In the last few years, I’ve found myself reading mainstream punditry less and less. I still scan the representative political sites, but I read a lot less off what they offer, at least the opinion/prediction stuff. I’ve stopped watching TV news entirely. I have no idea where CNN is on my dial and I have not watched Fox for so long I have no idea what makes up their lineup. I’m vaguely aware of a shakeup last year. The primary reason is bias. That would be my bias. I found in the last few years I tend to put too much weight on punditry I find agreeable and dismiss that which is unpleasant. I really thought Mitt Romney, for example, had a chance to win in 2012 because my only news source was Drudge and the punditry sites.

That bias thing has become something that pops up in my head whenever reading anything about politics. Almost all political coverage is about telling us what will happen next. There’s a small amount of time covering what happened in the past. In fact, it seems that modern times is as much about erasing the past as it is about anything else. That came to mind when looking at this piece in the NYTimes. Granted, I rarely read this guy, but I never would have remembered his errors unless he wrote about them. In fact, no one ever remembers the batshit crazy predictions and prognostications of the pundit-ocracy. I suspect most people, like I used to do, skim the stuff they wish was not true and soak in the stuff they hope is true. Since nothing ever changes that much, it all gets flushed down the memory hole.

This post by Steve Sailer is a good insight into the bullshit business. Most predictions about tomorrow are wrong because they start with the assumption tomorrow will be noticeably different from today.

Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair amount of competence in this tournament derives from having a sense of just how long it takes for stuff to happen. Since the game looks at typically annual time frames so that it can determine winners and losers in a reasonable amount of time, I bet a lot of losers have a tendency to say, “Yeah, that will probably happen” without estimating how long it could take for it to happen.

Then there is the bias toward bias. Fox News knows their audience is made up of rightward folks who wants confirmation and leftward folks and leftward folks who want to do battle with the right by yelling from the couch or through a proxy. Therefore, having people predict bad things for the Cult of Modern Liberalism is good business.  Then of course, there’s the peanut gallery effect. The more yells and screams that come from the crowd over one set of predictions or opinions, the more of that we are sure to get. Even if money is not the currency, just the sound of folks chanting your name is enough to buoy the prognosticator.

Knowing all of this, I wonder if my expectations of the near future will improve. By that, I mean will events unfold more like I expect or will my willful ignorance of the chattering classes make me less informed? I now devote much more of my leisure time to reading old books and studying odd stuff. I’m now reading an 18th century novel and a book on Bayesian probability. I have followed the health care stuff, for example, very little beyond the initial hilarity. Will my expectations about how it unfolds in 2014 be better without having kept up or worse? For the record, I doubt much of anything changes and some other event sucks all the air out of that room, at least for a while.

I predict I’ll never know.

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For most of my life, I have been a drug legalizer. I came to this conclusion while sitting at a campus lounge reading Adam Smith’s treatment of the English corn laws. It struck me at the time that if you replaced “corn” with “drugs” you have a nearly flawless argument against prohibition. It was one of those revelations common in the youth of the intellectually curious. It is also common amongst lunatics who end up in cults, but that’s not unimportant. At that age, simplicity is naturally more attractive because the mind is untrained and inexperienced. As you grow older you come to understand that the world is an infinite combination of simple transactions, thus making itself unknowingly complex.

Still, I have stuck with the idea of legalizing drugs.  The cost of locking up a million drug offenders is high. That portion alone is something like 50 billion in taxes. Layer on the courts, cops and social service barnacles and the war on drugs probably costs us a hundred billion a year on the conservative side.  These guys say that’s a good number, but this site puts the number much higher. Put a million people in jail at $50K a man and you get 50 billion. The basic numbers alone have always struck me as proof enough that the drug war is a scam and a failure. Even accepting there is a cost to legal drug use, it has always seemed to me that the scales tip in favor of legalizing as Milton Friedman argues here.

There is another argument, one I’ve often used against libertarians when I don’t feel like hearing them go on forever about weed. That is, people are all for legal drugs until Walmart has a sale on their extra special brand of heroine. That’s when the women start mobilizing for the children. Libertarians hate that argument, because it is true. Libertarians, like liberals, have an uncomfortable relationship with the human condition. Honestly, I never much cared for it either, but it avoided hearing yet another lecture on the evils of the drug war. Libertarians are like all fanatics in that they can’t change their mind and they won’t change the subject.

