Now that the GOP is riding in to rescue Obama’s war plans, the stage is set for a week of video game coverage of the attacks on Syria. It’s always hard to know if this is just media blather or real preparations for an attack. What we see with Obama is the strange habit of confusing talk with actions. That’s why the managerial class hated Dick Cheney. He did not confuse talk with action. This is how we ended up in two pointless wars of choice in Afghanistan and Iraq, so there is something to say for talking rather than acting.

Anyway, lost in the run-up is the questionable relevancy of Russia’s opposition in world affairs. Putin keeps making noises one would expect from a tough guy with some punch, but he is slowly coming to the realization that words speak louder than actions. Syria’s main patron, the one moving ships into the area and providing arms to Assad is now on the fence. Rather, Russia appears to be on the fence. It’s hard to know as Putin is doing as much talking as Obama, who is probably bluffing about all this.

Regardless, the US, with or without support from Europe, can launch an attack on Syria knowing Russia will do nothing but complain. Obama could take out Assad if he chooses, knowing that Putin is not going to war over it. He can help facilitate waves of Muslim migrants flowing into Europe and he can choke off energy supplies, but he can’t stop the US from doing what it wants. He just has to hope Obama gets cold feet, so he has no choice but to talk out of both sides of his mouth to buy time and let Obama sweat.

There are two reasons why Russia is becoming a peripheral player in world affairs. The first is Russia simply lacks the military resources to do much outside her territory. One of the things we learned after the fall of the Soviet Union is that their technology was very crude compared to what the West was using. The years since the Cold War have given greater access to technology, but military tech is as much a part of culture and the Russian culture is still deeply warped from 70 years of communism.

In the case of Syria, the Israelis probably have terrific intelligence about Syria’s air defense systems, as well as her missile locations. The Israeli missile defense system is more than enough to ward out the ad hoc attacks that could come from a full-on attack on Syria by the US. Then there is the fact the US can own the airspace within hours of a conflict and deliver missile attacks anywhere it wants. We could take out the Russian naval assets deployed to the region. Putin certainly knows this.

The second reason is money. The wealth of nations is now controlled by central banks, specifically the Federal Reserve and the ECB. Those two banks control the world’s financial system. Putin and Gazprom may have hundred of billions in energy resources, but that’s not worth a whole lot when the Fed can destroy their currency. Russia, like China, needs to be connected to the grid and that means remaining on good terms with the United States, which is the world’s banker and money exchange.

That’s the big reason the Russians have to tread lightly. Of course, geography plays a big role here too. While vast distances have protected the Russians from invading armies from the West, it keeps her on the periphery of European life. As a result, these sorts of adventures are not really meant to confront the United States, but to keep western government from ignoring the Russian. If the Russians took on the attitude of the Swiss or the Swedes, there would never be a reason to think about them.

Food fetches always seem to be a part of various types of cults. Sex is another thing that is common, but food is almost a universal in cults. The ancients had all sorts of dietary rituals tied to piety. The first known vegans were in Ancient Greece. Pythagoras was a zealous vegan, believing it was beneficial in all sorts of ways.  He would fit right in with the modern vegans of today. The Jews, of course, still have weird food rules, as part of their cult. Until recently, Christians had rules on what to eat when it could be eaten.

Today, the food fetish is mostly a thing for Progressives, which is another reason ti is a religion, rather than an ideology. There are vegetarians and vegans, but those are not all that popular on the on the Left. instead, being a foodie is the thing. This is a very feminine thing, as the act of enjoying food becomes a performance that is supposed to draw attention to the eater. Women are always posting pics of themselves drinking wine or having some exotic meal. Women love seeing themselves eating and drinking.

Then there is the food fetish by proxy, where liberal women demand their kids eat certain things or not eat certain things. Kids are calorie burning machines yet the scolds are trying to make them eat like an Ethiopian. Worse, they don’t want them eating meat or fat and instead give them carb laden diets. While you can pretty much feed kids anything not poisonous, growing bodies should have plenty of protein and fat. The former is integral to muscle growth and the latter is a source of energy. People used to know this.

