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When Iran freed five American hostages in January, President Obama was hailed by many in the mainstream media for his skillful diplomacy. However, more sober analysts, most notably Arthur Herman, wondered whether the Obama administration had, in effect, paid a ransom for the release of the Americans.

The sense that this was a gussied up case of ransom payment, rather than clever diplomacy, arose not from the $100 billion or so that Team Obama had bestowed on the mullahs through the nuclear deal. By January, this was, effectively, a sunk cost.

Rather, the ransom narrative was fueled by a new sweetener — a $1.7 billion settlement on claims relating to the sale of military equipment to Iran before the 1979 revolution, in the time of the Shah. This claim was for $400 million, the amount of money in a trust fund the U.S. apparently seized. The $1.7 billion settlement includes $1.3 billion in “interest.”

Rep. Mike Pompeo immediately voiced his concern about the payment. In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, he asked: “What is the relationship between the $1.7 billion payment and the release of the hostages?” Pompeo also noted that at least one top Iranian official had described the payment as “a bid to buy freedom of [U.S.] spies held by Tehran”.

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The secret to getting rich is as powerful as it is unexciting: live below your means.

That’s it. The bigger the difference between what you earn and what you spend, the sooner you’ll find yourself with enough money to do what you want with your life.

As with many ‘secrets’ to success, it’s simple but requires too much will-power for most people, which is why there are fewer rich people than there are poor people.

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But they won’t, because it’s too sensible.

The intel was there. But the intel, apparently, went unheeded.

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

Haaretz said that the intelligence agencies had specific warnings about an attack that would take place at the train station. Anyone in the world of intelligence knows that intel of that type should automatically be extrapolated to include airports as well.

Anyone with brains, anyway.

The Israeli concept of security at sites like airports and train and bus stations is called the layered approach.  The defense system is set up to catch unusual threats at the outer periphery.  If the what, or who, is not caught in the outermost layer, it is caught by a layer within.  That means surveying and checking people and possessions even before they enter a terminal.  It is not good enough to simply have a security screening station for people with boarding passes going to their gates.  This screening only protects the planes.

That’s what we have in the U.S. — basically ‘security theater’.

Israel has bolstered its airport and terminal security. They have access to the identifications of passengers before they even arrive at the airport.  They have an outer perimeter on the road which is the first screening layer and then they have numerous other layers.  Outside the terminal any one suspicious looking or acting is stopped and moved away from crowds. Inside the terminal there is more security, screening and cameras watching, once again, for suspicious behavior.

That’s because Israel takes security seriously. Unlike everywhere else.

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Those who preach ideas contrary to the Danish constitution could be stripped of their citizenship if proposals put forward by an anti-immigration party are adopted by the country’s government.

The right-wing Danish People’s Party (DPP) – which currently holds the second most seats in the country’s multi-party parliament – put forward the plans in an attempt to expel outspoken imam Abu Bilal Ismail, the Local says.

Ismail, a leading imam at the Grimhoj mosque in the city of Aarhus, has called for the destruction of Jews and a recent documentary revealed appeared to show him advocating the stoning of adulterous women and the killing of apostates.

Nothing like a national crime wave to wake people up. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

Read it.

Sometimes sanity actually wins one.

The controversy surrounding Quenette’s comments arose on November 12, 2015, during a graduate seminar discussion about race. The previous day, KU held a forum on racial and cultural issues affecting the campus in response to student protests over racial issues at the University of Missouri.

According to an open letter written by some of Quenette’s students, during a part of the discussion focusing on how the graduate students can bring up these issues with their students, Quenette said, “As a white woman I just never have seen racism…It’s not like I see ‘Nigger’ spray painted on walls… .” Later, the topic shifted to minority student retention rates in higher education. During that conversation, Quenette responded to one student who argued that the lower retention rate of black students stems from racism and poor institutional support by saying, “Those students are not leaving school because they are physically threatened everyday but because of academic performance.”

But, of course, this was ThoughtCrime and the Ministry of Truth tried to stuff her down the Memory Hole.

What a surprise.

It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay — a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in “conversational understanding.” The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through “casual and playful conversation.”

Unfortunately, the conversations didn’t stay playful for long. Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay — being essentially a robot parrot with an Internet connection — started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.

