The World Wide Leader In Lunacy

Everyone that watches sports knows ESPN has become this weird fever swamp of liberal lunacy. They are one step from sending hosts over to felate Obama in the White House, for example. They find a reason to do an Obama story every day, despite the fact Obama knows nothing about sports and has little interest in them. They are suspending someone for crime think every week it seems. That and they have notorious bigots like Michael Wilbon and Kevin Blackistone on regularly.

What’s stunning to me is how they work so hard to destroy the very things that allow them to exist. They have been cheering the legal cases against the NCAA, for example. ESPN counts on college sports to survive, yet their on-air talent is forever cheering the demise of college sports. We see the same stuff with the NFL and baseball. The only sports they promote are soccer (anti-American) and basketball, take a guess why that is. Otherwise, they are the network that bites the hand that feeds them.

Now we have one of their retarded people – and let’s be honest here. Kevin Cowherd probably has an 85 IQ – is bashing their customers for NASCAR. Further, he is trying to piss off the part of the country most crazy for sports – The South. But, as we know from watching these lunatics, they will jump on a grenade to spite the bogeymen. There are no more important bogeymen than white southern men.

Moonday on The Herd, ESPN’s Colin Cowherd partially blamed what he described as NASCAR’s southern “eye-for-an-eye culture” for the tragic death of driver Kevin Ward Jr., who was run over by three-time champion Tony Stewart Saturday at the Canandaigua Motorsport Park dirt track. As for Stewart, Cowherd said, “I watched the video seven, eight times: He revved up, other racers put on the brakes.”

Cowherd started off the 11 a.m. EST hour with a rant ripping the “machismo” perpetuated by NASCAR and what he repeatedly called the “eye-for-an-eye” worldview of the South. During his opening monologue and his follow-up discussion with NASCAR analyst Marty Smith, Cowherd criticized the sport for failing to ban running on the track and other dangerous displays of “bravado” long ago, and suggested a number of times that three-time champion Tony Stewart could have avoided hitting Ward.

Cowherd began the segment by citing NASCAR’s embrace of dangerous displays of masculinity and “settling the score,” saying that it, like the NFL, NHL and boxing, deliberately allowed those elements to draw in a larger male audience.

Maybe what they need is some homosexual drivers. Put a couple of trannies out there and magically it will be better!

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War on STEM

I’m fond of saying that the pod people who have colonized my country are members of a suicide cult. It’s not just that they will destroy that which contradicts their beliefs. That’s certainly part of it. In that regard they are like ISIS or the Taliban. To this type of fanatic, these alternatives cannot exist, otherwise their own identity must be false. Therefore, they are required to destroy all traces of these heretics and infidels. Razib Khan does a great job explaining this with regards to the current situation in Iraq.

Progressives are not just obsessed with destroying competitors. They seem determined to pull down the pillars of civilization. Their destruction of the America health insurance system is a great example. There’s no reason to explain the mayhem they are causing, other than a desire to destroy. It is possible that it is just gross incompetence, but it sure looks deliberate. This piece in IBD the other day is a good example. All of these results were predicted and avoidable. Yet, here we are.

Another example is the continued assault on the STEM fields. I saw this in my Twitter feed.

Tracy Van Houten has always been infatuated with space. Over the course of two decades and two degrees, that love took Houten from a pre-engineering class in high school to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she works as an aerospace systems engineer on groundbreaking projects like the Mars Curiosity Rover.

Like many female engineers, though, the 32-year-old mother of two has encountered challenges one might expect in a field where nearly 90% of professionals are men. Colleagues have occasionally asked Van Houten — sometimes the only woman in the room — to take notes during meetings and plan work parties. At times she feels her ideas aren’t acknowledged or heard.

Van Houten must also make difficult choices in order to juggle work and family — a balance male engineers may not feel as compelled to achieve. When her second child was a year old, she turned down the opportunity to join a team operating Curiosity once it landed on Mars, because of the grueling schedule.

A common assertion from feminists is that women have to make choices that men do not face. There’s never a mention of the reverse. Men certainly face choices women do not face. Both are a product of biological reality, but determined to be a social construct, because, well, vagina.

