Read it.

Bill McKibben wants the world to wage war against Climate Change, by giving governments full wartime powers to seize private property and coerce businesses into supporting the effort, and with strict government control of the economy.

Sky falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

If I had written a post anywhere near as outrageous as McKibben’s jingoistic demand for a war on climate, his demand for wholesale surrender of liberty and property rights to government, I would be called a fascist. But because McKibben is a green, he gets a free pass from mainstream media to demand the unthinkable.

Yeah, a lot of that going around.

Read it.

Facebook’s “Trending Topics” section is at it again. Saturday morning the site ran a headline in the section declaring, “Colin Powell: Former Secretary of State Confirms He Recommended Using Personal Email to Hillary Clinton.” The only problem is Powell made no such declaration and he denied Clinton’s claim.

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

Read it.

Hey. Priorities.

Read it.

Well, everybody at the New Yorker knows he loves it, whether he actually said it or not.

Read it.

On CNN New Day Wednesday morning, Chris Cuomo brought up the video of Sylville Smith’s sister, calling for violence in the suburbs getting widespread attention, though the initial part of her message calling for nonviolence in their community, was. “That part of the bite was not widely used,” Cuomo said, conveniently leaving out that CNN was the one who left out the rest of the soundbite, initially.

Well, we’ll just gloss over that part.

Read it.

Martin Reynolds, the fellowship director, spoke to this me over the phone Wednesday afternoon. When asked whether white journalists should bother applying to the program, Reynolds pointed to the fact the grant is for journalists of color. Asked what “colors” specifically, Reynolds said racial and ethnic minorities.

I pointed out that I am Argentine and asked whether this would allow me to qualify for this opportunity. Reynolds then asked if I was a “white male” and I responded in the affirmative, but pointed out that I’m still an ethnic minority. Reynolds then said that people “understand” if they operate within a “community of color.” The fellowship director said that he doesn’t require a photo of the applicant to check their color because he trusts their “integrity.”

When asked if the program is discriminatory, Reynolds said “no.” He viewed the program as necessary to cover a disparity in journalism. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race in employment.

Just in case you were wondering why ‘journalism’ is so defective.

Read it.

In the land of NeverTrump, it turns out one American is more reviled than Donald Trump. This would be the Donald Trump voter.

Lincoln famously described government as of, by, and for the people. Even so, the people are now getting a hard lesson about what happens when they reject the advice of their betters and go with a nominee of their own choosing. What happens is an outpouring of condescension and contempt.

This contempt is most naked on the left. No surprise here, for two reasons. First, since at least Woodrow Wilson progressives have always preferred rule by a technocratic elite over democracy. Second, today’s Democratic Party routinely portrays its Republican Party rivals as an assortment of nasty ists (racists, sexists, nativists, etc.) making war on minorities, women, foreigners and innocent goatherds who somehow end up in Guantanamo.

Thus Mr. Trump confirms to many on the left what they have always told themselves about the GOP. A New York Times writer put it this way: “Donald Trump’s supporters know exactly what he stands for: hatred of immigrants, racial superiority, a sneering disregard of the basic civility that binds a society.”

Still, the contempt for the great Republican unwashed does not emanate exclusively from liberals or Democrats. Thanks to Mr. Trump’s run for office, it is now ascendant in conservative and Republican quarters as well.

Read it.

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit. Voice of the Crust … you can fill in the rest.

The deeper problem facing the United States is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and “machine learning” systems.

Note the immediate ‘progressive’ cannonball into the Aggretation Fallacy: Somehow this is a problem ‘facing the United States’. Uh, no it isn’t — except in the minds of those who see every problem as a problem ‘for all of us’ (i.e. for government to solve).

Note the immediate ‘progressive’ assumption that ‘meaningful work and good wages’ are something that need to be ‘provided’ (i.e by government, because who else could do it?).

And, of course: government by ‘progressives’ — because (a) they’re smart enough to see the problem, as you are not, and (b) they’re smart enough to figure out a solution, as you are not (or at least their intentions are good, and that’s all that really counts).

