One of the things you learn as you travel around this world of ours is that people are not all the same. Way back in the olden thymes, our school teachers had just picked up Cultural Marxism and were preaching to us about how people everywhere were the same. I recall learning the word “ethnocentrism” in the fourth grade. We were about to learn about Japan and India and the teacher spent an hour telling us about how not to laugh at the weird things we were about to learn. That’s close to half a century now for our ruling fanatics to scream epithets against reality. Yet, reality is still here.

Race and culture are just stubborn things and will not yield to wishful thinking. Although I identify as African-American, my ancestors having left the dark continent 50,000 years ago, I am white. I’m very white. Other white people assume I am white and of the white culture. Black people make the same assumption. It is not that everyone is racist. It is that they have eyes and notice things like skin color. People also notice that, the occasional Oreo and Wigger notwithstanding, that skin color tracks closely with race and culture in America.

A good example of this is the film Iceberg Slim: Portrait of a Pimp. Until last night, I had never heard of the movie or knew much about the man. I am a fan of true crime so I am familiar with notorious criminals of all races. People find it odd that I can recall the names of obscure ghetto gangsters, but every man has his hobbies. Not only was I not very familiar with Mr. Slim, I had no idea he played such a big role in the culture of black America. Here’s the trailer:

Documentaries about people long after they are gone are usually full of lies.The director is not going to have a bunch of people on-screen saying they never heard of the subject of the documentary. Instead they find people willing to say they share the director’s passion for the subject. Still, according to Wiki, Slim’s books sold millions of copies in the 1970’s, exclusively to black readers. Yet, few white people have ever heard of him or hold “pimping” in the same regard as black Americans.

That last bit is an important takeaway. The Cult can rattle on about racism all they like, but people have eyes and they see things. Black people are covetous of their culture, black culture. They don’t want it thrown into the diversity blender. They want their heroes and antiheroes. Iceberg Slim is not an “American”  hero; he is a black hero.

It is why being authentically black looms so large over successful black entertainers. Snoop Dogg and Chris Rock live like the Clevers for goodness sakes. I’m more gangster than those two phonies, but they have to “keep it real” and pretend to be ghetto whenever the cameras are rolling.

That said, your culture is not getting very far if you insist on celebrating social pathologies as if they were cultural achievements. Much of American culture these days is exactly that, a celebration of the base and the crude. One television show after another is holding up the riff-raff and carny freaks as role models. Snoop Dogg got very rich pimping the nation’s youth out like whores. There are consequences to such things. For most of human history entertainers were treated as scum, pushed to the fringe of society. Today they are in charge, telling us about the greatness of a ghetto pimp.

Today I stopped for a sandwich at the local bagel shop. It is a treat I have maybe one or twice a month. Usually there’s a pretty little blond at the counter, but she was hustling tables this morning. A new girl was handling takeout. I’m assuming she is a lesbian due to the lip ring, boys jeans, plain hair and sports bra. For whatever reason, lesbians like to try and hide their boobs. I’m sure there is more nuance to lesbian dress codes, but as a non-lesbian, I only notice the basics. The other thing that seems standard with lesbians is the sour look. They always look sad.

Are there happy lesbians? I’m reminded of this classic from Steve Sailer. Re-reading it, I get the sense unhappiness is woven throughout the lesbian lifestyle. It is, after all, a narrow subculture that has never enjoyed the popularity with elite culture  that we see with male homosexuality. Lesbians in popular culture are mostly depicted as hotties performing for men. The typical lesbian, butch and surly, is ignored by popular culture. I would imagine that makes the sub-culture of lesbianism more difficult. The overall exclusivity of the group probably explains some of the surliness as well as the strict dress code. When roughly 1-in-100 are a potential sex-partner, life can be quite lonely.

I also wonder if the biology is more the issue than social pressure. Homosexuals have much higher drug and alcohol abuse. They have very high suicide rates. Violence between homosexuals is also much higher than between heteros. Lesbians, according to crime figures, are twice as likely to be a victim of domestic violence as hetero women. That’s a staggering number. When you look at divorce rates, it’s rather clear that homosexuals should not bother with marriage. Their rates of divorce are astronomical. Lesbians are the least likely to remain “married.” All of this points to a population of uncommonly miserable people.

