Jim Goad explains it all to you.

As a graduate of journalism school, it took me many years of tireless research to conclude that most journalists are so full of shit, it’s a wonder they don’t explode. I’ve learned to be especially wary of anyone who makes a point of referring to themselves as a “journalist”—more often than not, you aren’t dealing with an objective fact-digger but rather a robotic ideologue who will mercilessly mangle facts to fit his narrative while swiftly discarding any fact that even slightly subverts it.

The most depressing thing about trying to deal exclusively in facts is the fact that most people don’t care about facts. Fact is, they believe what they want to believe.

Read it.

In a reversal of stereotypes, “Democrats have become a party of the wealthy” admits Fredrik deBoer in the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Republicans–much to the chagrin of some Republican “elites”–have become a party of the working class.

The Antiplanner was reminded of this when I saw a report saying that 29.4 percent of Americans were now “upper middle class,” which the report defines as having incomes of $100,000 or more for a family of three (or roughly $82,000 for a family of two, $115,000 for a family of four, etc.–see page 3 of the report). This highlights something the Antiplanner has said several times before: the real social divide in America is not between the 1 percent and the 99 percent, but between the 30 percent and the 70 percent. Specifically, about 30 percent of working-age Americans are “knowledge workers,” and generally have college degrees, while 70 percent do physical labor, and generally don’t have college degrees.

…

Thus, when you read articles or listen to stories about the “hollowing of America’s middle class,” they don’t mean something is happening to the college-educated middle class. They mean that middle-income families are declining in importance as incomes are bifurcating into those with college educations having upper-middle incomes (or better) and those without having lower-middle incomes (or worse), with fewer having middle-middle incomes.

Joel Kotkin connects the dots.

Brexit also represents a shot across the bow to all the elites, not only in Brussels, but also in Westminster, both left and right, much as the Sen. Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump campaigns have been here in the U.S. The EU pushed policies aimed at the mundane pleasures of the middle class, such as affordable electricity, cheap air travel, cars and single-family housing. Those who opposed the edicts were often excoriated as unenlightened and even racist. The “betters” behind the “Remain” campaign waged a kind of class struggle against the British grassroots – and lost in shocking fashion.

Read it.

A butcher has begun selling meat using the imperial system, following the UK’s decision to leave the European Union.

It was because of an EU law that the UK formally adopted the metric system.

But Gratton’s Butchers in Barnstable, Devon, is now giving customers the choice of pounds and ounces or grams and kilograms.

…

The move has been popular among his customers who voted for Brexit: “All the customers wanted it back in pounds,” Mr Gratton said.

Real freedom includes the freedom not to change if you don’t want to.

That is a freedom that ‘progressives’ cannot permit.

Since, in their view, progress is inevitable, and progress requires change, any resistance to change is a choice against progress, and people who resist change are both Evil and Stupid.

As with Islam, progressivism is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

In case you’re wondering, I would have voted to Leave, based on a superficial analysis from the other side of the globe. It’s the idea of being a nation that answers to itself. I can understand wanting to join a common economic community. But when people you didn’t elect pass a law affecting the strength of your hairdryer to lessen energy consumption and prevent the planet from having a mean temperature of 156 degrees C by 3047, and there’s nothing you can do, people get peeved. Of course nationalism has its excesses. But the excesses of transnationalism are accumulated incrementally and smother all differences, and for people who are constantly droning on about diversity they seem dreadfully keen to impose a bland uniformity of laws. Culture survives for a while, but eventually the laws are your culture.

This same relationship is what caused the American Civil War, and poisons relations with the Federal government even today.

How you regard the Brexit as an American might say something about how you view the role of government, and the efficacy and desirability of international organizations. There’s a certain Star-Trekky well of course attitude towards international organizations, as though they are insulated from the poisons of tribalism and hence rational, wise bodies that make proper decisions based on The Good of the Many. But it depends on what they believe, and what they want, no? The idea that a transnational organization is superior in its nature to a government that arose organically from a thousand years of culture and reflects the national will and character is wishful thinking, and there’s one big example that comes to mind: the USSR. No, the EU is not the USSR, but given their druthers they’d love the scope of control the USSR had. Over the proper things. For the Good of the Many, of course.

I think it pretty obvious that this is Obama’s attitude, and Hillary’s.

Read it.

