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For anyone who has been in a cave, JournoList was an invitation-only email discussion group among “progressive” journalists and academics on which they exchanged candid views on the state of the nation and discussed the themes that should be pushed or suppressed as dictated by the needs of the movement.

The real problem with JournoList is that much of it consisted of exchanges among people who worked for institutions about how to best hijack their employers for the cause of Progressivism. Thus, the J-List discussion revealed yesterday in the DC was about how the group could get their media organizations to play down the Reverend Wright affair and help elect Barack Obama.

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Here’s a fascinating paradox of liberalism, one that affects not only them but anybody who lives where they have influence. Who you are determines truth. Ted Kennedy or Robert Byrd drop dead, and if Fox News says that’s what happened then it hasn’t really happened yet. Vice President Joe Biden says the Recovery & Reinvestment Act has saved-or-created a bunch of jobs, and it must be so because Joe Biden has done something to advance the progressive agenda. Thurgood Marshall was a deity, don’t say a word against his judicial philosophy or you’ll be the opposite. Identity determines everything.

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

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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The snotty tone is pure Crustian. ‘I know a better way, so why doesn’t everyone else get with the program? You all must be idiots!’

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More junk science from ‘nospank.net’. Correlation does not imply causation. More likely hypothesis: Children with low IQs are more likely to be spanked.

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‘Oh, before you get married? Have a plan for your divorce.’ Yeah, that’s a formula for success.

If you’re not comfortable making a commitment, don’t get married. Period.

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Note the ACORN symbol on the ‘Treasury Seal’. Guess they know where their power comes from, eh?

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This is the sort of serious, cutting-edge coverage that Rupert Murdoch has brought to the Wall Street Journal.

Scientists at P & G, with help from a Yale psychology professor, surveyed women, before and after using Pantene products, using a questionnaire that psychology researchers use to measure mood. They found women felt less “hostile,” “ashamed,” “nervous,” “guilty” or “jittery,” depending on the hair products they used, while at other times they said they felt more “excited,” “proud” and “interested.”

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, not even on Elm trees.

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The New York Times devotes a front-page news article today to attacking the Bloomberg administration for its record on racial diversity. “Top Ranks of Bloomberg Managers Are Largely White,” the article’s headline says. Nowhere is there any acknowledgment that someone could write the same article, just as accurately, about the leadership of the newspaper making the accusation: “Top Ranks of New York Times Managers Are Largely White.”

The Other McCain doesn’t really like much of anybody these days.

Sandy Goodman at the Puffington Host generates a truly useful idiocy in attacking another useful idiot, David Brooks, for his PBS NewsHour appearance Friday night.

The current crisis is Constitutional, economic, and legal. The difference between our President and Hugo Chavez doesn’t seem to extend much beyond accent.

The Other McCain delivers a smackdown.

Whatever happened to young journalists learning their craft as reporters before trying their hand at punditry or criticism? I suppose it would be slumming for a Princeton grad to take a job as a staff writer for a newspaper, covering school-board meetings and such. But am I the only reader who resents being lectured to by 22-year-olds? I don’t care what your SAT score was, sweetheart. You’re not that precocious.

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The researchers concluded that, prior to the invention of shoes, people had healthier feet. Among the modern subjects, the Zulu population, which often goes barefoot, had the healthiest feet while the Europeans—i.e., the habitual shoe-wearers—had the unhealthiest.

White People just love to have the practices of millenia exposed (preferably by a Crustian mag) as absurd, especially when backed by ‘science’ and most especially when the implication is that they are stupider than their primitive ancestors (and, by extension, primitive cultures today).

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We’ve written here about the regulatory revolving door, in which executive branch or congressional aides go to work for big banks or interest groups. Less mentioned is the revolving door out of the press corps. Mike Allen’s Politico playbook today has two examples: “Teddy Davis, ABC News Deputy Political Director joins SEIU as Assistant Director of Communications, working with the SEIU team on their political campaigns and policy agenda. Last day at ABC, 6/11. First day at SEIU, 6/14.” And: “Mark Johnson, Capital Bureau of The Charlotte Observer/The News & Observer, with the subject line ‘Ch ch changes’: ‘I’m very much looking forward to going to work for Gov. Bev Perdue starting June 28 as deputy communications director. If you need to reach me, this address will work for another week.'” Governor Perdue is a Democrat.

