[subscribe2]I admit to being a fan of Jay Leno. By fan I mean I have been recording his program for years and watching when I feel like watching some television. I don’t watch much TV, other than sports. While eating dinner, I like to watch something for an hour that will not piss me off or make me crazy. Leno is the perfect choice. His brand of humor is broad based and well within the bounds of common decency and middle-class respectability. Leno’s jokes are PG-13, his political humor sticks to the obvious from the headlines and it is not particularly ideological. He makes fun of whoever is in the news, regardless of party or status. His bits after his monologue are similarly tame, mostly letting regular people do silly things for the camera. The first 30 minutes make for a good dinner time show. I rarely watch his guests as I don’t follow pop culture.

All that said, I therefore took note of the fact he was being forced out by his employers in favor of a person named Jimmy Fallon. A quick search tells me Leno was dominating his counterparts, including the man-boy favorite, Jimmy Kimmel. The old Marxist David Letterman stagers on in third place. As Leno’s forced exit grew closer, his rating soared to the point where he was becoming a cultural phenomenon. His final show scored huge numbers. According to the people who care about these things, his final show was one of the most watched in decades. As an empirically minded person, 14 million viewers in a nation of 300 million looks tiny to me, but people who make millions to know about this stuff say otherwise. It is just a reminder that culture is not rational in the linear sense of the term.

If a major company decided to retire its top selling and most profitable product, for a new product that is obviously inferior, it could be excusable. Even the best and brightest get wild ideas in their ahead about what lies around the corner. Front running, or attempts at it, is what gets investors in the most trouble. The best investment for the typical American is an index fund based on the broad market or one of the major indices. Millions every day, however, try to guess the market and lose money doing it. If you keep doing it after seeing it fail, then it is not longer folly. There’s something else. NBC tried this a few years back and it was a costly and embarrassing disaster. To do it again when Leno is riding even higher than the last time raises the question. Why does NBC hate him?

I first bumped into the totalitarian mind when I was a kid working in DC. I worked for a Congressman doing nonsense work. Back in the old days, this was common. I’m sure it is a rigid process these days, but three decades ago it was not, so you got a fun mix of personalities. The law student in charge of the young staff was a nice girl, but a hard thumping liberal feminist. Inevitably she set her sights on me as someone who had to be run out of the office as a trouble maker. Her reason, which she told me when I confronted her, was that I was not “very liberal.” That’s all that mattered to her. So much so she did not note that I was the favorite of the congressman’s wife, driving her around town. The lunatic was cut loose and I stayed.

It was my first experience with a fanatic. The second experience was talking with an Iranian exile. He was a student when the Shah fell, but he was not a fanatic. Like me, he was a skeptic and thought his contemporaries were nuts. He told me a story to illustrate his point. In the Iraq war, the Iranian commander asked for volunteers to clear a minefield. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards volunteered. After some prayer, they ran across the minefield, blowing up the mines with their feet. A second wave of volunteers followed showing that the mines had been cleared. I then understood that the fanatics are the same the world around. The object of their fanaticism changes, but everything else is the same. The true believer gives up his identity for that of the group so sacrifice is the ultimate expression of faith.

The point of this diversion is that NBC is run by fanatics. A night watching MSNBC, for example, is a descent into madness. Within living memory, liberal members of the press would have mocked these people as the aluminum foil hat crowd. Today they run the news division of NBC. A good example of just how crazy things are at that asylum, is the Mike Huckabee flap. Despite video evidence showing Huckabee said the opposite of what NBC claims, they still have the fake story on their website. I suspect they really believe he said it. So much so that no amount of evidence will convince them otherwise. These people are no different than those Iranian guards running across the minefield. Reality is now a distant land across the sea.

In such an asylum, a non-believer like Leno would be suspect.All of the bees in the hive work to show their ideological purity. The leadership invests a lot in filtering out the apostates and spies. They are always worried about spies. Anyone that sticks out from the rest of the hive is assumed to be a deviationist. Leno’s willingness to take shots at their cult leaders certainly would alarm lunatics like Maddow. His success and value to the network would not matter much to these people. Their singular focus would be the removal of this bad person. Just as the first disastrous attempt to destroy middle-class health care did not change any minds on the Left, the first disastrous attempt to rid themselves of Leno did not dissuade the lunatics at NBC.

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I saw this post from the former Half Sigma and thought about spewing some venom toward the author. There’s something about the ridiculous little twerp that bugs me. Phoniness has always had that effect on me for some reason. I remember hearing the phrase “pseudo-intellectual poser” for the first time in prep school and thinking it was the greatest combination of words ever. Of course, we tend to hate the things in others we hate about ourselves so maybe I’m a pseudo-intellectual poser. You never know about these things. No matter how clearly you see the world, you always have a big blind spot that is called a mirror.

Anyway, this is what I thought deserved the boot to the face:

Most rich businesspeople can’t vote Republican because they are disgusted by the prole values that Republicans stand for. Anti-abortion? Anti-birth control? Anti-gay? Climate change deniers? No way are rich businesspeople who want to be part of polite society going to vote for that stuff. The Democrats are the only viable party to vote for. But why do the Democrats have to be so anti-business?

