Check it out.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Of course, the animal-rights-fascists are okay with that.

Leather has always been a byproduct of the meat industry, and as Americans’ beef consumption grew over the 20th century, the leather industry grew with it. The past three decades, though, have seen a decline of about 28 percent in Americans’ appetite for beef, and the supply of hides has dwindled accordingly. At the same time, drought in the Midwest has pushed up feed prices. The result is that America has fewer and more expensive cows. Meanwhile, the world’s consumers still want leather goods.

…

Howlett speaks with a Kentucky twang, where “can” sounds like “kin,” and is so close to her workers that she takes cigarette breaks with them outside her office. She drives a late-model Subaru Outback that’s adorned with “COEXIST,” “Member of the religious left,” and Human Rights Campaign bumper stickers. She bristles at the suggestion that tanneries are bad for the environment. Her facilities include a filtering system connected to the town’s wastewater treatment plant, and most of the tannery’s byproduct is recycled. “Contrary to popular opinion, those who make leather don’t want to be the bad guy,” Howlett says. “My vegan friends say, ‘Oh no, your leather shoes are from an animal,’ and I say, ‘Well, do you know where it would be if it wasn’t on my feet? In a landfill.’?”

An extract from a regular feature on Powerline blog, which I heartily recommend.

It is ever thus in every “social justice” movement. The more obvious it becomes that virtually all impediments to success have been removed, the more furious the professional “victims” become that nothing much has changed in their lives. And the more resentful of others whose life decisions and discipline have catapulted them to success.

Individual success is anathema to a victim class. It does not inspire; it refutes the linchpin of their victimhood: that the deck is permanently stacked against them all. Those who profit from their professional victim status cling to it like a Titanic survivor to a piece of driftwood. Michelle Obama springs to mind: an obscenely-rich professional vacationer and Food Scold who claims to be dissed at Target and unwelcome at museums in the racist country that elected her unqualified, incompetent husband. Twice.

Read it.

Cooking with vegetable oil releases toxic chemicals linked to cancer and even the degeneration of the brain, according to experts.

Lard, butter, coconut and olive oil are all better dietary choices, leading scientists have said – in advice which directly contradicts the NHS.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

The New York Times continues its campaign to grease the skids under urban blacks so that there is nothing to dissuade inner city blacks from moving out to various nowheresvilles, such as Inkster, MI.

They can say HI to the Muslims who are taking over eastern Michigan. I’m sure they have a lot of grievances to talk about.

Read it.

A graduate student at the University of Missouri has begun a hunger strike that he says will not end until either he dies or university president Tim Wolfe is fired.

Jonathan Butler, who describes himself as a “liberation activist” on his Twitter profile, sent a letter to the UM Board of Curators on Monday morning, laying down the terms of the strike.

I’m sure they trembled in their boots. Well, Birkenstocks.

“During this hunger strike, I will not consume any food or nutritional sustenance at the expense of my health until either Tim Wolfe is removed from office or my internal organs fail and my life is lost,” Butler claims

Sounds like a plan. What’s not to like? Unfortunately I’m sure he’s going to keep blathering during the process, so there’s no rose without a thorn.

In the publicly-posted letter, Jonathan Butler blames President Wolfe—whom he referred to as “decaying flesh”—for “a slew of racist, sexist, homophobic, etc[.] incidents” since Wolfe took office in 2012.

Butler, who is receiving a master’s in education, according to his LinkedIn profile, lists the university’s decision to cancel its contract with Planned Parenthood as one of those “racist, sexist, homophobic, etc[.] incidents.”

I guess he’s worried about getting pregnant and not being able to afford a you-know-what. You know what student budgets are like.

Butler also claims that the loss of health insurance for graduate students—the result of an IRS ruling on Obamacare—is another example of what he says is the failure of the university to create “a safe and inclusive place” for “marginalized/underrepresented students.”

Well, he was the kind of guy Obamacare was aimed at. Seems to me his beef is with Obama, not Wolfe.

Several students have publicly voiced their support for Butler on Twitter, telling him to “remain strong” and declaring themselves in “solidarity” with him.

