Power Line fisks the premier Voice of the Crust.

We have “little in common with the framers”? Not even, apparently, a system of government. This is reminiscent of Ezra Klein’s observation that the Constitution is old, so we may as well ignore it. Which means, apparently, that the rule of law is impossible, since no country can adhere for long to a written constitution.

And what is that reference to “ceding sovereignty” supposed to mean? Apparently the Times thinks that if we follow the Constitution, we are “ceding sovereignty” to the Founders, as though they were a foreign invader. Unbelievable.

I’ve never understood what liberals mean when they say the Constitution “evolves.” They clearly don’t mean that it can be changed by amendment. Nor do they seem to be referring to, for example, the application of the First Amendment to the internet, even though the web is not a “press.” When liberals talk about “evolution,” it generally seems to mean making stuff up–but only liberal stuff, of course.

Read it.

Duh.

It’s unclear who’s the bigger thumbsucker here: Those who did the study, or the Telegraph for publishing it.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

The climate campaign establishment increasingly looks like its own self-contained and self-referential lunatic asylum, unable to exercise any self-restraint in finding positive proof of climate change in every weather surprise. Several years back, climate campaigners in Britain, citing the latest warming models, ostentatiously predicted that snowstorms would soon be a thing of the past in Britain, something schoolchildren would read about in history books or hear tales about from their grandparents. Then this fall just past, the British Met Office predicted a 60 to 80 percent change of a warmer-than-average winter this year.

But now Britain is having its second extremely cold winter in a row, with record snowfalls nearly strangling the nation. Oops.

Not to worry. The climateers have swung into action, and have explained why cooling is really warming. Judah Cohen, a private “seasonal forecaster,” took to the pages of the New York Times to explain how the warming arctic led to more snowfall over the Siberian land mass, which in turn cooled the air circulating over the northern hemisphere, and there you have it, big cold weather storms in the United States and Europe. Or, as Mr. Cohen puts it, “the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes.” (Bryan Walsh at Time magazine offers a rundown of similar counterintuitive explanations for why warming causes cooling.)

This is all a lot more understandable if you’ve got a Crustian Secret Decoder Ring. Being very drunk also probably helps.

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You may ask yourself, ‘Why is a publication called The Chronicle of Higher Education writing about “evangelicals”‘? I wonder that, too. Feel free to search the article for some connection with ‘higher education’; I couldn’t find one. It appears to be Yet Another SWPL hit-job on Christianity — or at least what the author understands Christianity to be, which isn’t at all close — in the guise of an academic overview.

Yet as soon as evangelicalism becomes a subject, it splinters and splits. Indeed, taken together, recent studies by more-or-less outsiders show there is no such thing as evangelicalism. The term represents a broad range of significantly different theologies, practices, and religious movements within Christianity, and there are often tensions among and within them. Which is no revelation at all to most more-or-less insiders, who call themselves evangelicals, however qualified, and who argue as much with others who do the same as with those of us who don’t.

Apparently the author doesn’t know much about history (cue Herman’s Hermits). ‘Evangelicals’ are people who accept the Protestant Reformation dictum of sola scriptura, the belief that the Bible and what may be found therein, is the sole and ultimate authority for Christian practice. This is why ‘evangelicals’ insist on their congregations being ‘Bible-based’.

From the standpoint of historical goes-back-to-the-Apostles Christianity, of course, this is absurd; the Christian ecclesia isn’t just a religion, it’s also a church in the sense of a corporate body with an organic historical existence and a hierarchy of authority. One might as well say that all it takes to be a Marine is a set of dress blues and a Marine Corps Manual, the silliness of which is immediately obvious. ‘To you you’re a pilot; maybe even to me you’re a pilot; but to a pilot are you a pilot?’ Sadly, no. But the article never touches on this; indeed, the author might not even be aware that it’s an issue (which wouldn’t surprise me a bit).

But there it is. It saddens me that the intellectual rigor of The Chronicle of Higher Education seems to be decaying as quickly as that of Higher Education itself.

