Read it.

But you knew that.

There’s been a familiar pattern on college campuses in recent years of incidents of blatant racism or “hate crimes”—nooses hung on doors of black students, racist graffiti, etc—that in nearly all cases turned out to be hoaxes, after which the professional class of jellyfish employed as “college administrators” would cancel classes or wring their hands and declare the hoax to be a “teachable moment.” The good folks at The College Fix ran a roundup of several leading hoaxes back in December, and the Daily Caller had its own expose back in 2013.

My old haunt at the University Colorado at Boulder decided to try to get ahead of the game with a series of posters around campus that attempt to raise consciousness of racial bigotry by shining a spotlight on epithets and thoughtless remarks reported to the university, and encouraging students to report “bias motivated incidents (BMIs)” through an official process.  CBS News reported on this initiative last weekend (“University of Colorado Tries to Fight Racism with Racism”), and the College Fix included two facsimiles of the posters the university has produced, included here, based on reported BMIs. One claims someone said, “Your mom must be the janitor ’cause that’s the only job for dirty Mexicans.” Another says, “Go back to Africa—you don’t belong here.”

…

There are two further ironies here.  First, many of the sensitive souls on the Boulder campus are offended at the poster campaign itself, and have torn down a number of the posters. (If I was still there I’d surely grab one as a souvenir.) Strange how the very people who always say they want a “conversation about racism” always back away from having that “conversation.” But of course, we know what “conversation about racism” really means today: You shut up, and confess your collective white guilt.

Read it.

Sister Diana Momeka, OP, finally made it from Kurdistan to Congress to testify about the fate of the Nineveh Christians among whom she lived before ISIS invaded Mosul. No thanks are due to the State Department for her visit, though it’s not clear who exactly held State’s feet to the fire for their original refusal of her visit. Their “reasoning” , if you remember my first post on this story was based on an idiotic estimation that Sister Diana would use the occasion of a week’s visit to become an illegal alien. We should be so lucky, considering the numbers of sketchy individuals that very same State Department dumps into the United States by the thousands every year.

For the ignorant among you, “OP” stands for Ordo Praedicatorum; she’s a Roman Catholic Dominican nun.

Read it. And watch the video.

Confirms everything I’ve always known about avocado…. Out of the mouths of babes.

Read it.

Can’t say that I blame them — I mean, have  you ever been to Minnesota?

Read it.

Wisdom. Attend.

People will not obey laws that they think are stupid. Prohibition was the rub-your-nose-in-it proof of that. Multiplying bad laws merely brings law as a concept into disrepute, and undermines the Rule of Law that we all depend on.

Read it.

It appears that the Amtrak crash that killed seven people Tuesday resulted from speeding, but big-government advocates are already using this accident to make their case for more infrastructure spending. In fact, the problem is not too little money, but too much money going to the wrong places.

In 2008, President Bush signed a law mandating that most railroads, including Amtrak, install positive train control (PTC) by December of 2015. PTC would force trains to slow or stop if the operator ignored signals or speed limits.

In 2009 and 2010, President Obama asked a Democratic Congress to give him $10 billion to spend on high-speed trains, and Congress agreed. Not one cent of that money went to installing PTC in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.

PTC would have prevented this accident. There was plenty of money available to install it, but the Obama administration, in its infinite wisdom, chose to spend it elsewhere. Two days ago, it would have been embarrassing to realize that the government-run Amtrak hadn’t yet completed installation of PTC on its highest-speed corridor. Today, it’s a tragedy. But how is it the fault of fiscal conservatives?

Steve Sailer runs the numbers.

Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s Equality of Opportunity Project has ranked 2,478 United States counties by upward mobility in income of young people from what their parents earned in 1996-2000 to what they earned in 2011-2012.

Here are Chetty’s Top 25 best counties out of all 2,478 for young people whose families were in the bottom half of the income distribution (determined on a national basis) in the later 1990s. Chetty is looking at IRS reported income for a combination of people who moved and for people who were permanent residents.

I haven’t looked in detail at each one, but, yeah, they’re basically pretty much all white.

Read it.

Today’s major news story is the crash of an Amtrak train in Philadelphia, killing at least seven people and injuring many more, some critically. The crash had barely been reported before liberals on Twitter erupted with denunciations of Republicans. Why? Because the current House budget proposes cuts in federal support for Amtrak. How could that possibly relate to last night’s crash? Don’t expect logic from a liberal. Twitchy documented the dementia here and elsewhere.

