In the not too distant future, the robot historians and archaeologists – I’m assuming the robots wipe us out –  will puzzle over a number of things.The most obvious will be why humans invented robots that would be smart enough to wipe out humanity. The other will be why those same humans suddenly decided to start worshiping black people as if they possess magical healing powers.

In modern America, whites fear being called racist more than anything. I would imagine that you could put a gun to the head of most anyone in academia, for example, and demand they shout the “N” word. Their response would be to turn and put their mouth over the barrel and force you to pull the trigger. For most Americans, death is a better option than being a racist.

This of course has made it easy for blacks to be raging bigots. In another age, blacks looked to assimilate into the dominant culture because they feared the wrath of the majority. Now that the roles are reversed. blacks are encouraged to indulge in the most outlandish acts of racism. It’s not just the World Star Hip-Hop types either. It’s allegedly responsible members of the community like this Louisville judge.

Unhappy with the number of potential black jurors called to his court last week, Jefferson Circuit Court Judge Olu Stevens halted a drug trial and dismissed the entire jury panel, asking for a new group to be sent up.

“The concern is that the panel is not representative of the community,” said Stevens, who brought in a new group of jurors despite objections from both the defense and prosecutor.

And this wasn’t the first time Stevens, who is black, has dismissed a jury because he felt it was lacking enough minorities. Now the state Supreme Court is going to determine whether the judge is abusing his power.

On Nov. 18, after a 13-member jury chosen for a theft trial ended up with no black jurors, Stevens found it “troublesome” and dismissed the panel at the request of a defense attorney.

“There is not a single African-American on this jury and (the defendant) is an African-American man,” Stevens said, according to a video of the trial. “I cannot in good conscience go forward with this jury.”

A new jury panel was called up the next day.

After that, the Jefferson County Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office and Attorney General asked the Kentucky Supreme Court to look at the issue and see if Stevens has the authority to dismiss jury panels because of a lack of minorities. And last month, the high court agreed to hear arguments.

Imagine a white judge dismissing black jurors in a case because they were black. Ironically, Batson v. Kentucky was where the Supreme court ruled that a prosecutor’s use of peremptory challenge in a criminal case may not be used to exclude jurors based solely on their race. Here we have a judge doing it and everyone is nervous about doing anything about it.

Putting that aside, look at this from the story:

Jefferson County has long had a problem with minorities being underrepresented on local juries. Several black defendants have complained over the years that they were convicted by an all-white jury – not of their peers.

The Racial Fairness commission – a group made up of local judges, lawyers and citizens – has studied the issue for years, monitored the make-up of jury panels and found them consistently lacking in minorities.

For example, in October, 14 percent of potential jurors were black, far below the estimated 21 percent for all residents of Jefferson County, according to records kept by the commission. In September, 13 percent of potential Jefferson County jurors were black.

The premise of this is that blacks and whites are not peers and can never be peers. I’ll grant that the intent is to imply that whites can never stop being racist toward blacks, but the further implication is that blacks and whites can never be peers, which means we can never be fellow citizens. Hell, it could mean we cannot be fellow human beings.

That’s the sort of logic that has to flow from the narcotic of anti-racism. If blacks are objects of worship as whites try to cleanse their souls of racism, then blacks and whites can never be on the same footing as citizens or human beings. if so, what’s the point of having integrated societies? Why are we turning ourselves into pretzels to have diversity when we are not the same species? It’s like insisting everyone live with bears or mountain lions.

No one thinks about it because it really is just another area where meddling fanatics get to make war on normal people. They don’t really worship blacks. they just like it when this crazy judge outrages the hillbillies down in redneck country. It’s why they encourage Black Lives Matter to attack cops and cause mayhem. It’s all about hating the bad whites. Hating whitey is just another front on the cold civil war.

This will not end well.

My previous post used health care as a jumping off point to rant and rave about the consequences of putting lunatics in charge. I did not get into specifics about the potential consequences as I was running long and I’m trying to keep these blog posts from sounding like manifestos.

The general point was that we live in what feels like an “infinite margin of error” world where the people in charge are free to indulge their wildest fantasies, because we have so much extra, society can take the hit and bugger on. Whether or not that is true is debatable, but you have to admit that decades of lunacy have not brought the roof down on us yet. Maybe all the hand wringing is misplaced.

After all, what harm is there when a magazine dedicated to female sexuality names a mentally ill transvestite as woman of the year? The editors are just trying to demonstrate their fidelity to the One True Faith. The “tranny issue” or the “homo issue” is standard stuff now in the magazine world, a sure fire way to get the other howling lunatics in the press to notice you.

