Read it.

Hint: Fences.

Lileks.

“While the plane is preparing for takeoff, please pretend to pay attention to the flight attendant with the game smile, going through the safety instructions. It’s humiliating for her, standing in the aisle showing you how to put on a seat belt like it’s 1962. She could put this around her neck and pull the strap until she’s blue and you wouldn’t notice.

“Whoever makes eye contact with her gets a free drink. Anyone? No? Well, thank you for choosing to fly with us today, even though we know it had everything to do with price and nothing to do with the brand we spend millions promoting. Do you even know which airline you’re on? No.

“When we’ve reached cruising altitude we will be coming by with small pieces of shellac painted to look like pretzels.”

Read it.

Democrats, the party of corruption since before the Civil War.

Read it.

Stacy doesn’t understand the Narrative. Any motion in any direction by any UnColored person is a ‘white power gesture’, even if they don’t know it.

Read it.

Back to Michoacan for you, Manuel.

Read it.

That Trump — what a failure. He ought to just go home and let Hillary take over the Obama legacy of destroying the economy and making everybody but the Crust poorer and poorer.

Read it.

“Trust” means different things on elite social networks than it does on the rest of the internet, where most people would be happy to simply get better tools for filtering out death threats and Nazis. Here, trust is like rolling your tinted windows up as you drive through a certain neighborhood. It’s having the option to ignore people living lives wildly unlike your own. And this can seem ironic coming from the kinds of people who already have the least to fear online, and in the real world. On these social networks, trust and safety is about being around people who feel familiar to you — no matter who that excludes, which is almost everyone.

Another safe space for Democrats.

Read it.

Was AlGore on hand? He’s usually the guy that triggers these events.

Read it.

I guess they can’t handle the truth.

On Friday (appearing in Saturday’s print edition), the New York Times published its first column by Bret Stephens, the former Wall Street Journal columnist recently hired as a “conservative” voice.

Let’s see how long it takes him to turn into another Brooks.

Its theme was that the political “hyperbole” about climate change doesn’t match the underlying science — even if one trusts the underlying science. That alone was enough to send journalists into unhinged and often profane orbit.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

Read it.

As team Trump digs into taxing, spending and health-care reform, it’s learning a vital lesson of Washington. Once a government benefit is given, it can never be taken away. If young people have been overcharged by ObamaCare so middle-aged people can be undercharged, then the solution is to undercharge young people too. The taxpayer—usually visualized as a hedge fund manager—can always pay more.

Megan McArdle isn’t buying it.

My quarrel is not with the politics of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” nor with its realism. Expecting plausibility from dystopian fiction is like expecting haute cuisine from a highway service area. Of the dystopian fiction I’ve read, only “1984” comes even remotely close to feeling real, and that’s because Orwell was working from two vivid contemporaneous examples, from which he lifted freely.

…

America hasn’t had a unified theocratic tradition since the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the descendants of those Puritans are now pouring their fervent moralism into buying Priuses and complaining about Trump. The closest modern equivalent, the statewide hegemony of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, doesn’t look very much like The Handmaid’s Tale, and hasn’t the faintest prayer of co-opting the rest of the nation’s fractured religious traditionalists, many of whom do not even consider the Mormons to be Christian. And even if some movement did, somehow, gather a Mormon-like critical mass, Trump is hardly likely to be its avatar; our most religious red state was also the one where Trump had the greatest trouble.

…

There is nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page. But there is something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality. That risks confusion so we will not notice the real dystopia rising — or the rest of the world will be too tired of our cries to hear any warnings we shout.

Read it.

If your mother smoked, your kid may be autistic.

Thanks, mom.

Read it.

Wallflowers also don’t get attacked from behind. How much risk is that new ‘friend’ worth?

Some of us already have all the friends we care to have.

Read it.

Algorithms, we are told, “rule our world.” They are ubiquitous. They lurk in the shadows, shaping our lives without our consent. They may revoke your driver’s license, determine whether you get your next job, or cause the stock market to crash. More worrisome still, they can also be the arbiters of lethal violence. No wonder one scholar has dubbed 2015 “the year we get creeped out by algorithms.” While some worry about the power of algorithms, other think we are in danger of overstating their significance or misunderstanding their nature. Some have even complained that we are treating algorithms like gods whose fickle, inscrutable wills control our destinies.

