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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Economist like to throw around the term “disruptive” to describe the latest fads. It makes them feel hip and edgy, I guess. Most of it is crap. Some is just criminal. Steve Sailer often points out that Silicon Valley gets to exempt itself from a lot of rules everyone else has to follow. That’s why Uber gets to exist and it gets to be “disruptive.” I know that makes me sound like an old coot bitching about the kids running on my lawn, but I’m an old coot who bitches about the kids running on my lawn. Whaddaya gonna do?

The point is most of what is tossed around as disruptive technology is bullshit, but that does not mean there’s no disruptive technology. It’s just that culture and IQ blinds our betters to what is about to turn over the apple cart. By culture I mean the prevailing beliefs of those in charge. Back when I was screwing around with my first computer, the smart guys were starting a national newspaper. It was probably not my first computer, but you get the point. Most of us are too locked into the here and now to see what’s coming down the road. The folks who claim to be on top of the new trends are always surprised by what comes next.

That’s the culture part. There’s also the IQ part. Most of the American press corp struggles with basic technology. Back in the 1990’s, I used to love reading stories about the “internet” in the common press. They described it in the same language you describe a conspiracy theory or secret society. Even today, the typical “journalist” is overwhelmed by the technology the rest of us take for granted. That’s why they keep getting gaffed by nonsense like the Rolling Stone rape hoax. How hard was it to look up the facts on-line? It took me no time at all. I never got credit for that. Instead the guy at 28 Sherman claimed credit, but that’s not the point. The chattering skulls in the media are just not very bright so they miss the big stuff coming down the pike.

Anyway, where was I?

That’s right. Disruptive technology.

The thing that is going to toss over the apple cart is none of the stuff the middle-aged dorks at Marginal Revolution talk about every day. The meteor in the sky is DNA.

The social worker said no. The judge said no. The local phone books were useless.

For decades, no one and nothing could help Sue Warthen find the people who gave birth to her in the mid-1960s.

Then her adoptive mother encouraged Mrs. Warthen’s new husband, Rob, a computer whiz, to see what he could do.

He built a computer program that permitted him to “build out” family trees, and he asked his wife to swab her cheek and send her DNA to a genealogy company.

Mr. Warthen put her results into his program, worked with a “search angel” named Karin Corbeil, and found a trail that led to Mrs. Warthen’s birth mother.

Additional investigative work may now have led to her birth father too.

“I’ve always wanted to know where I actually came from that I wasn’t simply dropped off,” said Mrs. Warthen, who was adopted in Maryland when she was a few months old and has been looking for her birth family since the early 1980s, when she turned 18.

Today, hundreds, if not thousands, of adoptees have used DNA genealogy companies like Family Tree DNA, 23andMe and Ancestry.com to jump over bureaucratic barriers and find members of their genetic families.

“People sometimes say we can’t do it unless there’s close DNA matches, but that’s not true — we can do it with distant ones too,” said CeCe Moore, a professional genetic genealogist who has appeared on “Finding Your Roots” with Henry L. Gates Jr. on PBS.

Even “foundlings” can find their birth relatives, Ms. Moore said.

DNA testing is the only way to find family heritage for these people since “opening records can’t help when there are no records,” said Ms. Moore, who has helped find birth families for a woman who was abandoned as a baby behind a grocery store, another person who was left on church steps and a third who was left at a baby-sitter’s house.

People unfamiliar with adoption may not realize that for decades, it was typical for agencies, charities and lawyers to arrange “closed” adoptions.

This meant an adoptee was given an amended birth certificate with the names of their adoptive parents and possibly not told they were adopted.

Legally, their original birth certificates were, in most U.S. states, sealed in courts and not made available to an adoptee except in cases of legal necessity. Sometimes, only medical information about the birth family — but no names — was provided.

This led to widespread private and professional “search and reunion” efforts, as well as campaigns to change state laws to let adult adoptees have their original birth records.

A large chunk of Western culture rests on pretty lies that are hard to debunk. For instance, we know that you really can’t go from poverty to the penthouse with hard work. You can go from the slums to lower middle class through hard work. You can go from middle class to upper middle. You’re going to need something else to jump a bunch of rungs up the ladder or down the ladder. We all sort of know it, but we take comfort in believing otherwise. Think about how different the world would look if suddenly everyone figured out that going to college will have no material impact on your life. That one pretty lie holds up a trillion dollars in financialization.

