Way back in the olden thymes, cultural Marxism started with the appeal for tolerance. Normal people had to drop all of their hard earned cultural habits in order to include the “historically excluded.” Never mind that it was nonsense; it was a fad and otherwise sensible people fell for it. In the 1980’s and 1990’s I was sent off to sensitivity training on a regular basis as a part of my regular training as an employee. The course was always taught by a white woman of dubious sexual orientation. There would be a black guy as her second. They would tell us that in the name of tolerance, all of our ideas about life would no longer be tolerated.

There was always an “or else” lurking behind the words.

Here’s the “or else”:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.

“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”

ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”

“Political and social commentary is not a crime,” Holcomb said. “It is protected by the First Amendment.”

The subpoenas are just the latest twist in an ongoing saga over the Houston’s new non-discrimination ordinance. The law, among other things, would allow men to use the ladies room and vice versa.  The city council approved the law in June.

The Houston Chronicle reported opponents of the ordinance launched a petition drive that generated more than 50,000 signatures – far more than the 17,269 needed to put a referendum on the ballot.

However, the city threw out the petition in August over alleged irregularities.

After opponents of the bathroom bill filed a lawsuit the city’s attorneys responded by issuing the subpoenas against the pastors.

These thuggish tactics have always been the main part of Cultural Marxism. Few would ever go along with this nonsense without the “or else” in there. That’s what attracts the adherents. It is the opportunity to push people around that gets them excited. The Nazis built their movement on low-IQ street toughs looking for a reason to dress up and crack skulls. It’s why every Rousseau-ist cult ends in a bloodbath. They have no choice. That’s the only way “or else” can work.

I’ve commented before that you rarely, if ever, run into a jolly lesbian. In part, they are not trying to compete with other women for men. Males like women who are happy and flirtatious. Lesbians have no desire, allegedly, to attract males so they have no need to be happy and flirtatious.In fact, they have an incentive to be unappealing to men. The nastiness may simply be a way to ward off interested males, but heterosexual women also find lesbians to be unpleasant so who knows.

The other part is that the odds of meeting an available sex partner are extremely low. Lesbians are probably 2% of the population of females. Social science says the number is higher, but think about the number of homosexual males versus females you see on a regular basis. Throw in the fact lesbian relationships are highly volatile and it is easy to see why they would be unhappy.

There’s that and the strong possibility that homosexuality is just the most obvious item in a basket of pathologies. Every lesbian I know self-mutilates. They have all sorts of metal crap in their faces and visible tattoos. Non-lesbian girts do this too, but it was once called lesbian chic for a reason. The butchered haircuts and the wearing of rags all indicate a high degree of self-loathing. Then you have the outlandishly high addiction rates. There could be many sensible reasons for it, but one of those sensible reasons is mental illness.

So, we have a small population of bitter, often angry people who have their sexual wiring confused. Putting them in charge of anything sounds like a bad idea. Giving them an ideological sledgehammer to wield against a society with which they feel they are at war is nothing short of lunacy. The people of Houston put a Nazi drag queen in charge of their city and the results naturally follow.

I’ve never been a fan of Obama, but I fully admit to thinking he would turn out to be harmless. I expected a more pussified version of Clinton with a bigger dose of self-regard. He would fiddle around the edges here and there, maybe raise taxes a bit, get out of the Bush wars and that’s about it. I never imagined he would be so clownishly incompetent. I fully assumed the adults would keep him from breaking anything important for fear he would be a one term president.

Boy was I wrong.

We now have a second Ebola case. This one is vastly worse the first one. The poor Vietnamese girl could be explained as a mistake and an isolated one. This second one is not. Worse yet, the woman was allowed on a plane and now we may have hundreds of unknown people exposed to the virus. All of this is due to the administrations unwillingness to block all flight from Ebola countries. We know why too. If the Ebola outbreak had occurred in Scandinavia or Israel, Obama would have closed the airports immediately.

Lion of the Blogosphere has an interesting question. How much is this going to cost?

One or two in one location is probably a few million. Thousands spread across the nation moves into the billions category quickly. The whole country has to stop and re-engineer public health just because President Ebola let one of his tribesmen in from Liberia.