I saw this linked over at National Review. The commentary at NRO is pretty much what you expect from people on the Right these days. There are are no greater defenders of Israel and American Jewry than American Conservatives. Even Israelis are not as enthusiastic for the Tribe as these people.

The strangeness of it is America Jews are mostly hostile to the Right in America. I think that speaks well of Conservative Inc. and those who look to them for guidance. It means their position is a philosophical one, not political. The Left loves only those who help the Cult. If Jews start voting the wrong way, Liberal Democrats begin sporting little mustaches (the women) and khaki shorts.

Reading the story, I’m a little unsure if their position is sensible.

“Dorm Storming” is a tactic used by anti-Israel activists at many campuses to slide mock eviction notices under student bedroom doors in the middle of the night, allegedly to let students know how Palestinians feel when served with eviction notices prior to demolition of their homes. The content of the flyers, including the frequency, number, and practice of such pre-demolition eviction notices is disputed, but that’s somewhat besides the point.

Students for Justice in Palestine frequently is the perpetrator of these dorm stormings, as happened at Northeastern University recently, resulting in SJP’s suspension.

The point of sliding political flyers under dorm doors, rather than handing them out on the street as students enter and exit, is to intimidate students in their most vulnerable place, their bedroom, and at their most vulnerable time, while they sleep. That is why many if not most universities ban the practice.

I’m not sure if it is intended to intimidate. Maybe it is. Maybe sometimes it is. Maybe it is also intended to draw attention to their cause. There’s a tradition in America of this sort of outlandish behavior for the purpose of drawing attention. It’s easy to take a casual view of this as a consequence, even though it is clear these Palestinians hate Jews and hate America.

Universities have a legitimate interest in protecting student privacy in their homes (dorms) and bedrooms (dorm rooms).

This is a strong argument. There’s a time and place for everything in an orderly society. Harassing people who have zero to do with any of this is exactly what the school should discourage. On the other hand, This is not a legal issue. This is a culture issue. Why in the world are we inviting this here?

Assuming the constitutional right to free speech applied to private college campuses as in public spaces, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld ordinances protecting homeowners against unapproved intrusions.  Rowan v. U.S. Post Office Dept., 397 U.S. 728, 738 (1970)(“We therefore categorically reject the argument that a vendor has a right under the Constitution or otherwise to send unwanted material into the home of another…. That we are often ‘captives’ outside the sanctuary of the home and subject to objectionable speech and other sound does not mean we must be captives everywhere.”)

This is where it is time to change gears. There are no Muslim run countries where this sort of deliberation is possible. There are no Arab countries where this is possible. The concepts of free speech, peaceful protest and privacy are strictly Western concepts. More precisely, they are northern European concepts. If not for that collection of eccentrics on a barren island in the North Sea, liberal democracy would have remained a mystery to mankind. If the people called “Palestinians” got their way, we would all be dead, including the Jews.

The “dorm storming” is really much broader than just this college campus. By letting these savages into our lands, they are treating our country the same way they treat this college. These people have no interest in being Americans. They have no interest in the culture that allows for liberal democracy. The only reason they are here is to cause trouble for the West. The response  to macro-scale “dorm storming” should be mass deportation and a ban on all immigration from Muslim countries.

If this seems like an over reaction, consider this article from The Weekly Standard. Specifically, this passage in the body of the article:

Wilders has lived under heavy police protection for more than a decade. Credible threats have been made against him on many occasions, and plots broken up to take his life with bombs and guns. The spokesman for a group called Sharia4Holland called for giving “this dog of the Romans” the same treatment van Gogh got. More recently, hundreds of jihadists have left the Netherlands to fight in Syria, including one—“Khalid from Almere”—who can be seen on right-wing websites posing with heads he has separated from infidel bodies. (Wilders’s party is the top vote-getter in Almere.) All this immigration-related violence has changed the country from top to bottom. It was announced the week of Obama’s visit that van der Graaf will be released in May after serving 12 years of an 18-year term. The usual reaction among the Dutch has been incredulity that they once lived in a country that sentenced people so leniently.

