Read it.

(Full disclosure: Andrei was a classmate of mine at Yale.)

If the bias of today’s journalism is to be bemoaned, one ought to describe that bias properly. It would be all right if politically it was on the left, provided there were in abundant evidence all the gradations of liberalism, say, from John Stuart Mill to Herbert Marcuse. If these, moreover, were complemented by at least a minority press biased to the right, say, from G. K. Chesterton to Anders Breivik, then all would be well with the world.

Yet such is not the case. You can say what you like about Stalin or Pol Pot, but just try saying something nice in print about Hitler, or even Mussolini. Thus, as a journalist, I cannot think of an organ of opinion—not even the one you’re presently reading—that would encourage me to describe, say, the neoconservative intellectual David Frum as “a dirty Jew.” No similar hindrance, however, inhibited a university professor once describing me in The New York Times as “an intellectual thug.”

Read it.

In its desperation the climate campaign resorted to calling climate skeptics “denialists” for quite a while now, with some going so far as to make an explicit comparison with holocaust deniers, just in case anyone didn’t get the point.  Well, who are the “denialists” now?  Our friends at CFACT (Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow) are on hand this week at the latest round of UN climate talks in Bonn. What?—you didn’t know there was another round of climate talks under way?  Where they argue for hours about whether to place a semi-colon in a particular spot in their latest draft declaration (true story)?  Just mark it as another sign of the media’s waning interest in the issue.

Read it.

OF COURSE it’s racist! EVERYTHING is racist, if you are a Washtington Post reporter!

But did southerners explicitly design the program to be exclusionary? Perhaps not.

There’s a major concession.

Read it.

All television has become a parody of reality. For example, how many young women believe The Bachelor plausibly depicts 21st-century courtship rituals? Alas, very many. Once a friend and I watched an installment (my singular viewing) and endeavored to figure the annual income needed to furnish such a lifestyle. Our conclusion was that a man would need approximately $5 million after taxes to live as lavishly as the series presents. That isn’t an entirely implausible until one recalls that half the globe lives on less than $2 per day.

…

Elusive to me is the one black, one Asian, one white, and one “other” band of brothers stopping in for McNuggets. Yet to judge by television I am the only person in America whose friends are predominantly one color or another. Hopefully that doesn’t make me racist, but it evidently makes me unique.

Read it.

Intellectual dishonesty isn’t a monopoly of the Democratic Party, but they certainly have bragging rights to it.

We are all familiar with the Democratic hit and run operation, metaphorically speaking, in which the cry of “racism” is followed by the “move on” maneuver. Louisiana state senator Karen Carter Peterson — the chairman of the state Democratic party — brings the metaphor to life as she runs away from local television reporters who ask about her declaration that opponents of Obamacare are driven by racism.

Read it.

The Atlantic, being a Voice of the Crust, approaches all subjects from the Standard Progressive Viewpoint, i.e. progress is inevitable, no progress without change, therefore all change leads to progress, therefore change is per se a Good Thing. Hence the headline — young women are changing the language therefore You Go Girl.

After writing up the list of associations on the board, I’d point out that for nearly a thousand years, double negation was standard in English. “I ne saugh nawiht” in Middle English; “I don’t see anything” in Modern English. Today, one can find it in French, which negates verbs by affixing the particles ne and pas to either side of the verb, as well as in Afrikaans, Greek, and a number of Slavic languages. The point: There is nothing inherently “ignorant” or “stupid” about double negation; judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves.

Another Standard Progressive Viewpoint: All things are inherently equal, therefore it is illegitimate to judge one thing as better than another (except when it comes to the Standard Progressive Viewpoint, of course; we tolerate all things except intolerance).

Indeed, judgments about speech are judgments about the speakers themselves because some people speak better than others, just as all contests are about the contestants themselves because some contestants are better than others within the context of the contest. But context is alien to the Progressive mind, so away with it!

Read it.

George W. Bush has been blamed by the left for everything from hurricanes to the IRS targeting conservative non-profits. But now, it turns out that former Democratic National Committee head and current Virginia gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe blames Bush for his dad dying. Really. In an interview in May 2001, McAuliffe said that his father, Jack, died because “he could not go into a new year knowing that a Republican was actually moving into the White House.”

