Robert Higgs writes up something that has irritated me for years.

Rhetoric is often insidious, especially in political and policy-related discourse. The words a writer or speaker uses to express his ideas may easily tilt the reader or listener’s evaluation toward unwarranted acceptance or rejection. Politicians and others who make public pronouncements understand this effect, and they choose their words with an eye toward using the terms that make their arguments and proposals most persuasive.

Think ‘capitalism’, ‘price gouging’, ‘black market’, ‘frankenfood’, ‘Islamophobia’, etc.

Perhaps the most dangerous examples pertain to the ordinary, oft-used words “we,” “us,” and “our.” The danger arises because these words relate to groups of people, perhaps to groups as small as those with only two individuals, but often to groups comprising hundreds of millions of persons. Speaking in terms of collectives predisposes everyone who reads or hears the words toward the assumption that a collective is the appropriate concept for the consideration of what is right or wrong, desirable or undesirable for the government to do.

Whenever a Leftist wants to rope you into whatever Narrative item he (or she) is pushing, he (or she) always uses ‘we’, as if he (or she) and you were part of some group to which certain things ought to apply.

Read it.

Facebook workers routinely suppressed news stories of interest to conservative readers from the social network’s influential “trending” news section, according to a former journalist who worked on the project. This individual says that workers prevented stories about the right-wing CPAC gathering, Mitt Romney, Rand Paul, and other conservative topics from appearing in the highly-influential section, even though they were organically trending among the site’s users.

Several former Facebook “news curators,” as they were known internally, also told Gizmodo that they were instructed to artificially “inject” selected stories into the trending news module, even if they weren’t popular enough to warrant inclusion—or in some cases weren’t trending at all. The former curators, all of whom worked as contractors, also said they were directed not to include news about Facebook itself in the trending module.

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

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry….

Read it.

First, chase down a rabbit. I will wait while you do this. tick tick tick tick tick tick tick….

“If we were to go back to the very beginning of this process that has gone to an extreme today, I think it would really surprise many people,” said Daniel Lieberman, a professor of biological sciences at Harvard University. “We used to spend a disproportionate amount of our days chewing.”

“You can go for an entire day without chewing today, and that’s really bizarre from a historical standpoint,” he added.

Jim Goad seeks to right an historic injustice.

There persists a stubborn myth that all serial killers are white. If pressed to name a black serial killer, some may be able to point to The Atlanta Child Murderer, who to this day insists he was framed by police to cover over the true killers—the KKK, natch. Others may recall the black duo who became known as the Beltway Snipers. Beyond that, most people draw blanks—and that’s unfair in a society that prides itself on equality.

Not only have there been a lot of documented black American serial killers, blacks are actually overrepresented in this grisly yet attention-grabbing crime.

Studying the time frame of 1945-2004, criminologist Anthony Walsh found that out of 413 confirmed American serial killers, 90 of them were black—a quotient of 22% and nearly double their percentage of the population. An almost identical quotient is claimed by Eric W. Hickey in his book Serial Murderers and Their Victims. A massive database at Radford University tracking over 4,000 serial killers from 1900 to 2010 found that a whopping 40.6% of the killers were black. In his book Rise of the Black Serial Killer, Justin Cottrell says he’s confirmed 1,837 cases of American serial killers since the year 1860, with 53% of the killers being black. Cottrell also says that only 6% of white serial killers murder “outside their race,” whereas 57% of black serial killers are more racially ecumenical in choosing their victims.

Check it out.

I know it’s asking a lot to suggest people spend 13 minutes watching Hillary Clinton non-stop, especially when it is a 13-minute compilation of her lies. But just imagine the pain Michael Armstrong, the complier of this archive, had to endure to put this together. So get out a bottle of whiskey, or take some Dramamine or something.

Read it.

Pardon me for correcting the headline. I’m picky like that.

The point is, of course, not whether High Speed Rail ought to be available, but whether it can be made available at an affordable price. All of the available evidence points to the answer being NO.

I would use a Bentley if it were available, but I can’t afford one. The whole foundation of the High Speed Rail movement is the search for some way to implement it without bothering to do any sort of cost-benefit analysis, as if we could just use part of our inexhaustible stash of Unicorn Farts to fund it. (Of course, the people who come up with these projects never have to pay for it themselves, which is why it’s always a government-oriented deal.)

