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.

Reading the news these days is difficult because it so often reads like an old Lampoon gag. How many stories about boys being expelled for finger guns can you read before you start to think the schools are run by madmen?

This is one of those times when I’m left wondering if it is not some sort of elaborate gag.

Los Angeles police descended on Venice High School on Friday, arresting nine students in connection with a series of sex crimes that began more than a year ago and involved at least two female classmates.

All but one of the arrests were on campus; authorities were attempting to locate five other students. The investigation began after a parent reported the allegations on Tuesday.

As detectives investigated, they discovered at least one photograph showing sex acts, according to law enforcement sources. A photo that appears to show two teenagers engaged in a sex act has been circulated on social media. Allegations involved both consensual sexual acts between minors and coerced acts, which complicates the case, police said.

My first read registered “sex with minors” rather than “sex between minors.” Since the story is about arresting students, I went back and read it again, thinking I missed the part where the students were middle-aged men. Nope. They just arrested boys for having sex with their female classmates.

The alleged crimes include sexual assault and lewd acts with a minor. Although the incidents date back to 2013, Smith said, most occurred in the last two months — and as recently as this month. Sources said that several boys were present during at least some of the incidents.

Authorities provided few details about the allegations and declined to identify the boys who were arrested because they are minors, all between the ages of 14 and 17. Sources in law enforcement and at Venice High said some of the boys are members of the high school’s football and basketball program.

Someone better alert Steve Sailer. Haven Monahan has replicated and turned up in his local high school.

The allegations, they said, involved a group of male students working together to pressure girls into having sex. The boys were accused of making verbal threats and threatening the girls’ reputations, according to one of the sources.

In other words they just arrested boys for doing what boys have been doing for 50,000 years or more.

L.A. Unified Supt. Ramon Cortines said the students’ parents had been notified and crisis counselors were on campus to assist any other students.

“This is a painful moment for Venice High School and this district,” he said in a statement. “I want you to know that no sexual misconduct of any kind by students or staff will ever be tolerated in L.A. Unified.”

“We’re pouring all our resources over there today and for the next couple of weeks to make sure every child over there feels safe,” said school board member Steve Zimmer, who represents the Westside school. “Our crisis team and our psychiatric social workers are on site ready to provide services to every student who is affected by this, indirectly and directly.”

The fact that a school system has a “crisis team” and psychiatric social workers should be the place to start when historians dig through the rubble of our culture.

This will not end well.

Avoid hanging around people with names like Dreekius Oricko Johnson.

Dreekius Oricko Johnson

Former New York Jets and Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson is in stable condition after being shot in the shoulder during a drive-by shooting that occurred at 4 a.m. Sunday at an intersection in Orlando, Florida, according to police.

The driver of the vehicle, Dreekius Oricko Johnson, 28, was killed by gunfire, according to the Orange County sheriff’s department.

Johnson and Reggie Johnson, 29, were passengers in the Jeep, per the sheriff’s office. The latter Johnson suffered gunshot wounds to his shoulder, hand and leg. He, too, is in stable condition.

No arrests have been made in what police are calling a homicide investigation.

According to a police report, deputies arrived at the scene to find a Jeep with one deceased man and two others with gunshot wounds on the sidewalk. The victims said an unknown vehicle pulled up beside them at a red light and opened fire.

The sheriff’s office said no further information will be released at this time.

A a general rule, if the first result on Google for your name is a link to mugshots.com, you have made some bad decisions. Of course, frivolous ninnies like Alex Tabarrok blame it on excessive parking violations, but there’s a reason no one, including a university, lets guys like Alex Tabarrok have any responsibilities. To paraphrase a commenter there, libertarian chatterboxes can afford the luxury of maintaining an adolescent worldview well into adult life.

For those of us in the real world, a good rule of thumb is to avoid spending time around guys with names like Dreekius Oricko Johnson. His mother would have done better by him if she named him Food Stamp or Government Cheese. At least then he could pass himself off as the child of dope smoking artists. instead he came into this world with a ghetto name and left this life in a ghetto fashion.

