Monthly Archives: January 2015

Not in Anyone’s Name

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I went over to the British Spectator to see what they had to say about the Muslims shooting up Paris. The last I checked it was a respectably conservative opinion site. It used to be that “respectable” meant non-fringe, but these days it means not threatening to the status quo. Sure enough, this is their first instinct.

The Muslim Council of France, and of Britain, have denounced today’s attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo. As they know, one of the aims of the jihadis is to try to speak for Islam – but they have been joined in their condemnation by hundreds of Muslims on Twitter. Here are some of them.

It then goes on to list a dozen or so tweets from Muslims saying they are unhappy with the attack in Paris. As is always the case these days, the truth lies in the comment sections of respectable sites. The one at the very top nails it. When Muslims get their feelings hurt, they manage to have mass rallies and mass killings. After something like this, they can only muster some mild rebukes on twitter.

The fact that the first instinct of the Spectator is to insulate Muslims against the great mythical backlash that never comes is telling. A normal person can be forgiven for wondering whose side they are on here. It’s tempting to think that maybe it is just a subtle way to get readers to post comments, a form of click bait. The readers get to say what the writers and publishers are afraid to post.

That’s a fantasy. Even if true it just shows that the people allegedly leading the charge against the Left are simply to afraid to fight. What’s the point of supporting these folks if when it comes time to choose a side, they will join the opposition?

The problem we have in the Anglo-sphere is that the Anglos have no tribune. There’s no one willing to represent the stale, pale males who created civilization. There’s no one willing to defend civilization. If Charles Martel were alive today, the Frogs would have packed him off to sensitivity training or worse.

Buying Drugs in the Ghetto

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I have a growing relationship with the nation’s “health care system.” I put quotes in there because systems have an internal logic. It may be screwy and pointless logic, but there’s a reason things are the way they are in a system. There’s no logic to health care in this country. American health care is more like the exercise yard at the penitentiary. The weak are victimized by the strong for no reason other than they can. It’s what I imagine Hell to be, pointless, irrational torment.

I could probably fill up a library with commentary on the health rackets, but I’ll save that for another day. Last night I stopped at the pharmacy (that’s the chemist for my UK readers) to get my heart meds refilled. I stood waiting for someone to acknowledge me for ten minutes until a black fellow waved me over. His name was Michael Yababadodaba. OK, I made up the last name, but it was something like that. My guess is he originated in Ghana as they love English first names and tribal last names.

Michael moved so slow it was hard to know if he was actually moving. His English was passable, but I suspected he had an IQ in the 90’s. Everything about the job seemed to confuse him. After fiddling with the computer for ten minutes, he informed me that they were out of the medication. He did not know when it would be available. Further, he said he tried to call me earlier about it. That seemed to be important to him as he repeated it several times, like an incantation. I suspect that by “tried to call me” he meant that he tried and failed to use the telephone.

Another ten minutes of him fiddling around with the computer and he finally grunted out that another pharmacy had the medicine. It’s very weird to have to use hand signals to communicate with someone responsible for correctly dispensing your medication. Anyway, he handed me a piece of paper with a telephone number on it. Michael may not have the sense God gave a goldfish, but he has very nice penmanship. He has that going for him.

Pharmacist used to be a job for middle-class white kids from the state college. The job did not require much in the way of IQ, but you needed to be conscientious. Filling the wrong meds or letting someone take something that would have an adverse reaction with their other meds are the sorts of mistakes a pharmacy likes to avoid. The pharmacist is supposed to be a pest for little details, as the last check point in the quality control system. They are the sorts of people who enjoy reading the fine print on small bottles.

That worked fine until the usual suspects decided they needed to loot the pharmacies so they have started to import third world types on visas to fill those jobs. Instead of dealing with a pleasant white girl from the neighborhood, I now deal with illiterate Africans not entirely sure how they got here. I can’t imagine anyone in America is standing around saying that we have a shortage of Africans , but here we are, importing them from the mother country.

I called the number from my cell on the way out and learn that it is for a pharmacy in the ghetto. I fear no man, but being an old white guy in the ghetto at night is inviting trouble I don’t need. After reaching a human, I learned they do have the meds and my script will be filled and ready in the morning. The woman on the other end sounded white, pleasant and competent. I mentioned in passing that Michael did not fill me with confidence and she laughed and assured me my drugs would be there waiting. You can always trust the drug dealer to be straight with you.

Mid-morning, I had a break in the schedule so I headed over to the ghetto to make a drug buy. I always feel like I should have the soundtrack of Shaft playing in my eight track when I head into the ghetto. In the hood, it always feels like 1972. One thing about living in or near the ghetto is you quickly learn that black people are not good drivers. They are unpredictable drivers. For no reason other than they want to, a driver will make a right hand turn from the left lane or turn onto a busy street causing a pile up. That means you have to pay extra attention to avoid getting wrecked.

