Read it.

How about that fantastic government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

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

Steve Sailer tells you what the DemLegHump Media won’t.

Read it.

Many academics in the modern world seem obsessed with the sex difference in engagement with science, technology, mathematics, and engineering (STEM) fields. Or rather they are obsessed with the fact that there are more men than women in some of these fields. There is particular concern about the lack of women in prestigious STEM fields, such as Ph.D.-level faculty positions, but surprisingly there is no concern about the under-representation of women in lower-level technical jobs, such as car mechanics or plumbing.

The concerned academics have been especially effective in convincing others, or at least intimidating them, into accepting their preferred interpretations regarding the source of these sex differences (as illustrated in the Google memo debate). These interpretations are not surprising and they include sexism, stereotype threat, and more recently implicit bias and microaggression. Each of these ideas has gained traction in the mainstream media and in many academic circles but their scientific foundations are shaky. In this essay, we’ll provide some background on the STEM controversy and consider multiple factors that might contribute to these sex differences.

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T he best example I know that gives insights into the functioning of a complex system is with the following situation. It suffices for an intransigent minority –a certain type of intransigent minorities –to reach a minutely small level, say three or four percent of the total population, for the entire population to have to submit to their preferences. Further, an optical illusion comes with the dominance of the minority: a naive observer would be under the impression that the choices and preferences are those of the majority. If it seems absurd, it is because our scientific intuitions aren’t calibrated for that (fughedabout scientific and academic intuitions and snap judgments; they don’t work and your standard intellectualization fails with complex systems, though not your grandmothers’ wisdom).

Certain fashionable minorities have influence out of all proportion to their numbers. Homosexuals, for example, do not exceed 2% of the population, but you would think (from the news media) that there are at least as many homosexuals as blacks.

Freeberg has some interesting things to say.

I have long noticed that there are two kinds of people in the world: Those who are trying to achieve work upon external things, measurably altering states in one or more definable ways, upon one or more definable objects; and those who are acting as stewards of their own emotional state. In very crude terms, you might think of this as the difference between those who want to work and those who want to play. The former seeks to accomplish something and the latter wants to feel good all the time. It’s a maturity thing, since acting as a steward of your own emotional state is exactly what newborn babies do. It is the default condition. Later on, we get concerned about getting work done — for a variety of different reasons. But if you want to be effective at that you have to let go of the “be happy all the time” thing. Some people don’t, ever.

That is a very good articulation of  a distinction I have long felt but never been able adequately to express.

From this comes a split in how to deal with time. If your objective is to get work done, time is a resource and you never have as much of it as you might want to have. So you have to learn to prioritize. If your objective is to act as a steward of your own emotional state, you have to make sure you’re never bored. Time becomes a liability instead of an asset. As a consequence, you don’t prioritize, at least you don’t prioritize the same way as people who are trying to get a certain amount of work done in a limited amount of time.

Read it.

When trying to memorise new material, it’s easy to assume that the more work you put in, the better you will perform. Yet taking the occasional down time – to do literally nothing – may be exactly what you need. Just dim the lights, sit back, and enjoy 10-15 minutes of quiet contemplation, and you’ll find that your memory of the facts you have just learnt is far better than if you had attempted to use that moment more productively.

Read it.

Polygamy is de facto legal in Germany now — provided you’re a male Muslim immigrant who happens to have a spare wife or two tucked away in various places.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. With boys marrying boys, we have to take up the slack somehow.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line chronicles the disappointment.

After the 2016 election, the left and some Never Trumpers warned of dire consequences. Civil liberties would be curtailed. Court orders would be disobeyed. Russia would dictate our foreign policy. Trump would lead us into war. And that was just for starters.

Nothing of the sort has occurred. Nothing close.

This creates a problem for the left, its media allies, and some Never Trumpers. What happens when non-partisans realize that there are no catastrophic, or even particularly dark consequences from this presidency, just conservative policies and a bunch of unfortunate tweets? The answer is a dreaded one: Trump becomes “normalized.”

