I’ve gone on at length about the problems with the cops in the country. Suburban white people tend to think these arguments are either suicidal liberalism or libertarian idealism. The reason is suburban white people tend to have a vastly different experience with the cops than downscale whites and minorities. That’s a changing reality as more and more suburbanites have their dogs shot by storm troopers raiding the wrong house, but there’s always a lag in these things.

This video is a good example of how the lower classes experience the cops.

http://youtu.be/CZh9xumD1cQ

I’ve run into some version of that fat cop a million times. In bad neighborhoods they pair cops together and that usually means a hot head partnered with a more sober minded officer. The fat one should be fired for being a fat slob, but the dirty little secret is there’s not an excess of cops willing to work tough areas. The degenerates and sociopaths are willing to work the ghetto and that let’s a slob like the fat cop keep his job. It also destroys the relationship between the citizens and the police in these neighborhoods.

The Conventional Right tends to side with the cops, but the libertarian insurgency may be changing that a little. The Ferguson shooting was remarkable not in how the Left cynically tried to exploit it, but in how many on the Right jumped on the warrior cop angle. The thing is, the Right really should not be so quick to side with the cops. They are, after all, just another bit of the growing custodial state. Cops and their unions are constantly agitating for more money, less work, more benefits, more protections, etc.

The worst aspect of it is the cops work hard to avoid accountability. People like me, who cherish law and order, but have a distrust of the police would have a different view if we actually held the cops to the same standards as private security guards. This story in 538 is a good example of how the cops undermine their credibility.

Efforts to keep track of “justifiable police homicides” are beset by systemic problems. “Nobody that knows anything about the SHR puts credence in the numbers that they call ‘justifiable homicides,’” when used as a proxy for police killings, said David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at the University of Missouri who specializes in policing and the use of deadly force. And there’s no governmental effort at all to record the number of unjustifiable homicides by police. If Brown’s homicide is found to be unjustifiable, it won’t show up in these statistics.

In a data driven society like our, no counting how often cops shoot people is inexcusable. Forty years ago every round fired from a state issued firearm was logged. It was standard operating procedure for police departments to have cops check their firearms in at the station when their shift was over each day. A cop discharging his firearm could expect to fill out a lot of reports and answer a lot of questions. Today, when we have much better tools for documenting this stuff, we do less of it. The ATF, of all people, routinely lose their own service weapons.

Like so much of what haunts our age, the cop problem is not staying in the ghetto. The news has a stories every day about cops doing something nuts in the suburbs. Whether or not that will change the politics of the issue is a mystery to me. My sense is it will not as the suburbs are now littered with traffic cameras and soon will have drones buzzing around. Having a fat mental defect pushing around soccer moms in the burbs is probably going to face little resistance.

I’ve been a little skeptical about the Scottish independence stuff for two reasons. One is the polling showed the “No” vote winning handily. The funny thing about polls is the first ones tend to be right or at least close to right. The other reason is that it is hard to leave and there’s no obvious benefit. People are lazy and naturally conservative. If sticking with the UK keeps the welfare checks coming, that vote’s not changing. If sticking with the UK secures the business interests, then nationalism is not changing those minds either.

But, here we are a little over a week out and they say the “Yes” vote is now in the lead.

THE YES CAMPAIGN is ahead in the Scottish referendum battle for the first time, according to a poll, amid signs of infighting among senior figures backing the union.

The YouGov research for the Sunday Times found 51% supported independence, compared to 49% who wanted to remain in the UK.

The results are the latest evidence of a dramatic surge for the Yes Scotland campaign, which has seen the gap between the sides – once regularly in double digits – vanish in a matter of months.

The YouGov poll showed the Yes vote increasing by four points, while No dropped by the same number.

The headline figures exclude those who would not vote or are undecided. With those groups included independence was backed by 47% and staying in the UK 45%.

The two point gap is within the margin of error for such polls, meaning the contest, which climaxes on September 18, is effectively too close to call.

That’s not a big lead or even a lead, given the nature of polling, but it has the elites worried all of a sudden. This Bloomberg story says the Brits are now offering bribes to swing the vote their way.

Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne said a program to hand more powers to the Scottish Parliament if Scots vote No, offering Edinburgh more control over taxes, public spending and social policy, will be announced in the “next few days” as the London government responds to the shift in the polls. Talks are still ongoing on the detail of the proposal, his office said.

“It’s clear that Scotland wants more control over the decisions that affect Scotland,” Osborne said in a televised BBC interview. “The timetable for delivering that will be put into effect the moment there is a ‘no’ vote in the referendum. Then Scotland will have the best of both worlds. They will both avoid the risks of separation but have more control over their own destiny, which is where I think many Scots want to be.”

Just in case that’s not enough, the increasingly ridiculous Prime Minister says the Scots will be killed by Muslims if they vote for independence.

Scotland will be more vulnerable to terrorist attacks in a “very dangerous and insecure world” if it votes for independence on Sept. 18, U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron said.

Being part of a union gives Scots the protective benefits of being part of a larger country, Cameron told reporters at the end of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s summit in Newport, Wales, yesterday.

“With terrorist threats and other threats, isn’t it better to be part of a United Kingdom that has a top-five defense budget, some of the best intelligence and security services anywhere in the world, that is part of every single alliance that really matters in the world in terms of NATO, the G-8, the G-20, the European Union, a member of the security council of the UN?” Cameron said. “All those networks and abilities to work with allies to keep us safe. Isn’t it better to have those things than separate yourself from them?”

It’s good to know that it is not just America with the idiotic scare mongering about Jihadi. I’m not privy to the inner workings of ISIS, but my guess is they don’t give a damn about Scotland. They have bigger fish to fry. Further, I doubt the civilized world is going to tell the Scots to pound sand if they ask for help with rooting terrorists out of their golf courses.

I’m not sure which side I’m on. I’m not sure it matters as much as both sides claim. For the average Scot, life probably changes little if they go it alone. I do think it could lead places like Catalonia to follow the same path. In the main, I think the more small countries the better. As an ardent localist, I think lots of small countries makes it tough to sustain the weird corporatist internationalism we see today.

The best argument for hoping the Scots vote for independence is all the worst people are against it. The cult of economics swears the gods will reign terror upon us if the Scots vote for independence. All of the major parties in Britain are against it. The fascists in Brussels are against it. When just about every loathsome creature on earth is against something, I’m inclined to be for it. Admittedly, that’s not a great reason to be in favor of something, but I’m not a Scot and I don’t get a vote.

Another rich white guy is being run out of the NBA for noticing stuff. Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson is selling after the Inquisition discovered he held unclean thoughts.

Atlanta Hawks owner Bruce Levenson is selling his controlling interest in the team, NBA commissioner Adam Silver announced Sunday.

In July, Levenson self-reported an email he wrote to the team’s co-owners and general manager Danny Ferry in August 2012 that he called “inappropriate and offensive.” The league commenced an independent investigation after being made aware of the comments.

Levenson writes in a statement that the racially offensive comments came as he pondered ways to bridge Atlanta’s racial sports divide and increase fan attendance at Hawks’ games.

“In trying to address those issues, I wrote an e-mail two years ago that was inappropriate and offensive,” he said. “I trivialized our fans by making clichéd assumptions about their interests (i.e. hip hop vs. country, white vs. black cheerleaders, etc.) and by stereotyping their perceptions of one another (i.e. that white fans might be afraid of our black fans). By focusing on race, I also sent the unintentional and hurtful message that our white fans are more valuable than our black fans.”

“If you’re angry about what I wrote, you should be,” Levenson continued in the statement. “I’m angry at myself, too. It was inflammatory nonsense. We all may have subtle biases and preconceptions when it comes to race, but my role as a leader is to challenge them, not to validate or accommodate those who might hold them.”

Levenson notified Silver on Saturday night of his intentions to sell.

“I commend Mr. Levenson for self-reporting to the league office, for being fully cooperative with the league and its independent investigator, and for putting the best interests of the Hawks, the Atlanta community, and the NBA first,” Silver said in a statement.

