Posts Tagged ‘Tranny Bathrooms’

Haley? No. Pence? No. Pompeo? No. Sununu? No.

Sunday, February 12th, 2023

Now that it’s less than two years before the 2024 Presidential election, a small crop of Republicans whose last names are not “DeSantis” or “Trump” seem to have convinced themselves that they’re viable Republican presidential candidates. These people are either wrong or running for Vice President. The lack of enthusiasm for all four of the would-be candidates is palpable.

  • Former UN Ambassador and South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley. For some reason (photogenic?), NRSC has been using her as one of their email begathon pitch-critters for a while, which probably explains why I’ve been receiving countdown emails (“I’m making a special announcement in 6 days.”) for her-not-even-remotely anticipated run. One struggles in vain to find the significant party faction Haley appeals to. Soft feminist Republican businesswomen? Indian-Americans? Plus: She appointed Tim Scott to the senate. Minuses: Backed Rubio in 2016, and was soft on culture war/social justice issues until about late 2020, and refused to fight transgender bathrooms, very low-hanging fruit for actual conservatives, back when she had a chance as SC Governor. No thank you. Effectively running for Vice President.
  • Former Vice President Mike Pence. Former Vice Presidents (Nixon, Bush41) used to have the inside tract to a White House nod in the Republican Party, but those days are gone. A solid, unexciting Vice President in the Walter Mondale mode for the first 46 months of his term who royally pissed off Trump supporters with his words and deeds in the last two months. Rational or not, Trump supporters now seem actively hostile to a Pence run, and since they were his only potential base of significant support (and only if Trump didn’t run), that’s a real obstacle, despite him checking almost all of the right policy boxes. If he runs (I have my doubts, as he doesn’t seem to have even his own website), he’s effectively running in the John Kasich lane (right down to the “unexciting Midwestern governor” background), which is a one-way ticket to Palookaville. No thank you. The only candidate here that we know isn’t running for Vice President.
  • Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. There was a time when being Secretary of State was a solid stepping stone to The White House. And that time was “the early 1800s,” as Martin van Buren was the last to do it, and only after a stint as Vice President. Which is bad news for Pompeo, arguably the most successful Secretary of State since James Baker. Between the Abraham Accords and keeping the War on Terror coalition together long enough to destroy the nascent caliphate of the Islamic State, Pompeo was a vast improvement over the largely ineffective Rex Tillerson, and worked well with foreign nations and international organizations that were, to put it mildly, not wild about his boss. And he has some other impressive credentials as well. “He graduated first in his class from West Point, and from Harvard Law and was on Harvard Law Review. After six years in the House of Representatives, he became CIA director for Trump, and then secretary of state – the only person ever to hold both jobs.” His short congressional tenure earned him a 97% score from the ACU. For me one of the biggest problems with Pompeo is that, like Haley, I primarily know his post-office career as a guy constantly in my inbox begging for money, and also talking like a career politician that’s already cranking up the baloney factory before properly introducing himself for a run. As Beto O’Rourke found out, three terms in the house is exceptionally thin electoral experience for a Presidential run. Plus his attempt to use “pipehitter” as a catchphrase for some sort of imaginary blue collar credibility was just laughable, as the term conjures drug addicts rather than plumbers. There’s just a bit too much standard issue political phoniness here, and Pompeo strikes me as someone who’s time has already passed. No thank you, but the softest no thank you of these four.
  • New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu. I was only vaguely aware of Sununu The Younger, but his attack on DeSantis for having the balls to fight the poison of social justice instantly rocketed him to the bottom of my list. You would think Romney’s failure would have soured the party on moderate business-oriented governors, but evidently Sununu didn’t get the memo. Likewise, I doubt modern voters are interested in voting for Bush Lite The Next Generation. No thank you. An unwillingness to actual fight for conservative values is automatically disqualifying, and I don’t him bringing anything to the table as a Veep pick.
  • So there you have it. Four people who are not going to be the Republican Presidential Nominee in 2024.

    Bring on the Trump-DeSantis match!

    LinkSwarm for July 29, 2022

    Friday, July 29th, 2022

    The Biden Recession picks up downhill speed, liberals are spending $160 million to seize control of elections, Biden wants to starve your children until you accept transgenderism, and another Soros-backed DA gets the heave-ho from voters. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    
    

  • GDP shrunk by .9% in Q2, making the Biden recession official, no matter how much Biden Administration officials and their Democratic Media Complex toadies attempt to spin it otherwise.
  • Another sign of the Biden recession: car repos are soaring.
  • Manchin caves, helps pass bloated spending bill. Because there’s nothing so good for fighting inflation as deficit spending…
  • The FBI sabotaged the Hunter Biden probe in 2020. This is my shocked face.
  • Estimates that over 75,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in the invasion of the Ukraine.
    

  • “How the Left Hopes to Seize Control of Local Election Offices.

    Two big money liberal operations, ready to spend $80 million each, are trying to determine who controls elections and how in the years ahead.

    “The overall objective of the political left is to change the way you conduct overall elections,” Jason Snead, executive director of the Honest Elections Project, which advocates clean elections, told The Daily Signal.

    One of the two liberal groups, Run for Something, is a political action committee founded by a former Hillary Clinton campaign staffer. In the spring, Run for Something established its Clerk Work project with the goal of electing clerks, election supervisors, registrars, recorders, and other local officials charged with running elections.

    The PAC says it will promote thousands of election administrators in the years ahead. But for 2022, it reports endorsing 11 candidates competing in races in California, Colorado, Illinois, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee.

    Local election clerks generally are empowered to interpret and enforce state election regulations. They often have discretion on matters such as whether to count absentee ballots that come in after Election Day, how strictly to enforce voter ID or signature-matching requirements, and how closely poll watchers may monitor the ballot counting on Election Day.

    According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, county-level election officials are elected in 22 states. In 10 states, elected officials appoint members to a local board of elections. Another 18 states divide election administration duties between two or more offices.

    In any case, donating to specific candidates to oversee elections could directly or indirectly affect who holds these positions.

    Some practices of local election administrators also could be guided by another $80 million effort by the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, a coalition of mostly left-leaning organizations financed in part by Big Tech executives to train local officials in running elections.

    Snead and other critics say they see parallels between Run for Something and efforts to elect liberal prosecutors financed by liberal hedge fund manager George Soros. They also see strong similarities between the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s election administration grants in the 2020 election cycle.

    “What we shouldn’t lose track of is they are playing the long game,” Snead said. “They are going to look for every possible way to impact elections, and they can make substantial changes in the long run through this kind of program that they wouldn’t have been able to make in 2020.”

