Read it.

Good luck with that . The Crust speaks for their clients, and expects the clients themselves to STFU.

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The combined wealth of the Grant-Gordon whisky family, Highland Spring water owner Mahdi al-Tajir, oil tycoon Sir Ian Wood and former Harrods owner Mohammed Fayed dwarfs that of the one million people who make up Scotland’s poorest 20 per cent, according to a report by Oxfam Scotland.

1. Three individuals and a family doesn’t make it ‘families’.

2. Two of those guys aren’t even Scottish, but Arabs. Send them back where they came from and half the problem disappears. (See how simple that was?)

Whatever point Oxfam is trying to make is thoroughly lame.

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Since she has been know to kiss the butts of both in the past, licking the NRA (pun intended) ought not to trouble her unduly.

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Modern definition of ‘powerful’:

Did it make you feel good? Hell, yeah!

Did it actually make any difference? Well, not really, but we got great news coverage!

There you go. Mission accomplished.

Read it.

Yeah, well, what’s Obama going to do? Play golf at them? Parachute Michelle in to make their kids eat organic vegetables?

Read it.

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you….

Read it.

Well, not so’s you’d notice.

On September 30, the New York Times published a long article about Donald Trump’s wife Melania in its Fashion and Style section. The article said little of substance–Mrs. Trump is a nice lady, apparently–but it resulted in an epic sequence of five corrections.

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust must support the Narrative. Rinse. Repeat.

Read it.

The film Truth premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12. Starring Robert Redford as Dan Rather and Cate Blanchett as Mary Mapes, the film retells the Rathergate scandal based on Mary Mapes’s memoir Truth and Duty. I must be one of the few people in the United States actually to have read the book.

Mapes is the hero of her memoir and the hero of the film. In Mapes’s telling, she is not the perpetrator of a scandalous hoax. Rather, she is a liberal martyr to the truth. If she’s a martyr at all, she’s a martyr a la Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. In other words, she’s guilty as hell but she’s not confessing, ever, and now she has the best of Hollywood to lend her aid and comfort. The left does not give up promoting them, as we can see also in Kevin Williamson’s timely NR column “Codename: LIBERAL.”

Read it.

Earlier today, a 20-year-old man named Chris Mercer murdered 10 people at a community college in Oregon. At this moment, little is known about Mercer or his motives. (No doubt he had grievances.) Three handguns and a rifle reportedly were recovered at the site, but we don’t know whether he obtained those firearms legally or illegally. At this point, it is hard to say anything intelligent about the shootings except that they were a horribly evil deed.

That, of course, doesn’t stop our president from trying to make political hay. He immediately took the podium to demand that Congress pass more gun control legislation–any gun control legislation, apparently, whether it has any relationship to this crime or not.

Chances are it was a ‘gun-free zone’ (boy, that worked, didn’t it?) and so the shooter knew he had a blank check.

Steve Sailer pulls back the curtain.

From a news article in the New York Times:

Rise of Austrian Right Lengthens Shadow of Nazi Era

The NYT achieves Godwin’s Law in 8 words. No beating around the bush here!

…

Modern progressives increasingly believe that geographic locations emit powerful magic emanations that control the behavior of people who subsequently settle there. Thus inner city neighborhoods in America cause gun violence and poor test scores. Similarly, the Nazi-tainted geography of Austria will no doubt hoodoo the poor innocent Muslim youths into taunting and beating Jews they happen to find on their turf. National borders are just artificial lines drawn on a map, but geographic juju is forever.

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The incident happened Tuesday night, when students thought they found several nooses hanging from a tree. Word quickly spread as campus officials swiftly released a statement condemning the foul hate crime. But come morning, police said a short investigation had led them to conclude the “nooses” were really just the remnants of paper lanterns from an event held all the way back in June.

Unperturbed by the truth, students launched an assembly following the incident to speak as though the hate crime really did happen. According to The News Journal, a local paper, the assembly was held “to find ways to change the campus climate” in the wake of the bad atmosphere apparently exposed by a fictional hate crime.

