The stoners over at Reason have themselves worked up into a lather over this story from Georgia.

Members of a northeast Georgia SWAT team are “devastated” after a drug raid in which a flash-bang grenade landed in a 1-year-old’s playpen, seriously injuring the child, the Habersham County sheriff said Friday.

The police officers involved have been called baby killers and received threats following the incident, Sheriff Joey Terrell said.

“All I can say is pray for the baby, his family and for us,” he told CNN.

The SWAT team, made up of six or seven officers from the sheriff’s department and the Cornelia Police Department, entered the Cornelia residence Wednesday before 3 a.m.

A confidential informant hours earlier had purchased methamphetamine at the house, the sheriff says. The informant told police that there were men standing guard outside the home, and it was unclear whether they were armed, according to CNN affiliate WGCL.

Because the suspected drug dealer, Wanis Thonetheva, had a previous weapons charge, officers were issued a “no-knock warrant” for the residence, Terrell said.

Wanis Thonetheva is being held without bond.

When the SWAT team hit the home’s front door with a battering ram, it resisted as if something was up against it, the sheriff said, so one of the officers threw the flash-bang grenade inside the residence.

Once inside the house, the SWAT team realized it was a portable playpen blocking the door, and the flash-bang grenade had landed inside where the 19-month-old was sleeping, the sheriff said.

A medic on the scene rushed the baby outside to administer first aid, and a nearby ambulance was summoned. Authorities wanted to transport the baby via Life Flight to Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, 75 miles southwest of Cornelia, but weather conditions wouldn’t allow it. The baby was driven to the hospital.

Just in case you were wondering what someone named Wanis Thonetheva looks like, cause you’re one of those lookists or noticers, here is his mugshot.

Terrell has insisted his officers and those of the local police department did nothing wrong and blamed the target of the warrant (not found at the house that was invaded) on the attack on the toddler. A chief assistant district attorney for the county, J. Edward Staples, says the target of the warrant could in fact be charged for the injuries the sheriff’s deputies caused the toddler. In an obvious attempt to immunize himself and his office from liability, the sheriff has claimed the situation was unavoidable even as he attempted to offer reassurances that his SWAT team would be more diligent in the future. He told CNN that his officers “obviously would have done things different” (IF they knew there was a child in the home), like go in through a side door or not use a flash bang. Until using violence to crack down on non-violent “crimes” becomes politically untenable for “public servants,” it won’t matter how much ass-covering law enforcement does after the fact, these kinds of incidents will continue to happen.

I don’t have a strong interest in education policy. I tend to agree with John Derbyshire’s analysis of American public education. The very short version is the schools are run by an unassailable cartel and no reform is possible. Critiques from the conventional Right all miss this point, which is why they go nowhere. Reform efforts from the Left are largely based in Rousseauist nonsense and therefore doomed from the start. That leaves it a pretty dry subject as far as I’m concerned.

That’s why I could not restrain myself from commenting on this post by Nick Steves at Handle’s Haus. Steves is a sharp guy with some interesting things to say. There’s too much Moldbuggery for my taste, but that’s a topic for another day. It’s a well reasoned technocratic reform plan that has no chance of adoption. I tried to point that out, but Steves is a prickly guy and there’s little point in engaging him. I bring it up only to point out that education policy seems to make people crazy. I don’t get it, but I don’t understand the fascination with a lot of things.

The people it makes most crazy seems to be teachers. It is the one thing about education I find fascinating. Teachers are some of the most deluded people you will find in modern America. Years back I had a conversation with a gal who was fresh out of college and in her first teaching job. She was bitching about the pay and the hours. She complained about taking work home. I tried to explain to her that lots of people take work home and they work in the summer too. I also pointed out that most college grads were not making $55K per year for eight months work. I got no where, but it was not the first time I’ve have that conversation nor the last.

