Mark Bittman, the official Food Fascist for the New York Times, explains why all you Little People are a bunch of idiots about food.

A study published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal PLoS One links increased consumption of sugar with increased rates of diabetes by examining the data on sugar availability and the rate of diabetes in 175 countries over the past decade. And after accounting for many other factors, the researchers found that increased sugar in a population’s food supply was linked to higher diabetes rates independent of rates of obesity.

In other words, according to this study, it’s not just obesity that can cause diabetes: sugar can cause it, too, irrespective of obesity. And obesity does not always lead to diabetes.

The study demonstrates this with the same level of confidence that linked cigarettes and lung cancer in the 1960s. As Rob Lustig, one of the study’s authors and a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California, San Francisco, said to me, “You could not enact a real-world study that would be more conclusive than this one.”

THE SCIENCE IS IN! GLOBAL WARMING TOXIC SUGAR IS REAL! HIDE YOUR CHILDREN! OR AT LEAST SEND THEM TO A GOVERNMENT SCHOOL WHERE THEY WILL BE FED ACCORDING TO GOVERNMENT GUIDELINES AND THEREBY SAVED FROM THEIR STUPID PARENTS!

But as Lustig says, “This study is proof enough that sugar is toxic. Now it’s time to do something about it.”

The next steps are obvious, logical, clear and up to the Food and Drug Administration.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

Don’t you wonder, sometimes, how the Times’s reporters and editors did on their SATs? Just remember, next time that paper tells you the science on some topic or other is settled, that you are getting that assurance from people who don’t know the difference between diameter and circumference.

Read it.

On the agenda was one item: the emerging obesity epidemic and how to deal with it.

Aha! Obesity isn’t related at all to, you know, actual personal choices that people make! It’s an EPIDEMIC! You catch fatness, like a DISEASE! It’s obviously a Public Health Problem that is (as with all other Public Health Problems, like trans-fats and how much salt to use or soda to put in a container) The Job Of The Government!

“We were very concerned, and rightfully so, that obesity was becoming a major issue,” Behnke recalled. “People were starting to talk about sugar taxes, and there was a lot of pressure on food companies.”

In other words, they anticipated (rightly so, based on recent history) that they were about to get butt-fucked by politicians ginning up a crisis in order to demagogue their way to retaining their taxpayer-funded jobs, and so (like prey everywhere) were trying to figure out how to escape — the swine.

A chemist by training with a doctoral degree in food science, Behnke became Pillsbury’s chief technical officer in 1979 and was instrumental in creating a long line of hit products, including microwaveable popcorn. He deeply admired Pillsbury but in recent years had grown troubled by pictures of obese children suffering from diabetes and the earliest signs of hypertension and heart disease.

Pillsbury, of course, was obviously holding the little brats down and stuffing popcorn down their maws — the swine.

Food manufacturers were now being blamed for the problem from all sides — academia, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society. The secretary of agriculture, over whom the industry had long held sway, had recently called obesity a “national epidemic.”

Oh noes! Food companies actually try to make food that people will like! And BUY! The horror! The horror!

Message: You’re too stoopid to know what’s good for you — that’s why God gave you food columnists in the New York Times.

Read it.

Why Priests? falls below his usual low standards. The main thesis is that priests ruin everything. They’re power-hungry monsters who’ve taken over the Church, destroying the affirming, companionable, and egalitarian message of Jesus. Moreover, the priestly fixation on ritual sacrifice adds a bloodthirsty, prosecutorial, and altogether primitive cast to Christianity, which Garry Wills promises to deliver us from, restoring for the first time in two millennia the original spirit of Jesus and his followers.

Wills has been coasting on the virtues of his one good book, Nixon Agonistes, for about 40 years now. (If you haven’t read it, I urge you to do so; it contains valuable insights about the sixties and seventies, even to those of  us who lived through them.) Like the Republican apparatchik who hates Republican principles (cue Kevin Phillips, David Frum, Conor Friedersdorf, and David Brooks), he makes his living off of pandering to the Crust while pretending to be from the other side. (You’d think they’d get tired of this sort of thing, but they don’t.)

Like many other pretend Catholics, Wills makes the Protestant mistake of thinking that he knows more about what Christ intended than the people who were taught by Christ and or the people whom they taught. (This is an attitude that I have never been able to understand, myself, but it’s sufficiently widespread that it appears to be deeply rooted in human nature.) Odd thought: Nobody ever tries to tell the Latter Day Saints that they’ve got Joseph Smith all wrong. I wonder why that is….

There’s a lot of angry bluster in Garry Wills, but little else.

And that pretty much sums it up.

Read it.