It ought to have been real, and that’s good enough, see?

The Other McCain yanks back the curtain.

The naked partisanship of Stephanopoulos is not merely “liberal bias”; it is outright propaganda on behalf of the Democrat Party, which reflects ABC News policy of supporting Democrats. All of the producers and executives at ABC News are also partisan Democrats, so that the network has an organizational mission of advocacy on behalf of the candidates and policies of the Democrat Party. This is not only dishonest (because it presents partisan propaganda as objective “news”), but also dangerous, in that individuals like Stephanopoulos and organizations like ABC News cannot be expected to report honestly about the failures of Democrat officials and policies. The public is deliberately misled about, for example, the effectiveness of the Obama administration’s foreign policy, because many millions of citizens are spoonfed disinformation from Democrat partisans like Stephanopoulos.

Not really news but a useful reminder.

Read it.

They’re right — rather than using pigs, they ought to have used animal-rights activists. The patterns would be more realistic, and they wouldn’t be wasting valuable animals.

Steve Sailer is on a roll.

About a decade ago, I coined the term Occam’s Butterknife to characterize the contemporary liberal insistence upon implausibly convoluted explanations.

But now that race man Ta-Nehisi Coates is back with a giant article in The Atlantic about “The Enduring Myth of Black Criminality,” I need a more all-encompassing term to describe this increasingly fashionable rejection of reality. Let’s try: Occam’s Rubber Room.

In “The First Rule of White Club,” I reviewed Coates’ best-selling mini-book Between the World and Me about how as a nerdy child he had been terrified of Baltimore’s black thugs, which, due to redlining by the Roosevelt administration, were all the fault of white people. Or, excuse me, of “people who think they are white.”

Fortunately, The Atlantic’s staffers have edited out of the new article some of Coates’ more eye-rolling verbal tics (such as “black bodies”) and left us with 18,000 words of generic professional magazine prose. In the wake of a swarm of derisive comments citing the abundant statistical evidence that black criminality is no myth that greeted a preview of the article, the title is now “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration.”

Read it.

DOES the college lecture discriminate? Is it biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?

The notion may seem absurd on its face. The lecture is an old and well-established tradition in education. To most of us, it simply is the way college courses are taught. Even online courses are largely conventional lectures uploaded to the web.

Yet a growing body of evidence suggests that the lecture is not generic or neutral, but a specific cultural form that favors some people while discriminating against others, including women, minorities and low-income and first-generation college students. This is not a matter of instructor bias; it is the lecture format itself — when used on its own without other instructional supports — that offers unfair advantages to an already privileged population.

People get paid good money for writing this stuff.

Read it.

The New York Times today offers up a table examining the Democratic (but not Republican) Senators and House members opposed to Obama’s Iran agreement, noting whether they are Jewish and the proportion of Jewish constituents in their state or district.

…

Nice that they use yellow highlight for this feature. Only thing missing is the Star of David in place of an asterisk.

Read it.

It didn’t happen, of course — ‘progressives’ are always long on talk and short on action. If every narcissistic lefty who promised to move abroad if (insert random Republican here) were elected actually did so, the country would be in much better shape than it is.

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All this without one shred of evidence that sea levels are rising or are going to rise. It’s all just fearmongering by ‘climatistas’.

Sky falling; film at 11.

Read it.

Used to be, if people were hungry, attempts would be made to feed them and therefore keep them from starving. Nowadays, that’s apparently not enough.

It is, of course, a fact universally acknowledge that the government has a legitimate right and power to supervise every waking moment, and hence is morally culpable (even if legally bulletproof) for any aspect of one’s life that fails to suit — not the person, but any busybody external collective that feels entitled to dictate to other people (which is all of them).

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

The New York Times complains about Australia’s ‘brutal treatment’ of migrants.

Said ‘brutal treatment’ consists of shipping them back where they came from.

