Turn Off, Tune Out and Drop Out

Timothy Leary coined the phrase “Turn on, tune in, drop out” in the 1960’s. According to the Wiki entry, it was 1967 and may very well have been a marketing ploy. The Wiki entry is a little vague on that, but Leary was sort of a PT Barnum. He was good at getting people to pay attention to him and he figured out how to turn that into a business. Unlike Barnum, Leary was not offering tickets to a freak show. Leary and his camp followers were the freak show. He was all about being famous and that got him writing and speaking gigs.

Anyway, that phrase came to mind when reading this. Popular culture is for kids and pop technology is for kids too. There was a time when e-mail was for young people, but it eventually proliferated. Now e-mail is the domain of old people. Texting is for young people now, but that’s even starting to be replaced with things like Instagram. Facebook is the domain of grandparents and foreigners now. In other words, the platforms keep shifting, like all fads, but at some point the trend has to run out of road.

As the population of the West grows older, maybe the new trend will be something like the title of this post. The Boomers, who are not just hitting retirement in heavy numbers, will drop off the system entirely and enjoy their golden years in a fashion similar to their youth in old white America. It won’t be a fad, so much as a lack of interest. The whole point of social media is to collect data on people in order to sell them stuff and keep them from holding the wrong opinions. Old people are not the targets, so they will be ignored.

On the other hand, maybe the oldsters clogging up social media platforms and demanding rules that cater to them will set off a different fad. The young will get off social media entirely and instead go onto video platforms they can use on their phones. It’s not quite dropping out, but it is a return to a form of face to face interaction.  Fads are funny things, so it’s not unreasonable to think a back to basics fad could get going. Maybe dropping out will one day simply mean disconnecting from the grid like a normal person.

The Rise of Fake Black People

Pop culture is all around us, but I notice very little of it. My television is for watching sports when time permits. Maybe I turn it on if there is a big news event. Otherwise, I would not own one. I do watch a car show from time to time, but I don’t think that qualifies as pop culture. Movies are just as foreign to me. I rented a few for the holiday weekend. All had been released last year or earlier and I know few of the actors staring in them.

When it comes to music I am completely ignorant of what is current. Last night, looking for the football game, I bumped into a show featuring a sad looking Elton John and a hideous looking woman on stage playing piano. The TV said the show was Lady Gaga & The Muppets. Poor Elton appeared to have two black eyes, so I assume they had to beat the hell out of him in order to get him on stage with the ugly woman.

When I saw this on Drudge, I had to google the name “Kanye West” in order to learn why he is famous. I’ve heard the name, but I only know he married the Armenian women with the big butt, who is the current Paris Hilton. He is a singer, most likely of hip-hop, therefore he cannot sing without electronic enhancement. His skill is pretending to be from the ghetto in a way that gets elderly Jewish men excited. That way they can sell his crap to suburban white boys, who think it is cool to be an underclass black guy.

Using Wiki, I see that Kanye is about as authentically black as I am. He was born to talented tenth parents. He was raised by a mother who was a college professor. Some portion of his childhood was spent in China. All of his childhood was around upper middle-class types you see around universities. My guess, given the background of his father, is that his parents were communists or Marxists. When that fell out of fashion they went onto other fads. Kanye West is pretty much a lyrical Barak Obama.

The point here is that West’s parents built their lives around pleasing upper class white liberals and Kanye was blessed with the same skills. Instead of black power he sells hip-hop to the little white boys and girls. It’s a weird sort of exploitation. On the one hand, he is trivializing black culture by turning it into a commodity. On the other hand, that commodity he is selling is intended to destroy white culture by injecting the worst habits of black culture like drugs, degeneracy and cultural nihilism.

This seems to be a common theme with famous black people. There are plenty of whites and Jews who start from humble beginnings and make it big in pop culture. Blacks, even in areas like hip-hop, most often come from middle-class families and middle-class lifestyles. They make their money pretending to be a type of black person in public, but live like Victorians in private, mostly surrounding themselves with whites from their class.

The fat Armenian woman he married is from a wealthy real estate family. Maybe the family money came from something else, before they got into the real estate game, but the point is they have been rich for a long time.  Kanye West  was not hooking up with a shorty from the neighborhood when he picked here from the list. Instead he went with a rich white girl, who was probably like the girls he grew up around as a kid. He probably finds typical black women to be bitching and stupid, like the rest of us.

