I saw this linked on Drudge this morning. I have never heard of the site so I make no claims about its integrity. The video itself is not all that interesting, other than the fact Sharpton appears to have amnesia. What is interesting is the value of offense in the culture war. Sharpton is a festering carbuncle of a man. A sensible society would have scraped off that bit a filth from the shoe a long time ago. Instead the official religion of the country celebrates the guy. People who style themselves as the opposition, like Sean Hannity, treat the guy with respect.

As soon as you concede ground to these guys, you lose. That’s why you always have to be on offense. If dozens of private guerrilla video makers are ambushing guys like Sharpton and posting their work, the tide begins to turn. If a James O’Keefe type of operation does a 30 minute piece of Chris Mathews whites-only neighborhood, it forces that fat lunatic to go on defense, rather than rant and rave about normal people.  There’s plenty of money in the normalville to finance this stuff.

But, everyone is afraid to upset Lefty.

The big Ta-Nehisi Coates case for reparations has finally hit the web. A few weeks ago I made a soft case for reparations. By soft case, I mean a general nod in favor the argument. We have tried for at least two generations to relieve a certain segment of the white population of their unfounded guilt over slavery and discrimination. The only way to do that is to settle up with the blacks. At least that’s the it looks. We hammer out an agreement, write the checks and close the books on the issue for good.

The Coates story has been anticipated for a while, since he is the latest novelty on the circuit. Having read his blog for a while now, I expected it to be loaded up with fake erudition and he did not disappoint. Right out of the shoot we get a Biblical quote and a snippet from John Locke. Then the whole thing falls apart. Instead of making the case for why reparations will solve the problem, he spends thousands and thousands of words bitching and moaning about whitey and how rotten it is to be black in America. Anyone over the age of ten has heard it all before and has no interest in hearing it again. Coates took the lazy way out.

It’s not just laziness, it is cowardice. Look, reparations in the abstract are easy to argue. It is when you get to nut-cutting that things get tough. How much does each black person get? How do we determined who is eligible? Who pays? How do we figure that out? More important, how do we then de-construct the previous efforts at reparations like affirmative action? That’s tough and it takes skill to make the case. It also takes a degree of honesty not popular in the comfy lefty confines Coates enjoys these days.

I’ve posited that Coates is really just a grifter. He’s not well read or educated, but he knows how to game liberal elites into giving him stuff. He reads enough to drop references and book titles with some skill. That pleases SWPL types. He does the authentic black guy bit by living in Harlem (the gentrified part) and posing as a hostile black man. He’s checking off all the boxed for his benefactors. This article is aimed at them. It allows them to weep and wallow in their self-inflicted misery. They get to feel good over feeling bad about their privilege. They can now chatter about at the faculty get together, signaling their piety to one another without actually doing anything to earn it.

In another era, black people had a word for guys like Coates.

My conservative friends hate that I have zero interest in supporting Republicans. They really hate it when I say the best thing that could happen is for the GOP to fold up. You’re never going to beat a well armed and well organized religious cult with pleading and stammering. That’s all the GOP has to offer. The cause of this, however, is the deluded views of Conservative Inc. A good example is right here.

Politics is not always about somebody getting his way and somebody else failing to get his way. Consider the case of the Veterans Affairs hospitals: Nobody wanted this outcome. That outcome, recall, is a great many dead veterans, the result of medical and managerial malpractice. Democrats did not want the hospitals that care for our veterans to be catastrophically mismanaged while administrators set about systematically destroying the evidence of their incompetence, and Republicans did not want that, either. Independents are firmly opposed to negligently killing veterans. It doesn’t poll well. Everybody is so opposed to that outcome that we created a cabinet-level secretariat to prevent it and installed as its boss Eric Shinseki, a highly regarded former Army general. We spent very large sums of money, billions of dollars, to prevent this outcome, almost trebling VA spending from 2000 to 2013 even as the total number of veterans declined by several million.

This sounds nice and cheery, but it is mostly based on nonsense. The Left is all about who-whom. For them it is not only always about who dominates whom, it is only about who dominates whom. But let’s cut Williamson some slack as he may be just warming up.

Nobody wanted these veterans dead, but dead they are. How is it possible that the government of the United States of America — arguably the most powerful organization of any sort in the history of the human race, in possession of a navy, a nuclear arsenal, and a vast police apparatus — cannot ensure that its own employees and contractors do not negligently kill its other employees and former employees? Never mind providing veterans with world-class medical care — the federal government cannot even prevent bureaucratic homicide. All of the political will is behind having a decent VA, and there is nothing to be gained politically from having a horrific one. How can it be that, with everybody free to vote as he pleases and to propose such policies as please him, we end up with what nobody wants?

That sounds much better. That’s heading for the libertarian/classical liberal argument against socialism. Society is too big and too varied for any one group of people to “manage” it. The result of such attempts is disaster. Better to let people sort it out on their own.

