Tyler Cowen has a post up arguing that Cuba could be the next Singapore. I used to be a regular at his site, but then I made Alex Tabarrok cry and he asked me not to post there anymore. My pointing out that he has arranged his life in such a way that he avoid all contact with minorities was a bridge too far. I still read the site once a week, looking for material, but that’s it. Libertarian economics are a bit silly for an adult my age.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) has grown rapidly since its inception in October, a peaceful ‘strolling’ movement opposing the exceptional violence seen in street battles between Salafist Muslims and ethnic Kurds seen in many German cities this year and enormous immigration. Now on it’s tenth ‘evening stroll’, it has grown from a couple of hundred people, to 15,000 last week, to more than 17,500 last night.

In addition to the hundreds of banners with slogans such as ‘Against Hatred, Violence, and the Quran’, ‘Against Religious Fanaticism’, and ‘No Sharia in Europe’, the thousands attending brought song sheets which had been distributed online and sang favourite Christmas carols.

Despite the essentially ordinary character of many of the people taking to the streets for the peaceful strolls, and the admission by senior government and police figures that a great many of those joining in are families bringing their children, the organisation has come in for stiff criticism and rejection by the heights of the German elite.

I think it’s time we stop.
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

There’s battle lines bein’ drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.
Young people speakin’ their minds
A-gettin’ so much resistance from behind.

Chancellor Merkel has suggested the leadership of PEGIDA have an ulterior motive, despite their focus on non-violent protest and apolitical principles. She even went as far to warn people thinking of going on the weekly stroll to “watch out that they are not instrumentalised by the organisers”. The SPD, Germany’s Labour-party equivalent have gone as far as calling PEGIDA “Nazis in pinstripes”.

This is despite a report by the German police that there are significantly more known troublemakers in the counter-protest movements, than in PEGIDA itself.

It is not only German politics which is putting its weight behind the counter-PEGIDA movement. Apparently dismayed that 17,500 people had turned out in bad weather to sing Christian carols, the Protestant Bishop of Dresden said PEGIDA were trying “to exploit a Christian symbol and a Christian tradition” for political ends.

Germany’s art elite also showed their disapproval last night. The directors of Dresden’s Bavarian State Opera house, outside which the protests take place turned off the lights on the building, cloaking it in darkness during the stroll. Colossal 50-foot banners were draped in front of the building reading “humanity, respect, and diversity”.

The irony of it all. The people peeping outside their office windows, cursing the people in the streets used to be the people in the streets. Now they are pigs on two legs.

For as long as any of us have been alive, the default assumption is that humans are not the only self-aware beings in the universe. Everyone just knows that out in space, there are intelligent life forms that have evolved on some planet somewhere. Libraries of books and countless movies and TV shows have been created around the belief in life beyond earth. Not just bugs and plants either. Intelligent life along with all the stuff that comes with it.

Further, the life is almost always imagined to be more intelligent than earthlings. Everyone just knows that the aliens are our intellectual superiors. Most assume that means they have evolved to be our moral superiors. That lets our scolds project onto the aliens features and attributes they wish we possessed. Others go the other way and the aliens are an out-sized version of our worst features. That means the aliens roam the universe consuming natural resources like locusts or enslaving minorities.

I’m not sure where I saw this, but it fits the pattern.

If and when we finally encounter aliens, they probably won’t look like little green men, or spiny insectoids. It’s likely they won’t be biological creatures at all, but rather, advanced robots that outstrip our intelligence in every conceivable way. While scores of philosophers, scientists and futurists have prophesied the rise of artificial intelligence and the impending singularity, most have restricted their predictions to Earth. Fewer thinkers—outside the realm of science fiction, that is—have considered the notion that artificial intelligence is already out there, and has been for eons.

Susan Schneider, a professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut, is one who has. She joins a handful of astronomers, including Seth Shostak, director of NASA’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, or SETI, program, NASA Astrobiologist Paul Davies, and Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology Stephen Dick in espousing the view that the dominant intelligence in the cosmos is probably artificial. In her paper “Alien Minds,” written for a forthcoming NASA publication, Schneider describes why alien life forms are likely to be synthetic, and how such creatures might think.

