I’ve long said that liberalism is a suicide cult. Surprisingly, the chattering skulls who talk to and about these nuts on a daily basis are mystified by the behavior of the Left. Despite the mountain of evidence to the contrary, they continue to think liberals are rational people who are simply mistaken. Here’s a good example from George Will:

ObamaCare was never intended to remedy anything. I suspect the people who wrote this thing knew, to some degree, that there was never a large cohort of people wanting insurance and unable to get it. The poor have Medicaid. The old have Medicare. That leaves young working people who don’t get insurance through work for some reason. I’ve been working for over 30 years and have always been offered insurance through work. Even McDonalds offers health insurance. The fact is the claims never made any sense. The middle class person needing health insurance, but unable to get it is like big foot, often discussed but never seen.

The real goal of this thing was destruction. The Left is always looking to burn down the existing order. Liberalism is rage dressed up as an ideology. People join mass movements out of self-loathing. Liberalism allows those who rage at their condition to be a part of a movement that promises to vent the collective rage against the world. That’s why all communist propaganda uses images of war and revolution. They promise to break down the existing order and replace it with some ill-defined utopia. The latter is not the selling point. It is the former that gets the convert. They just want to kill people and break things, because they hate themselves and hate everyone around them.

The fixes that will emerge for ObamaCare will all fall into this theme. None will be designed to remedy the destructive elements of the bill. That would simply require repeal of those pieces. Instead, they will offer of new programs that will wreak even more havoc on the system. Premium support, for example, ensures prices for everyone will spike. That’s how subsidies work. The more subsidies offered for education, for example, the faster prices have risen. If public subsidies tamped down prices, college tuition would be effectively zero today. So the fix to ObamaCare will actually be more gasoline on the fire.

Growing up when and where I did, I’m familiar with racism. I never experienced it or witnessed anyone cause harm to another because of their race, but I grew up hearing stories about it, mostly in school. In my home, my parents took the view that treating people of different races poorly was rude. In public, you never aired your opinions about race or other races. It was just rude and we were instructed to never do it.

My first real exposure to a real honest to goodness racist was through a black schoolmate. His father or uncle, I no longer remember, refused to speak with or do business with white people. This was most likely just a boast, as I don’t think it would be possible, even today. My friend told it to me because he thought it was funny and assumed I would think it was funny, which I did. At that age, it was ridiculous.

But, in adulthood I learned like everyone else that race is a thorny subject. All the school lectures remained mythical for someone my age or younger. Only old people now recall when discrimination was permitted. Anyone under the age of fifty grew up watching integrated sports and entertainment, went to integrated schools and worked in jobs with people of other races. Still, race hovers over everything. Jim Crow has been talked to death, but other race issues have been forbidden for so long people no longer know how to discuss them.

One such example is black racism. In America it is OK for a black person to be a public bigot. Al Sharpton has made a career out of being a public bigot. Blacks gladly embrace their racism and think nothing of it. In fact, the people in charge encourage blacks and now the other non-whites groups, to root for their own team and root against whites.  This story buried in the news is a perfect example. Black voters elected a white guy because they thought he was black.

What’s left unsaid, but everyone knows, is he would have had no shot running as a white guy. Despite the fact the voters agreed with him, they would never have voted for him over a black guy. The old white guy obviously knew this and acted accordingly. There’s some attempt to say other factors decided the election, but the fact that the winner actively concealed the fact he is white says he knew what he was doing. He rightly figured out that the incumbent was unpopular, but blacks would never vote against one of their own.

My own view is we would be wise to decouple official racism from personal opinion. Times change and opinions change. Young people today don’t think the word “nigger” has any more emotional value than any other word. I hear young people, white and black, use it amongst themselves. In my day that was a sign of poor upbringing. Whites and black avoided the term out of self-respect. Young people are probably right to devalue it. Some things should be left in the past and archaic racial terms are a good candidate for the memory hole.

At the same time, rooting for your own side or wanting to be around your own kind is perfectly normal. Private discrimination is just a fact of life. Lecturing people about just creates this weird sense of terror. If your private words or private actions are revealed, your life can be destroyed, because you will be condemned as a racist. Unless you’re black or Hispanic or whatever else is washing up in American. Peaceful separation should be the norm and not condemned.

Official racism, however, is not something we should tolerate because it is incompatible with a free society. Even if you think the free society stuff is just nonsense, official racism is unworkable and always fails. As a white guy, I don’t want my government discriminating on racial lines, because it makes my government unnecessarily expensive. That and it gives them an excuse to play favorites within my tribe, not just for my tribe.

