Monthly Archives: October 2014

Protection Rackets

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Much of what is called the “new economy” is just an updated version of the old economy. Netflix, for example, transfers their infrastructure costs onto you, even if you don’t use their service. Their streaming service relies on the Internet and the cost of growing bandwidth is in your cable bill. Facebook exists because they don’t have to pay to put their site on your PC. You pay for it. Cost shifting is a big part of the new economy and in some cases it is outright extortion.

First the chefs of a small Italian restaurant got mad at online review site Yelp. Instead of trying to get better reviews, they decided to take a different approach: get terrible ones.

The campaign helped Botte Bistro get a rating of one out of five stars, as more than 1,000 reviewers left hundreds of tongue-in-cheek reviews panning the Richmond, California, eatery, said chef Michele Massimo, adding that it boosted business.

It was the latest protest among businesses who for years have complained that Yelp was extorting them by raising or dropping ratings depending on whether they advertised with the Internet’s most popular review site.

Yelp has persistently denied those claims on its website, in court and at every opportunity when the question is put publicly to the company.

“It wouldn’t pass the straight face test,” Yelp spokesman Vince Sullitto said of the extortion claims.

Sullitto said Yelp attracts millions of viewers and sells advertising to 80,000 businesses because of the site’s credibility with consumers. Sullitto said many of the company’s critics are businesses that have received bad reviews.

Last month, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals tossed out a lawsuit filed by several businesses claiming Yelp extorted them by removing positive reviews after advertising sales pitches were turned down.

The court is one rung below the U.S. Supreme Court and the ruling could have been a definitive one for Yelp.

Instead, it served to fuel the company’s critics because the court said that, even if Yelp did manipulate reviews to penalize businesses, the practice would not constitute extortion.

The court said it found no evidence of manipulation and that it was ruling narrowly only on the question of extortion. Nonetheless, the company’s critics said the ruling supported their claims.

Even before the 9th Circuit ruling, Yelp was battling two lawsuits filed by company investors who make similar extortion claims.

The suits, filed in San Francisco federal court over the summer, allege that the company’s stock traded at artificially inflated prices because the “company tried to sell services designed to suppress negative reviews or make them go away” and then lied about it.

The company has yet to formally respond to the lawsuits in court, but says it will fight these legal actions as well.

Last year, a lawyer serving as a small-claims judge in San Diego likened Yelp to a “modern-day version of the Mafia going to stores and saying, ‘You want to not be bothered? You want to not have incidents in your store? Pay us protection money.'”

This is not a new thing. Trade magazines have played the same game for years. Good reviews could make or break a product and the way to ensure it was to buy ads in the trade magazines. At the same time, writers would know they better play ball and say nice things about the products from their advertisers. It was not a formal arrangement, just a natural one. Everyone had an interest in promoting the product.

Yelp and other review sites have simply expanded the model to the Internet and every consumer business. Proving they are manipulating their rankings is never going to be easy, but it is hard to imagine they are not doing it. The bias will always be in favor of their customers who are the people sending them money, not the dingbats writing reviews. That’s what “new economy” types often forget. The customer is the guy writing the checks and he always comes first. In this case, the review site will look out for those businesses that pay for ads.

The Atheist’s God

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Atheism is just another secular religion. Unlike the radical politics, it has no Utopian aspects to it. There have been some atheists who preached about how the end of religion, by which they mean Christianity, will make the world a better place, but they always seemed to get tripped up by their hatred of Christianity. That’s the peculiar aspect to atheism. Other religions seek to crowd out the all other religions, but atheists just have it in for Christianity. Anyway, it is good to see I’m not alone in this view.

If an autobiography can ever contain a true reflection of the author, it is nearly always found in a throwaway sentence. When the world’s most celebrated atheist writes of the discovery of evolution, Richard Dawkins unwittingly reveals his sense of his mission in the world. Toward the end of An Appetite for Wonder, the first installment in what is meant to be a two-volume memoir, Dawkins cites the opening lines of the first chapter of the book that made him famous, The Selfish Gene, published in 1976:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of an age when it first works out the reason for its own existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: “Have they discovered evolution yet?” Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them. His name was Charles Darwin.

