It is always fun telling liberal white hipsters that gentrification is just a nice word for ethnic cleansing. In reality, it is nothing more than old rich white people throwing out poor brown people, so young white people can live in the city. This is very upsetting to white liberals, as they have no defense against it. It points to the fact that Progressives talk like MLK, but they live like the KKK.

It’s a nice gag and it gets the desired reaction, because it has the advantage of being the truth. This old NYTimes article tried to paint a pretty picture, but the fact is rich white people are flooding into cities like New York, pushing out the brown people. These sincere, wholesome bourgeois bohemians will chew your ear off about how diversity is our strength, except where they live of course.

It is not just NYC, DC is getting whiter. Boston gentrified long ago. Even Oakland is going for a lighter shade of pale. These cities voted for Obama 81% (NYC), 90% (DC), 80% (Boston) and 84% (Oakland). As these cities get whiter, they get more Progressive and they get more aggressive in their proselytizing. At some level, they know the truth, but their coping strategy is to become even more hysterical on race.

That’s why this story in the NYTimes is interesting.

Cities that have worked for years to attract young professionals who might have once moved to the suburbs are now experimenting with ways to protect a group long deemed expendable — working- and lower-middle class homeowners threatened by gentrification.

The initiatives, planned or underway in Boston, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh and other cities, are centered on reducing or freezing property taxes for such homeowners in an effort to promote neighborhood stability, preserve character and provide a dividend of sorts to those who have stayed through years of high crime, population loss and declining property values, officials say.

Newcomers, whose vitality is critical to cities, are hardly being turned away. But officials say a balance is needed, given the attention and government funding being spent to draw young professionals — from tax breaks for luxury condominium buildings to new bike lanes, dog parks and athletic fields.

“We feel the people who toughed it out should be rewarded,” said Darrell L. Clarke, president of the Philadelphia City Council, which last year approved legislation to limit property tax increases for longtime residents. “And we feel it is incumbent upon us to protect them.”

I love how they were not terribly concerned about “neighborhood stability” when the neighborhoods were black and brown. Once the white people took over, they suddenly start sounding like Rotary Club Republicans from the suburbs. The even funnier part is the city council president just about says they owe these urban pioneers for driving the bad element out of the city.

In doing so, cities are turning urban redevelopment policy on its head and shunning millions in property tax revenue that could be used to restore municipal services that were trimmed during the recession because of budget cuts, including rehiring police officers.

A decision to reduce property taxes can be risky because such levies account for at least 50 percent of operating budgets in most American cities and sometimes provide as much as 80 percent of a city’s revenue.

But even Detroit, where a declining tax base has been at the core of the bankrupt city’s troubles, recently announced plans to cut property tax rates.

Last month, Mike Duggan, Detroit’s new mayor, said property taxes would be cut by up to 20 percent to levels that more accurately represent the value of homes in the city. The reduction could cost Detroit as much as $15 million annually in revenue.

The tax adjustments are part of a broader strategy by cities to aid homeowners — who continue to struggle financially since the home mortgage crisis. In Richmond, Calif., lawmakers are attempting to use eminent domain to seize underwater mortgages to try to help homeowners keep their houses.

Housing experts say the arrival of newcomers to formerly working-class areas — from the Mission District in San Francisco to the Shaw neighborhood in Washington — is distinct from previous influxes over the past 30 years because new residents are now far more likely to choose to move into new condominiums or lofts instead of into existing housing, making the changes more disruptive.

“This latest wave of gentrification has happened very quickly, and cities are cognizant to keep from turning over entirely,” said Lisa Sturtevant, executive director of the Center for Housing Policy, a nonprofit research group. “And cities where property values are up and budgets are generally more stable have the wherewithal to provide tax breaks.”

Ms. Sturtevant said that given that many of the younger, newer arrivals do not necessarily plan to stay for long, cities are making a sensible economic choice.

“There’s less personal investment and less incentive to stay, so cities are saying, ‘Let’s invest in the stayers,’ ” she said.

It makes perfect sense for cities to try and lure middle-class white people. There are a million arguments about crime and race and poverty and education and drugs and blah, blah, blah. There’s no argument about the crime rate among middle-class white people, as it is the lowest in the world. Fill a city with them and you don’t have a crime problem. The other fact no one disputes is low crime means higher property values, high civic participation, better schools and more stable tax receipts.

This should be something everyone knows and accepts. If you really want to help black people, demand they act white, instead of indulging their bad behavior from behind the walls of your gated community. There’s nothing to be gained from lecturing whites about diversity, while the people doing the lecturing ethnically cleanse their own neighborhoods. All it is doing is creating a lot of angry white people.

The general view of Ukraine is that it is a part of some great power game with Russia on one side and the US on the other. Where China and Europe fit into this does not seem to be that important to the experts. The American media is not stuffed with worldly, thoughtful people, so they tend to the simple-minded when explaining these issues. In fairness, most American don’t care, so keeping it simple is probably the only way to get the attention of the public.

