Read it.

As that piece reported, Apple not only does its utmost to avoid paying federal taxes in the U.S., but also to minimize its taxes at the state and local level.

How evil. As if this asshole leftist writer doesn’t do the exact same thing whenever he gets a chance.

One favorite trick: Nevada. The Times: “With a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states. Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains. California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.”

Hint: Maybe if California’s tax rate were like Nevada’s, Apple would stay there. Why does Nevada have a zero corporate tax rate? Well, perhaps because they figure that they make enough off of people fleeing California that they don’t need it. Or perhaps they realize that corporations don’t ‘pay’ taxes, they just pass them on to consumers.

If Apple really cares about a shortage of homegrown engineering talent, then it should pay taxes to fund the institutions that could address that problem.

Like the California University system, which has gone from the best in the world to among the worst? What incentive does Apple have to throw money down that rathole? The assumption here is that the only thing needed to make America’s schools great again is more money, totally ignoring the fact that spending on these very same schools has expanded dramatically during the exact period when they starting circling the drain. Going by history, this correlation suggests that cutting funding for these schools might actually make them better. But elementary logic is a foreign subject to left-wing writers.

Read it.

There’s an old saying in journalism—a story just “too good to check out.”  You can tell the media’s bias not only from what they won’t check out, but what they won’t even consider checking out, let alone reporting.

News item: a deranged young man, James Holmes, shoots up a Denver theater last summer killing 12, and ABC News’s Brian Ross goes on the air to note that there’s a “James Holmes” affiliated with a Tea Party group in the area.  Didn’t bother to check it out; it was too good not to rush to broadcast.  Turns out there was no connection.

News item: following the bombing of the Boston marathon, a host of left-leaning media types hoped it would turn out to be a “white American” and not a Muslim extremist.  NPR’s Diana Temple-Raston speculated on air that it was likely right-wing extremists behind the bombing because it was Hitler’s birthday that week, and Hitler’s birthday is “big” for the right.

News item: Terrorists behead a British soldier in broad daylight, and then proclaim to bystanders that “They won’t stop fighting until you leave us alone.”  And on the network news broadcasts I took in tonight I did not hear the word “Islamic” mentioned once in connection to the story, which even Janet Napolitano can’t spin into something other than terrorism.  Wouldn’t want to “speculate,” as Brian Ross might put it.

Of course.

On Monday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) used the devastating Oklahoma tornado as an excuse to bash Republicans for denying global warming and implied Republicans were responsible for actually allowing the destructive natural disaster to occur.

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together.”

After blaming natural disasters in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas on global warming and Republicans, Whitehouse continued his rant by criticizing the Republicans he blamed for then asking the government for federal aid dollars.

Democrats, always living at the intersection of shameless and stupid.

Read it.

‘How DARE you take entirely legal steps to minimize your tax burden! You crooks!’

Next step: Accusing Apple employees of crossing streets at crosswalks in order to avoid jaywalking tickets, and of driving under the speed limit.

I swear, these people…. And McCain, that crypto-Democrat, is the worst of the lot.

Read it.

But there was a consensus!

Read it.

From the beginning, there have been two big questions about the administration’s deceptive spin on Benghazi: How were the talking points whittled down to virtually nothing from the CIA’s original draft? And how did a previously obscure YouTube video gain such prominence in the administration’s explanation of what happened in Benghazi?

Read it.

A major study of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed papers in the climate-science literature has – again – proven that among climate scientists, an overwhelming percentage agree with the consensus view that human activity causes global warming.

Not mentioned is the fact that if you don’t agree with the consensus view that human activity causes global warming, you won’t get a peer-reviewed paper published in the climate-science literature. Rather changes the perspective.

Read it.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

As the former head of an explicitly racist organization, I suppose he ought to know.

Read it.

MailMany modern Europeans have a special ability to piss themselves when the subject of firearms comes up, and the international worry-storm triggered by Defense Distributed’s development and distribution of plans for a fully 3D-printed, single-shot pistol have created just the latest opportunity for merriment and mayhem in Great Britain. In a story full of very nicely staged assassinesque photos of reporters clutching a “Liberator” pistol in public, the Daily Mail reports how it printed out the gun and “smuggled” it onto the Eurostar train, past security, “alongside hundreds of unsuspecting travellers.”

Read it.

