Without having read this article, I assumed it was the first step in the Left’s jettisoning of blacks from the coalition. The Left has been uncomfortable with their alliance with black America for years, probably going back to the Civil Rights Movement. Political expediency has kept blacks in the boat, but that may be changing. Hispanics look like a far more promising partner. I figured this post would be about what I think will be the next big deal in American politics and culture. A little hint of it can be found in the exchange I had with Steve Sailer in this post. But, that’s not where this is heading after all. What got my attention right out of the shoot is this:

Five years ago, while fervently supporting the candidacy of the man who would become America’s first black president, I came to the realization that I didn’t actually know any black people. Most of the people I did know (i.e., other white people) didn’t know many black people either. One, maybe two, was the norm. I asked one white guy I knew if he had any black friends, and he replied, “You mean ones that aren’t on television?”

My first thought was, “I bet the kid writing this is from the northeast.” I thought he was a kid because it contains that juvenile amazement at the realization there are a lot of things new to you that are not all that new. Young, smug climbers of the meritocratic age suffer from this more than anyone. They have been told since the cradle that they are the brightest little stars in the world. When they suddenly find out they have been walking around with incorrect ideas in their head they naturally assume they have discovered something new to the world.  The northeast assumption is the fact that whites in the northeast (there are no black people named Tanner) put a lot of distance between themselves and black people. They love MLK, but only at a great distance.

I went looking for his bio and found this:

Tanner Colby was born in Houston, Texas, in 1975. He grew up in Louisiana and Alabama and graduated from Tulane University in 1997. After graduating from college, he served as head writer for the National Lampoon Radio Hour for two years, then co-wrote a biography of “Animal House” and “Saturday Night Live” star, John Belushi. Following “Belushi,” he co-wrote the New York Times bestselling “The Chris Farley Show,” a similar oral history of the star of “Tommy Boy.”

– IMDb Mini Biography By: Tanner Colby

I may be wrong, but I’m thinking you are an extremely self-absorbed person if you are providing websites with your biography. Regardless, this guy grew up in the deep south and has had no black friends. That tells me he is a son of privilege. He hit school long after integration and surely spent a lot of his life around black people. At the ripe old age of 39 he suddenly realizes he knows no black people, his friends have no black friends and he looks at black people like the rest of us see furniture. Maybe Tanner is just a sociopath, but I’m thinking this guy has spent the bulk of his life gazing at his image in the mirror.

Anyway, low expectations are not a bad thing. I think this is a good start:

The pernicious effects of Republican attitude on race are plain to see. But one of the more subtle consequences of the right’s willful incompetence is that there is rarely any thoughtful critique of the left when it comes to race. Affirmative action is unfair to white people and the Democratic Party is a plantation—that’s about as incisive as the rhetoric usually gets. Even when Republicans have a legitimate point to make about the shortcomings of some government program, it’s almost as if they can’t help blowing their own argument. They’ll start off talking sensibly enough about educational outcome disparities and within seconds they’re rambling incoherently about how black men don’t take care of their babies. It’s really astonishing to watch.

But the fact is that a lot of liberals hold on to some really bad ideas about race too. Some of the arguments they keep trotting out amount to little more than unexamined platitudes, riddled with holes. Fifty years after the March on Washington, America’s high school cafeterias are as racially divided as ever, income inequality is growing, and mass incarceration has hobbled an entire generation of young black men. Do we really think this is entirely due to Republican obstruction? Or is it also possible that the party charged with taking black Americans to the Promised Land has been running around in circles?

Population genetics is all the rage these days. Not the science as much as the abuse of the science. You have that nitwit in England claiming interest in this stuff is tantamount to embracing Hitler. But, you also have guys like this who just claim science proves people they don’t like are inferior. But, you also have semi-respectable liberals getting a little frisky with the whole nurture/nature thing. I say semi-respectable because they will surely be expelled from the cult. Jews and Asians are on shaky grounds with the CML as it is. But, there are some entertaining bits of reaction that are worth noticing. Ashok Rao does some interesting things on economics, but he goes into a complete panic over Chua’s latest.