The more likely issue is a German – Russian one than a replay of the Cold War. The Russians want to maintain energy dominance and their best customer is Germany. The Germans would like to have other options, but there’s not much they can do about it. Ukraine sits in between the two and a whole lot of history. I know, there are a bunch of countries wedged in there now. I’m speaking historically. To steal a line from Joyce, history is a nightmare from which Europe can never awake.

David Goldman is a reliable source on these things. His latest is no exception.

Western governments are jubilant over the fall of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovich, a Russian ally. They may be underestimating Vladimir Putin: Russia has the option to hasten Ukraine’s slide into chaos and wait until the hapless European Union acquiesces to – if not begs for – Russian intervention.

That leaves the West with a limited number of choices. The first is to do nothing and watch the country spiral into chaos, with Russia as the eventual beneficiary. The second is to dig deep into its pockets and find US$20 billion or more to buy near-term popularity for a pro-Western government – an unlikely outcome. The third, and the most realistic, is to steer Ukraine towards a constitutional referendum including the option of partition.

Moscow has no need of allies with weak stomachs. But it will withdraw the offer of $15 billion worth of Ukrainian debt purchases and subsidies for natural gas exports to Ukraine and leave the nearly bankrupt country to the ministrations of the West. Careful what you wish for, Russia is telling the West.

Russian Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said that Ukraine should get money from the International Monetary Fund: “We consider that such a situation would meet the interests of Ukraine, would put the country on the path toward major structural reforms. We wish them success in this undertaking and in the rapid stabilization of the political and social situation.”

Siluanov is being mischievous. Twice in the past six years, the IMF suspended promised loans to Ukraine after the country refused to cut salaries and pensions and raise energy prices. Russia had offered a loan without conditions; any money the West offers will require austerity measures that no Ukrainian government is capable of enforcing.

The fall of Yanukovich is an embarrassment to Russia, and a well-deserved one, but that does not leave Russia entirely without options. Russia most likely will adopt the same stance towards pro-European Union politicians that the Egyptian military and its Saudi backers took toward Egypt’s the Muslim Brotherhood: let the opposition take the blame for economic and social chaos, and then move in when the country is on its knees. The Brotherhood ruled Egypt for a year, and then the food and fuel ran out, 30 million Egyptians, more than half the country’s adult population, demonstrated to oust it. The military obliged in August 2013 and immediately obtained emergency loans from the Saudis.

The rest goes into some detail on the financial realities facing Ukraine. This part is particularly interesting.

The country also is a demographic deader. At its present fertility rate (1.3 children per female), its 47 million people will shrink to only 15 million by the end of the century. There are at present 11 million Ukrainian women aged 15 to 49 (although a very large number are working abroad); by the end of the century this will fall to just 2.8 million. There were 52 million Ukrainian citizens when Communism fell in 1989. Its GDP at about $157 billion is a fifth of Turkey’s and half of Switzerland’s.

Ukraine is barely a country, rather an amalgam of provinces left over from failed empires – Russian, Austrian, Lithuanian, Ottoman – cobbled together into a Soviet “republic” and cast adrift after the collapse of Communism. Lviv (Lemberg) was a German-speaking city, part of Austrian Silesia; before World War II a quarter of its people were Jews. Jews were two-fifths of the population of Odessa. A fifth of the population, mainly in the east, are ethnic Russians; a tenth, mainly in the west, are Uniate Catholics, who have a special place in Catholic policy since the papacy of John Paul II.

Ukrainian nationality is as dubious as Byelorussian nationality: neither of them had a dictionary of their language until 1918.

At a great distance, it is not hard to cheer for the flag waving irregulars on the streets we see on television. Up close they are not so inspiring. The Germans and Russians are up close. Every German and every Russian has an ancestor who died in the lands we now call Ukraine. Add in the Poles, Czechs, Slovaks and the dog’s breakfast of minor peoples who have been run over by one army or another and you can appreciate the difference in perspective. Consequently, they see all of this through different eyes. This is a game community organizers are wholly unequipped to play.

That’s not an argument for or against one side of the ruling class. America is an island nation, as a practical matter. Like the Brits, we will naturally have a different take on world affairs. We should appreciate that by staying the heck out of European politics as much as possible. We will never be as good at the Great Game as the Continentals. There’s no shame in it. They will never be as good at sea power and a host of other things that come naturally to people insulated from other tribes by oceans. We can win the Great Game by staying out of it.

There is a specter haunting the neocons. it is the specter of Russia, which has been the same specter haunting their ancestors settled in America. The new term of art to sell this paranoia is “Eurasianism.” Maybe it will be “Duginism,” after the Russian political scientist Aleksandr Gelyevich Dugin. The later is easier for pundits on TV and radio to pronounce so that’s the one that probably sticks, but you never know. Maybe they come up with some new way to personalize the old tribal fear.