I am not inclined to trust in the intellectual capacity of a white guy who wears his hair like he wishes he were a black guy, but you never know.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never heard of him.

Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

In other words, a Child of the Crust. I dislike him already.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world.

And of course nothing says ‘I’m an individualist and war against a hive-mind world’ like a white guy wearing dreadlocks. No shit.

Read it.

Why is he wasting so much time on ‘not-news’? Where would Woodward and Bernstein be today if they’d gone running after some ancient shit like that? Oh, wait….

Read it.

Feel free to use this information to construct a News Story Bingo card. Modern ‘journalists’ have very little imagination and even less creativity, so they all follow the talking points issued by the White House and the New York Times.

Read it.

 A New York Times story posted online Sunday evening and appearing at Column 1 on Page 1 in today’s print edition included a picture of 1995 Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh — hardly a jihadist, at least not directly — alongside that of three real jihadists: alleged Ft. Hood mass murderer Nidal Hasan, foiled Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, and accused Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Another curiosity is the difference between the official headline of Scott Shane’s report (“A Homemade Style of Terror: Jihadists Push New Tactics”) and the browser window title (“Terrorists Find Online Education for Attacks”). That’s interesting, because the presence of the “online education” and the following paragraphs in Shane’s report effectively punch a gaping hole in the official meme, most strongly propagated by Boston Mayor Tom Menino and President Barack Obama, that Tsarnaev and his now-dead brother Tamerlan “acted alone”….

John Hinderaker faces a serious problem.

It is not easy to select the dumbest article to appear in the New York Times in any given week. Even if we exclude columns by Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman on the ground of lifetime achievement, there is plenty of idiocy to choose from. My nominee for this week is this piece by Nancy DiTomaso, titled “How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment.” Ms. DiTomaso, a professor at Rutgers business School, undertakes to explain persistently high unemployment among African-Americans. Some would say the obvious culprit is the anti-growth policies of the Obama administration, but Ms. DiTomaso is not interested in turning over that particular rock. Her starting point is quite different….

Jim Goad blows the whistle on a popular modern scam.

Meg Lanker-Simons, who I’ll presume hyphenates her surname to prove she’s not beholden to the patriarchy, is a bespectacled female wildebeest who grazes the campus of the University of Wyoming, always on the lookout for sexual harassment but never quite able to find it.

On Thursday she will appear in court to face misdemeanor charges that she interfered with a police investigation by fabricating an online male identity who claimed he wanted to “hatefuck” her and thus transform her into a “good Republican bitch.” After this initial—and, according to police, self-generated—post on April 24, Lanker-Simons responded by saying, “I’m left to wonder if there’s someone out there with a violent fantasy about me….”

As if. Here’s a picture. There’s a feminist fantasy and no mistake.

Simons, an award-winning blogger for Think Progress who is also chums with terrorist bomber Bill Ayers, appeared to bask like a whale shark in the odd sort of attention that only modern-day victims, real or imagined, seem to enjoy. That is, until a warrant for her arrest was issued.

Rather than upbraiding her for wasting public resources and staining the school’s reputation, the University of Wyoming issued a statement that Meg’s arrest should not be remembered as an example of third-wave feminism gone psycho, but it should be honored in that it “sparked an important discussion” about how the school has “no tolerance for sexual violence,” even if, well, a mentally unbalanced woman is simply imagining it.

Which appears to be happening an awful lot these days.

Read it.

A few months ago, when a clip aired revealing that current Arab Spring president of Egypt Morsi had, before he was elected, maintained that the Jewish people are “apes and swine”, it became apparent to any rational observer of the mainstream media that the mainstream media’s knowledge of Islam is an inverse limit approaching zero. Like one of those horrendous calculus strings as things go from bad to worse, the media either didn’t report Morsi’s sentiments because it is salaciously inconvenient, or chose to obfuscate by appeals to western ignorance of the nuances of the region, alleged Israeli atrocities, and its flagship ideology, Islam.

Obfuscation is the latest and only tactic left for the media in all matters concerning Islam and Muslims, a tactic not afforded to any other group. It has hallmarks of an affirmative action mindset, where everything is reduced to grievance and historical justification, and causes are deduced from those grievances.  And in so being, it is highly incoherent. Tangentially, as an easily accessible example, the conclusion that is often nimbly deduced from this mindset is that nationalism is bad because nationalism is the cause of the abuse of which Muslims have been subjected; whether it be the French, the British, Israelis or the Russians, a nation and their xenophobic national pride or colonial avarice is to blame.  But without an idea of a collective nation or culture, what use is the argument of collective grievance? And if it is of no use in regards to the French, but in fact a source of great self-deprecation, why is it used in respect to the Chechens, the Palestinians, or, for that matter, the Tibetans?

