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Black unemployment fell to 6.8 percent in December, the lowest ever recorded by the U.S. Labor Department since it began tracking the black unemployment rate in 1972.

Economists say it’s a sign the recovery from the Great Recession is finally starting to help a wider swath of the U.S. population.

Gee, I wonder how that happened, with That Notorious Racist Trump in the White House.

On the campaign trail, President Trump famously asked African Americans: “What do you have to lose?” by voting for him. He promised his economic agenda would lead to more jobs and higher wages for everyone. He ended up winning 8 percent of the black vote, a bit higher than Mitt Romney in 2012.

Well, everybody knows what a liar Trump is. This is just proof.  Oh, wait….

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How you can tell there’s something wrong: People are leaving and parts want to break away.

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Murders committed by white supremacists more than doubled in the US last year, accounting for the majority of extremist killings, according to a report.

Far-right radicals were responsible for 20 of the 34 extremist murders in 2017, said the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Eighteen of those were carried out by white supremacists, who killed twice as many people as Islamic fundamentalists, the civil rights group’s Centre on Extremism said.

Eighteen. For the entire United States. Wow. What a crime wave.

Compare this to the murder rate in the city of Chicago: 650 in 2017, many of them black people shooting black people.

The deadliest extremist attack of 2016, however, was linked to Islamic extremism. Sayfullo Saipov, the man accused of killing eight people with a truck in New York in November, is said to have had connections to Isis.

But that didn’t rate mention in the headline, maybe because murders by Muslims aren’t really news.

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Washington Metro officials pretended to be shocked when a Red Line train derailed due to a broken rail on Monday. In fact, the break should not and probably didn’t surprise any of them.

“It’s like, God, didn’t we do all of the fixing, the bad areas, SafeTrack?” rambled Metro’s board chair, Jack Evans. “All that stuff was intended to prevent stuff like this from happening.” Actually, Evans knows perfectly well that the SafeTrack work was superficial and the system still needs $15 billion to $25 billion of maintenance and rehabilitation work.

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An alligator and a Burmese python were locked in a cold-blooded battle to the death as a crowd watched in shock at a golf course in Naples, Fla., last week.

Remind me to stay away from Florida.

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It’s called obeying the law, Bernie. Something you would know nothing about.

You’re a Senator — if you don’t like it, work to change it, rather than just jacking your jaw.

If it’s unspeakable, then shut up about it.

Read it.

As a shareholder, I’m delighted.

Apple plans to repatriate some of its overseas profits and expects to pay taxes of $38 billion when doing so, which Apple says is likely to be the largest payment of this kind ever made. That tax payment, combined with its U.S. investments and planned capital expenditures, will account for $75 billion of its projected $350 billion contribution.

Thank you, Donald Trump and Tax Reform.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum.

Now that’s just sad, which unalloyed good economic news has to be tagged as ‘political’.

UPDATE: Apple announces second headquarters, promises to bring 20,000 jobs

The plan nods to the overhaul of the U.S. tax code signed into law at the end of 2017. The reform package lowered corporate tax rates and created a one-time break on cash being held overseas. Apple will take advantage of that provision, bringing $250 billion of offshore cash back to the U.S., a move that will create a $38 billion tax bill for the company. “A payment of that size would likely be the largest of its kind ever made,” the statement notes.

I’m sure Democrats are already lined up to spend it. (‘Pay down the National Debt? What are you, crazy?’)

UPDATE: Apple stock climbs on word of planned US investments & repatriated cash

Thank you, Donald Trump and Tax Reform.

UPDATE: Report: Apple shares $2500 bonuses with employees following US tax changes

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

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Heh.

Hey, I’ll give you these tulips for your bitcoin.

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Tell that to my local Goodwill. They’re always packed.

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Yeah, that’s the American Dream, apparently.

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Thank God the BBC isn’t racist like Donald Trump.

How’s that White Privilege working out for you, guys?

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And, of course, it COULDN’T be because of Donald Trump. It Just Couldn’t.

UPDATE: And the Usual Suspects are Triggered by it — North And South Korea Will Field A Joint Olympic Team, And A Lot Of People Are Unhappy About It

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Ayaan Hirsi Ali grew up in Somalia, where she suffered female genital mutilation. So now she speaks out against radical Islam. For that, SPLC put her on its list of dangerous “extremists.”

Maajid Nawaz was once an Islamic extremist. Then he started criticizing the radicals. SPLC labels him an “anti-Muslim extremist,” too.

While launching hateful smears like these, SPLC invites you to donate to them to “join the fight against hatred and bigotry.”

Dude, it’s all about the Nartative.

One man went to the Family Research Council headquarters to kill people, shooting a security guard in the arm before he was stopped.

The shooter told investigators that he attacked the FRC because he found them on SPLC’s hate list.

