Read it.

Amartya Sen, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, famously argued that since everyone favors equality of one sort or another, the key question is: Equality of what? A fierce argument in the wonkosphere over income inequality illustrates the need to be clear on this point.

It’s really very simple: It means that person X has more then person Y when the speaker doesn’t think that person X deserves to have more than person Y.

Read it.

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time.

Read it.

Yet another analysis of why suburbs suck by somebody who has never lived in a suburb.

Read it.

The “walrus crisis” is the Left’s latest effort to bully us into electing Democrats. Because…they’re going to do something about the walruses, I guess. Hard to say what. Chase them back onto the ice, maybe.

Koo koo kachoo.

Steve Sailer has uncovered another plot in the War on Women.

It’s almost as if women prefer to work hard in return for tangible rewards, such as a paycheck or their loved ones’ well-being. If you want people to work hard just for the satisfaction of being Right on the Internet, well, you’re probably going to wind up with a lot of men.

Steve Sailer has found a new tag for an invasive modern species.

The rise of the lumpenintelligentsia is a major development of Internet Age journalism. Below from Salon is a self-portrait by somebody named Daisy Hernandez of a modern Salon-type scribe in all her self-absorption, racism, sexism, wounded amour propre, dimwittedness, and general cluelessness.

My theory is that the rise of lumpenintellectuals like Ms. Hernandez is tied to the relative rise of advertising revenue relative to subscription revenue. For example, I pay a not insubstantial $3.75 per week to subscribe to the New York Times, but Slate, Salon, The Atlantic and other clickbait sites are advertiser-supported.

Read it.

Mostly because, being reasonable adults, they don’t much care that somebody has more money than they do.

Unlike, for instance, the people who write for Slate.

Read it.

You knew that climate change could be blamed for any kind of weather, but did you know that the underlying cause is not, in fact, carbon emissions but racism? That was one of about a thousand thrown-together messages put forward by the People’s Climate March, a recent NYC-centered network of rallies in support of something called “climate justice.”

All three words of the event’s title should give you pause: the possessive “people’s” is, so far as I can tell, the most naked signal of Stalinism; “climate”—when not being used by your grandparents while attempting to decide between Palm Springs and Pebble Beach—refers to the belief that politicians can control the weather; “march” conjures to mind stinking dreadlocks and half-digested critical theory more than it does soldiers marching in lockstep.

Read it. And watch the video for a sample of what he’s talking about.

The documentary covered the lives of Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt in what I found to be the predictably insufferable fashion Judge would have anticipated. Though Franklin Roosevelt died nearly 70 years ago, Burns’s work is not for those in search of cool judgment or historical detachment. The series was a love letter to Progressives, Democrats, and liberals. Part 7 traced FDR’s political heritage to Barack Obama, of course, which means it’s a good thing FDR was good in all his works.

The timing of the series is interesting. Arriving six weeks in advance of the midterm elections, the series allowed PBS to make its in-kind contribution to the Democrats in a big way this year. Those looking for historical detachment or impartial judgment or simply a balanced perspective had best look elsewhere.

Read it.

If you want to see the epitome of jejunosity at work (as Woody Allen put it in Love and Death) look no further than Hillary Clinton’s Washington Post review of Henry Kissinger’s new book, World Order. I almost wonder whether the Post published this as a deliberate act of cruelty to Hillary, who is obviously not ready for prime time.

The review begins with this profound gem: “When Americans look around the world today, we see one crisis after another.” When you see a lede like this, you can be sure you are in the presence of no ordinary mind. And sure enough, the rarified judgments just come tumbling one after another in a display of virtuoso brilliance not seen since Thomas Jefferson dined alone:

When I walked into the State Department in January 2009, everyone knew that it was a time of dizzying changes, but no one could agree on what they all meant. . .

Wait, this is supposed to be a review of a Kissinger book, right? Yes, but what book review by a Clinton wouldn’t turn into a vehicle for Clinton self-promotion and self-satisfaction? (And no jokes, please, about waiting for Bill Clinton’s self-satisfying review of Fifty Shades of Gray.)

