[subscribe2]I’m going to take a guess and say that few people are surprised by this development.

TMZ Sports has obtained a police report filed after the alleged incident … in which the accuser claims the alleged incident took place at a residence at the Viceroy Hotel on April 1.

According to the report, issued by the Miami PD, the woman claims she went to the apartment of Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Ricardo Lockette … to hang out with him, Kaepernick and 49ers wide receiver Quinton Patton.

The woman told police, around 9pm that night she mixed some drinks for the guys and gave them shots, but they told her that “in order to drink the shots she had to ‘hit’ the bong which contained marijuana.”

The woman says she felt lightheaded and went to the bedroom to lie down.  She claims Kaepernick “came up behind her into the bedroom and started kissing her.” “She advised they were kissing (mouth) and Mr Kaepernick started to undressed [sic] her. She got completely naked.  Mr. Kaepernick told her that he was going to be right back and left the bedroom. They did not have sex.”

The woman told cops that while she was still naked in bed, Patton and Lockette opened the door and “peeked” inside.  She says she told them to get out … but she can’t remember anything after that.

The woman later woke up in a hospital bed … but says she doesn’t remember how she got there or who took her there.

The woman also claims she has had a sexual relationship with Kaepernick in the past.

Kaepernick is the hero of every moonbat sports reporter. Just as Obama was the synthesis of their perfect president, Kaepernick is the embodiment of their perfect man of the future. He is mixed race, which is critical. In the future, everyone will look like extras from The Matrix. He is media savvy. He embraces ghetto culture, without actually going to prison. He practices a weird Unitarian sort of Christianity that does not upset the gays or women with all the morality stuff. He is the New Model Moonbat!

He also likes to do bong hits and have gang bangs with strange women. But hey, God is on his side. It says it right on his torso!

That’s something I’ve always noticed about many Evangelicals. It is a nihilistic brand of Christianity. It starts and ends with the individual’s “relationship with God.” That “relationship” is peculiar to each person and comes only with the rules the person and God, we’re supposed to assume, have agreed upon. At anytime, the faithful can get a clean slate by “accepting Jesus” and everything is forgiven. It is this theological bent that allowed Mike Huckabee to swing open the prison doors and let a lot of bad people walk free. After all, they accepted Jesus so who was he to judge?

I have no doubt that we will see Kaepernick come out at some point talking about God and forgiveness. Since he has a personal relationship with God, they will just work it out between them and Kaepernick will let us knwo the result. I’m going to bet the result is cost free to Kaepernick. After all, his god is a loving god.

It’s also a pagan God. The foundation of the Christian faith is the covenant. It is a deal between God and all men. Unlike the Jews, Christians think all people can be God’s chosen people. A covenant is a contract, a bargain. God will do his part, like make sure 2+2 = 4 forever and man must do his part. The reward for man is ever lasting life. You don’t get the reward if you don’t follow the rules and that’s where these new fangled Christians wander off the reservation. There’s is a pagan relationship with God, in the same way a Saxon would strike a deal with Wodan.

Kaepernick better get himself a good lawyer. His relationship with God is not going to do him much good if they find his DNA on the girl.

I’m fond of pointing out that what we in America call liberalism is really just a religion from Europe. It is a secular religion, but a religion nonetheless. For many of the adherents, it is a cult. The difference between it and other cults is the Führerprinzip is not always obvious. What we typically think of as a cult has some charismatic leader around whom the cult is organized. Liberalism is more like the Catholic Church in this regard. They have temporary leaders, as well as a collection of venerated saints. Today, BHO is the supreme leader. In the 1990’s it was Clinton. He’s now moved into the saint category with MLK, RFK, JFK and so forth.

Anyway, it is most obvious in the sub-cults like the environmental movement. This story about the search for a green cow is a great example.

A White House climate initiative has boosted a quixotic search for the “cow of the future”, a next-generation creature whose greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by anti-methane pills, burp scanners and gas backpacks.

Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the primary man-made gas warming the planet, but methane is far more potent and the US’s biggest source of it is its 88m cattle, which produce more than landfill sites, natural gas leaks or hydraulic fracturing.

The Obama administration’s launch last month of a plan to curb methane emissions has given fresh relevance to climate-friendly technologies for cattle that range from dietary supplements and DNA gut tests to strap-on gas tanks.

Now, imagine driving through the countryside and coming upon a dairy farm. You look out at the pasture and you see cows with tanks on their backs and a hose in their ass to collect their farts. The words, “You gotta be kidding me?” come to mind.

Juan Tricarico, director of the Cow of the Future project at the Innovation Center for US Dairy, an Illinois research institute, said the initiative had boosted his quest to create the “star athlete” of the bovine world.

