Coming Apart Into A Blue-On-Blue Civil War

In Charles Murray's excellent book, Coming Apart, he describes how America has bifurcated into two different places. One is inhabited by the Aristocrats, the elite, educated professionals. They have their prestigious degrees and they generally marry within their group. They have almost nothing in common with the Normals, people without prestigious degrees and who work at blue collar or service jobs, if they work at all. There is a dramatic cultural separation between the two.

The Aristocrats are overwhelmingly Democrat. It's a thoroughly blue class.

The riots over the past few days have been almost entirely blue on blue. It's the campus radicals and the blacks sacking cities run by progressives, starting in Minneapolis, whose mayor couldn't be more of a prog if he tried. And believe me, he has.

Dittos for the riots in Portland, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Blue Aristocrats run them all and they are watching their cities looted by blue foot soldiers.

The reason that they can't stop the rioting is that, true to the thesis of Coming Apart, the Aristos don't understand the Normals. Not one, little bit. In their tony universities, like Minneapolis' Mayor Frey's Villanova, the students were taught about whiteness and privilege and social justice. They were taught the language of apology and contrition. They learned that the world was made up of good-hearted proles who only needed enlightened Aristos to lead them into a glorious future.

That world does not, in fact, exist.

That's why Democrat leaders, mouthing Democrat mantras about peace and justice, have failed to get these riots under control. Their allies in the media and entertainment don't understand the world of the Normals, either. Hence, suggestions by the press that this is the work of white supremacists and vows by Hollywood stars to bail out the rioters from jail.

I hate to say it, but as I watch this unfold and see how the blue Aristos still cling to their racial religion, I don't see any way this ends except in a splitting of America, along the lines of Kurt Schlichter's novels.

This topic is too depressing. Instead of posting a riot photo, here's a redhead who likes to drink at our bird bath. Enjoy.

I Need An Experimental Farm

... or maybe just a house on several acres of land.

My Dixie project raised bed is currently full of healthy, happy cotton and cayenne.

I swear, two of my Nankeen cotton plants (far side of the bed) grew an inch the other day.

I've got new, Virginia Red tobacco seeds coming next week, but nowhere to plant them. Optimally, I'd grow about 30 of them so I could make a significant mound of cured leaves to test my fermentation ideas. I've got a new idea, by the way. If I had that many, I'd be able to construct a chicken wire box to fill with hands of tobacco leaves, effectively simulating a core sample from a commercial tobacco fermentation barn.

Imagine creating a 2' x 2' vertical slice of this pile.

The problem isn't growing the stuff or harvesting it, the problem is that I've run out of space.

This is just one more reason to move to Dixie, buy a house on 40 acres and start a chihuahua plantation.

Updated Thoughts on the Riots

I'm kind of losing interest in them. This is a blue-on-blue civil war. The left has cultivated racial paranoia in the black community in order to keep their votes following decades of disastrous Democratic rule of black neighborhoods. Through the academy, they've cultivated of America-hating ANTIFA radicals. Now, blue cities are being sacked by the radicals the left has deliberately created.

This was all perfectly predictable, when you think about it. When rioting, people don't travel far. Given the Democrats' domination of the cities, it was only ever going to be blue cities that would be wrecked by these groups.

Hilariously, they're doubling down on the whole race thing, making insane claims about white supremacists being behind the riots. I guess we shouldn't be surprised, given that the left screams that women can become men. In for a dime of delusion, in for a dollar. On Twitter, el gato malo said it as well as it could be said.

given enough indoctrination, a post truth society can be conjured into existence.

but a post truth universe cannot.

— el gato malo (@boriquagato) May 31, 2020

It's All OK As Long As You Vote

Two and two are four. Here's two for you.

Hillary wants you to vote.

Candace Owens says that's all they care about.

The black community is playing checkers while the mainstream media is playing chess.
Our youth will be imprisoned.
Our neighborhoods will be destroyed.
Our inability to think through emotional tragedies is our biggest curse, and the Democrat Party’s biggest blessing. pic.twitter.com/ncPAPq5Ajj

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) May 28, 2020

Here are two more.

This is Jacob Frey, the impeccably credentialed (Villanova, class of 2009) and perfectly woke mayor of Minneapolis. Racial justice has been a big part of his political life.

Here are the standardized test results from Henry High, an 1100-student, majority-black high school in Minneapolis.

It's possible to succeed at Henry High. Black kids aren't succeeding, but as long as they vote, it's all good.

Vote Vote Vote

Votes are the only thing that matter. You can spend 12 years in the progs' school system and end up illiterate, just vote. You can riot and burn down businesses, just vote. You can shoot each other on the streets, just vote. Use drugs, wreck your life, drink too much, just vote. Vote vote vote.

Of Matches And Explosives

The press wants you to vote, too. For the right people, of course. That's why they pump stories that feed racial paranoia. There's a very narrow filter for the press. They're constantly on the lookout for stories where a white person inflicts some kind of damage on a black person. It's best if it's someone in authority and the very best are white cops doing it. Those stories have gone above the fold for a decade or more now. They run them for as long as they can, like hit Broadway plays.

Our schools are similarly filled with vote-groomers. My daughter went to a race-crazed public high school where her American History text book featured one story of racial injustice after another. Our local Catholic university has embraced the progs' version of Nazi Race Theory, Whiteness Studies. All across the country, the education industry teaches children to hate America. The NYT recently ran their 1619 Project series to engender hatred of America.

