One of the central arguments in favor of legalizing drugs is that it eliminates the black market. At first blush, it sounds reasonable. If you can buy your fix at a legitimate store, there’s no need to go to the street dealer. That drives out the street dealer, the street crime, gang wars and so on and so on. It all makes sense, which is why everyone and his brother is carefully watching what is going on in Colorado. All of these arguments are being put to the test.

This story from the Guardian is interesting.

In these, the curious, infant days of Colorado’s legalisation of recreational marijuana, of shiny dispensaries and touch-screen ordering and suburban parties where joints are passed like appetisers over granite countertops, no one would notice the duplex. Plain brick, patchy grass behind chain link, it appears weary, resigned to what the tenant calls “the ‘hood” and others might call left-behind Denver, untouched by the frenzy of investment that has returned to downtown.

The front door of the duplex stays closed. Sheer white curtains cover the living room window. A basement filtering system vents air scrubbed of the sweet funky smell of the pot growing in the basement. The tenant keeps his grow operation here small. It’s his home. That’s his grandson upstairs watching TV with strict instructions not to open the door if someone knocks. Should the cops inquire, they’d find a frail-looking, middle-age Latino with diabetes and heart problems, talking about his pension and his Medicaid and waving his medical marijuana registry card.

The red card – part of the state’s legal landscape since 2000 when voters approved the sale of marijuana for medical use – allows the grower to cultivate a doctor-prescribed 16 plants. It does not allow him to sell what he does not consume to the underground market. It does not allow him a second grow operation in another rented house where he and a partner grew 55 plants until the landlord grew suspicious. It does not allow him to run his own little corner of a black market that still exists in the state with America’s most permissive legal pot sales.

The grower says he recently sold more than 9kg of his weed – Blue Dream for the mellow, Green Crack for the perk – to middlemen who flipped it for almost double the price.

“I try to keep it legal,” he says, “but sometimes it’s illegal.”

Camouflaged amid the legal medicinal and recreational marijuana market, the underground market thrives. Some in law enforcement and on the street say it may be as strong as it’s ever been, so great is the unmet local and visitor demand.

That the black market bustles in the emerging days of legalisation is not unexpected. By some reckonings, it will continue as long as residents of other states look to Colorado – and now Washington state – as the nation’s giant cannabis cookie jar. And, they add, as long as its legal retail competition keeps prices high and is taxed by state and local government at rates surpassing 30%.

I’m inclined to support these experiments in marijuana legalization. I don’t know the right answer, but discovery through trial and error is the way we have sorted these things out for 15,000 years. That said, I find it hilarious that people thought it would eliminate the black market. A highly regulated and taxed legal product will always be more expensive than an unregulated and untaxed product. Unlike cigarettes or booze, there already exists an efficient and sophisticated black market.

“I don’t know who is buying for recreational use at dispensaries unless it’s white, middle-class people and out-of-towners,” said Rudy Reddog Balles, a longtime community activist and mediator. “Everyone I know still has the guy on the street that they hook up with.”

Obviously, legalizing weed was an upper middle-class novelty cause. It was the pseudo-libertarians from SWPL-ville who pushed it through in Colorado. Even a “longtime community activist and mediator” should get that.

This black market boom, the state argues, is a temporary situation. As more legal recreational dispensaries and growers enter the market, the market will adjust. Prices will fall. The illegal market will shrink.

Actually, it will probably grow. Quasi-legalization makes it nearly impossible to police the black market. If you can’t bust a guy for holding, you can’t squeeze him for his dealer. If you can’t bust guys for holding quantity, you can’t squeeze them for the bigger dealers. Then you have the race angle. Busting the black guys in the hood for smoking reefer is not going to go over well when Kendall and Dylan are buying it at the mall with mom’s credit card.

In any case, these first curious months of the legal recreational market have laid bare a socioeconomic faultline. Resentment bubbles in the neighbourhoods where marijuana has always been easy to get.

The resentment goes something like: we Latinos and African Americans from the ‘hood were stigmatised for marijuana use, disdained and disproportionately prosecuted in the war on drugs. We grew up in the culture of marijuana, with grandmothers who made oil from the plants and rubbed it on arthritic hands. We sold it as medicine. We sold it for profit and pleasure.

