Read it.

It’s a great place to visit, but you really wouldn’t want to live there.

Read it.

I want one of those.

Read it.

The road to this agricultural town winds through the slums and cartel-controlled territory of Michoacán, ground zero for Mexico’s drug war, before arriving at a sight so strange it can seem like a mirage.

Fifteen-foot stone turrets are staffed by men whose green uniforms belong to no official force. Beyond them, a statue of an avocado bears the inscription “avocado capital of the world.” And beyond the statue is Tancítaro, an island of safety and stability amid the most violent period in Mexico’s history.

Local orchard owners, who export over $1 million in avocados per day, mostly to the United States, underwrite what has effectively become an independent city-state. Self-policing and self-governing, it is a sanctuary from drug cartels as well as from the Mexican state.

How American.

Read it.

Too bad the KGB isn’t around to give her a grant.

Nothing is so important as the proglodyte search for Heretics and Sinners….

Read it.

Room-temperature superconductors would be a singularity-level discovery.

Read it.

Or just stop having pets. That works, too.

First World problem….

Read it.

Whenever I’m reading a science fiction book involving an alien species, I always put it down if the alien species involved aren’t at least as strange as the Japanese.

Read it.

Some of us are very fortunate in our parents.

Read it.

But you have to remember that the tax cut bill was a TOTAL GIVEAWAY to The Rich ™ and actually STEALS MONEY from The Poor ™.

Read it.

But of course you have to realize that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in his first year in office.

Read it.

As an American, I’m embarrassed that Mika has any friends.

Read it.

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

I am not making this up.

Read it.

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

MSNBC Guest: ‘Evidentiary Piece Of The Book’ Is ‘Less Important’ Because We Already Know Trump Acts This Way  The Dan Rather defense: ‘fake but accurate’.

For Liberals, Every Damn Thing In the World Is About Trump

Psychiatrist Who Raised Concerns About Trump’s Mental Health Wants To ‘Contain’ Him For An Evaluation  The old statist impulse often comes out when it’s least expected.

NPR Anchor Uses Misquote to Trump Fan: Are You Backing a Lunatic Who’d Launch Nukes?

Telemundo Charges Trump with Waging ‘All-Out War’ on Immigrants  Some people can’t see the distinction between ‘immigrants’ and ‘illegal immigrants’.

Tom Steyer Is Hand-Delivering 535 Copies Of Wolff’s Book To Congress  It would be funny if one of the recipients smacked him with it.

Bernie Sanders: Trump Is ‘So Offensive’ And ‘I Worry About Him Being A Pathological Liar’  Bernie, that’s the LEAST of your worries.

Stephen Colbert jokes that Michael Wolff stole ‘Fire And Fury’ material from new show  I guess Colbert makes it up, too.

Woody Harrelson says he had to ‘fire up a joint’ to get through dinner with Donald Trump  Or even get out of bed in the morning, looks like.

ABC Panel Lauds Wolff’s Gossip Despite Agreeing Only ’50 Percent’ Was True  ‘Fake but accurate’.

John Hinderaker shakes his head.

The Democrats are doing the same thing to Donald Trump that they did to Ronald Reagan–questioning his sanity, claiming he is senile and unstable, denying his fitness for office. There are two differences: the Democratic Party controls the press more monolithically today than it did durning the 1980s, and the Democrats hate Trump even more than they hated Reagan–something I never expected to see.

Take comfort. If you’re taking flak, it means you’re over the target.

Read it.

Tablets are in many ways just like physical books—the screen has well defined boundaries and the optimal number of words per line doesn’t suddenly change on the screen. But in other ways, tablets are nothing like physical books—the text can extend in every direction, the type can change size. So how do we reconcile these similarities and differences? Where is the baseline for designers looking to produce beautiful, readable text on a tablet?