That said, I know this will never happen.

This miserable troll accosted me on the MR site today. His wrote:

This coming from a person who, from a very brief perusing of their repulsive blog, thinks that women have used their right to vote in ways that displease him and therefore should have said right revoked; thinks that black people won’t vote for white people despite the fact that this is empirical hogwash; and who openly expresses skepticism of democracy in general linked to virulent sentiments about blacks and Mexicans.

Normally I’d ignore the hysterical queen, but he is a good example of what I had in mind in my prior post. Private racism should be ignored. If black guys prefer not to associate with white guys, that’s their business. If Spanish guys prefer to live apart, that’s their right. The line to draw is in the law. The law should be color blind. Trying to force people to be colorblind in their private lives just opens the door for miserable bigots like Squarely Rooted to make a pest of himself in public. It would be nice if people were fair minded, but the cost of enforcement is way too high. I’d rather live next to Reverend Al than a dirtbag like Squarely Rooted. At least Reverend Al is honest.

Kevin Williamson, way back in 2009 I think, predicted that ObamaCare would collapse and either be repealed or drastically altered. His reasoning was that any attempt to rearrange 1/6th of the US economy was going to end in disaster. The public would be furious and the politicians of both parties would sprint to remedy the problem. Throw in the fact that the mathematics never made sense and it could not last and therefore would not last. I wish I could find the article as it should be framed as an honor to the one man who may have predicted the whole thing. At least it looks like he nailed it, assuming my recollection is correct.

I thought about that when I saw this. We’re seeing a lot of soul searching on the part of Democrats now that the poop has hit the fan with the exchanges, rate hikes and cancellations. Democrats probably believed the marketing from the Left. The argument that this disaster was part of the plan to advance single payer does not hold up. If these guys were that clever, they would not be running for the hills right now. They would have come up with a more clever way to march us to their preferred scheme. As is the case with all conspiracy theories, we have to believe that the conspirators are super geniuses who make elementary mistakes. The people who wrote this bill are not geniuses. They were true believers who thought it would work. They convinced the politicians of it.

Now they have a big problem. Obama and the White House probably don’t care. Obama has always been oddly indifferent to politics. Steve Sailer has thoughts on that, but I’m not sure he is right. Obama is most likely just a guy who does not play well with others, particularly the type who is in politics. As the Israelis have learned, the Democrats in Congress are learning that they cannot rely on this administration to guard their interests. That means they have to figure out how to cut their own deal with the GOP. It also means they may have to cut Obama loose, so to speak. Inside the party that is going to be very difficult. When you have spent the last five years calling anyone who opposed Obama a racist, how do you oppose Obama without opening yourself up to the same charge?

Then there is the natural divide within a party when facing a midterm. Safe Democrats will hold a different view than vulnerable Democrats.  Mary Landrieu will have no choice but to become a vocal opponent of ObamaCare if she expects to remain in the Senate. On the other hand, Elizabeth Warren can be the defender of the faith as she has no fear of the voters. Harry Reid can scheme against both sides to help those with a chance to win over those who are in hopeless races. Landreiu, if she is not careful, could find herself getting the cold shoulder from her party in 2014. That sort of stuff makes it very hard for the party to navigate. At some point, they will have to land on a strategy to unburden themselves of this fiasco.

The trouble is they were not prepared for this. The whole game of social democracy is that people like free stuff. If every free stuff scheme has something close to a majority getting their beak wet, then there’s never a majority in favor of getting rid of it. There may not be a majority getting welfare, but there are plenty of others willing to support what they view as riot insurance. “Better to give them housing and liquor money than have them burning down the city.” The middle class goes along with socialism because they fear social unrest more than the IRS. With massive money creation and borrowing, social democracy looks like the cure to all of life’s problems. The trouble here is there is no benefit. No one is getting the free stuff or the protection from those wanting free stuff. ObamaCare is just a wrecking ball through the existing order.

That’s why the theory in the Forbes article seems right, but the Democrats are not there psychologically. Again, they thought this was going to work. They have spent the last year calling Republicans Hitler loving child rapists. How in the hell can they now expect any help pulling their nuts out of the fire? How can they get their foaming at the mouth supporters to agree to the biggest walk back in political history? Even the most cynical politician has to know this is impossible. Therefore, the more likely scenario is they own it. They put out the word to the press to sell it and they roll out a massive PR campaign next year that promotes the program and blames the GOP for its defects.  They have no other choice.

ObamaCare will collapse, just not now.

