Monthly Archives: December 2014

Pinstriped Nazis

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In America, “Pinstriped Nazis” play baseball in the Bronx or play with money in Manhattan. In Germany, its the name for people that dissent from the prevailing religion of the ruling class of Europe. This story from The Tired Old Commie Times should be getting more attention.

Its members have been dubbed the “pinstriped Nazis” and they refer to their demonstrations as “evening strolls” through German cities. But on Monday night, an estimated 15,000 people joined Pegida, or Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West, in a march through Dresden carrying banners bearing slogans such as “Zero tolerance towards criminal asylum seekers”, “Protect our homeland” and “Stop the Islamisation”.

Lutz Bachmann, the head of Pegida, a nascent anti-foreigner campaign group, led the crowds, either waving or draped in German flags, in barking chants of “Wir sind das Volk”, or “We are the people”, the slogan adopted by protesters in the historic “Monday demonstrations” against the East German government in the runup to the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Associating themselves with the freedom demonstrations has given Pegida protests an air of moral respectability even though there are hundreds of rightwing extremists in their midst, as well as established groups of hooligans who are known to the police, according to Germany’s federal office for the protection of the constitution.

What’s hilarious about hearing old lefties talk about “hooligans” disrupting the peace with their protests is it was not that long ago when these same lefties were the ones in the streets being called hooligans. They will tell you it was different because their enemies were right wing extremists and these protesters are right-wing extremists. The near total lack of self-awareness by the old fools at The Guardian is always good for some laughs.

While avoiding blatantly racist slogans, some told the Guardian of their angst over the “demise of the West” due to the rise of Islam or voiced their distaste of salafists and homosexuals in the same breath, or decried the recent decision by local politicians to increase the number of homes for asylum seekers. One group, knocking back bottles of the local beer, talked openly of their fears of what they call “fecal jihad”.

Mario Lupo, a 40-year-old tourist from Milan, was among the onlookers sipping glühwein at Germany’s oldest Christmas market, the Striezelmarkt.

“We came here for the romance and joviality of the Christmas markets,” he said. “We expected some light-hearted carousing appropriate to this time of year, but didn’t expect to stumble upon these rabble-rousers and police in riot gear.”

Among the groups taking part, according to the police, were two soccer hooligan organisations already known to the police called “Faust des Ostens” (Fist of the East) and Hooligans Elbflorenz (Florence of the Elbe Hooligans), as well as members of the National Democratic Party (NPD). Alongside them were old and young men and women, including families with children in pushchairs, many of whom said they had no political affiliation.

The reason it is useful to view the Left as a religious cult is they display all the same tendencies. The extreme paranoia is one of the more obvious features. The fact that the overwhelming majority of the people protesting are garden variety Germans is seen as proof that they are really “extreme right-wing extremists.” They’re just carefully avoiding use the racist slogans, but the good people at The Guardian see right through it!

Pegida’s growing presence has presented politicians with a dilemma over how to uncouple the strong neo-Nazi element believed to form the core of the protests from ordinary Germans with grievances against the government, who make up the bulk of the protesters.

Almost two-thirds of Germans, according to a poll for news magazine Spiegel by the TNS institute, believe that Angela Merkel’s government is not doing enough to address concerns about immigration and asylum seekers, and 34% think Germany is enduring a process of “Islamisation”.

The chancellor had earlier warned that a right to demonstrate did not extend to “rabble-rousing and defamation” against foreigners.

Merkel said that those participating in the protests should “take care not to be exploited” by radical elements trying to tap into fears of a foreigner takeover in Germany.

If you only read American media, you would never know that most of Europe is boiling with anti-immigration sentiment. Just as in the United States, Europe and Britain have had enough with wholesale immigration. In that regard I’ll give The Guardian credit for actually reporting it. I’d be curious to know if the mainstream German press has bothered to report on any of this, other than to decry it as fascism.

