Talk about getting a story completely bass-ackwards — or at the very least a headline. The Today Show asks, “Does organic food turn people into jerks?”

“I stopped at a market to get a fruit platter for a movie night with friends but I couldn’t find one so I asked the produce guy,” says the 40-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “And he was like, ‘If you want fruit platters, go to Safeway. We’re organic.’ I finally bought a small cake and some strawberries and then at the check stand, the guy was like ‘You didn’t bring your own bag? I need to charge you if you didn’t bring your own bag.’ It was like a ‘Portlandia skit.’ They were so snotty and arrogant.”

As it turns out, new research has determined that a judgmental attitude may just go hand in hand with exposure to organic foods. In fact, a new study published this week in the journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science, has found that organic food may just make people act a bit like jerks.

“There’s a line of research showing that when people can pat themselves on the back for their moral behavior, they can become self-righteous,” says author Kendall Eskine, assistant professor of  the department of psychological sciences at Loyola University in New Orleans. “I’ve noticed a lot of organic foods are marketed with moral terminology, like Honest Tea, and wondered if you exposed people to organic food, if it would make them pat themselves on the back for their moral and environmental choices.”

OK, everybody repeat after me — I need a study to tell me this?

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Scientific America looks at “Ancient Diseases of Human Ancestors:”

I’ve written before about ancient diseases of the ice age, but this time I’m going even further back in time, to diseases that were present in the first human-like hominids. Although many human infections only developed after human settlements and animal domistication, early human ancestors would still have been fighting off bacteria and other nasty diseases. Some of these diseases are still around today.

Perhaps more than are necessary; am I the only one having flashbacks to the opening of Tom Wolfe’s “The Great Relearning” essay”

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroll, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.

The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that in the communes swept aside—quite purposely—were those that said you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s mattresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning . . . the laws of hygiene . . . by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

This process, namely the relearning—following a Promethean and unprecedented start from zero—seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.

Faster please, to coin a phrase.

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The World Wildlife Federation, who along with a little help from Fairfax Media, a major media conglomerate in Australia and New Zealand, has made Earth Hour an annual eco-pagan “holiday” amongst the far left (including businesses either dumb enough to play along, or perhaps in the hopes of appeasement). But that isn’t their only effort at playing Chicken Little. This year, they managed to convince the New York Daily News (a center-left paper that should know better) to run an article titled “Two Earths would be needed to sustain human activity by 2030, report finds,” that’s really a glorified press release for the WWF:

Planet Earth in a tight spot.

Mankind is draining the earth’s resources so quickly the globe would be bled dry before the end of the century at this rate, a new report shows.

Humans are living outside their means, depleting natural resources like forests, air and water 50% faster than the planet can renew, according to the 2012 World Wildlife Fund’s “Living Planet Report” released this month.

If the trends aren’t reversed, by 2030 we’d need more than two Planet Earths to sustain human activity, according to the study.

“If we just do business as usual…we’re just going to continue moving in this direction. At some point, the earth’s going to just give out. We don’t know when. But that’s a pretty scary thing to think about,” said Colby Loucks, director of conservation science at WWF. “The question is, we don’t know what the tipping point is.”

But you sure know how to shout doomsday on a regular basis. In 2009, the WWF commissioned this ad, in both still and video versions, which they pulled at the last minute, perhaps risking the backlash from the general public over a form of agitprop that James Taranto once dubbed, “Green Supremacism:”

Having exploited 9/11 to play the Moral Equivalent of War cliche, a couple of months later, the WWF decided to use children as human shields for their next campaign:

That 2030 date randomly chosen by the WWF’s latest “report” is interesting — it’s at least far enough out that most people will have forgotten it by the time it arrives, unlike all of the “we only have five years/ten years/four years to save the earth” cri de coeurs, many of which date from the Bush administration era, and are coming due, and making the enviro-socialists who issued them look particularly silly. But it’s close enough to scare those who wish to be scared by the latest Malthusian doomsday scenario.

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Remember the Audi “Green Police” ad from the Super Bowl in February of 2010? When “armed Environmental Police officers” and a “state Environmental Police truck” (an SUV, to add to the Gorewellian levels of irony) appear in a Massachusetts* newspaper article, what was fiction only a couple of years ago has now become reality. But then, as President Zelig Lemon Mood Ring demonstrates, reality is entirely fungible these days:

Looking to hit the spot with a savory ice cream at Great Brook Farm State Park this week?

You may be out of luck.

The park’s popular ice-cream stand was unexpectedly shut down by state officials over the weekend, after the stand’s operator made building improvements at the site without getting permission first.

Mark Duffy, who has operated the dairy farm at the state-owned park for 26 years and has a lease with the state to run the stand, said armed Environmental Police officers showed up at stand on Friday evening and stood guard throughout the weekend, turning away customers craving delectable sundaes and frappes.

