Lion of the Blogosphere is wringing his hands over the prospect of a left-wing loon becoming the next mayor. I think it is rational to have some concern. New York has become quietly intolerant since the 1970′s and that intolerance has made the city a better place. By that I mean the citizens decided enough was enough and elected politicians willing to clean up the crime, urban blight and dysfunctional public sector. Rudy cleaned up the tourist areas and public parks. He reformed the police department. Bloomberg left things in place and convinced liberal New Yorkers that it was OK to be tough on crime. He also showed how they could avert their gaze from the realities of gentrification. That reality is rich white people buy up the apartments, evict the brown people and then move in the kids of rich people. If Richmond enacted the same polices as New York, liberals would be staging freedom rides to Virginia.

Now it appears the intolerant wing of the political class has tired of the fight and the lunatics are taking over. You’ll note that I do not call them the tolerant wing. The opposite of intolerant in politics is stupid. Civilization is about not accepting a wide range of human behavior. Laws against violence, rape, sex acts and so forth are what allows civilization to flower. To be a liberal means not understanding this basic truth of the human condition, which seems to be the case with the next mayor. That probably means he will attempt to roll back that which has worked and replace it with polices that have failed everywhere they have been tried. The question is will the voters put up with it.

New York could go one of two ways. Right now it is following down the path of San Francisco. Economics and subtle racism have made San Fran a NAM free zone. The city is 5% black and 15% Hispanic. The rest is Asian and white. New York is getting less black and more white. Part of it is due to the economy of the city. Part of it is due to gentrification. Part is due to those police tactics to chase NAM males out of the city if they were inclined to dress like extras from a Jay-Z video. How much of each is responsible for the transformation of the city is unknown, but my bet is the latter is a declining factor. It is why the loons feel it is safe to go after it now. The danger is gone and the bad men hired to clean up the streets can be dismissed. It is reminiscent of the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Once the tough guy does his job, he can be replaced by the soft guy who does not startle the ladies.

I posted a comment on this post at National Review. I used to be a regular there, commenting on the blog. I stopped when the execrable Rich Lowry hired some loser to moderate the site. Instantly 90% of the users disappeared. Lowry had to spend a month begging people to return. I gave it another shot, but quit again when the same nonsense started anew. Lowry and the editorial staff at National Review are just a collection of middle-class strivers with nothing much to add. The only guy at National Review worth reading is Kevin Williamson and his flirtations with taboo subjects will surely get him sent off the island. There are two things that sniveling little twerp Rich Lowry will not tolerate. One is writers with talent and creativity. The other is anything that puts his TV gig at risk. Otherwise National Review is, at best, a souvenir program for the museum of late-20th century conservatism. At worst is is a platform for hollow men like Lowry to curry favor with the ruling class.

My comment was deleted and I’m not surprised. I made the point that precious fops like Potemra live in a city where it is official policy to hassle brown people on the streets. The intent of stop and frisk is to let the NAM know he is not welcome. Since the court struck down the Jim Bloomberg Law, the city’s chattering classes have been wringing their hands of New York becoming Detroit. Now word and deed are one as the official policy of driving out the blacks is matched by the public rhetoric. Yet, we still hear the lectures and the smug condescension over race. The same people demanding their Bull Connors put the dogs on every black guy wandering into Manhattan scream about Paula Deen and George Zimmerman. None of this is shocking as liberalism is a religion with many bogeymen. The result is a stunning lack of self-awareness. Liberals, almost always, reserve their harshest venom for the crimes they routinely commit. That’s how cults work.

The issue of race is one where the Right should be scoring points. Instead, punks like Lowry lead the charge against anyone who dares raise the issue. He is not alone. Dan McCarthy at The American Conservative is following the same path. It is no small thing that National Review is celebrating the purging of Ron Unz. Birds of a feather and all that. The reason behind these moves is the claim that it is bad for business. Donors don’t like it. Maybe. What’s really going on is the liberal TV outlets don’t like it. The dream of these climbers like Lowry and McCarthy is to get a permanent TV gig. You can only do that by being a suck up or a pioneer and they ain’t got the chops to be a pioneer. That leaves them on their knees in the executive suites of whatever TV channel that employs them. That means the Left lectures the Right on race and the Right forever apologizes for things it never did or said. Hitler, Mao and Stalin counted on the career man for a reason.

