Read it.

Eating well is hard, especially if you live a busy lifestyle and are often on the go. You pick up dinner from a shop while on your way home, and spot a ‘healthy’ label and so think you’re doing good.

But this might not always be the case. They say never judge a book by its cover and perhaps the same principal should be applied to food.

Women and minorities hardest hit.

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In a year marred by campus strife, at least one bright spot emerged in American higher education: the comeback of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, known as ROTC, at leading universities.

This year, Columbia University commissioned its first Marine officer, Patrick Poorbaugh, since 1970. Yale graduated two Naval ROTC officers— Sam Cohen and Andrew Heymann—for the first time since Richard Nixon was in the White House. Yale, with 41 midshipmen, boasts the largest NROTC unit in the Ivy League. Harvard senior Charlotte Falletta was recognized as one of the top 10 Army cadets in the nation.

Even Brown University, the last Ivy League school to move beyond the Vietnam-era politics that yanked ROTC programs from campus, is changing. In 2012 Brown established a center for students interested in military careers, and this year the school signed deals allowing students to participate in Naval and Air Force ROTC programs off campus.

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Update on this First Amendment lawsuit filed against the University of New Mexico last year: A federal judge has dismissed the case by former student Monica Pompeo, saying the Board of Regents is protected by “qualified immunity.”

The case revolved around Pompeo’s film-studies paper about the lesbian-romance movie Desert Hearts, in which she said homosexual attraction was “perverse” and referred to a childless woman in the film as “barren.” Her professor refused to grade the paper, saying it included “hate speech,” Pompeo claimed.

Yet another reason not to allow your kid to go to a government school.

Read it.

I don’t pretend to know what the truth is. But there is no need to prove malign intent on the part of the Western powers. The most charitable theory available, ‘the eternally recurring colossal cock-up’ theory of history, will do well enough. If a more sophisticated theory is required, I suggest we recall the assessment of C. Wright Mills when he spoke of US policy being made by ‘crackpot realists’, people who were entirely realistic about how to promote their careers inside the Beltway, and incorrigible crackpots when it came to formulating foreign policy. Since it is not only American folly and incompetence that is in the dock, I would also recall the assessment of Ernest Bevin, who remarked that ‘superiority is claimed by the middle class in the realms of government, when as a matter of fact their work is a monument of incompetence.’

Read it.

The following report by Anne Marie Waters examines the “grooming” phenomenon — actually, the sexual enslavement of underage girls by Muslim men— that has been making headlines in the UK for the past few years. In addition to the obstruction and obfuscation displayed by public officials and the police, much of the meaningful data on these crimes is either uncollated or altogether absent.

Read it.

How very American.

Read it.

Oh, the Islamophobia! Oh, wait….

Read it.

The year 2015 was a dismal one for American public education — at least by the numbers.

But don’t blame the kids. Parents are missing in action.

Except most Asian-American parents, that is. They tend to oversee their children’s homework, stress the importance of earning high grades and instill the belief that hard work is the ticket to a better life.

And it pays off. Their children are soaring academically.

The outrage is that instead of embracing the example of these Asian families, school authorities and non-Asian parents want to rig the system to hold them back. It’s happening here in New York City, in suburban New Jersey and across the nation.

John Derbyshire used to say (and may still) that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that 1,000,000 ethnic Chinese wouldn’t cure. I think he’s right.

Read it.

Many years ago, I put my 23andMe genetic screening results online at SNPedia where they are regularly updated so that my friends and enemies can all find out what’s genetically wrong (and right) with me. Consequences? None.

So what is Skloot advocating that has gotten me riled up? The government is proposing revisions to the Protection of Human Subjects rule that could possibly impose new and extensive consent requirements for using all sorts of biological samples derived from people. Skloot begins by asking readers if they want researchers to continue the practice of freely passing around cells derived from their bodies and the genetic information they contain?

