Crackpots are often entertaining, but they are usually just tiring. A guy who thinks dinosaurs once had a sophisticated society, but were obliterated by space aliens in order to give mammals a shot is probably a fun guy at the bar. The Brits used to call these sorts of eccentrics mad or daft, as in harmlessly nutty. At the other end of the spectrum, you have the sort that you suspect is one nudge away from going bonkers and shooting up a mall. These are the guys sending angry letters to the editor of their local newspaper – every day. Nowadays, they show up on Facebook and Twitter running “campaigns” against public figures. Or, they get a PhD and write articles for Salon.

The American Renaissance Foundation is an extremely conservative right-wing organization that also publishes a monthly magazine of the same name, American Renaissance (AR). The magazine’s first issue appeared in November 1990. The foundation was established by Jared Taylor (1952–) who serves as president of the New Century Foundation and as editor of AR. Taylor has ties to a variety of domestic and international racists and extremists. He is on the editorial advisory board of Citizens Informer, the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a virulently racist group whose website has referred to blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.” He has contributed writings to The Occidental Quarterly, a racist journal. He also has been a member of the board of directors of the National Policy Institute, a self-styled racist think tank, and has received funding from this institute.

Taylor has close ties with members of various neo-Nazi groups and with Gordon Baum, the CEO of Council of Conservative Citizens. He is a frequent radio guest of Don Black’s, operator of Stormfront, a white supremacist online forum that also advertises American Renaissance conferences. He also has ties to Mark Weber, head of the Institute for Historical Review. European racists are among his close associates, including members of the British National Party, a racist, far-right political party in England, and the National Front, a racist, far-right political party in France. Nick Griffin, the head of the British National Party, has been a speaker at two American Renaissance conferences. Frédéric Legrand, a member of the National Front, is a frequent contributor to American Renaissance.

In those 263 words, I highlighted 14 scare words. It reads like something written by the Lyndon LaRouche people. I was expecting some reference to Henry Kissinger and his international communist ties. This is the sort of rant you expect to be hand written on note paper, folded up a bunch of times and then stuffed into a plain envelope. If you read the whole 3,000 word tirade you start to think the guy already has Jared Taylor tied up in his basement and this piece includes his demands.

I know next to nothing about Jared Taylor. I recall Derb writing about him once so I went to the American Renaissance site. I find white identity to be a bit silly for the same reasons I black identity to be ridiculous. Not all blacks are the same and not all whites are the same. In America, blacks at least share a common ancestry and history. You can reasonably argue that there is a “black culture” that is shared by all black people. You can’t say that about whites. Flinty guys from New Hampshire are not a lot like Scots-Irish in Georgia. Then you have all the Poles, Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans and so forth. There’s simply no such thing as white identity.

That said, it is a harmless eccentricity. I’m more concerned about deranged crackpots like Robert Wald Sussman than some old white guys getting together to bitch about the “darkies.” Imagine the poor kids who foolishly take his course only to find they will be getting harangued three times a week by an aging madman.

New polling says the Liberal Democrats are in deep trouble with the voters. That is assumed to be good news for the ever so slightly less liberal alternative, the Republicans. The key will be getting the black vote out in force and what better way than a race riot? That looks like the plan. News reports coming from Ferguson Missouri indicate the cop will not be charged.

A report by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch this morning shows the official autopsy supports Ferguson officer Darren Wilson’s claim that Michael Brown struggled with him in his patrol vehicle, and that Brown did not have his hands up when he was shot Aug. 9.

A source tells the Post-Dispatch that Wilson testified to the Grand Jury that when he tried to get out of his SUV to talk to Brown and his friend Dorian Johnson about the theft of cigarillos, Brown slammed the door shut and punched him in the face.

Wilson pulled his weapon, and Brown grabbed it. At one point, the barrel was pointed at Wilson’s hip, then a shot was fired hitting Brown’s hand.

