Tom Smith of The Right Coast summarizes a piece in The Week.

America. Trump. Problems! Crisis! Dislocation, poverty, bad stuff, personal stuff. Loneliness. French stuff. De Tocqueville. No De Tocqueville quote though. Civil society stuff. Boy Scouts! Baseball! Lodges! Lodges? Lodges! Bowling Alone. Putnam. NSF study. Distrust. Anger. Anger! Lonely white working class people. On drugs! No, not on drugs. African-Americans. Church! Substance abuse. Depression. African-Americans. Lonely people support Trump. Mormons don’t support Trump. Mormons aren’t lonely. Grievance. Anger. Fear. Fear of other! Church. Russia. Common sense. Shouting. Republicans. No one listens.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

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All run by Democrats. Maybe there’s a connection there.

Venezuela: 75% of population lost 19 pounds amid crisis

In the survey, researchers found that most Venezuelans substituted red and white meats with vegetables and tubers — such as potatoes. According to the survey, 82.8 percent of Venezuelans are considered poor due to their income.

Venezuela is facing a political and economic crisis in which basic goods such as food and medicine are in short supply, unavailable or unaffordable. The United Nation’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean predicts Venezuela’s gross domestic product will decrease 4 percent in 2017, while the International Monetary Fund estimates inflation will increase 1,600 percent.

Apparently socialism cures obesity. Who knew?

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Leicester Cathedral has digitised and published the personal prayer book of King Richard III.  The original manuscript rests in Lambeth Palace Library with restricted access due to its fragile condition so this digital version will enable the public to view the book.

Hopefully this will encourage others to make such works available for digital viewing.

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Oh no! We’re going to run out of … uh, I forget….

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MALMO, Sweden — Violent riots broke out in a Stockholm neighborhood Monday night in the midst of an argument between U.S. President Donald Trump and the Swedish government over immigration policies in the country.

Riots erupted around 8 p.m. in Rinkeby — an area with a large immigrant population — after police tried to arrest a man in relation to an investigation. Masked men threw rocks at police, set cars on fire and robbed businesses.

Police responded with gun fire to quell the unidentified rioters.

Walter Olson reminds us.

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At least seven of the 46 Senate Democrats who voted against Betsy DeVos, President Donald Trump’s newly-minted education secretary, currently send or once sent their own children or grandchildren to expensive private schools.

Crap government schools for thee but not for me.

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I am not making this up.

So far, 285 restaurants across the U.S. have signed on, pledging to create safe and equitable work environments, where no one is discriminated against and everyone is paid a fair wage, offered benefits and given opportunities for professional growth.

Matt Philbin comments:

Gosh, that sure sounds like dishwashing utopia. And it may as well be utopia in the actual sense of the word. There are 616,000 restaurants in America. CNN finds it newsworthy that 285 of them – .046% — have pledged to run an extreme hippie fantasy camp for unskilled labor. (You can bet an inordinate number of these joints are vegan.) A CNN tweet plublicizing the story actually said “285 restaurants across the US” had joined. Heck, there are probably 285 restaurants in any three-block radius in Manhattan, not counting hot dog carts.

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That’s because obvious stupidity is very frustrating. An example:

“If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work,” Patricia Nana, a 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. “I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything — you could see how happy they were.”

The regulation actually would have cost relatively few mining jobs and would have created nearly as many new jobs on the regulatory side, according to a government report — an example of the frequent distance between Trump’s rhetoric, which many of his supporters wholeheartedly believe, and verifiable facts.

Note the assumption that ‘new jobs on the regulatory side’ would have equaled ‘mining jobs’ so what’s Trump complaining about?

Well, for one thing, ‘mining jobs’ produce coal, a useful product; ‘new jobs on the regulatory side’ produce regulations and interference with people trying to produce a useful product — not the same thing.

Plus, who thinks that ‘new jobs on the regulatory side’ would be the sort that former coal miners would qualify for? Show of hands? Yeah, I thought so.

Coal miners out of work, new jobs for Children of the Crust — it’s all good, according to the Washington Post.

That’s why people voted for Trump, and why they cheer each time he kicks a ‘journalist’ in the ‘nads.

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Well, duh. What part of ‘illegal’ don’t they understand?

