It looks like a standard collegiate prelude to a one-night stand. But there will be no kissing, no fondling, and definitely no Saturday morning walk of shame. Sean and Rae do not have the hots for each other—or anyone else, for that matter. In fact, they’re here hanging out at the campus outreach center, a haven for all who question their sexuality and gender identity, because they’re exploring an unconventional idea: life without sex. Or mostly without sex. They’re pioneers of an emerging sexual identity, one with its own nomenclature and subcategories of romance and desire, all revolving around the novel concept that having little to no interest in sex is itself a valid sexual orientation. Rae tells me she’s an aromantic asexual, Sean identifies as a heteroromantic demisexual, and Genevieve sees herself as a panromantic gray-asexual.

Not sure what these terms mean? You’re not alone. The definitions are still in flux, but most people who describe themselves as demisexual say they only rarely feel desire, and only in the context of a close relationship. Gray-­asexuals (or gray-aces) roam the gray area between absolute asexuality and a more typical level of interest. Then there are the host of qualifiers that describe how much romantic attraction you might feel toward other people: Genevieve says she could theoretically develop a nonsexual crush on just about any type of person, so she is “panromantic”; Sean is drawn to women, so he calls himself “heteroromantic.”

One of the striking things about the Left is just how much they model their tactics on those they swore Nixon used against them back in the last Great Liberal Awakening. Even forty years ago, when the Left was in a panic over Tricky Dick, their charges sounded more like a revenge fantasy than plausible reality. By that, I mean they were accusing Nixon of what they would do if only they were in his position.

A good recent example is Obama’s “Executive Amnesty” that was just blocked by the courts. This is reminiscent of Nixon’s use of impoundment, the power of the executive to not spend appropriated funds. In theory it gives the executive the opportunity to reign in nutty ideas funded by Congress. In practice, it was simply a way for a president to block spending on something he did not want.

The paranoia of the Left about Nixon, the imaginary one not the real one, led to the Impoundment Act of 1974. This stripped the power from the executive. Like most of what the Left claimed about Nixon, they imagined he was doing what they would do if they had the chance. In reality, Nixon’s use of impoundment was trivial.

The Left claimed Nixon was trying to be an emperor, which is always a concern in our form of government. There’s a balance between the executive, legislative and judicial. Giving the president too much power runs the risk of sublimating the other two branches to the whims of a temporary dictator. A degree of paranoia about what the executive is doing or planning is probably healthy.

Of course, no such paranoia exists now because Obama is the leader of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. The Führerprinzip has always been very strong with American Progressives. Just look at how they rallied to defend Bill Clinton, despite knowing he violated holy writ. With Obama, it is off the charts because they truly think he is Chocolate Jesus. There’s nothing the man could do to shake their faith in The One. Naturally, they are defending his lawless amnesty to the last man.

Yesterday I got home and flipped on the news. A Greg Gutfeld show was on and one of the people on the set with him was repeating the old line about Obama’s amnesty relying on the precedent of Reagan. It is nonsense and a lie, but the Cult believes it so they keep chanting it nonetheless. The striking thing about what the woman was saying is just how much it reminded me of the Nixon years. Nixon was no Boy Scout and he often justified his actions by comparing them to past liberal presidents. This tactic sent the Left into a frenzy. He was trolling them, in a way.

Here we are forty years later and the Cult is doing all the things Nixon did, plus the things they imagined Nixon wanted to do , but never got around to doing. The IRS scandal is a good example of how Obama is making Nixon look like a piker. Having the DOJ harass reporters as Obama has done would have led to massive protests in the 1970’s, championed by every news organization in the country. Today they defend it because it is their cult and that’s how cults work.

This amnesty stuff is more striking in that it gets to the heart of the liberal brief against Nixon. That is, an Imperial President inevitably leads to an Emperor. It was not what Nixon did that warranted removal; it was what he could do that warranted removal. The justification for pushing through The Impoundment Act was that Nixon, in the midst of Watergate, could not be trusted with that power.