  • Good news! Indicted, Soros-backed Baltimore DA Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid.

    When Soros-backed socialist son of convicted terrorists Chesa Boudin was recalled as San Francisco DA, the writing was on the wall. “Decarceration” is a disaster for everyone . . . except criminals.

    Now another Soros-backed “decarceration” state’s attorney has lost her reelection bid. It’s not clear if the multiple crimes for which Marilyn Mosby has been charged are the impetus for Baltimore’s voters deciding it’s time to move on or if it’s the shocking crime rates in the city as a result of her radical anti-law and order agenda. Maybe both.

    Mosby rose to national attention in the wake of the Freddie Gray riots and for her hyper-politicized botching of the prosecution in those cases.

    Fox News reports:

    Baltimore State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby lost her reelection bid to defense attorney Ivan Bates in the Democratic primary after she was indicted by a grand jury on federal charges alleging that she used coronavirus hardship as a reason to take money out of her city retirement account.

    The Associated Press called the race in favor of Ivan Bates, a defense attorney, on Friday night. Bates is a former prosecutor in Baltimore who served from 1996 to 2002 before becoming a defense attorney.

    Mosby, a Democrat, directed her office to stop prosecuting offenses such as drug possession, prostitution, urinating in public, and more during the coronavirus pandemic in an attempt to stop the virus from spreading in jails and prisons.

  • Object to tranny madness? No school lunches for you!

    In May, the Biden administration announced that any school that participates in the federal school lunch program (which is run by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service) must allow students to use bathrooms, locker rooms, and showers and play on the sports teams aligning with their gender identity if they want access to funds for the program — effectively holding money meant for ensuring student nutrition in exchange for compliance on radical leftist gender ideology.

    Now, twenty-two Republican attorneys general are fighting back by suing the U.S. Department of Agriculture over that new guidance.

    “We all know the Biden administration is dead-set on imposing an extreme left-wing agenda on Americans nationwide,” Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said. “But they’ve reached a new level of shamelessness with this ploy of holding up food assistance for low-income kids unless schools do the Left’s bidding.”

    According to the Washington Times, nearly 30 million students take advantage of the National School Lunch Program at about 100,000 public and non-profit private schools and residential childcare institutions. The Biden administration policy was seen as a direct assault on the 18 states with existing laws barring male athletes from participating in female sports.

    The lawsuit argues that the Biden administration (again) violated the Administrative Procedures Act by issuing regulations without going through the rulemaking process and that Bostock v. Clayton, the 2020 Supreme Court’s 2020 decision on employment discrimination, doesn’t apply to Title IX as the Biden administration claimed when they announced the guidance.

    “This case is, yet again, about a federal agency trying to change law, which is Congress’ exclusive prerogative,” Tennessee Attorney General Herbert H. Slatery III said. “The USDA simply does not have that authority. We have successfully challenged the Biden Administration’s other attempts to rewrite law and we will challenge this as well.”

  • Beto O’Rourke Campaign Staffers Vote to Unionize.” I can hardly wait for the first strike…
  • Things that make you go “Hmmmm.” Russian missile system being transported by rail…in the US.
  • Samantha Bee’s show gets cancelled by TBS.

    In other news, Samantha Bee was evidently still on the air somewhere.

  • Buzz Aldrin’s Apollo 11 jacket went for $2.8 million at auction.
  • “10 Biggest Adjustments Fleeing Californians Have To Make In Their New States.” One of my favs: “Man-buns are unacceptable in a professional setting. Or any setting.”
  • “CDC Declares Gay Orgies An ‘Essential Activity.'”
  • China: Threat or Menace?

    Thursday, October 10th, 2019

    Between that South Park episode and the NBA, awareness of China forcing corporate entities to silence its critics has exploded into the mainstream, so let’s do a roundup of Chinese news:

  • Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam threatens Chinese military intervention if protests continue.
  • China views people of Chinese extraction overseas as extensions of the Chinese Communist Party:

    I watch with unease as the People’s Republic of China turns 70 amid great fanfare about its growing economic and political heft, the longest-running nation state to ever fly a flag emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, surpassing even the former Soviet Union. Ever since it embarked on its modernization program, China has been subtly cultivating and influencing the Chinese diaspora to its cause.

    At an overseas Chinese conference just shortly before President Xi Jinping consolidated power and was reelected at the 19th Party Congress, Xi noted that the realization of the ‘great rejuvenation’ of the Chinese nation ‘requires the joint efforts of the Chinese people at home and abroad’, saying that he hoped that those who have Chinese descent outside of China — up to 60 million ethnic Chinese in more than 180 countries — can work hard for and share in the ‘Chinese dream’.

    The word ‘Chinese’ can refer to the citizenry of a country, a race, a language, and even a culture, ambiguities that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exploits in order to appeal to the diaspora via the sentimental heartstrings of heritage via ‘flesh and blood’. It exports and reinforces the concept that there is only one politically-correct way of being Chinese: loyalty to the party first and foremost, above all else. In effect, it’s like the ummah, an Arabic term that describes the supra-national global community that unites all Muslims as one. Only this one is based not on religion but on ethnicity, where Tibetans, Uigher Muslims, Chinese dissenters, Hong Kong protesters, are excluded and marginalized like infidels.

    Almost nothing embodies the scope of China’s attempts at a global soft power offensive more as the Chinese government-funded Confucius Institutes, where there are 480 branches operating on six continents around the world (watch out, Antarctica!). These institutes ostensibly offer language classes and promote cultural education and diplomacy, but in reality they are de facto fronts for generating good Public Relations and patriotism to the CCP. In 2014, the American Association of University Professors issued a report urging colleges to close the institutes or renegotiate their mutual agreements to guarantee a certain degree of academic freedom and control.

    The report asserted that ‘most agreements establishing Confucius Institutes feature nondisclosure clauses and unacceptable concessions to the political aims and practices of the government of China. Specifically, North American universities permit Confucius Institutes (CIs) to advance a state agenda in the recruitment and control of academic staff, in the choice of curriculum, and in the restriction of debate.’ As these centers draw scrutiny from the FBI, the Pentagon and even Congress, many CIs on US campuses have been closing.

    The rhetoric between pro-Beijing factions and critics of the Chinese regime has been heating up, especially in light of the current conflict with Hong Kong protesters spilling over at pro-democracy rallies in the United States, Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. There are roughly 1.5 million Chinese students studying overseas — roughly 300,000 in the United States alone — and increasingly, they are getting caught up in the crossfire of the escalating tensions and heightened scrutiny for ties to Beijing.

