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The student protest at the University of Missouri began as a response to a serious problem — outbursts of vile racism on campus — and quickly devolved into an expression of a renewed left-wing hostility to freedom of expression. At the protest on Missouri’s campus yesterday, on a space that is expressly open to free expression, protesters barred journalists from covering the demonstrations. In one scene, protesters surrounded and harassed Tim Tai, a photographer with the student newspaper, chanting, “Hey, hey, ho, ho, journalists have got to go.” The scene is captured on a video here, which rewards close watching until the end, where Melissa Click, a professor of mass media working with the protest movement, calls out, “Help me get this reporter out of here. I need some muscle over here.”

It’s pretty bad when even New York magazine, bona fide Voice of the Crust, has a problem with it.

Mark Steyn is deliciously dyspeptic today.

At this point in the evening, the candidates were arguing not whether it was disgraceful but whether it was do-able. Trump’s response is that not only is it do-able but it’s already been done – by a two-term Republican president. Eisenhower, by the way, was the last non-politician to be drafted as presidential nominee (and “I Like Ike” came from Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam). His sudden reappearance in the GOP pantheon is a fine example of the difference Trump’s made to this primary season: without his presence in the race, no-one would be talking about the practicalities of mass deportation of illegal aliens.

…

It is striking that, even in a conservative debate, mass, remorseless, illegal immigration is discussed almost entirely from the illegals’ point of view: as Kasich advises, think of the families, think of the children. Their families, their children. The families of those they’ve supplanted are of less consequence. The argument made by Bush and Kasich against enforcing the immigration laws is an appeal to moral preening: this is “not who we are”. But using mass immigration to destroy the lives of your own citizens? That’s exactly who we are.

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In a stunning discovery that overturns decades of textbook teaching, researchers at the University of Virginia School of Medicine have determined that the brain is directly connected to the immune system by vessels previously thought not to exist. That such vessels could have escaped detection when the lymphatic system has been so thoroughly mapped throughout the body is surprising on its own, but the true significance of the discovery lies in the effects it could have on the study and treatment of neurological diseases ranging from autism to Alzheimer’s disease to multiple sclerosis.

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As a lot of people have suggested, no one at Yale can rightly claim to be “systemically oppressed” or subjected to the assaults of “privilege” by others.  The notion is laughable on its face. And then there is the University of Missouri graduate student hunger striker. I tweeted this morning that the headline could read, “Graduate Student Goes on Hunger Strike: Ramen Noodle Sales Plummet.”

But lo and behold, the Missouri hunger striker, Jonathan Butler, comes of a family with a net worth near $20 million. You really can’t make this stuff up; The Onion staff must be sitting at their desks today in a state of despair.

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Note the clever thing that Trump has done here: Rather than bickering over whether it can be done at all, people have started bickering over how it could be done. To which Trump merely has to say, ‘Okay, that’s my idea, if you don’t like it, what’s your idea?’.

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Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s decision Tuesday to raise minimum pay for all New York state workers to $15 an hour underscores the powerful role governors and local governments can play in shaping the national wage fight.

And the [Union] crowd went wild.

Never has the Democrite agenda of using taxpayer dollars to buy votes been more blatantly displayed, nor more thinly veiled.

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Why did these activists and organic food industry lobbyists oppose a government-funded educational program which improved the molecular biology knowledge and expertise of high school students? A press release entitled “Keine Akzeptanzbeschaffung für Agro-Gentechnik an Schulen!” (“No Acceptance for Agricultural Gene Technology at Schools“) in 2012 by an alliance representing “organic” or “natural food” farmers accompanied by the publication of a critical “study” with the same title (PDF), which was funded by this alliance as well as its anti-GMO partners, gives us some clues. They feared that the high school students might become too accepting of biotechnology in agriculture and that the curriculum did not sufficiently highlight all the potential dangers of GMOs. By allowing the ethical discussions to not only discuss the risks but also mention the benefits of genetically modifying crops, students might walk away with the idea that GMOs could be beneficial for humankind. The group believed that taxpayer money should not be used to foster special interests such as those of the agricultural industry which may want to use GMOs.

