Read it.

Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that Hillary feels comfortable with scofflaws.

And this is a person wanting the job of ‘ensuring that the laws of the United States be enforced’. They don’t even pretend any more.

Read it.

Imagine for a moment that you are a person who owns a falcon. You don’t own the falcon just to have an unusual and intimidating pet but because you are a licensed falconer, among the growing ranks of Americans dedicated to the ancient and complex art of training birds of prey to hunt in partnership with humans. As part of your falcon’s schooling process, you must teach her to fly high, high enough to scan for prey and gain enough altitude to speedily swoop down on a smaller animal—and this is a challenging task, especially if you are a human being who is stuck on the ground. An increasing number of falconers around the world are solving this ancient logistical problem with a decidedly modern tool: a drone.

Read it.

East Asia has been gripped by an unprecedented rise in myopia, also known as short-sightedness. Sixty years ago, 10–20% of the Chinese population was short-sighted. Today, up to 90% of teenagers and young adults are. In Seoul, a whopping 96.5% of 19-year-old men are short-sighted.

Other parts of the world have also seen a dramatic increase in the condition, which now affects around half of young adults in the United States and Europe — double the prevalence of half a century ago. By some estimates, one-third of the world’s population — 2.5 billion people — could be affected by short-sightedness by the end of this decade. “We are going down the path of having a myopia epidemic,” says Padmaja Sankaridurg, head of the myopia programme at the Brien Holden Vision Institute in Sydney, Australia.

And here we thought it was just the politicians who were short-sighted.

It was a good thing they did. After five years, one in five of the children had developed myopia, and the only environmental factor that was strongly associated with risk was time spent outdoors6. “We thought it was an odd finding,” recalls Mutti, “but it just kept coming up as we did the analyses.” A year later, Rose and her colleagues arrived at much the same conclusion in Australia7. After studying more than 4,000 children at Sydney primary and secondary schools for three years, they found that children who spent less time outside were at greater risk of developing myopia.

…

But what scientists really needed was a mechanism: something to explain how bright light could prevent myopia. The leading hypothesis is that light stimulates the release of dopamine in the retina, and this neurotransmitter in turn blocks the elongation of the eye during development. The best evidence for the ‘light–dopamine’ hypothesis comes — again — from chicks. In 2010, Ashby and Schaeffel showed that injecting a dopamine-inhibiting drug called spiperone into chicks’ eyes could abolish the protective effect of bright light.

Read it.

The birth of a new ThoughtCrime — and, as you might expect, the New York Times in on the bleeding edge.

Read it.

The problem for Mrs Grenier, and Quebec’s other so-called “maple syrup rebels”, is that they cannot freely sell their syrup.

Instead, since 1990 they have been legally required to hand over the bulk of what they produce to the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (which in French-speaking Quebec is abbreviated to FPAQ).

Backed by the Canadian civil courts, the federation has the monopoly for selling Quebecois maple syrup on the wholesale market, and for exporting it outside the province. It sets the price for how much it pays producers, and it charges them a 12% fee per pound of syrup.

Producers are only allowed to sell independently a very small amount of syrup, to visitors to their farm, or to their local supermarket. And then they still have to pay the 12% commission to the FPAQ.

The United States government operated a similar legally-enforced cartel with respect to raisins, which (thank God) has been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2015.

Canadians don’t have that protection.

Read it.

Books, it turns out, were not only among the first commercially produced Christmas gifts; the book business played a central role in turning Christmas into the commercialized holiday that we know today. “Publishers and booksellers were the shock troops in exploiting—and developing—a Christmas trade,” Stephen Nissenbaum writes in The Battle for Christmas, his social history of the holiday. “And books were on the cutting edge of a commercial Christmas, making up more than half of the earliest items advertised as Christmas gifts.”

Starting in the 1820s, when Christmas was still largely a day of feasting and religious observance, publishers helped pioneer the concept of giving mass-produced goods as presents, inventing an entire genre of books, called Gift Books, designed to be presented to loved ones at Christmas. These were typically anthologies of poetry, fiction, essays, and drawings, with the contents of each volume tailored to appeal to a specific audience. “Gift Books were available at every price range and for every conceivable market—demographic, religious, political, and cultural,” Nissenbaum writes. “There were Gift Books for children (in fact, for boys and girls separately), young men, mothers, Jacksonian Democrats, proponents of temperance and abolitionism, even members of men’s clubs.”

Read it.

Which is like saying that you don’t believe in biology — Politically Correct but essentially stupid.

‘Nothing about whiteness describes who I am’

Except the fact that she’s, like, white.

