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Licencia y Registro Por Favor

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A couple of years ago I was pulled over on way to the office by a cop who resembled an extra from a Sabado Gigante skit. He crept up on me with his hand on his gun and when he got to the window, he asked for my license and registration in broken English. I was tempted to just drive away, thinking it was some sort of new way of car jacking. But, the middle of the afternoon in a business park is not time for car jacking.

Eventually, my weak Spanish and his poor English allowed us to communicate. He was, in fact, a local cop doing traffic duty. I guess they figured having a Spanish speaker was necessary. I think he forgot what he was doing or simply got confused, but he handed me back my stuff and I went on my way without him telling me why he pulled me over.

It looks I was encountering a new trend.

Law enforcement agencies struggling to fill their ranks or connect with their increasingly diverse populations are turning to immigrants to fill the gap.

Most agencies in the country require officers or deputies to be U.S. citizens, but some are allowing immigrants who are legally in the country to wear the badge. From Hawaii to Vermont, agencies are allowing green-card holders and legal immigrants with work permits to join their ranks.

At a time when 25,000 non-U.S. citizens are serving in the U.S. military, some feel it’s time for more police and sheriff departments to do the same. That’s why the Nashville Police Department is joining other departments to push the state legislature to change a law that bars non-citizens from becoming law enforcement officers.

Department spokesman Don Aaron said they want immigrants who have been honorably discharged from the military to be eligible for service.

“Persons who have given of themselves in the service to this country potentially have much to offer Tennesseans,” he said. “We feel that … would benefit both the country and this city.”

Current rules vary across departments.

Some, like the Chicago and Hawaii police departments, allow any immigrant with a work authorization from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to become an officer. That means people in the country on temporary visas or are applying for green cards can join.

Colorado State Patrol Sgt. Justin Mullins said the department usually struggles to fill trooper positions in less populous corners of the state, including patrol sectors high up in the mountains. He said immigrants from Canada, the Bahamas, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Central America who are willing to live in those remote places have helped the agency fill those vacancies.

“People that want to live there and build a family there and work there is a little more difficult to find,” Mullins said. “People moving from out of state, or out of the country, if they’re willing to work in these areas, then that’s great for us.”

This will not end well.

Sunday Miscellany

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To keep this blog interesting, I clip stories from Twitter and other places and save them for later use. Often, there’s simply not much that needs to be said about them so I thought I’d clear out the attic today and combine a bunch of them into a single post. There’s no theme here, other than I happen to notice them for some reason.

I saw this posted on Maggie’s Farm yesterday. I know a few people in the drug and alcohol treatment rackets. To a man, they say that their methods are entirely useless on people lacking the will or capacity to stop using. They also report that almost all addicts are more than a bit nuts and their drug and alcohol abuse is a symptom of that.

The question, of course, is whether these programs are anything more than a clearing house for addicts. Eventually, their drinking or drug taking gets them into trouble and they head off to treatment. Those with the will and ability to get sober do so and those lacking it fall down further. In other words, the treatment is irrelevant. It is the idea of it that works as a sorting mechanism…

The founder of Green Peace is a heretic. I was told by a Jewish friend that Jewish men naturally become more religious as they get older. He jokingly refers to Temple as God’s waiting room. It seems to me that Gentile men go the other way and become less religious in old age. Not only that, they become less tolerant of social codes and taboos.

British men seem to be famous for this last part. Something snaps and their words come raw and unvarnished. John Derbyshire is a good example. James Watson is another. Patrick Moore is Canadian, but either English or Irish ethnicity. I suspect that’s what is happening here. He has hit that stage where he is no longer willing to pretend and out comes the unvarnished truth…

I find the comments are often better than the content of news stories. Steve Sailer’s blog is mostly a comment magnate. Sailer seems to have figured out that he can throw some chum in the water and get a bunch of great feedback. It makes his blog one of the best on the Interwebs. Comment #13 in this thread is a good example.

It’s funny how most men are fine with homosexuals being homosexuals as long as they agree to the unwritten rule that they keep it out of public life. This seems to be our natural and default position and it’s the claim that “the personal is political” that is new and alien. A look at the origin of the word “idiot” is instructive:

Idiot is a word derived from the Greek ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs (“person lacking professional skill”, “a private citizen”, “individual”), from ἴδιος, idios (“private”, “one’s own”).[1] In Latin the word idiota (“ordinary person, layman”) preceded the Late Latin meaning “uneducated or ignorant person”.[2]
[….]