“For us it is very encouraging because it basically demonstrates that important players out there are thinking in similar ways to us,” he told the Financial Times.

But he said there were common misconceptions about where cattle methane comes from. “Ninety-seven per cent of all the methane gas is released by the front end through burps, not from the back end,” he said.

My mistake. They will also be wearing gas masks in addition to the, eh, ass masks.

Based on his research priorities, the dairy cow of the future will be the unstressed inhabitant of spacious accommodation, munching on anti-methane gourmet grains that are processed by an efficient, best-in-species digestive system.

And a billion or so humans will starve to death if he and his coreligionists ever get their way. I’m thinking there will always be a enough people with good sense to step in and throttle these idiots before they starve a billion people, but you never really can be sure.

“We want it to be more productive, we want it to be healthier, we want it to be a problem-free cow,” said Mr Tricarico.

Methane accounts for 9 per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions and does not linger in the air as long as CO2, but it has a global warming effect more than 20 times greater than CO2, the White House says.

However, financial barriers are hampering the adoption of tools to limit methane from cattle, as was the case with early technology to curb pollution from power stations and motor vehicles.

The costs are prohibitive for dairy and beef farmers and the kind of research that could make the tools more cost-effective would require public funding.

Ah, there we are. If we ever cut off the flow of public funds to these people, they are gone in a  week. But, state sponsored religion is like that.

C-Lock, a South Dakota company, sells a feeding station that gives animals dietary supplements such as basil to cut methane production and measures the content of their breath by pulling it towards trace gas sensors with a vacuum.

Patrick Zimmerman, C-Lock’s founder, says prices start at $45,000 but stresses the economic benefits of improved efficiency. “Of the energy the animals eat, 3 to 15 per cent is lost as methane and that’s a waste,” he says.

At Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology, scientists have created backpacks that collect gas via tubes plugged into cows’ stomachs. A typical animal emits 250-300 litres of methane a day and researchers say this could be used to power a car or a refrigerator for a day, but Jorge Antonio Hilbert of the institute says the tanks’ use on a large scale is “totally improbable”.

Jonathan Gelbard of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, says: “Anyone who can come up with a cost-effective way to harness that methane is going to make a lot of money.”

Ilmi Granoff of the Overseas Development Institute said an alternative to controlling cattle emissions would be to cut the number of cows.

“Forget coal, Forget cars. The fastest way to address climate change would be to dramatically reduce the amount of meat people eat,” he said. “But that involves cultural preferences and they are difficult to touch.”

And it would also kill a billion people or more. That’s the dirty little secret of the environmental movement. It is anti-human. They would gladly gas a billion people to “address climate change” or whatever pagan nonsense they are into this week. People join mass movements out of self-loathing. They hate themselves so they seek to trade their individual identity for that of the group. The resulting dynamic is a loathing of all things outside the cult and a willingness to die for the ideas of the cult. It’s why the body count for liberalism world-wide is staggering.

The old gag about newspapers went something like this. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it.

I use the past tense here as it no longer applies. The great conflation of newspapers means they are all just branch offices for the ministry of official dogma. Even the supposed “conservatives” of the Wall Street agree with the NYTimes on all of the big issues.

The Boston Globe may have been a big deal to the former rulers, but now it is sort of a low budget, off-Broadway act. They have all the pretentiousness you find at the Times or Journal, but none of the talent. Anyway, this is an editorial from today regarding the Connecticut basketball team.

Well before UConn began its magical march to the national men’s basketball championship, it led the 64-team tournament in a far less exalted category: lowest graduation rate. At 8 percent, UConn’s six-year graduation rate for its men’s basketball team is, frankly, a disgrace that can’t remotely be offset by the glories of Monday night’s victory. Second-year coach Kevin Ollie, who wasn’t in charge when the players started dropping classes like errant passes, wisely proclaimed that academics comes first, and touted the classroom success of this year’s team. He needs to keep working toward that goal, year in and year out, and seek to build a legacy similar to that of Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, whose four national championships over 34 years is less impressive than the fact that 98 percent of his players have gotten degrees.

Two things that jump out to me right away. Duke is an obvious exception. The demographics of their program are nothing like the typical college basketball program. If you are a high IQ prep basketball player, that’s your Harvard. When I say high IQ, I mean above average. The very small fraction of basketball players who have the cultural and intellectual ability to make it at Duke is exceptionally small. Boston College has a similar graduation rate and their program is awful. If the supply of talent was anything other than microscopic, every Catholic college playing Division I basketball would be a powerhouse.

