Monthly Archives: November 2014

I Was Right

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I wrote the other day that the Rolling Stone tale about a rape victim at the University of Virginia sounded fake. In order for it to be true requires a whole lot of other things to be true that are implausible. The most obvious being that a university where victimology is a mandatory religion would callously suppress stories about their secret rape culture. It also requires me to believe that upper-middle class Eloi, who spend their days playing Quidditch, are barbaric rapist at night. That and the story sounds like a passage from Lena Dunham psuedo-biography.

It looks like Steve Sailer is on the story now. And some guy I never heard of is on the trail too.

The latter blogger makes some good factual points. He also touches on what I wrote and that is the Rolling Stone story reads like a bad after school special. It is what people imagine goes one with their worst enemies when no one is around to record it. In this case, the rape culture fanatics in the womyn’s studies program who never get invited to frat parties. They think all men are rapists, particularly the ones who never look their way.

I have some familiarity with the University of Virginia. It is one of the “New Ivies” and that means it is drawing from the upper-middle classes. The members of the plutocracy that live in Northern Virginia send their kids there. This is the most fragile of the fragile males for the most part. I’m talking about the kid of boys that write things like this. If anyone is getting raped in these fraternities, it is the frat brothers.

I’m reminded of the Isaac Asimov novel Foundation. The people in charge figured out how to use religion to control their more powerful enemies. They turned science into a religion and supplied the “priests” to administer the “religion” for their neighbors. The point being is that if you control the magical thoughts all people have in their heads, you effectively control the people. Today, the magical thinking in most people’s heads has to do with keeping the pale penis people from rampaging through the vulnerable. The Cult through its cadre of priests is there to protect blacks, young women, foreigners, etc.

 

 

The Left and RGIII

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Way back in the olden thymes, the assumption was that blacks were too dumb to play quarterback. Amazingly, people said this while Terry Bradshaw was leading the Steelers to championships. Before Super Bowl XIII, Cowboys linebacker Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson famously ridiculed Bradshaw by saying, “He is so dumb he couldn’t spell ‘Cat’ if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘a’.” Whether or not Bradshaw was really that dumb has always been in question, given is long run of success after his playing career.

Still, it says something about the view of the position that people thought blacks could not play quarterback. It was not just racist white people either. Blacks generally thought this too. In the movie North Dallas Forty, there’s a line about it and no one was picketing the movie theaters over it. This idea has become so dangerous today that sports people have created a meta-language to describe it without ever actually saying it. Chattering skulls will just nod at one another whenever the subject is broached.

For a long time now the goal of football at all levels is to prove that blacks are better quarterbacks than whites. It is an obsession going on at least a twenty years, starting with Donovan McNabb. He was the first black QB to come along who allegedly had the intellect to do all the things white guys could do, but also possessed the special black magic that is so highly prized in the cult. McNabb’s inability to win the big game and become the great chocolate savior was frustrating for the Left. It is why they attacked Rush Limbaugh for noticing it.

In the last decade we have had Michael Vick held up as the new model quarterback, even after he was found to be a sadistic sociopath with a taste for torturing animals. The latest crop includes Cam Newton, Colin Kapernick, Russell Wilson and Robert Griffin III. None of these guys is very good at being an NFL quarterback. Wilson is the best of the bunch, but he acts white and votes Republican so the Left has trouble lauding him as their chocolate savior.

Newton and Kapernick are obvious dumbbells who will never be great at their position. Both were just big fast guys who can run like the wind, but that’s not a great skill for quarterback. The NFL has loads of big fast guys. The shortage is with smart guys who can run a modern NFL offense. Dummies that move their lips when they read can play other positions, but not quarterback. That’s why both of them are fading from the spotlight.

Robert Griffin III was going to be different. He is smart, charismatic, has the special black magic the Left values and he was not acting white like Wilson. The Left could look past Griffin’s politics because he had dreadlocks, which the Left associates with black culture. RG3 was the poster child for the “new” NFL and the “new” quarterback. I put “new” in quotes because this is about the tenth time we have gone through this. Now, Griffin’s career may be over.

