27th June 2023
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27th June 2023
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27th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
27th June 2023
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27th June 2023
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27th June 2023
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27th June 2023
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27th June 2023
Scott Johnson at Power Line.
Tirien Steinbach is an attorney who has served as associate dean for diversity, equity and inclusion at Stanford Law School. You may recall the role she played in the shoutdown of Fifth Circuit Judge Kyle Duncan at the law school. She took the lectern at the event to lecture Judge Duncan in support of the shoutdown. Steve Hayward and I covered the story in a series of posts that are accessible here. At least word this past March, Dean Jenny Martinez announced that Steinbach was “on leave.”
Steinbach now writes in a column posted at The Hill in defense of the continued use of racial preferences in higher education. Her column is headlined “Diversity, equity and inclusion: The new American battlefield.” Her introductory paragraph heads off in the direction of War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Doublethink of the Day
27th June 2023
What he said.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
26th June 2023
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26th June 2023
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26th June 2023
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26th June 2023
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26th June 2023
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26th June 2023
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26th June 2023
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26th June 2023
ZMan says the quiet part out loud.
Corruption is a natural part of government, regardless of the type of government, because men are not angels. Government has the power to compel which means it will always attract the sorts of people who are comfortable using force to take the property of others. In this regard, government corruption is a measure of the tolerance of corruption in the system. Government corruption is a function of the culture that controls the actions of the people in government.
By way of example, think about cheating in sports. Baseball developed a steroid problem because the culture within the sport came to tolerate it. No player dared report another player as it would lower his status in the sport. Once the league instituted tough drug testing measures, the culture changed. Players caught cheating let down their teams and even cost teammates money. This lowered their status so the culture of tolerance flipped to a culture of intolerance.
Police departments have always struggled with the culture of corruption. In the last century, big city police departments would go from clean to dirty almost overnight due to the actions of a few crooked cops. The crooked cops would find ways to get other cops to take bribes or participate in shakedowns. This made all the cops guilty to some degree, even if they just remained silent. An otherwise honest precinct quickly became corrupt because the culture changed.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Hour Is Late
26th June 2023
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
25th June 2023
Sage Journals.
Many of the messages presented in respectable scientific publications are, in fact, based on various forms of rumors. Some of these rumors appear so frequently, and in such complex, colorful, and entertaining ways that we can think of them as academic urban legends. The explanation for this phenomenon is usually that authors have lazily, sloppily, or fraudulently employed sources, and peer reviewers and editors have not discovered these weaknesses in the manuscripts during evaluation. To illustrate this phenomenon, I draw upon a remarkable case in which a decimal point error appears to have misled millions into believing that spinach is a good nutritional source of iron. Through this example, I demonstrate how an academic urban legend can be conceived and born, and can continue to grow and reproduce within academia and beyond.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Academic Urban Legends
25th June 2023
Read it.
Finland has started construction of a fence along its border with Russia, the Finnish Border Guard (RAJA), announced on February 28th.
Finland shares the longest border with Russia of any EU-member state, stretching approximately 1,300 kilometres on a mostly north-south axis.
Construction will begin “with forest clearance and will proceed in such a way that road construction and fence installation can be started in March,” RAJA said in a press release.
Can’t say that I blame them.
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
25th June 2023
FreeThink.
3D-printing robots are being A major housing development, built using 3D-printer robots on-site, is taking shape in the US state of Texas. The 100-house project on the outskirts of Austin is the product of a partnership between US house-building giant Lennar, and 3D printing company ICON. to build a 100-home housing development in the US state of Texas.
Bad news for Latinos, who make up 90% of the workforce of construction companies, especially in Texas. Every silver lining comes with a cloud.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Could 3D Printing Help Solve the US Housing Crisis?
25th June 2023
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25th June 2023
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25th June 2023
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
25th June 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
25th June 2023
Black-owned radio station may lose license over FCC ‘character qualifications’ policy (NPR) Make black people follow the same rules as everybody else? That’s WAYYYYYYYCIST!
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in BIPOC Privilege
25th June 2023
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in BIPOC Privilege
25th June 2023
The Other McCain
The editor of Iowa’s Quad Cities Times has apologized for publishing the cartoon above, after being called out on Twitter by Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who lamented the “shameful” cartoon and said: “It’s sad that this is how the MSM views Republicans. I’ve met with grassroots conservatives across America & never *once* experienced the kind of bigotry that I regularly see from the Left.”
Several commentators have described the cartoon as “racist,” but that’s not really the point. Rather, it is the libelous attribution of hateful bigotry to Republicans which is so offensive. What this illustrates is the assumption of liberals that they are morally and intellectually superior to the rest of us, especially in regard to racial issues, but really on every subject imaginable — economic policy, climate change, gay rights, you name it. “Hate” is now defined as disagreeing with liberals.
Posted in Democrats: Party of Fear--Party of Hate--Party of Death | Comments Off on Who They Think We Are
25th June 2023
NewsMax.