According to sources for CBS local in New York, “Sources indicated that Lanza wanted to top Breivik’s death toll, and chose Sandy Hook because it was an easy target with a large cluster of people.” The fact that Sandy Hook was a gun free zone could not have gone unnoticed by Lanza.

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

John Hinderaker blows the whistle on the Axis of Drivel.

The liberal media manifest their bias not primarily by writing things that aren’t true–although that sometimes happens–but rather, by selecting what they do and do not report as news. Major scandals and events of great importance are simply ignored if they do not reflect well on the Democratic Party, while minor stories receive endless attention if they advance the liberal agenda. You could illustrate this every day; here are a few examples from today’s news.

The Other McCain blows the whistle.

San Diego’s former mayor, Maureen O’Connor, is a liberal Democrat. But now that she’s been charged in a massive scandal — she stole more than $2 million from a charity established by her late husband, in order to fund a decade-long gambling binge – the New York Times somehow can’t bring itself to mention her partisan affiliation.

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

Timothy Egan writes for the New York Times on American politics and life, as seen from the Upper West Side.

Voices of the Crust, like Gorillas in the Mist, are totally predictable.

Like everyone else with a perverse curiosity about a castle-bound community fussing over whether to use a bouillon or a melon spoon, I’ve been consumed by the turns in “Downton Abbey,” the latest export from England to keep American public television afloat.

‘Perverse curiosity’? How about a more honest ‘secret longing’? Scribblers in service to the Crust have a secret wallet-envy for their inherited-wealth masters that often breaks out in the most revealing ways. At times it even leads them into inadvertent admissions of truth, such as this one that American public television is so bad it depends on foreign imports to stay above water.

But if someone with grease on his hands and an accent from a workaday neighborhood can rise to an estate management position in the rigid British class system, what, by comparison, are we to make of the American experience nearly a century removed?

Note that this apparently doesn’t apply to people named Kennedy who are in their fourth generation of living off the pile left by a former bootlegger and Democrat machine-politician.

Oh, but we are a nation free of class conflict, we tell ourselves daily, and live with the illusion that everyone with a job is somehow middle class.

As, indeed, they think of themselves – try to find somebody who goes to a job everyday that doesn’t describe himself (or herself) as ‘middle class’, however much they may have in the bank. It is this perception of themselves as ‘middle class’ that makes Americans, well, middle-class, especially in their outlook. The only people these days who think of themselves as ‘upper class’ (although they are never so gauche as to say it out loud) are the trust-fund babies of the Crust and their lickspittles in the press and the academy; again, it is self-perception, rather than bank balances, that maketh the man (or woman).

And yet, a raft of recent studies has found the United States to be a less upwardly mobile society than many comparable nations, particularly for men.

A trend that Democrats, Party of the Crust, keep hammering home, with policies ranging from the minimum wage (to keep working class people from entering the middle class) to confiscatory tax rates on income and inheritance (to keep middle class people from competing with the Crust for tony restaurant seats, slips in the marina, and condos in Aspen). The most ironic aspect of ‘less upwardly mobile’ in America is that the people complaining most loudly about it are the people most responsible for it in the first place.

One survey reported that 42 percent of American boys raised in the bottom fifth of income stayed there as adults.

Two words: Minimum wage. (Two more words: Gangsta culture.) If your idea of success in life is Kanye West or Tupac Shakur, then yeah, you’re going to be in the bottom fifth of income for pretty much ever.

Read it.

Because God forbid anybody should think them different from men.

A totally righteous argument, right? But the petition, which has 716 signatures at the time of this writing, says that this sort of language is “counterproductive to the women’s equality the President is ostensibly supporting.” It goes on to explain, “Defining women by their relationships to other people is reductive, misogynist, and alienating to women who do not define ourselves exclusively by our relationships to others. Further, by referring to ‘our’ wives et al, the President appears to be talking to The Men of America about Their Women, rather than talking to men AND women.”

Seven hundred and sixteen. An amazing crowd. The White House will be swamped.

Read it.

The Crust have their panties in a wad once again.

Ms. Stewart continued: “This photo cements stereotypes, perpetuates an imbalance in the power dynamic, is reminiscent of centuries of colonialism (and indentured servitude) and serves as a good example of both creating a centrality of whiteness and using ‘exotic’ people as fashion props.”

They actually pay people to write this crap. No wonder the country is screwed up. No Kleagle of the KKK was ever so obsessed with race as these drones of the political Left.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

It’s like if all the most advanced thinkers agreed that witches don’t exist, but that the career of witch-hunting remained lucrative and admired.

…

It’s fascinating how even the people who write and edit for the New York Times on human genetics-related subjects don’t actually read the New York Times’s excellent reporting on human genetics.