No tiger mom would have let her daughter publish this piece for a fifth grade project, let alone in the New York Times. Amy Chua, in a little under 3000 words, explains her theory of power and prosperity in modern America. Absent from this essay, however, is a single reference to any scientific study. Not only does the article exclude any hyperlinks – appalling for any serious journalism in the 21st Century – it refers to several anonymous “studies” without providing any information about the authors, making it well-nigh impossible for a reader to track it down.

Yes, the lack of hyperlkinks is what makes Shakespeare unreadable today. It is a strangely modern thing to fill up an essay with links to supporting documentation. Instead of persuading with well reasoned arguments, the writer is now expected to build a legal case, using prior arguments as precedent. If the area is related to science in any way, then you have to link to studies that you claim support your argument. It really is a tedious way of doing things and complete bullshit. The form is not intended to improve the work, it is intended to blunt it. It socializes reason in a way that is unreasonable. Amy Chua’s arguments are hardly original, but they stand on their own.

Anyway, I’m not a Chua fan, but I am enjoying the reaction to her from different corners. She’s probably right about why certain ethnic minorities have prospered while others have sunk to the bottom. Those traits, however, don’t spring from nothingness. I suspect she knows that, but she also likes showing up in the NYTimes and the swank book parties in Manhattan. That means she can describe what the elephant in the room would like if there was a room and an elephant, which there’s not and only racists would think so. Who knows, maybe she can play the victim card if some critic gets carried away or is from the wrong sub-group, not that anyone sees race, if race existed, which it doesn’t.

I’m reading an 80 year old copy of J.B.S. Haldane’s The Inequality of Man. He got some run when Richard Dawkins resuscitated his ideas in the 1970′s. HBD’ers will reference him from time to time, but otherwise he has been forgotten. My copy is a worn old paperback that is a few years from falling to pieces. I don’t know where I got it, but I figured I should read it before it falls to dust. As I’m reading bits of the page’s edge falls away, creating a natural bookmark. Even though it is 80 years old and written by an upper class Brit, the book reads easier than most modern stuff. The old British academics really knew how to use the language to reach a broad audience. Or, I’m just temperamentally suited for that sort of writing. You never know about these things.

There’s a great value, I think, to reading old books in science and social commentary. One of the things that jumps off the page right from the start is just how fresh much of his discussion of population differences seems today. I recently re-read The Money Game by Adam Smith. You would think a book about Wall Street written in the 190′s would seem ridiculous today. Instead, it was as fresh as anything written today. His treatment of computers and markets (keep in mind that computers were rarities in the 1960′s) was strikingly prescient. The lesson you take away is the money game, the world of finance, has not changed much at all in fifty years. The point of the book, is it had not changed much in the previous fifty years. Reading stories about scams run by big banks on the 1920′s that are just like those run today is a bit jarring in a good way.

That’s one reason why I think it is wise to read old books from time to time. It is a good way to remind yourself that the world has not changed very much, at least the big parts of it. By old books, I don’t just mean classics. A well read man should have read the Western Canon. Anyway, I suspect it is why the Left locks up history into a trunck and buries it in the backyard. Constant reminders that human relations have not changed very much makes the idea of Marxist Man  ridiculous even to the fanatic. If the nature of man is transcendent and rooted in his biology, Marxist Man is an impossibility. Then you have the fact that the ideas  current with modern lunatics are just recycled from past lunatics. Reading about people 100 years ago making the same claims you are making today is satisfying until you learn they failed disastrously. That is going to take the wind out of the sails of even the most dedicated. “This time things will be different” can only take you so far.

That said, there’s a service to the stable minded too. Haldane was one of the first population geneticists. He was also a Marxist. On the one hand, he offers up respectable and rational ideas about population genetics. On the other he claims Soviet communism is a roaring success and will certainly work in the long run. Incredibly, he claims the Soviets had, at the time of his writing, made no attempt to socialize agriculture. At the time, the Soviets were brutally collectivizing the peasants. killing millions in the process. It is also during the Holodomer, which a British intellectual of his stature surely heard some rumors. He may not have known the details, but the rumors were everywhere. The point here is that brilliant people are capable of believing outrageously insane things. Reading old books on social commentary is a great reminder of that. It is another reason, I suspect, the Left ignores their own intellectual history.