Now pot is legalised and who benefits? Rich people with their money to invest and their clean criminal records. And here we are again: on the outskirts of opportunity. A legion of entrepreneurs with big plans and rewired basements chafes with every monthly state tax revenue report.

Sing it brotha! Sing it!

Ask someone who buys and sells in the underground market how it has responded to legalisation and the question is likely to be tossed back with defiance. “You mean, ‘Who’s been shut out of the legal market?’” asks Miguel Lopez, chief community organiser of the state’s 420 Rally, which calls for legalisation of marijuana nationally.

“It’s kind of like we made all the sacrifices and they packed it up and are making all the money,” says Cisco Gallardo, a well-known gang outreach worker who once sold drugs as a gang member. For the record, he does not partake. It rattles him a little, he says, to see the young people with whom he works shed their NFL and rapper dreams for the next big thing: their own marijuana dispensary.

In this light, taxation is seen as a blunt instrument of exclusion, driving precisely the groups most prosecuted in the war on drug further into the arms of the black market. In one Denver dispensary, a $30 purchase of one-eighth of the Trinity strain of cannabis includes $7.38 in state and local taxes – a near 33% rate. As Larisa Bolivar, one of the city’s most well-known proponents of decriminalising marijuana, puts it: that $7 buys someone lunch.

“It’s simple,” she says. “A high tax rate drives black market growth. It’s an incentive for risky behaviour.”

It’s not hard to see where the logic is going. The thing is, legalization does nothing for Red Team or Blue Team. Both need an angle so they can pretend to be different. My guess is Red Team is going to be the tax collectors for the weed industry. The Blue Team will go the social justice route demand free weed and subsidies for the poor. Two decades ago, the ruler passed welfare reform which was supposed to start kicking loafers off the dole. Today, one third of the population is collecting. How long before they are giving away free weed in the ghetto?

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If you have been reading this blog for a while, you will have noticed that I am not particularly religious. I’m not an atheist, but I’m not religious. Mark me down as indifferent, maybe even insouciant. That said, I am sympathetic to Christianity and I think it is the one religion most compatible with self-governance. Islam is tribal and pagan. Judaism is too legalistic for anyone outside the tribe to manage. Atheism is just a license to believe any old nonsense that comes down the pike. Therefore, I prefer a mildly Christian society, if I get a choice.

The trouble is the people in charge of the country hate Christians with an intensity of a thousand suns. The Liberal Democrats, if they had the option, would make ISIS look multi-cultural. They would burn down every church in the country and ban the religion entirely. The Republicans have tried hard to use  Evangelicals for votes, but it has been hit and miss. Frankly, Evangelicals have been given a lot of bad advice about how to make a difference in politics. Now, the GOP is tired of pretending to care about things like abortion and homosexual marriage. They would like to free themselves of the snake handlers.

That means the Christians, social conservatives and Evangelicals may find themselves with out a candidate in 2016. At least, that’s what the WaPo is hoping for anyway.

Perched on the edge of his chair in a study overflowing with books, Pastor Gino Geraci reels off the Republicans he no longer believes in. His friend Mike Huckabee is an “odd bird” who couldn’t win a general election. Sarah Palin doesn’t inspire him with her “cliched responses to difficult questions.” Rand Paul is “fascinating but frustrating.”

Of all the Republicans weighing a bid for president in 2016, the only one who puts a smile on Geraci’s face is doctor-turned-conservative-media-darling Ben Carson. And yet, Geraci concedes, Carson is “not in the mainstream” and has little chance of ever being elected.

The assessment from Geraci, the founding pastor of Calvary South Denver, a sprawling evangelical church with several thousand congregants, reflects a broader sense of despair among white evangelicals about the Republican Party many once considered their comfortable home.

Many social conservatives say they feel politically isolated as the country seems to be hurtling to the left, with marijuana now legal in Colorado and gay marriage gaining ground across the nation. They feel out of place in a GOP increasingly dominated by tea party activists and libertarians who prefer to focus on taxes and the role of government and often disagree with social conservatives on drugs or gay rights.

I’ve always thought that Evangelicals have it wrong, as far as how to engage in politics. They think putting people who are from their cult in office is all that’s needed to get their desired policy outcomes. That was never going to work because big government is incompatible with religious liberty and social conservatism. The state is always at war with private association and private contract. The bigger the state, the more hostile it is to these things.