Read it.

The list of materials that can be produced by 3-D printing has grown to include not just plastics but also metal, glass, and even food. Now, MIT researchers are expanding the list further, with the design of a system that can 3-D print the basic structure of an entire building.

There has been a lot of ink spilled recently about how, rather than waste time going to college, enterprising young people ought to get a good-paying job in the construction trades.

Well, if that’s the road they’re going to take, they’d better be quick about it.

QuerkyWriter.

Read it.

Anti-Israel groups on college campuses have come up with a new tactic in their effort to pass BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) resolutions. They are manipulating the voting to exclude Jews from the process.

At Tufts, a group called Students for Justice in Palestine decided to place an anti-Israel divestment resolution on the school senate’s agenda on the evening before the Jewish holiday of Passover, at a time when many Jewish students would be unable to attend the student government meeting. More than 50 students emailed their “senators” urging them to postpone the vote until after the Jewish holiday. The senate ignored their request.

Similarly at Pitzer College, the student senate unexpectedly held a vote on Easter Sunday on whether to prohibit Student Activities Funds to be used for payment on goods or services from any corporation or organization associated with Israel. Many student senators were not present, and therefore unable to vote, due to their observance of Easter and Passover.

The resolution passed 22-0, with four abstentions.

The author of the resolution claimed, absurdly, that the vote occurred on Easter Sunday and during Passover by coincidence. As for why she didn’t announce that the BDS measure would be taken up, the author admitted it was “because my intention was to have it pass.” “I have had enough intellectual conversation about why people disagree with me,” she explained.

Another example of the snowflake as fledgling fascist.

Read it.

Hands up – don’t shoot! Oh, wait….

#BlackCrimesMatter

Read it.

A pizza joint in Portland Oregon has created the world’s cheesiest pizza using a total of 101 different cheese varieties.

And hipsters all over the globe start hyperventilating.

It is, of course, GMO-free. Sorry about the gluten — it’s that crust thing.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

The company behind a private fusion reactor in Great Britain announced Friday it will become partially operational next year.

The new reactor, dubbed Tokamak ST40, is being built in Oxfordshire by the a private company Tokamak Energy. The company plans to start generating the plasma necessary for fusion power sometime this fall and will reach operating temperatures early next year.

You can believe as much or as little of that as you care to.

Read it.

The Democrat Party is the world’s most successful hate group. It attracts poor people who hate rich people, black people who hate white people, gay people who hate straight people, feminists who hate men, environmentalists who hate the internal combustion engine, and a lot of bratty college kids who hate their parents.

However, the real secret of the party’s success is that it attracts the support of journalists who hate Republicans, and who therefore work tirelessly to convince the rest of us that we should vote for Democrats. . . .

No matter who the Republicans nominate for president, the Organized Forces of Liberal Journalism will paint him as a greedy, cold-hearted, woman-hating racist. If the GOP nominated a Buddhist monk or a Latina lesbian, still the New York Times and NBC News would find a way to convince themselves that the Republican candidate represented everything liberals hate about America — the military, the police, Christianity, capitalism, the internal combustion engine and heterosexual white men who work for a living.

Read it.

In the early twentieth century, progressives displayed an open contempt for individual rights. In a 1915 unsigned editorial at this magazine, the editors ridiculed the Bill of Rights as a joke. “They insist upon invoking abstract principles, instead of trying to determine for concrete cases whether social control should supersede individual initiative…how can we discuss that seriously?” The doctrine of natural rights will “prevent us from imposing a social ideal.” The progressives were able to unite idealism and pragmatism via science and the administrative state. What good was democracy if people voted against their collective interest? What expertise did the average American have in managing a state or a race? Black Americans in particular could not be trusted with the ballot. “The progressive goal was to improve the electorate,” Leonard writes, “not necessarily to expand it.” Jim Crow laws suppressed turnout in the South, but it fell in the North as well. New York state’s participation went from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920.

From there to street thugs and hate in less than a century. Progressives, you haven’t come a long way.

Read it.

Democrats, party of corruption since before the Civil War.

#BlackLiesMatter.

Read it.

Hey, let’s put female sailors on board ships! What could possibly go wrong?

Read it.

