Slate magazine takes its Voice of the Crust duties seriously.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

1. No proof for its main allegations of wrongdoing;

2. Unfair tone in communicating these unproven allegations;

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

4. Incomplete reporting and lack of critical context;

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

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

NPR’s stories are biased? Not news.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Not really news,  but a useful reminder.

Read it.

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

Sure, why not.

The Other McCain tells it like it is.

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

Steve Sailer spreads the word.

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

Read it.

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

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

Steve Sailer need do no more than quote.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Crustian clichés I enjoyed most in this article:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

More drivel from the New York Times.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But why stop there?

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

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

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

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

I got your incontrovertible consensus, right here.

Read it.

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read it.

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

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

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.

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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….

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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.

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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.

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‘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.

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But there was a consensus!

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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.