Nicholas Kristof, Voice of the Crust, pushes the Narrative.

So let me push back at what I see as smug white delusion.

Never mind that this entire article is ‘smug white delusion’, as demonstrated by ‘progressives’ in the media.

• The net worth of the average black household in the United States is $6,314, compared with $110,500 for the average white household, according to 2011 census data. The gap has worsened in the last decade, and the United States now has a greater wealth gap by race than South Africa did during apartheid. (Whites in America on average own almost 18 times as much as blacks; in South Africa in 1970, the ratio was about 15 times.)

Perhaps that’s because white people tend to work and black people tend to live off of government benefits. It’s not as if there’s some government agency out there (much as people like Kristof might wish for it) assigning people incomes and not giving black people Their Fair Share.

• The black-white income gap is roughly 40 percent greater today than it was in 1967.

Welcome to the War on Poverty, which (as with most government programs) merely makes things worse. All done by the sort of people that Nicholas Kristof votes for — many of which are white people, true, but their deficiency is not in their melanin level but in their politics.

• A black boy born today in the United States has a life expectancy five years shorter than that of a white boy.

That’s because black boys (and men) tend to shoot other black boys more often than white boys shoot other white boys. Why is that? You won’t find out by reading the writings of Nicholas Kristof, much less this one.

• Black students are significantly less likely to attend schools offering advanced math and science courses than white students. They are three times as likely to be suspended and expelled, setting them up for educational failure.

That’s because black people are on average less intelligent than white people, a fact that is well documented however much it is ignored by whites, like Kristof, who ‘just don’t get it’. That doesn’t tell you anything about individual black people, of course, but it does indicate how blacks as a group will do compared to whites as a group, which is what we’re talking about here. This isn’t rocket science; it just takes the ability to notice certain facts, an ability in which people like Nicholas Kristof are notoriously deficient.

• Because of the catastrophic experiment in mass incarceration, black men in their 20s without a high school diploma are more likely to be incarcerated today than employed, according to a study from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Nearly 70 percent of middle-aged black men who never graduated from high school have been imprisoned.

Don’t you just love that term ‘experiment in mass incarceration’, with its suggestion that police are wandering around just picking up black men at random and sticking them in prison? The prospect that these people might have actually, you know, committed a crime or something never appears on the radar. Another area in which Nicholas Kristof ‘just doesn’t get it’.

All these constitute not a black problem or a white problem, but an American problem. When so much talent is underemployed and overincarcerated, the entire country suffers.

And when people who are paid to write for national publications can get away with pushing these absurd fantasies, the entire world suffers. But they’ll never notice, because they live in a world of rainbows and unicorns in which wishing makes it so, reality never intrudes, and facts are whatever you read in the New York Times.

Read it.

The writer, Voice of the Crust for the Guardian in Britain, appears to need to get out more – and read a little bit of history; socialism is always for the rich, in the sense that it allows the apparatchiks to live like rich people and forces everyone else to live like poor people.

Who are the real scroungers? Free-marketeers decry ‘big government’ yet the City and big business benefit hugely from the state – from bailouts to the billions made from privatisation. Socialism does exist in Britain – but only for the rich.

Apparently the writer, who mistakenly equates ‘free-marketers’ with ‘the city and big business’, is as ignorant of economics and politics as he is of history.

The remarkable thing is that they pay people money to write this. Any middle-school student could grind these out like pancakes, and for a lot less remuneration.

Read it.

According to an alarming “climate change” article in yesterday’s NY Times, “Global warming is already cutting grain production by several percentage points, the report found, and that could grow much worse if emissions continue unchecked.”

But in the same NY Times, there was the article about how there’s so much grain in North Dakota that there are no train cars available to transport it.

And in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

China’s grain cupboard is overflowing.

