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Let that be a lesson to us all.

No doubt Trump is to blame.

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In a 1945 essay, Notes on Nationalism, George Orwell described a rumour among leftists that the real reason American troops had been brought to Europe was to suppress English communism, not fight the Nazis.

“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” Orwell famously noted. “No ordinary man could be such a fool.” Even by Orwell’s high standards, those words have aged extremely well. Tell an ordinary Canadian schlub that white people aren’t allowed to quote Beyoncé, and he will be smart enough to laugh in your face. Dress down a superbly intelligent Peace and Conflict Studies PhD candidate for the same act, and she will fall over herself with apologies.

Since 1789, Revolutions have always turned on their instigators. We apparently live in such a time.

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Taxpayer-funded bonds sold to raise revenue for parks and schools in cash-strapped Detroit will instead be used to lure its professional basketball team back into the city.

…

Taxpayers are already on the hook for more than $300 million of the $900 million construction cost for new Little Caesars Arena, built to host the Detroit Red Wings of the National Hockey League. The additional spending will make the arena suitable for basketball and help pay for new practice facility and front office for the Pistons.

This is what happens when Democrats run your city.

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The concept of a “hate group” could be useful. In practice, however, it is like the concept of “hate speech,” applied to shut down heterodox speech and confine the public square to dissemination of officially approved thought. The concepts somehow overlook the likes of the the hilariously misnamed Southern Poverty Law Center and its works, which direct something far beyond the Orwellian Two Minutes Hate to the likes of Charles Murray and Ayaan Hirsi Ali. If there is such a thing as a “hate group” — as I say, it could be a useful concept — the SPLC is it. Indeed, I think it may be our most influential hate group.

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The crash didn’t kill anybody; they all died in the resulting (perfectly predictable) fire beause of all the people rushing to steal fuel from the crashed tanker.

The wage of sin is death. Think of it as evolution in action.

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America’s comms regulator, the FCC, will fine a Florida Man $120m for flooding the country with nearly 100 million robocalls in three months.

The watchdog said that Adrian Abramovich of Miami ran a scheme that made more than a million calls a day – each with its caller ID information altered – with the aim of selling travel packages and condo timeshares.

The calls, 96 million of them in total, were presented on caller ID as coming from travel companies like TripAdvisor, Expedia, Hilton, and Marriott. When answered, they played a recorded message and, if the user prompted for more information, they were connected to an overseas call center, where the operator would try to sell a vacation package.

…

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How about that great government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

Reminder for the dimwitted: When a service is free, the demand increases to infinity — and eventually you run out of other people’s money to pay for it.

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A series of strong storms late last year brought warm winds down to Antarctica that melted a South Carolina-sized chunk of sea ice every day, leading to the lowest sea ice coverage on record for the South Pole.

And it likely had nothing to do with man-made global warming, according a new study published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“There’s no indication this is anything but just natural variability,” John Turner, a climate scientist with the British Antarctic Survey, told the American Geophysical Union’s (AGU) blog Friday.

DENIER! THERE’S A CONSENSUS!

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Avik Roy is a pretty prominent conservative health care policy expert, and he has the reputation of knowing what he’s talking about. We report, you decide.

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I have a question: Where did ‘the poor’ get all this money that there can be a ‘massive transfer’ to the rich?

These guys don’t even listen to themselves.

If Obama is so worried about it, perhaps he could shell out some of the cash he got from his book deal.

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

Megan McArdle reads this crap so that you don’t have to.

Well, you know, if you tilt your head to one side and squint a little, you can sort of see … Obamacare. I called the House health care bill “Obamacare Lite,” but compared to the Senate bill, the House was offering a radical new taste sensation. The Senate bill touches very little of the underlying architecture of Obamacare; all it does is eliminate the insurance mandates, cut spending and give states somewhat more autonomy in how those dollars are spent. Repeal Obamacare, you say? They’re barely even worrying it.

Steve Sailer reads this dreck so that you don’t have to.

Words not mentioned once in this article about the acquittal of Jeronimo Yanez: “Hispanic” or “Latino.”

I guess Hispanics, like Asians, now qualify as ‘white’ for victimology purposes.

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Time for another eco-Nazi civil war.

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The New Hampshire Senate passed a bill ruling you can freely kill your own child but will get charged with murder if you kill someone else’s kid.

