The New York Times warns is that only a generously-funded IRS stands between us and a country crawling with rich people! Be Warned!

Read it.

It’s harder to get away with this shit these days.

UPDATE: GoFundMe refunds $400,000 in donations from couple’s ‘scam’ fundraiser to help homeless man

Read it.

I first became aware of the Muslim fad for beheading infidels when Daniel Pearl was executed in Pakistan back in 2002. Over the years I saw a few more beheading videos, especially after the practice really began trending during the heyday of the Islamic State in 2014. I hated watching them, but it seemed a sort of duty, to be aware of what Islam is based on what it does. Eventually I realized that I’d had enough, and I quit watching them. I’ve seen what a beheading looks like now, many times over. I’m old, and my limbic system can’t take that much horror anymore.

Nope, it doesn’t even stop for Christmas.

The Ghost of Trump Chaos Future

Israel’s Government Collapses Amid Corruption Charges and Trump’s Mideast Chaos

Trump tweets ‘poor me’ as shutdown continues

Wealthy Republicans lose faith in Trump, as nearly 40% say they wouldn’t vote to re-elect him: CNBC survey’  I’d be interested in how many voted for him in the first place. Not that many, I’d guess.

Tom Friedman’s Christmas fantasy  Democrats are always giving Republicans advice.

Democrats: Government Is Christmas, and Trump Is the Grinch or Something

The engine that sustained Trump’s popularity could be about to stall  ‘We hope we hope we hope….’

Read it.

I’ve always thought so.

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The pettiness of proglodytes never ceases to amaze me.

On the other hand, the fact that Ryan can use the House gym during the ‘shutdown’ suggests that the government is not, in fact, shut down.

Read it.

The pews are emptying virtually everywhere in the higher-income world. The Catholic Church is divided and enmeshed in scandal, unable to prevent even historically cleric-dominated Ireland from liberalizing abortion. The once vibrant evangelical movement is losing momentum in the developed world while the more established Protestant and Jewish congregations are shrinking, some at a rapid rate.

Yet rather than an end to faith, this fading of religion may presage the radical re-invention of spiritualism. Just as Christianity replaced paganism at the end of the Roman Empire, rising new faiths—built around notions of social justice, the environment, and technology to extend life or even achieve immortality—may supplant the old ones.

GoFundMe account looks to buy ‘ladders’ to scale Trump’s border wall

Chris Christie compares Trump to ‘a 72-year-old relative’ who always thinks they’re right  He’s certainly more right than Chris Christie.

We Watch CNN’s Terrible Media Show So You Don’t Have To

Trump’s 12 Days Of Christmas

Adam Schiff Will Subpoena Mueller Report If White House Tries To Block Its Release  Of course, there’s no evidence that the White House is even considering doing that, but the Democrat gaslighting has to start somewhere.

Michael Bloomberg attacks Trump over government shutdown and warns ‘beginning of the collapse’ has begun  I’m sure that’s what he hopes is happening.

Read it.

Are they serious? I doubt it. But it makes a great excuse and an excellent ‘teachable moment’.

Check it out.

Read it.

The purpose of education is to socialise human beings into a life of complete institutional dependency. School teaches you that justice must come from someone in institutional authority, that meaningful activity must come from a ‘career path,’ that if you want to express yourself you must first gain access to centralised speech platforms,¹ that if you want to do something, you must first of all gain a licence or a qualification and that, above all, your own desires and instincts are invalid.

General incompetence, self-alienation and permanent childishness is the purpose of education; indeed the stated purpose. The designers of the modern school were chillingly explicit about what school is supposed to do.² Self-knowledge, self-confidence, peace-of-mind, sensitivity, spontaneity and autonomy do not figure; indeed they are existential threats of the highest order which must be repeatedly exterminated.

Modern education is only slowly breaking away from the factory-style method of aggregating all children into a batch based on age and flushing that batch through the school system like turds through a colon, without any consideration of individual talent or capability. Thus you have teachers spending most of their time attempting (unsuccessfully) to get the dimwits in the class up to speed, while the brighter students (bored out of their skulls) spend their time causing trouble. As a result, any ‘education’ that happens is in spite of, rather than because, the formal process.

Read it.

