Read it.

As you might expect.

As my colleague Joel Pollak writes at Breitbart California, the organisation, which claims it is tasked with improving relations between America and its Muslim communities took the pre-emptive step of representing Mr. Farook’s family, in what Pollak describes as a terrorist family’s “death benefit.”

CAIR’s assistance and public representation of Syed Farook’s family, in my opinion, closely resembles the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) behaviour of rewarding imprisoned terrorists, or, in cases where they’ve died during an attack, their families. The PA has used U.S. and UK foreign aid for these “salaries,” paid during incarceration, or, in the case of the families, for the foreseeable future.

Read it.

Yair Elbaz sent to Russ and me this very interesting interactive graph from McKinsey Global Institute. It arrays more than 750 paid occupations in the United States according to their average hourly wage rates* and the estimated percentage of how much of these workers’ tasks can be automated with existing technologies. Not surprisingly, the occupations that are most able to be automated – that involve the performance of the greatest number of tasks that can be automated with existing technologies – are generally at the lower end of the wage scale. The percentage of a surgeon’s tasks that can be automated is lower than is the percentage of a baker’s tasks that can be automated.

Read it.

A Kiev court upheld an appeal from the country’s Justice Ministry, which charged the party with a host of offences including “incitement of ethnic hatred” and “encroachment on human rights and freedoms”.

Ukraine adopted controversial “decommunisation” laws in May, which outlawed the display of Soviet symbols and prohibited the use of the word “communist”.

However, the Communist Party of Ukraine refused to change its name, logo or charter to comply with the legislation. The Party has spoken out against Ukraine’s new authorities, which came to power after a coup in February 2014.

The biter bit.

The greatest difference between National Socialism and Communism (International Socialism) is that Germany was required to ‘de-Nazify’ itself after they lost the war, but Russia and the other Communist states were never required to ‘de-Commiefy’ themselves. So Putin’s background as a KGB officer has never been a problem for him the way being an SS officer would have been for someone running for office in Germany.

John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International told the Guardian: “The decision may be seen as dealing with the damaging vestiges of the Soviet past. In fact, it does exactly the opposite by following the same style of draconian measures used to stifle dissent.

Let’s ask him what his position is on affirmative action for the descendants of Negro slaves. I suspect that he would be unable to appreciate the analogy.

“Expressing your opinion without fear of prosecution, particularly if that opinion is contrary to the views held by those in position of power, was one of the principles behind the EuroMaidan protests.

Don’t tell that to the Black Lives Matter crowd.

Read it.

The 61 tattoos that are across Iceman Ötzi’s body are the oldest tattoos known to man, according to new research.

And look what it got him – an arrow in the back and a death in the snow, pursued by enemies.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Remember the mom put on Illinois Child Abuse Registry for letting her kids, ages 11, 9, and 5, play at the park just outside her house?

The state’s appellate court has thrown out the “child neglect citation” against her, after a mere two-and-a-half-year battle with the Department of Child and Family Services. She was helped by the scrappy, brilliant Family Defense Center in Chicago.

Unbelievable.

Sarah Hoyt debunks some myths.

The idea that if you gave everyone enough food and time and free schooling they’d all become erudite and thinkers can be disproved by a stroll through your local Welfare hub.  Go on, I dare you, go down and start a little discussion on Kantian philosophy.

But it’s an idea that remains a myth on the left which has lost all other classical liberal ideals (like, you know, individual freedom) but holds fast onto this idea that education will somehow make a progressive out of everyone.  (Patently ridiculous as they’ve been indoctrinating several generations now, and it still won’t take the way they want.  That cold slap of reality counteracts it.  Which is why they advocate more cowbell.)

Read it.

Our boarding school backgrounds, our posh accents, our stylish outfits—in my experience, American students are often astonished by us Chinese internationals.

Not really. Those of us who have been paying attention realize that once Mao died China reverted to its historical pattern, the the Communist Party taking the place of an Imperial Dynasty with the Mandate of Heaven.

We’ve been sent off by our politically influential families to get precious Ivy League diplomas straight out of boarding schools.

China joins the Crust. Who knew?