This dread explains, I think, why lefty outlets like the Washington Post must feed readers a daily dose of anti-Trump material. On an ordinary day, the Post’s readers can expect a minimum of two front page stories a day of some alleged Trump outrage, plus more on the inside pages.

Since a president, no matter how bad, cannot commit that many outrages per day, the Post’s stories are frequently ridiculous.

Read it.

A Seattle, Washington resident recently made headlines by mistaking the Norwegian flag for the Confederate flag.

According to The Seattle Times, author Rebecca Morris sent a tip to the paper that read, “Hi. Suddenly there is a Confederate flag flying in front of a house in my Greenwood neighborhood. It is at the north-east corner of 92nd and Palatine, just a block west of 92nd and Greenwood Ave N. I would love to know what this ‘means’ … but of course don’t want to knock on their door. Maybe others in the area are flying the flag? Maybe it’s a story? Thank you.”

However, when a reporter checked out the flag’s location, it was actually a Norwegian flag that had been put up by a Norwegian-American man for the Olympics.

In the hunt for Heretics and Sinners, one cannot be too careful; one never knows how cleverly these ‘dog whistles’ may be disguised. (Remember: If you hear the ‘dog whistle’, then you’re the dog.)

In 2016, someone sent the Indiana University campus into a frenzy by tweeting, “IU students, be careful, there’s someone walking around in KKK gear with a whip.”

The person in “KKK gear,” however, turned out to be a Dominican monk wearing a robe.

Hey, you know what those Dominicans are like — they were in charge of the Inquisition, after all.

Read it.

Look around you—all the “news” stories covering the recent Florida tragedy talk about shooters and shooting. Shooting is not the problem. Murder is the problem.

These aberrant kids have been conditioned into thinking it’s OK to murder their classmates. There are no consequences that matter. Killing is fun. Heaven and hell are pipe dreams. No sense of morality or decent social conduct has been inculcated into their behavior.

Back in the day, no one could have imagined going into a school, or anywhere, and just randomly killing everyone in sight. Where would a person even get such an idea? Where would a person even get such an idea? Read that again. You know the answer. We had the guns, they were even easier to get—no papers at all.

When I was a kid — Hell, when I was in the Navy — nobody getting on a plane worried about it being hijacked, or blown up, or flown into a building. The prospect literally did not occur to us. Then some bright psychopath had an idea, and life became uglier for everybody else.

No one in mass media is talking about murder and murderers. Watch. They’re only talking about shooting and shooters. By itself, shooters and shooting is not anything bad—and they know that. Being a shooter and shooting is what good Americans do all the time.

Murder is ugly, too ugly to bear. Murderers are horrible, to be rejected outright by society. No glory in being a murderer. Especially no prize for being a mass murderer. So the media avoids it, and in their conspicuous campaign against private arms, they avoid dealing with the murder angle.

The media are leading the nation down a path of perdition, turning shooters and shooting—people and activities with wonderful, excellent attributes—into targets for fear, loathing and legislative assault. And they’re good at it.

Look at the stories. It’s all about the guns, never about the gunner. Somehow we are supposed to believe that merely picking up a firearm turns an ordinary person into a deranged killer.

That’s perfectly understandable when you realize the sort of people who are writing the stories. To them, anyone who would contemplate for even a second picking up a firearm is deeply flawed and, in their inner soul, is essentially a deranged shooter merely looking for a place to happen. Like keeping alcohol from a potential alcoholic, we must therefore keep guns from potential mass-murderers. It’s for their own good. (And For The Children! Can’t forget that one….)

Rosie O’Donnell Finally Decides To Make Money Off Of Her Hatred For Trump  Took her long enough.

Read it.

Depending on government employees would be a solution if government employees always, or even usually, did the jobs they are supposed to be doing.

One of the most pervasive fantasies of Lefty statists is the notion that a government employee is always the best possible choice for doing a particular thing; history teaches us that a government employee is usually the WORST possible choice for doing a particular thing.