The moonbats think they can piss off the squares from the safety of their Progressive cocoons so they never really pay any price. It’s a low risk way to look butch on behalf of the One True Faith and it gets some yuks at the expense of the rubes in flyover country. If there is even the slightest rumble of push back from the normals. Glamour Magazine goes back to posting stories titled “ten ways to please your man in bed.”

On the other hand, the same people ululating with ecstasy over the latest perversions don’t wave around the examples where real people suffered real harm from this stuff. Every day, people are encouraged to spend money on “professionals” who may as well be toting around Ouija boards and tarot cards. People who should know better allow these scams to go on because it is easier than doing their job and policing their ranks.

This Rutgers professor in the story was clearly a nut. She should have remained a harmless nut, but she was promoted to the point where she is the Chairman of the Philosophy Department at Rutgers. The poor people victimized by her could be forgiven for trusting their betters to make sure they were not putting the stamp of approval on lunatics by giving them lofty titles.

That’s ultimately the damage that comes from this unwillingness of our betters to uphold their end of the bargain. Being king comes with duties. You never hear rich people talk about their duties and obligations. The ravenous vermin that occupy political offices yammer on about their “public service”, but we all know that’s a lie. They are getting rich through politics. Otherwise, no one talks about their duties and responsibilities anymore.

When was the last time a plutocrat talked about his duty to his fellow citizens? Or, his obligations to hold up the key values and institutions? Even more laughably, make sacrifices for the good of their country? Instead, they prattle on like college freshmen about transforming the world, when they are not railing against the customs and traditions normal people rely on to maintain a happy and peaceful life.

Scipio Africanus, the man who beat the great Hannibal at Zama, was more than a great general. He was a great politician. Part of that was always showing the people that he was first and foremost committed to upholding the customs and traditions of the people. He was a man committed to public virtue. He would regularly make a show of his devotion by conducting public acts of piety.

Today, all of our betters are the inverse of Scipio in that they are big on public acts of piety, but their commitment is to destroying the faith of the people. Turn on the TV, listen to the radio, surf the Interwebs and you see example after example mocking the beliefs and customs of the common people. The Christians under Diocletian had more reason to be optimistic than Christians today. How long before they declare Christianity a hate crime?

It’s not just words either. It’s deeds. Take a look at the pictures in this story. Waves of savages from beyond the horizon are being invited to flood into Europe, attacking and displacing the native populations. For no good reason the people in charge of Europe are sowing violence and discord into their own societies, simply to spite their people. That’s what it is, spite. Like petulant children the leaders of the free world are throwing a tantrum and unleashing hell on their own citizens.

Again, it is assumed that the West can keep absorbing the body blows from these reckless acts by the people in charge. Our betters just assume they will forever remain immune from the consequences as they are hidden away behind high walls and armed guards. Maybe they are right and maybe we have evolved beyond paying any real price for this reckless disregard for reality.

Maybe. Maybe not.

It’s popular on the fringe to mock democracy, pointing to the endless supply of examples where “citizens” sign up for idiotic causes. The simple fact that 50% of people are below average in intelligence should be enough to shake anyone’s faith in democracy. As I’m fond of putting it, find the dumbest guy you know and give him a veto over your life. That’s democracy.

That said, the alternatives are not much better. If your system of government permits the deranged, insane and berserk to get control of the levers of power, eventually they will and you will be ruled by lunatics. Charles VI was king of France in the 14th century. He also thought he was made of glass. Christian VII of Denmark was a chronic masturbater who would randomly slap people in the face (with his hand) for no reason.

The great check on this for most of human history was scarcity. Human societies were a bad harvest away from serious unrest unless the people in charge were on top of things. That motivated the ruling class to police themselves. That was best done by killing off the deranged, the insane and the unpredictable. If the king’s son was a dangerous nut, then he would die in a hunting accident before he became a problem.

I’m exaggerating for effect, but the point is valid. When misconduct or misjudgements by the rulers had catastrophic consequences, the people in charge had no choice but to be prudent. This limited innovation and stifled technological progress, but it kept lunatics from gaining too much influence. Plus, burning heretics at the stake was fun.

In the current age, the people in charge can be reckless. We live in a post-scarcity time when even big mistakes by the rulers do not threaten our survival. At least it seems that way. We’re certainly testing the theory by allowing anyone with a crackpot idea to get a shot to try it out on the public. This story about health insurance in Colorado is a great example.

With Colorado’s shaky Obamacare exchange in peril, some health care advocates are calling for voters to scrap it and replace it with something far more ambitious.

Proponents of a statewide single-payer health care system have submitted 156,107 signatures, far more than the 98,492 required to qualify for the November 2016 ballot, to the Colorado secretary of state’s office for verification.If the measure qualifies, Colorado would immediately become ground zero for a national debate on the concept of steep tax increases in return for guaranteed health care coverage for all residents, all against the backdrop of a pivotal presidential race.

