The Ebola outbreak in Africa brought a few things about Africa to the public’s attention. One is the fact that people eat bats in Africa. First world people don’t think much about Africa, but the image of people eating bats is a jarring reminder that Africa is nothing like the rest of the world.

Of course, lot of Africans are moving out of Africa into the rest of the world. This summer we are sure to have the suicidal Western media moaning about the millions of Africans trying to cross the Mediterranean into Europe. If you are willing to cross the desert and the Mediterranean in order to live in a European ghetto, it is safe to assume you’re fleeing someplace much worse.

The question is just how awful are these countries?

Yesterday I posted about the murder rates. Getting murdered is the worst thing that can happened to you in any country. The next worst thing, I think, is getting some horrible disease like Ebola or AIDS. Worse yet, dying from curable things like cholera or measles that are beyond the individual’s ability to avoid. One can avoid sex and bat eating, but you have to drink water.

Disease rates are one of those things that drive migrants to and from countries. It’s a natural instinct. Anthropologists think Sub-Saharan Africans did not advance beyond simple village systems because of disease. Large population centers would be disease magnets. The better response is small isolated villages with a natural hostility to outsiders.

Given the communications revolution, even the most backward in Africa know that Brits and Franks don’t regularly die from the runs. They get their broken bones mended and no one rots to death in their hut for want of medical care.

Here’s the disease rates from WHO for Africa:

These numbers are for all infectious, parasitic diseases per 100,000. Not all disease is deadly, but without proper health care, even the flu can be deadly. That’s the utility of disease rates as a metric. High disease rates suggest not only something about the ecology and culture; they tells us how the population is organizing to address public health.

As expected, the countries in the Maghreb have the lowest disease rates in Africa. As with the homicide numbers, the accuracy of the data is a problem. In the West we track this stuff closely. No one has the slightest idea of how many drop dead from the runs in places like Eritrea.

For the sake of comparison, Iceland is 157 per 100,000. Most of Europe is around 175, even tropical places like Greece. Ukraine, the most corrupt country in Eurasia is 1545, similar to Arab North Africa. The US is at 330 and that’s with absorbing 30 million people from tropical fever swamps.

Some of these numbers are mind boggling. If you are an African in a place like Mali, why would you not take your chances on that leaky boat over the Mediterranean. The odds of being killed at sea are lower than dying from tuberculosis back home, if you are not murdered by a local thug.

The recent revelations about the Clinton slush fund has reminded everyone that the very worst said about the Clintons is the tip of the iceberg. There’s always more slime under the next stone. They are the Snopes family of the Ozarks. Their vermin-like rapacity is boundless, unimaginably boundless. Official Washington is not exactly the genteel Sartoris clan, but the old order of Washington simply lacks the capacity to deal with a moral nullity like Bill or Hillary.

That’s why I’m a little skeptical of the tut-tutting over the latest shenanigans. The American political class no longer has the will to police itself. The name of the game these days is to sell/steal everything that is not nailed down and that’s how dirt-bags like the Clintons have flourished. It was not that long ago when their kind would not have been welcome in the halls of power. They would have had to feed off the mountain folk in Arkansas.

Still, the chattering skulls are going on about how this opens the door for Fake Indian to run. I guess they have to talk about something, but anyone who knows anything knows she is not running. Even if Hillary quits the field and leaves a wide open race, Fake Indian will not run because she knows how things work in the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

One big reason the Cult hates Hillary is she is a loser. In 1992 she was given the job of ushering in a national health care system to replace the semi-private arrangements we have now. She bungled it badly and killed the issue for two decades. Worse yet, the resulting political fallout led her husband to throw the Left overboard to save his skin.

Fake Indian knows that the Cult is intolerant of losers. Lose an election and you’re done. If she were to run for president and lose the primary, she would be a loser and the vultures would be circling. There’s a Kennedy warming up on Congress for her seat and you can be sure he would be running in 2018 if Fake Indian were to run for president and lose. It’s not like Fake Indian has the support of the local machine. She’s a carpetbagger who depends on the support of the Cult.

Her better play is to let a stooge like O’Malley run against Hillary. Meanwhile, she can rant and rave from the well of the Senate about how her billionaire friends don’t do their fair share. She can run in 2018 with the promise she will step aside to let the next Kennedy take the seat in 2024. That will take her into retirement and she will never fall afoul of her coreligionists.

