I recall John Derbyshire discussing his fondness for Anglican Hymns, despite not being an Anglican. He related a story from a friend who continued to attend regular services, despite no longer believing in God. The friend said it was out of loyalty to the old tribe. Similarly, Derb has a fondness for the Christian rituals of his people out of a loyalty to and fondness for the tradition. That, I suspect, is something all of us have for something or another in our lives. Maybe it is a holiday tradition or family tradition that no longer makes much sense or possibly never made any sense.

An example in my own life is the making of chipped beef on toast over Thanksgiving. My father loved that breakfast. It is classic enlisted man food that carried into the American working class after World War II. I have few fond memories of my father, but it reminds me of better times for some reason. It is a tradition I have upheld to this day. Again, there’s nothing rational about it, but there’s an emotional tug that is impossible to resist.

I’ve been thinking about that today as the election draws near. I have voted since I was able to vote. I’ve voted in off-year elections and municipal elections, even when the stakes were so low that barely anyone else bothered to vote. I voted in the 1990’s when it was clear to me the GOP was rejecting every lesson learned in the Reagan years and were sprinting to catch the Liberal Democrats. I voted when that stone stupid sock puppet George Bush was president. I even voted in 2008 when the choice was between a dimwitted neophyte with nothing more than race on his side and an insane old man who barely knows where he is most of the time.

In 2012 I went to my polling place with the enthusiasm of a man heading for the gallows. Romney was not much of an upgrade to Obama in my view, but I’ve had to select between worse choices. I once had Ted Kennedy as my senator and Joe Kennedy as my Congressman. Imagine that. Plus, the chance to maybe get rid of the execrable Barak Obama was something.

As I was walking in I spotted a school bus unloading a bunch of Aztecs and Mayans. An old white woman was handing them instructions and speaking to them in bad Spanish. Clearly the Democrat GOTV effort was set to eleven. Bussing in illegal aliens in a district with 99% Democrat electorate is going the extra mile.

Inside I got in-line behind a chubby white girl with a fuchsia afro and a tackle box full of metal in her face. She was furiously tapping on her phone to some other dimwit. Behind me the Mayans were filing in, jibber-jabbering to one another in Mam. The poll workers were shuffling around from station to station, doing something. Every once in a while one of them would bark out a command. The pointlessness of it was overwhelming. The nitwit in front of me and the Mayans behind would surely cancel my vote many times over. I walked out without voting.

That was the first election I had skipped as an adult and I felt bad about it, but I was done voting. It is one thing to hang with an old pointless custom out of sentimentality. It is quite another to infuriate yourself doing something you vaguely sense is doing you harm. I skipped the last primary, despite some nagging sense of obligation creeping in on me. The lack of contested races made it easier. I live in a one party state so not voting is a bit easier, but the old sense of obligation was creeping in on me again.

Still, that old sense of obligation is there. It is not that my vote counts or that I really care who wins. That’s not my fault. Forces beyond my control have made my citizenship worthless. What I can control is how I discharge my duties and obligations. That means I’ll probably stop at my polling place in the morning and cast my ballot. The choices may be awful and I may hate having to vote for any of them, but at least I will have done my duty. My country may not care much for me and citizenship may mean nothing, but I still can be a good citizen. At least I’ll have that.

I’ve always admired the Left’s ability to quickly rationalize disconfirmation. Unlike any other religious movement, it has the ability to absorb defeats and turn them into building blocks for future assaults on their enemies. The Romans, before empire, had a similar quality. No matter how badly there were beaten in battle, they just assumed they would win eventually. It’s probably what stymied Hannibal. Even after Cannae, the Romans were not defeated. The American Left is similar. No amount of evidence will break the spirit of the believers.

Facing a bad night this Tuesday, Joe Biden is already saying the results will force the other side to yield.

Vice President Joe Biden says he expects congressional Republicans to work to “get things done” if they win control of the Senate — and he notes the White House is prepared to give a little.

In an interview with CNN released on Monday, Biden said that while he still expects the Democrats to retain Senate control, he believes a Republican-controlled Senate will move beyond obstructionism.

“[G]oing into 2016, the Republicans have to make a decision whether they’re in control or not in control,” the vice president told Gloria Borger. “Are they going to begin to allow things to happen? Or are they going to continue to be obstructionists? And I think they’re going to choose to get things done.”