Still, the fact that the fascists in charge are calling these protesters “Pinstriped Nazis” says a lot about the ruling class of Germany. The Nazis may have been vanquished, but their ideas about government, economics and culture carried the day in the West, All of us now live in a world run by the intellectual sons and daughters of Carl Schmitt. They are the real pinstriped Nazis and they even wear pinstripes!

I suspect a lot of patriotic Americans will look at what’s going on in Europe and think the tide is turning. I’m not so sure. The flow of history seems to be away from small organizational groups and towards larger and larger political entities. The foundation stone of Europe is the end of nations. Without nations, there can be no citizens. Without citizens, why should the rulers care if Dresden is populated with Turks, Celts or Martians? Dresden is not a place with an identity. It is an area where natural resources are stored for use by the ruling class.

Maybe there’s a biological limit that we are reaching and a great contraction is upon us. Human biology does seem to preclude one world government. People rebel against rulers that do not look like they are from their gene pool. Colonialism failed, despite being the best thing to happen to the colonized. Humans simple don’t trust people that are not their blood or at least resemble their blood. 50,000 years of evolution is tough to beat, even if you spent a summer at college in a philosophy seminar.

Still, The way to bet seems to be with the people currently in charge.

Crotch Warriors

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The Atlantic used to be a great journal. Now it just a forum for addle-brained nitwits to have a tantrum about the latest outrages. Steve Sailer is convinced it is done on purpose, as an elaborate goof on multiculturalism, but that seems unlikely. Too many people truly believe this nonsense. If a piece like this is a sophisticated send-up of the crotch warriors, the writer should be working in Hollywood, not free lancing between shifts at the local bar.

On September 9, a parade of men marched across the stage at Flint Center in Cupertino, California, outlining a variety of new products in the Apple lineage. After the iPhone, Apple Pay, and, the doll of the party, the Apple Watch, Apple CEO Tim Cook took the stage to give some more details about Apple Health, an app that had been announced back in June and will eventually integrate with the Apple Watch. In that June announcement, Apple’s Senior Vice President of Software Engineering Craig Federighi bragged that the app would let users “monitor all of your metrics that you’re most interested in.”

As promised, Health is a powerful app. It allows users to track everything from calories to electrodermal activity to heart rate to blood alcohol content to respiratory rate to daily intake of chromium. But there’s a notable exception. Apple Health doesn’t track menstruation, an omission that was quickly seized upon by many tech writers as, well, ridiculous. The Verge asked “is it really too much to ask that Apple treat women, and their health, with as much care as they’ve treated humanity’s sodium intake?” How could Apple release a health-tracking app without the ability to monitor what is likely one of the earliest types of quantified-self tracking?

The most obvious answer here is that if you can’t count to 28, you probably can’t master the device. That and the fact menstrual cycles have nothing to do with the purpose of these gizmos. The people who buy them mostly want to signal that they obsess about their health. That most likely means indulging in useless fads like pill-popping, weird diets and fake exercise like cross-fit.

But, to the crotch warrior, everything is about their crotch. Therefore health must be defined in terms of the crotch. A normal person with an interest in bettering their fitness would look for a way to count calories, measure their heart rate and so on. Crotch warriors want a devise that lets them count to 28 so they can spend even more time thinking about their lady-parts.

The comments, as always, are the best. The top comment is a great satire. But, the rest have great example of the insanely unaware. Commenter “Laura” reminds me of a friend named Laura. She is a hair on fire feminist convinced the conspiracy of the pale penis people is out to get her. Come to think of it, every woman I’ve known named Laura has been nuts.

Never Play Chess With A Russian

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Back in the Bush years, it was fairly obvious our ruling class had no idea how Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks thought about the world. America went into Afghanistan thinking Pakistan was an ally and that the locals would treat the invaders different than all the other invaders since Alexander the Great. The Bush people sort of understood that nation building in Afghanistan was a waste of time, but they thought they could be the baddest street gang on the block.

