Raymond Ibrahim lays out some inconvenient truth.

In the ongoing struggle between Islam and the West, one civilization has the will to triumph, but not the way; the other has the way to triumph, but not the will.

Some who dread Islam do not seem to understand this. They think that Islam is an irresistible force to be reckoned with; they see Muslim migrants as hordes of violent men invading Europe; they call on Western men to make a stand, resist the onslaught, save their women and children.

When only one side in a war is actually fighting, guess who wins?

Read it.

(Who better to track that particular spoor than the New York Times?)

Collectively, these microyuppies are just as strong in their ranks as their progenitors, if not more so. Three decades ago, the yuppie was viewed as a self-interested alien invader in an America that had experienced a solid 20 years of radical activism and meaningful progress in civil rights and women’s liberation. A generation and a half later, we have so deeply internalized the values of the yuppie that we have ceased to notice when one is in our midst — or when we have become one ourselves.

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Environmental alarmists are worse than pit bulls with a bone when it comes to refusing to let go of any random myth or misinformation they happen to pick up. Sometimes it appears that their chief targets are any modern technologies that are particularly useful to humanity. Last month, a really stupid Moms Across America study reported that it had found parts per billion (ppb) of the herbicide glyphosate in organic wines. Basically, the chemophobes found the presence of glyphosate that was between 10 and 3,000 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold. And never mind that drinking alcohol is a considerable risk factor for developing many kinds of cancer.

So a new set of environmentalist pit bulls calling themselves the Alliance for Natural Health USA is reporting that they tested a bunch of commercial brands of cereals, some eggs, bagels, and coffee creamers. What horrors did they uncover? Take corn flakes, for example. AHA-USA reports that the glyphosate was detected at less 75 ppb which even they acknowledge is 66 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold of 5,000 ppb. Their highest detection was for an instant oat meal which was 22 times lower than the EPA’s safety threshold for oats 30,000 ppb. The AHA-USA did manage to find organic cage free eggs in which glyphosate residues were double to triple the EPA’s very low threshold of 50 ppb.

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The Congressional Budget Office initially projected that Obamacare would have more than 20 million enrollees by 2016. As of the end of the 2016 calendar year enrollment period, there were “about 12.7 million” enrollees, per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This massive shortfall in expected enrollees has left insurers, both national and regional, working with fewer enrolled patients, many of which have been shown to be costlier and sicker compared to consumers who are covered by employer-based health plans.The Congressional Budget Office initially projected that Obamacare would have more than 20 million enrollees by 2016. As of the end of the 2016 calendar year enrollment period, there were “about 12.7 million” enrollees, per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This massive shortfall in expected enrollees has left insurers, both national and regional, working with fewer enrolled patients, many of which have been shown to be costlier and sicker compared to consumers who are covered by employer-based health plans.

Making matters worse, many of the dynamics that insurers had been counting on (aside from higher enrollment totals) haven’t played out.

…

The failure of the “risk corridor” has also been a disappointment. In simple terms, the risk corridor was a fund that profitable insurers on Obamacare’s exchanges were expected to pay into. This cash would then be distributed to struggling and/or new Obamacare plan insurers to help prevent excessive losses from mispriced premiums. In 2016, the risk corridor wound up being underfunded by more than $2 billion, leading more than half of Obamacare’s approved healthcare cooperatives to shut their doors.

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I suspect pre-natal influence, but you never know.

Steven Hayward scratches his head.

Historians and political theorists have long puzzled over how to resolve the glaring contradiction of Progressive ideology—namely, that Progressive “reform” emphasizes greater “democracy,” and championed innovations like the direct election of Senators, the initiative and referendum, etc. Give the people what they want! Up with democracy! At the same time, Progressives also advanced the theory of government administration deliberately remote from politics and popular accountability—the Administrative State staffed by elite “experts.” We can’t have those grubby people telling the government what to do! Down with democracy!

It is hard to make out, but there is a deeper dialectic at work in the Progressive mind, not unlike that more famous dialectic conjured up by that hairy German fellow. The purpose of the Administrative State—best understood with Saint-Simon’s famous single sentence description about how “the government of men is replaced by the administration of things”—is to create a new people.

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Hundreds of thousands of Californians may have mistakenly registered as members of a far-right political party with segregationist roots, which opposes same-sex marriage and abortion and has called for the construction of a Trump-style wall along the US-Mexican border.

