I know a number of bright people who read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ blog. Everyone once in a while someone with some credibility will make mention of him. The Atlantic is a respected publication, even though its quality varies greatly. There have been years when it is unreadable, but also years when it is great. It is predictable liberal pap most of the time, but aimed at the PBS tote bag crowd, so it is generally well behaved.

Putting it all together and I’ve tried to check in on his blog from time to time. I figure if respectable people think he is worth a few minutes on occasion, I can learn something about them by reading what they read and who they read.

The thing I’ve been puzzle by from the start is he appears to be a gold plated phony. If I were to describe his style, I’d start with conventional black whining about whitey with a heavy dose of references intended to imply erudition. He likes to mention how he can order food in French (and how the always white waiter is shockrf to see a black speak such great French!), but there’s never a reason for it.

Similarly, he drops references to writers we’re expected to think he has read, but he never actually writes anything that says he learned anything but the book title. It is the type of name dropping you get from college sophomores who are on their way to becoming posers. In my day, these were the types who smoked clove cigarettes and wore a lot of black, even in summer.

I think what we have here is simply a hustle. Coates is the house black guy at the Atlantic, performing the rituals expected from the position.  This post is a good example.

If you haven’t yet, it’s work checking out Barack Obama’s address before the National Action Network, last week. I think it’s one of the most significant and morally grounded speeches of his presidency. I think we will eventually regard this current effort to suppress the vote through voter-ID laws, ending early voting, restricting voting hours, etc., in the same way we regard literacy tests and poll taxes. (It’s worth recalling this piece for the magazine by Mariah Blake which helps historicize voter suppression.)

There are two assertions here. One is that this speech, that has been ignored by everyone, is his most significant as president. That’s not a very high bar for a president who has exactly zero memorable speeches according to his fans. Ask yourself, when was the last time you heard anyone quote an Obama speech? When have you heard anyone talk about one of his speeches a month after it was given?

As far as “morally grounded” is concerned, that’s simply emotive gibberish the Left uses to signal. The signal is this issue is not debatable. The people pushing voting reform are evil and those opposed are good. There can be no compromise. The fact that Coates misses this entirely suggests he is not the thinking man he would like us to believe.

The second claim is that cleaning up voter fraud, a well documented problem in every state, is voter suppression. He is correct in so far as requiring positive identification suppresses the dead vote and other methods for stuffing the ballot box. Otherwise, comparing these measures to Democratic efforts to keep blacks from voting is the sort of thing very stupid people repeat because they heard a flak on TV say it. For a guy who claims to be so erudite, Coates seems to like repeating a lot of very silly things.

I believe in judging Barack Obama’s rhetoric and policies not as though he were the president of black America, but of the United States of America. On that count his speech soared. There aren’t many topics more important than the security of our democracy. The president did not attack that topic gingerly, but forcefully, directly and without hedge.

I’m fond of saying that economists are the the priestly class of the modern West. The Congressional Budget Office is the Oracle at Delphi for Washington. The factions jostle with one another to please the gods and get the correct prophesy from the Oracle. Monks and scribes across the nation toil away at their spreadsheets, looking for ways to make every bit of human existence more “efficient.” Alternatively, they look to divine from statistics the truth about the unobserved from the observed. If X correlates to Y then the we must pretend that Y exists, even it doesn’t and fashion policy accordingly. That’s why I have a forty dollar light bulb that will be part of my estate.

That’s the problem with this religion. It is inhuman. Because enough people in Washington think it is more efficient to use LED bulbs, I have to sit in a weird blueish light typing this. I was perfectly happy with the old incandescent, I mean Edison, but what I want does not count. In fact, what anyone wants is entirely irrelevant. You can see what I mean in this post over at MR. Our scribes and monks are completely baffled by Russia. For some bizarre reason, the Russians keep doing things that are not efficient. Instead, they appear to be clinging to those old crazy ideas about language, history and culture. The best comment is from Jan.

Russia is in a population death spiral. For all the apparent xenophobia, they really need immigrants. Thing is, they already have ton of Central Asians working there illegally or temporarily. Something like half of Tajikistan’s income is from laborers who spend most of their year in Russia. Lots of this thing happening with Kyrgyz and Uzbeks as well.