University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Professor Jack Stauder says his political and ideological conversion away from socialism and Marxism occurred when he actually witnessed these systems in action.

After traveling to more than 110 countries to pursue various forms of research, notably cultural anthropology, Stauder described his conversion from Marxism as a process of disillusionment.

“I gradually became disenchanted with Marxism by visiting many of the countries that had tried to shape their societies to conform to its doctrines. I was disillusioned by the realities I saw in … socialist countries – the USSR, Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, etc,” Stauder told The College Fix via email.

“I came to recognize that socialism doesn’t work, and that its ‘revolutionary’ imposition inevitably leads to cruelty, injustice and the loss of freedom,” the professor continued.

The designation is not confused, he’s a professor of UMass at Dartmouth, Massachusetts, apparently a local campus.

Today’s Book: It Takes a Village (to Raise a Child).

A decade ago, then First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton chronicled her quest — both deeply personal and, in the truest sense, public — to help make our society into the kind of village that enables children to become smart, able, resilient adults. It Takes a Village is “a textbook for caring…. Filled with truths that are worth a read, and a reread” (The Dallas Morning News).

Your assignment: Identify the village in which Chelsea Clinton was raised.

Update: No, Sidwell Friends School (annual tuition $37,750) is not a village.

Read it.

Having serenaded a woman as she walked by and cleaning up litter ahead of previous matches, the Irish have now gone one step further.

One fan managed to dent a cars roof after standing on it to try and gain a better view of the street celebrations that were taking place in Lille ahead of Wednesday’s match against Italy that will decide their Euro 2016 fate. While the act of standing on someone’s car is not to be applauded, it was their reaction that made it another moment to remember.

A number of fans began to wedge money in the door of the car in the hope that they would cover the cost of the damage, but others decided that they would “fix the car for the boys in green”.

They began to hit the roof of the car around the area that had formed a large dent, and as any good panel basher knows, if you hit it in the right spot, the dent should pop out. That’s exactly what happened, sparking wild celebrations and more chanting – and amid all the cheering there was probably more dents too.

…

A quote from a bar owner in Paris praised the spirits of both sets of Irish fans, commenting: “Paris has been morose since the attacks [in November]. It does us good to see such happy people.”

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry,
And all their songs are sad.
–G.K. Chesterton

Read it.

When we have an episode of lunatics with guns:

• One side wants to control the guns.
• The other side wants to control the lunatics.

Say… wait a minute… What if we got together and…?

Nah, that’ll never happen.

…

If lunatics are deprived of guns, we would need worry only about their car bombs, suicide vests, hijacked airliners, and retail knife attacks. Or perhaps simply cars driven at high speed into crowds of pedestrians.

Scott Adams continues his masterly analysis.

A very-rich entrepreneur recently told me that the secret of hiring a good team of people is being ruthless in firing your mistakes. Lewandowski was the right guy for the primaries – evidently – but perhaps not a good fit for the general. If Trump can fire a close advisor and personal friend in this situation, do you worry that he can do it while President?

Hmm.

Jeb Bush’s campaign funding didn’t help him against Trump. So we have one data point telling us that political ads don’t work in 2016, at least against Trump. One data point isn’t a trend, and primaries aren’t the general election. But if television ads are persuasive in 2016, would we have GOP nominee Trump? It seems unlikely to me.

The Clinton team is fighting the war of 2008, using the tools of that era. Trump is dominating social media and gobbling up free TV time. Those are the tools of 2016.

Do you know why you didn’t realize TV ads are less effective these days? Because the only people who could tell you that rely on political ads for their profits. You won’t hear anyone on CNN or FOX tell you that ad dollars are less useful than they were in the past.

Saw that coming.

Read it.

Makes you wonder what else they might be wrong about.

Read it.

Read it.

Hint: Some scary shit.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

A while back I posted about a few examples, but since then there have been some more, so I thought I’d note them. Naturally, such examples will be rare. Even in states which allow concealed carry, there often aren’t people near a shooting who have a gun on them at the time. Many mass shootings happen in supposedly “gun-free” zones (such as schools, universities, bars, or private property posted with a no-guns sign), in which gun carrying isn’t allowed in many states. And there is no central database of such examples, many of which don’t hit the national media, especially if a gunman is stopped before he shoots many victims. Moreover, at least some examples are ambiguous, because it might be unclear — as you’ll see below — whether the shooter had been planning to kill more people when he was stopped.

