I have no love for Karl Rove, but you have to respect his political skills. He got George Bush elected twice and that was not small feat. Bush was one of the worst politicians we’ve seen in decades. By that I mean he lacks the sociopathic charm we prefer in our modern politicians. That and he struggled to string a sentence together. Americans like smooth talking fabulists, who lie on spec. Getting Bush into the White House took extraordinary skills by his team.

That’s why it was fun watching Rove launch of a missile at the old battleship called Hillary Clinton. Politics is a dirty business and Rove is a pro. He knows it is a good time to put that thought out there. Clinton is only getting older and every time she stumbles or looks dazed in public, the brain damage issue will come to mind. Long after people forget about this, they will remember that Clinton has brain damage.

Anyway, just for fun I thought I would look into who else will be running on the Democrat side. Once the fall election is over, the battle to line up moneymen, rolodex men and strategists will be on for both parties. A weak Clinton should draw in some challengers with nothing to lose from making a run at her. Plus, the crazy wing has never loved Clinton. That’s why they backed Obama in 2008. It was mostly out of spite. They will be looking for another horse to ride in 2016.

Crazy Joe Biden: It has long been assumed that Crazy Joe will stagger off the stage in 2016 and that will be the end of his time in politics. He’s no spring chicken and has a habit of saying insane things in public. He is also well regarded amongst the party establishment. He could challenge Cankles as the establishment candidate. His loyal service to Obama has also won him a lot of friends on the crazy wing. Vice Presidents have enormous advantages when running in a primary. It is why they almost always win if they run. Odds: 2-to-1

Fake Indian: Every liberal woman I know loves Fake Indian. She is a darling of the Left, many of whom think Obama let them down. She is a throwback to the 1960’s Left in that she yaps a lot of about the poor and disadvantaged. She is not young, but she is younger than Cankles and Crazy Joe. The other thing she has going for her is she can pitch herself as an outsider and a reformer. There’s enough distance between her and the Obama administration to plausibly call her an “insurgent” candidate. Odds: 5-to-1

Knuckles O’Malley: Martin O’Malley is a long way from his days of threatening to punch Baltimore radio hosts. He is the quintessential meritocratic climber. He’s also running the Democratic Governors Association, which means he gets to run around the country raising money and collecting favors. Like Bill Clinton, he comes from a terminally corrupt state and that means he has baggage. He may have knocked up a local news bunny at some point. But, he also has a disarming presentation on the stump and he is a foaming at the mouth liberal. Odd: 20-to-1

Brian “Nuts” Schweitzer: The nut-roots types loved this guy and they wanted him to take a shot at the open senate seat in Montana. The nutters have this image in their head of the perfect candidate. He is a combination Huey Long and FDR. They are convinced a populist appeal will turn working class white males into liberal democrats. Odds: 50-to-1

Mini-me: Duval Patrick is term limited out and will have nothing to so running for president is a good way to fill the time. It is also a good way to audition for jobs. He is also deeply connected to the Axelrod operation in Chicago and that means he will be able to tap into the Obama money machine. As the only black guy in the field, he will get a lot of support from his people in the primaries. Odds: 50-to-1

Il Duce: His old man never ran, probably because he was so mobbed up it would have got him killed. Andrew Cuomo does not have the problem. He’s another guy who could cut into Cankles support with establishment democrats. He probably does not run if Cankles runs for that reason, plus he knows this is most likely a GOP election to lose. He may be better of waiting until 2020. Odds: 100-to-1

One of the rules of life is to never underestimate the willpower of a fanatic. The true believer has always been the most dangerous human animal. Throughout history, the fanatic has posed the greatest danger to the established order and society’s leaders. Life is messy and inexact, requiring all sorts of difficult compromises. Fanatics are everywhere the enemy of compromise.

In modern America, we solved that problem by putting the fanatics in charge of the culture. This story is a great example. Black gangsters shooting one another over drug turf is now being called Hood Disease, a psychological ailment. After all, it can’t possibly have anything to do with the fact the gangsters are not middle-aged Irish guys. Race being a social construct and all.

