Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

Lunch is a nice meal and a free lunch is even nicer. The problem with free lunches is that someone always has to pay for them. Lunches don't grow on trees, unless they're fresh fruit, the ingredients have to be gathered, processed, shipped, mixed, prepared, packaged, shipped again and put on your plate by a waiter working in an establishment that has to pay rent, heating, electricity and salaries. A free lunch isn't just free food, it's the entire human and mechanical infrastructure needed to get it ready and subsidizing a free lunch means paying for that entire infrastructure. That's one reason why some states and cities are slipping into bankruptcy like a man who has had too many martinis over lunch. It's not just the free lunch that's expensive, it's the often inflated cost of the lunch delivery system that is killing everything. The free lunch began as the Bread and Circuses which had its roots in a Roman bread dole. Free or subsidized bread is...

From Bosch Fawstin THE INTERVIEW This week I did an hour-long conversation/interview with Jamie Glazov on his show and we had a great talk about a number of things. The embed is below, if you want to give it a listen. Listen to internet radio with Radio Jihad Network on Blog Talk Radio RESISTANCE The media is angry. It gets angry whenever it encounters resistance to its narrative. That's what happened with the Trayvon Martin case and Obamacare. When the media encounters resistance, it runs through its stages 1. Denial - No one but a few loons reject the narrative 2. Anger - How dare they reject the narrative 3. Bargaining - The media starts looking for moderates who will accept some element of the narrative 4. Depression - The media glumly pontificates on a broken America where racism and poor health care will always be issues. Where their narrative remains marginalized among the NPR/New York Times enlightened. But the fifth stage, Acceptance,...

The Trayvon Martin case is a wholly familiar one to residents of any major urban city. If you live in Chicago, New York or Los Angeles, then it's only a matter of time until an incident between a law enforcement officer, or more rarely a civilian defending himself, and a member of a minority group flares up into a citywide grievance theater complete with angry reverends on the steps of City Hall, women with stony faces holding up banners calling for justice and a media driven debate about police tactics and racism. This sort of thing happens with depressing regularity in cities where even the most liberal residents have to choose between police overreach and being murdered. It never leads to meaningful debate or a resolution, instead it peters out with the best actors in the grievance theater picking up money and influence, the media selling a few more papers or ads for nasal polyp relief on the drive time news and everything going back to the way it was. The grievance theate...

The only real lesson of the ObamaCare defense is that if you define the macro broadly enough, you are entitled to completely control every aspect of the micro. Everyone can be compelled to buy health insurance because health care is no longer a service bought from a doctor, it is a national market which everyone by definition participates in. The market is then divided between good consumers who buy health insurance and the parasites who don't. Alternative possibilities such as people who pay as you go, choose alternative health care or reject medicine entirely for religious or political reasons don't figure into a macro equation which sees people in the macro, not as individuals. Defenders of the Mandate insist that you couldn't similarly force people to buy Broccoli or a Chevy Volt but why not? You might not be able to individually force people to buy a specific product, but once you define a transportation market or an edibles market, you can force people to particip...

For a man so in love with the technology of image, the camera, the microphone and the teleprompter, the leader of the increasingly less free world has a natural tendency to put a little too much faith in it. This is the second time that an open microphone has let Obama down, the first time it recorded him stabbing an ally in the back, the second time it recorded him stabbing a few dozen more in the back. Medvedev, whose bosom buddy just managed to cling to power with a stolen election and brutal suppression of protests, surely understands how O feels. Photo ops with tigers and sunken treasures, not to mention skiing, martial arts and even rap, did not keep the Big P in smooth with the Russian public when the economy headed south. Vladimir Putin didn't have any racial guilt to ladle on the voters that might get them to overlook the mansions, the corruption and the abuses of power. But the average American voter, like the Russian voter, is more interested in the meat and potato...

"It doesn't matter if you're black or white," Michael Jackson sang, even as he embarked on a journey to crudely transform himself from one to the other through plastic surgery. Around the same time a biracial man who had grown up in a white family was protesting on behalf of a vehemently racist black professor. That man, who would later make it to the Senate and then the White House, chose to identify as black. In the Chicago Tribune, Obama's hometown paper, its columnist, Leonard Pitts Jr, insists that George Zimmerman is white because race is a construct and whiteness is not color, but privilege, making it completely indistinguishable from class. To indict Zimmerman, who is Hispanic and part of a multi-racial family structure, as a white racist, Pitts is forced to argue that race isn't race. Anyone who is of the "oppressed of the earth" is really black and anyone who is privileged is white. This news comes a little too late to spare Michael J...

Every now and then the left discovers someone who tells them what they already think, but puts a glossier edge on it, and elevates him to the status of "Serious Thinker". This is the office for which Peter Beinart has been briefly nominated. The chief prerequisite for becoming a serious thinker on the left is to state what is obvious to the left without actually seriously considering its obviousness. This is what Peter Beinart delivers by providing an indulgence for leftist Israel bashing by telling the bashers that they aren't bad Jews, it's the Israelis who are bad Jews, bad Democrats and bad people all around. As ideas go, this is about as original as old lefties reassuring each other that all the Kulaks had it coming or Bund members telling themselves that the Jews brought this on themselves. It's the feeble mutterings of bad people trying to convince themselves that they are good people because their victims have it coming. And what's a few more dea...

And We're Back On Tuesday I spoke at the Skirball, the evening of the next day I was back home and glancing at the number next to my latest article, "The New Nazis" saw that it was my 3000th article. It's been an interesting ride and it was a reminder of how I got into this, by writing day in and day out and connecting with more and more people. At the event and the Chai program with Adam Taxin, I was asked how I write so much. The simple answer is that writing perpetuates itself. Words are bricks and if you put enough of them together, you build something. Initially they may be small humble abodes but as the construction continues, they become places to live in and invites others into. The video from Skirball will be up at next week and I want to thank everyone who came to the event, those I spoke to and those I didn't get a chance to speak to, and of course all the regular readers, Doris Wise Montrose of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the ...