Read it.

Eminent domain abuse has reared its ugly head in East Harlem. As Ginger Adams Otis reports in the New York Daily News, city officials plan to seize a family-owned dry cleaning business and then hand the forcibly vacated land to a wealthy private developer.

Democrats talk a good fight when it comes the the poor and downtrodden, but it’s all hot air.

Read it.

Drainin’ the swamp, drainin’ the swamp….

Read it. And watch the video.

A new undercover video from Project Veritas shows Twitter employees discussing new ways for the social media site to censor political speech that they dislike.

The video shows eight current or former Twitter employees explaining how they will employ “shadow banning” and algorithms to prevent political opponents from spreading their ideas on the platform.

Severian continues our National Conversation.

Sometime in the Sixties, we noticed that many successful people have college degrees.  Because “correlation isn’t causation” is a truth we seem hardwired to ignore, we went on to infer that because successful people tend to have college degrees, a college degree causes success.  And since college degrees can be bought, we decided to buy them for our kids.  After all, what parent doesn’t want his kids to succeed?

The consequences were predictable to anyone who has ever seen a consumer fad.  Furbies, Cabbage Patch Kids, Tamagotchis, pet rocks, mood rings, coonskin caps, whatever (I dare you not to spend the next two hours on that site).  First everyone wants one, then the prices jack into the stratosphere, then everyone has one, then nobody cares anymore, because when it comes right down to it you’re carrying a fucking rock around in a box.

That’s what college is these days.

And now we have everybody and his sister pushed into going to college, even if they haven’t got the smarts or the discipline to get a degree, and the taxpayers are picking up the bill, either at the time in the form of financial aid or on down the line when they default on their humongous student loans.

Universities were never intended to be jobs training programs.  Nor were they intended to be research centers.  Both of those are parasitic on the bad “college causes success” inference from the Sixties.  With all those kids flooding onto campuses — and paying a pretty penny to do it! — military contractors like Dow Chemical realized they had a huge supply of trained labor sitting around, in the form of all those new-minted science PhDs churned out to meet the consequent demand for professors.  Why give some egghead a GS rating, a lifetime pension, and a security clearance, when Football U. will foot the bill for you?

Colleges are conduits for Elite values.  That’s it.  That’s all they’ve ever been.

And the Elite values they inculcate these days aren’t calculated to get somebody a job, but rather to become part of the permanent Underclass that, willy nilly, votes for Democrats because they’re dependent on Free Stuff at taxpayer expense.

Joe Bob Briggs tries to sort things out.

Every day somebody howls for the shutdown of a website, the squelching of a Twitter account, the nuking of a Facebook page, the removal of a video or a screed or a manifesto, all in the name of…uh…well, it depends, but mostly in the name of saving the world.

We’ve become a nation of scolds and censors and digital night-riders, trying to get people removed from the internet.

Many of these modern-day bowdlerizers are the same people crowing about “net neutrality,” whatever that is (and believe me, I’ve tried to figure it out), and demanding that Disney give up the copyright to Mickey Mouse because, after all, everything should be free and available and easy to find.

Well, everything except hate speech. Whatever that is.

Read it.

California state senator Scott Wiener, who represents San Francisco, has introduced Senate Bill 827, which would effectively void all local zoning rules in “transit-rich” areas, meaning areas within a half mile of a rail station or a quarter mile of a stop on a frequent bus route. Wiener’s goal is to allow the construction of high-density housing in those transit-rich areas, thus simultaneously providing more affordable housing and encouraging more people to ride transit.

Unfortunately for Scot Wiener, one of the distinguishing characteristics of SWPL proglodytes is hard-core NIMBYism, and so turning San Fran into some sort of Left Coast Houston has absolutely no chance of going anywhere.

Good thing, too, since we’ve already got a Houston here in Texas and it’s got its arms wide open for anybody priced out of their California dreamin’.

Steven Hayward wrings his hands.

Political scientists can point to a lot of evidence from past election cycles that one early sign that a party is facing a rout at the next election is a wave of incumbent retirements. In the last two days two senior Republican House members in California have announced that they will retire this year: Darrell Issa, and Ed Royce. Issa, based near San Diego, has just barely hung on to his seat in the last couple of election cycles, and Royce’s Orange County seat has been looking more marginal for a long time. California Republicans are going to be hard pressed to hold these two seats. (Incidentally, term limit rules adopted back in the Gingrich years may have played a role in these decisions. Both Issa and Royce would lose their committee chairmanships next year even if re-elected.)

A lot of normally intelligent right wing commenters have been getting the vapors about the 2018 mid-term elections, and most of it (as here) makes mountains out of molehills. Two Republican Congressmen having troubles in ever-increasingly Democrat California is not the same as a ‘wave of incumbent retirements’. Looking at trends is fine so long as the trends represent actual facts on the ground, and can be very misleading if you just cut-and-paste from the past to the present without making sure that the shoe fits this time.

