Read it.

It seems only fair.

Read it.

New Marvel superhero The Magic Negro coming to the Avengers soon.

After all, the adventures of Apple Board member AlGore (a.k.a. ClimateMan) was so successful.

Read it.

The dream of nuclear fusion is on the brink of being realised, according to a major new US initiative that says it will put fusion power on the grid within 15 years.

The project, a collaboration between scientists at MIT and a private company, will take a radically different approach to other efforts to transform fusion from an expensive science experiment into a viable commercial energy source. The team intend to use a new class of high-temperature superconductors they predict will allow them to create the world’s first fusion reactor that produces more energy than needs to be put in to get the fusion reaction going.

That would be nice.

Read it.

Canadians have yet to apologize.

Read it.

Actually, I think it is. Just pick one and stay there.

The problem? Florida doesn’t have the authority to adopt daylight saving time year-round.

The federal government controls the nation’s time zones, as well as the start and end dates of daylight saving time. States can choose to exempt themselves from daylight saving time — Arizona and Hawaii do — but nothing in federal law allows them to exempt themselves from standard time.

That’s okay. Just ignore the federal law. California is doing it with sanctuary cities.

“I Delight in Watching Her Die”

Demographic Jihad: Islamists Celebrate Rising Muslim Populations in Europe  Of course they do.

Fearing For His Life, a Christian Refugee in Austria Returns to Syria, Where It’s Safer

Sri Lanka stands at crossroads amid fears Buddhist-Muslim tensions will erupt in widespread violence  Think of what sort of provocation it take to turn Buddhists violent.

Sri Lanka: Fears of Friday prayers violence as Buddhist mobs escalate attacks on Muslims

Mutti’s Latest Victim: 14-Year-Old Keira Gross, Murdered in Lichtenberg

Four seriously wounded in Austria stabbings

Culture-Enriching Amok Time With a Knife in Vienna

Erdo?an’s Turkey has no Place in NATO

The Palestinian Authority Has Long Violated the Oslo Accords  But nobody Notices it because that’s contrary to the Narrative.

Al-Qaeda’s New Branding: The Less Extreme Alternative to ISIS

Syria: US-backed Kurds brace for dramatic escalation of Turkish invasion that could be bloodier than Aleppo, Raqqa or Eastern Ghouta

Indonesian Islamic university bans students who wear burqas from graduating

‘Damn your UN resolution’: Turkey’s Erdogan criticises Syria ceasefire and vows to keep fighting Kurds in Afrin

Tariq Ramadan Lies About Jihad

REPORT: Utah Teen Tried To Blow Up School After Researching ISIS

Radio station fined for playing song that ‘glorified battlefield victories against non-Muslims’

Turkey detains four Isis members over suspected US embassy threat in Ankara

Hamas Continues to Steal Energy From Gaza’s Residents

After the niqab: What life is like for French women who remove the veil  I suspect ‘honor killing’ is in it somewhere.

Inside Syria: With its enemies diverted or fighting each other, Isis is making a swift and deadly comeback I recommend we just let them kill each other until they decide to quit.

British Man Convicted Of Attempted Murder For Running Over Muslim Woman As Revenge For Islamic Terrorism

Isis fanatic tried to recruit children for ‘death squad’ to launch terror attacks in London

Burkina Faso: At least 35 people die after a series of terrorist attacks

Autistic teenager who planned Isis-inspired terror attack in Cardiff jailed for life

Brits Convict Three Men Who Raised ‘Army’ Of Teen Jihadis For Wave Of Terror Attacks

Fifa: Iran ‘promises’ women will be able to watch football matches the same day 35 female fans are arrested

At least 36 dead after Turkish forces hit pro-Syrian government troops in Afrin region

Hand Grenades and Gang Violence Rattle Sweden’s Middle Class

Merkel Acknowledges German No-Go Zones; Longtime U.S. Media Deniers Hardest Hit

Eastern Ghouta: Assad forces strip trauma kits and surgical supplies from aid convoy meant for desperate civilians

Read it.

As for would-be criminals looking for an easy mark, judging by the crime statistics it seems most have bypassed the Georgia town and moved on to easier targets. Even CNN was forced to admit that Kennesaw, populated by 33,000 people, has only had “one murder in the last six years and a violent crime rate of below 2%.”

