Every society goes through periods when its ruling class can no longer police itself. The Founders of America recognized this problem and designed a political system that would turnover a little more frequently than what they saw in Europe. For example, the typical king was on the throne for a couple of decades. According to this site, which seems authoritative, the typical British monarch hung around for 21 years.

Even when you drop out long serving monarchs and the short timers, you’re looking at a two decade reign. Most likely, Britain has had fewer violent changes of power than other countries, but that could be wrong. The French had a long run of peaceful transition. The Germans were at the other end as far as length of reign. Even so, most subjects could expect to serve maybe two monarchs in their lifetime.

Hereditary rule has some obvious problems. No matter how well the ruling elites police their own, you can still end up with a lunatic on the throne. Charles VI reigned for 42 years, despite thinking he was a wolf and made of glass. Christian VII of Denmark stuck around for over four decades, despite having an obsession with his penis. He jerked off so much it effected his health. He also would slap people for no reason and insisted on playing leap frog with visiting dignitaries.

When there is no system to prevent a lunatic from gaining power, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a few lunatics in power. When you have no way to remove them you either get some long serving lunatics or you get a lot of assignations. A system that requires the occasional assassination of the ruler invites all sorts of intrigue and paranoia. Every king has to assume he is surrounded by potential assassins. It is just a terrible way to police the ruling class.

Representative democracy is a cure for that. Even if you cannot prevent a lunatic from gaining office, his term will end soon enough. In theory, the churn of office holders will allow the ruling elite to sideline a nut before they get into office. If one slips by, then he can be removed in the next election. It’s not perfect, as the fickleness of voter’s means a good ruler could be turned out over something silly. But, everything is trade-offs, so not having a lunatic in charge comes with the risk of losing a good ruler on occasion.

Up until the 20th century the system worked pretty well in America. There was no way to be a career politician, unless you were wealthy. Most office holders either got rich first or inherited their money. Getting office without having got rich was extremely difficult. It was a pretty good system until socialism came along. The Founders could not imagine a sprawling welfare state with highly paid, semi-permanent office holders in charge of it. But, that’s what Progressives gave us.

Reading this bit of nonsense from Lamar Alexander, who is still alive and still in office, suggests we have entered one of those times when the elites can no longer police their ranks. He is a senator from a sensible state, which means he can be a pest on a national scale. Such an important job should be filled by someone with a stake in the success of the state and its people. Instead it is filled with a lifetime seat warmer who probably lives in Northern Virginia. He takes his vacation to the state he theoretically represents.

It is not a handful of wackos here and there. If some states or regions were struggling to find competent men to staff the elected posts, it would be self-correcting. That’s not the case. It appears to be a problem almost everywhere. Florida has a career criminal in the House. They also have a paranoid schizophrenic. Massachusetts has a sociopath with an imaginary family tree as one of their Senators. You could spend all day listing Congressmen and Senators who are completely nuts or just plain grifters.

The nuts appear to be a minority, but the grifters and sociopaths are probably a majority all elected officials at this point. It is not just the legislature. The ruling class of America has very little in common with Americans. These people look sort of like the people they claim to represent, but they may as well be space aliens. They live in a different world from their citizens and they have alien ideas about the nation.

I think a good starting point of any reform program is to accept the rule that if you have never had a job, you are not an American. That disqualifies you from office. Term limits has been discussed for a long time and it sounds good until you take a look at how the elites operate. The office holders are the tip of the iceberg. The important bit is under the waterline. That’s the vast bureaucracy that ruthlessly enforces the rules, the administrative and managerial class that formulates the rules and the vast army of lobbyists and think tanks who provide the elected officials with marketing material.

So, how is it that Americans have allowed things to degrade to this point? Part of it is fanatics wake up every morning with a plan to advance the cause. Normal people wake up every morning with more pedestrian thoughts in their heads. Another is the natural evolution of a ruling class is to tend to the walls of the castle. They are always looking to secure their position. Over time, they tinker with the rules, change the laws, alter the contract so they face less pressure. Their position becomes unassailable.

