Read it.

Sometimes someone from the Filling sneaks into the Washington Post.

Yesterday, in a somewhat useful exercise, my Democratic friend and sometimes sparring partner Carter Eskew compiled a “Republican Nutcase Check List” for Republican presidential candidates to take. (If you want to see how you’d rank, you can take that survey here.) With his quiz as motivation, and in the same spirit, I wrote a corresponding checklist for Democrats in general, given that their presidential candidate bench is so weak.

In order to slant his test and present Republicans as Democrats want them to be, Carter had to scour some remote corners of the country in search of narrow positions and specific incidents. Here, I’ll stick pretty close to what passes for “mainstream” Democratic positions in our nation’s capital.

This is called the Democratic Whackjob Survey, and I propose that all Democrats take it. There are eight questions and the answers will be tallied to give you a score on the whack-o-meter.

…

If you answered “yes” to 8 out of the above, you’re a whackjob who’s probably permanently in a purple haze, camped out in a public park with a Unibomber-inspired protest sign nearby. And if you are not currently working for the Obama administration, working on a Democratic voter-registration campaign or doing commentary on MSNBC, you should look into those opportunities.

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Much like the work of Garry Trudeau.

TrudeauLike Doonesbury itself, Garry Trudeau’s speech yesterday at Long Island University was entertaining at the beginning but eventually became tedious and smug. After opening with some funny reminiscences about his early struggles with unsympathetic editors, the cartoonist tried to tackle the topic of the murders at Charlie Hebdo. He did not take the position you might expect from a professional satirist. “Freedom should always be discussed within the context of responsibility,” he lectured. “At some point free expression absolutism becomes childish and unserious.”

Trudeau’s talk took its turn for the worse halfway in, when he offered a garbled account of the Muhammad cartoon controversy of 2005. “Using judgment and common sense in expressing oneself were denounced as antithetical to freedom of speech,” he told the audience. I seem to remember some responses to those cartoons that were more clearly antithetical to freedom of speech, including death threats and assassination attempts. Trudeau alluded to some of this, but he blamed the speakers, not the censors: “Not only was one cartoonist gunned down, but riots erupted around the world, resulting in the deaths of scores. No one could say toward what positive social end, yet free speech absolutists were unchastened.”

Read it.

I have this image of Jimmy Swaggart shouting at a bunch of hairy elephants in a huge tent. But that’s me.

Check it out.

As William Gibson famously said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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Traffic crashes are a cause of ill health, impaired living or curtailed lifespan. Does city growth, in its sprawl-type outward expansion, increase the incidence of fatal and injurious crashes? This factor is the latest addition to numerous attempts to pin a correlation or causality linking traffic accidents with any number of causes.

I can think of no suburb that is as scary to drive through as Chicago, Boston, or New York.

Read it.

And if ‘reasearchers’ say that, are we not obliged to believe it?

Good news for Chris Christie.

Read it.

Forty years after the Swedish parliament unanimously decided to change the formerly homogenous Sweden into a multicultural country, violent crime has increased by 300% and rapes by 1,472%. Sweden is now number two on the list of rape countries, surpassed only by Lesotho in Southern Africa.

Read it.

New York’s transit woes are a portrait of the collapse of blue model in miniature. The factors that Renn argues are causing the high costs are the classic features of that out-dated system: burdensome regulations, cronyism, and corruption. The problems will be hard to solve because they are deeply rooted. Corrupt politics, rent-seeking crony capitalists, organized labor, NIMBY lobbies, administrative incompetence resulting from poorly organized and poorly run bureaucracies: it took a lot of cooks to spoil this broth.

But the good news is that studying America’s biggest problems and bottlenecks — like our expensive health care system, bloated higher ed system, collapsing infrastructure — offer us the chance to reform and redesign the outmoded systems that are holding us back. The old ways of doing things aren’t good enough any more; American society needs a new era of reform that can transform a social and political infrastructure developed for the needs of an industrial society to the smarter, sleeker and more efficient infrastructure that our emerging information society desperately needs.

‘Just stick it in the garage and we’ll see if the other pieces show up.’

Richard Fernandez blows the whistle.

One of today’s man-bites-dog stories is that America cannot evacuate its nationals from war torn Yemen. Rather it hopes countries like India can do it for them. A State Department official said the U.S. government, which is providing logistical support for the Saudi campaign, believes it is too dangerous to risk a military operation to rescue Americans. “There are no current U.S. government-sponsored plans to evacuate private U.S. citizens from Yemen,” the official said. “We encourage all U.S. citizens to shelter in a secure location until they are able to depart safely.”

