Real Disruption

Economist like to throw around the term “disruptive” to describe the latest fads. It makes them feel hip and edgy, I guess. Most of it is crap. Some is just criminal. Steve Sailer often points out that Silicon Valley gets to exempt itself from a lot of rules everyone else has to follow. That’s why Uber gets to exist and it gets to be “disruptive.” I know that makes me sound like an old coot bitching about the kids running on my lawn, but I’m an old coot who bitches about the kids running on my lawn. Whaddaya gonna do?

The point is most of what is tossed around as disruptive technology is bullshit, but that does not mean there’s no disruptive technology. It’s just that culture and IQ blinds our betters to what is about to turn over the apple cart. By culture I mean the prevailing beliefs of those in charge. Back when I was screwing around with my first computer, the smart guys were starting a national newspaper. It was probably not my first computer, but you get the point. Most of us are too locked into the here and now to see what’s coming down the road. The folks who claim to be on top of the new trends are always surprised by what comes next.

That’s the culture part. There’s also the IQ part. Most of the American press corp struggles with basic technology. Back in the 1990’s, I used to love reading stories about the “internet” in the common press. They described it in the same language you describe a conspiracy theory or secret society. Even today, the typical “journalist” is overwhelmed by the technology the rest of us take for granted. That’s why they keep getting gaffed by nonsense like the Rolling Stone rape hoax. How hard was it to look up the facts on-line? It took me no time at all. I never got credit for that. Instead the guy at 28 Sherman claimed credit, but that’s not the point. The chattering skulls in the media are just not very bright so they miss the big stuff coming down the pike.

Anyway, where was I?

That’s right. Disruptive technology.

The thing that is going to toss over the apple cart is none of the stuff the middle-aged dorks at Marginal Revolution talk about every day. The meteor in the sky is DNA.

The social worker said no. The judge said no. The local phone books were useless.

For decades, no one and nothing could help Sue Warthen find the people who gave birth to her in the mid-1960s.

Then her adoptive mother encouraged Mrs. Warthen’s new husband, Rob, a computer whiz, to see what he could do.

He built a computer program that permitted him to “build out” family trees, and he asked his wife to swab her cheek and send her DNA to a genealogy company.

Mr. Warthen put her results into his program, worked with a “search angel” named Karin Corbeil, and found a trail that led to Mrs. Warthen’s birth mother.

Additional investigative work may now have led to her birth father too.

“I’ve always wanted to know where I actually came from that I wasn’t simply dropped off,” said Mrs. Warthen, who was adopted in Maryland when she was a few months old and has been looking for her birth family since the early 1980s, when she turned 18.

Today, hundreds, if not thousands, of adoptees have used DNA genealogy companies like Family Tree DNA, 23andMe and Ancestry.com to jump over bureaucratic barriers and find members of their genetic families.

“People sometimes say we can’t do it unless there’s close DNA matches, but that’s not true — we can do it with distant ones too,” said CeCe Moore, a professional genetic genealogist who has appeared on “Finding Your Roots” with Henry L. Gates Jr. on PBS.

Even “foundlings” can find their birth relatives, Ms. Moore said.

DNA testing is the only way to find family heritage for these people since “opening records can’t help when there are no records,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped find birth families for a woman who was abandoned as a baby behind a grocery store, another person who was left on church steps and a third who was left at a baby-sitter’s house.

People unfamiliar with adoption may not realize that for decades, it was typical for agencies, charities and lawyers to arrange “closed” adoptions.

This meant an adoptee was given an amended birth certificate with the names of their adoptive parents and possibly not told they were adopted.

Legally, their original birth certificates were, in most U.S. states, sealed in courts and not made available to an adoptee except in cases of legal necessity. Sometimes, only medical information about the birth family — but no names — was provided.

This led to widespread private and professional “search and reunion” efforts, as well as campaigns to change state laws to let adult adoptees have their original birth records.

A large chunk of Western culture rests on pretty lies that are hard to debunk. For instance, we know that you really can’t go from poverty to the penthouse with hard work. You can go from the slums to lower middle class through hard work. You can go from middle class to upper middle. You’re going to need something else to jump a bunch of rungs up the ladder or down the ladder. We all sort of know it, but we take comfort in believing otherwise. Think about how different the world would look if suddenly everyone figured out that going to college will have no material impact on your life. That one pretty lie holds up a trillion dollars in financialization.

