Monthly Archives: October 2014

Black <> Brown

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Back in the 70’s and 80’s, street hustlers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton would claim to speak for all nonwhites. Hispanics have never considered themselves black and they don’t seek to join hands with blacks in political matters. In the 90’s and 2000’s that became even more clear, but black leaders held onto the fantasy. Maybe it is just comforting in some way. The NY Times has a story on the coming election which has more magical thinking.

The confidential memo from a former pollster for President Obama contained a blunt warning for Democrats. Written this month with an eye toward Election Day, it predicted “crushing Democratic losses across the country” if the party did not do more to get black voters to the polls.

“African-American surge voters came out in force in 2008 and 2012, but they are not well positioned to do so again in 2014,” Cornell Belcher, the pollster, wrote in the memo, dated Oct. 1. “In fact, over half aren’t even sure when the midterm elections are taking place.”

Mr. Belcher’s assessment points to an urgent imperative for Democrats: To keep Republicans from taking control of the Senate, as many are predicting, they need black voters in at least four key states. Yet the one politician guaranteed to generate enthusiasm among African Americans is the same man many Democratic candidates want to avoid: Mr. Obama.

Now, Democrats are deploying other prominent black elected officials and other surrogates, buttressed by sophisticated voter targeting efforts, to stoke black turnout. At the White House, the president is waging an under-the-radar campaign, recording video advertisements, radio interviews and telephone calls specifically targeting his loyal African-American base.

“Anybody who looks at the data realizes that if the black vote, and the brown vote, doesn’t turn out, we can’t win. It’s just that simple,” said Representative Marcia L. Fudge of Ohio, the chairwoman of the Congressional Black Caucus, referring to African-American and Latino voters. “If we don’t turn out, we cannot hold the Senate.”

One of the dirty little secrets that no one wants to admit is Hispanics are not particularly fond of blacks. They don’t look at someone like Ms. Fudge as anything other than a voice of American blacks. Further, there’s no such thing as Hispanic. Puerto Ricans don’t like Dominicans. Central Americans don’t identify with Mexicans. Brazilians and South Americans don’t buy into the whole brown business at all.

A century ago WASP’s saw all Catholics as the same. Italians were even counted as black, along with Jews. My mid-century it was fairly obvious that Italians were not Irish and both were leaving the ghetto and joining middle-class America. Many Mexicans will take the same road as Italians. Amerindians. on the other hand, will fall somewhere between blacks at the bottom and whites in the middle.

That’s likely the path for most Hispanics. Cubans have done that in Miami. Mexicans will be a mixed bag as Mexico is a mixed culture. Central Americans are a tougher call, but we seem to be getting the more hardy and adventurous ones. I’m not saying they are natural conservatives or any of that nonsense. It’s just that brown ain’t black. Hispanics will splinter into the class structure of America, while blacks seem destined to remain in the Liberal Democratic ghetto.

The Madness of President Ebola

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The suicidal impulse of the Left is unmistakable. At the core, these people want to die and take the rest of us with them. Judicial Watch, which has a really good record of unearthing embarrassing stuff on our rulers, has this:

While the bipartisan voice grows to ban Ebola victims from entering the United States, a new report claims that President Obama is considering a plan to bring the world’s Ebola patients to the United States to be treated.

Judicial Watch, the conservative public watchdog group, says in a shocking report that the president is “actively formulating plans” to admit Ebola-infected non-citizens just to be treated.

“Specifically, the goal of the administration is to bring Ebola patients into the United States for treatment within the first days of diagnosis,” said the group.

Such a plan would likely cause a political outcry throughout the nation, on edge over the spread of the virus.

Judicial Watch, which probes federal spending and uses federal and administration sources to root out corruption, said it is unclear who would pay for transporting and treating non-Americans.

But they have details nobody else has. “The plans include special waivers of laws and regulations that ban the admission of non-citizens with a communicable disease as dangerous as Ebola.”

The organization added, “the Obama administration is keeping this plan secret from Congress. The source is concerned that the proposal is illegal; endangers the public health and welfare; and should require the approval of Congress.”