The whole point of being in the opposition is to oppose the prevailing orthodoxy. To do that you have to let a thousand flowers bloom. That means putting up with some weirdos and cranks, but it also means getting interesting perspective from guys like Unz, Sailer, Derbyshire and so forth. They have their own quirks and get things wrong, but they get a lot right too. When you’re the underdog, you need to be creative and take risks. Instead, the dying husks of Amercian conservatism are purging themselves of non-conformists and begging the majority to allow them to surrender. National Review has simply become the primary outlet of the collaborationist wing of the GOP.

In the Reagan years, liberals had a standard response to the fact Reagan was wildly popular. They said he was personally popular, but his policies were not popular. It was sort of true, in that some of his polices were unpopular, but his winning personality and the booming economy more than made up for it. Similarly, conservatives argued that the Clinton polices were not popular, but the affable Clinton was well liked. They had some evidence, but the Clinton polices were not all that different from the Bush polices.

The argument really fell apart in the Bush years. Initially, most white voters respected him as a decent guy. He was not charismatic, but efforts to demonize him never got very far because he was seen as decent and honestly, if not terribly bright. He won two elections largely because the public viewed him as the least bad option. Put another way, his polices were not all that popular and his personality was not ideal, but he was less offensive to middle-class white people than Gore or Kerry.

In contrast, we may actually be seeing an example of a president riding personal popularity in the face of his unpopular polices. There’s little doubt he won in 2008 because of the magic negro stuff. He was the living validation of everything the Baby Boomers believed about race and culture. Huge increases in the vote from black women, liberal whites and upper-middle class whites carried him to victory, even though his platform was ill-defined and not particularly interesting. The voters just wanted to like him.

The 2010 election and the continuing hatred of his signature achievement underscores this fact. The phenomenon is in full bloom with Syria. Obama is in the mid-to-low-40’s according to Gallup, yet his Syria policy has 27% support. Part of it can be attributed to the poor handling of the issue. That said, no amount of salesmanship is going to make another war popular. The best he could have done is match his own approval rate by rallying his party, but even they can’t get on-board with a war with Syria.

At the end of the Bush years, we saw what happened when the majority party used up all of its good will with the public. The 2006 election wiped out the GOP. We saw what happened when the president used up all of his good will. Bush fell into the low-30’s at one point. Obama is at 42% right now and this fiasco is not helping him. It will be interesting to see if his coalition starts to unwind as we saw with Bush. The Obama coalition may very well be more fragile, even temporary, but that may not be clear until the next election.

This piece from the NYTimes lays it out well. Personal validation has a short shelf life in politics. Eventually the practical overtakes it in importance. A big chunk of the Obama coalition is on board solely because it feels good. Of course, blacks support him on racial grounds, but they expect something in return. If loving Obama no longer feels good for liberal whites and blacks feel like they are getting shorted, Obama and the Democrats will have a very bad election in 2014. His personality may not be enough.

Of course, the one thing black politicians have often used when in trouble is the race card. Kurt Schmoke was the first Obama. He was a clean and articulate guy who came out of elite colleges and promised to be a new type of black politician. That is, black on the inside and white liberal on the inside. When that formula stopped working, he started dressing like Nelson Mandela and talking like Malcolm X. Perhaps Obama will find some way to play the race card before the 2014 election. Maybe he’s going to be Obama X.

I’m fond of using the word “reality” in discussion with members of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Part of it is that it makes them crazy. They love to end debate by uttering catch phrases like “as a member of the reality based community…” that are finished with a recitation from the catechism intended to end the discussion. In other words, it is just another way they declare themselves our moral superiors, giving them thr ight to rule facts out of bounds when they contradict tenets of the one true faith.

