Read it.

Yeah, Mia Farrow is the first person I look to when I’m looking for advice on how to run the world better.

Jack Shafer is pretty dyspeptic these days. But here’s the fun part:

Haitian Nitpicking Bonus No. 1: Why the goddamn hell is Barack Obama writing the cover story for next week’s Newsweek (which, like Slate, is owned by the Washington Post Co.)? He doesn’t know anything about Haiti outside of what his aides may have told him. He won’t even write it! If the piece is worth publishing, Newsweek should give the byline to its true author.

This is news?

Read it.

Note how Barbara Strauch establishes her progressive bona fides in the first paragraph:

I LOVE reading history, and the shelves in my living room are lined with fat, fact-filled books. There’s “The Hemingses of Monticello,” about the family of Thomas Jefferson’s slave mistress; there’s “House of Cards,” about the fall of Bear Stearns; there’s “Titan,” about John D. Rockefeller Sr.

How she resisted including Dreams From My Father in her list of ‘fat, fact-filled books’ is a puzzle. I love reading history, and the shelves of my living room are filled with books like The Art of Medieval Hunting by John Cummins, The History of Money by Jack Williamson, and John Adams by David McCullough — not the sort of shelf-liners that will get you a gig writing for the New York Times.

The problem is, as much as I’ve enjoyed these books, I don’t really remember reading any of them. Certainly I know the main points. But didn’t I, after underlining all those interesting parts, retain anything else? It’s maddening and, sorry to say, not all that unusual for a brain at middle age: I don’t just forget whole books, but movies I just saw, breakfasts I just ate, and the names, oh, the names are awful. Who are you?

A common problem among the Crust, for whom it is more vtal to display the right opinion-accessories than actually to have a thought. It’s a wonder they find their way to the office every day. Of course, they have people to do that for them.

Barbara Strauch is The Times’s health editor.

Of course. The health of The Times could certainly use some editing.

Read it.

Although why anybody would give a shit at this point is impossible to discern.

The Other McCain takes out the trash.

There are a number of people these days who are persistently characterized by dinosaur media hacks as ‘conservative’ despite a complete lack of evidence aside from the fact that they occasionally say a good word about what the dinosaur media hacks consider to be the ‘conservative position’ on a topic. David Brooks comes immediately to mind, as does Malcolm Gladwell and Andrew Sullivan, but certainly Friedersdorf fits in this bag. Indeed, it wouldn’t surprise me to find the New York Times someday tag unrepentant Trotskyite Christopher Hitchens as a ‘conservative’ because he correctly appreciates the threat that Islam poses to Western Civ and doesn’t hesitate to talk about it.

Read it.

Apparently the heart of American is Washington, D.C., and doesn’t bother with fact-checking, attributing a quotation from Bolingbroke’s ‘The Idea of a Patriot King’ to Jefferson.

Bolingbroke was about as far from Jefferson, politically and philosophically as it’s possible to get without being Hobbes.

(And what part of America does that make California?)

Read it.

Rachel Maddow recently indulged in a strange episode of media bullying, using a half a dozen disreputable and dishonest techniques to smear an obscure writer and psychotherapist, Richard Cohen, whose business it is to help homosexuals who wish to live heterosexual lives to do so.

Therapists such as Mr. Cohen are an object of special hatred for organized homosexuality, and that lobby probably has never had so prominent a voice as Miss Maddow’s. To be sure, Cohen is a distinctly unsympathetic figure. His psychotherapeutic work is pure New Age goo, but that is to be expected: Psychotherapy is pseudoscience. At its least destructive it amounts to idle chatter; at its worst it is a reality-displacing religion substitute, advancing beliefs that are every bit as fundamentalist and anti-rational as any desert jihadist’s, if not so violent.

Read it.

Perhaps it’s just that time of month.

Read it.

Apparently it could be caused by global warming. Whatever they teach in journalism school, blushing is apparently not included.

Read it.

A drone of the Crust looks down his nose at people who actually produce a useful product.

