Steve Sailer looks at analysis.

In recent years, the highbrow spooks at the government’s Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, an agency set up in 2006 in shame over the Iraq WMD call, have funded four years of Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project to find the best amateur foreign-policy forecasters. In a development reminiscent of the followers of statistical maven Bill James taking over baseball general managers’ offices, it turns out that the best volunteers are consistently better than the government’s experts, even though the professionals have access to confidential information.

The Other McCain picks up the thread.

American feminists, who have incited irrational hysteria over a non-existent “rape epidemic” on U.S. college campuses, will ignore this news. American feminists never said a word about the Rotherham Horror, in which English girls as young as 11 were pimped out by Muslim predators. American feminists don’t want to call attention to certain crimes committed by certain criminals, and it is not just Juanita Broaddrick’s rape accusation against Bill Clinton that feminists demand that we ignore. The feminist movement in the United States is controlled by the Democrat Party, and therefore rape is just a talking-point to them, an “issue” that feminists help Democrats exploit for partisan purposes. Because feminists are dishonest partisans, their agenda requires a lot of deliberate falsification — the phony “1-in-5” statistic, the UVA rape hoax, etc. — and it also requires feminists to ignore a lot of actual rapes which do not fit the Democrat Party-approved propaganda narrative.

Read it.

Sparky is now 11 and weighs 1,600 pounds, walking with a limp, according to an announcement made today by the USFWS.

Read it.

Privately-owned ATMs probably aren’t charging convenience fees out of spite—they charge the fees because it costs a certain amount of money to maintain the service. Capping them would prompt ATMs to make up the money some other way, either by charging customers more for other features or by cutting services. Note that this isn’t theoretical: federal banking regulation of interchange fees prompted many banks to scale back on free checking and rewards programs that largely benefitted poor people.

But don’t expect a candidate who believes Americans should be limited to just a few kinds of deodorants and sneakers to grasp that.

Read it. And watch the video.

The news about what happened last Thursday night in Cologne is still the top story in Germany, and is also drawing attention in the rest of Europe (see the previous post). The behavior of Cologne’s culture-enrichers was so blatant, so criminal, and so, well, ethnic, that the real story of the evening’s events can no longer be suppressed.

Read it.

The U.S. Army has had to make some bold moves to comply with a 2012 order (from Congress) to cut its strength 21 percent (120,000 troops) by 2018. At that point the army will have 450,000 personnel. While the army tried to avoid cutting combat units excessively, 13 combat brigades were disbanded and some were reduced to battalion sized task forces or just headquarters (to be revived as a brigade in wartime using reservists). Some brigades were converted from Stryker units to infantry and some lost one of their three combat battalions. Other brigades gained a battalion and some additional support troops and equipment. The point of it all was to make the most of a bad situation and reorganize so that each unit was best (or better) suited to its future assignments. Most combat brigades are organized and train for eventual deployment in a certain region. They might, as often happens, be sent elsewhere. But in the meantime they have a focus for their organization and training.

This is appalling. Just as in Europe, to fund government waste and abuse in social welfare programs, the government is having to cut back on its core functions, one of which is national defense. Europe can always fall back on the United States, but whom have we to back us up?

Read it.

The Isis militant group is likely to be using chemical weapons against its enemies in Syria and Iraq, Russia has claimed, after evidence of exposure to deadly nerve agents was reported by the UN.

The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons said it was investigating 11 alleged chemical weapon attacks reported to it by the Syrian government, and that in at least one case blood samples suggested “exposure to sarin or a sarin-like substance”.

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

Read it.

An assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst concluded his comparative politics course earlier this month by telling students the planet is dying because of human activity – and there is little hope of reversing course.

Yeah, whenever I take a course on comparative politics, I wind up worrying about global apocalypse due to climate change. Every. Single. Time. And I look to assistant professors of political science to sound the alarm.

Read it.

