This is an interesting post that touches on two things I think are interesting. One is the fact we may be reaching the limit of human longevity. Even so, humans are far healthier late in life than at any other time. We are probably within reach of solving some of the big killers like cancer, heart failure and dementia. While some may never be “cured” they will be manageable. Others will be delayed until much later in life. When I was a kid, it was rare to see a healthy a vigorous 70-year old. Today it is common. We will certainly be seeing more and more vigorous 80-year olds soon enough. Of course, we are already seeing drugs that allow humans to extend their prime years into what was once considered old age. It turns out that Huxley was right about that part of the future.

The more sinister side is this:

The only way to get a person past the “Calment limit” of (say) 125 will be some sort of genetic engineering. This might prove to be, if not easy, at least fairly routine — in technical terms. Fiddling with just a few genes in worms, fruit flies and mice has enabled scientists to extend their lifespan, sometimes up to sevenfold. One recent study in Lausanne found a 50 per cent reduction in the activity of just three genes on Chromosome 2 increased mouse lifespan by about 250 days, and kept them healthy longer.

By sinister, I mean controversial. As soon as it becomes possible to alter one’s aging with gene therapy, drugs will be created to give the same effect. If reducing a certain protein extends youthfulness, a clever company will bottle it and sell it. Human nature being what it is, there will come a time when this is not just possible, but consider essential.

Then we have this:

Ethically, however, such a step in human beings is unthinkable, since it would mean altering the genes of an unborn child without asking his or her permission. It is hard to imagine any government allowing such an experiment, with a high probability of unexpected consequences, let alone anybody finding a team of scientists prepared to do it.

Mr. Riddley is a man of his times. The fact that China would have zero hangups about doing this is alien to him. The Russians would certainly have no trouble with the ethics. Frankly, I don’t think any of the Oriental countries would flinch at such a thing. The Indians would certainly see a chance to profit at some point. They may not be pioneering the technology, but they would be ready to commoditize it.

This part is fascinating:

Plus, ethics aside, it is not easy to see where the demand for such a drastic and expensive step would come from. Who would actually want their next child to live past 125, let alone badly enough to go through with it?

There’s you have the post modern man’s dilemma in a nutshell. Who would possible want to have children much less children who will have extended lifetimes?! David Goldman put it best when talking about the falling fertility rates around the world. When people lose hope, they naturally wonder if it was better to have never been born. Childbearing is what happy, optimistic humans do as a celebration of life. For so many of our elites, living even a short time is horrible to contemplate, much less two lifetimes.

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In what may be the most shocking development in the last decade, the House GOP, with the support of Weepy & Co, voted a spending bill that denies funding for ObumblesCare. It goes off to the Senate to die, presumably, as the lunatics have a majority. Hairy Reed plans to use some shenanigans to strip out the provision and send it back to the House. If the House does not vote for it, then the government shuts down and we get the fake drama that comes with these phony shutdowns. The Senate GOP could filibuster the effort and then force a lot of Senate Democrats into the uncomfortable position of voting for this monstrosity in the lead up to an election. Lunatic Party senators in normal states are already frightened. This would not help.

The trouble is it will result in an ugly shit storm. Instead of back slapping and taking turns fucking the public, the fake conservatives in the GOP will have to take a side and maybe endure some harsh words from their “friends” in the Lunatic Party. Quislings like the sort over at NRO will suddenly find a chilly reception at MSNBC and CNN. They may even be excluded from the next pizza and ice cream party (the horrors!). The first member of the Surrender Faction of Conservative Inc to raise the white flag was Jonah Goldberg. That’s a bit surprising as he has never struck me as a shameless sellout, but times change and people change. His bosses told him to come out against the Evil Ted Cruz so he did what he was told:

The rest of the flunkies and losers at Conservative Inc were not far behind, wringing their hands and hyperventilating about the big meanies in the GOP.  Charles Kraphammer chimed in to to bash the effort. The argument being that they can’t win and all they will accomplish is to piss people off. That last part is what strikes fear in the heart of Conservative Inc. Most depend on the suicide cult we call liberalism for their survival. If you get branded as “extreme” then you are off the jabbering numbskull circuit. That’s why they are always so quick to lock arms with the Left in defense of cultural Marxism. It is also why they are in a panic now over this move by Ted Cruz and the conservatives.

