Monthly Archives: September 2014

Tortious Interference

Posted on by

Maybe it was here or maybe somewhere else, but I have wondered why people don’t sue these nuts who organize campaigns to get people fired. In the law, intentional interference with the contractual relationship of another person is a tort. Commonly, causing someone to not fulfill their contractual obligations is actionable. Going to customers or vendors of a business, under false pretenses, in order to get those customers and vendors to stop doing business with that business looks like a slam dunk to me. When the tortfeasor admits in public to the act, it should be automatic.

The recent campaign to silence conservative radio legend Rush Limbaugh is led by ten liberal activists engaged in a more than four-year long effort to destroy Limbaugh by targeting his advertisers, including a Media Matters executive vice president.A former Kent State university professor even targeted a small businessman advertising on Limbaugh’s show using her official university email account.

Information compiled by Limbaugh’s team — and first provided to The Daily Caller — demonstrates that nearly 70 percent of the tweets targeting Limbaugh’s advertisers come from the same ten Twitter users, all of whom are actively involved in the “Stop Rush” campaign, which keeps a database of all of Limbaugh’s advertisers.

Now, there’s a difference between a group of people posting their complaints and a group of people conspiring to cause harm. I suppose the argument, from a free speech perspective, is that these people are conspiring to get the public to tune out Limbaugh by convincing the public he is in error.

But, that’s not what we see here. These people are misrepresenting themselves to one party of a business relationship. Their singular purpose is to disrupt that business relationship. If Limbaugh was a donut shop and these guys were claiming Limbaugh stirs the dough with his junk, he could and certainly would sue their ass off.

While the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) is presenting its current anti-Rush campaign as a genuine repudiation of out-of-context remarks Limbaugh made on his radio show (replete with a fundraising email from Sandra Fluke), the Stop Rush effort is small, organized and existed long before the most recent controversial Limbaugh comments.

The activists even use technology to “machine-tweet” anti-Rush comments in robotic fashion to ensure maximum Twitter exposure for their insular group’s efforts.

“Angelo Carusone is the self acknowledged originator and head of the StopRush protest, in his professional role as executive vice president of Media Matters for America,” Limbaugh spokesman Brian Glicklich told TheDC. “But since they prefer it look grassroots and made up of real customers, he faded into the background long ago, reemerging only this week as he senses the danger of this illicit scheme being exposed for the fiction at it’s heart.”

Conrad Walton, owner of the emergency supplies company Survivor.com, revealed in a blog post that he began receiving emails from the small group “within 20 minutes” of his local advertisement airing during Limbaugh’s show on the Los Angeles station KEIB.

“It seemed to be a very organized campaign, from people who don’t listen to the show and know nothing about our company,” Walton wrote. “I just checked and they put one of my responses on their site, with my phone number.”

“Please stop advertising on Rush Limbaugh’s program,” former Kent State University professor Nancy Padak wrote to Walton using her “kent.edu” email address. “He stands for hatred and bigotry. Do you want customers/ potential customers associating your business with these values?”

Padak told TheDC that she has been retired from the university for four years.

Again, there’s nothing wrong with a pissed of person calling a business and giving them what for. If the reason for being pissed off is the business supports a heretic, that changes nothing. Getting your friends together to pretend to be something you’re not in order to pressure a business to end their business with another business is fraud, at the minimum. That’s clearly what we have here and it should be actionable.

As an aside, I love how the Daily Caller does things like this. They put the names and background out there, inviting people to let these idiots know how they feel about it. It is a trick they borrowed from the Lefty press.

Here are the names of the Stop Rush Ten, as identified by Limbaugh’s staff:

Angelo Carusone: Executive vice president of the George Soros-funded liberal attack group Media Matters for America. “Stop Rush, I initially rolled it out in late 2009 and early 2010,” Carusone told the Village Voice in 2012. “At the time, the Beck work was doing well…I started Stop Rush in 2009, 2010, and when I went to register the domain, I saw that Rush owned StopRush.com.” Carusone also agreed with the Village Voice that Sandra Fluke represented Limbaugh’s “Waterloo.” Carusone is responsible for leading the Stop Rush efforts and then “handing off” responsibilities to less well-known activists to create the appearance of grassroots outrage, according to Limbaugh’s staff.

Matthew Mitchell: An Altamont Springs, Florida resident who tweets as @CaptMurdock.

