Read it.

Writing in 2015, Dewayne Hendricks, CEO of think tank the Dandin Group, described how Silicon Valley exploited the visa scheme to the detriment of American techies.

“Beginning in the early 2000s, I witnessed first-hand what happens when Silicon Valley tech companies, focused almost exclusively on the near-term bottom line, bringing in massive numbers of guest workers as a prelude to offshoring later development and manufacture.

“Cypress Semi was a leader in convincing Congress that there weren’t enough domestic engineers to meet their needs. In fact, there were but many had families and weren’t willing to work, day-in-and-day-out, the often very long hours some SV companies desired and even for those that were amenable companies weren’t willing to offer adequate compensation. Companies also weren’t willing to adequately encourage education and grooming of domestic engineers. Instead, they got the H-1B visa program greatly expanded at the same time senior domestic engineers were furloughed, many never to work again in tech.

“These foreign engineers, mostly new graduates working (in overtime exempt positions) through jobs shops, were (as required by law) paid the same as the domestic engineers they had replaced but were forced to work more hours (often nearly double). For years I would watch these workers on their way back to their flats in the East Bay late into the evening on BART. In this way tech companies were able to stay within the letter of the law (equal pay to domestic workers) while exacting many more labor hours than they otherwise could. Many of these foreign engineers would later return (not all by choice) to their countries where SV companies had set up subsidiaries or made arrangements with local industry to continue follow-on design, development or manufacture,” he noted.

Read it.

Rueters reports that the Boy Scouts will begin accepting girls into the Boy Scouts, provided the girls pretend they are boys, or suffer from a mental illness making them unable to comprehend which sex they are, or their parents suffer from a mental illness making them unable to comprehend which sex their child is.

…

Unlike the decision to admit sexual perverts into the company of young boys, this decision to have teen girls bunking in tents and showing with adolescent boys in a movement allegedly design to teach boys morals, virtues, and manhood, was made with no previous debate among the membership.

No one was consulted. It was simply an ambush.

I recall being a Boy Scout. I doubt that any of the guys in my troop would have wanted a girl hanging around.

The SJWs have effectively killed off scouting. Churches and other non-insane, non-evil groups may or may not start youth movement of their own, but it will not have the universal and international character of Boy Scouts.

Well, the Boy Scouts had to get established at some point. Let’s see what can be done.

Rasmussen poll finds the truth.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 57% of Likely U.S. Voters favor a temporary ban on refugees from Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen until the federal government approves its ability to screen out potential terrorists from coming here. Thirty-three percent (33%) are opposed, while 10% are undecided.

I guess when Democrats say ‘that’s not who we are’ they’re not talking about Americans.

Read it.

Same old, same old.

Read it.

One of the most delightful consequences of Trump’s election is that the statist Left bureaucracy is fighting defense for the first time in my lifetime.

The EPA is one of the reasons that Richard Nixon will burn in Hell for all eternity.

Read it.

This would be great, a self-assembling list of tech companies who are willing to help destroy our culture in order to import cheap foreign labor.

The fact that Silicon Vally’s cheap foreign labor comes from India, Korea, and China rather than Mexico doesn’t affect the fact that it’s cheap foreign labor, depressing the wages of native Americans. (Of course, tech moguls also appreciate having access to cheap nannies, maids, chauffeurs, and gardeners as well.)

Read it.

The attempt through state action to nullify Federal law didn’t work out well for South Carolina in 1860.

Their subsequent attempt at secession didn’t work out well for them either.

Let’s see if modern attempts at foot-shooting work any better than past ones. (A modern-day Sherman March up the Pacific Coast Highway would be fairly entertaining, though.)

Read it.

It will be entertaining to see how cognitive dissonance ties up the Chattering Class into knots.

Pass the popcorn.

Apparently the poem by socialist Emma Lazarus later attached to the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty to raise funds for its purchase was, at some unspecified time, incorporated into the Constitution of the United States, either by amendment (which I can’t find) or by Supreme Court decision (which I also can’t find).

Funny how I got all the way through law school without encountering that fact.

Read it.

BLUF: Probably.

Andrew Klavan is not afraid to ask.

