Steve Sailer looks overseas.

The British will vote in a referendum on whether to leave the European Union on June 23, but the debate has gotten bogged down because of the limits on respectable opinion. The two allowable views are that Britain should leave because other Europeans are hateful, or that Europe should stay united so it can let in more non-Europeans.

The notion that Europeans might favor each other over outsiders (its founding idea) is today unthinkably racist.

Yet the main problems driving support for Britain exiting are immigration and the English fear that the EU is increasingly a mask for German mastery, hand in glove with Germany’s Great War ally Turkey.

But you aren’t supposed to talk about such matters.

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The following investigative report from the German public broadcaster ARD exposes the deliberate mistranslation by Muslim interpreters of the Arabic words spoken by non-Muslims. The rate of influx of Arabic-speakers into Germany is such that the authorities are unable to find enough translators who are both fluent and reliable. When acting as interpreters, Muslim translators take the opportunity to suppress the complaints and calls for help by non-Muslim refugees.

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IBM today announced a more efficient way to use phase-change memory, a breakthrough that could help transition electronic devices from standard RAM and flash to a much faster and more reliable type of storage. Phase-change memory, or PCM, is a type of non-volatile optical storage that works by manipulating the behavior of chalcogenide glass, which is how data is stored on rewriteable Blue-ray discs. A electrical current is applied to change PCM cells from an amorphous to crystalline structure, allowing you to store 0s and 1s in either state while the application of low voltage can read the data back.

The issue in the past has been PCM’s limited capacity and high cost; you can typically only store one 1 bit per cell. That makes it less useful for main memory applications like laptop or mobile phone storage. Yet IBM researchers discovered how to store 3 bits per cell by tinkering with how the crystals react to high temperatures, which are required to tap into multiple states for PCM cells. The jump is significant “because at this density, the cost of PCM will be significantly less than DRAM and closer to flash,” Haris Pozidis, IBM’s manager of non-volatile memory research, wrote in a statement.

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Researchers from Cardiff University’s Institute of Infection & Immunity discovered that certain germs trigger killer T-cells, a form of white blood cell that can cause diabetes.

The killer T-cells destroy insulin-producing ‘beta cells’, leading to an insulin deficiency.

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Eliminate the middle-man, so to speak.

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

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Cue screams of outrage about ‘frankenfoods’ by enviro-nazis, who would rather poor people around the world starve so long as it’s done ‘organically’.

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A new batch of emails, released late Friday afternoon, pulls back the curtain further on the level of collusion and coordination between anti-fossil fuel activists, their funders, and the attorneys general that have launched climate investigations into people, companies, and think tanks with which they disagree on the issue.

These emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by brought by The Competitive Enterprise Institute and Chris Horner, show that key activists behind this campaign had hoped they could make a case for prosecuting climate “deniers” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. But, due to multiple warnings from experts that such a case would be have no chance to actually succeed, they decided instead to shift their strategic focus to state-level attorneys general to get the job done. Interestingly, these emails date back to last summer, months before the Rockefeller-funded InsideClimate News and the Columbia School of Journalism published their #ExxonKnew investigations.

The key players that emerge from this latest batch of emails are George Mason University (GMU) professors Jagadish Shukla and Edward Maibach, who spearheaded a letter in September 2015 with several other colleagues to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Obama asking them to explore RICO charges against climate “deniers” and their funders.

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Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

In January, New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer made the case to the State Senate that a $15 minimum wage would be good even for “smaller businesses.” He pointed to the example of Brooklyn Brine, “a pickle manufacturer in Sunset Park [that] pays workers at least $16 an hour.”

It’s telling that an artisanal pickle maker that prides itself on “hand-crafted, non-GMO, Kosher-certified” fare and a “spicy maple bourbon” flavored variety that sells for $10 per jar is Stringer’s model small business. Notably, he didn’t mention the numerous Ecuadorian restaurants, Chinese dumpling houses, and Mexican coffee shops in the same predominantly immigrant neighborhood. youtube

The Crustian definition of ‘small business’ is not necessarily yours. They think of Whole Foods as a neighborhood grocery store, for example, where the rest of us think of Kroger or even Walmart.