Nancy Padak: A former Kent State University education professor who emails advertisers about Limbaugh from her official university email account.

Jason Rey: Georgia resident who tweets as @FranticQuark.

Lauren Reynolds: Los Angeles resident who uses Internet rating systems to downgrade companies for advertising on Limbaugh’s show.

Cherie Richards: Ohio resident and fellow Internet rating aficionado.

Sarah Smyea Rivers: California resident who actively tweets as @eurekasue49.

Dennis William Rohner: Florida resident.

Linda Kotsenburg Swanholm: California resident responsible for creating “target lists” of businesses linked to Limbaugh.

Carol Kernahan Wallin: California resident and anonymous Daily Kos writer who tweets as @Flushfools and @hrhprincess.

Ebola and You

Posted on by

I’ve developed an interest in Africa of late. A few books got me going and I find the place endlessly fascinating. The English have always had an obsession with Africa and I’m starting to appreciate why. It is a complex riddle. The Ebola outbreak has therefore caught my attention. An epidemic like this tests a lot of theories popular in population genetics. You get the hardcore HBD’ers jumping in, but also the more nuanced types looking for a way to stay between the lines of acceptable opinion.

The left-wing media outlets are largely oblivious to this growing underground. Instead, they stick with the old time religion and produce articles like this one in the New York Times. There’s nothing terribly wrong with it, but the headline makes people like me chuckle. The near total lack of self-awareness from these folks is amazing. I often wonder if they bother having mirrors in their homes. What would be the point?

More than 5,800 people in Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, Senegal and Sierra Leone have contracted Ebola since March, according to the World Health Organization, making this the biggest outbreak on record. More than 2,800 people have died.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Tuesday that in a worst-case scenario, cases could reach 1.4 million in four months. The centers’ model is based on data from August and includes cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone, but not Guinea (where counts have been unreliable).

Estimates are in line with those made by other groups like the World Health Organization, though the C.D.C. has projected further into the future and offered ranges that account for underreporting of cases.

There are roughly 209 million people in the countries affected by this outbreak. Nigeria has a murder rate of 20 per 100,000. The other countries on the list have slightly lower rates, but those are guesses. Even assuming a much lower rate, about 20,000 people are murdered in these countries annually. That does not count warfare, which is a regular feature in places like Sierra Leone.

The point here is to put the numbers in perspective. The best case scenario makes the epidemic something close to a massive spike in violence. The worse case puts it on par with a bloody civil war. The difference is the inevitable refugee problem it brings, along with people carrying the disease to new areas. The people in those areas will most likely respond with force to keep them out. The neighboring countries probably lack the ability to do it peacefully so it will get very ugly.

Another difference is the domino effect. Millions of Africans are moving north in hopes of making their way into Europe. The nations of the Maghreb are being paid to block their path, but how long that lasts is anyone’s guess. It’s one thing to block people carrying their belongings. It is another to block people carrying a deadly virus. It’s not the zombie apocalypse that causes the mayhem; it is the fear of the zombie apocalypse.

Interestingly, no one bothers to ask why Ebola is an African problem. The reason for that is the answers don’t fit into the narrative. Everywhere on earth, except Africa, humans are an invasive species. There are a lot of things different about Africans beyond skin color. They evolved alongside their environment. Everyone else evolved outside their environment, for the most part. But, we are not allowed to think of these things so it is best not to ask.

What are the chances of the disease reaching the West? Unless we take up bat hunting, there’s little to no chance.

Ebola was discovered in 1976, and it was once thought to originate in gorillas, because human outbreaks began after people ate gorilla meat. But scientists have since ruled out that theory, partly because apes that become infected are even more likely to die than humans.

Scientists now believe that bats are the natural reservoir for the virus, and that apes and humans catch it from eating food that bats have drooled or defecated on, or by coming in contact with surfaces covered in infected bat droppings and then touching their eyes or mouths.

The current outbreak seems to have started in a village near Guéckédou, Guinea, where bat hunting is common, according to Doctors Without Borders.

There’s an expression old Africa hands used to use. It is “AWA” and it means Africa Wins Again. The Europeans tried everything they could to turn their colonies into outposts of civilization, but they all failed. No matter what you do, Africa can’t stop being Africa and Africans cannot stop being African. That’s been the lesson in America since the Civil War. You’re not allowed to think that so we think other things.