Yet, Van Houten remains a dedicated engineer, and that’s not always common according to a new survey. For the past several years, two researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have surveyed 5,300 women with degrees in engineering. They found that females frequently leave the profession because there aren’t enough opportunities for career advancement, or because they need to fulfill parenting or caregiving responsibilities in the absence of family-friendly work practices and policies.

The research indicates that leaning in to an engineering career may not lead to leadership prospects or a lifelong vocation, as women may hope. Instead, these women find themselves working for unfriendly or even hostile supervisors who show little interest in helping them advance professionally or designing a flexible work schedule to accommodate family obligations. The survey respondents also reported being discouraged by antiquated attitudes expressed by male colleagues and feeling isolated in a “male-centric” workplace.

I love how men are supposed to accommodate women by “helping them advance professionally.” Maybe that’s good business. Maybe it is something a smart business owner should do. I don’t know. What this is, however, is a childish demand by girls unprepared for the real world. Suck it up toots.

Women, in fact, comprise about 20% of engineering school graduates, but only 11% of practicing engineers are female. In Fouad’s survey, a third of the women who left the field in the past five years did so to take care of children at home. Twelve percent reported a dearth of opportunities to advance in their career.

To a sane person, this seems pretty normal. Engineering, for example, is not sales. The value of an engineer is cumulative. A woman who leaves her job for five years to raise kids is coming back to work not just having missed five years of working. She is now behind the college grads in many cases. Her peers have advanced to supervisory positions. Odds are, the mom returning to work has better options outside of engineering. The same is probably true of all STEM fields.

To help both employees and their employers address these problems, SWE recently published a “playbook” that offers suggestions on how to better integrate work and personal commitments. Among the recommended policies are flexible scheduling practices, maternity and adoption leave, and on-site health and wellness resources.

Fouad, along with Bierman, believes that companies must start evaluating their policies for both sexes in order to effectively change attitudes in the workplace. As more men feel comfortable insisting on a sensible schedule, such requests will become the norm and not just the domain of female employees. Similarly, as more women view engineering as field that accommodates and encourages all of its professionals, they may increasingly join its ranks.

It’s not hard to see where this is going. The diversity rackets started the same way. First they sent out “helpful” play books. Then they sent out letters reading, “Nice company you have there. Too bad is something were to happen to it.” Not long after, the HR departments were flooded with women and minorities running diversity clinics. Jesse Jackson is out shaking down Silicon Valley. The more subtle types will be demanding engineering and technology firms start hiring girls – or else.

Put another way, it is convert, or else.

Some Pro Tips

Don’t run in traffic: Over the weekend, the sports weenies could not stop talking about race car driver Tony Stewart driving over another driver on a dirt track. The dead driver, wearing a black suit, got out of his wrecked car and ran onto the track. He made every effort to get in the way of Tony Stewart, the guy he thought caused him to wreck. Watching the video, the lighting at the track looks pretty bad. I’ve been to these types of track and they are not very well lit. Maybe Stewart should have seen him. Maybe he should have done something different. Who knows.

As citizens, we have a responsibility to conduct ourselves so as not to cause harm to others. It is a basic responsibility on all people everywhere. Otherwise, you cannot have human settlement. Race car drivers, for instance, have to try and avoid hitting other drivers or wrecking their cars. That responsibility stops where your responsibility to you begins. You are in charge of you. Your life means more to you than anyone else so you get the primary duty of guarding it.

That means when you run into traffic and try to jump in front of speeding cars, you own the consequences. Sure, the other guys have to take reasonable measures to avoid you, but if they don’t it is still on you. It is sad that a young man is dead and it is sad that the other man will now have to carry that with him. That’s all on the dead guy. My advice here is simple. If you don’t want to be run  over by Tony Stewart, don’t run in front of his car.

Don’t fight with the cops: Look, the cops are out of control. We all know that. In the land of the free, there are close to 50,000 SWAT raids every year. Fewer than ten percent involve an armed stand-off or kidnapping. We have foolishly turned the local police force into a paramilitary force. The difference is that the local yokels are rarely qualified to guard a lamppost, much less handle mil-spec hardware in urban residential areas. I get all that and I agree we have a problem.

That does not mean you fight the cops. When you do that, they may shoot you. When confronted by an armed retard with a sour attitude, you are wise to do as your told and let the lawyers figure it out. Most cops are decent enough people and just want to get home to their families. Some are nuts and others are just stupid. You can’t know any of this at the time of contact. My advice here is simple. Don’t fight the cops.

