Monthly Archives: November 2014

A Cornucopia of Liberal Crazy

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If you watch ESPN, you can’t help but notice how hard they are selling the NBA. They have a financial interest, for sure, but they are well into extreme slurping at this point. Their obsession with the Donald Sterling story was uncomfortable to watch. The parade of ESPN personalities performing sacred rituals showing their loyalty to the cause was a little like watching a UFO cult appeal to the stars.

Part of it is the network is run by Jews and the Tribe loves basketball. In the book, A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus Russell detailed how basketball was originally a Jewish sport. The Forward did a story on the dominance of The Tribe in basketball back when Donald Sterling was drawing unwanted attention to the fact. It stands to reason that a sports network run by the Tribe is going to cover the Tribe’s favorite sport.

That’s only a small part of their obsession. ESPN is stocked to the gills with liberal fanatics. The brighter types like Tony Kornheiser know how to blunt their fanaticism in order to hold an audience. Guys like Bill Plaschke are too stupid to pull that off so they go on the air ululating like lunatics whenever the opportunity arises. I find myself fast forwarding through a lot of their offerings because it is cringe inducing to watch it.

The Cult is berserk for the NBA because it is a fringe sport now. Like soccer, it is not enjoyed by the core of America. The NBA is the black man’s league and played by freaks that represent such a tiny slice of humanity that they may as well be from another planet. That appeals to the Cult’s anti-white male attitudes, their anti-Americanism and their general hatred of normal people . Not only are there no white males in the NBA, the sport has very little to do with the forms of masculinity that so offends the Cult.

Anyway, that setup was in lead up to this story I spied on ESPN today. First off you have Pablo Torre. He is the fake nerd ESPN likes to promote. He is a two-fer, in the head counting of modern liberalism. He plays his role without question and he has a Latino name. He’s also a polite ball washer who never wanders off the reservation and says anything vexing to his bosses.

Then we have the female head of the players union. She’s black and lacks a penis so the folks at ESPN were probably fainting in the aisles over this story. Her big talk about taking on the evil pale penis people, who run the NBA, is catnip for the Cult. The fact that she was an ornament at an overclass law firm is even better. Skadden is the pinnacle of ruling class law firms. You don’t go to them when you need a parking ticket fixed. You hire them when you’re in a beef with some other ruling class guy. They do a lot of work for clients like professional sports leagues and their television partners.

In the story you have some great nonsense.

Michele Roberts, the NBA players’ union executive director, on Wednesday questioned several of the principles that for decades have governed owner-player relations in the league, objecting to the concept of a salary cap while making clear she’d push for much more than a 50-50 split of basketball-related income.

“Why don’t we have the owners play half the games?” Roberts said, speaking in her Harlem office to ESPN The Magazine. “There would be no money if not for the players.”

“Let’s call it what it is. There. Would. Be. No. Money,” she added, pausing for emphasis. “Thirty more owners can come in, and nothing will change. These guys [the players] go? The game will change. So let’s stop pretending.”

Roberts, hailed as one of the most brilliant trial lawyers in the United States, made history in July by being elected the first female union chief in major North American sports.

But given the context of a nine-year, $24 billion TV deal set to begin in 2016, and the players’ ability to opt out of the league’s collective bargaining agreement after the 2016-17 season, Roberts’ relatively radical perspective could prove to be just as profound a change.

“I don’t know of any space other than the world of sports where there’s this notion that we will artificially deflate what someone’s able to make, just because,” she said, talking about a salary cap — a collectively bargained policy that, in its current form, has constrained team spending in the NBA since 1984-85. “It’s incredibly un-American. My DNA is offended by it.”

I may have to start going to church again if this woman does follow through with this threat. I’m sure she is the most brilliant attorney on earth and all that, but there’s a reason why she signs the back of pay checks and not the front. It’s also why she is not sitting in the owner’s box somewhere. Having her lead a revolt by the players against the owners would probably be the funniest bit of TV imaginable. It would be Cult on Cult violence.

Almost as good as Fake Indian ascending to leadership of the Democrats in the Senate.

The Muslim Veto

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When the Left decided that the word “religion” was bad, they quickly forgot their reason for the declaration. It had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with Christianity. In fact, in Lib-Speak, the word religion is a synonym for Christianity. The trouble with that is they forgot that their own whack-a-doodle belief-set is a religion and they lost the ability to properly deal with a religion that is willing to take them on, toe to tow. They now find themselves giving ground to Muslims on their home turf.