Carter came to be defined by Iran. The public concluded that he was simply not up to the task. They could forgive a lot, but the cumulative effect of his failures eventually collapsed his presidency. Bush the Smaller was undone by Katrina. It was not fair and most people were sane enough to get that, but it still came to symbolize the problems of his presidency.

Obama, on the other hand, has made his own mess. He will be remembered as President Ebola, the man who willingly imported a plague into the United States.

I remember when Slate first started publishing. Michael Kinsley was going to reinvent journalism, along with his super-rich patrons at Microsoft. The early version was just a PDF that you could read on your PC or print off at home. It was not a very interesting magazine at the time. Kinsley was a professional apple polisher and toady. He knew how to be interesting to rich people in private, but he had no skills of interest to a broader audience. If you look at his career, he is similar to Barak Obama in that he has a gift for currying favor with super-rich white people willing to give him stuff.

Today, Slate seems to be click bait. No one goes to Slate for incite or analysis. You go there for hilarious examples of some weird Liberal tick. The near total lack of self-awareness by the writers there makes for some comedy gold. A favorite, it seems, is Jamelle Bouie. Liberal whites love to decorate their website with a youngish black male writer willing to flatter liberal white people about race. The Atlantic has TN Coates and Slate has Baba Bouie.

His latest work of nonsense has the usual stuff, but it contains one useful bit of incite.

The glib response to stats on blacks and police is to cite so-called “black crime” or “black criminality.” But this depends on a major analytical error. Yes, blacks are overrepresented in arrest and conviction rates. At the same time, “criminal blacks” are a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of all black Americans. If you walked into a group of 1,000 randomly selected blacks, the vast majority—upward of 998—would never have had anything to do with violent crime. To generalize from the two is to confuse the specific (how blacks are represented among criminals) with the general (how criminals are represented among blacks). Statisticians call this a “base rate error,” and you should try to avoid it.

In fairness, you could apply this to police as well. The number of cops who shoot—much less shoot black Americans—is a small percentage of all cops. Why judge the whole by the actions of a few?

Human populations have been self-policing since the beginning. Some groups are better at it than others. Jews, for example, were exceptionally good at “boiling off” their members who did not really fit the tribe’s goal. The slow-witted and lazy would marry off into the gentile population, leaving the smart and faithful in the tribe. Do that for enough generations and you have a population of very smart and very loyal people. The Amish may very be the result of the same process. All people, in all times and places, have had to figure out how to deal with their troublesome fraction.

In America, whites of all types have figured this out pretty well. Instead of relying on old customs from Europe, they used geography. America is a big country with lots of useful land. That means the stupid, lazy and criminal can be set aside physically. That’s not to say the old ways were abandoned. Class distinctions reinforce the physical divide. Whites can identify their kind just by the look and location. Even to out-groups like Asians and Hispanics, this guy is a very different person than this guy, even from a great distance.

Orientals have relied on the old ways for the most part. Shame is a powerful tool to force cooperation and compliance, but it is also a useful tool for segregating the troublesome. I’ve known a few Koreans who basically abandoned their families because they could not or would not abide by the cultural mores of their community. They either conformed or walked away. The tremendous success of East Asians has allowed them to follow the white pattern and use distance and culture to weed out the troublesome from their ranks. This guy is not this guy even to this round eye.

The one group in America that has not figured this out is blacks. Successful blacks are under extreme pressure to avoid being white. They have to “keeps it reelz” in order to avoid being called an Oreo. This is not just for highly successful blacks. Middle-class blacks are under constant pressure to embrace black culture. Sports coaches tell me it is nearly impossible to get black kids into soccer and lacrosse. They all want to play basketball and football. You know see little black kids playing instruments anymore either. That’s for white and Asian kids. Hip-hop is black music.