The other thing that stands out is the ethnocentrism. The upper middle-class whites who run the Globe casually assume everyone heads off to college for the credentials and self-actualization. A bachelors in Medieval Folklore from Tufts is just as useful as a Journalism degree from Northwestern. For 90% of the kids getting basketball scholarships at major programs, the degree is meaningless. They are there to be trained for professional basketball, in America or overseas. That communications major they are working on is just a cost of admissions to what they hope will be a career as a pro athlete.

That’s an example of what makes liberalism such a potent religion. No amount of facts and evidence can shake the fantasy. The answer to every bit of dis-confirmation is either a bogeyman or a new plan to bring about the utopian future. Here we have John Calipari, the gold standard of college basketball coaches, calling for the players to become employees. They will be paid entertainers promoting the school through basketball. One would think this would cause the folks at the Globe to re-examine their views on college athletics, but here they are.

 The problem with academics in intercollegiate sports is deeper than any one program. It’s a structural dynamic that’s easy to see: Craving the best athletes for the sports that drive alumni interest and fundraising, universities stretch their admissions standards to accept players who would have a hard time handling their classwork in the best of circumstances. But athletes face an array of challenges that other students don’t: a punishing practice schedule that chews up dozens of hours a week; a mixed set of incentives, since they get their scholarships based on performance in sports, not academics; and an exalted status on campus that puts them beyond some of the normal checks and balances that keep other students focused on classes.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association bears a lot of the blame for letting sports overtake academics for far too many players. Lately, it’s tried to show some teeth by banning schools, including UConn last year, from championship play if their graduation rates are chronically low. But it’s an imperfect punishment. While universities deserve blame for low graduation rates, their current players — who aren’t responsible for the failures of their predecessors — do not. It’s tough to deprive them of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Over the years, the person best positioned to manage the conflicting pressures on the players has been the coach. If coaches make academics a priority, their players are far more likely to earn degrees. Some coaches, like Krzyzewski, are well known for showing care and concern for their players’ classroom performance. Others, like Ollie’s UConn predecessor, longtime coach Jim Calhoun, carry the opposite reputation. So, Ollie has his work cut out for him. At 41, he’s already lived up to Calhoun’s basketball legacy. It will take a lot of effort for him, and UConn, to live down Calhoun’s record of letting team members falter as students. He need only look down the hall of UConn’s athletic department for inspiration: The UConn women’s basketball team also brought home a national championship this year — with a 92 percent graduation rate.

The comparison to women’s basketball is hilarious. The women, who are not lesbians, have no expectations about playing professionally. They can, but they will be more interested in finding a husband and getting on with what biology requires. The lesbians, who make up a high percentage of players (and an outlandish percentage of fans) are not looking for a man, but their earning potential is very limited. Therefore, basketball is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That’s why most women’s programs are hilariously awful at basketball. The programs exist for Title IX reasons, not because of supply and demand.

That’s not so say there’s nothing wrong with collegiate athletics. Basketball is a sewer of corruption. The fact that 60% of NBA players file for bankruptcy within five years of retirement is no surprise. From middle school through the professional ranks, the sport is dominated by people who make boxing promoters look honest. Letting these people run their businesses on college campuses is highly questionable. But, admitting to any of that would open the door to a whole lot of questions no one wants to ask.

[subscribe2]As I crest the hill of my life, I no longer believe we will outgrow our racial problems. Stories like this one are the reason. Hank Aaron was a hero of mine when I was a boy. He was not the first black athlete to cross over, as they say, but he was one of the first to do it in a major way. In the 1970’s, Aaron was a superstar. There’s no doubt he suffered from racism and was treated poorly at times. He has also lived a fairytale life that few people on earth have ever experienced. America, for all its faults, was really good to Hank Aaron. Yet, all that matters to him is the bitterness.

Hank Aaron has the letters tucked away in his attic, preserved these last 40 years. He’s not ready to let them go.

He almost has them memorized by now, but still he carefully opens them up and reads every word, as if he wants to feel the pain.

“You are (not) going to break this record established by the great Babe Ruth if I can help it,” one of them reads. “Whites are far more superior than jungle bunnies. My gun is watching your every black move.”

Yes, Aaron even saved the death threats, the ones that vowed to end his life if he dared break Ruth’s cherished all-time home run record.

“I wouldn’t have saved those damn things,” says Hall of Famer Willie McCovey, who grew up in Aaron’s hometown of Mobile, Ala. “I would have burned them. I had a few of them myself over the years. I don’t save stuff like that.

“Why would you?”

I think the answer to McCovey’s question is this. What defines Hank Aaron, as far as Aaron is concerned, is race. It is not his place in American culture, the fact that he overcame so much or the fact he has lived a wonderful life. None of that matters, it seems.