What I’m enjoying about Haldane is something HBD chick touches on in this blog post. Population genetics and eugenics are separate things. The modern critics, all from the Left, of HBD immediately throw out the eugenics card. Haldane goes to great lengths explaining why the eugenicists are wildly mistaken on the science of genetics. What we know now and what he could not know then, is what the Left would do with these ideas. The modern Left’s assault on HBD has little to do with science and everything to do with history. When you start sniffing around in the past about eugenics, you find the heroes of the American Left as the chief promoters. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a proto-Nazi eugenicist who wanted to sterilize the unfit.

That’s an obvious example, but the Progressive Era is full of them. Sterilization campaigns were a regular feature of the American Left from the beginning and persisted even after the horrors of the Nazis were fully aired. The lingo changed, but the underlying justification remained. Programs launched by liberals in the 60′s and 70′s aimed at reducing birth rates in black ghettos were just thinly veiled eugenics programs. Of course, it is hard to claim your cult is the friend of the black man if you have been systematically trying to snuff them out. Similarly, it is hard to run the war on women stuff, when you are also ripping out their reproductive organs.

In contrast, the HBD folks, for the most part, don’t try to tease morality or public policy from the science of population genetics. There are exceptions and abuse, but the folks dedicated to the science don’t care about the politics. The reason is an example Haldane uses. Atoms do not act in predictable ways. Instead, they act in a number of ways with differing degrees of probability. Rolled up into a bar of steel, however, the mathematics presents an object to us that acts predictably and seemingly consistently. That’s population genetics. One Chinese guy is random and unpredictable. a billion are predictable and fixed.

One last thing on reading old books. There’s a valuable lesson in the wrongness of their certainty. One of my few criticism of John Derbyshire is his blind spot to the error rates of science. The history of science is the history of error. Reading Haldane’s ideas on cancer and what comes next for the treatment of the disease is cringe inducing. His description of blacks in America and their likely future is hilariously anachronistic. The point is Haldane was brilliant and empirically minded, but he and his contemporaries were wrong about a great many things. Those who came after them made their careers proving them wrong. Those who come after us will do us the same favor. Therefore, it is wise to not keep open the possibility that what we think we know now is all wrong.

One of my favorite targets is the pseudo-intellectual poser. This creature of the Left has been with us since the darkness descended on the West. They are are always folks who have ambition, but not much talent. That results in memorizing the liberal nostrums and then repeating them with an air of wearied resignation. They cultivate a certain look and a range of little outfits to identify themselves. Dandyism, it seems, will always be with us. One such example is Jamie Bartlett, who is a blogger at the Telegraph. The precious little baby has himself worked up over those of us on the Dissident Right.

Since 2012 a sophisticated but bizarre online neo-fascist movement has been growing fast. It’s called “The Dark Enlightenment”. Its modus operandi is well suited to a digital society. Supporters are dotted all over the world, connected via a handful of blogs and chat rooms. Its adherents are clever, angry white men patiently awaiting the collapse of civilisation, and a return to some kind of futuristic, ethno-centric feudalism.

It started, suitably enough, with two blogs. Mencius Moldbug, a prolific blogger and computer whizz from San Francisco, and Nick Land, an eccentric British philosopher (previously co-founder of Warwick University’s Cybernetic Culture Research Unit) who in 2012 wrote the eponymous “The Dark Enlightenment”, as a series of posts on his site. You can find them all here. 

HBDChick does an excellent job taking the guy apart. The mere fact that the guy works for a Marxist front group disqualifies him from serious company. But, it explains the liberal use of the word “fascist” in his rants. Marxism, like all groups on the Left needs bogeymen. The Marxists call their bogeymen fascists, which is a catch-all phrase for the undifferentiated other they fear is on the other side of the door, ready to burst in and snatch them away. It says something about the world when it is OK to be a Marxist, despite the fact that cult has murdered about 100 million people worldwide.

From his blog, it appears he is writing a book about witch hunting, I mean the dark forces he and his pansy army are fighting against on-line. It seems the modern dandy is always bravely writing hotly worded letters to the evil doers of the world. of course, those letter never get delivered. Instead they end up on blogs at the Telegraph or the Times. The evil doers are never actually evil or capable of doing anything other than holding an opinion different from those in the cult of modern liberalism. The real bad asses never have to worry about a discouraging word from the Dandy. That why the Left has been such a potent killing machine.