Griffin has made close to $20 million and has millions in sponsorship money coming his way so no one needs to feel sorry for him. NFL careers are short and most guys find themselves as salary men before they hit their 25th birthday. Griffin is doing just fine and will probably have a long career in sportscasting after his football career. Even after his troubles in Washington, some team will give him another shot next year and maybe he can extend his career.

In many ways Griffin is emblematic of how the Left treats blacks as ornaments, not people. Griffin is a special athlete, but he was not trained to be an NFL quarterback in college. His college ran a system that allowed him to run around as a tailback, rather than as a NFL-style quarterback. Griffin should have sat and learned for a few years before getting on the field. Instead, the pressure to have the next great black quarterback put him on the field when he was not ready and he got his legs broken up trying to be a runner in a league unkind to runners.

Griffin is emblematic of the Left ‘s view of blacks. The Left does not see them as real people and instead treats them like ornaments to decorate their halls. When a black person is useful they get to sit at the big table, but as soon as they’re no longer useful, they are dispatched. You can see it happening with Obama as the Left distances themselves from a black guy they no longer find useful. Griffin will get the same treatment now as he is balled up and thrown away by the Left of Modern Liberalism.

Rape Culture

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A decade ago or so, the sporting press was obsessed over black head coaches in football. In response, the NFL instituted the Rooney Rule, forcing owners and general managers to interview black coaching candidates. We saw a rash of black guys getting jobs and the panic subsided. No one know how many black head coaches there are now, but no one talks about it so the answer is “enough.”

The weird thing is this panic never extended to college ball, where you rarely see black head coaches. Every once in a while it gets mentioned, but you don’t see the panic. The SEC had some black coaches and that screws up the normal narrative where southern white males are blamed for everything race related. The real reason the Left never focused on college is even they have to accept that college is run by the Left. If they are going to get on colleges for not hiring black guys, they will be shouting at a mirror.

The other day NRO had a somewhat comical opinion up regarding the alleged rape culture of the University of Virginia. Rich Lowry is a UVA grad so he has an interest in the story. Rolling Stone has a long piece supposedly about a woman raped at Virginia by, wait for it, a bunch of white guys at a fraternity. The Rolling Stone reads like what liberals imagine happens in the rape culture of fraternities. It is mostly likely another hoax that is fan fiction for the the grievance set.

The reason to be skeptical is these tales contradict daily life. We’re supposed to believe that the coeds at the modern college think like coeds from Hollywood movies about coeds in the 1950’s. Five minutes around young people says that’s laughable. We’re also supposed to believe that the people running the school are callous to the victims, despite the daily parade of victims they trot around campus as a part of their haranguing of the student body.

That’s the part that makes the Rolling Stone story tough to accept. The modern college campus is a celebration of victimology. The people in charge are so far out on the Left they would make Pol Pot uncomfortable. Yet, we’re supposed to believe that they are turning a blind eye to gangs of feral white boys raping the hell out of the pretty little white girls. You’ll note the narrative never has any black people in it. The so called “rape culture” on campus looks a lot like a horror film written by the local lesbian club.

That brings us back to the black football coach issue. The piety pyramid says black guys trump white girls, gay or straight. Yet, we have the Left ignoring the black coaching story and seizing on the plight of the sorority sister. The former requires saying bad things about their coreligionists who run the schools. The latter lets them rant about faceless, nameless bogeymen and make believe victims that evoke the right kinds of emotions.

The frustrating part of this is how the modern Right rolls over for this nonsense. The professor who wrote the opinion piece for NRO should have to give back his diplomas. First, he swallows the Rolling Stone story, despite the obvious problems. Second, he cannot bring himself to look out his own window at the place he works and compare that to the imaginary world conjured in these stories.

The real madness in this new front in the war is the unstated claim at the core of the rape culture nonsense. For it to be true, rape amongst middle-class college white guys is spiking at a time when overall rape is in a steep decline. In fact, rape has dropped 58% between 1995 and 2010. Those numbers include colleges so the rape culture crowd has a math problem. But, like everything else that belches froth from the Cult, logic and reason are the first casualty.

Race Talk

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For most of my life I have found the topic of race to be uninteresting. The best we could hope for, in terms of black-white relations, is an uneasy peace between the races. A colorblind society was never going to happen because of history and nature. Humans are tribal and familial, thus making a colorblind society an impossibility anywhere on earth. Even if nature got out of the way, history would always be there. That leaves some form of uneasy peace.