Fast forward forty years and we have Obama claiming he can re-interpret laws in ways that clearly contradict the letter of the law. In this case, he says can direct federal agencies to not enforce certain criminal statutes and direct other agencies to ignore certain legal requirements. There’s no discussion of a limiting principle, which means there is no boundary to this authority. Logically, what they are claiming is the president could stop the FBI from arresting bank robbers and order prosecutors to drop all their criminal cases. In short, he can re-write the laws as he sees fit.

Interestingly, someone in the administration sees the problem and the risk of such an approach. If you read the judges ruling, it appears Obama never actually signed an executive order, which is a legally recognized document. Instead, he ordered DHS to issue a memorandum. The judge wrote that “both sides agree that the president in his official capacity has not directly instituted any program at issue in this case.”

Later he writes, “Regardless of the fact that the Executive Branch has made public statements to the contrary, there are no executive orders or other presidential proclamations or communiqué that exist regarding DAPA. The DAPA memorandum issued by Secretary Johnson is the focus in this suit.”

This is something even Nixon, the imaginary one concocted by the Left, was never able to conjure. Here we have the president saying he has issued an order, when in fact he did not. Of course, the reason for lying to the public is to deceive, something Tricky Dick was accused of in the Articles of Impeachment drawn up by Congress. Not actually issuing the executive order is an obvious attempt to shield the president from legal jeopardy. Again, that’s a degree of slipperiness Nixon could not imagine.

I’m an old man and that means I get cranky when the kids walk on my lawn, if I had a lawn. Like all old people, I was young once. That’s what gives old farts an edge over young pups. We remember what it was like to be them, but they have no way of knowing what it is like to be us. That, alas, is the only benefit of being old. Well, that and the willingness to say things in public that you’re afraid to say when you’re young. Otherwise, I fully admit to agreeing with W.C. Fields when it comes to young people.

I’m exaggerating a bit, but the tyranny of youth culture has gotten out of hand. Mark Steyn has commented for years that male leads are getting younger and more feminine. If I recall, he used the example of William Shatner playing Kirk in the original Star Trek series. Shatner was in his 30’s and playing a role as a middle-aged man. The current Star Trek movies feature boys in their 20’s playing boys in their 20’s inexplicably given command of a starship.

I’m not a big consumer of pop culture and maybe that’s why. Once I reached 30, everyone in music, TV and movies started looking young and silly to me. Even so, pop culture has always been juvenile and repetitive. The Honeymooners, for example, has been a standard template for TV for as long as I’ve been alive. I Love Lucy has been the template for couple-based sitcoms for fifty years now. Eventually, it gets boring for adults so it is left for kids, who are seeing it all for the first time.

That’s no what this post is about, however. The whole youth culture thing is now invading public affairs. The rulers feel it necessary to have bimbos as spokeswomen. Public affairs programming is beginning to look like the cafeteria at your local college. Rather than crabby old guys and gals with years of experience talking about the news, we have hot looking airheads repeating what they heard from some other hot looking airhead.

It’s not just TV news either. The reason for this post is something I saw on National Review the other day. If you look at the picture of the writer, it’s clear he is a child. He looks like he should be organizing the fraternity keg party this weekend, not offering opinions on the Federal Reserve. As an adult, I have no reason to care what this young fellow has to say about anything so why in the world is he offered up as an expert?

So that I don’t sound like a terrible meanie, I’m sure Jon Hartley is a fine young man with a world of promise. His resume says he graduated from U. Chicago with a degree in economics. He held jobs doing statistical work in public and private firms. He would make a great intern at a big bank or possibly a PhD candidate at a university. He’s clearly ambitious and one of his ambitions is to be famous. All of that is wonderful and I wish him the best.

