Author Archives: thezman

The Knock At The Door

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I used to tell people all the time that if you have a chance to listen to Greg Cochran speak, you should take it, as he is probably the smartest person you will ever hear. Cochran has excelled in two fields, physics, and anthropology. The former requires a very big brain to gain entry. In the case of anthropology, many of the people in the field are crazy or sociopaths. To be an exception and contribute to the stock of human knowledge, requires a rare combination of curiosity and blinkered indifference to social pressure.

Cochran has contributed three very important ideas that may not be correct, but they open new avenues to understanding human evolution and biological diversity. In the book The 10,000 Year Explosion, he and his partner, the late Henry Harpending, explained how agriculture and human settlement accelerated human evolution. This explains local differences in skin color, eye color, hair texture disease resistance and other genetic differences in human populations. It also explains personality and cognitive differences.

Another idea, one that has received less positive press, is Cochran’s theory that homosexuality must be caused by something outside of evolution. For example, a pathogen that sets off a chain of events in the womb resulting in the child being a homosexual. Cochran points out that the observed level of exclusive homosexuality means genes cannot be the cause of homosexuality. The fitness cost of genes ‘for’ homosexuality being too great. Natural selection would have eliminated the gene.

His “gay germ” idea is controversial, and it could be completely wrong, at least in the case of homosexuality. Its utility is really in how it changes thinking about human disease and the treatment of those diseases. Take something like Alzheimer’s disease. Researchers have spent decades laboring under the assumption it is genetic but have had little success in finding any proof. Well, what if the cause is something like a pathogen that sets of the process in the brain? What if cardiovascular disease is caused by pathogens?

That is a huge and controversial idea, but it probably is not the one that most scandalizes the moral authorities. Cochran is most infamous for his work on Ashkenazi IQ. A dozen years ago, he and his partner Henry Harpending published The Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence. In it they argue that Ashkenazi ████inherit higher verbal and mathematical intelligence than other ethnic groups, based on inherited diseases and the peculiar economic situation of Ashkenazi ████in the Middle Ages.

The paper is controversial for three reasons. One is the heretical idea that IQ is a real thing that can be measured. Worse yet, they claim intelligence is heritable, which means it is largely immutable. Smart parents have smart kids. Both ideas are against everything we believe and probably a direct threat to our democracy. It is not who we are. Only very bad people think that human diversity is the result of biology. Everyone knows that racism is the cause of all the bad differences, while diversity is the cause of the good differences.

That is bad enough, but the most outrageous aspect of the paper is that it focuses on the special people and that is not allowed. Even mentioning them in a direct way is justifiably forbidden now. After all, the Nazis started noticing these people, talking about their “group differences” and before long the Holocaust! The fact that racists and white supremacists often reference this paper is proof enough that it should be banned, the authors forced to confess and then they should be hurled into the void as a lesson to others.

If further proof is needed, this post on Greg Cochran’s blog should be enough. The post itself is just one sentence long, but in the nearly 200 comments, Cochran counter signals Holocaust skeptics so hard he probably sprained something while banging away at the keyboard. Clearly, it is the sign of a guilty conscience. At the minimum, it suggests he is worried that the morality police will be coming for him soon. He hopes that his outburst can be presented at his trial, and he will be given a reprieve. Good luck with that pal.

All joking aside, the post and the comments are a hilarious bit of Boomer posting. Ron Unz is an eccentric guy, and he is prone to conspiracy theories. It is hard to know how much he believes them. He could just find them intellectually titillating, like reading a very clever crime novel.  I get the sense that he is fascinated by the fact there is an official narrative, and it is ruthlessly enforced. Almost all Americans struggle with the bit of reality. Either way, the worst you should say about Ron Unz is that he is a harmless weirdo.

Casual indifference is never allowed in a theocracy, at least with regards to the moral codes. You are either enthusiastically on the right side of the question or you are an enemy of the faith. There can be no middle ground. Maybe Cochran is worried that the authorities will be coming for him soon, so he is hoping to inoculate himself against charge of insufficient signaling against antisemitism. Like a lot of Boomers, he still thinks we live in a rule-based society and that you can appeal to reason when defending yourself.

He would deny this and probably threaten to punch me in the nose for suggesting it, but false consciousness is common with many old white men. Just look at the comment thread in that post. Why are people in 2018 so worked up about something that happened 80 years ago in a foreign country? The cultural and ideological processes of the neo-liberal age blind people to their own motivations. You can be sure that the people commenting on that post felt great about it, but they never bothered to wonder why.

All that aside, they will be coming for Greg Cochran soon enough. If he is lucky, the non-binary, gender non-specific persons of uterus from the campus committee on inclusion will only require him to wear a dunce cap on campus. Maybe they will make him recant what he said about Cordelia Fine, peace be upon her. It is only a matter of time and appeals to reason will have no impact, because we live in an unreasonable age, ruled by ridiculous people. One day, there will be a knock on the door, and they will have come for Cochran.

The Black Death

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Way back when I still had a cable sub and still watched television, I was watching an episode of Red Eye, the late-night Fox News show, and the topic was crime. One of the guests was a black libertarian, who said something along the lines of, “In order to have a sensible discussion about crime, the first thing we have to do is put aside the issue of race.” All the nice white people on the panel fell all over themselves agreeing with the black, of course, mostly because they were grateful that he let them off the hook.

