Many moons ago, I sat through a presentation by the director of marketing for a company where I was working. He put up charts and graphs showing the effectiveness of the various market programs. It was very well done, but complete bullshit. Talking with the guy after his presentation, he admitted as much. There was no way to measure the effectiveness of his programs. I had been tasked with trying to come up with a way to do it, which was why I was in his presentation. To the guy’s credit, he knew there was no point in trying to fool me so he came clean. He was just making assumptions from anecdotes and wishful thinking.

The guy was not an asshole or a crook. He was doing his job like every other marketing guy. His bosses and coevals made all the same assumptions he made and relied on the same pseudo-logic to justify the marketing budget. Everyone just assumed smart people had worked it all out a long time ago. That’s why every great company spent money on ads, campaigns, promotions, etc. The one very memorable thing he said was that he made sure to spend a little more than his budget every year. That way, he would get  a bigger budget the next year.

I’ve always wondered if there would come a time when companies figured out that much of their advertizing was a waste of money. Dr. Pepper spends millions on college football, but their product still tastes awful. The percentage of people who will like odd flavored soda is fixed. No amount of advertizing with change it. Beyond product awareness and sales, advertizing strikes me as rather pointless. As I type this, I’m watching an ad for something that may be for clothes or possibly wheat. I have no idea and doubt anyone else does either. Millions were spent for something and I doubt the company will see a nickel in return.

On TV, most of these ads are filtered out by our brains as background noise. On-line, they are blocked by the browser and browser add-ons. I suspect most of us have become so good at blocking out web ads that we don’t even notice them. When I bother to look, I wonder why anyone would be spending money on them. Sites that lard up on ads, like Brietbart and the Daily Caller, I tend to avoid. If I have to close eight windows and then find and mute some stupid video in order to get to your site, your site sucks.

Of course, it has long been suspected that skimmers like Facebook use click farms to scam companies into advertizing with them. This video from earlier in the year is pretty good. No one has ever bothered to refute it. It has been known for a while that there are “like farms” for hire that will boost a Facebook page for a fee. Twitter has been plagued by zombie accounts to boost the follower counts of celebrities. The fact that Facebook, and presumably others, is using robots and click farms to scam advertisers should not shock anyone. The degree is the question. How much of scam is on-line advertising?

It appears half of these ads are never actually seen by humans.

Online advertising is a fickle thing. It accounts for 20% of the ad industry’s total spending, and over 90% of revenue for the internet giants Google and Facebook. That said, no one seems to have any idea whether it actually works.

That uncertainty reached a new high this week, as Google announced that 56.1% of ads served on the internet are never even “in view”—defined as being on screen for one second or more. That’s a huge number of “impressions” that cost money for advertisers, but are as pointless as a television playing to an empty room.

This is not a big revelation. The web metrics company ComScore reported last year that 46% of online ads are never seen. Spider.io, an ad fraud company acquired by Google in February, has pointed out that a large portion of ads are “viewed” only by robots, revealing that one botnet of 120,000 virus-infected computers viewed ads billions of times, running up the tab for advertisers without offering them the human eyeballs they sought.

 Still, the acknowledgement by a heavyweight such as Google that ad viewability is a problem could shake up the industry by delaying possible IPOs of ad companies and requiring new ways for advertisers to gauge the effectiveness of their ads.

The nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” In this case, it’s the obviously the half that pays for ads which are never seen, and now advertisers are looking for new tools to figure out which those are.

It’s worth noting that Google made this acknowledgement of the deficiency of the model it has profited richly from while also offering a new model to advertisers: In July it introduced its Active View product, which measures only viewed ads.

This goes back to the puzzle of Facebook and Twitter. How can they be worth billions? Yeah, they have lots of users, but so what? Those users pay them nothing. The ads on Twitter are minimal and you can’t even see them on your phone. I don’t do Facebook anymore, but the ads I used to see were mostly scumbags like dating services and fake medicines. At some point, the guys writing the checks will figure out they are wasting 100% of their money these sites.

This story about the problems desegregating the Hartford public schools is amusing. For the Cult, hatred of white people has become such a natural instinct, they can’t separate reality from fantasy anymore. They really think they can force the hoi polloi to live together according to the popular fads of the Cult. They never stop to think that maybe there’s a reason people are not embracing diversity.