Obtuse does not begin to describe that bit. The weird cultural fusion of 1950’s Greenwich Village, the 1960’s Harvard and 1980’s Manhattan  that is Silicon Valley is a temporary and tiny phenomenon. They may not like the crude, unsophisticated ways of those rubes back in DC, but they will adapt. The reason they will adapt, instead of DC adapting to them,  is simple. The folks working for the technocratic class carry tablets and smart phones. The folks working for the political class carry guns. An iPad can be a weapon, but an MP5 is a better weapon. Add into that the fact we crowd source public policy. Those prols in DC are really good at working the crowd. Silicon Valley can bankroll as many Hindus as they can find, but they will still be paying tribute to their rulers in DC until they are out of money.

Anyway, I see Steve Sailer picked up on the same story. His take is a bit more grounded in reality:

But the real future of politics is to have the best of both worlds: You’re doing it for the diverse and the poor and it’s going right into your bank account. Thus, for example, Mark Zuckerberg’s class war on his employees is framed as being waged out of concern for the Dreamers living in the shadows etc etc. The real political genius will be the guy who figures out how to tie tax-free repatriation of tech profits in Puerto Rico into World War G/T.

That sounds a lot like the past. I’m fond of saying that there’s a lot of money to be made off the poor. If you doubt that, I can take you for a ghetto tour of Baltimore and DC. There you will find Korean retail stores operating in places that would cause Half Sigma to rush to his fainting couch. I’m talking about the hard thumping ghettos. The Koreans open cash business like liquor stores, laundromats and convenience stores. Then you have the check cashing joints and the paycheck loan guys. Of course, there’s an army of social services parasites making fat salaries off the tax payer to run the welfare industrial complex. The best business in America is ghetto business. There’s never been a recession.

The truly amazing accomplishment of that cult, which grew up on Rue Saint-Jacques so long ago, is  they loath and despise the people, yet rally them to their banner. Those culturally sensitive types bankrolling the Hindu lawyer are carefully chasing the brown people out of their city. It takes skill and ideological fervor to preach about tolerance from you monochromatic compound and actually get the support of the people you expressly prohibit from entering. It makes me think stuff like this is probably not an accident. The Sino-Semitic push to ethnically cleanse the city comes with a rainbow flag and promises to fight those right-wing bible thumpers who fled the city a century ago.

Anyway, the future of politics. I’ve come to the conclusion we are headed into uncharted turf. The nation has been governed for a long time by two, non-ideological parties. Loosely speaking, the ideological differences between the parties were window dressing. In order to get votes they had to claim to be different, but they agreed on just about everything. That changed in the 1990’s. The Democrat party became an ideological party. The New Left finally got control of the senior offices and purged the ranks of non-believers. The people representative of the party today were considered political arsonists two decades ago.

This change in the landscape has sent cracks through the Republican party. The normal course of business had been for the deal makers and trimmers to run things and deal with the Democrats. The various strands of conservatism provided the organizational muscle and the money. The model no longer works and the factions are now at war with one another as the deal makers try to hold it together. To make matters worse, the leadership is trying to cut deals with the Democrats, who seek to exacerbate the fissures in the GOP. The CML wants the GOP and all its factions to die. As any Israeli will tell you, it is tough to cut deals with people who want you dead. The result is a staggering and confused leadership, frozen in terror at what’s happening around them.

There’s two endings possible. One is this drags on and candidate rises up in 2016 that can appeal to all sides. I have no idea who, but it would have to be a candidate from the grass roots, but trusted by the establishment. The party then wins the White House and slowly unwinds some of the mischief done by Obama. The other possibility is the leadership tries to purge the ranks of radicals and the party blows apart. They ram through amnesty after the mid-term and the GOP primary is a bloodbath similar to 1992. This time the base stays home and begins looking at building a third party.

The latter seems most likely to me. Late Empire America has a Rhodesia feel to it. The last defenders of Western civilization are surrounded by the barbarians and the fanatics. The former just wants revenge the latter is planning to live at a great distance from the mayhem they are creating. The new Robber Baron class looks around the world and thinks Brazil, India, China and even the Russians have the right idea. Fifty years from now places like San Francisco will be walled cities. All around them will be a vast ghetto.

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The food supply in the West is surprisingly safe, given the deregulated and decentralized nature of the system of producing food and getting it to your table. This reality, however, comes with frequent food scares. These cares are usually based in superstitious nonsense. Every day we see stories about how some staple of our diet is dangerous or a story debunking the previous scary story. Then there are the new snake oil salesman, pitching the latest food fads and miracle diets.

This story about Subway is a good example. The chemical in this case is Azodicarbonamide, a food stabilizer. There’s no science linking it to any negative health issues. We know this because it is in all of the food in North America and people are not falling over dead from it. Granted, there has not been a longitudinal study on the widespread use of it, but the lack of people dying from it is called a clue. That does not stop grifters from claiming otherwise. In this case, it is someone named Vani Hari.