That’s what the linked story is showing. DNA testing is now throwing over a bedrock feature of western adoption. It’s going to throw over the sperm donor business too. Once everyone knows that they can find their biological family, what’s the point of keeping donors secret? What’s the point of sealing adoption records? Of course, it’s also going to put the lie to the claims about parenting. DNA testing is not just going to reveal lineage. It will reveal the heritability of personality traits and IQ.

Big chunks of the foundation are about to crumble thanks to genetics. Medical insurance is all about risk. Insurance companies hedge their risk by creating large pools. Basically they socialize what they don’t know about their customers health risks. What happens when they know those risk from a simple mouth swab? For that matter, what happens when that same swab can determine one’s propensity for crime? Violence? Homosexuality?

As we have seen over the last few decades, magical thinking like socialism can get along just fine with the microprocessor. It’s not going to hold up to DNA testing. Capitalism probably falls apart too when we can easily divide the population into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. The Alphas and Epsilons have always been known. It’s the folks in the middle. Things work because they all know they are not Epsilons and think they can become Alphas. What happens when that’s no longer plausible?

Rambling about MSNBC

I saw this on Drudge.

MSNBC president Phil Griffin, whose cable news network is the only one among the big three to lose primetime viewers this season, told staffers he would look to turn things around by continuing a push for younger viewers in 2015.

Griffin, in a memo sent Monday, also promised “to get on the road — and outside of Washington” to broaden the network’s coverage.

“It’s no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for msnbc,” Griffin wrote.

“We have a long history of finding and nurturing great talent — and with an eye toward 2016 — we continued to build our next generation of top-notch journalists,” Griffin wrote.

The memo then singled out such 20-something hosts as Ronan Farrow, Kasie Hunt and Alex Seitz-Wald.

The fact that I had to run Kasie Hunt, Mike’s brother, and Alex Two Names through the google machine tells me they need to keep looking for the next “great talent” to nurture. The only reason I know anything about that squealing sissy, Ronan Farrow, is he was fun to mock at one point. Clips of him having a hissy fit would turn up in my mailbox. If Frank were alive today, Ronan would not be.

It also touted Shift, MSNBC’s just-launched streaming news service, which “is already allowing us to reach new, younger audiences.”

MSNBC’s push to embrace youth makes sense for the only cable news network to see its primetime audience erode in the current season, as measured by Nielsen.

Its 548,000 primetime viewers age 2 and older — down 18 percent from the comparable season a year ago — ranked third to CNN’s 560,000 (up 15 percent) and Fox News Channel’s 1,845,000 (up 1 percent).

Viewers “2 and older”?? You’ve got to be kidding me. The fact there’s a metric for toddlers left in front of the TV while mommy gets another glass of wine says that TV ratings are mostly bullshit. Regardless, in a country with over 100 million cable homes, getting one half of one percent to tune in says you’re about as appealing as ass cancer. There’s no way to spin those numbers.

This is why a la carte pricing of cable should be at the top of the conservative agenda. MSNBC would not exist without cable fees. If people could drop it, everyone would and 99% of the money to this outfit would disappear. The same is true of CNN. Fox would make it because they have a solid audience with money to buy stuff. The ad dollars would probably go up for Fox once the others folded. Just as Fox tries to play both sides of the street, competing news outlets would be forced to follow suit. The news would start to look like America.

This is a microcosm with what’s gone wrong on the professional right. They never understood the long game. Public sector unions were never about public sector workers. It was about taxing those workers to finance liberal causes. Grants to non-profits were never about charity. They are jobs programs for liberals, usually engaged in get out the vote activity. Up and down American society you see a skim. Wherever money changes hands, the Left is getting a cut to finance their operations. In that regard, they operate just like the Mafia.

The Feds finally broke the Mafia by cutting off their money. Tax laws turned out to be the best weapon. The annual audits of unions, pension funds and front companies made it impossible for the mob to make a living. The American Right needs to take the same view. Scott Walker paved the way in Wisconsin, of all places. Now that he has cut the Left off my from union money, the state is suddenly a lot less progressive.

Επανάσταση !

I know it is terrible of me, but I tend to root for anarchy. Let’s face it. Anarchy is great to watch on TV. Specifically, other people’s anarchy is fun to watch on TV. The Ferguson riots were entertaining, in part, because I don’t live anywhere near Missouri. Similarly, seeing Greece once again descend into anarchy promises to deliver some good entertainment.

Within minutes of the Athens parliament failing to elect a president, Alexis Tsipras, the man most likely to become Greece’s next prime minister, said the country had experienced “a historic day”.