An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs.[6] Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education.[6] In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot

“The personal is political” is a post-1960s concept that seems to be killing itself via Twitter as we speak. Give every silly girl the ability to broadcast her every passing thought via Twitter and the demand that we accept the personal as political drowns in its own waste.

I’m fond of pointing out that people join mass movements out of self-loathing. They seek to swap their natural identity for that of the group. It’s why the members of a movement compete with one another as to who is the most committed. Inevitably this zealotry contest ends with purges and maybe worse.

It’s also why Cultural Marxism so aggressively attacks the private space of citizens. Privacy is a challenge. Someone who wishes to maintain a private life has something to hide and therefore he may be a heretic. You never know until you turn him inside out and look. Islam has a similar suspicion of privacy, which is not a coincidence…

One of the things I love about Roman history is just how many incompetent rulers they were able to muster, yet survive. People on the rise accumulate a lot of cultural capital. In periods of bad rulers, they live off that excess capital from a previous age. The Roman Republic and a few early emperors accumulated a lot of cultural capital.

America is another story. The rulers from the Civil War through WW2 built a huge gap between America and the rest of the world. Conquering Europe and Asia in one shot is no small thing. But, it does appear the subsequent run of bad emperors is frittering it away. Obama will be remembered, I suspect, as a man thrust into a position for which he was unqualified, thus hastening the decline of the empire…

If you want to see how it ends for the Occident, it is right here in this story from Sweden. The religion of the West is a worship of the other. So much so the other now has a veto over the daily life of the European. In America, the cuckoldry is focused on black males, but in Europe it is the Mohammedan…

The following tweet was in my twitter feed for some reason:

I have never heard of Pharrell Williams. I’m always amazed by the number of famous people out there that are unknown to me. I bet I know no one who knows who this is either. But, someone does  as he has become fabulously rich at something…

Finally, the Cult has been tub thumping about this story for a week or more. Indian Wells has finally been redeemed as the steroidal Williams sisters made their triumphant return to the place formerly filled with black-hearted racists. I could not fathom why this was a such a big deal to the NYTimes. They have been covering it like an election.

Then it occurred to me that anti-racism has turned a corner. It is no longer about chasing after the blue-eyed devils. It is about the worship of black people now. They have become the chosen people of the American Left. The triumphant return of the Williams sisters is symbolic of the triumph of this weird new cult built around the worship of black people…

Corinthian 15

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Shay’s Rebellion, The Whiskey Rebellion, Nat Turner’s Rebellion, The Know-Nothing Riot of 1856, The Boston Police Strike, Bonus Army March, Zoot Suit Riots, The Watts Riots. There’s a long tradition of men (and women!) taking matters into their own hands and striking out at the state or society over grievances.

Now, we have the Corinthian 15.

Mallory Heiney, a 21-year-old former student of the now-defunct Everest College, is part of a group of students refusing to pay back their student loans.

Heiney wrote an op-ed article in The Washington Post in which she described the lies Everest allegedly told her as well as the insufficient education she says she received.

Heiney called Everest a “debt trap.” When she explained to her adviser that she couldn’t afford student-loan payments while in school, she was assured she could defer the payments on her $24,000 in student loans until post-graduation, according to her article.

That ended up being untrue, she said. Heiney said she was on the hook to start paying interest payments on her loans two months into her program.

The program also allegedly failed to provide her with a quality education. She said her teachers did little more than read aloud from textbooks, and she was unaware of basic concepts required to pass her nursing licensing exam. She said she was able to pass only by “spending hours researching the test questions online and watching YouTube videos.”

Heiney and 15 other students who attended the Corinthian College system have banded together to fight what they describe as predatory student-loan tactics by the financial aid offices and a failure to provide quality education.

The members of the group, referred to as the Corinthian 15, feel justified in their refusal to pay back their loans. They believe they are fighting for students everywhere who are manipulated by unfair university practices and are riddled with student loan debt as a result.