To make matters worse, said Duffy, the shutdown happened right before the sunny Mother’s Day weekend.

Good thing he didn’t try to open a lemonade stand — that’s a capital offense these days.

* I knew it had to be Massachusetts or California as soon as I saw the story on the Drudge Report.

Related: At the Corner, Peter Kirsanow dubs America “Oceania Light,” a reminder that George Orwell wrote 1984 as a warning, not as a user’s guide, which is what it’s morphed into over the last 20 years — with more than a little touch of the Weimar Republic, of course.

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Veteran public speaker Cavett Robert was fond of telling newcomers, “Don’t be in too much of a hurry to promote, until you get good. Otherwise you just speed up the rate at which the world finds out you’re no good.”

The Tea Party was born spontaneously in early 2009 but, with the exception of CNBC’s Rick Santelli, received little public support from the MSM (almost entirely the opposite, and that’s understating the case, as we all know). Unfortunately, Occupy Wall Street had far more ink than it knew what to do with in its early days last fall, thanks to an overwhelming superfluity of promoters in the legacy media who, along with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and other Democrat politicians, were desperate to have a Tea Party-style movement of their own. Well, besides, as Glenn Reynolds noted last year, “the Coffee Party, the Brownbaggers, The Other 95%, A New Way Forward, the One Nation Movement— am I leaving any out? I can’t remember.”

Walter Russell Mead (who reminds us that he much prefers his tea “tasted with pinkies appropriately extended in the proper, traditional way”) pronounces OWS RIP today:

To some degree, it was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement largely failed to connect with the African American and Hispanic churchgoers who would have to be the base for any serious grass roots urban political mobilization. The trade unions picked up the movement briefly but dropped it like a hot brick as they found the brand less and less attractive.

It is as if the Tea Party had been taken over by the Aryan Brotherhood and delusional vagrants while failing to connect with either evangelical Christians or respectable libertarians. The MSM at one point was visibly hungering and thirsting for exactly that fate of marginalization to happen to the Tea Party, and the MSM did its klutzy best to tar the Tea Party with that kind of Mad Hatter extremism. The Tea Partiers by and large (not always or cleanly) escaped the fatal embrace of the nutters and the ranters on their side of the spectrum; OWS was occupied by its own fringe, and so died.

OWS’s popularity continues to plummet. Many pollsters haven’t even bothered to ask the public about OWS since the protestors were kicked out of Zuccotti Park. The NBC/WSJ poll, one of the only reliable indicators of OWS support these days, shows OWS’s popularity has dropped by half since November. Over the same period NYC’s Mayor Bloomberg’s popularity has remained steady months after closing the sad and futile encampment at Zuccotti Park. No backlash there.

Of course, as Jonah Goldberg has written, what Occupy really needs (needed?) is a Republican president to protest against. At least during the mid-1960s, the nascent new left railed against LBJ, causing him to ultimately resign. If any Occupiers called for Obama’s resignation, I missed it; perhaps sensing that they would only speed up the preference cascade against him, the legacy media, despite going all in (and I mean, all in) for OWS, certainly didn’t play up any quotes along similar lines. Instead, we had the first “revolution” raging for the machine.

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Bill Maher isn’t letting the quick implosion of the Washington Post’s “bullying” story about Mitt Romney’s teenage days from stopping him embarrassing himself:

Appearing as a guest on Tuesday’s Conan show on TBS, HBO comedian Bill Maher absurdly suggested that recent allegations that Mitt Romney engaged in “bullying” in high school are worse than being molested by Michael Jackson, and asserted that he would be willing trade being beat up in grade school for being “gently masturbated by a pop star.”

Apparently, that last phrase is a stock part of Maher’s shtick; he’s used it before — here’s an excerpt from his May 3, 2005 appearance on the CBS Late Late Show, hosted by Craig Ferguson:

Bill Maher: “I think that there is no perspective. People have no perspective, especially about crime. You know, zero tolerance. You know, of course, nobody ever wants to see a child, you know, diddled. That’s just plain wrong. But even the people who are testifying against him, they’re saying that he serviced them. They didn’t service him.”

Craig Ferguson: “You don’t have kids, do you, Bill?”

Maher: “No.”

Ferguson: “No. I have a son. It makes me crazy, this thing, this Michael Jackson thing. It drives me, the idea of someone touching my kid, I would go, I nearly swore there. I’d go crazy.”

Maher: “Very wrong. But, you know, I remember when I was a kid. I was savagely beaten once by bullies in the schoolyard. Savagely beaten. If I had a choice between being savagely beaten and being gently masturbated by a pop star. It’s just me.”

Ferguson: “The always controversial Bill Maher, everybody.”

Maher: “What? That’s it?”

Ferguson: “Bill Maher. We’ll be right back with Rain Pryor.”