From the perspective of those on the alternative right, this is a wonderful development. The GOP and Conservative Inc are not on the side of small government and individual liberty. They are just gate keepers for the suicide cult we call liberalism. The CML counts on their “friends”  on the right to do the blocking and tackling in public debate. A guy like Pat Buchanan, who was mostly right, it turns out, about things like trade, gets run out of the GOP and out of the public domain by Conservative Inc. The same is true of a long list of writers and commentators. Seeing the quislings of Conservative Inc forced to choose will be enlightening. Here’s a little taste from the last time time for choosing:

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I’m watching the NFL and I keep seeing references to Hispanic Heritage Month. I watch the NFL via Red Zone so it is a bit of an echo chamber for whatever they are hawking each Sunday. It reminded me of traveling through Hispania as a boy with my parents. It was so odd hearing everyone speak Hispanish instead of English. Of course, even a child had to be impressed with the great achievements in Hispanic culture….What a bunch of nonsense. There is no such thing as Hispanic culture outside the blinkered world of white liberal fanatics. Mexicans and Puerto Ricans sure as don’t call themselves Hispanic unles they are getting free stuff to do it. These white snobs should drop the mask and just call them “those brown people cutting our lawn” and have done with the fantasy land of Hispania.

More important, even if we lump all Latin culture together like this, is “Hispanic culture” sucks. We know this because every Mexican with ambition is getting as far away from it as possible. That’s true of Puerto Ricans, Cubans, Guatemalans, etc. Anyone take a look at the Spanish economy lately? It makes our mess look like heaven. That’s why they are fleeing that sinking ship in record numbers. Why in the world would anyone “celebrate” being a loser? Is their self-hatred so deep that they will celebrate that which is obviously worse than what Americans have going on at home? The answer is obvious. These people hate themselves and their country.

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The usual suspects in the media think this was a grand idea. Ever on the lookout for their next crusade, they have decided that giving semi-retarded teenagers more money for playing a game is their reason to live. Every week some chattering skull is demanding (demanding!) the NCAA pay players. Never mind that the NCAA does not have the authority to pay players. Those fashionable uber-lefty college presidents run college football and they ain’t in the mood to give the knuckleheads a raise. Most of them privately wish sports would go away entirely. Then they would not have to rub elbows with those sweaty drunks at the booster club. If the college president had their way, the booster clubs would be shipped off to the salt mines.

Even so, the debate is the typically vacuous stuff we get from sports media. The typical journalism major is low-average IQ. The sports journalism guys are a at the bottom of that group. There’s nothing immoral about being a dimwit, but these guys should be on an assembly line somewhere, not pestering the rest of us through our TV’s and computers. College athletes are paid and paid exceptionally well for their age and contributions to the college. They get, tax free, tuition, room, board, books, meal money in the form of cash, world class physical training, extra tutoring and professional coaching. The typical state college athlete is getting between 25 and 50 grand a year in tax free benefits. Most contribute nothing to the profitability of the school. The women’s basketball team is all cost and no revenue. Ditto the field hockey team. Only football and basketball generate revenue.

The question is whether they should get more. It would probably serve the interests of the schools if they could give their revenue athletes cash to spend. The corruptions we see is usually from boosters and agents sliding small amounts of money to players who are cash poor. It is amazing in a way, but many of these players are borderline retarded so maybe not. If the players had some cash to spend then some portion would avoid trouble by taking money. It would not solve the problem, but it would make the professional scolds feel better and that’s worth something too.

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When I was a boy I had a thing for taking stuff apart. I was curious about how things worked. For instance, I once took the TV apart when my parents were away. Thinking back it is amazing that I did not electrocute myself. It’s also amazing that there was a time when parents thought it was fine to leave an eight year old home alone. It was a different country back then. Kids in my underclass neighborhood were home alone all summer with little to no supervision.

