The office building in which I work is having some renovations done. The renovations have been going on for so long I no longer remember when they started. The office towers are having the windows replaced. They do a space when it becomes vacant so it has been on-going for a long time. The tenants on our floor moved out so they have been doing the windows in those units. For some reason we agreed to let them do out office last week. As a result I am working at home.

The plan was to let them do their thing starting last Wednesday and they would be done by Monday. Of course, they were not done by Monday. My office looked like a bomb went off yesterday morning. Some Hispanic guys were milling around with tools, but that’s all they were doing. Another Hispanic guy, who was obviously of European stock, appeared to be in charge. The rest looked like extras from a National Geographic special on the Mayans. Lots of little brown oompa-loompas.

The guy in charge tried hard to avoid me, but I finally cornered him. He was evasive in that Latin way you know if you have ever been to South America. They appear to be saying yes, but they are so vague you really have no idea. On the one hand they are effusively agreeing with you. On the other they are never actually committing to do that which will resolve the confrontation. In my case, I wanted to know when the job would be done. The guy in charge said a few hours, but maybe a few days. Who knows?

Watching the scene, I got a good dose of the Latin Way. This is when a job requiring five people has ten people trying to do it. Because it is a five person job, the extra five people slow down the required five people. Another take on this is where they have three people working in such a way that they produce the work of one person. To white people, two working together can do the work of three. three working together produce the work of five. For Latin America, it never works out this way.

Yesterday morning, that meant some of the Mayans moving around with tools in their hand,  others taking turns moving a ladder around the room. Then some of the tool carriers would move a ladder or maybe move some tools around. Everyone once in a while they would say something in their language and one would leave for some reason and the return empty handed. They were working hard, but with no purpose. Instead of screwing off, they just looked busy, but the result is the same.

I fully understand why contractors, landscapers and so forth like Latin labor. They show up and try hard. With the right supervision, they can be excellent workers. That’s the problem. There’s no “smart fraction” coming over to supervise the Mayans. This old chart from the NY Times lays it out clearly. The Mexican immigrants coming to America are mostly dimwits. Add in the cultural issues and the odds of this group spawning a smart fraction capable of rising up in a modern technological society is rather slim.

This is the fundamental problem with the pro-immigration argument. The cheerleaders operate as if every human on the planet is capable of becoming the next Steve Jobs, which is so obviously not true it has to be a lie. Even when they acknowledge that some fraction are never going to be more than guys who carry things for a living, they claim that children of these people will magically flower into high IQ strivers. Biology says that is no more likely than some generation of cats producing litters of puppies.

At the other end the open borders crowd likes to extol, we have Indians. That’s sub-Himalayan Indians. I see car loads of them coming in to work at a programming or engineering shop. There are firms around here that specialize in bringing in these people on John McCain Temporary Work Visas. Those visas he thinks we need to create, despite having over twenty types of them now. These firms rent out apartments, set them up with bunk beds and pack them with Indian engineers and programmers.

What this is all about is avoiding the cost of locals. You can bring in an entry level programmer for about two-thirds the cost of training a college kid. Unlike the college kid, they have no outside distractions, don’t take days off and don’t require constant supervision. Their upside is very low, but they are temps so who cares. If anyone wants to know why kids are not going into STEM fields, just look at the numbers. Pay for engineers and programmers has been stagnant for two decades.

I think the dilemma for patriotic Americans is they sympathize with the contractors and landscapers. The Mayans seem nice. They work hard, even if they are not terribly bright. Everyone knows why the contractors prefer these people over the alternative. At the other end, the Indians also seem nice, when you see them. Unless you are in a stem field or very observant, you don’t notice the 100,000 or so temporary STEM workers brought into to cut the throats of Americans.

