Read it.

It’s nice to see that the spirit of adventure still exists in America.

Check it out.

For those of you who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you might like.

Read it.

The great thing about being a liberal is that it is an endlessly adaptable creed. Back in the 1960s and 1970s when white people moved to the suburbs and urban cores deterioration, it was called “white flight,” and the left decried it as racist, etc. But now that affluent whites have moved back into the urban cores, it is called “gentrification,” and it is terrible because it ruins old neighborhoods and pushes out poor people. See what I mean how fun and easy it is to be a liberal?

ZMan warns of trouble to come.

That’s why the current climate is so dangerous. Nature supplies more men with nothing to lose than any society can need. A political system that systematically marginalizes large swaths of young men, telling them they have no place in the world, is a society begging for political violence. Rebecca Klein of the Huffington Post may be feeling smug, for having “outed” a bad thinker, but she is not going to be so smug when her Prius blows up when she tries to start it. That’s where this war on our social rights is heading.

In the Civil Rights Movement, there came a point where the people in charge faced a choice. They could let reasonable men on both sides find a reasonable accommodation, or they could let the unreasonable men on both sides fight it out. Today, the people in charge have that same choice. They can put their unreasonable people on a leash and deal honestly with the reasonable people in dissent, or they can continue to wage this social war and invite the war into their streets and their neighborhoods.

This will not end well.

The Social War is, of course, most famously the name given to the conflict between Rome and the other cities of Italy in 91-88 BC. It did not end well.

Read it.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.

If they can give me better services than my bank, I’m in.

Read it.

And far more entertaining than his show. That’s what really burns.

Read it.

Fine, as long as it’s coming out of her pocket.

Wait until she gets the bill from the Republican party for ending slavery….

Maxine Waters: Trump Is ‘Racist’ For Questioning My IQ  I must be one, too, because I also question her IQ. I question her sanity even more strongly.

Here Are All The Attacks On Trump At The 90th Academy Awards [VIDEO]

Common And Andra Day Call Out President Trump, NRA  How ‘courageous’.

Common And Andra Day Call Out President Trump, NRA  Barack Obama now comes in vanilla.

NYT reports Sweden crime problem it criticized Trump for discussing

Daily Beast Roars: ‘Best Supporting Actor Should Go to Mike Pence’  Cheap trash talk is what passes for ‘journalism’ these days.

New York to Trump: Drop Dead

Florida shooting survivor David Hogg ‘hung up on White House call’ inviting him to Trump listening session  Typical Leftist – not interesting in listening, or ‘dialogue’, but merely lecturing. This kid has a great future as a Democrat apparatchik.

Read it.

European governments are experts at the politician’s friend, Leave No Stash of Money Unraided.

The difference  between a European government and the Mafia is merely the language spoken.

Joel Kotkin blows the whistle.

Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.

– The Who, “We won’t be fooled again”, 1971

Once seen as the saviors of America’s economy, Silicon Valley is turning into something more of an emerging axis of evil. “Brain-hacking” tech companies such as Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon, as one prominent tech investor puts it, have become so intrusive as to alarm critics on both right and left.

Firms like Google, which once advertised themselves as committed to being not “evil,” are now increasingly seen as epitomizing Hades’ legions. The tech giants now constitute the world’s five largest companies in market capitalization. Rather than idealistic newcomers, they increasingly reflect the worst of American capitalism — squashing competitors, using indentured servants, attempting to fix wages, depressing incomes, creating ever more social anomie and alienation.

At the same time these firms are fostering what British academic David Lyon has called a “surveillance society” both here and abroad. Companies like Facebook and Google thrive by mining personal data, and their only way to grow, as Wired recently suggested, was, creepily, to “know you better.”

The techie vision of the future is one in which the middle class all but disappears, with those not sufficiently merged with machine intelligence relegated to rent-paying serfs living on “income maintenance.” Theirs is a world in where long-standing local affinities are supplanted by Facebook’s concept of digitally-created “meaningful communities.”