Nobody bothers to answer these questions because nobody bothers to ask them. Rather, the western powers are subjected to the idiocy of a one David Sirota when its civilians are killed and maimed.

Read it.

A police investigation of the incident led to an examination (under search warrant) of Lanker-Simons computer. At that point police “obtained substantial evidence verifying that the offending Facebook post came from Lanker-Simons’ computer.” Lanker-Simons denied the accusation but was given a citation for making a “false statement” to police. She has now retained an attorney who says she will plead not guilty at her arraignment.

I blame Emmanuel Goldstein. He’s everywhere that Trotsky isn’t.

Read it. Or don’t.

As an author, and one that is currently living on unemployment insurance payments, DRM-free scares the shit out of me. Every book I’ve ever published has been pirated. Some I have even found in the “/tmp” directory of open HTTP servers. Every time I see my books pirated I die a little inside.

So get a real job. There’s no law that says you have to be a writer.

Writing is very difficult for me. People don’t realize how hard it is. How do I stop procrastinating and sit down to write? I eliminate everything else “tempting” from my life for a year or two until the book is done. Do you know what’s more tempting to do than writing? Everything. This basically means anything fun… eliminated. It kills my nights and weekends. It kills my social life. I say “no” to every invitation, movie night, gaming night, etc. When the book is done I always hold a big party to celebrate but also to re-introduce myself to my friends and loved ones that I’ve haven’t seen in so long.

If you hate it so much, why do it? There’s no law that says you have to be a writer. I’d advise you to get into an un’piratable’ line of work. Plumbing, say. Or maybe carpentry.

So what if you really really really want to be a writer? Write! Doesn’t mean you are somehow entitled to make a living at it. I’d dearly love to be able to make a living as a teacher, too, but it doesn’t pay shit, so I don’t do that as my day job. I’m sure the guy who quit working in order to get a degree in Puppetry, for which there is no apparent commercial demand, feels just as pregnant as you do. But you’ll both have to get over it, or starve.

Read it.

Climate change has become the all-purpose culprit for seemingly every problem, from AIDS to zoonotic diseases. Just this week, Democrats in the House of Representatives floated a resolution declaring that climate change could lead to increased prostitution. Meanwhile, in California, the press is trumpeting new research predicting doom for the state’s legendary wine industry. “Study: California Can Kiss Its Vineyards Goodbye,” a San Jose Mercury News headline blared last month. Apparently, climate activists think that if they threaten everyone’s favorite pinot noir, we’ll all roll over for their anti-energy agenda—though how much more rolling California can do is unclear, since it has already imposed a go-it-alone cap-and-trade program designed to solve global warming in one state.

Read it.

Brown Daily Herald opinions columnist Cara Newlon recently wrote in her piece “Don’t Rape” that despite the fact that one in four coeds are victims of rape or attempted rape, and that one in 12 male students commit these crimes, people are not talking about the subject enough.

So why is no one talking about this widespread issue? One reason is that it is not widespread. The campus rape pandemic seems to be a theory based upon poor survey methodology and repeated lies.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

One of the nation’s top advocates for paid sick leave utilizes unpaid interns who lack the pay and benefits for which the group lobbies.

The National Partnership for Women & Families (NPWF), a lucrative nonprofit that lobbies for mandatory paid sick leave laws in cities and states across the country, advertised part and full-time internships on its website that come without compensation or benefits.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

“They’ll have young adults working 40 hours a week for them without pay or benefits and at the same time they’re demanding that employers offer sick time to part-time employees,” he said. “If they’re offering this false narrative—that you can create these mandates without hurting the unemployment rate—they should at least be true to their values.”

First World Problem.

There is no molehill so small that some humorless retard can’t make into a mountain. Feminists have a particular talent in this regard. (You can tell they’re feminists because they think that wearing the traditional tin-foil hats is a surrender to patriarchy.)

Read it.

