Read it.

Grains may have a bad rep, but they also do a lot of good. Whole grains are high in fibre and have been linked to preventing ailments from heart disease to bowel cancer. They are also rich in B vitamins, iron and potassium.

But that doesn’t mean that Global Warming isn’t a thing! Not at all!

Read it.

Israeli researchers, writing in the journal Cell this week, have found that different people’s bodies respond to eating the same meal very differently — which means that a diet that may work wonders for your best friend may not have the same impact on you.

Lead authors Eran Segal and Eran Elinav of the Weizmann Institute of Science focused on one key component used in creating balanced diet plans like Atkins, Zone or South Beach. Known as the glycemic index or GI for short, it was developed decades ago as a measure of how certain foods impact blood sugar level and has been assumed to be a fixed number.

But it’s not. It turns out that it varies widely depending on the individual.

But that doesn’t men that Global Warming isn’t a thing! Not at all!

Read it.

What do they know that Obama doesn’t. (Whoa, there’s a hole with no bottom….)

Read it.

America may be obliged, for reasons unrelated to the inscription on the Statue of Liberty or holiday season humanitarianism, to accept Syrian refugees. But there’s a right way to talk about this—and a wrong way—irrespective of one’s position.

…

When it comes to partisan cheap shots, however, President Obama was in a class all own. For three straight days he lashed out at Republicans who expressed opposition to accepting Syrian refugees, and did so while on foreign soil.

…

“When you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land,” he added, “that feeds the [ISIS] narrative.”

Notwithstanding the fact that Obama’s story line has taken hold in the mainstream media, this is precisely backward. Syrian Christians are fleeing their home country because they were ticketed for extermination. “Genocide” is the word you’d hope administration officials would use, not “narrative.” What Obama is really doing is demonizing political dissent. His default response to anyone who says his foreign policy is a disaster is to label them racist or un-American.

Obama doesn’t give a shit about refugees, he’s reaching for any stick he can grasp with with to beat Republicans.

The vacuity of Keynesianism and the fundamental truth of Saye’s Law (‘supply-side economics’) is contained in the following exchange, overheard in a local Container Store:

“Can I help you find something, sir?”

“Yes. I’m looking for the thing that I don’t know I need until I see it.”

Read it.

Techie triumphalism is all around: “The best thing anyone can do to improve the quality of life around the world is to drive connectivity and technological opportunity,” Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, and his co-author, Jared Cohen, wrote in “The New Digital Age.” As Wael Ghonim, who helped usher in the Arab Spring, put it: “If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.” Today no human domain is safe from the technology world’s “solutionism,” in the phrase of the writer Evgeny Morozov.

Mr. Toyama used to share that worldview: “I am a recovering technoholic,” he writes. Then he moved to India, to lead the Microsoft lab, and observed a phenomenon that he would come to believe was universal: “Technology’s primary effect is to amplify human forces.” When computers entered rural schools, for instance, guess who held the mouse? Upper-caste boys. Technology wasn’t an intrinsic leveler or a bulldozer to archaic structures: It just gave people new, improved tools to be lovely or horrible to each other in all the old ways.

…

There are various explanations for the technology world’s contempt for existing human structures. It’s a world full of trained engineers — and many college dropouts — who cannot be expected to grasp human dynamics any more than political scientists understand Java code. Many brilliant technology leaders have stories of bullying and isolation in their youths that would leave anyone with abiding skepticism of human groups, institutions, cultures. If family dinners and school lunches were painful for you, “disrupting” eating with a venture-capital-backed protein drink like Soylent can seem like liberation.

The belief that technology can fix all our problems is very ‘progressive’, which is why the tech industry professionals who devote their work lives to Holy Entrepreneurship are so often politically neoliberal. The core belief of ‘progressivism’, that progress is inevitable so therefore the change that enables progress is inevitably good is at the heart of the start-up mavens who roam about the world like roaring lions seeking something to disrupt. Technology is just another tool, and tools are only as good or bad as the people who use them — and, sad to say, there are a lot of bad people in the world.

Read it.

