Read it.

I am not making this up.

It’s called ‘BOY’ for a very good reason.

Read it.

That’s pretty embarrassing. Although, just looking at the picture, I can’t imagine anybody missing him much. But that’s just me.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

I am reminded of a PEANUTS cartoon in which Snoopy is shivering outside on a snowy day and Charlie Brown and Linus walk by, stop to tell him ‘Be of good cheer, Snoopy.’ ‘Yes, be of good cheer.’, and then walk on, leaving Snoopy looking after them with a puzzled expression.

John Hinderaker at Powerline (a Real Lawyer as most DemLegHump Media chatterers are not) lays it out.

As Paul said, the Manafort charges had nothing to do with Donald Trump, nothing to do with the 2016 election, and nothing to do with Russian participation in the 2016 election. So Bob Mueller could only have brought the case in order to put pressure on Manafort to come up with some “dirt” on Mueller’s target, President Trump. As far as we know, Manafort has no dirt to give.

Meanwhile, and almost simultaneously, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen pled guilty to a series of offenses. Mostly, the counts relate to tax evasion. The only politically significant counts, as I understand it, relate to Cohen’s role in paying off Stephanie Clifford (“Stormy Daniels”) to keep quiet about her sexual encounter with Trump.

It is not illegal to pay someone to remain silent. The theory here is that the money paid to Clifford was an illegal campaign contribution. Since Cohen says he made the payment to Clifford at Trump’s direction, Mueller is trying to ensnare Trump in that “crime.” To my knowledge, there is no legal authority on whether paying a woman to keep her mouth shut constitutes a campaign contribution. It strikes me as a foolish interpretation of the law, and forcing Cohen to plead guilty to the “crime” of paying off Ms. Clifford doesn’t transform it into a crime.

That’s the bottom line. Of course, in these degenerate modern times, thin air can be whipped up into a ‘crime’ depending on how the political winds blow. We’ll have to see.

Ace of Spades brings his inimitable perspective.

I don’t know whether ‘Antifa’ has been declared by the government to be a terrorist organization, but I can’t think of any group that better deserves it.

Southern Poverty Law Center, maybe.

Read it.

Sure, open the border! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

Update: The Media Is Angry That Fox Is Covering The Mollie Tibbetts Murder

Fox Panel Blows Off Trump Joke As ‘Left Wing Clickbait’ — Even Juan Williams Didn’t Think It Was Funny

Associated Press Promotes Sour Grapes From Losing Republicans

FACT CHECK: Omarosa Said A Hush Money Agreement She Was Offered Was ‘Unlawful’ – Was It?

‘Language Is Not A Race’ — Tucker Explodes When Guest Paints Trump As ‘Wildly Racist’ For Complimenting ICE Agent’s English

Midterms 2018: Nuns to protest Donald Trump’s tax cuts outside Mar-a-Lago resort ahead of crucial vote  I am not making this up.

Trump blasted for administration’s ‘abysmal’ track record on science policy  I guess ‘science policy’ is now an essential function of government. Who knew?

Microsoft says fresh Russian hacking attacked Republicans ahead of US midterm elections  Boy, those Republicans sure are colliding with Russia, aren’t they?

CNN’s Chris Cuomo Tells Trump To ‘Man Up’ And Meet With Mueller

Joe Scarborough Asks If Melania Is Just ‘Completely Clueless’ Or Trolling Trump  I’m glad he has nothing more important to talk about.

‘John Brennan Shows How to Lose to Trump in One Easy Step’

CNN’s April Ryan Demands The White House Pay For Her Bodyguard  Of course, he won’t be allowed to carry a gun.

Read it.

I’m sure he’s glad to know they’ve got his back.

Totalitarians of a feather flock together, apparently.

Read it.

He ought to try Maxine Waters’ district. They have suitably low standards.

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If they ever have babies, those babies will be really really weird.

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Actually, the real state sport in California is wasting taxpayer money, but surfing is certainly a close second.

I am comforted by the fact that he apparently didn’t have anything better to do.

Read it.

I thought only Obama did that sort of thing.

The Other McCain, like me, loves the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

No, that’s her real name. I know it sounds like a made-up name, but it’s her real name.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Chicago, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Britain, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws in Britain, or the place would look like Texas.

