Read it.

And this is only worth mentioning because — wait for it —

The unique reef is already being threatened by oil drilling companies

Women and minorities hardest hit, of course.

The Guardian reveals – I’m shocked, shocked I tell you — that Shakespeare was a sexist racist bigot homophobe who probably voted Republican.

Only 17% of speeches in Shakespeare’s plays are by women

Shakespeare may have been widely championed as a visionary, but this description can’t be applied to his record on gender equality. On average men are given 81% of speeches, while 17% go to women and the rest are made up of unknowns or mixed groups, according to Open Source Shakespeare. Women tend to come off worst in his tragedies: Timon of Athens features just nine speeches by women, compared with 725 by men. And yet the population of Shakespeare’s England was roughly 53.5% male and 46.5% female. “It’s been rough on women actors with a passion for Shakespeare these 400 years,” says Tina Packer, the actor and artistic director at Shakespeare & Company in Massachusetts.

Somehow I can’t help but feel that this sort of misses the point. But I feel that way a lot these days.

Read it.

The 17^th annual White Privilege Conference in Philadelphia devolved into a precious snowflake whinefest when attendees noted that the conference was too white. No, I’m not kidding. To make things more absurd, a speaker, who was Caucasian, spoke over his allotted time, an offense that was nothing more than an exercise in white supremacy.

Jim Goad speaks truth to glower.

As everyone with two brain cells to rub together is well aware, a tremendous amount of social injustice exists in this so-called world of ours. To rectify this unfortunate situation, many among us who are devoted to enforcing equality by all means necessary have taken to wielding our smartphones like Star Wars lightsabers against all the big fat mean rich white male capitalist sexist scum-sucking cisgender pigs who need to be brutally tortured in public and then wiped off the planet because they think it’s cool and funny to dehumanize others.

Hashtag activism is a relatively new weapon in the arsenal of social justice warriors who seek to erase national borders, do away with greed, abolish ethnic conflict, eradicate hate speech, criminalize transphobia, foster a harmonious global community under one benevolent governmental taxing agency, and all other manner of, like, totally realistic and absolutely plausible goals.

Scott Johnson of Powerline fisks a Voice of the Crust.

In addition to the Twin Cities, Somali Muslim immigrants to Minnesota have settled in rural areas such as St. Cloud, Mankato and Willmar. Concern about the continuing waves of immigration from Somalia in particular is not confined to the Twin Cities. Thus Matt McKinney’s Star Tribune contribution to stifling discussion of the related issues in “Anti-Muslim speaking circuit runs through rural Minnesota.”

McKinney’s piece is pitiful. It presents all related concerns as manifestations of “Islamophobia.” It calls on Jaylani Hussein, executive director of the Minnesota chapter of CAIR, to render his opinion as an impartial expert. McKinney quotes Hussein: “A lot of these fears are coming from that type of general fear of the ‘other,’ and not real knowledge of Islam.”

I would say “a lot of these fears are coming from” Somali Minnesotans’ support for foreign terrorist organizations waging jihad. The support is manifested in the charges brought against the “Minnesota men” seeking to join ISIS in 2014 and 2015. Somali community sentiment is itself apparently supportive of the “Minnesota men” if not the cause. Rather than investigate the possibly rational causes of the “fears,” McKinney simply presents the concerns as evidence of bigotry.

Read it.

Today is “Equal Pay Day,” which mitigates the fact that April is also Irritable Bowel Syndrome Awareness Month. (Seriously—it is.) And so we might as well remind everyone—again—that the “Pay Gap” is another of those myths that liberals cling to like a drowning man to a life preserver.

Read it.

James Henry, a former chief economist at consultancy McKinsey and an expert on tax havens, has conducted groundbreaking new research for the Tax Justice Network campaign group – sifting through data from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and private sector analysts to construct an alarming picture that shows capital flooding out of countries across the world and disappearing into the cracks in the financial system.

Now, if you think that research conducted by any organization called ‘Tax Justice Network campaign group’ would find anything else, or that Voice of the Crust The Guardian would publish it, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’m just sure you want to buy. (Does anybody actually believe this drivel? Somebody must, or they wouldn’t spend good money — well, socialist money — publishing it.)

