A feature of modern times is the fake nerd. That’s the guy who dresses and talks like he was a geeky kid growing up and now busies himself with science and math. The TV show Big Bang Theory plays on this. In reality these fake nerds are almost always toting liberal arts degrees of the soft kind, like sociology or psychology. These people are brought onto news chat programs to repeat conventional wisdom, but salt their language with statistics or references to science.

Sports TV has been infested with the fake nerds. Pablo Torre on ESPN is the prime example. He majored in journalism, yet pretends to be a math guy on TV. It is a fair bet he cannot do basic math with any degree of confidence, but there he is every day pretending to be a stat-nerd on TV. These guys cherry-pick language and concepts from stat-heavy sites that analyze trends. They don’t understand the math behind them, but they don’t have to, as their job is to play a role, like an actor.

The good news for the fake nerds is their rabbi is back in business. Nate Silver’s racket is back up and running with the help of ESPN. Silver is a bright guy, for sure, but he is an ideologue and that gets the best of him. He’s a lot like Richard Lewontin, who was undeniably smart, but consumed with ideology. So much so it led him to lie about his work and do so brazenly. That’s not to say Silver is a liar, but it shows the risk of allowing an ideologue to assume the role of empiricist.

The application of statistics to human activity seems like a fool’s errand. Sports is a great example. Using advanced metrics has not helped gamblers. It may have helped some gamblers for a short time, but gambling is not just a math puzzle. Games of chance rely on human fallibility. That’s true of sports. The key to winning at sports gambling, for example, is to find the game outside the 90%. That means the possible outcomes within the 90% probability are not going to be winners for the gambler. You need the upsets and unexpected blowouts.

That said, the new religion of economics is legitimizing the use of statistics to public policy, because it opens the debate to corruption. Instead of focusing on desired ends, the focus is on process. The statistics make people think the outcomes are ordained and that what matters is how you get there. It’s why economics often looks a lot like tarot card reading. That assumption the future is written is never said, but it is often assumed, so process is all that matters.

It is a bit ironic. The last time this sort of materialist zeal got a purchase with the public was in the 19th century with Taylorism. That was the application of engineering to the work place to eliminate waste. Sounds a lot like what the new religion means by efficiency. Taylorism eventually gave us The Efficiency Movement. Progressives “such as Herbert Croly, Charles R. van Hise and Richard Ely sought to improve governmental performance by training experts in public service comparable to those in Germany, notably at the Universities of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Schools of business administration set up management programs oriented toward efficiency.”

Herbert Hoover was a big fan of this. Contrary to Progressive mythology, he was not a small government conservative. Like Nixon, he accepted the main arguments of the Left. He just picked the wrong party and, it turns out, the wrong time to be President. The point being that the last time our elites had a religious zeal for a new science of efficiency, promising to bring heaven on earth, they almost destroyed civilization. For that reason I wish Nate Silver and his fellow monks nothing but the worst.

I’m fond of saying that government makes liars and weasels of the citizenry. A good example is the light bulb. Like everyone reading this, I have used incandescent bulbs by default for my whole life. Modern hipsters insist on calling them “Edisons.” The young guy who sold me the fancy new LED bulbs the other day seemed proud of himself when he had the chance to say “Edisons” with confidence of someone who is sure he is about to bring a new believer into his cult.

Anyway, I got talked into trying an LED the other day, so I decided to go to the local light bulb emporium. These stores are popping up all over. I guess that means we have joined the future in the same way small towns used to celebrate getting a McDonald’s. Right out of the chute you know we are headed to a bad place when you can build a nationwide retail chain around batteries and light bulbs. Then again The Christmas Tree Shops are built around a single holiday.

The store is not big and probably exists mostly on batteries. We have all sort or weird battery needs these days. I asked the kid for the LED bulbs and he took me to the display and started in on the sales pitch. While he was talking I’m looking at the price of these things. Looking at $19.99 for a light bulb is a bit of an eye-opener. I then hear the guy say something about the LED bulb producing the same amount of light as a much higher watt incandescent bulb.

At that point I started focusing again, realizing that it takes a good sales pitch to sell a $20 light bulb. He’s telling me about lumens and watts, while I’m thinking about physics.  A watt is equal to the amount of energy in 1 ampere of current flowing at 1 volt. A lumen has something to do with the amount of light visible to humans. It was one of those moments when I wish I had retained more of my physics training. It’s a safe bet the retail clerk really has no idea what any of this means.

