I’m not a big believer in the alleged “deep state” that runs the country. I do think the rich and powerful exercise a great deal of influence over government. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the rich run the country and the political class is mostly their servants. That seems obvious. Rich guys parade in and out of the White House every day. The fact that these folks have a commonality of interests also seems obvious. Look at the push by rich people to flood the nation with peasants. Open borders favors the rich.

There’s a long way from that reality to the idea of a deep state, but when you see stories like this you have to wonder. Then only reason any of this is out in the public is the Snowden affair. Big bureaucracies like the NSA start making comical blunders like this when they reach a certain size. Still, it suggests the permanent ruling class is not the life-serving Congressmen and Senators, but the life-serving hacks in the bureaucracy.

The life-servers in the intelligence blob are the kings of the hill because they hold everyone’s secrets. It is not a big leap from that to thinking the rich guys telling Congress what to do also are pulling the strings at the NSA. On the other hand, maybe the security services have enough dirt on the rich to control them as well. Maybe it is just a weird balance of interests that keeps the whole thing running. The one thing that unifies all parties is making sure the public never gets what they want from government.

Charlie Strong, the head football coach at Louisville, will be the next head football coach at University of Texas. The Longhorns are part of college sports royalty, maybe even the top of the list of elite programs. They generate more revenue than any other school. They have the biggest facilities, the biggest fan base and the biggest egos. Other big state schools like Ohio State and Michigan can claim to be the top of the list, but most people consider Texas the NY Yankees of college sports.

Their decision to hire a black guy obviously has cultural meaning, mostly because the mass media is obsessed with race. In fact, the media will care more about the race angle than the fact Strong has a very good resume and is actually qualified for the job. Coaches tend to kick around for 20 years as assistants and head coaches at small programs. Eventually, they get a shot at a major, but not elite, program to show they can compete with the best. If they win, they get a shot to man one of the elite programs.

Strong has done all of those things. The fact that he is black should be an enormous asset to him, but that has not been the case. Instead, he struggled to get his first head coaching job.  The rumor was college presidents fretted over his race, thinking the fans would not embrace a black man as coach. Even after he got the job at Louisville and there were no white riots, the attitude among college presidents persisted. They were sure their racist fans would burn the school down if they dared hire a black to coach the football team.

In fact, that’s been the argument for decades now. There’s no evidence the fans care about the race of the coach. They just want to win. Boosters, who fund a lot of this stuff, would embrace a space alien if he could win games. If Strong was a bisexual, transvestite black Nazi, the Louisville fans would cheer him anyway. It’s fair to say sports are why America has as much racial peace as it does. White sports fans care more about winning than the realities of race, so they overlook it in order to have their sports.

Despite this, white college presidents still think their fans hate blacks. There are a growing number of black athletic directors, who would be eager to hire black coaches, but the number of black coaches remains very low. The fans actually think black coaches are a benefit dealing with black players. Again, the boosters just want to win so that leaves the school presidents as the primary obstacle to hiring clack coaches. That and the fact it is a long apprenticeship and blacks tend to have very high time preference.

These presidents are overwhelmingly white and liberal. They live and work in the least diverse parts of America. Anyone thinking the campus is diverse has never been to a McDonalds in the South. They also live and work in the most radically left-wing parts of America. Yet, they walk around thinking they are the friend of the black man and those others, those rowdies in the stands, black and white, are the bigots. It is a remarkable bit of cognitive dissidence. These people are strangely delusional.

It should also be noted that it is the southern schools that are leading the way with the hiring of black coaches. Here is where winning trumps all else. Vanderbilt is paying their black coach $3 million a year. Mississippi State had a black coach a decade ago. Charlie Strong started in the SEC and then went to Louisville. Miami had a black coach a few years back. The assistant ranks are ghostly white the further north you go, while the sidelines in the South have much more vibrancy.

Of course, the cognitive dissidence is not limited to the lily white leadership of American colleges and universities. When the Left sees all of these black coaches at southern schools, they believe it due to their heroic efforts to fix those bad whites in the south, even though the schools in the north remain ghostly white. It’s a reminder that for bad whites, race is a real issue to be dealt with in a serious way. For good whites, race is entirely about moral posturing in juxtaposition with the bad whites they detest.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

–Bertrand Russell

This post by Lion of the Blogosphere brought the above quote to mind. Mediocre minds have a habit of thinking themselves to be very smart, simply because they have internalized the assumptions of the cool crowd. In this case, he has been conditioned by his urban lifestyle to associate religiosity with intelligence. He clearly does not understand the topic, but it is a pose that makes him feel good so he is extra confident in it.

