A phenomenon observed by the  the more surly types is what they call the “drawbridge effect.” That’s where a group of over class types occupy a formerly beaten down area, setting about to approve it. Once it gets going, they begin to raise the drawbridge to keep the riff-raff out. That usually mean jacking up taxes, layering on regulations and limiting real estate. Cambridge Mass is a good example. Try building a house in that city and you will be met with a massive wall of regulation. That’s why no one builds houses there. Try to convert a building to apartments and the same thing happens. That’s why the population of Cambridge Mass is lower than it was in 1950.

We may be seeing something similar in the world of college sports. This story shows how it works. In this case, the big five conferences have hoovered up all of the good properties. They have left the undesirable properties in what they call the mid-major conferences. All of the conference commissioners have indicated two things. One is they are no longer interested in adding teams. The other thing is they now want special rules for themselves. They are, after all, the elite. In America these days, there is one set of laws for the prols and another set for the over class. They will lock in place the bulk of the revenue. They will setup rules that make it impossible for the prols to compete. But, they will need the prols for home coming games and early season cannon fodder.

The sound you hear is the raising of the drawbridge.

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Britain will be no more in half a century. Birth rates are falling and the island is being invaded by Muslims. The most popular baby name in Britain has been Mohamed for over a decade now. London is overrun by feral Muslims that are now sawing off the heads of natives. But, the dying husk of the nation is hanging onto their traditions. The birth of the future king (stop laughing) was announced like old times.

http://youtu.be/7i8arQH-tSE

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Baseball is getting around to penalizing players in the last round of PED troubles. The Biogenesis scandal promises to take down 20 players using records from the closed lab. Baseball seems determined to use this case to make an example of some guys. Banning players for 90 games is a big penalty and puts the player at risk of a permanent ban. Braun is a confirmed liar and now he has two strikes against him. Another pinch and he is gone for good. That’s the theory anyway. Baseball, like the rest of America is spineless these days.

The great error baseball made was agreeing to a bunch of rules and procedures that invite the lawyers into the room. They want this stuff out of the game for a some very good reasons. The press may claim fans don’t care, but the press is full of idiots. The home run blitz we saw in the last decade was getting ridiculous and would have undermined the game. Plus, someone was going to have a stroke or take a liner off the head and die. Former players would be in TV boo-hooing about how they wrecked their bodies for those evil owners.

The way to do it was not an overly complicated process negotiated with the union. The first step was to ban all of the names in the Mitchell Report for life. Following the example of gambling 100 years ago, would most likely make cases like the one we see today unnecessary. Banning the players they knew cheated and were named in the report would have sent the same message Kenesaw Mountain Landis sent to baseball when he banned the Black Sox players for life. From that point forward, you could have testing, but you would know that the commissioner reserved the right to throw you out of the game for life. That would put an end to this for all but the dumbest of players.

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When I was a lad in the 1980’s, the Reagan Revolution was just starting and being a right-winger was the hip cool thing. Those dreary lefties with their shaggy hair and linen colors were sad reminders of what went wrong with America in the 70’s. Low taxes, reducing regulations, free trade, getting government out of the way and making money were suddenly cool. Twenty years of liberalism will do that do a nation. The disastrous results on the 60’s and 70’s meant the first step was to roll back those errors. The fact that the state was not rolled back was hidden by the economic boom of the 80’s 90’s.

Ever since, the American Right has been locked in the 1980’s. No matter the circumstance, they offer up the same solutions. It is always cut taxes, cut government and boost business. Thirty years have passed since Reagan, yet the Right has not changed their message. A good example is James Pethokoukis in this National Review piece. He blames liberalism for Detroit’s problems. He suggetsts tax cuts as the solution., believing people will risk their lives to live and work in Detroit if you give them a tax break.

The men and women who ruled over Detroit for five decades did not come from another planet. They are the product of the Detroit culture. They were elected by the people of Detroit. They promised to do what the people of Detroit wanted from their government. Further, Detroit is no more liberal than San Francisco or Portland or Boston or Cambridge. Vermont is a whole state full of liberal gay guys. None of these places suffer from anything like we see in Detroit. Heck, everyone knows why Oakland is not San Francisco.