Or, more accurately, ‘reality in, reality out’. Funny it is that, when reality conflicts with ‘progressive’ a priori worldview, somehow it’s reality’s fault for being All Wrong.

Read it.

If nothing else, Trump has the virtue of being willing to raise questions that can profitably be raised but which more ‘grown up’ candidates just wouldn’t think to do.

In Twitter posts on Thursday morning, the Republican presidential front-runner called the 67-year-old security organization “obsolete” and complained that the U.S. pays a “disproportionate share” of its cost.

This is an excellent point that ought to be under ongoing discussion but Just Isn’t. There is no more monolithic aggressively expansionist Communist Soviet empire, which is the precise danger that NATO was crafted to resist. The nature and future of NATO, starting with a de novo review of whether it is even needed, ought to have taken place under Bush the Younger, but didn’t. (Democrats, of course, have no objection to the U.S. meddling in other countries’ business, so long as it’s done in furtherance of the ‘progressive’ agenda — South Africa, si! Zimbabwe, no!)

Absent the Soviet menace, NATO is exactly the type of entangling foreign alliance that George Washington so wisely warned against. It allowed the Europeans to cut their military budgets to the bone and grossly expand their spending on social services, with results as you see them. I think it’s high time that we cut them loose and say, ‘Hey, you worried about Russia? Spend your own money.’

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If there’s any doubt in anybody’s mind that the President doesn’t have the back of Western Civilization, his nonchalant attitude in Cuba should dispel it.

Think of it, while Belgian police were shifting through the horrible carnage in Brussels, our President and his elegantly coiffed wife and daughters were doing the “wave” with Raul Castro at a baseball game. Just imagine if George W Bush were still in office and he pulled off a stunt like that.

The game was bad enough. The optics of the entire trip were even worse: nobody was there to greet Air Force One when it landed at Jose Marti International Airport; Castro lectured Obama on the evils of the West; he raised Obama’s arm in a limp salute showing off the American President like a conquered chieftain. The only thing Obama didn’t do was bow at he waist in the presence of a foreign head of state. Maybe he would have if Castro was a Moslem king.

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The quantities of explosives and precursors, the American official said, raised questions about how the terrorists were able to elude detection, especially during a manhunt for Salah Abdeslam, the suspect in the Paris attacks who was arrested last week.

My suspicion is that Belgian authorities were asleep on watch — after all, Islam is a Religion of Peace, so what’s to worry about?

The officials and bomb-disposal technicians requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters.

Where would ‘journalists’ be without these people so eager to talk while unauthorized? Makes you wonder why their bosses even bother.

Mark Steyn shakes his head.

Earlier this month, some, er, high-spirited youths got a bit out of hand in Melbourne and Andrew Bolt wrote about it under the following headline:

Why Did We Import This Danger?

That could be the headline on every one of these stories: Brussels, and Paris, and Copenhagen, and the Cologne rapes and Charlie Hebdo and all the rest. But no matter how high the pile of corpses climbs the question never gets asked – nor does the natural follow-up: Why do we continue to import it?

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The study’s authors do recognize, however, that not all of these jobs will be automated. They explain that “a job is considered to be ‘exposed to automation’ or ‘automatable’ if the tasks it entails allows the work to be performed by a computer, even if a job is not actually automated.”

The jobs in question are mainly low-skilled positions, including jobs in transportation and logistics, office support and manufacturing.

Almost all of whom are Democrats. Welcome to the UnderCrust.

Read it.

It’s time to admit the extent of Europe’s problem with Islamic radicalism. This isn’t mere terrorism any longer, this is guerrilla war.

Just try to get them to admit it.

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“I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here],” one student said. “But this man is being supported by students on our campus and our administration shows that they, by their silence, support it as well … I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school,” she added.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Six years ago, President Obama signed Obamacare into law. Since then, Obamacare has placed patients above politics and has failed time and time again to protect the health and wellbeing of Americans across the country. Here are six of Obamacare’s most alarming failures.

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Police arrested a Longwood, Florida, 12-year-old girl for pinching a male classmate’s butt during school hours. Breana Evans has been charged with misdemeanor battery and was temporarily placed in juvenile detention.

Everybody involved in this story—Breana, her father, the cops, her alleged victim—thinks the arrest is an overreaction. Everybody, except the boy’s mom, who alerted police and demanded that they prosecute.

