This morning Tyler has a post up about his column in the NYTimes. That column is about this book on fugitives and life on the lam. The hook for Tyler and I suppose his libertarian followers is the drug angle. The libertarian fetish for drugs is comical at times.

You may think of being on the run as a quandary for only a small group of recalcitrant, hardened criminals. But in her study of one Philadelphia neighborhood, Professor Goffman shows that it is a common way of life for many nonviolent Americans. These people often face charges related to possession or sale of small amounts of drugs, or offenses like hiding relatives from the law. Whatever the negative moral implications of such crimes, they don’t merit having one’s life ruined.

I was watching a clip from Red Eye the other day and they had a libertarian on as a guest. On almost every subject he veered into a discussion of the drug war. Whatever the merits of libertarianism, the obsession with drugs undermines their legitimacy. People generally understand that drug addicts and their suppliers are human garbage. Dealing with them as we do may not be optimal, but romanticizing them is absurd.

That’s what you learn living in and around the ghetto. The people who come from outside, whether from the university, newspaper or social welfare bureaucracy, are terminally naive about life in the ghetto. The cops and bounty hunters are jaded for a reason. Their jobs require them to deal with this people in an un-blinkered fashion. The others come in looking for facts and anecdotes to fill out their already written narratives.

In another life, I made money repossessing cars. There are hundreds of cars in every city that are not technically stolen, but are treated as stolen by their owners. They can be rental cars that were never returned or used cars bought on payments that were never made. The owners will pay a bounty to tow truck operators to recover them. I would imagine it is different in each city and different today than it was ages ago.

Back in the stone age before GPS and sat-nav, hiding a car was easier than it seems. The cops would not look for a stolen car. They don’t look for them now. They would rather march around in battle gear looking like fat storm troopers. A rental car that is not returned will never get on the stolen list anyway so that makes relying on the cops totally pointless. The agencies would hire former cops as security men who could get access to parking ticket computers and motor vehicle systems.

They give the repo guys the list of parking ticket addresses, the renters address and anything else they had on the car. The repo guy would start hunting and using just that and experience, to find the car in a night. You jack the car and collect a fee. Guys who did it for a living would find a few cars a day sometimes. I knew a Puerto Rican who made a nice living this way. The cops would even use him to help on their cases as the guy was like a bloodhound. He could also steal anything that was not nailed down.

One of the first things you learn about the people absconding with rental cars or not paying their car payment is they know they are scumbags. They are not victims. They scammed the system for a free car, knowing they would most likely avoid the cops and get free use of a car for a month or two. Usually they put a woman up to fronting the money and signature. The girl would rent the car for the boy friend, who used it to peddle drugs or stolen goods. A lot of these cars ended up in drug cases.

In one case I recall, the car was found with two dead guys in the front seat. Someone in the backseat used a shotgun to relieve them of their brain matter. I assume it was a shotgun from the splatter, but the head explodes like a watermelon from point blank shots from high caliber handguns. It is called hydrostatic shock. The dash and windshield were covered in brains and bits of skull. Eventually they figured out the names of the corpses and both were fugitives.

That’s the thing about fugitives. There are a lot of them by choice. They fail to show up for court or they fail to show up at their parole meetings. The “minor drug offenders” are usually guys who pleaded down to possession and were sent to AA or NA as part of their deal. All they have to do is show up a meeting a week for a few months and turn in signed attendance forms. They blow it off and end up with a warrant. Again, these are not fallen angels.

That’s the other part of the drug obsession by libertarians that I find amusing. They think drug laws make people into criminals. Certainly some people fall into the drug game, but most of your dealers are criminals who like crime. If not for the drug game, they would be robbing houses or running scams. They like crime and drugs are a convenient way to indulge their wants. They get paid to do what they love!

This last part gets at the naïveté:

Economists are often skeptical of drug laws, favoring alternatives like legalization, decriminalization, or a combination of legalization and high taxation, to discourage use. (In an essay titled “Prohibition vs. Legalization: Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Drug Policy?” Mark Thornton, a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute, chronicles economists’ views of the war on drugs.) Drugs could be treated as more of a public health problem than a criminal matter.

It’s an urgent situation, because Professor Goffman’s book shows clearly that the microeconomics of a life on the run are grim indeed.

Life on the lam should be grim. No sane society wants their criminal fugitives to have it easy. That’s the whole point of the criminal justice system. The locals who are forced to tolerate these animals want the cops to scoop them up and take them away. It is easy to romanticize the drug dealer when you’re living in cloistered, gated communities. Ask anyone in and around the ghetto who is not in the game and they will tell you a different set of stories.

