Steve Sailer is not impressed by certain trends in modern culture.

Stand-up comic Daniel Tosh talks about his underprivileged childhood: he grew up in a house on a public golf course … on the right side of the fairway.

About three guys in the audience will laugh. Private club golfers tend to be better players, and when better players miss, they tend to hook the ball to the left; but public course hackers tend to slice to the right, so a house on the right side of a public course fairway gets bombarded.

It’s kind of funny how tens of billions of dollars of houses and condos were built right alongside fairways from about 1960 to 2000, yet now it just seems like an all-around bad idea.

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It’s not really true that every other course here at the University of Colorado at Boulder is about race, class, and gender.  It just seems that way.  Such courses are widely advertised on all the campus bulletin boards, like the special course in the sociology department pictured here (click to embiggen).  In fact, if you did a scientific survey of the campus bulletin boards, my guess is that four-fifths of the self-made flyers advertising courses for the next semester are for holy trinity (race, class, gender) classes.  I haven’t seen one yet for a science course, and three quarters of the student body here are majoring in STEM subjects.

I like that: The holy trinity (race, class, gender).

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 Buried inside a Congressional Budget Office report this week was this nugget: when it comes to individual income taxes, the top 40 percent of wage earners in America pay 106 percent of the taxes. The bottom 40 percent…pay negative 9 percent.

You read that right. One group is paying more than 100 percent of individual income taxes, the other is paying less than zero.

It’s right there in Table 3 on page 13 of the report. The numbers are based on 2010 IRS and Census Bureau figures.

Democrats, of course, are okay with that.

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You can buy a lot of health care for $300 million. Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to pass out the money?

The purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers. — Jerry Pournelle

John Stossel blows the whistle.

Celebrities who support big-government politicians routinely take advantage of tax breaks, which reduce the amount they contribute to that government.

It’s nice that Obama supporter Bon Jovi has a foundation that builds houses for poor people, but at tax time, the musician labels himself a “farmer.” He pays only $100 in state property tax. And his tax dodge gimmick: raising honeybees.

Bruce Springsteen sings about factories closing down but pays little tax on the hundreds of acres of land he owns. His dodge: An organic farmer works his land.

Hollywood’s campaign to “save the earth” brings out the most hypocrisy. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio recently announced, “I will fly around the world doing good for the environment.” Really? Flying around the world? I’m amazed they’re not embarrassed by what they say.

Freeberg blows the whistle.

The capable naturalists at Democracy Corps are trained to recognize even the latent, recessive racism lingering deep within the Republican genome. Like the human coccyx, the vestigial prejudice in the GOP voter is betrayed when the subject is scrutinized by those with trained eyes.

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An eyewitness said: ‘He told her she already had enough shoes, more shoes that she could wear in a
lifetime and it was pointless buying any more.

‘She started shouting at him accusing him of being a skinflint and of spoiling Christmas, it was a really heated argument.’

The shouting match ended when the man chucked the bags on the floor and jumped over the balcony, smashing into Christmas decorations on his way down before hitting the floor seven stories below causing shocked shoppers to flee in panic.

Surely a Tiger Mom in training.

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I am not making this up.

Read it. And watch the video.

Every year in Argentina, the National Conference of Women — sponsored by various non-profit NGOs — gathers in some city and, in recent years, the event has featured a protest against the Catholic Church. So when the radical feminists marched on the cathedral in San Juan de Cuyo on November 24, they were met by 1,500 Catholics who locked arms to form a human shield around the cathedral….

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These dogs, usually Alsatians, were also called “Hundminen” or “dog mines.” They were  trained to carry explosives on their bodies to enemy tanks, where they would then be detonated. No, it did not end very well for the dogs in question.

I bet you didn’t know that.

Read it. And watch the video.

In the video below Ezra Levant talks to George Igler of the British think tank Discourse about the young Italian woman in the UK whose baby was taken from her womb without her knowledge or consent. The mother, who is said to be bipolar, had some sort of breakdown. While she was in extremis she was sedated and the baby was removed by cesarean section. The child was taken into care, and more than a year later has never been given into the mother’s custody. Recent media stories about the case have caused an international sensation.