Her mother, gender aside, is a dick.

The school resource deputy—that’s the police officer who patrols the school—didn’t charge her with a crime because the boy didn’t want to press charges. Instead, Breana was suspended.

But the boy’s mother insisted to police that he was the victim of battery, and so they had no choice but to arrest Breana. She was Mirandized and put in a patrol car. They took her mugshot and booked her into juvenile detention.

The state attorney said that Breana will have to complete community service, submit to drug tests, and take classes. If she does all those things, the charges will eventually be dismissed.

Your tax dollars at work, at the behest of mentally deficient person whose vote counts every bit as much as yours.

So much for democracy.

Read it.

When an industry demands that the government regulate it more strictly, you usually don’t have to look very far to find a barely-hidden agenda. A case in point: The catfish industry has pushed through tighter controls on catfish, citing alleged health and safety concerns. (Summarizing quickly, the revised rules classify catfish—unlike other fish—as “meat” and subject it to stricter inspections.) Patrick Mustain,writing in Scientific American, reports that (a) the industry’s health and safety arguments were weak, and (b) to the extent that those arguments had merit at all, they applied just as much to other sorts of seafood, yet the people pushing the regulations have had no interest in extending them beyond catfish.

“By now,” Mustain concludes, “you’ve probably figured out that consumer safety is not in fact the likely inspiration for this rule.” The actual target was farm-raised catfish from China, Vietnam, and Thailand. The businesses raising catfish in ponds in Mississippi have an easier time meeting the new requirements than the Asian exporters do, so the rules undercut the foreign competition.

Remember that the next time you hear of rich people wanting the government to increase ‘their’ taxes.

Read it.

I knew the whole concept of an entrepreneurship degree was flawed (because you get a degree to get hired by an employer – the antithesis of entrepreneurship).  And I also knew most professors are scam artists who could never work it in the real world, and thus sell worthless, overpriced pieces of paper to naive millennials.  But there was also a piece of me who theorized there MUST be some old timer who retired, made their millions, and just wanted to share their experience to help young, budding entrepreneurs.

…

The truth is 66% of the “entrepreneurship professors'” resumes I searched had NO experience in being entrepreneurs.  The vast majority of them, like all their professor brethren, were the epitome of “those who can’t do, teach.”  Merely bystanders, spectators, studiers-of, and observers of real entrepreneurs in the real world making real change.  Simply the marching band who lacked the talent, skill, and work ethic required to make it on the football team.

Read it.

This just looks way cool. This is Captain Nemo’s other ride.

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Despite many hours of police coaxing, he remained near the top of an 80-foot tall sequoia tree in downtown Seattle early Wednesday, refusing to come down.

CBS affiliate KIRO reports that after 17 hours of the incident, downtown Seattle streets remain closed as officials struggle for a solution to get him out of there.

Who cares? Is that against the law? Was he bothering people?

I must agree with the sign-makers. Leave him alone, for crying out loud.

Check it out.

Because we all need a break from Donald Trump.

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Emory University President James Wagner will not allow an act of pro-Trump political advocacy to go unscrutinized: the administration will review security footage in hopes of identifying the person or persons who committed the heinous act of scribbling “Trump 2016” in chalk all over campus.

Haters gotta hate.

The messages horrified many students on campus, who complained to Wagner’s office that they felt intimidated and unsafe. In response, Wagner tepidly endorsed the perpetrator’s free speech rights while making every effort to assuage the offended students’ fears.

But that’s not the end of the story: Wagner also announced that he would review security footage in hopes of identifying the perpetrators and subjecting them to the “conduct violation process,” according to The Emory Wheel. If the perpetrators are not students, trespassing charges will be filed.

Free speech for we but not for thee.

Read it.

Now try to figure out how the facts reported in the article support the conclusion reached in the headline.

The Chattering Classes seem to regard as an intuitively obvious law of nature that the candidate with more money will ‘buy’ the election, yet the available evidence suggests that this is far from true (Jeb Bush, call your campaign committee). In fact, the facts seem to indicate that not all the money in the world will help when the voters just aren’t in the mood — Arianna Huffington’s ex-husband’s campaign for the Senate being the poster child for such efforts.

I think that the supposed power of money to dominate elections, like the supposed power of money to improve education, is just a popular delusion, assumed rather than actually demonstrated.