Economist are often skeptical of drug laws because they have never known a drug dealer. Anyone who thinks the corner boys of West Baltimore are going to head off to college or get jobs at the local university once drugs are legal is not qualified to discuss the issue. The Gangster Disciples and Latin Kings are not turning into charities once heroine is legal. These people will find new crimes to commit. It is what they do. Legalizing drugs just moves the problem, the real problem, down the street.

This report from the LATimes is being waved around by the usual suspects. I’m puzzled by their jubilation, but it may simply be that they hate Goldstein Sterling so much they delight in anything that harms him. Getting $2 Billion for an asset you bought for $12.5 Million does not sound like harm to me. If he had plopped that money into the stock market, he’s have about $100 million right now. I’m sure Thomas Piketty is not happy about this development.

This is not about money. This is about black identity politics. The NBA is the black America pastime. Whites watch basketball, but nothing like blacks. All the players are black, most of the coaches are black, the reporters are black and the front offices and agents are increasingly black. Hip-hop stars are getting into the agent business for a reason. The AAU runners and street agents are all black. Basketball in America is pretty much all black with a small number of Jews. I think all but a few teams are owned by Jews.

The banishment of Sterling is about black pride more than anything else. The fact that blacks can force a billionaire white guy out of the league puts an exclamation point on what they have been saying for years. It’s their league and they set the rules. I suspect the gloating over the amount is that it confirms the league is a highly valuable property, like the white sports. The Dodgers just sold for $2 Billion and now we have a second tier NBA franchise fetching the same money.

Of course, idiocy is always a good starting point and this may be the case here. Basketball teams are not as valuable as football and baseball teams. There are a number of reasons for it, but the big reason is the league is so poorly run. Maybe that’s fixable. On the other hand, a sport narrowly focused on 13% of the population has a clear ceiling. On the other other hand, business continue to chase the homosexual trade, despite that being 2% of the market. Anyone who says people are rational is not paying attention.

There’s another angle and that’s bullshit. Unless and until the details of the sale are revealed, we cannot say for sure the team was sold for $2 Billion. The usual suspects are primed to believe certain things and they have suspended disbelief.

For as long as I’ve been alive, the politics of crime and punishment have been mostly a fight between the left releasing criminals on the middle-class and conservatives trying to stop it. In the 1960′s and 1970′s liberals flung open the cage doors and crime went through the roof. In the 1980′s we started rounding up the crooks and putting them back in their cages. It seemed like the Left learned their lesson in the 1990′s and gave up on the idea of turning murderers loose on the public. That’s not true, of course.

The New York Times is out with an editorial demanding we fling open the cage doors again.

For more than a decade, researchers across multiple disciplines have been issuing reports on the widespread societal and economic damage caused by America’s now-40-year experiment in locking up vast numbers of its citizens. If there is any remaining disagreement about the destructiveness of this experiment, it mirrors the so-called debate over climate change.

In both cases, overwhelming evidence shows a crisis that threatens society as a whole. In both cases, those who study the problem have called for immediate correction.

You would not be faulted for thinking the person who wrote that is a mental patient in an asylum somewhere. If you were not from earth and you read that, you would assume the American government randomly captures and imprisons people for no reason other than sadistic amusement.

Several recent reports provide some of the most comprehensive and compelling proof yet that the United States “has gone past the point where the numbers of people in prison can be justified by social benefits,” and that mass incarceration itself is “a source of injustice.”

This is a very strange bit of rhetoric. Is there some tipping point where it no longer makes sense to incarcerate a murderer or rapist? Has anyone ever argued that the point of prison is to achieve a net benefit to society? That sounds callously materialistic.

That is the central conclusion of a two-year, 444-page study prepared by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences at the request of the Justice Department and others. The report highlights many well-known statistics: Since the early 1970s, the nation’s prison population has quadrupled to 2.2 million, making it the world’s biggest. That is five to 10 times the incarceration rate in other democracies.

Maybe we have a lower tolerance for crime than other democracies. Maybe we’re better at catching criminals. Maybe we have more criminals. After all, 13% of our population has crime rates we see in sub-Saharan Africa. Another 15% has crime rates on par with Latin American countries. The rest have crime rates similar to Europe and Asia.

On closer inspection the numbers only get worse. More than half of state prisoners are serving time for nonviolent crimes, and one of every nine, or about 159,000 people, are serving life sentences — nearly a third of them without the possibility of parole.

This is a real concern. There are few reasons to send non-violent criminals away for decades or life. Most of this is drugs and those life sentences are for career drug dealers and gangsters so the numbers are misleading. Still, that’s a legitimate line of inquiry. Instead of falling back on 1960′s liberal twaddle, the Times should have dug into that issue and maybe moved the conversation forward.

