Monthly Archives: September 2015

Germs!

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This is one of those stories that could be big or it could be a nonsense. The nonsense part is easy. Most medical research is poorly reported by the media. The men and women working at these sites simply lack the IQ to understand the material so they let the researchers write their copy for them. Studies are sent to the media with an executive summary. It is cut and pasted into a “news” story.

The result is a lot of scientific nonsense makes it to the public, but not all of it is bunk. In this case, there’s a growing speculation that germs may play a much bigger role in human health, with regards to issues like heart disease, cancer and Alzheimer disease.

The “seeds” of Alzheimer’s disease may be transmitted from one person to another during certain medical procedures, scientists have found.

A study into people who died of a separate kind of brain disease after receiving injections of human growth hormone suggests that Alzheimer’s may also be a transmissible disease.

The findings have raised questions about the safety of some medical procedures, possibly including blood transfusions and invasive dental treatment, which may involve the transfer of contaminated tissues or surgical equipment.

The investigation has shown for the first time in humans that Alzheimer’s disease may be a transmissible infection which could be inadvertently passed between people.

Scientists emphasised that the new evidence is still preliminary and should not stop anyone from having surgery. They have also stressed that it is not possible to “catch” Alzheimer’s by living with someone with the disease.

However, the findings of a study into eight people who were given growth hormone injections when they were children have raised the disturbing possibility that Alzheimer’s can be transmitted under certain circumstances when infected tissues or surgical instruments are passed between individuals.

Alzheimer disease does not fit well with our understanding of the genome and evolution. What’s known about the disease, and it is quite a lot now, suggests it should strike people of all ages, not just the very old. The most common gene associated with late-onset Alzheimer’s disease is called apolipoprotein E (APOE). The one form of this gene with the highest correlation to the disease is APOE e4, but having two copies of this gene, one from each parent, does not mean you get the disease. In other words, the correlation is weak.

There are other genes associated with the disease, as we see with many other diseases that turn up in old age. The number of factors associated with the incidence can be quite large. On the other hand, the genome has revealed some interesting associations. Heart disease is the one of the better example as it can be mapped. This map is a great example of how genetics and disease fit together:

If science is beginning to link  a disease like Alzheimer’s to a pathoigen, to use shorthand, it changes the way medicine attacks these diseases. In other words, if exposure to a pathogen triggers certain gene combinations, resulting in the production of a bad protein, science can better predict, but also better treat these diseases. Put another way, genetically linked disorders could still be treated, just at the pathogen level.

Where it can get revolutionary and scary is in the area of human behavior. Homosexuality remains a great scientific mystery. No one knows why some steady percentage of males are homosexual. Genetics could never be the answer as a gay gene would rarely be passed along to the off-spring, since homosexuals have far fewer off-spring. Basic math says the gay gene would have died out long ago. Here’s a nice Jayman post on the topic.

The gay germ theory is controversial as is everything to do with homosexuals, but the implications are not insignificant. If pathogens trigger behavioral traits, then it means behavior could, in theory, be modified medically. Curing things like homosexuality, alcoholism, or simply being a douche bag are suddenly not so far fetched.

No one reading this will live to see the day when you can take a pill for you homosexuality or unpleasant disposition. We’re not going to see the day when genes are altered in order to eliminate disorders. Some alive today will see treatments for common maladies of old age that will allow for more vigorous lives and even longer lives. Curing Alzheimer’s is not that far off. That alone will radically alter a lot of lives.

It’s not all bad news.

¡Yeb! Bush’s America

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The 2016 election is essentially about whether America will remain a country. You can’t be a country if you lose control of your borders, but that’s fixable. If you lose control of who is populating your lands, there’s no coming back from that mistake. The ruling class loses all of its legitimacy and the fracture society divides itself along ethnic lines with its own leaders and borders.

The public is finally coming to terms with what’s happening as stories like this become common.

Multiple buildings and vehicles in Loudon County, VA were vandalized with graffiti tags bearing the moniker of a notorious El Salvadorian street gang early Tuesday morning.

According to WUSA9, several vehicles on Gatwick Square and Wintergrove Drive were discovered with “MS-13″ spray painted on the exteriors.