Based on that transcript, and the clip I once watched of the incident (which may still be available on YouTube), Ferguson had the good sense to get Maher off the air as quickly as possible. Would that Maher’s employers at Time-Warner-CNN-HBO have a similar level of decorum.

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As spotted by the Watts Up With That blog. Note the 2007 date and the highlighted passage in the article:

Its always important to remember what has been predicted by the elders of science, and to review those predictions when the time is right. In four months, just 132 days from now at the end of summer on the Autumnal Equinox September 22nd 2012, the Arctic will be “nearly ice free” according to a prominent NASA scientist in a National Geographic article on December 12, 2007.

Fred Siegel of City Journal once dubbed this trend “Progressives Against Progress:”

Crankery, in short, became respectable. In 1972, Sir John Maddox, editor of the British journal Nature, noted that though it had once been usual to see maniacs wearing sandwich boards that proclaimed the imminent end of the Earth, they had been replaced by a growing number of frenzied activists and politicized scientists making precisely the same claim. In the years since then, liberalism has seen recurring waves of such end-of-days hysteria. These waves have shared not only a common pattern but often the same cast of characters. Strangely, the promised despoliations are most likely to be presented as imminent when Republicans are in the White House. In each case, liberals have argued that the threat of catastrophe can be averted only through drastic actions in which the ordinary political mechanisms of democracy are suspended and power is turned over to a body of experts and supermen.

Which is why, not at all coincidentally, such crankery went into overdrive in the naughts, culminating in Obama’s now failed rash of venture socialism. As many recent “not-so-final countdowns” will be coming due in the next few months and years, the Internet is going to have lots of fun pointing them out — something the MSM “unexpectedly” does so rarely.

(H/T: SDA)

Related: “Warmist Professor: I Call Global Warming Skeptics ‘Deniers’ So People Compare Them To Holocaust Deniers — What makes this even more grotesque is the professor is a Holocaust survivor.”

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As Jonah Goldberg noted in Liberal Fascism, the “Progressives” of a century ago were astonishingly racist, including such figures as Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, HG Wells, and George William Hunter, who wrote the book that John Scopes desired to teach in his classroom. A century later, and Chris Matthews demonstrates that everything comes full circle:

Matthews interviewed Bishop Harry Jackson, who has spoken out against Barack Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage. Speaking of Jesus Christ, Matthews ridiculously linked accusations that Mitt Romney once bullied a teen, nearly 50 years ago: “Do you think [Christ] would have been chasing after the kid with long hair and cutting his hair or he would have been the one protecting the kid with long hair in high school?”

Matthews sarcastically added, “But you’re with the guy who was going after the kid with long hair.” (Pastor Jackson informed the host that he was not, yet, supporting Romney.)

Fellow black minister, Reverend Delman Coates also appeared on the show. After Coates indicated he supported gay marriage, Jackson retorted, “Why not let the Muslims have polygamy and bigamy?”

This prompted Matthews to insultingly suggest: “I hope you evolve. Thank you very much. I’m just teasing.”

Considering Matthews routinely plays the race card, will he apologize for telling a black man to “evolve?”

Now we know why MSNBC hired Al Sharpton to appear on the network — it’s insurance that he won’t be hosting another show trial against a fallen MSNBC anchor.

Related: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey notes, “Video: Preachers in Baltimore blast Obama for same-sex marriage stance:”

No one expects the congregants of Pastor Burns’ church to run out and vote for Romney, but they’re going to be a lot less enthused about Obama — and a lack of enthusiasm in his base will put an end to hopes of a second term. Maryland is a safe state for Democrats under normal conditions; it last went Republican in 1988, and Obama won it by 25 points in 2008.  However, the same reason for that large margin of victory shows the risk for Obama, which is that 30% of the vote in the state comes from the African-American community that Pastor Burns and others serve.

Which is one reply to the question that Obama tacitly asks his base whenever he zigs to the right, alienating his anti-war base by not closing Gitmo and keeping in place many elements of GWB’s GWOT tactics, then zags to the left, alienating black and other minority voters in supporting gay marriage. Where is Obama’s base going to go?

Possibly not out of their homes on election day.

Update: Jim Treacher writes, “Ain’t no politics like identity politics ’cause identity politics don’t stop.”

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Found the Rhetorican, George Lucas has a little fun with his fellow One Percenters in posh Marin County, after they rejected his proposal to build a movie studio (which would bring jobs, revenue, and additional taxes into the area). First, his PR department issued a statement that reads:

The level of bitterness and anger expressed by the homeowners in Lucas Valley has convinced us that, even if we were to spend more time and acquire the necessary approvals, we would not be able to maintain a constructive relationship with our neighbors.

We love working and living in Marin, but the residents of Lucas Valley have fought this project for 25 years, and enough is enough.  Marin is a bedroom community and is committed to building subdivisions, not business.  Many years ago, we tried to stop the Lucas Valley Estates project from being built, but we failed, and we now have a subdivision on our doorstep.

