I watched a good bit of the Gavin McInnes film How to be a Man. It was free through Amazon so I gave it a shot.  Maybe it would not be that horrible. It was better than I expected. It is a short film, by today’s standards. I’m not a heavy consumer of video these days so I have to rely on the internet for this stuff. According to this the typical movie is 2.6 hours. That seems terribly long to me. Maybe that’s why I have not been to the theater in many years.

Gavin McInnes is a likable guy on screen. He plays a middle-aged beta male, Mark McCarthy, who thinks he used to be a real man. In fact he was a stand-up comic, who had brief success and then took a job at an adverting agency. At middle age he lives in an apartment with his pregnant wife. He has just learned he has terminal cancer and therefore will not be around to raise his unborn child. He hires an old friend’s kid to help him create a series of videos explaining how to be a man. The rest of the movie is these two bonding through a series of adventures.

An idea lingering in the background of the movie is that Bryan may be McCarthy’s son, as Bryan never knew his father and McCarthy used to party with Bryan’s mother in the old days. As the two work through adventures, creating videos about life lessons, McCarthy wants to teach his unborn child, a father-son relationship develops. In the end, McCarthy has learned how to be a father and Bryan becomes a man. In between we get some yucks and corn-pone advice about life, as told by urban elites.

In his articles and TV appearances, McInnes keeps returning to the issue of drug use and his allegedly wild youth. I say allegedly because I have no evidence to suggest his was an unusually wild youth. It is all relative, of course. When you live in a place like Baltimore, drugs, crime and regular gun fire is the wild life. Disheveled dudes with lots of ink and drug problems are a dime a dozen, but, in the swank coastal enclaves it may seem outlandish.

Anyway, the movie is sort of a walk down memory lane for McInnes. He is credited as one of the writers and I suspect the adventures were written by him. Through the movie, I kept waiting for the main character to have the revelation about his life that seems to be standard in these films. You know, the good guy, who is miserable suddenly sees how good he has it. We never get that. Instead there’s some suggestion that maybe the main character is figuring it out, but it is left unresolved.

For a short free movie it is a fine option if you have time to kill. McInnes actually has some talent, but something seems missing with him. He’s one of those guys who is above average at a lot of entertainment stuff, but not great at any one thing. It seems that people who do well in that business do one thing really well. Then again, maybe we just notice it, because they end up doing that one thing in movies or TV. The entertainment rackets are a strange business.

I’ve posted a few times on my ideas for reforming the prison system. This incident in New York is a good example of the problems in our handling of the defectives.

The state gave him no meds and no psychiatric referral, releasing the murderous ticking time bomb from prison on an unsuspecting public.

Daniel St. Hubert, a paranoid schizophrenic who spent five years in the slammer for trying to strangle his mom with an electrical cord, was operating with barely any safety net when he was sprung last month.

Nine days after he walked out of the upstate Clinton Correctional Facility, police say, he used a steak knife to kill a 6-year-old boy and seriously hurt his 7-year-old playmate at a Brooklyn housing project.

Police also suspect St. Hubert killed an 18-year-old college student and critically injured a 53-year-old homeless man.

St. Hubert’s sister said she pleaded with officials for help for her mentally ill brother before and after he was released May 23 from prison.

Judith Perry said he was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic with aspects of drug-induced psychosis.

“I begged them and they didn’t do it,” she told the Daily News on Thursday.

“I spoke to the social worker in regards to his mental capacity and when will he be able to see a doctor. They told me it doesn’t happen right away. It usually takes a couple of weeks. Usually they’re discharged with medication.”

Prison officials declined to discuss whether St. Hubert was treated for mental illness behind bars. Records show he was committed to mental health facilities three times — once in 2010 and twice in 2011.

You have the whole range of pathologies on display here. First you have a person with a long history of violence being released from prison. Even not knowing about his mental condition, no responsible adult should sign off on this act, but our prisons are not run by responsible adults.

Then you have the mental problems. That alone should have kept this person off the streets. There’s no fixing this man with current technology. Only a lunatic would think putting a monster in a cage for a given period of time changes the nature of the monster.

The bigger issue, the real root of what ails us as a civilization, is the insularity of the government functionaries. This madman went through the system. Government bureaucrats signed off on his release. We should be able to easily get this information and know who, exactly, is responsible for letting this maniac loose on the public. This will never happen. No one will be named. No one will be sanctioned. No one will be held accountable to the people.

John Derbyshire calls the culture war a cold civil war. I like it, even though it is imperfect. In modern America, we have two groups of white people. One hates the other with the intensity of a thousand suns. The other can’t figure it out. That’s means it is less of a civil war than an occupation. The ruling whites despise the colonized whites or something like that. This story in America’s Paper of Record is great example.

