Monthly Archives: October 2014

Just In Time For The Election!

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On fairly regular basis cops shoot black guys. Most of the time it is justified. Sometimes not, but hardly anyone bothers to notice. In big election years, however, the rulers take note as it is is a good way to gin up the black vote. Ferguson was a good example of one such shooting wrapped in a campaign commercial. Now, just in time for the election, we have another and right next door in St. Louis!

The fatal shooting of an 18-year-old black man in south St. Louis by an off-duty police officer sparked a night of unrest in a city still reeling from the August slaying of an unarmed man in nearby Ferguson.

Wednesday’s shooting happened at about 7:30 p.m. in the city’s Shaw Neighborhood, and involved an officer working a department-approved secondary job for a private security company, Police Chief Sam Dotson said at an early-morning news conference.

The officer approached a group of men. One of the men took off running, Dotson said, so the officer pursued. Dotson said the suspect approached the officer in an “aggressive” manner, with a physical altercation occurring. The man then turned and fired three rounds at the officer before his gun jammed, Dotson said.

The officer, who was not injured, returned fire, shooting 17 times and fatally wounding the man, Dotson said..

A gun was recovered at the scene. The officer was placed on administrative leave, as per department policy, police said.

Police have not identified the officer or the man he killed.

The incident comes nearly two months to the day after the police shooting of Michael Brown, 18, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, located about 20 miles away. Brown’s shooting sparked weeks of protests and spawned national discourse about police use of force.

Some of the people protesting recently in Ferguson were seen in St. Louis after Wednesday’s shooting, Dotson said.

“Tensions in the region are very high,” Dotson said. “Any police officer use of force certainly will draw attention.”

St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, who documented the turmoil in Ferguson after Brown’s Aug. 9 shooting death, reflected on the region’s renewed anguish.

“At the scene of yet another young man’s death,” he wrote on Twitter. “This happens too often in our city. It’s a crisis that we should all be concerned about.”

Activists took to the streets of St. Louis overnight, marching and chanting, seeking answers.

Some police vehicles were damaged during the protests, with windows smashed, Dotson said.

People also shared their frustration on social media, with #shawshooting the most popular national trending topic on Twitter.

A couple of problems. The black victim shot at the officer. The neighborhood looks rather white. Shaw appears to be one of those areas of the city that the SWPL’s are clawing back from nature. It’s 57% white according to the census and it has a very active community association. Those are all the signs of ethnic cleansing. The SWPL’s move in and organize so they can use the levers of government to drive out the unwanted. They do that by pressuring landlord to upgrade their properties, thus having to upgrade their tenants.

But, once the SWPL-ville Times choppers in some foreign correspondents to report on the case, I’m sure they will have figured out how to incorporate this into the narrative, linking it to Ferguson. Speaking of which, that grand jury has been at it for a long time now. I would assume the Democratic National Committee put in a request to have them file a no bill in the next week or two. That way the resulting riot will coincide with the home stretch of the election.

 

Or Else!

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One of things most people learn early in life is the danger of finishing a demand with the words “or else.” There’s always some chance the other party calls your bluff. Most academics don’t understand this simple reality. They especially don’t understand the risks of saying it to your boss.

The General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, the nation’s oldest Episcopal seminary, seemed to be regaining its footing after almost having to seek bankruptcy protection in 2010. It sold off some valuable real estate — its leafy campus in Chelsea is just steps from the High Line — and hired a new dean and president, the Rev. Kurt H. Dunkle, who promised to make the struggling institution a “joyful, thankful and useful” place.

A year after his arrival, however, the seminary has fallen into turmoil. Eight of its 10 full-time faculty members walked off the job on Friday to protest what they described in letters to the school’s board of trustees as Mr. Dunkle’s overly controlling management style, his habit of making vulgar and offensive remarks, and his frequent threats to demote or fire those who disagreed with him.

The work stoppage, faculty members said, was intended to force a dialogue with the board and, ideally, to lead to the firing of Mr. Dunkle. Instead, the tactic backfired. On Monday, the board dismissed the eight faculty members, leaving the seminary’s roughly 140 students, a month into their term, without professors to teach them.

“It’s a really difficult situation; it’s chaotic,” said Alexander Barton, 26, who entered the seminary this fall. “And as a student, it’s hard to see what is true and what is not.”