Anyway, it always bugs me when people talk about “believing” in evolution. You believe in things you don’t know or cannot know. One can believe in god, but you cannot prove the existence of god or the absence of god. You either believe or you don’t believe. Evolutionary biology is not a matter of belief. We have data from the fossil record. We have genetic data that is advancing every year. We have theories that explain the data and help in the search for new data. There are no leaps of faith involved.

As with all science, there’s a chance we have it all wrong. There’s no question we have some things wrong, as correction are common. The history of science, after all, is the history of bad ideas that were replaced with less bad ideas. This is especially true when it comes to natural science. People keep working a problem until the problem is solved and the solution joins the stock of axioms that form the foundation of science.

As far as whether accepting evolution is a sign of intelligence or not has always been one of those weird ticks of the Left. Years ago, they use to decorate their cars with Darwin fish, because they thought it tormented religious people. Now it is pretty clear that the Left is lurching into some very primitive thinking with regards to biology, as they embrace nonsense about human sexuality and race denial-ism. It’s pretty clear that the liberal embrace of evolution was always just a pose and nothing about science.

Anyway, the attempt to correlate belief and IQ is the sort of thing a supercilious person does when they want to appear clever. Belief is most certainly a biological human trait that probably co-evolved with language. The fact that all human groups have belief in the supernatural, buttressed with customs and rituals that frame out their culture, is what is generally called a clue. Belief, with religion being a subset, is most certainly something that has been selected for in human religion. We’re born to be true believers.

Of course, many high IQ people believe in very crazy stuff.  Noam Comsky is very smart guy for sure. He also think it is a good idea to murder people who don’t get along with Castro. The Blaize Pascal was a brilliant mathematician and theorist. He also was a fanatical Christian. Many of the physicists who worked on the Manhattan project were communists. Newton was obsessed with alchemy. The highly intelligent tend to be highly curious and prone to believing a lot of very wacky things as a result.

When I was a young pup, NYC was a dangerous shit-hole. The 70’s were pretty rotten all over thanks to the Left, but NYC was the epicenter of crap in America. The ghettos were ferociously violent. Drugs were rampant. Crime in general was a huge problem, even amongst the cops. In the early 70’s some radicals were still blowing stuff up. Ed Koch was mayor and his main attribute was explaining away the dysfunction of city government. He lasted into the 80′ basically on the claim he prevented the city from going bankrupt. He gave way to David Dinkins, who was a complete boob and failure. By the end of his time in office, New York City had suffered at least thirty years of corrupt and insipid left-wing mayors.

Giuliani came in after Dinkins and started to clean up the city. He cleaned up the petty crime and rounded up the gangsters. He cleaned up and professionalized the police force using modern techniques like noticing that most crimes are committed by young black males. The boom in financials certainly made it easier as it gave him a viable tax base. Unlike his lefty predecessors, he did not look at Wall Street as a crime or merely a source of money, he embraced the new financial class by embracing gentrification of the city’s neighborhoods. Bloomberg, nutty as he is, carried on the polices for another decade. Today, a middle class person can live in places like Harlem and Queens. Within my lifetime those areas were killing zones. That’s amazing turnaround for a population that had embraced lunacy to such a degree.

Now, here we are with a foaming at the mouth lunatic as mayor. Bill de Blasio is from the New Left. He was born too late to be a part of that world in its bombing years, but he was nonetheless educated by them after they moved into the universities. He defended Daniel Ortega in the 80’s and he still thinks Castro got it right. Despite the multi-decade experiment in progressive madness that nearly destroyed New York City, de Blasio is convinced this time it will be different.

“We recognize a city government’s first duties: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean; to ensure that those who live here – and those who visit – can get where they need to go in all five boroughs. But we know that our mission reaches deeper. We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.”

He’s right about the DNA part. True believers like de Blasio are born to join a cult. In another age, he may have been a Jesuit or a member of a heretical sect of Christians. In the 1930’s, he would have either joined the Nazis, fascists or Marxists, depending upon his location. That’s why democracy always fails. These nuts are always with us and they will never quit. They keep working the system until they can impose their brand of lunacy on the rest of us. The fact that everything he advocates has been tried and failed horribly will not deter him or his supporters. They are always armed with the phrase, “this time it will be different.”

