Read it.

The automatic reaction of the Left to disagreement is SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP!

Read it.

The EPA will introduce its final proposal sometime this spring that strips a waiver California and other states have long used to set tougher vehicle emission standards than the federal government, forcing every state in the U.S. to comply with the same rules.

Since manufacturers aren’t willing to make two products, one for a restrictive state and one for less restrictive states, California’s tight regulations have basically set the standard for mileage requirements for the country. This is the same trick that AlGore used to give us those wimpy 1.6 gallon flush toilets.

The move to revoke California of its waiver comes as the Trump administration is also looking to freeze Obama-era efficiency rules meant to cut carbon emissions from the transportation industry. The EPA, along with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is finalizing a proposal to freeze vehicle efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, in lieu of raising them annually.

This could get entertaining. Proglodytes are finding out that centralizing power in Washington isn’t such a good idea after all.

Read it.

A new web tool released late last month by the creators of social network Gab touts itself as the “Wild West of the internet,” promising free, unmoderated discourse across all platforms.

The application, aptly named “Dissenter,” comes in the form of a browser extension and effectively creates an open comment section on every single web page on the internet. The catch: there is nothing website owners can do to modify, manage, or otherwise control the conversation.

This could get entertaining.

Change does not always mean improvement.

Steven Hayward at Powerline blog does a little analysis.

New York magazine has produced a list of the “best books to understand socialism” that is so stupefyingly inane that you wonder if this is intended as satire or a really big put on. But no—they are quite earnest about this list, because it was curated by “experts.”

I once attempted to read DAS KAPITAL but when I read the first page I realized that Marx didn’t know the difference between value and price and that rather spoiled it for me. Rather like reading a book on geography by somebody who believes that the world is flat, it may have some usefulness but it’s hard to get really interested.

I can only assume they dug up their “experts” at some kind of retirement village for red diaper babies suffering dementia somewhere in the Balkans, since most of these titles are really old and out of date. What would we do without “experts”?

Ace of Spades follows this stuff so that you don’t have to.

I sure do like the Three Little Pigs meme, though.

The Other McCain shows you how.

They have two standards — one for them, and one for everybody else.

Read it.

That didn’t take long.

Read it.

Well, he’s right that low-alcohol beer was a significant part of the medieval diet.

Is he going to get up in the middle of the night for Matins? That’s what real monks do.

Read it.

Political scientists can trace the history of a former mainstream party (the Democrats) by studying the living fossils in their midst.

Read it.

Of course Apple won’t provide a reason for taking it down other than some bland boilerplate about ‘not meeting our standards’ because if they gave an honest reason they could get sued.

Read it.

I’ve always had my doubts about Michigan people. My Brother The Communist lives in Michigan.

Game of Thrones actor Conleth Hill lashes out at Trump’s The Wall is Coming posters

STUDY: CNN’s ‘The Situation Room’ Is a Weeklong Promo for Dem Investigations

CNN Touts Claims Republicans Are ‘Dying of Whiteness,’ Racial Voting  And it’s all Trump’s fault, of course.

GMA Eagerly Hopes Republicans ‘Embarrass’ Trump With ‘Rebuke’ on Border Wall Funding

Who Wants to Play the Race Card Against Joe Biden?  Evidently Biden represents ‘Trumpism. Who knew?

Are You A Trump Supporter Who Wants To Eat In Peace? There’s An App For That

Mueller investigation: Why the next week could be one of the biggest yet for Donald Trump+

Dear Diary: Jim Acosta Doesn’t Waste His Chance to Cause a Scene in the Briefing Room

Read it.

Five will get you ten that it never happens.

Read it.

Let’s hope the bureaucrats and environmentalists get the message.

Read it.

He’s got my vote.

Read it.

I think he made his point. Women respond positively to money and power, always have, always will.

‘How to I love thee? Let me count the ways….’

Read it.

Well, we’re not all that happy. We still have to suffer under a lot of bullshit governmentalism.

Make up your mind, mom.

Read it.

In the Navy they taught us how to make water-wings with our dungaree pants (hence the bell-bottoms).

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Joel Kotkin turns over a rock.

The people who build our homes increasingly can no longer afford them. As the state elite and their academic cheering crew celebrate our progressive boom, even the most skilled, unionized construction workers, notes an upcoming study, cannot afford to live anywhere close to the state’s major job centers.

