The Other McCain turns over a rock.

How do these bubbles develop? It’s the universities, stupid. Go back and read William F. Buckley Jr.’s God and Man at Yale. In 1951, Buckley described the way liberalism had become an unquestioned belief system inside elite academia. Once liberalism had attained hegemonic authority on university campuses, its intellectual prestige was assured. If it is “smart” to believe in, say, Keynesian economics, then impressionable young people who want to seem smart will parrot the Keynesian orthodoxies. Bad ideas that become fashionable in academia are thus diffused into the larger society, as all the smart young people are herded off to college and indoctrinated in these ideas, before entering careers with other college-educated people.

…

Liberalism is to academia what Islam is to Iran. If your worldview is decisively formed within the insular climate of an elite university, the equation “liberal = smart” is a formula you can never permit yourself to doubt, unless you are willing to admit that you have been hustled, scammed and bamboozled. A fellow with a diploma from Harvard or Stanford cannot confront the possibility that he has been swindled like an ignorant hick playing a carnival game at the country fair. This would inflict an irreparable injury to his self-esteem. He therefore seeks to avoid encounters with people who do not share his child-like faith in the Gospel of Liberalism. Thus, in any environment where liberals obtain power, they use that power to exclude and silence dissent. This is how liberals gained hegemony in our colleges and universities, in journalism and the entertainment industry, and how in the Obama Age they seek to institutionalize a Permanent Liberal Regime in government.

Richard Fernandez reviews these degenerate modern times.

No person’s education is complete without an acquaintance with nuts and bolts. Whether it concerns reassembling a a wheel or mounting a chain over sprockets, you learn there is nothing so fatal as disrespecting reality. Insignificant items like the order in which you tighten bolts or the thickness of little metal circles have an importance you never suspected.  Even the amount of tightening torque is important. The wholeness of your head may depend on a small detail like whether you installed a part the right way around.

Much of the unease which some feel toward the administration comes directly from the cavalier sloppiness of its work. Whether it is ‘forgetting’ to tell a judge that illegal immigrant work permits whose applications are before the court have already been granted or destroying evidence before they remember it had been subpoenaed or hearing Marie Harf cavalierly dismissing a joint letter by two distinguished former secretaries of state on the inadvisability of the Iran deal as “sort of, big words and big thoughts” — you get the sense of an indifferent crew, of people who got a pass for just being there.  Everywhere you look, there are parts left over where there should be none, things eerily rattling around inside the motor that should be silent and a weird kind of shimmy in joints that should have no play.

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Care for detail is regarded as a form of sabotage or obstructionism. Mark Joseph Stern in Slate captured the attitude of many Obama supporters when he wrote, ”why do we still tolerate the Supreme Court?”

Already this term, the conservative justices look poised to strike down an anti-gerrymandering law and a restraint on judicial campaign finance. The court could also strip 8.2 million Americans of their health insurance thanks to a malicious, mendacious lawsuit. … If we want to curb the Supreme Court’s power, all we have to do is ignore it.

Why tolerate it indeed? He points out that “all we have to do is ignore it.”  They are like guys who find a part in the shipping box which has no obvious use to them and whose purpose they are too lazy to look up in the included manual. So they just toss the superfluous item in the trash reasoning it’s probably not important anyway.

I have an idea — Let’s ignore Roe v Wade or Brown v Board of Education and see how the hipsters react.

Read it.

BLUF: Taxpayer subsidies of tuition and loans has increased demand and so increased costs to match.

ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the millennial generation to take on crushing educational debt loads, and everyone lived unhappily ever after.

This is the story college administrators like to tell when they’re asked to explain why, over the past 35 years, college tuition at public universities has nearly quadrupled, to $9,139 in 2014 dollars. It is a fairy tale in the worst sense, in that it is not merely false, but rather almost the inverse of the truth.

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To live in the US is to live in a nation of fears — most of them, irrational. The Department of Homeland Security — the eerily nationalistic-sounding phoenix that rose from the ashes of the World Trade Center — has done all it can to turn Americans into government informants, where they’re encouraged to turn in complete strangers for suspicious activities like not packing enough clothes or purchasing cookware.