The problem is this. White people like and support civil society. They will do what it takes to make it work, even while conducting experiments against reality. Black people like chaos and mayhem. That may seem harsh, but chaos and mayhem are the rule every black people rule, so you have to assume they like it. This is the iron rule of life. Societies are result of the people. Black people make black societies and whites make white societies. This is true in all times and all places. Economics is a result, not a cause.

Unless and until the Right figures this out, they will be chasing the sunset.

One of the more irritating aspects of living in a land run by a religious cult is that reality is forced into the official narrative. That which cannot fit is not just ignored, it is rejected and often ferociously. Prior to the 2012 election, as an example, the media refused to cover the erosion of the American middle class. If anyone mentioned anything about the stagnant economy they were greeted by a press wielding pitchforks and torches chanting “burn the witch!” The fact that it persists after the hero has been re-elected is more troubling.

It suggests these nuts really believe their own bullshit.

Here’s an example. China’s economy is slowing and very well may be in recession. The official number for there are always inflated or plain wrong so assuming the worst case is wise. Nitwits like Thomas Friedman will have to explain why their preferred brand of authoritarianism is suddenly not working. More important, the world will have to find a new champion to save this Potemkin world economy. Most important, we will now have to start wondering what happens to the ChiComs when their Ponzi scheme unravels. A billion pissed off Chinamen can make a helluva mess.

Then we have the on-going saga of Europe. Portugal is in trouble. We’ve seen this film and know how it ends. The main political parties suddenly join together to force through unpopular polices. They put on a show for a while, but in the end, they are simply the faces of the ruling elite. They will close ranks to defend their privileges. They force through the cuts and taxes to get the bailout. The policy fails and the people suffer. Eventually, the fringe parties start looking less fringe and the economic crisis moves to a political crisis.

In Greece, they are afraid to hold another election for fear of the communists. In Italy they fear the populists. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it and the reality looming over everything right now is the inherent defects of credit money and the economy built on it. Our leaders have built this amazing house of cards out of credit money. It is just a matter of time before it begins to collapse.

One of the things I think will be very interesting to watch over the next decade is the breakup of the cable monopolies. By that I mean the end of forced subsidies through the cable bill. I doubt we ever see multiple cable outfits servicing the same area. What we wil see in most areas is at least one satellite operator, a cable provider, a fiber company and a wireless company offering combinations of voice and data. TV will be offered as a part of the data package as just another internet service. Consumers will shop the providers based on their needs. Metered service will become common.

As is always the case, some areas will have several choices, while others have one or two options. A big city like New York will not have DirecTV, but Boise Idaho will not have fiber or cellular. More important, the content  will be unbundled from the pipe. Instead of paying Comcast $120 a month for TV and Internet, you will pay Comcast $50 a month and buy the content you  want from a broker or the originator.

The content providers are fighting this hammer and tong. The reason is they are currently making hundreds of billions from people who don’t want their product. Take a look at ESPN. They make $9 billion a year in revenue. Two thirds of that is from subscriber fees. Most estimates say that roughly 20% of households watch ESPN. Yet, 100% pay $8/mo to ESPN as it is part of the basic cable package. As soon as those folks get the chance to cut their bill by $70 a year, they will take it.  This Atlantic story goes into the details.

Of course, those billions coming out of cable bills into the channel operators like ESPN, Yes, NESN and FoxSportsNet will force them to change their business models. They will recoup some through other means like higher fees, but most of it will come through downsizing. Part of it means lower fees content suppliers, like sports leagues and syndication companies. It also means smaller players will have great access to customer and thus create alternative media. Live streaming will be the next big thing.

The chattering skulls will certainly be talking about Detroit, specifically about the bankruptcy filing. It is the largest municipal bankruptcy in our history. More important, it is viewed as a preview of coming attractions. Roughly half the states and hundreds of localities are technically insolvent. The money they raise through direct taxation is insufficient to cover their operating expenses. They get by through borrowing and transfers. Without state subsidies, for example, Baltimore would be bankrupt.

