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“The Tomb Guards maintain a constant vigil at the Tomb no matter the weather conditions,” states the group’s Facebook page.Members of the 3d U.S. Infantry Regiment, also known as “The Old Guard” are staying with the Tomb of the Unknown Solider at Arlington National Cemetery despite blizzard conditions slamming the area.

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The USS Stockdale, a guided-missile-launching destroyer, has set sail powered by an unusual fuel – waste beef fat.

The ship, deployed this week in the USS John C. Stennis Carrier Strike Group, is part of the Navy’s Great Green Fleet initiative, which is trying to make swabbies more environmentally friendly by using alternative fuels for power.

“The Navy’s use of renewable energy in the Great Green Fleet represents its ability to diversify its energy sources, and also our nation’s ability to take what would be a waste product and create homegrown, clean, advanced biofuels to support a variety of transportation needs,” said US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack.

“Today’s deployment proves that America is on its way to a secure, clean energy future, where both defense and commercial transportation can be fueled by our own hardworking farmers and ranchers, reduce landfill waste and bring manufacturing jobs back to rural America.”

This might sound like environmentalism gone mad but don’t have a cow, man, because there’s method to the Navy’s madness. The beef fat was purchased from ranchers in the Midwest at competitive rates, Vilsack said, and rendered into fuel by a California company at a cost of $2.05 per gallon.

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A recent study at the University of Granada in Spain has found that frying vegetables in extra virgin olive oil changes them for the better, adding phenolic compounds, which have antioxidant properties. Boiling and other methods of cooking veggies have no such benefit.

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Legislation sponsored by Senator Mike Doherty (R-23) ensuring that kids have the right to offer snow shoveling services before storms without municipal approval was signed into law by Governor Chris Christie.

The law was prompted by a sorry story from last year, when two Bound Brook, New Jersey, high school students tried to make some money shoveling their neighbors’ driveways, only to find out this was against the law.

No doubt there is a Union somewhere that is gnashing its teeth….

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One of the “few regrets” of his presidency, President Obama said dolefully in his State of the Union speech, was “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” Were he endowed with “the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt,” he remarked, he could have done more to bridge the partisan divide. But he pledged to “keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”

Did you experience a touch of déjà vu when the president said that? Four years ago, when he was in the home stretch of his first term and running for a second, he said much the same thing.

“I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest . . . I haven’t fully accomplished that,” Obama told an interviewer in 2012. “My biggest disappointment is that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked.”

Did he even try?

Hint: No.

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Somehow, highly classified information from SIPRNet, as well as even the super-secure JWICS, jumped from those closed systems to the open system and turned up in at least 1,340 of Clinton’s home e-mails — including several the CIA earlier this month flagged as containing ultra-secret Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Programs, a subset of SCI.

SAP includes “dark projects,” such as drone operations, while SCI protects intelligence sources and methods.

…

“It takes a very conscious effort to move a classified e-mail or cable from the classified systems over to the unsecured open system and then send it to Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” said Raymond Fournier, a veteran Diplomatic Security Service special agent. “That’s no less than a two-conscious-step process.”

He says it’s clear from some of the classified e-mails made public that someone on Clinton’s staff essentially “cut and pasted” content from classified cables into the messages sent to her. The classified markings are gone, but the content is classified at the highest levels — and so sensitive in nature that “it would have been obvious to Clinton.” Most likely the information was, in turn, e-mailed to her via NIPRNet.

Democrats Investigating Democrats: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

If Republicans had done any of this, their asses would already be sitting in jail.

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Anti-Semitism on U.S. college campuses spiked in 2015, with 302 incidents against Jewish students recorded at 109 schools in 28 states, according to a new report warning that the rise of anti-Israel organizations is fueling hatred and making many campuses unsafe for Jews.

And these organizations are typically geared toward favoring the ‘Palestinian’ cause, with Muslim students heavily involved.

The array of incidents were recorded at many universities and often included Nazi imagery, slurs calling Jews “evil,” and calls for Jews be murdered, according to a report published by the AMCHA Initiative, an organization that seeks to protect Jewish students.

I guess nobody worries about Judenhasse they way they do about ‘Islamophobia’, even though Jews are subject to hate attacks and Muslims almost never are.

Tammi Rossman-Benjamin, AMCHA co-founder and director, warned that anti-Semitism on campus is growing as a result of highly aggressive anti-Israel student movements such as the group Students for Justice in Palestine, which has used Nazi imagery in its campaign to demonize Israel.