My recollection of my own reaction was to wonder why they would bother talking about crime at all, if they are not going to consider the primary element. After all, net out black crime from the statistics and crime is not an issue we bother discussing. Sure, Hispanic crime rates are significantly higher than white crime rates, but they pale in comparison to black crime figures. The only people worried about white crime are white liberals, who like to tell each other scary stories around the fire pit about their trip to Walmart.

People on our side of the great divide tend to think the people in charge deliberately obfuscate on the race issue, because of nefarious motives. It’s tempting and there is no doubt that we are ruled by sociopaths, who enjoy lying to us about everything, not just crime. Still, a lot of people have simply lost the ability to talk about race. They have become so fearful of the issue that it has taken on magical qualities. Just as Jews are prohibited from speaking the name of God, most white people fear saying “black.”

This weird New York Times op-ed reminds me of that.

When they staged a “die-in” at Stroger Hospital in Chicago earlier this year, Delmonte Johnson and his friends — who together formed GoodKids MadCity, a group dedicated to ending violence in urban communities — had a straightforward request. They wanted what their wealthier, whiter, more suburban peers already seemed to have: freedom from the oppressive fear of being gunned down in their own neighborhoods.

Mr. Johnson, a 19-year-old who loved to sing and dance, who was an athlete and a budding social activist, will not get to see that vision realized. He was shot and killed Wednesday after playing basketball near his home.Mr. Johnson’s death was tragic and unnecessary and enraging. It was also the sort of death that’s become far too common in America, and in particular in Mr. Johnson’s hometown, where more than 2,000 people have been shot so far this year, nearly 400 of them fatally. While mass shootings involving high-powered guns and high death tolls have claimed an outsize portion of the nation’s collective grief — and its headlines — street shootings like the one that killed Delmonte Johnson are far more common.Mr. Johnson, who lost several of his own friends to gun violence, knew that fact all too well. His own advocacy emerged in the wake of the school shooting in Parkland, Fla., in February with the hope that some of the attention captured by that massacre might be cast toward communities like his — communities that are underserved, overlooked and routinely plagued by gun violence. “We have been screaming for gun control for the longest time,” says Carlil Pittman, a friend of Mr. Johnson’s who co-founded GoodKids MadCity. “But it’s not until it hits other communities that people pay attention. And then they respond with harsher laws that criminalize black and brown kids.”

As everyone knows, guns stalk the streets of our city. For some reason, the government just let guns walk in over the border, unmolested. In fact, they have programs to help guns come in to the country and gain residency. It’s as if the government wants guns to come here and kill people of color. If you did not know better, you would think that the people in charge of government care more about guns than American citizens. When will people wake up and realize that we need a big wall on the border to keep guns out of the country?

All kidding aside, you have to wonder how it is even possible to write about “gun violence” with a straight face. To a sober minded person, it seems impossible for anyone to believe such nonsense. That’s why so many in 2A community think it is deliberate and well considered lie. A multi-generational conspiracy sounds more plausible than people thinking guns magically cause black people to shoot one another. Sadly, that is what the people who write this stuff think. They think blacks are compelled to violence by guns.

The murder problem in Chicago is a problem easily understood with a bit of math and a little bit of race realism. Put a lot of black people in an area and they will start shooting at each other. Chicago has a lot of black people, so it has a lot of murders. The city is roughly 32% black, 32% white and the rest Hispanic, Asian and a mystery. Of the 405 homicides this year, as of this writing, 330 of the victims have been black. Just 26 have been white. Just 48 have been Hispanic, who are over 25% of the population.

Now, it is possible that there are gangs of white supremacists roaming the streets killing black people in all black neighborhoods. It’s possible that these white supremacists are so skilled that no one has ever seen them. It’s also possible that a gang of leprechauns are terrorizing the black neighborhoods. All things are possible if you wish hard enough, but the most probable answer here is that the victim rates reflect the crime rate. That is, 75% of the crime is being committed by 30% of the population, the black population.

Again, sober minded people understand this. The trouble is, we are not ruled by sober minded people, at least with regards to race. They really do believe that race is a social construct and that astronomical black crimes rates are a symptom of social inequality, racism and poverty. Rather than Old Scratch tempting the villagers into sin, there is now this mystery force called “whiteness” that is like swamp gas, rising from the America’s long racist past. In other words, black crime is a spiritual problem, not a practical one.

Racket Street

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Arguably, the greatest newspaper columnist of the modern media era, or at least the newspaper era, was H.L. Mencken. He’s ignored these days because he was a realist about the great questions of his day. He opposed entry into both wars, and he was a race realist. Back then, the ruling class still debated this stuff and the commentariat welcomed all views. America was still a country that trusted itself. Today, deviationists are hurled into the void because the people in charge are petrified of anything resembling dissent.

The opinion writers in the modern mass media are all pens for hire. Their job is to sell the glories of their masters. For example, all of the Never Trump loons that turned up in so-called conservative publications were being played by a couple of billionaires. They never bothered to admit it, but it is the thing everyone knows. The left-wing Progressives are similarly funded by billionaires, with the most obvious examples being the New York Times and the Washington Post. The news business is just a PR department now.