Wilson says he then chased Brown, who turned and ran toward him. Wilson said “stop,” then fired. Brown kept coming, so Wilson fired several more shots.

The Post-Dispatch also had three experts examine the official autopsy.

St. Louis medical examiner Dr. Michael Graham says the report supports claims that there was a “significant struggle” in Wilson’s patrol car, and Brown suffered a hand wound at “relatively short range.”

A forensic pathologist from San Francisco, Dr. Judy Melinek, says based on a bullet wound to Brown’s arm, Brown’s palms could not have been facing Wilson in the standard surrender position – with hands up and palms out – when he was shot, and Brown was falling forward or lunging when he was hit by the fatal shot to the top of his head.

Looks like what everyone probably knew it was all along, but that’s not the point. At least the family is ready to play their role in the effort.

Michael Brown’s aunt believes Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson will “feel the wrath of God’s vengeance” for the shooting death of the 18-year-old.

Speaking to MailOnline, Sheryl Davis believes Wilson committed murder. A grand jury is expected to decide by next month whether Wilson will be indicted in Brown’s death.

“It’s murder and they will feel and see the wrath of God’s vengeance come upon them in a mighty way, just as he promised all who do evil in his sight,” she said.

The shooting has sparked protests in Ferguson over the past two months as tensions are mounting following a New York Times report revealing new details about the incident.

The New York Times reported Friday evening that Wilson told authorities that Brown reached for the gun during a scuffle. The officer’s account to authorities did not explain why he fired at Brown multiple times after emerging from his vehicle, according to the newspaper.

The Times reported that the account of Wilson’s version of events came from government officials briefed on the federal civil rights investigation into the Aug. 9 shooting that sparked racial unrest and weeks of protests, some of which turned violent. Wilson is white and Brown black.

One protester warned what would happen if Wilson is set free.

“If there is not an indictment, excuse my French, all hell is going to break loose,” the protester told CNN.

The best thing that could happen here is for respectable blacks to take the side of the police. As I’ve pointed out before, the biggest obstacle to black people in America now is this stubborn racial solidarity that leads otherwise sensible people to defend savagery. Italians, Irish, Jews, Poles and other “ethnics” used WW2 as a chance to abandon their ethnic identity and become simply Americans. That often meant abandoning their old neighborhoods and their old neighbors. If you wanted to be a hood, the respectable Irish/Italians/Jews/etc wanted nothing to do with you.

Blacks have gone the other way and placed racial solidarity above all else. Defending ghetto culture may have been necessary in the 50’s, but it is self-defeating today. But, the ruling class needs the blacks to stay at the bottom of the social hierarchy so this is unlikely to change.  Ben Carson is shunned by respectable white liberals, but Al Sharpton gets a prime time TV show.

Mexican-Lebanese billionaire Carlos Slim controls the NY Times. Everyone pretends he has nothing but a financial stake in the company, but that’s nonsense. Slim became a billionaire because he knows how to handle himself around powerful people and their servants. In Mexico, he got going the old fashioned way. He built some businesses, got rich and then bought some politicians. He got rich enough to go public and take up a position within the Mexican ruling elite. That allowed him to get control of the telecom system and the mobile phone market that was just taking off. That made him a billionaire and put him into the global elite.

To be in the global elites means having friends at the top of the American political system. The NY Times is the official propaganda organ of the ruling class. It also losses money by the truck load. Saving the Old Grey Lady bought Slim a lot of friends in Washington. Now the good folks at the Times are returning the favor by letting the GOP know they better not get too aggressive on the immigration issue.

New Hampshire has one of the smallest populations of illegal immigrants in the country. Only about 5 percent of its 1.3 million residents are foreign-born, and 3 percent are Hispanic.

But tune into the Senate race between Scott P. Brown, the Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic incumbent, and you might think the state shares a border with Mexico, not Canada.

