Since forever, the children of successful men have often taken up positions in the ruling class once they reached adulthood. Some would argue that it is genetic. The able male finds a high quality mate and the result is a child with the genetic stuff to follow in the father’s footsteps. Others would argue that it is slipstreaming. The successful male blazes a path for his children. The unencumbered route to the ruling class is easy to traverse, even for the average, compared to blazing your own path. The dull-witted child of a billionaire is going to have a better shot at attending Harvard than the smart kid from the projects.

Maybe it is a combination of things, as is always the case. I don’t know, but I do know Americans have been cursed by a few dynastic families. The Roosevelt’s did a lot to damage the country. The Kennedy clan may be the biggest blight on a nation since Agrippina found a husband. We’ve been lucky too. Some of our worst politicians like Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon did not have kids interested in politics. At least they never made a go of it.

It looks like we dodged another bullet. Our semi-retarded vice president’s oldest kid is probably going to be the next governor of Delaware. Luckily, that’s a ticket to nowhere, but he’ll surely end up inn the Senate one day, taking up the seat held by his father as the dumbest man in the Senate. Biden’s other kid was hoping to run the same game with joining the National Guard as a lawyer so he could put “war hero” on his campaign website. Luckily, he was thrown out for drug abuse.

Vice President Joe Biden ’s son Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve this year after testing positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer by training who is now a managing partner at an investment company, had been commissioned as an ensign in the Navy Reserve, a part-time position. But after failing a drug test last year, his brief military career ended.

Mr. Biden, 44 years old, decided to pursue military service relatively late, beginning the direct-commission process to become a public-affairs officer in the Navy Reserve in 2012. Because of his age—43 when he was to be commissioned—he needed a waiver to join the Navy. He received a second Navy waiver because of a drug-related incident when he was a young man, according to people familiar with the matter. Military officials say such drug waivers aren’t uncommon.

Mr. Biden was commissioned as an ensign on May 7, 2013, and assigned to Navy Public Affairs Support Element East in Norfolk, Va., a reserve unit, according to the Navy. In June 2013, after reporting to his unit in Norfolk, he was given a drug test, which turned up positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Biden was discharged in February, the Navy said.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that it was “the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge. I respect the Navy’s decision. With the love and support of my family, I’m moving forward.”

We still have one hapless nitwit from the Biden clan in the pipe, but at least we avoided having a second putz from that deformed family tree.

I fully admit to having a mild resentment toward rich people. Every society has rich people. That’s just the natural order and every human society has had an elite that enjoys a better material existence than the rest. It’s not always obvious why. I look at the wealthy elites of today and I don’t see a collection of geniuses. I have some idea what genius looks like and I can’t think of a rich genius at the moment. CEO’s are smart guys and they work hard, but they are not that smart and they don’t work that hard. The number of rich people who invented some product or service that made human existence much better is tiny. In most cases, the guy inventing stuff is getting hosed by the rich guy who owns the company where he works.

That said, getting rich in business is no easy task. You have to be ruthless and you have to take a lot of abuse on the way up. There’s a fair amount of dumb luck involved as well as chicanery. It’s why CEO’s, partners in white shoe law firms and entrepreneurs are often horrible people. They are very good at getting ahead and climbing the greasy pole, but they suck at most everything else. Even so, dumb luck and serendipity play a defining role. Mitt Romney won the lucky sperm contest. Bill Gates was handed the golden ticket by IBM. Mark Cuban hit the lottery. If you have the choice between being a ruthless and crafty businessman or being a lucky businessman, take the latter.

When I look at the list of the super rich, I can live with the fact they are mostly assholes and they got lucky. If we started from scratch, all of them would do better than most and some would get rich all over again. Maybe not top-400 rich, but they would do OK. Like I said at the start, mine is a mild resentment. Further down the scale of rich people, say the typical suburban burgher, I have no strong feelings. Yes, SWPL-ville is full of conformist assholes who have heads full of goofy ideas about life, but I live in the ghetto so I don’t have to put up with it. I have no doubt that the guy with the $5,000 a month mortgage on the McMansion is busting his hump to pay for his lifestyle.

There’s where I am on rich people.