Here is the text of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution:

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

This gave women the right to vote anywhere it had been denied up to that point. It is worth noting that many states had extended the franchise to women to some degree. Most sensible people, men and women, knew this was a mistake and kept fighting the idea long after the Amendment passed. The story of female suffrage has been rewritten to fit the modern feminist narrative, but people at the time, including many women, knew this was a bad idea.

For over 4,000 years, people understood the foolishness of allowing women to directly participate in governance. The play, Lysistrata, was written in 411 BC. Fast forward 2300 years and women’s suffrage in America gave us, to quote Judge Roy Bean, “and everything went to hell. While our boys was overseas fighting the Kaiser, the women got Prohibition put in. Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.”

A recent example is the election in Virginia. The Republican lost narrowly to former Clinton bag man, Terry McAuliffe. Most sensible people clearly viewed McAuliffe as a sociopathic maniac, who should never have access to government power. Blacks voted for McAuliffe 98-2. Anyone familiar with the history of sub-Saharan Africa or Detroit knows the story here. That was predictable.

The difference maker was single women. They allegedly went for the lunatic by 42%! In contrast, the Republican won married women by 9 points. Anyone having spent a small amount of time on earth knows that married white women are vastly more sensible than single white women. Married women will share their husband’s suspicion of the state, as a natural threat to family life. Single women see the state as their sugar daddy. The gap between the two groups with regards to voting is stunning.

This is nothing new. The democrats have based their rise to power on the vote of barren spinsters and college sluts. In the 2012 election, they ran a campaign based on the argument that Mitt Romney wanted to rape single white women. It worked. It was not just single white women in that case. Many married white women fell for the argument that Romney wanted sew their legs shut. Women, it turns out get less stupid once married, but a large number remain fools even after landing a man.

Democracy is a terrible way to run a society, but if you are going to have it, you have to limit the vote to people capable of thinking beyond their narrow interests. Girls are too hormonal to make rational choices, so they should be spared the burden of voting. It may even make sense to bar single men up to a certain age, like 25. Regardless, taking the vote from single women is the only way forward that can maintain this fragile democracy.

It’s increasingly difficult to be a normal man and engage in the general culture. One reason is the people in the content business, especially the news business, seem like they are from another planet. They say things that are so at odds with daily reality you wonder if they ever go outside. Of course, most of what they write and say is propaganda. They don’t think of it that way. They are just enthusiastically repeating the articles of faith of their class. The news is just a hallelujah chorus for the cult of modern liberalism.

A good example is the brouhaha over the Miami Dolphins drama. The sports press, despite not knowing any details, has crafted this elaborate narrative into which they are going to force the participants. The “culture in the locker room” is one element. All of those terrible alpha males, you see. Of course, the white guy is pure evil because he used the magic word, despite doing in front of black guys who were laughing and egging him on while everyone is partying. The semi-black guy is the victim, despite no one on his team coming to his defense.

One reason for this weird disconnect is that the sporting press is dominated by beta males who find traditional male behavior threatening and distasteful. There’s a class element too. Football players may have gone to college, but football is decidedly working class. You don’t excel in the sport without being a physically tough man. To be a physically tough man means rejecting a central part of modern liberal culture. Like cops, football players accept the human condition at face value, which means accepting the biological diversity.

Another reason for this is Progressive culture is feminine. Women can be ruthless, but they don’t have the same hierarchical view of social organization as males. Men compete to establish the pecking order in the group. Women compete for the attention of males. That’s how the general culture operates now. George Bush once said, something along the lines that if one person hurts, government must act. That’s the general view of the over class. It is not winners and losers, it is just losers. As long as there are losers, no one can be a winner.

That’s why sports reporting is so weird. Normal men look at this story and just assume the one guys is a pussy and the other guys are assholes. Every normal man knows the world is divided into predators, victims and the men who make the world run. At the fringes, like a locker-room or a prison, the predators attack the weak.  So many of the people in the sports media grew up as victims of the playground bullies, they can’t understand what they are covering.

Technological leaps change how humans relate to the natural world and to one another, but they can also change people. The reason is the technological leap changes the environment of people in ways that change selection pressure. The move from hunter gatherer to agriculture is a good example. The sorts of traits that are favored by the former is not the same that is favored by the latter. Greg Cochran and Henry Harpending made this case in the book The 10,000 Year Explosion.

The thing is though, the changes are slow. There’s never been a technological change that has killed off a portion of the population carrying some mutation deemed deleterious in the new technological environment. The changes described by Cochran and Harpending happened over many generations. A person living in the 5th century was not all that different from a person living in the same place during the 10th century. People got a little smarter, a little more peaceful, but people remained essentially the same.

