Kevin Williamson takes a break from pissing on Trump to do some actual writing.

There is a maxim in regulatory affairs holding that “complexity is a subsidy.” For example, the complexity of the tax code is a subsidy for big businesses that can afford to employ large teams of tax attorneys. Complexity in government is a subsidy for lobbyists and their employers, disadvantaging relatively small firms and upstarts that do not have, e.g., General Electric’s operation in Washington. Complexity in the legal system is a subsidy for lawyers and for people who can afford good lawyers, which is one of the reasons rich people so often enjoy better outcomes in criminal cases than poor people.

Complexity is a subsidy for bureaucracies, too, a way of offloading work from the bureaucrats onto the populations they are in theory intended to serve. That’s the DMV model of public service.

But often the populations bureaucracies are supposed to serve are not very well equipped to do the bureaucracies’ work for them. I know we’re supposed to studiously avoid such patronizing thoughts, but you don’t usually end up in a welfare office because you’re doing awesome at life right at that moment. Many of our social programs are explicitly directed at people with reduced capacities — children, sick people, old people, etc. Using bureaucratic complexity to keep the welfare rolls down is underhanded. It would be better to be more honest about our intentions.

This complexity is not ‘intentional’, of course, despite Kevin’s indulgence in Conspiracy Theory. Never ascribe to malevolence what can be adequately explained by incompetence. Still, let us be thankful for small blessings that save the taxpayer money.

Steve Sailer.

This is the future of the American workplace: endless meetings in which Persons of Color get incoherently emotional.

You can see why tech companies are letting Indians take over their firms: diversity is not working, so creeping racial monopolization by somebody who feels zero white guilt at least might get some work done.

Alicia Keys at Grammys: Trump ‘Get Out,’ Bring in Cardi B  I am perennially surprised that celebrities appear to believe that anybody gives a shit what they think regarding politics.

Megyn Kelly and Alex Wagner Reveal the Liberal Media on Bill Maher’s Show

‘This Looks Like A Tactic To Sell Books’: GOP Senators Pan 11th Hour Bolton Leak While Romney And Collins Play Ball

Bolton Announces New Book and Advertising Campaign to Take Place During Impeachment Trial; Susan Collins Says She’ll Vote for Witnesses  Would Bolton throw Trump under the bus just to sell his new book? Well, duh….

Trump Impeachment a ‘Ratings Disaster’  Guess people aren’t buying what the Fake News is selling.

Unhinged Liberal Chris Wallace Has Meltdown On-Air, Attacking Katie Pavlich and “Trump Defenders”

Nancy Pelosi Says House Democrats Will Vote To Block Trump’s Travel Ban  Pure virtue-signaling, since it won’t pass the Senate nor be signed by Trump. They do it just to waste time.

Top Tech Journo Chides GOP on Impeachment, Tattles on Trump to Twitter CEO

Chuck Todd Loses It, Compares Ken Starr to ‘Bank Robber’  I would compare Check Todd to an autistic chipmunk. Who is right?

New Senator Kelly Loeffler Calls Out Mitt Romney for Attempting to “Appease the Left” By Insisting on Witnesses in the Impeachment “Circus”

Weekly Climate and Energy News Roundup #396

Is “Green” Energy a Ponzi Scheme?

House Republicans caught between Trump and young voters on climate change

Burning Trees For Heating Won’t Help With Climate Change: UK Think Tank

Do alarmists know the difference between weather and climate?  Doubtful.

While Microsoft Was Making Its Climate Pledge, Was Sponsoring an Oil Conference  The swine.

DC Solar Owners Plead Guilty to Largest Ponzi Scheme in Eastern California History

CNN Slams Republicans ‘Avoiding Uncomfortable Facts’ on Impeachment by Watching Fox News

AlSparks: Greta Thunberg: Little Tyrant?

Bottled Water Company Admits Dumping Deadly Arsenic Into CA’s Ecosystem… Nobody Goes To Jail

Enviro Activist Berates Hickenlooper For Once Suing To Prevent A Colorado Town From Banning Fracking I don’t know who this Hickenlooper is but I like him already.

Distinctive wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux could be lost forever, as climate change forces grape change  ‘could’

Read it.

Just in case.

The basic precaution is Stay Away From Other People.

Easier for some of us than others….

Whether he is alive or whether he is dead makes not a shred of difference to me or my life.

Not. One. Shred.

Nor to you, I suspect.

