We’re Doomed

The Catholics say despair is a sin and perhaps it is, but it is hard to be optimistic about the world when you see stories like this one. Even allowing for the possibility there could be more to the story than what is being reported, how can society survive when this sort of thing  is even plausible?

Thomas Salbey became an internet sensation after footage of him hurling abuse at Sonboly, from the balcony of his fifth floor apartment was posted on Twitter.

But while many praised Mr. Salbey for standing up to the gunman – who aimed shots in his direction – Florian Weinzierl, a spokesman for the Munich prosecutor, has confirmed that Mr. Salbey is to be charged with libel for his comments. It is not known who reported Mr. Salbey to the authorities.

As the attack by Sonboly was already underway, Mr. Weinzierl said that initial investigations have shown that Mr. Salbey’s diatribe did not affect the course of events. The specific charges have yet to be announced, but Mr. Weinzierl said he expected that they would include “insults to the detriment of the dead”.

Detriment to the dead? How is it possible that such a combination of words exists, much less made its ways into the law? Now, loopy nonsense gets into the law for various reasons and maybe this is the case, but civil authorities appear to be ready to charge a man for insulting the dead. How is this different from charging someone with being a wizard? The underlying assumption is that through some magical means, the insult reaches the insulted. I guess the prosecutor will use a Ouija board at trial to get a victim statement.

That’s only half the problem. What sort of person reported the guy? presumably, someone complained. In Europe, it is against the law to hurt someone’s feelings so I would assume that’s the angle. The accused insulted the dead, which made someone sad so the accused must be made to suffer. This is old testament justice for the snowflake age. Instead of eye-for-an-eye, it’s boo-boo for boo-boo justice.  The fact that this exists and people go along with it suggests there no hope for the West. Only a mass die off like the Black Plague can fix this.

It’s not so much that some women called the authorities on this guys. You just know it is a woman who dropped the dime. It is always a woman behind these things. It’s that people in positions of responsibility encourage this sort of thing. For all of human history, the ruling class discouraged this sort of behavior as they knew it could get out of hand quickly. The prosecutors or police who took this call should have politely listened, promised to look into it and then forgot about it. That’s how you’re supposed to handle community cranks.

We’re doomed.

 

The Revolt of the Media

Way back in the olden thymes, “the media” was the local newspaper, news radio and the evening news on the television. My father would read the paper every evening after dinner, while my mother would watch the evening news. Once in a while my mother would put on the radio and listen to the news channel, but that was rare. If the people in charge wanted to get the attention of the peasants, they had to do it in those small windows when people paid any attention to the news.

We live in a different age, but it is a very new age. We are saturated with media. Young people have no frame of reference so they just assume it has always been thus, but our modern mass media culture is one of those rare things that is truly new. It really was not so long ago when it was easy to be entirely uninformed about the world. It took great effort to be well informed. That’s not to say we are all worldly cosmopolitans, but the world is literally at our fingertips. More important, media is everywhere and it hard to escape it.

This newness means that the people in charge have struggled to put it to their uses. Buying off a few newspaper publishers was easy. Controlling the three TV networks required hardly any effort at all. A free wheeling mass media with millions of bloggers, podcasters and small outlets is a different task. Rounding up the farm’s bull is a hard job, but rounding up all the barn cats is actually much tougher. The former can get you killed, but the latter has a maddening number of variables.

When the masses started to get on-line, the “media experts” said it was ushering in an era of wonderfulness because the people would now have a say. The news would be interactive! It was not that long ago when every Progressive commentator went on and on about the wonderfulness of interactive media. I used to laugh at it as I was on-line long before the media airheads had heard of the internet. I knew those hothouse flowers would not last very long in the rough and tumble world of the internet, but like missionaries headed off to the the jungle, they were sure it was going to be great

I was thinking about that yesterday when National Review announced they had been taken over by Facebook. Like a lot of these sites, they learned the hard way that their audience was not going to just nod along and clap when instructed. Instead, they posted articles and the comments filled up with ridicule and criticism. That led to lots of comments from NR writers about the awfulness of the comment threads. Now that millennial pansies are in charge, they have turned it over to Facebook to police their comments.

It turns out that popular opinion is not all that popular with the people in the media. All over, news and opinion sites are clamping down on comments. They are heavily policed or they are shut down entirely. Twitter has allowed a band of angry lesbians to take over the moderation duties. Reddit hired Chinese grifter Ellen Pao to chase off the bad thinkers. Faceberg, of course, is run by howling lunatics, who ban people for any deviation from the orthodoxy. The media is slowly shutting down public comment in a rather deliberate effort to shut down dissent.

This started a couple of years ago, but the process has been accelerating. The claim from the media is the comment sections are revolting. Coincidentally, it is happening just when the public is revolting. It also coincides with a sudden solidarity among the media. They no longer seem to be divided along ideological lines. Now, they are quite unified. Read National Review, for example, and you could be forgiven for thinking it is New York Magazine or Salon. Glenn Beck, once the scourge of the Left, is now getting a sex change and supporting Clinton.