A note on Tuesday from Mr. Dunkle to the students, reprinted on Episcopal Café, a blog, explained that about half of the classes were in session as the school scrambled to find qualified personnel for the other classes. Students have taken to social media to express their dismay, often siding with the faculty. Dozens of faculty and clergy members from other seminaries have signed a petition asking that the professors be reinstated.

How an internal management dispute behind seminary walls turned into a mass dismissal seems to be a tale of hardball negotiating tactics gone awry, and mistrust between the faculty, the dean and the board of trustees. The situation is being followed widely in the Episcopal world, which has recently seen at least one other seminary, the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., mired in a similar controversy.

In Manhattan, the seminary faculty members are taking legal action to keep their jobs, arguing that it is illegal to fire striking workers who have made legitimate complaints. They also face potential eviction, because most of them live on the seminary’s grounds. Mr. Dunkle declined to comment.

Speaking at a meeting at their lawyer’s office on Tuesday night, the eight professors said that problems began soon after the appointment of Mr. Dunkle. One early rift came over his decision to end the daily celebration of Mass, an age-old fixture of seminary life. This was done over the unanimous objection of the faculty.

Last winter, students began sending letters to board members to complain, both about the end of the daily Mass and other changes they found disruptive, such as the decision to move morning prayers to 10 a.m. from 8. “We no longer begin our day in prayer. It’s now a midmorning thing to do … like getting coffee,” wrote one student, William L. Ogburn, who posted his letter online.

The faculty members also started to keep a list of offensive statements they said Mr. Dunkle was making to them.

He once described Asian people as “slanty eyed,” the professors reported to the board in a detailed letter on Sept. 17. At a meeting last spring, Mr. Dunkle compared the technical side of theological education to “looking up women’s skirts,” the letter said. He said that he did not want the seminary to be known as the “gay seminary.” He once commented to a female faculty member that he “loved vaginas,” according to the letter.

He began micromanaging, keeping statistics, for example, on how often faculty members attended lunch, the professors said. Instead of feeling like a communal place of Christian living, “suddenly it has felt progressively like I’m in junior high school, or maybe on a plantation,” said David J. Hurd, a black professor of church music who has been on the faculty since 1976.

Though the professors said they had alerted board members to the brewing problems numerous times, the chairman of the board, Bishop Mark S. Sisk, said that the board felt blindsided by the severity of the Sept. 17 complaints.

Bishop Sisk said the board did not immediately schedule a meeting with the faculty members, because in their letter, they had seemed to make a series of untenable demands that trustees interpreted as preconditions for a meeting. The professors asked that they be given immediate oversight over the schedule and program at the school. They also wanted to choose which board members they met with.

“If Dean Dunkle continues in his current position, then we will be unable to continue in ours,” the eight faculty members wrote.

The board responded several days later that it would immediately begin an investigation of the dean’s behavior. But the faculty members, acting on the advice of their lawyer, Andrew Hoffmann, wrote back on Sept. 25 that they felt the investigation was beside the point, that they had formed a union and that they were stopping work the next day unless steps toward meeting their other requests were taken.

That incensed the board. “I think the trustees felt, who are these people?” Bishop Sisk said. “They are using the students as pawns, really, in a larger agenda that they have of raising their concerns.”

It was then that the board decided that the letters amounted to a resignation, though the word resignation was never used. “They kept saying, ‘If you don’t do these things, we can’t keep our position,’ ” Bishop Sisk said. “Well, we thought, ‘We can’t do those things, so you don’t have your position.’ ” On Sept. 30, the board wrote a public letter saying the resignations had been accepted.

Ooops!

Information Asymmetry

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I’ve written in the past that public debt will one day be banned in the reforms that come after the great collapse. I’m half joking about the great collapse stuff, but history says we are due for a Bronze Age Collapse. The reason I think the banning of public debt will be on the list of reforms is we keep seeing these stories about American cities being swallowed up by debt payments.

Among the many ideas the Chicago Teachers Union have come up with over the years to save big money or generate gobs of new revenue for our cash-strapped city, a favorite involves what they like to call “toxic” interest-rate swaps deals.

Here’s the perennial claim, which is making a comeback as CTU President Karen Lewis contemplates a run for mayor:

The city and the school system have thrown away hundreds of millions of dollars after being duped by big banks into signing deals that locked in excessive interest payments. If only the city would take legal action, CTU again argued in a letter to the mayor last month, the money could be recouped and spent on city services and in classrooms.