Read it.

For some reason you never read anything positive about Republicans in the New York Times. I wonder why that is?

Watch it. Feel free to laugh — they do.

The SWPL guide to, well, you know, those icky religious people who live in Flyover Country, don’t send their kids to the right schools, and don’t worry about the Really Important Things in Life, like global warming and income inequality and whether Starbucks puts too much foam in their lattes.

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Liberals are big on gaps. The gap between rich and poor is a particularly fertile source of big government schemes. It’s a perennial inspiration of plans to tax and plans to spend.

Minneapolis Star Tribune education reporter Norman Draper brings us a new but nevertheless “glaring gap” that must be filled. You have undoubtedly missed it. It’s the “dearth of books the [Muslim] students can relate to and from which others can learn.”

The Koran seems to be sufficient; Muslim students can relate to it, although others tend to have a problem learning from it.

We could discuss the gap between the number of people Muslims kill and the number of Muslims that are killed by other people. That might prove entertaining.

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Matthew Boyle of The Daily Caller reported the “Diversity Committee” of the Society of Professional Journalists wants a yearlong “education campaign designed to inform and sensitize journalists” that the words “illegal immigrant” are hurtful and insensitive. In an article for the SPJ magazine The Quill, reporter Leo Laurence insisted that since our legal system presumes innocence until proven guilty, “Simply put, only a judge, not a journalist, can say that someone is an illegal.” (The National Association of Hispanic Journalists has also argued that the I-word unfairly “criminalizes a person.”)

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The liberal media sells liberal candidates as brilliant and even-tempered and “sophisticated” and “nuanced” of thought; all of these are non-ideological attributes which appeal to most, whatever one’s politics. And they need to do this, as only about 25% of the country can be persuaded to come along on the basic liberal message of higher taxes, more spending, more government power to dictate the affairs of men, and less freedom.

Meanwhile, Republican candidates get the opposite treatment from the media. I’ve noted before that every single Republican candidate is claimed by the media to be:

1. Stupid

2. Evil

3. Crazy

4. Out-of-touch

…and pretty much you can categorize every Republican office-seeker since Eisenhower (Out of touch) in this way. Nixon: Evil and Crazy; Reagan: Stupid and Crazy and possibly Evil; Bush I: Out of touch; Bush II: Stupid, Crazy, Out of Touch and Evil.

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The Wall Street Journal has an editorial inexplicably siding with Michelle Obama against Sarah Palin on the issue of Mrs. Obama’s campaign against childhood obesity.

Rupert Murdoch’s WSJ seems to be settling into bed with the Crust. Pity.

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Apparently some people can’t enjoy Christmas with their families if there’s even the slightest whiff of racism or homophobia about the ol’ homestead. Said people are, of course, uniquely sensitive and qualified to determine the presence of such knuckle-dragging indicia of barbarism.

One of the commenters at Feministe linked to the video below, giving instructions on how to tell people they are racist.

For those of you who have not experienced racist comments at Christmas dinner, you probably aren’t listening carefully enough.  Please follow these instructions on How to Recognize Racism.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

I vote for Hawaii. It’s farther away.

No doubt this will be settled in traditional Democrat fashion, i.e. whoever offers the largest bribe will win.

Read it.

Your digital camera may embed metadata into photographs with the camera’s serial number or your location. Your printer may be incorporating a secret code on every page it prints which could be used to identify the printer and potentially the person who used it. If Apple puts a particularly creepy patent it has recently applied for into use, you can look forward to a day when your iPhone may record your voice, take a picture of your location, record your heartbeat, and send that information back to the mothership.

This is traitorware: devices that act behind your back to betray your privacy.

And of course you’re so damned important that everyone, including important government agencies, wants to know. Feel free to panic. I’m going to go take a nap.

Read it.