As you probably know, the California-based company Apple makes a portable communication device — a device that an acquaintance of mine whose first language is not English distinguishes as a “self” phone. Though proper nouns conventionally begin with a capital letter, Apple spells the device’s trademark with an initial lowercase i, followed by an uppercase P. Thus styled, the word has a hump in the middle. I could print it here to show you, but I refuse to allow my prose to be so disfigured.

Rather an elegant examplar of why Apple is making money, and the New York Times isn’t.

Read it.

Survey says: You don’t have to be Swedish to believe that.

Robert Wright, in the New York Times, seems to think that, as Mick Jagger was fond of singing, ‘Well, after all/it was you and me.’ This has been a beloved meme of the Blame America First crowd since the sixties. (Funny, you’d think that, if this country sucked as bad as all that, they’d go somewhere else. Sweden, say.)

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.

By this logic, leaving them alone would reduce terrorism. This is an idea so absurd that only an intellectual could believe it, to use Orwell’s phrase. What the left can’t see, because it would undercut their entire worldview, is that Islam is founded and predicated on terrorism against non-Muslims; it’s not just Methodism with prayer-rugs. The left cannot admit that it is possible for people to exist who don’t just want to get along. This is their blind-spot with respect to communism, and this is their blind-spot with respect to Islam. ‘None so blind as they who will not see.’

Read it. And watch the video.

People do strange things in service to their religion. Some of these things look very odd to outsiders. Not that there’s anything wrong with that….

Steve Sailer is never afraid to dig where others fear to tread.

I’ve pointed out before that New York’s liberal media elite don’t want the public to discuss IQ, but they almost all get their four-year-olds’ IQs tested so they can win admission to fashionable private preschools. Now the New York toddler IQ testing madness has spread to New York public schools.

The Other McCain is having fun.

Congratulations to this overnight Caucasian! He is now a man who can join the Klan. Send the word to Senator Bob Byrd.

Read it.

Faced with the obvious – that Hasan is a jihadist, an America-hating, Islamic murderer, the media still did their level best to paint him as the innocent victim. That wretched tactic having failed them, presumably because America is very quickly getting to the end of its patience with this shit, the media limbers up, pins its ankles behind its egos, and will be piling on so much evidence of Hasan’s guilt that the only natural reaction from apologists and pusillanimous hand jobbers the world over will be to blame, accuse, and denigrate the US Army for either being too stupid to detect it, or choosing not to stop it.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Dvorak looks like Al Franken without the hair. Just sayin’.

Computers give us highly realistic games that suck people into playing them for hours on end. And I’d rather not even want to get into the time-killer called Second Life. Here a person actually creates a whole second life in which he or she can waste countless hours within that structure and waste time as another person.

Well, that’s lost productivity – if your goal in life is to work 24/7. Lighten up, John.

As a technologist myself, I have obviously promoted smart devices and computers, but I do look around at my own increasing disorganization and remind myself that I originally got into computers to get more organized and more efficient, not less. Instead I got less organized and less efficient.

So your personality deficiencies define how bad things are? Get over yourself, John. Go play a video game or something.

Read it.

Probably to make sure the government isn’t screwing them out of royalties.

Read it.

The New York Times is shocked, shocked I tell you, that conservative journalists are learning all the tricks that ‘progressive’ journalists have been using for years.

‘Momeee! Johnny hit me back!’

Read it.

On the Left, there’s no room for 90% compliance.

Read it.

New York Times columnist David Brooks says that Republicans in America should look for inspiration to Conservatives in Britain, who back a 50% top tax rate at the national level. This is what passes for the right-of-center regular voice on the New York Times op-ed page.

I find it curious that the Crust doesn’t have Own Goal Specialists the way the ‘right’ has people like Brooks, Frum, and Friedersdorf. Perhaps that’s what being the Establishment is all about — don’t think of it as selling out; think of it as buying in.

Read it.

No, they’re not talking about the Congressional appropriations process. Being Slate, they’re talking about a medical device that poor people can’t afford unless they’re subsidized by taxpayers, so obviously this means that the system is broken. The complaint seems to be that because we have more MRIs per capita than any other country, we therefore suck. No, I don’t follow their line of thought, either.

Read it.

