Category Archives: Weird Stuff

McDonalds

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It has been a long time since I’ve looked closely at the McDonald’s menu. When I was a boy, the the menu was pretty simple. They had hamburgers, cheeseburgers and the fish sandwich. On the rare occasion when I eat there, I still get a cheeseburger and a fish sandwich. Maybe I’ll do the one dollar chicken sandwich. Otherwise, I could not name five things on their menu. I suppose they still sell the Big Mac and fries, but the rest is a mystery I’m happy to ignore.

This story on Yahoo tells me they have 121 items on their menu. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but maybe they are counting things like ketchup packs. Still, how in the world did they let that happen? The whole point of fast food is it is simple, cheap, fast and consistent. The fish sandwich in Boston as in Minneapolis. It generally costs the same and is delivered the same. Given the general stupidity of the American people, 121 offerings just means it will undermine the whole effort.

In California, there is a chain called In ‘N Out Burger. They offer a cheeseburger, a hamburger, a double burger and fries. The food is good, the service is quick and the experience is consistent from restaurant to restaurant. It is what McDonald’s used to be fifty years ago. Chick-fil-A is the same concept, except they do not permit homosexuals in their stores.  Anytime I see one of these restaurants, they are packed. It turns out that McDonald’s was right the first time. People don’t like diversity.

It is the great lie of modern times that people like options. That’s nonsense. People are social animals. We like belonging to a group. That’s our nature. It’s why there are Pepsi drinkers and Coke drinkers. We have two types of cola. Then we have the oddball stuff for the weirdos, but it is a tiny market. When was the last time you heard someone order an RC Cola or a Moxie? No, people like a few choices so we can divide ourselves up into simple groups. Otherwise, diversity is always a bad thing.

Highway Robbery

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G. Gordon Liddy used to enjoy using the term “prison guards” rather than “corrections officers” on his radio show. Inevitably, guards would call in to defend their “profession” and chastise him for his choice of labels. He would then remind them that they chose to go into a “profession” that required them to look into the anus of other men. Things got ugly from there, but it was fun radio. It was also a good point. We decorate job names in order to conceal them. The classic is calling garbage men sanitary engineers.

A bigger point is that the sorts of people who go into these jobs are often as unpleasant as the job we’re trying to conceal. There are not a lot of soft, sophisticated men hanging off the back of garbage trucks. The guys guarding animals in cells are just as mean and nasty as the people they guard. They just know how to obey the rules. Similarly, cops are more often than not criminals with a badge and a gun. It’s obvious when you see stories like this one.

The two men in the rented red Nissan Altima were poker players traveling through Iowa on their way to Las Vegas. The police were state troopers on the hunt for criminals, contraband and cash.

They intersected last year on a rural stretch of Interstate 80, in a seemingly routine traffic stop that would soon raise new questions about laws that allow police to take money and property from people not charged with crimes.

By the time the encounter was over, the gamblers had been detained for more than two hours. Their car was searched without a warrant. And their cellphones, a computer and $100,020 of their gambling “bankroll” were seized under state civil asset-forfeiture laws. The troopers allowed them to leave, without their money, after issuing a traffic warning and a citation for possession of marijuana paraphernalia that carried a $65 fine, court records show.

Months later, an attorney for the men obtained a video of the stop. It showed that the motorists were detained for a violation they did not commit — a failure to signal during a lane change — and authorities were compelled to return 90 percent of the money.

This is nothing more than piracy. In the age of sail, governments would quietly grant permission to pirates to attack the shipping of their enemies. The British made a big show of chasing pirates, but they employed many of them. Today, states grant their police the right to rob people on the highways, seize their property and demand ransoms from them. Fighting the system is often not worth the trouble. Drug dealers are not suing the state for their drug money back so they keep quiet.

