Category Archives: Weird Stuff

More Nazis

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Heirs of Jewish art dealers sue Germany in US, demanding restitution of medieval art treasure

The heirs of Nazi-era Jewish art dealers say they have filed a lawsuit in the U.S. suing Germany and a German museum for the return of a medieval treasure trove worth an estimated $226 million.

The suit, which attorneys said was filed late Monday in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., is the latest salvo in a long-running campaign by the heirs for return of the so-called Welfenschatz, or Guelph Treasure — which they claim their ancestors sold under Nazi pressure.

Originally collected over centuries by the Braunschweig Cathedral, the Welfenschatz includes some of the outstanding goldsmith works of the Middle Ages, among them ornate containers in the form of cathedrals used to store Christian relics. Many of the silver and gold pieces are decorated with jewels and pearls. Some are more than 800 years old.

Attorney Nicholas O’Donnell told The Associated Press in an interview in Berlin that the suit asks the Washington court to declare an American and a British descendant of a consortium that owned the collection in 1935 — when it was sold to the German state of Prussia — the rightful owners today.

“Any transaction in 1935, where the sellers on the one side were Jews and the buyer on the other side was the Nazi state itself is by definition a void transaction,” O’Donnell said.

The organization that oversees Berlin’s museums, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, says that the collectors were not forced to sell the pieces, arguing among other things that the collection was not even in Germany at the time of its sale.

Last year, a German government commission created to help resolve restitution claims evaluated both arguments and recommended that the collection stay in Germany. The commission wrote that after thoroughly investigating the sale process, it came to the conclusion that it was not a “forced sale due to persecution.”

I love these stories for some reason. For as long as I have been alive we have have lived in the shadow of you know who and his minions. No matter the topic, eventually it will devolve into some comparison to you know who. Godwin’s Law is an example of just how thoroughly we have been marinated in Nazi lore. What gets forgotten, of course, is that in the early days of the Internet, most people on line were open minded sorts who enjoyed arguing about everything and anything. Then the addle-minded liberals showed up and started calling everyone Nazis.

The typical commenter at Taki is convinced we have a you know who fetish because the secret, international Jewish conspiracy controlling America. These are the types who load up the Kathy Shaidle columns with comments about “the Joos.” I think it is accurate to say American Jews punch way above their weight as an ethnic group, but I’m pretty confident there’s no Hebrew Dr. Evil holed up in a mountain lair controlling the world.

My sense is you know who and the Nazis cast such a long shadow because they are the alter ego of the American Left. The European fascists borrowed a lot from American Progressives. So much so Hollywood was planning a Mussolini movie back in the bad old days. More than a few Progressives admired the fascists before World War II and some even admired you know who. Joe Kennedy was such a you know who fan, FDR had to recall him from his post as Ambassador to the Court of St. James.

The thing is, we are just about out of Nazis. The war ended 70 years ago. Even if you assume teenage boys were able to lie their way into service, the youngest Nazi soldier alive today is 85. This old article says there may be fewer than 1,000 camp guards alive. At this point, all of them are over 90 and that means the number could be in the hundreds now.  Within the next decade, the final Nazi veterans will die and then what? We no longer fret over the Kaiser or King George. They’re long gone. At some point the books have to be closed on you know who and the Nazis.

Closing of the books on the Nazis seems long overdue when it comes to the claims in that Yahoo story. I think survivors had every right to try to get their property back after the war. If someone had their money, art or land stolen, then after the war they should have a chance to get it back. Land would be easiest. Money would be tougher, but there were plenty of records to track much of it. Other possessions might be tougher still and there should be a time limit. Once the claimant dies then that would be it. Letting great grandchildren of Jews killed by the Nazis make these claims seems like a stretch to me.

There’s also the little fact that just about every bit of the collection in question was stolen at one point from someone. That’s just the way it works. Everything from the Bronze Age in museums was stolen, for instance. If an Egyptian came forward with proof he was a descendent of Ramses II, we’re not giving him he contents of our museums. These people suing for their ancestors stuff seem like grifters playing the Hitler card. You can’t put your grievances in your will.

An Interesting And Simple Idea

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In the history of technology, the simple ideas often turn out to be the most long-reaching. That usually means putting some new whiz-bang technology to use in a pedestrian way. The kitchen microwave is most obvious example. Our world has been made vastly different by this labor saving device that no one set out to design. CorningWare and non-stick pans are other great examples. We take these things for granted, but these happy accidents have contributed to our easy living more than 99% of most innovations dreamed up over the last century.

Like all normal males, I enjoy watching sports. The trouble is the games are often too long or too dull. European football is an example of the latter. The long stretches of tedium are too much to ask. Basketball is an example of the former in that the final five minutes seems to take an hour, with all the fouling and timeout calls. This post on MR has a simple and novel way to address some of this.

