Read it.

Many medical studies show positive health effects from higher vitamin levels. The only problem? These studies often can’t tease out the effect of the vitamins from the effect of other factors, such as generally healthy living. Studies that attempt to do this typically show no impact from vitamin use — or only a very tiny one on a small subset of people. The truth is that for most people, vitamin supplementation is simply a waste of time.

But don’t throw them away, because in another year or two ‘science’ will demand that you take them again.

I take vitamins because that way my mother-in-law will shut up about me taking vitamins. Worth the price, in my opinion, but your mileage may vary.

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

Education Realist points out that the Drive for Diversity stalled out due to earlier Education Reforms. Teacher qualification tests were toughened up in some states, and Congress passed a law in 1998 intended to drive out of business bad education schools whose graduates couldn’t pass the test. Instead, the ed schools, no fools, just dropped affirmative action and stopped giving out diplomas until students had passed the state professional exams.

Funny how that works. Requiring actual, you know, performance really shoots ‘diversity’ right in the ass.

Read it.

Slow news day.

Andrew Napolitano is amusingly old-fashioned.

Madison knew that kings became tyrants through war. He fervently believed that by keeping the war-waging power in the hands of the president and the war-making power in the hands of Congress, the Constitution would serve as a bulwark against tyranny.

And we see how that worked out. Hey, better luck next time….

Read it.

Science is a method, not a set of dogmas. The scientific method is pretty simple: you suggest a hypothesis, calculate what facts in the real world must be true if the hypothesis is correct, and then check the hypothesis against reality. If the hypothesis implies false propositions of fact, it is wrong. Case closed.

Climate alarmists stand the scientific method on its head. When their theories, as expressed in climate models, conflict with reality, they conclude that something must be wrong with reality. The heat that their models hypothesize must be “hiding” deep in the oceans, or whatever. This isn’t science: it is a combination of politics and religion. A proposition that cannot be falsified by experience is not a scientific proposition.

Read it.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Stewart Brand indulges in a little historical revisionism.

Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair.
The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution

Read it.

In fact, the evidence that abstinence from alcohol is a cause of heart disease and early death is irrefutable—yet this is almost unmentionable in the United States. Even as health bodies like the CDC and Dietary Guidelines for Americans (prepared by Health and Human Services) now recognize the decisive benefits from moderate drinking, each such announcement is met by an onslaught of opposition and criticism, and is always at risk of being reversed.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

One of the rhetorical tricks of radicalism, a tactic at least as old as Karl Marx’s claim to have developed a scientific doctrine of socialism, is (a) to produce an elaborate theoretical explanation of whatever phenomenon they wish to criticize, (b) to denounce as a self-serving “myth” whatever common-sense justification is offered by defenders of the status quo, and (c) to claim that the inability of the status quo’s defenders to refute the radical challenge is proof that the “system” is illegitimate and must be destroyed. (It is certainly no accident that nearly all feminist theorists cite Friedrich Engels’s The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State in expounding their own critiques of “male supremacy.”) Defenders of any traditional way of life are always at a disadvantage in debate with radical intellectuals who, having built or borrowed some theoretical argument for revolution, scornfully dismiss the defense of tradition as mere sentimental prejudice in favor of the status quo. Hurling accusations of bigotry and ignorance at their antagonists, radicals insist that progress beckons us toward an enlightened future, if only we can overcome the irrational opposition of The Forces of Darkness who wish to keep society enslaved to the benighted past.

Read it. And watch the video, for sure.

This is one of the most beautiful mockeries I’ve ever seen.

Read it.

For the same reason that rich people can talk about money without freaking out — guilt and envy. (This is the sort of article you will only find in a Voice of the Crust.)

But that’s fairly typical of the convoluted, shamefaced, defensive way we talk about class in America: An Ivy Leaguer mocking another Ivy Leaguer because his denunciation of the Ivy League is just so Ivy League.

Read it.

Actually, the question ought to be phrased ‘Which states other than Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan are in the Midwest?’

Read it.

If Americans want a free society at home, then they must convince the U.S. government to give up its global empire. The militarized police recently on display in Ferguson was no freak coincidence: Antiwar activists and other civil libertarians have been warning for decades that an aggressive US foreign policy would eventually destroy domestic liberties. Americans can’t ask their government to subjugate foreigners with bombs but bow to their own wishes at the ballot box.