Vani started FoodBabe.com in April 2011 to spread information about what is really in the American food supply. She teaches people how to make the right purchasing decisions at the grocery store, how to live an organic lifestyle, and how to travel healthfully around the world. The success in her writing and investigative work can be seen in the way food companies react to her uncanny ability to find and expose the truth.

Where she got the knowledge she spreads is a mystery. A search for a more detailed biography comes up empty. It appears she was a marketing or sales person out of college and then got into the fake nutrition rackets. That’s not surprising. People in sales are good at finding the pressure points of people and exploiting them. So are con-artists, which is the entire population of the health food racket. Everyone wants to be healthy and will set aside rationality in the quest for good health. It is a very old story.

A feature of the female grifter these days is the weird aspirational way they describe themselves. Maybe is the way women have always talked, but men never had a reason to notice it. In this highly feminized culture, women are turning up everywhere in female lead roles, which are exaggerated versions of women. That means they talk about themselves in weird ways and seem to care about everything a bit too much.

My name Vani, means Voice in my native language, and I have always had things to “Voice” throughout my life whether it be about politics, the environment or whatever is making headlines. After suffering some serious health issues, I became incredibly passionate about understanding what is in food – how it is grown, what chemicals are used in its production, and what eating food does or doesn’t do for the body.

Hitler became passionate about killing Jews and Slavs. Mao, after coming to power, became passionate about killing off millions of his people. Pol Pot was very passionate about his work. Serial killers are passionate about their work. When the West was run by sensible men, taming one’s passions was a virtue. Now that it is run by women, the more passion the better, even if the person is a raving lunatic and con artist. Perhaps that’s the other feature of girl power. Everyone becomes a con artist.

Without having read this article, I assumed it was the first step in the Left’s jettisoning of blacks from the coalition. The Left has been uncomfortable with their alliance with black America for years, probably going back to the Civil Rights Movement. Political expediency has kept blacks in the boat, but that may be changing. Hispanics look like a far more promising partner. I figured this post would be about what I think will be the next big deal in American politics and culture. A little hint of it can be found in the exchange I had with Steve Sailer in this post. But, that’s not where this is heading after all. What got my attention right out of the shoot is this:

Five years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America’s first black president, I came to the realization that I didn’t actually know any black people. Most of the people I did know (i.e., other white people) didn’t know many black people either. One, maybe two, was the norm. I asked one white guy I knew if he had any black friends, and he replied, “You mean ones that aren’t on television?”

My first thought was, “I bet the kid writing this is from the northeast.” I thought he was a kid because it contains that juvenile amazement at the realization there are a lot of things new to you that are not all that new. Young, smug climbers of the meritocratic age suffer from this more than anyone. They have been told since the cradle that they are the brightest little stars in the world. When they suddenly find out they have been walking around with incorrect ideas in their head they naturally assume they have discovered something new to the world.  The northeast assumption is the fact that whites in the northeast (there are no black people named Tanner) put a lot of distance between themselves and black people. They love MLK, but only at a great distance.

I went looking for his bio and found this:

Tanner Colby was born in Houston, Texas, in 1975. He grew up in Louisiana and Alabama and graduated from Tulane University in 1997. After graduating from college, he served as head writer for the National Lampoon Radio Hour for two years, then co-wrote a biography of “Animal House” and “Saturday Night Live” star, John Belushi. Following “Belushi,” he co-wrote the New York Times bestselling “The Chris Farley Show,” a similar oral history of the star of “Tommy Boy.”

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tanner Colby

I may be wrong, but I’m thinking you are an extremely self-absorbed person if you are providing websites with your biography. Regardless, this guy grew up in the deep south and has had no black friends. That tells me he is a son of privilege. He hit school long after integration and surely spent a lot of his life around black people. At the ripe old age of 39 he suddenly realizes he knows no black people, his friends have no black friends and he looks at black people like the rest of us see furniture. Maybe Tanner is just a sociopath, but I’m thinking this guy has spent the bulk of his life gazing at his image in the mirror.

Anyway, low expectations are not a bad thing. I think this is a good start:

The pernicious effects of Republican attitude on race are plain to see. But one of the more subtle consequences of the right’s willful incompetence is that there is rarely any thoughtful critique of the left when it comes to race. Affirmative action is unfair to white people and the Democratic Party is a plantation—that’s about as incisive as the rhetoric usually gets. Even when Republicans have a legitimate point to make about the shortcomings of some government program, it’s almost as if they can’t help blowing their own argument. They’ll start off talking sensibly enough about educational outcome disparities and within seconds they’re rambling incoherently about how black men don’t take care of their babies. It’s really astonishing to watch.

But the fact is that a lot of liberals hold on to some really bad ideas about race too. Some of the arguments they keep trotting out amount to little more than unexamined platitudes, riddled with holes. Fifty years after the March on Washington, America’s high school cafeterias are as racially divided as ever, income inequality is growing, and mass incarceration has hobbled an entire generation of young black men. Do we really think this is entirely due to Republican obstruction? Or is it also possible that the party charged with taking black Americans to the Promised Land has been running around in circles?