The DHS fears nothing more than a person armed with a camera. If any citizen aims a lens at public transportation, infrastructure, certain manufacturing plants or government buildings, they’re assumed to be practicing the dark art of terrorism.

Note the scare-words ‘nationalistic-sounding’ — God forbid that we should be under the gaze of anything nationalistic-sounding.

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Not ‘actually are anti-gay’, just considered anti-gay. In these degenerate modern times, appearance trumps reality.

You may ask, what business is it of ‘tech leaders’ whether certain laws are anti-gay? Are ‘gay’ people demonstrably superior at tech stuff?

Message: ‘We Love Big Brother, and So Can You! Ask Us How!’

Read it.

One day in 2008, a Google employee sent Chief Executive Larry Page the following email:

“This is from the menu today. If there is no good answer or action from the company I will quit in protest.”

The employee was referring to food being served at that moment in the cafeteria of Google’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. It was called “Free Tibet Goji-Chocolate Crème Pie.”

That email ended up finding its way to a companywide list. Dozens, then hundreds, and finally more than a thousand emails followed, in what was at the time the longest email-chain debate in Google’s history. Internally, those watching from the sidelines called it a “kilothread” and noted that it was also the fastest thread in Google’s history to exceed 100 responses.

The thread bounced back and forth across the globe, between Google’s many international offices, several of which are in mainland China. Some engineers were incensed that Google would imply that Tibet should be free, even in the name of a menu item. Others took the opposite stance. Yet others worried that this was an issue of free speech — if a chef couldn’t name a pie as he pleased, what kind of talk would be regulated at Google next?

Some simply wondered why there was so much fuss over the name of a pie.

Perhaps because Big Brother will not let you ignore the Narrative.

The chef who had put Free Tibet Goji-Chocolate Crème Pie on the menu was immediately suspended. Bock later reversed it.

Told ya.

Mark Steyn pulls back the curtain and shows us the little man behind it.

At a so-called Easter “prayer breakfast”, President Obama, as is his wont, took another swipe at Christians….

Read it.

Things must really be bad if a Voice of the Crust like Slate has to admit it.

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And why ought they? They were just doing their jobs — pushing the Narrative regardless of facts or truth.

Steve Hayward at Powerline pulls back the curtain.

Forget the scientific argument over climate change for the moment, or for that matter, assume that climate catastrophe is a certainty for purposes of discussion.  From the beginning the climatistas and their media cheerleaders have confined all policy discussion to one single track: suppress fossil fuels, even though no affordable, scalable substitutes for hydrocarbon energy is in sight.

The practical ideas for the suppression of hydrocarbon energy have taken two forms: the favorite is emissions trading (“cap and trade”), which failed in Congress when Democrats still enjoyed large majorities in both houses, chiefly because the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill was so chock full of special interest deals and cross subsidies that it became apparent even to honest environmentalists (yes—they meet in a phone booth at DuPont Circle) that the bill was a mockery of serious climate legislation.

Freeberg turns over a rock.

The workforce of Walmart is much more diverse than Apple’s. Walmart hires twice as many women and more than twice as many blacks as a share of its workforce than does Apple. As Steve Bartin points out on his blog, “We hear with enormous conviction by progressives that it’s important that a workforce looks like America.” Well, the data clearly show that Walmart is doing a much better job than Apple of hiring a workforce that “looks like America.”

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Culture takes precedence, because the progressive agenda is first-and-foremost a cultural one, not an economic one. Over and over again we see these examples of certain selected well-heeled individuals and organizations escaping the proggie wrath that is all-but-expected to rain down, like fire from the heavens, upon anybody who makes too much, keeps too much, doesn’t manage to embrace, patronize, contract, employ the correct mix of pigments or sexual preferences. Certain names and certain brands get a pass.

Read it.

It was over a decade ago that purchasers representing a sometimes controversial segment of American society discovered that Home Depot had no interest in their business—in fact, it had a formal corporate policy against selling to them.