  • Making China part of the world trade system was supposed to lead to China liberalizing and adopting democracy. It was a beautiful theory with a lot of supporting evidence behind it. One tiny problem: It turned out not to be true:

    Back in May, I went back to the arguments American policymakers had with themselves in the 1990s as they contemplated extending “most-favored-nation” status to China, and then “permanent normal trade relations.” Something weird happened when chief executives of American companies discussed China back then. They kept describing a market of a billion new customers, as if the average Chinese citizen was awash in disposable income. They pictured a China full of people eating American soybeans, drinking Coke, wearing blue jeans made with American cotton, celebrating with American bourbon and riding on Boeing airplanes.

    America’s policymakers, by and large, agreed. Here’s Bill Clinton describing America’s future relationship with China in 2000, after the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed Permanent Normal Trade Relations:

    With more than a billion people, China is the largest new market in the world. Our administration has negotiated an agreement that will open China’s markets to American products made on American soil, everything from corn to chemicals to computers.

    Bringing China into the WTO and normalizing trade will strengthen those who fight for the environment, for labor standards, for human rights, for the rule of law . . . At this stage in China’s development, we will have a more positive influence with an outstretched hand than with a clenched fist.

    Clinton hailed the deal as a step to “a China that is more open to our products and more respectful of the rule of law at home and abroad.” And from that year on, America’s trade relationship with China was “normal.”

    Except . . . China wasn’t a “normal” country, and it never was one. Only a few decades earlier, the Chinese regime had perpetrated some of the greatest horrors of the century upon its people — the Great Chinese Famine — which killed tens of millions! — the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution. The Tiananmen Square massacre had just been a few years earlier. It still had political prisoners and a police state, it was slowly but steadily building up its military, it still harvested organs from prisoners in its jails. And yet most of America’s political and business leaders looked across the Pacific, averted their eyes from the draconian human rights abuses, focused relentlessly on that growing economy and potential billion customers and declared, “we can do business with these people.” And they told the rest of us to trust them. Oh, and Bill Clinton assured us that money donated by Chinese citizens in his reelection campaign had never influenced his thinking about China. Even though in 1992, he had campaigned as a tough critic of China and called George H. W. Bush as too soft on the regime.

    Nothing could seem to dissuade America’s business leaders when it came to their vision of an endlessly mutually profitable relationship with the regime. We kept being told how absolutely ruthless and relentless the Chinese efforts at corporate espionage were, and how brazenly and defiantly they stole patents, blueprints, and intellectual property. I don’t know about you, but when somebody steals from me, I don’t want to keep doing business with them. Yet America’s business leaders never seemed to experience anything that made them conclude the regime is so bad that it’s not worth doing business with them. There was this consistently weird disconnect in the comments from American business leaders, as they kept saying their Chinese competitors were overtly or secretly state-subsided, or would complain about corruption . . . but no one wanted to stop putting more resources there.

  • China is not as strong as it appears:

    Whereas the Soviet Union largely walled itself off from its greatest adversary, literally and figuratively, China’s leaders have sought to exploit America across the board for decades. China profits from U.S. financial markets; purchases cutting-edge U.S. firms; pilfers trade secrets and technology from U.S. companies, including defense contractors; and promotes a massive misinformation campaign on U.S. soil to sway policy and public opinion in its favor. Yet far from being a source of strength, Communist China’s dependence on America is one of its primary weakness.

    Like the Soviet Union before it, China’s tyranny stifles the creativity of its people. While Beijing grants some few a small amount of economic autonomy, it refuses to let the average Chinese citizen fully pursue her dreams, apply her talents, or realize her potential, preventing untold advances across every field of endeavor. There’s a reason Chinese parents send their children to American universities and their cash to Western banks. China’s seemingly inexorable rise requires continued access to America and the fruits of our system of free enterprise and the rule of law.

    This reality is coming into focus under President Trump. The administration has started to disentangle Communist China from America’s economy and institutions. China’s stock markets are suffering and its economy is growing at the slowest rate in nearly three decades. Additional unraveling of U.S.–China ties will likely further demonstrate the bankruptcy of the Communist economic model, and its need for external support.

    Beijing knows this, hence its relentless focus on tamping down trade tensions, but not national security or human-rights issues. It also benefits from the widespread belief that Communist China is here to stay, so we might as well deal with it rather than hope for a better, more democratic regime. In our organization’s discussions with government leaders, prominent academics, and corporations, we have found an overwhelming belief that a change in China’s government would be catastrophic. They prefer to work with the devil they know, not hope for a devil they don’t.

    Yet the lessons of history are worth remembering. The fall of the Soviet Union ushered in a new era of freedom, prosperity, and peace in its former lands, and far beyond. A collapse of red rule in China will surely be more complicated, given its greater interaction with the world, but it stands to reason that the Communist party’s loss will be the Chinese people’s gain. Many others, America included, will benefit, too.

    Communist China is weaker than it appears. However, it’s unlikely to fall unless the United States, and the rest of the free world, continue to ratchet up the pressure. The Communist ideology is a parasite that cannot survive for long on its own.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • Then there was the Marriott employee who was fired for liking a tweet
  • America has expanded its trade blacklist of Chinese companies to include several AI-focused firms.
  • Blizzard games, makers of World of Warcraft, Starcraft, Overwatch, etc., hit Hearthstone player Ng “blitzchung” Wai Chung with a year-long ban from competitive Hearthstone, expelled him from the Hearthstone Grandmasters tour and had his prize money reduced to $0 for “shouting ‘Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our age’ during a post-game interview on official Blizzard stream.”
  • Speaking of the NBA, remember: a million Uighurs in concentration camps is a statistic, but tranny bathroom laws in North Carolina are worth a boycott.
  • Related Tweets:

  • Gov. Abbott Calls Special Session

    Wednesday, June 7th, 2017

    On Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called a special session of the Texas Legislature starting July 18:

    Abbott gave legislators an ambitious 19-item agenda to work on — including a so-called “bathroom bill” — after they approve must-pass legislation that they failed to advance during the regular session. An overtime round, Abbott said, was “entirely avoidable.”

    “Because of their inability or refusal to pass a simple law that would prevent the medical profession from shutting down, I’m announcing a special session to complete that unfinished business,” Abbott told reporters. “But if I’m going to ask taxpayers to foot the bill for a special session, I intend to make it count.”

    (Ignore the usual Texas Tribune hand-wringing about the “controversial” nature of the bathroom law; it’s just a restoration of the status quo, reversing what the Obama Administration imposed on the nation via executive fiat.)