Aaron’s march to history ended 40 years ago today, when his 715th home run vaulted him past Ruth as baseball’s all-time home run leader. Yet it was an often joyless and lonely pursuit, and Aaron says he has good reason to hang onto the cruel correspondence.

“To remind myself,” Aaron tells USA TODAY Sports, “that we are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record. If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There’s not a whole lot that has changed.

“We can talk about baseball. Talk about politics. Sure, this country has a black president, but when you look at a black president, President Obama is left with his foot stuck in the mud from all of the Republicans with the way he’s treated.

“We have moved in the right direction, and there have been improvements, but we still have a long ways to go in the country.

“The bigger difference is that back then they had hoods. Now they have neckties and starched shirts.”

Aaron is 80 and I suppose some allowance should be given him for that fact. Men grow bitter as they grow old. Often, men who were great athletes will get very bitter. I doubt Aaron passed on a career in physics to play baseball. All he had was his physical ability. Once that faded, he was just another guy. That seems to be a very tough adjustment for many athletes and many get quite bitter.

On the other hand, Aaron is 80 and has seen a lot. When he was 15 and showing promise as a ballplayer, his future was bleak compared to white players. The best he could hope for was scratching out a living in the Negro leagues for a few years and then heading off to the farm or the factory. Today he sees young black guys with promise getting doted on by coaches, agents and promoters. If you are a 15 year old black kid with anything on the ball, the world is your oyster. There’s no better time or place to be black that 2014 America.

How can Hank Aaron be so blind to that truth?

That’s the sad state of things. Fifty years of trying to fix race and the people see little progress? That’s what the polling shows. When more than half of blacks and close to half of whites think things are the same or worse as in the past, you have to wonder if it is worth all the effort. I’m as skeptical as any man, but I thought Obama would remove a lot of racial tensions. Obviously, that has not happened. That presents the obvious question. If all of these efforts have failed, what can be done?

[subscribe2]The Gaystapo’s hit on the Mozilla guy has the usual suspects out wringing their hands about the Left’s alleged turn toward authoritarianism. I think there are two interesting things to consider. One is the Cult has done such a great job selling their alternative history of themselves, that hardly anyone knows it is nonsense. Even the professional Right accepts that the Cult is the home of free speech and tolerance. Of course, the one big idea that sprung from the Cult of Rue Saint-Jacques was Marxism and that has a body count of 100 million. If your cult has spent the last century murdering anyone suspected of independent thought, your not the religion of free speech and tolerance.  you’re the religion of free speech and tolerance.

The other thing worth considering is if this is a change in past practice. The tattered remains of conservatism thinks this is some ghastly new development. It seems to me that the Cult has been attacking people for unclean thoughts since I can remember. Robert Bork was attacked by the Mass Murderer on the Senate floor because Bork thought abortion was barbaric. According to David Horowitz, the New Left was running off heretics every week back in the 1960’s. Going even further back, the Left tried to ruin Whitaker Chambers because he had the gall to point out that Alger Hiss was a commie. It seems to me that kristallnacht is as an embedded feature of the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

Anyway, a surprisingly thoughtful look at this last point comes from the very liberal Corey Robin.

In a sharp take on the Left, Freddie deBoer asks, “Is the social justice left really abandoning free speech?” Drawing on this report about an incident at the University of California at Santa Barbara, Freddie answers his own question thus:

It’s a question I’ve played around with before. Generally, the response [from the Left] is something like “of course not, stop slandering us,” or whatever. But more and more often, I find that the answer from lefties I know in academia or online writing are answering “yes.” And that is, frankly, terrifying and a total betrayal of the fundamental principles we associate with human progress.

Freddie goes on to offer a rousing defense of free speech. I don’t want to enter that debate. I have a different question: Is Freddie’s sense of a change on the Left — “more and more often” — accurate?

To be clear, I know exactly the phenomenon Freddie is talking about, so he’s not wrong to point it out. But from my admittedly impressionistic vantage as a middle-aged American academic, it seems far less common than it used to be.

Historically, the Left has had an ambivalent relationship to what used to be derisively called “bourgeois freedoms.” From Marx’s On the Jewish Question to Herbert Marcuse’s notion of repressive tolerance, some of the most interesting thinking on the Left has been devoted to examining the limits of what for lack of a better word I’ll call the liberal defense of freedom and rights. And of course this tradition of thought has often — and disastrously — been operationalized, whether in the form of Soviet tyranny or the internal authoritarianism of the CPUSA.