Read it.

Joy Reid, a leftist writing at the Daily Beast, has a column titled “The Right Can’t Fight the Future.” It is an odd mingling of triumphalism and paranoia, a combination we see often on the left. It is the sort of thing we have seen a thousand times–the inevitable victory of leftism, never mind the USSR, East Germany, North Korea, Venezuela, and so on.

But some found Reid’s column impressive, including Larry Tribe, who was a smart guy when I knew him decades ago. I am not sure what has happened in the interim.

He succumbed to Leftist Brain Rot. It happens every time. This is why Obama didn’t dare nominate him to the Supreme Court, even though he was famous for being the Crust’s candidate for Best Constitutional Law Professor Ever.

‘Authoritarian Impulses’ — CNN Panel Triggered By Trump’s ‘President For Life’ Joke   Cue hysteria from the homor-impaired. These people need to get out more.

Obamas ‘Loved’ Tweet Calling Trump a White Supremacist on Premiere of ‘The Good Fight’  Of course they did.

Van Jones: ‘If President Obama Had One Week Like This, He Would Be In Guantanamo’  Which is a blatant lie. If Obama had a week like this, he would be lauded as the Second Coming of Martin Luther King — like every other week he had while he was President.

Maxine Waters Suggests Stormy Daniels Should Comment On Trump’s Mental State  I’d like to hear her comments on Maxine Waters’ mental state.

Because Of Trump More Women Are Deciding To Run For Office Than Ever  Not that he’ll get any credit for it.

Former CIA director says Trump is ‘unstable, inept, inexperienced and unethical’ in scathing interview  And yet he keeps winning and making life better for the American people. Funny how that works.

Donald Trump’s ‘joke’ about a Chinese-style power grab is worryingly unfunny  Cue hysteria from the humor-impared.

Read it.

Shhh! You weren’t supposed to notice that!

Eric S. Raymond blows the whistle.

There’s a lot of buzz about Iain Banks’s Culture universe lately, what with Elon Musk naming his drone ships in Banksian style and a TV series in the works.

I enjoyed the Culture books too, but they were a guilty pleasure for me because in a fundamental way they are bad SF.

They’re bad SF because the Culture’s economics is impossible. That ship hits a rock called “Hayek’s Calculation Problem” and sinks – even superintelligent Minds can’t make central planning work, because without price signals and elicited preferences you can’t know where to allocate resources. What you get is accelerating malinvestment to collapse.

And that’s the problem with Socialism and Communism and all the other statist -isms. There is no central allocation system that can beat the decentralized (‘crowd-sourced’, if you will) market price system for efficiently allocating resources. A naturally self-organizing system (‘kosmos’ in Hayekian terms) will in short order organize itself into the most efficient structure. It does so by its very nature.

Read it.

Muslims? What Muslims?

John Hinderaker at PowerLine calls time out.

President Trump said last week that he intends to use powers granted him by Congress to impose import duties on steel and aluminum. That was all it took for the press to become free traders. Gloom and doom are everywhere, as reporters gleefully tell us how our trading partners are planning to retaliate and how Trump’s tariffs will damage the economy. I don’t recall a similar reaction when it was Democrats who were the leading protectionists.

…

This is all about President Trump, of course. If Trump came out for a big increase in the minimum wage, the Washington Post would suddenly realize that it would increase unemployment among minority youths.

Read it.

What’s striking about all this isn’t the organization. If you start reading books about organizing, it’s clear how it all works. But no journalist covering the story wrote about this stuff for two weeks. Instead, every story was about the Parkland kids being magically effective.

…

The real tip-off should have been the $500,000 donations from Winfrey and Clooney. Big celebrities don’t give huge money to strangers on a whim. Somebody who knows Winfrey and Clooney called them and asked. But the press’s response was to be ever more impressed with the kids.

