Read it.

The horror! The horror!

Read it.

If you like Malcolm Gladwell, you won’t like this review.

Mr. Gladwell enjoys a reputation for translating social science into actionable insights. But the data behind the surprising dyslexia claim is awfully slim. He notes in passing that a 2009 survey found a much higher incidence of dyslexia in entrepreneurs than in corporate managers. But this study involved only 102 self-reported dyslexic entrepreneurs, most of whom probably had careers nothing like those of Mr. Boies or his fellow highfliers. Later Mr. Gladwell mentions that dyslexics are also overrepresented in prisons—a point that would appear to vitiate his argument. He addresses the contradiction by suggesting that while no person should want to be dyslexic, “we as a society need people” with serious disadvantages to exist, for we all benefit from the over-achievement that supposedly results. But even if dyslexia could be shown to cause entrepreneurship, the economic analysis that would justify a claim of its social worth is daunting, and Mr. Gladwell doesn’t attempt it.

I, for the record, do not like Malcolm Gladwell.

The Other McCain points and laughs.

This is the difference between pragmatism and ideology: Do you want to solve your problem, or do you want to construe every problem to fit political categories and intellectual abstractions?

If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, and if the only tool you have is feminism, every problem looks like heteronormative patriarchal oppression and “rape culture.”

Read it.

An email sent to students by a University of Maryland official that cites the Trayvon Martin shooting as evidence “it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida” is being blasted as the latest evidence of a left-wing bias on campus.

The email, from William Dorland, director of the school’s Honors College, starts by welcoming students back to campus, but then quickly veers into politics.

“This year, we learned that it is legal to hunt down and kill American children in Florida,” it reads, in a reference to the trial of George Zimmerman, who was cleared of all charges in the fatal shooting of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The email went out to all students in the Honors College.

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool —
That’s the way
Things work today;
Your tax bucks at work and play!

A bit of vacuous hand-wringing from the Guardian, the British equivalent of The Nation.

That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC’s navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.

This from a country that has a constant problem of jihadists murdering people on the street and in the subways, with gangs of Pakistani immigrants and their get grooming girls for sex slavery. Shouldn’t the world intervene? No, because that would be raaaaaaasit.

And then there’s the massacre at a Kenyan mall that is still in the news, in which the death toll is by my estimate at least three times that at the Navy Yard, and yet not a peep out of these guys. Shouldn’t the world intervene? No, because it’s just wogs shooting niggers and nobody at the lily-white Guardian can be bothered about those sorts of people.

And don’t get me started about the civil war in Syria, which is like a fight between Hitler and Stalin – there is no good side, just two different flavors of bad that we wouldn’t even consider being involved in did we not have an arrested adolescent for a President.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Except for the mass murder part. I guess black is the new ‘normal’.

Read it.

I mean … damn, people, take your shoes off if you need to….

If you’ve been following the news in the wake of the Washington Navy Yard massacre, you might be hopelessly confused about how frequently mass shootings happen in the United States. The Huffington Post reports that there have been at least 16 mass shootings this year so far, killing a total of 78 people. Mother Jones, on the other hand, has updated its much-cited “Guide to Mass Shootings” with the news that the Navy Yard murders were “the fifth mass shooting in the United States this year.” An article by Annie Linsky at Bloomberg doesn’t offer a count for 2013, but it does stress how rare such crimes are. That Huffington Post piece, by contrast, talks about how “common” mass shootings have “become.”

As you might have guessed, different reporters are using different definitions of “mass shooting.” We’ve waded through this thicket of competing numbers before, and if you want to get into the statistical weeds I can point you to a couple of posts I wrote last year, “Are Mass Shootings Becoming More Common in the United States?” and “Making Sense of Mass-Shooting Statistics.” Here’s the key points to remember as you read the numbers floating around in the press:

And, as you may have noticed, all of these counts take place in the-sky-is-falling regressive publications, who don’t really give a shit how many people get shot in ‘mass shootings’ (or they’d have something to say about the ‘mass shootings’ that take place every week in Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles and ….) except insofar as it provides a stepping stone to enacting more ineffective ‘gun control’ laws. It’s all about the narrative.