I guess he couldn’t face the prospect of having his taxes cut and America actually winning  a war rather than just putzing around.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

But the 1% they’re talking about are merely the people who hold the ‘world’s wealth’ — actually, it’s not ‘the world’s wealth’, but their own wealth; the formulation ‘the world’s wealth’ is a verbal shell game to make you think that it’s actually somebody else’s wealth that they have nefariously stolen — but rather the governmental officials who actually control it. That’s the Real 1%, the Upper Crust who determine how that wealth is used, no matter who nominally ‘owns’ it. The nominal wealth holders are the Clever Plastic Disguise to allow the Real 1% a punching bag when it’s convenient to get the Lower Crust riled up, as the U.S. Senate attempted to do to Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, recently. Unfortunately for them, Tim Cook (who is not as stupid as John McCain, much less such of McCain’s colleagues as, say, Al Franken) knows the score and isn’t buying what they’re selling.

Read it.

Has anyone sent the Obama memo to al-Qaida?  Oh, that’s right—al-Qaida comprises “loose networks” of “lone wolves” and other lowlifes, and now that Osama bin Laden is dead, they are as rudderless as a George Lucas Star Wars prequel.  There’s no central office to send the Obama memo to.

The AP has a fascinating article out yesterday that explains how al-Qaida is highly organized like a corporate bureaucracy complete with a board of directors, expense reports from the field, and business plans, culminating in the staggering fact that the North Africa chapter raised an estimated $89 million for jihadist activity through kidnappings and ransoms.  That starts to look like a serious business model.

Obama can declare victory all he wants to, but if the other side wants war, then it’s war. And when only one side is fighting a war, guess who wins?

Read it.

One of the blind spots of the progressive mind proceeds directly from the rock-solid assumption that, since Progress is inevitable and Progress isn’t possible without change, any change will therefore lead to Progress and so failing to change is somehow throwing Progress under the bus.

Therefore, those who refuse to see change, any change, as an improvement aren’t just wrong, they are Enemies of the Future and therefore of Mankind. And if change doesn’t work out, well, just change it again! There are an infinite number of possible ways to change, and therefore an infinite number of possible avenues to Progress, so inevitably we’ll hit on one, and everything will be golden.

As things fall apart around them, they bask in the warm glow of denial, comforted by the thought that We’re On Our Way To The Future.

Morons, every one of them.

Read it.

As this graph from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows, the United States is the only developed country that doesn’t guarantee its workers either paid vacation or holidays.

Yeah, because if the U.S. did that, then we too might have unemployment rates hovering around 20%, like the Europeans.

Of course, in practice, richer workers are able to negotiate for both paid vacation and paid holidays. It’s poorer workers who can’t take any time off.

Perhaps that’s because ‘richer workers’ (i.e. those with useful skills) are worth more than ‘poorer workers’ (i.e. those who could be replaced by a robot)? Naw, that couldn’t be it. (I think that’s the first time I’ve ever seen ‘richer’ and ‘worker’ combined in an article in the Washington Post. Where was the editor? Didn’t he know that ‘workers’ aren’t ‘richer’, and ‘richer’ don’t actually ‘work’?)

This is one more way in which the poor often end up working much harder than the rich.

The others being things like minimum wage laws, mandatory union dues payments even if you don’t want to belong to the union, uncontrolled immigration of low-skilled workers, and mandatory benefits that make ‘poorer workers’ uneconomical to hire.

Of course the goal here is not to ensure that ‘poorer workers’ don’t work as hard, but to make sure that they don’t work at all, by pricing them out of the market and guaranteeing that they’ll wind up on taxpayer-provided benefits and therefore augmenting the voter base of the Democrat party.

But that’s not on your copy, of course….

Read it.

As that piece reported, Apple not only does its utmost to avoid paying federal taxes in the U.S., but also to minimize its taxes at the state and local level.

How evil. As if this asshole leftist writer doesn’t do the exact same thing whenever he gets a chance.

One favorite trick: Nevada. The Times: “With a handful of employees in a small office here in Reno, Apple has done something central to its corporate strategy: it has avoided millions of dollars in taxes in California and 20 other states. Apple’s headquarters are in Cupertino, Calif. By putting an office in Reno, just 200 miles away, to collect and invest the company’s profits, Apple sidesteps state income taxes on some of those gains. California’s corporate tax rate is 8.84 percent. Nevada’s? Zero.”

