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.

I’ve never been a fan of Obama, but I fully admit to thinking he would turn out to be harmless. I expected a more pussified version of Clinton with a bigger dose of self-regard. He would fiddle around the edges here and there, maybe raise taxes a bit, get out of the Bush wars and that’s about it. I never imagined he would be so clownishly incompetent. I fully assumed the adults would keep him from breaking anything important for fear he would be a one term president.

Boy was I wrong.

We now have a second Ebola case. This one is vastly worse the first one. The poor Vietnamese girl could be explained as a mistake and an isolated one. This second one is not. Worse yet, the woman was allowed on a plane and now we may have hundreds of unknown people exposed to the virus. All of this is due to the administrations unwillingness to block all flight from Ebola countries. We know why too. If the Ebola outbreak had occurred in Scandinavia or Israel, Obama would have closed the airports immediately.

Lion of the Blogosphere has an interesting question. How much is this going to cost?

One or two in one location is probably a few million. Thousands spread across the nation moves into the billions category quickly. The whole country has to stop and re-engineer public health just because President Ebola let one of his tribesmen in from Liberia.

Carter came to be defined by Iran. The public concluded that he was simply not up to the task. They could forgive a lot, but the cumulative effect of his failures eventually collapsed his presidency. Bush the Smaller was undone by Katrina. It was not fair and most people were sane enough to get that, but it still came to symbolize the problems of his presidency.

Obama, on the other hand, has made his own mess. He will be remembered as President Ebola, the man who willingly imported a plague into the United States.

It is too soon to know if the young woman in Texas will die from Ebola so we can’t pin her death on anyone just yet. We can blame our government for letting disease riddled savages into our country, at least one of whom had Ebola and infected this young women. There’s a chance she could be saved due to the help of  a citizen.

The Texan nurse diagnosed with Ebola has received a blood transfusion from survivor Dr Kent Brantly, reports claim.

It is the third time Dr Brantly has donated blood to Ebola victims after medics discovered he had the same blood type as previous patient Dr Nick Sacra and NBC cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, who is still being treated.

Incredibly, nurse Nina Pham, 26, has also matched with Brantly and today received a transfusion of his blood in a move that doctors believe could save her life. 

Pham has been in quarantine since Friday after catching the disease from ‘patient zero’ Thomas Eric Duncan – the man who brought the deadly virus to America.

Brantly is believed to have traveled to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where Pham worked, to make the donation on Sunday night.

Today, Pham’s condition was described as ‘clinically stable’.

At the end of the Carter years, a lot of sensible people thought we were finished as a country. The people in charge simply had no idea how to turn the thing around and keep us from collapsing into a heap like Europe. But, the people were still in good shape. When someone with a clue came along, he was put in charge and the decline was arrested. Reagan was not perfect, but he did not have a bunch of crazy ideas in his head about the country and his countrymen. As a result, he championed sensible public policy that left the American people free to work out the rest.

Today, we are once again run by people with crazy ideas in their heads and the country is headed down the tubes. The difference now is we have millions of savages poring over the borders. Those savages are carrying disease and pestilence. Ebola is a disease you get from eating bats or improperly handling the infected corpses of the dead – IN AFRICA! There’s no damned reason for anyone in America to get the disease.

It’s time to build the scaffold.

I’ve always contended that atheism is just another secular religion. Unlike the Rousseau-ist cults, it has no Utopian aspects to it. There have been some atheists who preached about how the end of religion, by which they mean Christianity, will make the world a better place, but they always seemed to get tripped up by their hatred of Christianity. That’s the peculiar aspect to atheism. Other religions seek to crowd out the all other religions, but atheists just have it in for Christianity. In that regard it is similar to the lesser mass movements like MAAD and the boob cancer people.

Anyway, it is good to see I’m not alone in this view.

If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins unwittingly reveals his sense of his mission in the world. Toward the end of An Appetite for Wonder, the first installment in what is meant to be a two-volume memoir, Dawkins cites the opening lines of the first chapter of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.

