Read it.

Consider what’s happening in the capital of Florida. Female staffers and lobbyists have found “many male legislators will no longer meet with them privately,” reported the Miami Herald. “I had a senator say, ‘I need my aide here in the room because I need a chaperone,’ ” lobbyist Jennifer Green told the paper. “I said, ‘Senator, why do you need a chaperone? .?.?. Do you feel uncomfortable around me?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘anyone can say anything with the door shut.’?”

“I’m getting the feeling that we’re going back 20 years as female professionals,” said Green, who owns her company. “I fully anticipate I’m going to be competing with another firm that is currently owned by some male, and the deciding factor is going to be: ‘You don’t want to hire a female lobbying firm in this environment.’?”

Be careful what you wish for.

ZMan is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

Why is George Soros still alive?

For most of human history, a person who caused trouble for rulers found himself either on the run or on a pike. A earl or prince that made trouble for the king was dragged before the king, humiliated and then hanged. If he fought back, then the king sacked his lands, killed his family and made an even bigger spectacle of killing the the troublemaker. After all, the point of political power is to reward your allies and punish your enemies. Yet, George Soros, an international troublemaker, is free to make trouble wherever he likes.

The obvious reply to that is civilized nations no longer rely on political assassinations to handle their business. Political leaders have a self interest in discouraging the practice of killing heads of state. If ruler X has ruler Y killed, because it advantages him, the other rulers have no choice but to band together and kill ruler X. Otherwise, it is a lawless world of all against all. President Gerald Ford issued an executive order in 1976 prohibiting US intelligence services from conducting political assassinations for this reason.

That makes sense with legitimate political leaders, but George Soros is a rootless grifter, who has no allegiance to any government. Killing him would be no different than droning a terrorist. Some argue that international law prohibits targeted assassinations, but international law is mostly meaningless. The Israelis have been using targeted assassination against whoever they like for a long time, including the murder of Canadian engineer Gerald Bull. The US has droned more Arabs than we can count.

I’ve wondered about that myself. Offing people like George Soros is kind of what the CIA is all about.

Read it.

You know, as they do.

Well, people said Hong Kong would go to the dogs when it reverted to Communist rule; I guess they were close.

Read it.

‘Could’. That magic word. They would rise quite a bit if an asteroid hit the earth. If.

I’ll believe that the sea levels are actually rising when property in Malibu drops in price.

Read it.

Sounds about right.

Hmm. Perhaps we could combine this with the border fence….

Read it.

I wrote here about the void in the Trump/Sessions, where four nominees for Assistant Attorney General positions are being held up due to Senate inaction. The four positions are crucial ones: Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division; Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division; Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division; and Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division.

Why can’t these nominees get a vote? Apparently, it’s because of marijuana. Sen. Cory Gardner is vexed with Attorney General Sessions over enforcement of Federal marijuana laws in Colorado.

It’s offensive that these archaic privileges are standing in the way of efficient government. It’s especially offensive that a Republican Senator is impeding a Republican administration in pursuit of so trivial a subject.

Read it.

Yet another Hollywood snot trashing his own country. Feel free to leave any time, Bob.

Read it.

Yet another example of the culture of corruption in Democrat-run cities.

Trump’s budget hits poor Americans the hardest  Yeah, the deficit isn’t big enough. We don’t owe enough money yet.

Is Trump scaring away people who would stand in his way?  I certainly hope so.

ABC Panelist: To Work in White House You Must ‘Degrade Your Humanity’ and ‘Your Very Being’  And you don’t even get fries with that.

Immigrant Gang Attacks in Sweden Escalate Wins the Dan Rather ‘fake but accurate’ award.

‘Homeland’ Season Premiere Takes on ‘Paranoid,’ ‘Fascist’ President  And won’t tell the truth that it would more likely be a Democrat like Obama.

Robert De Niro Promises America Will ‘Eventually Cure Itself’ Of Donald Trump  In, oh, about 2024. I can wait.

MSNBC Assures Leftist: ‘We’re on the Same Side’ Against ‘Racist’ Trump  Of course, there’s no actual evidence that Turmp is a racist, but a good lie will serve the Narrative.

