Some smart guy supposedly said that democracy works great until the people learn how to give themselves a raise from the public treasury. It is one of those quotes attributed to famous people, even though it is clear they never said it. Reagan used to use the line a lot, but he is certainly not the source.

Wiki blames urban legend and maybe some obscure guy from the 1940’s. The source is not important as the sentiment is obvious. Once you start taking money from one citizen and giving it to another citizen, you open the door to institutional robbery. Or, as some other unknown smart guys said, “A government that promises to rob Peter to pay Paul will always get Paul’s vote.”

That’s been the dynamic of America’s experiment with social democracy since World War II. One party promises to rob one group of Americans and give some of the proceeds to another group of Americans. The game is to either fashion a majority of Peters on the promise of defending them from the Pauls, or, fashion a majority of Pauls promising to rob the Peters. When in the 1970’s it became clear that Thatcher was right and you do eventually run out of Peters to rob, we started robbing the unborn Peters through debt and money creation.

Now, it looks like we are running out of unborn Peters. The public pension time bomb is about to blow apart the present arrangements, but no one has any idea what to do about it. It is a straight forward math problem. The possible outcomes are known and few are good. Maybe if there is a miraculous change in demographics and asset values, everything will work out just fine. More likely, Detroit is the rosy scenario. As this story in City Journal explains, restructuring pensions plans is just about impossible.

When unions agreed to a deal last month with Detroit city government to freeze the city’s underfunded pension system and create a new, less expensive one, some experts hailed it as a model that other troubled cities might adopt. News reports prominently mentioned governments with deep retirement debt, including Chicago and Philadelphia, as candidates for similar reforms. But the agreement came about under a Michigan emergency law that applies to struggling cities like Detroit, which is in bankruptcy. In many states, by contrast, local laws and state court rulings have made it virtually impossible to cut back retirement benefits for current government employees, even for work that they have yet to perform. These state protections, which go far beyond any safeguards that federal law provides to private-sector workers, are one reason why so many states and localities are struggling to dig themselves out of pension-system debt, amid sharp increases in costs. It will take significant reforms to state laws—or bigger and more painful bankruptcy cases—to make a real dent in the pension crisis.

As a localist, I tend to think this is a good thing. The problems created by the people of Philadelphia should be shouldered by the people of Philadelphia. The state or federal government riding to the rescue just encourages more of this stuff. Plus, the people of these localities will feel the effects of their political choices. Maybe they make better choices going forward.

The Detroit plan, negotiated by unions with the city’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, freezes the city’s current underfunded retirement plan so that workers will receive benefits for new work at a reduced rate. Under the old plan, an employee who worked for the city for 35 years and retired at 62 with a final salary of $60,000 could qualify for a pension of nearly $40,000. By contrast, if that same employee works the final ten years of his career under the new plan, his annual pension would be about $35,000. In addition, if the new plan becomes underfunded, the employee will have to contribute more of his own money to help cover the costs.

Detroit’s reforms aren’t unusual by the standards of the private sector, where a federal law, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA), governs pensions. That legislation protects the benefits that a worker has already earned but allows employers to amend a pension plan for work that’s not yet been done, a move that can immediately reduce costs. Workers have the option of seeking employment elsewhere, of course, if they don’t like the new terms.

But federal law doesn’t apply to municipal retirement systems created by state legislation. In about two dozen states, courts have declared that laws creating pensions represent a contract between an employee and government whose benefits can never be reduced once a worker enters the retirement system. Many state courts—including those in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Colorado—have been influenced by a series of California legal decisions (often referred to, collectively, as the “California Rule” on pensions) which hold that the pension contract begins immediately upon employment, and that the terms of a government worker’s pension can only change if the alterations are “accompanied by comparable new advantages,” or benefits. The California Rule, University of Chicago legal scholar Richard Epstein has written, “Neuters the power of local governments to alter and amend, by wiping out all government flexibility to correct prior errors in pension program design or funding.” One result, he observes, “is a financial death spiral” in many municipalities.

The proper term for this is “suicide pact.” That’s what these states have created. A city that cannot raise taxes to pay its bills has to cut spending. If they are prohibited from cutting these pension deals, then they must cut other stuff. Fewer cops and fewer bureaucrats probably sounds good to libertarians, but they have never been to places like Philly or Baltimore. Fewer cops and fewer locals on the city payroll means my neighbors are coming to your neighborhood.

We see that spiral in California, where a number of municipalities entered bankruptcy in recent years, thanks in part to their inability to alter their unaffordable pensions. Courts, meanwhile, have short-circuited reform attempts. Voters in the city of San Jose, where pension costs have risen to $245 million, from $73 million in 2002, passed a ballot initiative in 2012 installing a new, less expensive pension system. But in December, a California judge invalidated the key changes, based on her interpretation of state court precedents.

The decision leaves California municipalities facing a bleak future. From 2006 through 2013, local governments that participate in the giant California Public Employees’ Retirement System saw their annual pension costs double, on average. Last year, the CalPERS board voted to require an additional contribution increase of 50 percent, phased in over five years. “While there is time to plan for the increase, the most fiscally stressed municipalities could find the increases unmanageable,” Moody’s wrote. Meanwhile, California governor Jerry Brown has signed off on another plan to rescue the state’s struggling teachers’ pension fund by requiring school districts to increase their annual contributions from $2 billion this year to $6 billion over the next seven years.

