When I was a boy I had a thing for taking stuff apart. I was curious about how things worked. For instance, I once took the TV apart when my parents were away. Thinking back it is amazing that I did not electrocute myself. It’s also amazing that there was a time when parents thought it was fine to leave an eight year old home alone. It was a different country back then. Kids in my underclass neighborhood were home alone all summer with little to no supervision.

Anyway, my thing for taking stuff apart became a problem so my poor parents bought me some nerd toys to keep me busy. I got a toy like this to learn how electricity worked. I got a chemistry set which I wound up using to kill the fish with by accident. The theory behind the toys was to encourage the smarter boys to use their brain, instead of playing sports all the time. In the 1970’s, it was still assumed that boys played sports, got in fights, rough housed outside and so forth.

I may be mistaken, but the “nerd” was a term people used. Being bookish was a thing and it was like being gay in the working class. Kids with brains and curiosity therefore were guided into manly ways to use your head. My chemistry set, for example, had a recipe for gun powder. Imagine something like that today. The shrieking from the usual suspects would be deafening. The electricity set had plans for building radios, just like they used in the army. It was a way to make being smart have utility.

Even way back in those olden times, people were starting to sense that having brains was going to be more useful for boys than being tough. The technological revolution was just starting to have a practical impact on the average people. My father, a steamfitter, got a calculator, which cost a bundle, from his employer to do layout work. My mother, a secretary, had to learn how to use a word processor. My first typewriter, in 1980, had an LCD screen to preview what I typed before committing it to paper.

It was already clear that the world was entering a fork in the road. Down one path the smart people would go and down the other the not so smart.  Parents, even old school working class types, saw the writing on the wall and started to encourage their kids to become nerds. My father thought it was fascinating that I had a head for numbers. He would quiz me all the time. When I took up chess, my grandfather would always want to play, as he loved the game of chess.

Here we are four decades later and the nerds run the world – sort of. The political class is still the same sort. Few have any math or science. The financial class, the folks really in charge, rely heavily on a technological elite, as well as people from the STEM fields. The rise of the quant, that guy who started out in physics, but ended up creating investment models, is proof the nerds run the world. Money men ar still portrayed as alpha males, but the alpha male on Wall Street is now a Korean or a Jewish nerd.

Nerds have certainly become a dominant force in modern societies. They have supplanted the “working man” in the popular culture. You just don’t see too many TV shows, for example, where the main character is a blue collar guy. When you do see blue collar guy in popular culture, he is either a  clownish exaggeration intended to make sport of the working man or a modern of the noble savage that is supposed to validate the prevailing assumptions about society, culture and politics.

Instead, the popular shows have snarky, high IQ nerds as stars. Big Bang Theory is a great example of this taken to the absurd. Anyone familiar with people in fields like theoretical physics knows they are not living in a hip apartment doing fun and interesting things. But, that’s TV. it is all fake, even the nerds. Cop shows now feature girls using technology to outwit the offish white criminals. Criminals on TV, of course, are nothing like reality, as far as complexion and competence.

That’s the other thing we have now – fake nerds. It makes sense. If the archetypal hero is a nerd, the beautiful people will imitate him. The fashionable Left has latched onto this with a death grip. I regularly see my lefty friends linking to stuff like this. None of them can add past ten without help. They majored in soft subjects like art of sociology in college and struggle with basic technology. It is really important to them, however, to be pro-science.

That means memorizing the latest from the Climate Change Cult (CCC), berating Christians for creationism and talking about their favorite science shows. The parents always swear their kids mastered the iPad (Apple being another pseudo-nerd symbol) at birth. That’s always amusing. Every Progressive mediocrity swears their kid is exceptional, which violates a basic rule of biological science. We now live in a world where every kids is above average.

Another manifestation of the fake nerd is the stat geek. ESPN has a fellow named Pablo Torre, who ticks a number of boxes. They have him on to perform the role of the young, hip math savvy sports analyst. I looked him up and found he was a sociology major at Harvard. The fact that he went to a swank prep school and Harvard suggests he is of above average IQ, but his last name suggests he could have gamed the system so it is hard to know. Still, he has no math or science.

