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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

“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.

Read it.

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.

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.

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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.