Although not, of course, to the extent of going on a hunger strike as well. You know how it is — an expression of solidarity is sufficient, without, like, actually doing anything. We’re with you, brother. [burp]

Butler previously led a group of black students in forming a human chain to block president Wolfe’s car at the university’s homecoming parade in October, as part of the students stated goal of new “inclusive policies” at the university, “as well as an overall shift toward a safer and more inclusive campus environment.”

Human chains to block people’s cars are an obvious step toward a safer and more inclusive campus environment, don’t you know.

The university has promised to require diversity training for all six thousand incoming freshmen, and already allows students to turn in their peers and professors for so-called “bias incidents.”

That worked so well for the old Soviet Union that it has quickly become a fashion in this country. We long to get rid of that dead weight Obama and have a leader like Putin that will get things done.

Despite these concessions, however, Butler and other students continue to call for Wolfe’s job. In addition to Butler’s hunger strike, Missouri students have launched a Change.org petition addressed to Missouri Governor Jay Nixon, demanding that he fire president Wolfe.

Let the world tremble before a Change.org petition; since Jay Nixon is a Democrat, this actually might work.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Just as fascinating is the mutation that Orthodox liturgical expressions underwent from Greek to Russian. Just sayin’.

Read it.

If you watch the raw video footage of the huge clots of refugees in Serbia or Slovenia, you can count twenty or thirty healthy single young men walk by before you see a family with kids. For every wailing baby there are dozens of unkempt young punks who shout, make demands, act aggressively, cause trouble, and fight with other refugees. They’re thieving and raping their way to the Promised Land: Germany, where they can continue their favorite pastimes in their new home.

It’s been obvious from the start that the “refugee” photos we see in major media outlets are carefully chosen for their eye-appeal from among hundreds or thousands of others in order to convince the viewing public that what they are seeing is something entirely different from the reality behind the façade.

Read it. And watch the video.

If typesetting were still in use for printing, European newspapers would all have a cliché for headlines: “Brawl at the Asylum Center”. As the translator points out in this case, such stories hardly constitute “news” in Germany these days.

The Other McCain does the needful.

Did you go through a special anti-homophobia training program in school when you were a kid? No, of course not. You were taught to be polite to everyone and respect others. You are not a bully. You’re a nice person.

So you are a civilized person, and not a violent ruffian, yet you never had any specific lessons about not being a homophobe. Why then do public school teachers seem to think such lessons are necessary?

My theory: Since they are haters, they thing everyone else is a hater, too. (They just hate the wrong things, and so have to be trained to hate the right things.)

Does it now occur to anyone, besides me, that public schools have stopped teaching facts — William Jennings Bryan, and all that — and instead are teaching attitudes? And don’t you see that the attitudes being taught in public schools are liberal attitudes, because all the teachers are liberals who vote for Democrats and they want to train your children to be liberals who vote Democrat, too.

The American public school system is corrupt. Public schools are a political indoctrination program operated by Democrat activists who pay dues to a teachers union that is one of the major funders of the Democrat Party. Why would any Republican parent let their children go anywhere near these kind of wicked and dishonest people?

The Sweet Home.

SALT gun.

NEMO Special Ops Drill.

Read it.

The hovalin is a functional acoustic violin that can be produced using most standard consumer 3d printers. The total cost of raw materials for the violin (4/4) is currently about $70. The hovalin was designed with Autodesk Fusion 360. Its shape and dimensions are inspired by the Stradivarius violin model.

Read it.

Innit has created a cooking system, built on machine learning and high-tech sensors, that can detect whatever it is you’re making for dinner and produce perfect results every time. And it doesn’t just cook chicken. We also had potatoes, gazpacho, and an apple tart, all equally delicious. For each food, it designs a cooking process optimized for your exact menu item. All you do is press play. Technically, I “cooked” our lunch: After the raw chicken went into the oven, I hit the play button, and voila.

Speed the day….

Read it.