Regardless, he is unqualified to write opinions about current affairs. That pipe I talked about the other day is already packed full of nonsense. The tiny capillaries that remain open to the transmission of sensible information cannot be clogged with the musings of children hoping to be famous one day. Surely there are seasoned adults with knowledge acquired through experience willing to write for these sites. if not and all we are left with is the tyranny of baffled young people it’s time to consider disbanding and going our separate ways.

At the start of the industrial revolution, lots of people got rich by getting around existing rules that governed other the world. That’s the nature of technology. The guy who invented the first plow found a way to get around the limitations of the hoe. The next guy who added a draft animal to the mix got around the limits of the human body. The Industrial Revolution, at the simplest level, was the application of science to the physical limits of the human being.

That’s the romantic view. The more realistic view is that great technological leaps are accompanied by, and maybe spurred by, a desire to get around laws, customs and moral codes. Web development in the 1990’s, for instance, was driven by the pornography business. The technology to display images and video on-line was primarily due to pornographers. Jeff Bezos became a billionaire avoiding sales taxes by selling on-line and gaming local tax laws. Uber right now is gaming the laws to undermine taxi cartels.

The push for open borders by Silicon Valley, for example, is about getting around labor laws and nothing more. Mark Zuckerburglar loves the idea of paying the rates they pay in Tamil Nadu India for technical work. He just hates the idea of having to go to Tamil Nadu India to get them. Instead, he would like to import those people to live in camps here and work at rates otherwise against the law here. He’s even willing to let them use indoor toilets, thus showing he is a warm and generous man!

The Robber Barons can’t put it that way so they lie about shortages of labor in their industry. Here’s a good example.

President Obama’s legislation on immigration has been one of the most hotly contested political reforms for a generation. The Immigration Order, along with Ron Paul’s subsequent bill attempting to overturn the reform, put immigration firmly at the forefront of the political agenda.

The outcry in the US reflects a similar sentiment sweeping across Europe. The rise of numerous right wing parties of varying extremes across European countries has led to immigration being actively curtailed. Anti-EU sentiment also is fueling a desire for homegrown talent in business in this highly charged atmosphere.

You see what’s happening? Those who oppose mass immigration are Nazis. They are bad people that can be dismissed, or worse, because they are not really human. They are extremists!

However, as arguments on both sides escalate, the technology sector has emerged as one of the few voices of reason. Digital companies are used to operating globally, and innovation is driven by attracting and retaining the best talent from around the world.

In San Francisco, the battle for talent has seen tech companies doing everything they can to win the best recruits. Hairdressers, free food and doctors are all expected as competition continues to soar. The distance between this environment and the national debate around restricting immigration is extraordinary.

The “everything they can” also includes colluding with one another to depress wages and prevent employees from jumping companies. For people allegedly trying everything to attract talent, they seem oddly willing to engage in what should result in lengthy prison terms in order to not attract talent.

The fact is there’s no shortage of technology workers in America or Europe. There’s a shortage of owners willing to abide by the laws and pay market rates. Instead they seek to game the system to enrich themselves at the expense of their countrymen. It’s a form of colonialism, except this time the colonists are exploiting their own ethnic group. I’d call it feudalism, except feudal lords provided a service in exchange for food rents.

The argument from libertarians in these matters is that the market will sort it all out. Tyler Cowen’s flunky always says it is unfair to punish people because of the accident of birth. National borders are immoral. That’s insane, but let’s think it through. No borders means no country. No country means no citizens and that means no government, at least no legitimate government. Order will simply be imposed by those with force to do so.

In such a world, the entire economics department of George Mason would be on a chain gang somewhere as chattel labor in a few weeks after the new system is in place.

The hard cold truth is that much of the tech sector is just another ruling class scam these days. Credentialed grifters get a license from the state to rip-off the public. The costs are socialized so they are not as obvious, while the profits are privatized. Flooding the country with cheap labor from abroad, living here as indentured servants, has a cost. Silicon Valley thinks you should bear that cost so they can enjoy the profits.

