Years ago, I was having problems with the cable and for the fourth or fifth time in a month I found myself on the phone with the cable company. The customer service woman had me push some buttons, reboot the box and report back the results. We did this a few times without success.

After the the fourth or fifth time I finally asked her why she thought another reboot would have a different result than the previous reboots. To her credit, she said she had no idea, but it was the only option she had to help me. I wondered at the time how long we would have gone on rebooting if I had not broken the loop.

I decided to cancel the cable at that point. She may not have had choices, but I had options. That event came to mind reading this story about the GOP in the Tidewater trying to run the same old scam on Trump that Fox tried during the debate.

Republican leaders in two states reportedly are plotting to make presidential candidate Donald Trump’s quest for the GOP nomination a lot harder.

Party leaders in Virginia and North Carolina told Politico.com that they are considering a push to require candidates entering their respective Republican primaries to pledge their support for the eventual nominee and not run a third-party candidacy — a pledge Trump, the current frontrunner, would not make when asked to during the Fox News debate earlier this month in Cleveland.

“Anybody who wants to seek the Republican nomination should have to commit to supporting the ultimate Republican nominee,” Virginia’s former Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli told Politico. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”

Republican party officials in North Carolina announced a similar proposal, and told Politico they already are in talks with lawyers to draft language for a provision that asks each candidate to support the GOP nominee.

“Everything is on the table,” an official told Politico.

Party leaders in North Carolina and Virginia say they hope their ballot proposals will help convince the billionaire businessman to fully commit to the Republican Party.

The primary requirements must be submitted to the Republican National Committee by Oct. 1, Politico reports.

“Ballot access usually is regarded as a party function,” former RNC Chief Counsel Tom Josefiak told the website. “It definitely would be left up to the state party to decide how it’s going to operate.”

This is just the party pushing the same button and hoping this time they get a better result. Fox News and the GOP schemed for a month about how to box in Trump on this issue and they came up with the very lame hand raising business to start the debate. That was a flop with the voters and failed to accomplish anything. I guess we can expect state party dimwits to push the same button over and over now, thinking this time is the charm.

What we are seeing here is something you hear in sports all the time. Pressure reveals character. It’s easy to be a principled man when there is nothing at risk. Sticking to your guns when you are at great personal risk is a different matter altogether. More than a few “honorable” men have been revealed as something less when faced with real risk.

The Republican Party and its media wing are being squeezed by their donors on the one side and their voters on the other. This is not unusual as rich people try hard to buy politicians from all parties. A fundamentally sound party can rely on its organizing principles to strike a balance. Right now the party and its media arm are lurching about from one crackpot scheme to the next, unmoored from anything resembling principles.

Similarly, the media wing of the party is struggling to mount an affirmative argument in favor of their team. Instead we have been treated to childish rants that resemble a baby banging his rattle on the high chair. I used to enjoy reading some of them. Now, I’m embarrassed for them. I get the sense, reading the comments in these rants about Trump, that I’m not alone. A lot of people are learning the meaning of myötähäpeä.

This post on Marginal Stasis got a ton of comments and so did the Sailer commentary on it at his site. What makes this interesting is not what is said in the comments or even what’s in the source article. The comments are mostly people reworking their favorite cheers with regards to immigration.

The libertarians chant about riding unicorns to their castles in the clouds. The patriots chant about the cultural collapse that would be an inevitable consequence of transporting the world’s peasants to your neighborhood. Then a fight breaks out and before long someone is calling the patriots racist.

That’s all fine, but why does everyone assume America would remain a country as currently constructed? More important, why is it assumed that immigration will play out the same everywhere? California has had a vastly different experience with immigration than Texas. Virginia has had a much different result than Maryland or Delaware.

A great book to read, if you like reading this blog, is called American Nations. It covers the history of the people who settled the Americas, breaking them into unique “nations” that have ties back to the old country. New England, for example, was founded by Roundheads mostly from a handful of towns in England. They imposed their culture and new arrivals were forced to assimilate. Later, Yankees migrated west settling in what is now the Midwest.

The neat thing about the book is he ties this together with the country’s history so we get to see how those old regional differences played out in the Civil War, for example. I like the book primarily because it jives with my view of history, but it is a great read and very good introduction to understanding the HBD view of history. For the record, I doubt the author would agree with it being HBD history, but that’s my take.

Anyway, wholesale immigration to America is not going to play out the same everywhere. It has not played out that way so far. New England has been far more welcoming to Irish immigrants than Hispanic immigrants. The town system allows them to pack people they don’t really want into ghettos away from everyone else. This puts a natural cap on immigration from places that are too ethnically different from the natives.