The political debate needs to engage the taboo topic of guaranteeing economic security to families — through a universal basic income, or a greatly expanded earned-income tax credit, or a 1930s-style plan for public-works employment. Ranting about bad trade deals won’t begin to address the problem.

Another thing that the ‘political debate’ needs to ‘engage’ is who is going to pay for all this. ‘Progressives’ seem to assume that the money is just out there somewhere and will show up when it’s required.

They actually pay people to write this crap.

Read it.

Having watched Michelle walk up stairs, this doesn’t surprise me. She’s the last person I’d go to for nutrition advice.

Read it.

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

According to Buzzfeed News, citing a company insider, then-CEO Dick Costolo secretly ordered Twitter employees to filter out abusive replies to the president during his May 2015 #AskPOTUS digital town hall. The company did so both by creating an algorithm to automatically filter out abuse and by manually removing certain tweets that slipped through.

Buzzfeed’s report is based on multiple inside sources, one of whom said that many senior employees were kept in the dark about the censorship in fear they would strongly object.

Read it.

Tucker Carlson, the 47-year-old editor in chief of The Daily Caller, is not gun-shy about expressing his opinion of today’s journalists: “They’re cowards, utterly conventional, trite and stupid,” he seethed to the Observer by phone earlier this month, adding “They go to Twitter to figure out what they’re supposed to believe.”

The pundit, who made his name as the conservative co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, also backs up his belief in his company’s recruiting practices. “I’ve never hired anyone who went to journalism school, and I never would. They’re boring rich kids with an overabundance of parental money,” said Carlson, whose father Richard, a veteran of print and television news, also served as ambassador to the Seychelles under President George H.W. Bush.

Read it.

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women and minorities hardest hit.

Read it.

Of course they did. After all, Trump is such an unusually bad person that they are justified in any trick they can think of, including flat lies.

When the Washington Post’s notoriously inconsistent fact checker Glenn Kessler feels he has to defend Donald Trump against a false claim, you know it must be a whopper. That was the case with the meme which arose last week that Trump, in words found at the New York Daily News, “booted a fussy baby from a rally Tuesday because the tot was wailing over the businessman’s speech.”

However, instead of giving several media outlets and the Hillary Clinton campaign the formal Four-Pinocchio “whopper” evaluation, Kessler merely gave Trump a “Geppetto checkmark” for telling the truth, and gave those who reported it and Team Hillary an unwarranted pass: “We can see why some reporters ran with this tale, based only on the videotape.”

Jim Rutenberg, proud Voice of the Crust, takes the mask off.

If you’re a working journalist and you believe that Donald J. Trump is a demagogue playing to the nation’s worst racist and nationalistic tendencies, that he cozies up to anti-American dictators and that he would be dangerous with control of the United States nuclear codes, how the heck are you supposed to cover him?

Because if you believe all of those things, you have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the past half-century, if not longer, and approach it in a way you’ve never approached anything in your career. If you view a Trump presidency as something that’s potentially dangerous, then your reporting is going to reflect that. You would move closer than you’ve ever been to being oppositional. That’s uncomfortable and uncharted territory for every mainstream, nonopinion journalist I’ve ever known, and by normal standards, untenable.

In other words, so-called journalistic objectivity is just a Clever Plastic Disguise that applies only when the ‘news’ doesn’t get too far beyond the Narrative.

It’s much dodgier for conventional news reporters to treat this year’s political debate as one between “normal” and “abnormal,” as the Vox editor in chief Ezra Klein put it recently.

In a sense, that’s just what reporters are doing. And it’s unavoidable. Because Mr. Trump is conducting his campaign in ways we’ve not normally seen.

In other words, it’s All Trump’s Fault for being such an outlier that it forces, forces ‘journalists’ to dump impartiality and support the Narrative. Yup. All Trump’s Fault.

For a proper fisking, go here.

Read it.

Which is very white of them.

Read it.

Actually, there are only two:

1. The sky is falling.
2. Give us money, lots of money, to fix it.

Read it.