As cited above.

One female student-athlete at Delaware Valley College came under scrutiny for tweeting, “Can I kill all the [expletive deleted] Jews in Lakewood pleeeasse?!?!!”

Had she tweeted that about Muslims, she wouldn’t be ‘under scrutiny’, she would have been expelled and possibly arrested.

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This time we move west, to Austria. Up until now Austrians have not exhibited the audacity and spunk evidenced by the leaders from the former East Bloc. But the ice floes seem to be shifting in Austria — the first Western European country to show the initial symptoms of coming to its senses.

What makes “Fortified Austria” different is that it represents a subset of the Austrian establishment. Previous manifestations of resistance in Western Europe — PEGIDA, the EDL, the Identitaire movements, street demos, etc. — have been grassroots phenomena, agitating from the bottom upwards. But the movement that has just formed in Austria includes at least two serving military officers in uniform, and I presume some of the older fellows in civvies are retired officers. They have gone on the record, with their faces fully exposed, willing to take whatever political risks their actions might incur.

It resembles a low-grade slow-motion military coup. In an American context, imagine a serving colonel and general joining some of their retired colleagues and going on record against the current administration’s reckless defense policies that endanger the security of the United States. That’s what this is analogous to.

Read it.

This is the first in a series of posts that represent the first tiny wavelets of what may turn into a massive tsunami of change sweeping over Europe.

Over the past few months we’ve posted a number of excellent videos and articles showcasing statements made by current political leaders in the former East Bloc countries of Central Europe: Czech President Miloš Zeman, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, and Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico.

To that list must now be added Václav Klaus, the former President of the Czech Republic.

The former president’s words in the following video and article go farther than anything said by the other three — perhaps because Mr. Klaus is no longer a sitting head of state, and does not have to worry about having a military coup engineered against him in reaction to his statements.

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Political pundits and historians always like to analogize the current election cycle to a past election cycle, though I think a case can be made that each cycle is unique and non-repeatable. On the surface, it might look like we might be heading for a repeat of 1912, when a Republican split led to the independent candidacy of Teddy Roosevelt and handed the White House to Woodrow Wilson. That, I am sure most sensible people will agree, was a blunder.

Was it ever. That was the start of the conversion of the historical Democrat Party into Amerca’s own brand of fascism, which flowered with Franklin D. Roosevelt and whose fruit have been marching through our institutions and corrupting them ever since.

But I wonder whether we might have four major candidates in the event of a Trump-Sanders or Trump-Clinton matchup—Bloomberg plus an “independent” Republican candidate (I’d guess it might be Romney)? Then the election we’d most resemble was 1824, when there were four major candidates running. That election was settled in the House of Representatives in favor of John Quincy Adams, even though Andrew Jackson won the most popular votes. One could imagine this happening again, with Trump, Clinton, or Bloomberg getting the most votes, but a Republican dominated House picking the “independent” Republican candidate. (Let’s hope to God it isn’t Jeb Bush.) One can imagine today’s Jacksonian candidate (Mr. T) being just as outraged as Jackson was at such an outcome. If you think things were bitter after the messy outcome of the 2000 election between Bush and Gore, just wait.

No matter how bad, the results would be better for America than Barack Obama, who has surpassed Jimmuh Carter as the Worst President Ever.

Cast your mind back to Bloomberg for a moment. Why did he run for mayor of New York as a Republican, even though he’s a much better fit in the Democratic Party? Or for that matter, if he wants to be president, why didn’t he run as a Democrat this year? (He dumped his Republican affiliation in New York as fast as he could, remember.) The obvious answer is that he had no opening in the Democratic Party in New York, where the party hierarchy operates much like a closed-shop union. And New York City Republicans have a bare cupboard.

Likewise, why is Donald Trump running as a Republican, after a lifetime of mostly liberal positions, and his occasional declarations that he leans toward Democrats? I still haven’t heard Trump give an account of why, suddenly, he’s changed his mind on so many positions. Like Bloomberg, it seems to be opportunism rather than conviction; he couldn’t win the Democratic nomination these days, but the open and scattered Republican field gives him an opening to win with a mere plurality of primary votes.

On the other hand, few traditions in American politics are of longer standing than opportunism.

Check it out.

