For years, I have been stumbling around like a drunk on the deck of a ship. Now thanks to walking expert Wendy Bumgardner, I now can walk like a professional!

Congratulations, you have decided it is time to start walking for health, fitness, and perhaps for weight loss. Walking is a great, natural way to achieve the daily physical activity amount recommended for good health.
We will lead you through a program for absolute beginners, with the goal to have you walking comfortably for 30 minutes to an hour, the level of physical activity recommended to reduce risks of heart disease, type II diabetes, breast cancer and colon cancer.

1. Preparing to walk: what you need to do before you begin a walking program. This includes whether you need to get medical advice before starting a walking program, what to wear for walking, and what kind of shoes to wear.

2. Walking Technique: Next, you will learn a good walking technique with proper posture, use of arms and leg motion.

3. Beginner’s Walking Schedule: how often to walk, how fast and how far to build up to the level of 30-60 minutes per day.

I’ve read tons of books about walking, but Wendy really gets to the point. None of that overly technical stuff.

What should you wear for fitness walking? Your walking clothing should be comfortable and loose-fitting to allow you to move.
Depending on your climate, dress in layers so you may remove a layer as you warm up while walking, and put it back on if you feel cool.

If you do not plan to walk up a sweat, a system can be as simple as a t-shirt, light sweater, and windproof jacket.

If you sweat while walking, you should invest in CoolMax or polypropylene shirts to wick the sweat away from the body.

In cooler climates you may want an insulating layer of polar fleece or wool.

Socks should be comfortable, and the modern running socks made from CoolMax or other high-tech fibers are preferable to cotton, as they prevent blisters by keeping the feet drier. Before You Buy Walking Socks.

A hat is essential to preventing sun exposure or keeping you from losing heat.

Sunglasses for outdoor walking prevent UV exposure for your eyes.

Wear sunscreen.

Carry keys and other articles in pockets or a hip pack. Pack lightly for most walks and leave the heavy purse at home.

Carry water if you plan to be walking for a half hour or more with no water on your route. A hip pack with built-in water bottle holder is convenient.

OK, enough of that. Let’s jump right to the hard stuff.

The walking step is a rolling motion.

Strike the ground first with your heel.

Roll through the step from heel to toe.

Push off with your toe.

Bring the back leg forward to strike again with the heel.

Flexible shoes will ensure you are able to roll through the step.

If your feet are slapping down rather than rolling through the step, your shoes are likely too stiff.

At first, your shin muscles may tire and be sore until they are strengthened.

All these years, I kept trying to walk on my hands. Who knew that you’re supposed to use your feet??!!

Seriously, that’s got to be the dumbest health article ever written.

Over at National Review, where I occasionally post in the comment sections, I’ve taken some flak for pointing out that falling oil prices are not due to market forces and they are not necessarily a good thing. The people who post there tend to be running dog Republicans, worshipping at the alter of capitalism. They think suddenly cheap oil is vindication of their “drill baby, drill” chants from a decade ago.

This post from the Beeb explains one of the down-side effects of an oil glut.

Oil companies and service providers are cutting staff and investment to save money.

Robin Allan, chairman of the independent explorers’ association Brindex, told the BBC that the industry was “close to collapse”.

Almost no new projects in the North Sea are profitable with oil below $60 a barrel, he claims.

“It’s almost impossible to make money at these oil prices”, Mr Allan, who is a director of Premier Oil in addition to chairing Brindex, told the BBC. “It’s a huge crisis.”

“This has happened before, and the industry adapts, but the adaptation is one of slashing people, slashing projects and reducing costs wherever possible, and that’s painful for our staff, painful for companies and painful for the country.

“It’s close to collapse. In terms of new investments – there will be none, everyone is retreating, people are being laid off at most companies this week and in the coming weeks. Budgets for 2015 are being cut by everyone.”

The thing that people don’t understand about the business of digging stuff up and selling it is there are costs. It cost money to set-up an oil well – lots of money. If you can get a million barrels from a well and the cost of extraction is fifty million dollars over the life of the well, you need to sell that oil for $50 a barrel to break even. If you started your project assuming $100 prices and now the prices are $40, your business collapses and the well closes.