John Derbyshire has been banging the climate change drum lately on his weekly broadcasts. I suspect listeners are disappointed in his apparent embrace of the alarmist position on climate change. Most on the Right instinctively oppose the climate change theology of the Left. Most are skeptical about what is promoted as science, in the same way they are skeptical about utopian claims. I certainly find it surprising that an otherwise sensible person would stake out this position:

And just a footnote here on my own position. I defined it last week as affirmative on warming, agnostic on the causes, negative on alarmism and hysteria. I got a lot of email and read it all carefully. As a result, there’s been a shift in my position. Hey, there’s no disgrace in changing your mind in response to persuasive arguments.

I’m still affirmative on warming and negative on big globalist programs to counter it. I’m no longer agnostic on causes though. Yes, I’m persuaded that at least some of the warming is due to human activity. So instead of affirmative, agnostic, negative, now put me down as affirmative, guardedly affirmative, and negative.

John is an empirically minded person with a strong interest in science. He is not, however, a scientist. Specifically, he is not a climate scientist. Therefore he is unqualified to come down on key parts of the topic. This is true of most people, even people who are climate scientists. It is a massive subject with many narrow specialties within it. There is no one authority one can point to on this stuff. Instead, there are competing tribes with agendas other than the search for truth.

Further, the science is new and woefully incomplete. That does not mean climate science has not accumulated a lot of useful data that allows for some preliminary conclusions, but this is not physics. We are just scratching the surface of an enormously complex topic. Again, that’s not to say the alarmists are all wrong or that Richard Lindzen is a modern Galileo. We don’t know right now. Consider this from Haldane:

Even if man does not perish in a dramatic manner, there is no reason why civilization should not do so. All civilization apparently goes back to a common source less than ten thousand years ago, possible in Egypt. It is a highly complicated invention which has probably been made only once. if it perished it might never be made again.

When in the past its light was extinguished in one area – for example when the Angles and Saxons wrecked Roman Britain – it could be lit again from elsewhere, as our savage ancestors were civilized from Italy and Ireland.

A modern world followed by revolutions might destroy it all over the planet. if weapons are as much improved in the next century as in the last, this will probably happen. But unless atomic energy can be tapped, which is wildly unlikely, we know that it will never be possible to box up very much rapidly available energy in a given place than we can already box up in a high explosive shell, nor has any vapor much more poisonous than mustard gar been discovered in the forty-one years that have elapsed since that substance was first produced. I think, therefore, that the odds are slightly against such a catastrophic end of civilization.

That’s from The Inequality of Man, written in 1937. Haldane was the father of population genetics and one of the best scientific minds of his day. I think that bit is actually from a talk he did with H. G. Wells, but I don’t have the book in front of me. He was hilariously wrong about all sorts of things. Most notably, he was an enthusiastic supporter of Soviet communism. H. G. Wells, the John Derbyshire of his day, was similarly wrong about important stuff. The properly skeptical person is wise to wait on new science like climatology before jumping to many conclusions.

The other thing about the climate change stuff is it has all the trappings of a political racket. We never hear the word “consensus” in other areas of science, unless it is in a discussion of the current state of speculative science. In other words, members of a particular field may say there is a consensus around this or that guess being right, but nowhere in science is the truth put up to a vote.

More important, the folks who know they are right don’t conduct witch hunts and demand those who disagree with them be thrown out of the profession. At the minimum, someone with a passion for science should recoil in horror at what is clearly anti-scientific attitudes. Much of what people like Michael Mann have been doing flies in the face of accepted scientific debate and open inquiry. When you have the facts on your side, there’s no need to resort to these tactics.

I’m fond of saying that economics is closer to tarot card reading than physics on the empiricism scale.  It is not just a pithy put-down. Economics is the one area of practical mathematics where getting the wrong answer is of no consequence. The reason is no one ever gets the right answer. I’m not talking about predicting the future. The future is not written, at least we don’t think so, which means conditions can change between the time you make a prediction and the point in the future being predicted.

Economics, I’m talking macroeconomics, deals is loads of complexity. The economy of the United States is the daily economic activity of 300 million people, plus every country with whom we conduct business. The millions of variables in play makes forecasting problematic. Even long after the fact it is hard to really know how much economic activity took place in a certain place at a certain time. Despite this, economists act as if they possess the ability to accurately forecast the future.

