After my ride I stopped for a burger at the local pub. They had one of the World Cup games on the big screen. For some reason the place was empty so I could hear the play-by-play of the game. Greece was playing Costa Rica. I was pulling for Greece for no reason other than they looked like old men compared to the Costa Ricans. They just looked like guys you would see smoking outside a club or arguing with one another at an outdoor café. The announcer made some reference to the star player celebrating their last win with a quiet cigarette. I think his name was Socrates.

It occurred to me that one of the reasons Americans tend to make fun of soccer is the announcers. Every four years ESPN imports an English guy (I think he is English) to call the games. They pair him with an American, who functions as a color guy. I did not catch the names and I really don’t care enough to look it up. It sounds like the same guy every four years, but maybe they have a rotation of British announcers. Again, I don’t know and I don’t care.

In America, we expect the play-by-play guy to be level headed and dry. In an exciting moment, he can show emotion, but otherwise he is supposed to be neutral and avoid making a spectacle of himself. The color guy is always a former jock who explains the action after the call. Announcers who make a scene get made fun of and color guys who are weird or goofy become punch lines. Chris Berman is considered the worst play-by-play guy in America, while Dan Dierdorff was the gold standard for uncommonly stupid commentary.

In soccer, this arrangement is exactly backward. The play-by-play guy is a clown. The British guy they drag over to do US broadcasts of soccer is like a parody. The over the top language and ridiculous comments about heroism and courage are topped off with overly dramatic comments during the few exciting points in the game. The color guy sounds like he is on drugs he is so mellow. He does not say anything you need to know. Instead, he works as a straight man to the weird announcer screaming about the heroism of a pass.

The only other place I’ve listened to soccer announcers is in South America and the announcers are famous for being emotional wrecks. But, they report the weather as if the fate of the world rests on their next utterance. That’s just how Latins roll. Brits are supposed to be stoic so there’s a reason for the deranged announcers that I’m not getting. I’m sure Brits are perfectly fine with it, but the chav-ball fans in America do themselves no good insisting on using the this announcer model.

Thinking about it, maybe the melodramatics from the booth are necessary. Eating my burger, there were long periods when nothing was happening in the game. Unlike American sports, soccer suffers a crucial defect. That’s the lack of statistics. In baseball, the dead time is filled with talk of the numbers. Football is a stat driven sport these days so that fills a big part of the broadcast. Maybe that’s why the soccer announcers have to carry on as they do. They have nothing to talk about for long periods.

That’s the other thing that does not work for Americans. Pre-game and post-game sports broadcasts are heavy on stats and heavy on strategy. In football, breaking down film is pretty much all the studio shows do these days. That and interviews with players and coaches. The half time show for the soccer game was three guys talking about how hard the players were trying. No replays. No strategy discussion. Just pointless statements about passion and effort.

The Greeks lost on coin flips.

Today is the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. At least it is considered the anniversary. This is the day Gavrilo Princip shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie in the city of Sarajevo. The Austrians blamed the Serbs and in July delivered an ultimatum they surely knew would be rejected. The point was to provoke war with the Serbs, which it did. In a month the great powers of Europe were aligned against one another in what would be a massively brutal war.  Close to 40 million men were killed, wounded or went missing in 51 months of war.

To put that in some perspective,  the population of the United States at the start of the war was roughly 99 million. Every hour of every day of the war over 1,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or went missing. Put another way, one day’s fighting in WW1 had more military casualties than the entire Iraq War. It is why, as John Derbyshire points out in his latest transmission, that Europeans called it a suicide attempt.

The Great War has got slighted in the history books, but that may be changing. Outside the Rousseauist bubble, more and more of us are taking a fresh look at this war in the context of civilizational suicide. Watching the American ruling class feverishly try to flood the country with third world peasants in an attempt to break the back of the middle-class, one cannot help but think things are headed to a dramatic denouement. One hundred years ago the ruling elites of the civilized world tried to commit suicide. They seem to be at it again.

The question that naturally arises when looking at the prelude to the Great War is how did these people not see what was coming? As John points out, all of the principles were highly civilized and highly cultivated. These were not savage people lead by glory seeking leaders. The rulers of Europe were often related and certainly familiar with one another though social connections. They were highly educated men leading a class of men with much to lose and little to gain from war. Yet, the actions of a lone madman set the civilized world on fire.

