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I am not making this up.

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All together now:

FIRST

WORLD

PROBLEM

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A recent arson attack did severe damage to a church in Israel on the Sea of Galilee, at the site where tradition says Jesus multiplied the loaves and fishes to feed five thousand hungry people. When it turned out that the perpetrators were zealous Muslims, the press dropped the story. Nothing to see here. Move along, folks.

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Nearly 10,000 people turned out to hear Bernie Sanders in Wisconsin. Why? Apparently, many Democrats want socialism.

…

Sanders calls himself a “democratic socialist,” not to be confused with New York City mayor Bill de Blasio’s preferred label, “social democrat,” but both believe that more power and wealth in the hands of government (and less in the hands of free people and the free market) is a good thing. They just don’t want you to think they’re dictators like Stalin. They may institute terrible economic policies, but they’ll have the backing of voters.

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How utterly appropriate: Steven Salaita will be the Edward W. Said Chair of American Studies at the American University of Beirut (AUB) for the 2015/16 academic year. A supposed expert on Native Americans whose anti-Semitic attacks on Israel cost him a job at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne, Salaita will assume a chair named for the late Columbia University English professor whose 1978 book Orientalism contributed more than any other work to the systemic intellectual decadence that still characterizes Middle East studies.

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North Korea has executed the manager of an underperforming terrapin farm, following a “field guidance tour” of the site by Kim Jong-un.

According to Daily NK, the chubby despot rolled up at the facility on the Taedong River in Pyongyang back in May (see pic, below), to find “some of the tanks were not adequately supplied with food and water, leading to the death of a lot of terrapins”.

Kim apparently “lashed out at everyone present during the inspection”, dismissing “nonsensical complaints” that water, electrical and equipment problems had caused the diminutive turtles’ demise.

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Most of us probably assume that if legal charges are filed against us and we consider them unjust, we have a First Amendment right to raise a ruckus in the press. But last week’s controversial Oregon cake ruling suggests that some public officials are not so sure about that.

This decision is very disturbing. Hopefully it will be overturned on appeal, but the fact that it was entered in the first place is frightening.

Steve Sailer thinks deep thoughts so that you don’t have to.

The concept of America being divided into sprawling red Republican regions and dense blue Democrat districts first became a cliché In November–December 2000. Over the past decade and a half I’ve probably thought as much about the underlying reasons as anybody, and in this column I’d like to speculate on an even more fundamental cause behind the red-blue divide.

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That the partisan divide is related to density is clear. My contribution in 2004–05 was to point out that the red-blue map is related to affordability of family formation, a topic first explicated by Benjamin Franklin in the 1750s but largely ignored in recent decades.

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But perhaps there are even more fundamental reasons for the density divide. The central red vs. blue identity gap falls between the Core vs. the Fringe of American life: The Obama coalition is a crazy quilt of identity groups who can be held together only by stoking fear and loathing of Core Americans.

In my terminology, the Filling vs the Crust.

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On June 26th Kuwait suffered its worst ever Islamic terror attack when a Sunni Saudi suicide bomber walked into a Shia mosque and detonated his explosive vest, killing himself and 26 Shia there to pray. Kuwait spends a lot of time, money and effort keeping its local Islamic terrorists under control but this attack came via Saudi Arabia, where police in both countries quickly discovered a new ISIL cell that largely consisted of men with known Islamic terrorist tendencies but who had learned how to conceal their real activities from whatever police surveillance they were under. To make this attack in Kuwait possible it was soon found a complex series of couriers and safe houses was used to move the explosive vest hundreds of kilometers across Saudi Arabia and into Kuwait. The bomber was not a suspected terrorist and because most of the states in Arabia allow free (without needing a visa) movement of their citizens it was easy for the Kuwaiti bomber to just fly in, get picked up by another member of his support team who took him to the mosque and delivered any last minute instructions. Security cameras showed the bomber calmly walking into the mosque, stop near a large group of praying Shia and explode. The only positive thing to come out of all this was that police were able to quickly connect many of the usual suspects (people already identified as potential problems) to this attack, arrest them and begin interrogations and prosecutions.