It really is amazing to watch. The people could rise up, drag Obama from the White House and hang him from a lamp post and the Left would respond by saying it is proof the mob has to compromise. When the shoe was on the other foot, the Left suggested that the remaining Republicans commit suicide, right after murdering their families. After all, the people had spoke and the Cult was the winner.

It is why the GOP will do exactly that, compromise. I think many in the GOP admire the tenacity and togetherness of the Cult. Time and circumstance keep them on the outside, but I suspect they wish they could be in the club. Middlebrow stiffs like John Boehner look at the Cult in the same way the shopkeeper looks at the aristocrat. That’s the bait. Obama and Biden will sweet talk Boehner and McConnell into thinking this time they will get invited to the party, right after they sign off on whatever it is the Cult wants, probably amnesty.

When all hell breaks lose after the grand compromise, the rubes like Boehner will be shocked to find out that their new friends are laughing at them behind their back on the pages of the Washington Post and New York Times. Newt Gingrich was famous for falling into this trap. The pudgy dork with bad hair and the weird name always wanted to hang out with the cool kids. That was his weakness. That and donuts.

My read on Debbie Wasserman Schultz is that she serves one purpose. She’s good at wiggling her ass in front of old Jewish men who write checks for the Florida Democrats. She may not be your cup of tea, but old guys at the Breakers just love gals like Debbie. She reminds them of the girls they married or should have married. Now, they have a weathered old bat nagging them all day. Debbie parlayed that into a nice local career, but ambition got the better of her and she tried to become a national figure. The results have not been good.

Still, she is a true believer with the IQ of a gold fish and the tenacity of a pit bull. Politics is not an intellectual game. It is about willpower and Debbie has that is spades. She wants to win more than anything and is willing to say and do anything to win. In another age, she would have been the king’s top concubine or maybe the local madam. She may be dumb as a post, but that shear determination to win overcomes a lot.

That’s the real power of the Cult. They put lunatics to good use. Here’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz doing her Baghdad Bob routine.

Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) predicted Sunday that her party will hold the Senate in Tuesday’s midterms thanks to its “superior” ground games in key states.

“I think we’re going to hold the Senate,” Wasserman Schultz said during an interview with ABC’s “This Week.” “We have a ground game that I know [the GOP] would take over theirs any day of the week.”

Wassermann Schultz also cited the high-level surrogates working with Democratic candidates on the campaign trail, including former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden.

Noting close poll numbers in key states, she said the Democratic party’s advantages are “superior to the ones that Republicans have.”

“When we keep races this close, Democrats win,” said Wasserman Schultz.

The upbeat assessment stood in stark contrast to the conclusions drawn by Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus during the same segment.

“Our ground game is whipping their ground game,” Priebus said, adding later, “We’re going to have a great night.”

“I would be very disappointed” if Republicans don’t take the Senate, he continued. “[But] the DNC in reality is not our competition … Their message isn’t working. If they have such a great message, they would be winning across the board.”

Republicans need to gain six seats in Tuesday’s election to take control of the Senate, though there is a chance the chamber’s leadership might not be decided until potential run-offs in December or January.

Anything can happen, of course, but the best data says the GOP wins the Senate and it will not be very close. What I find striking is the whole “ground game” business. The Cult is convinced they are on the right side of history. Events will carry them to the promised land and wash away the heretics. That’s really what they mean by ground game and GOTV efforts. They deeply believe there’s an army of the faithful manning phone banks, rounding up derelicts and aliens to vote and convincing the citizenry to get on the winning side.

It’s why they are convinced in things like voter suppression and “murky sources” mysteriously altering the outcome of elections. After all, if you’re on the right side of history, leading the masses to the promised land, how can you lose an election? The only reasons, the only plausible explanations, are nefarious forces thwarting your efforts. That’s why the Cult is so emotionally invested in get out the vote drives. It reinforces the narrative, but also provides some out for when things go poorly.

Many moons ago I read Eric Hoffer’s great little book The True Believer. Hoffer was an odd guy with a mysterious back story. People just assumed he was thinking about the Nazis and their capture of Germany in the 1930’s, but no one every really knew for sure. As I said, Hoffer was an odd guy. His official biography says he was born in New York, but there’s evidence he moved to America in the 20’s or 30’s. I recall reading somewhere that he was dodgy about a lot of details, including what he had in mind when he wrote the book.