Perfectly reasonable. It’s all about the Hunt for Heretics and Sinners.

Read it.

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

Before he retired from McGill University, Pieter Sijpke used to give his architecture students some pretty cool homework. He once told the class, “I want to be drinking in a snow bar by Friday.” His students went outside and got to work, and sure enough, “we had 50 people inside the snow bar by Friday afternoon.”

One of the neat things about being a professor is you have lots of students who will do stupid stuff for you just for a grade.

Read it.

Ponder what ‘reform’ of the LDS church could be so important as to merit mention in the headline.

Maybe it’s that whole Christianity thing — they’ve been waiting for the Mormons to give up on that for the longest time.

Read it.

The key to handling vegan social situations is quite simple: Don’t be such a dick about it. See? Problem solved.

Can’t help you with the problem of ‘making vegan food exciting’. Sorry.

Read it.

Huh. The right to kill your child before birth is somehow a ‘reproductive right’. Maybe it’s different in Polish.

I wonder what portion of the Polish population is represented by ‘thousands’. Since the population of the country in 2017 was over 38 million, I’m thinking pretty small. Don’t see that as being much of a trend. Still — the Narrative is the Narrative.

Steve Sailer explains it all to you.

Last Thursday, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) scheduled a meeting with the president to try to trick him into supporting their politically suicidal immigration bill. To their dismay, however, when they arrived they found that Trump had also invited realist immigration experts such as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), and the president’s speechwriter Stephen Miller.

In the ensuing debate, Durbin and Graham were demolished. So Durbin, his plot foiled, tried the underhanded ploy of asserting to the press, perhaps inaccurately, that Trump had used the now-notorious vulgarity to characterize Haiti.

Of course, Haiti ranks 163rd on the U.N.’s Human Development Index while Norway ranks first, so, as usual, what drives the establishment most crazy about Trump is his tendency to tell the rough truth.

This situation illustrates quite nicely the Standard Operating Procedure of the D.C. political class. Senators think that if they come to a President with a ‘bipartisan’ deal, he is ipso facto required to support it. A Senator balked in that expectation is totally entitled to act like a spoiled child and have a tantrum in the press. The press are totally entitled to use anything handy to trash a politician that they don’t like or who disagrees with them. Etc.

Read it.

Lindsey Graham, the Arlen Specter of the South, has been trying to ingratiate himself with President Trump, his former adversary. By doing so, Graham hopes to achieve his longtime dream of granting amnesty to illegal aliens.

One happy byproduct of the unfortunate “S***thole” controversy is that, in all likelihood, Graham’s friendship with the president is at an end. It’s over not because of that controversy, but because of what led to it. Simply stated, Graham tried to bamboozle Trump.

As Harry Truman once famously said, ‘If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog.’ One of the distinguishing characteristics of politics, not just in America but almost anywhere, is that ‘friends’ of politicians will inevitably try to use that ‘friendship’ to gain some sort of advantage through the proxy use of that politician’s authority. This is a reversion to an earlier cultural type, still nearly universal in the Third World, where someone in power is expected to use that power, not for the general good, but for the particular good of that person’s ‘friends & relations’. One of the most significant aspects of ‘American exceptionalism’ is the weakening of this ancient expectation and its replacement by the expectation that public officials will act for the general good, not just that of their personal affinities.

Democrats, of course, are the primary proponents of preserving the traditional orientation, as any examination of that hoary Democrat institution, the metropolitan political machine, makes clear. This is, I suspect, one reason why the Democratic Party was the usual object of the affection of organized crime — they both have the same approach to the use of political power. (When was the last time you heard of the Mafia trying to steal an election for a Republican?)

Republicans, on the other hand, take their cues from the classical Roman republican tradition, in which the service fo the res publica, the ‘public thing’, was paramount over la cost rostra, ‘our thing’ (sorry for mixing languages). There are recorded instances of Roman fathers having their sons executed for theft and treason, which in any other ancient civilization would be considered insane. The Founding Fathers of the American Republic were, needless to say, thoroughgoing republicans, if not Republicans.

Lileks.

There is no public consciousness. There are memes and opinions held by some, broadcast loudly to millions, accepted by some, ignored by others. If you do nothing but read or generate articles saturated with llike-minded chatter about your pet issues, yes, you think there’s a public consciousness, but that’s like being on a bus full of slumbering people and concluding the whole world’s asleep.

Read it.

It’s not enough to be a vegetarian, it’s not even enough to be obnoxious about it, one is obliged to join in the Hunt for Heretics and Sinners lest one be castigated as One Of Them.

MSNBC Panel Claims Trump Doesn’t Care About Hawaii Since They Voted Against Him

NYT Officially Designates Trump A Racist, And Nobody Cares

Scarborough Accuses GOP Senators Cotton And Perdue Of ‘Lying’ For ‘Racist’ President  Except, of course, that there is no actual evidence that Trump is racist. It’s just a proglodyte talking point.