Now the men are questioning the police tactics in an unusual federal civil rights lawsuit. In the suit, filed Sept. 29, William Barton Davis, 51, and John Newmer­zhycky, 43, both from Humboldt County, Calif., claim their constitutional rights against unreasonable searches and seizures were violated. They also contend the stop was part of a pattern connected to the teachings of a private police-training firm that promotes aggressive tactics.

Davis is a professional poker player, and Newmerzhycky worked as glass blower, according to court records. In an interview, Davis said the men felt as though they were being “stalked” by the police.

If allowed to proceed, the lawsuit could illuminate the widespread but little-known police practice known as “highway interdiction.” The suit names Desert Snow, the Oklahoma-based training firm, and its founder, Joe David, court records show. It also names the two Iowa State Patrol troopers who participated in the traffic stop and were trained by Desert Snow.

Desert Snow’s lead instructor, David Frye, said the lawsuit has no merit and contains “outrageous” and “inaccurate” accusations.

There’s a lot of make work in a society and ours is overflowing with it. This company training cops to shake down civilians on the highway should never exist. His company exists because of the laws that permit this sort of theft from people by the police. There are armies of diversity trainers, human resource managers, insurance consultants, etc., who exist solely because the law creates a need for them.

The rest of the story is worth reading. Three quick points come to mind. One is never talk to a cop unless required by the law. They are just criminals with badges so they should be treated as such. Yeah, I know, most are just doing their job. But some are not and you can’t know that. Cooperate with crooks like the two in the story and you could find yourself in jail while they find a way to steal your property.

The other thing that comes to mind is how these laws have not been challenged in court. Even in our degenerate times, due process is enforced. Stealing someone’s property and making them sue to get it back should never stand in court. We’re a mess as a country, but we’re not North Korea. At the minimum, the state should be required to get permission from the court to seize property.  In this case that would probably have stopped the whole thing before it got to the search.

Finally, later in the story the cops raid the guy’s home and find weed. They charge him with possession and a stack of other crimes that are all the same thing. Sandbagging has gone so far out of control even misdemeanor offense end up filling a page of the charging document. Come to find out they had a permit to grow their own weed. This is what we see all the time now. Charge/arrest first and force the citizen to prove they are innocent. We are now government by highway men.

Modern Horoscopes

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I always get a kick out of these things because they are mostly bullshit. If you go through the questions, they tell you the combination of famous people you most resemble. None of the famous people are monsters or evil. The idea is to flatter the user, not horrify them. Still, I’d be tempted to have results that said the user had a brain like Hitler or Jack the Ripper, but I’d be a terrible astrologer. Here is my result:

Leonardo of Arc
You have an active imagination and free-spirited side, which means you dream big, believe anything can happen, and are open to new experiences that might present opportunities to learn and explore. You get these traits from Leonardo da Vinci, the genius artist, inventor and mathematician whose talent is still considered to be one of the greatest in the world.

But you’re also very disciplined, and have a strong work ethic that grounds your personality and gives all your big dreams and ideas the fuel to become reality. You get these traits from Joan of Arc, the bold, fearless French heroine who was also canonized as a Catholic saint.

Joan of Arc was probably a schizophrenic. She had “visions” and heard voices. There’s some speculation that she faked it and was some sort of a con-artist, but grifters don’t take their con so far that they get burned at the stake. Modern feminists have made her a heroine of their cause so that’s probably why the site used her in its rotation. I took the test a few more times and got different results each time so they may be using a random personality generator.

The IQ crowd puts a lot of stock in these sorts of profiles. The Big Five personality traits are the gold standard. You can take the self-exam here if you’re interested. I’ve given a lot of these types of exams in the past and I know a lot of companies that use them for management development. The military academies used to administer them, but I don’t know if that is still the case. At the academies, testing for leadership is of obvious value so they do a lot of it.