California, which has always been split between a mild and tolerant south and a Yankee influenced north has largely been overrun by Hispanics, but mostly in the South. Northern California is getting whiter while the state gets browner. Similarly, Virginia has absorbed a lot of Hispanics, while West Virginia has absorbed very few. Those Appalachian mountain people are not friendly to outsiders of any type.

I think if we ever go for open borders, we’ll see three things happen. One is the native populations will begin to move around with a sense of urgency. Yankee transplants living in North Carolina will find a way to move back. We’re already seeing Midlanders who migrated to California heading to states like Colorado fleeing the Hispanics. I think the American nations will consolidate back into their natural zones again.

Another thing is each region will adjust to make sure the native population maintains control of the local power structure. This is something you see in California. The state looks like Mexico, but the state’s political leaders look like Vermont. In New England, this means a compulsory assimilation which will serve to scare off immigrants. In the Old South a return of the highly stratified cast system will make its return. The South will look a lot like South America or the Caribbean.

Finally, I think we would probably see the country break up. New England, most of New York and New Jersey, big chunks of the upper Midwest will either leave for Canada or become a separate country. The South and the Tidewater would most likely welcome it, breaking off as their own country. The Northwest would probably join Canada, but I could argue they would follow New England and the upper Midwest. The middle part of the country and states like Pennsylvania and West Virginia are hard to figure, but they could band together with Texas and Oklahoma or join the South.

The reason for thinking the country would break up is it has come close over much less. In the 19^th century New England was close to leaving the Union, but the end of the War of 1812 put a halt to that. The Civil War is the best example. If the South had not attacked Fort Sumter, the North would never had attacked. Instead the South would have been permitted to leave.

We are currently unified as a country only because Yankee culture dominates the political, cultural and financial high ground. One reading of American history is that it is the fight for control by Yankeedom. If the Yankee north can no longer dominate the rest due to massive immigration, they would look to leave and that would cause the rest to break apart too. The result would be four or five countries, maybe in some sort of federation to modulate trade, borders and defense.

A specter is haunting the West — the specter of immigration. All the powers of the old establishment have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this specter: Liberal and Conservative, democrat and aristocrat, college radicals and billionaires.

Where is the party in opposition that has not been decried as fascistic by its opponents in power? Where is the opposition that has not hurled back the branding reproach of racism, against the more advanced opposition parties, as well as against its reactionary adversaries?

Obviously, I’m having some fun here by reworking the opening lines of the Communist Manifesto to fit our current age. I’m fond of pointing out that Marx was not wrong about everything and he made some useful observations. In the 19^th century, he noticed that the real fight was between the rising new ideology against the old ideologies tied to the previous economic era. The Industrial Revolution was reshuffling the deck.

It’s also important to note that he got most everything wrong about how the world would look after the revolution. He was also stunningly wrong about human nature and the human condition. The followers of Marx murdered 100 million people trying to prove Marx right with regards to the nature of man and the making of the egalitarian society. I’m throwing that out there so my new readers don’t think I’m a Marxist.

Anyway, the thing about the rise of international communism in the 19^th century is it scrambled the normal feedback loop between the public and the rulers. All of a sudden there were conversations about how to best organize society that did not include the people currently in charge. What was most frightening to the people in charge was that in the ranks of the ruling classes were people secretly enamored with communism and sympathetic to the arguments.

That whole vibe keeps coming to mind reading the increasingly unhinged rants from “conservative” writers with regards to Trump and immigration. A couple of days ago Brit Hume was humping this article on Twitter. Hume is sort of the neo-con emeritus these days so he has a lot of stroke with the rank and file chattering skulls. Today National Review’s Kevin Williamson has a rewrite of that article up under his own name.

In both cases you have allegedly conservative writers calling immigration reformers racists and fascists. Not long ago, these writers were excoriating Progressives for using such language against George Bush and the neo-cons. That’s quite a transformation and a revelatory one. The question presented by the issue of immigration to the people in charge is “which side are you one?” We are seeing the answer in the response to the rise of immigration parties.

That’s what has me thinking about old Uncle Karl. Communism in Europe was an existential challenge to the ruling elites because it challenged the spiritual framework holding the old guard in place. That’s what made it so dangerous and why the people in charge reacted so violently to anything that smacked of communism. The Reds were a virus that had to be wiped out completely.

It’s a similar problem with immigration today. The people in charge have drawn long and hard from the well of egalitarianism. They believe it with the intensity of the fanatic. Therefore they lack the intellectual toolkit to address the concerns of the people seeing their towns and neighborhoods overrun by foreigners. The people of Dresden, for example, are demanding answers to a question the rulers of Dresden cannot answer.