These are the people who want everybody to confess Global Warming because science! I guess some science is more equal than others.

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Jonathan Butler played high-school football at Omaha Central High, where he won a state championship, and earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Mizzou, the newspaper reports. He is working toward a master’s degree in educational leadership and policy.

He is a member of a prominent Omaha family. The newspaper says that Butler’s father is Eric L. Butler, executive vice president for sales and marketing for the Union Pacific Railroad. His 2014 compensation was $8.4 million, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Guess he isn’t really an oppressed black dude from the ‘hood after all.

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This is part of the whole “consensus” scam that is central to global warming hysteria. The idea is to make it impossible for scientists who are skeptical of global warming to receive any funding or get published in peer-reviewed journals — and then declare that, lo and behold, there are no published scientists who are skeptical about global warming! The idea is to proclaim a spontaneous “consensus” that you created by excluding anyone who disagrees with you.

Funny how that works. I don’t think Galileo would have been comfortable with it.

Read it. And watch the video.

Ah, but can it do yellow?

Read it.

The 32-year-old did a backflip but landed on his head in Le Gossip nightclub in Savigny-sur-Orge, a suburb in Essonne, The Local reports.

Emergency services arrived at the club around 3am and initially resuscitated the man, but he later died from his injuries in hospital.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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You need to know the law to become a lawyer. But as the federal trial of former New York Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver illustrates, attorneys don’t have to perform any legal work to collect millions of dollars from a firm.

Leaders at Manhattan-based Weitz & Luxenberg PC testified that Mr. Silver, who was “of counsel” to the personal injury law firm for many years, performed no legal work while receiving more than $3 million in referral fees.

I’m sure it comes as no surprise to anyone that New York politics is as corrupt as it is in any Democrite-ruled city.

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“Everyone in the media thinks that Soylent is this product for people that are so busy they don’t have time for food; people who work 80 hours per week because they’re crazy,” Coogan says. “That couldn’t be further from the truth. We drink Soylent because it gives us the time to do other things that we love.”

This is actually very clever. Although this discusses mainly legal advice that was actually paid for, and how to get the best bang for your buck in doing so, it has Implications.

Anyone coming up with (or allegedly coming up with) a new product in the field of nutrition (loosely defined) can count on a lot of advice/criticism, solicited and un-. Assembling all of that in the form of a data reference, if not a database, is knowledge that would otherwise cost big bucks.

I’m waiting for somebody to do this with the ‘feedback’ that most companies get from their customers. (Yeah, they’re supposed to be doing that already, but a cursory look at the headlines reveals that whatever they’re doing now isn’t working very well.)

A great organization, deserving of your support.

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But not, of course, enough to vote for Republicans who might do something about the actual criminals.

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Apparently this scares some people.

Frankly, I’d be more scared if the opposite were true. But, of course, I don’t write for a living; I actually have a real job.

Watch it.

Want a covertable for your mid-life crisis car? Okay by me.

(Sorry about your dick.)

Read it.

Ruh-roh. Them’s fightin’ words.

Steve Sailer boils it down.

On Monday, America’s undergraduate college system melted down in three humiliating incidents.

At Yale, in a brouhaha over Halloween costumes that has been dragging on for a week and a half now, a distinguished professor apologized for defending freedom of speech and thereby triggering a black coed to screech obscenities at him. This sorry incident called to mind the struggle sessions of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the national leader encouraged self-righteous young nitwits to force scholars to wear dunce caps.

…

Americans love a winner. And the easiest way to win at college football is to recruit violent young men other coaches wouldn’t dare bring on campus. For example, although Coach Gary Pinkel is being praised for backing his players in their crusade to have the college president fired for being white, he’s presided over at least two major rape scandals.