I found this rather odd essay linked somewhere. At first blush it looks like the typical preaching to the choir you see from the broadsheets. Gaia is unhappy and must be appeased with the blood of the deniers! Well, they are not that entertaining, but you get the point. Instead, what we have here is a rare admission that what they are up to has nothing to do with science, but is a religious cause.

ACCORDING to a recent poll, a large majority of Americans, and roughly half of Republicans, say they support governmental action to address global warming. The poll, conducted by The New York Times, Stanford and the research organization Resources for the Future, stands in stark contrast to the vast partisan gulf in political efforts to address climate change. How could it be that so many Republicans view global warming as a problem, but so few on the right are pressuring the government to take action to address it?

A paper that Matthew Feinberg, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, and I published in the journal Psychological Science in 2013 suggests one answer to this puzzle: While the number of Republicans who say global warming is a serious problem has reached high levels, there remains a very large gap in moral engagement with the issue. We found that conservatives were less likely than liberals to describe pro-environmental efforts in moral terms, or to pass moral judgment on someone who behaved in an environmentally unfriendly way, for example by not recycling. Where liberals view environmental issues as matters of right and wrong, conservatives generally do not.

It is rare to see the masked dropped like this. Usually, the Left is waving around graphs and data that they don’t understand, but are sure proves their case, because you know, science! Here we have someone saying that it’s really a moral issue.

But why does this moral gap matter if most people now believe that global warming is a real threat? Other research has shown that people are generally reluctant to undertake costly political actions, even for a cause they think will be beneficial. After all, there are so many worthy causes competing for our time, effort and resources, and we can’t contribute to every one.

People think quite differently, however, when they are morally engaged with an issue. In such cases people are more likely to eschew a sober cost-benefit analysis, opting instead to take action because it is the right thing to do. Put simply, we’re more likely to contribute to a cause when we feel ethically compelled to.

Still, why do liberals moralize environmental issues, while conservatives do not? The answer is complex, owing in part to the specific history of the American environmental movement. A quick review of that history reveals that, while the environment has been politically polarizing since the 1960s, there is nothing inevitably liberal about environmental concern. After all, it was a Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, who founded the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.

Here you see the hive mind at work. Utopians operate in a world of “us-versus-them.” After all, there’s only one destination, the promised land. Therefore, you are either heading forward to that promised land or you are an obstacle to the tides of history. Nixon was no one’s idea of a conservative. He proudly embraced liberal economics and social engineering. In many respects, he was a proto-liberal. But, he was a Republican so he is one of the undifferentiated other the Left sees as the them.

To win over more of the public, environmentalists must look beyond the arguments that they themselves have found convincing. The next wave of moral arguments for environmental reform will need to look very different from the last, if they are to be maximally effective. Such efforts to understand others’ moral perspectives might not only bring both sides in line on this important issue, but also foster the sort of sincerity and respect necessary to sustain a large-scale collective effort.

The fascinating thing about utopians is they never seem to listen to their own words. They are just incantations that make them feel better, but make little sense to a non-believer. The writer claims big majorities are in favor of his preferred acts of piety to appease Gaia. What need is there to convince the holdouts? If a majority want what he wants, surely the elected officials, who all want what the author wants, will go along with it.

That’s because it is not a rational thing. At some level, the author and his coreligionists believe that the presence of even one non-believer keeps them from reaching the promised land. Just as ISIS is focused on purifying their lands by ridding it of every last infidel, the modern liberal obsesses over the dwindling number of non-believers in the West.

The other fascinating thing is that these utopians never take yes for an answer. That’s because they can’t. What animates their faith is the struggle. The promised land is always just over the next hill or around the next bend. Today they must valiantly struggle against the infidel so that tomorrow they can live in paradise. The fact that the Left has been triumphant for close to a century in America has brought them no closer to their goal. The promised land remains just out of reach, no matter how much ground they gain in the fight.

I used to be fond of asking these sorts of people a simple question. What would have to happen for you to feel like you won? They never have an answer. Instead, you get an answer to a question you did not ask. That’s because there are no conditions in which they will be satisfied and quit. It’s the struggle, not the victory. Environmentalism will be with us in some fashion forever simply because it is a religion, not a problem to be solved.