Read it.

 Ms. Quinn never blamed her problems during the race on sexism or homophobia. Still, her inner circle debated how to grapple with the question of gender.

Note the dog that didn’t bark: nobody is talking about her qualifications or her ability to do the job compared to the other candidates. It’s all a matter of how many boxes she can check on the Political Fashion Bingo Card and whether she can outscore the other candidates who are doing the exact same thing.

This is identity politics come home to roost. And it won’t ever get any better because a  losing candidate can always say, “Well, we didn’t get our groups out enough” and off they go to prepare for the next attempt.

Nicholas James Pell chronicles a liberal lynching.

The witch hunt kicked into full swing when Dickinson started mocking the “social justice” crowd, stating that feminism in tech was the biggest reason he blocked people on Twitter. Articles appeared featuring Tweets made as far back as 2010. The sundry “smoking guns” will leave those not in the thrall of the True and Holy Progressive Church scratching their heads. The enterprising folk at the Ministry of Hysteria, a major “new media” outlet that will remain nameless lest we drive more traffic their way, were able to find Dickinson mocking Mel Gibson’s “pack of niggers” meltdown, nuclear brinksmanship between the United States and Russia over gay rights, and Bradley Manning’s recent gender awakening. These were translated as racism, homophobia, and transphobia, the most recent addition to the list of mortal sins, respectively.

For the Uninformed, the web-rag Business Insider is a certified Voice of the Crust.

No one who opposes the Progressive Inquisition is safe. Societies in decline are notoriously dangerous places to live. This is doubly true of irrational theocracies, searching for Old Scratch under every rock. In the absence of real red meat, the sharks in the tank will turn on whatever is conveniently available.

Asserting that your opinions are your own will not protect you. While the progressive left defensively (and to some degree, correctly) claims that employers are under no compulsion to employ anyone whose behavior they find odious, no one has ever been fired for being too politically correct.

Read it.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way: John Maynard Keynes, one of the founders of modern economics, made a famous prediction that by 2030, advanced societies would be wealthy enough that leisure time, rather than work, would characterize national lifestyles.

And, as we all know, Keynes was always right.

In addition to relaxing during long holidays, the medieval peasant took his sweet time eating meals, and the day often included time for an afternoon snooze. “The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed,” notes Shor. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

Most of which was spent trying to figure out where their next meal was coming from. The modern day laborer is the functional equivalent, and if you aren’t willing to trade your day job for that life, then quit whining.

These thumb-suckers who write 1000-word essays that boil down to complaints about American having ‘no national vacation policy whatsoever’ are about as tedious as Old Media can get, and the fact that such crap fills the pages of the New York Times is certainly a contributory factor to why they’ve been losing money hand over fist.

Read it.

I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before the U.N. declares American citizenship an ‘essential human right’, the denial of which can lead to prosecution for war crimes or insufficient hygiene or something.

Read it.

Of course, they have nothing to say about the ‘diplomats’ who are spying on the U.S., certainly not during the Cold War.

Proper U.S. response: ‘Oh, yeah? Just what do you plan to do about it? Pick up your ball and go home? Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.’

Read it.

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

Read it.

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell said the verdict in the Trayvon Martin case in which George Zimmerman was found not guilty on all charges was “questionable.”

And of course Colin Powell is a famous lawyer and judge … oh, wait….

Powell was the country’s first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and first black secretary of state.

And still feels that racism is a problem. (Well, he’s right, but not the way he thinks….)

Read it.

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

Read it.

Just in case you didn’t know.