Hint: Maybe if California’s tax rate were like Nevada’s, Apple would stay there. Why does Nevada have a zero corporate tax rate? Well, perhaps because they figure that they make enough off of people fleeing California that they don’t need it. Or perhaps they realize that corporations don’t ‘pay’ taxes, they just pass them on to consumers.

If Apple really cares about a shortage of homegrown engineering talent, then it should pay taxes to fund the institutions that could address that problem.

Like the California University system, which has gone from the best in the world to among the worst? What incentive does Apple have to throw money down that rathole? The assumption here is that the only thing needed to make America’s schools great again is more money, totally ignoring the fact that spending on these very same schools has expanded dramatically during the exact period when they starting circling the drain. Going by history, this correlation suggests that cutting funding for these schools might actually make them better. But elementary logic is a foreign subject to left-wing writers.

Read it.

There’s an old saying in journalism—a story just “too good to check out.”  You can tell the media’s bias not only from what they won’t check out, but what they won’t even consider checking out, let alone reporting.

News item: a deranged young man, James Holmes, shoots up a Denver theater last summer killing 12, and ABC News’s Brian Ross goes on the air to note that there’s a “James Holmes” affiliated with a Tea Party group in the area.  Didn’t bother to check it out; it was too good not to rush to broadcast.  Turns out there was no connection.

News item: following the bombing of the Boston marathon, a host of left-leaning media types hoped it would turn out to be a “white American” and not a Muslim extremist.  NPR’s Diana Temple-Raston speculated on air that it was likely right-wing extremists behind the bombing because it was Hitler’s birthday that week, and Hitler’s birthday is “big” for the right.

News item: Terrorists behead a British soldier in broad daylight, and then proclaim to bystanders that “They won’t stop fighting until you leave us alone.”  And on the network news broadcasts I took in tonight I did not hear the word “Islamic” mentioned once in connection to the story, which even Janet Napolitano can’t spin into something other than terrorism.  Wouldn’t want to “speculate,” as Brian Ross might put it.

Of course.

On Monday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) used the devastating Oklahoma tornado as an excuse to bash Republicans for denying global warming and implied Republicans were responsible for actually allowing the destructive natural disaster to occur.

“So, you may have a question for me,” Whitehouse said on the Senate floor. “Why do you care? Why do you, Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, care if we Republicans run off the climate cliff like a bunch of proverbial lemmings and disgrace ourselves? I’ll tell you why. We’re stuck in this together. We are stuck in this together.”

After blaming natural disasters in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Texas on global warming and Republicans, Whitehouse continued his rant by criticizing the Republicans he blamed for then asking the government for federal aid dollars.

Democrats, always living at the intersection of shameless and stupid.

Read it.

‘How DARE you take entirely legal steps to minimize your tax burden! You crooks!’

Next step: Accusing Apple employees of crossing streets at crosswalks in order to avoid jaywalking tickets, and of driving under the speed limit.

I swear, these people…. And McCain, that crypto-Democrat, is the worst of the lot.

Read it.

But there was a consensus!

Read it.

A major study of nearly 12,000 peer-reviewed papers in the climate-science literature has – again – proven that among climate scientists, an overwhelming percentage agree with the consensus view that human activity causes global warming.

Not mentioned is the fact that if you don’t agree with the consensus view that human activity causes global warming, you won’t get a peer-reviewed paper published in the climate-science literature. Rather changes the perspective.

Read it.

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

Read it.

As the former head of an explicitly racist organization, I suppose he ought to know.

Read it.

MailMany modern Europeans have a special ability to piss themselves when the subject of firearms comes up, and the international worry-storm triggered by Defense Distributed’s development and distribution of plans for a fully 3D-printed, single-shot pistol have created just the latest opportunity for merriment and mayhem in Great Britain. In a story full of very nicely staged assassinesque photos of reporters clutching a “Liberator” pistol in public, the Daily Mail reports how it printed out the gun and “smuggled” it onto the Eurostar train, past security, “alongside hundreds of unsuspecting travellers.”

Read it.

I am not inclined to trust in the intellectual capacity of a white guy who wears his hair like he wishes he were a black guy, but you never know.

Jaron Lanier is a computer science pioneer who has grown gradually disenchanted with the online world since his early days popularizing the idea of virtual reality. “Lanier is often described as ‘visionary,’ ” Jennifer Kahn wrote in a 2011 New Yorker profile, “a word that manages to convey both a capacity for mercurial insight and a lack of practical job skills.”