Free Riders

Posted on by

An interesting topic in human evolution is the free rider problem. Economics has tried to tart it up with their nonsense, but it is a central problem of all human society. Well, it’s a problem as long as there is scarcity. Having people that consume more than they produce is not much of a problem when you have excess. Having people that subtract from the wealth of the society is not even a problem if you lots of extra, like Western societies. America has over two million people in jail. If we were struggling to feed everyone, the criminals would not be in jail. They would be dead or exiled.

People who claim to know about these things say religion probably evolved to deal with the loafers. On the one hand you have the gods looking poorly upon those who don’t pull their wait. That thought works as an incentive to contribute. On the other hand, it gives cover to the group when they have to punish a loafer. It’s easier to punish a relative when you believe the gods demand it of you. Similarly, it also rewards charity to those who can’t contribute. Religion solves a problem, but it also rewards the sort of behavior that makes the problem less of a problem in the long run.

When you see stories like this one, it’s easy to see how the death of the gods undermines the whole effort. The Left has tried to fill the role once filled by Christianity with a mountain of rules and regulations. But, that leads to stuff like this. A mountain of laws and a massive regulatory bureaucracy is just not the same as an angry and vengeful god. Regardless, the West has enough wealth to tolerate a large welfare class without undermining the the general belief in pulling your weight. The tax payers may bitch about these loafers, but they are ashamed to join them. That suggests a bit of hard wiring, rather than just culture.

Futurists like to talk about how robots will be doing all our work in the near future, but that’s not quite right. The technology is nowhere near as close as they would like to pretend. That does not mean that some jobs cannot be done by robots. This company thinks they can liberate the nation’s burger makers. Automating fast food jobs is probably going to happen within the next ten years. Assembling a Happy Meal requires no decision making at this point. The human merely supplies mechanical work and that can be done by machines. Humans are cheaper at the moment, but that’s probably about to change for lots of these jobs.

The driverless car, which sounds pointless to most people will probably put taxi and limo drivers out of work. Bus drivers could probably be replaced. It’s not happening tomorrow, but a decade from now it is not unreasonable. Again, the great robot takeover is not happening anytime soon, but within the lifetime of people reading this, it will happen, at least for low-skill work. Anything that does not require mobility and thought is ripe for takeover by the new robot workers. The question is how quickly the cost of the robots can fall below the cost of humans.

What never gets mentioned by modern economists or public policy types is the fact we already have scads of people in useless jobs. Having experience with the federal government, I know about a third of the people employed do nothing. They show up, perform tasks as instructed, but it is all busy work. Another third do real work, but we should probably stop them. The army of people coming up with new warning labels for shampoo bottles are a net negative to society. The rest probably do useful work, but I’m probably being generous. The same math is true in state and local government.

It’s not just the public sector. The private sector has millions of pointless workers. Lawyers are an easy example. Health care is packed to the gills with people who are there because the law requires it. The business does not need them, other than to meet the demands of the state. Education is another obvious example of make work. Tyler Cowen gets paid to write a blog for goodness sakes. It is easy to overlook the value of these jobs, but the truth is we got along fine for a long time without them. The growth of these sectors coincides with the end of manufacturing and that’s not a coincidence. We found something for idle people to do.

The question then is what happens when most people are idle? What happens to the free rider problem when robots are able to do all of our work and serve all of our needs? We’re already close to having a robot army to guard us. If robots can produce our food, shelter, transportation and entertainments, what do we do with our time? How does our morality about work and leisure adapt?

I don’t know the answer, but one option is Marx was right. Eventually, capitalism destroys itself. We will advance to the point where we eliminate our reason to exist. The robots will not become aware and stamp us out like in sci-fi movies. We will become aware of what we have done and stamp ourselves out. Those falling fertility rates may turn out to be good times a generation from now.

He Deserves The Chair

Posted on by

Dinesh D’Souza is popular with the Official Right these days, but that says more about the Official Right than D’Souza. There will be plenty of columns tomorrow from the usual suspects about the unfairness of prosecuting D’Souza.

Conservative author and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza was sentenced on Tuesday to spend eight months in a community confinement center during five years of probation after pleading guilty to a campaign finance law violation.

The defendant, a frequent critic of President Barack Obama, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Richard Berman in Manhattan. He was also given a $30,000 fine and ordered to do one day of community service a week during his probation.