Steve Sailer has written about the subject, but only superficially. Most of the paleocons, which make up the bulk of his audience, are not all that interested in how younger dissidents have responded to Dugin’s writing. The paleo-crowd simply does not care beyond demanding the US stay the hell out of the problems of Eurasia. Steve’s information and comments will therefore be received without too much fanfare. I may be reading it wrong, but that’s not a crowd looking for dragons to slay.

National Review is another matter. Given that they are wholly owned by the neocons at this point, they have to obsess over this new thing. Not only are they looking for a reason to restart the Cold War, they need to find a way to justify their embrace of multiculturalism. They had some guy named Robert Zubrin write a piece on Eurasianism. His biography suggests he is a very bright guy, but the tone of the article suggests he lies awake at night, straining to hear the hoof beats.

The roots of Eurasianism go back to czarist émigrés interacting with fascist thinkers in between-the-wars France and Germany. But in recent years, its primary exponent has been the very prominent and prolific political theorist Aleksandr Dugin.

Nazism, it will be recalled, was an abbreviation for National Socialism. National Bolshevism, therefore, put itself forth as an ideology that relates to National Socialism in much the same way as Bolshevism relates to Socialism. This open self-identification with Nazism is also shown clearly in the NBP flag, which looks exactly like a Nazi flag, with a red background surrounding a white circle, except that the black swastika at the center is replaced by a black hammer and sickle.

The open devotion to Nazism is Dugin’s thought is remarkable. In his writings he celebrates the Waffen SS, murderers of millions of Russians during the war, as an ideal organization. He also approves of the most extreme crimes of Communism, going so far as to endorse the horrific 1937 purges that killed, among numerous other talented and loyal Soviet citizens, nearly the entire leadership of the Red Army — something that Stalin himself later had second thoughts about.

What Russia needs, says Dugin, is a “genuine, true, radically revolutionary and consistent, fascist fascism.” On the other hand, “Liberalism, is an absolute evil. . . . Only a global crusade against the U.S., the West, globalization, and their political-ideological expression, liberalism, is capable of becoming an adequate response. . . . The American empire should be destroyed.”

This is the ideology behind the Putin regime’s “Eurasian Union” project. It is to this dark program, which threatens not only the prospects for freedom in Ukraine and Russia, but the peace of the world, that former Ukrainian president Victor Yanukovych tried to sell “his” country. It is against this program that the courageous protesters in the Maidan took their stand and — with scandalously little help from the West — somehow miraculously prevailed. But now the chips are really down. The Ukrainians are being faced not with riot police, but with Russian divisions, subversion, and economic warfare. The country needs to be stabilized, and defended. The Ukrainians deserve our full support — and not just for reasons of sympathy for those resisting tyranny or respect for the brave. It is in the vital interest of America that freedom triumphs in Ukraine.

Without Ukraine, Dugin’s fascist Eurasian Union project is impossible, and sooner or later Russia itself will have to join the West and become free, leaving only a few despised and doomed islands of tyranny around the globe. But with Ukraine underfoot, the Eurasianists’ program can and will proceed, and a new Iron Curtain will fall into place imprisoning a large fraction of humanity in the grip of a monstrous totalitarian power that will become the arsenal of evil around the world for decades to come. That means another Cold War, trillions of dollars wasted on arms, accelerated growth of the national-security state at home, repeated proxy conflicts costing millions of lives abroad, and civilization itself placed at risk should a single misstep in the endless insane great-power game precipitate the locked and loaded confrontation into a thermonuclear exchange.

The 20th century saw three great-power confrontations. Two of them turned into total war. We lucked out on the third. Do we really want to roll those dice again? We will have to, unless the Eurasianist program is stopped.

The stakes in Ukraine could not be higher.

It is not hard to see where this goes. The usual suspects in Conservative Inc. will be chanting about the shadow of Eurasianism over Europe. or, it could be the specter of Duganism haunting the West. Mix in some Cold War nostalgia and the usual suspects will be wearing American flag lapel pins again. We are ruled by people who are defined by ancient hatreds and nostalgia for a time when being anti-Russian was enough to be on the side of angels. They will never leave Russia alone.

I still subscribe to National Review and I still visit the site daily. It is more habit than interest these days. The magazine goes unread until they pile up and I thumb through them in one sitting. Charles Cooke is interesting from time to time. Andrew Stuttaford is often good when he writes about Europe. Kevin Williamson is the best writer they have left, which speaks to how bad it is now. They have run off most anyone with talent and something interesting to say.

Anyway, I was trying to read this from Jonah Goldberg and I kept thinking about how dreary National Review is these days. Part of it is me. My views have changed as I have grown older. It is just a part of getting older. But, the world has changed too. In the 1980’s, Bill Buckley was a rock star, of sorts. The main reason is a new generation was ready to push back against the Baby Boomer liberals. To be a young right-winger in the 1980’s was a lot of fun, even if the ideology did not always make sense.