Knowledge is not property. Let me repeat that. Knowledge is not property. A fact about you is not something you own

Read it.

“For purveyors of meeting bingo this is only good news. For the rest of us meetings have degenerated in to a quagmire of nonsensical verbal piffle,” he said in an article for Marketing magazine.

I’m wondering how they managed to weed it down to 10.

Read it.

I’m just positive that they’re losing sleep over it.

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Today we filed a lawsuit challenging Dignity Health’s use of religious directives to deny basic reproductive health care to its patients. Filed on behalf of patient Rebecca Chamorro and Physicians for Reproductive Health, the suit argues that withholding pregnancy-related care for reasons other than medical considerations is illegal in California.

I just love that weasel-worded phrase, ‘Pregnacy-Related Care’. Whenever you see ‘basic reproductive health care’, you know it’s neither ‘basic’ nor ‘health care’.

The refusal of hospitals to allow doctors to perform basic health procedures based solely on religious doctrine presents a real threat to a woman’s ability to access health care.

The assumption here, of course, is that ‘health care’ is some sort of right that ‘health care providers’ have to provide whether they like it or not. In the old days that was called ‘slavery’, but of course the ACLU doesn’t dare use the correct terms in this propaganda piece because then the game would be up.

Patients seeking medical care from public institutions should not have to worry that religious doctrine rather than medical judgment will dictate what care they receive.

The term ‘public institutions’ is suppose to fool Low Information Voters into thinking that this is some sort of government-owned facility, which of course it is not.

Ten of the 25 largest hospital systems in the U.S. are Catholic-sponsored, and nearly one of nine hospital beds in the country is in a Catholic facility.

So a win here would be a big step forward in the ACLU’s campaign to force people to do something contrary to their religious beliefs just because the ACLU thinks they ought to. If the Catholic Church in the U.S. tried to do the same to the ACLU, you would be able to hear the screams of outrage in Kazakhstan.

Read it.

The Muslim Student Association at San Diego State University is demanding that administrators combat Islamophobia by developing a “zero tolerance policy explicitly for Islamophobic speech and actions.”

Of course they are.

Read it.

I call the bad parts of Europe’s cities partial no-go zones because ordinary people in ordinary clothing at ordinary times can enter and leave them without trouble. But they are no-go zones in the sense that representatives of the state – police especially but also firefighters, meter-readers, ambulance attendants, and social workers – can only enter with massed power for temporary periods of time. If they disobey this basic rule (as I learned first-hand in Marseille), they are likely to be swarmed, insulted, threatened, and even attacked.

Little bits of the Dar al-Islam amidst the Dar al-Harb. How homey.

Read it.

The following video reports and articles concern a situation that is very familiar to those who live in or near culturally-enriched areas of northern Europe, such as the Swedish city of Malmö. Firemen or other emergency personnel are called to an immigrant neighborhood, where they are met with a hail of stones, bricks, bottles, and fireworks. Nowadays the fire brigade in Malmö won’t enter these enriched areas without a police escort.

The same situation arose in the Corsican town of Ajaccio on Christmas Eve, when residents of a Muslim neighborhood attacked firemen responding to an emergency call. The difference between Malmö and Ajaccio, however, is that an immediate, spontaneous resistance formed and fought back against the Muslims. Perhaps there is a strong collective memory in these southern regions of centuries of Islamic occupation and oppression. In any case, a crowd of locals not only took to the streets in protest, they went into the no-go zone and trashed a mosque.

Read it.

But as I’ve written before, journalists may well believe that passing laws is a good thing, and passing more laws is a better thing. But they would do well to mark that as an opinion. Many of us think that passing more laws – that is more mandates, bans, regulations, taxes, subsidies, boondoggles, transfer programs, and proclamations – is a bad thing. In fact, given that the American people pondered the “least productive Congress ever” twice, and twice kept the government divided between the two parties, it just might be that most Americans are fine with a Congress that passes fewer laws.

