Monthly Archives: July 2014

Why Are They Not In Jail?

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According to this story, the CIA has been illegally wiretapping the Senate.

The Central Intelligence Agency improperly and covertly hacked into computers used by Senate staffers to investigate the spy agency’s Bush-era interrogation practices, according to an internal investigation.

CIA Director John Brennan has determined that employees “acted in a manner inconsistent with the common understanding” brokered between the CIA and its Senate overseers, according to agency spokesman Dean Boyd.

The stunning admission follows a scathing, 40-minute speech Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein gave from the Senate floor back in March, in which she accused the CIA of covertly removing key documents from her panel’s computers during its review of the government’s torture, detention and rendition policies during the Bush presidency. The powerful California Democrat lacerated the CIA and charged them with possibly violating the Constitution.

Why was this announcement not accompanied by reports of CIA employees being led out in chains to be processed for trial? One of the greatest dangers to a self-governing republic is a rogue spy agency using confidential material against the people’s representatives. That’s why every sane country has laws prohibiting it. We also used to hang people for this sort of stuff. The unwillingness of the Congress to tackle this problem will come back to haunt them in the future.

Post-Modernism

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It used to be that “post-modernism” was said to be the artistic expression of late-stage capitalism,  at least according to Frederic Jameson. A useful definition of post-modernism came from the great philosopher Moe Szyslak. He said it is “weird for the sake of being weird.” Contra Professor Jameson, with few exceptions, post-modern art is crap made by people with no real artistic talent. On the other hand, maybe that’s a telling indictment of the flickering lights of western civilization.

Anyway, here is another definition of post-modernism. It is when a society forgets all of the lessons about human nature handed down from the previous generations and then embarks on the process of re-learning them through painful trial and error. A good example of this is right here in this story from the New York Times. It is the typical sob-story from a leftist rag about how men get away with being violent rapists and women are helpless victims.

She was 18 years old, a freshman, and had been on campus for just two weeks when one Saturday night last September her friends grew worried because she had been drinking and suddenly disappeared.

Around midnight, the missing girl texted a friend, saying she was frightened by a student she had met that evening. “Idk what to do,” she wrote. “I’m scared.” When she did not answer a call, the friend began searching for her.

In the early-morning hours on the campus of Hobart and William Smith Colleges in central New York, the friend said, he found her — bent over a pool table as a football player appeared to be sexually assaulting her from behind in a darkened dance hall with six or seven people watching and laughing. Some had their cellphones out, apparently taking pictures, he said.

Later, records show, a sexual-assault nurse offered this preliminary assessment: blunt force trauma within the last 24 hours indicating “intercourse with either multiple partners, multiple times or that the intercourse was very forceful.” The student said she could not recall the pool table encounter, but did remember being raped earlier in a fraternity-house bedroom.

The football player at the pool table had also been at the fraternity house — in both places with his pants down — but denied raping her, saying he was too tired after a football game to get an erection. Two other players, also accused of sexually assaulting the woman, denied the charge as well. Even so, tests later found sperm or semen in her vagina, in her rectum and on her underwear.

Later in the story, we get some additional background.

The fraternity houses, where so many parties occur, sit high above the lake. And it was at one fraternity, Kappa Sigma, where sometime between 9:30 and 10 p.m. on Sept. 7, Anna attended one of the year’s first big social events — a “highlighter party,” where students write on one another’s clothes with a marker that glows under black light.

Later there was dancing. Anna and a senior football player she had just met were grinding to the music, rubbing their bodies together.

With so many students packed together in the basement, it became hot, and the football player escorted Anna upstairs, where smaller groups congregated in students’ bedrooms. A friend tried to stop her, but she went anyway.

Anna said she had begun the evening drinking shots of rum mixed into Gatorade. She drank one beer at the dance, she said, and then the rest of an opened beer her dance partner had given her.