I like how the author ties evolution into the cult like aspects of atheism. The Darwin Fish people are a lot like liberals in that they love science as long at it is a weapon against their enemies. Atheists tend to get light headed when you explain the evolutionary importance of religion and modern humans. They start fainting when you explain the importance of teleology and Christianity to the growth of science.

It is a different matter when those he sees as his intellectual underlings—religious believers and any who stray from the strictest interpretation of Darwinism—refuse to follow his lead. Recalling his years at boarding school, Dawkins winces at the memory of the bullying suffered by a sensitive boy, “a precociously brilliant scholar” who was reduced to “a state of whimpering, abject horror” when he was stripped of his clothing and forced to take cold baths. Today, Dawkins is baffled by the fact that he didn’t feel sympathy for the boy. “I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying,” he writes. Dawkins’s bafflement at his lack of empathy suggests a deficiency in self-knowledge. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.

This is something I’ve noticed often with atheists. Their new religion is always a tantrum against their old religion. Penn Jillette never shuts up about his atheism. On many occasions he has talked about how it arises from having watched his mother suffer at the end of her life. His answer was that no God could let people suffer like that so there must be no God. His atheism is therefore a mix of narcissism, ignorance and self-pity. Despite the self-absorption, atheists don’t seem to know themselves very well. Maybe that’s why they declare themselves a God.

I’m not the only person to notice the fake nerd cult, but I’m pretty sure I’m the only guy calling it “fake nerdism.” The reason I call it that is the people into are fakers, frauds, posers, phonies. They also have no science. The ones on television are almost always liberal arts majors who spent their working careers play acting on TV, radio or the Interwebs. Sports has a lot of these “stats geeks” who borrow the language of statistics, but they have no idea what any of it means. The whole shebang, from Niel deGrasse Tyson to The Big Bang Theory is aimed at flattering people, who fashion themselves the smartest people in the room.

There is a cult like quality to some of it. A lot of these people, particularly the young ones, think they are part of a movement that will make this world like the imaginary one in sci-fi movies. The web site Tech Crunch seems to be one of their propaganda organs. It looks like they are also organizing a hajj for their followers this fall.

Haven’t gotten your tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Europe yet? The hottest tech conference of the year is coming to London this October, and to celebrate we’re giving away another free pair of tickets to the main event. All you have to do is enter to win. We’ll randomly select the winning entry, and the winner will be notified by email.

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The word “disrupt” is a buzzword borrowed from economics that is very popular in the fake nerd world. Every startup begging for money peppers its prospectus with this word. The reader is supposed to think the new company is a part of the glorious future where we all live in gleaming cities run on rainbow dust, where everyone is happy and there are no poor people. The future for these people is a sanitized San Francisco without the gays.

I’ll note the picture they use. You have two sexless people who possess that innocent, Eloi quality so popular with the fake nerd crowd. The one on the left is slightly Oriental, while the one of the right is Occidental. Maybe they are boys or maybe they are girls. We’re not supposed to know. If someone used this picture for a NAMBLA campaign, no one would be surprised. That’s the creepy part of the glorious future. It’s primary appeal seems to be to men who really like boys.

One of my recurring themes is the suicidal nature of Rousseau-ist cults. The double helix of the fanatic is composed of a desire to obliterate their self by swapping their identity with that of the group. The other side is the desire to get to the promised land by destroying the present, which is seen as the cage that holds the followers from reaching their goal. The nucleotides are the various fads that we see bubbling up from time time like racism, minoritism, various economic lunacies and so forth. The result is a movement that seeks to pull the roof down on human civilization.

That, paradoxically, makes it reactionary. The modern Progressive looks out at the world for that which is embraced by civilization and attacks it. They also embrace those who attack these things. Homosexuals, for example, are despised by Progressives, but they make a useful weapon against those pesky recalcitrant Christians in the hinterlands. Similarly, blacks have been a useful weapon in the assault on traditional Anglo-Saxon organizational traditions.

Islam, the mirror of Liberalism, is another useful lever to use on the foundation stones of civilization. Progressives have a tough time with it, because Muslims have a habit of beheading people and posting the videos on-line. So, the hunt for the moderate Muslim has been a recurring motif. This story is a good example of how the natural impulse of the Left is to embrace anything that is at war with Western Culture.