I think most people understand why Progressives demand open borders. It’s not just the practical matter of cheap votes. There’s a spiritual element. The Left is always looking for grace on the cheap. Inviting the world and putting them on welfare lets Progressives pretend they are doing the Lord’s work without actually having to sacrifice anything. The peasants are packed into your neighborhood, not theirs.

Professional conservatives have a similar thing going on with immigration. Conservatives have always struggled to answer the charge of racism from the Left. They have always struggled to square the founding myths of America with the founding realities. Immigration is how they could square that circle. By championing the little brown guys, they think they are washing off the stink of racism.

It’s why the reality of Hispanic voting patterns have never left a mark on the thinking of modern conservatives. It’s also why they keep yapping about how they must win over these “natural conservatives,” even though all the data says otherwise. They are sure they are on the side of angels. They have the right answer to the Great Question. Facts will come around soon enough.

Now all of a sudden, the bad thinkers are drawing massive crowds and mocking the complaints of the anointed. If you were a good thinker, sure you were just about to crest the last hill before the promised land, the horror of coming upon Trump hosting 30,000 people at an anti-immigration rally is something like Moses descending Sinai to see the Golden Calf. There can be no intellectual response, only an emotional one.

Way back in the olden thymes, I kept getting invitations from friends to join Facebook. I had no interest in joining Facebook, which made me a weirdo. Friends would ask me why I was holding out and I’d tell them “I’m just not that interesting.” I did not realize it, but I was subtly insulting my friends by breaking the unwritten rule of social media. That is, none of us are so interesting that we should be on social media. No one I know, except me apparently, can face up to the fact that their life is not all that interesting.

I finally relented for a while, but then I quit and no one noticed. The same is true with Twitter. I have two accounts. One for sports and one for this blog. I rarely tweet anything. When I do read the twitter (I love calling it “the twitter” for some reason), I mostly see strangers posting what they hear on TV or say on the Interwebs. It’s an echo chamber of snark and stupid.

A good example of the latter is Razib Khan, who is a super smart doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics. This is mighty tough material tackled by the very brightest people. On the twitter he comes off like a teenage girl with a bad attitude. The reason is he spends most of his time commenting about what twit-wits are tweeting. Dogs and flees.

I think there is merit to the wisdom of the crowds. I’m a human and humans are social animals. We take cues from those around us about what is and what is not acceptable and preferable. Restaurant reviews are the most obvious example. Bad reviews count for way more than good reviews, because we are wired to look for taboos and dangers. “I had a great burger” tells me nothing. “I found a rat in my soup” tells me everything.

Unlike many on my side of the fence, I’m not in favor of shuttering the TV stations and closing down the Interwebs. The young and the stupid need entertainments and it keeps them busy. We live in an age with lots of idle young men and idle young men get into trouble. Having them play video games and watch car chase movies is probably a good idea. It keeps them off the streets, at least for a little while. I’d rather have them on Facebook than on my street corner.

This is something the people in charge have long understood. The first thing the Reds did in the 19^th and 20^th century was take control of the media organs. The Cult of Modern Liberalism controls mass media in America because if you control the media you control the country. The CIA works hard to control social media because they understand that it is the key step in controlling the people. Having the title “Director of Internet Sock Puppetry” must make for some laughs in the Langley locker room.

The trouble is we are awash in mass media, meaning we are floating in a sea of bad information. Republican voters often carp about the low-information voter, but most of the people voting GOP believe all sorts of nonsense, mostly because they see it on Facebook. They think they are holding the correct opinions because people they see on TV or on-line hold those views and those people seem nice or smart or cool or whatever.

Men of the Right have been complaining about the stupidity of the people for a long time, which is why the Right has always opposed democracy. It’s indisputable that half the people in any society are below average in IQ. Giving them the franchise is inviting trouble, but as long as the smart fraction controlled the mass media, society buggered along without too much trouble. The dimwitted got their cues from the local paper or TV about which way to vote, thus mitigating any damage they could cause by backing a nut or a deviant.

That’s not really the case with social media. Twitter and Facebook are platforms run by the masses, mostly by the portion of the masses with free time. It is the nature of man to trust what is said to him and that makes all of us susceptible to the mass stupidification of mass media. If you spend all day listening to blockheads on Facebook or Twitter, you’re likely to get caught up in whatever the other blockheads are doing.

The so-called Arab Spring is a good example. The claim at the time is it was driven by social media. How did that turn out? Egypt had a nice blood bath with a brief period of control by Muslim lunatics. The same thing played out across the Maghreb. One could argue that the unrest in the Maghreb is in some small part responsible for the mass invasion of Europe from the Near East. It turns out that a million nitwits can be wrong.

