Mark Steyn looks at the madness afflicting the New York Times.

What confidence can we have that traumatized war refugees can be transformed into budding American entrepreneurs? We cannot know for sure. But recent evidence of recaptured children from the clutches of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda and victims of violent crime across five continents reveals that they become more active citizens than similar compatriots who have not suffered from these traumatic events.

What a fascinating study. If that’s how you make “active” citizens, let’s drop the entire student body of Oberlin in the middle of Somalia and see what they’re like when they get back.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Well, actually, a more accurate headline would be ‘Left-Wing BBC Reporter in Shock Over Tsarnaev Death Penalty’; of course, since the BBC (getting its money through compulsory license fees) doesn’t feel any inclination to wear a Clever Plastic Disguise over it’s ‘progressive’ bias.

This is almost a pure example of the type — the reporter is shocked, so of course all right-thinking people are shocked, and since Massachusetts is full of right-thinking people (having elected the Peter Pan Party since time out of mind), therefore Massachusetts is shocked and ashamed.

Read it.

Bosch Fawstin, a former Muslim who won the Muhammad cartoon contest at the Texas free speech event attacked by two gunmen Sunday, will soon be added to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s (SPLC) list of hate groups.

A very great honor which I hope he appreciates.

Read it.

The term ‘irremedially corrupt’ springs to mind.

But Clinton really had no other choice. The Republican presidential nominee, the Republican National Committee and groups associated with electing a Republican president are expected to spend at least $1 billion and probably closer to $2 billion to elect a GOP president. Democrats will attempt to match this fundraising, if not raise more.

No matter what happens, it’s always the Republicans’ fault. Thank you, NBC, Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Headlines you’ll never see in the Atlantic (unlike this one): ‘The Audacity of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders’.

I’m sure they would have used ‘ego’ if the Washington Post hadn’t gotten to it first.

Read it.

Headlines you’ll never see in the Washington Post (unlike this one): ‘Barack Obama’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Hillary Clinton’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Bill Clinton’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Harry Reid’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Nancy Pelosi’s Over-the-Top Ego’, ‘Jesse Jackson’s Over-the-Top Ego’, or ‘Al Sharpton’s Over-the-Top Ego’.

Ego, you see, is only a Republican characteristic, and cancels out his being black.

Read it.

If you like liberal ideologues who label inconvenient facts as “false,” then you’ll love PunditFact. Why? Because PunditFact just declared that a demonstrably true fact was false because, according to PunditFact, the factual claim “ignores critical facts that would give a different impression.” Facts are strange that way. They do tend to give an impression of the truth, even if some people find that impression discomfiting.

It gets more embarrassing than that, though. In an unsolicited April 28 e-mail to me, PunditFact author Louis Jacobson told me unequivocally that the demonstrably factual claim he was examining was “clearly accurate” and “technically true.” But today, Jacobson declares, that fact is suddenly “Mostly False.”

Read it.

Which it is, by their definition of ‘Islamophobic’ (i.e. daring to tell the truth about Islam).

Read it.

But let us express compassion for poor wee Brooke, a thirty-something special snowflake from the UNC Chapel Hill Department of Commie Propaganda (that is, Journalism). When I went to boot camp in 1987, my company commander was a SMC Baldwin. That’s Chief Signalman for you civilian types, though the rating was apparently merged with Quartermaster in 2004.

I kind of wonder what old Baldwin would think of his namesake slandering veterans as though military service turns Americans into some kind of foreign, invasive species. Veterans support and defend the Constitutional right of Brooke and her ilk to be as false and useless as they want to be. There is some irony to be mined in how the era of Hope and Change segregates Americans into victim groups, like the Baltimore rioters, and target groups, like veterans, Christians,  and males (trifecta for me!).

Read it.