Read it.

Here’s the arithmetic: one in three potential recruits are disqualified from service because they’re overweight, one in four cannot meet minimal educational standards (a high school diploma or GED equivalent), and one in 10 have a criminal history. In plain terms, about 71 percent of 18-to-24-year-olds (the military’s target pool of potential recruits) are disqualified from the minute they enter a recruiting station: that’s 24 million out of 34 million Americans. The good news is that while the military takes pride in attracting those who are fit, educated, law abiding, and drug-free, they’re having difficulty finding them—manifestly because fewer of them actually exist.

Steve Sailer writes the obit.

I’m familiar with the names of more social science professors than most people, but I’d never heard of “male feminist” sociologist Michael Kimmel. But apparently he’s a tireless self-promoter and big deal in Gender Studies, about as big a deal as a straight white man can get. But now he’s been Me Tooed by a former grad student of indeterminate gender (pronoun: “they”) named Bethany M. Coston. They says, at vast length, that Kimmel is just awful….

Steve Sailer does some fisking.

The New York Times is going to keep running opeds on how the wave of shootings in Chicago since the triumph over the cops of BLM in November 2015 are the fault of the Usual Suspects (cops, white supremacy, white men, Trump, systemic racism, etc etc) until somebody comes up with a semi-persuasive sounding one. Today … “food deserts” are to blame:

Because, you see, white supremacists and their racism makes it impossible for black people to live the hipster lifestyle. Isn’t that sad?

The Guardian over in the UK apparently has a unique feature.

The Week in Patriarchy is a weekly roundup of what’s happening in the world of feminism and sexism.

This particular instance is entitled Men’s fixation on young women is another sign of masculinity in crisis.

This is of course nonsense; men have been ‘fixated on young women’ for at least 5,000 years; something that’s lasted that long is, from an evolutionary point of view, certainly a feature rather than a bug, and thus far from being ‘in crisis’.

What’s actually ‘in crisis’ is the modern hipster female predilection for finding some aspect of men that they dislike and proclaiming it somehow a defect in men that men are somehow responsible for fixing.

Masculinity is certainly in crisis — but the crisis is caused by the disturbing number of women attempting to eradicate it, and by the even more disturbing number of men who are sufficiently confused as to jump on board that effort.

Such men are doomed never to reproduce.

I strongly suspect that Arwa Mahdawi is eventually going to find herself in the same boat.

Read it.

Funny how socialism is very productive in generating refugees. Other stuff, not so much.

Ace of Spades picks a side.

But anyway, as to this supposedly-I-support-his-policies-but-I-hate-his-character posture: it is strange indeed that they spend so little time or effort or emotion talking up these conservative policies they allegedly support. I guess you’ll just have to take their perfunctory word about that.

Read it.

These guys are a herd of oxymorons on the hoof.

Read it.

I’ve been close to despair of late as it appears, to me at least, that the divide on the right has widened considerably, nearly reaching the point of irreconcilable differences where both parties no longer talk to each other but instead face each other while talking mainly to themselves. For those who respect certain minds on both sides of the divide, the feeling is one of dismay at what is fast becoming the political equivalent of being caught between divorced parents who each insist that we take one side over the other notwithstanding the fact that they both screwed up.

The problem with people who describe themselves as ‘conservatives’ is that they can never define what being ‘a conservative’ is that would satisfy somebody else who ‘self-identifies’ as ‘a conservative’. I am confident that it’s because there is no such thing as ‘conservatism’ and hence no such thing as ‘a conservative’. In order to be a Real Ism, an ideology has to have some sort of target state toward which it strives, and soi-disant conservatives do not have a single target state on which they can all agree. The best you can say is that there are a number of aspects of current (or proposed) culture that they are together in being against, and I suppose that such is the best for which one can hope.

I prefer to describe myself as an anti-progressive, the way some people back in the Good Old Days described themselves as anti-Communists, because proglodytes do have an ideology and a target state towards which they are working, and I’m here to get in the way of that process as best I can.

The next time you’re trapped in a social situation with someone who ‘identifies’ as ‘a conservative’, just ask: ‘Okay, what do you want to conserve?’ and watch the reaction. It can be entertaining, but also rather sad.