People have have also been jittery about the President’s ‘low approval ratings’, ignoring the fact that (a) these are all polls run by people who oversample Democrats (you can look it up), and so will be worse than reality (the same polls showed Hillary getting a landslide a year ago, if you’ll remember), and (b) Trump isn’t seen as some sort of avatar of Republicanism the way that Presidents like Reagan and the Bushes were, so there’s a disconnect that makes such conventional wisdom inapplicable in the Age of Trump.

Trump is Getting Stuff Done and dragging Congress along behind him, and any Republican who is worried about re-election just needs to get with that program. The ones who are in trouble are the anti-Trumpers like Jeff Flake, and I have absolutely no problems with them retiring and letting an actual Republican try for that seat.

Read it.

Great, let the stoners and the eco-Nazis fight it out for a change.

The Madness of the Anti-Trump Shrinks

Trump’s Public Meeting With Congress Destroys Narrative That He’s Mentally Unfit

Robert De Niro destroys Donald Trump in damning speech: ‘He’s the f**king idiot jerk off in chief’  All they got is trash talk.

Trump presidency will end if Russia investigation touches on his finances, predicts Michael Wolff  Predicting the ‘end of the Trump Presidency’? Line forms on the left.

Chris Matthews Compares Trump Kids To Saddam Hussein’s Children  Yeah, we all remember that time that Jared Kushner ran his enemies through a plastic shredder. I totally see the resemblance. (Chris, check your meds.)

Donald Trump reveals plans to limit free speech with new libel laws  Well, no, actually, he didn’t.

NYT’s Kristof: Trump Is Scientifically Proven ‘Threat to Democracy’  Junk science makes it into the New York Times.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Thank goodness for Russian sleazeballs exploiting our immigration law loopholes: their whiteness allows the mass media to get worked up on the topic instead of still nervously shying away from, say, endemic Chinese birth tourism on the grounds that it might be racist to notice.

Not to mention the anchor babies from South of the Border Down Mexico Way. (I told you not to mention those!)

Read it.

As they do for all Americans.

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Score cards! Getcher score cards here! Ya can’t tell the victims without a score card!

Read it.

Giving amnesty to “Dreamers”—young adults brought to the U.S. illegally as children—would create a deficit of about $26 billion over 10 years, according to a report last month from the Congressional Budget Office.

“If we want to save taxpayers’ money, probably the best strategy is to enforce the law and encourage those here illegally to return to their home countries.”—@wwwCISorg’s Steven Camarota

In a video released Monday, the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies details costs presented in the government report.

Read it.

A hitchhiking robot that relied on the kindness of strangers to travel the world has been found with its head and arms ripped off, just two weeks into its first American tour.

The child-sized robot, known as hitchBOT, was found damaged beyond repair on the streets of Philadelphia early on Saturday. It had earlier hitched across the entire of Canada for 26 days and completed a hitchhiking adventure through Germany.

Note that they don’t dare reveal in what part of Philadelphia this happened. From this I suspect that it was in an area frequented by People of Color ™.

Read it.

Still waiting for you and Bill to write those checks to the IRS, Warren ‘Raise My Taxes’ Buffet.

Read it.

Just looking at his picture, I’d say it’s no great loss.

Read it.

The plans for the future Obama presidential library have just been released, and they are quite progressive, to say the least.

The library is scheduled to be built in Chicago, Illinois and will be within a stone’s throw of the University of Chicago, Jackson Park and the South Shore Cultural Center. The design includes three buildings: a museum, library and forum.

The library’s design and location has been a source of controversy itself within the Chicago community. The new 3D renderings for the park — released Wednesday — will only throw fuel on that fire.

It looks to me like a set from The Hunger Games.

UPDATE: Furious Chicago Professors Demand Obama Move His ‘Socially Regressive’ Presidential Center Elsewhere

The chief advantage of the Wolff book for the DemLegHump Media is that it allows them to insult Trump under the guise of ‘just reporting on what the book says’. That will keep it popular until they realize that, no, it won’t ‘drive Trump from office’ so they jump to the next lilypad in the swamp.

It will be a best-seller for a while because there are a lot of people out there who hate Trump and this is $20 worth of confirmation bias, cheap at the price. ‘See! It’s right there in a book! Told you so!’ Ann Coulter has been riding the reciprocal of that wave for years. (Somebody get that girl some bacon. She looks anorexic.)

But in the long run it won’t matter. There were a spate of books that came out during Bill Clinton’s tenure about all of the chicks he boffed and claiming that the was running drugs through Mena while he was governor, and nobody remembers that stuff except for experienced haters like myself. Certainly Millenials won’t; when something scrolls off of their Twitter feed it falls right in the Memory Hole.