Note the automatic assumption that money ‘flooding offshore’ isn’t ‘trickling down’. From people who spend their daylight hours bleeding over all of the Pitiful Poor People of the Third World, you’d think they would be delighted. But I guess not.

Read it.

In politics, a dog whistle is a rhetorical device–an oral expression susceptible to two interpretations, one straightforward and one, metaphorically speaking, at a higher frequency. In his 2004 speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination, John Kerry* asserted: “Let’s never misuse for political purposes the most precious document in American history, the Constitution of the United States.” A platitude to the ordinary ear was an endorsement of same-sex marriage at 30 kilohertz.

…

The thing we adore about these dog-whistle kerfuffles is that the people who react to the whistle always assume it’s intended for somebody else. The whole point of the metaphor is that if you can hear the whistle, you’re the dog.

Steve Sailer runs the numbers so that you don’t have to.

About 46,600 results (0.71 seconds)

Be still my heart.

The day was coined and publicised by a former high school teacher from California.

Yeah, that figures.

Read it.

Note that not once is there any mention of the elephant in the room: This would appear to be Just Another Islamic Honor Killing.

But that would be Noticing.

Read it.

The strongest recommendation for Donald Trump I’ve seen in months.

Although I’m sure that The Magic Negro is considering an Executive Order that would allow Europeans (and Africans, too! Why not?) to vote in our Presidential election ‘just this once’.

Read it.

Neither does Obama, the available evidence indicates, so I don’t know what he’s complaining about.

Steve Sailer calls out the Usual Media Suspects.

The L.A. Times article blames white people for the fact that Latinos are taking over formerly ‘integrated’ neighborhoods.

One seldom mentioned reason that white flight is a slow process in California is because the 1978 initiative Proposition 13 gives a major property tax break to homeowners who stay in their homes. So Los Angeles neighborhoods tend to be pretty stable compared to, say, Chicago neighborhoods. They don’t rapidly flip due to white flight, nor do they rapidly gentrify.

Liberals always want to get rid of Proposition 13 because it’s such an imposition on raising taxes to spend more on social programs. But nobody mentions that Prop 13 did more for neighborhood integration than just about any policy of the last 40 years.

That is, of course, not mentioned in the L.A. Times article.

Asians in Los Angeles used to be very integrated all over the place. But then forced racial busing came to LAUSD in the late 1970s, so the Jews bailed out to private schools and the Asians bailed out to small school districts in the San Gabriel Valley that they could take over and control, like Arcadia. This also proved a way for Asian parents to keep their daughters away from chasing white boys by moving them to Asian dominant public schools.

But whites are to blame nevertheless.

David Cole examines the pro-Hitler Left.

But my own views on The Donald aside, there’s no question that leftists have gone plumb loco over his candidacy. After decades of calling every Republican under the sun “Hitler,” leftists have now started to believe their own slur. As Daniel Greenfield points out, every GOP presidential candidate over the past fifty years has been Hitler according to the left. And as I mentioned a few weeks ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger was Hitler when he first ran for governor of California. Many people have forgotten that the night before the recall election, soon-to-be senator Al Franken announced on The Tonight Show that, if elected, Schwarzenegger would emulate Hitler (that’s the same Tonight Show hosted by Jay Leno, who, ten years earlier, had called Rush Limbaugh Hitler). When Romney was running for president, Mormons were Hitler. Last week, when Mormon voters demonstrated their intense dislike for Trump, all of a sudden they were Hitler no more.

John McCain is no longer Hitler, but he was back in 2008, when an episode of Family Guy labeled both McCain and Palin as Hitler(s). About a year after that episode aired, I was at a birthday bash for John Romano, the former Breitbart “Big Hollywood” author who chucked the right-wing blogosphere to open one of the Internet’s largest Parisian tour operating companies (an irony, as his views on Muslims and immigrants might actually make him a “hate criminal” in the very country he now depends on for his livelihood). A lone leftist at Romano’s party was John Viener, a producer and writer for Family Guy. I asked Viener about the McCain/Palin Hitler smear, which had been inserted into the episode not so much as a gag but as a political statement.

