Monthly Archives: August 2013

The End of Citzenship

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This Steve Sailer piece on the looming amnesty of 30 million invaders touches on the heart of the amnesty push. Western elites have largely abandoned the notion of citizenship. That’s because they see pride in national heritage as the same as Nazi xenophobia. Seventy years after the end of World War II and the West remains haunted by old Adolph. Perhaps is a matter of projection or fear of their own tendencies.

Another explanation is it stems from self-loathing. These people hate themselves, they hate the society that produced them and they hate the antecedents that make society possible. They busy themselves trying to scrub away anything that looks like nationalism, in the same way someone tries to wash away a stain. Of course, This means your moral standing is then defined by how far one is removed from a national culture.

That’s why dullards like our president insist on pronouncing foreign words with a foreign accent. They think it makes them sound worldly. Obama struggles with English, yet we’re supposed to take pronunciation lessons from him. It really is amazing that a man with so many opportunities to master another language at a young age never learned a word. It’s almost impossible for children raised in other lands to not pick up some of the language.

Anyway, I think it is something else. Americans are always late to the party. For instance, church attendance is still common in America. In Europe, the churches have been turned into museums or turned into mosques as no one bothers to attend. American church attendance is declining here in the liberal strongholds and they regularly make war on the religious. But, we are a few generations from reaching European levels of religiosity.

The same seems to be true of post-nationalism, but we are working hard to catch up to our kinsmen across the sea. The Republican Party still does the flag waving stuff, but the Democrats pretty much hate America. They always have hated Americans, but now they hate the very idea of America. It’s why Obama ran on fundamental transformation. In his mind, America was always a rotten idea, so it needs to be eliminated.

Europe has had a different experience. The reformation and the collapse of Catholicism as the unifying force in Europe resulted in a series of wars, collectively known as The Thirty Years War. The war left much of central Europe in ruins. Parts of Germany were reduced to cannibalism. Noble families were destroyed and vast wealth was squandered, in an effort to either restore the Church or find some suitable replacement to unify Europe.

The fact that the world was set on fire by a lunatic, who ate his own poo, had to resonate with the rulers. What replaced universal Christianity as the organizing ethos in Europe was nationalism. It was given a good Christian coat of paint, thus allowing the hoi polloi to believe they were God’s favorites and their rulers were God’s elect. By the 18th century, The Church was a side show and nationalism was the faith of Europe.

The result was the The Peace of Westphalia that largely ended the wars of religion, but it set the stage for endless territorial wars and wars over monarchical succession. In the 18th century alone there were over 40 wars on the Continent. Then the 19th century brought the Napoleonic Wars, followed by endless wars of rebellion, annexation and consolidation, as the borders of Europe were reshaped. Endless war was the default.

Fast forward to the 20th century and we see the ultimate clash of religions. Within a 30 period, the powers of Europe had destroyed one another, slaughtering tens of millions of people and plundering the West. Like The Thirty Years War, it was a matter of belief that set brother against brother in a near suicidal conflict. Fascism, Nazism, liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism were the driving forces of the world’s first ideological war.

The lesson European elites drew from the bloodbath was that nationalism was no way to run a society. They set about erasing it from their ranks. The slow development of a pan-European super state, the end of trade barriers, a single currency and free movement of people are all about erasing national identity. They are trying to create the unified Europe of Christendom, without the religion, in order to maintain peace on the Continent.

American elites have slowly absorbed these ideas. The trouble is, they don’t fully understand the point of post-nationalism, so their version has become anti-nationalism, which means anti-Americanism. The result is a race to overthrow everything that defines a nation, like language customs, borders. The selling off of the manufacturing base, for example, means they get to buy and use products lacking the words “Made in America.”

Military policy has been warped by this, putting the health and welfare of foreigners ahead of our servicemen. Of course, wholesale immigration is aimed at diluting the population. All of those pesky natives and their demands on government will be replaced with third world peasants happy for the hand outs. More important, being an American citizen will lose its value. The elites can be citizens of the world and the rest of us will just be the peasants.

More Stupid Party

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Reading reports such as this one, my first thought is Chuck Schumer really loves rubbing their noses in it. He knows Boehner is a pussy and he enjoys pushing him around like a schoolyard bully. He also hates normal Americans and so he is taking pleasure in telling us that we have no say in the immigration fight. He and the rest of the ruling class will open the flood gates and there is nothing more to discuss. Maybe it is something else, but it just feels like gloating. He also enjoys being a dickhead in public.