This glamorous exterior, however, only conceals people who are struggling with the dysfunctionalities, injustices, and hypocrisies of the Communist Party system. The contrast between the lofty Communist Party line our parents defend and the reality of the human depravity we witness in our lives forces our descent into depression, drug abuse, and all too often suicide.

The sort of angst that those trained to accept the Progressive Fantasy in place of reality always undergo. Welcome to the First World, home of the First World Problem.

People who don’t see this might envy our upscale lives. They view our weekend trips to Aspen, Colorado, or the Bahamas as mere excursions, as if our private jets simply shuttle us from one party to the next. As if our exotic summer travels are just about where we get to go, not about the political system we get to stay away from. They see our impeccable style—clothes from Alaïa, Jil Sander, or Valentino—and don’t recognize the self-hate that comes with our self-enhancement.

Cementing the Asian status as Honorary (so to speak) White People. Next up: ‘Check your privilege!’

The author’s SWPL credentials:

The author is a first-year in the Columbia/Jewish Theological Seminary joint program with prospective majors in ethnicity and race studies and Jewish history. Originally from China, she grew up between her hometown and boarding schools, and is of mixed Chinese and Jewish heritage.

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

Read it.

The Office for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion at Harvard University distributed what it is calling “Holiday Placemats for Social Justice” on campus to help freshmen students navigate difficult conversations when they return home for Christmas break.

An alternative title might be ‘DoubleThink for Dummies’.

Some prankster ought to paint ‘SWPL’ on all the roofs of Harvard buildings, just to keep things clear.

Read it.

Our company was born out of my own experience as the owner of seven franchised ice cream stores. But years before I owned a chain of quick-service retail establishments, I worked at one. I worked at McDonald’s, where I slung french fries, scrubbed high-chairs, and worked the drive-thru for $6.40/hour (Canadian!)

This investor that sat in front of me was successful. Wealthy. Smart, really smart. He attended an elite private school, and earned two different degrees from separate Ivy League institutions.

But he had never worked at McDonald’s before.

And I bet he had never known anyone that had.

It made me feel a bit like a savant. Here was this brilliant, successful man, who knew 2X or 3X more about many things than I did. But I knew 100X or even 1000X more about a huge part of the world that he had never really experienced.

There are 20 million retail workers in America, with two million of them working at McDonald’s and Walmart alone. Call it whatever you want: “the middle class”, “the working class”, “blue collar workers.” Whatever euphemism you choose, the fact is that a huge portion of North American workers are supporting themselves and their families by working for an hourly wage, often close to the minimum, in retail or hospitality.

Read it.

Stupidity is a profit opportunity the world ’round. Ask P.T. Barnum.

Read it.

Some historians expressed doubt that the Führer had shot himself, speculating that accounts of Hitler’s death had been embellished to present his suicide in a suitably heroic light. But a fragment of skull, complete with bullet hole, which was taken from the bunker by the Russians and displayed in Moscow in 2000, appeared to settle the argument.

Until now. In the wake of new revelations, the histories of Hitler’s death may need to be rewritten – and left open-ended. American researchers claim to have demonstrated that the skull fragment, secretly preserved for decades by Soviet intelligence, belonged to a woman under 40, whose identity is unknown. DNA analyses performed on the bone, now held by the Russian State Archive in Moscow, have been processed at the genetics lab of the University of Connecticut. The results, broadcast in the US by a History Channel documentary, Hitler’s Escape, astonished scientists.

Funny thing, you never see Trump and Hitler together. Could it be….?

Read it.

A look inside Communist Chinese society.

Before the communists marched in, my great-grandfather had already lost everything to gambling debts, except for a few houses left to his sons in his will, including grandpa’s. “Not too bad,” grandpa recalled. “The people in the neighboring village who won our land were later beaten to death during the Land Reforms.”

…

One day, four young men came into the house when only my grandma and two of her young kids were in. They told grandma, “Give us the pans and everything made of iron. Good news, from now on, you don’t have to cook at home, we will work together, eat together, the children will study together and play together. We will take the iron to make steel.” My grandma secretly hid a pan in the haystack, and cried to her husband when he came back. She said, “I heard the children will also be shared in the People’s Commune.”