The solution, of course, is for the public to revolt and hang all of these people. It’s not that the next group will be better quality. It’s that they will operate with the knowledge they could be hanged at any moment. Perhaps installing a gallows outside the door of the House. Every poll has to pass through the shadow of it on the way in and out of the building. They say the prospect if imminent death focuses the mind.

Facebook sent a notification to all of their users about a new feature. They report 200 million clicked on the link to make a video. That’s a lot of people, but only a fraction of their claimed user base. Given the feature requires very little from the user, they cannot claim that the other one billion users just lacked the time to do it. In other words, 200 million is probably their active user base.

How “sticky” those users are is debatable, but the volume of active users is consistent with other on-line results. People forget that Facebook did not invent social media. It was around for a couple of decades before FB came along. As a result we have a lot of data on it. The people claiming to know about this stuff lack the institutional memory to think about these earlier efforts at social media, but it exists.

Message boards, bulletin boards and so on are a lot like talk radio. That is, you have many more passive users than active users. Talk radio knows they have roughly one caller for every 100 listeners. They also know that the set of possible callers has a subset of regular callers that follows the Pareto principle. That’s how they can tell how many people are listening to a show. If the lines are lit up, they have a big audience.

Message boards will have 90% of their posts from five percent of users. About 10% of users visit daily. The rest drift by weekly and monthly. Back when sites like Scout and Rivals were looking for investors, they would claim user counts that were technically true, but not reflective of active users or paying customers. The ratio was 10:1 free accounts to paying accounts. That’s a different metric, but it reinforces the larger point.

There’s another thing with Facebook. How long are the users on-line? When I had an account, I’d check in most mornings with my coffee. Three minutes later I was reading another site. Mobile users are on the site for brief clips throughout the day, but not enough to be called active users. A billion users logging in for thirty seconds a day is not much of user base when you revenue depends on them clicking your ads.

Add to this the click farm stuff and you have to wonder if Facebook is not one giant confidence game. Even if that is too strong, how in the world can you justify a $165 billion market cap for an ad engine touching 200 million worldwide? Many of those “users” are living in huts or are children with no money of their own. How many are just robots that click on everything? The quality of those clicks count for everything.

Wendy Davis the adventuress from Texas that is the Left’s new hero. She came to fame when she filibustered a bill in the legislature that would ban abortions after 20 weeks. It was a publicity stunt that allowed her to catch lightning in a bottle with the national media. Like all modern politicians, she has little in the way of qualifications, other than a dogged determination to remain in public view. That means creating a fantasy biography that attempts to turn a parasitic life into heroic tale of struggle.

Davis is trying to parlay her 15 minutes of fame into a national political career, but even politics has some standards. A mediocrity with a good personality can go places in politics. A mediocrity that reminds you of your first ex-wife better have another skill. Like the music business, politics is full of one-hit wonders, who have that summer of success, but can never follow it up with a second hit. That appears to be the story arc of Wendy Davis, as she struggles to find a way to remain in the media.

Interestingly, Progressives remain committed to her, even though her ridiculous backstory has been revealed to be less than authentic. They are trying to carry on as if that truth has not been revealed. This piece in the NY Times on her reads like it was written by Hollywood. The writer carefully weaves Davis’s thin resume into the conventional narrative about the modern super woman so popular with feminists. By the end, though, the writer is forced to confess the obvious.

Meanwhile, the reality of Davis’s achievements were all around me as I drove back to my hotel, along a route that took me through her old City Council district, where few people probably spent much time wondering about what personal sacrifices went into the building of this bridge or that residential tower. What had once been a languid cow town was now a sleek city where folks still un-self-consciously stroll around in cowboy hats. Davis played a notable role in the integration of what Fort Worth had always been with what it was becoming. It struck me as a pretty good campaign theme. But perhaps it wasn’t good enough: It was impersonal, unrelatable and technocratic, a nice tale for a Texas Democrat to promote on the way to a landslide loss, just as the state’s last Democratic candidate for governor, former Mayor Bill White of Houston, did in 2010.