Russ Smith hates on the New York Times.

Just as a decreasing number of Americans still have the jingle “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should” etched in a corner of their minds, some people still claim—in all seriousness—that The New York Times is the “paper of record.” It’s fairly beyond dispute that the percentage of media consumers under the age of 30 don’t cling to that opinion about the Times, let alone even recognize the famous motto pushed by the paper, and so, inevitably, one day it’ll die out. Probably not in my lifetime, for even as the Times, like other print dailies, slides into niche-status—not unlike vinyl recordings—steadfast loyalists will warble, “If it’s in the Times, it must be true.”

John Podhoretz uncovers the rocks in the SOTU speech and watches what crawls out.

Last night, Barack Obama told Congress that “The American people don’t expect government to solve every problem.”

They might not expect it, but don’t worry, he’s got a plan for every problem — and in every case, the solution is more government.

Read it.

This pope has left a record of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of words and it is astounding how many liberal Catholics have read none of them. For a so-called Catholic pundit to talk about the pope and his place in history without having read a single word of the more than 50 books the Holy Father has written is like someone covering the Washington Nationals and not knowing Bryce Harper’s stats.

This is why, for the next few weeks of media attention on Rome, the progressive, leaning forward Catholic left will offer the most juvenile and reactionary coverage. There are basically three requirements to writing liberals columns and books about the Catholic Church:

1) Don’t know your subject. It is especially important that liberal Catholic intellectuals not read any of Pope Benedict’s writings. His books, particularly the popular Jesus of Nazareth series, are much more accessible than the works of John Paul II, which could get bogged down in academic jargon. He has also written tens of volumes about the liturgy, theology, Church history, and his own life. And in the unfortunate event that you do read some of his work, make sure you misquote it or use deceptive ellipses — see Wills, Gary.

2) Bring the snark. “The pope, following Sarah Palin’s lead, resigns.” So tweeted Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post shortly after the news broke of Pope Benedict’s abdication. I call this the Ana Marie Coxing of journalism. In order to debase the pope, it’s necessary to drag him into your pop culture frame of reference — even if doing so results in a joke that is neither insightful nor funny. The low end of this is, of course, Andrew Sullivan, who jokes about the pope wearing a “dress” and nice shoes.

3) Bring straw men. Lots of them. Throw a party. The pope hates women and gays. He’s turned his back on the Second Vatican Council. He doesn’t understand the modern world. Crucial to this step is a firm grounding in step #1.

Equally important is the iron insistence that the western world has not moved to the left in the last 50 years. To ignore the liberal shift means that one can simply say that gay marriage, the welfare state, and sexual “freedom” are simple facts of life, and that to be against them is like standing against the tides.

Hey — why treat the Pope with any more respect than they treat the average Republican? One must maintain standards, you know, and being a Voice of the Crust is a challenging (but deeply superficial) career.

Read it.

To me, the greatest fun lies in imagining how snazzy downtown high-speed rail stations might reshape and revive the fortunes of cities like Detroit, Cleveland, and St. Louis. Opponents of mass transit point out that such cities are built around the automobile, not mass transit, and thus lack the density needed to support a high-speed rail system. Proponents tend to agree—but note that cities can change. The federal government today spends more on highways in a single year than it does on Amtrak in 40. Hypothetically, a shift in transportation funding back to rail might spur a 21st-century boom in downtown redevelopment, much as the construction of the highway system spawned the suburbs in the post-World War II era.

Yeah, and maybe by then we’ll have our flying cars.

The reason why ‘progressives’ (statists, really) love trains and hate cars is that cars go from where you are to where you want to go, whereas trains go from where the statists think you ought to be to where they think you ought to want to go. Automobiles empower individual freedom, which is why statists hate them; trains are the fair-haired children of those who like density and central planning.

Read it.

The new New Republic, pictured to the right, makes the brave, original case that Republicans are white people.

While we wait for Sam Tanenhaus’s “historical investigation” to be made available online, a quick Wikipedia investigation of the magazine’s 15 editors throughout its century of publishing reveals that each and every one–Herbert Croly, Bruce Bliven, Henry A. Wallace, Michael Straight, Gilbert A. Harrison, Marty Peretz, Michael Kinsley, Hendrik Hertzberg, Andrew Sullivan, Michael Kelly, Charles Lane, Peter Beinart, Franklin Foer, Richard Just, and Chris Hughes–was not just white, but white and male. Hey white boy, watcha doin’ uptown?Though word on the street is that TNR is now “add[ing] women’s voices to a magazine that has long been short on them,” so hooray for progress, etc.

Read it.