So after witnessing the waves of antipathy across the country toward President Obama’s policies, New York Times writer Charles Blow introduces his readers to the term, “aversive racism.” It’s a sinister kind of prejudice, Charles explains, that reveals itself in disagreements based on factors “other than race.”

A simpler definition of aversive racism?

If you say it’s not about race, then it’s really about race.

Read it.

It’s getting so that even Brits are noticing that Jimmuh is a moron.

George Bush was reviled in the most blood-curdling terms by large sections of the American population: did anyone ever claim that this was because he was a Texan? The Ali G question, “Is it because I is black?” has a pretty straightforward answer in this case: no. Americans have profound fears about central government taking power away from individual citizens and those fears are legitimised by the Constitution. They have every right to express them without being smeared as “racists”.

Read it.

You can’t be in the business world for long without being impressed by how hard companies work to be good at what they do. And yet, here and there, there are exceptions. In recent years, the liberal news media–what used to be known as the “mainstream” media–have been in that category. Time after time, with mind-numbing regularity, they miss news that would be of interest to their readers. Of course, the stories they miss are not random–they are stories that make the Democratic Party, or liberal politicians or organizations, look bad.

Read it.

Bottom-feeder journalism.

The Other McCain is having fun.

One post is never enough, is it? When you take up the habit of bashing David Brooks, it’s like crack cocaine. One hit and you’re hooked.

Would that other conservative writers would catch the habit regarding the MediaPetCons like Brooks and Gerson.

Brooks speaks for the testosterone-deficient, the effete, those who are by habit critics because they lack the capacity to actually do anything. To borrow Patton’s description of such creatures, they know even less about fighting than they know about fornication, which is nothing at all.

Yeah, that’s about right.

Steve Sailer fisks Dalton Conley’s NYT op-ed.

Personally, I suspect that the main reason that poor people are less likely to pay back their mortgages than rich people is because poor people tend to have less money than rich people, but, then, I’m not the Dean of Social Sciences at NYU like Dalton Conley, so what do I know?

Decades of government programs to make homeownership “affordable” only succeeded by 2007 in making homeownership insanely unaffordable, so I guess the plan is to replace the word “affordable” with the word “attainable” and then just rerun the same old stuff.

Interview in some left-wing rag. Warning: He looks like the Cowardly Lion.

Where are you politically these days?
I became a registered Republican about five or six years ago because to have a successful democracy you have to have at least two parties, and one of them was failing miserably. We had enough good Democrats. We needed a few more good Republicans. We needed a loyal opposition.

Like Lindsay Graham, Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, Arlen Specter?

Have you ever seen “American Idol”?
No, I have never watched it. But I’m thankful we’re living in a world where we can actually afford to waste your time. What a great thing that is.

Read it.

As we noted yesterday, some of the less well-grounded members of the political media have been harshly attacking Palin for having a baby. Egads! Can we really have a heartbeat away a Christian who prays, or a woman who has borne children?

It really does seem as though the media and the Angry Left loathe Sarah Palin precisely because she is normal. Through the words of his supporters, Barack Obama has become the candidate of those who oppose religion and motherhood. With friends like these, who needs Karl Rove?

The media logothetes hate Sarah Palin because she’s every normal thing they’re not.

Yesterday the Associated Press, in reporting on the interview, relied on its own inaccurate reporting of a week earlier in claiming that Palin had “contradicted an assertion she made at her former church that ‘our national leaders are sending U.S. soldiers on a task that is from God.’ ” This claim disappeared from later versions of the AP dispatch, although we haven’t found any evidence that the wire service issued a correction.

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

The Other McCain voices an eternal truth.

Keith Olbermann is an evil maniac, but at least he is not as consistently jaw-dropping stupid as Matthews.

Indeed.

Read it.

Apparently journalists don’t know the meanings of the words they use. Who knew?

The term “icon” has two basic meanings, neither of which apply to Michael Jackson, Greg Norman, Ed McMahon, most Scottish mystery writers or anyone from Paul Revere & the Raiders. Originally it referred to sacred images painted on tiny wooden panels back in the days of the Eastern Empire. Thus, in theory, Farrah Fawcett’s famous ’70s poster could vaguely qualify as an icon. But for the longest time the word “icon” was used to refer to what Webster’s describes as “an object of uncritical devotion.” No more. Today it is used to describe anyone reasonably famous who is completely over the hill, on a respirator, or stone dead. Or, in the case of Mickey D’s, beloved but inanimate.

