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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Princeton University geologist Ken Deffeyes predicted that global oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005. In 2005, daily global oil production averaged 85 million barrels per day. Daily petroleum liquids production in July was 96 million barrels per day.

And yet I’ll bet he’s still a Princeton University geologist. Anybody working for a Real Company would be fired by now.

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‘Black leaders’ finally get a clue. About time, too.

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

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The Huffington Post has caused outrage among those readers who considered it a liberal left website by launching an Arabic edition which has promptly criticised gays, atheists and the practice of taking selfies.

Days after going live, the site has already published a series of vitriolic outbursts including a piece by an Egyptian contributor on Saturday complaining that atheists were being allowed on Egyptian television and that the Government permitted “a press conference for gays in the heart of Cairo”.

I guess believing six impossible things before breakfast wears off quickly when the carbs hit.

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Australians have been warned to get their dietary act together, after a survey revealed a growing and alarming trend for junk food excess.

According to the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), 40,000+ respondents to its Healthy Diet Score Survey – “a scientifically validated survey which assesses people’s diet quality against the Australian Dietary Guidelines” – scored an average 61 out of 100.

“Discretionary food, or junk food, intake was found to be three-times higher than the recommended daily limit,” CSIRO notes.

Gotta love Australians.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Invoking proportionate representation ideology, the research also determined that “less than 5 percent of all speaking or named characters in those movies were Hispanic or Latino, despite that group comprising about 17 percent of the U.S. population.”

Perhaps it’s because even blacks and females find watching movies about blacks and femals BORING.

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As the state of Illinois is struggling with budget problems, Northern Illinois University, a public school, just hired a “chief diversity officer” that will make more than almost every member of Congress and almost every governor. Vernese Edghill-Walden, whose full title is “senior associate vice president for academic diversity and chief diversity officer,” started working at NIU on August 1 and will make $205,000 a year — $185,000 in salary and $20,000 in allowances and expenses — according to an article in the College Fix. The website was originally alerted to the hire by a local site, USofArn.com Money is so tight in Illinois right now that state lawmakers struggling to figure out where to make cuts to balance the budget, while the state’s pension system nears bankruptcy. Still, NIU spokesman Joseph King is defending the hire and compensation as a good use of taxpayer money.

Having a black female diversity officer (Yeah, Michelle, I’m lookig at you) can keep you from expensive lawsuits — worth more than a Congressman any day.

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Not only are Muslims trying to take back any territory that they ever held, they’re trying to expand into new territory.

Islam is an existential threat to any non-Muslim polity. Eventually people will wake up to that. Hopefully before it’s too late.

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Part of the Iran nuclear agreement enables the removal of individual terrorists from Western sanctions, including notorious Lebanese assassin Anis Naccache.

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A group is advancing a plan to breed red heifers in Israel, according to a piece in the Times of Israel. That’s much more important than it may sound: Both Christian and Jewish holy books appear to predict the construction of a new Jewish Temple before the world ends. One of the obstacles has been that the ashes of a red heifer “without blemish or spot” are needed for certain ceremonies connected with it. It appears now that some embryos with the right genes are ready to go—if suitably kosher farms can be found for them in Israel.

I am not making this up.

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

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The U.S. Air Force is planning to install the microwave ADS, or Active Denial System (which transmits a searchlight sized beam of energy that makes people downrange feel like their skin is on fire) on several of its sixteen new AC-130J gunships. This would provide air force gunships with a non-lethal weapon for the first time. This may not work. That’s because ADS has been ready since 2007 but has never been used. In 2012 a possible reason for this was revealed. It seems that ADS performs poorly in the rain (or fog, mist, or snow). This is a common problem with microwaves and lasers, which are broken up by all these forms of precipitation. Tests of ADS during rainy conditions found that the pain turned to a warm comfortable feeling (especially in the cold and damp). Moreover, the microwaves only work on exposed skin, which means during cold or inclement weather (when people cover up) ADS is less likely to have much impact. Apparently it was believed that it would not take the locals long to figure all this out and improvise effective countermeasures. Thus this aspect of ADS, long suspected by scientists and engineers, was kept secret until 2012.

