I can’t say i know a lot about the work of John Fund. I think he shills for the neo-cons in the Wall Street Journal. I see him there and National Review, but I don’t often read him. I suspect his will be one of the jobs automated in the future. Anyway, he has this post up at NRO. It is emblematic of what is defective with the conservative mind. They confuse policy, principles and politics. The current fight in DC has very little to do with policy and nothing to do with principle. It is primarily a political fight. Both parties fear they are losing their base. The best way to win over doubters is to pick a fight with the enemy. John Boehner is not a genius, but he figured out that he had to go along with the conservative members on this and take a stand. Otherwise they risked losing big in next year’s election. In the end, they may have to accept some minor cuts here or there, which will amount to nothing, but they will have rallied the base for the next fights.

Fund, like all of Conservative Inc does not get it.

The notion that adding a defund-Obamacare provision to the continuing resolution or debt-ceiling measure would actually result in defunding Obamacare sounded too much like the strategy the “underpants gnomes” adopted in that classic episode of South Park. The kids discover that gnomes are stealing people’s underpants.

I hope I get a chance to negotiate with these guys once in my life. I will become fabulously rich. In politics, you start out knowing you will cut a deal. Your goal is to make the other guy look awful so he will give you better terms. Forcing that old pervert Hairy Reed to go on TV and defend this mess is good politics. Any time you can get Pelosi or the Aging JAP on TV is a good day for Republicans. They will inevitably say something so bat-shit crazy the public will recoil in horror. Conservative Inc never seems to get this and instead demands immediate surrender so they can regroup for another day, when they have the policy just right.

Of course, part of this is that old hacks like Fund don’t want to rock the boat. He makes a nice living repeating what he is told on TV and in print. He is invested in the status quo. Still, even guys who are willing to speak their mind and should know better often confuse the three “P’s” of public discourse. Liberals seldom make this error. They aim to win first and figure out the other stuff later. It’s why they tend to win all of the fights.

I fully admit to being torn on immigration. The arguments against allowing high numbers of foreigners to settle here are indisputable. We have too many workers right now. It is not just low skilled or laborers. It is all types. Depressing wages by flooding the economy with foreigners is not what a responsible government does to its people. Then there’s the issue with assimilation. The Hispanics are simply not assimilating like the myth claims they will.

The statistics are grim when you look at crime, addiction and social pathologies like illegitimacy rates. Our cultural elites celebrate ghetto life (from a distance) so it should come as no surprise that the imported peasant classes embrace the black ghetto culture as soon as they arrive here. In the prior century when the elites strongly embraced White values and demanded rapid assimilation, you got a different result. That and the immigrants, except for the Jews, were from white countries.

On the other hand, low levels of  immigration has worked in the past. America is better off having allowed certain types of people to settle here. The sort of person who packs up his bags and sets off for a new land is usually from hardy stock. It takes balls to do it, even with all the welfare help in place. Most people are afraid to move across town. That sort of risk taking is what keeps a culture vibrant and self-renewing. It’s a fresh injection of the pioneering spirit to keep the old stock population fresh and bold.

There are trade offs and maybe that’s not discussed enough, but the emotional side never gets discussed either. We sort of know we are getting things right when the world wants to come here and join the deal. That has value too. On the other hand, the focus on the romantic side of immigration could also be a sign that American culture is entering an the death phase. A people romanticize their past when they can no longer bear thinking about their future. That could be why we are so open to endless immigration.

The deciding factor for me is amnesty. There is no rational argument in favor of granting amnesty to illegals. None. It is simply a way to get grace on the cheap for people who fundamentally hate themselves, hate their fellow citizens and hate their country. In some cases, it is merely a way to rip off the public with some cheap labor. Put another way, the people in favor of high levels of immigration are either lying on looking to stick the rest of us with the cost of their quest for grace. If they’re for i, I’m against it.

The people who came to settle in the Americas, after migrating from Asia over the Beringia land bridge during Late Pleistocene era, make for a great case study with regarding human evolution. For example, science can now use DNA to tell the difference between those who settled ion South America from those in North America. The initial population split and became isolated enough from one another to develop different genetic mutations from one another. That buttresses has been observed elsewhere in the world.