Raffi Melkonian asks – as relayed by my colleague Tyler Cowen – “When can median income consumers afford the very best?” Tyler offers a list of some of the items in the modern, market-oriented world that are as high-quality as such items get and yet are easily affordable to ordinary people. This list includes iPhones, books, and rutabagas. Indeed, this list includes nearly all foods for use in preparing home snacks and meals. I doubt very much that Bill Gates and Larry Ellison munch at home on the foods such as carrots, blueberries, peanuts, and scrambled eggs that an ordinary American cannot easily afford to enjoy at home.

And even ‘poor’ people these days can have things that not the richest person in the world could have had even within my lifetime.

A slightly different list is one drawn up in response to this question: When can median-income consumers afford products that, while not as high-quality as those versions that are bought by the super-rich, are nevertheless virtually indistinguishable – because they are quite close in quality – to the naked eye from those versions bought by the super-rich? On this list would be most clothing. For example, an ordinary American man can today afford a suit that, while it’s neither tailor-made nor of a fabric as fine as are suits that I suspect are worn by most billionaires, is nevertheless close enough in fit and fabric quality to be indistinguishable by the naked eye from expensive suits worn by billionaires. (I suspect that the same it true for women’s clothing, but I’m less expert on that topic.)

I can wear the same shirts and pants as Warren Buffet or Bill Gates or Carlos Slim without straining my debit card.

Ditto for shoes, underwear, haircuts, corrective eye-wear, collars for dogs and cats, pet food, household bath towels and ‘linens,’ tableware and cutlery, automobile tires, hand tools, most household furniture, and wristwatches. (You’d have to get physically very close to someone wearing a Patek Philippe – and you’d have to know what a Patek Philippe is – in order to determine that that person’s wristwatch is one that you, an ordinary American, can’t afford. And you could stare at that Patek Philippe for months without detecting any superiority that it might have over your quartz-powered Timex at keeping time.) Coffee. Tea. Beer. Wine. (There is available today a large selection of very good wines at affordable prices. These wines almost never rise to the quality of Chateau Petrus, d’yquem, or the best Montrachets, but the differences are often quite small and barely distinguishable save by true connoisseurs.)

Brian Doherty lays out the misleading uses, flagrant abuses, and shoddy statistics of social science about gun violence.

Read it.

And rightly so, I think.

The first major action taken by Barack Obama in 2016—a set of new gun-control measures mandated via executive order—is aimed at a threat that Americans don’t spend a lot of time worrying about.

In its latest survey of Americans, Gallup finds that “dissatisfaction with government,” not guns or even terrorism, tops the list of concerns.

Funny how that works.

Obama’s new actions against guns include expanding background checks; changing definitions of mental illness in a way that limits who is able to own guns; increasing the number of federal agents charged with tracking gun sales and crimes; and more.

In other words, more power to government tools and less to individual citizens. My, what a surprise.

As Jacob Sullum noted here in December, most of the “common-sense” measures Obama is pushing would not have stopped the San Bernardino shooting or virtually any other recent mass attacks.

Don’t look at the evidence, just believe the Narrative. Guns leap from their holsters when you least expect them to and just mow people down, so therefore they Must Be Controlled.

Obama’s willingness to always pivot to issues that are not front and center, along with his willingness to expand the role of the state in virtually every aspect of our lives from health care to mass surveillance is surely a big part of the reason why people are consistently worried more about government than anything else. In this, of course, he’s had plenty of help from Republicans and his fellow Democrats, which also helps to explain another Gallup finding released this time last year: “In U.S. New Record 43% Are Independents.”

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it.

During the height of holiday shopping season, a consumer report stoked ample ill-will toward American manufacturers after purporting to show that women’s products are priced higher for completely arbitrary reasons. This so-called “pink tax,” said the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), affects almost every product marketed at American females, “from cradle to cane.”