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The form that the defence against the Sunni jihadists is taking is also plain. At every intersection, on every wall, on every corner, the banners of Iraq’s Shia militias blare out their allegiance. The slogan “At your service, O Hussein” — referring to the greatest martyr of the Shiites, killed by the Sunni Ummayads at the battle of Karbala in 680 AD — is everywhere. It is there next to the countless banners and posters of Hussein’s serene, bearded visage that one sees all around. It is there, too, amid the ubiquitous militia billboards, alongside pictures of ayatollahs Ruhollah Khomeini, Ali Khamenei, Mohammed al-Sadr and Ali al-Sistani.

The same Shia sectarian slogan can be glimpsed on the wall of the Iraqi Army checkpoint on the road from the airport. At your service, o Hussein. That is to say, the defence of Baghdad against Islamic State is not taking place in the name of Iraq. The men doing the fighting and dying are there as Shiites. This applies even to many or most of those wearing the uniforms of the official Iraqi Security Forces.

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17 of the 23 existing non-profit co-ops created by Obamacare are paying their executives exorbitant salaries as high as $587,000, according to reporting by the Daily Caller’s Richard Pollock. Not only do almost all co-op executives have zero insurance experience, but according to Pollock, their salaries may violate provisions in both federal law and Obamacare rules that limit executive compensation.

Several executives had portions of their salaries hidden in “obscure tax return footnotes” or did not report them at all. As Pollock points out, the median executive healthcare pay is $135,000 but at least five states paid their executives over $487,000 – more than three and a half times the average. These salaries likely violate a section of the Bipartisan budget Act of 2013 which prohibits federal contractor executive compensation from exceeding this amount. In addition, at least six co-ops (in New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Arizona, Louisiana, and Illinois) hid $26.5 million in additional pay in their footnotes as “management fees.”

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As a Vanderbilt Ingram Scholar, Hytham Al-Hindi gets his tuition fully paid for his undergraduate degree.

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In exchange for the $160,000 plus in free education, Vanderbilt gets its own Jew-hating, HAMAS-connected Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) student organization, started by Al-Hindi.

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And a better metaphor for the state of modern American politics I can’t imagine.

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Despite continued evidence that high-speed rail is a waste of money, reporters still write articles lamenting that high-speed trains in America are “elusive.” It’s elusive for a simple reason: it makes no sense, being slower than flying, less convenient than driving, and far more expensive than both.

The problem with trains is that they take you and people you don’t know from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be at a time that is inconvenient to you. This naturally recommends itself highly to Democrites and other statists.

What’s changed between 1906 and today? Today we have trains that can go roughly twice as fast as the train Miller proposed, but we also have planes that go at least five times as fast. We also have automobiles that can take you anywhere you want in an urban area, while the trains can only serve a few points because every stop reduces the average speed and makes the train less viable.

What hasn’t changed is the cost. After adjusting for inflation, building high-speed rail lines across mountains, such as the coastal mountains between San Francisco and Los Angeles and California’s Central Valley, is still extremely expensive. Even in the relatively flat area between Tokyo and Osaka, proposals for a high-speed maglev project call for 80 percent of the route to be in tunnels. Why spend all that money when we have planes that can fly over the hills at twice the speed of the trains?

Because the regressives want to cancel the 20th century, and getting rid of planes and automobiles (except for the Crust, of course) is a big part of that.

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And as a result was splashed over the headlines and airwaves for weeks, occupying the front pages of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc.

(Oh, wait….)

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And what is Los Angeles mostly full of?

The deepening gap between rich and poor is both a sociological fact and a state of mind. The cost of housing is up dramatically, and so is homelessness.

Which are characteristics of cities in what part of the world?

California has both the most “ultrarich” (people worth more than $30 million) and the worst poverty rate in America. Even though San Francisco recently overtook Los Angeles in ultrarich residents, ostentatious affluence and permanent poverty live side by side here.

And California is run by what political party?

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Just in case you doubted Jonah Goldberg.

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Owls have an impressive superpower in silent flight, made possible by specialized wings and feathers that disperse the sound of air rushing past them. Now an international research team says they have taken a tip from owls that could eventually lead to turbine blades and jet aircraft that produce significantly less noise.