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The distance record for sniper kills has been broken again, this time by two Australian snipers in Afghanistan using M82A1 12.7mm (.50 caliber) rifles. In a coordinated shot at a Taliban leader 2,800 meters away the two snipers fired simultaneously and six seconds later the Taliban chieftain fell dead. It will never be known which of the two shots got him. The victim would not have heard the shot, the rifles were so far away and the bullet was travelling faster than the speed of sound. About two seconds later anyone with the dead Taliban man would have heard the two shots, but faintly as the shooters were nearly three kilometers (two miles) away.

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Without consulting anyone, of course, least of all whoever owns the trees, in this case the City of San Francisco.

There is a group of fruit lovers in San Francisco that practice something known as “guerrilla grafting” –  they graft fruit bearing branches onto fruitless, ornamental trees across the Bay Area city. Having access to free fruit sounds like a wonderful idea, considering the number of homeless people who can rarely afford a decent meal, but guerrilla grafting is actually illegal.

In many metropolitan areas, urban foresters make sure that flowering fruit trees don’t bear any fruit, in order to keep fallen fruit from making a mess on sidewalks and attracting vermin. Most public trees are fruitless, a fact that the Guerilla Grafters obviously don’t like. While authorities see urban fruit-bearing trees as a nuisance, these agricultural rebels see them as an opportunity to provide fresh, healthy produce for free to anyone who walks by.

And, of course, the world must bend to their will.

Read it.

Those who believe the Digital Revolution will create more work also overlook the realities of risk when it comes to employing people. Once again, I wonder how many of these people have ever hired a single person on their own dime, i.e. with their own money, paid the overhead costs of an employer and took the risks of hiring employees.

Almost as risky as being white and going to college.

Those within the insurance industry know that there is an entire class of people who claim injuries in department stores, etc. so they can settle for $5,000 each “incident”– and they get the settlement because it will cost the corporation far more than $5,000 to contest, investigate, go to court, etc.

Not to mention the people who make a living suing under the ADA because your toilet is an inch too low.

As for hiring someone myself–I can’t afford the true costs or risks. It literally makes no financial sense to hire someone if you pay the full freight. I will hire formal enterprises that pay the full costs of their employees, but only when I can’t do the work myself.

Welcome to the Obamanation. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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Hey, he’s the oppressor, don’t you know?

The student had tried to attend the event at the request of The College Fix, which sought to ascertain the type of ways in which students might “stop white people,” and from doing what, exactly.

Pretty much everything, looks like. Go to college for sure.

Read it.

Today, U.S. fast-food workers will strike across 270 cities in a protest for higher wages and union rights that they hope will catch the attention of candidates in 2016 elections, organizers said.

The walkouts will be followed by protests in 500 cities by low-wage workers in such sectors as fast food and home and child care, a statement by organizers of the Fight for $15 campaign said on Monday.

The protests and strikes are aimed at gaining candidates’ support heading into the 2016 election for a minimum wage of $15 an hour and union rights, it said.

The strikes and protests will include workers from McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Burger King , KFC and other restaurants, the statement said.

Let’s see … when you raise the price of labor, then the cost advantage of labor over automation goes down, and then…

According to a recent BofA reported on how robotics will reshape the world, San Francisco start up Momentum Machines are out to fully automate the production of burgers with the aim of replacing a human fast food worker. The machine can shape burgers from ground meat, grill them to order with the specified amount of char, toast buns, add tomatoes, onions, pickles, and finally place it on a conveyor belt.

The robot is shown below. It occupies 24 square feet, and is much smaller and efficient than most assembly-line fast-food operations. It provides “gourmet cooking methods never before used in a fast food restaurant” and will deposit the completed burger into a bag. It does all of this without a trace of attitude.

Hm… Guess that’s not going according to plan.

Read it.

Read it.

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

Sarah Hoyt has some points to ponder.