Fortunately New Delhi will ride to the rescue of Uncle Sam. “India has won many friends by evacuating nearly 1,000 nationals of 41 countries from warring Yemen. … Along with some 4,600 Indians, Singh’s mission rescued citizens of Britain, France and the United States.”  The days of “exceptionalism” are over.  Americans being left on the beach alongside wretched 3rd World nationals is part of the march toward making it a normal country occupying a status considerably below India and perhaps above Nepal.

There was a time of course when claiming American citizenship carried the same weight as the ancient civis romanus sum.  ”I am a Roman citizen.” It conjured images of  grey warships offshore and grim faced Marines poised behind the ramps of landing craft. It implied diplomats who could pound the table as the local warlords quivered.  And even if it didn’t always quiver they sometimes did, for the despots could never be sure the Navy was not actually there.

But today even diplomats have no expectation of being saved from the tender mercies of knife-clattering Jihadis. If local secret agents who risked their lives for America can be left to their grueseome fates then ordinary citizens will have to make their own arrangements. At a State Department press briefing  one journalist actually asked Marie Harf if Americans should swim out of the country.

Read it.

Time for the annual reminder that the top end of the income ladder pays most of the taxes.

Read it.

All in all this will give the average U.S. household an extra $700 to save or spend this year. Shale has done a lot for our country, and while much of it has affecting overarching narratives of our country’s overall energy security, that $700 is a very real and very welcome number for millions of Americans.

‘Progressives’, of course, are against fracking, because they think it will cause earthquakes that will make California slide into the sea or something. Actually they’re against cheap gas for whatever reason, because they don’t want cheap gas — they want expensive gas, too expensive for people to use, because they’re against automobiles and want people to use bicycles and trains.

Giving up automobiles for bicycles and trains is, somehow, progress. Or else ‘progressives’ are actually a walking oxymoron. We report, you decide.

Read it.

We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. Department of Education, using authority it claims under Title IX and other federal laws, has arm-twisted the nation’s colleges and universities into stripping away procedural protections for faculty and students facing charges of sexual misconduct, sought to regulate speech as “verbal conduct,” and urged colleges to record microaggressive behaviors that do not rise to the level of harassment or assault but might add up in time to some future pattern. The resulting federal pressure has done much to generate a campus atmosphere in which administrators like those at the University of Virginia react even to unsubstantiated and soon-refuted assault claims with harsh crackdowns directed at whole groups of students against whom no misconduct whatsoever has been charged.

The substance of what the feds have been doing in this area has rightly stirred outrage, but another side of it also deserves scrutiny: it’s based on sheer fiat, on a series of “because we say so” edicts.

Remind me again why education is any business of the Federal governemnt…? Oh, right, teachers’ unions. Duh.

Read it.

Mr. Grijalva left a clue about how he operates in 2013 when the magazine In These Times asked about his legislative strategy. “I’m a Saul Alinsky guy,” he said, referring to the community organizer and activist who died in 1972, “that’s where I learned this stuff.”

What sort of stuff? Mr. Grijalva sent his letters not to the professors but to university presidents, without (at least in the case of Mr. Hayward) the professors’ knowledge. Mr. Hayward was not even employed by Pepperdine at the time of his congressional testimony in 2011.

But targeting institutions and their leaders is pure Alinsky; so are the scare tactics. Mr. Grijalva’s staff sent letters asking for information about the professors, with a March 16 due date—asking, for instance, if they had accepted funding from oil companies—using official congressional letterhead, and followed up with calls from Mr. Grijalva’s congressional office. This is a page from Alinsky’s book, in both senses of the word: “Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have,” reads one tip in his 1971 “Rules for Radicals.”

Yet adopting Alinsky’s tactics may not in this case fit with Alinsky’s philosophy. This is Alinsky with a twist. Despite myriad philosophical inconsistencies, “Rules for Radicals” is meant to empower the weaker against the stronger. Alinsky writes: “The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away.”

Reminder: You don’t have to be a Little Guy to be a Radical, just as you don’t have to be poor to be a Democrat.

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust must push the Narrative even if it derogates one of their tools, the teachers’ unions.

Yoda-Inspired Child’s Bath Towel.

Foldable Ultra-Portable Grill.

Read it.

The New Republic, with its punk owner Chris Hughes having locked the cockpit door, continues its rapid decompression and descent into the mountainside.  This week TNR carries a piece saying that the Rolling Stone UVA rape hoax story is the fault of . . . conservatives.