Read it.

If you are a Jane Jacobs fan, as I am, this will interest you.

… though widely celebrated for her insights and unabashed embrace of dense urbanism, Jacobs may ultimately prove more influential than relevant. Her writing was often incisive and inspiring, particularly when she opposed planning and overdevelopment and embraced the role of middle-class families in cities. But the urban revival that has actually taken place is at variance with her own romantic version of cities and how they work.

Mark Steyn says what needs to be said.

The bloodbath in Brussels? As I said to Hugh Hewitt on a previous occasion, all the stories are different, and yet they’re all the same. And, alas, it becomes harder to mourn the dead when we never avenge them. No doubt that narcissist wanker who plays “Imagine” is already dragging his piano to the airport or the metro.

In fact, somebody did. Can Mark pick ’em, or can Mark pick ’em?

In Brussels, the terrorists blew up the area outside the secure zone. Which was entirely predictable.

…

Clearly we need a secure zone outside the secure zone – maybe, say, outside the concourse. So everyone has to crowd on the sidewalk. And then when they blow that up we can move it back to the perimeter of the airport. And then…

…

This isn’t Belfast. It can’t be held down to “an acceptable level of violence”. In the long-term, there’s no assimilation, only civilizational suicide.

Read it.

Belgians and all Europeans are looking around themselves today with renewed apprehension, having been reminded once more by the attacks in Brussels about their vulnerability to terrorism that arises from within their midst. They’ve allowed parallel societies to emerge, and now they fear that the problem can only grow.

It was only fitting, for example, that when police arrested the suspected terrorist Salah Abdeslam in the gritty Molenbeek neighborhood of Brussels late last week, across town, European Union leaders were meeting at the plush EU Commission headquarters to discuss the immigration crisis that bedevils Europe.

Fitting because the Molenbeek neighborhood represents the division and separation that exist in European society, and why there is a fear that migrants arriving in Europe in their hundreds of thousands could find in such places networks ready to radicalize those migrants.

Read it.

For San Francisco’s many discontents, tech is a boogeyman, an “inescapable” presence, per The New York Times. But the tech monster is only an agent of chaos. The real fright-feature is the lack of housing. And the nightmare behind it is other people.

Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan has a wake-up call for San Francisco: Responding to David Streitfeld’s story in the Times, Nolan says that tech isn’t the problem, at least not the way that the Times paints it. The problem is that San Francisco won’t build housing, and making matters worse, residents work tirelessly to prevent more housing from being built.

“Acting in a way that prevents everyone else from living in your pretty little city because you already have a place that you like does not make you a progressive,” he writes. “It makes you greedy.”

Well, really, the two are hardly incompatible. Most ‘progressives’ are pretty damned greedy, in my experience.

It was not a pretty sight.

AND AS I STARED I COUNTEHHHD

THE WEBS FROM ALL THE SPYDURRRS

CATCHEENG THEENGS AND EATING THEIR INSYDES

LIKE INDECISION TO CALL YEUUUWWWW

AND HEAR YOUR VOICE OF TREEEZAWNNN

WILL YEW COME HOME AND STOP THIS PAIN TUHNYTE

STOP THIS PAIN TUHNYTE

I called up a few linguists and music historians to try to get at the heart of the pop-punk voice. But it turns out that when you make a linguist listen to a Blink-182 song, you get more than you expected. Pop-punk vocals are on the forefront of shifting regional dialects and, especially, a major vocal change happening in California in the past few decades. The three-minute pop-punk song, one of the dumbest forms of music ever conceived (in a good way, I’d say), maybe isn’t so dumb, after all.

Sort of like listening to Hillary Clinton giving a speech.

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… a federal lawsuit claims that the Seattle-based coffee giant deliberately underfills its lattes by approximately 25 percent.

The horror! The horror!

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The National Union of Students’ LGBT Campaign—a coalition of British student-activists—passed a motion to end committee representation for gay men, because they aren’t as oppressed as other LGBT individuals: like students of color and transgender students.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Hint: No.

