FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Almost half of California 2014 income taxes paid by top 1 percent.

As Iowahawk tweeted at the start of the month, “California is still a paradise for billionaires and bums. The problem is what it’s like for people in between…If you make $75,000,000/year, there’s no better place than California. If you make $75,000/year, no better place than Texas.”

Related: Considering that many of those one percenters paying the bills in California lean (often perilously) left — even as they’re demonized by their fellow Democrats — it will be fascinating watching the state eat its own seedcorn.

YOU AND I HAVE A RENDEZVOUS WITH SCARCITY: Obama is First President Ever to Not See Single Year of 3% GDP Growth.

(Headline from my February 24th 2009 Silicon Graffiti video, which predicted just such a scenario.)

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: College more dangerous than prison for women AND men when it comes to sexual assault, says Obama admin.

The Obama administration has produced new statistics on prison rape which, taken in conjunction with its widespread claims about college campuses, imply that women and even men are safer from rape in prison than they are on college campuses.

In a recent report from the White House states that 8.5 percent of female inmates and 3.7 percent of male inmates experience sexual assault while in prison. More than half of these incidents are committed by prison and jail staff, though the report acknowledges that “many abuse incidents in prisons involve other inmates as perpetrators.”

If one takes these statistics at face value and compares them to other widely reported statistics used by the White House on campus sexual assault, one could conclude that sexual assault is far more common on college campuses than in America’s prisons. After all, the Obama administration loves to tout deeply flawed self-reported surveys showing 20 percent of women and 5 to 8 percent of men are sexually assaulted on college campuses over a four-year college career.

This would mean that men are twice as likely and women nearly three times as likely to be raped on a college campus as they are in prison.

At least it’s good marketing for Reynolds Online University:

HOW KEN LIVINGSTONE LEFT LABOUR IN TURMOIL AFTER CLAIMING HITLER BACKED MOVING JEWS TO ISRAEL:

Mr Livingstone, who sits on Labour’s National Executive Committee and is co-chairman of the party’s defence review, claimed that Ms Shah’s suggestion that Israel should be “relocated” to the US was not anti-Semitic.

He said that she had been a “smeared” by the “Israel lobby” and even invoked Hitler to support his position.

“There’s been a very well-orchestrated campaign by the Israel lobby to smear anybody who criticises Israeli policy as anti-Semitic,” he said.

“I had to put up with 35 years of this. It’s completely over the top but it’s not anti-Semitic. Let’s remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy was that Jews should be moved to Israel.

“He was supporting Zionism — this is before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.”

Move away slowly; make no sudden moves…

NARRATIVE FAIL: This study found race matters in police shootings, but the results may surprise you. “The conventional thinking about police-involved shootings, and some scientific research, has been that black suspects are more likely to be shot than white suspects because of an implicit racial bias among police officers. But now a new study has found exactly the opposite: even with white officers who do have racial biases, officers are three times less likely to shoot unarmed black suspects than unarmed white suspects.”

SKYNET SMILES: China Debuts Anbot, The Police Robot:

Anbot’s most controversial feature is naturally the onboard ‘electrically charged riot control tool’ (likely a Taser or extendable cattle prod). This can only be fired by the Anbot’s human remote operators (it seems that just like the U.S. military, Chinese policemen do not yet feel comfortable giving armed robots the autonomous capability to fire their weapons). The Anbot’s large size means that it has room to mount other law enforcement gear, like tear gas canisters and other less lethal weaponry.

THX-1138, call your office.

PHOTOS FROM THE TRUMP RALLY LAST NIGHT IN ORANGE COUNTY via Roger Simon, who writes:

This is my third Trump event to witness in person (many more on TV) and it strikes me that they are becoming “happenings” for Middle America. They are unlike political events I have seen before. The most similar I have seen were rallies I attended for Bobby Kennedy years ago. RFK and Trump had and have a real charisma.

Read the whole thing.

(Bumped.)

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Liberal Policies Destroy Small Business.

As the late Tony Snow noted in a 1999 column titled “Queen Tut?” written as Hillary was prepping for her tour of duty as New York’s carpetbagging senator, “When told [in 1993 that HillaryCare] could bankrupt small businesses, Mrs. Clinton sighed, ‘I can’t be responsible for every undercapitalized small business in America.’”

And nothing has changed; last year, Joel Gehrke wrote at NRO, “Clinton noted that small business creation has ‘stalled out,’ to her chagrin. ‘I was very surprised to see that when I began to dig into it,’ she said while campaigning in New Hampshire. ‘Because people were telling me this as I traveled around the country the last two years, but I didn’t know what they were saying and it turns out that we are not producing as many small businesses as we use to.’”

Fortunately, Bernie Sanders has gotten to the root cause of the problem:

As James Taranto, who rescued Bernie’s tweet from the Memory Hole quips, “Millennials are gluttons for punishment. Sanders blames them for the recession; they vote for him anyway.”

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Assad siege of Aleppo could be ‘imminent,’ experts warn.

