Author Archives: thezman

The Point of Life

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What is best in life? Obviously, it is to crush your enemies. See them driven before you and hear the lamentations of their women. Alternatively, according to John Derbyshire, “The greatest joy for a man is to defeat his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all they possess, to see those they love in tears, to ride their horses, and to hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”

I’m kidding, sort of, but figuring out what is the point, the goal of life, is not an unimportant topic. Libertarians tell us the point of life is to be ground up into dog food because that’s efficient. Liberals tell us the point of life is the struggle. A meaningful life is one spent struggling against the natural order. Buckley Conservatives no longer contemplate this question as it could offend the Left.

One reason our politics are a dumpster fire in the West is no one bothers to ask, “to what end?” Read the stories about the Muslim invasion of Europe, for example, and you never see anyone asking the current non-Muslim rulers why they are doing these things. What’s the point? How does this benefit Europeans? There’s never a reason given. It’s as if there is no point. They are just killing time until something else comes along.

The void of pointlessness has been filled by the cult of economics, who claim the point of man’s existence is to make really cool looking pivot tables. Make Excel happy and utopia arrives. The debate here over trade was tinged with that vibe. Trade with Mexico is good because Walmart has cheap crap. This assumes that life in America was a hellhole in 1985, because we had less cheap crap. Does anyone’s plan for their life include “get more cheap crap” under the list of life goals?

It’s why arguments for or against trade and immigration based on math miss the point. These are not math problems. There’s no uniformly right answer. The math can help inform opinion, but ultimately social policy is about how people choose to live. The point of life for the Amish is going to be different than for Scots-Irish woodsmen in West Virginia. You see that here in this story about a small Nebraska town.

Half-ton pickup trucks crowd the curb outside the One Horse Saloon, a neon Coors Light sign in the window and rib-eye steaks on the menu, but otherwise Nickerson, Nebraska, is nearly silent on a spring evening, with only rumbling freight trains interrupting bird songs.

Regional economic development officials thought it was the perfect spot for a chicken processing plant that would liven up the 400-person town with 1,100 jobs, more than it had ever seen. When plans leaked out, though, there was no celebration, only furious opposition that culminated in residents packing the fire hall to complain the roads couldn’t handle the truck traffic, the stench from the plant would be unbearable and immigrants and out-of-towners would flood the area, overwhelming schools and changing the town’s character.

“Everyone was against it,” said Jackie Ladd, who has lived there for more than 30 years. “How many jobs would it mean for people here? Not many.”

The village board unanimously voted against the proposed $300 million plant, and two weeks later, the company said they’d take their plant — and money — elsewhere.

Deep-rooted, rural agricultural communities around the U.S. are seeking economic investments to keep from shedding residents, but those very places face trade-offs that increasing numbers of those who oppose meat processing plants say threaten to burden their way of life and bring in outsiders.

“Maybe it’s just an issue of the times in which we live in which so many people want certain things but they don’t want the inconveniences that go with them,” said Chris Young, executive director of the American Association of Meat Processors.

The default assumption here and everywhere in the mass media is that the point of life is economic growth. It’s as if there can be only two modes. One is pedal to the metal, sacrifice everything for economic growth, even if that means erasing the entire culture. The other mode is North Korea style isolationism and backwardness, where people are paranoid of outsiders and refuse to embrace modernity.

Of course, the real issue here is “who? whom?”

Nickerson fought against Georgia-based Lincoln Premium Poultry, which wanted to process 1.6 million chickens a week for warehouse chain Costco. It was a similar story in Turlock, California, which turned down a hog-processing plant last fall, and Port Arthur, Texas, where residents last week stopped a meat processing plant. There also were complaints this month about a huge hog processing plant planned in Mason City, Iowa, but the project has moved ahead.

The Nickerson plant would have helped area farmers, who mostly grow corn and soybeans, start up poultry operations and buy locally grown grain for feed, said Willow Holliback, who lives 40 miles away and heads an agriculture group that backed the proposal.

“When farmers are doing well, the towns are doing well,” she said.

The question of who would work the tough jobs was at the forefront of the debate, though many were adamant they aren’t anti-immigrant. Opposition leader Randy Ruppert even announced: “This is not about race. This is not about religion.”

Thanks to 50 years of Buckley Conservatism, standing up for you own is assumed to be a hate crime so everyone is conditioned to volunteer that they are not a racist or Christian. I look forward to the day when a white Christian can once again be proud of civilization.

But both were raised at the raucous April 4 meeting where the local board rejected the plant. One speaker said he’d toured a chicken processing plant elsewhere and felt nervous because most of the workers were minorities.

More overtly, John Wiegert, from nearby Fremont where two meat processors employ many immigrants, questioned whether Nickerson’s plant would attract legal immigrants from Somalia— more than 1,000 of whom have moved to other Nebraska cities for similar jobs, along with people from Mexico, Central America and Southeast Asia.

“Being a Christian, I don’t want Somalis in here,” Wiegert, who has led efforts to deny rental housing to immigrants in the country illegally, told the crowd. “They’re of Muslim descent. I’m worried about the type of people this is going to attract.”

Others pointed out that, given Nebraska’s unemployment rate is among the nation’s lowest near 3 percent, few local residents would accept the entry-level jobs. While the projected wage of $13 to $17 an hour was above the region’s current median wage for production workers, opponents argued meat processors generally have high turnover.

This really is the crux of the matter. The “American” company building these plants is about as American as the People’s Liberation Army of China. The owners of that company have no allegiance to America or Americans. The proof of that is their overwhelming desire to import Somalis as workers in their plants. To them, Nebraska may as well be a dead planet they can mine for its resources. America means nothing to them.