For the first time since the foundation of the modern Greek state nearly 200 years ago, radical leftists – marginalised, tortured and tormented for the best part of the 20th century – were on course to assume power. “Greeks,” he said, “should rejoice.” The government that had put the country through an assault course of austerity would soon be over.

The onerous terms of the deeply unpopular “memoranda”, agreed with foreign lenders to keep insolvent Greece afloat, would be overturned.

“The future has already begun,” he told reporters as the nation braced for early elections, a constitutional diktat when presidential polls fail. “You should be optimistic and happy.”

I love how the lunatics at the Guardian always carry on like their ideas have never been tried. You see the same stuff in US papers. Greece may not have allowed hair-on-fire crazies like Tsipras to run the government, but Greece has been a social-democracy since World War 2. That’s why they have been a basket case economically for fifty years. That and they are full of Greeks.

But the prospect of renewed political turmoil in the country where the eurozone crisis began will bring anything but a smile to the faces of decision makers in Brussels and Berlin. Greece, ineluctably, is being drawn into a new dance of uncertainty, a rollercoaster ride of high-pressure politics.

After six years of recession, the nation is only now beginning to show the first signs of recovery, posting a primary surplus – before interest payments on its mountain of debt – and returning to the capital markets that cut off funding at the start of the crisis.

But the country cannot survive alone. And market reaction to Monday’s news was instantly pessimistic, with the Athens Stock exchange plummeting by more than 10 percent.With bailout funds guaranteed to the end of February but far from assured after that, the spectre of Greece defaulting on its loans, and possibly crashing out of the eurozone, have been revived.

The reason Tsipras will be the next PM is the people have figured out that they can do just fine alone. If Greece leaves the Euro, the country will not sink into the ocean. They can default, print their own money and start over. They will have a year of turmoil, but then things will settle down and get back to normal. Greek bankers will be screwed, but they deserve it. Therefore, the threats from Germany about expulsion carry no force. The Greeks have nothing to fear from the Eurocrats.

On the other hand, the Euro lives on the belief that walking away from it is the end of the world. If Greece leaves the Euro and survives, the stronger nations like Spain, Italy and Portugal will get crazy ideas in their heads. If Greece thrives, then Europe is doomed, at least as currently constructed. The fact the Russia will be right there to help the Greeks should not be missed either.

Athens faces debt repayments of up to €20bn (£15.6bn) in 2015. On Monday the Greek finance minister, Gikas Hardouvelis, said local banks had enough funds to survive until March but unless further financial assistance was agreed they would enter into the uncharted waters of non-liquidity after that. This makes an effectively rudderless Athens in the run-up to elections on 25 January more daunting for the “troika” of creditors at the EU, ECB and IMF.

“What we are looking at is a Greece in crisis,” said Dimitris Keridis, professor of political science at Panteion University. “The first party will be Syriza but the elections may well be inconclusive. And then, once a government is formed, it will have a few weeks to elect a new president and negotiate with the troika.”

The radical leftists wasted no time, announcing that Tsipras would hold his first pre-election speech in central Athens on Monday night. The result of the presidential poll indicated the thirst, at least on a political level, for new beginnings. Opinion polls at the weekend confirmed Syriza’s popularity among a population exhausted by austerity.

An Alco poll published in Proto Thema on Sunday showed the neo-Marxists leading by 3.3%.

Many supporters are neither leftist, nor admirers of Syriza’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, but Greeks appalled by the catastrophic effects of policies that have left 1.5 million unemployed, 3 million facing poverty and the vast majority unable to pay their bills.

The party has pledged to fight such ills – referred to as Greece’s silent humanitarian crisis – by renegotiating the bailout accords that have propped up the economy to the tune of €240bn.

“Solution to Greece’s problems lies within the European context but the first thing we will say is that the programme has failed because it was badly planned and didn’t see the pitfalls that were coming,” said Euclid Tsakalotos, Syriza’s shadow finance minister. “Then we will address the priorities of austerity and debt.”

It will be interesting to watch this unfold. The Russians have already made friends with Tsipras and his people. They would love to use Greece to make trouble for Europe. Tsipras may be a lunatic, but he appears to be a clever lunatic. He will surely try to play the Germans and Russians against one another. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Tsakalotos is clearly signalling their intention to end the existing deal and arrangements first and talk about new agreements. That will make for some good times in 2015.

 

The White Shadow

Back in the 1970’s there was a TV drama called The White Shadow. It was a classic white man’s burden story popular in that era. The white man would learn the wonders of diversity, while helping the minorities rise from the ghetto to something better. Back then it was what passed for cutting edge. It was also fairly dull and no one watched it. Finally after three seasons the network threw in the towel.