I thought of that when reading this post at Sailer’s new shop. (The Unz Review has become a very nice site, by the way. The unconventional and heterodox need a sugar daddy and it looks like Unz is going to be it. ) The post was actually a post from Education Realist, someone I assumed was somewhat realistic about education. Again, we see the delusions about the realities of teaching. It is a really good gig compared to most jobs. The pay is good, the benefits are outstanding, the hours are excellent and you get summers off. Yet, teachers think they have it tough.

I pointed out that the retention rates for teachers are pretty high compared to most fields. If you look at this table from the DoE, teachers just about die in their jobs. The average age is 40 and the average tenure is 14 years. That number is only going up based on demographics. Over 40% of teachers have been on the job for more than 15 years. Generous pension plans means they are not walking away for late life career changes.

What I find very weird about teachers is they see to think they lack respect. You never hear this from people in the dreaded private sector. Lawyer take more abuse than almost any profession. You never hear them bitch about it. Car sales has to be at the bottom of legitimate work and they joke about that fact. Public sector employees always worry about status and no group frets over it more than teachers. Any criticism is treated like an assault.

All of this nuttiness is most likely due to an absolute avoidance of several truths about human biology. One is that not all people are equal in IQ. The goal of making everyone above average is madness. Then you have issues of race that were’ not a lot to talk about. Sex differences are another thing we are not supposed to notice. When you exclude large chunks of reality from your bound to end up in a very weird place.

I have a small soft spot for biker clubs for reasons I may or may not go into at some point. They are a truly American thing. The Hell Angels are badass dudes who do a lot of bad things so I’m not romanticizing them, but you gotta admire them for their fierce non-conformity. This story from Canada is pretty cool.

Provincial police are searching for three inmates with previous ties to the Hells Angels who escaped from a Quebec City detention centre using a helicopter.

A Sûreté du Québec spokesperson confirmed to CBC News that the prison break occurred at 7:45 p.m. ET from Orsainville Detention Centre and the inmates fled westbound in a green helicopter.

“We are talking closely with the detention centre to figure out exactly how the escape transpired,” said Ann Mathieu. “The priority number one is to find the helicopter.”

Police are now searching for Yves Denis, 35, Denis Lefebvre, 53, and 49-year-old Serge Pomerleau.

In 2010, Lefebvre was arrested by provincial police after a drug operation bust known as Project Crayfish that led to dozens of arrests. He was reported to have had ties to the Hells Angels.

Quebec has a long a bloody history with motorcycle clubs. The Biker Wars in the 1990’s resulted in hundreds of murders, dozens of bombings and general mayhem on the streets. Eventually the Canadians had enough and pretty much arrested every Hell Angel in the province.

During the bust police seized multiple weapons, 41 vehicles, a plane, a helicopter and $905,000, CBC Radio-Canada reported.

The three who escaped were being held at the detention centre waiting to stand trial, but it was not immediately clear what charges they were facing.

Police are warning anyone who sees the men not approach them and to call police immediately.

Last year, there was a daring escape at St-Jerome prison in Quebec involving a helicopter where a pilot was forced at gunpoint to pluck two inmates from the facility on a Sunday afternoon.

The thing about the big clubs like the Angels, Banditos and Mongols is they are sophisticated operations with a lot of intellectual fire power at the top. They’re not guys with beards swinging chains in bar rooms.

The daring and sophistication to use a chopper to get guys out of prison is what you see from former military guys, a source of recruits for these gangs since WW2. A whole bunch of guys with military training are mustering out as we wind down the War on Terror. That means the gangs will get a shot in the arm from new recruits.

On Friday I got a call from a former lawyer who is my former lawyer. He was actually looking for my business partner to play golf. That’s how he became my former lawyer. My business partner and I had a minor legal matter and we hired him to handle it. Some time after he had a moral crisis over the law and quit. He also quit his marriage and wandered off to parts unknown. He now has a small business specializing in estate dissolution. His moral crisis looks a lot like a nervous breakdown to me, but I play along to be polite.