This is nothing new. The dawn of pop culture was Jews selling black music and black culture to middle class white kids. The popular stars of the 30’s and 40’s stole much of their acts from blacks. They white-washed it so it was not obvious, but they were peddling black culture. In the 50’s and 60’s it became explicit and eventually blacks were allowed to get in on the act. The formula was the same, even when blacks got on stage doing their thing in the raw. Rich whites selling black culture to middle class white kids.

That’s the great change in the last two decades. Instead of Jews selling black culture through well-behaved blacks, the well-behaved blacks are selling black culture. In the old days, the black performers chaffed under the rules, often getting themselves in trouble by being too “authentic” which meant too black. Today, the black performers chaff at having to be too black because otherwise they would resemble something closer to a British colonial officer. That’s why Kanye West blurts out rants about Jews. To look real.

The Non-Ideological Ideologues

At this point, it should be clear to everyone that American policy makers have no idea what they are doing in the Arab world. The Iraq fiasco and the never ending Afghanistan blunder is proof enough. Just in case it is not clear, the Obama administration is trying to cut a deal with Iran that underscores the incompetence. The American foreign policy establishment is just a collection of people with positions not based in reality, but designed to set them apart from the other experts, because that’s what they do.

A good example is this piece from someone named Paul Pillar. His bio says he is a former CIA employee. He’s now “non-resident senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Security Studies, as well as a nonresident senior fellow in the Brookings Institution’s Center for 21st Century Security and Intelligence.” That’s quite impressive until you start reading his article on the pending Iran deal. It is a strange mix of logical fallacies and random positions that don’t seem to fit together very well.

For anyone who genuinely wants to avoid an Iranian nuclear weapon and whose attitude toward the nuclear negotiations with Iran has not been shaped by some other agenda, the “Joint Plan of Action” that was agreed to in Geneva this weekend is a major achievement that deserves enthusiastic applause.

When you start with a no true Scotsman fallacy, it is safe to assume you have staked out an indefensible position. In this case, anyone who thinks the deal is a bad one or defective in some way is guilty of having a hidden agenda. or, worse still, wants to see Iran get the bomb. If he had come to this conclusion after an exhaustive analysis of the various criticisms and alternative, maybe it is OK to make the claim. To unilaterally declare your position the only morally acceptable one says you have a weak hand. It gets worse.

First, it unmistakably moves Iran farther away than it is now from any ability to make a nuclear weapon, and even farther away from any such ability it would have in the future in the absence of this agreement. Among the facets of the deal that do this are the stopping of enrichment of uranium to 20 percent and the conversion of all current material enriched to this level into forms making it unavailable for enrichment to the level required for weapons.

That sounds good except Iran has never stood by any of its past deals. Why should we believe them now? If you are truly concerned about Iran getting a deliverable nuclear weapon, what you have to assume is they are willing to lie, cheat and steal in order to get one, so taking their word for anything is a non-starter. If you’re just trying to make it tougher for them, but you accept they will eventually get the technology, then there really is no point in making any deal with them.

Second, Iran’s program will be subjected to an unprecedented degree of international inspection, going beyond the treaty obligations of Iran or any other country and providing additional assurance that any Iranian departure from the terms of the agreement would be quickly detected.

How is this different than what has been in place for a decade or so? He does not say, but we have technology in place to monitor them now. There are roughly four ways to develop fissionable materials for a  nuclear weapon. They are gaseous diffusion, calutrons, centrifuges and breeder reactors. We know the only option for Iran is centrifuges and we know that’s what they are using. This requires a lot of resources and human capital, which we can monitor and get a good idea of their progress. We don’t need inspectors.

The Iranians, however, have weighed on on this point. Iran’s current president said, “Let anyone make his own reading, but this right is clearly stated in the text of the agreement that Iran can continue its enrichment, and I announce to our people that our enrichment activities will continue as before.” In other words, they will sign no deal that they think binds them to inspections or halting their program. That means whatever deal is done, will have no practical impact to how the West deals with Iran.

The point is, this whole Iran deal is just an exercise. It is a task for career people in the foreign policy establishment, like recess of finger painting for school kids. This is fine for European countries like France, as they don’t count. The American empire does matter, so these silly exercises have an impact. Whether it is cutting a bad deal with Iran or screwing over the Saudis to get it done, these time waster done by time servers in the foreign policy establishment can make the world worse.

