One of the things I think will be very interesting to watch over the next decade is the breakup of the cable monopolies. By that I mean the end of forced subsidies through the cable bill. I doubt we ever see multiple cable outfits servicing the same area. What we wil see in most areas is at least one satellite operator, a cable provider, a fiber company and a wireless company offering combinations of voice and data. TV will be offered as a part of the data package as just another internet service. Consumers will shop the providers based on their needs. Metered service will become common.

As is always the case, some areas will have several choices, while others have one or two options. A big city like New York will not have DirecTV, but Boise Idaho will not have fiber or cellular. More important, the content  will be unbundled from the pipe. Instead of paying Comcast $120 a month for TV and Internet, you will pay Comcast $50 a month and buy the content you  want from a broker or the originator.

The content providers are fighting this hammer and tong. The reason is they are currently making hundreds of billions from people who don’t want their product. Take a look at ESPN. They make $9 billion a year in revenue. Two thirds of that is from subscriber fees. Most estimates say that roughly 20% of households watch ESPN. Yet, 100% pay $8/mo to ESPN as it is part of the basic cable package. As soon as those folks get the chance to cut their bill by $70 a year, they will take it.  This Atlantic story goes into the details.

Of course, those billions coming out of cable bills into the channel operators like ESPN, Yes, NESN and FoxSportsNet will force them to change their business models. They will recoup some through other means like higher fees, but most of it will come through downsizing. Part of it means lower fees content suppliers, like sports leagues and syndication companies. It also means smaller players will have great access to customer and thus create alternative media. Live streaming will be the next big thing.

The chattering skulls will certainly be talking about Detroit, specifically about the bankruptcy filing. It is the largest municipal bankruptcy in our history. More important, it is viewed as a preview of coming attractions. Roughly half the states and hundreds of localities are technically insolvent. The money they raise through direct taxation is insufficient to cover their operating expenses. They get by through borrowing and transfers. Without state subsidies, for example, Baltimore would be bankrupt.

Kevin Williamson has a column up on it today. He dances around the elephant in the room, of course, but he does allude to it. What’s wrong with Detroit is it is full of blacks. The culture of corruption runs from the top all the way down to the bottom. This is not just a math problem. It is a moral problem. Detroit did not suddenly become corrupt. It started after the riots of the late 60’s. A city that was majority white became 80% black in 15 years. The whites fled taking their money, taxes and expertise with them.

On the numbers side,  Karl Denninger has a post up on the math of the problem. Detroit owes $9 billion to health and pension funds. That number will keep going up every day as current workers accumulate benefits. That’s $10,000 for every man, woman and child currently in the city. Throw in the secured credit, net out those unable to work and it is not hard to see the problem. The city owes more than it can ever possibly pay, probably by a factor of three – at best. Everyone the city owes should expect thirty cents on the dollar.

Karl makes a larger point, one that will be with us for a long time. One generation cannot promise itself future money from the pockets of the next generation. It is an unenforceable contract between generations. The reason is you cannot force people to execute their contractual obligations, no matter how they entered into the contract. Even slavers understood this. The people living in Detroit today are unable and unwilling to pay the debts created by previous generations, so those debts will not be paid.

The same is true across the country where government has racked over $54 trillion in pension and health promises. That’s $180,000 for every person in the country. By comparison, Detroit looks great. There’s simply no way all of those promises can be met, especially with the demographics of the country changing. Will newly arrived foreigners agree to pay your pension payments? The answer is not just “no” it is “hell no.”

Again, we see the same old pattern as we see with all of our nation’s maladies. The seed was planted in the 1960’s. The generation that won the fight against fascism, threw in the towel twenty years later to make their kids happy. The selfish, resentful brats we call Boomers have rampaged through American culture like locusts, destroying everything in their path. In old age, they will be demanding the rest of us live in poverty so they can have cushy pensions and health plans.

Google missed their second quarter numbers. The miss was due to ad revenue. Google does a lot of things, but there bread and butter is advertizing. Google is basically a giant marketing platform. it rents out space on the platform. The problem is that more and more people are doing their interwebs work on a mobile or tablet device. Small tablets and phones are worthless for advertising. The real estate is too small for traditional ads and other methods are so irritating no one would tolerate it.

The irony here is that internet companies like Google killed off the traditional advertizing platforms. The newspaper and magazine were the low end broad market ad platform. If you needed to sell a car, a couch or a sale at your store, you did it in the paper. Now, you sell the car and couch on eBay and the store is out of business or on-line. Now, technology is cutting its own throat. Marx said capitalism must destroy current value in order to make way for some new order that will replace the current economic order. Looks like Google just turned that corner.

I’m going to assume this is true, but with the caveat that it is perhaps exaggerated.  Still, that’s a lot of killing. If you do the math, dividing the total by the number of days (365 * 30) you get a figure of 105 murders every day for 30 years. That would be the equivalent of 130 murders a day in the US. The current rate is roughly 27 murders a day. Keep that in mind when our rulers drool over how Brazil is doing things.

Steve Sailer has a post up on the NYTimes piece about Syria. The Kurds are looking like the one population group in the Arab world with a chance to escape the entropy of Islam. In Iraq, Saddam tried to exterminate them, but they hung on through it all. Today, the Kurish areas of Iraq are the only civilized portion of the country. Business is booming, they have a reasonably sane government and they have avoided the sectarian terrorism that still plagues the rest of the country.  despite the face we did nothing to help them, the Kurds are the big winner in the Iraq War(s).