This is madness for a number of reasons. The least obvious is how this policy further erodes the trust between the citizens and their government. Trust in the political class is at record lows, but most people still think the bureaucrats in the various agencies are at least trying to their jobs. They view them as lazy, but generally honest civil servants run by a collection of political hacks connected to a politician.

Getting new politicians is a simple thing, in the mind of the public, even though that is not our current reality. Getting a new new managerial class, on the other hand, means blood in the streets. Putting the CDC in a position to fail is a dangerous game. When even the aging lefties at the NYTimes think the CDC is incompetent, you already have a serious trust problem.

There’s another layer to the trust issue. When the Bush people allegedly failed to help the looters in New Orleans after Katrina, it was not because they did not know what to do. That was never the claim. The claim was they failed to do what was required for some reason. This, however, looks like the opening scenes of every disaster movie. The people in charge are either too arrogant to admit they are facing a disaster or too stupid to know they don’t know what they are facing. As Greg Cochran points out, arrogant ignorance has a long history in the epidemic game.

In a few weeks, there will be political consequences. When Obama feels the need to quit the golf course and show up for work, you know the politics are more lethal to his cult than Ebola is to Africans. That may be comforting to Red Team partisans, but it is still very bad for the health of the Empire. The near total lack of trust in the political class has made it impossible for them to tackle any of the systemic problems facing the country. Making Red Team less odious than Blue Team is not going to usher in a reform movement.

That’s really not the main concern. As Greg Cochran pointed out in that post, the people in charge of the science of Ebola may be ideologically wedded to ideas that are completely wrong. That’s not without precedent. The Obama administration appears to be acting on the belief, and it is nothing more than belief, that Ebola is mostly a poor African savage problem. In clever, white America we don’t have to worry about witch doctors and strange burial rituals. The two infections in Dallas suggest otherwise.

The column in the Daily News makes a good case for concern, if not panic. We don’t know a lot about Ebola.

As a rule, one should not panic at whatever crisis has momentarily fixed the attention of cable news producers. But the Ebola outbreak in West Africa, which has migrated to both Europe and America, may be the exception that proves the rule. There are at least six reasons that a controlled, informed panic might be in order.

(1) Start with what we know, and don’t know, about the virus. Officials from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other government agencies claim that contracting Ebola is relatively difficult because the virus is only transmittable by direct contact with bodily fluids from an infected person who has become symptomatic. Which means that, in theory, you can’t get Ebola by riding in the elevator with someone who is carrying the virus, because Ebola is not airborne.

This sounds reassuring. Except that it might not be true. There are four strains of the Ebola virus that have caused outbreaks in human populations. According to the New England Journal of Medicine, the current outbreak (known as Guinean EBOV, because it originated in Meliandou, Guinea, in late November 2013) is a separate clade “in a sister relationship with other known EBOV strains.” Meaning that this Ebola is related to, but genetically distinct from, previous known strains, and thus may have distinct mechanisms of transmission.

Not everyone is convinced that this Ebola isn’t airborne. Last month, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy published an article arguing that the current Ebola has “unclear modes of transmission” and that “there is scientific and epidemiologic evidence that Ebola virus has the potential to be transmitted via infectious aerosol particles both near and at a distance from infected patients, which means that healthcare workers should be wearing respirators, not facemasks.”

The rest of that column is worth reading. Even if the President Ebola thinks the science is settled and Ebola is not that contagious, he clearly knows his apparatus for dealing with public concern is not working. He also knows the people running the CDC are struggling to deal with two, that’s TWO, cases of Ebola. Inviting a plague into the country just to prove some weird political point or spite his political opponents is madness. Given his views on Christianity, it is may be Domitian-level madness.

 

We Finally Catch A Break

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Since forever, the children of successful men have often taken up positions in the ruling class once they reached adulthood. Some would argue that it is genetic. The able male finds a high quality mate and the result is a child with the genetic stuff to follow in the father’s footsteps. Others would argue that it is slipstreaming. The successful male blazes a path for his children. The unencumbered route to the ruling class is easy to traverse, even for the average, compared to blazing your own path. The dull-witted child of a billionaire is going to have a better shot at attending Harvard than the smart kid from the projects.