…

I never thought most leftists really believed them. It’s just part of the kata, an expected countermove. Dude says “I’m a Republican,” you reply “Well, then, you’re Hitler.” It’s just theater.

But with Trump, leftists are acting like they really do believe he’s der Führer reincarnated. I think what we’re witnessing is a new twist on the Boy Who Cried Wolf, in which the boy doesn’t end up encountering a real wolf, but rather, he comes to believe his own lie. He now actually sees the nonexistent wolf he invented, thus becoming an even bigger menace to the townspeople, having transitioned from liar to zealot, from prankster to paranoid schizo.

Read it.

Poor special snowflake….

Read it.

Not that Obama has ever given a shit about democracy before.

During the keynote address at the Toner Prize of Excellence in Political Reporting, Obama took several swipes at the GOP presidential candidates — without mentioning any names.

Toner — isn’t that the black stuff that gets all over your hands and clothes when you try to replace it in a copier? Yeah, that sure sounds like political reporting to me.

Read it.

He told Management Today: “A free market system needs citizens to believe that the method of redistributing income is is fair and effective.

Uh, sorry, but a free market system doesn’t redistribute income. He must be thinking of socialism. (But that would imply ‘thinking’ which doesn’t appear to be much in evidence here.)

Parker’s wealth is put at £185 million by the Sunday Times Rich List.

So how much is a 50% income tax rate going to reduce his lifestyle? Not a shred, I would think. Who would it hurt? Um, maybe people who aren’t (yet) as rich as he is but who would like to be? Just maybe?

So ponder what he’s really up to.

What a surprise.

It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay — a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in “conversational understanding.” The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through “casual and playful conversation.”

Unfortunately, the conversations didn’t stay playful for long. Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay — being essentially a robot parrot with an Internet connection — started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.

Or, more accurately, ‘reality in, reality out’. Funny it is that, when reality conflicts with ‘progressive’ a priori worldview, somehow it’s reality’s fault for being All Wrong.

Read it.

I knew the whole concept of an entrepreneurship degree was flawed (because you get a degree to get hired by an employer – the antithesis of entrepreneurship).  And I also knew most professors are scam artists who could never work it in the real world, and thus sell worthless, overpriced pieces of paper to naive millennials.  But there was also a piece of me who theorized there MUST be some old timer who retired, made their millions, and just wanted to share their experience to help young, budding entrepreneurs.

…

The truth is 66% of the “entrepreneurship professors'” resumes I searched had NO experience in being entrepreneurs.  The vast majority of them, like all their professor brethren, were the epitome of “those who can’t do, teach.”  Merely bystanders, spectators, studiers-of, and observers of real entrepreneurs in the real world making real change.  Simply the marching band who lacked the talent, skill, and work ethic required to make it on the football team.

Read it.

Now try to figure out how the facts reported in the article support the conclusion reached in the headline.

The Chattering Classes seem to regard as an intuitively obvious law of nature that the candidate with more money will ‘buy’ the election, yet the available evidence suggests that this is far from true (Jeb Bush, call your campaign committee). In fact, the facts seem to indicate that not all the money in the world will help when the voters just aren’t in the mood — Arianna Huffington’s ex-husband’s campaign for the Senate being the poster child for such efforts.

I think that the supposed power of money to dominate elections, like the supposed power of money to improve education, is just a popular delusion, assumed rather than actually demonstrated.

Read it.

A group of around 40 millionaires wrote to Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and senior legislators, calling on them to consider raising taxes on the state’s wealthiest residents to help address poverty and other problems.

This is not about providing more money for addressing ‘problems’, which these people could easily do merely by donating large amounts of their own money to the State for such purposed. No, this is about forcing other people to spend money on this crowd’s priorities, whether they like it or not. The ‘problem’ is merely the excuse; it’s the coercion they like.

“As a businessman and philanthropist and as a citizen of New York State, I believe we need to invest in our people and our infrastructure,” said Mr Hindery, the managing partner of InterMedia Partners, a media industry private equity fund.

This is, of course, horseshit. Government spending is not ‘investment’, because investments bring returns; government spending is by definition ‘consumption’, as any Real Economist will tell you. This guy knows that — he’s just betting that Low Information Voters will not.

