Read it.

If automation-induced unemployment becomes a problem (or if the chattering class can convince voters that it is a problem, which is a different thing entirely), then this is the obvious policy recommendation from those who look first to the government to solve every ill.

Of course, nobody will have the bad grace to mention that constantly increasing the legal ‘minimum wage’ merely encourages increased automation.

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The Mercer County (New Jersey) Prosecutor’s Office has released the results of its preliminary investigation into the arrest of Princeton’s Imani Perry, and found that there was no wrongdoing on the part of officers.

According to First Assistant Prosecutor Doris Galuchie, “following Perry’s allegations of mistreatment, an internal affairs investigation reviewed all video evidence, police reports and court documents related to the case.”

“Based upon that review, the officer’s conduct is to be commended, not criticized,” she said.

And why is that?

“It is imperative to note that everything Perry claimed before the video came out is simply not true,” Galuchie said, “What happened to her had nothing to do with her race and everything to do with her driving 20 or more miles over the speed limit while her license was suspended and she had warrants out for her arrest.”

Read it.

I, for one, am fully prepared to believe it.

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This very ominous rusted piece of metal would have been state of the art at its time of construction. The estimated top speed was in the range of 250 to 350 km/h. In fact, the american built turbo jet train is currently still the fastest train ever built in North America.

The design of the train really isn’t that complex. As can be noted in the pictures, two standard jet engines, often recycled from airplanes, were attached to the front of the forward most car. With a little aerodynamic re-engineering of the train cars, that’s all it took to pioneer this new technology.

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Already having the world’s largest and most advanced arsenal of short range ballistic missiles, China is constantly finding new ways to keep its missiles relevant for future battles. The DF-16 SRBM, which entered service in 2011-2012, has a range of 1,000km (twice that of the older DF-11 and DF-15), accuracy of 5-10 meters, and a warhead of up to one ton. Fired from a 10X10 transport erector launch vehicle, the DF-16B can hide hundreds of kilometers inland inside China’s interior, but reach out to launch attacks against enemy ships and bases. By flying faster, higher and further than the DF-11 and DF-15, it also can slip through many missile defense systems. And it can take ona variety of payloads, including anti-ship warheads, multiple independent reentry vehicles (MIRVs), bunker busting munitions and more.

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The first set of rules was written by Frank L. Visco and originally published in the June 1986 issue of Writers’ digest.
The second set of rules is derived from William Safire’s Rules for Writers.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Specifically, I keep seeing reports that Apple has unlocked “70 iPhones” for the government. And those reports argue that Apple is now refusing to do for the FBI what it has done many times before. This meme is completely inaccurate at best, and dangerous at worst.

…

The New York case involves an iPhone running iOS 7. On devices running iOS 7 and previous, Apple actually has the capability to extract data, including (at various stages in its encryption march) contacts, photos, calls and iMessages without unlocking the phones. That last bit is key, because in the previous cases where Apple has complied with legitimate government requests for information, this is the method it has used.

It has not unlocked these iPhones — it has extracted data that was accessible while they were still locked. The process for doing this is laid out in its white paper for law enforcement.

…

The California case, in contrast, involves a device running iOS 9. The data that was previously accessible while a phone was locked ceased to be so as of the release of iOS 8, when Apple started securing it with encryption tied to the passcode, rather than the hardware ID of the device. FaceTime, for instance, has been encrypted since 2010, and iMessages since 2011.

So Apple is unable to extract any data including iMessages from the device because all of that data is encrypted. This is the only reason that the FBI now wants Apple to weaken its security so that it can brute-force the passcode. Because the data cannot be read unless the passcode is entered properly.

Read it.

A new cheaper and more effective genetic test which detects all known inherited heart conditions is expected to be taken up by hospitals.

Current tests assess a small number of genes to identify a limited number of conditions. However, the new blood test detects all conditions which are currently known by clinicians.

By examining 174 genes, doctors are able to identify faults and begin treatment that can minimise the risk of death.

