Read it.

POLICE say a rancher jumped on his horse and lassoed a man who was trying to steal a bicycle in the parking lot of a Walmart in Oregon, USA.

The Medford Mail Tribune reports 28-year-old Robert Borba was at the store getting dog food Friday when he heard a woman screaming that someone was trying to steal her bike.

The rancher says he quickly got his horse out of its trailer, grabbed a rope, rode over and lassoed the man and bicycle.

“I seen this fella trying to get up to speed on a bicycle,” said Borba, who was planning on helping brand cattle in California that afternoon. “I wasn’t going to catch him on foot. I just don’t run very fast.”

…

It was a first for Borba too, as he had only ever used his lasso skills to rope in cattle before. “I use a rope every day, that’s how I make my living,” he said. “If it catches cattle pretty good, it catches a bandit pretty good.”

Motion Sickness Relief Band.  I have no idea whether it actually works, but if it does, that would be awesome.

Collapsible Pet Exercise Pen. I suspect it would also work for small children.

Mobile Phone Night Light.

Hurom Masticating Slow Juicer. Ye who need this sort of thing know who you are.

EasiSpread self-heating butter knife.

Oxo Good Grip Wooden Spoons. These look very handy.

‘Toolbox’ that folds out into a barbecue.

Hodor Door Stopper. Well, it actually is useful.

46 household things you can do with a muffin tin.

Motorized ice cream cone.

Sarah Hoyt speaks truth to all of those other things out there.

Some time ago some people did a study and decided that people who were mildly depressed had a better grip on their circumstances and chances than those who were optimistic.

True dat.

Read it.

All those “refugees” that Germany has been welcoming with open arms are enriching German culture in unexpected ways. In one Hamburg school, migrant children who speak little or no German are terrorizing children from native German families.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

We’re not worried about the probe. We’re worried about the indictment.

Read it.

A radical treatment that wipes out and then regenerates the immune system can halt progression of aggressive multiple sclerosis and even reverse its symptoms, research has shown.

Scientists in Canada described results from a trial involving 24 patients with a highly active, relapsing form of the autoimmune disease as “very exciting”.

But at the same time they warned that the procedure was risky, and only likely to benefit a certain proportion of patients still in early stages of the illness.

Read it.

As part of a long-running project called CarbFix, researchers injected emissions from an Icelandic power plant deep into rock formations. The gas reacted with the basalt rocks, forming carbonate, a material similar to limestone. Once turned into carbonate, the carbon can’t leak back out into the environment.

Read it.

Hollywood is under high pressure from various left-wing groups to bring its business fully in line with political correctness. After the Southern California ACLU claimed that the movie industry didn’t have enough female directors, no fewer than two federal agencies launched investigations into Tinseltown’s hiring practices. Blacks have threatened to boycott the Academy Awards if the Motion Picture Academy doesn’t start handing out Affirmative Action Oscars. And Twitter pests are pushing studios to make Captain America gay, Princess Elsa lesbian, and James Bond female.

In response, one of Hollywood’s top studios has now announced plans for a new tentpole picture scheduled for release next Kwaanza—a superhero extravaganza entitled Social Justice League of America: Age of Imaginary Problems. The blockbuster will be written and directed by Lena Dunham, who will also play the lead role of Cecily Shrillwine.

Read it.

David R. Hall has a plan, and he’s done the math.

The wealthy Mormon engineer says he wants to build 20 “sustainable” megalopolises in Vermont, starting with 1 million people in the Upper Valley, where he has bought land around a sacred site of the Latter-day Saints in the tiny town of Sharon.

By his calculation, about 20 million people could fit in Vermont.

Hall calls the project NewVistas, and while he insists it is not sanctioned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or limited to the church’s members, the religious overtones are hard to ignore. Ground zero for the project is the birthplace of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church. The NewVistas communities would have a governance structure similar to the Latter-day Saints hierarchy. And the land use design comes from a blueprint for ideal communities devised by Smith, called the “Plat of Zion.”

I’d rather live next to an LDS than a socialist. I’ve never met an LDS that I didn’t like, and rarely met a socialist that I did.

Read it.

