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Wherever you stand on the subject of global warming, pay close attention to one under-reported aspect of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Paris Agreement. I am referring to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which is a financial mechanism intended “to assist developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter climate change.” According to the current estimates, developed countries will be obliged to contribute up to $450 billion a year by 2020 to the GCF, which will then “redistribute” the money to developing countries allegedly suffering from the effects of global warming.

Lo and behold, Zimbabwe’s government-run daily “newspaper” The Herald repored that “Southern Africa is already counting the costs of climate change-linked catastrophes… In Zimbabwe, which has seen a succession of droughts since 2012, a fifth of the population is facing hunger… feeding them will cost $1.5 billion or 11 percent of… the Gross Domestic Product.”

No doubt Robert Mugabe, the 91-year-old dictator who has ruled Zimbabwe since 1980, is salivating at the prospect of some global warming cash. Beginning in 2000, Mugabe started to expropriate privately-held agricultural land. The result of what what is euphemistically called “land reform,” was a monumental fall in productivity and the second highest bout of hyperinflation in recorded history.

PowerLine has it right.

The controversy over the Supreme Court vacancy is entirely predictable and playing out in predictable ways, but as of yet I haven’t seen anyone state the common sense of the subject directly.

I am sure when Democrats tanked Robert Bork in 1987 someone among them—probably even Biden—must have known that what goes around comes around.

Republicans have been waiting 30 years for payback for the shameful rejection of Bork; that day has arrived. Time to pay up, Dems. That’s the only sentence you really need to know. Everything else is mere rhetoric.

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Gröditz is a small town near Dresden in the eastern German state of Saxony. Like most other parts of Germany, the refugees that were welcomed into the area last year have ended up enriching the local culture in unexpected ways, not all of them pleasant.

The following report from Bild describes a attack on amateur soccer players by “refugees” that occurred earlier this month in Gröditz.

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Israel has picked up signs of the beginning of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East as Arab states seek nuclear weapons to counter Iran, the Israeli defence minister has warned.

Moshe Ya’alon said Sunni Arab nations were not reassured by last year’s nuclear deal between Iran and six world powers and were making their own preparations for nuclear weapons.

“We see signs that countries in the Arab world are preparing to acquire nuclear weapons, that they are not willing to sit quietly with Iran on brink of a nuclear or atomic bomb,” Mr Ya’alon said.

The defence minister gave no evidence to back up his claims but Israel closely monitors the military activities of its Arab neighbours.

Israel and the Sunni Gulf countries do not have diplomatic ties but are known to talk through back channels and are united in their opposition to Iran.

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Something that hasn’t been widely recognized is how Germany’s willingness to accept vast numbers of military age youths from Syria is facilitating the various leaderships in Syria to push toward their maximalist ethnic-cleansing goals.

Syria’s long-term problem is that it is highly diverse, with different groups that hate each other (often for good reasons).

Fighting in such situations can go on for a long time, but usually military ambitions run into diminishing returns: e.g., If our tribal enemies hold three watersheds, we can push them out of their most peripheral one fairly easily, their next-most marginal one with more difficulty, but they’ll die in the last ditch to defend their ultimate redoubt because they have nowhere else to go. And that’s a discouraging prospect for militaries on the offensive.

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Summary: The peak oil hysteria provides rich lessons for us today about learning from activists and the value of listening to our major professional institutions. Easy cynicism led people to believe outlandish forecasts, wasting valuable time and resources. Worse, we have had many such barrages by doomsters — aided by their clickbait-seeking enablers in the media — which have left us almost immune to warnings, no matter how well-founded. We can do better.

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On a late Monday morning in this rural New Hampshire town, Dayna and Joe Martin’s four children are all home. Devin, age 16, is hammering a piece of steel in the blacksmith forge he and his parents built out of a storage shed in the backyard. Tiffany, 14, is twirling on a hoverboard, deftly avoiding the kaleidoscope-painted cabinets in the old farmhouse’s living room. Ivy, 10, and Orion, 7, are sitting next to each other using the family’s two computers, clicking through an intense session of Minecraft.

It looks a lot like school vacation, or a weekend. But it’s not. This, for the Martin kids, is school. Or, to put it more accurately, it’s their version of “unschooling,” an educational theory that suggests children should follow their own interests, without the imposition of school or even any alternative educational curriculum, because this is the best way for them to learn and grow.