The major defect in these posturings by ‘creative’ type about what people going to college are going to college for is that they forget that they are unrepresentative of the Real World. People aren’t willing to go a hundred thousand dollars into debt in order to be better citizens; they do it because they hope to get a college degree that will allow them to make a lot of money. It’s just that simple. Unfortunately they think that a degree in Gender Studies or Puppetry will do that, and are destined for a rude awakening; in such cases, a traditional liberal arts degree would have stood them in better stead.

Read it.

If this is true, Europe will explode. This is triple the 2015 yearly rate of about a million (which itself was an over three-fold increase from the 282,000 that came in 2014). That current rate has already led to the rise of the far right, serious stresses on national and local governments, and the partial breakdown of the Schengen system. So far, many of these stresses have been manageable and perhaps reversible—but if things get three times as bad as they are right now, that will all change. Strong polls for the far right will likely become an election (or elections) in which a party like the Sweden Democrats or Front National takes office; Schengen hiccups could become an outright collapse of the system; and both inter- and intra-national tensions will skyrocket.

In the seminal book Camp of the Saints, Respail posited one million new immigrants into southern France, which is sufficient to destroy the French as a coherent nation. This will be quite a bit worse.

Read it.

Beneath Beijing’s bluster, Taiwan terrifies China because the small island represents a magnificent vision of what the mainland could be and what the Communist Party is not. This should be a reason to reaffirm that defending democracy in Taiwan is important to America and the region—and as an example for the PRC to follow. But like Ma’s unpopular government, the Obama Administration’s first instinct in this context is to bend to mainland sensitivities on this issue, weakening the defense of the Taiwanese democratic way of life in the process.

Name to the contrary notwithstanding, Democrats really don’t like democracy all that much.

Read it.

Researchers at Cornell University found, for the majority of people, eating more portions of junk food made no difference to their waistlines.

So much for the ‘scientific consensus’.

Read it.

Oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil is the target of a new state investigation that seeks to determine whether the company deliberately misled the public about the risks of climate change. The New York Times reports that New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a subpoena to the company on Wednesday, in which he demanded access to financial records, emails, and other documentation, dating back to the late 1970s.

If you can’t get them to shut up, see if you can cost them money. Your tax dollars at work, indeed.

Still waiting for the investigation of the ‘climate scientists’ who fudged the data to make ‘climate change’ appear to be a near and present danger. And waiting. And waiting….

Read it.

Read it.

A 9-year-old boy was shot and killed in what is being treated as a ‘targeted’ attack, according to police.

The murder of Tyshawn Lee, who on Monday afternoon was deliberately lured from a Chicago park to a secluded alleyway, is thought to have been gang-related.

Well, thank God for those strict gun-control laws in Chicago; otherwise the place would wind up like Texas.

Read it. And, please, watch the video.

The invaluable MEMRI clips the video of Umm Muhammad Shamanseh below, whose son Muhammad was killed while perpetrating a terror attack on a bus in Jerusalem on October 12. Appearing in her home via the Lebanese Al-Quds TV channel, she offered the interviewer candy to celebrate her son’s “martyrdom.” She said that she hoped her other sons would follow in his footsteps and pulled out a knife, threatening: “My deeds will speak louder than words.”

And who would know better than Mom?

Read it.

Overstock.com, a Utah-based online retailer that started as a seller of excess inventory, has been doing some stockpiling of its own. Jonathan Johnson, the chairman of the board who is also running for Utah’s governor says the company has $10.9 million in gold and silver and a three-month food supply for each employee. These reserves, according to Johnson, are in preparation for an inevitable financial crisis.

What do they know that you don’t? Hmmm?

Read it.

And as soon as that gets accomplished, they will come under criticism for being racist and denying Native Americans their due proportion of school mascots.

Mark my words … racist if you do, and racist if you don’t.

Read it.