Mainstream news journalists — by which I mean that collection of Democrats employed by large corporations to push the sort of big government that prevents small corporations from competing with them — have been breathlessly speculating that the recent “Women’s Marches” around the country may be the beginning of a movement. The marches, funded in part by anti-American globalist billionaire George Soros, called forth such headlines as “Cathartic Moment or Enduring Movement” and “Women’s March Activists… Seek To Build a Movement.”

No one knows the future, of course, but I can’t help wondering if the marches, large as they were, were not rather the end of a movement, a fond farewell to an amalgam of obsolete leftist causes that either never had a reason to exist in the first place or have lost whatever reason they might once have had.

If leftism is dead, the speech delivered by actress Ashley Judd in Washington, D.C., may well serve as its eulogy.

Freeberg’s reaction:

It’s all a bunch of gelatinous nonsense, held together by the bitter tendrils of resentment. At its core, are the notions that unproductive people should be able to pull rank on the people who actually produce things, and tell them how to do their producing. And, the premiere asset of any sovereign nation is its tax code, which should be based on resentment and hate. If you happen to be rich, you must have stolen it. Unless you happen to be one of the rich people who lean left. And then you’re wonderful.

Read it.

It’s amazing how positions change depending on which foot the shoe is on. Back in the sixties, the Crust were all about savaging local politicians who resisted enforcing the laws against, say, segregation. But now it all runs the other way.

Read it.

Democratic Rep. Elizabeth Esty from Connecticut launched a tweetstorm Monday afternoon against President Donald Trump’s travel ban, but quickly backtracked after followers confronted her on her visa-related voting history.

People in Congress (and there are far too many of them) who turn their positions on a dime in order to follow partisan marching orders from their leadership are so used to being in control of the public narrative that it often comes as a shock when they are called to account. Of course, in a rightly-ordered society it would be the ‘journalists’ who would do the vetting, but as we all know the DemLegHump Media can’t perform that function on Democrats.

Esty co-sponsored H.B. 158 on Dec. 3 2015, a bi-partisan bill that enabled the executive branch led by the the Department of Homeland Security to severely limit or curtail visas from countries like Iran and Iraq.

Hmm. Not that long ago, even. Must be something in the water in Connecticut. Yeah, that would explain what’s been going on at Yale, too.

Read it.

I was unaware of this phenomenon, women refusing to have children because it would somehow (never specified) promote bad climate change. But I applaud their decision. Such people ought not to reproduce.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

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

Watch it.

When the cultural Marxism just gets to you too much.

Read it.

But I thought walls didn’t work….

(Will the Islamophobia never cease?)

Read it.

Hey, there’s an idea! Let’s make it a law! NO AMERICAN WILL HENCEFORTH SET FOOT IN IRAQ!

What a great idea!

That will surely fix those pesky Americans. They will RUE THE DAY they ever messed with us.

Read it.

And liberal heads explode. ‘OMG! THE HITLER BROTHERS ARE CRITICIZING THE NEW HITLER! WHAT ARE WE TO THINK!?’

Of course, another of Hitler’s tricks was to emit ‘fake news’, like calling a hiatus in immigration from seven high-risk countries a ‘Muslim ban’.

Joe Bob Briggs brings the history.

Let me make this clear: I’m not a nativist, I’m a redneck. There’s a difference. A nativist would be one of those snooty New Englanders in the Mayflower Society. Blue bloods in ruffled shirts. Think Adlai Stevenson…Noah Webster…William Rehnquist. Congregationalists. Pointy-nosed moralizers. Some of them could be angry—Jonathan Edwards comes to mind—but they were angry in a sort of clench-jawed Connecticut debutante way. Ewwwww, don’t talk to her, she’s such a Kappa.

The nativist idea of a rebellion is to dress up like Indians and dump tea in the ocean—the 18th-century version of frat boys pranking the archrival football team.

The redneck idea of a rebellion is to lie in wait with a shotgun for the guy who’s trying to tax your whiskey.

ZMan turns over a rock.