John Adams and his coevals dismissed democracy out of hand as the surest path to national suicide. They were smart men who were not part of a religious cult. They were mostly skeptics, at least by the standards of their day. They knew the lower classes would always vote themselves a raise from their neighbor’s wallet. They knew the excessively religious would try to vote in their kind. Our last two presidents are examples of both. In the case of New York, the rabble has decided to sign on with the lunatics to attack the rich, who will leave if the attack is successful. And so it goes…

It seems the thing to do with blogs at this time of year is to make some predictions about the coming year. I’ve been reading up on and studying the prediction business so let’s see if I can put some of it to work.  My interest in the subject started with analysis work on big databases. I tried to apply what I was doing to predicting football games. I finally settled on a model that allowed me to beat the spread 59% of the time. That sounds good, but 57% is the break even point. Bookmakers charge vigorish. The book maker strives to set the line so that he gets equal money on each team. The losers pay the winners and the bookie takes his cut. If he does his job, he makes 5% of the total money bet on the game.

In other areas, it seems that bias plays a big role. We remember the correct predictions and forget the wrong ones. A guy who is rarely right will wave around his correct predictions, while the guy is never right remains silent. That gives us the impression that some people are good at forecasting human events. The other bit of bias is we want certain things to happen so we tend to favor predictions that comfort us. That means we will make predictions that comfort us. The old line about the bears predicting five of the last three market drops is true. The guys who are sure disaster is right around the corner will always predict disaster. No one predicts they will be proven wrong about their pet theory.

Of course, the bigger issue is the the appearance of randomness. A problem with several constants and one variable is easy to solve. Even a child can figure out the value of X from 5X = 10. Human affairs have many more variables and few constants. Solving for X gets a little tougher when the formula is 3X + Y – YZ = 75. Human affairs have millions of variables. The example of the double pendulum is  good one. We can predict the movement of a pendulum easily using basic math. Put a hinge in the middle and the movement becomes random and unpredictable. Seemingly so, at least. There are video on youtube you can look up if you are unfamiliar with this example.

Then there is the issue of time. I know, as a matter of mathematical certainty, that the Fed policy of dumping a trillion new dollars into the system will have to end. The bears think hyper-inflation is right around the corner the program will crash down any day now. They may eventually be right, but it could be next year or five years from now. Right now, the world economy is soaking up these new dollars and stuffing them into assets like stocks. Eventually, that ends, but knowing when is the mystery. The bears will predict soon and the bulls will predict some date over the horizon, meaning never.

With that in mind, here are some predictions for 2014 about things I care about a little:

1) Florida State will beat Auburn and it will not be that close. Auburn needed two very lucky events to be in this game. Statistically, those tow events happen once in a lifetime. They had both in one season. Florida State is a great team that can do it all and they have done it against top competition.

2) Denver will not make the Super Bowl. Peyton Manning will not join Earl Morrall and Jeff Rutledge as quarterbacks to make it to the Super Bowl on two different teams. The NFL playoffs comes down to defense. Great QB’s running great offense can win a game or two, but eventually, it comes down to defense. If the Patriots had a decent defense, Tom Brady has two more rings and an undefeated season. The Denver defense is one of the worst in the playoffs this year.

3) The US economy will remain in neutral, growing at about 2.5% after all the adjustments and revisions. The great slow down from health care will not appear as predicted. There’s some evidence that the economy was picking up in the last half of 2013, but certainly not booming. Unemployment, however, remains the primary drag and there nothing in the latest numbers to suggest things are changing on that front. ObamaCare will put downward pressure on the labor market. Continued exploitation of existing technology will offset much of this as companies get better at doing more with less, but you still need people with money buying stuff to make an economy grow. We remain at the edge of personal debt limits. That all adds up to more of the same in 2014.

4) Obama will fall below 40% in Gallup and remain there until the summer, but bubble back up into the low to mid 40’s in the summer. Americans want to like him, even if they hate his policies right now. There’s not a huge difference between 44% and 38% but it will be encouraging to the administration and his party. As noted above, people see what they want to see. The liberal media will break into an early version of Obama nostalgia this summer as a last gasp to salvage his second term, but the limits of reality mean he remains in the 40’s for the rest of the year.