I suggest that most talk about the problems of inequality actually invokes this ancient hypocritical ability to covertly discuss where to find lots of nice easy-to-grab stuff. We don’t discuss inequalities across time, because it is hard to grab much more than we do from the past or the future. We don’t much discuss the inequality of rich foreigners, because it is much harder to grab their stuff. We don’t much discuss inequality of those with unusual artistic abilities or sexual attractiveness, because we can’t directly grab their advantages and while we might try to grab their material goods to compensate, they don’t have that much, and the grabbing would be hard. (Also, such folks have more social status to resist with. For foragers, status counted lots more than material goods for influence.)

A few people within our nation who each have lots and lots of material goods, however, seem to make a great target for grabbing. So people discover they have a deep moral concern about that particular inequality, and ponder what oh what could we possibly do to rectify this situation? Anyone have an idea? Anyone?

And you’ll notice that the people who talk trash about inequality aren’t in a hurry to find somebody less well off than they are and split their stuff with them (yeah, I’m looking at you, Hollywood), just as the people who complain about not being taxed enough never seem to understand that, hey, you can just write a check to the IRS that they won’t hesitate to cash.

Read it.

Because, you know, rodeo clowns are just SO important.

On Tuesday, the Missouri State National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) issued a statement asking for federal involvement in the case of a rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask and then asked the crowd if they’d like to see Obama run down by a bull. “The activities at the Missouri State Fair targeting and inciting violence against our President are serious and warrant a full review by both the Secret Service and the Justice Department,” said State President Mary Ratliff.

As opposed to the racial strife and favoritism fostered by explicitly racist organizations like .. the NAACP. Nothing to see here, move along, move along….

Slate magazine assures us that We Need a War on Coal.

It’s wrong for affluent Westerners to inflict the damages of climate change on the world’s poor.

Oh, and just in case you don’t know who Peter Singer is … well, you’re luckier than most. Suffice it to say that he’s most famous for his his defense of infanticide.

Slate magazine takes its Voice of the Crust duties seriously.

Articles you’ll never see in Slate magazine: ‘A Day in the Life of the Muslim Brotherhood, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of a Planned Parenthood Abortion Mill, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of a Gay Bathhouse, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of Jeremiah Wright, Uncensored’; ‘A Day in the Life of Al Sharpton, Uncensored’. (Perhaps that’s because the Ku Klux Klan doesn’t feel that it has anything to hide — unlike these others.)

Read it.

What does a tin can containing a 12-course meal look like? All In One has the answer. It’s the creation of designer Chris Godfrey; a fresh take on gourmet dining that also serves as a commentary on the quality of mass-produced food. “Contemporary culture means on every trip into town you’re bombarded with gimmicks galore,” explains Godfrey. “Gimmicks often diminish their products to turn a profit, downgrading on the content but selling you something that’s ’50 percent more.'”

So it’s actually Just Another SWPL Snooty-Fest.

The NPR Ombudsman takes a ‘journalist’ to the woodshed.

The series committed five sins that violate NPR’s Code of Standards and Ethics. They were:

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;

2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;

3. Factual errors, shaky anecdotes and misleading use of data by quietly switching what was being measured;

4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;

5. No response from the state on many key points.

No doubt the investigative team was driven by the history of injustices suffered by Native Americans. There is much to be outraged about. But good intentions are not enough. Specifically, there is no whistleblower, no document — no smoking gun even — to support the unmistakable allegation that for nearly the last 15 years, state social workers have been so evil as to take Indian children from their families as a way to reap federal funds for the state government. The charge is so shocking and such a potential insult to many dedicated social workers that the burden of proof should have been especially high.

NPR’s stories are biased? Not news.

NPR employee calls them on it? Now that’s news….

Read it.

Soon college students all over America will be trundling to their advisers’ offices to choose a major. In this moment of financial insecurity, students are naturally drawn to economics, business, and the hard sciences. But students ought to resist the temptation of those purportedly money-ensuring options and even of history and philosophy, marvelous though they may be. All students—and I mean all—ought to think seriously about majoring in English. Becoming an English major means pursuing the most important subject of all—being a human being.

And that will totally help you get a job and support yourself once you leave the womb of academia.

