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About a year ago there was the usual fanfare about a new study that purported to show that hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for natural gas led to unsafe levels of local air pollution and increased cancer risk. Newsweek covered it, for example:

Living near to active fracking sites could increase the risk of cancer as the process harmful chemicals into the air, a new study has found.

Researchers from Oregon State University (OSU) and the University of Cincinnati found that hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, releases polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are linked to cancers and respiratory diseases.

The study found that moving just one mile away from active sites reduced the levels of the dangerous chemicals in the air by up to 30%.

Well guess what, mom? The study has been retracted. Not corrected or revised, but fully retracted because a “spreadsheet error” resulted in completely incorrect findings.

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You knew it had to happen. Black snipers shoot cops in Dallas and it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.

Funny how all of the violence at Trump rallies is caused by Hillary supporters. That includes the guy who tried to assassinate Trump.

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In my reading and writing on the history of eugenics (here, here, and here), I’ve begun to discern a common trait between the people called environmentalists and racists from a century ago.

They share a common outlook that is illiberal to its core. They imagine that a wise and powerful state can better plan a future for both nature and man. Both groups were panicked about unplanned progress, assuming it could only resort in degeneration, mongrelization, and destruction. They dreamed of a future in which they and not the unwashed masses would be in charge of how resources are used and how the human race propagates itself.

What we call ‘environmentalism’ would have been considered right-wing verging on ‘reactionary’ in any century other than this one (1916-2016).

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The FBI’s recommendation against the prosecution of Hillary Clinton for her wanton, illegal mishandling of classified information in her emails puts on display once again the reality of the so-called rule of law in the USA. This reality is, above all, that the system is trifurcated: there is effectively one set of rules for the great mass of white, middle-class citizens; another set for blacks, Mexicans, and poor whites; and, most notably, another set for the powerful and connected members of the ruling elite.

…

L’affaire d’Hillary, in contrast, shows that the system’s kingpins are pretty much above the laws, even the laws that they themselves have made and purport to enforce equally without fear or favor. The Clintons appear for all the world, and long have appeared, as a free-range criminal family with far-reaching elite connections—who’s to say what is bribe and what is shakedown?—amounting to what might well be described with a nod to Lady Macbeth herself as “a vast left-wing conspiracy.” So even when the FBI itself has the pelotas to report in great detail on Hillary’s law-breaking, it takes upon itself the pronouncement that a prosecutor would not have a case against her.

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Imagine what happens if the connectors fail.

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Happy Ramadan. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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The Atlantic is usually a reliable Voice of the Crust, so to have this kind of actual investigative journalism suggests that Hillary’s circled wagons might have a significant gap or two.

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The bullet that Hillary dodged may be coming back around.

The Utah Republican then asked if the FBI had investigated whether Clinton perjured herself when addressing the server while testifying to Congress.

“Not to my knowledge. I don’t think there’s been a referral from Congress,” Comey responded.

“Do you need a referral from Congress to investigate her statements under oath?” Chaffetz asked.

“We sure do,” Comey shot back.

“You’ll have one,” Chaffetz said with a laugh. “You’ll have one in the next few hours.”

…

The FBI does not take it upon itself to investigate matters before Congress, Comey told lawmakers later in the hearing. Instead, it waits for a formal offer to open an inquiry before examining whether a crime may have occurred.

…

If Clinton is found to have lied under oath while discussing the server — such as during an 11-hour hearing with the House Select Committee on Benghazi last year — she could be subject to felony charges of perjury, Comey hinted.

Comey’s situation appears to be that relying on such an old and untested statute can’t guarantee a conviction. Perhaps he’s fishing for authority to use something more fresh and potent. We shall see.

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If it were a left-wing group, of course, it would say ‘Watchdog group finds….’ It’s all about the Narrative.

Read the list.

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“Last Saturday afternoon (June 4) I’m standing on the west side of Main Street directly across from the Hunt Avenue intersection chatting with friends. Of course, traffic was heavy in both directions,” Smith wrote.