Anyway, my thing for taking stuff apart became a problem so my poor parents bought me some nerd toys to keep me busy. I got a toy like this to learn how electricity worked. I got a chemistry set which I wound up using to kill the fish with by accident. The theory behind the toys was to encourage the smarter boys to use their brain, instead of playing sports all the time. In the 1970’s, it was still assumed that boys played sports, got in fights, rough housed outside and so forth.

I may be mistaken, but the “nerd” was a term people used. Being bookish was a thing and it was like being gay in the working class. Kids with brains and curiosity therefore were guided into manly ways to use your head. My chemistry set, for example, had a recipe for gun powder. Imagine something like that today. The shrieking from the usual suspects would be deafening. The electricity set had plans for building radios, just like they used in the army. It was a way to make being smart have utility.

Even way back in those olden times, people were starting to sense that having brains was going to be more useful for boys than being tough. The technological revolution was just starting to have a practical impact on the average people. My father, a steamfitter, got a calculator, which cost a bundle, from his employer to do layout work. My mother, a secretary, had to learn how to use a word processor. My first typewriter, in 1980, had an LCD screen to preview what I typed before committing it to paper.

It was already clear that the world was entering a fork in the road. Down one path the smart people would go and down the other the not so smart.  Parents, even old school working class types, saw the writing on the wall and started to encourage their kids to become nerds. My father thought it was fascinating that I had a head for numbers. He would quiz me all the time. When I took up chess, my grandfather would always want to play, as he loved the game of chess.

Here we are four decades later and the nerds run the world – sort of. The political class is still the same sort. Few have any math or science. The financial class, the folks really in charge, rely heavily on a technological elite, as well as people from the STEM fields. The rise of the quant, that guy who started out in physics, but ended up creating investment models, is proof the nerds run the world. Money men ar still portrayed as alpha males, but the alpha male on Wall Street is now a Korean or a Jewish nerd.

Nerds have certainly become a dominant force in modern societies. They have supplanted the “working man” in the popular culture. You just don’t see too many TV shows, for example, where the main character is a blue collar guy. When you do see blue collar guy in popular culture, he is either a  clownish exaggeration intended to make sport of the working man or a modern of the noble savage that is supposed to validate the prevailing assumptions about society, culture and politics.

Instead, the popular shows have snarky, high IQ nerds as stars. Big Bang Theory is a great example of this taken to the absurd. Anyone familiar with people in fields like theoretical physics knows they are not living in a hip apartment doing fun and interesting things. But, that’s TV. it is all fake, even the nerds. Cop shows now feature girls using technology to outwit the offish white criminals. Criminals on TV, of course, are nothing like reality, as far as complexion and competence.

That’s the other thing we have now – fake nerds. It makes sense. If the archetypal hero is a nerd, the beautiful people will imitate him. The fashionable Left has latched onto this with a death grip. I regularly see my lefty friends linking to stuff like this. None of them can add past ten without help. They majored in soft subjects like art of sociology in college and struggle with basic technology. It is really important to them, however, to be pro-science.

That means memorizing the latest from the Climate Change Cult (CCC), berating Christians for creationism and talking about their favorite science shows. The parents always swear their kids mastered the iPad (Apple being another pseudo-nerd symbol) at birth. That’s always amusing. Every Progressive mediocrity swears their kid is exceptional, which violates a basic rule of biological science. We now live in a world where every kids is above average.

Another manifestation of the fake nerd is the stat geek. ESPN has a fellow named Pablo Torre, who ticks a number of boxes. They have him on to perform the role of the young, hip math savvy sports analyst. I looked him up and found he was a sociology major at Harvard. The fact that he went to a swank prep school and Harvard suggests he is of above average IQ, but his last name suggests he could have gamed the system so it is hard to know. Still, he has no math or science.

Now, he is pitched by ESPN and he plays along, as a stat geek. He’s the nerd with the numbers, juxtaposed with the dumb guys in the sports department. In reality he reads FanGraphs, gleans a few statistics that sound cool and then spouts opinions on TV and the internet. Nothing wrong with it, but it is clearly an act, no different than someone playing a doctor in a drama. That’s TV, but TV shapes and reflects the greater culture.