The fact that all of this was thought up by science fiction writers a long time ago is lost on all of these folks. I guess when you have letters after your name, dreaming up crazy nonsense is grant worthy, even when it is someone else’s crazy nonsense. Regardless, the Borg was thought up when they rebooted the Star Trek series for TV. That was ripped off from the first Star Trek movie when Voyager returns after having acquired all knowledge in the universe.

People who take a new spin on this bit are always heralded as futurists, people with grand imaginations that think up out-of-the-box scenarios. The reality is it takes little to no imagination or intelligence. What’s tough is imagining a world where we are are the dominant life form. That’s what pushes the envelope of imagination. It’s what made Asimov’s Foundation series so great. Asimov had an uncanny grip on religion and science, without have strong emotions for or against either of them.

It’s why I find the singularity stuff so dull and stupid. It is just a blend of mysticism and science fiction, without a lot creativity. Instead of reaching a higher consciousness, we end up on a hard drive somewhere on a core Internet server. Great. Living out eternity as CPU cycles would cause a truly intelligent being to unplug one’s self from the grid.

That’s the error in the singularity argument. Life is not driven by survival. It is driven by reproduction. Reproduction, even amongst the lower species, is driven by hope. When times are good and the future is bright, we get lots of reproduction. When the opposite is true, we get the opposite. Put another way, if there’s no tomorrow, there’s no need to reproduce. If there’s no need to reproduce, there’s no need to live. The singularity, therefore, is the nullification of life.

When Barry Soetoro was elevated to Primate of the Cult of Modern Liberalism, many people outside the faith thought it was a good sign. Maybe putting a black guy in the White House would close the books on America’s race history. After all, how could guys like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson get any traction when the leader of the free world was a living rebuke to their agitations? Jacksons discomfort with Obama winning election seemed like proof of the concept.

I was always skeptical of it. I remembered the last Chocolate Jesus to come along and that guy was brighter and more sensible than Obama. If Kurt Schmoke could not resist the call of the past, this jug-eared clodhopper from the academy was not going to do it. I know too many black people to think that most do not harbor a fair number of revenge fantasies. I also know a fair bit about post-colonial African history. If blacks can think that the CIA invented crack, they can certainly believe there is a conspiracy to kill black people.

My hope for Obama was that he would be a dreary scold that largely followed the policies set in place by his predecessors. While not a big fan of the Bush-Clinton policy, I could live with it for another decade. Letting a nitwit like Obama try his hand at public policy sounded like a bad idea, but Obama seemed like a guy perfectly willing to do nothing but give speeches. That and I was sure the Cult knew it was insane to try and start a race war. That failed in the 60’s and nearly ended their cult, making “liberal” an epithet for two decades.

But, here we are. The Cult has black mobs harassing white people at suburban malls. They have members of the Black Guerilla Family “executing pigs” on the streets. The Black Guerilla Family, by the way, is a creation of the New Left forty years ago. Fay Stender, a radial lawyer, helped create the BGF while she was working for the Black Panthers. The BGF rewarded her efforts by shooting her five times in front of her son. That should have been the lesson all of them learned from the last liberal awakening. Radicalizing blacks leads to death and the monster will always destroy its creator.

It’s natural, of course, to look the other way and just hope this is a temporary fit of madness. I suspect that’s why bright guys like Ross Douthat put so much effort into looking away from the truth that is staring them in the face – even while they are writing about it. There’s fear of losing a way to earn a living, but there’s also the hope that things are not what they appear to be, even when the facts are so clear.

For a while the media has assumed that this kind of identity-based politics inevitably favors the left, because 21st-century America is getting less white every day.

But that’s too simplistic, in part because the definitions of “white” and “minority” are historically elastic. If a “white party” seems sufficiently clueless and reactionary, it will lose ground to a multicultural coalition. But as African-Americans know from bitter experience, “whiteness” has sustained itself by the inclusion of immigrants as well as by the exclusion and oppression of blacks. That history suggests that a “multicultural party” may always be at risk of being redefined as a grievance-based “party of minorities” that many minorities would prefer to leave behind. (And leadership matters, too: A protean figure like Barack Obama can put together a genuine rainbow coalition, but it’s not clear how many other politicians can do the same.)