At some point, the money runs out and there’s no way to hide it. The outflow of tax payers from California is going to accelerate. Eventually, the pols will have no choice but to turn on the rich of San Francisco and Los Angeles. That will be fun to watch.

Legislators in Illinois have taken a different approach. Their state constitution bans changes to pensions, and costs have soared for both the state and its municipalities. Last year, legislators passed changes in defiance of constitutional protections, arguing in court that the state faces a “severe financial crisis” that makes reform “a valid exercise of the state’s reserved sovereign powers.” Unions are now challenging the reform law, and if they succeed, Illinois faces a $187 billion pension tab—equal to more than four times its revenues—with no plan to reduce the debt.

Illinois has lots of company. Without some way to amend the terms of retirement plans, states and municipalities groaning under the so-called California Rule face years of increasing costs and pressure on budgets that inevitably mean higher taxes and fewer services—in other words, the worst of both worlds.

Illinois will never pay those debts. In fact, none of these states with swollen pension obligations will pay those debts. Then we will learn that economists were wrong about public debt. For decades they have been arguing that debt has no negative impact of economic growth. In fact, they have consistently argued that debt boosts growth. That’s true until the point when the debtor cannot pay his debts. Then the whole thing collapses.

That’s always been the big lie within modern economics. Debt and money creation are nothing more than the pulling forward of revenue. If you imagine a nation’s economy as a balance sheet, raising debt to fund current consumption is a zero sum game. It is just an accrual. You artificially increase revenues today, but that entry is reversed out down the line, when the debt is repaid. Our decreasingly robust recoveries from recessions are due to the metastasizing debt.

What happens when the retirees learn they will not be getting paid is not entirely unknown. They will default on their debts. The people holding those debts will follow suit. If a state like California does default on its debts, things will get very ugly in America. There are simply too many people depending on those debt payments for there to be no serious consequences to the economy at large.

I’ve often thought that the next constitution will have a few provisions in response to the inevitable debt crisis that is coming our way. One is there will be serious limits on government borrowing. Frankly, outside of war, the Federal government should never be borrowing. At the state level, debt should be limited to asset backed lending. The state pledges a bridge or road as collateral. Otherwise, government is prohibited from issuing debt.

The other change is that citizens vote where they are born. The people of California who voted for lunatics are the real problem. They should not be allowed to move to a neighboring state and begin ruining their new home by voting for lunatics. Look at the states ruined by Californians moving away from their mess. Oregon, Washington, Colorado, New Mexico used to be sensibly run states. New Hampshire was ruined by lunatics from Massachusetts. Vermont was ruined by New York lunatics.

Steve Sailer has a great post up on his site about this hilariously deranged story in the New York Times. One of my favorite gags since the onset of homosexual hysteria is that the lunatics are crafting an imaginary past in which homosexuals were kept on lavender farms in the south. Like blacks, who Progressives claim to have liberated, homosexuals were forced to slave away on the lavender farms as chattel. That makes the lunatic obsession with homosexuals today an analog to the Civil Rights Movement. It is intended to be a joke, but the NYTimes story suggests I am not too far off the mark.

Glenn Burke was 27 when he walked out on Major League Baseball, his promising career as an outfielder undone mostly by the burden of being a semicloseted gay man. It was 1980, and it was more important, Burke later explained, to be himself than to be a professional baseball player.

I remember 1977 and I have no recollections of anyone hissing at this guy. In fact, I have no recollection of him at all. The reason is, he was not very good.

When you hit .237 over six seasons, the game walks away form you, not the other way around. He was not the first washed up ball player to blame the unfairness of life for his busted dreams. I’ve known a few guys who never got over washing out of baseball. They never made it to the bigs and have a million reasons for it other than they were not good enough.

You would think a reporter would utilize Al Gore’s Contrivance to look up the stats, but that’s not how lunatics roll. First they create the narrative and then they fill in the facts. It’s not a lot different from how the Soviets would airbrush people in and out of photos. When you think everything including observable reality must be bent toward reaching the promised land over the next hill, silly things like facts are not going to stop you from reinventing the past.

I’m laughing very hard watching the toadies in the sporting press line up to fellate LeeBong this summer. The letter his people crafted worked as intended and the full force of the liberal press is out promoting LeeBong Inc. I give the guy a lot of credit for hiring smart people and letting them run his affairs. One sports guy not falling for it is the thoroughly cynical Ron Borges.

If NBC is looking for contestants for the next season of “The Biggest Loser” they can start with Dwyane Wade.

Wade now understands what Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert felt like four years ago when he was jilted by LeBron James and temporarily lost his mind. Put your trust in someone who says, “I’m all about business,” and you’ll probably end up getting the business from him eventually.

Four years ago James stuck it to a city, but at least the team he played for deserved it to a degree because in seven years they didn’t give him much help. This time he only stuck it to one guy but that guy, Wade, damn sure didn’t deserve to be “Clevelanded.”

