I am not a young person, but I am not old yet either. That means I am less inclined to adopt new technology than a 20-something, but I will if it is practical. The older you get, the definition of “practical” tends to narrow. A teenager views a smart phone as a necessity, while a senior views it as a novelty. I have a smart phone and rely on it a great deal, but I also know I could get along without it, because I remember a time when these things did not exist. The dark ages get a bad rap. It was not so dark.

Facebook was sort of the reverse. In my youth I was an early adopter of mobile phones so I moved up with the technology. Facebook sis not exist in my youth, so I was a late adopter. Anyway, one of my friends badgered me into signing onto Facebook a few years back. I setup a page and did nothing with it. I added friends for the first month or so then I stopped. I would log in daily to see what was posted and maybe comment on occasion, but mostly it was a daily peak into on the lives of friends and some strangers.

The fact is, I never really used it much. I like my friends, but I have no need or desire to communicate with them daily. E-mail is better anyway. The friends of friends who come into view from time to time are not very interesting. It seems that the more prolific users are crazy. They are like drug fiends who will do anything to get attention on-line. They quickly run out of good ways to get attention, so they lurch into the unlimited supply of bad ways to get attention. You learn a lot about people a a result. None of it good.

My liberal friends have some real wackos in their circle. If you are logging onto a website of a politician to tell them and the world how much you love them, you need a psychiatrist, not a platform. Otherwise, the daily fare on Facebook is boring scraps of information about the collection of average people in my life. God bless them, but they are just not that interesting. Neither am I. I read a lot and know a lot of things that most people don’t know, but I am no more interesting than the next guy.

So, I deactivated my account. It seems that may be the one thing I have in common with young people. Facebook is now losing its cool factor with the young. I’ve always said it was a fad, but I started to wonder if I was mistaken. It turns out I was right. We know that a very large number of the accounts on Facebook are fake. We also know many are dormant. More important, we know that most of us are not that interesting. Facebook is like reality TV, without the parts created by writers to make it interesting.

The whole rationale for the company, however, is they get young people hook ed on the site, so they can sell them stuff or have the ad makers sell them stuff. If it turns out that they do not get young people, then you have to wonder if Facebook is a viable business, at least in the long run. The myth of marketing is that you have to sell young people in order to sell older people. Maybe that’s false, but if they are not selling young people, what are they selling to old people? That’s never been very clear with Facebook

Putting that aside, I wonder if social media has the legs experts claim. For all of human history, we lacked social media. Humans socialized in person. We have evolved to be good at it. We have never been good at communicating through writing or pictures. Almost all human knowledge is passed along in-person. A good way to look at it, consider the telephone. People will call one another to arrange a get together. No one meets with someone to arrange a telephone call. That would be absurd.

Telephone technology is a decent alternative to in-person communication, but not the preferred one. Social media like Facebook is closer to phone tag than anything else. It is people leaving message for one another on the refrigerator. Again, it works to a point, but it is never replacing normal human in-person interaction. Then there is the openness of these platforms. Despite the madness for an open society by the usual suspects, the truth is white people like their privacy. Facebook is anti-privacy.

Every society has its lunacy. Almost always, it stems from ignorance. Ancient people believed that the gods arrange the stars and made the sun rise and set. They lacked the capacity to understand the science we now take for granted. Their mythologies provided a useful explanation to a natural phenomenon. What seems nutty to people of today, made perfect sense 2500 years ago. It explained what they saw and that was enough.

Late 19th century Americans fell for all sorts of patent medicines, thinking they would improve their health. In most cases they were harmless scams. In some cases they were poison. Today, people believe organic food is better than the regular stuff. They don’t know that most of what they buy as organic is the same stuff as the non-organic produce sitting in the next bin. Again, it is mostly ignorance. You’ll find that the people with the weird food fetishes know the least about how food gets from farm to market.

That said, this is weird beyond words. Since the dawn of time, we have known that humans come in one of two sexes. We know a lot about the genetic differences between men and women. The Olympics actually tests female athletes to ensure they are not dudes. There is some very tiny portion of people who possess both male and female genetics, but you have a better chance of being struck by lightning twice on your way to cashing your winning lottery ticket than every meeting such a person.

The people going in for “gender reassignment” are not in that group. They are mentally ill in the same way people who think they are space aliens or animals. No matter how earnest and sincere an “otherkin” may be, they are not animals. Indulging them is not an act of kindness. It is cruelty. Allowing someone to live in a disturbed state of delusion is cruel and we should not do it. Encouraging people to mutilate themselves in order to act out their delusions is monstrous. The people promoting it should be stoned.

That said, you can see where this is headed. First there is the demand that these degenerates be tolerated. Then they have to be accepted. Then the morality flips and you are no longer a good person for being indifferent. Now you must celebrate their degeneracy as some sort of moral good. In the near future, normal people will have their lives ruined for not showing the proper enthusiasm for the guy in the sundress chasing after the kids at the playground. This madness can’t end fast enough.