Perhaps the next step is that you can sell kids into slavery as long as they are your own kids.

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An official in the Nebraska state Democratic party has been removed from his position after an audio recording surfaced of him saying that he wished Louisiana Rep. Steve Scalise had been killed last week when he was shot by a Democratic gunman during a congressional baseball practice.

Party chairwoman Jane Kleeb removed Phil Montag as chairman of the technology committee after an audio recording surfaced earlier this week of him saying that he was “glad” that Scalise was shot and that he wished “he was fucking dead.”

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

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Yeah, I can see toilets in India as being a significant part of Trump’s legacy. (After all, when draining the swamp, you’ve got to put all of the crap someplace….)

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Yeah, environmentalists all look pretty white to me. Sierra Club especially, they’re all a bunch of SWPL granola-crunchers.

Presumably non-white people have better things to do than hug trees.

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More self-segregation. We don’t even have to do anything to keep these proglodytes out of our state.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott was non-plussed over California’s travel ban, relaying though his spokesman John Wittman, “California may be able to stop their state employees, but they can’t stop all the businesses that are fleeing over taxation and regulation and relocating to Texas.”

Indeed. We especially welcome health care providers subjected to the new taxes.

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Sen. Mike Enzi on Wednesday said that Republicans aren’t going to listen to Democrats in their attempt to alter the new Health care bill due to the fact that Democrats didn’t listen to Republicans on Obamacare.

“We’re not trying to give the impression that we’re going to listen to them. They never listened to us,” he told the Washington Examiner.

What goes around comes around.

‘Other countries have threatening neighbors; America has Mexicans and Canadians, whose greatest threats consist of cheap labor and porous borders.’

— Michael Ledeen, Machiavelli on Modern Leadership

Read it.

The government-provided insurance system is going  broke, so the government taxes the people providing medical services. Yeah, that’s going to work.

Whom will they tax when the providers of medical services decide that they’d rather be practicing in, say, Texas?

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

Steve Sailer finds a real head-scratcher.

This is our challenge. We have to build a world where everyone has a sense of purpose and community. That’s how we’ll bring the world closer together. We have to build a world where we care about a person in India or China or Nigeria or Mexico as much as a person here.

Uh … how is demanding Americans care more about strangers on the opposite side of the world as much as they care about their neighbors in their own communities going to rebuild community in America?

The thing to keep in mind about Mark Zuckerberg is that whatever he says that he believes in, he really believes in. But not because it makes sense, but because he has a genius for increasing his wealth. Whatever ideas he pushes on you are ideas that will make him richer if you believe in them too. (Whether Zuck’s ideas will make you and your loved ones better off, though, is hardly his concern.)

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A college campus closed Wednesday and a professor reports having fled the state after calling white people “inhuman assholes” and saying “#LetThemFuckingDie.”

That sounds about right.

Professor Johnny Eric Williams of Trinity College in Connecticut says he has fled the state, claiming to have received death threats after he posted inflammatory, anti-white remarks on Facebook, according to Hartford Courant.

Gee, I wonder why.

The college closed Wednesday, but reopened Thursday.

Pity.

“I’m fed the fuck up with self identified ‘white’s’ [sic] daily violence directed at immigrants, Muslim, and sexual [sic] and racially oppressed people,” he said in a subsequent post. “The time is now to confront these inhuman assholes and end this now.”

I suspect that he would not like the result.

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

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Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.

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If Obama had suggested it, of course, they would LOVE the idea.

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Mystery solved: No, President Trump doesn’t have recordings of former FBI director James Comey.

“With all of the recently reported electronic surveillance, intercepts, unmasking and illegal leaking of information, I have no idea … whether there are ‘tapes’ or recordings of my conversations with James Comey, but I did not make, and do not have, any such recordings,” Trump said in a pair of tweets Thursday.

Trump did not explain why he made the suggestion that he secretly recorded conversations with his former FBI director in the first place, which came in a May tweet shortly after he fired Comey.

He was yanking the chains of the DemLegHump Media. He does that now and again just to keep his hand in.

Pass the popcorn.