Around midnight, a fraternity member tried to enter his room, but found it locked. He opened the door with his key and caught a glimpse of what would become a pivotal episode in Anna’s case: The senior football player was naked, and Anna was sitting on a bed with her top off, covering her breasts. The visitor quickly left.

At this point, everyone knows what happened. A young girl got drunk and wound up pulling the train. It is a crude things to say, but sometimes it is bets to describe things using crude language to make the point. John Derbyshire has this to say about the resulting rape investigation.

Is your sympathy for this young woman draining away as fast as mine is, listener?

Yep, you heard right: the young woman cried rape. The gist of the article is that she accused the original football player and two others of raping her, but the college didn’t discipline the guys.

On her video clip Anna says the following thing, quote: “When I came forward I felt so good because I was told that people had my back, they believed me, and the right thing would be done,” end quote. Let’s pass over in decent silence the bit about people having her back … What does she mean by “the right thing would be done”?

I don’t think there’s much doubt what she means. She means that she, Anna, should be fussed over and sympathised with as a victim, and that the guys who helped themselves to her incontinently drunk body should be expelled from campus, or better yet sent down for five to ten in the state penitentiary.

What a crock.

If you are a woman and choose to get blind drunk around a bunch of horny young males, you will probably regret itt. Similarly, if you don a meat suit and rush into a lion’s den, you will get mauled. This is something humans used to know. In fact, up until the 1960’s, it was so universally understood that it was common to separate boys and girls without adult supervision. Boys want sex and will do and say just about anything to get it and girls are vulnerable and a bit gullible.

Again, we used to know these things.

We have filled the heads of young women with feminist nonsense and we’ve done the same to males. Men were taught they had a moral obligation to protect the innocent, especially women and children. If you found a vulnerable women surrounded by predatory males, you had a duty to stop it. Today, you are told you should either join in or take pics of the gang bang and post them to your Instagram account.

The worst part of it all is this thoroughly insane idea that if it is not against the law it is permitted. Again, we have an example of this in this story. The girl and some of her friends, admit to behavior that the school should never tolerate. It is not illegal, but beneath the standards of this university. The adults running the school should know that if they turn a blind eye to their coeds getting blind drunk on weekends, this is the sort of thing that will happen. They should have expelled the women involved.

Further, the boys holding the party should all be expelled. The football players who appear to admit having sex with this girl should be gone. While they are not guilty of rape, they are guilty of being loathsome, despicable human filth. A guy willing to have sex with a passed out girl is of low character and you can never trust him. It is his nature to exploit others. The men running this school should know it and throw the garbage out when they find it.

To post-modern ears, particularly those of the younger generations, this sounds like the grousing of an old man. Maybe so, but this is how we used to manage ourselves as people. Lesser people were the ones carrying on like animals. We knew that holding the line was the only way to develop young men of character and young women of virtue. Today, talking about character and virtue is a hate crime, meanwhile stupid young girls are being sodomized on pool tables at our colleges and universities.

Again, we used to know better.

The Jewish Question

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I was in the market on Sunday morning, doing my weekly supply run and I saw something striking. Behind the deli counter, I spied a Muslim woman in a hijab. That’s not such a big deal, but the staff is required to wear uniforms. She was in what looked like a khimar. Not being an expert on Muslim clothing styles, I’m relying on the Interwebs to provide the specifics. The grocery chain, at this point anyway, does not have uniforms that meet Muslim standards so they let her wear her own.

What was striking is she was glaring at a group of customers. I mean eyes blazing full-on furious stink-eye. It was so obvious, I stopped and followed the invisible plane of her eye-lasers to their target. It was a group of Jews. I knew they were Jews because of their outfits. They were in the plain black kit of the Orthodox. We have a sizeable cluster of Lubavitchers near where I live. As best I could tell, they were just minding their own business looking at the salmon.

I stood there watching this for a few minutes, thinking maybe there was a clash of cultures about to happen at the deli counter. I was not alone. A couple next to me was seeing the same thing and probably thinking the same thing. The Jews finally went up to the deli counter and the Muslim woman just stood there glaring at them. I could not tell if they noticed here. There is an inscrutableness to the super-orthodox that makes it hard for gentiles to read them.