The only way to properly understand the American Left is to look at it as a civic religion. Because the American Left adopted European anti-Christianity in the 20th century, it is easy to think they are anti-religious. That’s a mistake the Right has made for half a century. The New Religion, what Progressivism is today, evolved out of the Social Gospel Movement, so it carries with it many of the same habits.

The most obvious of those habits is the obsession with public morality. Public Protestantism starts from the assumption that society is judged as a whole. The righteous, like the virtuous in revolutionary France, have a moral duty to raise up the fallen into the righteous life. This is what gives them license to nose around in your business and order you around. It’s not about fitting the economic pieces together as with European socialists. The American Left is consumed with building the City upon a hill.

…

That’s an important lesson to keep in mind when watching the antics of the Left of late. Their lunacy is not directed at the rest of us. They don’t care what you or anyone else thinks about what’s happening. Their public acts are about signalling to the rest of the believers. By holding protests and making fools of themselves in a public way, they are providing support for one another as they work through the disconfirmation. Like herd animals, they are huddling together in the face if danger. It is pure instinct.

Read it.

As reported in tonight’s news feed, gunmen shot up a mosque in Quebec City, killing at least five people.

Early news stories gave a bare-bones account of the incident, followed by the Narrative describing “Islamophobia” in Quebec, and a recent increase of Islamophobic incidents.

Then came reports from eyewitnesses who said that the gunmen had been shouting “Allahu Akhbar” as they fired their weapons. That shot holes in the Narrative, too — unless, of course, the shooters were white-supremacist neo-Nazis who were just pretending to be Muslims.

The following video sheds some light on what may actually have happened in Quebec City tonight. It’s taken from the Facebook page of the mosque that was attacked. In it you’ll hear the imam of the mosque discuss the enmity of former members of the congregation who were unhappy with the blasphemous “moderation” of this mosque — that is, the shot-up mosque was full of murtadeen, or apostates.

Read it.

Journalists, especially on the national beat, live in an insulated world populated by other journalists and like-minded, self-described policy wonks. Even if they happen to have come from the Midwest or somewhere else people do actual work for a living, they undoubtedly spent their youth yearning to leave. Having hated where they grew up, that economic reality is easy to escape and forget in recession-proof Washington, when you type and talk for a living.

Listening is only for people who “matter,” not those who labor. Industrial areas are places they visit every four years, like the zoo. You don’t listen to the animals at the zoo. They pop in, write their stories about blue-haired old ladies and how quaint it is, then head back to the DC cocktail circuit as a hero who can regale their peers with tales of how they survived some filthy diner lacking a proper brunch menu. “You mean they didn’t have mimosas?” The horror.

Read it.

In what might be described as the journalism equivalent of ambulance chasing, the Washington Post is inviting readers to tell it how their lives have been ruined by President Trump’s executive order on immigration.

…

I’ve been reading the Post for 55 years. I don’t recall the paper ever running individualized story after individualized story about how particular people have been affected by a government policy. Nor do I recall the Post ever soliciting such stories.

I also don’t recall the Post engaging in this sort of journalism when Donald Trump intervened to prevent companies from moving plants from the U.S. to foreign countries. The Post easily could have run multiple stories about workers whose jobs Trump saved, thereby rescuing their economic situation. The Post could have elicited information about the dire consequences particular people would have faced if the company had moved its operation abroad.

To the best of my recollection, the Post didn’t do so.

It can’t be that the Washington Post is out to get our new president, can it?

Read it.

The problem is not what they know, it’s what they ‘know’ that ain’t so.

Read it.

Scientists have engineered the first ever ‘semi-synthetic’ organisms, by breeding E. coli bacteria with an expanded, six-letter genetic code.

While every living thing on Earth is formed according to a DNA code made up of four bases (represented by the letters G, T, C and A), these modified E. coli carry an entirely new type of DNA, with two additional DNA bases, X and Y, nestled in their genetic code.

Freeberg on Calexit.

As someone else very astutely noted somewhere, liberals have no interest in elections in this day & age — just look at their reaction to the one we just had.