This is sufficiently clever to deserve its own post.

This is an app for your favorite smartphone or tablet that instructs you in how to tie knots.

Those of you who need to know how to tie knots know who you are.

If it were possible to give a smartphone/tablet app as a gift, I have a handful of people for whom I would right now be buying this app.

It is way cool.

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This week a meta-analysis of seven studies involving a total of 6,250 subjects in the American Journal of Hypertension found no strong evidence that cutting salt intake reduces the risk for heart attacks, strokes or death in people with normal or high blood pressure. In May European researchers publishing in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the less sodium that study subjects excreted in their urine—an excellent measure of prior consumption—the greater their risk was of dying from heart disease. These findings call into question the common wisdom that excess salt is bad for you, but the evidence linking salt to heart disease has always been tenuous.

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Interviews with refugees from the fighting in Iraq and Syria as well as people still in those countries shows that over 80 percent believe the Islamic terrorists in general and ISIL and al Qaeda in particular are creations of the West (particularly the United States) and Israel as a means to destroy their countries and Islam. This is nothing new and while all this is unbelievable to most Westerners and largely ignored by Western media and politicians it is very real and has been for a long time. Media in these countries is full of even more fanciful (to Westerners) inventions. This has caused problems for Western troops operating in those countries, although some have figured out how to take advantage of it.

All cultures have a certain belief in magic and what Westerners call “conspiracy theories” to explain otherwise unexplainable events. In the Islamic world, there is a lot of attention paid to sorcery and magic, and people accused of practicing such things are regularly attacked and sometimes executed because “sorcery” is a capital crime under Islamic law. Conspiracy theories are also a popular way to explain away inconvenient facts and this is often found useful in countries that are hostile to other forms of sorcery.

Bull’s Eye Power Nozzle.

Swann Ultra HD Security System.

22-oz. Soup Mug. For when you REALLY WANT SOUP.

Straight Edge Clamping Tool Guide.

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The choice of a single textbook for one section of a course at one university might seem like a decidedly local issue. But a dispute over whether an academic department may impose such a selection on all faculty members in a multisection course has set off a large debate over how textbook choices should be evaluated, who should select textbooks, whether price should be a factor, and academic freedom.

These issues came to a head Friday when Alain Bourget, an associate professor of mathematics at California State University at Fullerton, appeared before a faculty grievance committee to challenge a reprimand he received for refusing to use a $180 textbook his department had determined was the only appropriate text for an introductory linear algebra and differential equations course. Instead, he used two textbooks, one of which cost about $75 and other of which consists of free online materials.

Bourget maintains that his choices are just as effective educationally and much less expensive — so he should have the right to use them. But the university says that it makes sense for courses that have multiple sections to all use the same textbooks. Both Bourget and the university say their positions are based on principles of academic freedom.

Why is this such a big deal?

The Fullerton text in question is Differential Equations and Linear Algebra, published by Pearson with a suggested price of $196, but available at the Fullerton bookstore for $180 (used editions for much less). The authors are Stephen W. Goode and Scott A. Annin, the chair and vice chair, respectively, of the mathematics department at Fullerton.

Aha.

Read it.

This week, the French government announced a plan to standardize the French-language computer keyboard, as part of an effort to help protect and nurture the language. The ministry of culture and communication says it’s “nearly impossible to correctly write French” on keyboards sold in the country today, meaning that the language’s strict grammatical rules are being flouted more regularly. The ministry has partnered with a standardization group to develop a new keyboard norm, which will be presented for public feedback this summer.

Unlike the QWERTY keyboards on most devices in the US and Europe, French-language keyboards follow an AZERTY layout, and they’ve never been standardized. That means that the layout can vary from one manufacturer to another, making it difficult for users to locate important keys or accented characters.

Good luck with that.

More from the BBC here.

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Scientists from University College London (UCL) have developed a high-tech glass intended for self-cleaning, energy-saving windows.

A team led by Dr Ioannis Papakonstantinou has coupled “pencil-like, conical nanostructures engraved onto the glass” with a photochromic 5-10 nanometre film of vanadium dioxide.

The nanostructures trap air and ensure “only a tiny amount of water comes into contact with the surface”. Accordingly, “rain hitting the outside forms spherical droplets that roll easily over the surface – picking up dirt, dust and other contaminants and carrying them away”.

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I vote both.