The other side of debate is the standard stuff.

We have a lot of people locked up because circumstances demanded it. Quite simply, crime ranked among America’s most pressing political issues between roughly the mid 1950s and mid 1990s. As crime declined—coincident with building more prisons—the problem disappeared from the public imagination.

Demographics had something to do with it too. We should not kid ourselves about this reality. We had a larger cohort of young people at the peak of the crime wave.

Second, contrary to the implications flowing from the NYT, others on the left, and a few on the libertarian right, there are very, very few “innocents” being locked up. Most non-violent offenders have done very bad things.

I often wonder if the people who write these studies know these sorts of facts and choose to conceal them or they are just dumb. I had a family member in the drug game back in the 70′s and 80′s. When he got jammed up, he would take a deal on a minor charge. He once beat a man unconscious over a debt. He pleaded to simple possession as the victim refused to testify.

Third, although a lot of people (me included) would favor a lot more efforts to help both prisoners within jailhouse walls and after they get out, decades of social science have produced few certain ways of doing this. Many programs that sound good – vocational training, in-prison counseling, literacy classes, even most drug treatment – actually show mixed or negative results.

This is obviously true, but it never leads these guys to think past this point. We generally think that humans respond to incentives up to a point and within the confines of biology and culture. What that means is we strive to be good at what our biology and culture value. The two often overlap. We construct rules, both written and unwritten, to guide behavior in directions we collectively think is to our benefit. That’s how human societies work.

Some members of every human group respond in aberrant ways to the menu of incentives. Freeloaders, for example, have been a problem for human settlements since human settlement. Religion is thought to have evolved in response to this fact. Unpredictably violent people have been a feature of human existence since before modern man. Fratricide is not in the Bible for nothin’.

All of the evidence is pointing toward a biological source of crime. Certainly, crimes of opportunity like drugs are a separate class, but violent crime is most likely biological. Habitual theft of various types is most likely biological as well. Recidivism rates amongst career thieves and child molesters are so high that it is impossible not to conclude biology is the source. Some people are just born bad.

The question is what do we do with this unfixable and defective batch of humans? Locking them up is a good start, but letting them out is madness. Throwing the biologically violent in with petty thieves is cruel and senseless. Whatever chance for redemption the thief had going into jail is gone once he bunks up with a rapist or murderer. It seems to me that a sane and decent society looks for alternatives to warehousing the non-salvageable human defects.

I’m fond of pointing out that all of the things the Left accused Nixon of in the 1970′s have been done by Obama with enthusiasm. The Articles of Impeachment makes for an interesting read forty years later. Some are narrowly specific, but the misuse of the IRS, CIA and Justice Department sound like the daily schedule at the White House.

Now, I enjoy mentioning this to Lefty because it causes him to have a seizure. To be fair, the shenanigans that went on during the Bush years were not much better. The Clinton years were an odious triumph of the base and vulgar. We have been on a twenty year slide into the gutter.

A good example of the gross corruption of government is right here in this LA Times story.

The Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money.

The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall’s congressional elections.

Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan a “bailout” for insurance companies providing coverage under the healthcare law.

They continue to argue that most insurers shouldn’t need to substantially increase premiums because safeguards in the healthcare law will protect them over the next several years.

Let’s first start with the fact Congress gave the Executive carte blanche to hand out cash to whoever they like at the moment. This is pretty much the opposite of republican self-government. This is closer to the temporary dictatorships the Ancients were fond of in times of trouble.

Then we see the casual dishonesty of the administration. They’ve obviously been lying about what they are doing, but no one seems to care. Another day, another lie. Of course, they are not even bothering to hide the fact they are hoping to game the insurance rates to avoid answering for it at the polls.

But the change in regulations essentially provides insurers with another backup: If they keep rate increases modest over the next couple of years but lose money, the administration will tap federal funds as needed to cover shortfalls.

Although little noticed so far, the plan was already beginning to fuel a new round of attacks Tuesday from the healthcare law’s critics.

“If conservatives want to stop the illegal Obamacare insurance bailout before it starts they must start planning now,” wrote Conn Carroll, an editor of the right-leaning news site Townhall.com.

Good luck with that.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee began circulating a memo on the issue and urging colleagues to fight what they are calling “another end-run around Congress.”

Obama administration officials said the new regulations would not put taxpayers at risk. “We are confident this three-year program will not create a shortfall,” Health and Human Services spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt said in a statement. “However, we want to be clear that in the highly unlikely event of a shortfall, HHS will use appropriations as available to fill it.”