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The Venus’ flower basket sea sponge uses extraordinarily strong spicules — strands of nested glass columns–to anchor itself against flowing currents.

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Only for Voices of the Crust, supporting the Narrative. The rest of us recognize that ‘persons of color’ are more likely to be criminals.

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As Turkish prime minister (now president) Recep Tayyip Erdogan famously said, “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers.” And he wasn’t kidding — but he left out “armories”, because mosques serve that function, too.

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Recent revelations concerning the endemic sexual grooming of British girls by Muslim men demonstrate how crippling political correctness is, and how it complements the most abusive elements of Islamic law, or Sharia.

According to a June 24 report by the Birmingham Mail, as far back as March 2010, West Midlands Police knew that Muslim grooming gangs “were targeting children outside schools across the city—but failed to make the threat public.”

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The United Nations Human Rights Council is a body whose essential purpose is to stigmatize the Jewish state for imaginary crimes. The Obama administration therefore deems it important for the United States to fund and participate in the work of the body, such as the farcical investigation of alleged war crimes conducted by its Gaza Conflict Commission of Inquiry. Having concluded its investigation and issued its report, the commission concluded that both Israel and Hamas may have committed war crime in the course of Operation Protective Edge last year, but the commission unloads on Israel.

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Around this time every year, Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School and a longtime advocate of using technology to simplify tax filing, gets on the phone with reporters to explain what is wrong with how we do our taxes in the United States. Every year he says pretty much the same thing: No other industrialized country asks its citizens to jump through as many hoops to calculate their taxes as ours.

It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time, he adds. Instead it is the private sector — specifically, the software company Intuit, which makes TurboTax, the most popular tax program in the country.

Whenever there are burdensome regulations, there always arises an ‘industry’ to help people comply with those regulations — often built by people who were responsible for creating them (or administering them) in the first place. This ‘industry’ then becomes a powerful lobby against any attempts to break their rice bowl by simplifying the system. For example, in a world in which the wife of a Senator (and future First Lady) can get a bespoke job as ‘diversity officer’ at a public institution (which is then allowed to lapse when she moves on), ‘diversity’ is going to be hard to get rid of.

The reform plan would work like this: Today, employers, banks, brokerage firms and pretty much every other financial organization in the country send the federal government detailed records about our economic activity every year. These organizations also send you, the taxpayer, a similar set of documents, which are forms with names like W-2 and 1098. After you file your taxes, the government matches its two sets of documents to make sure you have filed correctly.

To Mr. Bankman, this double documentation doesn’t make much sense. If the government is already collecting financial data from employers and banks, why can’t the I.R.S. use that information to precalculate our tax returns for us? At the very least, why can’t tax software just connect to the government’s database to download all the information that the government has collected, saving us all that record-keeping and data entry?

I like it, although I also like the fact that it costs people time and money to do their taxes, thus creating a potential constituency for tax reform. (Just think of how people would scream if the withholding regime didn’t make the paying of taxes more painless than the filing of tax returns.)

But Intuit’s opposition to return-free filing has been ferocious. In the last five years, according to disclosure documents, Intuit spent nearly $13 million on federal lobbying. That is about the same amount that companies many times its size have spent on lobbying. Apple, which has an annual income about 40 times that of Intuit, also spent about $13 million on lobbying in the same period. While documents show that Intuit lobbies on several issues, including immigration, cybersecurity and intellectual property law, the company’s largest lobbying contracts all involve the issue of tax administration.

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

Intuit is far from the only opponent of return-free filing. Groups that call for lower taxes, like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, say it is a “conflict of interest” for the government to both collect taxes and calculate how much people owe.

Bullshit. The IRS already calculates what people owe, and if that disagrees with the return, the IRS will send you a letter telling you that they are changing it, which taxpayers can challenge. Why not eliminate the burdensome front end? My wife and I both have MBAs and we have yet to see a year where the IRS doesn’t find something they think we did wrong, mostly in the application of some pissant rule that their software is built to catch. We’ve gotten to the point where we just fill in the information that we have and let them calculate the tax; this has the added advantage that if they think we owe something they send us a bill, which typically gives us a couple of penalty-free months after April 15 to come up with the money.

