Read it.

The government spends billions of dollars on paying farmers not to grow crops, and to buy up their crops in order to support the prices. The reason this happens is because farmers are one of the most politically powerful lobbies in Washington, augmented by the dimwits who think that there is some sort of cultural icon value in ‘saving the family farm’, which is like ‘saving the buggy whip shops’. Most of this money eventually winds up in the hands of the agricultural conglomerates eventually, and they’re laughing all the way to the bank.

Google ‘Schumpeter creative destruction’ and read.

I suggest that this is God telling the agricultural industry — because, now, it is an industry — to get with the modern world.

As with an earthquake, all that such domestic protectionism accomplishes is to make the change, when it comes, more violent and destructive than it otherwise would have been. The longer it is delayed, the worse the result will be.

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My, what a surprise.

A fisking we will go, a fisking we will go….

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his month, an Ohio jury awarded the owners of Gibson’s Food Mart and Bakery in Oberlin $44 million in combined punitive and compensatory damages in its defamation action against Oberlin College and a top university administrator. The incident at the heart of the lawsuit stems from a 2016 hate-crime hoax involving three black students, occurring the day after Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Gibson’s, owned and operated by the same family for over a century, has been a popular spot for Oberlin College students looking to buy groceries within walking distance of campus. Gibson’s also supplied the college dining hall with baked goods.

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Video hosting platform Vimeo – whose CEO contributed to the 2016 Clinton campaign – has completely banned Project Veritas over a viral video of a surreptitiously recorded Google employee admitting that the search giant is training its algorithms to to avoid the “next Trump situation,” raising questions of 2020 election meddling.

Crowdsourcing the Ministry of Truth appears to be successful for the proglodytes. Orwill missed that one.

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Ain’t no effort involved. They ARE socialist.

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Marshae Jones, 27, was shot in the stomach Dec. 4, 2018, outside a Birmingham Dollar General on Park Road. Jones was five months pregnant at the time of the shooting and was taken to UAB Hospital, but her unborn baby did not survive according to AL.com.

Authorities initially charged the shooter, Ebony Jemison, 23, with manslaughter. However, a grand jury did not indict her and police dropped the charges, AL.com reported. Jones will be incarcerated in Jefferson County Jail on $50,000 bond.

Jones initiated the fight with Jemison over Jones’ unborn baby’s father, police allege, adding that Jemison was defending herself when she shot Jones. Pleasant Grove police Lt. Danny Reid emphasized that the unborn baby relied on his or her mother for protection and that the mother “shouldn’t seek out unnecessary physical altercations.”

Read it.

In a decision with far-reaching implications for national politics, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that federal courts do not have power to review partisan gerrymandering claims.

The decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the conservative majority. Justice Elena Kagan led the liberal bloc in dissent.

When district boundaries change to match demographic changes after every decennial census, there are going to be attempts to arrange things so that one side or the other gets an advantage. Aside from having some kind of computer algorithm do it, that’s inevitable.

Some people love the idea of having districts so evenly balanced that a little mood swing one way or the other can tip the election. I don’t, because thees people forget that the more evenly balanced the partisan makeup of a district, the more people are effectively not represented by the final winner of the contest. (Sure, Congresscritters make a lot of noise about ‘representing everybody in the district’, but that’s about as true as most Congressional utterances.)

An ideal district map would be as gerrymandered as possible, with each one being overwhelmingly toward one side or another. Sure, there would be people ‘marginalized’, but that’s always going to happen, and extreme gerrymandering minimizes the number of people who wind up taking it in the shorts. People who have been raised on professional sports teams, and the media who report on them, have been conditioned to want a ‘horse race’ that they can whoop and holler over, and they’ve forgotten the whole point of the system, which is to make people have the best shot of being represented in the legislature by somebody who feels the way they do on issues.

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Zarif’s comments prefigured the strategy that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is following today in his brinksmanship with President Trump. Playing on the fear, especially prevalent among European elites and American Democrats, that Trump is, precisely, an agent of chaos, Khamenei has taken a leaf from the book of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who in 2017 appeared at the World Economic Forum as the representative of enlightened globalism. “We should adhere to multilateralism to uphold the authority and efficacy of multilateral institutions,” Xi declared. “We should honor promises and abide by rules.”

They are sore at Trump for not abiding by Obama’s ass-kissing.

ZMan takes a look at the Democrat field.

Three things were fairly obvious, based on Twitter. One is the Democrat media was instructed to sell the hell out of Warren, which they tried hard to do, but Warren gave them little to work with after she read her prepared lines. What they are going to learn is what people in Massachusetts know about her. Like all pols, she can read from a script and seem quite good. On her own, she reveals herself to be quite dull. Her serious egghead presentation is just an act. She is a pseudo-intellectual poseur.