Perhaps some enterprising journalist will investigate this sleazy practice.

Amity Shlaes overturns a rock and takes a look at the myriad forms of life thus revealed.

To understand the nature of the Beck challenge, you have to recall that our system of higher education is a throwback to medieval economics: a guild. As in the classic guild, members require a lengthy period of training, with formal stages. To be in any way authoritative, a writer must have a Ph.D., a guild seal. Members of this guild have enormous discretion when it comes to the conferring of the seal – also typical. In the humanities and social sciences, Ph.D.s. and, it goes without saying, tenure-track posts — are usually awarded to those not hostile to the master professors’ views. For many decades top universities have been especially rigorous in this practice, with the result that it is difficult to find non-progressives with top credentials in the humanities. The guild demands much from its apprentices, graduate students, including dull work in obscure texts. Indeed it is proud of that obscurity, for it distinguishes academic work from, say, the easy popular histories on bookstore shelves or tv.

Steve Sailer does the jobs that the LameStream Media won’t do.

What Eia had done, was to first interview the Norwegian social scientists on issues like sexual orientation, gender roles, violence, education and  race, which are heavily politicized in the Norwegian science community. Then he translated the interviews into English and took them to well-known British and American scientists like Robert Plomin, Steven Pinker, Anne Campbell, Simon Baron-Cohen, Richard Lippa, David Buss, and others, and got their comments. To say that the American and British scientists were surprised by what they heard, is an understatement.

Recall that the Norwegian scientific establishment gives out the Nobel prize in Economics. Puts a new light on Paul Krugman, doesn’t it?

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Oh, remember all that stuff about islands being submerged in the rising sea levels? Never Mind!

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Rarely does a conservative author have his thesis validated on the front page of the New York Times just as his new book hits the shelves. But that is precisely what happened recently to Arthur Brooks. In The Battle, Arthur eloquently lays out the choice America faces between “the principles of free enterprise” and “European-style statism grounded in expanding bureaucracy, increasing income redistribution, and government-controlled corporations.” Now the Times has given us a window into our future if we do not heed Arthur’s warnings and choose wisely between these two visions.

In a story entitled “Europeans fear crisis threatens liberal benefits,” the Times reports that “Europeans have boasted about their social model, with its generous vacations and early retirements, its national health care systems and extensive welfare benefits, contrasting it with the comparative harshness of American capitalism. … But all over Europe governments with big budgets, falling tax revenues and aging populations are experiencing rising deficits, with more bad news ahead. With low growth, low birthrates and longer life expectancies, Europe can no longer afford its comfortable lifestyle.”

Hooda thunkit.

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By all appearances, this is a moment of reckoning for salt. High blood pressure is rising among adults and children. Government health experts estimate that deep cuts in salt consumption could save 150,000 lives a year.

And that’s exactly all that the New York Times spends on what we Real People would consider the fundamental question: Is the purported link between salt and high blood pressure actually a fact? Or merely a suspicion? For the Times, saying “government health experts” apparently settles the question — a remarkable bit of handwaving from a publication that is disinclined to accept the word of “government experts” in any field where said experts disagree with the preconceptions of the Times.

I wish I had a nickel for every time that “government experts” were damned sure of X, only to be equally damned sure of -X five years later. And of course I an congenitally disposed to think that, if “government experts” say X, the truth is more likely than not to be -X.

But that aside, one would think that an article discussing the Crust’s attempts to strong-arm the public into using less salt would delve a little deeper into whether such fascist thuggery is actually in truth justified.

Since processed foods account for most of the salt in the American diet, national health officials, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Michelle Obama are urging food companies to greatly reduce their use of salt. Last month, the Institute of Medicine went further, urging the government to force companies to do so.

But no.

A person in whom I have absolutely no interest has died.

Apparently this has come as a surprise to a lot of people.

Alex Tabarrok spanks Paul Krugman, always an entertaining sight.

In other words, libertarianism can’t work because government sucks. I am tempted to comment further on this creative line of reasoning but that is unnecessary since Paul has misunderstood the facts of the matter.

