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For anyone who, thanks to the Obama administration’s years of stonewalling, has forgotten about Fast and Furious, here’s the short version. In 2010, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agent was killed while on patrol near the Mexican border. The only two firearms found at the scene were semi-automatic rifles the Obama-Holder Justice Department allowed to “walk” as part of Fast and Furious, a firearms trafficking operation. That operation allowed approximately 2,000 firearms to flow illegally into the hands of Mexican cartel associates.

When the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform tried to investigate the scandal, Team Obama stonewalled. First, it denied that law enforcement officers allowed straw purchasers to buy firearms illegally in the United States with the intent to traffic them without apprehension. Almost a year later, it finally admitted that this is precisely what had happened.

Second, when the Committee subpoenaed relevant documents, Eric Holder’s DOJ refused to produce them, citing “executive privilege.” The House voted to hold Holder in contempt and filed suit to obtain the documents. Three and half years later, Judge Jackson ordered production of the 20,000 pages mentioned above.

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

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Bill Nye, called “The Science Guy” after the kids’ show he hosted for PBS back in the 1990s, is up for jailing people who question climate change.

Asked about environmental activist Robert Kennedy’s assertion that climate skeptics should be tried as war criminals, the TV personality mused, “We’ll see what happens.”

Artists and ‘intellectuals’ were among the strongest supporters — and chief victims — of the Stalin regime. Looks like history is repeating itself, as it tends to do.

Ammo Grrrll has some thoughts.

ONE: People do not value things that are free. We have a strong cultural belief that “what you pay is what it’s worth.” I offer as just one case in point, how free entertainers are treated. I offer the example with sadness and vast experience. Trust me when I tell you that all entertainers could fill their calendars every day with nothing but free gigs. People who would never dream of approaching a carpenter or a dermatologist and asking them to work for free think nothing of hounding an entertainer to work free for every charity, disease, battered women’s shelter and political candidate. I mean, these are all worthwhile causes, are you some kind of heartless profiteer, Mr. Musician, Ms. Comic?

…

TWO: Nothing should be free, but for sure not higher education. The students have no skin in the game; the colleges have no skin in the game; and the taxpayers who are skinned alive have no say at all. If free education were valued, then all students would graduate high school and community college would not be necessary as a kind of do-over high school.

Read the whole thing.

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Although not as long as jihadists keep killing vaccinators.

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In a paper published today in Molecular Ecology researchers announced that they found genetic differences between the ancestors and descendants of two separate populations of field mustard both of which evolved during the California drought between 1997 and 2004 to flowers earlier.

But of course ‘climate change’ will mean massive crop failures and WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE. Uh, no. Mother Nature is smarter than most eco-Nazis.

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Lindsey Gordon suffered a shattered pelvis and internal bleeding after Grand Isle, Louisiana, Assistant Police Chief Norris Esponge drove over her while she was sunbathing on the beach. Esponge, who was patrolling the beach in a Ford F-150, narrowly missed running over another woman who was sunbathing with Gordon.

Another reminder that government employees are seldom the sharpest knives in the drawer.

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A group of 50 cars closed down the San Francisco Bay Bridge on Sunday evening to put on a road show. What’s really remarkable is that none of the offending drivers have been arrested. Yet.

A road show is when several cars coordinate together to block off traffic. The open lanes are then used as a stage for burnouts, donuts, and other tricks. Once these jokers have their fun, traffic is allowed to open back up. In this case, five drivers worked together to block all lanes on the Bay Bridge, SFGate reported. Once traffic was stopped, 50 show offs flooded the bridge.

While road shows might seem like a car enthusiast’s dream, they thoughtlessly force hundreds of drivers to sit in miles-long traffic backups. In this case, nobody was able to cross the Bay Bridge while this latest stunt took place. Police haven’t made any arrests at this time. In a video of the road show posted by Instagram user Bay Area Movement is appears that the cars have removed their license plates to avoid detection. So far the video has over 2,000 likes on Instagram.

