Read it.

News so fake, even fellow Voices of the Crust can’t stomach it.

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Except that Schultz was a nicer guy and apparently more intelligent.

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Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

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Astronomers signed an agreement with the Spanish government to build the giant Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Spain’s Canary Islands, if it can’t be put on top of a mountain in Hawaii. Protesters repeatedly attempted to block the construction of the telescope and have attempted to stop it with lawsuits.

Native Hawaiians are trying to block the telescope because they consider the mountain sacred. Environmentalists also opposed the project, and their opposition forced the U.S. National Academies of Science to reconsider 15 years of planning to construct TMT on Mauna Kea.

I have an idea: All white people depart Hawaii and leave it to the natives and Barack Obama. They can go back to eating poi and we won’t have to listen to them any more. Eventually the Japanese and Chinese will own the place and raise the tone a great deal, at which point it will be safe for civilized people to return.

Michael  Barone blows the whistle.

“Dare I suggest,” writes the economist and blogger Tyler Cowen, “that the quality of governance in this country has taken a downward turn of late?” Or as Casey Stengel, while managing the New York Mets on their way to a 40-120 season in 1962, reportedly asked, “Can’t anybody here play this game?”

In successive weeks, both Democrats and Republicans have shown a downward trend in the quality of governance and raised questions about whether anybody in Washington can play this game.

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And we’re just the people to let them.

Economists sometimes talk about a fictional $1 million tax on, say, beagles to illustrate the perverse effects of a poorly designed tax code. In theory, the tax could bring in $20 billion, given there are about 20,000 registered members of the breed. But in reality, the tax would yield little, because few people would claim to own such dogs, suddenly “discovering” that their beagles were really something else, maybe mixed breeds or schmeagles.

That idea is useful when discussing what’s benignly referred to as the “estate tax.” Critics refer to it by the ominous-sounding “death tax,” given that it imposes a 40 percent hit on accumulated wealth after its owner heads to that great estate in the sky. It’s really the “Tax on Your Dead Neighbor’s Family,” given it’s all about grabbing others’ inheritance.

The first thing Democrats think is “I can spend your money better than you can” and the second thing is “How can I use the power of government to rob you?” After a while of this, people start moving to Texas.

Read it.

Imagine your day without knowing where to vandalize, what the latest gender-bending or LGBT craze is or even where to get F*ck Trump lipstick. (According to left loons at Bustle, that’s Lipslut.)

There has been a boomlet in unhinged, irrational and ridiculous left-wing websites — all aimed at getting clicks from young people. So rather than focus on the run-of-the-mill alt-left, I’m digging deeper. As the weeks go on, I’ll be telling you more stories about these outlets and more. So watch this space. Meanwhile, watch the spaced-out:

Pakistan bomb blast kills 22 and leaves dozens injured

Iranian man sentenced to death for ‘insulting Islam’ through messaging app

Pakistan Is No Friend to America

Syrian civil war: More than five million refugees flee conflict as global support for resettlement wanes

State Department Designates New Zealand’s Infamous ‘Kiwi Jihadi’ A Global Terrorist

Pentagon gets OK for more aggressive airstrikes in Somalia  Does anyone really give a shit about Somalia? I mean, really?

Italian Police Crush ISIS Plot To Blow Up Historic Rialto Bridge In Venice

ISIS Makes Everyone Dress The Same To Deter US Drone Strikes  We’ll see how well that works.

Isis charging Syrian civilians $1,000 ‘not to be used as human shields’

Jordan on the brink of repealing law allowing rapists to marry their victims to escape punishment

Muslim men need to understand that the Koran says they should observe hijab first, not women

Report: Growing Islamic Extremism In Latin America Poses ‘Major Security Threat’ To US

New poll suggests Turkish President Erdogan will lose referendum on executive powers by knife edge

ISIS holds terrified civilians as human shields in Syrian city

The US Is Dropping More Bombs On ISIS Than Ever Before

SUDAN: Tribalism, Genocide And Rebels Against Rebels

With 500 bombs a week, Mosul airstrikes mark ‘the most kinetic’ phase of ISIS air war so far

The Long Arm of Recep Tayyip Erdogan

Attacked at Home by Antifas

French Poll: 61 Percent Say Islam Is Incompatible With Their Society

Germany nabs Taliban fighter accused of killing U.S. soldiers

Die Schlacht am Rhein

NASA Scientist Still Being Held In Turkish Prison As Spy

London’s Westminster Terrorist Received Government Welfare Before Engaging In His Attack

Iraq: ISIS, Not US, Responsible For Killing 200 Civilians

Top Al-Qaida Terrorist Was Once Freed From US Custody In Afghanistan

How Turkish resorts are trying to recover after a year of terrorism, coups and travel restrictions