This whole effort, on Wolff’s part and the DemLegHump Media’s part, is still an attempt to play football while Trump is playing Call of Duty. Career politicians, even those who came late to the game like the Blessed Ronald Reagan, work within a structure where certain people’s opinions count and other people’s opinion’s don’t, and on that playing field the Democrats have been running downhill since Roosevelt.

Trump doesn’t know and doesn’t care what the Career Politician Thing To Do is. Those are conditioned reflexes that he never developed. He would make a great Bond Villain — you can never believe what you hear and only half of what you see, and whenever he offers to hold the football so you can kick it (as he did during the DACA meeting) it’s usually a good idea to give it a second thought. Watch the movie Where Eagles Dare if you want to know how things are going to develop these next three years. (Hint: Trump is played by Richard Burton. I’m hoping that Republicans can be as quick on the uptake as Clint Eastwood but I’m not optimistic.)

I have to agree with Scott Adams that the next President will be the biggest let-down imaginable; Trump is going to be an impossible act to follow.

Read it.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Your tax dollars at work.

UPDATE: Jack In The Box CEO: We May Replace Workers With Robots Because Of $15 Minimum Wage Campaign

Read it.

Sounds scary to me. Women and minorities hardest hit, obviously.

Read it.

Yeah, that First Congressional District looks kinda suspicious. And the 12th is right behind it.

Read it.

Get up, make money, go to bed. Easy peasy.

“You can change the world with an idea, but you have to think of it first.” — Simon Mendelssohn

Read it.

After 10 years running Sungevity, I recently completed a tour visiting solar companies in and around the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia. I am pleased to report the residential solar industry is thriving around the world — everywhere except right here in the U.S.

The reason for this is startlingly simple: American consumers are being charged over two times more for solar than is the average consumer overseas. That’s USD $10,000 more for a typical 5-kilowatt residential solar system. The panels are the same — so what on earth is going on?

The answer: red tape.

Here in the land of technology leadership and free-market enterprise, American regulation has more than doubled the cost of solar.

This is why the Democrats keep shrinking. They want the government to run stuff, and (as the Post Office and TSA demonstrate) whenever the government runs stuff they suck at it.

Read it.

And that’s the worst kind of racism there is!

An Asian American Studies professor at the University of Illinois says that interactions between Asian American students and international Asian students carries the risk of reinforcing so-called “colorblind racism.” Soo Ah Kwon says that students reinforce that form of racism in their attempts to reach out to their international counterparts.

I am not making this up.

“We problematize this schema not only because it places undue responsibility upon Asian American students but [because] it also renders the experiences of racial marginalization and discrimination invisible for international and domestic racial minority students,” writes Kwon.

God forbid that a schema go unproblematized. Women and minorities hardest hit, etc. etc.

Kwon says “colorblind racism” happens when people do not take race into account when confronting issues, which she argues is problematic because it ignores “structures of power that privileges whiteness and white supremacy.”

All racism, all the time. Got it. Martin Luther King got suckered by that one, obviously.

NBC’s Chuck Todd: Wolff’s Book ‘Reinforces’ Anti-Trump Narrative from ‘Entire Media’  As it was designed to do.

Joe Scarborough Complains Washington Post Won’t Publish His Trump Dementia Claim  It must really be demented.

Protesters beam ‘F*** Trump’ on college football national championship stadium before player appears to shout it

‘Roseanne’ star says hit sitcom returning to screens to hold a mirror up to Donald Trump’s America  Welcome to the Funhouse.

Krugman: Trump’s Admin Is Made Up Of ‘The Worst And Dumbest’  Actually, for ‘worst and dumbest’ I would nominate a Nobel Laureate in Economics who predicted a stock market crash that didn’t happen. Can’t get much dumber than that.

Scarborough Admits: No “Objective Evidence” That Trump Mentally Unfit  Which will not, of course, prevent him from claiming it.

WaPo Delves Deeper Into Fiction, Writes Fantasy Op-Ed In Trump’s Voice  They’ve got nothing real to work with, so they have to make stuff up.

Latest Fact-Free Claim From Michael Wolff: Trump May Be Dyslexic!

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Yet Another Crooked Black Female Politician. Seems as if there’s a lot of that going around.

Read it.

Watch the swamp drain right in front of your eyes.

Read it.

There already is a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, but the current crop of illegal immigrants want to jump the line and be rewarded for it.

Yes, the current immigration process is in the hands of TSA rejects. Yes, it is one of the least efficient and frustrating activities by a bureaucracy famous for its inefficiency. So the answer is to FIX IT. If Senator Graham had put as much effort into fixing the current system as he has into wringing his hand over those poor lawbreakers who snuck in the back door and now feel that their entitled to free room & board, it would be well on its way.

