Last month when I was in line waiting to vote, I spotted an extremely fat woman. She was so fat, her ankles rubbed together. Judging by the three gallon bucket of soda pop in her hand, I’m assuming she was not the victim of elephantiasis or some other disease. Everything about her was fat, even her head, which was the size of a bowling ball and covered in pink-dyed fur. How she was able to get around with hundreds of pounds of fat attached to her is a mystery. I would think the mere act of toting around so much weight would result in weight loss.

Last week, I stopped at the ghetto market for a few items and spotted a couple in the snack aisle. The man was something like a large ball with arms and legs. I estimated his diameter was close to 24 inches. That would mean his belt was 75 inches. His wife was of similar size. My first thought was how they were able to, you know, enjoy the marital bed. Is it even possible that they find one another attractive? I suppose it is possible that all of their energies are focused on moving around their girth and finding enough food to maintain their weight so sex is a non-issue.

Anyone familiar with American poverty knows that our poor people are fat, very fat. There are exceptions like drug addicts or those spindly ectomorphs you see loitering on street corners. Black woman, of course, are almost always fat. This is something most everyone knows. The ancients drew images of African women with giant stomachs and buttocks. In all probability, this is a genetic issue with West Africans. Even so, across the ethnic spectrum, American poor people are fat. Even our Mexicans are fat now.

In fact, Mexico is the world’s fattest country. This is mostly likely due to the fact that food is cheaper now than at any time in human history. It’s extremely hard to starve your people these days. Food is just too cheap and plentiful. Even basket case countries like those in sub-Saharan Africa have more than enough food. That’s most likely the cause of the population boom in Africa. The Malthusian limit has been pushed much further out so the population has exploded.

Public health officials tell us that obesity is a crisis in America. Being fat supposedly results in an exploding number of maladies like diabetes and heart disease. This drives up health costs thus collapsing the technocratic schemes cooked up by the managerial class. It’s important to remember that public health officials are usually wrong. For example, they said AIDS would jump from the bathhouse and heroin den into the middle-class suburbs. That never came closer to happening.

Even if obesity is a public health problem, it’s unlikely that there can be a public policy to address it, other than deliberate starvation of the people. Our Germans probably have the same obesity rates as Germans in Europe. The same is true across the ethnic landscape. We’re forbidden to notice that blacks and Mexicans are very fat, compared to everyone else. That means we’re forbidden to note that honky obesity rates are not too far off from Europeans rates. That would be racist and everyone knows race does not exist.

The point of this observation is to note that biology is beyond the reach of public policy. If fatness has some serious detriments to the population, then it will sort itself out over time. If fatness becomes associated with low status people, then there will be cultural pressure to not be fat. Smoking rates have declined not so much due to public policy, but from the fact famous people stopped smoking. It stopped being cool with famous people. Fatness will follow a similar path. We are seeing that with black actresses and singers.

Still, humans have never had to deal with the problems that come from too much food and too much free time to consume it. We really have no idea what will come from it and how it will hurt or help society. There could very well be a huge upside to having lots of fat people. Perhaps when the zombie apocalypse comes, the zombies will eat the fat people and be satisfied, leaving the rest of us to regroup. That’s unlikely, but nature tends not to reward that which is deleterious to a species. Nature is self-correcting.

There’s no reason to think that public policy in a liberal democracy would be capable of addressing problems that stem from excess. Liberal democracy evolved in an age of great inequality and scarcity. Having a super rich aristocracy could not work while the peasants were starving. We now have a mega-rich aristocracy while the peasants are munching snacks and playing video games. They are doing these things at public expense. The bottom half of America is receiving direct and indirect public assistance these days.

Would the super-rich aristocracy of today have the will to impose rules on the bottom half, with regards to their welfare? Mayor Bloomberg came the closest with his soda and salt bans, but they went no where. Even his peers snickered at his prudery. Would these same people be willing to back exercise requirements and fitness exams in exchange for welfare benefits? Probably not. A feature of the modern aristocracy and their attendants in the managerial elite is a fear of confrontation. Hence the passive-aggressive culture of the rich.

We’ll just have to rely on nature to solve the obesity problem.

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Every year around the Solstice, I buy myself something I would never buy for myself during the year. It’s not a present to myself, but more of a way to remind myself that life is for living. A little frivolity is a good thing. I live to work, not work to live, but there is a lot of life that falls outside the joys of labor. if you enjoy working, you can easily forget that there are many other things outside work that you enjoy equally. I a disciplined moderation in life helps to maintain the proper perspective.

Usually my annual indulgence is a gadget or technology item that I really have no use for, much less a need for. I have a closet full of old electronic toys. Some years I’ll upgrade something I do need to a version I really don’t need. Last year I upgraded my home PC for one with high end sound and video. I’m typing this on a high end laptop I bought two years ago at Solstice. The old laptop was fine, but the new one has surround sound and HD video! I’ve watched exactly one movie on it and never played a single game.