There’s a lot of good science behind it, but I’m not 100% sold. The reason I’ve always been a bit skeptical is I’ve taken these things and it is not hard to figure out the point of the questions. I’ve been able to game the test to get the result I wanted so I’m sure more devious minded people can do it with no problem. Then there is the fact people tend to lie on self-assessments. That said, I’ve been tested a lot so I’m probably not a great example. I also like reverse engineering these tests so I probably notice the patterns more readily that others.

Regardless, the Internet says I’m an artistic schizophrenic or a highly disciplined French heroine.

Glenn Beck

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When Glenn Beck was on Fox I loved his show, despite never watching it. What I loved about it is how he sent the Left into a frenzy. If you were a room full of strangers and wanted to identify the lunatics, mention Glenn Beck. The lunatics would suddenly begin convulsing and screeching. Otherwise, I found Beck to be a bit of  a weirdo. He was a man on a grail-quest. Having seen his ugliness in the bottom of a glass, he was racing around looking for the antidote.

Religion, followed by slaying the Progressive dragon was his thing on Fox. Then he left Fox and started his own network. I give him a ton of credit for figuring out before everyone else where the future of media lies. From what I gather The Blaze has made Beck a millionaire many times over. Still, when I see him I get the sense he is still a man on a mission that he is still trying to unravel. This latest seems to fit the pattern.

Glenn Beck on Monday revealed the true extent of his health issues, saying he can no longer keep what has happened a secret from his friends, his staff or audience, whom he considers to be his family.

If you have sensed a change in Beck — maybe you even thought he was losing interest in his program — Beck said it is because he was told he may only have several functional years left, and his health conditions were causing such excruciating pain that it was difficult to do live programming.

“Tonight’s show is not for the casual fan or, really, anyone in the press,” Beck said. “This is a one-on-one between friends. No one in the media ever does a show like this, because it is crazy. … But I believe that by not talking with you openly, it destroys everything of real meaning and value — namely, our trust.”

“I have never lied to you, but I have omitted a few really important facts because — they scared me,” Beck admitted, beginning to swallow back tears. “I didn’t have any answers, and the answers I was being given at the time meant … the end of our time together.”

Not only is there a religious vibe to this, there’s a Jimmy Swaggart vibe to it. That’s an old school preacher move. The personal testimony has been a staple of the southern religious experience since forever. The preacher reminds his flock that he is their shepherd. Then he tells them he is not long for this world. Then the ushers pass the plate and everyone kicks in what they can. The preacher recovers.

Beck said that five years ago, around the time of his Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C., God began to tell him that he was standing in the wrong place. At around the same time, his health issues began, starting with vocal cord paralysis, eyesight problems and what doctors at first believed was a painful form of neuropathy.

“While I was at Fox, the pain would get so bad that my camera crew, our executive producer Tiffany and I, had worked out hand signals so they would know when to take the camera off of me,” Beck revealed. “We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands and feet, or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, set them on fire or pushed broken glass into them.”

Beck said that while he was in intense pain, something unusual was happening that he actually thought was an advantage in his business: he only ever needed two to four hours of sleep a night.

“Doctors tell me that up until recently, I hadn’t had a real REM sleep in maybe as long as a decade,” Beck said. “I didn’t have a dream that I remember, except one in a decade. And quite honestly, this isn’t a symptom you look to fix if you have a ton to do. But the first sign of trouble I noticed was what I call a ‘time collapse.’ If we had met before, I couldn’t tell you if it was a month ago, a year ago or when we were in high school. I then began to lose names to faces and over time, entire conversations would go away.”

Beck said doctors told him it was normal for someone processing as much information as he was, and the phenomenon has been discussed by figures like Winston Churchill.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that Beck is a sort of stigmatic and a medium of some sort, with massive amounts of data flowing through him, to you, his followers. His suffering for you is, well, Christ-like, isn’t it? Well, the modern version, least ways. It is sort of a crucifixion-lite, where the savior nails himself to the cross metaphorically.