Also: 3 Broward County Police Officers Made No Attempt to Enter the School and Stop Nikolas Cruz

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The sad thing is that they have no idea what they’re talking about. They are utterly ignorant of what Trump was trying to say, and utterly ignorant of the profound differences between Trump and, for example, Fidel Castro.

The ironic thing is that in any other context they would have nothing but good to say of Fidel Castro.

Read it.

Although domestic crude oil production has reached heights not seen since the early-1970s, and will actually be setting new records this year, California’s oil output has plummeted nearly 60% since peaking in 1985 — with no sign of reversing. In stark contrast, mighty Texas has seen its crude production triple since 2010 alone to 3.6 million b/d.

Mexifornians probably think that this is a good thing.

Read it.

It’s about time that the Roman hierarchy step up to the plate when it comes to human life issues.

Read it.

Several months ago, Palacios was taking a stroll on his ranch and stumbled upon a small portable camera with an antenna fastened to a tree. Not long after removing the recording device, which was situated on his property near his son’s home, Palacios received phone calls from CBP officials and Texas Rangers, each one claiming they were the owners of the camera and ordering him to give it back, reports Ars Technica.

Palacios, having refused their demands and dismissed their threats of arrest, is still in possession of the camera, and hopes to use it as admissible evidence in his case.

Read it.

I’m sure he looked very sharp in his uniform and had all the Politically Correct opinions.

John Podhoretz, who lives in an Other Left Coast bubble, still finds an acorn every now and then.

In 2013, 107,000 crimes in the United States were committed with a gun. There are 330 million people in the United States. If we assume every one of those crimes was the work of a different individual, then .03 percent of all those who live with a gun in the United States used that gun in the commission of a crime.

That’s not 3 percent. That’s not one-third of a percent. That’s three-hundredths of a percent.

There are approximately 120,000 schools in the United States. If we use the term “school shooting” in the most capacious way, there have been 145 incidents since 2010. That means 0.12 percent of all schools in the United States have suffered the horror of a school shooting.

If you are the sort of person who believes guns are evil objects no one should want to possess, or that semi-automatic weapons are especially monstrous devices no one should be allowed to own, these numbers won’t matter all that much to you, or at all. In your mind, the very fact that guns are used in crimes, especially in mass shootings, invalidates any arguments on their behalf.

One Burning Issue. People Who Are Like Me are the only people who matter, and People Who Aren’t Like Me are barely tolerable and might not really be People after all.

But you are almost certain to ask, “Why does anyone need these things when they can do such harm?” You scoff at the tired line that guns don’t kill people; people kill people. You have likely assigned moral meaning to the ownership of a gun. And you have judged those who own one to be suffering from a moral flaw, and those who own many to be fetishistic monsters.

Maybe not even People at all.

What you have to understand is that while you believe you have all the moral force on your side, you cannot make a gun owner believe that he is the Parkland shooter. Because he isn’t. And let’s face it — somewhere, deep in your heart, you think he is.

And that’s the problem. To the Left, the Right aren’t even people, they’re just some sort of underworld denizens who just happen to resemble people in some respects.

Read it.

n the annual letter about the state of their philanthropic foundation released earlier this month, Bill and Melinda Gates answered “ten tough questions” that they get commonly asked. The Gateses are honest and cheerful in their responses, and the letter reveals more about their critics than it does about them.

“Why don’t you give money to fight climate change?” they are asked. The Gates Foundation underwrites undeniably worthwhile causes that most liberals would support. The Gateses want to end malaria and HIV, give poor kids a better chance at a good education, and empower women around the globe to provide for their families. But if you don’t tick off every liberal cause, then you are not really committed to change, apparently. Why not global warming, too? (And what about nuclear disarmament and saving the whales?) The Gateses point out that “in philanthropy, you look for problems that can’t be fixed by the market or governments. The clean-energy problem can be fixed by both.” But this is unlikely to assuage critics who believe that the market is the problem, and philanthropy is just there to help government.