As kids, we played games to a certain score. Pickup basketball was always a game to some number of points. Pond hockey was whoever scored five goals or scored last. We did not have a way to keep time so made sense to do it this way. Applying this simple idea to professional sports could address a lot of the problems that plague modern sports, especially basketball. That way, a team up by 25-points is unlikely to coast as they can win the game by pouring it on once they have that big lead. It also makes fouling as a strategy pointless, thus shortening the games.

Soccer would not benefit from this approach as there’s not enough scoring. The alternative suggested in the MR post is that you use the score at the half as a baseline. If it is nil-nil after the break, then the first goal wins. If it is 1-nil, then the first team to two goals wins. The benefit here is that the second half would become a sudden death or “golden goal” period for many of these games. That’s always good for the fans and it puts pressure on players. Let’s face it. Sport is best when the pressure is the highest.

Other sports don’t seem to be an obvious fit for this approach. Basketball and soccer strike me as the two games that should be exciting, action packed and quick, but are too often the opposite. For soccer, I’d add a rule that requires the fake injured player to stay on the ground for two minutes if no foul is called. Do it twice and you get ejected and your team plays shorthanded. The cry baby nonsense spoils the game. Soccer is at its best when skilled players on the attack face skilled players on defense.  We need more of that and less of the rolling around in agony stuff.

Basketball started down that road with the flopping, but has managed to curtail it so I don’t know if they have that as a serious issue like soccer. Basketball has way too many time outs and substitutions. Limiting the time outs could allow for more scoring runs and maybe quicker finishes. Good teams would want to keep playing and run up the score quickly. The weaker teams would tire and give out so the game would be over quickly. Two great teams, on the other hand, would be like Ali-Frazier slugging it out until the end.

The Tyranny of Youth

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I’m an old man and that means I get cranky when the kids walk on my lawn, if I had a lawn. Like all old people, I was young once. That’s what gives old farts an edge over young pups. We remember what it was like to be them, but they have no way of knowing what it is like to be us. That, alas, is the only benefit of being old. Well, that and the willingness to say things in public that you’re afraid to say when you’re young. Otherwise, I fully admit to agreeing with W.C. Fields when it comes to young people.

I’m exaggerating a bit, but the tyranny of youth culture has gotten out of hand. Mark Steyn has commented for years that male leads are getting younger and more feminine. If I recall, he used the example of William Shatner playing Kirk in the original Star Trek series. Shatner was in his 30’s and playing a role as a middle-aged man. The current Star Trek movies feature boys in their 20’s playing boys in their 20’s inexplicably given command of a starship.

I’m not a big consumer of pop culture and maybe that’s why. Once I reached 30, everyone in music, TV and movies started looking young and silly to me. Even so, pop culture has always been juvenile and repetitive. The Honeymooners, for example, has been a standard template for TV for as long as I’ve been alive. I Love Lucy has been the template for couple-based sitcoms for fifty years now. Eventually, it gets boring for adults so it is left for kids, who are seeing it all for the first time.

That’s no what this post is about, however. The whole youth culture thing is now invading public affairs. The rulers feel it necessary to have bimbos as spokeswomen. Public affairs programming is beginning to look like the cafeteria at your local college. Rather than crabby old guys and gals with years of experience talking about the news, we have hot looking airheads repeating what they heard from some other hot looking airhead.

It’s not just TV news either. The reason for this post is something I saw on National Review the other day. If you look at the picture of the writer, it’s clear he is a child. He looks like he should be organizing the fraternity keg party this weekend, not offering opinions on the Federal Reserve. As an adult, I have no reason to care what this young fellow has to say about anything so why in the world is he offered up as an expert?

So that I don’t sound like a terrible meanie, I’m sure Jon Hartley is a fine young man with a world of promise. His resume says he graduated from U. Chicago with a degree in economics. He held jobs doing statistical work in public and private firms. He would make a great intern at a big bank or possibly a PhD candidate at a university. He’s clearly ambitious and one of his ambitions is to be famous. All of that is wonderful and I wish him the best.

Regardless, he is unqualified to write opinions about current affairs. That pipe I talked about the other day is already packed full of nonsense. The tiny capillaries that remain open to the transmission of sensible information cannot be clogged with the musings of children hoping to be famous one day. Surely there are seasoned adults with knowledge acquired through experience willing to write for these sites. if not and all we are left with is the tyranny of baffled young people it’s time to consider disbanding and going our separate ways.

The Looming Weirdo War

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This was linked on the great Maggie’s Farm blog this morning.

Used to describe something that’s been around much longer than the word itself, the phenomenon of homonormativity is considered by many to be destructive to the queer rights movement and to the larger queer community.

