Daily Beast: How Trump May Torpedo Prince Harry’s Obama Wedding Invite  I doubt that Trump cares.

LA Times Critic: Theater Will Save Us from Trump Crisis, Our ‘Democracy In Meltdown’  ‘They may have won all the battles/But we had all the good songs!’

Democratic Lawmaker Blasts Trump For Not Spending Enough Time With Barron  Yeah, the Party of Hate (#POH) is the model for great parenting.

Read it.

The Internet is in the proverbial tizzy about Audi’s “feminist” Super Bowl advertisement, in which the automaker comes out in favor of equal pay for women.

Audi is merely doing what every marketing department flacks do: Finding a trend they can ride, which beats actually working. Watch MAD MEN for the details.

Well, if you’ve been reading along, I think you’ve figured out what the real message of this Audi advertisement is, but just in case you’ve been napping I will spell it out for you: Money and breeding always beat poor white trash. Those other kids in the race, from the overweight boys to the hick who actually had an American flag helmet to the stripper-glitter girl? They never had a chance. They’re losers and they always will be, just like their loser parents. Audi is the choice of the winners in today’s economy, the smooth talkers who say all the right things in all the right meetings and are promoted up the chain because they are tall (yes, that makes a difference) and handsome without being overly masculine or threatening-looking.

The ancient struggle between Cloud People and Dirt People. Audi wants to appeal to the Cloud People because the Dirt People don’t have any money and if they did they would spending in on an F150, not an Audi.

Read it.

Another Democrat Blue State boondoggle bites the dust.

Newsweek’s Bizarre Ivanka Story Suggests Confederate Flag in Photo Background Is ‘Dogwhistle’  Remember: If you hear the ‘dog whistle’, then you’re the dog.

CNN Correspondent: World Thinks That America Doesn’t Have A ‘Moral Leg To Stand On’  Of course, a CNN correspondent is the expert on what ‘the world thinks’, and ODDLY ENOUGH it matches what most of the ‘correspondents’ at CNN think. What are the odds?

Worst of MSNBC 2017  As you might expect, most of it has to do with Trump.

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BuzzFeed is taking heat on social media after publishing a story titled “37 things white people ruined need to stop ruining in 2018″ on Wednesday afternoon.

Included on the list is the argument that white people ruined the United States by voting for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 58-37 percent margin.

Other items on Buzzfeed’s list include macaroni and cheese, protests and the national anthem.

On the other hand, if you want to review things that black people ruined this year, check out the murder statistics for any major metropolitan area. I think white people come out pretty good in comparison.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

The medieval step was much more toe-focused. Instead of hitting the ground with the heel, medieval European strollers stuck out their feet like ballerinas, touching the ball of the foot down on the ground first before putting their full weight down. This lighter step takes more muscle effort—Warzecha says he’s developed killer calf muscles after doing it for six months—but allows you to feel any potential obstacles before you put your whole body weight on top of them, lessening the chances that you’ll injure yourself on a rock or a piece of wood or even a hidden snake. If you touch your toe to the ground first, you can always lift your leg back up and avoid stepping down harder on that sharp rock/snake, but if you hit the ground with your heel first, it’s harder to jump back.

Walking in high heels has much the same effect.

Down side: It makes you walk like a Gungan.

Read it.

Proglodytes are people who have never successfully grown up.

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His interest having been piqued by CNN’s intense coverage of the big white truck obscuring President Trump’s golf outing at Mar-A-Lago earlier this week, Mike Magnoli of the CBS News West Palm Beach affiliate turned his investigative skills to the case. He tracked down the truck. He found that the vehicle belonged to the sheriff’s department. He determined, however, contrary to the heavy breathing at CNN, that the truck was not intended to block reporters’ views of Trump golfing.

Thank God! The First Amendment is safe!

Read it.

I’ll make a first brush attempt a working definition:

Editorial Narrative:  A mandated set of guidelines for the overriding storyline for any news item concerning a specified topic, including required statements, conclusions and intentional slanting towards a particular preferred viewpoint. A statement from the Editors of “How this topic is to be presented.”