“Why do you work with corporations?” others ask. Bill Gates replies: “We think poor people should benefit from the same kind of innovation in health and agriculture that has improved life in the richest parts of the world. Much of that innovation comes out of the private sector.” What does it say about the people asking these questions that they need Gates to explain that corporations make money by creating products that the rest of us find useful, and that make life better?

The Left is a mish-mash of interest groups who all have a single Burning Issue on their minds, and — while they generally agree that other Lefty special interests are more or less on the same team — their own particular Burning Issue is obviously to even the casual observer the most important. Hence, whenever one of their Lefty fellow-travelers seems to be suggesting that there is some higher priority than the actor’s Burning Issue, they are greeted as potential Heretics or Sinners who might need to be burned at the stake in order to preserve the purity of the Lefty movement.

The critics are not satisfied simply with the improvement of life for the world’s most poor and desperate; they also want to see those at the top taken down a notch. “Is it fair that you have so much influence?” the Gateses are asked. “No,” they answer, but they have too much tact to tell the questioners that “fairness” in itself is not the goal of philanthropy. They note, however, that this question implies another: “If we think it’s unfair that we have so much wealth, why don’t we give it all to the government?” And here they say that, unlike government, foundations can “take a long-term approach to solving problems, and manage high-risk projects that governments can’t take on and corporations won’t.”

Unaddressed is how it is more ‘fair’ for the government to have that money than the individual who earned it, whether or not you think that the earning was ‘fair’.

A good example is the question, “Does saving kids’ lives lead to overpopulation?” Is this a serious question? It appears that we are now at a point where a foundation has to justify its efforts to save the lives of suffering children. Though the Gateses respond that when children are more likely to survive into adulthood, parents have smaller families, they also note, “saving the lives of children is its own justification.”

Not, obviously, in the eyes of the person who asked that particular question. The problem with focusing on One Burning Issue is that it leads actors into extreme the-ends-justify-the-means thinking, and brings them to support methods from which, if just sprung on them cold, they would recoil in horror. (Think of some of the things being said about Trump, the only justification seeming to be that Trump Is Actually Hitler.)

Scott Adams characterizes Twitter as ‘unqualified people with opinions’.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Boko Haram attack: 111 Nigerian schoolgirls missing, police say  And no Michelle Obama to get them back with a grumpy look and a Twitter hashtag. Whatever will we do?

Migrant Crisis: Islamist Rape Culture Comes to Europe

Culture-Enrichers Launch Brutal Attack on Two Female Cops in Melbourne

ISIS Destroyed Jonah’s Tomb But Inadvertently Unearthed More Biblical Evidence

Attacker Throws Bomb At US Embassy In Montenegro, Blows Self Up

France Introduces Tough Migrant Deportation Bill

Explosion Closes US Embassy in Montenegro as Assailant Dies In Blast

‘We are waiting to die’: 10 more civilians dead in East Ghouta as ferocious Assad assault continues

Pakistan looks to avoid being added to terror financing list

Syria war: Eastern Ghouta bombing ‘catastrophic’

Abbas, Haley exchange strong criticism over Middle East at UN Security Council

Rotherham grooming gangs may have abused more than 1,500 victims, investigators reveal

It’s not Just the Terrorists: al-Sisi’s Government Persecutes Egypt’s Christians

Iranian Airline Used Turkish Front Companies To Skirt US Sanctions

American flag destroyed, replaced with ‘ISIS flag’ at Utah high school

Aidan James: Briton ‘fighting against Isis in Syria’ charged with terror offences  One of which was Islamophobia, no doubt.

Suicide bombers kill at least 18 in crowded market in northern Nigeria

Zainab Ansari: Man given four death sentences for rape and murder of six-year-old girl that shocked Pakistan

A Mosque by Any Other Name

ISIS Claims Deadly Attack On Churchgoers In Russia

Militants in army uniforms ambush Iraqi troops near Baghdad, 27 dead

ISIS Kills At Least 27 Iraqi Militiamen In Ambush

Isis widow sentenced to death by hanging in Iraq

vNearly 100 Killed in Bombardment of Hard-Hit Suburb of Syrian Capital

Minnesota man sentenced in mall stabbings

Victor Davis Hanson turns over a rock.