That’s what the linked story is showing. DNA testing is now throwing over a bedrock feature of western adoption. It’s going to throw over the sperm donor business too. Once everyone knows that they can find their biological family, what’s the point of keeping donors secret? What’s the point of sealing adoption records? Of course, it’s also going to put the lie to the claims about parenting. DNA testing is not just going to reveal lineage. It will reveal the heritability of personality traits and IQ.

Big chunks of the foundation are about to crumble thanks to genetics. Medical insurance is all about risk. Insurance companies hedge their risk by creating large pools. Basically they socialize what they don’t know about their customers health risks. What happens when they know those risk from a simple mouth swab? For that matter, what happens when that same swab can determine one’s propensity for crime? Violence? Homosexuality?

As we have seen over the last few decades, magical thinking like socialism can get along just fine with the microprocessor. It’s not going to hold up to DNA testing. Capitalism probably falls apart too when we can easily divide the population into Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons. The Alphas and Epsilons have always been known. It’s the folks in the middle. Things work because they all know they are not Epsilons and think they can become Alphas. What happens when that’s no longer plausible?

Blogger Note: I will be spending the final day of the year as I always do, out in the streets stomping hippies. I’m not doing it for sexual gratification like most people. I just like the exercise. I’ll be up tomorrow with my predictions for 2015. Here’s last year’s effort.

I saw this on Drudge.

MSNBC president Phil Griffin, whose cable news network is the only one among the big three to lose primetime viewers this season, told staffers he would look to turn things around by continuing a push for younger viewers in 2015.

Griffin, in a memo sent Monday, also promised “to get on the road — and outside of Washington” to broaden the network’s coverage.

“It’s no secret that 2014 was a difficult year for the entire cable news industry and especially for msnbc,” Griffin wrote.

“We have a long history of finding and nurturing great talent — and with an eye toward 2016 — we continued to build our next generation of top-notch journalists,” Griffin wrote.

The memo then singled out such 20-something hosts as Ronan Farrow, Kasie Hunt and Alex Seitz-Wald.

The fact that I had to run Kasie Hunt, Mike’s brother, and Alex Two Names through the google machine tells me they need to keep looking for the next “great talent” to nurture. The only reason I know anything about that squealing sissy, Ronan Farrow, is he was fun to mock at one point. Clips of him having a hissy fit would turn up in my mailbox. If Frank were alive today, Ronan would not be.

It also touted Shift, MSNBC’s just-launched streaming news service, which “is already allowing us to reach new, younger audiences.”

MSNBC’s push to embrace youth makes sense for the only cable news network to see its primetime audience erode in the current season, as measured by Nielsen.

Its 548,000 primetime viewers age 2 and older — down 18 percent from the comparable season a year ago — ranked third to CNN’s 560,000 (up 15 percent) and Fox News Channel’s 1,845,000 (up 1 percent).

Viewers “2 and older”?? You’ve got to be kidding me. The fact there’s a metric for toddlers left in front of the TV while mommy gets another glass of wine says that TV ratings are mostly bullshit. Regardless, in a country with over 100 million cable homes, getting one half of one percent to tune in says you’re about as appealing as ass cancer. There’s no way to spin those numbers.

This is why a la carte pricing of cable should be at the top of the conservative agenda. MSNBC would not exist without cable fees. If people could drop it, everyone would and 99% of the money to this outfit would disappear. The same is true of CNN. Fox would make it because they have a solid audience with money to buy stuff. The ad dollars would probably go up for Fox once the others folded. Just as Fox tries to play both sides of the street, competing news outlets would be forced to follow suit. The news would start to look like America.

This is a microcosm with what’s gone wrong on the professional right. They never understood the long game. Public sector unions were never about public sector workers. It was about taxing those workers to finance liberal causes. Grants to non-profits were never about charity. They are jobs programs for liberals, usually engaged in get out the vote activity. Up and down American society you see a skim. Wherever money changes hands, the Left is getting a cut to finance their operations. In that regard, they operate just like the Mafia.

The Feds finally broke the Mafia by cutting off their money. Tax laws turned out to be the best weapon. The annual audits of unions, pension funds and front companies made it impossible for the mob to make a living. The American Right needs to take the same view. Scott Walker paved the way in Wisconsin, of all places. Now that he has cut the Left off my from union money, the state is suddenly a lot less progressive.

I know it is terrible of me, but I tend to root for anarchy. Let’s face it. Anarchy is great to watch on TV. Specifically, other people’s anarchy is fun to watch on TV. The Ferguson riots were entertaining, in part, because I don’t live anywhere near Missouri. Similarly, seeing Greece once again descend into anarchy promises to deliver some good entertainment.