The fact is you can’t built a political party around black identity. Everywhere it has been tried the result has been a bloodbath. If you’re going to build a party out of the dispossessed and disaffected, that party has to preach revolution and it has to promise vengeance. You can pretend otherwise, but the servants will never forgive their masters and the master will never trust their former servants. One side has to win completely, which is why violence is the logical end of what Obama and Democrats are doing.

The fact that the party of opposition, the White Party in Douthat’s parlance, is unwilling to face this reality just guarantees the result. The Black Party may hold delusions about a peaceful revolution of the fringe, but they seem perfectly willing to accept a violent result. The White Party just refuses to accept those choices. To the Black Party, it is a sign of weakness and that’s what guarantees the violent conclusion.

We need someone willing to speak to and for the silent majority or we will end up in the same place we landed the last time this lunacy was allowed to play out.

I must admit I have zero interest in Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s a magical ornament for the Cult and the fake nerds. He bills himself as a scientist, but he makes his living as an amusement park manager. That and doing the trained monkey bit on TV. There’s nothing wrong with it. Lots of people enjoy planetariums. Everyone loves TV and you can’t have TV without trained monkeys. But, it’s not my thing so I have not paid much attention to Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Lunatics are passing this video around so I watched it. My goodness. The guy is a complete and total clown.

I get that his audience wants validation so they come to hear the magical black guy tell them they are the bestest. My guess is there’s not a single person in the audience that could count their balls twice and come up with the same number so that means he can’t actually talk about real science. It’s all theater, a morality play, of sorts. He mocks the bad people in the familiar way and they arf like seals at the right time. It’s the Jon Stewart routine, but with high school science as the straight man instead of politics.

The thing that surprises me about this video is just how buffoonish he is during his act. The time or two I’ve caught him on TV he was pretending to be a serious scientist, but in that video he one step from dropping his pants and spraying his junk with seltzer. It’s rather embarrassing to watch, particularly since the premise is so absurd. If I did not know better, I’d think he was cleverly mocking the rubes in the audience.

Two cops executed by lunatic as revenge for Eric Garner.

Two uniformed NYPD officers were shot dead Saturday afternoon as they sat in their marked police car on a Brooklyn street corner — in what investigators believe was a crazed gunman’s execution-style mission to avenge Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

“It’s an execution,” one law enforcement source said of the 3 p.m. shooting of the two officers, whose names were being withheld pending family notification of their deaths.

The tragic heroes were working overtime as part of an anti-terrorism drill when they were shot point-blank in their heads by the lone gunman, who approached them on foot from the sidewalk at the corner of Myrtle and Tompkins avenues in Bed-Stuy.

“I’m Putting Wings on Pigs Today,” a person believed to be the gunman wrote on Instagram in a message posted just three hours before the officers were shot through their front passenger window.

The post included an image of silver automatic handgun with a wooden handle. Another post showed camouflage pants and blue sneakers which matched the clothing the dead gunman was wearing as his body was carried from the scene on a stretcher.

“They Take 1 Of Ours … Let’s Take 2 of Theirs,” the post continued, signing off with, “This May Be My Final Post.”

The gunman was a fugitive who had just murdered his girlfriend in Baltimore Saturday morning, sources told The Post.

Minutes after shooting the two officers, he, too, was dead.

He fled to a nearby subway station, the G-train station at Myrtle and Willoughby avenues, where, as pursuing cops closed in, he shot himself on a crowded platform, sources told The Post.

“They engaged the guy and he did himself,” one investigator said of the gunman’s demise.

Both shooting scenes — above and below ground — were scenes of blood and terror.

“I heard shooting, — four or five shots,” ear-witness Derrick McKie, 49, told The Post of the cops’ tragic murder. “It sounded like from a single gun,” he said. Ambulances and police cars rushed to the scene, he said.

“I seen them putting the cop in the ambulance. He looked messed up,” McKie, a barber, added. “He took a high caliber weapon to the face. He was lifeless…I couldn’t see where the holes was that, all I could see was blood. His body was lifeless.”