Of course, it is interesting to try and puzzle through what happened to ancient or forgotten civilizations. In some cases where they put together something that looked like an advanced civilization, then suddenly it collapsed. Figuring out why it disappeared in a few years is fun. It can also tell us something about human civilization in general. Although, knowing why the Greeks and Romans failed at the end has not changed a single mind among the modern ruling classes so it may not be a worthwhile endeavor.

The trouble, of course, when it comes to talking about the Amerindian societies is the modern primitives and their superstitions get in the way. We are no longer allowed to point out that sub-Saharan Africans never advanced far beyond the stone age until the white man arrived with the wheel, writing and so forth. Similarly, any discussion of American Indians must be is such reverent tones that it makes discussing the topic close to impossible, at least in an objective way. Here’s a good example.

In an otherwise straight forward story  you get something like this:

The first evidence of a settlement in the Cahokia area is from the year 600 CE, at a time when the Maya civilization would have been at its peak. But it wasn’t until after the largest cities of the Maya began to fall in the 1000s that Cahokia came into its own. It’s estimated that the city center held as many as 15,000 people (making it comparable in size to European cities of the same era), and reached the height of its productivity between roughly 1000-1300 CE.

The implication, something we routinely see in stories about the Mayan, Aztec and other Mesoamerican groups, is that these people had reached a comparable level of civilization to that of Europeans. Sometimes they are described as being more advanced, at the time, than Europeans. Always lurking somewhere in the discussion is the implication that everything was fine until the pale face came along and screwed everything up. It’s a version of the noble savage, with the white man as the villain ruining paradise.

The first step in human civilization was agriculture. This required something larger than kin-based organizational units. One guy planting a garden is not enough. Figuring out how to raise crops required large scale (relative to hunter gatherers) cooperation amongst people. The mesoamericans got this far. They also got to the point where they could have specialization. Instead of farming, some portion of society were craftsman, tradesmen and government functionaries/religious class.

That’s a big deal as it allows for a class of people who come up with new ideas and improve on old technology. Successful agriculture allows for an intellectual class. If Bill Gates had to till his fields every day, he was not going to have time to steal code from IBM. Having a class of people dedicated solely to metallurgy allows for constant improvement in that technology. The results help a society grow richer and add to its stock of people working on non-agricultural projects. There is a compounding effect.

That’s thing with these ancient people. They never made it that far. Europeans were smelting metal for 2,000 years before the Maya were stacking rocks on top of one another to make a simple wall. When they were at their richest, presumably allowing their best and brightest to try new things, they did some impressive stuff with stonework and architecture. More often than not, however, it was used for ceremonial, cultural and religious ends, rather than practical ends, like plumbing and sewage.

They did not invent any new technologies that would help them take control of their natural surroundings. While the Maya were perfecting stone age technology, Europeans had passed through the bronze age and were well into the iron age. Comparing the civilization achievements of these people with Europe is simply ridiculous for these reasons. Why one group went down a blind alley and one did not is interesting and useful to know, but it is not allowed to be discussed in the current climate of righteous hysteria.

Of course, we’re all supposed to feel bad for what happened to the Indians. To show that, we celebrate the achievements of the Maya, Aztecs and whoever else we can find that was kicking around the Americas before the white man. Throw in a healthy dollop of the noble savage myth and you have middle-aged white women claiming to have “Native American” ancestry. The American Indian has become a stock character in the never ending morality tale of white guilt and the quest for redemption.,

Reality is something different. The Indians were a dead end of sorts. At least when comes to technological achievement. The most advanced civilizations in the south never developed a large enough smart fraction to overcome their environment to a degree that allowed the shape their environment. They maxed out their ecosystem, but where never able to take control of it as happened in Europe and Asia.There were a few smart Indians around, but never enough to reach the necessary critical mass.

That last bit is the key. Europe in the 900’s was not a fun place. War, disease, famine and general mayhem made living beyond 30 a rarity. We called it the dark ages for good reason. Still, the ingredients were all there for a breakout. People had figured out the basics of agriculture to the point where they could produce more than they consumed and there fore have an inventive class, working on making better tools, better weapons and better ways to organize themselves in order to capitalize on their advances.

Understanding that process and why it happened is important. We know Amerindians have an average IQ a little higher than Africans. We know Europeans and Asians have significantly higher IQ’s than other human groups. That’s probably the place to start when trying to understand why the Aztec went down a dead end and were never able to get over the hump in terms of cultural development. This is all taboo, so instead we waste time worshiping people for having been mankind’s greatest losers.