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Not that they had all that much to start with.

Saudi Arabia has started taxing water for residents to try and address the soaring cost of debt as oil revenues decline.

The water tariff comes amid warnings that Saudi Arabia’s groundwater will run out in the next 13 years.

Read it.

Since Muslims tend to use hospitals as ‘living shields’ to protect combatants, that will simplify things somewhat.

Gavin MacInnes speaks truth to power.

As a Canadian immigrant by way of Britain, I am constantly surprised by the soft bigotry of low expectations blacks in America are awarded. I don’t care about slavery. America got 3% of the slaves Africa sold the New World and Americans lost 650,000 men abolishing the practice (the equivalent of 7M today). I heard they had it rough in America, but where I’m from “No Blacks, No Dogs” included “No Irish,” and they were slaves too. When a black person says something completely insane, I laugh my head off and go, “That’s idiotic.” In America, they say, “It’s complicated.” So a concussed entertainer such as Kanye West can go gallivanting through life like something out of a children’s book and the response is usually positive.

I’ve always wondered about that, too.

Read it.

It should be alarming for the West if Turkey and Saudi Arabia, two important U.S. allies, have decided to fight a strange cocktail of enemies on Syrian territory, including Syrian forces, radical jihadists, various Shiite forces and, most critically, Russia – all in order to support “moderate” Islamists. That may be the opening of a worse disaster in Syria, possibly spanning over the next 10 to 15 years.

On the other hand, do we really want these two as allies?

My, what a surprise!

Leaked documents show that the California high speed rail is reversing course—quite literally—and changing construction plans on the first 250-mile stretch of track. The new plan will now connect the Central Valley to the Bay Area—not Los Angeles as originally planned.

After all, who would want to go to Los Angeles?

News of the route change comes in the same week consultants projected a $260 million increase in additional costs for the first 22-mile leg of construction—which amounts to a five percent increase in price for a project that has yet to lay a single foot of track.

Your tax dollars at work.

California Assemblyman David Hadley (R-South Bay) told local radio station KFI 640 AM that the new route potentially goes against a provision in the high speed rail legislation that says the train must first connect to Los Angeles. He stated the language was added to ensure Southern Californians didn’t foot the bill for a train that could very well end up becoming a regional transportation project.

Which appears to be exactly what is happening. But when did government employees ever worry about following the law?

The route change is only the latest in a line of broken promises made by the California rail authority. Voters approved the project with a $33 billion price tag—that has since doubled to $68 billion and could go even higher. Construction is already over two years behind schedule and the state has still not disclosed how they plan to raise the $53 billion in additional funds to complete the Los Angeles-to-San Francisco track.

Promises? We don’t need no stinkin’ promises….

The sad part is that the problems with the high speed rail project were entirely predictable.

And predicted. But nobody ever listens when it comes to spending taxpayer money.

Read it.

Forget oil, the real problem is water.

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Remains of at least 100 dismembered prisoners and visitors have been found in drain pipes at a jail in Colombia’s capital, investigators said on Wednesday.

The jail houses drug traffickers, Marxist rebels and paramilitaries.

Well, then, that explains it. All of these types have nagging body-disposal problems.

“Remains of prisoners, visitors and others were thrown in the drainage system.”

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

For one thing, Apple appears dedicated to safeguarding my privacy. The government? Not so much….

For another, if Apple doesn’t safeguard my privacy to the extent I want, I can go elsewhere. The government? Not so much….

Read it.

What’s next? Missing pet pictures on milk cartons?

As if we weren’t already consumed with fear when it comes to our kids, now the pet industry wants in. There’s big money in making us believe we need to monitor our kids’ every move and guard against kidnapping, and Big Pet can smell it.

Mark Steyn underscores some inconvenient truth.