The first hundred years post-slavery the peace was kept through separation. In the north that meant physical separation. Whites kept blacks in urban ghettos, away from middle-class whites, usually using working-class white ethnics as a buffer. In the South, a legal separation was the preferred method. Blacks were non-citizens living amongst the white citizens. Once the North decided the South could not keep the peace that way, the South adopted a form of northern separation.

That’s where things have sat since the Civil Rights movement. Blacks are full citizens, but there is a physical, spiritual and cultural separation from whites. Overt racism is bad for keeping the peace so whites make sure they police that on their side of the fence. In cities like Baltimore and Washington, keeping the black ghetto from spilling into tourist areas is the main job of the cops. City leaders, black and white, look the other way and tacitly accept the arrangement. It keeps the peace.

That’s what made race talk so dull for me. There was no good reason to talk about the reality of race relations, as that would violate the unwritten rules. That left the sterile banalities from the Civil Rights Movement drifting around like pot smoke in a late 60’s dorm room. People with nothing to say, but determined to say it, filled the space reserved for discussions about race.

The determination of the American Left to fashion an electoral majority around the hatred of white men has made keeping the peace impossible. Here we are with a black ruler and yet we have race riots. Whether it is true or not, the perception of the American people is that race relations are worse now. That makes ridiculous platitudes about race less tolerable. NRO’s Jonah Goldberg, has this up today.

On Tuesday, the day after it was announced that Officer Darren Wilson would not be charged in the slaying of Michael Brown, President Obama for a second time called for calm. His statement was measured, careful and responsible. He condemned violence and looting while acknowledging the legitimate concerns animating the protestors. He wasn’t all that moving or eloquent, but this might have been one of those times when swinging for the rhetorical fences wasn’t what the moment needed.

One theme he hit repeatedly, and correctly, was that the passions of many protestors are rooted in something very real. The “frustrations that we’ve seen are not just about a particular incident,” Obama said. “They have deep roots in many communities of color who have a sense that our laws are not always being enforced uniformly or fairly.”

The passion of Nazis was rooted in something real too, whatever the hell that is supposed to mean. The Hutu’s slaughter of Tutsis was rooted in something real, hatred of Tutsis. This solipsistic babble is just a passive-aggressive way to agree with one side without accepting the moral consequences. In this case, Goldberg can pretend to sympathize with the blacks, without saying they are right.

There’s no doubt that is true. As John McWhorter writes in Time magazine, “The key element in the Brown–Wilson encounter was not any specific action either man took — it was the preset hostility to the cops that Brown apparently harbored.” Officer Wilson made a legitimate request of Brown. Brown, in turn, saw no legitimacy in it and behaved recklessly.

In a community where cops are feared, resented, or reviled, it’s almost inevitable that bad things will happen when cops try to do their job, even if they do everything by the book. Moreover, to simply say that the resentment of the police is unwarranted does nothing to solve the problem. People forget that for a brief moment in August, the protests turned peaceful and law-abiding when Missouri Highway Patrol Captain Ron Johnson, an African-American from Ferguson with credibility in the neighborhood, was put in charge of policing the protests.

Eventually, thanks in large part to an influx of professional agitators, rabble-rousers, and opportunists — attracted to television cameras like ambulance chasers to a bus accident — the protests got out of hand again. But that moment was instructive.

Now, if you’ve been following the news lately — and by lately, I mean the last several years, or even decades — none of this is particularly shocking. Friction between police departments and minority communities has been part of the national conversation on race (that liberals insist hasn’t been going on) for as long as I can remember. The New York Times has been regularly covering that beat for at least half a century. It’s a major theme of movies and music. It’s a huge profit center for Al Sharpton, who doesn’t lack for influence or microphones.

Before Jonah was born, everyone knew that blacks hated the cops. There’s never been a time in America when the blacks did not hate the cops. Policing has changed a lot over the years and the makeup of police departments has changed too. Even where most cops are black, the blacks hate the cops. Blacks especially hate black cops.

