The greatest threat to the people in charge has always been the property holder. Before human settlement, the strongest or oldest were the tribal leaders. Once humans began to settle into an agricultural life, it got a lot harder to boss people around. In the tribal days, exile was the way to keep people in line. If the tribe got too big, then they just split into two tribes so the malcontents could go off on their own, thus preserving the authority of the chief.

Once people started to settle into agricultural life, exile was not so easy. The chief could be angry, but as long as you could feed yourself and your family, you had no reason to leave and he had only one way to make you leave. That was to take your property. The trouble with that is he had to have hired men willing to kill and that meant the boss had to have a surplus of property to hire them.

It’s not an accident that for most of our time as settled creatures controlling the land was of paramount importance to the rulers. The Romans, upon the defeat of Carthage and Corinth, used the proceeds to throw the small farmers off their land, by use of slave labor. In short order Rome went from a Republic of free men to an empire run by powerful land holders.

In medieval times, feudalism put control of land in the hands of the crown and by extension, the nobles, who held these lands in exchange for service to the crown. In turn, vassals and peasants worked the land for the nobles. It was not until  the rise of global trade that one could challenge the power of the king without taking his lands.

Trade created capital that was mobile and therefore hard to steal. Stealing a man’s land is just a matter of killing his soldiers and forcing him off the land. When a man’s wealth is distributed all over and is highly portable, stealing his capital is not so easy. This required more complex schemes and more complex defenses.

The other day in my Greek post I pointed out that sovereign debt is mostly a way to rob the property holders of countries. No one really thinks about it like that as the people in charge prefer we think of it in other ways. They like to talk about government investment in the safety net, as if it were a real physical net underneath all of us, magically held up by fairies and magic dust.

That’s the sales pitch. Most sensible people like the folks reading this blog see past it and understand that it is just a way to pay for an ever expanding government. As we’re fond of saying on the Dissident Right, no tree grows to the sky. Eventually the government can borrow no more because no one will lend. That’s not just a Greek problem. The public debt of the West is at level unimaginable just a generation ago.

That’s where the credit currency comes into the mix. By artificially lowering the cost of borrowing, governments are allowed to shift more debt onto their taxpayers. Eventually, the debts must be paid thus creating the transfer of property through the state to friends of the state. Public debt is just organized looting of the middle-class.

This is a little more obvious when we look at it in small scale. That is the assault on small business by the financial sector. When talking about the banksters and their cronies in politics, everyone just assumes they spend their time on complex deals involving leverage, derivatives and special favors in the tax code.

Much of that is true, but unlimited cheap credit has had another terrible consequence that is a microcosm of what we are seeing with Greece. That is, insiders using zero cost debt to undermine the middle-class business owners. While Warren Buffet uses the tax code to raid mid-sized business, venture capital often uses cheap money to sack small business.

Let me use an example. I have known a local businessman for twenty years. I’m not sure how much of the details of his dealings I am free to reveal so I will be deliberately vague on some points. His business was a family business started by his father and another man in the 50’s. They distributed niche products in the Mid-Atlantic.

My acquaintance was never going to get rich running the business, but it afforded him a nice middle-class life. He was also able to hire a few a key people and pay them well, along with a staff of entry level people. Some of his employees had been in the business since he could walk. In other words, it was a typical middle-class small business.

About ten years ago his suppliers began to consolidate. One after another was bought up by some global player. He went from have a dozen suppliers vying for his business to just three. At the time, he thought it may be better for him as it was much simpler to do business with three suppliers.

Then one supplier bought one of his competitors and made them the exclusive distributor. All of a sudden, a sizable chunk of the market was walled off to him because he could not carry the products certain customers preferred. At this point he knew he was in trouble, but the options were limited. Profits started to get trimmed and he prepared for a reduced lifestyle in order to keep the business running.

Keep in mind that all of the consolidation was made possible by abnormally low interest rates. When money cost ten points, buying a competitor meant having a big chunk of cash in the deal. When money is three points most M&A deals can be done with no cash whatsoever.

A few years ago, some VC boys bought his biggest competitor. They brought in new technology and they made a deal with one of the big suppliers. Because it was all debt driven, they could drop prices putting even more pressure on the remaining independents. Quickly they went about offering buyouts to the little guys. My acquaintance sold out for what he could get.

