Mexican-Lebanese billionaire Carlos Slim controls the NY Times. Everyone pretends he has nothing but a financial stake in the company, but that’s nonsense. Slim became a billionaire because he knows how to handle himself around powerful people and their servants. In Mexico, he got going the old fashioned way. He built some businesses, got rich and then bought some politicians. He got rich enough to go public and take up a position within the Mexican ruling elite. That allowed him to get control of the telecom system and the mobile phone market that was just taking off. That made him a billionaire and put him into the global elite.

To be in the global elites means having friends at the top of the American political system. The NY Times is the official propaganda organ of the ruling class. It also losses money by the truck load. Saving the Old Grey Lady bought Slim a lot of friends in Washington. Now the good folks at the Times are returning the favor by letting the GOP know they better not get too aggressive on the immigration issue.

New Hampshire has one of the smallest populations of illegal immigrants in the country. Only about 5 percent of its 1.3 million residents are foreign-born, and 3 percent are Hispanic.

But tune into the Senate race between Scott P. Brown, the Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic incumbent, and you might think the state shares a border with Mexico, not Canada.

When someone called a talk radio show to ask Mr. Brown about global warming the other day, Mr. Brown immediately started talking about border security. “Let me tell you what I believe is a clear and present danger right now,” he said, brushing aside the caller’s concerns about the environment. “I believe that our border is porous.”

Footage of agents patrolling the rocky, arid Southwestern landscape is featured in Mr. Brown’s ads — not quite the piney highlands of New Hampshire.

A political group led by prominent conservatives like John R. Bolton, the former United States ambassador to the United Nations, attacked Ms. Shaheen last week with a video that juxtaposed two alarming images: a horde of people rushing a fence, presumably along the Mexican border, and a clip of Islamic militants right before they beheaded the journalist James Foley, a New Hampshire native. The ad was pulled after the Foley family complained.

Republicans have long relied on illegal immigration to rally the conservative base, even if the threat seemed more theoretical than tangible in most of the country. But in several of this year’s midterm Senate campaigns — including Arkansas and Kansas, as well as New Hampshire — Republicans’ stance on immigration is posing difficult questions about what the party wants to be in the longer term.

Some Republicans are questioning the cost of their focus on immigration. Campaigning on possible threats from undocumented immigrants — similar to claims that President Obama and the Democrats have left the country vulnerable to attacks from Islamic terrorists and the Ebola virus — may backfire after November. At that point, the party will have to start worrying about its appeal beyond the conservative voters it needs to turn out in midterm elections.

I always love the use of “some people question…” I once worked with a woman, a nasty shrew, who loved this device. She would deliver her insults via this imaginary third party. When someone objected, she would retreat into “I’m not the one saying this. I’m just relaying it.” The lefty media loves this tactic.

The other thing you see here is how the Cult sees the people on the other side as monolithic. They just assume the undifferentiated “other” they call “Republicans” are supposed to be in lockstep like the people in the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Therefore even one dissident means there are huge fissures within the GOP. The reality is the GOP is just the less insane side of the ruling class. The real divide on immigration is between the small ruling elite based in trendy cities and the vast majority of the American people, including recent immigrants.

That said, the point is to send the message. Immigration may be a nice sales pitch for this election, but don’t get any ideas about acting on it. The GOP knows better than to make Carlos Slim an enemy.

I’m in need of a new pair of casual shoes so I went onto Zappos to browse. I’ve used this service before and it is pretty good. I rarely go to stores now, preferring to shop on-line. You have to think it through with things like shoes because you can’t try them on before buying them. Zappos has a great return system so it is not awful if you screw up and buy the wrong thing.

Anyway, I see this on the site today:

Out of curiosity, I click on the link and this is the result. Some of the choices look like work boots, but not really. Most look like the sort of boots urban hipsters buy, despite never leaving the sidewalk. The rest look like something you wear to the bathhouse. I’m old and wildly out of touch with popular culture, but my goodness.

Maybe I’m reading to much into it, but it strikes me that post-scarcity America is turning the necessities of the past into ironic fashion statements. The perpetual grad student will kit himself out in faux work boots and a Carhartt jacket, maybe some carpenter pants. He will never have held the working end of a hammer or screwdriver, but he’ll have the gear of the guy who used to use them to make a living.

In the 1970’s, the young hipsters went to the army surplus store and bought field jackets and pea coats. None of them would have lasted an hour in the service, but they liked the clothes. The upper middle-class kids were being ironic, wearing the clothes of the military, often decorated with their “personal statements” while sporting long hair and beards. Maybe the generation coming along now is ironically mocking the idea of work by wearing the uniform of the working man.