Then the parade of idiots known as the Obama Administration came along and tried to win friends and influence bronze age people, wasting lives and treasure for no earthly reason. Of course, this may be giving the Bush people too much credit. They went blundering into Iraq fully convinced they could turn Iraq into a democratic, multicultural democratic paradise. Instead they unleashed decades of ethnic hatred, resulting in a blood bath and a massive failed state.

It is one thing to have nutty ideas about backward people on the periphery. That’s somewhat understandable, if not defensible, but it appears our rulers have no idea how anything works anymore. The problems in Ukraine are an obvious example. The Russians have always had a sense of space that drives their national identity. Any threat to it, particularly from the West, is going to get a response.

The problem is that our ruling class is very insular. There’s no longer a bubbling up of talent based on merit. Instead we have a credentialed elite that likes to pretend they are at the top of a meritocracy, but in reality they just ticked off the right boxes in the secular exam system. Everywhere you look you see Ivy League grads who rode the coattails of other Ivy League grads. The American foreign policy establishment is looking more like a priesthood than collection of seasoned realists.

Stories like this are a good example of the sloppy work that is the result of this insularity.

A Russian loan to France’s National Front. Invitations to Moscow for leaders of Austria’s Freedom Party. Praise for Vladimir Putin from the head of Britain’s anti-European Union party.

As the diplomatic chill over Ukraine deepens, the Kremlin seems keener than ever to enlist Europe’s far-right parties in its campaign for influence in the West, seeking new relationships based largely on shared concern over the growing clout of the EU.

Russia fears that the EU and NATO could spread to countries it considers part of its sphere of influence. And it has repeatedly served notice that it will not tolerate that scenario, most recently with its Ukraine campaign.

Europe’s right-wing and populist parties, meanwhile, see a robust EU as contrary to their vision of Europe as a loose union of strong national states. And some regard the EU as a toady to America.

The fact that many of Moscow’s allies are right to far-right reflects the Kremlin’s full turn. Under communism, xenophobic nationalist parties were shunned.

Now they are embraced as partners who can help further Russia’s interests and who share key views — advocacy of traditional family values, belief in authoritarian leadership, a distrust of the U.S. and support for strong law-and-order measures.

Statements by leading critics of the EU, or euroskeptics, reflect their admiration of the Kremlin.

This is obviously a planted story. The idea is to discredit the dissenters in Europe and America, by connecting them to Hitler 3.0 or whatever we’re up to now on the Hitler chain of existence. Of course, Hitler Putin financing these dissenters is justification for continuing the cold war on Russia. That’s all fair game, but this is so ham-fisted and stupid it makes me wonder if it is not some sort of bad joke. Later in the story they claim Gerhard Schroeder and Italy’s former Premier Silvio Berlusconi were Putin clients.

That’s the insularity part. The true believers running American foreign policy seem to lack any sense of self-awareness. This makes it impossible for them to see the world through the eyes of their competitors. It also has led to foolish fights with Putin over Ukraine, an utterly worthless slab of land on the fringe of Europe. Their need for a bogeyman to explain any resistance to their weird secular religion has created enemies where none needed to exist.

Never Put Bitter Weirdos In Charge

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For a very long time now, the Left has been telling us that the most wonderful thing possible is to be the first member of a fringe group to do something. The phrase “first black…” has been so heavily used it has lost all meaning. The Left now tacks on adjectives to sweeten the pot so we get combinations like “first black transgendered amputee….” but they have added in other groups to keep the racket going. Now that we have had the first black president, they want the first fake Indian president.

The thing is, we used to know that it was a bad idea to put weirdos in charge of anything. In this context, weirdo means anyone outside the core group. The British used to know that it was a bad idea to have a Catholic as prime minister. A major company would not appoint a confirmed bachelor as CEO. The French would never have a heterosexual as a general. In America, Nixon is a great example of how a bitter outsider cannot function in leadership.