It turned out the children weren’t confiscated, but soon the People’s Commune collapsed. Half of grandpa’s possessions had already been confiscated and redistributed, and even the bark of the trees in the yard were boiled and eaten by hungry villagers Grandpa had to take down the ink painting on his wall, and put up Chairman Mao’s portrait in its place. But that was fine by him. He loved Chairman Mao.

Mark Steyn on the latest GOP debate.

On Channel 9 in New Hampshire, there’s a Bush ad every ten minutes: That’s an expensive way of keeping a guy at 3 per cent in the polls.

Sean and I also addressed the way Trump has re-framed the debate. For the first time, immigration is being discussed in terms of what it does or doesn’t do for the people who are already here. Without Trump, the immigration portion of a GOP debate would be Jeb! arguing with Marco about whether the “pathway to citizenship” should be two years or six months.

Read it.

For many countries efforts to restrict Moslem migration is justified by past experience. Japan, for example, has virtually no Moslems and as a result has had no problems with Islamic terrorism. The Gulf Oil States severely restrict the movement of Moslem refugees (and migrants in general) into their territory. They say it is for security reasons. European countries that accept a lot of Moslems fleeing religious violence in their homelands report that the Moslem migrants end up committing a disproportionate number of crimes and often end up as a disproportionate fraction of the prison population. Thus in France, where ten percent of the population is Moslem, over 60 percent of the prison population is Moslem.

Read it.

A very unusual event occurred tonight in the small Dutch town of Geldermalsen: there was a riot.

“But Baron,” you say. “That’s not at all unusual. Culture-enrichers riot almost every day in The Netherlands, and all over the rest of Western Europe.”

Yes indeed, they surely do. But this was a riot by the indigenous Dutch, who were protesting the establishment of an asylum center in their town, a deal arranged behind their backs. This is a man-bites-dog story.

In the videos below you’ll at first see the public meeting, which is taking place in a room with big plate glass windows. While public officials drone on, the riot is gathering in intensity just outside those windows.

A Muslima takes the microphone to give her testimony. As she speaks, the people around her grow visibly uneasy, directing more and more of their attention to the windows, outside of which the protesting townsfolk are throwing fireworks and clashing with the police.

After another thirty seconds or so the call goes out to abort the meeting, and everyone hastily leaves the room. After that you can see some footage of what is transpiring outside the windows.

The European people are waking up to what their governments are doing to them.

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

Birth tourism isn’t just for Chinese grifters. Here’s the exhaustive website for a birth tourism company — Miami-Mama — for an especially unpopular form of white people: Russians.

A general lesson is that the advantages of living in America and being an American citizen are no longer well defended at present. In the past, Americans could rely to some extent upon distance and complexity to keep out large numbers of the world’s seven billion non-Americans. But the ubiquity of smartphones makes coming to America and scamming past our unsophisticated defenses far more feasible for the con artists of the world. Anything you need to know to worm your way in, you can look up on your phone.

I don’t really have a problem with that. Our immigration system, as with anything run by government employees, is broken — people get in who ought to be kept out, and it takes forever (even when it works) to let in the people who ought to be let in.

It’s hard to blame those with money and a taste for America for trying to game the system, and our legal system, with birthright citizenship, has given those with an appropriately long time horizon a great bypass to drive through. I would favor a Constitutional Amendment to fix the hole that a century of jurisprudence (if one can call it that) has created, but as it is we have to work with what we’ve got. If we’re going to be overrun with foreigners, as the Obama administration seems hell-bent (slur intended) on achieving, I’d rather they were rich and educated than poor and stupid.

Read it.

The notes, which are signed ISIS and carry the terrorist organisation’s flag, threaten to decapitate ‘non-believers’ unless they become a Muslim or pay a religious tax.

They have been distributed among several cities including Stockholm and warn ‘the police will not save you from being murdered’.

Gee, being a welcoming home to refugees sure seems to have paid off for the Swedish. (You’d think that they’d be satisfied with the rape epidemic, but I guess not.)

Read it.

Police say no one was injured when the car plowed through the entrance at the golden-domed monument, and the incident is under investigation. A motive is currently unclear, though early reports suggested the man was ‘incoherent’.

Read it.