As the harvest looms next month, the country is on track for an 11th year of bumper grain crops. But production is too much, even for the world’s most populous nation, with warehouses bursting at the seams and posing a dilemma for policy makers.

So it seems that the contention that there is an alarming lack of grain production is completely bogus. The exact opposite seems to be happening. What else can’t be trusted in “climate change” reports?

Read it.

A legal challenge involving congressional districts devised by the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature offers a perfect illustration of why politicians should not be in control of drawing their own legislative districts.

Note that such complaints only arise when it’s Republicans who are allegedly loading the dice — the constant attempts by Democrats to gerrymander themselves into permanent power are perennially overlooked. (And this is the Wall Street Journal — can you imagine what it’s like at the New York Times?)

Read it.

More leftist drivel from Time magazine, which has fallen on hard times, intellectually speaking.

Sorry, Virginia, but there is no Santa Claus, and (Joseph Blasi’s triumphalist vaporings to the contrary notwithstanding) the rich haven’t been converted to your ‘progressive’ fantasy.

What they have discovered is that mouthing the correct leftist clichés and devoting a minimal amount of money and posturing allows them entry to the Upper Crust and the levers of power.

Read it.

In Baldwin County, Alabama, an award-winning plan to provide guidance for private-sector developers was spiked—it was, constituents complained, part of a United Nations plot to end property rights, impose communism and force locals onto rail cars heading to secret camps. When the blueprint was voted down, residents cheered and sang “God Bless America.” Every member of the zoning commission resigned in disgust.

The whole concept of ‘zoning’ is fascist, and people who sit on zoning boards are fascists in their hearts, if not openly. Baldwin County dodged a bullet there; not every zoning commission is lucky enough to have members who conveniently quit when their plans are thwarted. Note the tone of this Voice of the Crust: The plan was award-winning (what award? awarded by whom? bet: some group of ‘urban planners’, i.e. closet fascists), so the rubes ought to shut up and listen to their betters.

A federal proposal that would have paid physicians for time spent discussing elderly patients’ medical and personal priorities in their final days of life was shelved.

What business is it of the federal government to pay physicians for elderly medical care? Note the assumption that every old person is on the government dole, and if the government doesn’t pay for it, it won’t happen.

Some conservatives, led by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, slammed the idea as creating “death panels” of bureaucrats to decide who would live and who would die.

If the government pays for your old-age health care, it gets to make the decisions about what care you get. And, as we have seen with the National Health Service in Britain, eventually that comes down to bureaucrats deciding that person X doesn’t get treatment because it would be a waste of government money. That sure sounds like a ‘death panel’ to me. I see no indication that the time spent discussing ‘medical and personal priorities’ would be spent with the patient.

With the rejection of the plan, which had been supported by geriatricians, oncologists and advocates for senior citizens, the aged in the United States now only hear their options for resuscitation, pain control and religious support if their doctors provide the counseling for free.

Again the assumption that if the government doesn’t pay for something, it won’t get done. (Of course the plan would have been supported by the people who would be getting paid taxpayer dollars for their services, and just who elected these ‘advocates for senior citizens’? Typically ‘advocates for’ are people whose goal in life is to get government funding for their target group, and they’re almost always self-appointed.)

In 2008, no one in America caught measles and 13,278 people contracted whooping cough. By 2013, measles infected at least 276 people in the U.S. and there were more than 24,000 cases of whooping cough. Medical experts attribute this trend to declining numbers of people being vaccinated, in large part fueled by a belief that doctors and pharmaceutical companies are hiding the dangers of immunizations to protect profits, even though earnings in this niche are so comparatively small that six out of seven companies have dropped out of the business in the past 35 years. Now, because of this false belief advanced by scientific frauds and celebrities, vaccine-preventable diseases that were once on the brink of extinction are roaring back.

I wouldn’t say that 276 cases of measles or another 7000 cases of whooping cough, in a population of 350 million, qualify as ‘roaring back’. That this is a ‘false belief’ is supported neither by evidence nor argument; it is just assumed.