Recep Tayyip Erdogan: Turkey could end decades-long EU bid because we are ‘no one’s whipping boy’

Culture-Enriching Robbery at the Platform in Herborn

Muslim Women in India Ask Top Court to Ban Instant Divorce

The Fabric of Arab Society Is in Tatters

Islamic Blasphemy Laws Enforced in Europe and America

The Army Is Sending An Unknown Number Of Troops In New Deployment To Mosul

The U.S. Army is sending reinforcements to Mosul

‘We see them as monsters. At least Israel makes normal, typical war’: As Isis caliphate shrinks, Syrian anger grows

Al-Qaida Leader With US Blood On His Hands Obliterated In American Airstrike

London Police Say Motive Behind ISIS-Claimed Attack Will Likely Remain Unknown  And London police will remain forever clueless.

Mosul: ‘Catastrophic’ civilian causalities force Iraqi forces to pause offensive against Isis

Libyan court suspends deal struck with Italy aiming to reduce refugee boat crossings over Mediterranean Sea

The Plight of Female Migrants in Germany

A New Police Fortress for Rinkeby

Canadian Navy Wants To Use Drone Boats To Stop Iranian Swarm Attacks

Culture-Enriching Lunacy With a Hammer

Khalid Masood: How popular schoolboy became a mass murderer who brought terror to Westminster  One word: Islam.

Khalid Masood: London terror attacker ‘was not lone wolf’ but part of a wider conspiracy, security officials believe  Yeah, it’s called ‘Islam’.

Raqqa offensive to begin in days despite Syria’s UN ambassador warning against ‘invasion’

Emboldened Somali pirates hijack second boat in a month ‘to use as mothership’

Boat carrying refugees sinks off Turkish coast with ’11 dead and at least four missing’

Ohio State U ‘Interfaith’ Room Stocked With Korans, No Bibles

Read it.

Pretty much everyone on the right has praised President Trump’s appointments, and what we have seen of his spending proposals looks good, too. Here in Minnesota, we are seeing a good example of the difference between the Trump administration and the Hillary administration we avoided. The subject is light rail transit.

Briefly, the powers that be have been trying to jam light rail transit down our throats for years. The cost is in the billions, and the trains hardly carry any riders, operating at huge losses. The latest proposed line is called Southwest Light Rail Transit (SWLRT). If it comes into being, it will only be because of nearly a billion dollars in federal funding, without which the project would be a non-starter. Which would be a good thing, since fixed rail transit is an obsolete technology that does nothing to relieve the Twin Cities’ highway congestion problems.

Just about everyone had given up, and was resigned to the idea that the SWLRT project would go forward. My organization, however, has continued to fight it, and it looks now as though our efforts may be successful.

A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you’re saving the taxpayers real money.

Read it.

Sanctuary city proponents often say their policies limiting cooperation with federal immigration authorities don’t endanger public safety. As ICE’s latest weekly declined detainer report shows, however, many county and city law enforcement agencies regularly release criminal aliens who have been convicted of violent crimes, including domestic battery and sexual assault.

The report, which covers February 4-10, tallied 47 declined detainer requests from two dozen jurisdictions across the country.

New York City accounted for 12 of those rejections, far more than any other jurisdiction. Among those illegal aliens released by New York jails were several who had been charged or convicted of violent crimes.

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School administrators are focusing on the toys rather than the mission.

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A find example of how Democrat politicians conspire with their base special interest groups to cheat taxpayers.

In an affidavit, the Fergus Falls resident says she is convinced the union, SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, forged her signature so it could start deducting the dues.

…

As The Daily Signal previously reported, a relatively small number of Minnesota’s 27,000 eligible personal care assistants voted in favor of an affiliate of Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, becoming their representative in collective bargaining.

Now personal care assistants such as Johansen have banded together in an effort to set a new election to decertify SEIU Healthcare Minnesota, in part because of what their lawyers describe as questionable tactics and the evidence of fraud.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

One of the remarkable things about the Cloud People is they have a non-linear timeline that has more holes than the fossil record. For most of them. the world started in the 1960’s. That’s because the Cloud is dominated by Boomers, but it is also when the Cloud started to form up as a social force. The result is they have two versions of the past. Their past, the 60’s and 70’s, and the long ago past, when Lincoln defeated Hitler.

This ahistorical world view is why they reflexively compare every foreign leader to Hitler and every problem in world affairs to Munich. It’s even more present tense for domestic matters. They have never stopped fighting the Civil Rights Movement. T.N. Coates makes $50K a speech because his kid brushed up against an old white women on an escalator once and that was just like the cops attacking the blacks at Selma.