The new rules of the newly Republican House of Representatives provide for the entire Constitution to be read aloud in the House on January 6. Also, “members will not be able to introduce a bill or joint resolution without a ‘statement citing as specifically as practicable the power or powers granted to Congress in the Constitution to enact’ it.”

Like the so-called ‘limit on the national debt’, this will serve as just another tedious exercise in sophistry rather than as any limit on the spending of money.

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“The big mistake of the crafters of the 20th Amendment was that they didn’t really anticipate airplane travel,” said Bruce Ackerman, a Yale University law professor. “It takes a lot of time to go from a district in Texas by train to Washington, D.C. Who’s going to schlep there?”

Still, for the next 47 years, the amendment seemed mostly to work as intended. There were some lame-duck sessions, often in wartime, but no grand legislative agendas.

Then, historians say, things started to change.

Fighting over the lame duck

In 1980, Democrats came back after losing the presidency and the Senate and passed major bills, including one that created the Superfund toxic-cleanup program.

“We wouldn’t need to be doing all this in the lame duck if the Republicans had not obstructed and delayed everything that we had been trying to do,” said Regan LaChapelle, a spokeswoman for Reid. “I don’t see anything wrong with working for the American people to get things done.”

Uh, guys, the Democrats had a majority. Even if every Republican voted NO, it wouldn’t matter — if you weren’t being sandbagged by your own party. ODF.

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How’s that whole Global Warming thing working out for ya?

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Is it just me, or has the quality of commentary in the Wall Street Journal plunged downhill lately?

On its face, there’s something strange about this notion: that a state that does not recognize same-sex marriage will not allow two women, married to one another in a different state, to get a divorce.

Strange to a Crustian metrosexual, perhaps, but not strange to an intelligent adult. No marriage => nothing to dissolve. Duh. (This guy graduated from law school and clerked for a federal judge? Our education system is worse off than I thought.)

James Blacklock, a lawyer in the attorney general’s appellate division, said that Texas law forbids any action that recognizes or validates a same-sex marriage granted in another state, even if the point of the action is to dissolve such a marriage.

So he knows the issue, he’s either too stupid to understand plain English or in denial about it.

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust tries a little sophistry in an attempt to save Obamacare.

Read it.

I don’t know which is more irritating: The fact that he had a wife, or the fact that anyone takes what she has to say seriously.

No, he wasn’t a ‘gentle giant’; gentle giants don’t try to shoot up a school board meeting.

Many people have problems with the economy, and many people’s wives lose their jobs; they don’t go and shoot up school board meetings. The guy was defective, and we’re rid of him. That’s all that needs to be said.

The Other McCain is having entirely too much fun with the No Labels people.

Few things are more predictable than this: Whenever Republicans are on the upswing — whenever conservatives are on fire with enthusiasm, proclaiming their core principles and clearly on the winning side of important issues — the mainstream media will devote enormous coverage to an alleged groundswell of discontented moderates whose demands for “bipartisanship” and “civility” are accompanied by condemnation of “divisiveness” and complaints that “extremists” are ignoring the vast majority of independent “centrist” voters.

Let the reader note that we never heard any such complaints about “divisiveness” and “extremism” after Obama was elected and Democrats were ramming their partisan agenda through Congress.

The purpose of No Labels, of course, is to give the most irredeemably stupid “independent” voters an excuse to keep voting for Democrats. The mere fact that “No Labels” gets an 808-word free advertisement on the op-ed page of the Washington Post should tell you all you need to know about this alleged movement: It’s a ginned-up Establishment scam with no real activist constituency.

Jonah Goldberg is not fooled.

I’m deadly serious about how stupid and pernicious I think this whole thing is.

I think Stan Kurtz had it right. No Labels claims it wants to make it easier to talk about politics by making it more difficult for people it dislikes to talk about politics. It’s political correctness by a different name (and we all know how there are no labels in political correctness!).

I’ve been tuning in and out of the livecast of the NoLabelpalooza and it is so transparently obvious that this is a Trojan horse for a bunch of defeated liberal and moderate politicians to find some new rationale for their continued political relevance.