All I want for Christmas is a ‘Do Nothing Congress’.

Read it.

Let us descend into the depths of SWPL-dom on the Left Coast….

The people in Bea’s baby yoga class are split down a social fault-line between vaxxers and anti-vaxxers. In a sensible society, parents would heed their doctor’s advice. Here, the hierarchy of perceived wisdom tends to be reversed: the one who knows best how a baby ought to be reared is the baby itself, followed by his or her parents, who’ve read at least three baby books and a bunch of persuasive unsourced articles that they found on the internet.

The paediatrician, meanwhile, is considered a corporate shill who just wants to poke needles in your child and pump it full of toxins, diphtheria and non-organic baby formula. A doctor’s recommendations must always be filtered through a Facebook forum for concerned local moms. And what do doctors know, anyway? Only what they’ve gleaned from a decade of medical training and their years of subsequent experience, backed up by the full weight of modern science.

If I were to ask my parents whether they raised me according to Attachment, Tiger or Parisian principles, they’d wonder what on earth I was on about. Middle-class child-rearing across most of the developed world has become increasingly demented: consumerist, competitive, ideologically charged. And LA’s “crunchy” moms and dads are pioneers, way out west at the crossroads of celebrity and new-age culture.

Read it.

Is it just me, or is there something very American about this?

Read it.

Talk about your First World Problems….

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A 14-year-old girl who was gang-raped as ‘revenge’ after her mother won a local election has reportedly killed herself.

The girl’s mother was a candidate of the block development council (BDC), a local government faction in the Mirzapur district of north-east India.

In a horrific twist on what is locally known as “Panchayat poll rivalry”, two men allegedly kidnapped the sleeping girl and raped her in a nearby field last Wednesday, according to the Times of India.

Read it.

Let us recall that for almost 40 years now, diversity has been the gold standard defense of racial preferences. Racial diversity is said to enhance the classroom (and general social) experience by exposing other students to views purportedly most likely to come from people of color.

Yet it is too little remarked that much of what we hear from black students — and not only amidst the protests of late but often over decades past as well — flies directly in the face of the whole diversity argument that university administrators propound so ardently.

For example, at Oberlin, student protesters are demanding not just one but several “safe spaces” for “Africana-identifying” students. It’s fair to assume that white students would not be allowed in these spaces, given that the rationale is that here is where black students could catch their breath after the endless sallies of racism that the school’s students and environment force upon them daily.

Read it. And watch the video.

In India, millions of people live alongside Asian elephants. Generally, they interact peacefully. But sometimes encounters can turn deadly.

The stakes are particularly high in the southeastern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. Between 1994 and 2013, 41 people there lost their lives in encounters with elephants. But now, new technology is helping prevent such deaths: An early warning system texts residents if elephants are near.

You think you’ve got problems? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Read it.

Every year brings new examples of ruthless college administrators trampling the free expression rights of students and faculty, and 2015 was no different. Here are eight of the most notable campus censors I wrote about this year.

The Other McCain sees the dystopian future.

The children of the American elite class suffer from a form of oppression that most of us can never understand. Parents whose privileges are a matter of having the right resumé — Ivy League diplomas, etc. — are keenly aware that, in order for their child to follow in their footsteps and become members of the soi-disant “meritocracy,” the child must get into their school’s “gifted” program, must maintain a perfect GPA, must achieve certain scores on the SAT, and must accumulate the kind of extracurricular and school leadership positions that will make their college application a winner. If Dad went to Yale and Mom went to Harvard, their child would be deemed a disappointment if she weren’t accepted at either of the parental alma maters.

To attend a mere state university? This will not do. She might as well be living in a trailer park and working the day shift at Waffle House.

Read it.

In Los Angeles, the NAACP filed a successful lawsuit against the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority for building light rail. The group argued that light rail was so expensive that the agency was forced to cut bus service to minority neighborhoods, resulting in a huge decline in transit ridership. The court ordered the agency to restore bus service, allowing ridership to recover. But in Baltimore, the NAACP seems to be arguing that cuts in bus service are worth building a billion-dollar tunnel under an African-American neighborhood.