We dare not mention illegal immigration in California as a factor in the state’s implosion. But privately, residents assume it has something to do with the 20 percent of the state’s population that lives below the poverty level. Illegal immigration plays a role in the fact that one-third of the nation’s welfare recipients lives in California and that one of four state residents was not born in the United States—or that one-half of all immigrant households receives some sort of government assistance, and that one in four homeless people lives in California.

Note a final statistic. A record of nearly $30 billion a year is forecast to be sent this year as remittances home to Mexico. If the sum is assumed to be wired largely by the reported 11 million illegal aliens, then illegal immigrants are sending per capita around $2,700 home per year. Again, in per capita terms, a household of five would average about $1,100 sent home per month to Mexico—a generosity impossible without the subsidies of the American taxpayer. (Some might wonder whether the U.S. could tax that sum to build the wall or at least declare that proof of remittances disqualifies one for public support.)

Esquire Article on ‘Black Panther’ Actor Takes Cheap Shots at Trump

Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups have multiplied under Trump, report finds  The implication being, of course, that this is somehow all Trump’s fault — for which, of course, they have no evidence, merely proglodyte assumptions.

Read it.

Put them on the borders, so the illegals can come into Mexifornia freely but can’t move on from there.

Be careful what you wish for….

Read it.

Blue states — where even the food is racist.

Speaking as a white guy who grew up in Indiana eating watermelon and ribs, I’ll be happy to claim them for white people.

I don’t know of any non-black people who actually eat chitlins and collard greens, so I don’t see what the problem is there.

Read it.

You probably didn’t hear this because few media organizations have even mentioned it, but Russia committed an act of war against the United States a little more than a week ago. No, this is not about more social media and election shenanigans. Russia mounted an armed assault against American soldiers and our allies in Syria, including Kurdish security forces affiliated with the People’s Protection Units, or YPG, at a military base in the city of Deir Ezzor, the largest in eastern Syria. Russian combatants fought alongside Assad regime fighters and Shia militias armed, funded and directed by Iran.

Scott Johnson of Power Line pulls back the curtain.

Last night CNN took up the 2018 children’s crusade that is intended to produce gun control where previously there has only been left-wing frustration. We are counseled to “do something” in a tone of unanswerable indignation. The volume is turned up to ear-shattering levels in lieu of traditional means of persuasion. In Minneapolis, students badly in need of the tools of critical thinking took the day off from school to wave slogans such as “Regulation isn’t scary, getting shot is.” The mayor joined the parade. On CNN, Senator Rubio faced up to the mob while Senator Nelson showed that he too had been shortchanged in the critical thinking department.

RealClear Politics has posted local television video of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School student Colton Haab. Haab says he was approached by CNN to ask a question at last night’s “town hall” but decided not to after the network gave him a “scripted question” in lieu of one he wrote himself. According to the report, Haab is a member of the Junior ROTC who shielded his fellow students while the school was under attack from the shooter, said he was going to ask about using veterans as armed security guards. He appears to be an impressive young man.

This morning CNN issued a statement to the effect “that it did not, and does not, script any questions for town hall meetings, ever.” I’m surprised to see CNN disputing one of the children possessing absolute moral authority, but perhaps Haab lost his immunity somewhere along the way.

Read it.

They can dish it out, but they can’t take it.

This is the world in which non-proglodytes have to live; welcome to it.

Read it.

The arrival of the robotic arm was not a happy affair at Professional Finishing in Richmond, California, just across the bay from San Francisco. In contrast to the hulking factory arms that have traditionally labored in isolation, this robot was meant to work right alongside humans, delicately sanding and painting things like speaker cases or cabinets for medical devices. Which sounded a lot like a first step toward replacing the company’s workers altogether.

“We did have one employee tell us, ‘Hey let me know when the robot’s up and running and I’ll just quit,’” says Professional Finishing co-owner Dawn White. “We said, just bear with us. Watch what happens. Help us and everybody will keep their jobs.”

