Paul Mirengoff explains the latest Leftist trope.

As far as I can tell, a micro-aggression is an affront — real or imagined for the sake of being affronted — so trivial that few stable adults would notice it and none would give it a second thought. When the term is used, the only aggression in sight is that committed by the grievance industry against the English language for the purpose of political bullying.

Read it.

Slow news day.

Steve Sailer connects the dots.

But even before the murders actually happened, the media was moving on to the real story: its fears of a backlash against Muslims, and the one brave woman, Melbourne writer Tessa Kum, who courageously tweeted her opposition to this theoretical but widely hoped for / denounced backlash. Tessa’s tweet is a genuine Big Story with Google News listing her in 88 news articles.

All you have to do is put the boot in when helping the Crust beat up on somebody in order to be praised for your ‘courage’, like a little kid smiling up at his big brother when he adds his pathetic little kick to the guy who is on the ground.

Read it.

Pay real attention to the commercials for just one night instead of making a sandwich. You will quickly notice there is an heirarchy of correctness for commercials on Planet Diversity.

There is equality of one sort: Married men of all races are hen-pecked morons whose wives are much smarter and more attractive. The pathetic idiots never know what cereal to eat or which laxative to use. It’s a miracle they can dress themselves and locate their jobs.

Black people are always cooler, smarter, and hipper than white people in commercials. Any doofus will be white. The guy with the “wrong” phone or computer will be white and uncool. Black people can be cutely wacky, like the football player who gets excited when his number comes up at the deli. But they can never be stupid, bad, ugly, or subservient.

Asians do not exist except very rarely as part of the wallpaper in a crowd scene and identifiable Jews do not exist at all. Any women who are “acting stupidly”, will also be unattractive. An example is “Helen” the bad dancer at the high school dance where JJ Watt appears. But in most ad “storylines”, women will be thin, pretty, and in charge.

Children of all races are smarter than adults, but particularly their fathers. Father not only no longer knows “best”; he knows next to nothing. He is lectured by his offspring about phones, computers, cars, and his own investments. Without kids to tell him what’s what, he would be probably be homeless. Once again, played for humor, but part of the relentless assault on everything male, traditional, or authoritative. Government is Big Daddy, Sugar Daddy, and Baby Daddy now; no need for any real flesh-and-blood fathers.

Read it.

A left-coast writer named Mark Morford thinks that gas prices falling to $2 a gallon would be the worst thing to happen to America. After all, he says, the wrong people would profit: oil companies (why would oil companies profit from lower gas prices?), auto makers, and internet retailers like Amazon that offer free shipping.

If falling gas prices are the worst for America, then the best, Morford goes on to say, would be to raise gas taxes by $6 a gallon and dedicate all of the revenue to boondoggles “alternative energy and transport, environmental protections, our busted educational system, our multi-trillion debt.” After all, government has proven itself so capable of finding the most cost-effective solutions to any problem in the past, and there’s no better way to reduce the debt than to tax the economy to death.

Jim Goad is nicely dyspeptic today.

Despite the Tawana Brawley rape hoax and the Duke Lacrosse rape hoax and the fact that on any given day you can search the phrase “false rape” on Google News and dredge up countless stories of bitter, scorned, vindictive, psychotic women falsely accusing men of rape, the howling harpies of latter-day feminism and their gelded male worker elves continue to insist that false rape accusations are a patriarchal fiction.

That’s why the nuclear-reactor-level meltdown of that mossy old rancidly flatulent hippie rag Rolling Stone over an at least partially—and perhaps entirely—fraudulent gang-rape story at the University of Virginia is so exquisitely delicious.

We live in a world where a fake rape at UVA gets more press than that (and worse) in entire Muslim countries. Go figure.

Read it.

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

Why is this considered ‘news’?

Read it.

Duke University sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva says today’s racism is fomented without the use of actual racists. Or something like that.

He’s also written a book by the same name — Racism Without Racists, that is — and says that such is “a new way of maintaining white domination in places like Ferguson.”

If an Enemy doesn’t exist, one has to be invented, in order to preserve Victim Privilege.

