The New York Times suddenly detects that the sky is falling, and wants to round up the usual suspects.

 A big reason America is falling behind other countries in science and math is that we have effectively written off a huge chunk of our population as uninterested in those fields or incapable of succeeding in them.

Well, my first question is: Who is this ‘we’? Does it include editorial writers for the New York Times? If so, why don’t they change their behavior? If not, what is with this ‘we’ business?

And I don’t see anybody standing at the door of classrooms barring anybody except white males from entering. Perhaps the Times still think this is 1954.

 Women make up nearly half the work force but have just 26 percent of science, technology, engineering or math jobs, according to the Census Bureau. Blacks make up 11 percent of the workforce but just 6 percent of such jobs and Hispanics make up nearly 15 percent of the work force but hold 7 percent of those positions. There is no question that women and minorities have made progress in science and math in the last several decades, but their gains have been slow and halting. And in the fast-growing field of computer science, women’s representation has actually declined in the last 20 years, while minorities have made relatively small gains.

Ah, that old ‘progressive’ bugaboo, ‘underrepresentation’. First, I want to see some evidence that the fact women make up half of the workforce has some inevitable relationship to how many jobs they hold in any particular field. Next thing you know, they’ll be complaining that men are underrepresented among the number of people who bear children.

Jim Goad sets the record straight.

On Friday evening, ABC’s 20/20 presented a postmortem tribute that oozed with so much sanctimonious brown-nosing that it should have been called Up Mandela’s Ass. I doubt that this saccharine chunk of carefully packaged propaganda was any more idealized, unrealistic, or one-sided than the thousands of other tributes that burst forth like millions of sugarcoated tears after his passing, but I was only able to handle one Mandela tribute lest my eyes roll so violently that they pop out of my head.

The 20/20 special peddled such obviously fraudulent lies as the allegation that Mandela’s African National Congress was “committed to nonviolent resistance.” Not a peep was made about the fact that Mandela was sentenced to prison not only for “treason”—which is the only charge the show mentioned—but that he pled guilty to an indictment accusing him of complicity in “the preparation, manufacture and use of explosives—for the purpose of committing acts of violence.” Nothing was said about the radical guerrilla army he founded called “Spear of the Nation” that was linked to hundreds of acts of violence and sabotage. Nothing was said about his claim that “violence in this country was inevitable.” Nor was it mentioned that he was offered freedom from prison in February 1985 if he agreed to foreswear violence but that he refused. And they certainly didn’t dare to show a clip of an ANC “necklacing” that’s one of the most brutal snippets of mob violence I’ve ever witnessed. Nothing was said about the Church Street Bombing or any of the other bombings and violent acts committed in the ANC’s name that in other contexts would have Mandela dubbed a violent terrorist. Instead, 20/20 referred to him with the much cheerier sobriquet of “freedom fighter.”

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

When Margaret Thatcher died in April, the British Left reacted with the kind of ugly viciousness you would expect of the British Left. This is worth remembering today when liberals are demanding that everyone must now forget the reality of who Nelson Mandela was.

Read it.

The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.

Read it.

No, it isn’t; it’s just evidence that you’re a slob.

Read it.

The White House, Democrats, and their supporters are mobilizing behind a focus for 2014 and beyond on the wage gap between the wealthy and the rest of America.

A paper by a centrist-Democratic think tank, which will be released Wednesday, finds that more than half of U.S. working-age families with children under age 18 earn $60,000 or less a year, and more than 75% earn $100,000 or less a year, putting a new frame on what the White House has described as a growing wage gap in the country.

Next up: The growing ‘price gap’ between Rolex and Timex. They both just tell time, right? So why the disparity? No doubt Republicans are behind it….

Read it.

This is, of course, the New York Times, so you’ll want to confirm this using a reliable source.

Read it.

Each year, the McRib makes a brief visit to Earth. Its arrival elicits reactions ranging from horror to awe. And for good reason: this would-be rib sandwich is really a restructured pork patty pressed into the rough shape of a slab of ribs, its slathering of barbecue sauce acting as camouflage as much as coating.

“Pork” is a generous term, since the McRib has traditionally been fashioned from otherwise unmarketable pig parts like tripe, heart, and stomach, material that is not only cheap but also easier to mold and bind into a coherent, predetermined shape. McDonald’s accurately lists the patty’s primary ingredient as “boneless pork,” although even that’s a fairly strong euphemism. Presumably few of the restaurant’s patrons would line up for a Pressed McTripe.