One of the very nice things about the Kindle (and the Kindle app on digital devices) is that they consistently look for ways to make your reading experience better. I see them sitting down in a big room on Monday around a whiteboard with a page-full of text and saying ‘What would a user want to do from this point? Okay, let’s implement that.’ They are constantly making improvements, to the point where they are adding things I didn’t know I needed until I saw them. That’s innovation. I now prefer reading on the Kindle (app) to reading an actual physical book.

I’d love to grow my own food, but I can’t find bacon seeds anywhere (not even at Whole Foods).

Pepsi bushes appear to be non-existent in my neck of the woods, as well.

Bummer.

Read it.

I’m impressed.

Cue feminist outrage.

Read it.

• Google changed Silicon Valley with its free company bikes that help employees get across its giant corporate campus.
• But locals in Mountain View, California — where Google is based — reportedly view the bikes as their own and end up displacing 100 to 250 bikes on a weekly basis.
• Now Google is trying to cut its losses. It’s hired a team of 30 contractors to retrieve bikes from around the city, and it is testing other solutions like GPS trackers and bike locks, according to The Wall Street Journal.

And reality intrudes into the hipster universe. Women and minorities hardest hit, no doubt.

Read it.

Tit for tat. BDS gives us a convenient way to identify all of the troublemakers.

Gary Spedding, a British cross-party consultant on Israel and the Palestinian Territories, told The Independent the blacklist was merely an excuse to legally justify barring activists and human rights observers from entering the country,

And a good excuse it is. These one-way idiots seem to think that they are entitled to cause trouble for Israel, but Israel is somehow not entitled to exclude them for it. Unbelievable.

I’m a phobic, you’re a phobic, he’s a phobic, she’s a phobic, wouldn’t you like to be a phobic too?

Read it.

The real question is, Affordable for whom?

Hint: Union labor, which almost all government activities require.

Read it.

Hah! Bacon makes everything better.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

The claimants accusing him of infringement include publishers of white noise intended for sleep therapy.

“I will be disputing these claims,” he told the BBC.

In this case, those accusing Mr Tomczak are not demanding the video’s removal, but instead the reward of any revenue made from advertising associated with it.

So it’s really All About The Money.

Read it.

Hey, where are those rising sea levels we were promised? Huh?

Read it.

How about that great government-provided health care? It sucks, but you’ll never see a bill! Except your tax bill.

The Other McCain poses an interesting question.

Occam’s Razor dictates that we ought not seek an obscure or complex explanation when an obvious and simple one is at hand. At some point during the past half-century, Democrats became the anti-white party, not necessarily because of their beliefs, but because of their interests.

You may dispute this interpretation, but what is the alternative theory?

Donald Trump book ‘will end his presidency’, says author of explosive Fire and Fury exposé  Oh, I think not.

Battle for gay rights in small-town Kentucky election is a symbol of Donald Trump’s raging culture war  Well, not’s not ‘Donald Trump’s raging cultural war’, since the war existed before he came along and he has shown no impulse to ‘fight’ any such ‘cultural war’; he’s just the most recent proglodyte verbal piñata. Calling it ‘Trump’s cultural war’ is like blaming Poland for starting WWII.

Donald Trump is more sinister than Richard Nixon, says Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg  In other words, he’s likely to get more ‘Republican stuff’ done than Reagan. But we knew that.

Donald Trump’s extraordinary defence of his ‘mental stability’, in full  Scott Adams’ analysis here.

Hollywood Director Judd Apatow Melts Down Over Trump’s ‘Stable Genius’ Tweets  C’mon, boy, catch the frisbee!

Read it.

As I sit here at my desk I hear a faint susurration of the air-conditioning system and a few random clicks and pops from various disk drives in the computer and the NAS. I don’t mind the air-conditioning noise because I spent my formative youth in the Navy where the sound of moving air meant that we could breath (and that was a good thing) — you didn’t ever want that noise to stop. (Now there’s the lawn mower from my neighbor next door but that’s an occasional thing, very comforting to we who live in suburbia. Plus the occasional plane over head and who knows what the Hell that is all about?)