The basic problem with any kind of ‘rail’ is that it goes from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, and you’re left to your own devices to cover the initial and final stages. When the alternatives are foot, horse, or boat, rail is a great achievement. When the alternative is a comfortable automobile that will take you from your own front door to the front door of where you’re going, on your own schedule and at your own pace, rail sucks big hairy donkey dicks. The people who Just Love Rail are people who live in high-density cities where one can walk or bike or take a cab to where the rail starts, then walk or bike or take a cab from where the rail ends to where you’re actually going. Fine for them. But these are the people who are so convinced that Their Way Is The Right Way that whatever your preference might be is of no account where it differs from them. I ascribe it to the increasing narcissism permeating our culture (e.g. tattoos and piercings and weird hair styles/colors).

Read it.

Typically, ‘foreign aid’ merely enables enrichment on the part of 3d-world kleptocrats. If you are very very lucky a bit of it trickles down to the people who actually need it.

Nobody bothers to say ‘Thanks’ to the U.S. taxpayers who foot the bill, so I’m not sure what the point of foreign aid really is. Except perhaps to allow American (and foreign) bureaucrats feel good about themselves for ‘trying to help’.

Read it.

I like to think that they could use an adjustment or two. Perhaps if they didn’t lean so far left ….

Read it.

As medieval scholars prepare for the journey to Kalamazoo for the International Congress on Medieval Studies, we wanted to tell you the story of a medieval scholar who undertook his own trip for learning – a trip that did not go as planned.

Traveling is always a bad idea.

Read it.

The method uses solutions of peptide and protein molecules that, upon touching each other, self-assemble to form a dynamic tissue at the point at which they meet. As the material assembles itself it can be easily guided to grow into complex shapes.

Read it.

It’s a strong contender for the geekiest video ever made: a close-up of a smartphone with line upon line of numbers and symbols scrolling down the screen. But when visitors stop by Nicola Marzari’s office, which overlooks Lake Geneva, he can hardly wait to show it off. “It’s from 2010,” he says, “and this is my cellphone calculating the electronic structure of silicon in real time!”

Even back then, explains Marzari, a physicist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland, his now-ancient handset took just 40 seconds to carry out quantum-mechanical calculations that once took many hours on a supercomputer — a feat that not only shows how far such computational methods have come in the past decade or so, but also demonstrates their potential for transforming the way materials science is done in the future.

Read it.

It seems that the Islamic Council of Norway (IRN), like so many other Islamic organizations around the world, is running a halal-certification racket, and using Mafia-style methods to persuade businesses to participate. The IRN, in effect, makes them an offer they can’t refuse.

Read it.

Robots will be the farmers of the future. A company in Japan is building an indoor lettuce farm that will be completely tended by robots and computers. The company, named Spread, expects the factory to open in 2017, and the fully automated farming process could make the lettuce cheaper and better for the environment.

I’m still waiting to see how they’re going to replace the free stuff, like sunlight and dirt and rain.

Voice of the Crust The New York Times obviously intends this as a Telling Indictment of the Lack of Effective Gun Control.

Go over the list.

Now: How many of these were ‘gun free zones’ (areas in which personal firearms were prohibited)?

They don’t ask that question, but you need to connect the dots.

Read it.

We experimentally vary white foreigner presence in dictator games across 60 villages in Sierra Leone, and find that the simple presence of a white foreigner increases player contributions by 19 percent. To separate the impact of the white foreigner’s race and nationality from other characteristics, we test additional predictions. First, the white foreigner’s presence may heighten demand effects, prompting players to try to impress the white foreigner by being more generous. This should make behavior in the game less indicative of true generosity. Consistent with this, we find that game contributions are no longer predicted by real-world public good contributions when the white foreigner is present. Second, those more familiar with aid may perceive the games as a form of means-testing, and therefore give less to signal that they are poor. Consistent with this, in the presence of the white foreigner, players in more aid-exposed villages give less, and are more likely to believe that the games are testing them for aid suitability. Together, these results suggest that players’ giving decisions respond to the white foreigner’s race and nationality. Behavioral measures are increasingly used to infer cross-national differences in social preferences or to assess aid effectiveness—our results suggest that we should be cautious in these uses.