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The French government has told over 800 refugees currently living in the so-called Calais Jungle that they will be expelled from the camp in the next few days.

The planned clearance of the southern section of the camp will also involve the demolition of three mosques, one church, three schools, a women and children’s centre, youth centre and legal lentre.

Also going is the vaccination centre credited with containing an outbreak of measles in the camp, the Jungle Books Library, a theatre and three hot food distribution points that currently serve 2,000 meals each day.

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More than 350 colleges assigned a book to their freshmen last summer. That is, each college picked one book as a common reading. That book was sent on a large mission. Its first job was to create community among the students by giving them something beyond social networking as a shared experience. The book is also meant to introduce pre-freshmen to college-level reading. Behind this lurks a third hope: engaging the half-hearted so they don’t drop out.

The books college pick, however, often betray these purposes. That’s because the common readings are dull and predictable. When I wrote the National Association of Scholars’ new report, Beach Books: 2014-2016: What Do Colleges and Universities Want Students to Read Outside Class?, I found that the typical assignment is a recent memoir with a simple story told in an even simpler style. This year’s most assigned book was Wes Moore’s The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates (2010). It tells how Moore, a poor black kid on the streets of crime-ridden Baltimore, overcame the odds to become a Rhodes Scholar, a decorated army officer, and a White House Fellow. He discovers a namesake in Baltimore who instead became a crack dealer and convicted murderer. Moore challenges the reader to do something for all the Wes Moores who weren’t as fortunate as he.

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The University of Missouri’s face of campus fascism, communications professor Melissa Click, has been furiously back peddling and apologizing for assaulting a student and calling for “muscle” to physically remove a student journalist from a public space. This campaign to save her job might have worked, had not new police body cam footage shown her in a separate incident screaming at a police officer to “get your f—— hand off me!”

She reminds me of that American chick who got run over by an Israeli bulldozer while training ‘Palestinian’ kids to hate America. (I can never remember her name.)

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Scientists are now able to diagnose the deadly disease using just a single drop of saliva, known as a “liquid biopsy”.

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A British SAS sniper took an Islamic State (Isis) commander’s head clean off as he taught jihadi recruits how to behead captives, according to reports. The marksman fired from over a kilometre away (1,000 metres) to land the shot.

The IS (Daesh) fighter was reported to be in the middle of a drill teaching new soldiers how to execute captives, according to the Daily Express. Some 20 new terror recruits were watching as the fatal bullet struck.

The soldier was operating in the northern Syria a fortnight ago and was using a .338 rifle with tumbling ammo that can cause a huge hole in the body on impact. The sniper had assistance from 12 fellow SAS soldiers, who managed to sneak into a jihadi compound before the shot was fired.

One military insider said: “One minute he was standing there and the next his head had exploded. The commander remained standing upright for a couple of seconds before collapsing and that’s when panic set in. We later heard most of the recruits deserted. We got rid of 21 terrorists with one bullet.”

Now that’s comedy.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, reminds the Low Information Voter of some inconvenient truth.

Knowing how to run a business is not the same thing as knowing economics.  To assume that the two domains of knowledge and expertise are the same is an error equivalent to assuming that a successful NASCAR driver is thereby an expert automotive engineer.  Of course, it’s possible for a successful NASCAR driver to know something about automotive engineering, just as it’s possible for a successful business person to know something about economics.  But success at each of the former tasks (driving a race car and managing a business) is not the same thing as, and requires very little familiarity with, the latter domains of knowledge (automotive engineering and economics).

Unfortunately, a successful business owner will have a good gut-level appreciation of certain economic principles, such as supply and demand, that deludes him into thinking that he knows more about ‘economics’ than he really does.

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Many colleges encourage students to seek mentors, frequently among the faculty. But soon, networking that extends beyond campus will become mandatory at Muhlenberg, and every student will learn this terminology. As part of a required course typically taken during freshman year, students will use a database of alumni and parents to practice networking and recruit mentors who share their interests. The program will begin this fall with a pilot of 80 students.

“The whole idea here is to engage our alumni and parents who have gone through life’s passages,” Williams said. “We’ll have mentors at varying stages of life’s journey available to stimulate our students’ thinking about who they are, who they aspire to be.”

