It used to be that you needed permission to record someone. Most states required both parties of a telephone call, for instance, to consent to it being recorded. You could not film someone and use it without their permission. The general principal being that you own your body and your words. You could, therefore, ban people from bringing cameras into your business or into your show if you were a performer. In the olden times, I recall seeing people dragged out of concerts because they smuggled in a camera.

But, things have become complicated. Everyone has a mobile phone and they almost always have cameras. They also have audio recorders. Every election a dozen or so pols get caught in a controversy over someone surreptitiously recording them saying bad things. Mitt Romney’s “47%” bit maybe cost him the election. Obama’s “Bibles and boomsticks” line still haunts him. Donald Sterling was tossed from the NBA because his whore recorded him saying bad things. In many cases this is illegal, but no one ever gets charged.

Anyway, this story about the Marriot getting fined for blocking cell phones got me thinking about some of the looming puzzles resulting from the spread of cheap radios. People don’t think of their cell phone as a radio, but that’s what it is. Those drones available on Amazon are possible because of cheap and effective radios. The amount of data we can send and receive through the air is what’s changing the physical space of human existence. The whole mobile computing revolution is the consequence of cheap radios.

If a business cannot prevent you from transmitting radio signals from their property, they can’t stop you from recording them or transmitting images of their business via radio. In a weird way, eavesdropping and wiretapping have become legal. Eventually, they become ubiquitous. Because of the explosion of false rape charges, males are now recording their sexual adventures just in case this app does not prove convincing. Citizens are routinely recording cops, so much so that cops are being equipped with full time body cameras.

We’re at the point where no one owns their voice or image. You can’t have an expectation of privacy because everywhere cameras and recorders are rolling or at least assumed to be rolling. The only place that is yours and yours alone is the pace between your ears and that’s not going to be for long. Facial recognition apps will soon be cheap and everywhere.There’s a reason sci-fi writers imagined a future where the sentient beings no longer had facial expressions, I guess. The only defense of that private space will be studied lying and deception. Humans trust will fall to zero as a consequence.

Maybe Ebola is our Vegan choriomeningitis.

There’s an old joke about the NY Times (or any liberal broadsheet for that matter) goes something like this. A meteor is found to be headed to earth. it is big enough to wipe out all life on the planet. The NY Times runs a headline “Meteor To Destroy Earth” and a subhead of “Blacks and Women to be Harmed the Most.” I recall hearing that at least 30 years ago, maybe longer. The only thing that has changed is the transmission method. By way of example, I offer this gen form CNN.

The tragedy of Ebola is not just its staggering toll. It’s also the implicit racism that the deadly virus has spawned. The anecdotes are sickening, particularly a Reuters report this week that children of African immigrants in Dallas — little ones with no connection to Thomas Duncan, the Liberian Ebola patient who died Wednesday in a local hospital — have been branded “Ebola kids” simply because of their heritage or skin color.

In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

 In both the United States and Europe, Ebola is increasing racial profiling and reviving imagery of the “Dark Continent.” The disease is persistently portrayed as West African, or African, or from countries in a part of the world that is racially black, even though nothing medically differentiates the vulnerability of any race to Ebola.

A Newsweek cover last month showed a picture of a chimpanzee with the headline: “A Back Door for Ebola: Smuggled Bushmeat Could Spark a U.S. Epidemic.” Whatever the intent, the picture was wrong.

Turns out the story was probably wrong, too, as a Washington Post investigation revealed. The new Ebola outbreak “likely had nothing to do with bushmeat consumption,” the Post reported, and there is no conclusive evidence that Ebola has been passed from animals to humans. A theory on animal-to-human transmission with some limited traction centers on dead fruit bats, not chimps.

“There is virtually no chance that ‘bushmeat’ smuggling could bring Ebola to America,” the Post concluded.

But the damage has been done. And as panic deepens, the danger is that racism — on planes and public transportation, in lines, on streets, in glances — deepens further, too.