There has been quite a bit of news coverage of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Don’t ask me why. The annual lovefest between Democratic politicians and Democratic journalists hasn’t generated any actual news in a long time. But this year’s event was perhaps notable because it exposed our president’s bitterness, as he approaches the end of his term. Humor is often revealing. Obama began with a joke that would be considered crude in a junior high school locker room:

After the midterm elections, my advisors asked me, “Mr. President, do you have a bucket list?” And I said, “Well, I have something that rhymes with bucket list.’” (Laughter and applause.)

Take executive action on immigration? Bucket. (Laughter.) New climate regulations? Bucket. It’s the right thing to do. (Laughter and applause.)

If I had said something like that when I was 12, my father would have whacked me. Now, we have a president so pitiful that he thinks such crudeness is appropriate humor.

Obama seems to share Hillary’s attitude of ‘Why can’t you people just do what you’re told?’

Read it.

A classic Voice of the Crust thumb-sucker.

Unmentioned: Why anybody should care.

Ross Douthat finds that his bullshit detector has gone off.

A LIVING cartoonist lecturing his murdered peers makes for a curious spectacle, but that’s what transpired at journalism’s George Polk Awards a week ago. The lecturer was Garry Trudeau, of “Doonesbury” fame; his subject was the cartoonists for Charlie Hebdo, the Parisian satire rag, who were gunned down by fanatics because of their mockery of Muhammad and Islam.

Trudeau did not exactly say they had it coming, but he passed judgment on their sins — not the sin of blasphemy, but the sin of picking a politically unsuitable target for their jabs. By mocking things sacred to Europe’s Muslim immigrants, Trudeau lamented, the Hebdo cartoonists were “punching downward … attacking a powerless, disenfranchised minority.” This was both a moral and an aesthetic failing, because “ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny — it’s just mean.”

Trudeau is hardly the first writer to accuse the Hebdo cartoonists of “punching down.” That phrase, and the critique it implies of “Je Suis Charlie” solidarity, has circulated on the Western left ever since the massacre. And understandably, because it reflects a moral theory popular among our intelligentsia, one that The Atlantic’s David Frum, in a response to Trudeau, distilled as follows: In any given conflict, first “identify the bearer of privilege,” then “hold the privilege-bearer responsible.”

As Frum notes, at its roots (both liberal and biblical) this is an admirable idea. Better to live in a society that favors underdogs than one that just lets victors have their way.

But on the contemporary left, the theory’s simplicity is becoming a kind of intellectual straitjacket. The Hebdo massacre is just one of many cases in which today’s progressives, in the name of overthrowing hierarchies, end up assuming that lines of power are predictable, permanent and clear.

Which they are not, for several reasons.

Why anyone would consider rich white Yalie Garry Trudeau a moral exemplar on anything escapes me.

The Atlantic, Voice of the Crust, tries to pull an Obama.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Read it.

Much like the work of Garry Trudeau.

TrudeauLike Doonesbury itself, Garry Trudeau’s speech yesterday at Long Island University was entertaining at the beginning but eventually became tedious and smug. After opening with some funny reminiscences about his early struggles with unsympathetic editors, the cartoonist tried to tackle the topic of the murders at Charlie Hebdo. He did not take the position you might expect from a professional satirist. “Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility,” he lectured. “At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious.”

Trudeau’s talk took its turn for the worse halfway in, when he offered a garbled account of the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005. “Using judgment and common sense in expressing oneself were denounced as antithetical to freedom of speech,” he told the audience. I seem to remember some responses to those cartoons that were more clearly antithetical to freedom of speech, including death threats and assassination attempts. Trudeau alluded to some of this, but he blamed the speakers, not the censors: “Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free speech absolutists were unchastened.”

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust must push the Narrative even if it derogates one of their tools, the teachers’ unions.

Read it.

The New Republic, with its punk owner Chris Hughes having locked the cockpit door, continues its rapid decompression and descent into the mountainside.  This week TNR carries a piece saying that the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax story is the fault of . . . conservatives.

The story (and “story” it is) by Elizabeth Stoker Brunig shows what an expensive college education in postmodern theory gets you these days….

Nicholas Kristof at Voice of the Crust New York Times phones in another rewarming of The Narrative.