One costly side effect of spread of mass media is that likable stupid people have the opportunity to spread nutty ideas. Walter Cronkite was a hugely popular because he perfected the avuncular style that people naturally trust. He seemed like a nice, thoughtful older man who was only there to inform the viewers. We now know he was a pathological liar and willfully misinformed his viewers on behalf of the Left

The cable news channels and network news operations are always looking for that person who can gain the trust of the viewer. If they can peddle the old time religion at the same time, that person is getting very rich on TV. A good example on the Right is financial pundit Larry Kudlow. On TV and radio he comes off as a super-nice, old financial hand, whose wealth of experience makes him uniquely qualified to assess the economy. He gets treated as a sage, despite being wrong about most of the things he discusses.

For all his wrongness, he is a good bellwether. He can be counted on to pitch the company line. In his case, the company is the GOP and the go along to get along gang of Conservative Inc. Seeing this today, we can assume that the GOP will be satisfied to say they are right, but otherwise do nothing to claw back some of the last five years. The signals are being sent to the party and its cheerleaders that the cost is clear. No one will expect them to actually do anything once they have some power.

The usual suspects will churn out some books about how to repeal this or reform that liberal policy. The GOP will offer up candidates long on complaints about the welfare state, but short on desire to do anything about it. The GOP will soon offer up a laundry list of things to fix it. The dynamic of the next 15 years as the boomers age off will be one where one party promises to fix it and the other promises to expand it. The logic of it is now off-limits. Instead, we are looking at a long losing fight against mathematics.

The line now from Conservative Inc is, “it will collapse under its own weight.” That’s true, but it will take 15 years. In a business, pushing off bankruptcy for fifteen years is a good thing. Most businesses don’t last that long. For government, the longer reform is delayed, the worse the cost of collapse is when it comes. In fifteen years, there will be a lot of white people expecting their checks and a lot of brown people expecting their free stuff. When the money runs out, things will get ugly in a hurry.

That’s the insidiousness of social democracy. You get the benefits up front, but push the cost way past the point when current office holders are gone. Whatever the structure, democracy ends up as a some type of tragedy of the commons. All of the incentives are for living in the moment and pushing the costs off to the next generation. It’s why every democracy ends in dictatorship. It’s also why the so-called conservatives are just fraudsters. They know this, yet they go along with it because it pays well.

Over at Marginal Revolution, there is a long thread on the callous indifference of liberals to the damage they have caused with ObamaCare. I called out an odious commenter name Michael Foody for it. A striking feature of modern liberalism is the bizarre pleasure they take in the suffering of others. In my youth, they put a lot of effort into claiming they were motivated by compassion for the suffering of others. The poor, afflicted and oppressed were turned into posters they could wave around to close off debate. It was all nonsense, of course. Hitler did the same thing as did Stalin. They had different tastes in victims, but the trick was the same. Manufacture a reason for people to stop thinking so they will go along with your scheme. The tens of millions murdered by the twin towers of leftist European politics shows how effective it is as a strategy.

Modern liberals have abandoned much of this. They still have their imaginary victims and imaginary bogeymen, but they are not as practiced in the public sympathy acts. If you read the MR thread, you see quite a few commentators who appear to delight in the suffering of their fellow citizens. The Brookings Institute guy comes off like a Soviet Commissar when asked about the number of Ukranians they have starved. You can just imagine the fascist prick muttering, “Everything within the state, nothing without…” as he dismisses the complaints of those screwed over by this law. I suspect the truth is, they really are happy that people they don’t like, middle Americans, are getting screwed by this. The Left has believed the middle is the enemy since they set up the guillotine in the 18th century.

That’s the central truth of the cult of modern liberalism. They are motivated by a deep hatred of those they see as their natural enemies. Southern whites, the religious and the middle class come in for particular attention. Liberal policy choices are reactionary in that they are based on what they think these groups want. A harmless old woman like Paula Deen is savaged because she is popular with Southern Whites. The governor of Texas is mocked and ridiculed because he is publicly religious. Sarah Palin is the devil because she is 100% middle American. Normal people have seen her type at the PTA meeting, the soccer field and the grocery store. That’s why the Left loathed her so deeply and instinctively. She was the typical American mom.

As ObamaCare rolls out, it increasingly appears the bill was written to cause maximum damage to middle class institutions. They have rules that force the religious to pay for abortion and birth control. There are rules that make it difficult for small business to offer health coverage. There are rules that punish families. Now we are seeing that the new policies that are offered up as a replacement are two and three times as expensive as the old policies, while covering less. Yet, the ease of getting on Medicaid is much easier. This latest spasm of social engineering is another example of the top and bottom ganging up on the middle to inflict damage on those who pull the wagon.