O’Malley, on the other hand, is the perfect off-cycle stooge. He has nothing to lose and nothing to do right now. Maryland is a small state located next to the Imperial Capital. That means there’s few local shakedowns available for ex-pols. He could run for Senate, but running for president is a better deal right now. It let’s him make connections all over the country, which means a high paying job at a lobbying firm after he loses.

Alternatively, he could raise his profile and set himself up for a Senate run in a couple of years. Ben Cardin is old and ready for the home so that seat will be open in 2018. A famous liberal with lots of rich friends will have no trouble winning that seat. It’s a no-lose proposition for O’Malley so he may as well be the Cult’s champion against Hillary.

My bet is Butch ends up as the nominee.

This post has already been linked to 1851 times!

Africa is much in the news of late. The Europeans are learning that Muammar Gaddafi may have been a flamboyant nut, but he was pretty good at keeping the people to the south from heading north. Since his demise, sub-Saharan Africans have been heading north, hoping to get into Europe. The Moslem lunatics are promising to open the floodgates unless something magical happens. Hundreds are drowning in the Mediterranean and you can be sure that number will only rise.

So, just how bad is it in Africa?

I thought it would be useful to look at the key metrics for measuring the awfulness of a country. The wonder of our age is that this sort of data is at our fingertips. If you want to know something about Equatorial Guinea, for example, you don’t have to go there, which is probably a good thing given that their ruler is a cannibal. But, perhaps my good friend Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo is getting a bad rap.

There’s a lot of data so I decided to think about it in personal terms. If I were to move to Africa, I would take stock of the things important to me. When you move to a new home, you think about the schools, the neighborhood, crime, the commute to work etc. That strikes me as a sensible way of looking at Africa. After all, a whole lot of Africans want to leave for some personal reason.

The first thing to consider is the murder rate, which is a good proxy for overall crime. I can tolerate most anything, except being murdered. In the US, the murder rate is 4.7 per 100,000, but we all know the truth of those numbers. Net out the black rate and the number drops in half. Look just at whites and the rate is within the norm for a European country, which is below 2.0.

Here’s a table of murder rates for Africa:

The numbers are from the UN so we should assume some fudging to make these countries look a little better. They also exclude war so the violent death rates is surely much higher. To give some perspective, the hardest thumping ghettos in America have a homicide rate in the 30’s.

On the other hand, New York City has a homicide rate of 4.0, below the national average. London has a rate of 1.6. Berlin is at 1.8 and Paris is at 1.0. The worst city in Europe is Amsterdam (legal weed, obviously) with a murder rate of 4.4. If you’re an African in Eritrea or Mali, north looks like a good option. It’s safer crossing the Mediterranean than crossing your own village.

The other piece to this is that these murder rates exclude war and they rely on local reporting, which is never going to be very good. Lots of people disappear every day in these countries and they never end up on official reports. That’s why I included the counties of the Maghreb in the table. Libya is certainly not the low violence utopia imagined in these UN reports.

Just looking at the violence rates, it is easy to see why the Africans are heading north. They live in hyper-violent societies. Even though the trip north is wildly dangerous, it pales in comparison to daily life in most of these places.

This post has already been linked to 1518 times!

Baltimore calls itself “Charm City” because they used to have a sense of humor. The city is one of the least charming places on earth and it used to be a lot worse. At its peak, Baltimore was a gray, dumpy industrial town. Today, it’s Detroit on the Chesapeake with a better tourist area. Otherwise, Baltimore is an unrelenting shithole that should probably be given the Dresden treatment.

That tourist area is a big draw, particularly the ballpark. I’ve been to most of the ballparks in the US and Camden Yards is right up their near the top of the list. The park is a great place to watch a game and the surrounding blocks offer some great places to eat and drink. The Federal architecture is some of the best you will see.

Beyond that, and much closer than the tourists realize, are my people. Most Americans just don’t know what’s lurking in many of our cities. They stay off of streets named Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. Everyone knows where to avoid, even if they don’t exactly know why. It’s as if their mental map has these places labeled “here be monsters.”

