I was listening to something the other day and there was a mention of the Lion Man of Hohlenstein Stadel. It is a piece of Paleolithic art, the oldest known to exist, from an area of the Swiss Alps where a lot of Aurignacian artifacts have been found. Carbon dating puts it at 32,000 years old, give or take. If you take a close look at the pics in the link, you will see it is sort of a half cat and half man thing. The remarkable thing about it is the detail. The “caveman” who created that thing was highly skilled. It is carved from a mammoth tusk and was carved with a flint knife, most likely.

That bit of art tells us a great deal about the people who created it. They had time to have at least one guy make art. They possessed the ability to imagine things that did not exist. That assumes there were no lion-men running around Europe at the time. Maybe the ancient aliens who gave humans civilization looked like lion-human hybrids, but that’s not the current theory. Instead, the level of sophistication in this piece as well as others suggests a high degree of cognitive ability and a sophisticated culture, one with religion and abstract reasoning. It means Aurignacian were modern humans.

That’s all important stuff. Well, it is important to sensible people interested in the origins of humanity. To social justice warriors, it is secondary to the fight against the pale penis people. In refreshing my memory of the artifact, I found this story about how Euro-nags are demanding the statue be called “Höhlenlöwin” (female European cave lion). The sex of the item could be useful, but without context it is meaningless anyway so there’s no point in debating, unless you are a crazed feminist determined to make a nuisance of yourself.

The only the reason to post about this is I think this stuff is cool and to underscore a point. These nuts that turn up from time to time in the media screeching about some made up crisis are not harmless. Imagine a plague of rage zombies running wild through the streets. They may be small in number and easy to pick off one at a time, but they still cause a lot of damage. That’s what we have in our intellectual space. Feminists, communists, anarchists and every other imaginable type of lunatic is running around wreaking havoc on public debate and intellectual discourse.

There’s a cost to it beyond the direct damage. Smart people with controversial ideas are less inclined to step forward when they know some nutter could pop up and ruin their career and life. An example is the Rape Hoax at the University of Virginia I wrote about the other day. The pajama boys at National Review are now jumping in on the act, borrowing heavily from Steve Sailer, who gets zero mention from the respectable chattering skulls, even though he seems to function as their spirit guide. As Steve pointed out, supposedly sensible people were too timid to point out the warning signals that the whole thing may be fiction.

Only after some fringe weirdos made the case did the cautious dip their toe in the water.

G. Gordon Liddy used to enjoy calling “corrections officers” prison guards on his radio show. Inevitably, guards would call in to defend their “profession” and chastise him for his choice of labels. He would then remind them that they chose to go into a “profession” that required them to look into the anus of other men. Things got ugly from there, but it was fun radio. It was also a good point. We have larded up job names in order to conceal them. The classic is calling garbage men sanitary engineers.

A bigger point is that the sorts of people who go into these jobs are often as unpleasant as the job we’re trying to conceal. There are not a lot of soft, sophisticated men hanging off the back of garbage trucks. The guys guarding animals in cells are just as mean and nasty as the people they guard. They just know how to obey the rules. Similarly, cops are more often than not criminals with a badge and a gun. That’s a point Liddy enjoyed making.

It’s obvious when you see stories like this one.

The two men in the rented red Nissan Altima were poker players traveling through Iowa on their way to Las Vegas. The police were state troopers on the hunt for criminals, contraband and cash.

They intersected last year on a rural stretch of Interstate 80, in a seemingly routine traffic stop that would soon raise new questions about laws that allow police to take money and property from people not charged with crimes.

By the time the encounter was over, the gamblers had been detained for more than two hours. Their car was searched without a warrant. And their cellphones, a computer and $100,020 of their gambling “bankroll” were seized under state civil asset-forfeiture laws. The troopers allowed them to leave, without their money, after issuing a traffic warning and a citation for possession of marijuana paraphernalia that carried a $65 fine, court records show.

Months later, an attorney for the men obtained a video of the stop. It showed that the motorists were detained for a violation they did not commit — a failure to signal during a lane change — and authorities were compelled to return 90 percent of the money.