Levenson had presided over the Hawks’ ownership group since 2004. Over the past decade, the team has never ranked higher than 18th in attendance and is largely overlooked in a market that also has the NFL, Major League Baseball and a passion for college football.

Atlanta CEO Steve Koonin will now oversee all team operations.

The Hawks become the second NBA team to hit the market this year. The Los Angeles Clippers were sold for an unprecedented $2 billion earlier this summer to former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer after former owner Donald Sterling was banned for life by the league after his racist rant to a woman became public.

I’ll just note that one NBA owner is a Russian mobster and one of his partners got rich convincing young black males to slaughter one another. But at least they don’t notice stuff, which is about the worst thing a person can do these days.

I’m starting to spot some of my material turning up here and there. Famous polemicist, like famous comics, tend to “borrow” material from the less well known cranks, like me. It looks like Andrew Klaven has “borrowed” one of my bits.

The last place you want to go for information about the causes of poverty is the NYTimes. I suppose you can lump every liberal rag in there and just call it the ruling class propaganda organ. It’s not that they don’t know anything useful about poverty. It’s that they are obsessed with jamming everything into the preferred, self-serving narrative. After all, the focus of their life is jostling for status amongst their peers.

This piece in the NYTimes is a good example of what I mean.

Let’s imagine for a moment that there are no political pressures distorting our discussion of poverty and that we can look at it as a technical problem, not a moral one.

Maybe we would find that most explanations – left, right and center – are not mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing.

Before we take this thought experiment further, we should consider the ramifications of new research that provides insight into urban social disorder, worklessness, the rising salience of education and the shortcomings of government policy.

In ruling class circles, being non-ideological is sort of like wearing glasses without lenses. In both cases, it is a pose. No one seriously wants bad vision and no one seriously wants to abandon the one true faith or put it on equal footing with the mongrel faiths. It’s what drives the fake nerd fad and you see the signaling in the first graph.

He also gives the game a way a bit by assuming it is impossible to escape political pressure when discussing anything. That’s an identifying characteristic of every Rousseau-ist cult. For them, it is always about who? whom? so that means politics infuses every aspect of their lives. The author just assumes this is true of everyone.

David Autor, an economist at M.I.T. best known for exploring the costs to American workers of automation and trade with China, has recently expanded the scope of his research on unemployment to look at the consequences for men who grow up in a fatherless household.

In a paper published last year, Autor, working in collaboration with a fellow M.I.T. economist, Melanie Wasserman, found that “the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels.” The trends have been much worse for men than women because “the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys’ psychosocial development and educational achievement.”

Autor and Wasserman cite data showing that “after controlling for a host of individual and family characteristics, growing up in a single-parent home appears to significantly decrease the probability of college attendance for boys, yet has no similar effect for girls.” The authors add that when raised with a nonresidential father, “boys perform less well academically than girls.”

Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins whose book “Labor’s Love Lost: The Rise and Fall of the Working-Class Family in America,” will be published later this year, looks at much the same problem as Autor, but from a different vantage point.

For the non-college educated, Cherlin wrote to me by email, “the majority of their births will occur outside of marriage, often in fragile cohabiting unions that have high break-up rates.” Conversely, the overwhelming majority of men and women with college degrees marry before they have children, have experienced a drop in their divorce rate and have seen their incomes rise as both husband and wife work.

The result, Cherlin points out, is that a “bachelor’s degree is the closest thing to a class boundary that exists today.”

There are a few things worth pointing out here. One is how the Left tends to look at humans as an alien species. If I wanted to learn something about France, for example, I would go to France. If possible, I would quiz someone with knowledge of France. Our Progressive overlords talk long about the value of personal experience as a spiritual enhancer, yet they chuck it for the quackery of social science when it comes to dealing with their fellow humans.

Then we have the amnesia. For my entire adult life the ruling class has been pushing things like no fault divorce, non-traditional coupling, consequence free sex, drugs, etc. In the 60’s and 70’s these idea blew through the lower classes like a tornado. The moral obligation of the ruling class is to espouse and enforce the unwritten rules that maintain order amongst the lower classes. The ruling class not only failed at this, they encouraged that which has done nothing but sow disorder amongst the people.

