Read it.

That sounds about right.

Lileks limns the travails of our times.

As problems go, this is small. As small problems go, though, this is big. Step one: You’re watching something on Netflix, and the picture pauses every 37 seconds, displaying a circle that seems to represent the passage of time. Is this an arty French movie that addresses the omnipresent sense of mortality by superimposing a clock over the lives of its characters? No, it’s a “Transformers” movie. The circle means your wireless connection is slow. Well, let’s go to the Internet provider’s HELP page. You learn that certain things can block Wi-Fi, including “walls, pipes, paint, air and the lingering aroma of last night’s fish dinner.” Hey! You had cod. Open a window. Doesn’t help.

Read it.

When the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, some who objected to the ruling opined that this will lead to legalizing polygamy or even group marriages (where two or more couples marry each other). What they didn’t mention was a new kind of marriage trend which also goes against the biblical definition of marriage being between one man and one woman. The new trend is called Sologamy, which defines marriage between one man or one woman – otherwise known as marrying one’s self.

I am not making this up. On the other hand, I have no confidence that the writers aren’t. But it’s fun to read.

Read it.

The following video and text don’t supply an answer to that question.

The author of the text (which is in German) is purportedly a former member of the Islamic State who wants to warn the West that ISIS possesses four nuclear devices, and plans to use them against the United States, Russia, France, and Germany. What he says may well be a hoax, or more specifically, deliberately planted disinformation to achieve particular political ends. I can think of several Great Powers who would find it useful to disseminate the fiction that ISIS is ready to use nuclear weapons.

However, it could also be true. If it is, you may be sure that the intelligence services of Russia and the major Western powers are well aware of it. As the ISIS defector points out, the West has moles inside the highest levels of the Caliphate.

Read it.

Is California the most conservative state?

Now that I have your attention, just how would California qualify as a beacon of conservatism? It depends how you define the term.

Since the rise of Ronald Reagan, most conservatives have defined themselves by pledging loyalty to market capitalism, supporting national defense and defending sometimes vague “traditional” social values. Yet in the Middle Ages, and throughout much of Europe, conservatism meant something very different: a focus primarily on maintaining comfortable places for the gentry, built around a strong commitment to hierarchy, authority and a singular moral order.

Until recently, modern California has not embraced this static form of conservatism. The biggest difference between a Pat Brown or a Reagan was not their goals – greater upward mobility and technical progress – but how they might be best advanced, whether through the state, the private sector or something in-between. Under both leaders, California evolved into a remarkable geography of opportunity.

In contrast, California’s new conservatism, often misleadingly called progressivism, seeks to prevent change by discouraging everything – from the construction of new job-generating infrastructure to virtually any kind of family-friendly housing. The resulting ill-effects on the state’s enormous population of poor and near-poor – roughly-one third of households – have been profound, although widely celebrated by the state’s gentry class.

Most people from a hundred years ago would look at the modern American ‘Left’ and call them dyed-in-the-wool reactionaries.

Ross Douthat at his best.

The state of the union isn’t all that one might hope, but it could clearly be a whole lot worse.

So what are Trumpistas and Bern-feelers rebelling against?

One answer might be that they’re fed up with exactly this — the politics of “it could be worse,” of stagnation and muddling through. They aren’t revolting against abject failure, or deep and swift decline. They’re rebelling against decadence.

Well said.

But don’t just think about the word in moral or aesthetic terms. Think of it as a useful way of describing a society that’s wealthy, powerful, technologically proficient — and yet seemingly unable to advance in the way that its citizens once took for granted. A society where people have fewer children and hold diminished expectations for the future, where institutions don’t work particularly well but can’t seem to be effectively reformed, where growth is slow and technological progress disappoints. A society that fights to a stalemate in its foreign wars, even as domestic debates repeat themselves without any resolution. A society disillusioned with existing religions and ideologies, but lacking new sources of meaning to take their place.

This is how many Americans, many Westerners, experience their civilization in the early years of the 21st century. And both Trump and Bernie Sanders, in their very different ways, are telling us that we don’t have to settle for it anymore.