I’m old enough to remember a time when the average home had three TV channels and a few radio stations. Some people had more than one newspaper, but in many towns it was one paper with maybe multiple editions through the day. I grew up in a house with two TV channels, which is why I never developed the TV habit. My father would come home with the newspaper, which he read after dinner. He was a working man so he read the evening paper. Salary men read the morning paper.

The point here is that it was not that long ago when mass media was a narrow pipe allowing for few voices. In order to get on TV, you had a long apprenticeship. That meant most of lunatics were weeded out before they got in front of a camera. Newspaper columnists spent years covering local stories, writing obituaries and following cops around town reporting on crime stories. Getting a column was a big deal and reserved for middle-aged men who could be trusted to keep it between the ditches, even if they drank at breakfast.

The communications revolution has made the pipe infinity larger. So much so that anyone with a little initiative can reach a broad audience. The trouble is the number of responsible, sensible people is fixed. That means the pipe is now full of nuts and morons hooting and bellowing at us, drowning out the few intelligent voices. The megaphone is now in the hands of the dumbest members of society. Here’s a good example.

The video is horrific. Madison, Alabama police officer Eric Parker slammed Sureshbhai Patel into the ground hard enough to paralyze him. There was a time when lynchings were carried out by mobs. Now, we have created a much more formal process of carrying out violence against oppressed and marginalized people. Badges and uniforms are handed out so that those we place in authority can intimidate and repress those that we think are less worthy of life. The temptation is to say that Eric Parker is an animal and dismiss the entire situation. The truth is that Eric Parker was simply doing what we paid him to do.

The dirty secret about the attack on Sureshbhai Patel is that a homeowner called in and reported him as, “…a skinny black guy, he’s got a toboggan on, he’s really skinny.” There was also an ominous report that he was getting close to a garage. The police showed up quickly for “a skinny black guy” in a white neighborhood close to a garage. These are racist thoughts perpetuated in white neighborhoods around our nation every day. The police first thought they were going after a black man.

Upon arrival, Officer Parker realized Patel did not speak English. Instead of having patience, Officer Parker grew more aggressive. How many times does this same situation play out over and over again throughout our nation? People who are unable to understand and speak English are treated like shit. What makes us think that our language is superior to every other language on earth? The truth of the matter is that the only language that our whole nation is fluent in is the language of violence and oppression. Officer Parker simply played out the way that we treat immigrants all the time…we push them around, treat them with suspicion and tell them to go home. What began as racism, turned into xenophobia and ended up in a crime of hate.

Ever since I heard about the story, I have not stopped praying for Sureshbhai Patel. When I told a religious friend of mine how concerned I was about this story, I was chastised, “If he is Hindu, then you need to first and foremost pray for his salvation.” Who the hell is going to pray for our salvation? We are an evil, intolerant and oppressive people in desperate need of an antidote. The first step of recovery is admitting you have a problem. For the love of God, can we please stop and admit that we need help?

The Huffington Post is pretty much just a platform for lunatics like the person who wrote the above report. If you actually click through the links to the news reports, you learn that this is a case of a gung-ho cop in a small town, something all of us have encountered at least once. The town quickly suspended the cop and is charging him with assault. It’s a shame this old man got hurt, but these sorts of things are bound to happen in a big country with 300 million people.

To a mentally disturbed person, this is something more sinister. If you run “Reverend Jeff Hood” through the google machine you quickly learn he is a crazy person. He’s probably harmless, but giving him a platform to broadcast his brand of crazy is irresponsible. When you’re trying to fill that huge pipe with content, however, you quickly run out of sane people and have no choice but to dip into the lunatic bucket.

There’s no mechanism in modern societies to deal with this phenomenon. Maybe people just ignore it all, but I doubt it. The downward drift of public discourse in the last three decades suggests the coarsening is proportional to the size of the pipe. The above story was on the front page of Yahoo today, which is why I noticed it. Some number of sensible people will read that nonsense and think it is legitimate.