This is just another case of hyperventilating journalists hijacking an otherwise admirable language because they are desperate to insert an infectious banality into their work and don’t care if it belongs there. There is no such thing as “the mother of all stimulus packages.” One cannot go in search of the Holy Grail of killer apps for the iPhone. The English language doesn’t work that way. It’s flexible, but it’s not stupid.

Read it.

The New Yorker is reputed to have legendary fact-checkers. That state of affairs obviously died some time ago, and now it reads just like the rest of the media — a doe-eyed journalist who sees their role more as a conveyor of what someone told them than as an investigator trying to figure out what’s going on.

In the latest issue, there’s a risibly clueless article on what makes us fat. First it confuses two levels of explanation — ultimate or evolutionary causes that made our bodies the way they are today, and proximate causes like “junk food adds pounds.” At the level of mechanisms, the author makes no mention of what causes fat to be stored in fat cells rather than flow into the bloodstream to be burned as fuel. It’s not very complicated — it’s hormonally regulated, and almost the entire story is how much insulin has been released. The word “insulin” does not appear once in her 4000-word article.

Easy access to fast food, potato chips, and the like is not necessary to drive up obesity rates, since plenty of other groups have been plagued by metabolic syndrome without any such food. There is a common factor, however: foods that are high in carbohydrates. She ends the article by ominously noting a new offering from Burger King that has lots of beef, bacon, and cheese. But of course, what everyone eats when they go to Burger King, McDonalds, Taco Bell, Olive Garden, or any other cheap human feed lot, has almost no meat or cheese at all. Most of the “hamburger” is the bun, and the rest is fries and soda. Let’s see, carbs, carbs, and more carbs — but that teensy ration of beef is what’ll get ya!

Contrast this with what you get when you eat at a place with Michelin stars — it’s animals, animals, and more animals, with a token portion of vegetables on the side or to enhance flavor. And not sissy animal products either — foie gras and caviar have some of the highest concentrations of saturated fat and cholesterol of any food. Yet somehow well-to-do French, Spanish, and Italians seem to be much thinner and freer of heart disease than lower-class Americans. Not only that, but their food — loaded with fat — actually tastes like something!

The Other McCain puts it in a nutshell.

People who like Sarah Palin don’t hate women. But everybody hates whiny bitches like you.

And that about says it all.

Read it.

Regina Benjamin is a family doctor who runs a rural clinic that treats many poor patients in the town of Bayou La Batre, Alabama. She has an MBA and she was the first black woman to be elected to the AMA’s board of trustees.

Look at the picture and tell me true: Would you have known that Obama’s pick for Surgeon General was a “black woman” unless somebody told you?

The Other McCain takes a look at David Brooks’ ordeal.

My theory is that the Senator wanted to borrow a pair and too late realized his mistake.

Read it.

INDISCRIMINATE gluttons and discerning gourmands alike have long been crazy for pizza. But over the last few years, they have elevated their passion to a vocation, sending pizza into a whole new stratosphere of respect. It isn’t just loved, and it isn’t just devoured. It’s scrutinized and fetishized, with a Palin-esque power to polarize.

They actually pay people to write this stuff.

Steve Sailer points and laughs.

Like I’ve been saying since last August, Biden is “kind of a bozo,” which is fine in a Senator or blogger or whatever, but not so fine in a Vice President, especially when he’s talking foreign policy, because foreigners might not realize he’s just Old Joe Biden running off at the mouth again, but might take what he says seriously on the assumption that he’s, like, you know, the Vice President of the United States of America. (As a commenter points out, Biden was brought on board specifically to impart foreign policy gravitas to the newcomer from the South Side of Chicago.)

Read it.

Even in Washington, it’s unusual to see an actual price tag placed on a chance to “alter the debate,” as the Post’s flier tastefully put it. Stranger still is it to see the city’s scourge of public corruption — the Post broke the Watergate story and the Walter Reed scandal, among others — seemingly offering its own good offices for hire.

