Paul Krugman loves to criticize Republican rich people but doesn’t seem to make the connection with rich Democrats.

Wealth can be bad for your soul. That’s not just a hoary piece of folk wisdom; it’s a conclusion from serious social science, confirmed by statistical analysis and experiment. The affluent are, on average, less likely to exhibit empathy, less likely to respect norms and even laws, more likely to cheat, than those occupying lower rungs on the economic ladder.

The names that leap immediately to mind are Clinton, Obama, and Soros. Krugman has other ideas, of course.

And it’s obvious, even if we don’t have statistical confirmation, that extreme wealth can do extreme spiritual damage. Take someone whose personality might have been merely disagreeable under normal circumstances, and give him the kind of wealth that lets him surround himself with sycophants and usually get whatever he wants. It’s not hard to see how he could become almost pathologically self-regarding and unconcerned with others.

“Clinton” leaps immediately to mind in every American not living on one of the Left Coasts.

So what happens to a nation that gives ever-growing political power to the superrich?

They turn into a Crustian-dominated welfare state, where tame mobs of Underclass intimidate those who won’t Get With The Program. Take a look around you.

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It’s the meme that refuses to die. It started, back in 2011, with the Waltons: six members of the family, we were repeatedly told, were worth as much as the bottom 30% of all Americans combined. I tried to address this silly stat back then, but now it’s gone global: back in January, Oxfam announced that the world’s 85 richest people had the same wealth as the bottom half of the global population. And now Forbes has come along to say that, actually, it’s not 85 people — it’s a mere 67.

Oxfam does a pretty bad job of footnoting its report, but I did manage to finally track down how it arrived at this conclusion. The 85 (or 67) number is easy: you just start at the top of the Forbes billionaires list, and start counting up the combined wealth until you reach $1.7 trillion. The harder question is: where does the $1.7 trillion number come from?

The answer is that it comes from a pair of tables in Credit Suisse’s 2013 Global Wealth Databook. First of all, you have to find the total wealth in the world, which you can find at the bottom of the fourth column on page 89: it’s $241 trillion. Then, you flick forwards to page 146, where you find the proportion of all global wealth held by each of the world’s income deciles. The top 10% have 86% of the wealth; the next 10% have 7.8%, and so on. Add up the bottom five deciles, and you get 0.7% (not 0.71%, which is the number in the Oxfam report; I have no idea where that extra basis point came from). And if you multiply $241 trillion by 0.7%, you get $1.7 trillion.

Basically, another instance of the Aggregation Fallacy.

Read it.

On December 2, the law school’s dean, Martha Minow, sent an email to all alumni about the incident. It said, in part:

Several days ago, our community was shocked and saddened by the defacement of the portraits of some of our African-American faculty in Wasserstein Hall. The Harvard University Police Department is investigating this as a possible hate crime. The outpouring of support for these faculty members has been a heartening reflection of the community that I know and love so deeply.

Since then, there has been radio silence on the investigation. This is, perhaps, because a group of students set up a web site called Royall Asses that argued, highly persuasively, that “anti-racist” social justice warriors perpetrated the alleged hate crime as a hoax.

Read it.

“For purveyors of meeting bingo this is only good news. For the rest of us meetings have degenerated in to a quagmire of nonsensical verbal piffle,” he said in an article for Marketing magazine.

I’m wondering how they managed to weed it down to 10.

Read it.

I’m just positive that they’re losing sleep over it.

Read it.

Today we filed a lawsuit challenging Dignity Health’s use of religious directives to deny basic reproductive health care to its patients. Filed on behalf of patient Rebecca Chamorro and Physicians for Reproductive Health, the suit argues that withholding pregnancy-related care for reasons other than medical considerations is illegal in California.

I just love that weasel-worded phrase, ‘Pregnacy-Related Care’. Whenever you see ‘basic reproductive health care’, you know it’s neither ‘basic’ nor ‘health care’.

The refusal of hospitals to allow doctors to perform basic health procedures based solely on religious doctrine presents a real threat to a woman’s ability to access health care.

The assumption here, of course, is that ‘health care’ is some sort of right that ‘health care providers’ have to provide whether they like it or not. In the old days that was called ‘slavery’, but of course the ACLU doesn’t dare use the correct terms in this propaganda piece because then the game would be up.

Patients seeking medical care from public institutions should not have to worry that religious doctrine rather than medical judgment will dictate what care they receive.

The term ‘public institutions’ is suppose to fool Low Information Voters into thinking that this is some sort of government-owned facility, which of course it is not.

Ten of the 25 largest hospital systems in the U.S. are Catholic-sponsored, and nearly one of nine hospital beds in the country is in a Catholic facility.

So a win here would be a big step forward in the ACLU’s campaign to force people to do something contrary to their religious beliefs just because the ACLU thinks they ought to. If the Catholic Church in the U.S. tried to do the same to the ACLU, you would be able to hear the screams of outrage in Kazakhstan.