From the comments:

The Democratic nominee for president will be Hillary Clinton, who will make a respectable effort but lose to the Republican nominee, who is unknown (probably Mitt). Two years later, the Democrats will retake Congress.

At least this is what us Democrats understand. But it is interesting that you all are so worried about Elizabeth Warren.

Maybe Cankles wins the nomination. History says she does not. The Liberal Democrats hate losers and rarely give them a second chance. Losing suggest there could be something wrong with the one true faith and that can never be tolerated. Therefore, losers are flushed down the memory hole. Carter and Dukakis were on milk cartons for years, even after Clinton won in 1996. Cankles is also old and ugly. That’s never going over well for a party that invests so heavily in the narrative of youth and newness. She will be 69 in 2016. When was the last time the Liberal Democrats ran someone that old?

As to what happens in 2018, I have no idea and neither do you.

Worried about Fake Indian? I think if the Liberal Democrats nominate that dunce I may blow a funny fuse.

I admit to not watching broadcast news much at all and only looking at domestic news sites for weird stuff I can write about or rant about as the situation warrants. I get all of my news from the British tabs, Drudge and blogs I visit. The Brits do a better job covering America than the local media and Drudge is a pretty good aggregator. Bloggers I follow do a  good job finding stories of interest. The point being is I probably miss a fair amount of what gets covered as news in America.

I got an chain e-mail today that read as follows:

He is Edward “Ed” Mezvinsky, born January 17, 1937. Then you’ll probably say, “Who is Ed Mezvinsky?”

Well, he is a former Democrat congressman who represented Iowa’s 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives for two terms, from 1973 to 1977.

He sat on the House Judiciary Committee that decided the fate of Richard Nixon. He was outspoken saying that Nixon was a crook and a disgrace to politics and the nation and should be impeached.

He and the Clintons were friends and very politically intertwined for many years.

Ed Mezvinsky had an affair with NBC News reporter Marjorie Sue Margolies and later married her after his wife divorced him.

In 1993, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, then a freshman Democrat in Congress, cast the deciding vote that got President Bill Clinton’s controversial tax package through the House of Representatives.

In March 2001, Mezvinsky was indicted and later pleaded guilty to 31 of 69 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Ed Mezvinsky embezzled more than $10 million dollars from people via both a Ponzi scheme and the notorious Nigerian e-mail scams. He was found guilty and sentenced to 80 months in federal prison. After serving less than five years in federal prison, he was released in April 2008 and remains on federal probation. To this day, he still owes $9.4 million in restitution to his victims.

About now you are saying, “So what!”

Well, this is Marc and Chelsea Mezvinsky.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That’s right; Ed Mezvinsky is Chelsea Clinton’s father-in law.

Now Marc and Chelsea are in their early thirties and purchased a 10.5 million dollar NYC apartment (after being married in George Soros’ mansion). Has anyone heard mention of any of this in any of the media? If this guy was Jenna or Barbara Bush’s, or better yet, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s father-in- law, the news would be an everyday headline and every detail would be reported over and over.

And yet liberals say there are no double standards in political reporting. And people are already talking about Hillary as our next President! And then there is possibly Chelsea for president in our future!

My first thought was it was one of those made up conspiracy theory things that gets recycled every administration. But, I remembered Mezvinsky from the Nixon days so I looked it up anyway. Here’s what Snopes has on it. Turns out it is true.

Steve Sailer likes to write about the deep state and I must admit I find it enjoyable. I’m skeptical about conspiracy theories, but that does not mean there are no conspiracies. What’s more common is the near incestuous dealings in the political class. If you get elected to Congress, the door is open for you and your tribe to join the ruling class and stay there regardless of your actions. You need to win re-election and prove you will not make any trouble for the people in charge. Once you do that, you are granted tenure and even a lengthy trip to the Federal can does not get you thrown out of the club.

That means your relatives can gain insider access to business deals unavailable to the hoi polloi. Your kids go to tony private schools and marry the kids of others in the political class. It’s a milder form of the big man politics so popular in sub-Saharan Africa. In South America it results in a system where the ruling elite will do anything to keep the peasants down in the valley. In Africa and the Middle East it means the dominant tribe murders any tribe that seems threatening, while the big man enjoys the benefits of being the big man. In the Occident, its more subtle and more diffused, because the smart fraction is much larger. Still, it is not hard to see how it can ossify into something more insidious than just grubby theft and graft.