The Associated Press said the so-called one-percent plan would create new, higher tax rates for those making $665,000 or more.

And that reveals the Secret Agenda. It’s not about ‘soaking the rich’, but about ‘soaking the almost-rich so that they won’t actually get rich’. Similarly, large companies favor extensive government regulations because they know that their revenues are enough to cover the costs, but that smaller firms that might prove a threat will be forced to the wall by the expense.

There is no more loathsome a snake than the rich man who calls for higher taxes.

The Other McCain looks at ‘journalism’.

Identity politics and liberal notions of “diversity” have so polluted the journalism racket that now even the sports pages are full of “social justice.” If there is a gay outfielder playing for some AA farm team anywhere in America, all he has to do is send an email to Sports Illustrated and they’ll run a 6,000-word feature about his courageous struggle against homophobia in Dubuque or Albuquerque or wherever.

Whether broccoli journalism is Good for Democracy, it’s not good for journalism, because people get tired of being told what to think.

A newsroom is not a pulpit, and editors are not theologians, and if you want to preach a sermon by disguising it as a five-part “investigate” series about homelessness or whatever, you might eventually find yourself preaching to an empty church, because readers are not entirely stupid. Your pretentious attitude as Our Moral Superiors™ is tiresome and obnoxious, and people won’t pay money to be treated like third-graders being scolded by their teacher. But I digress . . .

Read it.

And, more to the point, most of them don’t give a rap.

Read it.

Considering that many of them are illegal aliens, I don’t doubt it.

A new crusade has emerged among college students who insist on insulation from the real world – now left-liberal campus activists demand safe spaces from U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents who recruit at campus job fairs.

Hey, you never know, they might just whip some cuffs on you if you speak Spanish in the vicinity.

Protesters at several campuses in Southern California and Arizona have demanded administrators cut all ties with the federal agency, and some have protested agents’ presence on campus. Students say border protection representatives make students – especially students in the country illegally – feel unsafe.

Um, well, that’s sort of their job….

At UC Santa Barbara in late January, a parade of students boisterously demonstrated against border patrol recruiters at a campus job fair, loudly chanting “f*ck your borders, f*ck your walls.” One organizer told The College Fix agents’ attendance was “triggering” for undocumented students, adding “there is no space on this campus for an organization that continues to threaten the safety of students.”

It certainly seems to trigger a lot of juvenile behavior. But that’s probably not what they meant.

Read it.

Doubtless there is some utility in playing out worst-case scenarios as a way to plan for the future. That being said, the New York Times is reporting a new study, “Millions projected to be at risk from sea level rise in the continental United States,” in Nature Climate Change that calculates the number of Americans that would be affected by sea level rises between 3 and 6 feet by 2100 due to man-made global warming. As far as I can tell, the main contribution of the study is new coastal population projections. The researchers calculate that if sea level rises by 3 feet, the land that 4.2 million Americans live on will be at risk of inundation. If sea level rises by 6 feet, then 13.1 million Americans might have to move inland. The costs of relocating that many people could be as much $14 trillion. So researchers can now get their studies published in a prestigious scientific journal and publicized by leading newspapers by merely assuming a catastrophe. Neat trick.

On the other hand, I have this vision of seawater pouring down the stairs of a Manhattan subway stop. Mmmmm….

Read it.

It’s only fair. Donald Trump has already given his brutal assessment of the rise of Barack Obama.

Read it.

Harvard Medical School (HMS) students styling themselves the “Racial Justice Coalition” are demanding that their next Dean be “committed to social justice both inside and outside our community.”

And, of course, that has everything to do with learning to become a doctor.

Again, the intellectual fallacy here is that because Group X comprises Y percent of the population, then ipso facto they must be entitled to Y percent of the jobs in [insert your favorite field here].

Quite frankly, I don’t want anybody to be working on my health who is so stupid as to believe that .

Read it.

The Phillips 66 oil company wants to build a rail spur from the main railroad to their facility, allowing them to bring in oil trains through the city of San Luis Obispo, and the San Luis Obispo County Planning Commission is currently reviewing it, conducting a hearing on it last week.

The resolution, authored by a trio of non-ASI member students, one of whom is on the ASI University Union Advisory Board, and sponsored by two members of ASI Board of Directors, called for opposition to the project.