Gotta love Australians.

If the Europeans don’t fix their borders, well, This Will Be Why We Can’t Have Nice Things like the Australians have. You can make up your own list of Nice Things Europe won’t be able to have anymore, but obvious candidates include generous social insurance, high wages, and freedoms for women, such as enjoying public swimming pools alongside men.

Read it.

Let them ask the corpses at Charlie Hebdo how ‘gun control’ worked out for them.

Indeed, let them ask the corpse of Fusilier Lee Rigby whether ‘gun control’ makes you safe.

Actually, come to think of it, gun control for black people (like the shooter in this case) would probably be a good idea. They seem to be doing most of the gun crime, judging by law enforcement crime stats. Yeah, that’s the ticket.

Read it.

No mention, of course, of George Soros or Tom Steyer.

Sanders delighted a South Carolina rally of more than 3,000 people Saturday with his assertions that the Kochs and other “greedy” billionaires are destroying American democracy by infusing huge sums of cash into campaigns and election.

Like, oh, the Clintons?

The Vermont senator, who is pushing former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton from the left, called for publicly financed elections that would allow “anyone” to seek public office without “begging from billionaires.”

At least the Koch brothers don’t want to steal your money through taxes … unlike Bernie Sanders.

Read it.

In a playground for the superrich, I was an overpaid chaperone wearing a bespoke suit. Gluttony was common. So was sex; more than once we had to interrupt coitus in the restroom. Once a woman asked to leave her baby at the coat check. When the maître d’ explained that dinner lasted at least three hours, she stared back at him, unfazed. “Yes, I know.” Grown men wearing Zegna and Ferragamo would sit at the bar chanting, “We are the 1 percent!”

Another whine-whine-pity-me thumbsucker from the New York Times.

Edward Frame is a graduate student at the New School for Social Research.

I have no doubt.

Read it.

When I wrote about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book Between the World and Me, I noted that he was this year’s officially certified angry black. He is officially certified by the New York Times through Jennifer Schuessler, the Times culture critic and gatekeeper. Schuessler’s July 17 profile of Coates attests that Coates’s book “has had an almost frictionless glide straight to the heart of the national conversation.” (The official publication date of the book was July 14; Schuessler was on top of the story.) I wrote about Coates’s book in the City Journal essay “An updated racial hustle.”

Michelle Alexander is the author of The New Jim Crow, a book decrying the “mass incarceration” of blacks in the United States. Alexander was 2012’s officially certified angry black. She was certified by Schuessler an adoring profile when her book took off in paperback that year. I wrote about Alexander’s book in the Power Line post “Deep secrets of racial profiling (4).”

When the Times got around to assigning Coates’s dreadful book for review, whom did they turn to? Michelle Alexander, of course. It’s almost funny.

Imagine an immensely large circle of people in New York, each breathing the other’s exhaust.

The Times’s treatment of Coates’s new book represents a variation on an old story. Earlier this year Bryan Burrough’s book Days of Rage on the terrorist left prompted me to reflect on the role played by the New York Times as an instrument of celebrity propping up the revolutionary left. As a corollary, the Times is invested in protecting the reputation of the left. It is, shall we say, not given much to introspection regarding the impact of its judgments.

Read it.

CNN carried an op-ed today in its Opinion section titled, “Hillary Clinton revived America’s reputation in world.” The piece, by Eleni Kounalakis, was a paean to Hillary’s wonderfulness as Secretary of State. It took issue with those who say she has no accomplishments:

…

Kounalakis’s op-ed wouldn’t have had quite the same stature if CNN had disclosed the fact that she was one of Hillary’s top fundraisers, a fundraiser who was paid off with an ambassadorship, and therefore hardly an objective observer of Hillary’s successes (or lack thereof) as Secretary of State.

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

Steve Sailer celebrates the turning of the seasons.

An annual autumnal tradition here at iSteve is the crops-rotting-in-the-field stories about why we’re all going to die unless farmers get to import more peasants from Latin America to work cheap for them from such farm-savvy outlets as the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal.

