Read it.

Lucas Kinney, the son of a film director who worked on Hollywood blockbusters including Indiana Jones, was raised in the home counties but converted after dropping out of university

Certifiable beta male rage. I will gladly contribute toward his suicide vest.

Read it.

Nevertheless, we’re all going to die when the sea covers the land because all of the Antarctic ice has melted. it’s a consensus! The Science Is In! Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

Read it.

On college campuses, cracking down on dissident viewpoints isn’t censorship; it’s just “reducing paper waste.”

In a move that certainly looks like a revenge of sorts for The Argus publishing a conservative take on #BlackLivesMatter, Wesleyan University’s student government voted to consider cutting the student newspaper’s funding.

“Of gods we believe, and of men we know, that those who have power will rule.”

Jim Goad reveals all.

I believe that democracy is a sham designed to prevent the proles from rioting by fostering the illusion that politicians actually give a flip about whether voters live or die after they’ve voted for them. A president’s importance is sorely overrated. The Federal Reserve Chairman is who actually runs the country, so a president’s job is largely symbolic—their chief role is to fool voters into connecting with them emotionally, even if it’s behind a wall of trained killers from the Secret Service.

…

I thought I was angry until I saw Bernie Sanders. He looks like the world’s bitterest Muppet and belches up the same old cliches about socialism that have failed everywhere except Scandinavia, where they will fail soon once those nations receive a sufficient diversity injection. He used the terms “the 1 percent” and “billionaires” at least one billion times and made some patently fraudulent and easily disproved claims about where the US stands compared to the rest of the world when it comes to wealth inequality. When asked whether black lives matter or all lives matter, he chose the blacks, even though his fanbase is almost entirely white. He even cited the Southern Poverty Law Center as a reliable source. Oy gevalt!

Read it.

Someone has calculated that it would be less expensive for San Francisco workers to rent a two-bedroom apartment in Las Vegas and commute by air than to rent a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. They reasoned that a one-bedroom in San Francisco is about $3,100 a month while a two-bedroom in Las Vegas is about $1,000 a month, and four-day-a-week airfares would be about $1,100 a month. Even with local transport, Las Vegas is less expensive than San Francisco.

While most responses focus on the quality of life in Las Vegas vs. San Francisco, the point is that the latter is so terribly overpriced that some software engineers are actually living out of their cars.

…

San Francisco has other barriers to affordable housing. Rent control discourages builders from building much more rental housing. The city’s strict tenant-rights ordinance discourages people from renting out their homes. Inclusionary zoning ordinances in many Bay Area suburbs discourage new development in those suburbs. Lengthy permitting processes make it difficult for builders to respond to changes in demand. All of these things help explain why San Francisco is so expensive that someone might find it cheaper to commute from Las Vegas.

Read it.

One lesson we have learned over the years is that the Left never gives up. No defeat is permanent. Alger Hiss was convicted of perjury. He was innocent! The Rosenbergs were executed. They were framed! Mary Mapes and Dan Rather were fired. Their Texas Air National Guard story was a model of investigative journalism! Socialism has killed more than 100 million people, and impoverished countless more. Let’s give it another try!

The Other McCain reviews a book.

In his new book SJWs Always Lie: Taking Down the Thought Police, Vox Day summarizes the habits of progressive “social justice warriors”:

1. SJWs always lie.
2. SJWs always double down.
3. SJWs always project.

Vox Day’s Third Law of SJWs, the role of psychological projection in social justice discourse, is interesting to observe in practice, as accusations made against #GamerGate must always reflect some wrong of which progressives are themselves guilty. If you don’t understand #GamerGate, Breitbart.com’s Allum Bokhari has described it as “an online uprising of gamers against poor journalistic standards, political correctness, and moral crusaders in the world of video games.”

Read it.

Of course. Businessmen can — and do — go to jail. I have never encountered any bureaucrat going to jail (or even being fired) for breaking an EPA or OSHA regulation.

Read it.