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Imagine an election—a close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.

In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”

As Steven Hayward says:

I have no idea if there’s much to this, but beyond the techniques of “data mining” implied here, it should be filed away that Silicon Valley, and Google in particular, leans to the left, and even when not consciously left, tends toward an authoritarian elitism that is troubling. If Google could swing an election, there’s no doubt which way they’d swing it.

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The Climate Change Business Journal has calculated that global warming is now a $1.5 trillion a year industry. The Business Journal’s report is not available for free online, but its findings are reviewed by the Insurance Journal.

…

What is striking about the global warming industry is that its growth is driven more or less entirely by “policymaking,” i.e., government mandates and other policies. This is why “green” businesses contribute so lavishly to the political campaigns of politicians who drink the global warming Kool-aid.

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It’s been apparent for years that America’s underfunded public employee pension system, one of the backbones of blue model governance, will have to face a brutal reckoning at some time or another, but new data suggest that the date of that reckoning may be sooner than anticipated.

Free Your Feet by Putting Super-Strong Socks on Them. You first.

Jawhorse.

Zip Line Kit.

The GrOpener.

Cantilever Flatware.

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Of course, if a non-government group had done that, they’d have been fined within an inches of their lives, and possibly done some jail time.

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According to the latest reports, some soccer fans in the Czech Republic are not only showing signs of Islamophobia, they may even be WAYCISTS.

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Socialism fails every time it’s tried. Funny how that works.

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Italian police arrested the men, named as Imad Busadia, Abdullah Assnusi, Ali Rouibah, Suud Mujassabi and Shauki Esshaush, on Thursday Reuters reported.

…

The men, who are believed to be part of a Libyan-based trafficking ring, were arrested after survivors were brought to Sicily and gave further information to police.

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The Lifestyle Home Elevator from U.K.-based Terry Lifts is an impossibly clever home-help device for old folks or for anyone who can no longer use the stairs.

But better than the product itself is the Reuters news report about it, which is just about the most English thing you’ll see today. To watch it is to enjoy wall-to-wall carpeting, mugs of tea placed artfully in the shot, and highly inaccurate references to both Star Trek and Doctor Who.

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The latest tragedy in the Mediterranean, where a fishing ship smuggling possibly as many as 600 people capsized on Wednesday with about 200 presumed dead, is a portrait in miniature of the mess of policy mistakes, unintended consequences, and human folly that’s turning the Mare Nostrum into a graveyard. (A mark of how bad things are: 200 deaths can be considered “a portrait in miniature”.)

According to the WSJ, many of those aboard the ship came from Syria. For four years, the West has refused and/or been unable to do anything about the plight of that war-torn country, and no wonder people are fleeing it. Meanwhile, the port of immediate departure was in Libya, where the West—at the urging of many European nations—did intervene, but without any intention to stick around or plan to deal with the aftermath. Even as it becomes increasingly clear that Libya’s disorder is at the root of the current immigration crisis, Europe has not the foggiest clue how to fix things there.

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The Simele massacre was a massacre committed by the armed forces of the Kingdom of Iraq during a campaign systematically targeting the Assyrians of northern Iraq in August 1933. The term is used to describe not only the massacre in Simele, but also the killing spree that took place among 63 Assyrian villages in the Dohuk and Mosul districts that led to the deaths of between 600 and 3,000 Assyrians.

Mark Bauerlein is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

IN the coming weeks, two million Americans will earn a bachelor’s degree and either join the work force or head to graduate school. They will be joyous that day, and they will remember fondly the schools they attended. But as this unique chapter of life closes and they reflect on campus events, one primary part of higher education will fall low on the ladder of meaningful contacts: the professors.

That’s what students say. Oh, they’re quite content with their teachers; after all, most students receive sure approval. In 1960, only 15 percent of grades were in the “A” range, but now the rate is 43 percent, making “A” the most common grade by far.

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Hint: It ain’t happenin’.