This is a common theme in wholesale distribution around the country. The little guys are hoovered up by big players using borrowed money. Is it better for consumers? Maybe, but prices are not dropping so it is not a good deal from that regard. It’s not better for employees as small business hiring has never been lower.

The skillful use of debt has always been the hallmark of shrewd businessmen. That’s not what’s going on here anymore than the use of slaves by wealthy Roman landowners was a skillful use of labor. My acquaintance could not go to his bank and get the same deals as the VC boys raiding his industry. They had special access to cheap money and informational asymmetry let them exploit the tax law in ways the little guy could never match.

I pointed out the other day that it is easy to blame the Greek people and write them off as dead beats. It’s easy to blame the small businessman who goes bust. That way we can pretend it is still an even playing field and everyone is playing by the rules. That’s not what’s happening in America, Greece or anywhere else in the West.

Artificially low borrowing rates are warping reality and blocking the normal signals within society citizens use to make decisions. It’s also rearranging the social order in ways that are incompatible with liberal democracy. My acquaintance who lost his business is no different than the farmer thrown off his land. He loses his stake in the current order and goes from being a citizen to being a subject.

I need to wrap this up as it is already too long, but in another age, men on horseback flying the flag of their lord would raid towns and villages, hauling off what they could. The only recourse of the village was to submit to a lord promising protection.They got to choose their master.

Today, global finance is the tool to break the spine of the middle, making them dependent on the ruling elite. The systematic looting of Western economies through central banks is sucking the life out of the citizens. The Greeks are finally fighting back, but until they start hanging the people responsible, the tide will never turn.

One of my rules of life is to never put a bitter weirdo in charge of anything. People on the fringes usually have a lot of strange new ideas, but they are just as likely to secretly harbor a lot of deep resentments about the core. Barak Obama is the most obvious example. He was a fringe weirdo growing up in elite private schools and that festered into a deep hatred of typical white people.

A corollary to that rule is to never hire a mentally disturbed grifter to run your company.

Reddit CEO Ellen Pao commented this morning about the firing of Reddit Director of Communications Victoria Taylor, a move that has resulted in a very public revolt from users of the site. Pao wrote that the site is working on better tools for its moderators, but it will be a while before those tools are made available. “The bigger problem is that we haven’t helped our moderators with better support after many years of promising to do so,” Pao wrote in a comment. She said that Reddit has hired new employees to help build these tools, as well as new employees to engage with the community and its moderators. “We are going to figure this out and fix it,” Pao wrote.Since she was hired in 2013, Victoria Taylor has worked on Reddit’s popular “Ask Me Anything” question-and-answer sessions. She served as the main contact for celebrities and other high-profile figures participating in the sessions, helping to transcribe their answers to users’ questions over the phone. In response to her firing, Reddit moderators have effectively shut down many of the site’s most popular sections.

What’s amazing to me is that anyone would hire this woman in the first place. Her resume screams incompetence and she has a history of suing her employers. The only thing she brings to the job is she is Asian and probably lacks a penis. But, inside the Cult, she must have a lot of piety points, despite being laughed out of court a few months back.

I’m not a Reddit user, but I have looked at it from time to time. It strikes me as another Silicon Valley scam where suckers do all the work and some rich people keep all the profits. The Huffington Post is the best example of how the scam works. They relied on bloggers to provide content while Arianna Huffington kept the proceeds.

That works as long as the people running the scam remember to keep the mark happy. Huffington, like the Gabor sisters, has a strange charm that is very effective at keeping the mark happy. Pao is just a stupid twat focused on small time hustles. Putting her in charge of a sophisticated grift like Reddit was never going to work.

I saw this linked over at Maggie’s Farm.

Fats were singled out as the major enemy.

Research results published in the mid-1900s indicated that fats in our diets posed a health hazard.

Fats were not just full of calories that made us overweight. There were indications that fats were the main reason why a wave of cardiovascular diseases washed over the industrialised countries of the West starting in the early 20th century.

Research efforts and nutritional advice focused on how dangerous fats were and toward the end of the century a healthy diet consisted low-fat foods – a message heard at the doctor’s office and hyped by all the magazines.

Simultaneously, carbohydrates, including sugar, snuck below the radar, according to Birger Svihus, a professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU).

Why were carbs viewed so long as positive for health?

Svihus thinks he has found the answer in research:

Scientists in the 1970s concluded that the human body could not convert carbohydrates into fat.