…

So-called foodie culture is interesting in that it is not really a culture. It is the result of lack of culture. The people endlessly searching for a new dish or new cuisine do so because they have nothing of their own or at least nothing they wish to hold up as their own. The endless search for some new exotic cuisine is a distraction from facing the fact that their own culture is dead and its artifacts are now just museum pieces.

Read it.

Hoke County Schools in North Carolina are safe once again now that administrators have disciplined a public menace: 5-year-old Caitlin Miller, who was holding a stick and pretending it was a gun.

Don’t send your kid to a government school. Just don’t.

Read it.

Ah, yes. Travis County, here we come.

Time to squeeze the blue pustules on the rosy red bottom of Texas.

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I am not making this up.

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You knew it had to happen.

Makes you wonder what these people do for a living, other than making live miserable for others.

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Well, hate makes you ugly, and nobody can hate as well as Leftist politicians.

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As if a Muslim — Pakistani, no less — has any room to lecture others on hate. Kinda like being called a racist by a member of the KKK.

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A remarkably incisive analysis.

Of course, those who study history recognize that all radical ideologies get taken over the cliff by their fringe. But they never learn.

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Apparently even dogs have standards.

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Why anybody still pays attention to this clown simply amazes me.

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I’m not sure that Fozia Dualeh of the Twin Cities suburb Fridley is an immigrant or refugee, but I think it’s a pretty good bet. She has been charged with bilking taxpayers out of fraudulently procured welfare benefits in the amount of $118,000 over a one-and-one-half year period.

That is an impressive accomplishment, but Ms. Dualeh seems to have had the invaluable assistance of her husband, Abdikhadar Y. Ismail. For reasons that will become apparent, Ismail was found hiding under the covers in the course of a search of the family’s premises by law enforcement.

‘I want to come to America. I want to see a country where the poor people are fat.’

Read it.

Senate Democrats apparently could take some tips from Senate Republicans in hiring more racially diverse senior staff.

Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., noting that Republicans have an edge on Democrat colleagues in this department, said he wants to encourage his colleagues to find and bring on board qualified minority applicants.

“We have one of the most diverse staff[s] in the Senate, and that means you get more information with different perspectives than my other colleagues, which has been very helpful,” Scott told The Daily Signal in an interview.

Read it.

Congressional Republicans are first of all politicians, and politicians don’t get re-elected by cutting out buying votes with taxpayers’ money. They’re just less honest about it than Democrats.

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Another win.

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There’s no pleasing some people.,

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Everything is political these days.

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Yesterday California Attorney General Xavier Becerra announced 15 felony charges against two anti-abortion activists, David Daleiden and Sandra Merritt, in connection with their hidden-camera recordings of conversations with Planned Parenthood employees they sought to implicate in the illegal sale of fetal tissue. “The right to privacy is a cornerstone of California’s Constitution, and a right that is foundational in a free democratic society,” Becerra declared. “We will not tolerate the criminal recording of confidential conversations.”

The right to freedom of the press, which Daleiden and Merritt claim they were exercising, is also foundational in a free democratic society, and it conflicts with California’s dubious definition of the right to privacy. That conflict is especially troubling when law enforcement officials use privacy as a pretext to attack political opponents, which is what seems to be happening in this case.

The situation can be clarified by supposing that the people involved were DemLegHump Media ‘investigative journalists’ — 60 Minutes, say — looking into some accusation of the Koch brothers. It is immediately obvious that it such a situation the politician(s) involved would hail it and castigate any such prosecution a direct threat to the Constitution.

Read it.

The major defect of the Chattering Class of the Left that inhabits the DemLegHump Media is the rock-ribbed assumption that anyone who is unsound on one aspect of the proglodyte religion is therefore ipso facto unsound on every other aspect of the proglodyte religion.

This assumption operates so automatically that there isn’t even a shred of a pretense of checking what the actual facts of the matter might be — witness the ritual denunciations of Trump as racist and sexist and homophobic in the face of pretty clear evidence that he’s actually pretty indifferent on those issues.

And, when (as in this case) the evidence is clear, it is just ignored — ‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’

Read it.

Prediction: In any contest between a Real Hamburger and a Fake Hamburger, the Real Hamburger will win every time.

Notice how many people are making fake meat out of plants, and how nobody is making fake plants out of meat. Think about that.

Tyler Cowen looks at what the Crust obsesses about these days.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.

…

Most of the top music from the 1990s, such as say Alanis Morissette, would sound current if released today, a sign of cultural stasis in what was once a highly socially charged and rapidly changing sector. In 1967, music from 20 or even 10 years earlier sounded quite different and indeed archaic.