The United States’ regulatory bureaucracy has vast power. Regulators can ruin your life, and your business, very quickly, and you have very little recourse. That this power is damaging the economy is a commonplace complaint. Less recognized, but perhaps even more important, the burgeoning regulatory state poses a new threat to our political freedom.

What banker dares to speak out against the Fed, or trader against the SEC? What hospital or health insurer dares to speak out against HHS or Obamacare? What business needing environmental approval for a project dares to speak out against the EPA? What drug company dares to challenge the FDA? Our problems are not just national. What real estate developer needing zoning approval dares to speak out against the local zoning board?

Richard Fernandez discover that his bullshit detector has gone off.

From them the reader might understandably conclude that the debate was a food fight among a random collection of zany, or slightly demented mental midgets.  That the whole thing is a waste of time, like a cartoon feature before the real show featuring titans of progress like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.  That’s when the “reality based community” comes out to judge the real horse show.

…

The media’s assessment is in its way a restatement of one of Fiorina’s main accusations: the political class has stopped caring about voters for a long time and become its own self-licking ice cream cone.  The entire debate, including its subplots — Trump vs Kelly, Fiorina vs the rest —  is about the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Washington political elite.  But who cares because the debate and all the words in it were a “play within a play”, a drama acted out inside a larger drama.

…

The last world you wake up in is big money, giant lobbies, demographic blocs and voter groups clamoring to get paid off. That is the ultimate ground of political reality; that’s real.  That’s why, despite their complete mediocrity, the only “serious candidates” on either side are Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton because they know, as the media knows, where everything finally goes.

Steve Sailer has a loooong memory.

It’s amazingly hard for progressives to remember that they’ve been in charge of large aspects of life for a half-century or so, that the failures of society they constantly complain about actually have been happening on their watch for the last couple of generations.

Fortunately, it’s not too hard to find pictures.

For example, remember the unisex fashion fad that accompanied the feminist and gay revolutions of the late 1960s?

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Socialism must be the number one folly in the history of the human race. People keep trying it, and it keeps collapsing ignominiously. Yet leftists never give up. It is as though a guy stood in his yard throwing a ball into the air over and over, hoping that next time it won’t come back down.

Peggy Noonan looks behind the curtain.

I have read the Peter Schweizer book “ Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich.” It is something. Because it is heavily researched and reported and soberly analyzed, it is a highly effective takedown. Because its tone is modest—Mr. Schweizer doesn’t pretend to more than he has, or take wild interpretive leaps—it is believable.

By the end I was certain of two things. A formal investigation, from Congress or the Justice Department, is needed to determine if Hillary Clinton’s State Department functioned, at least to some degree and in some cases, as a pay-for-play operation and whether the Clinton Foundation has functioned, at least in part, as a kind of high-class philanthropic slush fund.

I wonder if any aspirant for the presidency except Hillary Clinton could survive such a book. I suspect she can because the Clintons are unique in the annals of American politics: They are protected from charges of corruption by their reputation for corruption. It’s not news anymore. They’re like . . . Bonnie and Clyde go on a spree, hold up a bunch of banks, it causes a sensation, there’s a trial, and they’re acquitted. They walk out of the courthouse, get in a car, rob a bank, get hauled in, complain they’re being picked on—“Why are you always following us?”—and again, not guilty. They rob the next bank and no one cares. “That’s just Bonnie and Clyde doing what Bonnie and Clyde do. No one else cares, why should I?”

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I’d love to have such a job.

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Prof. Karma R. Chavez is an associate professor at UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. According to a UW employee salary database maintained by the Wisconsin State Journal, Chavez made $87,224 during the 2014-2015 fiscal year, and has achieved tenure at the school.

Chavez teaches seven different courses, ranging from “Queer Theory” (CA 969) to “Queer Migrations” (CA 610) and “Rhetoric and Queer Theory” (also CA 610).

The name is perfect. This is somebody’s Platonic ideal of a ‘diversity’ hire.