Then it came out that the train was traveling around 106 miles per hour, entering a curve in a 50 mile per hour zone. It seems unlikely that the crash had anything to do with “infrastructure,” the liberals’ magic word. So, are liberals cowed at being not just wrong, but ghoulishly wrong? Not a bit of it. It doesn’t matter what the question is, the liberal’s answer is always the same: money. Specifically, government money.

The Other McCain lays it out.

The oxymoronic phenomenon of the “male feminist” is an endless source of amusement. If groveling self-abasement were an Olympic sport, “male feminists” would win the gold medal every four years.

Modern feminism is basically about three things:

1. Killing babies;
2. Hating men;
   and
3. Lying.

A common feminist lie is to deny that they hate men. This is exactly the kind of shameless dishonesty we must expect from fanatics who assert that killing babies is women’s most basic “right.”

Hateful bloodthirsty liars are not the kind of women that normal men find attractive, yet there are always enough abnormal men in the world that some of them actually want to have sex with feminists. Inspired by twisted masochistic neuroses or other perverse impulses, these pathetic males declare themselves feminists and, while not all “male feminists” end up in the lunatic ward like Professor Hugo Schwyzer, they always meet a sorry end, groveling for the approval of sadistic women whose raison d’etre is their contempt for men.

Read it.

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

Read it.

“Environmental Correctness” (EC) is just as authoritarian and mindless as standard-issue “political correctness,” and for the same reason. Leftist orthodoxy needs to suppress dissent, or it will collapse.

The latest example of EC in action comes from Australia, where the University of Western Australia has pulled the plug on a new research center at its business school because of its connection to Bjorn Lomborg.

Read it.

Lately, there have been reports that Sunni regional allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia have been planning a joint military offensive against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Damascus, a Nusayri [Alawi] nemesis for both Turkey and Saudi Arabia. The reports claimed that the planned operation would involve both ground troops and air strikes.

Read it.

It’s one of those headlines that sounds like a bad joke, but it isn’t. It’s not exactly a serious complaint, either, and it isn’t coming from actual Muslim students in any event. “Baffled Catholic University officials say they have never received a complaint from any of the schools Muslim students,” writes BeliefNet.

In fact, the university expressed its bafflement in a full-length statement: “Catholic University’s faithfulness to our Catholic tradition has also made us a welcome home to students of other religions. No students have registered complaints about the exercise of their religions on our campus. We understand that a professor unaffiliated with Catholic University has made public allegations claiming that we are discriminating against our students on religious grounds, but we have not seen any legal filing – and will respond to them if we do.”

Probably another case of overly-sensitive SWPL busybodies being offended for their favorite victims.

Read it.

Still, the city of Boston is growing as Millennials and Boomers alike look for walkable, dense places to live. Boston needs more transit, but the state can’t help much: Governor Charlie Baker has proposed cutting $26 million from the state Department of Transportation and $14 million of MBTA funding.

So when athletic company New Balance decided to expand its headquarters and build retail, a hotel, a track, and skating rink in one Boston neighborhood not served by public transit, it didn’t wait for the city to agree to build new train stations or add bus routes, which could have taken years. Instead, it decided to build a commuter rail station itself.

Today, the company is breaking ground on the new Boston Landing station, starting a process that will add another stop on the commuter rail line between Boston and Worcester by the fall of 2016. New Balance is paying to build the station, which will cost between $14 million and $16 million, and will then pay for its maintenance costs for at least the first decade after the station opens.

And if you don’t think they’re going to get their money’s worth in government favors, you don’t know how politics works on the Other Left Coast.

Read it.

For the third time this year, Islamist radicals in Bangladesh hacked a secular writer to death in public.

Four masked men chased down Ananta Bijoy Das Tuesday morning as Das left his home in Sylhet. They hacked him with machetes after running him down.

Richard Fernandez blows the whistle.

Perhaps Samuel Huntington’s most famous assertion comes his 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations in which he argues that “Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards.” The Western world is likely to remember the “borders” yet apt to forget the “innards”.  Yet it is the innards which is generating the greatest misery.  The quarrels of Islam are spewing out broken people at a near historic rate. There are more refugees in the world today than at any time since the Second World War: fifty million, according to the UNHCR.  Most of them are Muslims.

Gee, there’s an echo in here….

Read it.

More often than not, the targets of Muslim violence are other Muslims.

Read it.

Bosch Fawstin, a former Muslim who won the Muhammad cartoon contest at the Texas free speech event attacked by two gunmen Sunday, will soon be added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of hate groups.

A very great honor which I hope he appreciates.

Read it.