That meant you couldn’t become overweight or clog your bloodstream with fats by eating carbohydrates, whether they came from sweets or whole grain bread.

I’m often amazed by how much of the past has been forgotten. It is not just the ancient times or even the medieval times. We cannot remember what happened last week. There’s no great mystery as why the governments got the diet recommendations all wrong and it was not an honest error.

The first thing to know is the Framingham Study. From Wikipedia:

The Framingham Heart Study is a long-term, ongoing cardiovascular study on residents of the town of Framingham, Massachusetts. The study began in 1948 with 5,209 adult subjects from Framingham, and is now on its third generation of participants.^[1] Prior to it almost nothing was known about the “epidemiology of hypertensive or arteriosclerotic cardiovascular disease”.^[2] Much of the now-common knowledge concerning heart disease, such as the effects of diet, exercise, and common medications such as aspirin, is based on this longitudinal study. It is a project of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, in collaboration with (since 1971) Boston University.^[1] Various health professionals from the hospitals and universities of Greater Boston staff the project.

Initial finding from that study suggested a link between dietary cholesterol and cardiovascular disease. Thus was born the low-fat craze that has been with us for decades. Industry quickly figured out how to capitalize on this and make enormous amounts of money.

The first way was to use a waste product from food production to make a substitute for butter. That’s right. Margarine is made from waste. Food companies quickly figured out that the stuff they were throwing away could be re-purposed into “low-fat” foods. The stunning success of margarine led to a flood of low-fat stuff that is still with us.

Of course you don’t sell product without advertizing and advertizing is mostly about convincing people that your product is better than the alternative. If you’re in the business of selling low-fat foods, what better way than to point to government science as the reason your stuff is better?

Of course, you need to make sure the science does not change so lavishing the government and its scientists with money to keep proving the same point is a good investment. It’s not an accident that Big Food is an enthusiastic supporter of Big Government.

That may strike you as excessively cynical, but here is a long article from The Atlantic Monthly that is my source. You’ll not the date is 1989. That’s right, I recalled from memory an article from a quarter century ago and found it on-line.

The Greeks vote on something this weekend, but no one really knows whether it matters. The news indicates that the deal offered Greece is no longer on the table so the plebiscite on it would be moot. There’s also the fact that Greece appears to be in full blown financial collapse. The scenes on television remind me of the Argentine financial collapse of ’98. In fact, the comparisons are so close that the Argentinians of that era are advising the Greeks now.

Here’s an interesting documentary on the Argentine crisis.

The fascinating thing about this last phase of the now seven year crisis is that the enormity of Greek debt is finally being revealed. The IMF has released their analysis of Greek debt and there’s simply no way anyone can think the Greeks will ever pay their debts. It is a mathematical impossibility. Further, they will never be able to make their interest payments.

Greece has a €50 billion cash deficit through 2018, which means even under the bailout plan that was offered, Greece would be accumulating debt faster than it would be retiring debt. In theory, something magical could happen so that the economy would boom, but the debt burden makes that unlikely.

That means the people in charge of Europe have been lying to their public all this time. Default was an inevitability. That will then be followed by a restructuring of debt and debt forgiveness. Lying is no surprise as it was always assumed that the EU was buying time to transfer these debts from the private holders to the taxpayers.

The deliberate and seemingly pointless immiserating of Greece is what one would expect from a loan shark. It’s not the money, it’s the principle. The EU was supposed to make one big happy family of former countries. The trouble is one of the family members is a bit of a screw-up so the paterfamilias is teaching a lesson. It’s not so much for the one taking the beating, but for the rest. “Don’t be like Greece or we’ll break you like we broke them.”

That sounds good, but it remains to be seen if they will actually break Greece. The first hit is the worst hit and Greece is taking the first hit right now. By the time they vote, a fair number of Greeks will be ready to see it through. The next hit lands to the body of the EU financial system. No one knows what happens when the fallout from Greece starts washing up in the rest of Europe.

It’s easy to dismiss Greece as a dead beat country full of oily grifters. In theory, the Greek people have only themselves to blame for electing crooks and liars. That’s an argument against democracy, but the people never voted for bankruptcy. They were misled by their leaders, who got hooked on the heroin of global finance. They supported joining the Euro because they were told it would avoid these problems.

The problem at the core of global finance is that there’s no market mechanism to restrain public debt. The whole point of a floating currency regime is to disguise public debt in order to avoid making tough choices about the welfare state. It’s not an accident that since the Louvre Accords the size and scope of government has skyrocketed throughout the West.