This year, I’m at a loss. I’ve searched around for new gadgets and nothing jumps out to me. The hot new item is the Amazon Alexa. A few people have suggested that to me. That strike me as a stupid and pointless bit of nonsense that would just aggravate me. The hip young people in the commercials strike me as the sort of people I will send to the labor camps once I’m ruler of these lands. Having the fine people at Amazon spy on me like a doting mother is not something I will ever accept.

I thought about getting a new tablet, but there’s nothing new in tablets that excites me. I hate reading books from them anyway. I tried various versions of e-readers and I just don’t like it. My 7-inch model I got a couple of years ago works fine and does what I need it to do, which is let me goof off on twitter from the couch. I also wonder if staring at tablets close to your face is good for your eyes. I notice that I suffer from eye strain if I use the thing for more than an hour. Maybe it is just me, but that’s my suspicion.

Looking around at the other tech on the market for Solstice, I get the same vibe. It’s mostly polished up versions of stuff that has been around for a while. The new XBox I see advertised looks like the old one, but in a different color. The one item that looks cool is the heads up display for exercise that you can attach to your glasses. But, I looking like a douche bag is not a good idea. if you are an elite athlete, you can do it, but otherwise guys running around with gadgets on their heads are viewed as idiots.

Part of what plagues me these days is getting old. Once a man hits his middle years, the frivolous things lose their attraction. TV people know this, which is why they target kids and women. Men will watch sports and some shows with the wife, but otherwise, older men are not into TV. The same is true of movies. Even when it comes to sports, men lose some of their enthusiasm as they get older. Again, it is why they market jersey and caps to the young guys. they have the passion for it.

That said, I’m not an acquisitive guy and I don’t place much value in material possessions. I’m not quite Amish, but I am a plain person. Possessions come with obligations and often those obligations vastly outweigh the utility of the item. I’d like a boat, for example, but then I think about the work it takes to keep a boat. It is not just the cost of it. You have to be constantly fiddling with the things. An acquaintance in Florida has a boat. A two hour ride means an hour prep time and two hours after cleaning it up and hoisting into the dock. No thanks.

The point being that owning stuff usually means taking on obligations. In modern times, that means most people have credit card obligations they will never pay down. The result is they have fewer choices in other areas of their life. This is especially true of the lower classes who lack impulse control. They see, they want, they buy it on credit without much thought about the long term ramifications. That XBox in the living room can be quite demanding when it is sitting on the Visa bill at 23.9% interest. Heroin is less demanding than the material culture of our age.

Even so, I’m hunting around for some toy to buy this year and I’m coming up empty. I wonder if we have maybe hit some sort of dead end on the gadget front. The low hanging fruit of technology was picked long ago. The mobile phone and e-mail changed our world. Angry birds on your smart phone has not changed much of anything. Most people have a phone, a tablet and a PC. Everyone has a flat screen TV and some sort of console for games or movies. On the electronic gizmo front, we seem to have hit a dead end.

That may not be a terrible thing. Looking for some sort of gadget to buy, it occurred to me that I may find more pleasure in something else. I have been talking about cord cutting for a year. I should get on with it. I’ll need to upgrade my internet from DSL to cable if I want to do on-line video. That means wiring the house, which would be a nice weekend job. Alternatively, the guy down the road is selling an old Jeep that is a project car. Maybe that’s a better use of my Solstice money. Perhaps a return trip to Europe this winter, to gloat about Trump to the Euros.

There very well may be an end point to the materialist culture that blossomed in America last century. I could just be an old man with narrow interests, but it does feel like we have all the crap we need. If so, then perhaps a return to other pleasures will be the next big thing. It would be ironic that the politics of overthrowing the old hippies, currently in charge, ushers in one aspect of hippy culture – anti-materialism. Maybe the alt-right will adopt the old hippy mantra, “turn on, tune in, drop out” popularized fifty years ago by Timothy Leary. Maybe Amazon has a book on that…

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Whenever the the word “secession” is uttered, it is assumed that angry, racist honkies from the South are trying to stand athwart history, keeping America from reaching the great beige future imagined by the Founders. After all, the story of America is Yankee New England imposing civilization on the rest of the nation and, from time to time, those barbaric slack-jawed yokels from the South threatening to leave. Everyone knows this, because it is in our history books and movies.

In reality, the birthplace of secession in America is not Fort Sumter, but Salem Massachusetts. In the late 18th and early 19th century, Federalists based in Massachusetts agitated for the New England states to leave the Union. It really got going when Jefferson and the Republicans swept the 1800 elections, giving his party control of the Congress and the Presidency. The Federalists thought it was the sign of the apocalypse and ratcheted up their efforts to secede, culminating in the Hartford Convention.

It is a useful bit of history to keep in mind when thinking about the current grumbling from the Cult over the most recent election. Progressives are not a tolerant bunch. Even though they lack the self-awareness to see it, most of what drives them is a bone-deep hatred of their fellow Americans. You saw this with Bush the Minor, who embraced all the crackpot policies of the Left while in office. He was basically a post-modern LBJ, but the Left hated him because he was from Texas, a Christian and a Yankee apostate.