Well, how would we know? If they will lie about all the other stuff, why would anyone expect them to be honest about this? It’s not like the toadies and flunkies in the liberal media will ever check up on it.

The stakes are high for President Obama and the healthcare law.

Although more than 8 million people signed up for health coverage under the law, exceeding expectations, insurance companies in several states have been eyeing significant rate increases for next year amid concerns that their new customers are older and sicker than anticipated.

Insurers around the country have started to file proposed 2015 premiums, just as the midterm campaigns are heating up. Obamacare, as the law is often called, remains a top campaign issue, and big premium increases in states with tightly contested races could prove politically disastrous for Democrats.

If rates go up dramatically, consumers may also turn away from insurance marketplaces in some states, leading to their collapse.

The total disregard for truth by the ruling class is like a tidal wave of sewage. The foulness of it makes it hard to focus on anyone bit. We have no idea how many people signed up through these websites. We have no idea how many actually bought insurance. We have no idea how many had insurance, but were canceled due to this silly law. We don’t know how many went on Medicaid.

No one knows because the government refuses to publish the numbers for examination by the citizens. The lefty media, however, takes whatever the rulers say on faith. I guess all that talking truth to power stuff was just more bullshit.

This is the central feature of the Custodial State. The government is never going to be very good at tending to the needs of the citizens. The abuses coming out of the Veterans Administration are just the beginning. The response will be habitual lying by the ruling elites to the point where no one knows what is truth and what is fiction. This, of course, trickles down to the rest of us.

Ours is now a dishonesty society. Nothing is on the level. Everything is a deal. No deal is too small or too outlandish. And, it is only going to get worse.

I saw this post on National Review and could not help but laugh. Through the Bush years, National Review was just a clearing house for the GOP. Whatever crackpot idea the Bushies cooked up, NR would brand it “conservative approved” and peddle it to the masses. In fairness, the caterwauling by the Left made it easy to fall into this trap. Every cult member of my acquaintance was constantly chanting “Bush Lied” at me, making it impossible to think straight.

By 2006 most sensible people threw in the towel on Bush and the GOP. His rating fell into the high 20′s exclusively due to the Right walking away from his administration. It turned out that the paleo-cons were right and Bush was just Bill Clinton with morals and balls. Professional conservatives still struggle with their full-throated support of Bush and the GOP. Even today they struggle to separate themselves from the Republican Party. I guess this post over at NRO should be viewed as a positive development.

Jack Kemp famously called for the GOP to “take off its green eyeshades” in the late 1970s. By this he meant that the GOP needed to stop focusing primarily on balancing budgets and start focusing on how to grow the economy and improve the lives of average Americans. After its brief, unsuccessful detour into modern greeneyeshadism by nominating venture capitalist and business consultant extraordinaire Mitt Romney, most nationally serious Republicans are back to talking less about numbers and more about middle-class people. But if this map is any indication, even this effort still views America through a lens of green eyeshades.

This map shows household income for every county, town, and neighborhood in America. Wealthy and upper-middle-class areas are colored green, while the rest of America is colored in orange. As you can see, most of America is some shade of brown, while most of the eastern seaboard is colored in some shade of green.

This small detail on a map makes a world of difference to conservative and GOP chances to run the country. Virtually every major national consultant, analyst, staffer, and journalist lives in the green areas in and around Washington D.C., America’s Emerald City. This is a land where families making $100,000 a year struggle to buy a decent house, where everyone has a college degree, and the major health-care struggle is finding a doctor who takes your insurance.

This problem is compounded by the rise of super-donor-driven super PACs. Virtually all of the large donors who give to super PACs and GOP campaigns live in local versions of the Emerald City. They see highly educated people who get ahead by working hard, lots of prosperity and wealth, and think this is what America looks like. The major political problem they see is that some of their neighbors and friends vote Democratic, so they naturally think a national majority can be crafted by persuading those people to vote more on their self-interest and less on social and other issues. That view makes sense within the walls of the Emerald City, but outside of that realm America is a horse of a different color.

Pat Buchanan said a long time ago that the problem with the GOP is this. The sensible people elected a sensible conservative for the House or Senate. He starts out fine, but he goes native once he has lived in Washington for a few years. Way back in the olden thymes I saw it first hand. I’d see supposedly far right wing guys partying with their left-wing counterparts. It was the old Road Runner cartoons with Sam the Sheepdog. On the clock, when the cameras were running, they played their parts. Off the clock they were laughing at the rubes back home in Dogpatch.