Similarly, no one outside the Rousseauist bubble can figure out why our current rulers want to destroy their countries. Pat Buchanan famously noted that we may be the first civilization in history in which the ruling elite despises that which holds them up as elites. The drive to bring in 50 million exotic peasants to destroy the American middle-class is an act of suicide. The sorts of leaders these peasants favor tend to murder the types of leaders we have in place.

Today as 100 years ago, the causes and explanation are complicated. You really can’t point to one thing to place the blame. Part of our trouble today is due to the strange religious-political cult that dominates American politics. It is a toxic blend of Utopian lunacy and rage against the limits of nature. The collapse of Christianity as an active part of people’s lives means there is no transcendent alternative to the Utopian scheming. What fills the void is the sterile conservatism we see in the pages of National Review and the platform of the GOP.

The years leading to the Great War had a similar feel. Europe had abandoned Christianity following the 30 Years War. What came to fill the void was a strange nationalism that was loosely based on blood and soil. Contemporaneous accounts give one the sense that imperialism had run its course and everyone knew it could not last. The Great War was the way to find out what came next. But, there were economic forces as work, in addition to good old fashion human error.

Perhaps it is just a natural process. Marx described capitalism as the organized destruction of productive forces. What he saw was a natural process where competition commoditized labor and capital. Perhaps at the civilizational level, material success destroys the will to thrive. When there are no more hills to conquer, the leaders lose focus and this devolves into petty, selfish behavior leading to no good end. I don’t know, but today sure has the vibe of Europe’s last summer. Maybe one day Jean-Claude Juncker will be remembered like Gavrilo Princip.

Al Gore’s Contrivance brings word that Howard Baker has died. He is probably best remembered for posing the most famous question in American politics. That was, “What did the president know and when did he know it?” It clarified the Watergate scandal for the public, but it also drew a line in the sand amongst Republicans.

Repeated over and again in the senator’s mild Tennessee drawl, those words guided Americans through the tangle of Watergate characters and charges playing daily on TV to focus squarely on Richard Nixon and his role in the cover-up.

Baker’s famous question has been dusted off for potential White House scandals big and small ever since.

Baker, who later became Senate majority leader, chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and one of the GOP’s elder statesmen, died Thursday at his Tennessee home of complications from a stroke suffered days earlier, according to an email distributed at the law firm where Baker was senior counsel. He was 88.

Baker emerged as an unlikely star of the Watergate hearings in the summer of 1973.

When chosen as vice chairman — and therefore leading Republican — of the Senate special committee, he was a Nixon ally who thought the allegations couldn’t possibly be true. Democrats feared he would serve as the White House’s “mole” in the investigation of the break-in at Democratic headquarters and other crimes perpetrated in service to Nixon’s re-election.

“I believed that it was a political ploy of the Democrats, that it would come to nothing,” Baker told The Associated Press in 1992. “But a few weeks into that, it began to dawn on me that there was more to it than I thought, and more to it than I liked.”

He said Watergate became “the greatest disillusionment” of his political career.

Baker’s intense but restrained style of interrogating former White House aides played well on camera. A youthful-looking, side-burned 47-year-old, his brainy charm inspired a raft of love notes sent to his Senate office; a women’s magazine proclaimed him “studly.” He was mentioned frequently as presidential material.

By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, Baker was a household name with a reputation for fairness and smarts that stuck throughout a long political career.

In the 1970’s, Republicans were faced with a choice. Defend the indefensible or turn on their own man. They chose the latter. In the 1980’s, they faced a similar challenge, even though Reagan was never implicated in Iran-Contra, which was largely a non-scandal. Still, there were Republicans and Conservatives that went after guys like Oliver North.

The political cult we call the Democratic Party will never turn on their guy. They defended Clinton and they are defending Obama, despite abuses of power that make Nixon and Clinton look like pikers. They will defend the cult to the last man, no matter what evidence comes to light.

RIP Howard Baker.

Way back in the olden thymes, “spiritual” people eschewed traditional religion, in favor of weird pseudo-paganism and Eastern mysticism. Along with it came sub-cults like saving the whales or saving the environment. Concern for people and things over the horizon is the hallmark of new age religion. Most of these people were miserable pricks to their families and friends, but they had nothing but love for mother earth, nature and oppressed people living far away.