Today, of course, the white man would be routinely humiliated in each episode in an attempt to atone for his whiteness. The difference is it would not be a TV show but real life. According to America’s newspaper of record, the White Shadow is suing the New York City schools for discrimination.

A Bronx teacher says being a white man at his mostly black and Latino middle school has made him a target for unfair treatment — including being denied a key to the restroom for three years.

Paugh William Shadow of upstate Port Jervis charges he was discriminated against as a white man at MS 391, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit he filed against the city and the Department of Education.

Shadow claims he was falsely accused of corporal punishment, using derogatory language and leaving his post; and that school administrators refused to back him up on disciplinary matters and failed to reimburse him after he bought materials for his science-lab students.

The charges, including an allegation he marched sixth-graders up and down a set of stairs for more than five minutes as a means of discipline, were dismissed, he claims.

Shadow says he “was humiliated in front of his peers” and that school officials “discriminated against [him] due to his gender and race.” He is seeking unspecified damages.

My have times changed.

HBD Index

I saw this on Drudge today and I got a chuckle from it.

The first Jews to settle in what is now South Dakota established themselves in Deadwood during the Gold Rush over 150 years ago, finding a niche selling hardware, groceries, dry goods and more.

By 1920, the state was home to some 1,300 Jews. That community has dwindled to an estimated 390 people. No state has fewer.

It’s a small, but tightknit flock that makes do without a permanent rabbi and worries too few children are coming along to sustain it.

Steve Benn is a doctor who serves as lay leader at Rapid City’s Synagogue of the Hills. He says “nobody wants to be the last one to turn the lights out.”

Benn orchestrates bar mitzvah ceremonies, performs ritual circumcisions and conducts funeral services.

South Dakota is also one of the whitest states in the country. It is 6th, in fact. If you’re a member of Stormfront then South Dakota looks like a great place to live. Out of curiosity I looked for a breakdown of Jews by state. It looks like there are a number of contenders for the ideal Stormfront state. I’m not very familiar with their stance on these things, but my guess is they hate blacks slightly more than they hate Jews.

I searched “best state for black people” and I got back a lot of hits on black centered sites with state rankings by flava. I changed black to white and the results are mostly liberal sites ranting about racism. Change white to Jews and we’re back to serious analysis of where Jews have it best. Funny how that works.

Steve Sailer once proposed something called a Cromartie Index. It’s one of those funny things that pops up on those bad think sites. I wonder if anyone has ever created a measure to rank places to live, by the amount of diversity. In ecology, there’s a thing called the Simpson’s Index, which measures the diversity of species within a system.

A HBD Index would take into account race, age, religion and political outlook. I’m throwing religion in there because a place like Utah might look good to some, until they learn about the magic underwear business. The other problem is the fact that a 100% Hispanic town would have the same HBD score as a town in Maine, but mean different things to different people. Maybe including IQ would solve that problem.

Maybe if I have time I’ll try and come up with an HBD Index.

Black Solipsism

I’m not sure how I stumbled onto this blog. I was looking for something on Africa and it was in the search results. Google is a great search engine, but it is not without its weirdness. The post that was linked was this one. I thought it was a joke of some sort so I kept reading. Turns out the blog is by a self-absorbed and possibly unbalanced Brit. At least that’s my take. Maybe it is just very clever satire that I’m too “obtuse” to comprehend. You never know.

But the about me section says it is most likely not an elaborate gag.

I am a computer programmer who has lived mostly in or near New York City. The part of the world that has most shaped my view of it is Uptown Manhattan. Although I tend to think of myself more individually, I am in fact part of the wave of middle-class West Indians who left the city in the 1990s to bring up their children. I have two sons, ages 12 and 14 (as of 2010). After 15 years of marriage I left my wife, Rebecca, on March 1st 2009. I took our two sons. She was growing increasingly violent.

At university I studied computers and ancient Greek. Computers showed me how to make a living, the Greeks showed me how to live. People told me studying ancient Greek was a waste of time, but I learned far more about life and the world from the Greeks than from anything in computers.

In my twenties I was a Marxist, a materialist: If God exists, he does not matter to us. The universe is just matter in motion. In my circles in New York, Christianity was something for old women who did not know much about the world.

Then I got married, had children, settled down. Before I got married I had promised Rebecca that I would read the whole Bible. I did, cover to cover. As a materialist Marxist, no less. I found out it was not the pious fable I had always assumed it was. And so in time I became a Catholic.