This is an interesting post. Atheism is one of those things that is ridiculous when you seriously consider it. The atheist claims to be certain about the existence of god, but that is impossible. By definition, God is unknowable, so you either believe he exists or you don’t believe he exists. The key word there is belief. This is a human trait that is rooted in our biology. We know it is heritable and we have some sense of why this is a useful human trait. To argue against it is to argue against biological reality.

Here’s a relevant passage:

If reasoning is so easily swayed by passions, then what kind of reasoning should we expect from people who hate religion and love reason? Open-minded, scientific thinking that tries to weigh the evidence on all sides? Or standard lawyerly reasoning that strives to reach a pre-ordained conclusion? When I was doing the research for The Righteous Mind, I read the New Atheist books carefully, and I noticed that several of them sounded angry. I also noticed that they used rhetorical structures suggesting certainty far more often than I was used to in scientific writing – words such as “always” and “never,” as well as phrases such as “there is no doubt that…” and “clearly we must…”

To check my hunch, I took the full text of the three most important New Atheist books—Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, and Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell and I ran the files through a widely used text analysis program that counts words that have been shown to indicate certainty, including “always,” “never,” “certainly,” “every,” and “undeniable.” To provide a close standard of comparison, I also analyzed three recent books by other scientists who write about religion but are not considered New Atheists: Jesse Bering’s The Belief Instinct, Ara Norenzayan’s Big Gods, and my own book The Righteous Mind.

I’m a bit skeptical of this method. It assumes things that are not in evidence, as they say in court. people who are confident in their beliefs probably use language loaded with certainty, but we live in a passive age, so maybe not. Language is as much a part of the culture as ritual and ceremony. Given that we live in a feminine age, it may be that atheists have changed their language to use the passive-aggressive technique popular with women. In other words, it’s not as simple as the author assumes.

To provide an additional standard of comparison, I also analyzed books by three right wing radio and television stars whose reasoning style is not generally regarded as scientific. I analyzed Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, Sean Hannity’s Deliver Us from Evil, and Anne Coulter’s Treason. (I chose the book for each author that had received the most comments on Amazon.) As you can see in the graph, the New Atheists win the “certainty” competition. Of the 75,000 words in The End of Faith, 2.24% of them connote or are associated with certainty. (I also analyzed The Moral Landscape—it came out at 2.34%.)

One of the under discussed aspects of atheism is that the adherents are the biggest proselytizers. generally, we assume proselytizing is a sign of doubt. The person trying to bring you over to his side wants confirmation. if he were sure about what he thought on a subject, he would just add it to the stock of truths he carries with him. He would assume most people have the same truth. The proselytizer, in contrast, is never really sure, so he hopes to convince others so he  can be sure.

Reason is indeed crucial for good public policy and a good society. But isn’t the most reasonable approach one that takes seriously the known flaws of human reasoning and tries to work around them? Individuals can’t be trusted to reason well when passions come into play, yet good reasoning can sometimes emerge from groups. This is why science works so well. Scientists suffer from the confirmation bias like everybody else, but the genius of science as an institution is that it incentivizes scientists to disconfirm each others’ ideas, and it creates a community within which a reasoned consensus eventually emerges.

This is where the skeptic shows his worth. Science is just as prone to nonsensical beliefs as any other human endeavor. The endless feuding over climate science is a great example. Even the most empirically minded can become zealots, losing all perspective in their crusade. The skeptic is far less likely to fall into this trap as he is much more willing to accept that we simply don’t know the right answer. The skeptic, unlike the atheist, is only sure of his won fallibility.

Driving around Boston, some things caught my attention. One is the use of difficult to see speed bumps to reduce speeds in residential neighborhoods. Everywhere on earth, warning drivers of speed bumps is the civilized thing to do. In fact, civilization is measured by traffic. Well maintained roads, clear signage and sensible layouts are what you see in the first world. Outside of civilization, the roads are a mess, the drivers are crazy and you have no idea what’s around the next turn. Here’s a good example.

Anyway, driving around Boston, I come upon these massive speed bumps that look like slabs of side walk on in the street. My buddy warned me so I saw it, but it was not easy. If you were unfamiliar with the area, you could easily rip the wheels off your car. There’s little doubt that the people who installed them did this on purpose. The speed bump is supposed to be punishment. It’s another reminder that social justice is just thinly veiled social vengeance on the rest of us by people who hate us.

Another thing I noticed was a new type of street light. This one would be red for stop and flashing yellow for go. I’m sitting there, trying to figure out what that meant when my buddy tells me it is the new green. The point is to encourage caution, he thinks. There may be a better way to regulate an intersection than the traditional American scheme, but that’s certainly not it. That’s stupid. It feels like you’re being warned by your mother to look both ways or brush your teeth. It’s a traffic light that nags the drivers.

I have been traveling the last few days so no blogging and no internet. I brought a number of laptops so I could have if I wanted, but I wanted to take a break. Like everyone else, being on-line is such a big part of my daily life, it is a strange experience to unplug for a few days. For me at least, the strangeness comes mostly from the realization that I could easily unplug for good and never miss it. What we regard as the civic life of the republic is mostly nonsense. There really is no reason to pay attention to any of it.