Maybe it is a combination of things, as is always the case. I don’t know, but I do know Americans have been cursed by a few dynastic families. The Roosevelt’s did a lot to damage the country. The Kennedy clan may be the biggest blight on a nation since Agrippina found a husband. We’ve been lucky too. Some of our worst politicians like Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon did not have kids interested in politics. At least they never made a go of it.

It looks like we dodged another bullet. Our semi-retarded vice president’s oldest kid is probably going to be the next governor of Delaware. Luckily, that’s a ticket to nowhere, but he’ll surely end up inn the Senate one day, taking up the seat held by his father as the dumbest man in the Senate. Biden’s other kid was hoping to run the same game with joining the National Guard as a lawyer so he could put “war hero” on his campaign website. Luckily, he was thrown out for drug abuse.

Vice President Joe Biden ’s son Hunter was discharged from the Navy Reserve this year after testing positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the matter.

Hunter Biden, a lawyer by training who is now a managing partner at an investment company, had been commissioned as an ensign in the Navy Reserve, a part-time position. But after failing a drug test last year, his brief military career ended.

Mr. Biden, 44 years old, decided to pursue military service relatively late, beginning the direct-commission process to become a public-affairs officer in the Navy Reserve in 2012. Because of his age—43 when he was to be commissioned—he needed a waiver to join the Navy. He received a second Navy waiver because of a drug-related incident when he was a young man, according to people familiar with the matter. Military officials say such drug waivers aren’t uncommon.

Mr. Biden was commissioned as an ensign on May 7, 2013, and assigned to Navy Public Affairs Support Element East in Norfolk, Va., a reserve unit, according to the Navy. In June 2013, after reporting to his unit in Norfolk, he was given a drug test, which turned up positive for cocaine, according to people familiar with the situation. Mr. Biden was discharged in February, the Navy said.

Mr. Biden said in a statement that it was “the honor of my life to serve in the U.S. Navy, and I deeply regret and am embarrassed that my actions led to my administrative discharge. I respect the Navy’s decision. With the love and support of my family, I’m moving forward.”

We still have one hapless nitwit from the Biden clan in the pipe, but at least we avoided having a second putz from that deformed family tree.

Rich People

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I have a mild resentment toward rich people. Every society has rich people. That’s just the natural order and every human society has had an elite that enjoys a better material existence than the rest. It’s not always obvious why. I look at the wealthy elites of today and I don’t see a collection of geniuses. CEO’s are smart guys and they work hard, but they are not that smart and they don’t work that hard.

The number of rich people who invented some product or service that made human existence much better is tiny. In most cases, the guy inventing stuff is getting hosed by the rich guy who owns the company where he works. In other cases the guy with the great new idea has it stolen by someone how gets rich off it. Facebook stole the idea from MySpace, for example.

That said, getting rich in business is no easy task. You have to be ruthless and you have to take a lot of abuse on the way up. There’s a fair amount of dumb luck involved as well as chicanery. It’s why CEO’s, partners in white shoe law firms and entrepreneurs are often horrible people. They are very good at getting ahead and climbing the greasy pole, but they suck at most everything else.

Even so, dumb luck and serendipity play a defining role. Mitt Romney won the lucky sperm contest. Bill Gates was handed the golden ticket by IBM. Mark Cuban hit the lottery when Yahoo threw a billion at his worthless company. If you have the choice between being a ruthless and crafty businessman or being a lucky businessman, take the latter. This is the lesson of The Rocking Horse Winner.

When I look at the list of the super rich, I can live with the fact they are mostly assholes and they got lucky. If we started from scratch, all of them would do better than most and some would get rich all over again. Maybe not top-400 rich, but they would do OK. Like I said at the start, mine is a mild resentment.

That said, I look at this story from the Telegraph and I wonder if we have not lost our minds. The first guy on the list, Richard Branson, did not exactly come from the gutter, but he made his money in a real tough business and he made the business better. But, look at the rest of the list. Six of the ten are clowns. These are people who entertain us by pretending to be people they are not. Every society has entertainers, but we have made them into our ruling elite! Johnny Depp? David Copperfield?

Troll though Manhattan or LA and you can find a thousand people with the acting ability of Johnny Depp. He got rich on pure dumb luck. He showed up at the right casting call on the right day with the right look. His show had some success and a few lucky turns later he is a star. Nothing wrong with it, but what does it say about a society where this guy is super rich? My goodness. He’s not friggin’ Shakespeare. No one will remember him once his time is done. His footprints will wash away in a few years after his death, maybe sooner.