The program, called ColoradoCare, comes with a steep price tag: $25 billion, which would be raised with a 10 percent payroll tax increase. At the same time, the plan would provide all residents with Medicare-style health care coverage and allow the state to dump Obamacare.

Whether Colorado voters would agree to take on that kind of tax hike is another question — two years ago, they rejected a comparatively paltry $1 billion tax increase for education — but there is no doubt that the “no-more-Obamacare” argument resonates with certain segments of the population.

“For some people, I say, ‘It gets us out of Obamacare,’ and some people cheer,” T.R. Reid, a spokesman for ColoradoCareYES, said during the signature-gathering campaign. “It’s a purple state, and we have this purple plan that can appeal to both sides.”

The premise of this proposal is that the people who screwed up the old system with the central planning thing called ObamaCare now want to “fix” it by replacing it with an even nuttier government plan. They are not hiding from this or even sugarcoating it. It’s right there. The solution to government run health insurance is government run health insurance.

Of course, most of the people behind this are not insane, but many of them are. They are convinced that if you arrange the laws just the right the way, two plus two will equal five. The trouble is the cynical backers who seek to profit by having the crazy convince enough of the stupid to go along with another robbery. This can only happen when the people in charge are no longer policing their ranks.

Even in a post-scarcity age, the iron laws of supply and demand apply. There is a finite amount of health care. That means it must be rationed and the only way that ever gets done properly is through price. Even Chinese Marxists get this basic reality. For essentials like basic health care, food, shelter, etc., charity steps in so those with extra can help those in need.

You never hear anyone say this in public. Instead, pols from both parties come up with plan to summon the good spirits of plenty to vanquish the evil spirits of want. They don’t put it that way, but it is what they are saying. The fault is not that some people believe this. The trouble is the people who know better encourage this sort of reckless nonsense. At some point, the tab for indulging the reckless and stupid is going to be paid.

There is a class of citizen, a growing class, who look at the Republican Party, shake their heads and vow to never vote for any of them. It’s not that the Republicans have unusually dumb ideas or present their ideas in an off-putting way. It is simply the realization that The Stupid Party is not a serious endeavor and there is no point in bothering with them any longer.

Here’s a perfectly good example.

On State of the Union this morning, CNN’s Jamie Gangel sat down with Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), where she picked the Republican presidential candidate’s brain on a variety of topics. Such as:

 

• Why is Donald Trump beating you in your home state?
• What do you think about Donald Trump saying he’s going to win with Hispanics?
• Is Donald Trump more in tune with Republicans on immigration than you are?
• Are you comfortable with Donald Trump having “his finger on the button”? Is Donald Trump “ready to be commander in chief”?
• If he’s the nominee, will you “enthusiastically support him”?
• “Do you think there needs to be a Stop Trump movement”?

If that sounds as if she asked a lot of questions about Donald Trump, that’s because she did. In the five-and-a-half-minutes interview, Gangel asked eight questions about Donald Trump. The only other topic she found time to cover was Rubio’s missed Senate votes while campaigning.

I should say that the Stupid Party does not operate in a  vacuum. Their cheerleaders in the so-called conservative press are just as dumb. The writer here is probably a child just out of college, but even a child should be aware enough wonder why Rubio or any other Republican is going on CNN?

These shows on CNN attract a few hundred thousand viewers, none of whom will vote Republican. The people in charge of CNN are fully committed Progressives who would be OK with rounding up the bad thinkers and putting them into internment camps. There’s zero value in going on these shows if you are a Republican.

The stupidity does not end there as you can forgive a politician craving attention for going on a hostile program. The bigger error here is the waste of resources. The most precious asset a campaign has is the candidate’s time. A campaign is all about getting your guy as much face time with as many people as possible. It’s why you run ads and do large town hall style events.

Squandering half a day or more doing a five minute TV spot on a network no one watches is the opposite of smart. It is a stupid waste of time. Yet, one Republican after another lines up to wait around all day to do a five minute segment on these lefty networks. Most of the time, the result is embarrassing. It’s as if they are trying to lose.

Now, complaining about the questions is old hat for The Stupid Party, which is why they are the Stupid Party. They never learn, they just keep moaning about having the same gags pulled on them over and over. The point of the Peanuts cartoon was that if Charlie Brown had anything on the ball, he would have slapped the bleep out of Lucy for pulling the ball away the first time.

Here’s the thing. CNN is trying to attract viewers. Trump generates ratings. Rubio and the rest of the establishment dwarfs do not generate ratings. At some point, people with anything on the ball would wonder why and do something about it. Instead of moaning about the lack of interest, try being interesting and talking about things that seem to interest the voters. You know, like the Trump guy is doing.

