Read it.

It is none of Obama’s business, either as an individual or as President, what rights students have with regard to financial aid.

The original Bill of Rights delineated areas in which individuals were protected from government, not areas in which government got to mandate that they get Free Stuff.

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Well, there’s a surprise: The New York Times coming out against a government subsidy that chiefly benefits people who don’t read the New York Times. Stop the presses….

Read it.

In rural America, where there are more guns, fewer people, and fewer doctors than in the urban U.S., young people are at particular risk of suicide.

Whereas in big city slums, where there are a lot more people, a lot more doctors, and just as many guns (just not legal ones), young people are particularly at risk of homicide. But that’s not part of the Crustian Narrative, so you won’t find any mention of it in the Atlantic.

“Suicide is in many ways the oft-ignored part of gun tragedy in America, the part that few talk about, especially those who resist any efforts to decrease access to guns,” writes Frederick Rivara, a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington, in an editorial accompanying the study. He points out that 86 percent of suicide attempts using guns end in death, compared to 2 percent of attempts using drugs.

Don’t you just love that phrase, ‘gun tragedy in America’? I guess a gun is like the One Ring of Power, inevitably corrupting anyone who falls within it’s baleful influence. Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the government is rapidly making the Land of Opportunity into the Land of Poverty and Dependency, oh no….

Read it.

Written by a man, of course.

Jim Goad points & laughs.

Although it was released over three years ago, there were audible sounds of indigestion online recently at the discovery of a textbook called Is Everyone Really Equal?: An Introduction to Key Concepts in Social Justice Education. The book is intended for all students of high school age and above. From a cursory glance of the book’s advertising materials, it appears to be roughly as full of shit as its title would imply.

…

But sensible citizens such as you and I realize that the voodoo term “racism” is purely a social construct and thus has no innate meaning. That’s why different groups are always fighting one another to define it. The ability to define words is the root of cultural power. In my lifetime, the word’s definition has expanded with the ravenousness of a malignant tumor. Nowadays, everything white is racist. Even pointing that out is racist. And it’s racist of me for making fun of the fact that pointing this out is racist. And every word I keep saying from hereon out merely compounds the racism.

Steve Hayward remarks on the latest by the architect of the Obamacare exchanges fiasco.

Certainly Gruber’s suggestion of taxation of body weight to solve the ‘obesity epidemic’ is ludicrous, but it illustrates the way statists thing: Every problem that the intellectual clerisy thinks is a problem is properly a subject for government action, and taxation is not just a means for getting necssary government revenue but a tool of social manipulation to coerce the Great Stupidity of the Unenlightened to do things The Right Way.

People who express such proclivities ought to be debarred from government service.

Read it.

In the “Economic Report of the President” released on Feb. 19, the White House’s Council of Economic Advisers defines “middle class economics” primarily by the average income of the bottom 90%. “Average income for the bottom 90 percent of households,” according to the ERP, “functions as a decent proxy for the median household’s income growth.”

This is absurd: The average income for the bottom 90% is not a decent proxy for the median nor even a decent measure of household income. It is instead a roughly fabricated estimate of pretax “market income” reported on tax returns that falls below some threshold for the top 10% ($114,290 in 2013). But this dodgy number does serve as the basis for CEA Chairman Jason Furman ’s assertion a day later on the Vox blog that the U.S. has suffered a “40-year stagnation in incomes for the middle class and those working to get into the middle class.”

The measure has become popular on the left. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) recently asked an AFL-CIO conference, “Since 1980, guess how much of the growth in income the [bottom] 90% got? Nothing. None. Zero.” NPR displayed the same bottom 90% data and stretched it even further, claiming that “after 1980, only the top 1% saw their incomes rise.”

The source cited in the ERP for the claims about stagnating average incomes is the World Top Incomes Database. The U.S. data come from economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez, the same source cited by Sen. Warren and NPR.

Hey, if there isn’t a problem, they won’t get any support for ‘fixing’ it. The technical term for that is ‘tendentious’. Not to mention ‘partisan’.

