Read it.

I guess that’s why Democrats keeps losing elections, all those white men.

Read it.

Of course not. They’re all going to college, at taxpayer expense.

Read it.

The disruption was livestreamed on BLM at W&M’s Facebook page. Students took to the stage just a few moments after Gastañaga began her remarks. At first, she attempted to spin the demonstration as a welcome example of the kind of thing she had come to campus to discuss, commenting “Good, I like this,” as they lined up and raised their signs. “I’m going to talk to you about knowing your rights, and protests and demonstrations, which this illustrates very well. Then I’m going to respond to questions from the moderators, and then questions from the audience.”

It was the last remark she was able to make before protesters drowned her out with cries of, “ACLU, you protect Hitler, too.” They also chanted, “the oppressed are not impressed,” “shame, shame, shame, shame,” (an ode to the Faith Militant’s treatment of Cersei Lannister in Game of Thrones, though why anyone would want to be associated with the religious fanatics in that particular conflict is beyond me), “blood on your hands,” “the revolution will not uphold the Constitution,” and, uh, “liberalism is white supremacy.”

These people need to read up on what happened during the French Revolution. What goes around, comes around.

Read it.

This is from today’s New York Post: “President Obama blasted Republicans as the party of ‘billionaires’ on Tuesday while mingling with high-rollers at the $26 million estate of Rich Richman — yes, that’s his real name — in Greenwich, Connecticut.”

Democrats are used to believing six impossible things before breakfast, so it’s no surprise that they are quite comfortable screaming against the rich while relaxing in their multi-million dollar mansions with their kids attending schools that charge more in a year than most Americans earn in a year.

Read it.

David Frum ( or ‘David Traif’ as I like to call him) is less of a Republican than John McCain.

(Is it just me or does Tom Brokaw look like a chimpanzee with glasses?)

Read it.

Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.

Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

She’s a Yalie and well known to a number of friends of mine, who speak highly of her.

More: A Statistician Reconsiders Her Support for Gun Control After Looking at the Data

Read it.

The morning after a gunman murdered nearly 60 people in Las Vegas, Hillary Clinton tweeted that “we can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.” The former Democratic presidential nominee’s commitment to putting politics aside was gone in an instant, and her implicit claim that she knows how to “stop this from happening again” was equally empty.

Gun controllers like Clinton habitually seize upon mass shootings as evidence in favor of the policies they have always supported. But there is rarely any logical connection between the two, because in this debate showing you are on the right side is more important than persuading anyone.

ZMan goes dumpster-diving.

One of the more popular ways for people, with modest talents, to gain public attention is to be edgy. The best examples of this are the pop stars who have modest musical ability, but are willing to degrade themselves on stage, well beyond what is common. Comics used to play the edgy card, by dropping the F-bomb in their act or making increasingly bawdy sexual references. The game is to set yourself apart from the other mediocrities by saying and doing outlandish things. That way, the public pays attention to you instead of others.

Walter Williams is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Short Answer: Because the ThoughtCrime of Noticing must not be allowed to disturb the Narrative.

Long Answer: It would destroy the Clever Plastic Disguise that bad things happen to black people solely because of White Privilege and raaaaaaacist oppression. In truth, black people have a separate subculture from the rest of us, and that subculture is deeply degenerate — it encourages black people to define themselves solely in (adversarial) relation to white people, and creates a bizarre inverted social system in which the normal virtues that lead to success are castigated (can’t say ‘denigrated’ these days) as ‘acting white’ and therefore some kind of betrayal of one’s ‘blackness’.

Read it.

Most of the dorks jawing about gun control know as much about guns as they do about the Constitution, i.e. most of what they ‘know’ ain’t so.

The Other McCaine clears the air.

Between 2014 and 2016, the nationwide homicide rate has increased more than 20%, and the 3.4% increase in the US violent crime rate from 2015 to 2016 was the largest single-year increase in 25 years, the Justice Department said.

A major factor in this increase was the anti-police rhetoric of the Black Lives Matter movement, and most of the additional victims were black.

…

Who is killing these black victims? Not whites, and not the police, but other blacks.
In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The paper categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed.” That classification masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer.

Read it.

Funny how ‘unity’ always means ‘give in to the Left’.

Sorry, dude. We aren’t the droids you’re looking for.

Steve Sailer fisks David Brooks, pet pseudo-conservative of the New York Times.