Group hatred has always been an issue, but common sense was at play too. A distinct minority group was going to nurse a lot of grudges against the majority. If they ever got control of the levers of power, it was assumed they would exact some revenge. This is still well understood in the Middle East. Keeping the fringe out of power is a top priority. Examples of why are Iraq and Syria, where motivated and pissed off minority sects have killed a lot of people.

In America, we’re learning this with Obama. There was a lot of effort put into convincing us that even though he was black, he was not that black. Joe Biden called him clean and articulate, which was a way of saying he was not Jesse Jackson. Harry Reid mentioned that he was not a shuffling negro. In other words, he was not a black guy nursing a laundry list of grievances.

Of course, that has turned out to be total nonsense. Obama is a typical black guy and that means he is obsessed with race. All of his friends are black and all of his key advisers are black. All of those friends and advisers nurse the typical grievances we have come to expect from blacks in America. One of Obama’s closest friends is using race to dodge a trial of Obama cronies in Illinois.

Similarly, the Left is finding out that a taste for penis is not the only thing wrong with Chris Hughes. This nasty piece of work destroyed one of the Left’s great properties out of a fit of pique. Normal people who have had dealings with homosexuals knows that sexual inversion is just the bit of the iceberg we see with them. Under the waterline is a mass of crazy that makes dealing with them impossible. There are exceptions, of course, but prudence says you assume the worst and never put them in charge.

We’re going to find this out with Hispanics in the not so distant future. The Left is preparing the Castro Twins to be the next leaders. Both have managed to grow up in Texas, with a raging hatred of Texas and Texans. Putting them in charge makes as much sense as putting a foreign born Muslim in the White House so we can be sure it will happen. That’s life in post-reality America. Everything we used to know is forgotten and then painfully relearned.

McDonalds

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It has been a long time since I’ve looked closely at the McDonald’s menu. When I was a boy, the the menu was pretty simple. They had hamburgers, cheeseburgers and the fish sandwich. On the rare occasion when I eat there, I still get a cheeseburger and a fish sandwich. Maybe I’ll do the one dollar chicken sandwich. Otherwise, I could not name five things on their menu. I suppose they still sell the Big Mac and fries, but the rest is a mystery I’m happy to ignore.

This story on Yahoo tells me they have 121 items on their menu. I’m not sure how that’s possible, but maybe they are counting things like ketchup packs. Still, how in the world did they let that happen? The whole point of fast food is it is simple, cheap, fast and consistent. The fish sandwich in Boston as in Minneapolis. It generally costs the same and is delivered the same. Given the general stupidity of the American people, 121 offerings just means it will undermine the whole effort.

In California, there is a chain called In ‘N Out Burger. They offer a cheeseburger, a hamburger, a double burger and fries. The food is good, the service is quick and the experience is consistent from restaurant to restaurant. It is what McDonald’s used to be fifty years ago. Chick-fil-A is the same concept, except they do not permit homosexuals in their stores.  Anytime I see one of these restaurants, they are packed. It turns out that McDonald’s was right the first time. People don’t like diversity.

It is the great lie of modern times that people like options. That’s nonsense. People are social animals. We like belonging to a group. That’s our nature. It’s why there are Pepsi drinkers and Coke drinkers. We have two types of cola. Then we have the oddball stuff for the weirdos, but it is a tiny market. When was the last time you heard someone order an RC Cola or a Moxie? No, people like a few choices so we can divide ourselves up into simple groups. Otherwise, diversity is always a bad thing.

Rambling About Israel

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One of the thorniest problems in modern public debate is how to talk about Israel, without talking about Jews. If you have something bad to say about Israel, you will be called an anti-Semite by the usual suspects. On the other hand, anti-Semites cloak their Jew-hating in criticism of Israel. Of course, if you have anything to say about Jews, from an HBD perspective, you can be sure to have Israel held up as a counter, as if there’s no difference between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews.