Appearing on Tuesday’s New Day, liberal Daily Beast contributor and recurring CNN guest Dean Obeidallah went ballistic after a fellow guest and Donald Trump supporter recalled that Khizr Khan has a history of ties to the Clintons as the immigration expert was an employee of the law firm Hogan Lovells LLP, which not only has represented the Clinton Foundation but also worked on immigration cases involving the controversial EB-5 visa program.

After former South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer recalled Khan’s connections to the Clintons, the two got into a heated debate as Obeidallah incredulously accused the Trump supporter of “smearing” Khan by merely introducing his links to the Clintons into the political conversation.

Well, I can see where asserting a connection to the Clintons might be thought of as a ‘smear’ … if not true.

Read it.

So it’s not really about Lives, it’s about Money.

Read it.

My local newspaper, the Sonoma County Press-Democrat, is so clearly in the tank for Hillary Clinton that I no longer take pleasure in my morning read. Trump’s acceptance speech, for example, was covered on the front page with two stories: on the left a straight, albeit somewhat judgmental, account of the speech, and on the right a “fact check” that disputed every point made by the GOP nominee. Clinton’s speech was covered with three front page stories, with headlines describing her nomination as “historic,” “inspiring” and “trailblazing.” A relatively mild fact-checking piece was relegated to the back pages.

This transparent bias is a national phenomenon, infecting both print and television media to such an extent that it has become almost impossible to separate coverage of the Trump campaign from attempts to tear it down. The media has long been accused of having a liberal slant, but in this cycle journalists seem to have cast themselves as defenders of the republic against what they see as a major threat, and in playing this role they’ve lost the ability to assess events rationally.

And this is in the L.A. Times, a usually-reliable Voice of the Crust.

They’re not even pretending any more.

Read it.

Recently I wrote about why Washington gridlock is probably not the only reason Congress did not pass any of President Barack Obama‘s request for funds to fight Zika. It seems that lawmakers have not appreciated the severity of the Zika threat thus far.

Uh, dude? Not every problem is a problem for Congress, okay? Unless it’s a seriously contagious disease, it’s a local problem.

“Ron Klain was the White House Ebola response coordinator from October 2014 to February 2015. He is now an external adviser to the Skoll Global Threats Fund.” Ah, I see. His income depends on there being no local problems. Well, that’s good to know.

Somewhat annoying to find crap like this in the Wall Street Journal.

Christina Hoff Summers, in usually-reliable Voice of the Crust Time magazine, draws the line.

Much of what we hear about the plight of American women is false. Some faux facts have been repeated so often they are almost beyond the reach of critical analysis. Though they are baseless, these canards have become the foundation of Congressional debates, the inspiration for new legislation and the focus of college programs. Here are five of the most popular myths that should be rejected by all who are genuinely committed to improving the circumstances of women….

The Other McCain is not surprised.

The feminist remake of Ghostbusters has predictably failed at the box office. After opening at No. 2 its first weekend ($46 million gross in the U.S., behind The Secret Life of Pets), last weekend the ‘busters went bust, tumbling all the way to No. 5 ($21 million). This was a one-week decline of 54% in ticket sales, and three new films, including Star Trek Beyond, joined The Secret Life of Pets ahead of Ghostbusters. In its third week, however, Ghostbusters slid further, falling to No. 8 Friday, according to a Box Office Mojo estimate. To understand just how bad of an overhyped flop this is, compare Ghostbusters to Hotel Transylvania 2.

What? You’ve never heard of Hotel Transylvania 2? This G-rated animated comedy sequel opened last September with $48 million in gross domestic receipts its first weekend, which made it No. 1 at the box office. For the next two weeks it was in second place, and Hotel Transylvania 2 remained in the top five all the way to early November. In its first five weeks, the film grossed more than $150 million.

Read it.

Of course. Who ever heard of a right-wing comic? The best one could hope for is somebody like George Carlin who, while left-wing, poked fun at many of the pet tropes of the left like environmentalism.

