Category Archives: Culture

Bad Noticing

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The Danika Patrick story is coming to an end, but the usual suspects are hoping to squeeze one more drop of juice from the story. Patrick was always a marketing ploy by NASCAR to draw in suburban viewers. The new people running stock car racing are ashamed of their fans, they want new and better fans, which is why they hired Patrick as a driver. Richard Petty had the gall to point out the obvious, thus causing the usual suspects to rush to the little waif’s aid.

When it comes to Danica Patrick, the Petty family just can’t seem to pass on the subject without causing a caution flag.

This time, however, it was “The King” — NASCAR Hall of Famer Richard Petty — who took some swipes at Patrick when asked Sunday whether she would ever win in the Sprint Cup Series.

“If everybody else stayed home,” Petty told reporters at the Canadian Motorsports Expo. “If she’d have been a male, nobody would ever know if she’d showed up at a racetrack.

“This is a female deal that’s driving her. There’s nothing wrong with that, because that’s good PR for me. More fans come out, people are more interested in it. She has helped to draw attention to the sport, which helps everybody in the sport.”

That’s being polite, Patrick is in NASCAR because she is a women, but not a gross looking lesbian. She is not very good at driving a race car. If she was male, she is somewhere in the lower ranks hoping to catch a break. Probably by now she would have had to quit, as the dream would be over. Admittedly, I’m not a fan of the sport, but I’m pretty sure the point is to win once in a while, something she has never done.

Patrick finished 27th in the Sprint Cup standings during her rookie season, driving the No. 10 Chevrolet for Stewart-Haas Racing. Her highlight came in the season-opening Daytona 500, where she finished eighth after becoming the first woman to win the pole for that event.

That is her only top-10 finish in 46 races at NASCAR’s highest level. Before that, she amassed seven top-10 finishes and one pole in 60 races over four seasons in the Nationwide Series.

However, Patrick is one of the most successful female auto racers in history. Patrick is the only woman to win a major open-wheel race, finishing first in a 2008 IndyCar Series race in Japan. She has six top-10s in the Indy 500 and was third in 2009, the best finish ever for a woman in that historic event.

I suppose that’s something. Somewhere there is a midget claiming to be the best midget basketball player in history.

Petty has commented on Patrick’s involvement in NASCAR before, saying in 2006 that “I just don’t think it’s a sport for women. And so far, it’s proven out. It’s really not. It’s good for them to come in. It gives us a lot of publicity, it gives them publicity.”

His son — former driver and TV analyst Kyle Petty — has been more outspoken through the years about Patrick’s involvement, calling her a “marketing machine” and “not a race car driver” as recently as this past June.

“Danica has been the perfect example of somebody who can qualify better than what she runs,” Petty said on Speed TV last year. “She can go fast, but she can’t race. I think she’s come a long way, but she’s still not a race car driver. And I don’t think she’s ever going to be a race car driver.”

There’s no reason why females can’t race competitively, but there have been few female race car drivers. The one exception is drag racing, where there are several top female drivers. The reason is drag racing is not personal competition. The drivers really compete against themselves and their machine. They are not outwitting one another or engaged in a test of wills. regular car racing is a test of people, so that’s why women have had so little success and why Patrick is just a public relations ploy.

The Swiss

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This Tyler Cowen post captures what’s wrong with our ruling elites.

In my view immigration has gone well for Switzerland, both economically and culturally, and I am sorry to see this happen, even apart from the fact that it may cause a crisis in their relations with the European Union.  That said, you can take 27% as a kind of benchmark for the limits of immigration in most or all of today’s wealthy countries.  I believe that as you approach a number in that range, you get a backlash.

Countries have an absolute right to decide who is and who is not a citizen. They also get to decide who can and who cannot enter their country. They also control who can settle in their lands. The only people qualified to know how much immigration is good for the Swiss are the Swiss. An outsider can have no idea what will work for the Swiss, so they should not pretend they know the right answer. The best someone like Cowen can do is talk about what the Swiss think is best for them.

It is tempting to write this off as arrogant and obtuse, but that’s not it. What we seeing is an almost religious fervor by our rulers for a borderless world. They don’t state it that way, as they have gas-lit themselves on the matter of religion. They think they are pure logic machines, but that’s just self-delusion. Open borders is part of this utopia they imagine is right around the corner. If we just get rid of borders, human differences and sexual differences, humanity enters the Promised Land.