I wasn’t aware that anybody gave a shit what college students thought when it comes to railroad projects.

Read it.

Must be Islamophobia or one of those things.

Being constantly insulted by feminists — “Heterosexuality Is the Structure That Keeps Sexist Oppression in Place” — is something men are expected never to notice. Any man who objects to feminism’s anti-male hate propaganda will be instantly branded a misogynist. This is “Kafkatrapping,” whereby the denial of guilt is cited as proof of guilt.

Read it.

The Antiplanner confesses to not be a bible expert, but I don’t think Jesus ever said, “Thou shalt steal from thy neighbors so thee can afford to take expensive train rides.” But that seems to be the goal of Isaiah, a faith-based group in Minnesota that demands that taxpayers subsidize commuter trains from St. Cloud to Minneapolis.

Of course they do.

The Northstar commuter-rail line currently operates over the 40 miles from Minneapolis to Big Lake, about 28 miles short of St. Cloud. The line is a huge loser: it carried an average of around 1,250 round-trips a day in 2014, earning fare revenues of less than $2.4 million but spending $15.2 million on operations and $7.4 million on maintenance.

Of course it does.

St. Cloud residents who want to catch the train have to drive or take a bus to Big Lake. But taking a bus is so “antiquated,” complains Reverend James Albert, Isaiah’s leader. Apparently, they didn’t teach much history in Albert’s seminary school, or he would know that trains are nearly 100 years more antiquated than buses.

Evidently not.

“We feel we deserve the option to not own a car,” says Isaiah member Richard Gordon, a student at St. Cloud State University. While no one is preventing him from taking that option, that doesn’t also mean that he deserves to have 90 percent of his transportation costs paid for by taxpayers.

Students: The Entitled Class.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, turns over a rock.

Suppose it’s true, however, that modern markets are chock-full of devious phishermen preying successfully upon helpless phools who buy too many oranges in the belief that each has been “kist” by the sun. What’s to be done? The authors offer no specific proposals. Yet they clearly imply that more government regulation is a key part of the solution. At one point, for example, they advocate “more generous funding” for the Securities and Exchange Commission; at another, they speak approvingly of greater regulation of slot machines.

Solutions via government are based on a glaring fallacy: that people deficient in choosing for themselves in the marketplace will automatically shed those deficiencies once the government authorizes them to choose for others. Ironically, while citing slot machines, the authors make no mention of a related scam: government-run lotteries. The lotteries are perhaps the most obvious example of how those who are supposed to protect us from phishing scams themselves eagerly phish for phools.

Nothing, indeed, could be more phoolish than for ordinary men and women to submit to elites who are as confident as professors Akerlof and Shiller that they know best how other people should behave. Such elitism poses a far worse danger to society than entrepreneurs offering aromatic pastries for sale.

The world is just chock-full of people who are utterly convinced that they are far more qualified than you are to determine how you ought to live your life, from how you spend your money to how you spend your time to how you eat your fargin’ food.

Resist them, steadfast in the faith.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

I wish I were.

Read it.

You like what Bernie’s calling for, but you just don’t think he’s likely to win the general election, perhaps because “this country would never elect a socialist.” And even if he did win, you don’t think he’d be able to accomplish his goals, given how entrenched the GOP opposition is. Maybe you even think it’s already settled—that Hillary’s got the nomination locked up.

Here’s why going with that assumption—and backing Hillary in general—would be, in the words of Donald Trump, a disaster.

Apparently she is insufficiently communist for Salon magazine. Who knew?

But even apart from question of feasibility, we have to ask: Were Clinton to take office, would she seriously push for greater economic fairness, more peace and a generally progressive agenda, or would she defend the status quo?

I’m thinking not. So, apparently, are a lot of ‘progressives’.

Read it.

Most of that legacy was invading Christian countries and reducing them to slavery.

Are they going to have a similar ‘tourist trail’ to celebrate Hitler’s romp through Eastern Europe?

Read it.

The whitewashing of Muslim honor killings in America has seeped into academia. And the PC police have found a new scapegoat: Hindu Americans.