But if we think about this issue from the vantage of the 1960s, my sense is that today’s left — whether on campus or in the streets — is far less willing to go down the road of a critique of pure tolerance, as a fascinating text by Marcuse, Barrington Moore, and Robert Paul Woolf once  called it, than it used to be. (As Jeremy Kessler suggests, that absolutist position, which is usually associated with content neutrality, historically went hand in hand with the politics of anti-communism.)

Once upon a time, those radical critiques of free speech were where the action was at. So much so that even liberal theorists like Owen Fiss, who ordinarily might have been more inclined to a Millian position on these matters, were pushed by radical theorists like Catharine MacKinnon to take a more critical stance toward freedom of speech. But now that tradition seems to be all but dead.

Something happened on the way to the censor. Whether it was the pitched battle among feminists over the MacKinnon/Dworkin critique of pornography — and their advocacy of anti-porn statutes in Indianapolis and elsewhere — or the collapse of the Berlin Wall, most leftists since the 1990s have been leery of deviations from the absolutist position on free speech. Not just in theory but in practice: just consider the almost fastidious aversion to shutting down any kind of discussion within the Occupy movement.

That’s not to say that leftists don’t go there; it’s just that the bar of justification is higher today. The burden is on the radical critic of free speech, not the other way around.

Yes, one can still read of incidents like the one that provoked Freddie’s post (though compared to the past, they seem fewer and farther between). And critical issues like the relationship between money and speech are still argued overon the Left. But, again, compared to the kinds of arguments we used to see, this seems like small beer.

My take, as I said, is impressionistic. Am curious to hear whether others have a different impression. And to be clear, I’m talking here about the Left, not liberals, who may or may not be, depending on a variety of factors and circumstances, more inclined to defend restrictions on freedom of speech.

The professor cannot be blamed for defending his cult by claiming it has been anything but in favor of free speech. That’s just human nature. As the great John Derbyshire said of his book, Robin is not the type of liberal polemicist who snarls or shrieks. What I have read from him tells me he has a genuine interest in truth, even if he is full marinated in a 19th century pagan religion. His willingness to confront his coreligionists is unusual and will ultimately get him banished. My sense is he will at some point have a David Horowitz moment. Regardless, I think he is right to point out that this is not a sudden up-tick in witch hunting. It has been worse in the past. They are not killing anyone this time.

An alternative view is that as the last waves of this liberal flood recede, the hard thumping fanatics are rampaging through the culture looking for a few trophies. After the New Left had run out of steam in the late 1960’s, groups like the Weathermen and Symbionese Liberation Army went berserk and started killing people. In our unusually soft times, getting the twinks of Generation Onesie off the couch is nearly impossible, much less having them organize a guerrilla unit. Instead the fascists fruitcakes at Mozilla send nasty messages over Twitter.

The US Supreme Court refused to step into a slavery case in New Mexico. The New Mexico Human Rights Commission had ruled that two lesbians had the right to hold photographers as a slaves, forcing them to perform photographic work for them against their will.

The Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal from Christian photographers who were fined and admonished by the New Mexico Supreme Court for declining to work a same-sex ceremony, in what could be a blow to religious business owners.

The high court decision not to take up the appeal means the New Mexico ruling against them stands. That ruling is only binding in New Mexico, but could set a precedent that can be cited in subsequent cases.

In this case, Elane Photography, owned by Jon and Elaine Huguenin of New Mexico, was brought to court for refusing to photograph a same-sex couple’s commitment ceremony in 2006.

An attorney for the couple argued that the business openly advertises its wedding photography services, and as a public business is required to follow the same anti-discrimination laws as any other company.

The New Mexico Supreme Court ruled in August that the business’s refusal to photograph the ceremony involving two women did violate the state’s Human Rights Act.

Lawyers for the business, though, argued the ruling violates the business owners’ free speech rights by compelling them to “express messages that conflict with their religious beliefs.”

Elaine Huguenin said she also has a right of artistic expression under the First Amendment that allows her to choose what pictures to take, or refrain from taking.

The reason the SCOTUS is avoiding these cases is obvious. As soon as they grant a religious exceptions to private discrimination, freedom of association will be out of the box again. How can one permit Christians to avoid perverts, but not permit blacks to avoid Koreans?

They will run into the same problem when trying to argue that numerical and familial limits on marriage are acceptable, but biological limits are not. Once you let logic into the room, you start accumulating a list of axioms against which all this stuff is measured. The result is inevitable.

This was posted over at Marginal Review and it provides some interesting facts about anti-poverty programs. Coming from state media, it is a little surprising.

Liberals are shocked (shocked!) that Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and his co-partisans would consider cutting Medicaid, food stamps, Pell grants and other programs that serve the neediest Americans. They have accused Ryan of trying to balance the budget on the backs of the poor.