It’s one of those things you can read different ways. It could be real fear on the part of media over what’s coming their way through the comment sections. This is the sort of thing we associate with reactionaries facing a revolution. The people in charge try to suppress dissent so they can win the public relations campaign. If only one side can speak and they are holding a megaphone, enough people will be swayed to back the regime so that the revolt losses steam. That’s the theory, anyway.

On the other hand, the Cloud People speak a slightly different language than the rest of us. It’s why a crime story using the phrase “Minnesota man” means the man was not from Minnesota or even North America. In the language of the Cloud, interactive may have meant that they yell at you and you obey. These are people who truly believe they are called by the blank spot where God once existed to lead the Dirt People in the right direction. Ask any of them why they chose their career and they say, “I wanted to make a difference.”

There’s also the possibility that the people in media are just very stupid. Spend any time on an elite college campus and it is not hard to figure out that they select for things other than raw IQ. The kids that end up in the soft majors are not selected because they pegged the math portion of their SAT. Way back in the stone age, I was in college with a couple of rich kids who were as dumb as goldfish. But, family money is worth two SD’s on the entrance exams so they were accepted and put into sociology and psychology respectively.

My sense is that the Cloud People are beginning to master the new media tools. Oddly, the lesson they are learning is the lesson the Nazis learned. People naturally follow the herd. Put the herd into a big arena, pump in some emotional content and the herd goes where you tell it. Go to a Dallas Cowboy game and watch the buildup. It’s easy to see what happened in Germany.The 20 minutes before the game is a Nuremberg rally. Even if you’re not from Texas, you want to put on a cowboy hat, pull on your boots and defend the Alamo.

We are social animals that look to one another for guidance and acceptance. Unleashing click farms to promote the Cloud People narrative, while demoting the critics, gets the herd moving in the right direction. It also keeps the people holding the megaphones in high spirits. By having only cheering crowds in their line of sight, they truly feel they are making a difference and therefore redouble their efforts for the cause. That’s the weird thing about propaganda. It’s often more effective on the sender than the receiver.

All of this is fine if your ideal society is one where the bulk of the people are treated like cattle. That’s certainly the way our world has shaped up so far in the mass media age. The “big data” guys start from the assumption that we’re all in the hive. following orders from the queen via subtle signalling and nudging. Alter the composition of the signals and you alter society. The drones have no agency of their own. That’s the theory and maybe they are right. The great success of central planning suggest they may be onto something.

The Tragedy of the Google

In 1833 the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd published Two Lectures on the Checks to Population, which introduced an idea we later understood as the Tragedy of the Commons. The example used was of a common grazing area and how the interests of the people using this “free” public land would inevitably work at odds with one another in maintaining the public land. Everyone had an incentive to take as much as they could, as quickly as they could, but no one had an incentive to put back.

Today this is best understood in the management of fisheries. You can’t own parcels of the ocean and even if you can assign areas to particular fishermen, the fish don’t pay attention to these boundaries. The fisherman has no incentive to limit his cod harvest because the fish he does not catch will simply swim over to the next guy, who will catch them. In order to maintain the fishery, the state comes in and puts limits on the overall catch and what each fisherman can catch each season.

This fairly well known example is used by certain ideologues to demand socialization of all private property. Environmentalists will claim that the three-toed elephant slug is a common resource so it must be protected by the state. Therefore, anything that impacts the slug, requires permission from the state. That means if you want to mow your lawn or put up a tool shed, you have to file an environmental impact study and spend a bazillion dollars bribing environmental groups. It’s why we can’t build anything of consequence anymore.

Even though the idea has been abused, it is a useful concept when thinking about something like this story in Breitbart. Musicians are quickly seeing their revenue from music sales disappear. Newspapers all over America are near collapse because their content is distributed free on-line. Those that try to charge a fee just see the news given away by someone else, so their efforts to create property lines on-line always fail. Even the pornography industry is being gutted by a flood of free porn.

Now, the music industry has adapted to the fact Google is essentially an open air contraband market. Big shot musicians have teams of lawyers to police this stuff. The small musicians make their money from live shows and selling their music at their events. But, others don’t have this avenue. Photographers, graphic artists and writers just accept that they no longer have property rights to their work. I often see my work posted on other sites and no one from those sites asks my permission. I always give it when asked, but few bother asking.

The big internet operators and their government ignore all of this because they have grown stupendously rich off this racket. Google is essentially operating an open air contraband market with YouTube. Try running a heroin market on your property and see what happens. But, you’re not a billionaire and you can’t afford to buy a government of your own so the rules apply to you. Even banks find they have to report large movements of cash in order to help the government catch drug dealers. Ross Ulbricht is doing life in prison for being the Google of illicit drugs.

When the robot historians look back at the collapse of the West, they may point to the Internet as an institution analogous to slavery in the Roman Republic. Some argue that the flood of slaves in Rome after the victories over Corinth and Carthage altered the economic balance of Roman society. Large farmers could afford to buy up lots of slaves, thus collapsing the market for labor. This also allowed them to crush their smaller competition. The result was the rise of a landed oligarchy at the expense of the small land owners.

The Internet has brought back something that we thought was dead and that is rentier capitalism. This is the economic practice of monopolizing access to any kind of property, and gaining significant amounts of profit without contribution to society. Cable operators are a good example. In my youth, TV was free. It made it’s money from commercials. Today, you pay the monopolist a fee to get access to TV shows, that still run ads. In fact, they run even more ads than when I was a kid. In the case of kid’s shows, the programs are just ads to sell toys.