That’s the core of the new way we have to view the world. There’s us and them. The overclass gathering for their festival in Vegas should understand that the rest of us owe them nothing. They are on their own. It would be nice if the overclass was thankful and patriotic, dedicated to protecting the society that made their life possible. That’s not the case. They are just a collection of buccaneers with no loyalty to anyone. We have to return the favor.

The Monasteries of America

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Saint Fionán is claimed to have founded the Skellig Michael monastery in the sixth century. There is some dispute about when the monastery was founded, but it is largely considered one of the first Catholic centers of learning outside of Rome. There, the monks copied old texts, taught novices to read and write and proselytized to the Irish heathens. Slowly, monasteries were founded around Europe, doing the same work, often on behalf of the ruling families.

If you are an ancient history buff, one of the things you probably understand is just how important the Catholic Church was in preserving and maintaining the knowledge of the ancients. Throughout the Middle Ages, tucked away in monasteries, monks spent their days copying and preserving texts from antiquity. It was a slow and tedious process, but it was the only way to preserve and proliferate knowledge.

That last bit is important. Storing up knowledge in books at a monastery is fine but passing them around so others can learn and expand upon what is in those books is how civilization flourishes. Those monks copying old texts were increasing the mass of human understanding. Copying Aristotle meant that the copy could be sent to another monastery to be read and copied again. It also meant more men exposed to Aristotle, and not just in the monasteries. The nobility was able to build libraries too.

The thing about the medieval system was that it was tightly bound by Catholicism on one end and the state on the other. Intellectual life had to appeal to the king and the Church. In this regard, the Church served another key role. They vetted and filtered the books that were produced; thus, they controlled the knowledge of the society. The crown may have had a monopoly of force, but the Church gave it legitimacy and an intellectual structure through which to rule.

We like to think that the modern age is a time when information flows freely around society, unencumbered by the state or powerful interests. Colleges and universities are endlessly going on about having free speech and open debate. Journalists insist their job is to speak truth to power, which means saying things that are outside the approved list of truths. Even so-called conservatives bang on about the glories of free and open dialogue, usually while they denounce Donald Trump.

The truth is the monastery system is still with us. Instead of the crown financing the learning centers, it is billionaires, corporations, non-governmental organizations and international bodies. Instead of monasteries, we have think-tanks, research centers and foundations. All of which are “not for profit” which means contributions are tax deductible. The rich pay themselves for supporting the organizations that exist to promote the interests of the rich and powerful.

All around Washington DC, there are organizations, like American Enterprise Institute, that are financed by rich people to pump out papers, books, commentary and experts to populate TV and radio. If you look at their 990 filing, you see that the guy in charge made $700K in compensation. Board members made six figures, with most in the mid-200’s. Charles Murray made $270K just from this one job. His books, speaking fees and so forth probably double that number. Being a “thinker” pays well.

AEI is a big foot operation, but there many smaller ones too. The Fund for American Studies funds journalists and reporters with grants. The list of programs on their 990 is mostly benign stuff that sounds nice. Then you see the long list of trustees. The one name that jumps out is Fred Barnes who took $25K for his troubles. One of the benefits of being a journalist, who plays ball, is you get to sit on boards at these non-profits. Some pay more than others, but it is easy to see how it can add up.

Then there are the magazine rackets. National Review has a thing called the National Review Institute. Notice how they always call their people “fellow” to give it that academic feel. Their 990 is not remarkably interesting, but NRI is mostly a clearing house. The director makes $200K a year, in case you are curious. That is small potatoes compared to John Podhoretz, who takes over $400K in salary from Commentary Magazine, another non-profit operation.

Of course, it is not just indigenous billionaires paying these people to promote them in the press. Foreign governments get in on the act too. The government of Malaysia famously bought favorable coverage from conservative media a few years ago. You may recognize the name Ben Domenech from that article. He writes for the Federalist and was in on the anti-Trump crusade. He also got jammed up in a plagiarism scandal, yet he somehow remains in good standing with conservative media.

My favorite, I think, is Brent Bozell, who Mike Cernovich has been going after on Twitter. Bozell runs a racket called the Media research Center. It is supposed to police the media for bias. Brent makes $400K for his trouble, that’s when he is not penning anti-Trump pieces for Breitbart. No one should begrudge Bozell his money, but when the media watchdog is paid by the same people funding the media, it is hard to take him seriously.

The reality is our opinion makers are all kept men. They are the monks and clergy of our age, shaping intellectual life and setting the limits of what is and what is not permitted in the public sphere. This is done mostly to promote their own position, but financed by the donor class, on whose behalf the monks and priests of the commentariat work. When you are living the 1% lifestyle, you are not about to rock the boat by speaking truth to power.

The reason they are fainting over Trump and the rise of the Alt-Right is the same reason the Church panicked over Martin Luther. The difference is Jan Hus is an army of bloggers and writers on-line using the megaphones of social media. Trump, like Frederick III, is legitimizing much of it by speaking candidly on the issues of the day. Just as Trump supporters have no illusions about what Trump is as a politician, the commentariat is fully aware of what he represents, which is why he must be destroyed.

The Myth of Free Trade

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Fred_Z Writes:

Even so, Trump’s anti-global, anti-trade protectionist rhetoric is quite mad. I like his anti-illegal immigration stance, but that is the only thing that makes sense to economically protect Americans. The American middle and lower classes are not being ravaged by globalism and free trade, they are being ravaged by wage competition from illegals and insane government environmental, regulatory, tax and subsidy policies.

