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A malaria vaccine was 67 percent protective against infection in an early-stage trial involving adults in Kenya, according to a study published in Science Translational Medicine today. The results are encouraging, as many malaria vaccines that work well in the lab have failed to show the same efficacy in the field. But low malaria infection rates in the region at the time of the study are putting a damper on the results.

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The term ‘irremedially corrupt’ springs to mind.

But Clinton really had no other choice. The Republican presidential nominee, the Republican National Committee and groups associated with electing a Republican president are expected to spend at least $1 billion and probably closer to $2 billion to elect a GOP president. Democrats will attempt to match this fundraising, if not raise more.

No matter what happens, it’s always the Republicans’ fault. Thank you, NBC, Voice of the Crust.

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A record 1,335 people renounced their U.S. citizenship or long-term residency during the first quarter of 2015, according to a list released by the Treasury Department on Thursday.

The total is the highest quarterly number of expatriates since a law requiring the publication of their names was enacted in the 1990s, according to Andrew Mitchel, a lawyer in Centerbrook, Conn., who tallies the lists of names. The previous quarterly record was 1,130 for the second quarter of 2013, he says.

The new figure puts 2015 on pace to exceed the total of  3,415 renunciations in 2014, which was itself a record. That was up 14% from 2,999 individuals in 2013, the previous record.

Gee, I wonder why?

But the campaign has made the financial lives of more than seven million Americans living abroad more difficult, because the U.S. taxes nonresident citizens on income earned anywhere in the world, and U.S. tax liabilities can apply to the children born to Americans abroad. In many cases, there are only partial offsets available for double taxation.

…

A new survey conducted by a Hong Kong-based company that specializes in tax preparation for American expats found that 27% of the 1,840 Americans who responded were “seriously considering” renouncing their U.S. citizenship. That’s a jump from the 18% who said the same thing in the company’s 2014 survey.

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I’m sure you’re losing sleep over that as much as I am. The Guardian is one of the more self-parodic Voices of the Crust (not as bad as MSNBC, but MSNBC are professionals), and I await the inevitable headline ‘Men Land On Mars, Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.’

Luckily the only population on Mars that we know of is a handful of rovers, but no doubt we’ll start a war anyway, before dragging them into some form of slavery or oppression. It’s just what we do.

If by ‘we’ he means the Left, he’s certainly correct. But, to paraphrase Marcellus Wallace, ‘there is no we.’

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Reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holly Grail where Lancelot is running toward the castle and never seems to get there.

He’s been ‘pressing ahead’ with that closure ever since he got elected six years ago.

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Courtesy of Bloomberg, the world gets an idea of what the retail from-the-installer price of the battery might look like (rather than the wholesale price the ‘leccy car maker announced last week).

The Elon Musk-led system seller SolarCity, Bloomberg reports, will ship an installed 10 kWh Powerwall for US$7,140 (ouch outright purchase) or $US5,000 plus a nine-year lease.

To match a 16 kW generator that sells in the US for just US$3,699, the reporter works out, would require around US$45,000 worth of Powerwalls on the lease deal.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance doesn’t imagine the Powerwall making a dent in European markets like Germany, where the economics of solar power are well-understood. Its take is that “the economics of an average home with rooftop solar are not significantly enhanced by including the Tesla battery”.

Steve Sailer can’t resist saying ‘I told you so’.

Remember when in 2002 George W. Bush and Teddy Kennedy got together and hammered out federal legislation mandating that every public school student in America test above average by 2014?

Hey, I just remembered, it’s 2015 now. Did the No Child Left Behind law work?

Similarly, in 2005, the Los Angeles School Board decreed that by 2017 every student in Los Angeles must rank in the top third.

And whatever happened with that War on Poverty thing? Have we gotten rid of poor people yet?

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What’s interesting isn’t that Islam4UK spokesman Anjem Choudary believes that death should come to all who insult Mohammed, but that the Western cultural elites who would be his most probable victims think it’s bigoted to even question his view. But Choudary the parasite understands, perhaps more than his hapless intellectual hosts, upon whose body he feasts and is laying his eggs, how paralyzing the venom of political correctness is. “When asked why, if Western society was so bad, he lived here, he replied: ‘We come here to civilize people, get them to come out of the darkness and injustice into the beauty of Islam.’”

And if you can live more comfortably than in the Dar al-Islam, that’s nice too.

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Well, that’s what happens when you keep electing SWPL Democrats. You’d think people would learn after a while, but they never do.

