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Wating for the eco-Nazis to raise the cry of ‘Frankenfuel!’

And Steve Sailer is there to tell us all about it.

South and East Asians are considered white for the purposes of diversity statistics (except Ellen Pao, of course), but they’re told they’re People of Color for the purposes of hating Republicans and evil white men.

…

Still no pictures of Pao and her gay black diversity litigant scam artist husband Buddy Fletcher.

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In 2007, television underwent a great expansion — beyond the major broadcast networks, beyond televisions and into all kinds of genres — just at the moment the economy shrank, and a fantasy emerged. As real people became poorer and lost their jobs, the ones on TV got richer, and their jobs seemed more beside the point. All that space to tell new stories ended up dedicated to a limited set of jobs and an increasingly homogeneous notion of what work even means.

These days, there are only a handful of workplace taxonomies in scripted television. We’ve got police precincts, crime-and-forensics teams and legal-medical-Beltway dramas. NBC’s “Chicago Med,” “Chicago Fire” and “Chicago P.D.” are a virtual sexy-calendar night. These shows might know what a blue collar is, but they’re class-unconscious: Their characters don’t usually work for the explicit maintenance of their livelihoods. They work for comedy, for suspense, for sport. For the most part, TV cops, lawyers, bureaucrats and doctors inhabit the same kinds of toothsome residences and wear the same exquisitely tailored clothes, all showing off how fabulously art directors and costume designers earn a paycheck. Sometimes we see more of their work than that done by the people who inhabit it. Now on TV, no matter your actual job, almost everybody belongs to the same generic, vaguely upper-class class.

Watch an episode of a NYPD crime drama and tell me where a NYC cop gets the income to live in that sort of an apartment. (Apart of The Pad, of course….)

TV became — and still is — a medium struggling to understand “average,” “ordinary,” “normal.”

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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

The national living wage is having an unexpected effect on monthly salaries, according to a jobs website.

CV-Library says the average monthly UK salary has gone down since the introduction of the national living wage on April 1.

Crowdsourced data on the site shows that the average UK salary decreased 3.4 per cent to £32,899 in April compared to £34,055 in March. The retail sector has been hit hardest, with an 8.9 per cent drop in salary month-on-month, pushing the average salary in retail down to £28,762.

Britain does this stupid stuff so that we don’t have to. (I wish….)

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To encourage a “sustainable, resilient food system,” New York’s city council has proposed a $5 million municipal farm-subsidy program, under which the city would buy development easements in the Hudson Valley. In this way, the council plans to help feed “3 million New Yorkers liv[ing] in neighborhoods without adequate supermarkets.” It’s alarming to consider that New York could suffer food shortages so acute that the city government must establish its own agricultural supply chain. Indeed, according to the council, 1.4 million New Yorkers are “food insecure,” indicating a massive failure of markets to respond to this most basic need.

But is it true? If it’s hard to reconcile the idea that New York City has, simultaneously, starvation-level conditions and an “epidemic” of obesity in the same neighborhoods and among the same people, it is because the contemporary debate about food availability tends to ignore individual choice (and taste). Paternalism and finger-wagging masquerading as science distort the argument about how and what poor people eat. For example, the idea of “food deserts,” which is what the council means when it refers to neighborhoods without adequate supermarkets, has become a truism among liberals concerned about urban dietary habits. First Lady Michelle Obama, for example, has made their elimination one of her top priorities. And indeed, some areas around the country, especially in rural regions, lack good grocery stores.

Few of these are in New York City, however. According to the Department of Agriculture, which originated the term, two small areas on Staten Island qualify as food deserts—meaning that at least one-third of the local residents live one mile or more from a grocery store that sells fresh food. The rest of the city, the department concludes, is reasonably well served.

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Tammy Nutall-Pritchard had been braiding hair with her older sister, Debra Nutall, since she was 18 years old.

Nutall taught Nutall-Pritchard the craft when she was 15, and the sisters would stand side-by-side behind the chairs of scores of clients at Nutall’s Memphis, Tenn., salon who came in to get their hair braided while chatting and gossiping with customers.