Over at Marginal Revolution an hysterical homosexual took me to task for using the term in a post about religion and fertility rates. I’m assuming he is a homosexual due to the overwrought use of the word “intolerant” when discussing religion. That’s one of those things you see with gays in the academy. They use the word intolerant a lot. It is, as they say, a dog whistle. Pointing out observable facts sent him racing to the fainting couch.

I thought about that when reading this story about the rape scandal at Vanderbilt. From news accounts, this appears to be real rape or “rape-rape” as Hoopie Goldberg calls it.  A young woman was violated by a group of football players while she was unconscious. The documented actions of the accused indicate a consciousness of guilt and an attempt o hide the facts from authorities. On the surface, it looks like a real crime was committed.

Whether or not they are legally guilty of rape will be left up to whatever peculiarities of Tennessee law that apply. Sex crimes are funny, as the statutes reflect regional sensibilities. Age of consent is a good example. In some states, a woman getting passed out drunk and then crying foul stands no chance, because the law requires the court to evaluate the credibility of the people in order to determine consent.

Anyway. what these men did to this woman should be punished with a long stretch in prison, assuming the facts back the narrative in the press. If it was one drunk guy and a drunk girl, then that’s a different story. These players seem to have been sober, knew she was beyond drunk and then acted in a way after the incident to suggest the presence of a guilty mind. That’s not kids making a mistake. It’s criminals committing real crimes.

They are not, however, 100% responsible for the events. If a man jumps into a lion’s den wearing a meat suit, we blame him, not the lion. Similarly, if a woman goes out partying with a man and gets so drunk she is unconscious, she bears some responsibility. Now, men are not animals so they don’t get a pass like with the lion, but they are not immune from nature. This is something people knew up until last week.

Young men since the dawn of time have been willing to risk everything for sex. It is as much a part of our biology as left handedness or stereoscopic vision. It is why women have been taught to be weary of young men since the dawn of time. It’s why there were prohibitions against young people hanging around one another unsupervised. it was to protect the men from themselves and the women from the men.

That held until the magical thinking of feminism came along with all of its nature denying beliefs. If we arrange things the right way, they argue, women can be men, just without dicks. Men can be pleasant lesbians with dicks. Otherwise, sex as a biological characteristic can be willed away. Boys can be raised as girls and girls as boys. Like everything else with Cultural Marxism, sex becomes this gray, formless nothingness encompassed by the hollow word “gender” that means everything and nothing.

Reality does not go away when you stop believing in it. By nature, boys want to have sex with girls. They will go to great lengths to do it. Getting a girl drunk so she will give in to a man’s advances dates back to the first discovery of alcohol. Teaching women that this does not exist is like teaching them that gravity is a social construct. It is not just madness, it borders on the criminal. This young woman could easily have avoided this terrible thing by following the wisdom of a thousand generations of women before her.

Again, this does not absolve these young men, but a sensible society would find some way to mention the reckless stupidity of this woman. Everyone is far too afraid as the witch doctors and medicine women of feminism will never permit it. Instead the male student body of Vanderbilt will be subjected to lectures about denying their biology and the women will be told they are failing as women if they observe a bit of restraint when dealing with the opposite sex. It is senseless madness, but that’s where we are in America.

In politics, being lucky is the critical difference between being John Kerry and Barak Obama. Kerry, for all his faults, is an able politician. You don’t get to be senator by not having some political skills. He played the game carefully and made sure to take care of all the right people. Obama, on the other hand, is not a great politician, but he is a very lucky one. He bumped into the right people who helped him move up the ladder and he had the right opponents. That’s why he’s president and Kerry is not.

There’s another angle to this. Some politicians make up for bad luck or bad timing by being plucky and resilient. They figure out how to take a punch and keep standing. Bill Clinton is a classic example of the political survivor. Scandals that would have landed most pols in prison never slowed him down. Clinton could take a punch. We don’t know if Obama can take a punch. He’s been so carefully protected, no one knows if he has a chin. Even at this point in his tenure, we don’t know if the man can take a punch.

