Read it.

A paper published today in the British medical journal Lancet reports that the vaccine, which has been tested in Guinea since March 2015, has shown extraordinary results so far, with 4,123 people voluntarily vaccinated and all safe from the disease.

Read it.

This is entertaining: Debbie Wasserman Schultz struggles to explain how a Democrat is different from a socialist. It apparently is a question that has never occurred to her before….

Read it.

 It turns out, inefficient public education isn’t just an American or even a Western problem. Across the world, public schools are failing kids, yet there’s some good news to be had: private schools are on the rise, even in the poorest of countries.

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

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The Kurdish Workers’ Party, known as the PKK, was locked in a bloody war with the Turkish state from the mid-1980s until 2013. The cease-fire has, for all intents and purposes, been destroyed. Turkey is battling both ISIS and the PKK under the guise of fighting terrorism. Yet Turkish attempts to conflate ISIS and the PKK–even in the wake of the suicide bombing in a Kurdish border town that killed 32 young people–effectively ask people to overlook some salient facts.

…

Attempts to conflate Kurdish resistance with ISIS are designed to play on old, deeply rooted Turkish fears. A declaration of a state of emergency in Turkey would give the Justice and Development Party (or AKP), which lost its parliamentary majority in June elections, more flexibility to crack down on political opponents such as the Kurdish majority People’s Democratic Party. More than 1,300 people have been detained recently under the guise of cracking down on domestic PKK and ISIS elements in Turkey.

John C. Wright sums it up.

One of the arguments against the Anthropogenic Global Falsehood Theory is that so many scientists cannot be cooperating in maintaining a falsehood because such a conspiracy could not be maintained secretly.

I propose a simple rebuttal: the thing is not a conspiracy. It is a code of conduct that springs out of the worldview called Political Correctness.

When a large group of people take it as a maxim of their code of conduct that believing what is politically useful rather than what is true, it is not a secret that they do not believe nor say the truth. This is not a conspiracy except in the sense that Taoism or Monarchism is a conspiracy.

It is a shared worldview. Political Correctness differs from other shared worldviews in that it is, at its core, at its root, utterly dishonest. Political Correctness is the attempt to think whatever is approved thought, and not to think the truth. Whether it counts as lying when you yourself pretend you believe the lie with all your might is an interesting question for a psychopathologist. From a practical point of view, it is a lie.

So if everyone in the worldview lies, and lies in the same way about the same topics, this is not a conspiracy. It is not secret. Everyone outside the cult (who cares to look) knows political correctness is a lie.

It is a lie about … everything.

Read it.

I guess there are areas in which Black Lives Don’t Matter.

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Which confirms every misgiving I’ve ever had about Facebook.

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If, of course, you still use shoe laces.

Steyn on illegal immigration.

Every sentient Republican voter knows that “comprehensive immigration reform” is Beltway-speak for legalizing 30 million law-breakers while incentivizing 30 million more.

On their public statements, it is difficult to know what these guys really believe on immigration from one week to the next. Which in itself is rather strange: after all, among what Hillary Clinton calls “everyday Americans”, most people who want an end to illegal immigration have held that view consistently for some time; they were not, a year ago, gung ho for amnesty, in-state tuition discounts, no-questions-asked drivers’ licenses, pathways to citizenship, and another 30 million unskilled Latin-American peasants to start the comprehensive tango anew. But half their presidential candidates were. Odd. Yet, if you had to plump for one side or the other, if you had to toss a coin, wouldn’t the safer bet be that, with all the above, it’s their amnesty phase (which oddly enough tends to occur in the presidential off-season) that represents their genuine position?

Read it.

The Navy’s 30-kilowatt weapon is currently the only operational laser in the US military that can blow things up. (Targeting lasers and non-lethal “dazzlers” are commonplace). But other weapons are in the works.

Air Force Special Operations Command wants to put a high-powered laser into a future version of its AC-130 gunship. “Block 60 with the laser, that’s not 10 years out; Block 60 is a couple years out,” said AFSOC commander Lt. Gen. Brad Heithold.

Steve Sailer looks at the New James Baldwin.