The shrinking population of white students in Hartford’s suburbs is complicating efforts to comply with Connecticut’s landmark school desegregation settlement — and even making it harder for some of the capital city’s students to attend new schools created to help meet the racial integration goals set by the lawsuit 25 years ago.

State education officials are currently negotiating the latest changes to the agreement, reached with the plaintiffs after they won a 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court ruling, but say it is becoming harder to attract white students to Hartford’s schools because they’re living farther away.

About half the students living in the 22 communities subject to the agreement, according to state officials, are non-white. That’s up from about 38 percent in 2008, when the parties negotiated a revised timetable for progress on reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation. Another revision was made last year.

“The state is in the position of, how do you meet the requirements of the State Supreme Court given the fact that the demographics of the region have changed so completely,” said Kathleen Demsey, state Department of Education’s chief financial officer who worked for years on the issue. “Financially, it’s a burden for this transportation system, money that could be used for education is being used to bus kids.”

The hilarious bit here is the same people trying to force the proletariat to live together, based on some magic racial formula, will move heaven and earth to make sure their kids are are not going to school with the other races. Yet, they are mystified to learn that everyone else does the same thing.

But lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, Sheff vs. O’Neill, say there are still plenty of predominantly white communities in the region that can be drawn from to attract additional students, or where Hartford students can attend school in a racially integrated setting.

“We’ve made some progress but we still think there’s more that can be done,” said Dennis Parker, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and director of racial justice programs for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The issue of changing demographics has come up before. In 2013, the parties redefined the standard for diversity, allowing Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to count toward the 25 percent “white enrollment” threshold. Further changes could be among the proposals in this round of negotiations.

I’m sure the Asians are thrilled to know they will be used as cannon fodder in the ghetto.

Newly released statistics show 47.5 percent of Hartford’s 21,458 minority students are currently enrolled in “reduced-isolation settings,” a marked improvement from 11 percent in 2008. That comes after the state spent about $2.25 billion on new magnets and other programs throughout the region over a 10-year period. Yet the plaintiffs contend that progress falls far short of giving every Hartford student the opportunity to learn in a racially integrated setting.

Attorney Martha Stone said the state could create incentives to encourage suburban school districts to take in more Hartford students and foster more collaborative projects involving different entities, such as the proposed elementary magnet aerospace academy in Rocky Hill.

“There are so many different ideas that have been on the table for years that the state has not taken the initiative on,” Stone said.

Unlike other states where there has been forced busing and redrawn school districts, Connecticut’s settlement relies on voluntary desegregation and additional state funding. Parents inside and outside of Hartford can choose to enter a lottery in order for their children to approximately 45 magnet schools. Meanwhile, Hartford students can also choose to attend suburban public schools.

But the makeup of some suburbs is changing: East Hartford, for example, shifted from 23 percent minority enrollment in 1989, when the lawsuit was first filed, to 84 percent in 2013. Manchester jumped from 12 percent to 60 percent, Windsor from 31 percent to 71 percent, and Bloomfield from 74 to 96 percent.

This is pattern you see everywhere in the northeast. The FDR version of the Cult thought they should pack blacks into urban ghettos. They used white ethnics as a buffer, but then the ethnics bolted to the suburbs. The cities collapsed and we ended up with all of these urban jungles. Starting in the 80’s, the new plan was to move the blacks out to the suburbs so the Cult could reclaim the nice spots in the city. The white ethnics living in the inner suburbs are now bolting to exurbs and gated neighborhoods.

One of the reasons I say liberalism is a religion is I’ve been to places like Hartford and New Haven. The latter is a great example. Yale dominate New Haven, financially, politically and geographically. Down the hill from the idyllic campus lies the black side of New Haven. The only interface the students have with the people down the hill is the occasional robbery or beating. Otherwise, down the hill may as well be another planet. Every student on that campus knows where not to go and who not to trust.

Despite that reality all around them, the students at Yale are as liberal as they come. They go off into the world full of righteous anger about how  middle America treats its black people. You point out to them that the Yale campus is more like an antebellum plantation than normal America and they look at you like you’re speaking in tongues. That degree of self-delusion only comes from intense belief.