Additionally, walls, pillars and two parked school buses at nearby Trailside Middle School were also found bearing the gang tags.

MS-13 is known as one of the most violent gangs in the world, and has been connected to a string of murders on both the East and West coasts.
They are so feared in El Salvador, prison officials have allowed a detention center filled with 2,500 known members to essentially run itself.

Trailside Middle School is located roughly 8 miles from Parkside High School, where recently murdered 17-year-old Danny Centeno-Miranda attended classes.

Centeno-Miranda was shot twice on Sept. 4 in Sterling, VA by 20-year-old Henry Dominguez-Vasquez, 18-year-old Juan Aguirre-Zelaya and an unnamed 17-year-old.

All four men were in the country illegally.
Dominguez-Vasquez and Aguirre-Zelaya were charged with possession of a firearm by a person who is not a citizen of the United States and accessory after the fact, and the juvenile was charged with 2nd degree murder and use of a firearm in the commission of a felony.

For those unfamiliar with the area around the Imperial Capital, Loudon County is an upscale area with loads of SWPL-ville types. The median household income is $117,000 which makes it one of the richest counties in the nation. Million dollar homes are not uncommon there. To have a Salvadorian street gang operating there is like having The Black Guerrilla Family operating on Martha’s Vineyard.

This is ¡Yeb! Bush’s America. MS-13 has been operating in Northern Virginia for a long time now. The press has ignored it because they were more afraid of the bad whites and their hate thoughts than the gangsters. Now that the gangsters are showing up in the neighborhoods of the ruling class, the stories are showing up in the press. My guess is the majority of the managerial class is wondering if open borders is such a hot idea after all.

Of Course It Is About Race

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In one of my more popular posts, I made the rather obvious point that black people are the most bigoted people in America. I did not mention it at the time, but I don’t think you can really blame them. It’s only prudent for a distinct racial minority to be paranoid about the majority. That’s inevitably going to sound like bigotry, but racial solidarity is never going to sound sunny and open.

The upside of this is black people in America tend to say what everyone thinks but is too afraid to admit. This story about the never ending Tom Brady drama is a good example.

Brandon Marshall isn’t afraid to speak his mind, and that was on full display on Tuesday night.

Discussing the nullification of Tom Brady’s four-game suspension on Showtime’s “Inside the NFL,” the Jets’ wide receiver theorized about how race might have played a role in Judge Richard M. Berman’s decision.

“White players, specifically at the quarterback position, are treated differently,” the five-time Pro Bowler said.

Marshall told host Adam Schein that many black players feel that they are held to different standards than their white counterparts.

“Absolutely,” Marshall said. “At times, at times, at times, yes.”

The 31-year-old stressed that he’s not alone in this thinking. Rather, it’s a widespread belief around the league.

“I think that the important role that I play on this show is to give the viewers (an) inside look of the locker room,” Marshall said. “I am a player right now. This is not just from our locker room; this is from the locker rooms across the States. This is how guys are feeling. This is not just my opinion. These are conversations I’m having with guys.

“It’s just not African-American players. I’ve had this conversation with Caucasian players as well. The most important part of this whole discussion is the process for the players. They just want the process to be fair and right. They just want to get it right.”

Brandon Marshall is not terribly bright so we should not expect deep insights from him. But, he is not so dim to not notice that race has played a role in this ridiculous story. Black players are arrested all the time and that means the league is handing down punishments to black guys all the time. Look at the league’s police blotter and you see nothing but brothers.

When a white guy gets jammed up, the league has to consider the race issue and throw the book at the honky. It’s simply prudent. Otherwise, you end up with Soros funded mob outside your door, threatening to burn your league down. It’s the cost of handing deviant weirdos and bitter freaks a veto over public morality. In 21st century America, black people are sacred so you tread lightly around anything remotely connected to race.

The Yankee Crackup

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Back in the 80’s, Reagan was hailed as a brilliant politician for winning over working and middle-class ethnics, the so-called Reagan Democrats. The Archie Bunkers who voted Democrat out of instinct suddenly switched parties and voted Republican. Only old timers talk about the Catholic vote or white ethnics anymore, but within living memory, they existed and mattered.