All of that nonsense from the 60’s and 70’s was just religion for people who liked the benefits of public piety, but were not into any of the sacrifices. They had special outfits to wear in public, signaling their goodness. They ate strange foods and got into meditation and yoga. Bumper stickers were a big thing, as I recall.

Still, they were a minor nuisance, for the most part. Cleaning up rivers and protecting wildlife is the sort of stuff rich societies can do without causing too much trouble. It is what economist call public goods. Despite the fact the people behind these efforts were mostly monomaniacal weirdos, like Ralph Nader, the goals appealed to people’s Christian sense of duty. We are, according to Christian doctrine, caretakers of God’s creation. It’s the same way the social-welfare laws tag along on the people’s sense of Christian charity.

This arrangement started to change in the 1990’s. Bill Clinton felt it necessary to be open about his Christian faith. It was, in part, to make inroads into the South, but also appeal to northern Catholics. By 2000 Al Gore was dismissive of religion entirely while Bush was the Evangelical. That’s the source of the great divide that has roiled the nation ever since.

Obama comes along in 2008 and is clearly non-Christian. Maybe he is a Muslim, maybe he is simply not religious. His membership in the racist Chicago church hardly qualifies as religious. The clear message was that unlike the people who put Bush in office, Obama was not a Christian. The last election featured a man who never attends services and a man who belongs to a weird cult that is alien to the Judeo-Christian traditions of America.

The point of all of this is to underscore just how far Christianity has fallen in public estimation. In 1980, Reagan seeded his talks with references to the Bible, on the assumption everyone would know what he meant. His opponent was a deeply religious man who felt comfortable discussing his relationship to God on television. Today, it would seem strange to see a presidential candidate discussing such things.

One thing you learn when reading about population genetics is religion is near universal. We have evidence of religious practice going back as far as we have evidence of modern human activity. Science thinks religion evolved as one of the first human traits. If you take a step back and look at religion as a subgroup of mass movements, then it is even more obvious that faith and belief are necessary human traits.

Religion was most likely the first solution to the free rider problem. Not only does guilt and moral suasion push the free loader to pull his weight, it justifies taking harsh action against those who take more than they give. Belief in the common gods and common morality would have obvious reproductive advantages. A natural bias toward religiosity would, over many generations, bake belief into the human animal. Like all traits, it would manifest itself more prominently in some and less so in others. In short, all of us are believers to one degree or another.

That brings me back to the collapse of Christianity in America. Take a look at church attendance by state. Where are you more likely to find a global warming fanatics? Vermont or Mississippi? If you look at the bottom ten states, there you find the most deeply committed liberals and the most deeply committed warmists. Gaia worship, manifested as climate concern, is the religion filling the void left my Christianity.

Putting aside the strong correlations between church attendance and progressive fanaticism, take a look at this story from the other day. I sent this to all of my liberal friends. All of them dismissed it, claiming the writers are hacks and long discredited. Many used identical language, suggesting a source they commonly rely upon for the good word. This post over at MR elicits the same sort of response from believers.  In the mind of the warmist, you are either a believer or a denier. That’s the sort of language used by religious cults, not the empirically minded.

Whether you want to call AGW the master cult, encompassing the lesser cults of environmentalism, or you lump all of it into the same bucket with the other progressive fads, there’s no escaping the religious overtones to all of it. Here’s an interesting bit from a hard core lunatic site called ThinkProgress. These are the sort of folks who invest a lot of time counting heretics. Their map is revealing. It is not just party preference dividing the nation. It is religion.

The question is whether it was the vacuum left by the collapse of Christianity in these areas that allowed this pagan faith to spread or do the causal arrows point the other way. The American Left has been hostile to Christianity since the end of WW2. Perhaps as the people of these areas became more liberal, church attendance dropped and these weird fads spread. That’s not something I can answer.

What I do know is countries with populations deeply divided by religion don’t get along very well or for very long.

It strikes me that there are two great currents in human history that are now colliding with one another. On the one hand, there is a definite long term trend toward larger organizational units. The first human settlements were villages that grew into towns. These towns were the administrative centers for the surrounding farm and pasture lands. Those towns grew into cities and eventually city-states. The Bronze Age was dominated by city-states that conquered the surrounding city-states.

The city state gave way to the regional power that was a collection of city-states speaking the same tongue and having a shared history. Eventually, after a lot of war and conquest, we got nations, mostly composed of people with a shared genealogy and culture. There are exceptions, but the nations of Europe mostly track the ethnic grouping of the continent. The 20th century gave us world government, in bits and pieces. The European Union is all about creating a super-state. World trade organizations and financial regulators like the IMF are precursors of world governance.