How does Trump expect us to buy your exports if you refuse to buy our exports? David Ricard showed nearly 200 years ago that free trade benefits both sides, even if the other party is dumping below costs, and there is literally no credible counter-argument. Besides, you Yanks are utterly notorious for distorting dozens of markets, from sugar to corn, with ludicrous tax and subsidy policies.

Ah well, may we live in interesting times.

If I were going to list the things that have unraveled conservatism over the last thirty years, the embrace of libertarian trade myths would be high on the list. Trade has become a sacred item in the commentariat that can never be questioned and never be worshiped too much. Even the Left has found it impossible to make arguments against trade deals, instead embracing the globalism of their donors. It’s part of what has motivated Progressive support for Sanders over Clinton.

As is the case with so much of our current politics, trade is no longer a policy to be debated. You either fully support “free trade” or you are dismissed from the conversation. A similar thing happened with immigration over the years. All of the immigration skeptics were purged from the public square, leaving two types of immigration enthusiasts. You either hate white people or you are a shill for the cheap labor lobbies. Trade has followed the same path.

Despite the moralizing, trade is like any other policy. It is about trade-offs. There are benefits from lowering trade barriers, thus increasing trade between countries. There are liabilities that come from liberalized trade too. A good trade policy minimizes these costs so that the result is a net benefit. Bad trade policy fails to address the cost side and is a net negative. There is no free lunch, even with trade. There is always a cost side to every public policy.

Opening up trade with Canada, for example, hurts the America beaver pelt industry. Putting American beaver trappers out of work has consequences. Low cost Canadian beaver hunters will take market share from the Americans. Those workers will be let go, thus adding a cost to America. If those workers can be soaked up by a business that booms due to trade to Canada, then we very well may have a net benefit to America. If not, then not.

Trade with countries like Canada makes a lot of sense because Canada has things we want and we have things they want. Canada is culturally very similar to America, speaks the same language and maintains the same legal traditions. Trade between the two countries will require little additional policing as businesses on both sides have similar expectations of conduct. A Canadian firm that violates US law will show up in the US court to answer for it. Additionally, businesses on both sides know the governments of both sides will enforce the law equally.

On the other hand, trade with Mexico is a different animal entirely. Mexico is much poorer, lacks our cultural traditions and has a highly corrupt government. The reason American firms setup shop in Mexico is to avoid US labor and environmental laws. Carrier is not moving to Mexico because it is better. They are moving there because it is worse, thus allowing them to get away with things that would never be allowed to do in the Anglosphere. If the Mexican government complains, a small bribe solves the problem.

That’s the reality of trade with Mexico. It’s not the indigenous tortilla maker selling us tortillas so he can buy software and legal services from the US. “Trade” with Mexico is a variation of the sort of slavery that unraveled the Roman Republic. Instead of rich businesses bringing slaves in to work, they take the work to the slaves, all for the purpose of undermining their smaller competitors in the domestic market, who cannot afford to exploit the same rules.

Trade with Mexico has largely been a game of cost shifting. Other than weed and meth, Mexico is incapable of producing much of anything other than excess people. Trade deals with Mexico, however, have allowed global enterprise to shift their cost of doing business onto the American middle-class through declining wages, higher taxes and social instability. “Free trade” with Mexico has some real benefits to Americans, but it brings real costs too, costs that outweigh the benefits.

When you look at trade with China, the cost side starts to fill up with all sorts of indirect items. How much has Chinese hacking, theft and piracy cost America? I know a firm that has spent millions to keep China from pirating their product. A trick China uses is to flood the market with a sub-standard version of an American product, thus damaging the reputation of the American firm. How many dogs and cats were killed by Chinese pet food additives? How much will it cost us to defend Japan and Taiwan from Chinese aggression?

The point here is that trade is a good thing, but only when it is a net positive to the American people as a whole. Deals that allow plutocrats to shift their costs to the public so they can privatize profits are not good deals. Trump pointing that out does not make him a protectionist. It makes him a realist. It’s the innumerate phonies, clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, desperately trying to shut off these debates, who are divorced from reality. Trade, like all pubic policy, is about trade-offs. Those trade-offs are debated in a healthy society.

The Great Culture War

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Now that Donald Trump is about to clinch the Republicans nomination, the professional pundits, who got everything about this election wrong, are now busy trying to explain what it all means. The increasingly deranged Left is trying to jam all of it into their bizarre world view that says they are noble heroes fighting the dragon of oppression. On the Buckley Right, they are feverishly searching about for villains so they can avoid facing the reality of their position.

The one thing both sides agree upon is that Trump is being carried to the nomination by a wave of heroin addicts from the hill country. These snaggle toothed losers are angry at having been out-competed by the dusky fellows in foreign lands. Left out of the global nirvana, where well-scrubbed boys and girls take up positions in the media and think tanks, these hapless losers are lashing out by supporting Trump. It is the revolt of the hillbillies.

There is another thing both sides agree upon. Modern Progressives and Buckley Conservatives both hate the people to their Right. As Progressives have relentlessly dragged the Overton Window to the Left, The Buckley-ites have sprinted after them, fearful of being lumped in with the rabble to their Right. The window has been dragged so far to the Left that the number of people “on the right” is looking like a swelling majority. To the people peering out from their think tanks and limousines, however, we are on the verge of mob rule.

All of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over Trump disguises the fact that the American Left is collapsing. One place you see it is with their candidates. Hillary Clinton is a world class screw up planning to run as an old hen clucking about the men, with a mild whiff of lesbianism to spice it up. No wonder the 2000 year old man is giving her a run for her stolen money. The Left has nothing to offer so it coughed up these geriatric hairballs from the 1970’s.