They obviously do not succeed fully, and in many cases they fall so far short of success that their “virtue laws” are a laughing stock notwithstanding severe penalties provided for convicted violators. Although prostitution has been outlawed far and wide, for example, it has been practiced just as pervasively. Likewise for gambling. Indeed, in many cases, as in states with state-sponsored lotteries, the state has not forbidden gambling as such, but only private gambling that competes with the state’s own gambling enterprises, thereby making a mockery of the idea that it seeks to discourage a vice. An entire sector of the underground economy is involved in supplying the active demands of people who wish to use drugs, patronize prostitutes, gamble, or otherwise engage in “vicious” behavior the state has outlawed. So, at best, the state’s attempt to enforce virtuous behavior is a flop everywhere the state makes such an attempt.

Read it.

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

The attacks come just a few days after Salah Abdeslam was arrested in Brussels for orchestrating the terrorist attacks in Paris last year.

Read it.

Clinton and Obama tout a 1996 “gun buyback” that was actually a compensated confiscation of self-loading rifles, self-loading shotguns, and pump-action shotguns in response to the Port Arthur mass shooting. The seizure took around 650,000 firearms out of civilian hands and tightened the rules on legal acquisition and ownership of weapons going forward.

As a result, concluded one academic assessment, “Suicide rates did not fall, though there was a shift toward less use of guns, continuing a very long-term decline. Homicides continued a modest decline; taking into account the one-time effect of the Port Arthur massacre itself, the share of murders committed with firearms declined sharply. Other violent crime, such as armed robbery, continued to increase, but again with fewer incidents that involved firearms.”

I guess the guns weren’t killing people all by themselves after all — although you wouldn’t know it to hear ‘progressives’ talk.

What the law couldn’t do—what prohibitions can never accomplish—was eliminate demand for what was forbidden. And demand has an inescapable habit of generating sources of supply. If that demand can’t be legally satisfied, it will be met through black market channels.

In Australia, part of the supply of banned firearms comes from defiance of the original prohibition. The Sporting Shooters’ Association of Australia estimates compliance with the “buyback” at 19 percent.

The problem with democracy is that people often don’t shut up and do what they’re told by ‘democratic’ politicians.

“Police admit they cannot eradicate a black market that is peddling illegal guns to criminals,” the Adelaide Advertiser conceded a few years ago. “Motorcycle gang members and convicted criminals barred from buying guns in South Australia have no difficulty obtaining illegal firearms – including fully automatic weapons.”

Mission accomplished, I guess. You’d think America didn’t find out from Prohibition what happens when governments ban things that people want: crime and violence as ‘black markets’ take over. (‘Black market’ is, of course, a Ruling Class scare-term designed to denigrate free markets where government doesn’t want free markets to be.)

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Why does South Africa need armed forces to begin with? The country is a regional hyper-power. There is no earthly way in which any of South Africa’s neighbors—the microscopic Lesotho, impoverished Mozambique and Swaziland, starving Zimbabwe, and sparsely populated Namibia and Botswana—could ever threaten its national security.

…

Three reasons come to mind. First, the nation’s military is a massively inefficient jobs program that soaks up some of the country’s unemployed and a patronage system that provides sinecures to the lackeys of the ANC government. Second, it offers marvelous opportunities for self-enrichment to the country’s corrupt elite, which negotiates arms purchases from foreign suppliers.  Third, it is a status symbol. All serious nations have a military and so must South Africa—whether it needs one or not.

The giant waste that is the South African military is not new. It was a massive burden on the country’s economy under apartheid and, shock and horror, under Nelson Mandela. In fact, a comprehensive revamping of the country’s military was the first (yes, first) large spending project embarked upon by the newly-elected African National Congress government in 1994. One of the main beneficiaries of that titanic boondoggle was South Africa’s current president, Jacob Zuma.

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

Read it.

For the most part, colleges and universities have changed very little since the University of Bologna gave the first college lectures in 1088. With the exception of Massive Open Online Courses, or MOOCs—free lectures and courses on the Internet—most university learning still requires students to put their butts in seats for a certain number of hours, complete a list of courses, and pass tests demonstrating that they learned from those courses (or were able to successfully cram for over the course of a few days).

But a new model is upending the traditional college experience, and has the potential to change the way universities—both new and old—think about learning.

Called competency-based education, this new model looks at what students should know when they complete a certain degree, and allows them to acquire that knowledge by independently making their way through lessons. It also allows students who come into school with knowledge in a certain area to pass tests to prove it, rather than forcing them to take classes and pay for credits on information they already know.

And about fargin time, too.

