The Other McCain lays out some inconvenient truth.

Spain is dying. The total fertility rate — average number of lifetime births per woman — is 1.49 in Spain, and this is nearly 30% below replacement level. In December 2015, demographers noted that Spain had passed a crucial milestone — more deaths than births, a harbinger of population decline. Before a nation dies, it first grows old, and the graying population of Spain creates a heavy burden on the country’s pension and health care system, as there are fewer and fewer younger workers to pay taxes.

What Spain is now facing is demographic winter, and a Spanish businessman named Alejandro Macarrón Larumbe has created an organization called Renacimiento Demografico (Demographic Renaissance) to spread awareness of this looming social problem.

David Benkof points out some inconvenient truth.

Of course straight people suffer and die from HIV-related illness, just as about 200,000 Gypsies were murdered by the Nazis. But “AIDS is not a gay disease” was a situational political strategy, not a scholarly consensus. It was an epidemiological and historical obfuscation designed to gain sympathy and funding for the illness in an era when gays were outsiders. Yet it remains in 2017, repeated almost as a mantra anytime someone “outrageously” links AIDS with homosexuality.

But of course AIDS is linked with homosexuality. Even today, gay men receive more than two-thirds of HIV diagnoses, and earlier in the epidemic that number was even higher. Gay men are maybe 2 percent of the American population, but 55 percent of Americans living with HIV. Men who have sex with men are more than 60 times more likely to contract HIV than those who don’t.

Like calling Tay-Sachs a Jewish disease, or sickle-cell anemia a black disease, calling AIDS a gay disease is a rhetorical shortcut, not finger-pointing.

Lion of the Blogosphere connects the dots.

Let’s review what the liberal elites think. The liberal elites believe that having a good career is a reward for doing the right things. The right things include getting good grades in high school and then going to college where you become smart enough to work in a good career.

Liberal elites don’t believe in HBD. If white person, especially a white male, fail to go to college and “make something of themselves,” it’s because they were too lazy and too stupid (stupid in a moral sense and not an IQ sense) to do the right things, despite their white privilege. On the other hand, if a black or Hispanic fails to go to college, that’s because of pervasive racism, and therefore they deserve the help and sympathy of the government as compensation.

Given that the liberal elites who control the Democratic Party believe this, how can they convince the blue-collar whites they are on their side when they give off the vibe that they really despise those people for being lazy and stupid? Sometimes liberal politicians even let slip that they really think the blue-collar whites are a bunch of deplorables clinging bitterly to their religion, their guns, and their racism.

Robin Hanson lays it out.

High school students are easily engaged to elect class presidents, even though they have little idea what if any policies a class president might influence.  Instead such elections are usually described as “popularity contests.”  That is, theses elections are about which school social factions are to have higher social status.  If a jock wins, jocks have higher status.  If your girlfriend’s brother wins, you have higher status, etc.  And the fact that you have a vote says that others should take you into account when forming coalitions – you are somebody.

College is pretty much the same, with more alcohol.

Civics teachers talk as if politics is about policy, that politics is our system for choosing policies to deal with common problems.  But as Tyler Cowen suggests, real politics seems to be more about who will be our leaders, and what coalitions will rise or fall in status as a result.  Election media coverage focuses on characterizing the candidates themselves – their personalities, styles, friends, beliefs, etc.  You might say this is because character is a cheap clue to the policies candidates would adopt, but I don’t buy it.

The obvious interpretation seems more believable – as with high school class presidents, we care about policies mainly as clues to candidate character and affiliations.  And to the extent we consider policies not tied to particular candidates, we mainly care about how policies will effect which kinds of people will be respected how much.

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HAH!

So much for scientific ‘consensus’.

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Oops.

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Professor Winfried Hensinger is head of a team that has published an open-access paper in the Science Advances journal. He is quoted as saying: “For many years, people said that it was completely impossible to construct an actual quantum computer. With our work we have not only shown that it can be done but now we are delivering a nuts-and-bolts construction plan to build an actual large-scale machine.”