The fact is, we have no business in the Middle East. Buying oil and gas does not require a million troops in and around the region. Selling the Saudis and Israelis the tools to keep the really bad actors under control can be done from a distance. We can certainly give them quiet assistance if they need to put a beating on one of these bad actors. Otherwise, it is not our problem. Left on their own, the Iranians can’t get a nuke without help from outside and The Jews and Saudis can do a better job policing that.

The Fat Diet

For a very long time the American government has been telling people to cut fat out of their diet and eat grains and vegetables instead of meat. The Standard American Diet is not based on anything but some casual observations about who has heart disease and the proselytizing of food fanatics. People who actually think about this stuff have long argued that the government has it backwards. People should cut the carbs and not worry about dietary fat, but the nutrition establishment persists.

Now it looks like the Swedes are breaking ranks.

Butter, olive oil, heavy cream, and bacon are not harmful foods. Quite the opposite. Fat is the best thing for those who want to lose weight. And there are no connections between a high fat intake and cardiovascular disease.

On Monday, SBU, the Swedish Council on Health Technology Assessment, dropped a bombshell. After a two-year long inquiry, reviewing 16,000 studies, the report “Dietary Treatment for Obesity” upends the conventional dietary guidelines for obese or diabetic people.

For a long time, the health care system has given the public advice to avoid fat, saturated fat in particular, and calories. A low-carb diet (LCHF – Low Carb High Fat, is actually a Swedish “invention”) has been dismissed as harmful, a humbug and as being a fad diet lacking any scientific basis.

Instead, the health care system has urged diabetics to eat a lot of fruit (=sugar) and low-fat products with considerable amounts of sugar or artificial sweeteners, the latter a dangerous trigger for the sugar-addicted person.

This report turns the current concepts upside down and advocates a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, as the most effective weapon against obesity.

The thing about carbohydrates is they make you hungry. It is why Chinese food does not stick with you. It is loaded with carbs and often simple carbs like sugar. The calories are not the issue. It is metabolism and blood sugar. Humans evolved over a million years eating meat, bugs, fish and edible wild greens. When available, fruits and vegetables were eaten by our ancestors. Even into recent times, meat was the main part of the diet. We were designed, if you will, to eat meat because it is packed with energy.

A nice hunk of blubber can keep you going through the worst winter. It is not hard to see why humans that were good at digesting meat and fat would thrive, especially in harsh climates like in Europe and Asia. The people who could survive on game and fish were the ones who thrived in these areas. Evolution can work quickly when there is strong section pressure. The point being, we are probably better off eating like our ancestors. If you’re black, then eat like an African. If you’re white, eat like a European.

 

Lesson From The Market: Software

I go to an upscale grocery store that is like Whole Foods, but without the preachy liberal nonsense. They sell all the fashionable stuff and they make sure to create an atmosphere that flatters their clientele. It has a coffee shop and bakery, so shoppers can have a latte and a muffin while they browse the organic food items. Of course, everyone uses the silly canvas sacks that are supposed to be good for the earth. It’s all pretentious and silly, but unlike Whole Foods, the prices are great so i tolerate the other stuff.

Anyway, I was at the checkout and I noticed they still use a character based computer software. Judging from the interface, I’m going to say it is written in COBOL. You can sort of tell by the blue screen with red highlights. It could be some form of business basic or maybe even Clipper/Foxpro. Regardless, it is old stuff, probably written for them two decades ago. They have scanners and scales, but that’s not revolutionary. Integration to these items was done long before the graphical user interface.

Checkout is fast and efficient. The clerks never struggle to price an item or look up some obscure code for a weird item. For the grocery chain owners, the point-of-sale system is perfectly adequate and they obviously see no reason to “modernize it.” From their perspective, this tools does the job that needs doing, so there is no reason to replace with a new tool. In the grocery business, margins are small, so anywhere they can reduce costs, they will, even if it means using a twenty year old software system.

I know of at least a dozen goodly sized companies that use legacy system for their business. In one case, they use a system written by a firm long defunct in a language long abandoned. The other use systems that are a decade or more out of date and no longer supported by the developer. I know of a large importer using character based software written in the 80’s. Most banks in this country rely on software written in the 1970’s, patched up over the last few decades. There’s lots of old code out there.

The point here is that good enough is good enough. As much as we think technology is a constant driver of innovation and change, it does run its course. The lesson from the market is that we may have picked all of the low hanging fruit from the computer revolution. While automation will continue, it will be much slower than the futurist would like us to believe. That growing pile of legacy code that is out there in the world will only make the process slower. We are quickly reaching the point of diminishing returns.