Maybe I’m being mean-spirited, but I’m skeptical. Adrenal fatigue, for example, is nonsense. It is not a real medical condition. It was cooked up by snake oil salesman to trick middle-aged women into buying crystals and colonics. My bet is the real doctors told him he was either faking or suffering from some sort of psycho-somatic condition.

I know this makes me a stone-hearted villain, but I think he is faking.

Free Riders

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An age old problem in human society is the free loader problem. Economists prefer to phrase it as the “Free Rider Problem” so as not to drag in those icky moral and cultural issues. I prefer to use the more appropriate phrase, “free loader” as that’s the real problem. People unable to provide for themselves are not a problem, even for poor human societies. Every society, not matter how rich, is plagued by a slice of humanity that chooses to live off the labor of others, even when alternatives are available to them.

The better term may be the “entitlement problem” but that one has been claimed for other purposes. An example I like to use is the pizza problem. In my youth a friend had a roommate, who was from a very wealthy family. Having grown up unaware of the restraints the rest of us faced, he had a sense of entitlement. He just expected people to wait on him. Whenever we ordered a pizza, this guy would eat more than his share and never chip in for the bill, unless asked. He seemed oblivious to the fact that food cost money and the rest of us had to concern ourselves with the fact we lacked an abundant supply of money.

That’s one side of the entitlement coin. Spend any time around the very rich and you bump into this. When I worked for a Congressman in my youth, he and his family were often stymied by mundane things like buying gas. They never carried cash and did not have credit cards. Someone else was always there to pay the bill so when caught needing to actually pay for something, they would be stumped. The thing about it is there was always someone there to solve the problem for them. A sense of entitlement can carry you a long way in society.

The other side of the coin is the underclass.It is generally assumed by the ruling class that the lower class is just too dumb to do anything other than be poor. That’s often the case. There are a lot of very stupid people in the ghetto. But, they are not so stupid that they cannot provide for themselves. Instead of investing their time into middle-class pursuits, they work the welfare system, learning all the ways to maximize their return, while minimizing their investment. After all, they are entitled.

That’s the thing you see with the under-class. They view themselves as dependent and they can’t imagine things arranged any other way. Government and the rich people who run it owe them free housing, free food, free booze and so forth. In a weird way the under-class is like modern hunter-gatherers. They forage around their environment, in this case the ghetto and the custodial state that supports it, for the necessities to live. Every once in a while, the males engage in violent conflict with males from other tribes. Afterwards, they get high, eat and screw.

The point of all this is humans have been trying to figure out how best to handle the free rider problem since forever and we still struggle with it. The best way we have discovered is to have everyone pay their own way. A radical idea that has been tried in a few places with surprising success. Colonial New England is probably our best example locally. People were expected to pay their own way, take care of their families and not be a burden on their neighbors. Charity existed, but it existed with lots of strings. Those strings were intended to discourage you from needing charity. I used to live near an old almshouse from the 18th century, for example.

All that was considered crazy so we have struggled to come up with better answers. A good example how the struggle is going is Net neutrality. For reasons he most certainly does not understand, President Obama is pushing for the FCC to arbitrarily force ISP’s to treat all traffic the same.

President Obama urged the US government to adopt tighter regulations on broadband service in an effort to preserve “a free and open Internet.”

In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the principle of treating all Internet traffic the same way, known in shorthand as Net neutrality. That means treating broadband services like utilities, the president said, so that Internet service providers would be unable “to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”

Obama wades into a contentious debate that has raged over how to treat Internet traffic, which has only heated up as the FCC works to prepare an official guideline. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015. The debate has centered on whether broadband should be placed under Title II regulation under the Telecommunications Act, which already tightly controls phone services.

Proponents argue that Title II regulation would ensure the free and fair flow of traffic across the Internet. Opponents, however, believe the reorientation would mean onerous rules that would limit investment in the infrastructure and in new services, and that toll roads of sorts would provide better service to companies that can support their higher traffic volumes. But that in turn has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instances, intentionally slowing some content streams and speeding others.