Bingo.

There are pathways up from decadence. But there are more roads leading down.

Yup.

Read it.

It’s hard to read about how Saudi Arabia’s rulers are handling the collapse of oil prices without recalling the end of the Soviet Union. Every petro-state has to ponder this precedent, but for the Saudis the parallels must be unnerving. Consider: Their economy is inefficient and undiversified, based on irrational pricing and vast subsidies. There’s no modern taxation system; money just sloshes around, Soviet-style, on the basis of insider connections. There are no mechanisms of meaningful political representation, and after years of senescent leadership a new generation is clamoring to take over. Growing ethnic divisions and the military’s huge share of the economy round out the picture. To all this, add a sharp drop in export earnings, and it’s no surprise that people worry about systemic failure.

Read it.

The State Department is lying when it says it didn’t know until it was too late that Hillary Clinton was improperly using personal e-mails and a private server to conduct official business — because it never set up an agency e-mail address for her in the first place, the department’s former top watchdog says.

“This was all planned in advance” to skirt rules governing federal records management, said Howard J. Krongard, who served as the agency’s inspector general from 2005 to 2008.

The Harvard-educated lawyer points out that, from Day One, Clinton was never assigned and never used a state.gov e-mail address like previous secretaries.

Boy, that sure sounds suspicious, doesn’t it?

He also points to the unusual absence of a permanent inspector general during Clinton’s entire 2009-2013 term at the department. He said the 5¹/?-year vacancy was unprecedented.

But very convenient. Hmmm….

Added Krongard: “She’s trying to distance herself from the conversion from SIPRNet to [the nonsecure] NIPRNet and to her server, but she’s throwing her staffers under the bus.”

Hey, that sounds just like a … a Clinton.

Still, “It will never get to an indictment,” Krongard said.

For one, he says, any criminal referral to the Justice Department from the FBI “will have to go through four loyal Democrat women” — Assistant Attorney General Leslie Caldwell, who heads the department’s criminal division; Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates; Attorney General Loretta Lynch; and top White House adviser Valerie Jarrett.

Even if they accept the referral, he says, the case quickly and quietly will be plea-bargained down to misdemeanors punishable by fines in a deal similar to the one Clinton’s lawyer, David Kendall, secured for Gen. David Petraeus. In other words, a big slap on the wrist.

“He knows the drill,” Krongard said of Kendall.

Democrats investigating Democrats: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

Read it.

And that sure explains a lot. Anybody who thinks that Marx is any sort of economist is an idiot; they might as well call Thomas Aquinas an economist.

Read it.

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

In Washington, D.C., Lois Lerner, head of the tax-exempt organizations division of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), allegedly slowed or killed the nonprofit applications of conservative and libertarian organizations. In Wisconsin, Kevin Kennedy, director of his state’s political ethics organization and Lerner’s longtime “professional friend,” worked with a rogue Milwaukee district attorney to spy on, and seize the personal papers and equipment of, supporters of Gov. Scott Walker, a Republican. In Texas, the benign-sounding Texas Ethics Commission convened to determine whether a conservative nonprofit journalist is really a journalist and therefore deserving of First Amendment protections—or is an activist who does not.

In each case, the officials leading the charge are Democrats. And in each case, they invoke the language of campaign-finance reform and the specter of so-called “dark money”—donations to nonprofit organizations that Democrats allege have tipped the electoral scales rightward.

Campaign finance regulations are designed to make it as difficult as possible to get people elected who don’t already have the newspapers and TV on their side (i.e. Democrats). This is just more blatant than usual.

Freeberg shares his insight.

These are the guys putting Jeb Bush over Donald Trump, because, manners. Oh they say things about Trump being a showboat and a jerk, and they’re completely right. Where they’re wrong, is in thinking that we vote for a President to give us our manners. Silly.

In truth, we’ve been voting for a President to figure out what excuses should be used to suck money away from the industries that give us the things we really need, and where else that money should be diverted among the professions that make things nobody wanted. Republicans and democrats have both been doing it. And so the professions that give us the things we really need, while allowed to stagger on in the background while the loud people make a lot of noise, have been dwindling.