Of course, he could just be a jerk in real life, but clever politicians don’t do anything without reason. Schumer is either trying to depress the opposition or rally his supporters. He does not order breakfast without having some scheme behind it. People forget that politics is hard, even at the lower ranks. To get to where he is, while lacking anything that resembles charm, means he is a brilliant political athlete. Whatever he is saying in public, has a purpose and his ends are always at odds with the interests of heritage Americans.

The shocking thing is the staggering stupidity of the GOP leaders. When this started, everyone knew what was happening. The Senate would pass amnesty. That way it would be on the table, not matter what came out of the House. That was the threat. The point was to discourage the House from taking up the issue. Otherwise, the two bills would be combined into amnesty plus whatever the House supported.. Boehner publicly stated that this was going to happen unless the House refused to pass a bill.

The GOP base is fuming over it and will bolt the party if it happens. Boehner will probably lose his job if he is voluntarily walks into such a trap. They will lose the House and probably the 2016 election. Millions of white voters have abandoned politics because they have no party. Millions more will follow suit, if the GOP becomes handmaiden of the non-white party. This is obvious to anyone paying attention, which is why Romney somehow managed to lose to a very vulnerable Barak Obama. But, stupid people do stupid things.

 

The Left Side of the Bell Curve

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One fun way to scandalize most decent people is to tell them half the people in the world are below average in IQ. Americans hate the idea of IQ and fixed biological traits. The reason for this is free will is tightly wound into the American creed. We have rights and we are judged by how we exercise those rights. The multi-billion dollar self-help industry exists,m because Americans are sure you can improve on what God gave you. It is a central part of the American myth that we can be anything we choose to be.

It is also what drives so much of social science and government policy. No amount of evidence to the contrary will convince us that you can’t get better and smarter. It’s why the  phrase “Flynn Effect” has become an involuntary response from liberals whenever the subject of IQ is raised. Whenever the topic of IQ comes up on-line, the comments will have people swearing the Flynn Effect means IQ is malleable. That means the reason little Matumbo is dumb is not nature, but an insufficiently funded school system.

The fact is, though, IQ is real. Most of every population falls into the category of average IQ for that population. Then there are some that are dimwits and others with above average and even genius level IQ. Every population of humans has an average IQ, just as they have an average height. Europeans tend to be smarter than other populations, on average. This is one reason why Europeans raced ahead of the rest of the world starting in the 15th century. Not the only reason, but an important one.

European societies have a relatively large number of above average IQ people compared to other populations. This advantage did not count for a lot until technology permitted enough extra to support a leisure class. Once Europeans societies were able to afford a leisure class, the smart fraction was able to accelerate the progress down the road to modernity. On the other hand, the societies lacking the human capital to create a leisure class, also lacked a large enough smart fraction to overcome scarcity.

This is and interesting paper on how technology is changing our labor markets. The fact is, technology works great for smart people. It offers all sorts of new ways to make a living and make life easier. Even credentialization has not limited this. Every business has a need for smart people. I know lots of people who have changed careers a few times, because the demand for their smarts changed. The demand for IQ is constant. Even those with professional degrees have adapted in a similar fashion.

For the people on the left side of the bell curve, it is a different story. Their skills are narrow and they acquire new skills slowly. Technology is often making their skills obsolete. That’s one reason why we see stagnant wages and unusually high unemployment rates among the unskilled and semi-skilled. It’s not the only reason, but technology also makes it easier to plug on foreign low-skilled labor, thus making open borders more attractive. Many fall into a condition of chronic under employment.

The question is what to do about it.

Pat Buchanan Was Right

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I fully admit to falling for the Bush-Cheney “Freedom Agenda” stuff in the 2000’s. I did not fall for it entirely, as I assumed they were lying about most of it. I figured their talk of spreading democracy was just cover for getting rid of troublesome dictators they did not like anymore. Given the rising tide of Islamic terrorism and the failure of other options, I was willing to give it a shot. After all, fighting the lunatics over there was better than fighting them over here. It seemed like the best option at the time.