West Indian, of course, means black from the Caribbean. They are not typically obsessed with their race, but the better educated are just as solipsistic as American blacks. Looking at the guy’s posts shows me he has a near pathological obsession with his skin. John Derbyshire has written a lot about this phenomenon. He thinks it is an American thing, but it is a worldwide phenomenon. The post-colonial African leaders were educated in the West and brought back with them an obsession with their race.

In a recent radio transmission, Derb said:

For many American blacks, especially elite blacks like the Obamas, nothing exists outside their own blackness. Their blackness is endlessly interesting, endlessly fascinating to them. They can never get enough of thinking about it, talking about it, reading and writing about it.

If they write a book, it’s about their blackness: Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father, for example. If they write a college paper, it’s about their blackness: Mrs Obama’s Princeton thesis, for example, the seven words of whose title contain the word “black” twice. If they read a book, it’s about blackness. I’ve spent many, many hours riding the New York subway. Sitting next to a black person who’s reading a book, I take a peek: two times out of three it’s some black author writing about blackness.

Black black blackety-blackety-black. It fills their consciousness and absorbs their attention. What on earth must it be like to so trapped like that, such a prisoner of your own skin? I can’t imagine. I guess, just as the T-shirt slogan says: It’s a black thing; I wouldn’t understand.

It really is a strange thing. John is mostly right to isolate it as a feature of elite blacks, but you see some of it at the lower levels as well. My own sense is it is a part of the racial solidarity that is so strong with blacks. If you are living a middle-class life as a black person, the only way to keep it black is to talk non-stop about being black. It is an overcompensation to remain loyal to the blood, without walking around with your pants down, playing with yourself like they do in the hood.

It is not just a superficial affectation. The latest post on that blog referenced above is a good example of the studied obsessiveness with being black. If you scan through a course list of an Africa-American studies program, you see the same thing. There’s some history and culture course, but the meat of it critical race theory and its variants. CRT is the theory that a super-secret cabal of pale penis people rig everything to keep the black man down. That sounds insane, but I’m being kind. Here’s the official definition:

“CRT recognizes that racism is engrained in the fabric and system of the American society. The individual racist need not exist to note that institutional racism is pervasive in the dominant culture. This is the analytical lens that CRT uses in examining existing power structures. CRT identifies that these power structures are based on white privilege and white supremacy, which perpetuates the marginalization of people of color.”

I’ve written a lot about the need for blacks to drop the racial solidarity as a way to move into the mainstream of American life. That’s why the people in the race rackets are so obsessed with keeping everyone on the reservation. It’s a self-ghettoization that is self-perpetuating, therefore I see no way out of it. Perhaps it becomes so poisonous it just collapses on its own. Maybe when all the old race hustlers from the civil rights era drop dead, the funk will lift. When you have a distinct minority that defines itself by its obsession with being a distinct minority, there’s no reason to think they ever pull out of that spiral.

Libertarians and Prison Reform

Now that weed is legal in many places, the next great cause of libertarians is something equally pointless. That is prison reform. Rand Paul has been banging the drum for a year now. He is motivated, in part, by political concerns. He wants to inoculate himself against charges of racism so teaming up with a famous black on prison reform is his way to prove he is not racist. He thinks that because blacks dominate the prison scene, this will appeal to blacks. He’s wrong of course.

The rest of the libertarian cult has been jumping on board as well. The other day Kevin Williamson had a piece up on it. He was basing his article on the NYTimes article singing the blues about the state of New York prisons. I imagine they just went into the archive and fished out some articles from the 60’s and 70’s. Since the beginning, radical politics has been about letting the criminals wreak havoc on society.

Libertarians are always looking for ways to make nice to the Left. It used to be free weed and complaints about the Christians. That was how you could reject liberalism, without getting in trouble with the Left. Now that weed is legal and many Republicans are declaring themselves libertarians, these guys need a new bed to hide under. They seem to have landed on prison reform. Like drug legalization, it appeals to liberals, who fashion themselves as populist.

That last bit is vital to libertarians. Taking on topics like homosexual marriage, a proxy for cultural dominion, will put you at odds with the Left. Pushing for the end of public sector unions could ruin your life. Tackling issues that have no practical impact on Americans is a safe way to stand apart from the Left and the Right.