They stood there for a few minutes and the Muslim woman just stood there. Some other customer walked up and she waited on them, but still stealing glares at the Jews. This went on until someone else waited on the Jews and they moved on. The other employees certainly noticed the Muslim glaring at the Jews and they surely are aware of the world enough to figure out what was happening. Her supervisor certainly has noticed this behavior if casual customers noticed it.

I’m old enough to remember when even the mild-anti-Semite would check himself and say that the Jews deserves sympathy for what they have experienced. You never hear that anymore. I suspect that the Holocaust has finally moved into the mists of time or has been so overdone no one cares about it. In fact, it seems to be fashionable to be anti-Semitic in certain circles and I don’t just mean the comment section of Taki. Hostility toward Jews and Israel seems to be rising.

I think the indifference of the market employees to one of their coworkers bigotry is understandable. They don’t need the hassle. If there’s no brownie points in pointing out the Jew-hater, they are not going to bother noticing. I certainly could have said something, but I did not. The other customers did not say anything. We just shrugged and went about our business. No harm, no foul, at least for now anyway.

Stories like this from the provinces suggest the Jews are on the wrong side of the culture war roiling in the western world. Europe has imported millions of Muslims who are bringing back the old fashioned Jew hating of a century ago. Our own government is trolling the Muslim countries, using what’s called the diversity lottery, to import Muslims into America. As has been the case with Europe, importing millions of Jew-hating Muslims will have consequences, at least for the Jews in America.

What I find striking and what was on my mind at the market, is the fact Jews don’t fight back against this. If a white guy with a mullet was caught glaring at some black customers like that, the blacks would have attacked him. His co-workers would have reported him and his superiors would have fired him. Anthony Cumia was attacked and then fired for complaining about it. He was not doing anything wrong other than walking while white in Times Square.

In modern America, Jews are the most successful minority group by miles. Jews make up 30% of the Forbes 400, despite being just 2% of the population. Jews dominate academia, the media, entertainment and government. You would think they would be pushing hard to limit immigration from lands full of people dedicated to killing Jews, but, Jews are the biggest supporters of unlimited open immigration.

It is the Jewish question I find most puzzling.

The War on the Middle Gets Interesting

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For years, the assertion from the plutocrats that we needed more cheap STEM labor went unchallenged. Both political parties gushed about how wonderful it is to bring in scads of foreigners to work in technology. They would trot out the old canards about how foreigners founded most of the new businesses and so on. The truly strange part of this romantic narrative is how no one ever considered the implications. That is, the natives are too stupid and lazy to do these jobs.

It was always nonsense. There never has been a shortage of STEM workers. Certain segments in certain areas will experience shortages and overages. That’s how labor markets work. People  move around chasing demand and wages eventually reach equilibrium. Importing vast numbers of new labor is the economic equivalent of price fixing, which is what makes libertarians just another type of central planner. They love free markets until those markets result in things they don’t like or want.

Anyway, this being posted on a mainstream news site looks like a big change. The anti-immigration sentiment is growing and the pop culture chattering skulls are trying to get in on it.

Business executives and politicians endlessly complain that there is a “shortage” of qualified Americans and that the U.S. must admit more high-skilled guest workers to fill jobs in STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. This claim is echoed by everyone from President Obama and Rupert Murdoch to Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.

Yet within the past month, two odd things occurred: Census reported that only one in four STEM degree holders is in a STEM job, and Microsoft announced plans to downsize its workforce by 18,000 jobs. Even so, the House is considering legislation that, like the Senate immigration bill before it, would increase to unprecedented levels the supply of high-skill guest workers and automatic green cards to foreign STEM students.

As longtime researchers of the STEM workforce and immigration who have separately done in-depth analyses on these issues, and having no self-interest in the outcomes of the legislative debate, we feel compelled to report that none of us has been able to find any credible evidence to support the IT industry’s assertions of labor shortages.