Instead, the Stupid Party demands we pretend it is 1996 and their plans to shuffle commas around the tax code are fresh and exciting. They may as well be sporting mullets and jorts or leisure suits and perms. Marco Rubio is a great candidate to beat Bill Clinton in the 1996 campaign. Today he sounds like a guy who just woke up from a 20-year slumber.

It takes guts to stand out from the crowd and the one thing the Stupid Party has little of these days is guts. It is a collection of technocrats and trimmers, more at home in a cubicle working a spreadsheet than rubbing elbows with the hoi polloi. It’s not just that they are stupid and boring. It’s that they are cowards, little mice afraid to make a sound fearing the cat will notice them.

Rubio, if he was worth anyone’s time, should have cut that questioner off after the first question and then delivered a five minute dressing down so that she would never make the same mistake again. Even George Bush the Elder could drop the hammer on a guy like Dan Rather. The modern GOP pol is one step from groveling to these people on camera.

It’s unmanly and disgusting and that’s why no one takes Rubio seriously. He looks and sounds like a little boy being corrected by his teacher. But he is the modern GOP. The only thing they are missing are guys with neck beards and ear gauges, perhaps a few trannies thrown in to make the pathetic freak show complete.

One of my favorite topics around here is the domination of the Roundhead wing of the American ruling elite. In fact, the old Yankees are the ruling elite. It’s not just politics and finance, it is the general culture, but it is most obvious in politics. Southerners, for example, don’t have a prominent role in either party. Appalachia has no role and the southwest may as well not exist as far as Washington is concerned.

This Pat Buchanan column is a good example, I think. Buchanan is no one’s idea of a liberal, but he causally accepts a very Progressive idea that a nation must have a purpose, a spiritual purpose, that gives meaning to each and every citizen.

“If the Cold War is over, what’s the point of being an American?” said Rabbit Angstrom, the protagonist of the John Updike novels.

A haunting remark, since, for 40 years, America was largely united on the proposition that our survival depended upon our victory over communism in the Cold War.

We had a cause then. By and large, we stood together through the crises in the first decades of that Cold War–the Berlin blockade, Stalin’s atom bomb and the fall of China to Mao, the Korean War, the Hungarian revolution, the Cuban missile crisis, and on into Vietnam.

We accepted the conscription of our young men. We accepted wars in Asia, and, if need be, in Europe, to check the Soviet Empire.

Vietnam sundered that unity.

By 1967, the Gene McCarthy-Robert Kennedy wing of the Democratic Party had broken with the Cold War consensus. “We have gotten over our inordinate fear of communism,” said Jimmy Carter.

The Reagan Republicans and George H. W. Bush would pick up the torch and lead the nation to victory in the last decade of that Cold War that had been a defining cause of the American nation.

But when it was over in 1990, America was suddenly at a loss for a new cause to live for, fight for and, if need be, see its sons die for.

This national purpose stuff is playing with fire and something a good conservative, I think, would discourage. A whole lot of mischief has come from men on a mission. But, the assertion that America is a propositional nation held together by a shared national purpose is the dominant belief. Reagan talked about the city on the hill and Obama talked about transforming the world. Bush talked about spreading democracy to the savages.

This is an idea straight out of Puritan America. The religious fanatics that settled New England really thought they were building a new human society in God’s image, a light to lead the fallen world into the grace of God. The South never had these ideas, as the southern colonies were mostly business ventures that grew into colonies. Middle America was settled by continental refugees who just wanted to be left alone.

Of course, the assertion that America is a propositional nation sounds good until you think about it. After all, if anyone can be an America as long as they commit to the proposition, it means any American who does not accept the proposition can be tossed out. In other words, countries are just temporary arrangements that have no connection to biology, history or culture. Any group of fanatics with a goal can be a country!

Putting that aside, the whole idea of a national purpose strikes me as an idea conservatives would be wise to reject. The purpose of the state in a sensible society is to protect the interests of the citizens. It does that through the uniform enforcement of the law, the enforcement of contracts and the protection of private property. If the people need meaning in their life they can take up a hobby or join a church.

That does not mean conservatives should be isolationist or xenophobes. It’s just that the health and welfare of the rest of the world is the business of the rest of the world. No on likes a busy body and that’s what inevitably comes from this national purpose stuff. Americans become the world scolds, running around telling people how to live. That serves no one but the people in charge, who get grace on the cheap because someone else is paying the bill.