Almost all of the new oil sources coming on-line were planned and executed in a world of $60-$70 oil. That was the assumption of the investors. That’s an important piece of the puzzle that no one considers. Every BTU of energy is backed by a debt instrument these days. In fact, those debt instruments are backed by debt instruments.

The debt pyramid in the energy business probably looks like every other asset market. That means bankruptcies in the energy markets ripple through the financial world in the same way that foreclosures in Nevada brought down the housing market.

There’s that and there is the fact the oil glut is about things other than supply and demand. Demand is slightly down of late as the world economy has slowed. That has driven up relative supply. There’s also more supply due to speculators jumping into a hot market the last decade. But, there’s also the financial war with Russia lead by the US and Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis, of course, see this as manna from heaven. They can knock out the Russians who have been a source of mischief to them in the Middle East. A collapsing Russia would take Syria and Iran down, plus open the door for the Saudi pipeline projects.

An oil glut also knocks out North American producers who suddenly face margin calls. No one pumps at a loss so the high cost producers will have to shut down. An extended price slump means they go bankrupt. It also means credit flees the market, making even profitable operations less profitable. The Saudis can weather even $30 oil so this is good for them in the long run.

Cheap energy is always a good thing, but it is not without trade-offs. It’s why our next currency arrangement will probably be pegged to energy. If everything is priced in joules, price stability in the energy markets becomes the default state. Until then, energy is a tool of war and even cheap gas has negative consequences.

Steve Sailer argues that American politics is a battle of the fringe against the core with the Democrats as the party of the fringe. They have built a coalition of blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, single white women and weirdos. That’s their base of support. The math says they get to about 40% support with that collection of voters. The fact that Obama’s support has never dropped far below 40% supports the argument, at least the maths of the argument. Sailer’s latest stab at this is here.

This is not exactly new.  The first flowering of the Progressive faith was in the 19th century following the Civil War and Reconstruction. As the nation industrialized, Progressive ideas gained steam. Labor unions, temperance movements, efficiency movements and, of course, European socialism crept into the minds of those in charge, as well as those who wanted to be in charge. By the 20th century, we had guys like Teddy Roosevelt running around babbling about the “Square Deal” and sounding a lot like Elizabeth Warren.

The First Progressive Era “ended” with Woodrow Wilson and World War I. If you look at the coalition that supported the Progressives a century ago, you see the same fringe versus core dynamic. It was more explicitly populist because the country was mono-cultural. Blacks had few voting rights and women had limited voting rights. The fringe, therefore, was immigrants, Catholics and the newly emerging working class, versus the WASP core. Whipping up votes amongst the Irish in Boston was easier if you took aim at the Brahman in charge.

I put “ended” in quotes in the previous paragraph because it is simply false to say the Progressive Era ended with Wilson. The Return to Normalcy certainly put an end to Wilson’s reign of terror, but the ruling class was still firmly in the grip of the Progressive faith. Harding and Coolidge were restrained in their politics, but Hoover was a Progressive and FDR was obviously a true believer. The One True Faith never really dies. It just goes into hibernation after periods of activity and  dis-confirmation. The atrocities of the Wilson era made “Progressive” a dirty word, but the crisis of 1929 opened the door for a newly minted version of the old time religion.

The New Deal coalition was built on the Wilson coalition of fringe groups, but those fringes were quickly becoming the majority. In the northeast, Catholics were dominating city politics and beginning to control state politics. The New Deal was also a vehicle for Jews to rise to power in politics and finance. Henry Morgenthau made it to ambassador under Wilson, his son was Secretary of the Treasury under FDR. During the Depression, that was the second most important job in America. This iteration of the Progressive coalition was the most stable owing to the fact it was based on stable, sensible people. It’s why it hung together for so long.

Sailer, I suspect, is looking at current events and thinking back to events of his youth. Steve is 55, so he was a kid when the Civil Right movement exploded into riots in the late 60’s. He was a teenager when the LAPD raided a house in his neighborhood looking for Patty Hearst. By the time he was noticing events, the weirdos, lunatics and insane had taken over the New Left and taken over the news coverage. To a man his age, the Ferguson riots and the explosion of crazy in the culture probably looks like a replay of forty years ago.

