Read it.

Feh. I knew it all the time.

Those who claim that money can’t buy happiness are shopping in the wrong places.

Read it.

The leftist teacher and activist who made her name organizing violent protests like the ones at the University of California-Berkeley is under arrest for assault.

The College Fix reports that Yvette Felarca was charged for an incident in Sacramento, when a video camera recorded a so-called “white nationalist” being pummeled — allegedly by Felarca.

The teacher, a Berkeley Unified School District Teacher and the leader of a organization calling itself By All Means Necessary, had a hand in the riot that stopped Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking at Berkeley.

Perhaps we could trade her to Saudi Arabia for a Shi’ite terrorist to be named later.

Scott Adams explains it all to you on Periscope.

Read it.

“London is a very old city and the streets are not laid out in a grid, but Harry found a way to transform something chaotic into something clean, readable, and beautiful,” he explained to Citylab. “I wanted to take something completely natural and structure it as a transit system, because technically these rivers once were and still are a form of transportation.

Read it.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit entered an injunction Tuesday against a Washington D.C. law limiting the right to carry firearms outside the home, concluding that it may violate the Second Amendment.

…

The law is third gun control regulation promulgated by the D.C. Council that has struggled in the courts. In its latest iteration, the D.C. law strictly proscribed the circumstances under which concealed-carry licenses may be issued. The court concluded these provisions may be unconstitutional.

Read it.

Tourists affect me much the same way.

Watch it.

Sounds like a Republican.

Read it.

I see that India is well on its way to becoming a First World country.

We’ll know they’ve made it when they organize a Democratic party that encourages having government running everything.

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit, etc. etc.

“Score cards! You can’t tell the victims without a scorecard!”

Read it.

And I suppose that gravity doesn’t determine which way is down, either.

These people are really unhinged.

Read it.

Of course they do. It’s that or get sued, which is even more expensive and doesn’t provide cushy administrative jobs for Children of the Crust. Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

Read it.

I fail to see how any group that kills babies for a living has room to talk about ‘violence’.

If every employee of Planned Parenthood were murdered tomorrow, it wouldn’t even move the scales.

Read it.

This is where bleeding-heart social policy bites its intended beneficiaries in the butt.

It’s obvious to any rational adult that the existence of ‘sanctuary cities’ merely makes illegal immigration into a version of tree-tag: If an illegal can make it to a ‘sanctuary city’, he/she/it is home free. And some people are going to risk it. And some people are going to die. And all the hand-wringing in the universe will not get the blood off of their hands. But they will continue to blame everyone but themselves.

ZMan looks at the eco-Nazis.

Religions tend to set limits. Those limits come with the force of God or some spiritual force that transcends man. Otherwise, a religion would be nothing more than man-made rules enforced by the strongest. This is why laws in most of the world are rooted in the dominant religion of the region or country. The local religion is a list of restrictions and limitations placed on the believers. Naturally, when it came time to form a government and write laws, they relied upon the laws and rules of their religion.

This may seem rather obvious, but the concept of the limiting principle is easy to take for granted. This is a core feature of most religions and it easiest to understand by considering our laws. Take two people who are not robbing banks. Just as long as both are not robbing banks, neither is more or less of a bank robber than the other. Both are simply not bank robbers. In other words, while there may be degrees of bank robbery, there are no degrees of not bank robbery. Not being one is the limit of that virtue.

…

We see this with the nature movements that have been a feature of the Left for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. The greens always aim for some sort of Edenic outcome. Their goal always lies just a little further. The idea of “good enough” is outside their comprehension. Couple that with their preternatural belief in the sinfulness of man and you end up with a nature cult that borders on being a suicide cult. The end point of every Progressive nature movement is the end of mankind.

“Two legs bad, four legs good.” Orwell had them pegged.

In order to save the planet, according to researchers and experts no less, is to avoid having more humans and make the ones waiting around to die as miserable as possible. The unspoken reason for selling the car and sitting in the dark with your nothing burger is so you can suffer and atone for your sins. In other words, it is not enough to be a green, you have to kill yourself as the ultimate sign of your virtue.