I don’t mind a little noise; total silence would say to me ‘The world is dead’ and that would be an uncomfortable thing. There is a reason that those noise machines that supposedly help you to sleep have settings like SURF and WIND and RAIN. When I was younger and working I had a little all-in-one unit about six inches in diameter that contained a radio, a single-disk CD player, and a bunch of built in ‘relaxation’ sounds that were a great help in closing out a noisy office and allowing me to concentrate on my work.

Read it.

Yeah, tell us how that works out for you.

Read it.

How about that great government-provided health care? It sucks, but you’ll never see a bill! Except your tax bill, of course.

Read it.

There you go: Politically Correct Fat (brown good, white bad).

Read it.

How about that great government-provided healthcare? It sucks, but you’ll never see a bill! Except your tax bill, of course.

Read it.

Officially, the unemployment rate stands at 4.1 percent, as of December 2017. Unofficially — but in reality — the unemployment rate stands 6.5 percentage points higher at 10.6 percent, where it stood 9 months earlier. While the official unemployment rate has dropped by 5.9 percentage points from its peak in 2009, the real unemployment rate has dropped by only 2.9 percentage points since then.

…

In short, if you are 16 years of age and older, not confined to an institution or on active duty in the armed forces, but have not recently made specific efforts to find employment, you are not (officially) a member of the labor force. And if you are not (officially) a member of the labor force because you have given up looking for work, you are not (officially) unemployed — according to the BLS. Of course, you are really unemployed, but your unemployment is well disguised by the BLS’s contorted definition of unemployment.

Read it.

Of course not. They’ve got The New Hitler to Resist; what is a Clinton scandal compared to that?

Read it.

Except that Red State Americans can’t have you shot or thrown in jail like the Iranian mullahs.

You’d think he’d know that, but I guess not.

Read it.

Is this a great country or what?

Read it.

I am a utilitarian. Many (most?) utilitarians are progressives. So why am I not a progressive?

…

My view is that (at the current margin) more government spending does not solve these sorts of problems, it just ends up being wasted. Rather we should focus on boosting the efficiency of the economy.

Government and efficiency don’t live in the same universe.

I suspect that if Bannon wants to have some credibility he not wander around looking like a derelict. I’d be happy to buy him a suit and set him up with a barber. I’d even send him a gift subscription to the Dollar Shave Club.

Read it.

All of which is irrelevant, because they’re asking for an increase in ordinary income tax rates, and none of them make their money as wages or other ordinary income.

The reason Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary is because his money comes from capital gains from the sale of stock.

If you tax a guy who’s making a million a year at 90%, he still nets $100,000; if you do the same for somebody making $100,000, he winds up with $10,000. Rich people don’t care how much the income tax rate is because they never notice it — it’s all numbers on the page to them. What it DOES do is hit the almost-millionaires; you know, the guys who, if they have some money in their pocket, might be competing with a Patriotic Millionaire for a seat at a tony restaurant or a lift ticket at Aspen or a slot at a Monaco marina.

Of course, if they REALLY WANTED TO PAY MORE TAX, they could just send a check to the IRS. I’m sure the Treasury would be happy to get it. But they never do that, do they? So it’s not just that they’re not taxed enough, it’s that EVERYBODY isn’t taxed enough. (See explanation above.)

Read it.

Further adventures of the Horndog in Chief.

Read it.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

Maybe because they’re the bad guys? That’s just a guess, you understand.

Gidney, an associate professor in child study and human development at Tufts University who specializes in sociolinguistics, saw Scar’s accent as part of a disturbing pattern in the film: Foreign accents and non-standard dialects were being used to voice all of the “bad” characters. Gidney also noticed that Scar’s minions, the hyenas, spoke in either African American English or English with a Spanish accent. Gidney found this trend concerning, especially since the theme of the movie could be described as “the ‘natural order of things,’” he said. “I thought it was really disturbing that it was necessary to ‘take back the jungle’ from the British-sounding evil lion, plus the African American-sounding and Latino-sounding hyenas.”