In January, the Journal of Family Violence published “An Exploratory Study of Honor Crimes in the United States” by Brittany E. Hayes, Joshua D. Freilich and Steven M. Chermak. It was an act of cowardice as well as a shoddy piece of research. It broke absolutely no new ground, either theoretically or statistically, and is so “politically correct” that it completely misses an entire forest for a tree.

My, what a surprise!

Speaking at a White House reception for the National Governors Association yesterday, President Obama mentioned the series of shootings that killed six people in Kalamazoo County, Michigan, on Saturday. “Earlier this year, I took some steps that will make it harder for dangerous people, like this individual, to buy a gun,” he claimed. At this point there is no reason to believe that’s true.

Obama’s “executive actions” on gun control included a “clarification” of which gun sellers are “engaged in the business of selling firearms” and therefore must conduct background checks. But even if we assume that more gun buyers will undergo background checks as a result of that initiative (which is by no means assured), it is almost certainly irrelevant to the the case at hand.

Steven Hayward scratches his head.

The study, by UMass/Amherst economics professor Gerald Friedman, asserts that median income would soar by more than $22,000, 26 million jobs would be created and unemployment would fall to 3.8 percent. And that’s just from Sanders’s Medicare-for-All proposal alone. Imagine what going Full-Venezuela could do! The Sanders campaign pounced on this result, declaring it to be “outstanding work.”

A couple of observations before we enjoy the Democratic panic. First, I think we can safely assume that Prof. Gerald Friedman is no relation to Milton Friedman. I’m not even going to check it out. Second, every UMass/Amherst economics student who took courses from Friedman should demand a tuition refund immediately. Third, seriously Amherst? Would you hire a flat-earther for your geography department? Why would you hire one for your economics department?

Read it.

This past Sunday on This Week with the former Clinton enabler, the odious Senator Chuck Schumer instructed us in course to be followed in connection with the replacement of Justice Scalia on the Court: “Well, the job, first and foremost, is for the president to nominate and for the Senate to hold hearings and go through the process. You know, the Constitution, Ted Cruz holds the Constitution, you know, when he walks through the halls of Congress. Let him show me the clause that says president’s only president for three years.” The former Clinton enabler let Schumer’s instruction stand without any of the variety of challenges that might be made on the merits.

At Mediaite, Alex Rodriguez calls attention to one challenge that applies specifically to Schumer: “Schumer took the exact opposite stance nine years ago, going out of his way to bluntly tell the George W. Bush administration that he would filibuster any Supreme Court nominee they put forward in the next two years because he didn’t care for the ideology of his previous two nominees.” Rodriguez posts the video below from Schumer’s speech to the American Constitution Society, no less, and dryly observes: “This speech was delivered July 27, 2007. So Schumer – who now balks at the idea of a 300-day delay in appointing a Justice – would have been perfectly okay with filibustering a Supreme Court nominee for 543 days.” Curt Mills makes the same point at the Examiner, as does Ed Morrissey at Hot Air and others elsewhere. It can’t be made too often.

And the same goes for the other bloviators in the Democrite party. They seem to think that there’s one rule for them and another for everybody else, and their contempt for the Low Information Voter is such that they don’t even pretend any more.

Read it.

Actually, the crisis is the number of people ignorant of elementary economics who are allowed to write sky-is-falling articles like this one.

Come, let us fisk:

There is a growing societal divide in Vancouver that is threatening its future.

An assertion for which neither evidence nor argument are presented. Granted that it is part of the Narrative that person A having more money than person B is ipso facto a bad thing, just why it might be a bad thing is never backed up. OF COURSE IT’S A BAD THING! DIDN’T YOU HEAR ME? INEQUALITY!  Until your ears bleed. And saying, ‘Yeah? So?’ merely sets off another round of hand-waving.

The city is increasingly becoming an investor haven for the rich. Sure, there are some lucky souls, relatively middle-class people who got into the housing market before prices took off and who are now sitting on a gold mine. Most realize how fortunate they are, the lottery ticket they won.

Much like New York. Or London. Or even San Francisco. I don’t see those cities losing residents like, say, Aleppo or Damascus — the roads choked with handcarts, little children clinging to the skirts of their emaciated mothers, etc.