Further fisking of this expression of the Crustian Narrative is left for the reader. Go ahead, it’s good exercise. (Truth in Advertising would require them to change the name to Newsweak.)

Read it.

It took her more than nine years of working in the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, but Yasmina Haifi finally uncovered the secret truth about the Islamic State: It isn’t Islamic at all. Actually, it’s a Jewish plot.

Yes, really: that terrorist group formerly known as ISIS, responsible for acts of genocide in Iraq, for the beheading of American journalist James Foley, and for the murder of countless women and children in their war to establish a new Islamic Caliphate, Haifi revealed in a recent post on Twitter, is in fact a “preconceived idea from Zionists deliberately to make Islam look bad.”

Oh, I think Islam is fully capable of making itself look bad all on its own.

Read it.

Larry2 at Instapundit
There seems to be a pattern:

1. unarmed young black guy is shot,
2. there is a vast media outcry over the young “honor student’s” death,
3. family provides photos of the dead guy taken when he was 11 years old, well before he had opted for the ghetto thug look,
4. it comes out that the “honor student” has been committing felonies,
5. witnesses say the honor student was beating the hell out of the person who shot him,
6. Democrat politicians call for the shooter’s conviction, and
7. prosecutors, fearing rioting, black voters, or what have you, prosecute the shooter anyway.

Have I missed anything?

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

In the prestige press, Saturday has seen much clucking with distaste over Ferguson police releasing more information to the public than was optimal for the national media’s Narrative Maintenance purposes.

Steve Sailer does the math.

It’s quite a list.

Looking at this list, what stands out is how idiotic most of them are. Veteran investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein wonders if the Dominique Strauss-Kahn brouhaha wasn’t engineered by Sarkozy’s intelligence service to cripple his archrival, which would at least be a classy conspiracy. But most of these are just moronic … and yet the national media fell for them.

Read it.

I have a question: Why are teachers’ unions always run by obese women?

Maybe teachers union presidents who live in luxurious glass houses shouldn’t throw stones at the one percent. Chicago Teachers Union boss and generally unpleasant person Karen Lewis recently criticized Mayor Rahm Emanuel, calling him a corporate tool and “Mayor 1%.” (She has previously joked about killing rich people.)

Such populist screed is undoubtedly groundwork for an eventual mayoral run. It is also hypocritical. Lewis isn’t nearly as wealthy as Emanuel, but she’s no vagrant either. Her two union salaries bring her total compensation north of $200,000 a year, only about $15,000 less than the mayor’s salary. She owns three homes and vacations in Hawaii every year. She doesn’t quite crack the one percent, but her earnings put her in the top five percent of all Americans, according to the Chicago Sun-Times….

Read it.

Liberalism has been on a hair-trigger for several decades now about “blaming the victim” for any misfortune or ill-circumstance that they may be suffering—sometimes with good reason, but often not.  The irony is that liberals never seem to notice their symmetrical sin of blaming everything on racism, the “System,” the class structure of oppression, the Judean People’s Front, etc.  Like the apocryphal story of Bertrand Russell and turtles, for the left it’s always white people all the way down.

Read it.

Obama thinks in progressive clichés that fail to contemplate the predictable consequences of action or inaction, let alone the predictable consequences of his own words.

And as a result is always getting himselve — and us, his passengers — into trouble.

Warning: Friedman’s article may be hazardous to your health. I can feel brain cells dying as I read it.

True that.

Read it.

A Freudian slip.

The Other McCain has some breaking news.

Dana Sitar is a 28-year-old writer who works as a barista in a bookstore coffee shop to pay her bills. Divorced and childless, she is perhaps not the role model of happiness and success to whom America’s mothers usually turn when they need parenting advice, but being a feminist entitles her to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

Uh, yeah.

Read it.

And he was a Jew, too, just like Baby Jesus! Wow, what an amazing coincidence!

Read it.

At a fundraiser in Chicago, First Lady Michelle Obama complained that there was too much money in politics before asking for the “biggest, fattest check” from each of her donors.