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President Trump’s new choice for National Security Adviser is Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster. McMaster is best known for his 1997 book Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam, an examination into the disastrous Vietnam policies of Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara. In the book, McMaster not only attacks President Johnson, he also places blame on military leaders who refused to push back against abject leadership in the White House.

I have that book. I like him already.

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Well, it has to contain three times the ego. That costs.

But it will be in Chicago, which means that if necessary they can just steal the money.

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The National Health Service (NHS), which runs hospitals and public health services in England, Scotland and Wales, has experienced problems with long wait times for services and crowded emergency care for years, but the problems are getting worse, according to a report from the British Medical Association (BMA).

And they didn’t even have a Magic Negro pushing it.

NHS is deep in debt, and it could be running on a nearly £1 billion deficit ($1.2 billion) by the end of this year. The Department of Health is planning an influx of cash into the trust fund “backed by the NHS’s own plan for the future with an extra £10bn [$12.5 billion] by 2020,” the spokesperson told The Guardian.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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Making enough artificial beef in a lab for a burger cost $325,000 as recently as 2013, but further development of the process has cut the price to just $11.36.

An amount now less than the Democrat-favored minimum wage.

Coincidence? I think not….

Barton Hinkle has a way with words.

We’ll be able to thank both Republicans and Democrats for that, but at the moment the GOP has the first claim on the public’s gratitude. This is owing in no small measure to Corey Stewart, chairman of the Prince William Board of Supervisors and immigrant-basher extraordinaire. Stewart is the kind of guy who responds to Donald Trump’s most outlandish behavior with: “Not bad. Now hold my beer and watch this.”

…

Across the aisle the Democrats are having a whale of a good time, too. Just as in last year’s presidential election, they expected their heir apparent to the nomination—in this case, Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam—to cruise to the coronation by unanimous consent. Then Tom Perriello threw a wrench into the works. Or upset the apple cart, or whatever it is people do these days. (Note to self: Find Hipster, request advice regarding correct idiom.)

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This weekend, the Daily Dealer wrote about Ivanka Trump’s perfume line, which has skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller list of all beauty products. People rushed to buy the product to support Ms. Trump, even as left-wing activists called on Americans to boycott Amazon. In other words, at least in that case, the so-called Grab Your Wallet campaign backfired.

Now, it’s happened again. The boycotters have called on customers to protest Wegmans, a popular grocery store, for selling wines from Trump Winery. People didn’t listen. According to the Washington Post, the boycott “backfires spectacularly.” Even as the hashtag #StopTrumpWine popped up on Twitter, Wegmans keeps selling out of the offering. In fact, all but one Wegmans in the entire state of Virginia is sold out.

Boycotts only work when all the power is on one side. The Internet sees censorship as damage and routes around it.

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Welcome to our world, eh.

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Democrats continue to experience a near-crippling depression since President Donald Trump took office, forcing mental health professionals to name the problem post-election stress disorder, according to a Monday report from CNN.

No doubt there will soon be government programs to help such people.

The news coming from the White House on a daily basis is so disconcerting to those who oppose Trump that they are experiencing classical signs of depression, and moving off of Facebook and other social media sites.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

A New York City-based online therapist location service reported that traffic tripled in the days since the election, and demand continues to grow, fueled largely by gay, lesbian and minority clients.

“In my 28 years in practice, I’ve never seen anything like this level of stress,” said Nancy Molitor, a psychologist in the Chicago suburbs reported. “What we’re seeing now after the inauguration is a huge uptick in anxiety.”

Disconnection from reality will do that, when reality comes crashing down on you.

Liberals are so depressed and angry over Trump’s election, that they are taking it out on family and friends that supported the president during the election.

I hate to mention it, but they always did — it’s just that they’re losing this time.

When even the grief counselors need grief counselors, what’s a (helicopter) mother to do?

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The poster, written by the director, staff, and tutors of the University of Washington, Tacoma’s Writing Center, states “racism is the normal condition of things,” declaring that it permeates rules, systems, expectations, in courses, school and society.

Nowadays that’s certainly true, although it’s anti-white racism, which is (I suspect) not what they mean.