Ebola is a human tragedy, just like enterovirus D68, which causes sudden muscle weakness and severe respiratory problems, particularly among children. It has shown up in almost all the 50 states, with about 500 Americans infected so far, far more than ever. And it has begun to kill, beginning with a 4-year-old boy in New Jersey. Five new cases were reported in New Jersey alone on Tuesday. And there are no antiviral vaccines or cures. Yet enterovirus D68 is known by a scientific name and number. (Unfortunately for Africans, the Ebola virus was named after the Congolese river where the first outbreak was detected).

The saga of Thomas Duncan reflects racial perceptions. His girlfriend, Louise, whom he had reportedly been visiting in Dallas, had publicly begged for him to be given the same experimental ZMapp medication given to two (white) American missionaries who were infected in Africa and recently flown back to the United States.

“I’m just asking God and asking the American government for the same medicine they’re giving people that come from Liberia,” she said during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “Please, please, please, please, help me save his life. …Talk to doctors. They’ll find means to get a medicine to cure him. He’s so young.”

Louise refused to allow her last name to be used for fear of repercussions. Unfortunately, doctors and the pharmaceutical developer said there was no longer any ZMapp left for Duncan or any other victim. But the imagery that accompanied his plight lingers: Whites can be flown to the United States or Europe at any expense, while Africans are left to die unattended on the streets of Liberia or Sierra Leone. Or now, without ZMapp, in Dallas.

“It’s easy for the world — the powerful world, who are largely non-African, non-people of color — to ignore the suffering of poor, black people,” Harvard Medical School professor Joia Mukherjee said on PRI’s “The World” last month. It’s easy, she said, to “other-ize” the Ebola crisis.

Fear too often contorts morality and humanity.

It is easy to write off this nut as just another lunatic, but there’s no reason to think she is out of step with the rest of the Cult of Modern Liberalism. It is tempting to think it is just an act. The creepy meta-language is unsettling to the normal ear. Most of us never hear anyone say “other-ize” on purpose. This thing reads like a piece in the Onion so it is tempting to think it a spoof.

But, it’s not. This is how the pod people think.

Jim Geraghty is one of the many RNC hod carriers who posts at NRO. He has a special place on the site, which suggests a quid pro quo of some sort. His blog is lightly read and rarely commented upon so I can’t believe they are paying him. But, someone is paying him, unless he married a rich women. He has been banging the drum for conservatives to stop “sulking” and come out to support the various bowls of mush GOP Inc. is offering up this November. He’s been peddling the old lines from the 70’s like the “Buckley Rule” which dates back to the 60’s.

William F. Buckley was asked, in 1967, whom he would support in 1968 for U.S. president. Buckley responded with what would late be called the ‘Buckley Rule” for primary voting: “The wisest choice would be the one who would win. No sense running Mona Lisa in a beauty contest. I’d be for the most right, viable candidate who could win. If you could convince me that Barry Goldwater could win, I’d vote for him.”

You’ll note his aphorism is about the primaries. I’ll note that no one bothered to quote this line until the Bush years. That’s when GOP Inc started labeling their bowls of mush “Bill Buckley Approved” and repeating this line, omitting the bit about the primary. Buckley never advocated merely voting for the least liberal option in the general. I have no recollection of him addressing it. If one party offered up a rapist who is a communist and the other party offered up a child molester who was a libertarian, I doubt Bill Buckley would have argued you had a duty to support the child molester.

Anyway, Jim seems to have figured out these old lines about voting for the least awful option were not convincing anyone. He has been given new instructions. Now, not voting means the terrorists have won.

Take your pick; there’s no shortage of things to be outraged about. Hundreds of millions wasted on state insurance exchanges that don’t work. The IRS abuses. Lois Lerner, refusing to answer questions from Congress. No one at the State Department getting fired over the security decisions leading up to Benghazi. Assurances about Ebola that don’t pan out.