…

But it’s not just a mainstream media problem. None of the righty outlets writing about Parkland picked up on the clear evidence that professional organizers were backing the Parkland kids, either. Instead, they objected to the front-and-centering of minor kids as unseemly, which does no good: Lefties aren’t going to listen, and it doesn’t educate the Right to counter.

In other words, this was a carefully calculated and professionally run campaign to look like ‘spontaneous uprising by the oppressed’, the very thing that Lefty functionaries spend their lives doing. It’s no accident that Barack Obama’s first job out of school was ‘community organizer’.

Read it.

Silicon Valley has historically had a reputation for being quite libertarian, but it appears to be becoming increasingly intolerant towards conservatives and even libertarians. Companies seem to be rapidly adopting a culture of social justice that is far more consciously activist than the libertarianism and/or moderate liberalism that preceded it. As a consequence, conservatives and libertarians are now viewed less as people with different views, and more as obstacles to moral progress, thus justifying their harassment.

Most corporations these days are developing the atmosphere of a Communist re-education camp, in which ‘diversity’ is the unquestionable Party Line and those who don’t Love Big Brother are in danger of finding themselves on the street. In part this is just a response to modern culture: Those companies who don’t toe the Party Line open themselves to expensive lawsuits and boycotts; the NRA and its (former) partners are just the most recent poster children to be marched through the streets with their hands bound behind them and insulting placards around their necks.

There’s something missing from the social justice narrative though, demonstrated by the situation in Silicon Valley and those other fields I mentioned: it doesn’t take into account the power and oppression it exerts itself. In a society where social justice advocates are outside the dominant power structure—as was the case when these ideas were originally articulated—this doesn’t matter much, since their power is negligible. That’s increasingly no longer the case, as social justice advocates have come to exert major influence over central areas of society, and consequently have also gained substantial power over society as a whole. Clearly, an accurate model of societal power must include social justice ideology and its advocates.

I object to the term ‘social justice’ in its entirety. There is no qualified justice: Justice is Justice, and sticking an adjective on the front of it is an attempt to hijack a term in pursuit of a political agenda. (This is of a piece with other statist propaganda tools: ‘price gouging’, ‘war profiteering’, ‘black market’, etc.) Justice is inherently social — there is no ‘justice’ outside of society, so saying ‘social justice’ is like saying ‘damp water’. The use of the term ‘social justice’ is like the use of ‘gay marriage’, an attempt to steal the positive connotation of a social institution in promotion of a program that, objectively viewed, would be entirely outside, if not contrary to, the historic meanings of the term.

This Week in Media Bias History: Guess Who Blamed Reagan for… Trump?

NYT Front Sees ‘Hard Right’ in Both Trump, Neo-Fascist Europe; ‘Trickle-Down’ Insult  The Hitlers are coming! The Hitlers are coming! Nobody appears worried that the Stalins are coming and are mostly already here.

Read it.

It is remarkable to see the headlines about presidential aides Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump in the liberal media. The son-in-law and daughter of President Trump are now getting routinely hammered in The Washington Post, The New York Times, on CNN and even in The Wall Street Journal editorial pages, the latter decidedly not in the “liberal media” category.

But what is particularly noticeable is the reluctance to apply the same standards to presidential or other political relatives – if they are liberals.

Read it.

Women and minorities hardest hit, film at 11, etc. etc.

This is from The Guardian, so it’s full of semi-socialist hand-wringing. These people won’t be happy until we all subsist on green tea (fair-traded) and tofu (organically locally sourced).

Most of these ‘studies’ either depend on data from lab animals (if you’re not a lab animal, I’d say you’re pretty safe) or on statistical slices that say doing behavior X increases your cancer from Y to Z. The problem with that is the classical mistake of confusing correlation with causation. There are so many variables in the way individuals live there lives that picking one variable out of the mix and pretending that it’s the most important is almost the exact inverse of what true science ought to be. And this is exacerbated by running through the mush-for-brains of ‘journalism’, which never met a possible panic that it didn’t like.

Sheesh.

Read it.