What I’ve never thought through, has been well thought out by Peter Hitchens. I don’t entirely agree with Hitchens, but he offers up something I’m finding more attractive as I grow older. That is the central question of human society. What sort of society do you want to live in as a free man? Do you want one where drug addicts fill the parks and drunks fill the doorways? Or, do you want one where the drunks and drug addicts find it hard to be drunks and drug addicts? If it is the latter, then the question is not about how we legalize. The question is how we come up with better forms of prohibition.

In that regard, Hitchens is correct when he argues against addiction as a disease. This exchange is good stuff. Drug addiction is no more a disease than jumping off a building. I have some tendency toward addiction. I know this because I have plenty of addicts in my family tree. I really like getting drunk and I used to like tobacco. I temper my drunkenness and avoid tobacco. I hate cancer and tooth decay. There’s nothing I can do to prevent either of them other than pray. Calling addiction a disease is simply excusing behavior that civil and sane people want to limit in themselves and others.

I don’t know the right answer, but I am reconsidering the idea of legalization. It may be more economically efficient to legalize drugs. It may be economically efficient to kill malformed babies. It may be more efficient to kill old people when they reach 70. Western civilization did not come into existence because of efficiency. There’s no libertarian argument to explain the rise of the West. The story of the West is like minded people working to create a world they wanted and killing anyone who tried to stop them. There’s an appeal there that does not exist in the ovens of the Left or the soulless machinery of the libertarian.

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The hallmark of the fanatic is absolutism. The fanatic creates this imaginary world where everything is defined by its relationship to the wall. The wall being the barrier surrounding the intellectual and emotional asylum in which they feel safe and sane. Anything and everything on the other side of the wall is bad. The fanatic will have a range of words they use to describe the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall. The colorful language from North Korea to describe their enemies, real and imaginary, is a good example. The fanatic spend a lot of time worrying about the people on the other side. The fanatic is in a perpetual state of war, always checking the perimeter to make sure nothing breaches their defenses.

I thought about that when reading this article at Reason about the Duck Dynasty guy. Even they call his comments “anti-gay.” I’m admittedly not a student of this guy’s work, but what has been published is not “anti-gay” if we are restricting ourselves to English. His brand of Christianity, like 99% of Christianity,  considers sex outside of marriage a sin. Therefore, gay sex is a sin. That’s it. He said the same thing about bestiality and drunkenness. No one is upset at him for being anti-animal or anti-booze. The reason, of course, is those things lack a band of dedicated fanatics defending that activity. Sodomites have a phalanx of nuts willing to attack anyone that gets too close to the walls.

That’s the way it must be with fanatics. You are either with them or against them. There’s no room to be indifferent. Even if you are indifferent, they will force you to choose sides. It’s why their language becomes stark. You are either in favor of “gay rights” or you are anti-gay, a homophobe, a bigot, etc. You’ll note they have a long list of words to describe their enemies. The neo-fascist twit, Piers Morgan, is a solid example of the modern fanatic in that his language is infused with outlandish claims about the vast array of bogeymen he imagines are stalking him.

The reason for this is, in part, psychological. The fanatic is most likely biologically driven to be a fanatic. As Eric Hoffer noted, the true believer will jump from one fanaticism to another, often participating in many at the same time. For instance, an environmentalist will also be a member of some Marxist group, a vegan and an animal rights nut. They may also be obsessive about hobbies. I have some fanatic friends who are both crazy liberal and obsessed with certain supporting hobbies like mountain biking or English soccer.

Another reason, I suspect, is it works. Evolution is about trial and error. In another time, shaming manifested itself in a more violent way. Wayward women would be stripped in public and have their hair cut off. Blasphemers would have their tongue cutout. Today, thank goodness, we go for the hotly worded letter, but it works the same.  The Reason folks start to hyperventilate when they are forced to defend the culture. You get, instead, the mealy mouthed nonsense about the first amendment not covering private enterprise. The more people the fanatics can bully into standing aside, the better their odds.