As the fever breaks and America begins the long march back to normalcy, the Left is looking around and imagining themselves surrounded by the people they hate. It is why they like making up stories about Trump supporters assaulting good thinkers on the streets. They really believe that the next step is to round up the people of [the blank space where God used to be] and sending them off to internment camps. Therefore, any nutty tale that confirms that fear is accepted and waved around in the news.

The point being is that the spiritual sons and daughters of John Winthrop have never really wanted to be Americans, if that meant embracing the rest of us as equals. Rather, they are fine with America as long as it runs something like Iran, where the Progressive leaders run the country and the secular institutions of government are mostly window dressing. If Iran ever gets popular government, the Mullahs will head into exile. Now that America is on the road to free government, the Progressives are talking about secession again.

The big one is CalExit, a movement to have California break off from the rest of the country. This has been spurred by the election, where normal Americans broke mostly for Trump, but Californians voted in heavy numbers for the anti-American candidate. If you look at the bill of particulars on the CalExit site, the inability to dictate election results to the rest of the country is one reason they want to leave. Their history may be a little off, but the reasoning is well within the tradition of Yankee scolds going back to the founding.

That is not a terrible development. The lesson of the Hartford Convention is the rest of the country should have encouraged New England to leave. Fifty years after the convention, Puritan lunatics were invading the rest of the country, ushering in a century and a half of cultural lunacy that has just about obliterated America as a self-governing republic based in individual liberty. Letting the heirs of those original lunatics break off and create their own countries is an idea who time came 200 years ago.

There would be other benefits to California leaving. One is everyone would get serious about boundaries again. Californians would now be foreigners in America. The only way to regulate this is by tying citizenship to place of birth. People born in California, for example, would no longer be Americans. Those living in, say, Colorado, would have the right to return, like Jews to Israel, or remain as resident aliens. They would no longer have the right to vote, hold office or serve on juries. Colorado and Nevada would have a chance to avoid the same fate as Vermont and New Hampshire.

Another benefit is that it could encourage New England to break off and form a separate country too. At the minimum, the members of the Cult, who have moved to other places, like Virginia and North Carolina, may decide it is time to return home. Maybe New England does not secede, but perhaps it can go back to being a reservation for Progressive nutters that is granted a degree of autonomy. It would be a bit ironic if the end result was a demand from the Cult for a return of Federalism and state’s rights.

The major benefit of losing California is we would lose their trillion in bad debt that threatens to destroy the bond market. California has been able to kick its problems down the road because of its statehood. It is the stinky pile of sub-prime mortgages in the AAA rated MBS. Independence would force some responsibility on California. It could also force reform on the Cult of Modern Liberalism, which has thrived by shifting the costs of its polices onto others. If not, the rest of us would be free of them anyway, which is what matters.

One of the unintended consequences of a world of floating exchange rates has been the geometric growth of debt. The total amount of debt in the world currently sits at around $300 trillion, which is about three times the global GDP. That seems like an impossibility, but the value of all assets on earth is estimated to be around $300 trillion, which means every bit of potential collateral is pledged to someone, somewhere in some fashion. The world is literally drowning in debt, you could say.

Of course, those are just guesses. Some debt is actually listed as both an asset and a liability. Your mortgage is most likely in some sort of synthetic financial instrument as an asset against which there is some form of debt. Government bonds are used for collateral, as they are often considered the most reliable and trustworthy asset on earth. Banks soak up US debt, for example, because it is worth more to the bank than their cash deposits, as they can quickly package bonds into other financial transactions like repo agreements.

It’s also why the US government has no trouble finding willing lenders, despite having record debt and deficits. Those lenders are holding cash, which is not as valuable to them as the bonds. It’s not just the US government. The Germans also enjoy high demand for their debt. In Europe, the German Bund is the preferred collateral in finance transactions. In fact, it is so valuable, there is a shortage of it. The result is there is always pressure on the European Central Bank to not hold Germans bonds.

It is an important thing to understand about the world of modern finance. It is entirely driven by debt. When company X wants to do a deal, it does not reach into its cash reserves to finance the transaction. Instead, it will pledge an asset in a repurchase agreement. This is where it agrees to sell the asset to another party, but simultaneously agrees to buy it back at some point in the future at a fixed price. This is a modern form of pawning the wife’s wedding ring. The company gets the cash and the lender gets interest.

Of course, no tree grows to the sky, but the modern financial system is counting on debt being the exception.

Down in the depths of Europe’s financial system, a nasty blockage is building. The plumbers at the European Central Bank meet next week to try and fix it.

They may be four days too late. Italy’s referendum could just stretch the system to breaking point before then.

At stake is the health of the 5 trillion-euro ($5.3 trillion) securities lending market, which greases the wheels of all manner of derivative, short-selling and structured transactions. A crunch point has arrived in Europe. The last few days have seen an extreme spike in demand in particular for short-dated German government bonds.

These are among the few securities of high enough quality to be accepted as collateral in repurchase agreements. Cash is no good (well, not for the Bundesbank anyway). These agreements operate like high-quality loans whose proceeds are normally used for activities like financing the purchase of other securities. Without them, a lot of other everyday activities — such as bidding at bond auctions and hedging underwriting risk — could seize up.

The demand spike is from the usual year-end surge in demand for collateral getting pulled forward, and has exacerbated a shortage of securities that count as collateral.