The tech oligarchs who already dominate our culture and commerce, manipulate our moods, and shape the behaviors of our children while accumulating capital at a rate unprecedented in at least a century want to fashion our urban future in a way that dramatically extends the reach of the surveillance state already evident in airports and on our phones.

…

This drive is the latest expansion of the Valley’s narcissistic notion of “changing the world” through disruption of its existing structures and governments and the limits those still place on the tech giants’ grandest ambitions. This new urban vision negates the notion of organic city-building and replaces it with an algorithmic regime that seeks to rationalize, and control, our way of life.

The problem with everyone wanting to change the world is that they don’t leave any room for those of us who don’t want our world changed.

The drive to redesign our cities, however, is not really the end of the agenda of those who Aldous Huxley described as the top of the “scientific caste system.” The oligarchy has also worked to make our homes, our personal space, “connected” to their monitoring and money machines. This may be a multibillion-dollar market soon, but many who have employed such devices at home—appliances that track our activities and speak to us like loyal servants—find them “creepy,” as they should, given that their daily activities are fed back to enrich the high-tech hive mind. Both the city and house the future may owe more to Brave New World than Better Homes and Gardens.

This is a vision of the urban future in which the tech companies’ own workers and whatever other people with skills the machines haven’t yet replaced are a new class of urban serfs living in small apartments, along with a much larger class of dependent persons living on “income maintenance” and housing or housing subsidies provided by the state. “Bees exist on Earth to pollinate flowers, and maybe humans are here to build the machines,” observes professor Andrew Hudson-Smith, from University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis. “The city will be one big joined-up urban machine, and humans’ role on Earth will be done.”

This is why ‘urbanism’ is all the rage with the Cloud People — they want us all herded into high-tech barracks where we can be more easily controlled, not out wandering loose like free people.

Read it.

MI5 agents are allowed to carry out criminal activity in the UK, the government has acknowledged for the first time.

The prime minister was on Thursday forced to publish the text of a direction to the Investigatory Powers Commissioner’s Office, the spying watchdog, on governing “security service participation in criminality”.

It instructs the IPCO to oversee the participation of MI5 agents in criminal activity, which was previously conducted by the now-defunct office of the Intelligence Services Commissioner, under a secret order referred to as the “third direction”.

However, guidance about when British spies can commit crimes, and how far they can go, remains confidential.

This is from The Guardian, so it might just be Left-wing propaganda. But it’s still disturbing.

The problem with ‘the sovereignty of Parliament’ is that a government with a majority in Parliament can do any damned thing they please, without any protections for the rights of individual citizens.

Read it.

Several press outlets have noted that in its latest annual “Hate Tracker,” the Thought Police at the Southern Poverty Law Center have added “Male Supremacy” as a “hate group” category.

Associated Press and Reuters stories on SPLC Wednesday ignored their new “Male Supremacy” category. A story at the Arizona Republic and a Newsy video found at many local and regional news sites recognized it, but ignored the group’s smear of women allegedly backing “male supremacy.” The New York Times only carried the AP story and the Reuters story. Predictably, several women’s magazines — including Elle and Ms. — celebrated this development.

What they aren’t reporting is that the SPLC has also begun laying the foundation for marginalizing anyone providing intellectual support for mainstream men’s rights activists.

The SPLC long ago recognized that tracking the small number of relatively powerless people in white and black nationalist groups (yet somehow exempting the violent, hate-filled, exclusionary Black Lives Matter movement) was a losing proposition. Thus, SPLC has in recent years expanded the scope of its identified “hate groups” to those holding non-violent conservative beliefs.

Read it.