The U.S. State Department endorsed on Wednesday a controversial anti-terror handbook published by Canada’s Muslim community that refers to jihad as “noble” and urges law enforcement to avoid using terms such as “Islamic extremism.”

The handbook, published earlier this month by two Canadian Muslim community organizations, was so controversial that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) flatly rejected the manual and ordered its officers not to use it.

Yet the State Department’s official anti-terrorism Twitter feed, called Think Again Turn Away, appeared to endorse the controversial handbook on Twitter and linked to a positive article about it.

The handbook, titled United Against Terrorism, has become a contentious issue for the RCMP since its release. Several sections of the guide instruct Muslim community members not to cooperate with police while others claim jihad “is a noble concept.”

The RCMP ultimately decided to reject the book, citing its “adversarial tone.”

“After a final review of the handbook, the RCMP could not support the adversarial tone set by elements of the booklet and therefore directed RCMP Manitoba not to proceed with this initiative,” the police force said in a statement posted on its website.

The handbook itself recommends that “intelligence and law enforcement officials” should “avoid terms such as ‘Islamist terrorism’, ‘Islamicism’, and ‘Islamic extremism’ in favor of more accurate terms such as ‘al Qaeda inspired extremist,’” according to one section of the handbook, which still bears RCMP’s official logo.

Law enforcement officials also are told to “discontinue any inappropriate information gathering techniques including (but not limited to) showing up at workplaces, intimidating newcomers, questioning individuals religiosity, and discouraging legal representation,” according to the handbook.

The term “jihad” also is not appropriate to use, according to the handbook, a copy of which was first published by Canada’s CBC News.

“Do not refer to terrorists as ‘jihadis,’” the manual states. “This only emboldens them and gives them a legitimate status in the eyes of the vulnerable. Terrorism is not jihad. Jihad is a noble concept in Islam.”

Other sections tell the Muslim community that they are under no obligation to speak to the police about individuals who may be suspected of having extremist ties.

“The  tweet you are referring to features a repost of information from a Globe and Mail report on a new booklet produced by the RCMP and two Islamic groups,” said State Department spokeswoman Carolyn Glassman. “CSCC was simply sharing information about a new product related to counterterrorism. Our reposting does not connote an endorsement.”

The State Department’s endorsement of the guidebook struck some Twitter users as curious. This is not the first time that the State Department has run into trouble as a result of it tweets.

The department’s Counterterrorism Bureau (CT Bureau) was forced to issue multiple apologies earlier this year after it endorsed on Twitter a radical Muslim cleric who backed a fatwa calling for the murder of U.S. troops.

Terrorism analyst and reporter Patrick Poole said that the State Department’s tweet of the controversial handbook is a sign of what he called its disjointed policies.

“This is a testament to how absurd this administration’s counter-terrorism policies have become—promoting a publication the Canadian government has publicly rejected because they realized this booklet would do more to radicalize than to actually deradicalize,” he said.

“From letting members of designated terrorist groups into the White House, backing the Muslim Brotherhood in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, responding to demands of Islamic groups to purge counter-terror training materials, to endorsing extremist Islamic clerics like Sheikh Bin Bayyah only then to have to apologize, and now this,” he said. “To describe it as a series of missteps is a gross understatement. This is a coordinated campaign of counter-terror catastrophe.”

Living in a country whose prevailing religion treats the past as a far away planet can be exasperating, like when the people who have been in charge of race relations pretend they have just stumbled upon a social problem needing their attention. When you point out that they have been bitching about the problem for 70 years and they have been in charge of fixing it for 50 of those years, they call you a racist. It’s as if they suffer from a Irish Alzheimer’s. They only remember the grudges. But, it is not without its fascinating strangeness. Here’s a good example.

Whatever happened to good old American know-how?

The nation that invented modern management seems to be suffering a crisis of competence.

The Secret Service can’t protect the White House. Public health authorities can’t get their arms around a one-man Ebola outbreak. The army we trained in Iraq collapsed as soon as it was attacked by Islamic extremists, and our own veterans can’t get the care they need at VA hospitals. And, lest we forget, it was only a year ago that the White House rolled out its national health insurance program, only to see its website grind to a halt.