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The following story concerns the Islamization of German soccer, and particular the intimations of beheadings that players are apt to direct at their opponents.

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Not long ago the French Police finally cracked down on “The Jungle”, the squalid shantytown near Calais thrown together by illegal immigrants. At least some of the migrants thus displaced have now made their way to Paris, where they are determined to begin a new life for themselves — camped out in the space underneath an elevated Metro station.

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Operation Magic Carpet was the first major airlift of Jews to the newly independent Israel. In 1949, more than 50,000 were flown from Yemen in secret flights before the operation was officially unveiled amid much publicity as a declaration of the Jewish State’s commitment to bring its people home.

Israel recreated the mission in recent days, once again flying Jews out of Yemen. The number this time was 19, reflecting how the community has dwindled in the intervening years. About 50 more refused to leave, preferring to stay on in a country enmeshed in a bitter civil war.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

One of the most common arguments for mass immigration is ethnic restaurants. Immigrants from Thailand, for example, introduced the now ubiquitous Thai restaurants.

But, one thing that strikes me is that Thai restaurants haven’t improved all that much since the 1980s, while Italian restaurants, despite not much immigration from Italy, have continued to improve.

One reason for this is that most of the Thai immigrants working in Thai restaurants don’t really care about cuisine. They care about moving to America to make more money, and working in a Thai restaurant is just something Thais do for the money when they come to America. In contrast, a fair fraction of the relatively small numbers of Italians who move to America today are Italian cooking fanatics intent on bringing higher standards to Italian restaurants in America.

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Further evidence that the F-35 is a flying piece of shit.

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And that’s a good thing.

Cataracts, a protein buildup that clouds the lens of the eye, is the leading cause of blindness around the world. In most cases the patient will eventually need surgery to replace the clouded lens with an artificial one, and for the 20 million people worldwide per year who get the surgery, it doesn’t always fully repair their vision—many patients still need glasses or contacts. Now researchers have designed a surgical technique that uses the body’s own stem cells to regenerate a functional lens, a less invasive procedure than the current treatment.

Read it.

“The very fact that Lois Lerner isn’t in prison right now is proof of political interference at the highest levels. Lerner lied to congress, committed, contempt, and engaged in obstruction of justice on a massive scale. Yet nothing happen to her.”

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

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A group of around 40 millionaires wrote to Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and senior legislators, calling on them to consider raising taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents to help address poverty and other problems.

This is not about providing more money for addressing ‘problems’, which these people could easily do merely by donating large amounts of their own money to the State for such purposed. No, this is about forcing other people to spend money on this crowd’s priorities, whether they like it or not. The ‘problem’ is merely the excuse; it’s the coercion they like.

“As a businessman and philanthropist and as a citizen of New York State, I believe we need to invest in our people and our infrastructure,” said Mr Hindery, the managing partner of InterMedia Partners, a media industry private equity fund.

This is, of course, horseshit. Government spending is not ‘investment’, because investments bring returns; government spending is by definition ‘consumption’, as any Real Economist will tell you. This guy knows that — he’s just betting that Low Information Voters will not.

The Associated Press said the so-called one-percent plan would create new, higher tax rates for those making $665,000 or more.

And that reveals the Secret Agenda. It’s not about ‘soaking the rich’, but about ‘soaking the almost-rich so that they won’t actually get rich’. Similarly, large companies favor extensive government regulations because they know that their revenues are enough to cover the costs, but that smaller firms that might prove a threat will be forced to the wall by the expense.

There is no more loathsome a snake than the rich man who calls for higher taxes.

Read it.

The past few months have been desperately sad for the music industry with the loss of the likes of Motörhead’s Lemmy, David Bowie and The Eagles’ Glenn Frey.

To ‘celebrate’ their lives, one man has set up a radio station that only plays hits by dead musicians. The criteria to be played on the online-only station, called Radio Dead, is for one member of the group to be deceased. According to Sky News, former Capital and Virgin Radio DJ Steve Penk is behind the ‘joyous’ station.

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The movie Brooklyn portrays the type of housing many of our grandparents and great-grandparents lived in when they emigrated to the United States. People of very little means could afford to live in cities with the highest housing demand because they lived in boarding houses, residential hotels, and low-quality apartments, most of which are illegal today. Making housing affordable again requires not only permitting construction of more new units, but also allowing existing housing to be used in ways that are illegal under today’s codes.

