Ace of Spades documents the meltdown.

Let me guess: She’s a feminist and an anti-gun activist. Oh, and a Democrat, obviously.

Democrats: Party of Fear, Party of Hate, Party of Death.

Read it.

Truth will out.

Read it.

So young, and already a proglodyte.

Read it.

If they think they can win a pissing contest with Trump, they’d better think again.

Nice country you got there, Erdogan. Be a shame if something happened to it.

Read it.

The 28 nation bloc was upgraded from an international organisation to a member state in 2016, under former president Barack Obama.

…

The US president is a vocal supporter of Britain’s exit from the EU – he dubbed himself Mr Brexit in 2016 – and has regularly criticised the bloc for its approach to trade with America.

Heh.

Read it.

Unfortunately–from the standpoint of the Times and others who tried to make political hay out of the truly senseless killing of Jazmine Barnes–the police caught the murderer, and he is black. Just one day later, on January 6, the paper had to eat crow: “A Twist in the Jazmine Barnes Case as a Suspect Is Charged With Capital Murder.” It was the usual story. The murderer was a gang member who thought he was retaliating against a hostile gang and shot into the wrong car. How many times have we heard that?

Read it.

I’m sure there are people who would want it. Good luck getting it past the EnviroNazis, though.

Funny how some ‘progressives’ turn out to be the most reactionary people around.

Dan Crenshaw Slams Hank Johnson For Degrading Trump Supporters: This Is ‘Cowardly’

NBC News Analyst Calls For ‘Trump-Free Days’ Of Media Coverage  Good luck with that. Trump is their meal ticket.

Snoop Dogg posts profanity-filled video telling government workers affected by shutdown not to vote for Trump  I’m sure they appreciate the advice.

Ocasio-Cortez Says ‘No Question’ Trump’s A Racist  No evidence, either, but that doesn’t even slow them down.

Cornered: Trump escalates shutdown crisis  ‘Cornered’? More wishful thinking.

How Trump’s tweet storms to rally support for the government shutdown seem to be working

Trump’s Long Shutdown Could Destabilize the World  Yeah, like ‘climate change’.

Networks Debate Whether To Cover Trump’s National Address On Immigration  A debate that has not been held, so far as I am aware, for any previous President. We got your bias, right here.

‘Heck of an Honorable Guy’: What Democrats Thought of Trump’s AG Nominee 28 Years Ago

Read it.

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

If you raise the price of something, people buy less of it. I should think that even dimwit Democrats would know that.

Read it.

The XtraVue Trailer is a standard caravan that “causes a trailer or caravan to appear invisible in the rearview mirror of the vehicle towing it,” according to a press release from the company. The system uses cameras placed on the rear bumpers of both the vehicle and the trailer to produce a single homogeneous image, which is fed to a small display placed in front of the driver. This theoretically allows drivers to see what’s happening behind the caravan, giving them a better idea of what’s also on the road.

Read it.

Straight from the horse’s, uh, mouth.

Rush Limbaugh, on his show today, played a collection of sound bites from the Usual Suspects in the DemLeghump Media over these last two weeks. Apparently the government shutdown occurred because Trump received appropriate orders from Rush and Ann Coulter.

I don’t believe it for a minute, but I wish it were true — I’d feel a lot more confident about the future.

The Other McCain spreads some truth.

When 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes was killed in a drive-by shooting in Houston Dec. 30, the story “captured nationwide attention,” because Jazmine’s family claimed that the shooter was a white man:

The teen and her mother described the suspect as a white man with blue eyes, a thin build and no beard. They say he “looked sick” with sunken cheekbones and a pale face with a “five o’clock shadow.” He was wearing a black hoodie.

CNN jumped on the story — RAAAAACISM! — and the usual crew of #BlackLivesMatter hate-hustlers leaped into action, raising money and sending out incendiary tweets. Unfortunately for the purveyors of this narrative, it was false. The white man in the red truck that Jazmine’s family had seen wasn’t the shooter, but an innocent guy who was himself caught in the line of fire. The actual perpetrators were driving a KIA.

And black. So the story has suddenly disappeared from the national news.

Read  it.

I suppose this will be aimed at commercial use to start — laundromats and commercial laundry processing sites — but the $1000 price is well within household reach for the Usual Suspects. I don’t find folding laundry to be much of a burden (six years in the Navy will do that for you) but for genetically untidy people (you know who you are) this could be a great life-improver.

Antiplanner looks at the situation.