Some of the people involved in No Labels are very smart and very decent people who, as far as I can tell, have a deep patriotic love for America. What they seem to lack is sufficient respect for Americans and their ability to sort out these issues. They seem to think they are the Chosen People of politics with a unique insight into what is a legitimate point and what is an illegitimate one. They have contempt for the idea that there are sincere philosophical and political disagreements and so they try to belittle and dismiss those disagreements by waving them away as “labels” or name-calling (remember Barack Obama at the healthcare summit dismissing every inconvenient point as a “talking point”?).

Read it.

Thousands more children would eat lunches and dinners at school and all school food would become more nutritious under a bill President Barack Obama signed into law Monday, part of an administration-wide effort to combat childhood obesity.

I see vast herds of children wandering aimlessly through school looking in vain for storage. Apparently they were abandoned by their parents to fend for themselves — at taxpayer expense.

“At a very basic level, this act is about doing what’s right for our children,” Obama said before signing the bill.

No, doing what’s right for their children would be repealing the programs that encourage single motherhood, and perhaps reminding parents that they, not the taxpayer, are responsible for the children they generate.

“We can all agree that in the wealthiest nation on earth all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow and to pursue their dreams,” said Mrs. Obama. “Because in the end, nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children. Nothing,”

Certainly not anything so trivial as property rights. Hey, Michelle, you have a lot more money than I do — how about YOU pay for all these kids? It’s your idea, after all.

Read it.

The problem with ‘intellectual property’ is that everyone feels comfortable stealing it.

The essence of property is that it is EXCLUSIVE — if person A is using something, then nobody else can. So-called ‘intellectual property’ never has fit that description; no matter how many people have a copy of a book or musical recording, every single one of those people has an unimpaired ability to use it. This makes the whole ‘intellectual property’ scam untenable in the long term, and we’re watching it crumble and disintegrate in realtime.

The Other McCain has the goods.

Anyone offended by a video that showed “a scene of ants crawling on a crucifix” as a metaphor for AIDS — for this is what David Wojnarowicz’s video showed — is obviously an intolerant bigot. And wherever bigotry rears its ugly head, Frank Rich will courageously Speak Truth to Power. Or at least write 1,536 words to power….

The Washington Post, of course.

But some, like David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 at the age of 37, used art to keep a grip on the world. He was the quintessential East Village figure, a bit of a loner, a bit crazy, ferociously brilliant and anarchic. He was a self-educated dropout who made art on garbage can lids, who painted inside the West Side piers where men met for anonymous sex, who pressed friends into lookout duty while he covered the walls of New York with graffiti. In 1987, his former lover and best friend, Peter Hujar, died of complications from AIDS, and Wojnarowicz learned that he, too, was infected with HIV.

In other words, a bum who lived as a parasite on society and his fellow man. The saddest thing about his story is the willingness of the Crust to consider this abject failure to be, in their eyes, some sort of success.

Read it.

Note the assumption in the headline that a sit-in is somehow not a crime — which it most definitely is.

For some reason we have become desensitized to levels of street violence that in the Good Old Days would have brought ‘a whiff of grapeshot’ response. The U.S. Constitution gives the right of assembly but specifies ‘peaceably’; once it stops being peaceable, it stops being a right.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Tom Smith at The Right Coast spanks MoDo big-time.

Poor Maureen.  She could spend a whole day getting gussied up and she still wouldn’t look half as good as Sarah does in camos.  I watched the episode of Sarah Palin’s Alaska Ms. Dowd discusses here and she shockingly misrepresents it.  Palin switched rifles after a miss but as a subsequent test suggested, the sights on the first weapon were off.  She killed the caribou with a good, clean shot. I actually agree with Dowd that the suggestion in the show that hunting on the tundra is a practical way to harvest meat is somewhat misleading, but it’s not misleading at all to suggest it’s great recreation, a way to reconnect with family and you get some meat into the bargain.  I would love to go on such a trip.  Unless Dowd is suggesting we all give up eating meat, there’s nothing wrong with shooting caribou and eating them.  Dowd indulges in poor wittle Bambi fallacy as if her steak tartar comes from the meat fairy.  By contrast, we saw a lot of butchering of the Palins’ kill, a lot more than you usually see on hunting shows.  There are positively swarms of caribou on the arctic tundra and everything else up there, bears, wolves, skeeters, you name it, eats them, so why shouldn’t the Palins.  This is not shooting rhinos for their horns or something.