Of course, Jonah never bothers to ask why blacks hate cops or if their hatred is warranted. That leads to uncomfortable revelations about race, which are forbidden by the people he aims to please. Instead he veers off into babbling about the national conversation, elite chattering skulls and so forth. More nonsense wafting about the room for no good reason.

That’s what is making the race discussion interesting. One side is trying to keep the peace by sticking with the threadbare platitudes. The other is trying to stir up war by misrepresenting common everyday events so that blacks riot. You can’t have both of these for very long. Either the Left backs off and finds another way to get the black vote out in force or the race discussion moves from the banal to the painfully serious.

Modern Horoscopes

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I always get a kick out of these things because they are mostly bullshit. If you go through the questions, they tell you the combination of famous people you most resemble. None of the famous people are monsters or evil. The idea is to flatter the user, not horrify them. Still, I’d be tempted to have results that said the user had a brain like Hitler or Jack the Ripper, but I’d be a terrible astrologer. Here is my result:

Leonardo of Arc
You have an active imagination and free-spirited side, which means you dream big, believe anything can happen, and are open to new experiences that might present opportunities to learn and explore. You get these traits from Leonardo da Vinci, the genius artist, inventor and mathematician whose talent is still considered to be one of the greatest in the world.

But you’re also very disciplined, and have a strong work ethic that grounds your personality and gives all your big dreams and ideas the fuel to become reality. You get these traits from Joan of Arc, the bold, fearless French heroine who was also canonized as a Catholic saint.

Joan of Arc was probably a schizophrenic. She had “visions” and heard voices. There’s some speculation that she faked it and was some sort of a con-artist, but grifters don’t take their con so far that they get burned at the stake. Modern feminists have made her a heroine of their cause so that’s probably why the site used her in its rotation. I took the test a few more times and got different results each time so they may be using a random personality generator.

The IQ crowd puts a lot of stock in these sorts of profiles. The Big Five personality traits are the gold standard. You can take the self-exam here if you’re interested. I’ve given a lot of these types of exams in the past and I know a lot of companies that use them for management development. The military academies used to administer them, but I don’t know if that is still the case. At the academies, testing for leadership is of obvious value so they do a lot of it.

There’s a lot of good science behind it, but I’m not 100% sold. The reason I’ve always been a bit skeptical is I’ve taken these things and it is not hard to figure out the point of the questions. I’ve been able to game the test to get the result I wanted so I’m sure more devious minded people can do it with no problem. Then there is the fact people tend to lie on self-assessments. That said, I’ve been tested a lot so I’m probably not a great example. I also like reverse engineering these tests so I probably notice the patterns more readily that others.

Regardless, the Internet says I’m an artistic schizophrenic or a highly disciplined French heroine.

Ezra Klein is an Idiot

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Way back when Jonah Goldberg was a regular at NRO, he would promote the blogger Ezra Klein. He would go back and forth with Klein in blog posts and he did some podcasts with him. Jonah Goldberg is often fairly sensible, but he is not a guy without a certain agenda.. For example, he regularly reads Steve Sailer and Peter Brimelow, but he says otherwise. Being a government approved chattering skull means punching Right, but that does not make it right.

That explains his affinity for Klein. Klein is a person with a mediocre IQ. Like most bourgeois millennials, he is good at dressing himself up as an intellectual, but like most bourgeois millennials he lacks self-awareness and lacks any curiosity about the limits of his knowledge. Instead he does what all these guys did in college and that’s suck up to the teacher by repeating the lecture with enthusiasm. This latest letter from Ezra is getting lots of run.

We’ve finally heard from Officer Darren Wilson.

Wilson had been publicly silent since the events of August 9, when he shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. And, even as the grand jury announced its decision not to indict him, he remained silent. He had his attorneys release a statement on his behalf.

But on Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson’s full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “difficult or impossible to believe.” But I want to be clear here. I’m not saying Wilson is lying. I’m not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.

The unintentional comedy here is great. The always earnest Ezra is saying he was so committed to the narrative peddled by his people that he is now sitting in stunned amazement to learn it was all nonsense. Of course, what he really means is he is devastated that he can no longer virtue signal on the issue. He’s not interested in the truth or that good people were harmed by the Big Lie. Those are bad people and they got what they deserved.

