According to this report:

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This is linked to Drudge. It is one of the slide shows popular for fill space on sites. This one lists the sites top-10 cities in the world. What’s striking about the list is that it is almost exclusively ultra-white cities. The exceptions are Vancouver (Asian) , Toronto (Asian) and  Calgary(Asian). The rest are nearly all European, with a trivial NAM population. Helsinki just about glows in the dark. The other feature of the list is the dominance of cities down under. Australia and New Zealand have tiny NAM populations, trivial in demographic terms. The people who cooked up this list seem to think that’s a critical metric for a city.

One of the more hilarious bits is how each city is described in Wikipedia. Even though most are whiter than a Klan rally, they list “diversity” at the top of their list of attributes. Yep, they have every type of white person the world offers. Throw a few Chinese guys in and that’s the sort of diversity the diversity crowd likes to see. I have a friend who is a moonbat living in Arlington Mass. That’s a typical whites-only town in Mass. Very liberal and very white. The guy told me with a straight face they moved there because of the diversity. He seems to think the three Indian PhD candidates in the rented house makes the town into 1930’s Casablanca. Even pointing it out to him, he refuses to accept it.

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Kathy Shaidle has this up on her blog. I’m not a Rush Limbaugh listener so I’ll take his word for the decision to stop using MSNBC clips. I don’t know what sort of ratings Limbaugh is pulling these days, but I doubt his audience has much of an overlap with the nutters who watch racists like Chris Mathews glorify the Klu Klux Klan every night. I’ve tried to watch some of their offerings just for laughs, but it is so over the top absurd I switch off after a few minutes. If I were trying to mock moonnbat culture I’d create skits like Hardball and characters like the mentally disturbed lesbian.  I suspect a fair bit of their audience is made up of people looking for clips to post on right-wing sites.

Anyway, the ratings collapse is something. The public appears to be growing weary of the lunatics. This happened at the end of the last round of crazy in the late 1970’s. Even hod carriers in the press corp were openly mocking Jimmy Carter by the end of his term. Anecdotal evidence suggests ObamaCare and the stagnant economy are wearing down public support for the crazies. The health insurance madness is probably the biggest factor. Everyone seems to be talking about how they are getting screwed now.  Throwing people off their insurance and jacking up the rates even higher than in the past is a good way to piss off even diehard Obama voters.

These liberal spasms seems to have a defined end. By the end of the 1970’s, the public had put up with riots, war and stagflation at the hands of ridiculous posers and filthy teenagers. The staggering incompetence of Jimmy Carter was the finishing touch on that liberal spasm. Maybe the looming disaster of ObamaCare is souring the public, maybe it is just fatigue with a stagnant economy. It is probably a combination of things, but this spasm is running out of steam and it is showing up in the rating of the Moonbat News Service.

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…even the hookers are struggling to earn a buck.

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The hilarity of Bush’s fiercest critics now dusting off his arguments to justify another pointless war in the Middle East just never stops. The NYTimes site fell over the other day, most likely due to its own incompetence, but they are blaming Syria. No kidding. They are blaming a country without toilets

In an interview, Mr. Frons said the attack was carried out by a group known as “the Syrian Electronic Army, or someone trying very hard to be them.” The group attacked the company’s domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The Web site first went down after 3 p.m.; once service was restored, the hackers quickly disrupted the site again. Shortly after 6 p.m., Mr. Frons said that “we believe that we are on the road to fixing the problem.”

The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of hackers who support President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Matt Johansen, head of the Threat Research Center at White Hat Security, posted on Twitter that he was directed to a Syrian Web domain when he tried to view The Times’s Web site.

I’m so tired of hearing about sites being hacked. The reason they get hacked is incompetence. A properly designed and managed site like a news site should never get hacked. In most cases, they site is not even hacked. The hosting service is what goes down and that’s seldom a real hack. Usually it is either a stupid IT dork leaving a door open or an old fashioned hardware failure. Hackers who know their stuff are not wasting their time with a collection of tools like the American media.

Anyway, it is hilarious that the Left is now embracing its inner chicken hawk.

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As I get older I’m surprised by how much is forgotten.  One’s memory is supposed to fade as you age, but society’s memory is not supposed to fade. Yet, it seems like we are getting dumber. The crush of information that comes at us probably has something to do with it. Our brains simply can’t hold everything that comes at us. Still, it seems like someone would remember that everyone knew Bobby Riggs threw the match against the lesbian tennis player when it happened. I was just a tyke at the time and I recall the adults laughing at the thing. I’ve gone my whole life assuming the whole thing was a setup. The mafia angle is probably new.