Read it.

Finally, the mainstream media are beginning to acknowledge the poisonous fruits of multiculturalism. For years journalists have been afraid to speak the truth about what is happening in Britain, just as the council workers in Rotherham who were responsible for child welfare were afraid to speak the truth. And what is the truth they have been so afraid to give voice to? Multiculturalism is a failure, both as a political theory and as a matter of fact.

When the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany joined forces at the beginning of the war, Time magazine referred to the enemies of civilization as “Communazis”. Each had their final solution to the question of how human beings should live together on earth, and they were both willing to employ absolutely any means in order to achieve that end. We have seen the same mindset in government, both at a national level and in local councils up and down the land for many years now. Their final solution to the question of how we are to live is “multiculturalism”, and woe betide anyone who questioned that unproven, impossible theory.

Read it.

This is a very odd piece that will tell you more than you ever really wanted to know about Switzerland.

If I had sufficient spare time and a wholly warped sense of priorities, I think I could trace the boundaries of the wars of religion by driving around and listening to regional radio. As far as I can tell, Catholic cantons really go for snare drum backbeats and 2/4 time – if Mumford and Sons aren’t huge in Vaud, they are really missing an opportunity. Protestant cantons are much more into generic AOR. Everywhere in Switzerland gets a signal for the Europop collossus that is RTL2. However, the country does not seem to have any local attempts at hip-hop, for which I greatly respect them.

All in all, though, it’s a fascinating country, and if I hadn’t been born American I wouldn’t have minded terribly much being Swiss.

Charles Krauthammer finds that his bullshit detector has gone off.

Democrats used to wax indignant about having one’s patriotism questioned. Now they throw around the charge with abandon, tossing it at corporations that refuse to do the economically patriotic thing of paying the highest corporate tax rate in the industrialized world.

Odder still because Democrats routinely ridicule the very notion of corporations as persons. When Mitt Romney suggested that corporations were people in 2011, Democrats mocked him right through Election Day. In the Hobby Lobby case, they challenged the very idea that corporations can have religious convictions. Now, however, Democrats are demanding that corporations exercise a patriotic conscience. Which is it?

Read it.

To all the whiners about learning cursive: It could be worse.

Check it out.

From the point of view of the people providing the maps, of course. Your mileage may differ, depending upon your ideological bent.

Read it. And ponder the picture.

So Burger King is going to acquire the Canadian Tim Horton’s donut chain, in yet another tax inversion that causes so much cranial-rectal inversions among liberals. I sure hope we get a donut Whopper cheeseburger out of this merger. With bacon. That would be more awesome than a deep-fried Twinkie. (Lo and behold, turns out the genera already exist.)

Read it.

The history of telecommunications is a long story of progressives and populists demanding “public interest” regulations that produce and protect monopolies, followed by progressive and populist demands for regulations to fix the problems that their earlier regulations created. At each step, activists were coached and coaxed by the political and business interests in question.

…

Progressives today are traveling the well-worn policy path of trying to fix old mistakes by making new ones. They demand competition while promoting municipal public utility broadband systems. “Open access creates competition,” they claim, never minding that the unbundling requirements that force providers to lease their systems to competitors only create “competition” by turning an existing provider into a de facto monopoly. The goals of the modern net neutrality movement—which in effect seeks to prevent Internet Service Providers from providing anything but lowest-common-denominator service—might as well adopt the same early slogan of monopoly-era AT&T: “One System, One Policy, Universal Service.”

Theodore Dalrymple lays down some inconvenient truth.

Strangely enough, my experience of being a foreign correspondent, if that is what it was, has never caused me to doubt the veracity of what I read in the newspapers, which I swallow as a boa constrictor swallows a goat.

However, I have followed riots around the world vicariously ever since, and it seems to me that the principal precondition of such events in the modern world is clement weather. The association is much stronger than with, say, injustice, partly because there is complete agreement as to what constitutes clement weather, whereas what constitutes justice has been in dispute since at least the time of Plato. We all recognize good rioting weather when we see it, but injustice—well, we could go on arguing about it for days. Everyone can contain his anger in the rain.