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There’s no word from the White House yet over whether the President will speak at the funeral of the American woman murdered on the San Francisco waterfront Wednesday by a five-time deported illegal alien from Mexico.

I’m thinking No, since she wasn’t of a fashionable color.

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Instruments that measure the properties of light, known as spectrometers, are widely used in physical, chemical, and biological research. These devices are usually too large to be portable, but MIT scientists have now shown they can create spectrometers small enough to fit inside a smartphone camera, using tiny semiconductor nanoparticles called quantum dots.

Such devices could be used to diagnose diseases, especially skin conditions, or to detect environmental pollutants and food conditions, says Jie Bao, a former MIT postdoc and the lead author of a paper describing the quantum dot spectrometers in the July 2 issue of Nature.

Frederick Douglass explains it all to you.

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Let’s not forget the huge numbers of ‘experts’ who say that squatting is a healthier way to poop than sitting.

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Security inside the undersea link was once more brought into question as traffic was disruption as some 150 mainly young men tried to get on board UK-bound freight trains just after 10.30pm local time.

“From 10:30pm, around 150 migrants attempted to enter the platforms,” a Calais spokesman said.

Police confirmed: “Riot officers had to intervene to restore orde. Services were disrupted until the very early hours. There are attempts to get into the Tunnel pretty much every night, but this was one of the worse,” the spokesman added.

A Eurotunnel spokesman added that it “suffers from attempted intrusions every night”.

Richard Fernandez looks at the oddities of modern politics.

A picture doing the rounds of Facebook  shows a picture of Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas and actor George Takei, who called Thomas “a clown in blackface” for dissenting with the majority decision on gay marriage.  The caption says: “Thomas votes for the party that freed his ancestors.  Takei votes for the party that put him, personally, in an internment camp.”  The irony comes from the fact that there is often something more powerful than experience.  That impulse is the need to belong.  Intern me, only let me belong.

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Powerful social movements do not promote diversity, except superficially.  What they sell is membership in a group.  That is the core product of religions, clubs, political parties — and until recently, nations.  The left is no different.  It doesn’t want its members to think independently but follow the party line, to parrot the narrative. The party line must be served, no matter when, no matter what.

Just a few hours ago an illegal immigrant gunned down a young female tourist on Embarcadero wharf.  ”The man … was in a Bay Area jail less than four months ago and should have been turned over to federal immigration officials upon his release, instead of being set free, according to the Department of Homeland Security.”  But Bay Area authorities couldn’t turn him over they explained, because it would have run counter to the prevailing political narrative.

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What matters is not what you do, but who sent you.  Governors that round up illegal immigrants are accused of infringing on the federal government’s prerogative to control the borders.  But not so officials  who let illegal immigrant killers stick around to murder following “city policy”. Anyone who maintains that Obamacare is a failure will be accused of criminal right wing delusions, unless of course you’re Bernie Sanders and want to replace a failing Affordable Care Act with Single payer.  Then it’s okay. The different lies not in the act, but in the actor.

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A friend points out that some Social Media Justice Warriors are starting to get a sense that they could turn this type of thing into an institutionalized shakedown system like Jesse Jackson perfected back in the 1970s:

What’s becoming clear is that, besides pulling big numbers for yourself as a freelancer if YOUR opinion piece is the one that gets the avalanche started on an entertainer or writer, what the SJWs want is for Hollywood to share their money with them by hiring SJWs as consultants. In exchange for money and the gesture of deference, they will guide the writers and entertainers away from the arbitrary, and constantly changing, landmines.

Nice movie you got here. It would be a shame if anything bad happened to it.

Keep in mind that Rev. Jesse is both a problem to Corporate America and The Solution: he’ll provide your Fortune 500 behemoth with racial benediction if you, say, hire companies who donate to his operations to run your cafeteria (badly) and the like.

That helps explain the long tenure of Jackson and Sharpton at the top of the seemingly greasy pole of black grievance-mongering. Jesse understands how the game is played and is in it for the long haul.

Shelf-Pack Suitcase.

Rear-View Bike Radar.