Ensuring that New York businesses comply with government-mandated wage floors falls primarily to a dysfunctional and understaffed division of the state government. Many businesses don’t heed the current $9 minimum; when the rate rises to $15, the ranks of the noncompliant will swell.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

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Maybe they know something we don’t.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

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‘Experts’ are always being ‘stunned’ about something.

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‘We had finished the script and we were given a no-holds-barred memo saying that cannot stand and we’ve changed our minds because, after consulting, we’ve decided that toy won’t sell as well if it’s a female’

The ‘Ewock Rule’ triumphs again.

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I just read “The Battle For Room 314”, Ed Boland’s account of a year teaching at a NYC high school. Boland had been an admissions officer, done fundraising for nonprofits – but wanted to DO GOOD, and of course go broke in the process.

Such people are why ‘educators’ aren’t paid very well, despite all of the Great and Good telling us they’re the Most Important People Ever — because it doesn’t take much to be a teacher, and the market doesn’t pay a lot of what there’s an overabundance of.

The dean of the Harvard graduate school of education praises it, as does the former head of the Ford Foundation. So you know it’s a bad book. Sheesh, Boland only taught for a year, and he wasn’t particularly successful. He didn’t have great personal force, couldn’t control the kids, didn’t realize when they were lying to him. Came to hate them. But I didn’t expect to learn anything about educating kids- I wanted to see what page the educrats are on lately, just I have a green chili cheeseburger every ten years or so just to see if they’re still nasty.

I know that feeling.

Kathy Shaidle at Taki’s Magazine looks into some nooks and crannies.

Leon Neyfakh writes for Slate so, big surprise, his article “They Totally Knew: The People Who Foresaw the Rise of Donald Trump” doesn’t include a single prognostication that dates past last summer. That’s because all genuinely vintage “President Trump” predictions were made in the media equivalent of NASCAR country, where guys like Neyfakh rarely venture.

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“The Dallas streetcar project is another great example of how the Recovery Act is creating jobs and providing accessible transportation,” said then-Secretary of Immobility Ray LaHood in 2011 when he funded the project. Now that it’s been open for about a year, how many people are riding it? About 150 to 300 per day.

This is just one in a series of dramatic failures documented by the transit-friendly Streetsblog. After Atlanta began charging fares for its streetcar, ridership fell below 1,000 per day. Salt Lake’s streetcar carries a few more than that, but only about a third of the original projections. Tucson’s is supposed to be more successful, carrying 4,000 per day, but most of them are students who get major discounts.

Meanwhile, the cost of the Cincinnati streetcar has gone up from $102 million to $148 million. It won’t be completed until September, so there’s still time for more cost overruns.

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Two of the Democratic Party’s most loyal constituencies, labor and environmentalists, are clashing over an effort to raise tens of millions of dollars for an ambitious voter turnout operation aimed at defeating Donald J. Trump in the November election.

That’s because the Democrat party doesn’t have principles, merely pressure groups that it attempts to buy off with taxpayer money. Unfortunately, there’s often not enough to go around.

The rift developed after some in the labor movement, whose cash flow has dwindled and whose political clout has been increasingly imperiled, announced a partnership last week with a wealthy environmentalist, Tom Steyer, to help bankroll a new fund dedicated to electing Democrats.

That joint initiative enraged members of the nation’s biggest construction unions, already on edge about the rising influence of climate-change activists. The building-trades unions view Mr. Steyer’s environmental agenda as a threat to the jobs that can be created through infrastructure projects like new gas pipelines.

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President Obama spoke today with local reporters from around the country about the stalled Supreme Court nomination of his Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland. As America Rising Squared (AR2) reports, the president got several facts wrong (which, says AR2, has become the new normal for this Administration).

Obama told reporters that “in the past, [Garland] has been confirmed unanimously by the Senate for the current position that he holds.” Not so. In 1997, 23 Senators voted against his nomination to the D.C. Circuit. Among them were current Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and current Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley.