That said, I look at this story from the Telegraph and I wonder if we have not lost our minds. The first guy on the list, Richard Branson, did not exactly come from the gutter, but he made his money in a real tough business and he made the business better. But, look at the rest of the list. Six of the ten are clowns. These are people who entertain us by pretending to be people they are not. Every society has entertainers, but we have made them into our ruling elite! Johnny Depp? David Copperfield?

Troll though Manhattan or LA and you can find a thousand people with the acting ability of Johnny Depp. He got rich on pure dumb luck. He showed up at the right casting call on the right day with the right look. His show had some success and a few lucky turns later he is a star. Nothing wrong with it, but what does it say about a society where this guy is super rich? My goodness. He’s not friggin’ Shakespeare. No one will remember him once his time is done. His footprints will wash away in a few years after his death, maybe sooner.

That’s not to say there’s not some talent involved with being a good actor. It’s just not that hard. Lots of people can do it well enough to be believable on stage or on screen. I was at a fall festival no long ago where some local college kids were doing Shakespeare. It was as good as anywhere else, by anyone else. I once stayed at an inn where they had a small theater. Local kids and adults put on plays for the locals. It was as good, in terms of acting, as anything I’ve seen on Broadway. All over America, people are entertained by community theater. There’s a threshold level ability that is pretty low. Once you cross it, you can be a credible actor. In this case and this case, you can be horrible and still make a living.

I think that’s where my resentment rears its ugly green head. I look at a Johnny Depp and his island and wonder how that makes any sense. I see a Mark Cuban and think crime actually pays. In isolation it is not a big deal, but we have a lot of this, too much of this. A healthy society is one that produces a healthy, restrained elite. Our cultural and financial elites are corrupt, brutish and stupid. We’ve turned the culture over to pimps who made their whores millionaires. The financial affairs of the nation are ruled by con-men and bank robbers, skimming from the economy without every adding grain of sand to the wealth of humanity.

We have a rich people problem.

Way back in the olden thymes, cultural Marxism started with the appeal for tolerance. Normal people had to drop all of their hard earned cultural habits in order to include the “historically excluded.” Never mind that it was nonsense; it was a fad and otherwise sensible people fell for it. In the 1980’s and 1990’s I was sent off to sensitivity training on a regular basis as a part of my regular training as an employee. The course was always taught by a white woman of dubious sexual orientation. There would be a black guy as her second. They would tell us that in the name of tolerance, all of our ideas about life would no longer be tolerated.

There was always an “or else” lurking behind the words.

Here’s the “or else”:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.

“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”

ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”

“Political and social commentary is not a crime,” Holcomb said. “It is protected by the First Amendment.”

The subpoenas are just the latest twist in an ongoing saga over the Houston’s new non-discrimination ordinance. The law, among other things, would allow men to use the ladies room and vice versa.  The city council approved the law in June.

The Houston Chronicle reported opponents of the ordinance launched a petition drive that generated more than 50,000 signatures – far more than the 17,269 needed to put a referendum on the ballot.

However, the city threw out the petition in August over alleged irregularities.

After opponents of the bathroom bill filed a lawsuit the city’s attorneys responded by issuing the subpoenas against the pastors.

These thuggish tactics have always been the main part of Cultural Marxism. Few would ever go along with this nonsense without the “or else” in there. That’s what attracts the adherents. It is the opportunity to push people around that gets them excited. The Nazis built their movement on low-IQ street toughs looking for a reason to dress up and crack skulls. It’s why every Rousseau-ist cult ends in a bloodbath. They have no choice. That’s the only way “or else” can work.

I’ve commented before that you rarely, if ever, run into a jolly lesbian. In part, they are not trying to compete with other women for men. Males like women who are happy and flirtatious. Lesbians have no desire, allegedly, to attract males so they have no need to be happy and flirtatious.In fact, they have an incentive to be unappealing to men. The nastiness may simply be a way to ward off interested males, but heterosexual women also find lesbians to be unpleasant so who knows.

The other part is that the odds of meeting an available sex partner are extremely low. Lesbians are probably 2% of the population of females. Social science says the number is higher, but think about the number of homosexual males versus females you see on a regular basis. Throw in the fact lesbian relationships are highly volatile and it is easy to see why they would be unhappy.