What in the world possessed the Dutch to let these Muslim lunatics settle in their lands? What possible justification could there have been for such a brazen act of stupidity? Was anyone ever walking around Amsterdam saying, “This great city would be perfect if we added some dirty savages from the other side of the world. If we can find some that really hate us, that would be great!”

Of course not. The people never wanted any of this. It is their ruling elite who decided to invite a million Muslims to make war on the native population. Immigration is a means to break the back of the middle-class who operate as a natural check on the ruling class. If the Dutch had any sense, they would rise up and first hang every elected official, then turn on the collaborators, otherwise known as government employees. Once they took back control of their government, the next task should be the deportation of every Muslim and the leveling of every mosque.

[subscribe2]Inflection points in a culture are not always obvious when you are living through them. In the 1970’s the political culture changed in America, but not everyone was seeing it. Nixon, who relied on the same political tactics used by both parties through most of the 20th century found himself standing on shifting ground. Johnson and Kennedy, after all, played dirty tricks and used the power of their office to help their election chances. Kennedy beat Nixon because the Illinois Democratic machine rigged the election. Johnson got started by gaming local elections in Texas. Then all of a sudden the rules no longer applied to Nixon and he was hounded from office. The press was not going to merely be an observer of the battles. They were now part of the fight. Ever since it has been axiomatic that the press is liberal and has different rules for covering Republicans and Democrats.

In the 1990’s, the political culture changed again. The Republicans had caught up to the Democrats and were winning a lot of elections. The response from Democrats was public relations. The lesson they learned from Reagan was that a good presentation can change minds, even if the argument was flawed. Since they were convinced Reagan was a loon, the only explanation for his success was the presentation. The Clinton years gave us “spin”, which is just a nice word for baldfaced lying. An army of “spinners” were sent onto TV to tell one whopper after another, often violating the rules of decorum that had prevailed in public affairs broadcasting for decades. Just as important, the liberal press had to be aggressively partisan. It was no longer enough to be biased. Who, whom was all that mattered.

I think we will look back and see the Bush years as when it became OK to assault the basic institutions of democracy. In the Bush years, the need for vote reform became a hot topic on the Right. The reason is ballot stuffing operations kept turning up all over. The left was furiously trying to sign up illegal aliens to vote and the Right was furiously trying to pass laws to stop them. By the Obama years, nationwide voter fraud schemes like ACORN were in league with major Democratic financial operations like the SEIU. This story is just another example of how much abuse has crept back into the system as The Cult tries to get around the limits of public tolerance for their madness.

That’s just one type of abuse. You also have organizations busing around bums and Latinos to vote at multiple locations. In 2012, I saw a bus pull up at my polling place. It was full of Mexicans, not a one speaking English. A gal in a purple shirt gave them instructions in Spanish and they marched into the polling place. My bet is there were a lot of people voting from the grave. The Cult cross-checked the death certificates with the voter rolls and suddenly they have thousands of new votes wherever they need them. This is nothing new, of course. Liberal Democrats have been stuffing the ballot box since the 19th century. Today they have better data and better tools to do it. Still, the outright contempt for the idea of self-governance is what’s appalling.

When you look at the serial abuses from the Obama administration that the press shrugs at now, it is fair to say the ground has shifted once again. Instead of ritualized combat between citizens, who agree on the big issues, American politics is looking more like a gang fight. There are no rules, just what you can get away with. Whatever respect the ruling class had for the institutions of the republic is now gone. Anything goes. In an increasingly feudal society, the old feudal customs are making a comeback. It won’t be long before they are poisoning one another and burning down each other strongholds.

I saw this linked to Drudge and I had to laugh. In another post I mentioned the nuisance fraction. That’s the portion of humanity, who mostly interfere with the orderly operation of society. They are not criminals. They are merely dimwitted, reckless, careless, inconsiderate and so forth. The ghetto has a high number of these people. Go to a fast food joint near the ghetto and you find vibrant people in line not ordering off the menu. They also require a separate bag for each item and one of every free item available. You know you will be in line for a while when you see a few of these people in line.