Don’t start riots: I’m not terribly sympathetic to the plight of the black man. By that I mean I think the typical black guy can do just fine without my help or sympathy. Many choose to do otherwise. The result is the cops and the politicians often treat black people like crap. It is a shame and I wish it were otherwise. I wish our Progressive overlords were not herding black people into urban reservations, but they don’t listen to me either.

The thing is, when you riot and burn down your neighborhoods, I start to think maybe the bad guys are right. When oleaginous scumbags like Benjamin Crump is hired to represent the rioters, I’m even less inclined to sympathize. The family of the victim probably has a legitimate claim and they should get representation. There are plenty of local lawyers looking for work. The rest of us will be more inclined to listen if you avoid hiring a human hemorrhoid as your mouthpiece. This is two-part advice. Don’t riot and don’t hire  race hustlers to speak for you.

I hope this helps.

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Where Are The Criminal Charges?

I’ve been following this case for a while and I keep wondering why no one is in jail. There’s little doubt that major figures in tech were engaged in illegal activity. It is also clear, by the way, that their lust for H1B1 visas is just an attempt to suppress wages.

There is “ample evidence” that Silicon Valley was engaged in “an overarching conspiracy” against its own employees, a federal judge said on Friday, and it should either pay dearly or have its secrets exposed at trial.

Judge Lucy H. Koh of the United States District Court in San Jose rejected as insufficient a proposed $324 million settlement in a class-action antitrust case that accused leading tech companies of agreeing not to poach one another’s engineers.

In addition, her decision immediately resuscitated a public relations nightmare for Google, Apple and other top tech companies while vindicating a range of observers — including one of the plaintiffs in the suit — who said Silicon Valley was escaping justice.

With the case once again heading to trial, it threatens to expose to further scrutiny the business practices of Steve Jobs of Apple. The blunt emails of Mr. Jobs, an unquestioned genius, could prove to be his company’s undoing.

Steve Jobs was a horrible human being. If the Christians are right, Steve Jobs is being sodomized by Hitler and Stalin in Hell right now. He screwed his employees, treated everyone including his family like garbage and he was a pathological liar and confidence man. Maybe that finally gets a full airing in a courtroom. Too bad the cocksucker is dead.

Wolf of Wall Street

I used to know a guy who had dealings in Hollywood. He was an attorney and specialized in entertainment contracts. Beyond that I have no idea what he actually did for a living. He knew a lot of famous people and hung out at the trendy places. Movie stars and famous directors are the part of the iceberg we see. There’s a vast supporting structure under the waterline. He was a part of that world. Hollywood is a factory town and there are a lot of people working on the assembly lines.

This guy had a lot of good stories and gossip about famous people. The one thing he told me that I have often puzzled over is this. He said pure chance picks the stars. There are hundreds of people with the looks, talent and desire to be a bankable star. Dumb luck plucks a few out of the pile and makes them into household names. Dumb luck plucks even more out and makes them working actors who have a nice living playing bit parts in films, TV and commercials.

I don’t know enough about Hollywood to know if it is true. I’ve seen bad acting so I know it takes some skill and practice to be good at acting. I suspect that once you get past the awful stage into the plausible stage, that’s enough. Kevin Costner and Keanu Reeves are not very good at acting and they make millions as super star actors. They just have a look that works for the roles popular in their era.

Anyway, I watched Wolf of Wall Street and I can’t help thinking that dumb luck really is what rules the business. The director is a famous guy with all sorts of great films to his credit. How did he make this god-awful piece of crap? How is it that a talented director made such a horrible film? Similarly, how did the actors, all famous, not see this turkey coming a mile away? They have people to read the scripts for them. These people are supposed to know a good script from a bad one.

Now, I may be the one with bad taste. I looked it up on Rotten Tomatoes and it got good reviews. I don’t get it. The acting was fine, but the story was so stupid and childish I wanted to run from the room screaming. It just looked like an excuse for everyone to have a bunch of hookers on the set running around naked. I like naked women as much as the next guy, but I don’t need movies to show me cooz. Thanks to Al Gore, I can indulge that interest from a dozen PC’s I have around me all the time.