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American childhood has taken an authoritarian turn. An array of trends in American society are conspiring to produce unprecedented levels of supervision and control over children’s lives. Tracing the effects of childrearing on broad social outcomes is an exercise in speculation. But if social scientists are correct to posit a connection between childrearing and long-term political outcomes, today’s restrictive childhood norms may portend a broader regression in our country’s democratic consensus.

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A member of the elite Special Forces unit, Joint Task Force 2, who has not been named, killed an Isis insurgent from 3,450 metres (2.1 miles) away.

The shot broke the previous record, held by Craig Harrison, a member of the British armed forces, by almost 1000 metres.

…

“The shot in question actually disrupted a Daesh [Isis] attack on Iraqi security forces,” a military source told the Globe and Mail.

“Instead of dropping a bomb that could potentially kill civilians in the area, it is a very precise application of force and because it was so far way, the bad guys didn’t have a clue what was happening,” the source added.

 

Read it.

Johannes Gutenberg’s converted wine press, which turned inked letters into books, remained the same in principle for 500 years. But by the mid-1980s cheaper, faster, and more efficient ways of transferring words and images onto paper doomed the old practice of arranging clunky blocks of type in a massive metal machine to obsolescence.

Yet today letterpress is in the throes of a full-blown revival. In 2000, a flatbed proof press, often used in teaching and for posters, cost Boxcar Press founder Harold Kyle about $100. By 2005, the price rose to a few thousand. Today, if you could persuade someone to part with it, you might pay $15,000.

…

Beneath the old-timey patina of letterpress goods is a full-scale digital reinvention that drags Gutenberg’s great creation into the full embrace of modern technology.

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This is absurd. All of life is not politics. Rodman’s impact on the sport is beyond question. These people need to get a life.

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Probably one of those ‘lone wolves’ we’ve been hearing so much about lately.

Maybe he was just pissed off about the water.

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Germans like to tell people what they can and can’t say. They want to tell everybody how to live their lives. As you may recall, a while back we had a bit of a disagreement with them about that whole attitude. It didn’t turn out too well for them. But did they learn their lesson? Nein, das haben sie nicht.

What goes around comes around. Just sayin’.

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Federal agents arrested a prominent member of Boston’s illegal Irish community at his home Tuesday, touching off fears that thousands of Irish nationals living and working in the area are now targets for deportation.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained John Cunningham, an electrical contractor and former chairman of the Gaelic Athletic Association in Boston, for overstaying a 90-day visa after entering the United States in 2003. The arrest of such a well-known figure has sparked fresh concern among the estimated 12,000 illegal Irish in Massachusetts about their prospects under the Trump administration’s strict immigration enforcement policies, reports the Boston Herald.

If they can’t obey the law, ship ’em back.

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Speaking truth to glower.

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Well. There it is.

Read it.

Duh.

Jim Treacher points and laughs.

Jon Ossoff raised millions of dollars from people who couldn’t vote for him. He couldn’t even vote for himself. In retrospect, maybe that was a problem.

Congratulations to our newest member of Congress, Karen Handel. But if you think feminists and other Democrats are happy about a woman winning an election, if you think they’re celebrating this victory over rape culture and toxic masculinity and whatnot, you haven’t taken into account that the woman in question is a Republican.

Apparently Republicans aren’t real women. Somebody needs to e-mail Lindsey Graham immediately.

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You may have seen the news late last week about the latest “Presidential Advisory” on dietary fats released from the American Heart Association (AHA) published online in Circulation. The part of this report that seems to be making the most news around the internet is that coconut oil is unhealthy. In the last few days I’ve seen titles like “Coconut Oil is as Bad as Butter”, “Coconut Oil is Unhealthy and Has Never Been Healthy”. Not only do these types of headlines cause increased confusion for the general population, for those of us who understand the nuances and politics behind the AHA’s statement it’s absolutely infuriating. So, I thought I would write a rebuttal and present some actual facts about why their latest advice, and their continued promotion of inflammatory foods like margarine (yes, seriously) should be taken with a grain of salt.

Any group with the word ‘Association’ in it is a cartel, either in esse or in posse. The practical definition of a cartel is an association that has gotten the government in its pocket. They are about as trustworthy as the government, and often far less.

Zman nails it yet again.