There are few paths to becoming a highly-compensated Voice of the Crust more sure than penning screeds making fun of what the Great Unwashed eat. That way the people who read the Atlantic and pride themselves on being Exemplars of Wealth and Taste. Never mind that under different circumstances they’d be the first to push Locally Sourced Tripe as the sort of thing that Authentic Native Peoples do, and so you have to try it.

The Other McCain is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Fortunately, the Secret Service need not worry about Friedersdorf purchasing a Mannlicher-Carcano rifle just now. The focus of his manic obsession is not the current president, but his predecessor.

Bush Derangement Syndrome — the psychiatric malady that seized the minds of liberals for eight years of their paranoid nightmares — has left the landscape littered with deranged kooks. In 2011, Jared Loughner succumbed to 9/11 Truther craziness and went berserk in Tucson. Barrett Brown flipped out last year, ranting about a mad conspiracy against him. Down in Alabama, Roger Shuler is convinced he is the target of a corrupt scheme masterminded by Karl Rove. Anonymous hacker Jeremy Hammond blames Bush, too.

Then there is Conor Friedersdorf, superficially rational yet consumed by the delusion that George W. Bush was the worst president in American history, and in the grip of a dread fear that there will be a Second Coming of Dubya if the GOP ever wins another election.

Like David Frum, Friedersdorf (who Mark Levin calles ‘Friedersdork’, not without reason) is somebody who leveraged a fringe position as a Perhaps Bright Young Conservative into fifteen minutes of fame and then promptly left the reservation, never to return.

Read it.

I noted earlier today that many politicians, pundits and newspapers have been hypocrites on the filibuster, favoring it when their party is in the minority and opposing it when their party controls the Senate. But of all the hypocrites, the most shameless must be the editorial board of the New York Times. Have they forgotten that Google exists? Are they unaware that anyone can search their web site and see what they wrote about an issue when the shoe was on the other foot? Or are they so resigned to being known as partisan hacks that they just don’t care?

That the New York Times are a bunch of partisan hacks comes as no surprise — and hasn’t for at least sixty years. That their target reader has the memory of a two-year-old — Look, squirrel! — comes as no surprise, either.

Read it.

Most people don’t want to know how the McRib and McNuggets are made for the same reason they don’t like hanging around slaughterhouses and meatpacking plants, and to suggest that there’s something wrong with this is itself wrong. It’s a clear signal that the writer doesn’t understand ordinary folks and how they think and feel. Unfortunately, this is a common problem with the academic Pecksniffs among us, who can’t understand why Americans prefer tasty, affordable mass-produced hamburgers and pork sandwiches to tasteless, expensive “organic” foods that can’t be easily consumed while on the road in the family minivan. Or, for that matter, a preference for clinging to guns and religion in a time when the intellectualoids and their Lightworker are in charge and straining to produce a national transformation.

Read it.

Earlier this year, in “How to Eat Apples Like a Boss,” a video by Foodbeast, the Internet was promised the gift of confidence in apple-eating. Elie Ayrouth ate an apple starting at the bottom, proceeding to up to the top, and finishing with a wink to the camera, as bosses do. Eating as such, Foodbeast said, the core “disappears.”

I do them one better and say that it never existed. The core is a product of society, man. There is a thin fibrous band, smaller in diameter than a pencil and not bad to the taste. If you eat your apple vertically, it is not noticeable.

Ponder a publication that pays somebody to write about how to eat apples. (You know he didn’t write that for free.)

Ponder a society in which how much of an apple to eat is a controversy worthy of discussion in a national publication. (Message from the Third World: ‘Give me the fucking apple and I’ll make it disappear. No more problem.’)

Read it.

Searching for today’s article on line, I found virtually the same article was written 25 years ago. At least in that one, there is a grudging admission that the man who pulled the trigger on November 22, 1963, was actually a Marxist. Today’s article failed to mention the political orientation of JFK’s assassin or anything about him. Why ruin a good story with a distracting fact?

Read it.

The sort of SWPL problem that somebody who writes for the New York Times would worry about.

We don’t spend a lot of thought on that in Texas. Just sayin’.

Read it.