Now after losing her job and reportedly having to live on food stamps, she told the Guardian she will not apologise for how she identifies.

Of course not. Delusional people are delusional for a reason.

“If somebody asked me how I identify, I identify as black. Nothing about whiteness describes who I am… For as long as I can remember, I saw myself as black.”

I always saw myself as Green Lantern — didn’t mean I could fly.

She disputes those who tried to defend her actions by calling her ‘transracial’ – a term which implies similarity to transgenderism, in that you were born one race but identify as another.

In other words, her fantasy ought to trump your reality. In the Good Old Days they locked people up for that sort of thing.

Read it.

Oppression to follow.

It does not appear that President Yahya Jammeh’s announcement changes Gambia’s laws or the country’s constitutional status as a secular state.

Yet.

Hamat Bah of the opposition National Reconciliation Party criticized the decision. “There is a constitutional clause that says that Gambia is a secular state,” he said. “You cannot make such a declaration without going through a referendum.”

Referendum? We don’t need no stinking referendum.

Jammeh has ruled Gambia since seizing power in 1994.

Sounds like an Islamic Republic to me.

Read it.

Sanity is starting to penetrate.

Read it.

This merely underscores the stupidity of the whole concept of ‘intellectual property’, which is ‘property’ only because the government has created an artificial monopoly in certain discoveries.

(Reminder for the dimwitted: Property is something where, if person A has it, then person B doesn’t. Knowledge isn’t property, because if you’ve got it, nothing prevents me from having it, too.)

The problem comes when governments, under political pressure, arbitrarily invade this so-called ‘property right’ and so create a climate in which they can as readily invade true property rights.

Read it.

Approximately 50 student protesters from the University of Arizona and local high schools showed up Thursday evening to voice their displeasure at the opening of the Illegal Pete’s restaurant in Tucson, Arizona.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

The U. of Arizona Chicano-rights group M.E.Ch.A. says the term “illegal” is a racial slur.

Uh, what race is ‘illegal’? Or ‘Pete’? Perhaps they could change the name to ‘The Hypersensitive Hispanic’.

Read it.

Hey, they’re just progressive eugenicists. Not unlike Margaret Sanger and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Read it.

Scientists are studying past changes in sea level in order to make accurate future predictions of this consequence of climate change, and they’re looking down to Earth’s core to do so. “In order to fully understand the sea-level change that has occurred in the past century, we need to understand the dynamics of the flow in Earth’s core” says Mathieu Dumberry, a professor in physics at the University of Alberta.

Further evidence that the Transnational Dronage is panicing (Sky is falling! Women and minorities hardest hit!) based on incomplete information because climate models.

Coming soon to a hand-wringing bureaucrat near you: A plan to slow down the rotation of the earth by reverting to pre-1900 technology.

Remember: You heard it here first.

Based on their work reconciling these discrepancies, the scientists involved in the study are confident in predicting sea level to the end of the 21st century. “This can help to better prepare coastal towns, for example, to cope with climate change,” says Dumberry. “We’re talking billions of dollars of infrastructure here.” Dumberry notes that this study serves as a stimulus for more work to continue investigating the deep interior of our planet.

Translation; WE NEED MORE FUNDING! (Tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.)

Read it.

A rara avis, a book review in the New York Times that doesn’t parrot the latest SWPL fad.

If you’re a parent with young children, you’ve likely encountered a sanctimommy. Sanctimommies, of course, are that modern species of sanctimonious mothers who liberally dispense parenting advice laced with the subtext, “I’m not saying you’re a bad parent, but. .?.?.” Smug in their maternal superiority, they crusade perhaps most vehemently against moms who choose not to breast-feed.

If this moralism were limited to sanctimommies, it might be written off as nothing more than parenting blog fodder. But according to “Lactivism,” Courtney Jung’s riveting exposé of the forces that have turned the simple act of feeding one’s baby into a veritable battlefield, “to breast-feed or not to breast-feed” has become a question with far-reaching implications spanning medicine, politics, religion, feminism, commerce, race and social class.

Judging by recent history, ‘and soon to be a major motion picture’.

Read it.

And who knows better about ROI than Goldman Sachs?

Scott Johnson at Powerline waxes philosophical.

The rise of Barack Obama is a sign of the indifference of history to the well-being of the United States and, his Nobel Peace Prize to the contrary notwithstanding, the world. If history gave a damn, Barack Obama would still be voting “present” in the Illinois legislature, just to prove his existence to an indifferent universe.

