We have a police problem in the country and I think most people are aware of it. We have kitted out every Podunk PD with mil-spec gear and turned them into game keepers. When I was a kid, even blacks tended to look at cops as a trusted resource. Today, only rich white people have faith in the cops. Everyone else ranges from total contempt to general distrust. A lot of crime goes unreported these days because dealing with the cops is more hassle than it is worth. As I’m fond of pointing out, the cops will go to the mat to catch you speeding, but can’t be bothered to find your car when it is stolen.

It is easy to pick on the cops as they are the part of the iceberg we see. Below the water line is the vast law enforcement industrial complex that supports the cop on the street. The following insane story is a good example. Allegedly, it is against the law to teach people to lie and the Feds are now making a Federal case of it.

The owner of a website that instructs people how to beat polygraph tests was indicted by a federal grand jury on Friday for allegedly doing just that — “training customers to lie and conceal crimes during polygraph examinations,” the FBI announced.

Doug Williams, a former Oklahoma City police officer and owner of Polygraph.com, who’s been teaching people how to pass polygraph tests since 1979, was indicted on obstruction of justice and mail fraud charges related to his work. The Department of Justice’s public affairs office announced the news in a press release. It reads, in part:

Douglas Williams, 69, of Norman, Oklahoma, was charged in a five-count indictment in the Western District of Oklahoma with mail fraud and obstruction. According to allegations in the indictment, Williams, the owner and operator of Polygraph.com, marketed his training services to people appearing for polygraph examinations before federal law enforcement agencies, federal intelligence agencies, and state and local law enforcement agencies, as well as people required to take polygraph examinations under the terms of their parole or probation.

The indictment further alleges that Williams trained an individual posing as a federal law enforcement officer to lie and conceal involvement in criminal activity from an internal agency investigation. Williams also allegedly trained a second individual posing as an applicant seeking federal employment to lie and conceal crimes in a pre-employment polygraph examination. Williams, who was paid for both training sessions, is alleged to have instructed the individuals to deny having received his polygraph training.

Williams is an outspoken critic of polygraph tests. On his website, he says polygraph tests are neither reliable nor accurate, calling them “insidious Orwellian instruments of torture,” a “scam” and a “sick joke.” He says he’s administered thousands of tests with the Oklahoma City Police Department, the FBI and the Secret Service and claims to have testified before Congress and advised two presidents.

The polygraph is pure nonsense. That’s why even our messed up criminal justice system has rejected them. The whole shtick is an act to fool dumb people into admitting things they would prefer not to admit. The mark is strapped into a gizmo that looks serious and is run by a guy who looks even more serious. The whole point is to convince the mark that the contraption and the the technician can tell if he is lying.

If the DOJ was charging him with fraud, then maybe they have something. The above paragraph is about all anyone can train you on regarding the polygraph. Promising more would be dishonest, but that’s not what’s going on here. This is not a consumer protection case. Weirdly, they are admitting that you can “beat” a polygraph. Otherwise, why bother indicting this guy? That alone should drop the use of the polygraph.

Regardless, this is a great example of anarcho-tyranny. The DOJ has allowed the IRS to run wild harassing citizens. They have done nothing about the systematic looting of the nation by the bankers. These are things the people want from their government. Instead, they get the Feds chasing after old men peddling DVD’s on-line.

For a long time, Bill Cosby was the Cult’s most celebrated ornament. He checked all the boxes for the Cult in the 80’s and 90’s. His TV show was supposed to be the new model family for America. Cosby was the strong, sensible father married to a a smart and independent woman. Bill Cosby was Barak Obama when Barak was still Barry the African guy who sold weed. In fairness, the show was funny and entertaining without being preachy. Cosby made his money as a PG comic courting middle-class Americans and his sitcom was more of the same.

Then in the 2000’s Cosby went off the reservation and started saying bad things about black people. I would assume Cosby’s politics are to the left, but he is clearly from the other side of the culture divide. Cosby comes from the Booker T. Washington tradition in black America. That’s the belief that blacks get their place at the table by being so good whites have no choice but to acknowledge them. Cosby never played the victim card and often railed against those who did play that card. That made the Cult very uncomfortable in the 2000’s and Cosby fell out of favor.