Several of the traits that Dawkins displays in his campaign against religion are on show here. There is his equation of superiority with cleverness: the visiting aliens are more advanced creatures than humans because they are smarter and know more than humans do. The theory of evolution by natural selection is treated not as a fallible theory—the best account we have so far of how life emerged and developed—but as an unalterable truth, which has been revealed to a single individual of transcendent genius. There cannot be much doubt that Dawkins sees himself as a Darwin-like figure, propagating the revelation that came to the Victorian naturalist.

Note how the author ties evolution into the cult like aspects of atheism. The Darwin Fish people are a lot like liberals in that they love science as long at it is a weapon against their enemies. Atheists tend to get light headed when you explain the evolutionary importance of religion and modern humans. They start fainting when you explain the importance of teleology and Christianity to the growth of science.

It is a different matter when those he sees as his intellectual underlings—religious believers and any who stray from the strictest interpretation of Darwinism—refuse to follow his lead. Recalling his years at boarding school, Dawkins winces at the memory of the bullying suffered by a sensitive boy, “a precociously brilliant scholar” who was reduced to “a state of whimpering, abject horror” when he was stripped of his clothing and forced to take cold baths. Today, Dawkins is baffled by the fact that he didn’t feel sympathy for the boy. “I don’t recall feeling even secret pity for the victim of the bullying,” he writes. Dawkins’s bafflement at his lack of empathy suggests a deficiency in self-knowledge. As anyone who reads his sermons against religion can attest, his attitude towards believers is one of bullying and contempt reminiscent of the attitude of some of the more obtuse colonial missionaries towards those they aimed to convert.

You see this with atheists. Their new religion is always a tantrum against their old religion. Penn Jillette never shuts up about his atheism. On many occasions he has talked about how it arises from having watched his mother suffer at the end of her life. His answer was that no God could let people suffer like that so there must be no God. His atheism is therefore a mix of narcissism, ignorance and self-pity. Despite the self-absorption, atheists don’t seem to know themselves very well. Maybe that’s why they declare themselves a God.

More Failure

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I fully admit to initially supporting the second war with Iraq. I was not enthusiastic about it, but it did appear we could maybe do some good by installing a rational government in Iraq as a counter to Iran and Syria. I never had any illusions about self-government succeeding there. These people are incapable of managing liberal democracy, but they could handle a mild authoritarian state that was friendly to the West.

I assumed the Bush people were going to find a guy with a thick mustache who was happy to do business with us. I also thought they were just trolling thge Letf with all the talk about democracy. They would find a tough guy who would play ball, which has been the American since Monroe. Instead they went for liberal democracy and that was a total failure. Disaster is the right word for it.

Amazingly, it appears the Obama administration has managed to make it worse. This story from the British press suggests Iraq is about to fall, in a fashion similar to what we saw in South Vietnam a million years ago.

America’s plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group’s fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad.

The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama’s plan to “degrade and destroy” Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town’s remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

In the face of a likely Isis victory at Kobani, senior US officials have been trying to explain away the failure to save the Syrian Kurds in the town, probably Isis’s toughest opponents in Syria. “Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [Isis] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself,” said US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, in a typical piece of waffle designed to mask defeat. “The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively.”

Unfortunately for the US, Kobani isn’t the only place air strikes are failing to stop Isis. In an offensive in Iraq launched on 2 October but little reported in the outside world, Isis has captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It has captured Hit, Kubaisa and Ramadi, the provincial capital, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance by the Iraqi Army which showed itself to be as dysfunctional as in the past, even when backed by US air strikes.