Republicans are ‘blah’ about the midterms because they’ve lost faith that winning them will make a difference. Obama’s contempt for Congress, and lack of interest in working with it on his true priorities, is obvious. He’s pledged to unilaterally rewrite immigration enforcement to suit his needs. Large chunks of Obamacare are adjusted, nullified, improvised, and revised on the fly with no change to the written law. The president begins wars without waiting for any authorization for the use of military force. The U.S. attorney general is held in contempt of Congress with no real consequence.

No one can blame conservatives for being frustrated to the point of fury. But if American rank-and-file conservatives and Republicans conclude that the game is rigged, that it’s not worth playing, and withdraw from political life . . . then that will be the ultimate triumph of this president.

Got that? if you accept reality for what it is, the bad guys win. Therefore, the only moral choice is to keep marching off to support a political party that despises you and wants you dead. The only thing missing in these missives is “or else” thrown in to make the point.

I’ll grant that Jim is never going to bite the hand that feeds him. He makes his living carrying water for the GOP. But, there comes a point when the sales pitch is not working and further attempts crass into insult. This post is insulting. The GOP’s troubles are the fault of the GOP, not Obama or the system. Even Mike Huckleberry has lost patience with his party and he is probably going to run for the nomination.

Meanwhile over in England UKIP keeps gaining ground…

Tyler Cowen like to pretend the world started doing interesting stuff when he started noticing it, but human relations have not changed much forever. I saw this on his site. I think he called in average is over in dating or something equally stupid.

A new dating app called Luxy matches wealthy singles…to wealthy singles. It describes itself as “Tinder, minus the poor people.” The app’s iTunes page claims members are CEOs, investors, millionaires, and fitness models. So far, there are 3,000 users, and the average male user’s income is $200,000, company spokesman Darren Shuster told Vice. Shuster also told CNN that Luxy’s rich clientele is self-regulating and the app does not (yet) enforce salary verification. “If you show up in a 20-year-old VW Bug, and request to meet at McDonald’s, you won’t last very long on LUXY,” Shuster said. “It doesn’t take long to weed out those who belong on a different kind of dating site.” The app is so controversial that the CEO’s identity is kept anonymous. “With the rise of high-speed digital dating, it’s about time somebody introduced a filter to weed out low-income prospects by neighborhood,” wrote the app’s nameless CEO in a release.

Elites have been dating within their group since we have had elites, which is to forever. The commoner marrying the prince is a fairy tale for a reason. Marrying outside your class has always been a good way to get ostracized. A lot of it is controlled by women. Females born into the elite seek out the high status males in their class. They can be quite ruthless about it, but they also have the toolset to out compete commoners.

That said, I can see this app turning into a call girl service quickly. If you’re a rich guy and can’t find a woman, you have other issues. There’s a reason for $5,000 a night hookers exist. Outside of the US, super high end “escorts” and brothels exist for wealthy clients. I recall Ben Affleck getting caught in a Vancouver brothel when he first hit it big. It was a $1,000 a throw, if I recall correctly. Maybe it was some other douche bag actor, but I’m pretty sure it was him. This app will probably turn into a a way for lonely rich guys to score a hooker without leaving their condos.

On fairly regular basis cops shoot black guys. Most of the time it is justified. Sometimes not, but hardly anyone bothers to notice. In big election years, however, the Pod people take note as it is is a good way to gin up the black vote. Ferguson was a good example of one such shooting wrapped in a campaign commercial. Now, just in time for the election we have another and right next door in St. Louis!

The fatal shooting of an 18-year-old black man in south St. Louis by an off-duty police officer sparked a night of unrest in a city still reeling from the August slaying of an unarmed man in nearby Ferguson.

Wednesday’s shooting happened at about 7:30 p.m. in the city’s Shaw Neighborhood, and involved an officer working a department-approved secondary job for a private security company, Police Chief Sam Dotson said at an early-morning news conference.

The officer approached a group of men. One of the men took off running, Dotson said, so the officer pursued. Dotson said the suspect approached the officer in an “aggressive” manner, with a physical altercation occurring. The man then turned and fired three rounds at the officer before his gun jammed, Dotson said.