That’s not unreasonable, but I’m not entirely on-board with it. The New Deal coalition largely collapsed as a result of a resurgence of liberalism in the 1960’s. If you read any of the books by David Horowitz, the thing that’s important is the New Left explicitly rejected the Old Left as well as the New Deal. They thought the old commies from the previous generation were hopelessly lost, with their focus on organizing whites into a universal proletarian state. Similarly, they looked at the New Deal as a bourgeois compromise with the capitalists. The New Left that emerged in the 60’s and 70’s was about identity and culture, not money and property.

Things don’t move quickly in real time. Reading about the transition of the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire, the time between Sulla and Augustus, can be done in an evening, maybe two. In real time it took three generations. The average man alive in the time of the Social War could not possibly know what was coming over the horizon. People know what has happened in their lives and what they inherited from those who came before them. They act on it and build off it. Historians like to create narratives to tie it all together, but the people living it have no knowledge of that narrative.

The New Left in the 60’s and 70’s was simply reacting to the world they inherited. The young radicals that came along after World War II entered a world that was looking pretty good from an American perspective. In order to find the great dispossessed, you had to look beyond the quiet neighborhoods of Eisenhower’s America. You had to go to the black ghettos of northern cities and into the Old Confederacy to find people not happy with the status quo.

It’s not an accident that the current Left looks like a wrinkled, liver-spotted version of the New Left of 40 years ago. The people running the Left these days are mostly people who came of age in the 60’s and 70’s. It’s why this flowering of the old time religion looks so much like the last flowering. It’s also why it is so fragile and combustible. A coalition has to have more in common than an enemy. The members of that coalition are going to want their people in charge. Otherwise, the whole thing unravels with the first bit of adversity.

Those are the parallels Steve is observing, but there are differences as well. The New Left came along when both parties were ruled by men who had no interest in radical politics. The New Left was fighting the cops on the street while the party bosses sat inside. Today, the radicals are the party bosses, at least of one party. Similarly, radicals have command of all the high places in the culture. It’s not an accident that Obama uses a word like “shellacked” and we see a million occurrences of it in the press the following week. This story from the fall shows how insulated and monolithic the press is and that’s because they are all from the same cult.

That’s the fundamental difference between now and forty years ago. Back then the radicals were building a coalition in order to take control of the Democratic Party and then the country. Today, they run the country. The reason Washington looks like a high school cafeteria is because it is an adult version of what these people experienced as kids. The cool kids were the ones smoking weed and freaking out the squares, while the dorks publicly resented the fact they couldn’t join them, but privately wish they could. Those kids grew up and became Democrats and Republicans, respectively.

It’s why liberal hectoring sounds suicidal. The people in charge are railing about the people in charge. The people in charge are raising a mob from the dispossessed to assault the people in charge. The radicals of forty years ago at least had a rational aim in mind. Today it is an aging street fighter looking for a fight when there’s no one left to fight. It is both irrational and ridiculous.

It’s also why this may be the end of the Left and radical politics in America. It has burned itself out like we have seen with every Marxist-Leninist state. It’s ironic that Obama is normalizing relations with Cuba. Just as the American Radicals who were inspired by Castro are heading into an absurd decline, the end of the Castro brothers will be Walmart selling Che t-shirts in Havana.

Obama is normalizing relations with Cuba and Conservative Inc is flipping out about it. The usual suspects on the Right are focusing on the fact Obama is an Academic Socialist, sympathetic to unrepentant radicals like the Castro brothers. The line of attack is about Obama’s anti-American impulses, which are real, but not really what’s at work here. Many on the Right are anti-citizen, which makes them anti-American, by definition, so their yelping now is a bit hollow.

In reality, Obama is just doing the bidding of American business. The tourism rackets, gambling rackets and, of course, the bankers see big profits in Cuba. This news story from the spring lays out the case for normalizing relations so big business can cash in on Cuba. It is easy to forget that Cuba was a food exporter before Castro. They can also be a source of cheap labor for American business. Our rulers will also enjoy vacationing there as well.