    Here are Governor Abbott’s 19 items:

  • Teacher pay increase of $1,000
  • Administrative flexibility in teacher hiring and retention practices
  • School finance reform commission
  • School choice for special needs students
  • Property tax reform
  • Caps on state and local spending
  • Preventing cities from regulating what property owners do with trees on private land
  • Preventing local governments from changing rules midway through construction projects
  • Speeding up local government permitting process
  • Municipal annexation reform
  • Texting while driving preemption
  • Privacy
  • Prohibition of taxpayer dollars to collect union dues
  • Prohibition of taxpayer funding for abortion providers
  • Pro-life insurance reform
  • Strengthening abortion reporting requirements when health complications arise
  • Strengthening patient protections relating to do-not-resuscitate orders
  • Cracking down on mail-in ballot fraud
  • Extending maternal mortality task force
  • That’s an ambitious agenda…if Texas Speaker Joe Straus, who did so much to thwart so many of those items, let’s any of them pass.

    In an effort to force the special session, [Lieutenant Governor] Patrick had held hostage legislation, known as a “sunset bill,” that would keep some state agencies from closing. That “will be the only legislation on the special session [agenda] until they pass out of the Senate in full,” Abbott said.

    That’s quite defensible from a governance perspective, but it is going to eliminate Lt. Gov. Patrick’s biggest piece of leverage against Straus.

    With fewer items on the agenda, maybe House Republicans will have a chance to concentrate and actually act like Republicans rather than let Straus’ liberal coalition run roughshod over them.

    Texas Bathroom Bill Advances

    Monday, March 20th, 2017

    Last week the Texas Senate approved SB-6, the bill that rolled back the Obama Administration’s illegal imposition of tranny bathrooms on the nation.

    Remember when Obama campaigned on letting middle-aged men in dresses use the girl’s bathroom?

    Me neither.

    Out beyond a small but very vocal minority of Social Justice Warriors, no one was asking for tranny bathrooms, and outside of locales like San Francisco, I doubt even Democratic politicians are willing to campaign for them. That is why they had to be introduced by stealth and fiat.

    Tranny bathrooms represent the high-water mark of the hard left’s attempts to impose the idea of “gender as social construct” (as opposed to the obvious scientific truth of two biological sexes) on a resisting nation. That is why the cultural elites have been so desperate to defend the idea despite its widespread unpopularity. If you can get people to pretend a man wearing a dress has been magically transformed into a woman, despite the XY chromosomes in his body, you can get them to pretend to believe in just about anything.

    That’s why the left has fought the rollback so hard, why North Carolina had to be “punished” for daring to respect obvious scientific and time-honored truths rather than “gender fluid” fad popular among liberal elites.

    It remains to be seen whether Texas House speaker Joe Straus will bow to the will of the people, or to the cowardly business interests desperate to avoid elite wrath. Since Straus has never met a Democratic interest he wasn’t willing to cave to, it may require a concerted effort (perhaps by way of a discharge petition) to get HB 1362 voted on.

    LinkSwarm for February 24, 2017

    Friday, February 24th, 2017

    Welcome to another Friday LinkSwarm! Here in Texas, Spring has sprung, full stop.

  • The elites are revolting:

    It’s no coincidence that the most vocal outcry against President Trump’s measures have come from urban elites and the corporations that cater to them. It’s easy to spot the class divides in the scoffing at Andrew Puzder, CEO of the company behind Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s, getting a cabinet position instead of Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg who had been tipped for Treasury Secretary by Hillary.

    Carl’s Jr and its 4 Dollar Real Deal are a world away from Facebook’s Gehry designed Menlo Park headquarters. Or as a WWE tournament is from Conde Nast’s Manhattan skyscraper.

    It’s hard to imagine a clearer contrast between coastal elites and the heartland, and between the new economy and the old. On the one side are the glittering cities where workforces of minorities and immigrants do the dirty work behind the slick logos and buzzwords of the new economy. On the other are Rust Belt communities and Southern towns who actually used to make things.

    Facebook’s top tier geniuses enjoy the services of an executive chef, treadmill workstations and a bike repair shop walled off from East Palo Alto’s Latino population and the crime and gang violence. And who works in Facebook’s 11 restaurants or actually repairs the bikes in the back room? Or looks through the millions of pictures posted on timelines to screen out spam, pornography and racism?

    Behind the illusion of a shiny new future are Mexicans getting paid a few dollars an hour to decide if that Italian Renaissance painting you just shared violates Facebook’s content guidelines.

    If you live in the world of Facebook, Lyft, Netflix and Airbnb, crowding into airports shouting, “No Borders, No Nations, Stop The Deportations” makes sense. You don’t live in a country. You live in one of a number of interchangeable megacities or their bedroom communities. Patriotism is a foreign concept. You have no more attachment to America than you do to Friendster or MySpace. The nation state is an outdated system of social organization that is being replaced by more efficient systems of global governance. The only reason anyone would cling to nations or borders is racism.

    The demographic most opposed to President Trump is not a racial minority, but a cultural elite.

    This isn’t a revolution. The revolutions happened in June in the UK and in November in the US. Brexit and Trump were revolutions. The protests against them are a reaction.

  • In the midst of freaking out, Instapundit notes that our elites are displaying why they’re unfit to rule:

    Why all the anger over Trump?

    As I’ve pondered this, I’ve gone back to Tyler Cowen’s statement: “Occasionally the real force behind a political ideology is the subconsciously held desire that a certain group of people should not be allowed to rise in relative status.”

    I think that a lot of the elite hatred for Trump, and for his supporters, stems from just such a sentiment. For decades now, the educated meritocrats who ran America — the “Best and the Brightest,” in David Halberstam’s not-actually-complimentary term — have enjoyed tremendous status, regardless of election results.

    An election’s turn might see some moving to the private sector — say as K street lobbyists or high-priced lawyers or consultants — while a different batch of meritocrats take their positions in government. But even so, their status remained unchallenged: They were always the insiders, the elite, the winners, regardless of which team came out ahead in the elections.

    But as Nicholas Ebserstadt notes, that changed in November. To the privileged and well-educated Americans living in their “bicoastal bastions,” things seemed to be going quite well, even as the rest of the country fell farther and farther behind. But, writes Eberstadt: “It turns out that the year 2000 marks a grim historical milestone of sorts for our nation. For whatever reasons, the Great American Escalator, which had lifted successive generations of Americans to ever higher standards of living and levels of social well-being, broke down around then — and broke down very badly.