Within minutes of the Athens parliament failing to elect a president, Alexis Tsipras, the man most likely to become Greece’s next prime minister, said the country had experienced “a historic day”.

For the first time since the foundation of the modern Greek state nearly 200 years ago, radical leftists – marginalised, tortured and tormented for the best part of the 20th century – were on course to assume power. “Greeks,” he said, “should rejoice.” The government that had put the country through an assault course of austerity would soon be over.

The onerous terms of the deeply unpopular “memoranda”, agreed with foreign lenders to keep insolvent Greece afloat, would be overturned.

“The future has already begun,” he told reporters as the nation braced for early elections, a constitutional diktat when presidential polls fail. “You should be optimistic and happy.”

I love how the lunatics at the Guardian always carry on like their ideas have never been tried. You see the same stuff in US papers. Greece may not have allowed hair-on-fire crazies like Tsipras to run the government, but Greece has been a social-democracy since World War 2. That’s why they have been a basket case economically for fifty years. That and they are full of Greeks.

But the prospect of renewed political turmoil in the country where the eurozone crisis began will bring anything but a smile to the faces of decision makers in Brussels and Berlin. Greece, ineluctably, is being drawn into a new dance of uncertainty, a rollercoaster ride of high-pressure politics.

After six years of recession, the nation is only now beginning to show the first signs of recovery, posting a primary surplus – before interest payments on its mountain of debt – and returning to the capital markets that cut off funding at the start of the crisis.

But the country cannot survive alone. And market reaction to Monday’s news was instantly pessimistic, with the Athens Stock exchange plummeting by more than 10 percent.With bailout funds guaranteed to the end of February but far from assured after that, the spectre of Greece defaulting on its loans, and possibly crashing out of the eurozone, have been revived.

The reason Tsipras will be the next PM is the people have figured out that they can do just fine alone. If Greece leaves the Euro, the country will not sink into the ocean. They can default, print their own money and start over. They will have a year of turmoil, but then things will settle down and get back to normal. Greek bankers will be screwed, but they deserve it. Therefore, the threats from Germany about expulsion carry no force. The Greeks have nothing to fear from the Eurocrats.

On the other hand, the Euro lives on the belief that walking away from it is the end of the world. If Greece leaves the Euro and survives, the stronger nations like Spain, Italy and Portugal will get crazy ideas in their heads. If Greece thrives, then Europe is doomed, at least as currently constructed. The fact the Russia will be right there to help the Greeks should not be missed either.

Athens faces debt repayments of up to €20bn (£15.6bn) in 2015. On Monday the Greek finance minister, Gikas Hardouvelis, said local banks had enough funds to survive until March but unless further financial assistance was agreed they would enter into the uncharted waters of non-liquidity after that. This makes an effectively rudderless Athens in the run-up to elections on 25 January more daunting for the “troika” of creditors at the EU, ECB and IMF.

“What we are looking at is a Greece in crisis,” said Dimitris Keridis, professor of political science at Panteion University. “The first party will be Syriza but the elections may well be inconclusive. And then, once a government is formed, it will have a few weeks to elect a new president and negotiate with the troika.”

The radical leftists wasted no time, announcing that Tsipras would hold his first pre-election speech in central Athens on Monday night. The result of the presidential poll indicated the thirst, at least on a political level, for new beginnings. Opinion polls at the weekend confirmed Syriza’s popularity among a population exhausted by austerity.

An Alco poll published in Proto Thema on Sunday showed the neo-Marxists leading by 3.3%.

Many supporters are neither leftist, nor admirers of Syriza’s anti-capitalist rhetoric, but Greeks appalled by the catastrophic effects of policies that have left 1.5 million unemployed, 3 million facing poverty and the vast majority unable to pay their bills.

The party has pledged to fight such ills – referred to as Greece’s silent humanitarian crisis – by renegotiating the bailout accords that have propped up the economy to the tune of €240bn.

“Solution to Greece’s problems lies within the European context but the first thing we will say is that the programme has failed because it was badly planned and didn’t see the pitfalls that were coming,” said Euclid Tsakalotos, Syriza’s shadow finance minister. “Then we will address the priorities of austerity and debt.”

It will be interesting to watch this unfold. The Russians have already made friends with Tsipras and his people. They would love to use Greece to make trouble for Europe. Tsipras may be a lunatic, but he appears to be a clever lunatic. He will surely try to play the Germans and Russians against one another. That’s the oldest trick in the book. Tsakalotos is clearly signalling their intention to end the existing deal and arrangements first and talk about new agreements. That will make for some good times in 2015.