I just wish they would get on with it and not pester the rest of it. But I suppose the model doesn’t come with that option.

This is the problem that has haunted the Left in America. There’s no concept of good enough. They are always chanting, “we can do more” or “there is more work to do.” No matter how much damage they do in the holy cause, they are sure that more needs doing, more must be done. It’s why their causes tend to burn out in fits of insanity like we see with the whole transgender thing. The quest for the ultimate victim has led them to celebrate mental illness as a virtue and deny biological reality.

Denying reality is what the Left does best. It started with economics but then it metastasized.

ADD-ON: Environmentalists Go Off on a Bender

Nothing used to send environmentalists into a rage faster than when I started pointing out, more than 20 years ago now, that most (not all) environmental trends in the U.S. had gotten dramatically better, and would continue to get better in the future. You’d think environmentalists would take Yes for an answer, but when you are an eschatological cult, a decline in sin and the reduction it the need for authoritarian priestly salvation ruins your reason for existence.

Read it.

An Israeli security official is being held hostage in Jordan after he shot and killed a terrorist who tried to stab him with a screwdriver on Sunday. Even though the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, ratified by both Jordan and Israel, specifically exempts the official from all criminal and civil charges, Jordanian authorities have opted to violate the international accord and demand that the official be handed over for questioning by the local police. He is currently in the Israeli embassy in Amman, which is surrounded by Jordanian soldiers and police.

Read it.

“Those uniforms are manufactured in your District, Congressman, and your office lobbied heavily for it.”

That’s a truth you’ll never hear in public, of course.

Read it.

Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW), a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization working to eliminate governmental waste and fraud, just released its “2017 Congressional Pig Book,” an annual publication highlighting wasteful government spending that should embarrass each and every member of Congress.

While it is true that most government spending is for “entitlements” and other fixed costs, the “Pig Book” properly ridicules politicians who waste significant amounts of money on questionable programs.

Read it.

Funny how that works.

Read it.

For those of you thinking about a career change because Trump.

Lileks.

Last Saturday I stood in a store looking at a thin white plastic square that sings a song when you press a button on your phone. You’re thinking: “Wow, I’ll take two.” But it gets better: You stick the square on something you might lose and want to find. Keys. Dental plates. Dogs. Perspective.

Endless uses! Ever found yourself looking for the TV remote and thought, “It’s probably behind the sofa cushion. If only I could take out my phone, enter my code, call up an app, log in, dismiss the screen that says there’s an update, dismiss the screen that asks for a rating on iTunes and then push a button that makes the remote sing, so I can confirm that the remote’s probably under the cushion.”

Read it.

The demand for abortion in Oregon is going down, so why do pro-abortion lawmakers there seem so determined to increase it?

From 2011 to 2014, Oregon saw a 15 percent decline in the number of abortions.

It also saw a 7 percent decline in the number of abortion providers.

But, apparently that isn’t a trend line pro-abortion politicians want to see continue.

When it comes to restrictions on abortion, Oregon already has very few.

It has no parental consent or even parental notification laws. There are no mandated counseling or waiting periods for women seeking abortions. There are no additional regulations on facilities performing abortions to increase safety or ambulance-ready requirements.

And, unlike 43 other states that restrict abortion after either 20 weeks or after an unborn child can live outside the womb, Oregon allows abortions up until the moment of birth.

As a matter of fact, the only “restriction” on abortion in Oregon is that it isn’t free—for everyone.

So state lawmakers recently passed legislation to ensure that it is.

Read it.

When many middle-aged people think back to their childhood, they remember roaming the streets with their friends during long, hot summers. Our parents threw us out the door in the morning and instructed us not to come back until dinnertime. Often in charge of younger siblings, we strayed further than we should have, got into trouble and, by the end of the summer, had a collection of triumphs, scars and memories for life.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Parenting hasn’t only changed in terms of what is considered safe for children. Parents now worry more about the impact of their parenting on their children, feeling pressured to provide a stream of stimulating activities in a way that would have once seemed absurd. This has led to the emergence of two types of related parenting styles: the “helicopter” and the “lawnmower”.