Finally, we have the self-congratulations. Class has been a part of human society since the beginning. The four year degree is not a class boundary. It is one of many class symbols. Thomas B. Edsall, like every old liberal warhorse has used credentials to attach himself to the ruling class like a barnacle. His employer requires a degree for secretarial jobs so they can avoid being in the same room with the riff-raff. If college is a class barrier, it is because guys like Thomas B. Edsall insist on it.

The emergence of a rough ideological consensus on the causes of poverty and inequality would increase the likelihood of, but by no means guarantee, agreement on such initiatives as raising the minimum wage, increasing and expanding the scope of the earned-income tax credit, programs promoting marriage and paternal involvement, as well as stronger efforts to improve the quality of education, especially in poor neighborhoods.

This is classic hive thinking. “If only those idiots outside the hive would come around to our way of thinking we can do all the stuff we want.” The fact that his hive has been in charge of poverty programs for 70 years and has tried all of these things over and over for decades, has no bearing on his outlook.

Poor people are poor for three reasons. One is they are on the left side of the bell curve, in general. There are plenty of exceptions, but not being very bright is a hard thing to overcome and it always has been. Unless you plan to euthanize the stupid, the poor will always be with us.

Second, poor people make poor decisions. They are impulsive and want what they want when they want it. A poor person comes into money and buys a car, new clothes and drinks at the bar. Mr. Edsall comes into money and he calls his broker. Delayed gratification is punishment in the ghetto. In SWPL-ville, it is a virtue and one of the highest ones. You can never fix this, but you can mitigate it by not promoting ghetto parasites like the hip-hop community and much of Hollywood. Shame still works on poor people.

Finally, a lot of people like being working class. This is something the Hive never understands nor tolerates. They hate poor people and they really hate working class people. The poor are a constant reminder of their failure to reach Utopia. The working class are a rebuke to the Hive. These are people who could embrace the culture of the hive, but choose not too. They could watch the English Premier League, but prefer the NFL and NASCAR. That’s why the Left hates them.

People who know me would never say I am artsy. They would assume I am the opposite of that because of my political and social views. For as long as I have been alive, it has been axiomatic that artsy people are liberal and liberal people are artsy. It is the latter half of that where the confusion reigns. Progressive have always thought it trendy to strike the artsy pose. I know a few liberal women who paint, sculpt or do community theater. It’s very clearly an affectation, not a true calling.

In the olden thymes I used to have an interest in communist art. Soviet art was the most available, but Balkan and East European was the best. By best I don’t mean good. I mean hilariously terrible. Political art is always awful, but when done at gunpoint by people with real talent, it reaches a new level of awfulness. The religious fervor of the Christian church produced some of the most stunning art in human history. The religious fervor of communism produced the most awful art in human history.

Art reflects the culture of the people who produced it. We live in the Progressive Age and what passes for art reflects the bland, transactional conformity of our times. Modern artists think and act like global retailers. They find a target audience and produce product for it. Performers set out to flatter their audience by pandering to their worst instincts. Being a trendy Progressive means carefully repeating from the catechism.

In one of life’s many ironies, it is outside the hive where the weirdos live and where the fun is. Grover Norquist is a fairly despicable person in my opinion, but he not a liberal. He’s also fairly typical of what you find on the right these days, as far as diversity. People outside the hive like weird and enjoy being weird. It’s conservative, middle American audiences that drive the success of cutting edge TV shows like True Detective or series like Breaking Bad.

My bet is it is what keeps things like Burning Man going too. This piece seems to support that assertion.

What is Burning Man?

It is a larger version of … what? Woodstock? That was a bunch of teenagers coming to watch artists perform. At Burning Man, everyone is expected to be a participant. Burners bring their art work, their art cars, their personal dress and/or undress: everyone is on stage. The story of Woodstock was thousands of young people, without the sense to bring their own food and water, being rescued by the state police and sensible bourgeois rural folks. The story of Burning Man is one of radical self-reliance.