When someone called a talk radio show to ask Mr. Brown about global warming the other day, Mr. Brown immediately started talking about border security. “Let me tell you what I believe is a clear and present danger right now,” he said, brushing aside the caller’s concerns about the environment. “I believe that our border is porous.”

Footage of agents patrolling the rocky, arid Southwestern landscape is featured in Mr. Brown’s ads — not quite the piney highlands of New Hampshire.

A political group led by prominent conservatives like John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, attacked Ms. Shaheen last week with a video that juxtaposed two alarming images: a horde of people rushing a fence, presumably along the Mexican border, and a clip of Islamic militants right before they beheaded the journalist James Foley, a New Hampshire native. The ad was pulled after the Foley family complained.

Republicans have long relied on illegal immigration to rally the conservative base, even if the threat seemed more theoretical than tangible in most of the country. But in several of this year’s midterm Senate campaigns — including Arkansas and Kansas, as well as New Hampshire — Republicans’ stance on immigration is posing difficult questions about what the party wants to be in the longer term.

Some Republicans are questioning the cost of their focus on immigration. Campaigning on possible threats from undocumented immigrants — similar to claims that President Obama and the Democrats have left the country vulnerable to attacks from Islamic terrorists and the Ebola virus — may backfire after November. At that point, the party will have to start worrying about its appeal beyond the conservative voters it needs to turn out in midterm elections.

I always love the use of “some people question…” I once worked with a woman, a nasty shrew, who loved this device. She would deliver her insults via this imaginary third party. When someone objected, she would retreat into “I’m not the one saying this. I’m just relaying it.” The lefty media loves this tactic.

The other thing you see here is how the Cult sees the people on the other side as monolithic. They just assume the undifferentiated “other” they call “Republicans” are supposed to be in lockstep like the people in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Therefore even one dissident means there are huge fissures within the GOP. The reality is the GOP is just the less insane side of the ruling class. The real divide on immigration is between the small ruling elite based in trendy cities and the vast majority of the American people, including recent immigrants.

That said, the point is to send the message. Immigration may be a nice sales pitch for this election, but don’t get any ideas about acting on it. The GOP knows better than to make Carlos Slim an enemy.

I’m in need of a new pair of casual shoes so I went onto Zappos to browse. I’ve used this service before and it is pretty good. I rarely go to stores now, preferring to shop on-line. You have to think it through with things like shoes because you can’t try them on before buying them. Zappos has a great return system so it is not awful if you screw up and buy the wrong thing.

Anyway, I see this on the site today:

Out of curiosity, I click on the link and this is the result. Some of the choices look like work boots, but not really. Most look like the sort of boots urban hipsters buy, despite never leaving the sidewalk. The rest look like something you wear to the bathhouse. I’m old and wildly out of touch with popular culture, but my goodness.

Maybe I’m reading to much into it, but it strikes me that post-scarcity America is turning the necessities of the past into ironic fashion statements. The perpetual grad student will kit himself out in faux work boots and a Carhartt jacket, maybe some carpenter pants. He will never have held the working end of a hammer or screwdriver, but he’ll have the gear of the guy who used to use them to make a living.

In the 1970’s, the young hipsters went to the army surplus store and bought field jackets and pea coats. None of them would have lasted an hour in the service, but they liked the clothes. The upper middle-class kids were being ironic, wearing the clothes of the military, often decorated with their “personal statements” while sporting long hair and beards. Maybe the generation coming along now is ironically mocking the idea of work by wearing the uniform of the working man.

From the comments:

The Democratic nominee for president will be Hillary Clinton, who will make a respectable effort but lose to the Republican nominee, who is unknown (probably Mitt). Two years later, the Democrats will retake Congress.

At least this is what us Democrats understand. But it is interesting that you all are so worried about Elizabeth Warren.

