When it was revealed that the US government was reading everyone’s e-mails and tapping their calls, some not so well informed people recommended Tor as one way to keep the Feds out of your e-mail. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be totally false. Tor was never a foolproof way to be anonymous on-line and it is entirely possible tor was always a honey pot. According to this Bloomberg story, not only was the network hacked by the Feds, it has some rather big security flaws.

The fact that the funding for the project comes from the Department of Defense should have been a clue, but people want to believe there is a way to outwit the collective might of the tech industry and the imperial government. of course, the rumors leaking from the FBI to the main stream media could be psyops. They can’t crack Tor, so they leak that they have, hoping people will stop using it. If Tor collapses, some other option will take its place, maybe created by the Feds. Such is life in the surveillance state.

The handful of Progressives who care about privacy say the solution is to pass a bunch of privacy laws like the Europeans. The Euros do have a more adversarial relationship with the Tech giants, because of their natural anti-Americanism. In reality, the American Left likes to talk about Europe, as it allows them to carry on like they are citizens of the world, rather than local bumpkins.The idea that the US government will limit himself is laughable, but no American thinks clearly about this stuff.

The Left has always been deranged about this stuff. They will trust the government to police itself, but they assume every corporation is out to get them. This in spite the fact their new ruler is expanding the surveillance state, while giving the store away to the tech giants. Of course, the American Left has never been consistent. Even so, 5,000 years of human history tell us that those with power will exercise it and eventually abuse it. It is why The Founders limited it and diffused it.

The fact is, the state can get away with just about anything, as long as the bulk of the people think they safe, fed and entertained. Further, if the abuse is not direct, as in agents of the state knocking down doors, people tend to rationalize it. The government spying on everyone is read by 90% of people as “the government is spying on them.” Lather on some talk about Muslims trying to blow up the world and most people will view opposition to the surveillance state as subversion.

Nothing happens until the money runs out. The America middle class is willing to sit on its hands doing as they are told as long as they have their Olive Garden and sportsball on the television. When that ends, then we will see things change. When there’s no more money to fund the welfare state, the welfare state ends. When there is no more money to borrow to fund the Imperial Army, the Empire ends. When there’s no more money for the America surveillance services, that will end.

One of the things you learn when you go from working class to middle class is that the men get softer the further you go up the class ladder. By softer I mean less inclined to throw a punch. At the lower end of the scale, you better be able to back up your words with your fists or a knife or a gun. Otherwise, you better know how to keep your mouth shut and steer clear of trouble. In elite society, alpha males are quick with the witty jibe and enforce their dominance with clever repartee. Careful politicking, networking and favor trading is how one advances in the upper classes. Words, not deeds, are the currency of the rich. In the lower classes, too much talking can get you killed.

I thought about that as Obama stumbled and bumbled is way back from the brink of war yesterday. He and all of his toadies, coat holders and rump swabs are from the same world. Upper middle and upper class childhoods. Prep schools then elite colleges. After college it was law school, government service and perhaps stints at elite Wall Street firms to take care of the finances, then eventually service in the upper reaches of government or perhaps an NGO. The closest any of these folks ever got to a fight was a spat at the gym. You’re not going to find anyone who has been punched in the face.

In the hermetically sealed world of American politics, this is not big thing. Everyone is playing by the same rules of the pseudo-meritocracy. Obama played the game better than most and was able to parlay his race into the top job. In foreign policy, things are a bit different. In the Syria crisis, one of the major players is Vladimir Putin. He has probably killed people as a member of the KGB. He has certainly ordered people killed as he has gone up the food chain. He’s not Ivan the Terrible, but he is a genuine bad ass who made it to the top of the heap in a world where mistakes get you killed or let you kill your rival. Putin has been punched in the face.

You may think I’m overdoing it with Putin, but consider another major player. That would be Assad of Syria. He could easily have negotiated a deal to leave Syria and settle in Europe. Hell, he could do a deal with Obama and moved to New York City. Instead, he stays in Syria, fighting the rebels. He has ordered his military to kill men, women, children, pets and cattle. According to various reports, 100,000 civilians have been killed since this thing started. It takes a genuine badass to be in charge of a tribe willing to kill anyone in their way. Assad may have got to his place through nepotism, but he remains in power by killing anyone who challenges him.