Fundamentally, however, it isn’t urban and rural that causes the divide. It is middle class (meaning college educated with jobs that are based on thinking) versus working class (meaning jobs that are more based on physical labor). The nation has always had far more working class people than middle class people, and that remains true in rural areas. But in urban areas the middle class has grown while the working class has not. This has led to the appearance of an urban-rural divide, but that really just disguises the middle-class/working-class divide.

…

The real surprise is not that there is a middle-class/working-class divide, but that the working-class are so heavily Republican. At one time, the working class was heavily unionized and union workers tended to vote Democratic. Today, the strongest unions are public employees unions, and they are middle class. Most working-class workers — mechanics, electricians, plumbers, and so forth — are no unionized, and many own or aspire to own their own businesses, which puts them in the Republican camp to the extent that Republicans oppose regulation and taxation of small businesses.

Read it.

There is a lot of talk these days about hate in our public discourse. In truth, much of what is denounced as “hate,” especially by the Left, could more properly be described as disagreement. But every once in a while you come across the real article.

As in the case of Lara Kollab, an American Muslim from Ohio, who was fired from a residency at the Cleveland Clinic, one of America’s most respected medical institutions, after her long history of public anti-Semitism came to light. The Daily Mail has a good account.

Read it.

If you have to wonder whether you’re wealthy, you’re not wealthy.

Read it.

There has been a tremendous pushback in recent years against what are broadly known as “grievance studies”; a loose collection of academic disciplines characterized by their emphasis on oppressive social and political institutions and the marginalized identities they victimize. The philosophical outlook underpinning these disciplines tend to be portrayed in a less ambiguous manner: it is typically described as some combination of Marxist politics with postmodern skepticism, and has been variously termed “cultural Marxism,” postmodern neo-Marxism, the New Left, and so on.

In his book Explaining Postmodernism: Skepticism and Socialism From Rousseau to Foucault, the philosopher Stephen Hicks argues that post-Kantian thinking gradually led to the adoption of ever more skeptical epistemologies. At the same time, a growing number of intellectuals came to align with Marxist and socialist political perspectives. This leads Hicks to the claim that postmodern philosophy is the perpetuation of Marxist politics through other philosophical means. He argues that there is a clear through line where the scientific pretensions of classical Marxism gradually gave way to the irrationalist critiques of the cultural Marxists, and finally converged with the overtly skeptical epistemologies of the postmodernists. Specifically, postmodern skepticism was adopted as a philosophical backdoor to justifying socialism along largely emotive lines. To paraphrase a memorable quote in Hicks’s book, postmodern Leftists came to say feelings were all that mattered and their feelings demanded socialism. Hicks goes on to argue that this epistemological skepticism and cultural Marxist/Socialist politics is the philosophical wellspring of the various identity politics movements ascendant today.

Read it.

In July 2013, the Illinois legislature overrode the veto of then-Governor Patrick Quinn to eliminate the state’s status as the last holdout in refusing to issue concealed-carry permits. In moving from “no-issue” to “shall issue,” law-abiding citizens of the Land of Lincoln were finally able to enjoy the Second Amendment rights affirmed in D.C. v. Heller, McDonald v. Chicago, and Moore v. Madigan. Yet, even while benefitting from armed protection at the expense of taxpayers, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel maintained that “gun control is essential,” and that the new concealed carry law would result in an increase in crime.

Recently, two researchers disproved at least some of Emanuel’s prognostications and added to the growing body of evidence that allowing citizens the right to defend themselves with guns outside their homes can lead to a decrease in crime (see, e.g., here, here, here, and here for examples). Publishing in Applied Economics Letters, Srikant Devaraj and Pankaj Patel (from Ball State University and Villanova University, respectively) used neighborhood-level crime reports from Chicago and Philadelphia during the period January 2006 to December 2015. Their goal was to ascertain the effect of the Illinois concealed carry law on property crimes in Chicago, with the Philadelphia data serving as a “control” comparison over the same term. (Philly was selected because of its similar population density, demographic characteristics, and property crime levels, and because Pennsylvania also is a shall-issue state.)

An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however foolishly confident enough to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance, and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counter-acting and co-operative powers.

— Edmiund Burke

Robert De Niro calls Trump a ‘racist’ and compares him to Hitler and Mussolini  If that were true, De Niro would already be in jail.

Government shutdown: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accuses Trump of ‘hostage taking’ over border wall demands  The Democratic Party has found its very own James Traficant.

Read it.