“A large perfectly polished and gleaming black SUV is attempting a left turn from Hunt onto southbound Main (not easy). Suddenly blue/red lights are flashing from the windshield area of the SUV (like you would see in an official fire/police vehicle),” he continued. “I said to my friends, I’ve never seen that before on a ‘regular’ vehicle and I’d think that’s illegal and dangerous. They agreed.”

That’s when the large black SUV jolted across two lanes of traffic, lights flashing, to park in front of a fire hydrant at the high end shoe boutique Footcandy.

“A St. Helena police car happens to be going northbound and pulls into the center lane and the officer starts shaking his arm and hollering at the driver of the SUV. While this goes on a man exits the SUV assisting a woman from the vehicle. She dashes off to Footcandy while he waits by the SUV in the red zone,” Smith explained.

The police officer then drove off without confronting the driver, he wrote.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks not.

There was more of the same old, same old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predictions of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed rail — before the first mile of track has been laid. One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon.

Such pessimism is daily fare, and for good reason.

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The Obama administration has been illegally funding Obamacare “Cost Sharing Reduction” (CSR) payments for years over the objections of IRS officials, according to a report released today by the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Since Congress launched its investigation, multiple agencies have refused to provide information, selectively applied the law, and even pressured one witness not to testify.

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Markets work, even when some people don’t want them to, and even when some people try to stop them.

California, which in 1989 became the first state to ban so-called assault weapons, has expanded that category twice since then: in 1999, when the legislature added a generic definition to the original list of specifically proscribed models, and last week, when Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill aimed at a device that legally circumvented the ban. With the ink barely dry on the new law, another workaround is already available.

The 1999 law covered any semiautomatic centrefire rifle with a detachable magazine and any of six “military-style” features: 1) a flash suppressor, 2) a grenade launcher or flare launcher, 3) a thumbhole stock, 4) a folding or telescoping stock, 5) a forward pistol grip, or 6) a pistol grip that protrudes conspicuously beneath the action of the weapon. But regulations issued by the California Department of Justice defined “detachable magazine” as “any ammunition feeding device that can be removed readily from the firearm with neither disassembly of the firearm action nor use of a tool being required.” The regulations specifically said “a bullet or ammunition cartridge is considered a tool,” which left the door open to “bullet buttons” that release the magazine when you insert a cartridge into them. Since guns with bullet buttons did not technically have detachable magazines, they could legally include the features that offended the sensibilities of California legislators.

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The American house is growing. These days, the average new home encompasses 2,500 square feet, about 50 percent more area than the average house in the late 1970s, according to Census data. Compared to the typical house of 40 years ago, today’s likely has another bathroom and an extra bedroom, making it about the same size as the Brady Bunch house, which famously fit two families.

This expansion has come at a cost: the American lawn.

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Seems perfectly reasonable to me.

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The advent of electronic form for stories is no doubt helping this along. Ordinarily so short a story wouldn’t justify separate publishing, so would need some larger vehicle such as a magazine or an anthology. But in an era where bits are bits, they can economically be put up for sale by themselves.

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Countless foreign-born US veterans were deported after the federal government failed to assist in their naturalisation process, a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union said.

According to the report, many of the soldiers, whose service dated back to the Vietnam War, were deported after facing charges for minor misdemeanors – which can be deportable offences – and courts were not allowed to consider military service.

I’m curious as to why the ACLU is interested in this. Surely they don’t think that somehow ‘civil rights’ have been violated here?

If one is not a citizen, and one commits a crime, then it seems fairly obvious that deportation is a rational response for a government committed to preserving public order and the safety of its citizens.

David Cole ‘fesses up.

When the Paulists started making a stink during the 2012 GOP primary, I was called into action for my—how would Liam Neeson put it?—“very particular set of skills,” namely my research abilities and a steady hand with a poison pen. It’s funny looking back on that election year, when the GOP establishment’s worst problem was Ron Paul, and let’s be honest, he was at best a persistent but nonfatal tick on the fur of the big Republican dog. Truth is, we didn’t know how good we had it (you know, compared with how things are now). But back in 2012, the Ron Paul challenge was seen as a major headache that needed to disappear.