Check out this stunning statement from an Erratum published in the January 2016 edition of the American Journal of Political Science:

The authors regret that there is an error in the published version of “Correlation not Causation: The Relationship between Personality Traits and Political Ideologies” American Journal of Political Science 56 (1), 34–51. The interpretation of the coding of the political attitude items in the descriptive and preliminary analyses portion of the manuscript was exactly reversed. Thus, where we indicated that higher scores in Table 1 (page 40) reflect a more conservative response, they actually reflect a more liberal response. Specifically, in the original manuscript, the descriptive analyses report that those higher in Eysenck’s psychoticism are more conservative, but they are actually more liberal; and where the original manuscript reports those higher in neuroticism and social desirability are more liberal, they are, in fact, more conservative.

In plain language, they exactly reversed the results. According to the actual results of the study, Liberals are more authoritarian. Conservatives were inclined towards “social desirability.”

Read it.

With the race for the Democratic nomination effectively concluded, Hillary Clinton now awaits the endorsement of President Obama, which they expect to come within the next few weeks. Obama is poised to play a big role in Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump, acting as an emissary to groups and audiences that have been more reluctant to support Clinton in the past. But this creates its own set of problems: namely, that the FBI under the auspices of Obama’s administration is also actively investigating Clinton’s email server and her mishandling of classified information.

It’s hard to see any way that a conclusion reached under people like Loretta Lynch, serving at the pleasure of a president advocating vociferously for Clinton’s election, would be seen as treating the candidate fairly. Even if Clinton is cleared, a dark cloud will hang over the process. And Clinton herself should not be comfortable with the prospect of a process Trump will certainly denounce as crooked, especially considering that many Americans would likely agree with him.

Read it.

The Army is planning to deploy laser weapons able to protect Forward Operating Bases (FOB) by rapidly incinerating and destroying approaching enemy drones, artillery rounds, mortars and cruise missiles, service leaders told ScoutWarrior.

…

The emerging weapons are being engineered into a program called Indirect Fire Protection Capability, or IFPC Increment 2. Through this program, the Army plans to fire lasers to protect forward bases by 2023 as part of an integrated system of technologies, sensors and weapons designed to thwart incoming attacks.

At the moment, Army soldiers at Forward Operating Bases use a system called Counter Rocket, Artillery, Mortar – or C-RAM, to knock down incoming enemy fire such as mortar shells. C-RAM uses sensors alongside a vehicle-mounted 20mm Phalanx Close-in-Weapons-System able to fire 4,500 rounds per minute. The idea is to blanket an area with large numbers of small projectiles as a way to intercept and destroy incoming artillery, rocket or mortar fire.

Read it.

A young Muslim bar tender was reportedly beaten up at a bar in the city of Nice, southern France because she served alcohol on the first day of Ramadan.

Never mind that Nice is in France, Muslims reserve the right to beat up anybody who fails to obey Islamic law.

The victim said she was shocked that such an attack could take place in France.

“Serving alcohol doesn’t mean I’m not following my duties. I’m doing it because I am a barmaid. In Tunisia, I do the same job and I never had the same problem. I can’t believe that in France, the country of liberty, that I could be attacked like this,” she said.

Welcome to the Dar al-Harb, sweetheart. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

Starting stopwatch to see how long it takes some ‘journalist’ to blame Trump.

Three people — a young woman and two male passengers — were driving in a car from Interstate 189 to Shelburne Road, on their way to the beach, police say, when the explosion occurred inside the vehicle, Police Chief Brandon del Pozo said.

All three were adolescents. Their names and other information were not immediately released.

One of the male passengers was holding the small device when it detonated inside the new, two-door Kia sedan, which still had paper tags. The vehicle pulled into the Shelburne Road Plaza, and the occupants called police.

Well, perhaps they were just celebrating Ramadan. I’ve heard that pipe bombs are popular for that.

Read it.

The Washington National Cathedral said it will remove images of a Confederate battle flag from its stained glass windows because it considers them a symbol of hatred and racial supremacy.

The windows honor Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

How about they remove the term ‘National’ from their name, since they aren’t? They could call it Politically Correct Progressive Episcopalian Cathedral if they like; that at least would be accurate.

Read it.

Two suicide bombings that killed about 25 people in Baghdad on Thursday were claimed by Islamic State, whose stronghold of Falluja near the capital is surrounded by Iraqi forces which are now advancing on the city.