I’m thinking about the lumens, trying to remember if there was a conversion to watts when he says, “The real benefit of the LED is that it will last 40 years.” I’m 48 so that means the bulb will still be going strong when I’m 88 or dead. I look at the kid and say, “So I can leave these bulbs in my will?” He just looks at me, probably trying to wrap his mind around the idea of his light bulbs lasting longer than my life. When you’re young, death is a foreign concept. I just give him the stony face to see what he will do.

Eventually, he just says, “I guess you could. I never really thought of that.” I take some pleasure in the knowledge he will now be thinking about that the next time an old person comes in the shop. When he gets ready to tell some old guy that the bulb will last forty years, but the old guy may not make it forty months. It underscores the ridiculousness of selling something people still think of as disposable, on the argument that it will last two generations.

Of course, no one thought about putting light bulbs in their will, unless they were a vindictive jerk. For close to a century now light bulbs cost a few pennies and you threw them away when you moved. The typical house may have a dozen or more bulbs. The total cost of all of them less than this one LED he was holding. Never have I heard someone complain about the bulbs in their house. Sure, you have to spend money on an outside spot light or those weird little bulbs in a dining room fixture.

Like everyone else to this point, I’ve never needed a professional consultation on my home lighting. At most, you spend time with an electrician on how best to wires the house or an outside area, so you can get proper lighting. That’s a different matter than getting professional advice on where to place the lamp. Government has created a whole class of people, who make a living helping people do what generations took for granted. We live in the age of make-work.

That’s not the end of it. The reason we’re now including our lighting choices in our wills is corporate titans figured this was a good way to monetize their country’s green obsession. In this case, “Big Bulb” got Congress to ban the cheap alternative so we will be forced to spend a mortgage payment to replace the light bulbs in the house. Phillips and GE are not even lubing up before they monetize us. It is just a full on prison rape with light bulbs. Yeah capitalism!

I know, these bulbs will save me money. I can do math. Looking at my electric bill, I fail to see how the energy savings is worth investigating. If I lived in a stadium or an arena, I could see it. The only real savings I can see is the replacement. Let’s pretend the guy at the battery store was right. My “Edisons” will cost about $20 until my death. That’s about the same as the LED. Since we know the LED will not last that long, I’m losing on that score. In fairness, the LED’s will get cheaper so the math will get better over time.

Here’s the math that matters. Big Bulb was making about 10% profit on bulbs before the green lunatics got involved. That’s about a penny per bulb when you consider the manufactured cost. If they have the same margins on the LED, they are making 100 times that per bulb. The bulb-person ration will not change anytime soon. Initially people will be buying these expensive bulbs in the same volume as the normal bulbs. Big Bulb gets to see their profit soar for a couple of years.

What are the odds that Big Bulb will go out of business in a few years after all of our bulbs are replaced with these lifetime bulbs? After all, if everyone goes to these new bulbs that last forever, how long before bulb sales collapse? That’s where you know the longevity argument is bogus. The LED will last longer, for sure, but the smart people at Big Bulb did the math and they know their new bulbs will not so long as to make the bulb business irrelevant.

The topper is the bulbs I bought are not all that great. Maybe it is just a matter of getting used to it, but my bedroom now looks like a film school scene. The area immediately around the lamps is brighter and whiter. Everywhere else is in shadows. Maybe I got bad bulbs, but for $20 a pop, well, I expected more. Forty bucks is not what it used to be, but it is lunch for the week. Thanks to the helping hand of government, I spent $40 to get monetized and I sleep in a film noir movie.

The Progressives insist that the only people capable of bigotry are white and those that can be lumped in with them when convenient. The bigotry of white people can only be directed at non-white people. The pale face is the forever villain, in the morality play that is multiculturalism. Words like “diversity” and “pluralism” don’t really mean what they appear to mean. Instead, they are code for anti-white. It’s why the Left find it perfectly reasonable to exclude the white people from a diversity event.

South Puget Sound Community College says it was a mistake for an employee group to invite only people of color to a diversity “happy hour.”

The group that sent out the email last week apologized the next day and canceled the event, said Kellie Purce Braseth, dean of college relations.

The college believes the best way to celebrate and discuss diversity is to include everyone, Braseth told KING (http://bit.ly/1qvHzjW ).

“If you want to come you should be able to come; that just makes a richer conversation,” she said.

The invitation to all 300 staffers said the “Staff, Faculty and Administrators of Color” encouraged employees to reply to the invitation to find out the confidential date and time of what was being called a “happy hour” to “build support and community” for people of color.

The invite made it clear white people were not welcome.

“If you want to create space for white folks to meet and work on racism, white supremacy, and white privilege to better our campus community and yourselves, please feel free to do just that,” the email read.

Karama Blackhorn, program coordinator for the school’s Diversity and Equity Center, helped write the invitation.

It could have been worded differently, but she maintains the staff members of color would have a more honest discussion about race without white employees.

Explicitly talking about race “can be a really difficult conversation for a lot of people,” Blackhorn said.

Now, diversity meetings are about as fun as spending a week in an asylum, so most people would not be offended by this sort of thing. As long as this stuff is voluntary, these people can be whatever type of bigot floats their boat. That’s the thing though, they are bigots. They hold negative opinions about specific people based on what they see as differences of opinion. They naturally root for and support their side against the side they see holding an opinion or belief that most threatens their authority.

For example, Paul Krugman is a bigot and a flamboyant one. He seems to have some mental health issues, but he could simply be a fanatic. The bug-eyed look and drooling sneer are very creepy. Maybe he thinks that serial killer stare is handsome or maybe what you see is what you get. Either way, he has the look of someone who is struggling to keep it all together. His latest screed offers a good example of the left-wing bigotry.

So it’s comical, in a way, to see Mr. Ryan trying to explain away some recent remarks in which he attributed persistent poverty to a “culture, in our inner cities in particular, of men not working and just generations of men not even thinking about working.” He was, he says, simply being “inarticulate.” How could anyone suggest that it was a racial dog-whistle? Why, he even cited the work of serious scholars — people like Charles Murray, most famous for arguing that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. Oh, wait.

Just to be clear, there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist, and his dog-whistle may not even have been deliberate. But it doesn’t matter. He said what he said because that’s the kind of thing conservatives say to each other all the time. And why do they say such things? Because American conservatism is still, after all these years, largely driven by claims that liberals are taking away your hard-earned money and giving it to Those People.

There you have it. The bigot just assumes “those people” all think as he imagines because, you know, it is how those people are. Again, there is nothing intrinsically immoral about bigotry. It can be immoral, but not necessarily so. In a modern state like America, having a ruling class that hates the people over whom they rule, because the subjects hold the wrong opinions, is a problem. At some point, one side or both decide they cannot live with the morality of the other and hell quickly follows.

You go out for a long weekend and come home to a house full of plumpers.

A comedian under the impression he had rented out his posh Chelsea pad to a man with family in town for a wedding returned home to a wild orgy, he said.

Ari Teman, 31, claimed he left his apartment keys with David Carter, 32, on Friday night and stepped out for dinner before leaving town.

When he returned to the building to grab his luggage, a rowdy sex party featuring “Big Beautiful Women” was in the process of being shut down by building management.

“This was just so bizarre,” said Teman, who had rented his apartment via the Web site Airbnb.
“The worst part of the Internet right there was in my apartment.”

“There were all sorts of people walking out of my apartment and people coming in from the back yard. It was a huge mess.”

Teman said his apartment was trashed by a group of nearly nude, overweight people. After the shindig was broken up, Carter was a nervous wreck in the lobby, Teman says.

“This guy had a look of horror on his face,” Teman said. “He didn’t expect to see me for a few days. He said, ‘They shut us down, man, they’re shutting it down.’ ”

Carter, however, claims he just had a small, quiet get-together and that Teman was overreacting.

“I had six people, friends and family,” Carter told The Post. “He is making a big to-do because he is being evicted.”

Carter posted on Airbnb that he wanted a place for his in-laws to stay while they were in town for a wedding, Teman claims.

“He had a verified account and he seemed legit,” Teman said. “He had three positive reviews and so I approved the deal.”

When Teman later searched Carter’s phone number on the Internet, he found the raunchy soiree involving plus-sized women advertised online as “Turn Up Part 2: The Pantie Raid.”

One person even blasted out Teman’s Seventh Avenue address in a tweet for an “XXX FREAK FEST.”

Carter denied he had anything to do with the ad.

A web ad that was displaying information on the alleged orgy.

“There was no address on the advertisement and I had nothing to with it,” he said.

The professional comedian called police, but no charges were filed. He now claims he wants to move.

“I just don’t want to touch anything in there,” he said. “I threw sheets all over everything.”

Carter claimed that a little partying never hurt anyone.

One of the reasons I’m an economics-as-religion denier is right here in the story. People are liars. Economics has as an axiom that in the aggregate, people are honest. Simple observation and 5,000 years of history says otherwise. It is similar to my complaint about crowd-sourcing. You see it in the story. One person is dumb and foolish, but we’re supposed to believe that a million morons are smart and wise. Similarly, a million liars is not making for an honest market.

This irritated me for some reason.

A lefty friend once asked me whether I thought I held any subconsciously racist opinions. One should always be on the lookout for one’s own intellectual and moral defects, so I’ve been thinking about it, and I have a possible candidate: As I suggest in my NRO piece today, “Asian-American” seems to me to be an obviously nonsensical category, because it includes people of origins ranging from Pakistani to Japanese. But “African-American” has never seemed immediately nonsensical to me in the same way. This may be because I know a little bit more about Asia than I do about Africa, or it may be because Indians and Koreans strike my white American eye as obviously and visibly different in a way that is not true of members of many African groups. It should go without saying that I detest racism, and it is also the case that racial and ethnic feeling, even of the benign, St. Patrick’s Day variety, seems to me atavistic and primitive. My self-analysis here is not meant to be taken as normative, but rather an examination of the semi-subconscious impressions of what I believe to be a fairly typical middle-class white guy from Texas.

The new religion has made race awareness into the worst moral sin. By “race awareness” I mean noticing that not all people hail from the same tribes. It has become such a fetish that otherwise sensible people are petrified they may be one of those wretched noticers. The ridiculous bit of squid ink in the first paragraph that I highlight is a good example. I don’t think for a second that Kevin Williamson is losing any sleep over his “subconscious racism.”

While I don’t buy the race-as-a-social-construct position entirely, there is a great deal of cultural specificity to racial perception. Surely I am not the only white American guy in the history of the world to meet a Somali or an Ethiopian and have his brain simultaneously register “black” and “not black.” And I believe that that is the real psychological fault line for white Americans: not white vs. not-white but black vs. not-black. Ethiopia, Wikipedia informs me, recognizes more than 80 different ethnic groups on its census and, for whatever reason, members of some of those groups only push some of the buttons of perception associated in my particular brain with “black.” I think it probably says something about the culture that at some level my mind really wants to make that distinction in absolute terms. We all know that Barack Obama has one black parent and one white parent, but my impression is that people generally look at him and see black, rather than biracial.

This is akin to saying “I don’t buy this gravity-as-a-social-construct position entirely.” The science is in and race is exactly what we thought it was for 5,000 years. Like a lot of received wisdom that is easily confirmed through simple observation, there is a scientific explanation. Race is one of those. The Chinese guy’s genetic differences are not just limited to skin tone, hair texture and the shape of the eyes.

The fundamental fact, I think, is that when a white American sees a black American, he sees history, and that history looms far more significantly over black Americans than it does over Hispanics or Asian immigrants or other minority groups. Conservatives see that history and generally don’t want to think about it; progressives see that history and want to use it for their own political ends. And I don’t have the imaginative capacity to guess what the view looks like from the black perspective. In that sense, it’s hard for me to believe that black-white relations in the United States will ever be normalized, as much as I wish it were otherwise. The fact that “black” exists in my internal taxonomy as a unitary and exclusive category — even though at some rational level I know better — suggests to me that while “Asian” maybe be only a geographic term in the American political mind, “African” is a very different kind of term, one that has more to do with realities on this continent than realities in Africa.

This is the least ridiculous portion of the post. I think he is right that people with a long history with one another tend to remember that long history with one another. This is true in the same way that people who have evolved here on earth tend to look like us. Armenians and Turks will forever have opinions about one another that outsiders will never fully appreciate. Jews and Germans will always be tied to one another in ways that the Dutch and Jews are not, even though the Dutch gladly handed over their Jews to the Nazis.

The post strikes me as a way for Kevin to build up some credits so that when he reviews or writes about the forthcoming book by Nicholas Wade he has inoculated himself against the hooting and bellowing from the race hustlers. Kevin is the one bright penny at the moribund National Review, but the feckless twerp running the place cannot be counted on to stand by even his best writer. Maybe it is a wise career move on Williamson’s part. As science unravels the Standard Social Science Model, the empirically minded will come under assault for not vigorously praying at the right shrines. Indifference will no longer be acceptable.

Alternatively, it could be the start of what I have observed for years. Pat Buchanan called it “going native.” A sensible person moves to a moonbat land and before long they start sounding like a moonbat. It is hard to stand out from the crowd. Almost all of us feel pressure to conform and fit in with the group. When your friends insist the sky is pink and the grass is yellow, you will eventually give in and agree with them. It is why your red state congressman ends up on TV hugging the wackiest nutter on the Democratic side while extolling the virtues of surrender bipartisanship.

Perhaps Kevin Williamson is just going native.

This column reminded me of a few things. Tyler Cowen is a professor of economics. He was commissioned by the New York Times to ruminate on foreign policy. I have no doubt that other economists and pseudo-intellectuals laying claim to mathematics have been prepping “game theory” type analysis of Eurasian affairs. Tyler is a very smart guy who has many interesting things to say. Still, I’m old enough to remember when no one would ask an economist to discuss anything outside of economics, narrowly understood. Even there, they were one voice, the one wearing the green eye-shade and holding a calculator. Today, the local economist feels free to poke his nose into everything.

The reason for this is economists are the new priestly class. In another era, religious leaders routinely commented on the morality of public policy, including foreign policy. Today that role is filled by members of the local economics faculty. The reason is the morality of Christianity has been replaced by a new materialist morality amongst the ruling classes of the West. Every act is judged based on its impact on the cost/benefit to society. If the costs outweigh the benefits, the act is deemed immoral. On the other hand, anything that can be shown to have a positive integer on the bottom line is morally good. It is why passing a Byzantine health care bill was treated as a moral triumph. An economist somewhere said it would add wealth to the nation.

The flaw in this calculus is that the benefits of public policy often lie well over the horizon. The costs are often right now. Raise taxes on short-term stock flipping and there’s a real cost today. The long term benefit – fewer pump and dump schemes – lie down stream and are difficult to quantify. The result is a form of short term thinking about public policy that veers into the myopic. In America, living in the moment morality has produced a nation of amnesiacs incapable of remembering yesterday. This summer Democrat politicians will be out campaigning against ObamaCare and few will notice they were vociferous supporters just last year.

In foreign policy, this new morality is at the heart of our troubles with Russia. Putin and his coevals running Russia reject the materialism of the West, despite living like medieval royalty. They look at the Crimea as a part of their cultural history and a part of their patrimony. It is a part of what they hope will be their shadow, in which future generations will stand. That changes their cost benefit analysis. Russia is willing to lose a lot to get what to Western minds has limited value. The West wants Ukraine in the Euro so their bankers can loot what little remains in Ukraine. Russia wants it in their orbit because it defines who they are as Russians.

The other thing that comes to mind is just how deeply our elites are marinated in cultural nihilism. Top to bottom they think culture is witchcraft from a bygone era. People everywhere, according to our rulers, are the same. Everyone wants what we want, loves what we love and hates what we hate. You see this in domestic policy all the time. Education starts with the assumption that everyone can be above average, as Bush hilariously claimed. IQ, ethnicity and sex are declared off-limits as remnants from the barbaric era the rest of us call our past.

It is what drove policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Bush people truly believed that if they setup institutions the right way, Iraq would become Texas. The neo-con crowd is still stunned that the Iraqis preferred their tribal customs over what the American were offering. The CML is worse than the neo-cons in this regard. The bungling in the Maghreb during the recent revolts was like watching someone hit themselves with a hammer over and over, despite being told to put down the hammer.

In the competition with Putin, the West’s inability to see his motives through his eyes is leading to one error after another. John Kerry throws a temper tantrum thinking it will have the same effect it has when he does not get seated on time at the club. Instead Putin sees a weak, feckless man who is no threat to him. In Obama, he probably sees a guileless provincial surrounded by equally inept courtiers. The fact that Obama and his people cannot imagine that being the case means we have informational disequilibrium.

Consider this from Tyler:

A more reassuring kind of deterrence has to do with the response of Russian markets to the crisis. Russia is a far more globalized economy than it was during the Soviet era. On the first market day after the Crimean takeover, the reaction was a plunging ruble, and a decline in the Russian stock market of more than 10 percent. Russia’s central bank raised interest rates to 7 percent from 5.5 percent to protect the ruble’s value. Such market reactions penalize Russian decision makers, who also know that a broader conflict would endanger Russia’s oil and gas revenue, which makes up about 70 percent of its export income.

In this case, market forces provide a relatively safe form of deterrence. Unlike governmental sanctions, market-led penalties limit the risk of direct political retaliation, making it harder for the Russian government to turn falling market prices into a story of victimization by outside powers.

The underlying assumption is that Putin wants what we want. He and his coevals love what we love, hate what we hate and see themselves as citizens of the world, just like Tyler! Maybe the folks running Russia put a high price on having swank Miami condos and houses in Switzerland. It is just as likely they love their country, their forebears and their own place in the Russian time-line more than those trinkets. We don’t know, but Putin knows. He also knows those trinkets count for everything in the West.

No, this is not a post about marriage. This story in the Daily Mail says we could sentence people to jail for 1,000 years or at least make it feel that way.

Sentencing a criminal to 1,000 years in an artificial hell may one day become a reality.

At least, that is the claim of scientists at Oxford University who have been exploring controversial technologies that could extend human life.

They say billions are being invested in techniques that could mean the cruellest criminals will be kept alive indefinitely in condition befitting their crime.

According to their research, prison firms could also develop drugs that make time pass slowly, making an inmate’s sentence feel like an eternity.

Last year, a team of scientists led by Rebecca Roache began exploring technologies that could keep prisoners in an artificial hell.

‘Some crimes are so bad they require a really long period of punishment, and a lot of people seem to get out of that punishment by dying,’ Dr Roache told Ross Andersen in Aeonmagazine.

Dr Roache highlights what she describes as the ‘laughably inadequate’ sentence of 30 years in prison for Magdelena Luczak and Mariusz Krezolek.

Way back in the olden thymes, you know, last week, the counter to the homosexual marriage charge was it would lead to every pervert and nutjob demanding special treatment too. The act of defining something is drawing limits around the thing. What makes an apple an apple is not that it is not an orange. There are certain qualities that define an apple. If some other fruit has those qualities and some other qualities, like purple skin, we would call it a purple apple. Marriage, must have the biological element of reproduction. Without it, it cannot be marriage. Biology is the limiting principle.

Removing the limiting principle of biology renders the term and the institution meaningless unless you can come up with some new limiting principle. No one has and no one will. As has been pointed out a million times in a million places, homosexual marriage is not about the queers. The CML hates the queers almost as much as they hate blacks. Their aim to to destroy marriage. From the earliest days of the cult, marriage was considered bourgeois and reactionary. If you kill the word, you kill the institution, which has been the case everywhere homosexual marriage has been tried.

As predicted, the parade of perverts is on it s way.

An independent commission led by a former U.S. surgeon general has concluded there “is no compelling medical reason” for the U.S. armed forces to prohibit transgender Americans from serving and that President Barack Obama could lift the decades-old ban without approval from Congress, according to a report being released Thursday.

The report said Department of Defense regulations designed to keep transgender people from joining or remaining in the military on the grounds of psychological and physical unfitness are based on outdated beliefs that require thousands of current service members either to leave the service or to forego the medical procedures and other changes that could align their bodies and gender identities.

“We determined not only that there is no compelling medical reason for the ban, but also that the ban itself is an expensive, damaging and unfair barrier to health care access for the approximately 15,450 transgender personnel who serve currently in the active, Guard and reserve components,” said the commission led by Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who served as surgeon general during Bill Clinton’s first term as president, and Rear Adm. Alan Steinman, a former chief health and safety director for the Coast Guard.

This is how we are ruled by lunatics wielding junk science. Joycelyn Elders is a crank and a nut. According to Wiki, she has a masters in biochemistry. I have to question that only because the women has the IQ of a grape. The absurd claim that there are 15,000 trannies in the service is going to get passed around as fact, even though the source is a nut.

The panel, convened by a think tank at San Francisco State University, said the ban has existed for several decades and apparently was derived in part from the psychiatric establishment’s consensus, since revised, that gender identity issues amounted to a mental disorder.

