Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

Note that Chicago’s leadership caste in this century has largely consisted of sophisticated and ruthless Obama Administration insiders: Rahm, Penny Pritzker, Bill Daley, Valerie Jarrett, etc. As far as I can tell, they share a strategy of making Chicago more like Paris by moving the Problem People out of town: tear down housing projects near the lake, send their residents to suburbs or Dubuque with Section 8 vouchers … It’s the kind of foolproof plan that you could have explained to former Minister of Housing and Construction Ariel Sharon in 20 words and he would have woken up from his coma just to tell you he grasps perfectly what you mean.

Read it.

Rohini Sethi is the student body Vice President at the University of Houston. After the assassination of five Dallas police officers at a Black Lives Matter inspired rally, she wrote on Facebook: “Forget #BlackLivesMatter; more like #AllLivesMatter.”

Sethi quickly deleted the comment, but it nonetheless generated outrage. In response, Sethi issued a statement in which she called her comment “inappropriate.” She said it was an emotional response to the tragic killings in Dallas. She ended with the message: “?#?LetsTalkUnity?.” You can read her full statement here. There’s no reason to think it is insincere.

Sethi’s statement wasn’t enough to avoid punishment. Student body president Shane Smith suspended her for 50 days and ordered her to take a diversity seminar as condition of being reinstated.

In a Communist country that’s called being sent for ‘re-education’.

Contradict the Narrative, and they punish you.

Read it.

Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Jeb Bush, if his judgment is that bad.

I put it at 50-50 that Jeb Bush will make the same announcement some time before the election.

Victor Davis Hanson lays it out.

These differences wouldn’t matter so much if it weren’t for the fact that the nation’s urbanites increasingly govern those living in the hinterlands, even as vanishing rural Americans still feed and fuel the nation.

The elite that runs the country in politics, finance, journalism and academia is urban to the core: degrees from brand-name universities, internships at well-connected agencies, residence in New York or Washington, power marriages. The power resume does not include mechanical apprenticeships, work on ships or oil rigs, knowledge of firearms or farm, logging or mining labor — jobs now regulated and overseen by those with little experience of them. Few in Silicon Valley know where in the High Sierra their Hetch Hetchy water comes from or where in the bay their sewage is dumped. Food, too, is an abstraction. I doubt that most of my Stanford colleagues know that a raisin is typically a dried Thomson seedless grape, or whether a peach or plum needs to be cross-pollinated.

Read it.

Here’s how it happened. As part of Hillary’s Russian reset, the Kremlin committed $5 billion over three years to fund Skolkovo, an “innovation city” on the outskirts of Moscow billed as Russia’s version of Silicon Valley. Clinton’s State Department worked aggressively to attract U.S. investment partners and helped the Russian State Investment Fund identify American tech companies worthy of Russian investment.

Dozens of U.S. tech firms, including top Clinton Foundation donors like Google, Intel, and Cisco, then made major financial contributions to Skolkovo. According to Schweitzer, by 2012 Skolkovo had 28 Russian, American and European “Key Partners.” Of the 28 key partners, 17 have made financial commitments to the Clinton Foundation, totaling tens of millions of dollars, or sponsored speeches by Bill Clinton.

Russian money also flowed to the Clinton Foundation. Schweitzer reports that Andrey Vavilov, the chairman of SuperOx, part of Skolkovo’s nuclear-research cluster, donated between $10,000 and $25,000. Skolkovo Foundation chief and billionaire Putin confidant Viktor Vekselberg also donated through his company.

Hillary — best candidate money can buy.

Read it.

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

Well, here’s a liberal tilt.  Charlie Nash at Breitbart reports that after months and months of making a profit at the expense of Republican nominee Donald Trump, Apple is refusing to publish a political satire game about Hillary Clinton’s email scandal.

It’s okay that Apple publishes games that make fun of Trump by featuring him as a giant turd in the game “Trump Dump,” or “Dump on Trump Bird” or “Dump on Trump Twisty Wheel Edition” that allows a player to hit Trump with excrement. One game lets you punch Trump in the face. (Imagine the feminist reaction to these games with Hillary.)  But Apple has a BIG problem publishing anything that dare criticizes Clinton, even just scandal mockery.