Brooks is everything that Donald Trump hates about the Republican Party. The essence of Donald Trump is that it is possible to divide the world into two groups, Americans and non-Americans, and that he was elected to do things for the Americans. Brooks appears to be of the opinion, common on the left and in the Republican Establishment, that everybody is kinda-sorta an American, with some living in the U.S. and others not yet; the way Israel looks on Jews of the Diaspora.

Whatever disagreements I may have with Trump (and there are more than you know), I am with him in this.

Read it.

Mice get all the best stuff.

John Oliver calls out Donald Trump over ‘horribly racist’ response to Puerto Rico  Which it wasn’t, of course — his response was the same as that to Harvey and Irma.

Donald Trump heckled with ‘you don’t give a sh*t about Puerto Rico’ as he dedicates golf trophy to victims  Welcome to the Fact Free Zone. If Obama had done this, they’d be lining up to kiss his ass.

Geraldo From Puerto Rico: ‘NYT Hatred Of Trump Allows Reckless Lies’

Donald Trump doesn’t want to say too much about the Las Vegas shooting because he’s part of the problem  Well, no, he’s not part of the problem. This is just another proglodyte fantasy.

Trump’s silence on gun control says: It’s sad about your loved ones, but I need the NRA’s cash  Well, no, it doesn’t. This is just another proglodyte fantasy.

Trump will be called ‘presidential’ for his Las Vegas massacre response, but he’ll only be doing the bare minimum  Uh-huh.

Mag: Mexican Official Dreams Of Trump Assassination, But Most Urge Prudence

CBS Suggests Poor Cuba Relations Are Trump’s Fault, Not Castro’s

SNL’s Michael Che Calls Trump ‘B****,’ ‘White Cracker’

Las Vegas Shooting Keeps Trump Impeachment Bill From Hitting Congress [VIDEO]

Read it.

Mice get all the good stuff.

Paul Rahe points out some inconvenient truth.

Black lives ought to matter; and, in my opinion, they once did. They once mattered a great deal. Not long after he became mayor in New York City, Rudy Giuliani introduced a new method of policing that concentrated resources where there was a plethora of crime. It resulted in a dramatic decline in the murder rate, and Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton took notice and poured federal money into similar policing reforms. African-Americans living in rough neighborhoods were the intended beneficiaries, and they benefited a great deal.

But those days are long gone, and I do not believe that black lives much matter now. They did not matter to Barack Obama, Eric Holder, the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, the white radical who passed as black and founded Black Lives Matter, and to George Soros who funded the outfit. These folks were perfectly prepared to do a number on America’s African-American community and to put their lives at greater risk for the purpose of mobilizing them as a political force.

Read it.

Wrong. The most active and successful terrorist organization is Islam. They’ve been doing it for 1400 years longer than the NRA.

Read it.

Read it.

Everything something bad happens, some fringe authoritarians call for the government to ‘do something’, despite the unambiguous historical record that in most cases when the government decides to ‘do something’ it’s the wrong thing and done badly.

Read it.

“I don’t know why you’re still, like, sitting down, y’all. I don’t understand. I really don’t understand. Y’all can take your f**king test, but people are dying out there,” one protester, who remained behind, stated, then accusing students of supporting white supremacists.

Read it.

Too little, too late.

That flapping sound is chickens coming home to roots. Unless they clean house among the faculty, the problem will persist.

Read it.

Not long ago, emergency calls were handled locally. Outages were small and easily diagnosed and fixed. The rise of cellphones and the promise of new capabilities—what if you could text 911? or send videos to the dispatcher?—drove the development of a more complex system that relied on the internet. For the first time, there could be such a thing as a national 911 outage. There have now been four in as many years.

Uh-oh.

Read it.

The case concerns how employees may bring actions against their employers. Many employment contracts, some 25 million according to respondents lawyer Daniel Ortiz, contain provisions requiring employees to resolve disputes with employers in arbitration on an individual basis, effectively forbidding workers from organizing class actions. Critics of these provisions say they purposefully empower management at the expense of labor, since they inhibit workers from organizing to secure better contracts.

Though the Federal Arbitration Act (FAA) provides that a contract provision requiring arbitration must be enforced, section 7 of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) establishes the right of workers to engage in “concerted activities” to secure mutual aid and protection. At issue in Monday’s case was whether the NLRA allows employers to enforce contracts requiring case-by-case arbitration.

Read it.

And the kooks come out of the woodwork.

Read it.

Cue anguished screams by environmentalists, all of whom come from somewhere else.