Instead we see the opposite as the the food crazies are convinced that only through self-denial and even self-punishment can one be truly pure. There’s no science to back up any of it. In fact, the science points in the opposite direction. Low fat, high carb diets are not healthy at all. Low carb diets are not just beneficial, but more in line with our body’s food processing systems. Again, for kids, volume is what matters, along with plenty of physical activity, but if you going to skip anything, it is the carbohydrates.

On the other side of the coin, we get rants from people in favor of all sorts of extreme diets that are supposed to purify the soul. A lot of this is what gym rats call bro-science, but people want to believe in simple miracles. This stuff is not entirely without foundation, but the people pushing ti sound like evangelists. It’s not just about losing weight or maintaining a healthy diet. Being “keto” or some other regimen is supposed to indicate a purity of mind and good character, form dietary discipline.

People also want to believe their food is out to get them.The bread allergy stuff is a great example. A whole pseudo-science has built up around the gluten free fad, where people swear they gave up bread and their suddenly changed for the better. The reason people feel better when they cut out bread is they eat less. The reason for that is carbs burn quickly, so you eat more, because you are hungry more often. it’s why people always complain about being hungry after eating Chinese food.

The whole gluten free fad is looking a lot like a food racket, just like the organic food business. Neither are new. Big Food turned their waste product into margarine, when people were suddenly sure butter was bad for their heart. When preliminary data from the Framingham study seemed to show a link between high fat diets, high cholesterol and heart disease, Big Food was right there to cash in on it. There’s not a lot of margin in food production, so they are always looking for a way to sacralize the product.

Another funny thing about food fetishes is the current aversion to counting calories. It used to be an article of faith that the only wya to lose weight was to count calories. My mother was always writing down what she ate and looking through a calorie guide to avoid over eating. It was a nice hobby for her. Today, the food zealots rail against it as if it oogily-boogily from a primitive era. The fact is, counting calories will work, but most people today can’t handle that much reality, so they prefer the new oogily-boogily over the old.

I check in with the kitten of the blogosphere regularly because he links to interesting stuff. His comments, however, are strange at times, almost dimwitted. I don’t know what to make of it, but maybe he struggles with his sanity or something. Either way, this post got my attention. He is right that companies continue to use pre-employment testing even though the courts ruled against it in Griggs. I worked at two companies that employed the Wonderlic, math and vocabulary tests and personality profiles. I’ve administered so many tests I lost count long ago. The thing he does not understand is that these are not used in isolation. That’s how big companies get around Griggs. In many cases, the testing is done after a decision to hire. Companies also have diversity programs to avoid the dreaded disparate impact claim. Of course, all firms use filtering mechanisms to sort resumes.

That later bit is something employees like the aforementioned blogger don’t get. Management regularly meets with HR to discuss standards and practices. The reason it is not just “standards” is there are a lot of things done at the HR side that are not formal policy. That’s both out of necessity and habit. Humans are not, in fact, moist robots. If Sally from HR went to a Catholic college, she may be partial to applicants from Catholic colleges. Fred, a state U grad, may favor the state university. HR could very well be tasked with hiring minorities or women, even though it is not official policy. What no company does since Griggs is use an IQ test as a first filter. That’s no longer legal and a sure way to get sued. They may achieve the effect, but that’s in response to Griggs, not in spite of it.

Libertarians and conservatives love tossing out Schumpeter’s gale, the observation that new stuff destroys and replaces old stuff. The automobile destroyed the buggy whip business, but created whole new industries for the repair of cars. That’s fine and largely true, but Marx, from whom Schumpeter stole the idea, was also right. Capitalism will, if allowed to operate unfettered, destroy itself. It’s why Buckley said “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”

We are seeing this maybe in the cable TV business. Every home in America has cable or satellite now. There’s no growth in that business. The cable companies and content providers are trying to wring out more money by raising fees and charging more for the product. The response is people cutting the cord. News reports claim that the number of homes dropping TV has gone from under two million to over five million in the last few years. I know a few people who have pulled the plug. I’m considering it.