Modal Trigg Carmen Jimenez, 32, a social worker from Bedford-Stuyvesant, was on the subway platform when the gunman ran inside, pursued by officers.

“Everything happened so quick,” said Jimenez, who is eight months pregnant. “We were standing waiting for the G train. We heard arguing from the other end of the platform.

It looked like two cops came in there was lots of yelling and they said, ‘Everybody get down.’

“We tried to get out of there, and there was a lot of shouting, people were screaming, people were trying to run.

“I threw myself on the floor. I was afraid for my life and afraid for my baby.”

I hope when the “white community” comes together in an orgy of violence they go over to Bill de Blasio’s place and strangle him with one of those “I can’t breath” shirts the idiot ball players like to wear these days.

Update: Watching the news, it is not hard to see where this is going. The cops are furious with the Marxist nitwit mayor. Some pajama-boy on Fox is blaming the “atmosphere” in NYC, basically blaming the cops for causing the blacks to go wild. The Cult never takes the blame. It is always someone else.

That’s how it goes in an ideocracy.

I’m old and I hate change so naturally I think the kids, with their smartphones and sharing economy, are just a bunch of addled-minded commies, high on stupid. After all, what was wrong with hailing a cab and paying the fare? Now I’m supposed to hop in with some weirdo who drives strangers around town because he finds livery work self-actualizing? Fiddlesticks to that!

In all seriousness, I’ve been skeptical of Uber from the start. It has that slippery con-man vibe to it. Like everything else about the “sharing economy” it is real good at sharing the costs, but even better at privatizing the profits. Apparently, they are not very good at screening their drivers.

A man who works as a driver for the ride-sharing service Uber is accused of raping a woman he picked up in Boston.

The suspect, 46-year-old Alejandro Done of Boston, was arraigned Wednesday on charges of rape, assault to rape and assault and battery.

Authorities say on December 6, the victim was waiting for a ride-sharing driver at a residence on Tremont Street in Boston.

When the victim got into the car, the driver told her that he would need a cash payment for the ride, so he brought her to an ATM.

The driver then allegedly drove to a location the passenger was not familiar with, pulled over in a secluded area and jumped in the backseat where she was sitting.

“He allegedly struck her with his hands, strangled her, locked the car doors so that she could not escape and covered her mouth so she could not scream,” according to the Middlesex County District Attorney’s office. “During an ensuing physical struggle, the defendant allegedly sexually assaulted the woman.”

Uber says Done was not the driver the victim contacted to pick her up.

“This is a despicable crime and our thoughts and prayers are with the victim during her recovery,” Uber spokesperson Kaitlin Durkosh said. “Uber has been working closely with law enforcement and will continue to do everything we can to assist their investigation.”

Uber says Done passed a background check prior to becoming an independent contractor with the company. He is being held pending a dangerousness hearing scheduled for December 24 in Cambridge District Court.

Uber strikes me as one of the pet rock businesses of post-reality America. By that, I mean it is is a fun fad that people get rich from, but otherwise is not a real business with staying power. The reason is they are basically making money by deception. Part of that deception is cost shifting. They shift the operating costs of a taxi company onto the drivers, cell phone carriers and general society.

Let me explain that last part. On their site they say you don’t need extra insurance to be one of their drivers. That’s not exactly true. My insurance policy explicitly says I am not covered as a for-hire driver and my car will not be covered as a commercial vehicle. Uber says they cover you while you are on a trip, but the limits are the bare minimum and it is unclear if they are the primary or secondary carrier.

That’s just one piece of the cost shifted to the driver. If your fare spills their coffee, tears a seat of some other common occurrence, Uber is not paying for it. Uber is not getting your oil changed or your tires rotated. Basically, Uber is dodging the costs taxi companies face in fleet expenses, by suckering people into working for them under the table, in effect. What Uber is doing is no different than what landscapers do with illegal alien labor.

The old school taxi company they are “disrupting” is required to comply with a long list of laws, regulation, and insurance requirements. Those have costs which show up in the fare. No one is getting rich driving a taxi. Uber either shirks those costs or shifts them to the rest of us. That let’s them undercut the taxi companies and make money.