This becomes a problems when it comes to distance. A black family moves out to the burbs and their new neighbors are in tears having finally acquired a black neighbor. Then one weekday night the new neighbors have a party that starts at ten at night. All of their old neighbors from the ghetto show up and party into the wee hours. That sounds nuts, but I know of dozens of such examples. Suddenly, diversity is not so cool. The for sale signs go up and the neighborhood changes. The black people are left to think that white people just hate living near black people, when it is really just middle-class people not wanting to live in the ghetto.

Bill Cosby used to rant about this before he was hissed off the stage. Chris Rock had a great bit on the same theme. He was pressured to stop doing it because “white people misunderstood it.” That’s hilarious for a number of reasons. How long racial solidarity can keep the black middle-class from jettisoning their ghetto brothers is a mystery. A run through the television dial suggests the elites are fighting it which means it will not happen. That means the majority of blacks who commit no crimes and just want to live decent lives will remain chained to the ghetto visually and geographically, paying the tab for those who commit the bulk of the social trouble in modern America.

Back when were allowed to notice things like race, confrontations between urban hipsters and the natives were called battles of bros versus yos. Years back in Boston, a college boy was gunned down by a yo right in front of my building. Homeboy was minding his business, driving down the road when the college boy tried to jump over the hood of his car. The college boy hit the hood of the car and rolled onto the street. A confrontation ensued and homey blasted Dylan or Brad or whatever name the college buy was given. They never found the shooter and I always suspect the cops never looked that hard. Sometimes, you have to let nature take its course.

As the Left evicts NAM’s from the cities, we’ll see more stories like this one. The fact no one notices the skin colors is part of how it will go. The SWPL’s have plenty of code words to handle this stuff anyway. Words like “sketchy” and “dodgy” have become urban SWPL slang to describe black neighborhoods. The more sarcastic may even use “diverse” and “vibrant” if they feel like they are among coevals. The main tool the Left uses to push out the undesirables is complex rules. My bet is there was never a time when the city rented the park. The hipsters pushed for a change so they could take control of the park without having to confront the locals. Zoning laws have been a popular way to do this too.

The irony of all this is within living memory the tide was running the other way in cities. In the 50’s and 60’s these city neighborhoods were populated with middle-class white people. Local officials, real estate agents and would-be landlords used block busting to shove the whites out into the suburbs. They would get one family to sell to a black family. Within months the rest would agree to sell, usually after an unpleasant confrontation at the school or park with their new neighbors. Then it would be Katy-bar-the-door time as the whites fled to the burbs. All In The Family was based, in part, on this phenomenon.

Now, the children and grandchildren of those suburban pioneers are returning the favor.

Back in the olden thymes at the birth of the Internet, the place for technical people to gather on-line was the bulletin board. You dialed in with your modem and logged into a bulletin board to read posting from others and engage in debate with others of similar interests. I think the first BBS I logged into was a college football site. Not long after e-mail lists came along and then NNTP servers. This was the first “social networking” and was for nerds only. You had to know stuff to get on-line. Today, even retarded people have Facebook pages.

Now that the Hive is on-line, they have co-opted the language of the Internet. It used to be that a “troll” was someone who posted to get attention. Someone would post on a college football newsgroup, for example, that Miami was a school for thugs and drug dealers. A big argument would erupt allowing the troll to irritate a bunch of people. “Trolling” was a way to stir up trouble. Clever trolling has produced some of the most amusing bits on the Internet.

Now, the Hive has redefined the term to mean “people they don’t like.” Anyone who holds an opinion contrary to the Cult approved opinions is called a troll. Like Nazi and racist, it no longer has meaning. But, it also means the person so labeled has no meaning. So much so it can get you killed, apparently.

London (AFP) – The death of a British woman accused of a vicious campaign of online abuse against the parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann has ignited debate over the growing scourge of Internet “trolls”.

Brenda Leyland was found dead in a hotel room earlier this month after being confronted by Sky News over her alleged trolling of Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter went missing in Portugal in 2007.

An investigation is ongoing, but has found no evidence of foul play or third party involvement.

Using the Twitter handle @Sweepyface the 63-year-old reportedly posted thousands of hate-filled messages about the couple.

Her name figured on an 80-page dossier compiled by members of the public cataloguing alleged abuse directed at the couple and their two other children from a long list of Internet users, which is currently being investigated by the police.