It is a more intense than … what? Not quite the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Burning Man is an arts festival in the middle of the Nevada desert. It takes hours to get there, and you must bring what you eat or wear or need: you cannot buy anything there. Burning Man is more like Brigadoon – a western ghost town that springs to life. Dust storms. Cold nights. Black Rock City is completely built and then taken apart and disappeared each year, by 65,000 people.

Burning Man is greater than I had ever imagined. I have been to large demonstrations in favor of the environment, and the trash left behind is knee-deep. At Burning Man, you are hard-pressed to find a cigarette butt on the ground. There are no trash bins. Participants carry it in, and they carry it out. I have been to the Louvre. It is a very big place with many nice paintings. I knew that. I was not disappointed. Burning Man is more like Petra, the lost city in Jordan, which I found more impressive than its advance billing or reputation.

My wife and I had planned to join the “event” in 2012, but some idiot scheduled the Republican National Convention in Tampa for the same week. I objected, but the overlapping bit of the Venn diagram of Burners and Mitt Romney enthusiasts was perhaps not as large as I had thought.

Some self-professed “progressives” whined at the thought of my attending what they believed was a ghetto for liberal hippies. Yes, there was a gentleman who skateboarded without elbow or kneepads – or any knickers whatsover. Yes, I rode in cars dressed-up as cats, bees and spiders; I watched trucks carrying pirate ships and 30 dancers. I drank absinthe. But anyone complaining about a Washington wonk like me at Burning Man is not a Burner himself: The first principle of Burning Man is “radical inclusiveness”, which pretty much rules out the nobody-here-but-us liberals “gated community” nonsense.

It is the first principle of anything truly artsy or cultural. It’s why art is by definition conservative. Only lunatics and barbarians celebrate destruction. It is the lovers of life that capture their times in paintings, buildings and literature. It is the truly conservative soul who wishes to leave memories of his times to those who come after him. It is the idiots leaning forward who wish to be unleashed from the past and all memories of it. Art is, after all, nothing more than a memory passed from one generation to the next.

I can’t say I’m a big fan of Rand Paul. I don’t hate the guy. I think he is right about a lot of things. His old man was entertaining, even if he was a bit wacky. Rand appears to be a lot less wacky and a much better politician than the old man. That’s why Conservative Inc hates Rand Paul, I suspect. The old man was no threat because he always said something nutty to turn off people attracted to his libertarian arguments. Rand is far more ambitious and far more disciplined as a politician.

Anyway, Rich Lowry has a wishful thinking post about Rand Paul coming around to the neo-con foreign policy view. I say wishful thinking because I don’t think the Bush foreign policy has any takers left, outside of people scribbling for National Review and The Weekly Standard. The public, particularly the Right, has had enough of policing the provinces.

I wrote a column last year on the Rand Paul moment, on how events in the midst of the NSA controversy and Paul’s canny capitalizing on them were making him a real force in 2016 Republican presidential politics. He’s obviously still such a force, but events haven’t been so favorable to him lately. We’ve been starkly reminded of how dangerous the world is and how important American leadership is over the last few months. Now, on two very important questions, Paul has had to reverse field after initially, we can assume, going with his gut. First, he counseled against “tweaking” Vladimir Putin and sounded like we should give him running room in Ukraine, then toughened up his rhetoric. Second, after the Islamic State took Mosul, he wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal titled, “America Shouldn’t Choose Sides in Iraq’s Civil War.” Now, as Eliana notes below, he wants to declare war on the Islamic State.

In both cases, I obviously agree with his second position, and always welcome evolution in the right direction. His defenders can argue that none of these positions are strictly contradictory and defend it all on “when facts change, I change my mind” grounds. But the more cynical interpretation is that he was following the politics. Amazingly enough, if he had maintained his initial attitude of not doing anything to check the rise of the Islamic State, he would be to the left of Elizabeth Warren right now.