The saga of Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service is almost unbelievable. After “joking” years ago that he would audit his enemies, it turned out that Obama’s minions were in fact delaying or blocking routine applications for 501(c) status by conservative organizations, in order to help the Democratic Party. When Congress tried to investigate, the Obama administration stonewalled at every turn. Evidence mysteriously disappeared and the key player in the scheme, Lois Lerner, pled the Fifth rather than answer Congress’s questions.

Obama’s stonewall strategy has generally worked well. Scandals fade from the front pages when there are no new developments, and if information finally emerges, Democratic Party reporters treat it as old news. So the IRS scandal has pretty much disappeared from public awareness. Nevertheless, via InstaPundit, we learn that yet another IRS computer hard drive has been destroyed. How many is that now? I’ve lost track.

Read it.

Rather than condemning the rapes in Europe, this feminist calls people racists for noticing.

Read it.

At issue are the two civil complaints brought against Holland by school board officials over two newspaper ads she bought, which urged the members of her community to educate themselves about the candidates up for election to the town’s school board and to get out and vote. She did not advocate for or against any particular candidate. But because she had not registered as a “political committee,” two complaints were filed against her, beginning her unwanted and expensive quest to defend herself against frivolous and politically-motivated attacks on her freedom of speech and right to participate in the political process.

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In the simple morality tale that is modern mainstream liberalism, government spending leads to good things and cutting government spending leads to bad things. So when news broke that Flint, Michigan’s, water system was laced with lead and may have poisoned up to 2 percent of city residents, including 23 children, they already knew the cause: Spending cuts imposed on the city by the state emergency manager.

The Detroit Free Press lectured Governor Rick Snyder, the villain in liberal central casting who appointed the manager, thusly: “To lead the state, a balanced budget is not sufficient…He has got to see people, not sums, as the bottom line of the state balance sheet.” Meanwhile, a headline in Vox declared, “Flint, Michigan, tried to save money on water. Now its children have food lead poisoning.” And The Week’s Ryan Cooper accused Flint of poisoning its own residents to save a few bucks. “This is a stark demonstration of austerity’s false economy.”

A dissection of the events, however, suggests that it isn’t government austerity that  is responsible for the debacle but the government itself. And at every level: local, state, federal, elected officials, administrative agencies, you name it, I note in my column at The Week.

Watch it.

Check it out.

Funny thing about that: The top 15 high-tax states are all Blue States.

Texas, of course, is #46, which means that we have some work to do.

Steve Sailer points out some Inconvenient Truth.

A reader writes:

If Bernie Sanders didn’t exist, he’d be the politician Chris Pine works for in a made-up Cameron Crowe movie about idealism and soundtracked by Boomer rock

That movie, if it existed, would get denounced by lefty internet for being too white.

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When the defence ministers of France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy, Australia and the Netherlands join U.S. Secretary of Defence Ashton Carter Wednesday in Paris to discuss the future of the fight against Islamic State, Canada will be conspicuous by it absence.

Things were different not that long ago when Canada, under former prime minister Stephen Harper, was seen by many as leading the free world in understanding the challenge humanity faces from Islamofascism.

…

Fast forward five years to Monday, Jan. 18, 2016, and we now see that under the new government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau our commitment to fighting Islamic terror has been so deeply compromised that the coalition of seven major nations leading the fight against Islamic State decided not to extend an invitation to Ottawa.

It would have been inconceivable in the past for Canada’s defence minister not to be invited to the table. This time we were considered unworthy of a seat.

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Like it or not, the Iran nuclear deal is done. In much of the Middle East, defense officials in many states believe that a sizeable proportion of the soon-to-be released $100 billion Iranian windfall will be directed toward funding proxy armies of the Islamic Republic, for whom the Jewish state remains the prime target. Israel’s focus is now, more than ever, on defense and surveillance.

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Purely by coincidence, you understand. (Election? What election?) (Hillary? Who’s Hillary?)

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As if this were something pertaining to the duty a mayor, rather than managing the public services (police, fire, garbage collection) that are actually a part of his job.

f ever you were wondering why big American cities are governed so badly, take a gander at Boston University’s Menino Survey of 89 U.S. mayors, including 63 from the 275 cities with populations of at least 100,000 (key findings here; full report here).