Today that brand of conservatism feels about as exciting as disco. Reading Jonah’s column, I was thinking about how many times I’ve heard the same argument from the Conventional Right. There’s nothing wrong with it, other than the fact it was a reasonable response to the Left in 1950. Given where we are as a culture, the value of gentling tapping the brakes on the Progressive drive to the abyss is lost on me. I mean, what’s the point?  The time for debating this stuff is long ago in a foreign country.

For some reason I was reminded of when John O. Sullivan was shown the door by Bill Buckley. I had vague recollections of it being another case where Buckley canned the guy most thought was set to take over for him. I went looking and this is the best I could find, which is a column with lots of quotes from the article I must be recalling. Buckley could never figure out how to close the show that was his life. Like all men, he struggled to turn control of his project over to someone competent.

Given the shabby state of the conservative movement Buckley built and the sorry state of his signature achievement, he was foolish to try and leave a legacy. It is ironic in a way as he saw what happened to Henry Luce and his magazine empire after his demise. He was friends with John M. Olin, who bankrolled a lot of early conservative enterprises. Buckley surely knew that the best course was to shut it all down and let the next man build his own thing, outside the shadow of Buckley and his project.

Maybe it will not matter much. There does seem to be a gathering storm of dissident writers and publications out there on the Internet. Taki Mag has become a must read among anti-liberals. Bloggers like Steve Sailer promote dissident ideas. Still, it would be better if there was not this hollowed out entity claiming to represent the opposition to the Progressive orthodoxy. In the end, Buckley’s vanity may end up causing more harm to the causes he championed than the good he did as a leader of the Right.

Mark Cuban is probably America’s most famous lottery winner. At the start of the tech boom, he made a million dollars selling software. He used some of that money to start a company that broadcast sports events over the Internet. The company had a lot of success and was generating $13 million in revenue. The main reason was it could shift the cost to others, but he deserves credit for seeing a market and finding a way to profitably meeting it. Broadcast.com was a great idea.

That’s when he hit the lottery. Yahoo, drunk with dotcom cash, paid Cuban $6 billion for his company. The company turned out to be worthless to Yahoo. Within a couple of years a slew of others started broadcasting radio over the Internet and licensing issues made the concept unworkable. For his part, Cuban used his billions to buy a basketball team and make a fool of himself on TV. There’s nothing wrong with it as he is not harming anyone, but it is why he is America’s most famous lottery winner.

Like a movie star impressed with his own clippings, Cuban no longer understands this fact about himself. He really thinks he is a genius. He was clever, but he was mostly lucky, but the does not see it that way. As a result, he likes to go on TV and show the world he is a genius, which usually results in him saying ridiculous things that often get him in trouble. Recently, he made some crazy statements about the value of college as a development league for the NBA.

Mark Cuban thinks the next Kevin Durant would be better off in the NBA Development League rather than the college of his choice.

The outspoken Dallas Mavericks owner said he can envision scenarios where the country’s top basketball prospects would get drafted and play in the D-League rather than spend one season at an NCAA school.

Cuban said there’s no reason for a player to attend college as a freshman “because he’s not going to class, he’s actually not even able to take advantage of all the fun because the first semester he starts playing basketball.”

The billionaire owner said his idea is not yet a well-researched proposal, just an opinion. He said agreements with colleges could still give players a shot at an education.

“A major college has to pretend that they’re treating them like a student-athlete,” Cuban said. “It’s a big lie and we all know it’s a big lie. We can do all kinds of things that the NCAA doesn’t allow schools to do that would really put the individual first.”

I’ve long contended that the NBA is the worst run sports league on the planet. They are also the the best argument against the Zionist conspiracy stuff. All but a few owners are Jewish and the league office is run by Jews. Yet, they manage to screw up what should be one of the easiest businesses to run in sports entertainment. If the Tribe can’t run a sports league, they are not running the world. I guess the counter to that is the world is so screwed up it must be run by Jewish basketball executives.

Anyway, the league survives despite the best efforts of guys like Cuban. Football and hockey let others develop their players, thus minimizing their investment. Baseball has actually figured out how to make their development league profitable. The NBA, in contrast, drafts players nowhere near ready to play in the league and then pays them millions to learn. Many never learn or contribute very much to the teams that drafted them. The result is millions are wasted on bad players.

It has been known for a long time that basketball is the major sport requiring the least amount of learned skill. By high school, players have 70-80% of the learned skills, like shooting, dribbling, passing and defense.  It is not that complicated, even for the people most likely to take up the sport. The physical development is in place by the early twenties, leaving the emotional maturity. That’s why a player’s peak years are between 25 and 32. Michael Jordan won his first title at 28. Lebron James won his first at 27.