Maybe Cankles wins the nomination. History says she does not. The Liberal Democrats hate losers and rarely give them a second chance. Losing suggest there could be something wrong with the one true faith and that can never be tolerated. Therefore, losers are flushed down the memory hole. Carter and Dukakis were on milk cartons for years, even after Clinton won in 1996. Cankles is also old and ugly. That’s never going over well for a party that invests so heavily in the narrative of youth and newness. She will be 69 in 2016. When was the last time the Liberal Democrats ran someone that old?

As to what happens in 2018, I have no idea and neither do you.

Worried about Fake Indian? I think if the Liberal Democrats nominate that dunce I may blow a funny fuse.

I admit to not watching broadcast news much at all and only looking at domestic news sites for weird stuff I can write about or rant about as the situation warrants. I get all of my news from the British tabs, Drudge and blogs I visit. The Brits do a better job covering America than the local media and Drudge is a pretty good aggregator. Bloggers I follow do a  good job finding stories of interest. The point being is I probably miss a fair amount of what gets covered as news in America.

I got an chain e-mail today that read as follows:

He is Edward “Ed” Mezvinsky, born January 17, 1937. Then you’ll probably say, “Who is Ed Mezvinsky?”

Well, he is a former Democrat congressman who represented Iowa’s 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives for two terms, from 1973 to 1977.

He sat on the House Judiciary Committee that decided the fate of Richard Nixon. He was outspoken saying that Nixon was a crook and a disgrace to politics and the nation and should be impeached.

He and the Clintons were friends and very politically intertwined for many years.

Ed Mezvinsky had an affair with NBC News reporter Marjorie Sue Margolies and later married her after his wife divorced him.

In 1993, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, then a freshman Democrat in Congress, cast the deciding vote that got President Bill Clinton’s controversial tax package through the House of Representatives.

In March 2001, Mezvinsky was indicted and later pleaded guilty to 31 of 69 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Ed Mezvinsky embezzled more than $10 million dollars from people via both a Ponzi scheme and the notorious Nigerian e-mail scams. He was found guilty and sentenced to 80 months in federal prison. After serving less than five years in federal prison, he was released in April 2008 and remains on federal probation. To this day, he still owes $9.4 million in restitution to his victims.

About now you are saying, “So what!”

Well, this is Marc and Chelsea Mezvinsky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s right; Ed Mezvinsky is Chelsea Clinton’s father-in law.

Now Marc and Chelsea are in their early thirties and purchased a 10.5 million dollar NYC apartment (after being married in George Soros’ mansion). Has anyone heard mention of any of this in any of the media? If this guy was Jenna or Barbara Bush’s, or better yet, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s father-in- law, the news would be an everyday headline and every detail would be reported over and over.

And yet liberals say there are no double standards in political reporting. And people are already talking about Hillary as our next President! And then there is possibly Chelsea for president in our future!

My first thought was it was one of those made up conspiracy theory things that gets recycled every administration. But, I remembered Mezvinsky from the Nixon days so I looked it up anyway. Here’s what Snopes has on it. Turns out it is true.

Steve Sailer likes to write about the deep state and I must admit I find it enjoyable. I’m skeptical about conspiracy theories, but that does not mean there are no conspiracies. What’s more common is the near incestuous dealings in the political class. If you get elected to Congress, the door is open for you and your tribe to join the ruling class and stay there regardless of your actions. You need to win re-election and prove you will not make any trouble for the people in charge. Once you do that, you are granted tenure and even a lengthy trip to the Federal can does not get you thrown out of the club.

That means your relatives can gain insider access to business deals unavailable to the hoi polloi. Your kids go to tony private schools and marry the kids of others in the political class. It’s a milder form of the big man politics so popular in sub-Saharan Africa. In South America it results in a system where the ruling elite will do anything to keep the peasants down in the valley. In Africa and the Middle East it means the dominant tribe murders any tribe that seems threatening, while the big man enjoys the benefits of being the big man. In the Occident, its more subtle and more diffused, because the smart fraction is much larger. Still, it is not hard to see how it can ossify into something more insidious than just grubby theft and graft.