The SWPL protest where no man discriminateth. These are all jobs the Victims of Color could pursue if they wanted to — for whatever reason, they just don’t. But that doesn’t keep the racially-obsessed (guilty much?) from obsessing about them.

Read it.

BLUF: No, Arafat wasn’t murdered with polonium.

The claim Arafat was poisoned with polonium ignores a very important detail, as Brian Thomas writes: if Arafat had ingested polonium in 2004, there simply wouldn’t be any trace of it in his remains by now. That’s science not speculation.

Swiss scientists say Arafat had symptoms commonly linked to radiation poisoning, including nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and liver and kidney failure — but not two other classic symptoms, hair loss and a weaker immune system.

Gavin MacInnes delineates some inconvenient truth.

Some rich brats at Salon were recently bitching about the “GOP-shredded safety net” they claim has forced moms into the workplace. In a typical example of bourgeois naiveté, they assume it’s the libertarian lack of government that’s keeping us poor and tearing apart families.

This is false for at least three reasons. One, the government can’t create wealth. It can only make people poorer. Two, the poorest we have are single moms, and it’s the left that glorifies that lifestyle, not the right. And three, the poor aren’t even that poor.

Nick Gillespie throws up his hands.

Read it.

No problem. We’ll just go back to making everything with hand tools. Win-win!

Cancel that pesky Industrial Revolution! Let’s go back to the days of Karl Marx, where labor was supreme!

Or maybe not.

Read it.

After reading NY Times journalist Jane Brody’s condescendingly smug article about the benefits of living in a walkable neighborhood with short commutes, I wanted to know more about where she lives.

So I did some research and discovered that she owns a brownstone in Park Slope that’s valued, according to Zillow, at $2.85 million.

In the end I have to agree with the lesson from the article. If you can become rich enough to afford a $2.85 million home, you too can live in a really great location and smugly look down upon the poor people who can’t afford to live your lifestyle.

Somehow, I don’t think Obamacare will take us there….

Read it.

What is “the cheapest, most nutritious and bountiful food that has ever existed in human history” Hint: It has 390 calories. It contains 23g, or half a daily serving, of protein, plus 7% of daily fiber, 20% of daily calcium and so on.

“McDouble”, in case you’re curious.

The outraged replies to the notion of McDouble supremacy — if it’s not the cheapest, most nutritious and most bountiful food in human history, it has to be pretty close — comes from the usual coalition of class snobs, locavore foodies and militant anti-corporate types. I say usual because these people are forever proclaiming their support for the poor and for higher minimum wages that would supposedly benefit McDonald’s workers. But they’re completely heartless when it comes to the other side of the equation: cost.

Once again, rich white people laying down the law what non-rich and non-white people ought to be eating.

Read it.

Reliance on hard facts, scientific standards, and cautious conclusions seems to be withering away. Even well-school researchers have become involved in the game of activism and alarmism, using carefully chosen rhetoric to generate headlines and fear based on inconclusive and largely meaningless studies and even unpublished research.

See e.g. the Fedearl budget or any speech by Barack Obama.

Read it.

Women, beware: There’s a new emerging threat online. This week two journalists whose prior experience includes folding T-shirts at Abercrombie & Fitch and writing celebrity profiles of Demi Lovato discovered the manosphere lurking in the darkest recesses of the Internet. 20/20 has partnered with the Southern Poverty Law Center to expose this nefarious menace befouling the information superhighway as we speak.

I love the names these Regressives give their front groups: ‘Southern Poverty Law Center’ — as if it had anything to do with either poverty or law, southern or otherwise.

Like most things progressives hate, the manosphere asks difficult questions (“If feminism is so concerned with inequality, why isn’t it trying to get more women dying of workplace injuries?”) and poses uncomfortable truths. (“Men who act like belligerent assholes probably do get laid a lot more than men who show up with a dozen long stem roses on the first date.”) ABC, doing their due diligence and sticking to only the strictest of journalistic ethics, went ahead and interviewed a whopping two manosphere bloggers, which, to be fair, did provide a rough cross section of the movement.

And they have schools to train ‘journalists’ how to be this shallow. And they charge money to go to those schools. We use to have a saying that applied to that sort of thing: ‘A fool and his money are soon parted.’