The physical side is a such a major part of the game, injuries can easily alter the trajectory of a young player. Derrick Rose is a good example of why investing in youth can be foolish. The Bulls have $56 million invested in a  guy who has missed the last two seasons with knee problems. They are committed to paying him close to $80 million more, when it is unlikely he ever lives up to their hopes. This is why the other sports have low cost development systems for their young players.

Those leagues, however, tend be more selective with their owners. Mark Cuban has been rejected by baseball and football, simply because he is an idiot. Those leagues also lack the tribal blind spot you see with basketball. The NBA owners protect Cuban out of tribal loyalty, because there are not gentiles around to tell them otherwise. It’s the Achilles heel of clannishness. The tendency of the tribe is to protect the tribe, even when it is bad for the tribe. Cuban is bad for the tribe and the Tribe.

We don’t know a whole lot about the Druids. What we know about them comes from the Roman conquerors, who hated the druids. The Romans invested a great deal of men and material to stamp out the druidism. They associated druidism with a sense of self they thought was antithetical to the Roman way. This was largely true, but what motivated the Romans was the resistance. They hated it because it refused to yield.

The Welsh, for example, clung to druidism into the fourth century, despite regularly being slaughtered by Roman legions. All they had to do was humor the Romans and they could have avoided slaughter, but they could betray themselves. That sense of self, that identity was tough and the Romans were never able to stamp it out. Druidism, however, did die out. Christianity eventually became the religion of the island, overwhelming all of the pagan faiths, but it was not easy.

There’s an important lesson there if you are a Christian in 21st century America. Church attendance has plummeted in the Progressive controlled areas of the country.  This Gallup poll shows that church attendance in the Old North is down near European levels. This is a five year old study so the numbers are probably now below 20% in most of these states. Massachusetts, after the homosexual priest scandal, has seen church attendance plummet.

The Old South, on the other hand, has church attendance well above 50%. The Cold Civil War is and always has been a religious war in addition to a culture war. The new religion of the Old North is post-national Progressivism and it is a very aggressive. It is an intolerant religion. This column by Ross Douthat makes clear that the homosexual marriage fad is more about the war on Christianity than a celebration of homosexuality.

IT now seems certain that before too many years elapse, the Supreme Court will be forced to acknowledge the logic of its own jurisprudence on same-sex marriage and redefine marriage to include gay couples in all 50 states.

Once this happens, the national debate essentially will be finished, but the country will remain divided, with a substantial minority of Americans, most of them religious, still committed to the older view of marriage.

So what then? One possibility is that this division will recede into the cultural background, with marriage joining the long list of topics on which Americans disagree without making a political issue out of it.

In this scenario, religious conservatives would essentially be left to promote their view of wedlock within their own institutions, as a kind of dissenting subculture emphasizing gender differences and procreation, while the wider culture declares that love and commitment are enough to make a marriage. And where conflicts arise — in a case where, say, a Mormon caterer or a Catholic photographer objected to working at a same-sex wedding — gay rights supporters would heed the advice of gay marriage’s intellectual progenitor, Andrew Sullivan, and let the dissenters opt out “in the name of their freedom — and ours.”

But there’s another possibility, in which the oft-invoked analogy between opposition to gay marriage and support for segregation in the 1960s South is pushed to its logical public-policy conclusion. In this scenario, the unwilling photographer or caterer would be treated like the proprietor of a segregated lunch counter, and face fines or lose his business — which is the intent of recent legal actions against a wedding photographer in New Mexico, a florist in Washington State, and a baker in Colorado.

This is why the Left always wins. They don’t play politics by a set of rules that prevent them from winning the fight. They begin with the end in mind. Then they construct the term of engagement in such a way that they have the advantage. They know the Right will assiduously abide by those rules, which the Left will violate as necessary. The Left has one principle, which is winning, while the Right has a long list of principles that are more often than not imposed on them by the Left.

Meanwhile, pressure would be brought to bear wherever the religious subculture brushed up against state power. Religious-affiliated adoption agencies would be closed if they declined to place children with same-sex couples. (This has happened in Massachusetts and Illinois.) Organizations and businesses that promoted the older definition of marriage would face constant procedural harassment, along the lines suggested by the mayors who battled with Chick-fil-A. And, eventually, religious schools and colleges would receive the same treatment as racist holdouts like Bob Jones University, losing access to public funds and seeing their tax-exempt status revoked.

In the past, this constant-pressure scenario has seemed the less-likely one, since Americans are better at agreeing to disagree than the culture war would suggest. But it feels a little bit more likely after last week’s “debate” in Arizona, over a bill that was designed to clarify whether existing religious freedom protections can be invoked by defendants like the florist or the photographer.

If you don’t recognize my description of the bill, then you probably followed the press coverage, which was mendacious and hysterical — evincing no familiarity with the legal issues, and endlessly parroting the line that the bill would institute “Jim Crow” for gays. (Never mind that in Arizona it’s currently legal to discriminate based on sexual orientation — and mass discrimination isn’t exactly breaking out.) Allegedly sensible centrists compared the bill’s supporters to segregationist politicians, liberals invoked the Bob Jones precedent to dismiss religious-liberty concerns, and Republican politicians behaved as though the law had been written by David Duke.