You can go through the entire roster of players in this story, Jews Arabs and Persians, and find a whole bunch of seriously bad dudes. The thing about bad dudes, whether they are Arab dictators or the president of the local Hell’s Angels chapter, is they have no illusions about the human condition. They trust no one and expect everything. They also know their limits. Sonny at the biker bar knows he is not talking you out of your interests. The House of Saud knows the only way to stay in power is to use it. Talking about it does nothing. They are not beheading homosexuals in Riyadh because they have nothing better to do.

That’s why Obama & Co were made into fools by Putin and Assad. These are men fully equipped to deal with the realities of that part of the world. They have no illusions about what can be done. Obama and his people walk around thinking that a clever speech or well crafted argument is going to get everyone to do what they say. That’s how it has always worked for them. It is how they were trained. Again, they have never even met a guy who has been punched in the face, much less had to compete with him. The result is they lost this round to Russia and our influence in the world is continues to evaporate.

The first time I heard of modern supper clubs was from John Derbyshire. I don’t recall the specifics, just that he was a member of one in New York City. I want to say it was in one of his podcasts, but I don’t recall. That’s not important. I was surprised to learn such things were still going on. It seemed like a thing Victorians would do or perhaps rich people in the roaring twenties. When I think of supper clubs, the Jacobin Club is what comes to mind. Something clandestine and slightly heretical. I decided to see if any of these things existed in my part of the world and sure enough, they were around and not very secret about it. I just chalked it up to one of those things that was unknown to me but well known to most others. It is a big world, after all.

I saw this and immediately was reminded of it again. It turns out they are not legal and perhaps even subversive. Now the city intends to round up the miscreants and shut down their clubs. I suppose the next time we hear from John Derbyshire will be in the police blotter. It sounds absurd, but this is New York City. They want to regulate the amount of soda you can drink. They have been having the police hassle NAM males who are foolish enough to cross into Manhattan. This is not a place that thinks personal liberty and freedom of association have a place in their society. The mayor has been jetting around the country trying to get legislatures to strip citizens of their right to self-defense. What seems absurd today is conventional wisdom in New York City tomorrow.

All joking aside, it is one of those little things, a blade of grass stabbing through the asphalt, that encourages me a bit. Tocqueville found American’s obsession with what he called associations to be an important part of what made American liberty work:

The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

The fact that even in New York City, citizens are willing to commit little acts of subversion in league with others, often strangers, says the flame has not been extinguished entirely. The current arrangements cannot last and that means they will not last. The arithmetic makes it so. The question is what comes next. If Putin is right and we’re just a bunch of chumps like everyone else, then what comes next is going to be grim. If these little dinner clubs are any indication, maybe what comes next will not be so bad, perhaps even better than what we see now. It is a reason to be pessimistic in the short term, but optimistic in the long term.

Lion of the Blogosphere is wringing his hands over the prospect of a left-wing loon becoming the next mayor. I think it is rational to have some concern. New York has become quietly intolerant since the 1970′s and that intolerance has made the city a better place. By that I mean the citizens decided enough was enough and elected politicians willing to clean up the crime, urban blight and dysfunctional public sector. Rudy cleaned up the tourist areas and public parks. He reformed the police department. Bloomberg left things in place and convinced liberal New Yorkers that it was OK to be tough on crime. He also showed how they could avert their gaze from the realities of gentrification. That reality is rich white people buy up the apartments, evict the brown people and then move in the kids of rich people. If Richmond enacted the same polices as New York, liberals would be staging freedom rides to Virginia.

Now it appears the intolerant wing of the political class has tired of the fight and the lunatics are taking over. You’ll note that I do not call them the tolerant wing. The opposite of intolerant in politics is stupid. Civilization is about not accepting a wide range of human behavior. Laws against violence, rape, sex acts and so forth are what allows civilization to flower. To be a liberal means not understanding this basic truth of the human condition, which seems to be the case with the next mayor. That probably means he will attempt to roll back that which has worked and replace it with polices that have failed everywhere they have been tried. The question is will the voters put up with it.

New York could go one of two ways. Right now it is following down the path of San Francisco. Economics and subtle racism have made San Fran a NAM free zone. The city is 5% black and 15% Hispanic. The rest is Asian and white. New York is getting less black and more white. Part of it is due to the economy of the city. Part of it is due to gentrification. Part is due to those police tactics to chase NAM males out of the city if they were inclined to dress like extras from a Jay-Z video. How much of each is responsible for the transformation of the city is unknown, but my bet is the latter is a declining factor. It is why the loons feel it is safe to go after it now. The danger is gone and the bad men hired to clean up the streets can be dismissed. It is reminiscent of the movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Once the tough guy does his job, he can be replaced by the soft guy who does not startle the ladies.