Instead, Davis had reassured voters with a near-perfect narrative: a portrait of herself as modern-day Supermom, a woman who existed only in our imaginations.

Reality says Wendy Davis could have stayed at Harvard and not a single Texan would have noticed. Her life is inconsequential. Crediting her with the growth of Texas is like crediting my cat with the building of the Pyramids. At least there are pictures of cats in those pyramids. It reveals the hollowness of feminism in particular and Progressivism in general. Modern feminism is just unicorn hunting, as there is not escaping the realities of biology. As a result they are forced to rely on narrative, rather than reality.

That’s why Davis can be looked at as the predecessor of Lizzy Warren. Like Davis, Warren has no real accomplishments. In the case of Warren, she married well and that opened doors in the academy. her fake back story about being an Indian completed the puzzle. Like Davis, Warren is just a story designed to fit into the Progressive narrative, not a real person doing real things. Even her Senate run was just a story manufactured by the local media. Warren was just playing a role.

The 21st century is going to look a lot like the 17th century in that the organizing faith will be under constant assault from new thinking. In 1500, the ruling and intellectual elites of the western world believed in God and accepted the Church. By 1550, the Church was under assault as the Protestant Reformation spread through central Europe. The prevailing orthodoxy was under assault on all sides.

Fifty years later the schism within the Church was challenging the prevailing secular order in Europe. The Thirty Years War was kicked off in 1618 and by the end of the century, the world was an entirely different place. The jostling between the people of Europe was no longer about Christendom. It was about nationalism. More important, Christianity was no longer the organizing faith of western societies.

The Enlightenment swept away the old religion and offered up a range of secular replacements. Various forms of socialism, like Marxism, Fabian socialism and Bolshevism, were more than political or economic movements. They may have started with the material, but they ended with the spiritual. They became civic religions that would attempt to fill the role of the Church. Politics would become the public ceremony for the new religion. This is especially true of liberal democracy.

If you look around, the firm belief in the malleability of man is all around you. Test prep courses and materials promise to improve your scores on IQ tests. Americans are bankrupting themselves in pursuit of education. Billions are spent on health regimes that promise to make fat people thin and ugly people attractive. Behavior modification is so deeply ingrained in our culture we hardly notice it.

Economics, the closest thing we have to witchcraft in America, is entirely based on the belief you can make people do anything with the right incentives. The military is putting women in combat units, despite the obvious physical and psychological problems. Disparity of outcomes between races and the sexes are proof of bad behavior, not natural differences in talent. Mentioning black crime, of course, is as heretical as claiming, in 15th century France, that the Pope was a Jew.

All of this depends on a fundamental denial of science. Jacobinism, the mother culture of every left-wing movement, is a rejection of nature and therefore a rejection of science. Later movements bolted on science here and there as a marketing ploy, but the Left is by its nature, anti-science. It has to be. If you allow that some parts of the human animal are beyond the reach of social planners, you open up the possibility that large parts of humanity cannot be altered by social structure.

If the debate shifts from what should be done to what can be done, then the debate about what ought to be done changes as well. In a world where humans are infinitely malleable, what ought to be done is limitless. In a world where humans are the product of the mating decisions of their ancestors, what ought to be done is bounded by the limits of the human condition. Trying for make college scholars out of low-IQ people with poor impulse control becomes as immoral as torturing the mentally ill.

Science is slowly undermining the claims of these secular religions. On the one hand, we have evolutionary biology, which is telling us immutable truth about humanity. On the other hand, we have genetics, which is making a steady assault on the tenets of Standard Social Science Model. This piece in the Telegraph tells us that science may have found a gene that determines intelligence. We know these genes exist. The question is how many and how much each one influence the general intelligence.