When I was a kid, I worked for a congressman as a part-time job. An article of faith among the political class was that the typical American was not paying attention. That was regarded as a good thing by old timers. They saw it as a sign that American was psychologically healthy. The new breed of political animal saw it as a defect that needed to be remedied. I suspect the old hands had it right. The quality of the state is inversely proportional to its desires to gain the attention of the citizens…

I used to think libertarians were just nutty ideologues, but I’ve come around to the idea that most are just cowardly conservatives. Politics in America has always been about morality, not ideology. That cold civil war, as John Derbyshire calls it, is just a fight over what is going to be the prevailing morality. Moral arguments are messy and not about right answers, but about what people want. The morality of a people is simply what they people want to be true about themselves and the world around them.

As a practical matter, it means telling the Left you don’t want gay Boy Scout masters because you don’t like homosexuality. Defending normalcy is hard because it requires saying tough things and using tough language. Instead, you can avoid it all and claim to be a libertarian. You’re not for or against gay marriage or against abortion. You’re not for or against religious liberty. The libertarian avoids the culture war entirely and instead does battle with straw men on issues like legalizing weed and tax policy…

Even if you take libertarians seriously, it’s clear they suffer from the same problem you see on the Left. They assume things about people that are not true. For example, walk through an airport. Government does a terrible job running airports. It is as if they are trying to make air travel as inefficient as possible. The TSA people I encountered were universally surly and unpleasant. Airport staff acts like they are doing you a favor if they recognize you. The main reason for this is they deal with the public.

Some fraction of the traveling public is simply ignorant of the rules, written and unwritten, and need firm direction. Another fraction thinks they are special little snowflakes and try to prove it by bucking the rules. On one of the plane rides, I watched a women tell people the middle seat was taken. She just wanted extra room. Eventually, the staff had to threaten the old women so that the seat could be used. It’s a good reminder that order has to be imposed on some portion of the public. Libertarians can’t grasp this…

My first year at college, they had some sort of carnival, so all the campus freaks could perform in public. The student groups got to setup tables and recruit to their organization, sell food to raise money and so forth. One of the weirder tables was one by a group extolling the glories of Albania. I knew nothing of Albania, so I took their literature. The national symbol was a fascist looking black eagle on a red background. The women pitching me on Albania seemed so earnest about the place.

This was before the internet so I had to go to the library to learn about Albania. I learned that the leader, Enver Hoxha was a brutal dictator and the intellectual father of anti-revisionist Marxism–Leninism, which basically meant he rejected the deviationists that followed Stalin. Hoxha was not very influential in left-wing circles, but there was a sub-culture that was deeply loyal to his ideas. His ideology was Stalinism with an extreme form isolationism. Albania was a hermit kingdom during the Cold War.

Anyway, I was reminded of that when talking with some liberal friends. The gluten thing is the food fad of the Left. They all have it. One person believes this stuff so deeply she is starving herself. She beliefs she has suddenly developed an allergy to all food. I’ve known this person for thirty years. I have cooked for her dozens of times and I know she ate all sorts of things. Yet she suddenly thinks she has had this malady that makes her allergic to food. She reminded me of that woman handing out Albanian literature…

The New England Yankee has many ways to signal their righteousness. That is an inheritance from colonial times. In a world of communal salvation, showing you are on the side of the righteous is very important. Today that means signally good whiteness versus bad whiteness. They will mock Larry the Cable Guy, but claim to love Louis CK. They love Whole Foods, but think Walmart is evil. Males think it important to follow the English Premiere League, despite never having been to England.

This is not all them. NASCAR has a big track in New Hampshire. It’s not there because no one in New England follows car racing. It falls along a spectrum, where some people, the hard Left, make a big deal of signaling their good whiteness. At the other end are townies and regular people who just like the same stuff as everyone else. Most people fall in between, but it is the Left that sets the tone. It is a good reminder that the left in America grew out of a spiritual movement and retains that quality today…

If there was ever any doubt that the cult of diversity was, in fact, a cult, this should dispel those doubts.

A popular gifted program will get the axe after Ditmas Park school officials chose diversity over exclusivity.

Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” McDonald told parents in a letter posted on the photo-sharing site flickr and obtained by Ditmas Park Corner.

The benefit of “diversity” has never been established. History shows humans have been against diversity since the dawn of time. In fact, diversity is most likely bad for human communities. We are tribal animals and that means being around people like us. 100,000 years or so of evolution is not going to yield to a lecture from a snotty bourgeois bohemian that lives in gated community. That’s the thing with the cult of diversity, the preachers tend to live in monochromatic communities that are always white. You never hear brothers from the hood talking about diversity, other than the second definition. That’s code for black, as in “is there diversity there?” That means, “is it OK for a black guy to go there?” But, diversity as we see here is a religion for neo-Victorian white women who like a selection of ethnic restaurants within walking distance, but a nice big wall between them and the diverse.