NY Times ‘News’ Story Goes All Out on Trump ‘Racism’: ‘America Prefers White People’  And the New York Times does not. That’s it in a nutshell.

The New York Times List Of Donald Trump’s “Racist” Quotes Is Garbage  ‘In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s efforts to bring black and white America together, the New York Times has chosen to stoke arguments over race by amassing a collection of allegedly racist quotes by Donald Trump. The piece is titled: Donald Trump’s Racism:The Definitive List. In many places, the alleged examples of racism are dishonest and absurd. Time and time again, truthful statements by Trump are deemed to be “racist.” It’s shoddy work, and the Times ought to be deeply ashamed.’

Joe Scarborough: Trump Wants To ‘Keep Out People Who Are Not White’  For which, of course, there is no actual evidence, merely proglodyte talking points.

CBS’s Garrett Preemptively Blames Trump and GOP ‘Hardliners’ for Shutdown  Laying the groundwork for the Narrative, like good proglodytes.

Donald Trump condemned by pastor during sermon while Mike Pence ‘sits in pews red-faced’  It’s not enough these days to dislike somebody, you have to insult them publicly in front of their friends. That’s proglodyte manners.

Read it.

A team of scientists from University of Toronto, University of California, Berkeley and the Canadian Light Source (CLS) successfully managed to work out the ideal conditions for converting carbon dioxide to ethylene.

…

The researchers were able to design a catalyst and identify the precise conditions that maximise ethylene production during the reaction, while minimising methane and carbon monoxide production.

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The commanding officers for two American warships crippled in fatal accidents are facing military criminal charges ranging from negligent homicide to dereliction of duty.

An unusual step that underscores the seriousness of this situation.

Cmdr. Bryce Benson, the former commander of the Fitzgerald, together with three junior officers, face military criminal charges including dereliction of duty, hazarding a vessel and negligent homicide. Cmdr. Jessie L. Sanchez, former commander of the McCain, faces the same charges, according to USNI News.

Typically officers involved in incidents such as these are merely put somewhere that it’s obvious they have no future in the Navy. They then either retire or resign, depending on how much service they’ve got.

Read it.

Can’t wait to see how the Usual Suspects will spin this one.

UPDATE: Acosta Suggests WH Doctor Could Be Withholding Information About Trump’s Health

Journos Unable To Accept Results Of Trump’s Physical Exam

But He’s Crazy! Liberal Media Embarrass Themselves, Demand Doctor Insist Trump’s Mentally Ill

Normal people believe it when they see it. Proglodytes see it when they believe it.

Read it.

This is the Nobel Laureate in Economics who predicted a stock market crash if Trump were elected.

Makes you wonder what the Swedes were thinking. Oh, wait….

In any event, Krugman has been a parrot for the Crustian Narrative since he first got his name in print.

Read it.

Yeah, everybody and his dog calling Trump a racist really got the Democrats what they wanted, didn’t it?

I am reminder of the tale of the Scorpion and the Frog.

Read it.

Cory Booker’s problem is that he doesn’t have enough name recognition to make him a Player in the Democrat power structure. This may be an attempt to raise his profile by being Mr Outrage, a niche in which Elizabeth Warren has so successfully accomplished.

This also lets him posture about his ‘blackness’, which isn’t as obvious as it is with, say, Maxine Waters. It’s always a problem for these you’d-never-know-they’re-black-if-they-didn’t-tell you folks.

Quiz — Find the black guy in this picture:

For reference, here is a picture of an actual black guy:

I’d be willing to bet money that Cory Booker has almost as many white great-grandparents as I do.

Read it.

I’m not sure what the legal theory would be behind such a move. Certainly there would be grounds form noncompliant local officials to be impeached, but most of them have at least the support of their local political establishments.

Read it.

The founders of the state are appealing to Article 4, Section 3 of the U.S. Constitution and plan to bring legislation to the California legislature in the next 10 to 18 months to legally divide the state in two, CBS Sacramento reported Monday. West Virginia was created by the same method in 1863. The founders say that high taxes and poor government have forced the rural counties to take action against the more wealthy coastal areas.

This will go nowhere, of course, because the Left Coast needs these Other People’s Money to support their incipient socialist state. But it’s a noble effort.

“Well, it’s been ungovernable for a long time. High taxes, education, you name it, and we’re rated around 48th or 50th from a business climate and standpoint in California,” founder Robert Paul Preston. “There’s something wrong when you have a rural county such as this one, and you go down to Orange County which is mostly urban, and it has the same set of problems, and it happens because of how the state is being governed and taxed.”

When this fails, there’s plenty of room for you guys in Texas. C’mon down!