But, urban reservations are not a great way to keep the blacks under control unless you are willing to enforce the borders. If you let the wildlings break free of their areas and get into the tourist areas, you get scenes like last night. The hoodlums and corner boys will join in the fun and start doing what they do best, cause mayhem.

Baltimore is a good example of what happened when Progressives are allowed to rule unchecked. West Baltimore is a scary black ghetto and the main hub for narcotics trafficking in the region. If you ever want to understand why I think libertarians are fools, go to West Baltimore, but do it in the morning hours when the locals are asleep.

The rest of the city is a mix of gentrified hipsterville, old industrial and un-workingclass whites. The poor white areas are just poor white areas. Modest crime, mostly drugs, but otherwise no trouble to anyone. The hipster areas are the tax base and the future of the city, it is hoped, but they are bounded by the more rugged areas of the city.

Unlike New York or Washington, Baltimore can’t ship their problem blacks out to the suburbs. Whites fled Baltimore in the 60’s and 70’s and they are wise to this tactic. Some of it has been done Ferguson style by preying on the poorer white suburbs just outside the city, but it is hard to relocate 300,000 blacks without people noticing. The result is they remain in the urban reservation system built up fifty or more years ago.

In years past, Baltimore has tried to import Hispanics into the city hoping they would drive out the blacks. The last white Mayor and current presidential candidate spent years begging Hispanics to move to Baltimore. This worked in DC, but there was a close suburb able to take the refugees. Prince Georges County absorbed the blacks from DC on Section 8 vouchers. This mostly happened in the housing boom, which is why PG County was one of the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis.

But, Baltimore is not built for this type of ethnic cleansing. Hispanics prefer the safety of the surrounding counties where there are jobs and fewer black guys with guns. The result in Baltimore is sort of frozen in place. On the one hand you have the promise of the gentrified areas, but those areas are surrounded by a city run by the Black Guerrilla Family.

Drive around Baltimore and you can’t help but feel a little sad. There’s a lot of potential, but it is a city that seems to look for the wrong answer at every turn. Then again, the right answer, the one everyone sort of knows, can never be said, much less implemented. Frankly, shuffling these people from place to place like a bizarre game of Old Maid means someone gets stuck with the dysfunctional population. That’s Baltimore.

This post has already been linked to 3341 times!

I saw this story posted on The Twitter:

The Columbia University student targeted by a mattress-carrying protester filed a lawsuit Thursday against the school, arguing that it failed to shield him from harassment even though police and campus authorities refused to pursue rape charges against him.

In a lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court, Jean-Paul Nungesser said the school engaged in gender bias by allowing him to be subjected to a hostile and intimidating learning environment.

The hostile environment was created, the lawsuit says, by the ongoing protest of fellow student Emma Sulkowicz, also known as the “mattress girl.”

Mr. Nungesser, a German citizen, said the ensuing publicity has hurt his chances of remaining in the U.S., given that his job prospects have been hurt by the publicity surrounding the case.

The students engaged in sexual activity in August 2012, but Mr. Nungesser says the encounter was consensual, while Ms. Sulkowicz says she was raped.

A university tribunal ultimately found Mr. Nungesser not responsible, after which Ms. Sulkowicz launched her highly publicized protest.

She was invited by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, New York Democrat, to attend this year’s State of the Union address for her “Carry the Weight” campaign, which has been emulated at other campuses nationwide.

A university spokesman declined comment, according to the Associated Press.

I am unfamiliar with the story, but straight away I am rooting for the victim, the German student falsely accused of rape but this deranged young women carrying the mattress around campus. Here we have a school run by liberal fanatics and they could not find something to use against the guy so we have to assume he is the most innocent man on earth.

Putting that aside, these schools are run by adults who refuse to do their duty as adults in charge of young people. This woman with the mattress should have been expelled. She was given every chance to make her case and failed. To then make a mockery of the school with this protest should have led the adults to step in and send Ms. Sulkowicz packing.

I’m deeply intolerant of protests for exactly what we are seeing here. This young woman is not protesting; she is harassing another student. That’s the nature of protests in general. They are intended to harass the citizenry in order to compel behavior that would not happen otherwise. It’s just another form of mob rule.

Curious about the details, I googled “Jean-Paul Nungesser” and found this story at Slate, the journal of the modern lunatic.