The argument from libertarians is that Uber is forcing changes to those regulation, taxes and so forth, by functioning as an above ground black market. We’ll see. It may be easier just to put Uber out of business. Either way, Uber is not magically making taxis cheaper. They are just hiding the costs. When you factor back in the cost of being raped by the Uber driver, a taxi starts looking pretty good again.

I thought this was a gag at first.

Religious leaders and ordinary Australians sought to defuse communal tensions on Monday, after a siege at a Sydney cafe by a gunman who forced hostages to display an Islamic flag raised fears of a backlash against the country’s Muslim minority.

Within hours of the attack on the Lindt cafe in the centre of the city, a Muslim group reported that women wearing the hijab had been spat on and the right-wing Australian Defence League called on followers to protest at two major mosques.

The protests did not materialise and little is known about the true motives of the gunman.

But in the harbourside city, home to half of Australia’s 500,000 Muslims, police moved on a man shouting anti-Islamic abuse at the scene of the ongoing siege.

The man strode up to a police cordon and shouted: “Someone is going to die here because of Islam! There is no such thing as moderate Islam. Wake up and smell the coffee.”

He was confronted by another man who shouted back: “Muslims are welcome here.” Police urged the first man to leave, to a mix of catcalls and claps of support.

The sad fact of the matter is the whites never return fire. Year after year the incidents of Muslim terrorism pile up and nothing is ever done about it. Maybe if Romper Stomper were true, there would be fewer Muslim’s to cause trouble in the civilized nations. Of course, that’s true everything else. Blacks riot and everyone worries about the white backlash that never comes. Whenever a group of lunatics gets out of hand, the first thing we see in the news is fear of a backlash from the normals, but it never comes.

The fact is, “backlash” is the Sasquatch of liberal journalism.

Things could be taking a very bad turn in Missouri.

The St. Louis police chief has asked for the FBI’s help investigating what he believes was a hate crime attack against a woman in the same Bosnian neighborhood where a man was beaten to death days earlier by hammer-wielding teens, and where assaults have spiked dramatically in recent months.

The 26-year-old Bosnian-American woman told police she was stopped in her car by three African-American teens early Friday morning in the city’s Bevo Mill section, where tens of thousands of Bosnians settled following the civil war in the former Yugoslavia 20 years ago. The incident occurred just blocks from where Zemir Begic, a 32-year-old Bosnian-American, was beaten to death by teenagers with hammers a week earlier.

One of the assailants flashed a gun and ordered the woman out of her vehicle and another hit the woman’s windshield with what police believe was a crowbar, authorities said.

“You’re Bosnian,” one of the suspects allegedly said. “I should just kill you now.”

The woman, who was pulled from the car and then beaten, was found unconscious by a passerby, police said. The alleged statement prompted St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson to present the case to the FBI.

“As of now, officers are investigating this incident as a bias crime based on the victim’s account of the incident,” the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said in an email Monday. “The investigation is ongoing.”

Authorities said they don’t believe the attacks on Begic and the woman are related, but acknowledged a disturbing rise in violent crime in the area in recent months. Although police have not made a connection, the crime spike coincides with the rioting that followed the August police shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, Mo.

Bevo Mill residents, whose neighborhood has seen a cumulative 24-percent rise in aggravated assaults over the last three months, say assaults and threats by packs of teenagers against Bosnians have become the norm. One who spoke to FoxNews.com on condition of anonymity due to safety reasons claims he and his family experienced a similar attack and said there is a disturbing pattern of violence against white residents in the area.

“It is common for African-American teens to walk in the middle of the street and block in cars at intersections,” said the man, who has lived in the neighborhood for half a decade. “We have been stopped at intersections in Bevo and our car attacked by teens who pound on the car — laughing at us.”

“They only do this to white individuals, who they have learned will generally not respond. There is a pattern here and it is racially motivated,” he alleged. “Many of us are arming ourselves in order to avoid becoming the next victim to be beaten to death in the streets.”