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Within weeks of the Obama administration’s announcement last December that it would resume diplomatic relations with Cuba, the Internet nearly sank under the weight of new pages urging everybody to “see it now before it changes.” Because, apparently, a poverty-ridden, one-party police state teeming with cheap hookers and expensive mojitos would quickly be vulgarized by an influx of American tourists once U.S. travel restrictions eased.

The new fascination with all things Cuban (except, of course, its boorish political prisoners, still ignored in polite progressive society) has now been officially enshrined in American popular culture with the inclusion of Tiburones: Sharks Of Cuba in the Discovery Channel’s venerable Shark Week programming. You will know the trend has run its course and become unhip when the Syfy network announces production on Sharknado 4: Fidel Bites.

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Chao Chen, a Master’s student in design at London’s Royal College of Art, was inspired by an ordinary pinecone he saw in Hyde Park. Pinecones close when wet, and Chen decided to see if he could mimic the movement for a class project.

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He discovered that by layering a veneer, fabric, and a thin layer of film together he could make a material that reacted just like the pinecone to water: opening on sunny days, and curling in the presence of water.

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When insurance companies across the country requested hefty hikes for their Obamacare plan premiums, we noted that regulators might deny or scale back the requests. But the first official numbers are in from Oregon, and the results aren’t pretty for the ACA. Not only did the state’s Insurance Commissioner approve big premium hikes, she has even required insurers that didn’t request any increases to raise their prices.

Be careful what you vote for; you just might get it.

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There are two kinds of ice ages; they are fundamentally different and therefore require different methods of mitigation: (i) Major (Milankovich-style) glaciations occur on a 100,000-year time-scale and are controlled astronomically.  (ii) “Little” ice ages were discovered in ice cores; they have been occurring on an approx. 1000-1500-yr cycle and are likely controlled by the Sun.  The current cycle’s cooling phase may be imminent — hence there may be urgent need for action.

Read it. And watch the video.

“Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times,” Clinton said in the video announcement on April 12. “But the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”

So what do Millennials think of a candidate who criticizes the “1 percent,” but simultaneously owns multi-million dollar properties in Washington, D.C. and New York and spends her summers in the Hamptons? Campus Correspondent Cabot Phillips took to the streets of our nation’s capitol to find out in Campus Reform’s debut of “Candidate’s Cribs.”

She doesn’t mean herself, of course; she means those other people at the top.

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Blosom, the world’s tallest cow, was measured to be a full 6-foot-2 inches tall (190 cm) from hoof to withers when this photo was taken in early 2015.

Guinness officials had awarded the bovine beauty an official world record in August of 2014 while visiting her owner’s farm in Orangeville, Illinois, to verify that yes, a cow could really be that tall.

Gone, but not forgotten.

“Blosom was born to two normal-sized cows, and according to Patty, was even taller when she was eight years old,” wrote Rachel Swatman on guinessworldrecords.com. “Always friendly with her owners, Patty treated Blosom like any other household pet and loved nothing more than spending time with her out in the field.”

She’s a fool if she’s not trying to breed another one.

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At taxpayer expense, of course.

This week, trustees of the cash-strapped, taxpayer-funded City University of New York (CUNY) system approved a hefty annual salary as well as the fancypants title of “distinguished professor” for Paul Krugman.

New York City’s public college system pays Krugman $225,000 each year to analyze the vexing problem of income inequality at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center, Gawker notes.

Nice work, if you can get it. I can make up as many liberal fairy tales about ‘income inequality’ as Krugman; maybe I should apply.

The decidedly left-leaning economics professor is also employed by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as well as by the London School of Economics. Additionally, he works as a columnist at The New York Times. He has written books, too. His publisher is W. W. Norton & Company.

Pretty sweet.

Thus Krugman, who has long criticized substantial wealth inequalities in the United States, has a net worth that is over 39,000 percent of the net worth of the poorest quintile of Americans.

Well, I guess he won’t have to look far to start his study.

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Nathan Collier and his wives Victoria and Christine applied at the Yellowstone County Courthouse in Billings on Tuesday in an attempt to legitimize their polygamous marriage. Montana, like all 50 states, outlaws bigamy — holding multiple marriage licenses — but Collier said he plans to sue if the application is denied.