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Listen to any group of business leaders for more than a minute and you’ll get an earful about the crisis in “workforce development.” America’s economic performance, says the Virginia Chamber of Commerce, depends on “a workforce that possesses the skills and knowledge that employers need.” Millions of people are looking for work, and millions of jobs are open for hire, but the former can’t fill the latter “because of gaps in skills and training.” There simply are not enough students “emerging from our public education system” with the necessary know-how.

That is why the U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants the federal government to streamline its “national employment and training system.” Why it wants a public-education system that will “supply American businesses with the talent necessary to compete globally.” It is why, according to a recent news story, the Virginia Chamber “wants the state (to) put more emphasis in public schools on preparing students for skills needed in science, technology and health care careers.”

They’d much rather import them from India and Pakistan, where salary expectations aren’t so high and a green card is worth a cut in pay.

… six black teenagers beat up a white teenager in 2007 at Jena, Louisiana, and were promptly declared to be the Official Victims, with the usual supportive marches, petitions, legal defense funds, etc.

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Dayna Morales is a waitress currently on suspension at Gallop Asian Bistro in Bridgewater, NJ. Ms. Morales is the most recent entrant into the growth field of hate hoaxing, i.e., falsely claiming to be the victim of a so-called “hate crime” for fun and profit.

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In a thought-provoking story, Time magazine recently explored ?the real reason new college graduates can’t get hired. It’s not because they lack STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) training, and the recession is only partly to blame. Young people who have bad manners (now called “social skills) and dress eccentrically drive high youth unemployment. Time quoted a global study by Talent Shortage Survey from ManpowerGroup that found that one in five employers worldwide can’t find qualified young people to fill jobs.

“Specifically, companies say candidates are lacking in motivation, interpersonal skills, appearance, punctuality and flexibility,” Time noted. Such sloppiness shows us that the values of Skunk Hollow have gone mainstream. And if a young person gives off a vibe of believing a job is just another entitlement, he is less likely to get it. It’s also not a bad idea to dress appropriately when seeking work.

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A pointed reminder that, no matter how bad the American Nanny State might get, foreigners have it worse.

An Italian woman, who wasn’t named by media, is fighting to keep British social services from placing her baby for adoption. Last summer, the woman, who was then pregnant, came to England for a Ryanair training course. While there, she had a panic attack and called for help. When police arrived, she was on the phone with her mother who told them her daughter was bipolar and hadn’t been taking her medicine. Cops took her to a mental hospital where social services had doctors forcibly sedate her and remove her baby by caesarian section. The woman has fought a legal battle since to get her child back, but social services and British courts have refused to turn the child over to her or to its father.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Paul Mirengoff connects the dots.

In 1996, when Obama went into electoral politics as a candidate for the Illinois state Senate, he did so as the hand-picked successor to Alice Palmer, an avowed socialist. (Palmer, however, decided to fight Obama for the seat after she lost a special election for Congress; Obama kept her off the ballot by successfully challenging her petition signatures). Palmer is the author of such articles as “Socialism Is the Only Way Forward.” And she attended the Twenty-seventh Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1986.

Palmer would not have hand-picked Obama if she did not have good reason to believe that he shared her socialistic vision.

In 2000, when Obama ran for Congress against the prominent leftist incumbent Bobby Rush, the Democratic Socialists of America, though not endorsing either candidate, spoke of Obama in glowing terms while describing Rush as a disappointment to the left.

The Democratic Socialists of America would not have praised Obama if it did not have good reason to believe that he shared its socialistic vision.

Obama served in the U.S. Senate from 2005-2008. As Kurtz notes, one prominent index rated him the most liberal member of the Senate during that period — more liberal than even Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist.

Would Bill de Blasio have compiled a more leftist Senate voting record than Barack Obama did? It’s difficult to see how.

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This new demography—essentially a marriage of rich, young singles and the poor—has created an urban electorate increasingly one-dimensional, and less middle class, not only in economic status, but also, perhaps more importantly, in attitude. This can be seen in the very low participation rates in de Blasio’s victory in New York, where under one quarter of the electorate voted in the election compared to some 57 percent in the 1993 Giuliani vs Dinkins race. Historically, middle class voters were the most reliable voters and their decline has led to record low participation not only in New York, but also in Los Angeles, where new Mayor Eric Garcetti was elected with the lowest turnout, barely twenty percent, in a contested election in recent memory.