The term ‘institutionalized cronyism’ comes immediately to mind. Not to mention the fact that this seems cleverly designed to replace parents as the go-to source for advice, yet another attempt to detach parents from students’ lives and connect them with institutional substitutes.

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In celebration of Black History Month, the entire student population of a Virginia high school was assembled together in early February and forced to endure the collective guilt-whipping of a four-minute cartoon called “Structural Discrimination: The Unequal Opportunity Race.”

Produced by the African American Policy Forum—which is not a racist organization, because, duh, African Americans cannot possibly be racist—the crudely animated propaganda piece depicts four runners pitted against one another in a track race. A white male, a white female, a brownish male, and a full-blown coal-black dreadlocked female poise crouched at the starting line.

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Yoav Frommer, a leftist who teaches American history in Israel, argues in the Washington Post that Bernie Sanders’ democratic socialism might well become the mainstream view of the Democratic Party before long. I think he’s right. And if he is, it’s likely that the natural course of politics will produce a Bernie Sanders style president and congressional majority in the not too distant future.

And why not? It has happened throughout Western Europe. Great Britain, the nation most akin to ours, descended into socialism pretty rapidly.

Moreover, the attraction of socialism is easy to understand. In effect, it offers the promise of taking wealth from people who, by and large, have earned a lot of it and giving the proceeds to people who have not. Because the latter group vastly outnumbers the former, the mass appeal is obvious.

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When we consider the Groping Jihad that entered public awareness on New Year’s Eve in Cologne, we think of young women as the principal victims of the taharrush attacks by massed “testosterone bombs” in the public spaces of Europe.

However, we could just as readily speak of a “Child-Rape Jihad”, since culture-enriching men really do like their “infidel whores” young. Little girls, mostly, but pre-teen and teenaged boys also figure as likely targets, as exemplified by the horrific attack on a ten-year-old boy in a Viennese public pool. Mothers must be watching their children anxiously now as asylum centers sprout up like mushrooms in middle-class residential neighborhoods all over Western Europe, but especially in Germany and Austria.

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President for life Robert Mugabe wants the UN (meaning America) to provide $1.5 billion per year, to feed Zimbabwean people who are currently going hungry, thanks to his government’s decade long policy of looting and trashing productive farms. Naturally he blames his country’s problems on “climate change”.

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Three men in a Neukölln kiosk were attacked by thirty children and youths. The dispute was over the selling of alcohol.

The Gropiusstadt area in Neukölln is a social hot spot in Berlin South. The Kurdish owner of a snack bar and kiosk was forced to experience that last Sunday evening. Not for the first time, he says.

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We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been tranported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn’t always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

These crops were grown surrounded by massive “fruit walls”, which stored the heat from the sun and released it at night, creating a microclimate that could increase the temperature by more than 10°C (18°F).

Later, greenhouses built against the fruit walls further improved yields from solar energy alone. It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the greenhouse turned into a fully glazed and artificially heated building where heat is lost almost instantaneously — the complete opposite of the technology it evolved from.

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Adam Perkins is a Lecturer in the Neurobiology of Personality at Kings College, which probably means the old Institute of Psychiatry, world centre of psycho-research, where half an hour in the canteen with other researchers is better than most post-graduate courses.

Perkins has put together an interesting thesis: welfare states are shaping up dependency behaviours, generating an increasing number of employment-resistant persons, who contribute very little, soak up resources, and are likely to have more surving work-shy children.

…

The central thesis of the book is that the benefits of a generous welfare state erode work ethics, and that the longer people live under welfarism, the more they depend on those benefits, and the more likely they are to cheat to obtain them. Dependent households have more children: for every 3% increase in UK benefits the number of children born to claimants rises by 1%, mostly due to discontinuing contraception. Perkins lays great stock on the findings of Heckman, Pinto and Savelyev 2013 that childhood disadvantage promotes anti-social behaviour. He argues that welfare dependency increases the number of children likely to be brought up badly, eroding human capital from generation to generation.

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In the company’s original office, with its 1855 safe, overlooked by a photograph of the firm’s founding father, the general manager of parchment and vellum makers William Cowley receives a steady stream of phone calls from sympathisers and customers.

Paul Wright tells them how parchment and vellum are “the earliest writing materials, in use since man stepped out of a cave, wrapped some skins round a few sticks to make a tepee, and started scribbling on his tent walls”. He added: “All of humankind’s history is on parchment and vellum. Magna Carta was written on parchment. The Dead Sea Scrolls: parchment, in 435BC.”