Nutall-Pritchard did well—she charged around $300 per head and sometimes made more than $1,000 each week.

“It gave me joy,” Nutall-Pritchard, 47, told The Daily Signal of working with her sister. “She told me, ‘You learn a skill, it will bring an income for you if you do it the right way.’ She taught me to be the woman I am today, and she taught me that you can be your own boss.”

But Tennessee’s onerous licensing laws governing natural hair stylists like Nutall and Nutall-Pritchard eventually drove Nutall out of the state she and her family have called home their whole lives.

As a result, Nutall-Pritchard, who worked at the shop for more than six years, was out of a job.

Black Lives Matter, but apparently Black Jobs Don’t.

Read it. And weep.

While the rest of the country is hung up on the necessity of maternity leave — or even the newly coined “meternity” — one group continues to be overlooked when it comes to paid time off from work: new pet owners.

“Paw-ternity” leave is already a reality in the UK — the US pet-insurance provider Petplan found that nearly 5 percent of new pet owners in the UK were offered time off to care for their four-legged kids. (Not surprisingly, the UK is also light-years ahead of the US when it comes to maternity leave, offering up to 39 weeks of paid leave for new mothers.)

It’s time for the US to hop aboard the “paw-ternity” train.

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I guess they must be doing it wrong.

Isn’t it amazing how academic institutions which have been controlled by progressives for decades are such hotbeds of racism?

The University of Missouri is already suffering greatly from the protests of last fall but they keep digging the hole deeper.

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This presidential election may have been driven by populist fever in both parties, but at the end, the campaign has left the nation’s oligarchs in better position than ever. As Bernie Sanders now marches to his own inevitable defeat, leaving the real winners those oligarchs—notably in tech, media, urban real estate and on Wall Street—who are among Hillary Clinton’s most reliable supporters.

With either Ted Cruz, or , more likely, Donald Trump, as the GOP nominee, the emerging post-industrial ruling class will have little to no reason to even consider breaking with the Democrats. It’s already clear that companies such as Facebook consider it their duty to stop Trump, and there is a growing tendency among social media firms, including Twitter, to censor unpopular right-wing views.

Clinton, by outlasting Sanders, has done the oligarchs’ dirty work for them. As Greg Ferenstein, who has been surveying Internet billionaires in the Bay Area notes, the tech elite—much like media and Wall Street—have no sympathy for Sanders’s social democracy. After all, it’s much harder to become a mega-billionaire if tax rates for the wealthy soar; much better to show your commitment to things like gender equality, gay rights, climate change from the comfort of San Francisco or Manhattan luxury apartments or soaking in the hot tub in Malibu, Boulder, the Hamptons, or Los Altos hills.

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Good luck with that.

“I just want to know how you can say you’re going to put a lot of coal miners out of jobs and then come in here and tell us how you’re going to be our friend,” Mr. Copley said.

And how does Hillary, the working man’s friend, respond?

“What I said was totally out of context from what I meant,” Mrs. Clinton said. “It was a misstatement.”

Weasel, weasel, weasel, weasel, weasel….

Despite Mrs. Clinton’s best efforts to apologize and explain her plans for coal country, Mr. Copley remained unconvinced. He said he wanted more information about her plans for Appalachia.

Mrs. Clinton won’t get his vote when West Virginia voters go to the polls. Mr. Copley said he hasn’t decided which candidate to support, but he will be voting in the Republican primary.

Heh.

Read it.

Increasingly college students throughout the United States complain of perceived slights they call microaggressions, they demand safe spaces where they can be protected from harmful ideas, and they ask for trigger warnings to alert them to course material that might cause discomfort. We have argued that these are all manifestations of victimhood culture — a morality in which people display a high sensitivity to slight, handle conflicts by appealing to authorities, and seek to portray themselves as weak and in need of help. Older moral injunctions to ignore minor and unintentional offenses get cast aside, and those who successfully identify as victims or allies of victims gain a kind of moral status.

The technical term for ‘victims’ is prey, and in the Real World prey get eaten. God help these people if they ever get out in the Real World.

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The artist behind a nude Donald Trump painting has claimed she was punched in the face by a supporter of the Republican hopeful.