One of the weird self-correcting phenomenon you see in drug markets – street drugs, that is – is the intolerance for fakes. If a dealer gets caught passing off baby laxative as coke he is going to be dead. It is not just that he ripped off his customers; it is that he cheats his fellow drug dealers. The guy selling fake stuff raises everyone’s costs and risks. Pawn shops willingly cooperate with the police to counter theft for similar reasons. Their customers are not going to solicit a business that supports burglary. Antique dealers try to uncover fakes as it undercuts their business. Why spend big money on an original when you can get a fake? That does not stop the fakers, but it is an organic mechanism to police it. Highly distributed markets can do this. Centralized industries like music and movies cannot so they lobby the state to crack down on forgers.

There is a vast middle ground where most of us live and that’s where fakers can cause the most trouble. I was looking at NRO for something to aggravate me and saw this in their list of articles. It is not an article, but an ad dressed up to look like an article. National Review agrees to place ads like this in their article queue in order to trick people into clicking on the link. Magazines now have multi-page advertizements made to look like one of their stories. Even more strange is the ad in question here is itself full of fake stuff. The whole xenoestrogen stuff is largely nonsense, at least as it relates to organic food. Plants have all sorts of tricks to ward off pests and they often consider humans to be pests. A cobra is organic, too.

It does not stop there. According to this story in the Economist, academic papers are also being forged. The market for fake term papers is well developed. You can probably outsource your thesis if you are so inclined. To no one’s surprise, the epicenter of this new fraud is China. It seems like their entire culture is designed around deception. We get the term “sand bag” from China. In the colonial days, Chinese tea merchants would put sandbags at the bottom of casks to defraud the British. It is a bandit culture with no history of integrity. I know of companies that have to use special coding on their boxes to distinguish their product from the fakes as the Chinese will fake even the most mundane things.

Like the fake news story, fake research has a terrible trade off. If I can no longer tell the real stories in a magazine from the ads, I stop buying the magazine. If we can no longer distinguish real research from fake stuff from China, we no longer do research because no one can trust it. It strikes me as I type this that the great challenge to the West is how to deal with the massive on-going criminal enterprise known as the People’s Republic of China. Their hacking, credit fraud, piracy and knock-offs have real costs to the West. How long before it stops making sense to do business with them? I block all Chinese IP’s from this site because of spammers. How long before banks start to consider doing the same?

According to Drudge, all of the beautiful people are bracing for the shutdown of government. They are not worried for themselves, of course. They will make money from this either peddling fake horror stories in the news or shaking down fellow rich people for cash. No, they are deeply concerned for the little people who depend on government. After all, without the beautiful people and the managerial class that runs their rackets, the rest of us will starve. That’s nowhere near true, but it is what most of these people think is true. Some are just sociopaths and can pretend to think this even though they don’t, but most probably do believe it. You never know, of course, but I suspect they believe it.

Reality is something different. Anyone living around DC knows the drill. Whenever we get severe weather, the alarm goes off for “unessential personnel” to remain home. The streets are empty and 90% of government is closed. The fact that 90% is deemed non-essential by the state itself has been a long running joke around here for decades. I think they finally stopped using the term and came up with some obscure codes to transmit the message. “Employees code blue or lower should work from home.” Government employees barely work when they are at the office so you know they are just fucking off when they home for a snow day. This way they don’t have to use leave time. There’s always an angle.

For those of us in the dreaded private sector, this nonsense is a non-event. If you live in or around the Imperial Capital, traffic is much better, but otherwise you notice nothing different. The lunch spots will be less crowded, but otherwise it is business as usual pulling the wagon. If you live out in the unimportant areas, that would be areas not DC, New York or LA, then it is just another day. It is why these things don’t last that long. At some level the beautiful people know we could get used to not having ten thousand deadbeats packed into building at the DoE or HUD. If the people ever truly think they can get along without the leviathan, then the game is up. By the end of the week President Dickhead, Hairy Reed and Speaker Crybaby will decide to play nice and everything will be worked out so they can go on the Sunday shows and bray about saving the country.