That I think is why they have decided it is time to run the rape stories about him. Cosby is old and mostly retired now. He has become particularly ornery about his politics, which makes him a bigger problem. I have no idea if any of it is true. I’m naturally skeptical about this stuff. But, the story as presented suggests there’s something to it.

Bill Cosby, in the midst of a serious PR crisis as accusations about him sexually assaulting women make headlines around the world, has decided to stay silent.

In an interview on NPR’s “Weekend Edition” that aired Saturday (where Cosby and his wife appeared to talk about loaning works to the National Museum of African Art), Cosby, 77, didn’t say a word when host Scott Simon asked him about the allegations. In the past, Cosby has repeatedly denied these claims.

“This question gives me no pleasure, Mr. Cosby, but there have been serious allegations raised about you in recent days,” Simon said, without specifically saying what the allegations in question were.

There’s a long a pause. “You’re shaking your head no. I’m in the news business, I have to ask the question: Do you have any response to those charges?” Simon said.

Another long pause. “Shaking your head no,” Simon continued, and said again: “There are people who love you who might like to hear from you about this — I want to give you the chance.” And again, no response. (Listen to the audio here.)

The interview comes a couple days after Cosby’s name quietly disappeared from the “Late Show With David Letterman” guest line-up for next week. Cosby was supposed to appear on the show on Wednesday. Then, late this week, his name was gone and replaced with talk show host Regis Philbin.

There’s no word on whether the cancellation was Cosby’s idea or the show’s. Letterman’s publicist told the Associated Press that “We can’t comment on the guest booking process.”

Letterman remains in good standing with the Cult, despite his own habit of assaulting female interns and coming retirement. It’s perfectly plausible that word is out that Cosby is on the proscribed list. The degree of cooperation within the Cult across media companies is well documented so this is probably a coordinated attack on the Cos.

It’s why I’m skeptical about Cankles running for president. The Cult never forgets and they never forgive. Like Nixon she may outmaneuver them to win the primary, but like Nixon she will learn that there is no beating the Cult in the log run. If they are willing to take out a revered figure like Bill Cosby, they will have no qualms about taking down a bitter old hag at the end of her career.

Friday morning I came out to find some ice and snow on my truck. Not a lot, just a little to let me know that winter was here. In this part of the world, snow is uncommon in November. It happens once a decade or so. We’ll see some snow in December, January and February, but that’s usually it. The Mid-Atlantic has some strange weather because of the topography. It can get quite tropical in the summer with high humidity and thunderstorms every night. August in Washington is how most cultures imagine Hell. It is hot. It is sticky. It is full of sinners wailing in agony.

Anyway, we had an unusually mild summer with only a few hazy, hot and humid days. The fall came on early and now winter is on us a month ahead of schedule. And yet the global warming crazies continue to claim we are about to burn up.

Fueled by record warm ocean temperatures, October was Earth’s warmest such month on record, according to new data from three independent sources.

Coming after the warmest September on record and the warmest June through August period, the year is virtually certain to set a milestone for the warmest year.

This could mark an end in a temporary slowdown in the rate of warming, which scientists think has been caused by a mix of manmade and natural factors, which has lasted for about the past 15 years. One of those factors was cooling ocean waters in parts of the Pacific, which appears to be reversing in a big way.

Based on preliminary NASA data, the planet’s average temperature tied with 2005 for the warmest October since records began in 1880. Surface data from Japan’s Meteorological Agency shows it was the warmest October, hands down, while the University of Alabama at Huntsville’s satellite dataset pegged the monthly average temperature as the warmest in its records, which date back to 1979, in a tie with October 2012.

The satellite data offers somewhat of an independent check on the surface information, since satellites measure the global average temperature differently than surface weather stations.

The actual rankings from the different centers, especially for an individual month, are not as important as the longterm trend in global average temperatures, which also shows a warming planet, due largely to the buildup in manmade greenhouse gases.