‘Women and minorities hardest hit’ is one of the Timeless Tropes of the Narrative. Whenever a government agency starts beating one of these Crustian drums, you know that it will soon be followed by a demand for more government regulatory power over the lives of ordinary Americans — for their own good, of course.

Of course, individual consumers do have control over which products they buy, though. And while the pink razors with the butterflies on the packaging my be marketed toward women, no one’s forcing us to buy those over basic blue Bics. If the products in this study really were identical save for some totally non-desired factors, it seems likely that women, or at least a larger proportion of women, would simply choose the products marketed toward men.

Since they don’t, one can jump to one of two conclusions: either women are so brainwashed by marketing that they choose products against their own best interests because of it, or women find some discernible appeal in the women’s products—be that different ingredients, cosmetic factors, or whatever else—that make them worth paying more for. I’m going to go with the explanation that grants women a little intelligence and agency.

Of course, vast parts of the Narrative is based on the assumption that those who listen to advertising are just Mind-Numbed Robots who march out and do as the ads say, with no free will to resist — an outgrowth of the Crustian dogma that We Are Smart But They Are Dumb, ‘they’ being whoever doesn’t march to the Crustian tune.

Arnold Kling reviews Scott Sumner’s book The Midas Paradox.

The Great Depression of the 1930s is one of the most significant events in economic history. It had an impact not only on the people who lived through it but on economic theory and policy all the way to the present. I believe there is a strong case in favor of requiring every economics graduate student to take a course on the Great Depression. Furthermore, the reading list for such a course definitely ought to include Scott Sumner’s new book,The Midas Paradox: Financial Markets, Government Policy Shocks, and the Great Depression.1 Its title pertains to the role that Sumner assigns to gold hoarding in triggering the Depression.

Arnold is a Really Smart Guy and a Real Economist, so what he has to say is well worth hearing. My interest was sparked by his affirmation of the damaging effects of the Aggregation Fallacy, against which I have preached much in this blog.

Taki is delightfully dyspeptic today.

If ever there was a case of having one’s cake and eating it, this has to be it, and the only hypocrite missing for the moment is our old buddy William Jefferson Clinton, a beneficiary of Rhodes if there ever was one, who has as yet not demanded for the removal of the plaque and statue. Using the cash while whitewashing Rhodes out of history is hardly new. Our black brothers and sisters are doing just that as I write. Soon those who shaped our destiny, dead white folk like Washington and Jefferson and Madison, will be part of the history that does not dare speak its name. As one Oxford professor, a historian by the name of Mary Beard, said: Students should “look up at Rhodes and friends with a cheery and self-confident sense of unbatterability—much as I find myself looking up at the statues of all those hundreds of men in history who would vehemently have objected to women having the vote, let alone the job I have.” Now, there’s a lady speaking truth if there ever was one.

Sometimes that happens. It cannot, however, be depended upon.

The irony is that there were, from the start, lots of black Rhodes Scholars, mainly from Jamaica, then a British colony. Of course, Rhodes’ imperialism is now out of fashion, except for with George W. Bush and his neocon friends, who thought the Iraq invasion would be a cakewalk and that it would cost less than what Rhodes left that ungrateful Oxford college. (It’s cost a trillion if it cost a dollar.) Rhodes’ accomplishments in southern Africa transformed the continent into a modern one, and he did that while squeezing in nine terms as an undergraduate at Oxford. The once great nation of Rhodesia was named after him, and the poorest and most corrupt country today is called Zimbabwe, after Rhodesia was renamed by that nice democrat Robert Mugabe.

Mark Steyn is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Why Is Bill Cosby Finished While Bill Clinton Is Beloved?

Nobody needed criminal convictions to drop Cosby – just multiple accusations of sexual assault and some out-of-court payouts. But multiple accusations of sexual assault, out-of-court payouts and the loss of his law license are apparently not enough to bar Bill Clinton from another eight years in the White House.

Read it.