…

But to hate injustice is not necessarily to love justice; and one might have supposed that the first duty of those who claim to hate injustice was themselves to act justly. Virtually by definition, those who riot violently (as did a small number of the protesters) do not act justly, for almost always they do damage, sometimes much damage, to the interests of those who have not caused the injustice against which they supposedly protest, and therefore commit an injustice against those who are unknown to them. Such is the case of the crimes against property, or rather, as my friend the economist Peter Bauer used to insist, against the owners of property, in Ferguson (property cannot suffer, but its owners can). Two injustices do not make righteousness.

Sarah Hoyt has some words of wisdom. (Really. They are.)

Look, no humans band up then sit in their clubhouse twirling their moustaches and saying “now we’re going to be evil.” But human organizations often become evil. Partly this is because the people willing to do the donkey work of running a voluntary organization are often – not to say always – the type of mind that seeks power over others. If the charter of the organization allows them to achieve that power by dividing (as it were) the world in two and playing us against them, they will, and they will drive the association down an ever more paranoid path. At the end of which there’s always evil and attack on the “the other.”

Gavin McInnes is caught up in the same old.

It’s not even the real trannies who are mad. They’re on my side. It’s the fake trannies who want my guts for garter belts. You see, the hot thing with the kids today is pretending you’re transgendered. To mock this is to take away their “me snowflake” status and make them admit they’re just like everybody else. Telling normal people they’re normal is now a hate crime. The government was just kicked off Wikipedia for citing my article. A congressional staffer mentioned it and now they’re considering booting all of congress off of Wikipedia for good. Want to update your constituents on a new bill? Sorry, one person in your building exhibited signs of transphobia.

Anyhoozers, this happens to pretty much everyone. If you’re lucky, you get a good payout. If you’re even luckier, they got the story straight. I don’t know how many of my friends have almost lost their minds after being fired for something that never happened. All it takes is one angry coworker and next thing you know a nonexistent “You” said “nigger” or grabbed someone’s ass.

Read it.

Hear, hear.

Read it.

An intuitive code governs the way English speakers order adjectives. The rules come so naturally to us that we rarely learn about them in school, but over the past few decades language nerds have been monitoring modifiers, grouping them into categories, and straining to find logic in how people instinctively rank those categories.

Read it.

Many companies will train employees on the job. Lucas Mund spent a summer in college working at a local burger chain. “My 19 year-old boss was taking home $35,000/year with benefits,” he said. “Plus they train you on the job for free. She told me that she was on track to be a regional manager by the age of 30 and would make 100k by then.”

Working your way up to store manager has its perks. According to Murray Godfrey a Wal-Mart store manager “of a store in a moderate-sized locale can easily make $200k plus bonuses based on sales.”

Katie Nellis said managers of Walgreen’s drugstores in the US “often retire in their 40s.”

Turns out there’s a lot of moola in doing the jobs Americans don’t want to do.

Theodore Dalrymple expresses my sentiments exactly.

I take a small siesta after lunch—I find it revivifies my brain for about half an hour—but each time I wake up I am a little disappointed to be thrust back into the midst of life. Sleep, especially when dreaming, is so much more enjoyable than being awake, with all the petty tasks that consciousness imposes upon one. The process of keeping myself alive bores me terribly; every morning the same thing, shower, shaving, breakfast, how tedious it all seems!

Read it.

How’s that Global Warming coming along?

Ron Radosh looks behind the curtain.

Hillary Clinton’s recent Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg has produced a storm, both by comments from the usual pundits as well as among the ranks of the left-wing of the already very liberal/left Democratic Party. Many conservatives have responded by calling attention to Hillary’s obvious failures, to write off what she has had to say as of no consequence except for revealing her hypocrisy. No one put it better than Bret Stephens in The Wall Street Journal. He dubs her arguments as nothing but her “self re-invention as a hawk,” made because she “belatedly needs to disavow the consequences of the policies she once advocated,” and possibly because “she believes in whatever she says, at least at the time she’s saying it.”

I fully understand Stephens’ reaction to what Hillary Clinton said in the interview, but I think he neglects to take into consideration evidence that indicates she, while serving as his secretary of State, privately fought him tooth and nail, and presented advice that Obama rejected.

