Paris

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Upon disembarkation, the leader of the Muslims, Tariq bin Zayid, ordered the Islamic fleet burned, explaining that “We have not come here to return. Either we conquer and establish ourselves here, or we perish.”

“Near the river Owar [Loire], the two great hosts of the two languages and the two creeds [Islam and Christianity] were set in array against each other. The hearts of Abd al-Rahman, his captains and his men were filled with wrath and pride, and they were the first to begin to fight. The Muslim horsemen dashed fierce and frequent forward against the battalions of the Franks, who resisted manfully, and many fell dead on either side, until the going down of the sun.”

“The men of the north stood as motionless as a wall, they were like a belt of ice frozen together, and not to be dissolved, as they slew the Arab with the sword. The Austrasians [Franks], vast of limb, and iron of hand, hewed on bravely in the thick of the fight; it was they who found and cut down the Saracen’s king [Rahman].”

People That Need To Go

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When I’m ruler of these lands, there will be a lot of changes. I’m not talking about the structure of government or the status of cultural institutions. There’s a long list of items that fall into those buckets, but that’s a topic for another day. The changes I have in mind are the people changes. By that I mean there will be a whole bunch of people on the proscribed list when I’m king.

For instance, I don’t watch a lot of golf, but when I do there is always some d-bag yelling “Get in the hole!” at every tee box. Caddy Shack, the movie that started the gag, came out in 1980. My guess is it stopped being funny by the end of that summer. Yet, there are jerk-offs throughout the English speaking world still doing that at golf tournaments. Under my benevolent leadership, the authorities will round up these guys so they can be sent off to the mines.

The thing about pruning the human shrubbery is that you have to use quality of life as a proxy for social and intellectual aptitude. People who go out of their way to make a nuisance of themselves are going to have kids that go out of their way to be pests. The apple does not fall far from the tree so if we want to weed the garden of humanity, you have to focus on the pests, as well as mix your metaphors. The “Get in the hole” guy is a pest.

Similarly, and this is one that is very common around the Imperial Capital, is someone I call the “rolling roadblock.” Drive around Maryland, Pennsylvania or Virginia and you inevitably run into someone doing ten miles below the speed limit on the interstate. I’ve driven all over, and I see this person everywhere, but no more so than in the Mid-Atlantic. Further, this person is almost always a Maryland driver, and they tend to camp out in the left hand lane.

Under my rule, the police will be instructed to pull these people over, have their cars towed away to be crushed and the driver will be sent to the mines. Maybe they will be made to walk to the mines, just to add an artistic twist to the punishment. These are selfish, stupid people who put the rest of us at risk. I’m not sure they deserve to be sent to mines, but I’m going for “benevolent” dictator here, so I’ll let them live out their lives in the lithium mines.

Next on the list is someone I call “inappropriate dress” guy. The other day I’m in the coffee shop getting my coffee and muffin. It is late fall here, so the morning temps are in the 40’s meaning jackets and sweaters, along with long pants for men. It’s not winter so you can get away without a jacket if you’re an office man in shirtsleeves. That’s the way all of the normal people were dressed in the coffee shop, except one guy.

“Inappropriate dress” guy has to be wearing shorts and a t-shirt in late fall. Maybe in a snowstorm he is in shorts and a sweatshirt. It’s not that he trying to prove he is tough or that he can handle the cold. In the summer this guy will be wearing a knit cap or maybe wool socks and boots. I have to assume this is a psychological defect of some sort so as a nod to the eugenicists, I will have these guys rounded up and sent to the Antarctic. I will provide them with the inappropriate clothing for their trip.

Finally, at least as far as this post, is the guy every traveler despises. Since the invention of blue tooth, there have been guys wandering around airports talking to themselves and doing so loud enough so everyone else has to hear one half of their conversation. Last month I was in the DFW airport and on either side of me was a guy talking on his mobile using one of those idiotic blue tooth earpieces.

The thing that makes this guy super irritating is they are always boring morons. They never have anything interesting to say. If a Hollywood star or TV personality wants to share the details of their life with the rest of us, well that could be fun. If some guy wants to talk about how he is catting around on his old lady that might be interesting. Instead, it is always Larry from the Wichita office talking to Thad from corporate about how they are going to kill it at their demo. When I’m ruler of these lands citizens will be allowed to strangle these guys on the spot.

If you are one of the above described people, you now have one more reason to hope I’m never ruler of these lands.

 

Abortion Treatment Center?

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I’ve always been mildly opposed to abortion as birth control mostly because it is barbaric. It strikes me as something people will look back on in the same way we look back on bleeding or the use of incantations. Reaching up inside a woman and ripping out her baby is a nasty business, even under the most extreme threat to the life of the mother. Doing it for the heck of it is barbarism.