The problem is the Internet is not a utility. A utility is a special sort of monopoly that provides a specific product that is the same for all customers. Rich people get the same electricity as poor people. The utility charges by the unit at the same rate for all users. The Internet is a wildly varied service that is valuable only because of a millions of other businesses that sells products and services over the Internet. But, there are loads of companies transferring their costs to people who do not use their service, via the miracle of the cable bill. Facebook is the most obvious example.

The problem we have is a variation on the classic Tragedy of the Commons. The public, through their governments, allowed private industry to use public resources to construct the Internet, including the massive cable TV network. In many cases, these companies were paid to build out infrastructure. All of them rely on free access to public roads and sidewalks to maintain their networks, like any other utility. Unlike the electric grid, the Internet is a virtual market place, The ISP charges rent to anyone who sets up shop and charges access to anyone who wants to buy products offered on-line.

Well, sort of.

I pay much more for Internet service that I probably should, given my usage. I don’t watch movies on-line or listen to music on-line very often. The guy down the road has a bunch of kids who each use ten times the bandwidth I use. Their Internet bill is the same as mine. The costs are socialized so he can get cheap movies and I can get expensive e-mails. Much like the cable bill, we have a inverse of the utility model. Instead of metered billing, everyone pays the same, regardless of usage. The ISP’s want to implement what amounts to metered billing, like a utility, except the government is trying to stop them, because they say they are a utility.

Conservatarian Cooke-ness

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When I was a young man, I used to hear old people say something along the lines that young people would listen to each other, but never to those older than them. The sign a young man was maturing was when he sought out the advice of older people. This always seemed strange to me. I knew young people were idiots, including myself. Taking advice from any of them seemed like idiocy to me. I was young and dumb, but not that dumb. If I needed help, I went and found an old guy.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that I was way dumber than I realized in my youth. While I was right to seek out information from older people, I was not very good at figuring out which old people were worth consulting. That comes with age and experience. As you get older, you acquire your own knowledge, but you also get better at figuring out who is worth listening to or reading. Number one on the list of people you ignore is young people. God bless ‘em, but they don’t know anything and they don’t know anyone who knows anything.

That all came to mind while reading this post by Charles Alphabet Cooke on National Review. He is out with a book called the Conservatarian Manifesto. From the post:

The book is in part a look at the growing number of self-identified “conservatarians” — those people whose worldview is broadly right-leaning, but who are dissatisfied with the Republican party and with much of libertarianism. I also make some suggestions as to how conservatives can update their offering, propose a framework within which their various constituents can once again co-exist, and take on the notion that there is such a thing as a “social issue” per se. At the book’s heart is a sustained defense of federalism and of a thriving and diverse civil society.

My first thought, was that Mr. Cooke is a little young to be offering up a new political philosophy. Last week he was riding his Big Wheel around the driveway. His writing has the feel of the college sophomore coming home for Winter Solstice, lecturing the family about the real world. Even when you agree with him you cringe a little.

Putting my mean spirited bigotry towards the young to the side, I was reminded of when Rod Dreher went bonkers a decade ago and tried to build a cult around breakfast cereal. His shtick was “granola conservatism” otherwise known as “crunchy cons.” He defined these individuals as traditionalist conservatives who believed in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values. They also express skepticism about aspects of free market capitalism and they are usually religious (typically traditionalist Roman Catholics or conservative Protestants).

Of course, those of us who remembered when guys like Joe Sobran and Sam Francis were writing for respectable publications knew that conservatives were never capitalists nor prone to worship at the altar of free markets. Dreher’s “new” flavor of conservatism was just the original product with some of his own eccentric foibles sprinkled on top. It’s why no one remembers “granola conservatism” or Rod Dreher. It was the rantings of a young man in the sophomore stage of his life.