LeBron James was supposed to be more than Dwyane Wade’s teammate. He was supposed to be his friend. But, hey, cash is thicker than blood (at least when it’s in an $88 million pile), which is way thicker than water and considerably thicker than whatever bound James to Wade apparently.

Two weeks ago Wade joined James and Chris Bosh, and opted out of the remaining two years of his contract and the $41.8 million guaranteed to him by the Heat, ostensibly to make room for Miami to do what it could to keep the Big Three together. Only problem was The Big One wasn’t staying.

Any chance he could have given Wade a wink or a nod? Any way he could have left an anonymous tweet in Wade’s direct message box saying, “Ixney on the opt-out!”? Might he have considered saying, “Think twice, my brother, because you ain’t my brother, brother!”?

He might have, but instead he did to Wade what he did to the Cavaliers and the city of Cleveland. LeBron James played him.

LeeBong is not a dumb guy. He’s not a genius, but by the standards of the NBA is an elite intellect. Unlike most of these knuckleheads he is trying to build something that will outlast his playing days. To do that means you have to be selfish. In this case, it means walking away from his current team and playing the role of the prodigal son returning home.

Maybe he didn’t do it consciously. Maybe he really believes he didn’t know he left his heart in Akron, but the idea that it just hit him in the last week that, as he put it on SI.com: “My relationship with Northeast Ohio is bigger than basketball. I didn’t realize that four years ago. I do now,” is ludicrous.

Where Wade goes from here is an open question. Not surprisingly after a dalliance with the Houston Rockets that convinced them to deal away point guard Jeremy Lin and a draft pick to the Lakers to open up cap space for him, Chris Bosh reversed field and went back to Miami last night, agreeing to a five-year, $118 million contract. Houston offered him the max at four years and $88 million, but Miami could give him the extra year and an additional $30 million, and Bosh, having learned something from watching LeBron, snatched it.

At 32 and with aching knees, Wade is not in the same boat. At times this year he seemed to have become the third wheel of the Big Three. When healthy he can still play like D-Wade, but when his knees are aching he plays like Lil Wayne, if he plays at all.

To save them and improve the Heat’s chances of getting at least to “not two rings,” Miami rested him for 28 games. He averaged only 33 minutes all season and played only nine games in 31 days going into the Eastern Conference finals. Yet he still faded in the championship series. He wasn’t alone, by the way.

Since he opted out, the Heat owe him nothing, but could admit he opted out more to help them keep LeBron than to feather his own nest. Coupled with all he’s brought to the franchise, maybe they pay him fairly, but he won’t get paid like Bosh or James did, and unless Pat Riley has lost his mind, he won’t get paid like he was going to be paid two weeks ago either, whether he stays or leaves.

In the end, Dwyane Wade sacrificed himself for his team and his friend, but it was all for naught.

Welcome to the other side of the NBA, Dwyane.

The reason teams like to have veterans on teams is to help the young guys figure out the reality of life as a pro. One of the things they need to figure out is they only have so many years. At 20, a player may think he will play forever. At 30 most have figured out they have only a few years left. The guys who figure this out early tend to have better careers.

James watched Wade fall apart over four seasons. He knows life after basketball is right around the corner and he better be ready for it, even if that means using and abusing his friends in the game. This move back to Cleveland is all about LeeBong Inc producing cash long after LeeBong in out of the league.

I think if you are going to try and find the worst country on earth, Germany is a good option to support. I suppose picking a country is a bit unfair as countries are made of people. Those people often belong to more than one country. Jews, for example, are everywhere. In some countries they run everything (Israeli, United States) and in others they have little influence (Iran and Iraq). Germans are decedents of the Franks, but so are most French and the people in the low countries.

But, let’s keep it simple. I think if you were making a list of the world most horrible countries, Germany is a good choice. Think about what sent the civilized world into the Dark Ages. It was Germanic tribes sacking Rome. In 410 AD, Alaric I led the Visigoths into the Italian peninsula and sacked Rome. Granted, Rome was falling apart at the time and the capital of the empire had been moved from the city. Still, the Eternal City was extinguished by Germans and what followed was a thousand years of barbarism.

At the other end of the Medieval period we have the collapse of the one uplifting and unifying force in Europe. That was done by, you guessed it, Germans. The Protestant Reformation was driven by a crap-eating German lunatic. That led to the next great devastation of Europe. The Thirty Years War reduced much of Europe to rubble. Parts of central Europe were reduced to cannibalism. I can make a strong argument that this was the end of Christianity as the organizing force in Europe.  Instead, nationalism became the religion of the elites.

Nationalism, you’ll recall, is considered the main cause of the next great devastation of Europe. That would be The Great War. It was started by, your guessed it, Germany! As Peter Hitchens notes in his great column on it in the Spectator, it permanently altered the landscape of civilization, leading to all that plagues us today.

To say that that the First World War was the greatest cataclysm in human history since the fall of the Roman Empire is to put it mildly. The war destroyed so many good things and killed so many good people that civilization has not recovered and probably never will. Long after it officially ended, it continued to cause millions of deaths and tragedies, most obviously during its encore performance of 1939-45. But it did not stop even then. Many of its worst consequences came during official periods of peace and are unknown or forgotten, or remain unconnected with it in the public mind.