Obama has repeatedly availed himself of the supposed argument from “history” to express his high-minded disapproval of men and events in lieu of doing anything serious about them. In the cases of Putin and Assad, who have suffered the indignity of Obama’s occasional disapproval, history seems to be having the last laugh. What about Obama’s signing the United States on to Team Islamic Republic of Iran under the JCPOA? Obama is jumping on to the wave of the eighth century and taking us closer to the end of history. In this case it won’t have a happy ending. Someone needs to undo what Obama has done.

Read it.

Just two days after the brutal carnage, on December 16, Bangladesh became independent through the surrender of Pakistani occupation forces. Pakistani forces and local collaborators like Al-Badr, Al-Shams and Rajakar forces committed the killings aiming at annihilating the country’s intellectual class.

Next time you hear someone say ‘But Pakistan is our friend!’, remind them.

Read it.

China is a foreign country. They do things differently there.

What we would regard as corruption has been endemic to Chinese culture for about 3000 years.

Read it.

The list of schools where students can get a decent education has been dwindling for some time. And atmospheres of political correctness are nothing new. But with the second coming of ’60s radicalism — met this time with weak-willed administrators caving to long lists of student demands — the issue is whether there are any universities where dissenting students have half a chance.

Few and far between.

By the way, if your child is set on an Ivy League education, you may be particularly worried. The wrong Halloween costume at Yale can create a campus-wide uprising. At Brown University, people who want to engage in free inquiry now have to join a secret society. For the record, Shields says that Harvard has more ideological diversity on its faculty than the rest.

I would not send my child to Yale, although I enjoyed my years there.

Read it.

ISIL (al Qaeda in Iraq and the Levant) is taking advantage of the fact that most Libyan militias now mainly operate as local defense forces and don’t really want to fight. This means the greatly outnumbered ISIL forces don’t have to worry too much about facing a larger force in battle. On the plus side this provides an additional incentive for the two rival governments to unite. The UN appears to have used this and many other pressing issues (like running out of oil money and subsequent shortages of everything) to get the two governments to sign a peace and unification deal by the end of the year. Meanwhile ISIL is making the most of the current situation by expanding its control of Sirte and trying to expand east into territory controlled by the Tobruk government. This push is facing resistance, including air strikes by the handful of Libyan Air Force warplanes the Tobruk government has operational. ISIL is currently trying to reach the oil export port of Ajdabiya. There are already some ISIL forces fighting in Ajdabiya but reinforcements are needed but the coast road between Ajdabiya and Sirte has lots of hostile gunmen blocking it. In fact the fighting throughout Libya is fairly low key, causing fewer than a thousand casualties (dead and wounded) a month. People are pretty much fed up with all the fighting since 2011.

Read it.

The Palestinian governments in the West Bank and Gaza are unique in that they openly boast, to their own people, of waging terror campaigns against Israel but manage to convince the rest of the world that it is not terrorism but simply self-defense. The two Palestinian governments are also at war with each other but they are much less willing to discuss that openly, except to tell their own subjects to tell that those other Palestinians are evil and up to no good.

Read it.

In early December, after years of trying to justify allowing women into the infantry, artillery and armor and special operations forces, the U.S. government simply ordered the military to make it happen and do so without degrading the capabilities of these units. While the army was inclined the just say yes, find out what quotas the politicians wanted and go through the motions, some others refused to play along. SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and the marines pointed out that the research does not support the political demands and that actually implementing the quotas could get people killed while degrading the effectiveness of the units with women. This is yet another reason why many politicians do not like the marines and are uneasy about SOCOM. The commander of SOCOM promptly said the order would be implemented (otherwise he can kiss his upcoming promotion goodbye) but the Marine Corps has, as in the past, not voiced any enthusiasm at all. This decision involves about 220,000 jobs. About ten percent of these are special operations personnel, commonly known as commandos.

People will die — including many women — just because of a Politically Correct fantasy. Your tax dollars at work.

No wonder Trump is rocking the polls.

Read it.

On Wednesday, FBI director James Comey alleged that the San Bernardino shooters were already plotting a mass-murder attack on the United States before Tafsheen Malik received the K-1 visa admitting her to the United States. Her husband-to-be, Syed Farook, was born a U.S. citizen. Yet his family’s immigration history should also raise searching questions about the process by which would-be Americans are selected.

And didn’t, of course, because our government is incompetent in areas where Political Correctness disapproves of the Thought Crime of Noticing.

However one assesses that chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest. Illegal immigrants are of course entirely self-selected, as are asylum seekers. Even the refugee process, reportedly the most tightly screened, operates to a considerable extent outside national control: The first assessment of refugees is typically made by the UN High Commission on Refugees from within camps it operates. That explains why, for example, Christian Syrians make up only about 3 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States, despite accounting for 10 percent of the country’s population: Fearing violence from Sunni Muslims, they apparently hesitate to enter UN camps in the first place.

