THE WHOLE THING WAS A PONZI SCHEME, THE POLITICIANS TOOK THEIR WINNINGS AND YOU’LL BE STUCK WITH THE BILL: The Global Blue Model Crisis:

The laws of arithmetic don’t stop at the U.S. border: an explosive new report out from Citigroup shows that public pensions are grossly underfunded. . . .

The report singled out Germany, France, Italy, the UK, Portugal and Spain for having public sector pension liabilities in excess of 300 percent of GDP, while noting that corporate pensions in the United States and the UK are not in particularly good health either.
It’s an unpleasant reality that’s dawning on the Western world: the comfortable 20th century welfare state only appeared sustainable while the baby boomers were in the active workforce. As that venerable cohort ages (and reaps the considerable benefits provided by advances in medicine to live into a ripe old age), the demographics have shifted, and the underlying numbers just don’t add up any more: there are fewer and fewer working people available to support an aging population.

The adjustments the world over are going to be painful and ugly, when people at the end of their working lives realize that the comfortable retirement they were counting on is anything but assured.

Maybe this is why they’re now pushing assisted suicide so hard.

TWITTER IS SHUTTING DOWN TWEETDECK FOR WINDOWS: Funny, when I joined Twitter in December of 2008, Tweetdeck was Twitter for me. Built around multiple columns, with one for people in my Twitter Stream, another people responding to me, and another direct messages, Tweetdeck allowed me to have real time conversations, instead of trying to decipher the firehose of content coming out of my Twitter homepage. (That was back when I wanted to be interactive. After watching endless Twitter flamewars, I’m much happier to simply retweet interesting news and comments, and save my content creation for here and the main PJM site.)

“Twitter’s plan is to push all users to Twitter.com for their advertisement revenue,” as their stock price has cratered in recent months.  That that tends to happen when companies exit their original function to go full-on SJW instead. This despite the fact that “Tweetdeck is insanely popular among Twitter desktop users. They had previously bought the client.”

But this isn’t the first time that a Sillicon Valley corporation flush with cash has bought a product in order to eventually kill it.

The original version of Tweetdeck, which Twitter acquired in 2011 for $40 million from British software developer Iain Dodsworth ran on Adobe’s AIR platform. Adobe also has a record of buying out competitors seemingly only in order to kill their products. Serious Magic, which produced Ultra, the virtual set software I used on my Silicon Graffiti videos from 2008-2011 or so was remarkably easy to use and years ahead of its time. But in 2006, Adobe bought out the company, and eventually folded a half-assed version of Ultra into Premiere Pro and terminated the main platform because it was Windows-only, despite Ultra having produced a wide range of compatible virtual sets as accessory packs. Oh well — it was fun to be on the cutting edge of DIY video for a time.

STOP FEELING OUR PAIN: Pundits think empathy is crucial for a presidential candidate, but voters actually don’t care that much — and for good reason. Empathy is a highly overrated virtue in a leader (or anyone else) because it’s biased, parochial and innumerate. My New York Times column on the empathy debate in psychology ends with Adam Smith’s advice: Be guided by reason, not by “fellow-feeling.”

TO BE FAIR, THAT’S THE INTENT: How ‘Safe Spaces’ Stifle Ideas. “The very notion of diversity is now increasingly understood to refer to anything but differences of outlook, which we are urged — by the newly enlightened and militant — not to protect but to suppress and eliminate so that no delicate sensibility need be challenged or unsettled.”

ROGER SIMON: Is Detente between Trump and the GOP Establishment on the Horizon?

(Bumped.)

TO OUR RULING CLASS, THIS IS NOT A BUG, BUT A FEATURE: ‘Chilling Effect’ of Mass Surveillance Is Silencing Dissent Online, Study Says.

IN THE NAME OF DIVERSITY, you must conform!

ABRAHAM ZAPRUDER, CALL YOUR OFFICE. Video: Did Trump’s Campaign Manager Assault Michelle Fields?

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Government’s Brash Dash To Bash Cash. “Getting rid of the $100 bill has little or nothing to do with stopping crime or some other valiant effort. Government already has far too much control over the economy, via its monstrous tax code, massive bureaucratic regulatory agencies and now even health care, with far from laudable results in those areas and myriad others. If Summers and others in government had their way, cash would be eliminated altogether.”