It’s getting harder and harder for me to remain a sunny optimist.

Maureen Dowd has a column up that will surely raise some eyebrows in the sycophant wing of the American press corp. Dowd’s act is getting a little stale as she has reached the point where men no longer find her attractive. Women can carry off the coquette act into middle age, but then it starts to get a bit creepy. She has managed to carry it off into late middle age by mostly staying off TV. That way she can pretend to look like her head shot from twenty years ago. Her brand of snark is part southern matron, part campus feminist and part progressive toady.

It takes real talent to pull off, but not a dazzling IQ, which is why she has always stuck with the cheap shots and barbs. She was also smart to play the right side of the street. By staying in the liberal camp and shooting out, she always had plenty of defenders. Like it or not, America is a liberal country with a ruling class firmly committed to the progressive faith. Dowd built a career polishing the liberal totems and mocking the Left’s enemies, real and imagined.

That’s why her column is interesting. It’s a shot at the Clintons dressed up as a hit piece on David Brock.

I’LL pay for this column.

The Rottweilers will be unleashed.

Once the Clintons had a War Room. Now they have a Slime Room.

Once they had the sly James Carville, fondly known as “serpenthead.” Now they have the slippery David Brock, accurately known as a snake.

Brock fits into the Clinton tradition of opportunistic knife-fighters like Dick Morris and Mark Penn.

The silver-haired 52-year-old, who sports colorful designer suits and once wore a monocle, brawled his way into a Times article about the uneasy marriage between Hillary Clinton’s veteran attack dogs and the group of advisers who are moving over from Obamaland.

Hillary hasn’t announced a 2016 campaign yet. She’s busy polling more than 200 policy experts on how to show that she really cares about the poor while courting the banks. Yet her shadow campaign is already in a déjà-vu-all-over-again shark fight over control of the candidate and her money. It’s the same old story: The killer organization that, even with all its ruthless hired guns, can’t quite shoot straight.

Squabbling competing factions helped Hillary squander a quarter-of-a-billion dollars in 2008.

As Nicholas Confessore and Amy Chozick chronicled, the nasty dispute spilled into public and Brock resigned last week from the board of a pro-Clinton “super-PAC” called Priorities USA Action — whose co-chairman is Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager — accusing the political action committee of “an orchestrated political hit job” and “the kind of dirty trick I’ve witnessed in the right-wing and would not tolerate then.”

He should know.

The fever swamp types have never forgiven the Clintons for the 1990’s. They got some revenge in 2008 when they rallied to Obama and carried him to victory over Hillary. But, there’s a reason the Roman Emperors usually killed off their political enemies. The Clintons will not go away and now their crowd is threatening to take over the party again. The Left would love to find an alternative to Hillary, but Fake Indian is unlikely to run and the other options all have the wrong skin color and genitalia.

Still, the Left can’t embrace Hillary and that’s what this Dowd column shows. The irony here is that she was a Clinton toady for eight years. Dowd has always been nimble about avoiding intra-cult politics that have condemned others to non-personhood. Juan Williams is still in counseling over his excommunication. Maybe she is just losing her touch or maybe the fanatics in the cult are organizing a stop Hillary movement. I don’t know, but I do know stories like this one are not coming from the vast right-wing conspiracy.

When reading about the Julio-Claudian dynasty, I’m always struck by the juxtaposition of Nero and Augustus. Nero seems to have hated the very idea of Rome and everything associated with it. Every description of his time as emperor brings to mind someone obsessed with debasing everything around him, including his own position. Shocking the sensibilities of the nobles and offending the people appears to be all that mattered to him.

Augustus, it seems to me, loved the idea of Rome. For instance, he carried on many of the Republican traditions, despite the fact he was the emperor. There was certainly a political motive to pretending the old system was still in place, but he had to have a fair amount of respect for the idea of Rome to see the value in maintaining the customs. Of course, Suetonius claims he said, “I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.” That’s the mind of man in love with his city and what it represents.