An investigation by the Los Angeles Times found that that as many as three in four supposed supporters of California’s American Independent Party (AIP) believed they were registering as independent voters, free of party affiliation. Their mistake could prevent them casting potentially crucial votes in the Golden State’s primary on 7 June.

Among those thought to have ticked the AIP box on their voter registration forms, under the erroneous impression they were declaring themselves independents, are actors Demi Moore and Emma Stone; former boxer Sugar Ray Leonard; Mark Pincus, founder of tech firm Zynga; and Patrick Schwarzenegger, the son of former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Talk about your Low Information Voter … and their vote is just as good as yours. Think about it.

Read it.

The US and Britain consistently promote a One Iraq policy. They are understandably wary that changing the status quo would weaken the fight against Daesh. But the One Iraq policy is running out of steam and credibility. Such positions are held in public while debate about their viability proceeds in private, and then an apparently sudden change is enunciated. Political scientist Arezu Yilmaz told the Kurdish Rudaw newspaper, for which I write a weekly column, about “over 100 diplomatic meetings in Erbil last year with [the] international community directly speaking to Kurdish political actors, which is unprecedented”.

Speed the day.

Read it.

The Army’s new plug-and-play network for missile defense passed its third flight test on April 8th. In a particularly complex exercise, the Integrated Air & Missile Defense Battle Command System (IBCS) controlled two types of radar and two types of Patriot missile shooting down two types of incoming missile in the same engagement, contractor Northrop Grumman announced today. Next up for the program — its “Milestone C” review to determine whether IBCS can move from development into production.

IBCS is intended to connect the current arsenal of stand-alone systems into a greater whole, one in which any shooter — including potential future weapons such as lasers — can get firing data from any sensor. In a previous test in November, for example, a low-altitude cruise missile threat evaded a Patriot radar but got picked up by a Sentinel — originally designed for short-range anti-aircraft fire, not missile defense. With both radars plugged into IBCS, the network fed the Sentinel’s targeting data to a Patriot Advanced Capability 3 (PAC-3) launcher for a successful shoot down.

Read it.

Mountain lions and ants are among the many species great and small figuring out clever ways to live among people.

That’s what gun control laws get you….

Steven Hayward of Powerline is on the case.

Really, I don’t mean to pick on vegans relentlessly. I actually know a couple of conservative vegans, and hey, if you want to deprive yourself of tasty animals, it’s a free country. But of course there are the other kind of vegans who, following most leftist enthusiasms, would like to make it mandatory for everyone.

The first step is integrating veganism fully into the current mode of identity politics, thus providing a pretext for Bruce Springstein to boycott cattle-ranching states or something. Behold this Ph.D abstract from Durham University:

Queering Veganism: A Biographical, Visual and Autoethnographic Study of Animal Advocacy.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Raymond Ibrahim lays out some inconvenient truth.

A lie conceals the truth. And ugly but hidden truths never have a chance of being acknowledged, addressed, and ultimately ameliorated.

Because of this simple truism, one of the greatest lies of our age—that violence committed in the name of Islam has nothing to do with Islam—has made an intrinsically weak Islam the scourge of the modern world, with no signs of relief on the horizon.

Read it.

Precision medicine, an emerging field in which treatments are tailored to an individual’s genes, environment and lifestyle, is on the cutting edge of cancer treatment. President Obama launched his Precision Medicine Initiative earlier this year; several research institutions have undertaken large-scale clinical trials in which patients with different diseases can enroll, one of which was conducted by the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center with results published last week. And while some patients like Swain have benefitted from what researchers have figured out so far, precision medicine isn’t nearly as widespread—or precise—as proponents want it to be. To bring this field to its full potential, researchers will need to figure out how to best tailor treatments to suit every patient’s biological differences. And the more they learn, the more difficult that seems.

Jim Goad speaks truth to glower.

As everyone with two brain cells to rub together is well aware, a tremendous amount of social injustice exists in this so-called world of ours. To rectify this unfortunate situation, many among us who are devoted to enforcing equality by all means necessary have taken to wielding our smartphones like Star Wars lightsabers against all the big fat mean rich white male capitalist sexist scum-sucking cisgender pigs who need to be brutally tortured in public and then wiped off the planet because they think it’s cool and funny to dehumanize others.

