall for the argument that because some other country is wasting a hundred billion dollars on a transportation system that goes half as fast as America’s planes, we should waste at least that much money here. That only goes to demonstrate the failure of America’s educational system to help people gain the analytical skills they need to avoid being taken by con artists.

Ponder the fact that a stupid person’s vote counts just the same as yours. Be thankful that things aren’t as bad as they could be.

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Publication of Clinton Cash, Peter Schweizer’s expose of the money raised by the Clinton Foundation and the favors such money may have purchased, is two weeks away. However, some of Schweizer’s findings continue to trickle into the mainstream media. They are bad news for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

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In the following clip from TheRebel.media, Brian Lilley, formerly of SUN TV, talks about the latest jihad porn video released by the Islamic State, which shows the execution of thirty more Christians in Libya.

As he says, “This is a recruitment video.” It provides the Koranic justification for all the gore and violence shown at the end of the video, and is designed to lure in bloodthirsty young men eager to emulate the mujahideen of the Islamic State.

Now that Mr. Lilley no longer has to be bound by the editorial strictures of SUN TV, he is willing to tell his audience what most Gates of Vienna readers take for granted: the Islamic State represents the real Islam. Its murderous brutality is simply an acting-out of the instructions laid down by the founder of Islam 1400 years ago.

By the way — Brian Lilley describes the English-language narrator near the end of the ISIS video as a “North American”, but he’s obviously a Canadian. To someone born south of the Mason-Dixon Line, the Canadian accent is unmistakable….

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A classic Voice of the Crust thumb-sucker.

Unmentioned: Why anybody should care.

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On a dirt road high in Nicaragua’s northern mountains, a small knot of men and two precocious young boys uncoil electrical cable from the back of a pickup truck. Other workers swing machetes at overhanging tree branches. Along the cleared shoulder of the road, another crew tightens a cable on a freshly planted utility pole.

Verdant coffee plantations line the steep road, punctuated by wooden shacks where pigs orbit stakes in the mud. Placards on outhouses proclaim the names of aid organizations. Cinder-block evangelical churches mark even the tiniest clusters of homes.

This extension of the power grid will serve about 30 families in the San Ramón valley, about 200 kilometers northeast of Managua. “We’ve always lived in the dark here,” says Salvador Gonzáles, a resident of the valley and one of the men volunteering on the line crew. For him, the arrival of electricity means a refrigerator and a leap in quality of life. “I’ll have my soda cold, some chicken, some meat, a Popsicle,” he says.

And the SWPL cry goes ’round the clubs: ‘Oh noes! They’ corrupting these innocent primitive people with – gasp – technology!’

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist:

Examples of labor-saving technology that were created before the Industrial Revolution include the wheel, the lever, the pulley, the bucket, the barrel, the knife, the domesticated ox and horse, the fishing net, and moveable type.  Examples of such technology created after that revolution are even more numerous; they include the harnessing of electricity, the internal-combustion engine, the assembly line, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, refrigeration, and, of course, today’s many IT marvels.  Yet history knows no example of the introduction of labor-saving technology that caused permanent and widespread increases in involuntary human idleness.  And at least since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, all advances in such technology in market economies have been followed by improvements in the living standards of the masses – including (contrary to Ms. Tufekci’s suggestion) those advances introduced during the past few decades.

I certainly hope he’s right.

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Bike-share has a promising role to play in city transit networks, but its inability to reach low-income users has become an unsettling problem—and it’s a problem that appears to be growing. Take the latest member survey from Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C. (spotted by Mobility Lab). Half of the roughly 3,500 survey respondents reported having six-figure incomes:

CityLab is pretty much a Voice of the Crust devoted to SWPL problems, but my first thought is that if they put the bikes where ‘low-income users’ could get them, said low-income users would just steal the damned bikes and sell them to somebody for cash toward buying a car. Bikes tend to be a SWPL affectation in which people on limited incomes can’t afford to indulge.

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Perhaps they realized it was a really bad idea. That’s just a guess, of course.

Sarah Hoyt ‘splains it all to you.

Since Hillary Clinton announced, the feminists of the United States have undoubtedly been getting set to be outraged at things. We’ll see dozens of new wars on women, but we’ll have to check the news routinely to find out what they are because women are so oppressed in the United States that it takes whole academic departments and quite a lot of grant money to find examples of it. I figure this may be a good time, then, to talk about one of my personal pet-peeve memes, the microaggression.

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Ever wonder why the places with the greatest income inequality are invariably run by Democrats?

I doubt that they ever have.

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From the people who make the iPhone. Think about it.