Hall of Fame third baseman Mike Schmidt wants baseball to implement his science fiction idea that would replace umpires calling baseball games with a force field. Following up yesterday’s idea to shorten MLB games to seven innings, Schmidt thinks that using a force field would speed up games.

The idea from the retired Philadelphia Phillie is that a Star Trek like force field over the plate would shorten the game by taking the human element out of the game. Replacing an umpire with this force field would make every strike zone the same and force batters to swing.

Schmidt idea is that if a ball crosses the force field a little bell could sound indicating a strike. The idea of a force field, while interesting, is just a continuation of the silliness that seems to be coming out from people who feel that baseball needs to be fixed. The suggestions so far have been enough to make many baseball fans roll their eyes.

Umpires replaced in baseball with science fiction force fields as Mike Schmidt wants could open up the game for a lot more issues and complaints. The first thing baseball would need to figure out is how to get the force field to actually work with the strike zone rule. The strike zone differs from batter to batter based on a point near the middle of the batters chest and their knees. So a six-foot six-inch tall player normally would have a different strike zone than a five-foot seven-inch tall player.

I saw this on Drudge and reading it, I could not help but laugh at the outraged reporter. The breathless reporting of the “gay slur” like it is a violation of a sacred taboo is what gets me. That and the reportette’s unwillingness to actually report what it is the guy put on the sign. That’s how nutty this religion of liberalism is now. They put being rude to homosexuals up at the top of the list of taboos.

Of course, the ridiculous reporter is probably easily outraged. That’s what happens when you live your life isolated from large swaths of reality. According to her biography, she popped out of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and she has a JD from Yale. Smart gal, who does not have a lick of useful experience in the world in which most of us live. She may as well be a space alien covering earth as an anthropologist for the home planet.

Up until the 1960’s or so, reporters were plucked from the ranks of the working class. A boy with something on the ball, but lacking the resources or interest in academics could become a reporter. That typically involved a long apprenticeship working with experienced men. It also meant living amongst the people they often reported on for their papers. Then the job of reporter became a profession and a dumping ground for upper middle-class kids, who could not cut it in professions like finance or law. The result is a media full of precious sissies.

Now there’s something for the economist to ponder. This young gal has a million dollars worth of training at elite universities. What’s her marginal utility?

I’m listening to the The British History Podcast as time permits. One of the things that jumps out to me about first millennium Britain is the role of cleverness in maintaining the family line. The shrewd rulers had to be both cunning and powerful. We have romanticized this era, layering on our notions of chivalry and Norseman culture. The reality was something much different. The ruling clans were always fighting amongst themselves and plotting against the other families. Much like the Old West, getting killed by treachery was more common than getting killed in single combat.

That came to mind when reading this story about that odious toad, Al Sharpton.

A drug trafficker who worked for Al Sharpton’s nonprofit in the 1980s said that despite the preacher’s denials, he was eager to get a slice of the lucrative drug deal captured on FBI surveillance video.

“It was greed. He just wanted money,” Robert Curington, 72, told The Post during a two-day interview at his North Carolina home, detailing for the first time how Sharpton stepped into the FBI’s trap — and was then forced to become a federal informant.

Sharpton has said he showed interest in the drug deal only because he feared the undercover agent was armed. He also claimed that he snitched for the feds — as first reported by The Smoking Gun this week — because the mob was threatening him.

Curington called all of that a tall tale.

He instead provided a detailed account of how Sharpton wined and dined a man he thought was a South American drug lord — and said Sharpton met him not just once, but three times.

Sharpton’s saga began in the Manhattan offices of boisterous boxing big shot Don King in 1983, Curington said.

An unnamed felon trying to duck a 30-year prison sentence promised the feds he could help them nail King on coke-dealing charges.

An undercover FBI agent, using the name Victor Quintana, set up a meeting with King to discuss a boxing match in the Bahamas — but King had a bad feeling about the potential business partner and pawned him off on Sharpton.