…

Companies that bake your bread, build the bottles for your water, build the cardboard boxes for your Amazon shipments, clean the poop out of your sewer lines. Oh yeah, and put together your “transportation equipment.” Passenger jets. That’s up at the top of the U.S. exports right now, the stuff the other countries want to buy…*choose* to buy. You know what else is on that list? Software is on there…but way down. Probably doesn’t include anything I’ve written, as of yet…

Nothing liberals build, is on that list. Psychological help isn’t on it. Crazy new rules about guns, written by people who’ve sworn not to ever own any guns — those aren’t on the exports list. Come to think of it, I don’t see anybody clamoring for those things inland, either. They’re such great ideas they have to be forced.

Read it.

The Campbell Club at the University of Oregon is $17,000 in debt because, well, people take its anti-capitalist bona fides seriously. Or they’re just lazy bums.

The Daily Emerald reports that the Student Cooperative Association, which oversees campus co-ops, will shut down the Campbell Club in two months if it doesn’t pay its tab.

Just as ‘capitalism’ was invented by Karl Marx to serve as a shame-name for an economic system that was UnGood (i.e. not communism), so ‘anti-capitalist’ is embraced by people who dislike economic procedures that personally inconvenience them, such as paying rent, buying stuff rather than just getting it for free, and the like.

One of these days I’m going to do an article on The Myth of Capitalism and explain the damage to Western intellectual history by Marxism that is largely off the radar.

Read it.

The most formidable foe Indian commandos face are Indian politicians. Since 2013 Indian special operations forces and the various branches of the military have sought to form a united Special Forces Command based on the success of the American SOCOM (Special Operations Command). Created in the 1980s SOCOM went on to be the model for similar organizations in many other nations. One of the most recent was Israel in 2007. That is important because Israel has become a major defense supplier and military ally of India since the 1990s and the two countries exchange a lot military-related information and experiences. Indian officers and special operations troops are quite familiar with the success of the Israeli SOCOM. But by late 2015 these Indian efforts were blocked by a lack of government willingness to back the proposal and the fact that half the Indian armed forces (and nearly as many of the special operations troops) are not in the military but an equally large collection of paramilitary forces controlled by other bureaucracies. This was done on purpose in the late 1940s to prevent the possibility that the military would become powerful enough to take over the government. That has worked. Neighboring Pakistan went in another direction, building a relatively more powerful military and has suffered periodic military takeovers. But India has several other cultural differences from Pakistan that have helped prevent coups. Meanwhile many non-defense branches of the Indian government have grown fond of having their own armed forces and mainly because of that have been unwilling to give up or share control of their special operations forces. In reaction to that the military has been reluctant to provide assistance to these paramilitary forces, even when there was a strong case for it (as in efforts to deal with Islamic terrorism, leftist rebels and armed separatist groups).

A pity. In the world that is to come, India will one of our few potential allies against an expansionist Red China, and we need her to be as strong as possible.

Steve Sailer is guilty of the crime of Noticing.

I coined the term “the White Death” to refer to the rise in death rates among non-elderly whites during this century. It appears to be related to overdoses from prescription painkillers and heroin. Nobody paid much, if any, attention to it until economist Angus Deaton put out a paper on it last fall right after he won the econ (quasi-)Nobel.

“The Black Death” can refer to the >16 percent rise in homicide rates in big cities in 2015 over 2014. Nobody has crunched the numbers by race yet, but most of this appears to be a spike in black-on-black murders. This is likely related in some manner to Black Lives Matter agitation against law and order.

Read it.

Whilst President Obama and his administration are waging non-violent war against Israel, and Swedish dignitaries are playing the old, old game of anti-Semitic blood libel at the behest of foreign (Muslim) relations, they are allowing forced religious prostitution of young girls and women all across Europe, Canada and, one must assume, the US. No cases have yet come out in the US, but one can be sure that the motivation is there, but maybe, just maybe, the thought of an angry father, armed to the teeth, is more than the average ‘brave’ Muslim sex jihadist can contemplate.

