Read it.

I doubt that he regrets it for a second.

Read it.

Except that nobody has actually been prosecuted yet — he’s got one plea deal, one guy applying to have the charges thrown out, and a Russian company in court saying ‘Is that all you got?’ I guess this looks like success to Joe and Mika.

Read it.

Apparently the middle and working class are moving out, and the rich and illegal are moving in.

The top recipient state for the low and middle-income people leaving California is Texas. Liberals who claim to be on the side of the poor and middle class fall suddenly mute when it is pointed out that when poor and middle-class working people vote with their feet, they vote for a deep red state that liberals deplore.

The point is clear: California is now just a playground for rich and affluent professionals, and a lower class that cuts their lawns and cleans their kitchens.

Read it.

Thus confirming that it’s all a put-up job, ‘street theater’ designed to generate victims and sympathetic coverage from the Proglodyte Press.

UPDATE: Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz Decries Biased Media For Emboldening Terrorism [VIDEO]

ZMan has some shrewd things to say about what’s going on.

The on-going investigation into FBI shenanigans trundles on and it is easy to be a bit cynical about the whole thing. It’s clear that the DOJ and FBI are stalling, hoping the Democrats take the House thus relieving them of their duties to Congress. The modern habit of the Washington elite giving themselves a pass for their bad behavior, should lead sensible people to assume nothing comes of this. After all, it involves some of the biggest players in the semi-permanent Washington ruling class and they are above the law.

On the other hand, the list of people who tangled with Trump and then came to a bad end is long enough now to think it is not a coincidence. The mass media and the NeverTrump loons like to paint the guy as a buffoon, but he is a very savvy political athlete. What makes it work for Trump is that when guys like Eric Schneiderman go up in flames, it looks like Trump was not involved, but curiously prescient. The fact is, Trump plays rough and the people in the FBI scandal have every reason to fear retribution from him.

That’s the thing with Trump. He is a genuine politician, who does not have his head in the clouds or frets about getting a little dirty in a street fight. This is something we have not seen on the Right in national politics since forever. Reagan, on occasion, would throw some sharp elbows, but all of his worshipers since then have either confined themselves to the world of forms or found a reason why their principles prevented them from getting into the fight. The result has been a once sided drubbing of the Right by the Left.

Read it.

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

It’s not as if there were other demands on your time.

Read it.

But of course this is all Israel’s fault, too.

Om Malik reads the obituary.

Skype, was once a beloved product, one that I loved using every day. It was a product I wrote about long before it was trendy. I sent the team feedback. Like all tiny apps that are good at what they do, it became popular and grew really fast. It was sold to eBay, and then re-sold to Microsoft. And that’s when the magic disappeared. Through series of mergers and managers, Skype became an exact opposite of what I loved about it — independent outsider which was great at — chat, messaging and phone calls. It had just enough features, and its desktop client was minimal in its perfection.  Now, as I tweeted in the past, it is “a turd of the highest quality.”

Read it.

Maxford Nelson, director of labor policy at the Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Wash., told The Daily Caller News Foundation the city council’s message was “clear.”

“[The city council] does not view businesses as entities driving the job growth and prosperity in Seattle,” Nelson told TheDCNF. “The city council views businesses as entities to be punished and taxed for every employee that they hire.”

The “head tax,” as it is commonly called, was pushed principally by socialist city council member Kshama Sawant and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — one of the largest labor unions in the U.S.

I wonder how long before Jeff Bezos will take the hint. Socialists steal. It’s the heart of their ideology.

Victor Davis Hanson points out some inconvenient truth.

Conventional wisdom would suggest that liberal politicians and celebrities should be the least likely to express such racist condescension, if only out of cynical careerist and political concerns. Progressives see bloc minority, gay, and female support as vital to their project. The entire thrust of progressive charges of “white privilege” and “white supremacy,” usually lodged against less enlightened and less affluent whites, is that the elite are confident they’ve created a partnership of solidarity with minority activists. All deplore the supposed Neanderthal, red-state, and Trump-supporting white middle class.

Few may now remember the post-election rant of Melinda Byerley, an obscure founder of the Silicon Valley company Timeshare CMO. She became a window into the mind of the furious 2016 progressive voter — and infamous for five minutes for her candid, embittered, post-election Facebook posting that soon was enshrined as a credo explaining why miffed coastal elites hated people unlike them:

One thing middle America could do is to realize that no educated person wants to live in a sh**hole with stupid people. Especially violent, racist, and/or misogynistic ones. . . . When corporations think about where to locate call centers, factories, development centers, etc., they also have to deal with the fact that those towns have nothing going for them.