Today, he says, William Cowley, based in Newport Pagnell, Buckinghamshire, may be the only company in the world making “proper” vellum in the proper way – “without any harsh chemicals, by hand and hard, pigging work”.

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It would be helpful if there were another word for “infrastructure”: it’s such an earnest and passive word for the blood vessels of this country, the crucial conveyors and connections that get us from here to there (or not) and the ports that facilitate our trade (or don’t), as well as the carriers of information, in particular broadband (if one is connected to it), and other unreliable structures. The word “crisis” is also overused, applied to the unimportant as well as the crucial. But this country has an infrastructure crisis.

The near-total failure of our political institutions to invest for the future, eschewing what doesn’t yield the quick payoff, political and physical, has left us with hopelessly clogged traffic, at risk of being on a bridge that collapses, or on a train that flies off defective rails, or with rusted pipes carrying our drinking water. Broadband is our new interstate highway system, but not everyone has access to it—a division largely based on class. Depending on the measurement used, the United States ranks from fourteenth to thirtieth among all nations in its investments in infrastructure. The wealthiest nation on earth is nowhere near the top.

A mashup review of six books that will convince you it’s time to buy a missile silo in Wyoming and convert it to a survivalist bunker.

Steve Sailer holds up the fetid corpse of Political Correctness to public view.

Of course, the various certified minorities don’t have much in common and don’t much like one another. The only thing that can keep them on the same page is stoking hatred of the majority.

Naturally, the Flight From White continues. The Census Bureau is seriously considering breaking out a Middle Eastern/North African racial category to save Arabs from the ignominy of being counted as white.

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The government has made one last attempt to screw over a victim of an IRS bank account seizure. The screwing began in December of 2014, when the IRS — despite stating it would not perform forfeitures if there was no clear evidence of wrongdoing — lifted $107,000 from convenience store owner Lyndon McLellan. This was yet another one of the IRS’s “structuring” cases, predicated solely on the fact that multiple deposits under $10,000 were made. ($10,000 triggers automatic reporting to the federal government.)

After the IRS announced it would not be pursuing questionable structuring seizures — thanks mainly to several rounds of negative press — it still continued to pursue McLellan’s case, despite IRS Commissioner John Koskinen telling a Congressional subcommittee that this was exactly the sort of case the IRS would no longer be pursuing.

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The following excerpt from a speech by Czech President Miloš Zeman was recorded at a conference in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. Mr. Zeman had some very politically incorrect words to say about the mass immigration of Muslims into Europe. Once again, it is truly remarkable to hear such sentiments voiced by a sitting (not former) head of state in the European Union.

The man at the podium sitting to President Zeman’s left is Robert Fico, the prime minister of Slovakia, who has said very similar things to his own people on a number of occasions.

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Actually, the crisis is the number of people ignorant of elementary economics who are allowed to write sky-is-falling articles like this one.

Come, let us fisk:

There is a growing societal divide in Vancouver that is threatening its future.

An assertion for which neither evidence nor argument are presented. Granted that it is part of the Narrative that person A having more money than person B is ipso facto a bad thing, just why it might be a bad thing is never backed up. OF COURSE IT’S A BAD THING! DIDN’T YOU HEAR ME? INEQUALITY!  Until your ears bleed. And saying, ‘Yeah? So?’ merely sets off another round of hand-waving.

The city is increasingly becoming an investor haven for the rich. Sure, there are some lucky souls, relatively middle-class people who got into the housing market before prices took off and who are now sitting on a gold mine. Most realize how fortunate they are, the lottery ticket they won.

Much like New York. Or London. Or even San Francisco. I don’t see those cities losing residents like, say, Aleppo or Damascus — the roads choked with handcarts, little children clinging to the skirts of their emaciated mothers, etc.

And they have consciences when it comes to the plight of those who have no hope of buying a house of any description in the city.

How is not being able to buy a house a ‘plight’? Let’s take a look at places where buying a house can be done with pocket change — Detroit, say — and see whether that place is more worth living in than Vancouver. I suspect not. Whatever became of the Narrative trope, Let’s Do Things Like The Europeans? People in Europe don’t expect to be able to buy a house, especially in a hipster part of the city; they rent, as they’ve done for hundreds of years. Don’t hear any whining out of Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, or Vienna, about the lack of housing affordability.

