One of things most people learn early in life is the danger of finishing a demand with the words “or else.” There’s always some chance the other party calls you bet. My limited exposure to faculty life in our universities tells me most academics don’t understand this simple reality. They especially don’t understand the risks of saying it to your boss.

The General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, the nation’s oldest Episcopal seminary, seemed to be regaining its footing after almost having to seek bankruptcy protection in 2010. It sold off some valuable real estate — its leafy campus in Chelsea is just steps from the High Line — and hired a new dean and president, the Rev. Kurt H. Dunkle, who promised to make the struggling institution a “joyful, thankful and useful” place.

A year after his arrival, however, the seminary has fallen into turmoil. Eight of its 10 full-time faculty members walked off the job on Friday to protest what they described in letters to the school’s board of trustees as Mr. Dunkle’s overly controlling management style, his habit of making vulgar and offensive remarks, and his frequent threats to demote or fire those who disagreed with him.

The work stoppage, faculty members said, was intended to force a dialogue with the board and, ideally, to lead to the firing of Mr. Dunkle. Instead, the tactic backfired. On Monday, the board dismissed the eight faculty members, leaving the seminary’s roughly 140 students, a month into their term, without professors to teach them.

“It’s a really difficult situation; it’s chaotic,” said Alexander Barton, 26, who entered the seminary this fall. “And as a student, it’s hard to see what is true and what is not.”

A note on Tuesday from Mr. Dunkle to the students, reprinted on Episcopal Café, a blog, explained that about half of the classes were in session as the school scrambled to find qualified personnel for the other classes. Students have taken to social media to express their dismay, often siding with the faculty. Dozens of faculty and clergy members from other seminaries have signed a petition asking that the professors be reinstated.

How an internal management dispute behind seminary walls turned into a mass dismissal seems to be a tale of hardball negotiating tactics gone awry, and mistrust between the faculty, the dean and the board of trustees. The situation is being followed widely in the Episcopal world, which has recently seen at least one other seminary, the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., mired in a similar controversy.

In Manhattan, the seminary faculty members are taking legal action to keep their jobs, arguing that it is illegal to fire striking workers who have made legitimate complaints. They also face potential eviction, because most of them live on the seminary’s grounds. Mr. Dunkle declined to comment.

Speaking at a meeting at their lawyer’s office on Tuesday night, the eight professors said that problems began soon after the appointment of Mr. Dunkle. One early rift came over his decision to end the daily celebration of Mass, an age-old fixture of seminary life. This was done over the unanimous objection of the faculty.

Last winter, students began sending letters to board members to complain, both about the end of the daily Mass and other changes they found disruptive, such as the decision to move morning prayers to 10 a.m. from 8. “We no longer begin our day in prayer. It’s now a midmorning thing to do … like getting coffee,” wrote one student, William L. Ogburn, who posted his letter online.

The faculty members also started to keep a list of offensive statements they said Mr. Dunkle was making to them.

He once described Asian people as “slanty eyed,” the professors reported to the board in a detailed letter on Sept. 17. At a meeting last spring, Mr. Dunkle compared the technical side of theological education to “looking up women’s skirts,” the letter said. He said that he did not want the seminary to be known as the “gay seminary.” He once commented to a female faculty member that he “loved vaginas,” according to the letter.

He began micromanaging, keeping statistics, for example, on how often faculty members attended lunch, the professors said. Instead of feeling like a communal place of Christian living, “suddenly it has felt progressively like I’m in junior high school, or maybe on a plantation,” said David J. Hurd, a black professor of church music who has been on the faculty since 1976.

Though the professors said they had alerted board members to the brewing problems numerous times, the chairman of the board, Bishop Mark S. Sisk, said that the board felt blindsided by the severity of the Sept. 17 complaints.

Bishop Sisk said the board did not immediately schedule a meeting with the faculty members, because in their letter, they had seemed to make a series of untenable demands that trustees interpreted as preconditions for a meeting. The professors asked that they be given immediate oversight over the schedule and program at the school. They also wanted to choose which board members they met with.

“If Dean Dunkle continues in his current position, then we will be unable to continue in ours,” the eight faculty members wrote.

The board responded several days later that it would immediately begin an investigation of the dean’s behavior. But the faculty members, acting on the advice of their lawyer, Andrew Hoffmann, wrote back on Sept. 25 that they felt the investigation was beside the point, that they had formed a union and that they were stopping work the next day unless steps toward meeting their other requests were taken.