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As it turned out, the move had little to to with a principled anti-war stance and everything to do with a principled anti-red tape stance. The federal government is a pain in the ass to deal with. With regard to a memo to store managers reiterating policy, Frank Fernandez, executive vice president and general counsel noted, “Since we have never been a federally approved contractor, our intent was to re-state our existing policy for our stores and associates and remind them of their responsibilities in complying with related rules.”

A Washington Post piece on the growing kerfuffle noted, “a firm that does $50,000 worth of business in a year with the federal government automatically becomes a federal contractor and must file reams of paperwork.”

Read it.

A law raising the minimum wage to $12.25 an hour from $9 an hour recently went into effect in Oakland, California. And it’s leading daycare providers to raise prices and cut services and making some of the working poor fear they may not be able to find someone to care for their children while they work, not at rates they can afford.

Hey, Undercrust! Be careful what you vote for, you just might get it.

Steve Sailer reports on a trend.

“This is a really important point that, you know, CEOs have a lot of power and control on investment in states and we want to invest in states where there is equality,” Benioff said.

“One thing that you’re seeing is that there is a third [political] party emerging in this country, which is the party of CEOs,” he said.

One that toes the Peter Pan Party line is not a ‘third political party’ but rather an wholly owned (or is it wholly-owning?) subsidiary of the Peter Pan Party.

I’ve always hated SalesForce and now I know why.

Read it.

I didn’t know that there were so many morons in Indiana. Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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

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In other words, being a modern politician.

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And why not? She saw what it did for Bill.

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$1.2 million will buy you a bus that can go 170 miles on a single charge of batteries. The bus has 60 seats, which is just what is needed in Spokane, where the average bus carries just 9 people.

Spokane Transit previously persuaded voters to double the sales tax in 2004. The improvements made with that money led to a small increase in per capita transit ridership from about 25 trips per person per year to 27. Based on this, it doesn’t seem likely that another 50 percent increase in funding will do much to boost ridership.

Public transit in Left Coast cities is rather like the ICBM and nuclear weapons programs of countries like North Korea. It spends money that they really can’t afford on things that are pretty much for show, to demonstrate they they’re In With The In Crowd, but with little advantage for ordinary people.

Steve Sailer points out some inconvenient truth.

Being a fact is what makes it racist. That the designated next host of The Daily Show, Trevor Noah, doesn’t get that cornerstone of political correctness troubles a lot of nice white liberals, no matter how many Pokemon points being born in Soweto gets him.

Poor guy needs to get with the program and bone up on The Narrative if he wants a future in media.

More here: Circular Firing Squad Assembles for “Daily Show” Replacement

Read it.

The Other McCain is on the case.

“Affordable housing” is one of those phrases, like “social justice” and “sexual equality,” that sounds like a good thing, until you realize it’s a license for totalitarianism. For most of us, “affordable housing” means living someplace where we can afford the rent. The advocates of “affordable housing,” however, always want to live someplace we couldn’t afford to live — a trendy urban location — and demand a system of taxpayer subsidies and/or burdensome regulations to force others to allow them to live in a high-rent community at below-market rates. To put it as simply as possible, they’re moochers and “affordable housing” is about protecting their right to mooch.

The enemy of affordable housing is “gentrification,” which is what happens when people with actual jobs who can afford to pay rent at market value start moving into a trendy urban location where the moochers live.

Read it.

Hence the name ‘Affordable Care Act’. Government laws are always dependably named the opposite of the effect they will have.

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Just from looking at him I suspect that Indiana won’t miss him — or his people — all that much.

I wish to hell the Social Justice Warriors would boycott Texas. Save us a lot of work and improve the neighborhood, I can tell you.

Steve Sailer ponders the Narrative.

For years, I had been pointing out that two world-beating sectors of the American economy, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, paid relatively little attention to the panoply of anti-discrimination regulations that weigh down the performance of America’s less globally competitive sectors, such as Detroit.

Recently, however, the Eye of Sauron has finally turned in the direction of Silicon Valley, with glances at Hollywood, too. In the New York Times, reporter / feminist crusader Claire Cain Miller explains that what Silicon Valley needs to cure it of its disease of entrepreneurial men innovating rapidly is lots of stifling bureaucracy. Silicon Valley needs to become more like Detroit.