Another thing that was made obvious to enthusiasts is that Beto O’Rourke is just a slacker who has been getting by on his looks. The media likes him because he has the RFK routine down cold. He knows how to charm left-wing Baby Boomers. The trouble is, once you get past the horse teeth and hairstyle, you’re left with a guy who probably spends his free time reading comic books. He is in politics because it requires the least amount of effort for the best possible lifestyle. Otherwise, he is a bum.

Read it.

I must confess that the subject didn’t occupy much of my time, but it’s interesting nevertheless.

With the possible exception of some Big Wheels or other child transportation vehicles, most tires are black. You’d be hard-pressed to find a tire shop and come across a Goodyear or Michelin sample that’s any other color.

Natural rubber, however, is closer to an off-white shade, and early-model cars sported that lighter color. Early tire makers also often added zinc oxide to their natural rubber as a way to strengthen the material, resulting in white tires. But at some point, tire manufacturers decided to go darker. Why?’

Racism would be my guess.

Steve Sailer.

A good reminder of how immigrant groups are hot recruiting grounds for crime syndicates.

Read it.

Apparently we’ve reached the point in Wokeness that good music is being prepped as a target.

Read it.

Yang is one of the most interesting Democrat candidates I can remember.

Read it.

The question he has to ask himself is: Why do they hate us?

Read it.

First of all, Democrats have shifted their propaganda from “there is no crisis at the border, Trump is making it all up to distract you” to “there is a hearbreaking crisis at the border which we will fake-cry about on tv, and it’s all Trump’s fault.

Read it.

I wrote five years ago about the growing threat of a wealth tax.

Some friends at the time told me I was being paranoid. The crowd in Washington, they assured me, would never be foolish enough to impose such a levy, especially when other nations such as Sweden have repealed wealth taxes because of their harmful impact.

But, to paraphrase H.L. Mencken, nobody ever went broke underestimating the foolishness of politicians.

Oh, politicians are actually very cunning; it’s just that they do what’s best for them, not necessarily what’s good for the country.

Read it.

Around this time last year, the yearly American Customer Satisfaction Index Restaurant Report found Chick-fil-A to be its most highly-approved fast-food restaurant for the third year in a row. The report, based on data accrued from over 23,000 U.S. diners, assesses major chains on criteria from accuracy of food orders to restaurant cleanliness to variety of menu items and more.

Now, Chick-Fil-A can tack on a fourth consecutive winning year, as this year’s just-released ACSI Restaurant Report found the chicken chain at the top of its list once again. While it dropped 1% from 2018, Chick-Fil-A still maintained an overall ACSI score of 86 on a 0-100 scale, placing it five points ahead of next-highest competitor Panera with 81. At 80, there’s a four-way tie between Arby’s, Chipotle, Pizza Hut, and Papa John’s. McDonald’s remains at the bottom of the ranking, with a total score of 69.

The combination of really really good food and being a prominent victim of the Political Correctness crowd would apper to be unbeatable.

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This would appear to be a good fit for the new Zumwalt destroyers, whose original gun ammunition proved impossibly expensive.

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This piece from the Atlantic is nominally a critique of Establishment parents but also serves to highlight the extent to which the Crust is being reshaped by the institutions that nominally serve them and in particular how the Chattering Class is working to brainwash our ruling elite to follow their ideological agenda. This is the sort of environment that produced AlGore and the Obamas.

The Latest Trump Accuser Is Acting Awfully Wacky On TV

Morning Joe Assumes Trump Is a Rapist, Skips Lack of Evidence

Trickle Down Theory: Powell Trashes Trump, Praises Himself

Christie’s Scathing Indictment of Trump  Christie? Really?

Secret Service Detains Person Who Allegedly Spit On Eric Trump: Report

Megan Rapinoe Says She’s Not ‘Going To The F**king White House’  And the White House is the better for it.

Beto Says Trump ‘Responsible’ For Deaths Of Migrant Father And Daughter  Which is, of course, a lie.

Morning Joe: Mueller Is ‘Good’ vs. Trump ‘Evil,’ Warnings on ‘Post-Mueller Depression’  What would they do if they didn’t have Trump to lie about?

It’s Trump’s fault that migrants die trying to cross the border?

CNN Sneers, ‘Triggered’ Trump Won’t ‘Take Personal Responsibility’ for Drowned Immigrants

Highlights Magazine Condemns Family Separation At The Border Even Though Trump Ended Policy In 2018  Can’t let truth stand in the way of the Narrative.

Whoopi: Trump Trying to Criminalize Homosexuality, Like in Iran  Always knew she was an Islamophobe, with a name like Goldberg.

John Avlon: Huge Influx at the Border Is ‘Fundamentally a Trump Administration Policy’  I guess that’s why he keeps asking for a wall, the cunning devil.

