No Tricks Zone:

[T]wo Dutch researchers, Marc Cornelissen, 46, and Philip de Roo, 30, are assumed to have died in the Arctic. “They wanted to collect data about the melting ice cover.”

According to Cornelissen’s Twitter site, the pair began their expedition in late March. By early April they has set off on skis across Arctic sea ice accompanied by a husky. They had been posting daily reports at Twitter.

ResoluteAt times Cornelissen tweeted of unusually warm temperatures and even posted audios claiming to be skiing in shorts.

On April 29 things took a turn for the worse and the pair sent out an SOS while traveling near Bathurst Island, approximately 200 kilometers north of Resolute Bay.

On April 30 Cornelissen’s Twitter site posted that the two were missing.

Spiegel writes that it is suspected that one of the pair fell through “thin ice” and that their situation went unknown for a week. A Canadian search party found one body but the other member of the party remains missing. It is assumed that he has perished. Only the husky dog survived.

The site Cold Facts here posted a report stating that the ice conditions there were “very poor”. The two researchers are said to have been experts in their fields. Question: Why were the two trekking on ice conditions described as “very poor”? Shouldn’t experts know better?

Investigative journalist Seymour Hersch has a major exposé in the London Review of Books revealing the astonishing and extraordinarily scale of Barack Obama’s lies regarding the killing of Osama bin Laden. Hersch is a hard-core radical anti-American leftist but, in this case, I expect he’s telling the truth.

And the truth seems to be:

1. Osama bin Laden was being held in Abottabad as a prisoner of ISI, the Pakistani Intelligence Service, which was using him as a hostage to keep al Qaeda from attacking Pakistan. The Saudis were funding his detention.

2. There was no courier trail. A former Pakistani intelligence spilled the beans to the CIA in order to get the offered reward.

3. The Pakistanis knew we were coming, and reluctantly agreed to let the US conduct the hit under threat of loss of US aid.

4. There was no heroism and no firefight. Osama had no guards. He was a helpless invalid and a prisoner and the Seals were under orders simply to kill him out of hand.

5. Osama was not in touch with, or directing, al Qaeda operations, and there was no treasure trove of intelligence.

6. Barack Obama then completely broke his word to the Pakistanis. There was supposed to be a delayed announcement that Osama had been killed by a drone strike on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush, no mention of the house in Abottabad, and no clues whatsoever of Pakistani involvement or cooperation. By exploiting the killing of Osama for personal prestige immediately and abandoning the agreed-upon “drone strike” story, Obama double-crossed Pakinstan’s Intelligence Service, leading to a four-year-long rupture in relations.

7. There was never any burial at sea or Islamic service. Osama was literally shot to pieces, and the Seals happily tossed body parts out of the helicopter while flying home over the Hindu Kush.

Wow!

The Yale Alumni Mag leaks five interior shots of the interior of a particular building on High Street.

Bob Owens argues, perfectly correctly, that policemen should not be carrying Glocks.

In terms of mechanical design, there are few flaws with Glock pistols. If a law enforcement officer, soldier or citizen does exactly what they are supposed to do all of the time with cyborg certainty, there will be no problems with the Glock or other popular pistols mimicking its basic design. Unfortunately, “RoboCop” is only a movie, and humans are liable to make similar mistakes over and over again.

The underlying problem with these pistols is a short trigger pull and the lack of an external safety. In real-world encounters, a short trigger pull can be lethal, in part because a significant percentage of law enforcement officers — some experts say as high as 20% — put their finger on the trigger of their weapons when under stress. According to firearms trainers, most officers are completely unaware of their tendency to do this and have a hard time believing it, even when they’re shown video evidence from training exercises.

For more than 35 years, officer-involved accidental discharges with Glocks and Glock-like weapons have been blamed on a lack of training or negligence on the part of the individual cops. What critics should be addressing instead is the brutal reality that short trigger pulls and natural human reflexes are a deadly combination.

Though short trigger-pull guns dominate the law enforcement market, they aren’t the only game in town. A number of major and minor agencies use guns with much longer double-action triggers that are just as easy to fire deliberately but that are much harder to fire accidentally. The half-inch difference of trigger travel may not sound like much, but it can be the difference between life and death.