Fraud Book

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There is no way to check the details of this, but the fact the video has not been struck down the creator has not been sued, suggests it is not a slander of Facebook. Indian is known for hosting click farms and similar scams. One of the weird products of global village is the village idiots are easy to spot. Hindus will patiently sit in click farms, creating fake traffic for web sites. Russians, on the other hand, will never do it. Instead, they are better at gypsy scams like selling fake shoes and penis pills. The Philippines is another great place to setup click farms. The new thing is to setup outbound call center there because most speak English. That’s another job Russians would never do.

Anyway, it is a good idea to be suspicious of Facebook. It is one of those services that is great as long as it is free. If they start charging for it, the whole thing collapses. That leaves advertising, but that’s a limited game as well. Plaster the site with ads and people get turned off. Plus, ads are often the source of malware and most users have ad blockers. Then you have the mobile problem. Microscopic ads on a phone are worthless. The quality of advertising is another issue. Like a most internet advertising, the stuff on Facebook is aimed at the impulsive and stupid.

Now it seems the scam is different. They are getting companies to setup pages and then pay to get traffic to their page. Since no one in their right mind goes to a corporate FB page, they are using robots to fool the companies. It is a clever scam, but an old one. Pyramid schemes often work this way. Psychics have always used plants to trap suckers. They were also caught putting stuff on people’s home pages that was supposedly liked by a friend. It was pretty ham handed and they said it was an error, but no one should believe Mark Zuckerberg. Everything about that guy screams grifter.

The Death Spiral

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Story likes this are a good reminder that people will go to great lengths to avoid running afoul of the official morality, enforced by the ruling class. Violating the taboos of the commoners is never a problem, as long as the rulers are OK with it. In post-modern America, a way to show your worth in the ruling class is to violate the norms of decent people. To go the other way is to risk being ruined, as the ruling class is as ruthless as Muslims when it comes to enforcing their morality.

Baltimore has an interesting history. Up until the 20th century is was basically a port city without much industry. When industry arrived, it did so with a vengeance. Poles, Italians and Irish flooded in to work the docks, steel mills and factories. They had an enormous car plant near the docks that employed tens of thousands at its peak. In the 1950’s, Baltimore was one of the more important cities in the country. It was economically importation and had one of the leading newspapers in the nation.

The civil rights movement and its fallout in the 1960’s hit cities like Baltimore particularly hard. Traditional neighborhoods were broken up in something called block busting, as the usual suspects would buy a house and move in a black family. Everyone would put their house up for sale and the pirates would swoop in and buy at an increasingly discounted price. Basically the landlords figured out how to monetize racism. Baltimore went from roughly 75% white at the end of World War II to majority black in a decade.

As black on white crime increased, the politics became tribal. The remnant of the white population hung on for a while, but they were playing a losing game. Crime control became racist and fell away. The public schools fell prey to the racial spoils system and the collapse of human capital. The middle-class, black and white, fled the city. There was a respite for a while in the 2000’s, but like Detroit, Baltimore is dying and headed for bankruptcy. If you want to see the future, visit Charm City.

Maybe the Left can be forgiven for trying to address the issue of race and the very real results of discrimination. In retrospect, their solutions sound like the rantings of a crazy person, but at the time they probably sounded plausible. After fifty years of failure, there’s simply no excuse for race hustlers persisting in their views. Every conceivable effort has been made to make integration work. Trillions have been spent on a problem that is no better now than fifty years ago. It’s time accept reality.

The Homo War

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Looks like everyone over at the NY Times is ready to celebrate the first openly homosexual football player. The Left has been using homosexuals as a proxy in their war in white men for a couple of decades now. Football, which is popular with white men, is hated by the Left. That’s why they are peddling the concussion stuff. Now that can make it gay. The NFL will no doubt have Pride Day and maybe make the players wear rainbow outfits.

The weird thing about the homosexual stuff is it borders on self-mockery. Much of what constitutes the gay lifestyle and the gay aesthetic is self-denigrating. Homosexuals are full of self-loathing due to their affliction, so their public expression is often a mockery of the gay lifestyle. Liberace is a good example. Elton John is another. There’s nothing about the gay stuff that is ennobling or respectable. At bets it is campy and silly. At worse it is degenerate.

There was never a time when homosexuals were discriminated against on the scale of blacks, Jews, Irish, Italians and Catholics. There are some make believe times, like the Stonewall Riots, but they are mostly imaginary. Stonewall was not a riot in any sense of the word. It was a protest, for sure, that put attention on the cop’s habit of raiding Mafia owned gay clubs. The fact that the Mafia was exploiting homosexual males and the cops were primarily targeting the mob gets lost in the phony narrative.