What makes this response particularly instructive is that such bills have been seen, in the past, as a way for religious conservatives to negotiate surrender — to accept same-sex marriage’s inevitability while carving out protections for dissent. But now, apparently, the official line is that you bigots don’t get to negotiate anymore.

This is rather obviously the goal. Progressivism is a covetous faith. It does not play well with other religions. It is why their body count in so high. Catholics, over 1500 years, probably killed a million people for heresy. The radicals of the Enlightenment have murdered 100 million in a century and half. History tells us Genghis Khan was the most murderous invaded to ever enter Europe. In reality, history’s greatest monster was Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Which has a certain bracing logic. If your only goal is ensuring that support for traditional marriage diminishes as rapidly as possible, applying constant pressure to religious individuals and institutions will probably do the job. Already, my fellow Christians are divided over these issues, and we’ll be more divided the more pressure we face. The conjugal, male-female view of marriage is too theologically rooted to disappear, but its remaining adherents can be marginalized, set against one other, and encouraged to conform.

I am being descriptive here, rather than self-pitying. Christians had plenty of opportunities — thousands of years’ worth — to treat gay people with real charity, and far too often chose intolerance. (And still do, in many instances and places.) So being marginalized, being sued, losing tax-exempt status — this will be uncomfortable, but we should keep perspective and remember our sins, and nobody should call it persecution.

Finally, we see why the American Right is entirely worthless against the Left. They have never come to terms with what we face. They keep thinking that if only they can purify their souls, the Left will forgive them. Alternatively, they think they can reason with what amounts to religious fanaticism. Neither is tethered to reality or much good when your culture is being looted by well organized fanatics. The Right is built to lose, so it must be destroyed if there is ever to be an opposition to the Left.

Raw intelligence is a poor predictor of political success. The HBD people tends to link IQ with everything, even politics, despite the rather obvious fact that many of our politicians are uncommonly stupid. Joe Biden is quite dull. Years of drinking and a few strokes have shaved a dozen points off his IQ. Odds are he would score in the low 20’s on the Wonderlic Test, maybe even high teens. His rather obvious lack of intelligence has not worked against him. He’s going to president one day.

Saying that politicians are dumb is a popular past time, but not all of them are dumb and even the dumb ones can say some smart things. Simply noticing things can be the smartest thing one can do and some of our politicians can notice things. Sarah Palin was hooted down by the Left for her alleged lack of smarts. They mocked here for claiming Russian had designs on parts of the Ukraine.  This story from Breitbart goes into it in light of recent events..

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin warned that if Senator Barack Obama were elected president, his “indecision” and “moral equivalence” may encourage Russia’s Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine.

Palin said then:

After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.

For those comments, she was mocked by the high-brow Foreign Policy magazine and its editor Blake Hounshell, who now is one of the editors of Politico magazine.

In light of recent events in Ukraine and concerns that Russia is getting its troops ready to cross the border into the neighboring nation, nobody seems to be laughing at or dismissing those comments now.

Hounshell wrote then that Palin’s comments were “strange” and “this is an extremely far-fetched scenario.”

“And given how Russia has been able to unsettle Ukraine’s pro-Western government without firing a shot, I don’t see why violence would be necessary to bring Kiev to heel,” Hounshell dismissively wrote.

Palin made her remarks on the stump after Obama’s running mate Joe Biden warned Obama supporters to “gird  your loins” if Obama is elected because international leaders may test or try to take advantage of him.

That’s not to say Palin is very smart. It is a good bet that she is not working math puzzles in her free time. She’s not dumb like Joe Biden. Palin is school teacher smart, while Biden is fork lift driver smart. On the other hand, Biden is politician smart, while Palin is not. One can be left unsupervised while the other may run with scissors if you don’t watch him. You can trust Palin with your kids, while Biden, well, you know.

That’s the thing about politics in a social democracy. it’s not about smarts. Palin could have been the sharpest person in the room, but the Left would still call her dumb, because they need to call her dumb. They would get away with it because she is not good at politics in the way a lunkhead like Joe Biden is good at politics. That’s why democracy is a terrible system. It rewards Joe Biden and punishes Sarah Palin.

[subscribe2]I used to be broadly in favor of drug legalization. I never thought about it too much. Smart people seemed to think legalizing drugs made sense so I went along with it. My view of government says we should have a very small state controlled by the nation’s wealthy, leaving most things up to citizens to work out for themselves. At the same time, I knew that legalization was not a panacea. Life is nothing but trade-offs. Fewer drug laws may mean fewer cops chasing drug dealers, but it also means more drug addicts. They have a cost too. That’s an easy one to tease out right from the start, but there are always unexpected or hidden trade-offs. We’re just not very good at thinking through all of the possibilities. It’s why chess is not our national past time.