Read it.

On college campuses, controversies surrounding free speech have reached an all-time high. While social justice warriors advocate for safe spaces and trigger warnings, critics accuse colleges and universities of restricting freedom of speech for the sake of saving students from having their feelings hurt by “hate speech.”

However, as Yiannopolous told CNBC, “Who’s to say what’s a civil level of discourse? If Twitter wants to start regulating how we can speak, the tone in which we can have debates, the language we can use, it’s going to find that all of the interesting people on its network … are going to leave.”

Such is the problem with regulating free speech. There is no real way of determining what classifies as “hate speech” and what does not. In fact, due to the absence of the term “hate speech” in the First Amendment, it could be argued, as Steven Crowder, conservative radio show host, has done, that it does not even exist. Feelings are not an appropriate barometer for measuring how much free speech should be allowed.

Those who are determined to suppress speech with which they disagree will do so whenever they have the power and can get away with it. The Left has carefully cultivated that power over the last 50 years and I don’t see any effective efforts to reverse that process.

‘Progressives’, of course, will say that this Change represents Progress and is inevitable, the ‘right side of history’, so complainers ought to Give Up And Get With The Program. It’s not strictly necessary to Love Big Brother so long as you kiss his butt in public.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

My name is Phoenicia Hebebe Dobson-Mouawad. No, I’m not kidding. This is the name my parents chose for me 19 years ago and it is the reason I don’t go to Starbucks. Choosing a name for your baby can seem like a way to determine what type of parents you will become – many aim for trendy rather than traditional. However, faced with the resentment of your grownup offspring, who have endured a childhood of being embarrassed by their unusual name, you may wish you could turn back time.

Even the Hip and Trendy sometimes get their noses rubbed in reality.

Faced with an uncommon name, people think they have the right to voice an opinion. The worst is when a stranger feels it necessary to comfort me, having assumed (correctly) that my name is an affliction. “Oh, that’s different,” they say, or “How original.” I’ve learned that what people really mean by this is that they have no idea how to spell it.

Been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Steve Sailer, of course, has an opinion or two.

Kevin Williamson has a very bad feeling about this.

In the event, the two presidential candidates Americans got most excited about were Donald Trump, a nationalist, and Bernie Sanders, a socialist. Between the two of them, they make a pretty good national socialist. Trump won his party’s nomination and Sanders ceded his to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is (arguably) a little bit more of a nationalist and (arguably) a little bit less of a socialist, but in many ways a much better distillation of the partnership between big government and big business that characterizes our current political moment.

In Germany in the 1930s, the people the National Socialists were most worried about were the real sociaists, the SDP.

The people who don’t like free markets and free people, who want to control who you can buy from and sell to, or regulate who can criticize a politician and when and how, don’t think that way simply because libertarians have never figured out how to translate the gospel into their language. They have other values and other agendas. The white nationalists in the Trump camp and the Black Lives Matters activists opposed to them do not secretly want to be libertarian individualists on the Randian model: They want their identities affirmed by state action. They want a politics of Us and Them. Populist movements cannot survive long without a Them.

And the people who run the country today are very much about suppressing Them.

The Other McCain reads this shit so that you don’t have to.

In case you have forgotten atheist feminist Miriam Mogilevsky (@sondosia on Twitter), she is the “queer, gay, femme . . . homoflexible . . . lesbian with exceptions” who is “on the asexual spectrum somewhere” and does not “experience primary sexual attraction.” Ms. Mogilevsky’s confusing welter of identities is typical of Third Wave feminists, who are in favor of every kind of sexuality except normal sexuality.

Did I mention she’s into “polyamory”? That’s what we used to call “screwing around,” but when intellectuals screw around, they need a fact word for it, to make it sound clever. But I digress . . .

I have always found interesting the fact that evolution works even when you might not expect it to. For example, the sort of people who have abortions are the sort of people of whom you really wouldn’t want more (maybe Margaret Sanger was smarter than we think). Feminists probably fall in that category as well.

Read it.