It is a trend that has been replicated the world over against high-profile figures.

Brenda Leyland was not “trolling” anyone. She was most likely a nut who was harassing people. The abracadabra phrase “hate-filled” tells you that the couple she was harassing were members of the Cult. Noticing the obvious about the Cult is always hate-filled so I’m just connecting the dots.

Think about the mindset of the people who came together to compile the dossier on the dead woman. These are the sort of people who turned in Jews to the Nazi occupiers in France.

If you look at the economics of most cable channels, they can’t exist without cable fees. By that I mean without the buck per month or so they get from your cable bill, they go out of business. ESPN, for example, is on everyone’s cable service and the fee is something like $5 a month. They get close to seven billion a year from those fees, despite the fact only 20% of homes watch ESPN. If we ever went to a la carte pricing or pure pay per view, ESPN folds up shop. They only generate about two billion in ad revenue. If they survived, it would be a much different format. They would not be paying the NBA those enormous rights fees either.

A better example is MSNBC. This sob story in the Lunatic Times reports that their best shows draw fewer eyes than late night informercials.

Rachel Maddow, the biggest star on the MSNBC cable network, just posted her lowest quarterly ratings results ever.

“Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s signature morning program, scored its second-lowest quarterly ratings, reaching an average of just 87,000 viewers in the key news demographic group.

And “Ronan Farrow Daily,” the network’s heavily promoted new afternoon show, which stars a 26-year-old Rhodes Scholar with a high-profile Hollywood lineage, has been largely a dud.

Though it has mostly happened quietly, which may be a comment on the cable network’s larger status in the media landscape, MSNBC has seen its ratings hit one of the deepest skids in its history, with the recently completed third quarter of 2014 generating some record lows.

Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, acknowledged that his network had been struggling, but put it in the context of the overall drop in cable news. “This has been a tough year all around,” he said. “All three cable news channels are drawing a smaller combined audience than they were five years ago.” He also emphasized that despite the plunge that caused it to trail CNN in the last quarter, the network remained ahead of CNN for the full year.

In the past, MSNBC’s ratings have typically fallen during times of intensely followed major news events. The current period is awash in them, with stories like ISIS and Ebola commanding a high degree of international reporting. This plays well to CNN’s strengths.

MSNBC consciously established its brand as politics-centric, approaching stories from a left-of-center viewpoint, in deliberate contrast to the right-of-center approach of Fox News, which continues to dominate the news channel ratings. At the same time, MSNBC moved away from a close relationship with NBC News that it had during the early years of the network. Today, fewer NBC News correspondents appear on MSNBC.

Mr. Griffin said that a general apathy about American politics has also hurt the network. “You can look at the dysfunction in Washington, the wariness about politics, the low approval ratings,” he said. “That’s had an impact. But we’ve got to adjust; we’ve got to evolve.”

MSNBC’s recent results have not been encouraging. During the third quarter, Ms. Maddow reached an average of 183,000 viewers in the audience component that most matters to MSNBC’s advertisers, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, her lowest total since she started her show in 2008.

I love how the Times tries to equate Fox News with MSNBC, like they are mirrors. That’s insane, of course. Fox is pretty much straight news with a prime time of infotainment shows. O’Reilly, Hannity and the others are entertainers. They generate the big ratings and that’s how you pay the bills, usually. MSNBC is just a parade of screaming lunatics. Rachel Madow looks and sounds like a woman struggling with her sanity. A generation ago, these people would never been allowed to be on television.

It is just another example of how socializing costs boils off the normal and rational, leaving the weird and the extreme. The proliferation of cable channels relies on every home having cable (or satellite) and paying roughly the same for the service. The 20% who love sports get ESPN at a far cheaper rate than under a pay-per-view scenario. Billions are shifted from people with no interest in sports to these sports teams, via the socialism of the cable bill. Instead of catering to a broad audience, ESPN can focus on fanatics and indulge in their crackpot politics.