Moral: Do not let the shouting in the streets distract you from what is important TO YOU.

Relevant Ancient Wisdom: “Cobbler, stick to your last.’

I am far more interested in what the government is doing in response to this Chinese virus threat.

So far as I can see, that is exactly NOTHING.

Are they closing the airports to flights from China or carrying people from China who might have this virus? NO.

Aren they closing the ports to shipments from China or carrying people from China who might have this virus? NO.

WHAT KIND OF A FUCKING JOKE IS A SO-CALLED TRANSPORTATION SECURITY ADMINISTRATION THAT IS NOT CHECKING EACH AND EVERY PERSON ARRIVING IN THE UNITED STATES WHO MIGHT BE CARRYING THIS VIRUS?  The worst kind.

Nancy Pelosi and Pencil-Neck Schiff are Congresscritters from California. Are they working to make sure that California is safe from a potential pandemic? No, they’re too busy trying to lynch Trump.

Your tax dollars at work.

</rant>

Read it.

Trump just keeps on winning.

Read it.

President Donald Trump wasn’t the only one making history at this year’s March for Life. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar put an even bigger exclamation point on the day when he broke news at Family Research Council headquarters about new action the agency was taking.

After four years of watching California attack its own people, HHS is finally saying, “Enough.” If the state can’t be bothered to follow the law, Azar has decided to make it pay for it—in federal funds, if necessary.

It’s been a problem since 2014. That’s when California’s health department started strong-arming employers into covering abortion on their insurance exchange.

Read it.

Hey — priorities, man.

Read it.

Northern California homeowners were upset to discover that they have to pay $300 each for the cleanup of trash and waste from a homeless camp that had been cleared away, the Washington Examiner reported on Monday.

Well, that’s what happens when Democrats run your state.

Read it.

Built at a cost of $51 million, St. Louis’ streetcar line made its last run in December, 2019 when the organization operating it ran out of funds. Fittingly, it broke down on its very last run and its passengers had to walk the last few blocks of the route.

Built at a cost of $51 million, the trolley opened in November, 2018 after a decade of planning and construction. Proponents predicted it would carry 400,000 riders in its first year. In fact, it carried only about 20,000 and fare revenues didn’t come close to covering operating costs.

Read it.

“The world prefers to worry about pandas rather than about us, threatened with extinction in the land where we were born”, said Nicodemus Daoud Sharaf (pictured), the Syrian Orthodox Archbishop of Mosul as well as a refugee in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, home to many of the Christians who fled jihadis.

Steve Sailer.

Apparently some Toxic Masculinity is more equal than others.

Read it.

If the enviro-fascists will let them.

Read it.

Two FBI agents held an hours-long meeting in Minnesota in mid-October with a concerned party who handed over a trove of documents regarding Omar’s 2009 marriage to Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, a source with knowledge of the event said.

At the meeting, first reported by website The Blaze, the agents discussed concerns the Somali-born Democrat married Elmi, a British citizen rumored to be her brother, so he could obtain a green card and study in America, the source said.

UPDATE: Terroristic threats by Omar’s enforcer

Steve Sailer.

One of the modern world’s more publicized crises during the Great Awokening has been that blacks don’t win enough Grammy Awards. Sure, blacks win a lot of Grammy Awards, but they don’t win them all, do they?

An injustice that cries to the very heavens.

Obama Reportedly Called Trump A ‘Fascist’ During A 2016 Phone Call My, what a surprise.

CNN Legal Analyst Aghast That Trump’s Lawyers ‘All White Men’

‘SNL’ Sends Dershowitz to Hell for Defending Trump in Sketch

CNN’s Don Lemon and Panelists Laugh at Trump and His ‘Boomer Rube’ Voters  Laugh while you can, monkey boys.

‘They’ve Taken Their Best Kill Shot And Missed’: Geraldo Rivera Says Impeachment Is Doomed

Hillary Parrots Soros, Says Facebook ‘Intends To Reelect Trump’

‘God Only Knows’: Todd Dreads Trump’s Reaction to Possible Acquittal  For which situation the term ‘Bronx cheer’ was invented.

Romney Sides With Democrats: ‘Very Likely I’ll Be In Favor Of Witnesses’  Our favorite Democrat.