In the inner city, a health problem is making it harder for young people to learn. The Centers for Disease Control said 30 percent of inner city kids suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

The CDC said these children often live in virtual war zones. Doctors at Harvard said they actually suffer from a more complex form of PTSD that some call “hood disease.”

Unlike soldiers, children in the inner city never leave the combat zone. They often experience trauma, repeatedly.

“You could take anyone who is experiencing the symptoms of PTSD, and the things we are currently emphasizing in school will fall off their radar. Because frankly it does not matter in our biology if we don’t survive the walk home,” said Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Ph.D. of San Francisco State University.

In Oakland, about two thirds of the murders last year were actually clustered in East Oakland, 59 people killed.

East Oakland is the ancestral home of the Black Panthers.

Teachers and administrators who graduated from Fremont High School in East Oakland and have gone back to work there spoke with KPIX 5.

“These cards that (students) are suddenly wearing around their neck that say ‘Rest in peace.’ You have some kids that are walking around with six of them. Laminated cards that are tributes to their slain friends,” said teacher Jasmene Miranda.

Jaliza Collins, also a teacher at Fremont, said, “It’s depression, it’s stress, it’s withdrawal, it’s denial. It’s so many things that is encompassed and embodied in them. And when somebody pushes that one button where it can be like, ‘please go have a seat,’ and that can be the one thing that just sets them off.”

In 2013, there were 47 recorded lockdowns in Oakland public schools – again, almost all in East and West Oakland.

Maybe the Gangster Paradise is not all that.

I had my annual physical yesterday. Even though I am an old man, I remain in good health. Other than high blood pressure, for which I take a pill every day, and the occasional bouts of insanity, I have no health concerns. The pill is $12 for three months and has no discernible side effects, other than the aforementioned psychotic breaks. Those are a lot of fun for me so it is not much of a burden. I exercise frequently and watch my diet, but I am not like the guys in this story from the Weekly Standard. I take few supplements and I refuse to starve myself into a skeleton. I’m not interested in living forever if it means looking like this guy.

Anyway, sitting there waiting for Robin to ask her questions and then jam her finger up my arse, I started thinking about health care. There was a poster on one wall describing the horrors of smoking. It featured pictures of brown lungs and mangled faces. The poster was sponsored by one of the nicotine patch makers. There was a calendar sponsored by a local disability lawyer. There was a poster for some drug that must be aimed at fat people. Next to that was a poster for botox. I started thinking about John Kerry. What in the world would possess someone to have that done? I’m as vain as any other man, but immobilizing your face sounds crazy to me.

Looking around, it occurred to me that one reason America has such a dysfunctional health care system is we have convinced ourselves it is not a business. We think health care is this weird fusion of mystical religion, government service and natural resource. It is none of those things. It certainly should never be any of those things. Europeans made it a government service for the proletariat. It’s cheap and does the basics, but there’s a reason their elites don’t use the system. Africans and many Asians still treat medicine as a religion. The natural resource angle is an American invention. Our lunatics truly think health care is a magical well held hostage by insurance companies.

Health care is just another service. It is a business. If we looked at it that way, like we do veterinary services, we would do ourselves a world of good. When I take the cat to the vet, I pay for the service. I once had a cat with a heart problem. I was able to get first world, cutting edge cardiac care for the animal at a price that was trivial. A one hour visit with a world class doctor and his cutting edge machines cost $300. For large animals, heart surgery is now available to fix things like heart valves, again, at reasonable prices.

At no time is there any doubt that the transaction is exactly that, a transaction. My vet charges a fee and hopes to make a profit from my business with him. I decide whether the services are worth the money. Normal market forces drive prices down and innovation up. In my little slice of heaven, there are more veterinarians than physicians. The wait time for the vet is the next day while I had to wait over a month to see the nurse practitioner for my physical. That last bit is important. I see a real doctor for the cat. I’ve never met my doctor, just his nurses.