We could be on the cusp of the first great biological revolution introduced by human technological advance. If this is true, and it is most likely is true, the next great technological advance will change humans. If we can alter the DNA of human embryos, we will alter the DNA of human embryos. All the blather about bioethics is just that, as we have seen in every other human endeavor. If people can do it, and see an advantage in doing it, then people will do it, no matter the ethical implications.

Since most of the limits on our life spans are genetic, the most logical use of such technology is to extend our lives. This could be something done on fully formed humans at some point. This would not require changing our DNA, but changing how certain genes express. Of course, “fixing” genetic defects in the embryo could eliminate a wide ranges of diseases. The result of that is a new generation of humans capable of living much longer and living a much healthier than all previous humans.

There may be a hard coded upper limit to life span that is beyond genetics, but curing the diseases of old age would be well within the realm of possible. Aldus Huxley probably got it exactly right when he described a future where humans lived in their prime years right up until death. Since every human culture is based around the inevitability of death, big chunks of it become useless. Why bother developing a relationship with God, for example, if you will never meet him. Immortality redefines mortality.

Of course, another logical step is to improve off-spring. As soon as parents can pay to increase the good traits in their children, they will do it. If we can change our DNA to increase IQ, we will. Getting faster, bigger, stronger, better looking and whatever else we want could be possible if science can alter the DNA. How long before the Chinese create a class of nine foot guys with sprinter speed and near perfect coordination so they can dominate the Olympics? The bet is a week after they figure out how to do it.

Of course, this is still science fiction. The amount we know about the human genome is a drop in the ocean of what can be known. Having a general understanding of genes and gene mutation is a long way from making super men. Still, technology has a habit of moving quickly. It’s also possible we don’t have to know a whole lot in order to make better people or cure some diseases. As agriculture showed, small changes can have enormous downstream consequences of human beings.

Ken Cuccinelli, the failed gubernatorial candidate in Virginia, is a bit of mystery, unless you live in Virginia or you are a political junkie. He was the attorney general and he is conservative on social issues. No one claims he wants to stone gays in public or horse whip adulterers, so he is probably conventional in his politics. He appears to be the standard issue socially conservative Republican that has been around for years.

Terry McAuliffe, in contrast, is a well-known quantity. He is a sociopath, who spent most of the 1990’s defending the indefensible on cable chat shows.  Political flaks are notorious liars, much like attorneys and boxing promoters, but this guy was unusually slimy. The aging shock jock, Don Imus, told him to his face that he makes him want to bleach his eyeballs after seeing him. The guy’s post-Clinton career was one shady business deal after another, all involving ripping off taxpayers. He’s now the governor of Virginia.

This is why democracies murder themselves, or at least why we say it. There is a large number of adults in every population incapable of participating in public decisions. They are stupid, lazy or criminal. They lack the ability to put aside their narrow immediate interests in favor of the long-term interests of society. In the case of Virginia, a large number of voters live in NoVa and work in do-nothing jobs for the government or for do-nothing government contractors.

In the Tidewater area and around Richmond, you have large numbers of blacks who look at the government as their sugar daddy. Anyone promising more hand-outs gets their vote and the democrat is always the one promising more handouts.  Added to that are South American peasants, who are allowed to vote. That reason is they will gladly vote for the Democrat. In fact, they will let someone vote for them, so they don’t have to show up at the polls. Election fraud and immigration are almost synonymous now.

McAuliffe went around the state promising these folks he would rob the taxpayers and property holders and give some of it to these various welfare cases. Of course, they voted for him. It is a microcosm of what is going in in the country. The number of people in favor of robbing the productive class has grown to a point where you must get some of that vote in order to win. The deadbeats are oddly motivated to vote.The taxpayer is often so discouraged, they don’t bother. 

Then there is the morality angle. The Democrats turn every race into a referendum on the bad whites, those people who oppose immigration, want tom live free of blacks and and think local autonomy is a good thing. They are the bad guys, because they are the bad whites who are not ashamed to be white. That means your choice in an election is often between two good whites or between a good white and bad white. Publicly supporting the bad white is to go against public morality and no one relishes that.

This is nothing new. The Greeks eventually voted themselves to death. Alcibiades was the Bill Clinton of his day. He had no real accomplishments to his name, but he was able to charm the average Greek. In fact, he charmed them into invading Sicily, which brought Greek democracy to a bad end. The Romans eventually abandoned democracy for a dictator, leading to such wonderful guys as Caligula, but even a degenerate lunatic is often viewed as an upgrade of a champion of democracy like Terry McAuliffe.