There’s that and the strong possibility that homosexuality is just the most obvious item in a basket of pathologies. Every lesbian I know self-mutilates. They have all sorts of metal crap in their faces and visible tattoos. Non-lesbian girts do this too, but it was once called lesbian chic for a reason. The butchered haircuts and the wearing of rags all indicate a high degree of self-loathing. Then you have the outlandishly high addiction rates. There could be many sensible reasons for it, but one of those sensible reasons is mental illness.

So, we have a small population of bitter, often angry people who have their sexual wiring confused. Putting them in charge of anything sounds like a bad idea. Giving them an ideological sledgehammer to wield against a society with which they feel they are at war is nothing short of lunacy. The people of Houston put a Nazi drag queen in charge of their city and the results naturally follow.

I remember when Slate first started publishing. Michael Kinsley was going to reinvent journalism, along with his super-rich patrons at Microsoft. The early version was just a PDF that you could read on your PC or print off at home. It was not a very interesting magazine at the time. Kinsley was a professional apple polisher and toady. He knew how to be interesting to rich people in private, but he had no skills of interest to a broader audience. If you look at his career, he is similar to Barak Obama in that he has a gift for currying favor with super-rich white people willing to give him stuff.

Today, Slate seems to be click bait. No one goes to Slate for incite or analysis. You go there for hilarious examples of some weird Liberal tick. The near total lack of self-awareness by the writers there makes for some comedy gold. A favorite, it seems, is Jamelle Bouie. Liberal whites love to decorate their website with a youngish black male writer willing to flatter liberal white people about race. The Atlantic has TN Coates and Slate has Baba Bouie.

His latest work of nonsense has the usual stuff, but it contains one useful bit of incite.

The glib response to stats on blacks and police is to cite so-called “black crime” or “black criminality.” But this depends on a major analytical error. Yes, blacks are overrepresented in arrest and conviction rates. At the same time, “criminal blacks” are a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of all black Americans. If you walked into a group of 1,000 randomly selected blacks, the vast majority—upward of 998—would never have had anything to do with violent crime. To generalize from the two is to confuse the specific (how blacks are represented among criminals) with the general (how criminals are represented among blacks). Statisticians call this a “base rate error,” and you should try to avoid it.

In fairness, you could apply this to police as well. The number of cops who shoot—much less shoot black Americans—is a small percentage of all cops. Why judge the whole by the actions of a few?

Human populations have been self-policing since the beginning. Some groups are better at it than others. Jews, for example, were exceptionally good at “boiling off” their members who did not really fit the tribe’s goal. The slow-witted and lazy would marry off into the gentile population, leaving the smart and faithful in the tribe. Do that for enough generations and you have a population of very smart and very loyal people. The Amish may very be the result of the same process. All people, in all times and places, have had to figure out how to deal with their troublesome fraction.

In America, whites of all types have figured this out pretty well. Instead of relying on old customs from Europe, they used geography. America is a big country with lots of useful land. That means the stupid, lazy and criminal can be set aside physically. That’s not to say the old ways were abandoned. Class distinctions reinforce the physical divide. Whites can identify their kind just by the look and location. Even to out-groups like Asians and Hispanics, this guy is a very different person than this guy, even from a great distance.

Orientals have relied on the old ways for the most part. Shame is a powerful tool to force cooperation and compliance, but it is also a useful tool for segregating the troublesome. I’ve known a few Koreans who basically abandoned their families because they could not or would not abide by the cultural mores of their community. They either conformed or walked away. The tremendous success of East Asians has allowed them to follow the white pattern and use distance and culture to weed out the troublesome from their ranks. This guy is not this guy even to this round eye.

The one group in America that has not figured this out is blacks. Successful blacks are under extreme pressure to avoid being white. They have to “keeps it reelz” in order to avoid being called an Oreo. This is not just for highly successful blacks. Middle-class blacks are under constant pressure to embrace black culture. Sports coaches tell me it is nearly impossible to get black kids into soccer and lacrosse. They all want to play basketball and football. You know see little black kids playing instruments anymore either. That’s for white and Asian kids. Hip-hop is black music.