Reddit ‘Quarantined’ Biggest Pro-Trump Forum

Sanders Says 2016 Election Was ‘Rigged,’ Claims He Would Have Beaten Trump

2020 Hopeful Claims Global Warming Made Parts Of Central America ‘Uninhabitable’

Listening to climate doomsters makes our situation worse

AI Researchers Tout their Wares to the Climate Science Community

Why Politicians Who Don’t Understand the Science of Global Warming Don’t Need to Act.

Read it.

But you knew that.

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Project Veritas has released an email it says it received from a Google whistleblower, following up on the video that we wrote about yesterday. On its face, the email appears to be part of a discussion among members of Google’s “transparency and ethics” group. It describes Prager University, Jordan Peterson and Ben Shapiro as “Nazis” and addresses the question how their influence can be reduced.

Powerline is on the case. Stay tuned.

Steve Sailer.

A new study from Georgetown University reveals that if the student bodies of the 200 most selective American colleges were enrolled solely on objective SAT or ACT aptitude test scores, their student bodies would increase from 66 percent white under the current subjective system to 75 percent white.

Ironically, this study was supposed to prove, in the wake of the entertaining and immensely popular Varsity Blues scandal in which TV actresses bribed their lowbrow kids into USC instead of Arizona State, that affluent white people have unfair advantages in college admissions.

Over poor white people, perhaps.

Read it.

Murder is always a hateful act and murderers generally have hateful hearts. But Chief Blue was trying to appease Islamist groups without deviating too much from the facts, by imputing Islamophobia.

But the trial became a circus when Satana Deberry, a leftist pro-crime candidate allegedly backed by George Soros, defeated her credible predecessor to become the DA of Durham County.

District Attorney Roger Echols had wanted the death penalty. Satana ruled out the death penalty. The new radical DA had a very political agenda in mind. Not to punish Hicks, but to prove he’s a bigot.

Read it.

Crowdsourcing the Ministry of Truth.

“I just thought I’d hang out here in case you needed a bear later.’

Read it.

CMF (Composite metal foam) could provide superior protection against bullets and be much lighter as well, the theory was put to the test and it worked. This was done by modifying existing composite armor designs by substituting CMF for steel. This resulted in armor that weighed less and had superior stopping power. Composite armor is most widely used for tank armor. This is also called Chobham armor, after the place where it was developed in Britain during the 1960s. Composite armor used layers of metal (steel, depleted uranium and now CMF) separated by layers of ceramics to provide the most effective tank armor ever. Composite armor remains popular because it provides superior stopping power compared to the same weight of just high-quality steel plate armor. CMF takes this one step further by adding another lighter material, this time to replace some of the steel layers.

..

What makes CMF so effective is that the metal foam compresses when it is hit by a high-speed projectile.

Such as an APDS penetrator rod, the most common form of anti-tank ammunition. Chobham armor was developed to defeat shaped charge weapons, like RPGs, which is why RPGs aren’t used on tanks any more.

Read it.

taly’s Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini called a NGO migrant transportation vessel a “pirate ship,” and suggested that Germany and The Netherlands should split the 43 passengers who were picked up off the coast of Libya, according to Newsweek.

“Does the European Union want to solve the Sea Watch problem? Easy,” Salvini wrote on Facebook, “Dutch ship, German NGO: Half of the immigrants in Amsterdam, the other half in Berlin. And seize the pirate ship.”

How the Libyan migrant hustle works: Libyans get in whatever barely floating thing they can find and paddle out beyond the territorial limit, where a proglodyte ‘rescue ship’ picks them up and carries the ‘refugees’ to a European port.

Italy was swamped early on, and has decided that it doesn’t want to play this game any more, which is why they are now also going to France, Spain, and Greece.

Read it.

Isn’t that amazing.

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The Brave New World has apparently already arrived in Mountain View,

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Funny, I thought George Wallas was the Republican George Wallace.

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So much for ‘white privilege’.

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In a second day of bombshells from James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, a leaked document reveals what appears to be members of Google’s “transparency and ethics” group calling prominent Jewish conservatives Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager “Nazis,” along with Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who is not Jewish.

Read it.

Well, elect Democrats and that’s what happens.

ABC, NBC Hype Pelosi: Trump ‘Scaring the Children of America’ With ICE Raids  Oooh, Donald Trump will get you if you don’t watch out!

CNN’s Camerota Boosts Allegations Against Trump: ‘Legally It Was Rape’

Futuristic British Family Saga: Trump Spends Final Days in Office Nuking China

Michael Wolff: the Mueller indictment document ‘sits on my desk’

Why Is Ex-Fox Newser Carl Cameron Joining a Leftist Attempt at a Drudge Report?  Because that’s where the money is.