Maureen Dowd is one of a stable of New York Times writers who seem to have only two columns, one that says ‘I hate Sarah Palin!’ and one that says ‘I hate George W Bush!’, and they keep phoning in versions of those two as long as the Times is willing to pay for it. (Well, actually, to be fair, they have a handful of black writers who have a third column that says ‘You’re all racists out there!’)

Read it.

Shocking I know. But it does illustrate that Friedman thinks the Communist Chinese as clueless about America as he has so often demonstrated himself to be.

Consider the following gem:

Americans just had what they call an “election.” Best we could tell it involved one congressman trying to raise more money than the other (all from businesses they are supposed to be regulating) so he could tell bigger lies on TV more often about the other guy before the other guy could do it to him. This leaves us relieved. It means America will do nothing serious to fix its structural problems: a ballooning deficit, declining educational performance, crumbling infrastructure and diminished immigration of new talent.

Of course, it wouldn’t surprise a Normal Intelligent Adult that a Chinese Communist functionary wouldn’t recognize an election — after all, they dispensed with such nonsense long ago — but it apparently surprises Friedman?

And why not? Friedman wouldn’t recognize an election if it bit him on the butt, as this literary conceit demonstrates plainly.

His affection for the Communist Chinese viewpoint apparently keeps him from realizing that if the Congressmen in question didn’t have their regulatory hands on the throats of American business, then American business would not be paying them money, nor would the Congressmen in question be in a position to persuade them to do so.

No apparent recognition of the fact that, of all the liars in Congress, the highest percentage of them belong to the party that he supports, votes for, and keeps trying to push farther toward the Communist Chinese point of view. (The Communist Chinese, of course, are world-famous for their truth-telling at all costs.)

And, of course, a Normal Intelligent Adult would point out that the structural problems Ballooning Deficit and Declining Educational Performance are the direct consequence of people like Friedman being in control of the levers of power, that Crumbling Infrastructure is a direct consequence of the fact that people who build roads (and people who pay for them) are required to pay confiscatory Union rates by the very same sort of politician that Friedman would vote for (Democrat), and that Declining Immigration of New Talent doesn’t hold a candle to the problem of Increasing Immigation of Illegal Refugees From the Mexican Drug Wars.

But, then, a Normal Intelligent Adult really has no incentive to interact with Friedman at all; talking to a post would be so much more productive.

Check it out.

Yeah, that’s really effective advertising, all right. Makes me want to rush right out and buy one.

Not.

Read it.

Indeed, ‘Freakonomics’ is exactly the right title for the column.

Stephen J. Dubner is an author and journalist who lives in New York City.

And a Voice of the Crust. They left out the most important part.

The entire premise of the article is that this money somehow belongs rightfully to the government, and these slimy bastards, just by dying during the year when there is no estate tax, thereby screwed the government out of all this money that was rightfully its.

Read it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

But the Voices of the Crust are standing by to carry on its anti-American struggle.

El Pais, Le Monde, Speigel, Guardian & NYT will publish many US embassy cables tonight, even if WikiLeaks goes down.

Ah, yes, the Usual Suspects. What would we do without them? Perhaps win the war against terrorism, or something disgusting like that.

Read it.

An outfit called Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength has drawn the attention of the Wall Street Journal with a letter calling for a tax increase on those earning more than $1 million a year.