Read it.

How has the Internet upended commerce? Here’s a good structural analysis.

The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users. The best way to make outsize profits in any of these markets is to either gain a horizontal monopoly in one of the three parts or to integrate two of the parts such that you have a competitive advantage in delivering a vertical solution. In the pre-Internet era the latter depended on controlling distribution.

…

The fundamental disruption of the Internet has been to turn this dynamic on its head. First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.

Read it.

At the heart of this issue is a single unit of measurement–the calorie–and some seemingly straightforward arithmetic. “To lose weight, you must use up more calories than you take in,” according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dieters like Nash and Haelle could eat all their meals at McDonald’s and still lose weight, provided they burn enough calories, says Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University. “Really, that’s all it takes.”

But Nash and Haelle do not find weight control so simple. And part of the problem goes way beyond individual self-control. The numbers logged in Nash’s Fitbit, or printed on the food labels that Haelle reads religiously, are at best good guesses. Worse yet, as scientists are increasingly finding, some of those calorie counts are flat-out wrong–off by more than enough, for instance, to wipe out the calories Haelle burns by running an extra mile on a treadmill. A calorie isn’t just a calorie. And our mistaken faith in the power of this seemingly simple measurement may be hindering the fight against obesity.

…

Wrangham and his colleagues have since shown that cooking unlaces microscopic structures that bind energy in foods, reducing the work our gut would otherwise have to do. It effectively outsources digestion to ovens and frying pans. Wrangham found that mice fed raw peanuts, for instance, lost significantly more weight than mice fed the equivalent amount of roasted peanut butter. The same effect holds true for meat: there are many more usable calories in a burger than in steak tartare. Different cooking methods matter, too. In 2015, Sri Lankan scientists discovered that they could more than halve the available calories in rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice in the refrigerator.

Read it.

I have no idea how many justice ministers in the democratically civilized world have to make speeches arguing that their country is not a dictatorship. But Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozda? has recently felt compelled to remind the world of just that. Bozda? said the mere existence of main opposition leader Kemal K?l?çdaro?lu is proof that “there is no dictator in the country.” That was relieving.

Read it.

We have now reached the point where we have professional beggars. Lucky us.

Read it.

In Gaza, Hamas members were repairing a tunnel into Israel a few days ago when it collapsed and killed seven of them. These are the cross-border tunnels that Hamas terrorists use to enter Israel to commit murder or, better yet, try to kidnap Israeli soldiers. Thirty or more of these tunnels were destroyed by Israeli forces in the most recent conflict, and Hamas is now rebuilding them so they can renew their attacks on Israel. Informed of the death of one of the terrorists, his cousin said he was “happy and proud and welcomed the news of his death” because he “was martyred defending Islam and Palestine.” I am glad he is dead, too, but for different reasons.

Terrorists are immensely popular in “Palestine,” and tens of thousands reportedly turned out to mourn the seven who died in the tunnel.

Read it.

Welcome to the club.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Most Americans think that teaching is a natural talent, not the product of training, and that smart people are the ones with the talent. So some policy makers have concluded that the way to improve schooling is to lure top-scoring graduates into teaching (as Japan does) instead of scraping the bottom of the academic barrel (as America supposedly does). Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, invoked this idea in a speech last year.

But the problem in American education is not dumb teachers. The problem is dumb teacher training.

…

Teachers are smart enough, but you need more than smarts to teach well. You need to know your subject and you need to know how to help children learn it. That’s where research on American teachers raises concerns.

Read it.

Another whistleblower is facing charges brought by this administration — one that has prosecuted more whistleblowers than all other administrations combined. Thomas Tamm, a DOJ lawyer during the Bush era, exposed the NSA’s super-secret domestic surveillance program, whose authorization ran directly from the Attorney General to the Chief Judge of the FISA Court.

I guess when Obama said he would run the most transparent Administration in history, he was referring to letting his inner fascist shine through.