The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids worldwide bop to Beyoncé.

Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.

Unexamined is the fact that ‘ordinary Americans’ who have a job and support themselves are doing fine; it’s the slackers who live off of the labor of others who are doing most of the whining.

The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world.

At what? Being socialist? Be still my heart. This is like criticizing countries for being unlike the Soviet Union. ‘They may not be allowed to vote for more than one candidate, but at least they’ve got free day care!’

We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.

Well, that’s pretty much horseshit. The government does a fine job of ‘prevent[ing] early marriage’ by offering every UnderCrust female an apartment, food stamps, and MedicAid simply for having a child without bothering to marry the father. The ‘equality of our education system’ is almost perfect, with every child being offered an equally-crappy public education at the hands of ‘teachers’ who are more concerned about their salaries and benefits than their formal jobs. Why have ‘high school enrollment’ when it subjects you to attacks by juvenile delinquents that won’t be disciplined by any kind of authority? And I fail to see how ‘cellphone use’ constitutes a measuring stick for civilization.

The fun part, though, is the accompanying list. Notice that, except for Japan, all of the countries above the U.S. are government by highly blue-eyed white people — and, judging from college admissions, the Japanese can be considered Honorary White People (at least for affirmative-action purposes).

Maybe the problem is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough white people. That seems to be the key to getting higher on the list.

Read it.

No doubt that the Washington Post has the hipster ‘progressive’ demographic nailed.

Can you think of anything more illustrative of the Peter Pan Party’s core cultural meme ‘We Wont Grow Up!’ than this one?

Read it.

Note the weasel-word ‘diverting’, as if profits must by some law of nature not go overseas. By this you may know a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Two prominent factions within the Republican foreign policy establishment are fighting for control over who will help guide former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush‘s policy positions as he gears up for a campaign for the presidency.

More hawkish Republicans — represented by the prominent, interventionist neoconservatives who populated the ranks of the George W. Bush administration — have repeatedly raised concerns about the more pragmatic foreign policy team being assembled around Mr. Bush.

By which phrasing you know that the Crust have decided that ‘interventionist neoconservatives’ (almost worth the price of admission, that hate-phrase) will be the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Bush campaign.

Vanity Fair, Voice of the Crust, still can’t resist shooting fish in a barrel.

But that afternoon, after a long presentation to 200 NBC advertising salespeople, Turness was feeling better than she had in months. When she had been hired she knew she was stepping onto a troubled ship; finally, she felt, the organizational changes she had made were showing results. Meet the Press’s ratings were edging up; Nightly News seemed to be stabilizing. “Things,” she told Fili, “feel like they’re in a really good place.”

Her sense of relief, however, lasted mere minutes. As she left Fili’s office around 3:30, Turness learned the startling news: the most important person at the network, the face of NBC News, its anchorman Brian Williams, had apparently been exaggerating an anecdote about coming under fire in a U.S. Army helicopter during the Iraq war in 2003. A reporter from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes had called about it that morning. Williams was supposed to talk to him off the record in an effort to determine what the reporter planned to write. Instead, to the dismay of NBC’s P.R. staff, Williams had gone on the record and admitted he hadn’t been telling the truth, not only on a Nightly News broadcast the previous week but also over the years at public appearances and on talk shows.

Read it.

Only The New Republic can be racist and anti-Semitic without breaking a sweat.

Read it.

Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post condemning laws that protect religious freedom. Cook, who is himself gay, concluded with these words:

Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous.

We agree with that, and we would like to see Apple show some courage. Not by writing op-eds that will be hailed by Cook’s progressive friends and will cost Apple nothing, but by facing up to the fact that around the world, homosexuals face a lot worse problems than buying cakes for their weddings.

Millions for Indiana, but not one cent for Mecca. Cook and his Aeron-chair commandos are a good example of the Folk-Song Army:

“One type of song that has come into increasing prominence in recent months is the folk-song of protest. You have to admire people who sing these songs. It takes a certain amount of courage to get up in a coffee-house or a college auditorium and come out in favor of the things that everybody else in the audience is against like peace and justice and brotherhood and so on.” — Tom Lerer

Read it.

