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.

Read it.

Faith schools have been accused of adopting an approach bordering on  “religious racism” by turning away pupils simply on the grounds of their religion.

I am not making this up. I’m curious as to what part of ‘faith schools’ these people don’t understand. Certainly their understanding of language leaves a lot to be desired.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.”

And that’s it, in a nutshell — by controlling the words we use, these people are trying to control us. Understand what they’re doing, and resist.

Read it.

Well, economists who agree with the New York Times that ‘wealth inequality’ is ipso facto a horrible injustice.

These people — the top one-quarter of 1 percent of the country’s employed population — have enjoyed explosive gains in income and wealth in recent decades, even as salaries and wages stagnated for the typical American worker.

Note the use of the term ‘enjoyed’, as if this income had just dropped into their laps as they were somehow passing by on the street. No team of wild horses could get Nelson D. Schwartz to use the more accurate term ‘earned’, since that would be contrary to The Narrative.

Note that the entirety of the article is devoted to how much inequality is increasing — not one word attempts to justify the assumption that ‘wealth inequality’ is a Bad Thing.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

Read it.

James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University, is one of the most vocal proponents of the idea that mass shootings have not been getting substantially more common. It isn’t “the nature and number of incidents” that have really changed, he once wrote; it’s “the extent and style of news coverage.”

Read it.

I am not making this up.

n an early scene of the new documentary “Weiner,” former Congressman and scandal subject Anthony Weiner is biking through New York City.

“Are you somebody I’m supposed to know?” a passerby asks.

“Believe me, no,” Weiner says.

Like it or not, a lot more people are going to know a lot more about Weiner with this movie.

Although why anyone would want to defies explanation. Few people are more appropriately named than Mr Weiner.

Read it.

Rather than condemning the rapes in Europe, this feminist calls people racists for noticing.

Read it.

Portland Community College has designated April “Whiteness History Month” (WHM), an “educational project” exploring how the “construct of whiteness” creates racial inequality.

“‘Whiteness History Month: Context, Consequences, and Change’ is a multidisciplinary, district-wide, educational project examining race and racism through an exploration of the construction of whiteness, its origins, and heritage,” PCC states on its website. “Scheduled for the month of April 2016, the project seeks to inspire innovative and practical solutions to community issues and social problems that stem from racism.”

This from the whitest city on the Left Coast. You’d think that they’d just Do The Right Thing and walk into the sea, giving the area back to the skraelings.

Read it.

Finally, an incentive to watch the Oscars.

Perhaps they could create some new categories:

Best Token Fashionable Minority Affirmative Action Victim.

Best Supporting Token Fashionable Minority Affirmative Action Victim.

Best Celebrity Snit.

Best Excuse to Wildly Throw Around Accusations of Racism and Sexism.

Read it.

And this is in the New York Times, so it must be true, right?

We liberals are sometimes glib about equating guns and danger. In fact, it’s complicated: The number of guns in America has increased by more than 50 percent since 1993, and in that same period the gun homicide rate in the United States has dropped by half.

‘Glib’? I wouldn’t say that. ‘Delusional’? That I would say.

Read it and weep.

National Geographic, which until recently was an excellent magazine about travel and the wide world, is now just another Voice of the Crust.

Example: the subhead for the above title, which is “A new book looks at extreme priviledge in an unequal world.’ Not only do they not know what the word privilege means, they can’t even spell it correctly.

Presumably whoever wrote that line went to a government school — all the traces are there. (I suspect that Becky Little’s real first name is ‘Chicken’.)

Read it.

David Brooks, the pet ‘conservative’ columnist for the New York Times, reveals himself publicly as just another shill for the Crust.

For our younger readers, the transitive verb “to bork” is an eponym from the late Robert Bork, whom Ronald Reagan unsuccessfully nominated to the high court in 1987. Political lexicographer William Safire defined it as to “attack viciously a candidate or appointee, especially by misrepresentation in the media.”

…

Brutalism is a style of architecture, but Brooks means to repurpose the term as an ideological slur—and a religious one.

“In his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues,” Brooks writes. “Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy.”

That line of attack is redolent of the late Sen. Howell Heflin, an Alabama Democrat who—as George Will noted the following year—said he opposed Bork in part because, as the senator put it, he was “disturbed by his [Bork’s] refusal to discuss his belief in God—or the lack thereof.”

Scott Johnson, a Real Lawyer, reviews the Haley case that causes Brooks such heartburn here and concludes that Cruz had a legitimate case.

I would be surprised if Haley did not know that Texas has a three-strikes law. When he committed the second felony he obviously knew that he had been accused of the first felony (he was convicted three days later). More importantly, when Haley stole the calculator five years later he certainly knew that he had two separate prior felony convictions, which would usually be considered “two strikes,” and Haley obviously did not know that the second felony was not technically a second strike because he did not raise it at trial. Nor did he raise this on his appeal of his conviction, which he lost.

The sentencing issue was raised for the first time on a habeas corpus application in state court, which was refused because his argument was not based on any facts that were not known at the time of the trial (the timing of the convictions was obviously in the record, it was just that nobody realized that the two prior felonies were not technically sequential to each other), and Haley had not raised the issue on appeal.