The loss cannot be measured in cash because it was paid in the more elusive coin of faith, morals, trust, hope, and civility. The war is the reason why Europe is no longer a Christian continent, because too many churches supported it. Pointing to the poverty and scientific backwardness of the pre-1914 world is a false comparison. Who is to say that we could not have grown just as rich as we are now, and made just as many technological and medical advances, had we not slain the flower of Europe’s young men before they could win Nobel Prizes, or even beget and raise children?

The astonishing thing is that so many conservative, Christian, and patriotic people have yet to understand the damage this event did to their causes. It is at least partly because we can barely begin to imagine the world that we lost.

Stefan Zweig’s ambiguous description of a “Golden Age of Security” in his curious memoir of Austria-Hungarian twilight, The World of Yesterday, is one of the few attempts. But the civilization that Zweig portrays as stifling and repressed seemed to many who lived in it to be safe, calm, and free. His own mixed feelings, as he describes the woebegone departure of the Imperial Habsburgs from their domains, and the shocking sense of pain which beset him at the sight, are the truest thing in the book—a realization, far too late, of what has been lost forever and of what was now coming: unthinkable inflation, turning the modest life savings of the gentle into dust, along with the destruction of every known landmark and of all customs and manners, ending in the pit of tyranny, racial mass murder, and yet more war.

Of course, there’s no doubt why the war started.

Germany started the war because she wanted and hoped to gain enormous prizes through a swift victory, first over France and then over Russia. She encouraged Austria to be inflexible toward Serbia in the hope that this would happen, and the plan worked. It was not the first time that a country had carefully fostered a pretext for war, and it will certainly not be the last. Most readers in Britain and the U.S. will be able to think of recent examples.

There is a strong argument for saying that it was reasonable for Germany to want what she wanted, and that it was and is a great pity that no peaceful way could be found of reaching a sensible compromise over her legitimate demands.

There is an equally strong argument for wondering why the main critics of the Great War have been those of the anti-capitalist or socially liberal Left, while conservatives have tended to defend it, even to stand up for its dreadful generals and its unspeakable carnage, as some kind of necessity or patriotic duty.

The opposite should be the case. Those on the Left should defend it and rejoice over it. It was the fulfillment of their dreams. No single event has done more to advance the power of the state and of state socialism. Britain barely had a state before 1914. By 1918 it was one of the most tightly governed and bureaucratized patches of soil in the world. The Russian revolution would never have happened had there been no war in 1914. The great Christian and conservative empires of the world would probably all still exist. War also brought about the sexual, social, and cultural revolutions that are still convulsing what used to be Christendom.

The whole article is worth reading. He goes on to point out that it was Germany that financed Lenin and the Bolsheviks. The Germans, of course, gave us Marxism as well as Fascism. Those two account for 100 million deaths worldwide. They also gave us Critical Theory, otherwise known as Cultural Marxism. Who knows what the body count will be from that in the end. The EU is a German invention and is now run by Germans.

The damage done by Germans is not limited to Europe. The World Cup final is tomorrow. The Germans are on one side and Argentina, the vacation land for Nazis, is on the other. The United States, of course, has been greatly influenced by Germans. The largest ethnic group in the country are Germans and they turned the former British colonies from a Classical Liberal country into a big fat social democracy. Obama, America’s worst president, went to Berlin to give a speech once he secured the nomination. Coincidence?

In the worst country contest, I think my vote goes to the Germans.

This post has already been linked to 4628 times!

Here’s a tip I like to pass onto the young. If you are planning a life of crime, avoid getting face tattoos. It makes it easy for the cops to find you.

Richard Magnan sports many of them. The one on his forehead announcing “F— the World” may just emerge as the prosecution’s exhibit A in his upcoming trial. Perhaps the defense will enter the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox insignias on his face as evidence of a dangerous split-personality disorder.

A judge ordered the illustrated man held on $3 million bail on involuntary manslaughter charges on Wednesday. Chicago cops arrested Magnan on Monday for killing a friend over the holiday weekend. The rooter of the White Sox in the American and the Cardinals in the National–Is it a crime to hedge your bets and back a team in both leagues?–allegedly shot a fellow member of the 2-6 gang in the stomach in a Walgreens parking lot at the intersection of West 63rd Street and South Austin Avenue. The convicted felon, who now maintains it was a mistake (the shooting, not the righteous ink), fled the scene. There’s no word yet on how any potential witnesses described Magnan to the police.

Eyewitness accounts are often tough to support at trial. People make mistakes and forget things. Even public defenders can get an ID tossed in many cases. When the perp has a “Fuck the World” tattoo on his forehead, it’s hard to claim he was misidentified.

Imagine it is the year 2050 and mobs of lunatics are pulling down the Washington Monument on the grounds that Washington was a racist slave holder. Earlier they had stormed the National Archive and burned the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. These were deemed to be unwelcome reminders of the nations patriarchal past and violation of the new America. All around the country mobs are destroying anything that suggests a past not in line with the current modes of thinking.