The new cool is pretending to be someone who had a pocket liner as a kid and still pines for his slide rule. Just as the 70’s hipsters were products of squaresville, today’s nerds are most likely liberal arts majors that cannot figure out how to change the time on their car’s radio. That’s not what matters though. What matters is everyone knows how much you freaking love science. To say otherwise is to risk heresy.

The most ridiculous manifestation of this is the “policy wonk”,  who plays the role of expert on government and social policy. Like the fake nerds in sports, these nerds majored in journalism or public policy, maybe took a basic stats class. Otherwise they have no math or science. Their “wonkery” is nothing more than memorizing the policy positions of their party and then reciting them in clever ways on TV or print. The clever part is key. “Snark” is the call of the fake nerd, no matter the field.

Snark is an ironic disdain for convention that is really just a signaling mechanism. The snarky fake nerd makes some comment about Southerners, for example,  rejecting evolution as a way to publicly identify himself as an inside the set of right opinions. His coevals will respond with something similar, thus establishing that they too are members of the proper set. The person who takes issue with the comment is then identified as the outsider. Snark and irony are just public displays of membership in a group.

Economics is not a STEM field, even though economists try hard to convince people it is a branch of mathematics. It is a social science decorated with mathematics. That gives it the veneer of respectability that a field like sociology lacks. That said, it often resembles a cult, in that it has developed an internal logic and language that makes perfect sense to those inside, but seems weird and nutty to those outside. For example, they treat Maynard Keynes in the same way Mormons treat Joseph Smith.

Anyway, the buzzing over the Fed’s sudden course change is a good example. This is a fairly typical example. It does not mention Keynes, but the the belief that creating credit money is always and everywhere a good thing is on display. The intellectual trap they have made for themselves is quite clear. If credit creation  adds to the GDP, then it is always good to create debt. There are no conditions under which it can be bad so expanding he money supply becomes a permanent part of the economy.

No one ever stops to wonder how this can be so? After all, if it were that easy, it should have worked all the other times it was tried. The answer, of course, is to say it is different this time. The “new normal” meme has become the get out of jail free card for every utopian dreamer. In the case of economics, any doubts about endless credit creation is waved away with the line, “things are different.” In other words, everyone is supposed to just take what economists say on faith.

Economics is the religion of modern times. In a previous age, rulers would have a holy man or a shaman to endorse his polices. Today, the economists provide this role. In Obama’s first term, Christine Romer was trucked into the White House to tell Obama and the country that the math” said a reckless spending spree was just what the economy wanted. That’s when the “multiplier effect” got loose in the conversation. Since then every minor economic shaman has some theory about a multiplier effect.

The nuttiness is on full display at this site. These guys have built out a series of interactive charts to show various “multipliers” and the impact of the current fads in the faith. For the record, they are making sport of the whole idea by showing the nonsense of it all. The fact is, government spending fueled by debt is great until you run out of people willing to lend you money. Then you become Detroit. Quantitative easing, which is just credit creation at below market rates is just a clever way to disguise it.

By pumping the extra money into assets like stocks, purchasing power is destroyed slowly, rather than in hyper inflation like you see with old fashioned money printing. At some point, the new money will leak into the real economy. Americans have been getting poorer slowly, but seem to be figuring out what has happened to them.Adjusting for inflation, the government share of the economy has more than tripled in the last forty years, per capita and adjusting for inflation.

In addition to the growth of the state at all levels, the amount of debt, both public and private, has exploded: At every stop along the way, modern economics has told our rulers that this was the right policy. The result is a massive, incompetent government systematically beggaring the public. More critically, it has allowed for the transfer of social capital to massive global companies and financial institutions. The price of cheap goods is living among strangers who you don’t dare trust as neighbors.

This has been making the rounds on social media. It is an old post, almost a decade old, so it will be curious to see if the authoress will be forced to recant it. Ms. Bindel is upset that some crazy person hired a doctor to butcher him into looking somewhat like a woman and he now he wants to be a rape counselor. By the logic of modern “gender studies” he is on solid ground. After all, gender is a social construct. he can be a women if he wants and everyone has to pretend he is a women.