Homonormativity is a word that addresses the problems of privilege we see in the queer community today as they intersect with White privilege, capitalism, sexism, transmisogyny, and cissexism, all of which end up leaving many people out of the movement toward greater sexual freedom and equality.

Feminism is unabashedly anti-capitalism now. By capitalism, she means free markets, not the concentrations of wealth derided by traditional conservatives. The writer, for example, is in the MacCult. The preferred economic model of these folks is closer to Mussolini than Marx. She’s OK with enormous companies that turn their owners into super-rich billionaires, as long as the companies are of the one true faith. Walmart is bad capitalism and Apple is socially responsible entrepreneurship.

The other crimes (sins?) are just new names for the same old insanity second wave feminism offered up. The “cisgender” thing should be categorized as a mental illness. If someone declared Newton’s laws of motion “oppressive” we would lock them up, for fear they would jump in front of a car or jump off a building. If instead of saying they were a third sex, these people insisted we pretend they are invisible, they would be wearing a jacket with no sleeves.

First, let’s examine it’s counterpart, heteronormativity. This is a word that similarly describes the evaluation of “normal” sexuality that we see in our culture, from the policy and institutional level down to the interpersonal.

Muchisbeingwritten about heteronormativity, which describes the assumption and promotion that heterosexuality is the only “normal” and “natural” orientation out there, privileging those who fit the norm and positing anyone outside of this as abnormal and wrong.

Our culture is deeply heteronormative, but as queer experiences and rights become more accepted, a policing of sexual and gender expressions within LGBQ spaces is also growing. This is homonormativity.

Homonormativity explains how certain aspects of the queer community can perpetuate assumptions, values, and behaviors that hurt and marginalize many folks within this community, as well as those with whom the community should be working in solidarity.

It addresses assimilation, as well as intersection of corporate interests and consumerism within LGBQ spaces.

It also describes the assumption that queer people want to be a part of the dominant, mainstream, heterosexual culture, and the way in which our society rewards those who do so, identifying them as most worthy and deserving of visibility and rights.  

Bold in the original. My base assumption in life is that the invention of new worlds or jargon follows the invention of new lies. Words have meaning and when a people use an agreed upon lexicon, lying is difficult. Thus the need for new words and new grammatical constructions. Whenever I’m confronted with jargon I get suspicious.

In this case, these people are trying to cloak their true intentions. It never has been about rights or even acceptance with regards to homosexuality. It is certainly not what is at play with the more deranged members of these sexual identity cults. It’s about offending normal people. The guys in sundresses want to parade around your kid’s school because it offends you. The worst thing that could happen to them is for people to accept it. South Park did an episode on it.

As we’ve seen the issue of marriage equality gain success, swooping the nation in election after election, we have to question its position as The Gay Rights Issue™.

Fighting for sexual liberation and equality is, of course, so much more than fighting for the right to marry, but how is the positioning of marriage equality as the major issue also promoting homonormativity?

Marriage as an issue sets up the requirement that all relationships should mimic this heteronormative standard of sexuality and family structure. It promotes the idea that all people want to emulate straight monogamous couples.

When we focus only on this issue, we exclude polyamorous and other non-normative relationship structures as acceptable, as well as, of course, those who don’t want to get married.

Even as marriage becomes inclusive of a particular kind of queer relationship, it perpetuates a policing of other kinds of relationships, maintaining the borderline of what is an “acceptable queer relationship.”

The focus on marriage challenges very little, prioritizing the legal sanctioning of one’s relationships over real relational and societal transformation.

By showing that people outside of the heterosexual norm want the same things that “traditional, straight America” wants, themarriage equality movement fights to gain access to this social institution by reproducing, rather than challenging, heterosexual dominance and normativity andusing this as a basis for who deserves rights.

I’ve often remarked that inside of a mass movement, people find clarity. That’s what keeps them in the movement. Every failure and every setback is explained in someway that signals to the adherents that they must redouble their efforts. Every success is met with sound reasons why they must keep fighting for whatever it is the movement uses as a lure for the adherents. In some case, plain old delusion works fine as in the belief gay marriage is popular at the ballot box.

Putting that aside, the incoherence of these crotch-cults is what will ultimately pull them apart. Gay marriage is the obvious example. Homosexuals have a near total lack of monogamy. The social science is quite stunning, but social science is not science so it can always be disputed. Real science tells us that homosexual males account for 1.6% of the population and 65% of syphilis cases. Syphilis rates are a good proxy for promiscuity rates. People with astronomically high promiscuity rates are never going to adopt marriage, which has proven to be the case.

Therein lies the problem. In addition to having the dog chasing the car problem that is a feature of all mass movements, the sexual identity cults have the additional problem of success invalidating the cause. Social adoption of gay marriage will just prove it was ridiculous from the start. Similarly, normalizing all of these other fetishes will only make those causes appear more absurd.