That’s not to say there’s not some talent involved with being a good actor. It’s just not that hard. Lots of people can do it well enough to be believable on stage or on screen. I was at a fall festival no long ago where some local college kids were doing Shakespeare. It was as good as anywhere else, by anyone else. I once stayed at an inn where they had a small theater. Local kids and adults put on plays for the locals. It was as good, in terms of acting, as anything I’ve seen on Broadway. All over America, people are entertained by community theater. There’s a threshold level ability that is pretty low. Once you cross it, you can be a credible actor. In this case and this case, you can be horrible and still make a living.

I think that’s where my resentment rears its ugly green head. I look at a Johnny Depp and his island and wonder how that makes any sense. I see a Mark Cuban and think crime actually pays. In isolation it is not a big deal, but we have a lot of this, too much of this. A healthy society is one that produces a healthy, restrained elite. Our cultural and financial elites are corrupt, brutish and stupid. We’ve turned the culture over to pimps who made their whores millionaires. The financial affairs of the nation are ruled by con-men and bank robbers, skimming from the economy without every adding grain of sand to the wealth of humanity.

We have a rich people problem.

Pink Shirts

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Cultural Marxism started with the appeal for tolerance. Normal people had to drop all of their cultural habits in order to include the “historically excluded.” Never mind that it was nonsense. Sensible people fell for it. In the 1980’s and 1990’s people were sent off to sensitivity training on a regular basis as a part of the employee training. All of our ideas about life would no longer be tolerated. There was always an “or else” lurking behind the words. Here’s the “or else”:

The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.

“The city’s subpoena of sermons and other pastoral communications is both needless and unprecedented,” Alliance Defending Freedom attorney Christina Holcomb said in a statement. “The city council and its attorneys are engaging in an inquisition designed to stifle any critique of its actions.”

ADF, a nationally-known law firm specializing in religious liberty cases, is representing five Houston pastors. They filed a motion in Harris County court to stop the subpoenas arguing they are “overbroad, unduly burdensome, harassing, and vexatious.”

“Political and social commentary is not a crime,” Holcomb said. “It is protected by the First Amendment.”

The subpoenas are just the latest twist in an ongoing saga over the Houston’s new non-discrimination ordinance. The law, among other things, would allow men to use the ladies room and vice versa.  The city council approved the law in June.

The Houston Chronicle reported opponents of the ordinance launched a petition drive that generated more than 50,000 signatures – far more than the 17,269 needed to put a referendum on the ballot.

However, the city threw out the petition in August over alleged irregularities.

After opponents of the bathroom bill filed a lawsuit the city’s attorneys responded by issuing the subpoenas against the pastors.

These thuggish tactics have always been the main part of Cultural Marxism. Few would ever go along with this nonsense without the “or else” in there. That’s what attracts the adherents. It is the opportunity to push people around that gets them excited. The Nazis built their movement on low-IQ street toughs looking for a reason to dress up and crack skulls. It’s why every left-wing movement ends in a bloodbath. They have no choice. That’s the only way “or else” can work.

I’ve commented before that you rarely, if ever, run into a jolly lesbian. In part, they are not trying to compete with other women for men. Males like women who are happy and flirtatious. Lesbians have no desire, allegedly, to attract males so they have no need to be happy and flirtatious. In fact, they have an incentive to be unappealing to men. The nastiness may simply be a way to ward off interested males, but heterosexual women also find lesbians to be unpleasant so who knows.

The other part is that the odds of meeting an available sex partner are extremely low. Lesbians are probably 2% of the population of females. Social science says the number is higher, but think about the number of homosexual males versus females you see on a regular basis. Throw in the fact lesbian relationships are highly volatile and it is easy to see why they would be unhappy.

There’s that and the strong possibility that homosexuality is just the most obvious item in a basket of pathologies. Every lesbian I know self-mutilates. They have all sorts of metal crap in their faces and visible tattoos. Non-lesbian girts do this too, but it was once called lesbian chic for a reason. The butchered haircuts and the wearing of rags all indicate a high degree of self-loathing. Then you have the outlandishly high addiction rates. There could be many sensible reasons for it, but one of those sensible reasons is mental illness.