They found that, on average, teenagers carrying a particular gene variant had a thinner cortex in the left cerebral hemisphere, particularly in the frontal and temporal lobes, and performed less well on tests for intellectual ability.

The genetic variation affects the expression of the NPTN gene, which encodes a protein acting at neuronal synapses and therefore affects how brain cells communicate.

Their findings suggest that some differences in intellectual abilities can result from the decreased function of the NPTN gene in particular regions of the left brain hemisphere.

Although the genetic variation identified in this study only accounts for an estimated 0.5 per cent of the total variation in intelligence.

However, the findings may have important implications for the understanding of biological mechanisms underlying several psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia, autism, where impaired cognitive ability is a key feature of the disorder.

To sensible people, this may not sound ground breaking, but it is the sort of ripple that knocks over buildings down the line. If IQ is a matter of genetics, IQ tests can no longer be dismissed. Similarly, as behavior is linked to specific proteins, or the lack of them, whole swaths of social science fall into the category of witchcraft. If humans are not infinitely malleable, then 300 years of political theory goes out the window. At some point, there is the Galileo moment, when the old faith no longer has meaning.

This is hilarious. It has long been assumed that Manti Te’o is gay. The reason is pretty simple. If you are a world famous football player on a college campus, you can get all the girls you want. These days, even loser males get laid. The fact that Te’o preferred an imaginary woman over the real women all around him leads to the obvious conclusion. I don’t recall anyone offering up proof, but that’s the argument. The fact that the gay guy’s agent is running with it and saying his client would fit right in is too funny.

“I think the Chargers would be a great fit for [Sam], especially considering the way that they handled the Manti Te’o issue,” Barkett said Monday in a phone interview with the U-T. “It seemed to blow over very easily once the first game had happened. I think that’d be a great spot for [Sam] to land. And he’d be close to us.”

Te’o, who started 13 games this past season despite a persistent foot injury, repeatedly said that his Chargers teammates did not address the hoax with him.

I think this will be interesting to watch. The culture warriors have not had much success destroying the play on the field of the big sports. The best they have done thus far is attack the youth leagues, but the pros have been immune. The need to win and keep an audience is too powerful so far. As a result, football is bloodless in its treatment of talent. If you’re good you get paid. If you are trouble you get cut loose.

“He definitely will be addressing the media. We’re just trying to figure out what the best forum is for doing that.”

Sam, an All-America defensive lineman, led the SEC with 11.5 sacks and 19 tackles for loss last season, helping Missouri reach the SEC championship game.

Many draft projections see Sam as a middle-round pick, with some saying he could go as high as the third round with a possible position switch to outside linebacker. Sam is rated the No. 12 outside pass-rusher in the draft by ESPN Scouts Inc.

It remains to be seen how long ESPN can keep the story alive. They have a weird fascination with homosexual men that even out-weirds the NYTimes. Sports fans are a weird bunch, in that they will tolerate anything from players, as long as they help the team win, so the gay stuff will not matter to them probably. On the other hand, sports fans can easily abandon the sports media, if the sports media embraces this sort of degeneracy. ESPN better be careful with the gay agenda stuff.

The Danika Patrick story is coming to an end, but the usual suspects are hoping to squeeze one more drop of juice from the story. Patrick was always a marketing ploy by NASCAR to draw in suburban viewers. The new people running stock car racing are ashamed of their fans, they want new and better fans, which is why they hired Patrick as a driver. Richard Petty had the gall to point out the obvious, thus causing the usual suspects to rush to the little waif’s aid.

When it comes to Danica Patrick, the Petty family just can’t seem to pass on the subject without causing a caution flag.

This time, however, it was “The King” — NASCAR Hall of Famer Richard Petty — who took some swipes at Patrick when asked Sunday whether she would ever win in the Sprint Cup Series.