If you notice, fewer and fewer young people are even willing to pay lip-service to a “marketplace of ideas”. I used the phrase to no great effect among the audience and panelists of the ABC’s “Q&A” on Monday night and found few takers. If you put the “marketplace of ideas” up against the strict enforcement of correct views on gays, climate change, transgender rights, Islam, etc, on virtually any campus in the western world and took a vote, the “marketplace of ideas” would lose.

Read it.

In the West Bank the “knife terrorism” campaign organized by the local leadership (Fatah) continues. This is all about making the corrupt and incompetent Fatah more popular in the West Bank but opinion polls show that many (but not most) Palestinians would vote for Hamas if elections were held right now. Moreover polls show enthusiasm for the knife terrorism campaign is waning. While Hamas is hated by the people of Gaza, West Bank Palestinians don’t experience Hamas cruelty daily while they do endure the corrupt and inept rule of Fatah. The Fatah pro-terror media campaign has distracted many Palestinians from their problems with Fatah but also convinced many that Israel is refusing to negotiate peace when in fact it is the Palestinians who turned down two peace deals in the 1990s and instead tried terror campaigns to get more. Both of these “intifadas” failed and Fatah has sold the illusion that the third intifada (the “knife intifada) will succeed. It isn’t and that is one reason Hamas has not gotten involved. Since 2000 Palestinian media constantly pushed the idea that Israel has no right to exist and must be destroyed. Palestinians who disagree with this must either emigrate or keep silent. For most Palestinians it is easier to simply praise the knife until it all blows over. The knife terrorism campaign has, since September, left 27 Israelis (and one American) dead and over 250 wounded. But 170 Palestinians have died (65 percent of them while attacking). Palestinian media depicts unsuccessful attacks that result in attackers being killed or wounded as Israeli attacks against random (and innocent) Palestinians. Over all the knife terrorism does nothing for the Palestinians except increase their poverty and Fatah propaganda about how glorious it is to die.

Read it.

The U.S. government has yet another intelligence scandal on its hands. It’s an old complaint, one that became common during the Cold War. In short the president and his staff do not agree with intelligence reports relating to ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) and have frequently (and quietly) ordered them modified to conform with the more optimistic assessment the president wants. In response dozens of intelligence analysts and managers began complaining more and more, often to the media, that the intel reports the government was passing out were false but no one had the guts or clout to shut down this censorship program.

This sort of thing has long been a problem with intelligence agencies and it became acute during the Cold War. The CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) is responsible (since the late 1940s) for collecting, analyzing and reporting intel any problems with accuracy. The accuracy of this work is a matter of life and death because these reports, passed on to the Department of Defense and Congress are used as the basis for making all sorts of decisions. Keeping all this intel honest is a primary mission of the CIA. But the CIA track record is not all that great. There have been other problems as well, like the increasing likelihood of being found out.

Read it.

The following news report aired on Spiegel TV Magazine — that is, it’s a German MSM production from a redoubt of political correctness. You can see the usual Multiculti tilt in it — for example, the Maghrebian business owners welcome police intervention, because these newcomers are criminal riffraff — not like the earlier generations of immigrants who have integrated so well into German society!

And the Spiegel producers assiduously avoid examining the religious affiliation of the pickpockets, which leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The perpetrators from Morocco are obviously Muslims. But what about the criminal families based in Romania that send their trainees on a sort of journeyman tour of Europe? Surely they are Roma, whose small-group pickpocket predations are well-known across Europe, and in fact wherever Roma turn up. Are the Roma really cooperating with and training Moroccan pickpockets? Or are they two separate criminal cultures that just happen to infest German public transportation at more or less the same time?

Read it.

Presently, the best climate models fall many orders of magnitude short of the power and intricacy needed to effectively predict the long-term climate patterns that emerge from the interactions of all these planetary systems. And that’s not a failure of science; it’s just the reality of how tough the problem is.

Predictions are made by building models using the smartest simplifications we have thought of and running them on the most powerful computers ever built. Basically, it’s the best we can do right now.

But there is a major failure of science going on.