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On July 21, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced some “modifications” to the Oath of Allegiance that immigrants must take before becoming naturalized. The original oath required incoming citizens to declare that they will “bear arms on behalf of the United States” and “perform noncombatant service in the Armed Forces of the United States” when required by the law. Now the USCIS says that “a candidate [to U.S. citizenship] may be eligible to exclude these two clauses based on religious training and belief or a conscientious objection.”

The new changes further add that new candidates “may be eligible for [additional?] modifications based on religious training and belief, or conscientious objection arising from a deeply held moral or ethical code.”

Unless you’re a Christian, of course.

Question: If Barack Obama were secretly a Muslim, what (if anythong) would he do differently?

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Taxpayers are spending vast sums of money on time-consuming teacher development programs that don’t actually improve teaching quality, according to a study conducted by The New Teacher Project.

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

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What use have the Dutch for soldiers? It’s not as if they’re doing anything about the Muslims who are taking over their country.

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Bet you didn’t know we had a National Raisin Reserve, didja? Well, those raisins are a strategic asset, yesirreebob.

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And have been as far back as I can remember. Really, this is news?

Bernie Sanders has always caucused with Democrats, and they are perfectly comfortable with him. He’s still a long shot for the Democratic nomination, but he is rising in the polls. If there is a distinction between him and President Barack Obama on anything major, what is it? Both pushed “universal health care.” Both oppose the Keystone pipeline. Both believe taxes should be raised on “rich” people. Both believe in the redistribution of income. Obama wants two years of “free” community college. Sanders wants to make college “free” altogether. Both attack “corporate greed” and both belong to the school of economics that says, “you didn’t build that.”

Read it. And watch the video.

 The following report discusses the plight of a young homosexual under the Islamic State, who was faced with the likelihood of either being executed by ISIS or murdered by his uncle to preserve his family’s honor. If he had not escaped from Iraq, he would presumably be dead now.

What is remarkable about this story is that it aired on the BBC, of all places. Did someone fall asleep at the wheel at Beeb headquarters? Or are the times a-changin’?

Owen Bennett-Jones.

… the fact that more British Muslims are fighting for Islamic State than for the British army demands an explanation.

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The Federal minimum wage has been frozen at $3.35 an hour for six years. In some states, it now compares unfavorably even with welfare benefits available without working. It’s no wonder then that Edward Kennedy, the new chairman of the Senate Labor Committee, is being pressed by organized labor to battle for an increase.

No wonder, but still a mistake. Anyone working in America surely deserves a better living standard than can be managed on $3.35 an hour. But there’s a virtual consensus among economists that the minimum wage is an idea whose time has passed. Raising the minimum wage by a substantial amount would price working poor people out of the job market. A far better way to help them would be to subsidize their wages or – better yet – help them acquire the skills needed to earn more on their own.

An increase in the minimum wage to, say, $4.35 would restore the purchasing power of bottom-tier wages. It would also permit a minimum-wage breadwinner to earn almost enough to keep a family of three above the official poverty line. There are catches, however. It would increase employers’ incentives to evade the law, expanding the underground economy. More important, it would increase unemployment: Raise the legal minimum price of labor above the productivity of the least skilled workers and fewer will be hired.

As recently as 1987, the New York Times was on the right side of the minimum wage question.

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And about damned time, too.

The British preacher was arrested last year by officers from the Metropolitan Police’s counter terrorism command.

It is alleged that between June 29 last year and March 6 this year Mr Choudary invited support for the terrorist group, contrary to section 12 Terrorism Act 2000.

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Last week Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey charged a local political activist, Mark Iannicelli, with seven counts of jury tampering, a felony punishable by one to three years in prison, for handing out pamphlets in front of the Lindsay-Flanigan Courthouse. Morrissey’s office says “Iannicelli set up a small booth with a sign that said ‘Juror Info’ in front of the courthouse and provided jury nullification flyers to jury pool members.” According to the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), he distributed a FIJA brochure explaining that jurors have a “right to judge the law itself and vote on the verdict according to conscience,” along with “a flyer from another organization.”