In normal times, firms borrow the securities they need and quickly return them — there’s usually a flood of lending and borrowing going on, and the repo market operates silently in the background of Europe’s financial system.

But the ECB’s drive to jump start the economy has led it to buy up about 20 percent of the market for German bunds and other top-quality securities. Schatz — German government bonds of a two-year maturity — had become notably harder to come by. Firms can borrow them from the ECB, but only on the strictest of conditions. The Bundesbank has been even more resistant: it’s long been reluctant to accept any kind of collateral of lesser quality than German government bonds.

What all that means is the modern financial system has come to rely so heavily on government debt that governments cannot issue enough of it. The trouble is, government debt can take cash from the economy. This is fine when the economy is overheated or there is inflation. Central banks can step in and sell their bond holdings to soak up the excess cash. That’s not the case today anywhere in the world. Instead, governments are looking to boost the retail economy by getting more cash into the system.

The result is an unsolvable conflict. On the one had we have a financial system demanding ever more high quality debt, in order to drive growth in asset values. On the other hand, we have a retail economy demanding more cash moving around in the system in order to stimulate economic growth. It’s why smart guys like James Rickards see a financial crisis in the near future. The methods to paper over this inherent conflict are just a delaying action. At some point, the pressure exceeds the restraints and you get a crisis.

An organized unwinding of trillions in debt is never going to happen, so that means we will have a disorganized unwinding of trillions in debt. That’s the definition of a crisis. It is the unexpected, disorganized unraveling of something that probably should never have been allowed to happen. The mortgage crisis is the most recent example. Lending billions to people, who have no way to repay the loans, turned out to be a bad idea. In the fullness of time, the mortgage crisis will be seen as a warning, one everyone ignored.

The purpose of the European project, at least the purpose sold to the public, was to provide long term stability to the continent, particularly economic stability. The lesson of the first fifty years of the 20th century was that nationalist competition among states led to economic instability and war. Therefore, cooperation among the nations of Europe on economic matters, as well as a common defense, would keep the peace and allow all nations to prosper together, as one continent.

Talk to sophisticated Europeans and they will give you some version of how a united Europe has kept the peace. Many will argue that open borders and a single currency have been the solution. The Euro has become a symbol for the end of individual people, replaced by the common people of Europe. One people, one currency. The economic and political arguments for Europe have become a religion of sorts for the sophisticated types. This was obvious in the Brexit vote, with all the shrieking and panic after it.

The trouble is the Euro is proving to be unworkable and possibly a disaster for Europe. Since the end of the Cold War, when the project was supposed to come into its own as the new organizational model for the continent, it has been one crisis after another. The answer each time has been a doubling down on political and bureaucratic unification, which results in a new crisis. Each time they muddle through one problem, the result in a new set of bigger problems to be addressed.

There’s a Holy Roman Empire vibe to Europe these days. At some point, one of these problems is going to prove unsolvable. At that point, the logic of the whole enterprise gets called into question. That was the reason the Germans were hell bent on bringing the Greeks to heel. The sensible solution was to let them leave, but that would have meant the EU was a voluntary association of nations. If the Greeks left then anyone could leave. It turns out that political unity only works when it is compulsory.

That’s what may be tested now that the Italians have voted to reject the structural reforms most thought necessary to avoid a banking crisis in the country. Like the Greeks, the Italian banking system is in shambles, but the bigger issue is their political and legal system. Italian society is not engineered to work in a German economic model. That leaves two possible solutions. One is for the Italians to adopt the German political system or for them to go back to the Italian economic model, that is, leave the EU.

It turns out that Italians like being Italian and will not abandon their culture without a fight. This is a replay of the Greek crisis, except that the Italian economy is twice the size of the Greek economy. There’s also the fact that the Italians are much more of a core European nation, in the broader political and cultural sense. No one in Europe felt bad about stomping on the Greeks. The French and the Spanish will not be enthusiastic about siding with Berlin against Rome in a fight, because what comes next for Rome is next for Madrid and Paris.

Once again, we are seeing what is a core failing of technocracy. Public policy is about trade-offs. In a liberal democracy, the people, through their representatives, wrangle over these trade-offs and arrive at a compromise that satisfies most people well enough to keep the peace. Logic is not what drives these deliberations. Tradition, culture and vested interests play the leading roles. Smart people know how to create a better health system, for example, but getting everyone to go along with it is impossible.

Technocracy has no mechanism for this. It is the sterile decision making of bureaucrats insulated from the consequences of their policy choices. The managerial state has the added defect of bestowing a form of tenure on its members. No matter how much they screw up, they never lose anything but some face. That has even gone by the wayside. Jamie Gorelick is a colossal screw-up, but she keeps getting better gigs after each debacle. Hillary Clinton came close to falling all the way up into the White House.

Inevitably, people begin to look at the managerial class the same way the commoners looked at the aristocracy in 18th century France. The average citizen of a Western country feels as if they are ruled by strangers. The result is the rising tide of populism we are seeing, which is nothing like the top-down variant a century ago. The Italian vote was not about nationalism, It was about rejecting rule by strangers. It is why Trump will be the next president and Britain will leave Europe.  People prefer the familiar to the foreign.