My sense is Hoffer really never had any one group in mind. He was familiar with unionists, communists, fascists, progressives of various types, as well as the full spectrum of religious types in America. Having been around working class progressives that you find in union movements, I always suspected that was his inspiration. He worked on the docks and longshoremen are unusually fanatical in their unionism. Even today these guys are the truest of true believers in the union way.

I started life around working class unionists and then moved onto ruling class progressives. That’s probably why Hoffer’s book has always resonated with me. As a kid, I’d debate with the old guys about trade unions and there was no convincing them of anything. They believed in the union and that was that. Later in life when I got around ruling class progressives, I had the same experience. Unlike the union guys, Lefty was much more ruthless when it came to the old time religion. It seemed to me that they kept an index of non-believers because once one lefty knew you were not in the faith they all seemed to know.

I was thinking about this when I saw this somewhere last week. E.J. Dionne is a B-list talking head, but a committed member of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. He’s a very smart guy, but a fanatic nonetheless. In his youth he was a rabid Catholic and then he transferred that to political liberalism. This is not uncommon, as Hoffer pointed out six decades ago. People who join mass movements tend to move from one to another as they go through life. John Podhoretz explains this phenomenon with Jews. David Horowitz noticed the same thing when writing about mid-century communists.

Dionne’s column has the usual things you see with the fanatic.

The several dozen people gathered at a street corner just off the main square of this southeastern Kansas town of 5,600 were polite and friendly in the Midwestern way. They did not look in the least like a band of counterrevolutionaries intent on reversing the direction of the government in Topeka.

Yet the results of the tea party rebellion four years ago have led these civic-minded, middle-of-the-road Kansans to a quiet but fierce determination to take their state back from those who once talked incessantly about taking their country back.

What brought them together this week was a visit from Paul Davis, the Democratic candidate for governor. Davis has generally been running ahead of Republican incumbent Sam Brownback in one of the country’s most consequential showdowns on Tuesday’s ballot.

For reasons I’ve never quite understood, the Cult has an obsession with Kansas. I suspect they look as Kansas as typically American. If they can succeed there, it validates a big chunk of their mythology. After all, they are members of the vanguard leading the people to the promised land.

Brownback set things up this way by launching what he called, proudly and unapologetically, a “real, live experiment” that he hoped would provide a model of red-state governance. He pushed steep income and business tax cuts through the legislature, insisting that his program would spur unprecedented economic growth. The results have been less than inspiring: large budget deficits, credit downgrades and substantial cuts in education spending, some of which were reversed only because of a court order. Only rarely does an election pose such a clear philosophical and policy choice.

Brownback often cited low-tax Texas as his model, prompting a ready reply from Davis. Voters “don’t want to be like Texas,” he said in an interview at his storefront headquarters here. “They just want to be Kansas.”

What it means to be Kansas is precisely what’s at stake, and it’s why Davis’s campaign uses #RestoreKansas — a traditionalist’s slogan, when you think about it — as its Twitter battle cry. The choice Davis is offering is not between liberalism and conservatism but rather between two kinds of conservatism: the deeply anti-government tea party kind, and an older variety that values prudence and fiscal restraint but also expects government to provide, as Davis put it, “the basic services that are essential to the state’s vitality.”

Setting Brownback up as a Tea Party guy is necessary to make this election fit the narrative. Brownback is a conventional Republican. Similarly, the Democrat must be cast as an earthy, tribune of the people. Davis is a career hack and about as populist as Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. None of this really matters as the fanatic only sees what confirms his fanaticism. In this case, lunatics like Dionne imagine a world where entitled snobs like themselves are saving the rubes from the clutches of the non-believers they call the Tea Party.

I’ve noticed Hoffer getting mentioned more often by popular writers who are either rediscovering him or learning about him for the first time. There was a Hoffer revival in the late 70’s and early 80’s too. I suspect it corresponds to the waning of a liberal cycle. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Americans would go through periods of religiosity. When Christianity began to fade in the 20th century, this cycle transferred to the new religion of America. Now we have periods of Progressive Awakening. My hunch is the rediscovery of Eric Hoffer corresponds with the waning of a Progressive revival.