Read it.

In a recap of “significant success[es]” in 2015, State Department spokesman John Kirby lists “Bringing Peace, Security to Syria.” Talk about a whopper. Even the obnoxious team of Jan Psaki and Marie Harf might have shied away from a claim this preposterous.

Read it.

With each new speech they make, the nation’s two top Democrats continue to reveal their profound ignorance of what motivates the enemy both promise to defeat.

And they don’t want to know, because it intrudes reality into their ‘progressive’ fantasy world.

The White House trope that the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay must be closed because it inspires, recruits and ultimately creates terrorists is a stark illustration of the Obama administration’s failure to understand the threat posed by Islamism. Without offering any evidence, the president tells audiences that “Guantanamo has been an enormous recruitment tool for organizations like ISIL.” He argues that GITMO “is part of how they rationalize and justify their demented, sick perpetration of violence on innocent people.”

In reality the prison in Guantanamo Bay is not even a catalyst to the growth of the Islamic State. And until there are credible reports of jihadists, mid-attack, shouting “This is for Gitmo!” and “Release KSM!” rather than “This is for Syria!” and “Allahu Akbar,” no thinking person will believe otherwise.

Democrats making a statement as fact unsupported by any evidence, indeed contradicted by what evidence that actually exists? Say it ain’t so!

Explaining how American Muslims with “no criminal record or a history of terrorist activity” are motivated to join the Islamic State, the president pointed to a “notion of a gross injustice, that America is not living up to its professed ideals. We know that. We see the Internet traffic. We see how Guantanamo has been used to create this mythology that America is at war with Islam. And for us to close it is part of our counterterrorism strategy that is supported by our military, our diplomatic and our intelligence teams.”

Even Barack Obama can’t possibly believe that the Islamic State fighters would end their jihad if only the U.S. would change course and begin “living up to its professed ideals.”

Of course not, but he’s hoping that there are enough Low Information Voters out there that do believe it.

Read it.

This is news? Another thumbsucker from the New York Times.

Of course, the point is not necessarily to say something new, but rather to say something: The more a Voice of the Crust pounds a particular idea, like Income Inequality or whatever, the more Low Information voters are likely to panic and allow government action to encroach even more on their personal freedom.

The notion of “making a good match,” a staple of the writings of Jane Austen and Henry James, continues in contemporary romance novels.

As it has since the time that mankind first adopted agriculture. Alexander the Great had his generals marry women from the noble families of conquered people in order to cement his power. Of course, the Times wasn’t around then to notice so it wasn’t all that important.

At the same time, income inequality commands increasing attention from economists.

Mainly because it is one of the buttons the Crust use to keep the Underclass riled up, and economists are as dependent on the Crust for funding as anybody else. Tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Lately we’ve been learning just how much these two topics are tied together.

Mostly from Voices of the Crust like the New York Times. These guys have a tendency to like to breathe their own exhaust.

Whether measured in terms of income or education, there are more so-called power couples today than in the past, one manifestation of a phenomenon known as assortative mating, or more generally the pairing of like with like.

Well, no, the reason we have more ‘power couples’ today is because in the modern world women have more access to power and so turn what would otherwise be a Normal Couple into a Power Couple. Assortative mating has been with us for thousands of years, as the term ebenbürtig testifies. But organs like the Times never stick to the truth when it doesn’t serve their agenda.

The Other McCain looks at feminist objections to the ‘transgendered’.

Feminists coined the term “Peak Trans Moment” to describe the point at which they became disgusted with transgender ideology. One woman who related her experiences complained that transgender activists “expect to co-opt feminist time and attention away from their own issues to trans issues, and they expect it as their right.” Why aren’t transgender activists supportive of women?

Gee, that sure sounds familiar….

This is an insightful analysis, but where did transgender activists get their ideas of using “gender” as a weapon to manipulate others? Where did this victimhood mentality originate? Oh, that’s right — feminism.

Taki fisks the New York Times.

The latest Times ploy to undermine the American military is a very long, close-to-10,000-word diatribe by three of its “reporters” accusing an American SEAL outfit in Afghanistan of having committed a crime while training Afghan police officers back in 2012. The paper charges the SEALs with having beaten up an Afghan civilian—read a Taliban suspect—who later died after his rough treatment. It was never made clear despite the overheated verbiage who among the Americans and Afghans administered the beating. I would guess it was Afghan policemen, but the SEALs get the rap. The Times is calling it a cover-up. But Capt. Robert Smith, who thoroughly investigated the incident—he is now a military assistant to the secretary of the Navy—opted to drop all the charges.