Many things strike me about the gender-studies crowd, but one thing that is so obvious is that, as an “academic” discipline, they sure just make it up as they go along. And they are far more at odds with any current science than anything you will get from any religion department. There seems to be more evidence for Bigfoot than there is for the basic assumptions these folks operate under.

Erick Erickson turns over a rock and finds — surprise! — the lamestream media.

It is amazing that within a one week period the media went from speculating that right wingers were celebrating Hitler’s birthday on tax day to blaming Chechen nationalism to hearing the bomber say he was inspired by Islam to announcing it’s not him, it’s us to blame.

Had it been a tea partier who launched a terror attack at the Boston Marathon, the media would spend weeks blaming Republicans, conservatives, talk radio rhetoric, and Fox News hosts for inspiring the bombing.

But because the bomber himself says he was inspired by his religious faith and that faith happens to be Islam, the media will ascribe other reasons to explain the attack that are more palatable to the its liberal sensibilities. As often happens in these cases, the media quickly descends into blaming America first.

Read it.

What MSNBC fails to realize is that Obama hasn’t diverted from the Bush Doctrine one iota. Sure, maybe he’d rather call Republicans ‘enemies’ than terrorists and uses drones more than Bush, but: He kinda mostly continued with Bush’s policy in the context of prevention. Obama began withdrawal from Iraq on Bush’s schedule, he called for a Bush-esque surge in Afghanistan, he never closed Gitmo like he promised, he extended the scope and duration of the Patriot Act, he ordered drone strikes without due process (Bush called it preemption) — revive? Obama has never stopped Bush’s approach to the war on terror. What’s more, Obama ordered interrogation before Miranda which drew bipartisan criticism.

Steve Sailer is tracking the Thought Police so you don’t have to.

… It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.I would presume the motivation for this would be for the convenience of English / Womyn’s Studies majors and the like. (I could look it up on the Talk page, if I were interested enough.) It sounds like a bad idea, but one that my sources at Sexism Central tell me was not on their radar for implementation in the 2013 Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy.

And thank God for that….

The Crimson Reach is fed up.

Two young male Chechnyan Muslims decided to bomb strangers at a public event. Conjecturing and brainstorming the oh so huge probability-space of possible reasons why just really isn’t the sort of rocket science our commentariat desperately wants it to be.

Amen.

Read it. Do so thoroughly, because I feel a rant coming on.

This article illustrates the sort of crap that passes for thinking among Voices of the Crust these days.

There are two labor markets nowadays. There’s the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional.

‘Horrbly dysfunctional’ is a pretty strong term. This guy must be a trained economist, right, to justify using so strong a term about a natural pattern of human activity that, after all, works whether you want it to or not? Well, as it turns out, no:

 Matthew O’Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic covering business and economics. He has previously written for The New Republic.

As it turns out, he’s Just Another Left Journalist. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Okay, let’s look at his journalism.

Long-term unemployment is a terrifying trap. Once you’ve been out of work for six months, there’s little you can do to find work. Employers put you at the back of the jobs line, regardless of how strong the rest of your resume is. After all, they usually don’t even look at it.

The first thing that popped into my mind is a question: Why? I find this situation as counter-intuitive as the writer does, but when I come across such a thing, I want to dig into it. Why are employers — apparently, almost universally — doing this unexpected thing? There’s something going on here that we don’t see. Very puzzling. Ah! But we have an experienced, highly-paid journalist on the case. Let’s see what he finds out.

Except that he doesn’t. Nowhere in this article is any indication that he found out why, or that he even looked. Employers are being shits, and that’s all there is to it. They must be Really Evil People, just picking on a bunch of victims Because They Can.

Let’s be clear. Ghayad’s field study shows employers discriminate against the long-term unemployed.

Ooooh, discrimination. That’s pretty scary. Call in the torturers. But people discriminate all the time, and Voices of the Crust raise no objection. Planned Parenthood discriminates against unborn children, pretty severely at times, and that’s okay. The Obama administration discriminates against white people, and that’s just fine. Federal give-away programs discriminate against anybody who isn’t of the correct Victim Class, and everybody’s good with it. The tax code discriminates against rich people, and that’s not a problem. I discriminate against Mexican food, primarily because I don’t like Mexican food, and I’m not thrown in jail. (Yet, anyway.)

Still, you’d think that any rational adult, much less an experienced journalist, would be interested in the question Why? But this guy is not. (Speculation as to whether journalists qualify as rational adults is an exercise left to the reader.)