The response whenever I bring this up is “But you can put your cat down. People need loads of health care when they are old and you cannot choose to put them down.” That’s not entirely true. We withdraw life saving measures all the time. Living wills are for exactly that. Doctors have been telling families “there’s nothing we can do” for generations. The realities of death have been dealt with since the dawn of time. It is only of late that we struggle with the concept. In Europe, poor people are given pain killers and sent home to die. We used to do the same thing until the reformers came along.

Health care is a math problem. In any society the care and feeding of the helpless members is a top priority. Altruism is one of the oldest human traits and it is what allows us to live in large communities of strangers. We are not going to leave the poor and sick to die in the streets untended. The question is how best to supply that charity to these people. Everyone else should be paying their own way for health services just as we pay our own way for clothes and food. But, when you live in a society run by lunatics with magical thinking about observable reality, you get what we have now.

This was an easy one to spot.

In 2011, Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and director of the GI Unit at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, Australia, published a study that found gluten, a protein found in grains like wheat, rye, and barley, to cause gastrointestinal distress in patients without celiac disease, an autoimmune disorder unequivocally triggered by gluten. Double-blinded, randomized, and placebo-controlled, the experiment was one of the strongest pieces of evidence to date that non-celiac gluten sensitivity (NCGS), more commonly known as gluten intolerance, is a genuine condition.

By extension, the study also lent credibility to the meteoric rise of the gluten-free diet. Surveys now show that 30% of Americans would like to eat less gluten, and sales of gluten-free products are estimated to hit $15 billion by 2016 — that’s a 50% jump over 2013’s numbers!

One of the weirder parts of the post reality victim culture is people are always looking for a reason to fear their food. Ten years ago, I knew no one with a serious food allergy. Today, I may be the only person not reporting a food allergy. Of course, there’s big dough to be made in getting off bread.

But like any meticulous scientist, Gibson wasn’t satisfied with his first study. His research turned up no clues to what actually might be causing subjects’ adverse reactions to gluten. Moreover, there were many more variables to control! What if some hidden confounder was mucking up the results? He resolved to repeat the trial with a level of rigor lacking in most nutritional research. Subjects would be provided with every single meal for the duration of the trial. Any and all potential dietary triggers for gastrointestinal symptoms would be removed, including lactose (from milk products), certain preservatives like benzoates, propionate, sulfites, and nitrites, and fermentable, poorly absorbed short-chain carbohydrates, also known as FODMAPs. And last, but not least, nine days worth of urine and fecal matter would be collected. With this new study, Gibson wasn’t messing around.

37 subjects took part, all with self-reported gluten sensitivity who were confirmed to not have celiac’s disease. They were first fed a diet low in FODMAPs for two weeks, then were given one of three diets for a week with either 16 grams per day of added gluten (high-gluten), 2 grams of gluten and 14 grams of whey protein isolate (low-gluten), or 16 grams of whey protein isolate (placebo). Each subject shuffled through every single diet so that they could serve as their own controls, and none ever knew what specific diet he or she was eating. After the main experiment, a second was conducted to ensure that the whey protein placebo was suitable. In this one, 22 of the original subjects shuffled through three different diets — 16 grams of added gluten, 16 grams of added whey protein isolate, or the baseline diet — for three days each.

Analyzing the data, Gibson found that each treatment diet, whether it included gluten or not, prompted subjects to report a worsening of gastrointestinal symptoms to similar degrees. Reported pain, bloating, nausea, and gas all increased over the baseline low-FODMAP diet. Even in the second experiment, when the placebo diet was identical to the baseline diet, subjects reported a worsening of symptoms! The data clearly indicated that a nocebo effect, the same reaction that prompts some people to get sick from wind turbines and wireless internet, was at work here. Patients reported gastrointestinal distress without any apparent physical cause. Gluten wasn’t the culprit; the cause was likely psychological. Participants expected the diets to make them sick, and so they did. The finding led Gibson to the opposite conclusion of his 2011 research:

“In contrast to our first study… we could find absolutely no specific response to gluten.”