This NYTimes story from 2010 reports on the machinations behind the long running drive to open up Cuba to American business. There are 11 million Cubans ready to buy Big Macs, Coke and whatever other crap we can sell them. How they will pay for it is a mystery, but presumably Cuba will quickly become a slightly better version of Puerto Rico. Cubans are better educated than Puerto Ricans so they should adapt quickly to American tourism.

Of course, the Democrats are reading the polls and seeing a shift in Cuban-American politics. Young Cubans don’t care about Castro. They care about getting on the victimization train. They look around at the free stuff other Hispanics are getting and they want in on the scam too. You can’t blame them for it. In a balkanized, post-national society, group rights count for everything. It will be a tribal spoils system so why not join the winning team?

I doubt Obama and the Democrats have thought it through on that end. This is just a money grab at this stage. 2016 is looking like a toss-up, with The Stupid Party probably nominating Jeb Bush. The Democrats don’t have to concede the election so giving the Chamber of Commerce a big fat gift will pay off down the road.

The following news story is an example historians will use in the future to note the general madness that has afflicted our age.

A divided federal appeals court in Boston on Tuesday overturned a lower court’s ruling that a transgender Massachusetts prison inmate, convicted of committing a domestic murder, was entitled to taxpayer-funded sex change surgery.

The ruling by the First US Circuit Court of Appeals came after a 2012 ruling by US District Judge Mark Wolf, who ordered the surgery after finding that the state’s failure to provide it violated the inmate’s Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment.

In January, a three-judge panel of the appeals court upheld Wolf’s 2012 decision, but the state of Massachusetts then asked for an en banc, or full bench, review, which led to Tuesday’s ruling.

The ruling came in the case of Michelle Kosilek, who was born Robert Kosilek. Kosilek is serving a life sentence for killing her wife, Cheryl Kosilek, in 1990.

The court ruled 3-2, with Judges O. Rogeriee Thompson and William J. Kayatta Jr. filing separate dissenting opinions.

“We are faced with the question whether the [state Department of Correction’s] choice of a particular medical treatment is constitutionally inadequate,” the court said in the majority opinion.

“After carefully considering the community standard of medical care, the adequacy of the provided treatment, and the valid security concerns articulated by the DOC, we conclude that the district court erred and that the care provided to Kosilek by the DOC does not violate the Eighth Amendment,” said the opinion, which was written by Judge Juan R. Torruella.

Kosilek and the DOC — under successive administrations, both Democratic and Republican — have battled in the courts for decades over what medical treatment, clothing, makeup should be provided to deal with Kosilek’s gender identity disorder.

Wolf ruled in 2012 that the only medically appropriate treatment for Kosiliek’s condition was the surgery, which would be paid for by the state since Kosilek is a state prison inmate.

But the appeals court ruled Tuesday that Wolf had wrongly substituted his own judgment for the medical professionals, who did not unanimously endorse the surgery as the only appropriate solution for the condition that all sides acknowledged contributed to a depressed mental state and suicide attempts by Kosilek.

Wolf also went too far by “circumvent[ing] the deference owed to prison administrators’’ under federal laws when the issue is the safety of prison inmates, Torruella wrote.

“The prison administrators in this case have decades of combined experience in the management of penological institutions, and it is they, not the court, who are best situated to determine what security concerns will arise,’’ Torruella wrote.

The ruling said the DOC made a valid argument when it expressed concern about the safety of Kosilek and women prisoners he potentially could be housed with once the surgery was done.

“The DOC’s security report reflected that significant concerns would also arise from housing a formerly male inmate — with a criminal history of extreme violence against a female domestic partner — within a female prison population containing high numbers of domestic violence survivors,’’ Torruella wrote.

In a statement, Public Safety Secretary Andrea Cabral said the DOC accepts as true that Kosilek suffers from gender identity disorder diagnosis, and added that was not the issue that the latest round of Kosilek litigation was resolved by the courts on Tuesday.

“The First Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the medical and mental health care provided to Kosilek by the DOC did not violate the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constituion,’’ Cabral said in the statement.

“While we acknowledge the legitimacy of a gender identity disorder diagnosis, DOC’s appeal was based on the lower court’s significant expansion of the standard for what constitutes adequate care under the Eighth Amendment, and on substantial safety and security concerns regarding Ms. Kosilek’s post-surgery needs,’’ Cabral said in the statement.