One of my favorite words is “mokita” which means the truth everyone knows but agrees not to discuss. Every culture has things like that. In America, everyone knows one truth about race relations. That is, if blacks ever go to war with whites, they will lose everything. When you are 13% of the population, you always have to navigate around the other 87%. Given America’s race history, “navigating” means blacks  can raise holy hell from time to time when they feel cheated, but they can never cross the line into full revolt.

Bosnians are pretty good at the tribal warfare stuff. Probably better than their black neighbors. Given our insane immigration policies, I’m betting there are quite a few ex-military/ex-militia living there in Missouri. You can be sure they will be dialing their kin back home as well. Garden variety white people would be fleeing to the suburbs. I’m thinking these Bosnains are home polishing their weapons tonight.

I wonder if LeeBong will be wearing a Bosnian flag shirt to show solidarity with those victims.

Americans are not fond of conspiracy theories. They make good movie devices, but most Americans take things at face value. In fact, people who promote conspiracy theories tend to be written off as kooks. The 9/11 Truthers and the Birthers are two notable examples. I tend to be skeptical of these things as I have been around too long to be anything other than skeptical. Franklin was right when he said that “three can keep a secret if two are dead.” The entirety of our news business relies on blabber-mouths telling tales out of school. People simply cannot keep secrets.

But, that does not mean there are no conspiracies. The other day Steve Sailer connected the dots between the authoress of the infamous Rolling Stone story and Stephen Glass, the fabulist who duped the Left many years ago. Sabrina Erdly was a classmate if Glass and she wrote a glowing article about him after his demise. That connection says nothing about the veracity of her claims, but it adds a nice bit of color to the controversy. At the minimum, Erdly is not someone who thinks fabricating stories is a bad thing, if it is for the right cause.

Here’s where things get interesting. One of Erdly’s sources for her tale, is a woman named Emily Renda. She is a UVA grad who brought “Jackie” to the attention of Erdly. It turns out that Renda was not just a concerned citizen. She was working for the White House and was part of the Administration’s new crusade to end the alleged rape culture on campus.

University alumna Emily Renda, who worked with the White House Task Force last spring and interns in the University Office of Student Affairs, said the new campaign will change the language used to discuss sexual assault prevention.

“Men weren’t particularly engaged with sexual violence prevention because the only thing we were really pushing as part of [it] was ‘don’t rape people,’ which is not exactly a very proactive thing to tell people to do,” Renda said. “The language is starting to shift more to healthy conversations about healthy sexuality and consent, and having those for both men and women as kind of an engagement point.”

Renda said the changed approach will involve men who have felt alienated and broadly characterized as perpetrators of sexual violence, as well as women who have felt alienated and broadly characterized as victims.

“This campaign and the stuff that U.Va. is already doing, is irrespective of gender saying ‘it is, in fact, our responsibility just as individuals and humans, regardless of our gender,’” she said. “It’s a lot about pulling back on the victim-perpetrator dichotomy we were using before.”

“It’s On Us” follows the path of University initiatives like “Hoos Got Your Back” and “Not On Our Grounds” in stressing the importance of bystander education and intervention against sexual assault.

“We intended for ‘Hoos Got Your Back’ to be an introduction to bystander [intervention], and to raise awareness for how important bystanders can be in fighting sexual misconduct,” Eramo said. “We kind of considered it our first step, and our next step is working on developing and implementing some training programs for students, so I think you’ll see more of that coming towards the end of this semester and into the spring semester.”

“It’s On Us” will work alongside the University’s sexual assault awareness groups to empower the initiative on Grounds.

“What [“It’s On Us”] will hopefully do is augment the messaging we already have,” Renda said. “The hope is that “It’s On Us” can … be some sort of sub-campaign within [the] broader, more University specific [groups], because we want to keep the language that’s relevant to our community, while still looking into the national prevention effort.”

So, we have the White House, as part of its political strategy, pushing the bogus rape culture stuff. We have a member of the administration feeding a bogus story to a social justice warrior, who dutifully writes a highly fictionalized version for a progressive website known for its click-bait journalism.

Now that’s a conspiracy you can sink your teeth into!