Read it.

The ‘strategic oil reserve’ was just an oil price-support program in a Clever Plastic Disguise. It needs to go.

We have plenty of oil, without any need to depend on foreigners, if the fargin government would just let people extract it.

Sell the streets and drop the bomb
Was our cry….

Read it.

Present-day chimpanzees are humans’ nearest living relatives. Where the last chimp-human common ancestor lived is a central and highly debated issue in palaeoanthropology. Researchers have assumed up to now that the lineages diverged five to seven million years ago and that the first pre-humans developed in Africa. According to the 1994 theory of French palaeoanthropologist Yves Coppens, climate change in Eastern Africa could have played a crucial role. The two studies of the research team from Germany, Bulgaria, Greece, Canada, France and Australia now outline a new scenario for the beginning of human history.

Read it.

When it comes to “news” which might discredit Donald Trump or a member of his family, the modus operandi for too many in the press is, “Tweet and report first, ask questions later (if at all).”

On Sunday, several media members couldn’t resist falsely tweeting that Ivanka Trump will somehow control $100 million pledged by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates to a World Bank fund for women entrepreneurs, thus dishonestly opening the door to utterly false parallels to the Clinton family-controlled Clinton Foundation.

Steven Hayward looks at the slow-motion train wreck that is California.

Out here in California the latest Progressive cause—after high speed rail and solving climate change all by ourselves—is a state-based single-payer health care system. There is a bill (SB 562) that has passed out of one state Senate committee already, along with talk of a ballot initiative, and if those fail, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a certain candidate for governor next year, is talking about universal single-payer health care as a centerpiece of his campaign. (Aside: I’ll predict right now that Newsom will be California’s next governor, because isn’t it obvious that in its advanced state of decadence, California deserves a governor named Gavin.)

Now before reading further, take in the fact that California total state budget at the moment is about $180 billion.

And now take in the analysis of the bill from the state Senate Appropriations Committee (run by Democrats, remember), which has estimated that the single-payer system SB 562 contemplates would cost . . . $400 billion.

…

Keep your eye on this one, as it will be fun to watch Dem-on-Dem mayhem. The unions are unlikely to smile on this idea, for starters. But several Progressive interest groups promise to run primary challengers against any Democrat who votes against the bill when and if it comes to the floor.

Read it.

A shortage of homes for sale has bedeviled U.S. house hunters in recent years, so why don’t builders build more? One problem is that they’re running out of lots to build on—at least in the places that people want to live.

Cities that were sprawling before the Great Recession have begun to sprawl again. Space-constrained cities, meanwhile, have run out of room to build. That reality has spurred developers to focus on center-city neighborhoods where high-density building is allowed—and new units command exceedingly high prices.

And yet all of the ‘urban planners’ are still convinced that ‘high density’ is the way to go.

Uh, no.

Read it.

The Supreme Court of the United States today decided that U.S. companies may only face patent infringement lawsuits in the jurisdiction in which they are incorporated, which in Apple’s case would be California.

This has been an open sore for decades.

Read it.

Hire Tony Soprano to have them whacked.

Well, that’s what I would do.

Read it.

Thousands of union activists have swarmed downtown New Haven to force Yale University to negotiate a contract that would bring its recently formed union to the bargaining table.

Led by Yale’s graduate student union Local 33 Unite Here, the crowd is compromised of a mish-mash of local unions, students from up and down the East Coast, and Yale retirees. The protest is occurring directly outside the Ivy’s 316th commencement ceremonies and is set to bleed well into the afternoon. City officials have blocked off four streets (Elm St., College St., High St. and Church St.) and formed a police barricade between graduating students and activists.

These are the four streets that bound the Old Campus, the quadrangle where graduations are held.

At noon, a light drizzle descended upon the crowd.

No doubt God peeing on the whole shebang. What goes around, comes around.

Lion of the Blogosphere sorts it out for you.