“In 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus,” Heiney wrote in her article. “This soon led to the revolutionary Montgomery bus boycott. If those who came before us can take a stand in the face of persecution, harassment, beatings, imprisonment and even death, I will certainly stand in the face of wage garnishment and a tarnished credit report.”

Ah yes, Rosa Parks. That’s who comes to mind whenever I think of former students not paying their school debts. At least she did not compare herself to Jesus. I guess that’s something to celebrate.

Other former students are joining in, at least publicly, so maybe it is a thing. Then again, default rates are through the roof, over 15% according to various sources. It seems to be a tough figure to pin down because of the blend of private and federal lending. This report is the best I could find in five minutes of searching. Banks look to keep default rates below 2% as a rule. Anything higher is considered a problem.

Howling lunatic Elizabeth Warren is back again with another scheme to hand tax payer money to students who are in debt. That’s really not quite right as her scheme is about transferring tax payer money to her pals in the academy. No one ever seems to ask why college has become so wildly expensive. It’s just assumed to be an unalloyed good. No price is too high for the laying on of hands at the academy.

The sad reality of American higher education is that it has become a workfare program for the lesser lights of the managerial elite. If you have something on the ball you head off to the law of finance. If you are not terribly bright you end up in the economics department at local college. Most of what goes on at our colleges has nothing to do with training young people for productive work. That’s why tuition rates have skyrocketed.

But, that’s a subject we’re not permitted to discuss.

Now, whatever sympathy I may have for young people and their families facing modern college costs, I’m having a tough time mustering empathy for Ms. Heiney. The outsized sense of self-importance displayed by this young woman, the ring leader of this micro-protest, is a bit much. She is an adult and she foolishly entered into a bad contract. That’s not the fault of the taxpayers or the people who lent her the money.

That’s the trouble with the moaning about college debt. The people doing the moaning seem to be in a perpetual state of adolescence. Generation Onesie, raised by helicopter parents, expects the rest of us to pick up after them, tend to their boo-boos and organize our lives around them. The vibe that comes through in these stories about school debt is an overweening sense of entitlement.

Ironically, the institution inculcating this solipsism in the young is the source of their troubles, the colleges and universities. Go onto a modern college campus and it is a weird Potemkin village that operates nothing like the world around it. I always get the same feel as I get when I’m at a resort. It’s West World for young adults.

Elite universities are the worst. Just look at the graduation rates of these places and it is clear that failure is not an option. No one ever bothers to notice that schools allegedly offering the most challenging and rigorous education, have a near zero attrition rate. BUD/S training prides itself on its 65% failure rate. Ranger school is similar. Duke, in contrast, takes pride in its 99% graduation rate.

Ms. Heiney, who no one would mistake for an Ivy League graduate, nevertheless assumed that all that was required of her was to sign some forms, show up as requested, repeat what was was told to her and the world would be her oyster. This is the thread that runs through all of the complaints about school debt. No one takes responsibility for anything. Instead, strangers are expected to pick up the bill for the mistakes of these people.

One of the best lines Penn Jillette ever uttered was that government makes weasels of us all. You see it with college. The massive government loan system has turned the colleges into dependency rackets. Everyone involved is looking to separate the suckers from their money. The process produces waves of young adults expecting a good life at the expense of others.

The simplest and quickest way to end the problem is to end the government role in financing college. In short order, colleges will get cheap again, so that young people from modest backgrounds can work their way through school. Of course, we’ll need to find something for the Womyn’s Studies gals to do, which is why this will never happen. The ruling class needs a place to dump its misfits and that’s the college campus.

The Bloodless Materialism of Elon Musk

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The remarkable thing about Elon Musk, the only remarkable thing, is that sensible people take this silly man seriously. Judging from the news accounts and the cultural megaphones blasting away at us, Musk is regarded as some sort of seer, a man with a detailed working knowledge of the future. For reasons known only to him, he lets us in on it once in a while, usually at some big event where he is pitching all things Elon Musk.

According to Musk, Elon Musk is is a South-African–born, Canadian-American entrepreneur, engineer, inventor and investor. He is the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and chief product architect of Tesla Motors, and chairman of SolarCity. He is the founder of SpaceX and a cofounder of PayPal, Tesla Motors, and Zip2. He has also envisioned a conceptual high-speed transportation system known as the Hyperloop.

