When in the office, I try to keep up with the world by listening to the talk radio guys that make their audio available on-line. There’s a limit to how much Rush Limbaugh type of commentary I can take, so I switch it up and listen to some sports or maybe a local chat show. I’m working, so it’s more background noise than anything else, but it give me some idea of what my fellow citizens are interested in at the moment. That way I can do small talk with them without sounding like a visitor from another planet.

An ad that seems to turn up all over is for some sort of weight loss drug. It may be a dietary supplement, I don’t know as I never pay attention until the end. The pitch at the end of the ad is a warning about the possibility some fat people will lose weight too quickly, so they should use caution while using the drug. It’s an obvious lie, but they are playing on people’s desperation. It is a spin on the four hour erect claims from Cialus. The idea is to get the sucker thinking the worse possible result is their dreams come true.

It is a terrible thing to do, but it is a staple of the supplement business.  The “male enhancement” ads always warn about users suddenly having super models flocking to them for a little bit of that raging manhood they will get from the drug. At least the Cialus guys can claim to be defending themselves against a possible side effect. The weight loss drug is just a scam with exactly zero science behind it. In fact, all of them are scams, as most are just common herbs or maybe even nothing at all. Just filler.

I’ve been into health and fitness, off and on, for over 30 years and I have seen all sorts of crazy fads. The one that has always baffled me is supplements. The best source of vital nutrients is food. A properly constructed diet provides all of the vitamins and minerals a human requires. Even athletes can get everything from food. The use of steroids and growth hormone changes some of the math, but food remains the only supplement you really need. Eat a low-carb diet with plenty of green vegetables and you’re good.

According a massive new study, there’s no evidence to even make a weak correlation between supplements and good health. Even taking a multivitamin is a waste of effort, because most Americans have too much of everything in their diet. Most of those vitamins and minerals in the pill will be broken down in your stomach and passed throughout as waster product. There’s some evidence that vitamin-D is of some help to white people in the winter, but you can get that from fruit and vegetables too.

This will have no impact on the sale and use of these magic potions. People want to believe in miracle drugs. The core of every confidence game is the willingness of the sucker to think he is special. That’s always at the heart of these marketing plans for pills, magic diets or exercise fads. That’s the diet pill pitch. Most people, they claim, will lose weight, but you could be special. You could be the exception, who loses tons of weight. It is the same element that allowed Victor Lustig to sell the Eiffel Tower for scrap.

Food cults are nothing new and that is what the supplement business is when you examine it. The Greeks and Romans were fond of food cults. Pythagoras was a vegan, for example. Sacrificing animals and food offerings to the gods are part of it. Five thousand years ago, the cult would sacrifice a bull and leave some food at a shrine. This was followed by a feast. Today the cult arrives as Whole Foods to sacrifice their wallet for organic bananas and a variety of supplements, almost always “all natural.”

The truth is, humans are omnivores. Our bodies evolved over a very long time eating meat, fish and wild greens. That’s what we’re good at digesting. If you want to maintain a healthy diet, cut out the carbs and focus on meat, fish and eggs. Nuts and cheese add variety and fresh produce, when in season, as a source of carbs when you’re using that body as it was designed. That’s the other piece of the health puzzle. Exercise. We are made for lifting heavy things and short bursts of activity.

For those of you not up on your revolutionary history, that is the date of the Thermidorian Reaction. In radical circles, it has a different meaning. It is the inflection point in radical politics where the movement veers off into madness. The otherwise sensible people who were pushing the movement along begin to have doubts and question the people they have been following. The revolution, at this point, begins to eat itself, as radicals seek out doubters and the sober minded react to the craziness of the radicals.

For more than 200 years radicals have been replaying the French Revolution hoping for a different result. In every case, the radicals never see that they are following the same path as those who came before them. It suggest there is something about radicalism, maybe a biological quality to the radicals themselves, that results in this pattern. For some reason, they can never see that they are following the same story arc as prior radical movements, even when they are led by people who are students of prior radical movements.

Anyway, I first heard it is used when reading about the Berkeley Citizens Action struggles in the 1980’s. The New Left settled into the city and went about building a a radical organization. They used a document called The City’s Wealth to map out a strategy to gain control of Berkeley, which they eventually did in the 1980’s. That’s when Berkeley got into declaring itself a nuclear free zone and campaigning for various communist causes in South America. It is also when the city’s schools and quality of life began to collapse.