The point being, harassment of homosexuals has never been much of an issue in America. A black guy in 1990 probably faced more hostility than the typical gay guy in the worst of times. We’re talking about rude jokes, not anything that would alter one’s life. The gay lifestyle killed more gay men in a weekend than straights have in a century. Most people get this, so casting gays as sympathetic victims is a loser’s gambit.

As with all cults and subcultures, defining who is in and who is out of the group is the primary focus of the group. For the Left, being a member of the anointed mean embracing the homosexual stuff. It’s not about the homosexuals themselves. The Left does not care about them any more than they care about blacks. Homosexuals are just another charm of the progressive charm bracelet, to be shown off at the next cocktail party. The gay man is just another totem.

 

American Crackpot

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The American Conservative is a publication that seems like it should be better than it is and have a greater influence that it does. They have always struggled to keep it going, so that’s probably part of the problem, They tried to be a traditional paper journal, but that’s not something with a future. They have a website, but it is the antiquated “webzine” style that does not seem to work very well. The content has often been of the paleo variety, which is becoming a bit of an anachronism these days.

Anyway, this was posted the other day. It hits on why conservatism in general, but paleoconservatism in particular, never seem to work. There was always an effort to superimpose whatever they meant by conservatism onto the culture. That is, they often tried to take something that was obviously not Right and argue that it was actually conservative. often, the result was taking yesterday’s radicalism and making ti today’s right-wing orthodoxy. You see that in the Seeger piece.

Seeger was the authentic voice of the old American left and understood that conservatism, far from being inimical to socialism, was actually an essential component of it. In an interview with the New York Times in 1995 he declared, “I like to say I’m more conservative than [Barry] Goldwater. He just wanted to turn the clock back to when there was no income tax. I want to turn the clock back to when people lived in small villages and took care of each other.”

Seeger’s vision of the ideal society was not some high-tech futuristic metropolis but was rooted firmly in the past. America’s past. “When I was a boy, I read every single book by naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton,” he said in a 1982 interview.

Seeger was an unrepentant communist, long after it was clear Stalin was a murderous psychopath. He actively conspired with foreigners to do harm to his fellow citizens for no other reason than ideological zeal. If mass murder is a conservative principle, the Right may want to have a meeting or something to figure out what went wrong. Just because someone has fond memories of the past, it does not make them Edmund Burke. There is more to being conservative than being a reactionary.

Seeger rejected the egotism of the modern elbow society which neoliberal capitalism has created. “There was no ‘I’ in Seeger’s music, only a big, broad encompassing ‘we’” writes Jody Rosen. Seeger never liked to talk in terms of his career. “I hate the word ‘career’ because it implies one is searching after fame and fortune—two of the silliest things to want,” he said. He abhorred commercialism. When he was given a microphone he used it to forward the causes he believed in—and not push a new album or CD.

As Kathy Shaidle covered last week, Pete Seeger was a money grubbing thief who would screw his mother for a nickel.

He was a better socialist than the Trotskyite ideologues who accused him of being a Stalinist, and he was a better conservative than the McCarthyites who persecuted him. He understood, probably better than any other figure on the American Left, that in order for the human race to go forward we need to go back. Way, way, back.

That’s complete nonsense. Seeger was never “persecuted.” He was a proud Stalinist long after Khrushchev revealed the details of Stalin’s crimes.  In fact, he was dissembling about Uncle Joe right up until the end. As Mark Steyn pointed out, Seeger could never bring himself to condemn the man who murdered fifty million people just to prove a point. if being on the Right means anything it means opposing grand social experiments that slaughter tens of millions of people.

That gets back to the weirdness of American Conservative and that whole fringe right-wing world that operates around paleoconservatism. Maybe it is just the nature of fringe politics. As these people were pushed out of the main stream, many went looking for something else they can support. Inevitably, that mean embracing or accepting some crap pot stuff. Of course, everything outside the main looks like crack pottery when you’re standing inside the main. Crack pots are a matter of perspective.

Leno Versus The Lunatics

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I admit to being a fan of Jay Leno. By fan I mean I have been recording his program for years and watching when I feel like watching some television. I don’t watch much TV, other than sports. While eating dinner, I like to watch something for an hour that will not piss me off or make me crazy. Leno is the perfect choice. His brand of humor is broad based and well within the bounds of common decency and middle-class respectability.

Leno’s jokes are PG-13, his political humor sticks to the obvious from the headlines and it is not particularly ideological. He makes fun of whoever is in the news, regardless of party or status. His bits after his monologue are similarly tame, mostly letting regular people do silly things for the camera. The first 30 minutes make for a good dinner time show. I rarely watch his guests as I don’t follow pop culture.