I’ve always thought of Paulists as more of a distraction than anything else, the libertarian equivalent of the Ralph Nader PIRG crowd, but I admit that I don’t pay that much attention to ‘politics’ in the sense of who-gets-what-office-this-election-cycle; my interest is at a higher level, logically speaking, more what-are-these-idiots-doing-now and that sort of thing.

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CIAShortly after Khaleed al Masri arrived at a CIA prison in Afghanistan, officials figured out they had the wrong man. In fact, al Masri, a German citizen who had been kidnapped for the CIA by Macedonian police, didn’t appear to have any connections to terrorism. But agents continued to hold him and continued to question him for months. A recently released report said the CIA refused to release him because it couldn’t figure out a way to do so without admitting its mistake.

Sometimes I wonder which is the greater threat: Muslims or government employees.

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Well, I guess it worked. Oh, wait….

Selin Gören, who is a spokeswoman for the left-wing youth movement Solid, was attacked in the city of Mannheim in January while working as a refugee activist. She was ambushed in a play area late at night and forced to perform a sex act on her attackers.

Although she went straight to the police after the attack, she did not report the ethnicity of the men, nor that they were speaking Arabic or Farsi.

Instead, she said the men spoke German and robbed her.

However, after her initial interview she went back to the police 12 hours later and told the truth.

So at least she’s got that going for her.

She also wrote an open letter to a fictional migrant on Facebook, saying: “I am really sorry that your sexist and line-crossing treatment of me could help fuel aggressive racism.

“I’m going to scream… I will not stand by and watch, and it can happen that racists and concerned citizens name you as the problem. You’re not the problem. You’re usually a wonderful human being who deserves as much as any other to be safe and free.

And if you believe that one she’ll tell you another one.

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A disability rights advocate drowned in a bizarre accident when she fell into the Sacramento River in her wheelchair after watching Fourth of July fireworks.

No doubt the city of Sacramento will be sued under the ADA for not making the river wheelchair-friendly.

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Not good enough. She also has to be a transgender lesbian or its RAAAAAAACIST.

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Good reason not to go to college in New England.

If this kind of diversity deficit existed in any other way, it’d be considered a crisis.

No, only if ‘women and minorities hardest hit’.

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A British man acquitted of rape is threatening to go on a hunger strike after police issued an order requiring him to give them 24-hour notice before any sexual encounters.

The 40-year-old man, who legally cannot be named, was given a retrial in 2015 and acquitted of rape. Despite the ruling, police issued a “sexual risk order” against him. Under the order, the man must “disclose the details of any female including her name, address and date of birth… at least 24 hours prior to any sexual activity taking place.”

…

While it sounds dystopian, sexual risk orders are perfectly legal in England and Wales after the passage of the Anti-Social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act of 2014. Under the act, courts need only to find that a person is likely to commit a sexual offense “on the balance of probabilities,” even if they have never been found guilty.

This is what life is like in a country with no Bill of Rights.

Yet more reason to celebrate Independence Day.

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Now the ‘breakfast cheeseburger’ will be available all day.

Every day, in every way, life keeps getting better and better.

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The Green Party’s likely presidential nominee said federal officials should prosecute Hillary Clinton for mishandling classified information and endangering national security.

In a Wednesday statement, Jill Stein echoed Republican criticism of the Obama administration, saying that the FBI “is giving Clinton a pass” by declining to recommend criminal charges related to her use of a private email system while serving as secretary of State.

“All the elements necessary to prove a felony violation were found by the FBI investigation,” Stein said in a statement. “Her staff has said Secretary Clinton stated she used her private email system because she did not want her personal emails to become accessible under [Freedom of Information] laws,” she added. “This is damning on two counts — that she intended to disregard the protection of security information, and that she had personal business to conceal.”

‘Greens’ are crazy but evidently not stupid.