The radicals were so concerned about polishing their radical credentials and debating their radical theories with one another, they failed to figure out how to run a practical organization. They also started succumbed to the normal human temptations, like getting their money mixed up with the city’s money. Eventually the city’s less crazy liberal population revolted and started to throw out the radicals. Left-wing observers on the West coast called it America’s Thermidorian Reaction.

That may be what’s happening with the Affordable Care Act. It was the crowning achievement of the Left’s capturing of the national government in 2008. Five years on it is an unfolding disaster that is threatening the revolution. On the one hand, the old school types like Bernie Sanders are unhappy about the bill not going far enough. They were never happy about this, but hoped it was a first step. The liberals who are more concerned with practical politics are in a full blown panic as their poll numbers collapse.

On the other hand, this may signal the collapse of the more pragmatic wing of the Left, the wing led by people like the Clintons. They may be crooks, but they come out of the moderate strain of 60’s radicalism, that thought this government could be re-purposed to Progressive ends. The other wing, the anti-white wing, is not all that interested in reforming the system. They wish to sack it and then attack their white oppressors. They may see this failure as the failure of pragmatism and then demand more radical action.

There’s an interesting thread on MR about software patents. In recent years “patent trolls” have become a parasitic industry all to themselves.  Companies are created to acquire patents from the holders so they can then shake down whoever may be using them in their product. It’s not much different than what Jesse Jackson does for money. He makes a pest of himself and gets paid to go away. The practice goes back a long time to when travelers would take over an inn or a private home and you had to pay them to leave. of course, they tend to pick on little guys lacking the means to fight back. This from EFF is a good example.

The idea of a patent or license is to encourage and direct the behavior of the creative. Instead of offering a prize, the inventor is granted exclusive rights to his invention for a fixed period of time.  The world gets the invention and the inventor gets money, maybe lots of money. The assertion that patents are necessary to spur invention is a new idea. In fact, the idea of patents for intellectual property came under heavy assault in the 19th century.  That was an age of industrial growth and an explosion of innovation. For most of the last 500 years, starting from the advent of the patent system in Venice, patents were limited and temporary.

What we see today with patent trolls is how the law is easily turned into a weapon by the rentier class. In a prior age, the rentier had to be rich before he could extract rents. Today, you get rich by finding a way to freeload off the system in some way. The better you are at it the richer you get. Perhaps you get so rich you can buy land and rent it out. Our entire financial system is a rentier operation where well connected firms skim from the productive class in order to finance the political class who offer protection to the the financial class.

The current morass is just another example of why schemes to correct some aspect of the human condition always fail. There’s a fraction of every human society that seeks out ways to live on the labor of others. It is their one skill and their sole focus. Some become salesman or lawyers. others go into banditry or illicit trade. They are always with us. if try to protect the rights of the honest with patent laws, for example, the parasites will find a way to use that as way to lever money from the honest. Since they are really good at being parasites, they can never be out foxed by new laws. They always win in the end.

As John Derbyshire is fond of saying, pop culture is filth, but it is worth noticing, if you want to get a sense of where the culture is heading. It is a strange artifact of the modern west, modern America particularly, so it’s healthy probably speaks to the health of the American society. Youth culture is not a permanent feature of human society. In fact, it is an oddity. For most of human history, youth culture did not exist.Children graduated into adulthood and that was it. Youth culture is a creation of the American post-war Left.

To be accurate, what we think of as pop culture started in earnest in the 20’s and 30’s in big cities. People with disposable income could go to clubs and hear jazz music and carry on in ways that were otherwise prohibited. That was not really youth culture as we think of it today. It was an extension of the existing cosmopolitan leisure activity, brought down to a middlebrow level. Instead of you people attending formal dances, they went to clubs and listened to black music, smoked jazz cigarettes and talk about communism,

After the Second World War, an authentic youth culture was born. The proliferation of media, TV, radio and movies, quickly centered on young people. The reason is young people are dumb and have bad tastes. It’s a lot easier to sell them pop culture than to sell it to an older person with more complex tastes. Radicals also saw it as a way to recruit the young in their efforts to subvert public order. It’s not an accident that the long cultural revolution in America started with a revolution in pop culture.

There was also money to be made selling stupid young people bad music and silly fads that changed every year. Even though most was crap, some was quite good. By the late 60’s sixties and early 70’s, a lot of pop music was very good. Listen to Led Zeppelin, for example, and you hear very accomplished musicians tapping into old traditions in western music. It’s not Beethoven of Brahms, but within that genre, many of the best performers were very talented musicians. In a better age, they would have been put to better use.