It sounds crazy, but erasing the past is a popular past time with the lunatics. The Soviets would airbrush people in and out of the the past whenever it suited them. The Nazis tried hard to recreate things like Christmas to fit the official Aryan narrative. In my lifetime, the 18th century has been rewritten to read like a first draft of Roots. Currently, our lunatics are creating a mythological past where homosexuals were enslaved on lavender plantation in the South, thus making the lunatic obsession with homosexuals an analog of the Civil Rights Movement.

I’m increasingly fond of saying America is becoming a different type of Iran. Their lunatics believe in flying carpets, invisible imams and sorcery. Our lunatics believe biology is a social construct, everyone can be above average and humanity can be saved through mass extinction. The point of comparison between various types of lunatics is their belief in utter nonsense and their willingness to kill for it. I suspect that’s why Progressives are obsessed with a rapprochement with Iran. They see themselves in the eggplants.

Anyway, the scenario I described sounds crazy, but look at what lunatics will do if given the chance. These sites they are destroying are harmless to normal people. They are important historical sites that help define the people who live there. That’s what makes them so dangerous to the lunatic. Anything that contradicts the narrative, the prevailing orthodoxy, must be destroyed. If that sounds familiar, it should. Look at the list of people destroyed by PC fanatics in the last few years. The leap from destroying a career to murder is very short.

I’m old enough to remember when Arabs were proud of their cultural history. Western archaeologists and researchers were invited to these countries to dig around and find stuff, even Christian stuff. I may be an old man, but in the grand scheme of things, that was one generation ago, give or take. Here’s a picture of Afghan women at university in the 1970′s:

In the 70′s, a whole lot of Muslims looked at the lunatics and thought they would burn themselves out eventually. The more sophisticated Muslims understood the threat, but were sure they could deal with it. Others were convinced the people would never let the lunatics gain dominion over them. Everyone had a reason to think it would all work out in the end, even the lunatics. The difference is the lunatics had a plan and everyone else had wishful thinking.

Sound familiar?

If you pay attention, you cannot help but notice the blatantly racist attitudes of the black sports reporter. Some are worse than others, but all of them wear they’re resentments on their sleeve. Michael Wilbon is a notorious bigot. He must have been told to tone it down after the Rush Limbaugh imbroglio, but he is still pretty racist. Kevin Blackistone is a click short of being Louis Farrakhan. J. A. Adande is far from the worst, but his slip shows from time to time.

If I could get a meeting of my own with LeBron James, I’d ask him how he could even consider compromising his values and stepping down from the moral high ground he ascended to during the playoffs by weighing an offer from Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert.

LeBron produced the sharpest and most noteworthy criticism of Clippers owner Donald Sterling after TMZ made Sterling’s racially offensive diatribes public, saying “it’s unacceptable in our league.” No one has accused Gilbert of holding the same misguided racial perceptions as Sterling. With Gilbert, it’s about the personal attacks on LeBron’s character, and his diametrically opposed views on the business of the NBA.

For black sports reporters, the black icons are untouchable. Until his Thanksgiving meltdown, criticizing Tiger Woods meant shouts of racism from black sports reporters. Saying Bird was better than Jordon was racist. Saying anything bad about LeeBong is treated like burning a cross. Conversely, saying bad things about Donald Sterling is required, because he is a racist. Similarly, the owner of the Cavaliers is the great Satan because he said bad things about Leebong.

Gilbert, for those who never bothered to read his unhinged response to The Decision in 2010 before the Cavaliers recently purged it from their website, called LeBron’s departure to the Miami Heat a “cowardly betrayal” and said LeBron was a bad example for the children of Cleveland. This wasn’t just a critique of the televised announcement; it was a tantrum about the very premise of free agency, as if anything other than a career-long commitment to the team that drafted a player constituted treason.

The little noted fact of the Leebong move to Miami was how blacks viewed it as an escape from bondage. Leebong moving from one team to another was the seminal moment in the game, when the black players finally took control of their league from the Jewish owners. That last part is another seldom discussed aspect of this story. Blacks harbor a deep resentment of Jews.

A year later, Gilbert was among the group of owners holding to the hard line when the NBA locked out its players, willing to sacrifice games to institute a new collective bargaining agreement that limited player earnings and hampered the formation of superteams.

A return to the Cavaliers by James would be a tacit endorsement of all he rejected. It wouldn’t represent just a swallowing of his own pride — it would be a surrender in the battle for self-determination for NBA players.

We see it again. Gilbert is leading a conspiracy to keep the black man down.

There’s an undercurrent to this summer’s free-agency period that makes it more than just a reshuffling of rosters. The proceedings are a referendum on the labor conflict fought in 2011 and perhaps the grist for a new battle in the next round of negotiations.

I’ve interpreted reports that LeBron will take nothing less than a maximum contract as his way of rejecting the premise that it’s incumbent on players to make the financial sacrifices to win, as if the owners don’t also have the option of paying the luxury tax to assemble a championship team. To play for Gilbert would be to reward a man who wanted it this way. It would also mean leaving Heat owner Micky Arison, who made it clear on Twitter that he didn’t approve of the way collective bargaining negotiations were headed in 2011. (Arison also showed he had no love for Sterling, responding to a tweet criticizing Sterling in his mentions with an “lol.”)