This is why it is wise to be skeptical of studies. The world is complex and full of innumerable variables. Models are used to study one narrow part of the world. They are in no way similar to real life. Even with this refinement, no one should walk away thinking they have found a true cause here. It could very well be nothing more than the power of suggestion. Most people on gluten free diets just wanted to be with the cool kids.

Instead, as RCS reported last week, FODMAPS are a far more likely cause of the gastrointestinal problems attributed to gluten intolerance. Jessica Biesiekierski, a gastroenterologist formerly at Monash University and now based out of the Translational Research Center for Gastrointestinal Disorders at the University of Leuven in Belgium,* and lead author of the study alongside Gibson, noted that when participants consumed the baseline low-FODMAP diet, almost all reported that their symptoms improved!

“Reduction of FODMAPs in their diets uniformly reduced gastrointestinal symptoms and fatigue in the run-in period, after which they were minimally symptomatic.”

Coincidentally, some of the largest dietary sources of FODMAPs — specifically bread products — are removed when adopting a gluten-free diet, which could explain why the millions of people worldwide who swear by gluten-free diets feel better after going gluten-free.

Indeed, the rise in non-celiac gluten sensitivity seems predominantly driven by consumers and commercial interests, not quality scientific research.

Of all the dumb fads, this one seems harmless to me. Americans eat way too many carbohydrates. The Paleo guys take it too far, but they are right about basic human biology. We are built to consume meat, fish, eggs, dairy and green vegetables. That’s the best food for us. Carbs make us fat because our bodies struggle to process them. If you want to have a healthy diet, limit your carb intake and you will lose weight and you will feel healthy. Life is for living, so having ice cream or pasta or chips once in a while for a treat is great, but carbs should never be staples, unless you are living in a 15th century village.

A school in North Dakota has canceled their planned talent show. The teachers were going to dress the first graders up as homosexuals and have them perform in stereotypically homosexual fashion for the entertainment of others. A parent objected saying the show was racist because one of the little homos was dressed as an Indian.  That’s right. the issue was the Indian costume, not the gay bashing.

A Fargo first-grade class won’t be participating in the school’s talent show after a concerned parent called a planned act “racist.”

The students were supposed to be performing the song “Y.M.C.A.” during Bennett Elementary School’s May talent show.

For the show, a first-grade teacher asked parents to have their kids wear clothes like the Village People, the group that recorded the hit song in the 1970s. Some would come dressed as a policeman, a cowboy, a biker dude, a construction worker or a Native American.

But one mom, Elaine Bolman, said asking her daughter and her classmates to dress up like an Indian is offensive.

Clearly, Elaine Bolman hates homosexuals and is therefore a homophobic bigot.

This is the inevitable insanity of cultural Marxism. The contradictory and self-defeating logic does nothing but immiserate the people and culture. Elaine Bolman should drink a frothy glass of Drano tonight and put the rest of us out of her misery.

According to a new study, George Wallace was right when he said “Segregation now, segregation forever!” This time it is not just the South, it is all over.

Segregation is making a comeback in U.S. schools.

Progress toward integrated classrooms has largely been rolled back since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision 60 years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Blacks are now seeing more school segregation than they have in decades, and more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.

In New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of black students attend schools where 90 percent or more are minority.

Normal people tend to notice things. For instance, if they push a button and nothing happens, they quickly figure out the button does not work. Crazy people stand there all day pushing the button, each time expecting a different result. That’s what we keep seeing with the Left and social policy. Even if we assume their motives were good, six decades of failure should cause some rethinking of their goals. In this case, maybe people like living amongst people like them. That’s the history of the world so maybe it is not just an accident of history or white racism.

Project co-director Gary Orfield, author of the “Brown at 60” report, said the changes are troubling because they show some minority students receive poorer educations than white students and Asian students, who tend to be in middle-class schools. The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a “fundamental cause of separate-and-unequal schooling.”

This is the next great cause of the Cult. White people keep moving away from blacks and Latinos. The result is the schools remain segregated. Busing was a disaster so the only solution is to force blacks and whites to live together. They tried this in Berkeley in the 70’s and 80’s. Berkeley Citizens Action gained control of the housing authority and zoning board. The first thing they did was go after the lace curtain liberals on the hill. It was a disaster, but the Cult never learns from the past.