This particular school is in a gentrifying neighborhood, which means loads of middle-class white women pretending to be artists as they live like June Cleaver. That’s the other thing about the diversity cult. The women all pretend to be artsy feminists, but they live like a 1950’s house wife, including the husband with the good job. Of course, gentrification is when liberal white people throw all the black people out and then fix up the neighborhood. This neighborhood was pretty rugged until recently. You can be sure these urban pioneers singing the diversity gospel voted for the lunatic mayor. That’s what makes this hilarious. These are folks used to getting exempted from their rules. It looks like the lunatic mayor is changing that.

Anyway, here’s an oldie from a dead commie:

THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

Some things about living still weren’t quite right, though. April for instance, still drove people crazy by not being springtime. And it was in that clammy month that the H-G men took George and Hazel Bergeron’s fourteen-year-old son, Harrison, away.

It was tragic, all right, but George and Hazel couldn’t think about it very hard. Hazel had a perfectly average intelligence, which meant she couldn’t think about anything except in short bursts. And George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains.

George and Hazel were watching television. There were tears on Hazel’s cheeks, but she’d forgotten for the moment what they were about.

On the television screen were ballerinas.

A buzzer sounded in George’s head. His thoughts fled in panic, like bandits from a burglar alarm.

“That was a real pretty dance, that dance they just did,” said Hazel.

“Huh” said George.

“That dance-it was nice,” said Hazel.

“Yup,” said George. He tried to think a little about the ballerinas. They weren’t really very good-no better than anybody else would have been, anyway. They were burdened with sashweights and bags of birdshot, and their faces were masked, so that no one, seeing a free and graceful gesture or a pretty face, would feel like something the cat drug in. George was toying with the vague notion that maybe dancers shouldn’t be handicapped. But he didn’t get very far with it before another noise in his ear radio scattered his thoughts.

George winced. So did two out of the eight ballerinas.

Hazel saw him wince. Having no mental handicap herself, she had to ask George what the latest sound had been.

“Sounded like somebody hitting a milk bottle with a ball peen hammer,” said George.

“I’d think it would be real interesting, hearing all the different sounds,” said Hazel a little envious. “All the things they think up.”

“Um,” said George.

“Only, if I was Handicapper General, you know what I would do?” said Hazel. Hazel, as a matter of fact, bore a strong resemblance to the Handicapper General, a woman named Diana Moon Glampers. “If I was Diana Moon Glampers,” said Hazel, “I’d have chimes on Sunday-just chimes. Kind of in honor of religion.”

“I could think, if it was just chimes,” said George.

“Well-maybe make ’em real loud,” said Hazel. “I think I’d make a good Handicapper General.”

“Good as anybody else,” said George.

“Who knows better than I do what normal is?” said Hazel.

“Right,” said George. He began to think glimmeringly about his abnormal son who was now in jail, about Harrison, but a twenty-one-gun salute in his head stopped that.

“Boy!” said Hazel, “that was a doozy, wasn’t it?”

It was such a doozy that George was white and trembling, and tears stood on the rims of his red eyes. Two of of the eight ballerinas had collapsed to the studio floor, were holding their temples.

“All of a sudden you look so tired,” said Hazel. “Why don’t you stretch out on the sofa, so’s you can rest your handicap bag on the pillows, honeybunch.” She was referring to the forty-seven pounds of birdshot in a canvas bag, which was padlocked around George’s neck. “Go on and rest the bag for a little while,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re not equal to me for a while.”

George weighed the bag with his hands. “I don’t mind it,” he said. “I don’t notice it any more. It’s just a part of me.”

“You been so tired lately-kind of wore out,” said Hazel. “If there was just some way we could make a little hole in the bottom of the bag, and just take out a few of them lead balls. Just a few.”

“Two years in prison and two thousand dollars fine for every ball I took out,” said George. “I don’t call that a bargain.”

“If you could just take a few out when you came home from work,” said Hazel. “I mean-you don’t compete with anybody around here. You just sit around.”

“If I tried to get away with it,” said George, “then other people’d get away with it-and pretty soon we’d be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“I’d hate it,” said Hazel.

“There you are,” said George. The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?”

If Hazel hadn’t been able to come up with an answer to this question, George couldn’t have supplied one. A siren was going off in his head.

“Reckon it’d fall all apart,” said Hazel.

“What would?” said George blankly.

“Society,” said Hazel uncertainly. “Wasn’t that what you just said?

“Who knows?” said George.

The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For about half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say, “Ladies and Gentlemen.”

He finally gave up, handed the bulletin to a ballerina to read.

“That’s all right-” Hazel said of the announcer, “he tried. That’s the big thing. He tried to do the best he could with what God gave him. He should get a nice raise for trying so hard.”

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” said the ballerina, reading the bulletin. She must have been extraordinarily beautiful, because the mask she wore was hideous. And it was easy to see that she was the strongest and most graceful of all the dancers, for her handicap bags were as big as those worn by two-hundred pound men.

And she had to apologize at once for her voice, which was a very unfair voice for a woman to use. Her voice was a warm, luminous, timeless melody. “Excuse me-” she said, and she began again, making her voice absolutely uncompetitive.