As always, it’s about power.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: How David Brooks created Donald Trump: The political establishment denounced bourgeois Tea Partiers. Now, they must face raucous working-class Trumpsters.

AND NOW YOU KNOW…THE REST OF THE STORY: The legend of Col. Harland Sanders, from assistant manager of a cafeteria serving Manhattan Project atomic scientists in World War II, to international corporate spokesman, to the birth of Japan’s “Kentucky for Christmas” tradition. “In contrast to most other famous food icons, Colonel Sanders was once a living, breathing person, and his life story is considerably more tumultuous than the white-washed corporate biography suggests.”

(Via Maggie’s Farm.)

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT OVER THE WEEKEND: Protect free speech while battling ISIS. Some of Tennessee’s Democratic state legislators need a refresher course on the First Amendment. But, to be fair, they were just running interference for educrats.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE! Cab driver falsely accused of rape saved by his phone app: A woman who falsely accused a taxi driver of a knifepoint sex attack has been jailed after he exposed her lies using an app on his mobile phone. Her name is Astria Berwick. How many innocent men were convicted of rape before cellphones were invented?

ME GUSTA TRUMP: PORTRAIT OF A HISPANIC TRUMP VOTER: The New Yorker’s piece is dripping with incredulousness, reading like a portrait of a rarely seen (and dangerous) species:

John Castillo grew up in Lincoln Heights, the heart of Hispanic Los Angeles, in a tight-knit Mexican-American family. His father’s name was Juan, but his mother decided to name their son John. . . .

After the Marines, Castillo moved back to California and went to work for U.P.S. He’s now an inspector for an aerospace company. He was once a Democrat but is now a conservative and a Republican. The transition happened in the Marines. “The way they scream at you, it hardens you,” he says. “It makes you understand the importance of respecting the law.” He also thinks travel helped him get rid of a “naïve” point of view that he associates with liberal politics. He believes in the importance of the Second Amendment. . . .

His Twitter bio reads “devout Catholic” and “lifelong pro wrestling fan.” He’s also a fan of Spanish-language radio, and he retweets Pope Francis and the W.W.E. with equal enthusiasm. And he is also a passionate supporter of Donald Trump.

Fourteen per cent of Hispanic voters say they will “definitely support” the Republican candidate in November, and Castillo, who describes himself as an “American of Mexican descent, in that order,” is not an anomaly in his support for Trump. Although eighty per cent of Latino voters held an unfavorable opinion of Trump in a recent Washington Post/Univision poll, a fifth of Hispanic Republicans said they planned to vote for Trump during the Party’s primaries. That level of support has remained constant in states with a discernible Hispanic presence. According to entrance and exit polls, Trump got just under half of the admittedly few Hispanic Republican votes in Nevada and a quarter of them in Texas, surpassing Marco Rubio in both instances. Rubio won Florida’s Latino vote (seventeen per cent of all Republican voters) by a wide margin, but Trump’s backing among Hispanics remained at twenty-six per cent. .  . .

Over several recent conversations, Castillo explained his support for Trump in meticulous detail. At times, he sounded like the many white voters who have been inspired by the candidate.  . . .

When I responded that plenty of those whom he wants to protect could potentially be deported en masse by President Trump (there are a million undocumented immigrants living in Los Angeles County, more than in any other county in the United States), Castillo rejected the idea that his views were contradictory. I’d much rather live surrounded by my own people than any other,” he says, “but illegal is illegal.” And yet, there is a possibility that gives him pause: What if Trump keeps his word and rounds up Castillo’s friends and neighbors? “If he were to try that there would be riots and uprisings,” he says, blinking rapidly. “If he did that I would fight back.”

The New Yorker writer, Leon Krauze, is a Mexican journalist and Univision news anchor out of Los Angeles. He is clearly baffled that any Hispanic would ever even consider voting for Trump because of Trump’s pledge to crack down on illegal immigration. He clearly assumes that illegal immigration–and illegal immigration alone–is the only issue of concern to Hispanic-American voters, in much the same way that liberal/progressives often assume that abortion is the only issue of concern to women, or affirmative action or police brutality are the only issues of concern to blacks.