Illma Gore made headlines earlier this year when her painting of Mr Trump with a small penis, titled Make America Great Again, went viral. It is displayed at the Maddox Gallery in London.

On Saturday, Ms Gore shared a picture of herself with a black eye to her Instagram page.

“Today I was punched in the face by a man who got out of his car and yelled, ‘Trump 2016!’ in Los Angeles,” she wrote.

Sorry, but I find that vastly entertaining. ‘Mommee! Johnny hit me back!’ She should try painting a picture of Mohammed with a small penis and see what she gets.

Looking at her picture, it’s hard to tell where the makeup and tattoos stop and the bruises begin. ‘Were you injured? Or is that a political statement?’

“Though I encourage passion, opinion and emotion, especially through art, I think violence is disgusting […] This type of violence makes creatives feel like we live in a world where our individual creative input isn’t safe.”

It would seem that the pervertatarians can dish it up, but can’t take it. Poor special snowflakes. Somebody needs to educate them that ‘passion, opinion and emotion’ are the precursors for violence, as ultra-left riots around the world testify. I rather suspect that she would be among the first to distinguish what happened to her from what happens to any person who ‘does art’ that the ultra-left disagrees with.

The artist also pleaded with Mr Trump to stop “glamourising and perpetuating violence” and to “make America decent again”.

Perhaps she needs to talk to the Black Lives Matter crowd. Good luck with that.

Read it.

Previous research from Duke environmental engineer Ana Barros demonstrated that the regular landfall of tropical cyclones is vital to the region’s water supply and can help mitigate droughts.

Now, a new study from Barros reveals that the increase in forest photosynthesis and growth made possible by tropical cyclones in the southeastern United States captures hundreds of times more carbon than is released by all vehicles in the U.S. in a given year.

Cue conniptions by the Usual Suspects. (‘Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ science?’)

Read it.

The Army is developing its weapons, technologies and platforms with a greater emphasis on being ready for great-power, mechanized force-on-force war in order maintain cross-the-board readiness and deter near-peer adversaries from unwanted aggression.

While the service aims to be prepared for any conceivable contingency, to include counterinsurgency, counterterrorism and hybrid-type conflicts, the Army has been shifting its focus from 15-years of counterinsurgency war and pivoting its weapons development toward major-power war.

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University of Arizona College of Law’s decision to make the Law School Admission Test optional has put the school at odds with the powerful national nonprofit group that administers the exam and controls much of the law-school application process nationwide.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of the bureaucratic state is that it is not enough to be qualified to perform a certain function, one must have the correct credentials from the correct credentialing agency in order to be allowed to perform that function.

Last month, LSAC’s general counsel notified Arizona Law that the school’s new policy may violate its bylaws, which require that “substantially all of” a law school’s applicants take the LSAT.

The letter said the group is considering expelling Arizona Law from its membership, which would effectively cut off the school’s access to a crucial student admissions pipeline. The question of Arizona Law’s membership will be taken up at an LSAC board of trustees scheduled this week, the letter said. The board is made up of mostly law school deans and law professors.

Typically the Crust enforces such gateways by law or, when an appropriated law can’t be purchased, a set of semi-legal hoops to jump through that have the same effect. This ensures that all of the relevant apparatchiks are the Right Sort of People.

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The Securities and Exchange Commission, no longer content with just regulating securities, has accused a company called Timbervest of fraudulently taking undisclosed real-estate commissions. Timbervest was found liable by an SEC administrative law judge (“ALJ”), but even without getting into the merits of the allegations, there are several problems with this prosecution inquisition.

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Ponder the term ‘black market’ — does it say something about the market, or the person who uses the term?

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Some 1,300 pounds of bronze Roman coins dating to the 3rd and 4th centuries have been unearthed by construction workers digging ditches in Spain.

The find, in 19 amphoras — storage containers — is unique not only because of the volume of coins but because the coins appear to have never been in circulation, making them almost pristine by comparison with other discoveries.

Gates of Vienna is having a fundraiser. Please give generously.