…Fresh evidence is also being unearthed on the land reform that transformed the countryside in the early 1950s. In many villages there were no ‘landlords’ set against ‘poor peasants’ but, rather, closely knit communities that jealously protected their land from the prying eyes of outsiders – the state in particular. By implicating everybody in ‘accusation meetings’ – during which village leaders were humiliated, tortured and executed while their land and other assets were redistributed to party activists recruited from local thugs and paupers – the communists turned the power structure upside down. Liu Shaoqi, the party’s second-in-command, had a hard time reining in the violence, as a missive from the Hebei archives shows: ‘When it comes to the ways in which people are killed, some are buried alive, some are executed, some are cut to pieces, and among those who are strangled or mangled to death, some of the bodies are hung from trees or doors.’

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

Hillary Clinton has made clear she intends to dramatically raise taxes on the American people if elected. She has proposed an income tax increase, a business tax increase, a death tax increase, a capital gains tax increase, a tax on stock trading, and an Exit Tax, and more (see below). Her planned net tax increase on the American people is at least $1 trillion over ten years, based on her campaign’s own figures.

Hillary has endorsed many tax increases on that would hit middle income Americans, despite her pledge not to raise taxes on any American making less than $250,000. She has said she would be fine with a payroll tax hike on all Americans, she has endorsed a steep soda tax, endorsed a 25% national gun tax, and most recently, her campaign manager John Podesta said she would be open to a carbon tax. It’s no wonder she said her $250,000 tax pledge was merely a “goal.”

Watch Leon Panetta’s speech and see for yourself.

Read it.

Just think of it as a really-late-term abortion. The rationalizations are the same.

Steve Sailer decodes the Freddie Gray case.

Black district attorney, black mayor, black judge, black cops, black corpse, black rioters, black Attorney General, black President … white people to blame.

And that’s it, in a nutshell.

Read it. Or just watch the video to get the full effect.

Time to remind everybody of the Pillars of Progressivism:

1. Progress is inevitable (per Marx).
2. Progress is impossible without change (obvious to the most casual observer).
3. Since progress is impossible without change and progress is inevitable, any change will produce progress (eventually).
4. Since any change will eventually produce progress, constant change is mandatory (otherwise no progress).
5. Since any change will eventually produce progress, any resistance to change is Bad and the people who resist change are Stupid or Evil.

Hence the emphasis on Hillary as ‘bringer of change’ (and hence the lack of specification as to what exact changes she had delivered).

This also underlies Barack Obama’s whole ‘Hope and Change’ schtick.

If you read the lyrics of the Fleetwood Mac song Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow, they express perfectly the progressive mindset: The past is unimportant because it had less progress, and tomorrow will be better because it will have even more progress, and if I’ve harmed anybody I didn’t mean it so therefore it doesn’t count.

‘Oh, don’t you look back.’ This is the Clinton playbook in a nutshell. This is the life they live. This is what allows them to lie and lie and lie and never feel any remorse or even admit to it. That was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.

Read it.

Earlier this month the government resumed negotiations with the CNTE (education union). The negotiations are not working and this is not a surprise. CNTE is not really a union. Rather it is the armed wing of the SNTE (national teachers union). For decades the national union has been criticized because it had become corrupt and anti-education. Parents saw SNTE as an obstacle to their children’s education because too many teacher jobs were not for teachers but for whoever could afford to pay a bribe to get a no-show job. You were paid but you did not have to teach or do any work. That was a job worth fighting for. The state-supported schools had become useless and the CNTE would be called out to stage violent protests whenever local or national governments tried to change this. CNTE claims to have popular support but beyond the families of teachers the CNTE is hated and feared. Open criticism is often violently suppressed. CNTE and SNTE supported whichever political party would help them and was part of a larger corrupt system that most Mexicans want gone. The current reform effort by the federal prosecutors centers on former SNTE head, Elba Esther Gordillo Morales. In 2013 she was indicted on embezzlement and theft charges and arrested. Gordillo allegedly embezzled $160 million in union and education funds and was notorious for her luxurious lifestyle. The government is now trying to clean up the union. To aid with that the government passed a law that gives the federal government control over education. Who had controlled education policy before that? The teachers union did so, with minimal government oversight. Based on the embezzlement scandal, there was also minimal financial oversight. Until the new law was passed, the SNTE determined who was hired and fired. The new law says hiring will be based on qualifications and merit. The teachers union has been one of the most powerful (and allegedly most corrupt) unions in Mexico. It has around 1.5 million members and most of them are not qualified to be teachers. Currently the union maintains roadblocks in Oaxaca state and threatens widespread protests throughout Mexico. The union continues to demand that the government repeal the 2013 laws that required routine evaluations of teacher efficiency. The union also want the government to free two union leaders currently under arrest.