That incensed the board. “I think the trustees felt, who are these people?” Bishop Sisk said. “They are using the students as pawns, really, in a larger agenda that they have of raising their concerns.”

It was then that the board decided that the letters amounted to a resignation, though the word resignation was never used. “They kept saying, ‘If you don’t do these things, we can’t keep our position,’ ” Bishop Sisk said. “Well, we thought, ‘We can’t do those things, so you don’t have your position.’ ” On Sept. 30, the board wrote a public letter saying the resignations had been accepted.

Ooops! Next they are going to learn that the demand for “professors of church music” is not very high.

I’ve written in the past that public debt will one day be banned in the reforms that come after the great collapse. I’m half joking about the great collapse stuff, but history says we are due for a Bronze Age Collapse. The reason I think the banning of public debt will be on the list of reforms is we keep seeing these stories about American cities being swallowed up by debt payments.

Among the many ideas the Chicago Teachers Union have come up with over the years to save big money or generate gobs of new revenue for our cash-strapped city, a favorite involves what they like to call “toxic” interest-rate swaps deals.

Here’s the perennial claim, which is making a comeback as CTU President Karen Lewis contemplates a run for mayor:

The city and the school system have thrown away hundreds of millions of dollars after being duped by big banks into signing deals that locked in excessive interest payments. If only the city would take legal action, CTU again argued in a letter to the mayor last month, the money could be recouped and spent on city services and in classrooms.

Cities went out and made deals with Wall Street that looked good in the moment. They freed up cash to buy votes and pay off cronies. States did similar things with synthetic debt instruments like tobacco bonds. All across the country we see examples of states and municipalities struggling with bad debts. That’s not bad debt owed to them but bad debts incurred by previous administrations.

The libertarians simply shrug and say they should suffer. The neocons produce 5,000 page plans to restructure the debt using more synthetic securities cooked up by their buddies on Wall Street. Liberals want the courts to just throw it all out like we see with Chicago. That’s merely a short term fix that destroys the bond markets for a generation. If the court every did such a thing, the world financial system would collapse in a hour because of the trillions of derivatives that would be effected.

Anyway, the source of this is the title of this post, information asymmetry:

In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case.

The men on Wall Street who broker these deals are super smart and know their business better than anyone, other than maybe the guys at the other banks doing the same deals. The folks running pension funds are either men and women lacking the smarts to work at the big banks or they are not sociopaths. They are usually beholden to the local pols and therefore share their short term motives. They are easy picking for the sharpies on Wall Street. Chicago went into a gun fight dressed as targets, thinking it was a costume party.

There’s no fixing this. In fact, we used to know this. Pension fund managers used to spend their days reading the newspaper and banging their secretaries because all they had to do was buy T-Bills and high end corporate bonds. A chimp could do the job. Then the economics professions lowered interest rates to zero and suddenly the guys with bad comb overs had to start playing the market and doing interest swap deals with the big banks.

My solution is the simple one. Ban borrowing by municipal governments. This solves the temptation to play games with public money and public debt. If Chicago had to budget based solely on its tax base, you would have a different city. Karen Lewis would not be head of the teacher union, because there would most likely not be a teacher union. The power to obligate the unborn to pay for today’s party is what allows the party to grow out of control. You can afford barnacles like Karen Lewis when someone else is paying her salary.

Steve Sailer often says that people in the main stream press know what they are saying is nonsense, but they say it anyway because that’s just the way it is. The really smart ones use subtle language to lampoon the prevailing pieties of those around them. I’m not so sure. It could be, but I’m not sold. I’ve been around a lot of these folks and I suspect they really believe it. Maybe they are really good at pretending or I’m too dumb to find the heretical Easter eggs in their words. Like for instance in this piece.

America is widely considered a global leader in economics, business, and culture. But when it comes to education, the U.S. seems to be falling behind. In the 2012 PISA results, we ranked 27th in math, 17th in reading, and 20th in science. Our high school graduation rates are ranked 18th internationally.

A month ago, I had the pleasure of spending two weeks in Korea and Japan, meeting with leading education, technology, and telecommunications companies, as well as a ministry of education interested in Knewton adaptive learning technology.