By now, everyone has a fairly clear picture of what is taking place; the confluence of factors that have led to the moment at which we have arrived; the global influx of capital, largely from China; low interest rates, a low Canadian dollar – all of which has created a price ascension that is beyond most people’s comprehension.

Only if you have to take your shoes off to count. The ‘low Canadian dollar’ is the fault of the government (but somehow I suspect that the writer of this article would be glad to give Justin Trudeau a blow job if asked). The ‘global influx of capital’ would, in any other circumstance be celebrated; when it’s housing, it’s a bad thing? How come?

For many young adults, however, the city increasingly represents a place of which they no longer can afford to be a part. Consequently, Vancouver faces an almost existential threat; what happens when the lifeblood of any community, those in their 20s and 30s, decide to leave?

Since when are people in the 20s and 30s ‘the lifeblood of any community’? The lifeblood of any community are people who can afford to buy things in that community and support local businesses; typically people in their 20s and 30s are on the low end of that demographic.

And when people in their 20s and 30s leave, you wind up like the small towns of the Midwest: Unemployment is high, good and services are unavailable, and the local mood is one of quite desperation. If Vancouver were going through the sort of process that, say, Detroic is going through, then there might be a valid point here. But I haven’t heard anything about it. Nor does this author provide any statistics to back up his assertion, as a Real Journalist would. So he’s just blowing hot air up our butts.

This is tiresome, so the rest is left as an exercise for the reader. But it’s just the same old Sky-Falling-Government-Must-Act song and dance we expect out of the Drive By Media these days.

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

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He really looks like a rapist, doesn’t he?

The Purdue Students for Life group has been facing a heavy backlash this week after its members put up posters around campus that focused on how the abortion industry targets black women and their unborn babies for abortions. In coordination with Black History Month, the campaign posters read “Hands Up, Don’t Abort” and “Black Children are an Endangered Race” and included the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter.

On Monday, a small group of pro-abortion students and faculty held a sit-in protest during the pro-life club’s meeting and demanded an apology, LifeNews reported.

Then on Wednesday, the team at Students for Life reported the discovery of a violent threat against pro-lifers by Purdue staff member Jamie Newman. Newman reportedly called for the rape of pro-life women in an online comment on Live Action News.

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I must point out that the city of Elsinore, in which this odious judgment was handed down, is the same that prompted Marcellus to say (in Hamlet): “Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.” To add insult to injury, the legendary Holger Danske, the Danish hero who will awaken to save his country in its time of greatest need, sleeps in the cellars of Kronborg Castle at Elsinore. Surely at least one of Holger’s eyes is now blinking open …?

Reality? We don’t need no stinkin’ reality….

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As a Mexican-American, I can tell you that many Mexican-Americans think that Mexican immigrants who come to the United States illegally are taking advantage—of a porous border, of the social-services safety net, of loopholes in immigration law, and of an insatiable appetite among U.S. employers for cheap and dependable labor. And they’re not wrong about that.

It is one of the most pernicious myths of Identity Politics that Hispanics, especially those of Mexican descent, only have one opinion amongst them. Trump realizes that this is not true, and knows that people of Mexican descent who are in this country legally, either as citizens or legal residents who ran the gauntlet of the current broken immigration ‘process’, don’t have a lot of use for those who crawl across the border.

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Two Escondido, California, high school students—ages 16 and 18—could see their whole lives derailed because they committed the crime of keeping fishing supplies in cars they parked on school property.

The elder teen, Brandon Cappelletti, had three knives in his car: the remnants of a family fishing trip. The knives were used to cut lines and filet fish. The younger teen, Sam Serrato, had a pocketknife in his glove compartment. His father had left it there.

Both teens are facing expulsion. Cappelletti, a legal adult, could serve jail time if convicted of weapons charges, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Who doubts that, if they had been black, they would be free and facing no punishment?

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Is there anything global warming can’t do? Now it seems that there is so much global warming that it is slowing the rise of sea levels.

As glaciers melt due to climate change, the increasingly hot and parched Earth is absorbing some of that water inland, slowing sea level rise, NASA experts said Thursday.

Satellite measurements over the past decade show for the first time that the Earth’s continents have soaked up and stored an extra 3.2 trillion tons of water in soils, lakes and underground aquifers, the experts said in a study in the journal Science.