Government lies re food

For many years, starting in the late 1950s, a British nutritionist named John Yudkin waged a lonely war against the prevailing scientific consensus. Dietary fat was not the bogeyman it was portrayed to be, he argued. The real problem, he said, was sugar. In 1972 he published a book on the topic: Pure, White and Deadly.

And for going against the scientific grain, Yudkin was thoroughly savaged by the peers in his field. Among them was Ancel Keys, who believed fat was the culprit behind heart disease and other ailments. He made lacerating attacks on Yudkin and his research, and was joined in them by entrenched interests such as the British Sugar Bureau.

…

Eventually, however, the data suggesting problems with the fat-is-bad hypothesis—such as the fact that the French eat a lot of saturated fat but have very low rates of heart disease—piled up so high that it caused nutritionists to pause and rethink, albeit slowly and with considerable resistance. But by then, Leslie writes, “Yudkin’s scientific reputation had been all but sunk. He found himself uninvited from international conferences on nutrition. Research journals refused his papers. He was talked about by fellow scientists as an eccentric, a lone obsessive. Eventually, he became a scare story.”

Guess he was a ‘denier’, wasn’t he?

Of course, just because the nutritional consensus about fat was wrong does not mean the consensus about global warming is wrong. There’s an overwhelming scientific consensus about evolution and gravity, too. And evidence in favor of those theories continues to accumulate while evidence that could falsify them remains scarce as unicorns. Besides, prudence counsels restraint. Science might one day revise its view of gravity, but that doesn’t make it safe to jump off bridges.

Gravity and evolution have been demonstrated experimentally. Climate change — not so much.

Nevertheless, the story of John Yudkin should serve as a cautionary tale about the danger of groupthink and the folly of demonizing people who dare to ask hard questions. It’s crucially important that we get the facts about salt, climate change, and other possible hazards right. To that end, it’s also crucially important to recognize the possibility that we might be wrong.

Yea verily yea.

Scott Johnson turns over a rock.

Watergate gave us the Saturday night massacre when Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox let himself be fired rather than follow orders from President Nixon. The orders were lawful but Cox disagreed with them in principle. To my knowledge no intelligence officer or defense official or law enforcement officer has resigned in principle in the course of Obama’s presidency. Hillary becomes Evita. Welcome to Banana Republic City.

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Fourteen teen girls from the Bronx—all young women of color, ages 12 through 19—have gone missing since July 2014, according to New York City Councilman Andy King. He worries that their disappearances indicate the presence of a prolific youth sex-trafficking ring operating in the area. “Every other week our young girls are just vanishing off our streets,” said King at a June 29 press conference, explaining with creepy gusto that the missing Bronx teens had all been “attractive girls.”

There’s just one problem with the councilman’s lurid speculation: The vast majority of those 14 missing girls have already been reunited with their families.

Guess: Republican or Democrat?

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The chairman of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday said FBI Director James Comey plans to testify before Congress Thursday to explain his recommendation not to press criminal charges against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has faced heavy scrutiny over a recent conversation with Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, was invited by a separate committee to testify at a hearing next week.

Oversight! What a concept.

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Not every potential federal defendant gets the benefit of such distinctions. Consider the retired racecar driver on a snowmobile outing in Colorado who got lost in a blizzard and unwittingly crossed into a National Forest Wilderness Area, the Native Alaskan trapper who sold 10 sea otters to a buyer he mistakenly believed was also a Native Alaskan, and the 11-year-old Virginia girl who rescued a baby woodpecker from her cat.

The first two of these incidents resulted in misdemeanor and felony convictions, respectively, while the third led to a fine (later rescinded) and threats of prosecution. All three qualify as federal crimes, even though the perpetrators had no idea they were breaking the law—a kind of injustice that would be addressed by reforms that opponents falsely portray as a special favor to corporate polluters and other felonious fat cats.

The federal code contains something like 5,000 criminal statutes and describes an estimated 30,000 regulatory violations that can be treated as crimes. The fact that no one knows the precise numbers is itself a scandal, compounded by the fact that many of these provisions include minimal or no mens rea requirements, which specify the mental state required for conviction.

Watch it.