There will be plenty of personal culpability to go around as this mess all comes to light, beginning with President Obama, who offered himself to the American people as, among other things, a competent authority on the management of health care. He promised the country openness and transparency but has worked assiduously against those qualities, which carry not only ethical weight but practical value as well: Open and transparent arrangements are much less prone to abuse, especially abuse of the sort that results in death, because observation is linked to accountability, which is why police officers make so many wrongful arrests and destroy so much evidence in response to the perfectly legal act of videotaping them at work. (E.g.) The right thing to do, in response to 40 and counting veterans killed through negligence on his watch, is for President Obama to resign. A man with any self-respect would do it; a country with any self-respect would demand it. But that of course is not what is going to happen.

Then he tips into dream land. No one will be held to account for this. No one is held to account for anything in the Custodial State. You can be damned sure the press is not going to go after one of their own, forcing the ruling class to clean up its act. That highlighted sentence is so laughably naive and ridiculous I wonder if the poor man was having a stroke while writing this column. Look back at the never ending series of scandals that started in the Clinton years and name anyone who went to jail? Lost a job? Saw their career ruined?

Until Conservative Inc comes to terms with objective reality, they are just highly paid trolls.

I’m fond of pointing out that all of the things the Left accused Nixon of in the 1970′s have been done by Obama with enthusiasm. The Articles of Impeachment makes for an interesting read forty years later. Some are narrowly specific, but the misuse of the IRS, CIA and Justice Department sound like the daily schedule at the White House.

Now, I enjoy mentioning this to Lefty because it causes him to have a seizure. To be fair, the shenanigans that went on during the Bush years were not much better. The Clinton years were an odious triumph of the base and vulgar. We have been on a twenty year slide into the gutter.

A good example of the gross corruption of government is right here in this LA Times story.

The Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money.

The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall’s congressional elections.

Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan a “bailout” for insurance companies providing coverage under the healthcare law.

They continue to argue that most insurers shouldn’t need to substantially increase premiums because safeguards in the healthcare law will protect them over the next several years.

Let’s first start with the fact Congress gave the Executive carte blanche to hand out cash to whoever they like at the moment. This is pretty much the opposite of republican self-government. This is closer to the temporary dictatorships the Ancients were fond of in times of trouble.

Then we see the casual dishonesty of the administration. They’ve obviously been lying about what they are doing, but no one seems to care. Another day, another lie. Of course, they are not even bothering to hide the fact they are hoping to game the insurance rates to avoid answering for it at the polls.

But the change in regulations essentially provides insurers with another backup: If they keep rate increases modest over the next couple of years but lose money, the administration will tap federal funds as needed to cover shortfalls.

Although little noticed so far, the plan was already beginning to fuel a new round of attacks Tuesday from the healthcare law’s critics.

“If conservatives want to stop the illegal Obamacare insurance bailout before it starts they must start planning now,” wrote Conn Carroll, an editor of the right-leaning news site Townhall.com.

Good luck with that.

On Capitol Hill, Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee began circulating a memo on the issue and urging colleagues to fight what they are calling “another end-run around Congress.”

Obama administration officials said the new regulations would not put taxpayers at risk. “We are confident this three-year program will not create a shortfall,” Health and Human Services spokeswoman Erin Shields Britt said in a statement. “However, we want to be clear that in the highly unlikely event of a shortfall, HHS will use appropriations as available to fill it.”

Well, how would we know? If they will lie about all the other stuff, why would anyone expect them to be honest about this? It’s not like the toadies and flunkies in the liberal media will ever check up on it.

The stakes are high for President Obama and the healthcare law.

Although more than 8 million people signed up for health coverage under the law, exceeding expectations, insurance companies in several states have been eyeing significant rate increases for next year amid concerns that their new customers are older and sicker than anticipated.

Insurers around the country have started to file proposed 2015 premiums, just as the midterm campaigns are heating up. Obamacare, as the law is often called, remains a top campaign issue, and big premium increases in states with tightly contested races could prove politically disastrous for Democrats.

If rates go up dramatically, consumers may also turn away from insurance marketplaces in some states, leading to their collapse.

The total disregard for truth by the ruling class is like a tidal wave of sewage. The foulness of it makes it hard to focus on anyone bit. We have no idea how many people signed up through these websites. We have no idea how many actually bought insurance. We have no idea how many had insurance, but were canceled due to this silly law. We don’t know how many went on Medicaid.

No one knows because the government refuses to publish the numbers for examination by the citizens. The lefty media, however, takes whatever the rulers say on faith. I guess all that talking truth to power stuff was just more bullshit.

This is the central feature of the Custodial State. The government is never going to be very good at tending to the needs of the citizens. The abuses coming out of the Veterans Administration are just the beginning. The response will be habitual lying by the ruling elites to the point where no one knows what is truth and what is fiction. This, of course, trickles down to the rest of us.

Ours is now a dishonesty society. Nothing is on the level. Everything is a deal. No deal is too small or too outlandish. And, it is only going to get worse.

I get a little queasy reading some of the commentary on Wade’s latest book. Math is hard. Most people struggle with basic concepts like sets and relationships. When it comes to population genetics, the math is the easy part. Understanding the science is, as Steve Sailer puts it, the intellectual big leagues. Teasing out what could be nature from what is nurture from what is noise requires a big brain and a whole lot of humility. A lot of it is unknowable, at least at this time.