And they have consciences when it comes to the plight of those who have no hope of buying a house of any description in the city.

How is not being able to buy a house a ‘plight’? Let’s take a look at places where buying a house can be done with pocket change — Detroit, say — and see whether that place is more worth living in than Vancouver. I suspect not. Whatever became of the Narrative trope, Let’s Do Things Like The Europeans? People in Europe don’t expect to be able to buy a house, especially in a hipster part of the city; they rent, as they’ve done for hundreds of years. Don’t hear any whining out of Paris, or Rome, or Berlin, or Vienna, about the lack of housing affordability.

By now, everyone has a fairly clear picture of what is taking place; the confluence of factors that have led to the moment at which we have arrived; the global influx of capital, largely from China; low interest rates, a low Canadian dollar – all of which has created a price ascension that is beyond most people’s comprehension.

Only if you have to take your shoes off to count. The ‘low Canadian dollar’ is the fault of the government (but somehow I suspect that the writer of this article would be glad to give Justin Trudeau a blow job if asked). The ‘global influx of capital’ would, in any other circumstance be celebrated; when it’s housing, it’s a bad thing? How come?

For many young adults, however, the city increasingly represents a place of which they no longer can afford to be a part. Consequently, Vancouver faces an almost existential threat; what happens when the lifeblood of any community, those in their 20s and 30s, decide to leave?

Since when are people in the 20s and 30s ‘the lifeblood of any community’? The lifeblood of any community are people who can afford to buy things in that community and support local businesses; typically people in their 20s and 30s are on the low end of that demographic.

And when people in their 20s and 30s leave, you wind up like the small towns of the Midwest: Unemployment is high, good and services are unavailable, and the local mood is one of quite desperation. If Vancouver were going through the sort of process that, say, Detroic is going through, then there might be a valid point here. But I haven’t heard anything about it. Nor does this author provide any statistics to back up his assertion, as a Real Journalist would. So he’s just blowing hot air up our butts.

This is tiresome, so the rest is left as an exercise for the reader. But it’s just the same old Sky-Falling-Government-Must-Act song and dance we expect out of the Drive By Media these days.

Read it.

The former president appeared angry as he poured scorn on his wife’s opponent, portraying the Sanders campaign as dishonest and his healthcare proposals as unrealistic.

Being called dishonest by Bill Clinton is like being called ugly by a frog.

Read it.

Seemingly because contemporary American universities don’t already do enoughabout so-called social justice and diversity, Brown University’s Office of Campus Life and Student Services held a day-long “professional development” on the topics, and attendance topped 150 participants.

Called the “Social Justice Retreat: An Engaging and Open Space for Discussing Power, Privilege and Oppression,” both the morning and afternoon workshops during the January 19 affair “were packed with staff members,” according to Associate Dean Mary Grace Almandrez.

This is like mandating racial sensitivity training for the Obama White House. ‘Coals to Newcastle’ is the applicable cliche.

Read it.

As I mentioned the other day, stand-up comedians employ what they call “runners,” which are themes and punch lines they set up for recurrent laughs. Think of Jerry Seinfeld’s “did you ever notice. . .” or “not that there’s anything wrong with that” schtick.

Only days after the New York Times pranked us with their endorsement of John Kasich for the GOP nomination, they have returned with another of their comedy “runners,” in which they offer up “the conservative case” for a liberal idea, as though the Times really thinks we’ll fall for their good wishes for conservatism to prosper. They’ve done this repeatedly with bad ideas for climate change, criminal justice reform, tax increases, etc. The shorter version of all of these articles can be rendered “Why Conservatives Should Change Their Mind and Agree with Us.”

…

The ultimate in government regulation is empowering the government to regulate the process by which it is constituted by the people. The government is itself today the largest interest group in the nation—a fact that would horrify the founders. Giving the government more power to regulate political speech is to cement in place forever the primacy of the administrative state. Who thinks the government would regulate political speech against its own interest? Show of hands??

Read it.

Well, duh. I predict that the Russians will give this complaint all the consideration it deserves, i.e. none.

Read it.

Sarah Lahm, a freelance journalist who has been an education fellow for The Progressive magazine, writes that “what passes for acceptable school choice rhetoric, behind closed doors, is frightening.”