Montgomery County Public Schools will remove religious labels from school holidays, but members of the Islamic community say the adjustments to the school calendar do nothing to gain parity and a day off for the Muslim holiday of Eid.

The school board approved the school calendar for the 2015-2016 school year Tuesday. The calendar will no longer reference specific religious holidays but rather state simply that school will be closed on dates that correspond with holidays, such as Eid, Yom Kippur and Christmas.

Saqib Ali, a former Maryland state delegate and co-chair of Equality for Eid, was not happy with the board of education’s action Tuesday.

“Equality is really what we’re looking for,” Ali said. “Simply saying we’re not going to call this Christmas, and we’re not going to call this Yom Kippur, and still closing the schools, that’s not equality.”

A few things worth mentioning here. Montgomery County is a liberal stronghold. Many of the Cult’s famous members live there. For instance, Chris Mathews lives in the whites-only town of Chevy Chase Village, which is in Montgomery County. It is not Marin County, but more a respectably WASP version of it. The same beliefs, but far less ostentatious.

The big item in that selection is the quote from the savage. The savage says they are looking for equality, which is total nonsense. Islam does not play well with other religions. That’s a fact backed by 1400 years of evidence. The savage is also doing what the Left has always done in America. That is, equate a microscopic minority with the vast majority. There are very few  Muslims in America, but they demand equal footing with Jews and Christians, who are orders of magnitude more populous.

Again, we see the similarities between Islam and Liberalism.

Of course, this just points out two things. One is the Founders made an error regarding freedom of religion. It was an error they could not foresee. They never imagined Christian Europeans surrendering to savages on their own lands so they never thought to ban the savage and his religion from America. It’s too late to ban Islam from America, something that will happen one day, but not now. Instead, we should ban all immigration from savage controlled areas. Some will slip in, for sure, but keeping these people in their 50 or so countries should be a priority.

School board members said they were sympathetic to the desire to have Eid recognized and close schools but that legal precedent in Maryland bars them from closing for religious purposes.

“We can’t close for religious holidays. We can only close for operational purposes,” like high absenteeism, school spokesman Dana Tofig said.

That explanation doesn’t sit well with Zainab Chaudry, with the Council on American Islamic Relations.

“What’s really concerning to us is that similar conditions weren’t placed on any other faith community,” Chaudry says.

In the 1970s school officials decided to close on Jewish holidays because of high absenteeism.

But school board member Michael Durso said that the schools effectively close for a religious reason: the schools had high absenteeism because of a religious holiday in the community.

Noting the attempt to move away from favoring religions by instead referring to school days off as “winter break” and “student holidays,” Durso said as long as the Islamic community’s concern for parity wasn’t somehow addressed “it comes off as insensitive, and I just think we cannot afford to be in that light”.

That drew applause from parents who filled the seats in the board of education’s meeting room.

The adoption of the 2015-2016 school calendar does give students the day off on Eid but only because it happens to fall on another school holiday, Yom Kippur.

Several school board members, Chris Barclay, Judy Docca and Michael Durso, made it clear that they want to see a permanent policy change but that discussion would continue.

Board member Judy Docca acknowledged Tuesday’s action does little to satisfy a community that’s been waiting for years to see a change.

The fact that the vast majority of people in the County now have to flush their culture down the drain to satisfy these savages who don’t belong here is never mentioned explicitly. As I’ve said many times, I’m not a religious person. I come from a culture and people who have been shaped by and inspired by Christianity and that heritage is important to me. It is important to the overwhelming majority of people in Montgomery County.

So, the people there should adopt the Islamic solution. That means beheading the school board members for apostasy and then chasing every Muslim out of the county. That way, we can all celebrate Islam together one last time and also get our country back.

Instead, look for the Muslim Veto to come to your town next, as soon as you get your first Muslim.

The White Man’s Burden

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I was watching ESPN tonight and they did a story on Richie Incognito and his inability to get a job in the NFL. Allegedly, the NFL is telling teams they should not sign him. The ESPN piece, like the linked article and the comments in that article, bordered on the farcical. Everyone pretends to be mystified as to why a white guy, who was mean to a black guy, can’t get a job, while black guys found guilty of abusing children, beating women and killing animals are welcomed back into the league. Heck, a few years ago a black guy, who spent time in the can for homicide, was welcomed back into the league.

After working out for Broncos on Monday, Richie Incognito will have to keep looking. Denver, despite having a desperately thin offensive line, has decided to pass—for now—on signing the controversial-but-talented guard, who hasn’t played in the NFL in over a year.