The Navy, unlike the grubby Times, does not convict without definite proof, and while the victim was involved in perhaps planting a bomb, and having been captured and interrogated by both Afghans and Americans, the Navy dropped the charges. But not The New York Times. After all, the men involved were Americans, white and brave. Lying is a way of life among Afghans, so the SEALs had to have a very long and boring article, followed by an editorial, condemning them. Sulzberger and his motley crew should be forced to go and live in that pleasant land for some time, but that’s not how the world works. Incidentally, some Afghan pilots undergoing training in America have defected—yes, that’s the operative word—and have disappeared somewhere in our pleasant land without a trace. All I can say is, who can blame them? I’d rather be a fugitive in Uncle Sam’s land than a pilot in Afghanistan any day.

Read it.

When a CBS News segment featuring a focus group of American Muslims aired Friday, it highlighted their relationship to terrorism, with a particular fixation on how much responsibility they felt to condemn terrorist attacks.

But in interviews with The Intercept, two Muslim Americans who took part in the group complained that CBS edited out parts of the discussion where they raised their own concerns — including critiques of U.S. militarism, surveillance, and entrapment.

They also said that Frank Luntz, the right-wing pollster who led the focus group, silenced members of the group when they criticized discriminatory U.S. government policies.

When Luntz asked the group how they respond to attacks such as the recent one in San Bernardino, New York City activist Amelia Noor-Oshiro told The Intercept she asked Luntz, “Why don’t you ask that to people who actually commit acts of terror? Why don’t you ask that to White America who are responsible for a majority of domestic terror attacks?”

That didn’t make it into the on-air segment.

The Other McCain discovers that his Bullshit Detector is ringing loudly.

Let me state clearly what should be obvious to longtime readers: I don’t like it when kids at elite colleges claim to be victims of oppression.

Self-pity as a basis for political activism is a very bad idea and should be discouraged. Generally speaking, young people are ignorant and foolish. Being highly intelligent is not a substitute for experience, and youthful enthusiasm should never be confused with actual knowledge. Do not tell me you are a victim of oppression if your Daddy is rich enough to send you to a school where tuition is $50,586 a year….

Read it.

I admit that I never even heard of Putin killing journalists until after Trump received a glowing endorsement from Putin, then all of a sudden this makes Trump evil because Putin murders journalists. I tried to research this on Google, but found nothing.

News to me, too. Mind you, I wouldn’t blame him. I have a little list….

This blog post by Anatoly Karlin puts things into better perspective. Our supposed “ally” Recep Erdo?an is the one who has been imprisoning massive numbers of journalists. We really need to kick Turkey out of NATO ASAP. (Turkey was a decent place when the secular military controlled it, but now that they have a democracy of Muslims the country is clearly going to hell.)

Quite agree, quite agree. In fact, I suggest that NATO itself is obsolete now that Communism no longer controls Eastern Europe. But that’s me.

David Friedman turns over a ‘progressive’ rock.

It has long been known that increasing the concentration of CO2 increases the yield of C3 plants, including most crop species. The usual estimate is that doubling CO2 concentration, roughly what is projected for the end of this century, increases yield by 30% or more. This is an inconvenient fact for people who want to argue that AGW will reduce food supplies. Clearly what they need is a scientific article to cite, proving that CO2 is actually a bad thing for crops.

And they have one, in Nature no less: Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition.

…

If, with a doubling of CO2 (the abstract does not say what concentration was used in the experiments), crop yield goes up by 30% but the concentration of two minerals goes slightly down and the yield of protein only increases by 24%, that is a “threat to human nutrition.”

A striking example of propaganda disguised as science.

Steve Sailer fisks a very silly New York Times editorial.

Black students come to the physics classroom for the same reason white students do; they love physics and want to know more. Do we require that white students justify their presence in the classroom?

Yes. It’s called applying to college.

Do we need them to bring something other than their interest?

Yes. Their high school GPAs and test scores.

Contrary to Chief Justice Roberts’s implication, science is not some unchanging world of pure objectivity and fact. …

This by a black woman who allegedly has three degrees, one from an ‘Ivy League institution’. An astrophysicist who doesn’t believe that science is ‘some unchanging world of pure objectivity and fact’ would appear ipso facto disqualified from calling herself a scientist. Those kinds of ‘scientists’ we don’t need. Perhaps she’d feel more comfortable in a Gender Studies field.

Jedidah C. Isler is a National Science Foundation astronomy and astrophysics postdoctoral fellow at Vanderbilt University.

And probably an affirmative action child all the way through the process. Which merely underscores how corrupt the process has become.

Read it.

Our boarding school backgrounds, our posh accents, our stylish outfits—in my experience, American students are often astonished by us Chinese internationals.

Not really. Those of us who have been paying attention realize that once Mao died China reverted to its historical pattern, the the Communist Party taking the place of an Imperial Dynasty with the Mandate of Heaven.

We’ve been sent off by our politically influential families to get precious Ivy League diplomas straight out of boarding schools.

China joins the Crust. Who knew?