Don King is an exceptionally clever and cunning person. In fact, I’d put him in the 1% category. You will meet few men as cunning and sly as King. It is how he avoided the clutches of the FBI for five decades, despite being in a business known for criminality. It is how he maneuvered the Mafia out of boxing and largely ran the sport for decades – without killing anyone or going to prison. That’s an amazing accomplishment. Few mobsters ever die of old age and outside of prison. King is in a very small club.

The multidimensional thinking at work here is impressive. If Quintana was legitimate, King would get his piece as Sharpton was his guy. If the guys was just a crook, then Sharpton would get fleeced, not King. If the guy was a cop, then King avoids the FBI trap and Sharpton is out of the way without King getting his hands dirty. Intuitively, King saw the probabilities and charted the course most likely to benefit him. Sharpton, a first rate grifter in his own right, was a piker compared to King.

That brings me to this story. The casinos do more to guard against cheating than any organization on earth. They bring all the toys to the party. They use surveillance, facial recognition, statistics, behavior sciences, you name it. If it can be used to catch cheaters, they have it. Talk to anyone working at the higher levels of casino security and you are talking to someone operating at a level only found in the upper reaches of the NSA and MI6. They are that good.

Despite this, exceptionally clever men find a way to beat the house. It is the old saying. The cheat has to be right once, while the house has to be right every time. A small mistake like a defect in the playing cards can cost the house millions. I learned this as a kid working a part-time job at a rental company. The scammers had a million tricks to get the edge on the rental company. Fake licenses, fake credit cards, bad checks, you name it, they had a way to beat the system. I was always amazed by the amount of brainpower invested in stealing a rented car.

There’s a lesson there that undermines all of the “isms.” Whether it is socialism, Marxism or libertarianism, they depend on people voluntarily going along with the spirit of the program. It is why socialism and Marxism always end in a blood bath. The clever fraction can’t stop gaming the system, It is their nature. Once the socialists or Marxists get this, they start killing the uncooperative. If libertarians ever gained control of a country, I suspect it would end the same way.

Here’s a fascinating look at how the imperial ruling class lives. We like to think we vote for our representatives and they toil away in Washington doing the people’s business. In reality, a semi-permanent ruling class runs the country. It is why a neo-con like Victoria Nuland can work for a Liberal Democrat administration. Whatever Obama thinks about foreign affairs, no one important gives a crap. His opinion does not matter as he is not in charge of foreign policy. The same is true across the board.

“I see lobbying,” Tony Podesta has said, “as getting information in the hands of people who are making decisions so they can make more informed decisions.” Last week the information Tony Podesta was giving was the divorce complaint he had filed in D.C. Court against his wife Heather. The hands receiving that information belonged to a gossip columnist for the Washington Post, who made the “informed decision” to report on it. Later in the day Heather, who is also a lobbyist, informed the Post the text of her counter-suit. It published a follow-up.

The documents, which you can read below, did not become available to the rest of us until yesterday. They tell stories not only of a May-December romance gone sour, but of how obscene wealth can be amassed through rent-seeking and influence-peddling in Washington D.C., and of the hoary means by which the princelings of the capital and their consorts maintain and grow that wealth. They tell stories not only of an ugly divorce, but of the power of lobbying, of how one family maneuvered to the center of the nation’s dominant political party, of the transactional relationships, gargantuan self-regard, and empty posturing that insulates, asbestos-like, the D.C. bubble.

That the broken couple now uses the tools of their trade—the phone-call to a friend, the selective leaking of documents, the hiring of attorneys, the launch of a public-relations campaign—against one another is more than ironic. It is fitting. Tony and Heather Podesta reached the pinnacle of wealth and influence in Barack Obama’s Washington. Now they, like he, are in eclipse.

The rest of the article reads like a Hollywood comedy-drama about middle-aged divorce. One of things I think about is what comes next. The current arrangements in America seem to be about near their end. The entrenched interests are feverishly trying to keep the plates spinning, but that cannot last forever. Reform appears to be impossible so some sort of crackup is inevitable. What comes next is worth considering.

The Founders had a pretty good understanding of the bandits, highwaymen, con-men, the clever fraction and the parasites present in every human population. They also understood how easily the smart and successful could tip into corruption. Their project was designed to make it tough for these elements to gain power of their neighbors. They may have imagined a tribe of Podestas, but they never imagined a class of coat holders and fixers, who existed outside the power of the king. The next Constitution, if there is one, will have to address this type of vermin that runs the Imperial Capital.