Read it.

This article isn’t my attempt to justify anything to you?—?it’s not a defense of what’s in my gun safe or of the AR-15 itself. If, for you, my AR-15 ownership is prima facie evidence of my mental instability, sexual inadequacy, lack of a conscience, or what-have-you, then I honestly don’t care what you think about this issue. You can go back to broadcasting your own moral superiority on social media, and I can go back to tuning you out until your rage therapy session is over.

No, this article is for the genuinely curious?—?those who assume that 5 million of their fellow Americans are not inhuman or insane, and who want to understand what set of rationales, no matter how flawed and confused they may ultimately turn out to be, could make an otherwise normal person walk out of a gun store with an “assault weapon.”

Read it.

This is why Trump is so successful.

Obama would not have said that even if you had threatened to deliver his wife and daughters to ISIS.

Read it.

It would not be remarkable to observe that politicians lie. Many people lie. What is remarkable is that politicians keep telling the same lies over and over again. Few people do this. (Donald Trump, who tells a new lie almost every time he opens his mouth, is not a counterexample to this observation because he is not really a politician.)

I am unable to recall a time when politicians were not promising to balance the budget by eliminating “fraud, waste, and abuse,” or to help the poor by increasing the budget of a federal program, or to create energy self-sufficiency, or to stem the tide of illegal immigration by controlling the border, or to reduce gun violence by adopting stronger gun control measures, or…you get the idea.

Now, politicians are generally not stupid people. If there is one thing they know well, it is how to get people to vote for them. So if they are constantly repeating assertions that consistently turn out to be false, it must be because doing so has this effect. But why? Why does the public never seem to catch on? To answer this question, I want to describe something I call the “20 minutes game.”

Wakey wakey.

Stickers and posters featuring a rainbow-colored version of the Gadsden flag and the hashtag #ShootBack were raising eyebrows in West Hollywood on Thursday morning in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Florida.

The signage was affixed to electric boxes, light poles, trash cans and other fixtures near West Hollywood City Hall, the Pacific Design Center and along Santa Monica Boulevard. Several were hung near the Abbey Food & Bar, a well-known gay lounge.

The posters featured a coiled, striking rattlesnake, similar to the yellow Gadsden flag that reads “Don’t Tread On Me” and often is used by the Tea Party movement. The West Hollywood signs were rainbow-colored, like the gay pride flag.

“We are disturbed by them,” West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister said of the posters. “We don’t believe in an eye for an eye, and we advocate against gun violence.”

Which is why there are 50 people dead in Florida and a similar number in the hospital.

Read it.

What is it about blue states that makes people so eager to leave them? That’s a question worth pondering after seeing the results of Gallup’s latest State of the State poll, which, for the first time in eight years, found that more states lean Republican than Democratic. Only 14 states, the survey determined, are either solidly Democratic or trending that way, while in 20 states, the majority of residents are either solidly Republican or leaning right. Gallup deemed the rest toss-ups, with no clear advantage for either party.

The poll revealed other trends. Blue-state residents were far more likely to report that they wished to relocate. Seven of the eight states that residents are keenest to flee are solidly blue—led by Connecticut, where 46 percent of people want to follow the state’s leading employer, GE, to the exits. Also near the top of the list: New Jersey, Illinois, Rhode Island, Maryland, Delaware, and New York. The only state in the Top Eight not predominantly Democratic is Ohio, which Gallup considers “competitive” (neither Republican nor Democratic). Rounding out the Top Ten are Republican-leaning Indiana and Nevada.

The flip side of those results—that is, the list of states that people are least anxious to leave—is also suggestive. Of the 11 states leading in this category (two tied for tenth place), just three are Democratic, led by blue-leaning Oregon and Washington. Six are Republican, led by Montana and including Texas and North Dakota. The others are toss-up states.

Read it.

Of the approximately two million Chinese Koreans living in China, about half reside in Jilin Province, one of the country’s three northeastern provinces. Jilin comprises most of China’s border with North Korea and includes the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture — one of 30 administrative districts within the People’s Republic of China that are ruled, to some degree, independently of the central state. Given such a strong Korean influence on the region, it may seem logical that of Jilin’s ethnic Korean population many (if not most) would identify with one or both of the Koreas. Ethnic Koreans are, after all, described in Korean as tongpo; brethren abroad, compatriots borne of one ethnicity but living beyond the borders of their native land.