Democrats see amnesty for illegal immigrants as a cheap & easy way to create a large permanent dependent underclass whose votes they can buy in return for Free Stuff at the expense of the American taxpayer. They’ve had a lot of success with black people and figure that brown people are their next target. I see no reason why any Republican legislator ought to be willing to play their reindeer games.

Read it.

But you have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

Lileks, fisking David Brooks of the New York Times — not all that hard to do, but Lileks is always worth reading.

Most Trump critics are very shallow thinkers, in that they see Trump like a movie on a screen and think that what they see is what they get. The refuse to understand that what they see is a carefully calculated public persona that is used to confound his critics and enemies and, while they are busy chasing the frisbee, behind the camera he is Getting Things Done more effectively than any Republican President in my lifetime.

Scott Adams has a great analysis of this.Read his book.

Read it.

This will be entertaining.

Read it.

But you have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

The one example I always remember was about a girl who had graduated from Harvard and was unable to find a job she deserved. Instead she was reduced to waiting tables (gasp!) and doing temp work in offices. The story went through her struggles to get interviews and her process of considering alternative career options. Finally she landed a job as a social worker for the city. The piece wrapped up with a quick summary of her story and it was revealed that she had majored in folklore at Harvard.

Whenever the topic of college majors comes up, I always think of that story. I’ve made a hobby of rooting around in the course catalogs of liberal arts colleges, looking for bizarre classes and majors. Nothing so far has topped the Harvard Folklore and Mythology degree. Our colleges are full of lunatics doing useless work, of course, but there is some effort to dress it up as legitimate academic work. There’s no way to dress up a major in folklore. Exactly no one has ever said in an emergency, “We need a folklorist!”

If I were running a business I would not hire an Ivy League graduate without a lot of investigation into his or her background. It’s just not worth it these days.

Read it.

In Ohio, in case you’re not the political wonk they expect you to be. They could do a lot worse.

Read it.

What we discovered from the structural MRI scanning was remarkable. Numerous regions in the brains of the pandits were dramatically larger than those of controls, with over 10 percent more grey matter across both cerebral hemispheres, and substantial increases in cortical thickness. Although the exact cellular underpinnings of gray matter and cortical thickness measures are still under investigation, increases in these metrics consistently correlate with enhanced cognitive function.

Turns out that rote memorization is actually good for your brain. Sometimes the old ways are best.

Cue teacher-union heads exploding.

Read it.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Love to see Trump do this.

Read it.

Oh, fashionable victim schtick not working any more? Poor baby.

Read it.

Dude, you want to live in hipster-land, you get to pay hipster prices.

Read it.

We have the technology.

Read it.

AlGore must have gone there on vacation.

Who’ll be the first to blame Trump? Clock is ticking….

Read it.

The nerve of that guy.

Van Jones: It Would Be ‘Global Emergency’ If 50% Of People Around Any Other President Thought He Was Unstable Yeah: If.

MSNBC Commentator: Trump Is ‘Particularly Hostile’ To Expression From ‘Women And/Or African-Americans’  The evidence for which is: Zero.

Insanity! Michael Wolff Claims I ‘Have No Political Agenda’  It’s true. He’s just in it for the money.

Scarborough Wants GOP To Force Trump Into Mental Fitness ‘Exam’  I suggest that we force Scarborough into a mental fitness exam.

Media Excuse Away ESPN’s Katie Nolan for Calling President Trump ‘F—–g Stupid’  She works for ESPN so I guess she knows all about stupid.

Harvard Professor Compares Trump Mental Fitness Questions To Communist Russia Tactics  Hey, it worked for their communists, why can’t it work for our communists?

Anti-Trumpers Literally Dressing As Snowflakes At NAACP Championship

Steve Sailer sounds the alarm.

Read it.

And the Trump just keeps on winning.

Read it.

That would be fun. Trump would wipe the floor with her. I doubt that Putin would be impressed by crying.

“People of America! Look under your chair….”  And you will find a HUGE tax bill. Yeah, that will work.

How would Oprah respond to a terrorist attack? Hugs all around, is my guess. No, thanks.

Read it.

James Damore, a former Google engineer who was fired in August after posting a memo to an internal Google message board, arguing that women may not be equally represented in tech because they are biologically less capable of engineering, has filed a class action lawsuit against the company in Santa Clara Superior Court in Northern California.

His claims: that Google unfairly discriminates against white men whose political views are unpopular with its executives.

Damore is joined in the suit by another former Google engineer named David Gudeman, who spent three years with Google, working on a query engine. According to Gudeman’s LinkedIn profile, he left the company in December 2016 and has been self-employed since.

The lawsuit, filed by Dhillon Law Group, says it aims to represent all employees of Google who’ve been discriminated against due to their “perceived conservative political views by Google,” due to “their male gender by Google” and “due to their Caucasian race by Google.”

Pushback at last.