“If everybody else stayed home,” Petty told reporters at the Canadian Motorsports Expo. “If she’d have been a male, nobody would ever know if she’d showed up at a racetrack.

“This is a female deal that’s driving her. There’s nothing wrong with that, because that’s good PR for me. More fans come out, people are more interested in it. She has helped to draw attention to the sport, which helps everybody in the sport.”

That’s being polite, Patrick is in NASCAR because she is a women, but not a gross looking lesbian. She is not very good at driving a race car. If she was male, she is somewhere in the lower ranks hoping to catch a break. Probably by now she would have had to quit, as the dream would be over. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of the sport, but I’m pretty sure the point is to win once in a while, something she has never done.

Patrick finished 27th in the Sprint Cup standings during her rookie season, driving the No. 10 Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing. Her highlight came in the season-opening Daytona 500, where she finished eighth after becoming the first woman to win the pole for that event.

That is her only top-10 finish in 46 races at NASCAR’s highest level. Before that, she amassed seven top-10 finishes and one pole in 60 races over four seasons in the Nationwide Series.

However, Patrick is one of the most successful female auto racers in history. Patrick is the only woman to win a major open-wheel race, finishing first in a 2008 IndyCar Series race in Japan. She has six top-10s in the Indy 500 and was third in 2009, the best finish ever for a woman in that historic event.

I suppose that’s something. Somewhere there is a midget claiming to be the best midget basketball player in history.

Petty has commented on Patrick’s involvement in NASCAR before, saying in 2006 that “I just don’t think it’s a sport for women. And so far, it’s proven out. It’s really not. It’s good for them to come in. It gives us a lot of publicity, it gives them publicity.”

His son — former driver and TV analyst Kyle Petty — has been more outspoken through the years about Patrick’s involvement, calling her a “marketing machine” and “not a race car driver” as recently as this past June.

“Danica has been the perfect example of somebody who can qualify better than what she runs,” Petty said on Speed TV last year. “She can go fast, but she can’t race. I think she’s come a long way, but she’s still not a race car driver. And I don’t think she’s ever going to be a race car driver.”

There’s no reason why females can’t race competitively, but there have been few female race car drivers. The one exception is drag racing, where there are several top female drivers. The reason is drag racing is not personal competition. The drivers really compete against themselves and their machine. They are not outwitting one another or engaged in a test of wills. regular car racing is a test of people, so that’s why women have had so little success and why Patrick is just a public relations ploy.

This Tyler Cowen post captures what’s wrong with our ruling elites.

There is no way to check the details of this, but the fact the video has not been struck down the creator has not been sued, suggests it is not a slander of Facebook. Indian is known for hosting click farms and similar scams. One of the weird products of global village is the village idiots are easy to spot. Hindus will patiently sit in click farms, creating fake traffic for web sites. Russians, on the other hand, will never do it. Instead, they are better at gypsy scams like selling fake shoes and penis pills. The Philippines is another great place to setup click farms. The new thing is to setup outbound call center there because most speak English. That’s another job Russians would never do.

Anyway, it is a good idea to be suspicious of Facebook. It is one of those services that is great as long as it is free. If they start charging for it, the whole thing collapses. That leaves advertising, but that’s a limited game as well. Plaster the site with ads and people get turned off. Plus, ads are often the source of malware and most users have ad blockers. Then you have the mobile problem. Microscopic ads on a phone are worthless. The quality of advertising is another issue. Like a most internet advertising, the stuff on Facebook is aimed at the impulsive and stupid.

Now it seems the scam is different. They are getting companies to setup pages and then pay to get traffic to their page. Since no one in their right mind goes to a corporate FB page, they are using robots to fool the companies. It is a clever scam, but an old one. Pyramid schemes often work this way. Psychics have always used plants to trap suckers. They were also caught putting stuff on people’s home pages that was supposedly liked by a friend. It was pretty ham handed and they said it was an error, but no one should believe Mark Zuckerberg. Everything about that guy screams grifter.