“Harrison Bergeron, age fourteen,” she said in a grackle squawk, “has just escaped from jail, where he was held on suspicion of plotting to overthrow the government. He is a genius and an athlete, is under-handicapped, and should be regarded as extremely dangerous.”

A police photograph of Harrison Bergeron was flashed on the screen-upside down, then sideways, upside down again, then right side up. The picture showed the full length of Harrison against a background calibrated in feet and inches. He was exactly seven feet tall.

The rest of Harrison’s appearance was Halloween and hardware. Nobody had ever born heavier handicaps. He had outgrown hindrances faster than the H-G men could think them up. Instead of a little ear radio for a mental handicap, he wore a tremendous pair of earphones, and spectacles with thick wavy lenses. The spectacles were intended to make him not only half blind, but to give him whanging headaches besides.

Scrap metal was hung all over him. Ordinarily, there was a certain symmetry, a military neatness to the handicaps issued to strong people, but Harrison looked like a walking junkyard. In the race of life, Harrison carried three hundred pounds.

And to offset his good looks, the H-G men required that he wear at all times a red rubber ball for a nose, keep his eyebrows shaved off, and cover his even white teeth with black caps at snaggle-tooth random.

“If you see this boy,” said the ballerina, “do not – I repeat, do not – try to reason with him.”

There was the shriek of a door being torn from its hinges.

Screams and barking cries of consternation came from the television set. The photograph of Harrison Bergeron on the screen jumped again and again, as though dancing to the tune of an earthquake.

George Bergeron correctly identified the earthquake, and well he might have – for many was the time his own home had danced to the same crashing tune. “My God-” said George, “that must be Harrison!”

The realization was blasted from his mind instantly by the sound of an automobile collision in his head.

When George could open his eyes again, the photograph of Harrison was gone. A living, breathing Harrison filled the screen.

Clanking, clownish, and huge, Harrison stood – in the center of the studio. The knob of the uprooted studio door was still in his hand. Ballerinas, technicians, musicians, and announcers cowered on their knees before him, expecting to die.

“I am the Emperor!” cried Harrison. “Do you hear? I am the Emperor! Everybody must do what I say at once!” He stamped his foot and the studio shook.

“Even as I stand here” he bellowed, “crippled, hobbled, sickened – I am a greater ruler than any man who ever lived! Now watch me become what I can become!”

Harrison tore the straps of his handicap harness like wet tissue paper, tore straps guaranteed to support five thousand pounds.

Harrison’s scrap-iron handicaps crashed to the floor.

Harrison thrust his thumbs under the bar of the padlock that secured his head harness. The bar snapped like celery. Harrison smashed his headphones and spectacles against the wall.

He flung away his rubber-ball nose, revealed a man that would have awed Thor, the god of thunder.

“I shall now select my Empress!” he said, looking down on the cowering people. “Let the first woman who dares rise to her feet claim her mate and her throne!”

A moment passed, and then a ballerina arose, swaying like a willow.

Harrison plucked the mental handicap from her ear, snapped off her physical handicaps with marvelous delicacy. Last of all he removed her mask.

She was blindingly beautiful.

“Now-” said Harrison, taking her hand, “shall we show the people the meaning of the word dance? Music!” he commanded.

The musicians scrambled back into their chairs, and Harrison stripped them of their handicaps, too. “Play your best,” he told them, “and I’ll make you barons and dukes and earls.”

The music began. It was normal at first-cheap, silly, false. But Harrison snatched two musicians from their chairs, waved them like batons as he sang the music as he wanted it played. He slammed them back into their chairs.

The music began again and was much improved.

Harrison and his Empress merely listened to the music for a while-listened gravely, as though synchronizing their heartbeats with it.

They shifted their weights to their toes.

Harrison placed his big hands on the girls tiny waist, letting her sense the weightlessness that would soon be hers.

And then, in an explosion of joy and grace, into the air they sprang!

Not only were the laws of the land abandoned, but the law of gravity and the laws of motion as well.

They reeled, whirled, swiveled, flounced, capered, gamboled, and spun.

They leaped like deer on the moon.

The studio ceiling was thirty feet high, but each leap brought the dancers nearer to it.

It became their obvious intention to kiss the ceiling. They kissed it.

And then, neutraling gravity with love and pure will, they remained suspended in air inches below the ceiling, and they kissed each other for a long, long time.

It was then that Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, came into the studio with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun. She fired twice, and the Emperor and the Empress were dead before they hit the floor.

Diana Moon Glampers loaded the gun again. She aimed it at the musicians and told them they had ten seconds to get their handicaps back on.

It was then that the Bergerons’ television tube burned out.

Hazel turned to comment about the blackout to George. But George had gone out into the kitchen for a can of beer.

George came back in with the beer, paused while a handicap signal shook him up. And then he sat down again. “You been crying” he said to Hazel.

“Yup,” she said.

“What about?” he said.

“I forget,” she said. “Something real sad on television.”

“What was it?” he said.

“It’s all kind of mixed up in my mind,” said Hazel.

“Forget sad things,” said George.

“I always do,” said Hazel.

“That’s my girl,” said George. He winced. There was the sound of a rivetting gun in his head.