To permit defendants after all their appeals are exhausted to raise arguments that should have been raised at trial is a dubious proposition at best. The discovery of new evidence is one thing, but does a defendant have a perpetual right to suddenly say, “wait, I should have said…”?

Read it.

A female president would be more attuned to the issues facing America’s families than a male president, Hillary Clinton argued in a new interview released Thursday.

“My life experiences, what I care about, what I’ve been through just make me perhaps more aware of and responsive to a lot of the family issues that people are struggling with, whether it’s affording child care or looking to get their incomes up because everything is increasing in cost,”

How to help struggling families? Increase taxes! (Yeah, that’ll help.) I suggest that Hillary either didn’t learn as much from her ‘life experiences’ or ignored what she did learn in favor of vote-pandering.

For all the hand-waving and raised eyebrows, I still haven’t seen any evidence that Donald Trump has lied even half as much as Barack Obama, much less Hillary Clinton. Where’s the outrage about that?

At least Trump is entertaining, something that nobody has ever said about Barry or the She-Wolf of Washington.

Read it.

You, too, can play along.

Tonight’s State of the Union will be President Obama’s last, leading into a final presidential year that is unlikely to produce any major legislative action. And so, as multiple news outlets have reported, the speech won’t be a laundry list. Instead it will be more of a description of the sorts of outfits that he would like to see America wear.

…

As a report from RealClearPolitics describes it: “Gone in Obama’s eighth year are sweeping legislative ambitions. In their place: political storytelling aimed at a hoped-for Democratic successor and a Democratic Senate in 2017; maneuvers to protect seven years of governance; and lofty rhetorical riffs for the history books.”

…

Which brings us to the point of this post: Reason’s 2016 State of the Union drinking game—the very last under SOTU drinking game under president Obama! It’s the end of an era, folks. Drink up!

Read it.

Oh, pick pick pick. Everything is racist these days; they’re just trying to do their bit.

Putting tape on your mouth and standing in silent protest can make it hard for outsiders to figure out what your grievances are.

On the other hand, it keeps you from being annoying assholes, as most protesters are. I think that this trend ought to be encouraged.

Another grad student, Lucy Ogbu-Nwobodo, said “discrimination in the health system has a big impact on patients” – not enough so to explain what that is….

Read it.

Privately-owned ATMs probably aren’t charging convenience fees out of spite—they charge the fees because it costs a certain amount of money to maintain the service. Capping them would prompt ATMs to make up the money some other way, either by charging customers more for other features or by cutting services. Note that this isn’t theoretical: federal banking regulation of interchange fees prompted many banks to scale back on free checking and rewards programs that largely benefitted poor people.

But don’t expect a candidate who believes Americans should be limited to just a few kinds of deodorants and sneakers to grasp that.

Read it.

An assistant professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst concluded his comparative politics course earlier this month by telling students the planet is dying because of human activity – and there is little hope of reversing course.

Yeah, whenever I take a course on comparative politics, I wind up worrying about global apocalypse due to climate change. Every. Single. Time. And I look to assistant professors of political science to sound the alarm.

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During the height of holiday shopping season, a consumer report stoked ample ill-will toward American manufacturers after purporting to show that women’s products are priced higher for completely arbitrary reasons. This so-called “pink tax,” said the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs (DCA), affects almost every product marketed at American females, “from cradle to cane.”

‘Women and minorities hardest hit’ is one of the Timeless Tropes of the Narrative. Whenever a government agency starts beating one of these Crustian drums, you know that it will soon be followed by a demand for more government regulatory power over the lives of ordinary Americans — for their own good, of course.

Of course, individual consumers do have control over which products they buy, though. And while the pink razors with the butterflies on the packaging my be marketed toward women, no one’s forcing us to buy those over basic blue Bics. If the products in this study really were identical save for some totally non-desired factors, it seems likely that women, or at least a larger proportion of women, would simply choose the products marketed toward men.

Since they don’t, one can jump to one of two conclusions: either women are so brainwashed by marketing that they choose products against their own best interests because of it, or women find some discernible appeal in the women’s products—be that different ingredients, cosmetic factors, or whatever else—that make them worth paying more for. I’m going to go with the explanation that grants women a little intelligence and agency.

Of course, vast parts of the Narrative is based on the assumption that those who listen to advertising are just Mind-Numbed Robots who march out and do as the ads say, with no free will to resist — an outgrowth of the Crustian dogma that We Are Smart But They Are Dumb, ‘they’ being whoever doesn’t march to the Crustian tune.

Read it.

And Wall Street will laugh at Bernie Sanders, as it always has, because he has no chance of ever being President.

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The New York Times made itself a fool for the Rathergate film Truth. The Times not only published Stephen Holden’s breathless review of the film, the Times celebrated the film in a TimesTalks event featuring Robert Redford, Cate Blanchett, Dan Rather, and Mary Mapes, hosted by Times Magazine staff writer Susan Dominus. Holden also included Truth in his year-end best-of-2015 list (it’s number 7!). The Times went all in for this tribute to the greatest journalistic fraud of our era, as I noted in the City Journal column “Truth and the New York Times.”

In its year-end review of possible Oscar contenders, however, Times op-ed columnist Joe Nocera stumbles onto the truth and blurts it out. Doesn’t this require some kind of a trigger warning for Times readers?