The design involves multiple trapped ion-based scalable quantum computing modules with an architecture based on long-wavelength radiation quantum gates. Hensinger’s team say modules could be built using silicon microfabrication techniques that are within reach of current technology. A high-threshold surface error correction code can be implemented in the architecture to execute fault-tolerant operations.

The OFloinn makes a point.

Extreme cases are liable to arouse emotional investment and this leads to poor laws. Glanville Williams wrote, “It used to be said that ‘hard cases make bad law’—a proposition that our less pedantic age regards as doubtful.³ What is certain is that cases in which the moral indignation of the judge is aroused frequently make bad law.” (Wikipedia)

We can see this clearly in engineering where sometimes-tragic manufacturing flaws result in absurdly strict design changes because legislatures and courts (and even managers) do not distinguish between doing the right thing and doing the thing right. That is, between quality of design and quality of execution. There are times when a design change can prevent an operational error, but typically if a problem happened because an operator failed to follow a procedure, the solution is seldom a more complex and burdensome procedure. 

ZMan brings the heat.

We live in a strange age, probably not a lot different from the late feudal period, when the ruling class was largely unaware of the storm that was brewing. If you were an aristocrat, you may not have a lot of money, but what you had was social distance from the people who were not aristocrats. That distance was your currency. The provincial lawyer or merchant may have been accumulating money and lands, but he was never going to be you and never be in your circle. Making that clear was of the highest importance.

The main difference is that the sword nobility was also a defender of the old order, while the Dirt People of the day were looking to topple over the old order. Today, our sword nobility is hell bent of toppling over what’s left of the old order, simply to prove to one another they are not a part of the old order. Highlighting the distance between them and us is their primary fixation. It’s why Trump is so hated despite being a billionaire New Yorker. It’s because he is a man much more comfortable among the Dirt People because he respects them and crossing that class line is the great sin among the others.

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It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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BLUF: They’re smart but ignorant where it counts.

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(‘Criminal illegal aliens’ is a redundancy.)

Only 20 million to go….

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In a novel approach to defending terrorists, Yale University political science professor Andrew March argues that the U.S. should not designate the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a terrorist organization because it could subject researchers to prosecution for providing material support for a terrorist organization. In March’s bizarre logic, terrorists should not be labeled as such to avoid the possibility that a scholar might be falsely charged with helping them.

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Not every black American is Al Sharpton.

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Doing well is the best revenge.

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Shapes on the surface of this lens are smaller than the wavelength of light involved: a thousandth of a millimetre.

…

The advantage, Prof Capasso said, is that these “metalenses” avoid shortfalls – called aberrations – that are inherent in traditional glass optics.

Jim Goad scratches his head.

During the campaign season and after the election, nearly all of the political violence has come from the left, and it shows no signs of abating. What’s most distressing to me is that in many cases, the police are told to sit down and let it happen.

Despite the fact that the alleged “Nazis” aren’t being violent in the least, the waves of endless violence against them are justified by claiming that Nazis have been violent in the past, and if you don’t keep beating them unconscious, they will certainly be violent in the future, so this isn’t really violence at all, it’s direct action to preemptively quash the remote possibility of any future Nazi violence, even if the Nazis being beaten don’t identify as Nazis and have never advocated violence against their political opponents. Besides, everyone knows that punching Nazis is OK because they saw it in a Steven Spielberg movie, and who could possibly be more all-American than Steven Spielberg?

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God help the people of Quebec. I doubt they realize the extent to which they have been sold down the river by their leadership. By the time they do, it will be too late — the shackles will be already be in place, clanking around their feet as they work the fields for their new masters.

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The world is full of mundane, meek, unconscious things embodying fiendishly complex mathematics. What can we learn from them?

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Anti-Trumpers fear the ‘Orwellian’ while doing their best to bring it about.

Trumpers fear the Kafkaesque while kicking against the pricks (pun intended).

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He built a grassroots machine of two million supporters eager to fight for change. Then he let it die. This is the untold story of Obama’s biggest mistake—and how it paved the way for Trump.

Sometimes even being the Magic Negro isn’t enough.

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Good. I want to see New York under water. UNDER. WATER.

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I’ll bet, I’ll just bet they aren’t Republicans. Or Trump supporters.