This a nice opening to a hit piece on NSCW, especially to describe a public event that was held at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. Not a lot of closed doors at that event, I’m guessing, especially since it was free and open to the public, but details, shmetails, right?

Lahm also clucks that the panel was all-white even as she notes that one of the intended participants was African American but he “was not able to make it.” And there’s this slag: “But that’s not all. The whole room was white, as far as I could see.” That would include Lahm, by the way.

Read it.

Slate, a once-semi-readable website,published a 2,925-word tome on Tuesday by a guy who is really sad because he managed to rack up $200,000 in student loan debt by getting a useless degree at a fancypants private college and then, by borrowing more cash to be a graduate student.

Lesson: Don’t waste your time in college getting a useless degree unless you have a trust fund that will support you while you whine about your First World problems.

Garner’s tale of woe and world-historical budgetary stupidity begins — as he tells it, in excruciating detail — when he was a high school senior. He was a “consumer” of the “vacuous platitudes” on college brochures, and so he excitedly applied to Connecticut College — a school which currently charges a comprehensive fee of $62,965 per year.

“My siblings and I had the privilege of expecting we would attend private colleges,” Garner explains, even though his family had become “financially stressed” when he was in high school.

As Robert A. Heinlein always used to say, ‘Stupidity is always a capital crime.’ Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

The American pika is thought by many biologists to be a prime candidate for extirpation as the planet continues to warm, done in by temperatures too severe for this small mammal native to cold climates.

But a new study, published this week in the journal Global Change Biology, paints a different, more complex future for this rock-dwelling little lagomorph – the same order that includes rabbits and hares. Pikas may survive, even thrive, in some areas, the researchers say, while facing extirpation in others.

The research is important because pikas are considered a sentinel species for climate change impacts.

‘Sentinel species’ in eco-speak means ‘bloody shirt to wave to promote hysteria’. Just so you know.

Read it.

Better the crook you know than the fool you don’t?

The L.A. Times illustrates why newspapers are dying.

Less obvious, or at least less discussed, is the parallel conundrum Trump poses for self-styled progressives. How far can they go in decrying Trump’s support among white blue-collar workers without seeming to write off what was once regarded as a core progressive constituency?

The delusion that blue-collar workers were ever a ‘core progressive constituency’ marks this as a prime Voice of the Crust moment. Who do they think voted for Nixon? and Reagan?

It could be argued that the writing-off has already occurred. There has long been a shift in left-liberal politics away from any broad identification with “the workers” — narrowly conceived as white, male and straight — in favor of specific social and environmental issues that pose no threat to existing economic structures. In that regard, Trump’s blue-collar support might be viewed as a vindication: Workers of the world, take a hike. We never liked you much anyway.

Well, that at least is honest enough. But they say it just to try to deny it, which means that they’re still delusional.

Still, there remains the vexing question of how a billionaire demagogue can win the loyalty of the very people whose class interests he opposes.

The assumption here is a cultural Marxist one, that ‘a billionaire demagogue’ has ‘class interests’ opposed to those of the working-class. It also harps on the traditional ‘progressive’ theme that if the workers only knew what their true class interests were, they’d vote for socialists. This is an article of faith, not fazed by facts on the ground.

What possible sense can we make of blue-collar workers of any age, gender or race supporting a man whose very existence rests on their exploitation and, increasingly, on their obsolescence?

Gee, that doesn’t fit the Narrative, so of course it can’t be true. And yet it is. Who can square this circle?

The usual answers — fear of terrorism, resentment of immigrants, disgust with the Washington establishment — are sound enough, but they don’t go very deep.

In other words, the facts don’t match the Narrative, so it can’t be that the Narrative is wrong — something else must be going on there. Now we’re getting into Conspiracy Theory territory.

It’s as if the impossibility of depth were a given.

As it is, in the religion of the Progressive. When facts don’t agree with Belief, the Belief is right, so there must be something wrong about the facts.

Fisking the remainder of the article is left as an exercise for the reader. It won’t be very difficult.

Read it.

And that sure explains a lot. Anybody who thinks that Marx is any sort of economist is an idiot; they might as well call Thomas Aquinas an economist.