Meanwhile, the list of possible front-runners for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination includes New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, who has a limited relationship with evangelical activists, and the libertarian-leaning Paul, the senator from Kentucky who only recently began reaching out to social conservatives. One prominent establishment favorite weighing a bid, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio), is a supporter of legal same-sex marriage who claims his views on the issue could help him and his party appeal to younger voters.

This is where the Colonial Post shows itself to be blazingly ignorant of what’s going on outside the hive. Tubby is not getting elected to anything and he is pro-life. Rand Paul  has been playing the social conservative side of the street for years, as did his old man. He’s not winning the nomination, but he is hardly a typical libertarian. Rob Portman is a company man who has no chance in the GOP primary, even assuming he runs.

The disconnect between social conservatives and the GOP has become a “chasm,” said Gary Bauer, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 2000 and is now head of the Campaign for Working Families. He pointed to the party’s two most recent presidential nominees, Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, as examples of candidates who were touted initially as having broad appeal to centrists in the general election but ultimately never inspired evangelicals and lost.

Neither McCain or Romney were centrists. McCain has always been a bit of nut and hostile to Evangelicals. He went into Suffolk Virginia in the 2000 primary and told Evangelicals to shove it. Romney actually did well with social conservatives, despite the fact no one believed a single word that came out his mouth. His problem was not his positions. His problem was no one believed him.

Fundamentally, that’s the problem facing the GOP. No one believes them. If you are a social conservative serving the cause for the last twenty-five years, you have to be discouraged. In 1990, there were pro-life Democrats and no trace of gay marriage or tranny rights. Abortion and family law issues all looked like they were heading your way. The DLC was advocating a more conciliatory tone with social conservatives.

Today, even Republicans flinch at the mention of opposition to the most extreme perversions. This garbage is jammed in your face everywhere you look. I’ve stopped watching ESPN because I’m all fagged out and I’m not even an Evangelical. If I had committed my life to the Evangelical cause, I’d be ready to throw in the towel on politics.

I do wonder if the Christians in this country have one last fight in them, though. The lunatics have been running wild now for a decade and the damage is immeasurable. I know I’ll never see the day when we finally fix what Obama has broken. We’re still suffering for Clinton’s failures. The damage Bush did to the GOP will never be fixed. He effectively killed the party, I think. Even if the Christians have it in them, where do they turn?

I’m not terribly optimistic.

It looks like we have another “racially motivated” crime on our hands. He better bring his “peace mission” to Baltimore before things gets realz.

A 24-year-old man is listed in critical condition after being robbed and stabbed multiple times by a group of teenagers.

Early Monday morning around 4:20 a.m.  officers were called to the 1200-block of Wall Street for a reported stabbing. When officers arrived they located 24-year-old Sal Schittino suffering from multiple stab wounds to his body.

A preliminary investigation revealed that Schittino was attacked by four black males between the ages of 16 and 18, who had been riding on mopeds.

What?

The victim was white?!

Never mind. That’s not an issue anyone has to worry themselves over in this apartheid state country we call Amerikkka!

We have had a week to stare at the mayhem going on in Missouri. Everyone including me has gas-bagged about it at one time or another. Most everyone has found themselves eating some words, including me. So it goes with the news these days. By the time you have a good bead on things and you have a well formed opinion, no one cares. Everyone is onto the next big deal that will not be remembered in a week. Given this is an election year, some women somewhere will have to buy her own rubbers and that will be the next reason for a riot.

Anyway, here a few lessons I think we can take from this story.

Black people don’t like white people. There are some black people who are comfortable around white people, but those are exceptions. Generally speaking, blacks don’t like whites. The news has brought a parade of black people telling us in one fashioned or another that they think all whites are suspect and probably guilty of doing some harm to blacks. It’s a fact white people never consider. It’s only when something like this happens that they recoil in horror at the realization.

I grew up around black people and they were always quite blunt about not liking white people very much. I live on the edge of the ghetto now and the local black people make it very clear they are not fond of the blue-eyed devil. Here’s a Rasmussen poll that makes it clear. Blacks assume the worst of whites and they are probably not unreasonable in thinking it. If you grew up being told by your mother that white people want to own you like a dog, you’re going to have a dim view of whitey.