Cities went out and made deals with Wall Street that looked good in the moment. They freed up cash to buy votes and pay off cronies. States did similar things with synthetic debt instruments like tobacco bonds. All across the country we see examples of states and municipalities struggling with bad debts. That’s not bad debt owed to them but bad debts incurred by previous administrations.

The libertarians simply shrug and say they should suffer. The neocons produce 5,000 page plans to restructure the debt using more synthetic securities cooked up by their brethren on Wall Street. Liberals want ta debt jubilee. That’s merely a short term fix that destroys the bond markets for a generation. If the court ever did such a thing, the world financial system would collapse in a hour because of the trillions of derivatives that would be effected.

In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case.

The men on Wall Street who broker these deals are super smart and know their business better than anyone, other than maybe the guys at the other banks doing the same deals. The folks running pension funds are either men and women lacking the smarts to work at the big banks or they are not sociopaths. They are usually beholden to the local pols and therefore share their short term motives. They are easy pickings for the sharpies on Wall Street.

There’s no fixing this. In fact, we used to know this. Pension fund managers used to spend their days reading the newspaper and banging their secretaries because all they had to do was buy T-Bills and high end corporate bonds. Then the economics professions lowered interest rates to zero and suddenly the guys with bad comb overs had to start playing the market and doing interest swap deals .

The solution is a simple one. Ban borrowing by municipal governments. This solves the temptation to play games with public money and public debt. If Chicago had to budget based solely on its tax base, you would have a different city. Karen Lewis would not be head of the teacher union, because there would  not be a teacher union. You can afford barnacles like Karen Lewis when someone else is paying her salary.

Exoteric Nonsense

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Steve Sailer often says that people in the main stream press know what they are saying is nonsense, but they say it anyway because that’s just the way it is. The really smart ones use subtle language to lampoon the prevailing pieties. It could be, but that is probably just a way for him to not face reality. Media people certainly seem like they really believe their claims. Maybe they are really good at pretending, but it seems like a gratuitous assertion. Like for instance in this piece.

America is widely considered a global leader in economics, business, and culture. But when it comes to education, the U.S. seems to be falling behind. In the 2012 PISA results, we ranked 27th in math, 17th in reading, and 20th in science. Our high school graduation rates are ranked 18th internationally.

A month ago, I had the pleasure of spending two weeks in Korea and Japan, meeting with leading education, technology, and telecommunications companies, as well as a ministry of education interested in Knewton adaptive learning technology.

I couldn’t help but compare the education systems in these countries to that in the United States. Globally, Korea and Japan have some of the highest rates of academic achievement. In the 2012 PISA survey, Korea was ranked fifth in math and reading and seventh in science; Japan was ranked seventh in math and fourth in reading and science. Japan has the second highest high school graduation rate internationally, with Korea in fifth place.

It’s obvious that Korea and Japan both value education enormously. But so does the United States. We regard education as a basic human right.

So what’s driving this huge discrepancy?

Some say it’s cultural. In America, we prize exceptionalism; in Korea and Japan, the focus is on raising the mean. Others point to socioeconomic inequality; schools can’t fix poverty. American K-12 education is controlled at the local level, making it difficult to implement programs widely. We’re paralyzed by politicized debates over standards, testing, and budgets.

But I think there’s something more important at play here: the way we treat teachers. In Korea and Japan, teachers are revered and paid accordingly. Top students aspire to the profession.

We need to start treating teachers with the respect they deserve. Imagine if Apple, Google, Facebook, and the country’s top tech companies tried to recruit employees without offering them great pay, perks, top-of-the-line technology, development opportunities, and smart colleagues. It would be unthinkable.These companies have spent the time and investment to figure out exactly what it takes to get top people to want to work for them — and, once they’re there, to stay.

Once you correct for race, America’s schools do just fine. Our Koreans score the same as the Koreans in Korea. Our Mauritanians do as well as Mauritanians wherever it is Mauritanians live. Replace 15% of Japan’s population with Chechens and see what happens to their overall test scores and crime rates. Does this guy know this? There is no evidence to suggest he does know it..