I couldn’t help but compare the education systems in these countries to that in the United States. Globally, Korea and Japan have some of the highest rates of academic achievement. In the 2012 PISA survey, Korea was ranked fifth in math and reading and seventh in science; Japan was ranked seventh in math and fourth in reading and science. Japan has the second highest high school graduation rate internationally, with Korea in fifth place.

It’s obvious that Korea and Japan both value education enormously. But so does the United States. We regard education as a basic human right.

So what’s driving this huge discrepancy?

Some say it’s cultural. In America, we prize exceptionalism; in Korea and Japan, the focus is on raising the mean. Others point to socioeconomic inequality; schools can’t fix poverty. American K-12 education is controlled at the local level, making it difficult to implement programs widely. We’re paralyzed by politicized debates over standards, testing, and budgets.

But I think there’s something more important at play here: the way we treat teachers. In Korea and Japan, teachers are revered and paid accordingly. Top students aspire to the profession.

We need to start treating teachers with the respect they deserve. Imagine if Apple, Google, Facebook, and the country’s top tech companies tried to recruit employees without offering them great pay, perks, top-of-the-line technology, development opportunities, and smart colleagues. It would be unthinkable.These companies have spent the time and investment to figure out exactly what it takes to get top people to want to work for them — and, once they’re there, to stay.

Once you correct for race, America’s schools do just fine. Our Koreans score the same as the Koreans in Korea. Our Mauritanians do as well as  Mauritanians wherever it is Mauritanians live. Replace 15% of Japan’s population with Chechens and see what happens to their overall test scores and crime rates. Does this guy know this? My experience say probably not. I’ve had this conversation and the other person looks at me like I’m speaking in tongues. But, maybe I travel in the wrong circles. Perhaps the super smart sophisticates like David Liu use language in a way that rubes like me can’t comprehend and he is really making sport of liberal pieties regarding education and IQ.

Now, I do have the Google and I can find that Mr. Liu seems to have ripped off his claims from a group called the Varkey Gems Foundation that has been humping the idea of treating teachers as gods. I can also look up teacher pay from these guys who do the hard work of tabulating this stuff. Japan’s average pay, in US dollars, is $43,775 and South Korea is $43,874. The US is at $44,917. So much for his claims about how we pay our teachers compared to the Orient. The US, by the way, is the second highest pay rate, just behind Singapore. You’ll notice in the HuffPo report that the US also does just as well on the respect scale.

Further, the average pay for a software engineer is $69, 215 per year. It is also an infinity more difficult job requiring an IQ at least one standard deviation higher than a teacher. Education majors score at the bottom of the SAT for incoming freshmen. Many struggle with basic math. Many states were forced to scrap their teacher exams because the teachers kept flunking. In some cities, teachers cannot be fired resulting in perverts and degenerates on the payroll. None of this is tolerated in fields like software engineering. There are far fewer people with the IQ to do software than teach gym at the elementary school. That’s why the software job pays better.

I can see why Sailer thinks these guys are putting us on. How can someone be so wrong and made it to adulthood?

Social media is all about getting as many stupid people as possible together so they can bellow at anyone and everyone. Giving the dumb fraction a veto over the rest of us will go down as a primary reason the West collapsed. Here’s example eleventy billion.

The Jaguars have apologized for their mascot using the Ebola epidemic to mock the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Terrible Towels during Sunday’s game between the teams at EverBank Field on Sunday afternoon.

Jaxson de Ville held up a handwritten sign during the fourth quarter of the game that read “TOWELS CARRY EBOLA” while carrying a yellow Terrible Towel in his right hand. Jaguars president Mark Lamping said the team had no prior knowledge of the sign and is handling the matter internally.

“Improvisation and humor have both been key elements to the character of Jaxson de Ville, especially when he performs at home games,” Lamping said. “On Sunday, the person who has played Jaxson de Ville over the past 20 seasons made an extremely poor decision in that regard.

“The team was unaware of this inappropriate sign, which was hand-made by Jaxson during the fourth quarter of yesterday’s game, until after it had been displayed. We are handling the matter internally and taking it very seriously. We extend our sincerest apologies to anyone who was offended.”

Apologizing to people for their stupidity is madness. Spending a minute of time on what was a silly joke at a football game should be solid evidence at a commitment hearing. The correct response here was “go fuck yourself” when the scolds and pests complained about the mascot. But, that would require perspective.