This is nothing more than piracy. In the age of sail, government would quietly grant permission to pirates to attack the shipping of their enemies. The British made a big show of chasing pirates, but they employed many of them. Today, states grant their police the right to rob people on the highways, seize their property and demand ransoms. Not all states, of course, but many do this. Fighting the system is often not worth the trouble. Drug dealers are not suing the state for their drug money back so they keep quiet.

Now the men are questioning the police tactics in an unusual federal civil rights lawsuit. In the suit, filed Sept. 29, William Barton Davis, 51, and John Newmer­zhycky, 43, both from Humboldt County, Calif., claim their constitutional rights against unreasonable searches and seizures were violated. They also contend the stop was part of a pattern connected to the teachings of a private police-training firm that promotes aggressive tactics.

Davis is a professional poker player, and Newmerzhycky worked as glass blower, according to court records. In an interview, Davis said the men felt as though they were being “stalked” by the police.

If allowed to proceed, the lawsuit could illuminate the widespread but little-known police practice known as “highway interdiction.” The suit names Desert Snow, the Oklahoma-based training firm, and its founder, Joe David, court records show. It also names the two Iowa State Patrol troopers who participated in the traffic stop and were trained by Desert Snow.

Desert Snow’s lead instructor, David Frye, said the lawsuit has no merit and contains “outrageous” and “inaccurate” accusations.

There’s a line in Shawshank Redemption where Red gives a speech at his parole hearing. He says something along the lines that the job of parole board member is just make work for college boys. There’s a lot of make work in a society and ours is overflowing with it. This company training cops to shake down civilians on the highway should never exist. His company exists because of the laws that permit this sort of theft from people by the police. There are armies of diversity trainers, human resource managers, insurance consultants, etc., who exist solely because the law creates a need for them.

The rest of the story is worth reading. Three quick points come to mind. One is never talk to a cop unless required by the law. They are just criminals with badges so they should be treated as such. Yeah, I know, most are just doing their job. But some are not and you can’t know that. Cooperate with crooks like the two in the story and you could find yourself in jail while they find a way to steal your property.

The other thing that comes to mind is how these laws have not been challenged in court. Even in our degenerate times, due process is enforced. Stealing someone’s property and making them sue to get it back should never stand in court. We’re a mess as a country, but we’re not North Korea. At the minimum, the state should be required to get permission from the court to seize property.  In this case that would probably have stopped the whole thing before it got to the search.

Finally, later in the story the cops raid the guy’s home and find weed. They charge them with possession and a stack of other crimes that are all the same thing. Sandbagging has gone so far out of control even misdemeanour’s fill a page of the charging document. Come to find out they had a permit to grow their own weed. This is what we see all the time now. Charge/arrest first and force the citizen to prove they are innocent.

We are now government by highway men.

Way back before writing was common, there was a young black politician coming along who was ticketed for big things. The FDR-New Deal coalition was in tatters and the Reagan Revolution was in full swing. Catholics, the so-called Reagan Democrats, were walking away from the Liberal Democrats. Southern whites were heading for the exits. In both cases the underlying issue was race. The Civil Rights Movement turned into looting and retribution, busting up the old coalition that had made the Democrats the majority part for 50 years.

In the midst of what looked like a collapse of the American Left, the search was on for “new” Democrats. The Democratic Leadership Council was founded in ’85 with the goal of reforming the party and unloading the old commies and radicals that scared the hell out of decent people. The search was also on for new black leaders. Lunatics like Jesse Jackson were embarrassing and reminded whites of what went wrong with the Civil Rights Movement. That’s how Kurt Schmoke got his start in politics.

Instead of being a man of the streets, Schmoke was a man from the Ivy League. On paper he looked like the ideal black guy. He was smart, well spoken and civilized. He avoided all the bomb throwing that other black politicians could never seem to resist. Schmoke was a black politician who could go toe-to-toe with the white guys in the board room and the classroom. He was guided into elected office by the Maryland Democratic machine and eventually became mayor of Baltimore.

I recall being at a reception of some sort where Schmoke was ushered around by some big shot Democrats. The buzz about the guy was thick. He was going to be the first black governor and maybe the first black president. Instead he was mayor and never went any further in politics. He entered office as a technocrat who would make the city work. His first was uneventful, but it was clear he was not up to the task of fixing the city. By his second term it was typical black city politics. The pols were looting the treasury and the city services were declining. The people were also fleeing in droves.