God forbid we should pretend that anything is ‘the natural order of things’.

Gidney was inspired to embark on a study of language patterns in animated kids’ entertainment, teaming up with Julie Dobrow, a senior lecturer at Tufts who specializes in issues of children and media, to study how these trends play out on kids’ television shows. They’ve since analyzed about 30 shows and 1,500 characters, and they’re still at work on the project.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

The kicker: In many of the cases studied, villains were given foreign accents. A modern-day example is Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz, the bad guy in Phineas and Ferb who speaks in a German(ish) accent and hails from the fictional European country Drusselstein. Meanwhile, the study found that most of the heroic characters in their research sample were American-sounding; only two heroes had foreign accents. Since television is a prominent source of cultural messaging for children, this correlation of foreign accents with “bad” characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States.

Ah. ‘Engage with diversity’. There you go. The proglodyte hunt for Heretics and Sinners reaches into cartoons.

Read it.

Imagine that!

MSNBC Republican Charlie Sykes: Trump’s Tweets Display ‘Textbook’ ‘Authoritarianism’  What MSNBC means by ‘conservative’ is what we conservatives mean by ‘liberal’.

“Your Honor, the President Is Acting Like He’s in Charge and We Want It Stopped”  Joe Bob Briggs is on the case

Stephen Colbert shoots down Donald Trump with fake viagra advert: ‘Do we all have to die because your penis is small?’  Dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. Let me know when Colbert hits puberty.

Donald Trump’s ‘rush of tweeting’ is ‘indication of his falling apart under stress’, says Yale psychiatrist  Another example of the ‘psychic psychiatrist’ hallucination. If they did this to anyone else, it would be considered unprofessional.

Donald Trump eats McDonald’s food to avoid being poisoned, claims new book  A not unreasonable concern.

Alt-Left Insanity: ‘Trump Trauma’ Is Making Liberals Freak Out

CNN Commentator: Trump Is ‘Dysfunctional And Dishonest And Disloyal And Dirty And Dumb’  The resemblance between CNN and a high school cafeteria is probably not intentional.

MSNBC: Even If ‘Not All’ of Trump Book Is True, ‘the Spirit Is’ Accurate  The Dan Rather defense ‘fake but accurate’

Utah Man Indicted For Threatening To Kill ‘Sexist, Racist, Homophobic’ Trump

Trump is ‘psychologically unfit’ and nuclear button tweet is grounds for removal, says former Bush ethics lawyer  Another instance of the ‘psychic psychiatrist hallucination’.

Evidence of Trump campaign crimes exists, says Democrat Intelligence committee member  Of course he doesn’t cite any evidence but there just HAS TO BE some because Trump!

Did Donald Trump really have sex with his friends’ wives?  Well, no, but they’re running out of shit to say.

The View’s Behar Attacks ‘Collaborator’ Sean Hannity, Calls Trump ‘Typical Bully’  The only would-be bully here is the incongruously-named Joy Behar.

MSNBC: ‘Isn’t It Remarkable That We’re’ Discussing Trump’s ‘Mental State?’  Remarkable? No. Deranged? Yes.

Katy Tur: White House ‘Sources’ Say They’re Concerned About Trump’s ‘Mental State’  Conveniently unnamed.

Read it.

Hey, black people, hows that voting-for-Democrats-all-the-time thing working out for you?

UPDATE: JFK’s Nephew Says Rahm Emanuel Plans To Kick Black People Out Of Chicago

That would certainly solve a lot of his problems.

Read it.

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

I’m not sure I see the significance of two years. But hey. I quit worrying about my looks a long time ago.

Read it. And listen — if you really have to.

‘They may have won all the battles/But we had all the good songs!’  — Tom Lehrer