The other institution is cost shifting. The paint company that dumps its old paint into the river because it is a cheap way to get rid of the waste is shifting some of its costs to the public. Passing laws to prevent it or taxes on the paint maker to pay for the cleanup, is an effort to end the practice of cost shifting. Even today, the smallest mechanical shop complies with environmental rules because the punishments are draconian. These costs show up in the invoice to the customer. When I get my oil changed, I see an entry for oil disposal on the invoice.

The modern Internet giants shift huge chunks of their business cost to the public via all sorts of schemes. The most obvious being the internet providers. In most of the country, technology and/or the law prevents the internet provider from implementing metered service. Everyone pays the same for their internet regardless of usage. That means the guy with three teenagers that spend all day watching YouTube pays the same as the local feminist, who only goes on-line to post pictures of her cats to Facebook.

If the guy with the three kids had to pay for his usage, his bill would be five times that of the local feminist. He would also sharply limit his usage. Google and the other video providers would see their customer base shrink to the point where it may no longer make sense to exist in some cases. My first broadband bill was $12.95 per month. The cheapest in my area is now $69.95 plus a long list of fees and taxes. The service is marginally better, but not five times better. The additional cost is about me subsidizing my neighbors for the profit of the Internet companies.

Similarly, if the suppliers were charged for use of the public roadways, like we tax motorists and trucking companies, they would have to charge vastly more for their product. Instead, those costs end up in your tax bill, because, the government gives tax breaks to the internet providers. If Facebook had to build out a network to supply you their product, the cost would be prohibitive. Instead those costs end up in your cable bill, even if you have no use for Facebook. The internet economy is all about socializing the costs and privatizing the profits.

I’m going long here so let me wrap it up by summarizing a bit. We have created this virtual commons, but we have not come up with a way to manage it like a park or fishery. Further, we have permitted the development of rentiers, who skim from the public good, but contribute very little to it. Worse yet, we have massive cost shifting with the profits going to expand and perpetuate a system that works against the interests of the people. When a firm that made its money from cat videos can dictate terms to the US government, we’re well past the tragedy of the commons and into techno-feudalism.

Trump and the New Religion

The 2016 US Presidential election is shaping up to be one of those inflection points in the nation’s history. At this stage it is hard to know what comes after November, even if you are confident of the outcome. In 1964, the Liberals clobbered the arch-conservative Goldwater, but that turned out to be their last hurrah as 1960’s radicalism was about to blow itself apart. Similarly, many thought 2000 was a shift toward a post-Progressive America, but it was the start of a new Great Progressive Awakening.

I’m fond of calling the prevailing philosophy among our rulers the New Religion because it has all the attributes of a religion, just adapted to the mass media era. For those unfamiliar with this, the New Religion is based on egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. The last part is an outgrowth of the first two, but it is such a key part of the believer’s worldview, it really must be treated as a foundation item. Spend time on social media and you will inevitably run into people calling themselves anti-racists.

As Eric Hoffer observed, mass movements can get along without a god, but they must always have a devil. For the modern Progressive, the arch-demon is racism and everything is organized around fighting it. Abstract concepts make for useful devils, because they can be redefined on the fly to meet new challenges. A racist used to be some who hated blacks. Now it is someone hated by blacks or by the people who do the hating on their behalf.

As much as anti-racism is the star of the show, the other two legs of the stool are important too and we’re seeing that in the election. Trump is running on an explicitly nationalist platform. Nationalism comes with certain assumptions, like “our culture is better than others” and “our people are worth more to us than the people of other countries.” These are value judgments based on a shared history and a shared identity. America is not a blood and soil nation, but it is still a nation. My fellow citizens mean more to me than the people of France or Lichtenstein.

The internal logic of the New Religion excludes parochialism of any sort. All humans are equal, to the point where sex is even counted as a social construct. Therefore, no one can be morally better than another. Since culture is personality writ large and all personalities are equal, all cultures are equal. Anything short of embracing all cultures equally is racism. That means all the people who oppose the one-world globalism of our elites can only be driven by racism. They are evil so they must be fought at any cost.

That’s what we are seeing with Trump. He is a man who is the epitome of color blindness. He opened his first big club in Miami to all races, despite the fact the local residents opposed that idea. Those local residents were very liberal, you should note. His business associates look like the color wheel and his daughter converted to Judaism after marrying her very Jewish husband. Yet, Trump is running as a nationalist so the New Religion casts him as a racist. They even obliquely hint that he is an anti-Semite by calling him “Herr Drumpf” all the time.

The so-called conservatives in the media are just as smitten with the New Religion as their paymasters.  After all, a key part of being on contract at CNN or ABC is to be in the good graces of the fanatics that run those stations. Since the people in charge have defined racism as the worst of sins, no conservative will be caught dead associated with a racist. Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of these nancy-boys more than the thought of being cast into the pit alongside guys like John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer.