This becomes a problems when it comes to distance. A black family moves out to the burbs and their new neighbors are in tears having finally acquired a black neighbor. Then one weekday night the new neighbors have a party that starts at ten at night. All of their old neighbors from the ghetto show up and party into the wee hours. That sounds nuts, but I know of dozens of such examples. Suddenly, diversity is not so cool. The for sale signs go up and the neighborhood changes. The black people are left to think that white people just hate living near black people, when it is really just middle-class people not wanting to live in the ghetto.

Bill Cosby used to rant about this before he was hissed off the stage. Chris Rock had a great bit on the same theme. He was pressured to stop doing it because “white people misunderstood it.” That’s hilarious for a number of reasons. How long racial solidarity can keep the black middle-class from jettisoning their ghetto brothers is a mystery. A run through the television dial suggests the elites are fighting it which means it will not happen. That means the majority of blacks who commit no crimes and just want to live decent lives will remain chained to the ghetto visually and geographically, paying the tab for those who commit the bulk of the social trouble in modern America.

Back when were allowed to notice things like race, confrontations between urban hipsters and the natives were called battles of bros versus yos. Years back in Boston, a college boy was gunned down by a yo right in front of my building. Homeboy was minding his business, driving down the road when the college boy tried to jump over the hood of his car. The college boy hit the hood of the car and rolled onto the street. A confrontation ensued and homey blasted Dylan or Brad or whatever name the college buy was given. They never found the shooter and I always suspect the cops never looked that hard. Sometimes, you have to let nature take its course.

As the Left evicts NAM’s from the cities, we’ll see more stories like this one. The fact no one notices the skin colors is part of how it will go. The SWPL’s have plenty of code words to handle this stuff anyway. Words like “sketchy” and “dodgy” have become urban SWPL slang to describe black neighborhoods. The more sarcastic may even use “diverse” and “vibrant” if they feel like they are among coevals. The main tool the Left uses to push out the undesirables is complex rules. My bet is there was never a time when the city rented the park. The hipsters pushed for a change so they could take control of the park without having to confront the locals. Zoning laws have been a popular way to do this too.

The irony of all this is within living memory the tide was running the other way in cities. In the 50’s and 60’s these city neighborhoods were populated with middle-class white people. Local officials, real estate agents and would-be landlords used block busting to shove the whites out into the suburbs. They would get one family to sell to a black family. Within months the rest would agree to sell, usually after an unpleasant confrontation at the school or park with their new neighbors. Then it would be Katy-bar-the-door time as the whites fled to the burbs. All In The Family was based, in part, on this phenomenon.

Now, the children and grandchildren of those suburban pioneers are returning the favor.

Back in the olden thymes at the birth of the Internet, the place for technical people to gather on-line was the bulletin board. You dialed in with your modem and logged into a bulletin board to read posting from others and engage in debate with others of similar interests. I think the first BBS I logged into was a college football site. Not long after e-mail lists came along and then NNTP servers. This was the first “social networking” and was for nerds only. You had to know stuff to get on-line. Today, even retarded people have Facebook pages.

Now that the Hive is on-line, they have co-opted the language of the Internet. It used to be that a “troll” was someone who posted to get attention. Someone would post on a college football newsgroup, for example, that Miami was a school for thugs and drug dealers. A big argument would erupt allowing the troll to irritate a bunch of people. “Trolling” was a way to stir up trouble. Clever trolling has produced some of the most amusing bits on the Internet.

Now, the Hive has redefined the term to mean “people they don’t like.” Anyone who holds an opinion contrary to the Cult approved opinions is called a troll. Like Nazi and racist, it no longer has meaning. But, it also means the person so labeled has no meaning. So much so it can get you killed, apparently.

London (AFP) – The death of a British woman accused of a vicious campaign of online abuse against the parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann has ignited debate over the growing scourge of Internet “trolls”.

Brenda Leyland was found dead in a hotel room earlier this month after being confronted by Sky News over her alleged trolling of Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter went missing in Portugal in 2007.

An investigation is ongoing, but has found no evidence of foul play or third party involvement.

Using the Twitter handle @Sweepyface the 63-year-old reportedly posted thousands of hate-filled messages about the couple.

Her name figured on an 80-page dossier compiled by members of the public cataloguing alleged abuse directed at the couple and their two other children from a long list of Internet users, which is currently being investigated by the police.