Now, he is pitched by ESPN and he plays along, as a stat geek. He’s the nerd with the numbers, juxtaposed with the dumb guys in the sports department. In reality he reads FanGraphs, gleans a few statistics that sound cool and then spouts opinions on TV and the internet. Nothing wrong with it, but it is clearly an act, no different than someone playing a doctor in a drama. That’s TV, but TV shapes and reflects the greater culture.

The new cool is pretending to be someone who had a pocket liner as a kid and still pines for his slide rule. Just as the 70’s hipsters were products of squaresville, today’s nerds are most likely liberal arts majors that cannot figure out how to change the time on their car’s radio. That’s not what matters though. What matters is everyone knows how much you freaking love science. To say otherwise is to risk heresy.

The most ridiculous manifestation of this is the “policy wonk”,  who plays the role of expert on government and social policy. Like the fake nerds in sports, these nerds majored in journalism or public policy, maybe took a basic stats class. Otherwise they have no math or science. Their “wonkery” is nothing more than memorizing the policy positions of their party and then reciting them in clever ways on TV or print. The clever part is key. “Snark” is the call of the fake nerd, no matter the field.

Snark is an ironic disdain for convention that is really just a signaling mechanism. The snarky fake nerd makes some comment about Southerners, for example,  rejecting evolution as a way to publicly identify himself as an inside the set of right opinions. His coevals will respond with something similar, thus establishing that they too are members of the proper set. The person who takes issue with the comment is then identified as the outsider. Snark and irony are just public displays of membership in a group.

Economics is not a STEM field, even though economists try hard to convince people it is a branch of mathematics. It is a social science decorated with mathematics. That gives it the veneer of respectability that a field like sociology lacks. That said, it often resembles a cult, in that it has developed an internal logic and language that makes perfect sense to those inside, but seems weird and nutty to those outside. For example, they treat Maynard Keynes in the same way Mormons treat Joseph Smith.

Anyway, the buzzing over the Fed’s sudden course change is a good example. This is a fairly typical example. It does not mention Keynes, but the the belief that creating credit money is always and everywhere a good thing is on display. The intellectual trap they have made for themselves is quite clear. If credit creation  adds to the GDP, then it is always good to create debt. There are no conditions under which it can be bad so expanding he money supply becomes a permanent part of the economy.

No one ever stops to wonder how this can be so? After all, if it were that easy, it should have worked all the other times it was tried. The answer, of course, is to say it is different this time. The “new normal” meme has become the get out of jail free card for every utopian dreamer. In the case of economics, any doubts about endless credit creation is waved away with the line, “things are different.” In other words, everyone is supposed to just take what economists say on faith.

Economics is the religion of modern times. In a previous age, rulers would have a holy man or a shaman to endorse his polices. Today, the economists provide this role. In Obama’s first term, Christine Romer was trucked into the White House to tell Obama and the country that the math” said a reckless spending spree was just what the economy wanted. That’s when the “multiplier effect” got loose in the conversation. Since then every minor economic shaman has some theory about a multiplier effect.

The nuttiness is on full display at this site. These guys have built out a series of interactive charts to show various “multipliers” and the impact of the current fads in the faith. For the record, they are making sport of the whole idea by showing the nonsense of it all. The fact is, government spending fueled by debt is great until you run out of people willing to lend you money. Then you become Detroit. Quantitative easing, which is just credit creation at below market rates is just a clever way to disguise it.

By pumping the extra money into assets like stocks, purchasing power is destroyed slowly, rather than in hyper inflation like you see with old fashioned money printing. At some point, the new money will leak into the real economy. Americans have been getting poorer slowly, but seem to be figuring out what has happened to them.Adjusting for inflation, the government share of the economy has more than tripled in the last forty years, per capita and adjusting for inflation.