That’s the Arab world and easy to dismiss, but the evidence says the West is getting dumber and the Internet is probably a part of it. All of my Progressive friends get their “facts” from Wiki and Facebook. They think their ability to Google something makes them brilliant. This make them dumber than nature intended because instead of being ignorant, they are ignorant and certain. Smart people are always uncertain. It’s when the stupid become confident that things can get out of hand.

I must admit I have enjoyed the Trump-a-palooza this summer. The truth is, I have thrown in the towel on America so I don’t think our elections mean very much. It’s just a question about how fast we intend to drive into the abyss. Being old I should be rooting for slow as that means I can reach escape velocity before it gets ugly. On the other hand, life is for living and sticking around long enough to see the collapse has its attractions.

I can go either way so the elections are just entertainment at this point.

Six months ago I was thinking the Democrats would anoint Hillary, after the usual dalliances with a true believer, who excites the fever swamp types. It’s the GOP’s turn so this is when the party hands out their lifetime achievement award. The GOP would be figuring out if they can run Bush or if they have to find someone with the same polices, but a different last name.

Now, I think something is happening here. Clinton is now immersed in what could very well be the scandal of the century. There’s no way to wriggle free of the mishandling of classified data. You can finesse financial laws and ethics rules. You can’t finesse this stuff. News reports suggest there may be dozens of people who have violated the law and conspired to hide their involvement. This is Watergate level stuff given her position.

On the GOP side, Donald Trump just gave a speech in a stadium. If you are a member of the Party leadership or an advisor to one of the candidates, you should be in a panic. Trump went from sideshow at the start of the summer to leader of a revolution at the end of the summer. In-between, the GOP took their best shots at the man and did not leave a mark. Watching Trump’s crowd last night I kept thinking, “something is happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.”

One thing that is clear is I was the only guy to figure out that Trump was Beppe Grillo. The other thing is the ossified and blinkered chattering classes are wholly unprepared for what’s happening to them right now. They spend their time reading each other’s tweets, promoting each other’s work and chatting with one another at play time. They are not even aware of the vast network of writers, bloggers and trouble makers out there complaining about the status quo.

The best evidence of that is the deranged ranting of Kevin Williamson at National Review with regards to Donald Trump. It’s like watching a robot whose CPU errors out and the robot goes berserk, smashing itself into walls. When it is a bunch of metal it is funny. When it is a human being having a nervous breakdown, it’s sad and pathetic. In this case it is emblematic. Conservative Inc. is cracking up over what’s happening outside the Acela corridor.

Trump may turn out to be a poor spokesman for the massive crowds mobbing his events. I’m not a big fan of his style and I don’t think he has thought much about any of these things, other than immigration. That puts him way ahead of the dreary dishrags running for office, but the leader of a revolt needs a coherent platform. Maybe that comes, maybe not, but the crowds are not going away.

That’s why the rest of the candidates should be scared. To get these crowds for Bush or Walker or Kasich, you would have to round up the people at gun point. Even then, you would probably have to lock the gates to keep the people from fleeing the arena once the dreary dullard started talking. Those people at the Trump rally are not buying what the GOP is selling, even if they may not be sold on Trump as a candidate.

I don’t know what they do at this stage. These things can burn out on their own or they can break up like the Tea Party. The trouble is the GOP had corrupted the grass roots long ago so they could tear apart the Tea Party movement without too much trouble. The trouble here is this is ad hoc and completely outside the control of the “grass roots” organizations that exploited the displeasure pver Obama. This is a revolt against those organizations, especially the GOP establishment.

I’m skeptical about Trump. I think his lack of restraint will be his undoing. But, we’re seeing a collapse of the middle. The parties and the press are now bullhorns aimed at the public and the public gets it. This is not about Trump. He’s just the flag around which the dispossessed can rally. You can take down the flag and the people may disperse, but the dispossessed are still there. Someone will come along with a new flag eventually.

Human beings evolved over a very long time in small groups of related people. They hunted together, foraged together, ate together, slept together and did all the other things one does, in front of everyone else in their group. In all probability, all of the things we consider to be private were public for most of human existence. It’s only when you can live behind walls, away from the sight of others, that you can have privacy.

Did privacy evolve with settlement? Did the need for privacy influence settlement? Was it both, like language and religion. For as long as we know, settled humans have maintained some degree of privacy. Northern cultures seem to maintain a greater divide between public and private, but every settled society had the concept of privacy. Romans may have used communal toilets in the open air, but they did not have sex in the streets or discuss their family matters in the open.