So is the current party-line of Political Correctness requiring people who are stressed out already to have to cope additionally with weirdos, Social Justice Warriors, and people (both native and foreign) who can barely speak English. Nobody appears to care about that, either.

Read it.

Well, that’s a relief.

No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts.

— Robert Gascoyne, Cecil, 3d Marquess of Salisbury

Read it.

The new journalism.

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It don’t mean shit. Small things on the periphery, chiefly those that inconvenience taxpayers, will shut down. The rest of it will go on as usual.

Trump can end the conflict by winning or caving. Which one do YOU think he’ll do?

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all. Not every country considers ‘activists’ to be bullet-proof.

Read it.

Lies and the lying liars who tell them.

ZMan lets you in on a secret.

The late Irving Kristol, considered the godfather of neoconservatism, said his project was “to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.” Kristol further went on to describe his vision as uniquely America, despite the fact it had no roots in American history. The implication was that neoconservatism would be the new Right of the new America ruled by the new ruling class.

It was a rare example of honesty from a collection of intellectuals and advocates seemingly incapable of candor. In recent times, people like Bill Kristol argued in private that the wars in the Middle East were for the benefit of Israel, while in public he claimed it was a vital American Interest. At the same time, neocons pushed for the importation of Muslims, many from lands bombed in neocon wars. The predictable consequences were then offered as an excuse for more wars.

Read it.

On December 13, the Village of Hempstead, N.Y. hosted the Long Island Toy Gun Exchange Program, modelled after so-called gun “buybacks” that target real firearms. According to a report from local newspaper Newsday, each child received one politically correct toy in exchange “for whatever water pistols, Nerf guns and other toy guns they turn[ed] in.”

The toys for the turn-in were supplied by local businessman Sean Acosta, who made clear that the program is intended to influence impressionable children against firearm ownership at a young age, with the goal of shifting American public opinion against guns. As reported in the Newsday article,

“It has to start at a young age,” Acosta says of changing gun culture. “If we can get them to say, ‘It’s not cool to carry these toy guns,’ then maybe when they get older, they won’t ever carry a real gun.”

It would be amusing if someone were to shoot him. With a toy gun, of course.

Steve Sailer lays out the problem.

What’s a Social Justice Warrior to do?

It’s good training in gaming the system, however.

UPDATE: Checking the Racial Box

Read it.

Solar panels create 300 times more toxic waste per unit of energy than do nuclear power plants. If solar and nuclear produce the same amount of electricity over the next 25 years that nuclear produced in 2016, and the wastes are stacked on football fields, the nuclear waste would reach the height of the Leaning Tower of Pisa (53 meters), while the solar waste would reach the height of two Mt. Everests (16 km).

UPDATE: If Solar Panels Are So Clean, Why Do They Produce So Much Toxic Waste?

John McWhorter deals out some inconvenient truth.

Just as the first and second waves of both feminism and antiracism transformed social structures, third-wave antiracism may seem parallel to third-wave feminism in moving on to a different form of abuse, psychological rather than institutional. But this focus on the psychological has morphed, of late, from a pragmatic mission to change minds into a witch hunt driven by the personal benefits of virtue signaling, obsessed with unconscious and subconscious bias. As noble as this culture of shaming genuinely seems to many, it’s a dead end.

Steve Sailer shadows the New York Times on this vital issue.

Taki speaks for me.

Perhaps it sounds stuffy, but I am nostalgic for the good old days when manners were exquisite. You might think that this is a bit much, but not really. Things are so bad at present that even returning to the time of strict etiquette, I find, would be a blessing. Manners, you see, are as important as morals, and have very little to do with a man’s outer attributes—birth, rank, or education—but rather involve his inner qualities of character and behavior. At present, people take phony offense at anything and everything, yet rudeness is de rigueur and boorishness a virtue. It is hip to be discourteous, trendy to act primitive, and “in” to be coarse.

For Trump, ‘a War Every Day,’ Waged Increasingly Alone

‘A rogue presidency’: The era of containing Trump is over

US government shutdown: Trump border wall row puts 380,000 employees on unpaid leave over Christmas  Note the media spin that this is Trump’s border wall row, despite the fact that it’s actually Schumer’s border wall row.

Trump rebuked by Macron over Syria troop withdrawal: ‘An ally should be dependable’  Really? How many French soldiers are in Syria? None that I’ve heard of.