I’m surely over simplifying, but this is not a post about Rome. I just find Roman history a great starting place when trying to noodle through events of today. One thousand years of history provides a lot of useful examples and lessons. Add in some of the great historians and chroniclers and you get a great source of material for a blog post by a random idiot.

Anyway, I was thinking about that when reading this the other day.

Margaret Thatcher famously said that her greatest success as a politician was the rise of Tony Blair to lead a party he called New Labour: “We forced our opponents to change their minds.” As yet, Barack Obama can make no similar boast. Just the opposite: He radicalized his Republican opponents, and empowered most those who agreed with him least. With the presidential campaign of Jeb Bush, Obama can finally glimpse Thatcher-style success. Here, at last, is an opponent in his own image.

What can the son and brother of a president, grandson of a senator, and great grandson of the founder of the Walker Cup have in common with the son of a failed Kenyan politician? Look beyond the biography to the psychology.

The first part is nonsense on stilts, but this is David Frum and most of what he says is nonsense. He does have solid connections to the neo-conservatives so it is often worth weeding through the nonsense to learn what’s going on with the Cult of Leo Strauss. The last bit is what got my attention. Obama is a bitter weirdo whose presidency looks like a revenge fantasy from someone with a deep antipathy for America. Making this comparison to Jeb Bush is no small thing.

This bit he quotes from Bush is stunning to me:

I’m bicultural—maybe that’s more important than bilingual. For those who have those kinds of marriages, appreciating the culture of your spouse is the most powerful part of the relationship. Being able to share that culture and live in it has been one of the great joys of my life. We chose Miami to live because it is a bicultural city. It’s as American as any, but it has a flair to it that is related to this bicultural feeling. I wanted my children to grow up in a bicultural way.

You cannot be bicultural. To quote my ancestors, a man who chases two rabbits catches none. You can be an American with an appreciation of or even a fondness for another culture. You can be a Mexican with an appreciation of America. On the other hand, you can be an American who moves to another land and adopts the culture of that land, just as millions of Mexicans have adopted American culture. You cannot be on both sides of the fence. Claims as such suggest to me that Jeb Bush really does not like America all that much.

As Jeb Bush himself notes, there is a Bush family tradition of moving away from the culture into which one is born, to plunge into another. George H.W. Bush, born to a family of Northeastern grandees, reinvented himself as Sunbelt conservative. George W. Bush, born in New Haven, Connecticut, was the only member of the next generation of Bush brothers not born in Texas, and yet became the most Texan of them all. Jeb Bush moved away first from Texas, and then from his family’s patrician identity as White Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

By itself, this can be easily seen as a tick of successful families. The sons want to distinguish themselves from the father so they go another way. It’s one thing for one son to embrace the earthy side of the family. It is quite another for the other son to go so far as to embrace another country’s culture entirely.

Bush seems to have something more in mind than just the familiar (if overstated) claim that immigration can counter the aging of the population. He seems to think that there is some quality in the immigrants themselves that is more enterprising—more dynamic to use his favorite term—than native-born Americans. This is not only a positive judgment on the immigrants themselves. It is also a negative judgment on native-born Americans.

I used to wonder how anyone could think it wise to put a guy like Obama in the White House. You have a better chance of getting struck by lightning and hitting the lottery on the same day than meeting a man with Obama’s bio. He is the very definition of un-American. At least his supporters could claim he embraced America and loved his countryman. It’s an implausible claim, but not an impossible one.

Jeb Bush hates his country and his countrymen. That’s clear in all of his utterances. Putting this man in the White House is akin to handing the purple to Nero, after knowing what Nero intended to do as emperor. At least the Romans had the fall back policy of assassinating their intolerable leaders. We have to hope there’s a Sirhan Sirhan out there and he is able to slip past the Praetorian Guard. That’s not much of a fall back plan.