The officer, who was not injured, returned fire, shooting 17 times and fatally wounding the man, Dotson said..

(AP Photo)

A gun was recovered at the scene. The officer was placed on administrative leave, as per department policy, police said.

Police have not identified the officer or the man he killed.

The incident comes nearly two months to the day after the police shooting of Michael Brown, 18, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, located about 20 miles away. Brown’s shooting sparked weeks of protests and spawned national discourse about police use of force.

Some of the people protesting recently in Ferguson were seen in St. Louis after Wednesday’s shooting, Dotson said.

“Tensions in the region are very high,” Dotson said. “Any police officer use of force certainly will draw attention.”

St. Louis Alderman Antonio French, who documented the turmoil in Ferguson after Brown’s Aug. 9 shooting death, reflected on the region’s renewed anguish.

“At the scene of yet another young man’s death,” he wrote on Twitter. “This happens too often in our city. It’s a crisis that we should all be concerned about.”

Activists took to the streets of St. Louis overnight, marching and chanting, seeking answers.

Some police vehicles were damaged during the protests, with windows smashed, Dotson said.

People also shared their frustration on social media, with #shawshooting the most popular national trending topic on Twitter.

I’ve never been a regular TV consumer. When I grew up we had a crappy black and white console TV that got five channels. Two were UHF, which means they were not network affiliates. For my younger readers, there was a time when TV signals were sent over the air to people’s homes. That meant everyone had a big antenna on the roof and that meant family men were good at using a ladder to get on the roof so they could adjust the antenna for the football game. And that meant men had no time for hair gel or half thongs, but that’s a topic for another day.

Anyway, the point is I never developed the habit in my youth because the options were not very good. As much as old farts like me like to romanticize the past, things like TV are way better today than in my day. For a long time, I did not own a TV. I had plenty of ways to fill my free time, mostly involving liquor and women. A woman I was romancing talked me into buying a TV, which I did, thinking it may help the cause. (It did, in case you’re wondering.) Still, I have no beef with television, even though I’m an infrequent consumer.

Most of what is on TV is crap. It is harmless crap, but it is crap. I cut the cord primarily because I got tired of paying for crap I was never going to watch. So many nights I flipped on the set only to find nothing worth watching. I have pretty low standards and it was still tough to find anything worth my time. The few series worth watching, required me to plan for their airing and that’s not an investment I’m in the habit of making. Recording shows is fine, but that too requires planning and I’m just not that interested in it.

That 267 word intro is what is called a statement of interest, by the way. Now you know where I stand on TV and why. My biases are declared and I can now move onto the meat of this post.

So, the miracle of BitTorrent allows me to watch popular series when I want and as much as I want. If I have a few hours to kill one evening, I can watch a season of some show that is/was popular. Living in the world, getting asked about my TV viewing habits on a regular basis, means I feel the need to watch the more popular series, at least the big hits. Otherwise, I risk being a weirdo. Most of anyone’s social interactions are meaningless small talk anyway so keeping tabs on pop culture helps me grease the gears like a normal person and avoid saying in public the sorts of things I post here.

So, I’ve been binge watching some of the hit series of the last few years. I watched all of Breaking Bad in about two weeks time. I can see why people were devoted to it. It was very well done. Good writers and sensible actors can make for a very entertaining television. Binge watching changes things a bit, but if I had started watching it when it was current, I would not have tried to keep up with it. I’m just not willing to make that sort of commitment to a television show. Watching five episodes in a row, however, is a great way to do these long form serials.

I’m now watching Sons of Anarchy, which I think is still going, but maybe not. I could look it up but then you get the spoilers and that takes away some of the fun. I just finished season three and I have enjoyed it. I know a fair bit about motorcycle clubs, but even so, I’m still enjoying it. That’s the thing with TV. You have to accept that it is not going to stick too close to reality. The club they portray in the show is ridiculous, but that’s not the point. That’s just a vehicle for the drama. Al Qaeda has not killed as many people as the Sons of Anarchy in just two plus seasons.