    “The warning lights have been flashing, and the klaxons sounding, for more than a decade and a half. But our pundits and prognosticators and professors and policymakers, ensconced as they generally are deep within the bubble, were for the most part too distant from the distress of the general population to see or hear it.”

    Well, now they’ve heard it, and they’ve also heard that a lot of Americans resent the meritocrats’ insulation from what’s happening elsewhere, especially as America’s unfortunate record over the past couple of decades, whether in economics, in politics, or in foreign policy, doesn’t suggest that the “meritocracy” is overflowing with, you know, actual merit.

    In the United States, the result has been Trump. In Britain, the result was Brexit. In both cases, the allegedly elite — who are supposed to be cool, considered, and above the vulgar passions of the masses — went more or less crazy. From conspiracy theories (it was the Russians!) to bizarre escape fantasies (A Brexit vote redo! A military coup to oust Trump!) the cognitive elite suddenly didn’t seem especially elite, or for that matter particularly cognitive.

    In fact, while America was losing wars abroad and jobs at home, elites seemed focused on things that were, well, faintly ridiculous. As Richard Fernandez tweeted: “The elites lost their mojo by becoming absurd. It happened on the road between cultural appropriation and transgender bathrooms.” It was fatal: “People believe from instinct. The Roman gods became ridiculous when the Roman emperors did. PC is the equivalent of Caligula’s horse.”

  • You have to read this Glenn Greenwald piece on what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. “The more alarmed one is by the Trump administration, the more one should focus on how to fix the systemic, fundamental sickness of the Democratic Party. That Hillary Clinton won the meaningless popular vote on her way to losing to Donald Trump, and that the singular charisma of Barack Obama kept him popular, have enabled many to ignore just how broken and failed the Democrats are as a national political force.” Never mind that Greenwald ignores one of the big elephants in the room (the Social Justice Warrior/victimhood identity politics brigade doing such a bang-up job alienating American voters). His description of the other elephant in the room, the party’s fundamentally corrupt and anti-Democratic nature, is fairly acute.
  • The number of Republicans passes the number of Democrats in Gallup’s Party ID tracking poll. This has happened a few times before, but the mere 25% for Democrats does appear to be the lowest rating ever.
  • All the Trump Derangement is masking the Democratic Party’s own civil war. “There is no Barack Obama among the ranks of current Democrats. He simply does not exist. That truth, and Hillary’s defeat, means the years ahead will be ones of rebuilding and rebranding. So far, it’s not going well.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Seven days in February. “Why were former Obama-administration appointees or careerist officials tapping the phone calls of an incoming Trump designate and then leaking the tapes to their pets in the press?” Also this: “The Democratic party has been absorbed by its left wing and is beginning to resemble the impotent British Labour party. Certainly it no longer is a national party.”
  • “The Social Security Administration paid $1 billion in benefits to individuals who did not have a Social Security Number.”
  • “This is what Chuck Todd and others like him fail to accept or comprehend: The mainstream media have delegitimized themselves. Republicans and independents watched for eight long years as Todd and others of his ilk did their best to help and support the last administration; not only refusing to hold President Obama to account (the way they are imploring each other to do with Trump) but providing cover for him.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Turns out that patiently explaining to the deplorable redneck freaks of JesusLand why they’re ignorant rubes that need to be ruled for their own good doesn’t win votes.
  • MSNBC: Controlling what people thing is our job.
  • A look at the shell games played by the dark money left. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • With President Trump, America has an administration that is finally willing to name radical Islam as the enemy.
  • Women celebrate being liberated from the Islamic State. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • President Trump contemplates designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization and the New York Times freaks out. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Texas preschool teacher fired for tweeting to “kill some Jews.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Marine Le Pen is winning over French women. In addition to refusing to wear a headscarf, “Le Pen again vowed to protect French women after the mass sexual assault by groups of men in Cologne, Germany, just over a year ago in an op-ed that tied together immigration and women rights.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Part of Geert Wilders’ security detail has been suspended for possibly leaking details of Wilders locations to Jihadest groups. “Secret Service chief Erik Akerboom said he could not confirm the man’s identity but confirmed media reports he has a ‘Moroccan background.'”
  • Fourth circuit court decides to just ignore Heller.
  • The AFL-CIO is is cutting staff “amid continuing declines in union membership.” Faster, please. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Paul Krugman, the Cleveland Browns of economists. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • If you’re looking for a pundit with a clear-eyed vision of where President Donald Trump is going, Ross Douthat is not your man.
  • NASA contemplates a bold leap forward to 1968.
  • Men who SWATed, sent heroin to Brian Krebs’ house sentenced.
  • Cahnman’s Musings has a roundup of what various school district Superintendents make. It’s an interesting list, though I personally would not have broken it up by Texas House committee chairman. I’m not surprised that they average a low six figures, or that the Superintendents of Houston and Dallas ISD make in excess of $300,000. Why I don’t understand is why the Superintendent for Galena Park ISD, a working class school district with 22,549 students and a single 4A high school, makes $270,531, or 90% of the what the HISD Superintendent makes…
  • Feminist derangement syndrome: “I was walking into a gas station for a bottle of water when the man behind me stepped up to open the door for me. With that act of kindness, something inside me snapped and I flew into a blind rage. I began screaming at him at the top of my lungs.” (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Trump Administration to Social Justice Warriors: No tranny bathrooms for you!
  • “I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women” says ex-WNBA player Candice Wiggins, who says she was bullied and harassed for being straight. This is not exactly a surprise, thought that 98% number may be slightly high. I casually followed the WNBA back when the Houston Comets were dominating the league, but haven’t paid attention since they folded. Today half of the teams still lose money. But I’m sure their popularity will skyrocket any day now…

  • Vice President Mike Pence helps repair vandalism at a Jewish cemetery.
  • I have heard the bots reverting, each to each. I do not think that they will revert for me…
  • Are you smuggeling illegal butter, comrade?
  • LinkSwarm for December 16, 2016

    Friday, December 16th, 2016

    Next week come two joyous events: Christmas, and Donald Trump being confirmed President by the electoral college. The first is a time of family celebration, and the second means liberals can finally shut the hell up about their asinine cockamamie schemes to keep the duly-elect 45th President of the United States of America from taking office.

    Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm:

  • Speaking of the electoral college, publicity whore faithless elector Chris Suprun turns out to be a serial liar rather than a 9/11 first responder.
  • Linux guru Eric S. Raymond (who I’ve been on panels with at the odd science fiction event and such) has a long piece on the hard truths Democrats need to face to exit the political wilderness:

    First, your ability to assemble a broad-based national coalition has collapsed. Do not be fooled into thinking otherwise by your popular vote “win”; that majority came entirely from the West Coast metroplex and disguises a large-scale collapse in popular support everywhere else in the U.S. Trump even achieved 30-40% support in blue states where he didn’t spend any money.