The ultra-hardline Sunni insurgents said one attack was carried out with a car laden with explosives and the second with an explosive vest.

Read it.

Many states are broke, even though their constituents don’t know it. The two main drivers of states’ fiscal problems are the bloated promises made by lawmakers to their public employees about health care and pension benefits and an unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of a problem. Whether the dodging of long-term obligations is done knowingly or inadvertently hardly matters. The results are still the same. Faulty accounting always comes back to hurt the people in the cities and states that have used it—for example, Puerto Rico, Detroit, and Chicago.

Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying that the function of government is to hire and pay government workers. Now those buzzards are coming home to roost.

David Cole spends time in the underbelly so that you don’t have to.

Last week, the 2016 Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival (LAJFF) concluded its weeklong series of screenings here on the L.A. Westside. It’s always a special time when the LAJFF comes to town, because when else are you going to see Jews in Beverly Hills?

…

First off, it’s important to get an understanding of the definition of “false flag” among the conspiracy-minded. Initially, the term had a fairly simple meaning. It’s an operation designed to hide the true identity of the perpetrators of a crime while at the same time framing an innocent person or entity. Soldiers from country A dress in the uniforms of country B and carry out atrocities to make country B look bad. That has happened, no question. In fact, it’s an age-old war tactic, although so is claiming that something was a false flag when it wasn’t (country B actually does commit an atrocity and tries to weasel out of it by claiming, “No, it was people from country A wearing our uniforms! We wuz framed”).

…

I’ve had several prominent false flaggots tell me that I was an “inspiration” for this lunacy during my Holocaust revisionist years. “You’re the one who taught me, man, to, like, examine film clips and photos for tiny clues to expose hoaxes!” I hear that more times than I’d like to say, so permit me to set the record straight: If you think my work poring over documents and taking a magnifier to historical ruins is in any way equal to what false flag nutjobs do these days, you’ve completely missed the point of my work. Please stop giving me credit, and, while you’re at it, stop sending me so many damn friend requests.

Read it.

Everyone knows about the problems with Trump University. Trump should just be glad that Trump U didn’t have a Division I NCAA football team, or else he might well have Title IX complaints to go with the class action civil suit.

But did you know that Bill Clinton was a university chancellor? I didn’t either. There he is, over to the left. Moreover, he was paid $16 million by Laureate International Universities to be their “honorary” chancellor. Just think how much Slick Willie could have pulled down if he’d been a real chancellor. Just what is Laureate International University? It’s the parent company of Walden University, a mostly online, for-profit diploma mill that is facing the same kind of civil suits and fraud allegations as Trump University. Funny how the media seems to be uninterested in this story.

Read it.

Adam Goldman and Missy Ryan of the Washington Post report that the Obama administration believes approximately 12 detainees released from the prison at Guantanamo Bay have launched attacks against U.S. or allied forces in Afghanistan that have killed about a half-dozen Americans.

In March, Paul Lewis, who oversees Guantanamo issues at the Defense Department, admitted to Congress that former Guantanamo inmates are responsible for the deaths of Americans overseas. Since then, the administration has clammed up. However, the Post’s Goldman and Ryan have learned some details from sources.

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

The Other McCain vents a bit.

This token “diversity” of many TV and movie casts nowadays — does every police homicide unit in America now have a Puerto Rican lesbian detective? — is a sort of low-level background noise TV viewers have become accustomed to, but why does it seem so many of the plot lines are being scripted by writers who studied Critical Theory in grad school?

A good point, although I disagree with him about many of the movies he appears to dislike — I suspect that he appears to dislike.

Are people turning on prime-time TV to watch entertainment or to be lectured about race/class/gender oppression?

Obviously the latter, since that’s all they’re going to get.

Read it.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, on Tuesday introduced a new bill in the House to completely overhaul how the nation’s soldiers receive care from the Dept. of Veterans Affairs.

The solution: Start turning the sole, and worst, example of the federal government’s single-payer system back to the private sector.

About fargin time. The VA system is the poster child proving that government-provided health care would be a disaster.