Every society tolerates a certain amount of barbarism, but it’s never something to be encouraged. In another age, torturing animals was a form of public entertainment. Steve Pinker describes 19th century cat burning in one his books. Recruiting the slow-witted to bash one another to bloody pulp is a form of entertainment we call “boxing.” The point is barbarism is always a part of human society.

Just because we tolerate something does not mean we endorse it. Boxing is tolerated, but we don’t see it on free TV much as it is not something we want our kids to do so we subtly discourage it. Animal cruelty is banned because we don’t have to tolerate it. The difference here being that men fight by nature, while torturing animals is not part of our nature. Abortion is somewhere on the barbarism scale between tolerable and intolerable.

There’s also a matter of logic. Go into any pharmacy or grocery store and you will find racks of contraceptives. The cost of the most effective options is trivial. Even the poorest person can afford a box of rubbers. Therefore, demanding abortion as a form of contraceptive simply fails the logic test. It is, outside of rare cases, entirely unnecessary. Closing that door would make men and women more prudent about the legion of other choices on the shelf.

That said, I’ve also thought it best worked out locally. Abortion mills are businesses and subject to local laws. If towns in Mississippi don’t want them, then they can ban them. If Massachusetts wants to put them in grammar schools, that’s their business. Fundamentally, the thing that has always turned me off about abortion is that proponents are just using it to meddle in the lives of others. That and the creepy lying.

While nearly 100 percent of the controversy surrounding Planned Parenthood involves its abortion practices, the group says that abortions account for only 3 percent of the services it provides. What do abortion treatment and recovery rooms look like? And what other services does Planned Parenthood provide? On a day when a new Planned Parenthood facility in Queens, N.Y., was closed to the public, Yahoo Global News Anchor Katie Couric went behind the scenes to learn more.

The building is complete with a metal detector, bulletproof windows and round-the-clock security. In addition to medical consultants and clinicians, the facility offers social services and has a financial planner on site. Clinic director Latasha McGriff told Couric that since the facility opened on Sept. 1, clinic staffers have seen more than 1,200 men and women, representing 63 countries.

Abortion treatment? I guess we are supposed to think of it as just having some ointment rubbed on your arm to cure a disease. After all, who can really tell the difference between athletes foot and a child?

But that’s what you get from people who think more of plants and animals than human beings. Instead of being honest about the practice, they lie, which is not surprising. It’s how they lie that is creepy and demented. They think an abortion is no different than having a mole removed.

That’s where I always come back to on the abortion issue. The women holding up a picture of a fetus outside a clinic is motivated by a respect for human life. It may be over the top or even unhinged, but at least they have the moral clarity to understand the difference between an abortion and a manicure. Only a sociopath sees abortion amorally.

It’s not just the lack of morality. There’s a very weird celebration of abortion on display here. These people are proud of what they do and go out of their way to portray it as the truest form of feminism a woman can achieve. I’ve heard feminist say that you can’t be a woman without ever having had an abortion. It’s become a death cult for these people.

I guess that’s why I count myself as mildly opposed to abortion. I respect the religious arguments against it. I respect the moral and logical arguments against it. Those are to be hashed out locally where these issues are best handled. But what I can never get past is the unhinged enthusiasm of abortion fanatics. No matter where you come down on the morality of it, enthusiasm is simply beyond the pale.

It’s that enthusiasm that prevents me from being indifferent to the issue. People who think abortion is a rite of passage for women are one small step from celebrating infanticide and euthanasia. As soon as the line is crossed, where’s the next line and why would these people respect it? If snuffing out life in the womb as a matter of convenience is OK, then why not infanticide?

I know that’s the slippery slope argument, but some slopes are slippery. A core question any man of the Right must ask, with regards to public policy, is what are the consequences of being wrong? Banning abortion leaves open room for exceptions. Sanctifying abortion leaves open room for grizzly things like eugenics and infanticide. If you’re going to err, err on the side that does the least harm.

The Bust Out

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My grandfather had an expression he used so often I cannot disentangle it from him in my memory. The expression was “a dog that will bring a bone will take a bone.” The meaning is that someone who will loyally steal for you will just as quickly steal from you. Stealing is stealing and the sort of person who steals is not someone you should ever trust. I never understood why people would use dogs to steal bones, but that was long ago in a land far far away.

Anyway, it is one of those things that often pops into my head when thinking about the great pressing matters of our age. The temptation, at least for me anyway, is to confuse what I would like to see happen with what I think will happen. Being a man of the Right, it really means I confuse what I fear will happen with what I think will happen. Having that old pithy expression rattling around in my head reminds me that I have my biases like everyone else.