The most interesting case in Ronson’s book is that of Formula One mogul Max Mosley. He was allegedly caught attending an S&M sex session with prostitutes dressed as Nazis. Instead of apologizing or hiding, his response was “I can think of few things more un-erotic than Nazi role play.” He didn’t deny the encounter. He just clarified the details. They were Germans, not Nazis. He then sued News of the World and won. As far as Ronson is concerned, Mosley beat the system. He refused to kowtow and told the mob they were the ones who should be ashamed, so they just moved on. It’s like that scene in the new War of the Worlds where Tom Cruise aims a mirror at the probe and it immediately continues the hunt elsewhere. All you have to do to avoid the stigma of violating the commandments of political correctness is fight back.

This is true to a fault. Mattress girl was not raped. Vanessa Grigoriadis, who wrote the cover story on her for New York mag, screwed up. However, neither of them apologized or admitted any wrongdoing, so they both got away with murder, well, rape, well, fake rape. Sabrina Erdely and Rolling Stone apologized for their fake rape story and were permanently humiliated for it. When Rachel Dolezal was caught pretending to be white, she cowered and everyone laughed. Shaun King screamed that “it’s MY STORY” when he was caught and everyone went, “Oh shit, this is his story. We better back off.” Today Rachel works as a hairstylist and Shaun has a regular column in the Daily News.

Read it.

After years of indecision and short-term extensions, the House of Representatives passed a six-year transportation bill yesterday. Since the bill is not much different from a bill passed by the Senate a few months ago, it seems likely that the two will agree on a final bill later this month.

One of the main obstacles to the bill has been fiscal conservatives (and some liberals) who objected to $80 billion of deficit spending over the next six years. Many of the conservatives wanted to cut spending to be no more than gas tax and other highway revenues; the liberals wanted to raise gas taxes to cover the deficits and provide revenues for even more spending on roads and transit. Instead, the House stayed the course of spending more than is available, using various accounting tricks to cover the deficits.

What really happened is that newly minted House Speaker Paul Ryan wanted to prove his worth, so he twisted enough arms to get the bill passed. The bill even includes reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which many conservatives hated. Apparently, the long-term opponents of this bank and transportation deficits just gave Ryan his honeymoon and allowed the bill to pass without a big fight: only 64 members of the House voted against the final bill.

Read it. And watch the video.

This young Afghan is unhappy with Europe and wants to return to Afghanistan. But he says there is no way he can go back now.

Read it.

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

I’d like to see a Consittutional Amendment to require prior military service in order to be President.

Read it.

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

Mark Steyn tours an interesting part of the world.

The photo at right comes from the “Hitler” menswear store in Gaza. I don’t know whether Hitler himself is running it. If you know your P G Wodehouse, you’ll recall that his Fascist leader, Sir Roderick Spode, ran a ladies’ lingerie boutique on the side. So it’s entirely possible that the Führer has been running a men’s clothing chain in Gaza since the bottom dropped out of the dictating business.

At any rate, you ‘ll see that the mannequins are not just stylishly dressed but appealingly accoutred with sharp knives. Because when you go Jew-killing, you want both to look sharp and stab sharp.

Read it.

Within 24 hours of publication, “orthorexia” was trending on Facebook and the piece had garnered thousands of comments. Half the responses were ecstatic: “Awesome article,” one person wrote. “[I] would get incredibly anxious in the presence of certain foods such as rice or white potatoes before realizing that I had some kind of problem but couldn’t pinpoint what it was until I finally heard the word ‘orthorexia.’”

…

Most doctors don’t yet recognize “orthorexia,” at least, not as an official diagnosis. But people who have spent hours looking at images of food online probably will. It’s a perfect explanation for the fixation on “clean eating” that exists offline but can be exacerbated by the food blogs, or the anxiety around health that exists just outside the frames of carefully-crafted Instagram shots of well-composed plates. When Instagrammer Jordan Younger, better known as “the blonde vegan,” announced that she would be easing up on her restrictive-yet-aesthetically-pleasing diet because it was making her isolated and ill, the post was so popular it crashed the site. In it, Younger identified as orthorexic.

Those people aren’t as much of a problem as those food-fascists who would shove ‘healthy eating’ down your throat. (Yeah, I’m looking at you, Michelle.)

Read it.

