The court jester is a familiar image in western culture, serving a specific role in both politics and the culture. He’s the guy dressed in the weird leotard, juggling while telling jokes at the local Renaissance fair. Historically, the jester would tell jokes about the ruler, the people in charge. Maybe he would do it in the public square or maybe he would do it in court. In court, his role was, in part, was to bring a bit of reality, in the form of popular sarcasm, to the self-serious couriers.

Modern times brings us the Prog jester. This is a person, who says and writes foolish things that flatter the Left. The modern fool fool is the comedian or satirist. Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert and Bill Maher are examples of guys, who pass themselves off as clowns mocking greater society, but they are really selling flattery to the Left. Similarly, the satirist does not mock the ruling class, but rather his job is to flatter them by mocking the common people and enemies of the elite.

The licensed fool is a different thing. These are the people hired by the big propaganda organs of the Left. Thomas Friedman is an example. His career is all about ingratiating himself to elites. He passes himself off as a intellectual, writing books on big topics and columns on hard topics. Yet, it is clear he has only a cursory understanding of the material. It is a balancing act. He reports detailed findings from experts and then ruminates in broad generalities about the implications. The latter is always a pitch for some fad popular with his keepers. As a result, his work is perpetually sophomoric.

David Brooks is a slightly different take on this role. He holds the William Safire Chair at the NYTimes. The Times likes to keep a “conservative” around to maintain the facade of objectivity. It is never a flame-thrower like Mark Steyn or Ann Coulter. Instead they prefer the refined musings of non-threatening guys who happen to hold a few unconventional opinions. Brooks, like Safire, is first and foremost an elitist. That’s never in doubt. That means his eccentricities on a narrow range of public policy debates can be safely broadcast.

It’s now clear that the end of the Soviet Union heralded an era of democratic complacency. Without a rival system to test them, democratic governments have decayed across the globe. In the U.S., Washington is polarized, stagnant and dysfunctional; a pathetic 26 percent of Americans trust their government to do the right thing. In Europe, elected officials have grown remote from voters, responding poorly to the euro crisis and contributing to massive unemployment.

According to measures by Freedom House, freedom has been in retreat around the world for the past eight years. New democracies like South Africa are decaying; the number of nations that the Bertelsmann Foundation now classifies as “defective democracies” (rigged elections and so on) has risen to 52. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their book, “The Fourth Revolution,” “so far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the Western model.”

At first blush, this seems reasonable, but the cultivated lament is distinctly elitist and progressive. The failure to ram through more and more regulation and the public failure to love the state fully is what has Brooks sad. It’s a form and humble bragging, in that he is saying things are a mess because his side has not done more to impose their will on the little people. What looks like criticism is really back handed flattery of the friends and neighbors of David Brooks.

The events of the past several years have exposed democracy’s structural flaws. Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning. Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for. The system of checks and balances can slide into paralysis, as more interest groups acquire veto power over legislation.

Across the Western world, people are disgusted with their governments. There is a widening gap between the pace of social and economic change, and the pace of government change. In Britain, for example, productivity in the private service sector increased by 14 percent between 1999 and 2013, while productivity in the government sector fell by 1 percent between 1999 and 2010.

These trends have sparked a sprawling debate in the small policy journals: Is democracy in long-run decline?

This is where the poseur makes his appearance. Again, to the untrained it sounds like Brooks is up on the serious intellectual debates. Yet, he provides no evidence, other than he maybe read a review of the book, The Fourth Revolution, by two reporters from The Economist. That’s called signaling. He’s letting his tony readers that he hangs with the swells who read The Economist.

A new charismatic rival is gaining strength: the Guardian State. In their book, Micklethwait and Wooldridge do an outstanding job of describing Asia’s modernizing autocracies. In some ways, these governments look more progressive than the Western model; in some ways, more conservative.

In places like Singapore and China, the best students are ruthlessly culled for government service. The technocratic elites play a bigger role in designing economic life. The safety net is smaller and less forgiving. In Singapore, 90 percent of what you get out of the key pension is what you put in. Work is rewarded. People are expected to look after their own.

Actually, there’s nothing new about any of this. China’s “iron rice bowl” has been with us for seven decades now. In the West. corporatism has been kicking around for a century. Positive Liberty, embraced by the American ruling elite, has been with us since the fifties. Outside the cloistered places Brooks travels, the Custodial State has been a hot topic for two decades. My goodness. It is as if the man has been living in a cave.