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

In the month since Trump was inaugurated, and in the three months since he was elected, two things have become clear.

One is that what he says, and especially what he tweets, is fundamentally just noise. It has no connection with any concrete policy, and only tenuous connection to anything that he will eventually wind up doing.

So why does he do it? We can’t know for sure, but its result is to fully occupy the bandwidth of his enemies (and a number of his putative supporters). One traditional military tactic is to jam the other guy’s radars so he can’t tell what is actually going on, and the equivalent seems to be working on Trump’s opponents’ ‘mindshare’ very effectively. It’s like watching my wife work the cats with a cat dancer — they can’t ignore that flouncing feather or red dot, they have to run after it. She, in the meantime, is laughing uproariously; and I suspect that there is a lot of laughter filling the Oval Office of late.

The other is that the Angry Left is cruisin’ for a bruisin’. Most of the protesters and rioters of late are of two groups: Activist college students and urban minority thugs. They are accustomed to having authority figures, either college administrations or Democrat civil governments, roll over and play dead whenever they raise their voices. That will not work with Trump or with anyone in his administration, and eventually Trump will turn into Nixon and you’ll have dead bodies in Berkeley and Baltimore — and nothing will be done because it will look like a requisite response to nation-wide insurrection. Since these people don’t bother to learn any history they won’t be aware that the response to the Kent State shootings in 1970 was some sad music and Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972. You mess with the bull, you get the horns every time.

So what can we expect in the future? Trump is going to keep doing what he’s doing because it’s working. The Left is going to run itself ragged about things that don’t matter a damn, and in the meantime the government is going to be pursuing its program, which is guaranteed to make ‘progressive’ heads explode.

The whole Democrat party is going under suicide watch, because they’re so used to winning that they don’t have the psychological toughness to cope with losing the way they’re going to be losing for the next four years. These violent protests will either fizzle out, when their instigators realize that that they aren’t doing anything other than alienating the people whose support they need, or they will escalate to the point where the administration will feel safe in stomping on them. I remember the Sixties; they fought the law, and the law won.

It will be ‘interesting times’, for sure.

Bacon Grill.

Zojirushi travel mug.  I have one of their bread machines, and it rocks.

Tazer Pulse.

All-In-One Solar Powered Generator Briefcase.

Bi?m butter sprayer.

Electric Racklette Party Grill.

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And why not?

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Know instantly how much you suck….

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Dilbert creator Scott Adams announced on his blog recently that he will stop donating to his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley. Maybe it’s time for you to do the same.

Mr. Adams stated “…I’m ending my support of UC Berkeley, where I got my MBA years ago. I have been a big supporter lately, with both my time and money, but that ends today. I wish them well, but I wouldn’t feel safe or welcome on the campus. A Berkeley professor made that clear to me recently. He seems smart, so I’ll take his word for it.”

I’ve never given a cent to Yale, and I never will.

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There’s going to be a temptation to want to publicly mock those on the left who have responded to the confirmation of Betsy DeVos as secretary of education by suggesting they could pull their kids out of the public school system as a form of boycott.

This is like the Russians pulling out of Ukraine because Trump. That’ll teach ’em! Oh, wait….

Rabbit, meet briar patch.

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Fat people aren’t attractive. Black people aren’t attractive except to the extent that they look like slightly dark white people (cue Beyonce).

Sometimes it’s hard to tell the Victims without a scorecard.

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The brownshirts of the Left are on the march.

The Alliance For Educational Justice claimed,  “Today, families, residents and community leaders joined to block U.S. Department of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos from disrupting learning at Jefferson Academy.”

Looks to me as if the protesters were the only people disrupting anything. Where’s the ‘Justice’ in that?

And yet Trump is the New Hitler. Go Figure.

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One of the most unnerving aspects of the Great Democrat Freakout has been the astonishing level of nastiness unleashed. Like lynch mobs everywhere, the larger the audience, the more unhinged the behavior of individuals in the crowd. An aging, has-been singer shrieks her fantasy of blowing up the White House. Later, she walks it back, saying she was quoted “out of context,” though her words are perfectly clear. That was not particularly surprising since she had also welshed on her promise of Bill Clinton’s favorite form of sex to anyone voting for Hillary on November 8th. Had she kept her word, she would have missed the Pink Hat Rally because she would have been far too busy. And unable to speak clearly.