Sure enough, a clapped out sedan comes speeding toward me out of a parking lot on the left. Traffic coming the other way skidded to a stop in the snow and I had to do a series of maneuvers to avoid getting hit. The two yos in the “hoopty” were completely oblivious to the fact they almost caused a multi-car pile up. They just had somewhere to go and that’s all that mattered.

Anyone who has been to the third world knows that driving in those places is a life altering adventure. Drive anywhere for any length of time in these countries and you have a near death experience. A hallmark of the third world is comically dangerous roads. My sense is it is due to the lack of self-restraint and time preference. In the ghetto, time in not linear. As we invite the third world to settle in our lands, the ability to navigate ghetto drivers will be an essential skill.

I parked and headed into to get my meds. As I walked in the help all stopped what they are doing and looked at me like I just parked my space ship. They don’t see too many white guys in there. They assumed I was either cop or a higher up in the store’s management. Once they figured out I was just a customer, they went back to doing nothing. The woman at the counter was polite, but “customer service” in the ghetto is an abuse of the language. The woman was named, I’m not kidding, “Chakita” and she must have spent her pay check getting an elaborate hair weave. From behind the bullet proof glass she handed over my drugs and I handed over my money. What a way to live.

This is our future.

Jeb Bush is Smiling

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Given the mood of the electorate, anyone named Bush would have a tough time winning votes in the 2016 GOP primary. A good share of primary voters share my view that W was a decent and honest guy, but horribly wrong about most everything. His presidency caused so much damage to the nation we may never live to see it repaired.

That does not mean he cannot win. The elites love the Bush family. They are reliable on the important issues. The reason the Cult went bonkers over W was they saw him as a class traitor. His overt Christianity was horrifying just as it would be to fanatical Muslims. W represented the triumph of the wrong sort of white people, even if was merely symbolic.

Anyway, in order for Jeb to become president, he needs some things to happen. One is he needs the GOP field to be splintered. If conservatives of different stripes find a single guy they like enough to back, Bush is doomed. He needs every faction to be married to their guy until the money runs dry. Bush will have all the money he needs to run in the early contests so he can outlast everyone.

Seeing Huckabee jump in and now maybe Santorum has to make the Bush Klan smile.

Rick Santorum has invited former aides to Washington next week for a “private briefing” on his plans for a possible 2016 presidential bid.

The “Personal Invitation from Senator Santorum,” provided to CNN by a Republican who received it, was sent by a Santorum aide to more than two dozen “friends and former colleagues” from past campaigns and his time in the U.S. House and Senate.

“As you probably know, RJS is seriously considering a run for the White House in 2016,” Santorum adviser Matt Beynon wrote in the email, using Santorum’s initials.

“With the midterms and the new year behind us, he is beginning the final stages of preparation and consideration of another campaign,” Beynon wrote.

Santorum, he wrote, “would like to give you a personal update on his plans” at a “private briefing” on Jan. 13 at the offices of the American Continental Group, a lobbying and public affairs office in Washington.

Among the Santorum alumni invited to the session are a number of top lobbyists and political strategists who once worked for the former congressman and senator from Pennsylvania, including former George W. Bush spokesman Tony Fratto and former Republican National Committee finance director Rob Bickhart.

It’s important to understand that this is not a strategy session. Santorum is feeling these guys out to learn what the other guys are doing. He’s also signalling to Jeb his interests. Everyone assumes it is the GOP’s turn in 2016 so there will be a lot of jobs to be had in the next administration for Republicans. Santorum may be willing to run as a straw to sink Huckabee in Iowa, as long as the Bush people will help him out down the road.

This is looking a lot like 2000 to me. Everyone knew the Democrats would run Al Gore as the sober, more liberal Bill Clinton. When W started raising money in 1998 it became clear he was the establishment’s guy. George Schultz had recruited him and all the party big shots fell in line. By the time the campaign season started, everyone knew the game was rigged. Only McCain decided to challenge W, but he had no chance.

This time it is the open borders wing of the establishment recruiting a Bush to lead them in the GOP primary. They are deeply worried about what’s happening with the voters. The defeat of Eric Cantor was the shot heard around the Beltway. It’s why they have been pushing the House GOP to sign off on the ObamAmnesty. If they can make that stick, Jeb Bush can go around the voters to implement their agenda.