Amazingly, these same statistics also show there has been no increase for the “bottom” 90% since 1968. Measured in 2013 dollars, average income of the bottom 90% was supposedly $32,730 in 1968, $32,887 in 1980, $35,326 in 2007 and $32,341 in 2013.

This is totally inconsistent with the data the Bureau of Economic Analysis uses to calculate GDP. For example, real personal consumption per person has tripled since 1968 and doubled since 1980, according to the BEA. Are all those shopping malls, big box stores, car dealers and restaurants catering to only the top 10%? The question answers itself.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

For example, a statistician hired by the defense found that the reordering of prospective jurors, on average, pushed the number of black jurors back 43 positions in the order of selection and moved potential white jurors up by three positions. Prospective jurors who live in Boston were pushed back 25 positions, and those under 30 moved back 13 slots, the defense said.

The statistician, comparing the reordered jurors to their original order, found there were no prospective black jurors among the first 94 people in the new order. He said there would have been five potential black jurors if the court had kept the jurors in their original order. …

Well, then. Of course, the relevance of that to this case (Is Tsernaev ‘virtually black’ by some calculus?) is neither explained nor justified.

Read it.

A blockbuster peer-reviewed paper in the Science Bulletin, authored by Christopher Monckton, Matt Briggs, David Legates and Wei-Hock (“Willie”) Soon, is roiling the global warming Left. The paper identifies flaws in the computer models that predict major global warming–which shouldn’t be a surprise, since the models’ predictions have flopped. It concludes that due to mathematical errors, the models overstate the impact of CO2 on the climate by a factor of three times.

So far, global warming Leftists haven’t been able to find any technical flaws in the Science Bulletin paper, which you can download here. So, naturally, they have resorted to smearing its authors. Greenpeace focused on Dr. Soon, an astrophysicist who works part time for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Greenpeace served a Freedom of Information Act request on the Smithsonian, a public entity, for documents relating to funding of Dr. Soon’s projects. Greenpeace claims that these documents show that Dr. Soon’s projects received funding from Southern Company Services that was not disclosed in certain papers that Dr. Soon published.

The New York Times, having been fed the documents by Greenpeace, eagerly took up the cudgels for global warming Leftists, publishing a supposed expose under the headline, “Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher.” The Times and its fellows on the Left argue that Dr. Soon should have disclosed certain corporate funding with respect to past projects–not, however, the recent paper that the Left seeks to discredit.

Steve Sailer reports on the fundamental connectedness of all things.

I’m serious about the intent of the movie being to engineer a nerd-gay alliance. The screenwriter of The Imitation Game, Graham Moore, is the son of Democratic political operative Susan Sher, who was Mrs. Obama’s chief-of-staff and is now a bagwoman fundraiser for the Obama Library, so Moore has a good Chicago political head on his shoulders. The screenwriter comes more from the nerd side of the divide (Moore is apparently an effeminate heterosexual). His first book, The Sherlockian, was an updated Sherlock Holmes mystery; and his movie minimizes the gay stuff (which would have to have been about an aging toff with a taste for teenage rough trade) in favor of Benedict Cumberbatch doing his Sherlock-as-supercilious-nerd impression again.

So, everything was working according to Moore’s plan to build Clintonian bridges between the geeks and the gays until the screenwriter got up to give his Oscar acceptance speech. But he implied that being a “weird” kid in high school, like he was, is comparable in victimism Pokemon points to being a gay kid in high school, and all hell broke loose with the Designated Gay Avengers at Slate.

Read it.

A Vanderbilt law professor is facing backlash from the pro-Israel community after launching a campaign to shut down a rally supporting the Jewish state and opposing global terrorism, according to emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

The rally, scheduled to take place this weekend in Nashville, is being organized by Proclaiming Justice to the Nations (PJTN), a pro-Israel organization that fights anti-Semitism.

After the group sent out an announcement about the event, Vanderbilt law professor Edward Rubin responded with a scathing email to rally organizers letting them know that he is an “an opponent of Israel” and “not a member of an international Jewish conspiracy,” according to a copy of the message sent by Rubin from his official Vanderbilt address.

In the message, Rubin lashes out at Israel and vows to shut down the pro-Israel rally by contacting the local mayor’s office.