Obama went on to criticize Republicans for citing the fact that this an election year as grounds for not holding a hearing or a vote on the Garland nomination. With feigned incredulity, he asked “where’d that rule come from?”

It comes from Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden. In 1992 as Judiciary Chairman, Talkin’ Joe stated on the Senate floor that a President should not even nominate a Supreme Court justice in an election year.

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It’s taken six million years for humans to evolve from our ancestors to where we are today.

Unsurprisingly, our physiology has also changed – but not always for the better.

In fact, there are several body parts that were once very useful, but have since lost become all but redundant.

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In a 1998 speech, Bill Clinton lauded four African presidents for their commitment to democracy and free markets. Three of them are still in power today. The fourth one is dead.

Update on Soylent.

If you’ve heard about Soylent at all, it’s likely as a saccharine, mealy, unappetizing glop that a bunch of journalists tried and failed to live off of exclusively, just like Soylent’s inventor, Rob Rhinehart.

Marketed to coders and people launching startups, the entire Soylent phenomenon came across as a cult designed to deprive the rest of the world of some of the most basic pleasures of all—good food and the fellowship that comes with it.

But with an infusion of $20 million in January 2015 from venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Soylent the company pivoted from being a vehicle for its inventor’s quasi-apocalyptic notions about the future of humanity—Mr. Rhinehart recently declared that “grocery shopping is a multisensory living nightmare,” while lamenting that his apartment came with a kitchen—to a brand targeting people who just need something healthy and cheap to tide them over until their next proper meal.

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No doubt soon to be a protected class under the Civil Rights Acts.

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Wouldn’t that be a blessing? (Can Canada absorb that many whining slackers?)

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Of course they do.

https://bluebirdofbitterness.com/2016/05/16/prey-on-words-part-seven/

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The professional journalists covering the trial of the “Minnesota men” before Judge Michael Davis include the Star Tribune’s Stephen Montemayor. I rely on his work, as well as that of MPR’s Mukhtar Ibrahim and Laura Yuen, even when I am sitting next to him in court. Montemayor is a good and indefatigable reporter. If you want to know what’s going on during the day at trial, follow him on Twitter. He tweets everything of interest. He misses almost nothing.

Today, however, Montemayor presents as a case study in overlooking the obvious. He is unduly concerned by the racial composition of the jury. He thinks it’s a big deal that, while the three defendants are all black, the jury is all white. He has thus produced today’s Star Tribune story on the trial with Randy Furst: “Black defendants, white jurors: Does race make a difference in the courtroom?”

Read it.

House lawmakers on Thursday blasted the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) for doling out $90,000 in bonuses to one agency official despite a damning report that showed screeners failing to detect fake bombs and weapons during security tests.

…

A Homeland Security inspector general report released in June 2015 found that auditors were able to smuggle mock explosives and weapons past TSA screeners 95 percent of the time.

Committee members questioned why bonuses, awards and other forms of compensation were granted to senior TSA officials in the face of security lapses and allegations that employees were being reassigned to other airports as a form of retaliation.

They pointed to a $90,000 bonus that was paid over a yearlong period to Kelly Hoggan, an assistant administrator for the office of security administrations, whose base salary is $181,500.

I could live on that.

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The actor Wendell Pierce has been arrested following an alleged altercation with two  Bernie Sanders supporters in a dispute over US Democrat politics.

…

TMZ reports the 52-year-old became “enraged” after an apparent heated political debate with a man and woman who were Bernie Sanders supporters. Pierce is a supporter of Sanders’ rival and Democrat frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Saw that comin’.

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Thousands of children are hidden from authorities in unregistered schools across England, Ofsted’s chief inspector has warned.

Sir Michael Wilshaw’s warning comes after The Independent revealed thousands of children had disappeared from council records into illegal Jewish faith schools in north London.

Ponder the concept of ‘illegal school’. Ponder the depravity of a country where a school can be characterized as ‘illegal’.

Wisdom. Attend.