He is a also a foaming at the mouth Progressive fanatic. I mean full blown Bush Derangement Syndrome. No matter what the topic, he will bring it back to how the Republicans are ruining the world, killing poor people, slapping babies, you name it. You would think they would have moved on by now. Even Obama has stopped blaming Bush, but that’s not the case. A certain segment of the loony tunes crew still obsesses over Bush like it was their glory days of 2006. Soon after talking to my former lawyer, I got this in my e-mail.

“It no longer matters who sits in the White House,” former Goldman Sachs managing director Nomi Prins writes in her new book “All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances That Drive American Power.” “Presidents no longer even try to garner banker support for population-friendly policies, and bankers operate oblivious to the needs of national economies. There is no counterbalance to their power.”

Prins, who also worked for Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Chase Manhattan Bank, is now a fellow at the think tank Demos and a member of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ Federal Reserve Advisory Council. Salon spoke with Prins about a century of presidential coziness with bankers; Barney Frank’s defense of big banks’ power; and how to “break the alliances” before they “break us.” A condensed version of our conversation follows.

I’ll just note that Bernie Sanders thinks we need extermination camps for the non-conforming members of the society. Demos is, unbelievably, a Marxist outfit. You know Marx, the guy who inspired 100 million murders and counting.

It’s no secret that big banks play a big role in shaping U.S. banking policy. Your book argues they play a big role in all kinds of areas, like foreign policy. How broad, deep and consistent is the role of big banks in U.S. policymaking?

Throughout the century that I examined, which began with the Panic of 1907 … what I found by accessing the archives of each president is that through many events and periods, particular bankers were in constant communication [with the White House] — not just about financial and economic policy, and by extension trade policy, but also about aspects of World War I, or World War II, or the Cold War, in terms of the expansion that America was undergoing as a superpower in the world, politically, buoyed by the financial expansion of the banking community.

The convergence of fanatical and conspiratorial is not well discussed by academics and others. I’ve often noticed that the further you go down the fanatical road, the more conspiracy minded you pick up along the way.

And in what direction did that move policy? How did those policies become different than they would have without the bankers’ influence?

It was more a question of each group, in government and in the financial community, working together to push the same policies.

So, for example, in the beginning of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had adopted initially a policy of neutrality. But the Morgan Bank, which was the most powerful bank at the time, and which wound up funding over 75 percent of the financing for the allied forces during World War I … pushed Wilson out of neutrality sooner than he might have done, because of their desire to be involved on one side of the war.

Now, on the other side of that war, for example, was the National City Bank, which, though they worked with Morgan in financing the French and the British, they also didn’t have a problem working with financing some things on the German side, as did Chase …

When Eisenhower became president … the U.S. was undergoing this expansion by providing, under his doctrine, military aid and support to countries [under] the so-called threat of being taken over by communism … What bankers did was they opened up hubs, in areas such as Cuba, in areas such as Beirut and Lebanon, where the U.S. also wanted to gain a stronghold in their Cold War fight against the Soviet Union. And so the juxtaposition of finance and foreign policy were very much aligned.

So in the ‘70s, it became less aligned, because though America was pursuing foreign policy initiatives in terms of expansion, the bankers found oil, and they made an extreme effort to activate relationships in the Middle East, that then the U.S. government followed. For example, in Saudi Arabia and so forth, they get access to oil money, and then recycle it into Latin American debt and other forms of lending throughout the globe. So that situation led the U.S. government.

There you have it. The only thing missing here is a catchy name for the secret cabal running America.

You note that banks played a significant role in supporting both the initial passage of Glass-Steagall, and decades later, the repeal of Glass-Steagall … You also write that the power of the president “receded relative to that of the bankers, during the post-Nixon period.” How do you explain those shifts?

The banking community — in particular Chase, led by David Rockefeller — expanded very aggressively into the Middle East to be involved in recycling petro-dollars. There also became a shift in the alignment of working with presidents [from] more public-interest and national-interest goals, and it became much more of a private goal club. And then they have this whole other pool of money, and that was an instigator to moving aggressively forward, and not necessarily needing to be fully aligned with public policy, either supporting it or having it.