This year, Columbia University student Emma Sulkowicz became an emblem for how colleges mistreat victims of sexual assault on campus. After Sulkowicz reported an alleged rape to the Columbia administration and the college found the accused not responsible, she began hauling her 50-pound dorm mattress across campus as a powerful symbol of an adjudication system she claims is confounding, ineffectual, and unfair. The act has grown into Sulkowicz’s undergraduate art thesis project and inspired a national movement, Carry That Weight, that advocates on behalf of campus sexual assault survivors. In the shadow of her campaign stands Paul Nungesser, the student Sulkowicz says raped her. Today, the New York Timespublished the first interview with Nungesser himself. It’s the most intimate, high-profile portrait so far of a college student who was accused of rape—one who says that the system has failed him, too.

In his time at Columbia, three female students have accused Nungesser of sexual misconduct. He’s denied each accusation, and has not been formally disciplined by the university. When one student accused Nungesser of groping her at a party, the university initially decided against him, but he successfully appealed the ruling. After another student accused him of intimate partner violence, the university dropped the case when the alleged victim stopped cooperating with the investigation. And when Sulkowicz accused Nungesser of raping her, Columbia declined to find him responsible, citing lack of evidence.

In lieu of any formal finding, Nungesser had paid a social cost. “He has gotten used to former friends crossing the street to avoid him,” Ariel Kaminer reports in the Times. “He has even gotten used to being denounced as a rapist on fliers and in a rally in the university’s quadrangle. … His name has been plastered on campus bathrooms and published in easily searchable articles. His face is visible online, too, in photos that detractors have posted as warnings to strangers.” Because Columbia failed to discipline Nungesser, Columbia bloggers, activists, and supporters have stepped in to exact their own punishment, and national media has fanned the flames.

It’s hard not to feel sympathy for Nungesser here, even as the opinions he airs on intimate partner violence—“Outside of a forced marriage or kidnapping, it just seems very hard to believe that a person would over and over again put themselves in a situation where they could expect this kind of behavior to occur”—are odious. In a perfect world, Nungesser would never feel compelled to pontificate on that particular issue in the Times. As Sulkowitz has emerged as a symbol of disenfranchised survivors, Nungesser has come to symbolize all the entitled young men who take what they want and never pay the consequences. That’s not quite fair. No matter what actually happened in Nungesser’s three cases, campus rape is a systemic problem, and he’s just one man. Forcing Nungesser to pay personal consequences for the broken system is not going to fix it. Sulkowicz’s mother, Sandra Leong, rightly (and very generously and humanely) frames Nungesser’s experience as an unfortunate byproduct of the university’s failure to appropriately adjudicate sexual assault cases. “I think by sweeping it under the rug [Columbia has] subjected him to a very painful, scarring experience,” she told the Times. “I don’t see it as Emma’s fault because she just had to do what she had to do but I do see it as the school’s fault.”

I’ve never heard the phrase “intimate partner violence” because there’s no reason to have this sterile, banal expression. It’s the sort of thing the bureaucratic mind conjures rather than using the phrase “rough sex.” The former says nothing while the latter is clear and leaves little room for interpretation.

When you read the story behind all of this, it is not hard to see what happened. Boy meets girl. Boy finally bags girl. Boy gets bored and finds new girl. Girl gets pissed and seeks revenge. That’s not a scenario social justice warriors like the Salon writer can comprehend. Theirs is a world haunted solely by black hats and white hats.

It’s why the Salon writer dismisses the witch hunt against this kid and unilaterally declares that rape is a “systematic problem on campus” even though statistics show the exact opposite. The college campus is one of the safest places on earth, especially for women. Again, more men are raped in prison than women are raped in the whole country.

Finally, note the perfect world imagined by Amanda Hess. In that world, men would not be allowed to say things that Ms. Hess finds odious. Perhaps she would simply have them killed or have their tongues ripped out, I don’t know. What I do know is fanatical lunatics like Ms. Hess are always on the business end of the murder machine, clearing the field for the new utopia.

A while back, I took fire for defending death taxes. My failure to enthusiastically decry inheritance taxes was seen as something close to a mortal sin. Maybe just a severe wounding sin. Still, it was a reminder that taxes have become freighted with emotion, particularly outside the Cult of Modern Liberalism. My sense is most liberals think very little about taxes these days. They are the people in charge and therefore take a managerial view of government revenues.