Privacy is the key to ones identity. It’s why militaries march recruits around naked so much in their initial training. Criminal gangs, like some motorcycle clubs, will do the same thing to prospective members. Take away a person’s privacy and they can no longer stand apart from the rest. It’s hard to hold yourself distinct from others when they know even the most intimate things about you.

Today, the big challenge is keeping your financial life and medical life out of the hands of crooks and ne’er do wells. Unlike 50 years ago or 100 years or 500 years ago, a man on the other side of the globe can now peer into your life and learn things about you that you prefer to keep private. The people who signed up for Ashley Madison are now discovering that those privacy notices are not the safeguard they were promised.

It’s getting much worse than that. If you get a Google thermostat for the house, Google can now data mine your environment and they will. Your phone, your car, your TV and your PC are all reporting on your behavior. We have gone from passively guarding our private lives to having to aggressively protecting our privacy. It’s a losing fight.

What happens when it is no longer possible to keep any of your life private? What if anyone with a curiosity can go on-line and find out whatever they like about you? It’s not just going to change how you think of others, but it is going to change how you think of yourself. Imagine a world where everyone has the circumspection of a B-list TV personality, always whoring for attention.

That’s one possible outcome. Another possible outcome is a bandit existence where on-line pirates rob people by first stealing their secrets. The Ashley Madison hack is a good example of how a small number of dirt-bags can take down a business. Granted, the business in question caters to dirt-bags, but that’s just a coincidence. The next time it could be a clinic that holds sensitive patient data.

In such a world, you will be forced to employ a combination of deceptions to build a zone of privacy around your life. Most people already have dummy e-mail accounts for signing up to websites. People use proxy services to surf the web. Imagine a world where everyone lies about everything in order to make it impossible to assemble the mosaic of their life. A world in which no one can trust anything about anybody is not one that can have much in the way of social cohesion.

I think we are seeing a case where technology has outpaced our ability to evolve the corresponding cultural and psychological traits. For a few thousand generations we have maintained some degree of privacy and now we may be suddenly thrust into a world of none. Similarly, we evolved in a world where communication was slow and personal. Now we are swimming in a aether of mass media.

Maybe the end is that of John the Savage.

The great divide in the West is now immigration. On which side of the issue you fall, determines where you are on the political spectrum. If you have been paying close attention over the last two decades, this has been increasingly obvious. If you have just started paying attention, it may be a bit of mystery. After all, politicians in both parties dismiss the issue. The press is unwilling to cover it, other than perfunctorily. In polite circles, the “I” word is close to being the “N” word.

Even stranger, particularly in America where the never ending election season is boiling like never before, is that politicians are allergic to the topic. Donald Trump has made immigration his central issue and risen in the polls, yet his competitors refuse to discuss it. When asked, which is rare, they get a frightened look as if they have been asked about their desire for young boys. There’s real fear in their eyes.

What’s going on?

Rich people have always controlled our politics. That was true long before we had politics and no one should be shocked by it. Big business, unions and large issue groups have vast resources to lobby government so they have a big influence on policy. This is not a bad thing. It’s just a reality of life that often gets forgotten as we swim in a sea of Progressive nonsense about the power of democracy.

This was never much of a problem as there were lots of big business types who disagreed with other big business types. Unions opposed business and special interest groups opposed all of them. Plenty of money poured in from all sides so that the money game was just a reflection of public sentiment. A man could buy a legislator or even a few of them, but no one could buy all of them.

That’s changed a lot in the last few decades. The technological revolution and the technocratic revolution has unleashed a new force in politics and that’s the global elite. Mark Zuckerberg’s company makes money all over the world. Apple makes more in China than in the US. Countries are no longer places to global business. They are markets. Consequently, the super-rich are no longer citizens of a country. They are citizens of their class, the global elite.

What’s different about these rich people is they are untethered from their host countries. Their first loyalty is to their class. As a result, they coordinate their efforts across borders, parties and cultures. George Soros is a citizen of where? Who knows. He finances the looting of Ferguson Missouri and he backs pro-immigration parties in Europe. He has no national interests because he has no nationality.

The political and media class are the servants of this global elite. They fly on their jets to Davos and they rely on their largess to finance their think tanks and media companies. The American Enterprise Institute, for example, has no customers and conducts no commerce. Yet it has offices in Washington and 150 people on staff. Who pays for that? Donors, of course, and those donors are not school teachers and shop keepers.

The result of globalization is that a smaller class of people than the former ruling classes has a bigger impact on the national affairs of every country. The old way had rich people trying to buy influence with elected officials. The new way is elected officials trying to curry favor with the rich people, in the hopes they will finance their campaigns.