In fact, notes the study, soon to be published by Chapman University, not a single unionized construction worker can afford a median-priced house in any of the major coastal counties, including Orange, Los Angeles, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara, San Diego, Alameda, Sonoma and Napa. Even with incomes averaging over $73,000 annually, notes author and economist Dr. John Husing, most can afford median-priced homes only in the further reaches of the Central Valley or the Inland Empire, requiring huge commutes.

Read it.

Peggy Noonan advises us to “get ready for the coming struggle session.” What’s a struggle session? The term comes from Communist China’s cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Steve Sailer brings us a ripe one.

I’ve come around to believing that it makes sense to add on hate crime charges in the case of wholly gratuitous crimes like this that wouldn’t have happened without demographic animosity aforethought.

‘It would ultimately come down to the use of force’: What would happen if Trump refused to leave office?  Funny how nobody asked this question about Obama.

USA Today Sports Writer: NBA Owner & Would-Be President Mark Cuban Too Much Like Trump  I.e. He was a successful businessman, unlike all of the drones working for the Democrat nomination.

Julian Castro Responds To Omar’s Comments, Blames Trump  Yeah, well, Castro….

ABC News’ Terry Moran: Media, Democrats Face ‘Reckoning’ If Mueller Finds No Collusion

Schiff Acknowledges Mueller May Never Get Trump To Testify  That’s awfully white of him.

Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, ruminates.

My favorite one-factor theory of social attitude (and value) change over the last few centuries is that increasing wealth has induced a drift from farmer back to forager attitude (and values). Which plausibly helps explains changing attitudes toward fertility, gender, slavery, crime, democracy, war, leisure, art, and travel. In this post I want to suggest a (to me) new hypothesis about forager attitudes, which could help explain some recent attitude trends.

Ace of Spades preaches the True Word.

Read it.

How? With TAXPAYER MONEY, of course! Why not? It’s FUNDING! It’s governement money! It’s FREE!

Everyone has a right to clean water, no matter what you look like, how much money you make, or which political party you favor.

The mating cry of the Social Justice Warrior.

Watch it.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

The guy has a great radio voice. He ought to do voiceover work.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

Read it.

More than you ever really wanted to know about primitive navigation.

Read it.

Trump keeps dominating the agenda, despite Democrat attempts to jerk everybody’s attention over to what they want to talk about. He’s very good at that. Occasional-Cortex is good at it, too, but she keeps wasting it on unicorn farts like the ‘Green New Deal’ that won’t go anywhere.

Read  it.

There are three related problems that make California economically tenuous, and a fourth that makes the situation worse:

1. It’s no longer the best place in the world to start a startup.
2. The gains from the existing tech industry increasingly accrue to a) passive investors, and b) lucky landlords.
3. The state government is a levered bet on tech compensation.
4. These three problems, which are interrelated, won’t show visible symptoms until well after they’re terminally un-fixable.

Read it.

Tom Wolfe had the right idea when he pointed out that “The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe.” Unfortunately I am not so sanguine about its future correctness, especially since the current version of European fascism is nothing more than 6th century savagery being imported from Africa and the Near and Middle East, and we are only a generation or two behind.

Read it.

Chickens, coming home to roost: flap flap flap….

Read it.

On Friday Rep. Doug Collins released the transcript of Bruce Ohr’s testimony to the House Oversight Committee this past August. I have embedded the 268-page transcript below via Scribd. Ohr appeared before the committee voluntarily, not under subpoena, in connection with its investigation of bias within the Department of Justice and the FBI. He is a key participant in the Obama administration activities that, taken together, amount to one helluva political scandal.

Read it.

All it takes is a sniff of blood and the jackals are upon you.

Read it.

Sometimes, in the middle of a conversation—especially if things are heated or tense or confusing—they’ll pause, and they’ll say something like:

“I’m sorry, but—look. In my culture…”

…and then they’ll go on to explain something that one might easily mistake for a rule, or a request, or the enforcement of a social norm, but which is actually (as far as I can tell) just a statement about the version of the world they carry around inside their head.

That’s a great trick. I’m going to have to remember that one.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was such a thing as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, huh?

Read it.