Maybe this is a case of the NAACP’s Right Coast not knowing what its Left Coast was doing. But the heart of the complaint in Baltimore seems to be that blacks are somehow harmed because the state of Maryland chose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bus improvements instead of billions of dollars on one light-rail line. This suggests that the Maryland NAACP thinks dollars spent are more important than results. After all, Baltimore’s other light-rail lines are all embarrassing failures, with costs greater than projections but ridership well below projections.

Read it.

Denis Kowitz has a shepherd-retention problem at his Idaho wool-growing operation, and he hopes changes in federal immigration law will help fix it.

“One was named Oscar, the other…well, I can’t remember. But he’s gone!” he says of two hired hands who left in March, just when he needed them for lambing season on his ranch in Rupert, in southern Idaho.

Mr. Kowitz said he paid about $3,000 per shepherd to find them and fly them from Peru. He said he assumed they quit to work in construction or at a dairy or landscaper. In the past 16 months, he said he has lost six shepherds under similar circumstances.

Boy, that sure sounds like a problem. Sure can’t have immigrants moving around as if they were free to choose jobs. People might think that the whole Open Borders thing is about cheap labor, not humanitarian heart-bleed.

Read it.

In a recap of “significant success[es]” in 2015, State Department spokesman John Kirby lists “Bringing Peace, Security to Syria.” Talk about a whopper. Even the obnoxious team of Jan Psaki and Marie Harf might have shied away from a claim this preposterous.

Read it.

I’m always puzzled when government officials say that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. If that is the case, why are guards at Guantanamo Bay required to wear gloves when they handle the Koran? Why did we give Osama bin Laden an Islamic burial at sea? Somehow, when you investigate terrorism, Islam keeps popping up.

…

The Farook/Malik case illustrates the fact that when you poke around in the background of an Islamic terrorist, you find…Islam. That isn’t a surprising conclusion, unless you work in the Obama administration.

Read it.

Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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The first goal of taxation is to raise needed government revenue with minimum economic damage. That means lower marginal rates—the additional tax people pay for each extra dollar earned—and a broader base of income subject to tax. It also means a massively simpler tax code.

Hear, hear. Unconscionable amounts of money are wasted every year just trying to dodge burdensome tax levies.

What would a minimally damaging, simple, fair tax code look like? First, the corporate tax should be eliminated. Every dollar of taxes that a corporation seems to pay comes from higher prices to its customers, lower wages to its workers, or lower dividends to its shareholders. Of these groups, wealthy individual shareholders are the least likely to suffer. If taxes eat into profits, investors pay lower prices for less valuable shares, and so earn the same return as before. To the extent that taxes do reduce returns, they also financially hurt nonprofits and your and my pension funds.

…

Second, the government should tax consumption, not wages, income or wealth. When the government taxes savings, investment income, wealth or inheritance, it reduces the incentive to save, invest and build companies rather than enjoy consumption immediately. Taxes on capital gains discourage people from moving or reallocating capital toward their most productive uses.

Excellent analysis.

Read it.

Cowen rather coyly overlooks another aspect of the assortative mating that takes place at universities: The heritability of intelligence. Men and women now tend to look for partners who are at least as smart as they are and they tend to pass along their smarts to their children. A 2015 study reports that assortative mating correlates more with intelligence than for any other trait.

If they have kids, which a lot of them don’t; or at most one. I know at least one couple who are each only children and have only one child (and probably won’t have another). Sure, that kid will be highly intelligent but might not reproduce at all.

Gavin McInnes reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

It’s impossible to starve in this country. In fact, our biggest problem with the poor is they’re getting too fat. Everyone has a smartphone, even homeless dudes. There are more cars and guns than there are people and it’s virtually impossible to find a home without a fridge and a TV in it. When I put on my magic glasses it is impossible to understand why every so-called oppressed minority doesn’t thank their lucky stars Fortuna’s deadly wheel plopped them down on American soil.