A normal person trying to integrate the Hartford schools would look at the results thus far and conclude it is a failure. Decades of effort have come up empty so it is time to try something else. The true believer, faced with dis-confirmation, redoubles their efforts, convinced that this time things will be different.

The IQ guys swear that high IQ strongly correlates to success. That’s tempting to believe until you start thinking about the fabulously successful people who were also incredibly stupid. Caligula is the guy who comes to mind whenever I hear about the intelligence of our political leaders. Caligula was clever at times, but no one would call him intelligent. He managed to screw up so much he was murdered after just four years as emperor. Granted, he was probably mad, but that just underscores the fact you can get pretty far without being terribly bright.

One of the most oddly successful salesman I ever met was borderline retarded. I’m probably being a little mean there, but the guy was incredibly stupid. He sold auto accessories to retail stores and job shops. He worked hard, had a great personality and was willing to spend all day selling gaudy crap to people who had customers looking for gaudy crap. He was also a white guy willing to go into the ghetto and sell that gaudy crap. He made money hand over fist because he had the right products, the right market and the right attitude about it. He had a big house and a Cadillac, along with an 85 IQ.

When I was a teenager, I talked my way into a graduate seminar on proto-Marxism taught by a guy who was jarringly brilliant. He spoke five languages, could write in seven. He had a masters in math as well as a PhD in history. I don’t think he had two nickles to rub together and I doubt he cared. He drove a car that looked like it would collapse in a heap at any minute. I’m not sure if he was the smartest person I’ve met, but he is a good example of how a high IQ does not necessarily mean a high status, big money or even success in a narrow field.

There’s that and then there is the fact that serendipity plays a determinative role at the extremes. Germanicus, the father of Caligula, was a smart and accomplished guy, but he was unlucky and just a click less smart than Tiberius, who had him killed. Caligula was outlandishly lucky to find himself in the role of emperor. Of course, his successor was probably the luckiest man who ever lived. Claudius was an able emperor, but his rise to power still fascinates classicists because of its improbability. His relatively long reign is just as improbable.

In modern times, we have seen some people hit the lottery and become billionaires, despite not being terribly bright. Mark Cuban is a good example. He is a hustler and a risk taker. He does not mind making a spectacle of himself in public. He also got outlandishly lucky when fools totting dot-com money bought his worthless company for billions. The Facebook boys were similarly lucky. The proof of that is MySpace is the same product, but never caught on like Facebook. Mark Zuckerburglar is not stupid, but he is not a billion time smarter than you.

That’s what we’re seeing here with the death of the New Republic. The venerable progressive journal founded by the Mussolini loving Herbert Croly was recently purchased by Facebook lotto winner Chris Hughes. That was two years ago and now he has decided to turn it in Gawker, because he likes saying the phrase “digital media property.” The staff resigned en masse this week, making a big show of it for each other.

The Communications Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, has created a lot of very rich people. Some of those rich people are super-rich, like Chris Hughes. The cultural elite of every society lives off the generosity of the financial elite. They don’t always live well, but the arts can only exist with the ascent and support of the monied elites. One of the fun parts about Nero’s biography is what we learn about the status of entertainers. In Rome, they were the bottom of the social order, even though they were supported by the ruling elite.

The current cultural elites have always lived in a world where the rich are willing to write checks for the privilege of mingling with the intellectuals. Journals like The New Republic never made money, but they got rich patrons to bankroll them so the writers could have nice middle-class lives. National Review, for example, purged all of their conservative writers because their patrons demanded it. Guys like John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg refuse to go along with the official dogma so they were sent to the fringe.

The new money appears to be different from the old financial backers. The robber barons from Silicon Valley are not interested in hanging out with smug progressive writers. They want to hang out with ball players and starlets. That means the New Republic has to become a gossip site based in New York or Los Angeles, not a journal of dogmatic political thought serving the homely people of Washington. Never mind that there are plenty of gossip sites and the value of the New Republic lies in its ties to the Washington power elite.

It will be interesting to see this unfolds. The Cult is not going to take kindly to having their friends unemployed because some rich Nazi wants a different toy. Robber barons like Chris Hughes have the money to put up a good fight, but the Cult has the power of the state. They also know how things work, which apparently Chris Hughes does not. If he was half as smart as he thinks, he would have used TNR as a way into DC’s power elite. Then again, the Golden Rule says the man with the gold makes the rules.