Some like to argue that the new services are driving the cord cutting. Why pay for cable when you can get Hulu or Amazon? Well, those services are pretty crude, so it’s unlikely that they are driving the trend. Instead, it is people responding to the declining quality and rising cost of cable television. There’s also a cultural element. If you are white, television is now an endless assault on your dignity and patience. You can only be called a racist for so long before you accept it and turn off the television.

The reason you need government to prevent consolidation in the marketplace is to not only protect customers, but to protect markets. In the case of natural monopolies, like power and gas, the state has to provide the role the market would play in setting prices and protecting consumer rights. By allowing cable companies to bundle channels and monopolize whole areas of the country, the cable business is in trouble. In other words, the market needs to be protected from itself in order to survive.

Another area where uncreative destruction is creeping into the discussion is cell phones. This is a huge scam based on cheap credit. That iPhone really costs something like $800, but the phone company finances it over the two year contract. With the juice you pay $1500 a year to send pointless texts to friends. You also get to carry around a devise that tracks your every movement and sells that data to marketing companies who beam ads back to that phone.This is good for Apple and Google, but very bad for you.

Some call this late stage capitalism, but I think they just think the term sounds clever, so they say it without thinking about it. In reality, this is late stage democracy. Once the voter rolls expand to cove all adults, the system becomes a bust-out. The elected officials no longer care about voters or public good. They are hired men paid for by a donor class who controls politics, by controlling the parties. It’s not an accident that politicians that lose election end up in cushy six figure jobs as lobbyist and consultants.

This is a sensible take on the Syria mess. One thing that is always true about the so-called conventional wisdom in Washington is that it is always wrong. The reason is the people chattering away on TV or on-line don’t know anything and they don’t really need to know anything. There job is to be a circus of distractions. The most these people amount to are flunkies and coat holders for the political class. That’s how they end up on TV, where they can make good money says whatever nonsense they are told to say.

The writer of that linked post is also right about the point of the Obama foreign policy strategy. Obama does not care about this stuff. His people may care, because they are doing the bidding of other interests, but Team Obama is all about domestic politics, not foreign adventures. Using this situation to score some political points against the warmongers in the GOP is good domestic politics. It also gets him off the hook with Israel who would love to see the US invade another one of their adversaries.

Obama is not the hardest working guy and he is no political genius, but Progressives never lose sight of their purpose. They always look to cause trouble for their enemies, real and imagined, so they always have a strategy. They know his party will vote in lockstep with the administration. A handful of peaceniks will be allowed to vote against it for effect, but 90% will fall in line.  Given the comically bad leadership of the House GOP, the predictable result is Boner crying on TV as his party dissolves into a food fight over Syria.

In the Senate, the leadership on the GOP side is better, but you have warmongers like that senile old fool John McCain ruling the roost. There the administration will have an easier time of it. He can count on forty GOP votes, allowing the very liberal senators to vote against it. Given the number of vulnerable seats this year, this is a great result for the Democrats. They get their enemy warring with itself and team Obama gets to avoid the trap of war in Syria. When you have a purpose, you always have a plan.

The New England sportsball team cut Tim Tebow yesterday, which resulted in celebration form every Progressive warren in the nation. It was not just cultists, but their bourgeois bohemian fellow travelers. The usual suspects on the Left have hated Tebow from the start, because of his overt Christianity and his decidedly southern sensibilities. The cold civil war, as John Derbyshire calls it, will always be with us and play out in a myriad of little ways. Northern whites, then as now, scarcely see southern whites as American.

Those racist, science hating rednecks are what hold the nation back from progressing into a glorious future! On the other side, southern whites see northern whites as God hating, self loathing lunatics enslaved by a radical European religion bordering on a cult. There’s no room for compromise when both sides see the other as the problem. Through no fault of his own, Tebow is emblematic of this rift and therefore too much of a distraction for NFL teams, given his talents. Therefore, his career now appears to be over.

Of course, the main reason Tebow was cut from the sportsball team is that he is not good at sportsball, at least not at the position he seeks to play. Professional sportsball is a merciless business. There are millions on the line and therefore no one can let their emotions get in the way of winning the sportsball contests. If Tebow could help a team win at sportsball, he would have a job, even if he was murdering people on the side. These leagues are loaded with criminals and deviants who are good at sportsball.