Today, pop culture is noticeably devoid of talent. The automation and technology have, as is always the case, removed the art and replaced it with decoration. In the last two decades we have seen a stream of female pop singers following a standard formula, where they gain great success, but then fade and are replaced by an updated version, doing the same act. Madonna was the first to figure out how to be the raunchy power-pop diva and after here has been a stream of imitators doing the same act.

Heterosexual male singers have just about disappeared from pop music, instead turning up in country. The beta males like Justin Beiber are designed to appeal as much to the bath house culture as teens. Just as the proliferation of gay casting directors has turned the leading man into a gay icon, the proliferation of homosexuals in the music business has turned the male singer into a twink. Gays like their men to look like steroidal freaks or like teenage boys. That’s a truth of life that is forbidden, but still true.

The trouble with the factory formula is it eventually breaks down. Lady Gaga seems to be headed to the dustbin as her latest record is a flop. Her music was never anything special, but her marketing was better than most. Her people fused David Bowie and Paris Hilton with a dash of Marilyn Manson. Wisely, they kept it PG-13 so they could target young teenage girls, but also rope in the dorky older girls. It was good timing as the victim culture was growing, particularly among young females. It was good timing.

The transcendent theme to all of pop music these days, even country, is the stunning lack of real talent. Most of the singers need electronic enhancement. Few can play more than a few notes on an instrument. None are writing music. Instead there’s a music factory cranking out their tunes and a whole marketing team to build the back story and narrative of the performer. The lack of authenticity is near universal, which is ironic, as the genesis of youth culture was a quest for authenticity that transcended bourgeois life.

Friday I went to the doctor for an evaluation. The reason for this is the dentist saw a tiny little bump on my tongue that she said was probably nothing. Since I have insurance, she said I should get it checked out by a specialist. She gave me a referral to someone she knows. With some worry, I made the appointment. Unless I have the slowest growing tumor in history, it is a nothing issue, but you never know and the hygienist is right about having it checked out to make sure. Who knows? This could be my last post here.

I made the appointment and was told to show up 30 minutes early to do paperwork. I was given a clipboard and five forms. Half of it was the basic data a doctor would need in order to get a general history of the patient and get paid for services. The rest was data to defend him against future lawsuits. Liberals have argued for years that litigation is a tiny part of health costs, but they have a conflict of interest as most are lawyers abusing the court system. The rial lawyer lobby is very powerful in America.

Even objective studies cannot account for the millions of hours wasted filling out forms forced on us by the plaintiff’s bar.  A partner in a law firm filling out forms at a doctor’s office is a $1000 of waste. Multiply that over tens of millions of people and you have billions squandered in the morass of paperwork alone. That’s before you consider how many times you fill out the same form. Every visit to the doctor seems to require a new form, with the same data, but in a slightly different order with a new date.

I finish the forms and the whatever you call the people at the front desk took a copy of my insurance cards and driver’s license. Again, the scan of the license is about money. If they have to chase me, they now have my photo ID. This was something truck hijackers would do in the 50’s and 60’s. They would take the truck driver’s license and tell him to claim it was two black guys or two Mexicans. Since they had his license, he was under obvious pressure to cooperate. It’s an interesting comparison.

Then I wait and wait and wait. I had 12:30 appointment but did not get to see the doctor until 1:00. He was with me for 132 seconds. I know because I timed the great event. I then spent fifteen minutes checking out and paying my bill. That part was an issue because I learned they did not take insurance, but would submit the claim to my carrier for reimbursement. I tried to use my HSA VISA card, but that was declined for some reason. I then used my regular credit card to pay the $150 for the 132 second consultation.

The consultation resulted in another appointment. He will remove the bump and send it out for examination. He says it is unlikely to be anything but I will have peace of mind knowing for sure. He will also have $650 for the service. If I want my HSA to cover it, I will have to spend hours working that process. There’s a cost there as my time is worth something to me. I could pay out of pocket, but I have insurance for this stuff. They ain’t giving me a discount for not using it. It is another hassle for a service that is probably unneeded.

This is the problem with health care in a nutshell. It is something we all need, so it has attracted a special class of highwaymen. They stand between you and the product or service you need, demanding a toll. Unlike a stickup man, they force you to fill out forms and wait in line to be robbed. This is also why American health care will collapse before it is reformed. Those highwaymen have powerful lobbies to prevent laws curtailing their activities. We’ll just have to wait until we’re all bled dry, before there is reform.