Emmanuel Goldstein, we have a new gig for you….

Read it.

Speaking at California State University at Fresno last week, Dr. Cornel Pewewardy gave a lecture to students titled “How the Grinch Stole Thanksgiving.” Pewewardy spoke about the historical and cultural implications of the holiday.

“Like other holidays, including Christmas and Columbus Day, Thanksgiving is not based on historical accuracy, but rather on the importance and prevalence of maintaining a consumer culture”, Pewewardy, who is a member of both the Comanche and Kiowa tribes, said on Tuesday.

Obviously an affirmative action hire; this is what passes for scholarship on the Left Coast. (How can you be a member of two tribes who were historical enemies? Is that like being a ‘white Hispanic’?)

Historical ignorance in modern America being what it is, of course, few are aware that the Pilgrims were celebrating the traditional European festival of Martinmas:

St. Martin was known as friend of the children and patron of the poor. This holiday originated in France, then spread to Germany, Scandinavia, and Eastern Europe. It celebrates the end of the agrarian year and the beginning of harvesting. From the late 4th century to the late Middle Ages, much of Europe, including the UK, engaged in a period of fasting beginning on the day after St. Martin’s Day, November 11. This fast period lasted 40 days, and was therefore, called “Quadragesima Sancti Martini”, Latin for “the forty days of St. Martin.” Sundays were not counted as part of the fasting period. Gaudete Sunday, which can fall anywhere between December 11 through 17, was also not counted as a day of fasting, thus giving the 40-day count. On St. Martin’s Eve, people ate and drank very heartily one last time before they started to fast. This period of fasting was later shortened and called “Advent” by the Church.

And, indeed, the Orthodox Christian Church still starts the Nativity Fast on the Saturday after Martinmas, something of which ‘Professor’ Pewewardy is probably also ignorant — but, then, his ‘historical accuracy’ is obviously based on a political agenda rather than real history.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

While I was writing my new Taki’s Magazine column on Ferguson across Monday night and Tuesday morning, the sense was palpable that the dominant media had taken a humiliating double blow in a battle of their own choosing:

– The grand jury’s finding after months of careful research contradicted the Narrative promulgated in August and tenaciously held to ever since despite the piling up of evidence.

– The looting and arson by “protesters” in Ferguson was disgusting.

The first mainstream media pieces trying to snark about the events of Monday were deluged that night by critical commenters clearly better informed than the paid journalists.

Granted, a low bar.

Read it.

Black people killing black people. Not news.

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On November 22 the Tallahassee Democrat called for the repeal of the Second Amendment and a total ban on handguns and “assault rifles.”
For those who respond by saying that taking guns from law-abiding citizens will only leave them in the hands of criminals the Democrat says, “That’s a chance worth taking.”

…

What Ensley does not take into account is that the carry of handguns was banned on the FSU campus–thanks in large part of FSU president John Thrasher’s opposition to students being able to use them for self-defense–and what did that handgun ban accomplish? It simply guaranteed that the bad guy, 31-year-old Myron May, was the only person who had a gun when he decided to attack.

Read it.

For as many as a quarter of normal-weight Americans, the opposite is true. While they may have a “healthy” BMI and look skinny on the outside, on the inside, they’re a mess. Dr. Neil Ruderman first recognized these individuals 33 years ago, labeling them “metabolically-obese, normal-weight.” Today, they’re more casually described as “skinny-fat.” Skinny-fat people generally have all the hallmark health problems associated with obesity — high blood pressure, increased levels of LDL cholesterol, insulin resistance — without overtly looking the part.

I think that this is like the ‘unconsciously racist’ theme: you’re actually bad even though everything about you looks good.

Read it.

By whom? Democrats, of course. This is like Republicans criticizing Democrats for putting people who want to raise taxes in leadership positions.

The only news here is that the Wall Street Journal dignified it with coverage.

Read it.

