Drug War Inc. is making a stab at fighting back against the wave of pot legalization that is sweeping the country. Fighting drugs has been big business for decades now so the folks profiting from it are mature businesses and institutions. Millions depend on the never ending war on drugs for their livelihood. If the libertarians are correct and close to half our prison population is in the system for drugs, that’s a million people.

It probably takes that many to keep them in cages. You have the guards, their unions, the union bosses and the vast administrative layer. You have the people who build and maintain the cages. Then you have the cops and courts who chase and process the criminals. They have their suppliers and unions. Fighting the drug war is a multi-billion dollar industry that serves another multi-billion dollar industry, the political class. The politicians have been using the drug war to scare up votes for generations.

One way to justify their existence appears to be the claim that legalization will breed a whole new type of crime that must be fought by Drug War Inc. Certainly, these new businesses, flush with cash, will be targeted by criminals. The same people stealing copper pipe so they can sell it to buy meth will try to break into weed shops, rob the customers and so forth. Simply decriminalizing the buying and selling of weed is not going to change the fact that it is a cash business conducted by low-lifes.

That can be reduced by letting the pot dealers open merchant accounts to take credit cards and bank accounts to deposit their cash. They will need to adopt the same security tactics pawn shops and check cashing operations have adopted. Korean liquor store owners in Baltimore and Washington have solved the problem of running a cash business in black neighborhoods so the pot shops have plenty of examples. The above ground nature of it would then draw in professionals who know how to solve these problems

That’s not going to deter Drug War Inc from making their claims. You can be sure they will be rushing to the nearest news studio with any evidence of new crime arising from the weed shops. I don’t doubt that the black market weed dealers will seek some way to keep their business going and that may include attempts to get in on the act. Talk to any cop working narcotics cases and he’ll tell you that drug dealers like crime. If not for drugs, they would be into some other illegal activity. Criminals will always be with us.

The question is whether they will muscle in on the legal weed business. Organized crime has long been into illegal cigarettes. They steal them and sell them at a discount to convenience stores, but that’s a low level crime. The more profitable venture is to get large quantities from low tax states and send them to high tax states, without paying the tax. When Canada imposed a massive tax on cigarettes in the 1990’s, bootleggers set up shop in upstate New York to smuggle Marlboros and Camels into Canada.

Another way they can get in on the racket is through extortion, but that’s not a great crime these days. America is loaded with cops looking to arrest someone. The value proposition of extortion is just not what it was in the old days. Going into a retail joint and telling them to pay or you break their legs works if the cops are not prepared to intercede. That was the case in the heyday of the Mafia. Today the cops are the protection racket and they will not let anyone muscle in on their turf, so this seems unlikely.

Of course, the other side to this is that it is an example of anarcho-tyranny. Tasked with stopping the flow of drugs, Drug War Inc. eventually turned into a business and then a racket. It lost interest in actually stopping the flow of drugs and instead focused on terrorizing local potheads. Maybe what comes after anarcho-tyranny is just a massive set of institutions that consume resources, but do nothing.

One of the fun parts of reading old books is that you run into things that everyone knew to be true, but was completely false. Medicine is a great example. The worst thing that could happen to a sick person 200 years ago was that they doctor arrived. Up until very recent, medicine killed more people than it cured. Their medicine looks more like witchcraft than science. Strapping people to a gurney and hitting them with high voltage is pretty much barbarism. In its day, however, everyone was sure it was the peak of scientific reasoning.

That said, much of what gets labeled science today will be looked upon as nutty superstition in not so long. It’s not actually science, of course, but the term is so abused that future people will probably assume everyone agreed that things like sociology and economics were science. Most people have always known that psychology, for example, was quackery, but will future people know we knew that? Or will they just read the old books and assume we were that silly?  Will they know this was considered nonsense?