The story (and “story” it is) by Elizabeth Stoker Brunig shows what an expensive college education in postmodern theory gets you these days….

Read it.

Turkey is probably one of the best social laboratories in the world to prove why Islamist ideology cannot be compatible with a culture of humor, dissent and protest. It also offers a unique experience that shows how Islamists can even violate one of their religion’s most fundamental teachings for the sake of worshipping a leader’s cult of personality.

Read it.

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

Nicholas Kristof at Voice of the Crust New York Times phones in another rewarming of The Narrative.

The United States is the most powerful colossus in the history of the world: Our nuclear warheads could wipe out the globe, our enemies tweet on iPhones, and kids worldwide bop to Beyoncé.

Yet let’s get real. All this hasn’t benefited all Americans. A newly released global index finds that America falls short, along with other powerful countries, on what matters most: assuring a high quality of life for ordinary citizens.

Unexamined is the fact that ‘ordinary Americans’ who have a job and support themselves are doing fine; it’s the slackers who live off of the labor of others who are doing most of the whining.

The Social Progress Index for 2015 ranks the United States 16th in the world.

At what? Being socialist? Be still my heart. This is like criticizing countries for being unlike the Soviet Union. ‘They may not be allowed to vote for more than one candidate, but at least they’ve got free day care!’

We also rank 32nd in preventing early marriage, 38th in the equality of our education system, 49th in high school enrollment rates and 87th in cellphone use.

Well, that’s pretty much horseshit. The government does a fine job of ‘prevent[ing] early marriage’ by offering every UnderCrust female an apartment, food stamps, and MedicAid simply for having a child without bothering to marry the father. The ‘equality of our education system’ is almost perfect, with every child being offered an equally-crappy public education at the hands of ‘teachers’ who are more concerned about their salaries and benefits than their formal jobs. Why have ‘high school enrollment’ when it subjects you to attacks by juvenile delinquents that won’t be disciplined by any kind of authority? And I fail to see how ‘cellphone use’ constitutes a measuring stick for civilization.

The fun part, though, is the accompanying list. Notice that, except for Japan, all of the countries above the U.S. are government by highly blue-eyed white people — and, judging from college admissions, the Japanese can be considered Honorary White People (at least for affirmative-action purposes).

Maybe the problem is that the U.S. doesn’t have enough white people. That seems to be the key to getting higher on the list.

Gates of Vienna is not afraid to step on a few toes.

Is President Obama a Muslim?

That question has been hanging in the air in Counterjihad circles ever since the 2008 election campaign. But is there any real need to dwell on it? Hillary Clinton has already provided us with a succinct answer, albeit in another context: What difference at this point does it make?

A question I’ve been asking for many a year now.

Read it.

IRS employees waste over 500,000 hours each year on “union activities” said House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) on Wednesday.

As Roskam points out, this squandered an estimated $23.5 million in taxpayer funds, all while the IRS pleads poverty and makes excuses for not answering the phone.

As Jerry Pournelle has often said, the function of government is to hire and pay government workers.

Read it.

Rather like a tongue exploring a gap where a tooth once was.

Would that every RINO had the honesty to come out of the political closet. (Yeah, Lindsay Graham, I’m lookin’ at you.)

Freeberg has some thoughts.

This absolutely fascinates me. If you imagine liberals thinking about their goals the way normal people do about theirs, beginning with the end in mind and persevering through setbacks large and small — if you imagine them that way — you would have to credit them with optimism beyond the perimeter of sanity, plucky resolve that is just off-the-charts, inhuman. You would have to see them as bursting at the seams with exactly what they do not encourage in others. The attitude of: Don’t worry, you’ll win in the end. This is 180 degrees contrary to their message to everybody else, which essentially is one of: If you’re making $45k a year now, we can guarantee you will never make more than $55k in your whole life. You need social programs. Don’t try. Give up. The rich people have rigged the game. Go on “foostamps.”

Do liberals think about the end game? They have such enthusiasm, in those low trenches following their most disappointing setbacks, I know I’m not capable of matching it in mine. And so I don’t think of them that way, I think of them more like the dog chasing the car. Not a thought in the world about where this is all going, the possible scenarios, the victory, the defeat. There is only the pursuit. That’s why they pound the pavement just as hard when things aren’t going their way, as they do when they are. Just like the dog. I think.