It probably says something about us that we accept the dystopian future of Orwell as being to some degree inevitable, despite the fact he has proven to be wrong about most things. He was not wrong about everything. He got communism right in Animal Farm. His critique of writing is timeless and is probably more applicable today than in his era. On the other hand, the future is not “a boot stamping on a human face — forever.” Not even close. The future is a bot making sure you never get your feelings hurt or have a bad day.

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An obsession with who is and who is not ‘elite’ invariably marks people who are definitely not.

Being wealthy has become so passé that rich people are increasingly choosing not to display that wealth—that’s the theory behind a new book exploring the changing consumption habits of rich people in the West.

Actually, the reality is that the finer things in life are so available to non-rich people that rich people just don’t have that much in the way of an opportunity to grind the faces of the poor into the dirt they way they used to (in proglodyte fantasies). Bill Gates and Joe Sixpack both drink the same Coke, eat the same fries, pee in the same kind of toilet, and use the same type of gas in their cars.

In her new book, The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, Currid-Halkett takes aim at “Aspirationals”—the group that she sees as the new elite.

In other words, the people who are desperately afraid that they aren’t in the Upper Class, and so are going out of their way to find some means somehow to signal that they actually are. A bit of category confusion here.

Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates.

As I said, it’s all about signaling — mostly to yourself, to re-assure you that you are on the ‘right side of history’.

Still, Currid-Halkett’s book is an important glimpse into the decisions driving how today’s rich spend their money. And while it may be funny to joke about their yoga pants and affinity for kale, the rise of the “aspirational class” may have very real consequences. Perhaps most disturbing is Currid-Halkett’s conclusion that these consumption trends may exacerbate inequality. Increased spending by wealthy parents on education and health for their children, for example, may deepen class divides and limit opportunities for poorer kids.

Note the proglodyte axiom: Life is zero-sum, so if wealthy people spend more on their own kids it somehow ‘limits opportunities for poorer kids’.

Note the proglodyte axiom: Inequality is bad per se, so if you are better off but somebody else is even better off, then you are by definition worse off, even though in absolute terms you are better off. Ching! You’re a victim, and the taxpayers owe you money. Fork it over.

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We have the technology.

I don’t know of anybody outside of the military who makes a bed. Maybe maids in a hotel.

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This is actually pretty clever.

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That’s one of the findings contained in documents that the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is releasing as part of its ongoing probe into the death of Joshua Brown. The motorist from Ohio was killed last year in a Florida highway crash when the Tesla he was driving struck a tractor-trailer (PDF) as the semi was crossing an intersection of a divided highway that did not have a traffic signal. The crash raised eyebrows about the safety of new automated driving features when used during long stretches of driving. It was also the nation’s first crash fatality involving a vehicle in self-driving mode.

If the car tells you to do something, do it. We’ve seen this movie before

Model S driver had hands on steering wheel for 25 seconds during a 37-minute period.

Darwin Award candidate here.

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Note the Aggregation Fallacy: That there is some entity called ‘America’ whose job it is to solve the hunger ‘problem’. Typically this leads to calls for the Government to Take Action, with results (or, more accurately, lack of results) as you see them.

Note, too, the proglodyte axiom that Evil Corporations are somehow to blame for all the world’s ills.

We began to really embark on a charity approach as a more serious attempt to address what was considered to be an emergency at the time—which is why it was called the “emergency food system.” But that emergency never really went away. It just became institutionalized, and there’s been a permanent amount of food insecurity around the country since then. That’s one approach.

Elementary economics: If you provide stuff for free, the demand for such stuff increases to meet the available supply. Unless and until you run out of people who want more free stuff (which will never happen), you will never run out of people who want free stuff.

Another approach was welfare reform [under the] Clinton administration. That also reinforced the need for a charity approach because it lifted the government’s role in providing for basic income for the most impoverished people in the country.

Note another proglodyte axiom: If the government doesn’t Do Something, then nothing will get done.

Note another proglodyte axiom: It’s the government’s job to ‘provide for basic income for the most impoverished’. (Not food and other services; ‘basic income’ — i.e. free money)

Fisking the rest of this Crustian narrative is left as an exercise for the reader. (Don’t worry, it won’t be a challenge.)

Watch it.

No good deed goes unpunished.

Anybody who flies United deserves what he gets.

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Peak Oil is upon us! Yeah, we’re going to be running out of oil soon! Time to switch over to ‘renewable’ fuels!