When the dog catches the car, we all see there was never a car. He was just running around and barking.

The article is a crazy quilt of jargon and locution aimed at people in the third wave feminism cult so it is easy for a normal like myself to misinterpret it. Still, the vibe is undeniable. The gals at the womyn’s studies department are getting uncomfortable with the queers. It’s not just that they are jealous of the success of gay males in the culture. It’s that the queer rights stuff is making it impossible to turn weird for the sake of being weird into a political cause. The womyn are about declare war on the queers.

Good Government

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It is assumed, by liberal lunatics, that those who oppose them are universally against government. That’s complete nonsense, of course, but that’s what happens when you live in a country run by a religious cult. The truth is the Old Right and now the Dissident Right always thought government was essential to civilization. What must be guarded against is the excess of government.

Men are not angels. That is where the discussion must begin and end when it comes to investing power. Give government too much power and the men in charge will inevitably abuse it. Give corporations too much power and they will eventually abuse it. It is at the heart of Distributism.

Anyway, here’s a good example of what government can do and should do.

Numerous store brand supplements aren’t what their labels claim to be, an ongoing investigation of popular herbal supplements subjected to DNA testing has found, New York state’s top law enforcement official said Tuesday.

GNC, Target, Walmart and Walgreen Co. sold supplements that either couldn’t be verified to contain the labeled substance or that contained ingredients not listed on the label, Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s office said.

The supplements, including echinacea, ginseng, St. John’s wort, garlic, ginkgo biloba and saw palmetto, were contaminated with substances including rice, beans, pine, citrus, asparagus, primrose, wheat, houseplant and wild carrot. In many cases, unlisted contaminants were the only plant material found in the product samples.

Overall, 21 percent of the test results from store brand herbal supplements contained DNA from the plants listed on the labels. The retailer with the poorest showing was Walmart, where 4 percent of the products tested showed DNA from the plants listed on the labels.

Supplement makers sell products to the public claiming they are safe and possess magical powers. The government should be randomly testing these things to make sure they are safe and that the claims on the bottles are honest. The public needs to know if they are eating sawdust or houseplants.

Now, I know where you’re going to go. The state does not stop at testing. They will inevitably reach out the greedy hand demanding a bribe. The same inspectors who are checking the safety of these pills will be unleashed on some politically incorrect company doing all sorts of damage in the name of the one true faith.

Well, that’s true. There’s nothing magical about any of this. Give people too much power and you get abuse. That’s not an argument against government. it is an argument against big government.

Gluten Free Vegan Magic

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This goes up as I am cooking for a big party. I will be making three to four deep fried turkeys, the corresponding amount of side dishes, as well as appetizers and specialty items. I have been doing this on Super Bowl Sunday for decades now. There is a long and not terribly interesting origin story behind this tradition, but that is not important. The point is I have cooked for a large number of people many times over many years, and I have noticed some things about people and food that I thought would make a good post.

We live in the golden age of man when it comes to food. We have more than enough to feed all of us, even the poorest of us. We also have every variety of food imaginable. In addition to turkey, I will make an authentic Mexican dish with material from Mexico. I will have sides and appetizers with ingredients from around the world. Despite this bounty, everyone is now afraid of their food. Food allergies, moralizing and whack-a-doodle dietary fads has everyone looking at their plate with suspicion.

Back when this annual event started, it was easy to cook a bunch of food for a bunch of people. Besides the turkey and sides, we had beer and some store bought deserts. Then vegetarians started to show up followed by vegans. That meant adding dishes for people who do not eat meat and those who do not oppress their food, whatever the hell that means. Of course, beer was no longer enough so a variety of wines and cocktails were added to the menu. All of which came with a lecture from the food cultist about the morality and science of their new thing.

Recently everyone has become gluten free, swearing they have an allergy to bread. All those years stuffing cakes and sandwiches into their trap was part of some plot by big food to make them tubby. Statistically, I now have 25,000 friends. The reason is simple math. Science tells me that 0.2% of humans have the genetic defect for gluten intolerance.  I know at least 50 people claiming to have Celiac Disease. Divide 50 by .002 and you get 25,000. That or I have a lot of delusional friends.

The truth, of course, is bread has a lot of calories that the human body can use quickly. That is why humans make bread. It is a great way to feed a lot of people. The trouble comes when we eat too much and exercise too little. Modern humans simply do not get enough physical exercise for the amount of food they consume. When you stop eating bread, magically you reduce your calories and begin to lose weight. You lose weight so you feel better and more confident. That makes gluten evil, at least in the mind of the maniac.

My read on this faux-allergy stuff is it is mostly women. The yogurt makers have figured out how to capitalize on their psycho-somatic stomach discomfort by claiming “probiotics” are the cure. Slap a new label on the old yogurt, double the price and you have a whole new revenue stream for the Acme Yogurt Company. I wish I had thought of it.