Most jobs suck. Yours probably doesn’t–after all, you’re a member of the highly educated, cutting-edge TechCrunch demographic–but most jobs, almost by definition, are done by people coerced by the fear of not having enough money into doing work they mostly don’t want to do. We should be ecstatic about the prospect of robots doing that work for us. Shouldn’t we?

Nobody cares whether tech ‘eats jobs’ — what they care about is tech ‘eating incomes’, which said jobs provide.

Suppose self-driving trucks let us do all that work with 3 million fewer people, while creating 2 million better jobs with twice the salary elsewhere. How have we painted ourselves into a corner where that is somehow viewed as a bad thing? Why are we so scared of a future that boasts both greater economic production, and more people with the freedom to spend their time and effort however they desire? Shouldn’t a world with more output from fewer jobs (defined as “paying people to do things they don’t really want to do”) actually be extremely desirable?

Easy to see the three million eliminated jobs, easy to wave the hands about two million better jobs with twice the salary elsewhere; we people on the reality side of the aisle want some specifics behind that handwaving. Saying ‘here a miracle occurs’ is not sufficient.

Put another way: why would it still be important to maintain full employment in a world overflowing with machine-generated wealth available to everyone?

But it’s not ‘available to everyone’, outside of the Aggregation fallacy. Wealth doesn’t accrue to ‘everyone’ (except in socialist dreamworlds, and we’ve seen how well those work out), but to people who have a claim on that wealth through some market mechanism. This focus on distribution (for which I blame the fact that everybody reads Rawls in college) only deals with half of the question; what about production, and the claims on wealth that participating in production produces in all free societies?

The writer, of course, being a good Voice of the Crust, sees it as a Problem For Government; I blame the current media for allowing people like this to write about economic problems without bothering to learn something about economics first.

Read it.

No one knows why Taylor chose to wear that shirt on television during a massive scientific mission. From what we can tell, a woman who goes by the name of Elly Prizeman on Twitter made the shirt for him, and is just as bewildered as he must be that anyone might be upset about her creation. But none of that actually matters. What matters is the fact that no one at ESA saw fit to stop him from representing the Space community with clothing that demeans 50 percent of the world’s population. No one asked him to take it off, because presumably they didn’t think about it. It wasn’t worth worrying about.

Of course, if he’d been black, nobody would have dared open his (or, more accurately, her) mouth about it.

Of course, if he’d been black, he wouldn’t be involved in landing a spacecraft on a comet.

But this merely illustrates that for some people (even in the supposedly ‘technical’ press) their political agenda intrudes on every aspect of their lives — they still haven’t gotten over the fact that the only people who have been to the moon were white and male.

UPDATE: John C. Wright addes the choicest comment: ‘If I wrote this in a parody SFF story, no editor would buy it. It is too far beyond belief.’

Read it.

I can see that.

Read it.

Funny how the people who make the loudest noise about being opposed to ‘H8’ are the worst haters around.

Read it.

Of course — that’s the first thing they ask you when you arrive at the courtroom: Do you have a lawyer? If you say “No”, they won’t let you in. No exceptions.

Don’t even think of suggesting that people who are criminals by their very presence here would skip out on a court date. Never happen. Perish the thought.

Read it.

The New Yorker is a pretty reliable barometer of What’s Happenin’ Now among the Crust. Here they do the whole Bad Gluten thing.

For many people, avoiding gluten has become a cultural as well as a dietary choice, and the exposition offered an entry ramp to a new kind of life. There was a travel agent who specialized in gluten-free vacations, and a woman who helps plan gluten-free wedding receptions. One vender passed out placards: “I am nut free,” “I am shellfish free,” “I am egg free,” “I am wheat free.” I also saw an advertisement for gluten-free communion wafers.

I’m waiting for the one that tells the truth: ‘I am brain-free.’

Read it.

Now, add ‘climate change’ to the list of potential disasters to be prepared for, and imagine how much this Voice of the Crust would change her tone.

Read it.

Well: Obama. This Voice of the Crust can’t say that, of course, so they round up the usual suspects.

Read it.