In theory this should be good news for the Buckley-ites, but that has not been the result. Decades of trading away everything to the Left for a chance to guide foreign policy has left the Buckley-ites incapable of winning fights over cultural and economic issues. They have been surrendering for so long, it is now their default response. Worse yet, they have been trained to scold the rest of us about the need for compromise whenever the Left assaults a part of the culture.

There is another piece to this. Over the last quarter century, politics for both sides have become incredibly lucrative and largely unimportant. They risk nothing as money flows into Washington no matter which side is ascendant. When 90% of incumbents win reelection, there is never really much at stake for them. For the metastasizing pundit and think tank class, politics has been reduced to theater, like the battles at those medieval themed restaurants. Winning is not important. Putting on a good show for each other is what matters to them.

Outside the government class, it is a different story. Normal Americans are the ones paying the price for gesture politics. John McCain can be generous on immigration because he never experiences it. He lives in one of his wife’s twenty-three mansions, rides in government limousines and works in fortified government facilities. Men like John McCain live as strangers in this country. What they see of it is from a safe distance.

Similarly, the chattering skulls on television pull down six figure salaries and live in bunkered, whites-only communities. It is not an accident that they are crowded into the richest counties on earth, all of them around Washington DC. They are the petty royalty of the ruling class. To these people, normal Americans are aliens, indistinguishable from the people sneaking over the border.

The reality of the last quarter century for normal Americans is vastly different from the reality of the political class and the financial elites. Across the land has been a great stagnation, covered over by easy credit and financial legerdemain. For the average American, treading water has been a struggle, with many falling behind and losing faith in a system that no longer seems equitable. Mass media magnifies the yawning gap between the “winners” and the vast majority.

No one, on the Left or the Right, speaks to this. Instead, it is a repetition of the old platitudes from yesteryear. One side promotes minoritism at the expense of the middle and the other side champions globalist capitalism dressed up with libertarian moralizing. The tone and substance of the rhetoric suggests both sides see the common American citizen as the threat. It is as if we have been colonized. The rulers need us, but they detest us for it and can never trust us, because down deep, they are not one of us.

Almost a quarter century ago Pat Buchanan gave his infamous Culture War speech at the Republican convention. In it he said, “This election is about more than who gets what. It is about who we are. It is about what we believe, and what we stand for as Americans. There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as was the Cold War itself, for this war is for the soul of America.”

It has taken decades, but the American people may be prepared to join the fight finally.

The End Is Near

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I’ve always liked to think of the Hebrew Bible as mostly a collection of doomsayers who got lucky and were right. Lost to the mists of time are the thousands of guys who stood around Israel claiming that the end was near, only to live out their lives never seeing things get worse, much less come to an end. Ahijah the Shilonite’s grandfather spent his time claiming the son of David would turn out to be a no-goodnik so no one bothered to write his story.

Doomsaying seems to be a part of the human condition. John Derbyshire places it within the conservative tradition and that makes some sense. The Rousseau-ists imagine Utopia is just a few more committee meetings away from reality so doomsaying does not fit their style. Conservatives are naturally skeptical and therefore would imagine that disaster is much more likely to be awaiting the schemes of man. Then again, it’s easy to be skeptical of the doom and gloom claims too, so maybe Derb is wrong.

Still, you cannot deny that things have, from time to time, gone terribly wrong for mankind. The collapse of Rome set back human development for a thousand years. The Mongol Invasion exterminated Islamic intellectual life. It never did recover. The Black Plague killed off a third or more of Europe. The Sea People swept in from somewhere north of the Mediterranean, we think, and ushered in the collapse of Bronze Age civilizations.

That said, the last real threat to humanity was the Black Death and it probably made humans west of the Hajnal Line better in the long run. That’s hotly debated, but we did survive it. I guess you could put the nuclear standoff between the Russians and the US down as a near death experience for humanity. Whether or not it would have happened is debatable, but we survived that one too. So far, the doomsayers have been all wrong.

Then again, maybe we are long overdue for a great reset of the human condition.

The rise of robots and deadly viruses are among the threats that could wipe out swathes of humanity – but governments are failing to prepare properly for them, a new report warns

Catastrophic climate change, nuclear war and natural disasters such as super volcanoes and asteroids could also pose a deadly risk to mankind, researchers said.

It may sound like the stuff of sci-fi films, but experts said these apocalyptic threats are more likely than many realise.

The report Global Catastrophic Risks, compiled by a team from Oxford University, the Global Challenges Foundation and the Global Priorities Project, ranks dangers that could wipe out 10% or more of the human population.

It warns that while most generations never experience a catastrophe, they are far from fanciful, as the bouts of plague and the 1918 Spanish flu that wiped out millions illustrated.

Sebastian Farquhar, director at the Global Priorities Project, told the Press Association: “There are some things that are on the horizon, things that probably won’t happen in any one year but could happen, which could completely reshape our world and do so in a really devastating and disastrous way.

“History teaches us that many of these things are more likely than we intuitively think.”Many of these risks are changing and growing as technologies change and grow and reshape our world. But there are also things we can do about the risks.”

If there could be such a thing as a betting market for the next great calamity for man, I’d put my wager on disease. We have the technology now to look out into the heavens for asteroids and we know we are safe for now. Space aliens are probably too far away to ever be a threat, assuming they even exist, which is looking doubtful. That leaves the things that can occur locally as sources of the Apocalypse.