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In my life I have seen some excellent bar fights. Most bar fights are not very entertaining, as one drunk throws a punch at another drunk and it quickly turns into a wrestling match, usually with the two combatants knocking over some chairs and tables on their way to the floor. Once in a while though, you get a good one where the two drunks have the ability to stay upright and the willingness to trade blows. These are the ones that usually start inside, but go outside where they “can settle it like men.”

I once saw a guy setup like Bruce Lee, indicating he was a martial arts guy. He performed a perfectly executed round house kick. His mistake was that the other guy was not a martial arts guy so he ducked and then hit Kung Fu so hard with a right cross that his grandchildren will have headaches. Martial arts man hit the ground like he had been shot and that was the end of it. The crowd went back inside, leaving Kung Fu to search around for what went wrong. When I left he was gone so I guess he lived.

I’ve don’t have much respect for martial arts as a fighting tactic. When I was a little kid, of course, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. Then one day an older boy, known for having a black belt, challenged me to a fight. I shot a single leg take down and then broke his nose in an unnecessarily aggressive cradle. When my father was told of my villainy, he bust out laughing. I learned that you can turn a fight into a wrestling match, but you can never turn a fight into a Karate match. It takes two to karate. That’s why my father put me into wrestling, instead of karate.

I thought of this when I read that UFC star Colin McGregor wants to fight boxer Floyd Mayweather. My guess is that it will never happen, but you never know. There are a lot of UFC fans willing to pay good money to see it. Given the two men’s ability to gain attention with their showboating, I bet they could get a $200 million box office for  a fight. I’d probably buy it, even though I know McGregor would end up in the hospital or graveyard. I like freak shows as much as anyone and it would probably be hilarious.

That’s the thing with UFC. It is a modern freak show. They take tough guys and make believe they are highly skilled fighters. The martial arts stuff is a nice touch, because it distracts people from the fact these guys are just tough guys. They are allowed to use the tactics popular in bar fights, like tackling the other guy and kicking him in the groin. The organizers filter out the guys that are not entertaining and they hype the hell out of the events. It’s great marketing, particularly to young males.

That does not change the reality of the situation. McGregor is an excellent bar fighter, but Mayweather is a highly trained professional boxer. Even under the rules of the UFC, he would beat McGregor senseless in the first minute. My bet is the class of fighter you see at armory fights would beat the best UFC guys. The difference in skill, speed and strength is just too big. To even the odds, the rules would have to be altered heavily in favor of the bar fighter so it becomes a wrestling match, rather than a fight.

That reality is why this fight will never happen. The people running the UFC are too smart to have their best star humiliated. They spend too much time developing and marketing their stars to let one of them get beaten up by a real boxer. That would reveal the truth of it too plainly. Most UFC fans get that they are watching bum fights. They just like the back stories and the carnival of it. They can suspend their disbelief as long as all of the fighters are about the same in terms of skill.

My hunch with the UFC has always been that it is choreographed, like professional wrestling. The Kimbo Slice debacle has not been repeated and that tells me the organizers learned their lesson. A lot of people came away from that experience thinking it was just all hype and no real competition. Ever since, they have tried to keep the matches competitive looking, in order to keep up appearances. Whether they go beyond that to make the shows fun is open to debate. Given the age, my bet is they put their thumb on the scales.

Even if it is all on the level, the people running the UFC did not become billionaires by being stupid and it would be very stupid to have their top star beaten senseless by Floyd Mayweather. That’s why it is highly unlikely that it ever happens, at least not as long as McGregor is under contract with the UFC. Even a $200 million payday would not be enough to risk a billion dollar business. It’s much better to let fans pretend that these bar fighters are real fighters.

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When I was a kid, the big deal in sports news was Joe Gilliam, the quarterback for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Gilliam was the first black quarterback to start a season opener after the AFL–NFL merger in 1970, which is when people date the start of the modern NFL. Gilliam was benched eventually and never got another chance to start in the NFL. There was grumbling that his demotion was because he was black, but his poor play and drinking problems were the real reason. Still, even then, the default was to blame whitey.

What this means is that for my lifetime, the sporting press has been hunting for the great black quarterback. There have been plenty of black quarterbacks, but none have been elite or counted as greats in their era. The closest was probably Warren Moon, but he never won anything. Recently, there’s been an effort to make Cam Newton and Russell Wilson the black Joe Montana, thus proving that white people are Hitler. The trouble is the former is not very good and the latter has no interest in being anyone’s Sambo.

Steve Sailer has a convincing argument as to why black quarterbacks in the NFL tend not to be elite passers, and therefore non-elite quarterbacks. Oddly, the proof of this is a white guys, Tim Tebow. In high school, he was used as a quarterback because he was big and could run. In college, he was used the same way in Urban Meyer’s single-wing system. He had no career in the pros, because he was a terrible passer. If he had been turned into a linebacker in college, he would probably be in the NFL now.

That does not change the Cult’s desire to find the black Tom Brady and now they think the have found their man.

For Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, the hyperbole has turned into reality. Those who gushed over him in the preseason, lavishing over-the-top praise, have found those compliments to be just and warranted.

As the fourth-round rookie has led Dallas to a 10-1 record and taken franchise quarterback Tony Romo’s job, he has earned it all. So while respected trainer Tom Shaw used to whisper the comparisons he saw between pupils Patriots QB Tom Brady and Prescott, he now no longer feels compelled to keep quiet.

“I had Tom Brady coming out of college as a rookie and then the first seven years of his career,” Shaw told NFL.com over the phone on Wednesday night. “And I had the opportunity to work with Dak before the draft. What I noticed about Dak was, this guy had the same desire, work ethic, the same traits as Brady. Nobody wants to be compared to anyone else. But he was the hardest worker, guys gravitate towards him, he was the first one there…”

This urge to make Dak Prescott into Tom Brady in black face is perfectly consistent with Progressive thoughts about black people. They don’t really like black people very much. They like the idea of black people. Progressives have an image of the idealized black guy, the Magic Negro, that they believe will fulfill the prophesies about race in America. Barak Obama is about as close as they have come to finding their Big Foot and he did not usher in the end times. Instead he was a mulatto Jimmy Carter.

That’s the thing with Progressives and race. They don’t care about blacks as people. They see black people as something they can sacrifice on the Progressive altar, in order to get grace. American sportswriters will now be competing with one another in piety displays, showing their wonderfulness by how much they swoon over Dak Prescott. Whether or not the kid has any interest in being their Magic Negro is immaterial. He does not get a say in this as he is just a prop anyway.

Dak Prescott appears to be a level headed young man with no interest in changing his name to Hamilton or dancing on a string for the Progressive media. But, the Left has a way of getting their man, which in these cases means turning the object of their affection into a white-hating public nuisance. Colin Kaepernick started out as a sensible young man enjoying early and unexpected success in the NFL. Now he is the symbol for what has gone wrong with the NFL. Fans cheer for him to get hurt.

John Derbyshire called Hamilton a minstrel show and it is a good label for it. In fact, Progressive race mongering over the last half century has been a long live action minstrel show. Instead of whites in black face, Progressive deploy blacks to play the roles chosen for them. Blacks are just props used by good whites to distinguish themselves from bad whites and, at times, spite those bad whites. If real black people actually benefit, it is an unintended consequence. It’s something Hispanics should bear in mind.

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What has been happening in the West for the last decade, or so, is a populist reaction to the rise of global technocracy. Globalism is the spiritual-economic model that rewards poor people in poor countries and rich people in rich countries. The rich people in poor countries get a boost, as well, but that is a happy accident. The rich people in rich countries, pushing free trade and open borders, get their spiritual boost from seeing poor strangers rise up to challenge the middle classes in Western countries.

Global technocracy is the administrative off-shoot, where the attendants of the ruling elites take up newly created positions in the growing international administrative bodies. This includes Western universities, which have been deliberately transformed into international indoctrination and propaganda centers. In 1970, for example, Boston University was a commuter school for middle class kids in Massachusetts. Today the student body is close to 50% foreign born. Nowhere is the New Religion more popular than the college campus.

Popular resistance to this new form of governance is striking fear in the hearts of the ruling class, mostly because the people in charge have come to believe their own rhetoric about the arc of history. The people in charge of the EU just assumed everyone wanted the amorphous, gray blob that is Europe, rather than the vibrant national heritage that is their patrimony. Resistance to turning large swaths of Europe into Muslim ghettos has come as a bit of shock to the people in charge. Why wouldn’t people want this?

That fear will eventually be replaced with a response and that response will not be a change of heart. As we see in Europe, the people in charge have no limits when it comes to inflicting harm on their own people, as long as it supports the European project. Angela Merkel invited in a million Muslims, that no one wanted, because she hoped it would weaken the strength of Germany’s native population. Obama opened the flood gates with a similar goal in mind, but he was just a bit too late to stop Trump.

Anyway, that’s my reaction to this column in the New York Times. It reads like a planning session, by managerial class types, about how to de-legitimize the resistance.

Political scientists have a theory called “democratic consolidation,” which holds that once countries develop democratic institutions, a robust civil society and a certain level of wealth, their democracy is secure.

For decades, global events seemed to support that idea. Data from Freedom House, a watchdog organization that measures democracy and freedom around the world, shows that the number of countries classified as “free” rose steadily from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s. Many Latin American countries transitioned from military rule to democracy; after the end of the Cold War, much of Eastern Europe followed suit. And longstanding liberal democracies in North America, Western Europe and Australia seemed more secure than ever.

But since 2005, Freedom House’s index has shown a decline in global freedom each year. Is that a statistical anomaly, a result of a few random events in a relatively short period of time? Or does it indicate a meaningful pattern?

Mr. Mounk and Mr. Foa developed a three-factor formula to answer that question. Mr. Mounk thinks of it as an early-warning system, and it works something like a medical test: a way to detect that a democracy is ill before it develops full-blown symptoms.