CNN and then MSNBC followed a similar path. CNN got on everyone’s basic service, thus guaranteeing them a buck a month from every home, whether anyone watched or not. With a guaranteed revenue stream, they were free to indulge in whatever nonsense that was current at the time. Now, the only place people watch CNN is at airports. Similarly, MSNBC piggybacked on NBC to get on basic cable. They drifted into insanity and now the only place people watch is at the day room of the local asylum.

This happens whenever the link between the paying customer and the service provider is unclear, as is always the case with third party payments. Medical services get increasingly worse at the retail end because the patients are not the customers. It is the insurance company and government paying the bills. The schools are another example. The people running the schools care more about the unions and pressure groups than the students. People respond to incentives and when you funnel those incentives through third parties, it is natural to assume the needs of those third parties are supreme. In the case of the cable news channels, the money is there no matter what they do, so the weird tastes of the people running the channel dominate.

It is why I think a smart politician on the Right would be wise to champion a la carte cable. No one likes dealing with the cable monopolies. No one likes the fact they are paying for a bunch of channels they never watch. The cable monopoly is a perfect target for a populist politician. It’s why the lunatics chirp about “net neutrality” They know making the ISP’s into bad guys is easy money. The benefit to the Right is forcing a la carte pricing on the evil cable companies would go a long way toward de-funding the Left’s propaganda organs.

Much of what is called the “new economy” is just an updated version of the old economy. By that I mean robbing people. Netflix, for example, transfers their infrastructure costs onto you, even if you don’t use their service. Their streaming service relies on the Internet and the cost of growing bandwidth is in your cable bill. Facebook exists because they don’t have to pay to put their site on your PC. You pay for it. Cost shifting is a big part of the new economy and in some cases it is outright extortion. These paid review sites like Yelp look a lot like highwaymen to me.

First the chefs of a small Italian restaurant got mad at online review site Yelp. Instead of trying to get better reviews, they decided to take a different approach: get terrible ones.

The campaign helped Botte Bistro get a rating of one out of five stars, as more than 1,000 reviewers left hundreds of tongue-in-cheek reviews panning the Richmond, California, eatery, said chef Michele Massimo, adding that it boosted business.

It was the latest protest among businesses who for years have complained that Yelp was extorting them by raising or dropping ratings depending on whether they advertised with the Internet’s most popular review site.

Yelp has persistently denied those claims on its website, in court and at every opportunity when the question is put publicly to the company.

“It wouldn’t pass the straight face test,” Yelp spokesman Vince Sullitto said of the extortion claims.

Sullitto said Yelp attracts millions of viewers and sells advertising to 80,000 businesses because of the site’s credibility with consumers. Sullitto said many of the company’s critics are businesses that have received bad reviews.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a lawsuit filed by several businesses claiming Yelp extorted them by removing positive reviews after advertising sales pitches were turned down.

The court is one rung below the U.S. Supreme Court and the ruling could have been a definitive one for Yelp.

Instead, it served to fuel the company’s critics because the court said that, even if Yelp did manipulate reviews to penalize businesses, the practice would not constitute extortion.

The court said it found no evidence of manipulation and that it was ruling narrowly only on the question of extortion. Nonetheless, the company’s critics said the ruling supported their claims.

Even before the 9th Circuit ruling, Yelp was battling two lawsuits filed by company investors who make similar extortion claims.

The suits, filed in San Francisco federal court over the summer, allege that the company’s stock traded at artificially inflated prices because the “company tried to sell services designed to suppress negative reviews or make them go away” and then lied about it.

The company has yet to formally respond to the lawsuits in court, but says it will fight these legal actions as well.

Last year, a lawyer serving as a small-claims judge in San Diego likened Yelp to a “modern-day version of the Mafia going to stores and saying, ‘You want to not be bothered? You want to not have incidents in your store? Pay us protection money.’”

This is not a new thing. Trade magazines have played the same game for years. Good reviews could make or break a product and the way to ensure it was to buy ads in the trade magazines. At the same time, writers would know they better play ball and say nice things about the products from their advertisers. It was not a formal arrangement, just a natural one. Everyone had an interest in promoting the product.