NHL Overtime Math

For a long time now the NHL has settled ties, after a suitable overtime period, with a shootout. The reason they went to this format is the typical American fan hates a tie result and they hate seeing games go on for hours with no result. At least they think the fans hate ties. For some reason soccer fans seem to be OK with ties, but then again soccer fans are not really sports fans. There’s also the television factor. The TV people want the games to last a predictable length of time in order to sell ads

Regardless, the motivation for adding the shootout was not due to some practical issue of accounting. The NHL managed just fine for decades without the shootout. It was an attempt to address what they thought was a concern of casual fans and it was a way to add some excitement. Shootouts are fun, even if you think they are stupid. It’s not hockey, but it is a competition, one with something at stake. That’s the appeal of sports, seeing men match wits, skill and strength with one winning and one losing.

The thinking way back when was that teams would seek to avoid the shootout and take risks in regulation and overtime in order to avoid the luck of the shootout. Hockey people think of the shootout as random chance. Elite scorers will beat elite goalies more often than not. It is really not a test of the goalie’s skill. It is more random chance. Even if that is not true and skill plays some role, the players and fans think it is chance. Therefore, the players should be desperate to avoid it. That’s was the thinking.

The trouble is it did not work out that way. At first it seemed to, but it has settled into the same old routine with the road team playing for a tie late in regulation and overtime, figuring the odds favor them. They get the point for the tie and a 50/50 chance of getting the shootout point. It is quite rational if you do the math. Playing for the tie means a 90% chance of getting one point. It also means a 50% of getting the additional point. A little math means that approach is worth 1.4 points.

Throwing caution to the wind and going for the win means the game ends in a loss 50% of the time (let’s assume). That’s one point – 50% of 2 points for a win. For the “go for the win” strategy to make sense, you would need a win chance of greater than 70%, which is unlikely, even for the top teams. Obviously, if you had such an advantage, you would not be headed into overtime often enough to care. You would win 70% of your games and the risk of losing in overtime would not matter very much.

Turns out hockey teams are not that dumb after all.

Now the NHL is thinking about changing the rules to get rid of the shootout. The main motivation is that it is stupid to decide games this way. After that, they are finding that NHL teams are doing the simple math I described above and responding to risk in a rational way. Modifying overtime by taking a skater off the ice will change the math. The teams with better skaters will have some new advantages. It’s an effort to add more risk to over time in order to encourage risk take by certain teams in regulation.

The other thing they could do is change the points. A win should be three points and the ties one point. Let’s do the math again. Playing for the win, assuming the same 50/50 probability, results in 1.5 points while the tie is just a point. Add back in the advantages and disadvantages of 4-on-4 hockey and you get a lot more teams either winning in OT or desperate to avoid OT, thus playing to win in regulation.  The result could lead to more exciting finishes and far fewer ties. The teams will figure it out and act accordingly.

The Pitchman in Chief

Jim Geraghty has an interesting post over at National Review. I think a lot of people watching Obama stagger around from screw-up to screw-up  are revising their opinion of the man. Since he gave his first national speech at the democrat convention in 2004, his supporters have been telling us he is the smartest guy on the planet. They argued that he could manage the details as well as keep his eye on the big picture.

The PR machine of the Left we call the media amplified these claims to the point where even Obama antagonists bought into them. Steve Sailer has written that Obama probably had above average LSAT scores and therefore is above average IQ. That’s a far cry from genius, but it shows how widespread the belief in Obama’s intellect. It also shows that most people confuse above average with genius. Obama is no genius.

Generally speaking, we expect smart people to do smart things. At the minimum, we expect them to avoid obviously dumb things. When someone hailed as a combination of Jefferson, Lincoln, JFK and Einstein starts doing and saying stupid things, it comes as a shock to the believers. It’s that old saw about reality versus expectations. When Obama fails, it feels worse to his admirers because they expect perfection from him.

The missing piece, I think, is that Obama was not hired for his ideas. The party has been looking for their Reagan for three decades. They thought they had it with Clinton, but he was too much of a degenerate to make it work. Obama was “clean and articulate” without a “negro dialect.” In other words, he was black, but not that black. Like Reagan, he could read his lines with conviction. That was the lesson the Left drew from Reagan.