For extra credit, identify this quotation: ‘Porgy, you’re a white man, you have to help us….’

Raheem Kassam wants out.

When I was growing up, I couldn’t figure out why anyone would want to live anywhere but London. Dr. Samuel Johnson’s quote was branded on fashion accessories, I recall: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

Well, there’s an argument to be made about me being tired of modern life, certainly. But either way, Dr. Johnson’s quote simply doesn’t hold true anymore.

Today, London elects its first, demonstrably Islamist-sympathetic Mayor.

Read it.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

I’m not sure how I would cope with this situation.

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Because they’re Muslims. Duh.

The Pakistani Taliban’s brutal attack at an Army Public School in 2014, which killed more than 140 children, forced the country’s powerful military into launching a massive military operation against militants based in the tribal regions along the Afghan border. While for years, the Pakistani leadership is known to have patronized and sheltered various militant groups for different security related reasons, to everyone’s surprise, this operation promised to decimate all terrorist groups:  “All foreign fighters and local terrorists will be wiped out without any exception,” including the Haqqani network, said the military.

…

However this apparent major doctrinal shift in Pakistan’s strategic security and defense policy has proved another hoax. Before the operation, Pakistan Army’s media wing in a statement said that this will be an indiscriminate operation and when the soldiers “go there, they will eliminate everyone,” and by that the spokesperson meant “any terrorist who is on the soil of Pakistan right now within the area of operation.”

The military operation named Zarb-e-Azb, as announced has targeted all foreign or local militant groups except those who had left the region before the operation. Reportedly, the Haqqani network was tipped off before the start of the operation and moved its assets across the Durand Line, border dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Lying to the kaffir is not objectionable under Islam.

Scott Johnson of Powerline sums it up.

Obamacare was built on an edifice of calculated lies. Some of us could see the propositions on which President Obama sold Obamacare as falsehoods at the time of the selling. Others have learned from bitter experience after the buying. President Obama and his team hold a low opinion of the intelligence of the American people. See, for example, the case of Jonathan Gruber. Having elected him president twice, we have done much to earn his contempt.

Now comes Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to reveal the lies on which Obama’s alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran was promoted. See David Samuels’s May 8 New York Times Magazine profile of Rhodes, “The aspiring novelist who became Obama’s foreign-policy guru.”

Creative Kitchen Gadgets site. I have the banana slicer; it works very well, if that’s what you want to do. GBHOME12 coupon code.

Read it.

Engineers from GE Global Research unveiled a turbine that could provide power for 10,000 homes. But what’s truly remarkable about this turbine is its potential to solve the world’s energy challenges.

Typically, turbines weigh tons and use steam to run—this one is no bigger than the size of your desk, weighs around 68 kg (150 pounds), and runs on carbon dioxide. “This compact machine will allow us to do amazing things,” said Doug Hofer, lead engineer on the project, in Albany, New York. He continues, “the world is seeking cleaner and more efficient ways to generate power. The concepts we are exploring with this machine are helping us address both.”

The current design of the turbine will allow up to 10,000 kilowatts of energy to be produced; however, researchers are looking into scaling up the technology so that it can generate up to 500 megawatts, which could be enough to power a city.

Well, we’ll see.

Read it.

The Federal government opened the money spigot and so colleges (naturally) raised their prices. Now you can’t afford college unless you put yourself into debt-slavery.

Now ponder the effect on medical care prices of (a) insurance and (b) Federal health care programs.

Read it.

As the knowledge economy becomes increasingly spiky, concentrated, and urban, some of America’s most expensive cities like New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and Boston have become even more unaffordable. But the burden of escalating housing costs is not spread evenly, hitting some groups harder than others. As the affluent and the talented crowd into these urban centers, less advantaged families, those who don’t yet own a home, and younger people have trouble staying in or moving to cities, and many are pushed out.

Read it.

But you’d never know that from listening to Democrats or their lackeys in the press.