Perhaps that’s why I’ve never heard of him.

Raised mostly in Texas and New Mexico by bohemian parents who’d escaped anti-Semitic violence in Europe, he’s been a young disciple of Richard Feynman, an employee at Atari, a scholar at Columbia, a visiting artist at New York University, and a columnist for Discover magazine. He’s also a longtime composer and musician, and a collector of antique and archaic instruments, many of them Asian.

In other words, a Child of the Crust. I dislike him already.

His book continues his war on digital utopianism and his assertion of humanist and individualistic values in a hive-mind world.

And of course nothing says ‘I’m an individualist and war against a hive-mind world’ like a white guy wearing dreadlocks. No shit.

Read it.

Feel free to use this information to construct a News Story Bingo card. Modern ‘journalists’ have very little imagination and even less creativity, so they all follow the talking points issued by the White House and the New York Times.

John Hinderaker faces a serious problem.

It is not easy to select the dumbest article to appear in the New York Times in any given week. Even if we exclude columns by Paul Krugman and Tom Friedman on the ground of lifetime achievement, there is plenty of idiocy to choose from. My nominee for this week is this piece by Nancy DiTomaso, titled “How Social Networks Drive Black Unemployment.” Ms. DiTomaso, a professor at Rutgers business School, undertakes to explain persistently high unemployment among African-Americans. Some would say the obvious culprit is the anti-growth policies of the Obama administration, but Ms. DiTomaso is not interested in turning over that particular rock. Her starting point is quite different….

Read it.

A few months ago, when a clip aired revealing that current Arab Spring president of Egypt Morsi had, before he was elected, maintained that the Jewish people are “apes and swine”, it became apparent to any rational observer of the mainstream media that the mainstream media’s knowledge of Islam is an inverse limit approaching zero. Like one of those horrendous calculus strings as things go from bad to worse, the media either didn’t report Morsi’s sentiments because it is salaciously inconvenient, or chose to obfuscate by appeals to western ignorance of the nuances of the region, alleged Israeli atrocities, and its flagship ideology, Islam.

Obfuscation is the latest and only tactic left for the media in all matters concerning Islam and Muslims, a tactic not afforded to any other group. It has hallmarks of an affirmative action mindset, where everything is reduced to grievance and historical justification, and causes are deduced from those grievances.  And in so being, it is highly incoherent. Tangentially, as an easily accessible example, the conclusion that is often nimbly deduced from this mindset is that nationalism is bad because nationalism is the cause of the abuse of which Muslims have been subjected; whether it be the French, the British, Israelis or the Russians, a nation and their xenophobic national pride or colonial avarice is to blame.  But without an idea of a collective nation or culture, what use is the argument of collective grievance? And if it is of no use in regards to the French, but in fact a source of great self-deprecation, why is it used in respect to the Chechens, the Palestinians, or, for that matter, the Tibetans?

Nobody bothers to answer these questions because nobody bothers to ask them. Rather, the western powers are subjected to the idiocy of a one David Sirota when its civilians are killed and maimed.

Read it. Or don’t.

As an author, and one that is currently living on unemployment insurance payments, DRM-free scares the shit out of me. Every book I’ve ever published has been pirated. Some I have even found in the “/tmp” directory of open HTTP servers. Every time I see my books pirated I die a little inside.

So get a real job. There’s no law that says you have to be a writer.

Writing is very difficult for me. People don’t realize how hard it is. How do I stop procrastinating and sit down to write? I eliminate everything else “tempting” from my life for a year or two until the book is done. Do you know what’s more tempting to do than writing? Everything. This basically means anything fun… eliminated. It kills my nights and weekends. It kills my social life. I say “no” to every invitation, movie night, gaming night, etc. When the book is done I always hold a big party to celebrate but also to re-introduce myself to my friends and loved ones that I’ve haven’t seen in so long.

If you hate it so much, why do it? There’s no law that says you have to be a writer. I’d advise you to get into an un’piratable’ line of work. Plumbing, say. Or maybe carpentry.

So what if you really really really want to be a writer? Write! Doesn’t mean you are somehow entitled to make a living at it. I’d dearly love to be able to make a living as a teacher, too, but it doesn’t pay shit, so I don’t do that as my day job. I’m sure the guy who quit working in order to get a degree in Puppetry, for which there is no apparent commercial demand, feels just as pregnant as you do. But you’ll both have to get over it, or starve.