Fake Indian was in Minnesota, ironically enough, testing the waters for a presidential run.

Sen. Fake Indian (D-Mass.) brought her populist message Saturday to this small college town to rev up the final weeks of Sen. Al Franken’s reelection campaign, but also to claim the mantle of the modern liberal movement’s political godfather.

Speaking before more than 400 people at Carleton College, Fake Indian repeatedly invoked the spirit of the late Paul Wellstone, the fiery liberal senator who died 12 years ago this month in a plane crash during his reelection campaign. Wellstone remains a revered figure in Minnesota politics, and his brand of populism — out of step in the Clintonian Democratic Party of the 1990s — is now mainstream among leading liberal activists. Fake Indian has become the most prominent public face of that movement, and the Wellstone disciples in this town 40 miles south of Minneapolis gave their approval Saturday.

“The game is rigged, and the Republicans rigged it,” Fake Indian said to loud cheers.

From 2006 through 2008, the Left controlled the legislature. From 2008 through 2010 they controlled all of the Federal government. Since 2010, they have held the presidency and the Senate. That’s in addition to running the federal bureaucracy and the national media. They’ve had the means and the opportunity to fix whatever they think is rigged. But, imaginary bogeymen is what keeps the Cult of Modern Liberalism going.

It’s part of a three-state tour of Senate campaigns for Fake Indian, who later Saturday headed to St. Paul for a get-out-the-vote rally on behalf of Franken, Gov. Mark Dayton (D) and other candidates. Franken and Dayton are strong favorites to win reelection next month.

On Friday Fake Indian stopped in the Denver suburbs to help Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.) in his tough reelection campaign. And on Sunday, Fake Indian will be on the stump in Iowa for Rep. Bruce Braley (D), who is in a neck-and-neck race for the seat of retiring Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). It’s Fake Indian’s first visit in this election season to the battleground state, home to the first-in-the-nation caucus in early 2016 for the presidential campaign.

The crowd at Carleton — where Wellstone served as a professor before launching his long-shot 1990 Senate bid — gave its loudest cheers to Fake Indian, whose fights against big banks have made her a hero to liberal activists.

“She’s amazing. She shows that politics is a good thing,” said Rachel Palermo, 21, a senior at neighboring St. Olaf College. Some of her friends said they attended the rally just to see Fake Indian.

Palermo and her friends said they want Warren to run for president, but Alyssa Berg, 21, also a St. Olaf senior, noted it would be “counterproductive” for Fake Indian to run against Hillary Rodham Clinton.

I’ve been saying for a couple of year now that Fake Indian will be the Left’s choice to run for president. Cankles is old and ugly. The CML is like any other cult in that they need a “gifted individual” that is “born to rule”, so to speak, as their movement’s leader. That requires a degree of charisma that Cankles has never possessed. Plus, they have never forgiven her for her apostasy in the 1990’s. Fake Indian tickles the fancy of liberal women as their Jack Kennedy, except Fake Indian most likely does not have a dick.

The problem is she is an old white woman who lives is a maximally gentrified neighborhood that is hostile to black people. The fact that she scammed the quota system to score tenure at Harvard is not going to go over well with blacks either. There’s also a lot of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in Fake Indian. KKT was the great white hope of liberal women once too. Then she was unmasked as being a dunce and her career evaporated. Fake Indian is a hot house flower with the IQ of a goldfish.

Still, I hope to get a lot of mileage out of her campaign.

I’m a Second Amendment absolutist. By that I mean the courts should apply strict scrutiny when it comes to all gun laws, just as they do speech laws. There’s simply no compelling state interest to ban or license firearms. Stripping felons of their rights is acceptable and people declared mentally unfit has always been an acceptable reason for the state to deny citizens their rights. There’s nothing wrong with that as we apply that standard to all rights, not just guns. Otherwise, it is none of the state’s business if I own a gun or carry it around with me.

That’s where I’m coming from on the gun issue.

Even if you don’t care that much about the issue, the perversions that naturally arise from gun control efforts infect all aspect of life. Here’s a good example from the Cult Times.

A newly created database of New Yorkers deemed too mentally unstable to carry firearms has grown to roughly 34,500 names, a previously undisclosed figure that has raised concerns among some mental health advocates that too many people have been categorized as dangerous.

The database, established in the aftermath of the mass shooting in 2012 at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., and maintained by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services, is the result of the Safe Act. It is an expansive package of gun control measures pushed through by the administration of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo. The law, better known for its ban on assault weapons, compels licensed mental health professionals in New York to report to the authorities any patient “likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.”