And she didn’t even blush when she said it. (Of course, how could you tell?)

What she really meant is that there’s too much of the wrong kind (i.e. non-Democrat) money in politics, but of course it wouldn’t do to say that; anyway, her listeners knew what she meant.

Read it.

It wouldn’t have prevented him from being the child of an idiot.

Joe Biden, speaking at the Urban League conference in Cincinnati, reflected, “I should have had one Republican kid to go out and make money.”

The crowd burst into laugher.

“You know,” Biden continued, “so when they put me in a home, I get a window with a view.  You know what I mean? But my daughter is a social worker.”

So Democrats are parasites who don’t produce but live off of taxes paid by productive people? Well, that certainly fits what we know of his family. Besides, with his Senatorial and Vice-Presidential pension, I doubt that he’ll be living hand to mouth when he gets old and … I was about to say ‘senile’ but I think he’s achieved that stage already.

David Warren blows the whistle.

Here is a “thought experiment” for my remaining journalistic friends. It is an attempt to cast light by means of analogy. (“Now is the time when we juxtapose,” as the adored Kate Macmillan likes to write at Small Dead Animals.) And let me remind the journalist-entertainers of the mainstream, that they do indeed have influence, in the aggregate, over the tenor of our society.

The area and population of the territory the “Caliphate” now controls in Syria and Iraq being currently roughly equal to that controlled by the government of Israel, let us imagine what the “coverage” would be, had the Israelis told all Muslims to run for their lives; had they announced that everything Muslims owned now belonged to the Israeli government; and that any Muslim still found within Israel’s de facto borders after twenty-four hours would be put to the sword. Questions:

Do you think this story might make the front page?

Do you think the media would seek more information?

Do you think the matter might remain news for more than one day?

Jim Goad embraces the Dark Side.

If you’re generally a busy bumblebee like I am, you don’t have time to sit around all day socially constructing things. Thus, I am so glad that there are volunteers who do this work for me—and at no charge to boot! Merely keeping up with the latest culturally acceptable semantic terms is a full-time job in itself, and I am truly grateful there are people out there who tell me what to say and how to think. I am also in awe of their ability to make shit up while believing it’s true. Hats off to them—and I say that as a man who owns about twenty hats.

So for those of you who are far more socially conscious than I am, please be patient with me, because I’m just trying to keep up here—at least as I’ve been led to understand it, according to the latest science from The Global Science Foundation or whatever it’s called—homosexuality is genetically hardwired, but race and gender are only ideas, right? Is that the latest science? Got it. Bookmarked and filed. I will pick that, lick that, stick that, and flick that.

Read it.

Not only do you not have to know the first thing about libertarianism to cover it for major news outlets, it is perfectly fine to a) decline to ask anybody who does know, b) make up your own version of what it is, and then c) lament the terribleness of this terrible philosophy or people you have just created.

Yeah, well, they do that with everybody with whom they disagree. They’re equal-opportunity haters.

Read it.

Billionaires Warren Buffett, Sheldon Adelson and Bill Gates have teamed up to call for amnesty for America’s illegal immigrants as a solution to the ongoing crisis at the border as President Barack Obama mulls granting amnesty to millions via executive power.

“The three of us vary in our politics and would differ also in our preferences about the details of an immigration reform bill,” Buffett, Adelson and Gates wrote in the New York Times.

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

Wherever two Democrat billionaires are gathered together, they can always find a ‘moderate’ Republican to kiss their asses.

Read it.

The New York Times issued a correction today to fix a demonstrably false editorial that claimed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spent “days of near silence” before condemning the murder of Arab teenager Mohammed Abu Khdeir. Netanyahu had, in fact, called the killing an “abominable murder,” and on the day of the killing issued a statement instructing his minister for internal security to investigate the crime. Three Israeli suspects were arrested and have since confessed to the murder.