The interesting thing about Schmoke, and the only reason I bothered to keep up with his career, is he could never resist the pull of black racial solidarity. By his final term in office, he was dressed like an African potentate. He was sporting a kufi and dashiki. At one point he was flying the ANC flag at City Hall. Gone was all the talk of sitting with the white man as an equal. It was all black power and separatism. He even hired the Nation of Islam for security.

As Obama came along I was reminded of old Kurt Schmoke. The pitch was a bit different as the Cult was ascendent, rather than in decline. Back in the 80’s they were hoping to stave off collapse. In the 2000’s they were talking about realignment and making the Right a fringe operation. Instead of being a clean articulate black guy who would not scare the whites, Obama was a clean articulate black guy who would scare the whites. That’s largely been true, but Obama seems to be following the same path as Schmoke at the end of his time. Today Obama held a hate whitey festival at the White House. He invited all of the usual toothaches from the racial grievance industry.

The decent thing to do now is to let the whole Ferguson matter fade into the past. Race relations is about keeping the peace. That’s it. There will never be a colorblind society. If Obama cared a whit about improving race relations he’d be out front in closing the book on the whole thing. Instead he seems hell bent on causing blacks to riot nationwide. Like old Kurt Schmoke decades ago, he is embracing his Afro side with a vengeance and will spend the remainder of his term inflicting exactly that, vengeance.

This reminds me of something else from the old days. Obama’s sponsors, Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, were attracted to radical politics because they thought it upset the squares. In their Weather Underground days, they set out to do exactly that. The point of their terrorism was no point at all. They just liked mayhem. That’s what Obama’s Hate Whitey Day looks like. It’s just a way to cause trouble for no good reason. Bourgeois radicalism is just an extended tantrum against the peace and prosperity of the adults.

One final thought. I’m struck by the reaction of whites to all of this. When it comes to race, it has been a long time since whites have spoke forthrightly about the subject in public. On-line and on television I’m seeing some tough words about black crime, black racism and the general dysfunction of black America. That used to be the sort of thing that got you banished to Steve Sailer’s basement. In private, I’m hearing white people speak in ways that would have made Archie Bunker blush.  If blacks had the capacity to self-police, they would be wise to muffle their bomb-throwers now and let all this settle down.

I wrote the other day that the Rolling Stone tale about a rape victim at the University of Virginia sounded fake. In order for it to be true requires a whole lot of other things to be true that are implausible. The most obvious being that a university where victimology is a mandatory religion would callously suppress stories about their secret rape culture. It also requires me to believe that upper-middle class Eloi, who spend their days playing Quidditch, are barbaric rapist at night. That and the story sounds like a passage from Lena Dunham psuedo-biography.

It looks like Steve Sailer is on the story now. And some guy I never heard of is on the trail too.

The latter blogger makes some good factual points. He also touches on what I wrote and that is the Rolling Stone story reads like a bad after school special. It is what people imagine goes one with their worst enemies when no one is around to record it. In this case, the rape culture fanatics in the womyn’s studies program who never get invited to frat parties. They think all men are rapists, particularly the ones who never look their way.

I have some familiarity with the University of Virginia. It is one of the “New Ivies” and that means it is drawing from the upper-middle classes. The members of the plutocracy that live in Northern Virginia send their kids there. This is the most fragile of the fragile males for the most part. I’m talking about the kid of boys that write things like this. If anyone is getting raped in these fraternities, it is the frat brothers.

I’m reminded of the Isaac Asimov novel Foundation. The people in charge figured out how to use religion to control their more powerful enemies. They turned science into a religion and supplied the “priests” to administer the “religion” for their neighbors. The point being is that if you control the magical thoughts all people have in their heads, you effectively control the people. Today, the magical thinking in most people’s heads has to do with keeping the pale penis people from rampaging through the vulnerable. The Cult through its cadre of priests is there to protect blacks, young women, foreigners, etc.