There’s so much chaff in the air it is hard to get a bead on any of it. Ron Unz continues to publish this guy, despite the radioactive weirdo vibe. He hangs out with conspiracy buffs and has an obsession with Israel. Put his name in the google machine and you get nothing but Israel stuff, with some 9/11 conspiracy stuff tossed in the mix. Looking at his Wiki page, nothing jumps out and Wiki is edited by raging lefties so maybe I’m off-base, but it is just so hard to know.

Similarly, I saw this on Maggie’s Farm the other day. I admit I never heard of Max Blumenthal, at least not the Max Blumenthal in question. I once played racquetball with a Max Blumenthal, but he was not this one. His father is Sydney Blumenthal, a loathsome scumbag that worked for Clinton in the 1990’s. Still, I have no idea if Max Blumenthal is a self-hating Jew, a crank or just a guy with opinions about Israel that are unpopular. That’s the thing about all of this, it is impossible to tell the players even with a scorecard.

One of the things that no one is allowed to mention is the fact many Jews in American and Europe hate the very idea of Israeli. Well, they are fine with Israel as an abstract construction, but not as a real place with real people. They look at Israel in the same way Americans look at people from West Virginia or New Jersey. The crazy crackers from the mountains and the guidos from the Jersey are a reminder of a past a lot of people would just as soon forget. The hairy Jews haggling over a spot at the Wailing Wall are something most American Jews would just as soon forget too.

Then you have the other problem. Ashkenazi Jews are a remarkable group of people. A small group of people bound together by what most think was an imported religion, managed to survive and prosper, despite being surrounded by people hostile to their religion. They have not just survived; Ashkenazi Jews have dominated the cultural life of Europe and America. As Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out, Ashkenazi Jews are 1% of the US population and 30% of the richest Americans.

People tend to notice this remarkable success and that’s not a good thing for a distinct minority. If Israel was a country that existed in the 1930’s, odds are the Nazis would have gone for mass deportation of the Jews, rather than other options. There’s no way to know that, but it would have been the easiest path and people tend to seek the path of least resistance. Given the attitudes of early 20th century Europe, it probably would have been the policy of every country in Europe.

That’s the problem Israel presents Jews everywhere. If Israel is the Jewish homeland, why are Jews living in Denmark, Paris, Bangor Maine and Bozeman Montana? It offers up a handy excuse for majority populations to round up their Jews. Given recent history, you can’t blame Jews for being more than a little worried about it. In America, anti-Semitism has never been popular, but in Europe it has never been unpopular. Most Jews in America had close relatives that either fled Hitler or survived Hitler.

Of course, maybe that’s the point. If it is impossible to separate honest criticism from bigotry, decent people will avoid criticism. Americans are strangely polite in their public discourse. The last thing a chattering skull wants is to be called is rude or mean. If you can’t win a debate, shutting it down is the next best result. I’m not sure that’s the case here, but it is certainly true that any discussion of Jews is off-limits and discussions of Israel better be glowing. Otherwise, you risk being called a bigot.

Marie Antoinette with an Afro

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Russell Simmons is a very rich man. According to people who study these things, he is worth $325 million. That’s enough to make him a solid member of the Liberal-Democratic elite. Further, he has been rich for a long time and he has never been poor. He is the product of the rarest of things, a black two-parent household. Both parents have jobs in the New York City government. Simmons got rich thirty years ago peddling ghetto filth to young white kids in the suburbs.

The point being that Mr. Russell knows less about the ghetto and typical black life than my cat. His is a life of private apartments, private cars and private planes. He knows enough about black life to be able to peddle black culture to white suburban kids. Other than that, he has arranged his life such that he has nothing to do with black America. That’s not stopping him from pretending to be the tribune of the people.

Russell Simmons, co-founder of Def Jam Recordings, appeared on CNN last night on Out Front with Erin Burnett to warn there are more protests coming if “demands” are not met.

We are seeing the beginning of the end of police policing the police, he added.

“On Wednesday, we are going to ask for indictments and list of achievable demands.” (“We” referring to high profile celebrities and athletes that share Simmons’ beliefs.)