All that said, I therefore took note of the fact he was being forced out by his employers in favor of a person named Jimmy Fallon. A quick search tells me Leno was dominating his counterparts, including the man-boy favorite, Jimmy Kimmel. The old Marxist David Letterman stagers on in third place. As Leno’s forced exit grew closer, his rating soared to the point where he was becoming a cultural phenomenon.

His final show scored huge numbers. According to the people who care about these things, his final show was one of the most watched in decades. As an empirically minded person, 14 million viewers in a nation of 300 million looks tiny to me, but people who make millions to know about this stuff say otherwise. It is just a reminder that culture is not rational in the linear sense of the term.

If a major company decided to retire its top selling and most profitable product, for a new product that is obviously inferior, it could be excusable. Even the best and brightest get wild ideas in their head about what lies around the corner. Front running, or attempts at it, is what gets investors in the most trouble. Sticking with the tried and true is boring, especially for young people, so change for the sake of change is common.

Television is a different thing, in that the nature is short term. The whole point is to get a hit, ride it until it dies and then jump out the window with a suitcase and the cigar box full of cash. NBC tried this a few years back and it was a costly and embarrassing disaster. To do it again when Leno is riding even higher than the last time raises the question. Why does NBC hate him?

What we’re see is the work of fanatics. I first bumped into this when I was a kid working in Washington. I worked for a Congressman doing nonsense work. Back in the old days, this was common. I’m sure it is a rigid process these days, but three decades ago it was not, so you got a fun mix of personalities. The law student in charge of the young staff was a nice girl, but a hard thumping liberal feminist.

Inevitably she set her sights on me as someone who had to be run out of the office as a trouble maker. Her reason, which she told me when I confronted her, was that I was not “very liberal.” That’s all that mattered to her. So much so she did not note that I was the favorite of the congressman’s wife, driving her around town. The result was they found a new person to supervise the kids and volunteers.

It was my first experience with a fanatic. The second experience was talking with an Iranian exile. He was a student when the Shah fell, but he was not a fanatic or even religious, as far as I could tell. He thought the Islamists were nuts and was one of the first people I heard talk about the danger of Islamic fundamentalism. He told me a story about his time in the army during the Iraq war to illustrate his point.

His unit was near the front lines and they were preparing for an offensive. Between them and the Iraqi army was a minefield. Saddam’s army was trained and developed by Soviet advisers, so it relied about Soviet tactics. That mean they used a lot of mine fields. The Iranian commander asked for volunteers to clear a minefield. About two dozen Revolutionary Guards volunteered for the job.

After some prayer, they ran across the minefield, blowing up the mines with their feet. A second wave of volunteers followed showing that the mines had been cleared. That’s the definition of a fanatic. The object of their fanaticism changes, but everything else is the same. The true believer gives up his identity for that of the group, so sacrifice is the ultimate expression of faith. The act counts for more than the result.

The point of this diversion is that NBC is run by fanatics. A night watching MSNBC, for example, is a descent into madness. Within living memory, liberal members of the press would have mocked these people as the aluminum foil hat crowd. Today they run the news division of NBC. Inside the building is a daily competition between fanatics to see who is the most committed to the cause. Leno is not one of them.

In such an asylum, a non-believer like Leno would be suspect. In a weird way, his popularity is confirmation of his heresy.  Because normal people like him and he gets along with normal people, it is assumed he is an enemy of the cause, so they will do what must be done to run him off. That’s not to say his replacement is a fanatic. He’s just not the guy they see as the enemy. So, the change will be made.

The Grifter Gal

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The food supply in the West is surprisingly safe, given the deregulated and decentralized nature of the system of producing food and getting it to your table. This reality, however, comes with frequent food scares. These cares are usually based in superstitious nonsense. Every day we see stories about how some staple of our diet is dangerous or a story debunking the previous scary story. Then there are the new snake oil salesman, pitching the latest food fads and miracle diets.

This story about Subway is a good example. The chemical in this case is Azodicarbonamide, a food stabilizer. There’s no science linking it to any negative health issues. We know this because it is in all of the food in North America and people are not falling over dead from it. Granted, there has not been a longitudinal study on the widespread use of it, but the lack of people dying from it is called a clue. That does not stop grifters from claiming otherwise. In this case, it is someone named Vani Hari.