From WW1 through the 1970’s we did not see the creation of great fortunes. Great fortunes are made at the start of great economic revolutions. That left a long time for the relationships between the cultural, political and financial elites to settle in place. The Communications Revolution has created a whole new batch of great fortunes. The first batch, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, etc were happy to ape the style and manner of the established great fortunes. That meant buying their way into the cultural and political elites, without making any demands. The second batch of great fortunes is not looking to follow that path.

We now have a lot of stupid people with money buying up elite real estate, physical and mental. That will not be without consequence.

Here it comes. The great Republican sellout of their voters is coming earlier than I expected.

Trying to avoid a showdown over immigration, House Republican leaders are moving to make a deal with Democrats to pass a spending bill that would keep the government running past next week.

The emerging strategy follows legislation passed Thursday by the House declaring President Barack Obama’s executive actions to curb deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally to be “null and void.” That legislation wasn’t enough for some conservatives, who complained that the only way to stop Obama’s actions on immigration would be to forbid them in legislation that must pass if the government is to stay open.

Republican leaders are opposed to that course of action, fearing a government shutdown that they don’t want, and they plan to rely on Democratic votes to pass a bill to keep the government going.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Democrats were committed to keeping the government open, but she warned that Republicans could lose their support if they include too many contentious so-called policy riders in the spending bill, on issues like school lunch nutrition standards and water quality.

“We haven’t seen the bill. But there are some very destructive riders in it that would be unacceptable to us and, I think, unacceptable to the American people,” Pelosi said.

“The responsibility to keep government open is theirs. If the bill is anything that we can support, we will,” added Pelosi, who has more leverage in the negotiations because of Boehner’s likely need to rely on her to deliver Democratic votes.

The spending bill would pay for the operations of most government agencies for a year while extending the Homeland Security Department operations only for a few months. Homeland Security includes the immigration agencies that would carry out Obama’s executive actions, so the approach would allow Republicans to revisit them early next year, once they have control of the Senate and a bigger majority in the House.

“We think this is the most practical way to fight the president’s action,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

Several conservative lawmakers sounded resigned Thursday to being ignored by Boehner, who with a bigger majority next year will have more room to maneuver around balky tea party lawmakers.

My friends on the Right get cross with me when I say there’s little difference between the parties. They pound their shoe on the table shouting “There’s a world of difference between the parties!” The fact that no one can ever point to anything where the parties differ all that much is ignored. People want to believe.

Between now and the 2016 election, ObamaCare will become more entrenched and Obama will incrementally amnesty 20 million illegals. Occasionally we’ll hear shouts of protest from Weepy and Droopy, but they will do nothing about it. America faces the same problem the Brits are struggling with now. In America, there’s no party for the majority, just two parties trying to represent the elites. In Britain the void is being filled by UKIP. No such possibility exists in America so we’re doomed to state-party rule where the official parties are just the two faces of the ruling oligarchy.

Last week I posted something about the University of Virginia rape “scandal.”  I was not buying it and it now looks like I was right. Not that anyone should be surprised that I was right. That should be your default position. I’m a little surprised that I was so incredibly right. I said it “reads like what liberals imagine happens in the rape culture of fraternities.” Reality is rarely so neat and tidy like it is depicted on TV or in pulp fiction aimed at women. Steve Sailer did an excellent literary critique of the story the other day.

Anyway, the magazine is now running away from their story. The fraternity is about release facts that contradict key parts of the story. Getting details here or there wrong would be one thing, but we’re now learning that large chunks of the story are complete nonsense. Apparently, the young girl in question has been massaging this story for years, embellishing it as she goes, to the point where even her friends think she is a nut.

I do wonder if this will be a tipping point for this stuff. There’s a limit to how many times you can cry wolf. When you get highly memorable whoppers like this and the Duke lacrosse case, they tend to stick in people’s minds. When the next one comes up it gets easier to recall these hoaxes. It also makes it easier to recall the lesser hoaxes as they string together like beads on a string.