Certainly, those who blast the clingers, deplorables, and irredeemables cannot themselves be racist or sexists or misogynists or homophobes.

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in his first year in office.

Just bear that in mind.

Absolutely nothing.

Celebs Blame Trump For Deadly Protest Over US Embassy Opening In Jerusalem  Of course they do. Palestinians are like wild animals, they can’t be blamed for doing what they do. It must be Trump’s fault.

Vox Writer Has Mental Meltdown Over Possible Trump Korea Success

CNN’s Brian Stelter Admits to NY Times Columnist: ‘I’m a Trump Addict’  Brian Stelter looks as if he ought to be in a bad SEINFELD re-run.

NY Daily News: Ivanka Trump Is ‘Daddy’s Little Ghoul’  Funny how everyone at the New York Daily News has a sub-standard IQ. I’ll bet they’ve got a lot of diversity.

CNN’s Ana Navarro Thinks The Trump White House Is Just Waiting For John McCain To Die  I know I am.

Journos Mock Trump For Font Size On U.S. Embassy Plaque  When it’s all you’ve got, you go with it.

CNN Pundit Posts Graphic Depicting Shooting of President Donald Trump…  Chris Cillizza really needs to get a life.

Spike Lee Goes On Profane Rant Against Trump At French Film Festival  I can hear Trump’s response: ‘Spike Who?”

Read it.

But what about all the white people who do that sort of thing? Oh, wait….

Read it.

Perhaps if black people would quit breaking the law so much, this wouldn’t be so much of a problem.

Just a suggestion.

Read it.

I’m pretty sure that’s now a major.

Read it.

Feel free to go back to Africa, Spike. I hear that there are a lot of people in Zimbabwe who think like you do.

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in his first year in office.

Just bear that in mind.

Absolutely nothing.

“On the Internet, nobody knows your website is a dog.” — Mark Seidenberg, Language at the Speed of Sight

Read it.

The basic problem is that the tax-eaters in Seattle see ‘corporations’ as cash cows to be milked for ever-increasing welfare entitlements, and the city government uses those entitlements to buy votes. It’s the U.S. Congress in miniature. That’s why it only applies to ‘corporations’ over a certain size (the size where the number of small-business owners, i.e. voters, wouldn’t scream).

Read it.

The shock of events Monday — when a rioting mob attacked the Israeli border and 55 people were killed — is being twisted by the liberal media which misleadingly call this attack a “protest.” The truth is that the people of Gaza are governed by a terrorist organization, Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel….

…

Most Americans do not know the history of this conflict well enough to understand the reality of what happened Monday, even if the liberal media were willing to report it accurately (which they are not). Many people talk of “peace” in the Middle East as if there were something that Israel could do to placate the demands of its enemies, but this is an error akin to blaming Czechoslovakia for the 1938 Sudetenland crisis.

The reason there is no peace in the Middle East is because Israel’s enemies don’t want peace. What they want is dead Jews.

Read it.

This story begins at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where mysterious suitcases filled with cash have become a common carry-on.

…

Fox 9 learned that these cloak-and-dagger scenarios now happen almost weekly at MSP. The money is usually headed to the Middle East, Dubai and points beyond. Sources said last year alone, more than $100 million in cash left MSP in carry-on luggage.

…

As Kerns dug deeper, he found that some of the individuals who were sending out tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of remittance payments happened to be on government assistance in this country.

How could they possibly come up with such big bucks to transfer back home?

“We had sources that told us, ‘It’s welfare fraud, it’s all about the daycare,’” said Kerns.

Israeli Soccer Team Adding ‘Trump’ To Name To Celebrate Embassy Move

CNN’s Amanpour: Trump Is a ‘Grave and Existential Threat’ to the Press

MSNBC Analyst: Pro-Trump Veterans Are ‘Not Honorable’

Trevor Noah Compares Trump To African Dictator On CNN: ‘Follow The Money’  Hey, let’s follow your money for a bit, shall we, Trevor? How much does being a Token Black Guy get paid these days?