That’s not why the lunatics were cheering, of course. They hate him for cultural reasons, so they wanted to see him fail. Now, it is not just the cold civil war stuff. That certainly plays a role in Progressive thinking, but a growing aspect is the general hatred of maleness, particularly white maleness. In the Progressive hierarchy of evil, white males are slowing moving to the top, taking the place of mythical bad guys like Nazis and Klansmen. The Pale Penis People will soon be enemy number one.

Tebow is pretty much the emblematic white male. He’s not sitting around reading books or worrying about his privilege. He plays sports and likes hanging with his bros on the sportsball field. Then there is the religious aspect. His faith leads him away from the sorts of vices the ruling class likes to peddle to young white males. That makes Tebow a real problem if he manages to succeed at sportsball. Just imagine the comparison between him and the typical sportsball player. it raises a lot of uncomfortable truths.

That’s probably the main lesson from this. Even if you don’t care about sportsball, it is a part of the popular culture, so it is wise to pay some attention to it. The deliberate africanization of basketball and football is a foreshadowing of the browning of America that is planned for us by our betters. The subtle hatred of Tim Tebow, quintessential white guy, will one day soon be common in the culture. Today they hate this guy because he is a Christian, but tomorrow they will hate all white men for being white.

I once worked a company run by neo-Nazis, who did a lot of testing of their workforce. OK, they were not real Nazis, neo or otherwise, just fans of the extreme materialistic ideology we normally associate with Nazis. The real Nazis borrowed eugenics and managerial socialism from American Progressives of the early 20th century. The Efficiency Movement was a totalitarian fad that sought to squeeze out waste in all aspects of society. If that meant slaughtering people or neutering them, well, so be it.   Listen to Obama talk about ObumblesCare and you can hear the same themes. Kathleen Sebelius is obviously a big fan of Margaret Sanger with her lust for baby killing and exterminating the unfit.

Anyway, that long wind up is to get to the fact the company in question had a thing for IQ and psychological testing. They tested all new hires for math, vocabulary and IQ with the Wonderlic Test. Once someone was considered management material, they administered a battery of personality tests and more advanced IQ tests. I had to go through all of these in my youth so I’ve learned my way around them. The IQ tests are what they are, but the personality tests are crap if you know how they work. You can really fuck with the tester if you are so inclined, which I did, of course. Immediate supervisors were supplied a copy of the results and that file followed you around as long as you were employed.

One of the things I eventually learned (after breaking into the bosses office and reading the secret management manual) is they did not want high IQ people in most low and middle management jobs. If someone tested high average or better they would be flagged. If their personality suggested they could function independently then they would be guided to an analysts job or maybe a creative position. If not, then they would transfer them to some hellish backwater. The reasoning was that people with a high IQ would ask too many questions about policy or try to improvise to solve problems and that was never to be tolerated.  That and they would not hire blacks and women, but that’s a story for another day.

What does this have to do with Tebow?

I thought of the IQ ceiling while listening to sports radio this AM. They were discussing Tebow and it was the usual blather. They wanted Boston Blockhead to call in and say bad things about Tebow. That’s not hard as Boston has an unusually high percentage of stupid sports fans. It’s strange. They are crazy passionate about their teams, but they don’t know much about the sports. I’ve seen crowds at Fenway boo a sac fly or moving a runner along with a bunt. Spend time at a Pats tailgate and you begin to wonder if a local school for the retarded did not dump their students out into the parking lot for a party. Philly has the same problem.

Boston Blockhead calling in is nothing new, but the hosts are just as dumb. Once in a while a savvy guy will turn up on sports radio, but they never seem to last. Phil Wood in DC is a brilliant baseball guy. He never stays in a job very long, other than Nationals work. John Kincade is a guy out of Atlanta who knows his stuff and his limitations. In Boston, the only guy even close to having an IQ above room temperature is Dale Arnold and he can’t draw flies on the radio. That suggests to me that being too bright is bad for being a sports radio guy. If you are an opinionated moron, you can get and hold a large audience on sports radio.