Well, okay, we don’t know why. And if we don’t know why, we can’t really start trying to ‘fix’ it, can we? Ah, my friend, you underestimate the Left Journalist mind — there is an answer, the same answer they have to every problem they sort-of-look-into: More Government.

It’s time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed.

For a guy who didn’t bother to look into why a situation is happening, he seems awfully quick with a solution, doesn’t he? Let’s just have government pick up the slack, with all of that extra money they have, no doubt distilled out of unicorn farts.

The worst possible outcome for all of us is if the long-term unemployed become unemployable. That would permanently reduce our productive capacity.

The worst possible outcome? For all of us? I suggest that the worst possible outcome is for the government to become the default employer for those who can’t get a job, using all the money that they don’t have any more; by that reasoning, the government would be buying all those buggy whips that nobody needs anymore.

And it’s not a problem for those of us who have a job, or can get a job in less than six months — obviously this guy doesn’t read his own writing. Lefty Journalists just like to take molehills and make them into Mount Rushmore (awaiting the addition of Barack Obama’s smiling visage).

And I’ve got news for you, neighbor: THEY’RE ALREADY UNEMPLOYABLE. YOU JUST BITCHED ABOUT IT. The question is WHY and you went right by it as if it were invisible (which, I suppose, to a Left Journalist it is). DO YOUR JOB. FIGURE OUT WHY. Then maybe we’ll listen to your proposal on how to fix it.

We can do better, and we need to start doing so now. We can’t afford long-term thinking in either the short or the long-term.

Let that one sink in for a bit. We can’t afford long-term thinking, as if short-term thinking ever solved a problem for longer than the short term. No, Mr Lefty Journalist, long-term thinking is precisely what we need, and badly; and precisely what we AREN’T GETTING: Not from you, not from your fellow ‘journalists’, and not from the people who hold the Reins Of Power.

And THAT’S the real problem here. One in which you appear not interested.

And they pay people good money to write this swill. I’m in the wrong line of work, obviously.

Read it.

An article by a glass-half-full person who is probably in the tank for Obama the Economy Killer.

Read it.

 There are people on the Internet who become utterly convinced of their own awesome powers of observation. They read “Red Pill Blogs” and see the real world for how it really is. To these folks, it’s all a big conspiracy* and if they nose through the right Government Documents, they’ll discover the real X-Files. The Kenyan Birth Certificate, Tom Fife’s evening in Moscow, the Metallurgical evidence that fire doesn’t really melt steel, it’s all there on the Internet somewhere – probably in the Man-O-Sphere.

Read it.

Hint: It’s agin ‘em.

 The smartest, most literate, most influential minds of America have something mordant and deeply wrong infecting the core of their souls. No publication epitomizes this sarcoma more completely than Salon Magazine. Salon Magazine’s commentary following the Boston Marathon Terror Bombing provides further evidence that America’s most well-educated and carefully trained minds are in the midst of the iniquitous process of turning our nation into just the sort of evil we used to stand up and fight.

Quite frankly, I’d rather live next to Timothy McVeigh than Osama bin Laden. (That would be an interesting poll to take.)

 Just as every INGSOC needs a Goldstein; every Progressive needs a good Boogeyman to make the proletariat perform another idiot dance. Salon Magazine wants a good, stereotypical, White Male. They would even prefer a Bible-believing Christian if available. They hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a !WHITE! American. Like all good Progressives, they have another racial quota to fill.

Read it.

Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding and defies a rise in global greenhouse gas emissions.

It’s not hard. Repeat after me: ‘I was wrong.’ Say that ten times.

David Friedman blows the whistle.

 A recent post by Chuck Marr on a Huffington Post blog provides a nice demonstration of how to use true facts to support a false claim. It contains a series of charts with information on taxes, mostly federal. One of them is labeled: “Bush Tax Cuts Heavily Tilted to the Top,” and shows that the percentage increase in after-tax income as a result of the tax cuts was almost three times as large for taxpayers with incomes of more than a million dollars as for those with incomes of $40,000-$50,000.

What it does not mention, but what one can see from other charts on the page, is that high income taxpayers pay in federal taxes about three times as large a fraction of their income as middle income tax payers. So if the tax cuts reduced everyone’s taxes by the same percentage, the result would have been almost exactly what the chart shows. Indeed, the author could have made his claim even more striking by pointing out that taxpayers near the bottom of the income distribution got nothing out of the tax cuts—and neglecting to mention that the reason was that they were not paying any taxes.

