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?

As Paul Manafort goes down for 47 months, Americans need to face up to what this says about Donald Trump  Ed Krassenstein need to face up to the fact that it says absolutely nothing about Trump.

New revelations implicate Donald Trump Jr. in his father’s nefarious schemes  Ooooooo, nefarious schemes!

Castro: ‘We’re Going To See More Indictments’ Related To Trump  As many as they can cram in. Something’s gotta stick.

MSNBC Goes DEFCON-1 on Manafort Ruling; ‘Shocking’ ‘Injustice’ by ‘Puppet’ Judge to Please Moscow  Better than admitting that there just isn’t anything there.

Paul Manafort sentencing: What does jailing of Trump’s former campaign chief mean for president?  It’s called a ‘miss’.

Trump golf course faces fine for chopping down trees and dumping them in river  And of course this is all Trump’s fault.

Joy Behar Nuances Herself Into the Far Left Corner

Trump calls Russia investigation a ‘collusion witch hoax’ in rambling and inaccurate White House rant  They had to put ‘rambling’ and ‘inaccurate’ in the headline so that you wouldn’t mistake this for a news piece.

Trump says he wants to ‘honour’ and ‘celebrate’ women – Here’s all the times they’ve accused him of sexual misconduct   And, as we all know, ‘accusation’ is the same as ‘proof’.

CNN Panel Uses McSally Testimony to Attack President Trump, Even McSally Herself  She’s a Republican, so she can’t be a real victim. Besides: TRUMP!

diGenova: With Mueller’s Investigation Coming To A Close, Democrats Rely On Congress To Abuse The President

Brennan, Matthews Rage at Judge; Accuse Trump of ‘Joining the Other Side’ to Betray America

Jon Meacham: Trump May Be ‘in Thrall to a Foreign Power’  Cue Twilight Zone theme music….

Ilhan Omar: Let’s Face It, Trump Is Only Continuing The Terrible Policies of Barack Obama  Now that’s hitting below the belt.

Read it.

This from The Independent, usually a reliable Voice of the Crust.

Somebody escaped from maximum security.

Read it.

Perhaps it’s time to send her to her room. Perhaps without supper.

Quick work for a former bartender. Even Jesse Jackson Jr. didn’t work that fast.

Read it.

Just in case you were pining for news of the latest Hate Hoax. It’s not as if the ‘mainstream media’ are covering it.

Read it.

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

You’ll never see these in the ‘mainstream media’.

Read it.

The totalitarianism inherent in the proglodyte world-view is starting to come out.

Read it.

This is what happens when the government handles health care.

I don’t think we want this.

Ace of Spades has the story.

Bias? What bias?

I’ll bet the police would have intervened if they’d tried to throw the guy out, though. You can depend on that.

Read it.

In addition to being sanctuaries for illegal immigrants, the Left Coast is becoming a sanctuary for drug cartels.

A combination of ideal growing weather and proximity to tens of millions of potential customers has always made northern California a great place to grow dope. California was the first to permit medical marijuana, in 1996, and this past November, residents voted “yes” on Prop 64, making California the fifth state to legalize recreational pot. Almost two-thirds of the country’s total legal harvest comes from the Golden State. The crop brought in $2.8 billion in 2015, putting it somewhere between lettuce and grapes, and some estimates project the state’s “green gold rush” could become a $6.5 billion market by 2020.

Even as California embraces the booming legal marijuana market, though, it is also seeing an explosion in illegal cultivation, much of it on the state’s vast and remote stretches of public land. National forests and even national parks have seen a surge in large-scale illegal “trespass grows,” some with tens of thousands of plants spread across dozens of acres. As much as 80 percent of illegal pot eradicated in California is grown on federal lands, and that’s just the fraction that authorities find. (Trespass grows occur in other states in the American West, and even in remote areas back east, but at nowhere near the scale of California.)

…

The lethal poisons growers use to protect their crops and campsites from pests are annihilating wildlife, polluting pristine public lands, and maybe even turning up in your next bong hit.

Read it.

Since lobbyists were able to get passed the Defend Mickey Mouse Copyright Act, many works that would otherwise have gone into the public domain have remained under copyright.

Since the Usual Suspects appeared to have dropped the ball this time around, copyrights are beginning to expire again.

If you haven’t read Leave It to Psmith, you ought to. It’s Wodehouse at his best.

Read it.

I love a good detective story.

Read it.

I’d be more impressed if Zuckerberg and Bezos announced plans to break up the U.S. Senate.

That might actually have a chance of coming off.

Read it.

In the U.S., socialism is for the privileged.

Read it.

This is abnormal. There’s never been an offensive so vast against a president by his rival party. It took only two committees — one in the Senate, one in the House — to look into the Watergate scandal and drive President Nixon out of the White House in 1974. But Trump is more popular today than Nixon was, and Democrats are taking no chances he might escape their grasp.