An example is from Vox.

This reasoning doesn’t hold up. The global Jewish population is 13,854,800. This would seem to indicate 318,660 Jews with 140+ IQs.  However, since Ashkenazim account for 74 percent of the global Jewish population and “enhanced cognitive capacity is confined to the Ashkenazic branch of the Jewish population”, the likely number of high-IQ Jews around the world is 235,809 Askenazim plus 14,409 non-Ashkenazim for total of  250,218. A very conservative estimate of the global European population is 680 million. This indicates 2,720,000 Europeans with 140+ IQs around the world.

Therefore, crediting Jewish success to their high level of intelligence when there are at least 11 high-IQ Europeans for every high-IQ Jew isn’t logically credible. Especially because there are at least 48 high-IQ Han and 5 high-IQ Japanese to factor in as well.

No one, as far as I know, makes the claim that IQ alone explains the success of Jewish people. Askenazim gave up farming 2,000 years ago. Their religion required an enormous investment in education when the return on investment was limited. Jews adapted by moving into towns and cities to take up work that would reward literacy and numeracy. That made the Askenazim uniquely positioned when trade and commerce began to dominate European economics.

There’s also the cultural angle. Jews have always been under external pressure requiring a high degree of cooperation within the tribe. A whole bunch of people who are smart and prosperous working together will outperform a scattered, disorganized group with lesser IQ’s. The point being that IQ is one of many factors contributing to Jewish success. The fact that IQ correlates to success across groups makes it a good place to start when trying to explain something like Jewish success.

This post has already been linked to 1215 times!

The court jester is probably a familiar image. It’s the guy dressed in the weird leotard juggling and telling jokes at the local Renaissance fair. As is often the case, the historical character has been warped by our own confusion about history. We can blame Shakespeare for that, I suppose. The general idea has remained intact. The guy hired by the ruler to entertain the ruler and the court.

Modern times brings us the Cult Jester. This is a guy, but it can be a gal, who says and writes foolish things that flatter the Cult of Modern Liberalism. As in the old days, they come in different types. An example of the natural fool is the comedian/satirist. Jon Stewart, Steven Colbert and  Bill Maher are examples of guys who pass themselves off as clowns mocking greater society, but they are really selling flattery to the Left. Their audience barks and claps like trained seals, a part of the performance, as the fool says nasty things about the enemies of The Cult. Satirists are almost always the most fanatical conformists.

The licensed fool is a different thing. These are the people hired by the big propaganda organs of the Left. Thomas Friedman is a classic example. His career is all about ingratiating himself to elites. He passes himself off as a intellectual, writing books on big topics and columns on hard topics. Yet, it is clear he has only a cursory understanding of the material. It is a balancing act. He reports detailed findings from experts and then ruminates in broad generalities about the implications. The latter is always a pitch for some fad popular with his keepers. As a result, his work is perpetually sophomoric.

David Brooks is a slightly different take on the licensed fool. He holds the William Safire Chair at the NYTimes. The Grey Lady likes to keep a “conservative” around to maintain the facade of objectivity. It is never a flame-thrower like Mark Steyn or Ann Coulter. Those types are far too proletarian for the Times. Instead they prefer the refined musings of non-threatening guys who happen to hold a few unconventional opinions. Brooks, like Safire, is first and foremost an elitist. That’s never in doubt. That means his eccentricities on a narrow range of public policy debates can be safely broadcast, more as a conversation starter than a challenge to the orthodoxy.

Anyway, that long wind up was spurred by this column from David Brooks.

It’s now clear that the end of the Soviet Union heralded an era of democratic complacency. Without a rival system to test them, democratic governments have decayed across the globe. In the U.S., Washington is polarized, stagnant and dysfunctional; a pathetic 26 percent of Americans trust their government to do the right thing. In Europe, elected officials have grown remote from voters, responding poorly to the euro crisis and contributing to massive unemployment.

According to measures by Freedom House, freedom has been in retreat around the world for the past eight years. New democracies like South Africa are decaying; the number of nations that the Bertelsmann Foundation now classifies as “defective democracies” (rigged elections and so on) has risen to 52. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their book, “The Fourth Revolution,” “so far, the 21st century has been a rotten one for the Western model.”

At first blush, this seems reasonable. But, the lament is distinctly elitist and progressive. The failure to ram through more and more regulation and the publics failure to love the state fully is what has poor Davey in the dumps.

The events of the past several years have exposed democracy’s structural flaws. Democracies tend to have a tough time with long-range planning. Voters tend to want more government services than they are willing to pay for. The system of checks and balances can slide into paralysis, as more interest groups acquire veto power over legislation.

Across the Western world, people are disgusted with their governments. There is a widening gap between the pace of social and economic change, and the pace of government change. In Britain, for example, productivity in the private service sector increased by 14 percent between 1999 and 2013, while productivity in the government sector fell by 1 percent between 1999 and 2010.

These trends have sparked a sprawling debate in the small policy journals: Is democracy in long-run decline?