Greece

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For the longest time, the smart people looked at the situation in Greece, fainted and then, having been resuscitated, declared it impossible for Greece to leave Europe. Something had to be worked out to address their financial problems. Greece was, in a way, a test for the idea of Europe, but also an excuse to move from an economic cooperative to a political union. In Greece and Italy, leaders were replaced with ones more pleasing to Brussels and willing to sign off on austerity measures.

After a short interlude, the Greeks are back in the news. This time they are threatening to throw off their Euro-approved leaders in favor of a neo-fascist outfit called Syriza. I know, I know, the Left can never be called fascist, even if they look just Mussolini’s old party. Whatever you want to call them, Syriza is not interested in sticking with the austerity program or even with Europe. What they want is unclear, but all of the beautiful people are now convinced that their elevation will lead to a crisis.

The tone this time seems different. At least that’s my read on stories like this one. No longer are the money-men convinced that a Greek exit will collapse the Euro. I suspect the reason for that is the realization that it was always nonsense. Greece is a small country with little impact on Europe. Even the worst case scenario said they would not drag the continent into depression. They are simply too small. Now, everyone has insulated themselves to their problems so the risk is simply not there.

As the article indicates, there’s also a strange belief that Syriza is not what is claims. Once they gain power, they will like being in power. That means cutting a deal with Germany and remaining in Europe. The alternative would mean a depression and with that political turmoil. The conventional wisdom is that turmoil is bad for those in charge, even though Syriza is a different breed of cat. The thought of a party of the hard left using a crisis to seize total power seems to have been forgotten by everyone.

The Germans are now talking tough, in that post-modern German way. Merkel has no choice, given what’s happening to her coalition. On the one hand she has to acknowledge the growing frustration of many Germans over the bailing out of profligate Greeks. On the other hand, she has to remind the trouble makers that their heresy will not be tolerated. In other words, she can notice their noticing, but she can’t let it slide. It sounds like madness, but that’s all she and the globalists have at this point.

France is taking a somewhat different tack. The French elite are nowhere near as unified as the German elite over Europe. Frustration with the loss of “Frenchness” is not just a phenomenon of the lower classes. Gaullism still resonates with the French elite. The stunning success of Eric Zenmour’s book Le suicide français as well as the slow legitimization of Marie Le Pen suggests the French elite are not prepared to go all in with their German partners. That Weekly Standard piece is well worth reading, by the way.

People can convince themselves of anything. The globalization project, of which Europe is a major force, is predicated on the belief that the people will never notice what’s happening to them. The average German will not notice that his town is being over run by Muslim migrants living on the welfare system. The typical Frenchman will not notice his standard of living collapsing.

It’s also dependent on religion. Much like how religion was used by the Foundation in the Asimov novels, the religion of cultural Marxism is a narcotic that turns the addict into a defender of the faith. If you dissent from the bulldozing of traditional culture, you are branded a racist, which is just the new term for heretic. If you dissent from globalism and free trade uber alles, then you are an isolationist trying to turn back the clock. Again, this is just another way to brand you as a heretic.

In America, this brand of religion works exceptionally well. Calling someone a racist is about the worst thing imaginable. No one, of course, thinks isolationism is good so that means you have to be for free trade, open borders and globalism. Then there’s the job of being the world’s cop, which is America’s God given responsibility! Anti-racism, global capitalism and policing the world are wrapped in the flag of patriotism to keep the American public fully supportive of the ruling class.

In Europe, anti-racism is not the magic fairy dust it is in America. No one seriously thinks the Europeans can keep the peace. In fact, their inability to keep the peace is one of the justifications for Europe. Instead of racism, nationalism is the bogeyman used to scare the faithful and bully the heretics. That’s what makes the Eurozone crisis so thorny. You can’t help but notice that the problems all stem from the places where everyone has black hair, brown eyes and olive skin. It’s a big reason the European elites have been desperate to keep Greece from leaving the fold. Anti-nationalism is supposed to solve these problems, not exacerbate them.

The Greeks remaining in the Euro seems untenable. The Greek people will not tolerate the conditions placed on them and the Germans cannot make exceptions for the Greeks. They have to go. The details of that will slowly be worked out as both sides come to accept reality. The Germans, however, need Greece to suffer. Their exit from Europe has to be so terrible that Italy, Spain and Portugal are scared straight. That means the coming Greek crisis will be at a time and place of Merkel’s choosing.

The Germans and French may try to bolster their own standing by tightening immigration ever so slightly and dumping the Greeks from Europe. That would take some wind out of the sails of the anti-Euro parties. Daily images of Greeks rioting or waiting in line for money will drive home the point, at least for a little while. In the long run, Greece is not going to dissolve. If they find a rich uncle to help them through it, they could end up being what Euro elites have feared – a bad example for the trouble makers.