Head Of CPB Claims Trump Cutting PBS Funding Could Kill People But only the ‘right’ people.

NYT Reporter: President Trump’s ‘Hostility’ Toward Hispanics Explains Decline in Flu Shots  See whether you can untangle this one.

Read it,

Even minorities own guns because of the minority. What do they know that she doesn’t.

Most black people who die from guns do so at the hands of other black people. But they never tell you that on the evening news.

Read it.

Well, it keeps him off the streets.

This guy strikes me as someone who’s wealth ought to be re-distributed.

I guess this makes him an Honorary Bush. Who knew?

Read it.

Tell the truth — do we really NEED an Ambassador to Germany? If Trump want to talk to Merkel, he picks up the phone. If Tillerson wants to talk to Gabriel, he picks up the phone. I don’t see this as a major problem. Or even a minor problem.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

But let’s look at Mike Tirico instead as an example of how rare it is in modern non-Hispanic America for somebody who appears to be kind of black not to claim to be black. I won’t call him “the exception that proves the rule” because that always triggers a lot of people, such as a certain federal judge, who want to explain that, logically, an exception can’t prove a rule. So I will call Tirico an example of somebody whose famous exceptionalness to the general tendency offers support for the tendency.

The tendency is that people who are significantly black by ancestry seldom self-identify as white in recent decades (assuming they aren’t from some culture like Latin America where that is encouraged). This in contradiction to the popular theory of White Privilege.

Read it.

I guess that’s why those piss-ant islands in the Pacific are getting bigger.

I’ll believe that sea levels are rising when land prices in Malibu start going down. Not before.

PBS Analyst Compares Trump White House to Communist East Berlin  You can’t make this stuff up.

Deirdre McClosky fisks Richard Thaler’s Nobel Prize in Economics.

Adam Smith spoke of “the man of system” who “seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board.” Thaler and his benevolent friends are men, and some few women, of system. They hate the Chicago School, have never heard of the Austrian School, dismiss spontaneous order, and favor bossing people around—for their own good, understand. Employing the third most unbelievable sentence in English (the other two are “The check is in the mail” and “Of course I’ll respect you in the morning”), they declare cheerily, “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.”

We humans face a choice of treating people as children or as adults. A liberal society, Smith’s “liberal plan of [social] equality, [economic] liberty, and [legal] justice,” treats adults as adults. The principle of an illiberal society, from Thaler’s to the much worse kind, is that you are to be corrected not through respectful dialog that treats you as an equal, but by compulsion or trickery, which treats you like a toddler about to walk into traffic.

What some on the alt-right call ‘Cloud People’ versus ‘Mud People’. In case you’re in doubt, you and I are Mud People.

Wikipedia lists fully 257 cognitive biases. In the category of decision-making biases alone there are anchoring, the availability heuristic, the bandwagon effect, the baseline fallacy, choice-supportive bias, confirmation bias, belief-revision conservatism, courtesy bias, and on and on. According to the psychologists, it’s a miracle you can get across the street.

For Thaler, every one of the biases is a reason not to trust people to make their own choices about money. It’s an old routine in economics.

And politics.

The Progressive economists believed they saw monopolies, spillovers, informational asymmetry, consumer ignorance, producer ignorance—in short, everyone’s folly and ignorance except the nudging government’s—to the number of over one hundred imperfections. They imagined a new one every year or so, and lately have been getting Nobels for discovering allegedly fresh market failures. Paul Krugman, for example, received the prize in 2008, supposedly for reinventing monopolistic competition for international trade. He deserved it eventually, though he got it embarrassingly prematurely (compare Obama’s for peace) because the social democratic Swedes wanted to buck up a left-of-center columnist. Krugman tweeted about Thaler: “Yes! Behavioral econ is the best thing to happen to the field in generations.” He would say that.

Lenin would have agreed, had he still been around.

Nicolle Wallace Claims Trump ‘Doesn’t Even Want to Know’ About ‘Threats To The Nation’  Amazing how many ‘jorunalists’ appear to have missed their calling as TV psychics.