Now, with a little research you can find that Mr. Liu seems to have ripped off his claims from a group called the Varkey Gems Foundation. You can also look up teacher pay from these guys who do the hard work of tabulating this stuff. Japan’s average pay, in US dollars, is $43,775 and South Korea is $43,874. The US is at $44,917. So much for his claims about how we pay our teachers compared to the Orient. The US, by the way, is the second highest pay rate, just behind Singapore. You’ll notice in the HuffPo report that the US also does just as well on the respect scale.

Further, the average pay for a software engineer is $69, 215 per year. It is also an infinitely more difficult job requiring an IQ at least one standard deviation higher than a school teacher. Education majors score at the bottom of the SAT for incoming freshmen. Many struggle with basic math.

Many states were forced to scrap their teacher exams because the teachers kept flunking. In some cities, teachers cannot be fired resulting in perverts and degenerates on the payroll. None of this is tolerated in fields like software engineering. There are far fewer people with the IQ to do software than teach gym at the elementary school. That’s why the software job pays better.

The Moron’s Veto

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Social media is all about getting as many stupid people as possible together so they can bellow at anyone and everyone. Giving the dumb fraction a veto over the rest of us will go down as a primary reason the West collapsed. Here’s example eleventy billion.

The Jaguars have apologized for their mascot using the Ebola epidemic to mock the Pittsburgh Steelers’ Terrible Towels during Sunday’s game between the teams at EverBank Field on Sunday afternoon.

Jaxson de Ville held up a handwritten sign during the fourth quarter of the game that read “TOWELS CARRY EBOLA” while carrying a yellow Terrible Towel in his right hand. Jaguars president Mark Lamping said the team had no prior knowledge of the sign and is handling the matter internally.

“Improvisation and humor have both been key elements to the character of Jaxson de Ville, especially when he performs at home games,” Lamping said. “On Sunday, the person who has played Jaxson de Ville over the past 20 seasons made an extremely poor decision in that regard.

“The team was unaware of this inappropriate sign, which was hand-made by Jaxson during the fourth quarter of yesterday’s game, until after it had been displayed. We are handling the matter internally and taking it very seriously. We extend our sincerest apologies to anyone who was offended.”

Apologizing to people for their stupidity is madness. Spending a minute of time on what was a silly joke at a game should be evidence at a commitment hearing. The correct response here was “go bleep yourself” when the scolds and pests complained about the mascot. But, that would require perspective.

Curtis Dvorak has been playing de Ville since the mascot’s inception in 1996. The picture of the mascot holding the sign went viral and drew the ire of many on social media Sunday night.

Ebola is a viral disease that is highly infectious and spread by contact with bodily fluids. It has a mortality rate of nearly 90 percent. According to the World Health Organization Ebola response roadmap update from Friday, there have been nearly 8,000 probable, confirmed or suspected cases of the disease in the African nations of Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

There has been one confirmed case of Ebola in the United States, in Dallas.

Think about the intended audience of this column. These are people so intensely stupid the writer is required to explain what Ebola is to them. Frankly, if they are that stupid, what are the chances they can read?

“They” Are Always Losers

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Living in a time when the prevailing civic religion treats the past as a far away planet can be exasperating. For example, when the people who have been in charge of race relations pretend they have just stumbled upon the issue. When you point out that they have been bitching about the problem for 70 years and they have been in charge of fixing it for 50 of those years, they call you a racist. It’s as if they suffer from a Irish Alzheimer’s. They only remember the grudges. But, it is not without its fascinating strangeness. Here’s a good example.

Whatever happened to good old American know-how?

The nation that invented modern management seems to be suffering a crisis of competence.

The Secret Service can’t protect the White House. Public health authorities can’t get their arms around a one-man Ebola outbreak. The army we trained in Iraq collapsed as soon as it was attacked by Islamic extremists, and our own veterans can’t get the care they need at VA hospitals. And, lest we forget, it was only a year ago that the White House rolled out its national health insurance program, only to see its website grind to a halt.

Yes, you can argue that these problems all have different causes.

But it’s hard not to conclude that something basic is amiss in Washington.

It’s like sports fans when their team loses. “They” lost the game. Or, “they” need new management. When the team wins, then it is “we won.” Liberals  have been in charge of Washington since FDR, but now that it is coming apart, “they” have let us down, as if they are just passive observers.