Jakarta is not an Exemplar of Sea Level Rise

Fury after Prince Charles flew 16,000 miles in private jets before climate change lecture

Gardens will look completely different in 20 years time as pests are out of control, Gardeners’ World presenter warns

A Surge of New Plastic Is About to Hit the Planet

Climate-friendly food choices protect the planet, promote health, reduce health costs

UK Climate Assembly: What is more Eco-Friendly, British Beef or Avocados?

The Guardian: Aussie Climate Skeptics are Self Hating Cowards

Carbon Capture and Storage is necessary to keep global warming below 2°C  Betcha it’s not.

University offers students struggling with anxiety about climate change THERAPY to tackle their feelings of ‘anger, guilt and grief’

Read it.

Ring offers a front-door view of a country where millions of Amazon customers use Amazon cameras to watch Amazon contractors deliver Amazon packages.

I have a Ring doorbell, and my problem with it is that it is too slow — by the time the video comes up on my computer screen, the person on the porch has decided that there is nobody home and has wandered off.

More than 500 police departments have partnered with the company, gaining access to a service called Neighbors Portal, which allows users to “ask Ring to request video footage from device owners who are in the area of an active investigation,” according to the company. (This footage is often shared by law enforcement with media organizations for broadcast segments.) Some police departments assist in marketing Ring devices to local citizens, in some cases offering government-subsidized discounts, according to documents obtained by Vice.

Got no problem with that. Cops want my video, they’re welcome to it. Wish there were some way I could send it to them automatically with a complaint. Maybe next year.

Ring’s efforts to court law enforcement have drawn scrutiny from civil-rights organizations for violating the privacy of users and the subjects of their recordings, and for encouraging profiling by race.

Once you step on my property, you got no privacy. If you don’t want to be ‘racially profiled’, don’t belong to a race that has a high crime rate … or move to Chicago.

Read it.

An Australian bookstore has urged a “dating coaching” company to stop sending clients to their store to practice “pickup” tactics.

Gotta love Australians.

Read it.

A caravan of Central American migrants was stopped in its tracks last week by the Mexican National Guard, which arrested migrants as they crossed the river at the border town of Tecun Uman and hauled them off to a detention center in the nearby city of Tapachula.

Prediction: It won’t last. The cartels make too much off of smuggling people and have too much influence over the Mexican government for this to stick.

Read it.

group of protesters set alight on Sunday the lobby of a newly built residential building in Hong Kong that authorities planned to use as a quarantine facility, as public fears in the financial hub about the coronavirus outbreak intensified.

Read it.

France is losing the battle to save good bread as a Gallic baking renaissance among a small elite of boulangers has failed to topple the tasteless white baguette, the historian considered the world’s foremost authority on the subject has warned.

Sound the alarm!

(Bread Historian sounds like a great gig….)

John Hinderaker at Power Line looks behind the curtain.

From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else–someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with “modern” intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the future that the U.S. needed to imitate. In each case, the point was that we had to shed our archaic freedoms and enter the brave new world of central planning under the control–benign, of course!–of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Strangely, however, American free enterprise has managed to outlast and surpass all of those supposedly more advanced challengers.

Most recently, China has been the favored nation of the future. It has the advantage over Germany and Japan of being straightforwardly authoritarian (if no longer exactly Communist), which endeared it to anti-democratic liberals like Tom Friedman. Thus, liberals have eagerly calculated the future time when China’s GDP–or alleged GDP, as dictatorships have always been better at producing statistics than goods and services–would surpass ours. Given that China has three times our population, that would not seem to be a signal accomplishment. Nevertheless, liberals looked forward to it.

Read it.

Although practically all of the western media reports from the city of Wuhan have claimed that the city’s hospitals have been completely overwhelmed by cases of pneumonia as more cases of the Wuhan coronavirus are confirmed, the South China Morning Post reports that a team of researchers at Wuhan’s Jinyintan hospital have retraced the movements of the first individual who was diagnosed with the virus, and determined that he had no links to a shady seafood market selling live snakes and bats for human consumption.

UPDATE: Did China Steal Coronavirus From Canada And Weaponize It

U.S. Government continues to dump funds into an electrical sinkhole

Climate Racism? Black Climate Activist Cropped from Greta Photo

CLAIM: Climate Change Cited for Penguin Decline

Mexican conservationist feared murdered by illegal loggers

Citizens Assembly lets public consider how UK should meet climate change goals  Another self-appointed ‘watchdog’ group.

Washington Post’s Dana Milbank Blames Justice Roberts for Impeachment

Jerry Nadler Accuses Trump Of Being ‘A Dictator’  If Trump were a dictator, Nadler would be a bloody spot on the pavement.

