For a very long time now, the Cult has been telling us that the most wonderful thing possible is to be the first member of a fringe group to do something. The phrase “first black…” has been so heavily used it has lost all meaning. The Cult now tacks on adjectives to sweeten the pot so we get combinations like “first black transgendered amputee….” But, they have added in other groups to keep the racket going. Now that we have had the first black president, they want the first fake indian president. I take some solace in knowing I’ll be dead before we have the first gay Mexican transvestite president.

The thing is, we used to know that it was a bad idea to put weirdos in charge of anything. By weirdo, I mean anyone outside the core group. The British used to know that it was a bad idea to have a Catholic as prime minister. A major company would not appoint a confirmed bachelor as CEO. The French would never have a heterosexual as a general. In America, Nixon is a great example of how a bitter outsider cannot function in leadership.

Group hatred has always been an issue, but common sense was at play too. A distinct minority group was going to nurse a lot of grudges against the majority. If they ever got control of the levers of power, it was assumed they would exact some revenge. This is still well understood in the Middle East. Keeping the fringe out of power is a top priority. Examples of why are Iraq and Syria, where motivated and pissed off minority sects have killed a lot of people.

In America, we’re learning this with Obama. There was a lot of effort put into convincing us that even though he was black, he was not that black. Joe Biden called him clean and articulate, which was a way of saying he was not Jesse Jackson. Harry Reid mentioned that he was not a shuffling negro. In other words, he was not a black guy nursing a laundry list of grievances. He was pitched in the same way as the British pitched guys like Kwame Nkrumah. He was a man with whom whites could do business.

Of course, that has turned out to be total nonsense. Obama is a typical black guy and that means he is obsessed with race. All of his friends are black and all of his key advisers are black. All of those friends and advisers nurse the typical grievances we have come to expect from blacks in America. One of Obama’s closest friends is using race to dodge a trial of Obama cronies in Illinois.

Similarly, the Left is finding out that a taste for penis is not the only thing wrong with Chris Hughes. This nasty piece of work destroyed one of the Cult’s great properties out of a fit of pique. Normal people who have had dealings with homosexuals knows that sexual inversion is just the bit of the iceberg we see with them. Under the waterline is a mass of crazy that makes dealing with them impossible. There are exceptions, of course, but prudence says you assume the worst and never put them in charge.

We’re going to find this out with Hispanics in the not so distant future. The Cult is preparing the Castro Twins to be the next leaders of the cult. Both have managed to grow up in Texas, with a raging hatred of Texas and Texans. Putting them in charge makes as much sense as putting a foreign born Muslim in the White House so we can be sure it will happen. That’s life in post-reality America. Everything we used to know is forgotten and then painfully relearned. Even eight years with a fringe weirdo in the White House has not driven home the lesson so maybe I’m being generous with the relearning stuff.

It has been a long time since I’ve looked closely at the McDonald’s menu. When I was a boy, the the menu was pretty simple. They had hamburgers, cheeseburgers and the fish sandwich. On the rare occasion when I eat there, I still get a cheeseburger and a fish sandwich. Maybe I’ll do the one dollar chicken sandwich. Otherwise, I could not name five things on their menu. I suppose they still sell the Big Mac and fries, but the rest is a mystery.

This story on Yahoo tells me they have 121 items on their menu. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but maybe they are counting things like ketchup packs and beverages. Still, how in the world did they let that happen? The whole point of fast food is it is simple, cheap, fast and consistent. The fish sandwich in Boston is the same as the one in Minneapolis. It generally costs the same and is delivered the same. Given the general stupidity of the American people, 121 offerings just means it will undermine the whole effort.

In California, there is a chain called In ‘N Out Burger. They offer a cheeseburger, a hamburger, a double burger and fries. The food is good, the service is quick and the experience is consistent from restaurant to restaurant. It is what McDonald’s used to be fifty years ago. Chick-fil-A is the same concept, except they do not permit homosexuals in their stores, for sanitary reasons.  Anytime I see one of these restaurants, they are packed. It turns out that McDonald’s was right the first time. People don’t like diversity.

It is the great lie of modern times that people like options. That’s nonsense. People are social animals. We like belonging to a group. That’s our nature. It’s why there are Pepsi drinkers and Coke drinkers. We have two types of cola. Then we have the oddball stuff for the weirdos, but it is a tiny market. When was the last time you heard someone order an RC Cola or a Moxie?