Ace of Spades treats this with all the respect it deserves.

Read it.

Note to self: Stay away from Disneyland.

Read it.

A teenager posted online that he was glad to make it to his 17th birthday after all he had been through. Little more than an hour later, he was shot dead.

Armond Latimore was killed in broad daylight while standing outside a restaurant in St Louis, Missouri, on Saturday.

Just another instance of the senseless violence against People of Color in Amerika? Well, not exactly.

Previous postings showed the high school student holding wedges of $100 bills. In one he appeared to have a hand gun in the waistband of his trousers. In another he sent a message of support to Richard Antwon Donaldson, another St Louis teenager who has been charged with the murder of a 72-year-old man during an attempted car-jacking. “Keep yo head up,” he told Donaldson.

So the fact that he made it to 17 was in spite of, rather than because of, the life he apparently led.

Read it.

Sure, I believe that.

Read it.

As many are aware, Google’s management and staff helped put together the indomitable Obama big data, drill down, finite, targeted social media, voter mobilization effort in 2012. I proffered that Facebook might do the same. My thoughts were dismissed very quickly by some knowledgeable people on Ricochet as impossible given that Google so carefully controls its search algorithm and no such hanky-panky would be tolerated. Who believes this is not possible today?

Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks or downloading services are private. They are not subject to the First Amendment and therefore can arbitrate what is transmitted over their private networks. To police this and behave in a responsible way, they label any material which they deem inappropriate as “hate speech.” There is no way to know if they are limiting access, turning off the flow, or simply cutting out points of view that they deem “hate speech” unless they announce their intention to do so.

Republican politicians and conservatives have accused such companies of turning down the flow of Tweets, hits, and search results. There is clear evidence this has happened, whether this was intentional or not. If it happens at a critical moment in a campaign, in a particular locality, might it make a difference in the election outcome?

Big Brother has learned to outsource that stuff that isn’t in his core competency, which is shooting people.

The problem with not loving Big Brother is that you are surrounded by people who do, or who at least don’t mind his hand in their pockets and his grip on their heads.

John Fund asks a rhetorical question.

Hint: Yes.

An almost certain sign that a nation’s economic future and rule of law are in danger is the decision by its government to seize private land without paying compensation. From Cuba to Zimbabwe to Venezuela, expropriating private property has almost inevitably meant a slide into authoritarian rule.

That’s why many South Africans are worried at the news last week that its African National Congress (ANC) government has for the first time moved to seize land without going through the courts first, with two game farms in Limpopo the first test cases.

The planned seizures are part of a larger government plan to use its two-thirds majority in Parliament to change the nation’s constitution to legalize unilateral seizures. Once it has that new constitutional power, the government could in theory posture at being magnanimous and merely force landowners to give up their land for only a token or very small payment.

If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that once black people get in control of a government, that government sooner or later (typically sooner) collapses under the weight of corruption, cronyism, and abuses under color of law. It happened in Zimbabwe, it happened in Detroit, it has happened throughout Africa since the 1960s, and throughout the United States once People of Color got their hands on the levers of municipal power. The only reason that it hasn’t occurred more widely in the U.S. is the un-get-aroundable fact that Africans are only about 13% of the population.

Kevin Williamson peers behind the curtain.

… if you would like to know why some of us still recoil in horror at the words “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help,” consider this very interesting report from Winnie Hu of the New York Times. The short version: Residents of Harlem complained about overflowing trash cans, and the powers that be in New York City decided that the problem was the unauthorized dumping of commercial garbage into said public trash cans. So the city thought hard on that problem and took away the trash cans entirely. It took away hundreds in Harlem and more than 1,000 in the city at large.

Harlem residents are, as you might expect, not happy about that.

But they’re mostly Africans, who can be depended to vote for Democrats no matter what, so their happiness is of no interest to the Democrats who control the city government.

The problem with voting regularly for people who promise you free stuff is that you never get it.

Read it.

Good luck with that. ‘Conservative Catholics’ have yet to get anything that they wanted out of the church hierarchy.