This is where the poseur makes his appearance. Again, to the untrained it sounds like Brooks is up on the serious intellectual debates. Yet, he provides no evidence, other than he maybe read a review of the book, The Fourth Revolution, by two reporters from The Economist. That’s called signaling. He’s letting his tony readers that he hangs with the swells who read The Economist.

A new charismatic rival is gaining strength: the Guardian State. In their book, Micklethwait and Wooldridge do an outstanding job of describing Asia’s modernizing autocracies. In some ways, these governments look more progressive than the Western model; in some ways, more conservative.

In places like Singapore and China, the best students are ruthlessly culled for government service. The technocratic elites play a bigger role in designing economic life. The safety net is smaller and less forgiving. In Singapore, 90 percent of what you get out of the key pension is what you put in. Work is rewarded. People are expected to look after their own.

Actually, there’s nothing new about any of this. China’s “iron rice bowl” has been with us for seven decades now. In the West. corporatism has been kicking around for a century. Positive Liberty, embraced by the American ruling elite, has been with us since the fifties. Outside the cloistered places Brooks travels, the Custodial State has been a hot topic for two decades. My goodness. It is as if the man has been living in a cave.

These Guardian States have some disadvantages compared with Western democracies. They are more corrupt. Because the systems are top-down, local government tends to be worse. But they have advantages. They are better at long-range thinking and can move fast because they limit democratic feedback and don’t face NIMBY-style impediments.

Most important, they are more innovative than Western democracies right now. If you wanted to find a model for your national schools, would you go to South Korea or America? If you wanted a model for your pension system, would you go to Singapore or the U.S.? “These are not hard questions to answer,” Micklethwait and Wooldridge write, “and they do not reflect well on the West.”

So how should Western democracies respond to this competition? What’s needed is not so much a vision of the proper role for the state as a strategy to make democracy dynamic again.

The answer is to use Lee Kuan Yew means to achieve Jeffersonian ends — to become less democratic at the national level in order to become more democratic at the local level. At the national level, American politics has become neurotically democratic. Politicians are campaigning all the time and can scarcely think beyond the news cycle. Legislators are terrified of offending this or that industry lobby, activist group or donor faction. Unrepresentative groups have disproportionate power in primary elections.

As we always see with the Cult Jester, they always end up flattering their keepers. Our ruling class would love to transform our societies into a neo-fuedal one like we see in Asia and South America.

The quickest way around all this is to use elite Simpson-Bowles-type commissions to push populist reforms.

The process of change would be unapologetically elitist. Gather small groups of the great and the good together to hammer out bipartisan reforms — on immigration, entitlement reform, a social mobility agenda, etc. — and then rally establishment opinion to browbeat the plans through. But the substance would be anything but elitist. Democracy’s great advantage over autocratic states is that information and change flow more freely from the bottom up. Those with local knowledge have more responsibility.

Finally, hilarity ensues when even his keepers realize Brook has the IQ of a goldfish. What he proposes has never worked, but it has been tried many times in many places. The results have either been laughable failure of monstrous bloodbath. An elect working for the volk is an old tune Herr Brooks.

I was listening to the great Howie Carr yesterday and he was reading this old column. It is from 1995, the year after the GOP sweept the midterms. Jim Webb was considered a star for the new Democratic party in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Even though he worked for Reagan, he was a Democrat and allegedly one of the new breed, the post-Liberal Democrat. He supported Bob Kerry in 1992 and opposed both Bush and Kerry in the 2004 election. Anyway, it is interesting to read what Democrats were saying two decades ago.

Those who debate the impact of affirmative action and other social programs are fond of making distinctions among white Americans along professional and geographic lines while avoiding the tinderbox of ethnic distinctions among whites. But differences among white ethnic groups are huge, fed by cultural tradition, the time and geography of migrations to the country, and not insignificantly the tendency of white Americans to discriminate against other whites in favor of their own class and culture. In 1974, when affirmative action was in its infancy, the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center published a landmark study, dividing American whites into 17 ethnic and religious backgrounds and scoring them by educational attainment and family income. Contrary to prevailing mythology, the vaunted White Anglo-Saxon Protestants were even then not at the top.

A Greater Variation

The highest WASP group – the Episcopalians – ranked only sixth, behind American Jews, then Irish, Italian, German and Polish Catholics. WASPS – principally the descendants of those who had settled the Midwest and the South – constituted the bottom eight groups, and 10 of the bottom twelve. Educational attainment and income levels did not vary geographically, as for instance among white Baptists (who scored the lowest overall) living in Arkansas or California, a further indication that these differences are culturally rather than geographically based.

Imagine any Democrat using these words in a sentence.

Family income among white cultures in the NORC study varied by almost $5,000 dollars, from the Jewish high of $13,340 to the Baptist low of $8,693. By comparison, in the 1970 census the variance in family income between whites taken as a whole and blacks was only $3,600. In addition, white Baptists averaged only 10.7 years of education, which was almost four years less than American Jews and at the same level of black Americans in 1970. This means that, even prior to the major affirmative action programs, there was a greater variation within “white America” than there was between “white America” and black America, and the whites at the bottom were in approximately the same situation as blacks.