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Yeah, no surprises there.

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Significant amounts of natural gas on federal lands are being wasted, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year and adding to harmful greenhouse gas emissions, a congressional investigation has found.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office also said the Bureau of Land Management failed to conduct production inspections for hundreds of high-priority oil and gas wells — roughly 1 out of 5 — to ensure full payment of royalties to the U.S.

Prediction: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

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Here’s where it gets really weird — if you’re a stickler for logical consistency. Islamists are well-known for their condemnation and punishment of homosexuality. But it is safe to say that persons who are sympathetic to Islam and willing to overlook such “peccadillos” as the stoning to death of queers (and unfaithful female spouses) constitute a large fraction of the Gaystapo.

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A woman being held hostage in Florida ordered a pizza with a special request — to send help — potentially saving her life and the lives of her children.

Lion of the Blogosphere has the skinny.

I have been saying for a while that the moderately well off are Republican but the rich are Democratic. People didn’t believe me, but a new CNBC poll of Americans with a net worth of at least $1 million (which represents approximately the top 5% of the population) shows that 53% would vote for Hillary and 47% would vote for Jeb Bush, if they ran against each other.

Among millionaires 48 and younger, there is MASSIVE support for Hillary over Jeb with 70% supporting Hillary, while Jeb leads among millionaires 70 and older. You should note that millionaires tend to be older than the general population because it takes time to accumulate a million dollars, unless you are lucky enough to inherit it. The old guard still votes Republican, but the people who will be the rich of the future are very strongly Democratic.

We see that despite the Republicans presenting themselves as championing low taxes, Americans who are in the highest tax brackets prefer to vote Democratic. This makes you wonder why Republicans continue to go out on a limb to help people who vote for the other party and apparently who want to have their taxes raised.

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Last December, Honolulu’s rail transit project was estimated to be $700 million over budget. Now they are saying it is closer to a billion. Never fear, however: the state legislature just agreed to extend a half-percent excise tax, which was supposed to expire in 2022, indefinitely to pay for the rail and its cost overruns.

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

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Headlines you’ll never see in the Atlantic (unlike this one): ‘The Audacity of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’.

I’m sure they would have used ‘ego’ if the Washington Post hadn’t gotten to it first.

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Headlines you’ll never see in the Washington Post (unlike this one): ‘Barack Obama’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Bill Clinton’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Harry Reid’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Nancy Pelosi’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Jesse Jackson’s Over-the-Top Ego’, or ‘Al Sharpton’s Over-the-Top Ego’.

Ego, you see, is only a Republican characteristic, and cancels out his being black.

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Hey, if you don’t like the facts you find, find some facts you like. It’s not as if anybody who works for the government ever gets fired.

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And the myth of ‘intellectual property’ descends into self-parody….

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Dave Goldberg, SurveyMonkey chief executive and husband of Facebook operating chief Sheryl Sandberg, died Friday after falling from a treadmill at a gym at the Four Seasons Hotel in Punta Mita, Mexico, a spokeswoman for the attorney general’s office of Nayarit state said Monday.

The spokeswoman, who didn’t wish to be named, said Mr. Goldberg had gone to exercise alone at one of the hotel’s gyms around 4 p.m. Friday. He appears to have lost his balance and fallen, hitting the back of his head, the spokeswoman said.

This is God telling you not to exercise. Let that be a lesson to us all.

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This is the sort of juvinilia that passes for political discussion in These Degenerate Modern Times.

If some Republican had bought ‘barackobama.com’ and loaded it up with anti-Obama stuff, there would be a non-stop media circus ranging from cries of RACISM! to calls for government action to seize it and return it to Its Rightful Owner.

Since the target is a nominal Republican, all our Chattering Class can do is notice what a Really Funny Joke it all is.

David Cole gives us a peek behind the curtain.

I first encountered leftists using the goalpost shift technique while attending a majority-black public high school in L.A. in the early ‘80s. “They might let us have Eddie Murphy or Michael Jackson,” some of my angrier black friends would lament regarding how much territory “the man” was willing to cede, “but you’ll never see a black Miss America.” When Vanessa Williams was crowned Miss America in ‘83, the perpetually outraged moved the goalposts. “Well, okay, but she’s light-skinned. You’ll never see a dark beauty as Miss America.”