Contrast that with the vast bulk of the country, especially in the swing states needed to retake the presidency. Ohio has very few green counties; Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa have virtually none. In those states, making $100,000 is rare and enables you to live a very comfortable life. Most people make between $25,000 and $75,000 a year, with many more on the low end of that range than the high. In most of these counties, more people get by on less than $25,000 a year than earn more than $75,000. In these places, “decent home” means something much more humble, very few people have college degrees, and the major health-care struggle is getting or keeping private health insurance at all.

People with high-school degrees making $40,000 a year face problems very different from those of college-educated folks making $80,000. Their economic future is much more unstable, their job opportunities more limited, and their family finances more precarious. There are many more families in these circumstances among the growing Hispanic populations of the Southwest or the vast plains of the Midwest than one would guess living in the Emerald Cities. Republicans are right to focus on the needs of the middle class, but they must better understand who the middle class is if they are to succeed.

That sounds great, but I wonder if the gap between the typical American and the ruling class is too broad to cross.  Our rulers live lives that are so estranged from what the typical American experiences, they may as well be foreigners. America, the country with people and a culture and shared history, has been colonized by pod-people. They make noises that sound familiar and they sort of look like us, but they are alien to us in all the ways that matter. This story in the Financial Times touches on it.

The UK Independence party does not represent the start of a revolt but the culmination of it. A spirit of anti-politics began permeating the country around the turn of the millennium when Tony Blair, the last politician the British allowed themselves to love, broke their hearts by turning out to be a prime minister and not a miracle worker. The disillusion intensified after the Iraq war, a work of naive over-ambition forever remembered as an act of heinous deceit. Then came the crash, the expenses scandal and much more immigration than voters were told to expect.

Cynicism verging on nihilism is the closest thing modern Britain has to a national ideology. It has become common sense to assume the worst of anyone in public authority. Nigel Farage, Ukip’s leader, profits from this foul zeitgeist, not because he is a manipulative genius but because he is the nearest populist to hand. If it were not him, it would be some other jobbing demagogue with the dumb luck to be here now.

It is not obvious how to take him on. But it is increasingly obvious how not to. Hounded by the mood of anti-politics, Britain’s political class has become self-loathing and scared of its own shadow. Mainstream politicians ape the language and manner of populists. They vie to disown a “metropolitan elite” that they themselves constitute. They hope that nodding along as voters express their scorn for them will somehow spare them from it.

Politicians used to wound each other with accusations of incompetence, immorality or intellectual wrongness – all slurs grounded in substance. Now they try to define each other as “out of touch”. When David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, attacks Labour for indulging dependency culture or withholding a referendum on EU membership, he points to the party’s estrangement from public opinion. When Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, attacks the Tories for overseeing a fall in living standards, his point is that millionaires cannot care about the plight of the ordinary.

The measure of a politician’s worth is how much he is like “us” and not like “them”. Mr Farage’s real achievement is not electoral – his party has no MPs and runs no councils – but cultural. He has spooked the mainstream into emulating the values and priorities of its own tormentors.

As a ploy to neutralise Mr Farage, this self-abasement gets nowhere because it concedes his basic point – that Britain is run by a conspiracy of malign people – and radiates the most lethal weakness in politics: inauthenticity. Mr Cameron is the highest-born prime minister since Alec Douglas-Home half a century ago. Mr Miliband is a professor’s son whose main detour from north London’s cognoscenti was a year teaching at Harvard. They stand for major parties. When they or their similarly rarefied lieutenants play at being the man in the street, it looks craven and affected.

This is certainly true. When John Kerry was running for president, he tried to pass himself off us a regular guy. They kitted him out in an Elmer Fudd costume and sent him into a gun shop to buy a hunting license. It may very well have cost him the election. Normal men could not stop laughing at this effete over-class pansy trying to act butch. They would have been better off putting him in a sun-dress and having him sing duets with RuPaul.

The political classes believe they are unpopular because of something they have done. Certainly, expense-fiddling compounded their scuzzy reputation. And their sheer narrowness is alienating, too. Parliament has become a job guarantee for apparatchiks and activists who relax by watching television dramas set in other political capitals. In Britain politics is not just showbiz for ugly people but for weirdly obsessive people too.

The rise of populism, however, is not primarily the fault of any person – even Mr Blair – or any event. It is powered by structural trends that have been in train for decades. Prime among these is the fragmentation of class loyalty, which has cut the vote share commanded by the two main parties from 97 per cent in the 1951 election to 65 per cent in 2010. More votes are up for grabs, giving rebel parties a look-in.

People do not like being ruled by foreigners. That’s what it feels like in many Western countries today. In Britain, the major parties are more concerned about the Continentals and their European project than the needs and wants of the native Brits. In the US, our politicians and their toadies make noises that sound like American English, but it is all gibberish. The technical term for it is echolalic babbling. The press serves as the interpreter. We are ruled by pod people.