‘Pillar of the community’ business owner deported after nearly 40 years under Trump’s immigration policy  Really? He’s been under ‘Trump’s immigration policy’ for 40 years? I’m impressed,

CNN, MSNBC Push Myth Trump Urged Death Penalty for Innocent Black Teens

Rutenberg Pens Essay on NYT’s Brave War on Trump; Mocks ‘Lies’ of Swift Boat Vets

US intelligence ‘paid $100,000 to Russian who claimed to have compromising information on Trump but failed to provide it’  Gonna catch that red dot!

The essence of civilization is Carriage and Storage.

Without Carriage and Storage, you got nothin’. You’re living from day to day, sometimes hour to hour, and your future is so uncertain that it might as well not exist.

If you gather more than you can eat right now, you need Storage, or you’re mostly wasting your time. Dork.

If you kill more than you can eat right now, you need Storage, or you’re mostly wasting resources. Shame on you.

If your Storage doesn’t readily convert into Carriage, then you are fixed in one place, and eventually something (or someone) will find you and kill you. And they will eat what you have stored, and you will feel like an idiot, or would if you were still around.

Think about it. What are buildings? Partly shelter, mostly storage. What are vehicles? Exclusively Carriage. What would we be without buildings and vehicles? Chimpanzees without the hair. Not a pleasant prospect.

There is a reason the women carry bags, and men have pockets.

Think about it.

Read it.

If you haven’t read any of the novels of Ian M. Banks, you probably ought to do so.

This article tells you why.

It also contains some useful discussion of culture, technology, history, and moral choice.

This is, I think, where Banks draws upon his most sociologically astute observation, again extrapolating from contemporary cultural trends. There are a variety of developments that are associated with modernity. One of them involves a move away from ascribed toward achieved sources of identity. The idea is rather simple: in traditional societies, people were defined largely by the circumstances that they were born into, or their ascribed characteristics – who your family was, what “station” in life you were born to, what gender you were, etc. There were a strict set of roles that prescribed how each person in each set of circumstances was to act, and life consisted largely of acting out the prescribed role. A modern society, by contrast, favours “choice” over “circumstances,” and indeed, considers it the height of injustice that people should be constrained or limited by their circumstances. Thus there is a move toward achieved sources of identity – what school you went to, what career you have chosen, who you decided to marry, and the lifestyle you adopt. “Getting to know someone,” in our society, involves asking them about the choices they have made in life, not the circumstances they were born into.

There are, of course, advantages and disadvantages to both arrangements. The advantages of choice, for people living in an achievement-oriented society, are too obvious to be worth enumerating. But there are disadvantages. Under the old system of ascribed statuses, people did not suffer from “identity crises,” and they did not need to spend the better part of their 20’s “finding themselves.” When everything is chosen, however, then the basis upon which one can make a choice becomes eroded. There are no more fixed points, from which different options can be evaluated. This generates the crisis of meaning that Taylor associates with the decline of strong evaluation.

Read it,

If we depend on dentists to do this, it ain’t gonna get done, since then they would be out of work.

My idea of an ideal visit to the dentist is, I sit down in the chair, I get a small cup of fluid containing appropriate nannies, I swish that around in my mouth for a bit, and I leave with clean teeth.

Of course, eventually you’ll be able to do that at home. Bad news for the dentists.

Perhaps this will mark the demise of the ‘dentist’ as a separate medical speciality from ‘medical doctor’.

Even wonder why insurance companies distinguish between ‘dental benefits’ and ‘medical benefits’?

I think about these things.

Read it.

A story out of the United Kingdom details a University of Manchester research project to determine the carbon footprint of the humble sandwich. The upshot: a prepackaged and refrigerated breakfast sandwich with egg, bacon or sausage, produces as much carbon dioxide as a 12-mile car trip. No word on what kind of car the scientists assumed in this calculation — likely not a Tesla charged with coal-fired electricity.

At the other end of the scale was a ham and cheese sandwich made in one’s own kitchen. Presumably the fact that such a homemade meal didn’t require an employee who had to commute to work to make the sandwich, along with the packaging, shipping and refrigeration for hours afterward, played a large role in that sandwich’s superior carbon footprint rating.