Term limits sounds good, but it addresses a very small part of the problem. The Podesta clan does not make it’s money from the elected officials. No, they make their money by knowing all of the staffers, the lobbyists and most important, the permanent bureaucracy that implements and enforces Federal law. It seems to me the way to address this is to term limit government employment. You get ten years to collect a government check. After that, you rejoin the dreaded private sector. The exception would be military service and pension checks. Otherwise, you can be on welfare for ten years or work at the post office for ten years, but not both.

The way the parasite class will attempt to get around this is outsourcing. Instead of having HUD staffed with thousands of people, a contractor like Blackwater will spring up that does all of the functions, but avoids the limit on government service. The term limit, therefore, would have to be extended to government contractors. If Delloite, for example, cannot get along without government work, maybe they need to go away. This would require registering government contractors and publicizing employee lists, butt hat’s done now anyway.

I was listening to the great Howie Carr the other day and this was a topic for a segment or two. For those who hate watching news videos on-line, the very short version is retailers are shrinking their products while keeping the price the same. This, allegedly, inadvertently games the inflation numbers. A candy bar may remain $1.25, but it is 80% of its original size. The bag of sugar at the market went from five pounds to two kilos, which is roughly 4.5 pounds.

That last trick is common with beverages. A fifth of liquor is now sold as 500ML. A fifth is roughly 25 ounces, while 500ML is 17 ounces. They will mess with the shape of the bottle so it tricks the eye. This may sound like a small thing, but consider this. The tax on alcohol is roughly $23 per gallon. That means the booze maker saves $1.30 on taxes, plus the cost of tax collection and the cost of manufacturing his product. (Cheap liquor is not distilled. It is mixed at plants using water, flavorings and commercial alcohol.) Multiply that over a million bottles and you have real money.

I’ve noticed this all over the grocery market. I’m not insane so I have a sensible diet composing mostly meat, fish, eggs and dairy products. This has been true for most of my life so I tend to buy the same supplies every week. I’m an eat to live, not live to eat person. That means I can have the same thing for breakfast everyday for a year if it is convenient. It also means I notice when my grocery bill changes or when my food shrinks. Since the crash, my food bill has gone up close to 30%. I could get out for about $70 a week and now it is rarely under $100. Like the price of gasoline, food is much more expensive now than a decade ago, even though we are told there has been no inflation.

That’s the fundamental dishonesty at work. We live in a time when lying about everything is so common, no one notices. Ours is a dishonestly culture. The dick heads who came up with the idea to shrink the food are not the first to think of it. Long ago in a country far far away I was told about the pickle maker who hired a new plant manager. Soon, the plant was much more profitable so the owner went to see how it was done. The manager told him how he increased profits by removing one pickle from each jar. That means every ten jars netted him one free jar of pickles he could sell!

The owner fired his manager. The reason was the manager was not just cheating the customers, he was cheating the owner. The “savings” were eventually going to cost the owner business. In other words, they were not savings, they were accrued costs. Somewhere down the line that accrual would reverse out and someone would have to pay, most likely the owner. This is the most basic form of intergenerational theft. That’s spending tomorrow’s profits today. It creates a liability that has to be paid tomorrow.

The fact that the food makers are lying to us is not a stunning development. The standard has been set by public officials who lie so much it is impossible to know the truth. They lie on spec, as the gangsters say. Politicians have always lied, but it became the centerpiece of their morality in the Clinton years. This is when steaming piles of human filth like James Carville took over public discourse. They gave us the word “spin room” which is a cute phrase for the place where they orchestrate a campaign of lies to deceive the public. If you have been living in America for the past 25 years, you have become so use to the casual dishonestly from the ruling class, it now seems immoral to be honest.