In addition to the growth of the state at all levels, the amount of debt, both public and private, has exploded: At every stop along the way, modern economics has told our rulers that this was the right policy. The result is a massive, incompetent government systematically beggaring the public. More critically, it has allowed for the transfer of social capital to massive global companies and financial institutions. The price of cheap goods is living among strangers who you don’t dare trust as neighbors.

This has been making the rounds on social media. It is an old post, almost a decade old, so it will be curious to see if the authoress will be forced to recant it. Ms. Bindel is upset that some crazy person hired a doctor to butcher him into looking somewhat like a woman and he now he wants to be a rape counselor. By the logic of modern “gender studies” he is on solid ground. After all, gender is a social construct. he can be a women if he wants and everyone has to pretend he is a women.

She’s right, of course. There’s no such thing as a sex change procedure. It is all cosmetic as far as biology is concerned. If this guy is dug up 500 years from now, the DNA test will say he was a man. The reason for that is you cannot alter your DNA. Therefore, his sex is male because his DNA says he is a male. He may think he is a woman, a goldfish or a starseed. That just proves he is in need of psychiatric care. If he was convinced he was an elf from the North Pole, he would be in an asylum.

What makes this stuff amusing, obviously, is it is the intersection of one type of reality denying lunacy colliding into a different brand of reality denying lunacy. It’s a bum fight between left-wing crazies. In this case, it is angry old-school feminism against faddish degeneracy. For the longest time, cropped hair lesbians, dressed like loggers, were the cutting edge of academic fashion. All of a sudden whites guys in summer frocks are getting all the attention. It’s unfair!

Ms. Bidel writes, “Feminism is supposed to be based on the premise that prescriptive gender roles are a cause of women’s oppression.” She could have written that feminism is about rallying the the hobbits to defend The Shire and been on more rational ground. Men and women have different biological destinies. Thousands of years of evolution have made the sexes what they are, including their roles in human societies. Division of labor between the sexes is an incredibly useful adaptation. It may be inconvenient for some small portion of males and females, but Mother Nature does not care about your feelings.

In fact, mother nature has a funny way of punishing humans for defying reality. It usually means death and/or great suffering. Animals with weird mating or dietary adaptions like Pandas tend to get wiped out. Or, like the Shakers, wipe themselves out. That’s what appears to be happening with human populations that have adopted the voodoo of feminism. Fertility rates plunge. It turns out that men, rather than keep playing their role, have adapted too. The feminist demand for attention has resulted in them being ignored.

A long time ago in a far away land, a lowly business professor at a state college showed that a famous person from Stanford was a fraud and a con-man. The famous Simon – Ehrlich Wager Wager is one of those events that holds the attention of both sides of the political elite. Betting against over all human progress has proven to be a suckers bet for roughly 10,000 years. On the other hand, those inclined toward cynicism take pleasure in unmanning charlatans like Ehrlich on philosophical grounds.

Guys like Paul Ehrlich will always be with us, mostly because they are not about being empirically right, but about being morally right. There not appealing to facts and reason, when they stand out demanding the rest of us repent. What they are really doing is appealing to the managerial class, who view themselves as the keepers of public morality, by way of flattery. You see, if you agree with Ehrlich, then you are a good person, because all the good people agree with him.

Steve Sailer linked to this and provided some commentary. While Sailer can be a bit dismal in his analysis, he strikes me as a fairly optimistic guy. Optimists are people who think things will be fine in the long run. They may have doubt about the short run, but they think things tend to work out fort her best. Sailer seems to think that the people in charge will figure it out and make the necessary course corrections. One day, Steve will get to see his beloved California restored to what he recalls as a child.

I don’t know, but I would assume Sailer looks back fondly on the unmasking of Ehrlich as a fraud. It supports his generally optimistic view that things tend to get better in the long run. Therefore, when someone comes out with some gloomy predictions, Sailer tends to be more dismissive that most people. That’s why the Simon-Ehrlich wager still resonates after all these years. For the optimists, it is confirmation. For those in power, it is an excuse to ignore the warnings of their critics.