You may wonder how threatening someone with prison for passing out political literature can possibly be consistent with the First Amendment. The short answer is that it’s not. The longer answer is that local and federal officials periodically harass activists like Iannicelli under the pretense of preventing unlawful interference with jury deliberations. The statute cited by Morrissey makes it a Class 5 felony to “communicate with a juror” outside of judicial proceedings with the intent to influence the juror’s “vote, opinion, decision, or other action in a case.” But Iannicelli was not trying to affect the outcome of any specific trial at the courthouse. He was merely passing out pamphlets with general information about the rights of jurors.

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I have muttered around here more than a few times about the various idiocies of the Blood in the Mobile campaign. This was the idea that we could stop the appalling (and true) levels of violence in Eastern Congo’s mining trade by making American companies fill out lots of documents.

The idea was that if they all had to say whether they used conflict minerals, they’d all prefer to be able to say “no” and therefore there wouldn’t be the violence over the minerals trade that happens today.

We were told that this would cost some $10m originally, one cent on the price of each mobile phone. By the time the legislature got at it, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) said it would cost $4bn in the first year alone.

…

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Something I’d never thought to see, an article in favor of Joe Biden.

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In Thursday’s Republican debate, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker will be the antiunion candidate. That will be the media snark. He signed (unenthusiastically) a right-to-work bill that applies to his state’s private-sector workers. He promoted (very enthusiastically) a law that all but ended collective bargaining for its public-sector workers.

Critics will ask: What does this have to do with being president? Unfortunately, everything.

Unions may not matter much in American workplaces anymore but unions represent the main political obstacle to just about every kind of reform: School choice. Entitlements. Pensions. Health care.

Even causes that wouldn’t seem union business prompt union opposition. Labor has been the chief obstacle to overhauling California’s notorious Environmental Quality Act—a reform supported by Democrats and environmentalists—because unions like using the law’s excessive paperwork burdens to threaten projects important to employers.

Big labor is behind a New Jersey state senator’s proposal last week for a trillion-dollar federal bailout of state and local government pensions—pensions that most federal taxpayers who would be paying for the bailout can only dream about.

Big labor is behind $15 minimum-wage proposals in major cities—a high-risk experiment for low-skilled workers, who may find themselves without jobs. But it will be a winner for organized labor. Not only will it raise costs for nonunion businesses. In Los Angeles, unions seek their own exemption so they can conspire with employers to substitute untaxed benefits for taxable wages, which strengthens the union’s hold on workers while shifting costs to other taxpayers.

As Miles Kimball, a University of Michigan economist who calls himself a “supply-side liberal,” wrote on his blog a couple of years ago: “Most unions are middle-class organizations that in their political activities are ready and willing to sacrifice the interests of the poor to benefit their members and their leaders.”

An Actual Zimbabwean intrudes a little reality into the Narrative.

Did Cecil live near your place in Zimbabwe?

Cecil who? I wondered. When I turned on the news and discovered that the messages were about a lion killed by an American dentist, the village boy inside me instinctively cheered: One lion fewer to menace families like mine.

My excitement was doused when I realized that the lion killer was being painted as the villain. I faced the starkest cultural contradiction I’d experienced during my five years studying in the United States.

Did all those Americans signing petitions understand that lions actually kill people? That all the talk about Cecil being “beloved” or a “local favorite” was media hype? Did Jimmy Kimmel choke up because Cecil was murdered or because he confused him with Simba from “The Lion King”?

In my village in Zimbabwe, surrounded by wildlife conservation areas, no lion has ever been beloved, or granted an affectionate nickname. They are objects of terror.

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Everyone understands by now that our intervention in Libya produced a disaster. But many fail to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster. And few understand that the stated reason for the intervention, to prevent a bloodbath, lacked any real basis in fact.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Alan Kuperman, an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, provides clarity on these points. The article is called “Obama’s Libya Debacle.” However, given the leading role Hillary Clinton played, the former Secretary of State must take a major portion of the blame, just as she planned to take major credit (see her email traffic with Sidney Blumenthal) when she thought the policy had succeeded.

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Note that the top of the list is Jeb Bush at $19 million, about what Bill & Hillary make in a year.