White people don’t know anything about black people. I grew up in what used to be called a mixed neighborhood. In the South, whites and blacks have been rubbing shoulders since Anthony Johnson sued Robert Parker in the Northampton Court in 1654. When I moved north as a young man, one of the first astonishing things I discovered is just how little white people in the north knew about black people. In my lifetime that ignorance has spread everywhere, it seems. Unfamiliarity breeds boundless ignorance.

The thing is, whites want to know about black people. They just don’t want to live near them. They used to say that the whites in the north would treat blacks as equals as long as they did not have to live near them. Whites in the south were fine living around blacks as long as they did not have to treat them as equals. As has been the case for 150 years, the culture of the north dominates on this issue. Now, whites only know black people on TV. If you learn anything from Ferguson, it should be that black people are nothing like Beyonce and Jay-Z.

There’s no fixing the race problem. White people try hard to help black people. In fact, some white people are helping black people to death. The trouble is they don’t know anything about black people and wind up wasting time and resources on things that just make things worse. Nowhere on earth have blacks and non-blacks been able to live side-by-side in peace. In post-colonial Africa, the first thing the blacks did was attack the non-blacks. First it was the Europeans, naturally. Then it was the Indians, Arabs and Chinese.

In America, the story has been far better, but that’s because blacks are 13% of the population. Small minority groups tend to get along well with the majority. That does not change the fact that America is an anomaly in the race game. We probably had the golden age of race relations in the 80’s and 90’s and now it is heading back to something like the 70’s. That’s not awful, but it is never going to be the dreamy, weepy-eyed fantasy many white people imagine is just over the next hill. Race relations are going to be a tense stand-off for as long as any of us are alive. If anything, they will get worse.

We have a cop problem. The warrior cop business is getting a lot of play, but it is a symptom of a bigger problem. Liberals have decided to herd non-docile blacks into urban reservations. Conservatives decided to turn the cops into game keepers. Both sides then raced to see who could load the game keepers up with the most authority and weaponry. Now we have an army of pudgy robo-cops guarding a bunch of angry black people. The results are inevitable.

I’m sympathetic to the cops working the ghetto. They are given a job that is impossible. These are not men with the capacity to be philosophical about it. They want to get satisfaction from their work. Arresting the same guy over and over until he finally kills some other guy, who you have arrested over and over is not very satisfying. It does not take long for the cops to view the people they police as zoo animals. The ghetto is no place for people with a desire for accomplishment.

My sympathy for the cops does not change the fact we have a cop problem. We’re asking them to do things they are incapable of doing. Arming them to the teeth is not helping either. The fact is, the people of Ferguson don’t want the white cops from the suburbs policing their streets. Policing has to be local and personal. The cops in the black area should be from the black area. Let the brothas police themselves. It is not a perfect solution; it is just a better solution.

Historians disagree about when the Roman Republic ended. Some argue that it was when Tiberius Gracchus stood for re-election as tribune in 132 BC. Some argue it was when Julius Caesar “crossed the Rubicon” refusing to disband his army and submit to the Senate. I had a teacher who made a great argument in favor of the lex frumentaria as the beginning of the end. That’s the law passed by Gaius Gracchus providing subsidized grain to the poor of Rome. Well, it sounded convincing to a young Latin scholar.

It is one of those debates historians and cranks enjoy having as there is no right answer. You pick a date that fits your needs and go from there. I’m re-reading Gibbon and I think the best case for the end is when Tiberius Gracchus stood for re-election in 132 BC. It was at this point when the ruling elite of Rome, the patrician class, lost their respect for the law.

The law was no longer the agreed upon rules under which they would settle their differences. It became an obstacle to power or a weapon to wield against rivals once you attained power. The spirit of the law, the point of the law, no longer mattered. From there is was a short road to a “who, whom?” social order.

Of course, none of this could have happened without the destruction of the small landowners after the destruction of Corinth and Carthage. In 146 BC the Romans finally defeated their old enemies. Both cities were destroyed in spectacular fashion. The Romans burned the cities, killed all of the men and sold the women and children into slavery.

The influx of slaves changed the economics of the Republic. Large landowners could now replace their free Roman labor with slaves. This undercut the small landowners. The result  was a consolidation of the land and a massive influx of people into the city, mostly former farmers and soldiers.

That should sound familiar.

Anyway, as I’m re-reading Gibbon, I cannot help but wonder where the last five years will fit into the puzzle of when the America Republic ended or collapsed. This story from yesterday makes me think we are firmly in the lawlessness stage of the final crisis.