HuckleBerry

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I said in my predictions post that Mike Huckabee will run as the snake handler candidate in the 2016 GOP primary. My reasoning was pretty simple. This cohort needs a champion and they are a large cohort. Someone will always step forward. Second, and most important, Huck needs the work. He parlayed his last run into a TV job, but that has now run its course.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee announced Saturday night that he would be ending his Fox News talk show to gauge support for a possible presidential campaign.

“There has been a great deal of speculation as to whether I would run for President,” Huckabee told his followers on Facebook. “I won’t make a decision about running until late in the spring of 2015, but the continued chatter has put Fox News into a position that is not fair to them.”

Roger Ailes is no dummy. He knows Huck is running so he put him on the clock. Whatever juice Huckabee has as a TV personality has waned as the Evangelical movement dissolved in the last decade. Those people are still there and they are still going to church, they just don’t hold much interest to TV these days. The Libertarians are the cool new toy for the cable outlets.

“I feel compelled to ascertain if the support exists strongly enough for another Presidential run. So as we say in television, stay tuned!” he added.

Huckabee, who ran for the Republican nomination in 2008 and hosted his show for more than six and a half years, had drawn renewed attention by criticizing former secretary of state Hillary Clinton last month after she said “smart power” also means empathizing and showing respect for enemies.

“How can we empathize with terrorists who think nothing of beheading innocent men, women and children?” Huckabee asked in a blog post on his website last month.

Huckabee is a savvy political animal and he should not be under estimated. He learned a lot from his last run. What he needs now is an issue that lets him break out of the social conservative reservation. Immigration would be the ideal issue, but he is an open borders fanatic.

The 2016 race is already well underway online.

Even before Huckabee had made his announcement, Rand Paul’s PAC was firing away on the digital front. Just as the Kentucky Republican’s political arm had done when Jeb Bush signaled last month he was weighing a White House campaign, Paul’s team bought prime real estate for any Google searches using the terms “Huckabee record,” “Huckabee announcement,” “Huckabee taxes” and “Huckabee common core.”

I find it interesting that the Paul camp is taking aim at Huckabee. Rand Paul’s operation has hired a few key Santorum people. Rand has been courting the Christian Right by defending Christians in the Middle East. He may be thinking that he can run a subterranean, outsider campaign in the primary. On the one hand he has that loyal libertarian following and on the other, he is picking up the cause of Evangelicals, a group ignored of late by the GOP.

Huckabee would a problem, obviously. It’s why I suspect Rand Paul eventually decides to sit this one out. Maybe he flirts with it, but eventually declines to run. He has a pretty safe seat in Kentucky and Mitch McConnell owes him some favors. That means he’ll get plenty of money to win re-election. The Huckabee move probably seals the deal.

That’s what rank and file conservatives miss. The people running the GOP are professional schemers, skilled at playing the long game within the GOP. McConnell and Boehner crushed the Tea Party during the last cycle. Now the Rovians are working on 2016 trouble makers. Huckabee will never be president and he has a manageable price for his services. He can run interference for the party with the Evangelicals, making sure they don’t rally to a trouble maker like Paul or a Ted Cruz. Once it is all over maybe he gets a job in the Jeb Bush administration.

That’s the theory anyway.

What We Don’t Know

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We live in a miraculous age. Things that used to kill off large numbers of humans like disease or accidents, are no longer much trouble. People still die from falls and cancer, but not from the sniffles or a broken leg. Every year, science makes various cancers less lethal. New methods from genetics promise to mitigate things like Alzheimer’s Disease. It is hard not to think that man is inches away from conquering creation then, you see something like this and you’re reminded of how much we don’t know.

The most important job inside any cell is making proteins, and they are all made using instructions from DNA. This process is practically gospel in the field of molecular biology, but new research identifies some exceptions. Some proteins, it turns out, can make other proteins.

Proteins are assembled from amino acids inside cellular structures called ribosomes. Normally, the blueprints for every protein—from disease fighting antibodies to structural components that allow muscles to contract—are encoded in DNA and delivered to the ribosomes by molecules called messenger RNA. There, those genetic instructions are used by a related molecule called transfer RNA to build the protein.

The image above,published todayin the journalScienceshows a totally different way of building a protein. The yellow blob is a protein called Rqc2 that’s doing the job normally done by messenger RNA. It is connected to the transfer RNA (the blue and light green blobs), telling the ribosomes (the mass of white curls) to insert a random sequence of amino acids into the protein string.

This isn’t a case of a protein going rogue. It seems to be part of the recycling process that occurs when there’s a mistake in a protein being built. When an error is introduced, the ribosomes stall and call in a group of quality control proteins, including Rqc2. In observing this process, the researchers saw how Rqc2 links up with the transfer RNA and tells it to insert a random sequence of two amino acids into the chain (out of 20 total amino acids).