But, the people outside the Cult are another matter. As best I can tell, libertarians imagine a world of no taxes. The respectable libertarians, from what I gather, like the idea of a simple flat tax paid by all citizens. All income is taxed at 15% with no exceptions. I’m sure there are variations on this from other respectable libertarians, but the gist of it seems to be simplicity, but also a minimalist approach. Set the rate low and leave it low to force austerity on Washington.

Conservative Inc. is all over the map when it comes to taxes. The so-called Reformicons imagine all sorts of social engineering that can and should be done through the tax code. Ramesh Ponnuru has been obsessing over child tax credits for years. That’s the heart of the GOP view on taxes. Instead of spending on social programs, they create them in the tax code. They sell them the same way Democrats sell spending programs – free stuff for their voters.

At the heart of all of it is the belief that we can move closer to the promised land if we just arrange tax policy a certain way.

My Tax Philosophy

My first rule on taxes is they must be high enough to pay for government. Borrowing to finance current spending is just taxing the unborn – at best. In most cases it is damaging to the middle-class because excessive borrowing warps credit markets. That quickly leads to the sorts of logrolling shenanigans we see today where banks churn credit activity to skim a profit without providi9ng services.

Pegging tax collection to spending has a clarifying effect on public policy as the bill comes with the services. If everyone’s current tax bill suddenly jumped 50% to close the budget gap, we would be having a different debate about the size and scope of government. Everyone is always in favor of spending the other guy’s money, especially when the other guy has not been born yet.

Of course, the traveling partner with the first principle is transparency. Hidden taxes are a crime against the citizen.The reason governments hide their tax schemes is they know the public would not be happy. If we are going to have self-government, the self better have all the information. Otherwise, the citizens, as well as the rulers, are guessing at public policy.

The most obvious example of this is the business tax. These taxes are always passed onto the employees or their customers. Payroll taxes come out of wages. Corporate taxes show up in the price of the goods and services. If employees saw all of the taxes on their pay stub each week, there would be riots in the streets.

There’s another piece to this puzzle. Taxes are not voluntary. They are collected by force. That’s why the power to tax is the power to destroy. It’s also why powerful people grease politicians to avoid paying taxes. Corporate giants spend millions lobbying Washington and every other Western capital for tax breaks. You can’t have self-government if the rich guys are bribing their way out of their obligations.

Corruption is always a part of human affairs. That’s never going to change no matter how you arrange things. You can limit corruption by removing the temptations that come with the power to exempt some citizens from taxes, regulations or laws. You can’t sell favors if you have no favors to sell. A sensible tax code removes, as much as possible, the favors the pols can sell to their rich friends.

Who Gets Taxed

More than half of Americans avoid paying federal taxes. They pay sales taxes, payroll taxes, fuel taxes and so on, but they avoid incomes taxes, despite having income. This is often pointed out by Conservatives and libertarians as a defect in the current tax code. Liberals, of course, argue that any tax on the poor is unfair because the poor are, well, poor.

What’s missing from tax discussions is who gets taxed and why. The egalitarian fantasy is that every man gets a vote and therefore has an equal stake in society. No such society has ever existed or ever could exist. Human societies are hierarchical. At the top you have the people in charge. At the bottom you have the people who do as they’re told. To pretend otherwise is self-delusion.

The people at the top have the most to lose if things fall apart which is another way of saying they have the greatest investment in the complex social arrangements paid for by taxes. At the other end of the social order, the people at the bottom have the least to lose. Being a peasant for one king is no different, in general, than being a peasant for some other king. The people in a typical American ghetto don’t care who is in charge, just as long as the EBT is charged on time.

Anthropologists have long noted that it is the wealthy who bear the bulk of the costs of social complexity. This spans all cultures and all times. The mathematics of social organization are immutable. In order to have a wealthy ruling class, you need a complex social structure. That social structure will always cost more than you can tax the peasantry – vastly more. That’s why the rich pay the bulk of taxes.

Taxing the rich at higher rates and higher amounts is inevitable, but the poorest of the poor have some stake in society. Taxes are the cost of citizenship. If you are not paying taxes, you are not a citizen. This has been true in all times and all places. No one taxes slaves or beggars. You simply cannot be considered a citizen in a modern society unless you pay taxes and you can’t have non optimo jure cives in a modern society so everyone pays something.