And who could blame them? The ‘UN camps’ were created and maintained for the purpose of exacerbating squalor among refugees and thereby creating political pressure in whatever direction the transnational bureaucrats want it placed.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine lists the problems with ‘diversity’.

Few would deny that some racial diversity in a student body is worthwhile. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say they want to see African-American students nearly vanish from elite college campuses.

But it’s easy to question whether a given level of African-American representation in a student body is necessary to achieve diversity as the concept was always understood (see Notes 1 and 2). Stated differently, it’s probably impossible to show objectively that the levels universities strive for are necessary for this purpose.

Attempts to do so, for example by analyzing black representation on a classroom-by-classroom basis, descend into farce. Why must there be a black student in, say, a physics class? What, Chief Justice Roberts wanted to know, is the unique black perspective on physics?

Why, for that matter, is a black needed in any particular class? It would be terrible to attend college and never hear from a black student. But where’s the need to hear from one on the subject of Charles Dickens, David Hume, or the Catholic Reformation? And what if the black student in that class doesn’t speak up?

Steve Sailer digs up the dirt that the Crust would bury.

As we all know, the Campus Rape Crisis is due to white fraternity boys like U. of Virginia lifeguard Haven Monahan. Except, despite all the rules mandating counting race and rape on campus, nobody ever releases any figures about the racial makeup of college men accused of rape.

But in passing in a New Yorker article, Harvard Law School criminal law professor Jeannie Suk drops a bombshell: on average, male students accused of sexual assault look less like Haven Monahan than like, say, Heisman Trophy-winner Jameis Winston.

…

It’s funny how you used to hear all the time about the dangers of any “chilling effect” on freedom of expression, but now you hear all about how allowing freedom of expression creates a “hostile environment” and the phrase “chilling effect” has vanished.

Read it.

For years Islamists have argued that there is no evidence private Islamic schools – madrassas – are churning out radical jihadis willing to lay down their lives for Islam, fighting the supposed “kaafirs” (Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists). Despite the fact that most of the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Shabab and al-Qaida jihadis came from such institutions, Canadian Islamists and most of the media have dismissed my warnings and those of others on this issue as “fear mongering” and “Islamophobia.”

But now, Pakistani jihadi Tashfeen Malik, a student of a madrassa, has helped to carry out the San Bernardino massacre. For two years, Malik attended the world’s leading female Muslim madrassa, the Al-Huda Institute In Multan, Pakistan, which has a Canadian branch in Mississauga.

Read it. Note especially the title: Here’s Why the Good Guy With the Gun Always Gets Killed. From that you would expect a rigorous examination of all available cases where a person with a gun attempted to stop an ‘active shooter’, which invariably ended with the gun-bearer getting killed. But you would be wrong.

On Thursday night, The Daily Show focused on this idea of “the good guy with a gun,” and the results weren’t pretty.

Jordan Klepper, one of the comedian-correspondents who stayed behind after Jon Stewart’s departure from the show, actually went through the process of getting a carry license from the state of Florida, which is valid in more than 30 states. All that was required was mailing in a form and taking a few hours of training in New Jersey.

So. One guy. a ‘comedian-correspondent’. One. Guy. Who presumably was opposed to the concept a priori.

As you might expect, he blows it in every scenario. But! All is not lost while there’s spin to be spun.

For those who would write this off as a comedian for an openly liberal show simply failing on purpose to prove a point, the weary resignation on the faces of his trainers told a different story. The problem wasn’t Klepper’s clowning, but his belief, founded on a lifetime of action movies and video games, that in the right scenario, he could be a hero. The truth was, he just made things worse.

Pardon me for thinking that the reason why ‘he just made things worse’ is precisely because he’s a comedian for an openly-liberal show simply failing, not necessarily on purpose. He was not, as we say, motivated to succeed. And from this they draw the totally unwarranted conclusion that everybody in such a situation will get the same result. Which conclusion is not only false on its face but contrary to all of the available evidence from real-world situations.

Read it.

ASK most people about the problem of waste plastics in the environment and they will talk about plastic bags caught in trees and the vast slicks of plastic trash found in remote areas of the Atlantic and Pacific. But the most menacing plastic waste problem is less visible and not so well publicized.