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It is easy to forget that the way things are now is not the way they have always been. It also means the ways things are now is probably not how they will be tomorrow. For instance, the giant book stores that are going out of business never existed forty years ago. When I was a kid, there we old crusty book sellers and the mall shops. If you wanted mass market paperbacks, you went to the mall. If you had more exclusive tastes you sought out the old crusty place. Then with the flood of free money, every town in America suddenly had a massive book superstore. Now, they are going under as people remember that they don’t really read that much after all.

The same is true of casual dining. Thirty years ago, casual dining meant a local joint run by local people, usually foreigners. Then all of a sudden we’re flooded with massive chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster. Now it appears they may be following the path of Borders and Barnes & Noble.

In a move sure to set the culinary world and classy guys everywhere reeling, Darden has announced that it will either sell or spin off its Red Lobster restaurants.

Adding to the devastation, the company, which also runs Olive Garden and other fine-dining establishments, said it will suspend the opening of new Olive Garden locations and slow down new locations for LongHorn Steakhouses.

Why, you ask? Dear God, why??

Because Darden isn’t doing so good. It seems that consumers are turning their noses up at hoity-toity sit-down places like Red Lobster and Olive Garden these days in favor of cheaper chains like Chipotle.

Darden is one of the largest companies in the casual dining industry, with a market value of $6.7 billion, but its core chains have had stagnant growth, according to The New York Times. Last quarter the company experienced a 31 percent drop in net earnings. “The reduced unit growth will lower capital spending by at least $100 million annually,” the company said in a statement.

Red Lobster has 705 restaurants in the United States and Canada and had annual sales of $2.6 billion in 2013, but we guess that wasn’t enough for ol’ Scrooge Darden.

Putting aside the millennial snark from the writer, there could be a bunch of reasons for this that have nothing to do with the economics of chain restaurants. Red Lobster is awful. I’ve had to eat at them while traveling, they tend to be near motels and business parks, and I never had a good meal. They even put butter on salad. I like butter, but there’s a limit to everything. Olive Garden is a bit better. They tend to be in the same locations as Red Lobster so I’ve been to a few in my day. The food is better, but the value proposition is not great. Pasta is cheap. Paying $25 for spaghetti seems wrong. Maybe people have simply turned on these two chains in favor of others.

There’s something else. The rise of massive chain stores is due in large part to the credit boom. When you can bet money at 2% you will make different bets than when the money costs 10%. More important, you can make money from things with 2% money that you can’t with 10% money. Big capital projects like restaurant and bookstores can’t exist at borrowing rates at or above historic averages. Olive Garden is as much a creature of the free money era as bloated corrupt banks. Let interest rates rise to historic levels and a lot of things go away quickly, including Olive Garden.

Interest rates remain artificially depressed, but lending is not as free as we saw for two decades leading up to the crash. Giant corporations can get plenty of credit, but their customers are a different story. The Fed keeps pumping money into the system hoping the clogs eventually break free, butt hat’s looking like a fool’s errand at this point. Eventually, interest rates will return to normal and everything based on cheap money will go away, including a healthy chunk of government. Maybe this is another step along that path.

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I’m no fan of BitCoin. The idea of a digital currency is fine as it already exists to a certain extent. I carry little because I use a card for most purchases. That’s an electronic version of my home currency, which happens to be USD.  This is made possible by the vast digital network that allows me to engage in commerce digitally. Specifically, it allows me to convert my currency into a digital format for transmission around the globe. One of the primary attributes of currency is portability. cash and coins are more easily transported than  sheep or bales of hay.

Another primary attribute of currency is it is not easily destroyed. Coins are hard to destroy. If one is damaged, it can be exchanged at the mint for a new one. Similarly, paper money is quite durable. It does not decay over time if properly cared for by the holder. I have paper money that is 200 years old and it looks great. if I have some paper money that is damaged, I can exchange it for new money. This is the bulk of what the US Bureau of Engraving and Printing does every year. In other words, currency is durable and the replacement of that which is destroyed is predictable and orderly. This avoid wild fluctuations in value and unexpected changes in supply.