Curtis Dvorak has been playing de Ville since the mascot’s inception in 1996. The picture of the mascot holding the sign went viral and drew the ire of many on social media Sunday night.

Ebola is a viral disease that is highly infectious and spread by contact with bodily fluids. It has a mortality rate of nearly 90 percent. According to the World Health Organization Ebola response roadmap update from Friday, there have been nearly 8,000 probable, confirmed or suspected cases of the disease in the African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

There has been one confirmed case of Ebola in the United States, in Dallas.

Think about the intended audience of this column. These are people so intensely stupid the writer is required to explain what Ebola is to them. Frankly, if they are that stupid, what are the chances they can read?

One of the things fairly well known in black America is that abortion and “family planning” is about reducing the number of black babies. This should come as no surprise as liberal whites have been quite explicit about it since Roe. Abortion Inc has been targeting black neighborhoods for a long time. It’s a pretty good business for rackets like Planned Parenthood. They get paid to round up the customers and then they get paid for the service. That’s why the Left is obsessed with state funded abortion. It’s eugenics with a smiley face. The Left gets to pretend it is about health and safety, but it’s really about ethnic cleansing and eugenics.

This article in the Science section, of all place, of the NY Times is emblematic.

Marlice House was determined to take a different path from her mother, who had gotten pregnant with her at 17.

“I do not want that to be me,” she said.

So when Ms. House heard about a study offering sexually active teenagers in St. Louis free birth control, she signed up.

Three in 10 girls and women in the United States become pregnant before 20, a rate significantly higher than that in many other rich countries. The 14- to 19-year-old participants in the study Ms. House joined, nearly half of whom had already had an unintended pregnancy, were offered free birth control and counseled on the benefits of long-acting contraceptives like intrauterine devices and implants, methods used by fewer than 5 percent of teenagers.

Overwhelmingly, Ms. House and other teenagers — 72 percent of the 1,404 participants — chose long-acting birth control. And it had an enormous effect.

Pregnancy and abortion rates plunged to less than a quarter the rates of sexually experienced teenagers nationally, the group most comparable to those in the study. Rates were also significantly lower than those among all teenagers.

There’s not much new about this. In the 1970’s the Left was excited by the idea of making newly available drugs like Norplant mandatory for welfare recipients. The Left has learned from past attempts to exterminate black people so they couch it in language of choice and opportunity. But, they can’t help themselves as they put a picture of  a black girl on the article.

They also seem to be trying to draw in the anti-abortion people by claiming their new eugenics program reduces abortions. They repeat that bit a few times in the article. It’s a common error on the Left. Abortion, for them, is all about abortion as an end in itself. For pro-life people, abortion is just one aspect of the larger fight over human life, hence the name of their cause. The Left always projects its manias onto the wider world.

Come to think of it, that may be why they put a black face on their eugenics cause. They just assume their enemies are the bogeymen they imagine. They think the undifferentiated other outside their cult is shot through with racism. Therefore, they can market their eugenics program to the rabble by (wink, wink) targeting the blacks.

Living in a country whose prevailing religion treats the past as a far away planet can be exasperating, like when the people who have been in charge of race relations pretend they have just stumbled upon a social problem needing their attention. When you point out that they have been bitching about the problem for 70 years and they have been in charge of fixing it for 50 of those years, they call you a racist. It’s as if they suffer from a Irish Alzheimer’s. They only remember the grudges. But, it is not without its fascinating strangeness. Here’s a good example.

Whatever happened to good old American know-how?

The nation that invented modern management seems to be suffering a crisis of competence.

The Secret Service can’t protect the White House. Public health authorities can’t get their arms around a one-man Ebola outbreak. The army we trained in Iraq collapsed as soon as it was attacked by Islamic extremists, and our own veterans can’t get the care they need at VA hospitals. And, lest we forget, it was only a year ago that the White House rolled out its national health insurance program, only to see its website grind to a halt.

Yes, you can argue that these problems all have different causes.

But it’s hard not to conclude that something basic is amiss in Washington.

It’s like fans when sports teams lose. “They” lost the game. Or, “they” need new management. Liberals  have been in charge of Washington since FDR, but now that it is coming apart, “they” have let us down.