Young adults living in group houses with several roommates have found a way around these regulations, but low-income renters were better-served when families and single people could pay for housing that was designed to meet their needs at an affordable price. Alan During explains the confluence of interest groups that successfully eliminated cheap, low-quality housing:

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It was undoubtedly George W. Bush’s fault.

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Billy Maddox planted 100 acres of Roundup Ready soybeans this year. The big news is he didn’t pay Monsanto a dime.

It’s been 20 years since Monsanto developed its first genetically modified crops. Now some of its early patents are starting to expire, leading to the first “generic GMOs”—off-patent seeds that cost half as much and which farmers are free to save and replant.

Maddox is a seed dealer who works with conventional varieties. This year was the first time he ever sold any GMOs. From the acres he planted he was able to collect thousands of bags of seeds genetically engineered to resist glyphosate, the weed killer Monsanto markets as Roundup.

“We cleaned it, bagged it, and sold it. I tried to make a little bit of money,” says Maddox, speaking in a Southern drawl as he drives down a road somewhere near Jonesboro, Arkansas. “Oh yeah, the farmer saves money. If they buy it from me this year, they can plant for themselves next year.”

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The researchers have created a novel nanosheet – a thin layer of semiconductor that measures roughly one-fifth of the thickness of human hair in size with a thickness that is roughly one-thousandth of the thickness of human hair – with three parallel segments, each supporting laser action in one of three elementary colors. The device is capable of lasing in any visible color, completely tunable from red, green to blue, or any color in between. When the total field is collected, a white color emerges.

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Last fall, I proposed my “simplistic theory of left and right”:

1. Leftists are anti-market.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of market outcomes.  No matter how good market outcomes are, they can’t bear to say, “Markets have done a great job, who could ask for more?” 

2. Rightists are anti-leftist.  On an emotional level, they’re critical of leftists.  No matter how much they agree with leftists on an issue, they can’t bear to say, “The left is totally right, it would be churlish to criticize them.”
But even I’m shocked by how well my simplistic theory fits the 2016 election.  On the Republican side, Trump has steamrolled the competition.  How?  Though his concrete policy proposals are few and fluid, he’s expressed minimal interest in free-market ideas.  How then has Trump won over the rank-and-file?  By doing everything in his power to spite the left: teasing, trolling, ribbing, and scaring feminists, Hispanics, Muslims, protestors, and so on.  In a sense, Trump’s main campaign promise is to keep liberals awake at night – and he’s already fulfilling it.

On the Democratic side, matters are slightly more complicated.  Anti-market ideologue Bernie Sanders has pulled anti-market pragmatist Hillary Clinton noticeably to the left, but Hillary’s going to win.  How does this fit with my view that antipathy toward markets is the driving motive of the left?  Because much of Clinton’s support is strategic.  It’s very plausible that 20% of Hillary voters actually prefer Sanders.  They’re voting for her despite their sympathies because they think she’s more likely to win the general election.  In contrast, almost no one who prefers Hillary is voting for Sanders because they think he has better prospects in the general election.  In polls, the Clinton/Sanders/other breakdown is roughly 50%/40%/10%.  So if 20% of Hillary voters and 0% of Sanders voters are strategic, the sincere breakdown is 40%/50%/10%.  Sanders really is the soul of the Democratic Party.

Compare this with Scott Adams’ ‘Master Persuader’ analysis that I’ve been reporting here. These are interesting times.

Read it.

Urban areas might have reached “peak millennial.” As housing costs stay high and youth unemployment lags behind the general unemployment rate, older millennials have looked toward lower-cost suburbs with economic opportunity. Urban NIMBYism and government restrictions that drive up rents have pushed away millennials.

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

Read it.

Because it’s run by a government agency, of course.

Last year, the Washingtonian published a long investigative piece on the roots of Metro’s problems. The story found that the system has a toxic work environment, and employees charged with keeping the system in good repair know they’ll never be fired so they have no incentive to do their jobs well. Meanwhile, in the past, as dangerous maintenance issues were left ignored, managers stayed focused on petty issues, like making sure workers “wore their uniforms correctly and used Metro-issued microwaves to cook food instead of their own.”

And Democrats want people like these in charge of our health care. Think TSA.