It is not quite superstition, but the guy with the bone in his nose is within hailing distance of the town’s economist. The witch doctor thinks he is tapping into some universal truth that transcend time and place. That gives him the ability to diagnose the present and predict the future. Economics takes the same view. Every human action has some perfect model in the stars that only the economist can see. They can therefore look at current activity and predict the future compared to the world of forms.

Immigration is a great example. To the sane person, it is obvious that the people of a nation hold the exclusive right to determine who can and who cannot enter. To an economist, not such right exists. Any passing opportunist must be free to set up camp because the economist believes it will please the gods of efficiency. The fact that none of them would let you borrow their pencil much less pitch a tent in their yard is dismissed as irrelevant. Economics is modern shamanism.

Here’s a good example of how this weird religion has spread like kudzu across the West. The Scots will decide if they will to remain a part of Great Britain or become independent. From what I’ve read, they will not actually be independent as London will continue to rule their foreign policy. Scotland will become something like Puerto Rico without the rum and fine weather.

To an uncultured ear, that sounds like a reasonable thing. Scotland has been in Great Britain since 1707 and done pretty well as a consequence. If they now think it is better to go it alone, that’s for them to decide. Patriotism, tradition, nostalgia and mere taste are probably the primary motivations for the voters. That’s what sane people should expect. Instead, the smart set says things like this:

I’m against Scottish independence because I’m horrified at the prospect of our country being dismantled. I’d also argue that an independent Scotland is an economic nonsense. I’m not saying a country of 5m people, with a wealth of know-how, couldn’t survive. The problem is that the cultural, historic and commercial ties that bind us are too tight to safely be cut.

They can be symbolically severed, yes, with the creation of yet another expensive layer of Scottish government, with all the special advisers, civil servants and juicy public sector per diems that would bring to Edinburgh’s already cosseted political elite. But as far as the rest of the world is concerned, we’re one entity — a reality that’s prevailed for centuries, long before the 2012 Olympics.

Crucially, Scotland’s still extremely precarious financial services industry is viewed as UK-backed — and that means the Bank of England. The Scottish commercial banks, with their vast liabilities, and still unresolved off-balance-sheet losses, will always physically reside in Britain.

A perfectly good argument against this vote is based in history and tradition. The English can argue that he likes his country the way it is and will not go along with changing it. He may respect the Scots desire for independence, but it is not in the best interest of the British, who happen to be in charge, so they will not permit the vote or Scottish independence. Put another way, the English answer to the Scottish demand can be “No, because we said so. Discussion over.”

Instead, the writer feels it necessary to work through a bunch of pseudo-scientific reasons as to why the maths say it is a bad idea. Everyone in the West is petrified to stand up and say they want what they want because they want it. Cultural pride is so taboo we have otherwise reasonable people claiming the maths are on their side in the same way Druids thought the gods were on their side. The West is slipping into paganism and the economics profession is supplying the shamans. Worse yet, we are slipping into a tyranny of shamans. At least the old priesthoods knew their limits. I say if you see an economist, beat him. He will know why.

On libertarian sites, I’ve seen the following quote attributed to Gandhi. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I took it on faith that Gandhi said it. I don’t care that much about Gandhi so his sayings don’t move me in any important way.  I looked it up and found that Gandhi never said it. Instead it was some middle management type named Nicholas Klein. But hey, it could have been said by Gandhi….

I was web surfing and stumbled onto this post by Rod Dreher. I have vague recollections of Rod Dreher writing for National Review and then going crazy for a while about environmentalism. I may have the facts wrong, but I recall reading a column by Jonah Goldberg saying goodbye to his crazy former friend. He did not call him crazy, but it was implied. According to his Wiki page, he wrote a manifesto, which is the sort of thing you do if you’re the Unabomber or starting a cult.

His views don’t strike me as unusually weird, but maybe I have a very generous definition of what it means to be weird, at least in the realm of politics. Dreher is now a regular at The American Conservative, which is a fairly mainstream site, even if they are shunned by Conservative Inc. Unlike the National Review crowd, they are not on MSNBC all day, but their writers turn up at establishment sites once in a while, so Dreher is not exactly wring for a fringe publication now.