Back in the 1970’s there was a TV drama called The White Shadow. It was a classic white man’s burden story popular in that era. The white man would learn the wonders of diversity, while helping the minorities rise from the ghetto to something better. Back then it was what passed for cutting edge. It was also fairly dull and no one watched it. Finally after three seasons the network threw in the towel.

Today, of course, the white man would be routinely humiliated in each episode in an attempt to atone for his whiteness. The difference is it would not be a TV show but real life. According to America’s newspaper of record, the White Shadow is suing the New York City schools for discrimination.

A Bronx teacher says being a white man at his mostly black and Latino middle school has made him a target for unfair treatment — including being denied a key to the restroom for three years.

Paugh William Shadow of upstate Port Jervis charges he was discriminated against as a white man at MS 391, according to a Manhattan Supreme Court lawsuit he filed against the city and the Department of Education.

Shadow claims he was falsely accused of corporal punishment, using derogatory language and leaving his post; and that school administrators refused to back him up on disciplinary matters and failed to reimburse him after he bought materials for his science-lab students.

The charges, including an allegation he marched sixth-graders up and down a set of stairs for more than five minutes as a means of discipline, were dismissed, he claims.

Shadow says he “was humiliated in front of his peers” and that school officials “discriminated against [him] due to his gender and race.” He is seeking unspecified damages.

My have times changed.

Now that weed is legal, the next great cause of libertarians is something equally pointless. That is prison reform. Rand Paul has been banging the drum for a year now. He is motivated, in part, by political concerns. He wants to inoculate himself against charges of racism so teaming up with a famous black on prison reform is his avenue. I guess he thinks that because blacks dominate the prison scene, this will appeal to blacks. I’m thinking Rand does not know much about liberals or blacks.

The rest of the libertarian cult has been jumping on board as well. The other day Kevin Williamson had a piece up on it. He was basing his article on the NYTimes article singing the blues about the state of New York prisons. I imagine they just went into the archive and fished out some articles from the 60’s and 70’s. Since the beginning, radical politics has been about letting the criminals wreak havoc on society.

Libertarians are always looking for ways to make nice to the Left. It used to be free weed and complaints about the Christians. That was how you could reject Progressivism, without getting in trouble with the Cult. Now that weed is legal and many Republicans are declaring themselves libertarians, the Randians need a new bed to hide under. They seem to have landed on prison reform. Like drug legalization, it appeals to liberals, who fashion themselves as populist, and it is entirely meaningless in the great debates of our age.

That last bit is vital to libertarians. Taking on topics like homosexual marriage, a proxy for cultural dominion, will put you at odds with the Cult. Pushing for the end of public sector unions could ruin your life. Tackling issues that have no practical impact on Americans is a safe way to stand apart from the Left and the Right.

When it comes to prison reform, you’ll note that libertarians are mostly offering up warmed over ideas from the 60’s. The resulting mayhem brought about the end of the New Left in an orgy of violence. From Rand’s bill:

The REDEEM Act proposal would encourage states to raise the age of criminal responsibly to 18 years of age; expunge or seal the records of juveniles who commit non-violent crimes before they turn 15; place limits on the solitary confinement of most juveniles; and establish a system to allow eligible nonviolent criminals to petition a court to ask that their criminal records be sealed. Sealing the records would keep them out of FBI background checks requested by employers and likely make it easier for those former offenders to secure a job.

A massive amount of crime in the ghetto is committed by teenagers. My guess is Rand simply has no idea what happens in the ghetto so this sounds reasonable to him. Like all libertarians, he probably suffers from the belief that all people, regardless of race, will flourish if left to their own devices. Take away the game keepers from the black ghetto and you get Detroit, but you have to live here to know that, I guess.

That may be what’s at work here. Kevin’s piece is mostly a rehashing of the Times article with some complaints about government bureaucrats. He takes it on faith that the reporting is accurate, despite the long history of fabrication by the New York Times. The state abusing innocent citizens is considered the highest crime imaginable by libertarians, so that’s probably what got his attention. Even so, it is a safe topic on which to be outraged, which is what makes it attractive to libertarians in general.

As I pointed out in the comments, the main reason our prisons are so horrible is they are full of criminals. Fill up our prisons with cub scouts and nuns and they will not be so bad. Fill your state legislature with members of the local street gang and see what happens. Our jails are full of very bad people. Most of them will keep committing crimes until they are dead or too feeble.