In a statement, the Transgender Rights Project of Gay & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) noted that it had joined the legal battle on Kosilek’s behalf.

“I am appalled by this decision, which means that Michelle Kosilek will continue to be denied the life-saving medical care she needs and has been seeking for years,’’ Jennifer Levi of GLAD said. “This decision is a testament to how much work remains to be done to get transgender people’s health care needs on par with others in the general public.”

In a passionate dissent, Judge O. Rogeriee Thompson compared the majority’s conclusions to those drawn by the judges who upheld the constitutionality of the separate but equal doctrine for African-Americans in the late 19th century and the judges who approved internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Like the rulings in those cases, Plessy v. Ferguson and Korematsu v. United States, the Kosilek ruling will not stand the test of time, she wrote.

The majority, Thompson wrote, ruled the way they did, in part, because the surgery Kosilek seeks is considered “strange or immoral. Prejudice and fear of the unfamiliar have undoubtedly played a role in this matter’s protraction.’’

“The precedent the majority creates is damaging,” she added. “It paves the way for unprincipled grants of en banc relief, decimates the deference paid to a trial judge following a bench trial, aggrieves an already marginalized community, and enables correctional systems to further postpone their adjustment to the crumbling gender binary.’’

Kayatta, writing separately, said, “Scientific knowledge advances quickly and without regard to settled norms and arrangements. It sometimes draws in its wake a reluctant community, unnerved by notions that challenge our views of who we are and how we fit in the universe.”

“The notion that hard-wired aspects of gender may not unerringly and inexorably correspond to physical anatomy is especially unnerving for many,” Kayatta said.

In America, “Pinstriped Nazis” play baseball in the Bronx or play with money in Manhattan. In Germany, its the name for people that dissent from the prevailing religion of the ruling class of Europe. This story from The Tired Old Commie Times should be getting more attention.

Its members have been dubbed the “pinstriped Nazis” and they refer to their demonstrations as “evening strolls” through German cities. But on Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”.

Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-foreigner campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in barking chants of “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”, the slogan adopted by protesters in the historic “Monday demonstrations” against the East German government in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Associating themselves with the freedom demonstrations has given Pegida protests an air of moral respectability even though there are hundreds of rightwing extremists in their midst, as well as established groups of hooligans who are known to the police, according to Germany’s federal office for the protection of the constitution.

What’s hilarious about hearing old lefties talk about “hooligans” disrupting the peace with their protests is it was not that long ago when these same lefties were the ones in the streets being called hooligans. They will tell you it was different because their enemies were right wing extremists and these protesters are right-wing extremists. The near total lack of self-awareness by the old fools at The Guardian is always good for some laughs.

While avoiding blatantly racist slogans, some told the Guardian of their angst over the “demise of the West” due to the rise of Islam or voiced their distaste of salafists and homosexuals in the same breath, or decried the recent decision by local politicians to increase the number of homes for asylum seekers. One group, knocking back bottles of the local beer, talked openly of their fears of what they call “fecal jihad”.

Mario Lupo, a 40-year-old tourist from Milan, was among the onlookers sipping glühwein at Germany’s oldest Christmas market, the Striezelmarkt.

“We came here for the romance and joviality of the Christmas markets,” he said. “We expected some light-hearted carousing appropriate to this time of year, but didn’t expect to stumble upon these rabble-rousers and police in riot gear.”

Among the groups taking part, according to the police, were two soccer hooligan organisations already known to the police called “Faust des Ostens” (Fist of the East) and Hooligans Elbflorenz (Florence of the Elbe Hooligans), as well as members of the National Democratic Party (NPD). Alongside them were old and young men and women, including families with children in pushchairs, many of whom said they had no political affiliation.

The reason it is useful to view the Left as a religious cult is they display all the same tendencies. The extreme paranoia is one of the more obvious features. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the people protesting are garden variety Germans is seen as proof that they are really “extreme right-wing extremists.” They’re just carefully avoiding use the racist slogans, but the good people at The Guardian see right through it!