That last bit is what gets lost in discussion about BitCoin. A cryptological currency has a finite supply. The cost of getting the first “coin” is X. The next coin is X plus some amount. The next coin is X plus a slightly larger amount. This continues on at a predictable rate until the final coin is minted. The cost of minting, however, increases with each coin so the cost of minting coin X is less than the cost of coin X+n. This means the coins increase in value over time. A single currency unit of labor, for example, will increase in value. Put another way, the amount of lawn work I can buy with a currency unit today will be less than I can buy tomorrow. That makes the currency deflationary by design. In times of great technological progress, it will be wildly deflationary.

Now we have another big problem with BitCoin. It is easily stolen. The QR code *is* the money, not the bit of paper on which it was printed. Try stealing a coin on paper currency through the television and see how that works for you. For better or worse, stealing hard money, so to speak, means physically taking to from the holder. There are no special precautions one need take to keep their money safe when it is physical coin or paper. Like any other bit of property, you keep it in a safe place. With BitCoin, there’s no truly safe place. Worse yet, you don’t know it is stolen, in this case, unless you try to use it.

Now, this raises two other issues. One is the currency is not self-validating. I can examine a coin or paper and determine if it is real. I do not require a third party. BitCoin requires validation of each transaction. The guy on TV had no idea if he held money or just bits of paper. He needed someone else to be a party of his transaction to tell him that he was holding worthless paper. That someone else is a network of computers, but they are not anonymous. To work, they must keep a record of every transaction of every coin. That means the third party tracks your every move in order to function as a validating authority.

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As I grow older, it is clear that the most supercilious and ridiculous cohort in modern society is  single young females. Young females with anything on the ball have snagged a husband and are on their way to become mothers. They may lack experience, but they have some idea of right and wrong. The single twenty-somethings are almost always stupid twats with head full of feminist nonsense and convinced the world wants to hear from them. The truth, of course, si they are dumb as dirt and simply prove the Muslims don’t have everything wrong. There’s a reason single young women don’t turn up in history books very often.

That comes to mind when I saw this this morning. Jennifer Lawrence is probably well intended, but she is a clueless dimwit who hit the lottery. As she makes clear, we know about her because her name was picked out of a hat. She and a bunch of other young girls willing to blow a director for a job are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. She got lucky and blew the right director or agent. No harm in it, but it is no reason to put the stupid twat on TV and ask her about anything other than acting and blowing directors. The irony of Barbara Wawa doing the interview should not be skipped. In the Middle Ages she broke into the news bunny business on her back. So we have an old dumb twat interviewing a young dumb twat.

Anyway, you see this sort of nonsense turning up all over the culture. Commercials for TV shows tell me the dominant theme now is the “strong woman” plating the role of the man. The ideal modern woman is the leading man of the fifties with tits and a narrow waist. The ideal man is a hairless male prostitute or an agreeable lesbian with a dick. In politics, the ruling party is in power due to their ability to get the stupid twat vote out in force. That’s a hell of a way to run a country, but what could go wrong? After all, the progressive future is inevitable. Why bother listening to the people who have some idea how to do anything important? Let’s just take advice from 20-something lottery winners.

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Mark Steyn’s response to Jason Lee Steorts may be the end of his relationship with that publication. Rich Lowry will most likley side with his editor and Steyn will be sent packing. At this point, there are only two reasons to read National Review. One is Mark Steyn and the other is Kevin Williamson. Williamson is an empirically minded guy who does not have a lot patience for the trendy oogily-boogily that makes up most of modern discourse. He’ll piss off the queers eventually or maybe the race hustlers. It is just a matter of time before National Review looks more like the Nation than anything Buckley imagined. Time magazine, after all, was a right-wing publication into the 60’s. Then Henry Luce passed from the scene and before long Time was a lunatic outpost. So it goes.

The decline of National Review is a bit shocking in its speed. Rich Lowry has proven to be a ridiculous fop and coward. It was pretty clear that he was a rump-swab from the beginning. The guy is a talentless boob, but managed to ingratiate himself to Buckley and O’Sullivan. That type is familiar to anyone who has worked in a organization of more than three people. usually this type is quite ruthless once they get power. Lowry is turning out to be quite incompetent. Then again, National Review is not his primary interest. He is trying to make himself a TV star and NR is just a rung on the ladder. It is a shame, but there it is. Once guys like Steyn and Williamson are gone, NR will morph into a David Brooks role. That is, celebrating the left but occasionally offering up and few doubts.