That’s right, slavery is still happening in America. Guy Gecht, the CEO of a company called Electronics for Imaging is a slaver. No, he is not keeping black people on a plantation. He is keeping brown people on a plantation. Specifically, he is keeping Hindus on his corporate plantation, at least according to this report.

Ever heard of Electronics for Imaging? We hadn’t either until this morning, but it’s apparently a multimillion dollar, multinational, public corporation based out of Fremont, California. And the United States Department of Labor just caught EFI red-handed in an investigation, which found that “about eight employees” were flown in from India to work 120-hour weeks for $1.21 per hour. EFI apparently thought it was okay to pay the employees the same wages they’d be paid in India (in Indian rupees). Here’s the unbelievably crazy sounding quote EFI gave to NBC‘s Bay Area affiliate: “We unintentionally overlooked laws that require even foreign employees to be paid based on local US standards.”

Just so we’re clear: is there anyone reading this who doesn’t know that any person working in the United States is legally required to be compensated according to United States laws?

Alberto Raymond, an assistant district director with the US Department of Labor told NBC, “It is certainly outrageous and unacceptable for employers here in Silicon Valley to bring workers and pay less than the minimum wage.” And that applies to EFI especially, which posted just shy of $200 million in revenue in its last financial quarter. EFI is publicly traded on the NASDAQ exchange, and the company’s in the business of computer peripherals (mainly printer-based stuff).

The eight employees are being paid $40,000 in owed wages; they were reportedly installing computer systems at the company’s headquarters. EFI was charged $3,500 — yes, seriously — for being at fault.

Here’s the management team of the racist, slave-holding firm in question. Unsurprisingly, not a lot of flava there. If you’re going to chain brown people to their desks, forcing them to work for food, you’re probably not going to invite them into the boardroom. It should come as no surprise that Guy Gecht and his team are liberal democrats who give generously to the Liberal Democrats.

As I’m fond of saying, no one in the ruling class every gets punished these days. This savage dirtbag should be in chains busting rocks, instead he writes a check, frees a few of his slaves and goes about his business.

One of my favorite riffs is on the color and style of automobiles today versus fifty years ago. If you walked through a typical American parking lot in 1968, you would have seen cars with fins, lots of chrome, a variety of colors and lots of brash styling. The colors would be what jumps out to the modern eye. Today, the three most popular colors today are gray, black and white. Fifty years ago, green, yellow, teal, blue, red and orange were the popular colors.

Like East German architecture, modern American aesthetics is something close to brutalism. Design is the slave of utility, or at least claims to utility. Our cars may be aerodynamic and efficient, but they are ugly and dull. The argument is the people want their cars ugly and dull and maybe so, but why has a vibrant enthusiastic people suddenly decided to live in a black and white movie?

The reason is that dreaded word “efficient.” It is the universal excuse for sucking the fun out of everything. Safety is its traveling partner, wreaking havoc on mankind. This Randall Parker post on self-driving cars is a good example of how it works. Self-driving cars will be “better” in the sense they will be more efficient. Then they will be considered safer as the technology exceeds the driving ability of the typical teenage driver. That’s when they become mandatory. Driving, as a simple pleasure, will be banned.

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote that the state of nature was the condition outside the political community or anarchy. He famously wrote that:

“In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently, not culture of the earth, no navigation, nor the use of commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth, no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”

Hobbes was not terribly wrong about pre-settlement man. Life was violent and uncertain. It was not a war of man against man, but more of a war between extended families whenever they bumped into one another. The lack of trust, beyond blood ties, made industry, commerce and the storing of value impossible. Therefore, civilization, properly understood, was impossible. Even early settlement was marked by high levels of violence. Getting murdered was pretty common right into the Middle Ages.

What was impossible for Hobbes to contemplate was the other end of the spectrum. Totalitarianism was an impossibility and not something worth considering in the 17^th century. The custodial state was unimaginable. I would imagine if you went back in time and described the modern social democracy to 17^th century intellectuals, they would assume you were driven mad by time travel. Regardless, we are heading toward that polar opposite of the state of nature. Instead of a lawless world of anarchy, we will soon live in a world of total law and absolute order.