An English major is much more than 32 or 36 credits including a course in Shakespeare, a course on writing before 1800, and a three-part survey of English and American lit. That’s the outer form of the endeavor. It’s what’s inside that matters. It’s the character-forming—or (dare I say?) soul-making—dimension of the pursuit that counts. And what is that precisely? Who is the English major in his ideal form? What does the English major have, what does he want, and what does he in the long run hope to become?

And how is it that only the Magic English Major can work this remarkable transformation? Sadly, a question that is never answered….

The author is, as you might suspect, a Professor of English.

Read it.

I can feel New York Times editorials killing brain cells when I read them. Times editorials should come accompanied by a warning that they may be hazardous to your health. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Falstaff, they are not only stupid, they are the cause of stupidity in others.

Read it.

The Office of Civil Rights says Seattle serves all residents, whether they’re United States citizens or not. And while city leaders publicize “brown bag” lunch meetings as a way to designate a bring-your-own lunch time event, the term has a sordid history.

“It used to be a way people could judge skin color,” Bronstein said in a phone interview. Does the public find it offensive? Most people agree it’s not.

Unspoken is the fact that it’s used solely by black people to judge other black people. But, of course, if anybody anywhere is going to be offended, it’s off-limits.

Read it.

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

I’m hoping one of them is New York City — I want to see what sort of a ring it leaves around the Atlantic.

Read it.

In October 2011, as the Libyan uprising neared its end with the death of Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, Human Rights Watch (HRW)—a highly influential global organization claiming to promote universal moral principles—published a statement condemning Western governments for their “apparent eagerness to embrace Qaddafi because of his support on counterterrorism, as well as lucrative business opportunities” that, according to HRW, “tempered their criticism of his human rights record in recent years.”

What this statement conspicuously failed to note is that HRW had been an active participant in this eager embrace of the Qaddafi regime. Led by Executive Director Kenneth Roth and Sarah Leah Whitson, director of its Middle East and North Africa division, HRW has an overall dismal record with regard to “naming and shaming” Arab dictatorships. Over the years, it has devoted few resources to opposing the daily human rights violations that are characteristic of these regimes and has even built alliances with some. In 2009, for example, Whitson visited Saudi Arabia, where, instead of speaking out against attacks on women, minorities, and others, she sought funds to expand HRW’s role in the campaign to market the U.N.’s Goldstone report which falsely accused Israel of committing war crimes.

Not really news,  but a useful reminder.

Read it.

Of course. Free healthcare, free college educations, free money. Everything should just be free, free, free. Let’s make all of America look just like Detroit.

Sure, why not.

The Other McCain tells it like it is.

Liberal bias is not a matter of unfairness, but rather a matter of dishonesty — deliberately ignoring some facts, and misrepresenting other facts, in order to misinform the public by portraying to them a politically falsified view of events and personalities.

Steve Sailer spreads the word.

To be precise, economics takes issue with the industry’s argument. In contrast, economists, on average, have been shamefully reticent about pointing out that the Silicon Valley billionaires are denying the basic findings of economics (e.g., supply and demand) to add to their billions. Why? Maybe they figure if they are nice to the billionaires, the billionaires might be nice to them.

Read it.

I.e. people deciding that they don’t have to obey the law because, well, they don’t want to.

Let’s see them try that in a Muslim country….

Steve Sailer need do no more than quote.

     For example, since moving to a majority black city ten years ago it is the case that 100 percent of the people who randomly assaulted me on the street were African-American. And yet that was a single incident on one day out of thousands. The overwhelming preponderance of black men I walk past on the street on a day-to-day basis—even the young ones, even the ones wearing hoodies—aren’t committing any violent crimes.

Perhaps he just needs to be beaten up a few more times. Or shot, which is too often how black teenagers wind up in D.C, and Chicago, and Detroit….

Read it.

Salon.com, which does not have a staff that looks like America, continues its branding as the place to go for lectures on White Privilege, Whiteness, and how race drives almost everything in America.