Like so much of modern America, the business of selling the public on the glories of the plutocrats has become a racket. A good recent example is something called the R Street Institute, started and run by someone calling himself  Eli Lehrer, who is something of a universal man. He has published in far-Left publications like the Huffington Post and on so-called conservative sites like National Review. Even in our corrupt age, it seems like a stretch for someone to have an audience in both publications, but there we are.

R Street pitches itself as a free market think tank, hoping people will mistake them for libertarian or conservative. An amusing bit of their pitch is this line on their site. “To maintain its independence, R Street accepts no government funding.” This is part of the grift being run on the public these days. If the entity depriving you of your rights or robbing you of your income is a private entity, then it is all good. After all, only communists oppose private enterprise! If you are not murdered by the state, it’s all good.

Of course, The R Street Institute is just another racket. That may be why they picked the name, as a nod to the fact they are running a grift. When you start to dig around into the background of the place, it is not long before you stumble upon neocon grifters like David Frum and Marni Soupcoff. These people are like a drug-resistant virus. No matter how many times they are chased off the stage, they keep coming back. It seems America will have to be tented and fumigated before these pests are finally eradicated.

That’s really the way to look at them. Over the last year or so, mainstream publications have been posting stuff from writers with the R Street label. This one on the American Greatness site is a good example. That site is famous for having hosted Michael Anton, the guy who wrote the Flight 93 column. The subtext of this article is that the sorts of people attracted to nationalism and populism are very bad people, but they’re losers and going the way of the dodo so stop fighting the poz.

The writer is a hired pen for a globalist front group called the Institute for Liberty, which was one of the establishment operations that crushed the Tea Party movement. Once it became clear that the natives were restless and ready to try something new, all the establishment rackets swung into action to “help” the grassroots organize. To the surprise of no one, but the sincere people forming Tea Party groups, these establishment groups co-opted the whole thing and made sure they were never a threat to the orthodoxy.

You see the same sort of shenanigans with the R Street racket, except it is a neocon front group, rather than a Republican racket. Since neocons are toxic everywhere but Washington, they are now trying to fade into the background of left-libertarianism, where they can try to subvert nationalism and populism, without being obvious. Still, it is a stable of pens for hire who will provide content for cable shows and websites, all with the subtext that serves the interests of their paymasters. It’s a racket for the opinion rackets.

To circle back to where we started, a century ago America could have a raucous and combative press corps, along with razor-tongued columnists like Mencken, because the people in charge were confident. Today’s ruling class is so culturally disconnected from the North American economic zone that they live in fear of what is brewing below the cloud line. They hire armies of propagandists and censors to police the Dirt People for deviationism. The result is a commentariat that speaks to no one for no one.

It’s easy to get down over the endless censorship and obnoxious proselytizing we see in ads and entertainment. It’s important to keep in mind that they are not doing this because they are confident. They are doing it because they are afraid. If their product could sell itself, it would not need enforcers and pitchmen. The Cloud People in their castles are living in fear that the natives may becoming aware. Otherwise, they would have no reason to be pushy dragoons to attack anyone who dares question the orthodoxy.

Constitutional Conservatives

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A listener asked why I was hostile to the “constitutional conservatives” given that I would prefer to live in a society that abides by those old rules. After all, the tricorn hat crowd just wants to return to the old order as defined by the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. That’s a fair question and it is certainly true that most people in dissident politics came from some form of official conservatism or libertarianism. As such, most everyone here prefers ordered liberty.

The first problem with identifying as “conservative” is that the label has been thoroughly corrupted. When someone like Jonah Goldberg is considered the face of conservatism, the label no longer has meaning. Goldberg started out on the far left working for Ben Wattenberg at PBS. His “journey” to the right got him only as far neo-conservatism, which has always been a costume. The fact these people are allowed to call themselves conservative says conservatism is a meaningless label.

Even if you eliminate the neocons as not really conservatives, what’s left is nothing more than 1960’s progressivism and some ostentatious Bible waving. The self-styled “Bible believing Christians” are about as Christian as Hinduism. Their bespoke brand of religion is a product of the therapeutic culture, not Western civilization. Of course, libertarianism has always been libertinism with endless argument against organized to defeat progressivism,

Like the word “fascism” the word conservative carries with it baggage I have no interest in totting around. Any effort to “reclaim conservatism” is either a waste of time or doomed to subversion and corruption. Dissident politics is not just about rejecting the people who man the barricades. It is a rejection of the prevailing orthodoxy. The problem with Buckley conservatism was never just about ideology. It was the sort of people who saw it as a useful vehicle that was always the problem.

As far as the argument in favor of “returning to our constitutional principles” is concerned, it is important to understand that one reason why we are where we are now is those constitutional principles. The men who wrote the document and assembled the political order at the founding, did so to lock in their positions. Winners not only write the history books, but they also write the constitutions. Their old rules no longer make sense in the world created by progressives.