Today, only the city of Haditha and two bases, Al-Assad military base near Hit, and Camp Mazrah outside Fallujah, are still in Iraqi government hands. Joel Wing, in his study –”Iraq’s Security

Forces Collapse as The Islamic State Takes Control of Most of Anbar Province” – concludes: “This was a huge victory as it gives the insurgents virtual control over Anbar and poses a serious threat to western Baghdad”.

The battle for Anbar, which was at the heart of the Sunni rebellion against the US occupation after 2003, is almost over and has ended with a decisive victory for Isis. It took large parts of Anbar in January and government counter-attacks failed dismally with some 5,000 casualties in the first six months of the year. About half the province’s 1.5 million population has fled and become refugees. The next Isis target may be the Sunni enclaves in western Baghdad, starting with Abu Ghraib on the outskirts but leading right to the centre of the capital.

The Iraqi government and its foreign allies are drawing comfort, there having been some advances against Isis in the centre and north of the country. But north and north-east of Baghdad the successes have not been won by the Iraqi army but by highly sectarian Shia militias which do not distinguish between Isis and the rest of the Sunni population. They speak openly of getting rid of Sunni in mixed provinces such as Diyala where they have advanced. The result is that Sunni in Iraq have no alternative but to stick with Isis or flee, if they want to survive. The same is true north-west of Mosul on the border with Syria, where Iraqi Kurdish forces, aided by US air attacks, have retaken the important border crossing of Rabia, but only one Sunni Arab remained in the town. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing has become the norm in the war in both Iraq and Syria.

At some point, Iran gets involved directly. They have no choice. How exactly that works is a mystery, but they are not going to let their Shia brothers get over run by the Sunnis. This is a part of the world with many ancient rivalries, but they have plenty of new ones too. The Saudis and GCC worry much more about Iran than the worry about the lunatics running ISIS. These far flung religious wars are good for business anyway. The Saudis can send their lunatics off to fight and die in Syria or Afghanistan, rather than have them cause trouble in Riyadh.

Iran getting directly involved in Iraq is a bigger concern because it moves them to the head of the class and that puts the Saudi relationship with Washington in jeopardy. It also upsets the Israelis for similar reasons. In a weird way, the success of ISIS is putting everyone on the same side for vastly different reasons, but the Obama administration seems paralyzed right now. Either they don’t know what to do or Obama is too afraid to do anything. It could be both.

As Obama heads into lame duck status, he finds his popularity at home dipping into the 30’s and his party running from him like he is Patient Zero. Usually presidents spend their final two years legacy building with various foreign policy projects. Obama has never had much interest in foreign policy and has proven to be incompetent at it. The world is going to get much worse over the next two years. Maybe untenably worse

The Gay Hive

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Way back in the olden thymes, it used to be said that a man was defined by his views on abortion and Israel. The former was all about IQ. Understanding the downstream ramifications of widespread use of abortion as a means of birth control requires a supple mind, something rare amongst abortion advocates. The latter issue was all about morality. Israel is about understanding the moral difference between a man that shoves an old women in the way of bus and a man that shoves an old women out of the way of bus. If you think both are men that shove old women, you side with the Arabs.

These days, the issue that separates the the wheat from the chaff is homosexual marriage. The moral side is easy to see, but it is different from the Israel question. Liberal fanatics use the issue to segregate themselves from normal people. It is a crude, simplistic morality, but that’s how it goes with religious cults. Everything boils down to which side of the hive wall on which you fall. I’ve yet to hear a liberal friend explain why they are are for changing the definition of marriage. They just are and if you’re not then you’re a bad person with a head full of crimethink.

The IQ side of the coin is not so obvious, mostly because we have conflated morality and intelligence in modern times. The fake nerd culture has made intelligence a mark of moral goodness. Bad people breath through their mouth while watching UFC. Good people talk about the latest Malcolm Gladwell book they did not read, while watching Cosmos on Netflix. Despite that, there is a moral component and like abortion is has to do with the downstream consequences. That’s hard and bumps into icky subjects so it is not permitted in public. Instead we get tantrums and the spewing of buzzwords like in this ridiculous Atlantic story.

Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear a collection of marriage-equality decisions and deferred for another term what seems now an inevitable ruling for marriage equality. The very next day, the Ninth Circuit handed down an opinion, Latta v. Otter, striking down a number of same-sex-marriage bans.

In doing so, the appeals court provided the first of what will surely be many such decisions from which the Court can choose when the justices consider what cases they might hear in the future—and so offers potential rationales by which they might make marriage equality the law of the land. The Ninth Circuit’s majority opinion rejects same-sex-marriage bans because they violate the Equal Protection Clause by discriminating based on sexual orientation, which is a standard reason courts have struck down these bans.

But there is a twist: According to one judge, this is about sexism, too. In her concurrence, Judge Marsha Berzon argues that same-sex-marriage bans also constitute sex discrimination and therefore violate Equal Protection on additional grounds.

In some respects, Berzon’s concurrence was nothing new. Since the beginning of the fight for marriage equality, advocates have argued that a failure to allow same-sex couples to wed amounts to sex discrimination. This argument has, with a couple of notable exceptions, failed in courts. The Hawaii Supreme Court used this logic in 1994 when it issued the first decision in the U.S. for marriage equality (later nullified by a state constitutional amendment), and the argument has only succeeded in a Utah federal district court since then.

The formalist argument is that such bans classify on the basis of sex in a very basic way: In states where a man cannot marry a man, he is deprived of this right by virtue of his sex. That is, were the man a woman, he would have the right to marry his mate.

Let’s take the highlighted portions in order. The phrase “marriage-equality” is a marketing term intended to shift the focus away from the lack of an affirmative argument in favor of homosexual marriage. The fact that homosexual marriage is irrational, as a matter of former logic, is the reason. Similarly, same-sex-marriage bans are nonsensical since you cannot ban something that cannot and does not exist. It is akin to claiming there is a unicorn ban.

The third highlighted portion is why untethering yourself from objective reality leads to trouble. Humans come in one of two sexes, male and female. These are biological facts as axiomatic as gravity. Implying that people who act in ways contrary to the biology have created a third sex category should be grounds for commitment in the local asylum. The reason the state cannot issue a marriage license to two males is the same reason they don’t issue driver’s licenses to leprechauns.

The final bit it emblematic of most self-described advocates. They never bother to learn why things are as they are and they never learn the opposing arguments. The mind of the fanatic knows only that which supports the object of his fanaticism. Those who oppose these changes to the legal definition of marriage do so in defense of an institution that has served Western people well since the Franks first imposed it in the fifth century. Turning it into a roommate agreement, something that already exists, is nothing but a veiled attempt to destroy another pillar of civilization.

I’m tempted to say that these fanatics rally to homosexual marriage because they get caught up in the emotion of joining a mass movement. But, that’s just not the case. The two lesbians who wrote that Atlantic piece are incapable of reasoning through any of this, which is why they latch onto buzzwords and jargon. It let’s someone else do their thinking.

 

The Mark of Gideon

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It used to be that you needed permission to record someone. Most states required both parties of a telephone call, for instance, to consent to it being recorded. You could not film someone and use it without their permission. The general principal being that you own your body and your words. You could, therefore, ban people from bringing cameras into your business or into your show if you were a performer. In the olden times, I recall seeing people dragged out of concerts because they smuggled in a camera.

But, things have become complicated. Everyone has a mobile phone and they almost always have cameras. They also have audio recorders. Every election a dozen or so pols get caught in a controversy over someone surreptitiously recording them saying bad things. Mitt Romney’s “47%” bit maybe cost him the election. Obama’s “Bibles and boomsticks” line still haunts him. Donald Sterling was tossed from the NBA because his whore recorded him saying bad things. In many cases this is illegal, but no one ever gets charged.

Anyway, this story about the Marriot getting fined for blocking cell phones got me thinking about some of the looming puzzles resulting from the spread of cheap radios. People don’t think of their cell phone as a radio, but that’s what it is. Those drones available on Amazon are possible because of cheap and effective radios. The amount of data we can send and receive through the air is what’s changing the physical space of human existence. The whole mobile computing revolution is the consequence of cheap radios.