Honestly, I wouldn’t be remotely tempted to quit the 2016 me so that I could be a one-billion-dollar-richer me in 1916.  This fact means that, by 1916 standards, I am today more than a billionaire.  It means, at least given my preferences, I am today materially richer than was John D. Rockefeller in 1916.  And if, as I think is true, my preferences here are not unusual, then nearly every middle-class American today is richer than was America’s richest man a mere 100 years ago.

Read it.

As my wife likes to say, I am duberous.

Read it.

And quite naturally respond by raising shipping prices.

The nearly $6-per-shipment surcharge, levied by ABF Freight System Inc. and Old Dominion Freight Line Inc., comes after California this year began requiring trucking companies to pay drivers for time spent refueling, on rest breaks and other periods.

Trucking companies typically pay per mile driven, and industry groups say calculating additional wages in California add to the already elevated cost of moving freight in California. The state is home to the country’s two busiest ports, as well as some of the strictest labor protections and environmental standards.

One of the reasons that the economy is bad is because politicians keep raising everyone’s costs with bullshit regulations.

Read it.

In recent days, violence out of Gaza has indeed escalated significantly, and the trigger has been a succession of breakthroughs in the Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) ability to detect cross-border assault tunnels that threaten Israel’s south.

On Thursday morning, the IDF announced that it had found a tunnel 30 meters (98 feet) underground that reached into southern Israel, not far from where the IDF used new breakthrough technology to locate another tunnel in April.

Realizing it is about to lose its most prized offensive weapon against Israel – the ability to inject murder squads in Israeli territory though tunnels – Hamas’s military wing decided to do something it has not done in almost two years. It began a succession of cross-border mortar attacks in the vicinity, with a view to disrupting the detection work, and more importantly, to signal to Israel that Hamas is willing to risk war over its tunnel program.

Read it.

It seems crazy to call it the ‘New Normal’, but once again, record numbers of Americans are renouncing citizenship. Every three months, the Treasury Department publicly names individuals who renounced. It is surely more about FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act enacted in 2010,  than it is about politics. Still, numbers are flying, with one poll saying that 1 in 4 Americans would consider leaving if Trump is elected. Others claim they will leave if Hillary is elected.

In reality, of course, most who bristle about politics are not serious. And for those who are, they surely mean a temporary move, not a final exit. In contrast, giving up citizenship is a big deal. Yet the number of published expatriates for the first three months of 2016 was a record 1,158. In 2015, there were approximately 4,300 expatriations. Comparing present to past suggests that Americans renouncing citizenship have risen 560% from their Bush administration high. There are now 18 times as many renouncers as in 2008.

Read it.

How, then, are cities faring in meeting the aspirations of their black residents, judged especially by the ultimate barometer: whether blacks choose to move to these cities, or stay in them? Among major American cities, three main typologies emerge: the high-flying progressive enclaves of the West, the historically large cities of the Northeast and the Midwest, and the fast-growing boomtowns of the South. Though results vary to some extent, the broad trend is clear: the most progressive-minded cities are either seeing a significant exodus of blacks or, never having had substantial black populations, are failing to attract them. These same cities, home to some of the loudest voices alleging conservative insensitivity to blacks, are failing to provide economic environments where blacks can prosper.

How to have your ‘diversity’ and beat it, too.

Read it.

Live by Identity Politics, die by Identity Politics.

“Every business dealing in recent history that I’ve had with a socialist-minded person, I haven’t got paid,” Shupe told the station.

He added: “Every time I’ve dealt with these people in recent history, I get ‘Berned.’

“With an ‘e,’ not a ‘u.’ ”

So Shupe refused to tow her.

“He said ‘I can’t tow you, you’re a Bernie supporter,’ ” the woman, Cassandra McWade, told The Post on Thursday. “And I was like, ‘Wait, are you serious?’ ”

He was.

So it was not just politics, but recent experience.

Fox Carolina reported: “When he saw ‘a bunch of Bernie Sanders stuff’ he said he told the woman, ‘very politely,’ ” that he could not “tow her car because she was ‘obviously a socialist’ and advised her to ‘call the government’ for a tow.”

Now that’s comedy.

Shupe told the ABC station that he’d had “some horrible experiences in the last six months with towing cars for this mindset individuals,” in which, he said, he hasn’t received payment for services.

“They want to argue about a $50 tow bill, and it turns into just a drama and a fuss,” he said, according to WLOS. “And I said, you know, I’m not going to associate with them, and I’m not going to do any business with them.”