And then it happened, two dark-skinned Miss Americas, two times in a row (‘90 and ‘91). So of course that previously important goal was immediately superseded by a new one: “Miss America? That don’t mean nothing. Who cares? What you’ll never see is a black president!”

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Not free trade, mind you, but trade favoritism.

The textile industry is suddenly very chummy with the White House on trade, thanks to a geeky concept known as “yarn forward.”

As part of negotiations over the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, which includes the U.S., Japan and South Vietnam, the U.S. is insisting that only fabric produced from yarn made by a TPP country would be eligible for duty-free trade.

Why does that matter?

Since China isn’t a TPP member, Chinese-made fabric wouldn’t qualify. That’s important because Vietnam, a clothing-export powerhouse, often uses Chinese-made fabric—and that clothing wouldn’t be eligible for lower tariffs in the U.S. Vietnam would either have to develop its own fabric industry or import cloth from another TPP country to reap TPP benefits.

U.S. textile makers figure the yarn-forward rule could help keep China and Vietnam at bay when it comes to the U.S. market. The rule could also make Vietnam a more attractive place for U.S. textile-industry investment.

Yarn-forward is a “great start” for a TPP deal, says Jeff Price, president of a textile division at Milliken & Co., a big U.S. textile maker. Mr. Price also is chairman of the National Council of Textile Organizations, the U.S. textile-industry trade association.

For years Milliken considered yarn forward to be insufficient protection. The rule was developed to garner textile-industry support for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. The company opposed Nafta and most every other trade agreement the U.S. proposed until its former CEO, Roger Milliken, died in 2010, as described in a page-one article in The Wall Street Journal.

“We wanted no Nafta,” says Milliken’s former chief Washington lobbyist, Jock Nash. “We didn’t see how we could benefit.”

This White House is all about cronyism, and American businesses are fine with that.

Next time you hear a Leftist wail about ‘corporate greed’, hold up a mirror.

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Funny how that works.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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If you like liberal ideologues who label inconvenient facts as “false,” then you’ll love PunditFact. Why? Because PunditFact just declared that a demonstrably true fact was false because, according to PunditFact, the factual claim “ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.” Facts are strange that way. They do tend to give an impression of the truth, even if some people find that impression discomfiting.

It gets more embarrassing than that, though. In an unsolicited April 28 e-mail to me, PunditFact author Louis Jacobson told me unequivocally that the demonstrably factual claim he was examining was “clearly accurate” and “technically true.” But today, Jacobson declares, that fact is suddenly “Mostly False.”

Read it. And watch the video, of course.

The thought would never have ocurred to me, but, then, of course, I’m not an ‘international scientist’.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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Sounds as if the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ works just the same as every other sort of dictatorship.

Makes you wonder why all of the batty old white politicians are so keen on pushing this system onto their own countries. Are they really that stupid? Or is there something in it for them that they aren’t telling about?

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When Mohammed Emwazi went out from west London to Syria literally to carve out a new career as “Jihadi John”, masked avenger of non-wrongs, England lost an “extremely kind, extremely gentle” idealist. That is, according to a group called CAGE, whose director Asim Qureshi was moved to chivalrous indignation by the security services’ blatantly racist practice of quizzing known Muslim extremists about Muslim extremist terrorism. MI5 “harassment”, Qureshi opined, may have been the proximate cause of the young social justice campaigner’s flight into regrettable (if understandable) excess. He did not exactly say that the problem was rooted in aeons of Islamophobia, but that implication is always taken as read in such rationales.

When three teenaged girls from Bethnal Green flew from London to Istanbul to rendezvous with Islamist eye candy, it was obviously not their fault, because they were too “vulnerable” and too female to be autonomous individuals. Nor was it anything to do with their families — nor certain excitable Koran passages. It was the internet, but also the Metropolitan Police, who had handed letters about an absconded schoolmate to the girls to give to their parents rather than to the parents directly.

…

The core cause of British jihadism is of course the mass immigration mainstream politicians continue to promote, even though it was always obvious that when you import people you also import their pathologies — and when you assimilate no-one you alienate everyone. But again this is too difficult a target for politicians, many of whom are complicit in the cause and are in any case chronically uninterested in culture. This is a fast-moving situation, but it seems certain that for the foreseeable future we will keep fending off horror with soft hands, while looking concernedly at the crumbling consensus behind.

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It is hardly surprising that the universities on the Left Coast are boot camps for Crustian activism.

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There are some thing s Man was not meant to know.