“I want to let you know that I have become an opponent of Israel,” Rubin writes. “The reason is that Israel’s Prime Minister has chosen to inject himself into American politics as a supporter of the Republican Party and a lackey of [billionaire] Sheldon Adelson.”

“He is thus acting in opposition to everything I believe in: social justice, environmental protection, and basic human rights,” says Rubin, who describes himself in the message as “a strongly Jewish-identified American, and the son-in-law of an Auschwitz survivor.”

“I have always regarded Israel as important, but I am not a member of an international Jewish conspiracy: I am an American. Israel is trying to destroy my country, I no longer care about its welfare. I am a law professor, and I will contact the Mayor’s Office on Monday to see if there is any way that your demonstration can be prevented.”

I think I’m right, therefore you may not speak. That certainly doesn’t fit my definition of ‘an American’. Perhaps he needs to study up on the subject.

Read it.

Maybe because nobody cares about it other than Voices of the Crust like Slate? That’s just a guess, you understand.

Read it.

There is a recurrent fantasy within the Obama administration that they could get away with anything, if only that damn Fox News would shut up.

Read it.

In hindsight, perhaps the headline “Scott Walker Needs An Eraser” wasn’t the best idea.

In a recent column about the Wisconsin governor, a conservative Republican, New York Times columnist Gail Collins wrote that Walker had cut state aid to education, causing teacher layoffs in 2010. But Walker didn’t take office until 2011.

Whoops.

Read it.

Since it is so cold and miserable outside, I’ve been spending some time indoors, curled up in front of the computer watching comedy. No, not the 40th anniversary program of Saturday Night Live, but The New York Times newspaper coverage of climate change, which in this context is bitterly humorous.

There was the February 9, 2014, Times article headlined “The End of Snow,” which ran on the front page of the paper’s Sunday Review section, and which the ever-shrewd Matt Drudge remembered, and linked from his Drudge Report site, amid the snowmaggeddon roughly a year later. “In the Northeast, more than half of the 103 ski resorts may no longer be viable in 30 years because of warmer winters,” the article warned. “It’s easy to blame the big oil companies and the billions of dollars they spend on influencing the media and popular opinion. But the real reason is a lack of knowledge. I know, because I, too, was ignorant until I began researching the issue for a book on the future of snow…. This is no longer a scientific debate. It is scientific fact.”

Read it.

Hm. That’s a puzzler. Perhaps because they shoot people, cut their heads off, and blow them up? That’s just a guess, you understand.

An ambitious 81-page document, Fear, Inc. 2.0: The Islamophobia Network’s Efforts to Manufacture Hate in America, just appeared from the Center for American Progress, a liberal Democratic organization. Unlike its first iteration, in which a group with a $40-million annual budget and deep ties to big business had the nerve to claim that seven much smaller institutions were overpowering the country through their financial clout, this one looks at what the alleged “Islamophobia network” actually does.

I have never understood why the Left is so eager to serve as a Fifth Column for the jihad. Perhaps they think that thereby their heads will be cut off last?

The report, written by Matthew Duss, Yasmine Taeb, Ken Gude, and Ken Sofer, makes for interesting reading. Its premise is that critics of Islamism (1) are really anti-Islamic and (2) have single-handedly distorted a the fundamental American value, namely a “basic respect for the rights of minority groups throughout the country.” According to the CAP study, “the views of anti-Muslim actors stand in stark contrast to the values of most Americans.”

That could have something to do with the fact that Muslim actors stand in stark contrast to the values of most Americans, and indeed of civilized people everywhere.

By dint of hard work, however, “a well-funded, well-organized fringe movement can push discriminatory policies against a segment of American society by intentionally spreading lies while taking advantage of moments of public anxiety and fear.” This effort “takes many shapes and forms”: a general climate, cynical political efforts, and institutional policies. Despite some setbacks, continues the CAP narrative, the network’s efforts “continue to erode America’s core values of religious pluralism, civil rights, and social inclusion.”

So now we’re talking about the Democrats? They’ve lost me.