The failure is the lack of transparency and honesty about how feeble these models are and how much we should stake on their all-too-fallible forecasts. Thus the same problem continues: climate science has once again botched a prediction that its models were underequipped to make.

Read it.

A convicted murderer who was released Friday after 30 years in prison was arrested Sunday for allegedly beating his mother to death in her home.

Black lives matter … except to black people.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

President Obama’s Department of Education has been waging a seven-year war against for-profit colleges. So it’s a lesson in the self-interested ways of the modern regulatory state to see a veteran of that war now seeking to profit from education.

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The University of Phoenix was once educating close to half a million students but last month reported an enrollment below 180,000. And with Apollo recently trading below book value, it might be a real bargain—especially for an investor betting that the next Administration might go easier on for-profit colleges. Now comes news that Apollo will be sold to several private equity firms. And coincidence of all coincidences, after the sale closes the company will be run by a former top official in the Obama education department, the same outfit that led the attack on Apollo.

Gee, funny how that works.

To summarize, an Obama pal is the day-to-day boss of a department that succeeds in destroying 90% of the value of a politically targeted company. Then he leaves government, buys the company at a fire-sale price and announces that the problems that attracted so much negative government attention are ending—just in time for a new Administration that might not hate for-profit education as much as this one. Government mediation sure can be a lucrative business model.

Read it.

Well, duh — that’s what supposed to happen when you’re stabbed with a samurai sword.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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The 1998 Travel and Transportation Reform Act, which mandated the use of travel cards, ironically intended to simplify government employees’ purchases. But since each government agency manages its own employees’ cards, there is no uniform oversight of misuses. Over the years, whistleblowers shed light on the corruption of the travel card, agency by agency.

The most recent culprit is the Pentagon. From July 2013 to June 2014, Pentagon employees spent nearly $ 1 million at casinos using their travel cards. Also, employees spent more than $96,000 at “adult entertainment establishments.” Out of the 4,000 individual transactions, only 41 received punishment and a “letter of reprimand.”

Read it.

The best way to understand the Islamic State (ISIS) is to see it as the next phase of al-Qaeda. All Sunni Islamic jihadi groups—Boko Haram, ISIS, Taliban, al-Shabaab, al-Qaeda, even Hamas—share the same motivations based on a literal and orthodox reading of Islamic history and doctrine: resurrecting a caliphate (which existed in various forms from 632 to 1924) that implements and spreads the totality of sharia, or Islamic law.

Accordingly, ISIS’s notorious atrocities—beheading, crucifixion, sexual enslavement, and destruction of non-Sunni places of worship—are being committed by other jihadi groups (e.g., Boko Haram and al-Shabaab, both of which pledged allegiance to ISIS) and even by some Muslim governments (e.g., Saudi Arabia) and individual Muslims around the world.

Just in case you’ve been distracted by things like the Superbowl and the Presidential election and have somehow forgotten that there is a large group of people out there working to enslave us. Just a reminder.

My, what a surprise!

In principle, mens rea—Latin for “a guilty mind”—means the government must prove not only that a crime was committed, but also that the perpetrators knew they were breaking the law. In practice, this important component of due process has been ignored by federal and state lawmakers who have created numerous exceptions in the criminal code. Laws criminalizing sex with underage minors, for instance, often have no mens rea test: a person can be found guilty of having sex with a minor, even if he had every reason to believe the minor was of consenting age (even if, for instance, she lied and said she was older, as was the case for Zach Anderson).

One might expect the ACLU to cherish mens rea and advocate its application in more cases. If the government was universally required to prove that defendants understood the criminal nature of their acts, fewer people would be convicted. Fewer young, poor, and minority defendants would be railroaded for petty offenses, drug crimes, and zero tolerance weapons violations.

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The elites know what they want: a trackable record of every transaction that happens on planet Earth. Those who stand in the way or object are just facilitating “bad guys.” Some evidence this week from Harvard University, where Peter Sands, president emeritus of Harvard, has issued a new paper on the topic of “Making it Harder for the Bad Guys: The Case for Eliminating High Denomination Notes.”