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Bottom line:

The experience turned out well, but it also left me queasy. The only reason Veronica was able to carry out her experiment was that I had the flexibility to spend hours struggling through paperwork, and because I had a social network of scientists I’ve developed as a science writer. This was an exercise in privilege.

If Veronica had been the daughter of a single parent with a couple jobs and no connections to the world of science — if she had been like a lot of American kids, in other words — her idea would have gone up in smoke. She might not have even bothered thinking about the science fair at all.

Notice that the author’s thesis is that there is a problem with science fairs. It doesn’t occur to him that the real problem is the regulations and restrictions on kids doing science. The Blue State Crustian mindset is plain to see — regulations and restrictions exist and are not to be questioned; what remains for us to do is to Create Programs so that even proles can cope with them. Because Diversity (or, as he puts it, ‘equity’). What doesn’t even occur to him is that getting rid of the regulations and restrictions might be preferable; Servants of the Crust just can’t even form the thought in their heads.

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Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s increasing Third-Worldish authoritarianism is taking new turns: it is now visible outside Turkey.

At the same time as Erdogan was heading for Washington for a nuclear security summit, the two journalists who he asserted last year “will pay a heavy price” had to stand trial at a second hearing on charges of espionage and terrorism, and with life sentences hanging over their heads. Their “espionage and terrorism” activity concerned a story they ran in May 2015 detailing how Turkish intelligence was transporting weapons to Islamist fighters in Syria.

Free speech is not a Muslim value. (Neither is democracy, really.)

Read it. And watch the video.

The $15 minimum wage just went from “laughable” to “viable”—as a New York Times headline put it—to the law of the land for millions of New York and California residents.

In April 2016, the Empire and Golden states almost simultaneously passed laws that will boost the state-mandated wage floor to $15 over the next few years for all workers—a high-stakes bet that the law of supply and demand doesn’t apply to human labor.

To discuss the potential impact of the $15 minimum wage, Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Don Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, who writes frequently about the minimum wage at his blog, Cafe Hayek.

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The Boston Globe reports that locally-based shoe company New Balance is restarting its opposition to a trade deal supported by the Obama administration, contending the government failed to honor its side of secret deal.

Democrats being Democrats: Secret deals followed by reneging. Bill Clinton had this down to an art — and probably still does, for all anyone knows.

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Exxon has just challenged attempts by Al Gore’s climate witch hunt to “investigate” them, by demanding to know what crime they are supposed to have committed.

And about fargin time, too.

To date, most companies seem to have been happy to simply pay a bit of Danegeld, and get on with business, when unfairly targeted by green campaigners, rather than engage in a costly and potentially damaging PR battle with groups of fanatics who mostly don’t matter in the long run.

But a government backed investigation, with the possible threat of future RICO charges, is far more serious than a simple PR attack on a company’s corporate image. Exxon appears to have courageously decided to stand their ground, to put an end to this nonsense once and for all – a strategy which may lead them to challenge the increasingly shaky scientific basis of the entire climate scare.

When the government starts charging people with fraud and other crimes for speaking out against the ‘progressive’ Party Line, then it’s time to head for the doors.

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Everything you need to know about the 2016 race for the Democratic presidential nomination can be found in a single moment in one of the early debates, when Bernie Sanders was asked for his thoughts on banks. His face creased in pharisaical rage.

“They trample on the middle class, they control Washington, and why do they chain all their pens to the desks?” he demanded. “You gotta break up the banks into little pieces and then flush the pieces down the toilet so you can never put the banks back together. Then you just make the bankers pay for college for everyone, and America’s fixed!”

People used to scratch their heads over how the Nazis could be democratically elected to govern so civilized a country as Germany. Well, Bernie Sanders is demonstrating that it isn’t as hard as you might suppose.

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Freedom works every time it’s tried.