Anyone, regardless of party, who says anything like the above will be forced to leave the country.

These same less-advantaged white cultures by and large did the most to lay out the infrastructure of this country, quite often suffering educational and professional regression as they tamed the wilderness, built the towns, roads and schools, and initiated a democratic way of life that later white cultures were able to take advantage of without paying the price of pioneering. Today they have the least, socio-economically, to show for these contributions. And if one would care to check a map, they are from the areas now evincing the greatest resistance to government practices.

It would be folly to assume that affirmative action has done anything but exacerbate these disparities. The increased stratification and economic polarization in American life since 1974 is well-documented. In the technological age, with the shrinking of the industrial base, the decrease in quality of public education, and the tendency of those who “have” to protect their own and to utilize greater assets to prepare them for the future, the divergence in both expectation and reward among our citizens has grown rather than disappeared. The middle class has shrunk from 65% of the population in 1970 to less than 50% today. Its share of aggregate household income declined by 5% from 1968 to 1993, while the top five million households increased their incomes by up to 10% a year. A similar rift has occurred in the black culture, with dramatic declines at the bottom and significant gains among the top 5%.

Because America’s current elites are somewhat heterogeneous and in part the product of an academically based meritocracy, they have increasingly deluded themselves regarding both the depth of this schism and the validity of their own advantages. The prevailing attitude has been to ridicule whites who have the audacity to complain about their reduced status, and to sneer at every aspect of the “redneck” way of life. In addition to rationalizing policies that hold the working class male back from advancement in the name of an amorphous past wrong from which he himself did not benefit, the elites take great sport in debasing the man they love to call “Joe Six-Pack.”

This sounds like a speech from a different country. No public person talks or writes like this, even the so-called extreme right-wing conservatives.

And what does “Joe Six Pack” make of this?

He sees a president and a slew of other key luminaries who excused themselves from the dirty work of society when they were younger, feeling not remorse but “vindication” for having left him or perhaps his father to fight a war while they went on to graduate school and solidifies careers.

He sees a governmental system that seems bent on belittling the basis of his existence, and has established a set of laws and regulations that often keep him from competing. His ever-more-isolated leaders have mandated an “equal opportunity” bureaucracy in the military, government and even industry that closely resembles the Soviet “political cadre” structure, whose sole function is to report “political incorrectness” and to encourage the promotion of literally everyone but him and his kind.

He sees the meaning of words like “fairness” cynically inverted in the name of “diversity,” while groups who claim to have been disadvantaged by old practices, and even those who have only recently arrived in the country, are immediately moved ahead of him for no reason other than his race. In one of the bitterest ironies, he is required to pay tax dollars to finance the special training for recent immigrants even as he himself is held back from fair competition and the “equal opportunity” bureaucracies keep him from receiving similar training, gaining employment or securing a promotion.

He sees cultural rites buttressed by centuries of tradition – particularly the right to use firearms and pass that skill to future generations – attacked because many who make the laws do not understand the difference between his way of life and that of criminals who are blowing people away on the streets of urban America.

He watched the Democratic Party, once a champion of the worker-producer, abandon him in favor of special interests who define their advancement mostly through the extent of his own demise. To him “diversity” is a code word used to exclude him – but seldom better-situated whites no matter the extent of his qualifications and no matter the obstacles he has had to overcome, The Republican Party, to which he swung in the last election, has embraced him on certain social issues, but has yet to support policies that would override the tendency of elites to simply protect their own rather than reverse the travails of affirmative action and the collapse of public education.

Out of the Casualty Radius

Finally, he sees the people who erected and continue to enforce such injustices blatantly wheedling and maneuvering themselves and their children out of the casualty radius of their own policies. A smaller percentage of whites in academia and the professions is acceptable, so long as their children make it. The public school system is self-destructing, but their children go to private schools and receive special preparatory classes to elevate college board scores. International peacekeeping is a lofty goal, so long as their children are not on the firing line. Continuous scrutiny is given to minority percentages in employment, but little or none is applied to how or why one white applicant was chosen over another.

The Left likes to say the Right has gone way right while they have tried to move to the center. Putting aside the lunacy of a linear political landscape, this is 180 degrees out of phase with reality. In just two decades the political class has gone from where Jim Webb was roughly between both parties to a point where Jim Webb is a wacko. Imagine where we will be in two more decades. Nancy Pelosi will be a right winger and people will fondly recall the conservatism of Ted Kennedy.

Some time ago this book was exciting certain elements of the Dark Enlightenment. I don’t recall much popular discussion of the book, but dullards like Thomas Friedman were championing it in the NYTimes so the beautiful people may have been reading it. I skipped it because I remember the paperless office. When I was a boy, automation was going to make paper obsolete. I recall TV specials on our computerized future and they always started with the paperless office. Here we are half a century later and we’re buried in paper.

That’s the thing with futurists. They are almost always wrong. They throw so much crap against the wall, some of it is bound to stick. Alvin Toffler was correct to observe that the pace of technological change is quickening. At the time, it was not that hard to observe. The microprocessors were going to radically change all of our electronics, extending their applications beyond what was previously possible. Of course we were on the cusp of a period of rapid change.