Years ago, back in the early Bush years, I met Jonah Goldberg at a NRO fundraiser event. We were chatting and I mentioned Peter Brimelow and he turned pale. The look on his face was what you would expect if he just learned Godzilla was approaching. He pulled himself together enough to say, “You should never even read anything they write. It’s very bad.” and then he sprinted away like I was chasing him. It was old fashioned, gut level fear like you see in horror movies. Goldberg is now a unhinged opponent of Trump.

On the scale of certainty, the modern Progressive is quite sure he is an anti-racist. He even has that on the profile of his social media accounts. The old Buckley Right has always existed on the edge of grace, with respect to the Left so they are desperate to prove they are just as anti-racist as their brothers on the Left. It’s why they are so over-the-top in their hatred for Trump. It’s not a case of self-doubt leading to overcompensation. They fear their brothers on the Left do not believe they have cleansed themselves of racism, so their animus toward Trump is their purification ritual.

This is why guys like Erick Erickson are constantly trolling for the attention of Trump supporters on twitter and Faceberg. It’s why NRO has given itself over to anti-Trumpism to the point of self-parody. It’s also why the most over-the-top outrage about the Khan flap was from the so-called Right. These performances are not intended to convince Trump voters. They are intended to convince the Left that the official Right is fully housebroken and ready to live in the master’s house. Anti-Trumpism is a public act of piety by those who wish to be initiated in the New Religion.

The End Times

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

–Some Old White Guy

Spend any time around our nation’s ghettos and you quickly become a believer in Smart Fraction Theory. You often hear people say that the problem in the ghetto is a lack of good role models and most people take that literally, but it’s really just a polite way of saying that there are few smart people. Smart people not only make smart decisions, they mitigate the dumb decisions of others. Often, they take up positions of authority so they can prevent the dumb people from doing dumb things. Someone has to affix those stupid warning labels on products.

Another way to think of it is anti-personnel weapons. Ambush weapons are often designed to wound, not kill, enemy soldiers. A wounded soldier requires medical care. He may also require transport out of the area. Even if it does not halt the advance of the unit, care for the wounded will slow the advance and render the unit less effective. Stupid people have the same effect as wounded soldiers. It’s that they are a non-contributor to society. It’s that they are often a net negative, dragging down society, which is why Ayn Rand wanted to exterminate them.

America, like every Western country, has loads of smart, altruistic people, in addition to lots of middling people. Our Smart Fraction is large relative to places like Africa. This means we can carry a large number of low-IQ violent losers. America is the richest country on earth, despite having a population that is 13% African, because we have recruited the best and brightest from Europe over the last two centuries. Now we are skimming off the best Asians for settlement here.

That’s the theory. People in the cognitive sciences, when drunk or outside the wire, will tell you that you need an average IQ of about 94 to run anything resembling a modern economy. Pakistan with an average IQ of 84 is never going to leave the Iron Age because they lack the human capital. They have some very bright people, but not enough of them. Those smart people are overwhelmed by the teeming hordes of low-IQ hyper-violent mouth breathers from the hills, which is why those bright people flee to Europe.

Even if you reject biology as an explanation, travel a little bit and you soon figure out that there is a limit to the number of dysfunctional people a society can carry before it sinks. The debate, if there is one, is whether this can be arrested or whether technology can mitigate it. In the robot future, for example, the stupid will have their own robot custodian to keep them on the straight and narrow. Or, better training will raise up the stupid making them less stupid. Either way, there is some limit to the number of unproductive a society can carry and everyone gets it. People have always known this.

This long wind up is not in support of sterilizing Hillary Clinton voters, even though that would be a good idea. This is a post about the Zika Virus and similar plagues. What if something like Zika gets lose in the West and dramatically increases the number of pinheads? What if the smart, fearing they may birth a pinhead, further reduce their fertility? It would not take but a generation or two to significantly alter the cognitive profile of society. Further, this weakening of the West would reduce the global carry capacity.

When we think of the collapse of civilization, it is always nuclear war, economic collapse or the zombie apocalypse. What if it happens slower? Some new virus increases the number of unproductive, crazy and violent to the point where they begin to drag down society as a whole. The elites will withdraw behind their walls, but that does not change the facts on the ground. The West would eventually reach the point where it could no longer hold back the barbarian tide. This cascading effect would further reduce global carrying capacity.

It is easy to forget that those billion or so sub-Saharan Africans depend on food and medicine from the West. If that flow stops, they are instantly past their Malthusian limit and you get some combination of mass starvation, Hobbesian violence and mass migration out of Africa. The same is true of the Middle East. Even South America, which has made great strides in food production, still depends on a strong West to remain stable. Just look at Brazil if you want to see how fragile these countries are under the skin.

Here’s another thought. When scarcity was real, people, even the poorest, especially the poorest, had little sentimentality toward the weak. They could not afford to have sentimentality. Newborns with defects were euthanized. The old we left to die. The sick were put out of their misery. It’s a ghastly thing for modern, post-scarcity, humans to contemplate, but it was a necessary reality for most of human history. What if some disease like Zika spreads, resulting in a swelling population of pinheads?