An advert featuring the Lord’s Prayer has been banned from cinemas in case it offends people.

The Church of England said it had been left “bewildered” over the decision not to show the advert promoting Christian prayer in cinemas across the UK the week before Christmas.

The ad shows a number of people from different walks of life reciting or singing lines from the Lord’s Prayer, starting with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, walking through a park. His words are followed by those of a police officer, a weightlifter, a farmer, a congregation at a wedding and class of school children, among others in the minute-long piece of work.

…

The company stated it has a policy of not showing political or religious advertising in its cinemas as ads reflecting these personal beliefs risked upsetting, or offending, audiences, despite the ad having been approved by the Cinema Advertising Association and being given a “U” certificate by the British Board of Film Classification.

DCM said that “some advertisements – unintentional or otherwise – could cause offence to those of differing political persuasions, as well as those of differing faiths and indeed of no faith,” adding that in this regard DCM treats all political or religious beliefs equally.

Read it.

When Cutty Sark first hoisted her sails on the River Clyde in 1869, the Suez Canal had just opened and the British Raj was still in its infancy. The nippy tea clipper quickly became one of the world’s fastest ships, and has remained an object of universal fascination ever since.

Now, nearly 150 years later, a group of ship-lovers wants to recapture her glory days by building a replica. Cutty Sark 2 would sail the globe as a training vessel-cum-living museum, while carrying symbolic cargoes of tea and wool like her namesake, according to Vladimir Martus, a sailor and naval architect who is spearheading the project.

Read it.

Last Saturday in Paris, at the Boulevard Voltaire near the Bataclan club, I found myself staring at a pool of blood. I wondered what was happening with the world, and refocused my camera on the aftermath of the terror. When it became clear the attacks were planned in Molenbeek, I was not surprised. The real surprise? That Belgium expressed shock at the connection.

…

I was part of a new wave of young urban professionals, mostly white and college-educated — what the Belgians called bobo, (“bourgeois bohémiens”) — who settled in the area out of pragmatism. We had good intentions. Our contractor’s name was Hassan. He was Moroccan, and we thought that was very cool. We imagined that our kids would one day play happily with his on the street. We hoped for less garbage on the streets, less petty crime. We were confident our block would slowly improve, and that our lofts would increase in value. (We even dared to hope for a hip art gallery or a trendy bar.) We felt like pioneers of the Far West, like we were living in the trenches of the fight for a multicultural society.

Slowly, we woke up to reality. Hassan turned out to be a crook and disappeared with €95,000, the entire budget the tenants had pooled together for our building’s renovation. The neighborhood was hardly multicultural. Rather, with roughly 80 percent of the population of Moroccan origin, it was tragically conformist and homogenous. There may be a vibrant alternative culture in Casablanca and Marrakech, but certainly not in Molenbeek.

‘Diversity’ is not a Muslim value.

Lileks discusses home delivery.

Billboards around town are heralding a new Amazon service: They will deliver things to your house in an hour. Makes you want to order a 12-pack of Charmin then stand out on the boulevard hopping up and down when the truck pulls up. I suppose it’s useful for people who don’t want to go the store, but I like going to the store. You go for milk and come back with Green-and-Red Holiday Eggos and Sriracha Yogurt and a shoehorn and a can of Bison chunks for the dog. Delivery cannot provide that sense of random discovery.

Mark Steyn does a review.

The British Home Secretary, Theresa May, was a little behind the curve when she reacted to the bloodbath in Paris by insisting that “the attacks have nothing to do with Islam”. This is the old spin that, although some terrorists might claim to be Muslim, there’s nothing inherently Muslim about their terrorism.

But why be so modest? In the United States, the most senior members of the Democrat establishment are taking it to the next level.

The Other McCain surveys a disturbing trend.

America is in the grip of a crisis, namely a shortage of normal people. Evidence indicates that the population of kooks and freaks is rapidly increasing, and there are simply not enough sane people to keep the weirdos under control. Especially among the under-30 demographic, the United States is struggling to cope with the proliferation of dangerous perverts, drug addicts, psychotics and Ivy League liberal arts majors….