If a business cannot prevent you from transmitting radio signals from their property, they can’t stop you from recording them or transmitting images of their business via radio. In a weird way, eavesdropping and wiretapping have become legal. Eventually, they become ubiquitous. Because of the explosion of false rape charges, males are now recording their sexual adventures just in case this app does not prove convincing. Citizens are routinely recording cops, so much so that cops are being equipped with full time body cameras.

We’re at the point where no one owns their voice or image. You can’t have an expectation of privacy because everywhere cameras and recorders are rolling or at least assumed to be rolling. The only place that is yours and yours alone is the pace between your ears and that’s not going to be for long. Facial recognition apps will soon be cheap and everywhere.There’s a reason sci-fi writers imagined a future where the sentient beings no longer had facial expressions, I guess. The only defense of that private space will be studied lying and deception. Humans trust will fall to zero as a consequence.

Maybe Ebola is our Vegan choriomeningitis.

Pod Poeple on Ebola

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There’s an old joke about the NY Times (or any liberal broadsheet for that matter) goes something like this. A meteor is found to be headed to earth. it is big enough to wipe out all life on the planet. The NY Times runs a headline “Meteor To Destroy Earth” and a subhead of “Blacks and Women to be Harmed the Most.” I recall hearing that at least 30 years ago, maybe longer. The only thing that has changed is the transmission method. By way of example, I offer this gen form CNN.

The tragedy of Ebola is not just its staggering toll. It’s also the implicit racism that the deadly virus has spawned. The anecdotes are sickening, particularly a Reuters report this week that children of African immigrants in Dallas — little ones with no connection to Thomas Duncan, the Liberian Ebola patient who died Wednesday in a local hospital — have been branded “Ebola kids” simply because of their heritage or skin color.

In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

 In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

A Newsweek cover last month showed a picture of a chimpanzee with the headline: “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” Whatever the intent, the picture was wrong.

Turns out the story was probably wrong, too, as a Washington Post investigation revealed. The new Ebola outbreak “likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption,” the Post reported, and there is no conclusive evidence that Ebola has been passed from animals to humans. A theory on animal-to-human transmission with some limited traction centers on dead fruit bats, not chimps.

“There is virtually no chance that ‘bushmeat’ smuggling could bring Ebola to America,” the Post concluded.

But the damage has been done. And as panic deepens, the danger is that racism — on planes and public transportation, in lines, on streets, in glances — deepens further, too.

Ebola is a human tragedy, just like enterovirus D68, which causes sudden muscle weakness and severe respiratory problems, particularly among children. It has shown up in almost all the 50 states, with about 500 Americans infected so far, far more than ever. And it has begun to kill, beginning with a 4-year-old boy in New Jersey. Five new cases were reported in New Jersey alone on Tuesday. And there are no antiviral vaccines or cures. Yet enterovirus D68 is known by a scientific name and number. (Unfortunately for Africans, the Ebola virus was named after the Congolese river where the first outbreak was detected).

The saga of Thomas Duncan reflects racial perceptions. His girlfriend, Louise, whom he had reportedly been visiting in Dallas, had publicly begged for him to be given the same experimental ZMapp medication given to two (white) American missionaries who were infected in Africa and recently flown back to the United States.

“I’m just asking God and asking the American government for the same medicine they’re giving people that come from Liberia,” she said during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Please, please, please, please, help me save his life. …Talk to doctors. They’ll find means to get a medicine to cure him. He’s so young.”

Louise refused to allow her last name to be used for fear of repercussions. Unfortunately, doctors and the pharmaceutical developer said there was no longer any ZMapp left for Duncan or any other victim. But the imagery that accompanied his plight lingers: Whites can be flown to the United States or Europe at any expense, while Africans are left to die unattended on the streets of Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or now, without ZMapp, in Dallas.