The Broncos are firing on nearly all cylinders, save their run game. They rank 25th in yards per attempt, and 26th in yards per game. They’ve been shuffling their O-line all season in attempts to address the obvious problems—just this past Sunday they moved All-Pro guard Louis Vasquez to tackle, center Manny Ramirez to guard, and started Will Montgomery at center for the first time this year. In short: they’re desperate. And Incognito, if he can play anything like he did the last time we saw him, would be an upgrade.

But it’s been a very long time since we saw Richie Incognito. He was suspended after last season’s Week 8 after reports emerged of his harassment of teammate Jonathan Martin. The CBA only allowed for a four-game ban, but as more and more information came out, Incognito became increasingly toxic to the Dolphins, to they reached a deal to pay Incognito to sit out the remainder of the season. Finally, in February, the results of an NFL-commissioned independent investigation were released, and they showed Incognito to be a shithead of the highest order.

Except, this sport is full of shitheads. Abusers and bullies and harassers and just straight up bastards that no one can stand. And for the most part, all that comes a distant third place to how good you are at football. (Second place is how much you cost.) Incognito is, at least theoretically, still a good football player. At the time of his suspension, Pro Football Focus had him rated as the league’s 13th best guard (out of 71).

Yet Incognito can’t find a taker, despite a handful of teams kicking his tires from the moment he was reinstated in late August. This line, buried at the bottom of a Jay Glazer report, feels ominous:

Incognito visited the Chiefs and the Bucs this season and in both cases, each team got skittish after numerous calls from people inside the NFL were made and no deals were ever consummated.

I wonder what it could be?

I somewhat expected a lot of this to fade away now that the election is over. Mass fainting spells over the pale penis people acting poorly is a fine enough election tool, but the election is over. I suppose it just shows how fearful old rich white guys are these days. Donald Sterling had his team confiscated because he was deemed a heretic. In the old days, Jewish guys were immune from charges of heresy, but the Cult is turning on the Tribe, particularly the males. The war on the pale penis people is inclusive!

I’m noodling on something else for a longer post at a later date, but the fact that “bullying” is now worse than murder says a lot about where we are culturally. That’s a big part of the Incognito story. It’s not that he was mean to a black guy. It’s that he was ruled overly masculine and that’s close to a capital crime these days.

Charles Barkley Is Right

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Thomas Sowell used to talk about the damage affirmative action in college admissions did to black achievement. His argument was fairly simple. Putting unqualified blacks into elite colleges like Stanford may make white liberals feel good, but it just resulted in more blacks flunking out of college. The black students that should be in Fresno State, for example, were getting placed in UCLA. The blacks that should be at UCLA were getting bumped up to Berkley. Affirmative action created a cascading effect that damaged all blacks entering college.

Whether or not you agree with Sowell, putting people into a position for which they are unqualified is a terrible idea, regardless of the justification. It is one of the many ways the Left dehumanizes black people. Affirmative action in college admissions has nothing to do with helping black people. It is all about making the white people feel noble. They get to retire to their all-white neighborhoods to boast about how they are making the world a better place.

I’ve written here about the corrosive effect of racial solidarity amongst blacks. When Charles Barkley said pretty much the same thing I’ve been saying, I thought good things about Mr. Barkley. How could I not? He was less elegant, but more to the point. Blacks are the people hold black people back in America.

“We as black people are never going to be successful, not because of you white people, but because of other black people. When you are black, you have to deal with so much crap in your life from other black people,” Barkley said.

Barkley, a native of Leeds, said African Americans are too concerned with street cred than true success and that’s holding the community back.

“For some reason we are brainwashed to think, if you’re not a thug or an idiot, you’re not black enough. If you go to school, make good grades, speak intelligent, and don’t break the law, you’re not a good black person. It’s a dirty, dark secret in the black community.

“There are a lot of black people who are unintelligent, who don’t have success. It’s best to knock a successful black person down because they’re intelligent, they speak well, they do well in school, and they’re successful. It’s just typical BS that goes on when you’re black, man.”

For some reason, I decided to check in on the Atlantic’s house, er, black guy to see if he had picked up on it. Sure enough, he had a post up. Coates is a nice fusion of what Sowell and Barkely are saying. The Atlantic is decorating its site with Coates. They don’t really care what he has to say, how could they? His arguments are juvenile and incoherent. I thought after his embarrassing long essay on reparations that got so much attention, he would have been ushered off and replaced. His sudden “sabbatical” looked like a polite way of brooming the guy, but here he is.