“But,” writes CNN, “it’s unclear whether that has anything to do with the gun law.”

Unclear to CNN, perhaps.

Read it. 

Why should they cover her when she doesn’t bother to cover herself?

Victor Davis Hanson blows the whistle.

It leads to an endless race for equality and erodes prior rules.Not long ago I waited for a flight to board. The plane took off 45 minutes late. There were only two attendants to accommodate eleven passengers who had requested wheelchair assistance.

Such growing efforts to ensure that the physically challenged can easily fly are certainly welcome. But when our plane landed — late and in danger of causing many passengers to miss their connecting flights — most of the eleven wheelchair-bound passengers left their seats unassisted and hurried out. It was almost as if newfound concerns about making connections had somehow improved their health during the flight.

You can’t game the system unless there’s a system to game. And the more complicated it is, the more room there is to game it. But not to worry — our government has that covered.

Read it.

Apparently a large number of his constituents live north of the border.

Freeberg turns over a rock.

One of the fundamental concepts that are being bifurcated by this disagreement, is “we.” I, along with other people who are capable of thinking like responsible adults, do not believe life automatically becomes better when we have more rules. I’m more of a believer in what Tacitus said, “The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.” Gun control offends me, partly because it’s right in our Constitution that we aren’t supposed to have gun control of any kind. But it offends me even more when I recognize what it is: Something bad was done by a bad person, and so we come up with some restrictions to be placed on the ones who did not do it.

Most Proglodyte Dreams involve forcing people to do things that proglodytes have no desire to do or intention of doing. No proglodyte would be inconvenienced by a total ban on private firearms (except the ones caught defenseless in a ‘gun free zone’ when the next nutcase shooter with an illegal weapon comes along). When proglodytes say that ‘we need to do this’ or ‘we need to do that’, they never include themselves in that ‘we’.

There can be some difficulty in noticing this within certain issues. On the gun-control thing for example, people who want more rules about guns usually have no intention of ever owning a gun themselves. Many of them are protected by armed bodyguards, and intend to continue enjoying the benefits of this weaponized perimeter after they’ve won their latest victory and gotten the laws to work the way they want them to work. But on social justice issues and/or environmental issues, the man-is-outside-of-nature types don’t include themselves in the “we” when they speak of how toxic “we” are. Guilty-white-liberals droning on about white privilege, do not include themselves in the complaint even though I notice many among them are, and have been for awhile, quite privileged.

Those who complain most bitterly about ‘white privilege’ are themselves almost always white and very privileged.

Those who complain most bitterlyl about ‘income inequality’ are themselves almost always in the upper 5%, if not the %1 — and not one of them spends any noticeable amount of time giving of their unequal incomes to those poorer than themselves.

Those who complain most bitterly about ‘unaffordable’ health care are themselves almost always able to afford the best care that money can buy. The same goes with housing.

And we’re all familiar with the ‘environmentalists’ who complain about fossil fuels destroying the planet while swanning around in SUVs and private jets.

‘Death of Stalin’ Director Slams Trump as ‘Quite Menacing,’ ‘Chilling’  Yeah, a movie director is a trained psychologist.

Read it.

ODF. Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

Yet another attempt to make reality conform to How It Ought To Be rather than How It Is.

Work, in the sense used in the article, is easily defined: What you can do that other people are willing to trade you something for, whether it be ‘money’ or something else.

Those who think that they have ‘bullshit’ jobs are under the delusion that the world owes them ‘work’ that not only provides them with money but also happiness. This is a Special Snowflake delusion that is becoming increasingly prevalent in this Participation Trophy world.

If you don’t like your job, do something else. If there’s nothing else that you can do, make the best of it. It’s all about sucking it up and dealing with it.

Read it.

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

Read it.

The Democratic National Committee has required equal numbers of men and women on party central committees for decades. In many jurisdictions, the party complies by appointing females to achieve gender balance that elections don’t produce. In some jurisdictions, the appointed members aren’t permitted to vote or give floor speeches, but apparently that’s no longer the case anywhere in Maryland.

Thus, there is already gender balance on the central committee.

But state chairman Kathleen Matthews, wife of MSNBC’s Chris Matthews, isn’t satisfied with a quota for female membership on Maryland central committees. She’s imposing a quota for elected female membership. The only way to achieve this is through gender-segregated elections.