They have to run “everything”…but, they’re incurious dimbulbs, by & large, way too preoccupied with their virtue-signaling to take the time to define “everything.” You know anyone like this in your extended family? Every family seems to have one character like this. Sticking their nose into something that’s none of their concern, starting fights, but as long as they don’t find out about it it’s all good…so everyone else starts to keep secrets from them, because over time it’s been learned by all that that’s the solution. Just put Crazy Auntie Mabel in a snow-globe, of sorts, let her think the world is tinier than it really is. That, too, is an apt description of today’s liberals. If they find out little kids are being taken to church on Sunday mornings somewhere, they’ll start fights and they’ll get into that pit-bull mode of “This argument’s not over until it’s over the way I like it to be over.” But first, they have to find out about it. So we put them in little jars, shrink their little worlds, keep them from finding out about too much, and it’s all good.

Read it.

The Psychomachia, or ‘War of the Soul’, was composed by the Late Antique poet Prudentius in the 5th century and depicts an action-packed battle between the Virtues and Vices for possession of the human soul. This allegory of good versus evil was hugely popular in the medieval period with about 300 surviving copies of the work, 20 of which were illuminated. Two illuminated Anglo-Saxon copies are held at the British Library (now Additional MS 24199 and Cotton MS Cleopatra C VIII) and their illustrations can be compared to our comic books today.

Read it.

Doctors in London say they have cured two babies of leukemia in the world’s first attempt to treat cancer with genetically engineered immune cells from a donor.

The experiments, which took place at London’s Great Ormond Street Hospital, raise the possibility of off-the-shelf cellular therapy using inexpensive supplies of universal cells that could be dripped into patients’ veins on a moment’s notice.

Check it out.

Quit whining, start running.

Read it.

If someone offers a solution to the Gordian Knot of food sustainability, run it through the following gauntlet:

1. Does it allow you to do most of your food shopping at the grocery store?
2. Does it require just eliminating one or two things from your diet or, alternatively, eliminating all but a few things?
3. Does it excuse you from making substantial shifts in your diet as the seasons progress?

A ‘yes’ to any of those questions is the clarion call of bullshit. A long list of solutions gets beaten to death in this gauntlet, and few so much as vegetarianism.

The scientific term for creatures that eat only plants is ‘prey’.

Read it.

American chocolate tastes distinctively different from the kind made in Belgium, Switzerland or the UK – and most of the time, British people agree that the taste is inferior.

But why does it taste so terrible? The secret lies with a chemical that is also found in parmesan cheese, rancid butter – and vomit.

American chocolate is renowned for its slightly sour or tangy taste.

And some experts believe that’s because some companies such as Hershey’s puts its milk through a process called controlled lipolysis.

This breaks down the fatty acids in the milk and produces butyric acid – the chemical that gives vomit its very distinctive smell and acrid taste.

Read it.

Stop and think about that for a moment. Let it sink in. A neural computing system designed to translate content from one human language into another developed its own internal language to make the task more efficient. Without being instructed to. In a matter of weeks.

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust wakes up … sort of.

Then 2016 arrived, and with it, Donald Trump’s winning run for the White House. Suddenly the words “complexity” and “ambiguity” — not to mention “nuanced” — disappeared from the vocabularies of the so-called sophisticates, washed away in the swirling high tide of the return of that simplistic word: “evil.”

…

Strange, isn’t it, that when the tables are turned, the liberal pushers of moral ambiguity are as absolutist as any fundamentalist preacher associated with George W. Bush? There’s a lesson or two to be learned here. With all due respect to Brzezinski, the right doesn’t have a lock on paranoia. And dualism — our side good, your side evil — is actually baked into human nature and doesn’t really have much to do with how smart you are or how many shades of moral gray you think you can discern. Whenever you let loose your moral indignation at high decibel, someone somewhere will be laughing.

So who are the Manichaeans now?

Read it.

Funny how that works.

Read it.

Information is to be gathered, reviewed and summarized during the periods of suspension so that policy can be conformed to the national interest of the United States. Indeed, the order focuses throughout on the national interest of the United States, as in this provision that will never be quoted in a New York Times story:

Sec. 1: …In order to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

You mean we aren’t already doing this? We must be out of our minds.

Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to protect its citizens from foreign nationals who intend to commit terrorist attacks in the United States; and to prevent the admission of foreign nationals who intend to exploit United States immigration laws for malevolent purposes.