Even with a correction, the editorial in question was a mess from the top down. The New Republic has a good rundown of other egregious errors and misleading points that won’t be getting much-needed corrections. It’s likely that the editorial page was simply relying on the news side to feed its preconceived biases (though one story had already reported on Netanyahu’s comments), which is a mistake considering the NYT’s reporting exhibits absolutely no journalistic standards when it comes to the topic.

Steve Sailer takes note.

One of the biggest buttresses of the current ideological regime, broadly defined, is the widespread assumption that dissenters, even tenured economics professor David Brat (victor over former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor), can’t be very smart.

This appeals especially to people who don’t seem exceptionally smart themselves.

One of the funnier example of this phenomenon is the urge, which I’ve noted before, to cite Brat’s work on Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant Work Ethic as evidence that Brat isn’t smart (at least not by the high standards of Members of the House and spergy economists).

Read it.

A trio of US Democratic congresswomen have criticized top tech firms’ lack of diversity.

Read it.

Debates among people who share utopian goals, in fact, are nothing new. I remember coming out in the 1970s and 1980s into a world of cultural feminism and lesbian separatism. Hardly an event would go by back then without someone feeling violated, hurt, traumatized by someone’s poorly phrased question, another person’s bad word choice or even just the hint of perfume in the room. People with various kinds of fatigue, easily activated allergies, poorly managed trauma were constantly holding up proceedings to shout in loud voices about how bad they felt because someone had said, smoked, or sprayed something near them that had fouled up their breathing room. Others made adjustments, curbed their use of deodorant, tried to avoid patriarchal language, thought before they spoke, held each other, cried, moped, and ultimately disintegrated into a messy, unappealing morass of weepy, hypo-allergic, psychosomatic, anti-sex, anti-fun, anti-porn, pro-drama, pro-processing post-political subjects.

Carl M Cannon draws up a hit list.

Irritating phrases and words are not confined to political circles, or solely to Washington, although here in the nation’s capital they burrow in and proliferate like obsolete, but entrenched, government programs. This is a call to arms to fight them—but only metaphorically.

Read it.

When Jarl Mohn takes the helm as NPR’s chief executive on Tuesday, he will call on lessons learned from public radio in Los Angeles to address what he says is one of NPR’s most pressing priorities: increasing its reach into communities of color.

Perhaps it may soon quit being a Voice of the Crust? I’d bet against it.

At the time of his appointment, NPR’s board adopted a strategic plan intended to “increase the diversity of the audience by age, ethnicity and geography,” as well as the sources it quotes and the “diversity of NPR talent;” NPR’s newsroom staff is 77 percent white, and its audience even more so, according to a report from NPR’s ombudsman.

The basic problem is that black and Hispanic people don’t have the priorities that rich white ‘progressives’ think they ought to have, and that isn’t going to change any time soon.

Read it.

A site called ’24/7 Wall St.’ has an article with that title, but the study they cite in support merely tracks deaths due to firearms, whether murder, suicide or accident — and they admit that suicide is the most frequent. In order to track ‘gun violence’ correctly, one would have to take into account woundings, and probably even crimes involving firearms, which of course they don’t do — possibly because it would reflect badly on such blue state bastions as New York, Chicago, and Detroit.

Read it.

The usual suspects doing what they usually do. You’d think that all these rich-hating people might have trouble looking in the mirror, but no.

Read it.

Problem solved!

The group would do away with Pell Grants and those tax credits, exchanging one pile of taxpayer-funded stuff for another pile of the same taxpayer-funded stuff.

Read it.

Not her, of course, because they have People to do that for them, but the Little People.

“We are going to be talking to Department of Education about finding a way to reinstitute the notion of survival skills,” she said. “We can’t call it Home Ec because that’s got a bad connotation. But something like that for young men and young women that allows them … the tools they need to survive nutritionally, economically, financially. No kids are getting that anymore.”

A proper Democrat solution: (a) a government agency has to be in charge, because otherwise it won’t get done, and (b) changing the name from Home Ec, ‘because that’s got a bad connotation’, to something else, will totally fool everybody.