There are terrorists in our midst and they arrived here using legal means right under the noses of the federal law enforcement agencies whose mission is to stop them. That is not due to malfeasance or lack of effort on the part of these officers; it is due to the restrictions placed on them by the Obama administration.

I was a firsthand witness to how these policies deliberately prevented scrutiny of Islamist groups. The two San Bernardino jihadists, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, may have benefited from the administration’s closure of an investigation I initiated on numerous groups infiltrating radicalized individuals into this country.

Obama, the gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

The Guardian reports that the leaders of the European Union have asked the UN for advice about “negative emissions”. The “negative emissions” proposal is like regular Carbon Capture and Storage, except more unworkable.

Read it.

The government is interested in creating monopolies and oligopolies that operate as public utilities, which are the functional equivalent of state-owned enterprises. “Such domestication is part of ObamaCare’s goal of political control, and it may well be that only fewer, larger and more centralized insurers can survive financially.”

Substitute “Obama” for “ObamaCare” and “companies” for “insurers” and the sentence will be true for all other industries. Since 2008, this has been occurring in my world as banking has come to be dominated by a few players who are closely tied to big government and the Democratic party, under the guise of reining in Wall Street (“Don’t let a good crisis go to waste”). The financial services industry has been dramatically reshaped by administrative agencies accountable to no one.

Read it.

Searching for possible explanations, we encountered a training manual of the former Russian KGB.8 According to this manual, KGB operatives were instructed to keep their weapon in their right hand close to their chest and to move forward with one side, usually the left, presumably allowing subjects to draw the gun as quickly as possible when confronted with a foe. Indeed, under “Chapter 2–Movement,” the manual gives the following instruction: “When moving, it is absolutely necessary to keep your weapon against the chest or in the right hand. Moving forward should be done with one side, usually the left, turned somewhat in the direction of movement.” We wondered whether this could explain President Putin’s gait, since he had received KGB training earlier in life.9 If this were true, then it would be reasonable to expect a similar gait “abnormality” in other Russian officials who might have received similar instruction during weapons training by the KGB or other military or intelligence agencies. We therefore performed a YouTube search for videos of other Russian officials, with surprising results.

Read it.

As we all know, there’s nothing more unthinkable than restricting the right of foreign Muslims to immigrate here because they or their descendants might go on the Internet someday and learn that Allah wants them to commit Jihad at the office Christmas party. You’d have to be a Republican frontrunner to doubt the absolute sanctity of the Zeroth Amendment: that everybody in the rest of the world has the presumption of a right to move here. Granted, exceptions could be made for migrants visibly wearing suicide bomb vests, but to, say, disproportionately pat down Muslim migrants based on the stereotype of Muslim terrorists would be a hideous violation of the Zeroth Amendment.

Read it.

Birth tourism — illegally spending just enough time in America so your child can exploit America’s naive birthright citizenship rule — demonstrates the cash scarcity value of American citizenship that America’s leadership seems intent on giving away to random foreign grifters.

On the other hand, at least these people have money and are willing to spend it in the U.S. I have no reason to think that they’re doing it just so their kids can come to America some day and shut American workers out of low-paying jobs, while a random subset of them goes on to commit mass murder in a suburban school or mall. So we’ve got that going for us.

Read it.

So how’s that multicultural thing working out for you, Mrs. Merkel?

Actually, the esteemed Chancellor just said that Multiculturalism is a sham. So it’s not like she expects it to work out or anything. But I’ll bet the German people wish that she had come to this conclusion before she invited in a million new culture-enrichers — and counting.

The following news report describes a brawl between Syrians and Eritreans at an asylum center in Hamburg. The only solution the authorities could find was to separate the two ethnic groups — they moved the Eritreans out.

In other words, they are establishing the new multicultural utopia in Germany by creating official ethnic ghettoes. Eritreans have to live in one place, and Syrians in another, or else they will kill each other.

This sort of thing is not rocket science — anybody could have told them what would happen. Anyone, that is, except for sociologists and politicians — or Integration Minister Aydan Ozoguz, who happens to be a Turk.

Read it.

And what will happen? Nothing.

See how effective the UN is?

See how carefully Iran keeps their agreements?

See what an ASS Obama has made of U and ME?