That’s copied from his Wikipedia page, which I’m going to assume has been approved by Team Musk, as it were. Famous people today carefully manicure their Wiki pages. Rich famous people also have the power to sue Wiki into the stone age so they get to sign off on their Wiki entries.

The thing with Musk, like most of the Internet billionaires, is he never really invented anything. His first company was a service he cleverly sold to Compaq. Both are long gone. His second act was PayPal, but he did not “invent” that service. He bought the company and then cleverly sold it to eBay. SpaxeX and Tesla are both parasites, cleverly living off tax payer subsidies.

Musk is a clever and gifted pitch man, for sure. He is the P. T. Barnum of the Internet age, blazing new ground in the field of suckering the rubes, but that’s about it. I’m not even sure calling him an entrepreneur is the right way of putting things. His companies were all built to be sold, preferably to a greater fool with loads of cash. Mark Cuban got rich like this, too.

None of this is to say I have anything against the man. From what I can tell he made his money legally and did so without causing harm to others. It’s just that I have no interest in what he has to say about anything, unless he is giving tips on how to flip properties to rich suckers. That I might find interesting.

That makes me the weirdo as it seems the media falls all over itself to report on his every utterance. His latest is the claim that driverless cars will not just rule the future, they will make driving illegal. This is not the first time I’ve heard this claim. It and similar sorts of logic are popular with the Ray Kurzweil types. The robots will take over and humans will, well, no one really knows. Maybe live like Eloi tended to by robots.

For some reason, the futurists of today always remind of Whittaker Chamber’s take down of Ayn Rand. Chambers knew the authoritarian mind and he knew that man-made systems of human organization must always have coercion at their heart. The reason for this is that humans are not moist robots.

It is when a system of materialist ideas presumes to give positive answers to real problems of our real life that mischief starts. In an age like ours, in which a highly complex technological society is everywhere in a high state of instability, such answers, however philosophic, translate quickly into political realities. And in the degree to which problems of complexity and instability are most bewildering to masses of men, a temptation sets in to let some species of Big Brother solve and supervise them.

That’s the central issue with libertarianism in general and techno-libertarianism in particular. The only way it can work is if a benevolent dictator makes sure the people don’t do something stupid like vote for state provision of public goods. Guys like Musk imagine himself as the watch maker. His creations, the self-driving cars and personal robots, will implement his perfect society – or else.

Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler‘s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?

There’s that magic word that comes to mind whenever these technologist cross my view. It sounds so reasonable. The managerial elite love to use the word “efficiency” when discussing their latest ideas for how to manage your affairs. How hard is it to imagine Elon Musk saying that it would be more “efficient” to recycle the old for their phosphorous? Turn deformed babies into animal feed?

After all, that would be more efficient.

A Gore For All Seasons

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In an unreasonable age, when crazy people seem to be a feature of the dominant culture, who better to lead the Empire than a man suffering from mental illness? As a practical matter, it is a bad idea to put crazy people in charge, but given what’s happening it would be poetic to put a madman in charge. We often hold up guys like Caligula and Commodus as examples of what happens when the ruling class falls into chaos. America is now run by ululating fanatics so putting Al Gore on the throne makes sense.

Democrats need a debate about where their party goes next. Obamacare’s passage marked the rough completion of the social safety net that liberals began constructing during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidency. The end of the Iraq War drained Democrats of their foreign policy fervor. The rapid acceptance of gay marriage has robbed them of the next civil rights fight. There is work left to be done in all these arenas, but over time, the party will need to discover new dreams, much as Republicans have found the Ryan budget.

I’m a bit torn on Ezra Klein. Serious people on the Left don’t seem to think much of him, but, but they don’t publicly trash him. I think of him a flaky millennial airhead, but I’m not his target audience. Even so, he does hit on something once in a while and this is a good example. Progressivism has been seriously short of practical ideas for a long time and now that they have exhausted health care, they are running on fumes.