While we pray for those murdered and everyone who might be in danger, we cannot forget that the media and its allies in the Democratic Party have set a standard when it comes to reporting on the possible political motives of mass murderers. Though they generally make things up to turn the death of innocents into a talking point against the Right, it is still the left who set this precedent.

And what do you know, Chris Dorner, the former police officer suspected of being behind the murder rampage presently unfolding in Los Angeles, has apparently left behind a manifesto addressed to America that the media are already selectively reporting on to leave out the more inconvenient portions. You see, there is no political upside for the media to reveal the politics of this suspected madman.

What is being reported as Mr. Dorner’s manifesto not only endorses Hillary Clinton for president in 2016 and vigorously defends Barack Obama and the Democrats’ current gun control push; he also savages the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre while expressing all kinds of love for some of the biggest stars in the left-wing media — by name.

Which is why it hasn’t been all over the news, as it would have been had they been able to spin him as a right-winger.

Matthew Yglesias, Voice of the Crust, lays out the next step in the program: Repeating past mistakes.

They actually pay him to write this drivel. How can I get a job like that? Perhaps changing my name to Emilio Garbanzo would help.

Not me.

Read it.

From reading it, I must assume this is a parody. I would have a hard time taking usage advice from someone who misuses ‘should’ in the place of ‘ought’.

Read it.

But was 2012 really the warmest year on record in the U.S.? It may have been, but the truth is that we don’t know. There are two reasons for this. First, the historical data sets published by NCDC and NOAA lack integrity. Those organizations, which receive many millions of government dollars to promote global warming theory, do not publish raw data. Rather, as we explained here, they first adjust the data. How do they adjust it? They depress the temperatures that were actually recorded in past decades, in order to make today’s temperatures look warmer by comparison….

…

Then there is the fact that weather stations in the U.S. are generally sited in areas that are getting warmer for reasons having nothing to do with global warming, i.e., urbanization. Moreover, Anthony Watts’s research found that no less than 89% of weather stations in the U.S. fail to comply with the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements because they are located too close to heat sources.

Read it.

In the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, CNN’s Piers Morgan found a cause: gun control. Now some Americans want him deported. And…

Oh, sorry: You’re wondering who Piers Morgan is.

Well, I’m not, but most normal people might be.

He draws half the viewers of Sean Hannity and Rachel Maddow in the same time slot.

That many? Color me surprised.

I can spare those Americans who want me deported a lot of effort by saying this: If you don’t change your gun laws to at least try to stop this relentless tidal wave of murderous carnage, then you don’t have to worry about deporting me….I would…seriously consider deporting myself.

Don’t let the door hit you in the butt on the way out.

George Will spanks a Stanford law professor.

Karlan’s disdain for the Citizens United decision — which held that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment rights when they choose to speak collectively through corporate entities — is muddled. She denounces “spending by outside groups” without explaining what they are outside of. Evidently she accepts the self-interested assumption of the political class — the parties and candidates — that elections are their property and independent participants are trespassers. Karlan approvingly quotes the unsubstantiated assertion of Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer — itself disdainful of elected officials to whom Karlan urges vast deference — that contributions “buy candidates’ allegiance.” She seems unaware that abundant social science demonstrates that contributors respond to candidates’ behavior, not the reverse. And when darkly warning about campaign contributions from corporations’ “management,” she seems unaware that much of the corporate political spending is by nonprofit advocacy corporations — Planned Parenthood, not Microsoft.

It is disappointing when a professor at one of the top law schools in the country is so ignorant and confused.

She concludes: “For if the justices disdain us, how ought we to respond?” Her pronoun radiates democratic sentimentality — “us” conflates the citizenry and Congress. Today, just 18 percent of the citizenry approves of Congress’s performance. What becomes of Karlan’s argument when the conservative justices’ distrust of Congress, for which she disdains them as anti-democratic, is exceeded by the public’s distrust of Congress?

Like most progressives, she has a Maoist view of democracy — democracy is only truly democracy when it agrees with the views of the Crust.

Read it.

While liberals on Twitter pointed at the shooting of four firefighters in upstate New York as evidence that more gun control is necessary, NBC News reports that the gunman, one William Spengler, was already banned from owning guns.

Stopped him cold, didn’t they? My, those gun control laws really work, don’t they?

Read it.

The typical accusation about the Post and its decline over the last several years is that the paper is too liberal. The problem is even more fundamental than that. The Post‘s writers and editors no longer have any idea what makes an interesting story. It’s as if a hospital hired doctors who did not know the human body. I genuinely think the problem is that simple, and that profound.

Read it.