John Derbyshire’s latest racist, right-wing extremist extremism is up at VDARE. I’m a big fan of John’s work, even though I think the people at VDare are a bit weird. Not the bad sort of weird, more like the eccentric sort of weird. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s an oddness about some of them. Perhaps it is the effects of working with taboo material for so long, like radiation sickness. But, it takes all kinds and my tastes are not conventional. Anyway, his column has some interesting facts like this one.

The 1911 census in the newly-founded British dominion of South Africa showed whites as 22 percent in a population of 6 million. By 1980, although their actual numbers had more than tripled, they had dwindled to 16 percent in a population of 28 million, with a birthrate half that of blacks. The demographic writing was on the wall. (Whites are now nine percent in a population of 53 million, just twice the proportion of whites in 1970s Rhodesia, and of course still falling.)

I had that on my mind as I was reading something on National Review. The comment by Scott Wilson is the important bit:

Had the electorate in 2012 looked like the electorate in 1988, Romney likely carries all but a handful of states. Romney carried white voters in every age demographic. The GOP doesn’t have a policy problem, and frankly it really doesn’t have a candidate problem, although I understand the comfort in thinking those things might be true; if they were true, our problems would be fixable, or at least more easily fixable.

No,our problems are demographic in nature, and for that, there really isn’t any short-term cure. Sadly.

That, of course, brings to mind this Steve Sailer post from after the last election. A little math confirms something about modern American politics. Blacks vote democrat 100% of the time. Thinking there’s any chance of changing that is crazy. Right away that gives the democrats 13% of the vote. Hispanics are not as big, but they consistently go 70% for democrats. That’s another 6% of the vote bringing the floor for Democrats to 20% of a national election. In some states, that floor is higher, because of a smaller white vote.

When you look at the white vote, 20% have been calling themselves liberal for as long as anyone reading this has been alive. That’s another 15% going democrat bringing their floor total to 35%. Now, polling consistently puts the percentage of whites calling themselves conservative at 40%. Even though many in that group are libertarian, anarchists and just angry misfits, let’s assume they vote for the GOP. That puts their floor at 30%. That sounds pretty close, but the 35% is much more reliable and dedicated.

It is not hard to see what happens when you increase the Hispanic vote. If we amnesty 20 million Mexicans, that doubles the vote share, bringing the Democrats over the 40% threshold. That means they need just one in three  whites to carry an election. Even now, they need just 40% of that group. Scott Wilson is largely correct. The GOP has a demographic problem more than anything. The share of the vote off-limits is forever off-limits. The share that makes up their base is increasingly unreliable. The crackup we are seeing with Boehner is simply a reflection of slow tearing apart of the GOP.

The budget deal “negotiated” by Paul Ryan is a good example of why the GOP is struggling. The deal itself is mostly just some tinkering with minor elements of the overall budget. Spending does not change, taxes go up a tiny bit and some formula for hiking pensions is altered in a trivial way popular with people in the ruling class. This has the added benefit of allowing people claiming to be experts to get jobs in the bureaucracy, figuring how the new rules can be implemented. Regulation is a jobs program.

In reality, the reforms do nothing and the experts are just functionaries. The American system of government is designed to make change difficult even when the ruling class wants to make changes. When that intentionally sclerotic political system sits atop a massive continent-wide bureaucracy, change is damn near impossible. It’s like steering a super tanker with an oar. Maybe it can be nudged a bit, but the effects takes years for anyone to notice. When they are defending the status quo, change is impossible.

That’s the problem for the GOP. Historically, they have been the party of good management. They appeal to the middle class largely by promising stable, sensible management of the state. They are the squares. Radical change is not their thing. Even when it is their thing, like it was 30 years ago, it was more like the parents coming home to discover the remains of a house party. They make the kids clean up the mess and put the house back into its original order, or something close to it.

The trouble comes when a significant portion of their base has become radicalized. Guys like David Stockman and Rick Santelli make a living appealing to that growing segment of the population. Multiculturalism and globalism are creating two types of radicals in American politics. There are those who want to press the gas and drive society over the multicultural cliff, while another segment wants to grab the wheel and steer the car in another direction, without really knowing where to go or how to do it.

The Middle American Radical is restless. The country has been overrun by lunatics and they want something done about it. The trouble is the lunatics have a political party of their own called the Democrat Party. The MARs have tried over the decades to transform the GOP into a fighting force willing to take on the lunatics. The trouble with that is the GOP establishment is not radical. It is a collection of squares, chamber of commerce types and financial elites. Mitt Romney and John McCain are not radicals by any definition of the word. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell are stay the course Republicans.