More than half the members of the City Council have fired off a letter to Walmart demanding that it stop making millions in charitable contributions to local groups here.

Twenty-six of the 51 members of the Council charged in the letter that the world’s biggest retailer’s support of local causes is a cynical ploy to enter the market here.

“We know how desperate you are to find a foothold in New York City to buy influence and support here,” says the letter, obtained by The Post and addressed to Walmart and the Walton Family Foundation.

“Stop spending your dangerous dollars in our city,” the testy letter demands. “That’s right: this is a cease-and-desist letter.”

That can only make sense when you have lost your marbles. These people hate WalMart so much they will deprive their own people of charity to make it clear how much they hate WalMart. Why do they hate WalMart? It’s southern!

Last week, Walmart announced that it distributed $3 million last year to charities here, including $1 million to the New York Women’s Foundation, which offers job training, and $30,000 to Bailey House, which distributes groceries to low-income residents.

Walmart, which has been thwarted by union-backed opposition for more than a decade, said the handouts “can make a difference on big issues like hunger relief and career development.”

The retail giant said its business agenda “aligns with supporting the local organizations that are important to our customers and associates.”

But Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito called the donations “toxic money,” and accused Walmart of waging a “cynical public-relations campaign that disguises Walmart’s backwards anti-job agenda.”

There’s a level of crazy that lies beyond the ability to comprehend. This lunatic is just spitting out all the scare words she can conjure. There was a time when this sort of behavior disqualified you from public office – even in New York City.

I get home the other night and in the mail box was the latest Time magazine. I’m not a subscriber. The name on the front is unfamiliar and the address is not even close to mine. I did not think about it until throwing some stuff away last night. Almost all of my mail is junk these days. My bills come via the miracle of the Internet. No one sends letters anymore. That leaves a few magazines and mountains of junk mail. I pile it up and when the spirit moves I sort through it.

The Time website is useless so I can’t link the cover or even find it. This article from the LA Times has a pic of the cover. I would not have bothered to look at it if not the obvious fact the person on the cover is a tranny and the word “transgender” on the front. I no longer watch television so I’m going to guess that they are starting to fill up the roles with trannies, much like they filled up shows with flaming homosexual men a few years ago. One night of TV and you see more homosexual males than you meet in lifetime.

I’ve seen exactly three trannies in my life. One was a very tall and muscular black guy that frequented a coffee shop near my office. He was at least 6’5″ in heels and built like a linebacker. Everyone would freak out seeing this giant black dude in drag so that was always good for a few laughs. The other two were in Key West. I was walking around and passed by a tranny club of some sort. Two of them dressed as Marilyn Monroe were manning the door, so to speak.

I’ve been on earth a long time and seen a lot of things. If I’ve met three trannies, I’m thinking the numbers are microscopic in terms of population. Maybe it is more common than most think, but still, the numbers have to be really small. if homosexuals ate three percent of the population, men who dress as women must be a tenth of that. Those who think they are women must be even smaller.

That said, the tranny has become the dividing line between two groups of people. On the one hand we have liberal white people who engage in all sorts of magical thinking about the world, including things like biology and physics. They think someone can change their sex if they choose to do it. They think evolution stopped 50,000 years ago and that all humans are exactly the same. They think putting a dumb person in school long enough will make them smart. These things not only contradict accepted science, they contradict objective reality. They disbelieve and curse their lying eyes.

On the other side of the line is another group of believers. These folks believe in conventional religions, nationalism, fraternity and so forth. In the case of religion, they accept it may contradict science, but not in important ways that alter the functioning of society. In the case of nationalism, they know there’s no good reason to feel the way they do when the national anthem is played, but they accept it and relish it. In other words, these folks believe in things because they appear to make life more pleasant, their societies more successful and the future more palatable.

That would be the end of it if the first group of people did not hold the second group in such contempt that they wanted to kill them. The magical thinking crowd has not committed to the actual killing of the latter group, but they do want to kill all the stuff they believe. They want to stamp out Christianity, love of country and all of the things normal people think are important.

The great battle between these two camps of believers is what shapes our times. The fact that the fault line is the waist line will one day be great fodder for a wise cracking historian. The first group’s sudden embrace of deranged men in drag is based solely on the belief that the second group find this disgusting. If Evangelicals were to embrace homosexual marriage and drag queens, the first group of whites would make unholy war on gays and trannies.

The trouble for the “normals”, as I call the second group, is they keep hoping the fanatics, as I call the first group, will relent. They will never relent. The fanatics will continue to attack the normals until the normals are all dead. Then the fanatics will attack other groups of fanatics they deem insufficiently fanatical. This will repeat itself until the whole thing collapses on itself.