That said, men have their own food superstitions these days. I know guys who swallow dozens of supplements every day, believing they are the key to losing weight, staying young, getting a boner, living forever, etc. If the label says good things with words containing “-trophic” then they will shell out fifty bucks for a bottle. The more made up words the better. I read some of these bottles and start laughing as the neologisms are usually nonsense.

Modern times are all about the search for the magic pill or the magic food. This site I added to the blog roll has a bunch of stuff on supplements. Most supplements like daily vitamins are a waste of money at best. Some have some benefit, depending upon your lifestyle. A few have real science behind them like fish oil and vitamin D. But knowing what real science is and what is nonsense not so easy. The linked site appears to get that and take a critical view of the research offered up by the pill makers. But I have not spent enough time there to know for sure so do not take my word for it.

That is the thing that I find fascinating. It is not just that we do not know that much about human dietary needs. It is that we have so much bad science floating around. My guess is there is more money in bogus studies that help sell miracle drugs than in studies that debunk them. The result is a mountain of junk science, burying the good science, if it even exists.

Maybe that is the point of all of this. Science is boring, but believing nonsense is fun. Believing that your cheeseburger is out to get you is more interesting than knowing you cannot live on cheeseburgers without getting fat. If your choice of food can also be a way to elevate yourself on the moral scale, then eating becomes more than a bodily function. It is an act of piety.

My own view is less grandiose. I eat a minimum of carbohydrates because otherwise I would weigh 300 pounds. I stick with poultry, eggs, and some dairy. That way I can eat tasty things, like eggs and bacon, without worrying about my weight. On the other hand, life is for living so having pizza once in a while or a bag of chips (crisps) is not going to kill me. If it does, so be it. At least I had fun with the time I had. That is the point of life. Use the time you have and enjoy it as much as possible. Hell is for people who denied themselves pleasures thinking it was their ticket to heaven.

Enjoy the big game and may your balls never go flat.

Fake War Nerd

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I would not consider myself a regular reader of the War Nerd blog. I probably check in once a month or so when I am regularly reading it. In fact, I went a long time not reading it until John Derbyshire mentioned it a few months back. The fact is there are too many sites and too many writers to keep up with all of them regularly. I have a lot of interests so I’ll drift away from a site or a writer if they are not writing about what is interesting to me at the time.

Anyway, Derb’s mention of the War Nerd brought me back to it. The other day this entry got my attention. Reading it, my bullshit detector was pegged to eleven. Right out of the shoot, this struck me as very weird from someone claiming to be living in Kuwait.

I read a long article called “My Terrifying Night with Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord” last month. It was utter crap, and so similar to a lot of utter crap I’ve been reading about the women fighters of the Kurdish YPJ militia in Syria that I realized it’s time somebody called foul on the offensive, ignorant crap going around about what the media likes to call “women warriors.” I don’t particularly enjoy the role of progressive scold, and it don’t hardly come natural to me, but somebody’s gotta do it.

What happens, in every case where writers and TV reporters with no background in military reporting try to describe “women warriors” is that they sexualize everything, ignore the real context, and betray a deep misogyny in every word they write or speak on camera. I mean, to the point that it’s surprising, at least to me, because a lot of these people make a big deal about being progressive. I’m kinda shocked, actually, how crude their gender bias is. Nobody seems to be even trying to hide it.

That’s not the voice of the usual guy writing about the drinking in Kuwait or the bureaucratic insanity of the American defense procurement system. Instead, it sounds like a middle-aged white women from a typical American state college. The word “sexualize” is the thing. You only ever hear that from lefty scolds in the academy.

Then there is this:

I’m an American, and it wasn’t until I’d lived in the Middle East for years that I could see just how American I was, above all in my notions about gender and bodies. Americans see everything as a sexual hierarchy, and that seems so natural to us that you have to work very hard to realize it’s not a universal human pattern of thought, but a particularly American one. Percy hasn’t taken that time, doesn’t even know she needed to if she was to see what this Tajik matriarch is doing. The results…well, they’re pretty durn funny, and then infuriating, by turns.

That’s the sort of thing a young writer pens when they are trying to write travel fiction from their parents vacation house. It’s the sort of thing a non-traveler thinks experienced travelers have learned. It just sounds fake to me. The bit about how Americans “see everything as a sexual hierarchy” is right out of the womyn’s studies department of third rate state college. It’s the sort of line I write when making sport of feminism.

That led me to consult wiki. The Wiki on the blogger is fascinating and I feel confirms my suspicion. This bit is what I mean:

Gary Brecher is the pseudonym of John Dolan, author of The War Nerd, a twice-monthly column discussing current wars and other military conflicts, published originally in the eXile, then NSFWCorp, and currently in PandoDaily. A collection of his columns was published by Soft Skull Press in June 2008 .