“And America has not seen protests like those that are coming if justice doesn’t start to come down,” warned Simmons.

Simmons told Burnett, “Over 150K cases were brought before the grand Jury and and only 11 cases didn’t come back with indictments. It’s like lightening striking the black community over and over and over again.”

We need special oversight committees, we shouldn’t leave it to DAs who work with the police, explained Simmons.

Burnett asked, “You don’t feel defeated that has happened again and again and again?” to which Simmons responded, “We’re going to get indictments now because America hasn’t seen what’s coming.”

“When people understand the injustice properly, the way these protestors understand it, they’re all going to fight for justice, and that’s going to change this system.”

I’ve mentioned before that whites are growing increasingly weary of this stuff. There’s simply no excuse for it. If you are a young black person in America right now, the world is your oyster. If you choose to walk around with your pants down and  playing with yourself like an extra from a Russell Simmons music video, that’s on you. If you choose to be a “playah” and get “in the game” then you can look forward to a life spent in a cage, but it is your choice.

If Russell Simmons wanted to bring down the number of incidents of cops treating blacks poorly, he would stop peddling the filth that has made him rich. He would stop portraying blacks as feral animals in order to sell white people his merchandise. But, that would require a degree of self-awareness Mr. Simmons apparently lacks. His stepping forth as the tribune of poor black people is like casting Marie Antoinette as the leader of the sans culottes.

James Pethokoukis and Dunning-Kruger

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James Pethokoukis used to post at NRO about the economy and that’s where he first got my attention. He tended to write things that stupid people say when they wish to sound smart. I looked him up and sure enough, I found a journalism major. I look at journalism majors in the same way I look at communications majors. That is, these are people who were not smart enough to real college work or they were simply too lazy to do real college work.

In short order it became clear he was a fake nerd in the Ezra Klein mold, but maybe not as good at working the bit. Klein puts a lot of effort into it. Pethokoukis seems happy to be a clueless lunkhead that thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. Thus, the reference to Dunning-Kruger. As an aside, I love how is called a “fellow” at AEI. These agitprop houses love bestowing scholarly titles on one another.

Anyway, I saw this gem today and thought it was a great excuse to take some cheap shots at someone.

One big difference between America’s K-12 education system and that of other nations is where our teachers come from. McKinsey has found that top-performing nations recruit their teachers from the top third of college students. As one report notes, school systems in Singapore, Finland, and South Korea “recruit 100% of their teacher corps from the top third” of the academic class vs. just 23% in the US.

The other big difference, the one that makes all the difference, is the schools in Finland, Taiwan and South Korea are full of Finns and East Asians. When you compare US schools to those around the world, you have to make that adjustment. Once you do that, you find out that our Finns do as well as Finns everywhere. Our Koreans do better than those in Korea. Thinking like that is hard and lunkhead can’t be bothered with that.

The Ad Scam

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Many moons ago, I sat through a presentation by the director of marketing for a company where I was working. He put up charts and graphs showing the effectiveness of the various market programs. It was very well done, but complete bullshit. Talking with the guy after his presentation, he admitted as much.

There was no way to measure the effectiveness of his programs. I had been tasked with trying to come up with a way to do it, which was why I was in his presentation. To the guy’s credit, he knew there was no point in trying to fool me so he came clean. He was just making assumptions from anecdotes and wishful thinking.

The guy was not an asshole or a crook. He was doing his job like every other marketing guy. His bosses and coevals made all the same assumptions he made and relied on the same pseudo-logic to justify the marketing budget. Everyone just assumed smart people had worked it all out a long time ago.

That’s why every great company spent money on ads, campaigns, promotions, etc. The one very memorable thing he said was that he made sure to spend a little more than his budget every year. That way, he would get  a bigger budget the next year.