In other words, a currency system based on credit has worked at hiding the cost of government. In fact, it has been so good at it no one noticed that Greece was running up debt at an alarming rate. In the old system, Greece would have been facing double digit borrowing rates long before they reached this point.

Sovereign debt is mostly a way to rob the property holders of countries. When the state borrows, there has to be someone on the other side of the transaction. If they borrow from their people then they are taking property with a promise to pay at a latter date. If they borrow from abroad, then they are promising their tax payers will pay at a later date.

The only people with the ability to pay sovereign debt are the tax payers.

In the old currency arrangements, this was understood. Lenders knew this. If you lent gold to the neighboring king, you did so knowing you may have to invade his lands to get it back. That made lenders more prudent, which made the crown more prudent. Credit currency makes it appear that default is impossible so no one considers the cost of collection.

Successive Greek governments have promised the property of Greek tax payers as collateral. The Greeks on the dole are demanding their checks and making a fuss about it on TV. The real revolt is the from the people with money. The Greek taxpayers are refusing to pay up. Unless the EU is ready to roll in the tanks, the debts will have to be forgiven.

One thing no one is allowed to notice is that Progressives have a deep fascination with eugenics. Every liberal friend I have thinks there are too many people. They blame climate change on over population. The inability to build roads is the fault of too many people spilling out of the cities into the countryside. Even explaining to them the math of population density does not change their mind.

Progressives have a long history with eugenics. A century ago American Progressives were preaching the virtues of forced sterilization as a way to fix the population. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell, a 1927 Supreme court case upholding a Virginia law that authorized the state to surgically sterilize certain “mental defectives” without their consent.

In fact, America was the leader in the eugenics movement, not the Germans. This is an example of where fascism relied on an American intellectual development to inform their own views. Margaret Sanger, of course, was a raving eugenicist, in addition to being a nut. She wanted the state to distribute babies based on the fitness of potential parents.

As I said at the start, we’re not allowed to talk about this anymore. Instead, we must pretend that Ted Cruz wants to pack Bibles into the wombs of young women and sew their legs shut. While that’s happening, the Left can force young girls onto birth control in the public school system.

The school in question is mostly minority. According to Great Schools, it is 68% non-white. The demographics of the surrounding area tell me this is where the SWPL’s send the poor whites and minorities. The Feds are paying for this scheme through an anti-poverty program. The map tells me there are a plethora of abortion clinics nearby.

For as long as I have been alive, Progressives have worked to put the poor and black on mandatory birth control. The argument they use these days is that unwanted children keeps poor women poor. Getting them on birth control means they can go to school and get out of the ghetto. The fact that fifty years of doing this has not worked is not seen as a deterrent.

The thing about this is many people reading this would probably agree with mandatory birth control in these schools. I think there is a good argument for making birth control a condition of public assistance. If you’re on the dole, you get fixed. That’s for males too. Vasectomies are reversible so if you want your free cheese, drop trow and look to your left.

Similarly, drug testing the dependent is debatable, even if you are in favor of legalizing drugs. Getting high is a luxury item and people on the dole should not be spending on luxury items.On the other hand, having the idle high on drugs probably makes them more docile so maybe the libertarians will make drug taking mandatory for the dependent.

The bottom line here is that eugenics have always been a big part of the Progressive future. It has always been there. Sanger argued that “Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race.” She also wanted to “Give dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or compulsory sterilization.”

They have softened the language, but scratch the paint of a Progressive and you will also reveal a swastika.

Spinoza writes:

A while ago, your theme was cyclical progressive “great awakenings”, wasn’t it? I think you meant by this that reality eventually catches up to progressive excess every generation or so, to be followed by another awakening.
But lately you seem worried that the progressive victory is permanent.
If I am correctly representing two views you have, do you see them as compatible? I hope so.

I’m not sure reality ever catches up with Progressives. They simply exhaust themselves and go into a dormant phase for a while. The Progressive Movement under Wilson pushed through a massive expansion of Federal power, but eventually ran out of steam in World War I. Some of Wilson’s more egregious polices were rolled back, like the Sedition Act, but much of it remained. The movement went dormant in the 20’s, but came back to life in the 30’s with FDR and the New Deal.