At first, I left messages on the lab’s billing office voice mail asking for an explanation. A few months ago, when someone finally called back, she said she could not tell me what the codes were for because that would violate patient privacy. After I pointed out that I was the patient in question, she said, politely: “I’m sorry, this is what I’m told, and I don’t want to lose my job.”

…

Bills variously use CPT, HCPCS or ICD-9 codes (more about those later). Some have abbreviations and scientific terms that you need a medical dictionary or a graduate degree to comprehend. Some have no information at all. Heather Pearce of Seattle told me how she’d recently received a $45,000 hospital bill with the explanation “miscellaneous.”

…

“Medical bills and explanation of benefits are undecipherable and incomprehensible even for experts to understand, and the law is very forgiving about that,” said Mark Hall, a professor of health law at Wake Forest University. “We’ve not seen a lot of pressure to standardize medical billing, but there’s certainly a need.”

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Want a prestigious education? Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are the way to go. But if you’re looking for a high-paying career after graduation, you may want to look elsewhere.

It’s too late for me, but the rest of you might have a chance.

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As of today, May 1, [Brian] Hibbs is required by law to pay his employees at Comix Experience, and its sister store, Comix Experience Outpost on Ocean Avenue, $12.25 per hour. That’s just the first of four incremental raises that threaten to put hundreds of such shops out of business. …

Hibbs says that the $15-an-hour minimum wage will require a staggering $80,000 in extra revenue annually. “I was appalled!” he says. “My jaw dropped. Eighty-thousand a year! I didn’t know that. I thought we were talking a small amount of money, something I could absorb.”

Raising the minimum wage doesn’t force employers to pay their employees a ‘living wage’, it forces them to lay people off, and in many cases to close, laying everybody off. How’s that for screwing the people you’re trying to help? Stupidity + Government = Poverty. Happens every time it’s tried.

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And these reasons pretty much go for anybody for whom the security and power of a government job doesn’t outweigh the stifling sclerotic atmosphere, or who have the wit and education to escape it.

It really all boils down to whether one can honestly say ‘I don’t have to put up with this shit.’

For those for whom that is a true statement, who presumably have the talent and qualifications to go elsewhere, then elsewhere they’ll go. For those for whom that is not a true statement, there they’ll stay.

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This ought to come as no surprise. ‘Diversity’ is a code-word for ‘people not like us’, and most people (‘progressive’ mythology to the contrary notwithstanding) don’t really want to live near people that are greatly different from themselves. Even for SWPLs, a neighborhood full of ‘them’ is a nice place to visit but they wouldn’t (truth be told) want to live there.

Taki mourns the greatness of the past.

How have we come to this, you may well ask. How can Time sink so low as to put such an obscenity as Kanye West on its cover and even have him rap his obscenities during the gala dinner? I suppose it’s because we live in a world in which lies trump the truth, ugliness beauty, and evil goodness. West is a black man and he can do no wrong. By putting him on the cover as the most influential man in America Time wants to show its coolness and anti-racist credentials. Pop culture is what counts, not culture, and the Luces and their original creation are products of a white racist society that no longer has any say in America. Well, if you think the Time people got it wrong, what about one Sarah Blake? She’s written a book about the attention-grabbing rapper and has compared him to – yes, I ain’t kidding – to Jesus Christ. “Kanye is 33. If he were Jesus, he would die this year and be resurrected.” Nurse, help.

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Perfect for your foodie friends who think that ‘sea salt’ somehow has magical properties that will, in some ineffable way, save the planet.

(Hey, they laughed at the Pet Rock, too, but that guy made a lot of money.)

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The first is reflected in the title of this entry:  Will the mob tolerate an acquittal? The calls in recent days have been for “justice.”  I have considerable doubt whether those doing the loudest calling have even a slight interest in justice.  I think they want to see policemen and policewomen punished simply because of who they are.  If that is true, then the riots we have seen up to now will pale in comparison to the ones we’ll see in the event of an acquittal.

This is what we need to face:  The evidence will not make any difference to those most inflamed (and I use that word advisedly) about this case.  We’ve all seen this before  —  most recently with Darren Wilson in Ferguson and the fraternity falsely accused of hosting gang rape at the University of Virginia.

The facts are not the point.  The narrative is the point.

Foot-Powered Washing Machine.

High-Capacity Household Icemaker.

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Which it is, by their definition of ‘Islamophobic’ (i.e. daring to tell the truth about Islam).