Most women think the word “cunt” is an ugly word. It is, but a useful one. It perfectly describes the woman in this story. According to her testimony, she intends to hand out letters to fat kids on Halloween.

The letter, adorned with a smiling pumpkin graphic, begins “Happy Halloween and Happy Holidays Neighbor!”

“Your child is, in my opinion, moderately obese and should not be consuming sugar and treats to the extent of some children this Halloween season.

“My hope is that you will step up as a parent and ration candy this Halloween and not allow your child to continue these unhealthy eating habits.”

In the age of the beta male, this will not be much of a problem, but in a better age, this cunt would be driven from the neighborhood. When I was a kid, the parents would probably have helped us drive the bitch from town. Heck, the cops may have pitched in to help. Mob rule and vigilante justice are not to be encouraged, but they are not without some value. Some people are just assholes or cunts, as the case may be. They only respond to things that leave a scar. That means you have to punch them in the face once in a while to keep them from being a public nuisance.

Let’s hope the next time we hear from Cheryl it is a story about how she had to leave town.

This post has already been linked to 1692 times!

The libertarians are always banging their pots and pans about legalizing weed. It is fair to say they are obsessed over it. For as long as I’ve been alive, every conversation with a libertarian has always turned into a debate about legalizing drugs. While they are right about many of the consequences of the drug war, they are unrealistic about the consequences of legalization. The easiest way to think about it is this. A mother is driving down the road with her pre-teen kids and on the radio is a splashy ad about the weed sale at WalMart. In a society that has banned cigarette ads, it seems unlikely that we would tolerate the open sale of drugs, even mild ones like weed. In other words, libertarianism sounds great in the lab, but it would never hold up in the wild. The people will never allow it.

Even if you can work out a convenient lie like “medical marijuana” so you can have legal weed that exists on the fringe of society, there are other problems. This is a good example. If these two coaches were at a bar getting hammered, they would maybe face some sort of reprimand or a trip to a phoney counselor. That’s never going to happen with smoking weed, like these idiots were apparently doing. The public may be willing to legalize weed to a limited extent, they will never embrace it like beer. Punishing employees for doing that which is perfectly legal will be problematic. The public, faced with a choice between banning weed or allowing their kid’s teachers to do bong hits in the teacher’s lounge will prefer prohibition.

It is the central problem with libertarianism and liberalism. Both make assumptions about humans that are not based in reality. Humans are not moist robots. We have prejudices and preferences that are not always rational from a distance. Black kids, for example, join black student groups in college despite the fact it works against them. They just want to hang out with other kids like them. In social gatherings, women hang out together, often in the kitchen, while the men find their own space. The women can all be fiery feminists and the men beta males, but it happens anyway. Some things just don’t make sense if you think humans are rational in the way your iPad is rational.

If you give people, those irrational people, the freedom to arrange things the way they choose, they will inevitably choose to do things that are not liberal or not libertarian. This is not such a problem with liberalism as they don’t mind using force. Liberals are the intellectual heirs of Hobbes, not Locke. The libertarians have a big problem. On the one hand they want to let people have the choice to smoke week. On the other, they don’t want those same people to vote for politicians who promise to ban it. There’s a reason why we have never seen a libertarian society.

This post has already been linked to 878 times!

It took a while, but they finally banned me from posting at National Review. It seems my accurate portrayal of the execrable Ramesh Ponnuru finally did it. I called him Rich Lowry’s house boy, which must have finally forced their hand. The fact that he is Rich Lowry’s house boy did not seem to matter. Ponnuru is a hack who gets paid because he is willing to lick the boots of whoever pays him. Lowry keeps him around mostly for color. If Ramesh were a white guy named Smith he would be waxing Lowry’s car, not writing for his magazine. But, that’s how it goes with the upper-middle class twits these days. It is all appearances and gestures. The fact that a clown shoe like Lowry is in charge of National Review shows how pointless it is to support these organizations. “All movements become a business and then a racket.” National Review is now just a money raising racket for upper-middle class mediocrities.

It will be interesting to see how long National Review stays afloat. Buckley bankrolled the thing as it never made money, even when it actually stood for something. The ridiculous twink in charge now has no money of his own and limited ability to raise it from rich donors. Maybe Buckley set things up before he croaked so they could carry on, but that never stops the next generation from screwing it up in time. Their recent fundraisers have been disasters, forcing them to extend their deadlines. The quality of the product has declined sharply. The only worthwhile writer in their shop is Kevin Williamson. As happened with Henry Luce, the subsequent generations sell out the work of the founder eventually. Time went from solid new magazine to a looney tunes liberal absurdity. National Review will probably look like The Nation in a few years.

It was fun trying to get banned.

This post has already been linked to 863 times!