I’ve often mentioned that no one quotes an Obama speech. You never hear anyone reminisce about listening to one of his speeches. For a man allegedly a mix of Cicero and Patrick Henry, he has yet to coin a phrase or even capture a moment. Along the same lines, no one has ever talked about Obama’s ideas or his philosophy, other than when taking shots at him. He’s a guy who seems to leave no foot prints.

During his first campaign, commentators focused solely on his image. Clinton’s obvious frustration with his lack of specifics and the media’s willingness to skip over it was hilarious. They would hammer her over some minor detail about one of her schemes, while ignoring the fact Obama was spouting gibberish. In that one debate, she was about o throw a chair when no one challenged Obama’s vacuous answers to questions.

That’s thing. Obama was never hired to set policy or manage the party. His job was to be the right face in front of the public. He is the chief pitchman. Instead of selling mops or penis pills, he is pitching the party. The stimulus bill is a great example. He had zero input, as it was written by his party in Congress. His job was to not ask questions, sign the bill and read the copy from the teleprompter when selling it to the public.

The health care bill was similar, with the exception being he had to sell it before it was written. In that case, he sold the product brochure, since there was no product. If the insider reports are correct, Obama seems to get this and embrace it. He’s simply not that interested in the other stuff anyway. Instead, he can watch TV all day, then go out for a speech and cool reception some place. It’s an easy gig for him.

Obama, however, is not devoid of ego. At some level, he has to resent the hell out of the fact he is just a decoration for the white liberals who created him. There are some people happy to be puppets, so maybe he is one of them. We’ll know when he is out of office of he was happy as the organ grinder’s monkey. If he disappears into quiet retirement, then we’ll know he was fine with being a stooge. If does a Clinton, then we’ll know otherwise.

Strom Thurmon Killed JFK

The title of this bit is from Stever Sailer. Unsurprisingly, he recognized long ago that the JFK narrative was just another instance of white on white crime. That is, northern whites (whites who identify with northern attitudes on race) against southern whites. The mythology is that northern whites are tolerant and open minded, while southern whites are uneducated bigots.

That means you can be southern white while growing up in New Hampshire, as long as you say bad things about non-whites and shop at WalMart. On the other hand, many whites in suburban Atlanta are preachy about race, loath southern culture and therefore qualify as northern white. It’s good white versus bad white. The JFK killing shows the divide quite clearly as we see in this insane NYTimes piece.

FOR 50 years, Dallas has done its best to avoid coming to terms with the one event that made it famous: the assassination of John F. Kennedy on Nov. 22, 1963. That’s because, for the self-styled “Big D,” grappling with the assassination means reckoning with its own legacy as the “city of hate,” the city that willed the death of the president.

It will miss yet another opportunity this year. On Nov. 22 the city, anticipating an international spotlight, will host an official commemoration ceremony. Dallas being Dallas, it will be quite the show: a jet flyover, a performance from the Naval Academy Men’s Glee Club and remarks from the historian David McCullough on Kennedy’s legacy.

But once again, spectacle is likely to trump substance: not one word will be said at this event about what exactly the city was in 1963, when the president arrived in what he called, just moments before his death, “nut country.”

In other words, bad whites killed the hero of good whites and they refuse to accept blame for it. Never mind that Kennedy hated black people and seemed to admire Hitler. His old man was a Nazi so the apple does not fall far from the tree. The fact is JFK was killed by a quintessentially good white named Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a communist who tried to defect to Russia. Oswald would have fit in with Bernadine Dorn.

Then we have the fact that a bad white pushed through Civil Rights and was quite fond of black people, going back to the 1930’s. Johnson was a lot like Woodrow Wilson, in that he went against his inclinations and his native culture in order to fit it, but he was never accepted by the good whites. These inconvenient facts are airbrushed out of the narrative, as it inconsistent with the mythology of the good whites.

There’s another way to distinguish the tribal differences. LBJ was perfectly at home rubbing elbows with blacks. He got his start in politics by helping blacks get to the polls and actually voting. Granted, they were voting for him, but it shows his natural affinity for black people. Kennedy, on the other hand, despised blacks and made sure he was never around them. He thought MLK was a threat to the nation.

But, the truth is never important in mythology.

Theory Versus Reality

This excellent blog post is a reminder of that old joke the difference between theory and reality. Anyone familiar with business analyst types knows exactly why ObamaCare is collapsing. In the dreaded private sector, there are people who are experts on business theory, marketing their technology theory and so on. They make a nice living creating models of reality that can never exist in the real world. What they never do, of course, is run an actual enterprise that exists in the real world.