    County-by-county psephological maps show that your base is now confined to two major coastal enclaves and a handful of university towns. Only 4 of 50 states have both a Democratic-controlled legislature and a Democratic governor. In 2018 that regionalization is going to get worse, not better; you will be defending 25 seats in areas where Trump took the popular vote, while the Republicans have to defend only 8 where Clinton won.

    Your party leadership is geriatric, decades older than the average for their Republican counterparts. Years of steady losses at state level, masked by the personal popularity of Barack Obama, have left you without a bench to speak of – little young talent and basically no seasoned Presidential timber under retirement age. The fact that Joseph Biden, who will be 78 for the next Election Day, is being seriously mooted as the next Democratic candidate, speaks volumes – none of them good.

    Your ideological lock on the elite media and show business has flipped from a powerful asset to a liability. Trump campaigned against that lock and won; his tactics can be and will be replicated. Worse, a self-created media bubble insulated you from grasping the actual concerns of the American public so completely that you didn’t realize the shit you were in until election night.

    Your donor advantage didn’t help either. Clinton outspent Trump 2:1 and still lost.

    Your “coalition of the ascendant” is sinking. Tell all the just-so stories you like, but the brute fact is that it failed to turn out to defeat the Republican candidate with the highest negatives in history. You thought all you had to do was wait for the old white men to die, but anybody who has studied the history of immigration in the U.S. could have told you that the political identities of immigrant ethnic groups do not remain stable as they assimilate. You weren’t going to own the Hispanics forever any more than you owned the Irish and the Italians forever. African-Americans, trained by decades of identity politics, simply failed to show up for a white candidate in the numbers you needed. The sexism card didn’t play either, as a bare majority of married women who actually went to the polls seem to have voted for Trump.

    But your worst problem is less tangible. Trump has popped the preference bubble. The conservative majority in most of the U.S. (coastal enclaves excepted) now knows it’s a conservative majority. Before the election every pundit in sight pooh-poohed the idea that discouraged conservative voters, believing themselves isolated and powerless, had been sitting out several election cycles. But it turned out to be true, not least where I live in the swing state of Pennsylvania, where mid-state voters nobody knew were there put Trump over the top. Pretty much the same thing happened all through the Rust Belt.

    That genie isn’t going to be stuffed back in the bottle. Those voters now know they can deliver the media and the coastal elites a gigantic fuck-you, and Republicans know the populist techniques to mobilize them to do that. Trump’s playbook was not exactly complicated.

    Some Democrats are beginning to talk, tentatively, about reconnecting to the white working class. But your real problem is larger; you need to make the long journey back to the political center. Not the center you imagine exists, either; that’s an artifact of your media bubble. I’m pointing at the actual center revealed by psephological analysis of voter preferences.

    First on his list of suggestions: Give up their suicidal gun control policies.

    (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • The always pungent Jim Goad talks about how victimhood identity politics destroyed the Democratic Party:

    Still scratching their pointy heads over losing an election they were certain that history had preordained them to win, the Democrats are blaming everything except their own stupidity and arrogance.

    The intersectional house of cards has fallen. Every maladjusted minoritarian mini-tyrant in the country is freaking the frick out that their ragged, patchwork coalition of misfits is crumbing before their eyes. From coast to coast, every HIV-positive mulatto one-armed transgender lesbian midget is suddenly worried that Trump and his supporters in the heartland will become “normalized.”

    Huddled inside a rainbow-colored yet opaque bubble, it’s obvious that they have no idea what just hit them. Many overpaid and demonstrably clueless strategists seem to think that perchance they didn’t call people racists, sexists, homophobes, and Islamophobes enough. Maybe if they just verbally shat upon the stupid, uneducated, hateful, and soon-to-be-extinct white masses in flyover country who put Trump over the top, they could have shamed enough of these irredeemable rubes into voting for a party and an ideology that clearly hates their guts.

    Not for a moment does it seem to have occurred to them that maybe it’s not so wise to play aggressively hostile identity politics when your designated opponent is still the demographic majority.

    Listen up, dimwits: When you encourage racial pride in all groups except whites, you aren’t exactly making a case against “racism.” If you have even a semblance of a spine, sooner or later you’ll hear this nonstop sneering condescension about how you were born with a stain on your soul and say, “Hey, fuck you. I’ve done nothing wrong, but you’re really starting to bother me.”

    I suspect that for perhaps the majority of those who voted for Trump, it had nothing to do with the stupid, juvenile, leftist catchall excuse of “hatred.” If you really think extraordinarily complex social conflicts over power and resources can be explained by a dumb word such as “hatred,” I hate you.

    Instead, a large swath of voters grew so tired of being actively hated, they struck back and said “enough.” They didn’t “vote against their interests,” as is so often patronizingly alleged; they voted against the condescending, scolding, sheltered creampuffs who try to dictate their interests to them.

  • “NY Times Hires Reporter Who Sent Stories to Hillary Staffers for Approval.” This is my shocked face. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • For all the lunatic leftist blather, Obama Administration Attorney General Loretta Lynch says that there’s no evidence Russians hacked voting machines. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Also, it wasn’t Russia that obtained Hillary’s emails, it was disgruntled Democratic insiders that gave them to Wikileaks.
  • And speaking of disgruntled Democratic insiders, some Clintonistas are only too happy to see the back of Huma Abedin. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “Records: Too many votes in 37% of Detroit’s precincts.” (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Lots of Democrats are pretty clear about the contempt they hold regular Americans in, but few are so stupid as to actually call America’s heartland “flyover country” in public.
  • “David Brock’s Media Matters Has Hidden $1,052,500 From The IRS Since 2010.”
  • In another entry in the “liberals keeping it classy” annals, a reporter tweets about Trump having sex with his own daughter.
  • Hillary Clinton didn’t win “America’s” vote, she won California’s:

    California voters are alone responsible for Clinton’s “win” in the popular vote. The latest tally shows Clinton up by about 2.8 or so million votes. She’s won California by nearly 4.3 million votes. So, take away California and the rest of the country starts to look like… well, it looks like the rest of the country. California is weird, but if that’s what the Democrats want to elect a president of, then the only thing you can really say to them is, “Congrats, you already have Jerry Brown.”