This has temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20 percent, it said.

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One cause of the fragility is a weak parent-child relationship. Many teens would be the first to tell you that they love their parents. But they are not seriously concerned with what their parents think. Or more precisely, some are more concerned about what their peers think than what their parents think. Others are more concerned about their inflated self-concept than about what their parents think. Kids need to value their parents’ opinion as their first scale of value, at least throughout childhood and adolescence.

If parents don’t come first, then kids become fragile. Here’s why. A good parent-child relationship is robust and unconditional. My daughter might shout at me, “I hate you!” But she would know that her outburst is not going to change our relationship. My wife and I might choose to suspend some of her privileges for a week if she were to have such an outburst, but she would know that we both still love her. That won’t change, and she knows it.

Peer relations, by contrast, are fragile by nature. Emily and Melissa may be best friends, but both of them know that one wrong word might fracture the relationship beyond repair. That’s one reason why Emily is so frantic about checking her text messages every five minutes. If Melissa sends a text and Emily does not promptly respond, Emily is afraid that Melissa may misinterpret her silence as indicating a lack of enthusiasm. In peer relations, everything is conditional and contingent.

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Not long ago, I watched a woman set a carton of Land O’ Lakes Fat-Free Half-and-Half on the conveyor belt at a supermarket.

“Can I ask you why you’re buying fat-free half-and-half?” I said. Half-and-half is defined by its fat content: about 10 percent, more than milk, less than cream.

“Because it’s fat-free?” she responded.

“Do you know what they replace the fat with?” I asked.

“Hmm,” she said, then lifted the carton and read the second ingredient on the label after skim milk: “Corn syrup.” She frowned at me. Then she set the carton back on the conveyor belt to be scanned along with the rest of her groceries.

The woman apparently hadn’t even thought to ask herself that question but had instead accepted the common belief that fat, an essential part of our diet, should be avoided whenever possible.

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Bring it on. We won the last three.

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Oh, that’s all right, then.

(Note; Al Ashar ‘University’ is not a university as civilized people understand the term, but rather a school of Muslim theology.)

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Think of it as evolution in action.

Steve Sailer understands the dialectic.

One of the weirder contradictions of contemporary dogma is the belief that race does not exist combined with the government’s obsession with counting everybody by self-identified race. If race doesn’t exist, you’d think that, say, the Obama Administration would be under a lot of pressure from its supporters to dump the racial/ethnic classification system. Strangely enough, it never seems to occur to all the True Believers to ask their friends running the federal government to change the system.

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As the Antiplanner noted last week, Los Angeles is not the only region experiencing declining transit ridership. Another is Washington, DC, where a recent report from the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA aka Metro) revealed that ridership has fallen to the lowest level since 2004. The agency’s financial situation is so bad that WMATA’s number-two executive has resigned and, ominously, the agency has hired a bankruptcy attorney to help it deal with its problems.

Once again, politicians’ fondness for trains over automobiles will cost the taxpayers millions.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

“Zoe Quinn” was Patient Zero of the #GamerGate controversy. A tattoo-covered, mentally ill ex-stripper whose real name is Chelsea Van Valkenburg, Quinn was the creator of a tediously dull game called “Depression Quest.” She broke up with her boyfriend, a software geek named Eron Gjoni, and allegedly became intimate with a videogame journalist named Nathan Grayson. In August 2014, Gjoni published a nearly 10,000-word article exposing Quinn’s alleged misconduct.

…

There were all kinds of background factors involved, but liberals decided that the narrative was about “misogyny” within the male-dominated videogame industry, and also about women being “harassed” online. We can stipulate both of those points — yes, many videogame dudes are crude sexists, and yes, women are targeted for harassment — without allowing ourselves to be distracted from the essence of #GamerGate, namely that some women are shrewdly exploiting gender as a means of gaining lucrative advantages. The videogame industry would very much like to attract more female players, and this has creates certain incentives that attract cunning opportunists.

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If you look closely at the numbers in the Obama budget proposal, you find that Treasury economists figure that U.S. multinational companies with profits overseas are exploiting the tax code even more than previously estimated–which means even more money would be raised by changing the way U.S. companies’ international profits are taxed.

Oh, so is Obama suggesting that we bring our corporate tax rates in line with other developed nations and encourage American companies to bring that money back home rather than scrambling around for tax shelters overseas? No, of course not.