So, we have a small population of bitter, often angry people who have their sexual wiring confused. Putting them in charge of anything sounds like a bad idea. Giving them an ideological sledgehammer to wield against a society with which they feel they are at war is nothing short of lunacy. The people of Houston put a Nazi drag queen in charge of their city and the results naturally follow.

Self-Policing

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I remember when Slate first started publishing. Michael Kinsley was going to reinvent journalism, along with his super-rich patrons at Microsoft. The early version was just a PDF that you could read on your PC or print off at home. It was not a very interesting magazine at the time. Kinsley was a professional apple polisher and toady. He knew how to be interesting to rich people in private, but he had no skills of interest to a broader audience. If you look at his career, he is similar to Barak Obama in that he has a gift for currying favor with super-rich white people willing to give him stuff.

Today, Slate seems to be click bait. No one goes to Slate for incite or analysis. You go there for hilarious examples of some weird Liberal tick. The near total lack of self-awareness by the writers there makes for some comedy gold. A favorite, it seems, is Jamelle Bouie. Liberal whites love to decorate their website with a youngish black male writer willing to flatter liberal white people about race. The Atlantic has TN Coates and Slate has Baba Bouie.

His latest work of nonsense has the usual stuff, but it contains one useful bit of incite.

The glib response to stats on blacks and police is to cite so-called “black crime” or “black criminality.” But this depends on a major analytical error. Yes, blacks are overrepresented in arrest and conviction rates. At the same time, “criminal blacks” are a tiny, unrepresentative fraction of all black Americans. If you walked into a group of 1,000 randomly selected blacks, the vast majority—upward of 998—would never have had anything to do with violent crime. To generalize from the two is to confuse the specific (how blacks are represented among criminals) with the general (how criminals are represented among blacks). Statisticians call this a “base rate error,” and you should try to avoid it.

In fairness, you could apply this to police as well. The number of cops who shoot—much less shoot black Americans—is a small percentage of all cops. Why judge the whole by the actions of a few?

Why indeed. But, it is what we do as humans. We look for patterns. We assess risk to ourselves, our children and our chances of biological success. We then act on what we think are the patterns in a way that reduces our risks. It’s why old Jewish ladies don’t go out for walks at night in the ghetto. They know it is much riskier than sitting at home watching TV. It is why young black males go the other way when they see cops. Right or wrong, they believe cops are a threat to them so even when they have nothing to hide, they avoid the cops. Asking people to do otherwise is demanding them to commit violence against themselves.

There’s a social benefit here. Cops need cooperation from the people to do their job. They have to self-police if they are to stay on friendly terms with the public. In all cases where the police are hated by the community, you find a lack of self-policing. The cops get defensive and see the public as their enemy. It gets cleaned up when new pols hire new police chiefs who clean up the rot and re-establish relationships with the people they serve. The NYC PD under Giuliani is a perfect example of how self-policing works.

Human populations have been self-policing since the beginning. Some groups are better at it than others. Jews, for example, were exceptionally good at “boiling off” their members who did not really fit the tribe’s goal. The slow-witted and lazy would marry off into the gentile population, leaving the smart and faithful in the tribe. Do that for enough generations and you have a population of very smart and very loyal people. The Amish may very be the result of the same process. All people, in all times and places, have had to figure out how to deal with their troublesome fraction.

In America, whites of all types have figured this out pretty well. Instead of relying on old customs from Europe, they used geography. America is a big country with lots of useful land. That means the stupid, lazy and criminal can be set aside physically. That’s not to say the old ways were abandoned. Class distinctions reinforce the physical divide. Whites can identify their kind just by the look and location. Even to out-groups like Asians and Hispanics, this guy is a very different person than this guy, even from a great distance.

Orientals have relied on the old ways for the most part. Shame is a powerful tool to force cooperation and compliance, but it is also a useful tool for segregating the troublesome. I’ve known a few Koreans who basically abandoned their families because they could not or would not abide by the cultural mores of their community. They either conformed or walked away. The tremendous success of East Asians has allowed them to follow the white pattern and use distance and culture to weed out the troublesome from their ranks. This guy is not this guy even to this round eye.