Read it.

Funny how the news media delight in showing that white nationalists and neo-Nazis vote Republican but seem to ignore the fact that most ‘wiccans’ and astrologers vote Democrat. If one can infer that Republicans are the party of hate then one can just as readily infer that Democrats are the party of stupid.

Read it.

Ticket punched.

Resume line added.

Time to move on.

Read it.

Is there anybody who doesn’t work for the New York Times who still pretends that David Brooks is some sort of conservative?

Ace of Spades: Those Of You Who Bet on “David Brooks” for “Which NeverTrumper Would Be the First to Embrace the Hard Left’s Holy Grail of Reparations” — Collect Your Winnings

Read it.

This is mostly about trains, but I suspect similar problems afflict roads and bridges.

Don’t expect our infrastructure to get better anytime soon. (Who knows? Now that Lake Erie has ‘human rights’, maybe roads will eventually be able to vote and politicians will give them some attention.)

A Hipster Elegy.

In the two years after I graduated from college, my parents divorced, my relationship of two years ended, I quit Teach For America after a single awful month, I started and quit another job, and my therapist gently guided me to the understanding that I had an eating disorder. It was no wonder, then, that I wanted to move across the country, from New York, where I’d lived for most of my life, to California. In San Francisco, I would be new.

Let’s check off the Pokemon points:

1. College? Check.
2. Divorced parents? Check
3. Unmarried with bad ‘relationship’? Check
4. Tried fashionable underclass outreach program but couldn’t hack it? Check. (Maybe she ought to have gone Peace Corps.)
5. Can’t keep a job? Check
6. Therapist? Check.
7. Eating disorder? Check.
8. Yearning for the Coast? Check.

You don’t even need to read the rest of the article. It’s going to be another Cozy Memoir beloved by the fashionista press.

You know what taught me to live being alive? A high school classmate dying in a rice paddy. That sorts you out right quick.

Read it.

I cannot believe that this stuff can compete on price with food grown in the ground, even if you have to ship it severael hundred miles. I suspect that this is another Green Boondoggle that will eventually be pushing for taxpayer subsidies, like Wind and Solar.

Even New York City has farms within a half-hour drive. This is a hipster fad for sure.

Take a look.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

Poor Mark Zuckerberg has almost as many fables told about him as Trump.

Read it.

For years, the sharing economy was pitched as an altruistic form of capitalism?—?an answer to consumption run amok. Why own your own car or power tools or copies of The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up if each sat idle for most of its life? The sharing economy would let strangers around the world maximize the utility of every possession to the benefit of all.

Uh-huh. That works about as well as you think that it might.

Read it.

But that trick never works.

Suspected ISIS Member Convicted Of Killing 4 People In Belgian Jewish Museum Killings

Mehdi Nemmouche: Suspected Isis fighter guilty of ‘terrorist murders’ of four people at Jewish Museum in Brussels

Syria refugees launch bid to prosecute Assad’s government for war crimes: ‘We have suffered for too long’

Kashmir explosion: At least 18 injured after blast at bus station in Jammu near Pakistan border

Town Councillor Mugged by Underage Migrants in Maresme

Culture-Enrichers Riot in Grenoble

Israel Designates Hamas’ Al-Aqsa TV as a Terrorist Oranization  Well, duh.

Lewis Ludlow trial: Man who plotted ‘spectacular’ terror attack on London’s Oxford Street jailed for 15 years

Man Who Converted To Islam Jailed For Planning Terrorist Attack In London

ISIS Bride Goes Silent When Asked About Tweets Calling For Terror Attacks

At least 18 prisons blocked in France after radicalised inmate stabs guards

Isis child suspects being detained and tortured without evidence, human rights report reveals

French prison guards stabbed by suspected Islamist inmate in ‘terror attack’

These innocent American children were taken to Syria by their Isis sympathiser mother — now it’s time to bring them home

Two Dead In West Bank After Terrorists Ram Vehicles Into Soldiers

Lull in Terrorism Masks a Deepening Jihadist Threat, Dutch Report Warns

Saudi Arabia Revokes Citizenship For Osama Bin Laden’s Son

Storm of criticism after Iranian TV host suggests wives should put up with decades of beatings

Hezbollah calls UK terror ban an ‘insult’ to Lebanese people

Mogadishu attack: Battle rages in Somali capital as death toll nears 30

Syria civil war: ‘Toxic chemical’ containing chlorine used in Douma attack, inspectors conclude

Saudi Arabia prepares to prosecute women’s rights activists

Isis face final assault in Syria as US-backed fighters close in on last remaining stronghold

India-Pakistan crisis: Six civilians killed as shelling continues on Kashmir border

Synagogue memorial stone vandalised in antisemitic attack in France

Deadly Enricher-on-Enricher Violence in Barcelona

Egypt’s grand imam calls polygamy an ‘injustice’ for women

Trump investigation: US House panel launches probe into possible obstruction by president  Congressman Nadler reminds me of Dean Wurmer from ANIMAL HOUSE.