On the other hand, states are breaking up here and there. The Czechs split from the Slovaks. The Walloons and Flemings are close the breaking up Belgium. Scotland may be ready to bolt the UK. Quebec is once again making noises about leaving Canada. The Catalans want to leave Spain and the Venetians want to leave Italy. Of course, Iraq is about to break into pieces. In the US, we have states making noises about breaking into smaller states. California is moving closer than many realize to having it on the ballot in two years.

Advocates for Six Californias, a plan to split the Golden State into a half dozen separate states, are holding a petition drive this weekend to get their plan on the ballot in 2016.

The idea is the brainchild of Timothy Draper, a venture capitalist from Menlo Park – or as he hopes to some day call it, the state of Silicon Valley. Draper has sunk $2 million into signature gathering for the proposal. He maintains it will break bureaucratic deadlock in Sacramento (proposed state of North California) and attract more business.

“California has become the worst managed state in the country,” he told The Times this spring. “It just is too big and too ungovernable.”

Anna Morris, spokeswoman for Six Californias, said in an e-mail that  the group has collected “a significant amount of signatures and are hoping to get the remaining signatures we need this weekend.”“For people who put our chances at zero, we say that we are dedicated to challenging the status quo and are hopeful that Six Californias will be the much needed refresh for state government,” she said.

Joe Rodota, the co-chair of OneCalifornia, an opposition group, downplayed the significance of getting signatures on a petition.

“This is just a process that pretty much any well-funded interest can pursue,” said Rodota, former cabinet secretary for Gov. Pete Wilson. The real challenge, he said, is ballot approval and “it’s just very difficult to get a yes vote historically.”

Times political columnist George Skelton called Six Californias “crazy” and “really crackpot,” but he noted that attempts to break up the state have been around since its inception and can be highly diverting if never successful.

“Go ahead and put this thing on the ballot,” he wrote in April. “We could use some fun.”

There’s a strong argument for breaking up California just on administrative grounds. A better argument is for state government to get much smaller and let local government take on more responsibility. You could keep the state intact if county and city government were left to their own devises for providing services. The great mistake of centralization is the belief that spreading the misery makes it go away. The opposite actually happens. People are more willing to tackle local problems when they have control of local resources.

But, there’s no record of the centralizers ceding control back to the locals, at least not without a bloodbath. That’s the problem we see everywhere in America. Things like education policy, food charity, housing charity and health care arrangements have been handed to the Federal government and there’s little chance they hand them back to the states. Even staggering, outlandish incompetence is not enough to get the pols thinking about devolution. There’s no money in it for them. Instead, they will pull the roof down on all of us.

The same thing is happening in states like California. State government took over the schools, the police and the collection of taxes. Cities, counties and towns are just administrative arms of the state, often working at cross purposes with state agencies. The result is anarcho-tyranny. Here in the ghetto, I pass through traffic cameras every block. They are about to install cameras that look for seat belt violations. Yet, when my car was broken into the cops would not even take a report, much less look for the criminals.

The two trends I described at the start of the post are in conflict, but not everywhere. Scottish independence is an example where a fusion of localism and the managerial super-state may be the result. The Scots will manage their police, hospitals, charities, etc. The EU will run their currency, trade policy and foreign policy. Maybe that’s how it all shakes out. The managerial class of the super state living in cloud cities while the rest of us sort out what we can in out garbage strewn ghettos.

Casino gambling is going to make for a good book one day. I’m sure lots of books have been written on the subject from all angles, but the one containing the epitaph is still unwritten. Way back in the olden thymes, Las Vegas was the one place to legally gamble. That meant that most people did their gambling illegally.

Now we are up to our eyeballs in legal casinos, often run by the state. The argument being that it raises money from a bad thing to be used for a good thing and it cuts down on crime. Whether any of that is true is debatable, but what is certainly true is the casino business is in trouble. This story from Atlantic City is a pretty good example.

The Revel Casino Hotel warned its staff Thursday that it will shut down this summer if a buyer can’t be found in bankruptcy court.

In warning letters given to employees and obtained by the Associated Press, Revel said it is seeking a buyer for the struggling $2.4 billion casino, but can’t guarantee one will be found. If not, employees could be terminated as soon as Aug. 18, Revel said in the letter.