I’ve always wondered if there would come a time when companies figured out that much of their advertizing was a waste of money. Dr. Pepper spends millions on college football, but their product still tastes awful. The percentage of people who will like odd flavored soda is fixed. No amount of advertizing with change it. Beyond product awareness and sales, advertizing strikes me as rather pointless. As I type this, I’m watching an ad for something that may be for clothes or possibly wheat. I have no idea and doubt anyone else does either. Millions were spent for something and I doubt the company will see a nickel in return.

On TV, most of these ads are filtered out by our brains as background noise. On-line, they are blocked by the browser and browser add-ons. I suspect most of us have become so good at blocking out web ads that we don’t even notice them. When I bother to look, I wonder why anyone would be spending money on them. Sites that lard up on ads, like Brietbart and the Daily Caller, I tend to avoid. If I have to close eight windows and then find and mute some stupid video in order to get to your site, your site sucks.

Of course, it has long been suspected that skimmers like Facebook use click farms to scam companies into advertizing with them. This video from earlier in the year is pretty good. No one has ever bothered to refute it. It has been known for a while that there are “like farms” for hire that will boost a Facebook page for a fee. Twitter has been plagued by zombie accounts to boost the follower counts of celebrities. The fact that Facebook, and presumably others, is using robots and click farms to scam advertisers should not shock anyone. The degree is the question. How much of scam is on-line advertising?

It appears half of these ads are never actually seen by humans.

Online advertising is a fickle thing. It accounts for 20% of the ad industry’s total spending, and over 90% of revenue for the internet giants Google and Facebook. That said, no one seems to have any idea whether it actually works.

That uncertainty reached a new high this week, as Google announced that 56.1% of ads served on the internet are never even “in view”—defined as being on screen for one second or more. That’s a huge number of “impressions” that cost money for advertisers, but are as pointless as a television playing to an empty room.

This is not a big revelation. The web metrics company ComScore reported last year that 46% of online ads are never seen. Spider.io, an ad fraud company acquired by Google in February, has pointed out that a large portion of ads are “viewed” only by robots, revealing that one botnet of 120,000 virus-infected computers viewed ads billions of times, running up the tab for advertisers without offering them the human eyeballs they sought.

Still, the acknowledgement by a heavyweight such as Google that ad viewability is a problem could shake up the industry by delaying possible IPOs of ad companies and requiring new ways for advertisers to gauge the effectiveness of their ads.
The nineteenth-century retailer John Wanamaker famously said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is I don’t know which half.” In this case, it’s the obviously the half that pays for ads which are never seen, and now advertisers are looking for new tools to figure out which those are.

It’s worth noting that Google made this acknowledgement of the deficiency of the model it has profited richly from while also offering a new model to advertisers: In July it introduced its Active View product, which measures only viewed ads.

This goes back to the puzzle of Facebook and Twitter. How can they be worth billions? Yeah, they have lots of users, but so what? Those users pay them nothing. The ads on Twitter are minimal and you can’t even see them on your phone. I don’t do Facebook anymore, but the ads I used to see were mostly scumbags like dating services and fake medicines. At some point, the guys writing the checks will figure out they are wasting 100% of their money these sites.

Reality Complicates Diversity

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This story about the problems desegregating the Hartford public schools is amusing. For the Cult, hatred of white people has become such a natural instinct, they can’t separate reality from fantasy anymore. They really think they can force the hoi polloi to live together according to the popular fads of the Cult. They never stop to think that maybe there’s a reason people are not embracing diversity.

The shrinking population of white students in Hartford’s suburbs is complicating efforts to comply with Connecticut’s landmark school desegregation settlement — and even making it harder for some of the capital city’s students to attend new schools created to help meet the racial integration goals set by the lawsuit 25 years ago.

State education officials are currently negotiating the latest changes to the agreement, reached with the plaintiffs after they won a 1996 Connecticut Supreme Court ruling, but say it is becoming harder to attract white students to Hartford’s schools because they’re living farther away.

About half the students living in the 22 communities subject to the agreement, according to state officials, are non-white. That’s up from about 38 percent in 2008, when the parties negotiated a revised timetable for progress on reducing racial, ethnic and economic isolation. Another revision was made last year.