Yelp and other review sites have simply expanded the model to the Internet and every consumer business. Proving they are manipulating their rankings is never going to be easy, but it is hard to imagine they are not doing it. The bias will always be in favor of their customers who are the people sending them money, not the dingbats writing reviews. That’s what “new economy” types often forget. The customer is the guy writing the checks and he always comes first. In this case, the review site will look out for those businesses that pay for ads.

I’ve always contended that atheism is just another secular religion. Unlike the Rousseau-ist cults, it has no Utopian aspects to it. There have been some atheists who preached about how the end of religion, by which they mean Christianity, will make the world a better place, but they always seemed to get tripped up by their hatred of Christianity. That’s the peculiar aspect to atheism. Other religions seek to crowd out the all other religions, but atheists just have it in for Christianity. In that regard it is similar to the lesser mass movements like MAAD and the boob cancer people.

Anyway, it is good to see I’m not alone in this view.

If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins unwittingly reveals his sense of his mission in the world. Toward the end of An Appetite for Wonder, the first installment in what is meant to be a two-volume memoir, Dawkins cites the opening lines of the first chapter of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.

I like how the author ties evolution into the cult like aspects of atheism. The Darwin Fish people are a lot like liberals in that they love science as long at it is a weapon against their enemies. Atheists tend to get light headed when you explain the evolutionary importance of religion and modern humans. They start fainting when you explain the importance of teleology and Christianity to the growth of science.

It is a different matter when those he sees as his intellectual underlings—religious believers and any who stray from the strictest interpretation of Darwinism—refuse to follow his lead. Recalling his years at boarding school, Dawkins winces at the memory of the bullying suffered by a sensitive boy, “a precociously brilliant scholar” who was reduced to “a state of whimpering, abject horror” when he was stripped of his clothing and forced to take cold baths. Today, Dawkins is baffled by the fact that he didn’t feel sympathy for the boy. “I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying,” he writes. Dawkins’s bafflement at his lack of empathy suggests a deficiency in self-knowledge. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.

This is something I’ve noticed often with atheists. Their new religion is always a tantrum against their old religion. Penn Jillette never shuts up about his atheism. On many occasions he has talked about how it arises from having watched his mother suffer at the end of her life. His answer was that no God could let people suffer like that so there must be no God. His atheism is therefore a mix of narcissism, ignorance and self-pity. Despite the self-absorption, atheists don’t seem to know themselves very well. Maybe that’s why they declare themselves a God.

It is too soon to know if the young woman in Texas will die from Ebola so we can’t pin her death on anyone just yet. We can blame our government for letting disease riddled savages into our country, at least one of whom had Ebola and infected this young women. There’s a chance she could be saved due to the help of  a citizen.

The Texan nurse diagnosed with Ebola has received a blood transfusion from survivor Dr Kent Brantly, reports claim.

It is the third time Dr Brantly has donated blood to Ebola victims after medics discovered he had the same blood type as previous patient Dr Nick Sacra and NBC cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, who is still being treated.

Incredibly, nurse Nina Pham, 26, has also matched with Brantly and today received a transfusion of his blood in a move that doctors believe could save her life. 

Pham has been in quarantine since Friday after catching the disease from ‘patient zero’ Thomas Eric Duncan – the man who brought the deadly virus to America.

Brantly is believed to have traveled to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where Pham worked, to make the donation on Sunday night.

Today, Pham’s condition was described as ‘clinically stable’.

At the end of the Carter years, a lot of sensible people thought we were finished as a country. The people in charge simply had no idea how to turn the thing around and keep us from collapsing into a heap like Europe. But, the people were still in good shape. When someone with a clue came along, he was put in charge and the decline was arrested. Reagan was not perfect, but he did not have a bunch of crazy ideas in his head about the country and his countrymen. As a result, he championed sensible public policy that left the American people free to work out the rest.

Today, we are once again run by people with crazy ideas in their heads and the country is headed down the tubes. The difference now is we have millions of savages poring over the borders. Those savages are carrying disease and pestilence. Ebola is a disease you get from eating bats or improperly handling the infected corpses of the dead – IN AFRICA! There’s no damned reason for anyone in America to get the disease.