That was a big development primarily because it signaled a radical change in the party coalitions. The old Democrat coalition of working class northern whites, southern whites, blacks and the old Yankee ruling elite was no more. The South was going Republican and the white working class appeared to be following suit. It’s why so many swing state Democrat pols changed sides. They followed their voters to the new party.

Something happened in the 1990’s that arrested what should have been a long running ruling majority coalition. The old Yankee elites started jumping to the GOP side, joining the Rockefeller Republicans to take control of the party. The party of Reagan became the party of Bush.They made all the noises the Reagan coalition expected, but they were Bush men through and through. Just look at the House leadership and you don’t see a bunch of Evangelical Southerners.

Where we have been for the last two decades is a country with a ruling class largely based in the traditionally dominant region of the nation, the Northeast. The areas settled by old Yankees, along with the Midland areas dominate both parties and they take turns cobbling together ruling majorities from the other bits of the country. The Yankee-Midland coalition came out in force for Obama, while the Midland-Southern coalition came out strong in the midterms. The reverse occurred in the Bush years.

What seems to be happening is the Yankee-Midland coalition is blowing apart. I thought about this while in Massachusetts recently. In a Waltham restaurant, the TV’s started showing Trump’s visit to Norwood Mass. The whole place turned its attention to the show. I heard more than a few people cheering Trump. Friends I was with were all very interested in the Trump phenomenon.

That does not make much sense as we are given to believe that it is those xenophobic racists in the Deep South propelling his campaign. Just the other day, National Review ran a piece about how Trump is George Wallace. To Southerners, George Wallace no longer resonates. Most people in the South don’t remember the guy, probably confusing him with the black comic.

To political types from the Northeast, George Wallace is right up their with Bull Connor and the Confederate Flag. He’s a symbol of bad whites throughout time and place. In other words, this comparison is not for the benefit or detriment of bad whites. It is a one group of good whites signalling to other good whites that they are playing with fire. The hysterical response by Conservative Inc to Trump is not because he is a fringe xenophobe. It’s because he speaks for a wing of the coalition that appears to be going heretic.

Before Trump came along, there were rumblings from the other side of the Conservative ruling junta that things were not well. Reform Conservatives are warmed over Rockefeller Republicans from the pre-Reagan era. They have been agitating for a new direction where they shed the yahoos, with their boom-sticks, sky gods and limited government nonsense. They see Trump as a chance to wrench control of the movement and the GOP.

The thing that never gets discussed is this. Trump is a New Yorker. He has lived his life in a city that is majority non-white. Lumping him in with the racist crackers from the south is laughable. When he speaks, lots of regular people in the northeast hear one of their own. In contrast to the acrylic robots they see running both parties, Trump is a regular guy, just with a few billion dollars and a super model wife. He’s a guy a large number of people look up to as a good example.

To extend this out further, the inspiration for Trump on immigration is none other than Ann Coulter, a WASP princess from Connecticut. She was enthusiastic about Romney, simply because he was making the right noises on immigration. The great undiscussed truth of modern times is it is Yankee New England that is the most hostile to immigration. They are fine with the Hindu chemist or the Syrian engineer, but they have zero interest in the little brown guys you see loitering at the local Home Depot.

It’s hard to know how this plays out. The action has been on the GOP side, but the Democrats are having a nervous breakdown of their own. The old Yankee strongholds are experiencing another exodus, similar to what happened in the late 70’s and 80’s. Taxes are an easy culprit, but it could be culture. The middle class in these areas have simply grown disgusted with their ruling elites, the same ones they are revolting against today by supporting Sanders and Trump.

Maybe it something else, but it appears Yankeedom is heading for a crackup and taking the political class with them.

Bad Whites

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The place I usually get my drugs is on the edge of the ghetto. It serves the white ghetto and the soft black ghetto adjoining it. There also a Ferguson like white working class area there, which appears to be going Hispanic. The last time I was sent into the heart of darkness so I was grateful to avoid that this time.