Yes, you can argue that these problems all have different causes.

But it’s hard not to conclude that something basic is amiss in Washington.

It’s like fans when sports teams lose. “They” lost the game. Or, “they” need new management. Liberals  have been in charge of Washington since FDR, but now that it is coming apart, “they” have let us down.

“This isn’t a partisan problem,” argues Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School who worked in the Clinton administration — although she does fault the people at the top. “It hasn’t been a priority under this president to appoint good managers to top positions, but it wasn’t a priority under George W. Bush either.”

When things go wrong under a Democrat, it is a systemic problem. When they go wrong under a Republican, it is a failure of conservatism, capitalism, etc.

One basic problem, she said, is that the federal government’s personnel system is mired in antiquated civil service rules. “You can’t move people around; you can’t pay more to retain your best people; you can’t easily get rid of people you need to get rid of.” Additionally, she noted, “the pay at the top of the scale is inadequate to attract the best and the brightest into government, and as the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It’s very demoralizing.”

This is a common malady of modern times. They never stop to wonder why we have all of these rules. The modern reformer never bothers to ask why things are as they are, they just assume they sprung from nothingness. Therefore, driving a bulldozer through the existing order is always acceptable. I’m not defending the civil service rules, but there’s a reason for all of it. In almost all cases, the rules exist to prevent theft.

The other problem is the rank acceptance of corporatism. Government should never be attracting the best and the brightest. Government is a necessary evil, not the end point of human civilization. The modern mandarin, however, cerebrates the custodial state with the same degree of enthusiasm as the typical corrections officer embraces the drug war. In both cases, the expansion of the state means more opportunities for the barnacles to attach themselves to society.

In her view, Obama never made management a high priority — and it shows.

Until the Veterans Affairs scandal erupted this year, for example, there wasn’t a full-time implementation officer in the White House to monitor the performance of federal agencies.

“This administration has been disconnected from the government it’s supposed to be running,” Kamarck charges (and, remember, she’s a Democrat). “They seem to view the federal workforce as hostile territory. They don’t engage with it…. They don’t have a strong system of getting info from the agencies to the president.”

Oh, I don’t know. It seems like they have no trouble getting the IRS to go after their enemies. They had no trouble using the FBI and NSA to get dirt on people they wanted to leverage. This just sounds like a Clinton toady taking shots at Team Obama as Cankles gets ready for another run at the White House. But, it is a fascinating look into the minds of a cult member. As I wrote above, they are a lot like sports fans. “They” are losing, but a few years ago “we” were winning.

One of the things fairly well known in black America is that abortion and “family planning” is about reducing the number of black babies. This should come as no surprise as liberal whites have been quite explicit about it since Roe. Abortion Inc has been targeting black neighborhoods for a long time. It’s a pretty good business for rackets like Planned Parenthood. They get paid to round up the customers and then they get paid for the service. That’s why the Left is obsessed with state funded abortion. It’s eugenics with a smiley face. The Left gets to pretend it is about health and safety, but it’s really about ethnic cleansing and eugenics.

This article in the Science section, of all place, of the NY Times is emblematic.

Marlice House was determined to take a different path from her mother, who had gotten pregnant with her at 17.

“I do not want that to be me,” she said.

So when Ms. House heard about a study offering sexually active teenagers in St. Louis free birth control, she signed up.

Three in 10 girls and women in the United States become pregnant before 20, a rate significantly higher than that in many other rich countries. The 14- to 19-year-old participants in the study Ms. House joined, nearly half of whom had already had an unintended pregnancy, were offered free birth control and counseled on the benefits of long-acting contraceptives like intrauterine devices and implants, methods used by fewer than 5 percent of teenagers.

Overwhelmingly, Ms. House and other teenagers — 72 percent of the 1,404 participants — chose long-acting birth control. And it had an enormous effect.

Pregnancy and abortion rates plunged to less than a quarter the rates of sexually experienced teenagers nationally, the group most comparable to those in the study. Rates were also significantly lower than those among all teenagers.