The U.S. Army is once more reforming its basic training program to deal with complaints from unit commanders that too many of the new soldiers they were receiving were unable to perform adequately. The most common complaints were new troops who were undisciplined, physically unfit, lacked basic military skills that basic is supposed to impart and generally unsuited for military service. These calls for training reforms have been a common event since peacetime conscription was introduced after World War II. During the period of peacetime conscription parents, politicians and unhappy conscripts complained that that training was too dangerous or misguided in some other way and the army made changes. Then the changes proved to be the cause of unprepared troops who could not perform well in combat or got themselves killed and the army was called on to implement more effective training. After conscription ended in the early 1970s the problem gradually got worse because fewer politicians had any personal experience with basic training or military life but were called on by special interest groups or popular movements that saw military training as something other than a program to produce effective soldiers. In the last decade, as most American combat forces in Iraq and Afghanistan came home, there were calls to make a lot of changes in recruiting and training and were, from a military sense, counterproductive. It has gotten so bad that the problems have to be addressed.

Read it.

The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an employment discrimination lawsuit against the Wi-Fi Alliance – a non-profit based in Austin, Texas, that promotes Wi-Fi technology and standards – for allegedly laying off an employee because of his ongoing military service obligations.

The government’s complaint, filed on behalf of Charles O’Donnell, a Lieutenant Colonel with the US Army Reserve, claimed the alliance violated the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA) of 1994, a law designed to prevent private employers from discriminating against military personnel for fulfilling service obligations.

In a statement, John Gore, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division, said on Thursday the complaint underscores the DoJ’s commitment to protecting members of the military. “The men and women of our armed services expect and are entitled to the peace of mind of knowing that their civilian employment will not be jeopardized because they serve our country,” he said.

Pity that we have to depend on a British tech site to report on this incident. Austin is, of course, the Blue pustule on the rosy Red butt of Texas; the state topography is such that all Leftys drain into Travis County (unless they can catch ahold of the other major metropolitan areas in the state).

Read it.

You know, as they do.

CNN’s Cuomo Implicitly Refers to President Trump as a ‘Virus’

Nicolle Wallace Gets Shut Down by Condoleezza Rice for Implying Trump Is Racist

New York Times ‘Conservative’ Columnist Compares Never-Trump Republicans To Communist Dissidents

NYT’s Stephens Compares Anti-Trump Republicans to Anti-Communist Cold War Leaders

Alec Baldwin: I’m Going To ‘Give It Everything’ To Get Rid Of Trump  Unless he means running for Congress, he has a very inflated idea of his importance.

Trump’s White House is like ‘a plantation’, says ex-Trump aide Omarosa Manigault-Newman  Okay, show us how much cotton they made you pick.

More than half of Americans think Donald Trump is racist, finds poll  I’m surprised it’s that low, with The Press hammering him about it every day.

CNN’s Ana Navarro Uses The Golden Arches To Bash Trump White House  Remember that Navarro is alleged to be a Republican, although you wouldn’t know it by the company she keeps.

Joy Behar on Oscars: ‘Nobody’ in Hollywood Makes Fun of Trump Supporters  They tell these lies as if nobody will know they’re lying.

Read it.

This could have ended very badly.

Read it.

It is said when you are young and foolish, you are young and foolish. While a tautology, it is also true.

This is demonstrated by David Hogg, school shooting “survivor” sucking up media time lecturing everyone on violence, while at the same time displaying ignorance of facts, statute law, and Constitutional Law. (I put survivor in quotes because he was in a different building on campus. He had as much chance of actually getting shot as the Broward County sheriff’s deputies cowering outside the building containing the active shooter. Less, actually. There was a diminishingly small possibility the sheriffs might have shot Cruz leaving the building if only out of self-preservation.)

People like David Hogg wind up being either elected officials or, more likely, staff members to elected officials.

I do not mean that as a compliment. We all knew such people in high school and college, and always counted our fingers after shaking hands with them.

Read it.

And the star certainly didn’t hold back when it came to Donald Trump’s proposals to arm teachers, declaring on Twitter: “Can someone that’s been in a Gunfight tell that Muthaf*kka that’s Never been in a Gunfight, the flaws of his Arm The Teachers plan??!!”

Scott Adams asks the obvious question: What is the advantage of being in a gunfight without a gun? A subject on which Samuel L. Jackson has been silent.