Gelato is just the Italian word for ice cream, and while there are customary differences between them, I don’t think that there exists an ice cream/gelato police that will put you in prison if you call standard American-style ice cream “gelato” to make it more appealing to SWPLs. You see, SWPLs love stuff that’s European and usually despise eating foods commonly eaten by Amercian proles unless it’s eaten ironically. Although there seems to be an exception for ice cream, a food that spans social classes and can be unironically enjoyed by SWPLs even though they have a preference for the fancier-sounding gelato.

I’ve always preferred sherbet to ice cream. It’s the Turk in me.

Read it.

They’ll have to oil him up first.

Read it.

When Live Action called Planned Parenthood clinics asking for other services ranging from prenatal care to adoption to parenting resources, staff at seven of the clinics said to “just go online” or “just Google” those services.

In two especially chilling moments in the video, Planned Parenthood staffers tell women who are looking for an ultrasound that they don’t actually provide ultrasounds—not unless the plan is to take the baby’s life through abortion, that is.

“We don’t do any ultrasounds for prenatal care,” a staff member at a Council Bluffs, Iowa, Planned Parenthood tells a caller. “We do them when we’re doing abortions, but not for any other reason.”

Then they ought to call themselves ‘Planned Non-Parenthood’. Margaret Sanger’s dream of eliminating the Undesirables proceeds apace.

A graphic at the end of Live Action’s video shows that the corporation “performs” nearly 35 percent of all abortions in the U.S. compared with less than 2 percent of breast exams, less than 1 percent of pap smears, and less than two percent of cancer screenings.

I’ll bet they’re focusing on their ‘core competency’. They’ll probably win some sort of business award for that.

Read it.

The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, N.M., is testing a MaxPower microwave system that sends out an electromagnetic pulse a billion times stronger than the average household microwave. The system houses vast amounts of magnetrons, high-powered vacuum tubes that generate microwaves, releasing enough energy to mess with an IED’s trigger system and make it explode before a convoy is in danger.

I bet it would do an entire cow at one shop. Barbecue!

Victor Davis Hanson looks at Washington.

Far too many government officials never pay the price for their crimes and misdeeds: Clinton, Rice, Napolitano, Lerner … Comey is the exception.

President Trump’s firing of James Comey revealed strange timing, herky-jerky methods, and bad political optics.

Certainly, in the existential political war that Trump finds himself in, it would have been wiser, first, to have rallied his entire White House team and congressional leaders around the decision and established a shared narrative, to have been magnanimous to the departing James Comey, and to have had obtained private guarantees from a preselected successor that he or she would serve and be appointed within a day or two.

But otherwise the firing was overdue.

The head of the FBI (quite outside his purview as an investigatory official) announced in summer 2016 to the nation that he had decided not to seek an indictment of Hillary Clinton. Then, again in the role of a presumed federal attorney, he seemed to reverse that judgment by reopening his investigation. Then he appeared to re-reverse that decision — all at the height of a heated presidential campaign.

Read it.

For 20 years these news organizations, along with CBS, NBC and ABC, were the only game in town. They served as gatekeepers of information, and as their newsrooms became more and more detached from the center of the country, consumers began to become detached from them.

And then along came the Internet. Not only were different sources now available, but news aggregators such as Drudge made it easy to find things giving everyone access to “alternative facts.”

The universe of information expanded, and it became clear that what Peter Jennings, Dan Rather or the New York Times told consumers was not the whole story, and if you were a conservative (and a plurality of Americans self-identify as center right) you lost all trust in the mainstream media.

…

Read it.

Most people who have been exposed to defensive shooting techniques have heard the little slogan, “Two to the body, one to the head, is guaranteed to leave them dead.” Fewer shooters know this refers to a defensive shooting technique called the Mozambique Drill. But a large number of defensive students may be confused regarding the difference between the Mozambique and the Failure Drill. Well, as they say, here is the rest of the story.

I learned it as ‘Two to the body, one to the head, always leaves the target dead.’ But it’s core knowledge however construed.

Derek Hunter makes a discovery.