I’ve never been a fan of conspiracy theories and I’ve always thought tales of secret government programs to enslave the population to be stupid. Government is big, ponderous and stupid. It is a sledgehammer when it works at all. The sort of precision needed to micromanage the population has never been observed in government. The Soviets tried the hardest, but failed to do any more than murder anyone who go out of line. The NORKS have taken the state murder thing to another level, it seems, but plenty of the little buggers escape every year to tell me they are not good at monitoring everyone.

Anyway, I may need to update my views on these things. A story like this shows how even the blunt instrument of the state can be wielded like a sensitive instrument. A lunatic cop or cops can tap into the metastasizing database of the leviathan to learn all sorts of things about anyone they see. As more and more of our data is linked into the Borg, the easier it becomes for the lowest rung of the surveillance state to push around the citizenry. This fat cop did not act on his own. It is the policy of the cops in Maryland to harass gun owners. I’ve had it happen to me, on a smaller scale. He could never have done anything like this ten years ago. It won’t be long before agents of the state will be able to pull up your medical history at routine traffic stops.  Imagine what the more intelligent layer of the Borg can do with this information.

This story from last week I blogged about shows the way. Linking your DNA to an electronic ID like a Bitcoin would solve a lot of the technical hurdles for the surveillance state. DNA is unique and Bitcoin is unique. You can’t fake either one so it is impervious to counterfeiting if it your official ID. All of your transactions would then require some of your DNA, which could be as little as a few skin cells. The technology is not there yet, but within the decade it will be ready. That means everywhere you go can be tracked. All of your spending can be tracked. Put monitors in the home like this one and smart appliances from other global partners of the government multinational corporations and suddenly were all bugs in a terrarium.

It turns out the paranoid lunatics of yesteryear were right after all.

Trust is a useful human attribute in small groups like family, the clan or the village. The size of the group allows for quickly addressing a breach of trust, but also allows for quickly rewarding the holding of trust. A neighbor helping a neighbor in a small town will get immediate feedback from the rest of the town. In non-Western arrangements it is even more obvious. The complex relationships in the clan or tribe require trust as a unit of currency to work. At the center is the high trust members and at the fringes are the low trust members. It is what made the Mafia work for so long. They adopted the Arab tribal system which was impenetrable to western investigative techniques.

Trust does not scale up. The Jews in Germany were used to pogroms. Going back to the dawn of the Christian era in Europe, Jews had been subjected to various forms of persecution, usually for money. The Holy Roman Emperors would routinely shake down the Jews for money to fund their operations. The Church would commit similar shake down operations. Occasionally it became violent. The Jews adapted and learned how to survive it, based on a trust that their neighbors would never go too far with their persecutions. That was the fatal error for them in the 20th century. The Jews of Germany trusted the good sense of the average German. Of course, history is littered with examples of people trusting their rulers only to be murdered by them.

In modern times, Americans are struggling with this conundrum. The American culture is based on trusting a small, inept and distributed government. As the national state swells and absorbs the rest of government, the relationship between man and citizen has to change. Americans have to become much more like Europeans, who are quite used to living with an aggressive central state. They are also quite used to avoiding its gaze, including the bribing of officials, small scale sabotage of the system and other ways to dodge the rules. Americans doing business abroad are often shocked by this open corruption, especially in nations further south, but it is a rational survival technique. Americans have not figured this out, but they will eventually.

What helps the process and may derail some ugly conflicts are things like this. The people claiming to be good at safeguarding your money are not worthy of trust when they fail in basic ways like this. Even rich people are finding that the Borg is not as all powerful as it claims.  Of course, the rampant abuse by the Obama administration coupled with their staggering incompetence with health care has minted a new wave of government skeptics. A whole lot of people who used to say they trusted the government “to keep us safe” during the Bush years are having second thoughts. It may be too late to roll back the surveillance state, but these events will foster a new attitude toward it from the commoners.

That’s important because of what’s coming down the road. If you read a story like this you get a glimpse of that is coming. Bitcoin is useless as a currency, at least as a large scale currency. I’ll concede it has some utility for perverts and drug addicts. The technology, however, can be very useful to the state. Bitcoins must be validated at each use. The software to do this can be distributed in such a way that validation appears seamless. To do that the life of each coin must be maintained. The chain of custody is a part of the validation. It is the same concept we use for titling a car and validating its mileage. If the dealer rolls back the odometer, this can be caught with a title search. Some states do this every time they register a car.