My mother’s idea of ‘stream of stimulating activities’ chiefly involved a belt and me bent over the rim of a bathtub. I’ll pass.

Read it.

The two men burst into the fast food restaurant near Switch Island around 9.15 on Sunday morning and jumped over the serving counter to force their way into the office at the back.

They then threatened the manager and a cash delivery guard before stealing the cash boxes from them, the Liverpool Echo reported.

But as they made their escape, one of the men fell over, dropping the cash boxes.

Pretty incompetent. It will be interesting to know who they are, if they are ever found.

The offenders were described as tall, with their faces and hands covered.

Faces are typical, but hands? Hmmm. Perhaps to conceal the color of their skins? Hmmmmmm.

Read it.

What nefarious plan does he have cooking, since Everyone Knows that he hates women?

Check it out.

This is really slick. I just wish I could find out how to get rid of the Giant Homer Head.

Read it.

This puts the Left in a cleft stick: On the one hand, it makes for a larger dependent Underclass that will vote for more (Democrat) government giveaways; on the other, robots don’t vote Democrat.

I feel their pain.

Joel Kotkin brings some common sense.

When President Trump pulled out of the Paris climate accords, embraced coal, and stacked his administration from people from fossil-fuel producing states, the environmental movement reacted with near-apocalyptic fear and fury. They would have been better off beginning to understand precisely why the country has become so indifferent to their cause, as evidenced by the victory not only of Trump but of unsympathetic Republicans at every level of government.

Yet there’s been little soul-searching among green activists and donors, or in the generally pliant media since November about how decades of exaggerated concerns—about peak oil, the “population bomb,” and even, a few decades back, global cooling—and demands for economic, social, and political sacrifices from the masses have damaged their movement.

My guess: Because they’re unrelenting dicks, and lie through their teeth most of the time. But that’s me.

Read it.

“Fight for the Future,” a progressive non-profit organization that claims to “seek to expand the internet’s transformative power for good,” is offering as much as $15,000 a month to fund leftist activism against Donald Trump. Prospective members are expected to establish “A-Teams,” or cells dedicated to specific issues.

The ostensibly non-partisan organization, which was founded in 2011 to campaign for Net Neutrality, has shifted its focus towards the nation’s 45^th President, declaring him to be a threat to the world’s future. Posting on its “A-Teams,” or Activism Teams project page, the organization is calling upon activists of every stripe to step up in defense of the world.

It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

Read it.

The Democrats, and Sen. Chuck Schumer in particular, have engaged in an outrageous set of practices from 1993 to 2017 that have allowed them to steal huge majorities on all the federal circuit courts of appeals. This story needs telling because Senate Republicans, while performing very admirably in replacing Justice Scalia with Justice Gorsuch, have had their pockets picked with the courts of appeals.

Chuck Shumer is a Nazi’s dream — he’s a walking example of every anti-semite’s caricature of a slimy evil Jew.

Freeberg nails it again.

The job is to define behavior. That is the job. This means, as some wizened sages have observed, there is a necessity for those new to it to “change the way you think.” That’s true, because the job involves defining something, and until the necessity arises a lot of us don’t have to define much of anything at all. You see this in babies. If they get what they want by just making illegible noises, that’s what they are going to learn how to do. If they’re forced to articulate exactly what it is they want, and until then they don’t get it, they become more skilled in their vocal expression. That is learning to define. This stuff we call “code” is merely the medium through which definition is done. Most debates about programming languages are counterproductive, and most programming languages hurt the industry as a whole, because by adding themselves to the growing collection of languages they do injury against the progress of defining. Just like with the spoken word, changing the language in which an idea is expressed doesn’t do anything to improve the idea. Do you really need to switch? The code you’ve written already is an asset; it is the only product in existence, after your investment of time. “How many lines is your code” is a metric that might offer a clue about this, although not a decisive one. “Is it easy to read?” is a consideration, in the sense that a programmer familiar with it shouldn’t be given a reliable first impression that is the direct opposite of what it really does. As the language evolves, it should maintain backward compatibility as it does so, so that the code written already is treated like an asset. Which is what it is. So, there should be assurances to this effect. Guarantees are better than assurances. I suppose a parchment document signed in blood would be better than a guarantee. Regardless, the best definition of a “wrong language” being used is, oopsie, this compiler or interpreter is now on rev X which doesn’t support programming construct Y anymore, so you need to go demolish/reassemble. Yeah. While you’re doing that, switch languages because that was the wrong one. Then nuke it from orbit.