Local officials and the UN are calling for some action on the drug smuggling problem in Mali. Getting absolutely all the Islamic terrorists out of northern Mali has proved difficult mainly because the remaining terrorists have a lucrative source of income. This is their control of part of a smuggling network that moves drugs and people from sub-Saharan Africa to the Mediterranean coast and thence to Europe. There is also a steady traffic in weapons from Libya (where vast Kaddafi era stockpiles were looted during the 2011 revolution) to sub-Saharan Africa via Mali and other states on the southern edge of the Sahara. All this smuggling has actually been going on for years and was briefly interrupted in 2013 when the French invaded northern Mali. But now the smuggling operations have adapted to the presence of peacekeepers and French counter-terrorism forces in northern Mali and business continues.

Read it.

The following account of an Orthodox Christian priest who was persecuted in Germany is appalling for two reasons: (1) the incident itself, and (2) the virulently PC account of what happened as published in Die Welt.

It was all I could do to finish reading the story, because I kept wincing every time I encountered another politically correct trope.

Gates of Vienna provides us with a valuable checklist, since you can’t always tell what’s going on in a news story.

Breville FastSlow Pro cooker.

Kinkajou Bottle Cutter.

VSSL Survival Kit and Flashlight.

Steve Sailer discusses the unspeakable.

Historically, much effort was put into the obvious challenge of developing IQ tests that are stable across space, from culture to culture. In contrast, nobody until Flynn paid all that much attention to the question of IQ tests being stable across time.

Read it.

Two years ago a Dutch team created the world’s first laboratory-grown burger, which was made and eaten in London, according to the BBC. It cost £215,000 to produce.

Now researchers – aiming to tackle the growing demand for meat –  are to set up a new company, Mosa Meat, to make a tastier and cheaper version which they hope will be on general sale in 2020.

Oh boy.

Read it.

It had to happen.

One promise of the technology: defending larger airplanes, much like machine gun turrets protected bombers in World War II. Only this time, instead of shooting down fighter jets, the lasers could also stop missiles and drones.

Me want.

Read it. And for sure watch the video.

I could never make the jump from softball to hardball, because I just couldn’t see the damned thing coming.

Read it.

Colorado’s Obamacare co-op will shut down. The announcement comes just two days after Tennessee’s Obamacare co-op announced it will also close. Colorado becomes the seventh co-op to have shut down this year, joining co-ops in Tennessee, Nevada, New York, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Iowa/Nebraska, leaving taxpayers on the hook for almost $835 million. Despite this taxpayer funding, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has refused to release information about troubled exchanges, nor has it developed viability guidelines.

Read it.

Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old fake clock-maker who caused such a stir at his Texas high school, is expected to meet President Obama at the White House this weekend. Obama holds the lad out as a victim of anti-Muslim prejudice even though, as John has argued, his “invention,” which resembled the timing device of a bomb and was placed in a suitcase dummied up to look like a bomb, reasonably triggered concern.

In advance of his meeting with Obama, Mohamed met with another president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan. Bashir is quite a guy. In the 1990s, he harbored Osama bin Laden for five years. He has an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for orchestrating genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes in Darfur. His country is under a variety of U.S. sanctions, and there is evidence that he may have secretly stolen $9 billion in oil money.

Read it.

That’s because they figure they’ll get more Democrat Free Stuff from Bernie, who has floated free from all reality, than from Hillary, who is still holding on with one hand.

Read it.

I know that law is usually boring to non-lawyers, but every now and then an important case comes along that ought to concern everybody.

Foster involves a criminal trial in Georgia that led to a death sentence for Timothy Foster, an 18-year-old African-American who was accused of robbing and killing an elderly white woman. The prosecution used peremptory challenges, which permit parties in criminal or civil trials to remove potential jurors during jury selection, to eliminate every black prospective juror from Foster’s trial. Although the prosecution stated that it exercised its peremptory challenges for entirely race-neutral reasons, the record contains overwhelming evidence of purposeful—and therefore unconstitutional—racial discrimination. Examination of the prosecution’s own notes reveals that black jurors were singled out in at least five ways.

Increasingly these days we hear outraged claims of racism and racial bias in circumstances where such bleatings are obvious horseshit, but cases of bias do happen and this would appear to be one of them — not on the part of the jury, but on the part of prosecutors. Far too often prosecutors see their job as nailing somebody for a crime without caring too much which somebody gets nailed. This guy may be guilty — if I had to bet, that’s the way I would bet — but that doesn’t justify cutting corners on the way there.