The point, I think, is that dissident thinking, as in the general questioning of the status quo on the Right, is making headway into respectable places. To be clear, I have my doubts about how much realism can be tolerated. What John Derbyshire calls race-realism has plenty of merit, but there are too many people in the race-realism club who are just racists. At some point, the immune system of Conservative Inc. will kick in and start purging anyone with incorrect opinions on the blank slate and egalitarianism…

While I was over at TAC, I consumed this story about the schism on the Conventional Right. One of the things I want to go into more one day is the ridiculousness of the right-left model of framing political philosophy. In America, Progressiveness is a well-defined cultural, political and economic movement. Putting American Progressives on the Left, using the European model, is informative, but not authoritative.

On the Continent, the Right-Left dynamic is centered entirely on nationalism. Marxist-Leninism in an internationalist creed. Socialism, particularly Fascism, is a nationalist creed. Hitler is on one end, Stalin is on the other. Their disagreements on economics were trivial compared to their cultural differences. With the collapse of communism, even the Left in Europe is now pro-EU, while the Right is slowly forming into a populist and nationalist bloc. Same divide, different roles for each side.

Using the old Left-Right model for America is ridiculous. Putting the Reason Magazine crowd on the same side as Hitler is laughably ridiculous. In America, it has been the Left that has embraced fascist economics. Communism never got much of a purchase, other than the cultural variety after the war.  A political spectrum that somehow has American Progressives at the opposite end of people with whom they largely agree is a pretty weird spectrum. It’s not very useful, other than for partisan rhetoric.

Then you have the people who are not Progressives. Pat Buchanan and William Kristol agree on very little. They also hate one another. Putting them on the Right together is a category error. In the American Conservative article you see how the Right-Left model falls to pieces. Paul Gottfried remains trapped in the model, which fouls his assessment of Strauss. He’s spending so much time trying to make sense of the model, he mangles Strauss in the process…

Steve Sailer thinks the Open Borders crowd is carrying the day. That’s true for now, but it is a long game. Politics is the portion of the culture war above the waterline. Sometimes, it looks like one side is winning, but underneath the water a massive force is building that will become public. That’s what the immigration looks like right now. The people pushing open borders control the media. They think they are winning, but in reality they are building an opposition that will crush them at some point…

Someone took me to task for grammar and spelling mistakes on this blog. My response was that I don’t worry too much about those issues as this is a blog. Spelling should always be correct in public writing. I really should run these post through a spell check before posting them, but I’m often writing on the fly, so I miss stuff. This is a blog, which means it is like a public diary. I doubt anyone has ever spell checked their journal or their personal diary. Maybe they do, I’ve never kept a diary.

Now grammar is another story. My first contact with a rigid grammarian was when I was in college. He had, as far as I could tell, nothing to offer the curious mind. Instead he occupied himself with grammar, particularly the grammar of others. Ever since I’ve thought writers should feel free to go wild with the rules of grammar if that allows them to easily make their point. The point of grammar is to make communication easier, not more difficult. That means some degree of flexibility is required…

Apparently, only old men recall anything about the Cold War. During the Olympics, commentators on NBC were calling the Soviet Union a pivotal experiment in human affairs. In fairness, they don’t hire smart people with work these things. They hire people with high verbal dexterity, able to sound natural while getting instructions from producers and directors. They are actors more than anything else.

Even so, the bad old days of Soviet communism have receded so far into the past, they exist only in the imaginary space. The people directing the commentators have only an academic understanding of the Cold War. Since NBC only hired far left-wing people, that means they only have an academic understanding for why they are supposed to defend communism. They don’t know why they believe these things, they just know they are supposed to so they cook up weird language to describe Bolshevism.