Way back in the olden thymes, the assumption was that blacks were too dumb to play quarterback. Amazingly, people said this while Terry Bradshaw was leading the Steelers to championships. Before Super Bowl XIII, Cowboys linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson famously ridiculed Bradshaw by saying, “He is so dumb he couldn’t spell ‘Cat’ if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘a’.” Whether or not Bradshaw was really that dumb has always been in question, given is long run of success after his playing career.

Still, it says something about the view of the position that people thought blacks could not play quarterback. It was not just racist white people either. Blacks generally thought this too. In the movie North Dallas Forty, there’s a line about it and no one was picketing the movie theaters over it. This idea has become so dangerous today that sports people have created a meta-language to describe it without ever actually saying it. Chattering skulls will just nod at one another whenever the subject is broached.

For a long time now the goal of football at all levels is to prove that blacks are better quarterbacks than whites. It is an obsession going on at least a twenty years, starting with Donovan McNabb. He was the first black QB to come along who allegedly had the intellect to do all the things white guys could do, but also possessed the special black magic that is so highly prized in the cult. McNabb’s inability to win the big game and become the great chocolate savior was frustrating for the Cult. It is why they attacked Rush Limbaugh for noticing it.

In the last decade we have had Michael Vick held up as the new model quarterback, even after he was found to be a sadistic sociopath with a taste for torturing animals. The latest crop includes Cam Newton, Colin Kapernick, Russell Wilson and Robert Griffin III. None of these guys is very good at being an NFL quarterback. Wilson is the best of the bunch, but he acts white and votes Republican so the Cult has trouble lauding him as their chocolate savior.

Newton and Kapernick are obvious dumbbells who will never be great at their position. Both were just big fast guys who can run like the wind, but that’s not a great skill for quarterback. The NFL has loads of big fast guys. The shortage is with smart guys who can run a modern NFL offense. Dummies that move their lips when they read can play other positions, but not quarterback. That’s why both of them are fading from the spotlight.

Robert Griffin III was going to be different. He is smart, charismatic, has the special black magic the Cult values and he was not acting white like Wilson. The Cult could look past Griffin’s politics because he had dreadlocks, which the Cult associates with black culture. RG3 was the poster child for the “new” NFL and the “new” quarterback. I put “new” in quotes because this is about the tenth time we have gone through this. Now, Griffin’s career may be over.

Griffin has made close to $20 million and has millions in sponsorship money coming his way so no one needs to feel sorry for him. NFL careers are short and most guys find themselves as salary men before they hit their 25th birthday. Griffin is doing just fine and will probably have a long career in sportscasting after his football career. Even after his troubles in Washington, some team will give him another shot next year and maybe he can extend his career.

In many ways Griffin is emblematic of how the Cult treats blacks as ornaments, not people. Griffin is a special athlete, but he was not trained to be an NFL quarterback in college. His college ran a system that allowed him to run around as a tailback, rather than as a NFL-style quarterback. Griffin should have sat and learned for a few years before getting on the field. Instead, the pressure to have the next great black quarterback put him on the field when he was not ready and he got his legs broken up trying to be a runner in a league unkind to runners.

Griffin is emblematic of the Cult’s view of blacks. The Cult does not see them as real people and instead treats them like ornaments to decorate their halls. When a black person is useful they get to sit at the big table, but as soon as they’re no longer useful, they are dispatched. You can see it happening with Obama as the Cult distances themselves from a black guy they no longer find useful. Griffin will get the same treatment now as he is balled up and thrown away by the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

I started shaving when I was around 13 or 14. I no longer remember the exact time. My father shaved with straight razors and then safety razors. Neither looked all that enticing so I was pretty sure I was going to be a guy who just let his beard grow, but the adults had other ideas so I started shaving once I could grow even a little bit of a beard. By the time I hit adulthood disposable razors were common enough and decent enough to drop the safety razor. I don’t have a heavy beard, but I still need a decent razor to get a clean shave. For decades that meant cheap disposables, as long as they didn’t have those weird strips on them.