She’s right, of course. There’s no such thing as a sex change procedure. It is all cosmetic as far as biology is concerned. If this guy is dug up 500 years from now, the DNA test will say he was a man. The reason for that is you cannot alter your DNA. Therefore, his sex is male because his DNA says he is a male. He may think he is a woman, a goldfish or a starseed. That just proves he is in need of psychiatric care. If he was convinced he was an elf from the North Pole, he would be in an asylum.

What makes this stuff amusing, obviously, is it is the intersection of one type of reality denying lunacy colliding into a different brand of reality denying lunacy. It’s a bum fight between left-wing crazies. In this case, it is angry old-school feminism against faddish degeneracy. For the longest time, cropped hair lesbians, dressed like loggers, were the cutting edge of academic fashion. All of a sudden whites guys in summer frocks are getting all the attention. It’s unfair!

Ms. Bidel writes, “Feminism is supposed to be based on the premise that prescriptive gender roles are a cause of women’s oppression.” She could have written that feminism is about rallying the the hobbits to defend The Shire and been on more rational ground. Men and women have different biological destinies. Thousands of years of evolution have made the sexes what they are, including their roles in human societies. Division of labor between the sexes is an incredibly useful adaptation. It may be inconvenient for some small portion of males and females, but Mother Nature does not care about your feelings.

In fact, mother nature has a funny way of punishing humans for defying reality. It usually means death and/or great suffering. Animals with weird mating or dietary adaptions like Pandas tend to get wiped out. Or, like the Shakers, wipe themselves out. That’s what appears to be happening with human populations that have adopted the voodoo of feminism. Fertility rates plunge. It turns out that men, rather than keep playing their role, have adapted too. The feminist demand for attention has resulted in them being ignored.

A long time ago in a far away land, a lowly business professor at a state college showed that a famous person from Stanford was a fraud and a con-man. The famous Simon – Ehrlich Wager Wager is one of those events that holds the attention of both sides of the political elite. Betting against over all human progress has proven to be a suckers bet for roughly 10,000 years. On the other hand, those inclined toward cynicism take pleasure in unmanning charlatans like Ehrlich on philosophical grounds.

Guys like Paul Ehrlich will always be with us, mostly because they are not about being empirically right, but about being morally right. There not appealing to facts and reason, when they stand out demanding the rest of us repent. What they are really doing is appealing to the managerial class, who view themselves as the keepers of public morality, by way of flattery. You see, if you agree with Ehrlich, then you are a good person, because all the good people agree with him.

Steve Sailer linked to this and provided some commentary. While Sailer can be a bit dismal in his analysis, he strikes me as a fairly optimistic guy. Optimists are people who think things will be fine in the long run. They may have doubt about the short run, but they think things tend to work out fort her best. Sailer seems to think that the people in charge will figure it out and make the necessary course corrections. One day, Steve will get to see his beloved California restored to what he recalls as a child.

I don’t know, but I would assume Sailer looks back fondly on the unmasking of Ehrlich as a fraud. It supports his generally optimistic view that things tend to get better in the long run. Therefore, when someone comes out with some gloomy predictions, Sailer tends to be more dismissive that most people. That’s why the Simon-Ehrlich wager still resonates after all these years. For the optimists, it is confirmation. For those in power, it is an excuse to ignore the warnings of their critics.

Maybe human progress is inevitable and the sort of dire prognostications like the ones in that linked post can be safely ignored. Maybe Ehrlich was just a grifter and his failure has no meaning whatsoever. The predictions in that post look quite reasonable. There’s very good reason to think that the American Empire is slowly moving to a denouement that will be no more pleasant than the end of previous empires. if in ten years those things are true, the politics of America will be very rough.

A topic that never gets the attention it deserves is the role of credit money in the modern technological economy. More important, the role of this new money, built for a technological society, is having on the old economy, where most everyone lives and works. Outside of Silicon Valley, Washington and New York, most people exist in the late-industrial age. Their money, however, is designed for the post-industrial, technological age where information and network positioning is the basis of value.