The Obama plan would require companies to pay that 19% minimum rate to all governments combined, not just the U.S. The taxes that U.S.-based firms pay to foreign governments would count toward the minimum. The less they pay in taxes abroad, they more they’d have to pay to the U.S.

Rather than addressing the basic problem, the administration is trying to nail the doors shut so the livestock can be more easily slaughtered.

It’s hard to say definitively what’s behind this.

No, it’s not. The U.S. government is determined to bleed its businesses as thoroughly as it can, and this is the only area in which appealing to how foreign nations do things doesn’t seem to carry any weight.

It looks like U.S. companies are increasingly skillful at finding low-tax countries in which to book their profits while, for their part, foreign governments are reducing the rates at which they tax business.

And the administration’s actions merely increase the incentives to be even more clever in finding loopholes. The more cornered a victim feels, the more desperate the attempts to escape. And I suspect that companies like Apple can afford better attorneys and accountants than the IRS can.

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As the Super Bowl weekend excitement fades and the Panthers have left California with a loss, at least one player takes a second hit. Since out-of-state athletes are levied with the ‘Jock Tax’, Cam Newton will pay $101,360 on his bonus of $51,000- effectively making his loss one championship ring and roughly $50,000. That’s a bad day.

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Rep. Mike Coffman (R., Colo.), along with Reps. Peter DeFazio (D., Ore.), Jared Polis (D., Colo.) and Dana Rohrabacher (R., Calif.) introduced a bill on Thursday that would eliminate the Selective Service System, which they maintain is outdated and unnecessary.

These lawmakers said they hope Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s decision in December to open all combat positions to women will spark a conversation the necessity of the Selective Service System.

“Now that women are eligible to serve in combat roles and Congress debates how to proceed on the issue of draft inclusion, we should consider a full repeal of the draft and the abolition of the Selective Service,” Mr. Coffman said.

Good news. I personally think that conscription is unconstitutional, being contrary to the clear language of the Thirteenth Amendment.

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Because ISIS totally operates in the North Atlantic. Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Isn’t it time we got rid of NATO, and let the Europeans pay for their own defense?

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They appear on the sand like any piece of sea detritus. Sometimes they’re found, amid the candy wrappers and cracked shells, by volunteers cleaning up the area. Other times a vacationer might glimpse the grisly discard from the corner of her eye, a serene walk along the beach interrupted just like that.

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Sixteen of these detached human feet have been found since 2007 in British Columbia, Canada, and Washington state. Most of these have been right feet. All of them have worn running shoes or hiking boots. Among them: three New Balances, two Nikes and an Ozark Trail.

Perhaps there’s a James Bond villain in his Secret Island Lair out there somewhere who is disciplining his Minions.

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You too can be Politically Correct … for a price.

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Today, the African American Studies Department at the University of California-Irvine is hosting a talk by Sekou Odinga, aka Nathaniel Burns.

Odinga was a member of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party who spent 33 years in prison for attempted murder and for assisting convicted murderer Assata Shakur (Joanne Chesimard) escape from jail. (Shakur remains in exile in Cuba.)

If black people are some separate and hostile polity, then by all means let us treat them as one.

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It seems like so long ago, but really isn’t. In 2013, President Barack Obama acknowledged that the IRS had in fact been directing extra scrutiny to broadly defined right-wing “Tea Party” groups as they applied for various forms of tax-code recognition. In fact, Obama forced out the acting commissioner of the agency and pledged publicly, “I will not tolerate this kind of behavior in any agency, but particularly the IRS given the power that it has and the reach that it has in all of our lives.”

Paul Caron, a Pepperdine University academic who runs the always interesting TaxProf blog, recently celebrated the 1000th day of the scandal, which he argues (convincingly) has never really been covered or investigated fully. After Obama’s first big statements, interest drifted away for the most part and even the president’s bald acknowledgements that something was rotten at the IRS started to be walked back.

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

In a new USA Today column, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit, who’s been linking to TaxProf for the past 1,000-plus days, sums up the social implications of the IRS scandal:

It’s not just that evidence overwhelmingly points to the IRS having been weaponized in an effort to neutralize Obama’s Tea Party opposition. It’s that ordinary Americans can look at this and conclude that there’s no reason to follow the law if they can get away with breaking it since the people in charge of enforcing the law clearly regard it with contempt.