As I said, Adande is a reasonably level headed reporter. Still, his column is dripping with racial hatred of the Jewish owners, merely because they will not let the black players do what they want without repercussions. Owners in all sports try to drive down the cost of labor. That’s what they do. In basketball, the black man’s game, that’s treated as the ultimate sign of disrespect.

If that’s the case, there’s no middle ground and the league is headed for the rocks.

Evolutionarily speaking, humans are wired to distrust outsiders. In the very early days of humanity, about 50,000 years ago, humans lived in very small bands of hunter-gathers. The reason for this is the species was hyper-violent and hyper-aggressive. In a world where even the ape that looks like you could and would crush your skull with a rock at any minute, identifying friend and foe was vital.

The mechanisms for identifying friends evolved over time along with our complex relationships with one another. The mechanism for identifying foes was much simpler. If you are not a friend, it is assumed you are a foe. Evolution does not pick the best solution. It picks the simplest ones that work.

People who study these things tell us that altruism was one of the first modern human character traits to evolve. Trusting strangers is a big deal in human evolution. You cannot have much of a society without the capacity for trusting unrelated people. Males in particular have to have a way to trust unrelated males. The reason should be obvious.

Otherwise, you have to guard your women all the time. Figuring out how unrelated males can coexist was a big deal in human evolution. It made settlement possible. Eventually, it made civilization possible. A bunch of dudes who are unrelated, but agree not to bang each other’s women, working in concert is a force multiplier, civilizationally speaking.

Without getting too deep in the weeds on evolution stuff, the point is that civilization is about trust. That encompasses a lot more than just being able to leave your house without worrying about your old lady getting it on with the mailman. It is about willingly taking on obligations to society, even when the payoff is not obvious. It is about agreeing to settle disputes within a set of rules, administered by the rest of society. It is about preserving today for those who have yet to be born.

Anyway, what got me going on this is this post from Jim Geraghty. Most of it is nonsense, but there’s something of value lurking in it. That would be my great comment.

Well, the next generation is more transactional. This is something business and the military are struggling with as they hire, train and develop millenials. This generation puts lifestyle and personal goals ahead of all else. They are not interested in work that is uninteresting or routine. They need constant positive feedback either from superiors or through participation in a team.

The result is this generation has little emotional investment in work. They will walk away from a job if they don’t feel it is satisfying, even if that means leaving co-workers and friends in a difficult position. Anyone watching millenials take over a family business has seen them cut ties with long term employees and vendors on a whim.

How this will play out in society is seldom discussed. The military is spending a lot of time and money trying to get ahead of it. Retention of young officers is an enormous concern right now. Politically, we may be a facing a generation of sociopaths incapable of seeing past the immediate value of policy. These are not the sort of folks likely to carry a heavy burden to finance their parents retirement.

I’m not the first person to pick up on this. In fact, the military has been spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure how to adjust to the new generation. This paper from the Navy on the challenges they face in retaining young officers is very interesting. If you scroll down to page seven you get this:

Numerous studies have been conducted that evaluate the differences between significant workplace demographics, most notably between Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1980), and Millennials (1981-1995). One of the most concise is a recently concluded study jointly conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, University of Southern California, and London Business School. This 2011-2012 joint study collected data from more than 40,000 respondents, including a set of 13,150 PricewaterhouseCoopers employees (9,120 Millennials and 4,030 non-Millennials) at the same point in their career. Some notable differences between Millennials and their Non-Millennial counterparts include:

• Millennial employees are unconvinced that excessive work demands are worth the sacrifices to their personal life.
• Millennials say that creating a strong cohesive, team-oriented culture at work and providing opportunities for interesting work—including assignments around the world—are important to their workplace happiness, even more so than their non- Millennial counterparts.
• While the same basic drivers of retention exist for both Millennials and non-Millennials, their relative importance varies, with Millennials placing a greater emphasis on being supported and appreciated

Addressing retention, the report notes “Generational differences do exist among Millennials and non-Millennials, and should be taken into account by organizations that include employees from both groups. For example, Millennials are more likely to leave if their needs for support, appreciation and flexibility are not met, while non-Millennials are more likely to leave if they feel they are not being paid competitively, or due to a perceived lack of development opportunities.” This has alarming implications for senior leadership, since the traditional top-down approach and differences in generational perspectives are likely to hinder cross-generational communication.

Another concern is the Millennial’s perspective on employment, which takes a more “transactional approach” than that exhibited by Baby Boomer or Generation X officers. In general, this younger generation is not emotionally invested or tied down by 4-8 years of naval service. Instead, Millennials are more willing to vote with their feet if they feel their needs aren’t being met, forcing the service to adapt or subsequently fall victim to a lack of talent as disenfranchised service members leave – reducing the talent pool that will produce our future senior leaders.