A financial crash is a good bet. The highly complex economic arrangements we have today have no plan B if things go wrong. A century ago, electronic transactions did not exist. Today they are the heart of commerce. If that breaks, we suddenly live in a world without money. That will spiral out of control so fast government could never respond in time to head off calamity.

Another take on this is a collapse of the electrical grid. The real currency of the West is the electron traveling over copper wire. If some Exploding Mohameds set off a nuke and collapse the grid, western civilization stops. A world without cellphones, computers and television becomes a world of shotguns, food riots and warlords. Just take a second to imagine a world without TV and the internet.

Of course, this brings up the old standby from my youth, the nuclear holocaust. This has dropped from the culture, but there are more than enough nukes in the world to wipe out humanity. The Pakis have nukes. The NORKs have the bomb and maybe an ICBM soon. The Russians have nukes and they are due for have a crazy Ivan gain control of the country. We don’t talk about it anymore, but nuclear holocaust is still an option.

For my money, the best bet seems to be disease. The Zika virus now flowing north from Brazil is a good example. Disease spreads best in high density areas. The modern world has loads of high density areas for diseases and all it takes is one lucky mutation and blammo! We have a new plague ravaging mankind. Something like Zika that is spread by mosquito is a great example. Even quarantine will not work against this kind of plague.

Another element we have to day that works well for pandemics is the mass movement of people. The Spanish Flu was most likely the result of the Great War. Troops carried the disease all over Europe and then back to their home countries. The exact source of this strain of flu is still unknown, but the mass movement of people is certainly the way it spread.

Millions of Muslims pouring into Europe, as well as millions of South Americans pouring into the US is already increasing disease rates. Things like Whooping Cough have shown up in America after a long absence. Some new flavor of an old disease, like Zika or Ebola, that can be spread by mosquitoes could easily unleash a new plague on humanity. In weeks these guys would suddenly expect to have books of the new Bible named after them.

The Automat of the Future

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When my grandmother was young, she and her friends would go to the theater to see newsreels, which were the mass media of the age. The only other way to reach a lot of people was radio and newspapers. A common theme of newsreels was to talk about the glorious future of labor saving devices. A century ago, a new labor saving invention was coming every day so it certainly felt like humanity was accelerating forward.

The only reason I know about this is my grandmother would tell me about it when I was a boy. She liked to talk about how she would spend the day at the theater watching newsreels about the kitchen of the future that pretty much looked like her current kitchen. In 1920 having a blender in the kitchen was the driverless car of the day. By the time my mother was having kits, everyone had one.

The point my grandmother was making at the time is that the glorious future is never all that glorious when you get there. When she was a young girl, kitchen appliances would make being a wife and mother a breeze. That’s not how it happened. Being a wife and mother was pretty much the same, just with electric appliances instead of manual ones.

Of course, the American kitchen did not accelerate into the glorious future. It pretty much stopped around 1965 and has remained there every since. The fridge is a little better and dishwashers are better, but incrementally. The person of 1965 transported to today would not marvel at your Sub-Zero fridge. They would be stunned that it was unpainted, but that’s about it.

That’s something to keep in mind when listening to sermons on the robot future. The future is rarely as promised and when it is, it turns out to be rather mundane. My grandmother was promised a self-cleaning kitchen and instead got a dishwasher that required her to rise the dishes first. My mother was promised a kitchen that made food at a touch of a button, but only got a microwave out of it. The Jetson’s kitchen never arrived and probably never will.

The economics of technological innovation are what limit the result set. There’s not much to improve upon in a modern kitchen. The robot stove that delivers the turkey to the table would be really cool, but no one is buying one or reorganizing their house to accommodate it. The stove we have is good enough so there’s no reason to invent a new one. The microwave oven, the last great innovation in cooking, was an accident.

That’s what should limit enthusiasm for the robot future. Those self-learning machines from Skynet are going to enter a world of double-entry accounting. All of their advances will come with trade-offs. Those trade-offs are the boundary preventing you from having a jetpak and flying car. These things are possible, but the trade-offs make them unworkable. For as long as I have been alive men have been trying to solve the jetpak problem and all efforts have ended in tears.

The robot future will run into similar trouble as we see with the automated fast food restaurant. This is basically an Automat pitched as something new. When I was a kid, one of my memories was going to an Automat on a family excursion where you could buy food from a vending machine. By the time I hit adulthood, eating from a vending machine was for single men and drug addicts.

From the article:

On Tuesday, the Financial Times reported on an analysis by Deloitte that found that the UK had already lost 31,000 jobs in the legal sector to automation, and projected that another 114,000 jobs would be next.

It’s all happening very fast. In 2013, MIT engineering professor John Leonard told the MIT Technology Review that “robots simply replacing humans” would not happen in his lifetime. “The semi-autonomous taxi will still have a driver,” he argued. Today, Google’s autonomous cars have traveled more than 1m miles on public streets, and self-driving taxis seem all but inevitable.

Sharkey expects that the service industry will be particularly hard hit. He estimates that by 2018 there will be 35 million service robots “at work”.

A bartending robot named “Monsieur” is already on the market. A hardware store in San Jose, California has a retail associate robot named “Oshbot.” The UK salad bar chain Tossedreportedly announced this month that two outlets in London would have self-service kiosks instead of cashiers. On Thursday, Domino’s Australia unveiled a pizza delivery robot in Brisbane.

Notice no one every talks about the trade-offs. Let’s assume the Automat of the future is human-less, which is not the case, but we’ll pretend anyway. Who will be the customers for these things? Throw tens of millions out of work and they have no money to buy Extra Big-Ass Fries from the Hardees robot. That puts an end to the robot future in a hurry. Until that puzzle is solved, there will be no robot future.