Fake Indian was in Minnesota, ironically enough, testing the waters for a presidential run.

Sen. Fake Indian (D-Mass.) brought her populist message Saturday to this small college town to rev up the final weeks of Sen. Al Franken’s reelection campaign, but also to claim the mantle of the modern liberal movement’s political godfather.

Speaking before more than 400 people at Carleton College, Fake Indian repeatedly invoked the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, the fiery liberal senator who died 12 years ago this month in a plane crash during his reelection campaign. Wellstone remains a revered figure in Minnesota politics, and his brand of populism — out of step in the Clintonian Democratic Party of the 1990s — is now mainstream among leading liberal activists. Fake Indian has become the most prominent public face of that movement, and the Wellstone disciples in this town 40 miles south of Minneapolis gave their approval Saturday.

“The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it,” Fake Indian said to loud cheers.

From 2006 through 2008, the Left controlled the legislature. From 2008 through 2010 they controlled all of the Federal government. Since 2010, they have held the presidency and the Senate. That’s in addition to running the federal bureaucracy and the national media. They’ve had the means and the opportunity to fix whatever they think is rigged. But, imaginary bogeymen is what keeps the Cult of Modern Liberalism going.

It’s part of a three-state tour of Senate campaigns for Fake Indian, who later Saturday headed to St. Paul for a get-out-the-vote rally on behalf of Franken, Gov. Mark Dayton (D) and other candidates. Franken and Dayton are strong favorites to win reelection next month.

On Friday Fake Indian stopped in the Denver suburbs to help Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) in his tough reelection campaign. And on Sunday, Fake Indian will be on the stump in Iowa for Rep. Bruce Braley (D), who is in a neck-and-neck race for the seat of retiring Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). It’s Fake Indian’s first visit in this election season to the battleground state, home to the first-in-the-nation caucus in early 2016 for the presidential campaign.

The crowd at Carleton — where Wellstone served as a professor before launching his long-shot 1990 Senate bid — gave its loudest cheers to Fake Indian, whose fights against big banks have made her a hero to liberal activists.

“She’s amazing. She shows that politics is a good thing,” said Rachel Palermo, 21, a senior at neighboring St. Olaf College. Some of her friends said they attended the rally just to see Fake Indian.

Palermo and her friends said they want Warren to run for president, but Alyssa Berg, 21, also a St. Olaf senior, noted it would be “counterproductive” for Fake Indian to run against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I’ve been saying for a couple of year now that Fake Indian will be the Left’s choice to run for president. Cankles is old and ugly. The CML is like any other cult in that they need a “gifted individual” that is “born to rule”, so to speak, as their movement’s leader. That requires a degree of charisma that Cankles has never possessed. Plus, they have never forgiven her for her apostasy in the 1990’s. Fake Indian tickles the fancy of liberal women as their Jack Kennedy, except Fake Indian most likely does not have a dick.

The problem is she is an old white woman who lives is a maximally gentrified neighborhood that is hostile to black people. The fact that she scammed the quota system to score tenure at Harvard is not going to go over well with blacks either. There’s also a lot of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in Fake Indian. KKT was the great white hope of liberal women once too. Then she was unmasked as being a dunce and her career evaporated. Fake Indian is a hot house flower with the IQ of a goldfish.

Still, I hope to get a lot of mileage out of her campaign.

I’m a Second Amendment absolutist. By that I mean the courts should apply strict scrutiny when it comes to all gun laws, just as they do speech laws. There’s simply no compelling state interest to ban or license firearms. Stripping felons of their rights is acceptable and people declared mentally unfit has always been an acceptable reason for the state to deny citizens their rights. There’s nothing wrong with that as we apply that standard to all rights, not just guns. Otherwise, it is none of the state’s business if I own a gun or carry it around with me.

That’s where I’m coming from on the gun issue.