When the cost of running a campaign for Congress is over $10 million, you have to raise $15,000 every day to keep your office. Hillary Clinton will spend one billion dollars in her presidential run. The only way to raise that sort of money is to have the global elite on your side. Thus we see the Golden Rule: The man with the gold makes the rules. In politics now, it means the donors are the only constituents that matter.

That’s why everyone involved in politics panics whenever the “I” word comes up. Immigration is the one subject where the vision of anointed is revealed. On the one hand, global elites wish to get rid of citizenship and national governments because they are a nuisance. On the other hand, they imagine a world where the masses beneath them live in enforced equality. Their solution to inequality is to make everyone a peasant.

That last part is what no one discusses. The elites imagine a world like the college campus. At the top are the trustees who hire administrators to culture and cultivate the undergraduates who live communal lives. The new definition of socialism is the redistribution of happiness and self-actualization by a cloud people who rule as if they are gods.

This explains the gasps and shrieks from all quarters over the uncouth rantings by the novus homo with regards to immigration policy. Trump is a billionaire. His stance on immigration and his presentation make him a class traitor. That’s what’s triggering the irrational and emotional response to Trump. It’s why Progressives went bonkers over George W. Bush. It’s one thing to be mistaken. It is another to turn your back on your kind and side with the peasants.

There’s something else. The unhinged response to Trump by guys like Kevin Williamson is not really about the “I” word. It’s fear that the old Red Team – Blue Team song and dance is no longer going to play with the crowd. This is not just a Conservative Inc problem. The pearl clutching by Ezra Klein over Bernie Sanders rejection of open borders has the same source. The pajama boys fear they will be dragged into a discussion they can’t have because they can’t win.

One last thing before I end this foam flecked rant. In Europe we’re seeing old Left and old Right locking arms opposing immigration. On the other side are the kept men of the ruling class. A similar thing is brewing in America. Look at the sympathetic, if somewhat bemused, coverage of Bernie Sanders by the Dissident Right. Something similar is happening on the Left with regards to Trump.

In a multi-party proportional system like you see in Europe, this sort of fluidity is easy to accommodate as there are minority parties where voters can migrate to when the main parties are lacking. In America, with our rigid two party system, everything is invested in the status quo.

The media, financial arrangements, lobbying efforts are contingent on the Red Team – Blue Team purse fight. The “I” word threatens the whole thing because it scrambles the loyalties. If all of a sudden blacks are more concerned with the “I” word than the “N” word, Blue Team has a problem. If suburban white people stop listening to promises about shuffling commas around the tax code because they care more about immigration, Red Team is screwed.

The “I” word put everything at risk so the people in charge are putting everything they have into make the “I” word more taboo that the “N” word.

Years ago, I read a story about a kid who cleverly gamed the admissions system at Dartmouth, I think, by letting them think he was black. He checked “other” on the race questions and listed on his application that he was a member of the black students union and some other groups that would indicate he was black. Once he got on campus his new adviser was shocked to learn he was white.

This was before the movie Soul Man was released, but close enough to make me think the movie was inspired by the story. The wiki page on the movie does not mention the news story so who can say. The thing is, thirty years ago most people thought it was absurd to have different rules for different races when it comes to admissions. Here we are and nothing much has changed.

That’s probably to be expected given that college is enormously expensive now compared to when these stories were oddities. What no one could have imagined is the sudden rash of white people passing themselves off as black. Two months ago we had the NAACP leader outed as a ginger with a tanning bed addiction and now we have the #blacklivesmatter organizer revealed as a honky!

An investigative blogger has accused Shaun King, a key figure in the Black Lives Matter movement, of misleading media icon Oprah Winfrey by pretending to be biracial in order to qualify for an “Oprah scholarship” to historically black Morehouse College. The blogger says King is white and has been lying about his ethnicity for years.
King is a high-profile campaigner against “police brutality” and “justice correspondent” for the liberal Daily Kos website who told Rebel magazine in 2012 that he was biracial, with the magazine reporting that he is the “son of a Caucasian mother and an African-American father.” He has also described himself as “mixed with a black family” on Twitter.

King has been lionised by the press, praised as hero of civil rights and social activism. He has written extensively about a childhood in which he was terrorised by “decades old racial tensions.” He claims to have been “the focus of constant abuse of the resident rednecks of my school.”

Yet, in recent weeks, rumours have been circulating about his ethnicity. A 1995 police incident report lists Shaun King’s ethnicity as white. And blogger Vicki Pate, who has been assembling forensic accounts of Shaun King’s background and family tree on her blog, “Re-NewsIt!,” has published her findings.