Maybe human progress is inevitable and the sort of dire prognostications like the ones in that linked post can be safely ignored. Maybe Ehrlich was just a grifter and his failure has no meaning whatsoever. The predictions in that post look quite reasonable. There’s very good reason to think that the American Empire is slowly moving to a denouement that will be no more pleasant than the end of previous empires. if in ten years those things are true, the politics of America will be very rough.

A topic that never gets the attention it deserves is the role of credit money in the modern technological economy. More important, the role of this new money, built for a technological society, is having on the old economy, where most everyone lives and works. Outside of Silicon Valley, Washington and New York, most people exist in the late-industrial age. Their money, however, is designed for the post-industrial, technological age where information and network positioning is the basis of value.

The current setup with the dollar as the reserve currency pegged to nothing more than the hopes and dreams if the Federal Reserve is a new thing in history. In fact, it is one of the truly new things in the last thousand years. Since the Louvre Accords formalized the currency arrangements we have today, debt of all types has exploded. You see it quite clearly in this article from the Free Press about Detroit’s woes. Right in the mid to late 1980’s, Detroit went from a declining debt path to a skyrocketing debt path.

The article, of course, does not address the role of credit money and instead tries to shift the blame to its favorite bad guys. The truth is, the unfolding debt crisis has very little to do with policy decisions made by Mayors, Governors or even Congress. It is the result of the shift change in the currency arrangements of the world. The old market restraints, based on the bond issuer’s ability to pay, have been changed to a system where restraint is based on the ability of the system to absorb new debt.

Many people recognize the debt problem, but they don’t understand the underlying cause, instead falling on old chestnuts like “Fiat Currency!” Our economic elites think the answer to the debt crisis is more debt. Some of it is narrow self-interest, as debt creation offers profit opportunities. Others are just true believers who get misty eyed whenever someone mentions capitalism. Then, of course, most people struggle to understand a a shadow banking system with its trillions in complex derivatives.

Cities like Detroit certainly suffer from a collapse of human capital, but that’s not the cause of their debt problems. In the old system, where an ability to pay would have been a restraint on debt issuance, the city would have had to cut services long before the debt load became dangerous. In a system that is hungry for debt, there’s no shortage of people willing to take the Detroit paper. This has allowed the global financial system to loot American cities by offering debt these cities can never repay.

The bankruptcies of American cities are just a tremor, one that everyone will ignore, as these can be papered over by new debt from states. The looming pension problem will be a much bigger tremor, as there will be no way to pay the debt owed to baby boomers retiring from the civil service. At some point, probably in the next decade, the great credit expansion will reach some natural limit that no one currently understands and then we get the real crisis. Detroit will look like good times.

It is easy to chuckle at stories like this one from Massachusetts. Every day some new outrage emanates from these hotbeds of lunacy. Right now, Massachusetts is the epicenter of the suicide cult we call Progressivism. This is a state that replaced a liberal Republican with a fake indian, who is as dumb as a goldfish. They followed that up by replacing their retiring senator with an aging child weirdo nicknamed Mr. Frosty.

Massachusetts a good state to examine when trying to understand the currents in modern Progressive identity. About 45% of the population is normal. Another 45% is deep in the weeds of the Progressive theology. Massachusetts has the third lowest rate of church attendance in the nation and one of the lowest marriage rates. Unsurprisingly, they have one of the lowest fertility rates. Progressivism is not a fruitful religion.

The secular religion of liberalism is, like all cults, is based on self-loathing. Christianity and Judaism, in contrast, begin with the belief that God loves his creations. At their purest, they are a celebration of life and living. Adherents are attracted to these religions because they provide affirmation of humanity. For Jews, they believe they will one day spend eternity with their god. Christians will go to heaven.

Secular religions work the other way. They are premised on the belief that the adherent is vile and worthless. They join the movement in order to exchange their identity for that of the group. Progressivism offers a sort of cleansing, where the hated self is subsumed into the greater identity of the cause. The American Left has always been about self-abnegation, a weird sort of sacrifice of self to an all encompassing community.