Hoist with their own you-know-what.

Read it.

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

In honor of the upcoming 10th anniversary, The Daily Caller News Foundation re-watched “An Inconvenient Truth” just to see how well Gore’s warnings of future climate disaster lined up with reality.

As with most such Chicken-Little prognostications, Gore turned out to be full of Global Warming.

Gore’s been harping on global warming since at least the late 1980s, but it wasn’t until 2006 he discovered a way to become massively wealthy off making movies about it and investing in government-subsidized green energy.

‘Crapitalism’ is alive and well in the Democrat party.

Read it.

From the UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA – SAN DIEGO and the “follow the money” department, comes this study that shows activist groups how to fleece more money from the public.

…

Published in the journal Climatic Change, the study finds that people are willing to donate up to 50 percent more cash to the cause when thinking about the problem in collective terms.

Thinking about climate change from a personal perspective produced little to no change in behavior.

The Other McCain, nothin’ but net.

OK, let me interrupt this to make an important announcement. I hadn’t been planning to do this, but I now officially endorse Donald Trump.

If David Brooks hates Donald Trump, then it is my duty as a patriotic American to love Donald Trump. And if David Brooks says the fall election will be a “slaughter” for Republicans, this means Trump will win. And now let’s return to the total wrongness of David Brooks….

…

What is so despicable about David Brooks is his condescending attitude, his insuperable conviction that he is better than the rest of us, more intelligent and sensitive — all that “emotional connection and verbal expression,” you see. And as he departs on his tour of the American hinterlands, ripping himself out of the “bourgeois strata” to leap across “the chasms of segmentation,” I hope David Brooks gets what he deserves, namely to be beaten to a bloody pulp by a tattooed redneck.

I know that feeling.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

But my observation is about normal people. So, those who go by this label, are involved in arguments a lot more, and they use reasoning a lot less. Taking all of the above definitions into account and applying it to everyday situations, we might think of “reasoning” as traversing a sort of route on a map, with facts at one end, conclusions at the other.

It’s pretty hard to live an adult life, even for a day or so, without doing some of this. So how do they get around doing it? Part of it is, conclusions are really just opinions, and to an emotionally-invested liberal there’s no distinction to be made between facts vs. opinions. In their world, this stuff is all in the same salad bowl, it’s all just something you say to make people agree with you.

Their enduring position, and their attitude, is “accept it uncritically or else I shall call you a troglodyte.” Or something worse: Bigot, sexist, racist, homophobe. Mere insults carry a threat of social shunning, but the “ist” words carry a threat of vocational ostracism. Using plain simple words, that means career-death. That actually means something to a conservative.

David Cole deconstructs the L.A. Times.

Yet, as bad a paper as it is, the Times does possess one unique quality: a highly entertaining obsession with race. The Times can take any story, about any topic, and spin it to be racial. Accuracy and relevance are immaterial; all that matters is finding some way, any way, to cram some aspect of minority suffering or white devilry into every story. For example, last November, Times journalist and wise Latina Carolina Miranda felt the need to pause her review of a one-man Ben Vereen tribute show in order to remind her readers that the Republican Party “hadn’t historically had a warm relationship with African Americans.” Yes, “historically,” blacks never supported the party of Lincoln, emancipation, abolition, Reconstruction, antilynching laws, anti-Klan laws, and the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.

If you’re not reading the Times, this is the kind of incisive reporting you’re missing out on.

Imagine my disappointment.

To the Times, “white privilege” is as much a part of L.A. as the smog. So how do L.A.’s privileged whites rank in the new study? First? Second? Third? Try fourth. In terms of household median net worth, whites in L.A. rank behind Japanese, Asian Indian, and Chinese households. In terms of median total value of assets, whites also come in fourth after Japanese, Asian Indians, and Chinese. That’s the face of “white privilege” in L.A.—totally not white. And the L.A. Times? Totally not interested.

Well, for Social Justice Warriors, Asians are ‘honorary white people’, so that’s not surprising. (Any ethnic group whose average IQ is higher than the average IQ of a Fashionable Minority are Virtual White People ipso facto, and possessors of ‘white privilege’ — which will certainly surprise the Japanese who were interned during WWII.)