What happens next is the most unbelievable moment in the narrative. And so it’s probably best that I just quote Wilson’s account at length on it.

I was doing the, just scrambling, trying to get his arms out of my face and him from grabbing me and everything else. He turned to his…if he’s at my vehicle, he turned to his left and handed the first subject. He said, “here, take these.” He was holding a pack of — several packs of cigarillos which was just, what was stolen from the Market Store was several packs of cigarillos. He said, “here, hold these” and when he did that I grabbed his right arm trying just to control something at that point. Um, as I was holding it, and he came around, he came around with his arm extended, fist made, and went like that straight at my face with his…a full swing from his left hand.

So Brown is punching inside the car. Wilson is scrambling to deflect the blows, to protect his face, to regain control of the situation. And then Brown stops, turns to his left, says to his friend, “Here, hold these,” and hands him the cigarillos stolen from Ferguson Market. Then he turns back to Wilson and, with his left hand now freed from holding the contraband goods, throws a haymaker at Wilson.

Every bullshit detector in me went off when I read that passage. Which doesn’t mean that it didn’t happen exactly the way Wilson describes. But it is, again, hard to imagine. Brown, an 18-year-old kid holding stolen goods, decides to attack a cop and, while attacking him, stops, hands his stolen goods to his friend, and then returns to the beatdown. It reads less like something a human would do and more like a moment meant to connect Brown to the robbery.

Ezra Klein went to one of the safest public high schools on the planet. It may have the lowest NAM population outside of Reykjavik High. He grew up in the sort of neighborhood that has such a public school. He went to a safe white college and then into the media, which is run by his people. In other words, Ezra has no experience with the diverse.

Why did Michael Brown, an 18-year-old kid headed to college, refuse to move from the middle of the street to the sidewalk? Why would he curse out a police officer? Why would he attack a police officer? Why would he dare a police officer to shoot him? Why would he charge a police officer holding a gun? Why would he put his hand in his waistband while charging, even though he was unarmed?

None of this fits with what we know of Michael Brown. Brown wasn’t a hardened felon. He didn’t have a death wish. And while he might have been stoned, this isn’t how stoned people act. The toxicology report did not indicate he was on PCP or something that would’ve led to suicidal aggression.

By “we” he means the people who are paid to lie to us from their posts in the mainstream media. The rest of us knew the truth right away. Around blacks, you can never relax, which is why everyone tries to avoid being around blacks. It’s why Ezra’s parents made sure he was never around blacks, especially underclass blacks. It is a simply reality of life that everyone knows, except the dainty flowers in the media, apparently. Even there, they may simply be lying, because they are paid to lie.

More Tales of the Eloi

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The reason why publications like National Lampoon and The Onion lost their audience is daily life has become so ridiculous there’s no need to lampoon it. Post-modern means, among other things, farcical. This little gem is a great example.

Georgetown University (GU) student who says he was mugged at gunpoint says he “can hardly blame” his assailants.

Senior Oliver Friedfeld and his roommate were held at gunpoint and mugged recently. However, the GU student isn’t upset. In fact he says he “can hardly blame [his muggers].”

“Not once did I consider our attackers to be ‘bad people.’ I trust that they weren’t trying to hurt me. In fact, if they knew me, I bet they’d think I was okay,” wrote Friedfeld in an editorial featured in The Hoya, the university’s newspaper. “The fact that these two kids, who appeared younger than I, have even had to entertain these questions suggests their universes are light years away from mine.”

Friedfeld claims it is the pronounced inequality gap in Washington, D.C. that has fueled these types of crimes. He also says that as a middle-class man, he does not have the right to judge his muggers.

“Who am I to stand from my perch of privilege, surrounded by million-dollar homes and paying for a $60,000 education, to condemn these young men as ‘thugs?’” asks Friedfeld. “It’s precisely this kind of ‘otherization’ that fuels the problem.”

Police also aren’t the solution to the problem, Friedfeld argues.

“If we ever want opportunistic crime to end, we should look at ourselves first. Simply amplifying police presence will not solve the issue. Police protect us by keeping those ‘bad people’ out of our neighborhood, and I’m grateful for it. And yet, I realize it’s self-serving and doesn’t actually fix anything.”