Now we see they are quietly taking control of their areas in Syria. The Turks are naturally nervous about this, but there’s not much they can do about it. For the Turks, all of the options in Syria are bad options. Their bigger concern is the fact the Kurds will outnumber the Turks in twenty years. The future belongs to those who show up and in Turkey, the Kurds will showing up in big numbers. Between the three countries, the Kurds number 30 million. They sit on loads of oil and gas. They practice a mild form of Islam and are favorably disposed to western capitalism. That sounds like the makings of a pretty good country.

Maybe the West should start looking at the Kurds as potential partners instead of the crazy Arabs.

The late great Andrew Breitbart used to respond to liberal pieties with “So?” The point, I assume, was to challenge the assumptions behind the passage of the catechism being quoted. I thought of that when looking at this clip from the state media. The bald dorky guy is pretending to care what the two ghetto prols are saying, even though he has done everything possible to make sure he never runs into their kind in regular life. The two prols, raised on TV, repeat the lines they have heard their whole life, but never bothered to understand, assuming they could understand any of it.

For the sake of argument, let’s pretend Zimmerman looked at Martin and thought, “There’s a young black male. I better check him out as they are always committing crimes.” Heck, let’s take it further and assume he thought, “I had niggers, Why is that nigger in my neighborhood?” So what? Having bad thoughts is not a crime. Following someone because of those bad thoughts is not a crime. Punching someone in the face as Martin did to Zimmerman is a crime. Sitting on top of someone, bashing their head into the ground, is a crime. Pulling your gun and shooting someone doing that to you is not a crime.

There are a lot of things both men could have done and should have done different. So?

Consider this:

“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”

– Booker T. Washington, 1911

Then watch this:

I saw this posted on Drudge. I used to hate Ann Coulter. The reason is I thought it was just an act. She would play the role of crazy right-wing pundit for liberal paymasters on TV. I’ve softened on her, but that forced laugh still bugs me. But, she has toned it down a lot over the years. Maybe she is just getting older. I don’t know, but I find her funny and entertaining at times now. The linked column is a good example as it is a bit sarcastic, even when touching in the elephant in the room with the Zimmerman trial.

That elephant is black crime. Specifically, it is the enormous amount of crime committed by young black men. Richard Cohen, of all people, wrote about this in the Washington Post. According to the White House, black men between the ages of 15 and 25 make up one percent of the population. They commit 27% of the murders. Murder is considered a proxy for crime in general so it is reasonable to assume this group commits almost a third of the crime, despite being one percent of the population.

Normal humans make observations. One of our evolved skills is pattern matching. Daily life tells Americans of all ages and races that young black males are far more likely to be dangerous than all other groups. Throw in the universally recognized uniforms and non-verbal affectations of violent black culture and you have a very handy image of someone you should fear at first sight. Trayvon Martin fit the profile perfectly. When he attacked Zimmerman, only a fool would not have had a genuine and reasonable fear for his life..

Ann Coulter is right. if young black males want to blend in like everyone else, they should stop dressing like killers. More important, they need to stop killing people.

The news brings word that foaming at the mouth lunatic Keith Olbermann has been hired by ESPN. They plan to stick him on late night and promise he will not talk about politics. I guess we are supposed to believe that no one else could possibly fill that time slot so they had to hire a screaming fanatic to do it. That’s what Olbermann is and that’s what he will be in his new gig, a screaming fanatic in the mold of Father Coughlin. That’s probably unfair to fans of Coughlin, as they never passed themselves off as intellectuals.

Olbermann walks around thinking he is a genius level IQ when he is probably just about average for the population. That’s because like all fanatics, he conflates morality with reason. This has always been a feature of the Left. They see themselves as the anointed and anyone who does not see that must be stupid or evil. That gives them license to celebrate their brilliance and do anything they like against their opponents. The fanatic has no limits on his virtue or his vengeance. That’s why Olberman is a nut.

Regardless, it is emblematic of what has gone wrong in America. This idiot keeps getting high paying gigs, despite being a stupid dickhead that everyone seems to hate. Failing up seems to be the way the over-class operates. The more you screw up, the higher you climb. It is only in the wretched world of reality do we see a connection between performance and remuneration. Get fired from a few sales jobs for being an asshole and you end up working the drive through. Screw up in politics or the media and you get rich.

Steve Sailer has a link up to an interesting piece in the NYTimes regarding spatial reasoning. One of the little discussed aspects of team sports is the value of spatial reasoning. The ability to think through problems in three dimensions is a very useful thing if you are a quarterback, linebacker or point guard. These positions require an awareness of where everyone is and where they are going. It also requires an understanding of how the players will react to one another, the limits of the field and the context of the game.

I’ve often mentioned that certain sports are good indicators of skill at other sports. Jim Brown had great field vision in addition to his physical skills. He was a great lacrosse player in college. That’s a sport that requires high level spatial reasoning. You can be good at that sport without being a great athlete, but you have to possess that ability to visualize the field three dimensionally. Otherwise, you can have no idea what’s happening in the sea of sticks and people. Brown’s “vision” made him a terror on the football field.