Pegida’s growing presence has presented politicians with a dilemma over how to uncouple the strong neo-Nazi element believed to form the core of the protests from ordinary Germans with grievances against the government, who make up the bulk of the protesters.

Almost two-thirds of Germans, according to a poll for news magazine Spiegel by the TNS institute, believe that Angela Merkel’s government is not doing enough to address concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, and 34% think Germany is enduring a process of “Islamisation”.

The chancellor had earlier warned that a right to demonstrate did not extend to “rabble-rousing and defamation” against foreigners.

Merkel said that those participating in the protests should “take care not to be exploited” by radical elements trying to tap into fears of a foreigner takeover in Germany.

If you only read American media, you would never know that most of Europe is boiling with anti-immigration sentiment. Just as in the United States, Europe and Britain have had enough with wholesale immigration. In that regard I’ll give The Guardian credit for actually reporting it. I’d be curious to know if the mainstream German press has bothered to report on any of this, other than to decry it as fascism.

Still, the fact that the Nazis in charge are calling these protesters “Pinstriped Nazis” says a lot about the ruling class of Germany. The Nazis may have been vanquished, but their ideas about government, economics and culture carried the day in the West, All of us now live in a world run by the intellectual sons and daughters of Carl Schmitt. They are the real pinstriped Nazis and they even wear pinstripes!

I suspect a lot of patriotic Americans will look at what’s going on in Europe and think the tide is turning. I’m not so sure. The flow of history seems to be away from small organizational groups and towards larger and larger political entities. The foundation stone of Europe is the end of nations. Without nations, there can be no citizens. Without citizens, why should the rulers care if Dresden is populated with Turks, Celts or Martians? Dresden is not a place with an identity. It is an area where natural resources are stored for use by the ruling class.

Maybe there’s a biological limit that we are reaching and a great contraction is upon us. Human biology does seem to preclude one world government. People rebel against rulers that do not look like they are from their gene pool. Colonialism failed, despite being the best thing to happen to the colonized. Humans simple don’t trust people that are not their blood or at least resemble their blood. 50,000 years of evolution is tough to beat, even if you spent a summer at college in a philosophy seminar.

Still, The way to bet seems to be with the people currently in charge.

This post has already been linked to 2073 times!

The Atlantic used to be a great journal. Now it just a forum for addle-brained nitwits to have a tantrum about the latest outrages. Steve Sailer is convinced it is done on purpose, as an elaborate goof on multiculturalism, but I’m skeptical of that. I’ve run into far too many people who truly believe this nonsense. If a piece like this is a sophisticated send-up of the crotch warriors, the writer should be working in Hollywood, not free lancing between shifts at the local bar.

On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage. After the iPhone, Apple Pay, and, the doll of the party, the Apple Watch, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give some more details about Apple Health, an app that had been announced back in June and will eventually integrate with the Apple Watch. In that June announcement, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi bragged that the app would let users “monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.”

As promised, Health is a powerful app. It allows users to track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium. But there’s a notable exception. Apple Health doesn’t track menstruation, an omission that was quickly seized upon by many tech writers as, well, ridiculous. The Verge asked “is it really too much to ask that Apple treat women, and their health, with as much care as they’ve treated humanity’s sodium intake?” How could Apple release a health-tracking app without the ability to monitor what is likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self tracking?

The most obvious answer here is that if you can’t count to 28, you probably can’t master the device. That and the fact menstrual cycles have nothing to do with the purpose of these gizmos. The people who buy them mostly want to signal that they obsess about their health. That most likely means indulging in useless fads like pill-popping, weird diets and fake exercise like cross-fit.

But, to the crotch warrior, everything is about their crotch. Therefore health must be defined in terms of the crotch. A normal person with an interest in bettering their fitness would look for a way to count calories, measure their heart rate and so on. Crotch warriors want a devise that lets them count to 28 so they can spend even more time thinking about their lady-parts.

The comments, as always, are the best. The top comment is a great satire. But, the rest have great example of the insanely unaware. Commenter “Laura” reminds me of a friend named Laura. She is a hair on fire feminist convinced the conspiracy of the pale penis people is out to get her. Come to think of it, every woman I’ve known named Laura has been nuts.

I thought this was a gag at first.