These Guardian States have some disadvantages compared with Western democracies. They are more corrupt. Because the systems are top-down, local government tends to be worse. But they have advantages. They are better at long-range thinking and can move fast because they limit democratic feedback and don’t face NIMBY-style impediments.

Most important, they are more innovative than Western democracies right now. If you wanted to find a model for your national schools, would you go to South Korea or America? If you wanted a model for your pension system, would you go to Singapore or the U.S.? “These are not hard questions to answer,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge write, “and they do not reflect well on the West.”

So how should Western democracies respond to this competition? What’s needed is not so much a vision of the proper role for the state as a strategy to make democracy dynamic again.

The answer is to use Lee Kuan Yew means to achieve Jeffersonian ends — to become less democratic at the national level in order to become more democratic at the local level. At the national level, American politics has become neurotically democratic. Politicians are campaigning all the time and can scarcely think beyond the news cycle. Legislators are terrified of offending this or that industry lobby, activist group or donor faction. Unrepresentative groups have disproportionate power in primary elections.

As we always see with the Prog Jester, they always end up flattering their keepers. Our ruling class would love to transform our societies into a neo-feudal one like we see in Asia and South America.

The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms.

The process of change would be unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through. But the substance would be anything but elitist. Democracy’s great advantage over autocratic states is that information and change flow more freely from the bottom up. Those with local knowledge have more responsibility.

Finally, hilarity ensues when even his keepers realize Brook has the IQ of a goldfish. What he proposes has never worked, but it has been tried many times in many places. The results have either been laughable failure of monstrous bloodbath. An elect working for the volk is an old tune Herr Brooks.

For a while, this book was a big deal for people in certain tribes of the dissident right, but also with some in the mainstream. People like Thomas Friedman were championing it in the NY Times. so the beautiful people may have been reading it. The very short version is the robot revolution will have the same impact on humanity as the industrial revolution in the 19th century. There’s some truth to it, but like the paperless office, it is a thing that no one will live to see.

That’s the thing with futurists. They are almost always wrong. Most of them look around at current trends, then project those trends into the future. The trouble is no tree grows to the sky. Assuming some current trend will go on forever is like assuming your child will keep growing forever. The lack of 100-foot tall people tells as that trends always slow, come to a halt and often reverse themselves. The current technological trends will also slow and maybe go down dead ends and then end entirely.

On the other hand, many futurologist are just running a racket to get attention, sell book ans get on television to sell books. The way to do that is to either predict things that flatter people or predict things that scare people. Telling people their future will be the same as their present, but more boring, is not a big seller. Astrologers tell their female customers they will meet a mysterious stranger, for the same reason pulp writers crank out bodice rippers. Women by them.

This column in the New Statesman is a good summary.

Futurologists are almost always wrong. Indeed, Clive James invented a word – “Hermie” – to denote an inaccurate prediction by a futurologist. This was an ironic tribute to the cold war strategist and, in later life, pop futurologist Herman Kahn. It was slightly unfair, because Kahn made so many fairly obvious predictions – mobile phones and the like – that it was inevitable quite a few would be right.

Even poppier was Alvin Toffler, with his 1970 book Future Shock, which suggested that the pace of technological change would cause psychological breakdown and social paralysis, not an obvious feature of the Facebook generation. Most inaccurate of all was Paul R Ehrlich who, in The Population Bomb, predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s. Hunger, in fact, has since declined quite rapidly.

Science fiction writers are probably the best at getting some things about the future right, because they often have a good working knowledge of science. They also understand that human nature and human organization does not change all that much with technology.  Jules Verne got a bunch of stuff right and Aldous Huxley is looking to have nailed large chunks of cultural change. Still, most of what these people described never happened and will never happen.

Perhaps the most significant inaccuracy concerned artificial intelligence (AI). In 1956 the polymath Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do” and in 1967 the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky announced that “within a generation . . . the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”. Yet, in spite of all the hype and the dizzying increases in the power and speed of computers, we are nowhere near creating a thinking machine.

Such a machine is the basis of Kurzweil’s singularity, but futurologists seldom let the facts get in the way of a good prophecy. Or, if they must, they simply move on. The nightmarishly intractable problem of space travel has more or less killed that futurological category and the unexpected complexities of genetics have put that on the back burner for the moment, leaving neuroscientists to take on the prediction game. But futurology as a whole is in rude health despite all the setbacks.