A government encirclement of the Syrian rebel stronghold of Aleppo could be “imminent,” according to military and humanitarian observers, some of whom point to United Nations-sponsored peace talks as having given the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad maneuvering room.

If Syria’s largest city is surrounded by government troops, the strategic situation in Syria could change very rapidly for the worse, not only for Syrians, but also for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan—and for the Obama Administration, which has banked heavily on the crumbling peace talks to end five years of civil war and an expanding presence for ISIS amid the chaos.

The encirclement would also be a major strategic advance for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has drawn his forces in Syria, but has also been helping the Assad regime conduct more focused military operations under a two-month “cessation of hostilities.”

Smart Diplomacy™

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Yale Votes to Retain Honors for Rabidly Racist Democrat.

WHAT’S PUZZLING YOU IS THE NATURE OF TED’S GAME: Noxious Gasbag Peter King: ‘Cruz Gives Lucifer a Bad Name.’

Related: Cruz: “When Boehner Calls Me Lucifer, He’s Directing That at Americans…What Boehner is angry with is the American people for holding him accountable.”

FASTER, PLEASE: The Collapse of the Old Oil Order.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: WORLD WAR II AMNESIA. “Sixty million people would perish in the six years of war, more than any man-caused or natural calamity in history—and World War II would become one of the few conflicts in history in which the losers suffered far fewer fatalities than did the winners. Yet the lessons of World War II endure and had, until recently, guided our foreign policy successfully.”

Now they don’t guide our foreign policy, and, strangely, our foreign policy isn’t successful. Bad luck, I guess.

SCLEROTIC HYPOCRITICAL GRAY LADY DOESN’T PRACTICE WHAT SHE PREACHES. French dis-connection: The New York Times flees its own labor utopia:

The New York Times, which has never met a pro-union rule it didn’t like, has suddenly found notoriously pro-labor France too expensive a place to do business.

So, as The Post’s Claire Atkinson first reported, the paper is eliminating 70 positions from its Paris operation, with editing and print-production functions relocated to New York and Hong Kong.

To be fair, the Times editorial page has faulted French labor laws. But that hasn’t stopped it from pushing similar insanity here at home.

The Times’ editors are waging a nonstop campaign to impose a $15 minimum wage across America*. They’re also pushing for universal paid-family-leave mandates.

As Robert Conquest once noted in the first of his Three Laws of Politics, “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best” – even Pinch Sulzberger, it turns out.

* Ironically, an earlier, saner Gray Lady warned against such folly.

I HOPE GOOGLE REALIZES WHO IT’S GOTTEN INTO BED WITH, as one of these things is not like the other:

● The Android Administration — Google’s Remarkably Close Relationship With the Obama White House, in Two Charts.

● Is Google Getting Ready to Put Obama on Board of Directors?

● Obama Stands Silent, And Even Piles On, As Europe Attacks Google.

Whether or not Obama lands on the Google board, it’s a very safe bet that after our semi-retired president leaves office, he’s about to become the next Al Gore and Jamie Gorelick, parleying staggering incompetence as a government official into millions of dollars of additional net worth as a boardroom-hopping corporate executive. Where’s that revolving door surtax when you need it?

AND TO THINK BARACK OBAMA ACTED AS IF ART HISTORY IS USELESS: Off the Beat and Into a Museum: Art Helps Police Officers Learn to Look. “To teach people how to notice details they might otherwise miss, Amy E. Herman, an expert in visual perception, likes to take them to museums and get them to look at the art. Recently she escorted a group of New York City police officers to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and asked them to describe some of the things they saw. . . . A painting has many functions. It’s a cultural artifact, an aesthetic object, an insight into a time and a place, a piece of commerce. To Ms. Herman, it’s also an invaluable repository of visual detail that can help shed light on, say, how to approach a murder scene.”

As Virginia Postrel noted, Art History requires the mastery of a lot of visual information, and places a lot of emphasis on accurate, formal description of images. That said, Obama had a point on the undervaluing of skilled trades.

MY PEOPLE: Marc Randazza Wrote An Amicus Brief About Klingon, And It’s Magnificent.  One of the first reviews of my first book was in Klingon.  Like the original Shakespeare, I was told.

A ROUNDUP: Hugo Stuff.

PAYING FOR THE ROPE THAT WILL HANG YOU: Congress Warned Against Sending Taxpayer Funds to Russia for Rocket Engines.

YOU KNOW, THIS SHOCKED FACE IS GETTING KIND OF WORN: Obama Admin Dodges Congressional Inquiry Into Illicit Iranian Missile Tests .

IT MUST BE DONE: The Obligatory Post-Hugo-Finalists Post.

DOOMED TO REPEAT: World War II Amnesia.

OH, GOOD.  CRUZ IT IS, IF I HAVE TO WRITE HIM IN: Boehner Calls Cruz ‘Lucifer In The Flesh,’ Gives Best Reason Ever To Vote For Cruz.

DO THEY ACTUALLY HEAR THEMSELVES???? College more dangerous than prison for women AND men when it comes to sexual assault, says Obama admin.

RUNNING OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: The Death of a Nation.