There are many depressing results to contemplate. For instance, mayors rightly see “infrastructure” as their most pressing priority, and also rightly (at least in my experience from living the last 18 years in Los Angeles, the District of Columbia, and New York), put “roads” at the top of that infrastructure list, and yet when asked to name one project they would build with one big unrestricted grant, “mass transit” went to Number One; and when asked to name one small infrastructure item, bike/pedestrian improvements shot to the top. In fact, when asked a tradeoff question, about whether “Cities should make their roads more accessible to bicycles even if it means sacrificing driving lanes and/or parking,” a whopping 70 percent either agreed or strongly agreed.

With results as you see them: Bad traffic is made worse in favor of Crustian fads that few people use. And don’t get me started on HOV lanes….

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A quick Google check of the news finds that the more prominent peak oilers – Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, Kenneth Deffeyes, Daniel Goodstein – are maintaining a decorous silence as the price of crude sinks below $28 per barrel. After all, the International Energy Agency just warned that the world is “drowning” in oil. So no Jeremiads about the impending end of an oil-starved industrial civilization are appearing in the media. Nor, sadly, do many journalists seem interested in probing why the peakists’ widely touted dire forecasts have, once again, proven wrong.

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An “investigative summary” posted this month by the Justice Department’s inspector general criticizes the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for hiring a federal airport security screener to help find seizable cash in passengers’ luggage. Under the arrangement, the DEA designated the screener a “confidential source” and promised him a cut of any money he found while rummaging through people’s bags.

Was that wrong? Yes, according to the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The OIG concluded that paying employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to report evidence of criminal activity was inappropriate, since they are supposed to do that anyway. The OIG noted that DEA policy “precludes registering as a CS [confidential source] ’employees of U.S. law enforcement agencies who are working solely in their official capacity with DEA.'” It also worried that “asking the TSA Security Screener to notify the DEA of passengers carrying large sums of money in exchange for a reward based on money seized by the DEA violated the DEA’s interdiction manual” and “could have violated individuals’ protection against unreasonable searches and seizures if it led to a subsequent DEA enforcement action.”

America — well on its way to being a Third-World country.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, points out an Inconvenient Truth.

My late, great colleague Gordon Tullock famously pointed out the many possibilities to “do well while doing good.”  (See chapter 6 in this collection edited by my colleague Dan Klein.)  However, as I note in my most recent column in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, too many of my fellow economists, while perhaps superficially intent on doing good, are not so intent that they are willing to risk any of their own money on such efforts.  They wish to do good only by spending mostly other people’s money and by stripping away mostly other people’s freedom and options.  This consistent and chronic refusal of policy advocates to put their own money where their mouth’s are is as sure a sign as is humanly possible that these do-gooders are too reckless to take seriously.

Read it.

Between 2009 and 2011, the Department of Justice (DOJ) allowed 2,000 guns to be bought by criminals in the Phoenix area who were smuggling the weapons to Mexico in order to track the weapons in that country, because why should the DOJ limit itself to enforcing the law within America’s borders? Under the program, dubbed Operation Fast & Furious, the DOJ lost track of more than 1,400 of the weapons.

Now, one of those weapons, a .50 caliber rifle capable of taking down helicopters, has been found in the hideout of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the purported leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. It is the third time a weapon from Fast & Furious was found at a major Mexican crime scene.

Democrats Investigating Democrats: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

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But that trick never works….

A planet larger than Earth could be hiding in the cold, dark depths of the solar system. The presence of the planet, which would lie far beyond Pluto, is betrayed by the curious orbits of a handful of distant icy worlds.

As described Wednesday in the Astronomical Journal, the gravitational signature of a large, lurking planet is written into the peculiar orbits of these farflung worlds. Called extreme Kuiper Belt Objects, the misbehaving bodies trace odd circles around the sun that have puzzled scientists for years.

It’s tantalizing evidence that a ninth large planet might live in the solar system, though the world hasn’t been detected yet.

“If there’s going to be another planet in the solar system, I think this is it,” says Greg Laughlin of the University of California, Santa Cruz. “It would be quite extraordinary if we had one. Fingers crossed. It would be amazing.”

I’m curious as to what they’d call it. Barsoom?

Nick Gillespie, of tReason Magazine, is delightfully dyspeptic today.

While most fans merely suffered The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, and Revenge of the Sith, those movies represent a piss take on what happened to baby boomers who cut their teeth protesting Vietnam and ended up bombing hell out of the world during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama.

Read it.

I can certainly believe it. She certainly weirds me out.