This is most obvious in the case of the series Vikings. I’ve read a lot about the Vikings, their culture and history. Given their impact on Europe, it is a requirement for history buffs. Plus, they make for fun reading. The show is taking poetic license to a whole new level, but it is OK. They get the big stuff right enough to make the story work. The writers appear to have decided to skimp on accuracy in order to entertain and I cannot fault them for it. The whole point is to entertain, after all.

One of the things that seems to pop up in the popular series is the idea of fraternity. In all of these shows, the ways in which men bond with one another is an essential part of the story. The first long form cable drama to make it big was the Sopranos, a story about men in a criminal organization. The Wire relied on similar themes, just with different races and different types of crimes. The three shows I mentioned above are pretty much all about fraternity. That’s probably part of the appeal. In modern times, men no longer belong to clubs and fraternal organizations so maybe these shows tap into something there.

Similarly, these shows are populated with manly men. Movies and network TV have gone the other way. Action heroes are now 100 pound pixies in Lycra body suits. The stars of TV comedies are feminine beta males. These cable shows go the other way from the rest of the culture. In fact, they track more closely to the portrayal of men in movies during the 40’s and 50’s. The stars are gritty and working class. The willingness to do violence is not wrapped up in self-doubt and guilt. That’s the point of Breaking Bad. The main character becomes a man at the point when he realizes he enjoys being the bad guy.

The other thing that I see a lot of in these shows is the importance of family. The Sopranos was about the main character juggling the demands of two families. Breaking Bad is all about the main character trying to take care of his family after he is gone. Sons of Anarchy is a motorcycle version of Hamlet with a healthy does of Oedipus thrown in. Kevin Williamson had a nice take on it a while back. Maybe the emphasis on family as a themes in these shows taps into the general angst over the break down of the traditional family. Maybe it is just an easy way to write a drama. Sometimes, the simple answer is the right one, but my gut says there’s something going on there.

I installed some analysis tools to see how much traffic was coming to the blog and which sites were sending me traffic. You can break out your users by geography so I was looking at that and spotted something weird. I’m getting hits from Monomoy Island. I thought that was deserted or just used for research, so I looked it up.

Despite its remoteness Monomoy was home to its own community as early as 1710. A tavern for sailors was opened up in the location of today’s Hospital Pond, known then as Wreck Cove.

During the early 19th century a deep natural harbor at Monomoy’s inner shore, known as the Powder Hole, attracted a sizeable fishing settlement. In its prime Whitewash Village housed about 200 residents, a tavern inn called Monomoit House, and Public School #13, which at one time boasted 16 students. Cod and mackerel brought in to the Monomoy port were dried and packed for markets in Boston and New York. Lobsters were also plentiful, providing both food and income for the villagers, who peddled them to mainlanders at about two cents apiece.

The village was abandoned after its harbor was washed away by a hurricane around 1860. It remained uninhabited until 1863 when it was reconstructed and reinhabited until 1876. The new township of Whitewash Village thrived as a fishing town until a series of brutal murders and unsolved homicides sent villagers fleeing for the more frequently policed mainland. A storm in the spring of 1958 carved a wide shallow channel between Morris Island and Monomoy, separating it from the mainland. The Blizzard of 1978 further divided the island into North Monomoy and South Monomoy. A storm during the winter of 2006-2007 once again reconnected South Monomoy to the mainland, although North Monomoy remains an island. The island was designated in 1970 a Federal Wildlife Refuge, serving as an important stop on the migratory routes of 285 species of birds. Since gaining Federal protection in 1972, Gray seals have become a common sight on Monomoy and nearby Chatham’s South Beach island.

Monomoy has no human residents, no electricity, no paved roads; today, in fact, the only reminder of Monomoy’s habitation is the Monomoy Point Light, which guided ships from 1828 to 1923. The wooden lightkeeper’s quarters, the cast iron light tower, and the brick generator house are alone on the desolate point of the South Island.