Read it.

That would certainly explain Congress.

Read it.

But throughout the 2000s, the Pentagon spent $51.2 billion on 15 major programmes “without any fielded systems to show for it,” according to a new Center for Strategic and International Studies report.

The abandoned projects are largely due to a lack of funding attributed to the Budget Control Act and sequestration.

Hey, got to pay for all that welfare somehow.

Rezd it.

Full of Muslims. What do they expect?

The following account from Die Welt tells the story of a Russian woman who sought asylum in Germany along with her daughter. Based on her description, the situation for female refugees in German asylum accommodations is nothing short of horrific.

Read it.

Good to know that the Real America is still out there.

Steve Sailer pierces the Veil of Ignorance.

Another one of those ideas looming just outside the realm of the thinkable is that for the Democrats to import ringers from abroad to win elections, which Democrats have boasted about throughout this century, is a shameless example of political corruption. This is especially true when the Democrats are more or less explicitly making a deal with the Republican donor class: You Republican plutocrats immediately reap the economic advantages of immigration to your net worths, we Democratic politicians later reap the political advantages of their children’s votes.

Read it.

In the same week a federal jury convicted a Chicago transportation official of taking bribes from a leading manufacturer of red-light cameras, council members in another prominent American city are raising questions about the equipment’s effectiveness in improving traffic safety.

Several city council members in Tampa said this week they felt duped by promises of that red-light cameras would reduce traffic crashes. That’s not happening. Instead, crashes at 23 intersections where cameras are installed in the city have increased between 40 and 51 percent, two separate analyses found.

“We were told this would help and stop crashes and it’s not,” Tampa councilwoman Yvonne Yolie Capin tells WTSP-TV. “I look at these numbers and I don’t see the value to our tax dollars.”

Her comments came following a contentious meeting about the red-light cameras. Last month, a study compiled by the Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles showed crashes increased 14.6 percent at intersections after cameras were installed.

Portable Collapsible Bathtub.

Swiss Robotic Barista.

Designer Dog Houses. I am not making this up.

The Exotic Virtual Adventure Run. This is the yuppiest device I have ever seen in my life.

Read it.

As the United States faces the not-impossible prospect of an openly socialist president, Sen. Bernie Sanders, it is worth a quick revisit, from The Washington Post today, to how Venezuela’s socialist government is doing.

Hint: Poorly.

Read it.

Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-La.) is beginning his first term as governor by slamming taxpayers with a smorgasbord of tax hikes in order to close the Pelican State’s projected $700 million shortfall by June 2016. Nine of the tax increases proposed by Gov. Edwards, which are listed below, would directly hit consumers and five of them would take effect as soon as April 1st.

Well, he is a Democrat….

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.

Amazing how that works.

Rezd it.

I guess ‘leftier than thou’ is harder than it looks. Supporters of the crook always have problems with supporters of the fool; ask Nixon.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

The Obama administration will entirely withhold 22 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server because they have been classified as “top secret,” the State Department said on Friday.

The existence of multiple top secret emails in the Democratic presidential front-runner’s inbox will only increase public scrutiny on the former secretary of State’s unusual email arrangement, mere days before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest on Monday.

The 37 pages of emails are the first time the Obama administration has confirmed that messages within Clinton’s server while she was at State merit one of the highest levels of classification. Although the State Department has previously classified more than 1,300 of Clinton’s emails upon release, the vast majority of those were at lower classification levels.

Well, well, well.

Clinton’s presidential campaign quickly dismissed the news, which spokesman Brian Fallon called “overclassification run amok.”

My, what a surprise.

Read it. And for God’s sake watch the video.

That’s entertainment.

Read it.

His then-fiancee, who wasn’t even a UT student, posted criticism of two UT professors and tagged Barnett.

I think Communist regimes classify this as ‘associating with disruptive elements’.

Read it.