Stagnant wages

If a shortage did exist, wages would be rising as companies tried to attract scarce workers. Instead, legislation that expanded visas for IT personnel during the 1990s has kept average wages flat over the past 16 years. Indeed, guest workers have become the predominant source of new hires in these fields.

Those supporting even greater expansion seem to have forgotten about the hundreds of thousands of American high-tech workers who are being shortchanged — by wages stuck at 1998 levels, by diminished career prospects and by repeated rounds of layoffs.

The facts are that, excluding advocacy studies by those with industry funding, there is a remarkable concurrence among a wide range of researchers that there is an ample supply of American workers (native and immigrant, citizen and permanent resident) who are willing and qualified to fill the high-skill jobs in this country. The only real disagreement is whether supply is two or three times larger than the demand.

Unfortunately, companies are exploiting the large existing flow of guest workers to deny American workers access to STEM careers and the middle-class security that should come with them. Imagine, then, how many more Americans would be frozen out of the middle class if politicians and tech moguls succeeded in doubling or tripling the flow of guest workers into STEM occupations.

Redundant reforms

Another major, yet often overlooked, provision in the pending legislation would grant automatic green cards to any foreign student who earns a graduate degree in a STEM field, based on assertions that foreign graduates of U.S. universities are routinely being forced to leave. Such claims are incompatible with the evidence that such graduates have many paths to stay and work, and indeed the “stay rates” for visiting international students are very high and have shown no sign of decline. The most recent study finds that 92% of Chinese Ph.D. students stay in the U.S. to work after graduation.

The tech industry’s promotion of expanded temporary visas (such as the H-1B) and green cards is driven by its desire for cheap, young and immobile labor. It is well documented that loopholes enable firms to legally pay H-1Bs below their market value and to continue the widespread age discrimination acknowledged by many in the tech industry.

When considering the credibility of the industry’s repetitive claims of “shortages,” it is worth recalling its history of misbehavior in hiring and employment. The most recent example was the proposed $300 million legal settlement of a class action against companies such as Google, Apple, Intel and Adobe for anti-competitive collusion to suppress the pay of highly skilled employees, including unlawful agreements to not recruit each others’ workers.

IT industry leaders have spent lavishly on lobbying to promote their STEM shortage claims among legislators. The only problem is that the evidence contradicts their self-interested claims.

What we have today is a modern form of resource extraction. These big tech firms are not inventing anything or creating anything. Mostly, they are harvesting ideas at a discount and commoditizing them. They can do this because they have the backing of the government. Microsoft would have gone bankrupt a decade ago without their monopoly power. In fact, they never would have become a dominant firm without monopolistic tactics. Google is deeply in bed with governments around the world.

Most likely, this is one of those brief mentions that allows the media to pretend they are open to all sides of the debate. They do this with conservatives. They have on one right-winger and ten left-wingers and call it balance. In this case, one story critical of immigration in a sea of cheerleading for open borders. It’s all part of the propaganda effort to keep the public asleep as what is happening.

Eleutherophobia

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This is an interesting story.

Wikipedia has imposed a 10-day ban on all edits made anonymously from the House of Representatives IP address, for making what Wikipedia has characterized as “disruptive edits,” Ars Technica reports.

On the user talk page for the IP address, Wikipedia moderators explained that the cause for the ban came from abusive edits made to the Mediaite page after that website published an article on the @congressedits Twitter account that has been publicizing edits made from congressional IPs.

The offending edits characterized Mediaite as a “sexist transphobic” blog that “automatically assumes that someone is male without any evidence.”

The ban sparked a debate over the fairness of restricting the shared IP address over a few abusive users.

“Out of over 9000 staffers in the House, should we really be banning this whole IP range based on the actions of two or three? Some of us here are just making grammatical edits, adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD,” a user posting from the House IP wrote.