Then there’s something else. I don’t want to buy food and drinks at the ATM. I rarely go out to eat for lunch, but when I do it is to get out among people. The girl at the local deli is cute and I enjoy ogling her. The waiter is friendly and I enjoy chatting with him. I like the fact that the Greek family that owns the deli is onto the third generation now. You don’t replace that with robots.

The future imagined at any time tells us more about the people imagining it than the people who will create it. In the 1950’s, fear of nuclear war drove sci-fi and horror movies to imagine all sorts of monsters born from technological error. In those newsreels a century ago, when people were more optimistic, the future was bright and happy for humans. Technological progress promises prosperity. The fact that we dream of electric sheep says a lot about us, but little about the future.

The robot future imagined by our overlords is nothing like that glorious future sold to my grandmother in newsreels. Her glorious future was a great time to be alive. American would be free from the mundane to conquer the world. The robot future sold today is sterile and joyless, a great time to take advantage of the suicide kiosk at the mall. The great minds of our age say the future is pointless. Instead of a singularity, it will be a nullity.

Unless humanity is hardwired to self-destruct, that will not be the future. Life always finds a way. If it is truly pointless, then we will follow the path of the panda, except we will have built our own enclosures. Then again, those young men streaming over the border are full of hope for their future so maybe they just displace the people working on the sterile robot future. It’s hard to know, but the future will not be what our overlords imagine, at least not for them.

Culture and Cycling

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A good rule in life is that anything that has value is being faked. People in the collectibles business just assume everything is fake until proven otherwise. A fun book to read on art forgery is called The Art of the Con. Some of the scams described are rather outlandish, which makes it  fun read, but the theme throughout is always the same. If it has value, someone will find a way to fake it.

Of course, this is true everywhere. Baseball had a steroid scandal because there was money to be made in getting bigger, faster and stronger through any means available. If a drug could make you taller, then basketball would have a problem with it. Endurance sports like soccer and tennis have problems with players using drugs to increase endurance. The drug Sharapova used was to increase her cardiovascular capacity.

The thing with cheating is that the risk-reward relationship does not always make a lot of sense. In the art world, forgers will fake relatively cheap prints that make a small profit for them. They face the same risks as with faking a Rembrandt, but the rewards are relatively small. In sports, athletes will use steroids even though they are already at the top of their game. How much of a boost did Ryan Braun get from cheating versus what it cost him?

Some sports seem to have a culture of cheating, while others do not. Cycling and track and field are riddled with cheating. There are more great cheaters than great champions in those sports. Everyone cheats and that’s just the way it is. Golf on the other hand, has little cheating and actually relies on a rather austere honor code. Players have lost tournaments because they volunteered their own rule violations.

The thing that fascinates me is the cheating in cycling. No sport has the level of exotic cheating that we see here. It’s not just the Tour either. They cheat down in the minor leagues too.

A professional cyclist has been banned for six years after it was discovered she was racing with a hidden electric motor. Femke Van den Driessche was caught at the UCI Cyclo­cross World Championships in January, during an inspection of her pit area. A magnetic resonance scan, which Road.ccreports was conducted with a tablet, allowed officials to spot a battery and Vivax motor in the seat tube. Van den Driessche could have activated it using a Bluetooth switch concealed under her handlebar tape. She denied the allegations at the time, claiming the bike was given to her by mistake.

That’s complete nonsense, of course. Here’s a pic of how the motor was hidden in the bike.

 

 

 

 

 

The technology involved here is not something you do in your garage with some simple hand tools. The down tube is 31.6 mm in diameter so slipping a motor and battery into it required some smart guys with access to high quality machine tools. There is a company that makes this device, but it would not fit a racing bike. That and it costs $3000 for the cheap model. This level of sophistication is closer to $10,000.

The puzzle here is why would they go to these lengths? Cycling is not sport where the pros make big money. Even at the top level, the typical pro is simply living on an allowance of sorts. Their room and board is covered and they get to keep prize money, which is not a lot. They make more money selling their spare bikes and parts than they make off the tour.

At the cyclocross level, it’s a hobby, even though it is called professional. The sponsors cover the travel costs, room and board. They supply the bikes. This woman could expect to take home a few bikes after the season and sell them for enough to buy a used Toyota. Even if she was the greatest cyclocross rider in history, she was never going to make big money. Maybe she could hook on with a manufacturer one day in the marketing department.

Despite this reality, she and her team went to great lengths to find a tiny advantage. Realistically, how much of an edge could this device give her? The size limitation means the motor produced little power. The weight of the thing added about 10 kg to the frame, which makes a huge difference at this level of racing. Maybe the cheating helped this woman a tiny bit, but was it worth the lifetime ban and humiliation?

It’s another example of how any system that relies on humans acting rationally or purely in their self-interest is doomed to failure. Some people like cheating. Some people get off on the thrill of breaking rules. Every society has free loaders. More important, people are not always very good at discerning their best interest. Walk around my neighborhood on a summer day and you see that fact in living color.

There’s also the fact that culture is very hard to change. Cycling has been plagued with cheating for decades. Draconian punishments for drug use have only made the riders more clever at taking drugs. Track has a similar problem. There’s something about the people in the sport that leads to the rampant rule breaking. Barring imposition of a 24×7 surveillance of everyone involved, these sports will be riddled with cheating.

That’s the lesson here. Culture is not a collection of rules drawn up in a committee hearing. The rules of a society are the result of the culture, not the other way around. If you want an orderly society or an honest sport, populate it with orderly, high trust people. The results will follow. Similarly, introduce a bunch low-trust people and order will break down quickly. In the case of cycling, its biggest problem is it is full of cyclists.