The cult of global warming was an easy one to spot. In fact, it is just another manifestation of the weirdo nature cults popular in the 60’s. In the 60’s and 70’s goofballs and lunatics wanted everyone to become with nature. When everyone decided they liked civilization the hippies got mad and the result was the environmental movement. That’s where the government pushed people around in the name of the banana slugs and wombats. When that was not enough they began claiming the gods were vexed with us and were setting the planet aflame.

Just for the heck of it I tried to find a single city on earth that reported a record temperature in October and I came up empty. Around here we had a few days pushing the record for cold. Eurasian snow pack is setting records, which apparently strongly correlates to bad winters in North America. Otherwise, I was unable to find any evidence of record temps anywhere in October. I’m not a climatologist, but global warming should result in actual warming somewhere if it is a real thing. But, that’s not really the point. It never was.

If you watch ESPN, you can’t help but notice how hard they are selling the NBA. They have a financial interest, for sure, but they are well into extreme slurping at this point. Their obsession with the Donald Sterling story was uncomfortable to watch. The parade of ESPN personalities performing sacred rituals showing their loyalty to the cause was a little like watching a UFO cult appeal to the stars.

Part of it is the network is run by Jews and the Tribe loves basketball. In the book, A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus Russell detailed how basketball was originally a Jewish sport. The Forward did a story on the dominance of The Tribe in basketball back when Donald Sterling was drawing unwanted attention to the fact. It stands to reason that a sports network run by the Tribe is going to cover the Tribe’s favorite sport.

That’s only a small part of their obsession. ESPN is stocked to the gills with liberal fanatics. The brighter types like Tony Kornheiser know how to blunt their fanaticism in order to hold an audience. Guys like Bill Plaschke are too stupid to pull that off so they go on the air ululating like lunatics whenever the opportunity arises. I find myself fast forwarding through a lot of their offerings because it is cringe inducing to watch it.

The Cult is berserk for the NBA because it is a fringe sport now. Like soccer, it is not enjoyed by the core of America. The NBA is the black man’s league and played by freaks that represent such a tiny slice of humanity that they may as well be from another planet. That appeals to the Cult’s anti-white male attitudes, their anti-Americanism and their general hatred of normal people . Not only are there no white males in the NBA, the sport has very little to do with the forms of masculinity that so offends the Cult.

Anyway, that setup was in lead up to this story I spied on ESPN today. First off you have Pablo Torre. He is the fake nerd ESPN likes to promote. He is a two-fer, in the head counting of modern liberalism. He plays his role without question and he has a Latino name. He’s also a polite ball washer who never wanders off the reservation and says anything vexing to his bosses.

Then we have the female head of the players union. She’s black and lacks a penis so the folks at ESPN were probably fainting in the aisles over this story. Her big talk about taking on the evil pale penis people, who run the NBA, is catnip for the Cult. The fact that she was an ornament at an overclass law firm is even better. Skadden is the pinnacle of ruling class law firms. You don’t go to them when you need a parking ticket fixed. You hire them when you’re in a beef with some other ruling class guy. They do a lot of work for clients like professional sports leagues and their television partners.

In the story you have some great nonsense.

Michele Roberts, the NBA players’ union executive director, on Wednesday questioned several of the principles that for decades have governed owner-player relations in the league, objecting to the concept of a salary cap while making clear she’d push for much more than a 50-50 split of basketball-related income.

“Why don’t we have the owners play half the games?” Roberts said, speaking in her Harlem office to ESPN The Magazine. “There would be no money if not for the players.”

“Let’s call it what it is. There. Would. Be. No. Money,” she added, pausing for emphasis. “Thirty more owners can come in, and nothing will change. These guys [the players] go? The game will change. So let’s stop pretending.”

Roberts, hailed as one of the most brilliant trial lawyers in the United States, made history in July by being elected the first female union chief in major North American sports.

But given the context of a nine-year, $24 billion TV deal set to begin in 2016, and the players’ ability to opt out of the league’s collective bargaining agreement after the 2016-17 season, Roberts’ relatively radical perspective could prove to be just as profound a change.

“I don’t know of any space other than the world of sports where there’s this notion that we will artificially deflate what someone’s able to make, just because,” she said, talking about a salary cap — a collectively bargained policy that, in its current form, has constrained team spending in the NBA since 1984-85. “It’s incredibly un-American. My DNA is offended by it.”