The “Caring for our Heroes in the 21st Century Act” would launch a “Veterans Accountable Care Organization” to run the VA’s health care facilities. It would help create a new voucher system whereby soldiers could use VA funding to get care from the private sector. Specifically, it would enroll all new veterans into VetsCare Choice, which covers private health care, and it would let already-enrolled veterans opt in or stay with their existing coverage.

In other words, Obamacare without the lies.

Read it.

Police in Oklahoma are deploying an electronic scanner that can drain currency from prepaid credit cards seized at the roadside using civil asset forfeiture laws.

The Electronic Recovery and Access to Data (ERAD) handheld scanner was developed at the request of the Department of Homeland Security for use by US border guards. But the gadget’s maker is now marketing it to local and state police, and Oklahoma has bought 16 of the scanners for its highway patrol.

The reader can record data from any magstripe card – even down to hotel keys – and works with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, as well as Best Buy, Costco, Macy’s and Walmart gift cards. Any funds found can be frozen or transferred directly to a law enforcement bank account “to protect the integrity of the evidence and ensure the funds are available for trial or forfeiture,” ERAD’s advertising states.

I do not enter Oklahoma until they get this fixed.

Read it.

Presumably this is to make it apparent that they are not goons for a Mexican drug cartel.

I think.

Now, if they’d only publish one for high-school girls….

Read it.

Hoo-wee, the New York Times will really have to extend itself to top the boner and mother-of-all-corrections at the American Journal of Political Science. This is the journal that published a finding much beloved of liberals a few years back that purported to find scientific evidence that conservatives are more likely to exhibit traits associated with psychoticism, such as authoritarianism and tough-mindedness, and that the supposed “authoritarian” personality of conservatives might even have a genetic basis (and therefore be treatable someday?). Settle in with a cup or glass of your favorite beverage, and get ready to enjoy one of the most epic academic face plants ever.

Kevin Williamson pulls back the curtain.

The editors at the Huffington Post seem to have evolved on the issue, having just published a column by Jesse Benn, whose mirth-inducing bio-line identifies him as a doctoral student in journalism, in which he calls not for a revival in violent political rhetoric but for actual political violence: “Sorry Liberals, A Violent Response To Trump Is As Logical As Any,” the headline reads. Benn argues that the Trump phenomenon is not “a typical political disagreement between partisans,” and that “there’s an inherent value in forestalling Trump’s normalization. Violent resistance accomplishes this.”

E. J. Dionne has not been heard from.

A few days ago, Vox suspended an editor (after considerable criticism) who called for violence, in the form of riots, in response to Trump.

Gary Hart has not been heard from.

Neither has the president.

What’s violent rhetoric compared with genuine calls for violence?

Actual political violence is apparently to be encouraged when the goons are on the left and the target is (I suppose) on the right. Let a couple of ranchers in Nevada get squirrely, though, and it’s the end of days.

Read it.

Migrants in Germany committed or tried to commit some 69,000 crimes in the first quarter of 2016, according to a police report that could raise unease, especially among anti-immigrant groups, about Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal migrant policy.

There was a record influx of more than a million migrants into Germany last year and concerns are now widespread about how Europe’s largest economy will manage to integrate them and ensure security.

The report from the BKA federal police showed that migrants from northern Africa, Georgia and Serbia were disproportionately represented among the suspects.

Read it.

Which the Chattering Class assured us wasn’t happening.

When Europe agreed to open its borders to Syrian refugees in response to one of the greatest humanitarian crises of our age, officials assured the Western world: we’ve got this. There will be no jihadists among them; and if there are, we’ll be sure they won’t get in.

But it wasn’t exactly true. Jihadists, we now know, have been among them. They have gotten through. And now those same officials are starting to admit things might get even worse.

On Saturday, only weeks after Germany’s national security agency confessed it had been alerted to the presence of jihadists who posed as asylum-seekers, German police arrested three Syrians on charges of planning a major attack in Dusseldorf. The arrests followed a confession by a fourth suspect, arrested earlier in France, who had informed officials there about the plot. All four suspects, reported the Washington Post, had traveled to Europe along the well-worn, so-called Balkan Route. Prosecutors say the attack aimed to kill “as many bystanders as possible with guns and other explosives,” as had a plot foiled days earlier in Antwerp.

Read it.

He is, as you might expect, not a Person of Pallor.