First, lets start with that last bit. The job of a government employee never includes editing Wiki pages. The sense of entitlement from this person is grotesque. They think they have a right to screw off at work “adding information about birds in Omsk, or showing how one can patch KDE2 under FreeBSD” on Wikipedia. These people should be thankful they were not fired. Instead, they are outraged that they cannot screw off on the taxpayer’s dime.

The interesting part is the neologism “transphobic” in the complaint.  Let’s go ahead and assume for a second that “trans” in this weird context means someone that likes to pretend to be of the other sex. The second part, “phobic” has a primary meaning of “strong fear.” Agoraphobia is the strong fear of open spaces. The second definition, one fairly new, is “strong dislike.”  Putting it all together, the new scare word now is “a dislike of people who pretend to be of the other sex.”

The thing about the hive minded is the intellectual base stealing that must go on in order for their internal rules and proselytizing to make any sense. Fear of people who think they are invisible or fear of people who think they can fly is a reasonable fear, as they are a danger to others. Anyone who deeply believes things that are clearly untrue has a lot of mental problems. Thinking they could be a danger to themselves or others is reasonable. It is why we lock them up.

The crotch warrior wing of the Left, skips past the debate over “trans-sexualism” and declares it “normal” and natural, even though it is abnormal. Therefore, anyone not embracing this is evil. The word “transphobic” becomes another word for bad. The list of words that mean “bad” or “outsider” for the Left is very long. It could be a dictionary all by itself probably.

The more important point is the narrow mindedness and intolerance the Left. Like Islam, the zone of acceptable thought and conduct is shrinking. In the Middle East, the Muslims blow up historic sites and stone heretics, while in the West radicals deface your Wikipedia page. Like all fanatics, our Progressives suffer from a form of eleutherophobia. They live in fear that somewhere, someone is thinking and acting according to their own will.

Gun Nuts Rejoice

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The gun grabbers lost another one over the weekend. A Federal court overturned DC’s current ban on carrying a firearm outside the home. This was the city’s attempt to get around the Heller decision, which overturned their ban on gun ownership. The ban on carry outside the home was intended to make gun ownership pointless. You could own a gun, but you could not carry it outside the home for any reason.

A federal judge in the District of Columbia on Saturday overturned the city’s total ban on residents being allowing to carry firearms outside their home in a landmark decision for gun-rights activists.

Judge Frederick Scullin Jr. wrote in his ruling in Palmer v. District of Columbia that the right to bear arms extends outside the home, therefore gun-control laws in the nation’s capital are “unconstitutional.”

“We won,” Alan Gura, the lead attorney for the Second Amendment Foundation, told Fox News in a phone interview. “I’m very pleased with the decision that the city can’t forbid the exercise of a fundamental constitutional right.”

Gura said he expects the District to appeal this decision but added, “We’ll be happy to keep the fight going.”

The decision leaves no gray area in gun-carrying rights.

Judge Scullin extensively referenced the Supreme Court decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) to concluding “there is no longer any basis on which this court can conclude that the District of Columbia’s total ban on the public carrying of ready-to-use handguns outside the home is constitutional under any level of scrutiny.”

The court ordered the city to now allow residents from the District and other states to carry weapon within its boundaries.

Judge Scullin wrote that the court “enjoins Defendants from enforcing the home limitations of [D.C. firearms laws] unless and until such time as the District of Columbia adopts a licensing mechanism consistent with constitutional standards enabling people to exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms.”

The defendants are the city government and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier.

This case has dragged in the courts for five years. Gura has twice asked the federal appeals court to force Judge Scullin to issue a decision. The five plaintiffs filed in 2009, and the case was argued twice, most recently in Oct. 2012.

The city will appeal, but they have no chance to win on a total carry ban. They also opened up the door for the court to rule that the right to carry is a protected right and subject to strict scrutiny by the court. There is a school of thought that if such a case were to make it to the Supreme Court, they would effectively overturn all bans on concealed carry in the country. The result would be shall issue everywhere.