The real horror of the Soviet Union was not the gulags or the dreary aesthetic. The part that made American’s skin crawl was the idea of having to get permission from the state bureaucracy for everything. If you wanted to travel to another part of the country, you needed permission. If you wanted a car, you needed permission. Bureaucrats being what they are the answer was either going to be “no” or “yes but” and what followed was a nightmare. American’s like to believe they have free will and freedom.

The image of going down to the DMV to get permission for every decision in your life is still frightening to most Americans, despite the reality on the ground.. That’s what the average American could relate to and found monstrous. Decades after the Soviets are gone, many of the same people who were proud Cold Warriors now defend nonsense like this. Andrew McCarthy, a regular at Buckley’s old haunt, defends the surveillance state with the enthusiasm of a fanatic.

After seven years of litigation, two trips to a federal appeals court and $3.8 million worth of lawyer time, the public has finally learned why a wheelchair-bound Stanford University scholar was cuffed, detained and denied a flight from San Francisco to Hawaii: FBI human error.

FBI agent Kevin Kelley was investigating Muslims in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004 when he checked the wrong box on a terrorism form, erroneously placing Rahinah Ibrahim on the no-fly list.

In a free country, the government is not ticking off many boxes. When they do make a mistake, it is easily found and corrected. It most likely has little or no impact on the citizen, more of a nuisance than a real inconvenience. The government is simply not doing enough to cast much of a shadow over the land. That was the state of things in America until fairly recent. That started changing after the war and has slowly crept us up to a place where most things require permission from the state.

In the permission state, the smallest mistake can take years and millions to correct. The lives of vast numbers of people can be thrown into turmoil. The state becomes a vast machine, in side which turn massive gears connected to other massive gears. Inside those gears lie smaller gears. It is how the state thinks it is good idea allow anyone other than diplomats to travel to the United States from Malaysia. It is how normal people end up on no-fly lists needing years to rectify.

Another feature of the permission state is the people working inside it, those wheels and gears, are immune from punishment for mistakes. Everyone inside feels a need to protect everyone inside, so they close ranks anytime there is public scrutiny of the system. As a result, any effort to fix problems because an Alice in Wonderland adventure into the bureaucracy. They also lie about what they are doing. In the late empire phase of America, a defining feature is non-stop perjury from government.

Welcome to the permission state.

Eric Hoffer famously said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” There’s certainly a lot of truth to it, but he dismisses the religious aspects that carry through to the racket stage. Al Gore is making millions from the climate change racket, but he still believes it. The rest of the cult really believes it. There are plenty of movements run by cynical opportunists, but the congregation is still emotionally invested in the faith.

This post by Tyler Cowen is a good example.

Also, underlying this is the assumption that a society contains some finite amount of benefit that will be used up or diluted if more people are allowed entry. When in fact, it is possible that these additional people could be contributing to the society and increasing the benefit to everyone.

It is not at all clear why everybody should always have a right to go to another society to enjoy what other people have created.

To the skeptic, futurism is more annoying than instructive. The reason is the futurist is very rarely right about what comes next. Every once in a while, one of them gets something right, but it is always chance. Nassim Taleb is a good example. He became famous for “predicting” the financial collapse at the end of the last decade. Since then he has been on radio, TV and the internet making predictions. None of them have panned out. He’s a smart guy, but he is not a fortune teller, despite acting like one.

What futurists tend to get right is the stuff everyone gets right. For example, mortality rates are 100% over time. Predicting that someone or something will eventually end is not a worthwhile prediction. On the other hand, if you can accurately predict the day someone will die or some trend will reverse, that has value. To date, no one has been able to do that. Similarly, no one has been able to predict the future with a degree of accuracy that is useful. Nothing ages quicker the predictions about the future.

These days, futurists are all in on the robot future. Jobs will go away, except for the smart fraction who will run the robots. The rest of humanity will be on reservations guarded by and tended to by robots. It’s a version of Brave New World, except the robots lower classes will be replaced with robots. The custodial state will resemble a giant day care center with Mary Poppins being made of titanium alloy.