It’s all about what fits the Narrative, and a Voice of the Crust like Huffington Post gets with the program.

Read it.

Similar to the classes Communist regimes used to run where students indulged in ‘self-criticism’ for being so gauche as to be not workers or peasants.

Of course, Officially Non-White people could eliminate all of this ‘white privilege’ merely by ‘acting white’ — which, of course, they will never do.

Deborah Copaken Kogan, as one might expect from a female writing in The Nation, demonstrates that even people who make their living from words can’t seem to grasp that ‘inequality’ and ‘inequity’ are not synonyms. Ah, well. Life is full of whiners.

Read it.

If by ‘opening old wounds’  you mean ‘giving leftists assholes an excuse to demonstrate that they are indeed assholes’.

 As the world mourns the loss of one of the greatest stateswomen of the 20th century, Washington Post London bureau chief Anthony Faiola wrote yesterday that Margaret Thatcher’s death “appears to be opening old wounds.” To do so, however, Faiola selectively picked up anecdotes of left-wing hate-mongering, such as how the UK’s leading conservative paper Faiola noted how the UK’s Tory-leaning Telegraph newspaper had to close down the comments section about Lady Thatcher’s death due to the depraved vitriol of the nation’s left wing Internet trolls.

Faiola’s prime example of how Lady Thatcher’s death was dividing Great Britain was the occasional outbreak of leftists punks dancing in the streets in celebration of the former prime minister’s death. Included in the story was a photograph from St. George’s Square in Glasgow, where it seems only about 15-20 people showed up to figuratively dance on the Iron Lady’s grave.

Stop the h8! Suppress the left!

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The issue took a disgusting political turn on Thursday, though, when U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., used Sandy Hook to raise money. The money is not for one of the relief funds set up to help victims’ families, or to fund mental health services, or to support autism research.

“In the wake of the horror of the December 14, 2012, massacre of 20 beautiful children and 6 dedicated educators,” Blumenthal is asking supporters to send money to his 2016 re-election campaign!

The media in Connecticut appear to be surprised. I’m surprised that they’re surprised; they must have been asleep for the last 50 years.

The Other McCain looks at the political agenda of modern ‘journalism’.

For example, I’ve never quite understood (and there was a lot of questioning among media-watchers at the time) why Matthew Shepard’s death became a nationwide cause célèbre, with nationally televised vigils and so forth. As murders go, Shepard’s murder wasn’t particularly unusual: Privileged college kid goes to a local pub, meets up with a couple of local two-bit hoodlums who decide to rip him off and, instead, the rip-off escalates into murder.

Nasty crimes like that are unfortunately not man-bites-dog news and, except for the fact that Shepard was gay, his death might never have made headlines outside of Wyoming. But of course, Shepard was gay, and so his death became a symbol of America’s Rampant Homophobia and — if you didn’t pay much attention to the details — you might have thought Shepard’s killers were right-wing fundamentalist Christians, rather than a couple of small-town petty criminals, both of whom had prior records for minor offenses including burglary and marijuana possession.

Hey, if it fits the Narrative, that’s front-page material.

OK, so what if the rape-murder victim is a 13-year-old boy? That’s kind of a rare crime, and if the victim suffocated — bound and gagged — during an hours-long torture ordeal in which he was repeatedly sodomized, you might think a crime like that would be considered newsworthy.

But most people have never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, and there are those of us who suspect that maybe Jesse Dirkising is nearly unknown for pretty much the same reason that Matthew Shepard became famous: There’s an agenda.

Never mind whether it’s a good agenda or a bad agenda, it’s an agenda, and everybody knows what it is.

The point, from my perspective, is that news coverage is being influenced by a sort of consensus opinion among the influential elite of the journalism industry that some crime victims are more equal than others.

Hey, if it doesn’t fit the Narrative, it’s buried in the back pages.

Read it.

UNION GROVE, Wis. – Eighth-graders in Wisconsin’s Union Grove school district were assigned to fill out a “Liberalism vs. Conservatism” crossword puzzle, and they learned some new and very questionable “facts.”