The former executive director of a former Head Start program in Jersey City Tuesday admitted that he diverted more than $250,000 from programs for underprivileged children and used the money for personal expenses, including a Maserati and a mink coat, prosecutors said.

Read it.

A massive fire at Düsseldorf’s major international trade fair grounds yesterday has been followed by reports that the blaze was set deliberately by migrants who were angry because of Ramadan.

Officially, some 160 migrants were resident at hall 18 of the Messe Düsseldorf conference centre, but it was a facility plagued by racial conflict which had seen violence spark before. Düsseldorf’s Express newspaper reports these conflicts were not between European German staff and their guests, but between the predominantly Arab residents, and a minority of Afghans who sided with the security staff running the facility — who were mainly Iranian.

According to the testimony of “several burly Moroccan refugees” which the paper had spoken to even as the hall burnt down, the Iranians employed by the German state to look after other migrants from around the world had “deliberately” not woken the Arabs up in time for their Ramadan breakfast following a long run dispute.

Just three weeks ago there had been another, much smaller fire at the exhibition centre as a migrant set fire to his mattress in protest against the accommodation.

Well, that’s gratitude for you. I say, ship ’em back.

Read it.

A man who had more than 26 cancer tumours in his abdomen is now free of disease thanks to immunotherapy.

…

Despite more chemotherapy, all treatments failed and two years ago, Mr Chettle was told the cancer had spread to his bones. Cancerous spots were also still on his liver.

…

Within two or three months of enrolling in the trial, Mr Chettle’s symptoms began to ease off. “I was able to turn my neck again,” he said. By the time his daughter’s wedding took place a few months later, he was able to walk her down the aisle.

Mr Chettle, who receives the drug as a 30-minute infusion every two weeks, has now been on the trial for almost two years and has experienced a complete response to the treatment.

Steve Sailer gives us a rundown.

The New York Times reported last week:

Kamala Harris made history when she became the first black woman to be elected attorney general in California…. Ms. Harris would be the first black woman in the United States Senate since Carol Moseley Braun, an Illinois Democrat who served from 1993 to 1999, and Ms. Sanchez would become the first Latina elected to the Senate.

Interestingly, there was no mention in the Times account of Harris’ mother, an immigrant doctor from India who raised her, often in Montreal, after her father, a Jamaican economist, left. The analogy of Kamala Harris to Barack Obama is too embarrassingly obvious to spell out: America loves African-American politicians…as long as they weren’t actually raised by their African-American fathers, who, ideally, aren’t even American.

Black people are distinguished by their dark skins, wide lips, broad noses, and dark kinky hair.

Find the ‘black woman’ in this picture. Go ahead, take all the time you want.

In practice, the current Democratic party line appears to be: The less American America’s African-American politicians, the better.

It apparently helps to be not all that African, either.

Read it.

As if we need any more evidence of profligate waste in the transit industry, Chicago, Austin, and other cities are considering aerial trams, also known as gondolas. Portland’s infamous aerial tram, which opened in 2006, cost 500 percent more than the original projection, carries a mere 3,200 round trips per day, and collects fares that cover just 22 percent of its operating costs. The economic development that was promised if Portland taxpayers helped build it went to Florida instead.

The most famous aerial tram is, of course, the one from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island in New York City, an expression of the deep desire by the Crust of the Other Left Coast to live in Switzerland but still have access to Broadway and Fifth Avenue. It is perhaps not insignificant that before Roosevelt Island was ‘gentrified’ it was called Welfare Island.

Read it.

LawNewz.com discovered that when it comes to politics, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, the law firm behind the class action lawsuit, is not exactly neutral either. Our analysis, using data first compiled by The Washington Post, found that Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd paid the Clintons a total of $675,000 in fees for speeches since 2009. Hillary Clinton gave a $225,000 speech at the law firm as recently as September 4, 2014.  Bill Clinton also gave a speech for the same fee back in 2013, and another one in 2009 before the firm had been renamed (they used to be called Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP). In fact, of the five law firms that paid for the Clintons to speak over the last few years, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd paid out the most money.

I love the smell of Conspiracy Theory in the morning.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

I first wrote about why Crop Rot Fever is an evergreen media assignment back in 2006.