That future will be sterile, dull and short. The brevity will be entirely driven by the sterility and the dullness. Declining fertility rates are a direct result of the dreary dullness of modern times. The decision of a people to stop reproducing is just another way of saying they wish they had never been born. After all, you bring children into the world because you expect them to stand upon your shoulders. Children are about optimism. People don’t bring children into a dangerous or violent world, unless they expect things to get better. It turns out that they don’t bring children into a dull, sterile world either. The leaden sky obscures any possibility of a brighter future, so having children makes less sense.

Aldous Huxley, another smart Brit, got a lot right about the future. In Brave New World, the Savage eventually kills himself rather than conform to the dull stability of the World State. I suspect that’s going to be a feature of daily life in the not so distinct future. Japan has always had a high suicide rate. In American, people are offing themselves more often. Europeans are making a business of calling it quits.

The great fear of critics of consumerism in the last century was that we would amuse ourselves to death. Entertainments would crowd out information, making it impossible for society to produce intelligent citizens or make thoughtful, collective action. It turns out that we will be boring ourselves to death. Everything that brings happiness will be regulated, controlled and eventually banned, in the name of safety and efficiency.

There, I said it. I hope this selfish c— a—— gets Ebola and dies a nasty paper cut that gets infected.

Health officials said Tuesday they’re prepared to legally enforce the state’s “voluntary” quarantine on health care workers who’ve treated Ebola patients.

Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Mary Mayhew declined during a news conference to comment specifically on the case of nurse Kaci Hickox, who was confined against her will at a New Jersey hospital before traveling home to Maine. But Mayhew said her department and the attorney general’s office were prepared to take legal steps to enforce a quarantine if someone declines to cooperate.

“We do not want to have to legally enforce in-home quarantine,” she said. “We’re confident that selfless health workers who were brave enough to care for Ebola patients in a foreign country will be willing to take reasonable steps to protect residents of their own country. However we are willing to pursue legal authority if necessary to ensure risk is minimized for Mainers.”

Hickox’s lawyer insisted Tuesday that she was not under quarantine and said she was seeking time to decompress at an undisclosed location in Maine. Steven Hyman of the New York law firm McLaughlin & Stern told the Bangor Daily News that Hickox will not comply with Maine’s requirements to remain under quarantine for 21 days.

“She doesn’t want to agree to continue to be confined to a residence beyond the two days,” Hyman told the Daily news.

Hickox’s other attorney, New York civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, called Maine’s quarantine “unconstitutional.”

“The conditions that the state of Maine is now requiring Kaci to comply with are unconstitutional and illegal and there is no justification for the state of Maine to infringe on her liberty,” Siegel explained to the Daily News.

Here’s what should happen with this attention whore. The State Department should scoop her up, put her on a  plane back to Liberia and notify her that she can return only after she agrees to quarantine. That quarantine will take place at Guantanamo Bay.

I’m no fan of government, but this is the one area where we don’t mess around. If this self-absorbed cunt want to play Florence Nightingale, that’s her business. If she wants to bring back a deadly virus, that’s our business.

Admittedly, I know very little about homosexuals, other than I find homosexual males to be mildly unpleasant and homosexual females to be a bit absurd. I’m not a homosexual and I have had minimal dealings with homosexuals. Many moons ago I worked in Cambridge Mass. There was a lesbian bar and leather chaps bar within a block of me. I got to observe scads of homosexuals, but I can’t say I learned much. I had a gay guy working for me at the time and he deeply resented the leather chaps crowd, because he thought they made his kind look bad. That sounded reasonable at the time, given that they were dying like flies from AIDS. He also detested lesbians for reasons I could never fathom.

I know a woman who sells real estate to higher end clients. Her area is mostly $750K condos and million dollar suburban homes. Some of her properties are two and three times those rates, but I’m assuming her bread and butter is the million dollar range. She gets to deal with all sorts at their most unpleasant. She ranks homosexuals at the bottom of her preferred list of clients. Indians are the next worse followed by East Asians. Indian males are abusive to women in the workplace and East Asians can’t stop haggling. Homosexual males, I’m told by my friend, are petty, mean, pointlessly cruel to one another, overly dramatic and unwilling to follow the rules.

The point of this bit of extreme right-wing homophobic gay-bashing is as a preamble to this story Karl Denninger is linking to today.