I posted a comment on this post at National Review. I used to be a regular there, commenting on the blog. I stopped when the execrable Rich Lowry hired some loser to moderate the site. Instantly 90% of the users disappeared. Lowry had to spend a month begging people to return. I gave it another shot, but quit again when the same nonsense started anew. Lowry and the editorial staff at National Review are just a collection of middle-class strivers with nothing much to add. The only guy at National Review worth reading is Kevin Williamson and his flirtations with taboo subjects will surely get him sent off the island. There are two things that sniveling little twerp Rich Lowry will not tolerate. One is writers with talent and creativity. The other is anything that puts his TV gig at risk. Otherwise National Review is, at best, a souvenir program for the museum of late-20th century conservatism. At worst is is a platform for hollow men like Lowry to curry favor with the ruling class.

My comment was deleted and I’m not surprised. I made the point that precious fops like Potemra live in a city where it is official policy to hassle brown people on the streets. The intent of stop and frisk is to let the NAM know he is not welcome. Since the court struck down the Jim Bloomberg Law, the city’s chattering classes have been wringing their hands of New York becoming Detroit. Now word and deed are one as the official policy of driving out the blacks is matched by the public rhetoric. Yet, we still hear the lectures and the smug condescension over race. The same people demanding their Bull Connors put the dogs on every black guy wandering into Manhattan scream about Paula Deen and George Zimmerman. None of this is shocking as liberalism is a religion with many bogeymen. The result is a stunning lack of self-awareness. Liberals, almost always, reserve their harshest venom for the crimes they routinely commit. That’s how cults work.

The issue of race is one where the Right should be scoring points. Instead, punks like Lowry lead the charge against anyone who dares raise the issue. He is not alone. Dan McCarthy at The American Conservative is following the same path. It is no small thing that National Review is celebrating the purging of Ron Unz. Birds of a feather and all that. The reason behind these moves is the claim that it is bad for business. Donors don’t like it. Maybe. What’s really going on is the liberal TV outlets don’t like it. The dream of these climbers like Lowry and McCarthy is to get a permanent TV gig. You can only do that by being a suck up or a pioneer and they ain’t got the chops to be a pioneer. That leaves them on their knees in the executive suites of whatever TV channel that employs them. That means the Left lectures the Right on race and the Right forever apologizes for things it never did or said. Hitler, Mao and Stalin counted on the career man for a reason.

The whole point of being in the opposition is to oppose the prevailing orthodoxy. To do that you have to let a thousand flowers bloom. That means putting up with some weirdos and cranks, but it also means getting interesting perspective from guys like Unz, Sailer, Derbyshire and so forth. They have their own quirks and get things wrong, but they get a lot right too. When you’re the underdog, you need to be creative and take risks. Instead, the dying husks of Amercian conservatism are purging themselves of non-conformists and begging the majority to allow them to surrender. National Review has simply become the primary outlet of the collaborationist wing of the GOP.

In the Reagan years, liberals had a standard response to the fact Reagan was wildly popular. They said he was personally popular, but his policies were not popular. It was sort of true, in that some of his polices were unpopular, but his winning personality and the booming economy more than made up for it. Similarly, conservatives argued that the Clinton polices were not popular, but the affable Clinton was well liked. They had some evidence, but the Clinton polices were not all that different from the Bush polices.

The argument really fell apart in the Bush years. Initially, most white voters respected him as a decent guy. He was not charismatic, but efforts to demonize him never got very far because he was seen as decent and honestly, if not terribly bright. He won two elections largely because the public viewed him as the least bad option. Put another way, his polices were not all that popular and his personality was not ideal, but he was less offensive to middle-class white people than Gore or Kerry.

In contrast, we may actually be seeing an example of a president riding personal popularity in the face of his unpopular polices. There’s little doubt he won in 2008 because of the magic negro stuff. He was the living validation of everything the Baby Boomers believed about race and culture. Huge increases in the vote from black women, liberal whites and upper-middle class whites carried him to victory, even though his platform was ill-defined and not particularly interesting. The voters just wanted to like him.