It looks like we will find out. The Left has decided to break ranks and abandon him over this Syria business. Grayson is a nut and probably should be in a mental ward, but he is a bellwether of sorts. If he is breaking ranks, that means the fever swamp is losing faith in their man over this. Then there is the international scene where Obama is getting embarrassed by Putin. There’s now a viscous cycle at work. As domestic support flags, international support flags, which drives down domestic support.

Obama is headed for an embarrassing defeat unless the GOP saves him, which is always a possibility. They think it sells with their voters to be on the warmongering side of every issues, so to them this looks like a good way to score points. That could be bad for Obama. The other choice is to cowboy up and go it alone, but that is not his style. Plus he does not seem like he is all that excited by the venture. Either way, he is going to have to win a few fights against some of his own people to get his way on this.

No matter how this plays out, Obama is going to take a hit politically. The question is how does he respond. Bush just put his head down and ran forward. Clinton found some low hanging fruit he could grab to change the subject. That’s what veteran pols do when they have been through some tough times. They develop a way to handle a loss. That’s why the best politicians usually have a loss early in their career. Obama has lived a charmed life up to this point. Now we find out if has that something extra to bounce back from a defeat or if he makes an early transition to lame duck status.

For all of my adult life, the GOP has been called the home of the Right. If you are a conservative, however you wish to define it, you are supposed to support the Republicans. Even when the Republican option is is a useless squish like Mitt Romney or a beady-eyed climber like Paul Ryan, the argument is they are better than whatever the Democrats are offering. Bill Buckley used to say he voted for the most right-wing electable candidate, which resulted in guys like George Bush running the party.

The disaster that was George Bush the Younger was justified on the grounds that he was better than Kerry or Gore. You can’t blame sensible white people for falling for this argument. Al Gore was having a nervous breakdown in the 2000 campaign. John Kerry is as dumb as a goldfish and surrounded by people who are not much better. That does not change the fact that the GOP works hand and glove with the Democrats to keep moving the political center further to the Left. It’s always heads they win tails we lose.

In Britain, this game worked for a long time with Tory voters, but it appears to be getting a test from UKIP. Those weirdos attacking the Tories from the right are not buying the old argument. They point out that the Tories are in a partnership with the Liberals, which makes them the enemy of the working man by definition. UKIP exists for one reason and that is to destroy the Tory Party. Their reasoning is a fake conservative party is worse than no conservative party. That’s true in the US as well. We need a new party.

Proof of this is right here. Here we have alleged “conservatives” looking for an excuse to undermine their own policy. We’re supposed to believe that these guys want to reduce the size, expense and scope of government. Yet every time they have the chance, they try to expand the size, expense and scope of government. If you are a small government type, this is why you should be sitting out elections. If you keep voting for these idiots, you are the idiot. The only orderly way forward is to destroy the GOP.

Now that the GOP is riding in to rescue Obama’s war plans, the stage is set for a week of video game coverage of the attacks on Syria. It’s always hard to know if this is just media blather or real preparations for an attack. What we see with Obama is the strange habit of confusing talk with actions. That’s why the managerial class hated Dick Cheney. He did not confuse talk with action. This is how we ended up in two pointless wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq, so there is something to say for talking rather than acting.

Anyway, lost in the run-up is the questionable relevancy of Russia’s opposition in world affairs. Putin keeps making noises one would expect from a tough guy with some punch, but he is slowly coming to the realization that words speak louder than actions. Syria’s main patron, the one moving ships into the area and providing arms to Assad is now on the fence. Rather, Russia appears to be on the fence. It’s hard to know as Putin is doing as much talking as Obama, who is probably bluffing about all this.

Regardless, the US, with or without support from Europe, can launch an attack on Syria knowing Russia will do nothing but complain. Obama could take out Assad if he chooses, knowing that Putin is not going to war over it. He can help facilitate waves of Muslim migrants flowing into Europe and he can choke off energy supplies, but he can’t stop the US from doing what it wants. He just has to hope Obama gets cold feet, so he has no choice but to talk out of both sides of his mouth to buy time and let Obama sweat.