Another way of putting it: the United States hosts about as many Buddhists and Hindus combined as it does Muslims. Yet, when did Buddhists or Hindus try to change the existing order or engage in violence on behalf of their faiths? Who ever hears about them? Who fears them?

Indeed.

Read it.

Yet another thumbsucker from the New York Times. Distinguishing characteristics:

1. Tongue-bath for Obama’s socialist/fascist ‘domestic program’. (As if Obama’s ‘program’ were anything other than the standard Democrat ‘Vote for us and we’ll give you free stuff’.) That’s the first paragraph.

2. First priority is equality, not quality, in education. (Either ‘everybody can’t have one so nobody ought to have one’ or ‘everybody can’t afford one so the government ought to provide everybody with one’; ‘progressives’ don’t care which one you pick, so long as you stick to one of those two choices.) That’s the second paragraph.

3. First concern is how technology affects politically-fashionable ‘disadvantaged middle-school students’, not anybody from a more, say, productive stratum of society. That’s the third and fourth paragraphs.

4. Highest concern is for ‘weaker students’ (and, if you aren’t hip to the jive, this is spelled out: ‘boys, African-Americans’ — and that’s the only positive word about boys, if you can so characterize it, that you’ll find in the New York Times the day). That’s the fifth paragraph.

5. Supreme objective is not to draw any conclusions. ‘We don’t know why this is, but we can speculate.’ Okay, I’ll speculate: Who thought it was a good idea to give kids whose priorities, according to all the available evidence, never include ‘learning how to read or do math’ (acting White, don’t you know) an appliance that provided a universe of distractions that don’t depend on knowing how to read or do math?

6. Fill up with a lot of alarmism about the impact of technology on modern life. (Sky is falling. Film at 11.)

There you go. Now you know the formula for getting published in the New York Times. Go forth and lead us all to the Great Socialist Promised Land.

Slate is not afraid to ask the ‘progressive’ questions.

Maybe because they’re criminals? That’s just a guess, you understand.

Read it.

Apparently Obama is an unconscious white supremacist. Who knew?

Tim Worstall at The Register discovers that, yes, government employees are pretty much all socialists.

“Whenever regulators gather to discuss market failures…”

The subject under discussion is the ownership of data and EULAs and all that stuff that so excites a certain sort of techno-pessimist. And that’s what leads to the spraying: the assumption being made that people who are trading something they don’t value much for something they value more is a market failure.

To an economist this is what markets do: people don’t seem to value that data, that information, about who they are, where they are or what they do – or not very much. They certainly don’t seem to value it as much as the things they get by allowing access to it: the Facebooks, Googles and so on of this world.

That’s not the usual definition of a market failure, that’s the efficient working of a market. The data, the thing being valued, is moving from a place where it isn’t highly valued to one where it is more valued. Moving something from a lower valued use to a higher is the very definition of wealth creation.

The piece he’s sputtering about appeared in The Guardian, which is pretty much all socialists too. Funny how that works.

Read it.

Even when real names and other personal information are stripped from big data sets, it is often possible to use just a few pieces of the information to identify a specific person, according to a study to be published Friday in the journal Science.

In the study, titled “Unique in the Shopping Mall: On the Reidentifiability of Credit Card Metadata,” a group of data scientists analyzed credit card transactions made by 1.1 million people in 10,000 stores over a three-month period. The data set contained details including the date of each transaction, amount charged and name of the store.

Sky is falling. Film at 11. Women & minorities hardest hit.

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Of course it does; because it is — and they’re the only ones who care.

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President Obama’s recent State of the Union address began like many speeches: with an anecdotal story. In recounting the hardships of mother Rebekah Erler, Obama gave the nation a narrative of how government can help a normal middle-class family. Erler had gone through what many ordinary parents faced after the 2008 financial crisis: loss of a housing industry-dependent job and the rising day-to-day costs of raising a family. She was invited to the SOTU, and as she sat next to the First Lady, her story begged for empathy. Camera shots of her grateful visage complemented the orator-in-chief.

It was nice except for one crucial detail: Erler is a former field organizer for the Democrats. This wasn’t the touching story of an average American sharing her trials with the country; it was a political stunt used to help the party of government dependency.