The researchers believe that Rqc2’s seemingly aberrant behavior might be an integral part of keeping your body free of faulty proteins. It’s possible that it is flagging the protein for destruction, or that the string of amino acids could be a test to see if the ribosome is working properly. People with disorders like Alzheimers and Huntingtons diseases have defective quality control processes for their proteins. Understanding the exact conditions where Rqc2 is triggered, and where it fails to trigger, are the next step in this research, and could be important for developing new treatments for neurodegenerative diseases.

Even with technological acceleration, it will probably take a generation to figure out how that works. In the process, all sorts of new things will be discovered that present even more mysteries to be solved by future generations. It’s a good reminder that the set of things we do know about the natural world is a drop in the ocean of what can be known.

The Parasite Economy

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I saw this in a Taki column by Ann Sterzinger. I’m not a fan of Sterzinger’s brand of groaty snark. It may be a generational thing. Maybe it is my sexism. Who knows, but the New Yorker piece on the Internet parasite was worth wading through Sterzinger’s many references to bodily functions. Jim Goad has this habit too. Anyone he does not like is compared to a bowel movement or vomit or some other base human function. I don’t get the point of painting such pictures for the reader.

Anyway, the linked piece above is interesting and free of scatological references. The title is what gets me. A virus is always bad. Calling someone a “virologist” should be an insult, unless the person works for the CDC. Even after reading the article, I’m not sure if it is an insult or compliment here. What’s clear is the subject of the story makes his money by deceiving people and stealing the property of others. His sites are built around appropriating the ideas of others to draw an audience.

Deception is the primary line of business.

Much of the company’s success online can be attributed to a proprietary algorithm that it has developed for “headline testing”—a practice that has become standard in the virality industry. When a Dose post is created, it initially appears under as many as two dozen different headlines, distributed at random. Whereas one person’s Facebook news feed shows a link to “You Won’t Believe What This Guy Did with an Abandoned Factory,” another person, two feet away, might see “At First It Looks Like an Old Empty Factory. But Go Inside and . . . WHOA.” Spartz’s algorithm measures which headline is attracting clicks most quickly, and after a few hours, when a statistically significant threshold is reached, the “winning” headline automatically supplants all others. “I’m really, really good at writing headlines,” he told me. “But any human’s intuition can only be so good. If you can build a machine that can solve the problem better than you can, then you really understand the problem.”

At the bottom of a Dose post, there is usually a small “hat tip” (abbreviated as “H/T”). Many people don’t notice this citation, if they even reach the bottom of the post. On Dose’s first day of existence, its most successful list was called “23 Photos of People from All Over the World Next to How Much Food They Eat Per Day.” It was a clever illustration of global diversity and inequity: an American truck driver holding a tray of cheeseburgers and Starbucks Frappuccinos; a Maasai woman posing with eight hundred calories’ worth of milk and porridge. Beneath the final photograph, a line of tiny gray text read “H/T Elite Daily.” It linked to a post that Elite Daily, a Web site based in New York, had published a month earlier (“See the Incredible Differences in the Daily Food Intake of People Around the World”). That post, in turn, had linked to UrbanTimes (“80 People, 30 Countries and How Much They Eat on a Daily Basis”), which had credited Amusing Planet (“What People Eat Around the World”), which had cited a 2010 radio interview with Faith D’Aluisio and Peter Menzel, the writer and the photographer behind the project.

What passes for building a better mousetrap in the new economy is usually just using technology to game the system. In this case, the guy started out by attaching himself to the Harry Potter franchise. Calling it a “fan site” let him skirt the rules governing theft of intellectual property. If he tried selling Harry Potter shirts he would have been sued out of existence. Selling ads on a “fan site” is essentially the same thing, but it skirts the rules just enough to avoid a lawsuit.

The click bait sites are just fraud, for the most part. He’s gaming search engines and he’s misrepresenting his site to get hits. He then uses the traffic to defraud advertises. Increasingly, mainstream sites employ the same tricks. They split stories into many pages to drive up page hits. Bleacher Report has figured out how to game Google so that their crappy pages show up at the top of any sports related search. I’ve had to modify by browser to block that site.

Stealing from one another is not economic activity. There are only three types of economic activity that can increase the nation’s wealth. You either invent things, make things or fix things. Emerson Spartz is not doing any of that. He is siphoning money from people who make things, invent things and fix things. These parasites are the only part of the economy that are growing. The parasite economy has a natural limit. When the host dies, the parasite economy dies with it.