Unsaid in all of this is what it means for the Progressive coalition. The war on women stuff was a huge flop in the election. This stuff does not help the cause. It just makes appeals to lady part solidarity sound ridiculous, even to young women. With everyone re-thinking race relations in light of Ferguson, the progressive coalition is looking like it is about to collapse. Time will tell, but it looks like the late-70’s all of a sudden.

By now everyone with a pulse and an Internet connection knows the Staten Island grand jury refused to indict a cop that may have choked a guy to death. I say “may” have choked the guy to death because it is unclear if that is what happened. The dead guy was a big fat slob with lots of health problems. It is not even clear the cop choked the guy. The video of it looks like the cops had an arm around his neck, but maybe not applying enough pressure to kill the guy. It’s impossible to know from the video. It looks like any other day to me. I’ve seen cops do that in my little slice of heaven dozens of times.

That does not mean the cops were right. I just don’t see enough to think they committed a crime. Presumably the grand jury had medical testimony, witness testimony and legal testimony. Cops, unlike citizens, are permitted to use force to arrest someone, but there are rules they must follow and laws that govern their actions. The video is just one piece of the puzzle, but it is hard for me to say a crime was committed. I can’t even find a definite statement as to what killed the guy. There’s video of him on the ground in cuffs still alive so I’m guessing he was not strangled.

None of this matter much. The prosecutor took the evidence to a grand jury. They don’t do that asking for a no-bill. The old line about getting a  ham sandwich indicted is true, for the most part. Citizens put a lot of trust in the prosecutors. They also trust that the innocent will get a fair trial. That means there is a bias toward indicting the accused. When a grand jury fails to indict it usually means the case is laughably implausible. Of course, a prosecutor can take a terrible case to a grand jury for PR purposes like we saw in Ferguson, but that does not appear to be the case here. The city and the DA wanted this cop swinging from a light post.

The question is why the grand jury did not indict. My view of the video is not the same as the hysterics in the media. Reading the comments on some of these news stories suggests a non-trivial number of people watched that video and saw a combination of Bull Connor and Torquemada torturing a black man to death on the city street. Even assuming they are attention whores performing their public act of piety, the easy choice for the grand jury was to indict, but they chose the hard path.

My suspicion is we’re seeing the backlash to the race baiting the last few years. The Ferguson was so outlandish and offensive to decent people they are pushing back. Just as the silent majority rallied to Nixon, not because they loved Tricky Dick, but because they hated the forces of chaos unleashed by the Left, middle Americans are rallying against the latest push for chaos by the Left.

Today, the main political line of division in the United States is not between the regions of North and South (insofar as such regions can still be said to exist) but between elite and nonelite. As I have tried to make plain … for the last 15 years, the elite, based in Washington, New York, and a few large metropolises, allies with the underclass against Middle Americans, who pay the taxes, do the work, fight the wars, suffer the crime, and endure their own political and cultural dispossession at the hands of the elite and its underclass vanguard.
— Sam Francis

The men and women on that Staten Island grand jury live in the shadow of the elites. That’s where the firemen, cops, construction workers live. They are the people snotty New Yorkers call the “bridge and tunnel” crowd or prols by this guy. They are also the people called racists by the mayor for not wanting to deal with guys like Eric Garner every day. They are the folks who watch the rioting in Ferguson and wonder if that’s coming their way. Asked to choose between flawed cops and the kind of guys loitering in front of the bodega hassling the patrons,  they voted for the cops. They voted for order.

They sent a message.

I turned on ESPN Monday night to see they had the notorious racist, Kevin Blackistone, on to discuss the idiot players from the St. Louis Rams, who made racist taunts to the fans on Sunday. They came out of the tunnel with their hands raised, allegedly in solidarity with the ghetto thugs who occasionally get shot by cops during their crime sprees. Blackistone, of course, was defending them, but he slathered on a racist rant about how white cops are hunting black teenagers. He recited a list of phony statistics the Nation of Islam has been peddling.

It is easy to write off bigots like Blackistone as nutters put on TV as circus acts, but that’s not the case. For some inexplicable reason the University of Maryland has hired this semi-literate nut as an instructor. Imagine having to sit through a lecture by Louis Farrakhan three days a week in order to graduate. Of course, the white liberals who run our universities think this not only appropriate, it is justice. Forcing the suburban white kids to listen to this loon is punishment for their racism.