But long before Ryan unveiled his “Path to Prosperity,” politicians of both parties had been redistributing government spending away from the truly destitute and toward everyone else.

In the past few decades, the federal social safety net has gotten lusher and, on its face, more generous. Spending on the major safety-net programs nearly quadrupled between 1970 and 2010, and that’s after adjusting for inflation and population growth, according to calculations by Robert A. Moffitt, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University. He included both “means-tested” programs that are explicitly intended to combat poverty (such as food stamps, Medicaid, housing aid, Head Start, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and the earned-income tax credit) and social insurance programs (Medicare, Social Security, disability insurance, workers’ compensation and unemployment insurance).

There have been, however, winners and losers during that massive expansion.

Since the mid-1990s, the biggest increases in spending have gone to those who were middle class or hovering around the poverty line. Meanwhile, Americans in deep poverty — that is, with household earnings of less than 50 percent of the official poverty line — saw no change in their benefits in the decade leading up to the housing bubble. In fact, if you strip out Medicare and Medicaid, federal social spending on those in extreme poverty fell between 1993 and 2004.

That’s right, the hero of the 1990’s actually reduced spending on the poor. It’s never mentioned in the article as that would be rude, but the Clinton years were a decade of greed. I say that in all seriousness. The worst abuses in finance, government and politics have their roots in the Clinton Era. The Boomers, as is to be expected from the Worst Generation, started running wild through the institutions of government as soon as they gained control. That included shifting money from the poor to their friends on Wall Street.

Since the early 1990s, politicians have deliberately shifted funds away from those perceived to be the most needy and toward those perceived to be the most deserving. The bipartisan 1996 welfare reform — like the multiple expansions of the earned-income tax credit — was explicit about rewarding the working poor rather than the non-working poor. As a result, total spending per capita on “welfare” slid by about two-thirds over the past two decades, even as the poverty rate for families has stayed about the same. Many welfare reformers would consider this a triumph. If you believe many of the poorest families are not out of work by choice, though, you might have a more nuanced view.

Meanwhile, there is probably greater political cover for expanding the safety net for the middle class (that is, the non-destitute). As mid-skill, mid-wage jobs have disappeared — what’s known as the hollowing-out of the labor market — middle-class families have lost ground and are demanding more government help. These middle-class families, alongside the elderly, are also substantially more likely to vote than are the poor. The feds have whittled away at welfare, and (almost) nobody has said boo; touch programs that the middle class relies on, and electoral retribution may be fierce.

What the blogger fails to understand is the welfare system has nothing to do with addressing poverty. It never has and it never will. At one level, it is riot insurance. Keeping the populace in a city like Baltimore from burning the place to the ground is job number one for state government. The city government is just a criminal enterprise run by the locals as a skimming operation. The state, however, treats them as camp guards for a massive reservation. Welfare is just a part of the defense network.

Welfare is never sold this way. Americans want to believe they are special and that’s how the ruling class exploits them. Welfare is sold as a way to uplift the poor and give them opportunities to have the American dream. A great many middle and upper class people like getting some grace on the cheap through social welfare programs. That way, they can pretend they are doing something. It takes less work than charity and they can have more time to watch TV or shop for more crap on-line.

The welfare system is also a massive jobs program for the Cult. At this stage, this is more important than the rest. Local government gets money for patronage jobs. Hiring an army of case workers who just happen to be related to the ruling clan is good for business. Those case workers quickly turn into poll workers. State government gets money to run their patronage operations, which can often be testing grounds for the latest social engineering schemes. RomneyCare was just such an example. Of course, the massive bureaucracy at the Federal level is a good dumping ground for the dimwitted children of the ruling class. They get six-figure salaries and never get fired.

I think the main attraction of guaranteed minimum income schemes is that they eliminate the need for a vast army of patronage workers. It also eliminates the ability of Congress to buy votes and bribes with the programs. I have my doubts about the math, but conceptually it has some merit.

Here’s a PBS version of the argument and here is a NYTimes version. The Cult has some minor flaks out promoting it as the start of a campaign to make it their top issue next decade. Destroying health care started with a trial run in the 1980’s and three decades later they were finally able to swing the wrecking ball. Figure 2032 as the first time a Cult leader runs for Emperor on the guaranteed income proposal.

Today’s Drudge Report brings news that the odious toad known as Reverend Al Sharpton was a rat for the man.