If Roosh somehow manages to actually get screen time there’s going to be feminist teeth gnashing o’er the land the likes of which hasn’t been seen since…the last couple of weeks or so. It doesn’t take much to get them going, really. But Roosh is just the type of guy that sends the “gender as total social construction” crowd into a furious, white-hot rage. If Elam is your patient but wounded uncle, Roosh is the unrepentant rascal your wife prefers you not hang out with.

‘Incredulous indignation’ seems to be a constant state with some people, most of whom seem to make it into print.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

The government finally managed to hold liable a mortgage executive this week (although in a civil, not a criminal, case). But, the executive turned out to be a woman (and a single mother to boot), so the NYT feels bad about the government’s victory.

…

While I can understand the New York Times’ argument that she must be innocent by reason of not being a man, let me point out that by the same logic, she must be guilty by reason of being white.

It’s a conundrum …

Read it.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, who amazingly is the number 2 Democrat in the Senate, took to his Facebook account over the weekend to make the outrageous claim that a House GOP Leader told President Obama that he “cannot stand to look at” him. On Wednesday, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney dismissed Durbin’s claim, saying the incident “didn’t happen.”

“It did not happen,” Carney said, as reported by The Hill, saying he discussed the incident with a “participant in the meeting.”

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

Read it.

Nearly two decades ago, a landmark study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than those of less educated parents, giving them a distinct advantage in school and suggesting the need for increased investment in prekindergarten programs.

Of course, children of wealthier professionals probably have a 1o-point IQ advantage over ‘less educated parents’, so I’d love to see how ‘prekindergarten programs’ are going to help with that. Gene therapy or something?

Read it.

Which consistent stupidity since the sixties is one of the reasons I’m no longer a Roman Catholic.

Taki shares his thoughts.

What are the moral responsibilities of liberal democracies in a situation such as the Middle East at present? That’s an easy one. Stay the hell away and let the Saudis and Qataris do the fighting, which is like asking them to be nice to guest workers from Pakistan. My question is: Why is it that I knew what was happening in Syria two and one half years ago, while such brains as Obama and Cameron and Hague and la Clinton were out in left field? Why is it that I knew that extremists who want to erase Syria’s borders and establish a transnational Islamic state were the enemy, while the media and the EU were screaming bloody murder against Assad? Only three weeks ago on The Week, the arse-licker Christiane Amanpour was shouting about democracy and human rights and how we have to intervene in Syria. Andrew Neil was polite, as was Simon Schama, who dared suggest that the mercenaries doing the fighting were not all they pretend to be.

Read it.

What was once expected only of DailyKos or crazy fringe left-wing websites, now is mainstream liberal media.

Steve Sailer does the hard stuff so you don’t have to.

Continuing its blanket coverage of the problems of people who don’t really have problems, The New York Times turns from the plight of female Harvard Business School students to the tribulation of female Yale physics majors.

Hey, the NYT covers what it’s readers (i.e. the Crust and its hangers-on) want to read about, viz. themselves and their progeny.

The Other McCain turns over a very big, very flat rock.

Watch MSNBC all day long and keep in mind that, for the vast majority of the reporters covering politics in Washington, MSNBC is the Gospel Truth. Realize that the ambitious younger journalists in the White House press corps dream of the day when they’ll have their own regular spot on MSNBC or, perhaps, they will be appointed to a job in the Obama administration itself, like their hero and mentor, Jay Carney.

All of these reporters are Democrats. They hate and despise Republicans, and consider it their most important duty as journalists to help elect more Democrats and then to help the Democrats to advance their political and legislative agenda. To these reporters, the superiority of the Democrats is an objective fact, and anyone who says a word in favor of Republicans is therefore a liar or a fool or both.

No reporter in the White House press corps watches Fox News, except for amusement, to laugh at it as crude sport. Nor, for that matter, does any reporter in the White House press corps read conservative blogs or Web sites. Insofar as the Internet has any influence on them, the sites that are most influential among D.C. journalists are such venues as Think Progress, Media Matters, Mother Jones and Salon.

…

Was it “unbelievable” that Obama faced no tough questions at the press conference? It would have been unbelievable if he had.

The press corps is a constituency of the Democrat Party in the same way that the AFL-CIO, the NAACP and Planned Parenthood are constituencies of the Democrat Party. If any of them have any criticism of Obama, it arises from the feeling that he is not liberal enough.

Our nation’s “mainstream” media are, actually, Democrat Party propagandists. Let’s stop pretending that they are interested in truth.

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.