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Chateau Heartiste is mostly credited with popularizing the term “beta male” as a term of art to describe the over-class definition of masculine. I have no idea if it is true, but it seems right. The site is the Mecca and “game” theory, which is different than game theory. In that world, dividing the male population into betas and alphas is important so it makes sense they would be heavy on the use of the term. It does not matter much other than to point out that within the Resistance, there’s a strain of rebellion against the imposition of the Beta Male on American culture. The guys reading that site may not want to be hairy chested he-men, but they want to get laid and if that means being a little butch in public they will do it. A virtuous cycle that is under assault by the CML. The same people drugging little boys in school are peddling the pajama wearing queer in the health care ads.

The war is taking an odd turn this week. Mark Steyn takes on the hilarious story of the Duck Dynasty guy getting axed for being a public Christian. Steyn’s take is that it is a part of the stifling of non-leftist speech. He’s certainly right that the Left wants to stamp out religion, particularly Christianity. Liberalism in America is a lot like Islamic fanaticism. The reason is the the leading thinkers in Islam learned at the knee of Western leftists. The list of things that are unmentionable in public grows longer every day and most of Christianity is now on the list. I suspect we will look back in a few decades and wonder how an open Christian like George Bush won election. The day when that is a disqualification from office is at hand.

The hysterical reaction of National Review’s house gay, Jason Lee Steorts, shows there is another angle. The Duck Dynasty guys are emblematic of the traditional American male. That’s the guy who shaves because he has to, likes blowing things up and shooting guns. You see guys with big beards and bandanas and you assume they are not to be trifled with, unless you are a tough guy. Guys like Steorts hate these people because their mere existence puts the lie to effete culture. The Duck Dynasty guys are the ones who go out in the streets when there is trouble. Steorts stays in the salon and comforts the women. It is a lot easy to pretend your an alpha male if there are no alpha males around to prove otherwise.

I’m reminded by a story G. Gordon Liddy used to tell about one of his roommates at Fordham. The guy was French and it was just after WW2. Liddy, after getting to know him, asked how it was the Germans were able to march right through the French. His roommate replied that after the Great War, the French mothers prepared their sons  for peace, while German mothers prepared their sons for war. Perhaps humanity has advanced to the point where the Eloi can now enslave the Morlocks. Maybe we don’t need the Morlocks at all and we can regress to living like children in a land of plenty. If that’s true then the beta males will win. If not, then the serious looking men with beards will have the final word.

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This story in the Washington Post suggest the health care debacle will have an impact on the midterm elections. One thing we learned from the Nate Silver experience is that polling does not tell us much of anything on its face. The polls today have little correlation to what will transpire on election day in November of 2014. Whatever you may think about his methods, he was more right than wrong in 2012, so I it is not a bad idea to take his word for what it all means, which is not much right now.

Then again, when you see stuff like this it is hard to imagine things getting better for the Democrats next year. This should be the honeymoon period as goodies get dispensed and the Democrats take credit for it. Obama should be enjoying good numbers, as the people tend to get sentimental about the siting president at this stage. If people are angry about Obama’s polices and by extension the Democrat agenda, imagine how people will feel when the bill comes in 2014. Things look gloomy for them.

On the other hand, the Stupid Party always finds a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so it is safe to assume they will not gain much from the health care issue. That’s the thing though. Why are they so predictably stupid about these things? How is it that these people got to this point? They are not retarded or even dimwitted. It takes a degree of cleverness to be a politician, even at the town level. When you get to national politics, you need to be a shrewd operator. Why are Republicans so bad at politics?

Of course, it is not just the Republicans. They are the most egregious, but the fact is, all politicians are quite stupid in their execution. Further, they have clueless people on their staffs and there is an army of people in the policy side who get everything wrong. Look at the Bush people. Most of his advisers were smart Jews from the neocon side of the party and they got everything wrong. In fact, they came close to destroying the Republican party. Again, it’s not just Republicans. It is the entire political class.