I have a list of suggestions for where to start….

Read it.

And, even more, Bill Clinton.

Nixon gave us the EPA and OSHA, and gave us a big push down the slippery slope to welfare dependency with his Family Security Plan.

Read it.

“Islamophobia” is a term of art invented by fanatics to stigmatize their opponents. Speaking as “Minnesota’s chief federal law enforcement officer,” really ought to know better than to employ it in this context.

Luger’s article is short on examples of “Islamophobia.” What is he talking about? To fill out his column Luger draws on his childhood experience of anti-Semitism. He claims to have beaten up “the strongest of the bigots” who taunted him at school. Luger really ought to spare us. The Jews have suffered enough. Please keep us out of your public relations work as United States Attorney.

Luger’s column appeared earlier this week, before Professor Moshe Halbertal was shouted down at the University of Minnesota Law School. In Halbertal’s case we have public words and deeds with a tinge of religious animosity a mile or two from the office of the United States Attorney. Luger’s lucubrations lack such a case. The Star Tribune’s Maura Lerner, incidentally, covers the shout-down on campus in “Protesters disrupt Israeli professor’s lecture at the University of Minnesota.”

Read it.

Bringing the number from one to zero. Yeah, that really increases diversity.

Maybe they can find a black guy who’s more interested in doing his job than in pursuing a political agenda. It’s worth a shot.

Read it.

Will he ever get a monument? Just looking at him, I’d guess not, since he didn’t die at the hands of police after committing a crime.

Where are the Black Lives Matter people now? Here’s a kid who deserves to be remembered if anyone does.

Read it.

Oops.

Richard Fernandez intrudes some reality into The Narrative.

According to adherents of historical materialism, the story of humanity can flow in only one direction.   That makes progressive politics not only feasible but mandatory.  The one-way nature of history means milestones once passed are in the rearview mirror forever.  Barack Obama could think of no greater put-down than to accuse Mitt Romney of questioning the certainty of progress.

Gee, I’ve been saying that for years.

In this view, progress is like a ratchet, once it advances a tooth it can never go back.

Thus when “progress” actually retreats it causes no end of political embarrassment, not simply because it admits the possibility of fallibility, but it disproves the inevitability of “progress” itself. When China decided to reverse it’s “one child policy” to avoid a demographic catastrophe, as Bret Stephens explains, it did more than repeal a Politburo decision, it admitted that the most advanced idea of the day was a crock of s**t.  It is such a disappointment to progressives.

…

Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post writes: “The 2015 election is over. (You may not have known it was even happening.) And it proved one thing: Republicans have an absolute stranglehold on governorships and state legislatures all across the country.” But why?  The Democrats were evicted not because of any superiority in Republican organization but because their program eventually went stale and fell apart.

Read it.

The Oxymoron Party is at it again.

In the ongoing fight between Democrats and Republicans over election procedures like voter ID and early voting, the Democrats are supposedly the champions of higher turnout and reducing barriers to participation. But when it comes to scheduling off-cycle elections¹ like those taking place today, the Democratic Party is the champion of voter suppression.

…

Scheduling elections at odd times appears to be a deliberate strategy aimed at keeping turnout low, which gives more influence to groups like teachers unions that have a direct stake in the election’s outcome.

…

Why do Democrats and Democratic-aligned groups prefer off-cycle elections? When school boards and other municipal offices are up for election at odd times, few run-of-the-mill voters show up at the polls, but voters with a particular interest in these elections — like city workers themselves — show up in full force. The low-turnout election allows their policy goals to dominate.

Read it.

[Who writes this stuff?]

Read it.

Hey, whadda ya know, Scotty, we have transparent aluminum after all.

Read it.

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

Read it.

British police have dropped all charges against Bahar Mustafa, 28, the student welfare and diversity officer arrested last month for tweets that included the hashtag #KillAllWhiteMen.

Of course, if she had been a white man, she’d still be in jail.