A small child alive at the time of the Constitutional Convention, if he lived a long life, could have seen the birth and death of the American Republic. Within one generation, it was clear that the constitutional order was not going to hold together. The Hartford conventions were in 1815. Of course, not long after, the issue of slavery and the irreconcilable difference between the American South and Yankee New England made clear that the constitutional order was untenable.

The point here is while those “constitutional principles” sound appealing to our modern ears, the people who lived them did not like them very much. Interestingly, the romantics for the 18th century politics have the same problem as fascist romantics, in that they never wonder why their ideal was a complete failure. The fascist ideal can sound pretty good, until you look at the actual results. The same holds for the constitutional republic, as designed by the Founders.

Even if you can argue that with some modifications, the old order can be made to work, accounting for progressive efforts to undermine order, the problem is the same one faced by libertarians. That is, short of a violent revolution followed by a good bit of genocide, there is no going back to the old system. The people in charge will never permit it. That’s why they are tolerant of constitutional conservatives. They merely function as the court jesters of the neoliberal state.

Putting all of that aside, ask a constitutional conservative if he would like to bring back slavery or even freedom of association. The best you will ever get from these people is a willingness to limit the vote to taxpayers or property holders. They can’t even talk honestly about the role of women. Most of what the Founders believed is now considered disqualifying racism, sexism and ethnocentrism and the conservatives would agree with the Left on it.

The simple truth is that conservatism has been utterly worthless in stopping the march of progressivism through the institutions. If the Founders were alive today and gained power, the first people they would hang would be the conservatives on the grounds they collaborated with the enemy. For as long as I’ve been alive, the left’s greatest weapon in the culture war has been the so-called constitutional conservatives. In every fight, it has been these people who have counseled surrender.

Just as mobsters wrap a victim of a hit in a carpet and toss him in the nearest dumpster, the goal for us it to wrap the so-called conservatives in their constitution and dump them into the dustbin of history. If there is to be a society in North America where white parents can raise white children, white people must stop thinking there is an orderly solution to a lawless society. The people in charge have no respect for the spirit of the laws, much less the letter of the laws.

The Seekers

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The book, When Prophecy Fails, is a classic work of social psychology written in the 1950’s based on a study of a UFO cult called the Seekers. This group was led by a woman named Dorothy Martin, who claimed that aliens spoke through her to warn of a coming apocalypse. She employed something called “automatic writing” to channel the messages from the people of the planet Clarion. Through her, they were telling humanity that the world would end on December 21, 1954.

The study documented the believers and how they coped with the fact the word did not end on December 21, 1954. What they found is that instead of the group realizing they had been duped by a lunatic, they quickly developed an explanation for why the great event had not occurred and came to believe that with the same degree of intensity they had believed the original prophesy. In the case of the Seekers, within hours they were telling the world that their faith had convinced God to spare the world.

It is a useful thing to keep in mind. We tend to assume cults have a charismatic figure at the top, but that’s not always the case. Hassidic Jews are not led by a charismatic leader, unless you consider the Rabbi a cult leader. In fact, that may not be a bad comparison, in that Rabbis come and go, temporarily holding the position of sect leader, but not really a cult figure. Progressives swap out their chief lunatic as well. Look at their list of three initial heroes.

In the summer before the 2016 election, the left was sure Hillary Clinton would be anointed as their new leader. They were so sure of it, people quitting their jobs so they could prepare to move to Washington and serve the new ruler. Then disaster struck and the prophecy failed. Like the Seekers, they waited all night for a miracle, but there was no miracle. Also like the Seekers, they cooked up an elaborate explanation, rather than accept the result. Russian collusion is a coping mechanism.

It does not stop there with the left. They have a new prophecy that they are sure will come true on the first Tuesday of this November. They believe the magical blue wave will cleanse the the land of sinners, who defend the evil Donald Trump, by concealing the Russian hacking scandal. It’s why fiction writer Bob Woodward released his book this week and why the NYTimes ran the fictional op-ed. These are intended to be evidence at the trial of Donald Trump, when he is impeached.

It’s also why Elizabeth Warren was out demanding they invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump now. After all, if it is inevitable, why wait for the election? As far as she and the other hormonal crazies in the cult are concerned, the impeachment and removal of Trump is written in stone. True believers always succumb to the Tinker Bell Effect, because they believe so intensely, they inevitably begin to see everything as confirmation of their deeply held beliefs.

You’ll also note that these periods of extreme mania come and go. When Trump fired Comey, the Left was apoplectic for a week. Comey himself was out there casting himself in the role of martyr for the cause. Then it passed and no one talks about him anymore, outside of grand jury rooms. When Trump met with Putin, there was another week of fevered lunacy in the media. This week’s spasm coincided with the Kavanaugh hearings and next week, all of this will be forgotten.

What’s happening is the left is responding to disconfirmation in the same way the Seekers handled it. Rather than reevaluate their positions or beliefs considering obvious reality, they escalate their intensity to pull the faithful together. Firing Comey showed Trump was not about to resign, as the left believed. When he met with Putin, it annulled their Boris and Natasha fantasy. Now that Kavanaugh is obviously going to be confirmed, it undermines those beliefs.