5) The stock market will finish ahead of where it is today. Specifically, the DOW will be above 17,000 by year end, but not by much. There’s no question that the market has had a great run, but it has no basis in reality. Facebook, for example, has a P/E of 140. Twitter is worth $40 Billion, despite having no profits and no chance to make a profit in 2014. The P/E of the Russell 2000 is 87. The major indexes are better, the DOW is 19 and the NASDAQ is 21, but those remain high historically. The average P/E is 15 going back 100 years. Still, a trillion in Fed money will counter any pull back in 2014.

6) There will be no legislative changes to the health care law in 2014. Nothing will be passed out of the Senate. Right now, this thing is a gift to both parties. The Democrats scare the Left about how the Right wants to repeal it. The Republicans promise the Right they will repeal it. At some point, repeal becomes the stuff of the fringe and both parties take turns promising to repair it. For 2014, we have the repeal/defend dynamic so nothing changes.

7) The Red Sox will not make the playoffs. They caught lightning in a bottle and will fall back to being an 85-win team. The lost a key player in Ellsbury and the rest of the division got better. Repeating is always hard and the margin for error is small. Losing ten more games knocks them out of the playoffs and that’s certainly seems reasonable.

8) The Republicans will pick a net of nine Senate seats in 2014 and have a working majority. The House will see the GOP gained a dozen seats. The GOP establishment is revved up to prove a point to the right. That point is safe candidates can beat democrats in toss-up states. Put another way, they want to show the Right that wackos are not welcome in their club. I think the result will be a strong effort to field competent alternatives to at-risk Democrats and a solid election for the GOP. The Democrats have a dozen highly vulnerable incumbents and the GOP has none this time.

9) The sale of ebooks will continue to stagnate and people will begin to ask if they will displace hard books after all. Sales have been flat for a year. The novelty of tablet computers is cresting and that will put more pressure on sales. The fact is the reading universe is static. People consume a predictable number of books. Weird innovations in the free money era caused a spike (Mega book stores, Amazon, tablets), but there are no more novelties coming to boost sales. The mega book stores are closing. Amazon is flat. Tablets have been driving novelty interest in ebooks, but that’s coming to an end as the tablet market matures. The ebook may be a solution looking for a problem.

10) Tablet prices will fall significantly. They are on the cusp of becoming a commodity. As penetration peaks, the race to the bottom of the price curve will begin. Korean and Chinese makers will begin to flood the market with cheap Android based tablets. The fact is, these things should be cheap media consumption devises. The first HD TV’s cost $3K and now are a tenth of that in some sizes. Tablet prices will drop as the market for what they do best solidifies. Microsoft’s attempt to make them mini-desktops will fail. There’s no need for an $800 mini-laptop when you can get a real one for the same price.

11) Cheap tablets will begin to erode the smart phone market. The reason the smart phone exists is it give you a portable media consumption devise. A 7″ tablet is just as portable as most phones. Wi-fi is nearly ubiquitous now. A lot of people, particularly business people will begin to opt for a cheap mobile phone on a cheap plan and a cheap tablet for surfing the ‘Net.

12) 2014 will see the beginning of the end to the old mobile phone model. The market is maxed out now. The way for the carriers to compete will be with the plans, instead of the devices. The fact is, most people rarely leave their local area. That means small carriers can begin to chip away at the lower end of the market. That will lead to more lower end choices from the major carriers. It will also mean less bundling.

13) The first glimpses of a la carte pricing in cable and satellite will appear this year. The cost of cable is way out of hand and the alternatives are getting better. I can subscribe to Hulu for $8 a month and get more content than I could ever watch. I can get shows from Netflix and Amazon. Apple is ramping up their video content and Microsoft is unleashing hell with XBox One. Cable will begin to experiment with offer customers the ability to opt out of some channels to save a few bucks.

Tyler Cowen has a thought experiment on Bitcoin and the usual suspects are vibrating in ecstasy over it. Bitcoin has become a religion for most of these people. That means they have lost the ability to see the enterprise in rational terms. When they see things they like, they start singing the songs that celebrate the cult. When the see things they don’t like, they began chanting the incantations that are supposed to make the bad men go away. The comments sections of Bitcoin stories look like something from the local lunatic asylum.