The build out of the surveillance state was always a problem for me, but that was mostly for economic reasons. I just saw DHS quickly turning into another EPA. We would end up with a costly, blundering bureaucracy that accomplished nothing good. I also assumed the Left would hamstring all efforts to make the surveillance state effective, as they did with the CIA during the Cold War. It turns out I was mistaken on both accounts. The neocons really meat what they said and the Left never bothered to oppose the surveillance state.

In fairness to most everyone back then, the Left was out of their mind with rage after the 2000 election and then went nuts over the response to 9/11. A good rule for over a century is the assume that the Left is up to no good and going against their program is the way to truth. Seeing one Progressive after another ululating in the streets over the Bush foreign policy made it much easier to support. That and there was no alternative. It was the Bush plan or incoherent craziness that seemed to be rooting for the Muslims to win.

That was then. We have now seen a number of Muslim counties get the vote. In every case they voted for Islamic parties. It turns out that the majority of Arabs are deeply religious and they want to live in a country ruled by their coreligionists. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood garnered the plurality of the votes. The second place party was even more Islamic. In other words, the typical Egyptian saw the Brotherhood as the moderate option. The same thing happened in Iraq when we held their elections.

Iran, of course, has been down this path for 30 years. Despite the economic and political problems in Iran, the majority of the people actually support the ruling mullahs. They want to live in a country run by the tenets of their faith. Turkey is steadily moving toward becoming an Islamic state, rejecting western style liberal democracy. Again, the majority is in favor of Islamic rule. It really does not matter what the neocons hoped would happen, they should have know that Muslim countries would vote for Muslim government.

That’s what makes this post bothersome. A lot of of us have learned a lot about the Arab world and Islam in the last decade. Our intellectuals, however, have remained stubbornly ignorant. They desperately cling to the unsupported assertion that there is a constituency in these countries for liberal democracy. They see the young people on TV with their mobile phones and think that’s reality. That’s not reality. Those people are maybe 20% of the population. The rest see them as emblematic of the problems with liberal democracy.

It’s like the word “democracy” now means a whole package of economic, political and cultural institutions, rather than a political system. If the people vote for their traditional way of life, somehow that is anti-democratic. On the other hand, if our neo-liberal rulers rig an election to thwart the will of the people, that’s democracy in action. It’s hard to know if this is the result of anti-Western hostility among out elites or simply ignorance. It is probably a product of both. Anti-Western hatred has cultivated a generations of stupid intellectuals.

Either way, we are the first people on earth to have a ruling elite that loathes the very culture over which they rule, the culture that makes it possible for them to exist. This was Pat Buchanan’s insight thirty years ago. The American idea of a moderate representative republic that looks out for the interests of the people is revolting to the people who rule over us. So much so, they have revolted against everything associated with it. The result is a weird secular religion that they think they can spread around the world.

Detroit & Debt

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This post on ZeroHedge reminds me of something that never gets much discussion these days. That is, how can you create a system of governance that prevents the state from borrowing? The gold bugs and libertarians are the only people who see borrowing as the source of all trouble. The people in charge never think about it, as borrowing makes it possible for them to be in charge. Easy money allows the worst elements to dominate a democracy, because it makes it possible for the unprincipled to buy votes.

The outlandish growth of the Federal government is due to debt. There’s no way the public would tolerate the tax burden to pay for it. Instead, the rulers found subtle ways to tax the people, always through debt. In order to mask the erosion of purchasing power, they allow banks to create  unlimited credit for the public to use in lieu of earnings. State and local government uses debt in lieu of taxes to pay for expanding unionized workforces. Of course, public pensions are just taxing future tax payers for present vote buying.

Public debt is a type of Ponzi scheme. Like all Ponzi schemes, this one will eventually run out of new money to pay off old money. At the peak of the baby boom, for example, the Feds will be paying 78 million Boomers to sit around at about $50,000 per year. That’s $4 Trillion a year in welfare payments. No one has the slightest idea how to pay it. State and local pension obligations are something like a trillion a year short of being solvent and that may be a polite fiction. No one really knows how broke pensions are right now.

Within the next two decades, the money runs out. It will happen with cities, then a state and finally the Federal government will run out of money. There’s also the fact that global debt has reached levels never seen in human history. There has to be some upper limit to debt creation. The world is based on never ending debt growth, so what happens when that limit is reached? People talk about peak oil as when growth in demand out-paces the growth in supply. That never happens with oil, but it has to happen with debt.