It’s the tiny fibers, less than one millimeter wide, that come from our clothes when we launder them. These fibers make their way into the world’s rivers and seas through the sewage and drainage systems of our cities. The pollution is worst near urban areas, but it is global and has increased by more than 450 percent since the 1960s.

These minute strands of plastic — virtually invisible to the human eye — are made from a variety of natural (animal and plant) and artificial polymers. You can’t see them when you walk along the seashore at low tide, but they’re there, by the ton.

Sky is falling, women and minorities hardest hit, film at 11.

Read it.

What if extinctions were only temporary? Yes, we’re talking “Jurassic Park”-level science. It’s called de-extinction, and Dr. Mike Archer, a paleontologist, is trying to make it happen.

Read it.

This month, an Israeli study of personalized nutrition was heralded by a media frenzy. “This diet study upends everything we thought we knew about ‘healthy’ food,” claimed one headline. The study suggested that dieters may be mistakenly eating a lot of some foods, like tomatoes, that are good for most people, but bad for them. And it raised the possibility that an individualized approach to nutrition could eventually supplant national guidelines meant for the entire public.

What a shock.

Personalized medicine has already become well established in clinical practice. We know that the effects of some drugs vary from person to person and that genetic analysis of tumors can help doctors select the best cancer treatment for a particular patient. Despite the recent fanfare, we have also known for a long time that people respond differently to specific foods based on their genes, past health or other factors.

There’s a thought.

Unfortunately, standard diets typically fail to produce significant long-term weight loss. But those average outcomes mask tremendous individual variability. For instance, while a clinical trial published in 2005 of 160 adults randomly assigned to the Atkins, Ornish, Weight Watchers and Zone diets reported modest results in all groups after one year, individuals in those groups experienced weight changes ranging from a loss of 35 pounds or more to a gain of 10 or more.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

According to a big crop of recent studies, you’re sexist and you hate the poor. Well, not you personally. Except – quite possibly you personally, actually, even if you believe otherwise. In one study, men liked the idea of dating a hypothetical smart woman, but were less keen on actually meeting a real one. Another found that both sexes judge women, and only women, to be less credible when they’re angry. A third found widespread subconscious bias in favour of rich people, even among those who denied it; a fourth concluded that food tastes better in sexist packaging – “big and filling” for men, “light and healthy” for women. And as we know from research into “implicit bias”, being on the receiving end of such prejudice (being female, poor or black, say) doesn’t mean you don’t also harbour it yourself.

An astonishing admission to read in the pages of the Guardian, Voice of the Cultural Marxist Crust and Tribune of the Politically Correct.

Findings like these typically trigger outrage that such antediluvian attitudes persist. But here’s a troubling thought: what if our getting righteously cross about them makes matters worse? The psychological pitfall here is known as “moral satiation”: the act of calling out others for their prejudice makes you feel you’ve done your job, and need do nothing more, whereas in fact you’ve probably just solidified your own unwarranted assumption that you’d never fall prey to such biases. Something similar happens now that every online hothead is fluent in the previously specialist language of cognitive biases and logical fallacies. There’s no easier way to avoid introspection than to accuse someone else of a bias or fallacy – even though seeing yourself as less vulnerable to them is another cognitive bias. The caller-out glides smugly off into the sunset, confident their morality’s in splendid working order.

A more telling description of the ‘progressive’ Left has never been penned.

The deeper problem here is that we think of prejudice and bias as anomalies – occasional brain glitches that need stamping out, and from which good people can reasonably aspire to be free. Yet all the evidence suggests they’re basic tools of human reasoning: we must make snap judgments, on the basis of various shortcuts, or we’d be unable to function. Seen this way, hiring a talented teacher over a useless one is still a form of discrimination; the difference is that it’s fair and sensible, while discriminating on the basis of skin colour isn’t.

Except when it is — cf. the preponderance of studies on human bio-diversity and IQ.

Read it.

Americans by and large aren’t bigots, but the outbreak of Instant Jihad Syndrome last week convinced them that something was broken, and that the whole mechanism of Muslim immigration should be mothballed until the problem was fixed. They know perfectly well that some Muslims want to live in peace with non-Muslims and other Muslims want to burn down the world, but they don’t know how to tell the difference. As information about the couple’s longstanding terror connections trickles into the press, the public doesn’t trust its guardians to tell the difference, either. That was the lesson they learned from the jihadi Bonnie and Clyde of San Bernardino.