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Tyler Cowen linked to this today. It is a cornucopia of things that warrant comment. The first of which is a site called “Brain Pickings” sounds like something quirky and nerdish. Instead is appears to be run by a fruitcake who thinks “Brain Pickings is a human-powered discovery engine for interestingness” is clever. I know this makes me a big meanie, but I suspect Maria Popova is going to end up living with 50 cats. The “about” section borders on the creepy and what the Hell is a Futures of Entertainment fellowship? I asked Dr. Google and the response was, “There are some things you’re better off not knowing.”

Anyway, the first thing from the post that got my attention is:

Math-teacher-turned-psychologist Angela Duckworth, who began her graduate studies under positive psychology godfather Martin Seligman at my alma mater, the University of Pennsylvania, has done more than anyone for advancing our understanding of how self-control and grit — the relentless work ethic of sustaining your commitments toward a long-term goal — impact success.

Is there anyone who does not know that determination is the key to success? Are there people in America teaching their kids that hard work and determination are unimportant? Is there a culture trying to operate on the principle of “Don’t give a fuck”? The last time I checked, American culture is up to its ears in stories about how how grit and determination allowed someone to overcome all sorts of obstacles. The book business stays afloat on the self-help industry. Frankly, Tony Robbins has done more to promote and explain “grit” in one seminar than Ms. Duckworth has done in her career.

This is one of my peeves about the soft sciences. So much of what they do these days is nothing more than a ridiculous circle jerk. I guess living and working in a hermetically sealed world divorced from reality does that to people. There’s no organic market for the study of grit. Instead it is propped up by a government grant system that is nothing but a type of patronage racket. The soft sciences are starting to look like an isolated village in West Virginia.

This is priceless:

Duckworth spent a number of years toying with the idea of starting her own charter school, but eventually concluded that the model didn’t hold much promise for changing the circumstances of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, those whom the education system was failing most tragically. Instead, she decided to pursue a PhD program at Penn.

In other words, Ms. Duckworth quickly figured out that no one was going to give her money to experiment on their kids. Or, she decided it was too much like work to do the grifting it takes to get the funding for her ideas. The easy route was to game the system and get a PhD is nonsense. I have a friend who has been playing the same game for 25 years now. He has more credentials than most people and probably could not setup a lemonade stand with hurting himself. Our university system is packed with people who have no useful skill, even in the field they hold their doctorate.

Finally, the “grit” test at the end is hilarious. It is as if a child put it together. Anyone with the IQ of a chimp is going to figure out how to game the test. I’ve taken a lot of IQ tests and personality tests in my life. It is really hard to fool high IQ people on personality tests so I have low standards for those. This is so amateurish it could be passed off as a gag.

Anyway, I’m having another beer…

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I saw this linked on Steve Sailer’s site and thought it worth a different take. Steve tends to focus on the race angle, which is not unreasonable. For as long as I have been alive, public policy types have been harping about the gap between blacks and whites. Sometimes they take a break and yammer on about the lack of females in science, technology and math fields. They always start with the same premise. The pale penis people have rigged the game and are surreptitiously keeping the black man down and the chicks out of the science lab. For some reason we have let the Jews and Orientals rise to the top, but the beautiful people don’t care about them so they don’t count. In fact they hate Orientals, which is why they are dropping the private school entrance exams in NYC. Too many Chinese kids are winning places in the schools. We have spent tens of billions on every education fad imaginable and the numbers have not budged. In fact, they may have declined.

This first bit from the Teach For America article:

The phrase closing the achievement gap is the cornerstone of TFA’s general philosophy, public-relations messaging, and training sessions. As a member of the 2011 corps, I was told immediately and often that 1) the achievement gap is a pervasive example of inequality in America, and 2) it is our personal responsibility to close the achievement gap within our classrooms, which are microcosms of America’s educational inequality.

Right out of the shoot, you pick up the religious zeal. This is the sort of thing the armies use to bind soldiers to their unit and to their cause. A soldier will die for his buddy and he may die for a cause. He’s not risking his neck for the his king or his flag or some abstract principle. Generals have known this for 5,000 years. TFA is clearly trying to build the same esprit de corps amongst their recruits. Making the mission personal and focused is what well run armies do best. The US military is the best ever at this approach. They don’t want guys who follow orders. They want their men to achieve their goal within the framework of the mission. It is what allows the private to go to his commanding officer with an idea to get the job done better than originally planned.