Another aspect of the Seekers is relevant here. Dorothy Martin came out of the same cult that gave birth to Scientology. She later went on to reinvent herself as Sister Thedra and start a new cult called the Association of Sananda and Sanat Kumara. Progressives have similarly morphed into different things over the years. You’ll also note that spiritual cults tend to be led by women or have a lot of high-profile females.  The same thing is happening with the progressives.

All of this is amusing but imagine a country with a powerful army and nuclear weapons being run by nutters like Elizabeth Warren. Imagine a situation room that looks like the editorial board of the Huffington Post. There are no obvious remedies to having the ruling class succumb to mass insanity. The public can accept that their rulers are corrupt or evil. It’s hard to accept that they are insane. The proof of that probably comes too late as the loonies have already pulled the roof down us.

Nacirema

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Over the long holiday weekend, I had the misfortune of being in the company of a classic ConservaCon type. The only thing he was missing was the tricorn hat and over-sized copy of the Constitution. No matter what the topic, he somehow circled back to some version of “we need to get back to our constitutional principles.” It is the abracadabra phrase of these people. If we just say it enough times, poof!, we’re in the 18th century again, with better hygiene. It really is annoying, even if it is understandable.

On the way home I started thinking about the rights that actually exist in the Bill of Rights and how much of them we actually have now. I though it might make a good topic for the podcast, so that’s what I’m doing this week. It is one of those topics where after some thinking about it, you end up sounding like a radical civil rights lawyer. Well, like what radical civil rights lawyers used to sound like when we still had something resembling a constitutional republic and stable demographics. Funny how that worked out.

Something I did not discuss this week, but occurred to me while editing, is that our side needs a William Kunstler. He was the old publicity hound, who represented the radicals of the 60’s and 70’s. It was not so much that he was a great attorney, but that he knew how to work the press in favor of unpopular clients. Those old radicals knew how to normalize the defense of villains, thus making them less villainous, but also making it more difficult to railroad the inconvenient. He raised the cost of what passed for virtue signaling.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below. I’m now on Spotify, so the millennials can tune in when not sobbing over white privilege and toxic masculinity.

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Our Rights
  • 07:00: Freedom of Religion (Link) (Link) (Link)
  • 17:00: Speech & Assembly
  • 27:00: Gun Rights (Link) (Link)
  • 37:00: Privacy (Link) (Link)
  • 47:00: Taking the Fifth (Link)
  • 57:00: Closing (Music)

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The Weak Leading The Crazy

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The fake news phenomenon is not new. It’s been a part of the business since William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer invented it in the United States. They are the two credited with inventing yellow journalism and using it to get the U.S. to declare war on Spain at the end of the 19th century. It probably goes back further, but it was these two who figured out how to make it work. It’s not an accident that the two men who created fake news have journalism awards named after them.

More recently, the gold standard of fake news is the fake human interest story. This is where the fake reporter finds some fake people to profile. Sometimes the people are real, but their story is fictionalized and their quotes invented. Mike Barnacle had a long career at the Boston Globe writing fake human interest stories. He was eventually found out and fired, but people always knew he was a faker. He’s now a regular on MSNBC as a fake guest.

Another variation on this is the Stephen Glass example. He was a write for the New Republic, who wrote eye-catching first-person stories about outlandish things supposedly happening in Washington. Of course, his subjects were almost always conservatives acting in a way that titillated the left. For example, he did a piece on CPAC in which he described conservatives carrying on like a Roman orgy. He was eventually found out and fired.

Despite that rather famous event, progressive publications have done little to address the wholesale fraud that goes on in the business. All sources are now “unnamed sources” by which they mean imaginary. Even sports writers do this. It’s so egregious, it must be assumed that everyone knows it is all fake. When someone reports on something that only two people could know, and neither is named in the story, the report must be fake.

This week we may be seeing fake news merge with mass hysteria to set off a panic among the Cloud People. First we have Bob Woodward out with his latest collection of ghost stories. Woodward is the guy who used former CIA director Bill Casey as a source, while Casey was in a coma. His Watergate writing was similarly full of things too good to be true. There is a great book on that topic and all else related to Watergate called Silent Coup.

Anyway, Woodward has a book out on Trump in which he strokes every single fear and hatred of the loons. Perhaps sensing it was too obvious or hoping to piggyback on the release, the New York Times has an op-ed up that is supposedly written by a White House insider. Reading the thing, it feels as if it was written by a couple of clever college boys pulling a prank. Judging from the reaction, even liberals suspect it is fake or at least too fake.

Of course, all of this is a coordinated effort by the mass media to damage Trump in the run up to the midterm elections. We know this is a coordinated effort because they did their organizing in public view. Someone should tell the media that the point is to scare the public, not scare yourselves. All these whoppers they are producing read like the stuff pink pussy hat wearing gals tell one another after too many gulps of chardonnay at their female empowerment club.

All of this is amusing, but it is also revealing. The mass media tells us that there is no reason for the Dirt People to bother voting this fall. The blue wave is coming in November, and the House will soon be stuffed with exotic brown people, sporting funny names and a long list of grievances against whitey. Yet, they are in a full panic, carrying on as if they expect the opposite. The grotesque theater that was the McCain funeral is another example that suggests these people are nuts.