Hey, it’s serious business being a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

I rather suspect that Senator Warren would consider any profit at all to be ‘obscene’. She’d rather that all government money come from robbing taxpayers.

Isn’t it amazing that the people who are always first to put the government in charge of something are always the first to complain that it’s acting like a Real Business?

Read it.

 Computers and cyborgs aren’t about to render the American worker obsolete. But they’re tilting the nation’s economy more and more in favor of the rich and away from the poor and the middle class, new economic research contends.

The rich — like Barack Obama and his cronies, including those who own and operate the Washington Post. Yeah, those rich. Which is what make thumb-suckers like this one so … well, rich.

Despite rising fears of technology displacing huge swaths of the workforce, there remain huge classes of jobs that robots (and low-wage foreign workers) still can’t replace in the United States, and won’t replace any time soon. To land the best of those jobs, workers need sophisticated vocabularies, advanced problem-solving abilities and other high-value skills that the U.S. economy does a good job of bestowing on young people from wealthy families — but can’t seem to deliver to poor and middle-class kids.

Well, to begin with, wealthy families (including government employees like the Clintons and the Obamas) don’t send their kids to government schools, so they actual get an education. You’d think that the parents of ‘poor and middle-class kids’ would connect the dots and quit voting for these bozos, but they never do. So it’s pretty much a matter of Own Damned Fault.

It’s a challenge other countries are solving better than America, Levy and Murnane say.

And they’d say that even if it weren’t true, because it’s part of The Narrative that foreigners do everything better and America would suck less if we just became foreigners.

It’s one that U.S. policymakers will need to solve if they hope to keep their global economic edge and to keep lower-income Americans from falling further behind.

Which ain’t gonna happen while U.S. policymakers are in the pockets of the teachers’ unions whose votes them depend on for their cushy government jobs.

Tim O’Reilly is not a Voice of the Crust  but he plays one on the Internet.

The Crustian clichés I enjoyed most in this article:

‘The Sunday Times is a gathering of fascinating minds reflecting on the issues of the moment; it’s a conversation well worth being a part of.’ (In fact, the Sunday Times is a gathering of politically-correct chattering-class locksteppery that is well worth ignoring; you won’t miss anything important.)

‘While I think there is a lot to like in Obamacare, I totally agree that we could do way better if we scrapped the current system in favor of more profound change.’ (In fact, there is nothing to like in Obamacare, being a hideous amalgam of semi-socialist bureaucratic jobbery bolted onto the existing dysfunctional system that in turn arose in response to fascist price controls instituted during Roosevelt’s war. The profound change we need is for everybody to pay for his own health care/health insurance and make the cost tax-deductible, as now happens with employers. But they’ll never do that, because it allows people their own choice, instead of making them dependent on the choices of government employees and vote-purchasing megacompanies.)

‘Too bad politicians are so lacking in courage, and have such a hard time actually enacting sensible policies!’ (In fact, our political system is set up neither to reward politicians for courage nor to encourage them to actually enact sensible policies, but to keep them in power as they walk the high wire of voting block politics.)

‘I have a big interest in reforming corporate governance.’ (Of course, ‘reforming corporate governance’ means saying to a corporation ‘do it my way rather than your way’ and making ‘corporate governance’ even more divorced from economics and under the thumb of politics than it already is.)

‘There is a myth that public corporations are managed for the benefit of their shareholders; the reality is that they are most often managed for the benefit of insiders.’ (The ‘progressive’ problem with that is that the wrong insiders are in control; they’d be much happier if it were their insiders. AlGore is the poster child here, with Bill Clinton and Barack Obama carrying his train.)

‘We need fresh approaches to making our world more livable.’ (In fact, we need a return to the old approaches that worked; the fresh approaches that have been made since Teddy Roosevelt have invariably made things worse.)

‘Has “Caucasian” lost its meaning?’ (In fact, it never had a meaning; like ‘Aryan’ and ‘capitalist’, it was created by people with a political agenda who wanted to sound scientific.)