Everyone did indeed keep their jobs. Today, three of these machines from Universal Robots handle the brute sanding and painting, while humans handle more complicated tasks like assembly. Some of these workers even turned into robot technicians. It’s called collaborative robotics, and it’s popping up all over the place, thanks to advanced machines that sense when they’ve contacted a person and stop, as opposed to launching them across the room.

Read it.

Of course they did. How is this news?

Every picture of ‘Parkland Shooting Survivors’ ought to have circles and arrows saying ‘TOOL’.

The Antiplanner explains it all to you.

Business Insider is stunned by the notion that Silicon Valley residents who earn $400,000 a year consider themselves middle class. Yet they are; the only reason Business Insider doesn’t think so is that neither it nor Palo Alto Online — the source of Business Insider‘s data — understands the difference between class and income.

According to the Pew Research Center, “middle class” includes families of four that earn $48,000 and $144,000. But that’s not middle class; that’s middle income. While classes and incomes can be correlated, they are not the same. Social classes include upper, middle, and lower, but most of lower being working class.

Many people in America with top-tier incomes consider themselves ‘middle class’ and, effectively, they are — because their attitudes are ‘middle class’, since that’s the way they were raised.

This is more than just a quibble because working-class, middle-class, and upper-class people tend to have very different tastes and preferences. A working-class person who manages to earn $239,000 a year still shares more preferences with working-class people than upper-class people. An upper-class person who doesn’t earn much money one year still has tastes similar to other upper-class people.

One of the driving motivations behind rich people advocating higher income tax rates is a desire to keep middle-class people who just happen to have high incomes away from upper-class amenities such as hotels, restaurants, and resorts. Aside from the fact that these people, if they were serious, could just write a check to the IRS, the key is that they advocate raises in tax rates on ordinaryx income, such as wages, but not on the dividend and capital gains income that represents the chief source of really rich people’s wealth. The main reason Warren Buffet pays tax at a lower rate than his secretary is that she’s being taxed on wages and he’s being taxed on capital gains. But the fawning articles in The Press never tell you that.

Read it.

It certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

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Masculinity, perhaps, but hardly toxic — except to those who resist progress except at the hands of Official Victim Groups.

Obama Staffer ‘Really Sad’ That Trump ‘Literally Is Constitutionally Incapable of Being a President’  Uh, sure.

How Donald Trump is making racist language OK again  Another case of somebody reading Trump’s mind as to what he MUST be saying because TRUMP!.

Friedman Calls ‘Code Red’: ‘Our President is a Disturbed Person’  More chatterati mind reading.

New Trump dating service uses convicted child sex offender as model  The site has no connection to Trump, other than the exploitation of his name, but the chatterati are using it as a stick to try to beat the President nevertheless.

Read it.

A chemical bath and a hot-press can transform wood into a material that is stronger than steel, researchers report. The process, and others like it, could make the humble material an eco-friendly alternative to using plastics and metals in the manufacture of cars and buildings.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

There’s a reason that most teenagers aren’t allowed to vote, and this demonstrates the biggest one.

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The IRS first started claiming that its regulations have no economic impact in response to the 1980 Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA), which was designed to mitigate the compliance costs of federal regulations on small businesses. The RFA states that if a proposed regulation could have a large economic impact on small businesses, the agency must consider alternatives that would leave small businesses unharmed.

The RFA also contains a Congressional amendment specifically designed to cover IRS regulations, but the IRS has shirked its duty to comply with the RFA since Congress passed the law. The IRS has broadened its self-exemption from economic impacts to all impacts, including record-keeping and other reporting burdens. That means that IRS regulations can impact small businesses while completely evading oversight from Congress or the White House.

In the Internal Revenue Manual, a document the IRS uses to guide its compliance with oversight mechanisms, the agency bizarrely claims that its rules have no economic impact. This reading allows the IRS to avoid sharing information with Congress, the executive branch, and the American people. The IRS has never offered an adequate justification for this self-exemption.