Within American gender norms is the expectation that women should be modest. We argue that violating this “modesty norm” by boasting about one’s accomplishments causes women to experience uncomfortable situational arousal that leads to lower motivation for and performance on a self-promotion task. We hypothesized that such negative effects could be offset when an external source for their situational arousal was made available. To test hypotheses, 78 women students from a U.S. Northwestern university wrote a scholarship application essay to promote the merits of either the self (modesty norm violated) or another person as a letter of reference (modesty norm not violated). Half were randomly assigned to hear information about a (fake) subliminal noise generator in the room that might cause “discomfort” (misattribution available) and half were told nothing about the generator (normal condition: misattribution not available). Participants rated the task and 44 new naive participants judged how much scholarship money to award each essay. Results confirmed predictions: under normal conditions, violating the modesty norm led to decreased motivation and performance. However, those who violated the modesty norm with a misattribution source reported increased interest, adopted fewer performance-avoidance goals, perceived their own work to be of higher quality, and produced higher quality work. Results suggest that when a situation helps women to escape the discomfort of defying the modesty norm, self-promotion motivation and performance improve. Further implications for enhancing women’s academic and workplace experiences are discussed.

First off, biology makes women modest. There’s a reason we don’t have cultures on this planet where the women are aggressive and rowdy. Humans, like all life, have a primary purpose baked into the software and that’s reproduction. Males and females of our species have different reproduction strategies based in large part on our different roles in reproduction. This has nothing to do with “gender norms” made up by the ridiculous people in the oogily-boogily departments of modern colleges and universities..

Second, this nonsense is funded by tax payer and rate payers. Those future historians will no doubt know this and assume that the people of earth in this age really thought this nonsense was real and worth funding it. The reason we have those old books was because rich people were willing to bankroll their production. What that means is the answer to the question about how we will be viewed by future people is probably the same as we view past people. Future man will wonder why we did not progress very much.

I’m not a fan of democracy as a form of government. I think the Founders had it about right. For a country like ours, a republic is the way to go. State legislatures pick their senators, the people pick their congressmen and the Electoral College picks the president. The people should be consulted, but mob rule is no way to run a country or even a state. Society needs leadership and it needs executive action.

That does not mean there’s no room for democracy. In small groups, democracy is a great way to adjudicate the issued effecting everyone. Small towns or even cities can work just fine with a health dose of democracy. As long as you accept there will be a dumb fraction that insists on getting a ballot, you can make it work. You just have to set the rules so the dumb do not derail the project. A good example of that is the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Yesterday, Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux and Frank Thomas were elected to the Hall after missing a few times. All three are good candidates as they were elite players of their generation. As is always the case with elections, there is a parade of whiners who think the system must be defective simply because they did not like the result. These people tend to make silly arguments though. Jeff Passan is a good example:

Because, hell yes, it’s shameful that writers who demand openness from those they write about can hide behind some self-administered cloak of anonymity and cast votes with no merit. And you’re damn right that if 50 percent of the 10-man ballots were stuffed and voters copped to wanting to vote for Biggio except he was No. 11, the process deserves – demands – to undergo a thorough vetting and reconsideration. There are problems in the voting, no question, and in his explanation at Deadspin, Le Batard did a poignant job at pointing them out and forcing the BBWAA to ask itself how to remedy them.

Obviously, he struggles with the difference between the role of a reporter as a reporter and his role as a voter. Only a simpleton would demand these people post their ballot for president, but, sports writers are kind of dumb. The best example of this is Dan LeBatard, the ESPN personality who sold his ballot to a scandal site. The guy can be entertaining on TV, but he is otherwise a dullard. It takes a special skill to be funny and clever on TV, but it is not the same as general intelligence. Dumb people make the best clowns.

What has these people worked up is the absence of the cheaters. The voters can’t bring themselves to vote for the guys everyone knows cheated to make a name for themselves in baseball. The voting suggests guys like Bonds, Clemens and others will never get in through the ballot. Instead, they will have to appeal to the veterans committee in a decade or so in order to get into the Hall. The veterans are notorious for being protective of the Hall, but they have rectified past mistakes so it is a nice check on the whims of the voters.

What we are seeing with the Hall and the steroid users is democracy at its best. It is messy and seemingly incoherent, but the result is very wise. The players who deserve to be in, despite their transgressions, will get in eventually, but they will be made to wait as a form of punishment. Once no one cares enough to keep up the punishment, they will be voted into the HoF. It’s not perfect, but this is pretty close to the ideal of democracy, but it can only work at the small scale and when the stakes are very low.