A multimillionaire actress/talk show host not only pretends to believe that Republicans want to return her race to picking cotton, but now wonders aloud just how different we Trump voters are from the Taliban. Gosh, isn’t that Islamophobic comparing the mostly-peaceful Taliban to deplorable, irredeemable Trumpers? I guess the slavery thing wasn’t harsh enough.

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The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) made its largest lease sale in four years, marking the start of President Donald Trump’s plans to expand drilling on federal lands.

BLM sold drilling rights on 278 parcels of public land for $129.3 million. Bids ranged from $2 per acre to $16,500 per acre. The land sold was mostly located in Wyoming — about half of which is directly controlled by the federal government.

Well, it’s not really Trump; nor is it clear that he had any hand in it. It does suggest, of course, that the Bureau of Land Management is prepared to lick the hand that feeds it.

I really dislike this trend to ascribe everything that the government is doing, whether good or bad (depending on the viewpoint) to Trump. Unless he issues an executive order or gets on the phone to tell somebody what to do, the most that can be said is that the bureaucracy is taking their tone from the top, which is customary in any organization. More interesting, I think, is where bureaucrats continue in Normal Democrat Mode even after the change of administration. Of course, the DemLegHump Media aren’t really interested in drawing any attention to such things.

Rolling back federal restrictions on public lands would create 2.7 million jobs and add $663 billion to the economy each year for the next 30 years, according to a 2016 study by Louisiana State University and the free-market Institute for Energy Research.

Opening these lands and waters could boost wages by $5.1 trillion, generating $3.9 trillion in new federal tax revenue over the next 37 years according to the research. Increased energy development could create 2.7 million new jobs.

Such prognostications tend to be self-serving, especially when issued by ‘think tanks’ with a political agenda. Unfortunately, what passes for journalism today has a time horizon of about 48 hours, so there’s very little chance of somebody keeping track of these predictions, especially over the course of ’37 years’, which is why making such predictions is merely hot air.

Teenage girl among four suspects arrested for ‘planning Paris suicide bombing’ in new attack plot

Muhammad and Forced Conversions to Islam

Mosul: Liberated Iraqis free to play football without Isis’s bizarre rules

US child hacker confesses to launching cyber attack on Brussels Airport hours after Isis attacks

Isis claims it attacked Israeli port of Eilat with rockets launched from Egypt

Elite Hamas soldiers defecting to Isis from Gaza-based group in increasing numbers

Asylum seekers arrested for ‘sexually assaulting girls’ at German swimming pool

Syrian Dictator: Terrorists Are ‘Definitely’ Among Refugees  Well, he would know.

#NotAllSyrianRefugees Charged With Multiple Sexual Assaults At Canadian Water Park

This May Be Iraq’s Next Terrible Insurgency

Canadian Muslim Leaders Demand ‘Islamophobia’ Plan

Bin-Laden’s Old Pal Wiped Out By US Airstrike In Syria  Reach out, reach out and touch someone….

Nigerian woman says Boko Haram gave her 50p to carry out suicide bombing attack

Military officials: Iraqis are ‘the face and the front’ of war against ISIS

Survey Shows Europeans Are Increasingly Opposed To Muslim Immigration

U.S. commander: Mosul and Raqqa should be retaken in 6 months

Evidence Shows ISIS May Be Forging Passports

ISIS Terrorists Faking Injuries To Get Out Of Fighting

Isis ‘kills at least six Red Cross’ aid workers in Afghanistan

Austria ‘preparing to send troops to protect EU borders’ against refugees

Le Grand Remplacement

Isis file reveals ‘problem’ foreign fighters are refusing to fight in Iraq

Palestinian Authority considers worst case funding scenarios given Donald Trump’s Israeli sympathies  Remind me why the U.S. taxpayer is funding ‘Palestinians’?