CNN’s Zakaria Frets Over Trump Not Demanding Concessions from Israel  Apparently he thinks Israel is our enemy. And, indeed, I suppose he does.

Kennedy: Media On Trump ‘Like A Fetish Convention’

MSNBC Accused Others of Murder, Now Claims Trump Destroyed ‘Decency’

On CNN, Trevor Noah Compares Trump to African Dictator, Asteroid Shaped Like a Penis  Sorry about your dick, Trevor.

Media Ignore Tom Steyer’s Insane Trump ‘Hitler’ Comparisons  Perhaps because they know he’s insane.

Liberals Blame President Trump For Melania’s Hospitalization

Read it.

Tracy Lockwood, a registered dietitian based in New York City, detailed how the MGL (methylglyoxal) that’s found in manuka honey can prove extremely beneficial for those experiencing a runny nose as a result of hay fever.

“The active ingredient, MGL methylglyoxal, has been shown to be effective for treatments against nasal mucus – which is [one of the symptoms] you experience when you have allergies,” she told Well+Good.

We have the technology biology.

Read it.

Because they are brain-dead proglodytes? That’s just a guess….

With many American Jews supported former President Obama and other prominent Democrats who backed the Iran Deal three years ago, the American Jewish community needs to wake up and realize that this regime is seeking a second mass genocide of the Jewish people. The time has come for American Jews to remember Elghanian’s shameful killing by the Iranian regime — and to understand it as an example of the regime’s undying hatred for Jews.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

Truth is nothing compared to the Narrative.

Read it.

Probably Trump’s fault.

Read it.

Read it.

Mainly because a lot of Muslims are homicidal maniacs, and somehow this is Trump’s fault.

If Muslim governments can’t control their extremists, that’s not Trump’s fault either.

Read it.

Pretty sad when you have to go to a Third World country like Mexico to find good sense in politics.

Read it.

As if that will ever happen. Without race to bitch about, she’s got nothin’.

Read it.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians gathered along the Gaza security fence at the border. As the weeks-long protests at the border turned extremely violent Monday, riot organizers encouraged protesters to breach the barriers, and Israel warned that it would do whatever necessary to prevent a security breach, according to the Times of Israel. “Hamas [which controls Gaza] plans to carry out a massacre in Israel. The Israel Defense Forces [IDF] will not let them,” an IDF spokesman explained Sunday.

“We are excited to storm and get inside,” 23-year-old Mohammed Mansoura told The Washington Post, explaining that he would do “whatever is possible … kill, throw stones” if he made it through. Another protester told reporters he wanted to get inside Israel to end lives.

Read it.

Well, you know, these things happen, You have to admit that they kinda look alike.

Owners grew suspicious when animal showed talent for walking on two legs.

I’ll bet they did.

Cavuto Blasts Guest For Saying She Might Trust Trump More Than Kim Jong Un

Dana Nuccitelli: Support a Carbon Tax or Climate will Punish Trump Voters  Uh-oh.

ABC Condemns Jerusalem Embassy Move, ‘Killing Any Prospect of Peace’  What ‘prospect of peace’ did they have in mind? I don’t see any. As long as Arabs have guns, there is no ‘prospect of peace’.

How romance novels are getting a makeover in the Trump era

ABC Panel Rips Trump for Ripping Up Iran Deal, Claim War on the Way  Will they apologize when it’s obvious that they’re wrong? Of course not.

Bernie Sanders says its ‘beyond my comprehension’ White House will not apologise for John McCain cancer ‘joke’  It’s beyond my comprehension that anybody listens to this guy any more. Bernie, a hint: They didn’t tell the joke; they don’t have to apologize. That whole Collective Guilt thing is your Identity Politics fetish, not reality.

‘The institutional form of the one-room school was radically difterent from the institutional form of the school where children md subject matter are sorted into grades. Each form imposes its oro behaviors on teachers and students. The one-room school H. the teacher to cater to the differences among children and 6e difierences within each chiid. But the graded school requires rhet the teacher stand before his class of same-year-olds and teach thatever sameness has been prescribed for children in his grade.’

— John Henry Martin & Charles H. Harrison, Free to Learn: Unlocking and Upgrading American Education

This was published in 1972. Things haven’t changed much from that day to this, and education is still broken.

Read it.

But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his first year in office.

Just bear that in mind.

Absolutely nothing.

Read it.

What were they expecting it to do?

