Except for the hateful, cruel, petty people who live in it.

I’d vote that we deport Bad Santa there to some shithole country elsewhere, but I’m afraid that no matter where he is, he’s already squatting in that hole.

I was so impressed when the young woman who was brought here when she was 2 says she didn’t have health insurance for 18 years, and the Republican in back triumphantly announces that she didn’t have health insurance either, and that’s how she lost her eye. Yeah, that’s a great argument for your political party, lady.

No good and getting worse, I guess. He’s teamed up with right-wing fruitcake Dennis Prager to promote something called “No Safe Spaces” which is…I don’t know what it is. An opportunity for conservatives to whine about higher education, or something? Anyway, here’s a promo for it.

Warning: the first third of this video is set on “Utopia University”, of which Corolla says, That campus doesn’t really exist, does it? That doesn’t even look like parody to me. You could run that after Don Lemon’s show on CNN, and it would just play like a commercial. I think you’re going to see that Corolla has a bit of a credibility problem.

No university looks anything like that. I don’t understand the logic of proclaiming the importance of free speech while striving to silence all those liberal voices that make narrow-minded bigots uncomfortable.

Also, further statements that question Corolla’s credibility: in explaining their pairing, he says that Prager has more wisdom than anyone he knows (which might well be true), and that…he’s funny. I think we can safely say that statement is false.

I was relieved — it was made in Green Bay, Wisconsin, not by slave labor from MINNCOR, the Minnesota Department of Corrections. It seems that $700,000 worth of dorm and office furniture for the University of Minnesota is purchased from MINNCOR, but the money is not going to the inmates/workers.

While most inmates languish making less than $1 an hour, public records indicate that Minnesota Department of Corrections executives, including those at MINNCOR, made over $100,000 per year in fiscal year 2015-16. MINNCOR CEO David Milton made $58 an hour, approximately $120,000 per year starting in February 2016. Despite numerous lengthy, in-person conversations Milton declined to speak on the record for this article. Milton and his executive team lease inmate labor to private companies, government entities and nonprofits and manage the prison canteen system – the internal grocery and convenience store for inmates. MINNCOR’s overall sales revenue has expanded to $44 million for 2015 alone, with profits going to the DOC general fund and MINNCOR’s budget.

They’re paid a pittance, and the only place they have to spend that pittance is the company store.

That same year, the state’s disparate canteen systems were consolidated under MINNCOR. 2003 was also the first time that MINNCOR was profitable. Annual profits for 2003 totaled $100,000, jumping to $2.5 million in 2004. Writing in the Stillwater’s prison-produced and award-winning newspaper, Prison Mirror, investigative journalist and inmate Matt Gretz explained that when MINNCOR consolidated the canteen the expectation from inmates was that bulk purchases would cause prices to go down. Instead, canteen prices increased.

Centralization allowed the state to dip more easily into MINNCOR profits as budget cuts abound – putting more pressure on MINNCOR to generate profits. According to annual reports in 2008, canteen sales were 18 percent of MINNCOR’s revenue. By 2014 canteen sales amounted to $10.9 million, almost 25 percent of overall sales revenue for MINNCOR. This means that the single largest portion of money that MINNCOR earns comes from taxing the low wages that the organization pays inmates. After MINNCOR deducts up to 80 percent of an inmate worker’s pay for everything from the cost of confinement to victim restitution and medical co-pays, the little that is left of an inmate’s paycheck often goes to the canteen.

Like I said…slaves.

I wouldn’t boycott MINNCOR, though, since we shouldn’t punish the inmates, but I would think it only fair to arrest and imprison MINNCOR executives for corruption, and put them to work making chairs. I’d buy those.

Take a browse through Nancy McClernan’s blog, especially for the past few weeks. She’s tying all the threads together: evolutionary psychology, human biodiversity, Steve Sailer, Steven Pinker, Jerry Coyne, Phillipe Rushton, the Pioneer Fund, Arthur Jensen, The Bell Curve, all the usual suspects. It’s the ugliest bit of knitting I’ve ever seen.