The Roman church has had a shortage of both priests and nuns since at least the 1970s. I have no evidence on which to base an opinion, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that at least one of the motives in the kid-glove treatment of priests accused of sexual abuse was the fear that cleaning house would leave the house rather empty.

Read it.

Agricultural policy for the last fifty years might be characterized as ‘trying to turn the farm into a factory and not succeeding very well’. Review the performance of any of ConAgra’s or ADM’s factory-farms and this is pretty obvious.

The whole ‘urban indoor farm’ is just another such attempt to change the field into a factory floor. The problem is that organic processes (such as those that create food) aren’t really susceptible to the simplistic order of the assembly line. Any attempt to do so can only work by simplifying inherently complex natural biological systems so that they can be ‘managed’ for artifacture, which works about as well as a ‘managed’ economy — the latter gives you Soviet ‘goods’; the former gives you the equivalent of Soviet food. Nutrition gurus like Michael Pollan complain about the result, with good reason, and often about the artifactural production, but never get to the root of the problem.

Read it.

In SF and other cities where Square is ubiquitous, not everyone is a fan.

“I hate when I’m prompted to tip on fast food restaurants. Even worse, before I even get my food,” Nando Albuquerque tweeted at Square last year. “Taking my money (plus tip) isn’t service. Wouldn’t you agree?”

“I’m asking not to be coerced into tipping before receiving any service,” he went on. “I’m sure you can solve this, if you only accept it’s a problem.”

“Why can’t Square have a tip option that says, ‘it’s nothing personal, but I can’t give you 20% for handing me a pre-made sandwich,” Daniel Nigro asked on Twitter in May.

I solve the problem by not tipping. As a result, my wife insists on computing and adding a tip when we eat at restaurants.

Actually, that’s not true — I’ve given tips when the service I received was ‘above and beyond’ what I expected. But that’s awfully rare.

Steven Hayward writes from the proglodyte paradise.

Who runs San Francisco? Progressives do—and have for decades now. Why isn’t San Francisco a beacon for the failure of progressive governance?

‘I’m not going there’: As Trump hurls racial invective, most Republicans stay silent  Except that he doesn’t ‘hurl racial invective’; there’s noting ‘racial’ about ‘dog’.

Donald Trump would deport Melania if she divorced him, claims Omarosa

Trump officials sued over killer whales’ plummeting population crisis  Except, of course, that these are ‘Obama officials’, Trump not having had sufficient time to put his people into the lower levels of the bureaucracy. But they like to  blame Trump anyway.

MSNBC’s Al Sharpton Accuses GOP Of Stacking The Deck To Push Kavanaugh Through The Senate  Well, duh. Proglodytes have a congenital tendency to describe normal political practice and then whine that it is somehow illegitimate; of course, they don’t say that when they do it, and Republicans are either two fastidious or too cowardly to reciprocate.

Read it.

Trump is not nice. Republicans tried “nice” with Mitt Romney in 2012. They tried “experienced and professional” with John McCain in 2008. Both lost. One of the reasons? No matter who is the Republican candidate, the Democrat politicians, and the heavily-Democrat media are not going to be nice nor professional. They’re going to say and do whatever it takes.

I’ve been saying that for decades.

The author correctly points out that Trump doesn’t take a shot at you unless and until you take a shot at him.

The Other McCain draws the lessons from the deaths of the hipster bicyclists murdered by ISIS.

Jay Austin had a master’s degree from Georgetown University, a nominally Catholic school where one might think someone would have taught him that evil is more than “a make-believe concept.” But all the money spent educating Austin and his girlfriend was wasted, as they learned nothing that might have helped them survive in a world where evil does, in fact, exist. Instead, they believed the treacly popular nonsense of dumbed-down Buddhism — all that stuff about life as the enjoyment of sunsets, thunderstorms and gentle breezes — that proliferates on the Internet.

Notice that this young couple were childless? Yeah, childlessness is part of the same cluster of values that defines the Millennial hipster lifestyle. They don’t want to have kids, they want to be kids. Childlessness enables childishness, but they rationalize this as a humanitarian do-gooder project by telling themselves that overpopulation causes global warming. They strive to avoid adult responsibilities as long as possible, so they go to grad school — a master’s degree gives you an excuse to postpone adulthood until you’re 25 or 26 — and they want life to be an endless vacation. “Let’s ride our bicycles around the world!” is the perfect Millennial hipster idea, especially when undertaken with the noble-sounding goal of proving that evil doesn’t exist and that your “fellow human beings” around the world are “wonderful and kind,” despite “holding values and beliefs and perspectives different than our own.”