The 2010 election and the continuing hatred of his signature achievement underscores this fact. The phenomenon is in full bloom with Syria. Obama is in the mid-to-low-40’s according to Gallup, yet his Syria policy has 27% support. Part of it can be attributed to the poor handling of the issue. That said, no amount of salesmanship is going to make another war popular. The best he could have done is match his own approval rate by rallying his party, but even they can’t get on-board with a war with Syria.

At the end of the Bush years, we saw what happened when the majority party used up all of its good will with the public. The 2006 election wiped out the GOP. We saw what happened when the president used up all of his good will. Bush fell into the low-30’s at one point. Obama is at 42% right now and this fiasco is not helping him. It will be interesting to see if his coalition starts to unwind as we saw with Bush. The Obama coalition may very well be more fragile, even temporary, but that may not be clear until the next election.

This piece from the NYTimes lays it out well. Personal validation has a short shelf life in politics. Eventually the practical overtakes it in importance. A big chunk of the Obama coalition is on board solely because it feels good. Of course, blacks support him on racial grounds, but they expect something in return. If loving Obama no longer feels good for liberal whites and blacks feel like they are getting shorted, Obama and the Democrats will have a very bad election in 2014. His personality may not be enough.

Of course, the one thing black politicians have often used when in trouble is the race card. Kurt Schmoke was the first Obama. He was a clean and articulate guy who came out of elite colleges and promised to be a new type of black politician. That is, black on the inside and white liberal on the inside. When that formula stopped working, he started dressing like Nelson Mandela and talking like Malcolm X. Perhaps Obama will find some way to play the race card before the 2014 election. Maybe he’s going to be Obama X.

I’m fond of using the word “reality” in discussion with members of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Part of it is that it makes them crazy. They love to end debate by uttering catch phrases like “as a member of the reality based community…” that are finished with a recitation from the catechism intended to end the discussion. In other words, it is just another way they declare themselves our moral superiors, giving them thr ight to rule facts out of bounds when they contradict tenets of the one true faith.

Over at Marginal Revolution an hysterical homosexual took me to task for using the term in a post about religion and fertility rates. I’m assuming he is a homosexual due to the overwrought use of the word “intolerant” when discussing religion. That’s one of those things you see with gays in the academy. They use the word intolerant a lot. It is, as they say, a dog whistle. Pointing out observable facts sent him racing to the fainting couch.

I thought about that when reading this story about the rape scandal at Vanderbilt. From news accounts, this appears to be real rape or “rape-rape” as Hoopie Goldberg calls it.  A young woman was violated by a group of football players while she was unconscious. The documented actions of the accused indicate a consciousness of guilt and an attempt o hide the facts from authorities. On the surface, it looks like a real crime was committed.

Whether or not they are legally guilty of rape will be left up to whatever peculiarities of Tennessee law that apply. Sex crimes are funny, as the statutes reflect regional sensibilities. Age of consent is a good example. In some states, a woman getting passed out drunk and then crying foul stands no chance, because the law requires the court to evaluate the credibility of the people in order to determine consent.

Anyway. what these men did to this woman should be punished with a long stretch in prison, assuming the facts back the narrative in the press. If it was one drunk guy and a drunk girl, then that’s a different story. These players seem to have been sober, knew she was beyond drunk and then acted in a way after the incident to suggest the presence of a guilty mind. That’s not kids making a mistake. It’s criminals committing real crimes.

They are not, however, 100% responsible for the events. If a man jumps into a lion’s den wearing a meat suit, we blame him, not the lion. Similarly, if a woman goes out partying with a man and gets so drunk she is unconscious, she bears some responsibility. Now, men are not animals so they don’t get a pass like with the lion, but they are not immune from nature. This is something people knew up until last week.

Young men since the dawn of time have been willing to risk everything for sex. It is as much a part of our biology as left handedness or stereoscopic vision. It is why women have been taught to be weary of young men since the dawn of time. It’s why there were prohibitions against young people hanging around one another unsupervised. it was to protect the men from themselves and the women from the men.

That held until the magical thinking of feminism came along with all of its nature denying beliefs. If we arrange things the right way, they argue, women can be men, just without dicks. Men can be pleasant lesbians with dicks. Otherwise, sex as a biological characteristic can be willed away. Boys can be raised as girls and girls as boys. Like everything else with Cultural Marxism, sex becomes this gray, formless nothingness encompassed by the hollow word “gender” that means everything and nothing.