“Gee – I could tell that one was a doozy,” said Hazel.

“You can say that again,” said George.

“Gee-” said Hazel, “I could tell that one was a doozy.”

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This is hilarious:

Quarterback Eli Manning and New York Giants brass created bogus “game-worn” football gear to pass off as the real deal — and one of the forgeries is sitting in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, an explosive new lawsuit claims.

A helmet on display in the hallowed Canton, Ohio, gridiron museum — supposedly worn by Manning in Big Blue’s 2008 Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots — is just one of dozens of fake items the football superstar and his Giants cohorts have created to fool fans and make money from collectors over the years, the lawsuit alleges.

Other “forgeries” passed off on collectors include several Manning jerseys, two 2012 Super Bowl helmets and a 2004 “rookie season” helmet, according to court papers.

Two-time Super Bowl MVP Manning took part in the scheme so he could hang on to his personal items, according to the documents.

The memorabilia ruse is so common among Giants players and staffers, the documents claim, that team equipment manager Joe Skiba openly discussed Manning’s fake game gear on an official Giants e-mail account.

The lawsuit emerged as Manning’s big brother, Peyton, prepares to lead the Denver Broncos against the Seattle Seahawks in Sunday’s Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium, the Giants’ home field.

A rep for the Giants on Thursday said, “This suit is completely without any merit whatsoever and we will defend it vigorously. We will not otherwise comment on pending litigation.”

In my youth I hooked up with a roadie for the Stones to move some tickets. He was a crazy English dude and I was up for some adventure. I got to meet the band and I got great seats for the show. The interesting bit was the guy would sell anything not nailed down. The economics of that life required it. The tour covered travel and lodging, but pay was minimal. The roadies made their money scalping tickets, selling band stuff (real and fake) moving drugs and trading on their connection to the band. It was very much the carny lifestyle. I’m guessing the people working for pro sports teams have a similar life. They sell anything they can that belongs to the players.

The allegations are part of a civil-racketeering, breach-of-contract, malicious-prosecution and trade-libel suit filed Wednesday in Bergen County Superior Court by sports collector Eric Inselberg.

In one startling claim, the suit says Barry Barone, who has been the Giants’ dry cleaner since 1982, used his Rutherford, NJ, Park Cleaners store to beat up jerseys and other items at the behest of longtime locker-room manager Ed Wagner Jr.

In a 2001 incident, Wagner told Barone “to intentionally damage multiple jerseys to make them appear to have been game-worn when they had not been.”

Inselberg’s lawyer, Brian Brook of Clinton Brook & Peed, said his client walked in to find Barone “using a big pair of scissors to cut up a set of Giants’ 2000 season’s game-issued white jerseys,’’ in order to then “’repair’ those damages” to make the shirts look used.

Then you have the very honest men in the memorabilia business:

Inselberg was indicted in 2011 for memorabilia fraud for selling bogus used sport jerseys from teams.

But federal prosecutors in Rockford, Ill., dropped all the charges in May 2013, telling the judge that “prosecution was no longer appropriate in light of some new facts that were pointed out to us by defense counsel.”

The case was jettisoned two days after Inselberg’s defense lawyers told the court that Giants staffers had lied to the grand jury that indicted him about their relationship with him, in a bid to cover up for the team’s own fake-memorabilia sales.

Wednesday’s lawsuit is Inselberg’s attempt at retribution against the Giants.

The new suit alleges that Wagner, along with Skiba and his brother, Ed, also an equipment manager, were told by team brass to lie to federal investigators and the grand jury about how much Giants sports gear they sold him over the years.

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This excellent column from Steve Sailer hits on something I’ve been mulling over for a while now. I’m not talking about the ethnic stuff. I mean this last bit at the end of his column:

Perhaps it’s time, for the good of your family, for you to study the secrets of successful minorities. Granted, they won’t make America a better country, but maybe it’s a little too late to worry about that anymore.

I had an exchange last week with someone about the future of the country. Specifically the future of the country after the Republicans push through another amnesty. His point, one with which I largely agree, is that amnesty pretty much ends the Right as a force in American politics. The Right has very little influence now, but it is an obstacle that causes problems for the Left and their enablers. Classical Liberalism, the only post-Christian alternative to the Jacobins, will die out in an America with another 30-50 million third world citizens. The political parties will resemble what we see in Europe, international socialism versus national socialism. Any discussion of reducing the role of the state in the lives of the people would be on the fringe.

I fully admit to a degree of sadness at that prospect. For most of my life, I have liked my country. No nation is perfect and a propositional nation like America is always going to be at odds with itself over the defects. That beats the homogenizing and stifling  conformity forced up the citizens of most civilized nations. It certainly beats the barbarism of the uncivilized lands. If you are going to love your country, loving one that loves you back is a good choice. That relationship, however, will soon be a thing of the past. My “countrymen” will have no more in common with me than a guy living in China. My rulers will see me as just another subject, no different than any of the other entries on the spreadsheet. That’s the reason fertility rates in Europe have collapsed. Why would anyone bring someone into a world of strangers?

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