Cooke’s new brand of conservatism sounds just like libertarianism circa 1984. Thirty years ago libertarians were the guys who did not want to fight the Left over issues like abortion and they thought guys like Jerry Falwell were icky and gross. Libertarians famously broke with Reagan over, wait for it, the war on drugs. I know, it sounds crazy, but that was one of the main reasons Ron Paul gave for bolting the Republican Party in the Reagan years.

Cooke’s proposed new cult is basically 1980’s libertarianism with less of an emphasis on free weed. The obvious irrationality is the same we see with libertarianism. If people are to be free to organize themselves as they see fit, that means people will want their government to do a lot of things libertarians find unpleasant. The only sort of human that could live in a libertarian paradise is a person who detests his fellow humans so much he refuses to have anything to do with them. Otherwise, social creatures put rules on one another in order to facilitate mutually beneficial relations. That scales up to what we know as culture.

But, culture is tough intellectual ground to cover and most libertarians are simply not bright enough to master the material. Young people like Mr. Cooke have been marinated in Cultural Marxism since birth and that means they have a Pavlovian response to anything that bumps into culture. That response is to run and hide under the bed or, if they are a true believer, scream at the heretic until he runs and hides under the bed.

The only debates worth having in a civil society are cultural debates. What kind of people we choose to be is the only thing we can leave to the next generation. It is what they will stand upon as they decide how they will order themselves and how they will choose to be remembered. The reason these debates get so ugly and nasty is because they are so important. No one gives a crap about tax policy enough to lose a friend over it. People care about the culture and they are willing to fight over it, unless they are a conservatarian, I guess.

Myths and Madness

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Crackpots are often entertaining, but they are usually just tiring. A guy who thinks dinosaurs once had a sophisticated society, but were obliterated by space aliens in order to give mammals a shot is probably a fun guy at the bar. The Brits used to call these sorts of eccentrics “mad” or “daft”, as in harmlessly nutty.

At the other end of the spectrum, you have the sort that you suspect is one nudge away from going bonkers and shooting up a mall. These are the guys sending angry letters to the editor of their local newspaper – every day. Nowadays, they show up on Facebook and Twitter running “campaigns” against public figures. Or, they get a PhD and write articles for Salon.

The American Renaissance Foundation is an extremely conservative right-wing organization that also publishes a monthly magazine of the same name, American Renaissance (AR). The magazine’s first issue appeared in November 1990. The foundation was established by Jared Taylor (1952–) who serves as president of the New Century Foundation and as editor of AR. Taylor has ties to a variety of domestic and international racists and extremists. He is on the editorial advisory board of Citizens Informer, the newspaper of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a virulently racist group whose website has referred to blacks as “a retrograde species of humanity.” He has contributed writings to The Occidental Quarterly, a racist journal. He also has been a member of the board of directors of the National Policy Institute, a self-styled racist think tank, and has received funding from this institute.

Taylor has close ties with members of various neo-Nazi groups and with Gordon Baum, the CEO of Council of Conservative Citizens. He is a frequent radio guest of Don Black’s, operator of Stormfront, a white supremacist online forum that also advertises American Renaissance conferences. He also has ties to Mark Weber, head of the Institute for Historical Review. European racists are among his close associates, including members of the British National Party, a racist, far-right political party in England, and the National Front, a racist, far-right political party in France. Nick Griffin, the head of the British National Party, has been a speaker at two American Renaissance conferences. Frédéric Legrand, a member of the National Front, is a frequent contributor to American Renaissance.

In those 263 words, I highlighted 14 scare words. It reads like something written by the Lyndon LaRouche people. I was expecting some reference to Henry Kissinger and his international communist ties. This is the sort of rant you expect to be hand written on note paper, folded up a bunch of times and then stuffed into a plain envelope. If you read the whole 3,000 word tirade you start to think the guy already has Jared Taylor tied up in his basement and this piece includes his demands.