“If Revel is unable to complete such a sale promptly, Revel expects to close its entire facility,” the letters read. The company also said it plans to stay open while it searches for a buyer.

Shortly after distributing the letters, Revel filed a Chapter 11 petition in federal bankruptcy court, its second in as many years. Revel said it hopes to find a buyer quickly.

“We will work to reach an agreement with a new owner who will help ensure Revel’s long-term financial stability and who shares our commitment to providing Revel’s guests and players an exceptional experience,” said Scott Kreeger, Revel’s president and chief operating officer.

He said the casino has obtained a $125 million loan from one of its existing financiers so it can operate during its stay in bankruptcy court.

If you have never been to Atlantic City, here’s a quick primer. Imagine a bombed out ghetto city like Detroit or Newark. Place it next to a decent beach with a boardwalk. Plop some tacky, giant casinos on the boardwalk and you have Atlantic City. This particular casino was built far from the massive ghettos that bound the boardwalk area. In theory, it should be thriving, but it is not. In fact, all of the casinos in AC struggle.

One reason is the surrounding area. The big mistake was not pushing out the locals when they built the casinos in the 1970’s. But, that was before liberals figured out how to use gays and Mexicans to clear out a neighborhood and gentrify it. Back then they still thought “community development” would bring jobs and prosperity to the ghetto.

The other reason for the failure of AC is the casino boom. In fact, we may be reaching peak casino.

Racetrack casinos used to contribute as much as $240 million a year to Delaware’s tax coffers. But as the Northeast becomes saturated with gambling venues, the state’s casino revenue has tumbled, prompting a new industry request—for a tax break.

“It’s a different world for the Delaware casinos,” said Democratic Gov. Jack Markell, who supports reducing the tax burden on casinos by $20 million a year to help them compete.

More casinos have opened in the Northeast over the past decade than in any other part of the country, and the expansion is causing upheaval in the region. States that adopted gambling earlier than their neighbors, such as Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginia, are watching dollars drain away, and new projects have some wondering how many facilities the area can support.

Twenty-six casinos have opened since 2004, fueling a 39% increase in total annual gambling revenue in the mid-Atlantic and New England, according to a study by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Within 100 miles of Philadelphia, there now are 24 casinos, a big shift from the early 1990s, when Atlantic City, N.J., enjoyed an East Coast monopoly. At least a dozen more gambling spots are in the pipeline from Massachusetts to Maryland, raising fears in states such as Rhode Island that their casino tax windfall is at risk.

This is a familiar pattern. A truly new product pops up creating a new industry. Once it is clearly a winner, others rush in to get a bite of the apple. Supply shoots up, prices collapse and the product becomes a commodity. That’s followed by a culling of the supply herd.

Cheap money fuels M&A activity to consolidate stronger players. Eventually you end up with a handful of suppliers of the product who can make low margin businesses work on volume. We are in the oversupply phase with casino gambling.

The question is what comes next. In every other business a few operators emerge as the apex predators to gobble up the rest. That can’t happen with state run gambling parlors. Some will go this route where private operators run the casinos and pay a special tax to the state. That either means the state takes a smaller cut or they find a way to turn the operator into a utility, which seems unlikely.

There are two other models that could be the end game. One is the nationalized business model. In the old days it was popular in Europe for the state to take control of whole industries like steel and energy. By the 1970’s these industries were money losing disasters threatening to bankrupt the state. They were privatized and in many cases sent overseas. Decades from now states will probably be unloading these white elephants for pennies on a dollar.

The other model is pornography, which has followed an interesting path. The Internet gave new life to an industry largely run by degenerates and gangsters. It suddenly got cool and it got rich. But, the same tools that opened it up to professional business people opened it up to global competition. Revenues collapsed as amateurs started giving away their porn on the Internet. The “adult bookstore” followed Blockbuster Video into the great abyss.

Gambling can be done on-line. Not all of it, but poker, sports books and other, as yet uninvented, games can be done effectively on-line. Prohibitions against on-line gambling will work for a while, but getting around these limits is getting easier. I know poker players who belong to private on-like clubs, using gaming consoles. It will not be long before a clever guy figures out how to “monetize” this.