Read it.

Emails hacked from the Democratic National Committee reveal that Nicholas Confessore suppressed information about Hillary Clinton’s victory fund in an article he wrote about Bernie Sanders. The New York Times political correspondent made the omissions at the request of Hillary Clinton’s campaign lawyer, Marc E. Elias, and DNC officials.

The emails, published by Wikileaks, also appear to show that Confessore made other edits to the article at the request of former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Shultz. After Confessore’s revisions, DNC National Press Secretary Mark Paustenbach suggested that the DNC Chairwoman grant an off-the-record interview to a group of New York Times writers.

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

David Cole is having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.

In a normal election year, it would be big news: one of the largest and most influential newspapers in the U.S. fooled by a small cadre of internet trolls into publishing a completely false piece about a GOP presidential candidate. In a normal election year, a story like that would dominate the conservative news cycle for several days at least. Raging Glenn Beck types would demand that the editors explain the reason for the complete abandonment of journalistic ethics that led to the massive error, and there would probably be calls for the reporter responsible for the piece to be fired.

Hell, in a normal election year, a story like that might even seep into the mainstream news cycle, with “media critics” wailing like Björk over the decline of newsroom standards and practices.

But this isn’t a normal election year, as if anyone needs me to point that out.

Well, some people appear to need reminding from time to time.

Speaking of that, who is this intrepid sleuth wearing the fedora with an index card saying “press” neatly tucked into the fabric band? Why, it’s none other than ace millennial newshound Caitlin Dewey. Dewey is The Washington Post’s “digital culture critic.” She earned her bones as a star reporter through years of hard work—tiring nights walking a beat, pursuing leads that often went cold, uncovering graft and corruption at the highest levels of society. Just kidding; she won an essay contest sponsored by The New York Times in which college students were asked to describe their last breakup.

Wow. Here’s your replacement for the SATs. (And I’m sure she pronounces it ‘Kate-Lynn’ rather than the correct Irish ‘Kaht-leen’.)

Regarding U.S. presidential elections, what if everything we know is wrong? What if someone did everything the “wrong” way, and what if that person still won? If Trump wins, the rules will never again be respected as they were. An entire class of political hacks will lose their jobs, fatally exposed as naked emperors. So I don’t want Trump to start doing things the “right” way, or to become “presidential,” or coherent, or “kind and gentle,” or toned down, or “friendlier.” I want him to continue tweeting idiotic memes while pissing on the idea of creating a functioning ground game in swing states. I want him to continue to make funny faces, and to sling childish insults, and to say in an insulting way something that a more “serious” candidate would sugarcoat for wider acceptance. I want the son of a bitch to act as unpresidential as humanly possible. I want The Washington Post and every other “paper of record” to keep attacking him, and I want the conservative establishment to join in.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Perhaps the true measure of how far a society has slipped into the abyss, is not by looking at what people say, but instead, looking at what people are not allowed to say.

Read it.

‘Coded racist language’ is Academic for ‘he hasn’t said anything racist so we have to make it up’.

As a wise man once said, ‘If you can read the code, then you’re the racist.’

Yeah, you know it isn’t and I know it isn’t but what would the mainstream media (not to mention the lefty kooks) say about that if a Republican did it? Oh, wait, they already did….

John Hinderaker pulls back the curtain.

The Associated Press was once a straightforward, relatively nonpolitical news source, but those days are long gone. Now some of the most hard-core Democratic Party advocacy comes from the AP. Thus, it is no surprise that the AP is trying to advance the Democrats’ narrative that Trump is a bigot.

…

“Coded racial language” is big on the left, but note that so far, the AP hasn’t quoted a single word that Donald Trump actually said. Not one. The AP goes on in the same vein, quoting Trump’s far-left critics, but never citing any of Trump’s own words.

…

There is much more along the same lines; read it for yourself if you like. The next day, July 23, the AP came out with another anti-Trump racial smear: “Energized white supremacists cheer Trump convention message.” It is more of the same: Trump doesn’t actually say anything about race, but we liberals will tell you what he really means.