The dream leftists ruling elites since the beginning has been to register and track every member of society. The great enemy of the revolution has always been the same. That is people’s unwillingness to go along with the program. If you can track every person and every transaction, you can prevent the sorts of behavior you want to eliminate.  First you start by “nudging” people and then you can force those who don’t go along with the suggestion. Binding the technology of bitcoin with the ultimate unique ID generating algorithm ever conceived, DNA, you can have the perfect system for tracking and validating human behavior. Every transaction can be tracked and it can also be approved.

The future is not written and the way to change course is for people to lose faith in the rulers. Regular failures by the folks promising us we can trust them is a sure way to grow skepticism amongst the people. Even dimwits like the modern American voter get tired of being screwed eventually. Liberals will never lose the faith, but the rest are persuadable. If they are not won over by appeals to reason and tradition, maybe scaring them will work. The more the average guy is thinking about who is watching him as he swipes his card, turns on his GPS or walks down the street, the less he is going to trust the people doing the watching.

It seems the thing to do with blogs at this time of year is to make some predictions about the coming year. I’ve been reading up on and studying the prediction business so let’s see if I can put some of it to work.  My interest in the subject started with analysis work on big databases. I tried to apply what I was doing to predicting football games. I finally settled on a model that allowed me to beat the spread 59% of the time. That sounds good, but 57% is the break even point. Bookmakers charge vigorish. The book maker strives to set the line so that he gets equal money on each team. The losers pay the winners and the bookie takes his cut. If he does his job, he makes 5% of the total money bet on the game.

In other areas, it seems that bias plays a big role. We remember the correct predictions and forget the wrong ones. A guy who is rarely right will wave around his correct predictions, while the guy is never right remains silent. That gives us the impression that some people are good at forecasting human events. The other bit of bias is we want certain things to happen so we tend to favor predictions that comfort us. That means we will make predictions that comfort us. The old line about the bears predicting five of the last three market drops is true. The guys who are sure disaster is right around the corner will always predict disaster. No one predicts they will be proven wrong about their pet theory.

Of course, the bigger issue is the the appearance of randomness. A problem with several constants and one variable is easy to solve. Even a child can figure out the value of X from 5X = 10. Human affairs have many more variables and few constants. Solving for X gets a little tougher when the formula is 3X + Y – YZ = 75. Human affairs have millions of variables. The example of the double pendulum is  good one. We can predict the movement of a pendulum easily using basic math. Put a hinge in the middle and the movement becomes random and unpredictable. Seemingly so, at least. There are video on youtube you can look up if you are unfamiliar with this example.

Then there is the issue of time. I know, as a matter of mathematical certainty, that the Fed policy of dumping a trillion new dollars into the system will have to end. The bears think hyper-inflation is right around the corner the program will crash down any day now. They may eventually be right, but it could be next year or five years from now. Right now, the world economy is soaking up these new dollars and stuffing them into assets like stocks. Eventually, that ends, but knowing when is the mystery. The bears will predict soon and the bulls will predict some date over the horizon, meaning never.

With that in mind, here are some predictions for 2014 about things I care about a little:

1) Florida State will beat Auburn and it will not be that close. Auburn needed two very lucky events to be in this game. Statistically, those tow events happen once in a lifetime. They had both in one season. Florida State is a great team that can do it all and they have done it against top competition.

2) Denver will not make the Super Bowl. Peyton Manning will not join Earl Morrall and Jeff Rutledge as quarterbacks to make it to the Super Bowl on two different teams. The NFL playoffs comes down to defense. Great QB’s running great offense can win a game or two, but eventually, it comes down to defense. If the Patriots had a decent defense, Tom Brady has two more rings and an undefeated season. The Denver defense is one of the worst in the playoffs this year.

3) The US economy will remain in neutral, growing at about 2.5% after all the adjustments and revisions. The great slow down from health care will not appear as predicted. There’s some evidence that the economy was picking up in the last half of 2013, but certainly not booming. Unemployment, however, remains the primary drag and there nothing in the latest numbers to suggest things are changing on that front. ObamaCare will put downward pressure on the labor market. Continued exploitation of existing technology will offset much of this as companies get better at doing more with less, but you still need people with money buying stuff to make an economy grow. We remain at the edge of personal debt limits. That all adds up to more of the same in 2014.