Death By Cop

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Way back in last year (who can remember so far back?), Larry Elder wrote a piece about cops shooting people. The thrust of his post was that the frequency of cops killing citizens has dropped steadily, particularly amongst blacks.

By 2011, law enforcement shootings caused 2.74 deaths for every million blacks, and 1.28 deaths for every million whites. While the death-by-cop rate for whites has held pretty steady over these last 45 years, hovering just above or below the one-in-a-million level, the rate for blacks has fallen. In 1981, black deaths by cop stood at four in a million, but since 2000 has remained just above or below two in a million.

The bit he does not address is the ratio. Blacks make up 13% of the population, but make up 65% of the death by cop population. On the other hand, whites make up 73% of the population and just 35% of the death by cop community. It’s important to realize that those numbers he quotes are unreliable because the CDC does not collect the data. This is self-reported data, with the cops have discretion over what is reported.

Still, the broad outlines are good enough to wonder why blacks are so much more likely to have a violent encounter with the cops. Just using population numbers, blacks are getting offed at a rate five times higher than whites. The most obvious explanation is that blacks commit much more crime. Blacks are 13% of the population, but are responsible for 50% of the murders. When you adjust for crime rates, the violent confrontation rates make a lot more sense.

The fact is the drug game is run through the black inner city. Everyone knows this, including the cops. Baltimore, for example, is a main cross dock for the heroine trade. The drugs are smuggled in through the port, broken up and sent north and south. It’s why the cops look for young blacks driving rental cars on I-95. They are most likely moving drugs.

The cops get paid to police crime and that means they go where the crime is and that means the black inner city. The drug business is a violent business so you get a lot of violent young men attracted to it. Put the two together and you have a lot of cops chasing violent black in the drug business. The inevitable will happen, which is what drives a lot of the death by cop numbers.

There’s another thing though. Blacks hate the cops. This is true everywhere, not just the ghetto. There’s respect to be had if you give the cops a hard time. White people, even thugs, avoid hassling the cops. There’s no gain in it. Cops checking out bikers at a bar will find the bikers to be friendly and cooperative. Cops encountering a group of black males in the ghetto can count on at least one getting in his face, trying to start trouble.

It’s not just the cops. In the ghetto, one of the things you get used to seeing is young black males walking in the streets. They are just daring you to blow the horn. They will also stroll across a street against the light real slow so traffic has to stop. I’ve seen black females wait until the light is about to turn green and then walk into the crosswalk, laughing as the cars have to wait for the buffaloes to pass. It is a chaotic sense of entitlement that manifests as a random bucking of basic rules. In confrontations with the cops, this leads to violent conclusions.

I’m not sure how you fix this or if it can be fixed. Putting cameras on cops is just a way to avoid facing the facts. It lets race hustlers like Obama sort of blame the cops while pretending to look out for them. It also allows the more slippery members of the Randian cult to pretend they care about the black man. The libertarian angle here is drugs. It’s always drugs with them. But, it also lets them avoid confrontation with the Left, which is what they fear more than death.

Many conservatives believe race or racism was never a factor at all in the Brown and Garner cases, or in most of these types of cases. Many insist that the protesters were just making all this stuff up.

Who disagrees with this? Black people.

In poll after poll after poll after poll after poll—strong majorities of black Americans have consistently said that race plays a role in how law enforcement is applied and how the justice system is conducted in

We know that black teenagers are 21 times more likely to be shot by the police than whites. We know that 1 in 3 black men can expect to go to jail in their lifetime. We know that 1 in every 15 black males in the U.S. is currently incarcerated. We know black offenders receive longer sentences than white offenders. We know that despite the same rate of use of marijuana, blacks are 4 times more likely to be arrested.

You’ll note that libertarians love asking the question, but never bother to provide an answer. In this case, the question is “why do blacks believe they are at war with the police?” The obvious answer is that the Left has been preaching this to them for three generations, but the Randians can never take up that fight. Instead, they turn on the Right and blame them.

But are blacks just misperceiving these circumstances as racism, as many conservatives seem to think? Or have black men and women have observed things in their communities for a very long time that many outside their communities aren’t aware of?

Is this even a possibility? Many conservatives: Nope.

Years ago, I used to say inflammatory things as a conservative radio shock jock, “The Southern Avenger,” knowing it would generate a certain animosity, even racial.

I thought it was a badge of honor, that this was my role. I believed part of being a conservative was simply to ignore minority criticism, or perhaps to point to other minorities who agreed with me. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind significantly.

But do many and perhaps most conservatives subscribe to this mindset? I must ask—particularly given recent events and the reactions to them—is part of being conservative just not caring what black people think? It should be noted that there were diverse conservative opinions about the Eric Garner decision.