Lion of the Blogosphere lays out his predictions.

This is Star Wars for the politically correct times we live in. In the original, fighting was for men. White men. Women were just cheeky princesses in need of rescue, or maternal figures like Luke Skywalker’s kindly aunt (who was mercilessly killed by Stormtroopers, demonstrating how evil they were). In this new movie, the two main characters who fight against the Empire are a hot babe (played by 23-year-old British actress Daisy Jazz Isobel Ridley) and a black guy.

Sure, that says The Future to me….

Read it.

Sanders’s democratic socialism isn’t socialism. He disclaims public ownership of the means of production. Sanders’s socialism is Franklin Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, only more so. It’s the welfare state above all, in which income and wealth are confiscated from some and redistributed to others in the interest of “equality” and “security” and all things good.

Well, that’s all right, then.

Whereas Roosevelt connected welfare rights with the Bill of Rights, Sanders connects “democratic socialism” to Roosevelt. In Sanders’s manifesto, as among Democrats generally, everything is up to date if the date is 1944. Only the animus is really of the moment.

They’ve gone about as furr as they kin go … not really.

To invoke the marketing cliché, in his speech Sanders “rebrands” Democratic Party orthodoxy as “democratic socialism.” Democrats prefer the camo.

Of course they do.

Jonah Goldberg is always worth reading.

Dear Reader (Including those of you stunned by the news that Charlie Sheen has a sexually transmitted disease. Not since Jim J. Bullock announced he was gay have I been more shocked),

If you Google “Christian terrorism,” you’re probably a jackass to begin with. But if you do — bidden not by your own drive to jackassery but by the natural curiosity inspired by this “news”letter — you’ll find lots of left-wing trollery about how the worst terrorist attacks on American soil have been committed by Christians. Much of it is tendentious, question-begging twaddle. But I really don’t want to waste a lot of time on whether Tim McVeigh was a Christian or not (he really wasn’t).

What I find interesting is that many of the same people who clutch their pearls at the mere suggestion that Islamic terrorism has anything to do with — oh, what’s the word again? — oh right: Islam, seem to have no problem making the case that “Christian terrorism” is like a real thing. Remember how so many liberals loved — loved — Obama’s sophomoric and insidious tirade about not getting on our “high horses” about ISIS’s atrocities in the here and now because medieval Christians did bad things a thousand years ago? They never seem to think that argument through. Leaving out the ass-aching stupidity of the comparison, it actually concedes the very point Obama never wants to concede. By laying the barbaric sins of Christians a thousand years ago at the feet of Christians today, he implicitly tags Muslims with the barbarism committed in their name today.

Now, I see no need to wade too deeply into the theology here, but I think I am on very solid ground when I say that Islamic terrorism draws more easily and deeply from the Koran than Tim McVeigh drew from the Christian Bible. Of course, you’re free to disagree. In a free society, everybody has the right to be wrong in their opinions. (But don’t tell anyone at Yale that.)

Smitty at The Other McCain chimes in:

Modern politics grew more coherent, if not rational, when I realized that discussions like terrorism or the Syrian refugee crisis are all hormone-flinging directed at the flesh. Your Progressive overlords think you’re stupid, and will attempt to herd you with guilt, fear, and bribes to Do What They Say.

Conversely, there is shag-all interest in rational discussion, analysis, and a dispassionate effort at finding an optimal overall solution. “They never seem to think that argument through” because #ShutUp. There is power to be protected here, and allowing any sort of intellectual exchange is a direct threat to that power.

Obama is what you get when kids grow up without a father on hand to smack the silly notions out of their heads when necessary.

Read it.

This short video from the Pacific Legal Foundation details an attempt by government – in this case, that of the city of Palo Alto, CA – to extort money on a grand scale from innocent people.

…

…those people who have been especially active at artificially reducing Palo Alto’s supply of housing for low-income people are – under the pretense of being great champions of low-income people seeking housing in Palo Alto! – now unjustly (and unconstitutionally) penalizing other people (those who, again, have actually worked hard over the years to make low-income housing more available) for now moving into another line of work.