In line to buy drugs, I spied a typical white trash couple that is a common feature of the white ghetto. They were in shorts and flip-flops, exposing an array of tattoos. One had a cane, but he kept forgetting which leg had the limp. He is probably working a disability scam, something so common that lawyers advertise for it around here now. It’s also threatening to bankrupt the system.

The two of them had iPhones, which is ironic. Combined they probably have a two-digit IQ yet they feel the need to have expensive smart phones. Both had headphones so that means they have been downloading music on someone’s dime, because what good is an iPhone without music?

The tattoos always get me. Poor people like display items. Drive through the black ghetto and you will see expensive sports cars packed in front of run down housing blocks. Poor whites like cars too, but they have worse tastes in cars than blacks. Instead they invest their creative skills in ink. The two I saw today had elaborate Celtic images on their arms and legs.

Lots of people on the Dissident Right talk about the black underclass, but that’s easy. It’s celebrated on TV as if it is high culture. What never gets mentioned is the expanding white ghetto that is replacing what used to be the white working class. Those old solid neighborhoods where fathers worked two jobs are collapsing into lands where no one works and everyone is on the dole.

The two crackers I saw at the pharmacy are typical. The one with the fake limp is living off the woman. She had the EBT card and their Medicaid card. I’m pretty sure they were picking up a pain killer as one asked the other if they were “V” or “M” meaning Oxy. They call it hillbilly heroine for a reason and that reason is white trash love Oxy.

That’s the difference between the black ghetto and the white ghetto. The black ghetto is ruled by young black males. Older males who survived, get the hell out and stay out. The women are either baby mamas or their mothers. The white ghetto skews older, with many more older men.

There’s also less crime in the white ghetto. White teens commit crime, but they fear blacks and Hispanics so they keep their crime small. They don’t organize street gangs or battle for drug turf. That allows drug taking to be a family activity. It also means their intellectual capital, if you will, is invested in gaming the system for benefits. Whole neighborhoods are on disability in the white ghetto.

That’s the incredible thing about the ghetto. The women know how to work the system. They get a lot of help from government, but they have enough smarts to game the programs. On the other hand, they lack the smarts to avoid keeping a deadbeat under their roof who knocks them up between drug binges. There’s something at work, other than intelligence and education.

Something else that does not get mentioned is just how multicultural the underclass is compared to the over-class. It’s not strange to see a fat white girt with braids pushing a stroller containing a caramel colored baby. Hispanics and whites hang out together far more than you would ever see amongst good whites.

There’s a great blending going in the underclass, even though our betters insist otherwise. I wish I had a nickel for every time I was in a room full of upper middle-class white people bemoaning the latent racism of the poor whites. The irony escapes them because they never go anywhere near the ghetto.

It’s just a part of the Brazilification of America. I bet something similar is happening in Europe. Instead of blacks, whites and Hispanics, it’s Arabs, Africans and lower class whites. In a generation or two, the West will be a vast sea of caramel faces ruled over by a sparkly white ruling elite. That’s South America.

Extreme Radicals Of The Most Extreme Kind

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Heather Digby Parton is one of those low-watt moonbats we saw popping up on our screens regularly in the last decade, when the great tide of Progressive lunacy was reaching its high. Sites like Kos, Media Matters and Salon were home to these folks, organizing conferences and promoting their hooting and bellowing. Together, they formed the deranged choir that backed the post-modern sermons of Barak Obama.

According to Mx. Parton, she has traveled her whole life as an army brat. My bet is the phrase “citizen of the world” crosses her lips quite often. I’d also bet she still talks about how much she hated her parents. Modern Progressivism is mostly just mild individual psychosis scaled up to a mass movement.

Anyway, she has an hysterical rant in Salon telling her coreligionists they must rally to thwart the looming evil that is Ben Carson.

But what if neither Trump nor Carson are popular because of their personalities? What if the beltway consensus that Trump’s success isn’t based upon issues or ideology is wrong and voters are actually attracted to his crazy ideas on the merits? The fact that Carson is closing on him certainly lends credibility to that possibility, because despite his mild-mannered persona, Carson’s ideas are even more extreme than Trump’s.

