SF lawmakers voted to throw money around (money the city didn't have) and now sneer that tech cos must shoulder the shortfall with a special tax on them alone.

http://nyti.ms/29iQ4xs

July 4, 2016 10:59 PM was a fun one, even if it's probably not news to anybody.

Also, I wrote it from here, Back East, where it's already the 5th.

Honestly, sometimes you guys seem terribly primitive and backwards.

For Amy.

Also, I just figured out that I've been blocked on Twitter by Xeni Jardin.

I don't know why.

I don't care why.

I'm proud, regardless!

Anyway, back to Douthat’s point. His column made me think about why it was so damn satisfying to watch Christiane Amanpour, the epitome of globalist tribalism, melt down on air interviewing Ray Finch, one of Nigel Farage’s lieutenants, shortly after the Brexit win was announced. You might not have seen her spluttering hysteria when later she spoke with Brexiteer Daniel Hannan, who kept his cool and made her look like a screaming mimi:

Shorter Christiane Amanpour: How dare you?!”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cultured-hicks/

When manliness is eliminated from a culture fixated on the supposedly corrupt and vicious nature of masculinity, while armies of apologetic White Knights and self-abnegating feminist allies (aka “manginas”) come to replace a diminishing platoon of alpha males—“We live in a world run by betas and their lady friends,” quips J.R. Dunn in a prescient article for American Thinker—the writing is on the wall.

https://pjmedia.com/blog/when-a-culture-unmans-itself/?singlepage=true

I wouldn't say that the writing is on the wall, but I do hear the fat lady warming up.

Theodore Dalrymple explores why so many atrocities are committed by scions of the elite:

Adolescence is a turbulent time, of course, and some privileged young people in impoverished countries feel guilt at their own privilege (not that it prevents them from exercising it); revolutionary movements are often led by some sprig of the upper class. But something else is required to make ordinary young men act in so conscienceless a fashion. Here, I think, we have to turn to Solzhenitsyn:

Macbeth’s self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes, even Iago was a little lamb, too. The imagination and spiritual strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. Ideology—that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others’ eyes. . . . That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

After the downfall of Communism, Islamism is the only ideology that supposedly answers all life’s questions and can appeal to the adolescent search for certainty about what life is for. It appeals only to born Muslims and a small number of converts. It has none of the cross-cultural appeal that Communism did, for example. But why person x rather than person y falls for it—that is a question that can never be fully answered.

It's official. The fix is in. James Comey has seen the light, and received the payoff.

@IRA,

It ain't over 'till the fat lady sings. Or curses. Or in the case of Adele, singcurses.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/06/27/entertainment/adele-cursing-glastonbury-concert/

So.. Diversity for diversity's sake?

https://i.redd.it/7lrii4ce3f7x.jpg

A coordinated campaign by fundamentalist Islamic groups has led to Facebook shutting down a number of Arabic atheist pages.

http://freethinker.co.uk/2016/06/25/censorship-is-being-forced-on-facebook-over-atheist-pages/

Look at the balls on these guys:

http://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2012/07/16/156851175/five-men-agree-to-stand-directly-under-an-exploding-nuclear-bomb

Cousin Dave, you asked for a miracle. I give you the Eff Bee Eye:

https://twitter.com/VodkaPundit/status/750349611949142016

Last week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a press release entitled Thirty-One Top Scientific Societies Speak With One Voice on Global Climate Change. Punchline:

In a consensus letter to U.S. policymakers, a partnership of 31 leading nonpartisan scientific societies today reaffirmed the reality of human-caused climate change, noting that greenhouse gas emissions “must be substantially reduced” to minimize negative impacts on the global economy, natural resources, and human health.

https://judithcurry.com/2016/07/04/climate-power-play-by-the-aaas-et-al/

Another abject lesson on why it's a bad idea to co-sign loans:

Marcia DeOliveira-Longinetti's son, Kevin, was murdered last year in a case that still hasn't been solved. And, as the New York Times reveals in an extensive look at New Jersey's student loan industry completed in cooperation with ProPublica, DeOliveira-Longinetti is not only grieving her son but is being forced to pay off some of his student loans, for which she had co-signed. Though the balance of his federal loans was written off, he also got money from the state of New Jersey, which told his mother that her "request does not meet the threshold for loan forgiveness."

http://www.newser.com/story/227580/mom-forced-to-pay-off-murdered-sons-student-loans.html

Alternatively a term life insurance policy would have been handy.

BLM shuts down a gay pride parade.

http://heatst.com/culture-wars/black-lives-matter-activists-hijack-toronto-pride-parade/

There's bigotry going on here, and it isn't against blacks.

The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro

by Frederick Douglass

A speech given at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/douglassjuly4.html

Smarter than you.

Smarter than me.

Last week, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a press release entitled Thirty-One Top Scientific Societies Speak With One Voice on Global Climate Change.

Will they also explain how the satellites measuring temps havent recorded an increase, or how every climate model prediction has failed?

Or how the earth warming up to less that the last interglacial period of this current ice age will end all life on the planet?

Technically it still has yet to reach the temperature it was when the pyramids were built.

In the 70s it was predicted the Global Mean Temperature would be 11 degrees colder by 2000

In the late 80s it was predicted the GMT would soar so high all ice on the planet would have melted and NYC would be underwater by 2010

In 07, 08, and 09 Al Gore claimed that by 2013 the artic ice would be gone entirely

Since 1800s the GMT has risen less than 0.5 degrees, this despite predictions of increase ranging from 2 to 10 degrees in the 1980s, and despite greenhouse gas emissions doing nothing but increasing every year

Boy is that one a whopper Gog. Talk about your pipe dreams and crack.

Thanks for that data-free response, Ben.