4) Obama will fall below 40% in Gallup and remain there until the summer, but bubble back up into the low to mid 40’s in the summer. Americans want to like him, even if they hate his policies right now. There’s not a huge difference between 44% and 38% but it will be encouraging to the administration and his party. As noted above, people see what they want to see. The liberal media will break into an early version of Obama nostalgia this summer as a last gasp to salvage his second term, but the limits of reality mean he remains in the 40’s for the rest of the year.

5) The stock market will finish ahead of where it is today. Specifically, the DOW will be above 17,000 by year end, but not by much. There’s no question that the market has had a great run, but it has no basis in reality. Facebook, for example, has a P/E of 140. Twitter is worth $40 Billion, despite having no profits and no chance to make a profit in 2014. The P/E of the Russell 2000 is 87. The major indexes are better, the DOW is 19 and the NASDAQ is 21, but those remain high historically. The average P/E is 15 going back 100 years. Still, a trillion in Fed money will counter any pull back in 2014.

6) There will be no legislative changes to the health care law in 2014. Nothing will be passed out of the Senate. Right now, this thing is a gift to both parties. The Democrats scare the Left about how the Right wants to repeal it. The Republicans promise the Right they will repeal it. At some point, repeal becomes the stuff of the fringe and both parties take turns promising to repair it. For 2014, we have the repeal/defend dynamic so nothing changes.

7) The Red Sox will not make the playoffs. They caught lightning in a bottle and will fall back to being an 85-win team. The lost a key player in Ellsbury and the rest of the division got better. Repeating is always hard and the margin for error is small. Losing ten more games knocks them out of the playoffs and that’s certainly seems reasonable.

8) The Republicans will pick a net of nine Senate seats in 2014 and have a working majority. The House will see the GOP gained a dozen seats. The GOP establishment is revved up to prove a point to the right. That point is safe candidates can beat democrats in toss-up states. Put another way, they want to show the Right that wackos are not welcome in their club. I think the result will be a strong effort to field competent alternatives to at-risk Democrats and a solid election for the GOP. The Democrats have a dozen highly vulnerable incumbents and the GOP has none this time.

9) The sale of ebooks will continue to stagnate and people will begin to ask if they will displace hard books after all. Sales have been flat for a year. The novelty of tablet computers is cresting and that will put more pressure on sales. The fact is the reading universe is static. People consume a predictable number of books. Weird innovations in the free money era caused a spike (Mega book stores, Amazon, tablets), but there are no more novelties coming to boost sales. The mega book stores are closing. Amazon is flat. Tablets have been driving novelty interest in ebooks, but that’s coming to an end as the tablet market matures. The ebook may be a solution looking for a problem.

10) Tablet prices will fall significantly. They are on the cusp of becoming a commodity. As penetration peaks, the race to the bottom of the price curve will begin. Korean and Chinese makers will begin to flood the market with cheap Android based tablets. The fact is, these things should be cheap media consumption devises. The first HD TV’s cost $3K and now are a tenth of that in some sizes. Tablet prices will drop as the market for what they do best solidifies. Microsoft’s attempt to make them mini-desktops will fail. There’s no need for an $800 mini-laptop when you can get a real one for the same price.

11) Cheap tablets will begin to erode the smart phone market. The reason the smart phone exists is it give you a portable media consumption devise. A 7″ tablet is just as portable as most phones. Wi-fi is nearly ubiquitous now. A lot of people, particularly business people will begin to opt for a cheap mobile phone on a cheap plan and a cheap tablet for surfing the ‘Net.

12) 2014 will see the beginning of the end to the old mobile phone model. The market is maxed out now. The way for the carriers to compete will be with the plans, instead of the devices. The fact is, most people rarely leave their local area. That means small carriers can begin to chip away at the lower end of the market. That will lead to more lower end choices from the major carriers. It will also mean less bundling.