Read it.

Princeton University geologist Ken Deffeyes predicted that global oil production would peak on Thanksgiving Day, 2005. In 2005, daily global oil production averaged 85 million barrels per day. Daily petroleum liquids production in July was 96 million barrels per day.

And yet I’ll bet he’s still a Princeton University geologist. Anybody working for a Real Company would be fired by now.

Read it.

The Huffington Post has caused outrage among those readers who considered it a liberal left website by launching an Arabic edition which has promptly criticised gays, atheists and the practice of taking selfies.

Days after going live, the site has already published a series of vitriolic outbursts including a piece by an Egyptian contributor on Saturday complaining that atheists were being allowed on Egyptian television and that the Government permitted “a press conference for gays in the heart of Cairo”.

I guess believing six impossible things before breakfast wears off quickly when the carbs hit.

Richard Fernandez discover that his bullshit detector has gone off.

From them the reader might understandably conclude that the debate was a food fight among a random collection of zany, or slightly demented mental midgets.  That the whole thing is a waste of time, like a cartoon feature before the real show featuring titans of progress like Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.  That’s when the “reality based community” comes out to judge the real horse show.

…

The media’s assessment is in its way a restatement of one of Fiorina’s main accusations: the political class has stopped caring about voters for a long time and become its own self-licking ice cream cone.  The entire debate, including its subplots — Trump vs Kelly, Fiorina vs the rest —  is about the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Washington political elite.  But who cares because the debate and all the words in it were a “play within a play”, a drama acted out inside a larger drama.

…

The last world you wake up in is big money, giant lobbies, demographic blocs and voter groups clamoring to get paid off. That is the ultimate ground of political reality; that’s real.  That’s why, despite their complete mediocrity, the only “serious candidates” on either side are Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton because they know, as the media knows, where everything finally goes.

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Because that’s what sells. People could buy stronger-tasting beer if they wanted to, but the obviously don’t want to.

All the articles by all the Eurolingus beer snobs on the Other Left Coast aren’t going to change that.

Read it.

The Post shows that as a military reservist, Graham was promoted despite doing almost nothing and that he misrepresented his military service.

Come to think of it, that sort of sums up his political career as well.

For his part, Graham tells the Post that while he doesn’t mean to “pat myself on the back, Colonel Graham will put my entire record up against anyone who has ever served.”

Against Colin Powell? Against Tommy Franks? Against David Petreus? Against fellow RINO John McCain?

This sort of smug narcissism demonstrates for the world to see why Lindsey Graham doesn’t even belong in the Capitol, much less the White House.

Read it.

Yet another fantasy sequence from Voice of the Crust The Guardian.

Gilles Vesco calls it the “new mobility”. It’s a vision of cities in which residents no longer rely on their cars but on public transport, shared cars and bikes and, above all, on real-time data on their smartphones. He anticipates a revolution which will transform not just transport but the cities themselves. “The goal is to rebalance the public space and create a city for people,” he says. “There will be less pollution, less noise, less stress; it will be a more walkable city.”

Just like in 1900, where all truly regressive ‘progressives’ want to wind up. Any resemblance to Disneyland is purely coincidental.

Walt would have loved these guys.

Read it.

To limit the growth of health-care spending, and to help subsidize insurance for low-income Americans, the Affordable Care Act took a step toward limiting this tax break. Beginning Jan. 1, 2018, the law levies a hefty excise tax on health insurance plans worth more than $27,500 per family or $10,200 per individual (with some adjustments to thresholds to be made for hazardous jobs such as those in law enforcement or construction and other factors). This has been dubbed the “Cadillac tax.” (For details, see this Cigna summary or this Health Affairs policy brief.)

Once again, a Voice of the Crust shakes a finger at those who are spending money on things that the Crust would prefer it not be spent on.