As is often remarked these days, the nations of the West — Europe, Canada, the United States, and Australia — are drifting inexorably into a Soviet-style totalitarianism. Soft totalitarianism, mind you — no gulag necessary just yet — but still Soviet-like in its insistence ideological conformity.

So what artistic style would we associate with the democratic totalitarianism that dominates the post-modern West? What ideology are we obliged to conform to in our visual representations if we, the artists, want to get ahead?

Why, Multiculturalism, of course. What else could it be?

Walk into a post office, or a bank, or a supermarket, or a pharmacy, and all the images you see will display a uniformity of iconography. Images are chosen carefully to include a certain selection of exquisitely represented races and ethnicities. And they’re gender-balanced, too.

Of course.

We have no choice: the future is multicultural.

Such has been decided for us, for our own good, by people who know better than we do. Left to our own devices, we would be racist throwbacks, little Nazis and bigots wearing Ku Klux Klan robes, goose-stepping around the mean streets of our white supremacist dystopia.

But with the help of our cultural betters, we can recover from our atavisms. Through education and diversity training, we can learn to truly celebrate the wonderful inclusive rainbow quilt of cultures!

Then we can buy the world a Coke and live in perfect harmony.

Uh-huh. Yup.

Read it.

The Russian intelligence services discovered a bomb-making factory when they raided a secret mosque in the city of Samara. The explosives they found in the building were so unstable that they had to be detonated on the spot, leaving the mosque a little worse for the wear and tear.

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Turns out young people actually like driving.

Imagine that.

Check it out.

If Hillary is elected in the fall, we’ll all need to study up.

Robert Fernandez reveals some inconvenient truth.

However threatening the Taliban offensive becomes, the avalanche of logistics now has a momentum all of its own. The timing of the Islamic assault was probably no coincidence. The Taliban have been watching the Obama policy for years. All they had to do was wait till things passed the point of no return and then strike.

…

Perhaps the most tragic thing about Afghanistan is that the president picked a useless objective and made the decision to lose it at the greatest possible cost.

He has a gift.

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For over 250 years it has been believed that the Battle of Crécy, one of the most famous battles of the Middle Ages, was fought just north of the French town of Crécy-en-Ponthieu in Picardy. Now, a new book that contains the most intensive examination of sources about the battle to date, offers convincing evidence that the fourteenth-century battle instead took place 5.5 km to the south.

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It’s a remarkable record of prediction. One hundred percent wrong. The professor president who loves to talk about teachable moments is himself unteachable. Why is that?

…

When you’ve defined your political task as “fundamentally transforming the United States of America”—as Mr. Obama did on the eve of his election in 2008—then your hands are full. Let other people sort out their own problems.

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Black lives matter, we’re told—but in many American cities, black residents are either scarce or dwindling in number, chased away by misguided progressive policies that hinder working- and middle-class people. Such policies more severely affect blacks than whites because blacks start from further behind economically. Black median household income is only $35,481 per year, compared with $57,355 for whites. The wealth gap is even wider, with median black household wealth at only $7,133, compared with $111,146 for whites, according to a study by Demos and the Institute on Assets and Social Policy.

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.

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‘Part of the blame obviously goes to the father for not keeping his loaded gun under lock and key,’ says deputy police superintendent Manoj Kumar

Obviously a case of defective genes expressing themselves. Think of it as evolution in action.

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’bout time, too. I’ve been waiting for a Fox crew to take somebody from MSNBC out back and beat the snot out of him.

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Well, serves him right, swimming against the zeitgeist like that. Where does he think he is?

(Welcome to my world, kid.)

Lileks.

We went with my wife’s choice, which is fine. She has excellent taste, too, and by deferring to her choice I accumulated husband points, which I can spend on a new 4K TV.

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Today is the last day of Whiteness History Month up at Portland Community College, though it is not clear whether the social justice set at PCC want the world to know about it or not. Yesterday a person attempted to videotape a session on feminist theory, and as you can see at the beginning of this six minute video, one of the instructors encourages people in the audience to physically obstruct the person’s video.

Now, never mind the charming people who turn up on the video: if you’re preaching about justice, why wouldn’t you want more people to see and hear you? This takes gnosticism a bit too far I think.