The worst bias to have, of course, is the bias of hope, particularly when it comes to politics. As soon as you start thinking your side might win, the pol on your side will turn around and stab your side in the back. The reason conservatives hate evolution so much is they have seen too many of their guys evolve into liberals as soon as they hit Washington.

One of the things I find baffling about so many Republican voters is that they can’t seem to learn this lesson. They pour their heart into the party only to have the party crap all over them. Here’s a story coming out of DC that is a perfect example.

The first immigration bill introduced under Rep. Paul Ryan’s speakership Wednesday would bypass the annual 66,000 cap on H-2B work visas by allowing foreigners admitted in any of the three previous years to remain and not be subject to the cap.

Critics say it will lead to more competition for what are often middle-class American jobs and will eventually lead to more illegal immigrants as the foreign workers overstay their visas.

The H-2B is considered a “seasonal” work permit for lower-skilled workers such as cooks, construction workers, hospitality, theme park employment, maintenance, forestry, seafood processing, cruise ship employees and truck driving among many other jobs.

It differs from the H-1B, which is for skilled guest-workers and also is the subject of pending legislation sponsored by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., who wants to triple the number issued to foreign workers each year.

The cap exemption on the H-2B expired in 2007. At the time, it doubled the number but it could as much as quadruple, legislative sources told WND. This is the same way the total number of existing H-1B visa workers got so much higher than the annual inflow.

The H-2B visa program, though referred to as a “seasonal” guest worker program it is not an agricultural guest worker program.

The promise from Paul Ryan and his supporters in the party was that all immigration bills would be tabled until the new president was in office. Obama was too feckless and devious to trust and the issue was too divisive for Republicans. The main opposition to Ryan was over the fact he is an open borders fanatic that dreams of turning your town into Tijuana or Lagos. But, here we are anyway.

Politicians lying is nothing new, but this is a rather egregious example. Still, outlandish lying is what we have come to expect from Republicans. The outrage, of course, is how these dirt bags behind the bill are crapping all over their fellow citizens. Bringing in legions of foreigners to take the jobs of Americans is horrible in itself. Teaming up with business to screw the guys and gals at the bottom of the income scale is loathsome.

It’s tempting, of course, to think that these pols are just, wink, wink, helping local business get around labor laws that would otherwise force them to hire locals who, well, you know. We all know what I mean. Those Mexicans work so hard and they never complain, never call out sick and never steal. You don’t want to see the price of your Big Mac go to forty bucks, do you?

Except, the next guys they sell out will be you because the dog that will bring a bone will carry a bone. If they will sell out the white trash and blacks down at the bottom, they will have no qualms about selling you out the next time. In fact, they look forward to it. It is what they do. It is their nature. They will keep auctioning off bits and pieces of this country until there is nothing left.

It’s what used to be called a “bust out.” In the olden thymes, the mafia would get its hooks into a local business man who maybe had a gambling problem, a thing for boys or something else he would just as soon not disclose. The mafia would use this to get their tentacles into his business with the vague promise that there was some price he could pay to satisfy them.

Instead, they would run up his lines of credit, skim off all the cash and sell whatever they could out the back door, pocketing the results. Eventually, the business could borrow no more and it would be squeezed dry. At that point they would burn the place down, collect the insurance if any existed and the owner would turn up wearing cement sneakers.

That’s a big part of what’s driving the immigration issue. For sure, many are romantics with heads full of nonsense. Others imagine a Utopian world without borders. The guys doing the work to make it happen, however, are just gangsters in suits selling off every part of the country they can grasp.

Steve Chabot, Bob Goodlatte, Andy Harris, and Charles W. Boustany are not ideologues. They’re crooks, stealing anything and everything. A lot of people voted for them thinking, “they may be crooks, but they’re our crooks.” Nope. They are just thieves who steal because that’s what thieves do.

Fundamentally what ails America is that we have a ruling class that despises the people and nation over whom it rules. That’s why they have hung a sign on the door that reads, “Fire Sale: Everything Must Go!” Just as there’s no bargaining with the mafia, you don’t beat these people by getting more of “your guys” in the Estates-General.

Meantime, the bust out continues.

The Carnival of Lunacy

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One of the reasons I like the formulation “custodial state” to describe where the West is heading is it conjures in the mind the image of a nursery school or kindergarten. Sometimes I’ll tack on the phrase “game warden” to focus the mind on the image of a human zoo, like we saw in the movie Planet of the Apes.

This formulation has a lot of uses. When discussing technology, for example, we see that much of it is about removing human to human interaction and replacing it with robot to human interaction, with the robot filling the role of the nanny who looks after the children.The technology prevents the user from “making mistakes” or nudges them into the preferred choices.

Warehouse automation, for example, is about technology babysitting the employees so the supervisor does not have to do it. The magic barcode scanner did not fall from the sky. Managers wanted a way to keep their employees from making mistakes that did not require them correcting the employees face to face. Instead, the software does it.