In other words, shaving is not high on my list of concerns. So, I’m watching football today and I keep seeing commercials for a company called Dollar Shave Club. There’s another company running ads for a similar racket. In both cases the ads make it appear there’s a huge expense and hassle to buying razors. They claim that I can save hundreds a year buying on-line, something I know is impossible. I probably spend $50 a year on razors. The ones I buy are $3 for 10. That’s roughly two pounds sterling for my UK readers. A couple of times a month I buy a pack while at the market.

I found this story on why there’s a sudden razor panic that has not affected me or anyone I know. It would appear that in spite of the beard fad, men around the world are struggling with their razor purchases. Just as Uber has come to the rescue of cab fares, Dollar Shave Club is saving men from the trauma of razor shopping.

Or, it is nonsense.

A decade ago or so, the sporting press was obsessed over black head coaches in football. In response, the NFL instituted the Rooney Rule, forcing owners and general managers to interview black coaching candidates. We saw a rash of black guys getting jobs and the panic subsided. I have no idea how many black head coaches there are now, but no one talks about it so I’m assuming the answer is “enough.” I’m watching the Lions and Bears as I type this and I see a lot of black guys in coaching togs.

The weird thing is this panic never extended to college ball, where you rarely see black head coaches. Every once in a while it gets mentioned, but you don’t see the panic. The SEC had some black coaches so I guess that screws up the normal narrative where southern white males are blamed for everything race related. I always suspected that the real reason the Cult never focused on college is even they have to accept that college is run by the Left. If they are going to get on colleges for not hiring black guys, they will be shouting at a mirror.

The other day NRO had a somewhat comical opinion up regarding the alleged rape culture of the University of Virginia. Rich Lowry is a UVA grad so I’m sure he has a strong interest in the story. Rolling Stone has a long piece supposedly about a woman raped at Virginia by, wait for it, a bunch of white guys at a fraternity. I’m a bit skeptical about the Rolling Stone story as it reads like what liberals imagine happens in the rape culture of fraternities.

I’m skeptical of these sorts of stories because they contradict daily life. We’re supposed to believe that the coeds at the modern college think like coeds from Hollywood movies about coeds in the 1950’s. Five minutes around young people says that’s laughable. We’re also supposed to believe that the people running the school are callous to the victims, despite the daily parade of victims they trot around campus as a part of their haranguing of the student body.

That’s the part that makes the Rolling Stone story tough to accept. The modern college campus is a celebration of victimology. The people in charge are so far out on the Left they would make Pol Pot uncomfortable. Yet, we’re supposed to believe that they are turning a blind eye to gangs of feral white boys raping the hell out of the pretty little white girls. You’ll note the narrative never has any black people in it. The so called “rape culture” on campus looks a lot like a horror film written by the local lesbian club.

That brings me back to the black football coach issue. The piety pyramid says black guys trump white girls, gay or straight. Yet, we have the Cult ignoring the black coaching story and seizing on the plight of the sorority sister. The former requires saying bad things about their coreligionists who run the schools. The latter lets them rant about faceless, nameless bogeymen and make believe victims that evoke the right kinds of emotions.

The frustrating part of this is how the modern Right rolls over for this nonsense. The professor who wrote the opinion piece for NRO should have to give back his diplomas. First, he swallows the Rolling Stone story, despite the obvious problems. Second, he cannot bring himself to look out his own window at the place he works and compare that to the imaginary world conjured in these stories.

The real madness in this new front in the war is the unstated claim at the core of the rape culture nonsense. For it to be true, rape amongst middle-class college white guys is spiking at a time when overall rape is in a steep decline. In fact, rape has dropped 58% between 1995 and 2010. Those numbers include colleges so the rape culture crowd has a math problem. But, like everything else that belches froth from the Cult, logic and reason are the first casualty.

I’m not sure where I saw this site. It may have been Maggie’s Farm, but I’m not sure. I always get a kick out of these things because they are mostly bullshit. If you go through the questions, they tell you the combination of famous people you most resemble. None of the famous people are monsters or evil. The idea is to flatter the user, not horrify them. Still, I’d be tempted to have results that said the user had a brain like Hitler or Jack the Ripper, but I’d be a terrible astrologer.