  • Scott Adams on dwindling liberal protests against Trump: “What are you doing that is more important than stopping Hitler?????????”
  • More on that Trump vs. Department of Energy dust-up. How long do you think that stonewall will last when Rick Perry is running the place? (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Along with the selection of Mad Dog Mattis for Secretary of Defense, the selection of Michael Flynn for National Security Advisor signals that Trump is tossing political correctness out of the Pentagon. Good.
  • How Trump can use the power of the purse to crack down on illegal alien sanctuary cities. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • “Get ready for more Scott Walkers as Republicans control 25 state capitals: tax cuts, pension reform, right to work, school choice.” (Usual WSJ hoops apply.)
  • Obama tries to create a new ethnic group for Democrats to pander to.
  • How an underachieving screwup from Plano named John Georgelas became Yahya Abu Hassan, a leader of the Islamic State.
  • Indian prime Minister Narendra Modi’s insane “demonitization” scheme continues to wreck India’s economy.

    The parched branches of big banks are still fortunate. For unexplained reasons the RBI has supplied almost no new cash at all to India’s hundreds of smaller rural co-operative banks or to its 93,000 agricultural credit unions, so keeping millions of farmers from deposits that total some $46bn. It has also banned these institutions from competing with “pukkah” banks in exchanging old bills for new. With no cash flowing, farmers cannot even seek help from informal networks that in normal times account for more credit in rural areas than formal institutions. And although India’s 641,000 villages house two-thirds of its people, they contain fewer than a fifth of its ATMs. These are being slowly modified to supply the new notes, which unhelpfully are smaller than old ones; for now most stand idle.

    Starved of cash, India’s rural economy is seizing up. A study by two economists at Delhi’s Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research found that in the second week of the drought, deliveries of rice to rural wholesale markets were 61% below prior levels. Soyabeans were 77% down and maize 29%. Prices have also collapsed. In Bihar, Scroll’s reporters found desperate farmers selling cauliflower for 1 rupee ($0.01) a kilo, a twelfth of the prior price.

    It is not only farm incomes that are pinched. An investigation by Business Standard, a financial daily, found that virtually none of the estimated 8m piece workers who hand-roll bidis, a kind of cigarette, has been paid since the cash ban. Another Indian daily, the Hindu, reports that more than half of the 600-odd ceramics factories in the town of Morbi, a centre of the tile industry in the state of Gujarat, with a combined output worth some $3.5bn a year, have temporarily closed because they cannot pay workers. In Agra, the hub of Indian shoemaking, some firms are paying workers with supermarket coupons to keep them on the job.

    India’s wealthy few have servants to take their place in the still dismally long queues snaking outside banks, but the pain reaches even to the top. A dentist in a posh part of Delhi is shocked by a 70% fall in trade since the cash ban. “All my patients can pay with plastic so I assumed I was safe, but I guess people are just being careful about spending in general.” This does seem to be the case. A brokerage that surveys consumer-goods firms says November sales have fallen by 20-30% across the board. Property sales, which traditionally are made wholly or partly in cash, have plummeted even more.

    Small wonder that Fitch, a ratings agency, on November 29th cut its forecast for India’s GDP growth for the year to March 2017 from 7.4% to 6.9%. That is in line with most financial institutions’ trimmed estimates, although some economists think the damage could be even worse. “There will be no or negative growth for the next two quarters,” predicts one Delhi economist who prefers anonymity. “Consumer spending was the one thing really driving this economy, and now we are looking at a negative wealth-effect where people feel poorer and spend less.”

    Perhaps more embarrassingly for Mr Modi’s government, there are few signs that its harsh economic medicine is achieving the declared goal of flushing out vast hoards of undeclared wealth or “black” money. Officials had predicted that perhaps 20% of the pre-ban cash would not be deposited in banks, for fear of disclosure to the taxman. Yet within three weeks of the “demonetisation”—well before the deadline to dispose of old bills, December 30th—about two-thirds of the money had already found its way into “white” channels. Some of this is doubtless illicit: inspectors of Delhi’s bus system have found that the bulk of daily takings now mysteriously appears in the form of the banned bills, which public-sector firms can still deposit, rather than the usual small change. Reports from Maharashtra, in the centre of the country, suggest that brokers are offering to buy old notes with a face value of 10m rupees for 8.4m, suggesting that they have found ways of laundering them.

  • India’s Foxconn cell-phone factory has let 25% of its workforce go due to declining sales.
  • Speaking of phones, how long you have to work earn enough to buy an iPhone varies widely by country, from 24 hours in New York to 627 hours in Kiev, which is even more than Nairobi (468 hours).
  • Popping the liberal university bubble:

    When students inhabit liberal bubbles, they’re not learning much about their own country. To be fully educated, students should encounter not only Plato, but also Republicans.

    We liberals are adept at pointing out the hypocrisies of Trump, but we should also address our own hypocrisy in terrain we govern, such as most universities: Too often, we embrace diversity of all kinds except for ideological.

  • “In 2015: 4,454 men died on the job (92.4% of the total) compared to only 367 women (7.6% of the total). The ‘gender occupational fatality gap‘ in 2015 was again considerable — more than 12 men died on the job last year for every woman who died while working.”
  • Another day, another fake anti-Muslim “hate crime” exposed.
  • Llewellyn Rockwell of the Mises Institute explains Trump: “To get to where we want to go, the American political class has to be hit hard, and the media and the universities need to be exposed for the propaganda factories they are.”
  • Liberal women cutting off their long hair because of Trump. Says Instapundit: “Trump wins, and Democratic women respond by making themselves less attractive. Sorry, Democratic men!”
  • Formerly rich man forced to sublet his palatial digs to renters to make ends meet. Wait, did I say man? I meant The New York Times.
  • Pictures from an abandoned Russian military base above the arctic circle. (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • “City Of Chicago Working Around Clock To Clear 18 Inches Of Bullet Casings From Streets.”
  • Dripping Springs ISD stonewalls open records request over tranny bathrooms.
  • A Roundup of Texas Lawsuits of Note

    Wednesday, October 26th, 2016

    A number of lawsuits related to local or federal overreach in Texas are working their way through the court system. Here’s a quick roundup of developments in a few notable cases.

  • U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor reiterated that the injunction that stops Obama’s tranny bathroom mandate still applies nationwide. Attorney General Ken Paxton has filed a lawsuit against the tranny bathroom mandate which has been joined by 13 other states.
  • Paxton has also joined a Texas Public Policy Foundation lawsuit against the City of Austin over their new short-term rental ordinance. “The Ordinance raises significant constitutional questions, because it functionally ousts homeowners and investors from real property without just compensation.”
  • Paxton also joined another TPPF lawsuit against the City of Brownsville over their $1 fee on plastic checkout bags, calling it an illegal sales tax, as bags are not taxable under state law.
  • Speaking of Paxton, in case you missed it, the SEC case against Paxton was thrown out by a federal judge:

    Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton won a sweeping victory in court Friday when Federal District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III dismissed a fraud case the Securities and Exchange Commission had brought against him.