It seems, however, that there is a group of “other voters” — i.e., ones not predisposed against Hillary — for whom the Clinton sex scandals have resonance. That group is young radical feminists.

For them, according to this report in the New York Times, what resonates is Hillary’s role in attacking women who spoke out against her husband’s behavior towards them. They tend, it seems, to agree with Donald Trump who says that Hillary “was not a victim; she was an enabler — some of these women have been destroyed, and Hillary worked with” her husband to accomplish their destruction.

For young feminists, this isn’t “old news.” Many of them are learning the details for the first time. And although one can say that to raise the matter now is to “relitigate” it (to use one of President Obama’s favorite dodges), the “litigation” occurs under a new set of rules.

Jeff Jacoby turns over a rock.

Have you ever paid someone to punch a victim in the stomach? If you’re a Massachusetts taxpayer, you have now.

To induce GE to relocate to Boston, Governor Charlie Baker and Mayor Marty Walsh offered to cross the corporate behemoth’s palm with silver — lots and lots of silver. The package of incentives underwritten by Bay State taxpayers is expected eventually to total more than $150 million in direct subsidies, tax abatements, training funds, site improvements, and property acquisition costs. That means that General Electric — a conglomerate with roughly $150 billion in annual revenues — will siphon $188,000 out of the public treasury for each job it proposes to move to Boston.

Since this is basically one Blue State government screwing over another, one might be tempted to ignore it; neglecting the fact that all this is being done with money taxed from the people, not all of whom are brain-dead lefties. (Not even in Taxachusetts.)

Read it.

Interestingly, for a while, there has been a short memo about the alt-right floating about among “Conservatism Inc” warning people of the alt-right.  I’ve read parts of this memo and surprisingly its description of the alt-right is not inaccurate, just too succinct.  Here I’ll give a more detailed explanation of the alt-right.

The alt-right was first coined by Richard Spencer, as an intellectual alternative to the dry “Conservatism Inc” that then passed for right-wing thought. Since then, the term has really taken on a life all its own. As others have noted, the alt-right really isn’t a political movement per se but rather a zeitgeist. The big-tent alt-right includes identitarians and archeofuturists, race realists and HBD bloggers, European New Right (ENR), shitlords, neo-reaction (NRx) and reaction, trad Christians, neo-pagans, white nationalists, PUAs, etc. (Note, these groups are not mutually exclusive. For example, an alt-righter might consider himself an identitarian and race realist.)

I think this might describe me.

While the alt-right is a large tent that disagrees on some issues, one issue that really unites the alt-right is immigration.  The alt-right is fed up with Third World immigration into the West and wish to see most of these immigrants / migrants / refugees / invaders repatriated back to their ancestral lands.

Well, that definitely describes me.

Michael Brendan Dougherty recently called the alt-right “race obsessed”. A better phrase might be: race realists. Most alt-righters actually take Darwinism seriously. (If you are at a loss of what “taking Darwinism seriously” means, you might want to read this book.) Young alt-righters are comfortable with modern science which shows that human biodiversity is a facet of life. The fact that so many today in Conservatism Inc. want either to ignore or deny human biodiversity, shows how untethered from reality modern conservatism has become. It is living in a politically correct fantasy land.

Yup, me again.

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At the end of a luncheon for The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council in Davos, Switzerland, an informal, highly unscientific poll was taken on a question that has stirred brisk debate: the U.S. presidential contest. The approximately 40 top executives were asked: Show of hands, how many of you expect Donald Trump to be the next president?

No hands.

How many expect him to be the Republican nominee?

A few hands in the air.

How many of you expect Hillary Clinton to be the next president?

Nearly every hand in the room shot up.

There. Now we know how the Crust would vote … possibly the best endorsement for Trump obtainable.

Read it.

Except for the people who had their fingers in their ears yelling LA LA LA LA LA, of course, which is a group full of illustrious and important people.

In the aftermath of New Year’s Eve’s mass rapes of European women by Muslim refugees, the questions have been repeated: Should we have known this kind of thing would happen? Could we have known? And from local bars to parliaments, from family dinners to the nightly news, the answers keep coming back: Yes; we could. Yes, we should.

But interestingly, the people who say this with the most conviction are not right-wing Muslim-bashers, or activists opposed to the settling of Syrian refugees in Europe. They are Muslims, and mostly Muslim women.