When you look up John Dolan you get this:

John Dolan was born in Denver, Colorado in 1955. Dolan taught and studied at UC Berkeley, where he completed a PhD thesis on the literary writing of the Marquis de Sade.

He has published poems in many US and New Zealand literary journals and his first collection won the Berkeley Poetry Prize in 1988. In 1993, he moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, where he lectured at the University of Otago. During his time in Dunedin, Dolan contributed regularly to the Otago literary journal Deep South. In 2001 Dolan resigned his academic post, and moved to Moscow to become co-editor of the eXile, a bi-weekly English-language publication based there. He was the first reviewer of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a bestseller featured on Oprah’s monthly bookclub, to correctly expose this alleged memoir as fraudulent years before that was officially brought to light (the title of Dolan’s review was “A Million Pieces of Shit” and the first line was “This is the worst thing I have ever read”) . He is married to his former student, Katherine Liddy. Dolan relocated to Canada to teach at the University of Victoria in Canada in 2006. He claims to have been fired for encouraging students to criticize George Monbiot in 2008. Until spring 2010, Dolan was an associate professor of English composition and literature at the American University of Iraq – Sulaimani. He was fired in 2010 and wrote a lengthy article on his experience there.

I don’t want to belabor it, but it seems pretty clear that the guy behind the War Nerd blog is mostly full of baloney. He had a brief time in Iraq a few years ago and has created a fictional character as the blogger “War Nerd.” That’s my sense of it, least ways. The reason some of the posts sound like the howlings of a third wave feminist is they are probably written by his wife and former student.

Maybe this is old news and I’m late to the party. Like I said, I’m an infrequent reader. Still, just goes to show that you can’t take anything at face value.

The Homoverse

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Something I’ve always found odd is how stories about homosexuals on sites that allow comments are instantly filled up with comments from gay militants. National Review has been sleepy for a while now, not generating tons of comments. Ramush Ponnuru is one of the least interesting posters there so his stuff gets cobwebs on it before anyone posts a comment. Today he posted this about some professional homosexual bitching about normals not wanting give up their religion to please homosexuals. Immediately it was flooded with deranged commenters making a nuisance of themselves.

I asked how these weirdos organize troll attacks. Who has the time? I was informed that there’s actually a blog that organizes them to bomb sites they don’t think are sufficiently deferential to their cause. It’s called JoeMyGod and it is about what you would expect from a site devoted to the crotch. It’s littered with pictures of naked men. It appears to to be the work of rabid lunatics. They have a link to Right Wing Watch, the journal of the aluminum foil hat crowd so the blog owner is a crackpot.

I’m going to assume the thrust of the site, so to speak, is the cause of homosexual marriage. That and the abolition of religion. Homosexual have had a long running feud with Christianity to the point of obsession. That’s why these nuts are running around harassing bakeries and caterers they think are Christians. Homosexual marriage, 0f course, is just a tantrum against tradition, they incorrectly associate with Christianity. The fact that marriage as a social custom integral to human settlement dates back thousands of year prior to Christianity is lost on these people.

I’ve written in the past that I think homosexual marriage to be a most harmless insanity. Basing public policy on rants against biology and serendipity is probably a bad idea with unknown downstream consequences. The most obvious argument against is it weakens normal marriage and thus undermines social cohesion. My argument against it is the grounds of general stupidity. Homosexual marriage is absurd and it is stupid to pretend otherwise. But, I can be convinced it is just harmlessly stupid.

What’s striking about the Pink Mafia is the inherent fascism in their cause. The image of homosexuals and Nazi cavorting together makes me laugh just typing it, but they say Hitler was probably a man who preferred the company of other men. He did have a thing for leather. Anyway, the underlying argument from homosexual activists is that you must get permission to use your private property and you must get permission from the state before deciding with whom to associate. Everything within the state, nothing outside the state.

I doubt the people reading and responding to JoeMyGod have the capacity to think that through. They are just angry and they want to strike out at society. People who join movements do so from self-loathing. The homosexuals harassing Christian bakers are seeking to exchange their hated self for the identity of the group. It’s why Islam seems to have an unlimited supply of suicide bombers. The self-loathing see obliteration as the ultimate goal of their membership in the cause. Mass movements have a lot of those people by definition.

The comments section of the post that started all of this is interest in that the hive mind is on full display. Each comment is another way of shaking the fist at those outside the hive. The naked hatred of Christians is pathological. The neologism “Christianist” must be an epithet in their cult, but maybe it has origins elsewhere. A quick Google search suggests it started with Andrew Sullivan, but I’m not interested enough to research it further. It’s just another reminder that you never put weirdos in charge and you’re best off keeping them out on the fringe where they can’t break anything important.