Gambling has been a part of human societies since at least settlement. The thing is, there’s little value added opportunities in it. You can build a four-star hotel on a beach and make big money. Other than offering drinks, safety and volume, a casino is not offering a lot to the gambler. They are not there for the shows or the atmosphere. They are there for the action. That means these state gambling parlors will see their margins drop to the absolute minimum, with many going bust in the next decade.

There’s always been something dodgy about government running the vice rackets. In America, the Federal government runs the alcohol business. They make more from it than the private players. Alcohol is taxed at over $20 per gallon. The states run the cigarettes business and are now getting into the drug rackets. They own the gambling rackets in most places. The only thing left is prostitution and porn. Making money from vice makes you a pimp, no matter what you do with the money. Seeing the state fail at it is pleasing at some level.

More important, it underscores a criticism from the old right that has long been dismissed. That is, you cannot have an economy based on doing each others laundry. You have to make thinks and you have to invent things. That creates real jobs directly through employment in factories. It does so indirectly for all of the support services. It also props up the tertiary economy, like gambling and entertainment, as people use their surplus on leisure. You can’t have a real economy very long when it is based on selling off your assets to pay for leisure.

This is the flashing red headline on Drudge this morning. First we were told there was a mysterious glitch in the IRS network that resulted in the loss of only the e-mails under subpoena. Now we are being told that the IRS is the only organization on the planet that does not backup its e-mail system. Instead, they rely on users to take care of that on their own, along with securing their own government issued laptops.

Even I’m starting to get insulted by the lies.

For those of you too young to remember, we ran a president out of town a long time ago for these sorts of things. This is from the articles of impeachment for Mr. Nixon, way back in the disco era.

Article #2 Section #1:

He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavoured to obtain from the Internal Revenue Service, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, confidential information contained in income tax returns for purposed not authorized by law, and to cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be intitiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner.

Then we have this:

He misused the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service, and other executive personnel, in violation or disregard of the constitutional rights of citizens, by directing or authorizing such agencies or personnel to conduct or continue electronic surveillance or other investigations for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; he did direct, authorize, or permit the use of information obtained thereby for purposes unrelated to national security, the enforcement of laws, or any other lawful function of his office; and he did direct the concealment of certain records made by the Federal Bureau of Investigation of electronic surveillance.

The whole sorry episode has been washed down the drain of history, but the IRS stuff was probably the most outrageous at the time. The Watergate break-in was a big deal, but it was clear Nixon did not know about it before it happened. It was not all that clear he knew about it before it became a big deal in he press. It is where we get the expression, “It is not the crime, it is the cover-up.”

At the time, the stuff that truly offended the people as well as the political class was the potential misuse of the IRS and FBI. I say “potential” because it is not all that clear Nixon ever ordered anything of the sort. It is less clear that anyone else seriously tried to use the IRS as a political weapon. We now know that the FBI was corrupt in ways independent of Nixon so that’s a different story. Hoover created a monster that has never truly been tamed.

The FBI had been out of control for decades, but the IRS appears to have been fairly clean. You’re always going to have some level of corruption. When you’re dealing with sensitive data like taxes, petty abuse is inevitable. What led to including the IRS in the articles of impeachment was the mere suggestion of using the IRS for political purposes. The worst you can say about Nixon and the IRS is he would have abused it if it were a different organization.

That’s what makes this story so outrageous. This administration appears to have turned the IRS into an organization that can and was used as a political weapon. In other words, Team Obama went well past anything Nixon imagined. They have corrupted a government agency that was resistant to the Nixon people. Nixon’s corruption meter may have been pegged at ten, but Obama’s goes to eleven.

What this should do, but most likely won’t, is throw cold water on Conservative Inc and their fantasies about the Left. For decades the Left held Nixon up as the poster child for bad government. Today, they are defending a guy who makes Nixon look like a Boy Scout. These are not people who are merely mistaken. They are not people with whom you can have honest dealings. These are not men of principle. The best you can say about them is they are mendacious, cynical opportunist. In reality, they are religious fanatics. Pretending otherwise is suicide.

Pardon me for not being optimistic about where we are heading as a nation.

I’ve been thinking about generational stuff a lot lately. I’m noodling through a future post so I’m paying attention to millennials more than normal. I was talking about my new interest with someone and they sent me this story from their local paper.

You may have spotted the new summer trend in men’s fashion: short suits.

The look, which features short trousers and is paired with a tailored jacket, has found its way into retail shops across the country. But should you go for it?