As I wrote in my post on NRO, anyone who has seen a Millennial take over a family business has probably seen the behavior described in the Navy paper. Long time employees are jettisoned and vendor relationships are broken. It is not a money grab. I’ve seen situations where the old vendor was a better value, but the Millennial did not like the salesman or did not think the product was cool enough. The quest to be the most special snowflake of the bunch can get very expensive. As I type this I’m thinking of a firm that spent a lot of money on software just because the bosses son thought it looked cool.

Employing this generation is a challenge to every business owner. I know of a few companies that quietly avoid hiring this generation. They will hire a college grad, but they avoid hiring the 25-35 year olds. The reason is they are, as one guy I know put it, “lazy clock punchers that make more demands than they are worth. I’d rather hire a retired guy or a single mom. They may need time off, but they work hard and are grateful.” The guy I’m paraphrasing is not a geezer, but a guy in his forties.

A generation that has no loyalties and no concept of loyalty is going to be a problem in a welfare state with staggering debt obligations. Throw in the fact that these folks are only interested in that which elevates their self-esteem and you have a serious problem on the horizon. A generation willing to say “fuck it” and walk away from a good job, leaving friends and colleagues to struggle, is not going to be paying high taxes for granny. They would very likely support turning granny into dog chow if that’s more convenient.

That leads me back to where I started. This is a low-trust generation. They have to be. If you’re willing to cut loose a long time employee because you feel like it or send granny to the dog food plant because you can’t be bothered, no one is going to trust you.

A generation of perpetual toddlers unwilling to commit to anything that does not make them feel like special little snowflakes is hardly going to bite the bullet for societal obligations. I don’t think we’re looking at Late Bronze Age collapse, but American society is about to veer off into a low-trust direction. History says that brings consequences not good for civilizational progress.

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I’ve always thought that the worst aspect of life in a totalitarian country was the arbitrariness. If you find yourself living under a set of rules with which you disagree, you can adapt. Jews living in countries that banned Jews from public office, for instance, adapted and carved out lives that were fruitful and productive. Blacks in the American South did not like Jim Crow, but they could live with it.The fact that literacy rates, crime rates and illegitimacy rates were much better for blacks under Jim Crow speaks to the toughness of humans. As long as the rules are fixed and known, people can and will adapt.

Where things get ugly is when the rules are unknown and variable. Imagine driving on a highway where the speed limit is never posted and the cops get to set the limit according to their whim. Word would quickly get out and no one would drive that road. I suspect that’s ultimately why people flee totalitarian regimes. Cubans look at the sea as less of a threat than their own government because the former is predictable and the latter is not. It is this arbitrariness that makes for madhouse societies.

Anyway, this comes to mind reading stories like this one.

A federal appeals court ruled Monday that young adult illegal immigrants whom President Obama has given tentative permission to be in the country — so-called “dreamers” — are also entitled to driver’s licenses and ordered Arizona to issue them.

The ruling comes while the government is debating policy about a new wave of illegal immigrant children who are surging across the border in Texas, overwhelming federal authorities’ ability to handle them.

We now live in a land where the Head Lunatic In Charge can wave his hand and the people’s laws are mute. We live in a land where a Federal court can force a state to issue driver’s licenses to people who are not citizens.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer blasted the court’s ruling, saying it could end up meaning her state would have to grant driver’s licenses to some of those in the latest wave of illegal immigrants if Mr. Obama finds ways to avoid deporting them too.

But immigrant-rights advocates hailed the decision, saying it is a major step in helping the Dreamers, who were brought to the U.S. as minors by their parents, move toward some sort of normal life in the U.S.

“This is a huge victory for the young immigrants who want nothing more than to make meaningful contributions to communities in their home state of Arizona,” said Alessandra Soler, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

A three-judge panel on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Dreamers — so-named because of pending federal legislation known as the Dream Act — are in the same situation as other illegal immigrants who have applied for legal status and to whom Arizona law grants driver’s licenses while they await a final ruling in their cases.

The judges said to treat the Dreamers differently violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Think about the madness baked into that last sentence. The US Constitution provides the structure of American political institutions. The people of France do not consider it binding on them. They have their own rules and structures. The people of Kenya have their rules. In other words, the US Constitution applies to Americans in America. These lunatic judges have just declared that all humans on earth are now covered by the US Constitution, thus making them Americans.

There used to be a time when I’d just roll my eyes at the stuff tumbling from the 9th Circuit. It is a well know holding pen for liberal fruitcakes. Sadly, they are no longer outliers. They are the norm. The super structure of the nation is falling apart around us and we are left with the whimsical, arbitrary decisions of these petty despots. These people hate us and enjoy rubbing our noses in the fact we no longer are a nation of laws. The contempt for Americans in the words and deeds of these immigration fanatics is stunning.

In a madhouse society, the rulers are perpetually at war with the ruled. That’s where we are today. Elected officials furiously work to discredit the offices they hold in the eyes of the people. The keepers of the law undermine the people’s faith in the law. The law abiding today are criminals tomorrow. There are no fixed points and there are no rules. Nothing is on the level and there’s no grift that is too small. Welcome to the madhouse.

I don’t know where I saw this, but I’m surprised it is not getting more coverage. The Miami Herald, as far as I know, is a liberal rag in good standing. I can’t say I keep tabs on the standing of the local broadsheets, but I have no recollection of this paper indulging in conspiracy mongering. Anyway, this seems like a big deal to me.