In the 1980s, the United States had two major hubs of technology innovation. Everyone knows about Silicon Valley, but the East Coast had a “Silicon Valley” of its own, located along Route 128 in the suburbs of Boston. When Gov. Michael Dukakis touted the “Massachusetts Miracle” in his 1988 presidential campaign, he was largely talking about Boston’s high-tech boom.

Unfortunately, the Massachusetts Miracle didn’t last. During the 1990s, Silicon Valley boomed while Route 128 companies faltered. And researchers have pointed to a surprising culprit: Massachusetts law strictly enforces agreements that prohibit employees from taking jobs at competing companies. In contrast, California law banned these restrictions, making it easier for Silicon Valley startups to form and to recruit talent from larger companies.

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One of the casualties of the recent ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) attacks in France and Belgium was the reputation of Saudi Arabia as an ally in the fight against ISIL. The media were all over the state of Islam in Belgium and many little-publicized facts were made very public. Chief among them was the role of Saudi Arabia played in building (at Saudi expense) mosques and religious schools in Belgium and then staffing them. These facilities were controlled by very-conservative (and anti-Western) clerics and religious teachers who were often trained in Saudi Arabia. This should not be surprising as since the 1980s Saudi Arabia has spent over $100 billion doing this promotion of the very conservative Wahhabi form of Sunni Islam that has predominated in Saudi Arabia since the 18th century.

 

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Our Norwegian correspondent The Observer returns with an examination of “moderate” vs. “extreme” Islam, using the much-neglected tools of logic and formal analysis.

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A growing number of Islamist radicals are infiltrating Germany’s military, the Bundeswehr, with an estimated 30 former soldiers later joining international terrorist organizations, reports German press agency DPA International.

Germany’s military counterintelligence service (MAD) says 65 active soldiers are under investigation for suspected Islamist tendencies. Since 2007, 22 soldiers designated as Islamists have been discharged or left the military. Moreover, 29 former soldiers have left for Syria and Iraq to join Islamist terrorist organizations.

“We perceive a risk that the Bundeswehr may be used as a training ground for potentially violent Islamists,” says MAD leader Christof Gramm.

Judging by the performance of the Bundeswehr in recent NATO exercises, they might be in for a surprise.

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Using the term ‘plan’ very loosely.

Hillary Clinton’s proposed “New College Compact” is estimated by her campaign to cost $350 billion over ten years. According to the Clinton campaign, every cent of the $350 billion will come from tax increases on the American people. A review of the proposal by Americans for Tax Reform shows that as many as 438,000 New York households will be stuck with a higher tax bill.

The $350 billion tax hike over ten years comes in the form of a 28 percent cap on itemized deductions. The Clinton spending plan reduces the income tax deductibility of countless deductions including charitable donations, high medical bills, mortgage interest, and state and local taxes for Iowa families in the 33-percent, 35-percent, or 39.6 -percent brackets, limiting their value to just 28 percent.

According to IRS Statistics of Income Data for 2013 (the most recent year available), this Hillary tax hike will hit about 438,000 New York households, based on the number of families who earned over $200,000 and itemized their deductions.

The basic problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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While it’s true that liberalism is destroying America, it is also true that most liberals are not doing it intentionally.

Instead, they do what they do out of fear. Liberals are the casualties of social conditioning which inspires them to fear just about everything. That’s why they fear free speech, warm winters, competition, healthy debate, individualism, the Bible, guns, big sodas, freedom, capitalism, the U.S. Constitution, salt, manly men, a strong military, and so on. These irrational fears drive liberals to attempt to control their environment by creating safe spaces and collective utopias which always fail.

At the heart of liberalism is a quest for control over people’s lives and the insistence that a monstrous, micro-managing government offering minimal personal freedom is the only way to achieve fairness. If Americans understood how enslaved they are, they’d run the other way, but, “ignorance is bliss,” as the saying goes.

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By law, anyone with a severe disability is eligible to have the government discharge their federal student loans. The administration took steps four years ago to make the process easier by letting people who are totally and permanently disabled use their Social Security designation to apply for a discharge, but few took advantage. The Department of Education is now taking it upon itself to identify eligible borrowers and guide them through the steps to discharge their loans.