There’s not much new about this. In the 1970’s the Left was excited by the idea of making newly available drugs like Norplant mandatory for welfare recipients. The Left has learned from past attempts to exterminate black people so they couch it in language of choice and opportunity. But, they can’t help themselves as they put a picture of  a black girl on the article.

They also seem to be trying to draw in the anti-abortion people by claiming their new eugenics program reduces abortions. They repeat that bit a few times in the article. It’s a common error on the Left. Abortion, for them, is all about abortion as an end in itself. For pro-life people, abortion is just one aspect of the larger fight over human life, hence the name of their cause. The Left always projects its manias onto the wider world.

Come to think of it, that may be why they put a black face on their eugenics cause. They just assume their enemies are the bogeymen they imagine. They think the undifferentiated other outside their cult is shot through with racism. Therefore, they can market their eugenics program to the rabble by (wink, wink) targeting the blacks.

No, he has not been fired recently, as far as I know. I just expect him to be fired at some point. I’ve said for a while now that he will eventually step on the wrong land mine and Rich Lowry, after spending a night hiding in the closet, will fire Williamson in the same fashion he has sacked everyone else worth reading at National Review – over the phone. This latest is a good example of why I say this.

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a ribeye, extra rare, and the chef or the waiter or somebody messed it up. I sent it back to the kitchen. A lesbian couple near Uniontown, Ohio, ordered a baby, extra white, and their order got messed up — the sperm bank mistakenly gave them the product of a black man, with the result that their daughter, Payton, is half black. And that’s the problem with treating children as consumer products: You cannot send them back to the kitchen.

Good thing fertility doctors don’t work for tips.

Naturally, there is a lawsuit — for breach of warranty, among other things. The couple say that they are suffering stress from raising their mixed-race daughter in an overwhelmingly white community. I can picture the scene: A mob of angry Ohioans, torches and pitchforks at the ready, menacingly reads a declaration: “We, the town fathers of Obscurity, Ohio, were perfectly ready to be accepting, supportive, and welcoming of this lesbian couple’s test-tube baby. But when that lesbian couple’s test-tube baby turns out to be half black — well, that’s a bridge too far for the decent people of Ohio.” I suppose they might then burn half a cross — Ohio’s pretty weird.

While one must pity the poor little girl who is being treated like a defective Honda Civic, it’s a delicious clash of progressive pieties. The mother — and somehow I suspect that I’ll be informed five minutes from now that it is wicked to call the half of the couple who carried the child and gave birth the “mother” — Jennifer Cramblett, among other things complains that it is difficult to find a place to get her daughter a decent haircut. It should be a hoot watching her make that case in court. I’m a white, conservative guy from Texas, and even I know better than to go skipping merrily into the cultural minefield that is black women’s hair, a subject that calls to mind my favorite cowboy proverb: “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

Same-sex couples are riding a wave of cultural ascendency, but we should not kid ourselves: This is America, and race still trumps everything. You doubt me? In 2008, I reported in National Review about the case of an adoptive couple who had raised several children with severe disabilities but was denied the opportunity to adopt another disabled child because the authorities doubted their commitment to preserving the girl’s cultural authenticity — they’d said they intended to raise their children to be “colorblind” — and because their community in Alaska was judged to be too white, something that might damage the girl’s self-esteem. The girl in question suffered both from fetal-alcohol syndrome, which had left her mentally disabled, and from Russell-Silver Syndrome, a form of dwarfism that left her with an asymmetrical body, a triangular face, a malfunctioning digestive system, and other problems. It is unlikely that she would ever develop the mental capacity to feel racial alienation, much less that that would ever become a top-ten problem in her life. But race is the alpha and the omega to some people. If only we had a good word for people like that . . .

Kevin is a smart guy and a very good writer. That’s very dangerous all by itself. The chattering classes are dominated by people of average skills and intelligence, but top-2% envy of others. What will get him killed is his propensity to notice things, particularly about the social wars roiling the country. The temptation to notice things about race and then write about them in a clever and intelligent way will get the best of him eventually. Then he is bunking with Steve Sailer.