I remember fondly a famous contributory negligence case we studied during my time in purgatory in which a drunk man wandered down the street in a frontier town and fell into a hole where workmen had been repairing the street. Of course, he sued the city. The city argued that he was at least partially to blame because he was drunk. The court ruled that a drunk man had as much right to a safe street as a sober man, and more need of one. We might extend that principle here to say that a guilty man has as much right to a fair trial as an innocent one, however cut and dried things might seem.

Read it.

In combination, a person’s full name, Social Security number and birthdate have become a skeleton key for identity verification and, thus, identity theft. Yet the nine-digit number was never intended to be anything of the kind. In fact, from 1946 to 1971, cards came printed with the disclaimer: “FOR SOCIAL SECURITY PURPOSES – NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION.” That was before the rise of the personal computer; the data-rich environment of public- and private-sector digital transactions, from online voter registration to shopping; and the accompanying cavalcade of data breaches, from Target to the Pentagon.

Politicians frequently talk about whether Social Security is solvent. (It is, until at least 2033, and it will probably be restructured to operate much longer and avoid unpopular cuts.) Some candidates talk about data security, with Democrat Jim Webb decrying Chinese cyber-attacks in the party’s first debate and Republican Mike Huckabee suggesting that we launch a cyberwar against China. (The nation will not admit nor deny its role in the hacks.) But few politicians have tackled the less prominent but still thorny question of whether the Social Security number, as used, has become one of the biggest liabilities in data security.

Read it.

1977. And yet you’ve never heard of it, nor anything like it.

Perhaps there’s a reason for that….

Read it.

Darrell Whitman, a former San Francisco-based investigator for the Whistleblower Protection Program administered by OSHA, claimed the agency failed to defend workers who faced retaliation for reporting illegal activity and public safety concerns.

“They got rid of the squeaky wheel,” Whitman said.

Hey, it’s what governments do.

Read it.

That’s because people who get tattoos are narcissists who tend to be very touchy because their self-image is based on external inputs.

It’s all about them.

Read it.

Ah, but does it contain GMOs?

Read it.

At least some government employees are still committed to doing their jobs properly.

Read it.

The United Kingdom has chosen to allow rape of an “Asian” girl to be sanctioned more severely than a similar crime committed against a white girl.

As noted previously, British authorities frequently use “Asian” as a synonym for “Muslim,” as in a government report of sex-grooming in Rotherham. The report describes perpetrators of this scandal as “Asian” and sometimes “Pakistani,” but it is clear that many of the perpetrators are Muslim because the response refers to training packages for Muslim community leaders. Authorities ignored the situation for sixteen years, partly because of their contempt for the victims – underage “white” girls – and partly out of fear that they would be branded as “racist” (read, “Islamophobic”) for prosecuting the perpetrators.

On September 10, 2015, an appeals court agreed with a sentencing judge’s decision to impose a longer sentence on Jamal Muhammed Raheem Ul Nasir for sexually assaulting two underage “Asian” girls (at least one of whom was under age 13) because his victims allegedly suffered more than white girls would.

Read it.

In the long run, it’s probably smart to think strategically about ways we can all optimize our roles in the future economy. But for now, before the robots arrive and outsmart us all, let’s appreciate the fact that we’ve still got them beat when it comes to some tasks requiring fine motor skills, spatial awareness, and manual dexterity.

I’m sure opponents of the motor car thought the same thing about horses. That was then, this is now. And the ‘now’ keeps advancing.

1529. We won this one, barely.

As you can see, Muslims have been invading Europe through the Balkans and Hungary for a long, long time.

Check it out.

Hey, we’ve all had days like that.

Read it.

You have to be willing to revert to a Paleolithic pattern of sleep — and that means turning off your electric lights at dusk and leaving them off until dawn. Do that, and in about three week’s time, beginning around six hours after sunset each evening, you will find yourself experiencing a period of serene wakefulness that was once a nightly meditation retreat for all Homo sapiens on Earth. It’s a guarantee. It’s encoded in your genes.

…

For one month, beginning at dusk and ending at dawn, Wehr’s subjects were removed from every possible form of artificial light. During the first three weeks, they slept as usual, only for about an hour longer. (After all, he reasoned, like most Americans, they were probably sleep deprived.) But at week four a dramatic change occurred. The participants slept the same number of hours as before, but now their sleep was divided in two. They began each night with about four hours of deep sleep, woke for two hours of quiet rest, then slept for another four.

