Inefficient Coefficients

• Susan of Texas (The Hunting of the Snark) on income inequality and Megan McArdle's attempt to justify it.  Tiny taste:

  Please remember that McArdle is just parroting what she hears; she has few thoughts of her own. This is what your betters say about you as you take the bus to your under--paid jobs. You're inferior.
  [...]
  The government can spend money if it will help the rich but not the poor. They don't deserve it anyway, do they?
  
  So their taxes can be used to do drug research so Pharma can make higher profits for people rich enough to own drug companies and drug stock. The government can write laws that separate productivity from wages to further enrich the rich. It can write and enforce laws to protect the rich's property. It can enforce only regulations that keep the rich alive and healthy. But doing anything to benefit the poor will destroy the country.

• Turns out the West Fertilizer explosion in Texas was not an accident.

  It's bad enough that all the safety precautions that should have prevented the explosion were ignored or never in place due to Texas ignoring the issue of worker safety. But for this to be a deliberate fire to cause the explosion? That's hideous.

  (Zandar Versus The Stupid)
• Cerberus at Sadly, No! whales on Rod Dreher gibbering on transgender people.

  But what’s amazing isn’t that Rod Dreher is more full of shit than Donald Trump at a [coprophilia] conference. It’s how even the made-up bullshit story of “a friend of mine knew a guy who heard from an email chain” type myth-making still can’t manage to think of a genuinely concerning thing the demonic trans people are doing to provoke such a frightened response.
  
  And that’s kind of amazing right now. Bigots are so convinced that everyone is just as terrified by the mere concept of a woman who was assigned male at birth as they are, that they mumble in confusion when anyone tries to ask them what exactly people are supposed to be afraid of when faced with the prospect that trans people may go to school or stand in line or poop in a toilet. Like a human being. Like, seriously, creepers, stop peeping on people in the bathrooms. It’s gross.

Bonus video palate cleanser:  David Axelrod in conversation with Jon Stewart.  Via News From me.  With the question-and-answer period.