But the number of entries in the database highlights the difficulty of America’s complicated balancing act between public safety and the right to bear arms when it comes to people with mental health issues. “That seems extraordinarily high to me,” said Sam Tsemberis, a former director of New York City’s involuntary hospitalization program for homeless and dangerous people, now the chief executive of Pathways to Housing, which provides housing to the mentally ill. “Assumed dangerousness is a far cry from actual dangerousness.”

Since there is no such thing as “mentally unstable” this gives the fascists in the bureaucracy carte blanche to put anyone they don’t like in the system, thus stripping them of their rights. Humans can be deemed a danger to themselves or others. They can be deemed to be incapable of caring for themselves. These are all things with objective definitions. Mental stability is purely subjective and ripe for abuse.

Back in the 70’s and 80’s, street hustlers like Jesse Jackson and then Al Sharpton would claim to speak for all non-whites. Hispanics have never considered themselves “black” and they don’t seek to join hands with blacks in political matters. In the 90’s and 2000’s that became even more clear, but black leaders held onto the fantasy. I’m not sure why, maybe it is just comforting in some way. Charlie Rangel certainly knows this is nonsense, but it lingers on for some reason. The NY Times has a story on the coming election which has more magical thinking.

The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.

“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”

Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Mr. Obama.

Now, Democrats are deploying other prominent black elected officials and other surrogates, buttressed by sophisticated voter targeting efforts, to stoke black turnout. At the White House, the president is waging an under-the-radar campaign, recording video advertisements, radio interviews and telephone calls specifically targeting his loyal African-American base.

“Anybody who looks at the data realizes that if the black vote, and the brown vote, doesn’t turn out, we can’t win. It’s just that simple,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, referring to African-American and Latino voters. “If we don’t turn out, we cannot hold the Senate.”

One of the dirty little secrets that no one wants to admit is Hispanics are not particularly fond of blacks. They don’t look at Ms. Fudge as anything other than a voice of American blacks. Further, there’s no such thing as Hispanic. Puerto Ricans don’t like Dominicans or Mexicans. Central Americans don’t identify with Mexicans. Brazilians and South Americans don’t buy into the whole brown business at all. A century ago WASP’s saw all Catholics as the same. Italians were even counted as black, along with Jews. My mid-century it was fairly obvious that Italians were not Irish and both were leaving the ghetto and joining the WASP society of middle-class America.

That’s likely the path for most Hispanics. Cubans have done that in Miami. Mexicans will be a mixed bag as Mexico is a mixed culture. Central Americans are a tougher call, but we seem to be getting the more hardy and adventurous ones. I’m not saying they are natural conservatives or any of that nonsense. It’s just that brown ain’t black. Hispanics will splinter into the class structure of America, while blacks seem destined to remain in the Liberal Democratic ghetto.

I’ve long noted the suicidal impulse of the Left. At the core, these people want to die and take the rest of us with them. Judicial Watch, which has a really good record of unearthing embarrassing stuff on our rulers, has this:

While the bipartisan voice grows to ban Ebola victims from entering the United States, a new report claims that President Obama is considering a plan to bring the world’s Ebola patients to the United States to be treated.

Judicial Watch, the conservative public watchdog group, says in a shocking report that the president is “actively formulating plans” to admit Ebola-infected non-citizens just to be treated.

“Specifically, the goal of the administration is to bring Ebola patients into the United States for treatment within the first days of diagnosis,” said the group.

Such a plan would likely cause a political outcry throughout the nation, on edge over the spread of the virus.

Judicial Watch, which probes federal spending and uses federal and administration sources to root out corruption, said it is unclear who would pay for transporting and treating non-Americans.

But they have details nobody else has. “The plans include special waivers of laws and regulations that ban the admission of non-citizens with a communicable disease as dangerous as Ebola.”

The organization added, “the Obama administration is keeping this plan secret from Congress. The source is concerned that the proposal is illegal; endangers the public health and welfare; and should require the approval of Congress.”

This is madness for a number of reasons. The least obvious is how this policy further erodes the trust between the citizens and their government. Trust in the political class is at record lows, but most people still think the bureaucrats in the various agencies are at least trying to their jobs. Getting new politicians is a simple thing, in the mind of the public, if not in reality. Getting a new mandarin class and a new managerial class means blood in the streets. Putting the CDC in a position to fail is a dangerous game. When even the aging lefties at the NYTimes think the CDC is incompetent, you already have a serious trust problem.