The first factor was public support: How important do citizens think it is for their country to remain democratic? The second was public openness to nondemocratic forms of government, such as military rule. And the third factor was whether “antisystem parties and movements” — political parties and other major players whose core message is that the current system is illegitimate — were gaining support.

You’ll note that there is nothing in there about the conduct of the ruling class. If whatever they are calling “democracy” at the moment produces degenerates like the Clinton Crime Family or easily manipulated airheads like Bush or Obama, people are going to get suspicious of whatever you’re calling democracy. Of course, the fact that democracy, strictly speaking, is just mob rule, is not addressed. According to our betters, the Founders were a bunch of Nazis, because they opposed democracy.

The big point is the last one. Any resistance to the status quo will now be classified as anti-democratic. This is, of course, a backdoor way of smearing anyone who questions the wisdom of allowing unaccountable bureaucrats free rein to rearrange the social order, based on theories popular only on the college campus. It is a lot easier to call critics immoral and beyond the pale, than it is to debate them, so there will now be a healthy market for intellectuals, who can demonize the resistance to the status quo.

The humorous part of the story is this bit.

According to the Mounk-Foa early-warning system, signs of democratic deconsolidation in the United States and many other liberal democracies are now similar to those in Venezuela before its crisis.

Across numerous countries, including Australia, Britain, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the United States, the percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a democracy has plummeted, and it is especially low among younger generations.

For the last decade or so, it was popular on the Official Right to use Venezuela as a club to beat their liberal buddies over the head. Now those liberal buddies, having lost an election, are using it to beat their “conservative” buddies over the head. What’s funny about it is that the people who voted for Trump did so as a rejection of the Official Right, as much as a rejection of the Left. The Punch and Judy Show among defenders of the managerial class has lost its audience.

The fact is, democracy is a disaster. It’s a free shot for despots and lunatics to gain power, at which point they put an end to democracy. Democracy is a bus that runs in one direction and only has one destination – authoritarianism. It’s why sensible men of the Right, notice the qualifier, have preferred ordered liberty in the form of representative self-government. It permits the state to be responsible to popular will, but it protects the citizens from themselves and their worst instincts.

When I was a young man, I dated a girl who had a crazy uncle. He was a math whiz and he had worked at NASA on the Apollo missions. He was one of those wacky professor types, who enjoyed being eccentric more than he was good at it. In other words, his eccentric routine was a bit contrived. Even so, he was a character and I enjoyed spending time around him. We would play chess and talk about history. He was not very good at chess, but he knew a lot about history and he enjoyed debating it with anyone interested.

The thing that was puzzling about him was that he was a way out where the buses don’t run Progressive. He would rant about how private property was the ruin of humanity and the cause of all trouble. This was a very smart man with a firm grasp of advanced mathematics and a deep knowledge of history. Yet, when it came to politics, he was as nutty as a sociology professor at a state college. As soon as current politics came up in conversation, he went from normal to moonbat.

I was reminded of it reading this post by Steven Landsburg. His blog exists to promote his books, but he posts about other stuff too. A fun book to read is The Big Questions, which is overly ambitious and hilariously wrong at points, but still a fun read. From the blog post:

For your consideration:

I submit that Hillary Clinton lost because she did not make even a minimal effort to make herself palatable to people like me — people who care primarily about economic growth, fiscal responsibility, limited government, individual freedom and respect for voluntary arrangements.

Because I care about those things (and for a number of other good and sufficient reasons), there was never a chance I would vote for Donald Trump. I gave money to Jeb Bush. Then I gave money to Ted Cruz. Then I gave money to the “Never Trump” movement that was trying to foment a revolt at the convention. Then I gave money to pro-growth Senate candidates. For me, the only remaining choice was between voting for Clinton and not voting for Clinton. (I also considered sending her money.)

I knew that if I voted for her, I’d never feel good about it. That was too much to ask. But I’d still have voted for her, if only she hadn’t gone out of her way to make me feel awful about it. And that she just would not or could not stop doing.

Landsburg is a bright guy with a broad knowledge base. He has a PhD in mathematics.Yet, he is instinctively drawn to the Cult like a moth to a flame. That post reads like a personal struggle. He was drawn to one anti-Trump cause after another, not for logical reasons, but emotional ones. That was inevitably going to lead him to supporting Hillary Clinton, which would nullify all of his previous arguments about economics, politics and philosophy. But, Trump, the terrible Trump!

If you have read Landsburg, you know he is an open borders fanatic and a free trade zealot. The fact that neither of these positions makes any sense is not important to him. They offer an outlet for his missionary zeal and a way to get grace on the cheap. Salvation is a huge part of what drives the fanatic. Since modern fanatics no longer believe in God or the soul, they have fashioned economic theories and arguments to fill in these blanks. At the heart of their zeal lies the age old religious impulse to save the world.

Now, there’s another aspect to this. The most prominent libertarians live on the adult day care centers we call the college campus. Others live in the satellite version called the think tank. Most of their friends are in the Cult and often quite passionate about it. As a result, the most prominent libertarians spend their days trying to carve out an exception for themselves that does not vex their peers. Going in for the lunacy of NeverTrump was a cheap way to earn piety points with the nut jobs on campus.