One hand washes the other. The separate components of The Hive work together like any other form of social insect.

Jerry Pournelle has something to say about “consensus science”.

Apparently I’m not the only one to have noticed the herd mentality at New Scientist magazine.

David Broder outs the Obama staffers who’d really rather keep running against the Bushitler if they could.

Bush’s silence has made it harder for Obama to keep the public focused on Bush as being responsible for our present difficulties — the weak economy, the unsettled wars, the scandals of Guantanamo and the detainee program.

It is not for lack of trying. Obama regularly reminds the public in his speeches and news conferences of all the problems he inherited from his predecessor. But to reporters covering the White House, those reminders have become familiar boilerplate. And since Bush won’t fight back, they rarely get much coverage.

Disappointing that a columnist of Broder’s stature can’t use the subjunctive properly, but that’s the way it is these days.

Read it.

“The DC voucher pilot program, which is set to expire this year, has been a failure,” the NEA’s letter fibs. “Over its five year span, the pilot program has yielded no evidence of positive impact on student achievement.”

That must be news to the voucher students who are reading almost a half-grade level ahead of their peers. Or to the study’s earliest participants, who are 19 months ahead after three years. Parents were also more satisfied with their children’s schools and more confident about their safety. Those were among the findings of the Department of Education’s own Institute of Education Sciences, which used rigorous standards to measure statistically significant improvement.

Read it.

But the storm has fallen with a special ferocity on black and Latino homeowners, the analysis shows. Defaults occur three times as often in mostly minority census tracts as in mostly white ones. Eighty-five percent of the worst-hit neighborhoods — where the default rate is at least double the regional average — have a majority of black and Latino homeowners.

Perhaps that’s because they listened to the government and bought houses that they, you know, couldn’t afford. Always a bad idea, taking the government’s advice.

“My district feels like ground zero,” said City Councilman James Sanders Jr., an African-American who represents hundreds of blocks in Queens like this one. “In military terms, we are being pillaged.”

Novel concept: an area that pillages itself.

Years ago many banks drew red lines on maps around black neighborhoods and refused to lend; more recently, some banks began taking aim at those neighborhoods for the marketing of subprime loans, say consumer advocates.

How dare those racists target minority neighborhoods for loans! The swine! Not like the good old days where we could bitch at them for not lending in minority neighborhoods.

And that’s always a good rule of thumb when reading Maureen Dowd.

… which I never do unless moved by an unusual circumstance — in this case, the hilarious photoshop of Obama as Spock.

Consider: The New York Times, perhaps the premier newspaper in the country (if not the world), winner of enough prizes and awards to sink the Titanic, actually paid her money to write this. And will continue to do so. That tells you all you need to know about why newspapers are dying.

Read it.

An international team of scientists has used the latest electro-magnetic induction equipment to discover that the Arctic ice is in fact “twice as thick” as they had expected, says Christopher Booker.

Imagine that.

Read it.

Rule of thumb: Anybody who capitalizes “Other” save at the beginning of a sentence is a pseudo-intellectual moron who ought to be taken out and shot to improve the gene pool and safeguard what little culture we have left.

Read it.

No doubt starring Russell Crowe.

Wouldn’t mind seeing Gwyneth Paltrow in a suit of woad, though.

Read it.

This is the season of the beat-sweetener. A beat-sweetener (some prefer the term source-greaser) is a gratuitously flattering profile that a reporter writes about a government official in the hope that it will encourage (or, at the very least, not impede) that reporter’s access to the official in question. Newspapers and magazines have been full of them, and even the uninitiated may feel they’ve been reading a lot of dull profiles lately without knowing exactly why. My advice is to adopt a defensive-reader posture and treat all profiles of Obama’s new team as guilty until proven innocent. If you encounter emollient rhetoric in the first five paragraphs, skip the rest and move on. A beat-sweetener is a meal prepared for someone other than yourself, and there’s no reason you should waste precious time ingesting it.

The smell must be getting pretty bad when a Democrat administration — and its publicity arm, the dinosaur media — are being criticized in Slate, mouthpiece of the Chattering Classes.