I may have to start going to church again if this woman does follow through with this threat. I’m sure she is the most brilliant attorney on earth and all that, but there’s a reason why she signs the back of pay checks and not the front. It’s also why she is not sitting in the owner’s box somewhere. Having her lead a revolt by the players against the owners would probably be the funniest bit of TV imaginable. It would be Cult on Cult violence.

Almost as good as Fake Indian ascending to leadership of the Democrats in the Senate.

When the Left decided that the word “religion” was bad, they quickly forgot their reason for the declaration. It had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with Christianity. In fact, in Lib-Speak, the word religion is a synonym for Christianity. The trouble with that is they forgot that their own whack-a-doodle belief-set is a religion and they lost the ability to properly deal with a religion that is willing to take them on, toe to tow. They now find themselves giving ground to Muslims on their home turf.

Montgomery County Public Schools will remove religious labels from school holidays, but members of the Islamic community say the adjustments to the school calendar do nothing to gain parity and a day off for the Muslim holiday of Eid.

The school board approved the school calendar for the 2015-2016 school year Tuesday. The calendar will no longer reference specific religious holidays but rather state simply that school will be closed on dates that correspond with holidays, such as Eid, Yom Kippur and Christmas.

Saqib Ali, a former Maryland state delegate and co-chair of Equality for Eid, was not happy with the board of education’s action Tuesday.

“Equality is really what we’re looking for,” Ali said. “Simply saying we’re not going to call this Christmas, and we’re not going to call this Yom Kippur, and still closing the schools, that’s not equality.”

A few things worth mentioning here. Montgomery County is a liberal stronghold. Many of the Cult’s famous members live there. For instance, Chris Mathews lives in the whites-only town of Chevy Chase Village, which is in Montgomery County. It is not Marin County, but more a respectably WASP version of it. The same beliefs, but far less ostentatious.

The big item in that selection is the quote from the savage. The savage says they are looking for equality, which is total nonsense. Islam does not play well with other religions. That’s a fact backed by 1400 years of evidence. The savage is also doing what the Left has always done in America. That is, equate a microscopic minority with the vast majority. There are very few  Muslims in America, but they demand equal footing with Jews and Christians, who are orders of magnitude more populous.

Again, we see the similarities between Islam and Liberalism.

Of course, this just points out two things. One is the Founders made an error regarding freedom of religion. It was an error they could not foresee. They never imagined Christian Europeans surrendering to savages on their own lands so they never thought to ban the savage and his religion from America. It’s too late to ban Islam from America, something that will happen one day, but not now. Instead, we should ban all immigration from savage controlled areas. Some will slip in, for sure, but keeping these people in their 50 or so countries should be a priority.

School board members said they were sympathetic to the desire to have Eid recognized and close schools but that legal precedent in Maryland bars them from closing for religious purposes.

“We can’t close for religious holidays. We can only close for operational purposes,” like high absenteeism, school spokesman Dana Tofig said.

That explanation doesn’t sit well with Zainab Chaudry, with the Council on American Islamic Relations.

“What’s really concerning to us is that similar conditions weren’t placed on any other faith community,” Chaudry says.

In the 1970s school officials decided to close on Jewish holidays because of high absenteeism.

But school board member Michael Durso said that the schools effectively close for a religious reason: the schools had high absenteeism because of a religious holiday in the community.

Noting the attempt to move away from favoring religions by instead referring to school days off as “winter break” and “student holidays,” Durso said as long as the Islamic community’s concern for parity wasn’t somehow addressed “it comes off as insensitive, and I just think we cannot afford to be in that light”.

That drew applause from parents who filled the seats in the board of education’s meeting room.

The adoption of the 2015-2016 school calendar does give students the day off on Eid but only because it happens to fall on another school holiday, Yom Kippur.

Several school board members, Chris Barclay, Judy Docca and Michael Durso, made it clear that they want to see a permanent policy change but that discussion would continue.

Board member Judy Docca acknowledged Tuesday’s action does little to satisfy a community that’s been waiting for years to see a change.