I noted here that the news media’s performance on the Sandy Hook elementary school murders has been terrible, with news outlets committing one factual error after another. Yet in all the calls for “soul searching” that have followed Adam Lanza’s rampage, I haven’t seen a single one suggesting that reporters and editors should reflect on their own conduct, either in publicizing (and thereby encouraging) mass murderers like Lanza, or in making sure they have their facts straight before going public with information.

Read it.

I have to assume that it’s fundraising time at the Southern Poverty Law Center, because Morris Dees and company have gone looking for new people to label enemies of the republic. This time, they’ve found those long underappreciated serpents nesting in our midst, notorious fellow-travelers of the Patriot Movement knows as … anarcho-capitalists?

Be sure to check your sock drawer — you never know where they’ll show up.

That even SPLC writer Leah Nelson, may think her organization is reaching a bit far with this one might be indicated by the oddly passive title of the piece, “‘Anarcho-Capitalists’ Seen as Cousins of the ‘Patriot’ Movement.” They are? By whom? Oh. You mean the SPLC sees them as “cousins” yada yada and somehow potentially dangerous and hateful.

We’re self-referential, we’re proud, and we’re in your face. Not to mention your wallet.

Read it.

Kyriarchy – a neologism coined by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and derived from the Greek words for “lord” or “master” (kyrios) and “to rule or dominate” (archein) which seeks to redefine the analytic category of patriarchy in terms of multiplicative intersecting structures of domination…Kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression.

I am not making this up.

Sarah Palin’s kid’s divorce.

Al Gore’s kid’s divorce.

Media bias? What media bias?

Read it.

… climate alarmists have been remarkably adept at defining fringe views as the mainstream skeptic position, a sort of bait and switch that allows them to avoid debating the more difficult topics (for example, the proposition that the Earth’s climate system is dominated by strong positive feedbacks is far from settled and a literature review of that critical topic would show an incredibly broad range of results).   In the climate debate, the supposed “Defenders of Science” much prefer painting skeptics as beyond the bounds of polite society and therefore unworthy of response to actually debating the difficult points.

‘Climate-changers’ lie. Who knew?

I’m still waiting for someone to demonstrate how they can accurately measure the temperature of the entire planet to an accuracy of one tenth of a degree centigrade. Then we can discuss how exactly that allows them to predict what will happen in the future. Then we can discuss how exactly that justifies them blaming it on human activity. Then we can discuss the extent to which this aggregate overall warming is a Bad Thing. Then we can discuss what, if anything, can be done about it. Then we can discuss whether or not the proposed cure is worse than the situation it purports to cure.

So far they haven’t even reached first base, much less brought in the winning run. All of these fanciful ‘peer-reviewed climate articles’ are based on estimates, approximations, models, and highly questionable assumptions, and are science in the same way that astrology might be called science — yeah, there are some correlations here, but no demonstrated causal links, and that’s the key part.

Read it.

    Think about it for a second. The president loves basketball. He has an Indian name, he knows what it’s like to be poor and he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. And his theme song is “Hail to the Chief.” I think he definitely qualifies as the first American Indian president.

‘Has an Indian name?’ ‘Knows what it’s like to be poor’? Did they have a Jay Silverheels impersonator standing in for the President? And I wasn’t aware that basketball was a particularly Indian sport.

I suppose the fact that the throws like a girl makes him the first female president. Well, better him than Hillary. Congrats, Barry; don’t get your tits in the wringer.

Read it.

Just another silly politically fashionable Crustian buzzword, apparently.

Read it.

In conversations with POLITICO, some of the left’s most influential voices in media said that, with the concerns of re-election over, they intend to be more critical of the president’s performance and more aggressive in urging him to pursue a progressive agenda as the clock ticks on his last four years in office.

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

Read it.

Oh, really? What a novel idea….

Read it. And watch the video, if you’ve got ten minutes to throw away that you never want to have back.

Cheap entertainment for your Monday — I wouldn’t let this clown near any sick person if I had anything to say about it.

My first idea was to seek other opinions. Maybe this hospital is wrong. Maybe there are other places that wouldn’t need to do surgery. Maybe there is a laser, a chemical, an ancient tradition, a shaman, a scientist, a nanorobot.

As you might have guessed, he’s an artiste, and so knows very little about the real world.

My main objective — the best thing I felt that I could do — was to make my digital information available on the Internet, in formats that would allow people of multiple cultures, skills, professions and inclinations to access, use, recombine and redistribute it.

In other words, he’s depending on other people to cure him — for free. A poster child for the New World Order.

I see a cure as a dynamic process, in which multiple doctors, professionals, artists, scientists and others join as a society — to converse, support each other, be open to various contributions and shape solutions that merge humanity, technology, technique, philosophy and art. Creativity and “normal life” become part of the process and bring “diseased” people back to life.