‘It’s bizarre origin will quickly convince you that this euphemism for “white” exists to make racism a little less obvious.’ (More politically-correct I’m-white-but-I-hate-white-people-please-don’t-beat-me-uppery from someone who, given the choice, still wouldn’t choose to be non-white, but will forevermore wring his hands until they bleed about it nevertheless. ‘White’ doesn’t need a ‘euphemism’ except for people who regard being ‘white’ as sinful per se; the technical term for such people is ‘racist’.)

‘As they used to say, “How many times do we have to make the rubble bounce?”’ (Until it stops moving on its own. One of the flaws of democracy is that it give people with slogans for brains as much input into the political process as rational adults who bother to inform themselves on a subject. The reason we have ‘overkill’ on nuclear weapons is the undoubted truth that [a] nothing every works first-time-every-time and [b] this isn’t an area in which we can afford to skimp.)

Read it. Salon, of course; Yet Another Reactionary ‘Progressive’ Hand-Wringer.

Fancy Hands founder Ted Roden told me that his company often provides “a better opportunity than is offered locally. For example, a number of people have left jobs at gas stations and Domino’s pizza to work with us full-time because (they’ve told me), the work is better and the pay is better. One even visited us at the office and brought gifts … It’s actually a surprisingly good deal for them.”

That may well be true, but at this stage it’s difficult to get reliable numbers on what the average wages for Fancy Hands or Task Rabbit contractors are. What we can be reasonably sure of, however, is that these services are perfect examples of what Lilly Irani, a researcher at the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, and her co-author Six Silberman have described as “the fragmentation of labor into hyper-temporary jobs … an intensification of decades-old US trends toward part-time, contingent work for employer flexibility and cost-cutting.”

One of the most characteristic tropes of left ‘journalism’ these days, and indeed lefty ‘intellectual’ concern in general, is the ‘That may very well be true, but…’ formula. The obvious point of view is ‘these mental midgets just think they’re happy, it takes a well-educated socially-aware terribly-concerned politically-correct liberal like myself to perceive how truly miserable they really are’. This concern for people who are too stupid to be properly concerned for themselves is signature, and the visible expression of the congenital ‘progressive’ itch to stick one’s nose into everybody else’s business, which in turn is a specific expression of the general Liberal Fascist conviction that We The Anointed know best how YOU ought to conduct YOUR life.

Read it.

The U.S. military has wasted $34 million on a vast new headquarters in Afghanistan which will most likely never be used by U.S. forces. The 64,000 square foot monument to government incompetence stands vacant at Camp Leatherneck, Helmand province, Afghanistan.

Uh, I don’t think that this was the military’s idea. I think it was the Obama Administration’s idea. So don’t blame the military for following orders, especially stupid orders:

The windowless, two-story structure, which is larger than a football field, was completed this year at a cost of $34 million. But the military has no plans to ever use it. Commanders in the area, who insisted three years ago that they did not need the building, now arein the process of withdrawing forces and see no reason to move into the new facility.

Just another example of tReason magazine’s biases. Granted, the article was written by an intern, but still, where is the adult supervision? Sadly lacking.

Read it.

The state of Massachusetts is experiencing millions of dollars in loss thanks to entrepreneurial can and bottle collectors from other states carpetbagging in their wares to turn them in for $0.05 a piece. According to CBS Local Boston, trucks from Rhode Island are traveling into Massachusetts loaded up with bottles and cans, which bring no return in Rhode Island, and handing them over for cash in the Bay State. According to environmental consultant Kevin Dietly of Northbridge Environmental in Westford, “We estimate that something like 6-8% of all returns that come back each year are fraudulent. That probably costs the commonwealth between four and six million dollars a year.”

How is this ‘fraudulent’? You’re the guys paying for the cans and bottles. You don’t want the cans and bottles, don’t offer to pay a nickel apiece for them. Problem solved.

Clue: You get more of the behavior you pay for. Another clue: Markets work, even when you don’t intend them to.

Read it.