On October 1, the computing giant Intel pulled its ads from Gamasutra, a trade website for game developers, over an essay called “‘Gamers’ don’t have to be your audience. ‘Gamers’ are over” by a journalist named Leigh Alexander. Intel had been successfully harassed by a small, contemptible crusade called “Gamergate”—a campaign of dedicated anti-feminist internet trolls using an ill-informed mob of alienated and resentful video game-playing teenagers and young men to harass and intimidate female activists, journalists, and critics.

Unable to run Alexander out of game writing, as they had with the writer Jenn Frank, or force her from her home, as they did to the developer Brianna Wu, or threaten her from public engagements, as they did the following week to the critic and activist Anita Sarkeesian, Gamergate went after her publisher. And, in an unbelievable and embarrassing act of ignorance and cowardice, Intel capitulated. The company’s laughable “apology,” released late on that Friday afternoon, didn’t cover up the fact of Gamergate’s victory: Intel was not replacing its ads.

Failing to adequately cover this act of spinelessness was the first big fuck-up we at Gawker committed. Intel surrendered to the worst kind of dishonesty, and we allowed it to do so without ever calling it out. So let’s say it now: Intel is run by craven idiots. It employs pusillanimous morons. It lacks integrity. It folded to misogynists and bigots who objected to a woman who had done nothing more than write a piece claiming a place in the world of video games. And even when confronted with its own thoughtlessness and irresponsibility, it could not properly right its wrongs.

I may be mistaken, but my impression is that Gawker is a site run by and for homosexual men. If I recall, they got started “outing” people they did not like and then moved onto harassing Hollywood people. Homosexual males have a fetish for the entertainment business for some reason. They populate all of the gossip sites and they always have. Even in the dead tree era, Hollywood gossip writers were almost always gay men or old women. Judging by the dress-over-the-head hysterics in this article, I’m going to go ahead and assume “Max Reed” is a snarky pseudonym and the writer has a lot of rainbow flags with unicorns on them.

What makes this piece hilarious to me is how the pink mafia is being hit with the very same tactics they have used to assault normal people for three decades. Everything about the “gay rights movement” has been a fraud from the beginning, including their creation myth. Organized crime used gay clubs as cover, thinking the cops could not send in undercover officers to spy on them. The mob made money selling drugs to the gays and letting them fornicate in the back. It was also a great way to launder money. The cops would bust up these places in order to get at the gangsters running them, not the customers.

Anyway, the tactics used by the rainbow party have always been dishonest. They were one of the first to bully advertisers to pull ads from people the rainbow party disliked. They organized boycotts aimed at liberal nitwits who would then join in and force normals to go along with whatever the gays were demanding. The harassment of Christian bakers is the most recent example of the petty and nasty habits of the “gay rights” crowd. Seeing the tables tuned on them and their fellow travelers in the anti-humanism wing of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is just too funny.

As Karl points out, everything about the campaign against the pale penis people in the STEM world is based on lies. The broads at the heart of the gamergate controversy are simply attention whores making a buck off people seeking grace on the cheap. Set yourself up as a victim in a way that fits the Narrative and the world is your oyster. It turns out that nerdy boys like video games way more than girls, in every way that sentence can be construed. That’s why they end up writing code at game shops. Women end up in nursing and medicine for the same reason.

I’ve said for a while that homosexuals will regret having thrown in with the CML. Liberals hate homosexuals more than they hate blacks. As soon as “gay rights” stops being a useful weapon against normal people, the homos go back into the liberal dungeon. There’s also a limit to the amount of cultural insanity a society can tolerate. Unless you can monopolize violence like the North Koreans, the people will eventually get fed up and replace their rulers. It is the lesson of history. The lunatics in charge of western countries are pushing the natural limits with this stuff and the inevitable consequences will follow. In the end, nature always wins.

The North Carolina academic scandal has put the spotlight on the way athletes are handled by money grubbing colleges. Two decades of systematic grade enhancement is about as bad as it gets. You can’t pretend it is a rogue employee or an unscrupulous coach when the problem spans generations. Like the Penn State scandal, it can only happen when there is a culture that tolerates, maybe even encourages, the behavior in question. A lot of people believe boy rape is kind of a thing for male Penn State graduates. That seems harsh, but a lot of people say that. A lot of people. At North Carolina, instead of raping boys they were stealing from their students.