Their fanaticism is due to the lack of a limiting principle. In Christianity, there is no salvation on this earth. You can practice all the rites and rituals, live a moral life, but to do so excessively is to risk the sin of vanity. Put another way, Christianity draw a line at virtue where beyond it offers nothing extra. Progressivism does the opposite. The adherent is always looking to be just a bit more pious.

Also note that the inclusiveness is just a modern implementation of the Puritan sense of communal salvation. That tradition of assuming a community is only as righteous as its worst sinner has transformed into a demand that everyone must included in everything, or else. Diversity is just code for denying that people can have private lives and private affairs. If everyone can’t be in it, then it is immoral.

A world without borders is a world with just one border, a prison wall that keeps everyone inside so they can be supervised. That’s what Progressivism is today. It’s a license for the self-righteous to root around in your life, looking for signs of bad thoughts. The result is the end of all private association and all unsupervised separation. Their vision of society is something closer to a prison, than a utopia.

When it was revealed that the US government was reading everyone’s e-mails and tapping their calls, some not so well informed people recommended Tor as one way to keep the Feds out of your e-mail. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be totally false. Tor was never a foolproof way to be anonymous on-line and it is entirely possible tor was always a honey pot. According to this Bloomberg story, not only was the network hacked by the Feds, it has some rather big security flaws.

The fact that the funding for the project comes from the Department of Defense should have been a clue, but people want to believe there is a way to outwit the collective might of the tech industry and the imperial government. of course, the rumors leaking from the FBI to the main stream media could be psyops. They can’t crack Tor, so they leak that they have, hoping people will stop using it. If Tor collapses, some other option will take its place, maybe created by the Feds. Such is life in the surveillance state.

The handful of Progressives who care about privacy say the solution is to pass a bunch of privacy laws like the Europeans. The Euros do have a more adversarial relationship with the Tech giants, because of their natural anti-Americanism. In reality, the American Left likes to talk about Europe, as it allows them to carry on like they are citizens of the world, rather than local bumpkins.The idea that the US government will limit himself is laughable, but no American thinks clearly about this stuff.

The Left has always been deranged about this stuff. They will trust the government to police itself, but they assume every corporation is out to get them. This in spite the fact their new ruler is expanding the surveillance state, while giving the store away to the tech giants. Of course, the American Left has never been consistent. Even so, 5,000 years of human history tell us that those with power will exercise it and eventually abuse it. It is why The Founders limited it and diffused it.

The fact is, the state can get away with just about anything, as long as the bulk of the people think they safe, fed and entertained. Further, if the abuse is not direct, as in agents of the state knocking down doors, people tend to rationalize it. The government spying on everyone is read by 90% of people as “the government is spying on them.” Lather on some talk about Muslims trying to blow up the world and most people will view opposition to the surveillance state as subversion.

Nothing happens until the money runs out. The America middle class is willing to sit on its hands doing as they are told as long as they have their Olive Garden and sportsball on the television. When that ends, then we will see things change. When there’s no more money to fund the welfare state, the welfare state ends. When there is no more money to borrow to fund the Imperial Army, the Empire ends. When there’s no more money for the America surveillance services, that will end.

One of the things you learn when you go from working class to middle class is that the men get softer the further you go up the class ladder. By softer I mean less inclined to throw a punch. At the lower end of the scale, you better be able to back up your words with your fists or a knife or a gun. Otherwise, you better know how to keep your mouth shut and steer clear of trouble. In elite society, alpha males are quick with the witty jibe and enforce their dominance with clever repartee. Careful politicking, networking and favor trading is how one advances in the upper classes. Words, not deeds, are the currency of the rich. In the lower classes, too much talking can get you killed.

I thought about that as Obama stumbled and bumbled is way back from the brink of war yesterday. He and all of his toadies, coat holders and rump swabs are from the same world. Upper middle and upper class childhoods. Prep schools then elite colleges. After college it was law school, government service and perhaps stints at elite Wall Street firms to take care of the finances, then eventually service in the upper reaches of government or perhaps an NGO. The closest any of these folks ever got to a fight was a spat at the gym. You’re not going to find anyone who has been punched in the face.