Anyway, the movie sucked.

But was he wearing a hoodie?

This was linked on Drudge, so I’m going to assume it is getting national attention. That’s not unreasonable. An unarmed black male getting shot by the police is catnip for the liberal loonies in the media.

An unarmed teenager killed Saturday by Ferguson police, spawning continuing community unrest, had struggled for an officer’s gun in a patrol car first, officials announced this morning.

St. Louis County Police Chief Jon Belmar said one shot was fired by the officer’s gun inside the car during the struggle, and that the officer fired multiple times at Michael Brown, 18, as he ran away.

Belmar did not indicate whether police think the shooting was justified.

He said the shots that hit Brown were “more than just a couple but I don’t think it was many more than that.” He said an autopsy was pending and that a toxicology test would take as long as six weeks to determine whether Brown had alcohol or drugs in his system.

It’s funny how these things go. The white Hispanic in Florida had a pretty good excuse for shooting the black kid. Getting your skull crushed is usually enough to justify lethal force. In this case we have a cop shooting a guy in the back. There are very few circumstance where that’s warranted. If the guy was armed or out of his mind on drugs, maybe it makes sense. Otherwise, the cops can’t be shooting people who run away. That’s murder.

To their credit, the cops seem to know they have a problem and they are turning it over to the state and federal investigators.

Belmar promised a full investigation that might also include the FBI. He said the results would be forwarded to St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Robert P. McCulloch, whose office would decide whether criminal charges were justified.

The chief noted that as Ferguson Police Chief Thomas Jackson arrived at the scene Saturday, he called Belmar personally to ask for a county investigation. “I would not think anybody would do that if they had anything to hide,” Belmar said.

Jackson sat beside Belmar but did not speak in a short press conference at 10 a.m. at the community’s firehouse.

Belmar said he had not consulted the FBI but would call today. The FBI can investigate a police use-of-force incident as a possible violation of constitutional rights. Belmar emphasized that these are “standard protocols.”

The officer who fired, whose name has not been disclosed, is now on administrative leave. Belmar said that officer has been on the Ferguson force for six years and appears to have “no other issues” in his past.

Belmar said the officer had an encounter about noon Saturday with two “individuals” and was pushed back into his car and “assaulted” by Brown. The chief did not again mention the second person, nor did he describe the reason for the initial contact.

Belmar and Jackson left the press conference as reporters continued to call out questions.

Of course, that does not mean the more responsible members of the “community” cannot pitch in and help calm things.

State Sen. Jamilah Nasheed, D-St. Louis, and the St. Louis NAACP also have said they would seek a federal investigation.

Angry residents took to the streets shortly after Brown was killed in the 2900 block of Canfield Drive. Some shots were heard in the crowd that gathered, but nobody was injured. Some people chanted obscenities and “kill the police” as about 60 officers from multiple jurisdictions gathered.

At least 200 people continued the theme today outside the police station, 222 South Florissant Road, carrying signs and occasionally making speeches.

One of them, Shontell Walters, of Berkeley, said they took exception to the presence of police dogs with officers watching the scene. “They are trying to instill more fear in us,” she complained.

A memorial went up at the shooting scene, where Brown’s stepfather, Lewis Head, stood and wept this morning. “Ferguson killed my son,” he said. “They flat-out murdered him.”

A candlelight vigil is planned for that spot at 8 p.m.

In case you’re wondering, Jamilah Nasheed is a woman and, I know this will comes as a surprise, she is black. In fact, Ferguson Missouri is 65% black, according to City-Data. Looking at the map, I’m guessing this is an area taking spillover from St. Louis. The crime data from City-Data suggests the crime rate has been falling so this could be a gentrifying area. Spot Crime shows that the criminal element is east and south of the main part of the town. The overall crime rate is still much higher than the rest of the country. It is not Detroit, but it ain’t Mayberry either. The cops have a challenging job in that town.

Living in a majority minority party of the world, this is something that gets little attention. Policing high crime areas is a grind. The cops get cynical and if you’re lucky they just stop caring. Often, they resent having to police a population that seems to have no interest in civilization. Bad things start to happen and then the war is on. Los Angeles had this problem. In Baltimore and Washington, the cops simply keep the bad guys from leaving their area. The result is an urban reservation. I’ve been profiled a few times cutting through the ghetto. The cops simply assumed I was either lost or selling drugs. Why else would I be there?