Trump calls aides ‘f****** idiots’ as presidency risks spinning out of control  It’s so hard to get good help these days.

Leon Panetta: Trump Presidency Causing ‘Too Much Chaos’  And whose fault is that?

Can Patrick Shanahan handle the madness of King Trump?  The question is, can he handle the madness of the media?

Read it.

Yeah, she looks as if she has a stick up her butt all the time.

Steve Hayward at Powerline makes an exciting discovery.

Like our coveted Green Weenie Award, we could cover academic absurdities on an hourly basis these days. To paraphrase Will Rogers, there’s no trouble exposing the rot of our universities when so many faculty are working full time for you. So we limit ourselves to the most extraordinary or novel expressions of academic rot.

Like the idea that conventions in writing are—wait for it, you know what’s coming—raaaacccist!

I have always suspected it.

From 1930 onward, a small intellectual army passed over to the Communist Party with scarcely any effort on its part. Within a decade, simply by pursuing the careers that ordinarily lay open to them, these newcomers would carry the weak and stumbling American Communist Party directly into the highest councils of the nation, would subtly (or sometimes boldly) help to shape the country’s domestic and foreign policies. They would, at last, in a situation unparalleled in history, enable the Soviet Government to use the American State and Treasury Departments as a terrible engine of its revolutionary purposes, by the calculated destruction of powers vital to American survival (like China), or by creating power vacuums (like Germany), which breached the American political outworks abroad. Meanwhile, the party’s agents, working in the communications field, tirelessly justified those catastrophic betrayals to the nation as necessary acts of good faith to an ally (the Soviet Union whose philosophy denied the principle of good faith), or as prerequisites of permanent peace, or, if momentarily threatened with detection, as simply the unhappy blunders of American diplomatic innocence.

— Whittaker Chambers, Witness (1953)

Read it.

I’m comfortable not re-opening the government. How about you?

Eric Worrall elucidates the Narrative.

According to Wired contributor Daphne LePrince-Ringuet, the kind of anti climate policy protests which rocked France can be prevented with a few government handouts, and by convincing ordinary people of the good intentions of government.

The traditional handouts are bread and circuses.

Steve Sailer points out one of the elephants in the yard.

It’s really hard these days for followers of the conventional wisdom to think in terms other than of Good People and Bad People. Good People to do Good Things, so if undocumented workers (definitely some of the Good People) are littering and Tucker Carlson (a very Bad Person) is criticizing them for it, then littering must be good. Or if littering is bad, Carlson must be hallucinating in accusing the Good People of doing a Bad Thing. Or let’s not think about it and get Carlson banned from television so we don’t have to ever think about it.

In reality, of course Latino immigrants litter a lot, both at home and here.

Read it.

Los Angeles had doubled its homeless budget to $450 million. Despite that its homeless population had only dropped to 39,826, a reduction of only 256 people. The only surprise in those statistics is that the population dropped at all. Homeless spending has the notorious effect of increasing homeless populations rather than diminishing them as vagrants swarm in and agencies inflate their numbers.

But while doubling its homeless budget didn’t significantly diminish the homeless population in Los Angeles, it did have another spectacular statistical effect on the wellbeing of city residents.

LAPD statistics showed that homeless crime actually increased by nearly 50%, jumping from 5,976 crime reports of homeless perpetrators in most of 2017 to 8,906 crime reports in most of 2018.

Los Angeles had doubled its homeless budget and doubled the amount of homeless crime.

Read it.

For over a century, American Jews have eaten American Chinese food on Christmas. This pastime has evolved to a near-holy tradition, parodied on Saturday Night Live, analyzed in academic papers, and reaffirmed by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan.

I didn’t even know this was a thing.

Read it.

Now, apply this to what you see Donald Trump doing.

Read it.

bipartisan consensus among the foreign policy elite holds that America needs to maintain its de facto overseas empire. This includes both preserving stability, as well as fomenting deliberate instability, including regime change in places like Syria. This consensus among elected officials, defense contractors, general officers, talking heads, and various experts is not shared by the vast majority of Americans, who elected Barack Obama and Donald Trump on their promises to end “stupid wars” and put America first.

The American people have good instincts on these matters.

Read it.