The sorts of people attracted to daycare work are not the same type attracted to prison work. There’s a reason Mary Poppins was not the chief executioner of the state. Warehousing evil, violent men is dangerous work. It will attract a fair number of sociopaths and sadists. That means prison abuse will always be a part of prisons. As is true in all human endeavors, there are trade-offs. In this case, we put up with some abuse in order to keep the streets safe.

I also pointed out in the comments that the reforms that would make prisons less chaotic and dangerous are simply not permitted. Prisons should be segregated by race and sentence. Putting blacks and whites in the same cage is insane. Putting violent lifers in the same cage as common thieves and drug dealers on short sentences is equally nuts. But, the Cult will never permit such segregation so we are left with human warehouses.

Similarly, the people working in prisons should be segregated by race and sex. Frankly, it may not make any sense to have black prison staff, given that most of the prisoners are black. Too many guards are from the same neighborhoods as the prisoners. Maybe geographic segregation would solve the problem. Again, there’s no way the Cult would permit this sort of reform as they want the mayhem that comes from guards working as go-betweens for the prison gangs.

Having women guard male convicts is probably the craziest thing a society can do. This story from Baltimore is fairly typical. Women and men are different as a matter of biology, evolution, culture and psychology. Men guarding women or women guarding men will have predictably bad results. There should be no women permitted in male prisons and no men at women’s prisons. But, we know that will never be permitted.

There are other reforms that would make out prisons vastly more humane and peaceful. The Cult running our society simply refuses to do them. The reason is the people running the Cult of Modern Liberalism would prefer to fling open the prison doors and send the criminals out to feast on the hated core of society – the white middle-class. Libertarian interest in prison reform is just another way to avoid taking part in the culture war.

Tyler Cowen has a post up arguing that Cuba could be the next Singapore. I used to be a regular at his site, but then I made Alex Tabarrok cry and he asked me not to post there anymore. My pointing out that he has arranged his life in such a way that he avoid all contact with minorities was a bridge too far. I still read the site once a week, looking for material, but that’s it. Libertarian economics are a bit silly for an adult my age.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

PEGIDA (Patriotic Europeans Against Islamisation of the West) has grown rapidly since its inception in October, a peaceful ‘strolling’ movement opposing the exceptional violence seen in street battles between Salafist Muslims and ethnic Kurds seen in many German cities this year and enormous immigration. Now on it’s tenth ‘evening stroll’, it has grown from a couple of hundred people, to 15,000 last week, to more than 17,500 last night.

In addition to the hundreds of banners with slogans such as ‘Against Hatred, Violence, and the Quran’, ‘Against Religious Fanaticism’, and ‘No Sharia in Europe’, the thousands attending brought song sheets which had been distributed online and sang favourite Christmas carols.

Despite the essentially ordinary character of many of the people taking to the streets for the peaceful strolls, and the admission by senior government and police figures that a great many of those joining in are families bringing their children, the organisation has come in for stiff criticism and rejection by the heights of the German elite.

I think it’s time we stop.
Children, what’s that sound?
Everybody look what’s goin’ down.

There’s battle lines bein’ drawn.
Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong.
Young people speakin’ their minds
A-gettin’ so much resistance from behind.

Chancellor Merkel has suggested the leadership of PEGIDA have an ulterior motive, despite their focus on non-violent protest and apolitical principles. She even went as far to warn people thinking of going on the weekly stroll to “watch out that they are not instrumentalised by the organisers”. The SPD, Germany’s Labour-party equivalent have gone as far as calling PEGIDA “Nazis in pinstripes”.

This is despite a report by the German police that there are significantly more known troublemakers in the counter-protest movements, than in PEGIDA itself.

It is not only German politics which is putting its weight behind the counter-PEGIDA movement. Apparently dismayed that 17,500 people had turned out in bad weather to sing Christian carols, the Protestant Bishop of Dresden said PEGIDA were trying “to exploit a Christian symbol and a Christian tradition” for political ends.

Germany’s art elite also showed their disapproval last night. The directors of Dresden’s Bavarian State Opera house, outside which the protests take place turned off the lights on the building, cloaking it in darkness during the stroll. Colossal 50-foot banners were draped in front of the building reading “humanity, respect, and diversity”.

The irony of it all. The people peeping outside their office windows, cursing the people in the streets used to be the people in the streets. Now they are pigs on two legs.