Vani started FoodBabe.com in April 2011 to spread information about what is really in the American food supply. She teaches people how to make the right purchasing decisions at the grocery store, how to live an organic lifestyle, and how to travel healthfully around the world. The success in her writing and investigative work can be seen in the way food companies react to her uncanny ability to find and expose the truth.

Where she got the knowledge she spreads is a mystery. A search for a more detailed biography comes up empty. It appears she was a marketing or sales person out of college and then got into the fake nutrition rackets. That’s not surprising. People in sales are good at finding the pressure points of people and exploiting them. So are con-artists, which is the entire population of the health food racket. Everyone wants to be healthy and will set aside rationality in the quest for good health. It is a very old story.

A feature of the female grifter these days is the weird aspirational way they describe themselves. Maybe is the way women have always talked, but men never had a reason to notice it. In this highly feminized culture, women are turning up everywhere in female lead roles, which are exaggerated versions of women. That means they talk about themselves in weird ways and seem to care about everything a bit too much.

My name Vani, means Voice in my native language, and I have always had things to “Voice” throughout my life whether it be about politics, the environment or whatever is making headlines. After suffering some serious health issues, I became incredibly passionate about understanding what is in food – how it is grown, what chemicals are used in its production, and what eating food does or doesn’t do for the body.

Hitler became passionate about killing Jews and Slavs. Mao, after coming to power, became passionate about killing off millions of his people. Pol Pot was very passionate about his work. Serial killers are passionate about their work. When the West was run by sensible men, taming one’s passions was a virtue. Now that it is run by women, the more passion the better, even if the person is a raving lunatic and con artist. Perhaps that’s the other feature of girl power. Everyone becomes a con artist.

More Sight Seeing

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Driving around Boston, some things caught my attention. One is the use of difficult to see speed bumps to reduce speeds in residential neighborhoods. Everywhere on earth, warning drivers of speed bumps is the civilized thing to do. In fact, civilization is measured by traffic. Well maintained roads, clear signage and sensible layouts are what you see in the first world. Outside of civilization, the roads are a mess, the drivers are crazy and you have no idea what’s around the next turn. Here’s a good example.

Anyway, driving around Boston, I come upon these massive speed bumps that look like slabs of side walk on in the street. My buddy warned me so I saw it, but it was not easy. If you were unfamiliar with the area, you could easily rip the wheels off your car. There’s little doubt that the people who installed them did this on purpose. The speed bump is supposed to be punishment. It’s another reminder that social justice is just thinly veiled social vengeance on the rest of us by people who hate us.

Another thing I noticed was a new type of street light. This one would be red for stop and flashing yellow for go. I’m sitting there, trying to figure out what that meant when my buddy tells me it is the new green. The point is to encourage caution, he thinks. There may be a better way to regulate an intersection than the traditional American scheme, but that’s certainly not it. That’s stupid. It feels like you’re being warned by your mother to look both ways or brush your teeth. It’s a traffic light that nags the drivers.

The Cult of Diversity

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If there was ever any doubt that the cult of diversity was, in fact, a cult, this should dispel those doubts.

A popular gifted program will get the axe after Ditmas Park school officials chose diversity over exclusivity.

Citing a lack of diversity, PS 139 Principal Mary McDonald informed parents in a letter that the Students of Academic Rigor and two other in-house programs would no longer accept applications for incoming kindergartners.

“Our Kindergarten classes will be heterogeneously grouped to reflect the diversity of our student body and the community we live in,” McDonald told parents in a letter posted on the photo-sharing site flickr and obtained by Ditmas Park Corner.

The benefit of diversity, however it is defined, has never been established, beyond some wild claims by people in the diversity rackets. History, on the other hand, shows humans have been against diversity since the dawn of time. In fact, diversity is most likely bad for human communities. The evidence thus far shows that the greater the diversity, the weaker the community, as fewer people volunteer and participate in the running of the community.

We are tribal animals and that means being around people like us. 100,000 years or so of evolution is not going to yield to wishful thinking from people who tend not to live the diverse lifestyle. That’s the thing with the cult of diversity. The preachers tend to live in homogeneous communities, which means white communities. You never hear black people in the ghetto talking about diversity. The only time blacks use the word is as code to mean lots of black people, which is how white people are now using it.

This particular school is in a gentrifying neighborhood, which means loads of middle-class white women pretending to be artists as they live like June Cleaver. That’s the other thing about the diversity cult. The women all pretend to be artsy feminists, but they live like a 1950’s house wife, including the husband with the good job. All of their progressive posturing is intended to conceal the very real fact they live a very homogeneous life. Multiculturalism is a burka they throw over their life.