Read it.

In the run up to almost every presidential election, partisans on both sides of the political spectrum threaten to move to a country like Canada or Ireland if the other side wins. But this election is different.

If all the people who said they’d move to Canada if X got elected would just DO IT, we wouldn’t have these problems.

“There’s far less trust in the federal government and major institutions than there was 50 or 60 years ago,” says Jason Sorens, author of Secessionism and a lecturer in government at Dartmouth College. “A lot of people don’t feel represented in D.C. and they’re definitely open to radical solutions like secession because they feel as if that’s a way to get control back over their political destiny.”

That’s because statist trends in government are worse then they’ve been at any time since President Wilson.

Read it.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

This is what the Democrats want to  bring to America. Feel the Bern!

Read it.

Police have charged 36-year-old Jeannie Chapman of Brewer, Maine, with aggravated assault – a class B crime.

Taking exception to the news reports, a Pokémon player posted in the same Facebook group: “They have been reporting us as moronic zombies walking into traffic without paying attention to where we’re going and that’s simply not true.”

Pokemon Go players should ask themselves: ‘Why do they hate us?’

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Does anyone believe incoming students at Amherst College are racists? Amherst College does, apparently.

‘Welcome go college. Here’s why you ought to be ashamed that you can afford to come here.’

Read it.

Guess it didn’t work.

“Officers arrived on scene and found multiple victims suffering from various levels of gunshot wounds,” Fort Myers Police Captain Jim Mulligan said in a statement. Police say three people have been taken into custody related to the shooting but did not say why.

The problem with ‘gun free zones’ is that only law-abiding people leave their guns outside. Those aren’t the people from whom one needs protection.

I am not making this up.

I was safely ensconced in the Navy and college during this period, and so thank God missed most of it.

Read it.

Bavaria is getting more than its share of excitement this month. The latest incident occurred tonight, and involved a heavy explosion in the town of Ansbach that was not an accident. It killed one person and wounded ten others, some of them seriously.

Read it.

The greatest minds of humanity used to believe in a static universe, phrenology, and many more things that we might find ridiculous today. So if skepticism is so demonstrably useful and deserved, why do people demonize each other for failure to follow the herd?

It’s politics, stupid.

Like basically anything today, science often finds itself mired in the ostentatious game of political signaling. Opinions and interpretations of scientific research are as much a part of political identity as a bumper sticker or a lawn sign. This is hugely unfortunate because it leads people to adopt dogmatic approaches to a process that should be objective.

Politics ruin science (and pretty much everything else) because everything is reduced to a zero-sum game: an us versus them scenario where concession is likened to defeat. They also reduce diversity of opinion and promote groupthink.

‘Progressives’, of course, don’t have a problem with groupthink; their whole world depends on it.

Separated at birth?

Taki doesn’t much like modern Europe.

France was once a very great country, both a military as well as an intellectual powerhouse. It is now just a tourist attraction where one may or may not get killed by an Islamist.

Read it.

Despite steady job growth over the past six years, the U.S. labor market—by some accounts—has become a stagnant place where fewer people switch jobs and workers linger in the same roles for longer.

Recent research exploring the causes of this declining labor-market dynamism has focused on supply restrictions, such as state-based occupational licensing regimes, which make it harder for licensed workers to relocate across state borders, or prohibitively high rents in job-rich cities, which impede mobility. A drop in labor-market fluidity reduces overall employment rates, affecting younger and less-educated workers most of all, research by economists Steven Davis and John Haltiwanger shows. White House economist Jason Furman has also cited occupational licensing as a barrier to job fluidity.