Way back in the olden thymes, they tried building housing projects out in the suburbs. That was a hilarious disaster as people just moved away and you ended up with these weird pocket ghettos in the middle of nowhere. I remember one when I was a kid. HUD built the thing and within a few years all of the retail shops within two miles had been robbed. Eventually that part of the county became a mini-suburban ghetto. The private homes became rentals and then drug dens. Eventually those houses were abandoned. A few years ago I took a drive through the area and the complex had been bulldozed.

Although segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it’s also in the suburbs. “Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos,” Orfield said.

Housing discrimination – stopping or discouraging minorities from moving to majority-white areas – also plays a role in school segregation and “that’s been a harder nut to crack,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in front of the Supreme Court.

School performance can be entwined with poverty, too.

The reason it is a “harder nut to crack” is people are not insane. In the Baltimore – Washington area parents play all sorts of games to keep their kids out of ghetto schools. Parents will claim to live in a better area, using the address of a friend or relative, so they can send their kid to the better school. Of course, the massive suburbs and exurbs around places like Detroit  are the result of sane people fleeing the metastasizing ghetto.

“These are the schools that tend to have fewer resources, tend to have teachers with less experience, tend to have people who are teaching outside their area of specialty, and it also denies the opportunities, the contacts and the networking that occur when you’re with people from different socio-economic backgrounds,” said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.

For students like Diamond McCullough, 17, a senior at Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side, the disparities are real. Her school is made up almost entirely of African-American students. She said her school doesn’t offer physical education classes or art, and Advanced Placement classes are only available online.

I’d suggest the first problem is naming your kid “Diamond.”

John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas, said the work at UCLA has revealed how many of the advances in desegregating schools made after the Brown ruling have stopped – or been reversed.

While racial discrimination has been a factor, other forces are in play, Rury said. Educated parents with the means to move have flocked to districts and schools with the best reputations for decades, said Rury, who has studied the phenomenon in the Kansas City region.

In the South, many school districts encompass both a city and the surrounding area, he said. That has led to better-integrated schools.

Still, around the country, only 23 percent of black students attended white-majority schools in 2011. That’s the lowest number since 1968.

Kansas City is billion dollar experiment that should have put an end to this madness. Here’s a long report from Cato on the colossal failure of the reformers to fix the schools. Again, failure never seems to teach these people any lessons. It only encourages them.

This post over at Marginal Revolution is getting a lot of attention. Steve Sailer is filling the comments thread, which always brings out a lot of responses. The discussion about Obama is following the usual path. Even his supporters struggle to accept that he is a bright guy. That’s always been a strange thing about Obama-mania. The concept of the “first black president” overwhelmed any discussion of the man. His biggest fans know little about him.

There’s something else which I think will make Obama a curiosity for generations to come. The man lacks the usual traits we associate with leadership. There’s no evidence of physical courage. He is an awkward dufus who seems timid and aloof. All of our post-war presidents have been manly, for lack of a better word. He also lacks the risk taking trait. Again, even his biggest fans describe him as excessively cautious. He is also indecisive. This is something his fans loath about him. The man never makes a decision until the initiative is long lost.

I can see how critics would point to these defects and conclude it is a lack of IQ. He’s smart enough to know he is not smart enough so he waits until the smart people decide and then he jumps on-board. That’s a possibility, but being a genius has never been a desirable quality in leaders. Obama is at least as smart as Bush or Clinton, which is to say smart enough. The decisiveness of Bush and Clinton was more than enough to overcome whatever intellectual challenges they faced.

I’m fond of saying that Obama is our first alien president. I do that to piss of lefty, for the most part. But, the guy is a singular weirdo in our political history. Everyone in the ruling class is alien to normal Americans, but Obama is alien to the aliens. By the time a candidate is nominated, we know everything there is to know about him from birth to that moment. With Obama, we’re still not sure about large swaths of his life, including where he was born. He never tells stories about his youth or about when he was starting out in life. No one shows up on TV talking about their friendship with Obama. It’s as if he exists conceptually, but not tangibly.