A fine fisking of the notorious Timothy Egan, who writes about the world as viewed from the Upper West Side for the New York Times.

Read it.

‘Bioethicist’ sounds prtty cool, doesn’t it? Sounds as if it ought to be a science-based field, in which one can earn a degree, do research, get published, and be subject to the discipline such a thing implies.

Well, actually no. ‘Bioethecist’ is just the same old Leftist ‘you must listen to us because we know better than you what you ought to be doing’ cant, just more narrowly focused. Its political agenda is plain to see — next time you read some outgassing from a ‘bioethicist’, ask yourself if it’s something you can see a Peter Pan Party functionary pushing. If it is, that tells you all you need to know.

John Hinderaker asks the as-yet-unanswered questions.

The Columbia report takes us behind the scenes at Rolling Stone and adds new details about how the false story made its way into print. But it says little about why the scandal, one of the worst instances of journalistic malpractice on record, happened.

…

Of course: Sabrina Erdely and her editor, Sean Woods, believed “Jackie,” even though there were obvious indications of unreliability, because she was telling them what they wanted to hear, something that was consistent with a “larger pattern.” One might think that the nightmare the principals at Rolling Stone have lived through might generate some self-knowledge. But no. Their biases are intact.

…

I don’t know whether sexual assault is a serious problem on college campuses or not. FBI statistics indicate not women aged 18-22 who are not college students are significantly more likely to be raped, or otherwise sexually assaulted, than those who are college students, as one would expect. It occurs to me that if you are a rapist, women aged 18 to 22 are probably a prime target group. But it is an article of faith within the establishment, of which Rolling Stone is emphatically a part, that campus rape is an epidemic. That’s why they wanted to publish the article, and that’s why they weren’t too particular about whether it was true.

Anything that happens is an opportunity to push The Narrative, whether true or not, whether relevant or not.

Heather MacDougal is the designated hitter expounding the Crustian party line.

Easter is a pagan festival. If Easter isn’t really about Jesus, then what is it about?

That’s the ‘progressive’ mind at work — ‘X ix Y, so why are you so wrong?’

However much ‘Easter’ may have at one time been a ‘pagan festival’, it is now a thoroughly Christian festival; it’s only called ‘Easter’ by the inheritors of a smallish section of the Latin Western tradition, and of course all the Crust knows is the modern West.

It really is about Jesus, Heather, and a little effort spent on research, although it will take you away from your day job of parroting cliches for the Left, it would really help you out. You might want to start here.

Read it.

Four months after Rolling Stone magazine published a shocking—and soon discredited—account of a fraternity gang rape at the University of Virginia, the Charlottesville police department has released the results of its investigation into the alleged assault. It comes as no surprise that “no substantive basis” was found for the claim by a student known as “Jackie” that she was raped by seven men at a fraternity party as a UVA freshman in September 2012. What’s striking is to what lengths both the police and many in the news media have gone to tiptoe around the obvious fact that the tale was a hoax by a serial liar. This dance of denial suggests that in the current ideological climate, it is nearly impossible to declare any allegation of rape to be definitely false.

Mark Steyn looks at the latest leftist tar pit.

On Monday, when Trevor Noah landed the gig as Jon Stewart’s replacement, Salon‘s headline writers assured us:

Right-Wing Rage At ‘The Daily Show’ Is About To Get Very, Very Ugly

That’s because Trevor Noah is a mixed-race South African, and everyone knows right-wingers are ugly racists consumed with rage over miscegenation. As it turned out, there was not a peep from rage-consumed righties, perhaps because they don’t watch “The Daily Show” and had never heard of Trevor Noah, or perhaps because they were preoccupied with inconsequential foot-of-page-37 news stories like the nuclearization of Iran.