The point here is that we live in an age where adults are in retreat, increasingly afraid to play the role that adults have played since the dawn of time. Nowhere is this more obvious than the college campus. There you find overgrown adolescents living a Peter Pan existence, afraid of adulthood, lest they be thought of as old squares like their parents.

This is on display in this story about race trouble at Missouri University.

A group of black players on the Missouri football team says it will stop participating in football activities until university system president Tim Wolfe resigns.

The announcement came via Twitter on Saturday night in a post by Missouri’s Legion of Black Collegians. It comes after several recent racial incidents on Missouri’s campus, and with Wolfe under fire for how he has handled them.

The tweet included a photograph of 32 black men, including starting running back Russell Hansbrough.

“The athletes of color on the University of Missouri football team truly believe ‘Injustice Anywhere is a threat to Justice Everywhere,'” the tweet read. “We will no longer participate in any football related activities until President Tim Wolfe resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ experiences. WE ARE UNITED!!!!!”

This is the result of adults allowing children run wild out of fear of a monster of their own creation. Instead, the idiot coach is taking the side of the players and the university officials are cowering. The correct response is to explain to these players that regardless of what is happening in the world, they have responsibilities. If they go on strike, then they will be expelled and lose their scholarships.

Adults are supposed to teach children about responsibility. Taking a brave stand on some issue that has nothing to do with you is fine, but it’s only brave if you pay some price for it. More important, there’s always a price, even when you don’t get a gold star for bravery from the social justice warriors, so think carefully about your choices.

That would require the adults to act like adults and that’s never happening on a college campus. Instead, they indulge every bit of childish nonsense from the students, as well as the adults. So much so they are willing to overlook a crime wave by athletes in order to have silly games to attend and, of course, not notice who is committing the crimes.

Missouri had 63 criminal cases involving 46 athletes [between 2009 and 2014]. Twelve athletes were involved in more than one incident, Outside the Lines found, and Missouri had the second-highest number of allegations of sexual assault, violence against women, and harassment. Florida State had the most.

One of their gentle giants named Dorial Green-Beckham (guess the race) was a one man crime spree. In his two years at Missouri, Green-Beckham was arrested twice for marijuana-related issues and was the subject of a burglary investigation. In that last instance, that police report stated he allegedly threw a woman down a flight of stairs. Nice guy.

The American college campus is a land of Eloi. The only difference between the adults and the children is that the adults charge the children an extended entrance fee to gain admittance. Otherwise, the adults carry on like overgrown coeds. Since there are no real Morlocks to fear, they invent them in the form of rape hoaxes and imaginary racism. The result is a carnival of lunacy that mocks commonsense.

Perhaps the worst aspect of this is it encourages an ever widening vortex of lunacy. Some students make a nuisance of themselves and the adults do nothing. Then a group of overgrown adolescents in the faculty decide to top it by making a bigger display on campus. The Missouri campus is now well on its way to becoming Lord of Flies because there are no adults to put their foot down and call an end to it.

https://youtu.be/XvuM3DjvYf0

Bill Nye The Nazi Guy

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I’ve never been famous or had a desire to be famous. In fact, it has always struck me as a miserable way to live. These things are a matter of taste and not having ever been famous, I may be all wrong about my reaction to it. My ego has never responded well to flattery so I’m confident fame would not be fun for me. Having people stopping and pointing at me sounds horrible.

There are others for whom fame, even minor fame, is a narcotic that hooks them like a meth addict. They crave it and when they get a taste of it, they will do anything for more of it. My hunch is this is what drives people into the entertainment fields. It’s not the money or the thrill of being good at something. They want to be famous and they will go through every humiliation in order to get a taste of fame. The casting couch could not exist otherwise.

That’s what drives a guy like Bill Nye to repeatedly make an fool of himself. He gained some minor celebrity making kids laugh on TV while doing parlor tricks and now he is obsessed with getting on TV or mentioned on-line. That usually means saying asinine things that the Left can use to claim science proves they are right. It’s why he peddles himself as a scientist when he is nothing of the sort.

Yeah, you’re leading to my next point. Part of the solution to this problem or this set of problems associated with climate change is getting the deniers out of our discourse. You know, we can’t have these people – they’re absolutely toxic. And so part of the message in this book is to get the deniers out of the picture, and along that line – I’ve been saying this a lot the last few weeks as  I listen to the Republican debates – maybe one of these people will go out on his or her own, thinking for him or herself, and say, “You know, I’ve been thinking about this and climate change is a very serious problem. So if I’m president, we’re going to address climate change.”