That would have worked with Obama.

Suniva claimed competition from Chinese-made solar panels all but forced the company into bankruptcy, despite receiving more than $20 million in support from federal and state taxpayers, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

So I guess the answer is to require people in the U.S. who want to go solar to buy more expensive Suniva panels. They’d have better luck using the traditional way, i.e. buying a Democrat Congressman.

Read it.

FATCA, which was passed in 2010 by a Democratic Congress and enacted by President Barack Obama, requires law-abiding Americans with legitimate bank accounts outside the country and foreigners working in the United States to turn over information about their overseas holdings of more than $50,000.

Under new treaties with the United States, some 100,000 foreign financial institutions in more than 100 countries must report to the Treasury on an account of any so-called “U.S. person”—a U.S. citizen or someone with a green card or U.S. work permit—with $50,000 or more in it, or they risk being hit with a 30 percent withholding tax on their U.S. earnings.

Not surprisingly, FATCA compliance costs are large. Various reports by the Chamber of Commerce, foreign governments and banks show that as of 2016, compliance costs were anywhere between $200 billion and $1 trillion.

As a result, overseas banks are refusing to deal with Americans. And who can blame them?

Read it.

The top response may or may not come as a surprise to you – people not keeping their trolleys with them in supermarkets:

“Leave their cart in the middle of the damn grocery aisle while they look at stuff on the shelves. MOVE, PEOPLE,” one angry person wrote.

Amen to that.

Many agreed, and it wasn’t just in the aisles that neglected trolleys cause annoyance: “Leave their cart in the middle of an empty parking spot because they can’t be bothered to bring it back,” one person added.

Preach it, brother.

Read it.

Everybody’s a critic.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, vents about media treatment of the proposed ‘tax reform’.

In recent days I have – likely like you have – heard and read several media reports on Trump’s tax plan (or what we know of it so far).  Nearly all of these reports are juvenile: changes in tax rates are evaluated by the media according to changes in the legal tax liabilities of various groups of people.  For example, Trump’s proposal to cut the top federal personal income-tax rate from 39.6% to 35% is assessed only by its effect on high-income earners.  Specifically, of course, it’s portrayed as a ‘gift’ to high-income earners.  Eliminating the estate tax, as well as the alternative minimum tax, are likewise portrayed as benefits for the rich.

My purpose here isn’t to praise or to pillory Trump’s tax plan; I’ve yet to examine it in any detail.  My purpose, instead, is to lament this popular approach to evaluating taxation.  This approach, as Deirdre McCloskey might say, is that of a lawyer and not that of an economist.  The lawyer focuses on legal liabilities; the economist focuses on systemic consequences, both immediate and ‘seen’ as well as distant and ‘unseen.’

Actually, most of the j-school grads who are bloviating about it on TV aren’t even lawyers — but they have access to lawyers who (a) are mostly Democrats and (b) apparently slept through a lot of law school.

It’s true that if Smith’s last (say) $10,000 of annual income is currently taxed at a rate higher than a proposed new lower rate, Smith is made better off if this proposed lower marginal tax rate becomes reality.  (As an aside, I refuse to go along with the common-in-many-circles description of such a tax cut as a “gift” or a “giveaway” to Smith and other high-income earners.  Smith is the person who earned the income.  It is his property.  This income belongs to Smith.  The government takes it away from him.  For the government to reduce the amount of money that it takes away from Smith is not properly called a giveaway to Smith.  But let’s here say no more about this particular linguistic battering of reality.)

There’s a lot of that going around these days; the presumption that all your income belongs to the government except for whatever they graciously deign to let you keep infects a lot of people beyond the Usual Suspects who want your earnings confiscated because it’s more than they think you deserve.

Read it.

One of the staples of Portland, Oregon—”Portlandia” to TV viewers— is the annual Rose Festival, now in its 82nd year, and it has for several years now featured a kickoff parade, akin to the Rose Parade in Pasadena on January 1 every year. But this year’s parade, scheduled for this weekend, has been cancelled. The reason: It was going to include—gasp—Republicans! And this is too much for the hardened left, which threatens to shutdown the parade by violent means if it includes Republicans. And the city of Portland has caved.

Read it.