Syrian refugee’s German lawsuit against Facebook over ‘fake news’ terror claims begins

German police spark outrage for telling authorities to keep refugees away from carnival celebrations

Most Europeans want immigration ban from Muslim-majority countries, poll reveals

Hungarian mayor seeks to ban Muslims and gay people from his village

Somalia’s al-Shabaab militants behead four men for being ‘government spies’

Syrian regime secretly hanged 13,000 people at Assad’s notorious Saydnaya Prison, says Amnesty International  Guess it wasn’t that mch of a secret.

Afghanistan war getting little notice from Trump White House

Afghanistan requests U.S. air support for combat operations

What It’s Like To Get Executed By Assad

Sunni States’ Military Spending Sprees Could Fall to Radical Islamists

Hungary Wants To Put All Asylum Seekers In Detention Shelters

At least 20 dead in bomb blast outside Afghan Supreme Court

Iran responds to US sanctions with military drills and threat of further missile testing

Egyptian religious council rejects reform to law allowing men to verbally divorce their wives

The Threat America Is Neglecting in Afghanistan

Iran Makes A Big Show Of Unveiling ‘Homegrown’ Weapons. Turns Out They’re Probably Knock Offs

U.N.: More than 900 children killed in Afghanistan in 2016

Syrian troops, Turkey-backed forces surround ISIS stronghold

Israel Foils Another Hamas Kidnapping and Murder Plot

Israel Strikes Hamas Targets In Response To Rocket Attack

NATO Amps Up Anti-ISIS Mission After Trump’s Prodding

Iranian-Backed Rebels Launch Missile At Saudi Capital

Isis pay human traffickers for refugee children in ‘desperate’ attempt to attract more recruits

Record number of children killed in Afghanistan as Isis expands operations

Not ‘Lone Wolves’ After All: How ISIS Guides World’s Terror Plots from Afar

Turkish police detain over 440 people in anti-ISIS operation

Hundreds Of ISIS Suspects Arrested During Huge Anti-Terror Operation In Turkey

Man ‘raped 14-year-old child bride after illegal ceremony’

Hundreds of Isis suspects arrested during anti-terror crackdown inTurkey

Iraq archbishop: Where were all those protesters while ISIS committed genocides?  Gone to college, every one….

Saudi Arabia celebrates its first ever Women’s Day in RiyadhSaudi Arabia celebrates its first ever Women’s Day in Riyadh  All in chadors, of course.

Le Louvre terror attack: Father of alleged attacker Abdallah Reda el-Hamahmy insists son is not an Islamist extremist  Could have fooled me.

Iran sentences professor at Belgian university to death ‘without trial’ for alleged espionage

Official: U.S. ‘aggressively’ targeting ISIS, al-Qaida in Afghanistan

US-backed Syrian forces announce new phase in battle to retake Raqqa from Isis

Bill Warner: “It is the Purpose of Islam to Destroy All Art Because it is Jahiliyyah”

Experts: Social media firms fight Trump’s anti-terror plan while providing platform for terrorists

UAE condemns attack at the Louvre, pledges support to France

Idaho governor says persecuted Christians deserve refugee priority

Town square in France named after priest murdered by ISIS

Singapore sentences Saudi diplomat to caning ‘for molesting hotel intern’

Iran to blind woman accused of acid attack in retribution punishment

Al-Qaeda storms three Yemen towns days after botched US raid that killed up to 30 civilians

Germany offers asylum seekers up to €1,200 each to voluntarily return to their home countries

French Terrorist Was Egyptian Citizen On Tourist Visa

Terrorist Shouts ‘Allahu Akbar,’ Shot After Machete Attack on Louvre Museum

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Some time ago, around the time hat Congress passed No Child Left Behind, a reporter asked me what I thought its effect would be. I said I didn’t think it would have any.

Judging from the NAEP long-term trend scores for 17-year olds, I was right. They have hardly changed in more than 40 years. Naturally that’s what you would want to look at, rather than the scores for 4th graders or 8th graders. If they go up while graduates stagnate, it doesn’t matter. Only an idiot could get excited over that kind of sterile improvement – but since nearly everyone involved with this question is an idiot, they go on and on about it.