Like Communists and Fascists, atheists like the idea of religious faith, they just don’t want God included. It’s all about them, you see.

Read it.

Could you imagine an article in the New York Times entitled ‘On the atheist coast, offering theists a spiritual home’? No, neither can I, and that points out one of the most bizarre affectations afflicting the Crust these days: The blithe assumption that, even though they run the country, they’re some how ‘rebels’ and ‘edgy’, even ‘oppressed’. Our Ruling Class is never happier than when they are playing at being victims — a romantic fringe revolting against a stifling conformity … when they are the stifling conformity. It’s like a bunch of high-school students, being rebelliously independent — and all dressing and talking the same way. You wonder what they will do when they actually wake up.

Atheists, by definition, don’t need a ‘spiritual home’ — spirit is exactly the thing they deny, and their home is wherever the Rulling Class pitch their tents. In a world where high-school students get denied diplomas for daring to mention God at graduation, I don’t see that atheists have a lot to complain about; they’re sitting in the driver’s seat with their hands on the wheel but bitching about having no say about where the car is going. There are some situations for which the term ‘clueless’ is entirely inadequate.

Read it.

Yeah, well, you loved Hitler, too, and look what that got you. At least he isn’t running your government, as he is ours.

Read it.

Former Roseanne writer Joss Whedon is very upset with Clarence Thomas for his failure to support affirmative action:

Clarence Thomas is against affirmative action. There isn’t a hashtag big enough to contain the irony.

Let me unpack this for you: Joss Whedon, a wealthy white liberal, thinks it’s ironic that Clarence Thomas, a black conservative who is the grandson of a sharecropper and grew up in the Jim Crow south yet managed to work his way to the nation’s highest court, isn’t grateful for the handouts that Joss and his ilk have given him. Doesn’t that uppity idiot realize that he only serves at the pleasure of those, like Mistuh Whedon, who deigned to give him a helping hand? Surely he doesn’t think he earned that spot on the Supreme Court. He couldn’t be that clueless, could he?

In a supreme bit of irony, Whedon managed to validate every single negative thing that Clarence Thomas has ever written about affirmative action. And he did it in fewer than 140 characters! Now that’s economy.

More drivel from the New York Times.

 GUN manufacturers have gone to great lengths to avoid any moral responsibility or legal accountability for the social costs of gun violence — the deaths and injuries of innocent victims, families torn apart, public resources spent on gun-related crime and medical expenses incurred.

Similarly, socialists have gone to great lengths to avoid any moral responsibility or legal accountability for the social costs of their totalitarian beliefs — the deaths and injuries of innocent victims, families torn apart, public resources wasted on socialism-related crime and poverty incurred. Oh, wait — the authors are law professors. Well, that’s even worse than being socialist.

But there is a simple and direct way to make them accountable for the harm their products cause. For every gun sold, those who manufacture or import it should pay a tax. The money should then be used to create a compensation fund for innocent victims of gun violence.

Funny, I don’t see the criminals who actually use guns to commit crimes being brought under this rubric of ‘accountable for the harm these products cause’. I guess they were just holding the thing when it decided to go off by itself. Pesky things, those guns; you never know when they’re going to take it into their heads to shoot somebody.

This proposal is based on a fundamentally conservative principle — that those who cause injury should be made to “internalize” the cost of their activity by paying for it.

So you’re a fan of more prisons, stop-and-frisk programs, and mandatory minimum sentences for gun-related crimes? And the death penalty for people who use a gun to kill somebody else? (Somehow I don’t think so….)

Now, gun manufacturers and sellers are mostly protected from lawsuits by federal law.

Primarily to keep them from being subject to lawfare by people like, well, you two.

 As it happens, a model for this approach already exists. Under the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, those injured by vaccines are eligible for compensation from a fund financed by an excise tax on the sale of every dose of vaccine. In creating this no-fault system in the 1980s, Congress sought to provide care for those injured by vaccines while protecting manufacturers from undue litigation.