It all comes down to your personal style — if you have the confidence to don the new look with attitude, yeah, go for it. I like it and I’d wear it.

If you google “short suits” you get this. You’ll note it is almost all women in those pics. Then again, this guy is not exactly manly.

100 years ago, the custom was to put little boys in short trouser suits.

There’s a point to be made there, but I’ll resist the temptation to state the obvious.

Thousands of years of trial and error resulted in a simple, recent discovery. By recent, I mean relative to human existence. That discovery is that human societies must have well understood rules that apply to everyone. That’s the ideal, even though we accept that the rich and powerful can take advantage of their position. That’s why the tolerance for public corruption is a good measure of a civilization. A just and sane society has very little public corruption. The rich and powerful play by the same rules as everyone else.

In  this story we see once again how far American has fallen on that index.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office canceled six federal trademark registrations for the NFL’s Washington Redskins on Wednesday, saying the nickname is “disparaging to Native Americans” and cannot be trademarked under federal law that prohibits trademark protection on offensive or disparaging language.

The team has been under fire for the past year, with many groups, including the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, wanting the nickname changed.

Last month, the team hired a lobbying firm to help with the public backlash after senators sent a letter to the National Football League saying they also wanted the name changed.

 “We decide, based on the evidence properly before us, that these registrations must be cancelled because they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered,” the Trademark Trial and Appeals board wrote in its opinion.

Redskins owner Dan Snyder has repeatedly said that he will not change the nickname despite the opposition.

The Trademark Trial and Appeals Board said the “Redskins” name is the subject for cancellation for “entertainment services -namely, football exhibitions rendered in stadia and through the media of radio and television broadcasts.”

The team’s cheerleading squad, the “Redskinettes,” are also subject to the cancellation, for “entertainment services, namely, cheerleaders who perform dance routines at professional football games and exhibitions and other personal appearances,” according to the board.

This jihad against the Redskins is led by one of the most corrupt humans on earth, Harry Reid (D, Organized Crime). This is a man who entered politics penniless and is now super-rich. He made his money shaking down contributors and making land deals with organized crime figures. Dan Snyder may be an odious speck of a man, but he made his money honestly. He has a right to live in a land of laws and he has right to expect those laws will be respected by his government.

This is a national disgrace. Whatever your views on the name – and I think if you are upset by it you need psychiatric help – there is a proper, civilized way to go about it. Willy-nilly stealing the owner’s property is how banana republics function. What’s next? Will Reid send in thugs to break up Snyder’s house and threaten his family?

We have allowed our country to be taken over by criminals, deviants and lunatics. We should be ashamed of what we have done.

The World Cup started off in grand fashion. The very first match was rigged so the host team could notch a victory.

Croatia coach Niko Kovac said his players “better give it up now and go home” after Brazil were awarded what looked to be a soft, and crucial, penalty in their 3-1 win in the World Cup opening game.

With the match tied at 1-1 in the second half, Japanese official Yuichi Nishimura awarded Brazil a contentious spot-kick when striker Fred went down after a light touch from Croatia centre-back Dejan Lovren.

Kovac called the penalty “ridiculous” and said Nishimura was not at the level to be a referee on the sport’s biggest stage.

“If that was a penalty, we should be playing basketball,” Kovac said. “Those kinds of fouls are penalised there.

The liberal weenies in the American sporting press who keep telling us soccer is important never bother to mention that soccer is the most corrupt sport on earth. Here’s a piece on the rampant cheating and game fixing from PBS.

Soccer has been tainted in the past by evidence of match fixing. But European law enforcement officials outlined a complex scandal yesterday that was enormous in scope and could be deeply damaging to the game’s reputation.

The European Union’s police agency, Europol, said an 18-month investigation turned up 680 matches suspected of being fixed across the globe. The games were played between 2008 and 2011. The scandal may have even involved qualifying matches for the sport’s biggest tournaments, the World Cup and the European Championships.

The probe cited links to criminal networks, including a Singapore-based crime syndicate. Europol wouldn’t name any of the suspected matches or individuals, but said it involved more than 400 people in 15 countries.

That’s in Europe where respect for the law is still kind of important. Imagine what South America is like. But, that’s the nature of stupid sports. Sports with a high level of difficulty attract a different sort of player and a different sort of fan. Soccer is just a bunch of tiny smokers chasing a ball around. Gambling on it is the only way to keep it interesting. Well, that and getting drunk off your ass.