Some go further and think the smart fraction will be replaced by artificial intelligence that will quickly outstrip its human masters. The future then truly becomes a robot future as the robots, presumably, will snuff out the human population or enslave it. After all, if we think we suck as a species, the super-smart robots will surely know it and respond accordingly. Why would the robots perpetuate mankind, when they agree that people are the worst? These futurists, it seems, have a suicide wish.

It is easy to be skeptical about these things. The reason is all past predictions of the future have been hilariously wrong. A standard gag is to dredge up one of these predictions from some prior age and post it on-line. In the 1950’s computers were going to take over the world. OK, that’s right. The trouble is they imagined them to be the size of houses, looking more like space ships than what we have today. The futurists at the dawn of the microprocessor revolution were completely blind to miniaturization.

That’s the thing with the robot future. It skips past the giant obstacle in the way of reaching anything close to it. That is, humans hate fixed rules. We will never tolerate, for example, robot classroom instruction. We could turn over large swaths of college admissions, for example, to robots right now. Kids take a test and are placed according to their IQ and preparation. Instead we do the opposite and deliberately undermine efforts to do so. After all, we can’t have racist robots running admissions.

A better example is the law. We know with an exacting degree of certainty what the writers of the American Constitution intended when they wrote the document. We know the arguments for and against each section. We know what the men who adopted it thought of the provisions. For instance, we know exactly what they intended with the takings clause. Yet, that’s not how the learned men in robes decided a decade ago in the Kelo versus New London Connecticut.

The law, which is how we organize ourselves, will never be robot driven. The reason is we will never permit it. We like changing the rules when it suits our purposes. The Second Amendment is a case in point. The Founders were abundantly clear on the gun issue. They wanted a society where the citizens possessed the weapons of war, in order to be the ultimate check on state power. That means citizens have an unassailable right to own and carry the weapons one expects a solider to carry.

Despite this indisputable fact, we continue to wrestle with accepting this. States refuse to abide by the rules and courts, on occasion, enforce the rules. A robot built by lawyers would kill itself due to the infinite contradictions in its code. Or, it would be forced to kill all of the lawyers trying to get around black letter law. That would be a glorious result, for sure, but that’s why the lawyers will never allow it. The robot future can only happen if it includes a human future better than one without robots.

Instead of a robot future we will get something else. Laws will be passed to limit the use of automation in many areas of life. New ways to tax those that use automation to reduce costs will “level” the playing field. This will give their human intense competitors the emotional lever to use on customers. “Buy from us! We’re 100% Robot Free!” Just as genetically modified foods have come under assault, robots will face the same challenges. Until the robots can wipe us out, they have no future.

By our way, I mean the into the race realism camp.The answer is most certainly no, as he likes his pay check, but he flirting with dangerous ideas of late. Unsaid in the this post is that he obviously read and probably still reads Steve Sailer, who made some unfortunate observations about New Orleans once. This essay by Williamson has some observations that are the sorts of things that got Sailer hurled into the void. First he gives the standard lines conservatives are allowed to say about economics.

Economists have many different models explaining how economic growth happens. And though the relative merits of those models are hotly contested among economists, as are the relative weights that should be assigned to many variables, a few factors keep turning up: productivity, capital accumulation, population growth, and technological progress. (Those are the basis of the Solow-Swan model of growth.) While government policy certainly has an effect on those factors, they generally operate at some remove from it: You cannot simply pass a law mandating greater productivity or technological innovation. You can encourage your population growth by (for example) liberalizing your immigration rules, which will probably work if you are New Zealand or the United States but not for Rwanda or Haiti, or a sparsely populated rural community in the United States. Policy can encourage capital accumulation, but it cannot ensure it. We have invigorating political fights about the tax code and stimulus spending, and those are important fights to have, but many of the most important factors driving economic growth are beyond direct political control.