Anyway, there’s a lot of overlap with this group, the perpetually yapping on the phone set. I’m fond of saying that 99% of cellular communications is between two competing dimwits with nothing of value to impart to the other. They just jibber-jabber at one another like simpletons all day, every day. The other morning I almost drove over a woman who was yammering on her cell. It was 8:00 AM and I was heading to the office. She was headed toward the office building, phone in her ear, and walked into traffic. What could she possibly have to say that could not wait?

The answer is nothing.

Schutta says parents spend, on average, 11 hours a day using electronic devices. All that time takes away from face to face communication, which helps kids learn behavior.

“Kids in preschool and kindergarten are no longer as able to read social cues from other human beings,” Schutta said. “That’s in part because of their own media use and it’s in part because of their parents’ media use, they’re just not getting that training.”

Too much time on technology can also leave an emotional impact on your child, if you’re missing life moments for email.

The fat woman I almost hit was willing to leave an impact on my truck just to yap about nonsense to another blockhead. Putting aside the walking into traffic stuff, that women is most likely paying $100 a month for the phone. That’s $1200 a year after taxes. Judging by her dress, that’s two weeks wages per year going to the phone company so she can gossip to and from her remunerated activity.

For most of human history, making it to adulthood was a big deal. Even into relatively docile times like the middle ages, women lost a third of their off-spring by adulthood. Into the industrial age, losing a kid or two was not unusual. therefore, the least physically fit rarely made it long enough to breed. Even then, not having some value to society was a good way to remain a bachelor. In other words, for men at least, you had to have some status in order to pass on your DNA to the next generation.

Today, the stupid fat woman wandering into the street is saved by those of us who know better. Even if she was hit, a smart team of doctors would probably patch her up. A smart lawyer would get her a big settlement from the insurance company. In a world in which labor is less necessary, increasing the supply of epsilons will have negative consequences. On the other hand, giving the state the power to murder those they deem useless is never a good idea so I don’t think there’s much to be done about it.

Regardless, we may have found a way to short-circuit a vital natural process. Spend any time on Diversity Street and you see the challenge straight away. It’s not that the stupid are breeding. It’s that a basket full of traits antithetical to human progress are celebrated in a way that turns natural selection on its head. If you are a woman adept at turning generosity into a vice by scamming the welfare system, you can have ten kids and live well. If you are a male with high violence capital and a complete lack of social intelligence, you rise in status and therefore breed like a rabbit.

If you want a glimpse of the future, head on down to Diversity Street and imagine the folks you see wandering around your town, wearing Google Glass or whatever wearable devise emerges in the next decade. That’s the future. Millions of jabbering nitwits doing nothing more than planning their next crime or their next opportunity to breed new nitwits.

I keep bumping into stories prediction the end of the university system. This one made the rounds yesterday.

At a Dowling College campus on Long Island’s south shore, a fleet of unused shuttle buses sits in an otherwise empty parking lot. A dormitory is shuttered, as are a cafeteria, bookstore and some classrooms in the main academic building.

“There’s a lot of fear here,” said Steven Fournier, a senior who lived in the now-closed dorm for his first three years. “It’s not the same college I arrived at.”

Dowling, which got a failing grade for its financial resources from accreditors last month, epitomizes the growing plight of many small private colleges that depend almost entirely on tuition for revenue. It’s been five years since the recession ended and yet their finances are worsening. Soaring student debt, competition from online programs and poor job prospects for graduates are shrinking their applicant pools.

“What we’re concerned about is the death spiral — this continuing downward momentum for some institutions,” said Susan Fitzgerald, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service in New York. “We will see more closures than in the past.”

I admit to having never heard of Dowling College. An applicant would probably be better off not mentioning it to me if they were applying for a job. If the resume did not list a college, I’d probably never notice. Seeing an unfamiliar one I’d look it up. Looking at the college website does not fill me with confidence. “Literacy Education Department” sounds bad for some reason. I’m sure it is fine college, but who knows what that even means anymore?

These people claim to know, but their methodology is dubious. The graduates of Harvard are most likely smart and motivated. Comparing their earnings to those of other smart and motivated people who lack a diploma would be useful, but that’s impossible to construct. The fact that you are more likely to amass a net worth of a million dollars without a diploma than with a diploma is telling. I don’t have a link for it, but it is a decennial chestnut. Every decade someone does the math and announces that a college degree nets a higher salary, but not necessarily a higher net worth.