The trouble is he was wrong about everything else.

This column in the New Statesman sums up my views on futurists nicely.

Futurologists are almost always wrong. Indeed, Clive James invented a word – “Hermie” – to denote an inaccurate prediction by a futurologist. This was an ironic tribute to the cold war strategist and, in later life, pop futurologist Herman Kahn. It was slightly unfair, because Kahn made so many fairly obvious predictions – mobile phones and the like – that it was inevitable quite a few would be right.

Even poppier was Alvin Toffler, with his 1970 book Future Shock, which suggested that the pace of technological change would cause psychological breakdown and social paralysis, not an obvious feature of the Facebook generation. Most inaccurate of all was Paul R Ehrlich who, in The Population Bomb, predicted that hundreds of millions would die of starvation in the 1970s. Hunger, in fact, has since declined quite rapidly.

I’ll just note that the people who tend to get some bits of the future right are science fiction writers. By right I mean some bits and pieces here and there. Star Trek, for example, got mobile communications and mobile computing right for the most part. Jules Verne got a bunch of stuff right and Aldous Huxley is looking to have nailed large chunks of cultural change. Still, most of what these people described never happened and will never happen.

Perhaps the most significant inaccuracy concerned artificial intelligence (AI). In 1956 the polymath Herbert Simon predicted that “machines will be capable, within 20 years, of doing any work a man can do” and in 1967 the cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky announced that “within a generation . . . the problem of creating ‘artificial intelligence’ will substantially be solved”. Yet, in spite of all the hype and the dizzying increases in the power and speed of computers, we are nowhere near creating a thinking machine.

Such a machine is the basis of Kurzweil’s singularity, but futurologists seldom let the facts get in the way of a good prophecy. Or, if they must, they simply move on. The nightmarishly intractable problem of space travel has more or less killed that futurological category and the unexpected complexities of genetics have put that on the back burner for the moment, leaving neuroscientists to take on the prediction game. But futurology as a whole is in rude health despite all the setbacks.

This is where the predictions about our machine future fall apart. Yes, massive leaps have been made recently, but we are not close to building machines smarter than their creators. When one second of human thought requires a room full of servers, we are a long way from Terminator.

Benjamin Bratton, a professor of visual arts at the University of California, San Diego, has an astrophysicist friend who made a pitch to a potential donor of research funds. The pitch was excellent but he failed to get the money because, as the donor put it, “You know what, I’m gonna pass because I just don’t feel inspired . . . you should be more like Malcolm Gladwell.” Gladwellism – the hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically presented evidence – is the primary Ted style. Is this, wondered Bratton, the basis on which the future should be planned? To its credit, Ted had the good grace to let him give a virulently anti-Ted talk to make his case. “I submit,” he told the assembled geeks, “that astrophysics run on the model of American Idol is a recipe for civilisational disaster.”

Bratton is not anti-futurology like me; rather, he is against simple-minded futurology. He thinks the Ted style evades awkward complexities and evokes a future in which, somehow, everything will be changed by technology and yet the same. The geeks will still be living their laid-back California lifestyle because that will not be affected by the radical social and political implications of the very technology they plan to impose on societies and states. This is a naive, very local vision of heaven in which everybody drinks beer and plays baseball and the sun always shines.

This really is the crux of it. There’s money in predicting the future. In every town there exists a tarot card reader or psychic. I’ve known women with advanced degrees, who go to these people to get their future. Religion is all about the future. Live your life a certain way and you gain ever lasting life or languish in hell. The animating philosophy of modern political elites is based on the belief that the right arrangements will result in heaven on earth, however that is currently imagined. The demand for these promises is unlimited.

The bits about Gladwell and Kurzweil in the article are interesting. It seems that the people who get rich from telling ruling class types about the future never know a lot about the science they promote. The two guys who authored The Second Machine Age have no science. One has a degree in math, but has never worked in technology. Instead he has remained in college teaching management. The other guy just writes books. It does not appear that either of them have ever written a line of code.

Thomas Friedman is a guy who appears to learn the jargon of science and technology, but knows nothing about science and technology. His skill is flattering rich people, especially his wife who is mega-rich. This allows Friedman to flit around the world telling rich people they are the best. The court jester has been a feature of human societies since the Bronze Age. Telling the boss he’s wonderful by predicting the current course will lead to times of plenty is never going to get you fed to the lions.

Imagine if tomorrow the Chinese announce they have discovered some protein that causes criminality. That’s very unlikely, but let’s just pretend. Further, a simple test can determine if an individual has this protein and therefore is criminally inclined. That would certainly change how we go about fighting crime. The sci-fi concept of pre-crime would become a reality. Everyone could be tested and those with the protein would be flagged in some way. Suspects could be tested to eliminate the innocent. It is and amazing breakthrough that radically changes policing.