Read it.

Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama (um…um…um).

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Well, he’s a socialist, so he’s accustomed to thinking that wishes will come true.

Every time I see a picture of Bernie Sanders, I keep hearing ‘You kids get off my lawn!’

Read it.

With each new speech they make, the nation’s two top Democrats continue to reveal their profound ignorance of what motivates the enemy both promise to defeat.

And they don’t want to know, because it intrudes reality into their ‘progressive’ fantasy world.

The White House trope that the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay must be closed because it inspires, recruits and ultimately creates terrorists is a stark illustration of the Obama administration’s failure to understand the threat posed by Islamism. Without offering any evidence, the president tells audiences that “Guantanamo has been an enormous recruitment tool for organizations like ISIL.” He argues that GITMO “is part of how they rationalize and justify their demented, sick perpetration of violence on innocent people.”

In reality the prison in Guantanamo Bay is not even a catalyst to the growth of the Islamic State. And until there are credible reports of jihadists, mid-attack, shouting “This is for Gitmo!” and “Release KSM!” rather than “This is for Syria!” and “Allahu Akbar,” no thinking person will believe otherwise.

Democrats making a statement as fact unsupported by any evidence, indeed contradicted by what evidence that actually exists? Say it ain’t so!

Explaining how American Muslims with “no criminal record or a history of terrorist activity” are motivated to join the Islamic State, the president pointed to a “notion of a gross injustice, that America is not living up to its professed ideals. We know that. We see the Internet traffic. We see how Guantanamo has been used to create this mythology that America is at war with Islam. And for us to close it is part of our counterterrorism strategy that is supported by our military, our diplomatic and our intelligence teams.”

Even Barack Obama can’t possibly believe that the Islamic State fighters would end their jihad if only the U.S. would change course and begin “living up to its professed ideals.”

Of course not, but he’s hoping that there are enough Low Information Voters out there that do believe it.

Read it.

America takes its sports more seriously than its military. This is the conclusion we can draw from the December announcement by woebegone Defense Secretary Ashton Carter that women will now “be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men.” As though the only thing that militates against women serving in the military is baseless sexism.

…

Why hasn’t the NFL or the NBA or the NHL or the MLB followed the Obama Administration’s brave lead and started fielding women? In 2013, Lauren Silberman tried out as an NFL kicker and lasted just “two pathetic and pitiful” punts before limping off the field. Her best kick made it a whopping 19 yards. There hasn’t been a whole lot of women-in-the-NFL agitation since then. The idea of women joining, say, the Patriots’ defensive lineup, remains so ridiculous that not even the most doe-eyed frappuccino feminist is badgering professional football for women’s right to be trampled underfoot. But does the Secretary of Defense imagine that what happens in war is less violent than being run over by offensive tackle Sebastian Vollmer (6’8”, 320 lbs)?

Read it.

The fuss over Trump’s comments will eventually ebb. Of more interest to me is how the episode proved, once again, that while the story of the 71,000 Japanese-Americans who were relocated, and the 35,000 Japanese aliens who were interned (in a previous piece, I explained the difference), is classified under “never forget,” the story of the approximately 14,000 German- and Italian-Americans and aliens interned during the war is officially filed under “never remind.”

The memory of the Crust supports the Narrative, and nothing is allowed to interfere with that.

Meet Arthur Jacobs. He’s the poster boy for “doesn’t fit the narrative.” Not coincidentally, he’s also the poster boy for getting your nads kicked by your own government for eighty years just because you’re of German descent. You know what he isn’t the poster boy for? “White privilege.” Jacobs’ story personifies why the ordeal of interned German-Americans and aliens during World War II was sometimes worse than what the Japanese internees went through.