13) The first glimpses of a la carte pricing in cable and satellite will appear this year. The cost of cable is way out of hand and the alternatives are getting better. I can subscribe to Hulu for $8 a month and get more content than I could ever watch. I can get shows from Netflix and Amazon. Apple is ramping up their video content and Microsoft is unleashing hell with XBox One. Cable will begin to experiment with offer customers the ability to opt out of some channels to save a few bucks.

Tyler Cowen has a thought experiment on Bitcoin and the usual suspects are vibrating in ecstasy over it. Bitcoin has become a religion for most of these people. That means they have lost the ability to see the enterprise in rational terms. When they see things they like, they start singing the songs that celebrate the cult. When the see things they don’t like, they began chanting the incantations that are supposed to make the bad men go away. The comments sections of Bitcoin stories look like something from the local lunatic asylum.

The basic thrust of Tyler’s post is that Bitcoin is like any other commodity. Once a sufficient number of others get into the cryptocurrency racket in sufficient numbers, the price for all of these “currencies” falls to cost plus some tiny profit. Why anyone would consider something that functions like this a currency is never addressed. Tyler just treats Bitcoin like any other producible commodity, sort of a fusion of gold and some cheap manufactured good. Since the currency has no intrinsic value and no authority to set the value, the market sets the value based on utility, I guess.

Putting aside my complaints about Bitcoin as a currency (I think it is a clever reinterpretation of Pet Rocks), the main problem with these cryptocurrencies is the same problem we saw in the Free Banking Era. Central governments hate the idea of a currency they cannot easily manipulate. That has been true since Pheidon. If you control the money, you control the people. Naturally, ruling elites will seek to control the money as a top priority. It has nothing to do with economic efficiency and everything to do with order. Order is what allows the best citizens of the polity to rise and remain at the top of the status system. It is also what allows the less talented to live something close to a sane existence. Order is how humans guard against the anti-social fraction that exists in every human population.

This natural desire for order naturally leads to a ruling class that is the final authority. That authority, in order to be an authority, needs a method to control the people and thus the society over which they rule. Controlling the money is the most efficient way to accomplish this. Controlling land or monitoring individual transactions is unworkable over the long haul. The Soviets found this out after 70 years of Marxism. A simple way to control the populace is through the coining of money. That makes taxing easier for the authorities and it gives them control of trade and labor. It allows for the authorities to audit the citizenry to ensure compliance. Having a raft of competing currencies defeats these attempts and therefore can never be tolerated.

Think about it this way. Let’s say I come with a digital heroin. That is, a drug that can be transmitted on-line that you load on a flash drive, shove up your ass and get high for eight hours. Obviously, I’m not getting a lot of takers initially. The cost of making it is, for the sake of this example, cheaper than getting real heroin on the wholesale market. But, the lack of customers means I’m losing money every time I make a batch. Heroin addicts are not on-line so I go to where they are and start selling my new drug. I manage to get a few takers to try it and begin to build a client base through word of mouth. I hit the same spots at predictable times and sell my digital heroin the old fashioned way, but it is not illegal so I can do it at the mall or Starbucks.

This goes on for a while and no one is the wiser. The cops don’t care as it looks nothing like criminality from their perspective. The drug gangs don’t care at first because I’m not doing business on their turf. They are unaware of the threat I pose initially. But, they notice a drop in sales eventually as I build my business and they begin to make inquiries. Eventually they will figure out that someone is taking their customers. They may figure out it is me before they figure out what I’m selling or it may be the other way around, but at some point they put it together. They are losing control of their drug market because some outside group is selling a new product.

The drug gang will have three choices. They can kill me, but that will require knowledge they may lack. I could have advanced to the point where I’m selling my drug on-line. Drug dealers are not fools and they will recognize their lack of knowledge and see that as a risk in itself, perhaps a bigger risk. Killing me could create unknown problems. The other choice is to figure out what I’m doing and that means muscling in on my business. There is a reason we have such an array of street drugs. A clever guy creates a new product and the drug gangs eventually take it over and add it to their portfolio. The same guys controlling the weed sales in one area control the heroin sales too.

The third option is to enlist the state to take out my business. I’m conducting business and that means taxes are involved. It also means a mountain of rules and regulations. My drug may be legal, but not paying taxes on sales is illegal. Not filing for a business license and not abiding by the laws governing record keeping are against the law. If I have employees, then I need to pay them and that means taxes, workplace laws, social security, Medicare and unemployment taxes. As any small businessman knows, the state can shut you down on a whim.