I’m not making any predictions on this. Maybe humanity would quickly respond. Maybe we have lost the capacity to survive when facing real scarcity. There is no way to know. It’s hard to imagine a society that celebrates grief and victim-hood quickly shifting to cold-blooded realism, but maybe nature finds a way. Reality is, after all, that thing that never goes away when you stop believing in it. The reality of life is survival trumps everything, even familial love. Still, one has to wonder if the post-scarcity world is a trap of our own design.

This Blog – August 2016

I like to read about who reads the things I read and how many people read the things I read. Like all human beings, I’m curious about where I fit in with my fellow meat sticks. It is what defines us as social animals. There’s also the fact that if everyone like me is into something, there’s a good chance I’ll enjoy it. Alternatively, if the people into the same things I like happen to be weirdos, then maybe it is time for some soul searching. When it comes to websites and TV shows, I’m mostly interested in how many. Media wields a great deal of influence so the high traffic sites will have more influence than niche sites.

Anyway, this post on Vox Day reminded me that I have not done a post on this blog’s traffic for a while. I’m probably not alone in being curious about traffic stats so I want to post a regular update on site stats. Steve Sailer does this as part of his fund raisers. I’m always a little surprised that Sailer does not have more traffic. He’s been doing the blog thing for a couple of decades. Assuming VD is not bullshitting us with his stats, his site gets twice the traffic of Sailer. I see loads of references on social media to Sailer, but never Vox Day, but that could just mean I hang with the bad crowd.

I have installed a plugin for WordPress that lets me harvest all sorts of data. The big thing it does is filter out robots and trackers from the site traffic. I tested this on another domain and it does seem to work. I compared the stats to my server stats and there is a massive gap between the blogs numbers and the raw server logs, suggesting the robot filtering is working as they claim. According to the numbers, I have had 9,180,000 visits in the last year. Of those, 953,876 were unique visitors. The regular readership is just over 45,000. That’s defined as unique regular visitors.

I thank everyone for visiting and reading.

Now, compared to what Vox reports, my page views are half what he reports. I suspect there’s a difference in how page views are counted. His posts net three times the number of comments so maybe it is not that far off. If I were to guess, I’d say his readership is three or four times the size of this site, judging from the number of comments. Then again, some sites lend themselves to comments, while others do not. Ace gets a ton of comments, but most of them are gibberish. You see this on Breitbart where the comments often suggest the readership is missing a chromosome.

Digging through the stats, I see that the most popular post ever was this one. The most common keyword search that leads people here is “Cloud People.” The funny thing about that is someone used the term in conversation the other day and then explained to me what it meant. I know that person does not read this site so I guess the term is working its way into the language. The second most popular post is this one, so I may even get credit for the term when some TV big shot uses it. A man can dream.

I have received e-mails wondering how to donate money to me, but I have no way of doing that. I appreciate the thought, but I have not thought too much about setting up the mechanics for taking donations. In fact, I’ve never looked into how it works. I have a day job and I do this for fun. I think if the monthly readership cracks the 100K mark, I may consider it. To be perfectly candid, I’d feel weird holding beg-a-thons. Given that hitting the 100K mark is long off, I don’t have to think about it.

Again, I thank everyone for reading, linking, commenting and tweeting.

Trump And The Polls

A new poll after the nomination of the old hag as the Evil Party candidate suggests she got a mild boost from the show. Of course, Trump got a boost after his convention, but then the polling companies changed their methods in order put Clinton back in the lead. There are other polls showing Trump with a big lead and probably polls showing a dead heat. With the election more than three months out and most Americans enjoying the summer, the wild swing in the polls seems logical. It is why partisans are prone to dismiss any poll that does not make them feel good.

Polling science is said to be much better now than in the past. After each election we are told the pollsters got it close to right. Once in a while they miss, like we saw with Brexit or the last Parliament election in Britain. Obviously, the polling was wildly off with Trump early on and he did over-perform against the polls throughout the primary. That suggests the polling companies have not yet figured out how to identity the voter pool. Or maybe the critics are right and the pollsters are lying to help the establishment.

It is easy to be skeptical of polling. The sample sizes are so small, it is hard to see how they can be representative of the voter pool. What is never disclosed is the number of people who refuse to participate. It is reasonable to assume that the hard thumping fanatics want to be polled, while normal people have better things to do with their time. A generation ago normal people may have been inclined to participate, feeling it was their duty as a citizen, but those days are long gone. The normies are woke.

Then there is that other reason to be skeptical. Everywhere you look the media is conspiring to deceive the public. A Muslim shoots up a gay club and we get stories about how he was a homosexual struggling with his sexuality. All of those stories were lies. We get a dump of DNC e-mails showing a clear conspiracy between the media and the party, but the story they tell us is about Boris Badenov secretly conspiring with Trump. If you are willing to lie like that, rigging polls is no great shakes.

That said, quantitative types will argue that some polls are fairly good. They get within a point or two of the results. Nate Silver’s new model was laughably wrong in the primaries, but his old model was pretty close to right in most of the primaries. He may have been off a few points, but he was picking the correct winner in every case. Investors Business Daily has been within a point the last few elections. They missed on the 2012 winner, but that was a close election and they were better than the rest.