Among the many very bad ideas that proliferated in Western society since the 1960s is the pernicious notion that one should have a trigger-safety and go around treating a semi-automatic pistol as if it was a revolver.

This has even led to people going around asserting that you don’t want a pistol with a real safety, because it’s so hard to move a safety lever to the off position.

Glocks are cheap, reliable, and easy to shoot accurately… but they are a very bad choice for careless people and non-experts. Really, the Glock design is best carried, the way the Israelis do, with an empty chamber.

Gaston Glock should have put a regulation safety on his design.

Why, one well might wonder, are all sorts of people on the Left, and even Bill O’Reilly on the Right, hurrying to condemn Pam Geller rather than the Muslims extremists who wanted to murder her for the violence in Garland, Texas?

Ace has it figured out.

This is about class. This is all about class.

This is about, specifically, the careerist, cowardly, go-along-to-get-along mores of the Upper Middle Class, the class of people whose parents were all college educated, and of course are college educated themselves; the class that dominates our thought-transmitting institutions (because non-college educated people are more of less shut out of this industry).

It is a class which is deathly afraid of social stigma, and lives in class-based fear being grouped with the wrong people, and which is more interested in Career, quite frankly, than in the actual tradecraft of that Career, which is clarity of thought and clarity of expression.

Thus, our institutions of thought propagation are dominated by the very people who can be easily cowed by the Social Justice Warriors, and who will, therefore, adjust their speech in order to not run afoul of the thoughtless — and frequently lunatic — thugs of the censorious left.

Read the whole thing.

Disinformation links the Hog Island Press Cryptozoological Map of the United States, which is at least amusing.

Some states haven’t got any imaginary monsters. Connecticut and Rhode Island, for instance, are out of luck. Pennsylvania gets Thunderbirds, which I and Wikipedia have never heard of.

You can buy a pretty decent house and a major chunk of history in Britain right now for a mere £1,600,000 ($2,466,543).

Winkworth Salisbury Estate Agents:

The Manor House in Downton is tucked away next to the church in a peaceful corner of this bustling village. It is said to be the longest continually inhabited house in the South of England, from its original foundation as a chapel in around 850, and later as a medieval hall house. In the 16th Century, Elizabeth I leased the house from Winchester College and gifted it first to Thomas Wilkes, Clerk to the Privy Council, and then to Sir Walter Raleigh, who made significant home improvements, not least to impress Queen Elizabeth when she came to stay at the Manor House in 1586. The Raleigh family remained in occupation for the next hundred years and the Raleigh coat of arms is still to be found over the fireplace in the drawing room (historically known as the ‘Great Hall’ or ‘Parlour’).

Via Country Life.

After Ilya Repin, Бурлаки на Волге [Barge-Haulers on the Volga], 1873, Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.

The Telegraph reports on Mr. Putin’s embarrassing failure.

A new Russian tank announced with much fanfare as superior to Western machines stalled during a dress rehearsal for Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on Thursday.

The T-14 Armata, making only its second public appearance, ground to a halt on Red Square, opposite Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum.

Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minster, was reportedly forced to approach the tank to find out what had happened; servicemen then tried to hook it up to another military vehicle and tow it away. …

The stalled tank – which was stationary for about 15 minutes – was an embarrassment for the military. Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of defence, called the T-14 “a beauty” earlier this week, and Russian experts have been lauding its superiority to Western rivals such as the US Abrams and British Challenger.

The T-14 Armata is to be the main battle tank of Russia’s ground forces, and 2,300 are expected to be produced for the army by 2020. It has a remotely-controlled turret with an automatic weapons loading system and an armoured capsule for the three-man crew.

Scott Grannis calculates just how much economic growth we’ve lost, for some unknown reason, over the course of the last six years.