Then what?

The end of one era is the start of a new one. The new one is always about addressing the errors of the old one. If the end of the credit economy is ugly enough, serious people will have to come up with a solution to debt. That means some hard limits on borrowing. This assumes a soft landing from the financial crisis that comes from the end of the credit boom. if it ends in a world war, then maybe what comes next does not matter. The challenge for the post-collapse rulers will be keeping the bread lines peaceful.

Assuming the ideal denouement to the credit boom, how would nations put safe limits on public borrowing? State government have limits written into their constitutions, but those are often circumvented. A currency based in something useful like energy stocks could achieve a mix of gold’s limit’s ion credit growth, while allowing for a growth in the money supply as energy becomes more available and cheaper. It’s a hard puzzle to solve, for the simple reason people love spending today on the promise to pay tomorrow.

Why American Media Is Dying

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This story is a great example of what is wrong with the American media. First off, everyone knows that autograph brokers are grifters. They operate on the same moral plane as drug dealers and pimps. You just assume they are lying. Now, let’s assume ESPN does not know this going into the story. When the dirt bag tries to sell them the video, that should be the point when the reporter and editor realize they are dealing with a person who lies a lot.The fact it was done secretly makes this undeniably obvious.

Now, the press reports on shady characters every day so that’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is they decide to partner with the low-life by helping keep his identity concealed, so he can scam future athletes. By keeping his identity concealed, that’s what they are doing. If this guy’s name gets out, no one will deal with him. ESPN is helping him by keeping him anonymous. In the law, this is called accessory. ESPN is not directly robbing athletes, but they are facilitating it by helping this guy stay anonymous.

There’s another issue here. Why is ESPN making an issue of this? No one gives a crap what this kid is doing to make side money. The NCAA may care, but that’s their business at this point. of course, ESPN would never do this with the black athletes. They move heaven and earth to excuse the bad behavior. If this was a black kid, the story would be about how he is being exploited by the evil whites. Everything the media does is tailored to fit the anti-white narrative,m because the people running the media hate white people.

Putting aside the anti-white agenda, the problem with the media is they have an adversarial relationship with their alleged customers. Instead of challenging the people in charge on behalf of their readers, the media thinks they need to challenge their readers on behalf of the people in charge. In time, someone is going to figure out that attacking the media is a win-win scenario and that’s when the public turns on the press. Politicians sort of know it, but they never take it all the way. One day, some will figure it out.

These are the Good Times

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Everything is relative. When I was a boy, by grandfather would tell me stories of his youth in the second decade of the last century. He was born in 1910 and came over here at some point from Russia. That was always a mystery. The family was dirt poor, but he remembered it fondly. He told stories of the Depression too. Of course, he had stories from the war years. Again, all were fond memories despite the fact he and his family survived great deprivations. All of us tend to romanticize our youth when old.

Our younger years are the best of times, even when those times are terrible. The reason is youth. Being young means having hope because everything is in front of you. Even if the present is terrible, it’s all you know and tomorrow is another day. I have fond memories of the 1970’s, even though my family could barely keep the lights on. I was a kid and did not care. I had fun anyway. The turmoil in the greater society did not touch me and I have no way to compare my circumstances with the alternatives, so I enjoyed my youth.

Anyway, this post by Ashok Rao is interesting and a bit scary. Fake unemployment is at ~7.5% right now. Real unemployment is something closer to 11%. Some claim the figure, when backing out the part timers, is probably over 15%. I’ve always hated such games, but the government keeps playing games with the numbers. This WSJ article is a good read on the subject of part-time workers. What jumps out from Ashok’s post is that job gains have flattened out now. We see that in the weekly numbers and the monthly NFP.

The reason for the troublesome labor numbers is that employers are filling jobs with temporary workers when possible. There are lots of incentives for avoiding any permanent increases to their work force. There also the availability of indentured servants from abroad. No one ever talks about the fact that the labor pool keeps growing at the same pace as job growth and this is due to the flood of foreign workers. Instead, the government just keeps pushing their fake employment numbers, hoping no one notices.

What this means, form the perspective of present workers, is that we are in the bets of times. if you are a boomer looking to retire, you don’t care. The good times are gone anyway. The 20-somethings, on the other hand, are getting screwed and are going to get even more screwed. This economy, with all of them living at home and hustling part time work, is as good as it gets for a while. Looking at the recent economic data, we are headed into a period of near zero growth, when you net out money creation.