In the 1980’s, the Republican Party became the party of National Review. It was a blend of the Old Right and the New Right, but mostly the Old Right. American Conservatism of that day was about free markets, free trade, personal liberty, preservation of the traditional culture and a tough stand against Soviet authoritarianism. Reagan famously said “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”

Imagine a modern politician of any stripe saying something like that today. Watch this speech from Reagan and try to imagine, without laughing, a modern Republican saying similar things about the American Left today.

Most people reading this understand that the National Review of today is not the National Review of yesterday. In the 90’s Buckley started to lose his marbles and then gave way to a new group of editors who think homosexual marriage is a sacrament and citizenship is a vice. That said, the GOP is no longer the party of National Review. It is the party of The Weekly Standard.

In the last quarter century, the Republicans have held the White House once and members of The Weekly Standard held key jobs in that administration. No man is more important to the Republican Party today than Bill Kristol, who was a Bush consigliere. He has selected their last two nominees and their running mates.

Long before the 2008 election, he “predicted” McCain would beat Romney and the others and then he “predicted” McCain would take an unknown governor from Alaska as his running mate. The next cycle he “predicted” that Romney would win and select Paul Ryan as his second. Kristol is really good at “predicting” these things.

But, the truth is the modern GOP is the party of The Weekly Standard. There you find the technocratic authoritarianism that embraces the universal state, but with a alpha male veneer as opposed to the feminine version offered up by American Progressives. Neo-conservatives want the state, for example, to encourage family formation so women can have babies. Progressives discourage family formations so women can have abortions. Same gun, different target.

That’s why it is a good idea to pay attention to Bill Kristol when he starts talking about Republican politics. Back in the summer he somewhat jokingly said he would start a third party if Trump win the nomination. Now he is quite serious about it and he is letting us know who he will select as the party’s nominee.

The Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol predicted Thursday that Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Carly Fiorina will eventually lead the Republican ticket, and that Donald Trump would fade.

“Now there’s this Trump thing going on, I gather he’s going to do OK in the polls for a while, but he’s not going to be the nominee. We’ll be fine,” Kristol told MSNBC. “Rubio-Fiorina or a Fiorina-Rubio ticket’s going to win in November everyone should calm down.”

After MSNBC’s panelists prodded him into acknowledging Trump has a chance of winning the nomination, Kristol indicated it might be time for him to leave the GOP if Trump becomes its standard-bearer.

“If all the other candidates remain as pathetic as they’ve been so far, I suppose it’s conceivable he’ll [Trump] be the nominee and then we’ll have to support a third party,” Kristol said.

There you have it. It will be war or it will be Rubio- Farina. I think given the way men are now portrayed in modern America, the proper ticket here will be Farina – Rubio, but Ben Carson will be taking over the important running mate duties, while Rubio watches from the side, maybe filming it for the campaign website.

All joking aside, Kristol could be whistling past the graveyard, but he is the man behind the GOP curtain. He was not right all those times before because he is a good guesser. He was right because his iPhone has the contact information of every major donor, campaign staffer and fund raiser in the country on it. He is the most connected man in America or at least one of them.

The problem, of course, is that the formula The Weekly Standard prefers works great if you are Mr. Roarke and your resort offers realistic fantasies about being a successful politician. In the real world, there’s little appetite for invade the world-invite the world polices. Rubio- Farina might play well on the cocktail circuit in Georgetown, but they will get destroyed by Clinton in the general election.

But, maybe that’s what it will take. The years from 1964 through 1976 saw Progressives running wild while normal people figured out what was happening and then fashioning a party to represent them. Perhaps the site of Clinton auctioning off national monuments for cash to the Clinton Foundation will finally focus the minds of people who really should know better.

There are new polls out showing Ben Carson as the leader in Iowa at the moment. None of this means anything as there are loads of examples where candidate X lead three months out and failed to get single digit support in the actual caucuses. Ben Carson could say something batty like evolution is the work of Satan and everything changes. I have nothing for or against Carson, I’m just pointing out that these polls are meaningless.

But, it does raise the age old question about Iowa. Why do they go first? Iowa is not very representative of the country. Iowa, for example, is 2.6% black, while America is 13% black. It has a family formation rate similar to Texas, but votes like Connecticut. Similarly, it has church attendance similar to Tennessee, but votes for pro-abortion candidates. Iowa is a very weird state.

If I’m running the GOP, I’d want a state that is typical of my voting base to kick off the season. Virginia would be a good example as it is usually Republican and conservative, but it’s not Utah. They will vote Democrat and parts of the state are fairly loony so it has a good mix. The best solution would be to have a group of states vote first and pick the states that hover around the political center, like Missouri, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Thinking about it reminded me of a previous post about how the country would look post break up. America is becoming two ships passing in the night with most areas solidly in one camp or the other. It occurred to me that both parties are collapsing largely because they are out of sync with the balkanization of the country, even though both parties are responsible for it.