Maybe at some point normals will come to recognize this and join the fight. I don’t know. In my lifetime it has not happened or shown many signs of happening. In the 1980’s it looked like the nation finally snapped out of it and was ready to shrug off Cultural Marxism, but it was not the case. The fanatics were back in force by the 1990’s and every white guy was being marched off to diversity camp for re-education.

The smart bet in the Tranny Wars is on bearded weirdos demanding and winning the right to take your sons into the woods unsupervised as camp counselors.

This story in the NYTimes is becoming common.

Five months after Colorado became the first state to allow recreational marijuana sales, the battle over legalization is still raging. Law enforcement officers in Colorado and neighboring states, emergency room doctors and legalization opponents increasingly are highlighting a series of recent problems as cautionary lessons for other states flirting with loosening marijuana laws.

Everyone who had been making big money from the war on weed is screaming bloody murder about legalization. There are legitimate arguments against some of this, but the general tone suggests the prohibitionists are unlikely to make them.

There is the Denver man who, hours after buying a package of marijuana-infused Karma Kandy from one of Colorado’s new recreational marijuana shops, began raving about the end of the world and then pulled a handgun from the family safe and killed his wife, the authorities say. Some hospital officials say they are treating growing numbers of children and adults sickened by potent doses of edible marijuana. Sheriffs in neighboring states complain about stoned drivers streaming out of Colorado and through their towns.

“I think, by any measure, the experience of Colorado has not been a good one unless you’re in the marijuana business,” said Kevin A. Sabet, executive director of Smart Approaches to Marijuana, which opposes legalization. “We’ve seen lives damaged. We’ve seen deaths directly attributed to marijuana legalization. We’ve seen marijuana slipping through Colorado’s borders. We’ve seen marijuana getting into the hands of kids.”

One of the features of the modern social welfare state is official lying. That is people telling obvious lies, but everyone pretending they are just alternative opinions. Calling your organization “Smart Approaches to Marijuana”, when you’re clearly not smart or interested in anything other than prohibition, is an obvious lie. What Kevin Sabet goes onto to say is clearly made up nonsense that no adult would ever believe. Yet, here we are with the Times treating this crook like a legitimate source of knowledge.

Despite such anecdotes, there is scant hard data. Because of the lag in reporting many health statistics, it may take years to know legal marijuana’s effect — if any — on teenage drug use, school expulsions or the number of fatal car crashes.

It was only in January, for example, that the Colorado State Patrol began tracking the number of people pulled over for driving while stoned. Since then, marijuana-impaired drivers have made up about 1.5 percent of all citations for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

Proponents of legalization argue that the critics are cherry-picking anecdotes to tarnish a young industry that has been flourishing under intense scrutiny.

The vast majority of the state’s medical and recreational marijuana stores are living up to stringent state rules, they say. The stores have sold marijuana to hundreds of thousands of customers without incident. The industry has generated $12.6 million in taxes and fees so far, though the revenues have not matched some early projections.

Marijuana supporters note that violent crimes in Denver — where the bulk of Colorado’s pot retailers are — are down so far this year. The number of robberies from January through April fell by 4.8 percent from the same time in 2013, and assaults were down by 3.7 percent. Over all, crime in Denver is down by about 10 percent, though it is impossible to say whether changes to marijuana laws played any role in that decline.

That’s not a lot to go on, but at least it is honest. Maybe the Times highlighted the hysterical nonsense as a way to support the legalization case. It is hard to know. Propaganda sheets like the Times are expert at this sort of subtle campaigning.

The potheads are winning right now. They are handing the pols money in the form of new taxes. They have avoided any trouble, which keeps the suburban moms off their back. Most important, their critics sound foolish. Being blessed by the right enemies is always the key to winning public debate.

I’m not enthusiastic about legalization, but I was never enthusiastic about prohibition. I’d prefer a world where people did not smoke pot. It makes you stupid and it causes you to think idleness is a good thing. That said, it is not going to bring down civilization if some people smoke pot. There are other ways to discourage bad behavior that don’t require the state shooting citizens and locking them in cages. Just look at cigarettes.

Still, there are trade-offs to everything. We don’t know what else comes with legalizing weed, but we do know something does come with it.

This morning Tyler Cowen has a post up about his column in the NYTimes. That column is about this book on fugitives and life on the lam. The hook for Tyler and his libertarian followers is the drug angle. The libertarian fetish for drugs is comical at times. it really is hard to tell if people drawn to libertarianism come through the drug door or that people come to drug legalization through the libertarian door. maybe both just come through the divorced from reality door. Anyway, there’s this.