Religious leaders and ordinary Australians sought to defuse communal tensions on Monday, after a siege at a Sydney cafe by a gunman who forced hostages to display an Islamic flag raised fears of a backlash against the country’s Muslim minority.

Within hours of the attack on the Lindt cafe in the centre of the city, a Muslim group reported that women wearing the hijab had been spat on and the right-wing Australian Defence League called on followers to protest at two major mosques.

The protests did not materialise and little is known about the true motives of the gunman.

But in the harbourside city, home to half of Australia’s 500,000 Muslims, police moved on a man shouting anti-Islamic abuse at the scene of the ongoing siege.

The man strode up to a police cordon and shouted: “Someone is going to die here because of Islam! There is no such thing as moderate Islam. Wake up and smell the coffee.”

He was confronted by another man who shouted back: “Muslims are welcome here.” Police urged the first man to leave, to a mix of catcalls and claps of support.

The sad fact of the matter is the whites never return fire. Year after year the incidents of Muslim terrorism pile up and nothing is ever done about it. Maybe if Romper Stomper were true, there would be fewer Muslim’s to cause trouble in the civilized nations. Of course, that’s true everything else. Blacks riot and everyone worries about the white backlash that never comes. Whenever a group of lunatics gets out of hand, the first thing we see in the news is fear of a backlash from the normals, but it never comes.

The fact is, “backlash” is the Sasquatch of liberal journalism.

Back in the Bush years, it was fairly obvious our ruling class had no idea how Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, and the  others in Central Asia thought about the world. America went into Afghanistan thinking Pakistan was an ally and that the locals would treat the invaders different than all the other invaders since Alexander the Great. I suspect the Bush people sort of understood that nation building in Afghanistan was a waste of time, but they thought they could be the baddest street gang on the block. Then the parade of idiots known as the Obama Administration came along and tried to win friends and influence bronze age people, wasting lives and treasure for no earthly reason.

Of course, I may be giving the Bush people too much credit. They went blundering into Iraq fully convinced they could turn Iraq into a democratic, multicultural republic. Instead they unleashed decades of ethnic hatred, resulting in a blood bath.

It is one thing to have nutty ideas about backward people on the periphery. That’s somewhat understandable, if not defensible, but it appears our rulers have no idea how anything works anymore. The problems in Ukraine are an obvious example. The Russians have always had a sense of space that drives their national identity. Any threat to it, particularly from the West, is going to get a response.

I think the problem is that our ruling class is very insular. There’s no longer a bubbling up of talent based on merit. Instead we have a credentialed elite that likes to pretend they are at the top of a meritocracy, but in reality they just ticked off the right boxes in the secular exam system. Everywhere you look you see Ivy League grads who rode the coattails of other Ivy League grads. The American foreign policy establishment is looking more like a priesthood than collection of seasoned realists.

Stories like this are a good example of the sloppy work that is the result of this insularity.

A Russian loan to France’s National Front. Invitations to Moscow for leaders of Austria’s Freedom Party. Praise for Vladimir Putin from the head of Britain’s anti-European Union party.

As the diplomatic chill over Ukraine deepens, the Kremlin seems keener than ever to enlist Europe’s far-right parties in its campaign for influence in the West, seeking new relationships based largely on shared concern over the growing clout of the EU.

Russia fears that the EU and NATO could spread to countries it considers part of its sphere of influence. And it has repeatedly served notice that it will not tolerate that scenario, most recently with its Ukraine campaign.

Europe’s right-wing and populist parties, meanwhile, see a robust EU as contrary to their vision of Europe as a loose union of strong national states. And some regard the EU as a toady to America.

The fact that many of Moscow’s allies are right to far-right reflects the Kremlin’s full turn. Under communism, xenophobic nationalist parties were shunned.

Now they are embraced as partners who can help further Russia’s interests and who share key views — advocacy of traditional family values, belief in authoritarian leadership, a distrust of the U.S. and support for strong law-and-order measures.

Statements by leading critics of the EU, or euroskeptics, reflect their admiration of the Kremlin.