It was taken over by the US government just before World War II. The island was home to the Monomoy Island Gunnery Range until 1944 when the Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge was established.

I’m thinking the analysis software needs some tweeking or I’m popular with gray seals.

One of things most people learn early in life is the danger of finishing a demand with the words “or else.” There’s always some chance the other party calls you bet. My limited exposure to faculty life in our universities tells me most academics don’t understand this simple reality. They especially don’t understand the risks of saying it to your boss.

The General Theological Seminary in Manhattan, the nation’s oldest Episcopal seminary, seemed to be regaining its footing after almost having to seek bankruptcy protection in 2010. It sold off some valuable real estate — its leafy campus in Chelsea is just steps from the High Line — and hired a new dean and president, the Rev. Kurt H. Dunkle, who promised to make the struggling institution a “joyful, thankful and useful” place.

A year after his arrival, however, the seminary has fallen into turmoil. Eight of its 10 full-time faculty members walked off the job on Friday to protest what they described in letters to the school’s board of trustees as Mr. Dunkle’s overly controlling management style, his habit of making vulgar and offensive remarks, and his frequent threats to demote or fire those who disagreed with him.

The work stoppage, faculty members said, was intended to force a dialogue with the board and, ideally, to lead to the firing of Mr. Dunkle. Instead, the tactic backfired. On Monday, the board dismissed the eight faculty members, leaving the seminary’s roughly 140 students, a month into their term, without professors to teach them.

“It’s a really difficult situation; it’s chaotic,” said Alexander Barton, 26, who entered the seminary this fall. “And as a student, it’s hard to see what is true and what is not.”

A note on Tuesday from Mr. Dunkle to the students, reprinted on Episcopal Café, a blog, explained that about half of the classes were in session as the school scrambled to find qualified personnel for the other classes. Students have taken to social media to express their dismay, often siding with the faculty. Dozens of faculty and clergy members from other seminaries have signed a petition asking that the professors be reinstated.

How an internal management dispute behind seminary walls turned into a mass dismissal seems to be a tale of hardball negotiating tactics gone awry, and mistrust between the faculty, the dean and the board of trustees. The situation is being followed widely in the Episcopal world, which has recently seen at least one other seminary, the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass., mired in a similar controversy.

In Manhattan, the seminary faculty members are taking legal action to keep their jobs, arguing that it is illegal to fire striking workers who have made legitimate complaints. They also face potential eviction, because most of them live on the seminary’s grounds. Mr. Dunkle declined to comment.

Speaking at a meeting at their lawyer’s office on Tuesday night, the eight professors said that problems began soon after the appointment of Mr. Dunkle. One early rift came over his decision to end the daily celebration of Mass, an age-old fixture of seminary life. This was done over the unanimous objection of the faculty.

Last winter, students began sending letters to board members to complain, both about the end of the daily Mass and other changes they found disruptive, such as the decision to move morning prayers to 10 a.m. from 8. “We no longer begin our day in prayer. It’s now a midmorning thing to do … like getting coffee,” wrote one student, William L. Ogburn, who posted his letter online.

The faculty members also started to keep a list of offensive statements they said Mr. Dunkle was making to them.

He once described Asian people as “slanty eyed,” the professors reported to the board in a detailed letter on Sept. 17. At a meeting last spring, Mr. Dunkle compared the technical side of theological education to “looking up women’s skirts,” the letter said. He said that he did not want the seminary to be known as the “gay seminary.” He once commented to a female faculty member that he “loved vaginas,” according to the letter.

He began micromanaging, keeping statistics, for example, on how often faculty members attended lunch, the professors said. Instead of feeling like a communal place of Christian living, “suddenly it has felt progressively like I’m in junior high school, or maybe on a plantation,” said David J. Hurd, a black professor of church music who has been on the faculty since 1976.

Though the professors said they had alerted board members to the brewing problems numerous times, the chairman of the board, Bishop Mark S. Sisk, said that the board felt blindsided by the severity of the Sept. 17 complaints.