“Too many eligible borrowers were falling through the cracks, unaware they were eligible for relief,” said Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell in a statement. “Americans with disabilities have a right to student loan relief. And we need to make it easier, not harder, for them to receive the benefits they are due.”

It’s hell when you’re trying to give people Taxpayer Paid Free Stuff and they won’t even take it.

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Mizzou will be closing the Respect and Excellence halls (ironic names, given the circumstances) in order to utilize dorm space “in the most efficient manner” to keep costs down.

In March, the university announced that it saw a sharp drop in admissions for the coming school year, and will have 1,500 fewer students. This will lead to a $32 million budget shortfall for the school, prompting the need to close the dorms in order to save money.

Not surprising. Who wants to go to a University where you get harassed by NAM fascists all the time?

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Earlier this month, Morocco’s head of counterterrorism, Abdelhak Khiame,warned that the Islamic State (ISIS) is trying to build chemical weapons to use in an attack on Europe. The announcement comes after Moroccan authorities in February discovered components for making a chemical weapon during a raid on an ISIS cell poised for an attack in Morocco.

Khiame was not exaggerating the risk to Europe, as ISIS has the desire, and is working hard to develop the capability, to pull off such an attack. The recent terror strikes in Paris and Brussels demonstrated ISIS’ ability to infiltrate trained terrorists into Europe, and revealed the extent of terror networks embedded across the continent.

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It is becoming increasingly obvious that reporting on Islamic terrorism has become politicized. In short, the data is increasingly unreliable. This is most obvious in Israel where the Palestinian leadership praises those who carried out attacks in Israel similar to the ones that recently took place in Paris and Brussels because the victims were Israelis and most Arabs are taught that Israel is evil and killing Israelis is not. Yet the Palestinian leaders condemn the Paris and Brussels attacks in large part because European nations provide much of the foreign aid that keeps Palestinian government going and many Europeans agree that Israel is evil and must be destroyed. This is only one of many similar situation around the world. What is terrorism and what is not is often a matter of political, ethnic or religious convictions (“one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighters”). Thus the data on Islamic terrorist activity referred to by governments is not consistent. Even in the West, some government downplay obvious acts of Islamic terrorists and reclassify them as “workplace violence.” Even the United States has done this.

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If this sounds like the Cold War is returning to Europe, it is. There are other signs of this. For example the Americans are reviving the REFORGER exercises. As part of this the U.S. Army plans to store more pre-positioned military equipment in Europe and have brigades move their personnel to Europe for training with that equipment each year. The pre-positioning of equipment continued after the Cold War ended in 1991 but the annual troop movement exercises (REFORGER) to use the pre-positioned equipment stopped. Now it is being resumed with at least one brigade a year being sent to Europe to use the pre-positioned equipment for training exercises aimed at defending East Europe against Russia. Just like the Cold War, except then the Russian armies were already in East Europe before 1991 and it was Western Europe being defended.

As opposed to ‘a.m. in the evening’? Guys — either it’s ‘a.m.’ or ‘in the morning’, not both.

Saying both makes you sound like a dork (and there’s a reason for the….).

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Austria has began construction of an anti-refugee barrier across their border with Italy.

Police say work on creating a border control across the Brenner pass is scheduled to be completed by the end of May.

They say have begun pouring concrete for foundations of a registration hall, barriers and other structures.

The barrier is being built as a response to the anticipated flow of refugees trying to enter Austria after arriving in Italy from the Mediterranean.

How quickly the much-vaunted European Union is dissolving into its components as its Ruling Class fumbles the ball.

Dartmouth is sinking.

Someday we’ll look back on this and it will all seem funny, but for now the College is once again the subject of national mockery after KDE sorority decided to change the theme of its longstanding, elegant Derby social event.