(And the feminists say … [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp]….)

Read it.

Dana Milbank is a columnist for the Washington Post who serially exaggerates or distorts what he writes about. It’s just what he does. This has been established so many times by so many people that it’s disappointing to see he is still given prominent perch in his paper and that people who made it past their sophomore year in high school take him seriously. My contribution to the cataloguing of his hackery is “Dana Milbank Is Incoherent On Marriage,” which shows how he just made stuff up when covering a panel of women at the Heritage Foundation.

Well, thank God he’s the only one at the Washington Post who does that … oh, wait….

Read it.

That’s because all the affirmative action in the world can’t fix stupid.

In an interview with MSN.com, First Lady Michelle Obama explained she used to struggle to feed her kids right—even though she received an education from Harvard and Princeton.

Well, there’s the problem, right there. If she’d gone to Yale, it wouldn’t be a problem — except that you still can’t fix stupid.

Read it.

Instead the climatistas continue to behave like a cross between a religious cult and the mafia.  The latest outrage concerns Caleb Rossiter, a left-leaning professor of media studies at American University and a fellow with the very-left Institute for Policy Studies who wrote a terrific op-ed for the Wall Street Journal entitled “Sacrificing Africa for Climate Change.”*  Rossiter makes a simple point that escapes the climate policy “reality deniers” (sauce for the goose I say) that requiring expensive energy in an energy-staved world is to condemn millions of people to continue their lives of misery.

…

In an exclusive interview with Climate Depot, Dr. Rossiter explained: “If people ever say that fears of censorship for ‘climate change’ views are overblown, have them take a look at this: Just two days after I published a piece in the Wall Street Journal calling for Africa to be allowed the ‘all of the above’ energy strategy we have in the U.S., the Institute for Policy Studies terminated my 23-year relationship with them…because my analysis and theirs ‘diverge.’”

“I have tried to get [IPS] to discuss and explain their rejection of my analysis,’ Rossiter told Climate Depot. “When I countered a claim of ‘rapidly accelerating’ temperature change with the [UN] IPCC’s own data’, showing the nearly 20-year temperature pause — the best response I ever got was ‘Caleb, I don’t have time for this.’”

Read it.

Counterintuitive though it may sound, the greater peacefulness of the world may make the attainment of higher rates of economic growth less urgent and thus less likely. This view does not claim that fighting wars improves economies, as of course the actual conflict brings death and destruction. The claim is also distinct from the Keynesian argument that preparing for war lifts government spending and puts people to work. Rather, the very possibility of war focuses the attention of governments on getting some basic decisions right — whether investing in science or simply liberalizing the economy. Such focus ends up improving a nation’s longer-run prospects.

The Voice of the Crust has spoken.

Read it.

WE no longer have news. We have springboards for commentary. We have cues for Tweets.

Something happens, and before the facts are even settled, the morals are deduced and the lessons drawn. The story is absorbed into agendas. Everyone has a preferred take on it, a particular use for it. And as one person after another posits its real significance, the discussion travels so far from what set it in motion that the truth — the knowable, verifiable truth — is left in the dust.

The most amusing thing about it is that the venue in which he writes, the New York Times, is one of the lead dogs in this particular pack. This is like somebody writing in Soviet Pravda that there are too many oppressive totalitarian dictatorships in the world.

Read it.

Yet again, everything bad is good for you.

Yesterday agave was in, and today it’s out. “Natural” has little meaning for health outside of produce aisles. Eliminating sugars from a diet can’t constitute playing it safe, in that it means getting calories elsewhere—just as the advice to cut out fat in the 1980s is blamed for making people increase their consumption of sugar. Too much fat is bad, too much protein is bad, and too much starch is bad. Everything is good, and everything is bad. Even looking back, the basic tenets of the original 1980 USDA nutrition guidelines really do seem to hold up: “Eat a variety of foods; avoid too much fat, saturated fat, and cholesterol; eat foods with adequate starch and fiber; avoid too much sugar; avoid too much sodium.” And, of course, “Food alone cannot make you healthy.”