Consider the concept of employer-paid-for health care, which the author admits was a market response to a Typical Government Stupidity, wage and price controls during WWII. (Funny how many of today’s ‘crises’ are the result of Typical Government Stupidity in times past. Don’t get me started on the Fourteenth Amendment.) Whenever one finds a separation between who pays for the service and who receives the service, you get the following: People grabbing all the service that they can (after all, they’re not paying for it); service providers thinking up ever more new and original ways of providing services that they can hoodwink the recipients and the payers into consuming; and tedious acres of articles by simple-minded pundits about how something, SOMETHING must be done.

The answer, of course, is simple: People pay for their own health care. That allows the market to do what it does best, i.e. set prices and clear the market for a particular service. But the Crust doesn’t like simplicity, because it doesn’t serve their agenda.

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust makes its bid for Moral Superiority in an Identity Politics world.

Color film was invented quite a bit later. The principle was basically the same: take impressions of different wavelengths of light as separate photographs, and combine them into a full-color photo. The difference was they were able to take these “separate” photos in the different layers of chemicals on the same square of film; essentially a single photograph, and a single exposure (press-of-the-button.)

The proportion of the different colors in the photo — the photo’s color balance — was partially determined by the concentrations of chemicals in the film; and partially by the various chemicals used in processing the film and printing from it. This underwent a lot of fine-tuning. For example: the first color film was two-color, i.e. only in red and green. In the US, where this technology was being pioneered, most of this fine-tuning was done by affluent white men. And, as it turns out, the race of these men had implications: they were operating under a very particular assumption about whom and what their product was meant to capture.

Can’t get much more ‘progressive’ in tone than that.

Read it.

Well, let’s see — does she share her profits with her employees?

(Sorry, I knew I couldn’t write that with a straight face.)

Or maybe she’s waiting until she can get a tax break….

Read it.

Only for Voices of the Crust, supporting the Narrative. The rest of us recognize that ‘persons of color’ are more likely to be criminals.

Read it. And watch the video.

“Americans have fought their way back from tough economic times,” Clinton said in the video announcement on April 12. “But the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.”

So what do Millennials think of a candidate who criticizes the “1 percent,” but simultaneously owns multi-million dollar properties in Washington, D.C. and New York and spends her summers in the Hamptons? Campus Correspondent Cabot Phillips took to the streets of our nation’s capitol to find out in Campus Reform’s debut of “Candidate’s Cribs.”

She doesn’t mean herself, of course; she means those other people at the top.

Read it.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Why is this dipstick pretending to be a Republican? Is he just a masochist?

Read it.

Trump has an ego bigger than Ross Perot’s. Jeb Bush, to the extent that he thinks about Donald Trump, more likely sees him not as a threat but as a pothole on the highway of Republican politics.

Can’t say that he’d be wrong.

Read it.

These must be the same ‘right-wing Jews’ who overwhelmingly vote for (and contribute to) Democrite candiates.

The secret side of Barbra Streisand…? Who knew?

Read it.

Earlier this year, a firestorm erupted when Connecticut College philosophy professor Andrew Pessin’s 2014 Facebook comments, in which he compared Hamas in Gaza to a “wild pit bull . . . chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to escape,” were deemed “racist” and “dehumanizing” by student activists, colleagues, and administrators alike. Meanwhile, Middle East studies academics regularly emit commentary that is unambiguous in its bigotry, tastelessness, and vulgarity, to nary a peep. Not coincidentally, the vitriol is directed at targets academe finds politically unpopular: Israel, pro-Israel Jews, and anti-Islamists.

Read it.

It’s called ‘No Child Left Behind’ and socialist rags like the Washington Post love it.

Jim Goad views the media-storm with a jaundiced eye.

When I heard about last Wednesday’s spree, I thought of the 2010’s Hartford Distributors shooting, wherein Omar Thornton, a black former employee of a beer distribution company, shot eight white former coworkers to death before killing himself. Thornton’s white girlfriend would claim that he’d been taunted with racial epithets while at work, although even the nonwhite employees at the company denied that any such events ever occurred.