Gavin McInnes turns over a rock.

The media love hate crimes because they seem to explain everything that’s wrong with America and put the blame on someone who can handle it: white people. Unfortunately, there aren’t enough hate crimes against blacks to go around, and journalists are forced to invent them. What they don’t realize is that the biggest hate crime hoax is the press itself.

By creating an imaginary reality where blacks are constantly under siege, they are all but daring them to attack and murder whites. The media have created the racial tension they were going for, only they got everything backwards. In an attempt to create a fictional world where whites hate blacks, they accidentally created a real one where blacks hate whites.

Read it.

Middle East studies professors responded to the attacks by Islamic terrorists in Paris earlier this month not with rigorous, informed analysis or even unadultered sympathy for those gunned down in the offices of Charlie Hebdo and a kosher market. Their reaction was instead precisely what one has come to expect from academics more concerned with shielding Islam from blame and shifting responsibility for its adherents’ actions to the West than with the disinterested pursuit of truth.

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

Read it.

The U.S. government suppressed information about chemical weapons it found in Iraq, and several servicemembers were injured by their exposure to those weapons, The New York Times is reporting.

In an article published late Tuesday, the newspaper says it found 17 American servicemembers and seven Iraqi police officers who were exposed to mustard or nerve agents after 2003. They were reportedly given inadequate care and told not to talk about what happened.

“From 2004 to 2011, American and American-trained Iraqi troops repeatedly encountered, and on at least six occasions were wounded by, chemical weapons remaining from years earlier in Saddam Hussein’s rule.

“In all, American troops secretly reported finding roughly 5,000 chemical warheads, shells or aviation bombs, according to interviews with dozens of participants, Iraqi and American officials, and heavily redacted intelligence documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

God forbid anything should interfere with the ‘No Blood For Oil’ or ‘Bush Is A Stupid Warmonger’ memes. (Will the Times apologize for the ‘NO WMD WERE FOUND!’ coverage? Surely you jest.)

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

As you’ll recall, the Myth of Michael Brown collapsed in mid-August due to two revelations. On August 15, the convenience store video appeared showing gentle giant Michael Brown violently shoving the poor little Asian store clerk who tried to stop him from stealing. Then two days later, the Brown family’s privately-hired coroner announced Brown wasn’t shot in the back. His wounds were fairly consistent with the cop’s story.

Unfortunately for the New York Times, the national media in general, the town of Ferguson, the Democratic Party in November, Zemir Begic, NYPD Officers Liu and Ramos, and America in general, the Megaphone had apparently passed its Point of No Return by August 14, 2014.

Read it.

While the announcer was rightfully scourged for this ellipsis of common sense, I find to my dismay that if you google the phrase, there are still people using it. I wonder what term we will use in the future to distinguish African Americans from other nations versus African Americans from America or African Americans from Africa?

Likewise, my friend, born in South Africa, stepping into the student union hall for African American students on her campus on a hot day, to sit in a chair, panting, and enjoy the air conditioning, when she was peremptorily commanded to leave by a black woman, because this was the African American Student Union. My friend was unable to restrain her outrage, and shouted in her delightful British accent, “You fools! I am the only African in this room!”

I am reminded of the white kid from Tanzania, 3d generation in that country, whose first language was KiSwahili, being turned down for a scholarship that was reserved for students ‘of African descent’.

Read it.

One of John Kenneth Galbraith’s better and more sound witticisms was that economic forecasting was invented to make astrology look good. He should have lived long enough to take in climate change predictions. While we continue Beta testing our Climate Change Cliché Counter and scoreboard, we are pleased to take note of a new website that will surely be indispensable: ClimateChangePredictions.org. This group effort looks to be a one-stop shopping archive for all of the crazy—and contradictory—predictions that have piled up over the years.

Read it. And watch the video.

President Obama, speaking to an audience of mostly young people celebrating India’s Republic Day in New Delhi on Tuesday, told the crowd, “I realise that the sight of an American president as your chief guest on Republic Day would have once seemed unimaginable.  But my visit reflects the possibilities of a new moment.” He pointed out that he was the first American president to participate in the country’s Republic Day and boasted, “And I’m the first American president to come to your country twice!”