Another amusing aspect to this is the loonies will no doubt have their panties in a twist when the truth is revealed. If it is a real person in the White House, the media will suddenly be outraged by the doxing of this brave hero. Meanwhile, Darren Beattie will remain unemployed. If it turns out the writer is Jayson Blair, the whole thing will be thrown down the memory hole along with all the other hoaxes. Regardless, they will consider the contents to be gospel for the next six years.

Journalism has always been about shaping public opinion. It has always been fake news, which is why their top awards go to fakers It worked for a long time because the guys who used to run the media were smart, and they hired smart people. They also had a feel for their audience. Today, the typical journalist is a hormonal girl, with a head full of feminist nonsense. Alternatively, it is a foppish male with no useful skills and no useful experience in the world.

Compounding it is the management class of these news organizations have never done real reporting. Many came out of politics, never having covered a fire or reported on a court case. They don’t know the basics of the news business, so they are easily fooled by their obsequious underlings. The result is the typical news organization is the weak leading the crazy. In an age where facts are easily verified, fake news needs to be smart, but instead it is stupid.

It’s Complicated

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Anyone who has been through a change in software platforms for their company knows that it starts out as a lot of fun, but then turns into drudgery. Initially, thoughts of all the new stuff and better programs makes it feel like Christmas. Then the reality of going through every single business process of the company hits home. You end up re-thinking vast chunks of the company’s business processes, much of which is terribly dull, even though it is essential. It is the only way to get it right and take advantage of the new system.

What you learn from such an ordeal is that the company software system is the repository of the company rules that define how it exists. Over time, the rules changed and evolved, and the software was changed to evolve with the company. There were upgrades and modifications. If the software is old enough, there were modifications to modifications and many hands doing the work, many of whom are long gone. More important, many of the processes were created for reasons no one remembers. It’s just the way it is done.

The people who like to argue that complex systems cannot evolve from simple systems have never worked with business software. All complex business software started as simple software. Over decades, it evolved into highly complex systems that even the creators don’t fully understand. Usually, in the case of enterprise systems, there are teams who specialize in one aspect of the system. They have created interfaces that the rest of the system uses to pass data or call functions related to that area of the system.

The reason that systems tend toward increasing complexity is that the world is not a fixed place. Even small changes can require significant changes in how a company does business. In a government regulated industry like food or chemicals, the government is always updating the Code of Federal Regulations (CFR). That means regular changes to the forms that are printed or the data that must be captured. That, of course, means regular changes to the company software system. Over time, those changes add up.

Now, the people maintaining and modifying the software are not rewriting large swaths of it every time there is a change. They make small changes, the bare minimum, to keep costs down and get the change done quickly. That means they take shortcuts, hybridizing other functions and applying patches to existing code. It does not take long before this gets out of hand and even small changes require lots of thinking and planning.

It is good way to think about all human organization. The company that started out as two people, but grew to one hundred people, is at least a thousand times more complex than when it started. Obviously, the small town that grew into a city seems infinitely more complex than when it started. Even your social circle can suddenly feel wildly complex if your circle of friends expands to include people outside your initial peer group. Complexity grows at a rate faster than the growth the organization. That’s an iron rule of life.

The people working in artificial intelligence are running into this same problem. Replicating even the most mundane human task requires millions of lines of complex code. What we take for granted as humans is quite complex. For the same reason no one person can understand the complexity of their small town, the creators of AI cannot understand the complexity of their creations. Algorithms to handle one small task get unwieldy in hurry once they are interfaced with other algorithms to handle other small tasks.

This is why the robot future is a lot further away than the futurists want to believe. The cost of labor to automate a warehouse is a grain of sand on the beach, compared to the cost and complexity of automating a highway. Just as important, the cost of maintaining it is orders of magnitude higher. As every business owner knows, just because something can be automated, the cost of doing so often outweighs the savings. Put another way, just because something can be done does not mean there is a reason to do it.

Putting aside the cost of complexity, systems often become so complex that they become unpredictable. Even in business systems, which are simple compared to the software for driving a car, the complexity can reach a point where no one truly knows what will happen if some change is implemented. The result is a whole new process for performing quality control, to make sure the changes do not have some unexpected and unwanted downstream result. There are now certifications for software quality control professionals.

This is often why legacy systems are replaced. It’s not the technology, although that is often a handy excuse. It’s that the old system has so many patches and mods that no one knows how it works anymore. New changes result is weird outcomes and costly follow-up changes. As is true with everything in life, things sometimes get so complicated that the best answer is to start over. It is why men leave their families and why people change careers. It’s also why the people stand aside and let the revolutionaries topple the rulers.

That’s what a revolution is, when you think about it. It’s a lot like the decision to buy a new software system for the company. It’s not that what comes next will be better. It’s that the status quo is so complicated and unpleasant, anything must be better. Of course, just a new software never turns out as expected, revolutions always turn out to be a lot more unpleasant than anyone imagined. Instead of firing the initial consultants, the revolution eats its own, by killing off the first group of revolutionary leaders.

Even so, it is something to think about as the West struggles to reform itself. The web of pirates, grifters, reformers and patriots within the ruling classes of the West has reached a point where no one understands what’s happening. That’s why official Washington remains in a state of emergency over Trump. It’s why the European ruling class is worried that they may be too lazy to fight their own people. Everyone knows that the system is not working, but no one has any idea how to fix and everyone is afraid to touch it.