Story likes this are a good reminder that people will go to great lengths to avoid running afoul of the official morality, enforced by the ruling class. Violating the taboos of the commoners is never a problem, as long as the rulers are OK with it. In post-modern America, a way to show your worth in the ruling class is to violate the norms of decent people. To go the other way is to risk being ruined, as the ruling class is as ruthless as Muslims when it comes to enforcing their morality.

Baltimore has an interesting history. Up until the 20th century is was basically a port city without much industry. When industry arrived, it did so with a vengeance. Poles, Italians and Irish flooded in to work the docks, steel mills and factories. They had an enormous car plant near the docks that employed tens of thousands at its peak. In the 1950’s, Baltimore was one of the more important cities in the country. It was economically importation and had one of the leading newspapers in the nation.

The civil rights movement and its fallout in the 1960’s hit cities like Baltimore particularly hard. Traditional neighborhoods were broken up in something called block busting, as the usual suspects would buy a house and move in a black family. Everyone would put their house up for sale and the pirates would swoop in and buy at an increasingly discounted price. Basically the landlords figured out how to monetize racism. Baltimore went from roughly 75% white at the end of World War II to majority black in a decade.

As black on white crime increased, the politics became tribal. The remnant of the white population hung on for a while, but they were playing a losing game. Crime control became racist and fell away. The public schools fell prey to the racial spoils system and the collapse of human capital. The middle-class, black and white, fled the city. There was a respite for a while in the 2000’s, but like Detroit, Baltimore is dying and headed for bankruptcy. If you want to see the future, visit Charm City.

Maybe the Left can be forgiven for trying to address the issue of race and the very real results of discrimination. In retrospect, their solutions sound like the rantings of a crazy person, but at the time they probably sounded plausible. After fifty years of failure, there’s simply no excuse for race hustlers persisting in their views. Every conceivable effort has been made to make integration work. Trillions have been spent on a problem that is no better now than fifty years ago. It’s time accept reality.

Looks like everyone over at the NY Times is ready to celebrate the first openly homosexual football player. The Left has been using homosexuals as a proxy in their war in white men for a couple of decades now. Football, which is popular with white men, is hated by the Left. That’s why they are peddling the concussion stuff. Now that can make it gay. The NFL will no doubt have Pride Day and maybe make the players wear rainbow outfits.

The weird thing about the homosexual stuff is it borders on self-mockery. Much of what constitutes the gay lifestyle and the gay aesthetic is self-denigrating. Homosexuals are full of self-loathing due to their affliction, so their public expression is often a mockery of the gay lifestyle. Liberace is a good example. Elton John is another. There’s nothing about the gay stuff that is ennobling or respectable. At bets it is campy and silly. At worse it is degenerate.

There was never a time when homosexuals were discriminated against on the scale of blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians and Catholics. There are some make believe times, like the Stonewall Riots, but they are mostly imaginary. Stonewall was not a riot in any sense of the word. It was a protest, for sure, that put attention on the cop’s habit of raiding Mafia owned gay clubs. The fact that the Mafia was exploiting homosexual males and the cops were primarily targeting the mob gets lost in the phony narrative.

The point being, harassment of homosexuals has never been much of an issue in America. A black guy in 1990 probably faced more hostility than the typical gay guy in the worst of times. We’re talking about rude jokes, not anything that would alter one’s life. The gay lifestyle killed more gay men in a weekend than straights have in a century. Most people get this, so casting gays as sympathetic victims is a loser’s gambit.

As with all cults and subcultures, defining who is in and who is out of the group is the primary focus of the group. For the Left, being a member of the anointed mean embracing the homosexual stuff. It’s not about the homosexuals themselves. The Left does not care about them any more than they care about blacks. Homosexuals are just another charm of the progressive charm bracelet, to be shown off at the next cocktail party. The gay man is just another totem.