    Mazzant, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Barack Obama, found that even if all the facts the SEC alleged were true, they didn’t amount to any violation of securities law by Paxton.

    The SEC had dogpiled on Paxton after Collin County special prosecutors got a local grand jury to indict Paxton under state securities law in August 2015.

  • Now the question is whether Collin County will drop its own case against Paxton, and end payment of high dollar special prosecutor fees, now that the SEC has dropped the case.
  • Also note that Texas is still a co-plaintiff in State of West Virginia, et al. v. EPA, over the Obama Administration’s “Clean Power Plan,” which the Supreme Court ordered stayed February of last year.
  • FWISD Backs Down On Tranny Bathrooms

    Wednesday, July 20th, 2016

    I haven’t been able to focus much time on the issue, but parents in Ft. Worth have been fighting a tranny bathroom policy unilaterally imposed by ft. Worth ISD superintendent Kent Scribner over their objections.

    Good news! After Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton issued a ruling stating that the new rules violated chapters 11 and 26 of the Texas Education Code, Ft. Worth ISD has finally backed down on their tranny bathroom plans.

    After the uproar of parents, citizens, and students in Fort Worth over the past 3 months, the Fort Worth Independents School District (FWISD) has reversed its dangerous transgender guidelines that allowed boys into girls’ showers, locker-rooms, and bathrooms. The school district issued new guidelines today with significant changes that should go a long way to better protect all students in FWISD.

    Among the policy changes:

  • An explicit affirmation of parental rights: “Parents are partners with educators, administrators, and the board in their children’s education. Parents shall be encouraged to actively participate in creating and implementing education programs for their children. Texas Education Code § 26.001(a) unless otherwise provided by law, a board, an administrator, an educator or other person may not limit parental rights. Texas Education Code § 20.001(c).”
  • The critical recognition that “A parent is entitled to full information regarding the school activities of the student, except as precluded by Texas law.”
  • The replacement of rules about restroom and locker-room access. The previous rules have been replaced with the statement that accommodation requests will be “reviewed and addressed on a case-by-case basis based upon the particular circumstances of the individual student and school facilities.”
  • The removal of an unlawful requirement that punished school officials for notifying parents if their child showed transgender behavior.
  • Here’s a hint for the Social Justice Warrior crowd: Ft. Worth, like most Texas cities, is not going to take your culture war shenanigans lying down.

    LinkSwarm for May 23, 2016

    Monday, May 23rd, 2016

    This kept getting pushed out by other posts, so enjoy a heftier-than-usual LinkSwarm:

  • U.S. district court judge rules that House Republicans lawsuit against ObamaCare on separation-of-powers grounds can move forward. (Hat tip: Elizabeth Price Foley at Instapundit.)
  • You know how American leftists claim socialist Denmark is paradise on earth? Yeah, not so much. “Denmark’s suicide rate has averaged 20.8 per 100,000 during the last five decades, with its highest level of 32. The American suicide rate averaged only 11.1 during the last five decades, and has never exceeded 12.7. Danes are deeply deprived, driven by severe narcissism, and so more than 11 percent of adult Danes – the supposed happiest people in the world – are on antidepressants.”
  • Why the left hates the Jews:

    The Arab–Israeli conflict is a bitter and ugly one. My own view of it is that the Palestinian Arabs have some legitimate grievances, and that I stopped caring about them when they started blowing up children in pizza shops. You can thank the courageous heroes of the Battle of Sbarro for that. Israel isn’t my country, but it is my country’s ally, and it is impossible for a liberty-loving American to fail to admire what the Jewish state has done.

    And that, of course, is why the Left wants to see the Jewish state exterminated.

  • Vaguely related: “Frank Sinatra’s Love Affair With the Jewish People.”
  • Brazil’s President impeached.
  • This just in: Europe is still screwed.
  • Greece approves new “austerity” measures that they’ll no doubt continue to cheat and ignore while spending money they don’t have.
  • Speaking of Greece, “More than one in five school-aged refugee children in Greece have never been to school, a study has revealed. Child refugees stranded in Greece have been out of school for on average 1.5 years, and many of them ‘cannot even hold a pencil.'”
  • Hezbollah operations chief killed by Syria, but nobody’s entirely sure by who.
  • Why did the feds give Bill Clinton’s pedophile friend Jeffrey Epstein a sweetheart deal?
  • Elijah Woods says there’s widespread pedophilia in Hollywood. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • One billionaire moving to Florida is going to cost New Jersey $140 million in tax revenue.
  • Electric cars don’t lower emissions overall.
  • No sign of a down ballot Republican crackup.
  • Target has shed $10 billion in stock value since announcing its tranny bathrooms policy.
  • Why feminists hate sex: “The new feminist puritans see heterosexual sex as confirming and reinforcing outdated gender roles. That men and women not only have sex but enjoy it is a threat to the notion that both gender and sexuality are merely social constructs, to be crafted and rejected as instinct takes us.”
  • Why did 16 Republican Senators save the agency that’s hell-bent on creating instant public housing slums across America?
  • More than 300 UK CEOs come out in favor of a Brexit.
  • Eye-open infographic on mass public shootings from John Lott.
  • More proof that Social Justice Warriors hate everything, no matter how cute.
  • World’s oldest woman, and last living American born in the 19th century, dies. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
  • Listeria outbreak among frozen fruits and vegetables. “Some of the affected products were sold under brand names such as Earth’s Pride, Panda Express, Signature Kitchens and Trader Joe’s.” (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)
  • Meet the vegan Bernie Madoff. (Hat tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)
  • Black Pimps Matter.
  • Safety tip: Try not to get killed over cutting in line for the taco truck.
  • Facebook bans conservative for saying that Facebook bans conservatives. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Canadian company working on 20km high space elevator.
  • Jim Geraghty visits NRRAM.
  • The Dallas convention center sucks.
  • Microsoft is gonna Microsoft redux. (Hat tip: Borepatch.)
  • Wikipedia editor contemplates suicide over toxic atmosphere of powertripping.
  • Rehab for Internet addiction. “The program costs $25,000 for 45 days at the center.” Obviously I can’t be addicted to the Internet, because there’s no way I could afford the rehab…
  • I’m stealing this from Ace of Spades HQ: