This is hilarious. It has long been assumed that Manti Te’o is gay. The reason is pretty simple. If you are a world famous football player on a college campus, you can get all the girls you want. These days, even loser males get laid. The fact that Te’o preferred an imaginary woman over the real women all around him leads to the obvious conclusion. I don’t recall anyone offering up proof, but that’s the argument. The fact that the gay guy’s agent is running with it and saying his client would fit right in is too funny.

“I think the Chargers would be a great fit for [Sam], especially considering the way that they handled the Manti Te’o issue,” Barkett said Monday in a phone interview with the U-T. “It seemed to blow over very easily once the first game had happened. I think that’d be a great spot for [Sam] to land. And he’d be close to us.”

Te’o, who started 13 games this past season despite a persistent foot injury, repeatedly said that his Chargers teammates did not address the hoax with him.

I think this will be interesting to watch. The culture warriors have not had much success destroying the play on the field of the big sports. The best they have done thus far is attack the youth leagues, but the pros have been immune. The need to win and keep an audience is too powerful so far. As a result, football is bloodless in its treatment of talent. If you’re good you get paid. If you are trouble you get cut loose.

“He definitely will be addressing the media. We’re just trying to figure out what the best forum is for doing that.”

Sam, an All-America defensive lineman, led the SEC with 11.5 sacks and 19 tackles for loss last season, helping Missouri reach the SEC championship game.

Many draft projections see Sam as a middle-round pick, with some saying he could go as high as the third round with a possible position switch to outside linebacker. Sam is rated the No. 12 outside pass-rusher in the draft by ESPN Scouts Inc.

It remains to be seen how long ESPN can keep the story alive. They have a weird fascination with homosexual men that even out-weirds the NYTimes. Sports fans are a weird bunch, in that they will tolerate anything from players, as long as they help the team win, so the gay stuff will not matter to them probably. On the other hand, sports fans can easily abandon the sports media, if the sports media embraces this sort of degeneracy. ESPN better be careful with the gay agenda stuff.

The Danika Patrick story is coming to an end, but the usual suspects are hoping to squeeze one more drop of juice from the story. Patrick was always a marketing ploy by NASCAR to draw in suburban viewers. The new people running stock car racing are ashamed of their fans, they want new and better fans, which is why they hired Patrick as a driver. Richard Petty had the gall to point out the obvious, thus causing the usual suspects to rush to the little waif’s aid.

When it comes to Danica Patrick, the Petty family just can’t seem to pass on the subject without causing a caution flag.

This time, however, it was “The King” — NASCAR Hall of Famer Richard Petty — who took some swipes at Patrick when asked Sunday whether she would ever win in the Sprint Cup Series.

“If everybody else stayed home,” Petty told reporters at the Canadian Motorsports Expo. “If she’d have been a male, nobody would ever know if she’d showed up at a racetrack.

“This is a female deal that’s driving her. There’s nothing wrong with that, because that’s good PR for me. More fans come out, people are more interested in it. She has helped to draw attention to the sport, which helps everybody in the sport.”

That’s being polite, Patrick is in NASCAR because she is a women, but not a gross looking lesbian. She is not very good at driving a race car. If she was male, she is somewhere in the lower ranks hoping to catch a break. Probably by now she would have had to quit, as the dream would be over. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of the sport, but I’m pretty sure the point is to win once in a while, something she has never done.

Patrick finished 27th in the Sprint Cup standings during her rookie season, driving the No. 10 Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing. Her highlight came in the season-opening Daytona 500, where she finished eighth after becoming the first woman to win the pole for that event.

That is her only top-10 finish in 46 races at NASCAR’s highest level. Before that, she amassed seven top-10 finishes and one pole in 60 races over four seasons in the Nationwide Series.

However, Patrick is one of the most successful female auto racers in history. Patrick is the only woman to win a major open-wheel race, finishing first in a 2008 IndyCar Series race in Japan. She has six top-10s in the Indy 500 and was third in 2009, the best finish ever for a woman in that historic event.

I suppose that’s something. Somewhere there is a midget claiming to be the best midget basketball player in history.

Petty has commented on Patrick’s involvement in NASCAR before, saying in 2006 that “I just don’t think it’s a sport for women. And so far, it’s proven out. It’s really not. It’s good for them to come in. It gives us a lot of publicity, it gives them publicity.”

His son — former driver and TV analyst Kyle Petty — has been more outspoken through the years about Patrick’s involvement, calling her a “marketing machine” and “not a race car driver” as recently as this past June.

“Danica has been the perfect example of somebody who can qualify better than what she runs,” Petty said on Speed TV last year. “She can go fast, but she can’t race. I think she’s come a long way, but she’s still not a race car driver. And I don’t think she’s ever going to be a race car driver.”

There’s no reason why females can’t race competitively, but there have been few female race car drivers. The one exception is drag racing, where there are several top female drivers. The reason is drag racing is not personal competition. The drivers really compete against themselves and their machine. They are not outwitting one another or engaged in a test of wills. regular car racing is a test of people, so that’s why women have had so little success and why Patrick is just a public relations ploy.

This Tyler Cowen post captures what’s wrong with our ruling elites.

There is no way to check the details of this, but the fact the video has not been struck down the creator has not been sued, suggests it is not a slander of Facebook. Indian is known for hosting click farms and similar scams. One of the weird products of global village is the village idiots are easy to spot. Hindus will patiently sit in click farms, creating fake traffic for web sites. Russians, on the other hand, will never do it. Instead, they are better at gypsy scams like selling fake shoes and penis pills. The Philippines is another great place to setup click farms. The new thing is to setup outbound call center there because most speak English. That’s another job Russians would never do.

Anyway, it is a good idea to be suspicious of Facebook. It is one of those services that is great as long as it is free. If they start charging for it, the whole thing collapses. That leaves advertising, but that’s a limited game as well. Plaster the site with ads and people get turned off. Plus, ads are often the source of malware and most users have ad blockers. Then you have the mobile problem. Microscopic ads on a phone are worthless. The quality of advertising is another issue. Like a most internet advertising, the stuff on Facebook is aimed at the impulsive and stupid.

Now it seems the scam is different. They are getting companies to setup pages and then pay to get traffic to their page. Since no one in their right mind goes to a corporate FB page, they are using robots to fool the companies. It is a clever scam, but an old one. Pyramid schemes often work this way. Psychics have always used plants to trap suckers. They were also caught putting stuff on people’s home pages that was supposedly liked by a friend. It was pretty ham handed and they said it was an error, but no one should believe Mark Zuckerberg. Everything about that guy screams grifter.

Story likes this are a good reminder that people will go to great lengths to avoid running afoul of the official morality, enforced by the ruling class. Violating the taboos of the commoners is never a problem, as long as the rulers are OK with it. In post-modern America, a way to show your worth in the ruling class is to violate the norms of decent people. To go the other way is to risk being ruined, as the ruling class is as ruthless as Muslims when it comes to enforcing their morality.

Baltimore has an interesting history. Up until the 20th century is was basically a port city without much industry. When industry arrived, it did so with a vengeance. Poles, Italians and Irish flooded in to work the docks, steel mills and factories. They had an enormous car plant near the docks that employed tens of thousands at its peak. In the 1950’s, Baltimore was one of the more important cities in the country. It was economically importation and had one of the leading newspapers in the nation.

The civil rights movement and its fallout in the 1960’s hit cities like Baltimore particularly hard. Traditional neighborhoods were broken up in something called block busting, as the usual suspects would buy a house and move in a black family. Everyone would put their house up for sale and the pirates would swoop in and buy at an increasingly discounted price. Basically the landlords figured out how to monetize racism. Baltimore went from roughly 75% white at the end of World War II to majority black in a decade.

As black on white crime increased, the politics became tribal. The remnant of the white population hung on for a while, but they were playing a losing game. Crime control became racist and fell away. The public schools fell prey to the racial spoils system and the collapse of human capital. The middle-class, black and white, fled the city. There was a respite for a while in the 2000’s, but like Detroit, Baltimore is dying and headed for bankruptcy. If you want to see the future, visit Charm City.

Maybe the Left can be forgiven for trying to address the issue of race and the very real results of discrimination. In retrospect, their solutions sound like the rantings of a crazy person, but at the time they probably sounded plausible. After fifty years of failure, there’s simply no excuse for race hustlers persisting in their views. Every conceivable effort has been made to make integration work. Trillions have been spent on a problem that is no better now than fifty years ago. It’s time accept reality.

Looks like everyone over at the NY Times is ready to celebrate the first openly homosexual football player. The Left has been using homosexuals as a proxy in their war in white men for a couple of decades now. Football, which is popular with white men, is hated by the Left. That’s why they are peddling the concussion stuff. Now that can make it gay. The NFL will no doubt have Pride Day and maybe make the players wear rainbow outfits.

The weird thing about the homosexual stuff is it borders on self-mockery. Much of what constitutes the gay lifestyle and the gay aesthetic is self-denigrating. Homosexuals are full of self-loathing due to their affliction, so their public expression is often a mockery of the gay lifestyle. Liberace is a good example. Elton John is another. There’s nothing about the gay stuff that is ennobling or respectable. At bets it is campy and silly. At worse it is degenerate.

There was never a time when homosexuals were discriminated against on the scale of blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians and Catholics. There are some make believe times, like the Stonewall Riots, but they are mostly imaginary. Stonewall was not a riot in any sense of the word. It was a protest, for sure, that put attention on the cop’s habit of raiding Mafia owned gay clubs. The fact that the Mafia was exploiting homosexual males and the cops were primarily targeting the mob gets lost in the phony narrative.

The point being, harassment of homosexuals has never been much of an issue in America. A black guy in 1990 probably faced more hostility than the typical gay guy in the worst of times. We’re talking about rude jokes, not anything that would alter one’s life. The gay lifestyle killed more gay men in a weekend than straights have in a century. Most people get this, so casting gays as sympathetic victims is a loser’s gambit.

As with all cults and subcultures, defining who is in and who is out of the group is the primary focus of the group. For the Left, being a member of the anointed mean embracing the homosexual stuff. It’s not about the homosexuals themselves. The Left does not care about them any more than they care about blacks. Homosexuals are just another charm of the progressive charm bracelet, to be shown off at the next cocktail party. The gay man is just another totem.

This statue is scaring the coeds at Wellesley College.

According to the WaPo:

The mostly-naked man appeared on the Wellesley College campus Monday, clad only in white underwear briefs, barefoot, standing with his eyes closed and his arms outstretched.

He looked like a problem for the campus police.

He turned out to be art.

The figure — which was set beside a road on the all-female college campus near Boston — is actually a very lifelike sculpture from artist Tony Matelli. The sculpture, called “Sleepwalker,” was intended to draw attention to a new exhibit by Matelli at the campus museum.

“There’s no way you can miss this thing,” said Lauren Walsh, 22, a senior from Danvers, Mass. She said the sculpture was placed in a busy area near both academic and residential quads. “I looked at it for a few minutes, and it didn’t move,” she said. Which meant it was art.

Some students dressed the statue up in winter clothing, apparently worried that the man would catch cold (the students returned to take their clothes back in the morning).

It is a good bet that most of the girls were amused by it. Maybe they took a selfie with it, but otherwise it was just another day on campus. It’s actually rather lame. If the “artist’ wanted to be edgy or controversial, he should have create a statue of a modern Priapus with a giant ornamental member. Maybe add some devil horns and a long tail with a spike at the end. That would have caused more of an uproar from the usual suspects than the frozen accountant. Imagine this on the girl’s campus.

Anyway, the girls did not like a naked man on campus.

Walsh worked on a petition to get rid of it. She thought that the appearance of an almost-nude male stranger — especially at night — would bring added stress for students, especially those who had suffered sexual assault in the past.

“The statue of the nearly naked man on the Wellesley College campus is an entirely inappropriate and potentially harmful addition to our community that we, as members of the student body, would like removed immediately,” Walsh wrote, in a petition posted at the Web site Change.org under the name of another student, Zoe Magid. There are now 300 signatures in favor of getting rid of it.

The thing about feminism is it is largely a lie. Sure, a small number of angry lesbians stick with it after college, but the whole thing is just an act. Most of the women indulging in this stuff are smart enough to land a decent husband and have a family. They end up living more like June Cleaver than the feminist ideal. The ones who do live the life after college end up miserable and crazy. The dumb ones tend to fall into that trap.

The American Conservative is a publication that seems like it should be better than it is and have a greater influence that it does. They have always struggled to keep it going, so that’s probably part of the problem, They tried to be a traditional paper journal, but that’s not something with a future. They have a website, but it is the antiquated “webzine” style that does not seem to work very well. The content has often been of the paleo variety, which is becoming a bit of an anachronism these days.

Anyway, this was posted the other day. It hits on why conservatism in general, but paleoconservatism in particular, never seem to work. There was always an effort to superimpose whatever they meant by conservatism onto the culture. That is, they often tried to take something that was obviously not Right and argue that it was actually conservative. often, the result was taking yesterday’s radicalism and making ti today’s right-wing orthodoxy. You see that in the Seeger piece.

Seeger was the authentic voice of the old American left and understood that conservatism, far from being inimical to socialism, was actually an essential component of it. In an interview with the New York Times in 1995 he declared, “I like to say I’m more conservative than [Barry] Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Seeger’s vision of the ideal society was not some high-tech futuristic metropolis but was rooted firmly in the past. America’s past. “When I was a boy, I read every single book by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton,” he said in a 1982 interview.

Seeger was an unrepentant communist, long after it was clear Stalin was a murderous psychopath. He actively conspired with foreigners to do harm to his fellow citizens for no other reason than ideological zeal. If mass murder is a conservative principle, the Right may want to have a meeting or something to figure out what went wrong. Just because someone has fond memories of the past, it does not make them Edmund Burke. There is more to being conservative than being a reactionary.

Seeger rejected the egotism of the modern elbow society which neoliberal capitalism has created. “There was no ‘I’ in Seeger’s music, only a big, broad encompassing ‘we’” writes Jody Rosen. Seeger never liked to talk in terms of his career. “I hate the word ‘career’ because it implies one is searching after fame and fortune—two of the silliest things to want,” he said. He abhorred commercialism. When he was given a microphone he used it to forward the causes he believed in—and not push a new album or CD.

As Kathy Shaidle covered last week, Pete Seeger was a money grubbing thief who would screw his mother for a nickel.

He was a better socialist than the Trotskyite ideologues who accused him of being a Stalinist, and he was a better conservative than the McCarthyites who persecuted him. He understood, probably better than any other figure on the American Left, that in order for the human race to go forward we need to go back. Way, way, back.

That’s complete nonsense. Seeger was never “persecuted.” He was a proud Stalinist long after Khrushchev revealed the details of Stalin’s crimes.  In fact, he was dissembling about Uncle Joe right up until the end. As Mark Steyn pointed out, Seeger could never bring himself to condemn the man who murdered fifty million people just to prove a point. if being on the Right means anything it means opposing grand social experiments that slaughter tens of millions of people.

That gets back to the weirdness of American Conservative and that whole fringe right-wing world that operates around paleoconservatism. Maybe it is just the nature of fringe politics. As these people were pushed out of the main stream, many went looking for something else they can support. Inevitably, that mean embracing or accepting some crap pot stuff. Of course, everything outside the main looks like crack pottery when you’re standing inside the main. Crack pots are a matter of perspective.

I’m reading, as time permits, The Inequality of Man. This was written around when Haldane was converting to Marxism. You can tell he was deeply fascinated by the doings in the Soviet Union at the time. Haldane was convinced humanity was in decline, as he thought that was the natural evolution of all species. The only way to arrest that would be for man to alter his evolution. The only way to do that would be to alter his social arrangements.

I suppose it was only natural for him to be fascinated with what the Western intellectuals thought was the greatest social experiment in human relations since the French Revolution. According to his Wiki biography he became a full-throated Marxist in 1937, which was the start of the Yezhovshchina, the most intense of Stalin’s purges. A recurring theme of the time is the academic communists in the West became true believers just when the slaughter in the Soviet Union got going.

Two things keep popping into my head as I read through what is rather dry and painfully out of date genetic discussions in the book. One is that the most of the popular social theories of my grandparent’s age were mostly nonsense. Haldane talks about psychology as being the great savior of mankind because it will lead to the end of crime and mental illness. His fondness for eugenics is a bit chilling, even if what came next was wildly exaggerated.

The second thing is how belief and science are not incompatible. Haldane was an atheist, but he was a Marxist. There’s nothing rational or logical about Marxism. It starts with the assumption that heaven on earth is possible if things can be arranged just the right way. There’s no reason to believe it, but adherents do and they do so in order to be a part of the cause.

Catholics have no logical reason to have warm feelings toward the Pope, but they do because that’s what you do in that religion. Haldane was a rigorous and talented scientist, a brilliant scientist. Yet, he believed in some crazy religions like Marxism and eventually Hinduism. It is often assumed that belief and empiricism operate at polar opposites on the plane of human thought. It is simply not the case. True believers often make the best scientists.

I’m not sure if this is true today, I have no way of knowing, but science had a teleological thread to it well into the modern era. A guy like Haldane set aside God, but he still believed nature had a purpose and a design. Chance really did not figure into the science of his day. Discovering the truths about nature meant solving the purpose. “Why does a duck have a bill?” is a different starting point than “How did the bill win over the known alternatives?”

If I head off to Home Depot for a hammer and return with one, there’s agency involved throughout. If I head off to Home Depot and end up married to a Ukrainian in Florida, it is a series of choices that appear to be chance from a great enough distance.  It may not be chance in the strict sense of the word, but it is certainly not design. Teleology drove a good deal of early science and may be driving current science.

Here is an excellent essay from Kevin Williamson at National Review. I’ve commented before about how that publication has become a rudderless and supercilious operation since Rich Lowry took control. In a given week, there may be two or three things worth reading on that site, most of which will be by Kevin Williamson. If he were to leave or get fired I’d have no reason to visit the site. The guy is one of the better polemicists going these days. Even when you don’t agree, you take his argument seriously. That’s a rare quality, one I wish I possessed. Anyway, he bumps into a few subjects here that I have been noodling over of late.

At the risk of doing an injustice to Mr. Loy’s argument, the fullness of which cannot easily be communicated in this limited space, it must be understood that the thing that worries him here is not optional. “Manipulating the world in order to get what we want from it” is a pretty good definition of work, which is fundamental to our lives, so much so that in most of the ancient religions it is regulated in much the same way as sex and diet. Buddhism has a very developed philosophy of work — “right livelihood” being one of the requirements of the Eightfold Path — while the Christian story of the Fall is in the end an attempt to explain why we must labor: “Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.” What happens in the meantime? “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” The message is the same elsewhere: The literal meaning of “karma” is “work.”

The problem of work, and the related problem of unemployment, is per Mr. Loy’s observation one in which the collective experience is recapitulated at the individual level. Unemployment at the individual level often is traumatic: Economic stress is difficult in and of itself, but it also can disturb family life, may lead to isolation from one’s friends and community, and may provide an occasion for shame, even when that shame is unjustified. Because we are the richest people that human civilization ever has seen, there is no reason for anyone to go wanting for the mere essentials of subsistence; because we are the richest people human civilization ever has seen, it is very difficult to be satisfied with the mere essentials of subsistence.

There are two things here. One is the belief that work is fundamental to the human animal. The need to work is the need for purpose, not a need to labor. People have believed this since the dawn of time. My grandfather used to say that if you don’t have a reason to wake up in the morning, you won’t. Similarly, we have the other side of the coin. Idle hands do the devil’s work. People with nothing good to do with their time will find something evil to do with it. These expressions did not spring from nothing. They are the product of generations so experience, trial and error in the laboratory of history. We are social animals and to be so means having a role, a purpose, in the tribe. Otherwise, the tribe has no use for you. Banishment is an ancient punishment for a reason.

But what happens when we cross the threshold into a post-scarcity world? Yeah, I know. The Congolese and Somalis are starving and dying of the runs. The Brazillian peasantry are starving and dying too. The reason is not scarcity. The reason is these people are violent, dimwitted savages. If they were otherwise, they would have all the food and medicine they could need. Even with some portion of our population in the violent savage category, we are able to provide more than enough for everyone in the West. The savages of West Baltimore and South Philly are not starving or dying of cholera. They shoot each other and overdose on drugs, but they have enough to eat and a roof over their head.

It goes beyond just feeding the animals in our zoos. We are running out of things for honest ambitious people to do with their time. Whole job categories are being eliminated every year. In Tyler Cowen’s bean-topia, robots will do all the labor and much of the thinking. A small elite will sit atop controlling the robots. They will also make sure the robots keep the rest of us in our camps and reservations. I have my doubts about that scenario, but we are going to have to come to terms with the fact whole categories of labor are going to become obsolete for the first time in human history. It is one thing to lose the buggy whip maker. It is another no longer need doctors or farmers. Go into a modern warehouse and you don’t see a lot of people.

Capitalism is not nearly as beady-eyed and green-eyeshaded as its critics would have you believe. Imagine transporting Mick Jagger and J. K. Rowling back in time even a few hundred years and presenting to the Sun King these two English subjects, richer than pharaohs and so celebrated that neither could go to a shop or stroll down the street without causing a sensation, and then explaining that they are, respectively, a singer of songs and a teller of children’s stories — not for Her Majesty, but for the common people. We are good to our poets. And we are very good to our plumbers and mechanics and builders. It is a testament not only to our wealth but to our spirit that people in Brooklyn can use the phrase “celebrity butcher” without falling down on the sidewalk laughing. I cannot imagine going back to the 1950s and trying to explain to my father, who worked in a butcher’s shop, that there would be such a thing as a celebrity butcher, and that people would pay $85 to take a two-hour class from one.

I don’t think you need go back much further than a the dawn of the First World War. In 1914, it was impossible to become a billionaire singing ditties or writing children’s books. You could become mildly famous, as it in famous amongst your peers, by writing books. I doubt that Booth Tarkington or Eleanor Porter were getting mobbed on the streets or even recognized, despite being best selling authors. My grandfather used to point out to me that in his youth, performers were considered the scum of the earth. They were the lowest rung. Even cleaning a stable was considered more honorable than joining the circus or the theater. He’d end his rant with a point about John Wilkes Booth being an actor.

The status of entertainer was unchanged from the time of Ur through about 1930, give or take. Suddenly, mass media turned this relationship on its head. Telling jokes, singing songs, playing sports, fornicating in public and debasing yourself for the entertainment of others are now the way to riches. Even people who are bad at it get rich. Kwame Brown is a very bad basketball player. He has made $63 million dollars in the NBA. Sitcom actors who make one program end up earning tens of millions over their lifetime. This talent show culture has infected how we manage our affairs. President Obama won two elections because he belongs to a cult and reminds people of a young Morgan Freeman, an actor who often plays a president. I may be wrong, but I suspect this does not end well.

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