Read it.

As someone who grew up with most of these ‘obsolete’ technologies, they don’t surprise me. What surprises me is to appreciate how much grown adults today don’t have experience with, say, a dial telephone. (And, as someone who has hand-set lead type, I find ‘uppercase’ and ‘lowercase’ more familiar than most.)

Read it.

ROTC has long depended on college grades as a major factor in determining which cadets would become officers. That seemed to work. But since 2001 it has become more obvious that the quality of ROTC officers was declining while those from the service academies (West Point and the like) and OCS (Officer Candidate School, mostly for enlisted troops) was not. On closer examination it was found that the problem was grade inflation in American colleges. The old standards for acceptable grades no longer applied thus using college grades to select qualified ROTC members to become competent officers had ceased to work. The service academies were much less affected by the grade inflation craze in part because they were run by the military and their students were basically studying technical subjects. The enlisted candidates for OCS were the result of the quality control program still enforced for new recruits since the 1970s.

Read it.

Ensuring that Democrats continue to receive black votes in a monolithic block, it is in their interest for blacks to remain poor and resentful, which is why agitators like Jones work overtime to keep racism alive and boiling. If blacks in larger numbers entered the middle class, more of them would likely start voting Republican. No wonder the left makes sure to reinforce the idea that your skin color or ethnicity should determine your ideology and your vote, and why dissenters like Clarence Thomas are demonized. It’s rare to see this  implicitly acknowledged. Jones is right to be scared.

Read it.

Scientists from Virginia Tech and the University of Bristol have revealed how pigment can be detected in mammal fossils, a discovery that may end the guesswork in determining the colors of extinct species.

The researchers discovered the reddish brown color of two extinct species of bat from fossils dating back about 50 million years, marking the first time the colors of extinct mammals have been described through fossil analysis.

The techniques can be used to determine color from well-preserved animal fossils that are up to 300 million years old, researchers said.

Read it.

DreamstimeCritics of the current intellectual climate at university campuses believe classrooms are indoctrination camps where left-wing academics brainwash students into becoming social justice activists. They are mistaken. The most pernicious and questionably legal forms of indoctrination aren’t happening in the classroom at all, and are primarily driven by administrators rather than professors.

Oregon State University provides a good example. The campus has plans to implement a new training program for incoming freshmen in the fall of 2016. Dr. Angela Batista, the campus’s interim diversity officer, sent an email to students earlier this week asking them to review the proposed training program. This training is ideological by its very nature: students will complete on-line modules in “social justice learning,” “diversity,” and “inclusivity.”

“This training initiative is intended to provide all students entering Oregon State University an orientation to concepts of diversity, inclusion and social justice and help empower all OSU students to contribute to an inclusive university community,” according to the proposal.

Presumably they will all wind up loving Big Brother.

Read it.

Three New York college students who said they were targets of a racially motivated attack face multiple charges for what prosecutors are calling a false claim.

A grand jury on Monday indicted Ariel Agudio, Asha Burwell and Alexis Briggs, all 20, each on a charge of third-degree assault and multiple counts of falsely reporting an incident, the Albany District Attorney’s Office said.

Agudio and Burwell also face charges of harassment. Agudio also was charged with two counts of attempted assault.

Yet Another Racism Hoax.

The State University of New York at Albany rallied behind the students, who are black, when they came forward with claims that a group of white men and women attacked them on January 30 in a confrontation on a city bus. Students held a rally and university President Robert J. Jones said in a letter to students and faculty that he was “deeply concerned, saddened and angry about this incident.”

Others came to their defense on social media using the hashtag #DefendBlackGirlsUAlbany. The People of Color Caucus issued a letter in support of them.

But university police said an investigation revealed that no one used racial epithets against the women. Instead, they assaulted another passenger and falsely reported the incident.

“What happened on the bus was not a ‘hate crime,'” University Police Chief Frank Wiley said in February. “The only person we heard uttering racial epithets was one of the defendants.”

I guess it’s racism to defend yourself against black people assaulting you.

Black Lies Matter.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

Where are racial gaps in school test scores worst? Ironically, where liberals are most dominant.