No, Congress thought to stick it to the people with deep pockets when bad things happen to people who claim to have been injured by vaccines, without resort to those pesky formalities otherwise required by the law like having to prove that a certain manufacturer actually provided the vaccine that supposedly caused the injury, and indeed without resort to having to prove that the vaccine in question actually caused the injury in the first place. My torts professor used to deal with these cases on what he called Fuddlehead Friday, since he knew we were all just waiting for the weekend; perhaps understandably, most of these cases came from the California Supreme Court.

Guns, of course, are not essential for public health. But Congress has made painfully clear that it values the largely unfettered ownership of guns and their manufacture — despite the social costs of the violence that results when guns work as designed.

No, they’ve made it clear that they’ve actually read the Constitution — which, oddly enough, these ‘law professors’ appear to have dodged.

 Some of the victims of recent mass shootings — including the massacres at Aurora, Colo., Newtown, Conn., and Virginia Tech, as well as those who survived the 9/11 attack — have recently banded together to ask Congress to enact a National Compassion Fund, to make sure that charitable donations get to their victims rather than being swallowed up in administrative costs.

Oh, sure, passing the money through the Federal government is a sure cure for funds being eaten up in administrative costs. I really wonder what planet these people are from.

 Gun makers know that their products are lethal, and sometimes used illegally. They know that some of their dealers’ sales practices contribute to guns’ falling into criminal hands. They know that each year a significant number of innocent people will be killed or maimed by the use of guns. But quite often, the shooters themselves cannot be held fully or even partially accountable, financially, because they are unknown, destitute or dead.

So we’ll look under the lamp post because the light is better there. Sure, that makes perfect sense.

But why stop there?

Next up will be a tax on automobile manufacturers because of all the deaths and injuries caused by drunk drivers and illegal immigrants who can’t be bothered to carry insurance.

And how about all those uninsured people getting injured and killed? Hey, a tax on the insurance companies sounds like a lovely idea!

The New Republic, a Voice of the Crust, is forced to admit the truth: Ain’t no such thing as Global Warming.

Even as scientists asserted an incontrovertible consensus on climate change, a funny thing has happened over the last 15 years: Global warming has slowed down. Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; they’re perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections.

I got your incontrovertible consensus, right here.

Read it.

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

If a government-funded study didn’t find that conservatives were more racist than liberals — that would be news. Won’t ever happen, of course.

Read it.

Across-the-board cuts in federal spending have not only damped short-term economic growth but also threaten long-term investments that could provide a boon in the future, the White House chief economist said Tuesday.

Alan Krueger, the departing chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, warned the cuts, known as the “sequester,” are harming important federally-funded research and development that can eventually lead to new technologies that drive the economy.

Of course. If the Federal government doesn’t spend your money on research, research won’t happen.

Makes you wonder how anything got invented before the Federal government paid for it. (Maybe it came from the same alternate dimension as all of the goods that the Social Justice folks want to ‘redistribute’.)

Read it.

Why are public school union heads always black women who weigh 300 pounds? Is there some formal requirement, or just an ‘understanding’?

Paul Mirengoff fisks the Other Left Coast’s favorite ‘conservative’.

Brooks provides no evidence that illegal immigrants fit this definition to an appreciable degree. Nor would such a claim be justified. The former illegal immigrants who took advantage of the last amnesty overwhelmingly support the Party of big government.

Their successor illegal immigrants would almost certainly follow suit. This low skilled, poorly educated cohort perceives little interest in limiting the government’s ability to intervene on its behalf.

Brooks concedes that “immigrant areas” sometimes “go bad.” But he blames this on “America” for having “infected [immigrants] with bad values already present.”

I suppose, then, that if we toured Mexico City or San Salvador we would find no bad areas.

The only people who could possibly believe that David Brooks was a conservative would be the New York Times (because, of course, compared to them, he is).

Read it.

Two high-profile Obama White House alums are joining forces to start a communications business called The Incite Agency.

Makes you wonder what sort of ‘communications’ they plan to foster.