One of the many interesting examples is this story about how racists tried to use sports statistics to prove the inferiority of black people — they just can’t handle the intellectual demands of playing quarterback, goes the claim. Who is the source for the statistics behind this argument? Steve Sailer.

In one of my essays, I wrote that the position a quarterback is taken in the college draft is not a reliable indicator of his performance as a professional. That was based on the work of the academic economists David Berri and Rob Simmons, who, in a paper published in The Journal of Productivity Analysis, analyze 40 years of National Football League data. Their conclusion was that the relation between aggregate quarterback performance and draft position was weak. Further, when they looked at per-play performance — in other words, when they adjusted for the fact that highly drafted quarterbacks are more likely to play more downs — they found that quarterbacks taken in positions 11 through 90 in the draft actually slightly outplay those more highly paid and lauded players taken in the draft’s top 10 positions. I found this analysis fascinating. Pinker did not. This quarterback argument, he wrote, “is simply not true.”

I wondered about the basis of Pinker’s conclusion, so I e-mailed him, asking if he could tell me where to find the scientific data that would set me straight. He very graciously wrote me back. He had three sources, he said. The first was Steve Sailer. Sailer, for the uninitiated, is a California blogger with a market research background who is perhaps best known for his belief that black people are intellectually inferior to white people. Sailer’s “proof” of the connection between draft position and performance is, I’m sure Pinker would agree, crude: his key variable is how many times a player has been named to the Pro Bowl.

If you’re citing Steve Sailer, you’re really dredging the cesspool. Do go read the rest — scroll down to the bottom of the page, there’s a list of links to this month’s posts, and they’re all good.

Damon Young got hilariously irate with a Trump appointee. But he made a terrible mistake.

Anyway, during a hearing yesterday, Kirstjen Nielsen, Trump’s homeland security chief, claimed not to know that Norway, one of the world’s whitest countries, was in fact one of the world’s whitest countries. Let’s forget for a moment that, if you take Nielsen by her word, it means that the person in charge of keeping America safe from terrorist attacks lacks the general sense of geographic and demographic knowledge you’d find in a moderately intelligent hedgehog. I literally just Googled “children’s books about Norway” and all of them are either about snow or feature characters named “Snojakta.” She is, under oath, claiming to know less about Norwegians than a 3-year-old.

Instead, let’s focus on her name. Her name is Kirstjen Nielsen. This is, if it’s not the world’s whitest name, a name that didn’t win the world’s whitest name contest because it submitted its application too late and couldn’t enter. This name is so white that it just denied me a car loan. THIS IS THE NAME OF A GOTDAMN VIKING! THIS IS THE NAME OF SOMEONE WHOSE MIDDLE NAME IS PROBABLY BROOMHILDA!

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with having a Viking-ass, Norse-god-ass name. BUT THERE’S DEFINITELY SOMETHING WRONG WHEN YOUR NAME IS KIRSTJEN BROOMHILDA RAPUNZEL LANNISTER NIELSEN AND YOU CLAIM NOT TO KNOW WHAT COLOR YOUR GRANDPARENTS’ NEIGHBORS PROBABLY WERE.

I think he was too quick to hand out the prize for whiteness. I would like to point out that I am so white I recognize that that name is more Danish than Norwegian, that I live in Minnesota and did not grow up in Clearwater, Florida where good Vikings would melt, that I am married to a woman of Norwegian/Swedish ancestry with a silent “j” in her last name, that I literally named our daughter after a Norse goddess, that I’m of half-Scandinavian ancestry tainted with the blood of the English/Scots/Irish, who are almost as white, and that I should probably get that prize. And there is a shocking percentage of the Minnesota population who could reasonably contest me for it.

Unless the prize is also for being the dumbest white person on the planet, in which case I will gracefully concede to Ms Nielsen. She has earned it.