It sounds ridiculous. But look at what’s happening in the United Kingdom, where the government runs the health system.

To combat the country’s obesity epidemic, British officials just proposed limiting the number of calories permitted in thousands of foods sold in restaurants and grocery stores. A single-serving pizza would be allowed a maximum of 928 calories. A savory pie, no more than 695.

Invasive measures like these might sound like the stuff of a totalitarian dystopia. But when the government foots the bill for our medical expenses, it has a strong financial incentive to micromanage our health.

When the government is paying for your health care, then any decision that affects your health becomes the business of the government. This same overreach underlies the apparently universal power of the government under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution. All it takes is five Harvard Law graduates in Washington and you’re screwed.

Read it.

Proglodytes never imagined that the Imperial Presidency might turn around and bite them squarely on the bitt.

Jefferson rightly said that a government can only do things for you to the extent that it can do things to you.

Read it.

The Democrats hate Donald Trump, but do they hate his policies? In some cases, sure. But many elements of Trumpism are actually congenial to Democrats who want to run to Trump’s left…or is it his right? A reader unpacks Elizabeth Warren’s speech on “A Foreign Policy that Works for All Americans.”

Read it.

California, land of fruits and nuts….

Read it.

Primarily because their strawman-conservative would of course be so; they persist in confusing their fantasies for actual reality.

Dancing is about all that anyone of her generation could possibly be good at — they don’t study real things in school, as Occasional-Cortex has demonstrated on numerous occasions, they make little effort to support themselves by honest toil, and their days are so occupied by seriatim Two Minute Hates that they have no room for anything else.

Dem Expects Impeachment Of Trump Based On 2017 NBC Interview Comment  Good luck with that.

Nancy Pelosi Excuses Rashida Tlaib’s ‘Impeach That Mother**ker’ Comment  Like an overindulgent parent.

CNN And MSNBC Don’t Cover Rep. Comparing Trump To Hitler  Of course. That’s not news.

‘How do you impeach a president who’s done nothing wrong?’ Actually, it’s quite easy

CNN Panel Gets Heated When Trump Comes Up In Debate On Warren-Clinton Comparison

CNN Worships Nancy Pelosi’s Ice Cream Order — Slams Trump For Getting Two Scoops

Media Misses: New York Times Bias Exposed

Government shutdown: Three people die after Trump administration decide to keep national parks open  Of course, if they hadn’t kept the parks open, people would have bitched about that.

Mother Of Son Killed By Illegal Immigrant Tells Democrats To ‘Love Americans More Than You Hate The President’

Steyer Dumps More Cash Into Impeach Movement As Dems Jump On Board  A fool and his money are soon parted. They have to realize that this is going nowhere while Republicans hold the Senate, even if they can cobble together a plausible-sounding excuse.

Read it.

Yesterday, Trump administration officials met with Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats to negotiate about the border wall. Attempting to explain why this wall is so important to American citizens, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen did a presentation which listed how many criminal aliens have been detained at the border, plus drug smugglers, terrorists, human traffickers, and various other undesirables. This meeting became the headline story at Fox News: “Pelosi, Nielsen clashed during border-security meeting: ‘I reject your facts,’ House speaker said, according to report.”

That seems to me to be the basic principle of the Democrat Party: ‘I reject your facts.’

Read it.

The whole concept of ‘pay for your own stuff’ is not very popular these days, since everyone has seen how easy it is to get other people to pay for it.

Read it.

Ever notice how these shootings always take place in areas that are very anti-gun, like California, rather than in pro-gun places like Texas?

Read it.

Boulder’s newly enacted “assault weapons” ban is meeting with stiff resistance from its “gun-toting hippies,” staunch liberals who also happen to be devoted firearms owners.

Only 342 “assault weapons,” or semiautomatic rifles, were certified by Boulder police before the Dec. 31 deadline, meaning there could be thousands of residents in the scenic university town of 107,000 in violation of the sweeping gun-control ordinance.

“I would say the majority of people I’ve talked to just aren’t complying because most people see this as a registry,” said Lesley Hollywood, executive director of the Colorado Second Amendment group Rally for Our Rights. “Boulder actually has a very strong firearms community.”

The ordinance, approved by the city council unanimously, banned the possession and sale of “assault weapons,” defined as semiautomatic rifles with a pistol grip, folding stock, or ability to accept a detachable magazine. Semiautomatic pistols and shotguns are also included.

Read it.