That’s the standard product from Conservative Inc. Their’s is a fight lost long ago, but they are still allowed to wear their uniforms and have parades once in while so they wave the flags of free market capitalism. Then we have this:

But there is a critical variable that is at least partly within the direct control of government: the quality of government. The quality of government — its honesty, competence, reliability, and predictability — has an effect on most of the important economic variables. And not just government itself, but other institutions with the power to shape public life, such as unions and large firms. Quality is something outside of and different from policy specifics, which is why similar policies often produce wildly different outcomes in different polities: Single-payer health care in Bahrain turns out to be very different from single-payer health care in Canada. A high level of government-enforced union involvement has been catastrophic for the U.S. automotive industry but not for the German automotive industry, which is a lot less of a mystery than it seems when you account for the fact that the UAW is not IG Metall, GM is not Audi, and the U.S. government is not the German government.

Guess what else is different? That’s right. Ingolstadt is full of Germans while Detroit is full of non-Germans. It is a lot easier to have a sane government when your smart fraction invented large chunks of Western Civilization. When your smart fraction is barely capable of running a small-time drug den without killing one another, you’re probably getting a government that reflects that fact.

There is no way to put a happy face on this fact: Critical American institutions are of shockingly low quality. Corruption is a part of that: At No. 19 on the Transparency International rankings, the United States is tied with Uruguay. Its transparency score of 73 is far behind where you want to be, among such category leaders as Denmark, New Zealand, Sweden, and Finland (91, 91, 89, and 89, respectively). We lag well behind our Canadian neighbors and such important international competitors as Germany. Our overall standing is not terrible, but it does not place us among global leaders, either. Moderation in the pursuit of honesty is no virtue.

There’s an elephant in the room here. Kevin is a bright guy and he must surely know it, but he likes living an easy life so he avoids stating it directly. Further, he surely knows his readership knows it too. Perhaps Kevin Williamson is deliberately doing the dog whistle thing. On the other hand, the blinkered way these guys see the world can never be discounted. it’s possible he has described the elephant in the room without actually noticing it. Some people never notice what’s going on around them.

Every society goes through periods when its ruling class can no longer police itself. The Founders of America recognized this problem and designed a political system that would turnover a little more frequently than what they saw in Europe. For example, the typical king was on the throne for a couple of decades. According to this site, which seems authoritative, the typical British monarch hung around for 21 years.

Even when you drop out long serving monarchs and the short timers, you’re looking at a two decade reign. Most likely, Britain has had fewer violent changes of power than other countries, but that could be wrong. The French had a long run of peaceful transition. The Germans were at the other end as far as length of reign. Even so, most subjects could expect to serve maybe two monarchs in their lifetime.

Hereditary rule has some obvious problems. No matter how well the ruling elites police their own, you can still end up with a lunatic on the throne. Charles VI reigned for 42 years, despite thinking he was a wolf and made of glass. Christian VII of Denmark stuck around for over four decades, despite having an obsession with his penis. He jerked off so much it effected his health. He also would slap people for no reason and insisted on playing leap frog with visiting dignitaries.

When there is no system to prevent a lunatic from gaining power, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a few lunatics in power. When you have no way to remove them you either get some long serving lunatics or you get a lot of assignations. A system that requires the occasional assassination of the ruler invites all sorts of intrigue and paranoia. Every king has to assume he is surrounded by potential assassins. It is just a terrible way to police the ruling class.

Representative democracy is a cure for that. Even if you cannot prevent a lunatic from gaining office, his term will end soon enough. In theory, the churn of office holders will allow the ruling elite to sideline a nut before they get into office. If one slips by, then he can be removed in the next election. It’s not perfect, as the fickleness of voter’s means a good ruler could be turned out over something silly. But, everything is trade-offs, so not having a lunatic in charge comes with the risk of losing a good ruler on occasion.

Up until the 20th century the system worked pretty well in America. There was no way to be a career politician, unless you were wealthy. Most office holders either got rich first or inherited their money. Getting office without having got rich was extremely difficult. It was a pretty good system until socialism came along. The Founders could not imagine a sprawling welfare state with highly paid, semi-permanent office holders in charge of it. But, that’s what Progressives gave us.