The great gift that allowed Martin Luther King to rise to the top of black America and successfully lead the Civil Rights Movement was his ability to read and manipulate upper middle-class white America. By most accounts, King was a lot like Al Sharpton. He was personally corrupt and a degenerate. He possessed  few skills other than his ability to perform in public. What he had was a sixth sense about the ruling class whites. He knew that they lacked the appetite for confrontation and were generally in favor of dismantling segregation. Northern whites wanted it gone because they hate southern whites, but upper class southerners wanted it gone too. King played on that divide as you can see in his Letter From Birmingham Jail. The subtle point, made in the context of the events that got him locked up, was that whites had a choice. They could negotiate with him or fight with the brothers on the street. It is, negotiate with me or else.

King knew that the white folks in charge had no appetite for a fight. The faction willing to fight would be abandoned and used as a scapegoat. Later, guys like Jackson and Sharpton turned this trick into a racket. They would threaten to riot until they got paid. Jackson became a millionaire shaking down large companies. Sharpton is less rich, but he certainly lives well scaring honkey liberals into paying his way. In post-Colonial Africa, we see the same act, but in a different context. The white colonials were looking to put a black face on their possessions and went looking for the best and brightest Africans. The Brits went so far as to send them back to England for training and education. Eventually, some rose up and took control as the colonials withdrew.

The thing you saw over and over with the new African leaders was they all possessed an ability to sooth the fears of the whites. Time after time, the colonials were lead to believe that these guys were more like them than the typical African. They held no ill will toward them and would continue on the policies established by the whites. Ian Smith of Rhodesia, a skeptic of British policy, was even won over. Once they gained power, however, the new black rulers set about slaughtering anyone they thought was a threat. Eventually, that meant turning on the white farmers and administrators. In some cases, like Zanzibar, the bloodbath came quickly and brutally. In all cases, however, the initial phase was the ruling class whites being charmed by the new black leaders.

We are seeing something similar with Barak Obama. It turns out that his only real skill is the ability to make upper-middle class white liberals do stuff for him. Otherwise, the guy is incompetent. You see it in this story from the LA Times, of all places.  This is the basic stuff of governance. Governments spy on one another. They get caught. They are always prepared for both so as not to look foolish. Yet, this administration is incapable of this basic duty. Pick an item and the only thing Obama has been able to do well is rally upper-middle class white liberals to defend him from his critics. Everything else has been a mess.

Americans are now getting see up close why Africa has failed. We elected the Robert Mugabe of America politics as President.

This post has already been linked to 785 times!

According to a Danish economist, I’m a racist. The reason is I made the rather observation that Denmark has few NAM’s and that has a big impact on how their social services work. Judging from his post, I think merely pointing out the lack of a NAM population is racist. That’s not a surprise. We have reached a point that any mention of race or issues related to race is forbidden. I call it observationalism. It is the opposite of whatever causes people to say, “I don’t see race.” I see that on TV sometimes. I guess it means that someone has become so pure, they literally cannot tell the race of other people or themselves.

I thought about that while reading this story. Through the whole thing, get no hint of the ethnic element of the story. There’s a Spanish guy, maybe.  Pedro DeJesus is most likely Hispanic, but I’m probably violating some law by assuming that from his name. Otherwise, this could be a group of Swedes hunting down a Mongolian in a predominantly Nigerian neighborhood. You would think that the news account would mention something about the people involved. After all, a killer or killers are on the loose. Knowing something about them that could maybe lead to their arrest would be useful. Instead, we get “We’re told the suspect wore a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt.”

Good grief.

I saw this on Drudge this morning. I find it odd in these times that so many things get tossed down the memory hole, only to pop back up later. The truly odd part is everyone did forget about them. In this case, it was well known when the crime occurred that the crime was not what the NYTimes claimed. They massaged the facts to fit the prevailing worldview amongst their readership. They may have even believed their own BS as these people are zealots. They had all the bogeymen right there in the story – rednecks, flyover country, western outfits. Shepherd, of course, had the right look. Liberals prefer their homosexuals to be of the twink variety, not the bear variety. It all made sense to the hive mind of the NYTimes. When skeptics questioned the veracity of their claims, it was easy for them to dismiss the critics as right-wing homophobes.

Now there is a book from a professional homo challenging all of the claims. The evidence is pretty clear that the three men knew one another. They certainly did drugs together and maybe sold drugs together. One of them was certainly gay or at least sampled the penis on occasion. The murder was the result of the same stupid shit we see every day from the lower classes. Drugs, money and sex are always the reason. With white trash, money is usually the reason, but drugs is a close second. Black kill more often over drugs and then money. Sex is a third as morality of any sort long dissipated in the lower classes, but a lover’s spat does result in killing once in a while. That was the case here. Three druggies that may have been homos together got into a dispute and one of them ended up dead.

This post has already been linked to 901 times!