We let our daughter go to the college of her choice. She got into many state and private schools, some with scholarships. But no breaks at all from the expensive private college she selected. She loves it, and we can afford it, but it means constant sacrifice. She knows this, but it doesn’t stop her from regaling us with her friends’ pricey bling and fancy travel. I finally lost it when she ignored the care package I sent during exams, telling me about a friend’s new Cartier necklace instead. She texted: “I wasn’t asking for one.” I replied: “Please stop telling me about your rich friends’ luxuries! I don’t want to hear about them.” What do we do?

Quit indulging her. When I graduated from high school, my father told me ‘We put you through high school, the rest is on your own.’ And, thanks to the GI Bill and loans, I paid my own way through Yale and two graduate degrees at Indiana. If I had my way paid for me, I wouldn’t have appreciated it and I wouldn’t have focused on getting my money’s worth.

Being obliged to use your own money for something concentrates the mind wonderfully.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or the crime rate would skyrocket.

Read it.

Ireland is a magical place, but it’s not that magical.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

The main idea behind RCV is to collect more information about each voter’s preferences by giving them the option to rank the candidates. If no one wins a majority of first place votes, the last place candidate drops out and their votes go to the voters’ second choices (if any) in an on-the-spot runoff election, but without the hassle or cost.

Sometimes known as the ‘Australian ballot’, presumably because it was invented in Australia.

The system used currently in U.S> elections (and in British Parliamentary elections) is called ‘first past the post’ and a lot of people really hate it.

The additional information from each voter means that RCV has a much greater chance of avoiding the nightmare scenario of electing a candidate who would lose in head-to-head matchups against all other candidates—a situation known as Borda’s paradox. Researchers can debate the respective merits of various voting schemes for hours—and have, at a 2010 workshop in Normandy. But one fundamental idea almost all agree on is that a straight plurality vote is the worst way to pick a politician.

John Derbyshire does some ruminating.

“White Supremacist” is of course just totalitarian cuss-talk, like “counter-revolutionary” or “enemy of the people.” You’re not supposed to think about the meaning of the words. You’re just supposed to flip into Two Minutes Hate mode.

Read it.

Well. There it is.

Read it.

Snap quiz: Convicted felon — Democrat or Republican?

Since the House Democrats know that they can’t get any of this crazy shit through the Republican-c0ntrolled Senate, we can expect even more crazy shit — from impeaching Trump to Occasional-Cortex wet dreams — during the next two years, like kids pounding on the glass of the rattlesnake’s box.

EXAMPLE: Democratic Lawmaker Introduces Constitutional Amendment to Abolish Electoral College

EXAMPLE: Ocasio-Cortez Says 70% Ultra-Rich Tax Could Pay for Climate Plan

Read it.

Mark ‘Uncanny Valley’ Zuckerberg strikes back.

Read it.

How’s that socialism working out for you?

Read it.

I like it. It has texture, and scope.

Plenty of room down here in low-tax Texas, y’all….

Read it.

The super-insulated, radio-frequency-controlled designer cat passageway is one of many energy saving features in a super energy efficient house being built in West Vancouver.

Even in Canada, there are people with far more money than sense.

Rep. Hank Johnson Says He Didn’t Compare Trump To Hitler But Does It Again

Kennedy, Watters Take Aim At Marie Harf For Equating A Rep. Comparing Trump To Hitler To Birtherism

‘Impeach The Motherf****r’: Democratic Lawmaker Goes After Trump On Her First Day In Office  Democrats: Party of Fear, Party of Hate, Party of Death.

US Congresswoman declares war on Trump: ‘We’re going to impeach the motherf***er’ Talk is cheap.

Tlaib talks trash  You can take the girl out of the ghetto, but you can’t take the ghetto out of the girl.

California Democrat Eric Swalwell Predicts There Will Be A Race For Who Can Kick Out Trump First

Rick Wilson Refers To Trump Supporters As His ‘Rube, 10-Tooth Base’ For Believing Border Wall Promise  Tough talk from a bald shrimp with a chin-beard. I suspect any random Trump supporter could break him in half.

Democrats Refused To Listen To Border Security Briefing, So Trump Sent It To All Members Of Congress  They keep acting as if Trump were the Same Old Republican President they’re used to working over.

The Favourite: Olivia Colman appears to compare Trump to Queen Anne in award acceptance speech

Read it.

… which is why people vote for ‘far-right’ candidates in the first place.

Trump, eat your heart out.

Read it.

Sure, let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

For those in need of New Year’s resolutions.