“This isn’t a partisan problem,” argues Linda Bilmes, a public policy scholar at Harvard’s Kennedy School who worked in the Clinton administration — although she does fault the people at the top. “It hasn’t been a priority under this president to appoint good managers to top positions, but it wasn’t a priority under George W. Bush either.”

When things go wrong under a Democrat, it is a systemic problem. When they go wrong under a Republican, it is a failure of conservatism, capitalism, etc. The goalposts are on skates and they are moved around by the fanatics as required.

One basic problem, she said, is that the federal government’s personnel system is mired in antiquated civil service rules. “You can’t move people around; you can’t pay more to retain your best people; you can’t easily get rid of people you need to get rid of.” Additionally, she noted, “the pay at the top of the scale is inadequate to attract the best and the brightest into government, and as the old saying goes, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys. It’s very demoralizing.”

This is a common malady of modern times. They never stop to wonder why we have all of these rules. The modern reformer never bothers to ask why things are as they are, they just assume they sprung from nothingness. Therefore, driving a bulldozer through the existing order is always acceptable. I’m not defending the civil service rules, but there’s a reason for all of it. In almost all cases, the rules exist to prevent theft.

The other problem is the rank acceptance of corporatism. Government should never be attracting the best and the brightest. Government is a necessary evil, not the end point of human civilization. The modern mandarin, however, cerebrates the custodial state with the same degree of enthusiasm as the typical corrections officer embraces the drug war. In both cases, the expansion of the state means more opportunities for the barnacles to attach themselves to society.

In her view, Obama never made management a high priority — and it shows.

Until the Veterans Affairs scandal erupted this year, for example, there wasn’t a full-time implementation officer in the White House to monitor the performance of federal agencies.

“This administration has been disconnected from the government it’s supposed to be running,” Kamarck charges (and, remember, she’s a Democrat). “They seem to view the federal workforce as hostile territory. They don’t engage with it…. They don’t have a strong system of getting info from the agencies to the president.”

 It seems like they have no trouble getting the IRS to go after their enemies. They had no trouble using the FBI and NSA to get dirt on people they wanted to leverage. This just sounds like a Clinton toady taking shots at Team Obama as Clinton gets ready for another run at the White House. But, it is a fascinating look into the minds of a cult member. As I wrote above, they are a lot like sports fans. “They” are losing, but a few years ago “we” were winning.

Liberal Eugenics

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One of the things fairly well known in black America is that abortion and “family planning” is about reducing the number of black babies. This should come as no surprise, as liberal whites have been quite explicit about it since Roe. Abortion Inc has been targeting black neighborhoods for a long time.

It’s a pretty good business for rackets like Planned Parenthood. They get paid to round up the customers and then they get paid for the service. That’s why the Left is obsessed with state funded abortion. It’s eugenics with a smiley face. The Left gets to pretend it is about health and safety, but it’s really about ethnic cleansing and eugenics. This article in the Science section, of all place, of the NY Times is emblematic.

Marlice House was determined to take a different path from her mother, who had gotten pregnant with her at 17.

“I do not want that to be me,” she said.

So when Ms. House heard about a study offering sexually active teenagers in St. Louis free birth control, she signed up.

Three in 10 girls and women in the United States become pregnant before 20, a rate significantly higher than that in many other rich countries. The 14- to 19-year-old participants in the study Ms. House joined, nearly half of whom had already had an unintended pregnancy, were offered free birth control and counseled on the benefits of long-acting contraceptives like intrauterine devices and implants, methods used by fewer than 5 percent of teenagers.

Overwhelmingly, Ms. House and other teenagers — 72 percent of the 1,404 participants — chose long-acting birth control. And it had an enormous effect.

Pregnancy and abortion rates plunged to less than a quarter the rates of sexually experienced teenagers nationally, the group most comparable to those in the study. Rates were also significantly lower than those among all teenagers.

There’s not much new about this. In the 1970’s the Left was excited by the idea of making newly available drugs like Norplant mandatory for welfare recipients. The Left has learned from past attempts to exterminate black people, so they couch it in language of choice and opportunity. But, they can’t help themselves, as they put a picture of a black girl on the article.

They also seem to be trying to draw in the anti-abortion people by claiming their new eugenics program reduces abortions. They repeat that a few times in the article. It’s a common error on the Left. Abortion, for them, is all about abortion. For pro-life people, abortion is just one aspect of the larger fight over human life, hence the name of their cause. The Left always projects its manias onto the wider world.