America’s foremost public intellectual, Ta-Nehisi Coates, has published a new best-selling minibook, Between the World and Me, that’s interesting for what it reveals about a forbidden subject: the psychological damage done by pervasive black violence to soft, sensitive, bookish souls such as Coates. The Atlantic writer’s black radical parents forced the frightened child to grow up in Baltimore’s black community, where he lived in constant terror of the other boys. Any white person who wrote as intensely about how blacks scared him would be career-crucified out of his job, so it’s striking to read Coates recounting at length how horrible it is to live around poor blacks if you are a timid, retiring sort.

Read it.

John Nuttall told an undercover officer that his wife, Amanda Korody, believed that “grown-up Jews” go to “eternal hell” and that she would be doing Jewish children a favor by killing them and reaching paradise, police records revealed in British Columbia’s Supreme Court show.

“I asked Nuttall how he thinks he will have access to Jewish kids and he said [he and his wife] were both white and could pass for Jewish…They will be regulars in the synagogue. They will gain the trust of everybody. And once they have everything they will get enough guns and ammo to go ahead with their mission,” read the March 2013 record from an undercover RCMP officer.

Just think of it as REALLY late-term abortions.

Read it.

In ways that slip beneath the doctrinal radar, public defenders often behave like social workers. They find drug treatment and jobs for their clients, and intervene with landlords and employers. Conversely — and ironically — many civil welfare service providers act increasingly like law enforcement officials. Teachers call the police on their students, while welfare case workers often refer their clients for prosecution. This role-switching — by criminal lawyers and civil servants alike — is a function of the tight connection between criminalization and poverty: poor people tend to get swept up in the criminal system and such encounters tend to make people poor. This nexus is particularly powerful in the world of minor offenses and urban policing in which crime, unemployment, racial segregation, and lack of social infrastructure swirl around in one large, nearly inextricable mass. As a result, criminal justice actors are heavily preoccupied with defendants’ social welfare even as the welfare state routinely treats its clients as presumptive criminals. These hydraulic forces affect every official actor — from police officers to prosecutors to emergency room nurses and public school teachers. But public defenders play a special role. Their multi-faceted service commitments to both criminal and welfarist outcomes reveal deep features of the criminal system itself and its conflicted governance relationship to its most vulnerable constituents.

 

Read it.

A GROUP of Calais migrants reached Britain by storming the French port and sneaking through the Channel Tunnel during this week’s incursions, the Home Secretary has revealed.

Guess the Channel Tunnel is not looking like such a great idea.

Speaking after a meeting of the emergency Cobra committee, Theresa May said an undisclosed number of migrants had stormed the French port before illegally entering the UK through the 30 mile tunnel.

You would think that there would be some responsibility on the part of the French government to make sure that this sort of thing doesn’t happen, but apparently not.

Steyn on Obama.

President Obama has wrapped up his tour of Africa. It was notable, insofar as that word can be applied to the trip, for his somewhat condescending and neo-colonial lecture to his hosts on the need to ease up on the old homophobia.

Certainly, Africa is not terribly gay-friendly. But nor are other parts of the planet. In his ardent wooing of Iran, for example, he doesn’t seem to have been perturbed in the least by his new best friends’ executions of homosexuals, anymore than he is by the brutalization of gays elsewhere in the Muslim world. You might deduce in his highly selective criticism a certain cowardice. I’ll bet the mullahs do.

Read it.

A man dressed in a crop top, miniskirt and blonde wig sexually assaulted another man on the campus of San Diego City College over the weekend, officials told NBC 7 Monday.

According to the college police’s account, the suspect was bold. They say he came onto campus at about 7:15 Sunday morning and attacked a man on the patio in front of the administration building, forcing the victim to perform a sex act. The location is roughly the center of campus.

Saw that coming.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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An amazing admission by Voice of the Crust The Guardian. Some editor was asleep at the Narrative switch.

Read it.

Apart from human uses, corn makes up the majority of feed for livestock. At one point, over 95% of the feed grains grown in the United States were based on corn. It’s no surprise then that in 2015 alone, some 89.2 million acres will be grown in the United States. This represents around 40% of all the corn grown worldwide.