The basic thrust of Tyler’s post is that Bitcoin is like any other commodity. Once a sufficient number of others get into the cryptocurrency racket in sufficient numbers, the price for all of these “currencies” falls to cost plus some tiny profit. Why anyone would consider something that functions like this a currency is never addressed. Tyler just treats Bitcoin like any other producible commodity, sort of a fusion of gold and some cheap manufactured good. Since the currency has no intrinsic value and no authority to set the value, the market sets the value based on utility, I guess.

Putting aside my complaints about Bitcoin as a currency (I think it is a clever reinterpretation of Pet Rocks), the main problem with these cryptocurrencies is the same problem we saw in the Free Banking Era. Central governments hate the idea of a currency they cannot easily manipulate. That has been true since Pheidon. If you control the money, you control the people. Naturally, ruling elites will seek to control the money as a top priority. It has nothing to do with economic efficiency and everything to do with order. Order is what allows the best citizens of the polity to rise and remain at the top of the status system. It is also what allows the less talented to live something close to a sane existence. Order is how humans guard against the anti-social fraction that exists in every human population.

This natural desire for order naturally leads to a ruling class that is the final authority. That authority, in order to be an authority, needs a method to control the people and thus the society over which they rule. Controlling the money is the most efficient way to accomplish this. Controlling land or monitoring individual transactions is unworkable over the long haul. The Soviets found this out after 70 years of Marxism. A simple way to control the populace is through the coining of money. That makes taxing easier for the authorities and it gives them control of trade and labor. It allows for the authorities to audit the citizenry to ensure compliance. Having a raft of competing currencies defeats these attempts and therefore can never be tolerated.

Think about it this way. Let’s say I come with a digital heroin. That is, a drug that can be transmitted on-line that you load on a flash drive, shove up your ass and get high for eight hours. Obviously, I’m not getting a lot of takers initially. The cost of making it is, for the sake of this example, cheaper than getting real heroin on the wholesale market. But, the lack of customers means I’m losing money every time I make a batch. Heroin addicts are not on-line so I go to where they are and start selling my new drug. I manage to get a few takers to try it and begin to build a client base through word of mouth. I hit the same spots at predictable times and sell my digital heroin the old fashioned way, but it is not illegal so I can do it at the mall or Starbucks.

This goes on for a while and no one is the wiser. The cops don’t care as it looks nothing like criminality from their perspective. The drug gangs don’t care at first because I’m not doing business on their turf. They are unaware of the threat I pose initially. But, they notice a drop in sales eventually as I build my business and they begin to make inquiries. Eventually they will figure out that someone is taking their customers. They may figure out it is me before they figure out what I’m selling or it may be the other way around, but at some point they put it together. They are losing control of their drug market because some outside group is selling a new product.

The drug gang will have three choices. They can kill me, but that will require knowledge they may lack. I could have advanced to the point where I’m selling my drug on-line. Drug dealers are not fools and they will recognize their lack of knowledge and see that as a risk in itself, perhaps a bigger risk. Killing me could create unknown problems. The other choice is to figure out what I’m doing and that means muscling in on my business. There is a reason we have such an array of street drugs. A clever guy creates a new product and the drug gangs eventually take it over and add it to their portfolio. The same guys controlling the weed sales in one area control the heroin sales too.

The third option is to enlist the state to take out my business. I’m conducting business and that means taxes are involved. It also means a mountain of rules and regulations. My drug may be legal, but not paying taxes on sales is illegal. Not filing for a business license and not abiding by the laws governing record keeping are against the law. If I have employees, then I need to pay them and that means taxes, workplace laws, social security, Medicare and unemployment taxes. As any small businessman knows, the state can shut you down on a whim.

Here we ultimately see the problem with Bitcoin. We are back to where we started. Disruptive technology is not ignored by the folks at the top of the established order. In the drug example, the established authority is the drug game, which served as a proxy for the state. In the above ground world, the state will defend itself from the threat posed by Bitcoin and they have many tools at their disposal. They also have tanks, planes, missiles and other military goodies. Bitcoin can only exist as long as the state allows it to exist. That means it will have to serve the interests of the state to survive, which brings us right back to where we are now.

