NYT. Well, if it’s “quick and painless” they want, there’s always the guillotine. Yeah, it’s messy, but it’s quick and painless. And certain.

Why do I suspect a hidden agenda here? Hm?

NYT. Every now and then the Times prints something from an outside contributor that makes obvious what a bunch of dimwits their normal staff must be. The fact that it doesn’t appear to have any impact on the rest of the paper suggests that even the people who publish the Times don’t read it.

These life-cycle measurements are causing environmentalists worldwide to rethink the logic of food miles.

Oh, yeah, I really think so….

Ross Douthat is apparently unfamiliar with the fact that the Brahmin caste use the term “working class” to mean people who actually work for a living, i.e. not of the Brahmin caste. To them, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are “working class”.

Hyper-inequality is part of the story here, no doubt; on the other hand, I’m pretty sure there have always been people who are rich by any normal standard, but want to live the lifestyle of the super-rich and find themselves scrambling to keep up. And my interest in/sympathy for their plight is … limited.

You got that right.

LGF. No surprises here.

LanuageLog. Apparently the cultural transmission of professional knowledge within journalism is breaking down.

NYT. Surprisingly, an important topic surfaces where one would least expect it. Unfortunately, it’s only treated from the Inside Politics level, not as a serious issue.

NYT. The book reviewer as zoologist: Who are these strange people called “conservatives”? And why are they so inexplicably successful in connecting with our proletariat?

What he doesn’t realize is that, while clinging to the Liberal Label, he’s just as conservative as the right-wingers he detests; just about different things. This illustrates the primary defect of “conservative” as a political category.

I especially love the little tag at the end:

Stephen Metcalf writes the Dilettante column for Slate and is a frequent contributor to the Book Review.

Somehow I’m sure of it.

NYT. The Universalist view: If people are hungry, we are obliged to feed them; the only argument is about how.

NYT. Doesn’t say anything new about the illegal immigration problem but it says a lot about the biases of the New York Times and its ilk.

NYT. Note the headline: Rahmat Abdhir is just a “Californian”. No doubt he’ll soon be singing with the Beach Boys.

PowerLine. Hey, it doesn’t matter if it’s not true — it ought to have been true, and the story serves a Higher Purpose. These are the new ruling class. Aren’t we lucky?

LGF. Freedom of speech among the Kossaks. With video.

NYT. Will there be feminist protests about gender wage inequality? I rather doubt it.

Read it. No, the rich love you. There’s a difference. Trust a “journalist” to confuse the two.

But wait: These new Greenwich/Manhattan billionaires happen to be donors, friends, and constituents of Democrats–not Republicans. What’s a presidential candidate to do?

Ask what they know that you don’t. Hmmm?

Techdirt. They’d have to endure the drop in social status, however.

NYT. Only People of the Crust could have an argument about this.

WE. Poor Hillary! Nobody wants to treat her as if she matters.

“I couldn’t care less what Dick Cheney says about me. But when he plays politics with the lives of our troops, you had better be sure I’m going to respond. And I know that you want to respond too.”

Hate to be the bearer of bad news, sweetheart, but Dick Cheney couldn’t care less what you say about him, either. And as far as “playing politics with the lives of our troops”, giving an anti-war Senator such operational details as how we plan to withdraw from Iraq would be exactly that.

NYT. The Times is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

It is a testament, perhaps, to the fact that, compared with other immigrant groups, Indians tend to speak English when they arrive and are ready to assume a place in the middle class.

Oh, ya think? Plus they aren’t trying to blow us up. That’s a big plus in my book.

I guess assimilation works, huh? And you don’t have to give up your culture to do it, eh? What a surprise.

NYT. I see: Killing unborn children is within medical ethics, but preventing terrorists from starving themselves to death is not. Ah, it’s all clear to me now.

WP. I give up — why do we, the U.S. taxpayers, need to fork out billions of dollars to teach immigrants English?

NYT. Well, no, not really. It’s just the first of what I predict will be an amazing number of similar articles laying the groundwork for future “commentators” to cast doubt on the Chief Justice’s judicial opinions. If he were a left-wing member of the court, this would disappear in a week. But the moonbats will be echoing it forever, as with Bush’s youthful drinking problem.

NYT. Note how this servant of the Brahmin caste attempts, in the second paragraph, to limit the debate to their favored meme:

But in the short term, members of both parties say, the broader outline of that struggle is likely to be reduced to a simple question: “Are you for or against children?”

That’s certainly what they’d like the debate to be about. What it’s actually about is “Are you for or against government control of the health care system?” Let’s see if the anti-statist side can get a word in edgewise.

WT. Note that all of this angst is from people who normally consider the Wall Street Journal the voice of the new Nazi party.

NYT. Would she have gotten interviewed by the New York Times if she were a “global warming denier”? you be the judge.

NYT. Well, I have to confess that the diet of Adélie Penguins in Antarctica is certainly one of my top priorities.

NYT. Not to mention all those people breathing out there. I mean, what’s up with that? Have they no concern for the environment?

WP. Turns out that Congress is to blame for all these scumbags skipping out on their taxes. Whoda thunkit?

I guess even socialists get the blues. They’re against capital, and their against gains, so capital gains drive them right up the wall. And they don’t even get a cut of the money they had no hand in making! How immoral!

NYT. The subtext is all about “How DARE the ARMY approach OUR underclass?! Don’t they realize that these people ought to be manning the barricades here at home, not driving around freeing people overseas?!”

Unfortunately for the Brahmin caste, many of the underclass are determined not to stay there. They rightly see the military as an environment where they can get paid a decent wage for work that needs doing, from which they can get a leg up into the middle class. This doesn’t sit well with the People of the Crust, of course, whose power depends upon an uneducated proletariat steeped in Identity Politics whose votes can be bought with taxpayer money.

Read it. Let’s just step back a minute and see what’s going on here.

A major newspaper, the chief paper of the nation’s capital, is expressing an opinion on how people get fat. Think about that for a second.

1. Why do they care? Is this the business of a newspaper? Especially of a major metropolitan newspaper?
2. Is there nothing more important that they could spend their time on?

The study has a lot to say about how and why America has gotten fatter — and how the country can fight what might be fairly described as an epidemic of expanding waistlines.

Ponder the approach. The problem is “how and why America has gotten fatter”. Not certain individuals, who happen to make up an unspecified portion of the population, have gotten fatter (fatter than what?); not certain individuals who happened to figure in the studies that underly the whole handwringing (do these studies say something of general applicability?); but: “America” has gotten fatter. The focus is on the country as a corporate entity; the camera has pulled back so far that we see just a single block called “America”, without being able to make out any details. Just a big lump: America. Fatter.

Ponder the unspoken assumptions. “Fatter is bad.” “The country must fight it.” “It’s like an epidemic.”

Ponder the natural policy implication: “People must be responsible to themselves — and, now, it appears, to others around them — to eat healthy and exercise.” Emphasis added.

Could there be a clearer demonstration of how this house organ for the People of the Crust view the world and their place within it? Everyone is responsible to everyone for everything. Incidentally, you non-ruling-class dweebs are so stupid that you don’t know how to take care of yourselves. Well, you’d better shape up, or… what, exactly? The obvious next step is that the Nanny State is going to be all over your ass like ugly on an ape. Don’t make us come down there.

Does that bother you? It certainly bothers me.