The ‘progressive’ mind is locked into a certain intellectual loop: 1. Progress is inevitable (things get better because they always have), 2. There is no progress without change, 3. Since progress is inevitable, any change is good because it will ultimately lead to progress.

This is not purely a political belief system, but rather a religious belief system with a political agenda — much like Islam. Even when one points to changes that have had bad effects, the response is always ‘Well, be patient — everything will work out for the best.’ (‘The Best’, of course, from the ‘progressive’ viewpoint.) This is why spending trillions of dollars of tax money on a problem with only negative results leads to continued calls to throw good money after bad — in social welfare, in education, in any high-minded program you can think of. If progress has not occurred, it’s because we haven’t tried hard enough, we haven’t spent enough money, we haven’t had enough change.

Read it.

Unfortunately, it’s the wrong half.

‘Marriage Equality’ is the trendy phrase homosexuals have come up with for their campaign to redefine the term ‘marriage’, attempting to piggyback on the good vibes that everyone has about the Civil Rights movement and ‘gender equality’. But, like every such tendentious weasel-phrase, it is a lie masquerading as a ‘greater truth’.

The simple fact is that homosexuals have, and always have had, ‘marriage equality’ — they have, and always have had, the same right to marry a person of the opposite sex than heterosexuals have, and always have had.

But that’s not what they want. They want a ‘right’ that no one, homosexual or heterosexual, has or has ever had: The right to ‘marry’ someone of the same sex. They call it ‘marriage equality’ so as to deceive the people on the left side of the bell curve (whose votes are just as good as yours). And a comparable status to marriage, with all of the same legal rights and benefits, isn’t enough; only a radical (reaching to the roots) re-definition of the settled ancient term ‘marriage’ will do.

So the next time you hear or read the phrase ‘marriage equality’, know it for what it is — a lie, dressed up to look like the truth.

Read it.

Hundreds of smart electricity meters exploded in California after a truck crashed into a utility pole and caused a power surge on Monday.

More than 5,000 homes in Stockton have been affected, according to CBS Sacramento, following a surge caused by a rubbish lorry driver crashing into a utility pole and causing the pole’s top wire to touch its bottom wire.

“The top lines are considered our freeways. The bottom lines are our distribution lines taking power directly to homes,” a Pacific Gas and Electric spokesperson told CBS. “So when the two collide, they’re at different voltages and the higher voltage wins out, causing an overload.”

Yup, those are pretty smart meters all right.

Smart meters are a popular idea with governments and electricity companies around the world. In theory they might help to reduce energy consumption as well as furnishing energy suppliers with a lot of valuable information about their customers. A smart meter often allows a customer’s supplies to be shut off remotely; another benefit from the utility company’s point of view.

Your tax dollars (and corporate fascism) at work.

Read it.

Not while Oregan has blue-state zoning laws. Even Voice of the Crust The Guardian can’t get around that one.

Read it.

No doubt that the Washington Post has the hipster ‘progressive’ demographic nailed.

Can you think of anything more illustrative of the Peter Pan Party’s core cultural meme ‘We Wont Grow Up!’ than this one?

George Will points out some inconvenient truth.

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.

…

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.

Brain surgery is notoriously complicated. Before surgeons go in to remove a tumor, they study the size and location of the tumor. But once they’re in, they have to rely on their fingers and eyes to distinguish tumor cells from healthy brain cells. Now researchers have developed a “paint” that can be injected into a patient’s veins to make tumor cells glow. After a number of successful studies in mice and dogs, the paint is now being tested in humans in California.

I don’t know, Hugh. I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing. I think his actions are constituted in my mind those of the worst president we’ve ever had.

— Dick Cheney

Read it.

DreamstimeAn autistic 4-year-old wandered away from his home in Omaha, Nebraska, without his mom’s knowledge. She did the right thing: she called the cops. And what did she get for it? A neglect citation.

No good deed goes unpunished, especially by government.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, debunks a few common economic myths.

Josh Billings famously quipped, “The trouble ain’t what people don’t know; it’s what they know that ain’t so.” He was correct, especially as this keen observation applies to history.

Everyone knows, for example, that minimum-wage legislation is meant to help the working poor. A study of history, however, shows that this just ain’t so.

What is so is that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 — the legislation that created the national minimum wage in America — was designed to protect the higher wages of Northern textile workers, and the profits of Northern mill owners, from the intensifying competition unleashed by Southern textile mills in the Carolinas and Georgia.

…

Another historical myth is that Southern slavery harmed only the blacks who were enslaved. There’s no doubt that those who suffered most grievously from slavery were the slaves themselves. But slavery also inflicted great economic harm on non-slave-owning whites in the South.