The reason for this, and the flaw in the college model, is simple. Wealth is not the same as income. The small plumber with one truck and an assistant may not have a high salary. He’s constantly buying tools and paying off that truck. Once he gets the truck paid off, he buys another truck and hires another plumber. His salary is not going up, but the value of his business is going up. By the time he retires, he had four or five trucks, a paid off house, some real estate where he runs his business and so on. His brother the manager has none of that, despite making considerably more in salary.

Strangely, college is all about preparing a young person for life as an employee. The son of the plumber above may go to state college to make dad proud or he may just go into the business. The manager’s son is taking out debt to finance college so he can work for someone just like his father did. if you want of nation of renters, debtors and employees, our university system is great, until it collapses. If you want a nation of plumbers building up their asset base, then you need something different.

From that Dowling College article:

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has predicted that as many as half of the more than 4,000 universities and colleges in the U.S. may fail in the next 15 years. The growing acceptance of online learning means higher education is ripe for technological upheaval, he has said.

He is most certainly wrong. I say that because 99% of predictions are wrong. But, if he is right it will not change much of anything. Half of college students at state universities have no business in college. The world has all the communication majors it needs. Sending kids to major in criminal justice or physical education is a waste of everyone’s time. The kids sit in class learning nothing useful, while the instructors get to extend childhood indefinitely. The typical college campus is  a playground of Eloi.

Of course, what will all the Panda Men do once they are thrown off campus and into the wild?

In some respects, it is amazing how things evolved in the West after World War II. In my grandfather’s day, no one could imagine a world in which so few people worked. No one could imagine taking out tens of thousands in debt in order to attend college. Someone majoring in gym would have seemed hilariously implausible to him. Arithmetic says this arrangement has a short shelf life, but our rulers have managed to keep the plates spinning for three decades now. My generation was probably the first to take on big debt to buy a diploma. Back then the talk was it was a sign of the end of affordable college.

The comments in this post at ParaPundit suggest the probably future. Today, companies will sequence your DNA for a small fee. Taking an IQ test is a simple thing. I have Mensa card which indicates I have taken at least on IQ test and scored above a certain level. It will not be long before some company pops up offering a packaging of services to people so they can bypass the system in some way. A DNA test to show you have no genetic markers for expensive diseases could lower your insurance premium. An IQ test score from a credible company can help the truly gifted bypass college entirely. It may even be possible one day to use DNA to indicate raw IQ, language skills, math skills and so forth.

I may live to see the day when college is in the same dustbin as indentured servitude.

Congressman Schock, a Republican from Illinois thinks this country need fewer Americans and more Mexicans. Maybe he should take to wearing a  Mexican flag on his lapel. After all, he care a whole lot more about Mexican peasant than he does American citizens.

A problem that vexes economists and (soon) politicians is what will be done with all of the extra humans. It appears that we are running out of ways to keep people busy. In America, the labor participation rate remains stuck at all-time lows. Technology promises to eliminate the need for many jobs. Even growth industries like health care are ripe for technological upheaval. Much of what a doctor or nurse practitioner does can be automated. Getting a physical at a local kiosk is not far off. Accounting and engineering can and will be done by robots at some point. That’s the claim of this book, anyway. I’ll just note that predictions about the future tend to be hilariously wrong.

I will say, however, that  life would be truly vibrant if our more vibrant citizens dressed like this:

The Luddite Fallacy is nothing new. The counter to that is we have arrived at a time of genuine plenty. In the West, no one is going without food, unless they do so willingly. Medicine is universally available, even if the delivery mechanism is unnecessarily expensive. Violence is slowly ticking down and plague appears to be unlikely. In other words, the big things that have threatened humanity have been conquered. So much so that most of the human population can avoid work entirely. With further technological improvement, a very small number of people will be able to provide for the rest of humanity. The great challenge facing humanity over the next century will be how to organize ourselves in  world without work or want.

That’s the argument anyway. I’m not entirely sure I buy that, but I do think we are headed to strange new turf. This story is what should get everyone’s attention.

A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy.

Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single “letter” of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism.

A similar mutation in the same gene causes the equivalent inherited liver disease in humans – and the successful repair of the genetic defect in laboratory mice raises hopes that the first clinical trials on patients could begin within a few years, scientists said.

Given the state of medicine, the big challenge to extending human life is almost entirely genetic. The ability to fix these defects in our genome means, barring accident or environmental issues, humans could live to the maximum of their natural life. Better understanding of aging, which is moving along quickly, means living an extended youth. Whether or not human lifespans can be extended much beyond 100 years is debatable. Still, living  to 100 in peak physical condition is a good deal, given the alternatives.

That sounds great, but here’s something else we know from genetics. Roughly 50,000 years ago modern man emerged on the scene. Humans were physically and behaviorally human. Up until last week, scarcity was the rule for humanity. In fact, evolution depends on it. Competition for food and mates is what drives the whole process. It is not just what makes us human, it was necessary for there to ever have been humans. Just as important, it is what we are designed for as a species. All of our physical and behavior wiring is geared for a world of competition for food and mates.

Just as economists puzzle over what to do with all the extra people, we should also puzzle over what happens when all of those extra people are suddenly in a world for which they are poorly designed. I think the legion of wide bodies at your local Walmart is one obvious result of plenty. Food is cheap and plentiful. By that I mean the amount of calories available to even the lowest status human in America is astronomical compared to just a few generations ago. I recall hearing stories from my grandfather, who was born in 1910, about living on one small meal a day during The Depression.

Another possible result is the falling birth rate. Liberals like to claim this is due to low infant mortality rates and high wealth. This is ridiculous, but that’s to be expected. Others, like David Goldman, point to cultural decay. Having children is about celebrating the present and past. It is a gift to the future from those thriving today. That comes from culture. The old saying about proud societies is they are ones where old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. A strong and confident people wish to be remembered and the way to do that is through children. Otherwise, why bother?

An alternative may simply be confusion. For 49,900 years, humans had to have children as soon as they could. Every signal from their environment was triggering that urge. Now all those signals are scrambled. It is no wonder the receiving end would misinterpret these new signals. Just as obesity results in plentiful food, plummeting fertility rates may result from the lack of status and competition for mates. It’s not just the lack of babies; it is the lack of sex. Like people who work in a candy factory not liking candy, humans in a world of cost and objective free sex on demand may simply turn away from the most basic of urges.

This may sound ridiculous, but studies of the Khoisan people in Africa show us that humans quickly adapt to their environment. The hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari are the world’s “oldest people” according to geneticists. That means they are closest to the “original people” who are the foundation stock for humanity. Because they walk everywhere, women have one child at a time. If they have twins, the mother smothers one newborn. Carrying two children is too difficult so they can never have more than one small child at a time.

If you’re inclined to think a world without work or want is Eden, again consider the Khoisan. Until outside forces them forced them onto farms, they were able to gather and hunt for enough food in about 20 hours per week. Attending other needs like food preparation, tool making and so forth took up another 20 or so hours. That means the Khoisan were working far less per week than most other peoples on the planet. They also had a murder rate of Detroit, including fratricide, and they were in constant conflict with other groups.

I have no idea where it is all heading. Predicting the future is a lousy business, but we are looking a lot like Panda Bears. While we have no natural enemies and plenty of food in our environment, we have stopped having sex and children. Archaeologists in the far away future will dig through the remains of our time and call us Panda Man, the human species that simply had no reason to carry on.Having arrived at the end goal of evolution, we looked around and decided it was not worth the effort.

Our future is going to be very strange.

Steve Sailer has a fantastic breakdown of this article in the Atlantic. The article is tedious, but Steve’s deconstruction is well worth the time it takes to read it. I’ve been meaning to post something about the piece, but I have not been able to plow through it. By nature and habit I am a deliberate reader. Wading through what will surely be emotive slop is hard for me.

It is why I rarely read anything written by women. Women want to share experiences and talk about them. Men want to see facts and state opinions about them. That does not mean all male writers are Spock-like in the prose. it’s that many lack the emotional baggage train that I find uninteresting.