The counter to this is that the range of possible results in any election is pretty small. Since the end WW2, the average difference in the popular vote is a little under nine percent. The big outlier was Reagan beating Mondale 58% to 40% in 1984. Most elections are within a 5% range so that means about five possible outcomes. In most of these elections, it was long clear who would win. Of those sixteen elections, only six had any mystery to them and that is counting 1968 and 2000.

Election Percentage Year
Barack Obama, Dem. defeats Mitt Romney, Rep. 3.86% 2012
Barack Obama, Dem. defeats John McCain, Rep. 7.27% 2008
George W. Bush, Rep. defeats John Kerry, Dem. 2.46% 2004
George W. Bush, Rep. defeats Al Gore, Dem. -0.51% 2000
Bill Clinton, Dem. defeats Bob Dole, Rep. 8.51% 1996
Bill Clinton, Dem. defeats George H. W. Bush, Rep. 5.56% 1992
George H. W. Bush, Rep. defeats Michael Dukakis, Dem. 7.72% 1988
Ronald Reagan, Rep. defeats Walter Mondale, Dem. 18.21% 1984
Ronald Reagan, Rep. defeats Jimmy Carter, Dem. 9.74% 1980
Jimmy Carter, Dem. defeats Gerald Ford, Rep. 2.06% 1976
Richard Nixon, Rep. defeats George McGovern, Dem. 23.15% 1972
Richard Nixon, Rep. defeats Hubert Humphrey, Dem. 0.70% 1968
Lyndon Johnson, Dem. defeats Barry Goldwater, Rep. 22.58% 1964
John Kennedy, Dem. defeats Richard Nixon, Rep. 0.17% 1960
Dwight Eisenhower, Rep. defeats Adlai Stevenson, Dem. 15.40% 1956
Dwight Eisenhower, Rep. defeats Adlai Stevenson, Dem. 10.85% 1952

The point here is that claiming you nailed twelve of the last sixteen elections means nothing. Where pollsters are measured is when the final result is a mystery or debatable. Silver getting the 2012 election right made him a star because everyone else got it wrong. His star has now faded because he blew the primaries so badly. It suggests he was just lucky for a while or maybe his great insight was just a moment in time. The mood of the country has changed and the polling methods have changed, so his algorithm is now worse than guessing.

There is also a new element here that we have not seen in our lifetime. The people in charge universally hate Trump. The media of both parties, the leadership of both parties, all sides of the chattering skull class, all of the beautiful people, everyone. They all hate Trump and the people backing Trump. This is a revolt of the elites and it is reasonable to assume that the pollsters feel pressure to put their thumb on the scales. If you are going to do that, this is when you do it because everyone is doing it.

Even if the pollsters are playing it straight, they are facing an impossible task. What will this electorate be like compared to previous elections? We know lots of new voters are turning up. That was the story of the primary. We know lots of people are changing teams. Nationals Review, The Federalist and Red State are now wearing their woman cards, backing a candidate they excoriated just a year ago. At the same time, old Lefty warhorses like Susan Sarandon are flirting with Trump.

At least for now, no poll, even those that make you feel good, should be trusted. We are in uncharted territory in many ways. The pollsters, even those playing it straight, are just as lost as everyone else. More important, the people we tend to rely on for information are feverishly working against our interests to a level we have never seen. If they are willing to claim Trump is working for the KGB, they will say anything and do anything. All bets are off now, so trust no one.

Carny Folk

Some people are reportedly upset that actor Bradley Cooper is with Her. Given the age in which we live, the smart bet is that no one cares enough about Bradley Cooper to have noticed so his PR team authored the story and sent it out to the media. That is often how celebrity news gets created. The PR team sends e-mails to the media telling them their client will be doing something and included in it will be suggested story lines. A big chunk of sports “news” is cooked up by player agents.

Cooper’s people want the big shots in Hollywood to know that he, despite being a Pale Penis Person, is still firmly on the reservation. Another one of the strange parts of our current age is that those who make movies popular with the normies immediately fall under suspicion. American Sniper was a big hit with normal whites so the lunatics naturally suspect that Cooper may be some sort of spy for the enemy or even a heretic. Dressing him up and sending him to the old witch’s speech sends the right signal.

Now, actors are often quite stupid so their handlers do not want them performing off-script. Even the smart ones, Cooper went to Georgetown, often have psychological problems that can lead them to say and do strange things when not on their leash. Cooper has suffered from mental illness and addiction. Putting him in a box so the cameras can see him and then planting the phony victim story gets the coverage they want without risking an embarrassing off-the-cuff comment from the celebrity.

Logic says entertainers should avoid politics. There is no upside. On any given issue, close to half the public is on one side and the rest are on the other side. On the other hand, people do not really care what these people think so maybe there is no downside either. People make sport of the Hollywood moonbats because it is easy, but it does not seem to alter anyone’s viewing habits. Susan Sarandon is nutty as an outhouse rat, but in her prime she was easy on the eyes and a popular actress.

Politics in America is entertainment, at least that is how it is sold to us, so it makes sense for entertainers to be drawn to it. The people in charge assume we prefer things sold to us the same way Hollywood sells actors and they are probably right. Barack Obama won in 2008, despite being a foreign weirdo with a funny name. He is a good actor and he reads his lines flawlessly. For all anyone knows he was hired out of a community theater somewhere as he never had a job prior to politics.