Read it.

The Democratic convention has arrived. If they only go positive, they can get a bigger bounce than the small one it looks like Republicans got. That’s before considering their news media advantages, which the WikiLeaks emails in last week prove are just as intentional as the Right has thought for years. They weren’t just feeding stories to impressionable journalists, but the more enthusiastic partisans were sending stories to the Democratic National Committee for pre-publishing approval.

Take a deep breath and try not to be distracted by the phrase ‘a media’. (These people went to college, although you’d never know it.)

Read it.

Some of Hillary Clinton’s contemporaries who helped shatter glass ceilings in their own professions are exasperated that their female friends aren’t planning to help elect the country’s first woman president.

“I am never going to speak to you again unless you vote,” lifestyle entrepreneur Martha Stewart said she told a female friend in her 60s who plans to stay home Election Day.

You’d think it was the Miss America contest. Apparently it doesn’t occur to these ‘glass-ceiling breakers’ that the Presidency is an actual job with actual requirements and actual duties that are actually important. Just having two X chromosomes isn’t enough.

“We as women should be so proud that there is a strong and viable candidate,” said Ms. Stewart, a Clinton supporter. “Yet there are women who are not even thinking about her as a woman. They are just listening to criticisms of her that she is a liar.”

Perhaps whether she is a liar is more significant than whether she is a woman? Just maybe?

Read it.

Angela Gibbins, Head of Global Estates for the cultural relations organisation, which is partially funded by the taxpayer, made the comments in response to a photo on social media captioned: “I know he’s only two years old [sic], but Prince George already looks like a f****** d***head”, according to The Sun.

Posting a message beneath the picture of the young prince, she reportedly wrote: “White privilege. That cheeky grin is the innate knowledge he’s royal, rich, advantages and will never know any difficulties or hardships in life”.

Feel the love.

In response to criticisms online, the 52-year-old Ms Gibbins is said to have responded: “I’m sound in my socialist, atheist and republican opinions.

Yet another right-wing hater. Oh, wait….

Now, imagine what would have happened had she said that about some black kid.

Read it.

Though they haven’t yet completed covering things up, Hillary Clinton’s journalistic defense team at the Associated Press has swung into gear at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

Read it.

The Washington Post isn’t good at being subtle when it comes to Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. It’s quite easy to figure out which one is the Democrat, simply from the photos and photo illustrations they chose on the last two Sundays.

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

Read it.

I’ve written before about the study of Arthur Webb and Paul Kench regarding the fact that coral atolls are not being swallowed by rising seas. Their conclusion in that study was that the claims of sinking atolls were contradicted by the actual measurements of the islands in question. The measurements showed the islands were mostly either growing in size or staying the same (emphasis mine)….

Read it.

I had the privilege of carrying out field research among the Baluchi tribes of Iran.

However, anthropologists, including those studying the Middle East, gradually moved away from a scientific perspective toward a more subjective and politicized view. They were influenced in part by Edward Said, who in Orientalism (1978) argued that Western accounts of the Middle East were fabrications invented to justify imperialist invasion, colonial imposition, and oppression of local peoples. This “postcolonial” view blames Western imperialism for myriad problems worldwide, a view that neglects the cultures and agency of people around the globe.

This intellectual revolution has infected anthropology (among many fields) with a dangerous, self-contradictory nihilism that rejects the possibility of objective Truth toward which we may move and posits many different truths held by different peoples — all equally valid. Yet they behave as if their belief in many truths must be treated as The Truth that must not be questioned.

Read it.

That’s a win in my book. Now he knows how we feel about the prospect of a Hillary Clinton Presidency.

Bloomberg Business Week, Voice of the Crust, carries the water.

When Peter Thiel has the first move in a chess game, he lifts his e2 pawn, the fifth from the left and the one directly in front of his king, and advances it two spaces. It’s an aggressive tactic, putting the bishop and queen into play, which is why Thiel likes it.