“This isn’t a partisan problem,” argues Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School who worked in the Clinton administration — although she does fault the people at the top. “It hasn’t been a priority under this president to appoint good managers to top positions, but it wasn’t a priority under George W. Bush either.”

When things go wrong under a Democrat, it is a systemic problem. When they go wrong under a Republican, it is a failure of conservatism, capitalism, etc.

One basic problem, she said, is that the federal government’s personnel system is mired in antiquated civil service rules. “You can’t move people around; you can’t pay more to retain your best people; you can’t easily get rid of people you need to get rid of.” Additionally, she noted, “the pay at the top of the scale is inadequate to attract the best and the brightest into government, and as the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It’s very demoralizing.”

This is a common malady of modern times. They never stop to wonder why we have all of these rules. The modern reformer never bothers to ask why things are as they are, they just assume they sprung from nothingness. Therefore, driving a bulldozer through the existing order is always acceptable. I’m not defending the civil service rules, but there’s a reason for all of it. In almost all cases, the rules exist to prevent theft.

The other problem is the rank acceptance of corporatism. Government should never be attracting the best and the brightest. Government is a necessary evil, not the end point of human civilization. The modern mandarin, however, cerebrates the custodial state with the same degree of enthusiasm as the typical corrections officer embraces the drug war. In both cases, the expansion of the state means more opportunities for the barnacles to attach themselves to society.

In her view, Obama never made management a high priority — and it shows.

Until the Veterans Affairs scandal erupted this year, for example, there wasn’t a full-time implementation officer in the White House to monitor the performance of federal agencies.

“This administration has been disconnected from the government it’s supposed to be running,” Kamarck charges (and, remember, she’s a Democrat). “They seem to view the federal workforce as hostile territory. They don’t engage with it…. They don’t have a strong system of getting info from the agencies to the president.”

Oh, I don’t know. It seems like they have no trouble getting the IRS to go after their enemies. They had no trouble using the FBI and NSA to get dirt on people they wanted to leverage. This just sounds like a Clinton toady taking shots at Team Obama as Cankles gets ready for another run at the White House. But, it is a fascinating look into the minds of a cult member. As I wrote above, they are a lot like sports fans. “They” are losing, but a few years ago “we” were winning.

On Twitter, I subscribe (follow) to feeds like Mashable because it is so full of Cult craziness. There’s always good material there. It’s why I used to read TN Coates. These blog posts don’t write themselves. Well, sometimes they do, but you get the point. In my twitter feed I saw this gem from Mashable.

Climate change could affect the ratio of human males to human females that are born in some countries, a new study from Japan suggests. The researchers found that male fetuses may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Since the 1970s, temperature fluctuations from the norm have become more common in Japan, and at the same time there has been an increase in the deaths of male fetuses relative to the number of deaths of female fetuses in that country, according to the study.

Over this period, the ratio of male to female babies born in the country has been decreasing, meaning there have been fewer and fewer male babies born relative to the number of female babies born.

Got that. Your lawn mower will result in a race of Amazons enslaving men!

There’s one of these “studies’ every day it seems. All are intended to add another log to the scare fire these strange sub-cults use to fuel their movement. Smoking used to be like this. Twenty years ago I recall reading scare stories about how smoking was making everyone’s dick small. I like how Mashable puts a pic of a retarded looking kid at the top of the story. Nice touch.

This reminded me of this I saw in Maggies Farm last week.

Last week’s People’s Climate March drew 400,000 people onto the streets of Manhattan and a great deal of international attention to a subject of dire urgency. But some were skeptical about the event’s overall significance. “The march slogan was, ‘to change everything, we need everyone,’ which is telling, because it won’t change everything, because it didn’t include everyone,” wrote David Roberts of Grist. “Specifically, it won’t change American politics because it didn’t include conservatives.” True enough.

First off, the picture is classic. Imagine instead of sunflower standards they had eagles clutching a bundle of wooden rods and their shirts were black instead of orange. Same crowd, different uniforms. Second, overstating the crowd size is common with these neo-fascist groups. It’s argumentum ad populum with a lusty “or else” tacked onto it. Notice also the use of the word “conservative” to mean those outside their movement.

If there weren’t such a stark divide between American conservatives and almost everyone else on the question of the existence and importance of climate change — a divide that can approach 40 points on some polling questions — the political situation would be very different. So if any progress on climate change is going to be made through the American political system — apart from executive orders by Democratic presidents — it is going to have to somehow involve convincing a lot of conservatives that yes, climate change is a threat to civilization.