The one group in America that has not figured this out is blacks. Successful blacks are under extreme pressure to avoid being white. They have to “keeps it reelz” in order to avoid being called an Oreo. This is not just for highly successful blacks. Middle-class blacks are under constant pressure to embrace black culture. Sports coaches tell me it is nearly impossible to get black kids into soccer and lacrosse. They all want to play basketball and football. You know see little black kids playing instruments anymore either. That’s for white and Asian kids. Hip-hop is black music.

This becomes a problems when it comes to distance. A black family moves out to the burbs and their new neighbors are in tears having finally acquired a black neighbor. Then one weekday night the new neighbors have a party that starts at ten at night. All of their old neighbors from the ghetto show up and party into the wee hours. That sounds nuts, but I know of dozens of such examples. Suddenly, diversity is not so cool. The for sale signs go up and the neighborhood changes. The black people are left to think that white people just hate living near black people, when it is really just middle-class people not wanting to live in the ghetto.

Bill Cosby used to rant about this before he was hissed off the stage. Chris Rock had a great bit on the same theme. He was pressured to stop doing it because “white people misunderstood it.” That’s hilarious for a number of reasons. How long racial solidarity can keep the black middle-class from jettisoning their ghetto brothers is a mystery. A run through the television dial suggests the elites are fighting it which means it will not happen. That means the majority of blacks who commit no crimes and just want to live decent lives will remain chained to the ghetto visually and geographically, paying the tab for those who commit the bulk of the social trouble in modern America.

Bros Versus Yos

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

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

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

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

Hive Language

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Did Obama Kill Nina Pham?

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It is too soon to know if the young woman in Texas will die from Ebola so we can’t pin her death on anyone just yet. We can blame our government for letting disease riddled savages into our country, at least one of whom had Ebola and infected this young women. There’s a chance she could be saved due to the help of  a citizen.

The Texan nurse diagnosed with Ebola has received a blood transfusion from survivor Dr Kent Brantly, reports claim.

It is the third time Dr Brantly has donated blood to Ebola victims after medics discovered he had the same blood type as previous patient Dr Nick Sacra and NBC cameraman Ashoka Mukpo, who is still being treated.

Incredibly, nurse Nina Pham, 26, has also matched with Brantly and today received a transfusion of his blood in a move that doctors believe could save her life. 

Pham has been in quarantine since Friday after catching the disease from ‘patient zero’ Thomas Eric Duncan – the man who brought the deadly virus to America.

Brantly is believed to have traveled to Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital, where Pham worked, to make the donation on Sunday night.

Today, Pham’s condition was described as ‘clinically stable’.

At the end of the Carter years, a lot of sensible people thought we were finished as a country. The people in charge simply had no idea how to turn the thing around and keep us from collapsing into a heap like Europe. But, the people were still in good shape. When someone with a clue came along, he was put in charge and the decline was arrested. Reagan was not perfect, but he did not have a bunch of crazy ideas in his head about the country and his countrymen. As a result, he championed sensible public policy that left the American people free to work out the rest.
Today, we are once again run by people with crazy ideas in their heads and the country is headed down the tubes. The difference now is we have millions of savages poring over the borders. Those savages are carrying disease and pestilence. Ebola is a disease you get from eating bats or improperly handling the infected corpses of the dead – IN AFRICA! There’s no damned reason for anyone in America to get the disease. It’s time to build the scaffold.

Subsidizing The Crazy

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Most cable channels can’t exist without mandatory cable fees. Without the buck per month or so they get from your cable bill, they go out of business. ESPN, for example, is on everyone’s cable service and the fee is something like $5 a month. They get close to seven billion a year from those fees, despite the fact only 20% of homes watch ESPN. If we ever went to a la carte pricing or pure pay per view, ESPN folds up shop. They only generate about two billion in ad revenue. If they survived, it would be a much different format. They would not be paying the NBA those enormous rights fees either.

A better example is MSNBC. This sob story in the NY Times reports that their best shows draw fewer eyes than late night informercials.

Rachel Maddow, the biggest star on the MSNBC cable network, just posted her lowest quarterly ratings results ever.