D’Souza, 53, admitted in May to illegally reimbursing two ‘straw donors’ who donated $10,000 each to the unsuccessful 2012 U.S. Senate campaign in New York of Wendy Long, a Republican he had known since attending Dartmouth College in the early 1980s.

“It was a crazy idea, it was a bad idea,” D’Souza told Berman before being sentenced. “I regret breaking the law.”

Prosecutors had sought a 10-to 16-month prison sentence, rejecting defense arguments that D’Souza was “ashamed and contrite” about his crime and deserved probation with community service.

In fairness, it is grossly unjust what’s going on here. The people in charge are rampaging though the law with impunity. This guy gets sent to the can for what was a minor offense. If he was just some guy, of course, no one would care. He’s buddies with the big shots of Conservative Inc so they will be making a big deal of it. The safe bet is they stage a cry in for the guy or start crying “racism!”

The trouble wit this pity party is this. D’Souza has always been a backstabbing fink and an opportunist. When conservatism was more nationalist, he was a Reagan firebrand. When the neocons took over, he was right there with them. Now that the Right is all worked up over Obama, he’s going to be the most unhinged Obama hater and for only $49.95 you can get his book and latest DVD. In the end, it is always about moving product for him.

The real sin is that D’Souza stabbed in the back one of the great conservative polemicists of his generation. Back in the 1990’s, he took money to do a hit piece on Sam Francis for the neocons that ultimately got the man fired. Francis was his own worst enemy, but you don’t take a contract from the enemy to whack a member of your own family and remain in the family. For that, D’Douza can never be forgiven.

Tattoo You

Posted on by

Steve Sailer has a funny post up about tattoos. I’m old enough to remember when tattoos had meaning. It used to be that a man got ink if he was a criminal, a soldier, a sailor or a carny. Criminals used ink to signal their membership in gangs and to advertise their violence capital. Even the baddest of bad men prefer to avoid violent conflict if possible. Displaying the fact you will kill if provoked lets other bad guys know to avoid you. This is still true today.

Warriors have been inking up for as long as anyone knows. It used to be that soldiers got their unit insignia and maybe some ink to remember battles or places they experienced. Barbarians in antiquity used tattoos as a form of ornamentation. Vikings died their teeth. Sailors have long used ink to document their travels. A turtle standing on its back legs (shellback) for crossing the equator and being initiated into King Neptune’s Court. Again, this is a ritualized form of tattooing that has nothing to do with self-expression. It’s about membership.

The modern tattoo fad comes down from carny-folk who used tattoos as form of self-segregation. People who wished to live outside proper society would get all sorts of weird ink. Modern people are unaware of this connection. They have been told it is a form of self-expression, when it is really self-abnegation. Piercings are another tradition passed down from carny-folk to the modern hipster.

The modern tattoo trend is in reaction to the homogenizing effects of globalization and mass media. Regional and local weirdness has been thrown into the blender of mass global culture. The resulting gray slurry leaves few ways for an individual to set himself or herself apart. Young people, who are wired to “peacock” for mates use tattoos and piercing to draw attention. In a world where everyone lives the same, thinks the same and believes the same, superficial decoration is all that’s left. Strangely, you never see people talking to one another about their tattoos.

Another possibility is the modern tattoo is a form of self-mutilation. Greeks and Romans associated tattoos with barbarians. Greeks would tattoo their slaves, for example, as a way to distinguish them from Greeks. The Latin word  for tattoos is “stigma” and had the same meaning it does today. The Romans would tattoo criminals as a form of punishment. Soldiers who failed in their duties, but not so much to warrant death, would be tattooed and sent off to the frontier.

The Nation State

Posted on by

Economists are the near perfect example of the aphorism “a man good with a hammer sees all the world as a nail.” They are convinced that the totality of life on earth can be packed into one of their spreadsheets. The idea that people might not want the most efficient or most cost effective thing is alien to the mind of the economist. Despite mountains of obvious examples in daily life, they insist that people are moist robots, acting out of self-interest. Despite that, this post is worth the read.