The Tacoma Writing Center’s prioritization of social justice over grammar resembles previous concerted efforts to legitimize incorrect speech, such as Ebonics, “inventive spelling,” and “whole language.”

The proglodytes have a vested interest in normalizing deviance, expressed here in language, in order to boost the self-esteem of their political Underclass base.

David Freer fisks the advent of ‘sensitivity readers’ at publishers.

Let’s be real: most of the vocal angry perpetually ‘triggered’ and ‘micro-aggressed’ are impossible not to ‘offend’: ergo the bribe, to get them to go away – which means the next ten will arrive the next shakedown, before the words are cold. Secondly: in real demographic terms most of the perpetually offended make up a tiny proportion of the population, and in many cases an even smaller proportion of target readership. My wilderness survival novel is of no likely interest to urban Wiccan vegans. If I mention them in an insensitive way, most of the target audience wouldn’t give a shit. In fact they might like the book more. That’s reality, not PC.

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There’s a scary thought.

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Nothing that happened in Barack Obama’s presidential administration was a scandal. Not the gun-walking, not the ambassador killed by terrorists, not the pay-to-play green-energy stuff, not the weaponization of the IRS, not the Bowe Bergdahl swap, not the inspector general’s firing — none of it. Obama wanted it that way, and that was enough to make it so.

Sometimes it is good to be the Magic Negro.

Everything that happens in Donald Trump’s administration will be a scandal. Every Tweet, every denial of the obvious, every course change, every refusal to change course, every leaked internal disagreement, every assertion that some word or action is not a scandal. Trump is breathing, and that is enough to make it so.

Media bias? What media bias?

The Democrats, the media and the squalling children with their protest signs will never let this month go. It’s going to be Groundhog Month. No matter how much Trump and his acolytes learn, and they can learn; no matter how much good they do, and they may yet do good; no matter how different his administration may look at the end from how it looks today, today is what the public will hear about forever.

Who are you going to believe, the Left or your lying eyes?

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

Of course, if you’ve watched Captain America: The Winter Soldier, you know all this.

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I am not making this up.

The essence of ‘progressivism’, like Communism and fascism (its Siamese siblings), is that it is totalitarian — it must pervade every aspect of life, from cradle to grave. The key intervention stage is with children, because if you can brainwash the children so that they literally have never had an opportunity for free thought, then you’re home free. (This isn’t new – the Jesuits figured it out a couple of centuries ago.) If you take a look at modern government schools, especially the early grades, you can drop them next to the old Soviet and Nazi schoolrooms and the techniques are the same: all state-approved political messages all the time.

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A word game, popular in the great households of late medieval England, had at its heart the creation of collective nouns. In the lists of these names, alongside the laughter of hostellers, the glossing of taverners, the promise of tapsters and fighting of beggars, were household references – a carve of pantlers (who looked after the bread), a credence of servers (‘credence’ was the process of tasting of ‘assaying’ foods against poison), a provision of stewards of household – and a hastiness of cooks. The pressures of the medieval kitchen, the precipitate hurry and the irritation of the cooks are all captured in medieval meanings of ‘hastiness’. The word embodied a further dimension, however, through word play: ‘hasta’ was the medieval Latin for a spit, and we see at once the heart of the fire that has aggravated the cooks, the profligate the use of fuel in roasting, a busy-ness and the hard work that was necessary to produce the finest foods for table. This book is about what that food and drink, from the finest to the commonplace, meant to people in the later Middle Ages and how they expressed meaning through it in their daily lives – and many of them would have been engaged in cooking, even if they were not hasty professional cooks. The premiss is that food and drink mattered for a whole host of reasons beyond simply providing the necessities of life.

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Most historians, despite the recognition that field-battles were not the heart and soul of medieval warfare, still judge medieval cavalry by their performance within them. My findings show a much greater concentration on small unit actions, both in armament and organization, with cavalry centred on chevauchées on raiding and subduing castles in swift commando type take and hold missions. The diversity of mounted forces are also examined in the context of the lance and the integration of mounted crossbowmen and bowmen for combined arms tactics.

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We’re just waiting for them to become sentient. And waiting … and waiting….

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And we encourage them to do so.

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Way cool.

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Twitter has launched a new way to punish users for bad behavior, temporarily “limiting” their account.