Conclusion

As you can see, I’m amenable to estate taxes because they are transparent, simple and fall predominantly on the rich. The trouble here is the pols can easily auction off exceptions and loopholes. Warren Buffet has been preying on family business for decades, mainly due to the inheritance tax and the many loopholes created in the tax code.

Otherwise, I’m open to any tax scheme that is clear, simple and difficult to corrupt. Government is not free so we have to pay taxes. Taxing food, children, dead people, kittens or whatever is not a moral issue, it is a math issue for me, just as long as the tax is clear, simple, applied to everyone and most important, pays for all of government today.

I’ve called a lot of people “dick head” in my life. I’ve certainly called a few of them “dick face” when required. Australians have elected Dick Face to local office. There’s a whole genre of pornography on this theme that we can skip. Now, there’s a treatment for aging that, well, takes the term “dick face” in an entirely different direction.

What is the secret to a smooth, younger-looking complexion?

Foreskin, apparently. Baby foreskin to be exact.

The anti-aging industry is a billion dollar one, and both men and women will try just about anything to get a youthful appearance.

Better known as a HydraFacialMD, the treatment claims to be highly effective at improving overall skin health and remedying fine lines and wrinkles, skin texture and advanced signs of aging — among other things.

Dr. Gail Naughton, who developed the technology, told NY Magazine, “As we age, our cells divide at a slower rate, which contribute to the telltale signs of aging, like wrinkles and loss of firmness and luminosity. Growth factors captured from the donated foreskin of a baby (just one can generate over a million treatments) are at their peak ability in promoting rapid cell turnover. Applied topically, they spur adult skin cells to regenerate. This is said to have a smoothing effect on the skin.”

Certain spas and doctors offices offer the foreskin facials in NYC.

Some who’ve tried it rave about the results.

Ashley Weatherford, Associate Beauty Editor for NY Mag, tried the facial and said it gave her “Beyonce-level confidence.”

“Of course when it comes to facials, the proof is in the mirror. My skin glows in a way that I thought only Jennifer Lopez could glow,” Weatherford wrote.

“And a part of me feels like a Disney evil queen, draining youth from a newborn for a few weeks of a restored complexion. Is this the future of facials? And if so, is it wrong that I want more?”

Would you try the HydraFacialMD? Let us know in the comments below and on Facebook.

This is why satirists are a dying breed.

My office manager is a communist. She’s not a young nitwit with a head full of nonsense. She is an old women who grew up wishing her parents were communists. From what I can gather, she has signed up for every crackpot scheme to bubble forth from the Cult of Modern Liberalism since her glory days as a teenager.

Whenever we discuss politics, which is something I try to avoid, her preferred solution is for the men with guns to impose a uniform solution on all of us. The phrase “single payer” pops out of her mouth anytime health care is mentioned. She has Moonbat Tourette’s.

Today we were talking about current events and the subject of immigration came up, regarding the lower classes. We were having some moving done and the crew that showed up was mostly Hispanic, with a few blacks. The guy running the show was Eastern European. My guess is he hits one of the many open air labor markets for day labor. The moving business is a tough way to make a living so Sergei can’t worry about the niceties of the current labor laws. He needs cheap labor.

I fully admit to being a bit torn on the issue of immigration. My grandparents were immigrants. Even though I now “identify” as African American on government forms, my genome says my people come from Eurasia. They fled the Bolsheviks and set up shop in America.

I kind of dig the fact that my country welcomes those who can’t seem to get along with the folks back in the old country. I love thinking about what the rest of the world thinks when all those mutts wrapped in Old Glory march into the Olympic stadium. You just know a lot of them are thinking, “I wish that was me.”

In my mind, I see that as a big old middle finger to the rest of the world. I get that from my grandfather. He was never a rich man, but he loved the “fuck you” side of being an American. He came here, learned perfect English and made a life for himself as an American. As far as he was concerned, the folks back in the old country were losers.

That bit of sentimentality is not intended to get your patriotism up. I’m just stating my bias. I have an unreasonable bias toward immigrants, at least the ones trying to be Americans. But, that only works if citizenship has any value. If anyone can wander over the border and get all the same rights and privileges as me, the citizenship has no value. Further, my loyalty to my country evaporates.