Real GDP growth in the first quarter was weaker than expected (0.2% vs. 1.0%), but it wasn’t much of a surprise. It’s now been almost six years that the economy has managed only meager growth—about 2 ¼% per year on average. As a result, by my calculations, real GDP is a little over 10% below its long-term trend potential. That’s more than $2 trillion in lost income every year, and it’s getting worse. …

The chart above compares the level of real GDP to a long-term trend growth rate of 3.1%. This confirms once again that we are stuck in the slowest recovery ever. It’s my belief that the persistence of slow growth is largely the result of bad policies, though demographics likely plays a part too. Corporate profits have been very strong, but business investment has been very weak. Without new investment and risk-taking, we are not going to see a pickup in productivity which is, at the end of the day, what drives stronger growth and higher living standards. Investment has been weak probably because marginal tax rates and regulatory burdens have increased significantly in the past six years. In a sense, and expansion of government has suffocated the private sector.

Things are not going to change much for the better until policies become more pro-growth.

Whether the persistence of relatively weak growth is a reason for the Fed to continue to keep short-term interest rates extraordinarily low is one of the key questions of our time. I don’t see how low interest rates stimulate investment or enhance productivity. Only private initiatives can do that.

On the bright side, if policies do become more favorable, there is tremendous upside potential to look forward to. Closing the GDP gap would be nothing short of exhilarating.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin attempts to calculate the impact of the 2010 Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank) on the growth of the economy.

What did Dodd-Frank do to the effective tax rate on banks? Consider, first, the burden of complying with the new regulations. The American Action Forum’s analysis of the Federal Register indicates that the cumulative burden (including the market value of paperwork hours for compliance) is roughly $14.8 billion annually. Notice that after-tax income in the presence of the burden is:

[rL – C – Burden](1-tB)

where r is interest on loans (L), C is the cost of acquiring funds and other operations, and tB is the tax rate on banks. Suppose that instead of a burden, the same after-tax income was generated by simply raising the tax rate to t’. Then, by definition:

[rL – C – Burden](1-tB) = [rL – C](1-t’)

[which] can be re-arranged to yield:

t’ = tB + (1-tB)[Burden/(rL-C)]

To put some empirical meat on [this], the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) Quarterly Banking Profile (QBP) provides information on taxes ($67.5 billion) and net income ($151.2 billion) that permit one to compute an initial tax rate of 31 percent. Using the AAF burden data and (11) yields an increase to 37.8 percent from compliance burdens.

A similar approach can be used to transform the roughly 2 percentage point rise in the leverage ratio of the banking sector (from 7.5 to 9.5 percent) from 2008 to 2014 into a rise in the effective tax rate. The banking sector responded to Dodd-Frank by holding more equity capital, thus require it to have greater earnings to meet the market rate of return – the same impact as raising taxes. In this case, the higher leverage ratio translates into a further increase in the effective tax rate to 40.3 percent, for a total rise of 9.2 percent.

Collecting results, the impact on economic growth is a decline in the per capital growth rate of 0.059 percentage points annually. Is this a big deal? Consider lowering the growth rate in the Congressional Budget Office baseline projections by exactly this amount between 2016 and 2025. The lower rate of economic growth translates into a total loss of $895 billion in GDP or $3,346 for every member of the working age (16 and older) population over those 10 years.

Main Street in my 1950s Hometown

Zman listens to David Brooks bloviating about the Baltimore rioting at the Times, and marvels at how much money and liberty was wasted on the effort to make the American underclass equal, how futile it all seems and just how much has been destroyed in the process.

As the Boomers begin falling into the abyss, they have to look around and wonder if it was worth it. If you were born in 1950, for example, you grew up in America that is vastly different than today. It’s one your grandchildren will never enjoy. The trillions spent knocking down what you inherited could maybe have been spent more wisely. …

Put another way, the organic ways in which society managed the unproductive classes were blasted to bits by a bunch of people convinced they knew better than the dozens of generations that came before them. The proposed replacement for those ways have utterly failed, meaning everything guys like Brooks grew up believing was nonsense after all. Meathead is learning that Archie was mostly right.

Read the whole thing.

They’ve devoted the last 50 years to improving the condition of the black underclass, now they’re beginning the project of making being Gay equal, too.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.