Now, it very well may be that he is simply too dumb to realize he is an ornament. He’s certainly too dumb to know he is who Barkley had in mind when he talked about stupid blacks trying to tear down successful blacks. Of course, this could not happen if the white people running the Atlantic viewed blacks as something other than wrapping paper. Coates may be a nice guy, but he should be covering high school sports for a town paper, not writing essays for a major opinion journal. He is in way over his head, but it is not his fault. The fault lies with the white’s who hired him. The casacading effect of such decisions is their fault as well.

Glenn Beck

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When Glenn Beck was on Fox I loved his show, despite never watching it. What I loved about it is how he sent the Left into a frenzy. If you were a room full of strangers and wanted to identify the lunatics, mention Glenn Beck. The lunatics would suddenly begin convulsing and screeching. Otherwise, I found Beck to be a bit of  a weirdo. He was a man on a grail-quest. Having seen his ugliness in the bottom of a glass, he was racing around looking for the antidote.

Religion, followed by slaying the Progressive dragon was his thing on Fox. Then he left Fox and started his own network. I give him a ton of credit for figuring out before everyone else where the future of media lies. From what I gather The Blaze has made Beck a millionaire many times over. Still, when I see him I get the sense he is still a man on a mission that he is still trying to unravel. This latest seems to fit the pattern.

Glenn Beck on Monday revealed the true extent of his health issues, saying he can no longer keep what has happened a secret from his friends, his staff or audience, whom he considers to be his family.

If you have sensed a change in Beck — maybe you even thought he was losing interest in his program — Beck said it is because he was told he may only have several functional years left, and his health conditions were causing such excruciating pain that it was difficult to do live programming.

“Tonight’s show is not for the casual fan or, really, anyone in the press,” Beck said. “This is a one-on-one between friends. No one in the media ever does a show like this, because it is crazy. … But I believe that by not talking with you openly, it destroys everything of real meaning and value — namely, our trust.”

“I have never lied to you, but I have omitted a few really important facts because — they scared me,” Beck admitted, beginning to swallow back tears. “I didn’t have any answers, and the answers I was being given at the time meant … the end of our time together.”

Not only is there a religious vibe to this, there’s a Jimmy Swaggart vibe to it. That’s an old school preacher move. The personal testimony has been a staple of the southern religious experience since forever. The preacher reminds his flock that he is their shepherd. Then he tells them he is not long for this world. Then the ushers pass the plate and everyone kicks in what they can. The preacher recovers.

Beck said that five years ago, around the time of his Restoring Honor event in Washington, D.C., God began to tell him that he was standing in the wrong place. At around the same time, his health issues began, starting with vocal cord paralysis, eyesight problems and what doctors at first believed was a painful form of neuropathy.

“While I was at Fox, the pain would get so bad that my camera crew, our executive producer Tiffany and I, had worked out hand signals so they would know when to take the camera off of me,” Beck revealed. “We didn’t know at the time what was causing me to feel as though, out of nowhere, my hands and feet, or arms and legs would feel like someone had just crushed them, set them on fire or pushed broken glass into them.”

Beck said that while he was in intense pain, something unusual was happening that he actually thought was an advantage in his business: he only ever needed two to four hours of sleep a night.

“Doctors tell me that up until recently, I hadn’t had a real REM sleep in maybe as long as a decade,” Beck said. “I didn’t have a dream that I remember, except one in a decade. And quite honestly, this isn’t a symptom you look to fix if you have a ton to do. But the first sign of trouble I noticed was what I call a ‘time collapse.’ If we had met before, I couldn’t tell you if it was a month ago, a year ago or when we were in high school. I then began to lose names to faces and over time, entire conversations would go away.”

Beck said doctors told him it was normal for someone processing as much information as he was, and the phenomenon has been discussed by figures like Winston Churchill.

I guess we’re supposed to believe that Beck is a sort of stigmatic and a medium of some sort, with massive amounts of data flowing through him, to you, his followers. His suffering for you is, well, Christ-like, isn’t it? Well, the modern version, least ways. It is sort of a crucifixion-lite, where the savior nails himself to the cross metaphorically.

Maybe I’m being mean-spirited, but I’m skeptical. Adrenal fatigue, for example, is nonsense. It is not a real medical condition. It was cooked up by snake oil salesman to trick middle-aged women into buying crystals and colonics. My bet is the real doctors told him he was either faking or suffering from some sort of psycho-somatic condition.

I know this makes me a stone-hearted villain, but I think he is faking.