This glamorous exterior, however, only conceals people who are struggling with the dysfunctionalities, injustices, and hypocrisies of the Communist Party system. The contrast between the lofty Communist Party line our parents defend and the reality of the human depravity we witness in our lives forces our descent into depression, drug abuse, and all too often suicide.

The sort of angst that those trained to accept the Progressive Fantasy in place of reality always undergo. Welcome to the First World, home of the First World Problem.

People who don’t see this might envy our upscale lives. They view our weekend trips to Aspen, Colorado, or the Bahamas as mere excursions, as if our private jets simply shuttle us from one party to the next. As if our exotic summer travels are just about where we get to go, not about the political system we get to stay away from. They see our impeccable style—clothes from Alaïa, Jil Sander, or Valentino—and don’t recognize the self-hate that comes with our self-enhancement.

Cementing the Asian status as Honorary (so to speak) White People. Next up: ‘Check your privilege!’

The author’s SWPL credentials:

The author is a first-year in the Columbia/Jewish Theological Seminary joint program with prospective majors in ethnicity and race studies and Jewish history. Originally from China, she grew up between her hometown and boarding schools, and is of mixed Chinese and Jewish heritage.

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

Read it.

The Guardian reports that the leaders of the European Union have asked the UN for advice about “negative emissions”. The “negative emissions” proposal is like regular Carbon Capture and Storage, except more unworkable.

Read it.

Some time ago–several decades, actually–a group of us at my law firm formed a Chappaquiddick Book Club. We read three or four books on the fatal car accident that should have ended Ted Kennedy’s public career. The facts are much worse than most people realize: Kennedy presumably was drunk, but that is the least of it. After his car plunged into Poucha Pond, Kennedy saved himself but left Mary Jo Kopechne to die. In all likelihood, she could have been saved if Kennedy had simply knocked on the door of the nearest house with a light on, only yards away, and called the Edgartown rescue squad. That is what the head of the rescue squad said after he discovered Kopechne’s body inside the car, where she had wedged herself into an air pocket and probably survived for several hours, expecting help that never came.

Kennedy made no effort to save his companion. Instead, he made the long walk back to the house where he and others had been partying. He summoned his cousin Joe Gargan and tried to persuade Gargan to say that he had been driving the car. Gargan sensibly refused, but insisted that they go back to the pond and try to rescue Kopechne. Kennedy sat on the bank and watched while Gargan tried to dive down to the submerged car, unsuccessfully. Kennedy never did call the authorities, but instead returned to his hotel and attempted to set up an alibi with the night clerk.

It is a sordid story, and it soon will become a Hollywood movie. I couldn’t believe it when I learned that Rathergate was to be made into a film called Truth—Lies would have been a better title–and it seems equally far-fetched that anyone would want to make or invest in a film about Chappaquiddick.

Prediction: It will be a whitewash.

Read it.

The birth of a new ThoughtCrime — and, as you might expect, the New York Times in on the bleeding edge.

Read it. Note especially the title: Here’s Why the Good Guy With the Gun Always Gets Killed. From that you would expect a rigorous examination of all available cases where a person with a gun attempted to stop an ‘active shooter’, which invariably ended with the gun-bearer getting killed. But you would be wrong.

On Thursday night, The Daily Show focused on this idea of “the good guy with a gun,” and the results weren’t pretty.

Jordan Klepper, one of the comedian-correspondents who stayed behind after Jon Stewart’s departure from the show, actually went through the process of getting a carry license from the state of Florida, which is valid in more than 30 states. All that was required was mailing in a form and taking a few hours of training in New Jersey.

So. One guy. a ‘comedian-correspondent’. One. Guy. Who presumably was opposed to the concept a priori.

As you might expect, he blows it in every scenario. But! All is not lost while there’s spin to be spun.

For those who would write this off as a comedian for an openly liberal show simply failing on purpose to prove a point, the weary resignation on the faces of his trainers told a different story. The problem wasn’t Klepper’s clowning, but his belief, founded on a lifetime of action movies and video games, that in the right scenario, he could be a hero. The truth was, he just made things worse.

Pardon me for thinking that the reason why ‘he just made things worse’ is precisely because he’s a comedian for an openly-liberal show simply failing, not necessarily on purpose. He was not, as we say, motivated to succeed. And from this they draw the totally unwarranted conclusion that everybody in such a situation will get the same result. Which conclusion is not only false on its face but contrary to all of the available evidence from real-world situations.

Read it.

ASK most people about the problem of waste plastics in the environment and they will talk about plastic bags caught in trees and the vast slicks of plastic trash found in remote areas of the Atlantic and Pacific. But the most menacing plastic waste problem is less visible and not so well publicized.

It’s the tiny fibers, less than one millimeter wide, that come from our clothes when we launder them. These fibers make their way into the world’s rivers and seas through the sewage and drainage systems of our cities. The pollution is worst near urban areas, but it is global and has increased by more than 450 percent since the 1960s.