Steve Sailer follows all of this so that you don’t have to.

Mayor of Minneapolis fires white (and Canadian Amerindian) lesbian police chief after Somali diversity hire shoots yoga lady, replaces her with black guy with inscrutable name Medaria Arradondo (huh? What happened to Minnesotans named Svenson? Have I been lied to by Prairie Home Companion all these years?), African American hecklers get in mayor’s face, drive her from conference room.

The whole point of Prairie Home Companion was anthropology — an attempt by a born-in-Flyover-Country-but-left-as-soon-as-I-could would-be Left Coaster to explain these strange native tribes from the undiscovered country of the Midwest to the Real People of the Coast. The upper Midwest (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan), perhaps tainted by its proximity to Canada, has long been a cornerstone of Commie America.

10-in-1 Survival Kit.  For when the seas rise and drown civilization (i.e. coastal cities).

Anti-Leak Waffle Iron.

Foot Massagers. A great foundation for a Bond-villain techno-trap.

RepairClinic.com. For all your obscure part failure needs.

Read it.

Somehow, I’m betting that most of you fled from the bosom of your families in order to go live out in the big cold atomized impersonal individualistic world, and you’re not exactly champing at the bit to go back.

Because there are costs, and they are crushing.  Families do not understand, cannot understand, personal boundaries.  The counterbalance to “your family will always care about you” is “your family will feel free to use and remake every part of your existence.”  Families are places where every point of incompatibility or tension will be rubbed raw until it bleeds and festers, because people can’t just agree to leave each other alone.  Families subordinate your dreams to their own collective ambitions and values.  Families run Every. Single. Thing. through a system of manipulative personal politics.

Different people have different levels of tolerance for such things, and so the individualism / tribalism tradeoff plays out differently in every case.

I have very little. Most of my relatives are people with whom I would not voluntarily associate.

Jonah Goldberg turns over a rock.

One of the hallmarks of the “Ugly American” is the habit of thinking foreigners will understand what you’re saying if you just shout it louder and louder.

The Ugly Environmentalist does something similar. He exaggerates the challenge of global warming by using ever more hysterical rhetoric, thinking that if the last doomsday prediction didn’t work, this one will.

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

Read it.

They want to be accepted as normal, and there’s nothing more normal than a mob.

Read it.

Of course, the race of the teens is not mentioned. And we know what that means.

“Yeah he dead. Bet he gone. RIP,” one of the teenagers subsequently says.

I think we can guess.

UPDATE: Guess I was right. Black kids in Florida mock drowning man

Victor Davis Hanson points out some anomalies.

Those who would never stoop to paint their own houses gladly expend far more energy sweating at the gym. During the decline in physical-labor jobs over the last 50 years, an entire compensating industry has grown up around physical fitness. As modern work becomes less physical, requiring hours at a desk or some sort of immobile standing, the fitness center has replaced the drudgery of the field, the mine, and the forest as a means to exercise the body each day. A forbidding array of exercise bikes and StairMasters not only works the body; it also reinforces the modern, scientifically backed conviction that physical fitness promotes general wellness, mental acuity, and perhaps longevity. A new slang has entered the Western vocabulary, from “abs,” “glutes,” and “cardio” to “ripped” and “toned” to describe the ideal results of daily exercise: a look of chiseled fitness. The ideal is much different from the appearance of the pipe fitter and welder of the past, whose protruding bellies and girth were not necessarily incongruous with physical strength and stamina incurred from daily physical labor.

Me, I’m ‘sedentary’ and proud of it.