I guess the important part is to realize that being cured is not a physical thing but a state of mind. All together now: ‘I feel cured. I feel cured.’

William Jacobson fisks Nicholas Kristof of the NYT (granted, not a high bar).

I just visited relatives on Long Island for Thanksgiving, and the stumps of downed trees were everywhere.  There was a failure — most likely of prophylactic tree trimming, lack of emergency planning by LIPA, and failure to coordinate outside help – but none of that has anything to do with federal spending on the national grid.

Moreover, a back-up generator is like insurance, there when you need it, not a substitute for the grid.  Why would someone like Kristof consider it a bad thing for individuals to self-insure against the next Sandy?

But most of all, where is the link between marginal tax rates and (a) the percentage of total taxes actually paid by top income earners, which has risen in the last 50 years, and (b) the electric grid.  Assuming the false arguendo that higher marginal rates would have resulted in more tax revenue, where is the evidence it would have been spent on the national electric grid, rather than pork projects and giveaways for political constituencies?

The column goes on with a long list of similar non-sequiturs involving police services and gated communities, schools systems and private schools, and so on.

Completely ignored is that government spending is going through the roof, including on police and schools, yet we have little to show for it.  The answer for Kristof, more of the same.

Read it.

Jihadists are becoming expert and posed atrocities that cater to simple-minded mainstream media folks, and sometimes the MSM folks are accomplices in the deception.

I wrote a knowledgeable observer to ask whether he could shed any light on the suspicions I express in “Jihad poses for the cameras.” In response he invited me to check out the footage that the BBC played over its interview with Jonathan Sacerdoti last night. He observes:

2:10 – guy being picked up “injured.”

2:40 – same guy wandering around scratching his bits and pieces.

UPDATE: Some screen-shots.

Read it.

Black Chicagoans from the south and west sides took their message to what they say is the source of the problem when they converged outside of a fundraiser held by Mayor Emanuel for Barack Obama and then marched to the studios of ABC News.

Their message, “let us work in our own community,” was made all the more poignant as the ABC News crew ignored the news event outside their very studious. Not one camera was sent to cover the news that was, literally, placed at their doorstep.

Media bias? What media bias?

Read it.

He’s not a Magic Negro. How boring is that?

Photographer Gene Young thinks Romney could force the paparazzi to abandon Washington altogether.

“If he were to win, you might have, say, Kelsey Grammer or Jon Voight, but that’s not money you can make off the photographers,” said Young. “You’re not going to have the Eva Longoria, Jennifer Lopez, Will Smith, the big name A-Listers who come and support Barack Obama. … You’ll have to travel or maybe you’ll have to find something totally different to shoot.”

Photographer and autographer collector Mark Wilkins said a Romney administration would “bring back the same old boring celebrities we saw back when Bush was around.”

“Trace Adkins, all those country stars that no one really cares about,” said Wilkins. “I hope Romney doesn’t get elected because it will slow things down. Right now, there are celebs visiting the White House, four, five times a week that we don’t even know about until after they leave. Romney? Who wants to visit Romney?”

The horror! The horror!

Read it.

As it so happens, I’ve written on this issue before. So let me lazily quote myself rather than come up with something new. Specifically, I’m pulling from a piece I wrote for the Las Vegas Review-Journal after Hurricane Katrina.

But government officials really did prevent experienced private relief organizations and convoys of supplies from reaching people in need in the wake of Katrina. Police and bus drivers really did abandon their posts. And private companies really were ready to help.

Read it.

While you at it, I’d like a pony and a new iPad.

Freebergnails it, as he so often does.

See, I have this belief about assholes: We can disagree about whether or not a specific person is one, or is behaving like one within a defined setting as we evaluate some defined behavior of his, with reasonable points presented on both sides of such a disagreement. Right up until the individual is trying to be one. Asshole-ish-ness gets an automatic A for effort; if you’re working at it, it really doesn’t matter what the achievement is. People manage to do asshole things all the time without characteristically behaving like assholes, or without the personality deficiencies of assholes, but you don’t apply yourself toward asshole effort unless you’re an asshole.

Yes, that applies to sitting United States Presidents. What an asshole! “We have these things called aircraft carriers…”

One of the things that the debate brought out is that Obama really is an arrogant ass. See, if you’re running for President, and you’re in a public debate that supposedly demonstrates your qualifications for that job, you don’t talk to your opponent in a voice dripping with contempt as if his comment were beneath your notice. (Well, maybe if it’s Jimmy Carter. But otherwise: no.) I do my best to avoid looking at Obama but I’m sure he was rolling his eyes as he said it.