Who cares? It’s all just paper, and equally worthless, no matter what number is on the face. It’s only worth something because some government stands behind it with a gun — and even that doesn’t always work, as Zimbabwe and half a dozen South American kleptocracies have found out.

Read it.

Yesterday a judge sided with the FBI, ordering Apple to not exactly create a back door to bypass its encryption, but pretty damn close. The judge has ordered Apple to assist the FBI by making it possible to bypass or deactivate the auto-erase function that deletes the contents of the phone after too many failed password attempts; to allow the FBI to electronically submit passcodes rather than manually; and to eliminate any delays in the system between password attempts. The demands are clearly designed so that the FBI would be able to try to brute force the password by attempting every possible number combination. (You can read the full order and some technical analysis at Techdirt here).

…

What Cook doesn’t say but should be extremely obvious is that even if Apple creates only one of these devices for the government, the feds will most certainly try to backwards-engineer the tool to figure out how to replicate it. We have seen every single surveillance authorization given to the federal government abused and expanded to snoop on citizens for inappropriate reasons and without due process. There’s no reason to believe the same thing won’t happen here and that the justification for breaking encryption won’t be defined downward from “terrorist who killed 14 people” to “suspected drug dealer” or what the FBI defines as a domestic “extremist.”

If history tells us anything, it is that, when it comes to the ‘slippery slope’ argument, every government employee comes dipped in butter and ready to roll.

The Devil roams about the world like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, steadfast in the faith.

Read it.

First, the new post-inversion company will typically chose to bring more of their foreign earned income back to the U.S. than they would as an American based company. This is because they are no longer subject to the international taxation system of the U.S. tax code, and as the study notes, this means money invested in the U.S. economy.

In other words, if an American company owns a foreign company, the American company has to pay taxes on its operations and that of the foreign company, even if the foreign company didn’t do any business in the U.S. (Thanks a lot, Congress.) The other way around, the American company and the foreign company only have to pay taxes in the places where they have operations, which is HOW THE REST OF THE WORLD WORKS.

Second, post-inversion company typically pays more in revenue to the US treasury post- inversion, even as their marginal tax rate decreases.  It is important to note that the hysteria that inverted companies are abandoning the U.S., post-inversion companies continues to pay taxes on their U.S. operations.

Lastly, the authors found concerns over earnings stripping – the transferring of assets to low-tax jurisdictions – is overstated and not used to the extent that critics of inversions contend.

Read it.

A suspect in the New Year’s Eve sex attacks in Düsseldorf has been arrested after the woman he is accused of assaulting identified him in a documentary.

The 18-year-old woman, who has not been named, spotted the 33-year-old Moroccan man when he appeared on a documentary about petty crime called “King of the Pickpockets” on Spiegel TV.

She reported him to police and he was arrested on Saturday morning.

Steve Sailer reviews the scene.

Outright made-up-data fraud is hardly unknown in academia, but the double disasters have more to do with shortcomings in how contemporary researchers analyze relatively honest data. I suspect that the systemic failures stem more from researchers being allowed both too many and too few of that evocative (if actually rather dry) technical term: “degrees of freedom.”

…

In contrast, in what I’ll dub the Repetition Crisis (a.k.a. the Explanation Crisis), academics hamstring the interest and usefulness of their findings by ruling out ahead of time any explanatory factors other than the same tiny number of politically correct concepts that were exhausted decades ago.

…

For example, in discussing crime or poverty, social scientists are allowed to imply that the dirt that white people live upon is inherently magic while the dirt under black people is obviously tragic. But anything smarter and more interesting could get them furiously denounced by angry know-nothing students (or Watsoned out of their jobs if they lack tenure). So it’s safest just to blame everything and anything on white people.

Still, as the generations roll by, that’s increasingly sounding like a senile conspiracy theory. In 2016, blaming white privilege for everything you don’t like isn’t quite as lame as blaming the Bavarian Illuminati, but the gap is closing.