Free Riders

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An age old problem in human society is the free loader problem. Economists prefer to phrase it as the “Free Rider Problem” so as not to drag in those icky moral and cultural issues. I prefer to use the more appropriate phrase, “free loader” as that’s the real problem. People unable to provide for themselves are not a problem, even for poor human societies. Every society, not matter how rich, is plagued by a slice of humanity that chooses to live off the labor of others, even when alternatives are available to them.

The better term may be the “entitlement problem” but that one has been claimed for other purposes. An example I like to use is the pizza problem. In my youth a friend had a roommate, who was from a very wealthy family. Having grown up unaware of the restraints the rest of us faced, he had a sense of entitlement. He just expected people to wait on him. Whenever we ordered a pizza, this guy would eat more than his share and never chip in for the bill, unless asked. He seemed oblivious to the fact that food cost money and the rest of us had to concern ourselves with the fact we lacked an abundant supply of money.

That’s one side of the entitlement coin. Spend any time around the very rich and you bump into this. When I worked for a Congressman in my youth, he and his family were often stymied by mundane things like buying gas. They never carried cash and did not have credit cards. Someone else was always there to pay the bill so when caught needing to actually pay for something, they would be stumped. The thing about it is there was always someone there to solve the problem for them. A sense of entitlement can carry you a long way in society.

The other side of the coin is the underclass.It is generally assumed by the ruling class that the lower class is just too dumb to do anything other than be poor. That’s often the case. There are a lot of very stupid people in the ghetto. But, they are not so stupid that they cannot provide for themselves. Instead of investing their time into middle-class pursuits, they work the welfare system, learning all the ways to maximize their return, while minimizing their investment. After all, they are entitled.

That’s the thing you see with the under-class. They view themselves as dependent and they can’t imagine things arranged any other way. Government and the rich people who run it owe them free housing, free food, free booze and so forth. In a weird way the under-class is like modern hunter-gatherers. They forage around their environment, in this case the ghetto and the custodial state that supports it, for the necessities to live. Every once in a while, the males engage in violent conflict with males from other tribes. Afterwards, they get high, eat and screw.

The point of all this is humans have been trying to figure out how best to handle the free rider problem since forever and we still struggle with it. The best way we have discovered is to have everyone pay their own way. A radical idea that has been tried in a few places with surprising success. Colonial New England is probably our best example locally. People were expected to pay their own way, take care of their families and not be a burden on their neighbors. Charity existed, but it existed with lots of strings. Those strings were intended to discourage you from needing charity. I used to live near an old almshouse from the 18th century, for example.

All that was considered crazy so we have struggled to come up with better answers. A good example how the struggle is going is Net neutrality. For reasons he most certainly does not understand, President Obama is pushing for the FCC to arbitrarily force ISP’s to treat all traffic the same.

President Obama urged the US government to adopt tighter regulations on broadband service in an effort to preserve “a free and open Internet.”

In a statement released Monday, Obama called on the Federal Communications Commission to enforce the principle of treating all Internet traffic the same way, known in shorthand as Net neutrality. That means treating broadband services like utilities, the president said, so that Internet service providers would be unable “to restrict the best access or to pick winners and losers in the online marketplace for services and ideas.”

Obama wades into a contentious debate that has raged over how to treat Internet traffic, which has only heated up as the FCC works to prepare an official guideline. Those rules were expected to be made available later this year, though reports now claim they may be delayed until early 2015. The debate has centered on whether broadband should be placed under Title II regulation under the Telecommunications Act, which already tightly controls phone services.

Proponents argue that Title II regulation would ensure the free and fair flow of traffic across the Internet. Opponents, however, believe the reorientation would mean onerous rules that would limit investment in the infrastructure and in new services, and that toll roads of sorts would provide better service to companies that can support their higher traffic volumes. But that in turn has created widespread concern that ISPs could throttle service in some instances, intentionally slowing some content streams and speeding others.

The problem is the Internet is not a utility. A utility is a special sort of monopoly that provides a specific product that is the same for all customers. Rich people get the same electricity as poor people. The utility charges by the unit at the same rate for all users. The Internet is a wildly varied service that is valuable only because of a millions of other businesses that sells products and services over the Internet. But, there are loads of companies transferring their costs to people who do not use their service, via the miracle of the cable bill. Facebook is the most obvious example.

The problem we have is a variation on the classic Tragedy of the Commons. The public, through their governments, allowed private industry to use public resources to construct the Internet, including the massive cable TV network. In many cases, these companies were paid to build out infrastructure. All of them rely on free access to public roads and sidewalks to maintain their networks, like any other utility. Unlike the electric grid, the Internet is a virtual market place, The ISP charges rent to anyone who sets up shop and charges access to anyone who wants to buy products offered on-line.