Hashtag activism is a relatively new weapon in the arsenal of social justice warriors who seek to erase national borders, do away with greed, abolish ethnic conflict, eradicate hate speech, criminalize transphobia, foster a harmonious global community under one benevolent governmental taxing agency, and all other manner of, like, totally realistic and absolutely plausible goals.

Read it.

One reason American politics is so polarized is that President Obama has been so cavalier about his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws he dislikes. On Monday the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to one of his worst abuses, his 2014 order that rewrites U.S. immigration law.

In United States v. Texas, 26 states sued to block Mr. Obama’s executive diktat that awards legal status, work permits and other government benefits to some 4.3 million illegal immigrants, with no consent from Congress. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction stopping this ukase last year, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Those were narrow rulings, but the Justices enlarged the case to reach constitutional questions and will hear an unusual 90 minutes of oral argument.

Lileks.

There are two kinds of people when it comes to disaster preparedness.

1) I have a generator, food for a month, water purification tablets, candles, solar-powered radios, flint, a full medical kit and classic board games; we will sit in our house playing Clue until order is restored.

2) I have a baseball bat and a map to the first guy’s house.

Brian Lombardi at the New York Times lists the characteristics of the Beta Male Sensitive New Age Guy.

Servants of the Crust, these are your performance objectives.

Read it.

There was a time when most people believed that honor killings – if they had even heard of them – took place far away, in places like Afghanistan and Algeria and Iran.

These days, we know otherwise. They happen here in the West as well: in Texas, in Toronto, in Paris and Amsterdam.

Now Phyllis Chesler, the pre-eminent authority on the phenomenon and author of the most comprehensive study on honor killings, has found something else we didn’t know before: that many of these killings (and other honor violence) are perpetrated by women. “Women play a very active role in honor-based femicide,” she writes in her latest report, “both by spreading the gossip underlying such murders and by acting as conspirator accomplices and/or hands-on killers in the honor killing of female relatives.”

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

Amazingly (and perversely), law schools have been able to continue to raise tuition while producing nearly twice as many graduates as the job market has been able to absorb. How is this possible? Why hasn’t the market corrected itself? The answer is that, for a given school, the availability of federal loans for law students has no connection to their poor post-graduation employment outcomes…

Read it.

Nothing that a good spanking wouldn’t cure — the parents, not just the kids.

Read it.

A middle-aged book collector in Mali helped keep the fabled city’s libraries, books and manuscripts safe from occupying jihadists

Read it.

Would that we could do the same.

The correct way to handle this is that when ‘none of the above’ wins an election, the existing candidates are barred from running again and the election is repeated. Of course, no real-world political unit would actually do that. Still, it’s a nice dream.

Read it.

The Turkish poet Serkan Engin sends this guest-essay on the Islamic nature of the genocides of the early 20th century against Christian minorities in Turkey.

Scott Johnson of Powerline fisks a Voice of the Crust.

In addition to the Twin Cities, Somali Muslim immigrants to Minnesota have settled in rural areas such as St. Cloud, Mankato and Willmar. Concern about the continuing waves of immigration from Somalia in particular is not confined to the Twin Cities. Thus Matt McKinney’s Star Tribune contribution to stifling discussion of the related issues in “Anti-Muslim speaking circuit runs through rural Minnesota.”

McKinney’s piece is pitiful. It presents all related concerns as manifestations of “Islamophobia.” It calls on Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, to render his opinion as an impartial expert. McKinney quotes Hussein: “A lot of these fears are coming from that type of general fear of the ‘other,’ and not real knowledge of Islam.”

I would say “a lot of these fears are coming from” Somali Minnesotans’ support for foreign terrorist organizations waging jihad. The support is manifested in the charges brought against the “Minnesota men” seeking to join ISIS in 2014 and 2015. Somali community sentiment is itself apparently supportive of the “Minnesota men” if not the cause. Rather than investigate the possibly rational causes of the “fears,” McKinney simply presents the concerns as evidence of bigotry.

Read it.

And people complain about the shit Donald Trump says….

There is no logic that allows victims to sue gun manufacturers that would not also allow traffic accident victims to sue auto manufacturers (and dealers, for that matter), and I’ll let you imagine how far that would fly.

And, of course, that also ought to allow people who lose their jobs because of an increase in the ‘minimum wage’ to sue people like, ahem, Bernie Sanders.