I’m not sure about that as this court is timid and frightened to do anything that may upset the ruling liberals. The more likely result would be the court simply invalidating these bans as they arise. That leaves liberal states to keep their web of gun laws designed to harass middle class suburbanites, while pretending to care about the blacks who commit all of the murders.

That’s what makes the Left’s lust for gun grabbing puzzling at first. It is a loser politically and legally. The Left is far more pragmatic about the acquisition of political power than the Right. They take the long view and they are willing to accept one click on the ratchet and then fall back in defense. It is why America has steadily moved left over the last century. One side plays the long game while the other plays with itself.

There’s nothing to be gained and everything to lose with gun control. Liberals like Bill Clinton avoided the gun issue, knowing it was a loser with no upside. I think what’s going on here is it is part signaling, part culture war and part self-deception. The first part is easy. The people rushing around vowing to keep fighting for gun control are engaging in public acts of piety. The good Progressive shows he is a good Progressive by flagellating himself in public over guns.

Then there is the culture war angle. Guns are southern, white and working class, three things the Left loathes more than anything. Guns are sold at Walmart. Guns are owned by men with beards who wear camo and watch Duck Dynasty. That would be beards that are not intended to be ironic. Guns are owned by people who attend Christian services and listen to country music.

What keeps the Left going to this well is the last bit. It is the self-deception. No matter how hard they try to pretend otherwise, the Left has been in charge for at least three generations now. They have held complete control of our major cities. Yet, the lives of black people are worse today than under segregation. West Baltimore makes the Gaza strip look nice.

For the same reason the left never mentions Marx or socialism anymore, they obsess over suburbanites owning guns. The failure is too painful and discomforting. By pretending the problem is not the grotesque and reckless management of our cities by the Left and is instead the fault of the bubbas in the burbs, the Left can avoid answering for their crimes. It is a classic case of shifting the focus.

The Obama War on the Middle Class

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Today the leader of the GOP took to the airwaves to deride Obama’s war on the middle class. Using data from a just released study done by liberal think tank the Russell Sage Foundation, Reince Prebis pointed to figures showing that 75% of Americans are now poorer that they were under Bush. In 2003, median household net worth was $25,000 dollars higher than it is today. Pounding his fist upon the podium for emphasis, he said, “Under this administration the middle class has been hammered.”

OK, that’s not true. It would be nice if it were true, but that’s just a fantasy. The study is true, but the response from the Republicans is made up. The men running the GOP are too timid and stupid to play on the middle-class fears that their way of life is under assault from their own government. Plus, who names their child Reince? What kind of name is that? Putting that aside, the soft men of the Republican Party are incapable to addressing the concerns of their own voters.

Instead, they will allow a plutocrat like Elizabeth Warren get away with class warfare rhetoric and paint the GOP as the party of billionaires. If Lee Atwater were alive, he’d have a press conference every day bashing the Democrats for their war on the middle, forcing the press to do their damn job even if they hated it. He was probably the last Republican to show anything like a spine.

Here’s the summary:

In fairness, housing prices have not recovered, despite the trillions pumped in from the Federal Reserve. On the other hand, the hidden inflation due to that pump should have lifted all boats. Anyone who buys things like food, utilities, gas and clothing knows that things are much more expensive now than a decade ago. Still, no matter how you want to put your finger on the scale, the facts are as presented. The middle and lower class have taken in the pooper under this president.

Senator Dirtbag

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For the longest time, the Left has had a bad attitude toward the military. They used to say that former military should be banned from public office. The argument was based on the belief that their should be a hard line between the military and civilian sides of government. Given that it is the military that has the greatest respect for civilian government, it sounded like a nutty idea.

On the other hand, John McCain makes a good case for banning these guys from serving in Congress. He has built a political career around his military service, by waving his POW experience like a bloody shirt. McCain, wrapping himself and his nutty ideas in the American flag has been one of the more odious scenes in Washington over the last several decades.