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The only problem is, John Oliver isn’t American. He’s not American by birth and he’s not American by paperwork. He holds a green card and is married to an American, but he himself is not a legal citizen of the United States. He doesn’t vote, he doesn’t qualify for a slew of American welfare programs, and he can’t advocate to bring family members over to the US. The only thing that makes him ‘American’ is his weekly platform that allows him to pontificate about politics and flex a Constitutionally-endowed right to say what’s on his mind.

And about time, too. Late-night beta males like Oliver, Kimmel, and Colbert may have a lot in common with the Obamacare pajama boy but not with the bulk of real Americans.

This wasn’t lost on Piers Morgan, a fellow British ex-pat who called Oliver out while watching his show.

“Watching John Oliver repeatedly say ‘we’ & ‘us’ when discussing America is comical,” he tweeted.
“Mate, you were born in the Midlands to a pair of Liverpudlian parents & speak in a thick Brummie accent. You’re about as American as cricket & mushy peas, you shameless old fraud!”

Pretty sad when you can get called out by Piers Morgan.

Read it.

The top public school administrator in Washington, D.C., resigned his position Tuesday, four days after it was revealed that he had conspired with another official to place his daughter in the district’s highest-performing public high school. In the process, Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson bypassed the rules governing placement of district students in schools outside their own neighborhoods.

The other official, Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer Niles, was forced to resign last week.

Both of the crooked officials are Persons of Color, of course, this being D.C.

I guess they saw Congresscritters sending their kids to tony private schools instead of the behavioral-sink D.C. public schools and thought, ‘Hey, gotta get me some of that’.

Rush Limbaugh is reporting that Trumps approval rating is at 48%, as opposed to Obama’s 45% at this point in the first term.

Read it.

The ugly comes out no matter how much lipstick you put on the pig.

Read it. And weep.

Sometimes people send me houses that they describe as “cult compounds.” While it’s unlikely that every house fitting the description is occupied by a sinister death cult, it is interesting that there is a type of house tied to the idea of cults. Usually it’s a very large, plain looking house with small windows that has an almost hotel-like appearance. On the inside, they usually look like normal McMansions, not to say that that by itself isn’t sinister…

Just when you thought that the rot had gone as far as it could go….

Read it.

To understand how difficult and expensive it is to build housing in San Francisco, observe the case of Robert Tillman. Tillman owns a single-story laundromat in the city’s Mission District. Since 2014, he has been attempting to develop his property into a 75-unit apartment building.

The city is in the midst of a housing affordability crisis, with an average one-bedroom apartment going for $3,400 a month. So you might think Tillman’s project would sail through the permitting process. Instead, the city’s labyrinthine process of reviews, regulations, and appeals has dragged on for four years. The project has cost the self-described “accidental developer” nearly $1 million so far, and he hasn’t even broken ground yet.

Just bureaucrats being bureacrats? No, there are residential crazies to deal with as well.

The real opposition came from some of the neighbors. A community meeting in January 2016 served as something of a flashpoint.

At the meeting, one woman fretted that the tall building would violate the privacy of a nearby public school. Another argued that the project needed to be 100 percent affordable housing. Two representatives from local Latino Cultural District Calle 24 said that even a 100 percent affordable housing project was out of the question, given the proposed height of the development.

When Tillman said he saw his project as necessary so people like his daughter could afford to come back and live in the city, one particularly motivated activist said she wished his daughter was killed in a terrorist attack.

Such local ‘activists’ are rife in California, since they’ve realized that they can hold construction projects to ransom by threatening to delay progress until it’s economically dead unless they get to wet their beaks.

Read it.

And about time, too.

Read it.

Researchers believe people have begun evolving so they find it so unpleasant it could stop our species from drinking in the future.

I’m already there. I’ve attempted to drink alcoholic beverages, from beer to whisky, and it all tastes like particularly nasty medicine. Yuk.

Hear me, America! I am your future!

(You are in SO much trouble….)

UPDATE: Alcohol Is the Strongest Risk Factor for Dementia (2018)  Heh.