One of the weird aspects of the Cult of Modern Liberalism is the wearing of piety bracelets. I’m speaking figuratively. I don’t think they give out physical bracelets, but I would not entirely rule it out. Cults are big on uniforms. No, I’m speaking figuratively. Members of the Cult have a habit of displaying their piety in the same way women display charms on a bracelet. They make a big deal of letting everyone know they have a gay friend or a black friend. They don’t think of these people as people, of course. They are props, charms to hang on their bracelet that they rattle in public to signal to everyone they are a pious person.

Way back in the Bush years, my liberal friends and acquaintances all claimed to know a moderate Muslim. My friend Jim regularly claimed to work with an army of them, who surprisingly enough all agreed with him and the Cult about George Bush. My friend Jim even claimed to have read the Koran and never found anything in their about “killing infidels and Jews.”

He never read the Koran and most likely had no Muslim acquaintances. It was just a public act of piety. He and his fellow cultists needed that charm on their bracelet. My communist office manager made the same claims, word for word. These two have never met, which means a shared source. Since these people read the same narrow set of website and watch the same news programs, it is no surprise they make the same arguments, sing the same songs and read the same lines from the catechism.

In the homosexual marriage debate, all of my liberal friends suddenly sprouted homosexual friends. The fact that I have never met these new friends or know anyone who has met them never came up. I was too polite. Unsurprisingly, there was no talk about the Muslim friends who just a few years ago were allegedly confirming all of the claims of the Cult. The prominent charms on the piety bracelet were all gay all day.

Now I’m seeing Ukrainians turn up in conversation. My liberal friend Jim now claims to work with a collection of Ukrainians and Russians, all of whom, according to Jim, think Obama is the best and Putin the worst. My communist office manager is making the same claims. Her church is now suddenly the home for a bunch of Ukrainian exiles. Again, they think Obama is the best and Putin the worst. In both cases, they keep bringing up the fact they have Ukrainian friends as if that is definitive.

It appears the Cult has not elevated Ukrainians to the level of homosexuals so every cult member has a Ukrainian charm on their piety bracelet. Ukrainian is the new gay.

I keep bumping into stories prediction the end of the university system. This one made the rounds yesterday.

At a Dowling College campus on Long Island’s south shore, a fleet of unused shuttle buses sits in an otherwise empty parking lot. A dormitory is shuttered, as are a cafeteria, bookstore and some classrooms in the main academic building.

“There’s a lot of fear here,” said Steven Fournier, a senior who lived in the now-closed dorm for his first three years. “It’s not the same college I arrived at.”

Dowling, which got a failing grade for its financial resources from accreditors last month, epitomizes the growing plight of many small private colleges that depend almost entirely on tuition for revenue. It’s been five years since the recession ended and yet their finances are worsening. Soaring student debt, competition from online programs and poor job prospects for graduates are shrinking their applicant pools.

“What we’re concerned about is the death spiral — this continuing downward momentum for some institutions,” said Susan Fitzgerald, an analyst at Moody’s Investors Service in New York. “We will see more closures than in the past.”

I admit to having never heard of Dowling College. An applicant would probably be better off not mentioning it to me if they were applying for a job. If the resume did not list a college, I’d probably never notice. Seeing an unfamiliar one I’d look it up. Looking at the college website does not fill me with confidence. “Literacy Education Department” sounds bad for some reason. I’m sure it is fine college, but who knows what that even means anymore?

These people claim to know, but their methodology is dubious. The graduates of Harvard are most likely smart and motivated. Comparing their earnings to those of other smart and motivated people who lack a diploma would be useful, but that’s impossible to construct. The fact that you are more likely to amass a net worth of a million dollars without a diploma than with a diploma is telling. I don’t have a link for it, but it is a decennial chestnut. Every decade someone does the math and announces that a college degree nets a higher salary, but not necessarily a higher net worth.

The reason for this, and the flaw in the college model, is simple. Wealth is not the same as income. The small plumber with one truck and an assistant may not have a high salary. He’s constantly buying tools and paying off that truck. Once he gets the truck paid off, he buys another truck and hires another plumber. His salary is not going up, but the value of his business is going up. By the time he retires, he had four or five trucks, a paid off house, some real estate where he runs his business and so on. His brother the manager has none of that, despite making considerably more in salary.

Strangely, college is all about preparing a young person for life as an employee. The son of the plumber above may go to state college to make dad proud or he may just go into the business. The manager’s son is taking out debt to finance college so he can work for someone just like his father did. if you want of nation of renters, debtors and employees, our university system is great, until it collapses. If you want a nation of plumbers building up their asset base, then you need something different.