Steve Sailer casts his mind back.

Pretty soon, most of the edible big beasts were extinct.

This is still often blamed on Climate Change, since, obviously, it must have been easier for mammoths and the like to survive in the Americas during the Ice Age when the future site of Chicago was buried under a mile of ice.

…

In contrast, black bears are a little more at ease with people. It’s pretty common on Los Angeles news stations to show video of a black bear who has come down out of the hills for a swim in a backyard pool. The bear’s view of the traditional middle class Southern California lifestyle of a ranch house, backyard, and swimming pool, seems to be: “Cool! But how can they afford that?”

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Today the bicycle is a mixed bag, usually with more negatives than positives. In many cities, bike lanes now consume more road space than they free up, they add to pollution as well as reducing it, they hurt neighbourhoods and business districts alike, and they have become a drain on the public purse. The bicycle today — or rather the infrastructure that now supports it — exemplifies “inappropriate technology,” a good idea gone wrong through unsustainable, willy-nilly top-down planning.

Read it.

In the Land of Fruits and Nuts, it is not allowable that one, by one’s actions, undermine the efforts of Democrats to build a permanent underclass dependent on government handouts.

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You’d think that the government would learn from experience, but the ‘war on drugs’ proves that they don’t.

When the Crust are dedicated to hunt down Heretics and Sinners, there is no such thing as ‘fact’, there is only dogma’.

Time to be really politically incorrect.

When liberals discover that I have unorthodox views on race, they poke around for other unorthodox views. They think that if I am beyond the pale on enough fashionable subjects, it means I am a crackpot, and they can ignore the uncomfortable things I say about race.

…

We are supposed to care about the survival of the snail darter and the spotted owl. If you have endangered salamanders living on your property, the feds may not even let you build a house. I care a whole lot more about the survival of white people than I do about snail darters, and by 2050 we are expected to be no more than 4 or 5 percent of the world population.

Everybody is encouraged to be proud of their ethnic background except white people; they get criminalized for it.

Yeah — how come?

Jacob Lloyd expands on a familiar topic.

I’m not going to get into an argument about what a social justice warrior actually is, because the very concept is a slippery one – and, in any case, it’s better to see them as social justice bullies.  What I will say is that geeks are triggered by social justice bullies.

The core problem with SJWs is not that they are evil.  They have good intentions.  But they see people as groups, rather than individuals.  There is no attempt to draw a line between two different people, not when they’re in the same group.  SJWs see Sheldon Cooper and Warren Mears as being identical, even though they’re very different people.  People who happen to be in the favored groups get better treatment than the unfavored.  Worse, they are unable or unwilling to understand how their words scan to everyone outside their bubble.  A reasonable argument (to them) may not seem quite so reasonable to everyone else.

SJW tactics are very well known to geeks – they faced them back in high school!  Someone steps out of line – someone unpopular, someone with few true friends – and promptly gets blasted by the SJWs.  (The internet makes this worse, as it is now possible to pour scorn on JK Rowling, George RR Martin and others who would be too popular to bully in high school.)  The SJWs use ‘call-outs’ as weapons; instead of addressing matters privately, they humiliate their victims publicly.  And anyone who apologizes only makes it worse for themselves.

This is similar to Cool Kids Syndrome that I discussed earlier in the context of the supposed Democrat boycott of the State of the Union Message.

(George R.R. Martin looks like a huge tick, anyway, so it’s impossible to see him as being ‘popular in high school’.)

Read it.

Well, I can’t see it as a varietal wine.

Why does ‘gadget’ mean a gadget?

And don’t get me started on ‘widget’….

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Uh, guys, if it’s a ‘crime’, then it was created by government. ‘Automakers’ can’t make something a crime.

If lawmakers were corrupt, that’s their fault, too. Don’t badmouth business because government screwed up.

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Daniel Horowitz reports on a new study by criminologist John Lott. It finds that illegal aliens commit crimes at a disproportionate rate relative to their share of the population.

Lott’s study is based on data from the state of Arizona. His team examined data on all prisoners who entered the Arizona state prison from January 1985 through June 2017.

News you’ll never see in the DemLegHump Media.

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That’s a lot more impressive than ‘Raise my taxes!’

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Well, now. Perhaps we ought to restrict immigration from San Francisco.

Wonder how they’re going to pin that on Trump.

Read it.

Well, now. Ain’t that special. Wonder what Nancy Botox has to say to that.

Steven Hayward of PowerLine gives us the lineup.

Paul has already taken note of the Maryland Senate candidacy of Chelsea Manning, but I think we have overlooked the comic possibilities of the identity politics train wreck this might offer.

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Feel the Bern.

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I guess they got tired of blaming Trump.

Watch it.

If you aren’t following Scott Adams’ Periscope sessions, you’re missing half the fun.