This is where the predictions about our machine future fall apart. Yes, massive leaps have been made recently, but we are not close to building machines smarter than their creators. When one second of human thought requires a room full of servers, we are a long way from Terminator. Even assuming some breakthrough where the machines self learn in an increasingly fast recursion, we’re a long way from the machines becoming aware and taking over the planet.

Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, has an astrophysicist friend who made a pitch to a potential donor of research funds. The pitch was excellent but he failed to get the money because, as the donor put it, “You know what, I’m gonna pass because I just don’t feel inspired . . . you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.” Gladwellism – the hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically presented evidence – is the primary Ted style. Is this, wondered Bratton, the basis on which the future should be planned? To its credit, Ted had the good grace to let him give a virulently anti-Ted talk to make his case. “I submit,” he told the assembled geeks, “that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilisational disaster.”

Bratton is not anti-futurology like me; rather, he is against simple-minded futurology. He thinks the Ted style evades awkward complexities and evokes a future in which, somehow, everything will be changed by technology and yet the same. The geeks will still be living their laid-back California lifestyle because that will not be affected by the radical social and political implications of the very technology they plan to impose on societies and states. This is a naive, very local vision of heaven in which everybody drinks beer and plays baseball and the sun always shines.

This really is the crux of it. There’s money in predicting the future. In every town there exists a tarot card reader or psychic. Women with advanced degrees go to these people to get their future. Religion is all about the future. Live your life a certain way and you gain ever lasting life or languish in hell. The animating philosophy of modern political elites is based on the belief that the right arrangements will result in heaven on earth, however that is currently imagined. The demand for these promises is unlimited.

The bits about Gladwell and Kurzweil in the article are interesting. It seems that the people who get rich from telling ruling class types about the future never know a lot about the science they promote. The two guys who authored The Second Machine Age have no science. One has a degree in math, but has never worked in science or technology. Instead he has remained in college teaching management. The other guy just writes books.

Thomas Friedman is a guy who appears to learn the jargon of science and technology, but knows nothing about science and technology. His skill is flattering rich people, especially his wife who is mega-rich. This allows Friedman to flit around the world telling rich people they are the best. The court jester has been a feature of human societies since the Bronze Age. Telling the boss he’s wonderful by predicting the current course will lead to times of plenty is never going to get you fed to the lions.

I had my annual physical yesterday. Even though I am no spring chicken, I remain in good health. Other than high blood pressure, for which I take a pill every day, I have no health concerns. I exercise frequently and watch my diet, but I am not like the guys in this story from the Weekly Standard. I take few supplements and I refuse to starve myself into a skeleton. I’m not interested in living forever. If it means looking like this guy, then I’m certainly not interested.

There was a poster on one wall of the examination room graphically describing the horrors of smoking. It featured pictures of brown lungs and mangled faces. The poster was sponsored by one of the nicotine patch makers. There was a calendar sponsored by a local disability lawyer. There was a poster for some drug that must be aimed at fat people. Next to that was a poster for botox.  I started thinking about John Kerry. What in the world would possess someone to have that done? I’m as vain as any other man, but immobilizing your face sounds crazy to me.

Looking around, it occurred to me that one reason America has such a dysfunctional health care system is we have convinced ourselves it is not a business. We think health care is this weird fusion of mystical religion, government service and natural resource. It is none of those things. It certainly should never be any of those things. Europeans made it a government service for the proletariat. It’s cheap and does the basics, but there’s a reason their elites don’t use the system.

Health care is just another service. It is a business. If we looked at it that way, like we do veterinary services, we would do ourselves a world of good. When I take the cat to the vet, I pay for the service. I once had a cat with a heart problem. I was able to get first world, cutting edge cardiac care for the animal at a price that was trivial. A one hour visit with a world class doctor and his cutting edge machines cost $300. For large animals, heart surgery is now available to fix things like heart valves, again, at reasonable prices.

At no time is there any doubt that the transaction is exactly that, a transaction. My vet charges a fee and hopes to make a profit from my business with him. I decide whether the services are worth the money. Normal market forces drive prices down and innovation up. In my little slice of heaven, there are more veterinarians than physicians. The wait time for the vet is the next day while I had to wait over a month to see the nurse practitioner for my physical. That last bit is important. I see a real doctor for the cat. I’ve never met my doctor, just his nurses.