It is a trend that has been replicated the world over against high-profile figures.

Brenda Leyland was not “trolling” anyone. She was most likely a nut who was harassing people. The abracadabra phrase “hate-filled” tells you that the couple she was harassing were members of the Cult. Noticing the obvious about the Cult is always hate-filled so I’m just connecting the dots.

Think about the mindset of the people who came together to compile the dossier on the dead woman. These are the sort of people who turned in Jews to the Nazi occupiers in France.

If you look at the economics of most cable channels, they can’t exist without cable fees. By that I mean without the buck per month or so they get from your cable bill, they go out of business. ESPN, for example, is on everyone’s cable service and the fee is something like $5 a month. They get close to seven billion a year from those fees, despite the fact only 20% of homes watch ESPN. If we ever went to a la carte pricing or pure pay per view, ESPN folds up shop. They only generate about two billion in ad revenue. If they survived, it would be a much different format. They would not be paying the NBA those enormous rights fees either.

A better example is MSNBC. This sob story in the Lunatic Times reports that their best shows draw fewer eyes than late night informercials.

Rachel Maddow, the biggest star on the MSNBC cable network, just posted her lowest quarterly ratings results ever.

“Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s signature morning program, scored its second-lowest quarterly ratings, reaching an average of just 87,000 viewers in the key news demographic group.

And “Ronan Farrow Daily,” the network’s heavily promoted new afternoon show, which stars a 26-year-old Rhodes Scholar with a high-profile Hollywood lineage, has been largely a dud.

Though it has mostly happened quietly, which may be a comment on the cable network’s larger status in the media landscape, MSNBC has seen its ratings hit one of the deepest skids in its history, with the recently completed third quarter of 2014 generating some record lows.

Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, acknowledged that his network had been struggling, but put it in the context of the overall drop in cable news. “This has been a tough year all around,” he said. “All three cable news channels are drawing a smaller combined audience than they were five years ago.” He also emphasized that despite the plunge that caused it to trail CNN in the last quarter, the network remained ahead of CNN for the full year.

In the past, MSNBC’s ratings have typically fallen during times of intensely followed major news events. The current period is awash in them, with stories like ISIS and Ebola commanding a high degree of international reporting. This plays well to CNN’s strengths.

MSNBC consciously established its brand as politics-centric, approaching stories from a left-of-center viewpoint, in deliberate contrast to the right-of-center approach of Fox News, which continues to dominate the news channel ratings. At the same time, MSNBC moved away from a close relationship with NBC News that it had during the early years of the network. Today, fewer NBC News correspondents appear on MSNBC.

Mr. Griffin said that a general apathy about American politics has also hurt the network. “You can look at the dysfunction in Washington, the wariness about politics, the low approval ratings,” he said. “That’s had an impact. But we’ve got to adjust; we’ve got to evolve.”

MSNBC’s recent results have not been encouraging. During the third quarter, Ms. Maddow reached an average of 183,000 viewers in the audience component that most matters to MSNBC’s advertisers, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, her lowest total since she started her show in 2008.

I love how the Times tries to equate Fox News with MSNBC, like they are mirrors. That’s insane, of course. Fox is pretty much straight news with a prime time of infotainment shows. O’Reilly, Hannity and the others are entertainers. They generate the big ratings and that’s how you pay the bills, usually. MSNBC is just a parade of screaming lunatics. Rachel Madow looks and sounds like a woman struggling with her sanity. A generation ago, these people would never been allowed to be on television.

It is just another example of how socializing costs boils off the normal and rational, leaving the weird and the extreme. The proliferation of cable channels relies on every home having cable (or satellite) and paying roughly the same for the service. The 20% who love sports get ESPN at a far cheaper rate than under a pay-per-view scenario. Billions are shifted from people with no interest in sports to these sports teams, via the socialism of the cable bill. Instead of catering to a broad audience, ESPN can focus on fanatics and indulge in their crackpot politics.

CNN and then MSNBC followed a similar path. CNN got on everyone’s basic service, thus guaranteeing them a buck a month from every home, whether anyone watched or not. With a guaranteed revenue stream, they were free to indulge in whatever nonsense that was current at the time. Now, the only place people watch CNN is at airports. Similarly, MSNBC piggybacked on NBC to get on basic cable. They drifted into insanity and now the only place people watch is at the day room of the local asylum.