That last bit is not always obvious either. In a world where there is no truth, you can easily miss what’s happening. In the last election, Herman Cain was driven from the field because he liked getting freaky with co-workers. The people shrieking in outrage, however, spent the 1990′s defending a man who was a serial rapist and was impeached for shoving cigars into fat interns. The same people who lionized Hillary Clinton for sticking by her man, mocked Cain’s old lady or doing the same. If you need proof we live in an insane asylum, it is right there. (Cain’s defects as a candidate is not the point here)

All of this is predictable. When one religion so throughly dominates, it is impossible to tell the secular institutions from the religious ones, society descends into madness. The Founders understood this and worked to shape public institutions that were weak. They also worked to make it tough for one religion to dominate the rest. The theory being that if no one could hope to have control of the public institutions, they would work to prevent others from it and the result would be a preservation of republican government. They never anticipated what was going to come from the French Revolution.

It is comforting to think that there is a limit to this. You can only shrink the food so far. You can only hide the money creating and debt spiral for so long. Mathematics says there are limits and once those limits are reached, the game is up. I’m not so optimistic. It may be comforting to think there are still enough citizens willing to fight to keep the country, but that’s probably a fantasy. The overwhelming majority want the custodial state and will fight anyone who tries to stop them. No matter how much and how often the Cult lies to them, they will trust the Cult before they trust themselves.

We have a very serious problem with the paramilitary units we have installed around the country.

A spring break vacation turned into a nightmare for a Columbus family visiting the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force when four police officers in three cruisers drew guns and forced a grandmother and a mother to the ground as two young children screamed in fear from what authorities thought was a “stolen” vehicle.

Alice Hill, 65, her daughter-in-law Wendy Hill, 31, and Hill’s two children, Aaron, 8, and Brooke, 5, were pulling out of the museum parking lot after Aaron and Alice had counted the number of out-of-state cars on the way to their family minivan, WKRC-TV reports.

Unbeknownst to the family, an anonymous onlooker had called 911 and reported that the family was burglarizing vehicles in the parking lot.

On their way out of the lot, police pulled the vehicle over as one officer stood behind his door and drew his gun on Alice Hill, who was driving.

“I’m looking in my side view mirror and I see him step out of his vehicle,” Hill described to WKRC. “(He’s) behind his door with his gun drawn pointing it at me. I’m looking at my 8-year-old grandson, his eyes are full of tears and he says, ‘This is the worst day of my life.’”

Hill said she and her daughter-in-law were taken from the car at gunpoint, ordered to their knees, handcuffed, and detained in the back of a police cruiser, Dayton Daily News reports. Meanwhile, the two children screamed in fear in the backseat.

“My grandchildren are screaming,” Alice Hill recalled. “I mean they are hysterical, they saw the gun.”

“My 5-year-old daughter is asking, ‘Is grandma going to get shot?’” Wendy Hill told WKRC.

Alice Hill said that while they were detained the officer told them the license plates on their van were stolen. It was not until hours later that the Hill family was informed about the 911 call reporting them for burglary and the allegedly suspicious behavior of peering into car windows and looking at license plates.

WPAFB security officials said the incident turned out to be a misunderstanding, and that the authorities had followed protocol given the information reported through the 911 call.

“Our security force, based on limited information, made a high-risk traffic stop and believed that this vehicle was stolen based on the information they received,” CC Cassie Barlow, 88th Airbase Wing Commander at Wright-Patterson AFB, told the Daily News.

“An initial check of the vehicle plates with the National Law Enforcement Terminal System reported the vehicle as stolen,” according to a statement from the base Tuesday to the Daily News.

Cassie Barlow is a liar. The vehicle was never listed as stolen. Even if they mistakenly thought it was a stolen vehicle, there’s no need to put lives at risk over a stolen vehicle. Further, only a a complete moron would think a granny and mother with two small children is a risk. These “security officials” should be removed from their positions and possibly prosecuted. But, that’s never going to happen. There are no consequences when agents of the state are at fault.

[subscribe2]I’m going to take a guess and say that few people are surprised by this development.

TMZ Sports has obtained a police report filed after the alleged incident … in which the accuser claims the alleged incident took place at a residence at the Viceroy Hotel on April 1.

According to the report, issued by the Miami PD, the woman claims she went to the apartment of Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Ricardo Lockette … to hang out with him, Kaepernick and 49ers wide receiver Quinton Patton.