Once you know what the ‘carbon footprint’ is (assuming your calculations are anywhere correct, which I dispute), so what? The assumption seems to be that a ‘carbon footprint’ is a bad thing. Is it? Almost everything in life seems to have a ‘carbon footprint’ of some kind — but saying that doesn’t really tell you anything useful.

The Unarticulated Assumption of this whole effort seems to be that a smaller ‘carbon footprint’ is better than a larger one, but without any sort of scale by which carbon footprints can be measured, and some sort of idea as to what constitutes an ‘acceptable’ carbon footprint, it tells us Absolutely Nothing Useful. Another Unarticulated Assumption is that somehow human being are responsible for all of the ThoughtCrime ‘carbon footprints’ existing in the world today — which is proglodyte religious dogma, and (again) not useful. (What is the ‘carbon footprint’ of a whitetail deer? Is that a good thing or a bad thing?)

Presuming that the Manchester scientists are correct in their data, so what? As a former California lawmaker, I know the practical effect of such a study is to inform policymakers to “Do something!” That something most likely being a tax on prepared foods with higher carbon footprints.

My question is: How does increasing taxes solve whatever problem is caused by ‘carbon footprints’? Then theory seems to be that if we slap a tax on something, then less of that something will be produced. The flaw in that reasoning is that history teaches us that whenever we slap a tax on something, people just bend their minds to evading the tax, not toward decreasing the ‘carbon footprint’. The major disqualifying counter-argument is that, if a large ‘carbon footprint’ is a bad thing, then the proper governmental action is to ban the activity, not just tax it. (Somehow that never seems to occur to legislators.)

Read it.

No matter what you do, the house just sits there.

Read it.

ThoughtCrime among the machines. Does your AlGore-ithm love Big Brother.

From Politico, naturally.

The guilty flee where no man pursueth.

Read it.

It isn’t until halfway through this exercise in pearl-clutching that you find out that the kid is enrolled in a Roman Catholic school that — I’m shocked, shocked I tell you — actually takes Roman Catholic doctrine on abortion seriously.

The whole tone of the article is that of a mother who finds out that her Crustian children are hanging out kids whose clothes come from Walmart. The horror! the horror!

I suspect that the shock on the part of the school that one of their classes harbored a child of baby-murderers, who is being (apparently successfully) indoctrinated in their baby-murdering ways, is equally great. I suspect that the school can’t wait to get rid of the girl and (more importantly) her parents.

But, this being America (and Connecticut being a Blue State — I’m surprised they even allow Roman Catholics to live there, unless they’re CINOs like Botox Pelosi), it’s going to wind up in court sooner rather than later.

Watch it.

Scott adds a little perspective to the current conversation.

Read it.

The U.S. Marine Corps wants to form an Irregular Warfare Regiment (IWR) that would be a cross between the French Foreign Legion and the U.S. Army Special Forces. The IWR would have 4,200 troops and about 3,000 would be foreign born and selected because they were physically and mentally able to enlist and had language and cultural awareness skills the marines needed in various parts of the world. All officers and NCOs above the rank of E-5 (sergeant) would be U.S. citizens. If the program is established eventually many IWR officers and senior NCOs would be naturalized citizens. In effect, a foreign legion composed mostly of foreign volunteers seeking a quicker path to citizenship and able to meet Marine Corps standards.

This is an idea that the late Dr. Jerry Pournelle pushed for decades.

Or maybe being a Marine is turning into just another job that Americans ‘won’t do’.

Trump Maligned as Mad ‘Dictator’ by Estrella TV  You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

ABC Blames Trump Tax Cuts for Dow Plunging Twice in One Week  Tax cuts make the stock market go down … apparently journalists are ignorant of economics, too.

Joe Concha: Media’s Trump Anger Mostly ‘Performance Art at This Point’  And pretty bad performance art, too.

Environmentalists Are Trying To Keep The Eagles From Visiting The White House  Everything is political.

CNN’s Van Jones to Conan O’Brien: President Trump ‘Is a Joke’  And yet I don’t hear him laughing. Jones, that is; Trump has all the laughs he can handle.