It can’t be done. History teaches us that there is no reliable way to distinguish between a ‘peaceful Muslim’ and one that will, unexpectedly and without warning, go batshit-crazy jihadist — because that’s what the Koran teaches, and you can never tell when somebody will decide to take his religion seriously.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Being old enough to remember the 1960s to some extent and the 1970s vividly has the advantage of highlighting the irony of how often contemporary liberals demand exactly what 1960s liberals denounced. For example, giant corporations trying to use their economic power to silence political dissent was much denounced by liberals in the 1960s and much encouraged by liberals in the 2010s.

Much the same way that they encourage left-wing mobs to do the sort of ‘social action’ that they condemn right-wing mobs doing.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel reports on a focus group in which supporters of Donald Trump were shown attack ads against the tycoon. According to Weigel, the ads, presented by pollster Frank Luntz, did not cause members of the group to move away from Trump. In fact, focus group members were more inclined to support Trump following the presentation.

You’d almost think they didn’t care. The horror!

Weigel seems intent on making Trump’s supporters look as bad as possible. He devotes several paragraphs to two supporters who said they wouldn’t urinate on President Obama if he was on fire.

Luntz responded that this is “the meanest thing I’ve ever heard.”

The guy must not live in Washington or read any newspapers. I, for one, wouldn’t piss on Obama if he were on fire — it would probably be considered a ‘hate crime’.

As hateful as a few of the focus group members may have sounded, I doubt that any of them matched Weigel’s body of venomous anti-conservative rhetoric.

Not that he’s unique in that among ‘journalists’.

Read it.

Two culture-enriching soldiers have gone AWOL from Moody Air Force Base in southern Georgia. The two men, Mirwais Kohistani and Shirzad Rohullah, are from Afghanistan, our staunch ally in the “War on Terror”. They are part of a contingent brought into the USA for training.

The fact that Homeland Security is now leading the search for Messrs. Kohistani and Rohullah is a sign that someone in high places is very worried about them. And the public release of their names and photos tells us that DHS is serious about trying to find them — or is at least engaging in advance CYA, keeping in mind recent events in San Bernardino.

I don’t blame them. I’ve seen Afghanistan; even Georgia is better.

Good job of screening, there, guys; let’s do better than that on the Syrian refugees, shall we?

The two soldiers have been here for ten months. Why did they wait until now to disappear? Does the timing have anything to do with the mass purchase by Muslims of hundreds of cell phones at several Wal-Mart stores in Missouri?

I guess we’ll find out. Fortunately, these characters seem to have the minimal intelligence not to play these games in Texas.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, is worth quoting in full.

While it’s true that Milton and Rose Friedman, along with other libertarians and free-market conservatives who often use “free to choose” as a shorthand descriptor for a free society, believe that such a society results over time in better outcomes than are likely to be generated by less-free economic arrangements, it is emphatically untrue that the Friedmans – or any other respected libertarian writers – ever argued or even implied that free markets lead to something close to an earthly “Garden of Eden.”  The Friedmans understood, and all other respected free-market advocates understand, that our world is one of trade-offs and not “solutions.”  And so, indeed, as the options among which we are free to choose become both more numerous and more attractive, the costs that each of us incurs when exercising our freedom to choose rise.  If for no other reason, such a world cannot possibly ever be an “earthly paradise.”

Moreover, the case for a free society is very much a case for minimizing the prospect of large-scale harm that is always at risk of being unleashed when societies are directed from the top.  It is not a case that promises paradisiacal outcomes.  Free-market advocates recognize that people differ in their tastes, their risk preferences, their judgments, their self-discipline, their talents, and their opportunities.  And, therefore, free-market advocates recognize and accept the reality that many people will make not only choices that others judge to be ‘wrong,’ but also make choices that those who make such choices themselves later judge to be wrong.

Free-market advocates prefer to let even unwise adults remain free to choose than to use the state to oblige adults to choose as elites would have them choose.  There is nothing utopian about such a vision of society.  And by falsely accusing free-market advocates of being utopian, it’s as if Akerlof and Shiller are phishing their readers for phools into buying a faulty case for greater government intervention.

Freedom: It’s not the best thing; it’s the only thing.

Read it.

Miloš Zeman, the outspoken and politically incorrect president of the Czech Republic, has been featured in this space a number of times. Most recently he shared podium with Tommy Robinson, among others, when giving a speech to a group that opposes the Islamization of the Czech Republic.

In the following press conference Mr. Zeman elaborates on his earlier statements, which have repeatedly gotten him in hot water with the press and other gutmenschen throughout Europe. When taking reporters’ questions, he discusses Turkey’s inherent incompatibility with Europe, and why it is unsuited to be a member of the European Union.

Peter Nicholas, in the Wall Street Journal, gives us a synoptic view of a strange duck.