“It’s easy for the world — the powerful world, who are largely non-African, non-people of color — to ignore the suffering of poor, black people,” Harvard Medical School professor Joia Mukherjee said on PRI’s “The World” last month. It’s easy, she said, to “other-ize” the Ebola crisis.

Fear too often contorts morality and humanity.

It is easy to write off this nut as just another lunatic, but there’s no reason to think she is out of step with the rest of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It is tempting to think it is just an act. The creepy meta-language is unsettling to the normal ear. Most of us never hear anyone say “other-ize” on purpose. This thing reads like a piece in the Onion so it is tempting to think it a spoof.

But, it’s not. This is how the pod people think.

 

The Madness of Jim Geraghty

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Jim Geraghty is one of the many grifters who posts at NRO. He has a special place on the site, which suggests a quid pro quo of some sort. His blog is lightly read and rarely commented upon so I can’t believe they are paying him. But, someone is paying him, unless he married a rich women. He has been banging the drum for conservatives to stop “sulking” and come out to support the various bowls of mush GOP Inc. is offering up this November. He’s been peddling the old lines from the 70’s like the “Buckley Rule” which dates back to the 60’s.

William F. Buckley was asked, in 1967, whom he would support in 1968 for U.S. president. Buckley responded with what would late be called the ‘Buckley Rule” for primary voting: “The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. If you could convince me that Barry Goldwater could win, I’d vote for him.”

You’ll note his aphorism is about the primaries. I’ll note that no one bothered to quote this line until the Bush years. That’s when GOP Inc started labeling their bowls of mush “Bill Buckley Approved” and repeating this line, omitting the bit about the primary. Buckley never advocated merely voting for the least liberal option in the general. I have no recollection of him addressing it. If one party offered up a rapist who is a communist and the other party offered up a child molester who was a libertarian, I doubt Bill Buckley would have argued you had a duty to support the child molester.

Anyway, Jim seems to have figured out these old lines about voting for the least awful option were not convincing anyone. He has been given new instructions. Now, not voting means the terrorists have won.

Take your pick; there’s no shortage of things to be outraged about. Hundreds of millions wasted on state insurance exchanges that don’t work. The IRS abuses. Lois Lerner, refusing to answer questions from Congress. No one at the State Department getting fired over the security decisions leading up to Benghazi. Assurances about Ebola that don’t pan out.

Republicans are ‘blah’ about the midterms because they’ve lost faith that winning them will make a difference. Obama’s contempt for Congress, and lack of interest in working with it on his true priorities, is obvious. He’s pledged to unilaterally rewrite immigration enforcement to suit his needs. Large chunks of Obamacare are adjusted, nullified, improvised, and revised on the fly with no change to the written law. The president begins wars without waiting for any authorization for the use of military force. The U.S. attorney general is held in contempt of Congress with no real consequence.

No one can blame conservatives for being frustrated to the point of fury. But if American rank-and-file conservatives and Republicans conclude that the game is rigged, that it’s not worth playing, and withdraw from political life . . . then that will be the ultimate triumph of this president.

Got that? if you accept reality for what it is, the bad guys win. Therefore, the only moral choice is to keep marching off to support a political party that despises you and wants you dead. The only thing missing in these missives is “or else” thrown in to make the point.

I’ll grant that Jim is never going to bite the hand that feeds him. He makes his living carrying water for the GOP. But, there comes a point when the sales pitch is not working and further attempts crass into insult. This post is insulting. The GOP’s troubles are the fault of the GOP, not Obama or the system. Even Mike Huckleberry has lost patience with his party and he is probably going to run for the nomination.

Meanwhile over in England UKIP keeps gaining ground…

The Cult of Fake Nerdism

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There is a cult like quality to the fake nerd stuff we see in the culture. A lot of these people, particularly the young ones, think they are part of a movement that will make this world like the imaginary one in sci-fi movies. The web site Tech Crunch seems to be one of their propaganda organs. It looks like they are also organizing a hajj for their followers this fall.