They also need bogeymen. When this Progressive cycle started, they had Bush and the Iraq War to motivate them. Then it was the Tea Party and now it is white men. Hating the pale penis people is not without its merits, unless your a white man. Of course, Jewish males are finding out that they cannot play the victim card as they have been declared white.  So, the Tribe needs to  wind down the war on whitey and find a new villain.

The closest thing Democrats have to an organizing concern is income inequality. But their solutions are neither sufficient to the scale of the problem nor quickening to the pulse. Raising the marginal tax rate on dividend income is not the clay from which political movements are crafted.

To many Democrats, the fight the party needs is clear: Hillary Clinton vs. Elizabeth Warren. But the differences between Warren and Clinton are less profound than they appear. Warren goes a bit further than Clinton does, both in rhetoric and policy, but her agenda is smaller and more traditional than she makes it sound: tightening financial regulation, redistributing a little more, tying up some loose ends in the social safety net. Given the near-certainty of a Republican House, there is little reason to believe there would be much difference between a Warren presidency and a Clinton one.

The most ambitious vision for the Democratic Party right now rests with a politician most have forgotten, and whom no one is mentioning for 2016: Al Gore.

Gore offers a genuinely different view of what the Democratic Party — and, by extension, American politics — should be about.

Climate change is a real and growing threat to the world’s future. In 2009, nearly every country in the world agreed that global warming must be held to less than 2 degrees Celsius. We’re on pace to blow through that — warming the planet four degrees or more is horrifyingly plausible. No one really knows what that kind of temperature change — a swing that approaches the difference between most of human history and the Ice Age — would mean for humankind. The World Bank says there is “no certainty that adaptation to a 4°C world is possible.”

Income inequality is a serious problem. But climate change is an existential threat.

The key to picking a bogeyman is making sure you can control him. That means making sure the bad guys does not look too much like you. that’s even easier if the bogeyman is supernatural or imaginary. Villains are not much use if you can actually beat them. Imagine if in Barman #1 the police rounded up all the goofy villains in one shot. What’s the point of having Batman around? A good bad guy is alien and impossible to ever defeat.

Climate change has the advantage of being as fickle and elusive as the weather, because it is the weather. No matter what happens, the Gaia worshipers can point to the heavens and swear Gaia is angry with us. If it is unusually cold, man is causing global cooling. if it is too hot, it is global warming. If it is normal, it is a temporary respite, because climate change is always lurking around the corner. There’s a crisis for all seasons.

The thing with Gore, peace be upon him, is that he has purged himself of all the deviationism he picked up in the Clinton years. He has submitted himself to the self-criticism sessions and has emerged like a butterfly, a pure man of the one true faith. The big thing here is Gore could shift the focus from the corrosive war on whites, which is dangerous to guys like Ezra, and refocus attention on something less like Ezra.

As ridiculous as it sounds, Gore has won a lot of elections and he grew up in politics. If not for his nervous breakdown, Gore probably would have won in 2000. But, Gore is a white guy and it is hard to imagine the SJW’s standing aside while Hymie the Robot attacks Hillary Clinton in the primary. Vagina trumps Gaia on the piety pyramid. That’s just another reason to hope it happens. Moonbat on moonbat violence is the best.

The “Tip” of the Iceberg

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This is an interesting story:

Late last February, the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association (CIAA)— a conference comprised of historically African-American colleges and universities in the U.S.—held its annual basketball tournament in  Charlotte, N.C.

Conference participants stayed at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel but many hotel guests were shocked to find an automatic “CIAA Service” surcharge of 15 percent added to their bills at the lobby bar during the annual event.

“When she [a Ritz-Carlton server] brought the receipt, there was a CIAA surcharge that was included,” diner Patrice Wright told WBTV. “And we thought that’s interesting because we have frequented the establishment several times and never had any surcharge that was associated with any organization that was in town.”

Wright and her husband –who were not affiliated with the CIAA–contacted the Ritz-Carlton to understand why the hotel was permitted to charge a fee related to the basketball tournament to non-participants.

“Due to the size of the CIAA event, we instituted a modest 15% service charge for our lobby beverage servers, on whom the event places significant demands throughout the weekend,” said the hotel.

Years back, I was in New Orleans for a Patriots football game. The game was on the same weekend as the annual football game between Southern and Grambling. The locals call it the Soul Bowl. I got in on a Friday and I was the only white person in my hotel. My friends arrives and we increased the diversity of the place infinitely.