Real virtue is hard because most of it is internal.  It’s refraining from doing the things that the natural creature wants to do. It’s doing things you really don’t want to do.  It’s staying up an hour later to finish that overdue project, it’s getting up in the night because your spouse/kid is throwing up in the bathroom, it’s doing dishes before bed so your spouse doesn’t need to worry about them, it’s making a cup of hot cocoa for your kid when it’s snowy out and you know he/she is going to come trudging through the door, wet and cold.

Real virtue is putting what you ought to do higher in priority than what you want to do, and we see far too little of that these days. But that does not relieve us of the obligation to try.

Read it.

Well, they’re Government and that’s what Government does. I see no difference between them and Obama, except that their wives don’t bitch you out about your diet.

Read it.

Uh-oh….

Kathy Shaidle ponts and laughs.

Marijuana is the abortion of libertarians.

Small-government types, left and right, are unwholesomely obsessed with legalizing weed. Amusingly, both groups tend to stereotype so-con pro-lifers as hideous, crotchety, single-issue knuckle-draggers—“Have you noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?” But while antiabortion activists have gotten younger, more genial, and more media-savvy, pro-pot protesters haven’t evolved noticeably in my lifetime: They’re still scruffy, smelly, and likely contagious. More proof that “progressives” really do live in the past.

P.S. Why do pro-pot libertarians positively beam when explaining that legalization will “let the government tax and regulate” their favorite drug, when “taxes” and “regulations” are their greatest enemies when it comes to every other product or service?

A good question. I think it’s because they’re trying to persuade people whose values they don’t share and don’t understand, so they do it in a very ignorant and ham-handed way, like offering black demonstrators some watermelon to quit blocking access to your store.

Weed makes people lazy. You’ll notice I didn’t say “stupid,” although no one can convince me that toking it adds brain cells or IQ points, either.

Many of the dedicated potheads I’ve known have been of average—even above average—intelligence. And they were failures. Or, at the very least (“most”?), mediocrities. They worked just hard enough to get by, and even achieved a degree of success in a constricted sphere of endeavor: hosting a long-running novelty radio show; writing a few books and teaching (part-time) at the same college forever; assistant-managing a small indie record or video store, or maybe a bike shop.

Aye, there’s the rub. Smoking per se is sufficiently stupid that arguing over what’s being smoked strikes me as pretty pointless.

Read it.

I guess Muslims are the new Poles.

Read it.

A 64-page terrorist operations manual recently released by an Islamic State supporter on Twitter underscores concerns that the U.S. homeland remains firmly in the group’s crosshairs. FBI Director James Comey told U.S. intelligence officials last month that the Bureau has approximately 900 ongoing Islamic State-related inquiries, most of which involve homegrown suspects.

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

Read it.

These are the people who want to be in charge of your health care.

Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

Read it.

For the past three weeks, outdoor apparel maker The North Face and materials company Spiber have been touring a gold-colored parka across Japan. The prototype, called the “Moon Parka,” is a first—a coat whose outer shell is spun from synthetic spider silk.

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A man has died and another been critically injured after the shopping trolley they were riding crashed into a car as they reached 80 miles per hour in Sydney.

The unnamed men, both 28 years old and originally from Sweden, are believed to have ridden the trolley down Coogee Bay Road, Randwick, in the Australian capital at around 12.20am on Tuesday.

Sydney police said the accident occurred after the men found the abandoned trolley, deciding to ride it – with one on the back and the other inside it – until they crossed to the wrong side of the road and struck the vehicle.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Taqiya: “Taqiyya is an Islamic juridical term whose shifting meaning relates to when a Muslim is allowed, under Sharia law, to lie. A concept whose meaning has varied significantly among Islamic sects, scholars, countries, and political regimes”

Steve Sailer actually runs the numbers.

With the U. of Missouri football team and coach overthrowing the University’s president for insufficient racial hysteria today, it’s worth taking a look at the Missouri athletic program’s moral bonafides.