Over and over, these women, and other Western women who have worked in the Middle East and North Africa, pointed out the commonality of rape in the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia (the MENASAS region), and noted the oppression of women in most cultures there. (The Kurds form a notable exception.)

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The IRS erased a hard drive belonging to a former top employee involved in the agency’s controversial, taxpayer-funded hiring of elite trial law firm Quinn Emanuel.

Although there was a court preservation order on all documents related to the IRS hiring of the outside firm, the hard drive was erased anyway. The order was borne of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by Microsoft.

Even though the white shoe law firm has zero experience handling sensitive tax data, taxpayers have been footing bills of over $1,000 per hour for its services.

Democrats Investigating Democrats: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

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When one reads enough Chinese naval literature, diagrams of multi-axial cruise missile saturation attacks against aircraft carrier groups may begin to seem normal. However, one particular graphic from the October 2015 issue (p. 32) of the naval journal Naval & Merchant Ships [????] stands out as both unusual and singularly disturbing. It purports to map the impact of a Chinese intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) strike by twenty nuclear-armed rockets against the United States.

Targets include the biggest cities on the East and West Coasts, as well as in the Midwest, as one would expect. Giant radiation plumes cover much of the country and the estimate in the caption holds that the strike “would yield perhaps 50 million people killed” [????5000 ???]. The map below that graphic on the same page illustrates the optimal aim point for a hit on New York City with a “blast wave” [???] that vaporizes all of Manhattan and well beyond.

That makes the North Korean “threat” look fairly insignificant by comparison, doesn’t it? But what’s really disturbing is that the scenario described above envisions a strike by China’s largely antiquated DF-5 first generation ICBM. In other words, the illustration is perhaps a decade or more out of date. As China has deployed first the road-mobile DF-31, then DF-31A and now JL-2 (a submarine-launched nuclear weapon), China’s nuclear strategy has moved from “assured retaliation” to what one may term “completely assured retaliation.”

Read it.

Bet you didn’t know that.

As it happens, jihadi hate for non-Muslims is not limited to the Islamic State, which U.S. leadership dismisses as neither a real state nor representative of Islam. Rather, it’s the official position of, among others, Saudi Arabia — a very real state, birthplace of Islam, and, of course, “friend and ally” of America.

Saudi Arabia’s Permanent Committee for Islamic Research and Issuing Fatwas — which issues religious decrees that become law — issued a fatwa, or decree, titled, “Duty to Hate Jews, Polytheists, and Other Infidels.” Written by Sheikh Abd al-Aziz ibn Baz (d. 1999), former grand mufti and highest religious authority in the government, it still appears on the website.

According to this governmentally-supported fatwa, Muslims — that is, the entire Saudi citizenry — must “oppose and hate whomever Allah commands us to oppose and hate, including the Jews, the Christians, and other mushrikin [non-Muslims], until they believe in Allah alone and abide by his laws, which he sent down to his Prophet Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him.”

Well, there’s a Religion of Peace and no mistake.

Our other “good friend and ally,” Qatar, also officially documents its hate for every non-Muslim — or practically 100 percent of America’s population. A website owned by the Qatari Ministry of Awqaf and Islamic Affairs published a fatwa titled “The Obligation of Hating Infidels, Being Clean of Them, and Not Befriending Them.”

Along with citing the usual Loyalty and Enmity verses, the fatwa adds that Christians should be especially hated because they believe that God is one of three (Trinity), that Christ is the Son of God, and that he was crucified and resurrected for the sins of mankind — all cardinal doctrines of Christianity that are vehemently lambasted in the Koran (see 5:72-81).

Incidentally, this same Qatari government-owned website once published a fatwa legitimizing the burning of “infidels” — only to remove it soon after the Islamic State justified its burning of a Jordanian pilot by citing several arguments from the fatwa.

Oops.

Read it.

But you knew that.

And even if it weren’t, we’d just wind up with the crappy system that Britain has.

Shitty free care doesn’t help the people that single-payer is supposed to help.

Read it.

The Supreme Court decided today to review a decision adverse to the government in the legal challenge to President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s immigration rules. At issue is a program that would allow as many as five million illegal immigrants who are the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program under which they would receive work permits and avoid the possibility of deportation.

Obama’s power grab was thwarted when a coalition of 26 states filed a lawsuit alleging that Obama unlawfully sidestepped Congress and ignored the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act for changing rules. A federal judge entered a preliminary injunction shutting down the program while the lawsuit proceeded, and a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the injunction.