2015 Predictions

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A popular thing to do this time of year is make predictions about the coming year. I did such a post last year. Here they are if you are interested. I don’t have anything I’d like to change about the prologue of that predictions post.

Predictions are easy to make and fun because we get to project our hopes and dreams onto the blank sheet of tomorrow. The easy things to get right in the near term are the linear ones. The inflection points and random occurrences are very difficult to see in advance. The black swan events, of course, are impossible to know. You know, like the collapse of oil prices that every economist missed.

I’m a little surprised by how right I was in my picks. I got the Super Bowl wrong. Otherwise, I was right on everything else. I guess you can quibble with my stock market prediction a little, but I got the main parts right. The same is true of the election and the economy.

The thing I’m happiest about is the collapse of ebook sales. It looks like that fad has run its course. I read a lot and I mean I actually read. The people who promote ebooks mostly browse and display. By that I mean they skim a book and carry it around to show their friends that they are reading the latest Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell. You can’t do that with a Kindle. For a while they could show off their iPad, but now everyone has them so it is back to books.

After weeks of contemplation, years of study and the proper sacrifices made to my gods, I have glimpsed into the future and teased out some predictions based on my reading of the entrails.

1) The US economy will have one of its best years in two decades. Collapsing energy prices will push all prices down and the Fed will respond with more free money. It is not an accident that every recession is preceded by a spike in energy prices. Big economic booms are preceded by a collapse in energy prices. The high growth in the Clinton years came from cheap gas. In the Reagan years, cheap gas preceded the boom. Gas prices are around two bucks now and will be under it by summer. Growth will come in around 4.0% for 2014.

2) The new money has to go somewhere and housing is the most likely place. We’re already seeing a return of sub-prime lending, mostly in cars, but also in housing. The bankers had time to think up new names and new ways to package it so 2015 is a good time to unleash the hounds. Expect your mailbox to be littered with credit card apps and mortgage offers. I’m already seeing them here in the ghetto so they will be hitting mainstream soon enough. You’re probably thinking that we can’t be that dumb, but yes, we can be that dumb.

3) The DOW will continue treading water as the world adjusts to cheap energy. As we have seen of late, cheap energy is not all good news. Every BTU in the ground has a financial instrument attached to it. Big swings in price mean big ripples through the financial system. When that asset you pledged as collateral is losing value, the bank makes the call and you sell what you can to raise cash.

But, the market will respond to the better economy with a nice run later in the year. The guys at Zero Hedge will be howling in agony, but the great unraveling is not coming in 2015. By conventional measures, like  P/E, the market is over valued, but nothing like before the previous crashes. Better earnings will bring the ratios back in line. The DOW breaks 19,000, but finishes just under that new high.

4) There will be no material changes to ObamaCare from the courts or from Congress. The ruling class was sharply divided over it, but they will not go to war over it. That’s what everyone forgets. The people in charge have other concerns besides keeping the rabble under control. They have to keep their own peace. Obama will be gone in two years. They can wait. Plus, it is a great jobs program for the friends and relatives of elected officials. As we see with the tax code, complexity is good for the skimmers and grifters called consultants.

5) The GOP field for president will take shape this year. By the end of the summer, the “Wets” will be led by Jeb Bush. His emergence will chase off minor figures in that wing like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. His competition will be Chris Christie, who has no choice but to run this time. Christie is basically Bush-lite, no pun intended. Why have the light version when you can have the real thing? Bush will be the leader by fall, maybe even forcing Christie out before it gets started.

The “Dries” will be more interesting. Rand Paul is the early favorite, but he has a problem. In Kentucky, he cannot run for Senate and President at the same time. With Jeb in the race, my bet is he flirts with it, but sticks with his Senate job. Scott Walker has the best resume, but the worst TV style. Bobby Jindal has the ethnic thing going for him and many in the GOP are looking for a chocolate savior, but the Dries care more about ideas than image. In another age, Mike Pence would be everyone’s second choice and emerge as the consensus choice. Today, he just ends up as everyone’s first loser. Rick Perry will give it another shot, but he has the Dan Quayle disease and he sounds too much like W. John Kasich is the guy who will emerge as the conservative choice in the primary.

Finally, the snake handlers will have a candidate. Rick Santorum filled that job in 2012 and he’s not doing anything now. He plans a speaking tour in Iowa this month so it is safe to assume he runs again. The Evangelicals are not enough to carry a candidate to victory, but they can keep him in the game. Mike Huckabee will also test the waters. He’s been going to Iowa for a while now and he is a much better politician than Santorum. My bet is he emerges as the leader of the Pat Robertson wing this year.