It’s also no way for a sane people to manage their affairs. I’m not prone to doomsday thoughts, but this may be the critical moment in the history of the nation. If this self-loathing lunatic is put in the White House, the country is finished. Even if the people rise up and stymie this guy’s drive to gut the country, the consequences of that will be almost as bad. The senate murdering Julius Caesar may have stopped Julius Caesar, but it also put an end to the Republic.

Nero Bush must be stopped.

For a while now, I’ve been wondering what replaces football in America as the acceptable male sport. Baseball remains popular, despite howling to the contrary, but it is not a tough guy sport. Little boys need a sport where they can get all that aggression out of their system. Football has served that purpose in most of the country. In the Northeast and upper Midwest, hockey has been the tough guy sport for boys. In some areas like the Midwest, wrestling is popular. In the inner city, boxing used to be the thing.

Football is under assault by the Cult for a number of reasons. One is it is overly masculine. The other is it is too racial. They have tried hard to create great black quarterbacks, but so far it has come up empty. On the other hand, they can’t see to find fast white guys to play receiver and cornerback. Like track, the results reveal uncomfortable truths about people. Of course, there’s also the concussion issue which is probably exaggerated, but serious injury is real and enough to scare off some moms from letting their kids play football.

Football is also too Southern for the Cult. The best college teams are in the South and the best players are in the South. The Cult hates the South. That means another sport is needed to fill the need for boys. I’ve been leaning toward hockey filling that role. The reason is the “hockey mom” phenomenon. I know a lot of single mothers who put their kids into hockey. In the Mid-Atlantic, youth hockey is doing very well. Still, it is a cold weather sport and that makes it impractical for most of the country.

Anyway, watching the USA Sevens today – USA ties South Africa! – it occurred to me that this could be the next “soccer” for the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Like football, it is a tough guy sport. You can’t play rugby unless you have some courage. But, you’re unlikely to get your brains scrambled like in football. Heads clash, for sure, but not with the ferocity of football. The added bonus is it is easy to understand so single moms can stand on the sidelines and cheer.

The big bonus, I think, is it is a sport white kids can play. Speed, strength and size matter, but it is not a running and jumping sport like basketball or football. Cooperation and discipline probably count for more than anything in rugby. The game moves quickly and there’s a lot of action. The bigger bonus is the snob factor. Rugby is a sport played by gentleman, unlike soccer, which is played by criminals and deviants. Given that rugby is getting on TV I suspect that it may become the next big thing in America.

It seems to me that the doom and gloom crowd is increasingly unhinged. I wish I had a nickel for every “death cross” posted on Zero Hedge in the last year. They post negative economic reports like we are about to succumb to the zombie apocalypse. Don’t get me wrong, I like ZH and I get a kick out of their posts, but there’s a line between pessimism and lunacy and they seem to cross it a lot lately. Karl Denninger is following the same path. He posted this the other day.

Ok, now this is a pretty nasty report...

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for January, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $439.8 billion, a decrease of 0.8 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month, but up 3.3 percent (±0.9%) above January 2014. Total sales for the November 2014 through January 2015 period were up 3.8 percent (±0.7%) from the same period a year ago. The November to December 2014 percent change was unrevised from -0.9 percent (±0.3%).

Yuck.

What’s worse is the unadjusted numbers.  Keep in mind that there’s this holiday called Christmas in December, but….

Retail, total, was down about 21% unadjusted.  But what’s worse is the lie in the above caption — previous-year comparisons.  The unadjusted January figures were up only 2.85% from January 2014, and if you exclude cars it was only up 1.41%.  Incidentally, ex-autos sales were down 24% sequentially.

You don’t need a seasonal adjustment for the same month in different years!

There was one bright light — gasoline, which was down big (24%).  But the claim that this drop in gas price would translate inexorably to other purchases appears to be flat-out wrong.  Instead, consumers are paying down debt and reducing their leverage — except on cars.