If 10% Is Good Enough For Jesus

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Watch the imprint of a tire track in soft mud, and it will slowly blur, the ridges of the pattern gradually flowing into the valleys. Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have tested the theory that a similar effect could be used to give forensic scientists something they’ve long wished for: A way to date fingerprints.

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Los Angeles was once the epicenter of apparel manufacturing, attracting buyers from across the world to its clothing factories, sample rooms and design studios.

But over the years, cheap overseas labor lured many apparel makers to outsource to foreign competitors in far-flung places such as China and Vietnam.

Now, Los Angeles firms are facing another big hurdle — California’s minimum wage hitting $15 an hour by 2022 — which could spur more garment makers to exit the state.

Last week American Apparel, the biggest clothing maker in Los Angeles, said it might outsource the making of some garments to another manufacturer in the U.S., and wiped out about 500 local jobs. The company still employs about 4,000 workers in Southern California.

“The exodus has begun,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Cal State Channel Islands and a former director at Forever 21. “The garment industry is gradually shrinking and that trend will likely continue.”

To quote Ross Perot: ‘Told you so.’

Read it.

It has been widely observed that Hillary Clinton is having to repudiate the policy legacy of her husband’s tenure in the White House in the 1990s, which is extremely telling about how far down in the deep end Democrats are today. After all, Bill Clinton’s tenure coincided with robust economic growth, a balanced budget, and expansion of free trade. It also saw two of the greatest social policy achievements of the postwar era—a radical reduction in the welfare rolls, and the beginning of a sharp drop in the crime rate. Ah, yes—liberals don’t like those last two things. And they don’t much like the balanced budget either—and they really hate free trade. Remember that it was near the end of Bill Clinton’s tenure that saw the famous “Battle in Seattle” of leftist protesters against the World Trade Organization, which is ironic, since the Left usually likes any organization that has “World” in the title. Despite this, and Clinton’s shameful personal life, he left office in 2001 with high public approval ratings.

Read it.

No, they’re not talking about politicians, except incidentally.

Beyond the morally reprehensible side of criminals’ work, some business gurus say organised crime syndicates, computer hackers, pirates and others operating outside the law could teach legitimate corporations a thing or two about how to hustle and respond to rapid change.

Well, maybe Obama.

While traditional businesses focus on rules they have to follow, criminals look to circumvent them. “For criminals, the sky is the limit and that creates the opportunity to think much, much bigger.”

That certainly sounds like Obama and the Constitution.

While Devin Liddell, who heads brand strategy for Seattle-based design consultancy, Teague, condemns the violence and other illegal activities he became curious as to how criminal groups endure.

I ask myself the same question about Planned Parenthood.

Some cartels stay in business despite multiple efforts by law enforcement on both sides of the US border and millions of dollars from international agencies to shut them down. Liddell genuinely believes there’s a lesson in longevity here.

Perhaps it’s because they provide something that people want in spite of ruling-class nannying.

One strategy he underlined was how the bad guys respond to change. In order to bypass the border between Mexico and the US, for example, the Sinaloa cartel went to great lengths. It built a vast underground tunnel, hired family members as border agents and even used a catapult to circumvent a high-tech fence.

Like Hamas in Gaza. A perfect example.

Read it.

Introduced from Asia in the late 19th century as a garden novelty, but not widely planted until the 1930s, kudzu is now America’s most infamous weed. In a few decades, a conspicuously Japanese name has come to sound like something straight from the mouth of the South, a natural complement to inscrutable words like Yazoo, gumbo and bayou.

…

Now that scientists at last are attaching real numbers to the threat of kudzu, it’s becoming clear that most of what people think about kudzu is wrong. Its growth is not “sinister,” as Willie Morris, the influential editor of Harper’s Magazine, described in his many stories and memoirs about life in Yazoo City, Mississippi. The more I investigate, the more I recognize that kudzu’s place in the popular imagination reveals as much about the power of American mythmaking, and the distorted way we see the natural world, as it does about the vine’s threat to the countryside.

Read it.

In food processing technologies, Knight devoted most attention to those having to do the grains, so important for bread, beer, and other foodstuffs, dairy, ice and sugar.  It was still early in the industrialization of food processing.  He has little or nothing on canning and bottling (except for wine), on meat, on fats and oils, and even where the grains are concerned, little on roller milling or on the mechanization of baking.  All those were in the future.