However, while this characterization generally holds true for older Chinese Koreans, in particular those who fled across the border to North Korea during the famine years of the Great Leap Forward and the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, it is by no means applicable to the youngest generation. For them, the contemporary connection with South Korea is little more than functional, while that with North Korea barely exists at all.

Read it.

Poland and the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) have asked for some American troops. Not enough to halt a Russian invasion, just enough to ensure that the Americans and their NATO allies (or at least some of them) will intervene if Russia does attack. These four nations already have a mutual defense guarantee from NATO in the form of NATO membership. But that is not enough and what has been asked for, and granted, are some American troops in each of these nations. Not many, there will only be one reinforced battalion per country. That means about 4,000 troops overall.

These four East European countries join a growing list of nations who, threatened by dangerous neighbors, have agreed (and often asked) to host American troops. The first and most obvious examples of this are South Korea, Japan and Germany, where the host nations even pay for some of the costs for the foreign troops to be there. This form of defense has been quietly followed by a number of nations in the Middle East, like Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the UAE (United Arab Emirates). All of these Persian Gulf nations want the Americans around to keep the Iranians out. But it is not just the Iranians. Inside Iraq there have been American troops in northern Iraq to protect the autonomous Kurdish majority up there from the Arab majority.

Some of us remember.

Read it.

“I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms.” So declared John R. Salter Jr., the civil rights leader who helped organize the legendary non-violent sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi, in the 1960s. As Salter recalled it, he always “traveled armed” while doing civil rights work in the Jim Crow South. “Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine,” Salter wrote. “The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay.”

He wasn’t a Christian.

He wasn’t a Republican.

He wasn’t an NRA member.

He wasn’t ‘white’ as the Left understands the term.

He wasn’t Donald Trump.

He wasn’t Rush Limbaugh.

He wasn’t one of the Koch brothers.

He wasn’t an ‘Islamophobe’.

He wasn’t a member of any of the ‘hate groups’ identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

So who was he?

He was a Democrat.

He was a Muslim.

He was an Afghan ‘anchor baby’, a U.S. citizen only by virtue of our insane citizenship laws.

He had complied with all of the ‘gun control’ laws that Democrats have been pushing all these years.

He would have been able to purchase his guns legally under any of the laws now being pushed by Democrats.

Read it.

“Trump says very scary things—deporting immigrants, massive militarism and, you know, ignoring the climate,” Stein explained on Democracy Now. “Well, Hillary, unfortunately, has a track record for doing all of those things. Hillary has supported the deportations of immigrants, opposed the refugees—women and children coming from Honduras, whose refugee crisis she was very much responsible for by giving a thumbs-up to this corporate coup in Honduras that has created the violence from which those refugees are fleeing. She basically said, ‘No, bar the gates, send them back.’ You know, so we see these draconian things that Donald Trump is talking about, we actually see Hillary Clinton doing.”

My God, somebody on the Left who is actually paying attention! How did that happen?

‘I love the wisdom of crowds. It’s the individuals I hate.’ — Leo Laporte, This Week in Tech

Joel Kotkin just paints what he sees.

The great tragedy for Trump is that the basis for a grass-roots-led Republican victory lay within his grasp. He could have been, like Ronald Reagan in 1980, the instrument of populist revolt had he shown the same wit, self-control and positive eloquence. Instead, his crudity, his barely disguised racial stereotyping and his obsession with himself has taken from the GOP, at least for this election cycle, the possibility of reaping an enormous windfall from the widespread alienation of the populace from the political and economic ruling class.

As the North Vietnamese General said to the American General in response to the American’s claim that the North Vietnamese had never won on the battlefield, ‘That is very true. It is also irrelevant.’

One can generously concede all of the criticisms anyone might choose to make of Trump without touching on the core reality of the situation: No matter how imperfect a vessel for populist revolt against the ruling class Trump might be, he won because he was the only horse in this particular race.

No other Republican candidate presented himself (or herself) as potential standard bearer of ‘the widespread alienation of the populace from the political and economic ruling class’.

In politics, as in warfare, you fight with the candidate you have, not the candidate you wish you had.