From that Dowling College article:

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen has predicted that as many as half of the more than 4,000 universities and colleges in the U.S. may fail in the next 15 years. The growing acceptance of online learning means higher education is ripe for technological upheaval, he has said.

He is most certainly wrong. I say that because 99% of predictions are wrong. But, if he is right it will not change much of anything. Half of college students at state universities have no business in college. The world has all the communication majors it needs. Sending kids to major in criminal justice or physical education is a waste of everyone’s time. The kids sit in class learning nothing useful, while the instructors get to extend childhood indefinitely. The typical college campus is  a playground of Eloi.

Of course, what will all the Panda Men do once they are thrown off campus and into the wild?

In some respects, it is amazing how things evolved in the West after World War II. In my grandfather’s day, no one could imagine a world in which so few people worked. No one could imagine taking out tens of thousands in debt in order to attend college. Someone majoring in gym would have seemed hilariously implausible to him. Arithmetic says this arrangement has a short shelf life, but our rulers have managed to keep the plates spinning for three decades now. My generation was probably the first to take on big debt to buy a diploma. Back then the talk was it was a sign of the end of affordable college.

The comments in this post at ParaPundit suggest the probably future. Today, companies will sequence your DNA for a small fee. Taking an IQ test is a simple thing. I have Mensa card which indicates I have taken at least on IQ test and scored above a certain level. It will not be long before some company pops up offering a packaging of services to people so they can bypass the system in some way. A DNA test to show you have no genetic markers for expensive diseases could lower your insurance premium. An IQ test score from a credible company can help the truly gifted bypass college entirely. It may even be possible one day to use DNA to indicate raw IQ, language skills, math skills and so forth.

I may live to see the day when college is in the same dustbin as indentured servitude.

A problem that vexes economists and (soon) politicians is what will be done with all of the extra humans. It appears that we are running out of ways to keep people busy. In America, the labor participation rate remains stuck at all-time lows. Technology promises to eliminate the need for many jobs. Even growth industries like health care are ripe for technological upheaval. Much of what a doctor or nurse practitioner does can be automated. Getting a physical at a local kiosk is not far off. Accounting and engineering can and will be done by robots at some point. That’s the claim of this book, anyway. I’ll just note that predictions about the future tend to be hilariously wrong.

I will say, however, that  life would be truly vibrant if our more vibrant citizens dressed like this:

The Luddite Fallacy is nothing new. The counter to that is we have arrived at a time of genuine plenty. In the West, no one is going without food, unless they do so willingly. Medicine is universally available, even if the delivery mechanism is unnecessarily expensive. Violence is slowly ticking down and plague appears to be unlikely. In other words, the big things that have threatened humanity have been conquered. So much so that most of the human population can avoid work entirely. With further technological improvement, a very small number of people will be able to provide for the rest of humanity. The great challenge facing humanity over the next century will be how to organize ourselves in  world without work or want.

That’s the argument anyway. I’m not entirely sure I buy that, but I do think we are headed to strange new turf. This story is what should get everyone’s attention.

A genetic disease has been cured in living, adult animals for the first time using a revolutionary genome-editing technique that can make the smallest changes to the vast database of the DNA molecule with pinpoint accuracy.

Scientists have used the genome-editing technology to cure adult laboratory mice of an inherited liver disease by correcting a single “letter” of the genetic alphabet which had been mutated in a vital gene involved in liver metabolism.

A similar mutation in the same gene causes the equivalent inherited liver disease in humans – and the successful repair of the genetic defect in laboratory mice raises hopes that the first clinical trials on patients could begin within a few years, scientists said.

Given the state of medicine, the big challenge to extending human life is almost entirely genetic. The ability to fix these defects in our genome means, barring accident or environmental issues, humans could live to the maximum of their natural life. Better understanding of aging, which is moving along quickly, means living an extended youth. Whether or not human lifespans can be extended much beyond 100 years is debatable. Still, living  to 100 in peak physical condition is a good deal, given the alternatives.

That sounds great, but here’s something else we know from genetics. Roughly 50,000 years ago modern man emerged on the scene. Humans were physically and behaviorally human. Up until last week, scarcity was the rule for humanity. In fact, evolution depends on it. Competition for food and mates is what drives the whole process. It is not just what makes us human, it was necessary for there to ever have been humans. Just as important, it is what we are designed for as a species. All of our physical and behavior wiring is geared for a world of competition for food and mates.