Students learned conservatism is “the political belief of preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms … ”

Conversely, they learned liberalism is “the political belief of equality and personal freedom for everyone, often changing the current system to increase government protection of civil liberties.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. So are the people who want to smoke in restaurants, drink a Big Gulp, use transfats or salt in cooking, or own the gun guaranteed them by the Second Amendment.

Well, that’s what happens when you send your kid to a government school.

The New Yorker thinks so.

Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessey, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.

And, of course, what the New Yorker thinks constitutes a ‘university’ decides the issue. God forbid that they should encourage people to innovate, to produce products that will enrich people other than the Chattering Class, or even (the horror!) make a living.

But what’s the point of having a great university among the palm trees if students feel like they have to treat their professors as potential investors, found companies before they can legally drink, and drop out in an effort to get rich fast? Shouldn’t it be a place to drift, to think, to read, to meet new people, and to work at whatever inspires you? And Stanford has, in its day, produced a great variety of graduates: compost-flipping hippies, novelists, politicians, liberal firebrands, conservative firebrands, brilliant dropouts, and, of course, athletes. (The full name of the University is Leland Stanford Junior University, and people used to joke that the campus included two schools: Stanford University and Leland Junior College, the latter of which involved a set of courses that even the most dedicated of athletes could complete with reasonable grades.)

Hear the sneer.

Now, though, it seems like all the myriad identities are being subsumed. Students can still study Chaucer, and there are still lovely palm trees. But the center of gravity at the university appears to have shifted. The school now looks like a giant tech incubator with a football team.

Would that Harvard could say the same.

Read it.

“Growing up in a military family I heard my father and uncles talk about what Jane did, so from an early age I knew about her history with the war and how upset veterans were about it. Yet it amazed me that people just turned their backs and kept supporting her exercise videos and movies. I made a commitment early on not to support her projects,” Reyes told FOX411’s Pop Tarts column. “Then when I heard she was going to play such a well-liked and highly respected president’s wife, it got to me. They (the filmmakers) knew by picking Jane for the part they were going to stir up some stuff. I’m not a conservative or a liberal, I’m an American. And that was a slap in the face.”

This week, Fonda had a simple message for Reyes and the page’s fans.

“Get a life.”

Read it.

“Courts Without Judges” reads the headline of an attack on Senate Republicans by the New York Times editorial board. Bemoaning the fact that there 85 vacancies in the federal judiciary, the Times asserts that “by far the most important cause of this unfortunate state of affairs is the determination of Senate Republicans, for reasons of politics, ideology and spite, to confirm as few of President Obama’s judicial choices as possible.”

However, as Ed Whelan points out, in the second-to-last paragraph of the editorial we learn that “62 district and circuit court vacancies have no nominees.” Thus, the cause of three-quarters of the 85 vacancies is that President Obama hasn’t made nominations.

Of course, Democrats do exactly the same thing to Republican Presidential nominees (Judge Bork, are you listening?), but that somehow never seems to make it into the papers.

Read it. And watch the video.

Of course not. If you don’t support The Party Line, then you don’t get to be a Voice of the Crust. Silly boy.

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“Lewis’s Law” (coined by journalist Helen Lewis) holds that “the comments on any article about feminism justify feminism.” So when we read such comments, we see lots of people arguing but not really engaging. They’re like two ships passing in the night, talking past each other: While feminists believe it’s important to call out people for sexist remarks to address structural gender inequality, another group believes calling out sexist remarks is just another example of women exaggerating harm, censoring reasonable behavior, demanding “special rights” beyond what men have.

Makes you wonder why tech people so often vote for ‘progressive’ politicians, like Barack Obama, who lead the movement that reflexively paints them as sexist assholes.

Read it. And watch the video.

I guess it’s true: A conservative is a liberal mugged by reality.

(Sorry, Bill, Anne can do a lot better than you.)

Read it.

A safe bet, since none of the gun control proposals now being advanced would have made the slightest bit of difference. Those kids would still be dead.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

Read it.

And, of course, nothing in the news reports indicate that he’s a Person of Color, unless you are lucky enough to get a photograph, as here.

And,of course, if it were Republicans involved, charges of racism would be flying from the east even unto the west.

Read it.

What race is jihad terror against innocent civilians again? I keep forgetting. What race are Islamic supremacist attempts to subjugate non-Muslims under the Sharia? I always forget that one, too.

Yeah, I’ve always wondered how ‘Muslim’ became a ‘race’.