If you think you are a giant bunny rabbit, they lock you away. If you think biology is optional, you’re perfectly sane?

The ban also appears based on the assumption that providing hormone treatment and sex reassignment surgeries would be too difficult, disruptive and expensive. But the commission rejected those notions as inconsistent with modern medical practice and the scope of health care services routinely provided to non-transgender military personnel.

The military is not just another welfare agency for spongers to get free shit. I take that back. Elders treated it as just another welfare agency, getting free diplomas working the affirmative action rackets within the service. I guess putting trannies on the dole is logical, from her perspective.

I’ll just note that the press swallows this nonsense down whole. If Liberty University had a commission that issued a report calling trannies perverts in need of psychiatric help, the media would be leading a boycott and protest rally in Lynchburg. Fruitcake University drags in a dying races hustler to promote liberal agit-prop and they treat it like the Sermon on the Mount. Regardless, the parade of perverts will be in your town soon, leering at your kids, daring you to say something. Welcome to the new normal.

Sheila Jackson Lee is not retarded or missing a chromosome. She is just not terribly bright. The reason she is in Congress, however, is the voters of her district are mostly to the left of her on the bell curve. According to Wikipedia, her district is 40% black, 35% Hispanic and 20% white. According to this site, her district is one of the youngest. It ranks 18th in number of children under 5 and 30th in residents under 30. It seems odd that it would have so many babies, yet a declining population of adults. Hmmmm….

The answer is it is home to the Third Ward, a section of downtown Houston. The Third Ward is known as one of the most dangerous neighborhoods on the planet. According to this, you have a 1-in-13 chance of being a crime victim there. Getting a decent murder rate for the area is tough, but news reports claim a murder rate three times the rest of the city, which is 12 so that means over 30. It is hard to know for sure, but we know enough to say it is a hyper-violent place.

The general picture to keep in mind is of a poor urban ghetto filled with violent drug dealers and their underclass partners. You’re not getting a lot of high IQ strivers coming from that district. The median IQ of her district is below 85. It is the old line about the one eyed man being king of the blind. Jackson Lee is a moron by normal standards, but in her district, she’s the smart fraction. In Detroit, a smart fraction with IQ’s in the 90’s resulted in the Haiti-fication of what was once America’s richest city.

It is easy to pick on Lee and the people of her district, but it is the central defect of democracy. No matter how much you spend on education, half of the population is going to be below average. More than half, much more than half in fact, is average or below average in intelligence. The magical thinking of democracy is that one dumb person cannot be trusted to make decisions. A million dumb people will collectively act like a single smart person. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

The people of Lee’s district should not be voting on anything of significance. They are simply too dumb to be trusted. Some could be trusted with the vote. Certainly some own property, run a business and conduct themselves as responsible citizens. Most struggle to keep up with the basics of living. A fair number are unable to understand much more than a child. Why would anyone think it wise to let such people vote? Yet, this is the logic of democracy. It is an appeal to the lowest common denominator.

This is an interesting story. Mel Gibson got in trouble for, among other things, claiming that the Jews run Hollywood. The Jews who run Hollywood did not like Mel saying they run Hollywood, so they have banned him from Hollywood. Gibson is now called an anti-Semite because the Jews who run Hollywood don’t like him. It used to be than an anti-Semite was someone who hated Jews, but now it is someone who is hated by the Jews, which is why Mel Gibson in on the blacklist.

Now, the Jews who run Hollywood and the Jews who run the media, claim that Gibson is blackballed because he is bad for business.  I suspect most people don’t care about what Gibson thinks about anything. Danny Glover, for example, is a raging bigot and paranoid lunatic. Susan Sarandon is probably a schizophrenic. Her former paramour is a communist. Who is worse? A Holocaust denier or a guy in favor of murdering people with whom he disagrees?

No one really knows if Gibson is toxic with the public. He could be. Perhaps the public will not embrace a crazy, drunken anti-Semite. Worse, they could hold it against the studio that hires him or the actors who work with him. There are a lot of unknowns and for any business, unknowns are scary. Even so, the real issue here is the Jews running Hollywood can’t bring themselves to forgive Gibson. These are a people whose holy book is mostly a list of past enemies, so Mel will be waiting a long time.