In the hermetically sealed world of American politics, this is not big thing. Everyone is playing by the same rules of the pseudo-meritocracy. Obama played the game better than most and was able to parlay his race into the top job. In foreign policy, things are a bit different. In the Syria crisis, one of the major players is Vladimir Putin. He has probably killed people as a member of the KGB. He has certainly ordered people killed as he has gone up the food chain. He’s not Ivan the Terrible, but he is a genuine bad ass who made it to the top of the heap in a world where mistakes get you killed or let you kill your rival. Putin has been punched in the face.

You may think I’m overdoing it with Putin, but consider another major player. That would be Assad of Syria. He could easily have negotiated a deal to leave Syria and settle in Europe. Hell, he could do a deal with Obama and moved to New York City. Instead, he stays in Syria, fighting the rebels. He has ordered his military to kill men, women, children, pets and cattle. According to various reports, 100,000 civilians have been killed since this thing started. It takes a genuine badass to be in charge of a tribe willing to kill anyone in their way. Assad may have got to his place through nepotism, but he remains in power by killing anyone who challenges him.

You can go through the entire roster of players in this story, Jews Arabs and Persians, and find a whole bunch of seriously bad dudes. The thing about bad dudes, whether they are Arab dictators or the president of the local Hell’s Angels chapter, is they have no illusions about the human condition. They trust no one and expect everything. They also know their limits. Sonny at the biker bar knows he is not talking you out of your interests. The House of Saud knows the only way to stay in power is to use it. Talking about it does nothing. They are not beheading homosexuals in Riyadh because they have nothing better to do.

That’s why Obama & Co were made into fools by Putin and Assad. These are men fully equipped to deal with the realities of that part of the world. They have no illusions about what can be done. Obama and his people walk around thinking that a clever speech or well crafted argument is going to get everyone to do what they say. That’s how it has always worked for them. It is how they were trained. Again, they have never even met a guy who has been punched in the face, much less had to compete with him. The result is they lost this round to Russia and our influence in the world is continues to evaporate.

The first time I heard of modern supper clubs was from John Derbyshire. I don’t recall the specifics, just that he was a member of one in New York City. I want to say it was in one of his podcasts, but I don’t recall. That’s not important. I was surprised to learn such things were still going on. It seemed like a thing Victorians would do or perhaps rich people in the roaring twenties. When I think of supper clubs, the Jacobin Club is what comes to mind. Something clandestine and slightly heretical. I decided to see if any of these things existed in my part of the world and sure enough, they were around and not very secret about it. I just chalked it up to one of those things that was unknown to me but well known to most others. It is a big world, after all.

I saw this and immediately was reminded of it again. It turns out they are not legal and perhaps even subversive. Now the city intends to round up the miscreants and shut down their clubs. I suppose the next time we hear from John Derbyshire will be in the police blotter. It sounds absurd, but this is New York City. They want to regulate the amount of soda you can drink. They have been having the police hassle NAM males who are foolish enough to cross into Manhattan. This is not a place that thinks personal liberty and freedom of association have a place in their society. The mayor has been jetting around the country trying to get legislatures to strip citizens of their right to self-defense. What seems absurd today is conventional wisdom in New York City tomorrow.

All joking aside, it is one of those little things, a blade of grass stabbing through the asphalt, that encourages me a bit. Tocqueville found American’s obsession with what he called associations to be an important part of what made American liberty work:

The political associations that exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds, religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it is proposed to inculcate some truth or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society. Wherever at the head of some new undertaking you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association.

The fact that even in New York City, citizens are willing to commit little acts of subversion in league with others, often strangers, says the flame has not been extinguished entirely. The current arrangements cannot last and that means they will not last. The arithmetic makes it so. The question is what comes next. If Putin is right and we’re just a bunch of chumps like everyone else, then what comes next is going to be grim. If these little dinner clubs are any indication, maybe what comes next will not be so bad, perhaps even better than what we see now. It is a reason to be pessimistic in the short term, but optimistic in the long term.