Read it.

The most reversed Appellate Circuit Court in the country strikes again.

Read it.

The GOP has an opportunity to pick up a Senate seat in Minnesota. After the Democrats forced Al Franken out of office, Governor Mark Dayton appointed his Lieutenant Governor, Tina Smith, to serve until the general election in November. Smith is a little-known and rather faceless office-holder. As an urban leftist with questionable ties, e.g. as a former senior executive of Planned Parenthood, she is vulnerable. The question for Republicans is whether we have a strong candidate. Tim Pawlenty chose to run for governor rather than senator, so the most credible candidate so far is Karin Housley, a state senator who may be best known as the wife of Phil Housley, perhaps the best hockey player Minnesota has produced.

Now a guy named Richard Painter has stepped into the perceived vacuum and thrown his hat into the ring. Who is Richard Painter? He is a classic fake Republican. At one time, he held an “ethics” position in the George W. Bush administration, and he has parlayed that brief tenure into a career of Republican-bashing. We all know the type: a nominal Republican who probably hasn’t voted for a GOP candidate in a long time, but who sucks up time on cable news, trading on his supposed status as a Republican to lend weight to his attacks on actual Republicans. It is, frankly, a despicable species.

Read it.

Speed the day.

I don’t care which time they pick; just pick one and keep it the same all year.

Read it.

Less than four weeks after an unidentified man on Valencia Street attempted to tackle a self-driving car while it waited at an intersection, another neighborhood taxi driver took matters into his own hands by stopping in the middle of traffic to deliver a blow to a robot car hard enough to scratch the window.

Ned Ludd is dead but his spirit lives on in Mexifornia.

One of these days the backup driver will have a concealed carry permit and things will get Very Interesting.

Bill Kristol Thinks That President Trump Is ‘Very Rattled’ By Mueller  That’s because Kristol, in the same position, would be shitting bricks. Trump, thank God, is not Bill Kristol.

George Bush likes to joke Donald Trump ‘makes me look pretty good’  Actually, Donald Trump makes him look like a Democrat.

Parkland Survivor Kyle Kashuv Calls David Hogg ‘Hypocritical’ For Hanging Up On Trump

Antifa Declares Anti-Trump Feminist A Fascist  The witch-hunt for Heretics and Sinners proceeds apace.

AP Calls Trump’s Texas Supporters ‘Diehards,’ Uses Cooked Poll to Lowball His Popularity

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough Calls Trump Tariffs ‘Witchcraft Economics’  Scarborough has, of course, no discernible training in economics.

MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle: President Trump ‘Adores’ A ‘Honky-Tonk Rodeo’  Yet another proglodyte mind-reader.

Read it.

Nutrition studies are confusing and mostly useless for regular people. I do not say that just because a leading nutrition researcher has been exposed for manipulating data for years and years. I say it because most nutrition studies test the validity of small claims that just don’t matter in the larger scheme of living a life you love, and because the problems that ail us at the population level cannot be fixed with a bandolier of colloidal silver bullets. There is no “supplement” that can cure heart disease, or melt away obesity, or reverse the effects of inhaling a carcinogen all day, every day, for decades.

If you don’t pay attention to nutrition studies, then you won’t look like a fool when two (or five, or ten) years later they come out with another study that says, ‘You remember what we told you about X? Well, Never Mind. Turns out it’s good for you, not bad for you.’

Read it.

When you get dumped back in time, you don’t want to sound like a noob.

At last I’m going to get some use out of my Economics degree.

We hear a lot in the news about the ‘balance of trade deficit’. Supposedly this is a bad thing. In fact, however, it’s irrelevant. Like ‘social justice’, it falls into error by focusing on an incomplete subsection of a complex system.

The phrase ‘balance of trade’ refers to a comparison between how much stuff we send to other countries and how much stuff they send here.

When we send less stuff to them than they send to us, that’s called a ‘balance of trade deficit’.

The reason it doesn’t mean anything is because other countries don’t just send us stuff out of the goodness of their hearts. The expect to get paid. And they do get paid. This ought to come as no surprise.

So what happens when they send us more stuff than we send them? Do they not get paid? (What do you think?) They do indeed get paid. When they send us more stuff than we send them, they wind up with the difference in dollars. Perhaps an example will make this clear. If I give you stuff worth $100, and you give me stuff worth $150, you’re going to want that $50. And you’re not going to make that trade unless you get it. Depend on it.