Anyway, I think scholars will be puzzling over this guy long after I’m dust.

This story about world drunkenness is interesting. Immigrant countries don’t tell us a whole lot with a survey like this, but the old world offers some useful insights. Those screaming about scientific racism love talking about this sort of stuff, never understanding that it undermines their charges, making them look foolish. You can’t explain a map like this with culture alone.

From the article:

People in the UK are among the most prolific drinkers in the world, according to a report released by the World Health Organisation (WHO).

Britons over the age of 15 on average drink 11.6 litres of pure alcohol a year, according to the “Global status report on alcohol and health 2014”.

The report provides country profiles for alcohol consumption in the 194 WHO member states, looking at the resulting impact on public health and policy responses.

And it reveals that the harmful use of alcohol causes 3.3 million deaths a year worldwide.

Europe is the region with the highest consumption of alcohol per person, making up the entire top 10.

Belarus takes the top spot, with people on average drinking 17.5 litres of pure alcohol a year, followed by the Republic of Moldova where the figure is 16.8 litres.

Australia and Canada also have high levels of alcohol consumption, with people on average drinking 12.2 and 10.2 litres a year respectively.

In the United States the figure is marginally lower at 9.2 litres.

But in northern Africa and the Middle East, the average figure is less than 2.5 litres of alcohol per person, with many countries having figures below one litre.

When analyzing the stand-off with Russia over Ukraine, it may be useful to remember this map.

Steve Sailer has a post on the rise of UKIP.

From Slate:

Right-Wing Anti-Immigration Party Leads Labor, Tories in UK Poll

By Ben Mathis-Lilley

A controversial right-wing group known as the U.K. Independence Party (UKIP or Ukip) leads the traditionally dominant Labor and Conservative parties in polling ahead of next week’s election of British representatives to the E.U.’s European Parliament.

Why aren’t conservative politicians in the U.S. studying what Nigel Farage is doing right?

Notice for the umpteenth time that “controversial” no longer means “new, daring, cool, sexy” in the liberal media, it means “bad.”

Maybe Bush was right and everyone can be above average. Most of us think we’re above average, according to this story in the National Journal.

Forget being smarter than a fifth-grader. Most Americans think they’re smarter than everyone else in the country.

Fifty-five percent of Americans think that they are smarter than the average American, according to a new survey by YouGov, a research organization that uses online polling. In other words, as YouGov cleverly points out, the average American thinks that he or she is smarter than the average American.

A humble 34 percent of citizens say they are about as smart as everyone else, while a dispirited 4 percent say they are less intelligent than most people.

Men (24 percent) are more likely than women (15 percent) to say they are “much more intelligent” than the average American. White people are more likely to say the same than Hispanic and black people.

So, this many smart people must mean that, on the whole, the United States ranks pretty high in intelligence, right?

Not quite. According to the survey, just 44 percent of Americans say that Americans are “averagely intelligent.” People who make less than $40,000 a year are much more likely to say that their fellow Americans are intelligent, while those who make more than $100,000 are far more likely to say that Americans are unintelligent.

The results are not surprising. Western cultures have a habit of inflating their self-worth, past research has shown. The most competent individuals also tend to underestimate their ability, while incompetent people overestimate it. Not out of arrogance, but of ignorance—the worst performers often don’t get negative feedback. In this survey, 28 percent of high school graduates say they are “slightly more intelligent” than average, while just 1 percent of people with doctoral degrees say they are “much less intelligent.”

Bertrand Russell said “The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.”

The second sentence in the last paragraph is interesting. “Western cultures have a habit of inflating their self-worth, past research has shown.” I’d love to see an actual study on that. It strikes me as something a member of the suicide cult would assume is true, just out of self-loathing. That and how people respond to self-assessment surveys is an area of some debate. The responder could very well be reacting to the questioner in a culturally biased way. In Japan understatement is a valued social good while in America, boasting is valued. What the respondent actually thinks is unknowable.

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