The fact that the vast majority of people in the County now have to flush their culture down the drain to satisfy these savages who don’t belong here is never mentioned explicitly. As I’ve said many times, I’m not a religious person. I come from a culture and people who have been shaped by and inspired by Christianity and that heritage is important to me. It is important to the overwhelming majority of people in Montgomery County.

So, the people there should adopt the Islamic solution. That means beheading the school board members for apostasy and then chasing every Muslim out of the county. That way, we can all celebrate Islam together one last time and also get our country back.

Instead, look for the Muslim Veto to come to your town next, as soon as you get your first Muslim.

I was watching ESPN tonight and they did a story on Richie Incognito and his inability to get a job in the NFL. Allegedly, the NFL is telling teams they should not sign him. The ESPN piece, like the linked article and the comments in that article, bordered on the farcical. Everyone pretends to be mystified as to why a white guy, who was mean to a black guy, can’t get a job, while black guys found guilty of abusing children, beating women and killing animals are welcomed back into the league. Heck, a few years ago a black guy, who spent time in the can for homicide, was welcomed back into the league.

After working out for Broncos on Monday, Richie Incognito will have to keep looking. Denver, despite having a desperately thin offensive line, has decided to pass—for now—on signing the controversial-but-talented guard, who hasn’t played in the NFL in over a year.

The Broncos are firing on nearly all cylinders, save their run game. They rank 25th in yards per attempt, and 26th in yards per game. They’ve been shuffling their O-line all season in attempts to address the obvious problems—just this past Sunday they moved All-Pro guard Louis Vasquez to tackle, center Manny Ramirez to guard, and started Will Montgomery at center for the first time this year. In short: they’re desperate. And Incognito, if he can play anything like he did the last time we saw him, would be an upgrade.

But it’s been a very long time since we saw Richie Incognito. He was suspended after last season’s Week 8 after reports emerged of his harassment of teammate Jonathan Martin. The CBA only allowed for a four-game ban, but as more and more information came out, Incognito became increasingly toxic to the Dolphins, to they reached a deal to pay Incognito to sit out the remainder of the season. Finally, in February, the results of an NFL-commissioned independent investigation were released, and they showed Incognito to be a shithead of the highest order.

Except, this sport is full of shitheads. Abusers and bullies and harassers and just straight up bastards that no one can stand. And for the most part, all that comes a distant third place to how good you are at football. (Second place is how much you cost.) Incognito is, at least theoretically, still a good football player. At the time of his suspension, Pro Football Focus had him rated as the league’s 13th best guard (out of 71).

Yet Incognito can’t find a taker, despite a handful of teams kicking his tires from the moment he was reinstated in late August. This line, buried at the bottom of a Jay Glazer report, feels ominous:

Incognito visited the Chiefs and the Bucs this season and in both cases, each team got skittish after numerous calls from people inside the NFL were made and no deals were ever consummated.

I wonder what it could be?

I somewhat expected a lot of this to fade away now that the election is over. Mass fainting spells over the pale penis people acting poorly is a fine enough election tool, but the election is over. I suppose it just shows how fearful old rich white guys are these days. Donald Sterling had his team confiscated because he was deemed a heretic. In the old days, Jewish guys were immune from charges of heresy, but the Cult is turning on the Tribe, particularly the males. The war on the pale penis people is inclusive!

I’m noodling on something else for a longer post at a later date, but the fact that “bullying” is now worse than murder says a lot about where we are culturally. That’s a big part of the Incognito story. It’s not that he was mean to a black guy. It’s that he was ruled overly masculine and that’s close to a capital crime these days.

Thomas Sowell used to talk about the damage affirmative action in college admissions did to black achievement. His argument was fairly simple and straight forward. Putting unqualified blacks into elite colleges like Stanford may make white liberals feel good, but it just resulted in more blacks flunking out of college. The black students that should be in Fresno State, for example, were getting placed in UCLA. The blacks that should be at UCLA were getting bumped up to Berkley. It is one thing to admit someone into Stanford who is not qualified. Affirmative action created a cascading effect that damaged all blacks entering college.