The progs don't care about the 550 black kids at Henry High, most of whom graduate unable to read. No one cares about the black kids at Camden High or at the high schools in Baltimore or Chicago, either. As long as you can read well enough to mark the right box on the ballot, it's all good. To ensure that you never deviate from voting for them, they feed your racial paranoia constantly.

Heck, Joe Biden even said recently that if you don't vote for him, you ain't black.

So now our cities are burning after a single incident where a guy we don't know was involved in the death of another guy we don't know. There's no indication that the event that led to the death was racially motivated. There's no indication that the death was caused by the acts of the first guy. Just yesterday, the coroner said he didn't suffocate or choke to death and that intoxicants in his body played a part in what looks to have been a heart attack.

Who cares? Burn the cities. Wreck your neighborhoods. Graduate from our schools unable to read. We don't care.

Just vote.

Tribal Madness

Minneapolis riot summary: Some guy you've never met got into an altercation with another guy you've never met. One of them died. Because of this, we're rallying tribal groups and Minneapolis is being sacked. Other cities are suffering some amount of looting and destruction.

Yep, that makes sense to me.

How Innovation Works In Tobacco Fermenting

Whenever there's some kind of rioting, all I want to do is crawl under my blankets and hide there. All of the rage and vitriol is so depressing. Instead of blogging about what's going on in Minneapolis and LA, let's talk about something fun.

I recently listened to the podcast version of this episode of Uncommon Knowledge. 

I then went out and bought the audio version of Viscount Ridley's book, How Innovation Works. His primary thesis is that innovation is the product of trial and error more than anything else. I have a couple of patents and spent some time as a research scientist in my younger days. His assertion didn't ring true to me until I started thinking about my experiment with tobacco.

He's spot on as far as I can tell. When I thought about my inventions and documents, I realized that a great deal of trial and error went into all of them.

Going back to tobacco, my experiment failed when the leaves molded in the last step, fermentation. My postmortem made me wish I could try about a half dozen different ways of fermenting the stuff. Hobbyist fermentation of tobacco is trying to replicate what happens when you pile up the leaves in bulk in hot and humid places like the Carolinas or Cuba.

Since I don't have mounds of leaves and I live in arid San Diego, what I really want is a set of parallel experiments to try different ways to ferment small quantities of tobacco. What I want is trial and error.

Trial and error acknowledges that there are more variables or more candidate values for your variables than you can solve for analytically. As far as I can tell, the Viscount is right. Innovation owes a great deal to trial and error.

The Press Isn't Listening

I finally looked into Twitter's recent decision to post "fact checking" links on President Trump's tweets. The first foray into Twitter's self-destruction is all about voting by mail.

First, Twitter may have just signed its own death warrant. The only way it can survive is by being classified as a platform instead of a publisher. A platform, like the phone company, exerts no editorial influence on the content. A publisher does. A platform has no exposure to libel or slander charges from whatever passes over it. A publisher does.

Second, the whole vote-by-mail thing is a frightening example of what happens when you have a news media that is partisan. They are completely missing the story here. The deplorables are screaming out that they want elections they can trust. That means at least moving in the direction of voter ID if not using it universally. Vote-by-mail is the exact opposite of that.

If the deplorables feel like the ballot harvesting in Orange County and places allowing illegals to vote is happening more generally, then the militia protests in Virginia and Michigan will be repeated, only this time with more vigor.

In Michigan, peaceful protesters showed their unhappiness with the governor's lockdown orders.

In Virginia, peaceful protesters showed their unhappiness with the Democrats' modifications to the Second Amendment.

I don't know how much clearer this can get for the press. If they weren't so busy being political activists, pushing their progressive narratives, they might see what's coming. They might help us see what's coming, too. 

Nope.

As I blogged before, an insurrection won't look anything like what most people think.

(A)rguments against an informal militia standing up to the government featured claims that hunting rifles were no match for fighter jets. One congressional idiot even went so far as to talk about nuclear weapons. This was all wrong.

The people fighting to get their livelihoods back aren't facing F-18s. They're going up against cops. Very quickly, they've got the cops outnumbered and outgunned. When their cause has some amount of righteousness, they've also got the sympathy of law enforcement.

 This could get very ugly.

Teaching Lies

The UC system has decided to ditch the SATs because inequality.

The University of California board of regents voted Thursday to stop using the SAT and ACT college admissions exams, reshaping college admissions in one of the largest and most prestigious university systems in the country and dealing a significant blow to the multibillion-dollar college admission testing industry.

The unanimous 23-to-0 vote ratified a proposal put forward last month by UC President Janet Napolitano to phase out the exams over the next five years until the sprawling UC system can develop its own test.

The battle against standardized tests has raged for years because minority students score, on average, lower than their white classmates. Advocates argue that the exams are an unfair admission barrier to those students because they often cannot pay for pricey test preparation.

Yeah, it's all about expensive test prep classes. Just like it is at Camden High in New Jersey.

The kids can't read or do math..

... despite having plenty of teachers ...

... who graduate them anyway.

There's a single review comment about the school on the site.

Camden high school is a very good school but the only thing why parents think the teachers don't teach is because the students do not want to learn. These students in this school is very smart but they does not show it. Only if the students was less disruptive and start paying attention more than it would be good.

No one cares. The press is on high alert for any examples of racism, but totally ignore the hundreds of thousands of kids just like these. The teachers are negotiating for more pay and bigger pensions while keeping quiet about what is happening in their classrooms. The local politicians talk about everything except the wretched culture and the wrecked families.

Yes, by all means, let's ditch the SATs. Why do we want any objective measures of reality? If we have those, we'll just have to lie about them. It's best to hide reality so we don't have to lie so much.