That liberals are hypocrites is not news. Just take a look at the net worth of any Democratic Party leader who routinely rails against the “1 percent.” But in the age of Trump, where the hatred that normally drives what we’re told is the “tolerant” left has been turned up to 11. All standards have gone out the window; no hypocrisy is too great, no conspiracy theory too insane for someone on the left to advance it and its drone army to believe.

It must be easy to be a liberal in 2017. You don’t have to think for yourself. You don’t have to prove anything. And your life can swirl in a bubble where you’ll never have anything you say challenged in a serious way. Liberals have become the bad guy in Lethal Weapon 2 – their membership in the progressive club grants them a sort of diplomatic immunity from reality.

The same people who cheered the release of traitor Bradley Manning after serving only seven of 35 years for giving thousands of classified national security secrets to Wikileaks clutch their pearls to this day over the same website publishing unclassified emails from the Clinton campaign.

Read it.

Around the world, more homeowners are experimenting with residential batteries, which grab energy when it is generated and store it for later use. The excess power can be tapped if the grid goes down—in a storm, say—or during high-demand periods when electricity is more expensive.

Thanks to a big push by solar vendors and battery providers such as Tesla Inc., Samsung Electronics Co., and Sunverge Energy Inc., homeowners in the U.S. now have a choice of off-the-shelf home batteries, or they can get them through pilot programs hosted by local utilities and companies that install solar systems. The batteries are getting increased attention as solar power becomes more affordable and common in the U.S.

Read it.

I’ve always said how much I miss the 1950s, and here they are back again.

Much like President Trump getting Mexico to pay for building the wall, Democrats (and their fellow-travelers) are now getting black people to re-segregate themselves. I guess they just miss Jim Crow.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

For the full effect, read the article in a Valley Girl voice.

Read it.

Piper Harron is an unhappy-looking black woman whose mood would be greatly improved if white male math professors would just ’fess up to their unearned privilege and quit their jobs. She is currently a “temporary assistant professor” in mathematics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and I think we can all agree that this is the first time any of us has ever heard of that school.

Piper holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University, which sounds impressive until you take into account the mathematical fact that a study from Princeton reveals that blacks are given a handicap of 230 SAT points compared to whites when it comes to admissions standards.

On her resume, she makes the startling and mathematically improbable claim that during her eleven years of collegiate studies, she not only “survived external and internalized misogyny,” she also suffered the horrors of “external and internalized racism.” What are the odds?

Read it.

The event is taking place at Spøttrup Castle, a well-preserved 16th century fortress, and is part of the line-up for European Capital of Culture Aarhus 2017. The medieval combat will include one-on-one contests to large skirmishes, where teams of 16 people fight with swords, axes, clubs and warhammers.

Whilst the championships take place, the parkland around Spøttrup Castle will be converted into a Medieval market, selling everything from chain mail to mead. At the castle one can experience the entertainment up close while discovering some medieval gourmet as a real warrior, to the sounds of wild battle cries and metal on metal.

Everything old is new again.

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The Democratic Party is far gone in hate, but who do you suppose are the most lunatic Dems of all? The California Democrats are obvious candidates and, sure enough, their state convention yesterday concluded with a chant: “Fuck Donald Trump!” led by California Democratic Party chairman John Burton.

…

Now, just imagine how the AP would have reported on a state Republican convention that concluded in middle-finger-raised chants of “Fuck Barack Obama!” Do you think that would have been described as “a sign of the vigor of the party’s distaste for the president”? No, I don’t think so, either. California’s Democrats have gone insane, but how far behind is the Associated Press?

Read it.

The European Commission continues to threaten Poland for its refusal to accept its quota of “refugees” as required under the ukases issued by the mandarins of Brussels.*

Interior Minister Mariusz Blaszczak said that accepting refugees would “certainly be worse” than penalties imposed by the European Union. And Prime Minister Beata Szydlo is standing firm.