Some of these are pretty entertaining. The chief objection on the part of the Washington Post, of course, is that gerrymandering is beneficial to Republicans. (No mention, of course, that it was invented to benefit Elbridge Gerry, member of the precursor of the Democratic Party.)

Unlike some people, I have no problem with gerrymandering — absent a system in which one could sign up for the candidate of one’s choice, and that candidate had exactly as much power in the legislature as the number of his constituents, it’s the closest thing to pure representation (everybody is represented by somebody who agrees with him) as we are going to get. From the standpoint of democratic representation theory, it’s far better to have a bunch of districts in which the winner gets 90% of the vote than a bunch of districts in which the winner only gets 53%. (News organizations hate gerrymandering because it shoots the ‘horse race’ right in the butt and leaves them with nothing to report on election night; they’d much rather have a bunch of cliff-hangers that keeps the proles glued to their sets.)

Read it.

Everyone from network CEO Les Moonves to “Evening News’’ anchor Scott Pelley to former “Evening News’’ Executive Producer Patricia Shevlin ignored repeated phone calls and e-mails from The Post seeking comment on the bombshell claim by ex-CBS investigative ace Sharyl Attkisson.

In her new book, “Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington,” Attkisson charges that CBS higher-ups quashed her reporting on the deadly attack on the US Embassy in Benghazi, Libya, as well as reports on the federal “Fast and Furious’’ gun-running scandal and the president’s ObamaCare debacle.

John Hinderaker blows the whistle.

In this one-minute clip, trying to shore up the floundering Coakley campaign in Massachusetts, Hillary Clinton displays her ignorance of how the world works not once, but twice. First she assures her audience that raising the minimum wage doesn’t cost jobs, it leads to job gains. (“Our entry-level employees will now cost $15 an hour? Great! Let’s hire two!”) Of course, no one ever asks: if that’s true, Hillary, then why are you so cheap? Why not raise the minimum wage to $100 an hour?

…

“Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” Where do they come from, then? Does the stork deliver them? Are they legislated by Congress? Two equally plausible alternatives.

Watch the video of Hillary sticking her foot in her mouth if you have the stomach for it.

Steve Sailer goes through a thumbsucker by Voice of the Crust Ray Mark Rinaldi, ‘Fine Arts Critic’ for the Denver Post, whose chief objection to the new Denver rail station is that there aren’t enough black people wandering around to suit him.

We should just blow up all the beautiful buildings of the past. That way no nonwhites will be made uncomfortable by ever being reminded of what their ancestors didn’t accomplish.

Read it.

Join us then, as we review all 22 terrible reasons to go to law school….

Fisking dreck from a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Let me know when Ebola’s death toll matches that of militant Islam. Until then, STFU about ‘disaster of our time’.

Read it.

I’d like to know what business ‘the poor’ have buying a $1500 sofa in the first place. They don’t sound all that poor to me.

Read it.

The NBC news crew that returned from Africa after one of its photographers contracted Ebola is reportedly under a mandatory quarantine now because Dr. Nancy Snyderman may have violated the self-imposed quarantine.

On Thursday in Princeton, New Jersey, Snyderman, NBC’s chief medical correspondent, was reportedly spotted by many people “sitting in her car outside of the Peasant Grill in Hopewell Boro”:

Perhaps we could start a new holding camp, á la Gitmo, for journalists — in Monrovia….

Read it.

Richman, who built his $10 billion company developing rental housing, lives in the Conyers Farm area, where the minimum lot size is 10 acres. Twenty-five donors paid $32,400 each to get their photo taken with the president. Others paid $10,000 for dinner.

It’s like he’s not even listening to himself, but just reading from a teleprompter loaded by the cast of Saturday Night Live.

“If Republicans win, we know who they’ll be fighting for,” Obama said. “Once again, the interests of billionaires will come before the needs of the middle class.”

Those two sentences are correct, but not in the way he arranged them.

Obama arrived from New York City — where he had attended a fundraiser with hedge-fund billionaires George Soros and Paul Tudor Jones — in a convoy of four helicopters that landed at the Greenwich Polo Club.

Sometimes it is good to be the king, even King Putt.

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.

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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.