Out in town, we noticed a few things. One was the French Quarter was all black, no whites other than us and some other Patriot fans who apparently did not know about the Soul Bowl. It was like being on the streets of Lagos. It was teaming with black people and white faces stood out like the sun.

The other thing we noticed was the lack of cabs. We did not see any cabs and just assumed it was a local thing. Later we learned that the cabbies stay away during the Soul Bowl. When the game was over on Saturday and those fans left, the place was full of cabs. That confirmed what we were told.

Finally, the French Quarter proprietors were strangely racist, even the black ones. At one place, a black doorman waved us ahead of the black people waiting in line. We were a little puzzled by what happened so we asked the waitress, who was black. She flat out said whites tip better and spend more than the people in line.

That last bit is something I hear black people say all the time. I have black friends who proudly say they do not tip at all. I’m not entirely sure why and I’m not alone. This recent WaPo story seems equally puzzled. If your are a French Quarter business, the Soul Bowl turns out to be terrible for business, which is why many of them close. It’s why the cabbies take off during that event.

The hotel in the story at the top may simply have instituted a mandatory tip policy for events. That’s not uncommon either. The thing they know that most people don’t is big events draw lots of deadbeats. The attendees are often there because they got free tickets or as part of a discount package. This becomes their cheap-o-vacation. That means no tips and stealing the towels is an issue. This “tax” is to cover those costs.

Of course, we live in a lunatic asylum so everyone jumps to the worst possible explanation by default. The irony of calling the hotel racist for charging a blacks-only event a premium is lost on everyone. If they hosted an AmRen event, they would excoriated for not charging a premium. But, that’s what happens when you let lunatics take over your country.

 

Starbucks Hates Black People

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There are no Starbucks in the ghetto, so I have to assume the CEO of Starbucks hates black people. I suspect most of my neighbors would have a tough time spending ten bucks for a coffee and muffin, served up by a snotty lesbian with a face full of fishing tackle. Still, it is not hard to imagine how this would go in my neighborhood.

But the executive, who oversees a coffee empire with 4,700 U.S. stores, has now taken on arguably the most polarizing political debate in the United States: race relations.

Starbucks published a full page ad in the New York Times on Sunday — a stark, black, page with a tiny caption “Shall We Overcome?” in the middle, and the words “RaceTogether” with the company logo, on the bottom right. The ad, along with a similar one on Monday in USA Today, is part of an initiative launched this week by the coffee store chain to stimulate conversation and debate about the race in America by getting employees to engage with customers about the perennially hot button subject.

Beginning on Monday, Starbucks baristas will have the option as they serve customers to hand cups on which they’ve handwritten the words “Race Together” and start a discussion about race. This Friday, each copy of USA Today — which has a daily print circulation of almost 2 million and is a partner of Starbucks in this initiative — will have the first of a series of insert with information about race relations, including a variety of perspectives on race. Starbucks coffee shops will also stock the insert.

White plutocrats like the people running Starbucks can have “conversations about race”: because everyone they know is white and has the same opinions about race. Their conversation about race is more of a cheer than a conversation. I suppose that’s why they think this is a great idea.

In more vibrant neighborhoods like mine, there’s no need to have a conversation about race. Everyone knows the deal. We also know it is best be polite to one another in order to keep the peace. If the local coffee shop hires a bitter lesbian and has her lecture the customers about race, there will be blood.

If Starbucks wants to do something about race relations, how about they open some shops in my neighborhood. They’ll need to cut the prices and knock it off with the weird names for things, but maybe the shops in the rich white people towns can pay a little more for social justice.

That’s never going to happen, of course, because it would require some skin in the game. It’s much easier to stand on the lawn of the mansion or in the boardroom lecturing the rest of us from behind a line of security guards.

Haven Monahan Strikes Again!

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Man, this guy is incredible. He replicated out on the West Coast and now he is back east side wreaking havoc on another college campus.

A Penn State University fraternity was suspended for a year Tuesday after police began investigating allegations that members used a private, invitation-only Facebook page to post photos of nude and partly nude women, some apparently asleep or passed out.