That’s the true nature of civil rights now. It has nothing to do with helping blacks. If it did, we would not have cities where blacks live below the level of Nigerians. If helping black people was on anyone’s mind, there would be no defense of the gentle giant and his kind. The number one killer of young black people is young black males. The entirety of the country has had to organize itself around this reality. Everyone, regardless of race, knows where feral black men live and they avoid going near those areas. It’s so obvious the Cult had to declare the word “sketchy” racist. Just look around and consider all the things that are there as a defense against black crime.

The people most effected by black crime are black people. If the social justice warriors really wanted to help black people in America, they would be leading the charge to solve the black crime problem. Blacks are four times more likely to be murdered than non-blacks. What’s left out of that story is that almost all of the victims die at the hands of blacks. Even a modest reduction in black crime would have an enormous impact on black life in America. Yet, we never hear a peep from the social justice league.

Instead, they go on TV and scream at other white people. When not doing that they are encouraging the sort of outrageous behavior that causes sensible whites to reconsider their support for civil rights.

The nonsense going on at the Target is exactly what the Left means by civil rights. For the Left, civil rights is just another revenge fantasy. They hate normal everyday Americans, particularly white Americans. Whipping up black rage and then aiming them at middle America is what they call justice. If a riot ensues, then all the better. Meanwhile, the problems plaguing black America go unaddressed and millions of black people live in squalor.

For most of my life I have found the topic of race to be uninteresting. The best we could hope for, in terms of black-white relations, is an uneasy peace between the races. A colorblind society was never going to happen because of history and nature. Humans are tribal and familial, thus making a colorblind society an impossibility anywhere on earth. Even if nature got out of the way, history would always be there. That leaves some form of uneasy peace.

The first hundred years post-slavery the peace was kept through separation. In the north that meant physical separation. Whites kept blacks in urban ghettos, away from middle-class whites, usually using working-class white ethnics as a buffer. In the South, a legal separation was the preferred method. Blacks were non-citizens living amongst the white citizens. Once the North decided the South could not keep the peace that way, the South adopted a form of northern separation as their way of keeping the peace.

That’s where things have sat since the Civil Rights movement. Blacks are full citizens, but there is a physical, spiritual and cultural separation from whites. Overt racism is bad for keeping the peace so whites make sure they police that on their side of the fence. In cities like Baltimore and Washington, keeping the black ghetto from spilling into tourist areas is the main job of the cops. City leaders, black and white, look the other way and tacitly accept the arrangement. It keeps the peace.

That’s what made race talk so dull for me. There was no good reason to talk about the reality of race relations, as that would violate the unwritten rules of keeping the peace. That left the sterile banalities from the Civil Rights Movement drifting around like pot smoke in a late 60’s dorm room. People with nothing to say, but determined to say it, filled the space reserved for discussions about race.

The determination of the American Left to fashion an electoral majority around the hatred of white men has made keeping the peace impossible. Here we are with a black ruler and yet we have race riots. Whether it is materially true or not, the perception of the American people is that race relations are worse now than before Obama. That makes ridiculous platitudes about race less tolerable. NRO’s Jonah Goldberg, has this up today.

On Tuesday, the day after it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the slaying of Michael Brown, President Obama for a second time called for calm. His statement was measured, careful and responsible. He condemned violence and looting while acknowledging the legitimate concerns animating the protestors. He wasn’t all that moving or eloquent, but this might have been one of those times when swinging for the rhetorical fences wasn’t what the moment needed.

One theme he hit repeatedly, and correctly, was that the passions of many protestors are rooted in something very real. The “frustrations that we’ve seen are not just about a particular incident,” Obama said. “They have deep roots in many communities of color who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly.”

The Nazis passions were rooted in something real too, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. The Hutu’s slaughter of Tutsis was rooted in something real, hatred of Tutsis. This solipsistic babble is just a passive-aggressive way to agree with one side without accepting the moral consequences. In this case, Goldberg can pretend to sympathize with the blacks, without saying they are right.

There’s no doubt that is true. As John McWhorter writes in Time magazine, “The key element in the Brown–Wilson encounter was not any specific action either man took — it was the preset hostility to the cops that Brown apparently harbored.” Officer Wilson made a legitimate request of Brown. Brown, in turn, saw no legitimacy in it and behaved recklessly.