It seems the Polish government has evaluated the effects of mass Muslim immigration, and decided that the terrorism, violence, rape, and criminality would be more damaging to Poland than anything Brussels could do to the country. How commonsensical — and rare! The lytic agents imported by George Soros’ organizations are evidently not yet strong enough to break down the societal structure of Polish culture and traditions.

Read it.

Oh, yeah, being the guy’s third wife (or is it fourth? I lost track….) is really going to impress the Pope.

On second thought, with this Pope, that’s not impossible.

Forget I even mentioned it.

Read it.

Democrats: Party of corruption since before the Civil War.

Yet Another Crazy Black Female Congresscritter. That these creatures continue to get elected is the best argument against democracy I’ve ever seen.

Read it.

Theunis Botha, 51, from Johannesberg, was leading a hunt in Gwai, Zimbabwe, when they stumbled across a herd of elephants, which included pregnant cows.

Three elephants stampeded towards the hunters and Mr Botha opened fire with his rifle, prompting a fourth elephant to storm in from the side and lift him up with her trunk.

The Afrikaans news site Netwerk24 reported that another member of the group fired the fatal shot at the elephant and, as the animal collapsed dead, she fell on Mr Botha.

Usually karma isn’t that speedy.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Dr Stone’s alternative is to abandon the idea of filtration altogether. Instead, he plans to apply a phenomenon called diffusiophoresis to the problem. When CO₂ and water meet at the liquid’s surface they react to make carbonic acid. This is a solution of hydrogen ions, which are positively charged, and bicarbonate ions, which are negative. The newborn ions then diffuse away from the surface and into the main body of the water. That creates a gradient of ionic concentration perpendicular to the surface. Dr Stone’s insight was that, because the gravity-resistant particles which need to be removed almost always have either positive or negative static-electric charges on their surfaces, their interaction with an ion gradient of this sort, which is itself composed of charged particles, could be used to move them around.

Fresh clean water, here we come.

Read it.

Police say roughly 30 people were partying on a sidewalk while live streaming on Facebook’s platform when an unknown gunman (or gunmen) opened fire on the crowd, reports the Associated Press. As many as 27 shots were fired in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, a northern part of the city where fatal shootings occur relatively often.

From Wikipedia: “As of 2010, Strawberry Mansion was 94.3% black or African American, 2.3% white or European American, 1.6% Hispanic, 0.8% Asian, and 1% all other.”

Black Lives Matter — except to black people.

If they don’t take it seriously, why should anybody else? Just sayin’.

Read it.

NASA spends a lot of time researching the Earth and its surrounding space environment. One particular feature of interest are the Van Allen belts, so much so that NASA built special probes to study them! They’ve now discovered a protective bubble they believe has been generated by human transmissions in the VLF range.

VLF transmissions cover the 3-30 kHz range, and thus bandwidth is highly limited. VLF hardware is primarily used to communicate with submarines, often to remind them that, yes, everything is still fine and there’s no need to launch the nukes yet.  It’s also used for navigation and broadcasting time signals.

It seems that this human transmission has created a barrier of sorts in the atmosphere that protects it against radiation from space. Interestingly, the outward edge of this “VLF Bubble” seems to correspond very closely with the innermost edge of the Van Allen belts caused by Earth’s magnetic field. What’s more, the inner limit of the Van Allan belts now appears to be much farther away from the Earth’s surface than it was in the 1960s, which suggests that man-made VLF transmissions could be responsible for pushing the boundary outwards.

Cue hysteria from the Global Warming crowd.

ZMan brings the future.

One of the things that ails us in the modern age is we have yet to adjust our thinking to the modern economy. The great political-economic thinkers lived in a time when money was either gold, backed by gold or a fiat currency. The result is our political and economic debates are based in the logic of a world that no longer exists. The modern global economy is not based on fiat money or hard money. It is based on credit money, which has a unique set of characteristics.

