Author Archives: thezman

Forever Young

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My plan to live forever was pretty simple. I sat for a painting of myself and then set off on a life of hedonism. It looks like I was not the only guy working on this. Google is pouring money in the quest to defeat death.

Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology: Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn, a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.

“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris, it’s business.

This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”

Unsurprisingly, I’m skeptical. Since the great leap forward in medicine and diet, particularly for the treatment of infections, life expectancy has crept up slowly. In 1930, the typical white male lived to 62. Today the typical white male lives to 79. That’s a nice increase, but it has been a slow steady increase. It suggest the big increases in health and longevity have been realized.

That’s not to say there’s not some great leaps coming soon. Genetics offers up some opportunities to understand aging. There may be some ways to slow the process and extend lifespan. Cancer treatments, oddly enough, are adding greatly to our understanding of how cells age and die. Some cancer drugs are slowing aging in mice so there may be some quality of life things coming shortly.

Of course, this is being driven by the Boomer generation. Twenty years ago the rush was on to fix baldness and limp noodles. Now the rush is on to fix decrepitude. It’s not just Google pouring money into it. All of the big pharma companies are rushing to find the next big drug and that drug will be to ameliorate the effects of aging. If you were thinking the boomers were about to start dying off, you may be disappointed.

I’m not sure how I feel about living to 500. Men in my family live into their 90’s and in good shape until the end. I don’t recall any of them wishing they had more time, but I have no way of knowing what they thought in their last blinks. I suspect they missed their friends who had all gone before them.

That’s a big part of it. If I was going to live to 500, I don’t want to be the only 500 year old. That could have some advantages, but it would also be lonely. I find talking to someone half my age a chore and that’s decades. Imagine have a few centuries of experience on everyone else. I’d probably be the world’s biggest asshole.

NRx @ NRO

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For a while now I have been skimming the posts at National Review Online under the blog Post-Modern Conservative. I don’t know how long it has been running, but it is not new, just new to me. I see the phrase “post-modern” and I assume that what is behind it is awful. Post-modern is weird for the sake of being weird. It’s also an abuse of language.

There are two people posting there, neither of whom are familiar to me. I’ve learned with the modern media to research the credentials of writers as they are often just actors. Economic “experts” are journalism majors with no business experience. Legal experts are reporters who got a JD at night school between jobs, but never bothered to take the bar. It’s all a big show. Carl Eric Scott is a mystery, but Peter Augustine Lawler is a college professor and a regular at conservative publications.

I hesitate to call them neo-reactionary only because I hate the term and it seems to cover just about everyone not on red team or blue team. Putting John Derbyshire and Steve Sailer in the same bucket as Jayman and Nick Land looks like a category error to me. This map always struck me as a great way to map the stars outside of conventional thinking. The change I would make is to put the modes of modern thought in the center in relation to one another and have the Dark Enlightenment guys surrounding the core, sort of like an asteroid belt or debris field.

I must admit that I could never get through Mencius Moldbug’s series of posts. The opaque style never did it for me. Plus, I think you need to get to the point in blog posts. People are reading this at lunch or on break. They don’t have all day to look up obscure references and contemplate the use of language. Having gone to Jesuit schools where writing is taught to be a utilitarian task, I guess I have no appreciation for the aesthetics of the DE. It is that aesthetic that I see on the NRO blog. The posts are long winded and plaintive, as if they were written by men on death row.

There’s an age thing here as well. I’ve always got the sense that Mencius Moldbug and Nick Land spend way too much time working on their Frodo costumes. It is not that they wish to roll back the enlightenment and return to feudalism. They wish to roll back time and return to their childhood, reading Tolkien and dreaming of life in Middle Earth. There’s a graphic comic book quality to their writing that I find a bit off-putting.

These are small criticisms and mostly about style. I think their view of the managerial state as a fusion of class and religion is pretty close to my view of the modern West. The other difference here is I don’t pretend to have invented a philosophical school around this observation. Paleocons like Sam Francis and Paul Gottfried were writing about this stuff when Moldbug was in diapers. James Burnham was working out the details of the managerial elite before the managerial elite existed.