Voting in the Ghetto

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For years now I have been threatening to drop off the voting rolls, but I always find some excuse to vote every election. I have skipped some minor elections and I skipped 2012, but in the latter case it was mostly out of disgust. Standing in line knowing my vote counted for nothing and knowing I was expected to vote for the rabid pussies ticket was just too much. Maybe if the line had been shorter, I would have stuck it out and voted, but I bolted and skipped the whole election.

When you live in a one party state, voting really is a waste of time. The best you can hope to do is make some trouble. I vote against all of the ballot measures, for example. They tend to fail so I suspect I am not the only one who does it. In the primary, I will vote for the most deranged Democrat on the ballot. Again, this is out of pure spite. As a white man, the Democrat Party has nothing to offer me, but I can throw sand in their gears.

Voting in the ghetto has the added feature of seeing aspects of the underclass you do not often see. Even in the poorest neighborhoods, there are civic minded people. There is a nice black woman I see around town who works the polls every year. In the ghetto, the polling places are always run by black women. It makes sense. They are the people responsible for raising the children until they are old enough to go off to prison.

The other aspect of this is they love seeing honkies voting. I walked into the polling place and the nice black ladies lit up like I was a long lost relative. At some level, they sense that the presence of the honky is a good sign. We are the canary in the coal mine. When the honky leaves, your neighborhood is forever lost. Seeing me in the neighborhood and taking the time to vote means there is still some hope for the place.

I did not see any Hispanics voting yesterday. In past elections, I would see an organizer from the party ushering in the local illegals to vote for the party candidates. That is something our rulers never can grasp. They think all of these foreign imports will vote, but that is not how it works. People vote if they have a stake in the society and think voting matters. More important, they vote for one of their own so he can represent them.

All elections are theater and American elections are theater for white people mostly. Blacks participate, but solely as furniture for the good whites. All the signaling and language is aimed at whites and blacks. Neither party has the slightest idea how to do anything but the white-man overbite in front of these “diverse communities” during election season. Pandering and free stuff is just not going to get Jose interested in voting.

The funny thing I did see at the polling station was a couple of black ladies holding Trump signs. I have never seen anyone promoting a Republican in this neighborhood so that was a first. Trump being treated like ghetto trash by the party big shots is not missed by the black ladies. Black people are vastly more in tune with the subtleties of respect than the typical honky. Black people see what is happening with Trump and they relate.

That does not mean Trump will win many black votes. It just means they have no reason to fear him. That is why I suspect Hillary is in deep trouble. Blacks will vote for her over an old Jew, but they are not turning out in big numbers for her unless the Republicans run someone scary. Trump does not scare black people. In fact, blacks seem to respect him and appreciate his showmanship. It is a small thing but politics is a game of small things.

One of the goofier things yesterday is we are now back to paper ballots. The Left has been trying to shake down Diebold and ES&S for years. These are the firms that make the computer voting gear. Since they cannot get these companies to rig the machines in favor of the party, the party has made war on the companies. At least in Maryland, the campaign has worked so we are back to paper ballots. I guess if the paper company is found to be run by a conservative, I will be voting with colored rocks next time.

The other silly bit was how the party nominates delegates to the convention. I picked from a slate of women and a slate of men. By rule, the seven delegates voted to the convention must be four biological women and three biological men. You just know where this is headed. A few more turns of the wheel and there will be a list for the one tranny, the one left handed gay ginger and so on. The Democrats are the party of lunatics and black people now.

As to the results, it is pretty clear that the public has grown tired of the primary drama and has settled on Trump and Clinton. Sanders will stagger on for another month as he has the money and nothing better to do with his time. Cruz and Kasich will be looking to drop out in a week. The Trump sweep will give him momentum for next week’s Indiana primary, which is the last stand for the Cult of Never Trump.

Female Trouble

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Looking back, we had, in the person of Teddy Roosevelt, the finest President in the history of this country. He had the spirit and determination that matched the times and the land. Then the women got the vote, and everything went to hell. While our boys was overseas fighting the Kaiser, the women got Prohibition put in. Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.

–The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

One of the more obvious aspects of the modern lynch mob is it is almost always composed of women. Sure, there will be men tagging along, maybe throwing in some shots of their own, but the organizers are always women. Maybe a homosexual male will start it with a point and shriek, but 99 times out of 100, the person organizing the lynch mob is going to be a woman. She will sound the alarm and the rest of the coven will arrive, ready to set fire to the wicker man.

The social justice warrior phenomenon is mostly a product of Facebook and Twitter, as these services made it easier for stupid people to get on-line and blast their idiocy worldwide. As a result, unhinged young women now have easy access to a megaphone. Whenever one of them gets the boo-hoos or feels slighted by a man, she can give a couple of blasts on the horn and before long we have #gamergate or some other nonsense controversy.

That’s the most striking feature of the social justice warrior phenomenon. It is young, unattached females. Put #gamegate into a google machine and the third hit is a blog run by a lonely, unstable female. In fact, feminism today is just that, lonely unattached females looking for a purpose to their lives. Instead of snagging  a husband and having kids, they kit themselves out like extras from the freak show and scream at men for not loving them. Instead of tending to children, they talk endlessly about their unused female parts.

Much of what is going wrong in the West is some version of what we are seeing with the endless hashtag campaigns run by women. The female of our species has a biological purpose. That’s to find a suitable mate, bear children and raise them to sexual maturity. That’s nature’s assignment to women. Anything else is either in support of that purpose, frivolous or in opposition to biological necessity.