Next — well, we’ll let Movies.com take it from here:

[Lucas] wants to transform the property into low-income housing, naturally, ending their official statement with this zinger, “If everyone feels that housing is less impactful on the land, then we are hoping that people who need it the most will benefit.”

He’s working with the Marin Community Foundation to instead construct affordable housing for either low-income families or seniors living on small, fixed incomes. In order to smooth along the development, he’s already given them all of the pricey technical studies and land surveys Lucasfilm spent years conducting. And we think that’s just great. Because if there’s one thing rich people will hate more than having movie magic made in their backyard, it’s poor people moving in.

Mr. Lucas, we may hate you for turning your back on the original trilogy, but our hat is off to you on this one. Well played.

Heh. Incidentally, the press release from Lucasfilm’s PR department that Movies.com quotes goes on to note:

While we managed to build on Skywalker Ranch after one year master plan approval and another year PDP approval, it took over 10 years for the Master Plan approval on Big Rock and Grady Ranches. It took us three years for a PDP on Big Rock and now we are four years into trying to get a PDP permit for Grady Ranch with no end in sight.

As the company grew we realized we needed more space than what we were building in Lucas Valley at Skywalker Ranch, and it could not accommodate the whole company. We then worked to find more land on which to expand our corporate headquarters, our video game enterprise LucasArts, and our visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic. We were told there was no way we would be able to build a facility of that size in Marin County and therefore we moved the majority of our employees from Marin to the Presidio in San Francisco. We’ve had a great partnership with the Presidio Trust and created a low impact facility which offers great benefit to its surrounding community

How out of touch is Marin? They make San Francisco look like a pro-business city — at least from Lucas’s perspective. On the other hand, it’s a rather distorted perspective. Considering Lucas thinks of communist Vietnam as the good guys, why should he be angry at a local government that attempts to thwart his business plans — or be surprised at “The level of bitterness and anger” expressed by his fellow California leftists, simply because they’ve aimed their rancor towards him?

Found via The Rhetorican, who goes on to note, “Now all they need over there is a state prison and Marin County will finally be representative of California state government’s three main constituencies: ‘the very rich, the very poor, and the public employees.’”

Update: Will Smith gets mugged reality, decides not to move to France anytime soon. Don’t miss the video.

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Our latest Silicon Graffiti video was inspired by one of the key themes in the late Allan Bloom’s 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom wrote that by the middle of the 20^th century, American universities  had essentially become enclaves of German philosophy. As a result, “the new American life-style has become a Disneyland version of the Weimar Republic for the whole family,” according to Bloom. Last year in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman famously asked, ‘Can Greeks Become Germans?’

Why not? If we could, any nation can. This video looks at how and why that happened, and the results — or at least scratches the surface of those concepts, inasmuch as any six minute video can.

And when you’re done watching, check out David P. Goldman at his “Spengler” column (and that nom de blog dovetails remarkably well with our theme, doesn’t it?) on “Philistinism and Failure,” and follow David’s link to Fred Siegel from the April issue of Commentary, for his brilliant article on “How Highbrows Killed Culture,” for much more on this theme.

A handy, portable, easily embeddable YouTube format of the video is available here. And click here for three years worth of earlier editions of Silicon Graffiti.  The script of this week’s show, with plenty of hyperlinks to the books and blog posts that inspired it, follows on the next page.

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Perhaps the opening quote in Jonah Goldberg’s new book,  The Tyranny of Clichés, from George Orwell — “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men” — unduly influenced me. But as I joked with Jonah at the start of our two-part interview, when I first read the galleys of The Tyranny of Clichés back in February, my first thought, despite how pretentious it sounds, was that whereas Liberal Fascism was the equivalent of Emanuel Goldstein’s “The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism,” the alternative history book within the book of George Orwell’s 1984, The Tyranny of Clichés was sort of like the Cliff Notes to the Newspeak Dictionary.

As to the tyrannical nature of cliches, and how they’re used to steal bases in political arguments, Jonah writes in his new book:

I started to notice that the same thing happens in writing, on TV, in books; people invoke these clichés as placeholders for arguments not won, ideas not fully understood. At the same time, the same sorts of people cavalierly denounce far more thought-out positions because they’re too “ideological.” Indeed, in America, we train people to be skeptical of ideology. College students in particular are quick to object with a certain gotcha tone: “That sounds like an ideological statement.”