Senior White House officials are in talks with business leaders that could expand the executive actions President Barack Obama takes on immigration.

Obama was initially expected to focus only on slowing deportations of potentially millions of undocumented immigrants and altering federal enforcement policies. Now top aides are talking with leaders in big companies like Cisco, Intel and Accenture, hoping to add more changes that would get them on board.

Representatives for high-tech, agriculture and construction interests have put forward a range of fixes, from recapturing unused green cards to tweaking existing work authorization programs.

The outreach is an effort to broaden the political support for Obama’s decision to go it alone on immigration — another sign that suggests the White House fears a backlash in November, particularly among independent voters in battleground Senate races where Republicans are seizing on the issue.

“The president has not made a decision regarding next steps, but he believes it’s important to understand and consider the full range of perspectives on potential solutions,” said White House spokesman Shawn Turner. “The meetings were in keeping with the president’s commitment to do whatever he can, within the constraints of the law, to address the immigration issue.”

Turner said the meetings with business leaders were among more than 20 “listening sessions” with outside groups.

“They are very seriously looking at a big variety of things to figure out what people think would be helpful,” a source in one of the meetings said, describing the meeting as a “productive listening session.”

Senior administration officials stepped up their engagement with companies and business groups over the past month as they look to produce a series of executive orders starting in September. Aides are asking industry executives for ideas and are trying to earn their support against an expected barrage from Republicans opposed to Obama taking any action.

You’ll notice that the Obama administration is not looking for how they can enforce the spirit of the laws passed by the people’s representatives. They are not looking at the law as a limit to their power. They are looking at the law as an obstacle and spending all of their time scheming to get around it.

All of those quislings from corporate America in there know they are a part of an effort to subvert the law and harm the American people. They don’t care about any of that. They just want to line their pockets with your money. If we had any sense, the roads leading out of Washington would resemble the Appian Way after the Third Servile War.

No one can point to a single line in the Constitution that gives the president this right. No one can point to anything in the law that gives him this right. Obama is too stupid to understand any of it, but the people around him surely know it. They don’t care about the law or the results that will flow from their lawlessness. Whether or not it is the point of no return is unknown, but it is on the way.

Stop if you heard this one before. Stupid hippie chick is shocked to learn shit ain’t free – even from the government!

Ending insurance discrimination against the sick was a central goal of the nation’s health care overhaul, but leading patient groups say that promise is being undermined by new barriers from insurers.

First off, you cannot “insure” the sick. Insurance is a gamble. The customer buys a policy believing they will use more health services than they will pay in insurance premiums. The other side of the insurance bet is the insurance company. They are betting they will charge you more than you cost them over the life of the policy.

Otherwise, they lose money and go out of business. When you force them to insure people with known illnesses, they bake those known costs into the premium. If they cannot, then they find other ways to mitigate the costs, like not selling you a policy.

The insurance industry responds that critics are confusing legitimate cost-control with bias. Some state regulators, however, say there’s reason to be concerned about policies that shift costs to patients and narrow their choices of hospitals and doctors.

With open enrollment for 2015 three months away, the Obama administration is being pressed to enforce the Affordable Care Act’s anti-discrimination provisions. Some regulations have been issued; others are pending after more than four years.

More than 300 patient advocacy groups recently wrote Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell to complain about some insurer tactics that “are highly discriminatory against patients with chronic health conditions and may … violate the (law’s) nondiscrimination provisions.”

Among the groups were the AIDS Institute, the American Lung Association, Easter Seals, the Epilepsy Foundation, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society, the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the National Kidney Foundation and United Cerebral Palsy. All supported the law.

Coverage of expensive drugs tops their concerns.

Sure it is. People like free shit. Men who spend their weekends in bathroom stalls with strange men, contracting an incurable disease, would love it if the rest of us had to pay for their treatments.

At the end of the piece we have this gem.

“People who have high cost health conditions are still having a problem accessing care,” said law professor Timothy Jost of Washington and Lee University in Virginia. “We are in the early stages of trying to figure out what the problems are, and to what extent they are based on insurance company discrimination, or inherent in the structure of the program.”

No, they have plenty of access to care. They are having trouble getting someone else to pay for it. It is why I call these people lunatics. When you believe you can defy the laws of nature, deny the realities of the physical world and force everyone to pretend your fantasies are reality, you are a lunatic.