The president went on to refer to himself an astonishing 118 times in the short 33-minute speech, touching on injustices in the United States and in his own personal life.

tReason magazine is at it again.

Immigration is good for the United States. That fact is undeniable.

Wrong — I deny it. So make your case. (As if that will ever happen….)

Some immigration is good for the United States. I’d love to see us be more welcoming to rich people who will bring money (and investment, and growth) to the U.S. I’d really love to see us welcome more Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, whose cultural predilection for hard work, respect for authority, and devotion to family would boost the currently degenerating American culture no end.

Opening the floodgates to barely educated, criminally-inclined campesinos from south of the border — not so much.

Read it.

Well, he would know. Perhaps he ought to change the name to ‘The Problem of SWPLness’.

Read it.

That will come as news to the people at Harvard and Yale, to say nothing of Oxford and Cambridge.

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And AlGore is right there to second that emotion.

Read it.

To stop climate change, Al Gore wants to spend a mere $90 trillion rebuilding all of the world’s cities so that everyone is living in such high-density neighborhoods that they don’t need cars. While a few curmudgeonly types might think that $90 trillion sounds like a lot of money, it really isn’t, say Gore and former Mexico president Filipe Calderon. After all, the world is probably going to spend the $90 trillion on something in the next few years anyway, so what’s wrong with spending it on this?

Gore made the proposal at an economics conference in Davos, Switzerland attended by billionaires who fly in on private jets so they can tell other people they need to get used to consuming less. Of course, neither Gore nor the other millionaires and billionaires at the conference expect to be stuck living in a high-density apartment any time soon.

Read it.

Thomas Piketty, writing with economist Emmanuel Saez, has estimated that those in the bottom 90% of the income distribution received only 9% of the income gains between 1979 and 2007 (the year before the onset of the Great Recession).

But their estimate ignores government transfer payments, and it doesn’t take into account the aging of the population, among other things. When these adjustments are made, a much less pessimistic result emerges.

Why ‘pessimistic’? Some people have a lot more money than other people? Why is that a problem? The assumption seems to be that ‘Well, it’s a problem’, without any discussion (much less evidence) as to why it’s a problem. The people who bitch about it the most are the people who seem to assume that it’s ipso facto some sort of evidence of ‘social injustice’, but they can’t ever be bothered to explain why that is; they just assume it, and far too many people who ought to know better just accept that assumption without questioning it.

That’s horseshit, and I’ll be the first to say it. You want me to worry about income inequality? Okay, explain to me why it’s something to worry about. Otherwise, STFU.

Read it.

This Monday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case of Reed v. Town of Gilbert, Arizona, an important free speech case. Garrett Epps, a prominent law professor and contributor to the Atlantic, is deeply concerned that the Court will decide it in a way that leads to increased protection for speech that he does not like. Those who believe that the First Amendment should not be trumped by the subjective preferences of law professors should not fall under Epps’ spell.

What is the case about? The Town of Gilbert, Ariz., has a sign code that categorizes temporary signs and restricts their size, duration and location. Under the sign code, the Good News Community Church’s temporary signs promoting church services are subject to far greater restrictions than temporary signs promoting political, ideological and various other messages. That is, the sign code facially discriminates on the basis of the content of the messages communicated by the signs, effectively enabling government officials to act as censors.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

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Stockholm syndrome occurs when hostages express empathy, sympathy, and/or positive feelings about their captors, even to the point of identifying with and/or defending them. The Washington Post, whose reporter Jason Rezaian has been imprisoned in Tehran for more than five months, appears to be experiencing something resembling Stockholm syndrome.

Of course, if he were being held by a civilized government, they’d be marching in the streets.

Read it.

Boko Haram is waging a ruthless war throughout northeast Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country. On Wednesday, Boko Haram militants laid siege to Baga, a city that has resisted them, setting fire to buildings and killing residents indiscriminately. Hundreds of people fled into Lake Chad and attempted to swim to a nearby island. Many drowned along the way. Those who didn’t are now marooned without food and shelter and have no defense against the island’s swarm of malarial mosquitos. The death toll in Baga reportedly exceeds 2,000. Some 20,000 others are now displaced.