This happens whenever the link between the paying customer and the service provider is unclear, as is always the case with third party payments. Medical services get increasingly worse at the retail end because the patients are not the customers. It is the insurance company and government paying the bills. The schools are another example. The people running the schools care more about the unions and pressure groups than the students. People respond to incentives and when you funnel those incentives through third parties, it is natural to assume the needs of those third parties are supreme. In the case of the cable news channels, the money is there no matter what they do, so the weird tastes of the people running the channel dominate.

It is why I think a smart politician on the Right would be wise to champion a la carte cable. No one likes dealing with the cable monopolies. No one likes the fact they are paying for a bunch of channels they never watch. The cable monopoly is a perfect target for a populist politician. It’s why the lunatics chirp about “net neutrality” They know making the ISP’s into bad guys is easy money. The benefit to the Right is forcing a la carte pricing on the evil cable companies would go a long way toward de-funding the Left’s propaganda organs.

Much of what is called the “new economy” is just an updated version of the old economy. By that I mean robbing people. Netflix, for example, transfers their infrastructure costs onto you, even if you don’t use their service. Their streaming service relies on the Internet and the cost of growing bandwidth is in your cable bill. Facebook exists because they don’t have to pay to put their site on your PC. You pay for it. Cost shifting is a big part of the new economy and in some cases it is outright extortion. These paid review sites like Yelp look a lot like highwaymen to me.

First the chefs of a small Italian restaurant got mad at online review site Yelp. Instead of trying to get better reviews, they decided to take a different approach: get terrible ones.

The campaign helped Botte Bistro get a rating of one out of five stars, as more than 1,000 reviewers left hundreds of tongue-in-cheek reviews panning the Richmond, California, eatery, said chef Michele Massimo, adding that it boosted business.

It was the latest protest among businesses who for years have complained that Yelp was extorting them by raising or dropping ratings depending on whether they advertised with the Internet’s most popular review site.

Yelp has persistently denied those claims on its website, in court and at every opportunity when the question is put publicly to the company.

“It wouldn’t pass the straight face test,” Yelp spokesman Vince Sullitto said of the extortion claims.

Sullitto said Yelp attracts millions of viewers and sells advertising to 80,000 businesses because of the site’s credibility with consumers. Sullitto said many of the company’s critics are businesses that have received bad reviews.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a lawsuit filed by several businesses claiming Yelp extorted them by removing positive reviews after advertising sales pitches were turned down.

The court is one rung below the U.S. Supreme Court and the ruling could have been a definitive one for Yelp.

Instead, it served to fuel the company’s critics because the court said that, even if Yelp did manipulate reviews to penalize businesses, the practice would not constitute extortion.

The court said it found no evidence of manipulation and that it was ruling narrowly only on the question of extortion. Nonetheless, the company’s critics said the ruling supported their claims.

Even before the 9th Circuit ruling, Yelp was battling two lawsuits filed by company investors who make similar extortion claims.

The suits, filed in San Francisco federal court over the summer, allege that the company’s stock traded at artificially inflated prices because the “company tried to sell services designed to suppress negative reviews or make them go away” and then lied about it.

The company has yet to formally respond to the lawsuits in court, but says it will fight these legal actions as well.

Last year, a lawyer serving as a small-claims judge in San Diego likened Yelp to a “modern-day version of the Mafia going to stores and saying, ‘You want to not be bothered? You want to not have incidents in your store? Pay us protection money.’”

This is not a new thing. Trade magazines have played the same game for years. Good reviews could make or break a product and the way to ensure it was to buy ads in the trade magazines. At the same time, writers would know they better play ball and say nice things about the products from their advertisers. It was not a formal arrangement, just a natural one. Everyone had an interest in promoting the product.

Yelp and other review sites have simply expanded the model to the Internet and every consumer business. Proving they are manipulating their rankings is never going to be easy, but it is hard to imagine they are not doing it. The bias will always be in favor of their customers who are the people sending them money, not the dingbats writing reviews. That’s what “new economy” types often forget. The customer is the guy writing the checks and he always comes first. In this case, the review site will look out for those businesses that pay for ads.