When it comes to prison reform, you’ll note that libertarians are mostly offering up warmed over ideas from the 60’s. The resulting mayhem brought about the end of the New Left in an orgy of violence. From Rand’s bill:

The REDEEM Act proposal would encourage states to raise the age of criminal responsibly to 18 years of age; expunge or seal the records of juveniles who commit non-violent crimes before they turn 15; place limits on the solitary confinement of most juveniles; and establish a system to allow eligible nonviolent criminals to petition a court to ask that their criminal records be sealed. Sealing the records would keep them out of FBI background checks requested by employers and likely make it easier for those former offenders to secure a job.

A massive amount of crime in the ghetto is committed by teenagers. My guess is Rand simply has no idea what happens in the ghetto so this sounds reasonable to him. Like all libertarians, he probably suffers from the belief that all people, regardless of race, will flourish if left to their own devices. Take away the game keepers from the black ghetto and you get Detroit, but you have to live here to know that, I guess.

That may be what’s at work here. Kevin’s piece is mostly a rehashing of the Times article with some complaints about government bureaucrats. He takes it on faith that the reporting is accurate, despite the long history of fabrication by the New York Times. The state abusing innocent citizens is considered the highest crime imaginable by libertarians, so that’s probably what got his attention. Even so, it is a safe topic on which to be outraged, which is what makes it attractive to libertarians in general.

As I pointed out in the comments, the main reason our prisons are so horrible is they are full of criminals. Fill up our prisons with cub scouts and nuns and they will not be so bad. Fill your state legislature with members of the local street gang and see what happens. Our jails are full of very bad people. Most of them will keep committing crimes until they are dead or too feeble.

The sorts of people attracted to daycare work are not the same type attracted to prison work. There’s a reason Mary Poppins was not the chief executioner of the state. Warehousing evil, violent men is dangerous work. It will attract a fair number of sociopaths and sadists. That means prison abuse will always be a part of prisons. As is true in all human endeavors, there are trade-offs. In this case, we put up with some abuse in order to keep the streets safe.

I also pointed out in the comments that the reforms that would make prisons less chaotic and dangerous are simply not permitted. Prisons should be segregated by race and sentence. Putting blacks and whites in the same cage is insane. Putting violent lifers in the same cage as common thieves and drug dealers on short sentences is equally nuts. But, the Cult will never permit such segregation so we are left with human warehouses.

Similarly, the people working in prisons should be segregated by race and sex. Frankly, it may not make any sense to have black prison staff, given that most of the prisoners are black. Too many guards are from the same neighborhoods as the prisoners. Maybe geographic segregation would solve the problem. Again, there’s no way the Cult would permit this sort of reform as they want the mayhem that comes from guards working as go-betweens for the prison gangs.

Having women guard male convicts is probably the craziest thing a society can do. This story from Baltimore is fairly typical. Women and men are different as a matter of biology, evolution, culture and psychology. Men guarding women or women guarding men will have predictably bad results. There should be no women permitted in male prisons and no men at women’s prisons. But, we know that will never be permitted.

There are other reforms that would make out prisons vastly more humane and peaceful. The Cult running our society simply refuses to do them. The reason is the people running the Cult of Modern Liberalism would prefer to fling open the prison doors and send the criminals out to feast on the hated core of society – the white middle-class. Libertarian interest in prison reform is just another way to avoid taking part in the culture war.

It’s a Mystery

A Howard University football player celebrated Christmas by getting killed in a botched home invasion. For those unfamiliar with Howard University, it is a black college in Washington DC. TN Coates flunked out of Howard. It’s probably the most politically connected black college on earth. That’s why it has an endowment of half a billion. It’s also why it is counted as one of the Black Ivies.

A former coach and family friend of the Howard Bison running back who was one of two suspects fatally shot during an attempted robbery in Texas says Terrence Neal Tusan was a “good kid” and student.

Tusan, 22, was killed on Sunday at a Denton, Texas, apartment complex. Denton police say five people were involved in some sort of altercation during the home-invasion robbery.

“He was a good kid,” Clarence Nevels, a former coach and mentor to Tusan, told the Denton Record-Chronicle. “He had good grades and was just down at AT&T Stadium for Thanksgiving Day Madness Youth Football speaking to students about believing in themselves.”

Tusan, who was at home on holiday break from the Washington D.C., school, was killed along with 18-year-old Jakobi Dmon Gipson.

Police say three men forced their way into an apartment and gunfire broke out, leaving two suspects dead and two residents wounded. The third suspect fled and reportedly remains at large.

Nevels, who said he knew Tusan for 15 years, told the Denton newspaper that Tusan didn’t have a criminal history and wasn’t known to be associated with drugs.

“You have to wonder, what would be the purpose to throw his life away?” Nevels said, according to the Record-Chronicle’s report.