Kevin Williamson has a column up on it today. He dances around the elephant in the room, of course, but he does allude to it. What’s wrong with Detroit is it is full of blacks. The culture of corruption runs from the top all the way down to the bottom. This is not just a math problem. It is a moral problem. Detroit did not suddenly become corrupt. It started after the riots of the late 60’s. A city that was majority white became 80% black in 15 years. The whites fled taking their money, taxes and expertise with them.

On the numbers side,  Karl Denninger has a post up on the math of the problem. Detroit owes $9 billion to health and pension funds. That number will keep going up every day as current workers accumulate benefits. That’s $10,000 for every man, woman and child currently in the city. Throw in the secured credit, net out those unable to work and it is not hard to see the problem. The city owes more than it can ever possibly pay, probably by a factor of three – at best. Everyone the city owes should expect thirty cents on the dollar.

Karl makes a larger point, one that will be with us for a long time. One generation cannot promise itself future money from the pockets of the next generation. It is an unenforceable contract between generations. The reason is you cannot force people to execute their contractual obligations, no matter how they entered into the contract. Even slavers understood this. The people living in Detroit today are unable and unwilling to pay the debts created by previous generations, so those debts will not be paid.

The same is true across the country where government has racked over $54 trillion in pension and health promises. That’s $180,000 for every person in the country. By comparison, Detroit looks great. There’s simply no way all of those promises can be met, especially with the demographics of the country changing. Will newly arrived foreigners agree to pay your pension payments? The answer is not just “no” it is “hell no.”

Again, we see the same old pattern as we see with all of our nation’s maladies. The seed was planted in the 1960’s. The generation that won the fight against fascism, threw in the towel twenty years later to make their kids happy. The selfish, resentful brats we call Boomers have rampaged through American culture like locusts, destroying everything in their path. In old age, they will be demanding the rest of us live in poverty so they can have cushy pensions and health plans.

Google missed their second quarter numbers. The miss was due to ad revenue. Google does a lot of things, but there bread and butter is advertizing. Google is basically a giant marketing platform. it rents out space on the platform. The problem is that more and more people are doing their interwebs work on a mobile or tablet device. Small tablets and phones are worthless for advertising. The real estate is too small for traditional ads and other methods are so irritating no one would tolerate it.

The irony here is that internet companies like Google killed off the traditional advertizing platforms. The newspaper and magazine were the low end broad market ad platform. If you needed to sell a car, a couch or a sale at your store, you did it in the paper. Now, you sell the car and couch on eBay and the store is out of business or on-line. Now, technology is cutting its own throat. Marx said capitalism must destroy current value in order to make way for some new order that will replace the current economic order. Looks like Google just turned that corner.

I’m going to assume this is true, but with the caveat that it is perhaps exaggerated.  Still, that’s a lot of killing. If you do the math, dividing the total by the number of days (365 * 30) you get a figure of 105 murders every day for 30 years. That would be the equivalent of 130 murders a day in the US. The current rate is roughly 27 murders a day. Keep that in mind when our rulers drool over how Brazil is doing things.

Steve Sailer has a post up on the NYTimes piece about Syria. The Kurds are looking like the one population group in the Arab world with a chance to escape the entropy of Islam. In Iraq, Saddam tried to exterminate them, but they hung on through it all. Today, the Kurish areas of Iraq are the only civilized portion of the country. Business is booming, they have a reasonably sane government and they have avoided the sectarian terrorism that still plagues the rest of the country.  despite the face we did nothing to help them, the Kurds are the big winner in the Iraq War(s).

Now we see they are quietly taking control of their areas in Syria. The Turks are naturally nervous about this, but there’s not much they can do about it. For the Turks, all of the options in Syria are bad options. Their bigger concern is the fact the Kurds will outnumber the Turks in twenty years. The future belongs to those who show up and in Turkey, the Kurds will showing up in big numbers. Between the three countries, the Kurds number 30 million. They sit on loads of oil and gas. They practice a mild form of Islam and are favorably disposed to western capitalism. That sounds like the makings of a pretty good country.

Maybe the West should start looking at the Kurds as potential partners instead of the crazy Arabs.