The evil racist extreme right-wing extremists are having fun with the fact the center of the corruption was the Afro’d American Studies Department. As I tried to point out to those evil racist extreme right wing extremists, schools have a range of fake majors where they can stash jocks. My favorite is probably the Fashion major at Virginia Tech. I’ve been to Blacksburg many times and fashion is not their strong point. One of the classes for that major involves attending a fashion show. I actually know someone in the fashion business, a VP for a semi-swanky brand. I think he would hang himself if he had to spend an hour in Blacksburg Virginia.

The point being missed by all of this is it is not much of a sports story. If you look at a school like North Carolina, you will find that the “jocks” do better than the regular students in the class room. They get better grades and graduate on time. Like all state colleges, close to half the entering freshmen at North Carolina fail to graduate. The schools take in kids that have no business on a college campus just to get their government loan money. There’s also federal dollars and state dollars. The colleges know these kids have little to no chance of graduating, even with a bullshit degree like sociology or African-American studies.

The scam basically involves dumbing down the 100 and 200 level courses. The “core” studies are also dumbed down so kids can make it through freshmen year taking remedial math and English. NC State, for example offers Algebra and Pre-calculus. In the olden thymes, we had to finish calculus to graduate high school. Colleges fill up the first year with coursework that should be covered in middle-school so the kids don’t flunk out. The second year they start taking some real college course and that’s when the attrition begins. By the third year these kids are overwhelmed and drop out, having racket up debt and maybe a drinking problem.

The problem is much worse as the dilution of college cannot be checked once it starts. It is simply too profitable. Browning the NC State catalog, I see they have a major in Landscape Architecture. At the risk of sounding like a meanie, there’s no reason for the gardener to have a college degree. When I was a kid I did “landscape architecture” for school money in the summers. An old black guy taught me “Site Planning” and “Landscape Construction Materials.” He had different names for them and they were pass/fail, but the results were the same. I admit that designing a golf course takes skill, but these guys are going to be running lawn mower gangs at the municipal golf course.

As is always the case, there is a natural limit to the corruption. There’s only so much money to steal. Seven in 10 college seniors (71%) who graduated last year had student loan debt, with an average of $29,400 per borrower. From 2008 to 2012, debt at graduation (federal and private loans combined) increased an average of six percent each year.That’s according to these people. According to the Fed, 11.5% of the $1.2 trillion in school debt is delinquent. By way of comparison, the peak of the mortgage crisis saw a 9% delinquency rate on roughly one trillion in loans. Those loans were backed by an asset of some value. Student loans are backed by nothing.

But, it should work out just fine. Just keep pumping out landscaping majors and Afro’s America Studies graduates. What could go wrong?

The news brings word that the grand jury will be making its decision today. Everyone expects a no-bill and everyone expects a riot.

Missouri police have been brushing up on constitutional rights and stocking up on riot gear to prepare for a grand jury’s decision about whether to charge a white police officer who fatally shot a black 18-year-old in suburban St. Louis.

The preparations are aimed at avoiding a renewed outbreak of violence during the potentially large demonstrations that could follow an announcement of whether Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will face a criminal trial for the Aug. 9 death of Michael Brown.

Police and protesters have repeatedly clashed since the shooting, which prompted a national conversation about race and police tactics. Images of officers in riot gear and armored vehicles confronting protesters have drawn widespread criticism.

Many protesters want Darren Wilson indicted for murder. Grand jury proceedings are secret, but legal analysts say recently leaked information about Wilson’s testimony to investigators may be an attempt to prepare the public for the possibility that he might not be charged.

The decision could be made public within the next month.

In the meantime, law officers have adjusted their tactics for interacting more peacefully with protesters while also honing their procedures for quick, widespread arrests. They plan to have a large contingent of officers at the ready, but have been meeting with clergy, community leaders and students in hopes of building relationships that could ease tensions on the streets.

I’m just so damned tired of catering to these savages. Instead of spending millions to make sure the gentle little snowflakes rioting in the streets don’t get their “rights” violated, how about we stand up for civilization for a change. Let everyone in Ferguson know that their little slice of heaven will be sealed off before the announcement. You can riot your brains out, but no one is coming in or out. No one will come in to put out fires, tend to the injured, deliver food, fix a broken pipe, etc.

Once the rioting ends, the siege will be lifted.

My bet is we get a very different result, but then the Cult will not have an election issue.