Well, sort of.

I pay much more for Internet service that I probably should, given my usage. I don’t watch movies on-line or listen to music on-line very often. The guy down the road has a bunch of kids who each use ten times the bandwidth I use. Their Internet bill is the same as mine. The costs are socialized so he can get cheap movies and I can get expensive e-mails. Much like the cable bill, we have a inverse of the utility model. Instead of metered billing, everyone pays the same, regardless of usage. The ISP’s want to implement what amounts to metered billing, like a utility, except the government is trying to stop them, because they say they are a utility.

Limbaugh Sues The Cult

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I’ve long thought that the tactics of pressure groups have exceeded the bounds of legality. The law is clear about interfering with the business dealings of others for the purpose of causing one of more parties harm. It is one thing for me to claim my soap will make your clothes cleaner than the other soap. It is quite another to disrupt the relationship between the other soap and its vendors in order to harm the business of the competitor. That’s what liberal pressure groups are doing when they start harassing advertisers in order to get them to stop doing business with a TV or radio show.

I made this point in a post about Limbaugh a while back. I was immediately visited by a bunch of spam from lunatics claiming to be concerned about my opinion on Limbaugh. These people are crazy and they go beyond stating their opinions into the realm of tortious interference, in my opinion. Anyway, it looks like Limbaugh is planning to sue the Democrats for defamation.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh has threatened to sue the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) for defamation, The Daily Caller has learned.

Limbaugh retained the services of lawyer Patty Glaser and demanded that the DCCC “preserve all records in anticipation of a lawsuit for defamation and interference” after the Democratic Party group led a campaign against Limbaugh based on out-of-context statements the host made about sexual assault. Limbaugh’s legal team delivered a letter to DCCC representatives Monday informing them of the legal threat. Limbaugh has also demanded a public retraction and apology.

The Limbaugh team is currently proceeding from the standpoint of litigating and has not yet made a decision as to whether the DCCC could make any concessions at this point to prevent the lawsuit.

The DCCC “has intentionally disseminated demonstrably false statements concerning Rush Limbaugh in a concerted effort to harm Mr. Limbaugh, and with reckless disregard for the resulting impact to small businesses across America that choose to advertise on his radio program” according to the GlaserWeil law firm’s letter to the DCCC, which was obtained by TheDC. “Mr. Limbaugh clearly, unambiguously, and emphatically condemned the notion that ‘no’ means ‘yes.’”

“Let’s be clear: Rush Limbaugh is advocating for the tolerance of rape” the DCCC stated in a September fundraising email after Limbaugh mocked Ohio State’s new mandatory sexual consent guidelines.

Limbaugh’s team said that the DCCC’s campaign against Limbaugh provides grounds for a defamation case, based on legal precedent.

“The DCCC may believe it to be immune from liability by quoting words, taken out of context. This is untrue,” Glaser said. “There is significant on point precedent in the 9th Circuit for holding an organization responsible for falsifying meaning through selective quoting. In Price v. Stossel, the court held that, if a party accurately quotes ‘a statement actually made by a public figure, but presents the statement in a misleading context, thereby changing the viewer’s understanding of the speaker’s words,’ that constitutes defamation.”
This is long overdue. I think you give a lot of room for political combatants to whack one another around, even if it veers into outright lying. In politics, one man’s lie is another man’s holy truth. Defamation is another matter. The Left often just attacks bogeymen gratuitously. It is way to shift the focus from them onto some other. When that bogeyman is a real person and they are saying untrue things about him, then they have crossed a line.
Let’s hope the court awards Limbaugh a trillion dollars.

The Germ Theory of Stupid

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The evolutionary biologist Greg Cochran suggested that homosexuality may be the result of an unknown pathogen. The idea that pathogens could be the root cause of things like heart disease and insanity has been kicking around for a while. Like a lot of speculative science, there’s no money in it until someone finds something concrete and then there’s the politics There’s funding available for genetic research. There’s no money for locating the gay germ.

This may change things.

A virus that infects human brains and makes us more stupid has been discovered, according to scientists in the US.

The algae virus, never before observed in healthy people, was found to affect cognitive functions including visual processing and spatial awareness.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins Medical School and the University of Nebraska stumbled upon the discovery when they were undertaking an unrelated study into throat microbes.

Surprisingly, the researchers found DNA in the throats of healthy individuals that matched the DNA of a virus known to infect green algae.