Sarah Hoyt speaks truth to all of those other things out there.

Some time ago some people did a study and decided that people who were mildly depressed had a better grip on their circumstances and chances than those who were optimistic.

True dat.

Read it.

David R. Hall has a plan, and he’s done the math.

The wealthy Mormon engineer says he wants to build 20 “sustainable” megalopolises in Vermont, starting with 1 million people in the Upper Valley, where he has bought land around a sacred site of the Latter-day Saints in the tiny town of Sharon.

By his calculation, about 20 million people could fit in Vermont.

Hall calls the project NewVistas, and while he insists it is not sanctioned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or limited to the church’s members, the religious overtones are hard to ignore. Ground zero for the project is the birthplace of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church. The NewVistas communities would have a governance structure similar to the Latter-day Saints hierarchy. And the land use design comes from a blueprint for ideal communities devised by Smith, called the “Plat of Zion.”

I’d rather live next to an LDS than a socialist. I’ve never met an LDS that I didn’t like, and rarely met a socialist that I did.

David Cole spends time in the underbelly so that you don’t have to.

Last week, the 2016 Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival (LAJFF) concluded its weeklong series of screenings here on the L.A. Westside. It’s always a special time when the LAJFF comes to town, because when else are you going to see Jews in Beverly Hills?

…

First off, it’s important to get an understanding of the definition of “false flag” among the conspiracy-minded. Initially, the term had a fairly simple meaning. It’s an operation designed to hide the true identity of the perpetrators of a crime while at the same time framing an innocent person or entity. Soldiers from country A dress in the uniforms of country B and carry out atrocities to make country B look bad. That has happened, no question. In fact, it’s an age-old war tactic, although so is claiming that something was a false flag when it wasn’t (country B actually does commit an atrocity and tries to weasel out of it by claiming, “No, it was people from country A wearing our uniforms! We wuz framed”).

…

I’ve had several prominent false flaggots tell me that I was an “inspiration” for this lunacy during my Holocaust revisionist years. “You’re the one who taught me, man, to, like, examine film clips and photos for tiny clues to expose hoaxes!” I hear that more times than I’d like to say, so permit me to set the record straight: If you think my work poring over documents and taking a magnifier to historical ruins is in any way equal to what false flag nutjobs do these days, you’ve completely missed the point of my work. Please stop giving me credit, and, while you’re at it, stop sending me so many damn friend requests.

The Other McCain vents a bit.

This token “diversity” of many TV and movie casts nowadays — does every police homicide unit in America now have a Puerto Rican lesbian detective? — is a sort of low-level background noise TV viewers have become accustomed to, but why does it seem so many of the plot lines are being scripted by writers who studied Critical Theory in grad school?

A good point, although I disagree with him about many of the movies he appears to dislike — I suspect that he appears to dislike.

Are people turning on prime-time TV to watch entertainment or to be lectured about race/class/gender oppression?

Obviously the latter, since that’s all they’re going to get.

Read it.

Presumably this is to make it apparent that they are not goons for a Mexican drug cartel.

I think.

Now, if they’d only publish one for high-school girls….

Read it.

LawNewz.com discovered that when it comes to politics, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd, the law firm behind the class action lawsuit, is not exactly neutral either. Our analysis, using data first compiled by The Washington Post, found that Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd paid the Clintons a total of $675,000 in fees for speeches since 2009. Hillary Clinton gave a $225,000 speech at the law firm as recently as September 4, 2014.  Bill Clinton also gave a speech for the same fee back in 2013, and another one in 2009 before the firm had been renamed (they used to be called Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman & Robbins LLP). In fact, of the five law firms that paid for the Clintons to speak over the last few years, Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd paid out the most money.

I love the smell of Conspiracy Theory in the morning.

Read it.

Oops.

Two men attempted to carry out an armed robbery on a McDonald’s in France – only to be thwarted by a table full of soldiers from an elite military unit having their lunch at the restaurant.

The thieves burst into the restaurant in the eastern commune of Ecole-Valentin on Sunday night – one firing a warning gunshot while the other began raiding the tills, as customers and employees fled the scene.

…

It was at this point – once everyone was out of danger – that the soldiers made their move, pursuing the robbers into the car park.

They shouted for the men to stop, but they just carried on. One fell on some stairs and was quickly apprehended, while the other was halted by a shot to the abdomen.