Hogg was accepted into Harvard, despite scoring a 1270 on his SAT and having previously been denied entrance into schools such as UCLA and UC Irvine. Hogg’s acceptance is likely to bring more attention to Harvard’s admissions practices that have been criticized as discriminatory and un-meritocratic. Harvard is currently being sued after allegedly discriminating against Asians in favor of other minorities and white people with lower test scores.

Over the past decade I’ve watched that dark side take hole in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. A region that once supported a thriving, prosperous middle class has been transformed into something that resembles a Third World banana republic, with an obscenely wealthy ruling class, a vast and growing underclass, and not much in between.

— Dan Lyons, Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us

Read it.

Among the videos “meant to enrage or provoke” that prompted Glaser’s censorious mission were what she describes as “several misleading animations that showed a fetus that looks like a sentient child in the uterus,” women explaining why they regretted their abortions, and videos of former abortionists explaining what takes place medically and surgically during an abortion procedure.

Such videos are, of course, every pro-abortion activist’s worst nightmare. Because they reveal the unmistakable details of what takes place in every abortion — details that Glaser rightly, albeit dismissively, describes as “gore” — they’re written off as “dangerous misinformation.” Lest unsuspecting viewers risk running across this “gore” and oppose abortion as a result, true believers like Glaser insist that this type of content should be drowned out by videos from news outlets and “credible reproductive health-care providers” whose mission is to airbrush away the reality of abortion.

Trudeau Blames Trump For Canada’s Illegal Immigrant Crisis  Yeah, if we’d just shut up and take in all those vagrants, Canada wouldn’t have to.

Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame star vandalised again – this time with swastikas  These people just refuse to grow up.

Stephen Colbert Prays For A Trump Reboot Of Richard Nixon’s Last Month In Office

NYT: Crazed Trump doesn’t understand that Forever Wars mean forever

Trump is irresponsibly worrying about American border rather than Syria  I mean, really.

US government shutdown: ‘Trump temper tantrum’ halts work at string of departments after $5bn border wall demand rejected  ‘Temper tantrum’ must be the new Democrat talking point, all the ‘journalists’ are using it.

The Other McCain is a bit steamed.

The New York Times has published the most anti-American column imaginable on the subject of immigration, with this astonishing headline: None of Us Deserve Citizenship.

Certainly the people who write for the New York Times don’t, as this demonstrates rather completely.

Read it.

They left out the part about PETA and vegan heads exploding. That’s the best part.

There are a whole lot of things I’ve never done, and quite frankly I’m good with that.

Read it.

With the proliferation of different camouflage uniforms since the 1960s it was only a matter of time before someone collected images and data on the thousands of different camouflage patterns that have been put to use in the last century of so. The site in question is camopedia.org and it organizes the patterns by nation with another section for non-military patterns (for police mainly). The adoption of camouflage patterns for uniforms accelerated after 2003, in part because so many of them could be seen via digital pictures posted on the Internet. That proliferation of camouflage patterns led to their use for non-camouflage uniforms. In other words work and dress uniforms began to use camouflage patterns. And so it continues, but the process was not without its bumps, detours and utter failures.

Among other fatuities, this led to the Navy adopting a blue-green based camouflage pattern, nicknamed ‘blueberries’, that seemed specifically designed to make sure that if somebody went overboard on a cruise they would never be found by rescuers. Seriously, what need has anybody on board a ship for a camouflage uniform? Who are they going to be hiding from, their CPO? This was sure and certain proof, if anybody needed it, that the people in charge of determining what sailors wear are on some serious drugs.

The Other McCain peeks behind the curtain.

Glenn Reynolds has an excellent round-up of reaction to President Trump’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and reduce the force in Afghanistan by half, which was apparently the reason that General James “Mad Dog” Mattis resigned as Secretary of Defense.

Ace headlines it, “Trump Has Succeeded Where George W. Bush Failed: He Has Turned the Anti-War Left Into Passionate Neocon Warhawks and Intervention-Adventurers,” and cites Dave Reaboi’s observation: “The left has no foreign enemies and wages no foreign wars. They only have domestic enemies and domestic wars. When they’re pretending they care about a foreign war, that only means they are contriving justification for waging the real war on their domestic enemies.”

Read it.

Milk-bone. Works every time.

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My, what a surprise.

My first wife would have loved it.