The stark divide between “conservatives and almost everyone else” is another way claiming they are an ascendant movement about to sweep aside the deniers, accept for the recalcitrant conservatives. Hitler used the same phraseology with the Jews. It’ easy to forget that he was not talking about gas chambers in the 1920’s, but he still had plenty of scapegoats. It is a tactic that dates to the dawn of written history. The fact that the deniers are a sizable majority suggests these people are following the path of The Seekers.

How do you do that? The answer has more to do with psychology than politics.

The practice of tailoring a political message to a particular group is commonplace, of course. But the climate activist community has broadly failed to understand just how differently conservatives and liberals see the world on certain issues, and, as a result, just how radically different messages targeting conservatives should look.

The first step would be to recognize “conservative” is a world like capitalism. It is used by the hive minded as a label for those outside the hive. In this case, it simply means non-liberals.

“Although climate scientists update, appropriately, their models after ten years of evidence, climate-science communicators haven’t,” said Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale who studies how people respond to information challenging their beliefs. Luckily, social and political psychologists are on the case. “I think there’s an emerging science of how we should talk about this if we’re going to be effective at getting any sort of movement,” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford.

They should probably start by talking about the fact global warming has been on a two decade pause. They should also think about why all of their predictions have been wrong.

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that for many conservatives (and liberals), the current debate about climate change isn’t really about competing piles of evidence or about facts at all — it’s about identity. Climate change has come to serve as shorthand for which side you’re on, and conservatives tend to be deeply averse to what climate crusaders represent (or what they think they represent). “The thing most likely to make it hard to sway somebody is that you’re trying to sway them,” said Kahan.

This reminds me of how liberals, when exposed to Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, think he is talking about “right-wingers.” It is certainly true that most of us think the warmists are more than a bit nuts. They latched onto to something that is a mix of Old Testament prophesy, new age paganism and political fascism. Facts and evidence are not important to these people. It is about identity. That’s why they are the ones in the uniforms in that picture.

No, he has not been fired recently, as far as I know. I just expect him to be fired at some point. I’ve said for a while now that he will eventually step on the wrong land mine and Rich Lowry, after spending a night hiding in the closet, will fire Williamson in the same fashion he has sacked everyone else worth reading at National Review – over the phone. This latest is a good example of why I say this.

A couple of weeks ago, I ordered a ribeye, extra rare, and the chef or the waiter or somebody messed it up. I sent it back to the kitchen. A lesbian couple near Uniontown, Ohio, ordered a baby, extra white, and their order got messed up — the sperm bank mistakenly gave them the product of a black man, with the result that their daughter, Payton, is half black. And that’s the problem with treating children as consumer products: You cannot send them back to the kitchen.

Good thing fertility doctors don’t work for tips.

Naturally, there is a lawsuit — for breach of warranty, among other things. The couple say that they are suffering stress from raising their mixed-race daughter in an overwhelmingly white community. I can picture the scene: A mob of angry Ohioans, torches and pitchforks at the ready, menacingly reads a declaration: “We, the town fathers of Obscurity, Ohio, were perfectly ready to be accepting, supportive, and welcoming of this lesbian couple’s test-tube baby. But when that lesbian couple’s test-tube baby turns out to be half black — well, that’s a bridge too far for the decent people of Ohio.” I suppose they might then burn half a cross — Ohio’s pretty weird.

While one must pity the poor little girl who is being treated like a defective Honda Civic, it’s a delicious clash of progressive pieties. The mother — and somehow I suspect that I’ll be informed five minutes from now that it is wicked to call the half of the couple who carried the child and gave birth the “mother” — Jennifer Cramblett, among other things complains that it is difficult to find a place to get her daughter a decent haircut. It should be a hoot watching her make that case in court. I’m a white, conservative guy from Texas, and even I know better than to go skipping merrily into the cultural minefield that is black women’s hair, a subject that calls to mind my favorite cowboy proverb: “Never miss a good chance to shut up.”