The decline in voter participation occurs as cities are becoming ever more one-party constituencies. Two decades ago a large chunk of the top twelve cities were run by Republicans, but today none are. America’s cities have evolved into a political monoculture, with the Democratic share growing by 20 percent or more in most of the largest urban counties.

Under such circumstances the worst miscues by liberals are largely ignored or excused as politics and media take place in a kind of left-wing echo chamber. Even the meltdown of the healthcare law, which has hurt the president’s approval rating in national polls, seems to have not impacted his popularity in urban areas.

In New York and other cities this shift leftward, ironically, has been enabled by the successes of Bloomberg and other pro-business pragmatists whose successful policies on issues like crime have shifted the political agenda to other matters. “This election is not going to be about crime, as some previous elections were,” de Blasio told National Journal last month. “It used to be in New York you worried about getting mugged. But today’s mugging is economic. Can you afford your rent?”

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With the area economy rebounding, San Francisco is in the midst of a housing crisis as many residents are evicted from their apartments. “It is a situation rooted in limited housing stock and surge in demand that has pushed the median rent up from $2,968 in 2010 to $3,414 this year…,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle.

Sounds like New York.

The median home price has soared to nearly $900,000, which helps explain why nearly two-thirds of the city’s residents are renters. So the rent hikes are particularly acute—and have put the city’s tough rent-control laws in the spotlight. As property values have rebounded, an increasing number of San Francisco owners are getting out of the rental business and cashing out their properties to turn them into co-ops.

Sounds like New York.

While the city’s rent-control ordinance places strict limits on the ability of landlords to increase rents, a state law called the Ellis Act allows property owners to take their property off the rental market after providing tenants with a 120-day notice (and much longer for elderly or disabled tenants).

Sounds like New York.

“Speculative investments in housing has resulted in the loss of thousands of affordable apartments through conversions and demolitions,” according to a recent statement from a tenants’ rights coalition. Yet landlords ask whether further regulating and even prosecuting them in some instances, as the tenant groups propose, is the best way to encourage more people to get into the rental-housing business, which is what’s needed to increase supply and reduce rents. It’s an old economic rule that you get less of whatever you punish.

Just like New York.

In cities where the market reigns, people tend to be mobile, but in places such as San Francisco tenants stay put in their apartments given that they don’t want to leave their rent-controlled units. So few apartments become available. Restrictions on rent prices diminish the incentive of landlords to improve the buildings, thus leading to more substandard buildings, rent-control critics argue.

Just like New York.

San Francisco is a sought-after city on a tiny peninsula, which leads to a tight supply. “But the biggest problem with the Bay Area is 75 percent of the land area is off limits to development so you can’t build your way out of this,” said Lawrence McQuillan, senior fellow at the libertarian Independent Institute in Oakland. Even for cities without rent control, such as San Diego, these basic “supply and demand” lessons are useful for anyone whose “values” include affordable housing.

San Francisco: New York without the Mafia and the subways.

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Confirming me in my determination to limit exercise to acting as pallbearer for my sweaty friends.

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The student who staged the hoax is part of the school’s so called Bias Incident Response Team.

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

Paul Rahe lays out some inconvenient history.

William Bradford, Governor of the Plymouth Colony, reports that, at that time, he and his advisers considered “how they might raise as much corn as they could, and obtain a better crop than they had done, that they might not still thus languish in misery.” And “after much debate of things,” he then adds, they chose to abandon communal property, deciding that “they should set corn every man for his own particular” and assign “to every family a parcel of land, according to the proportion of their number, for that end.”

The results, he tells us, were gratifying in the extreme, “for it made all hands very industrious” and “much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.” Even “the women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression.”

Moreover, he observes, “the experience that was had in this common course and condition, tried sundry years . . . amongst godly and sober men, may well evince the vanity of that conceit of Plato’s and other ancients applauded by some of later times . . . that the taking away of property and bringing in community into a commonwealth would make them happy and flourishing.” In practice, America’s first socialist experiment “was found to breed much confusion and discontent and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.”

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Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Michael Anft writes that “most researchers who have looked into the issue—those who don’t receive their money from technology companies or their private foundations –say the notion that there is a  STEM-worker shortage is “a myth”

Silicon Valley lobbying groups have spent over $130 million on lobbying efforts to triple the number of visas the country currently awards on a yearly basis in an immigration bill, and those like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg have said that their high-tech companies need more workers from the STEM fields. If not, they have claimed that “a continuing shortage of workers in those fields will sink the nation and its economy beneath the surface of an ever-flatter world, overrun by lower-paid foreigners who have outpaced us in STEM education.”