Now, suppose in addition to finding this magic protein, they also find a remedy. A person with the crime protein could be given a drug that mitigates the action of the protein. Not only can criminals be found with a blood test, they can be “rehabilitated” with drug therapy. That way, once a criminal is found, they can be repaired, so to speak. Recidivism rates would fall to zero and there would be no need for a lot of the infrastructure we have in place to monitor ex-cons.

Think about how much human society would change after such a discovery. No need for prisons is the most obvious benefit. That alone is $100 billion in savings to society. Certainly an equal amount would be saved, probably double, in policing. Most crime is committed by repeat offenders. Depending upon who is counting, the number is as high as 80%.  Police forces could be slashed to a fraction of their current size, along with the courts and the whole massive edifice of criminal justice in America.

It sounds pretty good. Now, imagine that conservatives start howling with protest over this new test and the new drug. They start with the invasion of privacy and then move onto the moral issue of not punishing offenders when they are caught. In Congress they try to block this new science and take to the airwaves proselytizing against it. Of course, they are joined by police unions, prison guard unions, lawyers, bureaucrats and everyone else living off the criminal industrial complex.

Is there any doubt that the Left would call these people science –hating Luddites?

With that in mind, consider this post by a famous Progressive blog.

Let’s use the term “academic racism” to mean “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race” (the Merriam-Webster “full definition” of “racism”), in order to differentiate it from bigotry (the common-use definition).

Anyway, science writer Nicholas Wade has a new book out making the standard case for academic racism. Andrew Gelman, a statistician, has a review of that book in Slate. The review is good, and you should read it, but I thought I’d try to restate Gelman’s point in a slightly more compact way.

Basically, academic racism has a problem, and that problem is overfitting.

Here’s how academic racism generally works. Suppose you see two groups that have an observable difference: for example, suppose you note that Hungary has a higher per capita income than Romania. Now you have a data point. To explain that data point, you come up with a theory: the Hungarian race is more industrious than the Romanian race. But suppose you notice that Romanians generally do better at gymnastics than Hungarians. To explain that second data point, you come up with a new piece of theory: The Romanian race must have some genes for gymnastics that the Hungarian race lacks.

You can keep doing this. Any time you see different average outcomes between two different groups, you can assume that there is a genetic basis for the difference. You can also tell “just-so stories” to back up each new assumption – for example, you might talk about how Hungarians are descended from steppe nomads who had to be industrious to survive, etc. etc. As new data arrive, you make more assumptions and more stories to explain them. Irish people used to be poor and are now rich? They must have been breeding for richness genes! Korea used to be poorer than Japan and is now just as rich? Their genes must be more suited to the modern economy! For every racial outcome, there is a just-so story about why it happened. Read an academic-racist blog, like Steve Sailer’s, and you will very quickly see that this kind of thinking is pervasive and rampant.

There’s just one little problem with this strategy. Each new assumption that you make adds a parameter to your model. You’re overfitting the data – building a theory that can explain everything but predict nothing. Another way to put this is that your model has a “K=N” problem – the number of parameters in your model is equal to the number of observations. If you use some sort of goodness-of-fit criterion that penalizes you for adding more parameters, you’ll find that your model is useless (no matter how true or false it happens to be!). This is one form of a more general scientific error known as “testing hypotheses suggested by the data”, or “post-hoc reasoning”. It’s a mistake that is by no means unique to academic racism, but instead is common in many scientific disciplines (cough cough, sociobiology, cough cough).

At first this sounds like a sound criticism. If you don’t know much about population genetics and the current state of the science, you might be inclined to accept this as a valid critique. The trouble is the science described by Wade makes no such claims. In fact, few in the HBD world make these sorts of claims. There certainly is speculation about behavioral traits across groups and their possible genetic sources, but there are also plenty of speculation about cultural sources as well from the same people. In fact, the only people talking about culture at all are all on the so-called “scientific racism” end of the blogosphere. Progressives have so hamstrung themselves that large swaths of observable reality are now off-limits.

The fact is, it is very hard to tease out causal relationships when discussing human behavior. The example I started with is never going to happen. Even the most basic of behavioral traits involve an enormous number of factors, including genes. At this stage of the game, the best anyone can do is catalog group differences and then consider the possibility of genetic sources. Evolution starts with an assumption. That assumption is mutations that increase the organisms reproductive advantage will spread through the species, even driving development of new species. If in ten thousand years we can get a thousand different types of dogs, we can certainly get a few different types of humans. Denial of that is the denial of evolution.

That’s where the Left finds itself these days. When Galileo pressed forward with heliocentrism, the keepers of the faith were forced to choose between science and their faith. In retrospect it seems strange that The Church would fight that fight, but in 1632 it was deadly serious. The Catholic Church early on tried to reconcile Aristotle and Scripture. Through Augustine the mixing of philosophy, culture, and theology became inter-twined. And, since Catholic theology recognizes the traditions of the Church as equal in authority with written scripture, challenging the traditions of the Church was the same challenging Scripture.