These nuts truly believe their is an unlimited, inexhaustible supply of health care. The only reason everyone is not dipping their cup into the well of health care is the mean old health insurance companies are guarding it. That is madness. Worse yet, the madman who think it are in charge of the country and they are determined to bring the roof down on all of us.

I read Takimag most days. I like Kathy Shaidle and Steve Sailer. Some of the other writers are OK and some are comically bad. They had some ridiculous twink named Fiske-Harrison write for them and I had a blast mocking the poor guy in the comments thread. I was not alone. The column was so silly it is hard to believe an adult wrote it. Fiske-Harrison is some rich guy’s kid so I assume Taki published his writing as a favor. That’s how rich guys roll, I’m told.

Anyway, I tried to post on Taki today and I see I have been banned. Given that they let Nazis comment on their stories, I’m at a loss as to what I could have done. I have not posted there is a long time. I say some outlandish things, but my goodness. They have a wife-beater as one of their featured writers. I’m pretty sure nothing I’ve posted comes anywhere close to that.

But, here I am, banned from another site. I blame racism. What else could it be?

The whole TED Talk business is mildly amusing to me. Generally speaking, I love the idea. Give a smart guy a half hour to talk about a subject of his choice and you have a great hour of TV/Interwebs, assuming the usual assholes pack it with commercials. I’m not sure I’d travel to see it, but watch it on-line, if it is someone I find interesting.

But, they are not doing these things for plebeian slobs like me. These things are aimed at upper middle-class white people looking for grace. That’s what these things are – special services for the faithful to get some inspiration and some absolution.

A good example of this is one I found in my twitter feed for some reason. Apparently, someone hates me.

[ted id=2059]

The talk itself is stunningly awful, but the comments are hilarious.

Totally inspiring – the cadences swelling and receeding just adding to a magical presentation

Jane Thurnell-Read, the womyn who posted that is easily inspired.

Amazing, beautiful and powerful. Also a good reminder to listen to those silences each and every day. Because when there is silence, it not consent, it is not agreement, and often it hides a sadness or fear, or as Clint indicated shame. And nothing addresses these better than listening. And speaking up. I am so inspired by this talk. Thank you.

andrea eichhorn, the womyn who posted that nonsense must have taken a hit of acid before watching the video.

Thank You Clint. Your passion and common sense leap from your words and the screen. We have two ears and one mouth that we mostly use in the wrong proportions. Silence is all powerful, it fills us with awe on a mountainside or in a forest, but is awkward and feared when we are not alone. Listen for it. Embrace it. It gives us time to think, order our thoughts, remember that germ of an idea that needs time to grow and allow you to see that stranger or friend that needs your kindness.

Huw Edwards, the dick who posted that gem, must be one of those guys who plays the emotionally available guy shtick. His pic says he’s a bit long in the tooth for that bit. At 20 it goes over well with the hippie girl with the nice rack. At 50 you sound like, well this guy:

 I watched this earlier and then today I passed a homeless guy. I live in the centre of town and someone threw some food in a bin and he tried to get it out. He couldn’t because the bins only have small holes at the top, I guess to stop urban foxes pulling everything out. So he grabbed a stick and started trying to poke it in the bin to get the food, he sounded exasperated that it went in the bin when he could have had it. He was sitting right there outside the local convenience store with a little paper cup with a couple of coins in it, but I guess the guy never thought to give him his half eaten food.

I thought about what you had said and walked up to the guy and said “My name is Robert, what is yours?” He responded “Randal.” I immediately thought, what high hopes his parents must have had for him as this is quite a posh name in Scotland. But what I said to him was “can I get you sandwich from the shop?” he said “yes.” So I said “what kind would you like Randal?” he responded “ham and cheese.” So I got him the sandwich, it left me just enough to get some milk for the morning and so I skipped getting some sweets to watch a movie with at home, my usual weekend treat. I gave him the ham and cheese and shook his hand before I left and said “look after yourself Randel.” He smiled and said thank you and I left feeling a good deal better than I have in several days.

I’ve never acknowledged a homeless man by name before. I’ve given money, food or a bottle of water, but I’ve never asked their name.

I’m alone and have no one to speak to, but at least I have a roof over my head. No one ever asks my name anymore these days either, and there was a time I performed for hundreds of people every night. But, now I know no one, and so I know what it is to slowly become invisible to others.