The response whenever I bring this up is “But you can put your cat down. People need lots of care when they are old and you cannot choose to put them down.” That’s not entirely true. We withdraw life saving measures all the time. Living wills are for exactly that. Doctors have been telling families “there’s nothing we can do” for generations. The realities of death have been dealt with since the dawn of time. It is only of late that we struggle with the concept. In Europe, poor people are given pain killers and sent home to die. We used to do the same thing until the reformers came along.

Health care is a math problem. In any society the care and feeding of the helpless members is a top priority. Altruism is one of the oldest human traits and it is what allows us to live in large communities of strangers. We are not going to leave the poor and sick to die in the streets untended. The question is how best to supply that charity to these people. Everyone else should be paying their own way for health services just as we pay our own way for clothes and food. But, when you live in a society run by lunatics with magical thinking about observable reality, you get what we have now.

According to a new study, George Wallace was right when he said “Segregation now, segregation forever!” Of course, everyone has known he was right, regarding the benefits of peaceful separation, but he has so far been wrong about the forever part of his statement. No one is allowed to say it in public, but like so many of our current taboos, people act on what cannot be said.

Segregation is making a comeback in U.S. schools.

Progress toward integrated classrooms has largely been rolled back since the Supreme Court issued its landmark Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision 60 years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Blacks are now seeing more school segregation than they have in decades, and more than half of Latino students are now attending schools that are majority Latino.

In New York, California and Texas, more than half of Latino students are enrolled in schools that are 90 percent minority or more, the report found. In New York, Illinois, Maryland and Michigan, more than half of black students attend schools where 90 percent or more are minority.

Normal people tend to notice things. For instance, if they push a button and nothing happens, they quickly figure out the button does not work. Crazy people stand there all day pushing the button, each time expecting a different result. That’s what we keep seeing with the Left and social policy. Even if we assume their motives are good, six decades of failure should cause some rethinking of their goals.

Project co-director Gary Orfield, author of the “Brown at 60” report, said the changes are troubling because they show some minority students receive poorer educations than white students and Asian students, who tend to be in middle-class schools. The report urged, among other things, deeper research into housing segregation, which is a “fundamental cause of separate-and-unequal schooling.”

This is the next great cause of the Left. White people keep moving away from blacks and Latinos. The result is the schools remain segregated. Busing was a disaster so the only solution is to force blacks and whites to live together. They tried this in Berkeley in the 70’s and 80’s. Berkeley Citizens Action gained control of the housing authority and zoning board. The first thing they did was go after the lace curtain liberals on the hill. It was a disaster, but the Cult never learns from the past.

They tried building housing projects out in the suburbs. That was a hilarious disaster as people just moved away and you ended up with these weird pocket ghettos in the middle of nowhere. This was a phenomenon in the South mostly. Instead of urban reservation, they build “affordable housing” in working class suburbs and the whites then fled to the next suburb.

Although segregation is more prevalent in central cities of the largest metropolitan areas, it’s also in the suburbs. “Neighborhood schools, when we go back to them, as we have, produce middle-class schools for whites and Asians and segregated high-poverty schools for blacks and Latinos,” Orfield said.

Housing discrimination – stopping or discouraging minorities from moving to majority-white areas – also plays a role in school segregation and “that’s been a harder nut to crack,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which argued the Brown case in front of the Supreme Court.

School performance can be entwined with poverty, too.

The reason it is a “harder nut to crack” is people are not insane. In the Baltimore – Washington area parents play all sorts of games to keep their kids out of ghetto schools. Parents will claim to live in a better area, using the address of a friend or relative, so they can send their kid to the better school. Of course, the massive suburbs and exurbs around places like Detroit are the result of sane people fleeing the metastasizing ghetto.

“These are the schools that tend to have fewer resources, tend to have teachers with less experience, tend to have people who are teaching outside their area of specialty, and it also denies the opportunities, the contacts and the networking that occur when you’re with people from different socio-economic backgrounds,” said Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union Racial Justice Program.

For students like Diamond McCullough, 17, a senior at Walter H. Dyett High School on Chicago’s South Side, the disparities are real. Her school is made up almost entirely of African-American students. She said her school doesn’t offer physical education classes or art, and Advanced Placement classes are only available online.

John Rury, an education professor at the University of Kansas, said the work at UCLA has revealed how many of the advances in desegregating schools made after the Brown ruling have stopped – or been reversed.

While racial discrimination has been a factor, other forces are in play, Rury said. Educated parents with the means to move have flocked to districts and schools with the best reputations for decades, said Rury, who has studied the phenomenon in the Kansas City region.