The two top contenders for the Republican nomination have nothing in common in terms of style, but among a very big field they are the two with the most radical agendas, and, as Salon’s Simon Maloy pointed out recently, a common disdain for what they term “political correctness.” As uncomfortable as it may be to think about, maybe Republican voters aren’t just looking for someone to express their rage. Maybe they really are extremists.

Most conservatives have misunderstood this weird use of the word “extremist” by Progressives. The assumption is that these people are far out on the fringe such that normal looks radical to them. In reality they are not speaking to the bad whites. They are speaking to their alternatives in the Yankee Coalition. By attaching an idea to the bad whites, they hope to scare the more reticent members of the Yankee Coalition.

I think everyone is familiar with Trump’s agenda. For starters he’s going to round up and deport all the undocumented immigrants, build a wall on the border with a beautiful door and make Mexico pay for it, start trade wars with China and Japan, and when it comes to ISIS he has said:

“They have great money because they have oil. Every place where they have oil I would knock the hell out of them. I would knock out the source of their wealth, the primary sources of their wealth, which is oil. And in order to do that, you would have to put boots on the ground. I would knock the hell out of them but I’d put a ring around it and I’d take the oil for our country.”

Carson’s ideas are no less out in right field: He would use drones on the border to blow up caves where he believes immigrants are hiding. He believes that Planned Parenthood was created to commit genocide on African Americans. He has said that Obamacare is the worst thing to happen since slavery. And he believes that prohibitions against torture and war crimes are P.C. foolishness:

“Our military needs to know that they’re not going be prosecuted when they come back, because somebody has said, ‘You did something that was politically incorrect. There is no such thing as a politically correct war. We need to grow up, we need to mature. If you’re gonna have rules for war, you should just have a rule that says no war. Other than that, we have to win. Our life depends on it.”
So, the two most popular candidates in the Republican race for president are as different as can be when in comes to personality and style. One is a monumental blowhard billionaire and the other is a diffident brain surgeon.  But it’s not the way Trump and Carson speak or the style with which they present themselves that has the base so dazzled. These voters agree with the substance of what these two are saying. And they are both certifiable extremists. Maybe it’s time for the political establishment to reconsider their view that this phenomenon doesn’t amount to anything more than a political tantrum and take these people seriously.

Putting aside the characterization of the positions, what you see here is a not a message to the other loonies on the Left. This is the sort of thing your crazy liberal sister is going to be saying at Thanksgiving. “Have you heard what Carson said about abortion? Only Bible-thumping crazies believe that sort of stuff. Surely you don’t agree with those people.”

There’s a lot of denial going in in the ruling coalition. On the Left, they have been in the pumpkin patch for seven years now and they have little to show for it. They have to look at the Hillary – Sanders thing and be terrified. Worse yet, they assumed old friend Jeb Bush was going to cruise to victory and now that’s looking grim.

On the other side of the coalition, the GOP establishment similarly thought this was going to be a fun walk to victory. Even if their guy (Jeb Bush) was not going to fly, they had Kasich, Rubio and Walker in reserve. Now that none of these guys can draw flies and some of them are objects of hostility by voters, they don’t know what to do. Panic is setting on on both sides of the Yankee Coalition.

Post-Country Greece

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The Greek crisis of the summer made plain that the future is not intended to include the public having a say in the management of their affairs. The Greeks went to the polls, first to back an anti-austerity party and then to reject the austerity plan proposed to them by Europe. The result was a systematic collapsing of their economy by Europe until Tsipras capitulated.

Whether or not it makes sense for the Greeks to default or go along with the latest bailout is debatable. I’m firmly in the camp that says we invented bankruptcy for a reason, but it’s not really what’s important to me. What matters is who decides. When the people, through their traditional institutions, decide what’s best for them, we have sovereignty. When decisions are made by an outside force, regardless of makeup, you have subjugation.

Greece is now just a territory of Europe where the people insist on using a funny alphabet, but are otherwise subjects of the Euro ruling elite.