Funny thing … at this ‘overwhelmingly white’ campus (NPR’s words), looks like most, if not all, of the football team is black. Looks like pretty blatant racism to me. Where’s the outrage about that?

Read it.

It’s gotten so bad that even Voice of the Crust The Atlantic is saying something.

Professor Nicholas Christakis lives at Yale, where he presides over one of its undergraduate colleges. His wife Erika, a lecturer in early childhood education, shares that duty. They reside among students and are responsible for shaping residential life. And before Halloween, some students complained to them that Yale administrators were offering heavy-handed advice on what Halloween costumes to avoid.

Erika Christakis reflected on the frustrations of the students, drew on her scholarship and career experience, and composed an email inviting the community to think about the controversy through an intellectual lens that few if any had considered. Her message was a model of relevant, thoughtful, civil engagement.

For her trouble, a faction of students are now trying to get the couple removed from their residential positions, which is to say, censured and ousted from their home on campus. Hundreds of Yale students are attacking them, some with hateful insults, shouted epithets, and a campaign of public shaming. In doing so, they have shown an illiberal streak that flows from flaws in their well-intentioned ideology.

Mark Steyn turns over a rock.

Like I was saying only a couple of days ago, it’s all Islam, all the time…

Since Obama pressed his reset button with Islam in that Cairo speech six years ago, he’s handed half of Iraq and Syria over to the Islamic State, the other half of Iraq to Iran, and Egypt over to the Muslim Brotherhood and thence to military dictatorship, and turned the Libyan seacoast into the fast-track immigration check-in for the European Union, and Yemen into a failed state awash in state-of-the-art American weaponry. Up next, Jordan?

Question: If Obama were actually a Muslim, what would he be doing differently? I can’t think of anything, except maybe going to religious worship more frequently.

Read it.

… which everyone will ignore because they do that all the time anyway, so what’s different?

Perhaps College Republicans could return the favor by tweeting accusations of fascism during the next Democrite ‘debate’ (sorry, to have a debate you have to have more than one set of opinions on display) — but it’s just easier to post the video afterwards.

Steve Sailer doesn’t say ‘I’m not making this up’, but he ought to.

If I were a student at the University of Missouri, I’d leave. Just leave. Go somewhere else if possible, but every day spent elsewhere will advance improve one’s education more than being on that campus.

Read it.

And the mask comes off. Dante Chini, writing in The Wall Street Journal, validates his credentials as a native born denizen of The Crust by suggesting that what Jeb Bush needs to do is ‘elect a new people’.

As Jeb Bush struggles in the polls and promises to do better in upcoming debates, here’s a thought to consider: Maybe the former Florida governor’s problems are more about the GOP primary electorate they anything he is doing or can do.

Funny how these people from Flyover Country keep failing to get with the program.

Read it.

This just sort of says Modern World to me, somehow.

Read it.

Mops just passively soak up the good stuff.4 You may even have to push them around the floor; they have to be led to the drink. At best you can charge them admission or a subscription fee, but they’ll inevitably argue that this is wrong because capitalism is evil, and also because they forgot their wallet.

It makes a disturbing sort of sense.

Via Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, whom I heartily recommend to all.

The day-to-day practice of politics consists largely of pushing the envelope to see how big a lie — and how many of them — one can get away with at the moment.  In what other profession is blurting out the truth considered a gaffe?

Read it.

While Web-based companies like Facebook and Google are scouring the world for new talent to hire, older technology workers often find that their skills are no longer valued.

…

Some observers say much of this language is just code for age discrimination. They point to the case of Brian Reid, a 52-year-old manager who was fired by Google in 2004 — nine days before the company announced plans to go public — after his supervisors, including the company’s vice president for engineering operations, allegedly called him a poor “cultural fit,” an “old guy” and a “fuddy-duddy” with ideas “too old to matter.”

…

In an interview, Norman S. Matloff, a professor at the University of California, Davis, who has studied hiring patterns in the technology sector, said workers over 35 regularly face discrimination by technology companies.

Read it.

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