Of course, the employment numbers are largely worthless, as they assume things have not changed since the 1960’s. When the labor force was domestic and its growth was organic, the statistics meant something. Now that employers are permitted to import ringers from abroad to drive down wages and get around labor laws, those numbers are meaningless. The only number that counts for anything is the workforce participation rate, but that is never advertised as it reveals the truth of the current labor markets.

The Free Money Era

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For a long time I have been calling the period starting in the late 1980’s into the Great Recession the “Free Money Era.” The currency arrangements of today were put into place in the 1980’s with the Louvre Accords.  This established the system of fiat currency we have today. Not only are all currencies fiat, they float against one another according to the dictates of the main central banks. It is what has allowed China to go from a backward society to a semi-modern industrial power in one generation.

It is also what has allowed for the massive expansion of credit. That credit bubble has manifested itself in many ways. One is the housing boom and subsequent bust. The public sector debt problems are another. Easy money allowed Detroit to borrow into oblivion. The record amounts of personal and corporate debt is another result. In the 1970’s, it was impossible to run up tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. No bank would every lend that much, without suitable collateral. Today, it is common.

Another, less obvious example is entertainment. Sports entertainment has boomed since the 1980’s. A big part of that is borrowed money. The owners buy the franchises on debt and since debt is easy, there are lots of people with credit money bidding for franchises, so the value of franchises skyrocketed. In fact, credit money has inflated all assets. Then you have the patrons who pay higher and higher ticket prices, because they finance their lifestyle on easy credit. The modern age is built on piles of IOU’s.

Nothing can last forever. All of this debt fueled growth will come to a screeching halt when the upper limit of debt is reached. This is a decent article on the topic of college football. touches on the underlying irrationality of the college sports model. The article goes into a lot of stuff, but skips past the root cause. The college bubble is also a product of the debt bubble. Eventually, the colleges will run out of people able to borrow for college. At that point, the financial model of college and college sports begins to unravel.

Obama the Dim

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I’ve taken to calling Obama “Obumbles” because it infuriates my liberal friends. Liberals have an emotional need to believe they are the smartest people in the room, so causally accusing their hero of being a dimwit offends them greatly. It is the hangover from the “scientific socialism” days when the Left swore their preferred arrangements were the natural order. In a better time, true believers would justify their actions by claiming they were doing God’s will. Today, Progressive fanatics believe reason is on their side.

Anyway, this article by Kevin Williamson touches on that a bit. Obama is supposed to be the smartest man in the room. He may have an above average IQ, I don’t know. Steve Sailer thinks his test scores were probably high average at worst and most likely above average. That’s not enough, of course. The Unibomber was a genius. Mao was probably genius or at least very shrewd. Personality is the hand that wields IQ. In the case of Obama, the personality is one that is disinterested and lazy.

It is not simply the content of his political agenda, which, though wretched, is a good deal less ambitious than was Woodrow Wilson’s or Richard Nixon’s. Barack Obama did not invent managerial liberalism, nor has he contributed any new ideas to it. He is, in fact, a strangely incurious man. Unlike Ronald Reagan, to whom he likes to be compared, President Obama shows no signs of having expended any effort on big thinkers or big ideas. President Reagan’s guiding lights were theorists such as F. A. Hayek and Thomas Paine; Obama’s most important influences have been tacticians such as Abner Mikva, bush-league propagandists like the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, and his beloved community organizers. Far from being the intellectual hostage of far-left ideologues, President Obama does not appear to have the intellectual energy even to digest their ideas, much less to implement them. This is not to say that he is an unintelligent man. He is a man with a first-class education and a business-class mind, a sort of inverse autodidact whose intellectual pedigree is an order of magnitude more impressive than his intellect.

I would add that Obama is emblematic of the modern meritocracy. Accumulating credentials stands in place of accumulating accomplishments. Starting a business takes courage. Making it successful is hard work. Getting an MBA is relatively easy and it pays much better. The result is we have a lot of MBA-toting people who cannot run a lemonade stand and a shortage of honest entrepreneurs. A fair number of those credentialed professionals could never run a small business or dare try to start one.