The notion that an Hispanic, black, female, Asian, LGBTQ, or any other American could put “American” before these identity politics-driven categories is baffling to progressives. Yet Trump won the support of almost 3 in 10 Hispanic voters in the Florida Republican primary, almost half of Hispanic voters in the Nevada Republican primary, and 26 percent of Hispanic voters in the Texas Republican primary (the latter two States’ Hispanic population being heavily comprised of individuals of Mexican heritage). These are remarkable numbers, considering that the other two closest GOP competitors–Rubio and Cruz–are Hispanic-Americans and native sons in Florida and Texas, respectively.

Of course no one really wants to point out this inconvenient truth: Americans are Americans, and they don’t always march to the progressive, politically correct tune.

THE SCARY EFFICIENCY OF AUTONOMOUS INTERSECTIONS: Self-Driving Cars And No Stoplights.

IT’S BECAUSE MEN CHOOSE TO BE SEXIST, RIGHT? THAT’S GOT TO BE IT. STUPID, SEXIST MEN. A Choice That Explains Why Women Make Less Money Than Men. “It turns out men self select into more competitive industries than women and in turn make more money. It’s all about industry selection.” Men shouldn’t be allowed to do that.

STEVE GREEN EXPLORES MEXIFORNIA: 2016.

California’s government can no longer said to legitimately represent the interests of the people. When semi-clownish geriatrics like Jerry Brown can ignore his state’s real needs — water, jobs, safety — while wasting billions enriching single-party insiders building high-speed trains to nowhere, then it’s safe to say that the polyglot peoples of California no longer live under a legitimate government.

And now if that Bloomberg story I quoted at the top of this article is correct, it would seem that a foreign government may be using citizenship as a weapon to further its own interests via our election.

Under these conditions, how long will the people of California, or at least the southern half of it, continue to look to Washington? How long will they continue to think, “Of course we’re a part of the United States!”

How long can they remain a core?

Read the whole thing.

GERARD VAN DER LEUN: DELETE “HOOK.” INSERT “HEART.”

A LEGISLATIVE PUSH FOR Knife Law reform in New York. Remember, the existing BS on “Gravity Knives” just deprives honest people of useful tools and self-defense, while getting lots of minorities sent to jail for nothing. Even the Village Voice thinks the law needs fixing!

More background here. If only New York could be as progressive as Tennessee on this subject, but that’s probably too much to hope for.

READER BOOK PLUG: Reader Jeb Kinnison’s Substrate Wars series. Three books on Kindle; the first book is only 99 cents. It offers a great escape from today’s reality: “A science fiction thriller set in the US of a not-too-distant future, when the Bill of Rights is ignored and the US is run by the Unity Party, combining the worst of Democrats and Republicans.” Enjoy this unrealistic, but interesting, setting, and be glad that couldn’t happen in real life! . . .

PHOTO: OBAMA AND CHE, TOGETHER AT LAST.

“Righty media is going to spend the rest of the day regaling its audience with reminders of just how much of a subhuman degenerate Che Guevara really was. Here’s Benny Johnson out of the gate quickly with a reminder that Che was hoping for a nuclear attack on the U.S. during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”

Some of America’s more Strangelovian politicians would have no doubt assured us that America could have “absorbed” such an attack.

UPDATE: “Maybe we’re the bad guys. And Iran and Cuba are the good guys. That’s how Obama’s leftist mentors see the world. And just maybe, it’s how he sees it too.”

21ST CENTURY SOLUTIONS: This Guy Fixed His Teeth for Cheap With Homemade, 3-D–Printed Retainers.

KURT SCHLICHTER ON TODAY’S GOP: Astonishingly, the Establishment Losers Have Learned Nothing. Shocking, I know.

SUPREME COURT (UNANIMOUSLY): Second Amendment Protects Stun Guns.

Pretty much as I predicted in my Second Amendment Limitations piece — which, by the way, is still #1 on the SSRN Top Ten Recent Papers chart.

COOL PHOTOS OF A SOLAR ECLIPSE FROM SPACE.