No, people like a few choices so we can divide ourselves up into simple groups. Otherwise, diversity is always a bad thing.

One of the thorniest problems in modern public debate is how to talk about Israel, without talking about Jews. If you have something bad to say about Israel, you will be called an anti-Semite by the usual suspects. On the other hand, anti-Semites cloak their Jew-hating in criticism of Israel. Of course, if you have anything to say about Jews, from an HBD perspective, you can be sure to have Israel held up as a counter, as if there’s no difference between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews.

There’s so much chaff in the air it is hard to get a bead on any of it. Ron Unz continues to publish this guy, despite the radioactive weirdo vibe that pulsates from his text. He hangs out with conspiracy buffs and has an obsession with Israel that makes me uncomfortable. Put his name in the google machine and you get nothing but Israel stuff, with some 9/11 conspiracy stuff tossed in the mix. Looking at his Wiki page, nothing jumps out and Wiki is edited by raging moonbats so maybe I’m off-base, but it is just so hard to know.

Similarly, I saw this on Maggie’s Farm the other day. I admit I never heard of Max Blumenthal, at least not the Max Blumenthal in question. I once played racquetball with a Max Blumenthal, but he was not this one. His father is Sydney Blumenthal, a loathsome scumbag that worked for Clinton in the 1990’s. There’s a good chance the apple did not fall far from the tree. Still, I have no idea if Max Blumenthal is a self-hating Jew, a crank or just a guy with opinions about Israel that are unpopular. That’s the thing about all of this, it is impossible to tell the players even with a scorecard.

One of the things that no one is allowed to mention is the fact many Jews in American and Europe hate the very idea of Israeli. Well, they are fine with Israel as an abstract construction, but not as a real place with real people. They look at Israel in the same way Americans look at people from West Virginia or New Jersey. It is a hatred born of familiarity. The crazy crackers from the mountains and the guidos from the Jersey are a reminder of a past a lot of people would just as soon forget. The hairy Jews haggling over a spot at the Wailing Wall are something most American and European Jews would just as soon forget too.

Then you have the other problem. Ashkenazi Jews are a remarkable group of people. A small group of people bound together by what most think was an imported religion, managed to survive and prosper, despite being surrounded by people hostile to their religion. They have not just survived; Ashkenazi Jews have dominated the cultural life of Europe and America. At least until you know who came along. As Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out, Ashkenazi Jews are 1% of the US population and 30% of the richest Americans.

People tend to notice this remarkable success and that’s not a good thing for a distinct minority. If Israel was a country that existed in the 1930’s, odds are the Nazis would have gone for mass deportation of the Jews, rather than extermination. There’s no way to know that, but it would have been the easiest path and people tend to seek the path of least resistance. Given the attitudes of early 20^th century Europe, it probably would have been the policy of every country in Europe.

That’s the problem Israel presents Jews everywhere. If Israel is the Jewish homeland, why are Jews living in Denmark, Paris, Bangor Maine and Bozeman Montana? It offers up a handy excuse for majority populations to round up their Jews and ship them out. Given recent history, you can’t blame Jews for being more than a little worried about it. In America, anti-Semitism has never been popular, but in Europe it has never been unpopular. Most Jews in America had close relatives that either fled Hitler or survived Hitler.

Of course, maybe that’s the point. If it is impossible to separate honest criticism from bigotry, decent people will avoid criticism. Americans are strangely polite in their public discourse. The last thing a chattering skull wants is to be called is rude or mean. If you can’t win a debate, shutting it down is the next best result. I’m not sure that’s the case here, but it is certainly true that any discussion of Jews is off-limits and discussions of Israel better be glowing. Otherwise, you risk being called a bigot.

Russell Simmons is a very rich man. According to people who study these things, he is worth $325 million. That’s enough to make him a solid member of the Liberal-Democratic elite. Further, he has been rich for a long time and he has never been poor. He is the product of the rarest of things, a black two-parent household. Both parents have jobs in the New York City government. Simmons got rich thirty years ago peddling ghetto filth to young white kids in the suburbs.

The point being that Mr. Russell knows less about the ghetto and typical black life than my cat. His is a life of private apartments, private cars and private planes. He knows enough about black life to be able to peddle black culture to white suburban kids. Other than that, he has arranged his life such that he has nothing to do with black America. That’s not stopping him from pretending to be the tribune of the people.

Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, appeared on CNN last night on Out Front with Erin Burnett to warn there are more protests coming if “demands” are not met.

We are seeing the beginning of the end of police policing the police, he added.

“On Wednesday, we are going to ask for indictments and list of achievable demands.” (“We” referring to high profile celebrities and athletes that share Simmons’ beliefs.)

“And America has not seen protests like those that are coming if justice doesn’t start to come down,” warned Simmons.

Simmons told Burnett, “Over 150K cases were brought before the grand Jury and and only 11 cases didn’t come back with indictments. It’s like lightening striking the black community over and over and over again.”

We need special oversight committees, we shouldn’t leave it to DAs who work with the police, explained Simmons.

Burnett asked, “You don’t feel defeated that has happened again and again and again?” to which Simmons responded, “We’re going to get indictments now because America hasn’t seen what’s coming.”

“When people understand the injustice properly, the way these protestors understand it, they’re all going to fight for justice, and that’s going to change this system.”

I’ve mentioned before that whites are growing increasingly weary of this stuff. There’s simply no excuse for it. If you are a young black person in America right now, the world is your oyster. If you choose to walk around with your pants down and  playing with yourself like an extra from a Russell Simmons music video, that’s on you. If you choose to be a “playah” and get “in the game” then you can look forward to a life spent in a cage, but it is your choice.

If Russell Simmons wanted to bring down the number of incidents of cops treating blacks poorly, he would stop peddling the filth that has made him rich. He would stop portraying blacks as feral animals in order to sell white people his merchandise. But, that would require a degree of self-awareness Mr. Simmons apparently lacks. His stepping forth as the tribune of poor black people is like casting Marie Antoinette as the leader of the sans culottes.

James Pethokoukis used to post at NRO about the economy and that’s where he first got my attention. He tended to write things that stupid say when they wish to sound smart. I looked him up and sure enough, I found a journalism major. I look at journalism majors in the same way I look at communications majors. That is, these are people who were not smart enough to real college work or they were simply too lazy to do real college work.

In short order it became clear he was a fake nerd in the Ezra Klein mold, but maybe not as good at working the bit. Klein puts a lot of effort into the fake nerd routine. Pethokoukis seems happy to be a clueless lunkhead that thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. Thus, the reference to Dunning-Kruger. As an aside, I love how is called a “fellow” at AEI. These agitprop houses love bestowing scholarly titles on one another.

Anyway, I saw this gem today and thought it was a great excuse to take some cheap shots at someone.

One big difference between America’s K-12 education system and that of other nations is where our teachers come from. McKinsey has found that top-performing nations recruit their teachers from the top third of college students. As one report notes, school systems in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea “recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third” of the academic class vs. just 23% in the US.

The other big difference, the one that makes all the difference, is the schools in Finland, Taiwan and South Korea are full of Finns and East Asians. When you compare US schools to those around the world, you have to make that adjustment. Once you do that, you find out that our Finns do as well as Finns everywhere. Our Koreans do better than those in Korea. But, thinking like that is hard and lunkhead can’t be bothered with that.

Many moons ago, I sat through a presentation by the director of marketing for a company where I was working. He put up charts and graphs showing the effectiveness of the various market programs. It was very well done, but complete bullshit. Talking with the guy after his presentation, he admitted as much. There was no way to measure the effectiveness of his programs. I had been tasked with trying to come up with a way to do it, which was why I was in his presentation. To the guy’s credit, he knew there was no point in trying to fool me so he came clean. He was just making assumptions from anecdotes and wishful thinking.

The guy was not an asshole or a crook. He was doing his job like every other marketing guy. His bosses and coevals made all the same assumptions he made and relied on the same pseudo-logic to justify the marketing budget. Everyone just assumed smart people had worked it all out a long time ago. That’s why every great company spent money on ads, campaigns, promotions, etc. The one very memorable thing he said was that he made sure to spend a little more than his budget every year. That way, he would get  a bigger budget the next year.

I’ve always wondered if there would come a time when companies figured out that much of their advertizing was a waste of money. Dr. Pepper spends millions on college football, but their product still tastes awful. The percentage of people who will like odd flavored soda is fixed. No amount of advertizing with change it. Beyond product awareness and sales, advertizing strikes me as rather pointless. As I type this, I’m watching an ad for something that may be for clothes or possibly wheat. I have no idea and doubt anyone else does either. Millions were spent for something and I doubt the company will see a nickel in return.