Once again. the left trips on its uncanny ability to see things that aren’t there. But wait, there’s more:

So instead by Tuesday morning it was the left that was all in a lather – or as those self-same Salon headline writers put it a mere 24 hours after their previous headline:

Did Trevor Noah’s Twitter History Just Kill ‘The Daily Show’?

That’s because the lefties were all mad about the oddly misogynist and anti-Semitic Twitter feed of Mr Noah, full of jests about porking fat chicks and running over a Jewish kid in his German car – which is certainly a strange choice of joke for a 21st century comic.

At this point, I realized that I did, after all, know who Trevor Noah is. I’d caught him on telly in Oz a couple of years ago, and in London at the Royal Variety Performance. He struck me as like a lot of chancers from around the Commonwealth, chaps who make a nice living tailoring their shtick to whichever corner of the Anglosphere they happen to be in. Yes, yes, I know, I do a bit of that meself. Anyway, passing through Britain only a few days ago, I got back after dinner and thought I’d watch ten minutes of TV before turning in. Unfortunately, it was the BBC’s annual “Comic Relief” fundraiser, a long night of leaden japes and forced jollity, in the midst of which up popped Mr Noah….

Read it.

As the 2016 election nears, contenders in both parties have been hiring staffers, traveling to early-nominating stats and feverishly raising money. Their operations can look to some like campaigns—but they aren’t subject to any of the restrictions that would otherwise apply.

That’s the subject of complaints filed Tuesday with the Federal Election Commission by two campaign-finance watchdog groups, who allege that four potential contenders—former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker—are violating federal campaign finance laws.

How does one get to be a ‘watchdog group’? Apparently, coming up with an impressive-sounding name and reciting it to a reporter is sufficient. How about the more accurate ‘political stalking groups’?

The fact that three of the four are Republicans will not have been lost on the astute reader. Nor will the fact that Hillary Clinton has neither complied with this vague law nor been criticized by any of these so-called ‘watchdog groups’ for not doing so. Coincidence? I think not.

Read it.

That’s like saying ‘Man Poses as Doctor, Saves Lives’. If she can do the job well enough to make partner in a law firm, she is in fact a lawyer, and a damned good one, no matter what the government sas.

Read it.

A good example of how far The Narrative has penetrated even sites nominally devoted to tech subjects, such as TechCrunch; needless to say, there isn’t a shred of tech angle to it.

Notice the Crustian bases touched in the first three paragraphs, just to make sure you know who’s on the side of the righteous:

It’s hard to believe, after how far the gay rights movement has come, that we’re still doing this. But here we are.

Translation: Let’s all stamp our feet and make the bitter beer face because there are still people who don’t embrace our political agenda.

Republican Indiana Gov. Mike Pence has signed into law a bill that allows private businesses to discriminate against gay and lesbian consumers, according to CNN. The “Restoration of Religious Freedom Act” is meant to allow businesses and corporations to cite “religious beliefs” as a defense, should they be sued by a private party for discrimination.

CNN, of course, is an utterly unimpeachable authority as to What Things Mean and Why They Happened. OF COURSE the law was deliberately crafted to discriminate against one of our politically fashionable groups; what other possible motivation could there be?

This of course means that Gov. Pence and the state of Indiana are prioritizing the religious beliefs of a company or corporation (after all, corporations are people!) over the basic human rights of a gay person.

So getting a cake made for your ‘wedding’ and having it held wherever you want to is a ‘basic human right’, but freedom of religion is not. Glad that we cleared that up. The U.S. Constitution? A scrap of paper — feel free to ignore it.

Fortunately, this gives me a perfect excuse to drop TechCrunch from my RSS feed, which has too many tech sites on it as it is. Thanks, guys.

Heather MacDonald points out some inconvenient truth.

The most common statistic thrown out these days by President Obama, Vice President Biden, on down is that one in five women will be the victims of sexual assault during their college careers.