First World Problem.

There is no molehill so small that some humorless retard can’t make into a mountain. Feminists have a particular talent in this regard. (You can tell they’re feminists because they think that wearing the traditional tin-foil hats is a surrender to patriarchy.)

Read it.

What MSNBC fails to realize is that Obama hasn’t diverted from the Bush Doctrine one iota. Sure, maybe he’d rather call Republicans ‘enemies’ than terrorists and uses drones more than Bush, but: He kinda mostly continued with Bush’s policy in the context of prevention. Obama began withdrawal from Iraq on Bush’s schedule, he called for a Bush-esque surge in Afghanistan, he never closed Gitmo like he promised, he extended the scope and duration of the Patriot Act, he ordered drone strikes without due process (Bush called it preemption) — revive? Obama has never stopped Bush’s approach to the war on terror. What’s more, Obama ordered interrogation before Miranda which drew bipartisan criticism.

Steve Sailer is tracking the Thought Police so you don’t have to.

… It appears that gradually, over time, editors have begun the process of moving women, one by one, alphabetically, from the “American Novelists” category to the “American Women Novelists” subcategory. So far, female authors whose last names begin with A or B have been most affected, although many others have, too.I would presume the motivation for this would be for the convenience of English / Womyn’s Studies majors and the like. (I could look it up on the Talk page, if I were interested enough.) It sounds like a bad idea, but one that my sources at Sexism Central tell me was not on their radar for implementation in the 2013 Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy.

And thank God for that….

Read it. Do so thoroughly, because I feel a rant coming on.

This article illustrates the sort of crap that passes for thinking among Voices of the Crust these days.

There are two labor markets nowadays. There’s the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional.

‘Horrbly dysfunctional’ is a pretty strong term. This guy must be a trained economist, right, to justify using so strong a term about a natural pattern of human activity that, after all, works whether you want it to or not? Well, as it turns out, no:

 Matthew O’Brien is an associate editor at The Atlantic covering business and economics. He has previously written for The New Republic.

As it turns out, he’s Just Another Left Journalist. My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Okay, let’s look at his journalism.

Long-term unemployment is a terrifying trap. Once you’ve been out of work for six months, there’s little you can do to find work. Employers put you at the back of the jobs line, regardless of how strong the rest of your resume is. After all, they usually don’t even look at it.

The first thing that popped into my mind is a question: Why? I find this situation as counter-intuitive as the writer does, but when I come across such a thing, I want to dig into it. Why are employers — apparently, almost universally — doing this unexpected thing? There’s something going on here that we don’t see. Very puzzling. Ah! But we have an experienced, highly-paid journalist on the case. Let’s see what he finds out.

Except that he doesn’t. Nowhere in this article is any indication that he found out why, or that he even looked. Employers are being shits, and that’s all there is to it. They must be Really Evil People, just picking on a bunch of victims Because They Can.

Let’s be clear. Ghayad’s field study shows employers discriminate against the long-term unemployed.

Ooooh, discrimination. That’s pretty scary. Call in the torturers. But people discriminate all the time, and Voices of the Crust raise no objection. Planned Parenthood discriminates against unborn children, pretty severely at times, and that’s okay. The Obama administration discriminates against white people, and that’s just fine. Federal give-away programs discriminate against anybody who isn’t of the correct Victim Class, and everybody’s good with it. The tax code discriminates against rich people, and that’s not a problem. I discriminate against Mexican food, primarily because I don’t like Mexican food, and I’m not thrown in jail. (Yet, anyway.)

Still, you’d think that any rational adult, much less an experienced journalist, would be interested in the question Why? But this guy is not. (Speculation as to whether journalists qualify as rational adults is an exercise left to the reader.)

Well, okay, we don’t know why. And if we don’t know why, we can’t really start trying to ‘fix’ it, can we? Ah, my friend, you underestimate the Left Journalist mind — there is an answer, the same answer they have to every problem they sort-of-look-into: More Government.

It’s time for the government to start hiring the long-term unemployed. Or, at the least, start giving employers tax incentives to hire the long-term unemployed.

For a guy who didn’t bother to look into why a situation is happening, he seems awfully quick with a solution, doesn’t he? Let’s just have government pick up the slack, with all of that extra money they have, no doubt distilled out of unicorn farts.