No one who reads Seyyid Qutb’s book Milestones could be in any doubt that the destruction of ancient monuments by ISIS or the Taliban is perfectly in keeping with Islamist thought. Milestones is an important book not because of its merits, either intellectual or literary, but because of its influence. It was one of the founding texts of modern Islamic fundamentalism (if that is not an oxymoron) and is worth studying not for itself but for the light it sheds on a certain mentality, namely that of Moslems who believe themselves in possession of the highest truth yet find themselves permanently sunk in moral, economic and social squalor.

Read it.

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

I wonder when the U.S. government will realize that Pakistan is an enemy, not a friend.

Kathy Shaidle is surprised that the Peter Pan Party refuses to grow up.

Meanwhile, south of the border: Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh are many things, good and bad, but she isn’t “stupid” and he isn’t “loud.” But to leftists, right-wingers are all stupid and loud, and Coulter and Limbaugh are the only ones whose names they know. Think of the three-year-old who points at every animal and yells “moo!”

…

For almost 25 years, five days a week for three hours a day, Rush Limbaugh has monologued, mostly guest-less, on live radio to a national audience. Think about it: If he doesn’t really “believe that stuff,” then he’s arguably more deserving of that $40 million a year because let’s see you do that.

These scoffers think their reflexive, paranoid “dot connecting” makes them sound worldly, when just the opposite is true. Remember: Conspiracy theories are History for stupid people.

Read it.

Judging by most of the news coverage I’ve seen, I’m not prepared to say that they’re wrong.

Read it.

When wind hits a structure and flows over its surfaces the flow changes and generates a cyclical pattern of vortices at the tail end of the flow. This is known as the vortex shedding effect which creates something known as vorticity and that is what Vortex Bladeless uses to generate energy.

…

What the engineers at Vortex Bladeless are doing is embracing this effect instead of avoiding the aerodynamic instabilities to capitalize on the oscillation and therefore capture the energy. The mast is designed to oscillate in the wind (which is very different from Blowing in the Wind). As you can see in the picture above, this is not your usual wind turbine. It consists of a fixed mast, a power generator that has no moving parts which come into contact with each other and a semi-rigid fiberglass cylinder. The power generator is a system of magnetic coupling devices which means there are no gears needing lubrication and an overall system needing less maintenance.

Read it. And watch the video.

Parkour is what Batman does to relax.

Charles Murray lays it out.

It was our boast that in America, unlike in any other country, you could live your life as you saw fit as long as you accorded the same liberty to everyone else. The “sum of good government,” as Thomas Jefferson put it in his first inaugural address, was one “which shall restrain men from injuring one another” and “shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement.” Americans were to live under a presumption of freedom.

That was then, this is now.

We now live under a presumption of constraint. Put aside all the ways in which city and state governments require us to march to their drummers and consider just the federal government. The number of federal crimes you could commit as of 2007 (the last year they were tallied) was about 4,450, a 50% increase since just 1980. A comparative handful of those crimes are “malum in se”—bad in themselves. The rest are “malum prohibitum”—crimes because the government disapproves.

A useful distinction that nobody remembers any more. The worst thing you can say about any activity in these degenerate modern times is that it is ‘unregulated’.

It gets worse. If a regulatory agency comes after you, forget about juries, proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, disinterested judges and other rights that are part of due process in ordinary courts. The “administrative courts” through which the regulatory agencies impose their will are run by the regulatory agencies themselves, much as if the police department could make up its own laws and then employ its own prosecutors, judges and courts of appeals.

And God help you if you don’t get with the current political program.

Workers in government offices are often governed by such strict job descriptions that chipping in to help out a co-worker or to take the initiative breaks the rules—and can even get them fired, as in the case of a Florida lifeguard who rescued a person who was drowning just outside the lifeguard’s assigned zone.

Read it.

How about that government-provided health care in Britain! Don’t you wish we had a system like that In the U.S.? Hillary Clinton does, as does Elizabeth Warren, Barack Obama, and the other Usual Suspects.

‘It was long ago observed that the plain people, under democracy, never vote for anything, but always against something. The fact explains, in large measure, the tendency of democratic states to pass over statesmen of genuine imagination and sound ability in favor of colorless mediocrities.’

— H. L. Mencken, Notes on Democracy

Read it.

Well, New York is run by Democrats, and billionaires tend to be Democrats, so that would appear to be the sweet spot for them.

Steamy eight- or nine-figure sales were always the dream of former Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “If we can find a bunch of billionaires around the world to move here, that would be a godsend,” then-Mayor Bloomberg told The New York Times back in 2013. “Because that’s where the revenue comes to take care of everybody else.”