“Morning Joe,” MSNBC’s signature morning program, scored its second-lowest quarterly ratings, reaching an average of just 87,000 viewers in the key news demographic group.

And “Ronan Farrow Daily,” the network’s heavily promoted new afternoon show, which stars a 26-year-old Rhodes Scholar with a high-profile Hollywood lineage, has been largely a dud.

Though it has mostly happened quietly, which may be a comment on the cable network’s larger status in the media landscape, MSNBC has seen its ratings hit one of the deepest skids in its history, with the recently completed third quarter of 2014 generating some record lows.

Phil Griffin, the president of MSNBC, acknowledged that his network had been struggling, but put it in the context of the overall drop in cable news. “This has been a tough year all around,” he said. “All three cable news channels are drawing a smaller combined audience than they were five years ago.” He also emphasized that despite the plunge that caused it to trail CNN in the last quarter, the network remained ahead of CNN for the full year.

In the past, MSNBC’s ratings have typically fallen during times of intensely followed major news events. The current period is awash in them, with stories like ISIS and Ebola commanding a high degree of international reporting. This plays well to CNN’s strengths.

MSNBC consciously established its brand as politics-centric, approaching stories from a left-of-center viewpoint, in deliberate contrast to the right-of-center approach of Fox News, which continues to dominate the news channel ratings. At the same time, MSNBC moved away from a close relationship with NBC News that it had during the early years of the network. Today, fewer NBC News correspondents appear on MSNBC.

Mr. Griffin said that a general apathy about American politics has also hurt the network. “You can look at the dysfunction in Washington, the wariness about politics, the low approval ratings,” he said. “That’s had an impact. But we’ve got to adjust; we’ve got to evolve.”

MSNBC’s recent results have not been encouraging. During the third quarter, Ms. Maddow reached an average of 183,000 viewers in the audience component that most matters to MSNBC’s advertisers, viewers between the ages of 25 and 54, her lowest total since she started her show in 2008.

Note how the Times tries to equate Fox News with MSNBC, like they are mirrors. That’s insane, of course. Fox is pretty much straight news with a prime time of infotainment shows. O’Reilly, Hannity and the others are entertainers. They generate the big ratings and that’s how you pay the bills, usually. MSNBC is just a parade of screaming lunatics. Rachel Madow looks and sounds like a woman struggling with her sanity. A generation ago, these people would never been allowed to be on television.

It is just another example of how socializing costs boils off the normal and rational, leaving the weird and the extreme. The proliferation of cable channels relies on every home having cable (or satellite) and paying roughly the same for the service. The 20% who love sports get ESPN at a far cheaper rate than under a pay-per-view scenario. Billions are shifted from people with no interest in sports to these sports teams, via the socialism of the cable bill. Instead of catering to a broad audience, ESPN can focus on fanatics and indulge in their crackpot politics.

CNN and then MSNBC followed a similar path. CNN got on everyone’s basic service, thus guaranteeing them a buck a month from every home, whether anyone watched or not. With a guaranteed revenue stream, they were free to indulge in whatever nonsense that was current at the time. Now, the only place people watch CNN is at airports. Similarly, MSNBC piggybacked on NBC to get on basic cable. They drifted into insanity and now the only place people watch is at the day room of the local asylum.

This happens whenever the link between the paying customer and the service provider is unclear, as is always the case with third party payments. Medical services get increasingly worse at the retail end because the patients are not the customers. It is the insurance company and government paying the bills. The schools are another example. The people running the schools care more about the unions and pressure groups than the students. People respond to incentives and when you funnel those incentives through third parties, it is natural to assume the needs of those third parties are supreme. In the case of the cable news channels, the money is there no matter what they do, so the weird tastes of the people running the channel dominate.

It is why I think a smart politician on the Right would be wise to champion a la carte cable. No one likes dealing with the cable monopolies. No one likes the fact they are paying for a bunch of channels they never watch. The cable monopoly is a perfect target for a populist politician. It’s why the lunatics chirp about “net neutrality” They know making the ISP’s into bad guys is easy money. The benefit to the Right is forcing a la carte pricing on the evil cable companies would go a long way toward de-funding the Left’s propaganda organs.