“The decision first to prosecute and then to climb down so soon afterwards, made by the Crown Prosecution Service headquarters, calls into question their ability to make sensible judgments on delicate issues,” Mustafa’s lawyer, Mike Schwarz, told the Guardian. It should also call into question the wisdom of laws against so-called “hate speech,” an inherently subjective category.

Read it.

A team of European researchers have unveiled a scientific model showing that the Earth is likely to experience a “mini ice age” from 2030 to 2040 as a result of decreased solar activity.

Their findings will infuriate environmental campaigners who argue by 2030 we could be facing increased sea levels and flooding due to glacial melt at the poles.

However, at the National Astronomy Meeting in Wales, Northumbria University professor Valentina Zharkova said fluctuations an 11-year cycle of solar activity the sun goes through would be responsible for a freeze, the like of which has not been experienced since the 1600s.

From 1645 to 1715 global temperatures dropped due to low solar activity so much that the planet experienced a 70-year ice age known as Maunder Minimum which saw the River Thames in London completely frozen.

Global Warming? Never Mind….

Read it.

Sure, why not.

Read it.

No trace of Politically-Incorrect-Cooties must be allowed to exist.

If these guys are so offended by the seal, they ought to go to a different law school. C’mon, put your tuition where your mouth is. (Never happen, of course, they need that Harvard Law School ticket stub.)

Read it.

Michigan’s Consumers Mutual Insurance put a notice up yesterday that it will not offer insurance in 2016, making it the 12th ACA co-op to fall—a number that’s more than half of the 23 co-ops set up by the ACA in 2014.

But, but, but, I thought that these co-ops would save everybody from expensive health care!

Democrats, of course, have blamed Republicans for cutting federal funding to co-ops, which they argue could have kept them afloat. But the structural causes of the closures appear to lie deeper. Every co-op’s financial situation is unique, but in the case of one early closure—Iowa’s Cooportunity Health—premiums were set too low to cover the cost of the sick patients it attracted. Another threatened co-op, meanwhile, looked at the possibility of raising premiums. In other words, there is a tradeoff between plan affordability and insurer sustainability that the ACA simply hasn’t solved. Insurers can make their coverage affordable, but then their viability is threatened. Or they can raise premiums and save themselves—but at the cost of increasing the financial burden placed on Americans, whether directly or through tax dollars.

Guess not.

Read it.

Unfortunately, your government isn’t that much afraid of you — and has more cause to be.

Those Muslims who are afraid of anti-extremist initiatives ought to step up to the plate and do something about the prevalence of Muslim extremism.

When Muslims in a Christian country have as much to fear as Christians in Muslim countries, come talk to me.

Read it.

Or at least claim they do. Pardon my skepticism. ‘But it must be true! There’s a study!’ Yeah.

I’d certainly be interested in a study that looked at how many of those same ‘black millenials’ indulged in criminal behavior, but of course no such study will ever be forthcoming — for that we have to depend on the YouTube videos of black flash mob crime sprees.

Read it.

There’s a genre of expository writing where the author explains in detail how he got something completely wrong. The name for this form is “nonexistent” because no one ever does it. Similarly, you will never hear a lecture from an economist explaining how he got some prediction totally wrong. For instance, Obama’s economic team swore that the stimulus bill would set off an economic boom through the magic The Multiplier. They were wrong and it was a flop, but no one talks about it because it is simply not done.

This is something you see in all fields, not just public policy. You never read about scientists discussing how they screwed up an experiment or fell for some nutty idea that sounded good at the moment. What we expect and what we get is equivocation, denial and when that does not work, an attempt to flush the incident down the memory hole. It usually works too. Paul Ehrlich was hilariously wrong about human populations, but he has paid no price.

Freeberg:

Well, I can explain it, I think. Opinion-makers and opinion-distributors like Ehrlich pay no price for being wrong, because very few people care; and people don’t care because they, in turn, also pay no price. “Turned out to be right/wrong” has little practical meaning anymore. Our system of forming and governing societies, our style of discussing weighty issues, come from times in centuries past when being right or wrong meant the difference between living or starving. Now, it means the difference between strutting like a peacock on Facebook, or…fuming away on Facebook.