According to this story, one such unexpected trade-off is the use of EBT cards for buying weed.

The “Preserving Welfare for Needs Not Weed Act,” is expected to be introduced on Monday by Colorado Republican Reps. Dave Reichert, Scott Tipton and Cory Gardner, KDVR.com reported.

The bill would add pot dispensaries to the current list of locations where states must block welfare electronic benefits transfer (EBT) cards from being used for purchases or ATM withdrawals, Reichert’s office told the station.

KDVR.com reported last week that at least 19 different dispensaries allowed electronic benefits transfer withdrawals inside their pot shops in January. Public records obtained by the station showed 56 transactions, totaling nearly $4,000.

One of the only things John Edwards said worth remembering is the line about two Americas. There’s actually more than two. If you are black, you live in an America very different from that of white people. If you are a member of the ruling class, you live a life nothing like the rest of us. If you are in the underclass, you live a different life than most people. We spend a lot of time talking about blacks, the rich and middle America. Americans, particularly the ruling class, know little to nothing about the under class. A good primer is a documentary called The Wild Whites of West Virginia.

Anyway, this law will do nothing to curtail the use of EBT cards for buying weed. The underclass figured out long ago how to turn welfare benefits into cash. EBT cards are traded like any other commodity. Of course, the easiest trick is to use the card to buy a bunch of easily salable food, like canned goods or soda. Then you sell those to a small restaurant or market at a discount. Magically, the card was converted into cash. It is what funds the Oxycontin Express. This new law will do nothing to slow the conversion of EBT cards to cash used to buy booze and drugs.

People in the under-class are stupid, but they are clever. They know how to work a scam. Not all are without morality, but one reason the poor are poor is they lack social competence. Getting over on the government is not a moral question for them. It is a matter of impulse control. They can so they do. Of course, the under-class is at it full-time while the agents of the state administering these programs are part-timers. Just as prisoners know a lot more about the prison than the guards, the poor know more about the ghetto than the social workers and case officers from the state. The politicians know nothing about the poor, which why we got a welfare state in the first place.

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The Russians, probably still feeling their way through their response to what’s going on with Ukraine, are moving assets into the Crimea. Obama is now out waging his finger as you would expect from a silly fop.

Delivering a blunt warning to Moscow, President Barack Obama expressed deep concern Friday over reported military activity inside Ukraine by Russia and warned “there will be costs” for any intervention.

He did not say what those costs might be.

Obama called on Russia to respect the independence and territorial integrity of Ukraine and not try to take advantage of its neighbor, which is undergoing political upheaval.

“Any violation of Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity would be deeply stabilizing,” Obama said in a hastily arranged statement delivered from the White House. Such action by Russia would not serve the interests of the Ukrainian people, Russia or Europe, Obama said, and would represent a “profound interference” in matters he said must be decided by the Ukrainian people.

“Just days after the world came to Russia for the Olympic Games, that would invite the condemnation of nations around the world,” Obama said. “The United States will stand with the international community in affirming that there will be costs for any military intervention in Ukraine.”

I’m sure Putin is worried to death over this. The last thing he wants is a tersely worded letter from Obama. That could lead to a public tongue lashing and no one wants that. I’ll give AP some credit for that “He did not say what those costs might be” line. The AP is a collection of CML toadies, but even they have grown tired of the Carter 3.0. Obama is all hat and no cattle, as the cowboys say. He gives a speech and then goes back to watching TV. Victoria Nuland is a bigger nuisance than Obama, from the Russian perspective.

An interesting aspect of this is it exposes just how awful the American press is at covering anything but Hollywood. This story from Haaretz does a good job explaining how things will probably unfold.

When will we know the Russians have invaded Ukraine? We won’t. Unlike the summer of 2008 when paratroop brigades crossed the border into Georgia’s sovereign territory under the pretext of aiding the Ossetian minority, marines of the Russian Black Sea Fleet are already stationed on Ukrainian soil. The agreement between the two countries not only allows warships to be based at the port of Sevastopol, but also for Russian military vehicles to traverse the Crimean peninsula.

Acting President Oleksandr Turchynov did call upon the Kremlin not to allow its forces to leave the naval base, but an armored convoy had already travelled the 80 kilometers between Sevastopol and the regional capital Simferopol, stopping outside the town at a traffic police checkpoint. As it is, the Russians do not recognize Turchynov and his interim government. With perfect timing, Russian television broadcast Thursday morning the first statement by deposed president Viktor Yanukovych since he fled Kiev last weekend. The mystery of his whereabouts is over: He succeeded somehow in crossing over to Russia, which has given him sanctuary and from there he is questioning the legitimacy of those who currently – barely – hold power.

While the armored cars waited outside Simferopol, inside the town 120 armed men, their faces covered and no identifying signs on their dark uniforms, had since the early hours occupied the regional parliament building, the Russian flag flying on its roof. They haven’t released a statement or identified themselves. Some claim they are Russian marines, but that has not been confirmed in any way.