The district court’s injunction was based on a finding that the Obama administration didn’t follow the applicable procedures for changing rules. However, in agreeing to hear the case, the Supreme Court broadened the matter to encompass the more fundamental separation of powers concerns. It asked the parties to address whether the administration’s plan violates the constitutional command that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Looks like King Barry has encountered a stumbling-block on his way to supreme power.

Mark Steyn persists in pointing out inconvenient truth.

The argument was straightforward. The western world is going out of business because it’s given up having babies. The 20th century welfare state, with its hitherto unknown concepts such as spending a third of your adult lifetime in “retirement”, is premised on the basis that there will be enough new citizens to support the old. But there won’t be. Lazy critics of my thesis thought that I was making a “prediction”, and that my predictions were no more reliable than Al Gore’s or Michael Mann’s on the looming eco-apocalypse. I tried to explain that it’s not really a prediction at all.

…

Enter Islam, which sportingly volunteered to be the children we couldn’t be bothered having ourselves, and which kind offer was somewhat carelessly taken up by the post-Christian west.

…

Last year, Angela Merkel decided to attempt it. The German Chancellor cut to the chase and imported in twelve months 1.1 million Muslim “refugees”. That doesn’t sound an awful lot out of 80 million Germans, but, in fact, the 1.1 million Muslim are overwhelmingly (80 per cent plus) fit, virile, young men. Germany has fewer than ten million people in the same population cohort, among whom Muslims are already over-represented: the median age of Germans as a whole is 46, the median age of German Muslims is 34. But let’s keep the numbers simple, and assume that of those ten million young Germans half of them are ethnic German males. Frau Merkel is still planning to bring in another million “refugees” this year. So by the end of 2016 she will have imported a population equivalent to 40 per cent of Germany’s existing young male cohort. The future is here now: It’s not about “predictions”.

Read it.

A Stanford professor is deflecting criticism after allegedly deleting data from research associated with a year-old study in order to avoid inadvertently showing how green energy will kill millions of long-term jobs.

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

Prof. Mark Jacobson rebuked criticisms brought by Steve Everley of Energy In Depth, an oil industry-backed education project, that supplementary data actually showed using 100 percent green energy would result in 1.2 million jobs being eliminated from the economy.

Jacobson said Everley’s claim was a “flat out lie” and relied on “faked data.”

Everley’s claim was based on data taken from Jacobson’s own research, but when Everley went back to show the Stanford professor that the proof was in his own online files, he found the data was gone — Jacobson had deleted it just hours after Everley exposed the job loss numbers.

Ethics? We don’t need no stinkin’ ethics.

Read it.

Even as the U.S. rig count has retreated like Napoleon from Russia, shale remains the key to understanding the global oil landscape. Consider that despite all of the turmoil in key oil-producing regions, namely the Middle East, oil prices have not spiked. Nothing — not Russian intervention in Syria, not ISIS attacks on Libyan oil infrastructure, not the torching of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran — has been able to stop the oil price collapse. What is going on here? Does turmoil in the Middle East suddenly no longer matter? The American shale oil model has changed the world oil marketplace for the foreseeable future. Shale producers’ ability to quickly throttle down or ramp up upstream investment spending, drilling and production, as oil prices change, is viewed as an effective shock absorber against any potential oil price spikes. Mark J Perry, Investor’s Business Daily, 15 January 2016

My understanding is that cheap energy is typically really really good for economic growth. With the Democrats in power, of course, any disaster can happen.

Lion of the Blogosphere is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

The Eagles video made me wonder. Today, do any white proles skip college, form a band, and become famous musicians? Or was that just a 70s thing?

I think it all happens except for the ‘become famous musicians’ part — that doesn’t work any more if you’re working-class white.

Read it.

Portland Community College has designated April “Whiteness History Month” (WHM), an “educational project” exploring how the “construct of whiteness” creates racial inequality.

“‘Whiteness History Month: Context, Consequences, and Change’ is a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins, and heritage,” PCC states on its website. “Scheduled for the month of April 2016, the project seeks to inspire innovative and practical solutions to community issues and social problems that stem from racism.”

This from the whitest city on the Left Coast. You’d think that they’d just Do The Right Thing and walk into the sea, giving the area back to the skraelings.