Read it.

Wakey, wakey.

Beta Male whining at its very best.

Our assumptions about other people based on their gender, race, and other groups characteristics are embedded really deeply in our minds, and often come out without us even realizing. I know I can feel really ashamed when I realize I’ve had a sexist or racist thought, and often my first instinct is to try to pretend that it didn’t happen, or justify it in some way. But recently I’ve been trying to embrace the idea that those thoughts are going to be there, whether I like it or not. I think it’s better that I acknowledge them and correct them, than to try to ignore them while they continue to secretly undermine my attempts to treat people equally.

It can be difficult for many people, myself included, to talk about racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination, and even more difficult to acknowledge that I can contribute to them, even when I’m trying not to. But the first step towards making something better is admitting you have a problem. And it’s comforting for me to know that I’m not the only one with this problem, that even my female friend who’s long been involved with promoting diversity in tech has this problem.

So, I’m accidentally sexist, probably more often than I realize. We all probably are. Let’s try to acknowledge it to ourselves and each other, try our best not to be, and work hard to make up for it.

Read it.

Half of America’s Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) servers are running Windows Server 2003, despite extended support for it ending in July.

That’s according to a report by the Treasury Inspector General that took a look at the IRS’ $139m upgrade program.

The report is distinctly unimpressed and notes that the IRS “did not follow established policies over project management and provided inadequate oversight and monitoring.”

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

Read it.

Western Europe is currently undergoing a transformation, into a multicultural utopia or third-world hellhole, depending on your perspective. The process has been going on for decades. It began in the centers of major cities, and then spread to the larger towns and suburbs. Neighborhoods that used to be occupied by Europeans engaged in traditional European activities have morphed into exotic ghettoes that look more like Karachi or Rabat than London and Rotterdam.

Read it.

Bernie Sanders channeled the id of liberalism with his deliberate shout out last night that we should “look at” Scandinavian welfare states, especially Denmark and Sweden. He probably doesn’t know that Sweden has lately made some significant cuts to its social spending programs. But why let facts get in the way of a religious narrative.

More curious is that liberals always forget to mention that their beloved European welfare states rely on much more than high incomes taxes to pay for their benefits. All of them have very high (and regressive) consumption taxes. Sweden’s value-added tax is set at 25 percent. Any liberals in America want to propose such a tax here? Didn’t think so. You can count on that being one thing we won’t “look at” as Sanders goes forward.

The reason they are willing to give people all this free stuff is that it’s not their money.

Read it.

The perfect tabloid headline — and story. On to Oprah….

Read it.

Shrapnel dug into his head, back, arm and legs, and the concussion from the explosion tossed him into the air and down a hill. Mr. Webb kept fighting, throwing a grenade into the bunker and destroying it.

Mr. Webb was evacuated with serious injuries. Later, he was awarded the Navy Cross, which the Department of Defense describes as the second highest military decoration that can be awarded to Marines or members of the Navy, “for extraordinary heroism,” as well as the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and two Purple Hearts.

The shrapnel is still embedded at the base of Mr. Webb’s skull and in a kidney. He given medical retirement from the Marines, and after the war, Mr. Webb went to law school, served as secretary of the Navy under President Ronald Reagan, wrote books, and served a term in the U.S. Senate.

I think he’d make a fine Republican Presidential candidate. Oh, wait….

Read it.

So when Anderson Cooper asked Hillary, “How would you not be a third term of President Obama?” the question couldn’t have been unanticipated. Many are saying that Hillary performed well last night–I spent the evening at a conservative event and didn’t watch the debate–but this response strikes me as awful. The main difference, Hillary says, is that she is a woman. Well, all right then!

Gene Wolfe lays out some insight.

There is one very real sense in which the Dark Ages were the brightest of times, and it is this: that they were times of defined and definite duties and freedoms. The king might rule badly, but everyone agreed as to what good rule was. Not only every earl and baron but every carl and churl knew what an ideal king would say and do. The peasant might behave badly; but the peasant did not expect praise for it, even his own praise. These assertions can be quibbled over endlessly, of course; there are always exceptional persons and exceptional circumstances. Nevertheless they represent a broad truth about Christianized barbarian society as a whole, and arguments that focus on exceptions provide a picture that is fundamentally false, even when the instances on which they are based are real and honestly presented. At a time when few others knew this, and very few others understood its implications, J. R. R. Tolkien both knew and understood, and was able to express that understanding in art, and in time in great art.