But you can see the future coming.  Inventors are busy on all the heavy, onerous tasks of grinding and of moving liquids around (like milk in creameries), on ways to reduce heat (condensing pans), on ways to preserve food (ice), on ways to package food for transport (barrels), all employing the power of steam (or particularly in the United States with its many rivers, water) to do the work.

Read it.

Have a crying towel ready.

The decade from 1910-1920, the ‘progressive era’, was a period in which the modern semi-fascist governmental system was founded.

1913: Income Tax; Federal Reserve System (all your money are belong to us)

1914: Federal Trade Commission; Clayton AntiTrust Act (all your business are belong to us)

1916: Federal Farm Loan Act (all your groceries are belong to us)

1917: U.S. pokes it’s nose into Work War I; Conscription (all your lives are belong to us)

1919: Prohibition (start of the War on Popular Drugs)

It’s been all downhill since then.

Read it.

Solar energy company SunEdison Inc (SUNE.N) is preparing to file for bankruptcy as early as the evening of April 17, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, nine months after its market value had reached $10 billion.

A SunEdison spokesman declined to comment.

Such a move would represent a fall from grace for the former darling of Wall Street and the renewable energy sector, whose rapid, debt-fueled expansion with solar and wind energy plants around the world proved unsustainable. The company’s market value as of Friday was $117 million.

Without heavy subsidies, ‘green power’ is unsustainable — and, quite often, even with heavy subsidies.

Read it.

Officials in Saudi Arabia have reportedly told the Obama administration they will sell off hundreds of billions of dollars of American assets if Congress passes a bill that would allow the Saudi government to be held responsible for any role in the September 11 attacks.

Any outcome that reduces Saudi influence in the U.S. sounds like a win-win to me. Does that include the mosques and madrassahs they support that preach Wahhabism and jihad?

Read it.

Chalk messages triggered not just students but faculty and staff at the nation’s largest Catholic university.

DePaul University’s Black Student Union accused its College Republicans (CRs) of a hate crime because they organized the April 4 chalking outside the Student Center, with messages that alluded to Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump and praised police and Israel.

Though BSU representative Michael Lynch told The College Fix that he filed a hate-crime report against the CRs, both the DePaul administration and Public Safety department told The Fix they had not received any such report from Lynch.

In a campuswide email Monday obtained by The Fix, Vice President for Student Affairs Eugene Zdziarski said “many students, faculty and staff found the chalk messages offensive, hurtful and divisive.”

They also violated campus regulations by endangering DePaul’s tax-exempt status, he said – a claim that has been repeatedly challenged by a free-speech legal advocacy group.

I predict a sunny future for ‘Trump 2016’ chalkings now that the Fashionable Victim Class has revealed that doing so will wind them up like a cheap watch.

Read it.

At the last minute, officials at the State University of New York at New Paltz curtly canceled a planned campus debate between a notable left-wing media critic and a notable right-wing media critic because the right-wing media critic has right-wing views.

…

Emails obtained by the Oracle show that school officials aborted the debate because sociology professor Anne Roschelle complained about Kincaid’s political views. Specifically, she advised that the leftist, terrorism-inspiring Southern Poverty Law Center keeps an “Extremist File” concerning Kincaid.

Unidentified students and other professors also complained, Patterson said.

Read it.

Just after the September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, I warned that radical Islam would horrify the West into submission. In Europe, it has taken a giant step towards success. Europe’s horror at the prospect of human suffering has made it supine. Sadly, the more the Europeans indulge in their humanitarian impulses, the more Muslims will suffer. To be kind is to be cruel.

This is similar to the trick of flooding a castle under siege with starving peasants from the countryside. Sane defending commanders didn’t do that, even when their people were visibly starving outside of the walls.

Turkey’s President and de facto dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan last October threatened European officials with 10,000 to 15,000 drowned migrants, according to minutes leaked to a Greek news site and widely reported by European mainstream media–with no official denial. Erdogan demanded 6 billion Euros up front and 3 billion Euros a year to stop the refugee flow, telling European officials, “We can open the doors to Greece and Bulgaria anytime and we can put the refugees on buses, What will you do with the refugees if you don’t get a deal? Kill the refugees? the EU will be confronted with more than a dead boy on the shores of Turkey. There will be 10,000 or 15,000. How will you deal with that?”

The leader of a prominent Muslim country who claims to speak for the Muslim world threatened the Europeans with 10,000 or 15,000 Muslim deaths. When in world history has one side in negotiations threatened to kill its own people in order to gain leverage?