There’s another layer to the trust issue. When the Bush people allegedly failed to help the looters in New Orleans after Katrina, it was not because they did not know what to do. That was never the claim. The claim was they failed to do what was required for some reason. This, however, looks like the opening scenes of every disaster movie. The people in charge are either too arrogant to admit they are facing a disaster or too stupid to know they don’t know what they are facing. As Greg Cochran points out, arrogant ignorance has a long history in the epidemic game.

In a few weeks, there will be political consequences. When Obama feels the need to quit the golf course and show up for work, you know the politics are more lethal to his cult than Ebola is to Africans. That may be comforting to Red Team partisans, but it is still very bad for the health of the Empire. The near total lack of trust in the political class has made it impossible for them to tackle any of the systemic problems facing the country. Making Red Team less odious than Blue Team is not going to usher in a reform movement.

That’s really not the main concern. As Greg Cochran pointed out in that post, the people in charge of the science of Ebola may be ideologically wedded to ideas that are completely wrong. That’s not without precedent. The Obama administration appears to be acting on the belief, and it is nothing more than belief, that Ebola is mostly a poor African savage problem. In clever, white America we don’t have to worry about witch doctors and strange burial rituals. The two infections in Dallas suggest otherwise.

The column in the Straussian Daily News makes a good case for concern, if not panic. We don’t know a lot about Ebola.

As a rule, one should not panic at whatever crisis has momentarily fixed the attention of cable news producers. But the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which has migrated to both Europe and America, may be the exception that proves the rule. There are at least six reasons that a controlled, informed panic might be in order.

(1) Start with what we know, and don’t know, about the virus. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other government agencies claim that contracting Ebola is relatively difficult because the virus is only transmittable by direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who has become symptomatic. Which means that, in theory, you can’t get Ebola by riding in the elevator with someone who is carrying the virus, because Ebola is not airborne.

This sounds reassuring. Except that it might not be true. There are four strains of the Ebola virus that have caused outbreaks in human populations. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the current outbreak (known as Guinean EBOV, because it originated in Meliandou, Guinea, in late November 2013) is a separate clade “in a sister relationship with other known EBOV strains.” Meaning that this Ebola is related to, but genetically distinct from, previous known strains, and thus may have distinct mechanisms of transmission.

Not everyone is convinced that this Ebola isn’t airborne. Last month, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy published an article arguing that the current Ebola has “unclear modes of transmission” and that “there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

The rest of that column is worth reading. Even if the President Ebola thinks the science is settled and Ebola is not that contagious, he clearly knows his apparatus for dealing with public concern is not working. He also knows the people running the CDC are struggling to deal with two, that’s TWO, cases of Ebola. Inviting a plague into the country just to prove some weird political point or spite his political opponents is madness. Given his views on Christianity, it is may be Domitian-level madness.

Since forever, the children of successful men have often taken up positions in the ruling class once they reached adulthood. Some would argue that it is genetic. The able male finds a high quality mate and the result is a child with the genetic stuff to follow in the father’s footsteps. Others would argue that it is slipstreaming. The successful male blazes a path for his children. The unencumbered route to the ruling class is easy to traverse, even for the average, compared to blazing your own path. The dull-witted child of a billionaire is going to have a better shot at attending Harvard than the smart kid from the projects.

Maybe it is a combination of things, as is always the case. I don’t know, but I do know Americans have been cursed by a few dynastic families. The Roosevelt’s did a lot to damage the country. The Kennedy clan may be the biggest blight on a nation since Agrippina found a husband. We’ve been lucky too. Some of our worst politicians like Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon did not have kids interested in politics. At least they never made a go of it.

It looks like we dodged another bullet. Our semi-retarded vice president’s oldest kid is probably going to be the next governor of Delaware. Luckily, that’s a ticket to nowhere, but he’ll surely end up inn the Senate one day, taking up the seat held by his father as the dumbest man in the Senate. Biden’s other kid was hoping to run the same game with joining the National Guard as a lawyer so he could put “war hero” on his campaign website. Luckily, he was thrown out for drug abuse.

Vice President Joe Biden ’s son Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve this year after testing positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer by training who is now a managing partner at an investment company, had been commissioned as an ensign in the Navy Reserve, a part-time position. But after failing a drug test last year, his brief military career ended.