Same-sex couples are riding a wave of cultural ascendency, but we should not kid ourselves: This is America, and race still trumps everything. You doubt me? In 2008, I reported in National Review about the case of an adoptive couple who had raised several children with severe disabilities but was denied the opportunity to adopt another disabled child because the authorities doubted their commitment to preserving the girl’s cultural authenticity — they’d said they intended to raise their children to be “colorblind” — and because their community in Alaska was judged to be too white, something that might damage the girl’s self-esteem. The girl in question suffered both from fetal-alcohol syndrome, which had left her mentally disabled, and from Russell-Silver Syndrome, a form of dwarfism that left her with an asymmetrical body, a triangular face, a malfunctioning digestive system, and other problems. It is unlikely that she would ever develop the mental capacity to feel racial alienation, much less that that would ever become a top-ten problem in her life. But race is the alpha and the omega to some people. If only we had a good word for people like that . . .

Kevin is a smart guy and a very good writer. That’s very dangerous all by itself. The chattering classes are dominated by people of average skills and intelligence, but top-2% envy of others. What will get him killed is his propensity to notice things, particularly about the social wars roiling the country. The temptation to notice things about race and then write about them in a clever and intelligent way will get the best of him eventually. Then he is bunking with Steve Sailer.

I have had some dealings with crazy people and I’m not just talking about working for politicians. My first experience was with a friend of my mother who became convinced she was “the Madonna.” It was unnerving to hear someone say they were the mother of Jesus and be serious about it. What was more unnerving to me is the sense I got that she sort of knew she was saying crazy stuff. The look on her face said to me that she was not entirely sure what she was saying, why she was saying or if any of it made any sense. The strange cadence suggested she was hearing the words as we were hearing them.

Later in life, I’ve bumped into this a couple of times. In every case, the person appears to be unsure about their own sanity. That is, they say things that they suspect are crazy, but they are not sure. That’s why they always have that strange delay in their speech. They say something and then wait for the reaction, unsure if what they just said makes any sense. That’s always struck me as the true horror of insanity. If the crazy person is unaware of their insanity, they are not tormented by it. That’s usually not the case. The insane are tormented by the thought they may be losing their minds.

That always comes to mind when the Cult publishes a gender-bender story like this one.

It had been a relatively quiet policy debate until the full-page ad appeared in the local newspaper. “A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter,” it said. “Are you OK with that?”

The ad, placed by a socially conservative group in Minnesota, was meant to snap attention to a proposal to allow transgender students to play on teams based on their preferred gender rather than the sex assigned to them at birth.

It appears to have worked. More than 100 community members flooded a meeting this week near Minneapolis, and thousands more sent e-mails. In response, the quasi-public body governing high school sports in Minnesota decided to delay a vote on a new policy covering sports participation by transgender students. Members of the board of directors said they needed more time to study the issue.

The policy, which they now plan to vote on in December, was an attempt to grapple with a question that has bedeviled many states: How do you deal with the growing number of children identifying as transgender who want to participate in the highly gender-specific worlds of high school sports and extracurricular activities?

Way back when the Cult stopped using the word sex to mean male and female and started improperly using the word “gender”, I know we were headed for trouble. Back then, the madness was about denying the obvious differences between boys and girls. Hilariously, they claimed that sex was a social construct, not a biological one. In order to mask the madness, they changed the language. If you let the lunatics control the language, everyone eventually sounds like a lunatic. That way, the lunatics no longer have to wonder if they are the crazy person in the room. Political correctness is a form of self-medication.

The fact that “growing number of children identifying as transgender” does not set off any alarm bells in the Cult speaks volumes. Science tells us that human beings evolved very slowly over thousands of generations of trial and error. It does not happen overnight. Therefore, “new” traits and new “trends” are never new. Either we just discovered a way to notice or we are kidding ourselves, pretending the old is new. In the case of children suffering from the mental disease of “transgenerism” the latter is the most likely answer. Turning a mental disorder into a fad is almost as crazy as thinking you are the off-spring of a human-alien coupling.

Those crazy people I references at the start have been handed control of society. Now it is the sane who are tormented, wondering if they are the ones losing their minds because they don’t think reality is infinity negotiable. If you don’t want a homosexual taking your son into the woods, you’re a child abusing nut. If you think your daughter should not be forced to shower with the boys, you”re a sexist. If you punch a woman in the face, you’re a misogynistic monster, but if you come to that woman’s aid, you’re also a misogynistic monster.

In the madhouse of modern America, this makes sense, What’s wrong with you?