Now, in the Good Old Days when countries were on the Gold Standard, that difference would mean that I need to send you $50 in gold. Eventually I run out of gold, and that’s a problem. So in the days of the Gold Standard, a balance of trade deficit was actually a problem, because it ran the danger of a country running out of the stuff that backed their currency. If you have X number of dollars in circulation backed by Y amount of gold, and you send $50 worth of gold overseas, then you’ve got X number of dollars in circulation backed by Y-50 amount of gold. This is called ‘deflation’ and it is pretty much always a bad thing.

But we don’t use gold any more. If we send less to a country than they send us, they wind up with a big pile of dollars. What kind of dollars? Paper dollars. That’s right — they wind up with a big pile of paper that they hope we will be good for, on down the line. (Feel free to utter the magic words ‘Thuckerrrrr’ in a Bugs Bunny voice if you wish.)

So: Do they just sit on that big pile of paper and hope that it will be worth something someday? Uh, no. They spend that money in the U.S. as quickly as they can, in the form of ‘investment’. Feel free to look it up. This is why Saudi Princes and Japanese zaibatsu buy American companies, real estate, and other stuff that stays here rather than going overseas to be included in the Balance of Trade computation. Ignorant people, such as journalists and Keynsians, mistake the part that they see for the whole, and so run around in circles and jump up and down (and get handsomely paid; nice work if you can get it), but it’s all hot air.

So when you hear somebody bloviating and handwringing about the ‘balance of trade deficit’, imagine that person with a sign around his or her neck saying ‘I am stupid’. It will make you feel better.

Read it.

It was always foolish to believe that a less Christian America would be a less religious America.

The demise of religion among American youth is greatly exaggerated. It turns out that America isn’t raising a new generation of unbelievers. Instead, rising in the heart of deep-blue America are the zealots of a new religious faith. They’re the intersectionals, they’re fully woke, and the heretics don’t stand a chance.

Read it.

Leap Beads allow worshippers to focus on devotions instead of counting mantras by keeping score of mala rotations for them on smartphones.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

The ‘Lincoln Charters Project’, which is a partnership between the University of Lincoln, UK, and the City of Lincoln Council, will see conservators and medieval experts at the University working to preserve, digitally record, and analyse some of the city’s most prized manuscripts.

The collection of royal charters, which belong to the City of Lincoln, span nearly 400 years and include important documents from the reigns 25 kings, including King John, King Richard II and King Henry V.

This will be the first time that the city’s charters have been inspected and repaired since 1788 when Samuel Lyon, the city’s Town Clerk, carried out the work. While some of the documents have been put on display in the city’s Guildhall, many have not been seen since they were placed into the Lincolnshire Archives in 1904.

Steve Sailer writes about No Country for White Men.

Moments after actress Frances McDormand employed her victory speech at the Academy Awards to demand diversity quotas in moviemaking, she was taught a lesson in diversity, good and hard, when her brand-new Oscar was stolen by a black megalomaniac.

…

Like Silicon Valley, Hollywood had assumed throughout Obama’s first term that the vast web of race regulations ensnaring the rest of corporate America didn’t apply to them, due to their coolness (or whatever). After the Obama reelection campaign cashed their contribution checks, however, both California industries suddenly found themselves in trouble for not hiring enough blacks, women, and, uh, that other minority, the one nobody can remember.

Read it.

Poor iddle snowflake.

‘Journalists’ are the only people in the world who think they have a professional responsibility to be pig-ignorant.

CNN Panelist Condemns President Trump for ‘Expressing Admiration for an Authoritarian’  More humor-impaired Crustians. (Where was this guy when Thomas Friedman was expressing even more admiration for this authoritarian and his regime?)

Florida Billboard Labels NRA As A ‘Terrorist Organization’

Ana Navarro: ‘I Wanted More Trump Jokes’ At Oscars

CNN Guest: President Trump ‘Believes the Russian Activity Benefits Him Politically’  Notice how all these Leftys can read minds? If they’re so psychic, how come they’re not getting rich in the stock market?

NBC Panel Laughably Claims Oscars ‘Free of Partisan Attacks’  They say this stuff with a straight face (and a puckered puss).