I fully admit to initially supporting the second war with Iraq. I was not enthusiastic about it, but it did appear we could maybe do some good by installing a rational government in Iraq as a counter to Iran and Syria. I never had any illusions about self-government succeeding there. These people are incapable of managing liberal democracy, but they could handle a mild authoritarian state that was friendly to the West. I assumed the Bush people were going to find a guy with a thick mustache who was happy to do business with us. Instead they went for liberal democracy and that was a total failure.

Amazingly, it appears the Obama administration has managed to make it worse. This story from the British press suggests Iraq is about to fall, in a fashion similar to what we saw in South Vietnam a million years ago.

America’s plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group’s fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad.

The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town’s remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

In the face of a likely Isis victory at Kobani, senior US officials have been trying to explain away the failure to save the Syrian Kurds in the town, probably Isis’s toughest opponents in Syria. “Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [Isis] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself,” said US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, in a typical piece of waffle designed to mask defeat. “The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively.”

Unfortunately for the US, Kobani isn’t the only place air strikes are failing to stop Isis. In an offensive in Iraq launched on 2 October but little reported in the outside world, Isis has captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It has captured Hit, Kubaisa and Ramadi, the provincial capital, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance by the Iraqi Army which showed itself to be as dysfunctional as in the past, even when backed by US air strikes.

Today, only the city of Haditha and two bases, Al-Assad military base near Hit, and Camp Mazrah outside Fallujah, are still in Iraqi government hands. Joel Wing, in his study –”Iraq’s Security

Forces Collapse as The Islamic State Takes Control of Most of Anbar Province” – concludes: “This was a huge victory as it gives the insurgents virtual control over Anbar and poses a serious threat to western Baghdad”.

The battle for Anbar, which was at the heart of the Sunni rebellion against the US occupation after 2003, is almost over and has ended with a decisive victory for Isis. It took large parts of Anbar in January and government counter-attacks failed dismally with some 5,000 casualties in the first six months of the year. About half the province’s 1.5 million population has fled and become refugees. The next Isis target may be the Sunni enclaves in western Baghdad, starting with Abu Ghraib on the outskirts but leading right to the centre of the capital.

The Iraqi government and its foreign allies are drawing comfort, there having been some advances against Isis in the centre and north of the country. But north and north-east of Baghdad the successes have not been won by the Iraqi army but by highly sectarian Shia militias which do not distinguish between Isis and the rest of the Sunni population. They speak openly of getting rid of Sunni in mixed provinces such as Diyala where they have advanced. The result is that Sunni in Iraq have no alternative but to stick with Isis or flee, if they want to survive. The same is true north-west of Mosul on the border with Syria, where Iraqi Kurdish forces, aided by US air attacks, have retaken the important border crossing of Rabia, but only one Sunni Arab remained in the town. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing has become the norm in the war in both Iraq and Syria.

At some point, Iran gets involved directly. They have no choice. How exactly that works is a mystery, but they are not going to let their Shia brothers get over run by the Sunnis. This is a part of the world with many ancient rivalries, but they have plenty of new ones too. The Saudis and GCC worry much more about Iran than the worry about the lunatics running ISIS. These far flung religious wars are good for business anyway. The Saudis can send their lunatics off to fight and die in Syria or Afghanistan, rather than have them cause trouble in Riyadh.

Iran getting directly involved in Iraq is a bigger concern because it moves them to the head of the class and that puts the Saudi relationship with Washington in jeopardy. It also upsets the Israelis for similar reasons. In a weird way, the success of ISIS is putting everyone on the same side for vastly different reasons, but the Obama administration seems paralyzed right now. Either they don’t know what to do or Obama is too afraid to do anything. It could be both.

As Obama heads into lame duck status, he finds his popularity at home dipping into the 30’s and his party running from him like he is Patient Zero. Usually presidents spend their final two years legacy building with various foreign policy projects. Obama has never had much interest in foreign policy and has proven to be incompetent at it. The world is going to get much worse over the next two years. Maybe untenably worse.