When millionaire Steve Fossett’s plane went missing over the Nevada range in 2007, the swashbuckling adventurer had already been the subject of two prior emergency rescue operations thousands of miles apart.
And that prompted a prickly question: After a sweeping search for the wealthy risktaker ended, who should foot the bill?
In recent days, the massive hunt for a submersible vehicle lost during a north Atlantic descent to explore the wreckage of the Titanic has refocused attention on that conundrum. And with rescuers and the public fixated first on saving and then on mourning those aboard, it has again made for uneasy conversation.
“Five people have just lost their lives and to start talking about insurance, all the rescue efforts and the cost can seem pretty heartless — but the thing is, at the end of the day, there are costs,” said Arun Upneja, dean of Boston University’s School of Hospitality Administration and a researcher on tourism.
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
25th June 2023
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
25th June 2023
The Critic.
William Brown, Richmal Crompton’s “Just William”, faces a telling-off from a teacher for not paying attention. A hundred years ago, the 1920s teacher remarks, he might have been made to crawl up chimneys for a living instead of being educated, so he should consider himself jolly lucky to be in school. To which William replies that crawling up chimneys sounds pretty interesting, at least compared to having to sit behind a desk all day listening to said teacher banging on. Crompton, a feisty, disabled spinster, was a true subversive and she wasn’t going to let her fictional teacher get away with that crude application of the Whig theory of history.
From its inception the positive value of compulsory state education has been a nearly unchallenged orthodoxy. It wasn’t entirely unchallenged. The borough of Royal Leamington Spa, where I have lived for the great majority of my adult life, petitioned parliament to be excluded from the Education Act of 1870. The petition conceded that they could understand how it would be of benefit in the manufacturing districts if the working people could read and write and do arithmetic, but claimed that such training was an expensive irrelevance for the domestic servants of the Spa. They were given short shrift, of course. Then there was my grandfather’s village, Staithes, on the North Yorkshire coast. Nowadays it’s a famous tourist attraction, but in the 1870s it was a remote fishing village more easily accessed from the sea than the land. The first schoolteacher there reported that it was nigh on impossible to persuade the local children to turn up on time or sit behind desks all day. It worked in the end, and there is a rather staged photograph taken by the pioneering photographer Frank Meadow Sutcliffe in about 1880 of a small boy, explaining to several of my ancestors that they have misspelt the name on the prow of their boat.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Down with Skool
25th June 2023
Read it.
In her latest book, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives, bestselling author Heather Mac Donald skewers the ideology of “disparate impact”—a “once obscure legal theory that is now transforming our world.”
According to Mac Donald, disparate impact—in which any negative or disproportionate outcome impacting black Americans is declared to be a “tool of white supremacy”—has been deliberately developed and leveraged as a cultural tool, targeting “the very fundamentals of a fair society.”
Today, she argues, meritocracy, fealty to the rule of law, and even respect for our civilizational inheritance stand in the way of achieving so-called racial justice.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Prepare for Disparate Impact
24th June 2023
Washington Post.
Deep in the urban sprawl of the Western Hemisphere’s largest city, nestled within a thicket of highways, there is a low-slung shopping mall that boasts an attraction not rivaled anywhere in the United States.
The giant Outback Steakhouse.
Named the world’s largest Outback in 2018 — and the world’s most lucrative before that — its dimensions and legend since then have only grown. The restaurant is now nearly twice the size of the biggest Outbacks in the United States, where the faux-Australian chain was founded.
But even then, it’s not big enough. Not for Brazil, and not on a recent Monday.
Hostess Kalany Nunes, 19, surveys the line for lunch, several dozens deep.
“This is Outback,” she explains. “It’s very chic.”
Americans can do fake foreign better than anybody else in the world. USA! USA!
(I hace to admit that their waitresses are much better looking than American ones.)
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Why Beef-Loving Brazil Is So Obsessed With an American Steakhouse Chain
24th June 2023
Posted in Dystopia Watch, Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
24th June 2023
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
24th June 2023
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24th June 2023
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24th June 2023
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
24th June 2023
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24th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
24th June 2023
The Atlantic.
Equity-language guides are proliferating among some of the country’s leading institutions, particularly nonprofits. The American Cancer Society has one. So do the American Heart Association, the American Psychological Association, the American Medical Association, the National Recreation and Park Association, the Columbia University School of Professional Studies, and the University of Washington. The words these guides recommend or reject are sometimes exactly the same, justified in nearly identical language. This is because most of the guides draw on the same sources from activist organizations: A Progressive’s Style Guide, the Racial Equity Tools glossary, and a couple of others. The guides also cite one another. The total number of people behind this project of linguistic purification is relatively small, but their power is potentially immense. The new language might not stick in broad swaths of American society, but it already influences highly educated precincts, spreading from the authorities that establish it and the organizations that adopt it to mainstream publications, such as this one.