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We’re still a few years from the 2020 census, but federal agencies are already bracing themselves for the barrage of nosy questions they’ll fire our way. Well, actually, they’re bracing for the growing expense of getting us to answer those nosy questions. If the Census Bureau doesn’t get off its butt and make some already recommended changes, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns, the next nose-counting is likely to cost a bundle without being especially reliable.

As the GAO notes in a report published yesterday, the average cost of counting each household has risen, in constant 2010 dollars, from $16 in 1970 to $94 in 2010. That’s probably in part because the response rate has declined over that period. This just may—I’m speculating here—have something to do wth a muttered, “you gotta be kidding me” after a glance at the form, then a flick toward the trash.

The Census is a prime example of government bureucrats taking a legitimate government function and expanding it into a football stadium complete with luxury boxes.

The Census Bureau acknowledges that it faces growing resistance to lengthening surveys (both short and unbelievably long) and census takers. Part of its response, unveiled last year, is to bully us. What the Census Bureau should do, suggested Tasha Boone, Assistant Division Chief for the American Community Survey, is to write “YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW” in bigger letters than ever on the envelope.

Why more government workers don’t find a second career in marketing is a mystery to me.

The Constitution requires a count — nothing more, nothing less — of the people of the United States every ten years; it does not authorize a collective body cavity search of the American people.

The GAO also emphasizes that it’s made 121 suggestions regarding Internet surveys, research and testing, and improving IT management and security. “The Bureau needs to take action to address the recommendations GAO has made in prior reports. If these actions are not taken, cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls will likely diminish the potential cost savings that the Bureau estimates will result from redesigning the census for 2020.”

So…We should pretty much just count on high costs and “performance shortfalls” then, eh?

Oh, and those nosy questions, of course.

UPDATE: A commentor referred me to this delightful response to Census nosyparkers, which I recommend to all.

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Ann Corcoran of Refugee Resettlement Watch has written a new book exposing the scam of America’s “resettlement” program, which is dumping Muslim “refugees” on communities all over the country without prior consultation or local consent.

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To the question of whether armed police can storm your house and take away your personal effects and tell you to shut up about it, based simply on your political advocacy, Wisconsin answered for years, “Why, yes, they can — now please, shut up about it.”

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Speaking of consumption, any traveler along Interstate 40 or the old Route 66 knows about the Big Texan Steakhouse in Amarillo, which has the legendary contest where you get a 72-ounce steak for free if you can eat it (and all the sides dishes too) in under an hour.  A shockingly high number of people have accomplished this feat.  But none greater than the 120-lb California woman who last week succeeded in eating three of the Big Texan’s 72-ounce steaks—in 20 minutes.

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To err is human; government rounds all those people up and points them in the same direction.

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Code enforcement officers in Ogden, Utah, have ordered Jeremy Trentelman to take down the fort he built in his yard for his three-year-old son. They say the fort, which is made out of cardboard, violates city litter laws.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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By his own telling, the first time Walter L. Scott went to jail for failure to pay child support, it sent his life into a tailspin.

He lost what he called “the best job I ever had” when he spent two weeks in jail. Some years he paid. More recently, he had not. Two years ago, when his debt reached nearly $8,000 and he missed a court date, a warrant was issued for his arrest. By last month, the amount had more than doubled, to just over $18,000.

That warrant, his family now speculates, loomed large in Mr. Scott’s death. On April 4, he was pulled over for a broken taillight, fled on foot and, after a scuffle with a police officer, was fatally shot in the back.

The warrant, the threat of another stay behind bars and the potential loss of yet another job caused him to run, a brother, Rodney Scott, said.

Freeberg nails it once again. A slice:

The nonsensical complaint: A grievance, from or on behalf of some designated-oppressed-group, and something passive-voice. Women are “seen” in such-and-such a way, gay people are “seen” like this or black people are “seen” like that. Or, men and women are expected to be such-and-such a way by “society.”

Question that cannot be answered: If this complaint were restated in active-voice, what would be the subject? Who’s doing the seeing? Who’s doing this expecting?

Why we don’t get an answer: Because then the mission of reform would become finite rather than infinite. The subject would become an object. The mission of reform would also become testable, because the reform would have to do with changing the state of an object, and it would have to do with actually fixing a problem, like catching the shark in Jaws. And, it would be practical to ask bothersome questions like “Well, have you got it done yet, or don’t you?”

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According to EU’s border chief, up to one million refugees are waiting on the Libyan beach waiting to board ship for Europe. “Up to one million migrants could reach Europe from Libya amid collapsing security in the northern African country, the European Union’s border agency chief has warned.”