The worst possible outcome for all of us is if the long-term unemployed become unemployable. That would permanently reduce our productive capacity.

The worst possible outcome? For all of us? I suggest that the worst possible outcome is for the government to become the default employer for those who can’t get a job, using all the money that they don’t have any more; by that reasoning, the government would be buying all those buggy whips that nobody needs anymore.

And it’s not a problem for those of us who have a job, or can get a job in less than six months — obviously this guy doesn’t read his own writing. Lefty Journalists just like to take molehills and make them into Mount Rushmore (awaiting the addition of Barack Obama’s smiling visage).

And I’ve got news for you, neighbor: THEY’RE ALREADY UNEMPLOYABLE. YOU JUST BITCHED ABOUT IT. The question is WHY and you went right by it as if it were invisible (which, I suppose, to a Left Journalist it is). DO YOUR JOB. FIGURE OUT WHY. Then maybe we’ll listen to your proposal on how to fix it.

We can do better, and we need to start doing so now. We can’t afford long-term thinking in either the short or the long-term.

Let that one sink in for a bit. We can’t afford long-term thinking, as if short-term thinking ever solved a problem for longer than the short term. No, Mr Lefty Journalist, long-term thinking is precisely what we need, and badly; and precisely what we AREN’T GETTING: Not from you, not from your fellow ‘journalists’, and not from the people who hold the Reins Of Power.

And THAT’S the real problem here. One in which you appear not interested.

And they pay people good money to write this swill. I’m in the wrong line of work, obviously.

David Friedman blows the whistle.

 A recent post by Chuck Marr on a Huffington Post blog provides a nice demonstration of how to use true facts to support a false claim. It contains a series of charts with information on taxes, mostly federal. One of them is labeled: “Bush Tax Cuts Heavily Tilted to the Top,” and shows that the percentage increase in after-tax income as a result of the tax cuts was almost three times as large for taxpayers with incomes of more than a million dollars as for those with incomes of $40,000-$50,000.

What it does not mention, but what one can see from other charts on the page, is that high income taxpayers pay in federal taxes about three times as large a fraction of their income as middle income tax payers. So if the tax cuts reduced everyone’s taxes by the same percentage, the result would have been almost exactly what the chart shows. Indeed, the author could have made his claim even more striking by pointing out that taxpayers near the bottom of the income distribution got nothing out of the tax cuts—and neglecting to mention that the reason was that they were not paying any taxes.

It’s all about what fits the Narrative, and a Voice of the Crust like Huffington Post gets with the program.

Read it.

Similar to the classes Communist regimes used to run where students indulged in ‘self-criticism’ for being so gauche as to be not workers or peasants.

Of course, Officially Non-White people could eliminate all of this ‘white privilege’ merely by ‘acting white’ — which, of course, they will never do.

Deborah Copaken Kogan, as one might expect from a female writing in The Nation, demonstrates that even people who make their living from words can’t seem to grasp that ‘inequality’ and ‘inequity’ are not synonyms. Ah, well. Life is full of whiners.

The Other McCain looks at the political agenda of modern ‘journalism’.

For example, I’ve never quite understood (and there was a lot of questioning among media-watchers at the time) why Matthew Shepard’s death became a nationwide cause célèbre, with nationally televised vigils and so forth. As murders go, Shepard’s murder wasn’t particularly unusual: Privileged college kid goes to a local pub, meets up with a couple of local two-bit hoodlums who decide to rip him off and, instead, the rip-off escalates into murder.

Nasty crimes like that are unfortunately not man-bites-dog news and, except for the fact that Shepard was gay, his death might never have made headlines outside of Wyoming. But of course, Shepard was gay, and so his death became a symbol of America’s Rampant Homophobia and — if you didn’t pay much attention to the details — you might have thought Shepard’s killers were right-wing fundamentalist Christians, rather than a couple of small-town petty criminals, both of whom had prior records for minor offenses including burglary and marijuana possession.

Hey, if it fits the Narrative, that’s front-page material.

OK, so what if the rape-murder victim is a 13-year-old boy? That’s kind of a rare crime, and if the victim suffocated — bound and gagged — during an hours-long torture ordeal in which he was repeatedly sodomized, you might think a crime like that would be considered newsworthy.