I know next to nothing about Jared Taylor. I recall Derb writing about him once so I went to the American Renaissance site. I find white identity to be a bit silly for the same reasons I black identity to be ridiculous. Not all blacks are the same and not all whites are the same. In America, blacks at least share a common ancestry and history. You can reasonably argue that there is a “black culture” that is shared by all black people. You can’t say that about whites. Flinty guys from New Hampshire are not a lot like Scots-Irish in Georgia. Then you have all the Poles, Irish, Italians, Jews, Germans and so forth. There’s simply no such thing as white identity.

That said, it is a harmless eccentricity. I’m more concerned about deranged crackpots like Robert Wald Sussman than some old white guys getting together to bitch about the “darkies.” Imagine the poor kids who foolishly take his course only to find they will be getting harangued three times a week by an aging madman.

A Conspiracy Theory That’s True!

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I got an chain e-mail today that read as follows:

He is Edward “Ed” Mezvinsky, born January 17, 1937. Then you’ll probably say, “Who is Ed Mezvinsky?”

Well, he is a former Democrat congressman who represented Iowa’s 1st congressional district in the United States House of Representatives for two terms, from 1973 to 1977.

He sat on the House Judiciary Committee that decided the fate of Richard Nixon. He was outspoken saying that Nixon was a crook and a disgrace to politics and the nation and should be impeached.

He and the Clintons were friends and very politically intertwined for many years.

Ed Mezvinsky had an affair with NBC News reporter Marjorie Sue Margolies and later married her after his wife divorced him.

In 1993, Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, then a freshman Democrat in Congress, cast the deciding vote that got President Bill Clinton’s controversial tax package through the House of Representatives.

In March 2001, Mezvinsky was indicted and later pleaded guilty to 31 of 69 counts of bank fraud, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Ed Mezvinsky embezzled more than $10 million dollars from people via both a Ponzi scheme and the notorious Nigerian e-mail scams. He was found guilty and sentenced to 80 months in federal prison. After serving less than five years in federal prison, he was released in April 2008 and remains on federal probation. To this day, he still owes $9.4 million in restitution to his victims.

About now you are saying, “So what!”

Well, this is Marc and Chelsea Mezvinsky.

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That’s right; Ed Mezvinsky is Chelsea Clinton’s father-in law.

Now Marc and Chelsea are in their early thirties and purchased a 10.5 million dollar NYC apartment (after being married in George Soros’ mansion). Has anyone heard mention of any of this in any of the media? If this guy was Jenna or Barbara Bush’s, or better yet, Sarah Palin’s daughter’s father-in- law, the news would be an everyday headline and every detail would be reported over and over.

And yet liberals say there are no double standards in political reporting. And people are already talking about Hillary as our next President! And then there is possibly Chelsea for president in our future!

My first thought was it was one of those made up conspiracy theory things that gets recycled every administration. But, I remembered Mezvinsky from the Nixon days so I looked it up anyway. Here’s what Snopes has on it. Turns out it is true.

Steve Sailer likes to write about the deep state and I must admit I find it enjoyable. I’m skeptical about conspiracy theories, but that does not mean there are no conspiracies. What’s more common is the near incestuous dealings in the political class. If you get elected to Congress, the door is open for you and your tribe to join the ruling class and stay there regardless of your actions. You need to win re-election and prove you will not make any trouble for the people in charge. Once you do that, you are granted tenure and even a lengthy trip to the Federal can does not get you thrown out of the club.

That means your relatives can gain insider access to business deals unavailable to the hoi polloi. Your kids go to tony private schools and marry the kids of others in the political class. It’s a milder form of the big man politics so popular in sub-Saharan Africa. In South America it results in a system where the ruling elite will do anything to keep the peasants down in the valley. In Africa and the Middle East it means the dominant tribe murders any tribe that seems threatening, while the big man enjoys the benefits of being the big man. In the Occident, its more subtle and more diffused, because the smart fraction is much larger. Still, it is not hard to see how it can ossify into something more insidious than just grubby theft and graft.