You mean we aren’t already doing this? We must be out of our minds.

Read it.

I don’t so much mind not getting the promised flying car, but I’m really disappointed about not getting the promised celebrity exodus.

And they whine about Trump being a liar….

Ultimate Adventure Vehicle.

The Beard Bib.

Thermobest Gloves.

Bacon Toaster.

Glenn Reynolds understands the dialectic.

Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.

As I have been saying. The press is more bull than you think.

In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).

Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.

Read it.

Well, that’s what happens when Democrats are in charge.

Read it.

Hint: Everybody saves money

Read it.

I guess the Great White North doesn’t want them either.

Can’t say that I blame them.

Death toll jumps to 28 in al-Shabab hotel siege, car bombing

Turkey faces long and difficult fight against Isis in Syria

Six years on from the Arab Spring, revolution lingers in the Egyptian air

BBC: Prince among seven prisoners executed by Kuwait

Black Syrians: The Case Of The Yarmouk Basin

Feds Revetting Syrian Refugees With Red-Flags That Slipped Into US

German Women Now Have to Fear the Streets

New Jersey Teacher Who Traumatized Teens With Nude Selfies And Oral Sex Blames Muslim Upbringing  And if you believe that one, she’ll tell you another one.

Syrian government vows to fight on around Damascus as peace talks with rebels end without concrete progress

Islamist terror groups in Nigeria are now using babies in suicide bombing attacks, say officials

Extremist gunmen storm hotel in Somali capital, 6 killed

US Coalition Dropped More Than 10,000 Bombs On ISIS In The Fight For East Mosul

Iraqi PM: Eastern Mosul ‘fully liberated’ from Islamic State

Man accused of supporting Islamic State group gets 6 years

Official: Taliban launch nearly 19,000 attacks in 10 months

Brussels Bombings Were Deliberately Aimed At Americans, Jews

Dutch PM Tells Migrants To ‘Act Normal Or Leave’

Death Threats Are Nothing New for Muslim Reformers

Culture-Enrichers Break Violinist’s Finger — For Asking Them Not to Smoke

Al-Qaida Operatives Reportedly Taken Out In First Drone Strikes Under Trump

German authorities arrest man for ‘planning terror bomb attack’ on police and soldiers

Migrants Return To Calais Months After ‘Jungle’ Camp Demolition

Husband of British woman held in Iran criticises ‘secretive’ Foreign Office for failing to publicly call for her release

Suspected U.S. drone strike kills 3 alleged al-Qaida in Yemen

Iranian court upholds London mother’s five year prison sentence

Women Do Not Feel Safe in Germany  Gee, I wonder why?

Bomb blast kill 18, wounds over 60 in northwest Pakistan

Over 100 Al Qaeda fighters killed in ‘major’ US air strike in Syria, defense official says

Isis destroys more of Palmyra including Roman amphitheatre, say Syrian authorities

Read it.

The group of people gathered at a local restaurant to grieve 20-year-old Jamayah Fields’ death, reports The New York Post. Fields died after being shot Monday.

The gang found out that one of their targets was at the restaurant over social media, according to community activist Jedidiah Brown. The gang came to the location and opened fire, wounding six people inside.

Black Lives Matter … except to black people.

Read it.

But they can’t help it, because they are actually fascists in a Clever Plastic Disguise, and that’s what fascists do.

Read it.

Mostly former actor and now mostly performance artist Shia LaBeouf seems to be under the illusion that if the above monotonous chant is repeated on livestream video 24/7 for the next four years, it will somehow have some sort of political impact. Well, maybe not so much political as a comedy impact as we shall see although that definitely is not LaBeouf’s intention. Entertainment provides us with a quick review of LaBeouf’s latest performance art obsession that has inadvertently turned into comic art for others.

It’s astonishing how common the belief is among those who pretend to be other people for money that they are great movers and shakers in politics, despite the fact that their influence extends only to those on the left hand of the bell curve. I rather doubt that President Trump is losing a lot of sleep over being disliked by people whose major contribution to modern American life is increasing the percentage of the population who have tattoos, piercings, and minimum-wage jobs.

Read it.

And about time, too.