Whether or not you agree with Sowell, putting people into a position for which they are unqualified is a terrible idea, regardless of the justification. It is one of the many ways the Cult dehumanizes black people. Affirmative action in college admissions has nothing to do with helping black people. It is all about making the white people feel noble. They get to retire to their all-white neighborhoods to boast about how they are making the world a better place. Similarly, diversity is not about the diverse. It is about whites wanting to feel worldly by having some color around them, as long as the color knows its place.

I’ve written here about the corrosive effect of racial solidarity amongst blacks. When Charles Barkley said pretty much the same thing I’ve been saying, I thought good things about Mr. Barkley. How could I not? He was less elegant, but more to the point. Blacks are the people hold black people back in America.

“We as black people are never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you are black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people,” Barkley said.

Barkley, a native of Leeds, said African Americans are too concerned with street cred than true success and that’s holding the community back.

“For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you’re not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don’t break the law, you’re not a good black person. It’s a dirty, dark secret in the black community.

“There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don’t have success. It’s best to knock a successful black person down because they’re intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they’re successful. It’s just typical BS that goes on when you’re black, man.”

For some reason, I decided to check in on the Atlantic’s house, er, black guy to see if he had picked up on it. Sure enough, he had a post up. Coates is a nice fusion of what Sowell and Barkely are saying. The Atlantic is decorating its site with Coates. They don’t really care what he has to say, how could they? His arguments are juvenile and incoherent. I thought after his embarrassing long essay on reparations that got so much attention, he would have been ushered off and replaced. His sudden “sabbatical” looked like a polite way of brooming the guy, but here he is.

Now, it very well may be that he is simply too dumb to realize he is an ornament. He’s certainly too dumb to know he is who Barkley had in mind when he talked about stupid blacks trying to tear down successful blacks. Of course, this could not happen if the white people running the Atlantic viewed blacks as something other than wrapping paper. Coates may be a nice guy, but he should be covering high school sports for a town paper, not writing essays for a major opinion journal. He is in way over his head, but it is not his fault. The fault lies with the white’s who hired him. The casacading effect of such decisions is their fault as well.

An age old problem in human society is the free loader problem. Economists prefer to phrase it as the “Free Rider Problem” so as not to drag in those icky moral and cultural issues. I prefer to use the more appropriate phrase, “free loader” as that’s the real problem. People unable to provide for themselves are not a problem, even for poor human societies. Every society, not matter how rich, is plagued by a slice of humanity that chooses to live off the labor of others, even when alternatives are available to them.

The better term may be the “entitlement problem” but that one has been claimed for other purposes. An example I like to use is the pizza problem. In my youth a friend had a roommate, who was from a very wealthy family. Having grown up unaware of the restraints the rest of us faced, he had a sense of entitlement. He just expected people to wait on him. Whenever we ordered a pizza, this guy would eat more than his share and never chip in for the bill, unless asked. He seemed oblivious to the fact that food cost money and the rest of us had to concern ourselves with the fact we lacked an abundant supply of money.

That’s one side of the entitlement coin. Spend any time around the very rich and you bump into this. When I worked for a Congressman in my youth, he and his family were often stymied by mundane things like buying gas. They never carried cash and did not have credit cards. Someone else was always there to pay the bill so when caught needing to actually pay for something, they would be stumped. The thing about it is there was always someone there to solve the problem for them. A sense of entitlement can carry you a long way in society.

The other side of the coin is the underclass.It is generally assumed by the ruling class that the lower class is just too dumb to do anything other than be poor. That’s often the case. There are a lot of very stupid people in the ghetto. But, they are not so stupid that they cannot provide for themselves. Instead of investing their time into middle-class pursuits, they work the welfare system, learning all the ways to maximize their return, while minimizing their investment. After all, they are entitled.

That’s the thing you see with the under-class. They view themselves as dependent and they can’t imagine things arranged any other way. Government and the rich people who run it owe them free housing, free food, free booze and so forth. In a weird way the under-class is like modern hunter-gatherers. They forage around their environment, in this case the ghetto and the custodial state that supports it, for the necessities to live. Every once in a while, the males engage in violent conflict with males from other tribes. Afterwards, they get high, eat and screw.