The mayor of Cologne has summoned police for crisis talks after about 80 women reported sexual assaults and muggings by men on New Year’s Eve.

The scale of the attacks on women at the city’s central railway station has shocked Germany. About 1,000 drunk and aggressive young men were involved.

City police chief Wolfgang Albers called it “a completely new dimension of crime”. The men were of Arab or North African appearance, he said.

Guess they haven’t been paying attention to what young Muslims do with female kuffir and have been for the last 20 years. Well, better late than never, I suppose.

Read it.

And Wall Street will laugh at Bernie Sanders, as it always has, because he has no chance of ever being President.

Read it. And watch the video.

Last Thursday night — New Year’s Eve — a large crowd of “refugees” gathered in the Hauptbahnhof, the main train station of Cologne, and took advantage of the loud revelry and fireworks to avail themselves the “uncovered meat” they saw in front of them heading for the platform or alighting from the trains. A wave of harassment, groping, molestation, theft, and reportedly even rape descended upon native German women unfortunate enough to be passing through the station at that time.

The crimes committed that evening in Cologne were so blatant, and so uniformly committed by the newly-arrived enrichers of German culture, that even the city authorities were forced to acknowledge the ethnic component of what had just occurred. To be cynical about it, maybe a councilor’s daughter or a relative of the mayor were among those molested, prompting a breaking of the taboo against the discussion of immigrant crime.

Read it.

On New Year’s Eve, the Obama administration published a 200-page proposed rule in the Federal Register. The proposed rule is another executive order, in plain violation of the immigration laws. Obama’s executive order would illegally ignore the immigration caps that are enshrined in law. Senator Jeff Sessions denounced Obama’s usurpation, which, interestingly, was covered by hardly any “mainstream” news sources.

And if nobody does anything about it, he’ll keep doing it. Time for Congress to wake up.

Read it.

Clint Murphy let the deadline for getting health insurance by the new year pass without a second thought.

Mr. Murphy, an engineer in Sulphur Springs, Tex., estimates that under the Affordable Care Act, he will face a penalty of $1,800 for going uninsured in 2016. But in his view, paying that penalty is worth it if he can avoid buying an insurance policy that costs $2,900 or more. All he has to do is stay healthy.

“I don’t see the logic behind that, and I’m just not going to do it,” said Mr. Murphy, 45, who became uninsured in April after leaving a job with health benefits to pursue contract work. “The fine is still going to be cheaper.”

So, rather than pay $2900 he can’t afford for insurance, he’s going to be out $1800 and have no insurance. Your tax dollars at work.

Read it.

A 4-month-old girl is alive today thanks to a dramatic seven-hour surgery performed with Google Cardboard — those inexpensive handheld viewers that allow you to see 3D images on your iPhone.

Read it.

Closer … closer….

Read it.

But is the tension entirely unwelcome to the Saudis? Goldman and others note that the Saudis are under considerably economic pressure because of low oil prices. Iranian oil coming on to the market soon will put more downward pressure on oil prices at least in the short term. What better way to prop up oil prices than to ramp up the political risk premium, which serves the interests of both Saudi Arabia and Iran. A new war in the Gulf would do wonders for oil prices. Farfetched perhaps, but stranger things happen in the Middle East. Everyone ought to regard the surface accounts of the media about what is going on with a great deal of suspicion.

We could do worse that a serious Sunni-Shi’ite war in the Gulf, as happened in the ’80s. American shale oil would start being profitable again, and the jihadis would have something closer to home to occupy their minds.

Have you ever noticed how much Alec Baldwin looks like Lee Harvey Oswald?

And you never see the two of them together.

Read it.

On the other hand, he could be all wet.

Read it.

I was a member of the union for years and even served as a union representative. But the union never played an important role in my school. When most teachers sought guidance, they wanted help in the classroom and on how to excel at teaching. The union never offered this pedagogic aid.