In the last few years, I’ve found myself reading mainstream punditry less and less. I still scan the representative political sites, but I read a lot less off what they offer, at least the opinion/prediction stuff. I’ve stopped watching TV news entirely. I have no idea where CNN is on my dial and I have not watched Fox for so long I have no idea what makes up their lineup. I’m vaguely aware of a shakeup last year. The primary reason is bias. That would be my bias. I found in the last few years I tend to put too much weight on punditry I find agreeable and dismiss that which is unpleasant. I really thought Mitt Romney, for example, had a chance to win in 2012 because my only news source was Drudge and the punditry sites.

That bias thing has become something that pops up in my head whenever reading anything about politics. Almost all political coverage is about telling us what will happen next. There’s a small amount of time covering what happened in the past. In fact, it seems that modern times is as much about erasing the past as it is about anything else. That came to mind when looking at this piece in the NYTimes. Granted, I rarely read this guy, but I never would have remembered his errors unless he wrote about them. In fact, no one ever remembers the batshit crazy predictions and prognostications of the pundit-ocracy. I suspect most people, like I used to do, skim the stuff they wish was not true and soak in the stuff they hope is true. Since nothing ever changes that much, it all gets flushed down the memory hole.

This post by Steve Sailer is a good insight into the bullshit business. Most predictions about tomorrow are wrong because they start with the assumption tomorrow will be noticeably different from today.

Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t be surprised if a fair amount of competence in this tournament derives from having a sense of just how long it takes for stuff to happen. Since the game looks at typically annual time frames so that it can determine winners and losers in a reasonable amount of time, I bet a lot of losers have a tendency to say, “Yeah, that will probably happen” without estimating how long it could take for it to happen.

Then there is the bias toward bias. Fox News knows their audience is made up of rightward folks who wants confirmation and leftward folks and leftward folks who want to do battle with the right by yelling from the couch or through a proxy. Therefore, having people predict bad things for the Cult of Modern Liberalism is good business.  Then of course, there’s the peanut gallery effect. The more yells and screams that come from the crowd over one set of predictions or opinions, the more of that we are sure to get. Even if money is not the currency, just the sound of folks chanting your name is enough to buoy the prognosticator.

Knowing all of this, I wonder if my expectations of the near future will improve. By that, I mean will events unfold more like I expect or will my willful ignorance of the chattering classes make me less informed? I now devote much more of my leisure time to reading old books and studying odd stuff. I’m now reading an 18th century novel and a book on Bayesian probability. I have followed the health care stuff, for example, very little beyond the initial hilarity. Will my expectations about how it unfolds in 2014 be better without having kept up or worse? For the record, I doubt much of anything changes and some other event sucks all the air out of that room, at least for a while.

I predict I’ll never know.

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For most of my life, I have been a drug legalizer. I came to this conclusion while sitting at a campus lounge reading Adam Smith’s treatment of the English corn laws. It struck me at the time that if you replaced “corn” with “drugs” you have a nearly flawless argument against prohibition. It was one of those revelations common in the youth of the intellectually curious. It is also common amongst lunatics who end up in cults, but that’s not unimportant. At that age, simplicity is naturally more attractive because the mind is untrained and inexperienced. As you grow older you come to understand that the world is an infinite combination of simple transactions, thus making itself unknowingly complex.

Still, I have stuck with the idea of legalizing drugs.  The cost of locking up a million drug offenders is high. That portion alone is something like 50 billion in taxes. Layer on the courts, cops and social service barnacles and the war on drugs probably costs us a hundred billion a year on the conservative side.  These guys say that’s a good number, but this site puts the number much higher. Put a million people in jail at $50K a man and you get 50 billion. The basic numbers alone have always struck me as proof enough that the drug war is a scam and a failure. Even accepting there is a cost to legal drug use, it has always seemed to me that the scales tip in favor of legalizing as Milton Friedman argues here.

There is another argument, one I’ve often used against libertarians when I don’t feel like hearing them go on forever about weed. That is, people are all for legal drugs until Walmart has a sale on their extra special brand of heroine. That’s when the women start mobilizing for the children. Libertarians hate that argument, because it is true. Libertarians, like liberals, have an uncomfortable relationship with the human condition. Honestly, I never much cared for it either, but it avoided hearing yet another lecture on the evils of the drug war. Libertarians are like all fanatics in that they can’t change their mind and they won’t change the subject.