Anyway, the fact that these simpletons are spending another day talking about a guy who will never see the field this year is proof enough, I suppose. Tebow gets the locals worked up because he is a devout Christian from crackerville. That’s it. The team thinks he could one day be a backup and is willing to invest a little to find out if they are right. That’s the business of the NFL. As soon as they determine he will not work for them, he is gone. There is no room for emotion in their business.

This post has already been linked to 853 times!

The mental midgets of American foreign policy are convinced the war in Syria is about freedom and democracy, despite the fact the rebels are probably worse than Assad. Those rebels would not exist without Saudi and GCC money and arms. On the other hand, Assad would be sleeping with Muhamar Qaddafi if not for Iranian money and arms. There are reports that Iran has sent revolutionary Guard units to bolster Assad’s army. Put another way, without Iran and Saudi Arabia, this civil war never happens. Therefore, it is not about the specific actors and everything about the money men backing the actors. As the saying goes, the men with the gold make the rules. In this case, it is Iran and Saudi Arabia, Shia and Sunni.

This piece from the Financial Times goes into the other level of the game. The Euros, Russians and Chinese are not involved because they have an ideological interest. They are not there to promote freedom and democracy. The question no one asks and the FT piece skips past is why are these players so deeply concerned about a sewer in a land of sewers? The reason is natural gas. The Russians, through Gazprom, control about a third of the natural gas supply to Europe. They control most of it to eastern Europe. They want to control a larger share, particularly to Germany. History, you see, is the nightmare from which the Russians never awake.

What does that have to do with Syria?

Iran shares an enormous natural gas field with the GCC countries. They would like to sell it to Europe. Building facilities to liquify it and ship it over sea to Europe is not practical. That puts them in competition with everyone else and the Iranians are not going to out compete the world technologically. Instead, running a pipeline north to the Russian subject states and to the Black Sea is a cheaper and faster option. Running through Iraq to Syrian ports on the Mediterranean would be even better. Russia would then have a customer for their arms, regain Iraq as a client and dominate the natural gas market into Europe.

Following the money makes it easy to see the Russian interests. On the other side, the Saudis have a similar set of interests. The Saudis understand better than anyone that oil is going to be replaced by gas as the primary energy source in the world. Within a decade refineries will be on-line that produce gasoline from natural gas at prices cheaper than crude. The massive gas fields popping up all over means the peak oil crowd will need to find a new hobby. The only reason the House of Saud exists is oil. Take that away and they go away. Therefore they, along with the GCC countries, are looking to build their own natural gas pipeline to Europe.

Their pipeline could head in two different routes. One would lead from Qatar through Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq to Turkey. The other would go through Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria and on to Turkey. I don’t think you have to be that clever to see why the Saudis and GCC are invested in Syria. If their ideological buddies win then it makes building their pipeline a better option than the Iranian pipeline. Inevitably, money and resources would swing in their favor. It also has the benefit of cutting the legs out from under Iran and their push for nuclear weapons.

This post has already been linked to 809 times!

I’ve known a lot of Irish people over the years. American has loads of people who come from that blighted little island. Half of the people on the planet claiming Irish ancestry live in the United States. Living in Boston for a long time, I met and got to know plenty of Irish fresh off the boat. The last spasm of IRA terrorism brought a lot of Irish to America, often hiding out from the cops. They were generally good drinking partners and decent people. I’ve never been to Ireland and probably will never go there. The reason is, Ireland sucks!

What other conclusion can you draw? One freckle-faced mick every six minutes is hopping on a steamer for parts unknown. That 240 a day and close to 90,000 a year. Of course, the pace could very well quicken over time. There is a cascading effect when people vote with their feet. The first to go are the brave sort, willing to take a risk. If they do well, the next cohort, a group larger, but slightly more risk adverse, takes the plunge. As they settle elsewhere, their friends and relatives decide to take the chance and on and on it goes. At a certain point you get a rush for the exits. Time will tell if that happens, but the outlandishly high unemployment rates amongst the young says they will see a youth drain at the minimum.

This post has already been linked to 1669 times!

This post has already been linked to 847 times!