The New York Times story on this deadly siege appeared on page A6 of Saturday’s print edition, while the paper’s story of the suicide bombing landed on page A8.

Hey, Paris is important and Nigeria is, well, just Nigeria; nobody at the New York Times knows anybody in Nigeria, nor do they go there on vacation.

Read it.

I think it safe to say that any course of action receiving the approval of Jimmy Carter constitutes a damned stupid thing to do.

Read it.

Another thumb-sucker from the Washington Post.

Most of America’s richest think poor people have it easy in this country, according to a new report released by the Pew Research Center. The center surveyed a nationally representative group of people this past fall, and found that the majority of the country’s most financially secure citizens (54 percent at the very top, and 57 percent just below) believe the “poor have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.” America’s least financially secure, meanwhile, vehemently disagree — nearly 70 percent say the poor have hard lives because the benefits “don’t go far enough.” Nationally, the population is almost evenly split.

Note that the poor think their lives are hard because they don’t have it easy enough. Cry me a river.

Why the surprising lack of compassion? It’s hard to say.

But he’s going to pull something out of his ass anyway, ignoring the plain truth that people who have to work for a living don’t have a lot of affection for those who don’t have to work for a living.

At the very top, the sentiment is likely tied to conservatism, which traditionally bemoans government programs that redistribute wealth, calling them safety nets.

Sorry, but ‘the very top’ are more likely to be liberal than conservative — look at political contributions and public utterances (but that would disturb The Narrative, so shhhh….) And don’t spend a lot of time trying to make sense of that sentence grammatically, because it can’t be done; ‘conservatism’ doesn’t call government attempts to redistribute wealth ‘safety nets’, but theft — it’s ‘progressivism’ that calls such programs ‘safety nets’, in order to escape the thought that they’re, you know, theft. (Maybe the author thinks people like Obama are conservative; that’s the only explanation that makes sense grammatically, if not intellectually.)

Some 40 percent of the financially secure are politically conservative, according to Pew.

Which means that 60% aren’t … there goes the ‘likely tied to conservatism’ canard. Really, does anybody read this stuff before it gets published?

And conservatives are even more likely to say the “poor have it easy” than the rich — a recent Pew survey found that more than three quarters of conservatives feel that way.

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

More broadly, the prevalence of the view might reflect an inability to understand the plight of those who have no choice but to seek help from the government. A quarter of the country, after all, feels that the leading reason for inequality in America is that the poor don’t work hard enough.

‘No choice’? There’s an assumption you could drive a truck through, loaded with taxpayer dollars. And if a quarter of the country feels that the poor don’t work hard enough, then three-quarters of the country don’t feel that way, so another paragraph bites the dust.

I’ve seen more intellectual rigor come out of the Miss America contest.

Read it.

Republicans and Fox News viewers are more likely to hold false beliefs about the president and the war in Iraq, according to a new poll.

…

Overall, 42 percent still believe that troops discovered WMDs, a misleading factor in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003. It was later found that Iraq did have individual stockpiles of chemical weapons, but there was no active WMD program in the country.

Then I guess it’s not a ‘false belief’, then, is it? There’s a world of difference between ‘no WMDs’ and ‘no active WMD program’.

Matt Forney turns over a rock.

With the war between New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and the NYPD escalating to DEFCON 2, you’d think the people who need the police the most would stop biting the hand that protects them. But no one ever went broke overestimating the ungratefulness of the corn-fed hipsters who dominate the Big Apple’s media megaphone. Case in point: Gawker’s Andy Cush decries the force as “pathetic crybabies” and “an embarrassment to the city of New York.”

After trying to mentally calculate how much cheese Cush would need for his whine, I decided to do a little research into the guy. To the surprise of no one, he lives in Brooklyn and is not a New York native. According to his Facebook profile, Cush hails from the Baltimore suburb of Severna Park, confirming my belief that any town that has “park” in the name is a worthless cultural void.

Read it.