Dr Robert Yolken, a virologist who led the original study, said: “This is a striking example showing that the ‘innocuous’ microorganisms we carry can affect behaviour and cognition.

“Many physiological differences between person A and person B are encoded in the set of genes each inherits from parents, yet some of these differences are fuelled by the various microorganisms we harbour and the way they interact with our genes.”

Of the 90 participants in the study, 40 tested positive for the algae virus. Those who tested positive performed worse on tests designed to measure the speed and accuracy of visual processing. They also achieved lower scores in tasks designed to measure attention.

Humans’ bodies contain trillions of bacteria, viruses and fungi. Most are harmless, but the findings of this research show that there some microbes can have a detrimental impact on cognitive functions, while leaving individuals healthy.

The study’s findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

I like how 40 of 90 tested positive for stupidism. At first blush is seems like a blow to the IQ uber alles guys because we have a pretty solid example of environmental factors altering IQ. That would support the argument that improved environment (no stupid germs) will improve IQ. It also means that maybe the Flynn Effect is just the result of better hygiene, not better school. Just as better food supplied results in taller humans, better hygiene results in smarter humans. That would, of course, support many of the claims from the HBD crowd regarding IQ.

I would be curious about the race of the participants. If it turned out that the 40 were all from a certain place I think I would blow a funny fuse.

Bad Religion

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I think you have to judge any religion by its outcomes, intentional or accidental. Islam has some wise and beautiful elements to it. Much of the practical application of Islam is sensible, particular when applied to a tribal culture. That’s only part of the story. The other part is the butchery and forced ignorance that is the natural result of the full flowering of Islam. There’s a reason no Islamic society has produced anything of any value, other than things like suicide bombers and terrorism.

Marxism is another dreadful loser of a religion. The Soviet empire was good at keeping its people backward and ignorant, but not much else. Germans, despite there obvious faults, were able to reach the very pinnacle of human civilization, except when they were under Marxism. For fifty years Germans in the East produced nothing other than steroids to rev up their female athletes. Amazingly, East Germans even made bad cars while under the rule of Marxism. Then you have the enormous body count.

The weird religion of our current rulers has similarly outcomes. Steve Sailer points to a story in the lefty journal The New Republic extolling the glories of Qatar. People forget that the New Republic was founded by Malcolm Crowley, a fascist sympathizer who thought Mussolini was a leader FDR should emulate. But that was a long time ago and who can remember that stuff. Anyway, Steve’s point is the ruling class has no problem persecuting someone for not worshiping transvestites, but they are OK with slavery.

The Left is shot through with these bizarre contradictions. Liberals, for example, are crowing about recently passed marijuana laws, decriminalizing possession of weed. They forget that the Old Right was never in favor of drug laws and it was the Left that was behind Prohibition and the early war on drugs. But, weed is now a liberal fad so it’s OK. Contrast that with their never ending war on tobacco. A town in Massachusetts is now planning to ban tobacco entirely.

The cartons of Marlboros, cans of Skoal and packs of Swisher Sweets are hard to miss stacked near the entrance of Vincent’s Country Store, but maybe not for much longer: All tobacco products could become contraband if local health officials get their way.

This sleepy central Massachusetts town of 7,700 has become an improbable battleground in America’s tobacco wars. On Wednesday, the Board of Health will hear public comment on a proposed regulation that could make Westminster the first municipality in the United States to ban sales of all tobacco products within town lines.

“To my knowledge, it would be the first in the nation to enact a total ban,” said Thomas Carr, director of national policy at the American Lung Association. “We commend the town for doing it.”

Town health agent Elizabeth Swedberg said a ban seemed like a sensible solution to a vexing problem.

The vexing problem of people making informed decisions that the busy-bodies and pests don’t like.

“The tobacco companies are really promoting products to hook young people,” she said, pointing to 69-cent bubblegum-flavored cigars, electronic cigarettes and a new form of dissolvable smokeless tobacco that resembles Tic Tac candies. “The board was getting frustrated trying to keep up with this.”

Citing a report from the U.S. surgeon general, Swedberg said that if tobacco use continues unabated, 5.6 million American children who are younger than 18 today will die prematurely because of smoking. Change, she said, “has to start somewhere.”

The fact that they wish to ban things that are not smoking in order to keep people from smoking is lost on these people. Tobacco and anything related to it is bad because the Cult associates it with the type of white people who shop at Walmart and make fun of men who wear dresses. Weed is cool because it what young people like and you can now buy it at those quaint boutiques near that ski resort you went to in Colorado. Tobacco is what the guy fixing the lifts uses.