Way back in the olden thymes, it used to be said that a man was defined by his views on abortion and Israel. The former was all about IQ. Understanding the downstream ramifications of widespread use of abortion as a means of birth control requires a supple mind, something rare amongst abortion advocates. The latter issue was all about morality. Israel is about understanding the moral difference between a man that shoves an old women in the way of bus and a man that shoves an old women out of the way of bus. If you think both are men that shove old women, you side with the Arabs.

These days, the issue that separates the the wheat from the chaff is homosexual marriage. The moral side is easy to see, but it is different from the Israel question. Liberal fanatics use the issue to segregate themselves from normal people. It is a crude, simplistic morality, but that’s how it goes with religious cults. Everything boils down to which side of the hive wall on which you fall. I’ve yet to hear a liberal friend explain why they are are for changing the definition of marriage. They just are and if you’re not then you’re a bad person with a head full of crimethink.

The IQ side of the coin is not so obvious, mostly because we have conflated morality and intelligence in modern times. The fake nerd culture has made intelligence a mark of moral goodness. Bad people breath through their mouth while watching UFC. Good people talk about the latest Malcolm Gladwell book they did not read, while watching Cosmos on Netflix. Despite that, there is a moral component and like abortion is has to do with the downstream consequences. That’s hard and bumps into icky subjects so it is not permitted in public. Instead we get tantrums and the spewing of buzzwords like in this ridiculous Atlantic story.

Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear a collection of marriage-equality decisions and deferred for another term what seems now an inevitable ruling for marriage equality. The very next day, the Ninth Circuit handed down an opinion, Latta v. Otter, striking down a number of same-sex-marriage bans.

In doing so, the appeals court provided the first of what will surely be many such decisions from which the Court can choose when the justices consider what cases they might hear in the future—and so offers potential rationales by which they might make marriage equality the law of the land. The Ninth Circuit’s majority opinion rejects same-sex-marriage bans because they violate the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating based on sexual orientation, which is a standard reason courts have struck down these bans.

But there is a twist: According to one judge, this is about sexism, too. In her concurrence, Judge Marsha Berzon argues that same-sex-marriage bans also constitute sex discrimination and therefore violate Equal Protection on additional grounds.

In some respects, Berzon’s concurrence was nothing new. Since the beginning of the fight for marriage equality, advocates have argued that a failure to allow same-sex couples to wed amounts to sex discrimination. This argument has, with a couple of notable exceptions, failed in courts. The Hawaii Supreme Court used this logic in 1994 when it issued the first decision in the U.S. for marriage equality (later nullified by a state constitutional amendment), and the argument has only succeeded in a Utah federal district court since then.

The formalist argument is that such bans classify on the basis of sex in a very basic way: In states where a man cannot marry a man, he is deprived of this right by virtue of his sex. That is, were the man a woman, he would have the right to marry his mate.

Let’s take the highlighted portions in order. The phrase “marriage-equality” is a marketing term intended to shift the focus away from the lack of an affirmative argument in favor of homosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual marriage is irrational, as a matter of former logic, is the reason. Similarly, same-sex-marriage bans are nonsensical since you cannot ban something that cannot and does not exist. It is akin to claiming there is a unicorn ban.

The third highlighted portion is why untethering yourself from objective reality leads to trouble. Humans come in one of two sexes, male and female. These are biological facts as axiomatic as gravity. Implying that people who act in ways contrary to the biology have created a third sex category should be grounds for commitment in the local asylum. The reason the state cannot issue a marriage license to two males is the same reason they don’t issue driver’s licenses to leprechauns.

The final bit it emblematic of most self-described advocates. They never bother to learn why things are as they are and they never learn the opposing arguments. The mind of the fanatic knows only that which supports the object of his fanaticism. Those who oppose these changes to the legal definition of marriage do so in defense of an institution that has served Western people well since the Franks first imposed it in the fifth century. Turning it into a roommate agreement, something that already exists, is nothing but a veiled attempt to destroy another pillar of civilization.

I’m tempted to say that these fanatics rally to homosexual marriage because they get caught up in the emotion of joining a mass movement. But, that’s just not the case. The two lesbians who wrote that Atlantic piece are incapable of reasoning through any of this, which is why they latch onto buzzwords and jargon. It let’s someone else do their thinking.