For instance, the US government is no longer able to print up greenbacks and sprinkle them on the economy. Instead, when they expand the money supply, they expand lending, both domestic and global. It’s not just any sort of lending either. The central bank can buy up long term notes in order to drive down long term lending rates, thus expanding lending for capital goods. Alternatively, they can buy up short term debt and increase the amount retail lending. The Federal Reserve holds close to 2 trillion in mortgages, for example.

Read it.

Read it.

Harvard used to be a University. Now it’s just a playground for Children of the Crust and their Fashionable Minority pets.

Read it.

Student protesters shut down a sociology class at Northwestern University on Tuesday, after a professor invited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) public relations officer to be a guest speaker.

The protesters, chanting and waving banners, argued that the officer’s presence on campus represented a threat to undocumented students. But the professor — who canceled the class during the protest because she was concerned for the speaker’s safety — said she had been hoping to start a dialogue.

“The goal was to bring in somebody who was familiar with how that agency is structured,” Beth Redbird, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, told TIME.

They aren’t interested in knowing, they’re interested in winning — don’t confuse them with facts, just bow your head and obey.

P. J. O’Rourke tells us how he sees it.

“The politician creates a powerful, huge, heavy, and unstoppable Monster Truck of a government,” P.J. O’Rourke writes in his new book, How the Hell Did This Happen? (Atlantic Monthly Press). “Then supporters of that politician become shocked and weepy when another politician, whom they detest, gets behind the wheel, turns the truck around, and runs them over.”

Read it.

Far too many people operate according to a screwy and uncivilized code of ethics.  Butting in to strangers’ private affairs is applauded as altruistic if done through the agency of the state, while resisting and protesting against such officiousness is portrayed in the media and in the classrooms as evidence of greed or of cruelty or of ignorance (or of some combination of the three).

Making matters much worse are the all-too-typical modern economists.  They thrill to the not-very-challenging challenge of pointing out the many ways that real-world markets ‘deviate’ from textbook models – and in particular of all the many situations in which flesh-and-blood individuals acting in markets are less than fully informed.  These economists then leap, stuffed with confidence but devoid of anything at stake, to the conclusion that they – and the state officials who they imagine are eager to act on their scientific advice – somehow know, or can make known, all that the flesh-and-blood people are presumed not to know about the details of each of these individual’s specific situations.

Read it.

The following article discusses the role played by German organization in the smuggling of “refugees” from Libya to Italy. German groups are prominent among those who coordinate with people-traffickers to meet just off the coast of Libya and “rescue” boatloads of migrants.

Read it.

In a quietly released statement issued late on a Friday afternoon, the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission, an agency of the state government, announced a proposal to effectively redefine the word “sex” in the state’s discrimination law to also include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” or “SOGI” for short.

This proposal wouldn’t change the law—only the commission’s “guidance” on the matter. But this new “guidance” would mean the law would be enforced as if it had changed.

This guidance comes on the heels of repeated failures to accomplish the same outcome through the legitimate way of changing laws—through the legislative process and with the consent of the governed.

Proglodytes really aren’t all that into the whole democracy thing. After all, they know better than the rubes in flyover country.

Stikk Gel Pads.

Read it.

And not in a good way.

Academic systems rely on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Drawing on data from the US, Germany and the UK, Alexandre Afonso looks at how the academic job market is structured in many respects like a drug gang, with an expanding mass of outsiders and a shrinking core of insiders.

Much like the nomenklatura of the old Soviet Union, and I suspect the resemblance is more than coincidental.

Read it.

During the 2016 presidential election, Bernie Sanders refused to answer questions about Venezuela during an interview with Univision. He claimed to not want to talk about it because he’s “focused on my campaign.” Many suggested a more plausible reason: Venezuela’s present economy is an example of what happens when a state implements Bernie Sanders-style social democracy.

Similarly, Pope Francis — who has taken the time to denounce pro-market ideologies for allegedly driving millions into poverty — seems uninterested in talking about the untrammeled impoverishment of Venezuela in recent years.

It doesn’t fit with the Narrative and therefore doesn’t exist.

Read it.

And then they wonder why they can’t seem to find a job.