Instead, the union focused on politics. I remember a phone call I received before a major election from someone in the union. It was a “survey,” asking teachers whether they would vote for so-and-so if the election were held tomorrow. I disagreed with every issue and candidate the union was promoting. After that conversation, I thought about what the union represents. Eventually, I realized that my dues—about $1,000 a year—went toward ideas and issues that ran counter to my beliefs.

So I opted out of paying the portion of union dues that is put toward political activities. The Supreme Court requires unions to provide this option, but I was surprised by how difficult this is. To opt out you have to resign from the union and relinquish all benefits—insurance, legal representation, maternity leave. Although you are prohibited from voting on any new contract, you are still forced to pay for the union’s collective bargaining, on the theory that the union negotiates for everyone.

Read it.

Read it. And watch the video.

The culture-enriching gentleman in this video is one of the Syrian “refugees” who arrived in Germany last year. In his home country he must have been a prosperous man of high social standing, because he had four wives. In order to get them into Germany with him, he had to lie to the authorities. But that’s OK, because lying in order to advance the cause of Islam is sanctioned by the Koran and all four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, as well as in the Shi’ite version of the fiqh. And it definitely advances the cause of Islam to take all your wives and children with you to a kuffar country (and make more Muslim children when you get there), all while being supported by the infidel taxpayers’ money.

The following interview aired originally on Sky News Arabic. It was subtitled in German, and that version has been used to make the English subtitles.

Read it.

In a post about the Saudi Arabia/Iran crisis — the Saudi beheading of a Shiite cleric; the Iranian burning of the Saudi embassy — John asked, “the Middle East couldn’t possibly get worse, could it?” At NR’s Corner, David French examines the crisis and concludes “in the Middle East things can always get worse.”

Things have indeed gotten worse under President Obama. They got worse when Obama withdrew from Iraq and they are getting even worse following his nuclear deal with Iran, an abject capitulation by the U.S.

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

Read it.

Compare Obama.

Read it.

The Disney Millennium Copyright Act has much to answer for.

Each year, for the past few years, the wonderful Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University publishes a blog post highlighting key works that should have entered the public domain on January first, but did not. And each year, we write about it again. Here is the list for 2016. These are mostly works that were published in 1959. Under the law at the time they were created, the maximum copyright term was 56 years, and that apparently was more than enough of a bargain for the work to be created. That we retroactively extended those works, taking away the public domain for no actual benefit, remains a travesty. The list includes books like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, and Strunk and White’s famed The Elements of Style. Films that should be in the public domain today include Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, and Some Like It Hot. The original season of the seminal Rocky and Bullwinkle show would also be in the public domain.

Read it.

I’m surprised they can get away with this in these degenerate modern times.

Still … sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran fundamentally boil down to two things – the battle to be the dominant nation in the Middle East and the fact the countries represent the regional strongholds of two rival branches of Islam.

Read it.

Along the vast, zigzagging perimeter of Isis’s self-styled state, the militants are steadily being pushed back as the forces­ ranged against them gain in strength.

In the process, new borders are being drawn, new fiefdoms are being carved out and the seeds of potential new conflicts are being sown.

Read it.

The package of gun controls that New York legislators hurriedly passed in January 2013, a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in neighboring Connecticut, banned the sale of magazines capable of holding more than seven rounds. Later Gov. Andrew Cuomo—who had insisted that the bill, known as the SAFE Act, be passed before legislators had a chance to read it, let alone consider its implications—realized “there is no such thing as a seven-bullet magazine” for most guns. The law was therefore changed to allow continued sale of 10-round magazines while prohibiting New Yorkers (those without badges, that is) from putting more than seven rounds in them, except at “a recognized firing range.” (No, really.) A bill recently proposed by two Democratic legislators from Brooklyn promises to repeat the mistake of imposing an ammunition limit that cannot be enforced.

Read it.