As with last week’s Charleston shooting, racial animus appeared to be a motivating factor for Thornton. The main difference is that you’ve likely never heard of Omar Thornton, while you are already painfully aware of Dylann Roof.

That is no coincidence. I’d even suggest it’s by design.

And so — what follows?

I suspect the double standard exists to simultaneously whip up black rage and white resentment. As it is currently configured, our media/government complex focuses almost exclusively on anti-black horror stories—whether real or imagined—while it outright ignores or buries stories about black-on-white violence.

This creates unnecessary resentment on both sides. Blacks get the false impression that they’re being disproportionately murdered by whites—rather than, you know, other blacks. And many whites who’ve been victimized by black violence feel that either no one believes them, no one cares about them, or that everyone feels that they deserved it anyway because of, you know, history and stuff.

How is that anything but a divisive strategy? How can either side win a game with rules like that?

A  very good question; one that Obama, for example, will not answer.

Read it.

A professor famous for predicting the imminent demise of the human race at regular intervals since the 1970s has predicted the imminent demise of the human race.

Paul Ehrlich, who is the Bing Professor of Population Studies at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment, says it’s definitely on this time.

Why are people still listening to this ass? You’d think that somebody who’d been wrong so many times would lose his job — and he would, if he had a job in the Real World. Environmentalism, however, is a fantasy-land (much like Second Life, but not as much fun).

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Ogg Hall, home to many first and second-year students, prominently displayed the heterosexual privilege board so that students could read about “benefits automatically derived from being or being perceived as being heterosexual.”

This is news? At least they’re using the term correctly — although, since the majority of people are heterosexual, they might use ‘pubilage’ instead (not that that’s a word….).

Why don’t they just say ‘normal privilege’ and be done with it? Of course there are a lot of ‘privileges’ associated with being normal, primarily because that’s what most people are — indeed, that’s what ‘normal’ is all about.

Read it.

The Korean math prodigy at one of the nation’s top high schools had Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on the phone, personally encouraging the teenager to attend Harvard University. She received letters from Harvard professors, encouraging her to bring her brilliant abilities to Cambridge next fall instead of accepting her admission to Stanford University on the opposite coast.

As the student struggled to decide between five-figure scholarship promises from both schools, she received a novel offer: She could spend two years at each elite school as part of an arrangement just for her. The exciting dual-enrollment opportunity garnered star-struck coverage from Korean media outlets, which dubbed her the “Genius Girl.”

But none of it was true.

John Hinderaker does a little fisking.

Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley is pissed about the Charleston shootings. That is what he said in an email to supporters. So, is he pissed at the murderer, Dylann Roof? Don’t be silly! He’s pissed at Republicans. When you’re a Democrat, it’s all politics, all the time.

Every bad thing that hits the news is yet another stick with which Democrites try to beat Republicans, even when Republicans as such had nothing to do with it.

And yet  cities that are run by Democrites and undergoing major meltdowns, like Detroit, or murder machines, like Chicago, are apparently nobody’s fault, or else everybody’s fault, like Global Warming.

The real issue relating to straw purchasing is lack of enforcement. Under the Obama administration, federal prosecutions of gun-related offenses have declined by 30% to 40% compared with the Bush years. Eric Holder’s politicized Department of Justice had higher priorities than prosecuting actual crimes. As is so often the case, it makes much more sense to enforce laws already on the books than to pass new ones.

But Democrites get Election Points for passing new cool-sounding laws, even if they don’t do anything effective, rather than, you know, enforcing existing law, which might leave them open to Being Evaluated On Performance, to which they react like Bela Lugosi to garlic.

I’d be more interested in whether O’Malley is ‘pissed’ about the crime wave in Baltimore, of which he was once mayor and of which he is at present Governor, and just what he plans to do about it. Oh, wait, that would be Being Evaluated On Performance, and we can’t have that.