You’ll note the Randian never bothers to prove that there is something racial behind the statistics. He just throws out some numbers without finishing the thought. It’s a common trick. You, the reader, are supposed to pick up the line of thought and conclude there must be something malevolent behind those numbers. Of course, the solution will inevitably be the legalization of drugs, the only reason the Randian Cult exists.

I’m open minded about drug legalization, but I’m also skeptical about the results. There’s no free lunch. The trade-offs in legalization are more drug use, more social pathology from drug abuse and more petty crime. The welfare state will also balloon as the need to care for the addicted increases. The courthouses and jails will be less busy, but the medical system and welfare system will be much more busy.

More important, anyone who thinks legalizing drugs will solve the black ghetto problem has never set foot in the ghetto. Those corner boys slinging drugs are not going to start programming disruptive mobile apps once the drug money is gone. They will still be violent criminals looking to score. They’ll just move into something else, maybe Rand Paul’s neighborhood.

2015 Predictions

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A popular thing to do this time of year is make predictions about the coming year. I did such a post last year. Here they are if you are interested. I don’t have anything I’d like to change about the prologue of that predictions post.

Predictions are easy to make and fun because we get to project our hopes and dreams onto the blank sheet of tomorrow. The easy things to get right in the near term are the linear ones. The inflection points and random occurrences are very difficult to see in advance. The black swan events, of course, are impossible to know. You know, like the collapse of oil prices that every economist missed.

I’m a little surprised by how right I was in my picks. I got the Super Bowl wrong. Otherwise, I was right on everything else. I guess you can quibble with my stock market prediction a little, but I got the main parts right. The same is true of the election and the economy.

The thing I’m happiest about is the collapse of ebook sales. It looks like that fad has run its course. I read a lot and I mean I actually read. The people who promote ebooks mostly browse and display. By that I mean they skim a book and carry it around to show their friends that they are reading the latest Michael Lewis or Malcolm Gladwell. You can’t do that with a Kindle. For a while they could show off their iPad, but now everyone has them so it is back to books.

After weeks of contemplation, years of study and the proper sacrifices made to my gods, I have glimpsed into the future and teased out some predictions based on my reading of the entrails.

1) The US economy will have one of its best years in two decades. Collapsing energy prices will push all prices down and the Fed will respond with more free money. It is not an accident that every recession is preceded by a spike in energy prices. Big economic booms are preceded by a collapse in energy prices. The high growth in the Clinton years came from cheap gas. In the Reagan years, cheap gas preceded the boom. Gas prices are around two bucks now and will be under it by summer. Growth will come in around 4.0% for 2014.

2) The new money has to go somewhere and housing is the most likely place. We’re already seeing a return of sub-prime lending, mostly in cars, but also in housing. The bankers had time to think up new names and new ways to package it so 2015 is a good time to unleash the hounds. Expect your mailbox to be littered with credit card apps and mortgage offers. I’m already seeing them here in the ghetto so they will be hitting mainstream soon enough. You’re probably thinking that we can’t be that dumb, but yes, we can be that dumb.

3) The DOW will continue treading water as the world adjusts to cheap energy. As we have seen of late, cheap energy is not all good news. Every BTU in the ground has a financial instrument attached to it. Big swings in price mean big ripples through the financial system. When that asset you pledged as collateral is losing value, the bank makes the call and you sell what you can to raise cash.

But, the market will respond to the better economy with a nice run later in the year. The guys at Zero Hedge will be howling in agony, but the great unraveling is not coming in 2015. By conventional measures, like  P/E, the market is over valued, but nothing like before the previous crashes. Better earnings will bring the ratios back in line. The DOW breaks 19,000, but finishes just under that new high.

4) There will be no material changes to ObamaCare from the courts or from Congress. The ruling class was sharply divided over it, but they will not go to war over it. That’s what everyone forgets. The people in charge have other concerns besides keeping the rabble under control. They have to keep their own peace. Obama will be gone in two years. They can wait. Plus, it is a great jobs program for the friends and relatives of elected officials. As we see with the tax code, complexity is good for the skimmers and grifters called consultants.

5) The GOP field for president will take shape this year. By the end of the summer, the “Wets” will be led by Jeb Bush. His emergence will chase off minor figures in that wing like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan. His competition will be Chris Christie, who has no choice but to run this time. Christie is basically Bush-lite, no pun intended. Why have the light version when you can have the real thing? Bush will be the leader by fall, maybe even forcing Christie out before it gets started.