Interstitial video between Hillary’s lies and Comey’s evaluations.

John Stossel gets back to basics.

A century ago in the U.S., government at all levels took up about 8 percent of the economy. Now it takes up about 40 percent. It regulates everything from the size of beverage containers to what questions must not be asked in job interviews.

How can people be expected to keep up with it all?

Government has two jobs:

1. Keep people safe.
2. Keep people honest.

Everything else is statist bullshit.

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Increasingly, we live in a world where shared, universal experiences are fewer and further between. Where once you could count on a few tens of millions of people watching a TV show with you—and often at precisely the same time—these days DVRs and streamed video means you can watch things literally years after they make their cultural splash, and even if you do watch them at the same time as just about everyone else, chances are a much smaller number of people are watching it with you.

Which leads to the most ridiculous of all ridiculous First World Problems: Trying to find a TV show everyone at a dinner or other gathering has watched completely in order to have something to discuss passionately. It’s a lot harder than it should be.

Jeff Somers is one of my Recommended Writers (see column to right).

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Think of it as evolution in action.

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Archaeologists excavating a Roman-era synagogue at the site of Huqoq, Israel, have uncovered two new panels of a mosaic floor with instantly identifiable subjects—Noah’s ark, and the parting of the Red Sea during the Israelite exodus from Egypt.

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Below is another instance of culturally-enriched sexual assault in which the perp got off lightly. In this case the crime is the rape of a Swedish woman by an Eritrean “refugee”. The rapist can’t be deported after serving his (minimal) sentence because — wait for it — it would violate his rights, and besides, he is only 19. Such is the lunacy of Modern Multicultural Sweden.

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Black Lives Matter Toronto grabbed much of the media spotlight on the weekend by staging a 30-minute disruption of the Pride parade and issuing a set of demands to organizers, including barring police floats and booths from future events.

Get yer scorecard! You can’t tell the victims without a scorecard!

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DreamstimeThe Rystad Energy consultancy has just released its new calculations of global oil reserves and estimates that the U.S. may harbor as much 264 billion barrels of oil compared to Saudi Arabia’s 212 billion barrels. Overall, world oil reserves exceed 2 trillion barrels. At current production rates, this is enough oil to supply the world for 70 years.

Feel free to look up ‘Peak Oil’ if you’re in the mood for some idle amusement.

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Just to be clear, that’s ‘films about medieval society’, not ‘films made in medieval times’.

Well before any of us went to school and learned about the Middle Ages through academic text books, our conception of the era was probably established through more non-academic means, namely literature and film. It is impossible to know with the precision needed to create a film what the Middle Ages actually looked like. Thus, filmmakers more often than not, fall back on inaccurate tropes that we have come to equate with the Middle Ages, but which are really romantic constructs of the 19th century. And it is this very type of ahistoricism, according to historian Arthur Lindley, which obscures the reality of the Middle Ages and sentimentalizes it in a way that denies it any real independent existence. Filmmaker Andrew Elliot also noted that scholars are upset with Hollywood because, as he describes it, of the ‘filmmaker’s audacity to infringe on the serious scholarly domain of the Middle Ages.’ But if this is the way most people are exposed to the Middle Ages, then it behoves us to acknowledge medieval film as an important area of scholarship.

Lileks.

Condolences to everyone by the Milwaukee Road train station: Hope you’re feeling better. How do I know you’re ill?

Simple. I have a new smartphone app called “Sickweather,” and it tracks illness in your immediate area. How? Does it listen for your hacking coughs, fix your location via GPS, cross-check with Walgreen Cold-and-Flu aisle trips, and upload it so the NSA and Chinese hackers can send you get-well cards?

No. It scans Facebook. Well, you say, what doesn’t? The accuracy of the app depends on people staggering to their computer, feeling like achy sweaty sloths, and typing URGH I HAVE FLU so people can LIKE it, and companies can send you a coupon for something that makes you feel 17 percent better and tastes like blueberries grown in Chernobyl.