Read it.

One of the suspects from the March 22 Brussels bombings was the subject of a 2005 documentary on successful integration in Sweden.

Osama Krayem, a 23-year-old Swedish citizen, is awaiting trial in Belgium for his part in the Brussels bombings which killed 32 civilians. Krayem was supposed to be the second suicide bomber at the Maalbeek subway station, but got cold feet.

Along with his brother and father, 11-year-old Osama Krayem were featured in the documentary “Without borders – a movie about sports and integration.” The documentary focused on how Krayem and his brother found their place as immigrants in Malmö, Sweden, by playing soccer with the Swedish boys.

“There are so many positive things to highlight,” Christer Grike, the soccer club’s communication director, told local newspaper Sydsvenskan before the release in 2005. “Unfortunately, the media image is often too dark.”

Muslims are like Communists: Their true allegiance is to the Community of Believers, not the place where they just happen to be living in right now.

Scott Johnson updates us on the sordid tale of Somali immigrants to Minnesota who decided to get down with a little jihad.

Adnan Farah is one of the ten “Minnesota men” charged with supporting ISIS and related offenses last year. On Thursday he joined four of his co-conspirators pleading guilty under a deal offered by prosecutors. Under the deal, Farah pleaded guilty to providing material support and resources to ISIS and the prosecutors agreed to drop the remaining charges against him.

Farah had originally rejected the deal at the urging of then defense team member Hassan Mohamud, a legal assistant in the office of P. Chinedu Nwaneri, an attorney who was co-counsel representing Farah’s brother, Mohamed Farah. It’s hard to keep the Muhammads straight without a scorecard.

Hassan Mohamud is a man of many hats. He’s an imam and local Somali Muslim “community leader.” Having attended William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, he taught Islamic Law as an adjunct member of the faculty. His work as a legal assistant in Nwaneri’s office suggests that he has never passed the bar exam.

Be careful not to step in the diversity — it’s Hell getting that stuff off of your shoes.

Read it.

Recently, a pair of controversial federal food issues has made the news. The unpredicted increase in USDA farm subsidies and continuing fallout from the new dietary guidelines have captured headlines. They’re worth focusing on together, as they represent some varied and truly awful federal food law and policy.

Remind me where in the Constitution the Federal government is granted power over ‘food policy’.

Earlier this week, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Tx.) blasted critics of farm subsidies, claiming we live in a “fantasyland” where such subsidies aren’t needed.

Conaway’s remarks come as news broke this week that Congress has woefully underestimated the cost of farm subsidies. The latest figures show taxpayers are on the hook for $13.9 billion this year, according to reports. A separate estimate shows congressional predictions fell more than a billion dollars short of actual predicted payment figures.

Are we running short of food? I don’t see any shortages, judging by the lack of lines for, say, bread at the grocery store — unlike the former Soviet Union and other places that had (and have) a government ‘food policy’.

When the most recent Farm Bill passed, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), then-chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, touted the law as “an opportunity to cut spending.” What’s happened since? Spending has only risen. Last year, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group predicted subsidies could reach $30 billion by 2018.

Democrats: Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with crop insurance. But taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to insure farmers against risk any more than they should be on the hook for subsidizing NASCAR drivers’ auto insurance. “If crop insurance is an important element of farming,” I wrote in 2012, “then let farmers buy such insurance on the open market—without taxpayer support—and, if need be, pass the costs on to consumers.”

No, that would be sensible, and so is necessarily excluded from government policy.

PolyScience Control Freak Induction Cooker.

Trash Krusher.

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Health insurance companies are amplifying their warnings about the financial sustainability of the ObamaCare marketplaces as they seek approval for premium increases next year.

Insurers say they are losing money on their ObamaCare plans at a rapid rate, and some have begun to talk about dropping out of the marketplaces altogether.

“Something has to give,” said Larry Levitt, an expert on the health law at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Either insurers will drop out or insurers will raise premiums.”

While analysts expect the market to stabilize once premiums rise and more young, healthy people sign up, some observers have not ruled out the possibility of a collapse of the market, known in insurance parlance as a “death spiral.”

And, once again, reality intrudes on ‘progressive’ fantasies.

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Remember that the next time you hear a politician whine about ‘the 1%’ not paying ‘their fair share’.

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Let that be a lesson to us all.