Anyway, that’s where I come from on immigration issue. Talking with my commie office manager, I was surprised at how strongly she is opposed to immigration. Her reasoning is that it hurts blacks and poor whites. I get the sense she is new to the subject, at least this side of the topic. She’s up on all the latest Progressive trends so I doubt she has arrived at this position independently. She’s getting this from somewhere.

The other thing she said is that immigration is a tool for corporations to exploit the middle-class. She is a big Elizabeth Warren fans so I suspect all of these new opinions from my office manager are coming from the Fake Indian side of the fever swamp. Warren has voted in line with her party on immigration, but I don’t recall her saying much about it.

Warren’s faculty lounge populism mostly appeals to credentialed Progressives who resent not making more money. A rich white woman standing on the steps of her mansion, ranting about the rich strikes normal people are laughably absurd. I think Progressives understand that this brand of populism has a small audience so they are looking to expand into other areas.

The idiots in the GOP may be focused on winning Hispanic votes, but the Progressives know better. They need to get white people voting for them again and an easy way to do that is the immigration card. They can even pitch immigration restrictions as a way to help immigrants, thus avoiding the charge of xenophobia.

There’s always been a Star-Bellied Sneetch quality to American Progressives. By that I mean they get revved up on a fad and it eventually fades, to be replaced by a new fad that often contradicts the old fad. In that regard, liberals are like teenage girls. In order to distinguish themselves from the Old New New Left of the Obama years, the New New New Left is embracing immigration restriction.

The polling on the issue makes clear that a hawkish position on immigration is the safe one and that may be what’s happening here. As both parties gear up for 2016, they are figuring out that the mood of the public is running away from them so they need to catch up. Whether or not the people in charge will follow on is unknown, but we may be seeing a paradigm shift over the next 18 months on the issue of immigration.

Or, my office manager will be burned at the stake by her coven for the crime of apostasy.

I saw this linked on Drudge:

A former SS sergeant described how so many Jews were brought to the Auschwitz death camp at once that he was put on a 24-hour shift guarding the ramp where they disembarked from the trains.

He told in chilling detail how cattle cars full of Jews were brought to the Auschwitz death camp, the people stripped of their belongings and then most led directly into gas chambers.

Oskar Groening is being tried on 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, related to a period between May and July 1944 when around 425,000 Jews from Hungary were brought to the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in Nazi-occupied Poland and most immediately gassed to death.

During that period, so many trains were arriving that often two would have to wait with closed doors as the first was ‘processed,’ Groening testified at the Lueneburg state court.

‘The capacity of the gas chambers and the capacity of the crematoria were quite limited. Someone said that 5,000 people were processed in 24 hours but I didn’t verify this. I didn’t know,’ he said. ‘For the sake of order we waited until train 1 was entirely processed and finished.’

Auschwitz survivors describe their arrival as chaotic, with Nazi guards yelling orders, dogs barking and families being ripped apart.

But Groening, 93, maintained the opposite, saying ‘it was very orderly and not as strenuous’ on the ramp at Birkenau.

‘The process was the same as Auschwitz I. The only difference was that there were no trucks,’ he said during the second day of his trial. ‘They all walked – some in one direction some, in another direction… to where the crematoria and gas chambers were.’

I think there was a strong case for hanging the Nazi leadership after the war. That’s an easy one. Similarly, hanging the really nasty officers who committed atrocities was a good idea. After that I just don’t see the sense in these trials in the aftermath of the war. Hanging people who took orders strikes me as contrary to western tradition. You hang the man giving the orders, not the man following them.

Seventy years on, none of this makes any sense to me. This old guy is 93. What do they expect to come of this? He’s going to croak any day now. These trials are nothing more than guilt porn. They have nothing to with justice, they never do, and they sure don’t have anything to do with vengeance. The guy is 93.

I guess we will have to wait for the final Nazi to die in the next few years. There are only a few thousand left, if that many. The Nazis, in my view, cast way too long of a shadow. Marx is arguably history’s greatest monster. At least 100 million were murdered in that prick’s name. Hitler was a piker compared to the Reds, but Western Progressives see too much of themselves in the Nazis. Maybe when the last Nazi dies, the Cult will be free.