It might be time for a new system.

You Own You

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One of the odd developments in the technological age is that it looks like the Europeans will be taking the lead in taming the tech giants. Americans have been brainwashed into worshiping business, so any resistance to what the tech companies are doing to us is met with howls of protest. Even the American left is in the tank. Things are different with the Europeans, who maintain that old socialist distrust of capitalists. That’s what you see in stories like this one, where the Euros are trying to reign in the socials.

Leading journalists from more than 20 countries joined a call Tuesday for European MPs to approve a controversial media reform aimed at forcing internet giants to pay for news content.

European Parliament lawmakers return in September to discuss the proposal, a first draft of which was rejected last month after a fierce debate.

The so-called copyright and neighbouring rights law aims to ensure that producers of creative content—whether news, music or movies—are paid fairly in a digital world.

But the plans have been firmly opposed by big US tech firms such as Google and Facebook, as well as advocates of internet freedom.

An open letter signed by more than 100 prominent journalists from major news outlets warned Tuesday that “this fleecing of the media of their rightful revenue” was “morally and democratically unjustifiable”.

“We have become targets and our reporting missions cost more and more,” said the letter written by AFP foreign correspondent Sammy Ketz and published in several European newspapers including France’s Le Monde.

“Yet, even though (the media) pay for the content and send the journalists who will risk their lives to produce a trustworthy, thorough and diverse news service, it is not they who reap the profits but the internet platforms, which help themselves without paying a cent,” the letter said.

“It is as if a stranger came along and shamelessly snatched the fruits of your labour.”

The editorial urged the European Parliament to “vote massively in favour of neighbouring rights for the survival of democracy and one of its most remarkable symbols: journalism”.

Major publishers, including AFP, have pushed for the reform—known as Article 11—seeing it as an urgently needed solution against a backdrop of free online news that has wiped out earnings for traditional media companies.

The thing that no one ever seems to discuss is that companies like Facebook don’t make anything and their service is barely adequate. What they are doing is exploiting a natural monopoly so they can monetize the creative work of their users, including their personal information. Social media companies are skimming operations that operate on the fringe of legality. These companies harvest all sorts of information from users even trying to harvest your medical and financial records

Social media companies have figured out how to transfer the value of creators from the owner to the tech giant. After all, Google’s search engine can only work if there is something worth finding. The search engine has value, but so does the content. The same is true of the content on FaceBook or Twitter. The only reason to be on those platforms is the content generated by users. The platform is a tiny portion of the value, but the platform owners consume all of the revenue from the system.

This is why, as an aside, newspapers and magazines are going broke. It’s not the only reason, but it is a big reason. If the New York Times took down its web site today, just shut it down completely, subscriptions would suddenly spike. The reason is, the entire liberal ecosystem relies on the New York Times for content and direction. It is the home church of the Progressive cult. Their regular readers would go back to buying the paper like the old days. If all newspapers followed suit, the internet gets quiet all of a sudden.

Putting that aside, there is a simple reform that addresses the abuses of the tech giants, as well as some of the other problems created by technology. You own you. That means your personal information, your image, your words, they all belong to you and anyone using them must have written permission. If Facebook wants to sell your demographic data to some marketing company, they must have your written permission and not just through the abuse of leonine contracts. You have to consent to each sale.

This is not a new idea. Your credit record is not something the credit bureau can distribute without your permission. The propaganda on TV shows, where the cops instantly access the suspect’s credit card and personal records, is just part of the conditioning campaign against privacy. In reality, they need a warrant and it is hard to obtain. A lender must get your written permission to obtain your credit records from a credit bureau. It’s not just for privacy reasons. That information is your property and you have right to control it.

The thing is, this is a very easy solution to the abuses that have arisen from the technological revolution. The doxxing phenomenon popular with the bubble heads of Progressive media would go away with better property protections. All of sudden, they would be forbidden from using the images and personal information of people they wish to harass. Unless they could show that the information they obtained is in the public domain, they would be liable for any damages, plus the criminal use of stolen goods.

Again, this is not terribly difficult to navigate. If it is not yours, then you need permission to possess it. This is the rule with personal property. If you are found in possession of stolen goods, you are charged with a crime. It does not matter if you did not know they were stolen, because you knew the property was not yours. In other words, unless you are the lawful owner of the property, the burden of proof is on you to show you had a right to possess it. The principle is used in security clearances, so it is not an untested concept.

The result of tighter property laws, with regards to personal information, would be the end of social media as a profitable business. No one should weep for them as they are not technology companies in the conventional sense. They are parasites that exploit bottlenecks and gaps in the law to skim from the public. The internet was much more free wheeling and open without companies like Google and Facebook. The reason for that is there were no stickup men creating bottlenecks in order to rob the users.

Think Local

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For most of human history, we understood that people are not the same. Different people had different customs, different gods, different material habits and of course, they looked different. When describing the people of a foreign land, writers and storytellers would spend a lot of time describing these differences. Julius Caesar, in his commentaries on the conquest of Gaul, was at his best describing the looks and dress of the p. It not only made his tale interesting, but it also made a point. The Gauls were not Romans.