Read it.

Funny how they don’t show the would-be Caliphate territories. Wonder why?

Maybe we ought to do one for North America. That would be amusing.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

UPDATE: Massachusetts Dem Refuses To Partake In Moment Of Silence For Las Vegas Victims

UPDATE: Another Dem Senator Calls For Gun Control Legislation, Blames GOP For Massacre

UPDATE: Forging the Trump Connection: CNN Reporter: Country Music Fans Are Likely Trump Supporters [VIDEO]

UPDATE: CBS Legal Exec Fired For Vegas Shooting Hot Take

Read it.

The Islamic State’s official news agency claimed responsibility for a Las Vegas Sunday night shooting that left at least 50 dead and 200 injured.

The claim reportedly states that gunman Stephen Paddock converted to Islam months before the attack. U.S. intelligence officials are reportedly aware of the claim and are disputing the claim saying they see no evidence of the terrorist group’s connection to the attack.

They have an obvious motive to claim affiliation with the attack, whether it exists or not.

New York Times ISIS correspondent Rukmini Callimachi importantly noted in late March that ISIS “has shown itself to be accurate in claiming only attacks they directed/inspired.”

But apparently that’s not what they do.

Whatever it may say about this particular shooter, it says a lot about Islam.

Read it.

Why are so many ‘activists’ these days fat ugly women? Is there some genetic link between obesity and idiocy?

Read it.

Last week, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos visited Harvard University’s Institute of Politics to discuss her school choice agenda. Students in the audience interrupted her several times; some even held up a sign accusing her of being a “white supremacist.”

The irony, of course, is twofold. One, the subject of DeVos’s Harvard address—school choice—is a policy that offers low-income students of color a respite from the hopelessness of the failing traditional public school systems in many cities. Two, DeVos’s recent major policy accomplishment was rescinding the Obama administration’s infamous Title IX “dear colleague” letter, a move that will restore a modicum of fairness to campus sexual harassment trials—trials that disproportionately disadvantage male students of color.

This makes DeVos a “white supremacist”? Please.

Read it.

artin Luther’s Protestant Reformation turns 500 at the end of this month, and I honestly think he would have been surprised to see it last this long, not so much because his initial project of reforming the Church of Rome would have been realized by now but rather because he was under the impression that the world was probably ending soon. Well, here we are, and it’s 2017. A lot has happened in Protestantism’s five centuries.

Most people look at the Reformation from either a Roman Catholic perspective or a Protestant perspective.

There is a reason that there has never been a ‘reformation’ in Orthodoxy. Most of the issues that Protestants raised are areas in which the Roman church departed from Orthodoxy. Sale of indulgences can’t happen in a Church that doesn’t believe in Purgatory, for example.

Read it.

Authorities say Stephen Paddock, a 64-year-old resident of Las Vegas, is the shooter who killed 50 people in the mass shooting at the Route 91 Festival late Sunday night on the historic Vegas Strip — but have not revealed a motive or whether the alleged shooter was following any “belief system.”

Cue media speculation about membership in ‘alt-right’ or ‘white supremacist’ groups.

It is unclear if they have also found the suspect’s 62-year-old Asian female roommate, whom authorities identified as Marilou Danley and described as an “associate” who stands at 4 foot 11 inches tall and weighs around 111 pounds.

Cue some connection to Trump, reasonable or not.

Read it.

Well, not really. They’re looking at skin color, not ‘race’ per se.

Now map this against Muslim terrorist incidents. Notice the correlation?

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

As nearly half of all Ashkenazi Jews can trace their lineage, via a particular genetic mark, to four women who emigrated from the Middle East to Europe about a thousand years ago, chances, Rabbi Carmel continued, “are high, statistically speaking, that anyone able to prove that they are the offspring of those four mothers is Jewish according to halacha.”

Well. There it is.

Check it out.

Also works for generating modern academic gibberish for articles and papers.

MSNBC Panelist On Puerto Rico: Trump Believes ‘Only White People Are True Americans’  For which, of course, there is not a shred of evidence. This is just racism straight up.

Katy Tur’s Book Reveals a Reporter Who Can’t Stop Insulting Trump

NYT’s Paul Krugman Falsely Blames ‘Trumpie’ For Non-Existent Cholera Outbreak In Puerto Rico  When they don’t have any bad news to blame on Trump, they just make it up.