Similarly, some of the New Deal was rolled back. The big programs like Social Security remained, but much of the central planning was slowly peeled back. Still, the paradigm had shifted and there was no going back to the pre-FDR ways. The Federal state would play the dominant role in the lives of Americans.

It is the ratchet effect. The Progressive push begins and we get a series of clicks until finally some push-back and the advance is arrested. The core holds for a while and then the advance begins against. Click, click, click and then another pause.

We’re certainly headed to a period of normalization, but there will be no roll back of anything we have seen over the last decade. I’m not even sure there will be any attempt at roll back. Eisenhower talked about a reigning in the military-industrial complex. Reagan talked about a rollback the welfare state. There’s exactly no one in public life talking about a course correction, much less rollback.

The great question is whether we have reached a point where the traditional American core is so weak and so broken that it cannot stabilize. After the cultural revolution of the 60’s and 70’s, there was still a large stable base of sensible, prosperous Americans able to restore sanity to the country. That base is greatly diminished today and may simply be too weak to rally after the latest onslaught.

That said, it is easy to lose sight of the silent majority. In the 70’s, people really and truly thought the country was lost. Jimmy Carter gave speeches about how it was all downhill and we better get used to it. I recall G. Gordon Liddy talking about how he and his coevals thought they were facing a revolution. That did not happen. Things stabilized and we had a nice run of peace and prosperity. You never know what is over the next hill.

Over the last week or so I have been going back and forth with a friend about the timeline in the Terminator movies. With the new one coming out, the old ones have been on cable. I either forgot or I was unaware that they had made a fourth movie, based around the John Connor character, so I watched it the other day. That film tries to address the timeline issue, which is what spawned the discussion.

The trouble with time travel, of course, is the paradox. In this case, sending Kyle Reese back in time could alter the timeline in such a way that the future no longer includes the possibility of sending that same guy back in time. That’s the paradox. It is the old bit about going back in time to kill your parents. It’s a logical impossibility.

Therefore, the only way the movies can make any sense is if the future guy is destined to be a part of the natural timeline. Your attempt to go back and kill your parents always fails, but in the attempt, events are shaped in such a way that you one day decide to go back in time to kill your parents. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

In the movie four they try to tidy up this bit of the plot, so they make it clear that John Connor knows how this works. He knows he sends his father back in time to save his mother. The trouble with that is he could roll the dice and decide to just shoot the man destined to be his father, thus scrambling the whole thing, but then that would mean someone else was his father.

The point here is that time travel as a plot devise is fine as long as you don’t think about it too much. The only way to make it work logically is to either accept determinism or the multiverse. The former naturally appeals to humans, while the latter is incomprehensible to most people, so Hollywood preaches a weird form of fatalism in these movies.

There’s a similar problem with space aliens. Logic say that intelligent life evolving on another planet is most likely going to look a lot like us.

They are often portrayed on screen as little green men with elongated limbs and saucer-like eyes.

From E.T to the X-Files, aliens from outer space have captured our imagination for decades.

Yet a new book from a leading evolutionary biologist argues that if they exist and we ever encountered them, they would look very similar to us.

Professor Simon Conway Morris said extra-terrestrials that resemble human beings should have evolved on at least some of the many Earth-like planets that have been discovered by astronomers.

This is most certainly true, to a point. A planet the size of earth orbiting a sun similar to ours would probably be very similar to earth. In order to support carbon based life of any complexity it will need to look very much like earth. An intelligent species evolving on an earth like planet will therefore come out pretty close to humans. Maybe all the smart people are black instead of Chinese, but otherwise things would be pretty close.

“An area of biology which is becoming popular, perhaps too popular, that the possibility evolution is becoming much more predictable than people thought,” he told The Independent. “The book is really trying to persuade the world that evolutionary convergence is completely ubiquitous. Wherever you look you see it.

“The theme is to try and drive the reader, gently of course, into the possibility that the things which we regard as most important, ie cognitive sophistication, large brains, intelligence, tool making, are also convergent. Therefore, in principle, other Earth-like planets should very much end up with the same sort of arrangement.”

Professor Conway Morris, a Fellow at St John’s College, said it follows that plant and animal life on other planets able to support life would also look similar to Earth’s.

He said: “Certainly it’s not the case that every Earth-like planet will have life let alone humanoids. But if you want a sophisticated plant it will look awfully like a flower. If you want a fly there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to swim, like a shark, there’s only a few ways you can do that. If you want to invent warm-bloodedness, like birds and mammals, there’s only a few ways to do that.