Bishop Sisk said the board did not immediately schedule a meeting with the faculty members, because in their letter, they had seemed to make a series of untenable demands that trustees interpreted as preconditions for a meeting. The professors asked that they be given immediate oversight over the schedule and program at the school. They also wanted to choose which board members they met with.

“If Dean Dunkle continues in his current position, then we will be unable to continue in ours,” the eight faculty members wrote.

The board responded several days later that it would immediately begin an investigation of the dean’s behavior. But the faculty members, acting on the advice of their lawyer, Andrew Hoffmann, wrote back on Sept. 25 that they felt the investigation was beside the point, that they had formed a union and that they were stopping work the next day unless steps toward meeting their other requests were taken.

That incensed the board. “I think the trustees felt, who are these people?” Bishop Sisk said. “They are using the students as pawns, really, in a larger agenda that they have of raising their concerns.”

It was then that the board decided that the letters amounted to a resignation, though the word resignation was never used. “They kept saying, ‘If you don’t do these things, we can’t keep our position,’ ” Bishop Sisk said. “Well, we thought, ‘We can’t do those things, so you don’t have your position.’ ” On Sept. 30, the board wrote a public letter saying the resignations had been accepted.

Ooops! Next they are going to learn that the demand for “professors of church music” is not very high.

I’ve written in the past that public debt will one day be banned in the reforms that come after the great collapse. I’m half joking about the great collapse stuff, but history says we are due for a Bronze Age Collapse. The reason I think the banning of public debt will be on the list of reforms is we keep seeing these stories about American cities being swallowed up by debt payments.

Among the many ideas the Chicago Teachers Union have come up with over the years to save big money or generate gobs of new revenue for our cash-strapped city, a favorite involves what they like to call “toxic” interest-rate swaps deals.

Here’s the perennial claim, which is making a comeback as CTU President Karen Lewis contemplates a run for mayor:

The city and the school system have thrown away hundreds of millions of dollars after being duped by big banks into signing deals that locked in excessive interest payments. If only the city would take legal action, CTU again argued in a letter to the mayor last month, the money could be recouped and spent on city services and in classrooms.

Cities went out and made deals with Wall Street that looked good in the moment. They freed up cash to buy votes and pay off cronies. States did similar things with synthetic debt instruments like tobacco bonds. All across the country we see examples of states and municipalities struggling with bad debts. That’s not bad debt owed to them but bad debts incurred by previous administrations.

The libertarians simply shrug and say they should suffer. The neocons produce 5,000 page plans to restructure the debt using more synthetic securities cooked up by their buddies on Wall Street. Liberals want the courts to just throw it all out like we see with Chicago. That’s merely a short term fix that destroys the bond markets for a generation. If the court every did such a thing, the world financial system would collapse in a hour because of the trillions of derivatives that would be effected.

Anyway, the source of this is the title of this post, information asymmetry:

In contract theory and economics, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case.

The men on Wall Street who broker these deals are super smart and know their business better than anyone, other than maybe the guys at the other banks doing the same deals. The folks running pension funds are either men and women lacking the smarts to work at the big banks or they are not sociopaths. They are usually beholden to the local pols and therefore share their short term motives. They are easy picking for the sharpies on Wall Street. Chicago went into a gun fight dressed as targets, thinking it was a costume party.

There’s no fixing this. In fact, we used to know this. Pension fund managers used to spend their days reading the newspaper and banging their secretaries because all they had to do was buy T-Bills and high end corporate bonds. A chimp could do the job. Then the economics professions lowered interest rates to zero and suddenly the guys with bad comb overs had to start playing the market and doing interest swap deals with the big banks.

My solution is the simple one. Ban borrowing by municipal governments. This solves the temptation to play games with public money and public debt. If Chicago had to budget based solely on its tax base, you would have a different city. Karen Lewis would not be head of the teacher union, because there would most likely not be a teacher union. The power to obligate the unborn to pay for today’s party is what allows the party to grow out of control. You can afford barnacles like Karen Lewis when someone else is paying her salary.