But most people have never heard of Jesse Dirkhising, and there are those of us who suspect that maybe Jesse Dirkising is nearly unknown for pretty much the same reason that Matthew Shepard became famous: There’s an agenda.

Never mind whether it’s a good agenda or a bad agenda, it’s an agenda, and everybody knows what it is.

The point, from my perspective, is that news coverage is being influenced by a sort of consensus opinion among the influential elite of the journalism industry that some crime victims are more equal than others.

Hey, if it doesn’t fit the Narrative, it’s buried in the back pages.

Read it.

UNION GROVE, Wis. – Eighth-graders in Wisconsin’s Union Grove school district were assigned to fill out a “Liberalism vs. Conservatism” crossword puzzle, and they learned some new and very questionable “facts.”

Students learned conservatism is “the political belief of preserving traditional moral values by restricting personal freedoms … ”

Conversely, they learned liberalism is “the political belief of equality and personal freedom for everyone, often changing the current system to increase government protection of civil liberties.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. So are the people who want to smoke in restaurants, drink a Big Gulp, use transfats or salt in cooking, or own the gun guaranteed them by the Second Amendment.

Well, that’s what happens when you send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

“Courts Without Judges” reads the headline of an attack on Senate Republicans by the New York Times editorial board. Bemoaning the fact that there 85 vacancies in the federal judiciary, the Times asserts that “by far the most important cause of this unfortunate state of affairs is the determination of Senate Republicans, for reasons of politics, ideology and spite, to confirm as few of President Obama’s judicial choices as possible.”

However, as Ed Whelan points out, in the second-to-last paragraph of the editorial we learn that “62 district and circuit court vacancies have no nominees.” Thus, the cause of three-quarters of the 85 vacancies is that President Obama hasn’t made nominations.

Of course, Democrats do exactly the same thing to Republican Presidential nominees (Judge Bork, are you listening?), but that somehow never seems to make it into the papers.

Read it. And by all means watch the video.

Read it.

And, of course, nothing in the news reports indicate that he’s a Person of Color, unless you are lucky enough to get a photograph, as here.

And,of course, if it were Republicans involved, charges of racism would be flying from the east even unto the west.

Read it.

And if you fix those, we’ll fine other ones. So you might as well just give up now and go kill yourself. Be sure to apologize in your suicide note.

Read it.

Is there anything that this guy won’t politicize?

No; no, I suppose there isn’t.

Read it.

 This evening, on Ed Schultz’s soon-to-be-extinct weeknight MSNBC show, a histrionic Michael Moore accused white gun owners of racism . . . then proceeded to say it was reasonable for them not to be afraid of their white neighbors  . . . and admitted he felt more comfortable walking down the streets of Toronto than Detroit.

Read it.

This is what happens when a psychologist tries to write history.

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Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee in January, Independence Institute Research Director David Kopel, a leading gun policy scholar, noted:

    The murderer at Sandy Hook fired 150 shots over a 20-minute period, before the police arrived. In other words, a rate of fewer than 8 shots per minute. This is a rate of fire far slower than the capabilities of a lever-action Henry Rifle from 1862, or a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle from 2010. Indeed, his rate of fire could have been far exceeded by a competent person using very old technology, such as a break-open double-barreled shotgun.

So Lupica, like other supporters of Feinstein’s bill, is simply wrong to think that Lanza needed a special sort of gun to fire as fast as he did. In any case, as Kopel pointed out, the criteria that legislators use to identify so-called assault weapons “do not ban guns based on how fast they fire, or how powerful they are.” Rather, “the definitions are based on the name of a gun, or on whether a firearm has certain superficial accessories (such as a bayonet lug, or a grip in the ‘wrong’ place).” Feinstein’s bill, for example, would ban the Bushmaster rifle that Lanza used by name while specifically exempting other rifles (such as the Ruger Mini-14, as long as it has a fixed stock) that fire the same ammunition just as quickly.

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There is a certain enlightened segment of America that relishes a good gastro-scolding, whether delivered gently by a Michael Pollan (“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants”) or more vituperatively by a Mark Bittman (“In the time it takes to go into a McDonald’s, stand in line, order, wait, pay and leave, you could make oatmeal for four while taking your vitamins, brushing your teeth and half-unloading the dishwasher”). But there is a much larger segment of America whose members heedlessly eat processed foods that make them overweight and unwell. Michael Moss, a dogged investigative reporter who neither scolds nor proselytizes, is here for them.