These minute strands of plastic — virtually invisible to the human eye — are made from a variety of natural (animal and plant) and artificial polymers. You can’t see them when you walk along the seashore at low tide, but they’re there, by the ton.

Sky is falling, women and minorities hardest hit, film at 11.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Being old enough to remember the 1960s to some extent and the 1970s vividly has the advantage of highlighting the irony of how often contemporary liberals demand exactly what 1960s liberals denounced. For example, giant corporations trying to use their economic power to silence political dissent was much denounced by liberals in the 1960s and much encouraged by liberals in the 2010s.

Much the same way that they encourage left-wing mobs to do the sort of ‘social action’ that they condemn right-wing mobs doing.

Read it.

The Washington Post’s Dave Weigel reports on a focus group in which supporters of Donald Trump were shown attack ads against the tycoon. According to Weigel, the ads, presented by pollster Frank Luntz, did not cause members of the group to move away from Trump. In fact, focus group members were more inclined to support Trump following the presentation.

You’d almost think they didn’t care. The horror!

Weigel seems intent on making Trump’s supporters look as bad as possible. He devotes several paragraphs to two supporters who said they wouldn’t urinate on President Obama if he was on fire.

Luntz responded that this is “the meanest thing I’ve ever heard.”

The guy must not live in Washington or read any newspapers. I, for one, wouldn’t piss on Obama if he were on fire — it would probably be considered a ‘hate crime’.

As hateful as a few of the focus group members may have sounded, I doubt that any of them matched Weigel’s body of venomous anti-conservative rhetoric.

Not that he’s unique in that among ‘journalists’.

For those of you who went to a government school, be aware that a ‘catalyst’ is a substance that facilitates a chemical reaction without being consumed by it.

Donald Trump is turning out to be the perfect catalyst for the American Crustian political establishment, allowing them to generate and beat up on straw men at an amazing rate. If you look at the commentary about Trump, from the Usual Suspects in the Drive-By Media to the cookie-cutter-generated establishmentarian candidates in the Republican Presidential race, it is easy to see that what they say about Trump doesn’t actually refer to what he said or what he believes or what he actually plans to do, but rather to whatever nasty thing most thoroughly floats their boat politically which they then attribute to Trump, even when it’s obviously untrue to the point of being ridiculous. It’s like dangling a bleeding animal over a tank full of piranha.

And the most entertaining part about it is that they’re obviously not listening to their own blatherings, otherwise they’d realize that they are generating the biggest collection of Freudian slips in the history of mankind. We all know that the Left feels free to indulge in behavior toward those who disagree with them that they would quickly ascribe to Fascist or Nazi leanings if it happened to them, without any appreciation of the irony involved. There’s apparently somebody working for the ACLU who has spouted off that Trump is Goebbels and therefore ‘we’ need to shoot people who would vote for him before it’s too late. Really, you can’t make this shit up.

Coupled with Jerry Brown revealing in public that he actually is a statist apparatchik, and we can see that times are rapidly approaching where we will need a Confucian ‘Rectification of Names‘, where all masks are stripped away and the ugly souls at the heart of the Progressive Apocalypse are revealed for all in their true squalor.

Read it.

Scalia made the very reasonable suggestion that perhaps it isn’t doing black students any favors by admitting them to a school on the basis of their skin color rather than their qualifications, and the Usual Suspects in the Drive-By Media had the expected meltdown.

This commentary demonstrates mismatch of a kind — the mismatch between a serious Supreme Justice and a press corps too lazy, too ideologically left-wing, and/or too politically correct to engage an argument that, though controversial, is well-rooted in research and legal scholarship.

More broadly, we see an example of a dangerous tendency. Too often nowadays, arguments and assertions of fact are judged by whether they are “offensive,” not by whether they are valid or true. A joke can be judged by its offensiveness (in addition to its humor). However, arguments should be judged only by whether they are valid and assertions of fact only by whether they are true.

Read it.

India’s crucial role at the climate change talks in Paris has once again been underlined by a high-level outreach by the United States, including a call to Prime Minister Modi from President Barack Obama who hopes to cement his legacy with an ambitious global agreement on curbing global warming.

God forbid he should spend any time doing his job, which is protecting the American people from their enemies, such as Muslim jihadists.

Obama reached out to Modi on Tuesday in an attempt to break the deadlock at the climate summit, where the responsibility of developing countries such as India in tackling rising global temperatures has been a sticking point.

That’s because the ‘developed nations’ are wanting the ‘developing nations’ to bear the bulk of the expense for fixing ‘global warming’, and the ‘developing nations’ rightly suspect that it’s a crock of shit — which it is.

Sources said an agreement in Paris will not be possible without India and the US converging on a range of issues. A lot is at stake for both countries as the Paris climate agreement on limiting carbon emissions and financing cleaner energy will have a far reaching impact on their economies.’

And that’s the problem in a nutshell. The proposed ‘policies to address climate change’ are going to cost somebody a lot of money, and the argument is (as always) about Who Pays So That Progressives Can Feel Good.