The Journal reporter asked a couple of the “patriotic millionaires” why they don’t just send in voluntary checks to the Treasury rather than trying to raise everyone’s taxes. One of them, Dennis Mehiel, responded, “Let’s carry this voluntary taxation argument to its conclusion. We already have a country like that, it’s called Greece. No one pays taxes in Greece. We’ve had a progressive income tax in the U.S. for decades and during that time we had a growing middle class and increased affluence and increase consumption. To say we should just write our own checks is a spurious argument. It’s catchy. But it has no validity in a substantial dialogue about public policy.”

But the American millionaires are not like Greeks who don’t pay taxes. In fact in 2007 the top 1% of taxpayers paid more than 40% of the federal income taxes, more than are paid by the bottom 95%. In 2008, the top 1 percent of tax returns paid 38.0 percent of all federal individual income taxes and earned 20.0 percent of adjusted gross income.

So either there’s something else going on here, or millionaires can be as stupid as anybody else. Which it is, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Mr. Mehiel ran for lieutenant governor of New York in 2002 and lost after a campaign full of mud-slinging.

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

There’s a certain asymmetry in this debate. The “Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength” get attention from the press, probably get invited to testify on Capitol Hill, see their names in the company of other famous and widely lauded people, and seem selfless. If some millionaires against tax increases were to start an organization called Patriotic Millionaires Against Coercion and Socialism, they’d get attacked as selfish, even though they’re not the ones trying to force their own values on others. The Patriotic Millionaires Against Coercion and Socialism, if they ever got started, would argue that they’d rather exchange the money voluntarily with their employees, their shareholders, their customers, or their charities than have it taken by force by the government.

‘Asymmetry’. What an anodyne name for it. I think the technical term in German is ‘einbahnstrasse’.

Read it.

You just know it’s bound to happen, especially after an election season as heated as this one was. That Republican relative we all have is going to show up at Thanksgiving and start parroting lies about Democrats that he heard on Fox News or from one of those shadow group attack ads he saw on TV during the campaign.

That’s why we’re proud to bring back the DCCC’s Thanksgiving Cheat Sheet. The Cheat Sheet will arm you with the real facts so you can answer back with the truth as soon as your Republican relatives start sounding like Sarah Palin.

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My question is: If she were white or Asian, would they care quite as much?

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An odd thing to see on NPR. Usually they’re a reality-free environment.

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ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger has been awarded a column in the New York Times, which explains that ProPublica “produces investigative journalism in the public interest.” The formulation makes one wonder in whose interest the rest of journalism is published in.

Read it.

The Wall Street Journal succumbs to the Identity Politics Error.

Despite more diversity initiatives, as well as maternity-leave and part-time policies that are generally viewed as female-friendly, women remain dramatically underrepresented in law firms leadership ranks, according to a new study from the National Association of Women Lawyers.

The key shell-game-word here is ‘underrepresented’. Using the term ‘underrepresented’ assumes (without attempting to prove) that women are somehow entitled to some sort of ‘representation’ within the legal field — presumably a proportion matching the number of women in the population as a whole, or in the college-educated population, or some other arbitrary percentage — and that if reality doesn’t match that ideal number, there is Something Nefarious Afoot.

The truth is that the mix of people in a particular profession IS NOT A REPRESENTATIVE FUNCTION; there is no ‘one person one vote’ rule in how people go about making their livings. It’s as irrelevant as whether or not you have as many dollar bills in your wallet as other people in your ‘group’, however that ‘group’ may be defined. The two are not connected, and are determined by nothing more than your preference for carrying around dollar bills, or pure chance.

The Identity Politics Nanny Brigade have succeeded in getting this ‘underrepresented’ meme in circulation so well that even so presumably-well-educated a person as Vanessa O’Connell (and who the hell is Vanessa O’Connell?) is snookered by it. The depth of this corruption is her reference later on in the article to this ‘underrepresentation’ as ‘inequity’, as if it’s somehow unfair on the part of Somebody (who, exactly?) that this ‘underrepresentation’ exists.

Read it.

Identity politics doesn’t always lead to clear-cut solutions.