The woman told police, around 9pm that night she mixed some drinks for the guys and gave them shots, but they told her that “in order to drink the shots she had to ‘hit’ the bong which contained marijuana.”

The woman says she felt lightheaded and went to the bedroom to lie down.  She claims Kaepernick “came up behind her into the bedroom and started kissing her.” “She advised they were kissing (mouth) and Mr Kaepernick started to undressed [sic] her. She got completely naked.  Mr. Kaepernick told her that he was going to be right back and left the bedroom. They did not have sex.”

The woman told cops that while she was still naked in bed, Patton and Lockette opened the door and “peeked” inside.  She says she told them to get out … but she can’t remember anything after that.

The woman later woke up in a hospital bed … but says she doesn’t remember how she got there or who took her there.

The woman also claims she has had a sexual relationship with Kaepernick in the past.

Kaepernick is the hero of every moonbat sports reporter. Just as Obama was the synthesis of their perfect president, Kaepernick is the embodiment of their perfect man of the future. He is mixed race, which is critical. In the future, everyone will look like extras from The Matrix. He is media savvy. He embraces ghetto culture, without actually going to prison. He practices a weird Unitarian sort of Christianity that does not upset the gays or women with all the morality stuff. He is the New Model Moonbat!

He also likes to do bong hits and have gang bangs with strange women. But hey, God is on his side. It says it right on his torso!

That’s something I’ve always noticed about many Evangelicals. It is a nihilistic brand of Christianity. It starts and ends with the individual’s “relationship with God.” That “relationship” is peculiar to each person and comes only with the rules the person and God, we’re supposed to assume, have agreed upon. At anytime, the faithful can get a clean slate by “accepting Jesus” and everything is forgiven. It is this theological bent that allowed Mike Huckabee to swing open the prison doors and let a lot of bad people walk free. After all, they accepted Jesus so who was he to judge?

I have no doubt that we will see Kaepernick come out at some point talking about God and forgiveness. Since he has a personal relationship with God, they will just work it out between them and Kaepernick will let us knwo the result. I’m going to bet the result is cost free to Kaepernick. After all, his god is a loving god.

It’s also a pagan God. The foundation of the Christian faith is the covenant. It is a deal between God and all men. Unlike the Jews, Christians think all people can be God’s chosen people. A covenant is a contract, a bargain. God will do his part, like make sure 2+2 = 4 forever and man must do his part. The reward for man is ever lasting life. You don’t get the reward if you don’t follow the rules and that’s where these new fangled Christians wander off the reservation. There’s is a pagan relationship with God, in the same way a Saxon would strike a deal with Wodan.

Kaepernick better get himself a good lawyer. His relationship with God is not going to do him much good if they find his DNA on the girl.

I’m fond of pointing out that what we in America call liberalism is really just a religion from Europe. It is a secular religion, but a religion nonetheless. For many of the adherents, it is a cult. The difference between it and other cults is the Führerprinzip is not always obvious. What we typically think of as a cult has some charismatic leader around whom the cult is organized. Liberalism is more like the Catholic Church in this regard. They have temporary leaders, as well as a collection of venerated saints. Today, BHO is the supreme leader. In the 1990’s it was Clinton. He’s now moved into the saint category with MLK, RFK, JFK and so forth.

Anyway, it is most obvious in the sub-cults like the environmental movement. This story about the search for a green cow is a great example.

A White House climate initiative has boosted a quixotic search for the “cow of the future”, a next-generation creature whose greenhouse gas emissions would be cut by anti-methane pills, burp scanners and gas backpacks.

Carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the primary man-made gas warming the planet, but methane is far more potent and the US’s biggest source of it is its 88m cattle, which produce more than landfill sites, natural gas leaks or hydraulic fracturing.

The Obama administration’s launch last month of a plan to curb methane emissions has given fresh relevance to climate-friendly technologies for cattle that range from dietary supplements and DNA gut tests to strap-on gas tanks.

Now, imagine driving through the countryside and coming upon a dairy farm. You look out at the pasture and you see cows with tanks on their backs and a hose in their ass to collect their farts. The words, “You gotta be kidding me?” come to mind.