Anyone who has played sports, committed crimes, belonged to criminal organization, served in the military or been to prison knows that males can be violently cruel. On that list, two are considered honorable activities, while the other three are counted as dishonorable. Yet, the qualities one needs to thrive in all of them are the same. You have to be tough minded. You have to be willing to use violence to establish your place in the group. You have to overcome physical fear and take physical punishment.

In all cases, you will be confronted by other males who want to dominate you, sometimes in extremely unpleasant ways. In every locker room, there are guys trying to push around other guys. You earn respect from your teammates by pushing back. In prison, you better be willing to kill that guy or you’re going to be his punk. Men can be horrible to other men, but modern times and a feminized culture push this truth to the fringes. Still, it is an immutable part of the human condition.

Once in a while it creeps into view. A current example is the case of Miami Dolphin’s lineman Richie Incognito. Reportedly, he harassed a teammate to the point where the guy quit the team and went to get psychiatric help. I’m quite sure that every player on the team knew what was going on and many participated in it. The victim was probably despised by everyone because he was taking it. No man respects another man who will not fight back.

The over-class can preach the contrary in TV and movies, but no one respects a wimp, a pussy or a punk. That’s why no one came to the guy’s aid. Incognito is a horrible human being, by all accounts, but as far as the other players were concerned, he was the better man. It’s terrible and it is cruel, but it is the way men are to one another. This poor sap will get help, but he will never play football again. Like the Ned Beatty character from Deliverance, he can never look another man in the eye again.

Incognito has been suspended and will face some sort of punishment. As long as he can play the position, he will get work and be welcomed by other players. They may think he is a bad guy, but they will respect him. That’s the other side of this sort of thing and why campaigns against bullying are pointless. Men, by nature, respect the bully more than the bullied. In the evolution of man, being counted on to fight is an important asset. When the other tribe is coming for your women, the wimp is a liability.

I’ve never been a believer in supplements. The reason is I’m a natural skeptic and the claims always set of my BS detector. The other reason is I know a bit about nutrition and science. Humans have evolved as omnivores. We can get the nutrition we need from a wide range of sources. In modern times, with so much food available to us, the odds of missing something important are close to zero. It’s why no one calls in sick because their rickets or scurvy is acting up. We have more than enough food.

All of those fat people waddling in and out of Walmart are not lacking in essential vitamins or minerals. Similarly, the health benefits of these things are dubious. It is rare that you see real science backing a claim. Even in cases where there is some correlation between a supplement and a positive life outcome, the benefits are weak. Take a vitamin may help in some small way, but not enough to worry about not taking one. That said, most of it is harmless so taking a multivitamin every day is not going to kill you.

At least that’s what I used to think. I read stuff like this and wonder how many people have been harmed by this crap. Whenever I watch TV, I see ambulance chasers looking for victims of one drug or another. Often, the causes of the alleged injury is something I heard marketed just the year before. Maybe it is just another scam, but some portion are legitimate. Given that these companies appear to be jamming whatever they can find into gelcaps and selling it to the public, I suspect a lot more harm is being done than we know.

Among their findings were bottles of echinacea supplements, used by millions of Americans to prevent and treat colds, that contained ground up bitter weed, Parthenium hysterophorus, an invasive plant found in India and Australia that has been linked to rashes, nausea and flatulence.

Two bottles labeled as St. John’s wort, which studies have shown may treat mild depression, contained none of the medicinal herb. Instead, the pills in one bottle were made of nothing but rice, and another bottle contained only Alexandrian senna, an Egyptian yellow shrub that is a powerful laxative. Gingko biloba supplements, promoted as memory enhancers, were mixed with fillers and black walnut, a potentially deadly hazard for people with nut allergies.

I suppose a terrible farting spell is not the end of the world, but it is not something you should expect from a pill being sold in America. We have this massive regulatory state and yet they allow crooks to sell fart pills to the public without any consequences. Giving people a “powerful laxative” when they are hoping for a little help with their depression is downright monstrous. Unless what is bringing you low is a lack of fiber, and that seems highly unlikely, giving depressed person the runs sounds quite cruel.

All of this is fraud and is easily policed. The trouble is we have a government that is no longer interested in this basic functions. These require effort and risk by the bureaucrats within the custodial state. These companies have money and lawyers. They can fight back. Crimes like fraud are allowed to go on because the state has no desire to enforce these laws. Yet, someone with a real drug that can help real people will be faced with the wall of regulation promulgated by the state.