That’s fine and maybe it is for the best. Greeks have never got the hang of the country thing. They had a decent run of city-states a long time ago, but that was when Greeks had red hair and blue eyes. The more swarthy version of the Greeks seem to have trouble organizing much of anything.

The end of countries, however, is not without other consequences. One is that we now need new labels, as seen in this Telegraph story on the looming Greek elections.

Greek voters are set to punish the government of prime minister Alexis Tsipras after polls show his hard-Left Syriza party is on course for a shock defeat in a general election later this month.
Mr Tsipras, who called a snap vote on August 20, has seen his party’s comfortable 15 point lead evaporate in just six weeks, putting the centre-right New Democracy in pole position to lead Greece’s fifth government in just four years.The ascendant conservatives – who support the bail-out and will keep the country in the euro at all costs – edged ahead of Syriza for the first time since May 2014 in two polls this week.
A survey carried out by Metron analysis put ND in the lead with 24pc of the vote, compared to 23.4pc for the incumbent Leftists. A previous poll for Mega TV put them on course for 25.3pc of the vote ahead of Syriza’s 25pc.With opposition forces gathering steam, Mr Tsipras is facing a fierce popular backlash having capitulated to onerous bail-out conditions to keep the country in the euro for the next three years.

However, pre-election polls suggest no single party will win enough support to form a majority government after the September 20 ballot.

Analysts now expect the pro bail-out conservatives, who oversaw the last international rescue and dominated Greek politics before Syriza’s landmark election in January, to form a more stable coalition, dramatically reducing the risks of a future eurozone exit.

Smaller pro-euro forces such as Socialists PASOK and the centrist To Potami party are also more inclined to join a unity coalition headed by ND’s interim leader Evangelos Meimarakis, rather than the tainted Mr Tsipras.

The single biggest issue in Greek politics is membership in the Euro, followed by the invasion by Arabs, who are promising to destroy what’s left of Greece on their way to Germany. Yet, the socialist and the conservative are in lock step on both issues. The “hard left” is the outsider, because they signed off on the same bailout as the Right and Left support.

How does this make any sense?

It does not and maybe that’s the point. If elections are now rituals for the hoi polloi to blow off steam, what difference does it make that the commies are in league with anarcho-capitalists? Democracy is not just another sporting event in Greece. You buy a team jersey, got somewhere to drink outside and cheer for the guys wearing your jersey. When it’s over, you sing some songs, get drunk and fall asleep.

Traveling Man

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When I was young man and just getting out into the world, I noticed that the gap between myself and my coevals grew quickly once I ventured outside our shared confines. I had friends in school who had never left the state and did not have much interest in what was beyond their little slice of heaven.

Once I was regularly venturing beyond the perimeter, a gap between myself and them started to grow. At the time, I did not get why they lost interest in me, but I also had my own new interests. I lost touch with them and that was it. Within a year or two, people I talked to every day had become strangers.

Travel changes the traveler in ways the traveler does not notice. When you’re young you don’t know these things, but through travel you begin to figure it out. As I sink into decrepitude, I find that my only close friends are people who have had a fair amount of travel. My trips usually involve meeting these friends somewhere new or possibly visiting them at their new digs.

In a gathering, I can quickly figure out if someone has a lot of miles on them. There’s an aloofness, an otherness, that comes from travel, particularly living in strange places for extended periods.  I suspect that it comes from having seen humans in various natural environments and discovering that settled life is mostly the same everywhere. Life in Portland Maine is pretty much the same as life in Portland Oregon.

Once you figure out that your way is not all that special, it is hard to remain a provincial. The heart of provincialism, it seems to me, is the belief that your way is unique, not necessarily better. Once you see that it is not unique some of the ropes tying you to your ancestral lands are cut and you can no longer feel the same way about it.

Saying that, I have know men who have traveled for work, yet lost none of their provincialism. I worked with a guy from Pittsburgh, who got on a plane every Monday going somewhere. He and his family had moved a few times around the country for work. Yet, everything about his professional life was geared toward getting back to Pittsburgh and getting off the travel circuit. He was and would always be a Yinz.