Read it.

The following article from Die Welt concerns the appearance of a new culturally enriched motorcycle gang in Germany that aims to rival the Hells Angels and other established gangs in violence and criminal activity.

The biker gangs are called “rockers” in Germany, a leftover term from early-sixties Britain. Nash Montana, who translated the article, says: “These enrichers don’t even use bikes. They probably don’t even know how to hold up a bicycle.”

Read it.

The barbaric and elusive Chechen commander who recruited British executioner “Jihadi John” has moved to Sirte, Libya to assume control of ISIS operations in the terrorist organization’s metastasizing Mediterranean caliphate.

Read it.

Islam Buheiry is one of those rare birds, a genuine Islamic reformer. Notice that what he wants to do isn’t a “reformation” of Islam, but a reinterpretation of its core texts in the hadith and the sira. It’s a tough job, and I doubt that he and people like him will ever succeed — the Koran says what it says, after all, and the violence and misogyny of Islam are clearly laid out in numerous hadith. Many (if not most) of them would have to be purged completely to make Islamic doctrine less inherently violent. Yet there’s no doubt that he is putting his life on the line in what may well be a futile endeavor.

Before you jump all over him for what he’s attempting to do, bear in mind that the gate of ijtihad (independent interpretation of Islamic scriptures) has been closed for more than a thousand years, and any reopening of it will be attempted within Islam itself. That is, you and I and other non-Muslims will have no input into the process, and no say whatsoever in whether it will succeed. All we can do is quarantine Islamic countries and keep Muslims out of our societies until the unlikely occasion when such reinterpretation occurs.

Read it.

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

Peter Tatchell is one of the most prominent and vocal gay rights activists in England, participating in causes and actions going back to the 1970s. He famously attempted a citizen’s arrest of extremely anti-gay Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe when the leader was visiting London. He was actually attacked and injured by Mugabe’s guards during a second attempt to arrest the man in Brussels in 2001. He has a lengthy history of support for LGBT causes, peaceful causes, and all sorts of left-leaning positions.

But he signed a letter opposing behavior by students in colleges in the United Kingdom who were attempting to deny the ability of speakers to discuss ideas with which they did not agree, so screw him. If Tatchell doesn’t support driving out speakers who hold unpopular views, then he shouldn’t get to speak either. So the argument apparently goes. Tatchell is supposed to give a speech today at Canterbury Christ Church University on “re-radicalizing queers.” But his support for open platforms for free speech are not queer enough for the National Unions of Students’ LGBT rep.

Read it.

Read it.

Then there is the model that Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, have pursued — with astonishing success. For them, politics is the family business. There is no distinction between business careers and political careers. Holding and serving in public office provides a platform from which they can monetize experience, connections and prominence. And then they use the wealth gained through, say, speaking engagements and media tours, to lay the groundwork for the next campaign. Electoral office, business, wealth, and public service, all meld together seamlessly.

We got your 1%, right here.

Read it.

Class is back. Arguably, for the first time since the New Deal, class is the dominant political issue. Virtually every candidate has tried appealing to class concerns, particularly those in the stressed middle and lower income groups. But the clear beneficiaries have been Trump on the right and Sanders on the left.

Class has risen to prominence as the prospects for middle and working class Americans have declined. Even amidst a recovery, most Americans remain pessimistic about their future prospects, and, even more seriously, doubt a bright future (PDF) for the next generation. Most show little confidence in the federal government, although many look for succor from that very source.

To understand class in America today, one has to look beyond such memes as “the one percent” or even the concept of “working families.” As Marx understood in the 19thcentury, classes are often fragmented, with even the rich and powerful divided by their economic interest and world view. In our complex 21st century politics, there’s a big divergence among everyone from the oligarchic classes to those who inhabit, or fear they will soon inhabit, the economic basement.

Read it.