According to Anft, though, “Unemployment rates within STEM fields generally, while lower than the overall unemployment rate of 7.2 percent, are often higher than they’ve been in years—a sign that there is a shortage of jobs, not workers.” He notes that if there were a shortage, there would be a “rise in wages in technology and science fields. And that isn’t happening.”

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How does a confessed child porn criminal keep his community college salary?

He’s in a union, of course.

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Your tax dollars at work.

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As the Dodd Frank regulations about conflict minerals approach the date at which people actually have to do something about them, it’s worth seeing if they’re really the monstrously ghastly clusterfuck I’ve been predicting they will be. Much to my surprise they’re not: they’re worse.

Jim Goad looks at the current scene.

Why has the American media suddenly snapped out of a self-induced coma to pay attention to the Knockout Game? Gullible journos are acting as if it’s a spanking-new phenomenon that is sweeping the country, but the practice of black wolf packs cold-cocking pedestrians for cheap thrills has been going on for years. The only thing that’s sweeping the country is the media’s sudden willingness to talk about it. And not only are they talking, they’ve also dropped dog whistles such as “youths” and “teens” and are openly noting the assailants’ and victims’ race. What was the tipping point?

…

Throughout history, those who rule the streets have often served as the shock troops and enforcers for those who rule the nation. This isn’t some empty nihilistic ritual—it’s a highly political act of establishing dominance and marking one’s territory.

…

Black Atlanta radio host T. J. Sotomayor recorded a 16-minute video where he says white people should counter the Knockout Game with one called Shootout Game.

True that.

Joel Kotkin nails it.

The yeoman class, whom the Russian Communists called ‘kulaks’ and attempted to liquidate, are the backbone of any society, as Jefferson appreciated.

Obamacare’s first set of victims was predictable: the self-employed and owners of small businesses. Since the bungled launch of the health insurance enrollment system, hundreds of thousands of self-insured people have either had their policies revoked or may find themselves in that situation in the coming months. More than 10 million self-insured people, many of them self-employed, could meet a similar fate.

Unlike large companies or labor unions, which have sought to delay or duck implementing the Affordable Care Act, what could be called the yeoman class lacks the political might to make much of a dent in Washington policies. Indeed, in the Obama era, with its emphasis on top-down solutions and Chicago-style brokering, Americans who work for themselves probably are more marginalized today than at any time in recent memory.

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Help us celebrate rich white people creating works of art to sell to other rich white people in order to raise pocket change (relatively to the net worth of the people involved) that will go (nominally) to benefit poor black people (but actually line the pockets of First World bureaucrats and Third World kleptocrats) and allow these same rich white people to feel all warm and fuzzy about themselves, while middle class people in their own countries can’t find a job because the politicians that the same rich white people helped put into office are busy destroying their economy and their culture.

Lenin was right.

Lion of the Blogosphere has the right of it.

The NY Times finally acknowledges the existence of the knockout game, or rather they acknowledge the existence of people talking about it, because the take of the article is that it’s really an urban myth and the purported knockout-game attacks are just random violence.

Furthermore, the writer of the article deftly implies that people who are talking about the existence of such a game are racist while at the same time completely avoiding reporting that the perpetrators of the attacks are black and the victims white.

One interesting nugget from the article is that the prole whites in predominately Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn are taking the threat very seriously.

As well they might, since a lot of these ‘games’ target Jews specifically.

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Broward Circuit Judge Lisa Porter has been in law for 25 years in Florida, but she never saw a case like this one. Five teenagers allegedly organized and then beat, held down, and videotaped a 16-year old girl while she was raped by 19-year old Jayvon Woolfork.

At the hearing for Patricia Montes, 15, and Erica Avery, 16, prosecutor Maria Schneider handed over the defendants’ cellphones and told Porter the victim pleaded with the attackers to stop. The girl broke bones in her face and bled from her ears when she was thrown down the stairs and her head smashed against the concrete. Her eyes were beaten in until they were swollen shut.

I guess we’re all Trayvon (rhymes with ‘Jayvon’) Martin now. (Except for white people, of course.)

Freeberg nails it yet again.