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

Do Democrats even understand how bad this looks?’

…

In order to defend a bad deal negotiated by President Obama, they are advocating hostile diplomatic actions against their own country?

Read it.

You can almost hear the sighs of relief from the readers of the Daily Mail, which publication has no real equivalent in the U.S. — think of the bastard child of People magazine and the National Enquirer.

Interestingly enough, I learned recently that the heirs of the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha have neglected to get the British monarch’s permission to marry since the last child of Duke Carl Eduard died, which makes their marriages invalid under British law, and so there is nobody now qualified to apply for reinstatement of the Dukedom of Albany (of which they were deprived under the Titles Deprivation Act for fighting for Germany against Britain in World War I). So that title is technically extinct under British law and would be available for Prince Harry and his squeeze when they get married, if they don’t do the expected thing and get made Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Oddly enough, the heirs to the crown of Hannover have been very conscientious about getting British royal permission to marry, most recently for the marriage of the current pretender Prince Ernest Augustus to a princess of Monaco (although he loses his right to the British throne for marrying a Roman Catholic).

In any event, it’s a very spiff-looking document; the British are always good about that sort of thing.

Read it.

The Chinese Navy — officially the People’s Liberation Army Navy — already has one operational carrier, the Liaoning, which it bought unfinished from Ukraine after the collapse of the Soviet Union. That ship joined the Chinese fleet in 2012 and began its first operations four years later, putting China in the small group of seafaring powers that maintain aircraft carriers, led by the United States, which has 10 Nimitz-class carriers alone.

Trump’s new crusade against the NHS has the potential to destroy his reputation in Europe once and for all  But I thought everybody in Europe thought he was a Nazi? Yet another ‘journalist’ who thinks everyone shares his opinions.

Bill Maher Says Trump Supporters Are ‘Married To The Mob’  Really? I mean, really?

Read it.

Evidently he wasn’t aware that Mexico is effectively a Third-World Country. Think of it as evolution in action.

There appears to be some sort of mental defect in SWPL hipsters that deludes them into thinking that exotic foreign locations are a huge theme park devoted to their amusement.

Hint:

1. Take a look around you.
2. Figure out where the immigrants are coming from, illegals especially.
3. DON’T GO THERE.

The Other McCaines deals out some inconvenient truth.

Online dating is a bad idea. Every time I repeat this warning, someone in the comments will say, “But I met my [husband or wife] on [name of online dating site] and everything was awesome,” as if this anecdotal exception disproves the rule that online dating is a bad idea.

People who engage in online dating are self-selected. What they all have in common is, nobody they know in real life wants to date them. Think about that — if a guy is on OKCupid or Tinder, the one thing you know about him is, he couldn’t find a girlfriend any other way. Simply by signing up for a site, he’s advertising the fact that he’s a loser.

Which immediately raises the question, why do women sign up for these services?

Without going any further in our analysis of why these patterns exist, we can nevertheless say that the results shown by the OKCupid study demonstrate typical patterns of losers — men who waste their time in a futile pursuit of beautiful women, and ordinary-looking women who foolishly imagine that Handsome Princes are as common in reality as they are in Disney fairy-tale cartoons.

Doesn’t sound like a process that will end well.

Read it.

If you have to wonder who your ancestors were, they probably weren’t anything special.

Read it.

Today, spin classes, artisanal food, and the college application process have replaced Sunday promenades, evening lectures, and weekly salons. But make no mistake, they serve the same purpose: transforming class privilege into individual virtue, thereby shoring up social dominance.

Progressives as the new Puritans, Hipsters as the new Victorians — everything old is new again.

Current exercise trends, like hot yoga, spin, and CrossFit, all demonstrate a commitment to self-denial and self-discipline, values much praised by the Victorians. Marathon running has become the ultimate signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous — and not at all kinky — fashion.

This seeps over into everyday activities as well. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are filled with people dressed in workout gear with no sweat in sight. This clothing marks its wearers as the type of people who care for their bodies, even when they aren’t exercising. Yoga pants and running shoes display virtue just as clearly as the nineteenth-century wives’ corseted dresses did.

Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.

Read it.

The commemorations of Marx’s 200th birthday have done at least one thing: they’ve reminded me of Britain’s abject intellectual decline.

Listen, for example, to this debate about Marx (34 min in); Paul Mason’s interlocutor couldn’t tell the difference between Marx and a bucket of fish.