Come to think of it, that may be why they put a black face on their eugenics cause. They just assume their enemies are the bogeymen they imagine. They think the undifferentiated other outside their cult is shot through with racism. Therefore, they can market their eugenics program to the rabble by (wink, wink) targeting the blacks.

Gaia is a Fascist

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The climate change cult is very weird. This is a good example.

Climate change could affect the ratio of human males to human females that are born in some countries, a new study from Japan suggests. The researchers found that male fetuses may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate change.

Since the 1970s, temperature fluctuations from the norm have become more common in Japan, and at the same time there has been an increase in the deaths of male fetuses relative to the number of deaths of female fetuses in that country, according to the study.

Over this period, the ratio of male to female babies born in the country has been decreasing, meaning there have been fewer and fewer male babies born relative to the number of female babies born.

Got that. Your lawn mower will result in a race of Amazons enslaving men!

There’s one of these “studies” every day it seems. All are intended to add another log to the scare fire these strange sub-cults use to fuel their movement. Smoking used to be like this. Twenty years ago there were scare stories about how smoking was making everyone’s penis small. It is amusing how Mashable puts a pic of a retarded looking kid at the top of the story. Nice touch.

Then this in Maggies Farm last week.

Last week’s People’s Climate March drew 400,000 people onto the streets of Manhattan and a great deal of international attention to a subject of dire urgency. But some were skeptical about the event’s overall significance. “The march slogan was, ‘to change everything, we need everyone,’ which is telling, because it won’t change everything, because it didn’t include everyone,” wrote David Roberts of Grist. “Specifically, it won’t change American politics because it didn’t include conservatives.” True enough.

First off, the picture is classic. Imagine instead of sunflower standards they had eagles clutching a bundle of wooden rods and their shirts were black instead of orange. Same crowd, different uniforms. Second, overstating the crowd size is common with these neo-fascist groups. It’s argumentum ad populum with a lusty “or else” tacked onto it. Notice also the use of the word “conservative” to mean those outside their movement.

If there weren’t such a stark divide between American conservatives and almost everyone else on the question of the existence and importance of climate change — a divide that can approach 40 points on some polling questions — the political situation would be very different. So if any progress on climate change is going to be made through the American political system — apart from executive orders by Democratic presidents — it is going to have to somehow involve convincing a lot of conservatives that yes, climate change is a threat to civilization.

The stark divide between “conservatives and almost everyone else” is another way claiming they are an ascendant movement about to sweep aside the deniers, accept for the recalcitrant conservatives. Hitler used the same phraseology with the Jews. It is a tactic that dates to the dawn of written history. The fact that the deniers are a sizable majority suggests these people are following the path of The Seekers.

How do you do that? The answer has more to do with psychology than politics.

The practice of tailoring a political message to a particular group is commonplace, of course. But the climate activist community has broadly failed to understand just how differently conservatives and liberals see the world on certain issues, and, as a result, just how radically different messages targeting conservatives should look.

The first step would be to recognize “conservative” is a world like capitalism. It is used by the hive minded as a label for those outside the hive. In this case, it simply means non-liberals.

“Although climate scientists update, appropriately, their models after ten years of evidence, climate-science communicators haven’t,” said Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale who studies how people respond to information challenging their beliefs. Luckily, social and political psychologists are on the case. “I think there’s an emerging science of how we should talk about this if we’re going to be effective at getting any sort of movement,” said Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford.

They should probably start by talking about the fact global warming has been on a two decade pause. They should also think about why all of their predictions have been wrong.

It’s worth pointing out, of course, that for many conservatives (and liberals), the current debate about climate change isn’t really about competing piles of evidence or about facts at all — it’s about identity. Climate change has come to serve as shorthand for which side you’re on, and conservatives tend to be deeply averse to what climate crusaders represent (or what they think they represent). “The thing most likely to make it hard to sway somebody is that you’re trying to sway them,” said Kahan.

This reminds me of how liberals, when exposed to Eric Hoffer’s True Believer, think he is talking about right-wingers. It is certainly true that most think the warmists are more than a bit nuts. They latched onto to something that is a mix of Old Testament prophesy, new age paganism and political fascism. Facts and evidence are not important to these people. It is about identity. That’s why they are the ones in the uniforms in that picture.