This is one of the most beneficial articles I’ve ever read, and fits very nicely with the systems-oriented approach to life laid out in Scott Adams’ seminal book How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.

Steve Sailer examines the backside of American history.

One of the more eyebrow-raising examples of media power to control the contents of public thought space is the near disappearance of any recollections of the huge leftist Nuclear Freeze movement of the early Reagan years. “Nuclear Freeze” doesn’t even have its own Wikipedia topic.

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Keeping track of time is critical for many tasks, such as playing the piano, swinging a tennis racket, or holding a conversation.

Neuroscientists at MIT and Columbia University have now figured out how neurons in one part of the brain measure time intervals and accurately reproduce them.

The researchers found the lateral intraparietal cortex (LIP), which plays a role in sensorimotor function, represents elapsed time, as animals measure and then reproduce a time interval. They also demonstrated how the firing patterns of population of neurons in the LIP could coordinate sensory and motor aspects of timing.

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Titled, “free radio on my phone,” the campaign says that most Android smartphones have a built-in FM receiver which doesn’t require data or Wi-Fi to operate.

The U.S. arm of the campaign believes iPhones also have a built-in radio chip but that it can’t be activated. Apple wouldn’t confirm this detail.

The radio chip in many Android phones also lies dormant. But the campaign says it can easily be activated — if telecom providers ask the manufacturers to do it.

Right on.

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The U.S. Senate just confirmed what an Air Force general hinted at in February 2016?—?and which should have been obvious for years to close observers of U.S. air power.

The Joint Strike Fighter program is not developing one, common warplane for the U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps and the air arms of America’s closest allies.

No, the Joint Strike Fighter is actually three different plane designs sharing a basic cockpit, engine and software and a logistical network. The Air Force’s F-35A, the Marines’ F-35B and the Navy’s F-35C should, in all fairness, be the F-35, F-36 and F-37.

“Despite aspirations for a joint aircraft, the F-35A, F-35B and F-35C are essentially three distinct aircraft, with significantly different missions and capability requirements,” the Senate stated in its version of the National Defense Authorization Act for 2017.

And each one is a flying piece of shit.

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The composition of theatergoers’ breath fluctuates along with movie scenes, according to a study published this week in Nature’s Scientific Reports. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry and Johannes Gutenberg University found that they could reliably map the chemical patterns of a movie as it progressed through heart-racing scenes and calm ones. During Hunger Games, for instance, carbon dioxide and isoprene levels increased whenever Katniss was fighting for her life. The researchers think isoprene levels correspond with suspense.

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

Cue whine about difficulty getting funding, preferably from taxpayers.

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Maybe this time they’ll take the hint.

A North Dakota rancher shot and killed the first wolverine spotted in the state in more than 150 years, sparking the ire of animal advocates who found the killing unnecessary and rather cruel.

“Killed this here critter out tormenting the cows yesterday,” Jared Hatter wrote on his Facebook profile shortly after the late-April shooting of the rare animal.

Animal advocates make a hobby of sticking their noses into other people’s business. Of course, they had no sympathy for the cows being tormented. White privilege, or something.

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Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has threatened to seize factories that have ceased production and arrest their owners after extending emergency powers amid the country’s massive economic crisis.

I keep expecting the Estate of Ayn Rand to sue the Venezuelan government for plagiarism.

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According to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the State Department also fails to consistently conduct legally-required review of the Egyptian forces that are supplied and trained by the U.S.

The U.S. government has sent Egypt more than $6.4 billion in military aid since 2011, which has been used to purchase F-16 jets, Apache helicopters, tanks, explosives, and police equipment.

The U.S. government has bankrolled the Egyptian military for decades, propping up the rule of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. But the aid was widely criticized after 2013, when a military coup deposed Egypt’s new democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi. To skirt a law banning aid to coup regimes, the State Department has refused to call what happened a “coup.”

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I am not making this up.

Hey, if actors can make tons of money pretending to be other people, why not try to make tons of money pretending to be another race?

The sad thing is that people will buy it.