But then, toward the ‘80s and ‘90s, they — because they had aggressively now recycled this oil money into Latin American debt, and realized they were facing a Latin American third-world debt crisis — they went back to the U.S. government, and to Reagan and George [H.] W. Bush, and said, “You know, we have a problem: We now need your support, we need you to back the World Bank; we need you to back the IMF; we need you to back us, because we don’t want to lose the money we just very aggressively recycled.”

So then they snapped back, and then they also realized — because they got that government support, and that bailout of third-world debt — they realized it was time to sort of push forward into dismantling aspects of regulation that had also bound them.

Glass-Steagall has taken on mystical qualities with the Left. My communist office manager blames the repeal for everything. My wacko friend Jim, who went completely insane during the Bush years, gets misty eyed when the phrase is uttered. The fact that the repeal was championed by Bill Clinton and both parties in Congress is never mentioned.

How does Barack Obama fit into the history that you assess in your book?

First of all, Obama’s economic and financial policy, Cabinet and advisers are largely retreads of the Clinton administration. So from the standpoint of the banking community, and connections to the banking community, there was very much an overlap, if not a complete overlap, of individuals who were all key to the deregulation of the banking industry, and who either came from, or now speak for, large sums of money through the banking industry …

The policies of not just lax regulation of banks, but subsidizing their failures — which the Clinton administration did after the 1994 Mexican Peso Crisis, and which the Bush administration even before that, did with the third-world debt crisis — was magnified many times under the Obama administration. His favorite banker was said to be — by the New York Times — Jamie Dimon. The number of visits, which I document in the book, between the White House and the key leaders of the big six Wall Street banks, increased five- to tenfold under Obama versus under George W. Bush.

Now, when he was campaigning he talked very strong about reforming Wall Street. And when the Dodd-Frank Act was signed in July 2010, he talked about it being the greatest reform since the Glass-Steagall Act of FDR’s time. But it was nothing remotely like that.

So the way I look at Obama is that his policies were a continuation of Clinton’s policies with respect to banking and finance, which were a continuation of George Bush’s policies, and Reagan’s policies, as they were actually shaped by Bush’s banking friends of the time.

So, the heart of the conspiracy is the Bush clan. It is always the Bush clan with these people.

My former lawyer, in our conversation, went on a tear about how a small group of families, never listed on the Forbes 400, control 99% of the wealth in America. I’ve heard some version of this from left cranks a few times. One day I’ll research it.

I think one inevitable outcome of utopianism is conspiracy mongering. You believe the glorious future is inevitable. You and you cohorts work tirelessly to bring it on and it fails to materialize. The only reason must be a secret cabal thwarting your efforts. What else could it be? The hunt for the conspirators is what leads to the murder and mayhem.

The other day Tyler had a link up to this story. I don’t think the argument has much merit. I posted my opinion on the matter which was:

Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers.

This story on Drudge tells me the under-30 set are flocking to a movie about a beta male, rather than the sci-fi action flick. This is nothing new. Cruise has seen his fortunes decline over the last decade, but he is not alone. The traditional male lead has been fading for years. Movie tough guys are long gone. Instead we get cartoon characters like Batman or Spiderman. Then you have the cartoonish guys like Hugh Jackman. Otherwise, male leads are funny self-effacing lesbians with a dick.

I did not think this was a revelation. Mark Steyn has been writing about it for a decade. What was surprising to me was some of the reaction to my comment. Justin may still be sobbing over how the mean man basically called him a pussy. Julian chimed in with a crack about my age, which I found hilarious. Two guys named Justin and Julian defending beta-male culture is why we have the expression, “truth is greater than fiction.”

Trends and fads are what they are. People live in their time and young people lack the perspective to stand outside themselves and see their time in context. They think things are the way they are because they have always been the way they are. The past is stories told by old people about a country that no longer exists. That’s the benefit of youth, but also the curse of it. That means the trendy beta males of today are only just becoming aware of the fact they look a lot like the pussies and wimps of yesteryear.