Just as economists puzzle over what to do with all the extra people, we should also puzzle over what happens when all of those extra people are suddenly in a world for which they are poorly designed. I think the legion of wide bodies at your local Walmart is one obvious result of plenty. Food is cheap and plentiful. By that I mean the amount of calories available to even the lowest status human in America is astronomical compared to just a few generations ago. I recall hearing stories from my grandfather, who was born in 1910, about living on one small meal a day during The Depression.

Another possible result is the falling birth rate. Liberals like to claim this is due to low infant mortality rates and high wealth. This is ridiculous, but that’s to be expected. Others, like David Goldman, point to cultural decay. Having children is about celebrating the present and past. It is a gift to the future from those thriving today. That comes from culture. The old saying about proud societies is they are ones where old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit. A strong and confident people wish to be remembered and the way to do that is through children. Otherwise, why bother?

An alternative may simply be confusion. For 49,900 years, humans had to have children as soon as they could. Every signal from their environment was triggering that urge. Now all those signals are scrambled. It is no wonder the receiving end would misinterpret these new signals. Just as obesity results in plentiful food, plummeting fertility rates may result from the lack of status and competition for mates. It’s not just the lack of babies; it is the lack of sex. Like people who work in a candy factory not liking candy, humans in a world of cost and objective free sex on demand may simply turn away from the most basic of urges.

This may sound ridiculous, but studies of the Khoisan people in Africa show us that humans quickly adapt to their environment. The hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari are the world’s “oldest people” according to geneticists. That means they are closest to the “original people” who are the foundation stock for humanity. Because they walk everywhere, women have one child at a time. If they have twins, the mother smothers one newborn. Carrying two children is too difficult so they can never have more than one small child at a time.

If you’re inclined to think a world without work or want is Eden, again consider the Khoisan. Until outside forces them forced them onto farms, they were able to gather and hunt for enough food in about 20 hours per week. Attending other needs like food preparation, tool making and so forth took up another 20 or so hours. That means the Khoisan were working far less per week than most other peoples on the planet. They also had a murder rate of Detroit, including fratricide, and they were in constant conflict with other groups.

I have no idea where it is all heading. Predicting the future is a lousy business, but we are looking a lot like Panda Bears. While we have no natural enemies and plenty of food in our environment, we have stopped having sex and children. Archaeologists in the far away future will dig through the remains of our time and call us Panda Man, the human species that simply had no reason to carry on.Having arrived at the end goal of evolution, we looked around and decided it was not worth the effort.

Our future is going to be very strange.

Congressman Schock, a Republican from Illinois thinks this country need fewer Americans and more Mexicans. Maybe he should take to wearing a  Mexican flag on his lapel. After all, he care a whole lot more about Mexican peasant than he does American citizens.

Steve Sailer has a fantastic breakdown of this article in the Atlantic. The article is tedious, but Steve’s deconstruction is well worth the time it takes to read it. I’ve been meaning to post something about the piece, but I have not been able to plow through it. By nature and habit I am a deliberate reader. Wading through what will surely be emotive slop is hard for me.

It is why I rarely read anything written by women. Women want to share experiences and talk about them. Men want to see facts and state opinions about them. That does not mean all male writers are Spock-like in the prose. it’s that many lack the emotional baggage train that I find uninteresting.

Steve’s comment on this bit from the article

… In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools ….

is what is what I want to discuss. Steve responds, “In other words, the North was traditionally segregated spatially, while the South was segregated socially.”

Let’s back up here a second. The author, a black woman by the way, is writing for a northern publication about “resegregation” in the South, when she fully admits the north is vastly more segregated than the South. If I did not know better, I’d assume this is a very clever prank by someone trying to illustrate the blinkered idiocy of northern white liberals.

According to the author’s resume, she lives in Brooklyn, a place that is actively driving out black people so upper middle-class whites can live in trendy neighborhoods. She grew up in Iowa, went to Notre Dame and then went to UNC for a masters. Her choice of majors tells me she grew up middle-class or better. Her knowledge of the South and experience with the underclass can probably be written on a napkin.

I don’t want to get who/whom here. Outsiders often make the best observers as they lack the emotional blinkers of insiders. Her observations could very well be better than those of someone of the South and deeply familiar with the underclass. As Steve illustrates, what we’re getting here is the same old liberal platitudes about race dressed up with some statistics and stories.In other words, the story was written before she started gathering personal accounts, anecdotes and statistics.

The point is not to inform, but to confirm. Nikole Hannah-Jones is playing the same side of the street as Ta-Nehisi Coates. This is a performance piece intended to flatter the all white northern liberal readership of The Atlantic. I bet town meetings in Iceland have more diversity than the readership of the Atlantic. It is not just super-white, it is culturally monolithic. Ms. Jones seems to have figured this out and parlayed that into a nice payday.