The Russians have been focused on this part of the world for about 500 years, give or take. They are pretty good at it. Americans, on the other hand, can’t locate their own state on a map and think Ukraine was invented last week. A very weird aspect of the CML is they think everything new to them is new to the world. The Obama administration is probably twenty steps behind Putin.

Putin can decide the timetable and he has no reason to hurry. There are enough Russian troops in Crimea and reinforcements on high alert on the borders. He can choose his moment, and allow the Russian majority in Crimea to do much of the work for him in a snap referendum on returning their region to Mother Russia.

Putin has one advantage not mentioned in the article. They can turn off the gas to Ukraine and Germany. The EU lacks the resources to prop up Ukraine even if the Russians cooperate. Putin clearly knows the Ukrainians will have to deal with him on his terms. Now it is about establishing the shape of the negotiating table.

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A reader alerted me to a new cause by the food crook, Vani Hari. According to her website she targeted Chick -fil-A for her latest shake down. Chick-fil-A is a private company so we’ll never know how much money changed hands. The company may have been willing to give her a press release she can post on her website. This is the sort of thing that gets the suckers buying her crap and reading her website. Vani is mostly an attention whore hoping to parlay her quackery and exotic looks into TV gigs. She certainly knows nothing about food science, based on the bullshit she posts on her site. This from her latest post on bread:

Bread is a really hot topic and is targeted as the root of many health problems. Overall, bread gets a bad reputation because grains are not easy for your body to digest, can overwork your pancreatic enzymes, contain the anti-nutrient phytic acid and an abundance of dreaded gluten. Also, our wheat crops in this country have been through some serious genetic manipulation to make them profitable for the food industry and less healthy for us.

First off, grains are no more or less easy to digest than anything else. There are things in food our body does not break down. These are passed out in the process scientists call taking a dump. Second, there is no such thing as “overwork your pancreatic enzymes.” She just made that up or thought it sounded scary and decided to borrow it. The real knee slapper is “contain the anti-nutrient phytic acid and an abundance of dreaded gluten.” Every food huckster latches onto scare words and throws them around to sound sincere. Anti-nutrients are in all of our food. Cooking breaks them down, making it easier for us to absorb nutrients from food. I bet she thinks “antinutrient” means it actually takes away nutrients from our system, like some sort microbial vampire.

Anyone with an IQ above room temperature knows the gluten free craze is a fad, not science. I regularly give gluten-free friends food loaded with gluten, telling them it is gluten free. I’m a good liar and they want to believe me. So far, none of them have died or reported any problems. In one case, one asked me where I got the gluten-laden snack they thought was so yummy. The fact that all of them suddenly became intolerant of gluten last week says something about the power of belief. These are bright, educated people. Yet they fall for bullshit like Vani peddles.

Ripping off the believer is the third oldest profession, right behind prostitution and politics. A pest like Vani, however, can cause real damage. Her shakedown of Chik-fil-A is a good example.

During my meeting with them back in October 2012, we discussed a laundry list of concerns I had with their menu items – everything from MSG in their famous sandwich, to artificial food dyes, to TBHQ, and GMOs. During our discussion in their boardroom, they asked me to prioritize the list of requests. I told them eliminating artificial food dyes would be a quick change to implement, but my number one request on the list was to provide safer and more sustainable chicken that is raised without antibiotics and GMO feed.

Even though they are not going fully organic or non-GMO, this commitment is significant. This will help to reduce the common practice of using antibiotics to quickly fatten chickens and keep them “healthy” in unsafe conditions. This is important because the more we use antibiotics in our environment, the less impact they will have on us when it comes to treating certain superbugs. The widespread use of antibiotics in animal feed is responsible for creating new strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, that could, frankly, wipe out the human race if we don’t start doing something about it now.

It’s rather obvious that the Chick-fil-A executives have learned a lesson from dealing with the Gay Liberation Army. The truth is never a suitable defense against lunacy. It is a lot easier to buy off this cunt than try and fight her. In another era, the smart fraction regularly had to deal with snaggle-toothed nitwits massing in town over demonic possession or the growing elf problem. The truth was never going to allay their fears so a a religious ritual was conducted and the smart fraction made the proper public acts of piety. That’s what Chick-fil-A is doing here. In this case the nitwits all have names like “Jeni” and “Hayley.” It is not an accident that most Vani’s followers are broads.

Agricultural science has made it possible for fewer and fewer people to feed more and more people at cheaper and cheaper prices. Antibiotics keep millions of Americans alive. Instead of getting wiped out by the flu ever decade, we get the runs for a few days or an excuse to stay home and make a long winter weekend. Forcing growers to stop using modern science in food production drives up costs and increases risks. Selling chicken treated with prayer versus chicken treated with antibiotics should be an easy choice.

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