Tusan, a junior for Howard, had 331 rushing yards with two touchdowns this season as a backup running back, including a 70-yard TD in a 38-25 loss to Rutgers.

Police recovered two guns, one belonging to a victim and another belonging to a suspect. Police haven’t specified who opened fire.

“Terrence was the only child [his mother, Donna Tusan] had left, and now he is gone, too,” said Nevels, who the newspaper reported was speaking on behalf of the Tusan family. “We just want to ask anyone looking into this incident to investigate further.”

It’s not much of a mystery, of course. Terrence and Jakobi decided to rob someone, probably over drugs or a lack of respect. A gun fright erupted and the result was inevitable. Young black males commit an enormous amount of crime and this is fairly typical of what happens in the ghetto. The technique of bursting into a home and shooting up the place is popular for reasons no one bothers to explore. It does seem to be a more popular murder technique with blacks than other races.

Another mystery never discussed is why black males commit so much crime. This story is a familiar one. A young man seems to have some promise so coaches and teachers take a special interest in him, hoping he can be an exception. Everything goes well until he suddenly decides to rob a liquor store or murder a drug dealer. It’s not like the kid started to hang with a bad crowd or start taking drugs. It just all goes wrong all of a sudden for no obvious reason.

One reason is the extreme racial solidarity in black America. In white America, keeping the good kids away from the bad kids is the focus of everyone. Even back in the old days adults had no trouble culling the defects from the herd. Somewhere around puberty, the stupid and uncontrollable ended up in “special” classes, away from the rest of the students. That is not permitted in black culture.

The result of this is Terrance gets to hang with Jakobi as an equal, but they should never be treated as equals. Jakobi is high status in the hood. His ghetto name is what you go on here. In the white world, Dakota is not allowed anywhere near Dwayne and that was the case from about the fifth grade. By the time Dakota is at college, Dwayne is long gone. In black America. Terrence is never allowed out of the hood. He has to “keeps it real.” Otherwise, he runs the risk of being a “Tom” or acting white.

Post-Christian Madness

I’ve written a lot about the religious aspects of modern liberalism. The idea is not my creation. Rousseau wrote about Civil Religion in the Social Contract. His was a compromise between a religion of the state, the Catholic religion, with which he was most familiar, and Christianity in general. Later writers picked up on this theme. HG Wells pitched socialism as a universal religion. American Progressives in the early 20th century argued for a social gospel that was a fusion of Continental socialism and American Protestantism.

This concept was fairly well known and understood amongst leftist writers and thinkers into the 20th century, then it sort of disappeared. Talk to a modern liberal today and they will think you’re nuts if you compare their thing with religion. This is especially true of economists and fake nerds. They have it in their heads that their thing is a model of dispassionate logic, the very opposite of religion. That post the other day where I called Neil deGrasse Tyson a circus clown is a good example. To the people worshiping Tyson, religion is the opposite of science. In their binary world, the former is evil and the latter is good, Satan versus God.

Back in 2000 when Al Gore wandered off to Mt. Sinai to get the good word on climate change, I pointed out to the amazing number of new converts in my peer group that Al Gore was falling back on his religious training. He was playing the role of Old Testament prophet. It was pretty obvious that he was having a breakdown during the campaign. His bizarre behavior in the debates was later explained by his wife as him cracking under the pressure. She went onto to say that losing the election to Bush sent Gore into a tailspin and she thought he was having a breakdown. Instead, he came back as a convert to a new religion that looked a lot like the Old Testament.

Anyway, there’s a long piece in The Weekly Standard from a month back that comes at modern liberalism from the religious angle. I’m behind on my magazine reading so I’m just getting around to it. The fact that no one on the Right in the chattering classes has mentioned it says a lot, I think, about the general dimness of modern conservative movement. It’s well worth reading. The writer comes at it from a slightly different angle than I do, but it is a good take. Bottom, despite being a Catholic, really gets the messianic quality of 19th century American Protestantism.

I would quarrel with him on the apocalyptic section of his piece. I’m not so sure the Zero Hedge crowd is preaching doom because they think the gods are angry. They simply think they are right about the current economic arrangements.  Similarly, the preppers and doomsday types building bunkers in the woods have always been with us. They think the fragile nature of society will inevitably lead to collapse. That and many of them are just nuts. They are not motivated by religiosity. The various end of times fads on the left, however, are a part of their over all religious impulse.