Detroit is America’s most violent city.  Its violent crime rate for all four violent felonies—that’s rape, murder, aggravated assault, and robbery—is 2%.  Its rape rate is 0.05%.  A 20% crime rate for any crime, much less one as serious as rape, is virtually unheard of.  Not even in Africa’s most brutal civil wars has anything been experienced in human history like a 20% crime rate.  And yet despite a rape rate that is allegedly 400 times that of Detroit’s, sophisticated, highly educated baby boomer mothers are beating down the doors of campuses to try to get their daughters in.

The frenzy of college admissions begins earlier and earlier each year.  Here in Manhattan, parents are paying $200 an hour for tutoring for prekindergarten, all in the hope of getting their little darlings into Harvard 14 years later.

The White House Council on Women and Girls says that the survivors—and be sure to use the word survivors—of sexual assault on campus suffer lifetimes of post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, suicidal thoughts.  What are we seeing in fact?  Girls graduate at 23% higher rates than men on campus, and go on to lead highly lucrative careers.  If the rape epidemic was going on as claimed, we wouldn’t merely have rape administration Title IX bureaucracy sprouting up on campuses because there would be no more campuses.  You would have had a massive exodus of girls from college campuses years ago, and a demand to create actually safe environments for student learning.  Why hasn’t that happened?  Because the campus rape epidemic does not exist.

Steve Sailer points out the incongruity. (Which is in a box in the corner, with the ambiguity, which has not yet put on weight.)

It turns out that the real killer was … the black street criminal. What kind of Law & Order episode would that be? Dick Wolf made a fortune putting on countless “Law & Order” episodes in which the killer turned out not to be the Rudy Guede-like thug, like most of the time in real life, but actually an affluent white person. Life would be so much more entertaining if well-to-do, good-looking white people like Amanda Knox, Haven Monahan, and John Doer were going around murdering, raping, and discriminating all the time.

So, we need a new term: Great White Defendant Privilege. The definition of Great White Defendant Privilege is that when the wheels of the justice system finally get done grinding, it often turns out that the Great White Defendant tried and convicted in the press didn’t actually do it (or, as in the case of the Night of Broken Glass fraternity gang rape at UVA, didn’t actually exist), and the justice system lets them go just because they are innocent (or nonexistent).

Read it.

Almost one year ago to the day, however, at the same Council of Foreign Relations gathering, Brennan did explain what makes Muslims from all around the world join the Islamic jihad (then under the rubric of “Al-Qaeda”). After assuring all in attendance that al-Qaeda’s ideology is “a perverse and very corrupt interpretation of the Qur’an”; that “al-Qaeda has hijacked” Islam; that “they have really distorted the teachings of Muhammad”—Brennan still confirmed that, even so “that ideology, that agenda of al-Qaeda has gained resonance and following in many parts of the world.”

When asked why such a “perverse and very corrupt” understanding of Islam—one that has “distorted the teachings of Muhammad”—so resonates among Muslims, the CIA responded by saying that it was being “fed a lot of times by, you know, political repression, by economic, you know, disenfranchisement, by, you know, lack of education and ignorance, so there—there are a number of phenomena right now that I think are fueling the fires of, you know, this ideology.”

Read it.

I guess it’s the Atlantic‘s turn to start the inevitable round of ‘journalistic’ hit-jobs on any Republican candidate to the right of Hillary Clinton. The subhed tells the tale:

The former Texas governor turned a constitutionally weak office into a source of tremendous informal power.

He can’t get around the fact that the office is ‘constitutionally weak’, so Perry can’t be a real ‘caudillo’ (he’d have used ‘fuehrer’ if he’d thought he could get away with it, but he dimly perceived that everybody would just laugh at that one), but Perry has to be somehow painted as a ‘caudillo’, so he’s going after Perry’s ‘informal’ power. (How dare you have informal power, you fascist!)

Being a Voice of the Crust means that sometimes you can just phone it in. (I want Richard Parker’s job. I want a job where you don’t have to think in order to be paid for writing.)

Read it.

The Washington Post reveals what the new Party Line will be.