What I’ve never thought through, has been well thought out by Peter Hitchens. I don’t entirely agree with Hitchens, but he offers up something I’m finding more attractive as I grow older. That is the central question of human society. What sort of society do you want to live in as a free man? Do you want one where drug addicts fill the parks and drunks fill the doorways? Or, do you want one where the drunks and drug addicts find it hard to be drunks and drug addicts? If it is the latter, then the question is not about how we legalize. The question is how we come up with better forms of prohibition.

In that regard, Hitchens is correct when he argues against addiction as a disease. This exchange is good stuff. Drug addiction is no more a disease than jumping off a building. I have some tendency toward addiction. I know this because I have plenty of addicts in my family tree. I really like getting drunk and I used to like tobacco. I temper my drunkenness and avoid tobacco. I hate cancer and tooth decay. There’s nothing I can do to prevent either of them other than pray. Calling addiction a disease is simply excusing behavior that civil and sane people want to limit in themselves and others.

I don’t know the right answer, but I am reconsidering the idea of legalization. It may be more economically efficient to legalize drugs. It may be economically efficient to kill malformed babies. It may be more efficient to kill old people when they reach 70. Western civilization did not come into existence because of efficiency. There’s no libertarian argument to explain the rise of the West. The story of the West is like minded people working to create a world they wanted and killing anyone who tried to stop them. There’s an appeal there that does not exist in the ovens of the Left or the soulless machinery of the libertarian.

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In the great something measuring contest between old weird America and the cosmopolitan perverts knows as the gay lobby, old weird America came out ahead. I’ve never seen a minute of Duck Dynasty, but I’ve met those guys many times living in the South. They don’t give up easy. There’s a reason why the US military relies so heavily on young men from that part of the country. While I’m cynical about the future of the nation, I can’t bet against the crackers in old weird America.

The hallmark of the fanatic is absolutism. The fanatic creates this imaginary world where everything is defined by its relationship to the wall. The wall being the barrier surrounding the intellectual and emotional asylum in which they feel safe and sane. Anything and everything on the other side of the wall is bad. The fanatic will have a range of words they use to describe the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall. The colorful language from North Korea to describe their enemies, real and imaginary, is a good example. The fanatic spend a lot of time worrying about the people on the other side. The fanatic is in a perpetual state of war, always checking the perimeter to make sure nothing breaches their defenses.

I thought about that when reading this article at Reason about the Duck Dynasty guy. Even they call his comments “anti-gay.” I’m admittedly not a student of this guy’s work, but what has been published is not “anti-gay” if we are restricting ourselves to English. His brand of Christianity, like 99% of Christianity,  considers sex outside of marriage a sin. Therefore, gay sex is a sin. That’s it. He said the same thing about bestiality and drunkenness. No one is upset at him for being anti-animal or anti-booze. The reason, of course, is those things lack a band of dedicated fanatics defending that activity. Sodomites have a phalanx of nuts willing to attack anyone that gets too close to the walls.

That’s the way it must be with fanatics. You are either with them or against them. There’s no room to be indifferent. Even if you are indifferent, they will force you to choose sides. It’s why their language becomes stark. You are either in favor of “gay rights” or you are anti-gay, a homophobe, a bigot, etc. You’ll note they have a long list of words to describe their enemies. The neo-fascist twit, Piers Morgan, is a solid example of the modern fanatic in that his language is infused with outlandish claims about the vast array of bogeymen he imagines are stalking him.

The reason for this is, in part, psychological. The fanatic is most likely biologically driven to be a fanatic. As Eric Hoffer noted, the true believer will jump from one fanaticism to another, often participating in many at the same time. For instance, an environmentalist will also be a member of some Marxist group, a vegan and an animal rights nut. They may also be obsessive about hobbies. I have some fanatic friends who are both crazy liberal and obsessed with certain supporting hobbies like mountain biking or English soccer.

Another reason, I suspect, is it works. Evolution is about trial and error. In another time, shaming manifested itself in a more violent way. Wayward women would be stripped in public and have their hair cut off. Blasphemers would have their tongue cutout. Today, thank goodness, we go for the hotly worded letter, but it works the same.  The Reason folks start to hyperventilate when they are forced to defend the culture. You get, instead, the mealy mouthed nonsense about the first amendment not covering private enterprise. The more people the fanatics can bully into standing aside, the better their odds.

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