Contrast this with a few decades ago. Then, if you wanted a critical assessment of Marx, you might reasonably have asked Leszek Kolakowski, Samuel Hollander or Isaiah Berlin – men who, agree with them or not, knew what they were talking about. Today, his most high-profile critics are ignorant gobshites.

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’.

Let me repeat that.

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism’.

‘Capitalism’ is a term created by Marxists in order conveniently to tag and condemn people that they disagree with. This is a well-worn tool in the Marxist belt; everything is ideological, so everything must be an ‘-ism’ because everything has an implicit ideological agenda. Hence Marxist writings are full of such terms as Revisionism and Deviationism and Trotskyism — even Stalinism fits this template, when it came time to turn their backs on him. (This Alinskyish tagging has a long history. Terms like ‘black market’, ‘price gouging’, ‘profiteering’, ‘windfall profits’ etc. are the spoor of people trying to get a rhetorical armlock on their political opponents.)

But in order to be an ‘-ism’, something must have an ideological component (think ‘environmentalism’), and there is simply no ideological component to ‘capital’ (even though most people use the term ‘capitalism’ as if there were).

Marx himself didn’t use ‘capitalism’ but he did use ‘capital’, and he used it in a very specific and restricted sense: To refer to the machines that were used to produce mass-produced goods during the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the distinguishing characteristic of which was that such machines were owned by someone other than the people who operated them. Prior to industrialization (a more accurate term for which would be ‘automation’), workers typically owned their own tools — think blacksmith, weaver, carpenter, mason — so there was no separation between ‘labor’ and ‘the means of production’. That separation came about during industrialization, and one might with good reason say that the use of such automation is the defining characteristic of ‘industrialization’.

Here we get into a vocabulary problem. ‘Manufacture’ strictly means ‘making by hand’, but everybody has carried the term forward to refer to things that are made by automated processes as well, which confuses things. A better term for the latter would be artifacture, and I hereby invent that word to make the distinction clearer.

A Capitalist, for Marx, was the guy who provided the machines necessary for artifacture, and hired laborers to operate those machines. These laborers may or may not have been sufficiently skilled to make the product the Old Fashioned Way — somebody who ran a power loom would not necessarily be a skilled weaver (although he might be, coincidentally). To Marx, stuck in his Labor Theory of Value, the existence of a Capitalist, who would take the profit from production and give only part of it to the worker involved, was therefore screwing the worker out of the fruits of his labor. (Don’t get me started on the stupidity of the Labor Theory of Value.) Therefore, in Marxist terms, a Capitalist was a Bad Guy by definition, an ‘exploiter’ (Marxists love to use that word), and deserved any bad thing that happened to him, such as Communists stealing his property.

Unfortunately, since Marxists wield intellectual clout out of all proportion to their actual ideas, the term ‘capitalism’ has become the de facto standard way of referring to our modern industrialized economy. But even a moment’s reflection will reveal that artifacture, far from being an expression of a particular ideology, is merely a necessary stage on the road from small-scale production to industrialized mass production (indeed, artifacture is the very cornerstone of mass production), and has nothing to do with politics at all. Even the old Soviet system, where the ‘people’ (i.e. the government) owned the ‘means of production’ (the machine tools), was ‘capitalist’ in the Marxist sense, the difference being that the government, rather than individuals, were the Capitalists.

But this confusion also leads to ‘capitalism’ getting tied up with notions of private property and freedom of markets and so forth that, strictly speaking, have nothing to do with who owns the ‘means of production’. This confusion has even worked its way down to the Underclass. If you ever watch the movie WOODSTOCK, one of the announcements made from the stage during the event is to the effect that somebody out in the audience had his hamburger stand burn down and ‘if you don’t think that capitalism is all that weird, you might help the guy out and buy some of his hamburgers’ — whereas, in fact, a hamburger stand is the precise opposite of what a Marxist would call ‘capitalism’, because the ‘worker’ owns the tools he is using to produce the food. That’s the sort of confused modern situation we live in, and even respected academics who ought to know better use the term ‘capitalism’ where ‘automation’ or ‘industrialization’ would be more accurate. We live in an intellectually lazy time.

So the next time you hear somebody use the term ‘capitalism’, you can now explain to that ignorant dimwit why capitalism is a myth.