If you travel around the country, it is clear that Arlington Texas is in a different country from Arlington Massachusetts. On the other hand, Portland Oregon is not a lot different from Portland Maine. It’s a big country with distinct regional cultures and sensibilities. The parties would be wise to take advantage of this to produce leadership and nominees that represent a broader segment of the country.

I’m thinking about this great map from the book American Nations.

We have roughly five regions in the country. New France, El Norte and New Netherland are too small to make this work so I’m sticking with the big five. If we divide the states into five buckets and have each vote for the presidential nominee as a block, then it forces the candidate to appeal to at least three regions of the country.

The obvious flaw is that one or two regions could have a hometown favorite and you end up with no candidate getting three regions so this regional vote has to be an over layer on the state by state system. Currently, the states send delegates to the convention based on the makeup of their congressional delegation. Then there are a bunch of extra delegates so the party leaders can put their thumb the scale.

My thinking is you have regional delegates that are awarded to candidates that win the popular election in the regions. A candidate that won the most votes in Yankeedom, for example, would get all of those regional delegates, even if they only won Mass and Connecticut. Similarly, winning California by a few points, could still mean losing the region if the other candidate wins the other states by big margins.

The idea is not to create national candidates, but to create nominees that think regionally and strategically. Crafting a campaign that appeals to The Midlands, Appalachia and the South is not just going to win the nomination, but it will make for a winning general election campaign, at least for the Republicans. It also breaks their nominees free from trying to appeal to primary voters in the Northeast who will never vote for them in the general.

Obviously, I have no spent a lot of time thinking it through, but I’m thinking that the current situation is headed for a bad place. The GOP is dumpster fire of a party, as we see with the struggle to find a new Speaker of the House. If a welfare state technocrat from Wisconsin is the bets they can do, it may be time to disband and try something else.

During the unrest in Baltimore, an unreported element was the revenge and score settling. The news people painted a picture of aggrieved brown people going into the streets to make their case the only way they knew how, but that was just the TV show part. Most of it was good old fashioned looting, stealing and pointless mayhem. But, a small portion was gang bangers taking the opportunity to settle scores, rearrange the map and make some points.

In every community on earth, there are people who have revenge on their minds and when the opportunity comes along to get some payback, they take it. It’s just a part of human nature. Fear of going to prison or fear of being found out keeps most of it under control, but in a place like Baltimore or Detroit, it does not take much to set off a round of score settling.

Revolutions, when they come, unlock all of those doors at once and you get a lot of bloodletting that has nothing to do with the revolution. Sure, the revolutionaries hold public trials, humiliate their former masters and hang enough of them to satisfy their lust for revenge. That’s just part of the deal, but the common people settle their scores too. The revolutionaries eventually have to reign it in which is when the revolutionaries start looking a lot like the guys they overthrew.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when reading this story.

SunTrust Banks in Atlanta is laying off about 100 IT employees as it moves work offshore. But this layoff is unusual for what the employer is asking of its soon-to-be displaced workers: SunTrust’s severance agreement requires terminated employees to remain available for two years to provide help if needed, including in-person assistance, and to do so without compensation.

Many of the affected IT employees, who are now training their replacements, have years of experience and provide the highest levels of technical support. The proof of their ability may be in the severance requirement, which gives the bank a way to tap their expertise long after their departure.

The bank’s severance deal includes a “continuing cooperation” clause for a period of two years, where the employee agrees to “make myself reasonably available” to SunTrust “regarding matters in which I have been involved in the course of my employment with SunTrust and/or about which I have knowledge as a result of my employment at SunTrust.”

The employees were informed of their layoff at the end of September, and the last day of work for some is Nov. 1. This is according to several of the affected employees, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

The severance is seen by affected employees as a requirement to provide ongoing technical assistance as needed. The severance agreement itself says that this assistance from former employees “will be requested at such times and in such a manner so as to not unreasonably interfere with my subsequent employment.” An employee shared the severance clause with Computerworld.

This assistance can be by telephone or in-person meetings, and it may be provided without “additional consideration or compensation of any kind,” the clause says.

“How do they think this is acceptable?” said one affected IT worker about the clause. He said he couldn’t fathom how the bank can cut its IT staff and yet insist that former workers be available to fix problems.

You come into work and learn you will be laid off. That sucks, but it happens. Then they tell you that you have to train your replacement. That more than sucks. That’s humiliating. Then you learn that your replacement is a turd eater from the other side of the world. Now you’re pissed. Then some smug asshole from HR says you will have to agree to help the guy for two years on your dime.