But, it goes beyond just morale building:

Although TFA seminars and presentations never explicitly accuse educators of either, the implication is strong within the program’s very structure: recruit high-achieving college students, train them over the summer, and send them into America’s lowest-performing schools to make things right. The subtext is clear: Only you can fix what others have screwed up.

This where it starts to get a bit creepy. Youth organization in Mao’s China, Stalin’s Russia and Hitler’s Germany had the same premise. The older folks had made a mess of things. The next generation, the young people, they can start fresh as the new model citizen in the new model army. Ladling on a healthy dollop of “trench socialism” gets you an individual who has given over themselves entirely to the cause. It’s not hard to see how this can get out of hand quickly. Today TFA is helping little black kids read. Tomorrow they are throwing them into ovens because they lower the SAT average.

If you think I’m going too far, consider this bit:

In the weeks between accepting the offer to join TFA and the start of our training, I was told by e-mail that “as a 2011 corps member and leader, you have a deep personal and collective responsibility to ground everything you do in your belief that the educational inequality that persists along socioeconomic and racial lines is both our nation’s most fundamental injustice and a solvable problem. This mindset,” I was reminded, “is at the core of our Teach For America—Metro Atlanta Community.”

Anyone familiar with 20th century European history can see what the TFA is doing. It is not quite a cult, but it has the trappings of a mass movement as described by Eric Hoffer. The people running TFA are trying to build something more than a teacher training program. They want an army of true believers infiltrating the schools. Presumably these young fanatics will one day take up positions of authority and run the education system. The fact that every totalitarian movement aims first at the youth is not coincidence here. The political cult we call liberalism in America  is the heir to the secular mass movements of the prior century, communism and fascism. Or, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, the two religions at war over Europe.

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One of the great insights I found in David Goldman’s book, How Civilizations Die, is how he linked fertility, religion and the desire to be remembered. As someone who is non-religious, it made a lot of sense. After all, the primary biological imperative, the reason all living creatures exist, is to pass on their DNA to the next generation. Like salmon, cornflowers and butterflies, humans are wired to reproduce. That is just the material way in which we are remembered. For a species cursed with self-awareness, it is easy to see how this can mutate into a desire to be remembered for our deeds, the composition of our life as a members of our tribe. We honor our dead, mark their graves, so we will be remembered by those who come after us.

I’m at an age when these thoughts come easily so it is no surprise that this column by Steve Sailer brought it to mind. The Graduate was released before I was born and was already a cultural icon by the time I had any clue about it. I may have seen it at some point, but it left no impression on me. I don’t recall anyone in my peer group ever mentioning it. For Baby Boomers, it remains a cultural touchstone. The title alone means things to them. The thought that occurred to me is what happens when the Boomers shuffle off this mortal coil? Will that movie still be a considered great art? I’m sure Steve would probably say yes and point to films like Gone With The Wind and The Wizard of Oz. Citizen Cain is probably the best example of a movie that remains a classic long after anyone involved is dead. Even their children are dead now.

I don’t know the answer and I cannot know the answer. I probably will live long enough to have some inkling, but maybe not. These things get worked out in the fullness of time. The Sound and the Fury was a dud until Faulkner was in his dotage. I think it sold 3500 copies when it was released on 1927. The best seller that year was Gone With The Wind, a book no one has read in fifty years. Then we have examples like It’s a Wonderful Life that was a flop in its day, but struck a cord with viewers of subsequent generations. A Christmas Story is another example of something made legend long after its release. A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.

The thing I wonder about these icons of early Boomer culture is whether they will be used to explain the insane rampage through America’s cultural institutions over the last half century. If the movie touched Boomers because of the alienation of the main character, the question is why were all of these kids feeling alienated? What went so horribly wrong that a generation of middle-class Americans produced a batch of kids determined to commit cultural suicide? Given the arithmetic, it is unlikely the nation survives the denouement of the Baby Boomer Generation. Kindles full of books will be written on how they did it. Why they did it will be the great question to be debated for generations after. Maybe The Graduate will be one little piece of the puzzle and therefore be remembered long after the last Boomer is finally in Hell.

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This guy is why the nation is doomed. His blog is interesting on occasion, but his crude, bobo snobbery is emblematic of what went wrong. Mommy and Daddy did well enough to send him to a decent private school which got him into a decent college. He is the product of what I call near-elite education. A generation ago, these schools took working class kids and gave them a first rate education. Today they are full of brats who think they are WASP gentry. They’re not and he’s not. He writes code and lives in an overpriced apartment like millions of other schmucks, but likes (needs) to pretend he is something other than run of the mill.