But corn has seen a decline due to a number of factors. Crops have been hard hit by climate change. Higher temperatures have led to decreased yields and less overall abundance. As a result, the value of corn has dropped since 2012. This has put additional pressure on farmers, suggesting they may have to forego corn and look to other crops to maintain viability. This could harm corn stocks and hinder food security.

There may be an answer to the corn dilemma, but to find it, one has to look not in the prairies but the sea. Within the salty brine are algae. These microorganisms, once believed to be primordial plant species, are nutrient-making machines. They are known to produce high levels of antioxidants and also a variety of essential fatty acids. Some companies have even seen their algal-derived products make it to market.

Hmm. Kelp-fed beef just doesn’t have the same ring, somehow.

Read it.

George Simolaris is a member of the Board of Selectmen (the town council) in Billerica, Massachusetts. According to him, some of the crosswalks around town have become unsafe because the paint has faded, and it’s been taking forever to get the town manager and/or Board to repaint them. After more than six months of waiting, he says, he decided to help, so he went out last week and painted several of the crosswalks himself, at no cost to the city. He even used his own paint. Then they looked nice and were easy to see.

For this, he will be prosecuted.

Read it.

Tell the truth: Where would it be more appropriate? Yeah, well, maybe Washington….

One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.

— Eric Hoffer, Before the Sabbath

Read it.

As the Antiplanner noted a couple of weeks ago, the source of the gridlock is Congress’ decision ten years ago to change the Highway Trust Fund from a pay-as-you-go system to one reliant on deficit spending. This led to three factions: one, mostly liberal Democrats, wants to end deficits by raising the gas tax; a second, mostly conservative Republicans, wants to end deficits by reducing spending; and the third, which includes people from both sides of the aisle, wants to keep spending without raising gas taxes.

This third group is no doubt the largest because it is politically the easiest position to take, and it is responsible for the Senate bill. Gas taxes and other federal highway user fees bring in about $40 billion a year, while Congress is currently spending about $52 billion a year and wants to increase it by at least the rate of inflation. To make up the difference, the Senate bill includes a hodge-podge of ideas such as increasing customs fees and selling oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. As the Post noted, the one thing these sources of funds all have in common is that “none is related to surface transportation.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis, these funding schemes will only be enough to last through 2018, after which Congress will have to find another $51 billion to keep the spending going for another three years. That shortfall alone is probably what killed the bill in the House, though it would be nice to think that House members were also wary of a 1,000-plus-page bill sprung on them at the last minute (scroll down to “SA 2266? or search for “DRIVE Act”).

Read it.

Can’t say they’re wrong.

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I wouldn’t mind having a job as a professor.

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“I was thinking I’m an animal lover. The cats were looking like they wanted some love and [I] just jumped over and petted them,” a regretful Josh Newell, 35, told the NBC affiliated WCMH news channel.

Uh, yeah.

Read it.

Shucks, I could have told you that.

A new study into causes of the scarcity of women in technical and scientific fields says that it is not discrimination by men in the field keeping the ladies away. Nor is it a repugnance felt by women for possibly dishevelled or unhygienic male nerds.

No, the reason that young women don’t train in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM) areas – and thus, don’t find themselves with jobs at tech companies, in IT etc – is quite simply that they mostly don’t know enough maths to do those courses.

“It is all about the mathematical content of the field. Girls not taking math coursework early on in middle school and high school are set on a different college trajectory than boys,” says economics prof Donna Ginther.

Ginther and a colleague, Shulamit Kahn, examined statistics on young women’s maths qualifications and mathematical requirements for college courses in America. Put simply, they found that absence of women studying a given course can be accounted for simply by the fact that most young women don’t know much maths.

Read it. Feel free to laugh.

The University of Toledo is starting the nation’s first full undergraduate major in disability studies, an interdisciplinary field that already has considerable scholarly interest and graduate options.

This will eventually be subsumed into the Department of Fashionable Victimology. At some point there will come a Studies Studies major.

Read it.

Yet another fantasy sequence from Voice of the Crust The Guardian.

Gilles Vesco calls it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. He anticipates a revolution which will transform not just transport but the cities themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for people,” he says. “There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress; it will be a more walkable city.”