NYT Editorial Writer So Lame on Immigration That Trump-Trashing David Frum Objected!  Pretty bad when you’ve lost David Traif Frum.

Trump’s Accuser Seems Bananas; David French Believes Her Implicitly, Because of Course He Does

Is This Why The US Media Is Pushing For A War?

Media Attacks Should Be a Signal to Trump: Focus on Flawed Climate Science

Tapper Obsesses Over ‘Climate Emergency’ During Interview With Pence

Looking at Clouds From Both Sides

Prince Charles’s Duchy of Cornwall empire threatened by climate change

House Democrats Spread ‘Lies’ About Climate Change And Hurricanes, Scientist Says

Michael Mann Accuses the Trump Administration of Burying Climate Studies

Climate change threatens Acropolis and other ancient Greek monuments  Although they will never do the damage that the Turks did.

Read it.

Ooo! Ooo! Linked! Linked! Better watch out! It’s been — wait for it — linked!

These people make my ass tired.

Read it.

The exposé was so damaging that Google-YouTube deleted Project Veritas’ video exposing the tech giant’s electioneering.

And the Google executives have deleted their social media pages.

Jen Gennai, the Google executive caught on video bragging that “Congress can pressure us but we’re not changing,” panicked, deleted her Twitter account and made her Instagram ‘private.’

Gaurav Gite, the Google engineer revealing the tech giant’s actions to manipulate its algorithms based on its own definition of “fairness,” has deleted his Facebook page.

You can run, but you can’t hide, in this interconnected world.

Read it.

Granted that there is a public health government interest in vaccination, nevertheless it seems to me that as long as the vaccinations are freely available the only people who might suffer from lack of vaccination are the people who refuse to get vaccinated. Vaccinations are rather like seat belts in that respect.

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Her head is very crowded.

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Citing Newsom’s tweeted video (below), Monica Showalter writes: “I thought it was satire, something cooked up by his political enemies. You couldn’t put out a less attractive video than the one Gavin Newsom did for illegal aliens on Twitter, advising them himself on how to obstruct ICE from any deportation maneuvers. And sure enough, he wasn’t hacked — it really was blue-checked he.” I yield to Monica’s American Thinker post “California’s Gov. Gavin Newsom puts out a video for illegals on how to obstruct ICE.”

Quotable quote: “And more creepy still, [Newsom] cites the ‘three strikes’ law, as if to acknowledge that illegals commit quite a few crimes while they are here sopping up the services.”

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My, what a surprise.

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Obviously it is advantageous to draft more complete notes that precisely capture the course content and allow for a verbatim review of the material at a later date. Only it isn’t. New research by Pam Mueller and Daniel Oppenheimer demonstrates that students who write out their notes on paper actually learn more. Across three experiments, Mueller and Oppenheimer had students take notes in a classroom setting and then tested students on their memory for factual detail, their conceptual understanding of the material, and their ability to synthesize and generalize the information. Half of the students were instructed to take notes with a laptop, and the other half were instructed to write the notes out by hand. As in other studies, students who used laptops took more notes. In each study, however, those who wrote out their notes by hand had a stronger conceptual understanding and were more successful in applying and integrating the material than those who used took notes with their laptops.

I would have killed for a laptop when I was in college.

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I’ll start by giving you all a chance to consider some basic questions that Mayor Eric Garcetti and his staff failed to address – and the mainstream media – left hanging in the wake of a report that confirmed the obvious rise in homelessness in Los Angeles over the past year or so.

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In 2019 American investigators found that international people smuggling syndicates had expanded into Central America and Mexico. The evidence was the appearance of hundreds of African and Middle Eastern illegal migrants into the United States. That turned the Mexican-Central American people smuggling operations into an even bigger business that was apparently now earning the local and international smuggling syndicates over two billion dollars a year.

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There are numerous reports that an influx of migrants is overwhelming the already-fragile system in the Balkans. You may think this is not pertinent if you don’t live in Europe. But just like the collapse of Venezuela, the Balkan War, and the collapse of Greece, there are patterns of behavior to which attention should be paid.

Victor Davis Hanson.

Progressivism’s signature brand is now tribalism: all of us in different ways are victims of a white male Christian heterosexual patriarchy—or a current 20 percent hierarchy that past and present has supposedly oppressed anyone not like themselves. In contrast, our differences define who we are, and are not incidental to the content of our characters. The salad bowl, not the melting pot, is the new national creed. America is to be a conglomeration of competing tribal parties in the fashion of the Balkans, Rwanda, or contemporary Iraq.

How does the relative victimhood work politically? Progressive elites (oddly often white, but “woke,” males) serve as umpires who adjudicate familial spats and intersectional fractures. Like good cowboys, they ride herd, directing the squabbling and snorting flock in the right direction without losing too many strays on the way to the election booth.