This is the sort of cronyism hand-in-glove with government in which the Democrat party specializes. Under the guise of ‘doing something for the underprivileged’ they stand in the way of those actually doing something for the underprivileged. The poster child for this system is the whole minimum-wage scam.

Read it.

Hillary Clinton and Team Obama like to pretend that the terrorism perpetrated throughout the world by Muslims has nothing to do with Islam. Maybe they should tell this to the families of those killed today at the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali.

According to reports, the terrorists took a large number of hostages, but then released those (reportedly around 20 in number) who could recite a verse from the Koran. That’s what I call a religious test.

Funny thing – so would I.

Read it.

A Democrite not really comfortable with democracy explains that all those Little People are really really stupid to turn down Free Stuff.

The Bamboo Spade.

An Alarm Clock That Slaps You in the Face. I am not making this up.

Apex Knife Sharpener. Dunno how it works, but it looks way cool.

Pizza Wrapping Paper.

Read it.

Student activists at Smith College are barring journalists from covering their activities unless said journalists first pledge their loyalty to said activists’ cause. These irascible protesters believe the Mizzou protesters did not go far enough, apparently.

Well, I mean, Smith….

‘Of course, it is likely enough, my friends,” he said slowly, “likely enough that we are going to our doom: the last march of the Ents. But if we stayed at home and did nothing, doom would find us anyway, sooner or later. That thought has long been growing in our hearts, and that it why we are marching now. It was not a hasty resolve.’ — Treebeard, The Fellowship of the Ring

Read it.

The report by Washington State University researchers suggests there is a categorical difference between people who are heterosexual and those who are not.

I wonder how many of the Global Warming envirotards will accept this little bit of science.

The new study analysed the behaviour of 33,000 American adults, and found 3% of men and 2.7% of women were not heterosexual.

But they sure do make a lot of noise.

“There are distinct quantitative differences in sexual orientation, which means that there are categories of people based on sexual orientation,” she said of the report in the Psychological Science journal.

Waiting for the DENIERS to surface….

Read it.

From Ramadani’s history lesson you would never know that Muslim nations were ever imperialists on their own account, ever brawled among themselves or made life hard for others. The bombing of synagogues in Baghdad in the early 1950s? The work of Zionists, you fools. The long campaign of terror carried out by Islamists in Syria in the 1970s and 80s, Syria’s support for Hezbollah, the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in Hama? All a lie because, as Ramadani told Russian television, “neither Syria nor Iraq had any terrorist organisations before the American invasion of Iraq in 2003”.

Nobody cares to remember that the areas in which fighting is now going on were conquered by Arab Muslims from people who were Not Bothering Them. Syria, ‘Palestine’, and Egypt were Christian, full of people who were Not Arabs. Iraq was Persian.

Read it.

Reminder for the dimwitted: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

An American university has held a three-day retreat for students who “self-identify as white” to discuss “white privilege” in the midst of the ongoing racial tensions overwhelming campuses across the US and Canada.

‘Self-identify as white’? Who does that any more? Everybody ‘self-identifies’ as a fashionable victim group. I would refuse to attend such an explicitly racist event — and, since this is a state-supported University, bring a lawsuit against it on civil-rights grounds.

This all makes Bernie Sanders a lot more understandable; obviously there’s something in the water.

Read it.

‘Separate but equal’ is back — with a vengeance.

Wonder whether anybody on campus will call this what it is: Racism. But I doubt it.

Read it.

Barack Obama — wrong again.

Media bleeding hearts — wrong again.

Read it.

Unfortunately they’re objecting to him because he was a recist (which he was, nice of them to wake up to that) but not because he was a statist (which he also was, and in pursuit of which he did far more damage).

Read it.

A threat by the nation’s largest health insurer to pull out of ObamaCare is a sign of the industry’s growing angst about the viability of the federal exchanges, sources close to the industry say.

UnitedHealthcare’s warning sent new shockwaves across the healthcare sector after weeks of mounting anxiety among private insurers whose participation in the exchanges is critical to the viability of the president’s signature law.