Before the late 18th century there were no real nation states. … If you travelled across Europe, no one asked for your passport at borders; neither passports nor borders as we know them existed. People had ethnic and cultural identities, but these didn’t really define the political entity they lived in. …

Agrarian societies required little actual governing. Nine people in 10 were peasants who had to farm or starve, so were largely self-organising. Government intervened to take its cut, enforce basic criminal law and keep the peace within its undisputed territories. Otherwise its main role was to fight to keep those territories, or acquire more. … Many eastern European immigrants arriving in the US in the 19th century could say what village they came from, but not what country: it didn’t matter to them. … Ancient empires are coloured on modern maps as if they had firm borders, but they didn’t. Moreover, people and territories often came under different jurisdictions for different purposes.

Such loose control, says Bar-Yam, meant pre-modern political units were only capable of scaling up a few simple actions such as growing food, fighting battles, collecting tribute and keeping order. …

The industrial revolution … demanded a different kind of government. … “In 1800 almost nobody in France thought of themselves as French. By 1900 they all did.” … Unlike farming, industry needs steel, coal and other resources which are not uniformly distributed, so many micro-states were no longer viable. Meanwhile, empires became unwieldy as they industrialised and needed more actual governing. So in 19th-century Europe, micro-states fused and empires split.

The author is confusing a lot of things here. There were nation states before anyone thought of inventing passports. The British had a clear sense of national identity by the time of the Thirty Years War and most argue that the 100 Years War was the birth of nationalism. Certainly the French and English saw themselves as nations by the the 17th century. When you look at how people identified with the local polity, the Romans clearly had a firm understanding of citizenship.

That said, the idea of nationalism is a recent development. The English and French caught the fever first and then the Spanish and Italians. The Swedes had a national identity in the Thirty Years War. Central and Eastern Europe, however, were late to the game. Outside of China, India and Japan the rest of the world still struggles with the concept. If not for the West forcing these concepts on the people of Africa and the Middle East, tribalism would still be the natural method of self-organization.

Agrarian societies are not in need of a large public works projects, at least not the simple sort of farming in place for thousands of years. Maybe large scale irrigation would have been helpful, but farming adapted to the land. Road maintenance for getting crops to market would have been useful and the Romans did a lot of it, but the European model worked just as well.

As a result, in purely agrarian societies, there was never an economic need for coordinating loads of people into creating publicly held assets. The pillaging of France by the English in the 100 Years War, did change the economy, creating a demand for talent to build and maintain large estates. That probably sowed the seeds for later economic innovation like road building an irrigation projects.

Industrial societies, on the other hand, need large scale public works and that can happen in two ways. One is with the lash in low trust societies. The other is through coordinated cooperation in higher trust societies. A group of people can come together for mutual economic benefit and hire a bunch of men to do the work that the rich guys need done. There is obvious exploitation here, but it is not slavery.

It is important to note that the Industrial Revolution did not start in Africa or the Fertile Crescent. The elements for industrialization were in place in England, which is why it started there first. The combination of demographics, social structure and limited political institutions built on a national identity allowed large scale economic operations to flourish in England before anywhere else.

As industrialization flowed on to the continent, the countries with “far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialized societies” were the last to industrialize. In the case of Russia, industrialization destroyed the “far-reaching bureaucracies” needed to maintain order. The riots and revolts of the 19th century in central Europe were largely due to the collision of these existing “far-reaching bureaucracies” and the changing economics.

These new nation states were justified not merely as economically efficient, but as the fulfilment of their inhabitants’ national destiny. A succession of historians has nonetheless concluded that it was the states that defined their respective nations, and not the other way around. …

“nation building” … required the creation of an ideology of nationalism that emotionally equated the nation with people’s Dunbar circle of family and friends. That in turn relied heavily on mass communication technologies. … Nationalist feelings … arose after mass-market books standardised vernaculars and created linguistic communities. Newspapers allowed people to learn about events of common concern, creating a large “horizontal” community that was previously impossible. National identity was also deliberately fostered by state-funded mass education.

The key factor driving this ideological process, Maleševic says, was an underlying structural one: the development of far-reaching bureaucracies needed to run complex industrialised societies. For example, says Breuilly, in the 1880s Prussia became the first government to pay unemployment benefits. At first they were paid only in a worker’s native village, where identification was not a problem. As people migrated for work, benefits were made available anywhere in Prussia. “It wasn’t until then that they had to establish who a Prussian was,” he says, and they needed bureaucracy to do it. Citizenship papers, censuses and policed borders followed.