Nets Hype Alleged Trump Audio Only ABC Has Heard, Refuses to Air

Black Woman Gets Angry at a White Woman, Blames It on Trump, by Steve Sailer

What If They Gave an Impeachment and No One Came?

FLASHBACK: Last Impeachment Reminded NY Times of ‘Nazi Germany’

NY Times Conspiracy: Right-Wing Media Have Been Helping Trump for 50 Years?  How prescient.

Toobin Bashes ‘White House and White People’; Wonders If Women Will Be ‘Allowed’ to Speak

“Racist” Trump Supporters Should Lose Their Vote, Says NBC. Guess Who Decides They’re “Racist”?

Read it.

In the past few days, there have been multiple shootings in downtown Seattle. Ordinary citizens are wondering if they should be going there at all, and are expressing their opinions publicly. Local businesses are appealing to city government to improve conditions in their neighborhoods, so they are not confronted with drug deals, gang shootings, and homeless people in their doorways on a daily basis.

That’s what you get when Democrats run your city.

Read it.

n Israeli biological warfare expert claims a deadly coronovirus spreading globally may have originated in a Wuhan laboratory linked to China’s secret biological weapons program, the Washington Times reported.

The Wuhan Institute of Virology is the only declared site in China capable of working with the virus, the news outlet’s national security correspondent Bill Gertz wrote.

Read it.

She was the second black woman to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. She earned that distinction as a fugitive wanted on murder and kidnapping charges stemming from her role in a notorious attack on a courtroom in Marin County in California.

Read it.

This appears to be from a legitimate news source.

Read it.

In spring of 2019, I finished a semester of student teaching, completed my Master of Arts in Teaching, and accepted a full-time job offer to teach high school English at a public school just outside of Salt Lake City. A couple of weeks ago, after teaching only one full semester, I quit.

Although I loved teaching English and engaging with students, the current working conditions at my school—and in schools across America—are so poor that teachers are leaving in alarming numbers, causing a vast teacher shortage that has escalated to a crisis in many states. Considering that enrollment in teacher training programs is drying up and the teacher shortage is only set to increase, it is important to understand why teachers are leaving the profession. I can only speak for myself, but recent research and an internet full of anecdotal evidence support the idea that I am not alone.

Perhaps the teacher-union/government-school problem will solve itself.

ZMan does a deep dive on the culture.

By just looking at how males today seek attention, what we see is that they are mostly empty gestures. There is no merit at the core of the act. Rather than parade around the village with their kill, they are parading around empty handed, making wild claims about what they did on the hunt. Status in this age is now gained by telling increasingly bizarre and outrageous fishing tales. It is a desire to seek attention, and therefore status, without first doing anything of merit.

This is not just a phenomenon among the proletariat on-line. In fact, it is a habit learned by watching the elites. Status in areas like politics or entertainment is often just the result of clever attention seeking. In the music business, attention seeking has been industrialized and monetized. In politics, the people running for office take pride in having never accomplished anything. In fact, never have tried to accomplish anything is the badge of honor. A man of deeds is wholly unwelcome.

Of course, this is further evidence of the feminization of society. Attention without merit is an entirely female trait. Males take great risks to accomplish things for which they will get acclaim and status. Females use their natural charms to gain the attention of the high status males. For the female, the accomplishment is in gaining attention, rather than in doing something that results in attention. Today’s male social media stars are highly feminized males performing female roles.

Steve Sailer.

The fundamental problem is that Western man came up with more ideas worth studying than any other identity group.

Apple TV+ is close to picking up a Scott Z. Burns climate change series

Billionaires who made their fortunes by trying to stop climate change

Real-life climate disasters are mirroring doomsday myths—and that’s worse than you think Popular ‘Science’.

Chris Cuomo Says Greta Thunberg Is Off Limits Because She’s A ‘Kid.’ Twitter Users Recall Some Recent CNN History

Nature Predicts Worsening Climate Driven Forest Fires – Burning What?

The West Is Burning! (Or Is It?)

German Language Police Group Decides To ‘UnWord’ The Term “Climate Hysteria”

Global warming could have a negative impact on biodiversity generation processes  I’m sure it would — if it existed.