Here’s a wild guess on my part, but if things get out of control in America, a whole lot of bank managers are going to turn up with their throats cut. Of course, this sort of spiteful treatment of Americans by people who no longer think they are Americans is common these days. The Cloud People who imagine themselves cut loose from the bounds of citizenship seem to take pleasure in humiliating the Ground People.

Thinking about it, I wonder if revolutions are not just the accumulation of slights and humiliations to a point where the damn breaks and they wash away the old order, leaving a vacuum for someone to fill. Those avant garde revolutionaries that end up in charge are not the vanguard. They are just the people smart enough to ride the tidal wave of resentments.

I don’t know enough about revolution to know and I don’t think much about it. I have my revenge fantasies like any other normal man, but those are for my own entertainment. It just seems to me that our betters are in a hurry to heap as many slights and humiliations upon as they can. It’s as if they think they are at war with us. At some point, the other side of that war is going to wake up and decide to join the fight. I would not want to be a SunTrust Bank manager when that happens.

An expression I’m fond of using is “no tree grows to the sky.” I don’t know where I picked it up, but like most of my pithy expressions, it appeals to be sense of the natural order. Everything begins, evolves, changes, adapts, but eventually ends. It strikes me that most of the periods of tumult were the result of people just assuming the trend lines would never change. Everything would stay the same forever.

The one area where this always jumps out to me is the cult of economics. If you scrape away the posing and posturing, this strange modern religion is built on the absolute belief that economies can and must grow forever. The “economy” has been turned into a thing with agency that punishes and rewards the people, based on their treatment of the economy.

Nowhere in modern economics do you find people talking about steady low growth or even static economies, other than as cautionary tales. In the word of modern economics, the economy of a country is the plant from Little Shop of Horrors. It must be fed so it can grow and nothing must be permitted to get in the way of feeding the thing. In the moral hierarchy of modern economics, everything comes second to the economy, even human life.

To some degree, this is what drives the open borders fanaticism among the ruling classes. The shamans of the cult of economics tell these simple minds in politics that the economy must grow or we all die. Further, they tell them that the only way to grow it is to grow the population. Since the locals refuse to have ten kids per woman, the only solution is to import millions of peasants from the fringes of civilization.

In fact, growing the economy is so important to the health of the people that it trumps the life of the people. Mark Dayton comes pretty close here to saying that opponents of mass immigration don’t deserve to live, that they can be fed to the economy like the murder victims are fed to the plant in the above musical. To Mark Dayton, his statement is noble because he is saying he is willing to sacrifice his kin to please the god of modern economics.

Harsh words and heartfelt sentiment were exchanged by community members and local officials on racial issues in Central Minnesota at the St. Cloud NAACP Community Conversation with Gov. Mark Dayton.

Hosted Tuesday at St. Cloud Public Library, about 100 people from diverse backgrounds gathered to ask questions of St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis, St. Cloud Police Chief Blair Anderson, State Rep. Jim Knoblach, Minnesota Human Rights Commissioner Kevin Lindsey, Council on Black Minnesotans Community Program Specialist Kolloh Nimley and St. Cloud AFYA Pharmacy co-owner Dr. Edris Kosar.

From the start of the event, Dayton bluntly stated his opinions on the racial tension in St. Cloud and across the state in regards to immigration.

“Look around you. This is Minnesota,” Dayton said. “Minnesota is not like it was 30, 50 years ago. … This is Minnesota and you have every right to be here. And anybody who cannot accept your right to be here, and this is Minnesota, should find another state.”

Dayton is defining citizenship here based on your acceptance of the New Religion. Much as libertarians think the unproductive should be turned into fertilizer, the man of the New Religion thinks the infidel is no longer his fellow citizen, maybe not even his fellow human being. The Bantu tribesman on the other side of the planet wishing to settle in your neighborhood means more to Mark Dayton than you, if you are not sufficiently enthusiastic for the new faith.

The bit of reality the shamans cannot contemplate is that the economy will not grow forever. Much of what is called growth is just currency manipulation. Another part is gaffing the numbers so the spreadsheets look pleasing. Automation, of course, is going to eliminate most work in the next generation. Growth as currently understood will come to an end by the middle of this century, no matter how many Bantus are imported to Minnesota.

The trouble is, everything in the West is based on the assumption that the economy will grow forever.That’s not irrational. For most of human history, scarcity has been the great challenge. The great minds were all put to the task of figuring out how society can allocate scare resources to support the maximum number of people. In a world with shortages of food, water, housing, shelter and safety, growing the supply of those stocks is paramount. It trumps everything.

That’s not the modern West. It’s barely the case in the savage areas. The population explosion in Africa is due to more food, medicine, shelter and security. We live in an age where poor people are obese because they sit around all day eating massive calories, taking massive amounts of intoxicants while watching television. Mexico is the most obese country on earth and they are allegedly waddling north in search of more stuff, like grazing animals.