Still, it is a good reminder that you can be highly intelligent and also have a head full of nonsense. J. B. S. Haldane was, by all accounts, a brilliant man. He was also a committed Marxist, even when it became clear that Marxism was a death cult. Lots of brilliant people were attracted to communism in the 20th century, despite the irrationality of it. Today, the blank slate beliefs of Progressives are catnip for intellectuals, even though a walk around any shopping mall offers ample evidence to contradict it. It just feels good to believe.

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The Wall Street Journal has a story on the troubles facing Chinese tech giant Huawei as it tries to enter the US mobile phone market.

A Chinese technology giant, whose telecom networking equipment is shut out of the U.S. due to security concerns, is bringing its high-end smartphone to American consumers for the first time.

But a number of obstacles are blocking Huawei Technologies Co.’s path to success in the U.S. smartphone market.

U.S. carriers, which distribute more than 80% of handsets in the country, are reluctant to work with Huawei—the world’s third-largest smartphone maker by shipments behind Samsung Electronics Co. and Apple Inc.—because of its low brand recognition and security concerns associated with its networking equipment, people familiar with the matter say. A 2012 congressional report recommended that U.S. carriers avoid using Huawei gear in their networks for fear that China might use it to spy on Americans. Huawei has denied such accusations, saying it operates independently of Beijing.

Much of what goes on in the modern age requires people to deny observable reality. China is an authoritarian state, run by a military government, that is highly paranoid of the outside world. Paranoia about the non-Chinese world is a feature of Chinese culture, a permanent feature. The type of government can change, but the Chinese elite will always view the rest of the world as smelly barbarians that must be kept under control. China is probably the most chauvinistic society on earth.

The result of this is that no Chinese firm operates independent of Beijing. Any company large enough to export to the rest of the world, or import from the rest of the world, is in bed with the Chinese government. More important, any tech firm big enough to play on the global stage is deeply connected to the Chinese military, because they could not be so big without the blessing and active support of the People’s Liberation Army. This is something everyone knows, except for the writers of the Wall Street Journal.

The result is trade with China comes with a hidden cost. If you move your electronics making factory to China, they will steal your technology. They will also do things like bake spyware and back doors into networking gear so the the PLA can exploit US communications networks. That means the US has to spend billions in counter-espionage activities in order to prevent the Chinese from running off with all of our secrets. This is just one example of the hidden costs of trade with China.

It’s not just China. We have so-called free trade with Mexico. The result was not trade in the way normal people think of it. What happened was dirty US manufacturers located their plants to Mexico. Companies looking to game the labor laws followed soon after. Mexico is not selling us more stuff and buying more of our stuff. Mexico is just a loophole in US labor and environmental laws. If you make lead-acid batteries, for example, putting the battery plant in Mexico in the right move.

The problem is those environmental costs don’t go away. The Mexican government estimates that 10% of their GDP is lost due to the effects of environmental degradation. Go to Mexico City and the air is like soup. Of course, environmental degradation does not stay local. Air pollution in one place goes global as the winds change. The fevered attempts to ban your car and lawnmower in order to reduce carbon emissions are mostly due to “developing” countries like China and Mexico.

Of course, you also have the labor problem. Making car batteries in the US means people working in a car battery factory. Move those jobs to Mexico and we do get slightly cheaper car batteries, but we get more unemployed people. The unemployed car battery worker is not taking up a self-actualizing career at the George Mason economics department. He’s going on the dole or drifting down the economic scale. At low levels, the trade-offs seem worthwhile, but once you scale this up the costs metastasize.

There’s also another hidden cost to free trade. Donald Trump rode to the White House on the promise of reorienting trade in the patriotic direction. All the beautiful people thought the issue was settled. Everyone they knew was a free trader. The same was true in Britain with regards to EU membership. Open borders and free trade are obviously all good with no bad, according to the beautiful people. In both cases, the Dirt People had other ideas and rallied to the banner of patriotic trade and nationalism.

The reason for this is so-called free trade erodes public trust. People assume politicians are crooked and dishonest. Even so, they expect their government to put their interests, the nation’s interests, ahead of the interests of foreigners. They may be crooks, but they are our crooks. Free trade and open borders break that contract as the state ends up siding with strangers over the citizens. The citizens soon begin to question the value of citizenship and their support for the state. The consequences are inevitable.

A good rule of life is that anytime a well understood word suddenly gets a modifier, you know a caper is afoot. Trade is something people always understood. One group of people trades their excess for the excess of another group of people. Mexico sends Canada sombreros, while the Canadians send Mexico beaver hats. Free-trade is something else entirely. It is a collection of loopholes, so well-connected industries can get all the benefits of the state, but shift the costs onto others. Those cost are often quite high.

Trade between nations is a good thing. America selling pop culture to China makes it tough for China to be bellicose and belligerent. China selling cheap manufactured good to America prevents domestic firms from becoming lazy and stupid. American cars are vastly better due to competition with Japan. China scrupulously looks out for her interests and America should do the same. If that means the snowflakes on campus have to pay a little more for their iPhone, so be it. In the long run, it is a bargain for them and their countrymen.