Even if you don’t care that much about the issue, the perversions that naturally arise from gun control efforts infect all aspect of life. Here’s a good example from the Cult Times.

A newly created database of New Yorkers deemed too mentally unstable to carry firearms has grown to roughly 34,500 names, a previously undisclosed figure that has raised concerns among some mental health advocates that too many people have been categorized as dangerous.

The database, established in the aftermath of the mass shooting in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and maintained by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, is the result of the Safe Act. It is an expansive package of gun control measures pushed through by the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The law, better known for its ban on assault weapons, compels licensed mental health professionals in New York to report to the authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.”

But the number of entries in the database highlights the difficulty of America’s complicated balancing act between public safety and the right to bear arms when it comes to people with mental health issues. “That seems extraordinarily high to me,” said Sam Tsemberis, a former director of New York City’s involuntary hospitalization program for homeless and dangerous people, now the chief executive of Pathways to Housing, which provides housing to the mentally ill. “Assumed dangerousness is a far cry from actual dangerousness.”

Since there is no such thing as “mentally unstable” this gives the fascists in the bureaucracy carte blanche to put anyone they don’t like in the system, thus stripping them of their rights. Humans can be deemed a danger to themselves or others. They can be deemed to be incapable of caring for themselves. These are all things with objective definitions. Mental stability is purely subjective and ripe for abuse.

Back in the 70’s and 80’s, street hustlers like Jesse Jackson and then Al Sharpton would claim to speak for all non-whites. Hispanics have never considered themselves “black” and they don’t seek to join hands with blacks in political matters. In the 90’s and 2000’s that became even more clear, but black leaders held onto the fantasy. I’m not sure why, maybe it is just comforting in some way. Charlie Rangel certainly knows this is nonsense, but it lingers on for some reason. The NY Times has a story on the coming election which has more magical thinking.

The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.

“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”

Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Mr. Obama.

Now, Democrats are deploying other prominent black elected officials and other surrogates, buttressed by sophisticated voter targeting efforts, to stoke black turnout. At the White House, the president is waging an under-the-radar campaign, recording video advertisements, radio interviews and telephone calls specifically targeting his loyal African-American base.

“Anybody who looks at the data realizes that if the black vote, and the brown vote, doesn’t turn out, we can’t win. It’s just that simple,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, referring to African-American and Latino voters. “If we don’t turn out, we cannot hold the Senate.”

One of the dirty little secrets that no one wants to admit is Hispanics are not particularly fond of blacks. They don’t look at Ms. Fudge as anything other than a voice of American blacks. Further, there’s no such thing as Hispanic. Puerto Ricans don’t like Dominicans or Mexicans. Central Americans don’t identify with Mexicans. Brazilians and South Americans don’t buy into the whole brown business at all. A century ago WASP’s saw all Catholics as the same. Italians were even counted as black, along with Jews. My mid-century it was fairly obvious that Italians were not Irish and both were leaving the ghetto and joining the WASP society of middle-class America.

That’s likely the path for most Hispanics. Cubans have done that in Miami. Mexicans will be a mixed bag as Mexico is a mixed culture. Central Americans are a tougher call, but we seem to be getting the more hardy and adventurous ones. I’m not saying they are natural conservatives or any of that nonsense. It’s just that brown ain’t black. Hispanics will splinter into the class structure of America, while blacks seem destined to remain in the Liberal Democratic ghetto.

I’ve long noted the suicidal impulse of the Left. At the core, these people want to die and take the rest of us with them. Judicial Watch, which has a really good record of unearthing embarrassing stuff on our rulers, has this:

While the bipartisan voice grows to ban Ebola victims from entering the United States, a new report claims that President Obama is considering a plan to bring the world’s Ebola patients to the United States to be treated.

Judicial Watch, the conservative public watchdog group, says in a shocking report that the president is “actively formulating plans” to admit Ebola-infected non-citizens just to be treated.