That’s where the Left finds itself with genetics and evolution. The 19th century Left, focused exclusively on economics, is long gone. The post-war Left has blended culture, socials science, public policy and the law into a secular religion. Just as the Church could not disentangle theology from science, the modern Left cannot separate science from its ideology. Religion, secular or otherwise, are totalitarian. Therefore anything that contradicts the faith is the enemy of the faith and must be destroyed. The Left’s war on evolution and population genetics is the only possible response. Otherwise, the foundation stones of their faith crumble. If man is not a lump of clay that can be molded by the enlightened, then the justification for the progressive faith evaporates.

There’s another angle, one that I think haunts the Left and one that the HBD crowd fails to appreciate. Going back to my example that started this long post, there’s another option. Instead of “rehabilitating” the criminal with drug therapy, the people known to carry this trait can be sterilized at birth. In a couple of generations, the trait could be eliminated from the population or at least greatly diminished. The remaining people with the gene would be ostracized and unable to find mates. What the sterilizers missed, natural selection would address. This is not unfamiliar turf for the Left. Prior to World War Two, eugenics was very popular with Progressives in America. The man who coined the term was a Socialist. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was a motivated by the eugenics movement.

The science is what it is and the progress in genetics is chipping away at the Standard Social Science Model. The inevitable conclusion of evolution, the inescapable end game, is that everything we are is the result of the billions of combinations of genes. Further, evolution has taken different paths in different places with different peoples. If we are not lumps of clay at birth that can be shaped by social policy, the choices left to attain the Progressive dream are monstrous. Therefore, it is perfectly understandable why the Left is in a panic over what’s going on in genetics and evolutionary biology.

Welfare programs for the poor are resented by the middle-class for good reason. Money is siphoned from the taxpayer and given to people who refuse to work or obey the laws and customs of society. The welfare class, when given a chance, makes clear they do not appreciate the help and resent the fact the taxpayer expects them to be grateful. It is no wonder the middle generally resents the lower in a social democracy like America.

Welfare takes many forms. This story about Tesla is an example of how the rich get tax money shoved into their pockets.

Tesla Motors, an electric car maker backed by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), posted a $49.8 million loss in the first quarter of 2014. This loss compared to a profit of $11.2 million in the same period a year earlier despite selling more cars.(i) Last year’s profit was not due to electric car sales, but to sales of California zero-emission-vehicle environmental credits to other auto manufacturers. Those lucrative credits have declined and tight battery supply has made it harder to produce the carmaker’s electric vehicles.

“Sales of California zero-emission-vehicle environmental credits to other auto manufacturers” is a nice way of saying free money from the middle-class. The state forces the normal car makers to tax their customers on behalf of Tesla. The cost of those credits, after all, is a part of the cost of building cars. That cost is passed onto the consumer in the price of the car. Tesla, in effect, gets to tax every car buyer in California.

During the first quarter of 2013, Tesla received about $68 million (12 percent of revenue) from the sale of zero vehicle emission credits. Note that without the sale of these credits, the company would have lost over $50 million during the first quarter of 2013.[v] According to a Wall Street analyst, Tesla earned as much as $250 million in 2013 on their sale. Translated into dollars per vehicle, Tesla made as much as $35,000 extra on each sale of its luxury Model S electric sports sedan through state environmental credits that it sold to other auto manufacturers that need to buy credits to satisfy California regulations. Adding in the Federal tax credit of $7,500 per vehicle and a state rebate of $2,500 per vehicle, the state and federal incentives totaled as much as $45,000 per vehicle that Tesla sold for as much as $100,000, depending on the model and options.[vi]  Essentially, regular taxpayers who buy typical cars, trucks and minivans are heavily subsidizing an additional car for a clientele whose average income is just under $300,000 per year.

This is the math problem that haunts modern corporatism, the political-economy of the West. Hidden taxes to subsidize unprofitable ventures looks like a great solution to the “problems” of the market. The rulers look around and say we need to be using electric cars, but the pesky market refuses to comply. That’s called a market failure. The solution to “market failure” is to form these public-private partnerships to “jump start” business like Tesla in order to “nudge” the market in the preferred direction. In theory, electric cars will become competitive at some point and then the market will take care of the rest.

There are two problems with this. One is the money spent on this hidden tax does not come from nothing. It is money that would be spent on some other good or service. These other industries go to the state looking for help for the same reason Tesla gets help. The system quickly becomes a game of whack-a-mole. The state is forever on the hunt for new Peters to rob in order to pay the growing list of Pauls. Government becomes a highwayman, robbing anyone trying to operate a business within reach of the state.

The other problem is the math is not zero sum. The state thinks it can supply an unlimited amount of energy to the economy, as if it is a first order perpetual motion machine. That’s no more possible in an economy than it is in physics. Eventually, the economy begins to crawl to a halt or the state crawls to a halt. In California,  the state is bankrupt. Several of its cities are in bankruptcy and the state has no way to pay its pension obligations.

That’s the big difference between welfare for the rich versus the poor. The poor are an annoyance. The cost of the various programs is not insignificant, but it is largely paid by the rich. The high earners pay the bulk of the taxes which cover the trillions in welfare payments. The vast web of corporate welfare, subsidy schemes like Tesla and financial shenanigans in the banking system loots the middle class. That’s what the war on the middle is intended to accomplish. That’s why the middle-class is disappearing.