Juan Tricarico, director of the Cow of the Future project at the Innovation Center for US Dairy, an Illinois research institute, said the initiative had boosted his quest to create the “star athlete” of the bovine world.

“For us it is very encouraging because it basically demonstrates that important players out there are thinking in similar ways to us,” he told the Financial Times.

But he said there were common misconceptions about where cattle methane comes from. “Ninety-seven per cent of all the methane gas is released by the front end through burps, not from the back end,” he said.

My mistake. They will also be wearing gas masks in addition to the, eh, ass masks.

Based on his research priorities, the dairy cow of the future will be the unstressed inhabitant of spacious accommodation, munching on anti-methane gourmet grains that are processed by an efficient, best-in-species digestive system.

And a billion or so humans will starve to death if he and his coreligionists ever get their way. I’m thinking there will always be a enough people with good sense to step in and throttle these idiots before they starve a billion people, but you never really can be sure.

“We want it to be more productive, we want it to be healthier, we want it to be a problem-free cow,” said Mr Tricarico.

Methane accounts for 9 per cent of US greenhouse gas emissions and does not linger in the air as long as CO2, but it has a global warming effect more than 20 times greater than CO2, the White House says.

However, financial barriers are hampering the adoption of tools to limit methane from cattle, as was the case with early technology to curb pollution from power stations and motor vehicles.

The costs are prohibitive for dairy and beef farmers and the kind of research that could make the tools more cost-effective would require public funding.

Ah, there we are. If we ever cut off the flow of public funds to these people, they are gone in a  week. But, state sponsored religion is like that.

C-Lock, a South Dakota company, sells a feeding station that gives animals dietary supplements such as basil to cut methane production and measures the content of their breath by pulling it towards trace gas sensors with a vacuum.

Patrick Zimmerman, C-Lock’s founder, says prices start at $45,000 but stresses the economic benefits of improved efficiency. “Of the energy the animals eat, 3 to 15 per cent is lost as methane and that’s a waste,” he says.

At Argentina’s National Institute of Agricultural Technology, scientists have created backpacks that collect gas via tubes plugged into cows’ stomachs. A typical animal emits 250-300 litres of methane a day and researchers say this could be used to power a car or a refrigerator for a day, but Jorge Antonio Hilbert of the institute says the tanks’ use on a large scale is “totally improbable”.

Jonathan Gelbard of the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental group, says: “Anyone who can come up with a cost-effective way to harness that methane is going to make a lot of money.”

Ilmi Granoff of the Overseas Development Institute said an alternative to controlling cattle emissions would be to cut the number of cows.

“Forget coal, Forget cars. The fastest way to address climate change would be to dramatically reduce the amount of meat people eat,” he said. “But that involves cultural preferences and they are difficult to touch.”

And it would also kill a billion people or more. That’s the dirty little secret of the environmental movement. It is anti-human. They would gladly gas a billion people to “address climate change” or whatever pagan nonsense they are into this week. People join mass movements out of self-loathing. They hate themselves so they seek to trade their individual identity for that of the group. The resulting dynamic is a loathing of all things outside the cult and a willingness to die for the ideas of the cult. It’s why the body count for liberalism world-wide is staggering.

The old gag about newspapers went something like this. The Wall Street Journal is read by the people who run the country. The Washington Post is read by people who think they run the country. The New York Times is read by people who think they should run the country. The Boston Globe is read by people whose parents used to run the country and they did a far superior job of it.

I use the past tense here as it no longer applies. The great conflation of newspapers means they are all just branch offices for the ministry of official dogma. Even the supposed “conservatives” of the Wall Street agree with the NYTimes on all of the big issues.

The Boston Globe may have been a big deal to the former rulers, but now it is sort of a low budget, off-Broadway act. They have all the pretentiousness you find at the Times or Journal, but none of the talent. Anyway, this is an editorial from today regarding the Connecticut basketball team.