Anyone familiar with their history will recognize why I call him the Nazi Guy. He is dehumanizing the people who disagree with him and his cult’s beliefs. That lets him dismiss them without consideration. It’s a pretty short trip from where he is now, calling the infidels “toxic”, to a place where he is demanding they be rounded up and shot.

Again, Nye is just an attention whore saying increasingly deranged things in order to get people to notice him. He has figured out that his fake scientist act works on the hard thumping crazies of the Left so that’s his act. If juggling chainsaws was popular with the public, he would be out there doing that instead of peddling this nonsense.

The whiff of fascism is particularly strong here because climate worship has a lot in common with fascism, particularly Nazism. Hitler was a vegan and a bit obsessed with living what we would consider to be the granola lifestyle. The Germans, after all, did give us the Hippies. Instead of rubbing out the mongrel races threatening the folk, the Climate Nazis want to rub out those who threaten Gaia.

This is not an exaggeration. There was a green wing to National Socialism and it was very influential. The mystique of blood and soil was exactly that, blood and soil. For the Nazis, the folk were inextricably bound up in the land. Romantic feelings toward nature were an essential part of the Nazi movement. Preserving Germany for Germans was one side of the coin. Keeping the natural environment of Germans pristine and unsullied was the other side.

Stories like this from New York make a lot of sense if you think of these people as they think of themselves. The climate change warriors are not just defending the environment; they think they are defending themselves and their kind. It’s blood and soil mixed with Puritanism. Instead of the elect running around looking for blasphemers, they are running around looking for deniers. Instead of bringing sinners to account, they are suing the oil companies.

The Mind of the Moonbat

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I was driving yesterday thinking about being interviewed by Bill Maher. This was not some sort Walter Mitty fantasy. For some reason I was thinking about the time I was sitting next to Bill Maher at a restaurant in Miami a dozen years ago. He was at the table next to me and that had us sitting within a foot of one another. He smelled like feet and looked like he had not slept in a week. I think his companion was a hooker, but maybe he just has a thing for skanks.

That led me to think about how a loathsome creature like Maher has managed to get rich in entertainment. Why would anyone agree to go on his show? Ann Coulter used to be a regular and I recall hearing her say she counts Maher as a friend. Maybe my experience is not indicative of the real Bill Maher, but people I know who do know him say I’m being too kind. Maher is worse than I think.

That’s what led to my imagining what it would be like to sit on his show and interact with. I have, from time to time, watched his HBO show. It is mostly for anthropological reasons, like watching a show on Pygmies or the Papuan. Instead of primitives, it is Progressives performing for other Progressives, not thinking much about who else is watching. It’s like being a fly on the wall of a cult meeting.

The thing with Maher is that he is a good example to use when explaining how members of a religious cult understand and respond to the world outside the cult. From my small sample size of viewings, the typical show is Maher and other members of The Hive leading the audience in the current hymns. Once is a while he has a normal person on in the same way tent preachers bring the town drunk up to be healed. The point is to use the hapless sinner as an example.

On a few occasions I have seen a normal shine the focus on some defect of the Left and this is where you see Maher show himself to be a full spectrum moonbat. He has a physical reaction to hearing contrary information, squirming in his seat and rolling his eyes. It’s not intended to to be dismissive either. It’s a genuine physical reaction to unclean thought invading the safe space.

I’ve tested this on my moonbat office manager. I’ll engage her in some normal chit-chat knowing that she will eventually figure out how to conform the topic to one of the three solas of the One True Faith. This is where I pounce and point out some defect in the faith or some corruption of the party. She will recoil in horror and look furtively around the room, the fight or flight mechanism kicking in like a shot of adrenaline.

The other thing you can observe with Bill Maher is the tactic of shifting the focus. His heretical guest will point out that Obama lied about something or other and immediately Maher will respond with something about Bush or Palin or some other monster in the moonbat pantheon. The purpose is to change the topic of discussion away from that which vexes the faithful to something more pleasing.

In comment threads of new stories critical of Ben Carson, you will see moonbats jumping in when someone points out the double standard applied to black Republicans versus black Democrats. This is very bad think so they chime in with made up stories about how the racist white press in the olden thymes tormented the heroic Obama. That shifts the focus from present reality to something imaginary.

I used to think this was a defense mechanism, a herd instinct in the human personality toolkit that is tapped into by the hive minded or maybe dominant in these people. Every herd animal has some way for members to warn the herd of danger. Progressives hooting about stranger-danger is just an adaptation of this. The trouble with this theory is that Progressives are forever trying to pick fights with normal people. Instead of being a defense mechanism, this is an attack mechanism.

That’s been my observation of shows like Maher’s and others where three-on-one is moonbat fun. They bring the bad thinker in who valiantly tries to make his points. The tactic of shifting the focus inevitably puts the victim on defense. The segment was supposed to be about Obama, for example, but instead devolves into another critique of his critics, hinting that maybe the bad thinker is a racist.