Look at Obama. According to Steve Sailer, Obama is above average in IQ at the minimum. He thinks he is in the top-2% or maybe higher. John Derbyshire makes similar arguments. John approaches the political-IQ issue a little different. He points to Obama having a high verbal-linguistic intelligence. That high verbal is a huge advantage in politcs, relative to math aptitude. Derbyshire and Sailer are first rate on the IQ beat so if they think Obama is an elite IQ, they are probably right about it.

So, why did Obama sign off on that stupid health care program?

Even if you want to dismiss the argument that Obama is smart, the army of people around him are certainly not blockheads. Pelosi looks like an opium addict, but she did not get to where she is by being stupid. Chuck Schumer is a smart guy. He got a perfect score on his SAT, when that counted for something. Surely the army of policy experts involved in creating the bill were smart enough to know that the bill they created was going to be a political disaster. There really is no way to blame it on stupidity.

How is it that so many smart people could be so stupid? The explanation offered by partisans is that this unfolding disaster is part of a sinister plan to turn the country over to a single payer. That sounds good when you write it down on the napkin at the bar, but in reality it looks like madness. These people are wired to be politicians and politicians always seek to be on the good side of the voters. Even rabid ideologues avoid crossing the people until they have total power.

If the plan is to smash the system and then rush in with a replacement, this is a ham-fisted way to go about it. If you’re so clever to scheme this sort of way, you should be clever enough to remove your fingerprints. If this does collapse private insurance in America, liberalism will be discredited for a generation, maybe forever. The folks replacing the demolished system will not be radical socialists. Now, radical socialists do suffer from a weird form of myopia, but are they really that myopic?

That still leaves a long list of incredible stupid statements that work against the interests of these bright people. Obama admitting that he just learned that insurance is complicated probably lost him five points of support. Pelosi’s crazy act makes even her most fanatical supporters cringe. Then you have back benchers like Debbie Wasserman-Schultz. How in the heck can we explain her existence? The inescapable conclusion is the political class has a large number of very smart people who say and do outlandishly stupid things.

We may be led by smart people, but they do outlandishly stupid things.

The Left is slowly working to ban the electronic cigarettes. Their reasoning has nothing to do with science since science clearly says these things are vastly less harmful than smoking. The second hand smoking claims, always dodgy in terms of science, evaporate with these things. What comes out of the smoker is water and no one has ever claimed harm from second hand water vapor. Plus, there’s no smell. That’s one of the major selling points, so, the liberal scolds had to come up with a different excuse:

City Council Speaker Christine Quinn said the ban would make it easier to enforce the city’s Smoke-Free Air Act, which banned smoking in bars, restaurants and other indoor public spaces.

“Because many of the e-cigarettes are designed to look like cigarettes and be used just like them, they can lead to confusion or confrontation,” Quinn said.

So these anti-smoking zealots just hate smoking so much, they don’t even want to see images of it in public.  Therefore, in order to make it easier for the scolds to harass people enjoying themselves, they will now pretend virtual smoking is real smoking. This really does make the point that it was never about public health. It was always about imposing their values on others. It’s not even about the values, so much as the act of forcing people to comply with their rules. It’s about the scold getting scold the wicked.

Smoking is unhealthful and it is proper to encourage people to avoid the habit. At this point, everyone knows this. The costs of deleterious habits should always be on the person engaging in them, where possible. Smokers should be charged a hefty premium on their insurance and taxes levied on tobacco. Banning smoking in closed spaces is fine, even though the science is dodgy. Bars and restaurants that permit smoking should post a sign over the door making it known. Let the market sort that out.

Vaping, from observation and a little research, is a far less harmful activity than smoking and not a burden on others. It may pose no harm at all. If the nicotine is removed, you’re left with an asthma inhaler. The stuff in these things is propylene glycol, the same stuff they use in some inhalers. It is used in all sorts of food and medicines, approved by the FDA for decades. Sucking in anything but air is probably posing some risk and there may be some unknown risks with these things, but they are less harmful than smoking.

Sensible public health policy should always encourage the sorts of trade-offs that improve public health. In this case, giving people an incentive to switch from tobacco to vaping would be the wise policy. yeah, it looks weird seeing people wrapped in a cloud of vapor, but it beats seeing them outside the door smoking. Instead, the busy bodies are running around looking for a reason to torment those hooked on nicotine. It’s a good reminder that the people who rule over us are petty miserable tyrants.