Claire Cain Miller was the Voice of the Crust who led the charge in support of gold-digger Ellen Pao. Her message is quite clear: We lost this one, but we never forgive and we never forget — get with the program or you’ll wind up crushed.

Oh, and there’s a reason Apple and Microsoft spend millions in Washington freshening the trough, so you’d better start shelling out; nice tech industry you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it….

Read it.

The notion that words such as “civility” and “divisive” have clear definitions is under attack by academic moral relativists who grant themselves the right to twist words to mean whatever aids their quest for power. A recent Stanford University lecture co-sponsored by the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies and titled “Academic Freedom in the Context of the Israel-Palestine Conflict: A Talk by Steven Salaita,” illustrated the point.

Salaita—the former Virginia Tech professor and author of Israel’s Dead Soul currently suing both the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and unnamed donors after his offer of a tenured professorship in American Indian studies was withdrawn due to his vitriolic, Israel-bashing, anti-Semitic tweets—delivered another in a series of nationwide lectures in which he portrayed himself as a martyr, valiantly battling the forces of “civility.”

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Jeff Gerth and Sam Biddle at Gawker write that Hillary’s private email server acted as portal to a private intelligence network that included retired members of special operations, former CIA clandestine personnel and foreign informers.  Acting in some indeterminate capacity over it was Sidney Blumenthal, former aide to president Bill Clinton and now apparently a retainer to the family dynasty.  It was the compromise of Blumenthal’s emails by the Romanian hacker Guccifer that in part led to journalists to discover Hillary’s private email account.  Publicly available sources describe Guccifer as a taxi driver who penetrated the email accounts of the Bush family, Colin Powell and of course Sidney Blumenthal by sheer persistence.

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All in all the emails provide a glimpse into the world of a great political family, conducting what at times appears to be a private policy and rewarding loyal individuals with access to governments who were influenced or indeed installed in power by the actions of the United States. “At least 10 of the memos deal in whole or in part with internal Libyan politics and the government’s fight against militants, including the status of the Libyan oil industry and the prospects for Western companies to participate.”  There is nothing overtly illegal described in the emails.

In medieval times, each great family depended on its ‘household’ (employees) and ‘affinity’ (supporters, retainers, relatives, and friends) in order to gain and exercise political power. For all their public displays, ‘progressvies’ prove with their every action that they are actually throwbacks to a more primitive time, and ought to be called ‘regressives’ instead.

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The Daily Princetonian reports that during the 2012 presidential campaign, 157 Princeton University faculty and staff members donated directly to the presidential candidates. Two of them gave to Mitt Romney; the rest gave to President Obama. The amount donated to Obama exceeded $169,000. The two donations to Romney amounted to $1,901.

Who were the two renegades that gave to Romney? One was James Shinn, a visiting lecturer at the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education. The other was Mark Oresic, a custodian.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to Princeton unless you — and your kid — are already socialists. It will end badly.

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San Diego police responding to a domestic disturbance call went to the wrong address, where one of them killed the homeowner’s service dog. Ian Anderson said that when he opened the door after the officers knocked, his dog came up behind him. One of the officers reached down to pet the dog. The other stepped back, drew his weapon and shot the dog.

Read it.

The prospect of large parts of New York and Washington under water fills me with giddy anticipation. Sadly, few of these Chicken Little angst-bombs come true. But I can dream….

Steve Sailer casts an eye on the Other Left Coast.

Here’s another installment in my continuing series Learning from New York. For my entire life, the residents of New York City have instructed the rest of America on what to believe. During the first half of my life, New Yorkers themselves seemed to more or less believe what they were telling the rest of us, and thus their great city deteriorated. During the second half of my life, however, New Yorkers stopped worrying about the disconnect between the advice they were ladling out for the hinterlanders and how they actually ran their own city. And New York City has consequently ascended to new extremes of safety and luxury.

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And about damned time, too.

John Stossel turns over a rock.