A handful of pompous jackasses is no big deal, but we have at least one full generation of them with the millennials. The late Gen-X group suffered from the same defect and the current crop is heading down the same path. A society can only survive so many entitled fops before it starts to lose its footing. Add to that a growing dependency class that the fops enjoy tormenting by supporting insane government policy and you have a recipe for disaster. America is headed for a cultural smashup that is going to be awful. The smug punks like the Twink of the Blogosphere are too stupid to leave the “prols” alone and the “proles” are too well armed to take it.

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I was getting a haircut on Sunday and the chit-chat with the barber was about music. She is my age, mid-40’s, so she thinks the new pop music is mostly crap. Her son is listening to hip-hop, which is crap. Whatever artistic merit there was disappeared when white boys in the suburbs became the prime demographic. That and the “artists” cannot carry a tune, read or write music or string together lyrics. But, there’s lots of crap that is not hip-hop so it is not just the brothers that suck at music these days. There has always been lots of crap. Read the book The Wrecking Crew and you will learn about how the early rock music was mostly manufactured by middle-aged Jews from the Jazz era. The difference between now and previous eras is that there used to be talented musicians and groups producing some quality stuff amongst the crap.

A good example is Bob Seger. He got famous in the 1970’s with a bunch of hits that still get airtime today. Go into a college bar and you will still find a few Seger songs getting played, particular later in the night when even the best get tight. Seger was before my time, for the most part, but my generation was playing his stuff in the 80’s and 90′ so it is not like he is a newly re-discovered fad because of a TV commercial. The reason he had some staying power is the quality of the music. I was never a big fan, but I have been listening to his greatest hits lately. The arrangements, lyrics and pacing is phenomenal. It is what you get when experienced professional musicians with talent make records. In all probability they hammered out each song on a piano and then brought in the rest of the instruments. The studio sessions were about getting the sound on vinyl, not making bad voices and bad musicians sound good.

There are probably dozens of examples from each decade that you can point to like this. The 1950’s was dominated by manufactured pop hits, but Chuck Berry made the electric guitar do things unheard of before his time. Fifty years from now people will find his licks beguiling. The Stones, The Who, and Hendrix will hold up and have held up. The 70’s has Zeppelin, which may have been the most sophisticated rock band ever. I’m still amazed at their range and complexity. It is not Beethoven, but for pop music it is incredible. I’m not sure who from the 80’s will stick around, probably metal acts like Sabbath and Maiden. The 90’s see things starting to peter out and the 2000’s bring nothing to mind. It is hard to imagine anyone getting out the Madonna or Michael Jackson CD’s again.

This apparent decline in high end quality music the last two decades is a mystery. Where are the talented musicians going if not into the garage or basement to create something good? Part of the answer is nowhere. Young people are simply not picking up instruments as they did in the past. When I was a kid, everyone played something, even in poor neighborhoods. It was just the way. I was started on the trumpet at six and took lessons until I was 12. Most kids dropped it for sports or other stuff, but many stuck with it. Today, the only kids I see with an instrument are Oriental and Hindu girls carrying violins. Blacks have abandoned the guitar and seem to be losing interest in the drums.  Whites have dropped music entirely. This old post describes the plight of the guitar in music.

The argument is that computers are filling the void. Anyone can now sit down at their PC, load some software and create the sound of drums, guitar, piano, etc. They can make their voice sound like something other than a bag of cats. There’s no longer a need to learn to read music or play an instrument. Certainly studios stopped using drummers when they could use computers instead. The problem here is the computer does not improvise, experiment or make adjustments. Maybe one day, but right now it is dependent on the talentless blockhead pushing the buttons. That’s why pop music is collapsing in a sea of mediocre crap that sounds like all the other mediocre crap.

That brings me back to Bob Seger. He did not hit it big out of the womb. He kicked around for years learning how to play music that people enjoyed. Good musicians have an ear for what others will like. That comes from many nights in many clubs. Dragging your computer gear into the club and “DJ’ing” is really not the same thing. When you get down to it, you’re just wearing another man’s suit, pretending you look better in it. Without the training and the training grounds, there can be no Bob Seger. Like so much of post-reality America, our pop culture is withering, living on the past with autumn closing in…

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