Vengence High School

Whenever I see the phrase “social justice” I know the user means “revenge.” The reason is it is always used in the context of a self-defined loser demanding money from the folks they see as winners. The losers are bitter at being losers (or crazy) and they want to take it out on someone.

The link between winners and losers never seems to make much sense. It’s like the champions look for causes that are both obscure and pointless. David Horowitz has made this point often. The middle-class Jewish kids, who helped the Black Panthers beat the system in the 70’s, did it just to cause mayhem.

Anyway, there’s now a high school based on the principles of social justice. Conveniently, it is called Social Justice High School and it is located in Chicago. For some reason a lot of New Left radicals came from Chicago.

The Little Village Lawndale High School is a reality because of the principles of social justice. Our belief in self-determination inspired a community to act on its convictions to affirm its right to a quality education. Through a system of support, guidance, and accountability our students will graduate high school, be prepared for college and implement a post secondary plan. Our students will cherish and preserve their ethnic and cultural identity, will serve and determine the future of our community, and will have a passion for peace, justice and the dignity of all people.

The language here looks similar to the corporate jargon I like to make sport of from time to time. There’s a creepiness to it that brings to mind dystopian sci-fi films where the fully human protagonists is faced with a formless, faceless authority that is determined to rubout all traces of humanity.

The purpose of the school of social justice is to assure that all students become critical thinkers through a curriculum that is rigorous, innovative, and implemented through meaningful school relationships.

Project based and problem based learning that addresses real world issues through the lenses of race, gender, culture, economic equity, peace, justice, and the environment will be the catalyst for developing our curriculum.

Service learning will be the center of our curriculum. Our community and the city will be our classroom. All learning will be relevant to the lives of our students.

We will increase student learning and achievement by building on what our students know and utilize their everyday experiences in order to build the excellence of basic skills and literacy.

The professional community composed of administrators, teachers, students, parents and other community members will learn together and from one another.

That’s an impressive collection of abracadabra words. The Left, like all cults, has a thing for magic words and incantations. One that always makes me chuckle is “critical thinking” which is Left-speak for attacking the current order. These guys are all about pulling down the walls. They say it is to remove barriers, but it is really so they can pull the roof down on the rest of us.

The core beliefs section is great:

Truth and Transparency

We will practice honesty and authenticity in our communication and relationships with students, our community, peers, and ourselves.

Struggle and Sacrifice

Our struggle is against systems of power that have been historically used to deny, regulate, and prohibit access to the most basic human rights that should be granted freely to members of society regardless of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or religious belief. We accept the reality that such struggle will require sacrifice from all involved.

Ownership and Agency

We will take responsibility as agents and catalysts of change to expose the truth about the functions of power, work (unite) to interrupt their operations, and operate as producers of power to meet the needs of the Greater Lawndale community.

Collective and Community Power

Through collective community power, we commit to a conscious effort to overcome the intended historical obstacles that have been designed to disempower and divide our communities, and thereby meet the needs of all members of Greater Lawndale for continual betterment and progress.

Authenticity is a magic word for these people. To normal people, this word implies simplicity and originality. To the Left it means unadulterated adherence to ideology. Of course, struggle and sacrifice have a long history with cults. It is integral to their survival. The adherents have to be willing to give themselves completely to the cause in order for them to live forever in the cause.

I’ll just note that this is pretty standard stuff on the Left. My bet is up and down the Obama education department this sort of language is common. They not only think this school is a good thing, they want to make your kid’s school just like it. It is why vouchers are a dumb idea. Those vouchers would come with strings requiring classes in social justice and empowerment.

But, this is probably the future anyway.

Watching Old People Work

The other day I was watching a monkey fuck a football. By that, I mean I was watching a bunch of guys tear up some concrete in the courtyard of my office building. One guy was running a jackhammer, but not the traditional kind. It was attached to a bobcat. Others were cutting rebar, while others moved the rubble around for no apparent reason. They were not screwing around or loafing, just disorganized. So much so I could not help but watch it.