Bloomberg was a rich Democrat before he was a RINO (which move was made so that he would have less competition for the Mayor’s office). Most rationales for giving rich people tax breaks are based on ‘we want them here rather than there so that their spending will boost our economy’ — which, when Reagan said it, was derided as ‘trickle-down economics’ — but apparently when Democrats say that it’s okay.

Jim Goad looks at the scandal du jour.

Despite the ceaseless yippety-yap one hears about “white privilege,” the glaringly obvious privilege currently denied to white Americans is the privilege to feel OK about their racial identity. Unless you wear your skin as if it were a guilt-laden hairshirt, and unless you frame white history as nothing more than one giant unpardonable sin against humanity, you will be hounded and mocked and derided and demonized. The way things stand in the modern mainstream narrative, there is no such thing as a “self-hating white person.” Instead, those are known as the “good” whites. The remaining whites—the ones who either take pride in their racial identity or really don’t give a fig about it either way—are witches in the process of being rounded up and burned at the stake.

…

White pride is the only sort of ethnic identity whose expression is all but legally forbidden. It’s certainly the biggest cultural sin you can currently commit.

This was all made howlingly clear last week after a Colorado barbecue joint announced that it had designated June 11 as a “White Appreciation Day” during which a 10% discount would be offered to all white customers.

Read it.

Ritu Shah Burnham says she doesn’t want to close her pizza shop. But she says Seattle’s new $15 an hour minimum wage makes it impossible for her to make a profit. She’ll close the shop in August, leaving 12 employees without a job.

Read it. And watch the video.

Islamic theology and law refer to the time preceding Islam as the jahiliyyah, the age of ignorance. Everything that existed before Islam is worthless; none of it is worth saving. In fact, all evidence of the jahiliyyah is offensive to Allah, and must be destroyed. That’s why the Islamic State burned the library in Mosul. That’s why the Taliban blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

Read it.

I know it’s a favorite saying around here that if liberals didn’t have double standards they wouldn’t have any standards at all.  But seriously—the Clintons really abuse the liberal privilege.

Read it.

Two police officers, one white, one black, shot and killed by two black men and a black woman.

How does this fit into the meta-story about white cops keeping the black people down and preventing them from becoming medical doctors or college professors?

Mark Steyn explains the Crustian agenda.

Read it.

“Britain First” is one of those groups found in any polity that finds itself in the throes of fracturing and breakdown. This sudden “unity” under Prime Minister Cameron may be surprising, but it is not the result of a vigorous electorate or a free public sphere.

We have groups like Britain First here in America, too, and for the same reasons. These are the disaffected who have had the temerity to speak up, only to find themselves kicked to the curb (kerb) or ejected into the outer darkness where they are supposed to stay and — above all — shut up. If I remember correctly, BF was one of those groups which grew out of the screws being turned on the British National Party until it finally cracked under the strain. Britain excels at these tactics; perhaps because all the ornery DNA has either left for colonial lands or has been killed off in two utterly ruinous “world” wars. Those who followed after them don’t appear to value the same things as those whose places they took. Remnants of England are merely that: remnants.

Read it.

After the Texas shooting, there is all round condemnation in the US media of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, the two of the greatest counterjihadists around; for indulging in “needless provocation.”

So, even in the Land of Free and the Home of Brave, after fourteen years of a brutal attack on it, there are open calls for surrender.

This only shows that dhimma can be imposed from the top, in one go, if the believers have conquered the land; or it can also be imposed from below, by imposing one provision at a time, and unleashing vigilantes on the violators.

The real strength of the Religion of Peace is the sanction of vigilantism in it. So government may be sincerely secular and tough, the press may be objective, security agencies may indeed be highly competent and able to control big-ticket terrorism, but there is no solution whatsoever to vigilantism.

If there are millions who are ready to walk up to a person who has offended them and kill him, there is nothing any police can ever do. In such situations, the only way the person can live is to go into hiding, and that is what those who run afoul of Religion of Peace do to survive. In reality they have gone for complete physical separation, though they are alone on the other side of wall.

Read it.

I’ve decided I’m going to call myself an “Islamoskeptic,” because it neatly combines two left-wing, debate-stifling epithets at one stroke. If you criticize Islam, you’re an “Islamophobe”—the moral equivalent of a racist, so shut up we don’t have to listen to you any more. And if you align at all with climate skepticism and criticize any aspect of climate change orthodoxy, you’re met with the shutdown term of “science denier.” Both terms represent gross abuses of reason.

Read it.

As ‘No Child Left Behind’ is achievable only by letting no child get ahead, so ‘social equality’ is only achievable by everybody being equally distressed. No surprises here. And of course the new clerisy are on the bleeding edge.