The New York Times made itself a fool for the Rathergate film Truth. The Times not only published Stephen Holden’s breathless review of the film, the Times celebrated the film in a TimesTalks event featuring Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Dan Rather, and Mary Mapes, hosted by Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus. Holden also included Truth in his year-end best-of-2015 list (it’s number 7!). The Times went all in for this tribute to the greatest journalistic fraud of our era, as I noted in the City Journal column “Truth and the New York Times.”

In its year-end review of possible Oscar contenders, however, Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera stumbles onto the truth and blurts it out. Doesn’t this require some kind of a trigger warning for Times readers?

Read it.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care?

Wouldn’t it be great to have a system like that in the U.S.?

The Other McCain lays out some inconvenient truth.

Bad judgment and bad morals are generally not a formula for success in life, and the fact that the men with whom Charlotte Shane hooked up via Tinder were all inadequate, disrespectful and/or immature should not surprise us. As I have explained elsewhere, the dating market is full of bad guys because all of the good guys already have girlfriends and good guys don’t cheat. Past a certain age — maybe as early as 25 — the singles scene is nothing but culls and rejects. The keepers are already taken, and if you’re still in the dating scene when you’re 30, you’re rummaging through piles of damaged goods and leftovers in the discount bin.

The one thing Charlotte Shane cannot do is consider that she could ever be at fault. Exactly how “mature” and “respectful” is she? Not very. Promiscuity is inherently immature, and it’s not respectful, either.

Check it out.

If you’re interested in Skraelings, as I am, this looks fascinating.

If you’re not, feel free to do something else.

Paul Graham speaks sense to stupidity.

I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it. Not just by helping the 2400 founders YC has funded. I’ve also written essays encouraging people to increase economic inequality and giving them detailed instructions showing how.

So when I hear people saying that economic inequality is bad and should be eliminated, I feel rather like a wild animal overhearing a conversation between hunters. But the thing that strikes me most about the conversations I overhear is how confused they are. They don’t even seem clear whether they want to kill me or not.

The most common mistake people make about economic inequality is to treat it as a single phenomenon. The most naive version of which is the one based on the pie fallacy: that the rich get rich by taking money from the poor.

Usually this is an assumption people start from rather than a conclusion they arrive at by examining the evidence.

Evidence? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence….

Even people sophisticated enough to know about the pie fallacy are led toward it by the custom of describing economic inequality as a ratio of one quantile’s income or wealth to another’s. It’s so easy to slip from talking about income shifting from one quantile to another, as a figure of speech, into believing that is literally what’s happening.

The phrase ‘share of the national income’ is a key giveaway here, making the Aggregation Fallacy of thinking that the ‘nation’ has an ‘income’ of which the only interesting thing is who gets what ‘share’.

Except in the degenerate case, economic inequality can’t be described by a ratio or even a curve. In the general case it consists of multiple ways people become poor, and multiple ways people become rich. Which means to understand economic inequality in a country, you have to go find individual people who are poor or rich and figure out why.

But that would take actual work, and it’s much easier to assume and opine, which pays the same (or sometimes better).

Traditional economists seem strangely averse to studying individual humans. It seems to be a rule with them that everything has to start with statistics. So they give you very precise numbers about variation in wealth and income, then follow it with the most naive speculation about the underlying causes.

Most economists live in Aggregation Fallacy World because that’s the way they were trained and it’s that sort of work that they’re paid for. Thinking outside the box is rarely indulged in when the box is providing your paycheck.

I’m all for shutting down the crooked ways to get rich. But that won’t eliminate economic inequality, because as long as you leave open the option of getting rich by creating wealth, people who want to get rich will do that instead.

Although the Democrats are doing their best to stamp that out. That’s the one thing at which Obama and his henchmen have actually been successful.

UPDATE: An extensive response is here — read it, and its comments.

Read it.

Among my favorite observations made by Thomas Sowell is his insistence that in economic reality human beings confront, not the possibility of solutions to problems but, instead, only trade-offs.  We can have more of this good, but only at the cost of having less of that good.  T.A.N.S.T.A.A.F.L.  Such is economic reality.