A former member of Kappa Delta Rho at the university’s flagship campus in State College tipped police off to the page, telling them in January that it had been used by members to share photos of “unsuspecting victims, drug sales and hazing,” according to a copy of a police warrant obtained Tuesday by The Associated Press.

The ex-member also provided authorities with printouts from the page.

I’ll just point out that the former member who ratted should get a beating that his grand children will feel. That aside, “private” and “invite-only” should be a clue here.

The fraternity’s national executive director, Joe Rosenberg, told the Penn State chapter in a letter on Tuesday that it is banned from most activities for the near future and must reorganize.

He said the suspension was “for the most serious misconduct, most serious disregard of fraternity rules, policies and property by the chapter.”

Chapter officials, who can appeal the decision, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

A Penn State administrator called the allegations a violation of the standards and values required for recognized student organizations.

“The evidence offered by the Facebook postings is appalling, offensive and inconsistent with the university community’s values and expectations,” Damon Sims, Penn State’s vice president for student affairs, said in a news release.

Sims said the school continues to investigate, and vowed that the university would find those responsible and hold them accountable.

Police said anyone who posted the photos could face misdemeanor charges of harassment or invasion of privacy, with a fine the most likely sentence.

Posting naked picture is now a crime? That would be news to the billion dollar porn industry. I guess the claim here is the women who got naked and passed out from drugs or drink did not consent to having their pictures taken. Here’s a top tip ladies. Don’t get so drunk that you pass out naked in a frat house. That way, you won’t wake up as a glazed doughnut or with your pics posted on-line.

The funny thing here is that the same people always saying the girls can play with the boys suddenly sound like a Victorians when the girls get into trouble. Guys have been doing rotten things to guys who pass at the party since the Viking age. Maybe all that feminist nonsense about girls being able to party with the boys was not right after all.

What’s a British Term for Bat Shit Crazy?

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Britain has arrested a teenager for a tweet.

A teenager has been arrested on suspicion of sending a racist tweet aimed at Arsenal striker Danny Welbeck.

The post was made after Welbeck netted the winning goal during an FA Cup quarter-final clash against his former club Manchester United on 9 March.

Manchester-born Welbeck joined the Gunners for £16m last summer.

The 15-year-old boy, from the Salisbury area, was arrested on suspicion of racial abuse and released on bail until 13 April, Wiltshire Police said.

I’m not a a free speech absolutist. I think people make a fetish over so-called free speech in order to avoid discussing freedom of association. I argue that freedom of association solves the modern problems of speech. In this case, the people who found the speech of the teenager offensive should have the right to ignore it. Problem solved.

Given the hysterical nature of anti-racism, it is no surprise that it leads to the policing of thought and speech. Anti-racism has been called a theodicy by some on the DR, but that is not quite right. The proponents are not trying to reconcile their conception of the supernatural with reality. They are trying to reconcile Rousseau-ism with reality. We need a new word.

That said, the religious become more fanatical when faced with dis-confirmation or an existential threat. Islam has lurched into lunacy in the face of the cultural encroachment of the West. Anti-racists have a tough time because humans are biologically racist. We are hard wired to cling to our kin and then those who resemble our kin.

The communications revolution has accelerated the decent into madness because it brings the anti-racist in contact with a tidal wave of reality. Rather than reconsider, the fanatic sees dis-confirmation as proof they must re-double their efforts. If that means rounding up children for the crime of hurting the feelings of a sports star, so be it.

The Prophet Algore Resurfaces

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Way back in the 2000 election, I was pretty sure Algore was having a nervous breakdown. His bizarre behavior in the debates suggested he was losing his grip under the strain of the campaign. His Zelig act in the second debate was one of the more disturbing things I’ve seen in politics. We came very close to putting a madman in the White House. Well, a different sort of madman than usual.

His Old testament prophet act following the election confirmed it for me. He went off into the wilderness, grew a beard and gained fifty pounds. Then, he came back with the good word, as it were, on global warming. His whole act had the feel of a guy thinking he is on a mission from God.

As his crusade grew more craven and ridiculous, he has faded from public view. That and Chocolate Jesus in the White House made the Prophet Al a redundancy. But, with Obama heading to the dustbin, it looks like the prophet is back with the good word again.