Government, free of the need to turn a profit, are loaded with these sorts of experts and theorists. The army of health care experts and policy wonks has been desperate to test out their theories on the American public for decades. The result is a system that incorporates all of the latest fads. This is the norm in all government initiates. Anyone who has worked on a government project knows the drill. The design included in the original contract fails on contact with reality. Then bids go out to fix it.

Social democracies like ours take this approach with all projects. It is why government seems to be getting increasingly inept. Fifty years ago NASA could go from zero to moon landing in five years. Seventy years ago America went from no army and in depression to conquering the world while beating Hitler and Tojo within a decade. Today, they can’t build a website in five years. Here we are 12 years on and the World Trade Center is not completed. The Empire State building was built in a year, start to occupancy.

Contra the blogger, it is not just technology. It is everything. Obama announced last week that he and his team were stunned to learn that insurance is complicated. Amazingly, he thought this was an insight. How is it possible that an American could possibly have made it to adulthood not knowing this? That’s the reality of political class. They are so divorced from reality that they are stunned to learn that insurance is completed. The administrative layer is even more oblivious to the reality of the modern world.

That’s the lesson here with ObamaCare. The people in charge only have a vague understanding of how our highly complex modern society works. They know America through polling, policy debates and campaigning. The political class is thoroughly insulated from the land over which they rule. Because these people are inoculated from the consequences, they can be cavalier in their ignorance. Their loyalties, however, are to the political class as evidenced by the Census and IRS scandals.

In that regard, ObamaCare is emblematic of what’s wrong and a good proxy for what we can expect going forward.

Our Most Dangerous President

The argument for forcing Nixon out of office was that he was an imperial president, who violated the norms of democracy. That is, he had no respect for the law and as a result a lawless environment evolved in the White House. It was, of course, a justification intended to hide the truth. Nixon was hated by the Left because he was an aggressive anti-communist in the 1950’s. The Left could never forgive him for his attacks on the Left, so they could never accept him as a legitimate president. He had to go.

The charges against Nixon were always nonsense, even on the dubious moral grounds promoted by the Left. Woodrow Wilson was recklessly used his power to suppress the media. He jailed 10,000 Americans for opposing his war. FDR trampled all over the concept of republic, promoting a program that looked a like Italian fascism. Compared to those two, Nixon was a piker. Most of the stuff Nixon was doing was done under his predecessors. Kennedy and Johnson loved spying on people.

That said, a healthy self-governing society should have a fair amount of transparency and the political class should be deeply invested in the rules. Once the people in office lose respect for the rules, the road to authoritarianism opens, as the rules lose their moral power. In other words, adherence to the rules is purely practical, rather than a matter of status within the ruling class itself. People obey the rules if they benefit them and violate the rules if that works. No one is ashamed of breaking the rules.

We’re seeing this with Team Obama. They figured out how to use the IRS as a political weapon, stocking the upper ranks with their people who set about harassing the political enemies of Obama. Today brings word that the Census Bureau has come in for similar treatment. They faked the unemployment numbers leading up to the election. That naturally calls into question all of the other economic reports. It may also explain how the regional reports never seem to square with the national statistics.

This is very serious stuff. In a modern economy, information is currency. Like money, it can be debased. When people lose faith in the currency, they lose faith in the entity issuing it. Trust in government is near record lows and that’s with a national media out waving pom-poms for the ruling class. Imagine where things go if the press throws in the towel on these people. It may not matter as no one trusts the press anymore anyway.

Of course, that same poll shows that the people no longer trust the most democratic institution in the nation – Congress. Fifty years ago, the alleged culture of lawlessness in the Nixon White House was enough to force out the president. Here we have actual corruption, real violations of the basic trust. Yet, the political class cannot bring itself to even discuss it, much less act on it. The old line about silence being consent is overused, but it applies here. Lawlessness is now the law of the land.

Of course, you have to wonder what else they are doing. if they are willing to abuse the IRS, are they willing to abuse the FBI or the CIA? They corrupted the FBI by installing true believers into the leadership layer. What happens if they do the same with the FBI? What are the chances the media would look into it? If they are willing to excuse the abuse of the IRS, why would they raise an alarm over other abuse? This sounds far-fetched, but ten years ago the IRA stuff seemed far-fetched, but here we are anyway.