If this election proves anything, it is that immigrant bashing is not a white-only sport. Non-whites can play it just as well. Advocates of liberal immigration policies, therefore, can’t count on the coming end of white domination to automatically propel this country in their direction. They have to keep making their case to the American public regardless of its hue—brown, black, or Avatar blue.

Of course, this being an article in tReason magazine, the assumption here is that More Immigrants Is Good, Restrictionism Is Bad. (When you don’t like a viewpoint, cast it into an ‘-ism’ and all will feel good about trashing it.) But it has some interesting information carried along with the political posturing, sort of by accident.

Read it.

Statement that food prices are rising?  Smart! Sarah Palin agreeing with your statement that food prices are rising?  Dumb!

And they wonder why even their own reporters don’t read the papers anymore.

Read it.

Employees at a CBS affiliate in Anchorage left an accidental voicemail for an aide to GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller in which they discussed and laughed about the possibility of reporting on the appearance of sex offenders at a Miller rally. And they chatted about responding with a Twitter alert to “any sort of chaos whatsoever” including the candidate being “punched.”

The Crust takes care of its own.

McDonald’s Workers Are Told Whom to Vote For

Except, of course, that they weren’t. But, of course, one seldom expects truth from the New York Times, and one is rarely disappointed.

Read it.

Apparently we aren’t the only ones who have noticed the decline in quality.

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Well, of course, he didn’t ‘attack’ the Congressman for being a Muslim; he urged that the Congressman not be re-elected because he is a Muslim, which is a perfectly reasonable position for anybody who has, you know, actually read the Koran … which I suspect that nobody at the Washington Post has actually done.

But, of course, that’s an invincible blind-spot on the part of those who are psychologically committed to the position that Islam is ‘just a religion’ and hence ought to be excluded from any debate on public policy–despite the fact that Islam is not just a religion but a totalitarian ideology based on religion, and despite the fact that those who write for (and read?) the Washington Post wouldn’t give any religion other than Islam the respect that they would give, say, a convicted murderer.

Especially amusing is the accompanying photograph, showing Muslims engaged in their customary ‘hate speech’ with the caption ‘Muslims begin education campaign to counter U.S. backlash’ (a ‘backlash’ for which there is absolutely no evidence, unlike the daily evidence that all the hate is on the part of Muslims–as this photograph makes plain).

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

Read it.

Well, perhaps; so what? Pedestrians are ‘at risk’ whenever a new road is built; we don’t avoid building new roads because of that.

A new ferry route across the Strait of Gibraltar is threatening the largest concentration of whales and dolphins in the Mediterranean, environmentalists have warned.

The correct term for these people is not ‘environmentalist’ but rather ‘anti-humanist’–they give every other species priority over their own. You won’t see any animals, for example, doing stupid stuff like that. Animals are smarter than environmentalists.

“There is an exclusion zone that is ignored already and now they are going to create a new route that slices it in two,” Pilar Marcos, head of Greenpeace Spain’s coastal campaign, told Spanish newspaper El Pais.

What ‘exclusion zone’? The one that Greenpeace would like to pretend exists where they want it to?

Instead it will urge freighters sto reduce their speed during the crossing to 13 knots and post lookouts on deck to “avoid collisions with cetaceans”.

Sure, whales that can’t be bothered to get out of the way are an adequate reason to creep across the ocean. Hey, guys, the point of going from point A to point B is to get there in as little time as possible; this isn’t a senior-citizen Golden Years cruise. Thirteen knots might have been hot stuff when sails were in vogue but I’ve ridden bicycles that go faster.

“In 2002 we saw one close up. A freighter passed by our side and ran into a sperm whale, which was left expelling jets of blood,” said Renaud de Stephanis, president of CIRCE.

It’s not as if these were stealth watercraft. Whales that are too stupid to get out of the way will die and not reproduce; eventually you have a whale population that knows enough to avoid ships. That’s called ‘evolution’, and all the cool species are doing it. (For all their supposed fondness for nature, these ‘environmentalists’ seem remarkably clueless as to how it works.)