To the best of my knowledge, Samuel L. Jackson has never been ‘in a gunfight’ either (playing one in the movies doesn’t really count), so I fail to see how he has any expertise over Trump on the subject.

Read it.

Yet Another Crooked Democrat Politician.  Not really news, but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Diabetes – or uncontrolled blood sugar levels – is normally split into type 1 and type 2.

But researchers in Sweden and Finland think the more complicated picture they have uncovered will usher in an era of personalised medicine for diabetes.

Read it.

American singer and model Taylor Muhl has always had a unique birthmark in the shape of different skin pigmentation divided by a line running straight down the middle of her torso.

It wasn’t till Muhl investigated this that she learned she was one of around only 100 people ever to have a rare condition called chimerism, which means she has two sets of DNA.

Read it.

A man who employs six people in California is so fed up of fighting to remain in the US he and his family have “deported” themselves.

Khaled Altarkeet, the owner of a café in San Jose, donated leftover food to Catholic charities before boarding a plane to Kuwait with his wife and four children after he was unable to extend his business visa.

“I’m shutting the business and forgetting the United States,” he told The Mercury News. “I will find another country that is more accepting and willing to take my investments, since this place doesn’t want us.”

Sometimes the system works. If he had been named Sanchez, of course, he’d just stay and thumb his nose at the law.

Mr Alterkeet initially obtained an L-1 visa, which was valid for one year, in order to work on his business. But immigration authorities refused to grant the entrepreneur an extension when he applied in October, on the grounds he failed to prove he was the manager or an executive.

That seems a pretty low bar. Wonder why he couldn’t meet it?

Funny how Trump has been President for one year and it’s now ‘Trump’s America’, while Obama was President for eight and it never was Obama’s America.

Read it.

Explicit racism is now official Democrat policy.

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Former nine-year Google employee Arne Wilberg claims the company started canceling interviews in 2016 and 2017 with people who are not black, Hispanic or female because the website was trying to improve its diversity, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Google had “irrefutable policies, memorialized in writing and consistently implemented in practice, of systematically discriminating in favor job applicants who are Hispanic, African American, or female, and against Caucasian and Asian men,” the lawsuit claims.

Read it.

That because Pence’s God is white and therefore a racist fantasy, whereas Oprah’s God is obviously black and therefore way cool. Not as cool as Obama, of course, but still pretty cool.

Read it.

I guess he isn’t Hitler after all. Who knew?

(Be cool. It’s just more Red Dot Exercise for the media.)

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Well, there you go. If a shooter shows up, sic the dogs on him. For sure they’ll be more dependable than a deputy.

Read it.

Depends on your expectations, I should think.

Last week Laurence Tribe, a Harvard University law professor, stated (with the smug certainty befitting a Harvard don) that “the semi-automatic AR-15 can fire over 10 rounds per second.” That’s 600 rounds a minute. Um, nope. That weapon’s maximum rate of fire is at best 45 rounds a minute. The list goes on. CNN reported that an AR-15 “shotgun” was used in the 2013 Washington Navy Yard shooting. There’s no such thing as an “AR-15 shotgun.”

I am reminded of the scene in the Eddie Murphy movie THE DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN where ‘Congressman Johnson’ (from Florida, natch) joins a Congressional junket to somewhere in the South to shoot duck — with AR-15s. That degree of ignorance goes without mention in movies all the time.

Read it.

The liberal media were jubilant when news broke Wednesday morning that Dick’s Sporting Goods planned to stop selling AR-15’s at all their stores and would impose age restrictions on those looking to purchase a weapon. But what they were championing as growing momentum for their gun control cause may just be a case of political opportunism because Dick’s made the same announcement in 2012 after Sandy Hook, but neither ABC nor NBC cared to mention that key tidbit that evening.

Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it. Or did I already say that?

UPDATE: Dick’s Sporting Goods Employee Quits Over Gun Restriction