I recall the Soviet empire having the same problem. But surely rich people can hire the right kind of lawyers. And I’m sure a hefty campaign donation or two would smooth the waters.

Of course, if it gets bad enough that it would be cheaper to have some NY state functionaries whacked, well, there’s plenty of local talent for that, too.

Warren Attacks Trump For Dangling Pardons — Stumbles When Asked If She’d Do The Same

WaPo Editor Uses Cancer-Stricken Alex Trebek To Attack Trump

Mitchell Echoes Democrat Guest, Slams ‘Shameful’ Trump Putting Kids in ‘Cages’  Which, of course, never happened.

Trump Signed Bibles In Alabama And People Can’t Handle It

Rep. Ted Lieu Deletes Tweet Blasting Trump For Alabama Visit  Oops.

Trope Derangement Syndrome, by Steve Sailer

Maher, Panel Compare Trump to Michael Jackson, Congressional GOP ‘Rapists’

Read it.

A team of researchers at Technion and the University of Haifa have developed a new computer vision approach for solving archaeological puzzles. In their paper, pre-published on arXiv, they introduce a general algorithm that can automatically reassemble fragments of archaeological artifacts.

Read it.

Hey, sauce for the goose….

Read it.

Pretty sad when a chancre like Maher calls you a cancer.

Read it.

An analysis of progressivism as a modern form of classic Puritanism.

Today’s intolerant divorce themselves from the intolerance of their political ancestors by imagining them as the political ancestors of their political opponents. So, eugenics, prohibition, and so much else enthusiastically supported by progressives become, in the telling of modern progressives, the work of reactionaries. This enables followers of an intellectual tradition to not learn from past mistakes.

Margaret Sanger, for example, started Planned Parenthood because there were too many black babies being born.

William Blaxton, the city’s first settler who dwelled alone on Boston Common, invited the Puritans to settle on the Shawmut. They soon encouraged him to leave. “I have come from England because I did not like the Lord Bishops,” the first Bostonian lamented. “I cannot join you because I would not be under the lord brethren.”

In the next generation, the Puritans, who depicted themselves as paragons of religious freedom (a bit of propaganda so effective that most fall for it today), executed four on Boston Common for the crime of Quakerism.

We bad.

Read it.

Wealth frees a person from immediate survival concerns and therefore increases the importance of symbolic identities. And this, coupled with youth’s natural affinity for rebellion, almost inevitably leads to at least a passing phase of identity-based radicalism. So while others sounded the tocsin, proclaiming this a grave threat to social sanity, I remained skeptical. Of course, I agreed that social justice ideologies were often odious and possibly pernicious, especially inside the elite institutions where they most rapidly proliferated; but, I also thought that alarmism about the problem was equally unhelpful, diverting limited cognitive resources from more constructive activities.

However, I am no longer skeptical. I have come to believe that the hostility to the West embedded in this kind of thinking and activism is a serious and growing problem. It is therefore critical that we understand the motives that drive it and the conditions that enable it, and that we challenge its erroneous assumptions and persuade others of its corrosiveness, preferably without alienating those who find it appealing but are also willing to listen to reasonable objections.

Read it.

Golden Rice which has been genetically engineered to have higher levels of the vitamin A precursor beta-carotene is finally about be to approved for planting by poor farmers in Bangladesh. This a big step toward improving the health of some of the poorest people on the planet. Vitamin A deficiency causes blindness in between 250,000 and 500,000 children each year, half of whom die within 12 months, according to the World Health Organization. A study by German researchers in 2014 estimated that activist opposition to the deployment of Golden Rice has resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in just India alone.

Environmentalist ideologues have fought fiercely for two decades to prevent this crop from being offered to poor farmers in developing countries. Among other things, they hired thugs to rip up test fields of the grain at the International Rice Research Institute in the Phillippines.

Steve Sailer looks at David Brooks and reparations.

Obviously, in Brooks’ conception, reparations aren’t intended to work in any real world sense. The point of Brooks “concrete gesture of respect” is that a really futile and stupid gesture of inchoate religious symbolism be done on white people’s part by setting fire to a giant pile of money.

But being concrete-minded myself and oriented toward starting from examples rather than abstractions, I’m fascinated by the practical questions of who gets how much.

An excellent question. How much is Maxine Waters owed because she was oppressed? How about Cory Booker?