And that’s about as close to good sense as a review in the New York Times can stand to get; not all that close. A more intelligent person, without an ax to grind, would hesitate to use the phrase ‘who neither scolds nor proselytizes’, about a book with a subtitle that suggests that unhealthy eating (by the finger-pointer’s definition, of course) is a sudden calamity visited upon the innocent consumer by the big bad corporate giants, without any individual choice or responsibility involved.

Moss’s gift to posterity is the phrase “pink slime,” which he popularized in a 2009 New York Times article as part of a series on beef safety that won him a Pulitzer Prize.

Oh, yeah, ‘pink slime’ doesn’t scold or proselytize, not a bit. (Where are these people when it’s big bad government doing the nasty on taxpayers? In the box with the ambiguity, I suppose.)

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Jillian Rayfield of Salon.com set out to create a false narrative about Breitbart News Network’s “The Uninvited” CPAC event, complete with accusations of “Islamaphobia,” before the panelists spoke a single word, according to an eyewitness.

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

“Before the panel discussion, they had already had their posts prepared,” Poole said. “I was sitting directly beside them and she had her article on ‘Islamaphobia is alive and well at CPAC’ post all ready to go.”

Poole said this is an example of Salon’s far left-wing writers fabricating a “pre-determined narrative” aimed at undermining the substance of arguments made during the event.

Hey, that’s what they’re paid for.

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“White Privilege” is the theory advanced by people desperate to claim racism but who can’t actually find racism.  So it’s no surprise that many White Privilege conferences are held on campuses.

Not sure when ‘privilege’ came to be a synonym for ‘advantage’, but I suppose it’s all part of the Narrative.

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Wow. A liberal professor at NYU agrees with Mayor Bloomberg’s nanny state statist policies. Who could have predicted such a thing?

Lileks takes a look at the fever swamps.

The Onion tweeted this bio of Pope Francis, and I shrugged and unfollowed. Now: does the person who wrote that think he is a better person than the Pope? I guarantee it. The writer, I’d bet, holds certain ideological positions which are the mark of a Proper Person, and whose possession insulates the holder from all sorts of criticism. The Pope, for example, does not believe in changing marriage, which means one can safely put him in the “hater” or “-phobe” category that frees one from additional intellectual expenditures. There’s the story going around about his visit to an AIDS clinic, where he washed and kissed the feet of sufferers, which the author of the Onion piece would dismiss as a PR stunt without any regard for the meaning of the act, and then also make a face and say “really, seriously? Ick.”

So it’s faith, not works.

The last is somewhat subtle – Lileks is nominally a Lutheran.

Left rag International Business Times response with shock and awe.

Of course, that means there are 34 states in which car accidents kill more people than guns, but that headline wouldn’t have fit the nerrative.

Get with the program! Ban those cars! Oh, wait….

Lefty rag Business Insider serves as an echo chamber for British lefty rag The Guardian recycling the same old ‘feminist’ tropes. (The screen title says ‘Married Men Should Change Their Names’; freedom for women isn’t enough for feminists, men have to be oppressed before they’re happy – if feminists could ever be happy, which seems doubtful.)

Excuse me while I play the cranky feminist for a minute, but I’m disheartened every time I sign into Facebook and see a list of female names I don’t recognize.

And, of course, it’s All About You. The distinguishing characteristic of ‘feminists’ and other proto-fascists appears to be deep anger that the world isn’t Doing Things Their Way. Come on, world! Get with the program!

You got married, congratulations! But why, in 2013, does getting married mean giving up the most basic marker of your identity?

Oh, maybe because their identity is now changing a bit? And they want to indicate that publicly? Next up, she’ll castigate them for getting married at all.

And if family unity is so important, why don’t men ever change their names?

They do, although ‘feminists’ will never admit it. And there are cultures where women don’t take their husbands’ last names, although feminists will never admit that, either.

Read it.

The RINOs come out to play their appeasement games.

McCain quoted heavily from a Wall Street Journal editorial that slammed Paul’s filibuster on the Obama administration’s drone use, including a line that said “If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously, he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids in college dorms.”

Yeah, those guys who didn’t vote for McCain. That’ll show ’em.

John McCain seems to be settling into his post-candidate career as the Boring Rerun of Bob Dole. Every time he opens his mouth, I find myself missing Barry Goldwater.