There are two big problems for Paul here. One is that the politics of foreign policy are shifting, not just on the right, but more broadly. That means that Paul’s foreign policy, which was running with the grain of Republican sentiment in the post-Bush era, is now running against it. Navigating that for him will obviously be tricky, and creates the second problem. Paul is a conviction politician. That is an enormous part of his appeal. If he is seen as playing it too cute on foreign policy — trotting out robust Paulite sentiments, before walking them back into more conventional positions — he will undermine a major part of his broader appeal as a straight-shooter. Paul can run as a Paulite purist on foreign policy or he can run as a traditional Republican/cautious hawk. He can’t run as both.

Engaging in the debate in the comments section, it strikes me that the Right is really out of gas. They have nothing to offer. They are making a huge deal over ISIS and Iraq, because that’s all they have right now. The GOP seems to have gone underground, hoping public disgust with Obama is enough to carry them to victory in November. There are no Republican leaders anyone finds interesting, except Rand Paul and he’s not on good terms with Conservative Inc.

Politically, there’s not a lot of space between the parties on domestic issues. Republicans want to give tax breaks to the rich and Democrats want to give regulatory breaks to the rich. Theoretically, the lower classes are getting handouts from the Democrats, but that’s just lip-service. No one cares about the poor. The great American middle-class has no party. There is no tribune of the people. Both parties make commercials declaring their love for the people, but no one can name a single policy or position held by either party that benefits the middle-class.

That’s the attraction of Paul and to a lesser degree libertarianism. Even though it is not said, their offer is simple. Since the state does nothing but harass you and steal your money, why not vote for the guys who will not harass you or steal your money? Instead of promising to rebuild your trust in the state (Obama 2008, GOP 2016), the politics of personal apology, they offer to help you get even with the state. It’s populism for dorks and compared to what the GOP has on offer, it may look pretty good in two years.

In the 1960’s, blacks rioted all over the country. It is assumed now it was in response to the assassination of MLK, but that was not always the case. The Watts Ghetto Riot was over a traffic stop. No one says it, but our rulers have put a lot of effort into riot prevention since the 1960’s. Generous welfare and housing used to be called riot insurance by some snarky writers. I’m old enough to remember when it was commonly understood that the social welfare system was about keeping the cities from burning to the ground.

I bring it up because the case in Ferguson, like the 1992 Los Angeles Ghetto Riot, is a reminder that money is not always enough. The rulers have to offer some blood. Not their blood, of course, but the blood of a subject they can use as a proxy. In 1992, the courts needed to send those cops to jail, maybe letting one of them get murdered in prison. That’s what the ghetto wanted. When they did not get it, they rioted.

This story from Detroit is how it is done.

Theodore “Ted” Wafer, a 55-year-old Dearborn Heights man whom a jury found guilty of second-degree murder Aug. 7 for the porch-killing of 19-year-old Renisha McBride of Detroit, has been sentenced to between 17 and 32 years in prison.

Wafer is accused of shooting McBride when she appeared on his front porch last November. It was about 4:40 a.m. in the morning. McBride, whom the medical examiner said had a .21 blood-alcohol level and marijuana in her system, struck a parked car and fled the scene blocks away nearly four hours earlier.

Wafer said McBride pounded violently on his front and side doors, he feared it was multiple home invaders outside attempting to enter and potentially kill him.

Wafer, armed with a shotgun, unlocked his front door, opened it and shot McBride through the locked screen door when she appeared feet away.

His attorney, Cheryl Carpenter, argued self defense.

I don’t know the details and I have no idea what constitutes self-defense in Michigan. I do know that a normal person would be hesitant to call this murder. Murder is about intent and that seems impossible under the conditions described in the paper. But, I don’t know the details.

Wafer was convicted of second-degree murder, meaning the jury believed Wafer intentionally killed McBride or intentionally inflicted great bodily harm resulting in her death; and manslaughter for aiming a firearm at a person resulting in death.

He received a minimum 15 years for second-degree murder charge which made his manslaughter punishment, 7 to 15 years, moot. Additionally, Wafer will serve two years for felony use of a firearm.