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So now we can see why the national press has been so tactically vague for all these weeks about the precise races of the Baltimore officers involved, while allowing the public to assume it was all about Straight White Males run amok again.

Well, then, what’s the problem?

Read it.

The government of Egypt is composed of Egyptians, and of Egyptians who are not starkly different in terms of class or creed from ordinary citizens. Yet these Egyptians do not know how to provide adequate education, jobs, health care, or decent housing for large numbers of citizens. They do not know how to balance the budget or curb corruption or pay for the pension obligations they have amassed. Above all, they do not know how to create a sense of confidence, loyalty, and community between those who govern and those who are governed despite at least rudimentary forms of accountability. And they do not know how to control the police.

The municipal government of Baltimore is composed of normal people from Baltimore, and both the present and previous democratically elected Mayors of the city are black women. Three of the past four Mayors have been black. Much of the city council and school board is composed of black members, too—as is about 40 percent of the police force. Yet these leaders do not know how to deliver quality education to the children of the city, especially those from poorer families. They don’t know how to deal with anxiety-ridden children growing up without a father, amid neighborhoods infested with gangs. They don’t know how to provide adequate nutrition to children so that they are ready to learn in school. They don’t know how to make landlords paint their lower-rent properties so that little kids like Freddie Gray don’t eat lead paint chips, or how to make heroin-addicted mothers (like Freddie Gray’s mother) sweep the floors to prevent their kids from eating lead paint chips. They don’t know how to control the trade in illegal drugs (Freddie, at age 25, had been arrested 22 times for drug-related crimes), to balance a budget, to pay pension obligations, to inspire confidence—or to control the police. You need not have watched The Wire to know all this, but it certainly would have helped.

What am I trying to say here? Simply this: Cairo and Baltimore suffer from serious structural social dysfunctions. The problems in each are not the same, but both sets of problems have multiple and compound sources that are varied, engrained, poorly understood for the most past, and largely immune to fast-working policy fixes from on high. Leaders cope with problems if they can, manage them if they are very lucky; they cannot solve them, either because they lack the power, or because they don’t know how, or both.

Lessons from Baltimore:

1. Don’t live in a city that has a large number of black Underclass in it.
2. Don’t live in a city run by Democrats.
3. Avoid any combination of 1 and 2.

Richard Fernandez points out some inconvenient truth.

The Baltimore mayor was unconcerned about property destruction because she was convinced that “someone” would rebuild it.   The same “someone” who will pay for the deficit and ransoms to al-Qaeda, as well as the bribes to Iran.  The identical “someone” that will cough up the reparations to the inmates of Guantanamo.  The “someone” who will man the ships to fight the Iranian boghammers, should it come to that.

“Someone” is the source of other people’s money.  He is like the tooth fairy who makes the wreckage of looted streets and houses go away.  In fact four pastors in the revival tent of the Left  advocate sending prayers known as tax collection letters to “someone” — who is not from earth, not from MSNBC anyway  – to pay for all their wishes as they don’t pay any themselves.

“Someone” is the Leftist equivalent of God; responsible for all the good and bad in the world, something to fear as much as  need. This mysterious deity, when loosed from control, is the cause of the failure of all their schemes, he makes the crops go bad, ruined Detroit, hexed foreign policy, inspired the riots in Baltimore and caused the drought in California.

…

Lenin called imperialism the final stage of capitalism, but he always assumed that Communism would be the highest phase of socialism. That’s where he was wrong. What Lenin didn’t realize was that prayerful piety is the ultimate stage of Leftism.  It’s when you are in a line praying there is still toilet paper, or bread or a job left for you at the end; it is when you are on your knees before al-Qaeda begging them to reduce the ransom from $2 to $1.85 million because that’s all your house, car, jewelry and life savings are worth.  It is when your arms are raised in rapturous hope at the coming of Obama, Warren, Sanders — or Hillary.  That’s the last vision of heaven you will see as you rush to one side of the boat.

Chesterton was right. When people stopped believing in God they didn’t believe in nothing, they started believing in anything.  ”Lock them in the hold! Lock them in the hold!!”

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 Federal law says that states must accept and use a federal form for registering voters. But the federal form doesn’t require any proof that the person submitting the form is a citizen.

The form just asks the registrant to check a box.

Meanwhile, federal law mandates that voter registration forms be made available and pushed everywhere from licensing branches to welfare offices.

Of course not. Perish the thought.

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Presumably without people in them, although with the E.U. you never know.