There’s also a gap between people who travel beyond their native lands and those who just travel around their country. I have a friend, one I was visiting with recently, who has lived all over the world. He has a different air about him than friends who have stuck to North America. I think you acquire a sophistication about humanity when you observe foreigners in their native habitat.

I suspect this is why Europeans seem so sophisticated to Americans while the English just feel like funny talking rubes to us. There’s familiarity too. Most Americans know enough about the English to understand something about them. Living in a land where over the next hill live a bunch of weirdos speaking gibberish probably makes provincialism difficult.

I once worked for a company that moved managers around every two years in order to break their provincialism. The theory was that living in a bunch of different places would make them company men rather than “Bostonians” or “Iowans”. Anyone who does not understand the link between corporate ideology and fascism has never worked at a large corporation.

The FBI used to follow this model, but for entirely different reasons. In order to avoid corruption, agents moved from field office to field office every two years, while they were field agents. They wanted fresh eyes, but they also wanted to avoid the possibility of corruption. The “Zip” Connolly story shows why that was a good idea.

Part of what drives the managerial elite’s hatred of the American middle-class is this cosmopolitan – provincial tension. The girl who went off to Holyoke to major in public administration and womyn’s studies was not trained to hate normal people. She acquired it through travel and class solidarity. First she went off to college, then maybe grad school, with internships in DC and NYC in between.

By the time she lands in the bureaucracy somewhere, she looks back on her parents and childhood with a degree of contempt. Those local yokels seem small and stupid to her, because, after all, they have not seen the world. The fact that she may be as dumb as a post only reinforces this dynamic. Her tribe is the vast army of cubicle jockeys in the bureaucracy, naturally at war with the “other”, who happen to be Americans.

With that in mind, it is not hard to see why the Maoists and Khmer Rouge sent these people out to the fields. I’m fond of pointing out that the commies are often pretty good at noticing the problems. It’s their solutions that are criminally insane. The Asian commies really understood the gap between the cosmopolitan and the provincial and how it warped the relationship between the ruled and the rulers.

That and it was probably a lot of fun sending egg heads out to the rice paddies. Who amongst us have not seen a guy like this and thought it would be a good idea to send him out to the mines? But, that’s a topic for another day. I have to unpack.

 

Vox Means Stupid

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The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias wherein relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. Another name for this is the Joe Biden Effect, where a relatively stupid person is certain he is the smartest person in the room, when he is most likely the dumbest person in the room.

People in cults are prone to this because inside the cult, it appears to be a perfectly logical structure for viewing the world. Intelligence is seen as a measure of the degree of acceptance, as well as the ability to repeat dogma in various situations. The result is knowing the catechism better than everyone else makes you the smartest guy in the room.

Progressives suffer from this more than anyone, because they have replaced the supernatural with a warped conception of science. Their cause is not righteous it’s logical, even when it makes no sense to anyone. Here’s a good example of someone smugly thinking they are making a brilliant point, when they are speaking gibberish.

The point of Black Lives Matter isn’t to suggest that black lives should be or are more important than all other lives, but instead that black people’s lives are relatively undervalued in the US (and more likely to be ended by police), and the country needs to recognize that inequity to bring an end to it.

For starters, the premise is a lie. This is easily discovered. A white guy in confrontation with the police is more likely than a black guy to be killed. The fact is blacks are 13% of the population and commit more than half the crime. Therefore, they will have vastly more confrontations with cops, but even so, cops appear to be much more careful with them than with white offenders.

Reddit user GeekAesthete made this point in a thread explaining why the phrase “all lives matter” is offensive

Offensive to whom? It’s the question they never bother to answer as they just assume they are speaking for Science! and you better bow down and worship Science! The possibility that hooting “Black Lives Matter” is offensive to everyone else never crosses their mind. That would require introspection and self-awareness, traits not found in cults.

The childishness on display here is another example of how cults work. When sensible people point out the absurdity of “Black Lives Matter!” the response is a sneering dismissal. The assumption is you are too dumb to understand so they make a silly cartoon to explain it, which not really about explaining as much as the sneering. Cult members are highly invested in who? whom? It’s what defines them.