On TV, most of these ads are filtered out by our brains as background noise. On-line, they are blocked by the browser and browser add-ons. I suspect most of us have become so good at blocking out web ads that we don’t even notice them. When I bother to look, I wonder why anyone would be spending money on them. Sites that lard up on ads, like Brietbart and the Daily Caller, I tend to avoid. If I have to close eight windows and then find and mute some stupid video in order to get to your site, your site sucks.

Of course, it has long been suspected that skimmers like Facebook use click farms to scam companies into advertizing with them. This video from earlier in the year is pretty good. No one has ever bothered to refute it. It has been known for a while that there are “like farms” for hire that will boost a Facebook page for a fee. Twitter has been plagued by zombie accounts to boost the follower counts of celebrities. The fact that Facebook, and presumably others, is using robots and click farms to scam advertisers should not shock anyone. The degree is the question. How much of scam is on-line advertising?

It appears half of these ads are never actually seen by humans.

Online advertising is a fickle thing. It accounts for 20% of the ad industry’s total spending, and over 90% of revenue for the internet giants Google and Facebook. That said, no one seems to have any idea whether it actually works.

That uncertainty reached a new high this week, as Google announced that 56.1% of ads served on the internet are never even “in view”—defined as being on screen for one second or more. That’s a huge number of “impressions” that cost money for advertisers, but are as pointless as a television playing to an empty room.

This is not a big revelation. The web metrics company ComScore reported last year that 46% of online ads are never seen. Spider.io, an ad fraud company acquired by Google in February, has pointed out that a large portion of ads are “viewed” only by robots, revealing that one botnet of 120,000 virus-infected computers viewed ads billions of times, running up the tab for advertisers without offering them the human eyeballs they sought.

 Still, the acknowledgement by a heavyweight such as Google that ad viewability is a problem could shake up the industry by delaying possible IPOs of ad companies and requiring new ways for advertisers to gauge the effectiveness of their ads.

The nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” In this case, it’s the obviously the half that pays for ads which are never seen, and now advertisers are looking for new tools to figure out which those are.

It’s worth noting that Google made this acknowledgement of the deficiency of the model it has profited richly from while also offering a new model to advertisers: In July it introduced its Active View product, which measures only viewed ads.

This goes back to the puzzle of Facebook and Twitter. How can they be worth billions? Yeah, they have lots of users, but so what? Those users pay them nothing. The ads on Twitter are minimal and you can’t even see them on your phone. I don’t do Facebook anymore, but the ads I used to see were mostly scumbags like dating services and fake medicines. At some point, the guys writing the checks will figure out they are wasting 100% of their money these sites.

Things could be taking a very bad turn in Missouri.

The St. Louis police chief has asked for the FBI’s help investigating what he believes was a hate crime attack against a woman in the same Bosnian neighborhood where a man was beaten to death days earlier by hammer-wielding teens, and where assaults have spiked dramatically in recent months.

The 26-year-old Bosnian-American woman told police she was stopped in her car by three African-American teens early Friday morning in the city’s Bevo Mill section, where tens of thousands of Bosnians settled following the civil war in the former Yugoslavia 20 years ago. The incident occurred just blocks from where Zemir Begic, a 32-year-old Bosnian-American, was beaten to death by teenagers with hammers a week earlier.

One of the assailants flashed a gun and ordered the woman out of her vehicle and another hit the woman’s windshield with what police believe was a crowbar, authorities said.

“You’re Bosnian,” one of the suspects allegedly said. “I should just kill you now.”

The woman, who was pulled from the car and then beaten, was found unconscious by a passerby, police said. The alleged statement prompted St. Louis Police Chief Sam Dotson to present the case to the FBI.

“As of now, officers are investigating this incident as a bias crime based on the victim’s account of the incident,” the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department said in an email Monday. “The investigation is ongoing.”

Authorities said they don’t believe the attacks on Begic and the woman are related, but acknowledged a disturbing rise in violent crime in the area in recent months. Although police have not made a connection, the crime spike coincides with the rioting that followed the August police shooting of a black teenager by a white police officer in nearby Ferguson, Mo.

Bevo Mill residents, whose neighborhood has seen a cumulative 24-percent rise in aggravated assaults over the last three months, say assaults and threats by packs of teenagers against Bosnians have become the norm. One who spoke to FoxNews.com on condition of anonymity due to safety reasons claims he and his family experienced a similar attack and said there is a disturbing pattern of violence against white residents in the area.