Mull this statement over in your mind a minute or two, and it becomes clear: Some teenager at heart, having successfully used elaborate Marxist rhetoric to get out of garbage-hauling duty for the entirety of his young, snot-nosed existence, managed to bullshit His way into the White House. That is a problem, and by no means a small one.

And that is the basic flaw with Obama. He needs to grow up. He needs to approach life in an adult manner. He needs to act like the President of the United States, not just the Homecoming King.

Even disregarding the ideological spectrum, this is precisely what I do not want to see in the Oval Office, this swaggering hipster can’t-be-told-anything mentality.

That’s what this election is all about: Putting the adults back in charge, and sending the Bros back to the frat house.

Read it.

The International Cycling Union announced Monday that Armstrong is being stripped of his Tour de France titles.

And yet he still won the races — a historical fact. How are they going to get around that? The Ministry of Truth doesn’t yet have an effective Memory Hole, much as the International Crust might wish they had one available.

“The UCI has tested Lance Armstrong 218 times. If Lance Armstrong was able to beat the system, then the responsibility for addressing that rests not only with the UCI but also with” the anti-doping agencies that accepted the results, the cycling union said in its statement.

Ann Althouse brings up an interesting point:

 Shouldn’t the UCI be stripped of something for missing the evidence? I’d like damages for all the time I’ve wasted paying attention to this sport. If all those races are now to be understood as phony, all of the money that anybody made promoting and presenting this sport was a big fraud. Stripping Armstrong of his titles doesn’t restore what we’ve lost.

Actually, I’m inclined to believe Armstrong over some semi-government agency. Their statements sound like the classic mentally-deranged conspiracy theory: ‘The fact that we found no evidence of doping merely underlines the insidious nefarious nature of his evil plot!’

Read it. And try not to laugh.

Walk into most tech companies and you’ll be greeted by the same picture – a room made up entirely of men. You can practically smell the testosterone.

Uh, no. Programmers are not known for excessive levels of testosterone — those guys do football and sales, not Javascript.

The technology industry is still struggling to shake off the image of the male, pizza-guzzling, antisocial nerd – a perception that initiatives like this month’s Ada Lovelace day – which celebrates the role of women in technology – and Lady Geek’s “Little Miss Geek” campaign, are striving to change.

And, of course, pizza-guzzling (how do you ‘guzzle’ a pizza?), antisocial nerds are justly famed for their testosterone. Watch a couple episodes of CHUCK and you’ll be convinced.

Although women fill close to half of all jobs in the US economy, they hold less than 25% of jobs in the science and technology sector, according to a government report. In the UK, the problem is even worse: currently only 17% of jobs in the technology sector are held by women. Both numbers are declining year-on-year.

Conspicuous by its absence: Any explanation as to why this is a ‘problem’; it’s just assumed, in the sure and certain knowledge that anyone reading a BBC article will know, just know, that it is.

Can you say ‘political agenda’? I’m sure you can.

So long as shiny new gadgets keep flying off the shelves, what does it matter who’s making them?

A good question. Let’s see whether it gets answered. My money is on No.

It’s all very well appealing to a tech chief exec’s sense of social injustice – but the bottom line is that they are running a business.

Gee, there’s that pesky political agenda again — the definition of ‘social injustice’, and how it differs from just plain ol’ ‘injustice’, is left as an exercise for the reader (no pun intended).

What do they care about gender diversity, really?

Indeed, why ought anyone to care about ‘gender diversity’ (i.e. Jobs For The Girls)? Again, one of those Politically Correct Good Things That All Right Thinking People Want Without Knowing Why.

We ultimately need to appeal to the thing that matters most: their wallets.

Feel free to wonder about who the ‘we’ is in that sentence. Hint: It’s probably not you, unless you get your news from MSNBC.

That’s why every chief executive should be made aware of the following stat: tech companies with more women on their management teams have a 34% higher return on investment.

Repeat after me the magic phrase: ‘Correlation does not imply causation’. I guess they don’t teach logic in Gender Studies 101.

The reasons are obvious.

Are they really? Really?

Diversity is important in any industry, but is especially relevant when it comes to technology.

Why? No discussion, just assertion. After all, we’re preaching to the choir here. It seems plausible that diversity of products is important, and perhaps diversity of approaches, but I know of no peer-reviewed studies that hook this up uniquely with two X chromosomes.

Tech is the way that world talks to each other. People have never emailed, liked, commented, called, messaged and tweeted more than we are doing right now. And guess what? Half of all those people are women.