Here is my result:

Leonardo of Arc
You have an active imagination and free-spirited side, which means you dream big, believe anything can happen, and are open to new experiences that might present opportunities to learn and explore. You get these traits from Leonardo da Vinci, the genius artist, inventor and mathematician whose talent is still considered to be one of the greatest in the world.

But you’re also very disciplined, and have a strong work ethic that grounds your personality and gives all your big dreams and ideas the fuel to become reality. You get these traits from Joan of Arc, the bold, fearless French heroine who was also canonized as a Catholic saint.

Joan of Arc was probably a schizophrenic. She had “visions” and heard voices. There’s some speculation that she faked it and was some sort of a con-artist, but grifters don’t take their con so far that they get burned at the stake. Modern feminists have made her a heroine of their cause so that’s probably why the site used her in its rotation. I took the test a few more times and got different results each time so they may be using a random personality generator.

The IQ crowd puts a lot of stock in these sorts of profiles. The Big Five personality traits are the gold standard. You can take the self-exam here if you’re interested. I’ve given a lot of these types of exams in the past and I know a lot of companies that use them for management development. The military academies used to administer them, but I don’t know if that is still the case. At the academies, testing for leadership is of obvious value so they do a lot of it.

There’s a lot of good science behind it, but I’m not 100% sold. The reason I’ve always been a bit skeptical is I’ve taken these things and it is not hard to figure out the point of the questions. I’ve been able to game the test to get the result I wanted so I’m sure more devious minded people can do it with no problem. Then there is the fact people tend to lie on self-assessments. That said, I’ve been tested a lot so I’m probably not a great example. I also like reverse engineering these tests so I probably notice the patterns more readily that others.

Regardless, the Internet says I’m an artistic schizophrenic or a highly disciplined French heroine.

Way back when Jonah Goldberg was a regular at NRO, he would often promote the blogger Ezra Klein. He would respond to Klein’s posts and I think he did some podcasts with him. Jonah Goldberg is a bright guy and fairly sensible. I know, for example, that he regularly reads Steve Sailer and Peter Brimelow, but he cautions against mentioning them in public. Goldberg understands the media world and you don’t want to be associated with the fringe if you want to keep your career. At the same time, you better read these fringe guys if you want to know what’s going on in the world. Even though I don’t agree with Goldberg on a lot of things, I respect him as a chattering skull.

But, I never got his affinity for Klein. My read on Klein is he is a narrow-minded fanatic with a mediocre IQ. Like most bourgeois millennials, he is good at dressing himself up as an intellectual, but like most bourgeois millennials he lacks self-awareness and lacks any curiosity about the limits of his knowledge. Instead he does what all these guys did in college and that’s suck up to the teacher by repeating the lecture with more enthusiasm than the professors was ever able to muster.

Anyway, this latest letter from Ezra to whoever still reads him is getting lots of run. Most of it is mocking, and it deserves to be mocked.

We’ve finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson.

Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And, even as the grand jury announced its decision not to indict him, he remained silent. He had his attorneys release a statement on his behalf.

But on Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson’s full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “difficult or impossible to believe.” But I want to be clear here. I’m not saying Wilson is lying. I’m not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.

The unintentional comedy here is hilarious. The always earnest Ezra Klein is saying he was so committed to the narrative peddled by his cult that he is now sitting in stunned amazement to learn it was all nonsense.

What happens next is the most unbelievable moment in the narrative. And so it’s probably best that I just quote Wilson’s account at length on it.

I was doing the, just scrambling, trying to get his arms out of my face and him from grabbing me and everything else. He turned to his…if he’s at my vehicle, he turned to his left and handed the first subject. He said, “here, take these.” He was holding a pack of — several packs of cigarillos which was just, what was stolen from the Market Store was several packs of cigarillos. He said, “here, hold these” and when he did that I grabbed his right arm trying just to control something at that point. Um, as I was holding it, and he came around, he came around with his arm extended, fist made, and went like that straight at my face with his…a full swing from his left hand.

So Brown is punching inside the car. Wilson is scrambling to deflect the blows, to protect his face, to regain control of the situation. And then Brown stops, turns to his left, says to his friend, “Here, hold these,” and hands him the cigarillos stolen from Ferguson Market. Then he turns back to Wilson and, with his left hand now freed from holding the contraband goods, throws a haymaker at Wilson.