Such skepticism doesn’t bother me. Indeed, I encourage it. The problem is that while our radar is great at spotting in-bound ideological statements, clichés sail right through. People will say “It is better that ten men go free than one innocent man go to jail” and then stop talking, as if they’ve made an argument simply by saying that. They will take the slippery slope at face value. They’ll say “Diversity is strength,” as if it means something, and “Violence never solved anything,” as if that were not only plausible but so true that no further explication is required. “We are only as free as the least free among us” they’ll proclaim, misquoting Martin Luther King, Jr., or Elie Wiesel, or was it Captain Jean-Luc Picard? But of course, this isn’t even remotely true. It is a very nice thing to say. It’s a noble thing to try to live by. But it’s in no meaningful sense true. Rather, it is the sort of thing people assert in the hopes that it will win them uncontested ground in an argument.

Sometimes the problem is simply lazy thinking. But in other cases the lazy thinking merely creates the vulnerability for radical thinking. Some incredibly ideological ideas simply ride into your head like the dream spelunkers in the movie Inception— setting up, working their way through your programming— all because they’re wrapped in the protective coating of clichés.

Click below to listen to the podcast:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

(16.5 minutes long; 15.2 MB file size. Want to download instead of streaming? Right click here to download to your hard drive. Or right click here to download the 5 MB lo-fi edition.)

Since in the past, a few people have complained of difficulties with the Flash player above and/or downloading the audio, use the video player below, or click here to be taken to YouTube, for an audio-only YouTube clip.  Between one of those versions, you should find a format that plays on your system.

Watch for Part II of our interview tomorrow, in which Jonah will discuss the entomology of liberal clichés such as “diversity” and “social justice,” and how Bill Clinton used the phrase “The Middle Class” as a cliché he rode to victory in 1992. Plus a look back at how Liberal Fascism was received by the right, the left, and by historians.

A transcript of Part I of our interview begins on the next page. (Part II’s transcript will appear tomorrow.)

Update (5/8/12): Part II is now online here.

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At Commentary, Seth Mandel explores how Elizabeth Warren, running against Scott Brown in Massachusetts, is “playing an important role in our political discourse: she is the ghost of liberalism future.” As Mandel writes, “Warren’s alleged use of affirmative action, if true, would have to be the most egregious abuse of the system at the expense of minorities we’ve seen yet. Elizabeth Warren is, as a white woman, statistically speaking very much a member of this country’s majority. The only category in which she is a true minority is wealth: Elizabeth Warren is very, very rich:”

The sad part about all this is that Warren is clearly intelligent and dedicated to her (redistributionist) cause. Back in August, Christopher Caldwell wrote a piece on her in the Weekly Standard in which he praised her earlier writing as “brilliant and counterintuitive work.” Though many on the right object to Warren’s politics, no one thought she was ill-equipped intellectually for the important debate on economic policy now sweeping the public sphere.

Yet in the age of Obama, this is how campaigns are run. Warren may have interesting things to say, but she, too, has become something of a liberal cliché. Despite her obvious smarts, she has reflexively fallen back on charges of sexism, even when they are so ridiculous as to make you cringe. If Warren, a rich, white, Harvard professor, is a victim, everyone is.

Why does this matter? Because it reveals that the left thinks affirmative action is a joke, another cudgel with which to attack political opponents at the expense of minorities who might, thanks to liberalism’s insistence on keeping students in failed school districts, actually put the policy to some good use. And because if Elizabeth Warren is unable to advance coherent liberal policy arguments, then there may be none to advance.

John Fund dubs Warren the Check-the-Box Lady:

Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate running against Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, claimed for a decade in law-school directories that she was Native American even though her only evidence for her status was family “lore.”

After days of stonewalling, she now says she claimed minority status only in order to find others with tribal roots. “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it, and so I stopped checking it off,” she told reporters this week.

“Being Native American has been part of my story I guess since the day I was born,” Warren said, who has never mentioned her Native American heritage while she has been a Senate candidate. Yesterday, however, the candidate informed a Boston news station that her “high cheekbones” were testimony to her Native American background.

After a week of digging, helpful scholars at the New England Historic Genealogical Society say they have a hint that Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother may have been Cherokee. An electronic transcript of an 1894 marriage application back in Warren’s Oklahoma lists her ancestor as Cherokee. That would make Warren 1/32nd Native American. But the genealogists say the actual marriage certificate doesn’t list any Cherokee ancestry.

Noting that Warren suddenly dropped any claim to Native American ancestry as soon as she was hired at Harvard, Howie Carr of the Boston Herald concludes: “Once she’d reached the pinnacle of her trade, she ditched the fake-Indian routine. Maybe White Eyes Warren saw the smoke signals and figured out that someone was going to call her out on her ancestry. She was right.”

Actually, this is one time where a couple of pictures really is worth a thousand words. With a little help from her fellow “liberals” in the MSM, she’s also doing a wonderful job making a hash of racism in 2012 as well:

 Update: At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey writes, “Democrats worried about Warren in Massachusetts,” quoting Larry Sabato:

“This takes her biography into a bizarre dimension,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “It has derailed the effort to define Warren in a voter-friendly way.”