Wafer claimed during trial he never meant to kill McBride and he and didn’t know the shotgun was loaded.

Carpenter, who became emotional for a few minutes while arguing why the judge should divert from the sentencing guidelines, said the full minimum sentence is a veritable life sentence for Wafer, who would be 72 in 17 years.

That’s the point. When an old white guy shoots a young black women in a place like Detroit, the old white man must be killed, unless he was under extraordinary danger from the young black person. That’s just the way it is and the people in that courtroom knew it. No one wants to see the old man die, but that beats a riot. Maybe his case gets appealed and in five years he is quietly released for health reasons. Maybe he gets shanked in the showers. All that matters now is the ghetto got their blood.

I could write a book on what I think is wrong with college in America, but this story is a simple example.

Michael Wilbon has been one of Northwestern’s biggest and most visible fans. Now he will have a hand in running his favorite university.

Wilbon was among the six new members elected to Northwestern’s Board of Trustees. The co-host of ESPN’s “Pardon The Interruption” was a 1980 graduate of the Medill School of Journalism. He has maintained his Chicago roots by writing columns for ESPNChicago.com.

In 2010, Wilbon gave the commencement address at Northwestern.

Wilbon told the graduates: “I know from my own professional and personal experiences that you, as a group, are as well prepared as any and better prepared than most to leave Evanston and be successful, by any measure, at whatever you want to do.”

Wilbon isn’t the only new trustee with sports connections. Bulls president Michael Reinsdorf and Mark Walter, chairman of the Los Angeles Dodgers, also were named to the board.

Michael Wilbon is a racist, but that’s not the issue here. I’ve said on many occasions that I am not scandalized by racism. I think all of us are as tribal as ever and it is not something that can be exorcised from the human animal. Morality is about action and it is morally wrong to treat your countrymen poorly simply because they are not of your race. That’s a matter of choice. You can think bad thoughts about the Korean guy down the block. You may even say bad things about him. As long as you don’t act on it you’re just a guy with an opinion. That’s Michael Wilbon, a guy with opinions, many of them racist.

That’s not the issue. He is wholly unqualified to sit on the board of anything. Wilbon is a TV performer. His job is to sniff the jocks of NBA players and describe the experience on TV. There’s nothing wrong with it, but it does not qualify him to sit on the board of a major university. Wilbon has never run a lemonade stand. What could he possibly know about the complex financial, administrative and philosophical decisions facing a university?

The answer is nothing. They put him on the board because he is a famous clown.

That’s the problem with our colleges. There is a fundamental lack of seriousness. It’s why Rice can have a rapper teach classes and be proud of it. It’s why every university in the nation can populate its ranks with crotch warriors. When you have an unlimited supply of free money and face no consequences, thanks to an ever growing debt bubble, you can pretty much do what ever you want. That’s what they do. Our universities are a five star playground for crackpots, perverts and charlatans.

There’s always going to be a degree of silliness to universities. When 80% of the people on a campus are young people, you are going to get what you get from young people on their own for the first time. In fact, the kids are not what’s wrong with our colleges these days. It’s the adults. It strikes me that the kids today are more serious about college than in my day. When I was coming up, a man could still aspire to a middle-class life without college. It was a luxury good.

Today, kids leave high school, having been told for a dozen years that they have to get a college degree. otherwise, they will be permanently trapped in the underclass. Four year graduation rates are down, but much of that is due to the massive increase in students. But, 5,6 and 7 year graduation rates are way up. That says even the weak students keep plugging away. I know plenty of adults who returned to college to finish a degree just to do it.

What the Wilbon story underscores is college has become a racket. Northwestern has no need for his expertise or opinions. What they need is his fame. They have  got to keep the suckers lining up and loading up with debt to pay those tuition bills. Those massive tuition bills finance a petty nobility who get to live outsized lives, despite contributing fairly little to the sum of human capital. College is just part of the big skim.