A new paper says the problem is not supply. It’s that firms just don’t have enough demand for labor.

Steve Sailer deconstructs the Narrative so that you won’t have to.

White people, of course, are responsible for everything bad in the world, especially when they aren’t even present.

Now, cops say things like, “I’m going home tonight,” meaning: “I’m not getting myself killed over this.”

Can’t say that I blame them.

Read it.

American liberals trumpet a “wage gap” between men and women, notwithstanding reams of social science data demonstrating that men’s higher average earnings reflect life choices, not discrimination. White House salaries are published, so analysts have shown that Barack Obama’s own staff manifests the same “pay gap” that Obama and Hillary Clinton decry in private industry. Democrats have no response; as usual, they count on voter ignorance.

It is entertaining to see the same drama play out in the United Kingdom….

‘Progressives’ are the masters of ‘do as I say, not as I do’.

Politicians love to impose burdens, sometimes impossible burdens, on others, especially business people, but they are much more understanding when it comes to their own conduct. In 1994, Newt Gingrich and his colleagues drafted a Contract With America, a key provision of which was that Congress should live by the same laws it imposes on the rest of us. That proposal was wildly popular, given that Congress had made a regular practice of inserting an exception for itself in legislation.

Homework exercise: Look up whether Congress and its staffers have to use the same Obamacare insurance they dump on everybody else.

Read it. And watch the video.

Scotland Yard cancelled all leaves for bobbies after a riot by youths chanting “black lives matter” in Hyde Park in the poshest part of London left a policeman stabbed.

Read it.

And yet the Obamanation still can’t figure out what his motive might be. What a puzzler!

Read it.

Black Lives Matter activists occupied police union offices in Washington, D.C. and New York City on Wednesday morning for what protesters say is the unions’ role in defending police violence against minorities and opposing police reform legislation.

In D.C., activists with the local chapters of the Black Youth Project 100 and Black Lives Matter blocked the entrances to the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) legislative headquarters and the nearby intersection.

Meanwhile, the New York City chapters of the BYP100 and Million Hoodies occupied the lobby of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, which represents New York City Police Department officers.

Standing outside the FOP’s legislative office in D.C., local Black Youth Project 100 activist Clarise McCants called the FOP “the most dangerous fraternity in America.”

“We’re here today to make sure that no legislation that will continue to criminalize black people and protect killer cops is created,” McCants said. “When police officers kill us, they call their police union rep first, so the unions, especially the Fraternal Order of Police, are one of the main hindrances to keeping police accountable.”

If these guys are trying to start a race war with the police, I know who I’m betting on.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Perhaps he knew something we don’t.

Appearing in court in the small city of St. Pölten, where the incident occurred, the man was asked by the judge why he had drawn the penis, to which he replied: “Just because.”

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Kathy Shaidle vents.

The political correctness my anarchist pals and I wrote off in the late ’80s as an irritating passing fad on a par with Cabbage Patch Dolls has become, along with certain varieties of mental illness, enshrined in public policy and entrenched in quotidian intercourse.

It’s 1968 with (even) crappier music. I want it over.

Read it.

Everyone I know in Dallas is personally acquainted with somebody who was run into by a drunk illegal Mexican with no license and no insurance.

That’s why Trump’s wall is so attractive. It’s just that simple.

Sarah Hoyt does the news.

Lately I’ve found myself growling at the tv.  This is part of the reason that, in the US I watch almost no TV.  Okay, okay, I confess, it’s because at one time I threw a house slipper at the TV and Dan decided he should stop watching it when I was around, because next time I might throw a snow-boot.

But that was campaign speeches. This is the news.

Jim Goad blows the whistle.

All across America, white people are apologizing to black people for things they didn’t do and historical situations they had no hand in creating. While it obviously makes these self-flagellating Caucasoids feel good about themselves, will it make even the tiniest difference in the lives of ordinary black Americans?

Hint: No.