…

One of the more interesting aspects of this flood of human misery is that it is not entirely spontaneous.  Jihadi groups are doing their best to encourage it.

…

While the refugee flood is most certainly a humanitarian tragedy, it is very probably a deliberate component of the rapid advance of Islamist forces through North Africa, Arabia and the Levant.  The probable reason why the establishment can’t see this is because they’ve willed themselves not to see the war.  The constant mantra is that there is no war on terror; that the enemy is nothing to do with Islam.  See the war and you can see the tactic. In fact it is reminiscent of the old Nazi 1940 method of driving refugees onto the roads before them to tie up the French while the Panzers advanced behind them.

Gates of Vienna is having a fundraiser. They’re good people; go give them some money.

Little Folkies

Little folkies on the hillside, little folkies made of ticky tacky
Little folkies, little folkies, little folkies, all the same
There’s a white one, and a white one, and a white one, and a white one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

All the people who are folkies all know how to say “diversity”
But they all think in boxes, little boxes, all the same.
And there’s artists, and there’s journalists and there’s teachers of social sciences
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

They believe the TV newscast and the newspaper editorials
But they never believe conservatives so they can’t be taken in.
Now they don’t all wear gray ponytails and they don’t all wear Birkenstocks
But they wear them on the inside in the boxes in their brains

And the houses look like summer camp and they all buy organically
And they don’t have any children, except okay, maybe one.
There’s a Green one and a Pink one, an old Red one and a Rainbow one,
But they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all think just the same.

Read it.

Sometimes the mask slips … and sometimes they just leave it at home.

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Daewoo, Samsung, and Hyundai’s shipbuilding wings are already setting a standard for the use of bleeding edge robotics in manufacturing. According to a U.S. Navy study they rely on robots for over two thirds of the welding, as well as much of the cutting, grinding steel, and polishing. But keeping the robotic assembly components fed with material requires a lot of heavy lifting and transfer of large metal components.

That’s where the Daewoo S&M Eng. is having the RoboShipbuilder step in. Currently the exosuit is being used by employees and can lift up to 30 kg (66.1 lb.). That’s enough to lift a variety of smaller steel components, and precisely position them for the most difficult welding tasks.

The suit uses a mixture of hydraulics and electric servomotors to carry the load. Workers start by standing on footpads and then strap the exoskeleton legs frame to their legs, followed by a backpack-like section and arm frame. The exoskeleton accommodates workers of heights between 1.6 and 1.85 meters (5’3″ to 6’1″).

Steve Sailer has some ideas on the subject.

The population of the African continent in 2013 was 1,111,000,000, so one million migrants would be less than one out of a thousand. In other words, there are lots more where those came from. By the way, the UN forecasts that the population of Africa by the end of the century will be nearly four billion.

A simple reform would be to modernize the refugee application system to the 21st Century and run it solely over the Internet. You can apply from your local Internet cafe in your own country, and if you are Einstein, Solzhenitsyn, or Coetzee, you get in. If you aren’t, too bad, stay home. If you show up without your application being already approved, you get a year in a work camp and a one way ticket home.

This would stop the drownings quick.

The current refugee system is like if you showed up at Harvard in person and demanded they let you be a student, so they say, well, we’ll take a couple of semesters to process your application, so in the meantime here’s the Harvard course catalog!

Funny how Harvard doesn’t work that way.

Read it.

Ever wonder why you don’t read about Republicans getting paid off like this?

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The Islamic State has just released another video where it executes more Christians, this time for not paying jizya — the tribute demanded of Christians according to Koran 9:29 in order to live under Islam as Christians.

Two scenes appear in the 29-minute long video. The first scene consists of a group of Christian Ethiopians dressed all in black, with armed and masked Islamic State members standing behind them. According to the video, this scene takes place in the city of Fezzan. The Ethiopian captives are called “Nationals of the cross, from among nationals of the Ethiopian Church.”

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Right now, the chef of the future looks like a pair of robotic arms that descend from the ceiling of a very organized kitchen. And it makes a mean crab bisque.

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Having lived in United Arab Emirates’ capital, Abu Dhabi, for more than five years, William Janssen was already accustomed to drinking desalinated water — seawater treated in large machines that consume lots of energy. So Janssen came up with the idea of using solar energy instead to transform salt water into drinking water, a more sustainable, cost-effective method.

So Desolenator was founded in 2012, and the company has been working with Innovation Experience, a group that helps marry “clean tech development” with human-centered design, since 2013 to make the idea a reality. The company has since become part of London’s Imperial College accelerator program for clean technology startups, and just this week it met its $150,000 crowdfunding target on Indiegogo, with a week still to go.