The funny thing to me is the strange persistence of the feminist lunacy about the differences between the sexes. Biology is not a social construct, yet the idea persists. We have a mountain of evidence now from the military and it is clear that women can’t do the same things physically as men. It turns out that 10,000 years of observation was indeed correct. That’s why there is one set of standards for women and another for men. It is also why we will never see women in combat units. They simply cannot do what is required. Yet, saying it in polite company gets you sent out of the room if you’re lucky. Most likely you get an earful from some screeching harpy.

The magical thinking does not stop at physical skills. Since 1901, women have made up four percent of the Nobel laureates in Medicine, two percent in Chemistry, and only one percent in Physics. The number of men with an IQ of 145 is seven times that of women. At the highest levels,  the ratio is 30:1. On average, men are clearly better at mathematics and dominate the higher IQ groups. Men are also over represented in the low end of IQ, which makes sense evolutionarily. Human society needed a smart fraction, but also a strong violent fraction. Someone needs to be in charge, but someone has to be willing to carry out the orders. Women, in contrast, have to be good at bearing and raising children, which requires neither high math skills nor great physical courage.

Despite the mountain of evidence and 10,000 years of observation, put “women not good at math” and you get back pages and pages of links to stories claiming the facts are to be ignored. Hilariously, the counter to decades of test score will be a paper in Psychology Today. That’s like asking the local palm reader to prove gravity is just a state of mind. But, there is too much invested in feminism to let facts get in the way so here we are, revisiting a story from forty years ago.

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In the 17th century, European elites told themselves and their subjects that it was providence that put them in charge. For most of human history, blaming God for the rulers has been a popular option. The alternative is some system where rulers are determined through merit. Exceptional warriors have often risen to the top of their society. Wealthy merchants would graduate into the ruling class either through bribery or marriage.

In modern times, western elites have no use for God and they are allergic to discussing nature as it applies to humans. Instead we have this make-believe meritocracy. The first step is to go to the right prep schools so you can get into the right college. Then it off to graduate school for networking and rubswabbery. Once those credentials are obtained, then it is getting the right jobs to fill out the resume and make the right friends.

Finally, if you worked the system correctly, you get into that top tier, where all of sudden the floor becomes impenetrable. You have made the club and unless you harm the reputation of the club or call into question the logic of the club, you are in the club for life, no matter what you do. That’s why government service has become the ticket to great wealth. It’s like having your own private toll booth on the highway. You get paid by simply being there. The managerial elites is a collection of toll takers.

Today we have this story about the perpetually wrong Larry Summers possibly getting the job of Fed Chairman. This was the guy who did the hatchet job on Brooksley Born over derivatives. She was the person who tried to blow the whistle of Long Term Capital, a trillion-dollar hedge fund that was about to go bust due to creative accounting. LTC had powerful friends in the managerial class, so they were saved by the government and the whole matter was swept under the rug. Again, that floor never gives way.

Everything Summers said back then turned out to be completely wrong. The single biggest economic event of the modern era and he was totally wrong. Yet, he is held up as an expert. Granted, it is economics, a profession with no right answers, only models of right answers. Still, you would think getting the one big thing wrong would have some impact on his career. That’s never how it works in the managerial state

He’s far from being an exception. In fact, he is the norm. There are whole professions that now have become inoculated against their own failures. The intelligence community got it all wrong at the end of the Cold War and they totally missed the rise of Islamic extremism, but they just get more money and power. We are rocketing toward a police state, because the people in charge are staggeringly incompetent. They just keep failing up.

When you look around the public square, you can’t help but notice that the number of interesting and insightful people seems strikingly low. It’s like television where expanding from three channels to three hundred resulted in 297 channels of crap, in addition to the previous three channels. The democratization of the media has not opened the field to new and interesting people and ideas. Instead, it has allowed in an army of mediocrities who repeat all the same stuff everyone else says. It is a sea dull-witted conformists.

A post like this in the American Spectator is a good example. There is a worthy discussion, maybe even a debate, to had over the role of populism in a modern western society. It’s a debate we will have to have, one way or the other. Populism is not an unalloyed good. It can run amok, like we saw with Hugo Chavez, where it turned into a cult of personality that has lived on after his death. Granted, it is Venezuela and western style liberal democracy is a poor fit, but populism seems like a poor fit too.

Closer to home, the Bolsheviks are probably the quintessential populists. There movement was the literal overturning of the old hierarchical order. You can’t get any more populist than that. The Nazis were certainly appealing to populist sentiment. Granted, they were battling the Bolsheviks for popular support, but that just goes to the heart of the criticism of populism in general. When the goal is simply to win enough of the crowd to gain power, populism can easily become mob rule and then authoritarianism.

The point here is that we are about o have a long debate about populism and it would be a good idea if serious people, or at least people with serious pretensions, were capable of discussing the issue like adults. It would also help that the people writing for public consumption knew something about the subjects. For example, there is a lot of overlap between political libertarianism and populism. In both cases, there is a rejection of rule by expert and the rejection of expertise as a requirement for rule.