Hollywood reacts to Trump’s Puerto Rico tweets: ‘You’re going straight to hell’

Why doesn’t Donald Trump care about Puerto Ricans? Because they can’t vote for him  More ‘analysis’ that reveals more about the intellectual shortcomings of the ‘analyst’ than it does about its subject.

Saturday Night Live Calls Trump A ‘Cheap Cracker’ Over Puerto Rico Response

MSNBC Panel: Trump Criticizing Mayor Is ‘Toxic Brew’ Of Racism, Incompetence, Egomania  Well, actually, it’s not. They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.

Parks And Rec, Jimmy Fallon TV Writer: ‘If You Support Trump You Should Have Your Children Taken Away’

Read it.

The Associated Press is a loyal servant of the Democratic Party and its liberal components. If you doubt that assertion, consider today’s AP article on the upcoming U.S. Supreme Court term by reporter Mark Sherman.

Like pretty much all AP reporters, Sherman is a liberal, as you can see from his Twitter feed. So how does a liberal reporter spin his coverage of the Supreme Court? It’s easy: he just frames every legal issue with the liberal narrative, and turns exclusively to liberal sources for comments on the Court’s controversial cases.

Read it.

The only surprising thing about the total catastrophe in Puerto Rico is that it took so long for the “Trump-Is-A-Bigot-Who-Hates-Brown-People” refrain to get cranked up to eleven, Concerning which, a few observations.

Read it.

Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

But it’ll never happen — without his nominal affiliation with the Republican party, he’s just another has-been politician.

This is of a piece with all of the Hollywood Ho-Hos who loudly shout that they’re leaving the country if this or that Bad Thing Happens. Most recently it was the election of Trump. But they never follow through.

Read it.

More proglodyte Puritanism.

Check it out.

It is difficult to provide useful information on Medieval Technology. Information is hard to obtain, few surveys have been published, and in many cases the available sources fail to indicate their sources.

The information contained on these pages has been gleaned from a variety of places, most often secondary sources. The scholar will almost certainly have to check those sources to find the original citations. To make this process as easy as possible, complete bibliographic references, including page numbers, have been given.

ZMan casts aspersions.

The reason that Buckley Conservatism completely failed to halt the advance of Progressivism is that the Buckleyites eventually came to accept the moral framework of the Left. Libertarians have gone down the same road, embracing the morality of Progressives, while trying to find a way to carve out a place for individual liberty within that moral framework. It’s why the differences between libertarianism and what passes for conservatism are trivial now. They both operate in the same narrow space.

Wrangling over the permutations and combinations of difference between ‘traditionalists’ (conservatives) and libertarians was the chief occupation of the Party of the Right during my undergraduate years at Yale.

A good way to illustrate this is with this interview Carl Benjamin conducted with Jared Taylor. Benjamin is a British provocateur who goes by the handle Sargon of Akkad on social media. He describes himself as a liberal, but to Americans that should be understood as libertarian. His views are consistent with what you see from the Reason Magazine types. That means he embraces the libertine social polices of the Progressives, but he likes getting cheap stuff from Amazon without paying sales tax.

And a better description of ‘libertarian’ I’ve never seen.

Freeberg nails it again.

I’ve occasionally noticed, when arguing with strangers on the Internet that I figure out are still in college or have only recently graduated (it isn’t tough), I can completely discombobulate them simply by admitting I’ve been wrong about something. Sometimes if I’m in an extra snarky mood I’ll tell them I make ten or more mistakes every day before they even think about getting out of bed, which in many cases is probably true. Trouble is, if this assault is fitting for the target, it’s difficult for the dialogue to proceed because it’s like introducing the concept of days-of-week to a barnyard animal, or depth to some kind of stencil-creature from a two-dimensional universe. Willing to admit you’ve ever been wrong about something? My professor didn’t teach me how to deal with this! What is this strange brew?

What’s really going on here is arrested development. No, that’s not a reference to a man in his fifties getting in Internet arguments with strangers…although that may apply too. No, I’m referring to the fastening of an identity, not so much to the specific assertion being made, but to the lofty goal of being right. Five-to-seven year olds argue this way: I’m smart-n-right, you’re wrong-n-dumb. They grow up, graduate high school, go to college which is supposed to be a proving ground for bold, diverse, innovative new ideas, and then graduate that. Still arguing the same way. I’m right you’re wrong, ALL the time…now what were we arguing about again? I forgot. But I’m still right.

…

It’s said that a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, well, it might be more accurate to say a conservative is a liberal who put in his time waiting in line at the DMV.