Young German Lopez, the writer of that nonsense, most certainly thinks he is a clever fellow. After all, he writes for Vox and that’s what clever fellows do. Progressives are so susceptible to the Joe Biden Effect because they have so much confirmation around them. Their cult controls the high ground so there’s an unlimited number of pats on the head for them.

Mitt Romney in a Skirt

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The other day CNN changed their rules for the upcoming debate such that Carly Fiorina can be at the adult table this time. To no one’s surprise the media was giddy over the prospect. Rich Lowry was out in his cheerleader outfit, waving the Fiorina pom-poms. David French had a piece up telling us that Fiorina is the next Margaret Thatcher. My hunch is Conservative Inc. is convinced she can derail Trump and maybe fool his voters into supporting her.

It’s not a terrible idea as GOP voters are like everyone else these days. They are marinated in the proselytizing of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. White men are bad. Women and minorities are good. That means the dream candidate for many voters is a one-legged lesbian Elvis impersonator of color. All Florina has to do is wave around a little American flag and make the right noises about abortion and she’s in double digits.

Fiorina is in many ways emblematic of what’s gone wrong with the GOP. The party is now seen as a craven insider party willing to make whatever cynical deals it needs to make in order to please the donor base. The reason Trump and to a lesser degree Carson are polling so well is they don’t have the stink of McConnell and Boehner on them. The party’s media arm is therefore pumping air into Fiorina ‘s tires thinking that will satisfy the hoi polloi.

That may not be totally fair to Fiorina, but the fact is she is where she is strictly because she lacks a penis and gave a lot of money to Republicans in the past. If she had a penis, she is Brian Russell. Having a moderately successful corporate career is simply not enough to run for president and get more than a few votes. Her resume says Congress, not president.

Of course, that resume is not exactly sterling either. She finished her corporate career as CEO of HP and was the anti-Steve Jobs, because she took a strong brand and ran it into the ground. Under her watch, HP lost half its share price and shed thousands of jobs trying to stem the bleeding. Her tenure is considered one of the biggest fiascoes in Silicon Valley history. HP share holders held parties after she was fired and the stock jumped 10% that day.

She was also a disaster at her previous stop. Lucent does not get much attention when people talk about Fiorina’s resume, but it is probably the most telling part of her story. She swung big deals that looked great on paper, but ended up saddling the company with massive debts that eventually killed the firm. Like everything else in the go-go Clinton years, Lucent was a big bust-out that skimmed billions from suckers through inflated stock prices.

In other places, I’ve called Fiorina the original Ellen Pao and the more I think about it the more I like it. In the 80’s, as the Boomers took over businesses, this weird creature appeared on the scene – the female executive. Every company wanted the power girl on their brochure and in their executive suites. Most were probably qualified, but a lot rode the warm upward currents of affirmative action to positions for which they were unqualified.

Putting that aside, assuming I’m just a bad thinker, she has run for office in the past. In 2010 she took on the rapidly decaying Barbara Boxer, who is as popular as rectal cancer in California. That was a great year for Republicans and a moderate like Fiorina running against an old bag should have been a race. Instead Fiorina ran a comically bad campaign and lost by double digits.

The thing about that race is it looked just like the 1994 Senate race in Massachusetts where Mitt Romney took on Ted Kennedy. Fat boy was on the ropes as the locals were ready for a change. His drunken antics were even embarrassing to Mass voters and Romney was a modern, moderate Republican in the old Yankee tradition. Plus, 1994 was shaping up to be a monster year for the GOP.

I was in a restaurant in Saugus Mass the night of the big debate. It seemed like everyone got up and went into the bar to see Fat Boy finally get taken down. Teddy was sober and played the dead relative card. Mitt folded and he looked scared. Everyone left the bar and went back to their tables. It was over and everyone knew it. Romney saw his polls collapsed and he was crushed in the election.

That should have been the end of it for Mitt, but he was rich and determined. He retooled and won the governorship. Then he retooled again to run for president. All that retooling left a guy who was willing to say anything to win. Even by the standards of politics, Mitt Romney was a gold plated phony. You see the same pattern with Fiorina, except she is skipping the run for governor. But, she’s still Mitt Romney is a skirt.