NYT’s Michelle Goldberg: ‘Disgraceful’ for Journalists to Stoop to Joke With the President!

Meacham Invokes KKK, George Wallace While Discussing ‘Trumpism’  Funny how some people feel entitled to make something up and call it ‘Trumpism’ as if it were a real thing.

DNC Head Perez: Trump Is ‘The Most Dangerous President In American History’

Fired Trump Aide Speculates Wildly About Trump, And The Mainstream Media Laps It Up  Why not? Everyone else is doing it.

How Trump’s Hudson Tunnel Snit Threatens the National Economy  Sky is falling, women and minorities hardest hit, etc. etc. Yet another attempt to get U.S. taxpayers to bail out a Blue State’s problems.

TV vs. Trump in 2018: Lots of Russia, and 91% Negative Coverage (Again!)

Former Obama Aide Predicts ‘Prisons Will Be Full Of’ Trump Associates  More proglodyte fantasies.

CBS’s Colbert Pathetically Begs Chelsea Clinton to Curse at Trump  It ought not to be all that hard.

Trump Syndromes  Victor Davis Hanson sums it up.

Trump’s personal travel costs could pay to send food and water to Puerto Rico for almost three months, new analysis shows  Odd how nobody did this kind of analysis when Barack and Michelle took separate planes (at taxpayer expense) to vacation in Hawaii.

MSNBC Demands ‘Truth Teller’ at All Trump Events: ‘Nothing He Says Is True’  What he says about the Fake News media is pretty much true.

Read it.

Jeez, you’d think the place was run by Trump supporters.

Perhaps we can paraphrase an old Russian joke: ‘If you meet a New Yorker on the road, beat him. He will know why.’

Read it.

In a world-first, an ESA-led team has built and fired an electric thruster to ingest scarce air molecules from the top of the atmosphere for propellant, opening the way to satellites flying in very low orbits for years on end

…

There are no valves or complex parts – everything works on a simple, passive basis. All that is needed is power to the coils and electrodes, creating an extremely robust drag-compensation system.

As best I can figure, this works similarly to the magnetohydrodynamic drive made famous in The Hunt For Red October.

Read it.

Marking Tuesday’s midterm election primaries in Texas, ABC’s Good Morning America decided to take a story that was already 73% pro-Democrat and make it 100% pro-Democrat by editing out the one Republican interviewed for the report. The segment in question, from Congressional Correspondent Mary Bruce, was recycled from Sunday’s This Week and hyped how “Democrats are hoping to turn this deep red state blue, fueled by a wave of female candidates.”

Proglodyte dreams! Who wants to read about those deplorable old Republicans, anyway?

If the X in the above statement is something that was determined by genetics, the statement is bullshit and the speaker is a bullshitter.

That’s all you need to know.

Read it.

Inside the gin bottle was a note written in German and dated 12 June 1886. Ms Illman’s husband, Tim Illman, later helped translate the note.

The Western Australian Museum (WAM) confirmed the authenticity of the find, saying it believed the bottle was thrown from a German sailing ship attempting to find efficient shipping routes.

Read it.

Judge Titus noted early on that the issue before him is not whether DACA is lawful. Rather, the issue is whether the Trump administration “made a reasoned decision to rescind DACA based on the Administrative Record.” “Any alternative inquiry,” he wrote, “would impermissibly require a court to “substitute its judgment for that of the agency.”

…

Judge Titus also found that “the Administrative Record — the basis from which the Court must make its judicial review — does not support the notion that [the president’s order] was targeting a subset of the immigrant population, and it does not support any supposition that the decision was derived on a racial animus.” He rejected the argument that Trump’s harsh comments about illegal immigrants, and others, provide a basis for invalidating a program as improperly motivated.

A judge who doesn’t pretend to be a mind-reader. How refreshing.

Read it.

How about that great government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

We do. Move to Canada. If they have anything seriously wrong, they come to the U.S. because the lines for ‘free’ medical care in Canada are too long.

Read it.

Applying to everything from the pictures researchers take in the library’s reading rooms to the 1.7 million high-resolution Newberry images currently available online, the revised policy is intended to encourage users to interact more freely with collection items as they produce new scholarly and creative work.

For anybody interested in medieval books, this is great news.

Lileks.

Definition: To recognize someone but ignore them (Merriam-Webster Online).