She claims that King is entirely white and says a birth certificate, which Breitbart has since independently acquired from the Kentucky Office of Vital Statistics, names a white man as his father.

I think if that guy told me he was black, I’d struggle to keep a straight face. I’d have a much easier time believing he was a member of a white power or skinhead group.

“King, 35, has related the story of the hate crime on his blogs and in his recent self-help book, seemingly to bolster his credibility as an activist and as a self-help guru,” wrote the Daily Caller‘s Chuck Ross. “While King has said that he was attacked by up to a dozen ‘racist’ and ‘redneck’ students, official records show that the altercation involved only one other student.”

“And while King has claimed that he suffered a ‘brutal’ beating that left him clinging to life, the police report characterized King’s injuries as ‘minor,’” Ross reported.

This month, more details have emerged from King’s account that do not match up with the police report or eyewitness accounts from journalists who noticed that King’s public claims did not square with reality.

For as long as I’ve been alive, black people have hated it when whites act black. Maybe things are different with young people, but I still think blacks look at a guy like this and want to beat his ass. His fraud comes off like mocking of blacks, not imitation. How is this different than black face?

On the other hand, a man can throw on a sundress and the rest of us have to pretend he is a woman. The same people telling us that Bruce Jenner is now a girl are the same people claiming that science says race is not real. That means this cracker is just living the life. If he wants to pass himself off as a Mohawk, he can do that too. Race is just a social concept.

This is always the problem with these crackpot ideas. They never think them through. Defending the dude in a dress because he scandalizes the wreckers from normalville is a knee slapper until Vanilla Ice shows up claiming to be Malcolm X. The old system where everyone accepted biology did not have these problems. Imagination land where you can be anything you want is fine for children, but not so good for adults.

News brings word that the keepers of virtue have now trained their sights on the South Snohomish girl’s softball team. Their crime, according to this story, is in playing by the rules in order to get a result the coercive authorities did not like.

A South Snohomish softball team in the thick of a major league-sized scandal has been eliminated from the Little League Softball World Series after losing a mandated one-game playoff.

South Snohomish lost a rematch Tuesday against Central Iowa, 3-2, ESPN reports. The single-game playoff followed regular pool play — where South Snohomish went undefeated — and was required after Central Iowa levied accusations of game-throwing against the local team.

On Monday, the previously unbeaten team of girls from South Snohomish lost 8-0 in pool play to a team from North Carolina at the world series tournament in Portland. In complicated play rules, the loss in the final game of pool play bumped the tough Central Iowa squad from the tournament, while still allowing Snohomish to move on.

But early into South Snohomish’s loss Monday, officials from other teams suspected something was up.

According to the Des Moines Register, the South Snohomish team didn’t only lose to North Carolina, they lost badly. The previously hard-to beat team didn’t get a hit, and they allegedly hardly tried to swing. When they did swing, they allegedly tried to bunt on two strikes or swung at balls in the dirt.

The Snohomish team’s four best players were also benched during the game, the Des Moines Register reported.

This is one of those examples that illustrates the difference between a consensual society and a coercive society. The former is all about the means, not the ends. Yes, the rules are there to give order and structure, to mitigate issues that face the society. There is an end in mind, but the focus is always on applying the rules uniformly and universally, even if you sometimes get a bad result.

Coercive societies are focused on the ends exclusively. The rules are just the tools used to get to the end. They are applied and ignored on a case by case basis, because all that matters is achieving the desired end. Utopian and religious societies are obvious examples, but every authoritarian society is an ends justifies the means system.

In a consensual society, we admonish the sort of gamesmanship by this team as poor sportsmanship. After all, throwing games is against the spirit of fair competition, but it was permitted so you accept the result. Utopian fanatics see an unwanted result and they change the rules on the fly to suit their purpose. It’s why they cooked up a big pile of goofy rules in the first place.

I think it was Alfred J Nock, but I may be mistaken, who formulated the idea of the hidden law. That’s the unofficial rules, customs and taboos that do most of the governing of society. Replace those with written rules and you crowd out the social lubricants that allow for peaceful coexistence. Put another way, written rules make crap weasels of us all because they force us to game the system, like this softball team.

The dominant issue in the West is immigration. The ruling elites are obsessed with filling up our lands with people from other lands. It’s nearly impossible to get members of the elite to discuss the matter, much less explain their reasoning. A politician or party that embraces immigration reform, even mild reform, is treated like a Holocaust denier. Even climate change, which is pretty much a religion at this point, is more open to debate than immigration.