The result of a century of feminism is a society that works against the interests of women. Young men are no longer obligated to get married and be family men. In fact, being a traditional male is routinely mocked by popular culture. All the pressure on men is to not get married. Instead, males have easy sexual access to females, to whom they have no obligation, other than cab fare to the abortion clinic.

It’s not just young females who are suffering from a century of feminism. Middle-aged women have always faced a difficult time. The kids leave and the mother’s purpose expires. Every man over the age of 40 understands that women often go bonkers at this stage of life. They get into weird causes or begin to obsess over trying to look young. Because we live in an age where so many women made it to this age without bearing children, we now have a surplus of women like Melissa Click.

At the risk of sounding like a neanderthal, Mx. Click should be somewhere doting on grandchildren right now, not out making a nuisance of herself. Instead, the self-defeating religion of feminism guides her into self-destructive behavior that has led to a life of frustration. That frustration comes from pursuing an endless list of causes and movements that can never satisfy the biological urge. Her life is an endless itch that can never be scratched.

We are learning the hard way that Aristophanes was right all along. A society run by women can never work. And the West is run by women, make no mistake. This pic of the defense ministers of Europe is a regular on twitter. The most powerful country in the EU is run by an old maid. The US could very well install an old lesbian as president this fall. Liberal men spend their days watching cuckold porn and trying on sundresses, while writing angry posts about bathroom laws.

This is not a stable arrangement, which is why the West is struggling to perform the basics of a human society. The women of Europe are demanding open borders, which drives up their mating opportunities. That’s biology. The trouble is the young men arriving see the women as utterly useless as women, beyond momentary sexual release. That’s the rapefugee crisis in a nutshell. The Muslims are right. The West is run by whores and homosexuals.

This will not end well.

The Prison Vote

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The corrupt governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, announced the other day that ex-cons will be granted the vote just in time of the presidential election. His assumption is that identity politics being what it is, the ex-con vote will naturally flock to Hillary Clinton, supporting someone they see as their own. There has always been an assumption that convicts, if given the chance, will vote for people like themselves.

That is the assumption. The reality is something different. Ex-cons tend not to vote at all. Those who would be inclined to vote are those who have gone the other way with their lives, embracing religion or social advocacy to help ex-cons get on the right path. It is a small club that will not make a difference in an election. Their party choice will most likely be along racial lines. The honkies voting for the Christian Republicans and the blacks voting for Liberal Democrats.

What is really going on here is an attempt to energize the black vote, particularly the female black vote. There is an assumption among white plutocrats that because so many black men are in prison, black women are naturally soft on crime. Liberals have done the math and realized that Obama won states like Virginia the first time on the overwhelming turnout among black women. Without black women voting in large numbers, he may have lost in 2012.

The image of the wailing black woman, as her son is led away to prison, is what they have in mind. They think by being soft on crime, they can appeal to that voter. Of course, that same black woman will be the first one yelling that the police do not do their job, so it is more complicated than the rich honkies understand. That and the last time I checked; Hillary is not a charming black man. That is what these black women saw in 2008, not a cackling hag promising treats.

There is also an HBD assumption in the weeds here. Lefty will call you a racist for noticing that blacks commit an enormous amount of crime, but they base their political calculations on it. They make assumptions about blacks that would make the Aryan Brotherhood blush. Even the AB understands that not all black people think alike. That has always been the thing with Lefty. He talks like MLK but lives like the KKK.

Whether or not ex-cons should be allowed to vote is a tricky subject. On the one hand, we have the idea of paying your debt to society. You break the law and you pay the price for it. Once the price is paid, your rights are restored. Including the right to vote makes a lot of sense. The argument here is that we want to encourage ex-cons to become good citizens and the promise of a second chance is an incentive. Either you paid your debt or you still owe, there’s no in between.

Of course, the right to own a gun should also be restored, but you can be sure no one will ever ask Liberal Democrats about that issue. That is the reason the Wuss Right is in trouble. They simply refuse to go on offense. They should be attacking the Left on this very issue. Make it about the Left’s gun grabbing. That is how you win at politics. Always be on offense and force the other guy to defend his positions. But they are called the Wuss Right for a reason.

Libertarians would go even further and say we should not maintain public crime records. Once a person has fulfilled their obligations to the criminal justice system, they should not have to carry the burden of a criminal record. The argument here is a youthful indiscretion can haunt someone for the rest of their days and that is not in the public interest. Sealing the criminal records after the punishment has been served lets the offender rejoin society with a clean slate.

Keeping this stuff a secret, however, is now impossible. Put a name into Google and you can quickly find their criminal history. The Social Justice Warriors and the people who fight them use this basic tool all the time to unearth damaging information. Stop exposing criminal records to the public and a private firm will step in and do it. Imagine Apple running a criminal database. Tim Cook would expunge the records of the sodomites, but enhance the records of Christians.

Putting that aside, I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument in favor of restoring all rights to ex-cons. I have met more than a few men who lost their franchise due to being knuckleheads in their youth. They got into the drug game and eventually got busted. They went onto live normal productive lives, but were barred from voting and had to explain their criminal record to every potential employer. How that serves the public interest is hard to explain.

On the other hand, giving murderers and child molesters a clean slate is against the best interests of society. Sex crimes arise from deep psychological defects that can never be fixed. Murder is a crime against the very nature of human society that can never be truly forgiven. Housing these people in cages may not be practical, but ostracizing them via the scarlet letter is something the public will always demand. This is where my penal colony idea looks fairly good. Sex offender island would solve this problem.