I’ve been asking this question since the early 1990s and will continue asking it until someone gives a satisfying answer or they throw their hands up and admit there is no answer: Can you name a majority-black country on Earth where blacks live longer and have a higher standard of living than they do in America? Don’t avoid the question or wonder about my motives for asking it—just ANSWER it. If you can’t, you will be forced to concede that blacks die younger and are far more impoverished when left to their own devices than when they live in white-majority countries. I realize this fact alone destroys your dangerously fraudulent “equality” narrative, but the question must be asked, again and again, wherever poisonous propaganda serves to make white people feel guilty for being history’s winners.

The Antiplanner weighs in.

America needs less democracy to avoid tyranny, says Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine. America “suffers from too much democracy,” agrees Richard Cohen in the Washington Post.

Anyone who supports Donald Trump is a traitor, writes Charles Pierce in Esquire. James Traub in Foreign Policy calls Trump and Brexit supporters “ignorance masses” and says it’s time for the “elites to rise up” against them, or at least to “un-delude them,” perhaps in re-education camps.

…

Who are the elites who say these things? They aren’t just the one percent of intelligentsia who live in Manhattan or inside the Beltway. Really, most of them are among the 30 percent of people who make up the upper-middle class: namely those with college educations who earn around $90,000 a year or more per two-person family.

These people are totally out of touch with the realities faced by the other 70 percent. How many people with college educations number among their real friends someone who is working class? How many even talk with working class people other than restaurant servers, retail clerks, and similar workers? How many understand that the policies that benefit the college-educated upper-middle-class often harm the working class?

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

If it comes to a war between black nutjobs and police, I know which one I’m betting on.

I have this vision of Donald Trump sitting back with a smile on his face like the Joker.

I feel secure because there are no black people (that I’ve ever seen) in my neighborhood. We have a lot of South Asians, but South Asians, like East Asians, are Honorary White People in almost everybody’s view; certainly in the view of the Crust.

Read it.

“We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.” Nothing captures the attitude of the modern college activist as perfectly as this statement, made by Yale University students petitioning the English department for changes to the curriculum (they wanted to read fewer white male poets).

It’s the constant refrain of the far-left social justice student: Our minds are made up. The time for discussion is over. We aren’t here to be educated. We are here to educate you.

Paul Mirengoff at Powerline lays it out.

African-American leaders and pundits are tripping over themselves talking about “the talk.” For example, in his Dallas speech, President Obama referred to black parents giving their children “’the talk’ about how to respond if stopped by a police officer — ‘yes, sir,’ ‘no, sir.’”

Is there evidence that black parents give their children such a talk more often than white parents? I haven’t seen any.

Nor have I seen evidence that “the talk,” if widely given in the African-American community, is having the desired effect. Michael Brown wasn’t saying “yes sir, no sir” when he twice attacked Officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, first in Wilson’s police car and later on the street. Freddy Gray wasn’t saying “yes sir, no sir” when he made a scene and then threw himself about in the police van in West Baltimore.

How about the black teenagers in McKinney, Texas who crashed a pool party and then refused to disperse when the police arrived and told them to? One of the kids repeatedly disobeyed reasonable police orders. Yes, one officer badly overreacted to this incident. However, my point for purposes of this post is that the behavior of the teenagers suggests that either they didn’t get “the talk” or didn’t take it seriously.

Perhaps there ought to be a mandatory viewing of Chris Rock’s video How Not To Get Your Ass Kicked By The Police, which is on YouTube.

Mac Donald describes how, in Cincinnati, a small riot broke out in late July 2015 when the police arrived at a drive-by shooting scene where a four-year-old girl had been shot in the head and critically injured. African-American bystanders loudly cursed at officers who had started arresting suspects at the scene on outstanding warrants.

The next month in Ferguson, 18-year-old Tyrone Harris opened fire at police officers, according to law-enforcement officials, and was shot and wounded by police in response. A mostly black crowd pelted the cops with frozen water bottles and rocks, wounding three officers, while destroying three police cars and damaging businesses, Ferguson police said. Some protesters reportedly chanted, “We’re ready for what? We’re ready for war.”

The same month, in Birmingham, Alabama, an officer was beaten unconscious with his own gun by a suspect in a car stop. There was gloating on social media. “Pistol whipped his ass to sleep,” read one Twitter post. The officer later said that he had refrained from using force to defend himself for fear of a media backlash for alleged racism.