Some users are receiving notices their accounts are limited for 12 hours, meaning only people who follow them can see their tweets or receive notifications. When they are retweeted, people outside their network can’t see those retweets.

Some speculate these limitations are automatic based on keywords, but there is no hard evidence.

This would be fine if this was used uniformly to clamp down on harassment, but it appears to be used on people, simply for using politically incorrect language.

All of this can be avoided, of course, simply by not using Twitter. (Duh.)

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By any historical and constitutional standard, “the people” elected Donald Trump and endorsed his program of nation-state populist reform. Yet over the last few weeks America has been in the throes of an unprecedented revolt. Not of the people against the government—that happened last year—but of the government against the people. What this says about the state of American democracy, and what it portends for the future, is incredibly disturbing.

…

These days an architect of the overreaching and antidemocratic Waters of the U.S. regulation worries that her work will be overturned so she undertakes extraordinary means to defeat her potential boss. But a change in policy is a risk of democratic politics. Nowhere does it say in the Constitution that the decisions of government employees are to be unquestioned and preserved forever. Yet that is precisely the implication of this unprecedented protest. “I can’t think of any other time when people in the bureaucracy have done this,” a professor of government tells the paper. That sentence does not leave me feeling reassured.

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Unregistered schools! ThoughtCrime! IngSoc is threatened!

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And gotten five more times done. (That’s the part the DemLegHump Media always leave out.)

I’m good with it.

Steve Sailer unmasks the scam.

One reason that there is so much competition on campus these days to be the Single Most Offended Student is that that seems like a way to try out for one of the growing, but still limited, number of paying gigs as Social Justice Jihadis.

…

So that could be the next battleground, with young SJWs protesting that artists are hiring as their Sensitivity Readers excessively reasonable and helpful members of each Official Victim Group instead of fire-breathing puerile Social Justice Jihadi know-nothings like they are supposed to.

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The county commissioners voted 9-3 to uphold an order from Mayor Carlos Gimenez that local authorities cooperate with federal immigration officials, in accordance with the law, and refuse to provide arrested illegal immigrants sanctuary. Gimenez issued the order after President Donald Trump warned he would strip so-called “sanctuary cities” of federal funds.

Another win for Trump … and reason. And I’m sure greed had something to do with it.

One commissioner characterized the vote as “just a financial decision,” saying it has “nothing to do” with immigration. “This is a country that opened arms to everyone, allowed opportunities to everyone,” Rebeca Sosa said before her vote. “I am so sad to see that people are afraid of something that has nothing to do with immigration. This was just a financial decision.”

It was just business. I always liked you.

After the vote, upset residents shouted “shame on you,” and threw pieces of paper and white carnations at the dais before storming out of the chambers, a local outlet reports. “May God have mercy on your soul,” one woman yelled. Others stood and shouted obscenities, according to Fox News.

How tolerant.

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Full of Muslims, of course. What could go wrong?

(Ever try to behead somebody wearing a spacesuit? It’s a challenge.)

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

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Everything bad is good for you.

Steven Hayward turns over a rock.

The Standing Rock/Dakota Access Pipeline protesters are becoming the Meryl Streep of leftist protests, winning multiple awards for Worst Performance in a So-Called Protest. We awarded them a coveted Power Line Green Weenie a couple weeks ago for leaving so much trash around that it had become an environmental threat to the very same river they claimed to be trying to protect.

…

But here is my favorite single sentence of the story:

Relevant personnel are combing the site for dead bodies rolled up in tarps, as well as weapons that could be used against Morton County police officers. They are using bulldozers and earth-moving equipment to scrape the area clean of debris.

…

Young males who live at home are used to having their mothers pick up after them. Especially when they’re off protesting. Now they’ll have an extra Green Weenie statuette to pick up.

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Thank you, Andrew McCarthy.

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Yes, Virginia, there really were Soviet spies.

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Once again, Crustian parents make sure that their spawn are properly indoctrinated.

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The executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalism compared President Donald Trump to the late Venezuelan leftist dictator Hugo Chavez in a column Friday.

Guess they realize that calling him the New Hitler is getting lame.

“What does Trump have in common with Hugo Chavez? A media strategy,” Joel Simon wrote in a column for the Columbia Journalism Review.