Up until last week, none of this would have mattered. For the bulk of human history carny-folks were at the bottom of the social ladder. Perverts, deviants and troublemakers ended up in the entertainment business. That is true today, except we used to have the good sense to keep the carnies out on the fringe. They would come in, do their shows and then be told to move along. Decent people understood that you did not want these dirt bags hanging around too long. Now, the carnies are in charge.

Most actors are crazy liberal. They stake out positions that suggests they are divorced from reality. The rich, famous ones embrace third-world authoritarian politics, which if implemented, would land them in a work camp. The minor actors embrace the latest Progressive fads, usually in the most degrading fashion. People like Lena Dunham seem to invest most of her time finding new ways to humiliate herself on behalf of a cause. It turns out that stupid, crazy and liberal is not much of a handicap in Hollywood.

My guess is that there is a lot of overlap in cognitive qualities required to be an actor and be a loony-tune liberal. They say there is no dignity in television, because you will inevitably be required to degrade yourself on camera. To do that means you cannot have a high opinion of yourself. A healthy self-loathing and a desire to obliterate one’s own is going to be a necessary skill for an actor. Similarly, joining a mass movement like a political cause is best done by those seeking to exchange their identity with that of the group.

People in show business are always on the prowl for affirmation. They go on stage because they want the applause. What makes American Progressivism enduring is it imbues the adherent with the sense of intellectual and moral superiority. To be a liberal is to be super-smart so if you are a super-smart good person, you are a liberal. That is the belief. It is why dimwits like Janeane Garofalo and Sarah Silverman kit themselves out as bohemian intellectuals. They just assume that their ability to remember the lines from the liberal catechism makes them intellectuals.

The wisdom of putting carny folk at the top of the social ladder is open to debate. My sense is the only people who think these people are at the top of the status structure are the actors and people who want to be actors. Everyone else gets that actors are low-lifes and fairly stupid. While there are exceptions, the public is conditioned to assume their favorite actor is nutty as a fruitcake in real life. Then again, the people running for office are often worse than the carny folk so maybe it is a good idea to put the carnies in charge.

My Problem With Atheists

My general impression of Richard Dawkins is that he is an unrelenting d-bag. I do not know the man and I do not know much about him. I read his one important book a long time ago and I am more inclined to his side in the great debate between Dawkins and Gould. I think Dawkins is a bit too narrow and reductionist, but Gould is simply afraid to face some tough facts about human biodiversity. None of that stirs much emotion in me. What has always bugged me about Dawkins is his evangelical atheism.

I am not a religious man and I cannot say I am a believer, but I am not an atheist. To be an atheist is to know there is no god and as a matter of simple logic, no one can know that. In the set of things that are possible, no god is one member. A single god is another. Multiple gods are yet another. This set exists in the set of things no man can know, at least not in this life. You can believe, but you cannot know. Christianity incorporates this reality, which is why we have the expression “mystery of faith.”

Now, I accept that many people will disagree with that formulation. Many religious people will argue that they do, in fact, know that God exists because God speaks to them. Many atheists will argue that the lack of a belief in God is the same as believing there is no God. I do not accept the premise of the former or the logic of the latter, but I do not care all that much either. I am indifferent to these things because I do not have to live with them. I do not walk around worried about my relationship with God and I do not worry about your relationship with God, or the lack of one.

What I do know is man is a believing machine. Belief most likely evolved with language, which means it is one of modern man’s defining traits. As is the case with much of evolution, this is a guess, but read enough history and you begin to think it is a damn good guess. There has never been a time when man did not have strong beliefs about a transcendent order. Even communism is an argument about returning to the natural order. Commies may not believe in God, but they believe they can do his job.

The old saying is that “a man who believes in nothing will fall for anything” and that has been my observation. Humans are built to believe and it is only a question of what they believe and how strongly. Some are deeply devout and others, like me, are over on the skepticism side of the belief range. Those fervent atheist, the devout atheists, are simply believing in something that is just as unknowable and requires as much faith as any formal religion. They just lack the decency to admit it.

Unlike those Christian proselytizers, who knock on my door to tell me the Good News, atheists never fail to let me know they are here to bring the Bad News. Atheists take a great deal of pleasure in making others unhappy. In fact, it seems to be the point of their religion, a religion they never shut up about. I have never met an atheist who does not hold his fellow man in contempt. It is not a reserved contempt either. It’s a public, snotty contempt like you see in this story.

Dawkins has been making war on God for decades hoping that one day God will join the fight. In fact, it is the reason he gets in the news at all anymore. Like many celebrity scientists, he stopped doing any real work years ago. Now he is just a professional celebrity, who courts the admiration of Progressives by making war of Christians. It is a shabby way to be famous, but a familiar one. Black Science Guy leveraged his management of an amusement park into wealth and celebrity, by mocking the right people.

Bill Maher is a grubby pervert who got rich running a TV ministry for dimwitted liberals. For those who grew up watching TV preachers, Maher’s act is obvious. His show is church for moonbat shut-ins. Dawkins is on the show not because Maher or his audience understands a thing about genetics or biology. No, the point is to have a show where the atheists jeer at those who believe in God. Pagans lit fires and sacrificed animals to please their gods. Atheists jeer at Christians to please themselves.