…

In contrast, the lowest unemployment rate at the moment is in Ames, Iowa (2.0%), where a different agriculture productivity model prevailed.

Read it.

According to the available metrics, the most-read JAG post to date—by a significant margin—has been “Trump and the Judge.” We think it’s a pretty good post. But still. This fact alone would seem to vindicate our contention that all is not well with America or with conservative intellectualism. Or, to be less circumspect, that America has become, or is well on the way to becoming—in the classic sense—a corrupt republic.

…

Here’s what’s really going on. The old American ideal of judging individuals and not groups, content-of-character-not-color-of-skin, is dead, dead, dead. Dead as a matter of politics, policy and culture. The left plays by new rules. The right still plays by the old rules. The left laughs at us for it—but also demands that we keep to that rulebook. They don’t even bother to cheat. They proclaim outright that “these rules don’t apply to our side.” They can be openly biased, and justly so, because of past injustice, present white privilege and so on. But for the right, it’s always 1963. And not the actual 1963 (which was bad) but the 1963 of the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech (one of the greatest ever, by the way), as if it were actually the law of the land right now. Which, of course, it isn’t.

Read it.

Why is this news?

Read it.

A lecturers’ union is refusing to let its officers take part in debates at an equality summit if they are white, straight, able-bodied men.

The equality conference of the University and College Union said that members must declare their ‘protected characteristic’ – whether they are gay, disabled, female or from an ethnic minority – when applying to attend.

Activists say that it means representatives who do not qualify cannot participate in all of the discussions – even though they have been elected by their union branch.

I am not making this up.

Emma-Jane Phillips, who sits on the UCU equality committee, said: ‘Equality reps are passionate about equality regardless of their own situation.

To infer that someone does not understand someone’s situation just because you don’t tick a box is insulting.’

Welcome to IngSoc. Be careful not to step in the diversity; it’s Hell getting that stuff off your shoes.

Read it.

Oops.

Two men attempted to carry out an armed robbery on a McDonald’s in France – only to be thwarted by a table full of soldiers from an elite military unit having their lunch at the restaurant.

The thieves burst into the restaurant in the eastern commune of Ecole-Valentin on Sunday night – one firing a warning gunshot while the other began raiding the tills, as customers and employees fled the scene.

…

It was at this point – once everyone was out of danger – that the soldiers made their move, pursuing the robbers into the car park.

They shouted for the men to stop, but they just carried on. One fell on some stairs and was quickly apprehended, while the other was halted by a shot to the abdomen.

To be fair, any twelve soldiers would have done the same.

What’s the French for ‘You deserve a break today!’?

Watch it.

That’s a pretty good stalk the panther has going.

Lion of the Blogosphere puts it in a nutshell for your convenience.

The judge, Gonzalo Curiel, is a member of the San Diego La Raza Lawyers Association. Anti-Trumpers will say that doesn’t mean anything, that it’s just a Latino lawyers association. But if they are just a Latino lawyers association, then that’s what they should have called themselves. By choosing the name “La Raza” they open themselves to legitimate speculation that they share the radical left-wing pro-immigrant anti-American-citizen anti-white politics of the National Council of La Raza.

It’s easy to see why a judge with leftwing pro-immigrant politics would be unable to fairly judge Donald Trump. And Trump has a constitutional right to due process of law, and the legal process allows a litigant to request a new judge.

Minorities routinely claim that they can’t be fairly judged by a white judiciary, and a white judge who joined a “white lawyers association” would surely be kicked off the bench for being a “racist,” so there is clearly a PC double standard here. But that’s not the argument Trump is making. It’s not that the judge can’t fairly judge his case because they are different races, but because of different political views.

‘La Raza’ is apparently Spanish for ‘The Race’ and hence, in my view, an explicitly racist organization. If they weren’t Fashionable Minorities, such explicitly racist ‘minority’ organizations (Yeah, I’m lookin’ at you, NAACP) would get the same treatment as Aryan Nations and the KKK. But in this degenerate modern world, not so much.

Read it.