In one of life’s ironies, as the left imposes the blank slate and extreme egalitarianism on society, science is unearthing contrary evidence on a near daily basis. It’s fair to say we now have a mountain of science supporting the claims made by our side of the great divide, with regards to human diversity. That mountain grows larger with every new bit of evidence from the human sciences. This report about Neanderthals and Denisovans is another big piece of data explaining the diversity of man.

Denny was an inter-species love child.

Her mother was a Neanderthal, but her father was Denisovan, a distinct species of primitive human that also roamed the Eurasian continent 50,000 years ago, scientists reported Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Nicknamed by Oxford University scientists, Denisova 11 — her official name — was at least 13 when she died, for reasons unknown.

“There was earlier evidence of interbreeding between different hominin, or early human, groups,” said lead author Vivian Slon, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

“But this is the first time that we have found a direct, first-generation offspring,” she told AFP.

Denny’s surprising pedigree was unlocked from a bone fragment unearthed in 2012 by Russian archeologists at the Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.

Analysis of the bone’s DNA left no doubt: the chromosomes were a 50-50 mix of Neanderthal and Denisovan, two distinct species of early humans that split apart between 400,000 to 500,000 years ago.

Advances in the ability to extract DNA from fossils is one of those revolutions in science that does not get enough attention. Hucksters like Stephen Jay Gould got away with their schemes mostly because there was a lack of hard evidence to support or contradict theories about early humans. That is changing as material science and genetic testing improves. The political narrative about the origins of man is falling apart, giving way to observable reality about the diversity of man.

“The very fact that we found this individual of mixed Neanderthal and Denisovan origins suggests that they interbred much more often than we thought,” said Slon.

Paabo agreed: “They must have quite commonly had kids together, otherwise we wouldn’t have been this lucky.”

A 40,000 year-old Homo sapiens with a Neanderthal ancestor a few generations back, recently found in Romania, also bolsters this notion.

But the most compelling evidence that inter-species hanky-panky in Late Pleistocene Eurasia may not have been that rare lies in the genes of contemporary humans.

About two percent of DNA in non-Africans across the globe today originate with Neanderthals, earlier studies have shown.

Denisovan remnants are also widespread, though less evenly.

“We find traces of Denisovan DNA — less than one percent — everwhere in Asia and among native Americans,” said Paabo.

“Aboriginal Australians and people in Papua New Guinea have about five percent.”

Taken together, these facts support a novel answer to the hotly debated question of why Neanderthals — which had successfully spread across parts of western and central Europe — disappeared some 40,000 years ago.

Up to now, their mysterious demise has been blamed on disease, climate change, genocide at the hands of Homo sapiens, or some combination of the above.

But what if our species — arriving in waves from Africa — overwhelmed Neanderthals, and perhaps Denisovans, with affection rather than aggression?

A point that Greg Cochran has made is that Neanderthals and Denisovans had evolved some highly useful traits that allowed them to survive in areas inhospitable to African populations. As modern humans spread through Eurasia, they mixed with these earlier populations and picked up some of these genetic advantages. They could also have simply observed things the Neanderthals had learned. The smarter and more clever humans then used acquired skills to dominate their new environments.

Recent research showing that Neanderthals were not, in fact, knuckle-dragging brutes makes this scenario all the more plausible.

Our genetic cousins executed sophisticated hunting strategies in groups; made fires, tools, clothing and jewellery; and buried their dead with symbolic ornaments.

They painted animal frescos on cave walls at least 64,000 years ago, well before most Homo sapiens arrived in Europe.

Far less is known about Denisovans, but they may have suffered a similar fate.

Paabo established their existence with an incomplete finger bone and two molars dated to some 80,000 years ago.

Among their genetic legacy to some modern humans is a variant of the gene EPAS1 that makes it easier for the body to access oxygen by regulating the production of haemoglobin, according to a 2014 study.

Nearly 90 percent of Tibetans have this precious variant, compared with only nine percent of Han Chinese, the dominant — and predominantly lowland — ethnic group in China.

Some things cannot be acquired through imitation, like the ability to breathe at extremely high altitudes. This may not seem all that important in the grand scheme of things, but if all human attributes are genetic, then it probably means the social diversity we see in humans has a genetic basis as well. If local populations can have local traits, then it goes a long way toward explaining the great diversity in human social organization. Even today, the way Africans prefer to live is different from how Eurasians prefer to live.

Of course, what this new data tells us is that the differences between populations are not uniform. Those modern humans who encountered and mixed with Denisovans have a lot more in common with one another than they do with their ancestors in Africa. The same is true of those populations that mixed with Neanderthals. The mixing of Denisovans and Neanderthals would explain why Asians and Europeans have more in common with one another than either group has with Africans.

None of this argues in favor of any political agenda, but it does argue against the assumptions underlying the neoliberal order. Humans are not interchangeable and the differences we see are genetic and the result of local evolution. It turns out that the Left was sort of right when they said, “Think globally, but act locally.” People are the product of their local environment. The best thing to do, for the sake of global harmony, is to leave people in their local environment, so they can live locally, among their people.