The current setup with the dollar as the reserve currency pegged to nothing more than the hopes and dreams if the Federal Reserve is a new thing in history. In fact, it is one of the truly new things in the last thousand years. Since the Louvre Accords formalized the currency arrangements we have today, debt of all types has exploded. You see it quite clearly in this article from the Free Press about Detroit’s woes. Right in the mid to late 1980’s, Detroit went from a declining debt path to a skyrocketing debt path.

The article, of course, does not address the role of credit money and instead tries to shift the blame to its favorite bad guys. The truth is, the unfolding debt crisis has very little to do with policy decisions made by Mayors, Governors or even Congress. It is the result of the shift change in the currency arrangements of the world. The old market restraints, based on the bond issuer’s ability to pay, have been changed to a system where restraint is based on the ability of the system to absorb new debt.

Many people recognize the debt problem, but they don’t understand the underlying cause, instead falling on old chestnuts like “Fiat Currency!” Our economic elites think the answer to the debt crisis is more debt. Some of it is narrow self-interest, as debt creation offers profit opportunities. Others are just true believers who get misty eyed whenever someone mentions capitalism. Then, of course, most people struggle to understand a a shadow banking system with its trillions in complex derivatives.

Cities like Detroit certainly suffer from a collapse of human capital, but that’s not the cause of their debt problems. In the old system, where an ability to pay would have been a restraint on debt issuance, the city would have had to cut services long before the debt load became dangerous. In a system that is hungry for debt, there’s no shortage of people willing to take the Detroit paper. This has allowed the global financial system to loot American cities by offering debt these cities can never repay.

The bankruptcies of American cities are just a tremor, one that everyone will ignore, as these can be papered over by new debt from states. The looming pension problem will be a much bigger tremor, as there will be no way to pay the debt owed to baby boomers retiring from the civil service. At some point, probably in the next decade, the great credit expansion will reach some natural limit that no one currently understands and then we get the real crisis. Detroit will look like good times.

It is easy to chuckle at stories like this one from Massachusetts. Every day some new outrage emanates from these hotbeds of lunacy. Right now, Massachusetts is the epicenter of the suicide cult we call Progressivism. This is a state that replaced a liberal Republican with a fake indian, who is as dumb as a goldfish. They followed that up by replacing their retiring senator with an aging child weirdo nicknamed Mr. Frosty.

Massachusetts a good state to examine when trying to understand the currents in modern Progressive identity. About 45% of the population is normal. Another 45% is deep in the weeds of the Progressive theology. Massachusetts has the third lowest rate of church attendance in the nation and one of the lowest marriage rates. Unsurprisingly, they have one of the lowest fertility rates. Progressivism is not a fruitful religion.

The secular religion of liberalism is, like all cults, is based on self-loathing. Christianity and Judaism, in contrast, begin with the belief that God loves his creations. At their purest, they are a celebration of life and living. Adherents are attracted to these religions because they provide affirmation of humanity. For Jews, they believe they will one day spend eternity with their god. Christians will go to heaven.

Secular religions work the other way. They are premised on the belief that the adherent is vile and worthless. They join the movement in order to exchange their identity for that of the group. Progressivism offers a sort of cleansing, where the hated self is subsumed into the greater identity of the cause. The American Left has always been about self-abnegation, a weird sort of sacrifice of self to an all encompassing community.

Their fanaticism is due to the lack of a limiting principle. In Christianity, there is no salvation on this earth. You can practice all the rites and rituals, live a moral life, but to do so excessively is to risk the sin of vanity. Put another way, Christianity draw a line at virtue where beyond it offers nothing extra. Progressivism does the opposite. The adherent is always looking to be just a bit more pious.

Also note that the inclusiveness is just a modern implementation of the Puritan sense of communal salvation. That tradition of assuming a community is only as righteous as its worst sinner has transformed into a demand that everyone must included in everything, or else. Diversity is just code for denying that people can have private lives and private affairs. If everyone can’t be in it, then it is immoral.

A world without borders is a world with just one border, a prison wall that keeps everyone inside so they can be supervised. That’s what Progressivism is today. It’s a license for the self-righteous to root around in your life, looking for signs of bad thoughts. The result is the end of all private association and all unsupervised separation. Their vision of society is something closer to a prison, than a utopia.