There are two reasons why Russia is becoming a peripheral player in world affairs. The first is Russia simply lacks the military resources to do much outside her territory. One of the things we learned after the fall of the Soviet Union is that their technology was very crude compared to what the West was using. The years since the Cold War have given greater access to technology, but military tech is as much a part of culture and the Russian culture is still deeply warped from 70 years of communism.

In the case of Syria, the Israelis probably have terrific intelligence about Syria’s air defense systems, as well as her missile locations. The Israeli missile defense system is more than enough to ward out the ad hoc attacks that could come from a full-on attack on Syria by the US. Then there is the fact the US can own the airspace within hours of a conflict and deliver missile attacks anywhere it wants. We could take out the Russian naval assets deployed to the region. Putin certainly knows this.

The second reason is money. The wealth of nations is now controlled by central banks, specifically the Federal Reserve and the ECB. Those two banks control the world’s financial system. Putin and Gazprom may have hundred of billions in energy resources, but that’s not worth a whole lot when the Fed can destroy their currency. Russia, like China, needs to be connected to the grid and that means remaining on good terms with the United States, which is the world’s banker and money exchange.

That’s the big reason the Russians have to tread lightly. Of course, geography plays a big role here too. While vast distances have protected the Russians from invading armies from the West, it keeps her on the periphery of European life. As a result, these sorts of adventures are not really meant to confront the United States, but to keep western government from ignoring the Russian. If the Russians took on the attitude of the Swiss or the Swedes, there would never be a reason to think about them.

Food fetches always seem to be a part of various types of cults. Sex is another thing that is common, but food is almost a universal in cults. The ancients had all sorts of dietary rituals tied to piety. The first known vegans were in Ancient Greece. Pythagoras was a zealous vegan, believing it was beneficial in all sorts of ways.  He would fit right in with the modern vegans of today. The Jews, of course, still have weird food rules, as part of their cult. Until recently, Christians had rules on what to eat when it could be eaten.

Today, the food fetish is mostly a thing for Progressives, which is another reason ti is a religion, rather than an ideology. There are vegetarians and vegans, but those are not all that popular on the on the Left. instead, being a foodie is the thing. This is a very feminine thing, as the act of enjoying food becomes a performance that is supposed to draw attention to the eater. Women are always posting pics of themselves drinking wine or having some exotic meal. Women love seeing themselves eating and drinking.

Then there is the food fetish by proxy, where liberal women demand their kids eat certain things or not eat certain things. Kids are calorie burning machines yet the scolds are trying to make them eat like an Ethiopian. Worse, they don’t want them eating meat or fat and instead give them carb laden diets. While you can pretty much feed kids anything not poisonous, growing bodies should have plenty of protein and fat. The former is integral to muscle growth and the latter is a source of energy. People used to know this.

Instead we see the opposite as the the food crazies are convinced that only through self-denial and even self-punishment can one be truly pure. There’s no science to back up any of it. In fact, the science points in the opposite direction. Low fat, high carb diets are not healthy at all. Low carb diets are not just beneficial, but more in line with our body’s food processing systems. Again, for kids, volume is what matters, along with plenty of physical activity, but if you going to skip anything, it is the carbohydrates.

On the other side of the coin, we get rants from people in favor of all sorts of extreme diets that are supposed to purify the soul. A lot of this is what gym rats call bro-science, but people want to believe in simple miracles. This stuff is not entirely without foundation, but the people pushing ti sound like evangelists. It’s not just about losing weight or maintaining a healthy diet. Being “keto” or some other regimen is supposed to indicate a purity of mind and good character, form dietary discipline.

People also want to believe their food is out to get them.The bread allergy stuff is a great example. A whole pseudo-science has built up around the gluten free fad, where people swear they gave up bread and their suddenly changed for the better. The reason people feel better when they cut out bread is they eat less. The reason for that is carbs burn quickly, so you eat more, because you are hungry more often. it’s why people always complain about being hungry after eating Chinese food.

The whole gluten free fad is looking a lot like a food racket, just like the organic food business. Neither are new. Big Food turned their waste product into margarine, when people were suddenly sure butter was bad for their heart. When preliminary data from the Framingham study seemed to show a link between high fat diets, high cholesterol and heart disease, Big Food was right there to cash in on it. There’s not a lot of margin in food production, so they are always looking for a way to sacralize the product.