Jim Geraghty has a post up on National Review Online about the “polarization” of the public over politics. Usually what these guys mean by polarization is that the public is not buying what the media is selling them. When a non-liberal shows up on campus to give a speech and is heckled, he is polarizing. When an abortion fanatic shows up at a Catholic college and is heckled, he is courageous. Anyway, the point of his post is that people are mad and it has nothing to do with politics.  I posted this in the comments:

First off, Frank Luntz is probably a sincere person and all around great guy, but his profession is closer to witchcraft on the empiricism scale than it is to science. He makes his living telling the Sean Hannity audience what they want to hear. I don’t want to call him a charlatan as I think he believe this stuff. If he were not performing on the Hannity show, he would be watching it.

Second, income inequality is not just a leftist fad for the political season. Keep in mind that the Left has embraced the modern tools of crowd sourcing. While far from perfect, they are very useful in defining trends. Americans are increasingly aware that the folks in charge live vastly different lives than the rest of us. There’s also a growing suspicion that the interests of the ruling class are at odds with the middle class. A rich tech billionaire moaning about paying his market rate does not go unnoticed.

Third, this is not the first time America has seen this sort of problem. The new robber barons are different in that they are Davos men, cosmopolitan citizens of the world who got rich from global capitalism. Their loyalty to country and culture is nearly non-existent. That makes them seem <i>alien</i> to the hoi polloi. The robber barons of old were men who embraced country and culture.

Global capitalism is a boon to rich people in rich countries and smart people in poor countries. It is a bane to the middle class of rich countries. As a political matter, the GOP has a choice. It can be the party of the middle class and stop chasing after the favor of the plutocrats. This, I suspect, is a lost cause. Alternatively, they can go back to their historic role as accountants to the ruling class. The Left works on reorganizing society and the Right keeps the books.

The narrative says the GOP represents conservatives, by which is meant middle-class white people, but that’s a myth. The recent actions of Boehner and McConnel make that clear. The early embrace of Chris Christie as the choice for 2016 is another clear sign the party would like to be rid of the Tea Party and the other non-conformists. For half a century, the GOP was about defending the public finances and defending against the communists. Otherwise, they went along with whatever the liberal democrats wanted.

A careful reading of history shows that all ruling elites have these two factions. One side wants to charge ahead with all sorts of schemes. The other side wants to tap the breaks and steer clear of trouble.  Otherwise, they agree on most of the important stuff. In modern times, we are seeing the ruling elites move closer, as they begin to define themselves in opposition to the people over whom they rule. In Europe, this is well under way as formerly ideological opposites are now in power sharing deals. The Tories and Labor, for example

The question is whether the people on the outside will go along with this deal. In America, the slow grinding down of the middle-class is not going unnoticed. Europe has all sorts of weird social unrest. People are unlikely to go along with a new system where everyone is relatively poor compared to the ruling elite. Then there is the question of sustainability, as global capitalism rests on the belief that borrowing rates at the top can always be zero.

This can only work if the elites can control capital almost entirely and even then, it is hard to see how that can be sustained. People will first note that “both parties” fail to deliver, while the wealth gap grows ever wider. Then the people notice that voting has no effect on the process. That’s when people start looking for option, usually at the extremes. The Left will search out screamers who promise to rally the fringes against the middle-class whites, while those middle-class whites tart listening to those promising to defend their stuff.

In the end, gross inequality leads to social unrest.

Something I could not help but notice over the holidays is the near complete purging of Christ from Christmas. This has been a topic of debate for years now, but the steady retreat of Christianity from the public space is remarkable. Not too long ago, America had a president who was overtly Christian. He talked about Christ in public and regularly attended services. Within living memory, public figures would take time during Christmas to proclaim their faith and wish their fellow Christians Merry Christmas.

Today, we have mainstream news sites debating whether we should move Christmas to a weekend, rather than its traditional date. I had exactly zero cards this year with the word Christmas on them. Instead it was happy holidays, as if there were a variety of holidays from which to choose. When I said “Merry Christmas” to people, they looked at me like I was a heretic. Not everyone, some people brightened up and return the favor, but the fact is, the bad guys have won on the issue of Christmas.