…

Celia Dugger thus establishes an Editorial Narrative for the series, and for all health-related journalism at the NY Times, along the lines of;

“The processed food, soda and fast food industries’ increasing focus on markets in the developing world is causing the rise in obesity rates and weight-related illnesses.” 

This is not a rare opinion — it is one of the mainstay talking points of anti-corporatists of all stripes.  It just doesn’t happen to be supported by any Science — a point which even Dugger at the NY Times admits.    It is just an opinion and it is based on simplistic time-coincident correlation.

…

When a story — a bit of news, a new journal paper — doesn’t fit the narrative required or desired by the Editors — then there is a problem.  If the news is truly Big News and Important — then the journalist has to do his/her best to report it and somehow slip in enough of his/her editor’s narrative to get it accepted and published.  We see this a lot in climate stories where the article goes along well enough, reporting some new findings, and then, out of nowhere, comes a line like “Of course, this new study does nothing to cast any doubt about the overwhelming evidence for human-induced climate change which is currently threatening the very existence of our planet.”

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I don’t know why this is, but hospital corridors, lobbies and the warren of doctors’ offices and clusters of buildings that house them are like a giant maze, so I often got lost and disoriented, but I saw a lot, too. And what I saw that impressed me the most were the hospital placards commemorating the donors who made these enormously expensive facilities possible as well as the hospital’s main contributors whose names are astride the broadside of the buildings, names like Mary Birch, Conrad Prebys (no relation to Reince), Scripps…names that meant little or nothing to me, much less how they accomplished such towering acts of philanthropy.

…

I don’t care how many Ferraris, multi-million-dollar houses on tropical islands — or entire islands — ultra-wealthy people own, I felt a refreshing faith in humanity for their gifts. What would we do without the top one percent and those likeminded generous individuals? You certainly won’t see my name on the signage of a medical pavilion anytime soon — or doubtfully ever at the rate I’m going. But they fill a huge void for which I am grateful.

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This study examines exposure to the police drama television genre and its impact on perceptions of crime and racial criminality. Content analyses of three seasons of Law & Order were examined to evaluate the show’s portrayal of race and crime compared to actual crime statistics for New York City during the same periods. A survey was also conducted to examine perceptions of personal safety and the influence of television’s depiction of race and crime. Results suggest whites are disproportionately portrayed as criminals five to eight times more often on police dramas compared to actual crime statistics for the city of New York, exposure to police dramas increases beliefs of threats to personal safety, and exposure to police dramas leads to elevated perceptions of white criminality among non-whites. Results provide additional support for cultivation theory and “Mean World Syndrome,” and implications for delimitation and racial distrust.

Read it.

Pretty sad. Cue appropriate government program….

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions — or provide the politically incorrect answers.

The ThoughtCrime of Noticing appears to trigger cognitive dissonance in proglodyte journalists.

UPDATE: Why Liberal Professors Won’t Discuss Black Family Formation

Brian Stelter: Fox Does A ‘Disservice’ To Viewers By Giving Accurate Information  Apparently it’s Not Fair to point out that Trump’s approval ratings are comparable to Obama’s at this point in his tenure.

The year in journalism: Mainstream media flunks the Trump challenge

Left-Wing Mob Demands Blood For Okay Hand Sign  Common hand sign confirms that Trump is a Nazi, or something.

CNN Finally Solves The Big White Truck Mystery   Well, that’s a relief.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun  control laws in Baltimore, or the place would look like Texas.

ZMan lives in Baltimore, and refers to it as ‘Lagos on the Chesapeake’.

Read it.

What more fitting monument to a millenarian movement could there be than a thousand-page “saga”? Yuri Slezkine’s guiding argument in this remarkable, many-layered account of the men (rarely women) who shaped the October Revolution is that the Bolsheviks were not a party but an apocalyptic sect. In an extended essay on comparative religion that constitutes just one of his thirty-three chapters, he puts Russia’s victorious revolutionaries in a long line of millenarians extending back to the ancient Israelites; in their “totalitarian” demands on the individual believer, he suggests, the Bolsheviks are cut from the same cloth as the sixteenth-century Münster Anabaptists and the original “radical fundamentalist”, Jesus Christ.