Larry Summers, former head of the National Economic Council, thought having Jarrett represent the White House was a mistake. Business leaders “felt patronized and offended by Valerie,” Summers told Woodward, largely due to her tendency to insist that she spoke for the president, and an approach to problem-solving that involved little more than scheduling multiple lunch meetings. One CEO complained to Alter that “when we go to the White House, we talk to people we wouldn’t hire.” Alter himself has likened Jarrett’s role in the White House to “the CEO putting his sister in charge of marketing.”

…

Who thinks it is a good idea for non-producers to control production? Who fails to see that this is steering in the direction of no longer producing things? It seems so obvious. It’s embarrassing to have to take time to point it out. Is this one of those things where there is a division between the malevolent and the ignorant, between the active and the passive? As in: Valerie Jarrett wants to tell people who know far better than her, how to make something, so let’s put her in a position where she gets to do that…meh, okay, alright, can’t see a reason not to. I suppose that’s why Obama is where He is. His fans don’t claim to understand the particulars of cellular phone technology, or health insurance, or any other kind of business. They claim the opposite. I’ve spoken to them. Obama’s just fun to watch. Gives great speeches. Is it all like that?

…

Political figures achieve their high position, within politics, because of…politics. Period. We forget this out of convenience. But we forget it at an extraordinary cost to ourselves, and to the things we claim are important to us.

Freeberg nails it again.

The generation that comes to power after JFK’s demise, thinks big. Too big. Rather than feed a child, they want to “end famine and poverty.” Rather than find a diplomatic alternative to the latest war, they want to “end war.” Politicians on both sides fall prey to this thinking — although it seems only Republicans get nailed for it — with George W. Bush widely, and perhaps rightfully, lampooned for wanting to “end terrorism.” End, end, end. I’m guessing their perception must be, and I partly sympathize with this, that all (or most) bad things that happen are merely echoes of something that came before, and if we can just somehow bring it all to a stop, the tragic echoing will cease forever. Like making a species extinct, except it’s something bad going extinct, and that would be a good thing. End disease, end blight, end bigotry and racism, end war, end hate, end all sorts of things…that horrify us, but are part of life, and will endure as long as life endures. Even death is a part of life. But with this innocence-lost event now five decades past, the prevailing viewpoint has no time to understand that. It’s too busy ending things.

…

We tend to think of a loss of innocence as having something to do with an acquisition of knowledge. There may be some truth to that. But, knowledge doesn’t do you any good if you can’t think straight.

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In a survey of staff at clinics across England, the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) found that more than a third said patients were “sometimes” losing their sight needlessly because of delays to treatment and follow-up care caused by capacity problems.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that here in the U.S.?

No, I thought not….

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The modern “environmental” movement has little or nothing to do with the environment, and a great deal to do with the real green stuff: money. One hundred thirty-two governments are in a huff because their latest attempt at extortion has failed….

And, of course, they’re miffed that the U.N. isn’t living up to its obligation to transfer money from First World taxpayers to Third World kelptocrats. C’mon, let’s get with the program!

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The craven act of sucker punching an unsuspecting person known as the “knockout game” is being played in cities across the nation. The object of the game is to walk by a person unaware that your intention is to punch him in the face or the back of the head and try to knock the person unconscious with one swift blow. The game has resulted in at least one death and many seriously injured people. The only perpetrators identified thus far have been black teenagers.

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Thus far, gun control is a commonality between the attacks and the cities in which they are happening. It appears the attackers are choosing victims in cities where both the victim and bystanders lack the ability to be armed in self defense.

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Hey, Asians look white in the dark….

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Officer Chris Wilson was the Phoenix Police Department’s “community liaison to the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community” until August 2012, when he was arrested and charged with having sex with two teenage boys.

Set a thief to catch a thief; set a pervert to ‘liase’ with perverts. What could go wrong?

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Question: What business is it of the government what kind of doorknob is on your building?

More here.

Thomas Sowell is under no illusions.

New York City police authorities are investigating a series of unprovoked physical attacks in public places on people who are Jewish, in the form of what is called “the knockout game.”

The way the game is played, one of a number of young blacks decides to show that he can knock down some stranger on the streets, preferably with one punch, as they pass by. Often some other member of the group records the event, so that a video of that “achievement” is put on the Internet, to be celebrated.