Chief Imam Of Egypt Draws Backlash From Other Imams For Denouncing Polygamy

Christianophobia and Islamophilia Among Catalonian Marxists

ISIS Uses ‘Human Shields’ To Stall US-Backed-Forces Final Push

Proof of Bias? Poll Finds 99% of CNN Viewers Think Trump Lied About Russia

How the prospect of a fifth term for Algeria’s president sparked the biggest protests in 30 years

Hundreds of Isis prisoners with ‘no blood on their hands’ released in Syria

Anti-Semitic Vandalism Surges Across Eastern France

Helping Asylum Seekers in the Netherlands is a Dangerous Business

Two American children may be trapped in last Isis enclave in Syria, father says

Google refuses to remove Saudi government app that lets men track and control women  Political Correctness is all very fine/But don’t let it hurt the bottom line.

British special forces expected to step into counter-terrorism vacuum after US pulls out of Afghanistan  Because, after all, the only people who can do anything about terrorism are white people….

A socially acceptable form of murder: honour killings in Russia’s North Caucasus

Steve Sailer reports.

It will be interesting to see whether the Democrat party’s adult supervision will survive much longer.

Read it.

Does anyone else always hear Darth Vader’s voice in their head whenever they read the letters CNN?

Read it.

Automation is often presented as an inexorably advancing force, whether it’s ushering in a threat to jobs or a promise of increased leisure or larger profits. We’re made to imagine the robots rising, increasingly mechanized systems of production, more streamlined modes of everyday living. But the truth is that automation technology and automated systems very often fail. And even when they do, they nonetheless frequently wind up stranded in our lives.

For every automated appliance or system that actually makes performing a task easier—dishwashers, ATMs, robotic factory arms, say—there seems to be another one—self-checkout kiosks, automated phone menus, mass email marketing—that actively makes our lives worse.

I hate these things, and will not usr them. I’ll actually go buy stuff somewhere else.

The horror!

I’ll bet they haven’t heard of Gloria Steinem, either.

‘It gets real personal, real fast’: Dems fear targeting Trump kids could backfire  Oh, ya think?

Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to de-legitimize the 2020 election  The way CNN keeps trying to de-legitimize the 2016 election?

One CNN Guest Uses McSally Rape Claim To Attack Trump — The Next Attacks McSally  Because they’re Republicans and Republicans cannot be allowed to accumulate Pokemon Victim Points.

Democrats Poised To Disregard Mueller On Collusion, Launch Their Own Investigations  If you don’t like the facts you find, find some facts you like — or can make up.

Trump Is Right ? The Latest Investigation Against Him Is Another ‘Witch Hunt’

Media Magic: How a Democrat Pedophile Became a ‘Trump Scandal’

‘Tim Apple’: Trump calls Apple CEO Tim Cook by wrong name during White House meeting Scraaaaaaape that barrel.

Trump is trying to pay his way to an annihilation of Palestinian statehood, and an erasure of Israel’s crimes  Robert Fisk is the guy for whom ‘fisking’ was named, since his writing typically offers a fertile field for it.

Beware the Ides of Trump  Hope springs eternal in the NeverTrumper breast.

Media Compare Alleged Serial Underage Rapist R. Kelly to Kavanaugh, Trump  Because everything bad is Trump’s fault.

Tim Cook Changes His Twitter Handle To ‘Tim Apple’ After Trump Gaffe

‘CNN Tonight’ Muddies Waters on Anti-Semitism, Downplays Omar to Bash Trump

Jared Kushner goes rogue in Saudi Arabia, prompting national security concerns  ‘Goes rogue’? Seriously?

Read it.

Time to compare Pokemon Victim Points and see whose is bigger.

Read it.

I remember when Arnie pretended to be a Republican.

I guess there’s no more money to be made that way.

Read it.

And that’s a big problem.

Ace of Spades brings the happy news.

Well, at least we cleared that up.

Read it.

Just in case you’re keeping track.

Read it.

This madness, which long ago infected university campuses, is now seeping into HR departments of large employers. The result is the rise of the woke corporation, and it might affect the way you work. Certainly, no one should assume that their own company, however sensible-seeming, is immune.

Crackpot ideas that used to be confined to neo-Marxist professors in grievance studies departments have been enthusiastically embraced by the giants of capitalism. Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Goldman Sachs, Coca-Cola are all on board and anyone who publicly challenges this new orthodoxy is not merely endangering their chances of promotion, but at risk of being fired.