As I walked home I remembered a poster I once saw for the homeless, that had a play on words that said – we don’t just want your change, what we want is real change.

That comment is the most liked comment on the post. It’s what I mean by this crap being a religious experience for old white people. He watched the video, had his religious experience and then went out like an apostle to minister to a bum he spotted on the way home. Then he posted it on the site so his co-religionists could praise him. The only thing missing is  chorus of “amens” from the congregation.

Here’s a link to Clint Smith. The first thing that should jump out to you is he is working on a PhD in education at Harvard. This is how the Ivy leagues makes their grad schools balance out the Chinese and Jewish guys filling up the STEM fields. They created doctoral programs in nonsense fields like education and womyn’s studies.

You’ll also note that he is a “slam poet.” That’s where exhibitionists scream at the audience in gibberish. In another era, these guys would be wearing a beret, playing folk guitar poorly while the audience smoked reefer. Now, it is old white women with long dangle earrings drinking twenty dollar chai tea while some idiot screams doggerel at them. If you think there’s nothing worse than free verse, go to a poetry slam sober. In the old days a guy could at least get laid at something like this.

I am a one percenter. By that I mean I have an IQ in the top 1%, according to the people who claim to know these things. I have a Mensa card and everything. Mensa is a two percent society, by the way. I joined only to prove a point. I mention it not to brag, but to Make it clear where I’m coming from on this. Unlike most people with an interest in IQ and HBD, I don’t think IQ is determinative on an individual basis. Often, it is as meaningless as eye color in how a person turns out. Other factors like sanity, focus, ambition, dumb luck and circumstance count for a lot more than raw IQ.

One of my obsessions is belief and why people believe the things they believe, often in the face of evidence to the contrary. This post on Unz the other day got me thinking about it. Noam Chomsky was a great linguist. I use the past tense as no one in the field pays any attention to him anymore. There’s also some question as to whether he was all that brilliant when people did pay attention to him. That’s not why they stopped listening to him. The reason people stopped listening to him is he is a nut.

Chomsky is a Stalinist, or at least he was a Stalinist. His article is mostly an apologia for the Soviets and their conduct during the Cold War, The rest is an indictment of US foreign policy. Like every other old Red, Chomsky is a reactionary. Anything against Soviet communism must be evil. Everything else flows from it. The fact that he can excuse the mass murder committed by the Soviets is just another example of the man’s madness. Chomsky is a brilliant lunatic.

It is easy to excuse it because of the politics. The madness of the progressive faith has excused a lot of monstrous things so it is easy to blame one for the other. We’ve all known very nice people who go off the rails as soon as the discussion turns to the political. My former attorney was a great lawyer and a brilliant guy until you mentioned Republicans.

But, smart people often believe in crazy stuff. Rick Rosner is a good example. The guy may be the smartest man on earth. He has had a nice career in TV, but nothing a guy with an average IQ could not achieve. Rick also believes in magic fairy dust and living forever. All of those supplements he takes are junk. That whole racket is exactly that, a racket. Most of the stuff you can buy at GNC is just filler material with no health benefits whatsoever.

He’s not alone in the wacky supplement/live forever club. Ray Kurzweil is another brilliant guy sucking down hundreds of pills a day in the belief he will live forever. I don’t think there’s much reason to doubt that Kerweil is a brilliant guy and a wildly successful guy. He’s also as mad as a hatter. He may think popping 150 pills keeps him young, but he looks old to me.

I’ve always thought IQ testing is popular because it is possible. We can create puzzles to test people’s problem solving skills that control for education, language and culture. Problem solving and pattern matching are important skills, but not the only skills. In many areas of life, those skills are not very important. Politics and government are two obvious examples.

It’s hard to measure things like social awareness, charisma, guile and scheming. The Big Five Personality tests seem to do a decent job measuring some of this, but I can make the results come out anyway I like with a little focus. I did this one as if I was Obama and then I did it pretending to be what I imagined TR would be like. I nailed TR and was Carter the first time when I did Obama. I did the test a third time and nailed Obama.

You can’t game IQ tests that way. The crappier ones are easy to fool, but that’s true of all inferior products. The Big Five tests have a lot of study and brainpower behind them and they are not good for much of anything, other than discussing third parties. That’s why I suspect psychometricians are drawn to IQ. If you can measure something it must be important. That’s the logic, leastways.