That’s one side effect of managerialism. Getting credentials is a straight forward process with fairly clear instructions. If you have above average test scores, it means going to a good college and doing what you are told for four years. This opens the doors to elite society. Since the number of people meeting the minimum threshold exceeds the number of seats, the meritocracy quickly becomes a game of who you know and how to game the system. The result is a lot of credentialed idiots running around elite society.

Maybe that is self-correcting or maybe it does not matter. How much damage does a John Kerry really cause? Obama is president and he has proven to be fairly harmless. The bigger issue is that the ruling class, which depends on the ranks of the managerial class for talent, because incredibly narrow. The strivers at the bottom are motivated to emulate the people at the top, because that appears to be the path to success. Over time, the diversity of thought falls to zero. Everyone thinks and says the same things.

This happened with the Chinese exam system. Initially, it was a great way to find and cultivate talent. In time, the people entering the system saw that emulating those in the system was the golden ticket. The reason is the people in the system selected for people who would reinforce their position within the system. A few spins of this wheel and the imperial administration was staffed with men who only knew esoteric stuff like lines from old poetry and calligraphy. Something similar is happening to America.

 

Riley Cooper

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The root of the word culture is “cult.” Modern people hear the word cult and think of nuts living in a compound somewhere, waiting for the aliens to arrive. If you are old enough, you may recall Jim Jones and his wacky escapades in Guyana. We never think of our culture or customs as anything like a cult, but every society has their beliefs, customs and taboos. More important, every society has its rewards and consequences for either exulting the prevailing beliefs or violating one of the taboos. It’s what makes up culture.

Therefore, every society has its morality police who roam around testing private virtue in public ways. Paula Deen was sent off to internal banishment for being honest about dropping a now forbidden word in the before times. Travon Martin was sainted for confirming an article of faith about America, held by the people in charge. That is, white people secretly wish to kill black bodies. The morality police use these sorts of examples to both crush the wrong thinkers and warn the righteous of the consequences of sin.

Now we have Riley Cooper, a stupid redneck who was caught dropping the magic word at a country show. At this moment, his career as a professional football player is close to being over simply because he holds views that are different from the ruling cult. The pressure on the Philadelphia Eagles to cut him will be high. If he is cut, no team will sign him, fearing a visit from the morality police. It is OK to sign a murderer or rapist. Those are just crimes against people. Signing a racist would be a crime against the gods.

The same people snuggling up with a picture of MLK every night are now claiming Riley Cooper must be punished because he is white. In other words, it’s not about racism, as a universal concept. It is about hating white people as a sign of virtue. In this case, a white guy using the word “nigger” is bad because he is white, not because using the word “nigger” is always bad.  One day soon, whites will be forced to use separate drinking fountains and have to ride in the back of the bus, just like a , well, you get the point.

Civic religions operate on fear. In cases like this, it is the fear that people will notice the nutty contradictions. Cooper is not working math puzzles in his free time. He is a dumb jock, but he sees the double standard every day. His teammates call one another “nigger” all the time and it is considered cool. In other words, he foolish decision to get tanked up and start yelling “nigger” is not a problem because he said a bad word. it is a problem because it underscores this obvious double standard. He must be punished.

In the name of racial tranquility, they are now demanding that the black players denounce their teammate. It is not enough to hang the scarlet “N” on the white guy, they have to dictate the thoughts of the black guys too. A cynic would say our rulers like it when we are trying to kill one another. That implies a logical intent. The more likely answer is it is simple zealotry. They have been trained to yell at the white racist and defend the back victim. If the black guys don’t join in they must suffering from the effects of institutional racism.

The best part of this, the part that should lead one to think there is not only a God, but he has a wicked sense of humor, is the presence of Michael Vick. This is the guy who was found to be torturing animals for pleasure. He would drown puppies in buckets of water and electrocute them. If he really needed to get off, he would hang them from trees. By any reasonable standard, Michael Vick is a demented and dangerous lunatic. News actors are running to him for his opinion about the monster that is Riley Cooper.

This is all madness and it will end poorly. Humans are designed to be suspicious of and antagonistic toward those not like them. We evolved in small groups and suspicion of outsiders was always an evolutionary advantage. In the case of disputes over precious resources, tribal hatred rising to the level of religious faith. In a modern, multi-ethnic society such as ours, a certain amount of friction is natural. Deliberately exacerbating it is a good way to get a civil war, but the social justice warriors probably want that.