Trump Blamed For ‘Black Panther’ Not Having A Perfect Rotten Tomatoes Rating  He’s everywhere, he’s everywhere.

Read it.

I guess that now F. Lee Baily has been everywhere disbarred there’s an open ecological niche.

Tuvalu is growing, not shrinking, new research shows

Sinking island nation of Tuvalu is actually growing

‘Sinking’ Pacific nation Tuvalu is actually getting bigger, new research reveals

Pacific nation Tuvalu has grown by 73 hectares over 40 years

Pacific islands ‘growing not shrinking’ due to climate change

And, for the cognitive dissonant True Believers:

Small atoll islands may grow, not sink, as sea levels rise

Uh, yeah — as sea levels rise, small islands grow rather than shrink. I see.

Read it.

Indeed — it will make you think that you have better things to do than watch television.

It will also make you think that Colbert is a dick, but most right-thinking people already do, so that’s not news.

Read it.

New York City public defenders protested Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers Thursday for arresting their clients at courthouses.

Note that these are illegal immigrants who have been arrested for committing crimes.

Several hundred public defenders lined up outside a courthouse in the Bronx after ICE agents arrested Dembele Lanier, an illegal immigrant who was leaving the courthouse after seeing a judge for an assault charge. His wife said the ICE agents were waiting for Lanier outside of the courthouse, WNYC News reported.

In a ‘sanctuary city’ like New York, it’s their most efficient option.

After Lanier’s arrest, Bronx public defenders and attorneys for The Legal Aid Society gathered in front of the courthouse with posters that read “immigrants are welcome here.”

Note the refusal to distinguish between legal immigrants (who are indeed welcome here) and illegal immigrants (who aren’t).

The Legal Aid Society is a communist-dominated group whose members never met a criminal that they didn’t try to get off.

The Bronx public defenders said ICE was “not an immigration enforcement zone.”

That’s a very stupid statement for lawyers to make.

Read it.

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

Read it.

And remember that ‘on’ is pronounced ‘own’.

The Islam Racket

The Islamization of Europe: The Evidence

SYRIA: Turkish Entanglement

German Chemical Companies Are Shocked Again That Syria Is Using German Products To Kill People

Last two of British Isis jihadists known as ‘the Beatles’ ‘captured in Syria’

Pakistan Moves To Ban Valentine’s Day For Being ‘Un-Islamic’  Which, of course, it is.

Latest Clash Between US Coalition And Pro-Regime Forces Points To New Risks In Syria

Iranian Revolutionary Guards: Terror Within And Abroad

Isis propaganda video shows women fighting for first time amid ‘desperation’ to bolster ranks

Inside the Ring: Obama-era cash traced to Iran-backed terrorists

Turkey accused of recruiting ex-Isis fighters in their thousands to attack Kurds in Syria

James Matthews: Former British Army soldier who fought against Isis in Syria faces terror charge

US Prisons Don’t Have A Way To De-Radicalize Terrorists, Study Finds  In fact, they’re finishing schools for radicalism.

Iran executed three children in January, human rights group says

‘Fight like a girl’: Meet the female kickboxer empowering Saudi women

Mujahideen Allied With Turkey Fight Kurds in Syria Using NATO-Supplied Weapons

Anger and fear along Turkey’s border as offensive brings the war back home

Denmark poised to ban Islamic full-face veils

There are 64 US jihadis in Iraq and Syria, finds new report

Muslim Brotherhood, Hizballah, and Palestinian Groups Unite to Praise Deadly Attack

Palestinian peace negotiator tells US ambassador to UN Nikki Haley to ‘shut up’ over Abbas criticism

Al-Arian Calls U.S. ‘Our Enemy’ At Turkish Conference

Israel demolishes EU-funded Palestinian classrooms in occupied West Bank  No mention of the fact that such buildings are often used to store munitions, including rockets that Hamas uses to attack Israeli settlements.