“Specifically, the goal of the administration is to bring Ebola patients into the United States for treatment within the first days of diagnosis,” said the group.

Such a plan would likely cause a political outcry throughout the nation, on edge over the spread of the virus.

Judicial Watch, which probes federal spending and uses federal and administration sources to root out corruption, said it is unclear who would pay for transporting and treating non-Americans.

But they have details nobody else has. “The plans include special waivers of laws and regulations that ban the admission of non-citizens with a communicable disease as dangerous as Ebola.”

The organization added, “the Obama administration is keeping this plan secret from Congress. The source is concerned that the proposal is illegal; endangers the public health and welfare; and should require the approval of Congress.”

This is madness for a number of reasons. The least obvious is how this policy further erodes the trust between the citizens and their government. Trust in the political class is at record lows, but most people still think the bureaucrats in the various agencies are at least trying to their jobs. Getting new politicians is a simple thing, in the mind of the public, if not in reality. Getting a new mandarin class and a new managerial class means blood in the streets. Putting the CDC in a position to fail is a dangerous game. When even the aging lefties at the NYTimes think the CDC is incompetent, you already have a serious trust problem.

There’s another layer to the trust issue. When the Bush people allegedly failed to help the looters in New Orleans after Katrina, it was not because they did not know what to do. That was never the claim. The claim was they failed to do what was required for some reason. This, however, looks like the opening scenes of every disaster movie. The people in charge are either too arrogant to admit they are facing a disaster or too stupid to know they don’t know what they are facing. As Greg Cochran points out, arrogant ignorance has a long history in the epidemic game.

In a few weeks, there will be political consequences. When Obama feels the need to quit the golf course and show up for work, you know the politics are more lethal to his cult than Ebola is to Africans. That may be comforting to Red Team partisans, but it is still very bad for the health of the Empire. The near total lack of trust in the political class has made it impossible for them to tackle any of the systemic problems facing the country. Making Red Team less odious than Blue Team is not going to usher in a reform movement.

That’s really not the main concern. As Greg Cochran pointed out in that post, the people in charge of the science of Ebola may be ideologically wedded to ideas that are completely wrong. That’s not without precedent. The Obama administration appears to be acting on the belief, and it is nothing more than belief, that Ebola is mostly a poor African savage problem. In clever, white America we don’t have to worry about witch doctors and strange burial rituals. The two infections in Dallas suggest otherwise.

The column in the Straussian Daily News makes a good case for concern, if not panic. We don’t know a lot about Ebola.

As a rule, one should not panic at whatever crisis has momentarily fixed the attention of cable news producers. But the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which has migrated to both Europe and America, may be the exception that proves the rule. There are at least six reasons that a controlled, informed panic might be in order.

(1) Start with what we know, and don’t know, about the virus. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other government agencies claim that contracting Ebola is relatively difficult because the virus is only transmittable by direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who has become symptomatic. Which means that, in theory, you can’t get Ebola by riding in the elevator with someone who is carrying the virus, because Ebola is not airborne.

This sounds reassuring. Except that it might not be true. There are four strains of the Ebola virus that have caused outbreaks in human populations. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the current outbreak (known as Guinean EBOV, because it originated in Meliandou, Guinea, in late November 2013) is a separate clade “in a sister relationship with other known EBOV strains.” Meaning that this Ebola is related to, but genetically distinct from, previous known strains, and thus may have distinct mechanisms of transmission.

Not everyone is convinced that this Ebola isn’t airborne. Last month, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy published an article arguing that the current Ebola has “unclear modes of transmission” and that “there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

The rest of that column is worth reading. Even if the President Ebola thinks the science is settled and Ebola is not that contagious, he clearly knows his apparatus for dealing with public concern is not working. He also knows the people running the CDC are struggling to deal with two, that’s TWO, cases of Ebola. Inviting a plague into the country just to prove some weird political point or spite his political opponents is madness. Given his views on Christianity, it is may be Domitian-level madness.