In a community where cops are feared, resented, or reviled, it’s almost inevitable that bad things will happen when cops try to do their job, even if they do everything by the book. Moreover, to simply say that the resentment of the police is unwarranted does nothing to solve the problem. People forget that for a brief moment in August, the protests turned peaceful and law-abiding when Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, an African-American from Ferguson with credibility in the neighborhood, was put in charge of policing the protests.

Eventually, thanks in large part to an influx of professional agitators, rabble-rousers, and opportunists — attracted to television cameras like ambulance chasers to a bus accident — the protests got out of hand again. But that moment was instructive.

Now, if you’ve been following the news lately — and by lately, I mean the last several years, or even decades — none of this is particularly shocking. Friction between police departments and minority communities has been part of the national conversation on race (that liberals insist hasn’t been going on) for as long as I can remember. The New York Times has been regularly covering that beat for at least half a century. It’s a major theme of movies and music. It’s a huge profit center for Al Sharpton, who doesn’t lack for influence or microphones.

Before Jonah was born, everyone knew that blacks hated the cops. There’s never been a time in America when the blacks did not hate the cops. Policing has changed a lot over the years and the makeup of police departments has changed too. Even where most cops are black, the blacks hate the cops. Blacks especially hate black cops.

Of course, Jonah never bothers to ask why blacks hate cops or if their hatred is warranted. That leads to uncomfortable revelations about race, which are forbidden. Instead he veers off into babbling about the national conversation, elite chattering skulls and so forth. More nonsense wafting about the room for no good reason.

That’s what is making the race discussion interesting. One side is trying to keep the peace by sticking with the threadbare platitudes. The other is trying to stir up war by misrepresenting common everyday events so that blacks riot. You can’t have both of these for very long. Either the Left backs off and finds another way to get the black vote out in force or the race discussion moves from the banal to the painfully serious.

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The reason why publications like National Lampoon and The Onion lost their audience is daily life has become so ridiculous there’s no need to lampoon it. Post-modern means, among other things, farcical. This little gem is a great example.

Georgetown University (GU) student who says he was mugged at gunpoint says he “can hardly blame” his assailants.

Senior Oliver Friedfeld and his roommate were held at gunpoint and mugged recently. However, the GU student isn’t upset. In fact he says he “can hardly blame [his muggers].”

“Not once did I consider our attackers to be ‘bad people.’ I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was okay,” wrote Friedfeld in an editorial featured in The Hoya, the university’s newspaper. “The fact that these two kids, who appeared younger than I, have even had to entertain these questions suggests their universes are light years away from mine.”

Friedfeld claims it is the pronounced inequality gap in Washington, D.C. that has fueled these types of crimes. He also says that as a middle-class man, he does not have the right to judge his muggers.

“Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’” asks Friedfeld. “It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem.”

Police also aren’t the solution to the problem, Friedfeld argues.

“If we ever want opportunistic crime to end, we should look at ourselves first. Simply amplifying police presence will not solve the issue. Police protect us by keeping those ‘bad people’ out of our neighborhood, and I’m grateful for it. And yet, I realize it’s self-serving and doesn’t actually fix anything.”

Friedfeld suggests that the “privileged” adapt to normalized crime, until the wrongs of the past are righted.

“The millennial generation is taking over the reins of the world, and thus we are presented with a wonderful opportunity to right some of the wrongs of the past,” writes Friedfeld. “Until we do so, we should get comfortable with sporadic muggings and break-ins. I can hardly blame them. The cards are all in our hands, and we’re not playing them.”

Friedfeld did not respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment in time for publishing.

This is common at our elite colleges and universities. Some time ago I was visiting with a friend who was at Yale Divinity. In the grad school bar we took in the scene and too many beers. What stood out was just how socially awkward and submissive the men were compared to what one would expect in a normal college setting. My friend said it was worse with the graduates than the undergrads, but he was probably splitting hairs. He called them a generation of suckups, which looked about right.

I can’t help but think it would have been better for all concerned if the robbers had pulled the trigger on poor Oliver.