The New York authorities describe a recent series of such attacks and, because Jews have been singled out in these attacks, are considering prosecuting these assaults as “hate crimes.”

Many aspects of these crimes are extremely painful to think about, including the fact that responsible authorities in New York seem to have been caught by surprise, even though this “knockout game” has been played for years by young black gangs in other cities and other states, against people besides Jews — the victims being either whites in general or people of Asian ancestry.

Attacks of this sort have been rampant in St. Louis. But they have also occurred in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and elsewhere. In Illinois the game has often been called “Polar Bear Hunting” by the young thugs, presumably because the targets are white.

The main reason for many people’s surprise is that the mainstream media have usually suppressed news about the “knockout game” or about other and larger forms of similar orchestrated racial violence in dozens of cities in every region of the country. Sometimes the attacks are reported, but only as isolated attacks by unspecified “teens” or “young people” against unspecified victims, without any reference to the racial makeup of the attackers or the victims — and with no mention of racial epithets by the young hoodlums exulting in their own “achievement.”

Despite such pious phrases as “troubled youths,” the attackers are often in a merry, festive mood. In a sustained mass attack in Milwaukee, going far beyond the dimensions of a passing “knockout game,” the attackers were laughing and eating chips, as if it were a picnic.
One of them observed casually, “white girl bleed a lot.”

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except white people, of course.)

Read it.

Places, note, run by Democrats.

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We tell ourselves that things like farmland preservation, high-speed rail, and smart-growth housing policies are needed for the good of society. But really, we just want them for ourselves, so long as someone else pays for them, preferably people who we don’t like, such as those members of the working class who drive loud cars and live in little suburban homes but don’t really appreciate the great outdoors. Until we get it out of our heads that other people should pay for the things we want, our society will continue to grow less equitable and, for the most part, less wealthy each year.

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This sort of thing it why I don’t practice law — it would take too much of my day just washing my hands.

The resurrection of John Edwards, erstwhile presidential candidate and philanderer, has begun. Not content with simply restarting his career as a trial lawyer after the debacle of his affair with his campaign videographer and her subsequent pregnancy and his trial on corruption charges, Edwards made the announcement of his return with the help of a public relations agency. He is reopening his law practice by rejoining his former partner, David F. Kirby, to form Edwards Kirby, where his daughter, Cate Edwards, who went to Harvard law school, will join him on the payroll.

How she can stand to be in the same room with the guy who treated her mother so shamefully is pretty good proof that mendacity is genetic.

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You didn’t know about that? It’s right next to the section that says you can murder your unborn child. I’m surprised you missed it.

In a column about the case, New York Times legal writer Adam Liptak claims “there are constitutional values on both sides of the case: the couple’s right to equal treatment and Ms. Huguenin’s right to free speech.” But the Constitution guarantees equal treatment by the government, not by private individuals or organizations. The 14th Amendment cannot justify requiring photographers to treat all couples equally any more than the First Amendment can justify requiring publishers to treat all authors equally. By erroneously suggesting that deciding Huguenin’s case means choosing between competing “constitutional values,” Liptak lends cover to the American Civil Liberties Union, which in this case is arguing that Huguenin’s civil liberties should be overridden by a principle that cannot be found in the Bill of Rights.

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However, the university specifically pointed out that it didn’t purposefully kill the incredible specimen. “The longest-lived clam was collected along with many others and, as it is impossible to age the clams until their shells have been opened, there was no indication of its extreme age until after this had been done,” the university writes in a press release. “The notion that scientists knew in advance that it was the longest-lived species and then deliberately destroyed it is plainly incorrect.”

They were well-meaning morons, not malicious. Well, that’s all right, then.

And this tells you everything you need to know about ‘climate scientists’.

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As if that mattered to somebody at Harvard….

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 When a city is badly broken, it can be very tough to fix.

Just ask Darren Green, president of a coalition of community groups in Trenton, N.J., where deep budget cuts in 2011 forced the city to lay off a third of its police force.

“We’re at a place now where it’s very dangerous to walk the streets,” he said, his thoughts periodically interrupted by the distant sound of passing sirens. “The school system is dysfunctional and not working. You have young people who are robbing elders. Young people who are destroying communities. With no leadership and the community in disarray, there’s a lot of bad here.”

Well, that’s what happens when you put Democrats in charge.