Bet you didn’t know that. I certainly didn’t.

Read it.

A service offering monks for hire on Amazon has been criticised by Buddhists who say it “commodifies a religious act as a service”.

Uh, well, it really is a service. Monks gotta eat, too, you know.

The Japanese Buddhist Federation is to formally request that Amazon stops selling the services of Buddhist monks for memorial services and other ceremonies, according to The Asahi Shimbun, Japan’s daily newspaper.

Wet blankets.

A statement from the Federation, released on Christmas Eve, said that the service raises questions about Amazon’s attitude towards religion. Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Read it.

The Diwan al-Rikaz (Department of Precious Resources) is one of the Islamic State’s [IS] bureaucratic wings that have emerged since the announcement of the Caliphate on 29 June 2014. Literally, al-Rikaz refers to anything that can be extracted from the ground. In that regard, the Diwan has a number of sub-divisions, most notably including oil and gas as well as antiquities. Mining and trading of minerals also fall under the Diwan al-Rikaz’s authority. Previously I have covered some specimen documents from the Diwan al-Rikaz, such as the leasing of gasoline stations in Mosul, oil and gas distributions to the local population, oil and gas sale receipts and permission for excavating antiquities.

As with other IS departments, co-optation of existing structures is key as part of the emphasis on authorization and oversight of activity, particularly when it comes to oil and gas resources. Compare, for instance, with the Diwan al-Siha (Health Department) requirement for new pharmacies and clinics to have its stamp of approval.

Glenn Harlan Reyholds (“Instapundit”) has an answer.

In my hometown of Knoxville, Tenn., a 15-year-old became a hero the week before Christmas.

Zaevion Dobson, a football player at Fulton High School, threw himself on top of three girls as gang members released a hail of bullets in an apparently random retaliation for a shooting the day before. Zaevion traded his life for the girls’ safety; he died after being struck by a bullet.

Here’s a case where black lives really do matter — this kid gave his life to protect others. That’s what being a hero is all about.

Dobson’s heroism speaks well of his family and his community. Football encourages quick-thinking physicality, but how people react in that split second is a reflection of the values they’ve absorbed over a lifetime. Greater love hath no man, we are told by the Bible, than that he lay down his life for his friends.

We’d like to live in a world where such heroic tendencies are common, but if they were common, then they wouldn’t be heroic, would they? But surely, we’d like to live in a world where selfless heroism is more common.

We would indeed.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Freeberg does it so you don’t have to.

I can’t write funny stuff like Mr. Barry, but I must have some talent for noticing things, since I get in trouble so often for noticing things I’m not supposed to notice. Human behavior, for instance. The pattern is pretty clear: People see a problem, they come up with a wrong solution, they chase that for a little while…or a great while. Maybe forever. But if they’re capable of learning something, they eventually figure out the solution they’ve been chasing is the wrong one, and they go to work on their solving skills and start chasing a solution that is, at least, not quite so wrong.

Yes, Barack Obama won re-election in 2012. That doesn’t really prove anything, though, other than for a lot of people it took more than four years to figure out they’d been chasing the wrong solution. For the people like Mr. Barry who see 2015 as a year of pain, the feeling is not imaginary. It is real. This paradigm shift of figuring out you need to re-evaluate the solution, that you’ve been chasing after the wrong one, is never a comfortable one. It is the scraping of the blade of theory getting shaped and sharpened against the stone of practice. And 2015 seems to have taken form as the year of the Great Sharpening.

A year in which a man won the title ‘Woman of the Year’ doesn’t have a lot to recommend it. But we’ll survive this, as we have survived so much else.

Read it.

Hey, it’s in the New York Times so it must be true, right?

Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-gatherers, not bread-eaters. If exposed to gluten, some of us will develop celiac disease or gluten intolerance, or we’ll simply feel lousy.

Most of these assertions, however, are contradicted by significant evidence, and distract us from our actual problem: an immune system that has become overly sensitive.