Steve’s comment on this bit from the article

… In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools ….

is what is what I want to discuss. Steve responds, “In other words, the North was traditionally segregated spatially, while the South was segregated socially.”

Let’s back up here a second. The author, a black woman by the way, is writing for a northern publication about “resegregation” in the South, when she fully admits the north is vastly more segregated than the South. If I did not know better, I’d assume this is a very clever prank by someone trying to illustrate the blinkered idiocy of northern white liberals.

According to the author’s resume, she lives in Brooklyn, a place that is actively driving out black people so upper middle-class whites can live in trendy neighborhoods. She grew up in Iowa, went to Notre Dame and then went to UNC for a masters. Her choice of majors tells me she grew up middle-class or better. Her knowledge of the South and experience with the underclass can probably be written on a napkin.

I don’t want to get who/whom here. Outsiders often make the best observers as they lack the emotional blinkers of insiders. Her observations could very well be better than those of someone of the South and deeply familiar with the underclass. As Steve illustrates, what we’re getting here is the same old liberal platitudes about race dressed up with some statistics and stories.In other words, the story was written before she started gathering personal accounts, anecdotes and statistics.

The point is not to inform, but to confirm. Nikole Hannah-Jones is playing the same side of the street as Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a performance piece intended to flatter the all white northern liberal readership of The Atlantic. I bet town meetings in Iceland have more diversity than the readership of the Atlantic. It is not just super-white, it is culturally monolithic. Ms. Jones seems to have figured this out and parlayed that into a nice payday.

I bought some music from Amazon yesterday. It has been a while since I have done this so I was unaware of the changes they have made to their process. Once I bought the songs, I was asked if I wanted to launch the cloud player. There was no second choice so I agreed. Then I was informed my cloud player was out of date and I was asked if I wanted to download the latest. The only choice was yes.

Eventually, the cloud player opened and I saw my songs. Nice. A little looking around at the new interface I saw that the songs were in the cloud, not on my PC. I’m a prime user, but I don’t use the cloud service. I had configured my account originally to automatically download music purchases. Amazon decided we needed to take our relationship to the next level and changed that for me.

A little fiddling and I am able to download them. Not exactly. I kept hitting the download button and nothing happened. This was starting to remind me of every long term relationship I’ve ever had with a woman. I try again and I’m informed I have to change my settings. OK, we’re definitely in a relationship now. I fiddle with this for a while and I get no where. Well, I get frustrated. I guess that is somewhere.

I take a look at where I save my music and discover it is restricted for some reason. I then remember I was trying to get my PC to talk to my XBox. In order to do that I had to have an extended exchange with Microsoft Media Center and my XBox. I probably spent two hours trying to get that to work so I could play a mp4 I got from a friend. I wanted to play it on my big screen, but I ended up watching it on my PC after two hours of dealing with Microsoft.

Somewhere in the process, Media Center locked down all of my media folders. I guess this is Microsoft telling me they are jealous of my relationship with iTunes and Amazon. And yes, iTunes was not working now because it could not read those directories. I also noticed that Media Center had created a new user on my system. I guess this is for the XBox to talk to my PC. Who knows? Microsoft is such a jealous mistress.

Anyway, I unriddle all of this and fix the permissions. I finally download my music and my transaction with Amazon is complete. I still have the cloud player on there and I have to get rid of the crappy Microsoft junk that caused all of this. The point of all this is it is getting increasingly difficult to have a transactional relationship with these companies.

I’m not interested in building a relationship with Amazon. I just want to buy my stuff and move on. The word “share” has become this screaming siren, warning you that some multinational is about to waste hours of your time trying to get to know you. By “getting to know you” I mean gathering up details about your life that they will use to “monetize” you down the road. Monetize means ease you into a situation where they get to skim money from your wallet at will and sell your personal information to other skimmers.

This is the world in which we find ourselves as “citizens” in late empire America. You cannot be left alone. If you want to do just about anything, you have to have a relationship with some company that is usually working hand and glove with the state to “nudge” you in the direction they prefer. Simple transactions like buying a song suddenly turn into elaborate time wasting exorcises instead of quick transactions between anonymous parties. The great tech boom has resulted in the exact opposite of what libertarian technologists promised thirty years ago when this started.