Just like in 1900, where all truly regressive ‘progressives’ want to wind up. Any resemblance to Disneyland is purely coincidental.

Walt would have loved these guys.

Read it.

The EmDrive, an experimental propulsion device, may be producing a warp field.

According to posts on the NASA Space Flight forum, when lasers were fired into the EmDrive resonance chamber, it was found that some of the beams were travelling faster than the speed of light.

But, being a government agency, they will find some way to screw it up while making it impossible for anybody else to do anything with it.

Ring of Fire

Read it.

The simulated city carries none of urbanity’s institutional hardware: no visible governmental facilities, religious institutions, schools or civic centers clutter the street wall. The simulated city eschews manufacturing and offices, instead making itself the chief enterprise: a mecca of retail, dining, and entertainment. It has cherry-picked the good stuff from the old urban form, presenting a cosmetically perfect face without blemish or quirk, redolent in its synthetic beauty.

…

Unlike the shadow-world of Florida’s urban downtowns, riverwalks, boardwalks, and Main Streets, throngs of people crowd these places every day and every night. For all the hoopla about the reinvigorated city, Florida’s urban scene fails to deliver even a fraction of the sidewalk life that these places have. The simulated city is the powerhouse of the future.

Read it.

It made me the man I am today.

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The only person with which I share food is my wife — Texas is a community property state, and she’s entitled to half.

All of this is a little hard on people who, darn it, just want a bit of alone time with the food they actually ordered. For years, reluctant sharers only had to fend off the occasional fry filcher, or the girlfriend who virtuously passes on dessert — and then plants her fork in her companion’s crème brûlée. Now, whole menus are devoted to socialist portions.

Read it.

Is this a satire? Or straight? We report, you decide.

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Well, here we are again, at the beginning of a presidential campaign in which the Republican Party, having lost its hold on the radical middle, is terrified of the electoral consequences. The supporters of Reagan and Perot, of Gingrich and Pat Buchanan, have found another aging billionaire in whom to place their fears and anxieties, their nostalgia and love of country, their disgust with the political and cultural elite, their trepidation at what our nation is becoming.

…

It is immigration—its universally celebrated benefits and its barely acknowledged costs—that is the third rail of U.S. politics, with repercussions from the border to Eric Cantor’s district in 2014 to courtrooms and the Republican debate stage today. Trump didn’t step on the third rail; he embraced it, he won’t let go of it, and in so doing he’s become electric. Republicans, Democrats, journalists, corporations all want to define themselves against him, and their flaunting of their moral superiority only feeds the media monster, only makes Trump more attractive to the dispossessed, alienated, radical middle.

Cubrick cabinet.

Tactical Baby Carrier.

Read it.

To limit the growth of health-care spending, and to help subsidize insurance for low-income Americans, the Affordable Care Act took a step toward limiting this tax break. Beginning Jan. 1, 2018, the law levies a hefty excise tax on health insurance plans worth more than $27,500 per family or $10,200 per individual (with some adjustments to thresholds to be made for hazardous jobs such as those in law enforcement or construction and other factors). This has been dubbed the “Cadillac tax.” (For details, see this Cigna summary or this Health Affairs policy brief.)

Once again, a Voice of the Crust shakes a finger at those who are spending money on things that the Crust would prefer it not be spent on.

Consider the concept of employer-paid-for health care, which the author admits was a market response to a Typical Government Stupidity, wage and price controls during WWII. (Funny how many of today’s ‘crises’ are the result of Typical Government Stupidity in times past. Don’t get me started on the Fourteenth Amendment.) Whenever one finds a separation between who pays for the service and who receives the service, you get the following: People grabbing all the service that they can (after all, they’re not paying for it); service providers thinking up ever more new and original ways of providing services that they can hoodwink the recipients and the payers into consuming; and tedious acres of articles by simple-minded pundits about how something, SOMETHING must be done.

The answer, of course, is simple: People pay for their own health care. That allows the market to do what it does best, i.e. set prices and clear the market for a particular service. But the Crust doesn’t like simplicity, because it doesn’t serve their agenda.

They ought to have a high-school course on not talking back to a man with a gun. It might save more lives than driving lessons.