Friedfeld suggests that the “privileged” adapt to normalized crime, until the wrongs of the past are righted.

“The millennial generation is taking over the reins of the world, and thus we are presented with a wonderful opportunity to right some of the wrongs of the past,” writes Friedfeld. “Until we do so, we should get comfortable with sporadic muggings and break-ins. I can hardly blame them. The cards are all in our hands, and we’re not playing them.”

Friedfeld did not respond to Campus Reform’s request for comment in time for publishing.

This is common at our elite colleges and universities. Some time ago I was visiting with a friend who was at Yale Divinity. In the grad school bar we took in the scene and too many beers. What stood out was just how socially awkward and submissive the men were compared to what one would expect in a normal college setting. My friend said it was worse with the graduates than the undergrads, but he was probably splitting hairs. He called them a generation of suckups, which looked about right.

I can’t help but think it would have been better for all concerned if the robbers had pulled the trigger on poor Oliver.

Education Madness

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The other day, this gem from Jim Geraghty was featured on National Review. Uber has become a magic word for the Conservative Inc. and it very well be on its way to being another word for “sacred.” Anything they want to imbue with moral virtue will get the word “Uber” slapped on it in the same way lefty will affix and “i” to anything they want to make sound high tech.

Americans are depressed.

Their deep-rooted pessimism about the future may or may not put a Republican in the White House in 2016. But seriously shaking this gloom will probably take more than the usual conservative policy proposals of tax reform and simplification, a defense buildup, regulatory reform, and so on.

History demonstrates to us that giant, rapid, positive change is possible, in both the political and the economic realms.

Actually, history argues the exact opposite. Giant, rapid changes are things like earthquakes and hurricanes. Revolutions and wars are giant, rapid changes. Good change is incremental, perhaps even glacial. The fact that someone calling himself a conservative would write such dewy-eyed nonsense says a lot about why there’s nothing left to the conservative movement in America. But, the point of the article is education so let’s get to the meat of it.

1. School choice everywhere. Any parent, in any community, should be able to send his or her child to any school that will accept that child. Period. Yes, some might say this is Washington forcing a change on the states. Too bad. We don’t run our education system for the benefit of state and local education officials — or at least we shouldn’t. We do it for kids and parents. Any administrator who wants to deny parents the right to send their children to the school of their choice can get the hell out of the education system.

The guys with kids always latch onto public school choice like it is a magic solution, without ever thinking about what they are saying. We have school choice now. You can send your kid to private schools, you can move to a place with good public schools and you can home school. This reality has done nothing to alter the inherent defects of public schools run by unions and forbidden to discriminate.

That last part is the elephant in the room. Bad schools all have the same problem. They are are full of bad students. Those students come from bad families, usually black and poor. The schools are not allowed to throw the troublesome kids out, so the schools degenerate as the responsible parents move away. School choice is just a way to segregate the bad apples, usually minorities, without owning up to the what your doing.

2. Trade schools, trade schools, trade schools. Our leaders have to drive a stake into the heart of the attitude that all American children need to go to a four-year college or university. Not every American kid needs a degree, but every American kid needs a skill. This is a cultural fight as much as a policy fight.

Jim Geraghty is an open borders fanatic. He can barely choke out the words “illegal immigrant” without sobbing. Why in the world would we spend a cent on vocational training when we are importing a population of helot workers to do these jobs? Further, conservatives cheered as we let the financial sector auction off the manufacturing base to China and Mexico. Unless Geraghty plans to ship vocational school grads to China, there’s no point in sponsoring vocational training.

3. Push the business world to step directly into education. Corporations have complained for a long time that the education system is not providing them with workers ready to step into entry-level jobs. It’s time to bring the employers into the classroom.

Go ahead, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Cargill, Nike, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Disney, Intel, Wal-Mart, Goldman Sachs. Build your own charter schools. What smart kid with an aptitude for engineering wouldn’t want to go to a Ford Academy of Automotive Engineering or a SpaceX aerospace school? Or how about a Google School of Computer Science? These schools would “check all the boxes” for the usual range of core subjects, but they would also offer a constantly updated curriculum in the specialized area relating to their industry. Attendance at one of these schools wouldn’t guarantee future employment at the sponsoring company, but it would certainly open doors and establish early connections.