Haven’t gotten your tickets to TechCrunch Disrupt Europe yet? The hottest tech conference of the year is coming to London this October, and to celebrate we’re giving away another free pair of tickets to the main event. All you have to do is enter to win. We’ll randomly select the winning entry, and the winner will be notified by email.

About TechCrunch Disrupt:

    • Disrupt is one of the most anticipated technology conferences of the year.
    • We start each day with panels and one-on-one chats featuring our writers, special guest speakers, leading VCs, and fascinating entrepreneurs.
    • Each afternoon, we host the Startup Battlefield competition which culminates in six finalists taking the stage at the end of the event for a shot at winning the Disrupt Cup.
    • The event takes place from October 20 and 21 at Old Billingsgate, London, UK.

The word “disrupt” is a buzzword borrowed from economics that is very popular in the fake nerd world. Every startup begging for money peppers its prospectus with this word. The reader is supposed to think the new company is a part of the glorious future where we all live in gleaming cities run on rainbow dust, where everyone is happy and there are no poor people. The future for these people is a sanitized San Francisco without the gays.

I’ll note the picture they use. You have two sexless people who possess that innocent, Eloi quality so popular with the fake nerd crowd. The one on the left is slightly Oriental, while the one of the right is Occidental. Maybe they are boys or maybe they are girls. We’re not supposed to know. If someone used this picture for a NAMBLA campaign, no one would be surprised. That’s the creepy part of the glorious future. It’s primary appeal seems to be to men who really like boys.

Nothing Changes

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Tyler Cowen likes to pretend the world started doing interesting stuff when he started noticing it, but human relations have not changed much forever. I saw this on his site. I think he called in average is over in dating or something equally stupid.

A new dating app called Luxy matches wealthy singles…to wealthy singles. It describes itself as “Tinder, minus the poor people.” The app’s iTunes page claims members are CEOs, investors, millionaires, and fitness models. So far, there are 3,000 users, and the average male user’s income is $200,000, company spokesman Darren Shuster told Vice. Shuster also told CNN that Luxy’s rich clientele is self-regulating and the app does not (yet) enforce salary verification. “If you show up in a 20-year-old VW Bug, and request to meet at McDonald’s, you won’t last very long on LUXY,” Shuster said. “It doesn’t take long to weed out those who belong on a different kind of dating site.” The app is so controversial that the CEO’s identity is kept anonymous. “With the rise of high-speed digital dating, it’s about time somebody introduced a filter to weed out low-income prospects by neighborhood,” wrote the app’s nameless CEO in a release.

Elites have been dating within their group since we have had elites, which is to forever. The commoner marrying the prince is a fairy tale for a reason. Marrying outside your class has always been a good way to get ostracized. A lot of it is controlled by women. Females born into the elite seek out the high status males in their class. They can be quite ruthless about it, but they also have the toolset to out compete commoners.

That said, I can see this app turning into a call girl service quickly. If you’re a rich guy and can’t find a woman, you have other issues. There’s a reason for $5,000 a night hookers exist. Outside of the US, super high end “escorts” and brothels exist for wealthy clients. I recall Ben Affleck getting caught in a Vancouver brothel when he first hit it big. It was a $1,000 a throw, if I recall correctly. Maybe it was some other douche bag actor, but I’m pretty sure it was him. This app will probably turn into a a way for lonely rich guys to score a hooker without leaving their condos.

The Double Helix of Lunacy

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One of my recurring themes is the suicidal nature of Rousseau-ist cults. The double helix of the fanatic is composed of a desire to obliterate their self by swapping their identity with that of the group. The other side is the desire to get to the promised land by destroying the present, which is seen as the cage that holds the followers from reaching their goal. The nucleotides are the various fads that we see bubbling up from time time like racism, minoritism, various economic lunacies and so forth. The result is a movement that seeks to pull the roof down on human civilization.