Sabato also said that Warren’s claim that she didn’t list herself as a minority to gain an employment advantage is not believable.

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious she was using (the minority listing) for career advancement.”

“This is what happens when candidates don’t tell the truth” — as opposed to say fellow Massachusetts liberals such as John Kerry and the late Ted Kennedy? But then, as Jeff Jacoby of the Boston Globe once wrote, “That which is permitted to Massachusetts congressmen is not permitted to congressmen from other states” — apparently that applies to would-be liberal senators there, as well.

More: Oh, and speaking of Kerry, our one-time proponent of radical chic, and champion of the Great Recession’s ability to “reduce” “global warming” has somehow transformed himself along the way into quite the “prescient” investor…

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Tesla, the “green” automaker for those whom its fellow lefties in Occupy Wall Street would dub the “One Percent,” now claims that the batteries in its current line of electric cars are no longer susceptible to “bricking.” That’s the issue that was originally claimed back in February by Gawker-owned Jalopnik.com, which reported that the batteries inside Tesla’s electric cars would require an expensive replacement not under warranty, if they were allowed to run down to zero.

The brain of 80 year old Bay Area Congressman Pete Stark (D-CA), whose mental batteries have never seemed 100 percent charged, may have finally bricked itself however:

Chronicle: You got Silicon Valley in your district, or a slice of it.
Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA): Do I?*
Chronicle: Solyndra’s down by your way, as a matter of fact.
Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA): Yes.
Chronicle: What specifically are you going to do in the next term to work with the tech sector?
Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA): I wish I had big enough expense allowance to get one of those new “S’s” that Solyndra’s going to make down there, the electric car. My 10 year old is after me. He no longer wants a Porsche. He wants dad to have an “S” sedan. They sound wild. I guess they run $60,000-$90,000.”

Video of the sclerotic San Francisco Democrat’s gaffe at the Tatler. I only hope Pete’s civil for a change if he calls in to complain.

On the other hand, as the Weekly Standard notes, for President Obama, Solyndra has become an un-company, having scrubbed the crony corporatist start-up from its latest “green” “energy” campaign ads. Not surprisingly, the virtual clean-up was far more successful than Solyndra’s own efforts to remove its toxic after-effects.

(more…)

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Wikipedia — where anyone can falsely accuse an associate of Robert F. Kennedy of being “directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby,” but any mention that Obama ate a dog — despite Obama having now mentioned said fact on the record at least three times himself — is apparently verboten, at least during the election year.

Back in 2004, Robert McHenry, the former editor in chief of the Encyclopedia Britannica, dubbed its would-be Internet successor “The Faith-Based Encyclopedia” at Tech Central Station; in terms of quality control, it looks like little has changed in the interim.

Say, has anybody heard from Comrade Ogilvy recently?

Related: Speaking of Obama and the Memory Hole, meet “Barry’s Imaginary Girlfriend.” As Jim Geraghty writes, with some thoughts on both Obama’s college-era girlfriend and Elizabeth Warren, the 1/32nd Indian maiden, the password for 2012 is…“Composite.”

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Charles Cooke’s latest article at NRO on Occupy Wall Street dovetails perfectly with my previous item on German socialists using “climate change” as a pretext to transform their nation. (Which seems to happen on a regular basis in Germany, oddly enough…) After dropping by Madison Square Park, Cooke writes:

“Naomi Klein went to the Heartland Institute’s International Conference on Climate Change,” the speaker was saying, “which must have been an unpleasant experience.” (Snickers greeted this addition.) “And what she discovered was that the conservatives get it. She wrote about it in The Nation.” He picked up a piece of paper and read aloud: “Here’s what she said they think:

. . . climate change is a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism. As conference speaker Larry Bell succinctly puts it in his new book Climate of Corruption, climate change “has little to do with the state of the environment and much to do with shackling capitalism and transforming the American way of life in the interests of global wealth redistribution.”

The assembled Occupiers laughed nervously, and some nodded. “Yes!” smiled the speaker. “The Right gets it. They spread misinformation about the science, as they know that it means the end of how we’ve been living. And they’ll do anything to keep the system as it is.” At this, everyone nodded. “So,” he continued. “What can we do?” The group had a brief conversation about the importance of educating Americans in scientific truth — which will, no doubt, have raised a few hackles among those intent on relitigating the Science Wars — and an agreement that everybody needs to stop driving cars, and then moved on to more important things.

“Well,” the speaker said, “I want to move on a bit. A lot of people live in the suburbs and they have a few cars and they live in houses that they probably bought in the 1980s. We need to morally exclude those who don’t recognize the problem, and let them know that they have no place in a future America.” This sounded a bit off to my ears, so I waited until they were finished and then asked one of the friendlier-looking participants a question: “I understand that you think these people in the suburbs can’t continue their lifestyles. Where will they live if not there?”