The new national database of school-district test scores created by education researchers at Stanford and Harvard reveals that the single widest white-black racial gap in American public school districts is in the city most synonymous with leftism since 1964: Berkeley, California.

How badly do blacks lag whites in Berkeley public schools? Berkeley’s white-black gap is 1.60 standard deviations. In other words, the median black student would score at only the 5th percentile if he were white.

Yet, Berkeley is ferociously antiracist. It was the first to have a Black Studies Department at the high school level. In the 2012 election, Berkeley voted for Obama over Romney 90 to 5. Berkeley Unified school-district administrators obsess over any data showing that black students get punished more than other races.

Still, the racial gap is bigger in Berkeley than anywhere else.

A. Barton Hinkle is full of it.

Republicans have slammed McAuliffe’s order as nothing more than political chicanery. But while they might have a point about the politics, they are wrong on principle. Having paid their debt, felons should be able to rejoin civil society as full members in good standing. As Rep. Bobby Scott (D-VA) put it the other day, responding to GOP critics: “The right to vote is a right. It is not a privilege.”

Huh? What DEBT? Do not be confused by the fantasy phrase ‘paid your debt to society’. There is no debt here; these people didn’t spend time in the slammer because they were ‘in debt’. They were there for a reason — what part of CONVICTED FELON does this writer not understand?

Felons can NEVER ‘rejoin society as full members in good standing’ because the presumption that applies to all other non-convict citizens, that they can be trusted out loose in society, has been convincingly refuted in the case of a CONVICTED FELON. These are people who have demonstrated THROUGH THEIR OWN ACTIONS that they think that their desires outweigh the duties imposed on them by law to NOT ROB, NOT STEAL, NOT MURDER, NOT ASSAULT, and NOT whatever else they were caught doing.

Ordinary people can be trusted to vote and carry firearms safely because the law presumes them to be safe, law-abiding citizens. That presumption does not operate with respect to CONVICTED FELONS, who have demonstrated that they can NOT be so trusted.

Prison is not a Catholic priest; it cannot absolve you from your sins once you do your penance. They lost control once, and may lose control again; the law’s job is to protect everybody and cannot just give them a do-over because it makes some people feel warm and fuzzy. Sorry, Charlie, but you don’t get to endanger my safety just because you might be feeling forgiving.

Read it. And watch the video.

‘Hey, lady, can your dog come out and play?’

Read it.

A new sex-trafficking law in Georgia clarifies that undercover cops totally count as minors for purposes of handing out 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentences. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed the measure, which is being touted as a crackdown on the sex-trafficking of minors, into law this week. In addition to enhancing the penalties for sex trafficking someone with a developmental disability, House Bill (HB) 770 says that it shall be no defense to charges of sex trafficking of a minor that no such minor actually existed.

Making the world safe for entrapment….

I am not making this up.

You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred.

The AntiPlanner has some thoughts.

As noted in today’s Google doodle, today is Jane Jacob’s 100th birthday. No doubt many people will write positive things about her. However, as the Antiplanner has noted before, her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is overrated.

Jacobs made two points, one of them right, and one of them wrong. Her correct point, which is celebrated by many libertarians, is in recognizing that urban planners don’t understand the cities they claim to be designing. The hubris of planners writing 50 year plans when they don’t even know what’s going to happen five years from now would be amusing if the consequences weren’t so expensive.

Jacobs wrong point, which is celebrated by many urban planners today, was in thinking that she did understand cities. She thought she understood her neighborhood, Greenwich Village, New York, but she didn’t understand it very well. She reduced her understanding to four simple “conditions” that she said all cities needed: mixed uses, short blocks, a mixture of old and new buildings, and density of residents and jobs. Her application of these oversimplified conditions to all “great cities” made her just as guilty of hubris as the planners she criticized.

Voice of the Crust The Atlantic explains why you ordinary people are too dumb to run your own lives and so out to leave it to exeprts, like, oh, I don’t know, let’s see, maybe government?

While Americans are not expected to manage their own legal cases or medical conditions, they are expected to manage their own finances. To be sure, the rise of the independent and empowered consumer rests on the belief that they have the requisite knowledge to be up to the task. But is it reasonable in such a system to expect people to succeed? Economists examining financial literacy would say no.