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Andrew Sullivan is obsessed with homosexuality, both his own and that of others. He now demands to know whether Elena Kagan is a lesbian. I may be wrong, but my guess is that it is about as likely Ms. Kagan is a lesbian as it is that Sarah Palin is the mother of Trig, another deep question that Sullivan continues to ride into what should be his well deserved oblivion.

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Let me dissent sharply from that conventional wisdom and argue that what talking heads are calling “capitalism” is actually “crony capitalism” and that it is crony capitalism that is responsible for most of our current economic difficulties.

A useful reminder.

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What is this ‘find a gap, see the sky falling’ syndrome that causes the modern knee to jerk so badly?

So there’s a gap? Who the hell cares? In reality, gaps exist. Get over it.

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I’m sure they are.

While home-schooling’s popularity has increased, the rate of growth concentrated in Texas’ high school population is off the chart: It’s nearly tripled in the last decade, including a 24 percent jump in a single year.

“That’s just ridiculous,” said Brian D. Ray, founder of the National Home Education Research Institute. “It doesn’t sound very believable.”

Well, perhaps not to you….

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Unfortunately, the left side of the blogosphere is in fact a caste system*, and the higher castes do not exist to break their own scandals: they exist to ‘break’ the ’scandals’ that are given unto them by professional scandalmongers within the Democratic party.  Which is why Markos is distinctly uninterested in covering this story further, to the point of not even bothering to update the original post (as of 2:30 PM EST, Thursday 05/06/10) with the CoC’s denial: it doesn’t fit the narrative, and Establishment Democrats don’t want this allegation explored further.  After all, aside from everything else it’s not actually true.

Read it.

‘Zenergy’ eco-home gets award from local senator anyway.

Of course. Facts can’t be allowed to stand in the way of The Narrative.

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And why ought it? The Bible isn’t intended as history but as moral instruction. One could as pointlessly worry about the ‘discrepancies’ in Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Aesop’s Fables. Either you get the point or you don’t — and, sadly, the Lame Stream Media typically don’t.

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The Greenpeace noise machine managed to persuade the Guardian to publish a “shocking” article detailing the amazing fact that donors tend to support groups that advocate points of view with which they generally agree.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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A White House staffer told the American Spectator that “These are Republican CEOs who are trying to embarrass the President and Democrats in general. Where do you hear about this stuff? The Wall Street Journal editorial page and conservative Web sites. No one else picked up on this but you guys. It’s BS.” (We called the White House for elaboration but got no response.)

Oh, I think that the White House and Democrats are doing a fine job of embarrassing themselves all on their own.

In other words, CEOs who must abide by U.S. accounting laws under pain of SEC sanction, and who warned about such writedowns for months, are merely trying to ruin President Obama’s moment of glory. Sure.

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Maureen Dowd, the Times’s op-ed columnist for angry, single, middle-aged, Upper West Side women who talk to their cats, ends her rant against the pope today by stomping her feet and hurling the ultimate zinger at the Vatican’s legal experts:

“Maybe they worked for Enron.”

Paul was just doing his job. ‘Tis the season for reconciliation, Maureen.

Programs! Get your programs here! You can’t tell who’s getting paid off by who without a program!

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‘It must be true! I read it on the internet!’

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Anybody who can’t get affirmative action points from the government. This includes Caucasians and Asians.

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

A Crustian view of a recent book.

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We have the technology.

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Fox News reported the allegations as facts, even though not a single video documenting the allegation supports them. It took the word of the Democratic congressmen at face value without noting the efforts Democratic partisans to brand opposition to Obamacare and the rest of the program of national socialism as racist. Given the partisan animus of those making the allegations and the lack of evidence supporting them, I think Fox News made a serious mistake in reporting the allegations as facts.

As they say, we report, you decide. When Fox News reported the allegations as facts over the weekend, it decided rather than reported.

Read it.

Virtually every aspect of Sikes’s story as told to reporters makes no sense. His claim that he’d tried to yank up the accelerator could be falsified, with his help, in half a minute. And now we even have an explanation for why he’d pull such a stunt, beyond the all-American desire to have 15 minutes of fame (recall the “Balloon Boy Hoax” from October) and the aching need to be perceived as a victim.

Jacob Sullum looks at healthy living and the scientific method.