“Where will they live? In a community!” she replied.

“They do live in a community,” I said.

She laughed nervously. “A different community. One that we’d all design together.”

“Forgive me,” I said. “But you just described America. This is a community that we all designed together. How would yours differ?”

After a while, we established that what she actually meant was that people who shared her views would need to design the parameters of others’ lives — for the “common good,” of course. She was very nice — more Tom Friedman than Mussolini — and would surely be horrified if I were to buy her a copy of Liberal Fascism and suggest that people like her are exactly what the book is about. But neither her basic decency nor her naïveté can change the fact that she and her fellow panelists have succumbed to the totalitarian temptation, and adopted wholesale the seductive idea that the future is just too important to be left to individuals and free institutions and must thus be bent to the will of experts who happen to look very much like them.

There’s an unintentionally hilarious disconnect in this article yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle on Occupy Oakland, that dovetails well with Jonah’s latest book, The Tyranny of Cliches:

At one point, one group of protesters surrounded a Bank of America branch on Lakeside Drive, pounded on windows and chanted, “Oakland is the people’s town, strike occupy, shut it down.”

“We are here today because capitalism has destroyed basic human need,” said a 20-year-old protester who only identified himself as Connor.

“I am sort of into the libertarian/communist thing myself,” he said. “I am an advocate of human need, not monetary need.”

I know Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute had his paradoxic “liberaltarian” movement around 2006 or so, which largely ran out of steam once Obama took office and “liberals” found themselves rather intoxicated by their newfound power, but how exactly does “libertarian-communism” work? As Jonah and I recently discussed when I interviewed him about the new book:

DRISCOLL:  Let’s discuss some of the liberal clichés that are debunked in the new book.  One of your chapters spends quite a bit of time debunking a newly favorite phrase of President Obama, “social Darwinism.”

GOLDBERG:  Yeah, this is, you know—this is a good example of the sort of—the spinoffs from Liberal Fascism.  One of the things, when you start studying fascism, that you have to deal with, is this thing called “social Darwinism.”  And you’re constantly told in various, you know, textbooks and all the rest, that Nazism was a doctrine of social Darwinism.  And at the same time, we’re told that the Robber Barons and people like Herbert Spencer were champions of something called social Darwinism in the United States.

And there’s a huge disconnect here.  Right?  I mean, it sort of gets at sort of the same problem you have where people call libertarians fascists.  You know, a libertarian fascist is almost, by definition, an oxymoron.  Hitler was not a real leave-’em-alone kind of guy.

Neither was Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Che, etc., oddly enough.

Watch for my interview with Jonah early next week. In the meantime, Zombie has video of the mostly peaceful Occupy San Francisco throwing bricks off a rooftop in a mostly peaceful way at police and innocent bystanders.

Related: “History is replete with Peoples’ movements that, claiming weight of numbers and well-meaning intentions for others, have changed the course of society–but not necessarily for the better. In other words, pathologically altruistic movements.”

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“Germany Succeeds Making Energy Unaffordable For 15% Of Its Population – 600,000 Households Disconnected Annually,” the No Tricks Zone Website, devoted to “climate news from Germany” claims:

Every year 600,000 households (2 million people) are getting their power switched off in Germany because they can’t afford the skyrocketing electric bills. At that rate the country (population 80 million) will become blacked-out like North Korea by 2050.

It’s one way of reducing carbon emissions – just catapult your population back to the Stone Age. Online German flagship daily Die Welt has an article on how skyrocketing electricity prices are making electricity unaffordable for a large number of Germans.

Many people in Germany are no longer able to pay their electricity bills. And energy prices continue to climb – rapidly. The president of the VdK social association Ulrike Masche, accuses the German federal government “of having neglected the social dimension of the energy transformation”.

It’s not that they neglected it — it’s that, like Obama promising to bankrupt coal companies, and his energy advisors promising $9.00/a gallon gas, they view these as features, much as how Democrats John Kerry and Claire McCaskill trumpet the carbon-reducing benefits of the recession.

Or as Will Collier writes today on the aftermath of East Germany, “How fundamentally f***** up does a system have to be to produce impoverished… Germans?” But then global warming is simply a different means to the same end.

Speaking of which, longtime readers of our site will will member back in 2010, during our “Springtime for Algore,” when we had lots of fun with an article in that month’s edition of Condé Nast’s Traveler* praising to the hilt what they called Germany’s “Eco–Anschluss.” Could Germany’s future yet again resemble the post-1945 aftermath of the original Anschluss? Survey says….maybe.

(more…)

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From Lileks’ latest addition to his Website, “News and Ads of ’70s Radio,”Confused young hippies: see the world with the new mod Navy:”

I’m pretty sure that post-dates the original ad for recruits looking to serve on Her Majesty’s Psychedelic Service:

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“Is New York Times boss piloting a ‘ghost ship?’” The above video asks. (Short answer: yes.)