The lack of interest by the professional Right in this way of looking at the American Left has always puzzled me. Reagan, having gone head to head with commies in Hollywood, knew they operated with a religious zeal. He was a big fan of Eric Hoffer, from whom I got my understanding of the Left. Reagan is practically worshiped by the professional Right, yet this part of Reagan’s thinking is never mentioned. That Bottom article should be the sort of thing to get the chattering skulls on the Right going as it is easily quotable. But, they skip past it.

There’s a reason for it, but I don’t know it.

 

What the End of the Left Looks Like

Apparently, the end of the latest Progressive awakening will be queer Nazis, perverts and low-IQ black people making war on old Jews, for their racism. Or something. The increasingly laughable ornament over at the Atlantic was promising to hold his breath and turn bluer if the queer Nazi running The New Republic did not right the wrongs committed by those dastardly Jews that ran the magazine for so long. “Black lives matter,” by the way, is code for “kill the blue-eyed devil.”

I’m not going to go into the Apostrophe Coates article because it is incoherent schlock written by a man with a tenth grade understanding of the world. I used to post about Coates, but then I started to feel bad for making sport of him. He can’t help it. The people who decorate their magazine with guys like him are to blame. It’s the person hanging the ornament, not the ornament.

Anyway, the new editor of The New Republic seems to agree with Ornament.

Gabriel Snyder issued his first editor’s note as head of The New Republic on Monday, promising that the magazine will survive the latest turmoil and be home to more ambitious and diverse journalism.

“The New Republic has always been both in love and at war with its prior self,” Snyder, a former editor of The Atlantic Wire who replaced Frank Foer earlier this month as the editor, wrote in the note. “The magazine’s early decades were marked by abrupt ownership changes, unceremonious dismissals of editors, shifting policy positions, and uprooted headquarters, all accompanied by masthead upheavals.”

The majority of The New Republic’s masthead resigned en masse during the first week of December after the owner’s decision to force out the editorial leadership, move the magazine to New York and rebrand the venerable, century-old publication as a “digital media company.”

Yeah. What we lack is “digital media” companies. All this time we have been waiting for this guy to come along and give us a reason to have the Interwebs. My goodness.

Snyder also announced a crew of new contributors to upcoming issues including Ann Friedman, Batya Ungar-Sargon, Cathy Park Hong, Inga Safron, Jazmine Hughes, Jeff Ball, Thomas Rogers, Jen Doll, William Giraldi and Jeet Heer. Snyder wrote that these new voices and experts will “be diverse in race, gender, and background.”

“As we build our editorial staff, we will reach out to talented journalists who might have previously felt unwelcome at The New Republic. If this publication is to be influential, and not merely survive, it can no longer afford to represent the views of one privileged class, nor appeal solely to a small demographic of political elites,” Snyder wrote.

You can be sure they will be diverse in how they look, but not in how they think. If any of them dare say something nice about Jews or something mean about queers, they will be sent off to an internment camp. It’s why I call them ornaments. They are there to make it look like a lot of new and different stuff is going on, but in reality it is just the same old drab display with new ornaments.

In his note, Snyder recounted the many years of turmoil and change at the magazine, defending owner Chris Hughes and CEO Guy Vidra’s plans.

“[I]f our founders sat down today to settle on the best way to achieve this mission, they would not have picked a weekly printed magazine and ignored a vast array of digital publishing possibilities. And just like any publication with hopes of success in the world of 2014, they would want The New Republic to be better at welcoming into our fold readers, writers, and editors who reflect the American experience as it exists today,” Snyder wrote.

People who know Chris Hughes say he has great social skills, but is as dumb as a brick. He got rich by hitting the lottery so now he is a pissed off blockhead with money to burn. The proof of that is what we see going on here. The New Republic was a magazine of the ruling class. It was never intended to reach a general audience. What he’s done is buy a Bentley and then equip it with spinners and a fur interior.

But, there may be something else other than rank stupidity. Walter Russell Mead has a post up on the cresting of the liberal wave and what comes next. The past says the final denouement is an orgy of violence as we saw in the 60’s and 70’s. The trouble with that is the young people today are too soft and silly to riot in the streets or plant bombs in public buildings. Instead they have Twitter rants.

That may be what we’re see with Hughes and the New Republic. It is a tantrum. Frustrated by reality not yielding to wishful thinking, this generation of radicals will take it out on their cult leaders and each other. Instead of burning down your neighborhood, they will burn down their own stuff. The gays will make war on the Jews. The blacks will make war on the gays. The one-legged lesbian Elvis impersonators will make war on the transgendered.

Godspeed.