Wholesale, uncontrolled immigration has become a spiritual good. It’s not a means to an end, as is often argued by critics. There’s no doubt greed drives some of it, but money is the not the goal for most open borders fanatics. Across Europe and now in the US, immigration is scrambling the political calculus, hamstringing the major parties as fringe parties surge. Yet, they refuse to debate the topic. Yet, the topic remains a taboo.

There’s an old line about fanatics that they cannot change their mind and they won’t change the subject. A corollary to that, with regards to immigration, is that immigration fanatics won’t change their mind and will never permit the subject to be raised in their presence.

That’s what comes to mind when reading a story like this one if the Imperial Capital Gazette:

In a gesture of German goodwill, the administration in this medieval city leased a newly renovated apartment building here to humanely — even comfortably — house dozens of desperate ­asylum-seekers. The newcomers from Syria and other war-
ravaged nations would enjoy freshly redone floors, cute balconies and shiny, modern appliances in a cheerful building near a timber-framed pub.

Then Meissen’s goodwill went up in smoke.

On a cool night six weeks ago, suspected right-wing arsonists struck the building, scorching its interior and rendering it uninhabitable days before the ­asylum-seekers were to move in. The attack added Meissen, a gothic castle town of 30,000 on the Elbe River, to a string of German cities caught up in an escalating rash of violence against refugees.

The acts include an ugly spate of arson targeting refugee centers as well as physical attacks on refugees themselves, marking the return of what critics say is an unnerving brand of xenophobia to Western Europe’s most populous nation.

A normal person would look at this and think, “Maybe it is not such a great idea after all to import tens of thousands of aliens and plop them into unsuspecting neighborhoods.” Of course, normal people would wonder why the locals never got a say in this great social engineering program launched by their government. What good is democracy if you don’t get a say in who is and who is not allowed into your country?

Immigration is one of those issues that exposes the big lie of democracy. There’s nothing more important to the life of a nation than deciding who is and who is not permitted to settle in the nation. The whole damn point of having countries is to keep the other people out. If the people are going to have a say on anything, it is the question of whether or not a country is going to remain a country.

Yet, the elites say that is not permitted. The rubes can vote on who gets to move some commas around the tax code. The rubes can vote on who will run the regulatory state. You can pick your own breakfast cereal, but the people in charge run the store, set the hours and decide what’s on the shelves.

The reason for all this is the people in charge believe, with the fanaticism of a convert, that they have a moral obligation to help the poor on your dime. This interview of Bernie Sanders is revelatory:

Ezra Klein: You said being a democratic socialist means a more international view. I think if you take global poverty that seriously, it leads you to conclusions that in the US are considered out of political bounds. Things like sharply raising the level of immigration we permit, even up to a level of open borders. About sharply increasing …

Bernie Sanders: Open borders? No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal.

Ezra Klein: Really?

Bernie Sanders: Of course. That’s a right-wing proposal, which says essentially there is no United States. …

Ezra Klein: But it would make …

Bernie Sanders: Excuse me …

Ezra Klein: It would make a lot of global poor richer, wouldn’t it?

Bernie Sanders: It would make everybody in America poorer —you’re doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don’t think there’s any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help poor people. What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs.

In other words, open borders is about getting grace on the cheap by, on the one hand, bringing in the world’s poor, but avoiding the cost by dumping them into the proletarian neighborhoods. Sanders, for all his faults, should be lauded for leaving his religion in the synagogue and sticking with the economics.

You see this in the Post article:

The attacks are undercutting Germany’s image as the country leading the effort to aid a record flow of refugees into Europe, highlighting the rising social tensions in the region amid the avalanche of asylum-seekers. At the same time, the violence has ignited a heated national debate over what pundits here say is a rise in overt racism and intolerance — in a nation highly sensitive to both because of Nazi-era atrocities.

All this is happening as Germany takes in more asylum-
seekers than any other nation in Europe — a number set to reach an estimated 500,000 this year alone — while quickly running out of places to house them. As a result, the national government in Berlin is turning to insular and almost wholly white enclaves to take in the newcomers, who are mostly from the Middle East and Africa.

The creepiness here is that they don’t give a damn about the immigrants getting the business from the locals. What matters is the goodthinkers in Germany are being embarrassed by the conduct of the bad thinkers. Again, it’s a spiritual exercise, not a political or economic one.

The mistake immigration patriots make is in thinking the motivation behind open borders is simply monetary. There’s no doubt that greed-heads like Mark Zuckerburglar are in it for the cash, but most of these people are in it for salvation. They no longer believe in God, but they still believe in salvation and their brand of salvation is communal. To save themselves, they must save the world, however much it cost you.