The former mob snitch has become a regular in the White House, where he has met with the 44th president in the East Room, the Roosevelt Room, and the Oval Office. He has also attended Obama Christmas parties, speeches, policy announcements, and even watched a Super Bowl with the First Family (an evening the man has called “one of the highlights of my life”). During these gatherings, he has mingled with cabinet members, top Obama aides, military leaders, business executives, and members of Congress. His former confederates were a decidedly dicier lot: ex-convicts, extortionists, heroin traffickers, and mob henchmen. The man’s surreptitious recordings, FBI records show, aided his government handlers in the successful targeting of powerful Mafia figures with nicknames like Benny Eggs, Chin, Fritzy, Corky, and Baldy Dom.

Later this week, Obama will travel to New York and appear in a Manhattan hotel ballroom at the side of the man whom FBI agents primarily referred to as “CI-7”–short for confidential informant #7–in secret court filings. In those documents, investigators vouched for him as a reliable, productive, and accurate source of information about underworld figures.

The ex-informant has been one of Obama’s most unwavering backers, a cheerleader who has nightly bludgeoned the president’s Republican opponents in televised broadsides. For his part, Obama has sought the man’s counsel, embraced him publicly, and saluted his “commitment to fight injustice and inequality.” The president has even commented favorably on his friend’s svelte figure, the physical manifestation of a rehabilitation effort that coincided with Obama’s ascension to the White House. This radical makeover has brought the man wealth, a daily TV show, bespoke suits, a luxury Upper West Side apartment, and a spot on best seller lists.

Most importantly, he has the ear of the President of the United States, an equally remarkable and perplexing achievement for the former FBI asset known as “CI-7,” the Rev. Al Sharpton.

I’m not certain, but I think this qualifies as selling out to the man. Does this make the Reverend an Uncle Tom?

A lengthy investigation by The Smoking Gun has uncovered remarkable details about Sharpton’s past work as an informant for a joint organized crime task force comprised of FBI agents and NYPD detectives, as well as his dealings with an assortment of wiseguys.

Beginning in the mid-1980s and spanning several years, Sharpton’s cooperation was fraught with danger since the FBI’s principal targets were leaders of the Genovese crime family, the country’s largest and most feared Mafia outfit. In addition to aiding the FBI/NYPD task force, which was known as the “Genovese squad,” Sharpton’s cooperation extended to several other investigative agencies.

TSG’s account of Sharpton’s secret life as “CI-7” is based on hundreds of pages of confidential FBI affidavits, documents released by the bureau in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, court records, and extensive interviews with six members of the Genovese squad, as well as other law enforcement officials to whom the activist provided assistance.

Like almost every other FBI informant, Sharpton was solely an information source. The parameters of his cooperation did not include Sharpton ever surfacing publicly or testifying on a witness stand.

Genovese squad investigators–representing both the FBI and NYPD–recalled how Sharpton, now 59, deftly extracted information from wiseguys. In fact, one Gambino crime family figure became so comfortable with the protest leader that he spoke openly–during ten wired face-to-face meetings–about a wide range of mob business, from shylocking and extortions to death threats and the sanity of Vincent “Chin” Gigante, the Genovese boss who long feigned mental illness in a bid to deflect law enforcement scrutiny. As the mafioso expounded on these topics, Sharpton’s briefcase–a specially customized Hartman model–recorded his every word.

In all seriousness, it took some balls to wear a wire. It may make him a dirt bag, but he was a dirt bag long before he became a rat so I’m not sure this matters a whole lot. The fact that Obama pals around with this odious toad is the bigger issue. It undermines everything Obama has said about race in America. When it gets down to it, racial solidarity trumps everything if you are black. You can’t complain about racism if you embrace a loathsome bigot like Sharpton, simply because he is black.

This story from America’s paper of Record is funny.

With swimsuit season right around the corner, a new science-based, anti-diet book offers the most enabling advice we’ve heard this year: Those thunder thighs you hate so much might be key to long life.

“The Obesity Paradox” presents compelling evidence that those with excess baggage might be healthier and better able to fight off diseases than normal-weight counterparts. Conversely, the “thin and unfit” waifs have the worst body types for long-term health.

Though obesity remains a risk factor of “epidemic portions” — more, some researchers say, than smoking or alcoholism— associated with heart disease, stroke, Type-2 diabetes, and cancer, cardiologist Carl J. Lavie argues that we need to rethink what we call “fat” and what we consider “healthy.”

Lavie, a cardiologist at the John Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans sums it up with one phrase in his book: “Looks can be deceiving.”

The idea of thin being beautiful is not universal. American blacks have always preferred big sloppy fat women over “pancake butts.” The older Hindu men in my area love waddling around showing off their big gut. In their culture, a big belly is a sign of success. That and the hip-hop starter kit of gold ropes and chains. Victorians, as best I can tell, were all chubby chasers.