In the South, many school districts encompass both a city and the surrounding area, he said. That has led to better-integrated schools.

Still, around the country, only 23 percent of black students attended white-majority schools in 2011. That’s the lowest number since 1968.

Kansas City is billion dollar experiment that should have put an end to the madness of forced integration. Here’s a long report from Cato on the colossal failure of the reformers to fix the schools. Again, failure never seems to teach these people any lessons. It only encourages them. That’s because their dream of an integrated society is now just vengeance. They hate white people.

In the latest Radio Derb, he mentioned this story from Britain. The short version of it is Britain is slowly going halal. The natives are allowing Muslim fanatics to colonize the place and add it to the caliphate. That’s an exaggeration, sort of. For reasons no one knows, they have imported millions of Muslim crazies, who now make up 4% of the population. The results are predictable. Bombings, consanguineous marriages resulting in a rash of pinheads and, of course, demands for special rights.

Then there is this story. It is easy to get sucked into believing things that you want to believe, so it is a good idea to seek out contrary opinion. In this case, the New Statesman is a left-wing site, which in this context means they will be in favor of unlimited immigration and cosmopolitanism. The headlines promises the counter argument to the resistance to open borders.

I am sitting in one of London’s finest Indian restaurants, Benares, in the heart of Mayfair. I’ve just placed an order for the “Tandoori Ratan” mixed-grill appetiser – a trio of fennel lamb chop, chicken cutlet and king prawn.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty excited. Most of the upmarket restaurants in London do not cater for the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. Benares is one of the few exceptions: all of the lamb and chicken dishes on its menu are halal.

The restaurant opened in 2003 and its owner, Atul Kochhar, is a Michelin-starred chef. “Right from day one, we’ve kept our lamb and chicken halal,” Kochhar says. “It was a very conscious decision because I grew up in India, a secular country, where I was taught to have respect for all religions.” Kochhar, who is a Hindu, says Muslims make up “easily between 10 and 20 per cent” of his regular diners. It isn’t just a taste for religious pluralism that has dictated the contents of his menu; serving halal meat makes commercial, as well as cultural, sense.

At this point, the B.S. detector is flashing. One of the oldest gags the Left employs is to conjure the too good to be true example that just happens to prove their point. In this case, the choice of this one restaurant is supposed to be emblematic of the market at work. If the market resulted in a refusal to go hala, the author would have an entirely different view of the market. That’s always how the Left views the market.

To other, perhaps less tolerant types, however, the rise and rise of halal meat in the west and here in the UK, in particular, is a source of tension, controversy, fear and loathing. British Muslims are living through a period of halal hysteria, a moral panic over our meat. First there came 9/11, 7/7 and the “Islamic” terror threat; then there was the row over the niqab (face veil) and hijab (headscarf); now, astonishingly, it’s the frenzy over halal meat.

Now the B.S. detector is flashing so much it is starting to smoke. The fake outrage is an old standard from lefty. If you want to know when he is about to slather on a layer of bravo sierra, look for the mock outrage. That’s the tell. Of coruse, once we learn about Mehdi Hasan it comes into perspective. The brief bio says he is a regular around Fleet Street. Then there is this bit from the Spectator.

As displays of duplicity go, Mehdi Hasan’s performance on the BBC discussion show Question Time seemed hard to beat. Hasan delighted leftists by hounding the Daily Mail. Who really “hated Britain”? he asked. Not Ed Miliband’s father, as the Mail had claimed, but the “immigrant-bashing, women-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.”

How the audience clapped and cheered. How they loved the sight of a principled left-wing journalist taking on the “Daily Hate” without fear of the consequences. Unfortunately for everyone concerned, the Mail showed within a day that Hasan’s outrage was phoney: a piece of cynical crowd-pleasing by a manipulative hack. He had sent Paul Dacre a begging letter asking for work. Although he was on the left, Hasan said, he admired the paper’s

“passion, rigour, boldness and, of course, news values. I believe the Mail has a vitally important role to play in the national debate, and I admire your relentless focus on the need for integrity and morality in public life, and your outspoken defence of faith, and Christian culture, in the face of attacks from militant atheists and secularists.”