Again, national identity came to France in the 15th century. Early in the war, English armies would be stocked with all sorts, as well as English. Similarly, the armies loyal the French King were stocked with Scots, English and French. By the end of the war this was no longer true. The French fought for France and the English fought for England. French national identity is what drove France’s involvement in the Thirty Years War two centuries later. The idea that nationalism was born in the Industrial Revolution is at odds with history.

It is fair to argue that the Industrial Age allowed for the industrialization of the state. The managerial revolution is why we have a managerial class. I suppose one can argue that this then let nationalism sweep the continent. A better answer is that the barbarism of the Thirty Years War ended Christianity as the organizing force on European elites. Nationalism filled the void, eventually giving the people a new foundation myth and a sense of destiny. Still, the Industrial Age certainly helped accelerate the modern bureaucratic state along with the spread of various Rousseau-ist cults as a organizing philosophies.

The Piety of Plutocrats

Posted on by

Steve Sailer has lately been plucking hilarious examples of self-beclownment from the NYTimes and arguing it is deliberate. I’m not sure if he is right, but it would be nice if it is deliberate. Stories like this suggest otherwise.

John D. Rockefeller built a vast fortune on oil. Now his heirs are abandoning fossil fuels.

The family whose legendary wealth flowed from Standard Oil is planning to announce on Monday that its $860 million philanthropic organization, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, is joining the divestment movement that began a couple years ago on college campuses.

The announcement, timed to precede Tuesday’s opening of the United Nations climate change summit meeting in New York City, is part of a broader and accelerating initiative.

The picture above the text is dripping with sanctimonious self-regard. These people arranged for the profile on a left-wing platform so they could advertise their virtue before a major left-wing gathering. The breathless prose in the saccharine you get a cavity reading it. The key bits are right there in the beginning. It is a “movement” and that means it has religious overtones. Religions are just a type of mass movement. The fact that it started on college campuses is a big deal to the Cult. That means it is innocent and pure, according to the mythology of their faith.

In recent years, 180 institutions — including philanthropies, religious organizations, pension funds and local governments — as well as hundreds of wealthy individual investors have pledged to sell assets tied to fossil fuel companies from their portfolios and to invest in cleaner alternatives. In all, the groups have pledged to divest assets worth more than $50 billion from portfolios, and the individuals more than $1 billion, according to Arabella Advisors, a firm that consults with philanthropists and investors to use their resources to achieve social goals.

The people who are selling shares of energy stocks are well aware that their actions are unlikely to have an immediate impact on the companies, given their enormous market capitalizations and cash flow.

The money involved here is not even a rounding error. That’s not the point. They really don’t want to have any impact on these firms. The whole point of this is to bask in the warm glow of the self-satisfaction that comes from a public act of piety. In another age, these idiots would have donated a bull to the festival to be slaughtered at the temple.

The Colonists

Posted on by

I’m fond of saying that America has been colonized by pod people. Unlike the racists white colonists that oppressed the noble people of places like Africa and the Americas, these colonists sort of look like the people over whom they rule. They even speak the same language, for the most part. Rather than secure their place by force of arms, the new colonial class has convinced the natives they are on their side as protectors. It’s why they invest so much time telling some natives that the other natives are a danger. Divide and conquer.

Maggie’s Farm had a link to this story on Legal Insurrection. She seems to think it is really cool that the ruling class is all-white. She describes herself as “an attorney, writer, and digital strategist from Dallas, Texas.” You can’t help but get a bad vibe from the expression “digital strategist.” It sounds like a fake job for women. Tech firms tend to load up their marketing and human resources departments with women to counter the fact their talent is all white and Asians dudes. They give the ladies of marketing titles like “digital strategist.”

Anyway, the vast chasm between the ruled and the ruler is hardly news. The interesting bit is that the political divide looks a lot like what’s happening in trendy coastal cities. Upper middle-class whites are systematically driving out non-Asian minorities. Washington DC is getting whiter by the day. This old list shows that DC, like other trendy ruling class places is becoming less vibrant. Harlem went white a few years ago and is on its way to looking like Reykjavik. It only makes sense that the governing class would follow the same path, getting whiter, richer and more self-absorbed.