You may think of being on the run as a quandary for only a small group of recalcitrant, hardened criminals. But in her study of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Professor Goffman shows that it is a common way of life for many nonviolent Americans. These people often face charges related to possession or sale of small amounts of drugs, or offenses like hiding relatives from the law. Whatever the negative moral implications of such crimes, they don’t merit having one’s life ruined.

Whatever the merits of libertarianism, the obsession with drugs undermines their credibility, because it suggests they are not really serious.. People generally understand that drug addicts and their suppliers are bad people. Some addicts are just unlucky, but most are bums who would be bums without the drugs. The dealers are freeloaders who should be put to the sword. Dealing with them as we do may not be optimal, but romanticizing them is absurd.

That’s what you learn living in and around the ghetto. The people who come from outside, whether from the university, the media or social welfare bureaucracy, are terminally naive about life in the ghetto. The cops and bounty hunters are jaded for a reason. Their jobs require them to deal with this people in a sober-minded fashion. The others come in looking for facts and anecdotes to fill out their already written narratives about the imaginary life in the ghetto..

In another life, I made money repossessing cars. There are hundreds of cars in every city that are not technically stolen, but are treated as stolen by their owners. They can be rental cars that were never returned or used cars bought on payments that were never made. The owners will pay a bounty to tow truck operators and ambitious free lancers to recover them. I would imagine it is different in each city and different today than it was ages ago when I dabbled in it.

Back in the stone age before GPS and sat-nav, hiding a car was easy. The cops would not look for a stolen car. They don’t look for them now. They would rather march around in battle gear looking like fat storm troopers. A rental car that is not returned will never get on the stolen list anyway so that makes relying on the cops totally pointless. The agencies would hire former cops as security men who could get access to parking ticket computers and motor vehicle systems.

They give the repo guys the list of parking ticket addresses, the renters address and anything else they had on the car. The repo guy using just that and experience would find the car in a night. You jack the car and collect a fee. Guys who did it for a living would find a few cars a day sometimes. I knew a Puerto Rican who made a nice living this way. The cops would even use him to help on their cases as the guy was like a bloodhound. He could also steal anything that was not nailed down.

One of the first things you learn about the people absconding with rental cars or not paying their car payment is they know they are scumbags. They are not victims. They scammed the system for a free car, knowing they would most likely avoid the cops and get free use of a car for a month or two. Usually they put a woman up to fronting the money and signature. The girl would rent the car for the boy friend, who used it to peddle drugs or stolen goods. A lot of these cars ended up in drug cases.

In one case I recall, the car was found with two dead guys in the front seat. Someone in the backseat used a shotgun to relieve them of their brain matter. I assume it was a shotgun from the splatter, but the head explodes like a watermelon from point blank shots from high caliber handguns. It is called hydrostatic shock. The dash and windshield were covered in brains and bits of skull. Eventually they figured out the names of the corpses and both were fugitives.

That’s the thing about fugitives. There are a lot of them by choice. They fail to show up for court or they fail to show up at their parole meetings. The “minor drug offenders” are usually guys who pleaded down to possession and were sent to AA or NA as part of their deal. All they have to do is show up a meeting a week for a few months and turn in signed attendance forms. They blow it off and end up with a warrant. Again, these are not fallen angels.

That’s the other part of the drug obsession by libertarians that I find amusing. They think drug laws make people into criminals. Certainly some people fall into the drug game, but most of your dealers are criminals who like crime. If not for the drug game, they would be robbing houses or running scams. They like crime and drugs are a convenient way to indulge their wants. They get paid to do what they love, This last part gets at the naïveté of these guys.

Economists are often skeptical of drug laws, favoring alternatives like legalization, decriminalization, or a combination of legalization and high taxation, to discourage use. (In an essay titled “Prohibition vs. Legalization: Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Drug Policy?” Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, chronicles economists’ views of the war on drugs.) Drugs could be treated as more of a public health problem than a criminal matter.

It’s an urgent situation, because Professor Goffman’s book shows clearly that the microeconomics of a life on the run are grim indeed.

Life on the lam should be grim. No sane society wants their criminal fugitives to have it easy while on the run. That’s the whole point of the criminal justice system. The locals who are forced to tolerate these animals want the cops to scoop them up and take them away as quickly as possible. It is easy to romanticize the drug dealer when you’re living in cloistered, gated communities. Ask anyone in and around the ghetto, who is not in the game, and they will tell you a different set of stories.

Economist are often skeptical of drug laws because they have never known a drug dealer. Anyone who thinks the corner boys of West Baltimore are going to head off to college or get jobs at the local university once drugs are legal is not qualified to discuss the issue. The Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings are not turning into charities once heroine is legal. These people will find new crimes to commit. It is what they do. Legalizing drugs just moves the problem, the real problem, down the street.