One final interesting point — non-store retailers were only up 2.57% from last January.  It appears that the “internet shopping craze” has finished its large growth numbers; this has an interesting set of implications for everyone selling and marketing on the Internet, particularly Spamazon.

PS: People are getting drunk more — to the tune of 13.1% more over last January.  Gee, I wonder if the lies are finally getting to ordinary folks……

Month to month changes in retail sales may be of importance to a retailer trying to pay his rent. In macro economics, no one really cares about it since holidays and seasonality play such a big part in retail. Restaurants and flower shops do better in February than January for obvious reasons. What matters is year over year. January 2015 was better than January 2014. But, Karl and his cult can have none of that so they focus on the month to month figure, which is meaningless.

As far as his comment about adjusted numbers, that’s nonsense. Lots of retail is done on weekends. If you gain a weekend day or lose a weekend day, it can make a big difference. The government plays games with the numbers so a certain amount of skepticism is warranted with regard to adjusted numbers. that does not mean all normalization of data is a fraud.

It is about ten degrees today, at least it was, so everyone is bundled up as if they are stationed at the Arctic Circle. I come out onto the street and I’m greeted by a big talking garbage bag. It has legs and I see a set of eye peering out at me. Two little boys are tagging along and the bag is speaking to them in Arabic. Such is life in the ghetto. it is where you get to see the business end of ruling class social experiments.

Muslim women walking on the street in the niqab or the burka are not just following a custom. It is a statement. In Muslim lands the point of the outfit is to warn off other males. It is a form of modesty and it is a warning. These women belong to men not you and you better keep that in mind. In America, the outfit is to let you know that the Muslims are taking over this turf and you better get used to it.

Islam does not play well with others, but Arabs don’t play well with others either. It is a toxic mix that has left the Middle East a hyper-violent, chaotic jungle in the desert. When Muslims move out of their homelands into other lands, they first work to displace the locals and then they inflict their customs and religion on whoever is left. Hamtramck Michigan is a good example. The US government probably plans to put the Yemeni refugees they keep recruiting in Hamtramck.

Sally Howell, a professor in the University Michigan system, has written extensively about Muslims in America. One of her themes is how Muslim immigrants can bring down crime in a city. She points to Hamtramck as an example. What she does not mention, and what never gets mentioned, is how this happens. Of course, we all know the answer to that, it’s just not proper to say it in public. It’s that old mokita again.

In the Imperial Capital, population displacement became the tool for urban renewal. The Washington Post ran articles about how the Hispanic immigrants were lowering crime rates. It was always the same gooey nonsense you get from immigration romantics, but that was just frosting. The message being sent to readership was that the immigrants were not adding, they were replacing. MS-13 tends to take a dim view of the locals. A rash of machete attacks sent the message. Washington is no longer an urban jungle.

Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out how Section 8 is used to clear out undesirables from urban areas the Cult wants to reclaim. They move the problem to some unsuspecting suburb and then move in gays and hipsters to spruce of the former ghetto. It’s a form of ethnic cleansing. Instead of shooting the unwanted population, they bribe them to leave. Hell’s Kitchen, for example, has become Hell’s Breakfast Nook.

Immigration serves a similar role for the people in charge. Chicago and Baltimore, for example, have been desperately trying to attract Hispanics to “clean up” their cities. The problem is the violence is too frightening even for Mexicans, who know a thing or two about violence. Muslims may turn out to be their solution. Baltimore looks pretty good compared to Sana’a.

With Jeb Bush the most likely president, you can be sure he will import millions of Muslims from the countries his family screwed up a decade ago. There’s more than enough displaced Muslims in the Near East now to fill up a couple of America cities so he’ll have plenty of support from the Democrats. His own party just wants Hindu and Chinese slaves for Silicon Valley and Hispanic slaves for the service industry.

Ask not for whom the talking trash bag ululates. It ululates for you.