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God forbid we should let them reproduce.

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Along the New England coast, the cold appeared to be at least partially the culprit in the deaths of three thresher sharks found washed up on the shores of Wellfleet and Orleans on Cape Cod over the past several days, according to scientists.

We don’t hear about the sharks until paragraph 18.

Skomal hypothesised that the sharks, which are usually about 12 feet long, had begun to make their way south as northerly waters cooled, but got trapped by Cape Cod, as have wayward dolphins before them, and pushed up onto the beach, where the cold may have hastened their death.

Three paragraphs about sharks in the entire article.

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Back when then-president Barack Obama used to lament and lament some more that the United States no longer builds amazing infrastructure projects like the Golden Gate Bridge (setting aside for the moment that it wasn’t the federal government that created America’s finest span), buzzkills like us would point out that A) the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included a whopping $105 billion for infrastructure, characterized by Obama at the time as “the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an Interstate Highway System in the 1950s,” and B) “Every dollar that governments spend on every level gets inflated by contracting rules, social engineering, environmental aspirations, and sops to public sector unions.”

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A convenient web site for those who want to bind their own books.

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The prize for the most wasteful post-9/11 initiative arguably should go to FirstNet—a whole new agency set up to provide a telecommunications system exclusively for firefighters, police, and other first responders. They would communicate on bandwidth worth billions of dollars in the commercial market but now reserved by the Federal Communications Commission for FirstNet.

FirstNet is in such disarray that 15 years after the problem it is supposed to solve was identified, it is years from completion—and it may never get completed at all. According to the GAO, estimates of its cost range from $12 billion to $47 billion, even as advances in digital technology seem to have eliminated the need to spend any of it.

Read it.

Thanks in part to crowdsourced computers and smartphones belonging to over a million volunteers, the scientists have figured out how to choose the building blocks required to create a protein that will take on the shape they want.

In a series of papers published this year, Dr. Baker and his colleagues unveiled the results of this work. They have produced thousands of different kinds of proteins, which assume the shape the scientists had predicted. Often those proteins are profoundly different from any found in nature.

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Food scientists have successfully created a new type of bacon which has a reduced cancer risk.

In collaboration with Spanish chemists, British food manufacturers Finnebrogue claim to have produced the world’s first bacon that doesn’t include nitrites from vegetables or curing agents

Muslim student who wished someone a merry Christmas says he was beaten so hard he ‘thought he was going to die’

Gunmen Attack Cairo Church, Killing at Least 8

Two men charged with plotting Christmas terror attack

Document Given to U.K. Allegedly Confirms Brotherhood’s Terror Link

Shia Muslims visit Nigerian churches to celebrate Christmas with Christians

Pakistani woman ‘gang raped on orders of village council’ after marrying man of her choice

Taliban, death threats and not giving up: Afghanistan’s football pioneer Khalida Popal tells her harrowing yet heroic tale

Kabul suicide bombing: Isis claims responsibility for terror attack on Shia cultural centre killing 40 people

St Petersburg supermarket bombing was a terrorist act, says Vladimir Putin

Kabul explosion: At least 41 dead in bomb attack on Shia cultural centre

Islamic State Claims Deadly Blast at Afghan Shiite Center

Stabbed to Death in the Drugstore by a Culture-Enricher

“Swedish” Terrorist Arrested in Rotterdam

Truck Jihad Plot Foiled in Germany

CBS Ignores Egyptian Man’s Shooting at Cops in Pennsylvania’s Capital

Vienna: Silent Night, Violent Night

Bigoted Bedfellows: American Islamist Groups AMP and CAIR

Rethinking “Radicalization”: Dutch Researcher Discusses What Makes a Homegrown Terrorist

Mo Farah targeted with racist abuse after wishing his Instagram followers a Merry Christmas