Note that this traditional ‘pawn to King 4‘ move is how an overwhelming majority of chess games start. Warning! Thumbsucker ahead!

His status as ringleader of the PayPal Mafia, the network of former employees and co-founders that includes SpaceX’s Elon Musk and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, makes him one of Silicon Valley’s most influential and admired figures; his iconoclastic politics make him a subject of amusement. Not coincidentally, and disconcertingly to many of those close to him, Thiel is also one of Donald Trump’s most prominent backers.

When he was just another gay tech CEO, presumably fashionably progressive, he was one of the crowd; endorsing Trumjp, however, makes his politics ‘strange’. All Hail the Narrative!

Read it.

Professor Gregory Jay’s personal website is devoted almost entirely to questions of whiteness and racism, with some whole essays on topics of “whiteness studies” addressing questions like “who invented white people?”

Needless to say, the guy is himself white. One is strongly tempted to say ‘You first’.

Imagine what the reaction would be to someone advocating the ‘abolition of whiteness’. Then find the racist in this picture.

Read it.

As it was clearly intended to do.

‘Index I took from old Vladivostok telephone directory.’

Read it.

You can’t make this shit up.

There are three respects in which Pokemon Go is regarded as racist by those in the know in the BLM movement. The first respect, is that it’s much safer to play Pokemon Go, which requires you to walk around your own neighborhood; if you’re white and living in your own neighborhood. Second, if you’re black and you play Pokemon in Beverly Hills, chances are the police are going to stop you, question you and see what you’re REALLY up to.

The third respect in which Pokemon Go is racist is that you can set yourself up as a white Avatar, hunting down and collecting–or shooting–the black monsters in your own neighborhood.

Bet you didn’t know that.

Read it.

The New York Times continues its uninterrupted string of lectures on how you ought to do things their way.

What most people picture when they think of flour — that anonymous chalk-white powder from the supermarket — is anathema to Jones. Before the advent of industrial agriculture, Americans enjoyed a wide range of regional flours milled from equally diverse wheats, which in turn could be used to make breads that were astonish­ingly flavorful and nutritious. For nearly a century, however, America has grown wheat tailored to an industrial system designed to produce nutrient-poor flour and insipid, spongy breads soaked in preservatives. For the sake of profit and expediency, we forfeited pleasure and health. The Bread Lab’s mission is to make regional grain farming viable once more, by creating entirely new kinds of wheat that unite the taste and wholesomeness of their ancestors with the robustness of their modern counterparts.

This may seem to contradict the usual ‘progressive’ attitude that what is old is bad and what is new is good. But it really doesn’t — it is founded in the deeper ‘progressive’ attitude that what we do now is inadequate so we have to change. This allows ‘progressives’ to make noises that in any prior century would suggest deep-dyed right-wing reactionary attitudes. Let them eat cake is okay so long as it’s understood that it is locally-sourced artisanal cake using heritage strains of flower and gluten-free, which only the 1% could possibly afford.

Read it.

For a while I thought we were re-living the 1970s, with Carter era stagnation and weakness. Now we seem to be moving back in time to the 1960s. That was when the Democrats first tried to claim that “law and order” is code for racism. The Democrats lost that one. It turned out that Americans really do care about upholding the law, and really are opposed to crime.

So now the Democrats want to re-enact their losing strategy, believing, apparently, that this time it will win for them. If I were a Democrat, I would attempt an intervention. But I am not a Democrat, so I am happy–well, not happy, since the whole thing is inexpressibly sad–but willing to let them go down the same sterile path to defeat.

As a wise man once said, ‘If you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog.’

Read it.

For a fail-safe indicator of media bias, it’s hard to beat labels. The little words the reporters stick in to describe institutions often turn out to tell more about the bias of the reporters and news organizations than about the institutions to which they are being applied.

A good recent example — a good example, but bad journalism — of this phenomenon comes in a news article by Patricia Cohen that appears in the business section of the New York Times under the headline “What Trump and the G.O.P. Can Agree On: Tax Cuts for the Rich.”