The Mail attracts writers, who ought to oppose it, because it pays them top rates on one condition only: they say exactly what the editor wants them to say. You can get at least £1,000 for a morning’s work, and Dacre will fill your pockets even if he decides not to use your piece. Writers will bark like a performing seal for money as easy as that. My colleague Polly Toynbee once revealed that Geoffrey Wheatcroft, an author she regarded as a friend, produced a “stinking” attack on her at the Mail’s behest. He then “had the nerve to write me a cringing [private] letter claiming his copy had been doctored and, anyway, he had a lot of little Wheatcrofts to keep in shoe leather”.

Wheatcroft was being too modest. If you obey orders at the Mail, you can keep them in Louboutins.

But leftists should pause before denouncing Hasan as a charlatan and a sell-out. They are the purer hypocrites and greater fools. Hasan is from the Islamist religious right. He disputes how closely he has pushed up against the extremes – ever the politician, he says that old clips of him denouncing non-Muslims as “cattle” have been “taken out of context”. But he was being sincere when he told Dacre he was

“attracted by the Mail’s social conservatism on issues like marriage, the family, abortion and teenage pregnancies”.

Of course he was attracted. He is a religious reactionary. I have no doubt either that if Dacre had offered him work, he would have taken it and the opprobrium that would have followed, not only for the money but for the love as well.

Just when it looked like Mehdi was nothing more than a liberal crank, we learn he is something worse. He was born in Britain and lives there now. He passes himself off as a moderate Muslim adapting well to life in a civilized country. In reality he is loyal to Islam above all else. According to his Wiki, he has been caught, in unguarded moments, saying the sorts of things one expected from Muslim lunatics.

It is why no civilized country should permit the entrance of citizens from Muslim countries, outside of diplomatic delegations and narrow business reasons. Allowing any settlement of Muslims in your lands is asking for trouble. They simply refuse to adapt or get along with non-Muslims. What they believe, what Mehdi Hasan believes, is incompatible with Western liberal democracy. Why on earth would sane people is a western democracy invite these people to settle in their lands?

One bit of vibrancy around the Imperial Capital is the massive number of Spanish speaking peasants that have crowded into the area. Hyattsville Maryland, for example, looks like Tijuana. The store signs are all in Spanish and the streets are littered with little brown people who look like extras from a documentary on the Mayans. Any large parking lot features numbers of loitering men, waiting for day work. Contractors will pull up in trucks and a few men will jump in the back.

Another feature of our new vibrantly diverse future is organized crime. In Northern Virginia, MS-13 has setup a base camp. Like all major businesses, they feel the need to be near the center of world power. If the Fortune 500 can keep offices in DC, MS-13 can keep space in Northern Virginia. They were, after all, created by the US government. Our tax dollars trained them in El Salvador and then our rulers imported them into Los Angeles as part of our open borders policy.

This new vibrantly diverse future is not without some small downsides. Take, for example, this story out of Minnesota.

The Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area is a long way away from the home turf of Mexico’s Sinaloa drug cartel, but that didn’t stop three cartel enforcers from making their way up the region in an attempt to hunt down two teenagers they accused of stealing drugs and money from a stash house.

The three enforcers were allegedly sent from Los Angeles to St. Paul on orders from the Sinaloa cartel to find the people who stole 30 pounds of methamphetamine and $200,000 from a stash house in St. Paul. The two teens that the cartel hit men snagged were tortured, had their lives and that that of their families threatened and were told to find the missing drugs or come up with $300,000 to compensate the cartel, according to court documents obtained by the (Minneapolis) Star Tribune newspaper.

“The kidnappers told [the 19-year-old] that if he didn’t return the drugs or come up with the money, he and his entire family would be killed,” according to court documents.

In case you are curious, this is what diversity looks like:

Here’s something else to get used to:

Despite indictments pending and two of three enforcers taken into custody, the story has people in the Twin Cities area shocked and worried as law enforcement deals with a spike in drug trafficking and heroin overdoses.

Federal authorities told the Star Tribune that they are not shocked that the Sinaloa cartel would go to such lengths to retrieve their money and drugs, especially in the lucrative Midwest heroin market. What worries them is that instead of using their own people, the cartel apparently hired the hit men from the feared Mara Salvatrucha 13 street gang (MS-13).

The phrase “not shocked” means “thinks it is hilarious” in federal law enforcement language. This is the sort of thing that makes their work interesting. Properly enforcing the borders and sensibly dealing with drug gangs is hum-drum stuff. Chasing down murder-torture around the country, while giving interviews to the press is fun. It makes their work fulfilling, which is the only reason our betters hold jobs these days.