Read it.

Why this qualifies as news is difficult to understand. China has no tradition of democracy, multi-party or otherwise, and the fact that the current one-party state masquerades as a Communist dictatorship (which in turn masquerade as representative governments) is just multiple layers of window-dressing. China is China, and this autocratic government is not appreciably different from any other autocratic government they’ve had in the last 6,000 years; it just uses a Clever Plastic Disguise with modern buzzwords.

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These days saying “organic” isn’t good enough: being an eco-foodie has become a high art. If you want scallops, you don’t just buy scallops. They need to be labelled “hand-dived”: a dirty big trawler didn’t drag them and their delicate eco-system from the ocean floor; instead, a wholesome, Buddha-worshipping man donned a diving suit and soft gloves before he swam to the bottom of the sea, asked the scallop’s permission to remove him from his rock, and then lulled him to sleep with soft music playing from an iPod.

John Hinderaker of Power Line takes a tour of the coming revolution in Wisconsin.

Big Government posted this funny video of Communists in Madison, Wisconsin, who are convinced that the revolution is just around the corner. First Tunis, then Cairo, then Tripoli–and now, Madison! Christian Hartsock traveled to Wisconsin on behalf of Big Government and was invited to a meeting of the local chapter of the International Socialist Organization. Some of the Communists at the meeting turned out to be representatives of public sector unions.

The video actually reminds me of my youth; I attended meetings a lot like this. Very little has changed, although I don’t think the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s were quite this dim.

Wisconsin has always been the Massachusetts of the Midwest, so this isn’t really news, but it is a useful reminder. I guess socialism requires proximity to large bodies of water.

Read it.

Apparently Eric Hobsbawm is at it again.

It is a deeply puzzling thing.  The grip, that is, of Marxism on the minds of so many evidently intelligent people.  I think I understand the appeal of Marxism on the brain of the early twenty something, having suffered through it, not to mention my poor father, myself.  (That is, he suffered through my infatuation with Marxism.)  But it goes way beyond that. You have to think that if our planet were ever to be discovered by some moderately ethical star faring race, and they were able to appreciate along with everything else the history of communism and all its acolytes, the case against just sterilizing the muddy ball on which we live would be made considerably weaker.  What an appalling, nasty, weak-minded and heartless batch of insects it makes us look. And even that’s unfair to insects — ant colonies work well at least.  They don’t set up little ant gulags.  If the aliens arrive, somebody will have to make sure Hobsbawm STFU.  He merits the dubious distinction of having made scholarship a crime against humanity.

Read it.

As scholars ranging from the liberal political scientist Ira Katznelson to the libertarian legal historian David Bernstein have now documented, organized labor’s rise to power typically came at the expense of black workers. Consider collective bargaining, the legal arrangement whereby a union selected by a majority of employees receives the monopoly bargaining power to exclusively represent all employees. This valuable union tool first became part of federal law under section 7A of the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933. Since blacks were barred from the vast majority of unions at that time, collective bargaining served as a de facto ban on all black workers in unionized shops.

‘Progressives’ do many historically odd things, such as the embrace of the Democratic Party, which was the party of slavery from Andy Jackson’s time up through the Civil War, and the party of Jim Crow from the Civil War up through LBJ.

The Other McCain must spend most of his time laughing.

The Lara Logan story proves to be the gift that keeps on giving, thanks to a predictable pattern: Someone attempts a reaction more complex than “rape is bad,” and immediately gets shouted down by angry feminists.

Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Read it.

It’s interesting to observe the media engaged in pack-like behavior and worth considering its causes and effects. Sometimes I wonder why the media just stopped covering the mosque in lower downtown Manhattan. Did it go away? No, but the media did.

Media rule of thumb: Christians getting murdered is never news; Muslims feeling insecure is  always news.

Read it.

Who will own the brains of smart cities–citizens or corporations? At stake is an impending massive trove of data, not to mention issues of privacy, services, and inclusion. The battle may be fought in the streets between bands of Jane Jacobs-inspired hacktivists pushing for self-serve governance and a latter-day Robert Moses carving out monopolies for IBM or Cisco instead of the Triborough Bridge Authority. Without a delicate balance between the scale of big companies and the DIY spirit of “gov 2.0” champions, the urban poor could be the biggest losers. Achieving that balance falls to smarter cities’ mayors, who must keep the tech heavyweights in check and “frame an agenda of openness, transparency and inclusivness.”

You have to love an article that fills up your Buzzword Bingo card in the first paragraph. What I find most amusing about such things is the artificial separation it assumes between alleged ‘huge corporations’ like ‘IBM or Cisco’ and us aw-shucks down-home folks like … the Rockefeller Foundation and the ‘Institute for the Future’. How thin and threadbare that curtain is can be seen by looking at the contributors:

The roster of expert contributors comprises a who’s who of ubiquitous computing and gov 2.0 types, including MIT Senseable City Lab director Carlo Ratti, Everyware author Adam Greenfield, the Santa Fe Institute’s Nathan Eagle, Intel Labs Director Genevieve Bell, Microsoft Research’s Jonathan Donner, and San Francisco CIO Chris Vein.