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The small German town of Limburg an der Lahn in Hesse is changing the musical lineup for its town hall glockenspiel after a local vegan said she was offended by “hostility toward animals” in one song.

Before, the town’s bell tunes included a song called “Fox, You Stole the Goose.” It describes how theft puts the fox in the crosshairs of a local hunter with a big, long shotgun.

The Limburg glockenspiel played only the melody, not the lyrics. But the unnamed vegan woman was bothered by the song’s imagery about a hunter with a gun, so she complained to city officials, who yielded to her request.

Q. How do you tell a vegan?

A. You don’t tell a vegan, she tells you.

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Touted as “all chicken, no crust,” the base is made of 100% chicken fillet and then topped with “100% mozzarella cheese” and “sauce made from California tomatoes.”

Further toppings on offer include ham, pineapple and KFC sauce.

Is this a great country, or what?

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I am not making this up.

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There are three annual events that fill every red-blooded American with joy: Christmas, the Fourth of July, and whatever day they hold the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner. We all anticipate the WHCD with a sense of childlike wonder — Which reliably leftist comedian will be the host? How will they all slam Republicans and pat themselves on the back for being so wonderful? Petit filet again? — and everybody dreams of one day attending.

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Hitler was a vegetarian. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

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The Big Reveal.

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‘We’ll show you! We’ll KILL our children!’

Uh, okay. So eventually there will be more of us and less of you.

That works for me, but it’s still not clear in what fashion that works for you.

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We have the technology.

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Through an examination of thousands of opinions (especially of district courts), docket sheets, briefs, and other filings, plus archival research and interviews, this Article provides the first general assessment of how federal courts handle the federal government’s disobedience. It makes four conclusions. First, the federal judiciary is willing to issue contempt findings against agencies and officials. Second, while several federal judges believe they can (and have tried to) attach sanctions to these findings, the higher courts have exhibited a virtually complete unwillingness to allow sanctions, at times swooping down at the eleventh hour to rescue an agency from incurring a budget-straining fine or its top official from being thrown in jail. Third, the higher courts, even as they unfailingly thwart sanctions in all but a few minor instances, have bent over backward to avoid making pronouncements that sanctions are categorically unavailable, deliberately keeping the sanctions issue in a state of low salience and at least nominal legal uncertainty. Fourth, even though contempt findings are practically devoid of sanctions, they have a shaming effect that gives them substantial if imperfect deterrent power.

Sarah Hoyt looks at the current scene.

At any rate I don’t remember exactly what I said anymore, but it went something like this: the left fed the right coins into the machine — the fundraising for Hillary was astonishing — and pulled all the right levers, from a press more than fully in the tank (to the point of getting the debate questions ahead of time to the Hillary campaign and also of BURYING her many scandals, including Benghazi, the financial shenanigans of the Clinton foundation, and the crazy server-in-the-bathroom stupidity), to celebrity endorsements, to more or less helping the Republicans select the candidate the democrats thought least likely to win against Hillary. Fraud to the extent it exists (It did in massive galloping amounts in the precinct I watched in 12.

The polls, cooked or not, were no more cooked than in 2012, and they showed a blow out.  EVERYTHING WAS GOING SO WELL.

And then the machine broke.  Instead of the planned, prepared, pushed Hillary presidency it delivered Trump.

Right now, from pussy hats to riots, the left is reacting like teenagers who did everything right and for whom the vending machine failed to deliver what they purchased.  So they’re screaming, and trying to push the machine and slamming it against the wall, trying to get it to dispense the treat they bought.

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For the fourth year in a row, a record number of Americans and green-card holders renounced their U.S. citizenship or legal permanent residency in 2016, according to Treasury Department data slated for publication Thursday.

…

Taxes, and penalties for citizens abroad not paying taxes, are a key reason for the record levels of expatriations, according to Mitchel. The 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, a statute intended to fight tax evasion by Americans with accounts abroad — Mitchel explained to The Daily Caller — has caused many American living outside the U.S. to escape the IRS’ grasp by leaving the system entirely.

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The following report from Swiss television describes the increasing level of violence that confronts the medical staff in the emergency room of a hospital with a large migrant clientele.