This already happens. Charter schools are run by for-profit companies. Major corporations spend enormous sums in training their workers. Asking them to take over the public schools sounds great, until they send Jim Geraghty the bill. Then he is not going to be as enthusiastic.

Worse still, when Acme School Inc fires Jim Junior for having a low IQ, Jim Sr. is calling his Congressman. Private business spends a lot of time discriminating amongst the various inputs available. They know you can’t make a good product with poor ingredients. Google would not exist if they were forced to hire an army of low-IQ degenerates and criminals.

Far too much of what passes for conservative these days is just warmed over progressive mush from the 70’s and 80’s. Conservatives used to argue for local control of schools, abolition of teacher unions and aggressive segregation of students based on merit and local custom. That was the best way to provide the best education to the broadest portion of the population, but allowing for the skimming off of the best and the worst for the special treatment they warrant.

Time To Ban Toy Guns

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Years ago the Left was opening up another front on their war on normal. They wanted boys to stop playing with toy guns. Cap guns fell out of favor and mothers of young boys were told to keep their boys from “violent toys.” It went nowhere since boys like fighting. They will fashion anything handy into a gun, sword or club. Even lefty mothers had to concede it was a losing battle, but the Left never quits.

They will try to lever this tragedy into a campaign to ban toy guns.

A 12-year-old boy shot by police after grabbing what turned out to be a replica gun died from his wounds on Sunday, one day after officers responded to a 911 call about someone waving what the caller described as a “probably fake” gun at a playground.

Deputy Chief Ed Tomba said one officer fired twice after the boy pulled the fake weapon — which was lacking the orange safety indicator usually found on the muzzle — from his waistband but had not pointed it at police. The boy did not make any verbal threats, but grabbed the replica handgun after being told to raise his hands, Deputy Chief Tomba said.

“That’s when the officer fired,” he said.

The Cuyahoga County medical examiner identified the boy as Tamir Rice.

An attorney for his family, Timothy Kucharski, said the boy went to the park with friends Saturday afternoon, but he did not know the details of what led to the shooting.

The police department is investigating the shooting.

Both officers who responded, a first-year rookie and a 10-year department veteran, have been placed on administrative leave pending the results of the department’s investigation.

As is always the case with these things, the details will take a while to come out, but that won’t stop the trouble makers from jumping to wild conclusions. I will say that I have been around a lot of guns and I have never seen a kid’s toy that would fool me at shooting distance. Pellet guns are a different thing so maybe that’s the issue here. On the other hand, cops have killed innocent people because they mistakenly thought a wallet or cell phone was a weapon.

The county prosecutor’s office also is investigating.

Mr. Kucharski said he will conduct his own investigation into the shooting and review the police’s investigation to determine “how exactly an innocent young 12-year-old boy could be killed playing at the park.”

“His mother is devastated,” Mr. Kucharski said.

The shooting of the boy, who was African-American, occurred as a grand jury is expected to make a decision soon over whether to charge a white police officer who shot an unarmed black teenager in Ferguson, Mo., setting off months of protests.

Mr. Kucharski said he did not know the race of the officer who shot the boy, and the shooting did not appear to have anything to do with race.

The important question, he said, was why the officers did not act with more caution because they were dealing with a child.

“The police have to address these things in the proper context,” he said.

“This is a 12-year-old boy. This is not a grown man.

“I’d think you would handle situations with children differently than you would with an adult. They don’t fully understand everything that is going on.”

Police said the weapon was an “airsoft” type replica that resembled a semi-automatic handgun.

The proper context is that in the ghetto, 12-year old boys are regularly toting around guns and shooting people. Bangers have long assumed that a child can get away with one murder before the law treats him as an adult. It’s also why you see boys running drug corners. Even if they get popped, they are facing a trip to juvenile detention and therefore have no reason to talk to the cops.

Normally I would assume this will be used by the gun grabbers, but the Ferguson fiasco may trump the gun grabbers. Ferguson is looking like Burning Man for the Anarchists so maybe that’s run out of steam. It’s tough to know, but my guess is the Cult is ready to throw in the towel on Ferguson so that leaves the gun angle as a useful way to push Ferguson off the radar.