These folks know their constituency is not interested in radical change. They like things the way they are right now. Their constituents, of course, are the donors who bankroll their campaigns and the Republican Party. The donor class may be small in number, but they control most of the cash. You’ll note that the same people underwriting the GOP underwrite much of the Democrat Party and underwrite organizations promoting forever war in the Middle East. They are not interested in making any changes.

The Reagan Revolution was about rollback. In some important ways, the Left was pushed back, but in other more important ways, the Left prevailed. The MARs, being sensible people, accepted that you can’t win every fight. You come back another day and they did in 1994 with the Contract with America. They forced some reforms onto Clinton, but lost most fights. Again, win some lose some but live on to fight another day, which was supposed to happen when Bush was elected. That never happened.

Instead it was mostly a stalemate over foreign policy while the Left swept the field on the domestic side. The MARs began to question their allegiance to the GOP and started to walk away from the party. Mitt Romney lost because a whole lot of folks, supposedly in the GOP base, walked away. The ridiculousness of Mitt Romney, a liberal from a weird religious cult, being the standard bearer for a party that allegedly represents the interests of white people, is one of those things that will be studied for a long time.

That brings us back to the budget deal. Doing this deal is good tactics. As a party, the GOP needs to stand aside right now and let the clown show unfold. ObamaCare is a disaster that is cratering support for the Democrats. It is not going away either. In fact, it promises to get worse next year. That will impact the economy, no matter how much the BLS fakes the numbers. Sometime in the spring they can roll out a list of promises that are reasonable and current. Then they can sail to another midterm victory.

That’s the problem though. Good tactics are not what their voters want. This theater of the Left making demands, while the reasonable boys in the GOP meets them half way and finds a way to make it work is not selling. Those Middle American Radicals stayed home in 2012 in enough numbers to tank the election for Romney. In the 2016 election, they may just show up and vote for some outsider who promises to nuke the whole thing. At that point, the party is over for Conservative Inc and the party of squares.

In the fullness of time, this age will be described as one where the people in charge had to re-learn everything about human nature, that people had known for thousands of years, but somehow been forgotten. Maybe forgotten is not the right term. It’s as if people have un-learned things. A deliberate effort has been made to deny basic parts of reality, in an effort to prove crackpot theories about human nature and human organization. This story about health care costs in the Washington Post is a good example.

The Left can believe things that are obviously wrong. So much so, they can convince people who should know better that up is down and down is up. Health care is a great example. For example, the ObamaCare debacle is turning into the greatest public works failure in the history of man. If the Hoover Damn had cracked open on the first day and crumbled into a pile of stones, it would not be as big a failure as ObamaCare.

Every day brings another hilarious failure of the website or some aspect of it. What has gained less attention is the fact few people have bothered to even try to sign up. Of those, almost all should have been on Medicaid all along. The Left claimed 20 million Americans were without insurance and would buy it if it were cheaper. They claimed another 20 million or so were young people who should be paying into the system, but are not.

The Left believed the 40 million uninsured myth with the intensity of a fanatic. As the numbers come in, they hold to it. Even non-Liberals still accept the claim. Never mind that the figures never held up to experience or reason. If you are young, you don’t need insurance. If you are poor or old, you can go on the dole. If you have a job, you most likely have a policy from work. Small business people have private plans.

Of course, a trip to the local ER shows it is full of illegal aliens who should not be here in the first place. The great uninsured never existed in numbers worthy of this initiative. The uninsured, those who legitimately exist, are like the unemployed. They are a temporary class, a shifting, dynamic cohort that is transitioning from one job state or life state to another. There was never a great emergency to be addressed, but the Left believed it.

The great uninsured was a big fat hoax. They never really existed in numbers warranting state action. Instead of asking to look behind the curtain, everyone went along with the claims made by the Left. So much so we have a multi-trillion dollar disaster on our hands that will end up helping a handful of people, who probably never needed the help in the first place. Those who did need help could have relied on existing programs.

Even now, the debate still focuses on how to replace it or how to fix it. No one is bothering to ask why the premise of the thing is not holding up to empirical fact. You can be sure that if anyone publicly challenges the claim they will be called a monster. Obama will keep wheeling out white people supposedly helped by his program and the liberal press will yammer about the lack of an alternative. No one will question the premise.