Here we ultimately see the problem with Bitcoin. We are back to where we started. Disruptive technology is not ignored by the folks at the top of the established order. In the drug example, the established authority is the drug game, which served as a proxy for the state. In the above ground world, the state will defend itself from the threat posed by Bitcoin and they have many tools at their disposal. They also have tanks, planes, missiles and other military goodies. Bitcoin can only exist as long as the state allows it to exist. That means it will have to serve the interests of the state to survive, which brings us right back to where we are now.

In the great something measuring contest between old weird America and the cosmopolitan perverts knows as the gay lobby, old weird America came out ahead. I’ve never seen a minute of Duck Dynasty, but I’ve met those guys many times living in the South. They don’t give up easy. There’s a reason why the US military relies so heavily on young men from that part of the country. While I’m cynical about the future of the nation, I can’t bet against the crackers in old weird America.

I’m reading Destructive Generation by David Horowitz and Peter Collier. It is a collection of mini-biographies of the people who made up 1960’s radicalism. It was published in 1989 so it was around when he was going public with his apostasy and rejection of leftism.  His Wiki entry, surprisingly, does a good job summarizing his life as a public intellectual. I say it is surprising as Wiki is populated with liberal fanatics who often assault the pages of people they deem enemies of the faith. I think it says something about the boomer generation and their personal impact on the next generation of lunatics.

Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and George Jackson have left no imprint on black Americans. Even old warhorses like Alcee Hastings and Eleanor Holmes don’t mention them. Similarly, the nation had to be reintroduced to dirtbags like Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn. Even liberals had forgotten all about them when they suddenly re-emerged as the principle backers of Barak Obama. In conservative circles, David Horowitz is well out of the mainstream. The boys and girls at National Review have probably never heard of him.

Anyway, the first chapter is on Fay Stender. Her Wiki is here. As you can see, she was in no small part responsible for giving us prisoner rights, a madness that remains with us to this day. She also helped create the prison street gang, The Black Guerilla Family. I bet they have killed ten thousand by this point as their reason to exist is to sell drugs and control urban street gangs that sell drugs. Stender and her cult of radical lunatics set free dozens of psychopaths who went onto murder innocent people once they were released. They also caused lasting damage to the criminal justice system. Forty years on we still struggle to repair the damage.

What jumps out to me in the 60-page description of Stender’s life is just how much sex drove radical politics. Stender was mostly driven to the prison movement because she wanted to fuck badass black guys. The milquetoast Jewish boys at college could not light the fire the way a jailed Mandingo could, I guess. Women are wired to seek out high status males, but this is often interpreted as most physically dominating. In my day, everyone knew the easy mark was a feminist girl. They would let you do anything to them.

This sexual impulse made everyone shockingly stupid. Despite elite educations, they failed to understand the necessity of jails and law enforcement. This is basic stuff, yet they were so filled with fanatical zeal to strike a blow against their parent’s system, they could not see what was right in front of them. Guys like Newton and Jackson, for example, were cunning criminals who knew how to exploit these stupid brats. The fanatic, however, is myopic out of necessity and Stender’s crowd could never see what was obvious to the world around them. For them, it was all about the cause. Even when Stender was shot by one of the criminal negroes they had helped, it still did not sink in.

The other thing that jumps out is the self-absorption. Everything about these people tracks back to some way to profit. The hypocrisy in how they lived versus how they talked is shocking from this great distance. I’ve often noticed that leftists project their faults onto others, which is why the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is so useful. These people are full of self-loathing, but not so much that they would abandon their comfortable lives. The trope of the guilty liberal is overdone and misses the mark. Guilt and loathing are different things. One leads to contrition; the other leads to destruction. That’s what’s clear in the Stender tale. She and her coevals were on a suicide mission.

Finally, the conventional wisdom is the New Left radicals were boomers. The truth is they were not. Stender and her crowd were born in the 1930’s. In fact, all of the leading radicals of the 1960’s were born in the thirties and early forties. Generally, we think of the boomer as having been born between 1945 and 1964, with the real end point being much earlier for the “60’s generation.”  By the time of the Summer of Love, Fay Stender was a middle-aged woman.