In making himself a viable candidate for the party nomination, though, Mr. Sanders is sounding more like a liberal in the Franklin D. Roosevelt tradition than a classic socialist.

Well, there are some of us who consider Franklin Roosevelt as being sufficiently a classic socialist as to make no difference, but never mind.

Few in the movement expect that Mr. Sanders, should he win the White House, would quickly usher in an economy organized around socialist principles.

By which I assume they mean ‘more than it already is’. The reason they’re so sanguine is that, looking back at how much socialism has crept into American government through people who were socialist at heart if not in name, if they actually get somebody who embraces the name of socialist, the socialization of America can only get faster. I can see their point.

But they see his candidacy as a vehicle to broaden understanding about democratic socialism.

There’s an oxymoron for you, ‘democratic socialism’.

In his speech, Mr. Sanders said he didn’t believe the government should “own the means of production.”

Then he’s not a socialist, and is cripplingly ignorant of what socialism means. I’m more inclined to think that he’s lying, but that’s me.

Read it.

Members of the Black Student Union at Eastern Michigan University stormed the halls and classrooms of Pray Harrold Tuesday afternoon, promising the protests would not stop until their list of demands is met.

“All black students report to the hallway! If you want freedom, report to the hallway! If you want freedom report to Welch Hall at 1:30!” The leader of the group was screaming while banging on a drum to get the attention of students and faculty in the academic building.

Since the 1960s there has been this subtle acceptance that being a ‘protester’ somehow absolves a person from polite behavior. Things that would have gotten a non-student locked up somehow get winked at when students are doing the coercion.

“The black students have been asking for these things for years and we are frustrated with the school’s administration,” one of the student protesters told Campus Reform. “These are not new demands; we tried to be peaceful, but our frustration has built up. We want to feel safe, and right now we don’t.”

So the way to ‘feel safe’, apparently, is to threaten others. I see.

When the meeting was over, EMU students and BSU followed two members of the board out to their cars to block them from leaving.

“Hey now! Hey now! We want freedom! Freedom! All these racist ass regents! We don’t need ‘em, need ‘em!” The BSU and other EMU students chanted while arranged in a half-circle, arms linked, blocking the vehicles of two members of the Board of Regents from leaving the parking lot.

After about 10 minutes of chanting, three police officers on the scene were joined by 12 other Ypsilanti Police Officers.

Here’s where a concealed carry permit comes in very handy.

The leader of the group, who would not release his name to Campus Reform, said he felt they won the feud even though they didn’t win the vote because they made the board members fearful.

Yeah, that’s a sure way to persuade them to give up the ‘safe space’ demanded. The standards for admission to EMU must be lower than low.

For those of you who went to a government school, be aware that a ‘catalyst’ is a substance that facilitates a chemical reaction without being consumed by it.

Donald Trump is turning out to be the perfect catalyst for the American Crustian political establishment, allowing them to generate and beat up on straw men at an amazing rate. If you look at the commentary about Trump, from the Usual Suspects in the Drive-By Media to the cookie-cutter-generated establishmentarian candidates in the Republican Presidential race, it is easy to see that what they say about Trump doesn’t actually refer to what he said or what he believes or what he actually plans to do, but rather to whatever nasty thing most thoroughly floats their boat politically which they then attribute to Trump, even when it’s obviously untrue to the point of being ridiculous. It’s like dangling a bleeding animal over a tank full of piranha.

And the most entertaining part about it is that they’re obviously not listening to their own blatherings, otherwise they’d realize that they are generating the biggest collection of Freudian slips in the history of mankind. We all know that the Left feels free to indulge in behavior toward those who disagree with them that they would quickly ascribe to Fascist or Nazi leanings if it happened to them, without any appreciation of the irony involved. There’s apparently somebody working for the ACLU who has spouted off that Trump is Goebbels and therefore ‘we’ need to shoot people who would vote for him before it’s too late. Really, you can’t make this shit up.

Coupled with Jerry Brown revealing in public that he actually is a statist apparatchik, and we can see that times are rapidly approaching where we will need a Confucian ‘Rectification of Names‘, where all masks are stripped away and the ugly souls at the heart of the Progressive Apocalypse are revealed for all in their true squalor.

Read it.

Earlier this year, a drone carrying a tiny amount of radioactive sand was flown onto the roof of the Japanese prime minister’s office. The act was a protest against the country’s nuclear energy policy rather than a serious threat, but Japanese police apparently saw it as something of a wake-up call. In order to combat such aerial threats in future, Tokyo’s Metropolitan Police Department has unveiled a net-wielding interceptor drone that will be used to hunt down and snare rogue quadcopters.