So these words are now off the table: “polarizing,” “calculating,” “disingenuous,” “insincere,” “ambitious,” “inevitable,” “entitled,” “over-confident,” “secretive,” “will do anything to win,” “represents the past,” and “out of touch.”

Steve Sailer does an entertaining fisking of Yet Another NYT Thumbsucker.

In “Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant” in the new NYT Magazine, we see another tribute to the golden oldie study by economist David Card that because wages in Miami didn’t fall relative to four other cities from 1980 to 1984 despite the Mariel Boatlift of May 1980 increasing Miami’s supply of labor, ergo that proves that the law of supply and demand doesn’t apply to immigration.

But, was ceteris truly paribus in Miami in 1980-84 relative to Card’s control group of other American cities? Or was there anything else boosting the economy of Miami from 1980 to 1984 that wasn’t happening on the same scale elsewhere?

To research this apparently extremely obscure topic in economic history, I spent a half hour on Youtube. I’ve interleaved some video evidence regarding the unique source of Miami’s early 1980s prosperity above and below.

Read it.

Washington Post. The sky is falling. Women and minorities hardest hit. *Yawn*

If you’re going to phone it in, it might as well be a bomb scare.

Read it.

Hillary Clinton told a crowd of journalists that she wants a new beginning in her relations with the press. Then, to prove her sincerity she entertained questions for 20 minutes.

Just kidding. Clinton did talk of a new beginning, but she took no questions, according to the National Journal.

The assemblage of hard-nosed reporters was clearly put off by Clinton’s unwillingness to take questions. Accordingly, Clinton received only polite applause when she finished her remarks.

Just kidding. Charmed by Clinton’s one-liners (almost certainly written by someone else), the journalists gave her a standing ovation.

In her remarks, Clinton offered the reporters tough love, or something. She called on them to focus on “serious” and “substantive” journalism going forward.

Translation: Don’t burden my presidential campaign by discussing anything that goes to my character or integrity.

Read it.

Enter The New York Times. America’s so-called “newspaper of record,” the once proud Gray Lady, has seen better days. Its circulation is dwarfed by that of its crosstown rival, The Wall Street Journal. Founded merely 33 years ago, USA Today’s circulation and influence has skyrocketed. And The Economist, a weekly British newspaper, has grown to become perhaps the most influential print publication in the world.

What has gone so wrong for the NYT? Many things are to blame. The paper’s leftish editorial page is out of step with a large portion of the American public. A high-profile scandal, in which journalist Jayson Blair was caught fabricating articles, damaged its credibility. The biggest factor, however, is the rise of credible challengers — both print and digital — that simply do better journalism. There is little incentive to spend money to read the NYT when superior news coverage (and more sensible editorializing) can be found elsewhere.

The NYT’s science coverage is particularly galling. While the paper does employ a staff of decent journalists (including several excellent writers, such as Carl Zimmer and John Tierney), its overall science coverage is trite. Other outlets cover the same stories (and many more), in ways that are both more in-depth and more interesting. (They are also usually free to read.) Worst of all, too much of NYT’s science journalism is egregiously wrong.

Read it.

The claim arose in a lawsuit (pdf) filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which has tried unsuccessfully to get the TSA to release documents on its SPOT (Screening Passengers by Observation Techniques) [pdf]) program through the Freedom of Information Act.

SPOT, whose techniques were first used in 2003 and formalized in 2007, uses “highly questionable” screening techniques, according to the ACLU complaint, while being “discriminatory, ineffective, pseudo-scientific, and wasteful of taxpayer money.” TSA has spent at least $1 billion on SPOT.

The ACLU, of course, would be opposed to any screening program that treats, oh, say, young Middle Eastern males differently from white grannys from Iowa. (Although I’m fully prepared to believe that anything run by the TSA is based on junk science; I’d just like the analysis to come from a credible source.)

‘Behavioral screening’ is the method that Israelis use for their airline, so obviously it doesn’t work worth a darn — look at all those Israeli airline planes being hijacked and blown up.