Read it.

And look where it’s gotten them.

Led by Guo-Dong Wang, a molecular biologist at China’s Kunming Institute of Zoology, the scientists from China, Canada, Finland, Singapore, Sweden and the US, studied the DNA of 46 dogs from South-east Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas, along with 12 grey wolves.

They found indigenous Chinese dogs revealed closer genetic links to their wolf ancestors while retaining the greatest genetic variety, a strong indicator that domestic canines began somewhere in east Asia around 33,000 years ago.

Read it.

The professor’s name is Bree Picower, associate professor of Early Childhood, Elementary Education, and Literacy Education at Montclair, and the workshop she teaches is called “Social Justice Curriculum Design for the Elementary Classroom.”

“This workshop is designed to help teachers visualize social justice education by providing examples of projects, making social justice in K-6 setting accessible, practical, and achievable,” the workshop’s description reads.

The workshop also requires students to “explore issues of social injustice, learn about social movements, raise awareness, and engage in activism.”

In Russia, the name for this is Komsomol; in Germany during the 30s, HitlerJugend. All they need is the snappy uniforms.

The Other McCain is on a roll.

Diversity is one of those “glittering generalities” — like Equality and Progress and Science — that function in public discourse as a sort of intellectual anesthesia, inducing a trance-like state in which we can be argued into accepting bad policy because any opposition could be characterized as a sin against these vague concepts. Rhetorical invocations of abstract ideals are a sort of counterfeit currency, a substitute for sound logic and sturdy facts, when we are talking about matters of policy that affect the real lives of flesh-and-blood people in a world where the potential consequences of foolish naïveté include War, Famine, Disease and Death.

…

You might think the lessons of history would teach people to be skeptical toward slogans as a substitute for sound policy, but the teaching of history has been hijacked and corrupted by ideologues in much the way journalism has been similarly hijacked and corrupted. The moral of history, as taught in American schools and universities, is the same as the moral of every story in the major news media: Vote Democrat.

Read it.

In the past few years, even as the United States has pulled itself partway out of the jobs hole created by the Great Recession, some economists and technologists have warned that the economy is near a tipping point. When they peer deeply into labor-market data, they see troubling signs, masked for now by a cyclical recovery. And when they look up from their spreadsheets, they see automation high and low—robots in the operating room and behind the fast-food counter. They imagine self-driving cars snaking through the streets and Amazon drones dotting the sky, replacing millions of drivers, warehouse stockers, and retail workers. They observe that the capabilities of machines—already formidable—continue to expand exponentially, while our own remain the same. And they wonder: Is any job truly safe?

The Atlantic is a leftist Voice of the Crust but it has some damned fine writers, who tend to ask the right questions even when their answers are, more often than not, the same ‘progressive’ pap.

Futurists and science-fiction writers have at times looked forward to machines’ workplace takeover with a kind of giddy excitement, imagining the banishment of drudgery and its replacement by expansive leisure and almost limitless personal freedom. And make no mistake: if the capabilities of computers continue to multiply while the price of computing continues to decline, that will mean a great many of life’s necessities and luxuries will become ever cheaper, and it will mean great wealth—at least when aggregated up to the level of the national economy.

The major question mark regarding automation is, not how robots are going to be producing all of these goods for cheap, but how the people who need these cheap goods are going to earn the money to pay for them.

But even leaving aside questions of how to distribute that wealth, the widespread disappearance of work would usher in a social transformation unlike any we’ve seen. If John Russo is right, then saving work is more important than saving any particular job. Industriousness has served as America’s unofficial religion since its founding. The sanctity and preeminence of work lie at the heart of the country’s politics, economics, and social interactions. What might happen if work goes away?

Bear in mind that an automated world doesn’t need a lot of manual labor, and that ‘knowledge work’ doesn’t leave a lot of demand for the half of the population who are, by definition, of less than average intelligence. In a world where people, in large part, define themselves by the work that they do, what happens when there isn’t any work than anyone wants them to do? Even if they have sufficient worldly goods, through government benefits or whatever, a brief glance as the sort of path many heirs of great fortunes take suggests that a disturbing number of them will wind up drones and slackers.

Read it.

But you knew that.