“It is common for African-American teens to walk in the middle of the street and block in cars at intersections,” said the man, who has lived in the neighborhood for half a decade. “We have been stopped at intersections in Bevo and our car attacked by teens who pound on the car — laughing at us.”

“They only do this to white individuals, who they have learned will generally not respond. There is a pattern here and it is racially motivated,” he alleged. “Many of us are arming ourselves in order to avoid becoming the next victim to be beaten to death in the streets.”

One of my favorite words is “mokita” which means the truth everyone knows but agrees not to discuss. Every culture has things like that. In America, everyone knows one truth about race relations. That is, if blacks ever go to war with whites, they will lose everything. When you are 13% of the population, you always have to navigate around the other 87%. Given America’s race history, “navigating” means blacks  can raise holy hell from time to time when they feel cheated, but they can never cross the line into full revolt.

Bosnians are pretty good at the tribal warfare stuff. Probably better than their black neighbors. Given our insane immigration policies, I’m betting there are quite a few ex-military/ex-militia living there in Missouri. You can be sure they will be dialing their kin back home as well. Garden variety white people would be fleeing to the suburbs. I’m thinking these Bosnains are home polishing their weapons tonight.

I wonder if LeeBong will be wearing a Bosnian flag shirt to show solidarity with those victims.

This story about the problems desegregating the Hartford public schools is amusing. For the Cult, hatred of white people has become such a natural instinct, they can’t separate reality from fantasy anymore. They really think they can force the hoi polloi to live together according to the popular fads of the Cult. They never stop to think that maybe there’s a reason people are not embracing diversity.

The shrinking population of white students in Hartford’s suburbs is complicating efforts to comply with Connecticut’s landmark school desegregation settlement — and even making it harder for some of the capital city’s students to attend new schools created to help meet the racial integration goals set by the lawsuit 25 years ago.

State education officials are currently negotiating the latest changes to the agreement, reached with the plaintiffs after they won a 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court ruling, but say it is becoming harder to attract white students to Hartford’s schools because they’re living farther away.

About half the students living in the 22 communities subject to the agreement, according to state officials, are non-white. That’s up from about 38 percent in 2008, when the parties negotiated a revised timetable for progress on reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation. Another revision was made last year.

“The state is in the position of, how do you meet the requirements of the State Supreme Court given the fact that the demographics of the region have changed so completely,” said Kathleen Demsey, state Department of Education’s chief financial officer who worked for years on the issue. “Financially, it’s a burden for this transportation system, money that could be used for education is being used to bus kids.”

The hilarious bit here is the same people trying to force the proletariat to live together, based on some magic racial formula, will move heaven and earth to make sure their kids are are not going to school with the other races. Yet, they are mystified to learn that everyone else does the same thing.

But lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, Sheff vs. O’Neill, say there are still plenty of predominantly white communities in the region that can be drawn from to attract additional students, or where Hartford students can attend school in a racially integrated setting.

“We’ve made some progress but we still think there’s more that can be done,” said Dennis Parker, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and director of racial justice programs for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The issue of changing demographics has come up before. In 2013, the parties redefined the standard for diversity, allowing Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to count toward the 25 percent “white enrollment” threshold. Further changes could be among the proposals in this round of negotiations.

I’m sure the Asians are thrilled to know they will be used as cannon fodder in the ghetto.

Newly released statistics show 47.5 percent of Hartford’s 21,458 minority students are currently enrolled in “reduced-isolation settings,” a marked improvement from 11 percent in 2008. That comes after the state spent about $2.25 billion on new magnets and other programs throughout the region over a 10-year period. Yet the plaintiffs contend that progress falls far short of giving every Hartford student the opportunity to learn in a racially integrated setting.

Attorney Martha Stone said the state could create incentives to encourage suburban school districts to take in more Hartford students and foster more collaborative projects involving different entities, such as the proposed elementary magnet aerospace academy in Rocky Hill.

“There are so many different ideas that have been on the table for years that the state has not taken the initiative on,” Stone said.

Unlike other states where there has been forced busing and redrawn school districts, Connecticut’s settlement relies on voluntary desegregation and additional state funding. Parents inside and outside of Hartford can choose to enter a lottery in order for their children to approximately 45 magnet schools. Meanwhile, Hartford students can also choose to attend suburban public schools.