Obama, who faces opposition to his clean energy plan in the Republican-controlled US Congress – both chambers – and multiple states, wants to leave the White House next year with a “climate legacy” that protects American interests.

The hard reality that there is no such thing possible doesn’t intrude on his fantasy world in the slightest. The Selfie & Hashtag President just doesn’t see why everybody doesn’t get with the program.

“There was very little agreement on most issues,” a negotiator from a developing country said.

And you can carve that in stone.

Read it.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a complete major media freakout like last night’s NBC Nightly News coverage of Trump—it tops even the breathless coverage of the “constitutional crisis” of Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” in 1973. You can watch it at the link above if you are a glutton, but suffice it to say the NBC News crew failed in concealing their animus and panic toward Trump (I thought NBC’s foreign correspondent Richard Engel was going to have an embolism on camera, and Andrea Mitchell looked like she’d need another facelift by the end of her report) and, by extension, his millions of supporters who are presumed to be semi-literate gun-toting racist xenophobes . . . have I left anything out? Oh yeah—Trump’s supporters probably eat at Denny’s and don’t listen to NPR. The horror.

…

Covering Trump has to be the best thing since the invention of moveable type: you never know what he’s going to say.

Trump is the most entertainment to happen in an election since Ross Perot.

Read it.

Which wouldn’t work, because of the Islamic doctrine of Taquiya.

Read it.

In his lamentable speech last night, President Obama concluded that we could be confident of defeating ISIS because we are “on the right side of history.” As though “history” cares about us, and has something tangible like the force of gravity to bring to someone’s side. It’s what substitutes for gravitas among liberals. As the Wall Street Journal commented this morning, “History is made, not delivered as a birthright, and victory against killers has to be won.”

“The right side of history” is perhaps the laziest trope in the liberal lexicon, but it has a serious intellectual pedigree. By coincidence, this morning I was re-reading Leo Strauss’s lecture “Progress or Return?”, and came across this long passage that explores not the depths, but the total abyss, behinds this commonplace cliché.

This slogan is a pure reflection of the ‘progressive’ belief that Progress Is Inevetable (progress being defined as things going their way) and that history inevitably moves in their direction, and their ain’t nothin’ you kin do about it.

The connection with the Hegelian thought behind Marxism is obvious, and organic.

Read it.

The Drive-By Media can be depended upon to fill up their pages and minutes of air time with hand-wringing about the fear of an ‘anti-Muslim backlash’ every time Muslims go nuts and start killing people.

But the much-feared backlash never seems to happen.

But wait! The Post tells us there is an “intense backlash.” But the opening paragraphs don’t describe a backlash, they describe the fear of one by an activist. Where is the actual backlash?

By dint of much digging around, eventually a news outlet will discover an instance of someone being rude to a Muslim, or shouting at hin/her, or maybe even throwing a punch — you know, the sort of thing that a white person would encounter in any Black Lives Matter demonstration.  Pretty wimpy for an ‘intense backlash’.

Even more toxic than what? The FBI’s latest statistics, for 2014, show a total of 1,140 religion-based hate crimes in the U.S. Only 16% (182) were directed against Muslims, about one for every 44,000 Muslims living in the U.S.

Perennially, the ‘anti-Muslim backlash’ is the dog that doesn’t bark in the night. And yet the Drive-By Media seem to assume that it’s there, just because they wish it to be there.

Actually, Muslims are more likely to perpetrate hate crimes than to be victimized by them. In 2014, more than half of the religion-based hate crimes–58%–were directed against Jews, and in many instances were perpetrated by Muslims. Does the United States currently have a “toxic climate” for Jews? Apparently so.

Not that you’ll know it by paying attention to the Drive-By Media.

Read it.

The Guardian, in Britain, is a tediously tendentious left-wing rag, whose writing is superior to The Daily Worker but whose political agenda — and lack of intellectual rigor — are exactly the same.

Does the massive foreign and national corporate buying of urban buildings and land that took off after the 2008 crisis signal an emergent new phase in major cities? From mid-2013 to mid-2014, corporate buying of existing properties exceeded $600bn (£395bn) in the top 100 recipient cities, and $1trillion a year later – and this figure includes only major acquisitions (eg. a minimum of $5m in the case of New York City).

Oh, noes! Things are being bought! Things are being owned! The sky is falling!

Well, not really. Because of land-use restrictions, urban property, especially urban core property, has skyrocketed in price to the point where only corporations, or extremely wealthy individuals, can buy it. Why this comes as a surprise to a ‘journalist’ escapes me; I have no trouble explaining it to a 10-year-old. (Of course, if extremely wealthy individuals were doing this buying instead of corporations, I suspect that the Guardian would still think that the sky is falling.)

I want to examine the details of this large corporate investment surge, and why it matters.