When I first opened it up, little markers indicating disease rained down on Minneapolis like the Judgement of Heaven, and any rational person would instantly run outside and daub an X on the front door in lamb’s blood. (We were out. Had it on the list, too.) Downtown was a seething mass of SICK icons, concentrated in two areas: Right outside the Milwaukee Depot, and the Warehouse District.

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The BRG’s response “acknowledges that political speech is free and protected,” though there is a but in there, enabling the BRG to condemn the messages:

As a group, though, we are committed to the idea that political speech is open, engaged, and part of a public debate. These seemingly connected reports suggest a pattern of using the idea of political speech to target specific members of the Skidmore community with biased messaging. As such, the BRG does not interpret these messages as political speech but as racialized, targeted attacks.

The hysteria is similar to chalking incidents revealing pro-Trump messages at universities across the country in the spring, which is when the messages appeared at Skidmore. The overreaction from the first message at Emory University led to a contest in which numerous schools participated with chalk messages of their own.

As a wise man once said, ‘If you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog.’

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One of the little publicized (at least in American media) complaints by U.S. allies in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq is the growing use of lawyers and media consultants to determine who American warplanes can attack. Local civilians noticed, especially in Afghanistan where civilians complained about this first in 2009 when they were told that the reason American bombers and armed helicopters were allowing more of the Taliban to escape was because of the need to consult lawyers first to ensure that the attack was “legal” (not likely to be interpreted as a “war crime” if any civilians got hurt.) Most of the complaints, which appeared in Afghan media but rarely anywhere else, were made by rural civilians being terrorized by constant Taliban violence. Worse, the Taliban soon became aware of the new rules and quickly developed tactics to exploit the rules to obtain maximum immunity from air attack. This information spread quickly (via the Internet) to other Islamic terror groups. The civilian victims of these terror groups eventually figured it out as well but no one paid much attention to that.

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Yeah, let me know how that works out for you.

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Two studies, examining the diets of over 23,000 adults, found pasta consumption was associated with a lower prevalence of obesity and a healthy body mass index (BMI).

The research, published in the journal Nutrition and Diabetes, concluded pasta consumption was associated with the healthy Mediterranean diet.

A Mediterranean diet, rich in vegetables, fruit, fish, olive oil and whole grains, has been associated with better overall health, a lower risk of heart attacks and strokes and protection against Alzheimer’s disease.

Well. There it is.

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Happy Ramadan. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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When Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio hosts a reception for a string of A-list stars, supermodels and wealthy philanthropists later this month, he will make an impassioned plea for more action to be taken on global warming.

But instead of holding the event in Los Angeles, where most of his guests are based, they will fly halfway around the world to the glitzy French resort of St Tropez – at enormous cost to the environment.

Last night, green campaigners were quick to criticise 41-year-old DiCaprio, who in February used his Best Actor acceptance speech at the Oscars to warn about the dangers posed by climate change.

Green is for thee but not for me….

One guest who attended last year’s gala said: ‘It’s basically a big party for Leo and his showbusiness friends and models. The models, of course, do not pay for tickets, and neither do the VIP guests – they get to have a nice big free party.’

The Mail on Sunday has learned that guests opting for the Grand Earth Protector Package – ‘prime dinner seating for 12 guests’ at a table near to DiCaprio – costs £125,000. The more frugal Earth Protector Package – seating 12 at a slightly more distant table – costs £82,000, while those content with social Siberia can choose the Ocean Steward Package, at a mere £58,000 for 12 diners.

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The retailer built a reputation and hit $100 billion in annual revenue by offering deals. The first thing a potential customer saw was a bargain: how much an item was reduced from its list price.

Now, in many cases, Amazon has dropped any mention of a list price. There is just one price. Take it or leave it.

The new approach comes as discounts both online and offline have become the subject of dozens of consumer lawsuits for being much less than they seem. It is also occurring while Amazon is in the middle of an ambitious multiyear shift from a store selling one product at a time to a full-fledged ecosystem. Amazon wants to be so deeply embedded in a customer’s life that buying happens as naturally as breathing, and nearly as often.