I’ve been doing that for decades; didn’t know there was a word for it.

Read it.

On January 31, Nashville Mayor Megan Barry announced that she had ended an extramarital affair with city policeman and bodyguard Rob Forrest. Since then, except for the Associated Press, the national media showed little interest in covering a whirlwind of subsequent troubling revelations. Even last week’s call by the left-leaning Nashville Tennessean for Barry’s resignation has been virtually ignored. During that time, the AP failed to tag Barry, who resigned on Tuesday, as a Democrat in 9 of 10 stories.

Media bias? What media bias?

After Barry’s January 31 announcement, Forrest immediately retired with an annual pension of $80,000. In late February, his wife filed for divorce. It’s fair to characterize Barry, the more powerful person in the relationship, as a homewrecker.

What a great advertisement for the MeToo movement.

Seems to me that if a Republican had done something that, we’d be wondering how much jail time would be involved. Since it’s a Democrat, she can look forward to some juicy consulting gigs and maybe a book deal.

Read it.

On Monday, CaliBurger started its newest “employee,” a learning robot that can cook 150 hamburgers an hour. Flippy doesn’t just flip hamburgers, he exposes why raising the minimum-wage hurts workers.

Flippy, built my Miso Robotics, uses thermal imaging to tell it precisely when to flip each patty, allowing for more or less perfect consistency. And it supposedly will get smarter the more burgers it flips, and various attachments will eventually let it handle other aspects of the burger-making process.

…

In some respects, automation like Flippy is an inevitability, as computers and robotics get increasingly sophisticated. Replacing workers with robots has been going on for decades.

But raising the minimum wage will accelerate this trend by making even costly robots a better deal than increasingly expensive, minimally skilled workers.

Yup. Minimum-wage raisers are terminally ignorant of elementary economics, and their constituents are the ones who will suffer for it.

Read it.

Watson’s suit alleges that Dick’s policy violates Oregon law against age-based discrimination for people 18 years and older in places of public accommodations. State law includes prohibitions against discrimination in stores that are open to the general public.

Watson also filed a separate suit claiming a Walmart store in Josephine County, Oregon, discriminated against him by denying him a rifle sale “on or about March 3, 2018.” As with Dick’s, the Walmart employee at the gun counter allegedly told Watson that rifles and shotguns could not be sold to individuals under the age of 21. The employee indicated that ammunition for firearms could not be sold to anyone under 21 either.

In both suits Watson alleges that the defendants, Dick’s and Walmart, not only discriminated but “advertised … unlawful discriminatory policies by issuing a press release, and other materials, stating that [the defendants] will no longer sell any firearms or ammunition to any person under the age of 21.”

You knew it had to happen.

Read it.

Who are these sinister people, the ‘investor class’? Nothing immediately comes to mind, but they sure sound scary, don’t they?

No issue in America today better illustrates the divergent interests of working Americans and the 1 percent than pension reform. Substantial empirical evidence shows that America’s favored retirement vehicle — the 401(k), recently renounced by its own inventors — is grossly inadequate and will leave tens of millions of Americans with insufficient retirement assets. And yet states and cities are busy converting traditional pensions into these failing 401(k)s or equivalents, to the great benefit of money managers and the finance class.

Another apparent villain of the piece, this time the ‘finance class’. Who might these sinister folk be? No telling — the author certainly can’t be bothered to tell us — but, again, they sure sound scary, don’t they?

Another thing the author fails to reveal is what ‘substantial empirical evidence’ about the ‘gross inadequacy’ of the 401k might be. I guess we’re just supposed to take his word for it.

Speaking anecdotally, it was the 401k that put me on the road to having sufficient financial independence to retire when I wanted to. If that’s failure, gimme more. Of course, the 401k does demand a bit of discipline on the part of the person allegedly saving for retirement; the only difference between it and a normal brokerage account is the fact that it’s sheltered from taxes, which would seem to suggest that the ‘failure’ belongs in to the tax system rather than the vehicle itself — which I am fully prepared to believe.

Advocates of pension “reform” — which really means cutting or eliminating traditional pension funds — will tell you that such funds are a big drain on state and local budgets, since, as defined-benefit programs, they are obligated to pay workers a defined amount in their retirement. But that’s largely a question of political priorities; underfunded pensions are the result of, well, decades of underfunding pensions. The real reason for the attack on pensions goes deeper, and exposes the great and growing rift between America’s economic elite and everyone else.