But the makeup of some suburbs is changing: East Hartford, for example, shifted from 23 percent minority enrollment in 1989, when the lawsuit was first filed, to 84 percent in 2013. Manchester jumped from 12 percent to 60 percent, Windsor from 31 percent to 71 percent, and Bloomfield from 74 to 96 percent.

This is pattern you see everywhere in the northeast. The FDR version of the Cult thought they should pack blacks into urban ghettos. They used white ethnics as a buffer, but then the ethnics bolted to the suburbs. The cities collapsed and we ended up with all of these urban jungles. Starting in the 80’s, the new plan was to move the blacks out to the suburbs so the Cult could reclaim the nice spots in the city. The white ethnics living in the inner suburbs are now bolting to exurbs and gated neighborhoods.

One of the reasons I say liberalism is a religion is I’ve been to places like Hartford and New Haven. The latter is a great example. Yale dominate New Haven, financially, politically and geographically. Down the hill from the idyllic campus lies the black side of New Haven. The only interface the students have with the people down the hill is the occasional robbery or beating. Otherwise, down the hill may as well be another planet. Every student on that campus knows where not to go and who not to trust.

Despite that reality all around them, the students at Yale are as liberal as they come. They go off into the world full of righteous anger about how  middle America treats its black people. You point out to them that the Yale campus is more like an antebellum plantation than normal America and they look at you like you’re speaking in tongues. That degree of self-delusion only comes from intense belief.

A normal person trying to integrate the Hartford schools would look at the results thus far and conclude it is a failure. Decades of effort have come up empty so it is time to try something else. The true believer, faced with dis-confirmation, redoubles their efforts, convinced that this time things will be different.

The IQ guys swear that high IQ strongly correlates to success. That’s tempting to believe until you start thinking about the fabulously successful people who were also incredibly stupid. Caligula is the guy who comes to mind whenever I hear about the intelligence of our political leaders. Caligula was clever at times, but no one would call him intelligent. He managed to screw up so much he was murdered after just four years as emperor. Granted, he was probably mad, but that just underscores the fact you can get pretty far without being terribly bright.

One of the most oddly successful salesman I ever met was borderline retarded. I’m probably being a little mean there, but the guy was incredibly stupid. He sold auto accessories to retail stores and job shops. He worked hard, had a great personality and was willing to spend all day selling gaudy crap to people who had customers looking for gaudy crap. He was also a white guy willing to go into the ghetto and sell that gaudy crap. He made money hand over fist because he had the right products, the right market and the right attitude about it. He had a big house and a Cadillac, along with an 85 IQ.

When I was a teenager, I talked my way into a graduate seminar on proto-Marxism taught by a guy who was jarringly brilliant. He spoke five languages, could write in seven. He had a masters in math as well as a PhD in history. I don’t think he had two nickles to rub together and I doubt he cared. He drove a car that looked like it would collapse in a heap at any minute. I’m not sure if he was the smartest person I’ve met, but he is a good example of how a high IQ does not necessarily mean a high status, big money or even success in a narrow field.

There’s that and then there is the fact that serendipity plays a determinative role at the extremes. Germanicus, the father of Caligula, was a smart and accomplished guy, but he was unlucky and just a click less smart than Tiberius, who had him killed. Caligula was outlandishly lucky to find himself in the role of emperor. Of course, his successor was probably the luckiest man who ever lived. Claudius was an able emperor, but his rise to power still fascinates classicists because of its improbability. His relatively long reign is just as improbable.

In modern times, we have seen some people hit the lottery and become billionaires, despite not being terribly bright. Mark Cuban is a good example. He is a hustler and a risk taker. He does not mind making a spectacle of himself in public. He also got outlandishly lucky when fools totting dot-com money bought his worthless company for billions. The Facebook boys were similarly lucky. The proof of that is MySpace is the same product, but never caught on like Facebook. Mark Zuckerburglar is not stupid, but he is not a billion time smarter than you.

That’s what we’re seeing here with the death of the New Republic. The venerable progressive journal founded by the Mussolini loving Herbert Croly was recently purchased by Facebook lotto winner Chris Hughes. That was two years ago and now he has decided to turn it in Gawker, because he likes saying the phrase “digital media property.” The staff resigned en masse this week, making a big show of it for each other.