…

Milk-producing animals were first domesticated about the same time as wheat in the Middle East. As the custom of dairying spread, so did lactase persistence. What surprises scientists today, though, is just how recently, and how completely, that trait has spread in some populations. Few Scandinavian hunter-gatherers living 5,400 years ago had lactase persistence genes, for example. Today, most Scandinavians do.

Here’s the lesson: Adaptation to a new food stuff can occur quickly — in a few millenniums in this case. So if it happened with milk, why not with wheat?

“If eating wheat was so bad for us, it’s hard to imagine that populations that ate it would have tolerated it for 10,000 years,” Sarah A. Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania who studies lactase persistence, told me.

Read it.

How the Dar al-Islam comes to America on little cat feet.

Minnesota’s Somali community presents a stark challenge to Americans concerned about terrorism. The community is Muslim, large, and protected by an extreme form of ideological conformity that runs from the governor down and permeates the media.

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

While the Somali community’s support for law enforcement is questionable at best, its support for community members charged with supporting terrorist organizations is highly visible. Yet the Star Tribune goes out of its way in a news story on this month’s charges against the former airport employee who recruited here for ISIS to state as a fact that “Muslim community that’s exceptionally engaged with efforts to counter extremism.”

Jim Goad vents.

They say white people deserve to hate themselves for all the pain and death they’ve wrought. I say white people are loathsome these days because they’re uniquely susceptible to such idiotic guilt-tripping. That’s the problem with white people—not that it was so easy for them to conquer the world, but that it’s so easy to make them feel bad about it.

The Other McCain explores the dark nooks and crannies of American culture so that you don’t have to.

Carmen Rios (@carmenriosss) has described how she “became a women’s studies major and a raging lesbian feminist in college.”

This is what happens when you send your daughter to college. An unpleasant surprise.

She is communications coordinator at the Feminist Majority Foundation. She speaks on behalf of the movement, and Carmen Rios is tired of hearing heterosexual women say the wrong thing.

Sounds like a personal problem.

What is mystifying is when Carmen Rios says she has “done a lot of work alongside straight women.” Who are these women? How does feminist heterosexuality happen without reinforcing the “gender binary”? And what about the males who are (allegedly) involved with these (allegedly) heterosexual feminists? Exactly what purpose do these males serve in the lives of feminist women? Because feminism denies that males have any distinct social role or function, it is logically impossible that a feminist would ever actually need a man. Why, then, would a man wish to associate with a woman who considers him useless?

Very good questions.

John Hinderaker of PowerLine has an epiphany.

Steve’s post earlier today is a great reminder of how over the last 200 years, free enterprise has led to an unprecedented explosion of wealth, individual liberty and creativity. Nothing in human history–putting aside for the moment the claims of religion–has enriched the human race to anything like the same degree. If human history has conclusively established any fact, it is that free enterprise is fantastically successful, while socialism is a pitiful failure. Think of North Korea, the USSR, Maoist China, Albania, East Germany, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, India until it wised up. The list goes on and on.

And yet…the siren song of socialism still lures suckers. Currently, Venezuela is learning the age-old lesson the hard way. But we can’t laugh at Venezuelans, when Bernie Sanders is a serious contender for our presidency and is far and away the campus favorite. How is it that socialism (or the urge toward socialism, anyway) can survive? It is the cockroach of ideologies, seemingly impervious to all efforts to kill it.

It may be helpful to think of socialism as a species of fraud. There are many types of fraud, but nothing new under the Sun. The same frauds that Venetian merchants guarded against persist today. The same con games that flourished hundreds of years ago still work. Charles Ponzi’s financial empire collapsed in 1920, and he was arrested and sent to prison. Yet hardly a month goes by without another Ponzi scheme being revealed. There is only one way in which a Ponzi scheme can end: in disaster. This is a mathematical fact. Yet people fall for them, over and over.

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. By definition, half of the human race is below average in intelligence.