Susan Quinn: Time to Break from the Palestinians and the Peace Process

Turkish border guards are shooting Syrian refugees fleeing war, says Human Rights Watch

Female singer Sumbul Khan murdered by gunmen in Pakistan because she refused to perform at party, police say

A Man in a Wheelchair Makes an Easy Target for Culture-Enrichers

Culture-Enrichers Terrorize the Car Parks of Flanders

‘Not Your Habibti’: Meet the young Palestinian woman bringing #MeToo movement to the West Bank  I give her a projected life span of about a year, maximum.

“Arabs and Muslims Will Never Accept Israel as the Jewish State”

SIL Car Bomb Innovations

Iranian state TV apologises after domestic abuse victims advised to ‘kiss their husband’s feet’

ISIS Gunman Convicted Of Attempted Murder In Ambush Of Police Officer

Muslim Student Tries To Get Another Student Expelled For Refusing To Wear A Hijab

Mattis Keeps Military Strike On The Table If US Confirms Assad Used Sarin Gas Again

Calais violence leaves four teenage refugees in critical state as smuggling gangs ‘exploit growing desperation’

No, the Syrian Kurds Are Not Terrorists

After More Than Two Centuries of Peace Sweden Prepares for War

Syria war: Outcry over ‘mutilated’ female Kurdish fighter

Read it.

ThoughtCrime! Down the Memory Hole!

Time to home-school.

Read it.

I’m willing to bet that if they catch the perp it will turn out to be a black guy.

Read it.

Left-wing website Salon retracted an article titled “Why is the Bible so badly written?” Thursday because it was too poorly written to meet their editorial standards.

The news outlet came under fire on social media after publishing the article Thursday morning, in which the author Valerie Tarico claimed the Bible is littered with “awkward constructions” and “weak character development.” Salon shirked responsibility for the piece by claiming it had been republished to Salon.com from a partner website.

Read it.

I understand the SS used to use this as a toughening exercise.

Except that they used Alsatians, not hamsters.

Don’t suppose she wound up any tougher.

Read it.

Which is why Sweden is doomed.

Read it.

She nailed that one.

I can’t wait until she accuses him of being a Jew — what a smear! Oh, wait….

Read it.

Reality always intrudes eventuallly.

The Usual Suspects will, of course, have a cow. Their fantasy land is so fragile that any chink that lets daylong in might suffice for the whole thing to come crashing down.

Read it.

Well, that explains Democrat Congressmen. Isn’t science wonderful?

Read it.

Cue proglodyte outrage.

I’ll bet you’re wondering why the Democrats are so committed to importing foreigners into the U.S.

Well, I’ll tell you.

When you say ‘American’ to a Democrat, they think ‘redneck Republican’ — hence their hostility to the use of the word ‘American’, the flag, patriotism, etc. Their immediate reaction to this is ‘Not Our Kind’ — and they’re right. The ideal Democrat country consists of Their Kind of People and an appropriate servant population, with nothing resembling a middle class to cause trouble.

There are two reasons why Democrats want tons and tons of foreigners to come freely to the U.S.

1. They hope such people will vote Democrat (illegally if they can get away with it) in return for generous government benefits. (This is why Democrats also advocate ‘removing barriers to citizenship’, because it interferes with their process.) It was customary for Democrat city political machines (and may still be, for all I know) to provide ringers who would swear falsely that the immigrant had lived in the U.S. for the requisite period of time and was an upstanding candidate . My great-grandfather benefited from this system, being sworn in as a U.S. citizen the day he got off the boat from Ireland in exchange for a commitment to vote Democrat until (and, for all I know, after) he died. (My father was born a couple of weeks after my grandfather died, and my grandmother remarried a non-Irishman, which is probably what broke the chain.)
2. Such people are already accustomed to being governed by a narrow corrupt ruling class that is more white than they are. They think it’s How The World Works and, while they’re not happy about it, they don’t see any prospect of changing it (because it never changes in the place from which they came). If you doubt it, look at the sort of countries from which Democrats prefer their immigrants: Latin America, the Middle East, the Caribbean, sub-Saharan Africa – any place that could accurately be described by a non-Democrat as a ‘shithole country’. Nobody from democratic countries in Europe or East Asia need apply.

There.

That was easy. Ask me a hard one.

Read it.

She was expensive, but worth it.