The Communications Revolution, like the Industrial Revolution, has created a lot of very rich people. Some of those rich people are super-rich, like Chris Hughes. The cultural elite of every society lives off the generosity of the financial elite. They don’t always live well, but the arts can only exist with the ascent and support of the monied elites. One of the fun parts about Nero’s biography is what we learn about the status of entertainers. In Rome, they were the bottom of the social order, even though they were supported by the ruling elite.

The current cultural elites have always lived in a world where the rich are willing to write checks for the privilege of mingling with the intellectuals. Journals like The New Republic never made money, but they got rich patrons to bankroll them so the writers could have nice middle-class lives. National Review, for example, purged all of their conservative writers because their patrons demanded it. Guys like John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg refuse to go along with the official dogma so they were sent to the fringe.

The new money appears to be different from the old financial backers. The robber barons from Silicon Valley are not interested in hanging out with smug progressive writers. They want to hang out with ball players and starlets. That means the New Republic has to become a gossip site based in New York or Los Angeles, not a journal of dogmatic political thought serving the homely people of Washington. Never mind that there are plenty of gossip sites and the value of the New Republic lies in its ties to the Washington power elite.

It will be interesting to see this unfolds. The Cult is not going to take kindly to having their friends unemployed because some rich Nazi wants a different toy. Robber barons like Chris Hughes have the money to put up a good fight, but the Cult has the power of the state. They also know how things work, which apparently Chris Hughes does not. If he was half as smart as he thinks, he would have used TNR as a way into DC’s power elite. Then again, the Golden Rule says the man with the gold makes the rules.

From WW1 through the 1970’s we did not see the creation of great fortunes. Great fortunes are made at the start of great economic revolutions. That left a long time for the relationships between the cultural, political and financial elites to settle in place. The Communications Revolution has created a whole new batch of great fortunes. The first batch, Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, etc were happy to ape the style and manner of the established great fortunes. That meant buying their way into the cultural and political elites, without making any demands. The second batch of great fortunes is not looking to follow that path.

We now have a lot of stupid people with money buying up elite real estate, physical and mental. That will not be without consequence.

Here it comes. The great Republican sellout of their voters is coming earlier than I expected.

Trying to avoid a showdown over immigration, House Republican leaders are moving to make a deal with Democrats to pass a spending bill that would keep the government running past next week.

The emerging strategy follows legislation passed Thursday by the House declaring President Barack Obama’s executive actions to curb deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally to be “null and void.” That legislation wasn’t enough for some conservatives, who complained that the only way to stop Obama’s actions on immigration would be to forbid them in legislation that must pass if the government is to stay open.

Republican leaders are opposed to that course of action, fearing a government shutdown that they don’t want, and they plan to rely on Democratic votes to pass a bill to keep the government going.

House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Democrats were committed to keeping the government open, but she warned that Republicans could lose their support if they include too many contentious so-called policy riders in the spending bill, on issues like school lunch nutrition standards and water quality.

“We haven’t seen the bill. But there are some very destructive riders in it that would be unacceptable to us and, I think, unacceptable to the American people,” Pelosi said.

“The responsibility to keep government open is theirs. If the bill is anything that we can support, we will,” added Pelosi, who has more leverage in the negotiations because of Boehner’s likely need to rely on her to deliver Democratic votes.

The spending bill would pay for the operations of most government agencies for a year while extending the Homeland Security Department operations only for a few months. Homeland Security includes the immigration agencies that would carry out Obama’s executive actions, so the approach would allow Republicans to revisit them early next year, once they have control of the Senate and a bigger majority in the House.

“We think this is the most practical way to fight the president’s action,” House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said.

Several conservative lawmakers sounded resigned Thursday to being ignored by Boehner, who with a bigger majority next year will have more room to maneuver around balky tea party lawmakers.

My friends on the Right get cross with me when I say there’s little difference between the parties. They pound their shoe on the table shouting “There’s a world of difference between the parties!” The fact that no one can ever point to anything where the parties differ all that much is ignored. People want to believe.

Between now and the 2016 election, ObamaCare will become more entrenched and Obama will incrementally amnesty 20 million illegals. Occasionally we’ll hear shouts of protest from Weepy and Droopy, but they will do nothing about it. America faces the same problem the Brits are struggling with now. In America, there’s no party for the majority, just two parties trying to represent the elites. In Britain the void is being filled by UKIP. No such possibility exists in America so we’re doomed to state-party rule where the official parties are just the two faces of the ruling oligarchy.