All members in good standing of the Crust, whether from ‘huge corporations’ or their academic/governmental counterparts. The whole emphasis of projects like this is top-down ‘design’ and control, rather than getting these fumblers out of the way of individuals working on market-based solutions to problems of which the top-downers are the primary cause. I am reminded of the scenes from Monty Python’s Life of Brian where the crowd shows up outside of Brian’s house and plead with him to tell them how to think for themselves.

Read it.

And it took them quite a while to notice.

And we’re all still waiting for someone to care.

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Obama lied? Say in ain’t so.

Read it.

Rudolph P. Byrd is a professor of African-American studies and founding director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University. Henry Louis Gates Jr. is a professor of African and African American studies and director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at Harvard University.

And both are, evidently, explicit racists, subscribing to the ‘one drop of blood’ theory.

Read it.

More hand-wringing from the New York Times.

Species die. It has become a catastrophic fact of modern life. On our present course, by E.O. Wilson’s estimate, half of all plant and animal species could be extinct by 2100 — that is, within the lifetime of a child born today. Kenya stands to lose its lions within 20 years. India is finishing off its tigers. Deforestation everywhere means that thousands of species too small or obscure to be kept on life support in a zoo simply vanish each year.

The only species whose extinction I am not prepared to tolerate is my own. In that I suspect I am differ from most environmentalists.

Read it.

This article from Fast Company illustrates the myopia with which much, if not most, of the Crust is afflicted. Guys: There are much more important things going on it Egypt right now than lack of access to the Internet. Back up a bit and gain some perspective.

The worst part about late January is that my RSS reader becomes choked with crap from people who think that the world is waiting with bated breath for what they have to say about the most useless piece of political theatre outside of an airport.

One thing Barry won’t say is, “Take a look at Michelle’s butt and tell me we don’t have an obesity crisis in this country.” That would demonstrate a sense of humor; I’d pay to see that.

Read it.

In a speech this week in Doha, Qatar, Hersh advanced the notion that U.S. military forces are directed and dominated by Christian fundamentalist “crusaders” bent on changing “mosques into cathedrals.”

Oh, would that it were true. But this delusion is like unto the super-sophisticated gear that the CIA uses in the Bourne movies: A left-wing fantasy. We should be so lucky.

Read it.

It’s amazing how often ‘pro-union’ people wind up using the same anti-union tools that they condemn in others.

Read it.

Read it.

Tinfoil hats! Get yer tinfoil hats, right here! Can’t avoid the mind-control lasers without a tinfoil hat!

This is what passes for journalism these days. No wonder newspapers are dying.

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Mothers should be taught how to cuddle and talk to their babies as part of a major Government drive to stop children descending into a life of crime as they grow up.

I swear, I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer sounds kinda bitter.

Promoting resentment might seem like divisiveness and vitriol, but in Tucson the taxpayers were being forced to pay for the promotion of resentment of whites, so that’s A-Okay. Discord and intolerance is not subsidizing  resentment toward a class, as long as the class is whites.

Read it.

Electric cars are like tulip bulbs in 17th century Holland: Just another Crustian fad.

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What would have happened if the Congresswoman with whom Jared Loughner apparently had been more or less obsessed since 2007 had been a Republican? Would Republicans have blamed the Tucson murders on Democrats’ “eliminationist rhetoric”? They would have had a relatively good case; to take just one of many examples, they could have pointed to Democratic Congressman Paul Kanjorski, who said that the Republican candidate for Governor of Florida should be put against a wall and shot. I am not aware of a single instance where any Republican politician has said anything so inflammatory. But no: frankly, it would not have occurred to conservatives to try to make a connection between Democrats, no matter how disreputable they may be, and the act of a deranged lunatic in Arizona.

How about the Democrats? Would they have responded to the murder of a Republican Congresswoman by calling on Democrats to tone down their rhetoric and get off the radio or television? Just kidding, obviously.

Read it.

The first and most serious is the sickness living in Loughner’s head.  Evidence in the form of farewell videos, internet postings, and the recollections of people who knew him reveal a profoundly disturbed person who had veered far into a paranoid world.  Loughner’s complaints about government mind control and other rants were not “anti-government” in any political sense, but anti-government or anarchist in the Ted Kazynski-deranged sense.  We do not know Loughner’s motives, but those motives whatever they were were the byproduct of Loughner’s clearly delusional view of the world.

There also was a second sickness on display, and it was the swiftness and the vigor with which the left-wing blogosphere and some more mainstream Democrats immediately sought to blame Sarah Palin and right-wing “vitriol” in general for the shooting.

The usual suspects.

Not a shred of evidence connecting Loughner to Palin, the Tea Parties, or the right wing, yet the left-blogosphere, mainstream media and Democratic politicians have erupted into a frenzy of name-calling directed at Palin and those who oppose Obama’s agenda.

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

Arnold Kling ponders one of the more odious personality characteristics of ‘progressives’.

With The Attitude, progressives do not take on the actual ideas expressed by conservatives or libertarians. Instead, they sneer and engage in self-congratulation.

Do all progressives display The Attitude? No, but those who do tend to achieve more prominence than those who don’t. As a result, sometimes I fear that progressivism is going to degenerate into nothing but The Attitude. I think that when progressives are on the defensive, they are more likely to fall back on The Attitude. Right now, I think progressives should be thinking about where they stand with respect to large financial institutions, the long-term fiscal outlook, and the political power of public sector unions.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.”)

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.