Even if you think the similarities between populist politics and libertarianism are incidental, the rejection of populism in that post is just crude posing. It is something that has become a common feature of so-called conservatism. It’s a cultivated sneer from people with nothing to show for themselves. What conservatism has borrowed from libertarianism is the dilettantism. They parade around as if they know everything, but they sport of record of failure that would make a Cleveland sports fan blush.

In a way though, studying modern libertarianism a good way to understand why Buckley-style conservatism was a huge flop. Their goal was to engage the Left within the constraints of the political system, designed by the Left. Before long, they turned playing by the rules into a badge of honor, despite getting whipped by the Left, who never abides by the rules. Libertarians similarity shoot themselves in the foot, but always finding someway to remain a marginal player. They take pride in being ignored.

Looks like Obama will launch an attack on Syria soon.  I would assume this has been in the works for at least a year, but the chemical attack is being used as a justification or maybe the chemical attack is fake. One of the things that is hard for people to come to grips with is that most news is fake. It’s a combination of propaganda, bias and incompetence. If Obama wants a war, the media will provide the news stories to justify the war, even if they have to make them. That’s just life in a no trust society.

Either way, the US military does not move that quickly. The planning and execution structure is heavily bureaucratic and sclerotic. They need four or five planning sessions to build a latrine. That’s not a bad thing. It’s just how big armies of a global empire have to function. The minute civil war broke out in Syria, the military began preparing options for their civilian bosses. This from Wikileaks suggests western special ops have been working in Syria for a couple of years, probably since Bush invaded Iraq.

Of course, they have probably been working with Israeli intelligence and maybe even Saudi and Qatari forces. Then there is the fact that lots of money can be made from war, especially in a land full of oil and gas. Mesopotamia has become something of a giant version of Casablanca during World War II. Everyone and anyone that can make a buck from oil or war is int he region. War is inevitable, as long as there is money to be made from war. That means all the great powers are invested in the region.

This story article was linked on Marginal Revolution. In the comments, a fellow named Bill points out that rent-seeking inevitably leads to worthless occupations. The source story is one of those snarky rants that have become popular with Millennials. They like that blend of pointless irony and dismissive disgust with reality. It seems like a strange affectation, as it implies a combination of naivete, obliviousness and solipsism. Of course, there is the strong possibility that millennials are in fact naive, dumb and solipsistic.

Economists will naturally reject the the assertion that there are “bullshit” jobs, because it lies outside their belief set. No profession is controlled by its tools like economics and since they have not tools to measure culture or biology, those things are left out of their models. That’s a story for another day. The important bit is that even in the private sector, loads of worthless jobs are created because they favor the state. Or, those jobs exist because they favor some cultural push by the state, like diversity training, for example.

One place you see this is in sports entertainment. In the days before cable, the sideline reporter did not exist. The reason is two-fold. One is women don’t know much about sports and therefore were not in the sports business. The other reason is no one would pay to have these bunnies on the field. The money was not there to do it.The job of sideline reporter is not a lot different than that of cheerleader. They pretend it is a real job, but it’s not. The girls come and go, because they are just not that important.

Government created cable monopolies have changed all that. ESPN can tax 100 million homes through their cable bill, which they do for about $8 a month. According to people who track this stuff, ESPN is watched by 20% of cable homes. That means the other 80 million homes are paying $80 bucks a year so ESPN can hire T&A to strut along the sidelines. ESPN is a great marketing machine, but it is mostly a rent-seeker. It spends a portion of its $9 billion in revenue bribing politicians and cable operators.

There is nothing new about rent-seeking. Government is the monopoly of force in a society, which means they can force people to do stuff and not do stuff. In a democracy, bribing elected officials so they will force people to do stuff that favors your business, is as old as democracy itself. Ben Franklin was a rent seeker. he got government contracts for printing and he got them by buttering up government officials. That’s how it works.

Franklin is a good example of how rent seeking can have unintended consequences down stream from the event itself. Franklin was a printer. His government contracts did not keep his presses running full time, so he he used the excess time to print fliers, newspapers and almanacs. In a way, government contracts underwrote the birth of the newspaper business in the colonies. Sports oligopolies and cable oligopolies are rent seekers that are altering the very nature of media, as a consequence of their rent seeking.

Put another way, rent seeking creates make work. Economics can understand the first part, but they struggle to understand the second part. they certainly don’t grasp the cultural impact of the second part. The legions of people in make work jobs want to keep those make work jobs. The employees of government contractors, for example, are the most effective lobbyists for more government. Northern Virginia, the home of government employees, media and political operators, is a billion dollar lobbying machine now.

Anyway, here is one of my all time favorite bits on the bullshit job theme.