Ms. Cohen mentions three research organizations or think tanks in her article. One, the Tax Policy Center, is a joint venture of two center-left organizations, the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution. Ms. Cohen refers to it as “the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center in Washington.”

Two others, the Tax Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, are also nonpartisan, but they are on the center-right of the ideological spectrum. Ms. Cohen refers to them as “the conservative American Enterprise Institute” and “The conservative Tax Foundation.”

Got that? The Times describes the center-left think tank as “nonpartisan,” but it describes the center to center-right think tanks as “conservative.”

Read it.

If you relied on accounts by the mainstream media of the Chilcot Report regarding Britain’s decision to participate in the toppling of Saddam Hussein, you might easily conclude that it supports the “Bush-Blair lied, people died” narrative so cherished by the left. You wouldn’t know that the Report actually rejects this claim.

This account by Steven Erlanger and David Sanger of the New York Times doesn’t say so. Neither does this account by Geoff Witte of the Washington Post. He claims that the Report “offer[s] official validation to the views of the Iraq War’s most ardent critics.” But those critics insist that Bush and Blair lied. The Report finds otherwise.

Witte also asserts that “the report will give ample ammunition to the war’s toughest critics, including those in Britain who have called for war crimes charges to be brought against Blair.” Witte doesn’t even try to explain how the Report’s finding might support a war crimes charge. Witte is simply indulging in leftist rhetoric (and, perhaps, wishful thinking).

Hey, if it doesn’t fit the Narrativ e, it’s not really ‘news’.

Gavin McInnes connects the dots.

As the chaos unfolded late Thursday night in Dallas, I was struck by how many members of the media insisted the protest was peaceful and we have to remain calm. Who are these people, my high school teacher? I’m tuning in to learn how many cops are dead. My reaction to it is none of your business.

The reason these reporters were acting like teachers is that’s how they see themselves. They don’t just report the news, they Voxplain it. Of course, the problem with thought control is you need to keep correcting the course. First they tell us “racism is alive and well” and we should be disgusted with our country, but when that starts a riot, they backpedal and tell us we’re overreacting. This is how socialism works. You circle-kick the pendulum away from a problem and when it goes smashing through the cuckoo clock, you scramble to swing it back the other way. The clowns on TV went to Cultural Marxism school so they’re not trained journalists. They’re trained socialists. This means they’re experts at propaganda and controlling the populace while having little or no interest in the truth.

Read it.

About a year ago there was the usual fanfare about a new study that purported to show that hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) for natural gas led to unsafe levels of local air pollution and increased cancer risk. Newsweek covered it, for example:

Living near to active fracking sites could increase the risk of cancer as the process harmful chemicals into the air, a new study has found.

Researchers from Oregon State University (OSU) and the University of Cincinnati found that hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as fracking, releases polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are linked to cancers and respiratory diseases.

The study found that moving just one mile away from active sites reduced the levels of the dangerous chemicals in the air by up to 30%.

Well guess what, mom? The study has been retracted. Not corrected or revised, but fully retracted because a “spreadsheet error” resulted in completely incorrect findings.

Read it.

You knew it had to happen. Black snipers shoot cops in Dallas and it’s all Donald Trump’s fault.

Funny how all of the violence at Trump rallies is caused by Hillary supporters. That includes the guy who tried to assassinate Trump.

Read it.

The BRG’s response “acknowledges that political speech is free and protected,” though there is a but in there, enabling the BRG to condemn the messages:

As a group, though, we are committed to the idea that political speech is open, engaged, and part of a public debate. These seemingly connected reports suggest a pattern of using the idea of political speech to target specific members of the Skidmore community with biased messaging. As such, the BRG does not interpret these messages as political speech but as racialized, targeted attacks.

The hysteria is similar to chalking incidents revealing pro-Trump messages at universities across the country in the spring, which is when the messages appeared at Skidmore. The overreaction from the first message at Emory University led to a contest in which numerous schools participated with chalk messages of their own.

As a wise man once said, ‘If you can hear the dog whistle, you’re the dog.’