Watching the show, I noticed that there was not a single immigrant on the crew. It was all white guys and one black guy. I’ve noticed that a lot lately. Construction has been down around here since the crash so maybe the Mexican trade guys moved on and what’s left is the old white guys who used to work in sales or something. I don’t know. I’m just guessing. Maybe the government cracked down on the illegals in the trades. Stop laughing.

The other thing was the age. Every one of the crew was over forty. One guy was in his sixties. He was busting his hump, outworking everyone else. The old guy was in great shape. He even smoked, which puts the lie to the whole smoking scare. I’m going to say the bulk of the crew was between 45 and 55. There was one guy that could have been under 40, but that’s it. Pretty old for manual labor.

Out of curiosity, I looked up the average age of construction workers and found this from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. There’s a lot of data there and it does not look like construction is an old business. Manufacturing is older. Government is really old with a median age pushing 50 for most sectors. Searching around for more granular data I found this story that claims the average age of welders is 55. For some reason we have had a welder shortage for years now. I have a relative who is a career criminal and welder. He gets out of the can and goes back to welding, often being bailed out by his employer.

I did some further searches and there’s not a lot of great data for the trades. Plumbers in Texas, for example, are 50 years old, on average. The median age of carpenters is supposedly 48 across the country. If you look closely at the BLS data, retail is the youngest sector and government is the oldest. Manufacturing is the next oldest and then you get into the trades. Young people seem to be in services, technology and retail.

When you start looking at the data, it is not hard to see why upper middle class whites favor open borders. They don’t work in the trades. Their kids will not even work summers in the trades. Heck, middle class kids no longer work summers. That’s for the plebes. On the other hand, upper middle class people need their toilets fixed and their houses repaired. At the same time, it is easy to see why the public is turning on immigration. Despite what the people on TV believe, America is not 30-something beautiful people living in swank urban enclaves. Most people are related to one of those guys busting up the sidewalks outside my office.

Still, demographics and immigration does not explain why the trades are getting gray. It is not easy to be a carpenter or a steamfitter. Welding is a lot more involved than working in a government office. To be a competent carpenter you need math skills, problem solving skills, in addition to physical skills. The young people with something on the ball are discouraged from going into the trades, while they are encouraged to head off to college. At some point, that has to change.

Fake Wine

When I was first coming up, I found myself in the company of big shots at a big shot dinner. The head big shot, feeling like a king, started ordering wine for the table. I was a young man and wine was alien to me. At least the culture of it. I knew nothing about it and I had no interest in it. The waiter brought over a magnum sized bottle of wine and did the wine ritual for the big shot. He told me the wine was $1500 a bottle. It tasted like every other red wine I’d tasted to that point.

Later in life I came to understand that wine is mostly bullshit. It is a lot like modern art. A small group of people decide what is and what is not trendy and the prices are set accordingly. I actually got to know a guy, who is a member of the Court of Masters. His membership is all about making money in the wine business. I never believed for a second he knew anymore about the taste of wine than anyone else. He just knew all of the proper jargon that was used to impress people out of their money.

The thing is, people look at the price tag above all else. For years now I have bought my office manager a bottle of wine at Christmas. She likes to entertain over the holidays. I go into the wine store and ask the clerk to give me a $100 bottle of French or Italian wine. I accidentally leave a price tag on it. Every year she tells me her guests love the wine. It looks expensive so they just assume it must be good. They make sure to say it, to avoid sounding plebeian. The wine rackets depend on that natural social instinct.

There’s also the priest/expert factor. In spiritual matters, we rely on holy men to tell us right from wrong. There are rituals they conduct to instruct us on morality, absolve us of sin and bear us up under the weight of life. In practical matters, we look to experts to cut through the thicket of details and tell us that we need to plug the red wire into the blue socket. The wine business rolls the two together making the wine expert the arbiter of good taste and good character. He also teaches people how to show it.

This story from America’s Paper of Record shows how high end wine is just high end bullshit.

An international wine dealer has been jailed for 10 years for fraud after selling fake vintages and cheating fellow connoisseurs out of tens of millions of dollars.

Rudy Kurniawan, 37, an Indonesian-born businessman, had been considered one of the top wine collectors in the world, becoming famed for his palate and ability to identify fine wines.

But it emerged he had been blending the contents of cheap bottles in the kitchen of the home he shared with his mother.

He then placed the blends in old bottles, stuck fake labels on them and claimed they were rare vintages, selling them for vast sums.