The failure of the subsidies (an idea championed by anti-fat crusaders such as Kelly Brownell) is not surprising, since people do not buy Doritos and ice cream because they are cheaper than broccoli and brown rice. As for the success of the taxes, the enthusiasm of health nannies should be tempered by the fact that the experiment was highly artificial, since the subjects were not spending real money on real food.

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And about time, too. Bet they wish this could have worked 200 years ago.

Alvin Delisle is Mohawk. Pauline Labelle is not. They have spent a decade together, but are being forced to separate as their leaders have ordered all non-aboriginals off their lands in eastern Canada.

Cry me a river. They are not, of course, ‘forced to separate’; he could always move to wherever she’s going. Apparently his commitment is pretty shallow.

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Demonstrating how Hollywood writers aren’t reticent about inserting gratuitous political points into prime time dramas, on last Sunday night’s (February 21) episode of ABC’s Brothers and Sisters, “Nora Walker,” played by liberal actress Sally Field, walked into her kitchen during a kick-off party for her daughter’s Republican senatorial campaign, and complained to another daughter, a son and his husband: “I can’t believe the three of you are in here drinking while the GOP is out there denying global warming.”

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An Australian government programme that imposes restrictions on Aboriginies in an attempt to stamp out sexual abuse of children in remote outback towns has been branded racist and ineffective by the United Nations.

And, let’s face it, the U.N. knows from ineffective and racist.

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I’m thinking not.

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Well. Isn’t that special.

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Yeah, about the time I get my personal jet belt.

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Puts to rest any speculation that David Brooks is actually a conservative.

The Other McCain, of course, reacts appropriately.

NPR.

Your tax dollars paid for this. Aren’t you proud?

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Which is…?

Professor = uppity = black. Left wing, Socialist, palling around with terrorists = out-of-place black. Intellectual = frightening = especially frightening when black. True, most professors, intellectuals, and left wing Socialists are actually not black, nor are those categories seen as stereotypically black. But you say something bad about President Obama, of course that must mean you’re attacking his race. Because, you know, it’s not like conservatives have ever been known for criticizing white liberals. Why else would they pick on a liberal politician if not because of his race?

Read it.

Feel free to be depressed for, oh, about ten minutes. This is, after all, the most important thing we have to worry about today.

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An excellent we-mind-everybody-else’s-business-so-that-you-don’t-have-to article from The New Republic, the paradigmatic SWPL publication. Part of the “think globally, angst locally” movement.

Jane Brody, in the New York Times, gives a tongue-bath to Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual. This is such a poster-child piece of New Age Journalism that it has to be read to be believed.

I find Pollan’s books entertaining, but Brody freely admits the characteristics (‘Mr. Pollan is not a biochemist or a nutritionist but rather a professor of science journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.’ and ‘…this little book, which is based on research but not annotated…’) that lead me to take his aphorisms with a grain of salt. (Oh, wait, no, salt is bad … unless it’s kosher sea salt gathered by happy tribesmen in underdeveloped nations.)

Brody also cements her status as a member of the Crust with such PC sentiments as ‘I will add a third reason: our economy cannot afford to continue to patch up the millions of people who each year develop a diet-related ailment, and our planetary resources simply cannot sustain our eating style and continue to support its ever-growing population.’ People who use phrases like ‘economy cannot afford’ ought to be sent to re-education camps until they quit thinking in absurd generalizations and better understand the nature of markets.

Brody is also a devout communicant of the Church of Gaia: ‘No natural food is simply a collection of nutrients, and a processed food stripped of its natural goodness to which nutrients are then added is no bargain for your body.’ You’d think that somebody with a degree in biochemistry would hesitate to use terms like ‘natural goodness’, but apparently a lifetime in journalism degrades neural pathways more than one might expect.

Pollan certainly understands his audience, and will probably make a ton of money on this book, as he has on his previous two. It’s amazing how many people keep writing for The Whole Earth Catalog thirty years after its demise.

Read it.

Well, maybe then people will stop whining about it.

Look, anybody who reads a newspaper knows that taking a boat within a thousand miles of the Somali coast is like putting cake out for the rats. This isn’t a hundred years ago, and if you get captured by thieving Muslims you are on your own, baby. These guys are probably too old for a Darwin Award but I’d still be happy to recommend them.