Bros Versus Yos

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Back when were allowed to notice things like race, confrontations between urban hipsters and the natives were called battles of bros versus yos. Years back in Boston, a college boy was gunned down by a yo right in front of my building. Homeboy was minding his business, driving down the road when the college boy tried to jump over the hood of his car. The college boy hit the hood of the car and rolled onto the street. A confrontation ensued and homey blasted Dylan or Brad or whatever name the college boy was given. They never found the shooter and I always suspect the cops never looked that hard. Sometimes, you have to let nature take its course.

As the Left evicts NAM’s from the cities, we’ll see more stories like this one. The fact no one notices the skin colors is part of how it will go. The SWPL’s have plenty of code words to handle this stuff anyway. Words like “sketchy” and “dodgy” have become urban SWPL slang to describe black neighborhoods. The more sarcastic may even use “diverse” and “vibrant” if they feel like they are among coevals. The main tool the Left uses to push out the undesirables is complex rules. My bet is there was never a time when the city rented the park. The hipsters pushed for a change so they could take control of the park without having to confront the locals. Zoning laws have been a popular way to do this too.

The irony of all this is within living memory the tide was running the other way in cities. In the 50’s and 60’s these city neighborhoods were populated with middle-class white people. Local officials, real estate agents and would-be landlords used block busting to shove the whites out into the suburbs. They would get one family to sell to a black family. Within months the rest would agree to sell, usually after an unpleasant confrontation at the school or park with their new neighbors. Then it would be Katy-bar-the-door time as the whites fled to the burbs. All In The Family was based, in part, on this phenomenon.

Now, the children and grandchildren of those suburban pioneers are returning the favor.

Hive Language

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Back in the old days at the birth of the Internet, the place for technical people to gather on-line was the bulletin board. You dialed in with your modem and logged into a bulletin board to read posting from others and engage in debate with others of similar interests. I think the first BBS I logged into was a college football site. Not long after e-mail lists came along and then NNTP servers. This was the first “social networking” and was for nerds only. You had to know stuff to get on-line. Today, even retarded people have Facebook pages.

Now that the Hive is on-line, they have co-opted the language of the Internet. It used to be that a “troll” was someone who posted to get attention. Someone would post on a college football newsgroup, for example, that Miami was a school for thugs and drug dealers. A big argument would erupt allowing the troll to irritate a bunch of people. “Trolling” was a way to stir up trouble. Clever trolling has produced some of the most amusing bits on the Internet.

Now, the Hive has redefined the term to mean “people they don’t like.” Anyone who holds an opinion contrary to the Cult approved opinions is called a troll. Like Nazi and racist, it no longer has meaning. But, it also means the person so labeled has no meaning. So much so it can get you killed, apparently.

London (AFP) – The death of a British woman accused of a vicious campaign of online abuse against the parents of missing girl Madeleine McCann has ignited debate over the growing scourge of Internet “trolls”.

Brenda Leyland was found dead in a hotel room earlier this month after being confronted by Sky News over her alleged trolling of Kate and Gerry McCann, whose three-year-old daughter went missing in Portugal in 2007.

An investigation is ongoing, but has found no evidence of foul play or third party involvement.

Using the Twitter handle @Sweepyface the 63-year-old reportedly posted thousands of hate-filled messages about the couple.

Her name figured on an 80-page dossier compiled by members of the public cataloguing alleged abuse directed at the couple and their two other children from a long list of Internet users, which is currently being investigated by the police.

It is a trend that has been replicated the world over against high-profile figures.

Brenda Leyland was not “trolling” anyone. She was most likely a nut who was harassing people. The abracadabra phrase “hate-filled” tells you that the couple she was harassing were members of the Cult. Noticing the obvious about the Cult is always hate-filled so I’m just connecting the dots.

Think about the mindset of the people who came together to compile the dossier on the dead woman. These are the sort of people who turned in Jews to the Nazi occupiers in France.