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

Economic theory suggests that the ultimate goal of any monopolist would be “perfect price discrimination” in which each customer is charged the maximum they would possibly pay. To ensure they know exactly how much that is, student by student, colleges require parents of applicants to perform a financial colonoscopy upon themselves via the federal FAFSA form, accompanied by signed 1040 forms. And many require the even more intrusive CSS document.

Of course, colleges aren’t a monopoly, but they appear to be a pretty successful cartel, at least as far as I can tell from noticing their Augusta National-level landscaping budgets. It’s been decades since I’ve seen a college campus that looked as dried out as Pinehurst No. 2 at the U.S. Open last June.

John C. Wright lays out some inconvenient truth.

Originally the word had a very specific meaning. It was coined by Mussolini, a socialist, to describe how his heresy of socialism differed from orthodox Marxist socialism.

The word itself comes from the fasci which is the Roman symbol of a magistrate called a Lictor, that is, the authority of the state to punish dissent and nonconformity. The fasci is a bundle of rods surrounding an ax. You can see it in the architectural decorations of statehouses and courts of law. The bundle of rods represents the truism that any one stick can be broken in isolation, but when gathered together, cannot be broken. If put into words, it is a symbol of the motto that unity is strength.

The two main differences of doctrine are, first, that Mussolini socialism operates factories and large businesses as public utilities, where the owners are allowed to keep their businesses in name only, but in fact are reduced to mere managers under direct state control, or quartermasters. This is distinct from Marxism in that it does not consider businessmen and workingmen to be two separate species of mankind, as Marxism does, locked in a Darwinian struggle to the death for racial survival.

The second difference and related to the first is that Mussolini considered the nation, that is, a racial and cultural group sharing a language, to be the fundamental collective to which the individual was to be subordinated, and the state to be the apotheosis of the collective Will. This is distinguished from Marxism who selected the rather more abstract (and irrational) group of persons engaged in categories of economic activity to be the fundamental collective.

The short answer is that a Fascist is a Nationalist Socialist whereas a Marxist is an International Socialist.

Read it.

Man, I’m telling you, if someone who is both a government employee and a union member can be fired, who is safe?

J. D. Tuccille attempts to be persuasive.

Are libertarians just Ayn Rand-obsessed pot smokers who want to hide their money from the tax man?

Yeah, pretty much — at least the ones who write for tReason magazine. When our civilization is faced with an existential threat from a billion people whose totalitarian ideology was crafted in the 7th century by a mass-murdering brigand, worrying about whether smoking pot is legal is a perspective problem that makes such ‘libertarians’ irrelevant. If ‘libertarian’ means anything, it means a devotion to liberty, and worrying about what people can smoke here rather than spending full time about how basic liberty is being suppressed there (and here as soon as they can make it happen) is impossible to characterize as other than juvenile.

Jim Goad lays out some inconvenient truth.

If you start with the premise that people are equal, then disparities in income and intelligence between groups will be blamed on the phantom demon known as “injustice,” and all your political energies will be spent trying to, as the tiresome saying goes, “level the playing field.”

But if you start with the premise that they aren’t equal, nearly all inequalities can be explained by, well, inequality—in other words, the idea that the playing field started out level, and inequalities began emerging when certain groups and individuals proved more adept than others. You will therefore view any attempt to “level the playing field” as artificial and essentially contradictory—to achieve equal results, one must instead tilt the playing field so that all the players appear to be the same height. The chief goal of “diversity” is, ironically, to make everyone the same.

Read it.

Most people, if offered the alternative between their current job on one hand and, on the other hand, the same salary but no job would choose the latter. Many do make this sort of choice. Casey Mulligan, a University of Chicago economist, calculates that half the depression of the labor market during the recent recession lies in the incentives created by the expansion of the safety net.

And note that anybody who gets bored without a job or needs the sentiment of being useful can do charity work. So why do most of us want to work at paid jobs?

The answer is simple. What people are really after is not jobs, but the incomes that come with them. And people want incomes because they want to consume during their leisure time. Life is not about making useless efforts, but about enjoying things, many of which, alas, only come with some effort. Jobs are the cost; consumption is the benefit.

Read it.

The New York Times ran an op-ed piece that helpfully demonstrated the pitfalls of lifestyle arguments in favor of urbanism, namely that they are annoying to everyone but the people making the argument.