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In case anyone was thinking I was angling for a writing job at National Review, this post should set your mind at ease. The other day, I spied this gem from Jim Geraghty the other day and thought it was a good topic. I’ve said before that Uber has become a magic word for the beautiful people and it very well be on its way to being another word for “sacred.” Anything they want to endow with moral virtue will get the word “Uber” slapped on it in the same way people would affix and “i” to anything they wanted to make techy.

Americans are depressed.

Their deep-rooted pessimism about the future may or may not put a Republican in the White House in 2016. But seriously shaking this gloom will probably take more than the usual conservative policy proposals of tax reform and simplification, a defense buildup, regulatory reform, and so on.

History demonstrates to us that giant, rapid, positive change is possible, in both the political and the economic realms.

Actually, history argues the exact opposite. Giant, rapid changes are things like earthquakes and hurricanes. Revolutions and wars are giant, rapid changes. Good change is incremental, perhaps even glacial. The fact that someone calling himself a conservative would write such dewy-eyed nonsense says a lot about why there’s nothing left to the conservative movement in America.

But, the point of the article is education so let’s get to the meat of it.

1. School choice everywhere. Any parent, in any community, should be able to send his or her child to any school that will accept that child. Period. Yes, some might say this is Washington forcing a change on the states. Too bad. We don’t run our education system for the benefit of state and local education officials — or at least we shouldn’t. We do it for kids and parents. Any administrator who wants to deny parents the right to send their children to the school of their choice can get the hell out of the education system.

This has always bugged me about Conservative Inc. The guys with kids always latch onto public school choice like it is a magic solution, without ever thinking about what they are saying. We have school choice now. You can send your kid to private schools, you can move to a place with good public schools and you can home school. This reality has done nothing to alter the inherent defects of public schools run by unions and forbidden to discriminate.

That last part is the elephant in the room. Bad schools all have the same problem. They are are full of bad students. Those students come from bad families, usually black and poor. The schools are not allowed to throw the troublesome kids out so the schools degenerate as the responsible parents move away. School choice is just a way to segregate the bad apples, usually minorities, without owning up to the what your doing.

2. Trade schools, trade schools, trade schools. Our leaders have to drive a stake into the heart of the attitude that all American children need to go to a four-year college or university. Not every American kid needs a degree, but every American kid needs a skill. This is a cultural fight as much as a policy fight.

Jim Geraghty is an open borders fanatic. He can barely choke out the words “illegal immigrant.” Why in the world would we spend a cent on vocational training when we are importing a population of helot workers to do these jobs? Further, conservatives cheered as we let the financial sector auction off the manufacturing base to China and Mexico. Unless Geraghty plans to ship vocational school grads to China, there’s no point in sponsoring vocational training.

3. Push the business world to step directly into education. Corporations have complained for a long time that the education system is not providing them with workers ready to step into entry-level jobs. It’s time to bring the employers into the classroom.

Go ahead, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Cargill, Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Disney, Intel, Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs. Build your own charter schools. What smart kid with an aptitude for engineering wouldn’t want to go to a Ford Academy of Automotive Engineering or a SpaceX aerospace school? Or how about a Google School of Computer Science? These schools would “check all the boxes” for the usual range of core subjects, but they would also offer a constantly updated curriculum in the specialized area relating to their industry. Attendance at one of these schools wouldn’t guarantee future employment at the sponsoring company, but it would certainly open doors and establish early connections.

This already happens. Charter schools are run by for-profit companies. Major corporations spend enormous sums in training their workers. Asking them to take over the public schools sounds great, until they send Jim Geraghty the bill. Then he is not going to be as enthusiastic, I bet. Worse still, when Acme School Inc fires Jim Junior for having a low IQ, Jim Sr. is calling his Congressman. private business spends a lot of time discriminating amongst the various inputs available. They know you can’t make a good product with poor ingredients. Google would not exist if they were forced to hire an army of low-IQ degenerates and criminals.

This is the sort of piece that reminds me of why I don’t consider myself a conservative. Far too much of what passes for conservative these days is just warmed over progressive mush from the 70’s and 80’s. I’m old enough to remember when conservatives argued for local control of schools, abolition of teacher unions and aggressive segregation of students based on merit. That was the best way to provide the best education to the broadest portion of the population, but allowing for the skimming off of the best and the worst for the special treatment they warrant.

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