Reality does not go away when you stop believing in it. By nature, boys want to have sex with girls. They will go to great lengths to do it. Getting a girl drunk so she will give in to a man’s advances dates back to the first discovery of alcohol. Teaching women that this does not exist is like teaching them that gravity is a social construct. It is not just madness, it borders on the criminal. This young woman could easily have avoided this terrible thing by following the wisdom of a thousand generations of women before her.

Again, this does not absolve these young men, but a sensible society would find some way to mention the reckless stupidity of this woman. Everyone is far too afraid as the witch doctors and medicine women of feminism will never permit it. Instead the male student body of Vanderbilt will be subjected to lectures about denying their biology and the women will be told they are failing as women if they observe a bit of restraint when dealing with the opposite sex. It is senseless madness, but that’s where we are in America.

In politics, being lucky is the critical difference between being John Kerry and Barak Obama. Kerry, for all his faults, is an able politician. You don’t get to be senator by not having some political skills. He played the game carefully and made sure to take care of all the right people. Obama, on the other hand, is not a great politician, but he is a very lucky one. He bumped into the right people who helped him move up the ladder and he had the right opponents. That’s why he’s president and Kerry is not.

There’s another angle to this. Some politicians make up for bad luck or bad timing by being plucky and resilient. They figure out how to take a punch and keep standing. Bill Clinton is a classic example of the political survivor. Scandals that would have landed most pols in prison never slowed him down. Clinton could take a punch. We don’t know if Obama can take a punch. He’s been so carefully protected, no one knows if he has a chin. Even at this point in his tenure, we don’t know if the man can take a punch.

It looks like we will find out. The Left has decided to break ranks and abandon him over this Syria business. Grayson is a nut and probably should be in a mental ward, but he is a bellwether of sorts. If he is breaking ranks, that means the fever swamp is losing faith in their man over this. Then there is the international scene where Obama is getting embarrassed by Putin. There’s now a viscous cycle at work. As domestic support flags, international support flags, which drives down domestic support.

Obama is headed for an embarrassing defeat unless the GOP saves him, which is always a possibility. They think it sells with their voters to be on the warmongering side of every issues, so to them this looks like a good way to score points. That could be bad for Obama. The other choice is to cowboy up and go it alone, but that is not his style. Plus he does not seem like he is all that excited by the venture. Either way, he is going to have to win a few fights against some of his own people to get his way on this.

No matter how this plays out, Obama is going to take a hit politically. The question is how does he respond. Bush just put his head down and ran forward. Clinton found some low hanging fruit he could grab to change the subject. That’s what veteran pols do when they have been through some tough times. They develop a way to handle a loss. That’s why the best politicians usually have a loss early in their career. Obama has lived a charmed life up to this point. Now we find out if has that something extra to bounce back from a defeat or if he makes an early transition to lame duck status.

For all of my adult life, the GOP has been called the home of the Right. If you are a conservative, however you wish to define it, you are supposed to support the Republicans. Even when the Republican option is is a useless squish like Mitt Romney or a beady-eyed climber like Paul Ryan, the argument is they are better than whatever the Democrats are offering. Bill Buckley used to say he voted for the most right-wing electable candidate, which resulted in guys like George Bush running the party.

The disaster that was George Bush the Younger was justified on the grounds that he was better than Kerry or Gore. You can’t blame sensible white people for falling for this argument. Al Gore was having a nervous breakdown in the 2000 campaign. John Kerry is as dumb as a goldfish and surrounded by people who are not much better. That does not change the fact that the GOP works hand and glove with the Democrats to keep moving the political center further to the Left. It’s always heads they win tails we lose.

In Britain, this game worked for a long time with Tory voters, but it appears to be getting a test from UKIP. Those weirdos attacking the Tories from the right are not buying the old argument. They point out that the Tories are in a partnership with the Liberals, which makes them the enemy of the working man by definition. UKIP exists for one reason and that is to destroy the Tory Party. Their reasoning is a fake conservative party is worse than no conservative party. That’s true in the US as well. We need a new party.

Proof of this is right here. Here we have alleged “conservatives” looking for an excuse to undermine their own policy. We’re supposed to believe that these guys want to reduce the size, expense and scope of government. Yet every time they have the chance, they try to expand the size, expense and scope of government. If you are a small government type, this is why you should be sitting out elections. If you keep voting for these idiots, you are the idiot. The only orderly way forward is to destroy the GOP.