And guess what? They seem to be using the current male-created tools just fine. (Men, just to use one example, don’t typically spend a lot of time posting cat videos on YouTube. Yet there they are.) So how are women uniquely qualified to create products for women to use? Is there a secret handshake or IP address or something?

It’s not that we believe women are better or more effective than men – they just simply provide a different point of view, something that is vital when bringing a new product to market.

And that’s why marketing tends to be dominated by females — certainly the marketing departments of every company I’ve ever worked for seem to be run that way. Why do we especially need women writing code in order to create products that appeal to women? ‘Sharon, would you buy this program?’ ‘Hell, no.’ ‘What would you buy?’ ‘Something that makes it easier to put cute videos of my cat on YouTube.’ ‘Okay, boys, there’s our product spec. Let’s get to it.’

What special skillset do women as women bring to the creation of these products? The answer is not provided.

Well, we could do this sort of barrel-fish-shooting all day, but my fingers are getting tired.

(Oh, you might want to look for any mention of the author’s technical credentials. All I see is a celebration of her ability to get her opinions into print — not exactly the sort of person I’d hire to do a web site or a search algorithm. Perhaps the smell of testosterone gave her the vapors.)

Read it.

Democrats are all about feminism — so long as women stay on the Democrat plantation.

“The fact that they use this theme of Martha McSally in a kitchen cooking up recipes is…overtly sexist and insulting to any woman, but it certainly doesn’t fit specifically with me,” she said. “For crying out loud, I served 26 years in the military. I was too busy shooting 30 mm out of my A-10 at the Taliban and al Qaeda to spend any time in a kitchen.”

My kinda girl. I’d vote for her, if I lived in Arizona, which thank God I don’t.

How politics became a business.

Political ‘consultants’ — corrupting our politics (for a modest fee) since 1933.

Of course, since it’s The New Yorker, Republicans are the villains of the piece (all the specific Bad Examples cited are Republicans, like that Enemy of Mankind Nixon (boo, hiss); no mention of the Clintons, James Carville, or Paul Begala, much less of Tommy Boggs), and the examples are all stuff that Right Thinking People Support While Cretinous Republicans Oppose, like compulsory health insurance (‘But they turned the President’s sensible, popular, and urgently needed legislative reform into a bogeyman so scary that, even today, millions of Americans are still scared.’), but it’s still an interesting read, if only for the way in which they point the Finger of Indignation at slanted tendentious writing while practicing the same thing themselves.

Nicholas Kristof thinks that life is a kindergarten, where Teacher is in charge and the supreme achievement is Play Nicely With Others.

The problem: Reality isn’t a place in which all of the toys are already provided and the chief worry is a fair ‘distribution’.

The tragic flaw of Kristof and his fellow Crustians is that they all read Rawls in college and actually believed it.

Read it.

 Since the dawn of the space age, more than 20 000 objects larger than a softball have accumulated in Earth’s orbit. About 1000 of those objects are spacecraft that carry active payloads, serving many valuable missions for mankind. But the rest could best be called junk, the by-product of thousands of launches and routine spacecraft deployments, nearly 200 explosions, and several collisions. And this junk poses a serious problem.

Not to me, it doesn’t. I’m sure that the people for whom it does represent a problem, i.e. the people (mostly governments and corporations) who have satellites up, are aware of it and taking whatever action they think is appropriate. (Or maybe not – the chief achievement of government employees, including NASA, is to kick the can down the road.)

This sort of the-sky-is-falling thumbsucker of an article is why there are so many hysterical buttinskys wandering around.

How do we change our ways?

What do you mean ‘we’, paleface? ‘We’ don’t. It’s not been demonstrated that it’s any of ‘our’ business.

One of the ugliest features of modern ‘journalism’ is the habitual, reflexive tendency to find something that can be characterized as a problem, and then JUMP to the conclusion that it’s some sort of character flaw in ‘us’ that ‘we’ need to fix. And the MUST HAVE proposed solution is invariably something that the government MUST DO, at taxpayer expense.

NASA continues to fight a growing hazard with what has been, at best, a level budget.

Translation: WE NEED MORE MONEY!!!!! (Not surprising when you look at who’s writing the article..)

What NASA—and the world—needs is a clear mandate.

I’ll give you a ‘clear mandate’: Mind your own bloody business.

You want to ‘fix’ this ‘problem’, fine, it’s your problem, you pay for the fix. Put YOUR money where YOUR mouth is, leech.

At least in Wisconsin.

A frequent state Capitol protester known for navigating the statehouse on a Segway was charged Monday with two counts of misdemeanor disorderly conduct for allegedly harassing journalists working in and near the second-floor Capitol press room.

Of course, when they do it to you, they’re just doing their jobs….