It’s why I’m skeptical about Gavin McInnes. He is building a back story to all of those ridiculous tattoos he got as a young man. “I was drunk and I thought it was fun” sounds ridiculous when you’re 50. Vague references to drugs and the criminal underworld avoids that unpleasantness.

Of course, there’s something else going on beyond silly fads. Starting in the 80′s, there has been a  campaign against the traditional white male. Boys in school were loaded up with mind altering drugs so they would be more like little girls. Male characters on TV were portrayed as stupid, foolish, emotional and helpless. On the other hand, female action heroes (hilariously) were pushed on the culture in movies. The results are what we see today.

How all this plays out is open for debate. I used to think reality would beat this nonsense out of the boys, but I’m skeptical about that now. Maybe the next generation will revolt against their parents ideas, but that assumes these beta males are reproducing. The evidence suggests Panda Man is living up to his name.

Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/assorted-links-1149.html#comments

Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/assorted-links-1149.html#comments

John Derbyshire has a piece up starting with the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, moving into the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese model and finishing with this.

Universal-suffrage democracy may have been a good idea 120 years ago, when most adults did productive work into their sixties, then died. In today’s top-heavy welfare states, it just empowers tax-eaters to loot the national wealth.

Tomorrow’s politics will be the art of providing make-work for as many as possible of the employable minority while pacifying the un-employable majority with a state dole. In that world, universal-suffrage democracy will be untenable.

Already, unconsciously, we are making appropriate adjustments. Our universities, after a few aberrant decades of experimenting with open inquiry and the advance of knowledge, have reverted to their medieval purpose (the purpose that Chinese higher education always had): to train an intellectual elite for the propagation and defense of the state ideology. Then it was Christianity (in China, Confucianism); now it is utopian egalitarianism—“political correctness,” the Narrative. The advance of knowledge can go hang.

Since we are already making cultural adjustments to the inevitable future, can the political adjustments be far behind?

There’s a branch of the alternative right or dark enlightenment or neo-reaction, I’m not sure of the precise labels, that holds a view of the intermediate future that is a mix of District 9, Elysium and Terminator. They think most of us will be thrown into camps without regard to race, sex, age or ethnicity. We’ll live on garbage from the the other group of humans, the elites. The elites will rely on super smart robots to keep their position and keep the rabble in their camps. Some small servant class will exist to maintain the robots and tend to the elite.

Some put greater emphasis on the super smart robots. Others underscore the camps. There are surely others who have a combination of favorites with some other elements added into the mix. Either way, the future is Hell, as they imagine it. This is where I remember that north people imagined Hell as barren and cold, while south people imagined it hot and fiery. The point being our view of the horrid future is probably a reflection of what we think of as the horrid present.

One common thread that runs through the various parts of the asteroid belt of view points that encircles mainstream thought is a rejection of democracy. Way back in the olden thymes when I voted for the first time, I became an anti-democrat. A look around the room at my fellow voters was enough for me. Seeing people, who I knew were struggling with the basics of living, in-line to vote made plain that democracy turned self-government into a lottery. The rest of us had to hope the dimwits pulled the right lever.

That said, you can’t argue with the results. Life in Europe and America is vastly better now than 1900. People are healthier, better fed and we live much longer. Outside of the urban reservations, violence is no longer a factor. In 1900 a person traveling alone cross country needed to be armed and prepared to kill. Today, a person traveling cross country only has to worry about what sights to see on the way.

Rule by dimwit seems to be working out, despite it all.

On the other hand, to the people in a car heading for a cliff, the ride may seem pleasant and fruitful. Democracy in America is a relatively new thing. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. The woman’s vote did not emerge as a force until after WW2. Minorities were systematically prevented from voting until the 1960’s. Our experiment in universal suffrage is, therefore, only a couple of generations along. The results are not promising. You don’t have to be a pessimist think we are heading for a bad end.