The lesson here is that when dealing with a moonbat, the key is to always keep the focus on them. They are highly skilled at shifting the focus as it appears to be a biological instinct, but if you have some discipline, you can have some fun watching them squirm in agony. This old video of British airhead Piers Morgan being tormented by Ben Shapiro is a great example.

If you watch carefully, you see Morgan desperately trying to shift the focus from himself in order to put the guest on the defense. First he tries the “how dare you stuff” hoping this will put Shapiro off his game. When that fails he desperately tries to change the subject and have the guess address arguments made by some third person.

I’ve always through that this video should be mandatory viewing for the training of normal people going on these shows. This does not happen because the Left signs the checks and the surest way to get fired is to challenge the One True Faith effectively. Even so, for normal people dealing with the moonbat relative or lunatic at the office, knowing how to keep the focus on the moonbat is a valuable skill. If I ever find myself interviewed by Bill Maher, I hope to remember it.

Digital Fantasies

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America’s Newspaper of Record brings word that Amazon has opened its first bookstore, as in brick-and-mortar bookstore.

The opening of Amazon.com’s first brick-and-mortar store on Tuesday proves that software is not really “eating the world,” as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put it in 2011.

In his widely noted Wall Street Journal column about predatory software, Andreessen wrote:

“Today, the world’s largest bookseller, Amazon, is a software company — its core capability is its amazing software engine for selling virtually everything online, no retail stores necessary. On top of that, while Borders was thrashing in the throes of impending bankruptcy, Amazon rearranged its Web site to promote its Kindle digital books over physical books for the first time. Now even the books themselves are software.”

Retail stores are still not strictly necessary, and yet Amazon now has one in Seattle. That’s because the book market has proved less one-dimensional than publishers and sellers feared in 2010 and 2011.

In September, The New York Times revealed that the Association of American Publishers had registered a 10 percent decrease in digital book sales in the first five months of the year and that the number of independent bookstores was actually growing.

The failure of the Great Pumpkin to rise from the pumpkin patch and sprinkle the children with free eBooks is hardly surprising. I used to go around and around with moonbat friends about this issue as they were all convinced that we would soon be reading everything from a magic tablet. Physical books were old and stuff so of course they serve no purpose.

As is always the case with Utopians and futurists, they naturally assume that because they cannot see the obstacles to their fantasies, those obstacles must not exist. Full steam ahead! In the case of books, the glorious future of eBooks faced the very real obstacle that they were not a very good replacement for real books. They are and remain, a solution in search of a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I consume most writing off a screen. I read a book or two per month, sometimes more sometimes less. I read a ton on-line. It has been so long since I’ve held a newspaper I can no longer remember when. The other day, I was getting coffee and someone asked if they had a newspaper. To me, it sounded like he wanted to know where to tie up his horse.

The thing I was never able to explain to my moonbat friends with regards to eBooks is that books as we understand them, along with bookstores, publishers, writers, editors, layout men, illustrators etc., did not spring from nothing. They evolved over time to solve the problem of quickly and easily distributing content to as many people as possible in a way that profits the people involved in that process. It is not easily replaced.

Movable type was invented in 1040. The printing press was invented 400 years later. In other words, it took 20 generations for there to develop a need for the mass production of printed material and a solution to be developed. We have another 30 generations to get us to the paperback that you can take to the beach. The point being is there is a lot of trial and error in those bodice-rippers you wife reads.

Utopians never think of these things as they think that their inheritance dropped from the sky. They have no appreciation for what they see around them. All they know is the sleek looking iPad is cool and all the cool kids have them so let’s close down the bookstores and make everyone read eBooks. That’s an exaggeration, but that’s the level of thinking. The people betting on eBooks were betting that 50 generations of work could be replaced in a wave of the hand.

I say all this as someone who reads eBooks. I read physical books too, but I also read eBooks when convenient. I re-read Camp of the Saints the other day off my tablet. The book is terrible and I would not display it on my bookshelf so I saved the money and downloaded it. The thing is, I don’t read a lot of books that suck and I tend to make notes in the margins when I read so the physical book works better most of the time.

Further, if I leave a book on a plane or at the beach, no big deal. If the sun melts my tablet, that is a big deal. If I drop my tablet down the steps, that’s a big deal, while dropping a book off the roof costs me nothing. These are things the Progressive mind can never contemplate as they see no value in them, because they see no value in people. My preferences are immaterial to the material mind.

This blinkered reasoning is standard fare these days so I’m an outlier. The physical book was as good as it needed to be and mail order was fast enough and cheap enough. For something to replace this model it had to be different, offering things you could never get in a book like embedded video or multidimensional plot strictures for fiction where every reader get s a slightly different experience. Instead eBooks are just books that make your eyes bleed.