— Matt Helm, The Shadowers

Read it.

The world’s first malaria vaccine has cleared one of the final hurdles prior to being approved for use in Africa.

The European Medicines Agency gave a positive scientific opinion after assessing its safety and effectiveness.

Read it.

In a wide-ranging report, the UN Human Rights Committee called for Britain to implement a number of measures in order to comply with international treaties, including the holding of independent investigations into murders and other human rights abuses during Northern Ireland’s Troubles and improvements to the way human rights abuses by the Armed Forces overseas are dealt with.

It also said the age of criminal responsibility – which is 10 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and eight in Scotland although children there can only be prosecuted when they reach 12 – was “not in accordance with international standards” and should be raised.

Who hires these people? And why?

Read it. And watch the video.

The Islamic State has released yet another grotesquely violent execution video. This one is directed at a French-speaking audience, and after he shoots his captive, the executioner promises that there will be corpses in the streets of Paris if the French do not submit to Islam.

I’m certain that he’s correct; there will be corpses in the streets of Paris. The question is: Whose? It is, after all, not that many generations since the French proved themselves adept at creating corpses with great efficiency…

Read it. Feel free to laugh.

The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.

Oh, maybe it’s the whole Koran/Mohammed/Jihad business. Naw, that couldn’t be it.

But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions—however slickly produced and communicated—have had popular appeal in the first place.

Perhaps it’s adherents read the Koran and took it seriously. Naw, that couldn’t be it.

The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict—still less control—these developments. Who predicted that Zarqawi would grow in strength after the US destroyed his training camps in 2001? It seemed unlikely to almost everyone that the movement would regroup so quickly after his death in 2006, or again after the surge in 2007. We now know more and more facts about the movement and its members, but this did not prevent most analysts from believing as recently as two months ago that the defeats in Kobane and Tikrit had tipped the scales against the movement, and that it was unlikely to take Ramadi. We are missing something.

Yeah – it’s called ‘Islam’. (Make you wonder what ‘we’ he’s talking about.)

The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country.

Oh, well, then, that explains it.

We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.

‘Baffled?’ Try ‘clueless’. Try ‘dumber than a box of rocks’. Try ‘invincibly ignorant’.

Read it.

The legislative sausage-making process is apparently so streamlined that many sausage-makers are barely involved in the process. It’s not that they don’t want to be. It’s that other sausage-makers want their product to be pushed out the door with a minimum of inspection.

Senator Mike Lee posted a video to his Facebook page that contained a rather graphic depiction of expeditious sausage-making. As his printer whirred away behind him, Lee noted that a $47-billion, 1,033-page transportation funding bill was up for a vote. In less than an hour.

…

The bill — which failed to obtain the number of votes needed to open debate — was a bipartisan effort (led by Barbara Boxer [D] and Mitch McConnell [R]). That’s probably the best thing that can be said about it and the legislators behind it. Rather than prove lawmakers can occasionally put aside their differences and actually move forward with the business of legislating, this bill simply signals that both sides of the aisle are willing to resort to bullshit tactics.

The bill arrived at the last minute because the effort itself was last minute. Federal highway aid to states is up against a July 31st expiration deadline. Despite its length, the bill is still far from finished. It takes money from a variety of unrelated programs to fund federal aid for the next three years. The problem is the bill authorizes spending for the next six years. That’s the other reason the bill’s champions were hoping to shove this through with a minimum of debate: the bill leaves it up to the next Senate class to figure out where it’s going to get the other $45-60 billion it will need to keep the federal aid flowing.

Read it.

Some people have entirely too much time on their hands.

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Christian Adams reports that an internal report by the Texas Department of Public Safety, obtained by PJ Media, finds that illegal immigrants have committed hundreds of thousands of crimes, including nearly 3,000 homicides, in Texas. According to the Department of Public Safety’s analysis, foreign aliens committed 611,234 unique crimes in Texas from 2008 to 2014, including thousands of homicides and sexual assaults.

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

They’re already criminals just by coming here. They’ve already proved that they’re willing to break the law if they get some advantage by it. Why is it news that they break other laws when they get here?