According to Wikipedia, 43% of Americans attend church regularly. Without digging into the statistics, I would expect some large portion of the 57% to be “C&E” Christians. That is, people who attend at Christmas and Easter. That’s significant compared to other first world countries. France is at 12% and Canada are at 20%. These are two nations with historically high religiosity. Parts of central Europe have attendance rates in the single digits. In the West, Christianity is just about dead, but America remains a hold out.

The signs, however, point to that changing. One of those signs is the near perfect elimination of Christianity from Christmas now.  Within living memory a mainstream publication would have avoided publishing an article about moving Christmas. Today it gets a shrug. A lot of that has to do with the elites abandoning Christianity for multiculturalism and various Progressive fad. They have also decided that Christianity is for the bad people, so it has become a mark of goodness to not be a Christian.

The regional breakout on church attendance is interesting:

The lower rate of church attendance seems to correlate with the embrace of Progressive politics, but it also tracks with regionalism. At the bottom is the ancestral home of the American round heads, while the top is where we find the cavaliers. The one exception is Utah, which was founded by heretics from the old New England Protestantism. Even so, there are not a lot of Republican states in the bottom half of that chart.

There are exceptions, but those exceptions seem to be so-called battleground states like Florida. I cynical eye would say these states are slowly sinking into the same morass as the low-marriage, low church attendance states. In a decade they will go from states that trend against the Left to states that are reliably Left like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Every four years the non-liberals would get their hopes up and think they have a shot to win there, only to find out the Left rallied enough of their supporters  to carry the day.

Now that legalizing the weed is the new thing, it did not take long for business to jump on the trend. Spirit Airlines is now offering Get Mile High fares to Colorado.

Spirit Airlines is known for jumping into the political debate with it’s irreverent advertising and it certainly wasn’t going to let a golden opportunity like marijuana legalization in Colorado slip by.

“The no smoking sign is off,” an advertisement on the airline’s website reads. “Get Mile High with $10 off your next flight. Fares so low they’re barely legal in some states.”

On the offer’s landing page, Spirit says, “If you want to make a beeline for Colorado right now, we don’t blame you — but we’re up to take you to plenty of chill destinations. … Book today … and be sure to pack some munchies.”

Colorado citizens who are 21 and older are now permitted to purchase recreational marijuana.

Spirit has been known to push the envelope with some of its ads. In 2011, Spirit capitalized on the Anthony Weiner Twitter photo scandal by offering “The Weiner Sale: With Fares Too HARD To Resist.”

In 2012, the airline capitalized on the U.S. Secret Service prostitution scandal by offering “More Bang for your Buck” for flights to Cartagena, Colombia.

This was entirely predictable. Once you legalize weed, there is money to be made in selling weed. There is money in expanding the market for it and that means normalizing the selling and consumption of it. The vast commercial machine used to sell everything from airplanes to pencils will swing into motion to spread the use of marijuana. That is the hidden value of prohibition. It prevents the massive marketing machine that is American commerce from promoting the thing that is actively prohibited.

While you may not care about this, lots of middle class parents do care. They will begin agitating for new rules to end the “marketing of weed to their kids.” A politician, looking for an angle, will propose rules to curb this stuff. No one will dare fight it because no one wants to be seen as in favor of selling weed to kids. Before long, we end up with what we see with cigarettes  or worse. I doubt we see a rollback on the legalization process, but the rules on weed will make the cigarette laws look mild by comparison.

I’m not a big believer in the alleged “deep state” that runs the country. I do think the rich and powerful exercise a great deal of influence over government. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the rich run the country and the political class is mostly their servants. That seems obvious. Rich guys parade in and out of the White House every day. The fact that these folks have a commonality of interests also seems obvious. Look at the push by rich people to flood the nation with peasants. Open borders favors the rich.

There’s a long way from that reality to the idea of a deep state, but when you see stories like this you have to wonder. Then only reason any of this is out in the public is the Snowden affair. Big bureaucracies like the NSA start making comical blunders like this when they reach a certain size. Still, it suggests the permanent ruling class is not the life-serving Congressmen and Senators, but the life-serving hacks in the bureaucracy.