6) The Democrat field will be a little less fun, but still worth watching. Butch O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland needs a job. He’s a Clinton rump-swab, but he also needs money so he will run, hoping to get on the ticket as a second. Jim Webb is running. Joe Biden will run. I suspect we see some others jump in just to get some exposure. The improving economy will do wonders for Crazy Joe as Obama will no longer be as unpopular. Plus, he will have access to Obama’s machine and that means the black vote.

The wild card is Fake Indian. She is the dream candidate for the hard thumping crazies on the Left. Female moonbats have been buzzing about her since she popped out of her teepee two years ago. The thing is, she’s got some skeletons and the fake Indian stuff will get a thorough review if she runs. The Boston media gave it a good leaving alone, but she’s not getting off easy in a national race against a Clinton. I predict she flirts with a run, but decides against it.

What we will begin to see in 2015 is the unraveling of the coalition. Webb will target members of the old Democrat coalition, working class whites. Fake Indian will be the candidate of the faculty lounge radicals, until she makes it clear she will not run. O’Malley will target the young, urban progressives that fill up the audience of John Stewart. Crazy Joe will try to target blacks. Clinton will base her campaign on Wall Street and K Street. My prediction here is 2015 is when we see Butch O’Malley emerge as a serious candidate and legitimate challenger to Cankles.

7) Now for some lighter fare. I like the Patriots to play Dallas in the Super Bowl, with the Patriots winning. The Patriots are an easy pick, given the way they play at home. Dallas is the long shot pick, but we always get something different. Plus, Jerry Jones has suffered enough for that face lift. The gods will let him have one last trip to the big game.

8) The English Premier League will go bankrupt. The dozens of US soccer fans will be so distraught, they will commit mass suicide by drinking their beard oil. Soccer will then be banned worldwide in order to prevent such a thing from happening again.

9) In the other sport I watch, baseball, the Red Sox will return to the post-season with the New York Yankees. The World Series, however, will feature neither team. The Angels will emerge in the American League and the Dodgers will win the National League.

10) On the technology front, 3D printers will hit the market at reasonable prices. By reasonable, I’m thinking under a grand for a home model. They will be the must have Solstice gift for 2015. No one has any need for 3D printing, but that discovery is for another year. In 2015, everyone will be convinced they have to make their own plastic-ware or be thought a Luddite.

11) People will begin to wonder if Apple has a future. It has been a great run, starting in 1998. That’s when Apple became a fashion statement, instead of an expensive and buggy PC. Then they hit gold with the iPod in 2001. The iPhone is 2007 and then the iPad in 2010 kept the magic alive and the profits booming. Steve Jobs has been dead for three years and nothing interesting has come from Apple since then. Jobs was a master showman for this era. I’d put him up there with PT Barnum. The poof who replaced him is not in that league.

Apple still sells a lot of stuff, but that stuff is on the verge of becoming a commodity. Those elevated margins cannot last without some way to keep the fad going. I just got a tablet for $100 from Asus. It does everything you want from a tablet. Why would I spend five to ten times that for an iPad? There’s a reason no one buys Apple desktops. There whole act is about the fashion statement. That’s why their best sellers are their most conspicuous mobile products – phones and tablets. 2015 is the year Apple stops being cool.

12) Blackberry sells itself to Google for parts. They have some great technology and patents. They are dug in deep with the car makers, for instance. The trouble is they can’t sell enough phones to remain profitable. They finally position themselves for a sale in 2015. Karl Denninger has to be institutionalized as a result.

13) This year we see the first widespread race riot in a major city. So far the riots have been localized, but that can’t last. In a major city, the cops will screw up and shoot a black guy that is actually innocent. That will set off a race riot in that city and perhaps lead to unrest in other cities. We’re on the down swing of the race cycle and that means things will get worse until they become intolerable.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is a Clown

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I must admit I have zero interest in Neil deGrasse Tyson. He’s a magical ornament for the Left and the fake nerds. He bills himself as a scientist, but he makes his living as an amusement park manager. That and doing the trained monkey bit on TV. There’s nothing wrong with it. Lots of people enjoy planetariums. Everyone loves TV and you can’t have TV without trained monkeys. But, he guy is a complete clown.

I get that his audience wants validation so they come to hear the magical black guy tell them they are the bestest. My guess is there’s not a single person in the audience that could count their balls twice and come up with the same number so that means he can’t actually talk about real science. It’s all theater, a morality play, of sorts. He mocks the bad people in the familiar way and they arf like seals at the right time. It’s the Jon Stewart routine, but with high school science as the straight man instead of politics.

The thing that surprises me about this video is just how buffoonish he is during his act. The time or two I’ve caught him on TV he was pretending to be a serious scientist, but in that video he one step from dropping his pants and spraying his junk with seltzer. It’s rather embarrassing to watch, particularly since the premise is so absurd. If I did not know better, I’d think he was cleverly mocking the rubes in the audience.