For my entire life, war in Europe has been unthinkable. In the Cold War, conflict meant nuclear exchange and the end of the human race. Therefore, war with the Soviets was to be avoided at all costs. It was also assumed, correctly, that the Russians were not interested in war with the West, at least not a shooting war. Proxies such as Vietnam or various civil wars in the third world were as far as it could be allowed to go.

Once the Cold War ended, war was looking like a thing of the past. Hammering the provinces from time to time was as far as it would go. Europe was into the end of history stuff and racing toward one worldism. If you talked about the Russian threat ten years ago, you were considered a nut. Heck, in the 2012 election, Obama mocked Romney for talking up the threat of Russia. The liberal press corp roared with laughter when Obama said “The 80’s called and they want their foreign policy back” in one of the debates.

Now, here we are with the very liberal Slate posting article about the looming war with Russia.

Over and over again—throughout the entirety of my adult life, or so it feels—I have been shown Polish photographs from the beautiful summer of 1939: The children playing in the sunshine, the fashionable women on Krakow streets. I have even seen a picture of a family wedding that took place in June 1939, in the garden of a Polish country house I now own. All of these pictures convey a sense of doom, for we know what happened next. September 1939 brought invasion from both east and west, occupation, chaos, destruction, genocide. Most of the people who attended that June wedding were soon dead or in exile. None of them ever returned to the house.

When you start with a reference to the looming Nazi onslaught, you know the rest of the article is going to be seriously grim.

In retrospect, all of them now look naive. Instead of celebrating weddings, they should have dropped everything, mobilized, prepared for total war while it was still possible. And now I have to ask: Should Ukrainians, in the summer of 2014, do the same? Should central Europeans join them?

I realize that this question sounds hysterical, and foolishly apocalyptic, to American or Western European readers. But hear me out, if only because this is a conversation many people in the eastern half of Europe are having right now. In the past few days, Russian troops bearing the flag of a previously unknown country, Novorossiya, have marched across the border of southeastern Ukraine. The Russian Academy of Sciences recently announced it will publish a history of Novorossiya this autumn, presumably tracing its origins back to Catherine the Great. Various maps of Novorossiya are said to be circulating in Moscow. Some include Kharkov and Dnipropetrovsk, cities that are still hundreds of miles away from the fighting. Some place Novorossiya along the coast, so that it connects Russia to Crimea and eventually to Transnistria, the Russian-occupied province of Moldova. Even if it starts out as an unrecognized rump state—Abkhazia and South Ossetia, “states” that Russia carved out of Georgia, are the models here—Novorossiya can grow larger over time.

The thing about American politicians and strategists is they always assume the other guys think like they think. That’s been the problem with Ukraine since the start of this. My bet is exactly zero people in the American foreign policy bubble have heard of “Novorossiya” or what the “Wild Fields” means to Russian nationalists. Anne Applebaum is a smart woman and super connected to the deep state, yet this is the first time she has written about this. This suggests that the Western foreign policy elite knows next to nothing about what’s going on in Russia today.

That’s the scary part about this situation. It looks like the West is not just clueless about Russia, but almost in disbelief every time Putin makes a move. This story about Igor Strelkov is a good example. That part of the word has forever been dominated by out-sized and outlandish personalities. Just look at how the collapse of the Soviet Union unfolded. Boris Yeltsin was not a sober and cautious man, by any stretch of the imagination. Look at some of the characters in the “stans” or even in the Russian parliament.

Wars start for one of two reasons. One is the combatants don’t know what’s coming and blunder into war. The other is the combatants know exactly what is coming, but the stronger side will not be deterred. The American Civil War and the First World War are example of the former. If the participants had the benefit of foresight, they would have made different choices. The bloodbath may have happened under different conditions, I don’t know, but there’s no way people voluntarily submit to a mass kill-off.

That’s what’s scary about what’s unfolding with Russia and the West. The West has no idea what they are dealing with in Ukraine or with Putin. They think they can wage technological and financial war to force their preferred solution on Putin. On the other hand, Putin seems convinced the West is paralyzed by a lack of confidence. He can impose his preferred solution on the West with the force of arms. History says he is probably right in the short run, but the West is right in the long run.

What happens in between is the scary part.