Most obviously, slavery artificially reduced the supply of workers available to work in whatever factories and businesses might have been established by non-slave-owning whites. Therefore, these whites — who outnumbered slave-owning whites, even in the South — suffered reduced opportunities to launch their own businesses. In the South, chattel slavery stymied the single greatest force for widespread and sustained economic growth: market-directed entrepreneurship.

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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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

For the first time, researchers can improve the way humans walk without using an external power source, according to a study published in Nature today. A boot-like exoskeleton that fits into a regular running shoe reduces the energetic costs of walking by about 7 percent. In short, it makes walking less tiring without resorting to a battery pack or a motor — something that could really come in handy for people who have trouble walking, or military personnel in remote areas.

Read it.

Note the weasel-word ‘diverting’, as if profits must by some law of nature not go overseas. By this you may know a Voice of the Crust.

Read it.

Two prominent factions within the Republican foreign policy establishment are fighting for control over who will help guide former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush‘s policy positions as he gears up for a campaign for the presidency.

More hawkish Republicans — represented by the prominent, interventionist neoconservatives who populated the ranks of the George W. Bush administration — have repeatedly raised concerns about the more pragmatic foreign policy team being assembled around Mr. Bush.

By which phrasing you know that the Crust have decided that ‘interventionist neoconservatives’ (almost worth the price of admission, that hate-phrase) will be the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Bush campaign.

Read it.

The United States government devotes about $40 billion each year to means-tested housing programs, plus another $6 billion or so in tax expenditures on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC).

Yet total subsidies for home ownership may run as high as $600 billion, most of those not going to the poor.

There are over twenty different federal subsidized housing programs and most of them are no longer producing new units.

My question is: How come it is somehow the job of the Federal government to provide people with housing at taxpayer expense?

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.

Read it.

Studying the eating habits of 8,399 Americans, the researchers separated out a group of 753 who ate at least one small apple every day. These apple eaters were generally healthier and better educated than the general populace, but once the effects of such confounding factors were accounted for, there was no statistical difference to be found. Apple eaters were just as likely to visit the doctor or have an overnight hospital stay as everyone else.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

This analysis, led by University of Michigan assistant professor Matthew Davis, has a number of important limitations. While its subjects are nationally representative for the US, the data is based on their recall of food consumption over a period of 24 hours, which they assert to be representative of their usual diet. That’s then compared against their hospital or doctor visits over the previous month, which are again self-reported, and the metric for “keeping the doctor away” is to have no more than one meeting with a medical professional during that period. That leaves the nuance of why people might need treatment unaddressed.

Your tax dollars at work.

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….

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

Here’s a brand new article from the New York Times that nicely illustrates the theme of my Taki’s column about how the Eye of Sauron can only glare at a few instances of discrimination at a time. For example, the federal government is currently blithely rebuilding the civil service examination system, junked as discriminatory in 1981 due to disparate impact, but is also persecuting the very blue state of New York for trying to hire good teachers.

Does that make sense? Of course not, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s more fun to be behind the Eye than in front of it.

Read it.

Transit-oriented developments (TODs) are supposed to promote economic growth because the demand for it is so high. But if so many people want to live in dense, mixed-use developments, why do they so often need subsidies?

Because in reality very few people want them, but those people control the public purse strings and can afford to build their utopia at our expense.

Vanity Fair, Voice of the Crust, still can’t resist shooting fish in a barrel.

But that afternoon, after a long presentation to 200 NBC advertising salespeople, Turness was feeling better than she had in months. When she had been hired she knew she was stepping onto a troubled ship; finally, she felt, the organizational changes she had made were showing results. Meet the Press’s ratings were edging up; Nightly News seemed to be stabilizing. “Things,” she told Fili, “feel like they’re in a really good place.”

Her sense of relief, however, lasted mere minutes. As she left Fili’s office around 3:30, Turness learned the startling news: the most important person at the network, the face of NBC News, its anchorman Brian Williams, had apparently been exaggerating an anecdote about coming under fire in a U.S. Army helicopter during the Iraq war in 2003. A reporter from the military newspaper Stars and Stripes had called about it that morning. Williams was supposed to talk to him off the record in an effort to determine what the reporter planned to write. Instead, to the dismay of NBC’s P.R. staff, Williams had gone on the record and admitted he hadn’t been telling the truth, not only on a Nightly News broadcast the previous week but also over the years at public appearances and on talk shows.