The real problem is not democracy, per se. The problem is what it does to the governing institutions and the people who control them. In the 19th century, both political parties catered to the property holders, business men and the educated elite. That’s where the votes were so that’s where the politicians went looking for votes. The result was the parties were representative of the nation’s various interests, all of whom had the same general goals in mind. As a result, national politics was regional, not tribal. Northern states favored industry and trade, while southern states favored agriculture.

Once you flood the voting booths with millions without an ownership stake in the country, politics becomes tribal. The parties seek to assemble collection of tribes, even though they may not have shared interests. This attracts a different class of politician. In order to get white union guys to vote with black welfare queens, you have to be cunning and persuasive. The appeal is emotional, not logical. The result is what we see. Both parties are dominated by sociopaths, interested only in beating the other side in the next fight.

Democracy has its place and it a requirement of civilized governance. It must be tempered and that’s what we lack. Returning the Senate to the states, for example, would cripple the federal welfare system. States would never tolerate the meddling. Of course, the Senate would attract a different class of politician. Low-life grifters like Chuck Schumer and John McCain would be of no use to their respective state legislatures.

The conditions under which we re-apply the brakes to our run-away democracy is the mystery. Maybe that’s where the doom and gloom set has it right. History is not exactly full of successful reformers steering their society away from the rocks. Instead, it the story of one crash after another.

I watched, well, mostly watched the Gavin McInnes film How to be a Man. It was free through Amazon so I gave it a shot, figuring it would be horrible and I’d turn it off after 20 minutes. It was better than I expected. It is a short film, by today’s standards. I’m not a heavy consumer of video these days so I have to rely on this fabulous invention by Mr. Gore for my data on films. According to this the typical movie is 2.6 hours. That seems interminable to me. No wonder I have not been to the theater in years.

Gavin McInnes is a likable guy on screen. He plays a middle-aged beta male, Mark McCarthy, who thinks he used to be a real man. In fact he was a stand-up comic who had brief success and then took a job at an adverting agency. At middle age he lives in an apartment with his pregnant wife. He has just learned he has terminal cancer and therefore will not be around to raise his unborn child. He hires an old friend’s kid, Bryan, out of film school to help him create a series of videos explaining how to be a man. The rest of the movie is these two bonding through a series of adventures.

An idea lingering in the background of the movie is that Bryan may be McCarthy’s son. Bryan never knew his father and McCarthy used to party with Bryan’s mother in the old days. As the two work through adventures, creating videos about life lessons McCarthy wants to teach his unborn child, a father-son relationship develops. In the end, McCarthy has learned how to be a father and Bryan becomes a man. In between we get some yucks and corn-pone advice about life, as told by urban elites.

In his articles and TV appearances, McInnes keeps returning to the issue of drug use and his allegedly wild youth. I say allegedly because I have no evidence to suggest his was an unusually wild youth. It is all relative, of course. When you live in the places I prefer to live, drugs, crime and regular gun fire is just part of the rich tapestry that is the ghetto. Disheveled dudes with lots of ink and drug problems are a dime a dozen. But, in the swank coastal enclaves it may seem outlandish.

Anyway, the movie is sort of a walk down memory lane for McInnes. He is credited as one of the writers and I suspect the adventures were written by him. Through the movie, I kept waiting for the main character to have the revelation about his life that seems to be standard in these films. You know, the good guy who is miserable suddenly sees how good he has it. We never get that. Instead there’s some suggestion that maybe the main character is figuring it out, but it is left unresolved.

For a short free movie it is a fine option if you have time to kill.

I’ve posted a few times on my ideas for reforming the prison system. This incident in New York is a good example of the problems in our handling of the defectives.

The state gave him no meds and no psychiatric referral, releasing the murderous ticking time bomb from prison on an unsuspecting public.