Another funny thing about food fetishes is the current aversion to counting calories. It used to be an article of faith that the only wya to lose weight was to count calories. My mother was always writing down what she ate and looking through a calorie guide to avoid over eating. It was a nice hobby for her. Today, the food zealots rail against it as if it oogily-boogily from a primitive era. The fact is, counting calories will work, but most people today can’t handle that much reality, so they prefer the new oogily-boogily over the old.

I check in with the kitten of the blogosphere regularly because he links to interesting stuff. His comments, however, are strange at times, almost dimwitted. I don’t know what to make of it, but maybe he struggles with his sanity or something. Either way, this post got my attention. He is right that companies continue to use pre-employment testing even though the courts ruled against it in Griggs. I worked at two companies that employed the Wonderlic, math and vocabulary tests and personality profiles. I’ve administered so many tests I lost count long ago. The thing he does not understand is that these are not used in isolation. That’s how big companies get around Griggs. In many cases, the testing is done after a decision to hire. Companies also have diversity programs to avoid the dreaded disparate impact claim. Of course, all firms use filtering mechanisms to sort resumes.

That later bit is something employees like the aforementioned blogger don’t get. Management regularly meets with HR to discuss standards and practices. The reason it is not just “standards” is there are a lot of things done at the HR side that are not formal policy. That’s both out of necessity and habit. Humans are not, in fact, moist robots. If Sally from HR went to a Catholic college, she may be partial to applicants from Catholic colleges. Fred, a state U grad, may favor the state university. HR could very well be tasked with hiring minorities or women, even though it is not official policy. What no company does since Griggs is use an IQ test as a first filter. That’s no longer legal and a sure way to get sued. They may achieve the effect, but that’s in response to Griggs, not in spite of it.

Libertarians and conservatives love tossing out Schumpeter’s gale, the observation that new stuff destroys and replaces old stuff. The automobile destroyed the buggy whip business, but created whole new industries for the repair of cars. That’s fine and largely true, but Marx, from whom Schumpeter stole the idea, was also right. Capitalism will, if allowed to operate unfettered, destroy itself. It’s why Buckley said “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”

We are seeing this maybe in the cable TV business. Every home in America has cable or satellite now. There’s no growth in that business. The cable companies and content providers are trying to wring out more money by raising fees and charging more for the product. The response is people cutting the cord. News reports claim that the number of homes dropping TV has gone from under two million to over five million in the last few years. I know a few people who have pulled the plug. I’m considering it.

Some like to argue that the new services are driving the cord cutting. Why pay for cable when you can get Hulu or Amazon? Well, those services are pretty crude, so it’s unlikely that they are driving the trend. Instead, it is people responding to the declining quality and rising cost of cable television. There’s also a cultural element. If you are white, television is now an endless assault on your dignity and patience. You can only be called a racist for so long before you accept it and turn off the television.

The reason you need government to prevent consolidation in the marketplace is to not only protect customers, but to protect markets. In the case of natural monopolies, like power and gas, the state has to provide the role the market would play in setting prices and protecting consumer rights. By allowing cable companies to bundle channels and monopolize whole areas of the country, the cable business is in trouble. In other words, the market needs to be protected from itself in order to survive.

Another area where uncreative destruction is creeping into the discussion is cell phones. This is a huge scam based on cheap credit. That iPhone really costs something like $800, but the phone company finances it over the two year contract. With the juice you pay $1500 a year to send pointless texts to friends. You also get to carry around a devise that tracks your every movement and sells that data to marketing companies who beam ads back to that phone.This is good for Apple and Google, but very bad for you.

Some call this late stage capitalism, but I think they just think the term sounds clever, so they say it without thinking about it. In reality, this is late stage democracy. Once the voter rolls expand to cove all adults, the system becomes a bust-out. The elected officials no longer care about voters or public good. They are hired men paid for by a donor class who controls politics, by controlling the parties. It’s not an accident that politicians that lose election end up in cushy six figure jobs as lobbyist and consultants.