“Obesity paradox,” the term, was coined in 2002 by Dr. Luis Gruberg and colleagues at the Cardiovascular Research Institute in Washington D.C., when they discovered — to their surprise — that overweight and obese patients had roughly half the risk of mortality than normal-weight patients following angioplasty, a procedure to unblock arteries in the heart.

Lavie’s book challenges widely accepted views on obesity and health.

Lavie noticed a similar trend in his patients recovering from heart failure. He published his findings in 2003, where he revealed that for every 1 percent increase in body fat there was a 13 percent increase in overall survival.

“These findings created an uproar among my colleagues,” Lavie writes. “Unfortunately, the science world wasn’t ready to accept this observation in the early 2000s.”

But other studies backed the findings up. Overweight and moderately obese people also had better outcomes with other chronic diseases like kidney failure, advanced cancer, and AIDS.

This should not be shocking. The disconnect between official dogma and observable reality has never been greater in the West. Humans are obviously living longer and living better now than at any other time in human history. We are also at our fattest.

The studies are intriguing — but less clear is why.

Theories abound. For one, fighting off a disease requires using more energy. Patients who have more fat squirreled away might be at a natural advantage to battling chronic diseases.

The science world wasn’t ready to accept this observation.

Then there’s the role of genetics. While an overweight person might develop, say, heart disease because of his weight, a thin person who develops heart disease is more likely to have developed it because of a genetic predisposition. But, he writes, “A thinner person’s prognosis would be worse in comparison to a fatter person’s due to the power of those genetics.”

Of course it is genetics. What’s amazing is there are still people who doubt this.

The obesity paradox, though, has had its fair share of critics. Some argue that these studies fail to take into account smokers, who are more likely to have lower BMIs. Some point out that the most sick tend to be the thinnest.

Lavie retorts that these criticisms don’t explain away the growing body of research that links higher BMIs to increased survival rates. Obesity — defined as having a BMI of 30 or higher — is “a crude way of determining one’s risk factors for obesity related illnesses.”

BMI doesn’t take into account body shape, cardiovascular level, or genetics.

And not all fat is created equal. Instead, unhealthy fat follows the real estate rule of “location, location, location.”

Abdominal fat, for instance, is associated with greater risks for diseases, while fat stored on bottoms, thighs, hips, or upper arms does not carry the same risk factors.

Carrying lower fat might actually help us combat cardiovascular diseases. Fatter thighs are linked to lower risks of metabolic syndrome, a cluster of risk factors that include raised blood pressure and high triglycerides.

The cult of healthy living has been with use for a very long time now. The folks making billions from it will never sign off on the end of their influence. That’s why reform fails everywhere in all things and all places. Reform is just a polite way of saying it is time to scrape the barnacles loose from the ship’s hull. Those barnacles will fight to stick around until the last man. The food police have a good thing going and they are not going to agree with science, if it means they lose their jobs.

Here’s what matters. Humans are wired to eat as much as they can when they can. For 99% of human history, food was scare and the supply was unpredictable. Those who could load up on a kill and weather the long winter were going to survive to spring. Repeat that for 50,000 years and you have a species that will overeat when food is plentiful It’s not that complicated. Europeans are probably more susceptible to this owing to the fact they evolved in much harsher conditions than tribes around the equator.

I was listening to Imus the other day and he was reading a spot for these guys. While looking them up I found this outfit doing the same thing. Pawn shops are almost as old as prostitution. Mosaic law addressed lending, which in those days was exclusively asset based lending. The Greeks and Romans had pawn brokers. English law is based on Roman law as regards pawn brokers. In America, every state has laws regulating pawn shops. In fact, the laws are rather aggressive. The pawn shop owner has to undergo a background check and be finger printed. They are required to keep detailed records of all items taken in and get positive identification of the customers. The state requires these records to be made available to police on demand.

That’s what’s puzzling about these on-line operations. Where are they licensed and how can they do business across state lines? Here’s an article from a couple of years ago on the growth of mega-pawn shops. It’s not hard to see where this is headed. Local pawn dealer will start buying protection from their state legislature. The Internet guys will try to do the same and we get a replay of Tesla in New Jersey. How it plays out is a mystery. My sense is the core customer for pawn brokers will not willing to go on-line and then ship their goods.

Anyway, it is a good example of how we are running out of places to employ technology to squeeze out profits. The low hanging fruit from the information age has been picked. We are now into the great settling out as the dust clears. Just as the great fortunes of the industrial age were built prior to the Great Depression, the great fortunes of the Communications age have been built prior to the Great Recession. There are a few plumbs to be picked and maybe ePawn is one of them, but the pickings are slim.