A sane person would ask whether it is better for the guy fixing the chair lift to be smoking a Marlboro or a jumbo? I’m OK with the repairman sucking on a cancer stick while he repairs the lift. Nicotine helps concentration. The same repairman doing bong hits before working on the lift is probably about to kill a bunch of people. Of course, he probably called out of work so he can play video games and eat chips all day, but that’s another story.

Conservatarian Cooke-ness

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When I was a young man, I used to hear old people say something along the lines that young people would listen to each other, but never to those older than them. The sign a young man was maturing was when he sought out the advice of older people. This always seemed strange to me. I knew young people were idiots, including myself. Taking advice from any of them seemed like idiocy to me. I was young and dumb, but not that dumb. If I needed help, I went and found an old guy.

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned that I was way dumber than I realized in my youth. While I was right to seek out information from older people, I was not very good at figuring out which old people were worth consulting. That comes with age and experience. As you get older, you acquire your own knowledge, but you also get better at figuring out who is worth listening to or reading. Number one on the list of people you ignore is young people. God bless ‘em, but they don’t know anything and they don’t know anyone who knows anything.

That all came to mind while reading this post by Charles Alphabet Cooke on National Review. He is out with a book called the Conservatarian Manifesto. From the post:

The book is in part a look at the growing number of self-identified “conservatarians” — those people whose worldview is broadly right-leaning, but who are dissatisfied with the Republican party and with much of libertarianism. I also make some suggestions as to how conservatives can update their offering, propose a framework within which their various constituents can once again co-exist, and take on the notion that there is such a thing as a “social issue” per se. At the book’s heart is a sustained defense of federalism and of a thriving and diverse civil society.

My first thought, was that Mr. Cooke is a little young to be offering up a new political philosophy. Last week he was riding his Big Wheel around the driveway. His writing has the feel of the college sophomore coming home for Winter Solstice, lecturing the family about the real world. Even when you agree with him you cringe a little.

Putting my mean spirited bigotry towards the young to the side, I was reminded of when Rod Dreher went bonkers a decade ago and tried to build a cult around breakfast cereal. His shtick was “granola conservatism” otherwise known as “crunchy cons.” He defined these individuals as traditionalist conservatives who believed in environmental conservation, frugal living, and the preservation of traditional family values. They also express skepticism about aspects of free market capitalism and they are usually religious (typically traditionalist Roman Catholics or conservative Protestants).

Of course, those of us who remembered when guys like Joe Sobran and Sam Francis were writing for respectable publications knew that conservatives were never capitalists nor prone to worship at the altar of free markets. Dreher’s “new” flavor of conservatism was just the original product with some of his own eccentric foibles sprinkled on top. It’s why no one remembers “granola conservatism” or Rod Dreher. It was the rantings of a young man in the sophomore stage of his life.

Cooke’s new brand of conservatism sounds just like libertarianism circa 1984. Thirty years ago libertarians were the guys who did not want to fight the Left over issues like abortion and they thought guys like Jerry Falwell were icky and gross. Libertarians famously broke with Reagan over, wait for it, the war on drugs. I know, it sounds crazy, but that was one of the main reasons Ron Paul gave for bolting the Republican Party in the Reagan years.

Cooke’s proposed new cult is basically 1980’s libertarianism with less of an emphasis on free weed. The obvious irrationality is the same we see with libertarianism. If people are to be free to organize themselves as they see fit, that means people will want their government to do a lot of things libertarians find unpleasant. The only sort of human that could live in a libertarian paradise is a person who detests his fellow humans so much he refuses to have anything to do with them. Otherwise, social creatures put rules on one another in order to facilitate mutually beneficial relations. That scales up to what we know as culture.

But, culture is tough intellectual ground to cover and most libertarians are simply not bright enough to master the material. Young people like Mr. Cooke have been marinated in Cultural Marxism since birth and that means they have a Pavlovian response to anything that bumps into culture. That response is to run and hide under the bed or, if they are a true believer, scream at the heretic until he runs and hides under the bed.

The only debates worth having in a civil society are cultural debates. What kind of people we choose to be is the only thing we can leave to the next generation. It is what they will stand upon as they decide how they will order themselves and how they will choose to be remembered. The reason these debates get so ugly and nasty is because they are so important. No one gives a crap about tax policy enough to lose a friend over it. People care about the culture and they are willing to fight over it, unless they are a conservatarian, I guess.