The boys, like their father, are lean, strong and healthy. Their parents chose to live in New York, where their legs and public transit enable them to go from place to place efficiently, at low cost and with little stress (usually). They own a car but use it almost exclusively for vacations.

“Green” commuting is a priority in my family. I use a bicycle for most shopping and errands in the neighborhood, and I just bought my grandsons new bicycles for their trips to and from soccer games, accompanied by their cycling father.

These arguments – whether they’re about physical health, or “diverse” or “vibrant” or “creative” communities, or whatever else – are, at bottom, about telling people that they are lacking, and that in order to improve themselves they should become more like the author. In the 1970s, when city dwellers felt superior mainly because of their supposed cultural capital and were telling middle-class suburbanites to loosen up a little, that might have been obnoxious but harmless. In our current situation – when the city dwellers making these arguments are the economic elite (the author of this particular piece, Jane Brody, lives in gentrified brownstone Brooklyn, I believe) – it’s a lot more sinister. Brody talks about commutes as if their length and form were something that most people could freely choose, rather than something imposed upon them by their wages and the price of housing and form of development of their metropolitan area. She makes this a story about personal morality, rather than the constraints we choose to put on people through public policy.

Read it.

Maybe black women just can’t act. Or perhaps they just aren’t much to look at — I’ve noticed that ‘black’ women who are generally considered good-looking really look like white women with one African great-grandparent. Beyoncé? Yup. Michelle Obama? Not so much.

Bill Reader pulls back the curtain.

Control of the circumstances of a battle is the key to winning, and the proverb reminds us that our ability to control such things is much greater if we do it well in advance… in times of peace… than when they are immediate needs… in times of war.

Commonly in politics, we see it applied when someone (99.99% of the time a Democrat, which is not to our strategic advantage) accuses an opponent of a crime preemptively in order to excuse their own malfeasance later. The crime is often a generalized one that’s difficult to disprove, such as being an -ist. Obama bought practical immunity from questions about his otherwise extremely questionable past in two elections, simply by accusing opponents of being racist. Such general accusations of prejudice are very useful. Any sufficiently well-known public figure will be opposed for reasons both philosophical and prejudicial. The accusation gives followers sanction not to even attempt to differentiate the groups, however prominent the prior and insubstantial the latter. The accusation becomes a kind of magic word, spoken to protect the user from the conflict of ideas.

Read it.

A peek inside the workings of the Crust.

In some senses, this budding blue-collar rebellion exposes the essential contradiction between the party’s now-dominant gentry Left and its much larger and less well-off voting base. For the people who fund the party – public employee unions, Silicon Valley and Hollywood – higher energy prices are more than worth the advantages. Public unions get to administer the program and gain in power and employment while venture capitalists and firms, like Google, get to profit on mandated “green energy” schemes.

What’s in it for Hollywood? Well, entertainment companies are shifting production elsewhere in response to subsidies offered by other states, localities and companies, so high energy costs and growing impoverishment across Southern California doesn’t figure to really hurt their businesses. Furthermore, by embracing “green” policies, the famously narcissistic Hollywood crowd also gets to feel good about themselves, a motivation not to be underestimated.

This upside, however, does not cancel out hoary factors such as geography, race and class. One can expect lock-step support for any proposed shade of green from most coastal Democrats. Among lawmakers, the new Democratic dissenters don’t tend to come from Malibu or Portola Valley. They often represent heavily Latino areas of the Inland Empire and Central Valley, where people tend to have less money, longer drives to work and a harder time affording a decent home. Cap and trade’s impact on gasoline prices – which could approach an additional $2 a gallon by 2020 – is a very big deal in these regions.

…

In Washington, D.C., there is tension between East Coast and West Coast Democrats on one side and representatives from the Plains and the South on the other. Progressives shrug at the loss of these regions and the associated white working-class voters who, as the liberal website Daily Kos contended earlier this year, are just a bunch of racists, anyway.

Steve Sailer brings the fun.

You can see why places like Oklahoma City let themselves get raped by major league sports team owners in order to call themselves major league. Oklahoma City snagged Seattle’s NBA franchise a few years ago and now has a wonderful basketball player in Kevin Durant. The OKC basketball team is currently cool, so OKC gets featured in this article about a broad trend.

Steve Sailer grasps what few see.