It’s time to build the scaffold.

I fully admit to initially supporting the second war with Iraq. I was not enthusiastic about it, but it did appear we could maybe do some good by installing a rational government in Iraq as a counter to Iran and Syria. I never had any illusions about self-government succeeding there. These people are incapable of managing liberal democracy, but they could handle a mild authoritarian state that was friendly to the West. I assumed the Bush people were going to find a guy with a thick mustache who was happy to do business with us. Instead they went for liberal democracy and that was a total failure.

Amazingly, it appears the Obama administration has managed to make it worse. This story from the British press suggests Iraq is about to fall, in a fashion similar to what we saw in South Vietnam a million years ago.

America’s plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group’s fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad.

The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town’s remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

In the face of a likely Isis victory at Kobani, senior US officials have been trying to explain away the failure to save the Syrian Kurds in the town, probably Isis’s toughest opponents in Syria. “Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [Isis] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself,” said US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, in a typical piece of waffle designed to mask defeat. “The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively.”

Unfortunately for the US, Kobani isn’t the only place air strikes are failing to stop Isis. In an offensive in Iraq launched on 2 October but little reported in the outside world, Isis has captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It has captured Hit, Kubaisa and Ramadi, the provincial capital, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance by the Iraqi Army which showed itself to be as dysfunctional as in the past, even when backed by US air strikes.

Today, only the city of Haditha and two bases, Al-Assad military base near Hit, and Camp Mazrah outside Fallujah, are still in Iraqi government hands. Joel Wing, in his study –”Iraq’s Security

Forces Collapse as The Islamic State Takes Control of Most of Anbar Province” – concludes: “This was a huge victory as it gives the insurgents virtual control over Anbar and poses a serious threat to western Baghdad”.

The battle for Anbar, which was at the heart of the Sunni rebellion against the US occupation after 2003, is almost over and has ended with a decisive victory for Isis. It took large parts of Anbar in January and government counter-attacks failed dismally with some 5,000 casualties in the first six months of the year. About half the province’s 1.5 million population has fled and become refugees. The next Isis target may be the Sunni enclaves in western Baghdad, starting with Abu Ghraib on the outskirts but leading right to the centre of the capital.

The Iraqi government and its foreign allies are drawing comfort, there having been some advances against Isis in the centre and north of the country. But north and north-east of Baghdad the successes have not been won by the Iraqi army but by highly sectarian Shia militias which do not distinguish between Isis and the rest of the Sunni population. They speak openly of getting rid of Sunni in mixed provinces such as Diyala where they have advanced. The result is that Sunni in Iraq have no alternative but to stick with Isis or flee, if they want to survive. The same is true north-west of Mosul on the border with Syria, where Iraqi Kurdish forces, aided by US air attacks, have retaken the important border crossing of Rabia, but only one Sunni Arab remained in the town. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing has become the norm in the war in both Iraq and Syria.

At some point, Iran gets involved directly. They have no choice. How exactly that works is a mystery, but they are not going to let their Shia brothers get over run by the Sunnis. This is a part of the world with many ancient rivalries, but they have plenty of new ones too. The Saudis and GCC worry much more about Iran than the worry about the lunatics running ISIS. These far flung religious wars are good for business anyway. The Saudis can send their lunatics off to fight and die in Syria or Afghanistan, rather than have them cause trouble in Riyadh.

Iran getting directly involved in Iraq is a bigger concern because it moves them to the head of the class and that puts the Saudi relationship with Washington in jeopardy. It also upsets the Israelis for similar reasons. In a weird way, the success of ISIS is putting everyone on the same side for vastly different reasons, but the Obama administration seems paralyzed right now. Either they don’t know what to do or Obama is too afraid to do anything. It could be both.

As Obama heads into lame duck status, he finds his popularity at home dipping into the 30’s and his party running from him like he is Patient Zero. Usually presidents spend their final two years legacy building with various foreign policy projects. Obama has never had much interest in foreign policy and has proven to be incompetent at it. The world is going to get much worse over the next two years. Maybe untenably worse.