Read it.

THE Pfizer-Allergan deal is a travesty. Pfizer, which is based in New York, will move overseas by merging with Allergan, based in Ireland, in a maneuver known as a corporate inversion. The point isn’t to find corporate synergy. It is to leave behind our uncompetitive international tax system.

Not only is this the largest inversion in history, but it will also open the floodgates for other companies to leave the United States, further eroding our tax base, damaging our economy and costing many thousands of jobs.

This is not just me speculating. I have spoken to many chief executives who confirm they are planning to follow Pfizer’s lead. But while this inversion has set off a firestorm of public statements by our leading presidential candidates and other politicians, Congress continues to do nothing.

The United States has the worst corporate tax system in the world. In the world. And all the whining about corporations ‘not paying their fair share’ won’t persuade them to cut their own throats by remaining in the U.S.

Read it.

And the feminists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

Feminists are too busy denouncing patriarchy in countries where women actually have rights to bother about the ones where they don’t.

Read it.

The woman, in her 50s, approached the three teenagers in Edgware road, Westminster at around 6am on Saturday to ask for directions after returning from a night out.

Police said the group, described as youths of Asian or Arabic appearance, led her to Park West Place – a block of apartments minutes away from Hyde Park – where she was raped.

The only think unusual about this story is that it actually made it into a newspaper.

Mark Steyn mentions the unmentionable.

Stop Muslim immigration? According to Paul Ryan, “That’s not who we are.” But increasing numbers of western citizens are less worried about “who we are” than who we will be if this keeps us.

Hear, hear.

So enlightened progressive liberals believe, on the one hand, in an America where everyone should go to college and encumber themselves with six-figure debt to the point where the local KwikkiKrap is reluctant to hire a night clerk without a bachelor’s degree. And, on the other hand, they believe in importing immigrant groups in which some 84 per cent of the adult population has never set foot in Grade One.

Bingo.

Read it.

Soon to appear in a major motion picture, I have no doubt.

Read it.

Astrophysicist Matthew Schneps was waiting at a bus stop, scanning a scientific paper he had downloaded onto his smartphone, when it dawned on him: he was reading with ease.

That realization surprised Schneps, who has dyslexia, a learning disability that makes reading difficult. He had always felt comfortable in the lab, not the library.

“Prior to that [moment], I hadn’t really been able to get through papers like that,” said Schneps, who directs a laboratory at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “I would rely on what people would tell me about what was in them.”

His bus stop epiphany led Schneps to wonder whether hand-held gadgets might be an effective reading platform for people with dyslexia. Now, eight years later, his research, which has shifted from studying stars, is beginning to show there may be some benefits. The timing couldn’t be better.

Read it.

The point being, of course, that the ergonomics of smartphones as reading devices are not only kind of rad, but historically so.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The ornamental cherry, plum and pear trees lining the streets of San Francisco produce beautiful flowers. The blossoms span a spectrum of bright white, soft pink and violet-red. Their leaves change with the seasons and theirs branches provide shade over sidewalks. But the trees aren’t there to bear fruit that you’d enjoy eating.

An urban agriculture project has spent the last five years trying to change that. A group known as the Guerrilla Grafters are grafting branches from fruit-bearing trees onto city-owned ornamental ones.

One in four people in San Francisco face the the threat of hunger or poor nutrition, according to the SF-Marin Food Bank. The scofflaw project is intended to let anyone who’s hungry pick free fruit in the public domain.

And a lot more. For members of the Guerrilla Grafters, the project is also about promoting public spaces, ecological diversity, and getting the public engaged with the environment.

And, not coincidentally, sticking one in the eye of the local government in a non-destructive way.

Read it.

Yeah, but it’s still an obsession with toilets.

Read it.

And of course the UN knows best; look at all the other times they’ve been right.

(Watch Lilyhammer on Netflix. You’ll enjoy it.)

Read it.

Vox had a piece yesterday on the Cruz-Lee proposal to make it easier for U.S. patients to access drugs and devices already approved in other developed countries. The Vox piece had some howlers. Most notably this:

“There’s no evidence the FDA blocks innovation or makes innovation harder or makes it more costly,” said Kesselheim.