Atheism is a religion for those incapable of selflessness but obsessed with venerating themselves anyway. It is a religion for those who want grace on the cheap. The major world religions make demands of the adherent. The Mohammedan believes Allah commands him to act in specific ways. Christians believe God has specified rules for those who accept Christ into their life. There is no one to make such demands on atheists, so they make demands on everyone else. It is why they always have a look on their face like they just detected a bad odor. You are not meeting their standards.

That is my problem with atheists. I do not care what you believe as long as it does not ruin the limited amount of time I have on this earth. I would not care about Islam if not for the fact Muslims tend to explode in public places. Similarly, I would have nothing to say about atheism if not for the fact atheists go out of their way to be such raging public douche bags. I would have no reason to think about Richard Dawkins, but he keeps showing up to make sport of those who believe in God. That makes him a giant douche, which appears to be only point of atheism.

Constitutional Scripturalism

Ted Cruz setting himself on fire at the GOP convention is a good example of how things are not always what they seem. The Wuss Right cheered because they hoped it would hurt Trump. They never cared for Cruz, which is why they refused to back him until the last days of the primary. Even those who were willing to back Cruz early on were muted in their enthusiasm. Once there was nothing to lose and he was throwing one last rock at Trump, they could let loose with full-throated cheers for Lion Ted.

The Wuss Right’s reticence with regards to Cruz is not all wrong. Cruz is a weasel, who cannot be trusted. He proved that the other night. He is also revealed himself to be a fanatic, fully capable of stepping on a rake that he laid in front of his own path. Cruz seems to believe the things Glenn Beck says about him. He imagines himself as the throne half of the team, while Beck imagines himself representing the altar side of their thing. Their thing is a strange movement that blends evangelical Christianity, Mormonism and evangelical Constitutionalism.

Conservatives tend to define themselves as people who are faithful to the spirit of the law, as well as the letter. When it comes to the Constitution, the Right typically takes a narrow view. If it is not explicitly in the document, then it is assumed to not be in the document. This is in line with the traditional negative liberty that is the bedrock of the American system of governance. The state only has powers specifically granted to it. Put another way, the state must get permission from the citizens to act.

Listen to a Ted Cruz speech and he talks about the Constitution in the same way preachers talk about Scripture. You either read the document as the literal word of God or you are a sinner. An America that is not organized around the literal reading of the original document is failing in its duty to God. Similarly, liberty is a stand-in for salvation. One is either in a state of liberty or outside the light of the Founders. When a guy like Ted Cruz talks of religious liberty, it clearly means more than just being left to worship as you please. It is liberty as a religion.

The irony of this evangelical constitutionalism is that it was Evangelicals who ushered in the whole “living constitution” stuff. The Christian reformers of the 19th century badgered the courts to accept a more expansive role in law making. This always meant chipping away at property rights in order to eradicate immorality from national life. The Abolitionist Movement was, after all, an attack on property rights. Slaves were property and freeing slaves is, legally speaking, no different than “freeing” someone’s car or their cash.

Treating the founding documents as holy texts and the Founders as messengers of God seems like a natural evolution of Evangelical politics. In the 70’s and 80’s, Christian conservatives got involved in politics and ended up as a reliable Republican constituency. This traditional approach to politics got them nothing but disappointment as the liberals steamrolled conservatives in Washington on social issues. Strategy shifted to backing coreligionists, thinking that would result in more dependable politicians. Eight years of George Bush disabused most Christians of that belief.

Holding up a holy text as something more than words on a page is to be expected. Religions only work when the rules are set forth by an authority higher than man. Otherwise, it is just coercion. Deifying the Constitution, the way we see with guys like Cruz and Beck, inevitably deifies the men who wrote it. It also assumes a transcendence that the writers never imagined. The men who wrote the Constitution fully understood that it was a grab-bag of compromises that were necessary in order to organize thirteen nations into a single country.

Just as important, the men who founded the country relied upon the work of others to form their opinions and debate how to best organize the newly independent country. Jefferson, for example, borrowed heavily from The Declaration of Rights with which Parliament asserted its rights against the King in the Glorious Revolution. Imbuing the Constitution with sacred authority inevitably turns the writers into something they were not and strips them of their humanity. The Founders were just men, but they were still men.

That is what makes the Cruz speech and his refusal to back Trump interesting. The Wuss Right, filled with hatred for the rise of Trump and his nationalist backers, cheered Cruz as the heir to Reagan. The Cruz people, however, are not looking for Reagan. They tried that and got nowhere. They saw the Cruz speech and saw their savior, a man in the line of the Founders, sent by God to bring his people back into the light of the Constitution. It’s why his followers are sure God will punish America for rejecting their man.

Ted Cruz says he will run in 2020 no matter what happens in 2016. It remains to be seen whether this movement he is leading has legs. These things often fizzle out. With high profile people like Glenn Beck and Erick Erickson signing on and preaching from their Internet pulpits every day, it is probably going to be with us for a while. Ted Cruz is the leader of the political version of the Westboro Baptist Church now. The founding documents are holy scripture and the leaders are men of God, sent by God.