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

The Trump-hating mainstream media claims that President Trump has an enemies list. It’s possible that he has one, but the list of people whose security clearance is under review isn’t it. An enemies list would be longer and would include, for example, Jim Acosta. The list in question is simply a group of people who may not deserve the privilege of having a security clearance now that they are not in government.

Calling the list an “enemies lists” has its uses, though. It enable aging liberals to gloat about being on Nixon’s enemies list — the real thing. And it enables the Trump-hating mainstream media to push the Trump-as-Nixon theme.

I have an Enemies List. I’ll bet it’s longer than Trump’s.

Here is the reality about presidents and their enemies: (1) every president has them, whether on a list on not; (2) only a stupid president doesn’t know who they are; (3) people who get themselves elected president aren’t that kind of stupid.

The media are experts at spinning stuff that makes perfect sense into something that they can white and bitch about.

Read it.

Don’t be fooled by the sob stories in the DemLegHump Media.

Bill Maher Taunts Donald Trump Over Omarosa: ‘He Lost His One Black Friend’

That Was Quick: Netflix Drops The Axe On Michelle Wolf’s Show  I guess Virtue Signaling doesn’t compensate for the fact that some people just aren’t very funny.

CNN Panelist Tries To Kick Pro-Trump Contributor Off The Show: ‘We’re done. Get Out!’

Brennan Implies Trump Could Start A War To Divert Negative Media Attention From Himself  Much as Brennan is trying to do.

Read it.

Lucky you.

Read it.

If ever there was a vivid illustration of illiberal liberalism, it was the response to one of the essays in this very series. After The Economist published an by Kathleen Stock, reader in philosophy at the University of Sussex, which sensitively questioned whether “self-declaration alone could reasonably be the only criterion of being trans”, the Sussex Students’ Union denounced her as a transphobe. In the union’s original statement, it declared “we will not tolerate hate on our campus.” “Trans and non-binary lives are not a debate.”

These key tropes—“we will not tolerate” and “this is not a debate”—are now frequently deployed to curtail discussion of issues deemed to be taboo, invariably to “protect” people deemed vulnerable from speech deemed hateful. This secular version of blasphemy follows a sacred script, written by those who consider themselves liberals. Dare to query it and you’ll be damned.

Read it.

Except, of course, that ‘feudalism’ was based on land that was actually productive rather than just Hipster Expensive, but nobody expects ‘journalists’ to understand what they’re talking about these days (especially at Voices of the Crust like Slate).

The story, by Liam Dillon and Ben Poston, analyzes the fallout from a 1986 California law that allows children to inherit their parents’ frozen-in-time tax assessments along with their houses. The state’s property tax rolls were forever stunted by 1978’s beloved, infamous Proposition 13; the 1986 follow-up, Proposition 58, is what allows those ’70s tax rates to be enjoyed by the next generation.

Voted for by a legislature that is overwhelmingly Democrat.

According to the California Legislative Analyst’s Office, the inheritance exemption cuts $1.5 billion from the state’s property tax intake each year—or 2.5 percent of total statewide property tax revenue. In counties with the highest property values, the exemption can reduce state revenue by nearly 10 percent.

And, of course, anything that reduces government revenues is a Crime Against Humanity.

Prop 58 was intended to help families avoid a sudden property tax spike after a homeowner’s death and allow children to afford to stay in their parents’ homes. But it has also enthroned a privileged class of second-generation California homeowners, many of whom don’t even live in those houses.

Read it.

When a company hires predominantly from a demographic that has been indoctrinated with the idea that ‘whistleblowers’ are Heroes of the Revolution and whose heroes are Aaron Schwarz, Julian Assange, BradleyWhatever Manning, and Edward Snowdon, this is to be expected.

Read it.

One thing that proglodyte legislators can never do is Think Things Through. Hence they are always mousetrapped by Unexpected Consequences. The rest is Narrative.