Stabbing murder at restaurant planning to open for homeless on Christmas Day

Danes Tighten Border Controls With Germany

Israeli Players Banned from World Chess Championship in Saudi Arabia

Christians gather to celebrate Christmas in Mosul church for first time since Isis driven out

France Deploys 97,000 Security Personnel To Keep Christmas Safe

Armed guards posted at Christmas church services in majority Muslim countries

Pennsylvania police shootings were ‘terror attack,’ DHS says

Pennsylvania Jihad

Congressional Candidate Tied to Pakistani Terror Group

FBI Thwarts Christmas Terror Attack From ISIS Sympathizer

Revenge For ‘Mistreatment Of Muslims’: Australian Police Say It’s Too Soon To Call Car Attack Terrorism

Another Day, Another Rape in the Shisha Bar

She Was Asking For It!

Christmas Market in Bonn Evacuated

‘Isis supporter’ arrested for plotting Christmas bombing of San Francisco

Read it.

Black Americans hate Spanish and aren’t crazy about Spanish-speakers either. They associate Spanish speakers with coming to take jobs by working cheaper and harder. They associate speaking Spanish on the street with plotting against them.

Apparently teaching your kid a second language is White Privilege or something.

Kathy Griffin Can’t Stop Blaming Trump For Her Own Career-Ending Move  The New Hitler made her do it.

CNN Loses It After Trump Blocks View of Golf Course With Box Truck

Kos: After Dems Win Big in Midterms, They’ll ‘Investigate the F**k Out of That Orange A**hole’ Trump  If.

Media Coverage In 2017 Marked By Bombshells That Weren’t

MSNBC’s Katy Tur Lets Rep. Speier Claim President Trump Is Seizing Power Like A ‘Tyrant’  Funny, he hasn’t done anything that Obama didn’t do.

House Intel Dem: Public ‘Already Aware Of’ Most Evidence Against Trump  In other words, they got nothin’

President Donald Trump’s monthly travel costs ‘a third higher than Obama’s’  I suggest we’re getting value for our money.

Kentucky Democrat says ‘a lot of us’ think Trump has ‘committed impeachable offences’  Ah, but proving it….

Saddest Man In America Screams At Robot Trump During Disney Ride

Read it.

The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

Read it.

TOTAL — $24,485,383,599

That would be a good start.

Eric S. Raymond does music.

I’ve been diving into the history of rock music recently because,
quite by chance a few weeks ago, I glimpsed an answer to a couple of
odd little questions that had been occasionally been bothering me for
decades.

The most obtrusive of these questions is: Why does nothing in today’s
rock music sound like the Beatles?

It’s a pertinent question because the Beatles were so acclaimed as
musical innovators in their time and still so hugely popular. And yet,
nobody sounds like them. Since not long after the chords of the “Let
It Be” died away in 1969, every attempt to revive the Beatlesy sound
of bright vocal-centered ensemble pop has lacked any staying power
among rock fans. It gets tried every once in a while by a succession
of bands running from Badfinger to the Smithereens, and goes nowhere.
Why is this?

Another, related question is: Why does so very little in today’s rock
music sound like Chuck Berry?

I just listened to James Gang’s YER ALBUM on YouTube and he’s absolutely right.

I also wasted a day pining for 1969. Sigh.

Holman Jenkins understands the dialectic.

For this viewer, the meaning of the Trump show began to change with last week’s tax bill. Donald Trump normalizes nothing new and outré in our politics after all. He is but an effective parody of the politicians we have, and have long had.

We are also learning something about the relationship, in our age, between the political show and movement, however fitful, on the nation’s business.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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Apparently you have to get your victim points before the end of the year in order to qualify for something.

Read it.

Really — when was the last time you saw a black farmer? Eh? Eh? I rest my case.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

My guess is that law enforcement’s aversion to listing Hispanics as different from whites goes back to LULAC’s campaign in the post-War era to get Latinos declared to be just plain white, which is why there was no separate category for Hispanics on the 1950 and 1960 Censuses.