Each year, Earth Day is accompanied by predictions of doom. Let’s take a look at past predictions to determine just how much confidence we can have in today’s environmentalists’ predictions.

In 1970, when Earth Day was conceived, the late George Wald, a Nobel laureate biology professor at Harvard University, predicted, “Civilization will end within 15 or 30 years unless immediate action is taken against problems facing mankind.” Also in 1970, Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford University biologist and best-selling author of “The Population Bomb,” declared that the world’s population would soon outstrip food supplies. In an article for The Progressive, he predicted, “The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.” He gave this warning in 1969 to Britain’s Institute of Biology: “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.” On the first Earth Day, Ehrlich warned, “In 10 years, all important animal life in the sea will be extinct.” Despite such predictions, Ehrlich has won no fewer than 16 awards, including the 1990 Crafoord Prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences’ highest award.

Read it.

The brownshirts of the Left are on the march. Yet Trump is supposedly the new Hitler.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

A new research letter published today in the journal Nature makes a startling claim that, if correct, will rewrite everything we know about how North America was populated.

But in the the words of its own author, Steven Holen, the evidence he and his colleagues discovered “went against everything I’ve ever taught in my career about early humans in North America.”

So clearly it’s reasonable to be skeptical. That’s why we’re breaking down the evidence in this special edition of CSI: Mastodon.

UPDATE: More here.

Read it.

Read it.

The University of California’s administration kept millions of dollars in a secret fund even as it sought permission from the Board of Regents, and approval from the public, to raise tuition. It also overpaid employees who were already handsomely compensated, and provided them expensive perks.

Public institutions exist to provide the Crust and their offspring with affluence at taxpayers’ expense.

Read it.

Will the Islamophobia never cease?

Funny, the bear didn’t look Jewish….

Steve Sailer watches the meltdown.

Lately, American higher education is notoriously prone to tantrums. Two more academic meltdowns last week raise connected questions:

First, are scholars allowed to suggest any explanation for racial disparities other than that White People Are Bad?

Second, if they can’t say anything heretical or interesting, do we really need white scholars anymore, or can they be replaced by Professors of Color?

All of the above, I’d say.

Read it.

Hillary Clinton’s Department of State aides threatened a South Asian prime minister’s son with an IRS audit in an attempt to stop a Bangladesh government investigation of a close friend and donor of Clinton’s, The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Investigative Group learned.

A Bangladesh government commission was investigating multiple charges of financial mismanagement at Grameen Bank, beginning in May 2012. Muhammad Yunus, a major Clinton Foundation donor, served as managing director of the bank.

Democrats, the Party of Corruption since before the Civil War.

Read it.

And here I thought it was more pictures of the ‘Science March’. Hard to tell without a scorecard sometimes.

I suppose it’s about all they’ve got left (no pun intended).

Read it.

“Being ‘pro-science’ has become a bizarre cultural phenomenon in which liberals (and other members of the cultural elite) engage in public displays of self-reckoned intelligence as a kind of performance art, while demonstrating zero evidence to justify it,” Dr. Jeremy Faust, a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, wrote in Slate.

“There was an uncomfortable dronelike fealty to the concept — an oxymoronic faith that information presented and packaged to us as Science need not be further scrutinized before being smugly celebrated en masse,” Faust wrote. “That is not intellectually rigorous thought — instead, it’s another kind of religion, and it is perhaps as terrifying as the thing it is trying to fight.”

Perhaps because ‘progressivism’ is, fundamentally, a cult.

Read it.

Two professors from West Chester University decided to do an in-depth analysis into various people’s ancestries and backgrounds. First they asked participants to guess the results. One of their participants, Bernard, came away very displeased when the test revealed he was mainly European and not at all black.

Bernard walked into the test identifying himself as “black.” He informed the professors ahead of time that despite having a white mother, his mother raised him to identify as a black man.

“My mother said, ‘I know you are me, but no cop is going to take the time to find out your mother is white,’” Bernard explained before the test. “She was very specific about raising me as a black man.”

Perhaps because those Victim Points can be traded for valuable prizes.

Perhaps if I ‘identify’ as rich somebody will give me money.

Read it.

Still won’t make up for the millions who died because of Rachel Carson.

Read it.

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

Read it.

A useful reference for those of us who often find ourselves throwing books against the wall.