From the 1930s to 1960s, as rich white people moved into New York City, urban planner Robert Moses got city bureaucrats to condemn and destroy busy black neighborhoods. The city called the neighborhoods “blighted” and moved many of the poor into rent-subsidized apartment complexes called “projects.” Many quickly became slums.

Now times have changed. Some rich, white people want to move into poorer, non-white neighborhoods because they like diversity (and cheaper real estate). So today the newcomers are attacked by liberals because they cause “gentrification.”

Guilty of being white and not-poor! Off with their heads!

Read it.

Important attention has been drawn to the shameful condition of middle income housing affordability in California. The state that had earlier earned its own “California Dream” label now limits the dream of homeownership principally to people either fortunate enough to have purchased their homes years ago and to the more affluent. Many middle income residents may have to face the choice of renting permanently or moving away.

However, finally, an important organ of the state has now called attention to the housing affordability problem. The Legislative Analyst’s Office (LAO) has published “California’s High Housing Costs: Causes and Consequences,” which provides a compelling overview of how California’s housing costs have risen to be by far the most unaffordable in the nation. It also sets out the serious consequences.

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These causes result from conscious political decisions. While California’s coastal counties do not have the vast stretches of flat, appropriately developable land that existed 50 years ago, building is increasingly  prohibited on that which remains (for example, Ventura County, northern Los Angeles county and the southern San Jose metropolitan area).

Demonstrating an understanding of economic basics not generally shared by California policymakers or the urban planning community, LAO squarely places the blame on the public policy limits to new housing construction:

Read it.

It shouldn’t come as any surprise that someone out there writing for The Economist has a problem with the looks of our bosses.  Leftists have been waging a war against nearly every personal advantage for years: if they aren’t upset because your parents are rich, they’ll insult you because your parents are white, or maybe because you have a penis.  In their most unreasonable moments, they might even be upset that you deserve your own job.  It seems only reasonable to expect that sooner or later, they would be complaining about whether or not our bosses keep themselves in shape.

This is because at the heart of all leftism lies an unreasonable envy of all advantage (disguised as an advocacy of the disadvantaged) and an unhealthy hatred of actual diversity (disguised as an appreciation of difference).  They call life a meritocracy when your successful parents raise you to win, which is a lot like complaining that your parents raised you at all.  It’s almost enough to make you wonder whether they loathe the laws of cause and effect.  In the fight against all odds – not his, but everyone’s – the leftist hasn’t only forgotten that different people breed different people; he’s forgotten that different people are diversity itself, and that diversity, the thing he claims to be championing, means that someone is going to have natural advantages.

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Of course, ‘goes bold’ is Voice-of-the-Crust for ‘sells out’.

Headline you’ll never see: ‘Democrat President defies liberals, goes bold on budget’.

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All across Europe, Islamic and radical right-wing scum are strangely allied in their belief in the worldwide Jewish conspiracy. So we shouldn’t be surprised that the persecution of Jews is hitting its stride again. The exodus from France is only the tip of the iceberg. Anti-Semitic insults and smears have long since become “normal” again — including in Austria. The threshold for physical violence is sinking steadily. Smug European citizens look the other way (in irritation?) — like that other time in Vienna when Jews were allowed to clean the streets with toothbrushes. And the oh-so-humane Left chants anti-Semitic mottos in their demonstrations against Israel, but say nothing about this new mega-scandal.

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It didn’t start with global warming: environmentalists have been distorting (and sometimes fabricating) facts for a long time. As a result, most people have learned to view environmentalists’ claims with skepticism. Here is a case in point.

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, discovers that his Bullshit Meter has gone off.

California has plenty of water…just not enough to satisfy every possible use of water that people can imagine when the price is close to zero. As David Zetland points out in an excellent interview with Russ Roberts, people in San Diego county use around 150 gallons of water a day. Meanwhile in Sydney Australia, with a roughly comparable climate and standard of living, people use about half that amount. Trust me, no one in Sydney is going thirsty.

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The other day we noted the tenured professor of sociology from Penn State, Karen Halnon, who ranted about Venezuela while lighting up a cigarette on an airplane. Surely she deserves to be Entry Number 1 in Power Line’s Worst Professors in America roster.