The missing bit here is we don’t know what we will look like 10,000 years from now. We know, for example, that humans as a whole are about ten points dumber now than in the Victorian era. The main reason for that is stupidity is not as lethal as it was then. Similarly, we are physically weaker as a whole, due to the fact we do far less physical labor.

An intelligent life form on another planet that is able to traverse the stars to reach earth will be vastly more advanced than us and therefore further down the timeline of evolution. If the artificial intelligence people are right, they will have long ago figured out how to upload their consciousness into the machine and will no longer be organic, as we currently understand it.

Of course, a species with the ability to traverse the stars will surely have the ability to cloak their presence from us anyway. Therefore, the only way we will ever encounter space aliens is when we evolve to the point where we can traverse the stars and meet them halfway. Alternatively, we will see the humanoids of another planet when we visit, but they will look like retarded apes to us as we will have evolved well beyond our current meat stick form.

In other words, there are no little green men and even if there were, they would not reveal themselves to us anyway.

One of the ways you tell who is winning and who is losing is to look at which way the advice is flowing. Losers never give advice because no one takes advice from a loser so even if they have something to offer, no one pays much attention. Winners, on the other hand, love talking about how they won and will offer anyone and everyone tips as to how to be a winner.

There’s also something else. Winners are confident. They are willing to offer help to the loser because they are sure they are better than the other guy and have no fear he will use the advice to turn the tables. In other words, it is safe for the winner to be magnanimous as he perceives he has little to lose and will gain much by looking magnanimous. The loser, in contrast, must play close to the vest in the hope of scoring an upset.

That’s why we see in American public debate, a flow of advice and suggestions from Progressives to their alleged opponents. Democrats are always brimming with tips for Republicans. Progressives are always out lecturing extreme right-wing extremists about the folly of their extreme right-wing extremism. Here’s an example from David Brooks the other day.

These conservatives are enmeshed in a decades-long culture war that has been fought over issues arising from the sexual revolution. Most of the conservative commentators I’ve read over the past few days are resolved to keep fighting that war.

I am to the left of the people I have been describing on almost all of these social issues. But I hope they regard me as a friend and admirer. And from that vantage point, I would just ask them to consider a change in course.

Consider putting aside, in the current climate, the culture war oriented around the sexual revolution.

Put aside a culture war that has alienated large parts of three generations from any consideration of religion or belief. Put aside an effort that has been a communications disaster, reducing a rich, complex and beautiful faith into a public obsession with sex. Put aside a culture war that, at least over the near term, you are destined to lose.

You get that? David Brooks is generously offering you his sage advice , which is you need to give up and join the winning team. He wastes a lot of time tarting it up, while casting himself as something other than a conventional Progressive. That’s just part of the act. William Safire perfected this a half century ago and now it has become a feature of Progressive agit-prop.

Of course, this is not advice offered in the spirit of fellowship. David Brooks thinks social conservatives are sub-human and he would gladly sign up to slam the oven door on them. This is mostly gloating. Brooks is taking a victory lap. He also hopes that social conservatives will keep fighting. His cult is reactionary and they need bogeymen. When the day comes that the Cult clears the field of enemies, it is the day it collapses.

It’s why the Cult is so good at inventing monsters. Its identity is based on struggle, something they inherited from Continental communists. Despite the fact Brooks has never known a time when he and his coreligionists have not been in control of the culture, they still believe they are struggling to set things right and break the spine of the WASP oppressors.

After every battle, the Cult celebrates, but then says there is much left to be done. This Brooks column always turns up in the transition phase, They partied and now they are sobering up, being reminded that “those evil social conservatives are still out there, plotting and scheming to take back our victory. If only they would just give up!”

In one of life’s great ironies, America is being cleared of Christians by a religious cult that habitually nails itself to the cross and then blames the Christians.

Looks like the Apple Watch is a dud.

The Apple Watch was supposed to be the next magical product from the gadget maker. Not so fast, says Andy Hargreaves of Pacific Crest in a note to clients.

Hargreaves Tuesday cut his forecast for Apple Watch sales in the current fiscal year from 11 million to 10.5 million. That might not sound like much of a reduction, but he warns the bigger letdown will come next fiscal year due to “soft follow-on sales.” The analyst says the company will sell just 21 million watches in fiscal 2016, down from the earlier 24 million estimate.