“It’s about marriage equality,” Collier told The Associated Press Wednesday. “You can’t have this without polygamy.”

We told you so….

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The postulate that nature abhors a vacuum seems to apply in politics as elsewhere. There is a vacuum in the Democratic field of candidates for president. Like Gene McCarthy in 1968, Bernie Sanders is in the process of demonstrating the existence of the vacuum. Again, like McCarthy in 1968, there his utility ends. Sanders would not be a viable Democratic candidate for president.

If that is so, then the Republican Presidential race must suck real bad (e.g. Trump).

Hm. Come to think of it….

The vacuum is the space for a plausible alternative to Madam Hillary. Such a candidate would have to be liberal and able to recite the regnant shibboleths with conviction, of course, but he would also have to be likable and honest in his own way in order to distinguish himself from Madam Hillary. This candidate would instantly slow and have a good chance of interrupting the Clinton death march to the Democratic nomination, which seems to be enacting a variant of what Leo Strauss called the joyless quest for joy. In this case it is the joyless quest for power.

Considering how much Democrites lust for power even on their slowest days, the present dearth of candidates would seem to undermine the premise.

Will Joe Biden fill the space created by Hillary’s candidacy?

Probably not. To Quote Joey the Hit Man, speaking of Nixon-McGovern: ‘I had a choice between a fool and a crook. Naturally, I voted for the crook.’

Biden, let it be noted, is 72. Because Barack Obama ended the careers of so many younger Democrat officeholders only the geriatric contingent like Biden are plausible alternatives to Madam Hillary. We know Biden is possessed by the ambition to be president. He would be a fool not to challenge Madam Hillary. He’s not the brightest bulb in the room, but he’s no fool.

Well….

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, offers some advice for the perplexed.

Here’s this week’s precept:

Avoid fucked-up people.

Most citizens of a functioning society live in a bourgeois style. They obey the law, keep regular hours, and brush their teeth. They get as much education as they can tolerate, acquire a marketable skill, work, marry, raise kids, and keep their debts under control.

The people I’m advising you to avoid, the fucked-up people—hereinafter FUPs—are the others. You’ve met them, or will: the drunks and moochers, the losers and dropouts, the profligates and unemployables. They will at best waste your time, at worst drag you down (?) into fucked-uppery.

Amen to that.

Don’t.

Just … don’t.

All it does is raise awareness that you’re too much of a slacker to do anything beyond a token effort, getting credit for ‘good intentions’ without actually being productive — a great Yeah Me Too.

Really, just don’t.

Read it.

One of the great statistics being bandied about in the great inequality debate is that the Walton family have more wealth between the four siblings than the bottom 40 per cent of Americans do in total. Apparently this is something most shocking – and, of course, something must be done.

I would argue that there’s nothing very unusual in this at all and also that it’s actually a thoroughly good idea. Who knows, by the time I’ve finished explaining why one or two of you might even agree with me.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

My stance as a critic of public education began while I was in fifth grade at Lithia Springs (Ga.) Elementary School, but it was not until our eldest daughter spent a year in kindergarten that I realized that the system is inimical to liberty. Your local public schools are destroying America, and are ultimately a greater threat to our nation’s survival than ISIS.

The first lesson of school is, your parents are idiots.

See, this is why we need school: If parents were smart enough to teach their own children how to read and write, there would be no need for this massive government bureaucracy to provide education to our youth. Silly parents! How dare you think yourselves competent to educate your own child! Education is only possible when conducted by a government-trained expert and provided in a government-controlled classroom under the direction of government-certified bureaucrats.

The second lesson of school is, your parents are wrong.

This was not really a problem so much when I was in school four or five decades ago, when our parents and our teachers shared similar or identical religious, moral and political beliefs. Adult authority in that time and place spoke in a single voice that was patriotic, Christian and dedicated to basic values like hard work and honesty.

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If it doesn’t blow up somewhere along the trip.

No, thank you.

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Moral: Don’t steal shit in a country that has a legal right to keep and bear arms.

Seems pretty straightforward to me.

Read it.