Well before UConn began its magical march to the national men’s basketball championship, it led the 64-team tournament in a far less exalted category: lowest graduation rate. At 8 percent, UConn’s six-year graduation rate for its men’s basketball team is, frankly, a disgrace that can’t remotely be offset by the glories of Monday night’s victory. Second-year coach Kevin Ollie, who wasn’t in charge when the players started dropping classes like errant passes, wisely proclaimed that academics comes first, and touted the classroom success of this year’s team. He needs to keep working toward that goal, year in and year out, and seek to build a legacy similar to that of Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski, whose four national championships over 34 years is less impressive than the fact that 98 percent of his players have gotten degrees.

Two things that jump out to me right away. Duke is an obvious exception. The demographics of their program are nothing like the typical college basketball program. If you are a high IQ prep basketball player, that’s your Harvard. When I say high IQ, I mean above average. The very small fraction of basketball players who have the cultural and intellectual ability to make it at Duke is exceptionally small. Boston College has a similar graduation rate and their program is awful. If the supply of talent was anything other than microscopic, every Catholic college playing Division I basketball would be a powerhouse.

The other thing that stands out is the ethnocentrism. The upper middle-class whites who run the Globe casually assume everyone heads off to college for the credentials and self-actualization. A bachelors in Medieval Folklore from Tufts is just as useful as a Journalism degree from Northwestern. For 90% of the kids getting basketball scholarships at major programs, the degree is meaningless. They are there to be trained for professional basketball, in America or overseas. That communications major they are working on is just a cost of admissions to what they hope will be a career as a pro athlete.

That’s an example of what makes liberalism such a potent religion. No amount of facts and evidence can shake the fantasy. The answer to every bit of dis-confirmation is either a bogeyman or a new plan to bring about the utopian future. Here we have John Calipari, the gold standard of college basketball coaches, calling for the players to become employees. They will be paid entertainers promoting the school through basketball. One would think this would cause the folks at the Globe to re-examine their views on college athletics, but here they are.

 The problem with academics in intercollegiate sports is deeper than any one program. It’s a structural dynamic that’s easy to see: Craving the best athletes for the sports that drive alumni interest and fundraising, universities stretch their admissions standards to accept players who would have a hard time handling their classwork in the best of circumstances. But athletes face an array of challenges that other students don’t: a punishing practice schedule that chews up dozens of hours a week; a mixed set of incentives, since they get their scholarships based on performance in sports, not academics; and an exalted status on campus that puts them beyond some of the normal checks and balances that keep other students focused on classes.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association bears a lot of the blame for letting sports overtake academics for far too many players. Lately, it’s tried to show some teeth by banning schools, including UConn last year, from championship play if their graduation rates are chronically low. But it’s an imperfect punishment. While universities deserve blame for low graduation rates, their current players — who aren’t responsible for the failures of their predecessors — do not. It’s tough to deprive them of a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Over the years, the person best positioned to manage the conflicting pressures on the players has been the coach. If coaches make academics a priority, their players are far more likely to earn degrees. Some coaches, like Krzyzewski, are well known for showing care and concern for their players’ classroom performance. Others, like Ollie’s UConn predecessor, longtime coach Jim Calhoun, carry the opposite reputation. So, Ollie has his work cut out for him. At 41, he’s already lived up to Calhoun’s basketball legacy. It will take a lot of effort for him, and UConn, to live down Calhoun’s record of letting team members falter as students. He need only look down the hall of UConn’s athletic department for inspiration: The UConn women’s basketball team also brought home a national championship this year — with a 92 percent graduation rate.

The comparison to women’s basketball is hilarious. The women, who are not lesbians, have no expectations about playing professionally. They can, but they will be more interested in finding a husband and getting on with what biology requires. The lesbians, who make up a high percentage of players (and an outlandish percentage of fans) are not looking for a man, but their earning potential is very limited. Therefore, basketball is a means to an end, not an end in itself. That’s why most women’s programs are hilariously awful at basketball. The programs exist for Title IX reasons, not because of supply and demand.

That’s not so say there’s nothing wrong with collegiate athletics. Basketball is a sewer of corruption. The fact that 60% of NBA players file for bankruptcy within five years of retirement is no surprise. From middle school through the professional ranks, the sport is dominated by people who make boxing promoters look honest. Letting these people run their businesses on college campuses is highly questionable. But, admitting to any of that would open the door to a whole lot of questions no one wants to ask.