The funny thing about this topic is people have known all of this for a very long time. It is why morality has always been so important to human societies. A moral person is not a threat, even if they are not the smartest guy in the room. An average IQ president who has a sound belief system is going to cause less mischief than a super-smart guy who is a moral nullity. Clinton is a great example of the latter.

I always had a soft spot for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Maybe it is is freakish physique or his weird demeanor. I don’t know. He’s just a weird dude in so many ways I can’t help but like him. John Derbyshire, when he is not slacking off, talks about old weird America from time to time. Kareem is part of old weird America. He’s one part black guy, one part California weirdo. one part famous athlete and one part batshit crazy philosopher. Lately Time Magazine has been letting him express his batshit crazy side.

Will the recent rioting in Ferguson, Missouri, be a tipping point in the struggle against racial injustice, or will it be a minor footnote in some future grad student’s thesis on Civil Unrest in the Early Twenty-First Century?
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The answer can be found in May of 1970.

You probably have heard of the Kent State shootings: on May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard opened fire on student protesters at Kent State University. During those 13 seconds of gunfire, four students were killed and nine were wounded, one of whom was permanently paralyzed. The shock and outcry resulted in a nationwide strike of 4 million students that closed more than 450 campuses. Five days after the shooting, 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C. And the nation’s youth was energetically mobilized to end the Vietnam War, racism, sexism, and mindless faith in the political establishment.

You probably haven’t heard of the Jackson State shootings.

On May 14th, 10 days after Kent State ignited the nation, at the predominantly black Jackson State University in Mississippi, police killed two black students (one a high school senior, the other the father of an 18-month-old baby) with shotguns and wounded twelve others.

There was no national outcry. The nation was not mobilized to do anything. That heartless leviathan we call History swallowed that event whole, erasing it from the national memory.

That’s not true at all. There was a big showy commission that addressed both Jackson State and Kent State. The Jackson State incident was due to the students trying to burn down the university and the cops being put into a situation for which they were unprepared. They basically threw a bunch of cops into the middle of a riot and they panicked. But hey, when you’re trying to rally the proletariat from your Malibu home, who has time for details?

And, unless we want the Ferguson atrocity to also be swallowed and become nothing more than an intestinal irritant to history, we have to address the situation not just as another act of systemic racism, but as what else it is: class warfare.

By focusing on just the racial aspect, the discussion becomes about whether Michael Brown’s death—or that of the other three unarmed black men who were killed by police in the U.S. within that month—is about discrimination or about police justification. Then we’ll argue about whether there isn’t just as much black-against-white racism in the U.S. as there is white-against-black. (Yes, there is. But, in general, white-against-black economically impacts the future of the black community. Black-against-white has almost no measurable social impact.)

Then we’ll start debating whether or not the police in America are themselves an endangered minority who are also discriminated against based on their color—blue. (Yes, they are. There are many factors to consider before condemning police, including political pressures, inadequate training, and arcane policies.) Then we’ll question whether blacks are more often shot because they more often commit crimes. (In fact, studies show that blacks are targeted more often in some cities, like New York City. It’s difficult to get a bigger national picture because studies are woefully inadequate. The Department of Justice study shows that in the U.S. between 2003 and 2009, among arrest-related deaths there’s very little difference among blacks, whites, or Latinos. However, the study doesn’t tell us how many were unarmed.)

This fist-shaking of everyone’s racial agenda distracts America from the larger issue that the targets of police overreaction are based less on skin color and more on an even worse Ebola-level affliction: being poor. Of course, to many in America, being a person of color is synonymous with being poor, and being poor is synonymous with being a criminal. Ironically, this misperception is true even among the poor.

And that’s how the status quo wants it.

Years ago, I was part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government of Guatemala. Status Quo was an invaluable resource. In all seriousness, poverty is simply not an issue in modern America. I see a lot of poor people. Way more than Kareem does out their in Malibu. Most of the poor are fat. Most of them have plenty of drugs and booze. It’s not a life I want to live, but it beats starving or shivering in the cold. The poor have it better than any poor people in the history of the planet.

The rest of it is more of the same nonsense he picked up from TV. Like I said at the start, I’ve always had a soft spot for Kareem. I wish him no harm. He would be better off just enjoying is remaining years and feeling good about having lived a better life than all but a handful of humans in the history of man. Kareem had a great life.