Prediction: Details will be few and far between, and airy generalities will rule. Like this one:

Cities are the spaces where those without power get to make a history and a culture, thereby making their powerlessness complex.

Actually, they go there to get jobs and support themselves and raise families. But nobody could do a Studies major in that.

If the current large-scale buying continues, we will lose this type of making that has given our cities their cosmopolitanism.

People are actually paid to write this stuff. If this guy wants to talk about ‘people without power’, he ought to look to small farmers and small businessmen, who have the least power in our society. But no — they aren’t fashionable, and the Guardian is all about The Narrative.

The rest is simply more of the same. Picking it apart is left as an exercise for the reader, not involving not much exercise at all.

Read it. And watch the video.

Donald Trump’s insistence that he saw one or more television news stories about Muslims in Jersey City celebrating the collapse of the Twin Towers in September 11 provoked outrage on the left. Among others, the Washington Post’s fact checker, Glenn Kessler, awarded Trump four Pinocchios, claiming that his assertion was “outrageous.” I wrote about the controversy here, agreeing that Trump exaggerated–there was no evidence that thousands of Muslims celebrated–but that Kessler was also wrong in dogmatically denying that there was any evidence of any such reaction to the 9/11 attacks. The controversy has continued from there, as Trump has doggedly insisted that he saw a television report that was the basis for his statement.

Now, someone has found the TV news report that Trump probably was talking about. It is from a local station in New York and was broadcast on September 16, 2001. The report confirms that Muslims were observed celebrating the collapse of the World Trade Center on September 11, and says that eight were arrested. This is consistent with newspaper accounts that were published at the time, including one in the Washington Post:

No apology will be coming from the Drive-By Media, of course.

Lion of the Blogosphere sums it up very nicely.

Yes, that’s what the LA Times is calling it. Not Islamic terrorism. A rampage.

Meanwhile, we now know that the two (not three) suspects were a devoutly religious Muslim of Pakistani origin, Syed Rizwan Farook, and his Saudi Arabian bride. He allegedly met the Saudi Arabian woman, Tashfeen Malik, online, and went to Saudi Arabia to meet her in person, and then they were married.

The mainstream media, which is trying to pin the terrorism label on the crazy guy who shot people at Planned Parenthood, is trying to assign this obvious case of terrorism to workplace violence.

Yeah, workplace violence like the jihadist Nidal Hassan shooting up Fort Hood.

This tells you everything you need to know about the Narrative.

Read it.

The only ‘stronger background check’ that would have prevented the San Bernardino shooting would be one that barred Muslims from buying guns or explosives. But, of course, that’s not what he meant; after all, that would be ‘profiling’.

I’ve often wondered how they distinguish a ‘background check’ from ‘profiling’. I suspect it has to do with skin color.

Read it.

This is news?

(Ponder: When have you ever read a headline ‘Democrats attack [insert name of Republican here]’s spending plans’? That would be … never.)

Read it.

The National Women’s Studies Association is the newest scholarly group to back the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement against Israel.

What does ‘Women’s Studies’ have to do with Israel? Is Israel a place where women are significantly oppressed? (What about the surrounding Arab states? Can we expect a similar boycott? I’m sorry, I can’t say that with a straight face….)

“We’re basically redefining feminism and putting solidarity with Palestine into that definition of what it means to be a feminist,” said Sharoni, a professor of gender and women’s studies at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. “Or, to put it differently, the vote of almost 90 percent of the members of the National Women’s Studies Association in support of this resolution underscores the fact that boycott, divestment and sanctions can be or is seen by members of our association as an example of expressing feminist solidarity.”

In other words, ‘women’s studies’ aren’t about studies at all, but merely a vehicle for pushing cultural Marxism and lining up behind the ‘progressive’ Narrative.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/12/climatista-drama-in-paris-illustrated.php

Read it.

As James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal points out, when Islamic terrorists strike, we get immediate assurances of the peaceableness of Islam. When an oddball drifter attacks a Planned Parenthood clinic, we hear about the collective guilt of pro-lifers.

And that’s it, in a nutshell.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following video features clips from yesterday’s demonstration by global warming activists in Ottawa. In addition to their leftist knee-jerk racism — why are Indians touted as having a unique moral authority on “climate change”? — they are volunteering to fight for the right of their comrades in the Frozen North to remain frozen.

With an agenda like that, how can they lose?

Slate, of course, let’s us know the Party Line on the Planned Parenthood situation.

Tendentious sub-head: Forget Syria. The most dangerous religious extremists are migrants from North and South Carolina.

Let’s see: Just because there are dangerous people already in the United States is somehow an argument for our bringing in more from overseas. I’m sure it makes sense to the Bright People at Slate, but I’m afraid it says non sequitur to me.

From Wikipedia: “William Saletan, a Jewish native of Texas, graduated from Swarthmore College in 1987.” He lives in Bethesda, Maryland, so he apparently escaped Texas as soon as he could. I rather doubt he’s ever lived in North or South Carolina, so I guess that makes him an expert…?