Also in common with Kim Kardashian, Mark Zuckerberg, Barbra Streisand, and everybody elected to public office. Boy, that Chavez guy really gets around. But Joel Simon doesn’t have ‘a media strategy, oh no. Trump also puts his pants on one leg at a time, another similarity to Chavez! It’s uncanny!

Simon wrote, “Trump’s unrelenting attacks on the media and attempts to undermine its credibility and paint it as an opposition force are straight out the Latin American populists’ playbook.”

A playbook he stole from previous socialists everywhere. Let’s get our attributions right, now.

While these Latin American populist leaders are “leftist-oriented there are remarkable similarities between the two in the rhetoric they employ to mobilize supporters,” the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalism wrote.

Perhaps because that’s because of unrelenting attacks beforehand by the media.

“In Latin America, this process was aided by the fact that the traditional media has been allied with oligarchic interests,” Simon added.

Of course, that wouldn’t apply to the New York Times, owned by the Sulzbergers, or the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos. No sir, no oligarchic interests around here.

He added that, “Trump’s intent is clear. Through his relentless attacks, he seeks to create an environment in which critical media is marginalized and the truth is unknowable.”

Sounds like the DemLegHump Media coverage of Hillary. But Hillary can’t be like Chavez, that would be sexist.

The executive director of the journalism organization said that American journalists should not “take the bait” and act like the “opposition.”

Too late.

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Why do so many Americans shun the institutions traditionally devoted to saving and loaning money? The answer, many people tell Servon, is that banks don’t seem to want their business and make it too difficult and expensive to get anything done.

“Banks want one customer with a million dollars,” the owner of one check-cashing chain tells her. “Check cashers like us want a million customers with one dollar.”

…

“Customers can find it difficult to predict when banks will charge them a fee (they sometimes change the timing) and what the amount of the fee will be; this lack of clarity can be costly,” Servon writes. “Now imagine the interior of a check casher—or visit one. It resembles a fast food restaurant more than a bank. Posters tell you what products are sold, and large signs above the teller windows list every product, along with its price.”

I’d like to have a doctor’s office like that, please.

Alternative services come with clear costs—and they move fast. Somebody facing bills needs a paycheck cashed now, not after an arbitrary delay while the check clears. Unpaid rent or unpurchased groceries are bigger concerns than a few dollars in fees.

And that’s what competition — when it’s allowed — delivers. Unfortunately, legislators, academics, and other government employees are too fond of telling other people how they ought to live their lives.

Financially sophisticated young Americans are also turning away from traditional banking. Peer-to-peer lending through online services such as Prosper and Lending Club “requires far less paperwork than other loans and is perceived to be more transparent than payday loans,” writes Servon. Loans through these platforms tend to be relatively inexpensive, too. Online-only banks such as Simple and Walmart’s GoBank cater to customers seeking greater transparency and lower costs, and some offer financial advice that millennials in particular find helpful.

Paperwork that is mandated by government regulation, ‘just standard clauses for your protection’, as the Phantom of the Paradise  likes to say.

“The regulators are causing the opposite of the desired effect by making it so dangerous now to serve a lower-income segment,” JoAnn Barefoot tells the author. A former official with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Federal Housing Administration, and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, and a deputy controller of the currency, Barefoot points to a web of red tape—much of it intended to battle discrimination—that makes serving many potential customers a legal minefield.

…

Traditional banks have meanwhile gained a reputation for working hand-in-hand with government. That relationship certainly doesn’t serve the needs of the many customers, from illegal immigrants to established businesses, who want to avoid official scrutiny of their transactions. When Servon asks a successful building contractor why he uses check-cashing services, he answers, “The insurance, the taxes, the workers comp—it’s killing us. Some guys try to hide as much of their income as they can—they got two-million-dollar businesses and they report half a mil. I’m telling you—it’s impossible to stay afloat if you don’t do some of that.”

Read it. And watch the video.

It’s more of a pavise than a proper shield, but useful nevertheless.

http://dailysignal.com/2017/02/17/in-1-chart-what-your-favorite-fast-food-items-would-cost-with-15-minimum-wage/

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That pesky old First Amendment….