“Anecdotal evidence suggests Apple Watch demand is slowing quickly,” according to Hargreaves’ note. “This dovetails with recent supply checks, which suggested a reduction in component order volume.”

The report is the latest data point indicating investors and developers need to downscale their expectations from this new gadget. In early May, brokerage firm UBS cut its fiscal 2016 forecast for Apple Watch sales – even calling the launch of the product “somewhat botched.”

This was not hard to call. You can slap the Apple logo on a turd and sell 20 million iTurds to idiot fanbois who think owning one makes them smart. The trouble is there’s no real need for a watch computer.

The FitBit is a cheap option for health nuts. It does all of the things you could possibly want from a fitness tracking device. It is durable, it does not need to be charged every five minutes and it does not need your phone to work properly. It’s still a waste of money, but it’s cheap so you won’t feel bad leaving it in a drawer once the novelty wears off.

The Microsoft Band is better than the Apple Watch and half the price. Paying an extra $10 a month for an iPhone is one thing. Paying $400 for a wearable that does nothing is another thing altogether. Again, the Microsoft offering is cheap enough to be a toy you won’t regret abandoning when the novelty wears off.

The thing with Apple is they have largely rode the success of the iPod for 15 years now. It was clever marketing and a novel, minimalist design that got the managerial classes using it as a signaling devise Steve Jobs was a great pitch man, turning Apple into a movement, rather than a bad electronics maker. We forget that until the iPod, their products were mostly junk.

I’m sure people will take exception to that last bit, but it is true. The main reason Microsoft crushed Apple in the 90’s is Apple made expensive boutique computers that were unreliable. Business went for cheap and predictable. It was not until Apple abandon their own OS and went with a Unix variant that their computers became reliable.

Regardless, Apple relies on phone sales entirely and phones have reached their end, as far as innovation. They are becoming a commodity as happens with all consumer electronics. Tablets, untethered from the wireless carriers, are already in commodity range. I got one free the other day.

A generation from now kids will look at holograms of their parents holding Apple products and laugh in the same way kids today laugh at photos of their parents wearing thin ties in the 80’s. Steve Jobs will be the Tom Jones of this era.

It’s tempting to think the lawlessness we are seeing with our government is a new development, but it has been a slow incremental process. Heck, you can go back to the the 70’s and fine court ruling that were plucked out of thin air. Roe is the most obvious example. The court held that if the Founders had thought of it, they would have included abortion in the Bill of Rights so we’ll just pretend they did.

Most of the lawlessness in America is a much more mundane thing like the abuse of civil forfeiture laws.

In February 2014, Drug Enforcement Administration task force officers at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky Airport seized $11,000 in cash from 24-year-old college student Charles Clarke. They didn’t find any guns, drugs or contraband on him. But, according to an affidavit filled out by one of the agents, the task force officers reasoned that the cash was the proceeds of drug trafficking, because Clarke was traveling on a recently-purchased one-way ticket, he was unable to provide documentation for where the money came from, and his checked baggage had an odor of marijuana. (He was a marijuana smoker.)

Clarke’s cash, which says he he spent five years saving up, was seized under civil asset forfeiture, where cops are able to take cash and property from people who are never convicted of — and in some cases, never even charged with — a crime. The DEA maintains that asset forfeiture is an important crime-fighting tool: “By attacking the financial infrastructure of drug trafficking organizations world-wide, DEA has disrupted and dismantled major drug trafficking organizations and their supply chains, thereby improving national security and increasing the quality of life for the American public.”

But the practice has become contentious, in part because agencies are generally allowed to keep a share of the cash and property they seize. In cases like Clarke’s, where local and federal agents cooperate on a seizure, federal agencies typically keep at least 20 percent of the assets, while local cops split the remainder among themselves. Critics argue that this creates a profit motive and leads to “policing for profit.”

There’s a term for this. It’s called piracy. In the age of sail, the crown would unleash privateers on the shipping of another country. One king’s pirates were another king’s entrepreneurs. Today, the privateers get a W2 from the local government and rob the subjects of the crown.

This being 2015 America there’s a non-trivial chance this story is entirely made up or they left out important facts. Sadly, we simply cannot trust our news sites these days. Still, I know of too many similar cases. The pattern is they target people they think are unlikely to lawyer up and take them to federal court. If you’re a lawyer at a white shoe firm you can travel through these jurisdictions carrying bags of cash. The state always targets the weak.