Yet talk long enough to the most accomplished academics, lawyers, and CEOs—who also tend to be the most conscientious about biking, jogging, and weightlifting (obesity is mostly an epidemic of the poor and lower middle classes)—and more often than not, they will brag about a long-ago college summer job waiting tables or an internship repairing hiking trails. They might praise the granite-counter installer who redid their kitchen, or offer an anecdote about the time they helped the tree-trimmer haul limbs from the backyard out to the trailer at the curb. There seems a human instinct to want to do physical work. We moderns want to be able to say that we have some residual firsthand familiarity with drudgery—or at least share our admiration for muscular labor when one sees the positive results of physical craftsmanship, or even the smallest physical alteration of the natural environment.

Read it.

I found this discussion of individualism and tribalism very interesting.

Obviously, this whole individualism thing has both a lot of sources and a lot of ramifications.  But an absolutely central part of it, something without which it cannot survive or cohere, is economic individualism: the idea that an individual person can own property in his own right, with full and complete title to it, including the right to alienate (sell) it as he pleases.  Without that, well, people can’t really act as free individual agents unless they’re prepared to give up all their resources, because all their resources are at least partly controlled by someone else.

…

The main alternative to individualism is the tribe.  Within a tribal system, an individual basically isn’t a meaningful social unit, he is a component of his kinship group.  The tribe owns all the property, and you can’t sell it off, because everyone in the tribe (including all those yet to be born) have a claim on it.  You have duties to the tribe, and those duties define your life, even if maybe you personally would rather do something else.  You are bound to work, and marry, in a way that advances the tribe’s interests.  If you have wealth or power, it is incumbent on you to use it in a way that advances the tribe’s interests.  You get the idea.

This tribe thing is the default social setup for humans.  It dominated most of the great premodern civilizations.  In India, pretty much all of society was built around kinship groups (jatis).  In the Arab world, tribal ties were always paramount – so much so that basically every successful Arab empire had to use slaves to run the government and the military, just on the grounds that foreigners without families wouldn’t funnel all the empire’s resources to their tribes.  The situation in China was a little different, since the kinship groups got kicked in the teeth early by Qin Shi Huangdi’s massive centralized bureaucratic state, but they were always there and always fighting to hang onto what power they could.  Etc.

Read it.

Blue State blues.

Detroit has foreclosed on a remarkably large number of private homes for failure to pay property taxes. The tax bills in question may have been unconstitutionally high, and federal funds intended to prevent the foreclosures have been spent demolishing the houses instead.

Read it.

Of course, since it’s NPR, they couldn’t use a real ordinary goat milk farm; they had to find a prison goat milk farm, because no information is really valid unless it’s received from The Oppressed.

Number Of Potential Terrorists In Germany Continues To Grow

Israeli police ban Muslim men aged under 50 from Friday prayers in Jerusalem

Turkey ‘Determined to Build an Aircraft Carrier’

Palestinians Attack Israeli Police At Jerusalem Holy Site, Hamas Calls For Religious War

The Palestinian Mountain of Hate

Donald Trump urged to intervene in case of Saudi student facing execution for protesting the Kingdom’s rulers

Former Isis ‘sex slave’ returns home to northern Iraq take revenge on the group

The Torcy-Cannes Gang and the Problem of Anti-Semitic Islamist Violence in France

NYT: It’s racist to not let immigrate Cousin Abdul’s father-in-law’s nephew’s four wives/cousins and their 23 inbred Special Needs children

Turkey’s state-run news publishes locations of previously unknown US bases in northern Syria

‘Iran Remains Foremost State Sponsor Of Terrorism,’ US Declares

Former London postman charged with murdering Syrian captives in Isis mass execution

Canadian Islamist Groups Lose Charity Status Over Potential Militant Financing

30 Percent Of European-Born ISIS Fighters Are Returning To Their Homes, US Believes  Lucky us.

The massacre of Mosul: 40,000 feared dead in battle to take back city from Isis as scale of civilian casualties revealed

Turkey Spills Out Secret Details Of US Troop Locations

Two Canadian Women Reported Captured Fighting For ISIS In Mosul

Yemen civil war: 20 civilians including women and children ‘killed in Saudi-led air strike,’ UN says

Water thrown at terrified Muslim women in ‘fake acid attack hate crime’ outside Southampton mosque

Nobel winner Malala Yousafzai speaks out against Boko Haram in Nigeria  As if that ever helped.