Every bullshit detector in me went off when I read that passage. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen exactly the way Wilson describes. But it is, again, hard to imagine. Brown, an 18-year-old kid holding stolen goods, decides to attack a cop and, while attacking him, stops, hands his stolen goods to his friend, and then returns to the beatdown. It reads less like something a human would do and more like a moment meant to connect Brown to the robbery.

Ezra Klein went to one of the safest public high schools on the planet. It may have the lowest NAM population outside of Reykjavik High. He grew up in the sort of neighborhood that has such a public school. He went onto college and life in super white American media. In other words, Ezra is a sissy without the slightest clue how violent men go about their business. Anyone who has spent time in the ghetto watched that video of the Gentle Giant shaking the life out of the Asian clerk and saw the familiar. It’s how ghetto boys roll.

Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?

None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. Brown wasn’t a hardened felon. He didn’t have a death wish. And while he might have been stoned, this isn’t how stoned people act. The toxicology report did not indicate he was on PCP or something that would’ve led to suicidal aggression.

Who do you mean by “we” Eloi?

I read Karl Denninger daily. He’s crazy as an outhouse rat, but he makes a good point once in a while. His bizarre fascination with Blackberry is hilarious to me. His threats to ban posters who disagree with him are great theater. Some poor sap thinks he is dealing with a sane blogger and then Karl goes crazy on him for posting something Karl does not like. Most of all he is a great example of how conspiracy nuts think.

The decision was “no bill” which isn’t all that surprising — but I maintain that this case had to go to a petit jury and be heard in public — not in the “privacy” of a Grand Jury room.  The reason is this:

Wilson then fired another round of shots as Brown approached Wilson as if he was going to tackle the officer.

“Just coming straight at me like he was going to run right through me,” Wilson said. “And when he gets about … 8 to 10 feet away … all I see is his head and that’s what I shot.”

I cannot square that with the forensics — specifically, if Brown was coming straight at Wilson at a full charge, and he was shot in the process of that charge, being killed instantly as we know occurred from the forensics where is the damage to his knees, legs, arms and/or other body parts from falling forward onto pavement while at said full charge?

This is the problem that I cannot resolve between the testimony and the physical evidence and it deserves to be heard in public and resolved.

I believed and still do believe that only an indictment would lead to the exposition and determination of these facts, and thus whether Brown was lawfully stopped in the middle of his assault or was killed in an act of manslaughter or worse.

However, like it or not you have to respect the process.  If it’s broken (and I believe it is in circumstances such as this) we need to change that rather than looting and burning the town.

His bizarre use of bold and italics leads me to imagine someone banging away on their keyboard in a manic fit. His whole site reminds me of the early days of the Interwebs when people were first learning how to use HTML. If you could do it, you did it and the results were seedy and garish.

To the point. The conspiracy nut  is never satisfied. Karl spent a lot of time noodling over how the Gentle Giant was shot in the top of the head. Now we know. It was never that great of a mystery, but the conspiracy minded latch onto little inconsistencies like this and then build their grand theories from them. Originally, Karl was sure the autopsy contradicted the cops version of events. It  turns out that the evidence and witnesses back the cop’s version.

But, that’s not how the mind of a nutter works. They keep moving the goal posts whenever new evidence throws their theory for a loop. Now he says the grand jury should have charged someone they did not think committed a crime. That way the nutters can spend a year analyzing the evidence for signs the Illuminati are behind the whole thing. They just can’t except things for what they are. In this case, a cop shot a guy who was attacking him.

The wicked part of this line of argument we’re getting from the libertarian cult is that they reject the notion that their fellow citizens can figure out this stuff on their own. Good or ill, civil societies base their criminal justice system on the notion that common citizens can look at the evidence and judge the guilt or innocence of another citizen. It’s not perfect, but it is the best we can do. Rejecting the grand jury system is a rejection of the liberal model of criminal justice.

Therein lies the fundamental difference between the Old Right an everyone else. The Old Right was willing to accept bad outcomes, as long as the law is followed. All of these other guys will trample the law in order to get their desired result. As soon as you say the ends justifies the means, you’re on your way to the death chamber.