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Thousands of Christians in German refugee shelters are being persecuted by Muslims, sometimes even by their security guards, according to a new report, which asserts that in most cases German authorities have done nothing to protect the victims.

The study alleges that German authorities and police have deliberately downplayed and even covered up the “taboo issue” of Muslim attacks on Christian refugees, apparently to avoid fueling anti-immigration sentiments.

Parent Hacks: 134 Genius Shortcuts for Life with Kids.

Food Huggers.

Planter that doubles as earthquake helmet. Hey, you never know.

Exploding bike locks. When you’re really serious.

Fire alarm that texts you when your house is on fire. We have the technology.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

You’ll note that almost all of these cities are run by Democrats.

Another thing that might be going on is that the Mexican heroin dealers have started pushing smack in the big cities, stirring up the black gangs. Sam Quinones’s book Dreamland reported that about a half decade ago, Mexican heroin dealers were concentrating on selling heroin in white rural areas because nobody important in America much cares about white hillbillies quietly dying of overdoses (you’ll notice that nobody talked about the White Death in the media until the new Nobel Economics laureate Angus Deaton brought it up right after he won his award). But, according to Quinones, back then Mexican heroin retailers considered African Americans to be hotheaded and violent and thus to be avoided.

But that kind of prudence among foreign drug dealers can seldom last, and now Mexican heroin is spreading to black ghettos, with predictable results in terms of blacks shooting blacks.

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Not much needs to be said, except maybe come and live in Texas.

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Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is ramping up her fundraising schedule, attending a number of fundraisers this week that cost donors six-figures to attend.

The former secretary of state attended a pair of small, intimate gatherings in New York City on Thursday evening that cost donors a minimum of $100,000 to attend, according to a campaign official. On Wednesday, she attended two $100,000-a-head events in Englewood, N.J., and New York City.

She wants them to know that they’re getting the best Democrat President that money can buy.

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Parents of college students are rarely studied. However, many U.S. universities, particularly those lacking the deep pockets and extensive resources of elite privates, have come to rely on parents to fill numerous financial, advisory, and support functions.

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Most—but not all—of the parents in my sample fell neatly into several categories. About two-fifths were “helicopter” parents like Andrea and Alexis, regarded in the media as among the most reviled figures of 21st-century parenting—pesky interlopers who test the patience of school officials, meddle with university affairs, and raise a generation of “coddled,” “entitled,” and “under-constructed” youth.

We couldn’t have bad schools without bad parenting.

Yet intensive parenting is, in many ways, a logical response to the harsh risks facing young people during college and early adulthood. Increasing income inequality, high rates of young-adult unemployment, and a decline in stable and well-paying entry-level jobs loom threateningly in the foreground. Declines in state and federal support for higher education, coupled with rising administrative costs in a complex regulatory environment, have led to skyrocketing tuition. Additionally, the sheer diversity of academic and social options, particularly at large public universities, makes it easy for college students to make costly mistakes. Involved parents provide insurance against risk.

And so-called ‘journalists’ who perform as enablers — such as this one.

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Except for the testimony of the guys who actually did it. But I guess they don’t know nuthin.

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Wendy’s is joining the restaurant push toward automation in some customer service. The chain announced this week that it will be making self-service kiosks available to all its (primarily franchise-owned) 6,000 stores later this year. It will be up to individual franchises to decide whether to use them.

Drastic increases to minimum wages are notably a factor. Investor‘s Business Daily points out the chain separately has more than 200 restaurants in California and New York. Stores actually owned by Wendy’s instead of franchises have seen wage inflation of between five to six percent so far. Obviously when the $15 minimum wage takes off in those two states, there will be much more.

Sure, you’ll get that higher minimum wage — if you actually have a job, which you just lost to a robot. Too bad.

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An amazing achievement, and a slap in the face to those who say that persistent racism and sexism are holding back minorities.

Russell Moore speaks truth to power.

The Sexual Revolution, chaotically, wants to tell us that gender means nothing and that gender means everything. Neither is true.