Mr. Biden, 44 years old, decided to pursue military service relatively late, beginning the direct-commission process to become a public-affairs officer in the Navy Reserve in 2012. Because of his age—43 when he was to be commissioned—he needed a waiver to join the Navy. He received a second Navy waiver because of a drug-related incident when he was a young man, according to people familiar with the matter. Military officials say such drug waivers aren’t uncommon.

Mr. Biden was commissioned as an ensign on May 7, 2013, and assigned to Navy Public Affairs Support Element East in Norfolk, Va., a reserve unit, according to the Navy. In June 2013, after reporting to his unit in Norfolk, he was given a drug test, which turned up positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Biden was discharged in February, the Navy said.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that it was “the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge. I respect the Navy’s decision. With the love and support of my family, I’m moving forward.”

We still have one hapless nitwit from the Biden clan in the pipe, but at least we avoided having a second putz from that deformed family tree.

I fully admit to having a mild resentment toward rich people. Every society has rich people. That’s just the natural order and every human society has had an elite that enjoys a better material existence than the rest. It’s not always obvious why. I look at the wealthy elites of today and I don’t see a collection of geniuses. I have some idea what genius looks like and I can’t think of a rich genius at the moment. CEO’s are smart guys and they work hard, but they are not that smart and they don’t work that hard. The number of rich people who invented some product or service that made human existence much better is tiny. In most cases, the guy inventing stuff is getting hosed by the rich guy who owns the company where he works.

That said, getting rich in business is no easy task. You have to be ruthless and you have to take a lot of abuse on the way up. There’s a fair amount of dumb luck involved as well as chicanery. It’s why CEO’s, partners in white shoe law firms and entrepreneurs are often horrible people. They are very good at getting ahead and climbing the greasy pole, but they suck at most everything else. Even so, dumb luck and serendipity play a defining role. Mitt Romney won the lucky sperm contest. Bill Gates was handed the golden ticket by IBM. Mark Cuban hit the lottery. If you have the choice between being a ruthless and crafty businessman or being a lucky businessman, take the latter.

When I look at the list of the super rich, I can live with the fact they are mostly assholes and they got lucky. If we started from scratch, all of them would do better than most and some would get rich all over again. Maybe not top-400 rich, but they would do OK. Like I said at the start, mine is a mild resentment. Further down the scale of rich people, say the typical suburban burgher, I have no strong feelings. Yes, SWPL-ville is full of conformist assholes who have heads full of goofy ideas about life, but I live in the ghetto so I don’t have to put up with it. I have no doubt that the guy with the $5,000 a month mortgage on the McMansion is busting his hump to pay for his lifestyle.

There’s where I am on rich people.

That said, I look at this story from the Telegraph and I wonder if we have not lost our minds. The first guy on the list, Richard Branson, did not exactly come from the gutter, but he made his money in a real tough business and he made the business better. But, look at the rest of the list. Six of the ten are clowns. These are people who entertain us by pretending to be people they are not. Every society has entertainers, but we have made them into our ruling elite! Johnny Depp? David Copperfield?

Troll though Manhattan or LA and you can find a thousand people with the acting ability of Johnny Depp. He got rich on pure dumb luck. He showed up at the right casting call on the right day with the right look. His show had some success and a few lucky turns later he is a star. Nothing wrong with it, but what does it say about a society where this guy is super rich? My goodness. He’s not friggin’ Shakespeare. No one will remember him once his time is done. His footprints will wash away in a few years after his death, maybe sooner.

That’s not to say there’s not some talent involved with being a good actor. It’s just not that hard. Lots of people can do it well enough to be believable on stage or on screen. I was at a fall festival no long ago where some local college kids were doing Shakespeare. It was as good as anywhere else, by anyone else. I once stayed at an inn where they had a small theater. Local kids and adults put on plays for the locals. It was as good, in terms of acting, as anything I’ve seen on Broadway. All over America, people are entertained by community theater. There’s a threshold level ability that is pretty low. Once you cross it, you can be a credible actor. In this case and this case, you can be horrible and still make a living.

I think that’s where my resentment rears its ugly green head. I look at a Johnny Depp and his island and wonder how that makes any sense. I see a Mark Cuban and think crime actually pays. In isolation it is not a big deal, but we have a lot of this, too much of this. A healthy society is one that produces a healthy, restrained elite. Our cultural and financial elites are corrupt, brutish and stupid. We’ve turned the culture over to pimps who made their whores millionaires. The financial affairs of the nation are ruled by con-men and bank robbers, skimming from the economy without every adding grain of sand to the wealth of humanity.

We have a rich people problem.