Shades of the Phiesta event cancellation imbroglio from a few years back. In that one a Latin-themed cardiac research fundraiser and party was canceled for ostensibly being offensive to Latino students. Put on by Alpha Phi sorority and Phi Delta Alpha fraternity, the event had taken place uneventfully in previous years at the College, and in fraternities and sororities all over the country. But then at Dartmouth, one student complained, and all hell broke loose.

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Today it is frankly unbelievable that Washington allows its Asian and European allies to continue cowering behind it. That they prefer not to do more is understandable. But that is no reason for America to do it for them.

Steve Sailer dishes the dirt.

There were two NFL draft-related results. First, that between 2001 and 2012, players with publicly-documented pre-draft arrests were nearly twice as likely to be arrested after reaching the NFL than those who had not been arrested. The second, which is perhaps less obvious and more valuable, was that there was a small but clear correlation between arrests and Wonderlic tests scores. Players who scored below the mean in the researchers’ sample were also about twice as likely to be arrested in the NFL as those who scored above it.

Stop. Just stop.

Shortly after the latest ISIS suicide bombers struck in Brussels on March 22, German Green Party MP Franziska Brantner tweeted “Why do they hate us so much?” The intelligentsia’s ignorance perseveres in spite of the answer right in front of them: it’s not hatred but an ideology called Islamism that compels violence. We are now almost 15 years beyond 9/11, and it’s time to stop asking this question after every major jihadist attack.

None so blind as they who will not see.

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It is widely thought to affect the brain in a similar way to cocaine, and now a new study has suggested people addicted to sugar should be treated in the same way as other drug abusers.

According to researchers from Queensland University of Technology (QUT), excessive sugar consumption increases the dopamine levels in a similar way to other drugs such as cocaine.

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

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And even stronger is the fact that it’s a Democrat administration.

Democrats investigating Democrats — nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

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Today is “Equal Pay Day,” which mitigates the fact that April is also Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month. (Seriously—it is.) And so we might as well remind everyone—again—that the “Pay Gap” is another of those myths that liberals cling to like a drowning man to a life preserver.

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The fate of a $655 million judgment against the Palestinian Authority (PA) is in the hands of a federal appellate court.

Judges at New York’s 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments Tuesday in the case of Sokolow v. PLO, et al., in which jurors found the PA and the Palestine Liberation Organization liable for a series of terrorist attacks in 2001-2004 that were part of the Palestinian intifada.

Those attacks killed or wounded members of 11 American families who filed the lawsuit under the Anti-Terrorism Act (ATA). During a six-week trial last year, jurors saw internal PLO and PA records showing payments to terror cells that were part of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which was created by the PLO. Families of PA and PLO employees killed carrying out terrorist attacks, or who were imprisoned after attacks, also received monthly payments.

The PA’s defense hinges on an argument that U.S. courts do not have the jurisdiction to hear such a lawsuit. The United States does not recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, they argued, and the PA’s activities here fail to meet the standard for being “at home.”

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During an interview with the editorial team of the New York Daily News, Hillary Clinton admitted her tax proposals will increase taxes on the American people by at least $1 trillion over the next ten years.

Now tell me again how you won’t vote for Donald Trump if he gets the Republican nomination.

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

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In a recent letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY-R), four senators this week voiced their opposition to extending expiring renewable energy provisions as part of the FAA reauthorization bill. Senators Jeff Flake (AZ-R), Mike Lee (UT-R), James Lankford (OK-R), and Jeff Sessions (AL-R), took exception to current attempts by some in the Senate to attach tax credits for green energy to such an important and needed bill.

Good luck with that….

Read it.

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

Eric S Raymond pulls back the curtain.

Once upon a time, free-trade agreements were about just that: free trade. You abolish your tariffs and import restrictions, I’ll abolish mine. Trade increases, countries specialize in what they’re best equipped to do, efficiency increases, price levels drop, everybody wins.