In an effort to further promote their Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, the EPA may have violated the Financial Services and Government appropriations Act of 2014, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). How they broke the law; through their use of government funds for “unauthorized publicity and propaganda” and the use of “indirect or grassroots lobbying”. To put it simply, the EPA used government funds, designated for other purposes, to orchestrate false support for their new land grab.

In a thinly veiled attempt to spin their rule into something more presentable, they used a crowd speaking website known as Thunderclap. The EPA set up an initial page and support goal, and when that goal was reached, Thunderclap would send out a tweet previously made by the EPA that would be automatically sent out by the campaign supporters, and thus spreading the message. Thunderclap estimates the EPA’s message reached almost 2 million people. The GAO argues that since the EPA did not take responsibility for the tweets themselves, they violated the statute.

They didn’t stop there either; they continued their grassroots campaign through the use of two outside websites in favor of the rule. Through the use of hyperlinks, the EPA allowed and promoted travel to websites, for the Surfrider Foundation and National Resources Defense Council, with opinions and blogs that would attempt to trick people into being in favor of the rule. This collusion clearly is against the statute, and even though the EPA didn’t directly post, they sent traffic to these sites, once more likely violating the statute.

Read it.

Hint: Not only is she a crook, she’s an incompetent crook.

Read it.

At least 19 immigrant children were inadvertently handed over to human traffickers by the U.S. government last year after it failed to conduct proper background checks, a Senate report released Thursday said.

But we can surely vet all of those Syrian refugees, guaranteed!

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

A college bound high school student criticized Black Lives Matter in his school paper and received death threats.

Free speech? We don’t need no stinkin’ free speech.

Read it.

It has gotten to the point where we need elected representatives to fight for due process on college campuses.

Read it.

When it comes to the connection between Islam and “anti-infidel” violence, one fact must be embraced: the majority of those in positions of leadership and authority in America are either liars or fools, or both. No other alternatives exist.

The reason for this uncharitable assertion is simple: If Islam was once a faraway, exotic religion, today we hear calls for, and see acts of, violence committed in the name of Islam every day. And if our leaders don’t, many of us still have “ears that hear and eyes that see” (Proverbs 20:12).

Read it.

Just burn your passport… or eat it… and learn to say “I am Syrian” in German and English!

Moroccan “youths” know a good scam when they see one, and becoming Syrian refugees is their ticket to a prosperous future.

Read it.

“Infidels,” or non-Muslims—or those who are not Muslim enough or the wrong kinds of Muslims—are often seen as the natural recipients of Islamic violence as prescribed by Islamic law, or Sharia.

Few, however, are aware that Sharia can cause individual Muslims to do violence upon themselves.

According to France24, on January 15, a Muslim boy in Pakistan “cut off his own hand believing he had committed blasphemy, only to be celebrated by his parents and neighbours for the act.”

After an imam told a mosque gathering after Friday prayers that those who love Muhammad always say their prayers, he rhetorically asked if anyone present doesn’t pray. Mohammad Anwar, the overly eager 15-year-old boy, impulsively raised his hand, apparently thinking that the imam was asking who among the crowd does, as opposed to doesn’t, pray.

The response was typical: “The crowd swiftly accused him [the boy] of blasphemy so he went to his house and cut off the hand he had raised, put it on a plate, and presented it to the cleric.”

Read it.

DNA stores our genetic code in an elegant double helix. But some argue that this elegance is overrated. “DNA as a molecule has many things wrong with it,” said Steven Benner, an organic chemist at the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in Florida.

Nearly 30 years ago, Benner sketched out better versions of both DNA and its chemical cousin RNA, adding new letters and other additions that would expand their repertoire of chemical feats. He wondered why these improvements haven’t occurred in living creatures. Nature has written the entire language of life using just four chemical letters: G, C, A and T. Did our genetic code settle on these four nucleotides for a reason? Or was this system one of many possibilities, selected by simple chance? Perhaps expanding the code could make it better.

We still don’t know how genes work and they want to make new ones.

Read it.

I suspect that it’s not so much that they’re afraid of fat as it is they’re against anything the people enjoy.

Plus they just like to tell people what to do; that’s a large part of it.