Now we have Senator John Walsh (L-Montana) doing the same thing in an effort to squirm out of plagiarism charges.

Sen. John Walsh of Montana said Wednesday his failure to attribute conclusions and verbatim passages lifted from other scholars’ work in his thesis to earn a master’s degree from the U.S. Army War College was an unintentional mistake caused in part by post-traumatic stress disorder.

The apparent plagiarism first reported by The New York Times was the second potentially damaging issue raised this year involving the Democrat’s 33-year military career, which has been a cornerstone of his campaign to keep the seat he was appointed to in February when Max Baucus resigned to become U.S. ambassador to China.

National Democrats said Wednesday they remained “100 percent behind Sen. Walsh” in his campaign against Republican Rep. Steve Daines.

Walsh told The Associated Press when he wrote the thesis, he had PTSD from his service in Iraq, was on medication and was dealing with the stress of a fellow veteran’s recent suicide.

“I don’t want to blame my mistake on PTSD, but I do want to say it may have been a factor,” the senator said. “My head was not in a place very conducive to a classroom and an academic environment.”

The guy’s lone reason for being in the Senate is an exaggerated military career. That’s bad enough, but now he wants to blame PTSD for being a thief and a fraud. Leaving aside the many questionable claims of PTSD, there are no examples of PTSD causing plagiarism. It is an insult to the men struggling with real wartime experiences. Not only did the guy embellish his service to get into Congress, he’s now trying steal the real harm done to soldiers and use it to get out of a jam.

Of course, this is a good example of what happens when you let a ideologues take over your country. If this guy had an “R” next to his name or was a believing Christian, he would have been run out of office by now. His chances for winning re-election would be zero at this point, assuming he ever got into office. This guy not only gets a pass, he has the full support of the Left.

Still, Democrats hoped that the uproar would soon die down, and Walsh could soon return to regular campaigning. They likened the scandal to the 2010 Connecticut Senate race, when it was revealed that Richard Blumenthal never served in Vietnam, contradicting his numerous assertions that he did, as well as the 2012 controversy over whether Elizabeth Warren improperly cited having Native American heritage to advance in her academic career. Warren and Blumenthal eventually won those races.

Just look at the language there. Blumenthal lied about his military service. Warren lied about being an Indian so she could scam the racial spoils system. This is what normal people call fraud, or perhaps tendering a fraudulent device. That device being their tongue. No where in the news story do we see the words “lie” or “fraud” describing their acts. Yet, in the last cycle, Todd Akin and the word “rape” were so often linked in news stories, people assumed it was his given name.

This comes to mind:

The Eskimos on the Left

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Franz Boas is credited with originating the idea that the Eskimos have an unusually large number of words for snow. The implication is that they have an usually keen understanding of snow, due to being surrounded by it most of the year. The accuracy of the claim is tangled up in a much larger debate about language, culture and now, genetics and race. In dissident circles, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is enjoying a bit of a renaissance for the same reason

An example is in this post on National Review.

Apparently only conservatives and others on the right can be obstructionists, according to Roget’s Thesaurus.

A search for synonyms of “obstructionist” on Thesaurus.com, which cites Roget’s, reveals that the source considers several words related to conservative and right-leaning political stances to fit the definition of a “person who is cautious, moderate; an opponent of change.” Under antonyms, it lists left-leaning words.

Included in the list of obstructionist synonyms are “right-winger,” “right,” and “rightist” and ”Tory,” the British conservative party.

Other synonyms listed for obscrutionst are “traditionalist,” “conserver,” “conventionalist,” “unprogressive,” and “redneck.”

Here’s a screenshot of it.

Capture

Progressives have a long list of words for “bad.” Terms like “extreme” and “right-wing” are lefty epithets clearly intended to mean “bad.” This is whi it has become a gag on the right to call yourself an “extreme right-wing extremist right-winger.” Another way to look at it is these are all words that mean “outsider” to the hive-minded members of the progressive cult.