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In just the latest instance of a taxpayer-funded university singling out white students for privilege-shaming “education sessions,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted a special workshop on Tuesday for the purpose of getting white students to acknowledge and confront their own white privilege.

According to the university website, “The Privilege of Whiteness” workshop was designed for white people to “reflect on and name the ways their privilege impacts their beliefs and behaviors by gaining the skills to identify the historical roots of White privilege and how it manifests today.” Prospective attendees were informed that the workshop was “designed for a White audience,” although “People of color” were still welcome.

The workshop is one of a handful of “education sessions” offered through the university’s Morgridge Center for Public Service. Students wishing to participate in the university’s Badger Volunteers program are required to attend at least one of the education sessions.

The University of Wisconsin is just the latest university to single out white students for privilege-shaming workshops.

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The Russian army has taken delivery of twenty pre-production version of the tank for operational testing—which is currently under way just outside Moscow at Kubinka. The first operational T-14 unit is likely to be stood up in Siberia with a unit that performed particularly well during the invasion of Crimea according to a source.

“Test of the Armata are going according to schedule without any problems,” Alexei Zharich, deputy director of Uralvagonzavod told the Russian language daily Izvestia. “Serial deliveries could begin at any moment [5]—as soon as the customer wants it.”

However, Zharich seems to be addressing only the T-14 main battle tank variant. He didn’t address the other combat vehicles that are part of the Armata family—it’s not clear if those vehicles are also in production. The Armata Universal Combat Platform consists of the T-14 main battle tank, the T-15 heavy infantry fighting vehicle and the T-16 armored recovery vehicle, among a host of other vehicles. Another member of the Armata family includes an upgunned heavy assault armored vehicle, which has been dubbed “the Tank Killer” by Russian media. The “Tank Killer” [6] variant seems to incorporate a derivative of the 2S35 Koalitsiya-SV’s 152mm artillery piece into the Armata chassis in a direct fire mounting.

Joe Rosenberg takes Bernie to the woodshed.

Bernie Sanders should ask people like me—refugees from collectivist paradises—about income inequality.

Oh, I don’t think that will ever happen. Bernie doesn’t like to ask; he likes to tell.

It takes an immigrant like me to parse the poison that Bernie Sanders is peddling to the naive youth of this country. It takes someone who has experienced socialism’s failures firsthand—as I did, initially as a small child, later as a young adult—to see why Sen. Sanders is succeeding: We elders, immigrants and native-born alike, have failed to teach our children and grandchildren about the economic history and false promises of the myriad forms of socialism that infest our world.

Very true.

As an example of kibbutz ideology: Does it make sense for a person running the washing machines in the laundry to be receiving exactly the same pay and living benefits as someone who might be the community doctor after going to medical school? That may sound like an extreme example, but the same principles apply throughout the economic structure of a collectivist economy. Unlike Chinese or Russian collectivism, Israel’s was voluntary—but insane nonetheless.

You could never get me into an arrangement like that. The whole ‘voluntary collectivism’ was tried by innumerable hippies in my generation, and it all invariably came crashing down.

My experience is far from unique. I have many colleagues who left supposed paradises, socialist countries like China, Russia and Greece, and now strive to succeed on Wall Street. They’re seeking not a handout but a piece of the American Dream, just as I did. When I entered the business Wall Street was a far clubbier place than today. It has increasingly become a meritocracy open to people of every background.

Not to listen to Bernie and Hillary it isn’t.

Read it.

We’d say this is the pot calling the kettle black, but that could be perceived as racist.

Of course. If you’re a Certified Victim like this girl, the other guy you attacked cannot be a victim, really, by definition.

The Black Student Union at San Francisco State University is defending Bonita Tindle, the black student who physically attacked the white student Cory Goldstein because he wears dreadlocks, and saying a viral video “misrepresent[s]” their altercation.

Actually, I’m at the point that I’ll welcome anybody, even a Certified Victim, attacking a white student who is wearing dreadlocks, a fashion that I have always thought a symptom of how far our culture has degenerated.

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At a recent Town Hall in Ohio, Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton proudly stated that she was the only candidate with a policy to bring renewable energy “into coal country, because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

Such a statement not only evidences Clinton’s reckless indifference to the plight of thousands of hard-working Americans, but more importantly highlights the fact that Clinton is all to willing to capitalize on far left, populist talking points at the expense of low-and-middle income families.