I must admit to experiencing some amusement when I read the statement of May 18 from the executive director of U.S. PIRG regarding the Obama administration’s new overtime regulation:

U.S. PIRG previously submitted comments expressing our concern that the DOL overtime rule as proposed would have significant negative consequences for non-profit, cause-oriented organizations like ours. The final rule does nothing to address those concerns. Doubling the minimum salary to $47,476 is especially unrealistic for non-profit, cause-oriented organizations. Organizations like ours rely on small donations from individuals to pay the bills. We can’t expect those individuals to double the amount they donate. Rather, to cover higher staffing costs forced upon us under the rule, we will be forced to hire fewer staff and limit the hours those staff can work – all while the well-funded special interests that we’re up against will simply spend more.

Most amusing is that fact that organizations like U.S. PIRG spend their time lobbying to inflict upon others precisely the sort of government regulatory meddling about which they are whining here.

The biter bit. Schweet.

Read it.

Cobb County (Ga.) Commission Chairmain Tim Lee has broken the news to his constituents that their taxes will have to be increased to complete the funding of a $40 million bond — which they voted overwhelmingly in favor of — to build public parks. To date, only about half of that bond has been funded, according to AJC.com.

But in a jaw-droppingly cynical act of crony capitalism and untransparent government, the county has found a way to come up with approximately $400 million in public funds to subsidize the new stadium being built for Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves, even though it denied the public a vote in the matter.

It’s shit like this that make people vote for Donald Trump.

I won’t live in a city that has a major sports stadium for precisely this reason.

Read it.

Increasingly, the Democratic Party is divided between two elements of its coalition – an oligarchy that supports Clinton and a base of workers, many of them younger, who favor Sanders. To the Clintonites, her positions on gay rights, the environment and feminism make her an acceptable progressive. However, to those who back Bernie, her embrace of, and by, the oligarchs, amid rising economic inequality, represents a glaring contradiction with someone supposedly leading “the party of the people.”

Read it. And watch the video.

She is said to be beautiful, hardworking, and a virgin. She’s also just 11 years old.

Read it.

Of course it’s in ‘progressive’ rag The Guardian so it’s full of ‘fascism under the bed’ language, but at least its coverage, which you won’t find in the American Drive-By Media. Sample:

The worst part about Cody Wilson is that he’s likable in person, and it’s easy to want to root for him as the underdog. But then he’ll say something so off-the-wall – “gun safety is using both hands”, say – and you crash back to reality.

‘Reality’, of course, being the Political Correctness cocoon, in which Gun Cooties are the worst kind of cooties you can have, even worse than Racist Cooties, Sexist Cooties, Homophobia Cooties, and CisNormativeHeteroPatriarchy Cooties.

Read it.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Sharon Helman, who oversaw the Phoenix office for Veterans Affairs—the one that created phony waiting lists to avoid oversight and criticism and whose exposure by CNN prompted a new law—is probably going to get rehired. Forget for the moment that “Helman plead guilty earlier this year to not reporting $50,000 in gifts she received from a lobbyist seeking business with the VA, including a car and a $5,000 check.” And hell, let’s forget what was going on in the Phoenix office that she headed up: An investigation discovered at least 3,500 vets stuck on secret waiting lists so they wouldn’t be counted on official lists that tracked how quickly former soldiers got treatment. At least a few dozen of the vets died while on such lists.

Read it.

A person can’t open the newspaper these days without encountering a reminder of the plummeting value of the dollar. Sunday’s New York Times was a perfect example. The lead editorial, about money in politics, reports, “As the money torrent rises, it’s no coincidence that for the first time in history, most members of Congress are millionaires (268 of 534 House members), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.”

This is indeed “no coincidence,” but not in the way the Times intends. The rising number of millionaires in Congress is not some indication that the legislature has been overrun by the rich, but further evidence, as if it were needed, that a million dollars isn’t what it used to be. The Center for Responsive Politics count the Times references makes no adjustment for inflation, so there’s no way to tell, as measured by any real yardstick, whether today’s Congress is richer or poorer than it used to be. In fact, the rising number of millionaires in Congress may be a sign that the chamber is more representative than it is plutocratic; CNBC reported recently that there are a “record number of millionaires living in the U.S.,” an estimated 10.4 million of them, if one counts by assets and does not include the value of one’s primary residence.

Find the government’s Consumer Price Index (thank you, Google) and figure out what your annual salary for your first job out of school is in today’s dollars. You will be shocked.