Turkey’s new school curriculum drops evolution and will teach concept of jihad

Saudi Arabian woman who wore miniskirt in viral video has been arrested, state television claims

Christian Refugees Flee Islamic Persecution In Greek Refugee Camps, Seeking Asylum

Is Turkey Headed for Another Coup?

Hannover: Moroccan Culture-Enricher on Trial for Raping 7-Months-Pregnant Woman

US student sentenced to 10 years in Iranian prison after being convicted of espionage  Kid’s Asian, so nobody cares.

Egyptian Police Ambush, Shoot Upstart Terror Leaders In Cairo

US, British volunteers battle ISIS in Syria’s Raqqa

Taliban Slaughtering ‘Record’ Number Of Civilians As Afghan War Slides Into Ruin

16-year-old German girl who ran away to join Isis ‘rescued alive’ from Mosul rubble

Muslim attacked by knife-wielding robber in mosque calms him down and makes him breakfast

Christian man ‘kills teenage daughter over relationship with Muslim prisoner’ in Israel

Nets Ignore American Sentenced in Iran, But Cover Drowning Deer

Two Iranians Charged With Hacking Vermont Software Company

EU votes to slow sales of rubber rafts to Libya in response to migrant crisis

Marines Help Afghan Army Seize Helmand District From Taliban

First a Biker, Then a Muslim, and Then an Undercover Agent for the PET

Muslim Brotherhood Leads Calls for “Intifada” Against Israel

Muslim School In UK Has Books That Say Men Can Rape Their Wives

Taliban seen with SCAR rifle commonly carried by American commandos

Netanyahu To Macron: Political Islam Seeks To Destroy The West

Converts and Jihad

The Real Jihadist Threat No One Is Watching

Saudi girl draws fire by posting Snapchat video of herself wearing a miniskirt in public online

Muslim council secretary general ‘forced to resign’ after attending gay son’s wedding

Jordanian Soldier Sentenced To Life Of Hard Labor After Killing Green Berets

Marines aid Afghan forces in recapture of strategic district

#NotAllMuslims Riot, Assault Women At German Town Festival

Italy Delays Plans To Give Citizenships To 800,000 Children Of Immigrants

Israeli shooting range offers tourists chance to shoot down targets designed to look like Palestinians

Egypt: One person killed and at least 19 injured as Nile Island squatters clash with Cairo police

Syrian Hairdresser Who Slit His Boss’s Throat “Began to Talk About Allah More and More”

A mini-Cologne in a small German city

Anti-Migrant Party Becomes More Popular In Austria

‘We Will Rip The Heads Off Those Traitors:’ Turkish President Doubles Down One Year After Failed Coup‘

We will cut their heads off’: Erdogan vows bloody vengeance against plotters at huge rally to mark failed coup anniversary  How Islamic.

Israeli forces shoot dead suspected Palestinian militant in West Bank gunfight

Muslim school where library books said husbands could beat wives to be taken over by Government

Italy Considers ‘Nuclear Option’ To Ease Growing Migrant Crisis

Israel reopens Jerusalem holy site after deadly attack on police officers

Egypt knife attacker ‘sat and spoke with two victims in fluent German’

Viennese Woman Assaulted by Somali — For Owning Dogs

President Erdogan vows to behead ‘traitors’ on first anniversary of failed Turkey coup

I’ve Worked with Refugees for Decades. Europe’s Afghan Crime Wave Is Mind-Boggling

Turkey dismisses 7,400 more police, soldiers and public sector workers a year after failed coup

New Afghanistan Doll Teaches Young Boys How To Respect Women  Yeah, that’ll work.