To be fair, any twelve soldiers would have done the same.

What’s the French for ‘You deserve a break today!’?

Read it.

Increasingly, the Democratic Party is divided between two elements of its coalition – an oligarchy that supports Clinton and a base of workers, many of them younger, who favor Sanders. To the Clintonites, her positions on gay rights, the environment and feminism make her an acceptable progressive. However, to those who back Bernie, her embrace of, and by, the oligarchs, amid rising economic inequality, represents a glaring contradiction with someone supposedly leading “the party of the people.”

Read it.

Gerald Early, a professor of English and African and African-American studies, explodes some of the mythology surrounding the late Muhammad Ali. The first myth is that Ali was a civil rights advocate or activist. Not so.

The Muhammad Ali after whom Cassius Clay re-named himself was, among other things, a proponent of black slavery:

Muhammad Ali next turned his attention to military campaigns independent of the Porte, beginning with the Sudan which he viewed as a valuable addition resource of territory, gold, and slaves. … Ali’s reign in Sudan, and that of his immediate successors, is remembered in Sudan as brutal and heavy-handed, contributing to the popular independence struggle of the self-proclaimed Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, in 1881.

What a role model. All of the black people who become Muslim might as well cut to the chase and join the KKK.

Some of us remember.

Read it.

When Sonia Sotomayor said that being a “wise Latina” influences her decisions for the better, that—we were told—was not merely nothing to worry about but a sign of her judicial temperament and fitness for the High Court. When Trump says being a Latino will influence this judge’s hearing of his case, he’s Hitler.

There may seem at first glance to be an inconsistency here. But there is a common thread. The left mostly takes for granted, first, that people from certain ethnicities in positions of power will be liberal Democrats and, second, that they will use that power in the interests of their party and co-ethnics. This is a core reason for shouts of “treason!” “Uncle Tom” (or Tomas) and the like. People like Clarence Thomas are offending the left’s whole conception of the moral order. How dare he!

The implicit assumption underlying Sotomayor’s comment and Thomas’ refusal to play to type is that there is a type—an expectation. By virtue of her being a liberal, a Democrat, a woman, and a Latina (wise or otherwise), Sotomayor’s voting pattern on the Court ought to be predictable. As, indeed, it is. So should Thomas’, but he declines to play his assigned role.

The whole ‘progressive’ playbook comes down to the heartfelt cry, ‘Please! Be reasonable! Do it my way!’

Trump simply took this very same logic and restated it from his own point-of-view—that is, from the point-of-view of a rich, Republican, ostentatiously hyper-American defendant in a lawsuit being litigated in a highly-charged political environment. He knows full well that at least 50% of the country will howl like crazy if he wins this suit. He knows that the judge knows that, too. He further knows that judge knows what his own “side” expects him to do. It would take an act of extraordinary courage to act against interest and expectation in this instance. And our present system is not calibrated to produce such acts of courage but rather to produce the expected outcome.

That’s what diversity is for. That is, beyond the fairness issue, viz., that in a multiethnic country, it’s unwise and arguably unjust for high offices to be monopolized by one group. But that’s an argument for something like quotas—or, if you want to be high-minded about it, “distributive justice”—and the quota rationale for diversity is passé. The current rationale is that diversity provides “perspectives.” Perspectives to aid in getting around the law and procedure. Otherwise, who cares about diversity? Just apply the law. Simple.

Trump is taking for granted—because he is not blind—that ethnic Democratic judges will rule in the interests of their party and of their ethnic bloc. That’s what they’re supposed to do. The MSM and the overall narrative say this is just fine. It’s only bad when someone like Trump points it out in a negative way. If a properly sanctified liberal had said “This man is a good judge because his background gives him the perspective to see past narrow, technical legalities and grasp the larger justice,” not only would no one have complained, that comment would have been widely praised. In fact, comments just like it are celebrated all the time. That is precisely what Justice Sotomayor’s “wise Latina” phrase was meant to convey.

The game is rigged. You know it, I know it, the judge knows it, and Trump knows it. Trump just has the utter unspeakable gall to say it.

Read it.

Escalating costs for nuclear power plant construction in the U.S. were not inevitable, according a new study in Energy Policy. They were largely the result of the increased regulation that followed the Three Mile Island reactor meltdown in 1979.

Government is a problem, not a solution.