Then environmentalists began honking about exporting pollution and demanded what amounted to imposing First World regulation on Third World countries who – in general – wanted the jobs and the economic stimulus from trade more than they wanted to make environmentalists happy. But the priorities of poor brown people didn’t matter to rich white environmentalists who already had theirs, and the environmentalists had political clout in the First World, so they won. Free-trade agreements started to include “environmental safeguards”.

Next, the labor unions, frightened because foreign workers might compete down domestic wages, began honking about abusive Third World labor conditions about which they didn’t really give a damn. They won, and “free trade” agreements began to include yet more impositions of First World pet causes on Third World countries. The precedent firmed up: free trade agreements were no longer to be about “free” trade, but rather about managing trade in the interests of wealthy First Worlders.

Today there’s a great deal of angst going on in the tech community about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Its detractors charge that a “free-trade” agreement has been hijacked by big-business interests that are using it to impose draconian intellectual-property rules on the entire world, criminalize fair use, obstruct open-source software, and rent-seek at the expense of developing countries.

These charges are, of course, entirely correct. So here’s my question: What the hell else did you expect to happen? Where were you idiots when the environmentalists and the unions were corrupting the process and the entire concept of “free trade”?

Read it.

Every year at this time, we see the same kind of headlines: “U.S. biggest military spender in the world.” They’re are all based on the release of the global military spending database, an annual report compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

What the headlines usually miss is that U.S. defense spending is going down while global military spending is going up. The fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than any other individual nation dramatically misses the point.

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Don’t fly. Problem solved, and you’ll be a lot safer.

Ask me a hard one.

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Boko Haram’s use of child suicide bombers in the Nigeria regional conflict has increased ten-fold in the past year, according to a new Unicef report.

Nearly one in five suicide attacks orchestrated by Boko Haram are now carried out by children, more than 75 per cent of which are performed by girls.

Unicef’s report, Beyond Chibok, released two years after Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls in the area, shows that the number of children involved in suicide attacks in Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad and Niger increased from four to 44 in the space of a year.

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There you go. Don’t say we never have useful stuff here.

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I suspect that a lot of Trump’s support comes from people who just like the fact that using his name winds up ‘progressives’ like a cheap watch.

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One of the more recent targets for the U.S. led coalition airstrikes has been the University of Mosul in northern Iraq. It was long known that ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) was using university facilities for training technical personnel, especially computer and communications specialists and bomb builders. Research was also being done on chemical weapons and how to build “dirty bombs” that used radioactive material.

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Under pressure from Obama educrats, public school districts are no longer suspending even violent students; but now, under pressure from Black Lives Matter, they are suspending teachers who complain about not suspending bad kids.

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The public swimming pools of Germany and Austria serve as an uncovered-meat market for recently-arrived Muslim “refugees” in Germany and Austria. The following article from the Austrian daily Kurier describes the proactive measures being employed against sexual assaults at the pools by Viennese authorities. Needless to say, the program makes sure not to “discriminate” against the migrants by targeting them specifically.

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Part of the reason is that Yemen sits on Saudi Arabia’s back doorstep, and a hostile government there could put southern Saudi communities in danger. But the campaign in Yemen has actually worsened Saudi security, as Houthi militants retaliate by firing rockets at Saudi villages and staging border raids. And while Al Qaeda has menaced Saudi Arabia in the past, its presence in Yemen has never elicited a major military mobilization—that’s been left to the United States. So why intervene now?

To understand the war in Yemen, you have to assume the perspective of a Saudi elite and zoom the camera outwards. Once upon a time, the Shia-majority nations of the Middle East were ruled by monarchs and strongmen who were largely unsympathetic to the idea of Shia power—Iraq under the Sunni Saddam Hussein, Bahrain under the Saudi-backed Khalifa dynasty, and Iran under the Pahlavis. Islam was governed as it had been for centuries, with Sunnis wielding power and Shia awaiting the end times. America viewed the Middle East through the lens of regnant Sunnis, and collaborated with many of them, most notably the Saudi royal family.