The Daily Howler has another example, this one from the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

In July, we learned that a Google search of the word “bigotry” turned up a definition that equated the word to “right-wing.” The sample sentence from the Oxford Dictionary set off a small firestorm of anger by conservatives, who don’t consider themselves bigoted and don’t think it should be part of any dictionary definition of the word.

Well, it seems Merriam-Webster also thinks conservatives are bigots.

A review of Webster’s synonyms and antonyms section of the word reveals the following:

In other words, liberals and progressives are the opposite of bigoted, but anyone related to “conservatism” is.

If you are a member of a cult, a hive or a tribe, knowing the boundaries is all consuming. It is, after all, the boundaries that define you. It’s why Jews, for example, look at Christians as a monolithic block. From their perspective, they are just the the rival team. The atheists and non-believers are mixed up in the undifferentiated other in way that seem strange to Christians, who draw different boundaries.

For Progressives, we see the same siege mentality we see with Jews, the former being irrational while the latter is rational. That’s an important distinction. For the Left, all that matters is whether you are inside the walls of the cult or outside the walls. The former is “one of us” while the latter is the hostile undifferentiated other, for which they have an endless supply of labels.

Note too that Progressive theology is greatly shaped by Judaism. It has long been noted that Jews are wildly over represented on the Left. It is reasonable to assume that a lot Jews getting together to create a political movement will end up leaving a lasting impression on the resulting product. It’s why neo-conservatism sounds like a weird combination of tzedakah and libertarianism.

Why Central Planning Fails

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Central planners, whether Blue Team or Red Team, start from the assumption they can know everything. That means they can create a system that accounts for all possible variables and anticipates all possible combinations. When their preferred solution fails, they redouble their efforts believing the failure is simply due to not accounting for some variables. Once they factor those in and recompile their solution, everything will be perfect.

Alternatively, some other central planners will look at the failure and claim theirs is the correct formula and insist on it over the other team’s solution. For a century now, this has been the dynamic of American public policy. One side comes up with some new solution to a problem, a problem they most likely created, while the other side cooks up a solution, waiting for their turn. Both sides of the political class are sure they know everything or at least they can know everything.

The fact is, no person can know everything. No matter how smart or clever, they cannot possibly know or even contemplate the storehouse of knowledge generated over centuries of trial and error. This is the core argument in favor of conservatism and the primary rebuke of radicalism. When you set out to replace the traditional responses to the challenges of human society, you inevitably fall short because those institutions are the accumulated knowledge of generations of people.

An example of why this is so is this story from Florida.

A South Florida renter came home to find people living inside his house but the family illegally squatting inside said they are not leaving.

The owner of the property on SW 5th street and 49th Avenue said his friend William Ruiz has been renting the house for the past two years and recently started to move out while the house was listed for short sale.

Ruiz went on vacation for two days and said when he came back, he found the locks on the house changed and strangers living inside using his belongings.

“They’re using his bed, his dining room table…all his ornaments,” said homeowner Luis Camayd over the phone.

The man who moved in with his pregnant wife and toddler didn’t want to be identified but said he was scammed by a phony realtor.

He said a lease agreement proves he paid $3,600 to live at the home.

The man, he said, he gave the cash to is no longer returning phone calls.

“I’m really stunned because the house was set to be sold already. I can’t sell the house until we get them out of there,” said Camayd.

Normal people cannot anticipate such deviousness. It takes a special mind to think up a scam like this one. The people who sit around thinking about ways to manage their fellow humans may be sociopaths, but they are pikers compared to the guy running this scam. Confidence men have always been with us. The most famous is Victor Lustig who sold the Eiffel Tower for scrap.

Trimmers, corner cutters and confidence men are part of what evolutionary biologists refer to as the free rider problem. Religion, it is thought, evolved to help deal with this problem. Social customs are also aimed at mitigating these sorts of problems. Even with a 15,000 year head start, religion and culture struggle to keep up with the free loaders. A handful of school boys fresh from university have no chance to engineer a solution to these sorts of challenges.