Read it.

Being the Washington Post, of course, you’ll never see a headline ‘Pro-Muslim Feelings Propel Left Wing in Europe’.

Note, too, that this is a ‘religion’ column. Except for the fact that it mentions Muslims and the reactions to Muslims, it’s really all about politics.

Read it.

The irony here is fairly obvious.

So it was a serendipitous time for Columbia University to convene the first Elites Research Network conference last week. The conference drew in scholars focused on inequality across academic disciplines, like economics, political science, sociology and history.

In the academic world, this was remarkable. As several of the scholars acknowledged, there has traditionally been some unease in talking about the elite, let alone researching them.

Perhaps because it’s rather obviously an exercise in navel-gazing? By what sophistry are academics convened at Columbia University considered to be somehow outside of ‘the elite’, however defined?

“The poor don’t have the power to say no. Elites don’t grant us interviews. They don’t let us hang out at their country clubs.”

Uh, hate to be the one to break the bad news, Professor, but if your not allowed to hang out at country clubs, it’s far more a function of being named Sudhir Venkatesh than of being a professor of sociology.

But Dorian Warren, an assistant professor of political science at Columbia, said the increasing concentration of wealth, moving from the top 10 percent of Americans to the top 1 percent, has made this the right time to look more closely at the group. “We have to understand what’s going on at the top,” Mr. Warren said.

Ah, now it becomes clear. When they say ‘elite’, they actually mean ‘rich’. That avoids the elephant in the room: The fact that any definition of ‘elite’ in America that doesn’t include the upper tiers of academia, government, and mass media (such as The New York Times) would be laughed out of the room in any gathering other than one of Crustian academics.

This is how the professoriat can pretend to objectivity and outsider status–the ‘elite’ are rich and we’re not rich so obviously they’re not in the ‘elite’. Never mine that every professor at Harvard or Princeton or Stanford makes far in excess of the Obamassiah’s $250,000 p.a. definition of ‘rich’.

“If you look at the poor as a problem, you’ll be angry at elites or you’ll expect them to come up with a solution,” said Mr. Venkatesh, who took the most pragmatic line. “You have to come in accepting that there will always be poor people in society and there will always be wealthy people in society, and neither of the two reached that status by their own efforts.”

And there’s the Voice of the Crust. I guess Bill Gates was just walking down the street one day and was randomly picked to win the World’s Richest Guy contest.

Radley Balko explains how it works.

It goes something like this: When a black person expresses views that liberal elites have deemed unacceptable for black people to hold, it is permissible for good liberals to respond by implying that said black person is either too stupid or too corrupt to think for himself, and to then call that black person racist names. In fact, not only are both responses permissible and not racist, they are a recommended way of displaying your open-mindedness.

Read it.

The Maori language is in danger of dying out because of neglect by successive New Zealand governments, a new report has claimed.

Read it.

Apparently it doesn’t help.

“The screen won’t go blank,” said Faton Begolli, a sophomore from Boston. “There can’t be a virus. It wouldn’t be the same without books. They’ve defined ‘academia’ for a thousand years.”

Actually, we’ve only had textbooks for less than half that. The original purpose of a college lecture was so that students could make (from dictation) their own copies of the materials that the teacher was using. (Easily done with Peter Lombard’s Sententiae; differential calculus, not so much.)

So much for the collegiate learning experience.

Read it.

More news from the world of starving ‘Palestinians’.

* Time magazine, which previously claimed that Palestinians were “starving,” now writes of the Palestinian “multistory villas fronted by ornamental porticos and columns,” the “car dealerships selling everything from BMWs to Hyundais,” and the “state of the art gyms with the latest equipment, classes in spinning, kickboxing and Pilates, a sauna and even a smoothie bar.”

* Upcoming on the next Gaza “aid” convoy: an Algerian militant wanted by Swiss authorities for torture