The “Dries” will be more interesting. Rand Paul is the early favorite, but he has a problem. In Kentucky, he cannot run for Senate and President at the same time. With Jeb in the race, my bet is he flirts with it, but sticks with his Senate job. Scott Walker has the best resume, but the worst TV style. Bobby Jindal has the ethnic thing going for him and many in the GOP are looking for a chocolate savior, but the Dries care more about ideas than image. In another age, Mike Pence would be everyone’s second choice and emerge as the consensus choice. Today, he just ends up as everyone’s first loser. Rick Perry will give it another shot, but he has the Dan Quayle disease and he sounds too much like W. John Kasich is the guy who will emerge as the conservative choice in the primary.

Finally, the snake handlers will have a candidate. Rick Santorum filled that job in 2012 and he’s not doing anything now. He plans a speaking tour in Iowa this month so it is safe to assume he runs again. The Evangelicals are not enough to carry a candidate to victory, but they can keep him in the game. Mike Huckabee will also test the waters. He’s been going to Iowa for a while now and he is a much better politician than Santorum. My bet is he emerges as the leader of the Pat Robertson wing this year.

6) The Democrat field will be a little less fun, but still worth watching. Butch O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland needs a job. He’s a Clinton rump-swab, but he also needs money so he will run, hoping to get on the ticket as a second. Jim Webb is running. Joe Biden will run. I suspect we see some others jump in just to get some exposure. The improving economy will do wonders for Crazy Joe as Obama will no longer be as unpopular. Plus, he will have access to Obama’s machine and that means the black vote.

The wild card is Fake Indian. She is the dream candidate for the hard thumping crazies on the Left. Female moonbats have been buzzing about her since she popped out of her teepee two years ago. The thing is, she’s got some skeletons and the fake Indian stuff will get a thorough review if she runs. The Boston media gave it a good leaving alone, but she’s not getting off easy in a national race against a Clinton. I predict she flirts with a run, but decides against it.

What we will begin to see in 2015 is the unraveling of the coalition. Webb will target members of the old Democrat coalition, working class whites. Fake Indian will be the candidate of the faculty lounge radicals, until she makes it clear she will not run. O’Malley will target the young, urban progressives that fill up the audience of John Stewart. Crazy Joe will try to target blacks. Clinton will base her campaign on Wall Street and K Street. My prediction here is 2015 is when we see Butch O’Malley emerge as a serious candidate and legitimate challenger to Cankles.

7) Now for some lighter fare. I like the Patriots to play Dallas in the Super Bowl, with the Patriots winning. The Patriots are an easy pick, given the way they play at home. Dallas is the long shot pick, but we always get something different. Plus, Jerry Jones has suffered enough for that face lift. The gods will let him have one last trip to the big game.

8) The English Premier League will go bankrupt. The dozens of US soccer fans will be so distraught, they will commit mass suicide by drinking their beard oil. Soccer will then be banned worldwide in order to prevent such a thing from happening again.

9) In the other sport I watch, baseball, the Red Sox will return to the post-season with the New York Yankees. The World Series, however, will feature neither team. The Angels will emerge in the American League and the Dodgers will win the National League.

10) On the technology front, 3D printers will hit the market at reasonable prices. By reasonable, I’m thinking under a grand for a home model. They will be the must have Solstice gift for 2015. No one has any need for 3D printing, but that discovery is for another year. In 2015, everyone will be convinced they have to make their own plastic-ware or be thought a Luddite.

11) People will begin to wonder if Apple has a future. It has been a great run, starting in 1998. That’s when Apple became a fashion statement, instead of an expensive and buggy PC. Then they hit gold with the iPod in 2001. The iPhone is 2007 and then the iPad in 2010 kept the magic alive and the profits booming. Steve Jobs has been dead for three years and nothing interesting has come from Apple since then. Jobs was a master showman for this era. I’d put him up there with PT Barnum. The poof who replaced him is not in that league.

Apple still sells a lot of stuff, but that stuff is on the verge of becoming a commodity. Those elevated margins cannot last without some way to keep the fad going. I just got a tablet for $100 from Asus. It does everything you want from a tablet. Why would I spend five to ten times that for an iPad? There’s a reason no one buys Apple desktops. There whole act is about the fashion statement. That’s why their best sellers are their most conspicuous mobile products – phones and tablets. 2015 is the year Apple stops being cool.

12) Blackberry sells itself to Google for parts. They have some great technology and patents. They are dug in deep with the car makers, for instance. The trouble is they can’t sell enough phones to remain profitable. They finally position themselves for a sale in 2015. Karl Denninger has to be institutionalized as a result.

13) This year we see the first widespread race riot in a major city. So far the riots have been localized, but that can’t last. In a major city, the cops will screw up and shoot a black guy that is actually innocent. That will set off a race riot in that city and perhaps lead to unrest in other cities. We’re on the down swing of the race cycle and that means things will get worse until they become intolerable.