EPA’s Andrew Wheeler Explains Why Activists Are Wrong To Blame Australian Wildfires On Climate Change

Soros Takes A Page Out Of Liz Warren’s Playbook, Says Facebook And Trump Are Conspiring To Win Reelection

DeVos Hails [Notorious Racist] Trump’s ‘Partnership’ With Historic Black Schools

Martha MacCallum Grills Eric Swalwell On Senate Process: ‘It’s Not The President’s Team’s Responsibility To Prove Him Innocent’

Putin ‘Owns Donald Trump,’ Says MSNBC Analyst Claire McCaskill

CNN’s Sneering John Berman: ‘Future of the Republic’ in the Hands of a Lazy Senate

CNN Hopes ‘High School’ Republicans Get ‘Thrown Behind Bars’ for Not Taking Impeachment ‘Seriously’

CUT! Stephanopoulos Caught in Throat-Slitting Gesture to End Trump Lawyer Talking Bias?  What bias?

Twitter Censors Team Trump Pro-Life Video with Content Warning

Lisa Murkowski: Why are the Democrat House Managers Demanding That We Go Through the Hassle of Calling Witnesses Whom They Themselves Refused to Call?

Roots of the whistleblower

MSNBC: ‘We All Know’ Republicans Are ‘Horrified’ By Trump Well, some are, and some aren’t.

Sam Bee Links Trump Lawyers to ‘Rape Culture,’ Yet She Loves Rape-Enabler Hillary

CNN Reporter Accuses Trump Of ‘Damage Control’ After He Speaks At March For Life

Read it.

The Trump administration on Friday gave California a “notice of violation,” threatening to cut federal healthcare funding for the state if it continues to insist that insurance plans cover abortions.

According to Axios, the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) said the requirement is illegal, violating a law that prohibits the U.S. from giving funding to states or other entities that discriminate against health providers that don’t want to provide abortion services.

I love having a Federal government that is willing to get into these pissing contests with proglodyte state governments.

Read it.

I’ll bet you’ll never guess what it looks like….

Personally, I have no problem with it.

Read it.

Most city councils’ are to the left of Bernie Sanders. The City of Portland is no exception. The parody “Portlandia” was a documentary, not a comedy. The working middle-class does not go city council meetings. When you’re busy trying to earn a living the last thing you want to do is go to a city council meeting. You do not want to listen to the whining from every advocacy group whose title begins with “Friends of,” or a Gutter Bunny (urban bicyclist) that has run every red light in the city and has displayed the impudent digit to every motorist that came close to ending his headlong rush to oblivion. His complaint: the city is not providing enough bike lanes, which he has no intention of using even if they were provided.

That’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

Read it.

Last Sunday I read an article and viewed the accompanying video of a Baltimore police Sergeant being kicked by “bystanders” as he attempted to arrest a person who, allegedly, spit in his face.

That’s what happens when Democrats run your city.

Read it.

A court in El Salvador ordered Raúl Antonio Ventura to be held in jail Thursday for social media posts and telephone messages that encouraged people to congregate in San Salvador, the country’s capital city, in late January in order to form a caravan to the U.S., the Associated Press reported.

A step in the right direction.

Read it.

The most cursory research into the civil rights movement will reveal that the right to keep and bear arms was crucial to Negro survival.

Read it.

Let me be the first then: Hunder Biden took a no-show job with a company that hoped to leverage influence with the sitting Vice President.

Both Hunter Biden and Joe Biden ought to be under DOJ investigation.

Victor Davis Hanson.

None of these decades-old rationales for Middle East intervention remain relevant today. The Cold War is over. China is using cash, not arms, to seduce Middle East regimes to lease out ports and facilities for its Belt and Road Initiative, an extravagant neo-imperial global project that grows ever more dubious in a strictly cost-to-benefit analysis, especially as China bogs down in a trade war with the United States and seems to be offering round-one concessions to try to end it. With a million Muslims in Chinese reeducation camps, and its clumsy diplomacy abroad, Beijing may eventually become as unpopular in Arab capitals as Moscow was during the Cold War.

I think that the question is not ‘Must America be in the Middle East?’ but rather ‘Must America linger in the Middle East?’.  Our technological superiority is such that if some development in the Middle East threatens an American interest, we can just go in and blow it all to Hell, kill the people who are causing the problem and then back off — no need for ‘boots on the ground’, just a demonstration that if you cross us you wind up dead, and we don’t care what form of government rules over the rubble.

Babylon Bee.

That would certainly save a lot of effort.

An answer that is occurring to many men nowadays.