The post-9/11 era is rife with what Orwell called “the abuse of language” (“war on terror,” “overseas contingency operations”), but no abuse more obviously illustrates his complaints than the media cliché describing how a moderate Muslim becomes an Islamist: he becomes radicalized. This euphemism (a passive construction in grammatical terminology) denotes almost nothing. Orwell calls it a “verbal false limb,” that is, a device used to “save the trouble of picking out appropriate verbs and nouns.” It has become the default explanation for a phenomenon few want to discuss.

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There is much to dislike about both the passive “was radicalized” construction and the term “radicalization,” which comes from an adjective (radical) turned into a verb (radicalize) and then into a noun. The term “self-radicalized,” which appears to be a reflexive passive verb, if such a thing exists, is even worse.

…

What Gore Vidal called “the popular Fu Manchu theory that a single whiff of opium will enslave the mind” is not a good metaphor for Islamism. Islamism is inculcated over time. Teachers spread it in schools with books. Imams and community leaders reinforce it in mosques and Islamic centers. Some communities ignore it, and some families tolerate it. Sudden Jihad Syndrome only appears sudden to outsiders.

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While many put finding love down to chance, who we are attracted to may have far less romantic origins and instead be down to our genes.

Researchers have discovered the genes that determine how tall we are may also influence the people we are attracted to, with most people being attracted to partners of a similar height to themselves.

Read it.

This is a good overview of the current state of the Shi’a/Sunni conflict, which has been going on pretty much since Muhammad died.

Read it.

This is a fascinating story about how fast medical science is advancing and, most especially, about how individuals who just won’t give up can have an unexpected impact on many lives.

Read it.

This past Sunday on This Week with the former Clinton enabler, the odious Senator Chuck Schumer instructed us in course to be followed in connection with the replacement of Justice Scalia on the Court: “Well, the job, first and foremost, is for the president to nominate and for the Senate to hold hearings and go through the process. You know, the Constitution, Ted Cruz holds the Constitution, you know, when he walks through the halls of Congress. Let him show me the clause that says president’s only president for three years.” The former Clinton enabler let Schumer’s instruction stand without any of the variety of challenges that might be made on the merits.

At Mediaite, Alex Rodriguez calls attention to one challenge that applies specifically to Schumer: “Schumer took the exact opposite stance nine years ago, going out of his way to bluntly tell the George W. Bush administration that he would filibuster any Supreme Court nominee they put forward in the next two years because he didn’t care for the ideology of his previous two nominees.” Rodriguez posts the video below from Schumer’s speech to the American Constitution Society, no less, and dryly observes: “This speech was delivered July 27, 2007. So Schumer – who now balks at the idea of a 300-day delay in appointing a Justice – would have been perfectly okay with filibustering a Supreme Court nominee for 543 days.” Curt Mills makes the same point at the Examiner, as does Ed Morrissey at Hot Air and others elsewhere. It can’t be made too often.

And the same goes for the other bloviators in the Democrite party. They seem to think that there’s one rule for them and another for everybody else, and their contempt for the Low Information Voter is such that they don’t even pretend any more.

Read it.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

A dozen of the UK’s smartest canines are being trained to master the controls of a light aircraft after a nationwide search to find candidates for the experiment.

Full details of the extraordinary venture – which was first reported on by The Independent last year after amateur fliers at a London airfield spotted a dog grappling with aircraft-style controls – can now be revealed.

Kathy Shaidle is delightfully dyspeptic today.

I’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird.

I was going to add, “because I’m Canadian, duh,” but while researching this piece, I learned that Lee’s 1960 novel had long been required reading in British schools—and when it was dumped from the curriculum two years ago, there was a massive freak-out. Hey, England, you have a bunch of your own writers, no? Ah, yes, but Mockingbird’s “otherness” was clearly part of its rather twisted allure across the pond:

The South is an incredibly complex place, but there are British-held stereotypes about its attitude to race and class that this novel could reinforce, and even add to its appeal.

Translation: “American rednecks are evil, stupid, and funny!”