Frankly, that would be laughable were it not coming from a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. It costs well over a billion dollars to get the average new drug approved and much of that cost comes from FDA required clinical trials. Longer and larger clinical trials mean that the drugs that are eventually approved are safer. But longer trials also mean that good drugs are delayed. And the more expensive it is to produce new drugs the fewer new drugs will be produced. In short, longer and larger trials mean drug delay and drug loss.

Read it.

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

Ohio’s recent cigarette tax hike has sent smokers over the border to purchase cheaper tobacco, according to Kentucky’s State Budget Director John Cilton. The Kentucky Budget Office’s latest report notes a hefty spike in the percent of tax receipts collected from cigarettes, up 6.5 percent in November and 1.9 percent overall, citing Ohio’s “recent increase in tobacco taxes” as the most likely culprit.

With House Bill No. 64, the Ohio General Assembly unwisely chose to push millions of dollars in commerce and tax revenue into northern Kentucky, where the excise tax on cigarettes is less than half of Ohio, coming in at 60 cents a pack. With the 35-cent increase from the previous rate of $1.25 per pack, Ohio now has the 23rd highest tax on cigarettes in the nation at $1.60 per pack.

One of the problems of democracy is that periodically new people grasp the reins of power and have to learn all over again that what they want to have happen with their bright ideas isn’t always what happens. The Law of Unintended Consequences is always waiting in the bushes to bite those who do not think things through right square on the butt.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard (well, easy, really) questions.

You can read the whole thing, and you can also read Steve Berman’s commentary at Red State, which begins: “Nobody argues against the fact that there needs to be diversity at the top of large companies, but . . .”
Uh, what?
Is it a “fact” that “diversity at the top” is a “need”? I am skeptical. Why should anyone care whether the executive suite is “diverse”? Are the Japanese executives at Toyota worried? And why does Steve Berman limit this “diversity” requirement to “large companies”?
How large does a company have to be before the “need” for “diversity at the top” becomes a “fact”? If a family of Mexican immigrants opens a taco stand, should they be required to hire a Korean assistant manager for the sake of “diversity”? Does anyone complain there are “too many” Italians working at the pizza restaurant?

This reflects earlier articles I’ve referenced regarding ‘diversity’. Is there a unique ‘African-American’ or ‘Hispanic’ perspective on physics? Latin? Microbiology? Greek? Organic Chemistry? Russian? Meteorology? Babylonian epigraphy?

Businesses exist for exactly one reason, to make profit. Anything that contributes to the goal of making profit is good, and anything that distracts from that goal is bad. Period.

Companies do not exist for the sake for the employees. Nobody has a “right” to a job at any company, because if the company does not make profit, the company will go bankrupt and then everybody will be unemployed. Your employment is therefore a function of your daily contributions to the goal of making profit.

That ought to be carved in stone in a prominent place at every business school in the world.

Where legitimate authority is uncertain or disputed, we find what Hobbes called bellum omnium contra omnes (“the war of all against all”), and the identity-politics mentality of “diversity” is symptomatic of this societal drift toward anarchy. Why should anyone care that the CEO of Sam’s Club is a black woman? And why should she care whether the suppliers are white males? Sam’s Club exists to make profit, as do the companies that manufacture the products that are sold at Sam’s Club, and as long as everybody is making profit, so what? The people who are calling for a boycott of Sam’s Club are reflecting the same mentality as those who want to boycott Donald Trump’s businesses because they don’t like Trump’s opinions on immigration. The idea that everything is political — that everything should always be up for a vote or otherwise subject to political influence — and that we are victims of “social injustice” if things don’t go our way, must ultimately lead to anarchy and civil war.

Preach it, brother.

Sarah Hoyt reflects on the fact that, not only is the future not evenly distributed, the present isn’t either.

I’ve long since realized that I grew up somewhere between medieval England and Victorian England.  Tudor England feels about as familiar to me as the present day which is why I like visiting now and then.

But even in Elizabethan England, there were different time zones, by which I don’t mean the artificial time declarations (though they went by the sun, so it was different too) but more that different parts of Britain at that time were in different “places” historically.

…

The borders of Scotland are “centuries behind” Tudor England on the road from tribalism to a modern state. This in turn means a lot of other things about it are “primitive” as the poor character keeps suffering through.