…

Restaurants are increasingly an organizing and revitalizing force in our cities, and eating out has continued to rise as a means of socializing. America’s educated professional class may be out of touch with sports and tired of discussing the weather, and so trading information about new or favorite restaurants, or recipes and ingredients, has become one of the new all-purpose topics of conversation. Food is a relatively gender-neutral topic, and furthermore immigrant newcomers can be immediately proud of what they know and have eaten.

Read it.

Amazing how much impact a ‘social construct’ can have.

Megan McArdle visits America for Bloomberg News.

There’s no getting around it: For a girl raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, Salt Lake City is a very weird place.

I went to Utah precisely because it’s weird. More specifically, because economic data suggest that modest Salt Lake City, population 192,672, does something that the rest of us seem to be struggling with: It helps people move upward from poverty. I went to Utah in search of the American Dream.

Columnists don’t talk as much as they used to about the American Dream. They’re more likely to talk about things like income mobility, income inequality, the Gini coefficient?—?sanitary, clinical terms. These are easier to quantify than a dream, but also less satisfying. We want money, yes, but we hunger even more deeply for something else: for possibility. It matters to Americans that someone born poor can retire rich. That possibility increasingly seems slimmer and slimmer in most of the nation, but in Utah, it’s still achievable.

Read it.

Democrat, of course. God forbid any of her voter fraud clients should be deported.

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Funny how all those ‘studies’ that say that raising the minimum wage won’t cause unemployment never seem to describe what happens in real life.

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A milestone. It’ll never fly with the spendaholics in Congress, of course, but just having a President make the effort is encouraging.

You will have noticed, if you have been paying attention, that the loudest clamoring about being ‘sanctuary cities’ comes from yuppie hipster enclaves like San Francisco or Malibu or West Palm Beach or Manhattan. The reason for this is that the Upper Crust can’t afford to lose their Underclass dependents, upon whom they rely for domestic servants, nannies and housekeepers and yardboys and such.

Scrape off the icing of virtue-posturing and that’s all it is. Those who scream loudest about ‘living wage’ are the same ones who are ready to die in the last ditch to continue paying their illegal servitors a less-than-market wage for their Upper Crust lifestyle.

So, as with any other area of life, tune out the bleatings and follow the money.

Read it.

Mariza Ruelas currently faces up to two years in jail in California for the crime of selling ceviche through a Facebook food group. Welcome to the mad world of American food regulation. In Biting the Hands That Feed Us, Baylen Linnekin looks closely at a system that can take pride in a historically safe food supply but that also imposes too many rules that defy common sense.

Linnekin traces the system’s origins to The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s exposé of the appalling conditions in Chicago’s slaughterhouses, and to the New Deal’s hyper-regulation of agriculture. Such intrusiveness culminated in the case of Wickard v. Filburn, in which the Supreme Court ruled that Americans don’t even have the right to consume food they grow themselves, on their own land. Food regulation has marched steadily onward ever since.

Eric Raymond provides some advice to those who are not.

This blog post is brought to you by a recent bad experience I had watching a 5-minute clip from Big Bang Theory on the recommendation of a friend who thought I might find it amusing.

Bleagh. This is supposed to be a show about geniuses? It’s not. It’s a show about a dimwit’s idea of what bright people are like. The slowest person in my peer group could out-think and out-create any of these sad-sack imitations of “smart” on any day of the week.

Read it.

Because we all know how having too many white people involved just ruins a school system.

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A government watchdog group filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for not handing over records related to the “environmental justice” grants the agency hands out to activist groups across the country.

Judicial Watch filed suit Monday after the EPA failed to comply with a 2015 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records of environmental justice grants and their associated proposals during the Obama administration.

“The Obama EPA’s ‘environmental justice’ slush fund for its left-wing allies needs to be exposed,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said in a statement. “This is a simple records request and the fact that the Obama EPA ignored it for years tells you the agency has something to hide.”

Read it.

New research from Oregon State University, published on Friday in Behavioural Processes, concludes that cats enjoy human contact more than eating.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

Oh, well, that’s all right, then.

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The alleged rape of a 14-year-old Rockville High School student by two illegal immigrant classmates has thrown the issue into the national spotlight. Some local residents are laying blame for the assault at the feet of Montgomery County officials and state lawmakers, who they say have ignored law-abiding citizens while trying to score political points by resisting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement orders.

“Rockville High School was a tragedy waiting to happen and can happen again,” North Potomac resident Ed Amatetti told fellow protesters. “This is a public safety and school safety issue. It’s about schools with declining academic and discipline standards, in part to accommodate other ill-conceived policies we question here today.”