Oh, and in 2004 he wrote a book — Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War. No doubt that explains why abortion is now illegal in the U.S. Oh, wait….

This guy appears to be a poster child for the ‘progressive’ ability to live in a fantasy world and write about it as if it were reality. I wish I could get a job like that.

David Dayen, contributing writer for Salon, is shocked, shocked that Google is spreading its money around to buy a little influence.

I’m thinking that David Dayen doesn’t get out much.

I’m willing to bet that David Dayen is too young to remember the days when Microsoft was too apolitical to have a lobbying operation in Washington, D.C., and as a result got bogged down for TEN YEARS in a bogus ‘anti-trust’ suit prompted by people who were less pristine and more government-savvy. (Microsoft has since learned better.) Say what you will about Google, they’re not stupid, and they can learn from the mistakes of others.

(I’m waiting for the day when David Dayen, or some other squeaky clean do-gooder at Salon, does a similar expose regarding, say, the Clinton Foundation. I am not, however, willing to hold my breath waiting for it.)

Jim Goad looks behind the headlines.

The weekend before last, Donald Trump egged on a frenzied crowd of sweaty Alabama rednecks as they beat, kicked, and bludgeoned a peaceful Black Lives Matter activist, while last Monday night five peaceful Black Lives Matter protestors in Minneapolis were shot by a group of armed white supremacists who came looking for trouble and fired wantonly into the crowd. This is all part of the ongoing terror and violence that our white supremacist society routinely rains down on noble, longsuffering black Americans.

Of course that’s all bullshit. But that’s the impression you’d get from reading most media accounts.

Let’s “deconstruct” these real-life events, shall we?

Read it.

But you knew that.

On Sunday, a 20-year-old Israeli woman was stabbed to death, another Israeli was rammed by a car and attacked with a knife and a third was assaulted by a knife-wielding teen affiliated with the Islamic Jihad terror group.

All three assailants were killed in the course of their attacks.

But the headline to the Times’ story about Sunday’s attacks did away with cause and effect, muddled victim and aggressor: “1 Israeli, 3 Palestinians Killed in Attacks in West Bank.” The online headline was later changed, but the print headline Monday morning was equally obtuse: “West Bank Faces Spate of Assaults That Kill 4.” The “West Bank” faced nothing. It was Israelis who faced assaults.

Read it.

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

200 undergraduate students participated in a game testing researchers’ theory

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Steven Hayward sees Onions everywhere.

Oh, good grief. The New Yorker is trying to give the New York Times a run for its money as the most pathetic attempt to put The Onion out of business….

There’s a lot of competition these days for that space, unwitting though it might be.

As has been noted, funny how climate change doesn’t seem to cause Lutherans, Hindus, Jews, or Zoroastrians to become terrorists or start wars, though as we have seen climate change caused Hitler and Nazism, so there’s that. If the climate-Syrian war connection is “uncontroversial,” it’s because it is . . . completely idiotic. Is it really the case that if it were four degrees cooler in Syria there’d be no civil war? Gosh, why are we wasting all of this time on peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians? Just send air conditioners and tankers full of Evian to Gaza.

Steven Hayward connects the dots.

The New York Times editorial page (insert guffaws here) has just discovered, a few days after the brightest and best at Princeton, what conservatives have known for decades: Woodrow Wilson was a racist! They still haven’t been able to connect the dots between Wilson’s racism and his progressive ideology, nor grasp the irony that Wilson was merely aiming to provide blacks with a “safe space,” as we say nowadays. We know liberals are slow learners, but this is embarrassing, unless the Times is planning to announce tomorrow that it has in fact decided to compete with The Onion.

Fisking the New York Times is both easy and fun, so far be it from me to point out that the editorial board that endorsed Woodrow Wilson for President is not, by any stretch of the imagination, the same as the editorial board that condemns him today. However, since the New York Times shows no reluctance in ignoring such historical changes when it chooses to smear some venerable American institution or movement, turnabout is certainly fair play.

Read it.

I question whether they would piss their pants this way if some film about Stalin put Communist symbols all over the NYC subway.

Somehow I think not.

Janey Stephenson goes the last mile.

This is a sobering week for women’s liberation in the UK. Tomorrow, our Chancellor will announce further austerity measures on the UN International Day to End Violence Against Women. This coincidence would be darkly funny if it wasn’t so devastating. Make no mistake: austerity is state violence against women.

I am not making this up.

We use words like ‘cut’ and ‘slash’ to describe austerity, so how can we deny that it is economic violence? And when it is women’s services at the receiving end of such brutal assaults, austerity becomes state violence against women that reinforces interpersonal violence against women. What better way to assist perpetrators than make it almost impossible for their victims to receive the support they need to flee?

The staff of the Onion must be jumping out of windows; how could you possibly parody this stuff?