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I’m here to tell you that understanding another culture — or even understanding that another culture really exists, and they’re not just sort of playing at it — is REALLY hard.  Humans are very good at absorbing the conditions they’re born into and internalizing them as THE conditions, i.e. the only true ones, and then thinking of everything else as a bizarre variation.

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For me, who grew up in one culture, entered another when I went to school (think of it as being raised in Apalachia then joining mainstream culture.  I had to learn almost completely different language.)  and then came here for a year, went back for four while dating someone neither Portuguese nor American, then came here to live.  It gives you a very clear vision of both cultures.  And it makes it very obvious it’s not all just “pretending” to be different.

It still stuns me that in that time and in that place, intelligent well read men could believe this clap trap of “one world” and government and religion both withering away leaving behind this human being that if he ever existed would be truly alien.

Read it.

But there seems to be a broader fissure underlying this discussion: why don’t people at the 90th percentile of the income distribution feel particularly rich?

The answer is simple: because any Americans who are richer than this cohort are so much richer.

Read it.

Eating a healthier diet rich in fruit and vegetables could actually be more harmful to the environment than consuming some meat, a US study has claimed.

Lettuce is “over three times worse in greenhouse gas emissions than eating bacon”, according to researchers from the Carnegie Mellon University who analysed the impact per calorie of different foods in terms of energy cost, water use and emissions.

Published in the Environment Systems and Decisions journal, the study goes against the grain of recent calls for humans to quit eating meat to curb climate change.

Hah!

Read it.

Some time ago–several decades, actually–a group of us at my law firm formed a Chappaquiddick Book Club. We read three or four books on the fatal car accident that should have ended Ted Kennedy’s public career. The facts are much worse than most people realize: Kennedy presumably was drunk, but that is the least of it. After his car plunged into Poucha Pond, Kennedy saved himself but left Mary Jo Kopechne to die. In all likelihood, she could have been saved if Kennedy had simply knocked on the door of the nearest house with a light on, only yards away, and called the Edgartown rescue squad. That is what the head of the rescue squad said after he discovered Kopechne’s body inside the car, where she had wedged herself into an air pocket and probably survived for several hours, expecting help that never came.

Kennedy made no effort to save his companion. Instead, he made the long walk back to the house where he and others had been partying. He summoned his cousin Joe Gargan and tried to persuade Gargan to say that he had been driving the car. Gargan sensibly refused, but insisted that they go back to the pond and try to rescue Kopechne. Kennedy sat on the bank and watched while Gargan tried to dive down to the submerged car, unsuccessfully. Kennedy never did call the authorities, but instead returned to his hotel and attempted to set up an alibi with the night clerk.

It is a sordid story, and it soon will become a Hollywood movie. I couldn’t believe it when I learned that Rathergate was to be made into a film called Truth—Lies would have been a better title–and it seems equally far-fetched that anyone would want to make or invest in a film about Chappaquiddick.

Prediction: It will be a whitewash.

Read it.

An SAS sniper was able to stop a group of jihadis launching a suicide bomb attack by killing the terrorists with just three bullets in a dramatic shoot-out in an ISIS-held part of Iraq.

The marksman, who joined the SAS a decade ago, potentially saved the lives of hundreds of innocent people by firing three well-aimed shots at the jihadists as they left a bomb factory near Mosul.

The sniper was given the go-ahead after the men were spotted leaving the bomb factory wearing heavy coats in hot weather – a sign they were trying to hide their suicide vests.

They were on their way to carry out a terror attack at a nearby town, in which they planned to detonate their suicide vests amongst hundreds of civilians – causing mass deaths.

However, the SAS veteran wiped out all three of the extremists, as well as two ‘guards’ who were supposedly in place to keep a look-out and protect them from military forces.

The sniper shot the first jihadi in the chest as he walked out of the factory, which caused his suicide vest to detonate, killing him instantly – as well as two ISIS ‘guards’ who were sat in a nearby car.

The second ISIS militant was wiped out by a shot to the head, while the third was also killed when the sniper’s bullet struck his suicide vest and caused it to detonate.

Give that man a cigar.