“The state is in the position of, how do you meet the requirements of the State Supreme Court given the fact that the demographics of the region have changed so completely,” said Kathleen Demsey, state Department of Education’s chief financial officer who worked for years on the issue. “Financially, it’s a burden for this transportation system, money that could be used for education is being used to bus kids.”

The hilarious bit here is the same people trying to force the proletariat to live together, based on some magic racial formula, will move heaven and earth to make sure their kids are are not going to school with the other races. Yet, they are mystified to learn that everyone else does the same thing.

But lawyers for the plaintiffs in the case, Sheff vs. O’Neill, say there are still plenty of predominantly white communities in the region that can be drawn from to attract additional students, or where Hartford students can attend school in a racially integrated setting.

“We’ve made some progress but we still think there’s more that can be done,” said Dennis Parker, a lawyer for the plaintiffs and director of racial justice programs for the American Civil Liberties Union.

The issue of changing demographics has come up before. In 2013, the parties redefined the standard for diversity, allowing Asian, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islanders to count toward the 25 percent “white enrollment” threshold. Further changes could be among the proposals in this round of negotiations.

I’m sure the Asians are thrilled to know they will be used as cannon fodder in the ghetto.

Newly released statistics show 47.5 percent of Hartford’s 21,458 minority students are currently enrolled in “reduced-isolation settings,” a marked improvement from 11 percent in 2008. That comes after the state spent about $2.25 billion on new magnets and other programs throughout the region over a 10-year period. Yet the plaintiffs contend that progress falls far short of giving every Hartford student the opportunity to learn in a racially integrated setting.

Attorney Martha Stone said the state could create incentives to encourage suburban school districts to take in more Hartford students and foster more collaborative projects involving different entities, such as the proposed elementary magnet aerospace academy in Rocky Hill.

“There are so many different ideas that have been on the table for years that the state has not taken the initiative on,” Stone said.

Unlike other states where there has been forced busing and redrawn school districts, Connecticut’s settlement relies on voluntary desegregation and additional state funding. Parents inside and outside of Hartford can choose to enter a lottery in order for their children to approximately 45 magnet schools. Meanwhile, Hartford students can also choose to attend suburban public schools.

But the makeup of some suburbs is changing: East Hartford, for example, shifted from 23 percent minority enrollment in 1989, when the lawsuit was first filed, to 84 percent in 2013. Manchester jumped from 12 percent to 60 percent, Windsor from 31 percent to 71 percent, and Bloomfield from 74 to 96 percent.

This is pattern you see everywhere in the northeast. The FDR version of the Cult thought they should pack blacks into urban ghettos. They used white ethnics as a buffer, but then the ethnics bolted to the suburbs. The cities collapsed and we ended up with all of these urban jungles. Starting in the 80’s, the new plan was to move the blacks out to the suburbs so the Cult could reclaim the nice spots in the city. The white ethnics living in the inner suburbs are now bolting to exurbs and gated neighborhoods.

One of the reasons I say liberalism is a religion is I’ve been to places like Hartford and New Haven. The latter is a great example. Yale dominate New Haven, financially, politically and geographically. Down the hill from the idyllic campus lies the black side of New Haven. The only interface the students have with the people down the hill is the occasional robbery or beating. Otherwise, down the hill may as well be another planet. Every student on that campus knows where not to go and who not to trust.

Despite that reality all around them, the students at Yale are as liberal as they come. They go off into the world full of righteous anger about how  middle America treats its black people. You point out to them that the Yale campus is more like an antebellum plantation than normal America and they look at you like you’re speaking in tongues. That degree of self-delusion only comes from intense belief.

A normal person trying to integrate the Hartford schools would look at the results thus far and conclude it is a failure. Decades of effort have come up empty so it is time to try something else. The true believer, faced with dis-confirmation, redoubles their efforts, convinced that this time things will be different.