That last bit is not unimportant. I was watching Red Eye the other day and the topic was drugs. Legalization is now cool amongst those living in the bunker communities. The cast of Red Eye is emblematic of the SWPL-types now running the culture. One of the guests was a cute little girl named Katherine Timpf. She said something along the lines of “I live in Harlem and see people selling drugs every day.” They all nodded without the least bit of irony. They are totally unaware of what’s going on around them. Dylan from upstairs who had a heroin problem is a different breed of cat from D’Quan who slings dope on a Camden street corner, but no one in hipsterville knows that.

But, that’s thing with the colonial class. They don’t really know they are a colonial class and they don’t seem to know there’s a world outside of the Potemkin villages they are building for themselves in the coastal cities. There’s a blissful unawareness that most obviously shows up in political attitudes. When you live in a quaint little Victorian on a block filled with sophisticated hipsters like yourself, you trust the system. The cops are your friends and the people with who you work in government are your well-intentioned neighbors. In a world where there are never any layoffs or pay cuts and no such thing as a recession, it easy to be naïve. They are the Eloi and we are the Morlocks, except they live off us, instead of the way Wells imagined it.

The Face of Suicide

Posted on by

Baltimore is a majority black city with an all black government and bureaucracy. Like Detroit, the government avoids plundering what wealth is left only because they are too incompetent to steal what’s left. There are pockets of rich whites and a small hipsterville, but otherwise it is Lagos on the Chesapeake. But, they can’t help but jump on the latest fads.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake plans to unveil dozens of recommendations Wednesday intended to lure immigrant families to Baltimore and retain them.

The proposals, from increasing the availability of translators at city agencies to making it easier for the undocumented to buy homes, offer insight into the mayor’s pledge to attract 10,000 new families over the next decade — an effort that is focused in part on the city’s burgeoning immigrant neighborhoods.

“I want to make sure that Baltimore isn’t behind the curve on this trend,” said Rawlings-Blake, who will formally announce the recommendations today. “This is about taking advantage of the growth that we’ve already seen.”

The proposals are part of a new report crafted by a city task force and the Abell Foundation.

Census data show that 46,000 people in Baltimore were born in another country, and 40 percent of them are naturalized citizens.

That represents a 55 percent increase in the number of people who identified themselves as immigrants in 2000. Most analysts believe those numbers significantly underrepresent the number of immigrants who entered the country illegally.

The task force suggests the city should approve an ordinance requiring agencies to develop policies that comply with federal regulations on “language access” to ensure that those who don’t speak English can take advantage of city programs.

And noting that potential homebuyers who don’t have Social Security numbers often struggle to obtain mortgages, the panel also recommends creating a committee to study programs that allow immigrants to borrow instead with a Tax ID Number issued by the Internal Revenue Service.

Again, why would any government want more poor people? The reason they can’t get credit is they are not here legally and they have no money. It is a crazy thing, but this is what extreme partisanship is like in a late stage democracy. These people will self-harm just to be on the right side and hold the right opinion.

Why November Does Not Matter

Posted on by

A lot of conservatives are hoping for a wave election this November. They still hold out hope that a GOP majority will halt the decay and mark the turnaround. This story from The Hill says otherwise.

It wasn’t part of the jobs message he planned to pitch, but Speaker John Boehner said Thursday that immigration reform would help boost the economy.

“Immigration reform will help our economy, but you’ve got to secure the border first,” the Ohio Republican said after a speech at the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute. “We’ve got a mess and everyone knows we’ve got a mess.

“Our legal system is broken, our border isn’t secure, and we’ve got the problem of those who are here without documents,” the Speaker continued. “It needs to be fixed. We’re a nation of immigrants, the sooner we do it, the better off the country would be.”

His immigration comments, in response to an audience question, weren’t part of his prepared remarks. They followed a 20-minute-speech in which Boehner laid out his five-point plan to jump-start America’s economy.

As everyone knows, flooding the nation with new workers will drive up wages and make everyone richer. All of that twaddle about supply and demand is just nonsense. It really is incredible how the basics of economics are thrown out the window when it comes to immigration and foreign workers.

It is well known that Boehner has a well paid landing spot lined up. He needs to seal the deal with an amnesty bill. He tried to do it over the summer, but Obama screwed it up with the Children’s Crusade at the border. They thought that was a winner, but the backlash made passing amnesty an act of suicide. After the election, during the lame duck session, Boehner will bring up an amnesty bill and it will pass.