The point of all this is humans have been trying to figure out how best to handle the free rider problem since forever and we still struggle with it. The best way we have discovered is to have everyone pay their own way. A radical idea that has been tried in a few places with surprising success. Colonial New England is probably our best example locally. People were expected to pay their own way, take care of their families and not be a burden on their neighbors. Charity existed, but it existed with lots of strings. Those strings were intended to discourage you from needing charity. I used to live near an old almshouse from the 18th century, for example.

All that was considered crazy so we have struggled to come up with better answers. A good example how the struggle is going is Net neutrality. For reasons he most certainly does not understand, President Obama is pushing for the FCC to arbitrarily force ISP’s to treat all traffic the same.

President Obama urged the US government to adopt tighter regulations on broadband service in an effort to preserve “a free and open Internet.”

In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the principle of treating all Internet traffic the same way, known in shorthand as Net neutrality. That means treating broadband services like utilities, the president said, so that Internet service providers would be unable “to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”

Obama wades into a contentious debate that has raged over how to treat Internet traffic, which has only heated up as the FCC works to prepare an official guideline. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015. The debate has centered on whether broadband should be placed under Title II regulation under the Telecommunications Act, which already tightly controls phone services.

Proponents argue that Title II regulation would ensure the free and fair flow of traffic across the Internet. Opponents, however, believe the reorientation would mean onerous rules that would limit investment in the infrastructure and in new services, and that toll roads of sorts would provide better service to companies that can support their higher traffic volumes. But that in turn has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instances, intentionally slowing some content streams and speeding others.

The problem is the Internet is not a utility. A utility is a special sort of monopoly that provides a specific product that is the same for all customers. Rich people get the same electricity as poor people. The utility charges by the unit at the same rate for all users. The Internet is a wildly varied service that is valuable only because of a millions of other businesses that sells products and services over the Internet. But, there are loads of companies transferring their costs to people who do not use their service, via the miracle of the cable bill. Facebook is the most obvious example.

The problem we have is a variation on the classic Tragedy of the Commons. The public, through their governments, allowed private industry to use public resources to construct the Internet, including the massive cable TV network. In many cases, these companies were paid to build out infrastructure. All of them rely on free access to public roads and sidewalks to maintain their networks, like any other utility. Unlike the electric grid, the Internet is a virtual market place, The ISP charges rent to anyone who sets up shop and charges access to anyone who wants to buy products offered on-line.

Well, sort of.

I pay much more for Internet service that I probably should, given my usage. I don’t watch movies on-line or listen to music on-line very often. The guy down the road has a bunch of kids who each use ten times the bandwidth I use. Their Internet bill is the same as mine. The costs are socialized so he can get cheap movies and I can get expensive e-mails. Much like the cable bill, we have a inverse of the utility model. Instead of metered billing, everyone pays the same, regardless of usage. The ISP’s want to implement what amounts to metered billing, like a utility, except the government is trying to stop them, because they say they are a utility.

The habit of not noticing is strong in modern America. Perhaps it has always bee the case. It is impossible to know. Not noticing what the ruling class is doing may very well be a part of the human toolkit. That’s really what we’re talking about with political correctness. You can notice all sorts of things about your fellow man, as long as the people in charge are OK with it. It’s so common it must be our natural inclination. Anyway, I thought of that whilst reading this post by Karl Denninger.

How can we defend this sort of crap — and help fund it?

Jerusalem (AFP) – Israel pledged Monday to build more than 1,000 new settler homes in Arab east Jerusalem, in a move the Palestinians warned was likely to trigger an “explosion” of violence.

….

The news emerged just weeks after hardline settlers took over 35 homes in Silwan, a densely populated Palestinian neighbourhood on the southern edge of the Old City, sparking fury in the West Bank city of Ramallah and condemnation from Washington.

So seizing land from people that live there simply on their political and ethnic background is ok?

What would be our reaction if a bunch of white families decided to take over 35 homes owned by black people in a US City?  We’d call that what it is — grand theft and probably worse, and seek to put those people in prison, right?

Well?

Is it really any more difficult than this to understand?  I think not.

You cannot tell me that you want peace while at the same time you’re doing this — unless your definition of “peace” is in fact subjugation.