This is obviously a planted story. The idea is to discredit the dissenters in Europe and America, by connecting them to Hitler 3.0 or whatever we’re up to now on the Hitler chain of existence. Of course, Hitler Putin financing these dissenters is justification for continuing the cold war on Russia. That’s all fair game, but this is so ham-fisted and stupid it makes me wonder if it is not some sort of bad joke. Later in the story they claim Gerhard Schroeder and Italy’s former Premier Silvio Berlusconi were Putin clients.

That’s the insularity part. The true believers running American foreign policy seem to lack any sense of self-awareness. This makes it impossible for them to see the world through the eyes of their competitors. It also has led to foolish fights with Putin over Ukraine, an utterly worthless slab of land on the fringe of Europe. Their need for a bogeyman to explain any resistance to their weird secular religion has created enemies where none needed to exist. Putin is not some nitwit from the periphery. Russians are pretty good at realpolitik. Our overly credentialed nitwits would be wise not to play chess with him.

The GOP sellout this week reminded me of something I saw in the Weekly Standard after the election. Fred “The Beadle” Barnes had a piece on Mike Coffman, a nobody congressman from Colorado, who managed to win in a gerrymandered district. Barnes is one of the true believers in the neo-liberal wing of the GOP. I call them neo-liberal because most of them used to be moderate liberals. Barnes was a long time writer for The New Republic. That was before it was turned into a bathhouse journal.

Republican representative Mike Coffman of Colorado was the No. 1 target for defeat by House Democrats in 2014. Making matters worse, he had been gerrymandered out of his solidly Republican district and was opposed by the most impressive candidate Democrats could recruit. His future as a congressman did not look bright. Yet he was reelected.

How did he do it? He learned to speak Spanish.

Coffman gave speeches in Spanish. Five days before the election, he debated his Democratic opponent in Spanish, an event carried nationally on the Spanish language television channel Univision. He held his own. Coffman won the election, 52-43 percent.

The Democratic obsession with ousting Coffman began in 2012 when his district in the suburbs to the south and east of Denver was transformed. It became 20 percent Hispanic, 9 percent black, and 5 percent Asian, along with a mélange of smaller minority communities. Coffman had won with 61 percent of the vote in 2008 and 66 percent in 2010. But in 2012, in the new swing district, he beat Democrat Joe Miklosi only 48 to 46 percent.

You can already guess where The Beadle is heading. The RINO fantasy is a world where pasty-faced blancos rule over a land of socially conservative brown people who enjoy authoritarian rule.

Learning Spanish wasn’t the only reason Coffman won. He’s a conservative Republican who benefited from the GOP wave. He’s known for making it possible for veterans to get private medical care in some cases. He favors opening federal land in Colorado to oil and natural gas production.

But something else happened to him on the way to reelection. He substantially softened his position on immigration reform. Or as he says, he “moderated” his view.

The House seat he captured in 2008 had been held by Tom Tancredo, a firm opponent of amnesty of any kind for illegal immigrants. Coffman had agreed with him for years. But spending time with immigrant families—and needing their votes—“influenced my position,” he says. He’s now a supporter of immigration reform.

“I clearly want to see something get done,” Coffman told me. He opposes the “comprehensive” reform that passed the Senate last year. And he’s critical of President Obama’s plan to legalize illegal immigrants by executive order.

And there we are. His victory had nothing to do with a comically bad opponent, a GOP wave and a depressed minority vote. Nope, The Beadle has proved that abandoning western civilization and embracing open borders was the key to victory. You can just hear the lament rising from the offices of The Weekly Standard. “Why can’t these knuckle-dragging Tea Party monsters accept our version of reality??!!”

Mags like TWS are not for the rabble. They are journals of the ruling class. Celebrating diversity is for them the same as celebrating Christmas is for the rest of us. It does show why guys like Boehner have no fear about ramming through amnesty and ObamaCare funding. The people who put that raging alcoholic in charge will stick by their man as long as he does not get drunk in public and does their bidding in the House.

Those of you who plan to be alive in the coming decades better learn Spanish. That’s your future, unless you plan to move to Canada or Iceland or China. That’s not practical, so your RINO future será narrada en español. Espero que te guste la comida picante , porque celebrar la diversidad no es sólo watiching Univsion .

Saludos, mi amigos.