In Fed Up, Katie Couric refers to the 1992 food pyramid, which was all carbs at the bottom, but also to the popular practice of calorie balancing, which she says is based in misunderstanding. “What if the solutions weren’t really solutions at all? What if they were making things worse? What if our whole approach to this whole epidemic has been dead wrong?”

Rhetorical questions are the currency of extraordinary implications in documentaries. What if our whole approach to this epidemic has been part of an ongoing investigation into understanding the complex nature of human metabolism and nutrition, and it’s all building on itself, and there’s some validity to most of it?

Makes you wonder when they’ll get around to abandoning the ‘scientific consensus’ behind Global Warming.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

Liberalism is simply a set of prejudices, a collection of syllogisms all of which end, “ergo, vote Democrat.” Their smug presumption of their own  moral and intellectual superiority makes liberals the most easily deceived people in the world.

…

Liberals fall for this kind of hoax because (a) they overestimate the value of their own intelligence, (b) they naïvely underestimate the ability of cynical manipulators to wrap themselves in the mantle of victimhood, and (c) they are themselves  utterly unscrupulous in exploiting any narrative that advances the liberal cause.

Gavin McInnes points out the news that isn’t the news because it isn’t on the News.

Last month, Ohio’s Peg and Jeffrey Schoebert were bludgeoned to death by a black teenager because they thought he’d be a terrible boyfriend. The story is very hard to find outside of local news sources but Britain noticed. I got the story through friends in Ohio who met Peggy’s sister. Apparently, the rich, white Schoeberts adopted an East Indian girl who later identified as black. She thought her upbringing was too square and wanted a “more ghetto experience” (the sister’s words), so the parents allowed her to leave private school and go to a public school in a bad area. She hooked up with Shawn Eric Ford, Jr. and soon after, found herself in a knife fight. Her parents decided that was enough ghetto experience for one lifetime and forbade her from seeing Eric. He retaliated by bashing in their skulls with a sledgehammer, and he wasn’t alone. Has anyone heard this story?

Well, you have, now, but without reading it here, would you? I think not.

What about the white couple in Knoxville, Tennessee who were raped and murdered by five black people (including a woman) back in 2007? Christopher Newsom was shot in the back of the head after being raped with an object but his girlfriend Channon Christian was violated for much longer. Then they poured bleach down her throat and left her to suffocate in the garbage. These stories don’t make the major news outlets.

Perhaps because they would reflect poorly on a fashionable minority. Or perhaps it’s because it would be a ‘dog bites man’ story — too ordinary to be news.

A happy suburban family destroyed by murder like Scott and Laci Peterson is a good story. We want to hear about Jon Benet Ramsey if you promise to leave out the gruesome details. A missing plane can pay CNN’s bills for months, and juvenile accusations of sexism and racism are even more lucrative. Here in NYC, there is about a murder a day. If the paper showed each one in all its gruesome details, it would make you want to kill yourself.

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Trayvon Martin was assassinated by a racist Charles Bronson. That’s a cool action movie. To get into the part where most young blacks are killed by young blacks is depressing and that doesn’t sell papers. If it bleeds, it leads but if it bleeds too much, the paper disintegrates in your hand and you can’t read it. Neil deGrasse Tyson loves to whine about the racist odds he overcame to become a scientist. The real narrative should be the unified family that raised him and the horrible future most children of single mothers are faced with. The narrative he’s chosen is like a cool, black version of Bad News Bears. The truth is more tedious than being audited. We’d rather hear about a Mozilla executive who lost his job for opposing gay marriage. That can be debated in a bar. Hearing about gays being legally executed in Iran can go suck a bag of dicks. I don’t mind talking about fat kids being bullied, but if you change the subject to albinos being ripped apart in Tanzania because they’re believed to have magic blood, I’m outta here.