Steve Sailer often says that people in the main stream press know what they are saying is nonsense, but they say it anyway because that’s just the way it is. The really smart ones use subtle language to lampoon the prevailing pieties of those around them. I’m not so sure. It could be, but I’m not sold. I’ve been around a lot of these folks and I suspect they really believe it. Maybe they are really good at pretending or I’m too dumb to find the heretical Easter eggs in their words. Like for instance in this piece.

America is widely considered a global leader in economics, business, and culture. But when it comes to education, the U.S. seems to be falling behind. In the 2012 PISA results, we ranked 27th in math, 17th in reading, and 20th in science. Our high school graduation rates are ranked 18th internationally.

A month ago, I had the pleasure of spending two weeks in Korea and Japan, meeting with leading education, technology, and telecommunications companies, as well as a ministry of education interested in Knewton adaptive learning technology.

I couldn’t help but compare the education systems in these countries to that in the United States. Globally, Korea and Japan have some of the highest rates of academic achievement. In the 2012 PISA survey, Korea was ranked fifth in math and reading and seventh in science; Japan was ranked seventh in math and fourth in reading and science. Japan has the second highest high school graduation rate internationally, with Korea in fifth place.

It’s obvious that Korea and Japan both value education enormously. But so does the United States. We regard education as a basic human right.

So what’s driving this huge discrepancy?

Some say it’s cultural. In America, we prize exceptionalism; in Korea and Japan, the focus is on raising the mean. Others point to socioeconomic inequality; schools can’t fix poverty. American K-12 education is controlled at the local level, making it difficult to implement programs widely. We’re paralyzed by politicized debates over standards, testing, and budgets.

But I think there’s something more important at play here: the way we treat teachers. In Korea and Japan, teachers are revered and paid accordingly. Top students aspire to the profession.

We need to start treating teachers with the respect they deserve. Imagine if Apple, Google, Facebook, and the country’s top tech companies tried to recruit employees without offering them great pay, perks, top-of-the-line technology, development opportunities, and smart colleagues. It would be unthinkable.These companies have spent the time and investment to figure out exactly what it takes to get top people to want to work for them — and, once they’re there, to stay.

Once you correct for race, America’s schools do just fine. Our Koreans score the same as the Koreans in Korea. Our Mauritanians do as well as  Mauritanians wherever it is Mauritanians live. Replace 15% of Japan’s population with Chechens and see what happens to their overall test scores and crime rates. Does this guy know this? My experience say probably not. I’ve had this conversation and the other person looks at me like I’m speaking in tongues. But, maybe I travel in the wrong circles. Perhaps the super smart sophisticates like David Liu use language in a way that rubes like me can’t comprehend and he is really making sport of liberal pieties regarding education and IQ.

Now, I do have the Google and I can find that Mr. Liu seems to have ripped off his claims from a group called the Varkey Gems Foundation that has been humping the idea of treating teachers as gods. I can also look up teacher pay from these guys who do the hard work of tabulating this stuff. Japan’s average pay, in US dollars, is $43,775 and South Korea is $43,874. The US is at $44,917. So much for his claims about how we pay our teachers compared to the Orient. The US, by the way, is the second highest pay rate, just behind Singapore. You’ll notice in the HuffPo report that the US also does just as well on the respect scale.

Further, the average pay for a software engineer is $69, 215 per year. It is also an infinity more difficult job requiring an IQ at least one standard deviation higher than a teacher. Education majors score at the bottom of the SAT for incoming freshmen. Many struggle with basic math. Many states were forced to scrap their teacher exams because the teachers kept flunking. In some cities, teachers cannot be fired resulting in perverts and degenerates on the payroll. None of this is tolerated in fields like software engineering. There are far fewer people with the IQ to do software than teach gym at the elementary school. That’s why the software job pays better.

I can see why Sailer thinks these guys are putting us on. How can someone be so wrong and made it to adulthood?