Busy Work

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Walk around any big company and you will find lots of people that appear to do nothing but busy work. They have titles and responsibilities. They perform all sorts of activities, but it is nearly impossible to figure out how these activities help the company. In tough times, these are often the people who get let go and everyone who is left moans about having to do their work, but in a month or so no one notices anymore.

Government and the academy are loaded with people that do nothing but busy work. I once knew a guy whose mother was a year from retirement from the government. Her department was closed and instead of transferring her elsewhere, they just let her run out her time in an office. She spent her days making scrapbooks of the grand kids. They even gave her an office with a window.

I knew a guy who worked for the city of Boston and all he did was attend meetings. His day would start with a meeting and he would go from meeting to meeting all day with breaks for lunch and answering voice mails and so forth. I had some fun trying to pin him down on what he actually *did* every day. The best I could tell, he’s gift was in never answering the question.

Maybe the reason the workforce participation rate is at all-time lows is because of a side effect of automation. That is, there’s no need to automate busy work. The process of automating essential work is making it harder to add extra people who spend their days keeping busy. As companies automate essential work, there’s less waste, as in the guy in the cubicle who spends all day on Facebook.

The area I notice this most often is in IT departments. Companies of any size will have at least one IT person. Often they have several. One guy handles desktop support, while another manages their software and corresponding database systems. Some other guy is the boss and he usually spends his days in meetings, not actually doing work. All of these people appear to be essential when something goes wrong, but things don’t go wrong very much anymore.

These jobs could be and used to be combined. I’m old enough to remember when there was not much of a need for desktop support because everyone used dumb terminals. This can be done today with things like Citrix and thin clients. Similarly, the IT guy was never in management meetings. Like engineers, these were guys who did work, not talk about it. We’ve created a lot of busy work in IT.

The place where you see endless busy work is the academy and the “think tanks” that have sprouted up like dandelions all over the Imperial Capital. In the academy, the study of the obvious has become a staple of life. Every day we see something in the news feed that can be classified either as the “study of the obvious” or the “study of the imaginary.” The latter pretty much keeps the economics departments around the country going.

I think it is part of what is driving the replication crisis in the soft sciences. Most of these studies are cooked up in order to fulfill grant funding conditions. The government doles out money and part of the deal is a paper on some topic. The result is loads of “research papers” that are simply gibberish.

The old saying that idle hands do the devil’s work applies to busy work. My suspicion is most of the people rattling around the academy are better at fraud than anything academic. Take for example this guy who did a guest post on the Ron Unz site. Ron posted it mostly because it conforms to his view that biology does not exist. Ron is a denier!

Anyway, look at the bio of the writer, Chanda Chisala:

I am from Zambia, Africa. My formal educational background is in Biochemistry, but I have never practiced it or worked in that field. I started my web company immediately upon graduating in Biochem at the University of Zambia. I also formed Zambia Online in 1998 and it is still the most active Zambian web site today (see Zambia Google rank).

“Human Supremacism” is what I call my philosophy. It simply means that man is the highest kind of being possible in reality, and it means that every individual is absolutely the highest kind of being in the universe. This is the only logical foundation for the ideology of human rights. No one has a right to control another human being, not government, not society, nothing, because nothing is above any human being. So, observing human rights simply means that you can’t involve any human being in any kind of interaction without their permission. And this interaction means interacting with any of their property. Governments exist solely for the purpose of sustaining this principle. Anything they do above that is not their duty and it is usually a violation of human rights itself. Human supremacism.

In 2008, I was granted the Knight Fellowship by Stanford University to study “the impact of the internet on the future of African journalism, and the philosophy of human rights.”

In 2009, upon completing my Knight Fellowship program, I was invited back to Stanford by the Hoover Institution as a Visiting Scholar.

At the risk of sounding uncharitable, Mr. Chisala has no business being on a college campus. The reason he has never worked in biochemistry is there is no one in Zambia in need of a biochemist and no one outside of Zambia would hire a biochemist from Zambia. STEM fields are notoriously un-PC because they are right answer fields. Checking the right boxes does not trump getting the wrong answer.

Having figured this out, Mr. Chisala set about a career as a hustler that has taken him all the way to Stanford. His personal philosophy reads like something you see in high school yearbooks, but that’s not what matters. He’s checking the right boxes at Stanford and that’s what matters. He gets to fritter away his day writing nonsense about the Internet in Africa, a topic no one cares about, including Africans. This is busy work.

The assumption by the robot future guys is that we will reach a point where the robots either wipe us out of become our caretakers. We will become Eloi and the machines will be our Morlocks, without the harvesting and eating part. A world kindergarten where humans are free to play like children, while their robot overseers look out for their safety.