If social construction is as powerful as its enthusiasts claim, how could it not affect human beings genetically? If a social group constructs a new ideology about who should marry whom, for instance, how would that not alter future lineages and gene frequencies?

For example, America has witnessed over the last ten generations the socially planned breeding of a new endogamous extended family, a fast-growing proto-race that now numbers over 200,000 and is currently on pace to double every 21 years: the Amish.

And, judging from how spectacularly well the Amish have weathered the last half-century’s fertility-depressing social revolution in the surrounding “English” culture, they seem to have a clear flight path to numbering in the millions before the end of this century.

Read it.

First, catch a rabbit….

Proponents of the Paleo diet follow a nutritional plan based on the eating habits of our ancestors in the Paleolithic period, between 2.5 million and 10,000 years ago. Before agriculture and industry, humans presumably lived as hunter–gatherers: picking berry after berry off of bushes; digging up tumescent tubers; chasing mammals to the point of exhaustion; scavenging meat, fat and organs from animals that larger predators had killed; and eventually learning to fish with lines and hooks and hunt with spears, nets, bows and arrows.

Most Paleo dieters of today do none of this, with the exception of occasional hunting trips or a little urban foraging. Instead, their diet is largely defined by what they do not do: most do not eat dairy or processed grains of any kind, because humans did not invent such foods until after the Paleolithic; peanuts, lentils, beans, peas and other legumes are off the menu, but nuts are okay; meat is consumed in large quantities, often cooked in animal fat of some kind; Paleo dieters sometimes eat fruit and often devour vegetables; and processed sugars are prohibited, but a little honey now and then is fine.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

A general prejudice in health journalism is that everybody is the same, so the reason medical research hasn’t yet come up with definitive answers to questions like what kind of diet should you follow or how much sleep should you get isn’t because different people need different things. Sure, that might make sense, but that’s not Science. Instead, Science is when there’s just one answer.

…

Personally, I’m not sure I believe that “oversleeping” really exists. I hear people all the time say that they feel lousy because they slept too much. If I sleep 10 hours and I’m still tired, it’s not because I slept too much but because I needed to sleep 12. But you may well be different.

Read it.

Presumably this is education against, rather than training for.

Eric S Raymond speaks for all right-thinking people.

When I look at these buildings, and the Tolkien sketches from which they derive, that’s what I see. The timelessness, the organic quality, the rootedness in place. When I look inside them, I see a kind of humane warmth that is all too rare in any building I actually visit. (Curiously, one of the few exceptions is a Wegmans supermarket near me which, for all that it’s a gigantic commercial hulk, makes clever use of stucco and Romanesque stonework to evoke a sense of balance, groundedness, and warmth.)

I want to live in a thing like the Hobbit House – a hummocky fieldstone pile with a red-tiled roof and a chimney, and white plaster and wainscoting and hardwood floors. I want it to look like it grew where it is, half-set in a hillside. I want the mullions and the butterfly windows and the massive roof-beams and the eyebrow gables. Want, want, want!

Read it.

And be sure to read the comments.

Read it.

Once I became an employed educator, the vast majority of what I learned — and used — in the classroom was garnered from other, mostly veteran, teachers. If education schools want to be truly practical, keep the courses like those I noted, and cut (or make optional), classes like “Historical Foundations.” Expand the time undergrads actually spend in schools observing and teaching with an experienced instructor. (I’ve learned that in recent years my alma mater has implemented much of that last recommendation; student teachers’ time and duties in their placement schools have expanded quite a bit.)

John C. Write may or may not be a good science fiction writer (haven’t read any of his stuff, although I plan to) but he’s an excellent social commentator.

The orcs do not merely hate sunlight and happiness and romance, they think the weather is out to get them. They fear policemen and love wild bears. They think Mohammedan terrorists are the good guys and Jews are not an oppressed and hated people. They think two persons of the same sex can have sex and that this requires the sacrament of marriage to sanctify and celebrate their filthy unnatural sodomy.

They think common sense is a hate crime, and therefore they avoid it at all costs. These people LIVE to be offended. They BREATHE being offended. They LOVE being offended. To avoid offending them would leave them with nothing to do.

Merely by writing a story where the hero wedded the heroine, I offended the orcs. Good stories offend them because they are good.