Compare these Degenerate Modern Times, where every pervert feels entitled to be considered normal.

It is said with some truth that there is no progress without loss; and it is always said, by those who wish to destroy good things, that progress requires it. No great insight or experience of the world is necessary to see that such people really care nothing for progress. They wish to destroy for their profit, and they, being clever, try to persuade us that progress and change are synonymous.

This captures the essence of the ‘progressive’ — change for the sake of change, for that will inevitably lead to progress. Trust us.

Read it.

In case you missed it, the latest bad news for the Affordable Care Act came via the New York Times this past weekend: Americans who signed up for coverage through the law are dropping their insurance at least in part because the plans are too expensive.

That’s why they call it the Affordable Care Act, because you can’t afford it. Public laws are always named the opposite of the effect that they have — witness No Child Left Behind, which actually means No Child Gets Ahead.

Read it.

Zaiger, 85, is arguably the most famous plant breeder alive today. From his farm west of Modesto, he has created novel new fruit – like the pluot – that grace tables around the world. He has also improved familiar varieties, such as creating plums that can weather an intercontinental voyage.

These innovations have revolutionized an increasingly global fruit industry, earning him a reputation among farmers and fellow fruit experts that is hard to overstate.

“Big, with all capital letters,” suggested Tom Gradziel, a geneticist and professor of plant sciences at UC Davis. “We’re all beneficiaries, and by we I mean the public in general and me as a breeder.”

Just waiting for the ecoFascists to get around to targeting him….

Read it.

By attaching malaria proteins to cancer cells, tumours could be burrowed into and then destroyed — and it seems to be effective on 90 per cent of types of cancers

Read it.

A couple of decades ago, the planning mantra in Oregon was “don’t turn Portland into Los Angeles,” meaning don’t make it more congested. So planners were a bit chagrinned to discover that their plans actually aimed to turn Portland into Los Angeles (see p. 7), meaning a dense urban area (L.A. is the densest in the nation) with a low number of freeway miles per capita (L.A. has the lowest of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas). Since then, Portland-area congestion (measured in hours of delay per commuter) has reached the Los Angeles’ 1985 level.

Today, the mantra is “don’t turn Portland into San Francisco,” meaning an extremely unaffordable housing market. So it should be no surprise that Portland planners are following exactly the policies that will turn Portland into San Francisco.

Read it.

I asked More Guns Less Crime author John Lott about it and his answers were disappointing. Empiricists are no fun. “I don’t know,” he replied. “We don’t have the data.” He did concede that America has an intense prison culture with “38% of black males having a felony background.” He also backed up Bill Whittle’s claim that the remarkably gun-heavy Plano, Texas has pretty much the lowest crime rate in the world (0.4 homicides per 100,000).

My home town.

Lott is a human Google machine when it comes to guns and crimes and I learned a lot from our conversation. I learned the black family was far more intact in the 1950s and their propensity for crime back then was actually similar to whites. I learned almost nobody gets arrested simply for marijuana possession (0.3% in Arizona) and the vast majority of drug offenses involve trafficking.

And what happened from that time to this? The War on Poverty. If you want to screw something up, give it to the government.

Read it.

This is, or was, a New York case in which a 54-year-old woman sued her eight-year-old nephew for negligence, alleging that he acted unreasonably when he leaped into her arms after she showed up at his birthday party in 2011. According to the Westport News, the boy had just been given his first bicycle and was riding it around when his aunt showed up. “Auntie Jen! Auntie Jen!” he exclaimed—which is already unreasonable, because once is plenty—and ran toward her. “I remember him shouting, ‘Auntie Jen I love you,” Auntie Jen testified, “and there he was flying at me.” She said she tried to catch the boy but they tumbled to the ground. Auntie Jen broke her wrist in the fall, or maybe I should say that the defendant broke the plaintiff’s wrist by leaping upon her negligently, without warning, and with malice aforethought.

That, or something like it, is what she alleged when she sued her nephew for negligence two years later.

I had relatives like that, fortunately mostly now dead.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?