Although the guides refer to language “evolving,” these changes are a revolution from above. They haven’t emerged organically from the shifting linguistic habits of large numbers of people. They are handed down in communiqués written by obscure “experts” who purport to speak for vaguely defined “communities,” remaining unanswerable to a public that’s being morally coerced. A new term wins an argument without having to debate. When the San Francisco Board of Supervisors replaces felon with justice-involved person, it is making an ideological claim—that there is something illegitimate about laws, courts, and prisons. If you accept the change—as, in certain contexts, you’ll surely feel you must—then you also acquiesce in the argument.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Moral Case Against Equity Language
24th June 2023
Read it.
Most Americans pay state and local income taxes based upon where they reside. Accordingly, the shift to remote work made no difference to their tax liability. But some employees are subject to commuter taxes, which are assessed based upon where the work itself is performed.
Commuter taxes raise their own public policy concerns—after all, commuters have no say in how those tax dollars are used because they cannot vote in those jurisdictions. The antiquated justification for commuter taxes is that employees receive some tangible benefits while they are physically in the city, i.e., if an employee has a medical emergency while at work, it would be the city’s emergency services that would respond.
But what happens when commuters are no longer commuting to those cities?
…
When Massachusetts issued a rule requiring employees who had previously worked in Massachusetts but were now working elsewhere due to Covid-19 to pay Massachusetts income taxes anyway, its neighboring New Hampshire sensibly filed a case in the United States Supreme Court on behalf of its citizens who were neither living nor working in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, taxpayers got no clarification because the Supreme Court declined to hear New Hampshire’s complaint, leaving Massachusetts’ unconstitutional money grab in place for the time being.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Taxation Without Representation Meets the 21st Century
24th June 2023
John C. Wright.
Let us ponder if there is an argument to repeal women’s suffrage.
Follow the science1
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Mama Bear and the Ballot Box
24th June 2023
Read it.
The future is here, and if you enjoy being dominated by control freaks you are going to love it.
“Digital identification” is one of the primary areas the globalists are focusing on right now, and as you will see below, the radical changes that are now being proposed are extremely scary. But most Americans have no idea that any of this is happening. Instead, many of them are obsessing over the relatively meaningless dramas that our corporate news outlets are constantly pushing. Meanwhile, the globalists are achieving their goals at lightning speed, and there is hardly any resistance at all.
I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on 8 Signs That The Futuristic Control Freak Agenda Of The Globalists Is Rapidly Moving Forward
24th June 2023
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
24th June 2023
Washington Free Beacon.
“Can the senator’s penis please be off the record?”
This remarkable sentence, uttered by a panicked press aide after his boss, the seven-fingered Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.), relieved himself in an organic pea field during an interview with Washington Post journalist Ben Terris, hardly stands out among the array of mind-boggling details recounted in Terris’s new book, The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind.
Tester’s rogue member is merely an aside in this collection of profiles highlighting the unelected power players who survived, thrived, and failed in national politics since Donald Trump annihilated the status quo, violating precious “norms” left and right. Washington may have “felt different” during the Trump presidency, Terris writes, but The Swamp proved as resilient as ever. Rather than being drained as promised, it simply “filled up with new creatures.” And, boy, are they something to behold. The Big Break is not for the faint of heart or stomach.
The book opens in December 2021. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, the 38-year-old granddaughter of billionaire oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, is throwing a holiday party at her $2.2 million Victorian mansion in a trendy Washington neighborhood. Her beloved Maltipoo, named after Malcolm X, roams the living room floor scrounging for crumbs. Ryan Grim, editor of The Intercept, is wearing a Harriet Tubman T-shirt and chatting with the half-brother of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The host is trying to gin up support for Mandela Barnes, the left-wing Wisconsin Senate candidate she met at a pool party in Miami around the same time he accused the her grandfather’s industry of “destroying the world.” He was “riding in one of those inflatable unicorns.”
This is normal.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
24th June 2023
Read it.
Think about Hunter Biden’s pain. Talk to your dad about his feelings—and his period. And be warned: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is suspiciously cozy with his wife.
These were actual mainstream media narratives last week. As usual, I’m saving the receipts.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Media Failures of the Week
24th June 2023
Read it.
A virulently antisemitic terror-tied group has managed to convince media and politicians that it has been magically transformed into a respectable legitimate “civil rights group.” Created in 1994 by Islamistssupportive of Hamas, the Council on Amesdrican-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has for 29 years systematically engaged in promoting and disseminating vile antisemitic attacks on Jews.
Take, for example, CAIR Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid, who has invoked religion to attack Jews specifically.
“Who are those who incurred the wrath of Allah? They are the Jews, they are the Jews,” he said in a 2012 sermon. He also blamed “pro-Israeli occupation organizations and activists” for “Islamophobia, and anti-Muslim bigotry,” which he said was “one of the greatest social ills facing American today.”
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.
Especially if
You might be a Jew.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Investigative Project on Terrorism’s New Book Exposes CAIR’s Long Antisemitic Track Record
23rd June 2023
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in BIPOC Privilege