Read it.

And about time, too. If I were as rich as a Democrat (Hey, Warren Buffet! Hey, Bill Gates!), I’d be happy to fund such suits.

A student at an Arizona community college is challenging her school’s so-called “speech zone,” arguing the policy “severely limited” her right to free speech and due process.

Brittany Mirelez, a freshman at Paradise Valley Community College in Maricopa County, Ariz., was kicked out of the designated speech zone in October for failing to obtain permission to use the space.

Mirelez had set up a table to converse with students about a group she is trying to start called the Young Americans for Liberty. The group, which has branches nationwide, advocates for limited government and liberty-minded candidates.

Originally, Mirelez said a Student Life official granted her permission, but shortly after setting up her table, a different official told her she had to leave because she didn’t get approval to use the space 48 hours in advance.

Gavin McInnes reacts badly to modern mores.

A millennial walked into my office this week looking like a simpleton with a court date. He had a cheap suit on with square-toed shoes and his hair lay flat on his forehead like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. His shirt came straight out of the dirty laundry and the collar on it was so crumpled it sat over his blazer like a pile of used condoms. When I began to list the dozens of fashion crimes this young man had just committed he stared at me like a Papua New Guinean being shown how to open a tin. I’m beginning to think young men have been dressing wrong for so long, they no longer know what’s right. I came of age in the ’80s when mods set the template for how to dress, but today all they have is Reservoir Dogs and Men in Black. Those guys don’t even use pocket squares.

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

Many in the West believe that the current outbreak of Islamic terrorism began when the United States reacted too violently to the September 11, 2001 attacks. Islamic terrorist violence is nearly nine times greater now than it was in 2000 and many in the West believe that this is largely because the West is fighting back. The other view is that Islam was, alone among the major religions, founded as a militant faith and has continued to preach constant struggle against non-Moslems no matter what. Many Westerners are put off by these facts and prefer to believe that no religion could be that violent and self-destructive. Yet the historical record shows Islam to be consistently violent, aggressive and extremely hostile towards non-Moslems.

What triggered the current plague of Islamic violence was more than a trillion dollars of oil income flowing into the Middle East since the 1960s plus an unexpected (and misinterpreted) Islamic victory over Russia in Afghanistan during the 1980s. That victory was largely funded by billions of dollars in Arab (mainly Saudi Arabian) oil money. That cash did not just buy weapons but also supplied thousands of conservative Islamic clergy preaching the need for holy war in Pakistan and establishing mosques and religious schools dedicated to keeping this struggle going after Russia left Afghanistan in 1989.

Read it.

Early in the 21st Century, noted education experts Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush got together to push through Congress the bipartisan No Child Left Behind act mandating that 100% of American public school students be above average by last year.

As luck would have it, that didn’t actually happen.

But now Obama has just signed a new bipartisan bill to replace No Child Left Behind, the even more implausibly entitled Every Student Succeeds act.

But don’t say that nobody never learns nothing. While Every Student Succeeds sounds like it’s bound to fail, this time Congress didn’t mandate that students actually do much of anything; so, looked at from the right perspective, Every Student Succeeds can’t miss.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

I’ve been vaguely aware of Carlos Slim Helú for most of the century and have been following his career closely since he began to challenge Bill Gates and Warren Buffett for the title of World’s Richest Man about 8 years ago. But it’s only with the publication in Spanish of a biography of Slim this fall that I became aware of Slim’s literally Fascist roots in Lebanon.

The media has been more interested in imputing fascism to Slim’s business / political frenemy Donald Trump than in covering the background of the New York Times’ savior and largest individual shareholder.

Read it.

The political and policy empire tied to billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has begun what officials say will be a significant push to ease or dismantle state and local licensing rules that govern everything from hair-braiding to pet grooming.

Koch’s network is gearing up to work on the issue with an unlikely ally: President Obama.

Most licensing laws are artificial barriers to entry lobbied through legislatures by existing businesses to stifle competition, like taxi medallion laws and those relating to such things as hair-braiding. Until the advent of Uber, taxi compaies were the most adept at this scam.

Read it. I am not making this up.

Putting aside whatever feelings you may have for McDonald’s poultry sourcing decisions and nutritional benefits, it’s hard not to be impressed by this Lego McNugget dispenser that can provide an order of chicken bites and dipping sauce in exchange for a €2 coin. The Lego builders over at YouTube channel Astonishing Studios put the contraption together using a Lego Mindstorms set — a custom software and hardware kit for creating toy brick robotics that no one presumably thought would be used to exploit humanity’s shameful indulgences.