In the last month alone, insurers have learned that the Obama administration has significantly lowered its expectations for new customers and will have far fewer federal dollars to help cushion insurer losses.

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

“We’ve been very clear with the Administration about the serious challenges facing consumers and health plans in this exchange market,” Marilyn Tavenner, the CEO of the powerful insurer group America’s Health Insurer Plans, wrote in a statement.

Leading insurers have already given strong warnings that the Obama administration needs to step up its funding commitment for companies that are still struggling with less-healthy — and therefore more expensive — customers. Some believe that Thursday’s announcement by UnitedHealth could be an attempt to pressure the administration into action.

Gee, it costs more than predicted and doesn’t work as well. Who could have seen that coming?

Read it.

Score card! Get yer score card here! You can’t tell your Islamic terrorist groups apart without a score card!

Read it.

Nothing to do with Islam, of course. Perish the thought.

Read it.

According to a report by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), one of the world’s most influential conservationist groups, global warming is now the single biggest threat to the long-term surival of the polar bear as a species.

Of course, the chances of an organization named ‘International Union for the Conservation of Nature’ releasing a report that says polar bears are find and ‘climate change’ no big deal are — let me hit the calculator quickly — let’s see — less than zero.

Of course, Real Scientists disagree.

Read it.

The Paris terrorists attacks occurred during a six day period of “international” soccer matches — i.e., contests between national teams. In fact, one of the attacks was directed at the Stade de France, where France was hosting Germany.

During the remaining matches, there was supposed to be a minute of silence in honor of the victims of the Paris attacks. Unfortunately, this was too much to ask of many Muslim soccer fans.

More news from the whitest city in the nation.

The latest is that Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, has decided that there is no need to expand the region’s urban-growth boundary as there is plenty of room to accommodate the 400,000 new residents that region is expected to gain in the next two decades. Metro’s plans calls for housing 80 percent of those new residents in multifamily housing primarily located in downtowns and along transit corridors.

As Texas transportation official Mike Heiligenstein pointed out at the American Dream conference in Austin two weeks ago, the idea that huge numbers of people can live downtown is absurd. Downtown Austin today seems to be a forest of high-rise condos, yet only 10,000 people live there. He pictured what it would look like with 20,000 more residents and it seems impossibly dense–yet 20,000 is less than 5 percent of the region’s anticipated growth. Most Americans simply don’t want to live in Manhattan, and given the nation’s wide-open spaces, they shouldn’t have to–yet planners in both Portland and Austin think they should.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

We’re constantly being lectured about White Privilege, but the long term trend in the United States over the last half century is for groups on the margins of whiteness, such as Hispanics, South Asians, and, now, Arabs, to demand that the government grant them the status and associated privileges of being officially Nonwhite in modern America.

Read it.

Who are we letting out? The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office has a website where you can scroll through the names of inmates proposed for release, and the “opposition letters” the DA has filed opposing release, as well as a list of a few dozen inmates released over the DA’s opposition. Doesn’t look like the releases are limited to “non-violent” offenders or just the poor kids who got caught with a joint. A few samples:

Rezd it.

I’d compare them to the Gestapo, but the Gestapo were never this silly.

Read it.

The AquaBounty company applied to the Food and Drug Administration to get approval for its genetically enhanced salmon back in 1995. Its salmon are modified to using a gene from another fish called ocean pouts which enables it to grow much faster using less feed. The company has jumped through all sorts of hoops to make sure that its fish cannot escape and that it is nutritionally identical to regular salmon. Naturally, the opponents of modern biotech foods lied incessantly about its alleged dangers to the environment and people. At long last, the FDA bureaucrats have mustered the courage to follow actual scientific evidence and ruled today.

Read it.

Molenbeek is a notoriously culturally enriched district of Brussels that is well-known to regular readers of this blog. It has recently come to the attention of the general public, thanks its being the old home place for Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the recently deceased mastermind of last Friday’s jihad massacre in Paris.

Read it.

And you thought your exams were tough….

Read it.

