ANALYSIS: TRUE. California Is the Model for National Divorce, Not Democratic Domination:

Third, while Teixeira and Leyden point to California as a model for combatting inequality, it’s one of the most unequal states in the nation. The most prosperous parts of the state are not only undeniably beautiful, they’re also populated by a creative and entrepreneurial class that gives each place a distinctive intellectual energy. If you’re rich enough, parts of California are very, very nice places to live. If you’re not, housing prices will keep you out more effectively than the guards at any gated community.

The end result is inequality so great that the nation’s tech titans happen to live in the poverty capital of America. According to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, nearly one out of five state residents is poor.

Finally, California’s progressive supermajority has led to a spate of petty authoritarianism that most Americans reject. I’ve written extensively about how California is seceding from the Constitution. The state has taken direct aim at the First Amendment rights of its pro-life citizens, implemented confiscatory gun-control policies, regulated pronoun usage, and repeatedly attempted to restrict religious liberty. All too often California progressives have demonstrated that “California values” are incompatible with the Bill of Rights.

Read the whole thing.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Famed gay rights lawyer sets himself on fire in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park in protest suicide against fossil fuels.

David Buckel, 60, was found in the park at 6.30am on Saturday before hundreds descended on it to enjoy the warm Spring weather.

He left a note in a bag for police which read: ‘My name is David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide.

‘I apologize to you for the mess.’

The note was left in an envelope labeled ‘for the police’.

He was protesting over climate change, his note read, and the dramatic method was intended as a metaphor for how fossil fuels are destroying the planet.

Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution to be a how-to guide.

HATCHY, HUGE, DIFFERENT: 2018 BMW 640i xDrive Gran Turismo: Not a crossover. Not a wagon. Better than either. I can’t decide if I like the way it looks or not.

21st CENTURY HEADLINES: Arcade fame turns to infamy as Billy Mitchell’s record-setting Donkey Kong score is invalidated.

Found via NRO’s Dan McLaughlin, who tweets, “Imagine dedicating your life to mastering Donkey Kong, only to have it slip away.”

SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: The Al Gore Effect Comes to Minnesota.

(Classical reference in headline.)

TAMARA KEEL: Revisiting the CZ-75 and its Clones.

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FASTER, PLEASE: Viagra Has a Shocking Effect on Cancer, And Could Save Thousands of Lives.

THE IMPORTANCE OF STRIKING SYRIA’S SCIENTIFIC STUDIES AND RESEARCH CENTER: As Claudia Rosett writes, “Leading from in front, President Trump is finally redrawing the red line that President Obama erased in 2013. Whatever the threats and criticisms that will surely follow, the world will be safer for it. The vital message is that America is no longer the hamstrung giant of the Obama era.”

Read the whole thing.

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THE IMPOSSIBLE BURGER comes to White Castle.

IT’S COME TO THIS: USA Today Declares ‘Ebony and Ivory’ Offensive, Insufficiently Woke.

It’s nice to see 2016’s “Guide to Properly Hating Old Movies” is easily adaptable to other mediums as well.  

UPDATE: Given the paucity of rap and hip-hop lyrics given the Central Scrutinizer treatment in the above referenced USA Today article, as NewsBusters asked earlier this week, In the Era of #MeToo, Why Does Hip-Hop Get a Pass?

OUT: INTERNET OF THINGS. In: Internet of Cows.

TO BE FAIR, HE WAS JUST TOO DARN BUSY BEING GUIDED BY THE BEAUTY OF OUR WEAPONS. Doofus: Brian Williams is trending because he referred to President Trump as President Obama (video).

(Classical reference in headline.)

ANDREW FERGUSON RECORDS THE END OF ‘CIVILISATION:’

In the closing moments of the final episode of Civilisation, Clark intended to strike a note of optimism. “When I look at the world about me in the light of these programs, I don’t at all feel as though we are entering on a new period of barbarism,” he said. He shows us the campus of the then-new University of East Anglia. Apple-cheeked college students pop in and out of classrooms, labor over books—the baby boomers as Clark hoped they were in 1969. “These inheritors of all our catastrophes look cheerful enough. . . . In fact, I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well-fed, as well-read, as bright-minded, as curious, and as critical as the young are today.”

Watching at home, we can assume, was the 14-year-old Mary Beard, all a-tingle and raring to go to college herself, where she could use her curiosity and reading and bright-mindedness to prove the great man and his theory wrong.

Read the whole thing. Back in 2013, I described watching Kenneth Clark’s seminal program as akin to reading “Notes from Atlantis” – the postwar British culture that made it simply no longer exists. As Ferguson writes, from the title onward, the BBC’s new sequel, Civilisations (note the title is of course, now plural), “pokes us in the ribs” repeatedly with its successor intellectual culture – a queasy mélange of postmodernism and multiculturalism. Exit quote from Beard, one of the hosts of the new series:

‘We’ know that ‘we’ are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be uncivilised. . . . The inconvenient truth, of course, is that so-called ‘barbarians’ may be no more than those with a different view from ourselves of what it is to be civilised, and of what matters in human culture. In the end, one person’s barbarity is another person’s civilisation.

No. (Nice paraphrase of the motto at Reuters that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” though.) As Saul Bellow famously said in the early 1990s, eternally angering the left, “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus? The Proust of the Papuans? I’d be glad to read him.”

LAUREN SPAGNOLETTI: The 10 Best Alien Films Ever Made.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who still has a soft spot for “Enemy Mine,” but I’m going to have issues with any Best Alien Films list lacking “The Day the Earth Stood Still” or John Carpenter’s 1982 remake of “The Thing.”

ANDREW MCCARTHY thinks the Michael Cohen investigation poses a real threat to Trump.

Meanwhile, from Lee Smith: Robert Mueller’s Beltway Cover-Up: By using the justice system as a political weapon, Mueller and his supporters in both parties are confirming what many Americans already believe: We are not all equal under one law. “Mueller’s job is to obscure the abuses of the US surveillance apparatus that occurred under the Obama administration.”

Flashback: “Hypothesis: The spying-on-Trump thing is worse than we even imagine, and once it was clear Hillary had lost and it would inevitably come out, the Trump/Russia collusion talking point was created as a distraction.”

Plus: “But if they thought Hillary was sure to win, why bother spying on Trump? A sinister reason: To prosecute him — for something, anything they could discover — after he lost, so as to properly cow Hillary’s opposition. That might be true, but on the other hand, LBJ spied on Goldwater when his win was assured, and Nixon did the same vs. McGovern. Why would unthreatened incumbents spy on opponents they expect to lose? Maybe they do it for the same reason a dog licks himself: Because he can.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student faces punishment for posting copies of professor’s email calling conservative students ‘evil.’

PREDICTABLE: #HashtagDiplomacyHasn’tExactlySavedTheWorld—It was four years ago today that Boko Haram militants in war-torn northeastern Nigeria kidnapped hundreds of young schoolgirls. A few escaped. And as a result of negotiations with the militants, about a hundred have since been freed. But more than a hundred are still missing. Some are thought to be dead. And there have been many more group kidnappings by Boko Haram.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, SEGREGATION TODAY, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER EDITION: A student organization at Scripps College will host a pool party Friday night exclusively for people of color, clearly stating that there are “no whites allowed.”

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AFGHANISTAN IN THE SNOW: Exfiltration after an exercise, USAF pararescue and Army helicopters.

MICHAEL BARONE: Speaker Ryan follows the lead of Speaker Reed.

Meanwhile, a more critical assessment from Mickey Kaus.