That, paradoxically, makes it reactionary. The modern Progressive looks out at the world for that which is embraced by civilization and attacks it. They also embrace those who attack these things. Homosexuals, for example, are despised by Progressives, but they make a useful weapon against those pesky recalcitrant Christians in the hinterlands. Similarly, blacks have been a useful weapon in the assault on traditional Anglo-Saxon organizational traditions.

Islam, the mirror of Liberalism, is another useful lever to use on the foundation stones of civilization. Progressives have a tough time with it, because Muslims have a habit of beheading people and posting the videos on-line. So, the hunt for the moderate Muslim has been a recurring motif. This story is a good example of how the natural impulse of the Left is to embrace anything that is at war with Western Culture.

The U.S. State Department endorsed on Wednesday a controversial anti-terror handbook published by Canada’s Muslim community that refers to jihad as “noble” and urges law enforcement to avoid using terms such as “Islamic extremism.”

The handbook, published earlier this month by two Canadian Muslim community organizations, was so controversial that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) flatly rejected the manual and ordered its officers not to use it.

Yet the State Department’s official anti-terrorism Twitter feed, called Think Again Turn Away, appeared to endorse the controversial handbook on Twitter and linked to a positive article about it.

The handbook, titled United Against Terrorism, has become a contentious issue for the RCMP since its release. Several sections of the guide instruct Muslim community members not to cooperate with police while others claim jihad “is a noble concept.”

The RCMP ultimately decided to reject the book, citing its “adversarial tone.”

“After a final review of the handbook, the RCMP could not support the adversarial tone set by elements of the booklet and therefore directed RCMP Manitoba not to proceed with this initiative,” the police force said in a statement posted on its website.

The handbook itself recommends that “intelligence and law enforcement officials” should “avoid terms such as ‘Islamist terrorism’, ‘Islamicism’, and ‘Islamic extremism’ in favor of more accurate terms such as ‘al Qaeda inspired extremist,’” according to one section of the handbook, which still bears RCMP’s official logo.

Law enforcement officials also are told to “discontinue any inappropriate information gathering techniques including (but not limited to) showing up at workplaces, intimidating newcomers, questioning individuals religiosity, and discouraging legal representation,” according to the handbook.

The term “jihad” also is not appropriate to use, according to the handbook, a copy of which was first published by Canada’s CBC News.

“Do not refer to terrorists as ‘jihadis,’” the manual states. “This only emboldens them and gives them a legitimate status in the eyes of the vulnerable. Terrorism is not jihad. Jihad is a noble concept in Islam.”

Other sections tell the Muslim community that they are under no obligation to speak to the police about individuals who may be suspected of having extremist ties.

“The  tweet you are referring to features a repost of information from a Globe and Mail report on a new booklet produced by the RCMP and two Islamic groups,” said State Department spokeswoman Carolyn Glassman. “CSCC was simply sharing information about a new product related to counterterrorism. Our reposting does not connote an endorsement.”

The State Department’s endorsement of the guidebook struck some Twitter users as curious. This is not the first time that the State Department has run into trouble as a result of it tweets.

The department’s Counterterrorism Bureau (CT Bureau) was forced to issue multiple apologies earlier this year after it endorsed on Twitter a radical Muslim cleric who backed a fatwa calling for the murder of U.S. troops.

Terrorism analyst and reporter Patrick Poole said that the State Department’s tweet of the controversial handbook is a sign of what he called its disjointed policies.

“This is a testament to how absurd this administration’s counter-terrorism policies have become—promoting a publication the Canadian government has publicly rejected because they realized this booklet would do more to radicalize than to actually deradicalize,” he said.

“From letting members of designated terrorist groups into the White House, backing the Muslim Brotherhood in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, responding to demands of Islamic groups to purge counter-terror training materials, to endorsing extremist Islamic clerics like Sheikh Bin Bayyah only then to have to apologize, and now this,” he said. “To describe it as a series of missteps is a gross understatement. This is a coordinated campaign of counter-terror catastrophe.”