It was Halloween night, 2001. The horrors of 9/11 were still fresh on the the minds of Americans.

At a time when everyone was on edge, the sight of a man disposing documents in a dumpster behind a Bradenton storage facility aroused suspicion. Summoned to the scene, Manatee County sheriff’s deputies confronted the man, who had a Tunisian passport.

According to FBI records, authorities searched the dumpster and found “a self-printed manual on terrorism and Jihad, a map of the inside of an unnamed airport, a rudimentary last will and testament, a weight-to-fuel ratio calculation for a Cessna 172 aircraft, flight training information from the Flight Training Center in Venice [Fla.] and printed maps of Publix shopping centers in Tampa Bay.”

The Flight Training Center is where 9/11 hijack pilot Ziad Jarrah, who was at the controls of United Airlines Flight 93 when it crashed in Shanksville, Pa., took flying lessons.

This intriguing tale and at least one other are contained in a batch of partially redacted documents released this past week as part of ongoing Freedom of Information Act litigation by the online news site BrowardBulldog.org. The suit, filed in 2012, seeks the FBI’s files from a once-secret investigation into a family of Sarasota Saudis who left the country abruptly about two weeks before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, leaving behind clothing, jewelry and cars.

The main figures in the family were Abdulaziz al-Hijji, his wife, Anoud, and her father, Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a Saudi prince.

The report of the Bradenton incident is in some way linked to the al-Hijjis’ saga, although precisely how is unclear. The link might be spelled out in one of the many redacted passages. Nor is it clear in the unredacted portions who the man was or whether he was detained. An FBI letter accompanying the documents says the redactions have to do with national security and other exclusions.

The documents — the fourth batch released in response to the Broward Bulldog lawsuit — were located via court-ordered text searches using the names of the al-Hijjis and Ghazzawi. U.S. District Judge William J. Zloch in Fort Lauderdale is currently reviewing more than 80,000 pages of 9/11 records.

“This release suggests that the FBI has covered up information that is vitally important to public safety,” said Miami attorney Thomas Julin, who represents BrowardBulldog.org. “It’s startling that after initially denying they had any documents they continue to find new documents as the weeks and months roll by. Each new batch suggests there are many, many more documents.”

“There needs to be a full-scale explanation of what’s going on here,” Julin said.

The thing about lies and coverups is there is usually something lurking behind the lies and coverups that is worse than the lies and coverups. What’s strange about this stuff is we seem to know the general outlines of that thing in the shadows. Official Washington turned a blind eye to a lot of stuff, including Saudi funding of terrorism. Immediately after 9/11, there was a scramble to cover that reality up. Lying about this stuff now seems to make little sense.

A second FBI document released last week, dated Feb. 2, 2012, is similarly tantalizing — and similarly murky.

On that day, according to the document, FBI offices in Tampa and Charlotte, N.C., received information from Washington stamped “secret” stating that a “person of interest” in the FBI’s massive 9/11 investigation had returned to the United States.

The person, whose name is redacted, was reported to be “traveling to Texas and LA for business/tourism.” The person apparently told authorities upon entering the country that he could be reached in Charlotte. He provided a telephone number “associated with furniture manufacturers in North Carolina,” the report states.

Details about that were blanked out. But the report also states, “Tampa is notified that a person of interest to Tampa regarding the PENTTBOMB investigation has a valid visa for re-entry into the U.S.” PENTTBOMB is the FBI’s code name for its 9/11 investigation.

Whether this person was ever detained, interviewed or allowed to go about his/her business is unclear in the unredacted passages.

In all, the FBI released 11 pages. They contain statements reiterating that the al-Hijjis had departed the United States in haste shortly before 9/11 and that “further investigation” had “revealed many connections” between them and persons associated with “attacks on 9/11/2001.”

Those statements flatly contradict the FBI’s public statements that agents found no connection between the al-Hijjis and the 9/11 plot.

Yet they dovetail with the account of a counterintelligence source who has said investigators in 2001 found evidence — phone records and photographs of license plates snapped at the entrance to the al-Hijjis’ Sarasota-area neighborhood — that showed Mohamed Atta, other hijackers and former Broward resident and current al-Qaeda fugitive Adnan Shukrijumah had visited the al-Hijji home.

None of that information, or even the fact that an investigation in Sarasota took place, was disclosed by the FBI to Congress’ Joint Inquiry into the attacks or to the 9/11 Commission, according to former Florida Sen. Bob Graham. Graham co-chaired the joint inquiry.

Maybe this is all there is to it. The FBI lies to Congress a lot. They lie to the President a lot. It is one of the things everyone knows and no one really says much about. It goes back to Hoover. Read enough about Watergate and you realize that the FBI and to a lesser extent the CIA operate outside the control of the elected government. They are part of the permanent state. The FBI covered this stuff up because they did not want to both own up to being asleep at the switch and then lying about it.

I don’t know, but it is a strange story.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/01/4212644/fbi-records-chilling-find-in-bradenton.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/07/01/4212644/fbi-records-chilling-find-in-bradenton.html#storylink=cpy