Steve Sailer does the news behind the news.

The Other McCain documents the derangement.

The phenomenon of “Tumblr Feminism” really has to be seen to be believed. In the 1950s, women with mental illness were treated with psychoanalysis, tranquilizers or electroshock therapy. Now, all the crazy women just log on and post their deranged gibberish on Tumblr, where thousands of other crazy women tell them how awesome they are.

Nick Gillespie isn’t afraid to ask the easy questions.

What is it that Don Draper tells Peggy in that episode of Mad Men when she gives birth to an unintended baby? Something like “Don’t look back, there’s nothing for you there. Keep moving forward.”

I thought of that moment while reading Thomas Friedman’s column about the Islamic State and the Middle East in The New York Times.

…

Oddly, Friedman is absolutely uninterested in pausing for a second and asking his assistants to rummage through his own archives. There, he would find voluminous words from the man himself pushing for the very courses of action he now tut-tuts.

The Guardian is a dependable source of ‘progressive’ drivel.

The gap between the richly rewarded few of tech firms and banks and the rest of us is growing wider. Blame the digital revolution.

Note the assumption: gap between the ‘richly rewarded few’ and ‘the rest of us’ is a Bad Thing, and Something Is To Blame. Nothing ever happens without the activities of a villain, or villains; a very animistic point of view. The fact that ‘the rest of us’ live incomparably better lives because of that same digital revolution is of no importance; one speck of shit in the wine makes it shit all the way down.

Someone once observed that the difference between Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher was that whereas Thatcher believed that she was always right, Blair believed not only that he was right but also that he was good. Visitors to the big technology companies in California come away with the feeling that they have been talking to tech-savvy analogues of Blair. They are fired with a zealous conviction that they are doing great stuff for the world, and proud of the fact that they work insanely hard in the furtherance of that goal. The fact that they are richly rewarded for their dedication is, one is given to believe, incidental.

Irony of ironies: Tony Blair and those who write for the Guardian share the same syndrome. And there’s the real rub: Those who write for the Guardian, I suspect, are not as richly rewarded for their dedication as the geeks of Silicon Valley, AND IT BURNNNNNS!.

Read it.

For half a century, memories of the Holocaust limited anti-Semitism on the Continent. That period has ended—the recent fatal attacks in Paris and Copenhagen are merely the latest examples of rising violence against Jews.

Since this is the Atlantic, of course, a Voice of the Crust, a ritual spit against Emmanuel Goldstein is required:

Renewed vitriol among right-wing fascists and new threats from radicalized Islamists have created a crisis, confronting Jews with an agonizing choice.

Sorry, but I don’t see any right-wing fascists (oxymoron) threatening Jews in Europe; it’s the ANTIFA (anti-fascist ‘progressive’ street thugs) and (wait for it) militant Muslims that are causing the problems.

I’d say it’s time for the Jews of Europe to lock & load and dish out a little of what they’ve been taking. But that’s me.

Read it.

There are few Voices more Crustian than Salon, and obviously the idea of a place where people can be free from interference from, well, the sort of people who write for Salon quite naturally fills them with horror.

Of course, such people have to be subjected to the Two Minute Hate, so they set up the shot with the crack about ‘One Percenters’, as if the people who underwrite Salon were ordinary middle class folks:

Salon has been unprofitable through its entire history. Since 2007, the company has been dependent on ongoing cash injections from board Chairman John Warnock and William Hambrecht, father of former Salon CEO Elizabeth Hambrecht. During the nine months ended December 31, 2012, these cash contributions amounted to $3.4 million, compared to revenue in the same period of $2.7 million.

Warnock is one of the founders of Adobe, and I doubt that he worries about where his next Aston-Martin is going to come from. Hambrecht, after Princeton, went on to help launch Netscape and Amazon; another fellow with a well-padded investment account.

Read it.

That’s why nobody takes seriously Lindsay Graham, who appears to be striving to be the Joe Biden of the Republican establishment.