Reading this bit of nonsense from Lamar Alexander, who is still alive and still in office, suggests we have entered one of those times when the elites can no longer police their ranks. He is a senator from a sensible state, which means he can be a pest on a national scale. Such an important job should be filled by someone with a stake in the success of the state and its people. Instead it is filled with a lifetime seat warmer who probably lives in Northern Virginia. He takes his vacation to the state he theoretically represents.

It is not a handful of wackos here and there. If some states or regions were struggling to find competent men to staff the elected posts, it would be self-correcting. That’s not the case. It appears to be a problem almost everywhere. Florida has a career criminal in the House. They also have a paranoid schizophrenic. Massachusetts has a sociopath with an imaginary family tree as one of their Senators. You could spend all day listing Congressmen and Senators who are completely nuts or just plain grifters.

The nuts appear to be a minority, but the grifters and sociopaths are probably a majority all elected officials at this point. It is not just the legislature. The ruling class of America has very little in common with Americans. These people look sort of like the people they claim to represent, but they may as well be space aliens. They live in a different world from their citizens and they have alien ideas about the nation.

I think a good starting point of any reform program is to accept the rule that if you have never had a job, you are not an American. That disqualifies you from office. Term limits has been discussed for a long time and it sounds good until you take a look at how the elites operate. The office holders are the tip of the iceberg. The important bit is under the waterline. That’s the vast bureaucracy that ruthlessly enforces the rules, the administrative and managerial class that formulates the rules and the vast army of lobbyists and think tanks who provide the elected officials with marketing material.

So, how is it that Americans have allowed things to degrade to this point? Part of it is fanatics wake up every morning with a plan to advance the cause. Normal people wake up every morning with more pedestrian thoughts in their heads. Another is the natural evolution of a ruling class is to tend to the walls of the castle. They are always looking to secure their position. Over time, they tinker with the rules, change the laws, alter the contract so they face less pressure. Their position becomes unassailable.

The solution, of course, is for the public to revolt and hang all of these people. It’s not that the next group will be better quality. It’s that they will operate with the knowledge they could be hanged at any moment. Perhaps installing a gallows outside the door of the House. Every poll has to pass through the shadow of it on the way in and out of the building. They say the prospect if imminent death focuses the mind.

Facebook sent a notification to all of their users about a new feature. They report 200 million clicked on the link to make a video. That’s a lot of people, but only a fraction of their claimed user base. Given the feature requires very little from the user, they cannot claim that the other one billion users just lacked the time to do it. In other words, 200 million is probably their active user base.

How “sticky” those users are is debatable, but the volume of active users is consistent with other on-line results. People forget that Facebook did not invent social media. It was around for a couple of decades before FB came along. As a result we have a lot of data on it. The people claiming to know about this stuff lack the institutional memory to think about these earlier efforts at social media, but it exists.

Message boards, bulletin boards and so on are a lot like talk radio. That is, you have many more passive users than active users. Talk radio knows they have roughly one caller for every 100 listeners. They also know that the set of possible callers has a subset of regular callers that follows the Pareto principle. That’s how they can tell how many people are listening to a show. If the lines are lit up, they have a big audience.

Message boards will have 90% of their posts from five percent of users. About 10% of users visit daily. The rest drift by weekly and monthly. Back when sites like Scout and Rivals were looking for investors, they would claim user counts that were technically true, but not reflective of active users or paying customers. The ratio was 10:1 free accounts to paying accounts. That’s a different metric, but it reinforces the larger point.

There’s another thing with Facebook. How long are the users on-line? When I had an account, I’d check in most mornings with my coffee. Three minutes later I was reading another site. Mobile users are on the site for brief clips throughout the day, but not enough to be called active users. A billion users logging in for thirty seconds a day is not much of user base when you revenue depends on them clicking your ads.

Add to this the click farm stuff and you have to wonder if Facebook is not one giant confidence game. Even if that is too strong, how in the world can you justify a $165 billion market cap for an ad engine touching 200 million worldwide? Many of those “users” are living in huts or are children with no money of their own. How many are just robots that click on everything? The quality of those clicks count for everything.