Think of it as evolution in action. Unfortunately, the rest of us may get caught in the Extinction Event.

Read it.

Black, Latino, gay, Native American and Asian students at fancypants Columbia University segregated themselves into separate commencement proceedings this year.

I’m sure they were separate but equal.

The segregated ceremonies, which have occurred in past years, are in addition to the main commencement ceremony attended by all Columbia graduates, reports Campus Reform.

Shucks, I was hoping this would ensure that the normal students wouldn’t have to put up with the shenanigans that these fringe wackos typicially pull at a university graduation. Oh, well, give it a year or two.

Lion of the Blogosphere shares.

Trump’s trip to Saudi Arabia presents good possibilities for positive press. No doubt it causes cognitive dissonance for Democrats that the Arab countries like Saudi Arabia are very happy that Trump is President, because they hated Obama. They don’t care about Trump’s “Muslim ban,” because they don’t let Jews and Christians immigrate to their countries, why do they care if the United States does the same to their people, as long as they can all get along diplomatically? The Middle East simply does not understand the do-gooder liberal ethic at all. They think they’re a bunch of chumps. They love to take advantage of those chumps, but they have no respect for them.

I try to be cynical but it’s impossible to keep up.

Read it.

In an illicit industry, recruiting low-skilled workers is challenging because the jobs require discipline and a high level of trust. Prisons in Latin America have made drug traffickers’ lives easier, since these have turned into virtual business schools, where the most experienced people in the business are put in touch with those interested in illegal activities. This is also where gangs gain strength, among other ways by requiring their members to get conspicuous tattoos to reduce the dangerous possibility of them leaving the organization.

That’s why prisons ought to be arranged to keep prisoners in isolation from each other, bleeding hearts to the contrary notwithstanding. ‘But but but … that would be cruel!’ Yeah, that’s why they call it ‘punishment’. Feel free to consult a dictionary.

There also ought to be a program to arrest on sight people with gang tattoos. ‘But but but … that’s profiling!’ Yup. The reason profiling works is because it’s scientific — people with gang tattoos are telling you that they’re in gangs. The least we can do is take them at their word.

These problems have solutions.

Read it.

George Soros has all but bought another district attorney’s seat.

The left-wing billionaire turned the Philadelphia district attorney’s race on its head by giving $1.45 million to fund a super PAC in support of his preferred candidate, Larry Krasner. Krasner, a progressive lawyer who has never worked as a prosecutor, sailed to an easy victory in the Democratic primary on Tuesday. Because Philadelphia is a Democratic stronghold, Krasner’s primary victory all but guarantees him to win the general election in November.

Democrats, best politicians money can buy.

Read it.

So what’s the catch? Cost is a big one. More than safety or waste issues, cost is nuclear’s Achilles’ heel. Modern-day reactors have become jarringly expensive to build, going for $5 billion to $10 billion a pop. Worse, the price tag seems to be rising in many places. Back in the 1960s, new reactors in the US were one of the cheaper energy sources around. Two decades later, after a series of missteps, those costs had increased sixfold — a big reason we stopped building plants.

What Brad Plumer (a Voice of the Crust) will never mention, nor even allow himself to think, is that these cost are from litigation by eco-Nazis who see the word ‘nuclear’ and immediately hyperventilate and multiple oppressive layers of government regulation (largely in response to eco-Nazi political pressure).

Additional woes followed. In its 1971 Calvert Cliffs decision, the DC Circuit Court ordered nuclear regulators to change their rules to comply with the National Environmental Policy Act. That opened the door for citizen lawsuits to intervene in the licensing and construction process, sometimes causing further slowdowns.

Oh, ya think?

Then nuclear suffered a mortal blow after the much-publicized (but nonfatal) meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. Every reactor still under construction at the time — 51 in total — suddenly faced major regulatory delays, changes in safety procedures, and new back-fit requirements. Construction times doubled, stretching out past 10 years. Costs went through the roof, past $7,000/kW for some reactors:

In other words, government regulations and bureaucratic delays.