The life-servers in the intelligence blob are the kings of the hill because they hold everyone’s secrets. It is not a big leap from that to thinking the rich guys telling Congress what to do also are pulling the strings at the NSA. On the other hand, maybe the security services have enough dirt on the rich to control them as well. Maybe it is just a weird balance of interests that keeps the whole thing running. The one thing that unifies all parties is making sure the public never gets what they want from government.

Charlie Strong, the head football coach at Louisville, will be the next head football coach at University of Texas. The Longhorns are part of college sports royalty, maybe even the top of the list of elite programs. They generate more revenue than any other school. They have the biggest facilities, the biggest fan base and the biggest egos. Other big state schools like Ohio State and Michigan can claim to be the top of the list, but most people consider Texas the NY Yankees of college sports.

Their decision to hire a black guy obviously has cultural meaning, mostly because the mass media is obsessed with race. In fact, the media will care more about the race angle than the fact Strong has a very good resume and is actually qualified for the job. Coaches tend to kick around for 20 years as assistants and head coaches at small programs. Eventually, they get a shot at a major, but not elite, program to show they can compete with the best. If they win, they get a shot to man one of the elite programs.

Strong has done all of those things. The fact that he is black should be an enormous asset to him, but that has not been the case. Instead, he struggled to get his first head coaching job.  The rumor was college presidents fretted over his race, thinking the fans would not embrace a black man as coach. Even after he got the job at Louisville and there were no white riots, the attitude among college presidents persisted. They were sure their racist fans would burn the school down if they dared hire a black to coach the football team.

In fact, that’s been the argument for decades now. There’s no evidence the fans care about the race of the coach. They just want to win. Boosters, who fund a lot of this stuff, would embrace a space alien if he could win games. If Strong was a bisexual, transvestite black Nazi, the Louisville fans would cheer him anyway. It’s fair to say sports are why America has as much racial peace as it does. White sports fans care more about winning than the realities of race, so they overlook it in order to have their sports.

Despite this, white college presidents still think their fans hate blacks. There are a growing number of black athletic directors, who would be eager to hire black coaches, but the number of black coaches remains very low. The fans actually think black coaches are a benefit dealing with black players. Again, the boosters just want to win so that leaves the school presidents as the primary obstacle to hiring clack coaches. That and the fact it is a long apprenticeship and blacks tend to have very high time preference.

These presidents are overwhelmingly white and liberal. They live and work in the least diverse parts of America. Anyone thinking the campus is diverse has never been to a McDonalds in the South. They also live and work in the most radically left-wing parts of America. Yet, they walk around thinking they are the friend of the black man and those others, those rowdies in the stands, black and white, are the bigots. It is a remarkable bit of cognitive dissidence. These people are strangely delusional.

It should also be noted that it is the southern schools that are leading the way with the hiring of black coaches. Here is where winning trumps all else. Vanderbilt is paying their black coach $3 million a year. Mississippi State had a black coach a decade ago. Charlie Strong started in the SEC and then went to Louisville. Miami had a black coach a few years back. The assistant ranks are ghostly white the further north you go, while the sidelines in the South have much more vibrancy.

Of course, the cognitive dissidence is not limited to the lily white leadership of American colleges and universities. When the Left sees all of these black coaches at southern schools, they believe it due to their heroic efforts to fix those bad whites in the south, even though the schools in the north remain ghostly white. It’s a reminder that for bad whites, race is a real issue to be dealt with in a serious way. For good whites, race is entirely about moral posturing in juxtaposition with the bad whites they detest.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

–Bertrand Russell

This post by Lion of the Blogosphere brought the above quote to mind. Mediocre minds have a habit of thinking themselves to be very smart, simply because they have internalized the assumptions of the cool crowd. In this case, he has been conditioned by his urban lifestyle to associate religiosity with intelligence. He clearly does not understand the topic, but it is a pose that makes him feel good so he is extra confident in it.

Anyway, it always bugs me when people talk about “believing” in evolution. You believe in things you don’t know or cannot know. One can believe in god, but you cannot prove the existence of god or the absence of god. You either believe or you don’t believe. Evolutionary biology is not a matter of belief. We have data from the fossil record. We have genetic data that is advancing every year. We have theories that explain the data and help in the search for new data. There are no leaps of faith involved.