To make sense of the latest bit of timely Taiwanese digital surrealism, P.J. Gladnick of Newsbusters has the backstory:

New York Times publisher Arthur “Pinch” Sulzberger Jr has suddenly become the moose in the room that everybody now wants to talk about, including his disgruntled staffers…and Taiwanese animators who have produced an hilarious video about his bizarre management style (below the fold). The Taiwanese parody is based on a recent email sent by Times science and health reporter Don McNeil to about 150 fellow staffers.

Reading McNeil’s explosive email, one gets the impression that Sulzberger’s primary qualification to helm the Times was to live through birth:

The Times is in labor turmoil. Journalists are openly angry. Even the sacred Page One meeting has had a protest.

The company has no C.E.O.

Arthur has cancelled his annual State of the Times address.

He didn’t even speak at Anthony Shadid’s memorial. Jill “greeted us in his name” as he sat there.

The antlers that the animated version of Sulzberger wears throughout the above video are a reference to Pinch’s infamous stuffed moose from the Jayson Blair-era:

The moose is loose On the empty stage, Sulzberger, Raines and Boyd sat side by side. They got no applause and no catcalls, though some audience comments were cheered. In a surreal moment that reminded one staffer of Shari Lewis’ old TV show, Sulzberger produced a stuffed toy moose that he sometimes trots out as a symbol of open communication. Its use struck some in the audience as a tone-deaf and patronizing gesture. Sulzberger handed the moose to Raines, who laid it aside.

As James Lileks wrote at the time, “grown-ups do not use metaphorical mooses to break the ice:”

Let’s imagine how that would have worked in WW2:

Patton: Dammit, Ike, I -

Eisenhower: uh uh uh, George. I don’t see Mr. Moose. I hear moosey feelings, but the table looks pretty mooseless to me.

Patton: (fingers pearl handle of his revolver) (drops a dirty, wet rag on the table) That’s my moose. It fell under the tank treads. Sir, about Normandy -

Eisenhower: What did you call you moose? You’re supposed to give it a name!

Patton: As soon I saw it was under the treads, I named it Monty.

Lileks wrote almost a decade ago that “adults no longer run the Times;” today, they’re also pretty scarce at the other end of the Northeast Corridor. QED:

“The president has a very difficult time with the business community. Most people in business and most people who are successful are Republican that’s just a fact of life.”

– Bill Daley, President Obama’s former Chief of Staff.

But then, as Ann Althouse asks, while Obama is “slow-jamming the news” with a late-night television host and hitting the fund-raising circuit 24/7, who is running the show at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

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Bill Whittle explains why “The love of theory is the root of all evil.” If you question the oncoming horrific effects of “climate change,” watch before your house is allowed to burn down, as a Forbes columnist recently suggested.

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As Victor Davis Hanson wrote in February, “Now What? The Obama administration’s real problem is existential: What if it gets what it wants, but then finds that either it or the country really is uncomfortable with what it got?”

The same question applies to the MSM, which is but an extension of the Obama administration.  Or perhaps it’s the other way around. In any case, you can NBC see the cognitive dissonance at work by comparing two quotes; the first from the happy shiny birth of Hopenchange, when the Office of the President Elect was punking President Bush, the second from earlier today, during the administration’s possible twilight.

Here’s Tom Brokaw, hosting NBC’s Meet the Press, interviewing President-Elect Obama on December 7th, 2008, with a question that will live in infamy for the MSM:

Let’s talk for a moment about consumer responsibility when it comes to the auto industries. As soon as gas prices dropped, consumers moved back to the larger cars once again. The SUVs are the big gas consumers. Why not take this opportunity to put a tax on gasoline, bump it back up to $4 a gallon where people were prepared to pay for that, and use that revenue for alternative energy and as a signal to the consumers: “Those days are gone. We’re not going to have gasoline that you could just fill up your tank for 20 bucks anymore.”

Brokaw’s sentiments were echoed during that same month by the Washington Post and the New York Times.

Flash-forward to NBC alumnus Keith Olbermann on ABC’s This Week, earlier today. Despite his most recent former employer also being in favor of high gas prices (except during an election year), for Olbermann in 2012, high gas prices are suddenly a mysterious conspiracy with the potential to derail Mr. Obama’s reelection bid:

One of the things I turned to, to try to establish that was to look at the average gas price at various key moments, and the lowest price in the last six years, the nadir of gas prices at the pump, was the day of this president’s inauguration in 2009. There has to be some connection between that being the least busy political moment of a president’s career, where you’re not going to — you’re not going to hurt them, you’re not going to harm him that way, and the price of gas. There has to be an almost deliberate or at least a side effect quality to that. There must be.

There must be! Perhaps Faber College’s Eric Stratton knows the answer.

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