As I have repeatedly pointed out Israel has an intractable demographic problem in terms of who gives birth to how many kids, and there is no solution to this problem that maintains Israel as a Jewish state over time.

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A business person I know recently found a couple of his employees were stealing from him. It was petty theft and he never would have detected it, except one of them bragged about it to another employee. One thing led to another and he was informed by a loyal employee of what was happening. He fired the thieves and that was the end of it. It was not the first time and it will not be the last time. Every business has policies and procedures in place to discourage it and discover it when it does happen.

If you talk to cops, they will tell you that they solve most crimes with a lot of help from the criminals. The crooks leave physical evidence that is easy to trace back to them. They brag about their exploits to friends. These days, they post about their crimes on Facebook and Twitter. There’s something about humans that leads them to give themselves away when they are breaking the rules.

The point I’m leading up to is the recent report on the North Carolina academic scandal is based on assumptions that contradict our everyday experiences with our fellow humans. For instance, former UNC Athletic Director and current ACC Commissioner, John Swofford, claims he was wholly unaware of what was going on all around him.

John Swofford, the ACC commissioner, said that during his final years at North Carolina he saw no warning signs, sensed no red flags, about bogus independent studies courses that for nearly two decades inflated athletes’ GPAs and helped keep them eligible.

Swofford, who spoke Wednesday at the ACC’s annual basketball media day, was the athletic director at UNC from 1980 through 1997, when he left to become the ACC commissioner. By the time he left, a long-running “paper class scheme,” as it has been described recently, had been ongoing for four years.

Kenneth Wainstein, a former U.S. Justice Department official, last week announced the results of his months-long investigation into suspect courses in UNC’s African- and Afro-American Studies Department. Wainstein concluded that, from 1993-2011, 3,100 hundred students — nearly half of them athletes — passed through bogus paper classes in AFAM.

Among the athletes who were enrolled in the classes, which had no professor oversight, nearly half were football and men’s basketball players. Overall, athletes received higher grades in the courses than non-athletes — often As and Bs for papers that were found to have been heavily plagiarized.

Asked Wednesday if he sensed “any red flags” about the AFAM courses during his final years at UNC, Swofford said, “I don’t think so.”

“I think if you look at (the Wainstein) report there, in my last few years there, there were some, in terms of numbers, very relatively minimal, independent study classes and AFAM,” Swofford said. “But that really took off in about 2000.

“So it never came up while I was there as an issue from any source. If it had, obviously, we would have addressed that with the appropriate people. But it never arose as any issue at all.”

When Swofford was UNC’s athletic director, the academic support program for athletes was, for a time, housed within the athletic department. He changed that, though, and moved the academic support program — formerly called the Academic Support Program for Student-Athletes — to the College of Arts and Sciences, where it has remained.

Now, I suppose it is possible that not a single student talked to anyone about the fake classes. It’s possible the adults running the scam swore a blood oath and said nothing. I suppose no one at the school ever wondered why so many athletes were taking and acing these classes. All of that could be true, but is so unlikely that it borders on the laughable. In all these years not a single person bragged? Blabbed? Accidentally let slip with something?

According to the report, this was a miraculous crime spree. For almost two decades, a handful of low-level flunkies and one professor orchestrated an elaborate fraud without anyone in charge ever noticing. They were so good, they were able to elude detection by dozens of coaches, several directors and a couple of presidents. Not only does this contradict common everyday experience, it is one of the all-time great crimes.

That’s all nonsense, of course. What we are seeing is another example the how we no longer punish the people in charge. The report was commissioned so the people in charge of the school could pretend to be doing the right thing, while not actually blaming anyone who was in charge at the time. Instead, it is some low-level flunkies left holding the bag. Much like how Janet Reno “took responsibility” for killing all of those people at Waco, being responsible means never having to answer for your actions.

It is the problem that plagues our age. The people in charge have no respect for the rules, they don’t abide by them and they never face any consequences for breaking the rules. Walter Russell Mead calls what happened at UNC a moral collapse. That true, but it misses the larger issue. The UNC scandal is emblematic of what has happened to American society. The utter and complete moral collapse of the ruling class has reduced to a transactional society run by sociopaths.