As with all science, there’s a chance we have it all wrong. There’s no question we have some things wrong, as correction are common. The history of science, after all, is the history of bad ideas that were replaced with less bad ideas. This is especially true when it comes to natural science. People keep working a problem until the problem is solved and the solution joins the stock of axioms that form the foundation of science.

As far as whether accepting evolution is a sign of intelligence or not has always been one of those weird ticks of the Left. Years ago, they use to decorate their cars with Darwin fish, because they thought it tormented religious people. Now it is pretty clear that the Left is lurching into some very primitive thinking with regards to biology, as they embrace nonsense about human sexuality and race denial-ism. It’s pretty clear that the liberal embrace of evolution was always just a pose and nothing about science.

Anyway, the attempt to correlate belief and IQ is the sort of thing a supercilious person does when they want to appear clever. Belief is most certainly a biological human trait that probably co-evolved with language. The fact that all human groups have belief in the supernatural, buttressed with customs and rituals that frame out their culture, is what is generally called a clue. Belief, with religion being a subset, is most certainly something that has been selected for in human religion. We’re born to be true believers.

Of course, many high IQ people believe in very crazy stuff.  Noam Comsky is very smart guy for sure. He also think it is a good idea to murder people who don’t get along with Castro. The Blaize Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and theorist. He also was a fanatical Christian. Many of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan project were communists. Newton was obsessed with alchemy. The highly intelligent tend to be highly curious and prone to believing a lot of very wacky things as a result.

When I was a young pup, NYC was a dangerous shit-hole. The 70’s were pretty rotten all over thanks to the Left, but NYC was the epicenter of crap in America. The ghettos were ferociously violent. Drugs were rampant. Crime in general was a huge problem, even amongst the cops. In the early 70’s some radicals were still blowing stuff up. Ed Koch was mayor and his main attribute was explaining away the dysfunction of city government. He lasted into the 80′ basically on the claim he prevented the city from going bankrupt. He gave way to David Dinkins, who was a complete boob and failure. By the end of his time in office, New York City had suffered at least thirty years of corrupt and insipid left-wing mayors.

Giuliani came in after Dinkins and started to clean up the city. He cleaned up the petty crime and rounded up the gangsters. He cleaned up and professionalized the police force using modern techniques like noticing that most crimes are committed by young black males. The boom in financials certainly made it easier as it gave him a viable tax base. Unlike his lefty predecessors, he did not look at Wall Street as a crime or merely a source of money, he embraced the new financial class by embracing gentrification of the city’s neighborhoods. Bloomberg, nutty as he is, carried on the polices for another decade. Today, a middle class person can live in places like Harlem and Queens. Within my lifetime those areas were killing zones. That’s amazing turnaround for a population that had embraced lunacy to such a degree.

Now, here we are with a foaming at the mouth lunatic as mayor. Bill de Blasio is from the New Left. He was born too late to be a part of that world in its bombing years, but he was nonetheless educated by them after they moved into the universities. He defended Daniel Ortega in the 80’s and he still thinks Castro got it right. Despite the multi-decade experiment in progressive madness that nearly destroyed New York City, de Blasio is convinced this time it will be different.

“We recognize a city government’s first duties: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean; to ensure that those who live here – and those who visit – can get where they need to go in all five boroughs. But we know that our mission reaches deeper. We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.”

He’s right about the DNA part. True believers like de Blasio are born to join a cult. In another age, he may have been a Jesuit or a member of a heretical sect of Christians. In the 1930’s, he would have either joined the Nazis, fascists or Marxists, depending upon his location. That’s why democracy always fails. These nuts are always with us and they will never quit. They keep working the system until they can impose their brand of lunacy on the rest of us. The fact that everything he advocates has been tried and failed horribly will not deter him or his supporters. They are always armed with the phrase, “this time it will be different.”

John Adams and his coevals dismissed democracy out of hand as the surest path to national suicide. They were smart men who were not part of a religious cult. They were mostly skeptics, at least by the standards of their day. They knew the lower classes would always vote themselves a raise from their neighbor’s wallet. They knew the excessively religious would try to vote in their kind. Our last two presidents are examples of both. In the case of New York, the rabble has decided to sign on with the lunatics to attack the rich, who will leave if the attack is successful. And so it goes…