Daniel St. Hubert, a paranoid schizophrenic who spent five years in the slammer for trying to strangle his mom with an electrical cord, was operating with barely any safety net when he was sprung last month.

Nine days after he walked out of the upstate Clinton Correctional Facility, police say, he used a steak knife to kill a 6-year-old boy and seriously hurt his 7-year-old playmate at a Brooklyn housing project.

Police also suspect St. Hubert killed an 18-year-old college student and critically injured a 53-year-old homeless man.

St. Hubert’s sister said she pleaded with officials for help for her mentally ill brother before and after he was released May 23 from prison.

Judith Perry said he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with aspects of drug-induced psychosis.

“I begged them and they didn’t do it,” she told the Daily News on Thursday.

“I spoke to the social worker in regards to his mental capacity and when will he be able to see a doctor. They told me it doesn’t happen right away. It usually takes a couple of weeks. Usually they’re discharged with medication.”

Prison officials declined to discuss whether St. Hubert was treated for mental illness behind bars. Records show he was committed to mental health facilities three times — once in 2010 and twice in 2011.

You have the whole range of pathologies on display here. First you have a person with a long history of violence being released from prison. Even not knowing about his mental condition, no responsible adult should sign off on this act, but our prisons are not run by responsible adults. Then you have the mental problems. That alone should have kept this person off the streets. There’s no fixing this man with current technology. Only a lunatic would think putting a monster in a cage for a given period of time changes the nature of the monster.

The bigger issue, the real root of what ails us as a civilization, is the insularity of the government functionaries. This madman went through the system. Government bureaucrats signed off on his release. We should be able to easily get this information and know who, exactly, is responsible for letting this maniac loose on the public. This will never happen. No one will be named. No one will be sanctioned. No one will be held accountable to the people.

Here is Reagan giving the 40th anniversary speech. I miss having an American in the White House.

Conservatives are fond of repeating Schumpeter’s gale. Capitalism is an evolutionary process of continuous innovation and creative destruction. I doubt many of the talking heads who say it have any idea what it means, but that’s another story. The thing is, capitalism is just destructive sometimes. That comes to mind when looking at what’s going on with college football. It is a multi-billion dollar sport determined to blow itself apart. The looming civil war between the big budget programs and the rest of college sports is going to get ugly.

At least one college football coach isn’t happy about the SEC threatening to take their ball and leave if the Power Five conferences aren’t granted autonomy by the NCAA.

Central Florida coach George O’Leary, in fact, put a historical spin on SEC commissioner Mike Slive’s threat of forming a “Division IV” if the league — along with the ACC, Big 12, Big Ten and the Pac-12 — don’t get the flexibility needed to create their own bylaws.

“They sound like the South during the Civil War,” O’Leary told the Orlando Sentinel earlier this week. “If they don’t get their way, they’re going to secede and start their own country. … I think college football is in real trouble.”

I’ve always wondered why the rest of the college sports world tolerates the SEC. The casual disregard for the rules by these schools is not new. They were cheating since the founding of the NCAA. It’s like the league attracts sociopaths. I bet 80% of the rules are the result of an SEC scandal.

Smaller Division I schools likely can’t afford the changes that the SEC and the major conferences are seeking. And while Division II and Division III have their own rules, forming a Division IV would seemingly create a wider divide between the Power Five and other smaller schools.

“They’re trying to go the other way and create an even wider gap between the haves and have-nots,” O’Leary told the Sentinel of the Power Five and the SEC’s threats. “I think some of these schools have forgotten where they came from.”

The SEC wants the NCAA steering committee to adopt its proposal for the voting threshold, which would allow the Power Five to pass legislation with more ease.

My assumption is the men running college sports are savvy operators. This attempt to starve out the smaller programs is the sort of thing you do when the pie is no longer growing. Maybe they see trouble coming over the horizon for their business and are taking step to insulate themselves from it. On the other hand, maybe they are just greedy and about to blow up their industry. All sports have become so greedy and short sighted, it is hard not to look at them like cannibals in a war of man against man.