And barely three days later, we have out second distinguished professor to add to the roster: Pancho Savery of Reed College in Portlandia.

Elizabeth Nolan Brown peeks behind the curtain.

Lawmakers want one type of eatery, one offending beverage, one no-no nutrient that, if abolished from American diets, will reverse the course on this whole obesity trend. Because what we actually need is a lot more nuanced and a lot tougher sell: widespread shifts in cultural atittudes toward food; increases in nutrition knowledge; and overhauling of food policies that kill innovation and subsidize the foods that are killing us. You can see why lawmakers prefer to focus on limiting the number of McDonald’s.

“Researchers agree that even without an empirical effect, policies can start conversations that change societal norms,” the Times states. Gwendolyn Flynn, nutrition policy director for Community Health Councils, “has noticed that at community meetings in South L.A., there is often fruit and water among the pastries and soda. ‘That’s huge,'” she said.

It might sound radical, but perhaps community meetings could provide fruit and water without a banning economic activity from South L.A.?

Read it.

This week, Starbucks Coffee Company announced its “Race Together” initiative, which encourages employees to strike up conversations with customers about race relations in America. Yes, you read that right. Baristas will be encouraged to write “Race Together” on cups, offering a gentle psychological nudge and suggesting it’s a good idea to discuss hot-button and largely misunderstood issues with complete strangers who are also armed with piping hot beverages.

Also, is it just me, or has that guy with the laptop at the prime corner table been locked in the same hunched-over position with his stuff sprawled all over for the past three days? Why isn’t he at a smaller table? Are those cobwebs in his beard? Wait. Is he even ALIVE? Welcome to Starbucks, friends. Let’s go talk to that guy about race. Maybe then he’ll actually leave.

Mickey Kaus points a finger.

Most of the mainstream broadcast and cable networks avoided giving excessive coverage to the recent congressional fight over the Department of Homeland Security, which was all about Republicans trying to block Obama’s executive amnesty by attaching restrictions to DHS funding. NBC Nightly News went a step further and avoided mentioning the immigration issue even when covering the funding fight — treating the threat of a DHS shutdown as if it were some sort of out-of-the-blue natural disaster.

But it’s one thing for Dem-friendly NBC to go to bat for Obama’s causes.  It’s another if Fox does it too. Fox is supposed to be the feisty opposition network. You’d think it would wage a rousing campaign against Obama’s executive actions on immigration, which are surely wildly unpopular among its viewers, both because of their ends (de facto legalizing of illegals) and their means (presidential overreach).

You’d think that.  But you would be wrong.

Read it.

No doubt they want to make sure that it’s not designed to catch actual terrorists but rather reflects the diversity that is America.

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Hint: It’s not good.

Over a period of nine years covered by the study, people who regularly drank diet soda gained almost triple the amount of fat in the abdominal area as those who didn’t consume it, researchers at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio say.

Their increase in waist circumference was three times that of people who didn’t drink diet sodas, and even people who consumed diet soda only occasionally had double the increase over people who drank no diet soda, they reported in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society.

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You remember Castro? Obama’s new Latin American buddy?

Steve Sailer is irate.

I’ve been covering for at least 4 years the scandal of “birth tourism” — pregnant women from China paying a lot of money to hole up in Southern California for a couple of months so their upcoming baby can be granted the pecuniary benefits of American birthright citizenship — because the advertisements in Chinese are so clear about what chumps we Americans are with our schmaltzy ideas about immigration.

Finally, early this month the federal government raided 20 birth tourism operations in SoCal.

But it looks like most of the Chinese customers are going to get birthright citizenship for their future kid anyway, sending a message to foreigners to keep engaging in this scam.

Hm. Given the choice of which sort of people are getting anchor babies, I’d pick rich Chinese over poor Mexicans any day.

Read it.

So much for shopping at Starbucks. I guess they want all the non-hipsters to go elsewhere. Good luck with that.

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At least one writer at the Voice of the Crust Washington Post is forced to admit the truth.

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The whole point of Obamacare was precisely this, to mandate health insurance levels that people can only afford if subsidized by the government, and thereby nail down another corner of dependency on government.