It is unpleasant to explain to our children not only that we are at war, but that they will be, too. At a time when adult behavior is in short supply on our college campuses, however, it is particularly important to deliver some unpleasant truths to the kids, among them that our real-life enemies—who really do want to kill us and destroy our civilization—do not come straight from the pages of their storybooks. Western leaders have managed to avoid both truths for 14 years. And counting.

Actually, we’ve been at war with Islam (or, more accurately, they’ve been at war with us) since they boiled out of the Hijaz 1400 years ago. People have just been lulled into complacency by the fact that things have been quite for a century or two.

But now They’re Back and They’re Bad.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, speaks sense to stupidity.

Whenever I hear politicians and their deputies discuss the subject that I know best, economics, they typically get it wrong.  And they get it wrong not in minor ways; they get it wrong in fundamental ways.  They frequently speak and write as if trade-offs don’t exist – as if the titles of statutes determine the outcomes of statutes – as if prices are arbitrary numbers that can be manipulated by government with no undesirable or unintended consequences – as if the benefits of international trade are “our” exports while the costs of such trade are our imports – as if nations “compete” against each other economically – as if the destruction wrought by natural disasters has an economic upside – as if government officials are immune to the knowledge constraints and self-interested motivations that affect actors in private markets.

Ain’t that the truth.

In short, when the subject of discussion or the object of action is the economy, politicians and their deputies typically sound and act as if they are imbeciles (or as if the audiences they aim to please are made up largely of imbeciles).  So why should I trust that these same politicians and their deputies, when they discuss and act on matters about which I know far less than economics, are not imbeciles?  Why should I suppose them to be any more informed, reasonable, and wise – and less politically motivated – than they are when they discuss economics?

A very good question that I wish more people would ponder.

I admit it: I don’t know a great deal about foreign affairs and military matters.  But I do know that the same politicians and deputies who consistently act in ways that I am certain are ignorant and dangerous when they intrude into the economy are the same politicians and deputies who I am asked to trust when they intrude into foreign affairs.

I do know quite a bit about foreign affairs (and military matters) and I can testify that they are just as ignorant and dangerous in those fields as in economics.

Read it.

A man assaulted in what police are treating a religious hate crime says he has been living in fear for years since converting from Islam to Christianity.

Perhaps it’s because the penalty for ‘apostasy’ from Islam is death. (It’s in the Koran.)

‘But Christians are just as bad!’ Oh, wait, they’re not….

Read it.

Note that not even the Telegraph dare put ‘Islamic’ in the headline.

Islamist fanatic Abu Izzadeen has said he wants to be deported back to the UK after complaining about the quality of food in custody in Hungary.

The extremist, whose real name is Trevor Brooks, was caught on a train heading for Romania on Saturday along with another fanatic, Simon Keeler.

The pair was allegedly in breach of travel restrictions that say they are not allowed to leave the UK without permission.

Read it.

Polls indicate that most Americans oppose importing thousands of Syrian refugees in particular, and more immigrants in general. So naturally, in his first important act as House Speaker, Paul Ryan is reported to be rushing to the floor, as early as tomorrow, a bill that will insure that President Obama gets his way on the issue.

Paul Ryan has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

The legislation the House will vote on is called the American SAFE Act. It is a misnomer and the bill is, frankly, a fraud. It is premised on the idea that the Obama administration will be able to identify potential terrorists among Syrians who claim to be refugees, a claim that everyone knows is false.

Speaking as someone who just wasted a morning dealing with the Social Security Administration, I am loathe to believe that the government is competent in any area that it touches.

Both Intrnational Mens’ Day and World Toilet Day.

Make of that what you will.

Read it.

The story of technology is in fact the story of textiles. From the most ancient times to the present, so too is the story of economic development and global trade. The origins of chemistry lie in the colouring and finishing of cloth. The textile business funded the Italian Renaissance and the Mughal Empire; it left us double-entry bookkeeping and letters of credit, Michelangelo’s David and the Taj Mahal. As much as spices or gold, the quest for fabrics and dyestuffs drew sailors across strange seas. In ways both subtle and obvious, textiles made our world.

More blood was shed over sources of alum, fixative for dyes, that you might imagine.

Read it.

Yeah. That works.