Read it.

Read it.

I’d sure feel a lot better if we had a decent fence down there.

Read it.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Besides, where would such a fragile flower of femininity find two Buntline Specials? I wouldn’t believe it in Texas; I damned sure won’t believe it in London.

Read it.

Welcome to the 1595 Club. As its name suggests, the club teaches a martial-arts system dating back to the 16th century. Inspired by the Italian-born master-fencer Vincentio Saviolo, the combination of fencing, self-defence and keep-fit can be adapted to swords, sword and dagger, cane and unarmed combat.

But no white scarves.

“I see [the 1595] as an art, not a sport,” the quietly spoken Chatfield tells me. “The old Italian word for swordsman is giocatore – a player, not of a game, but of a musical instrument. You learn to use your body like an instrument. The sword is like a paintbrush.”

…

Our knowledge of this technique is found in what amounts to an advertising brochure, Vincentio Saviolo: His Practise, in Two Bookes, written in 1595 by John Florio. Florio may well have known Shakespeare via Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the playwright’s patron and possible lover. This may explain why phrases from Florio’s text can be found in As You Like It and, more strikingly, Romeo and Juliet. The duel between Mercutio and Tybalt is narrated through Saviolo’s instructions: “…with one hand beats/ Cold death aside, and with the other sends/It back to Tybalt, whose dexterity/Retorts it…”

Steve Sailer looks under the radar.

For a dozen years or so, I’ve been pointing out that Southern California appears to be filling up with immigrants from the former Warsaw Pact.

But it’s hard to find out much about them. The media aren’t too interested in them. They’re immigrants (yeah) ,but they’re white (not yeah), so that confuses and discourages the press: What line should we take on them? Are white immigrants bad or good?

Read it.

BLUF: Obama didn’t stay bought.

The Democracy Alliance is the left-wing billionaires and millionaires club that we wrote about here and elsewhere. It is interesting that Soros, along with Tom Steyer the Left’s principal money man, regretted his decision to support Obama for the presidency.

Of course, on the basis of Tanden’s email, it appears that Soros’s remorse wasn’t due to a realization that Obama is a terrible president, but rather to his own lack of access. With Hillary, on the other hand, “he can always call/meet with you on an issue of policy.” That sums up Hillary’s candidacy in a nutshell: just as far left as Barack Obama, but more corrupt! Watch for it on bumper stickers.

Read it.

Liberal Boston University professor and Muslim apologist Kecia Ali recently wrote an article for The Huffington Post that attempted to make excuses for the pervasive nature of slavery (particularly sexual slavery) in the modern Muslim world. Right off the bat her arguments begin to feel as ridiculous as they truly are, and even without knowing for certain that something is wrong, a reader can feel that something is wrong – both with her reasoning (which is limited) and with her arguments (which are specious and easily disproven).

Memo: Probably a good idea not to send your kid to Boston University.

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

Read it.

An attempt at anti-bullying went awry at Southwest High School in Green Bay, Wisconsin, leading to a teacher getting punched in the face.

Ridwaan Mohamud, a 17-year-old of Somali background, broke his teacher’s nose on December 21 after stewing all weekend over comments the teacher made the previous Friday.

Allegedly, in an attempt to assure Mohamud that he is “not ugly,” the instructor jokingly had told the student “I would date you.”

Mohamud’s family says that “the interpreted homosexual comment is extremely offensive.”

(a) I agree with the kid. The teacher ought to man up, take his lumps, and apologize.

(b) Watch ‘progressive’ heads explode as the pro-gay gene fights it out with the Islamophilia gene.

Read it.

Yale is 5, Princeton is 6, Harvard is 25. (Saw that coming.)

On the other hand: I will never believe that students at Brown work harder than cadets at West Point. So you can take the rest with a grain of salt.