A post-scarcity world should be a world of steady populations, with periods of modest growth and decline, based on fashion. It is a simple math problem. Instead, our rulers are convinced that we must have more and more people in order to feed the economy. Whether or not they really believe it is hotly debated on the Right, but clearly it is baked into their world view. The modern politician talks about nothing other than economics and economic growth.

I think it goes deeper than just a current fad. Everything is based on growth, real or imagined. Our institutions and culture are based on growth. We deliberately debase the value of labor through currency manipulation, for example, in order to encourage productivity and economic activity. The explosion of debt is so the welfare state can keep growing. Those massive credit markets everyone now fears is to keep the economy growing.

Generations of ruling classes have been trained on the core belief of never ending growth. Remove Audrey II from the modern discussion and what do we have? The error made on the Right is to assume this obsession with economics is in order to avoid answering that question. It may simply be that they fear discussing culture because it may upset the gods of growth and then there will be hell to pay.

Way back in the olden thymes, everyone and I mean everyone believed that the weird fuzzy-wuzzy fascism of the Democratic Party was settled policy. Only lunatics and fans of Hitler thought otherwise. After all, the 1964 election had proved it! We did not yet have science! but the defeat of Goldwater was the next best thing. There could be only two types politics, hard-boiled liberalism and soft-boiled liberalism.

People could be forgiven for assuming that was true. Goldwater was recklessly described as a lunatic, who wanted to blow up the world. He was not, but the press and all the beautiful people hooted and roared when LBJ sent out psychologist claiming that Goldwater was deranged. As an aside, expect this to happen with Trump and Carson, except it will be economists.

That meant the choices before the voters would be between the metastasizing welfare state of the Republicans or the metastasizing welfare state of Democrats. In other words, you could have any color car you wanted as long as it was black. There was no turning back the clock and going back to the dark days when things were better. No sirree, it was all settled. All the smart people said so and if you said otherwise, you were not smart, maybe even crazy.

The weird thing about the Reagan years is they may as well have never happened. All the good that was done in those years has been rolled back and some of it so quickly it is hard remember that was ever done. What’s crazier, is immediately after Reagan, his party went right back to believing what they believed before he won two landslide elections. That is, they had to be Democrat-lite in order to win elections.

One of the reasons the GOP is in trouble today is their insistence on being a slightly less crazy version of the Democrats. That has its appeals as there are always voters out there afraid to rock the boat. That and it promises to keep the fanatics in the liberal press corp at bay. The trouble is the bulk of the people who would like an alternative to the Liberal Democrats can’t stomach the trimmers and compromisers the GOP is offering up.

Truman said it, I think, when the people get the choice between a Democrat and a Democrat, they pick the Democrat. That’s the dilemma facing the GOP these days and it appears to be what has unmanned the Conservatives in Canada yesterday. Given the choice between something and nothing, the people chose something even though that something is as dumb as a goldfish.

The last time I had any reason to care about a Trudeau, the new Prime Minister’s mother was running around showing her beaver to the public. Margaret Trudeau was good looking piece of tail back in the day, dumb as a plank, but that’s probably why the geezerly Pierre married her. Too bad her son and Canada’s next leader got her brains and his old man’s megalomania.

“We beat fear with hope,” Trudeau said. “We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together.”

How is it possible for a fully formed adult to say such idiotic things in public? Political speech in the mass media age is aimed at the functionally retarded, but even by that low standard this drivel is embarrassing. Worse, it’s unmanly and mean. You won. Be honorable in victory you sniveling punk. But then again, why should he? The voters just voted in an insipid punk. He’s just giving them what they want.

Nature abhors a vacuum so when the responsible people refuse to be responsible, the irresponsible get to run wild. In this case, the people claiming to represent the sane and sensible Canadian could not be bothered to take the fight to the howling crazies so the howling crazies won. Again, given the choice between something and nothing people always pick something.

This reminds me of something. A few years back I was at an event for a friend and present at the event was the wife of a Canadian official. We talked a bit about politics and she made the comment that in Canada, the conservatives were not extreme like they are in the US. I nearly bust out laughing, thinking of Mitt Romney as extreme, other than extremely dull. But, she made clear that it was very important to Canadian conservative to not be viewed as too far apart form the the rest.

The lesson that will be drawn by the Canadian Conservative party officials is that Harper was too hard edged and he was insufficiently deferential to the Left. The next time, they must beg harder. It’s the same lesson the American Right “learns” after every election, win or lose. No matter the result, they must grovel harder next time.

Today, the little mushroom people of Nova Scotia weep for their country.