Perhaps the term ‘philomorons’ rather than ‘philosophers’ would be more appropriate.

Read it. And watch the video.

For readers who may be relatively new to the Counterjihad: the book shown in this video is ’Umdat al-salik wa ’uddat al-nasik, or The reliance of the traveller and tools of the worshipper. It is commonly referred to as Reliance of the Traveller when cited in English.

The Revised Edition (published 1991, revised 1994) is subtitled “The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law ’Umdat al-Salik by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 769/1368) in Arabic with Facing English Text, Commentary, and Appendices”, and was edited and translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller. The publisher is listed as amana publications in Beltsville, Maryland.

This an authoritative source on Sunni Islamic law, because it is certified as such by Al-Azhar University in Cairo. In it you can find the most notorious elements of sharia (death for apostasy and blasphemy, the second-class status of women, the lack of punishment for the killing of kuffar, etc.) backed up by verses of the Koran and hadith.

Read it.

Austin is where everybody in Texas who wants to be in California but can’t afford it goes to live … plus it has the state University and the legislature, which just makes it worse.

Steve Sailer fisks the Washington Post — granted, not a difficult task.

Racial segregation between blacks and whites in the U.S. has been declining for decades, but very gradually, and in some places less so than others. The recent uptick in segregation that Hall, Crowder and Spring measured is small but still significant. It was also particularly large in Western cities heavily hit by the housing bubble like Las Vegas and Sacramento.

Alternatively, you could say that the Housing Bubble that preceded the Housing Bust artificially increased integration by giving more mortgages to minorities, as President Bush had insisted at his 10/15/2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. There, Bush demanded 5.5 million additional minority homeowners by 2010, and he told his federal regulators (as well as financial and real estate industry leaders) that the way to get to this higher level of racial equality was to stop being so persnickety about traditional credit standards, such as down payments and documentation.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the old-fashioned ideas about credit risks were more realistic about who could afford to pay back mortgages than Bush’s notion that outdated redlining prejudices were the cause of the racial Housing Gap.

Those who think that George W Bush was a conservative need to take a look at his record, not the contrast with more-Leftists Democrats.

Read it.

In his 2007 bestseller book, The Children of Moses, quirky Turkish writer Ergun Poyraz claimed that then Prime Minister [now President] Recep Tayyip Erdogan was a crypto-Jew. The book’s cover depicted Erdogan and his wife in a Star of David, and portrayed Erdogan as a secret agent of “international Jewry.”

…

The Middle East has never been short of conspiracy theories. But the idea that there are crypto-Jews or secret friends of Israel is increasingly popular with Muslims who are waging political, ideological and sectarian wars among themselves.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Hint. Not.

Sorry, I’m just not used to seeing ‘objective’ and ‘Robert Reich’ in the same paragraph, much less the same sentence.

Read it.

He explained that the migrants did not want to come to Malta because that would make it difficult for them to proceed to Northern Europe.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the Med.

Read it.

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

The saga of Abortion Barbie continues. Do a Google Search for ‘Democrat’ and ‘ethics’ and try to find a return that doesn’t include ‘violation’.

Solar Grill.

Read it.

The Hispanic owners of a barbecue joint in Colorado plan to hold a “White Appreciation Day,” when white customers will get a 10 percent discount, because it was “the least we can do” to celebrate white Americans, they told Denver NBC affiliate 9 News (KUSA) in a story published Friday. They said the promotion started off as a joke but they will follow through with the idea, which critics label discriminatory.

I love these incidents that hit hit the fault lines of modern Political Correctness.

“We have a whole month for Black History Month. We have a whole month for Hispanic Heritage Month, so we figured the least we could do was offer one day to appreciate white Americans,” said Edgar Antillon, who owns the Rubbin’ Buttz BBQ in Milliken, Colorado, with Miguel Jimenez. They said they’ll devote June 11 to White Appreciation Day, when a 10 percent discount will be taken off orders from white customers.

Calculating the victim points on each side of this controversy is left as a exercise for the reader.

A state official said the promotion could open Rubbin’ Butz to civil rights investigations if nonwhite customers complain about the discriminatory discount. “If someone felt like they were being discriminated against, they could come to the civil rights division and file a complaint in our office, and we would investigate that,” Jennifer McPherson of the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies told the NBC affiliate.

Needless to say, if they’d run the same promotion in favor of non-whites, there would be no problem. Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

But it costs $40,000 a year (less if you’re black or female). It also helps if you’re from a well-connected Democrat family.

Check it out.

Read it.

And heed it.