While selling the fake wines he lived a luxury lifestyle driving expensive cars and collecting modern art.

It is not hard to see how this worked. He is foreign so stupid Americans naturally assumed he was exotic and international. He learned the lingo so he must be an expert. His lavish lifestyle confirmed he was an international man and a member of the elite. He presented himself as these people wished to view themselves. A classic con.

A judge in New York ordered Kurniawan to forfeit $20 million (£11 million) and pay $28.4 million in restitution to his victims.

US District Judge Richard M. Berman said: “The public at large needs to know our food and drinks are safe and not some potentially unsafe homemade witch’s brew.

“This was a very serious economic fraud, a manipulation of US and international markets.”

Prosecutors said Kurniawan had seven main victims, one of whom was the billionaire businessman and financier William Koch, who gave evidence in the trial.

After being sentenced Kurniawan said: “I’m very sorry for what I have done.”

Kurniawan had moved to the US at the age of 16 and will be deported after completing his jail sentence.

Jerome H Mooney, his lawyer, told the court Kurniawan had wanted to mix with rich people in California, where he had lived with his mother.

The lawyer said: “He was insecure, very insecure. He wanted to be them. He wanted to be part of it. Nobody died. Nobody lost their savings. Nobody lost their job.”

Kurniawan had become known as “Dr Conti” because of his expertise in the wines of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti vineyard in Burgundy.

He was found out and arrested by the FBI after trying to sell 78 fake bottles of wines for around $700,000 at an auction in London in 2012. Other experts spotted mistakes including missing French accents on labels.

I’ll just note that no one ever tasted one of his wines and said it was fake. He was caught because he got sloppy with his label making. I’ll grant that much of his product was sold to people who collect, not drink, wine. Still, an expert somewhere popped the cork on one of his brews and was fooled. But, they are always fooled. There is simply no evidence to support the claims of wine and food tasters, it is a fraud.

 

Soy Latino

I always thought I may be Latino or a Latino. I’ve never been comfortable with the term to know the proper usage. Hispanic is another word that vexes me. I’ve never met a Mexican or Puerto Rican that used it. It’s always upper middle class white people. Anyway, according to this story, polls show Latinos agree with me on a wide range of issues. Either I’m Latino or they are becoming me.

Immigration is only the 6th-most-important issue for Latino voters in California when casting a vote for a candidate for U.S. Senator or for U.S. Congress, according to a statewide survey conducted by Univision.
When registered Latino voters were asked to name their most important issues, the results, in order, were: education (21%), jobs (16%), government spending and the deficit (15%), social security (13%), “how what they do will affect my wallet” (10%), health care (9%), immigration (8%), and crime and personal safety (5%).

An overwhelming 86% of those surveyed support comprehensive immigration reform. However, a majority–53%–of registered Latino voters in California also answered that they believe that, “…we should require borders to be secured before providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.”

Furthermore, when asked, “Which of the following is your major concern or complaint about the Republican Party?”, only ten percent of those surveyed named Republican opposition to immigration reform.

The number one gripe was that Republicans “care mostly about corporations and big business” (17%). Other concerns, in order, were that Republicans: care only for themselves (17%), favor the rich (14%), are against immigration reform (10%), don’t stand up strongly for their beliefs (7%), “don’t understand people like me” (6%), and favoring white people not minorities (5%).

I’ve said for years that the problem we have is both parties are sock puppets for multi-nationals and the banksters. The Democrats are better at pretending they are for the average guy, but that’s because most of them are a little nuts. Republicans, on the other hand, think being the friend of CitiCorp and Haliburton is the same as being business friendly. These are not businesses. They are fiefdoms.

The second complaint, that they care for themselves, is another with which I agree. The GOP leadership has known for a long time how to turn their promises to the base into results, but they refuse to do it. They prefer the status quo as that’s where the easy money resides. They use the middle-class to lever riches for themselves from the political system. Democrats, at least, try to follow through with their promises to destroy the country.

Of course, the big take away is that immigration is meaningless to the prospects of the GOP with Latinos. As a newly minted Latino, I have a different interpretation. Like the majority of my new race, I want a secure border, expedient deportations and sensible policy about who and how many immigrate here. I DON’T WANT AMNESTY.