That’s a nice sweep under the rug. The problem with defined-benefit pension plans has always been that those in charge of the plans are reluctant to fund them properly, either because they want to use the money for something else (in a private business) or because they were overly generous in their pension promises and the chickens are now coming home to roost (in public pensions). That strikes me as a serious and ongoing problem worth more than just a handwave on the way to pointing the finger to Those Sinister Forces Over There who are to blame for all our woe, ‘America’s economic elite’. (Who are these sinister folk? Once again, the author is silent. Apparently we’re supposed to know instinctively who these beneficiaries of the Two Minute Hate might be.)

The whole reason the 401k was invented was because people were tired of putting their economic future in the hands of people whose incentives were all pointed the wrong way. I’d rather have a lump of money that I can manage myself than depend on the probity of pension fund managers (and, whoever ‘America’s economic elite’ might be, I strongly suspect that pension fund managers are in that number).

Consider how we 401(k) holders behave as investors. How many of us thought to sue Wells Fargo after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau revealed that the bank had created millions of fake credit card and bank accounts? Or to push our fund managers to do so for us? How many of us call up our fund managers after a quarter, a year or a decade in which we underperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index to renegotiate our fees? Or even to switch managers? How many of us even know how our funds performed relative to the S.&P. 500?

Well, I do. That’s what being an investor is all about. However little influence we may have on a 401k fund manager, I would bet you money that it’s less than the influence we would have on the pension fund manager of a defined-benefit pension. Just think about that for a second and you’ll see it’s true.

At bottom, the problem is structural. We are to our investees and investment managers what nonunionized, “right to work” workers are to their employers: alone and devoid of leverage to negotiate. That stands in sharp contrast to traditional pensions, which, like unions, are collective and centrally managed.

And there you have the mask lifted at last. This is just an apologia for ‘collectively and centrally managed’ pensions, one more step on the road to a ‘collectively and centrally managed’ life. Wanting to be in control of our own destiny (and, despite the trash talk in the article, a 401k gives people a lot more control than a centrally managed pension fund) is a ‘structural problem’.

And the elephant in the room is the fact that almost all defined-benefit pensions have a certain minimum time in service — the one time I worked for a defined-benefit pension company, EDS, it was five years — whereas with a 401k any money you have in the account goes with you when you leave (and can be converted into an IRA that you can actively manage to your heart’s content) even if it’s only a month or so.

Remember, these are the days of employee mobility, where people jump from job to job as often as they like (or need to do), rather than spending decades in the same fabric-covered box. The longest time I ever worked for a single employer in my working life was the six years I spent in the Navy — for which I got no pension benefit; nor would I have gotten it for any other job I’d held except for that five years with EDS (which doesn’t translate to much of a pension benefit, let me tell you). Looking back on it, the existence of the 401k is the reason I have any pension pot at all.

Eventually we get to the real villains of the piece: ‘the Kochs and their allies’. That tells you everything you need to know about the author — and his chosen vehicle, the New York Times.

Read it.

On Jan. 2, a Chevy Bolt EV operated by General Motors’ Cruise driverless car division in San Francisco’s Mission District was waiting at a green light for pedestrians to cross when a man “ran across Valencia Street against the ‘do not walk’ symbol, shouting, and struck the left side of the Cruise AV’s rear bumper and hatch with his entire body,” damaging a tail light, according to a report filed with the California Department of Motor Vehicles.

It would appear that not even in California are people down with the future.

Read it.

The obvious question that occurs to me is ‘Who cares?’ ‘Income inequality’ is one of the Left’s favorite talking points, but they always assume-without-attempting-to-prove that ‘income inequality’ is ipso facto a Bad Thing, like slavery or  wearing white shoes after Labor Day.

The roots of this attitude are, of course, in Proglodyte Dreams, in which everybody is exactly the same, has exactly the same talents and skills, and therefore ought to receive exactly the same economic compensation for whatever it is tht they do, be it inventing the computer or collecting old bottles to redeem for the deposits.

It is a symptom of how far our civilization has degenerated that they don’t even feel any impulse toward justifying this assumption.

Read it.

Reminds me of the old Monty Python advertisement: ‘It’s a foot ointment! And a laundry detergent!’