Maybe the alternative is a world composed of busy work. The robots will figure out that humans need to feel important and that means performing work. The robots will create a world where it appears all of us are doing important stuff, but in reality we are just spinning our wheels, killing time in busy work, like maintaining blogs.

The Yankee Scold

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In another age, David Brooks would have been a guy standing against the wall at the town hall meeting, where the fate of Esther was being debated. Some would argue that a good dunking was enough. Others would argue that burning at the stake was the only way to make sure the devil was not living in the village. Later, David would make clever and witty observations about the night’s events to his coevals.

Poor Esther, however, would have spent that night looking for David to come to her aid believing he would explain to the townspeople that she was not a witch or possessed by the devil. After all, the well regarded Mr. Brooks had counseled her to trust in the good judgement of the townsfolk and trust in God to carry her through this ordeal. A whole lot of Esthers have gone to the gallows waiting for their David to rise and speak on their behalf.

David Brooks is pitched as a conservative voice at the New York Times, but I can’t think of single right winger who would consider him a fellow traveler. Brooks is what the Left imagines a good and sensible conservative should be, as opposed to those malignant Morlocks on the other side of the wall. For Progressives, Brooks is a good person with some contrary ideas about how best to run society.

As is always the case with the Left, reality is something different. Brooks is a Public Protestant. That is, he is not overly concerned with private morality. He was, for instance, one of the first to dismiss the indecency charges against Bill Clinton. Instead, men like Brooks imagine themselves as anointed by God to carry out God’s work and try to make the world a more perfect and less sinful place.

When men like Brooks think and write about morality, it is not in the context of his relationship to the Almighty. It is about your relationship with the Almighty, which happens to be the managerial class, of which Brooks is a member in good standing. This profile of Brooks provides an example of what I mean.

In general, Brooks contends, journalists balk at sharing moral viewpoints, and readers bristle upon receiving them. His critics find him an insufferable scold, a pompous sermonizer. “I think there is some allergy our culture has toward moral judgment of any kind,” he reflects. “There is a big relativistic strain through our society that if it feels good for you, then who am I to judge? I think that is fundamentally wrong, and I’d rather take the hits for being a moralizer than to have a public square where there’s no moral thought going on.”

Therein lies the difference between the Public and Private Protestant. The Born Again Christian would prefer it if the public square was family friendly, but that has nothing to do with their relationship with God. It’s why we see these folks retreating from politics again. Their salvation is a personal matter, not a political one. Once there is no room in politics to debate issues like abortion and marriage, there’s no point in participating.

For Public Protestants like Brooks, the public square is all consuming. The anointed are not judged by their private relationship with the Almighty. They are judged, along with the society they maintain, on the general morality of society. It’s why they are endlessly meddling in the lives of the people. If they let you fall into a degraded state, it reflects on them so they believe they are obligated to prevent that from happening, whether you like it or not.

The trouble that is brewing in the Republican Party is directly tied to this divide over morality. David Brooks is considered a conservative at the New York Times because he resists the current fads roiling the ruling class and instead adheres to old Yankee sense of public obligation and public authority. The Progressives really don’t disagree with him on these points. They just think he is old fashioned, which is closely associated in their mind with reactionary.

Outside of this ecosystem, where the bulk of GOP voters reside, this dynamic just looks like two sides of the same coin. Paul Ryan hugging Barak Obama as they agree on how much of your money to spend on their public improvement projects strikes many GOP voters as a betrayal. In the room where these two men are hugging, it feels like they are adversaries. Outside the room it looks like they are partners.

That’s because outside the room, most American are Private Protestants. I’m using the term as a non-sectarian, cultural label. Lots of atheists, Catholics and Hindus reject the serve-the-world/save-the-world ethos of the ruling class. These voters are looking from Republican to Democrat, and from Democrat to Republican, and from Republican to Democrat again; but it is impossible to say which is which.

Since the 19th century, America has been dominated by the old Roundhead culture that dates to the founding. The south has been too weak economically and culturally to push back. The middle has thrown in with the winners out of necessity. The choices before the voters since the middle of the 20th century has been between the hair-on-fire fanatic and the prudent scold, with guys like Brooks filling the role of the latter.

Politics is about numbers and the numbers no longer favor the Roundhead coalition and that’s what leaves guys like David Brooks sleepless at night. His role as the sensible antidote to the fanaticism of his coreligionists is of no value when there is a more cavalier coalition to counter the Roundheads. That’s what we are seeing signs of in the Trump coalition.

The space for the Yankee scold to operate is getting small. Perhaps that’s why David Brooks is suddenly struggling with his relationship with the Almighty. He keeps working on that sermon, making weekly improvements, but the number of people in the pews gets smaller and smaller. Pretty soon, all the Yankee scolds will be left searching for a congregation.