Mosul: ‘Isis militants’ thrown off cliff and shot after Iraqi forces liberate city

Erdogan Marks Anniversary Of Coup Attempt By Firing Thousands Of Employees

Terrorists Murder Two Israeli Police Officers in Shooting Attack on Temple Mount

Pentagon: U.S. forces kill ISIS leader in Afghanistan

Churches In Egypt Halt All Activities For Remainder Of July Amid Terror Threat

House Rejects Proposal For Pentagon To Study Violent Strains Of Islam

US Soldier, ISIS Supporter Believed Hitler Was Right And Moon Landings Were Fake

Watch Israeli Police Engage In A Shootout With Arab Terrorists In Jerusalem [VIDEO]

Viscount Ridley explains it all to you.

The problem, of course, is the term ‘capitalism’, which is a dysphemism coined by Marx in order to have a handy stick with which to beat his opponents. It joins similar pro-statist terms like ‘price gouging’ and ‘black market’ and ‘profiteering’ in the arsenal of those who oppose free choice between economic actors.

The Other McCain keeps track so that you don’t have to.

Young people are becoming seriously confused by the transgender cult. Or perhaps the causation works the other way, and confused young people are magnetically attracted to the cult belief that, with the “treatment” of synthetic hormones and surgery, they can escape their adolescent woes by “transitioning” into the opposite sex. Feminists have identified the factor of social contagion in what they call “rapid-onset gender dysphoria.” Through the influence of peers, and also through online recruitment by transgender cultists, many teenagers are quite suddenly convinced that they were “born in the wrong body.” In a matter of months or even a few weeks, an otherwise healthy teenage will develop an obsession with “gender transition” and demand that parents not only accept their new transgender identity, but often threaten suicide unless parents support them in seeking hormone “treatment” immediately. This kind of emotional blackmail is part of the transgender cult’s ideology, as activists claim that anyone who opposes them is effectively sentencing teenagers to death by denying them acceptance and “health care.”

Your hardware determines what sex you are. If your brain disagrees, that’s a software problem, not a hardware problem.

Trying to fix a software problem by radically changing the hardware to match the software is ass-backwards.

Read it.

The big three networks ignored a report Wednesday uncovering violations of federal law committed by the U.S. Postal Service, which pressured managers to approve time off for employees to campaign for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other Democrats.

“High-level postal officials had for years granted employees’ requests for unpaid leave, leading last year to an ‘institutional bias’ in favor of Clinton and other Democrats endorsed by the National Association of Letter Carriers, one of the largest postal unions” amounting to a violation of the Hatch Act, reports The Washington Post.

The Hatch Act is a law enacted in 1939 to prevent federal employees from supporting candidates. Investigators concluded that the postal service had been involved in the process since the 1990s.

Read it.

After Abortion Barbie, there was nowhere else to go….

Jeffrey Payne, who won the title of International Mr Leather in 2009, hopes to challenge the state’s current Republican governor, Greg Abbott, who announced his bid for reelection last week.

Sounds like the perfect Democrat candidate.

“Texas needs a Governor who believes in Real Texas Values, like integrity, honesty, freedom and independence,” Mr Payne said.

In other words, not a Democrat.

“We need to stop wasting our time and money on trivial legislation and start investing in finding ways to help Texans, their families, and their businesses prosper.”

At taxpayer expense, no doubt.

In an interview with CBS Dallas, Mr Payne said he does not think Texas voters will focus on his same-sex marriage – or, presumably, on his connections to the BDSM-tinged gay leather community.

Read it.

New York: It’s a nice place to visit, but you wouldn’t want to live there.

Read it.

A Toronto man who spent $550 building a set of stairs in his community park says he has no regrets, despite the city’s insistence that he should have waited for a $65,000 city project to handle the problem. The city is now threatening to tear down the stairs because they were not built to regulation standards.

Bureaucrats get snippy when you show them up.

Retired mechanic Adi Astl says he took it upon himself to build the stairs after several neighbours fell down the steep path to a community garden in Tom Riley Park, in Etobicoke, Ont. Astl says his neighbours chipped in on the project, which only ended up costing $550 – a far cry from the $65,000-$150,000 price tag the city had estimated for the job.