A fine example of what I call ‘horseshit social science’ — basically, an extended example of confusing correlation with causation. (No good reason is given for restricting the treatment to ‘white non-farm U.S.-born men’ except the obvious: that’s the data he had available.)

An example crap conclusion:

College-educated men and women are the privileged players in our transformed economy: They can pool two incomes and provide a solid financial foundation for a marriage. In contrast, we have seen declines in marriage among high school graduates who are stuck in the middle of the labor market, where they can no longer find the kind of steady, decently paying employment that supported their grandparents’ marriages.

While it’s true that having two professional incomes is a Very Good Thing, people rarely marry on the basis of their partner’s contribution to the family wealth pool. If it were, and two such instances of homo economicus were looking at marriage, surely it would be obvious that for those whose income is uncertain pooling endeavors is far more advantageous than going it alone; hence we would expect non-rich people to marry with greater frequency than rich people, just out of a desire for self-preservation. Yet that is not the conclusion.

And this guy works at Johns Hopkins, a premium U.S. university. A more glaring example of the decline in intellectual standards in modern academia would be difficult to find, except that it’s depressingly common.

And why would a respected publication like The New York Times print such a thumbsucker? Because it supports the ‘progressive’ Narrative, of course; All The News That Fits Our Rants is the new motto.

Read it.

Governor Palin, for whatever reason, continues to be catnip to liberals. I can’t explain it; the only observation I can offer is that there is something about attractive conservative women–Palin, Michelle Malkin, Michele Bachmann, younger generation conservatives like Dana Loesch–that causes liberals to take leave of their senses.

Read it.

Gawker‘s J.K. Trotter recently made the decision to publish the name of the person he now presumes to be Lena Dunham’s alleged rapist. That was irresponsible of him. Several journalists have dedicated considerable time to investigating the sexual assault that Dunham chronicled in her memoir, Not That Kind of Girl; their reporting, and all information made available by Dunham in response, suggests that the attacker in the story may be a composite character based on her impressions of several dfferent people. Indeed, the person Gawker outed was not even a Republican activist—the key identifying detail attributed to the attacker in the memoir.

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

The Other McCain does a little venting.

When Jake Brewer complains about “noise” on the Internet, he doesn’t mean that he is unable to find what he wants online. No, he is an educated person, very sophisticated in his use of Internet tools, and has no problem accessing the information he seeks. What Jake Brewer is complaining about is that the online audience he wants to reach with his message — whom he presumes to be less educated and less sophisticated than himself — is distracted by “noise,” which he defines as information less important than the message Jake Brewer is sending.

Guess what, Jake? It’s called democracy. Idiots who spend all day sending each other cute puppy videos on Facebook? Democracy.

Read it.

Misleading health news stories are surprisingly widespread. One survey by Gary Schwitzer, who runs the watchdog website HealthNewsReview, looked at 500 health stories published in large newspapers over two years. Many of the stories were awfully flawed, he found, overplaying the benefits and underplaying the harms of various treatments, exaggerating the prevalence of diseases, and leaving out discussion of alternative options.

And these stories are a real health hazard. Lots of people make decisions every day based on the things they read in the media. A number of studies have documented the ways media coverage influences people’s health choices, from whether to get screened for breast cancer or go in for a colonoscopy.

Ask any physician about the number of patients who have come into their offices, requesting some test or treatment based on something they saw in the media. I’ve heard from many of them. I’ve also heard from health ministers who say they rely solely on journalism to inform themselves about the latest science. I don’t need to tell you again about the alarming hold a certain TV doctor has on his audience — no matter how dubious his advice.

Read it.

It’s astonishing how many bad ideas the creators were able to cram into a two-and-half-minute video, which concerns a child protagonist who “doesn’t feel safe with a gun in my house.”

First, the child steals the gun out of his mother’s dresser—something no young person should ever do. Then he brings it with him to school. Kids have been shot by cops for brandishing fake weapons; bringing a real gun to school is even more reckless, and could result in serious injury or death. Last, he shows the gun to his teacher and asks her to make it go away. Any child who did this would be expelled on the spot at the very least, and could face criminal charges, regardless of any mitigating circumstances.