I Thought That Was Racist

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Chris Mathews, like many on the Left, went insane during the Bush years and never recovered. Instead of getting proper medical care, he was given a TV show. Despite living in the only whites-only town in the Baltimore – Washington area, he has spent the last six years lecturing us about race. His central claim is that all mention of Obama outside the Left is motivated by race. Now, Mathews is calling Obama a shuffling, well, he’s calling him lazy. I’ll leave it at that.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: Let’s get tough here. Is this the problem of a second term that presidents get lazy, intellectually lazy, and cut off from the country and they start picking deputies for jobs instead of looking for the best people? The lazy thing to do is somebody leaves, you promote their deputy. This is, I think, part of the endemic problem of second terms. They don’t go out and mix with people, find new people, new hotshots to fill these jobs. They just keep promoting the person whose turn it is and they’re not as good as the person they picked the first time…

MATTHEWS: And before you get me accusing this president of being physically lazy. I think there is a social kind of laziness. Refusing to reach out and meet a lot new people and check a lot of possibilities. Don’t just go with the next person in line. And I really think this second term cabinet is not up to the first term cabinet because they never are. And you know that, Roger. They just never are.

Kennedy went out and met people like [Robert] McNamara and [Dean] Rusk and he went looking for them and he put them into the best slots he could. And he talked them into it, he recruited people he didn’t even know [and] he recruited them. Presidents should go out and look for people. They should be practicing affirmative action all the time in leading or else they get atrophied into that little world of people like Valerie [Jarrett] and Mrs. Obama and you’re just listening to the same voices all the time.

I know it is a rigorous demand but it’s a real one. Or else you’re going to get smaller as your presidency goes on and therefore more vulnerable to surprises.

The hilarious thing about the Left’s elevation of Obama to the top spot is how little they know about the man. In his two autobiographies, he went on at length about being lazy. He has said this in interviews. He has gone into detail about how he gets bored with all sorts of things like showing up for work and listening to advisors. Yet, the Left is always surprised that Obama is what he says he is. it’s almost as if they really don’t care about Obama the man and just see the black guy. Like they can’t get past his skin color…

The Madhouse

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This is going to become more common..

It had been a relatively quiet policy debate until the full-page ad appeared in the local newspaper. “A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter,” it said. “Are you OK with that?”

The ad, placed by a socially conservative group in Minnesota, was meant to snap attention to a proposal to allow transgender students to play on teams based on their preferred gender rather than the sex assigned to them at birth.

It appears to have worked. More than 100 community members flooded a meeting this week near Minneapolis, and thousands more sent e-mails. In response, the quasi-public body governing high school sports in Minnesota decided to delay a vote on a new policy covering sports participation by transgender students. Members of the board of directors said they needed more time to study the issue.

The policy, which they now plan to vote on in December, was an attempt to grapple with a question that has bedeviled many states: How do you deal with the growing number of children identifying as transgender who want to participate in the highly gender-specific worlds of high school sports and extracurricular activities?

When the Left stopped using the word sex to mean male and female and started using the word “gender”, you know we were headed for trouble. Back then, the madness was about denying the obvious differences between boys and girls. Hilariously, they claimed that sex was a social construct, not a biological one. In order to mask the madness, they changed the language. If you let the lunatics control the language, everyone eventually sounds like a lunatic.

The fact that “growing number of children identifying as transgender” does not set off any alarm bells speaks volumes. Science tells us that human beings evolved very slowly over thousands of generations of trial and error. It does not happen overnight. Therefore, “new” traits and new “trends” are never new. Either we just discovered a way to notice or we are kidding ourselves, pretending the old is new. In the case of children suffering from the mental disease of “transgenerism” the latter is the most likely answer. Turning a mental disorder into a fad is almost as crazy as thinking you are the off-spring of a human-alien coupling.

Those crazy people I references at the start have been handed control of society. Now it is the sane who are tormented, wondering if they are the ones losing their minds because they don’t think reality is infinity negotiable. If you don’t want a homosexual taking your son into the woods, you’re a child abusing nut. If you think your daughter should not be forced to shower with the boys, you”re a sexist. If you punch a woman in the face, you’re a misogynistic monster, but if you come to that woman’s aid, you’re also a misogynistic monster.

In the madhouse of modern America, this makes sense, What’s wrong with you?