The Madness of Diversity

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I’m very skeptical of the great Hebrew Conspiracy to break white America on the wheel of Cultural Marxism. Sure, they are the most ethnocentric people on the planet and they are very smart and clever. They do favor their own and do so without noticing it. These are true things, but that’s a long way from Jews being at the heart of a conspiracy to undermine white society that dats back to the time of Christ. That’s a long time to hole a grudge, even for the Jews, who are world’s greatest grudge keepers.

Still, I’m skeptical. I’m inclined to think Norman Podhoretz is right. For over 100 generations Ashkenazi Jews “boiled off” the non-believers, skeptics and those with a high capacity for affective empathy. The resulting population has a high degree of belief and group identity. As belief in an invisible man in the sky becomes less plausible, these impulses found a home in the various Rousseau-ist cults that have ravaged Western Civilization. To say Jews are over represented in Left-wing politics is to say blacks are over represented in the NBA.

When I see stuff like this, I can see why the Hebrew Conspiracy guys think the things they think.

Just because this is baseball’s golden era doesn’t mean the sport can’t glisten even brighter.

Don’t worry, this isn’t another dissertation about speeding up the game of baseball.

It is about speeding up a different kind of change.

Perhaps a recent panel discussion about baseball’s racial and gender gap — held on the same day Rob Manfred received unanimous approval from the owners to become the next commissioner and just a day after the best slugger in the game, a 25-year-old named Giancarlo Stanton with Irish, African-American and Puerto Rican roots signed off on his historic $325 million contract with the mid-market Marlins — sparked the beginning of real progress on an issue that has vexed baseball for far too long.

With African-Americans representing at least 14 percent of major league rosters for two decades between 1967 and 1998, their representation has been on a steady decline that has flattened out the past few years at around 8 percent but has shown no signs of ascent.

Major League Baseball has tried to reverse the decline. The RBI Program and Urban Youth Academies are two attempts to revive African-American participation and then there’s the sport’s 17-member On-Field Diversity Task Force, assembled in August.

Theo Epstein and his brother Paul started the Foundation To Be Named Later, which has been focused on building and expanding urban baseball. Their panel, held last week at TD Garden, focused on baseball’s demographic problems and the topic of declining African American participation at the major league level hit several nerves.

Clearly, baseball hasn’t figured it out.

Baseball is an international sport. It is very popular in the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America and East Asia. Every team  has a large compliment of foreign players. The fact that 14% of baseball players are black Americans means they are over-represented in baseball. Blacks are currently 13% of the US population. But, guys with last names Silverman, Manfred and Epstein think that’s not enough. If you’re making the case that the Tribe is at war with Occidentals, looking at the surnames on each side of the divide is a good place to start.

As I wrote above, I’m disinclined to think there’s a conspiracy, but the war on sanity is very real. Fanatics of all stripes are hell bent on pulling the roof down on all of us.

Any gathering of general managers is devoid of African-Americans, and any census of front offices of baseball teams, especially in the baseball operations departments, will reveal fewer than a handful of women.

Tyler Tumminia, senior vice president of the Goldklang Group, which owns five minor league baseball teams, including the Pittsfield Suns, is looking to buy more. She believes the days of the “old boy network” are coming to an end. How quickly is up for debate.

“I don’t think it’s a problem in minor leagues, females, I think the problem is mostly rooted in major league baseball, we talk about it all the time,” said Tumminia, who is married to Red Sox general manager Ben Cherington. “Society in general, we have no apprehension having female captains flying us all over the place nor do we have apprehension to open us up in our hearts or minds as medical surgeons or doctors but we have a hard time generally in society seeing those people putting a roster together, that’s some funny (expletive) to me. No disrespect to general managers.”

We don’t have apprehensions about female surgeons or female pilots. That’s because there are so few female pilots and heart surgeons. About 3% of commercial pilots are female and about 10% of surgeons are female. No one complains about the lack of diversity in the cockpit or operating room because diversity is a luxury good. When failure is an acceptable outcome, diversity is king. When failure can kill people, no one gives a crap about diversity. In other words, most of us not so crazy that we would rather die on the operating table than look up at a bunch of pale faces before the procedure.