All of this is a long way from “yes sir, no sir.”

Sounds to me as if the fault is not with the police.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Sounds make to order for a disgruntled old fart candidate.

The Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign has reportedly been collecting a wide variety of donated canned and dried beans in its Philadelphia office, with the intention of feeding the flatulence-inducing vegetables to willing Bernie Sanders supporters before they enter the convention hall. Organizers of the “fart-in” won’t provide the names of those delegates who have pledged to participate, but they have indicated that at least “a bunch” are inclined to make their gaseous protest heard.

Now that’s entertainment … if you’re a college sophomore, as I suspect a lot of such people are.

Read it.

On Tuesday, during the memorial service for the five murdered Dallas police officers, President Obama began the speech eloquently. But it sadly once again became a political dividing tool when he made the absolutely outrageous statement that teenagers can get a hold of a Glock more readily than a book or a computer.

Harmony, brief as it was, immediately became a social media free-for-all. He just could not help make it about his political beliefs with a whopper of a lie. Has he never heard of a library? Did he think politics really belonged at a memorial service? With an entire nation grieving and watching an entire city and police force grieving in front of him, for some odd reason, he felt the need to go there.

Yeah, well, that’s all he knows how to do.

Civil Rights icon Bob Woodson has little respect for the Black Lives Matter provocateurs. He finds them morally bankrupt, whose only determination seems to be fifteen minutes of shame rather than concrete resolutions to problems.

“I would never equate one moment of the Civil Rights movement to anything that BLM has orchestrated,” he said.

“They are no different than the Black Panthers,” he said of the often violent Black Nationalist party that thrived in the 60’s until the early 80’s.

Well, yeah.

Woodson said, “I think people in power in both the left and right are profiting from this divide; because the left can use it politically and so can the right. The left can use it to turn out the base and the right can use it to turn out voters who would not normally vote for them but do out of fear,” he said.

“Some of us who have standing as civil rights people need to have a voice,” said Woodson; “The media always gives a camera and a microphone to the disruptors but not the people who are trying to find solutions.”

“We need to get these hustling black preachers out of the way, and give voice to people like the Dallas police chief. That is someone who is showing leadership,” he said.

Hear, hear.

Woodson doesn’t just blame BLM for inflaming racial tensions. “Look at what Fox News is doing,” he said. “It is what pisses me off with conservative broadcasters; they will have on Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and then Bill O’Reilly and Laura Ingraham become the foil,” he said.

“In short, the face of opposition to BLM is O’Reilly and Ingraham,” Woodson said.

“Fox should not be using Sharpton or Jackson or these other race hucksters,” he said. “All they are doing is continuing the divide and I am forced to conclude that some people on the right have begun forming their own grievance industry in reaction to BLM,” Woodson said.

Well said.

Read it.

Already in the 1950s, Jacques Barzun pointed out in his House of Intellect, people were beginning to say “I feel that…” instead of “I think that…” in common discourse. This terminological ferment marked a change in how people were engaging the world as the Modern Ages passed away. Reason, which had been enjoying a free pass and a table close to the orchestra ever since the Middle Ages (when it was virtually the only kind of thing taught in the universities), and which even later modestly named a time period after itself, butted heads with sentiment… and lost. This “triumph of the will” gave us Romanticism, Nietzsche’s philosophy, impressionist paintings, and self-esteem classes like “Me Studies.” The heart wants what it wants.

The Sixties then were less a youth revolution than the aftermath of an adult abdication. Commenting on Barzun, R.R. Reno wrote that “the adult world of achieved self-discipline” gave way to “an adolescent world of spontaneity and desire” as the epigones of the old Bourgeois threw in with the Bohemian project, a “royal road to self-discovery through the alchemy of self-expression.” Barzun predicted that the then-emerging Bohemian Era would be anti-intellectual: characterized by an “externalized and collective sense of purpose” (Everything is political! Everything is a Movement!) and an “undifferentiated, amorphous inner life” (The triumph of the will! If it feels good, do it!). After all, the Bourgeois Era was repressive, patriarchal, and logocentric, wunnit?