Plus, eye-witness reports can be vague. To witnesses, the fundamental racial categories tend to be Black and Not Black. Thus, Joseph Wambaugh’s LAPD novels always have a Problematically Latino character: a guy whose mom is Mexican but his dad is Swedish so he doesn’t look mestizo, or a guy who kind of looks Latino but is actually half Arab, or maybe a Filipino with a Spanish surname who looks mostly Oriental but maybe could be the kind of Latino the other Latinos call “Chino,” and so forth and so on.

‘We have tapped into something’: Impeachment drive builds digital army to take on Trump  The fact that he hasn’t done anything to rate impeachment must be very frustrating.

Will Harry and Meghan Markle snub Trump? US President could be REFUSED wedding invite  There is no indication, of course, that Trump cares about this. But his enemies sure do.

Ranking Budget Rep Defends Calling Trump A ‘Cancer On The Country’

New York Times Columnist Admits Hysteria Is No Way To Beat Trump

Why People Hate the Media, Chapter 12,186

Islamophobia even worse under Trump than after 9/11 attacks, says top Muslim activist  As if an ‘activist’ ever told the truth.

Donald Trump is ‘running a criminal enterprise out of the White House’, says former US governor  Why anybody listens to Howard Dean any more is a total mystery.

Told you so. It’s coming.

Read it.

Drat those poor people anyway.

Read it.

And has accomplished more in one year than any other President I can remember.

If it works, go with it.

NYT’s Hess Channels Trump’s Clenched Fist: ‘Look What My Whiteness Allows Me to Get Away With’

Why Trump isn’t getting the credit he thinks he deserves

Trump Isn’t Watching Too Much TV. He’s Watching the Wrong Kind

Bill Kristol Accuses Trump Of Trying To ‘Shut Down’ Mueller Investigation  If he wanted to shut it down, he could do so in fifteen minutes.

Bad Calls of 2017: Sports Media Hated on ‘Soulless Coward’ President Trump

Newsweek: ‘How Trump and the Nazis Stole Christmas To Promote White Nationalism’  You can’t make this shit up.

MSNBC: Sports Editor Calling Trump and Fox News ‘Neo-Nazis’ Is ‘Absolutely Brilliant’, ‘Thought-Provoking’  The thought it provokes is what planet they’re from.

Read it.

Pity the poor liberal Democrats. Once upon a time leading Democrats understood the need for tax reform. It’s not necessary to go back to John F. Kennedy or even the bipartisan tax reform of 1986 to see this. If you paid close attention to Hillary Clinton ten years ago when she was still in the Senate, she noted publicly that our corporate income tax system needed reform, and even Obama declared that he thought the corporate income tax rate should be lowered to around 25 percent. But he never pursued the idea, even though it would have been an easy bipartisan achievement for him. What explains this resistance?

The mystery deepens when you realize that if even eight or 10 Democratic senators had decided to support tax reform and bargain with Republicans, they might well have been able to keep the state and local tax deduction beloved of insolvent blue states everywhere, and probably the Obamacare individual mandate. One thing a handful of Democrats would easily have preserved is the prohibition on oil exploration in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which has been the holy grail for environmentalists for nearly 40 years. By their intransigent opposition, Democrats were completely routed. What explains this shortsightedness, if not political incompetence?

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, or the place would look like Texas.

One-Third Of Increase In US Homicide Rate Because Of Chicago Neighborhoods

Being governed by Democrats will do that for you.

You will notice that the three ‘fail’ grades have nothing to do with technology, but rather with the Social Justice Warrior political agenda.

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Of course he does.

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Using an ambulance to travel to the hospital in an emergency can cost upwards of $1,000 USD. Now research demonstrates that a significant number of people are instead choosing Uber to perform the same service.

The paper – currently being peer reviewed – examines the effect on ambulance usage as Uber was introduced to 766 cities across 43 states. According its findings, even the most conservative estimate shows a seven percent reduction in people traveling via ambulance where the service is available.