Getting back to that NRO blog, it is much more of a paleo thing than a DE thing, in that they don’t get into the LoTR stuff or call for a return to feudalism. Unlike the paleos, they are assiduously avoiding the elephant in the room, which is race.  Lawler is a college professor so he has spent a life being cautious about the ever changing list of proscribed topics. Instead, they seem to be focused on the shape and direction of a post-liberal world where 18th century ideas of liberty are no longer relevant.

What’s interesting to me is NR purged all of its paleocons a decade ago. The last few holdouts were purged within the last decade. John Derbyshire and Bob Weissberg were the last two from the paleocon tribe. NR bringing back a sort of paleocon-lite is a curious development. It suggest that maybe Conservative Inc recognizes they are in an intellectual cul-de-sac. They can’t come out and say Pat Buchanan was right about the Bush family after all, but maybe the wheels are finally turning with the professional Right. They are noticing that the cage door is now closed, not locked yet, but closed.

National Review started as a rejection of the accommodations made by the Old Right, in reaction to the growing excesses of the Left. Here we are at the end of another Great Liberal Awakening, in which the conventional Right has been defenestrated, and National Review is showing some signs of grasping in the dark, so to speak, for a new reason to exist. It will be interesting to see how it unfolds. I’m skeptical as long as they avoid biology, which remains the elephant in the room of Rousseau-ism. But, it bears watching.

Skoolz are Brokin

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I don’t have a lot of interest in the education. I think humans are born with a degree of natural intelligence. We are also born with certain broad personality traits. Both are inherited from our ancestors. The witch’s brew of DNA is that makes us what we are is set in the womb and there’s not a whole lot we (or anyone else) can do about it. With regards to education, kids will learn what kids want to learn to the level their abilities will allow. No system will change that.

Americans of the modern age reject the above as crime-think. Everyone is sure that the right schools, the right teachers and the right methods can make everyone above average, as George Bush put it. A lot of this is bound up in anti-racism, which is almost a religion all its own these days. By focusing on the schools and the methods, it allows everyone to ignore the students walking through the schoolroom door. Disparities in test scores become proof that everyone must redouble their efforts to “fix” the schools.

Anyway, this was in my twitter feed the other day. It is a long description of a private school by a public school teacher who has decided the public schools are not for his kid. The tone suggest the author is racked with guilt and searching for some reason why the private schools are so much better than the public school. Well, a reason that does not touch on the taboos that make frank discussion of education impossible. As a public school teacher, the author is required to promote all the whack-a-doodle ideas that define public education in America, but he loves his kid so he is in a tough spot.

The comments are hilarious as you see all the lunacy on display, with regards to education. This article was also in my twitter feed. It must be education week on twitter. The general thrust is that we need more data to come up with the perfect solution to education. This strikes me as another way to avoid the rushing reality of the classroom.  We have mountains of data and everyone pretty much knows the truth, but mokita. The comment from Aida McAuly is why education policy is a dog’s breakfast of crackpottery.

The whole premise of this article is wrong. School should not be about
“content”, that which can be measured with tests. Rather, it should be
about inspiring curiosity, building empathy (which can be done with
mixed age, race, ethnicity and ability classrooms) and encouraging
exploration and collaboration. Those elements are the essence of what
determine the quality of a human being’s life. I’m sorry to deflate
Wired’s fascination with everything technological, but unless we begin
to look at education from a developmental perspective, which takes into
account not just our brain, but our 5 senses, our need for movement,
choice in what we learn and when we learn it, being able to make genuine
contributions to a learning community through purposeful work, we’ll
continue to chase our tails. Any by the way, if you are curious about
what type of education offers engagement in all of these…go visit an
authentic Montessori classroom today. To the dismay of many of the
“data advocates” reading this article, you won’t find screens but you
will see very happy, engaged children concentrating at extremely high
levels for long periods of time.

There’s simply no way to include crazy people in the discussion without getting batshit crazy results, which is why our pubic schools are a dumpster fire.

 

 

 

 

Oh, I Think I Know The Answer

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This headline is one of those questions that answers itself. “The Apple Watch: Is it a gadget or a fashion statement?” I’m fond of pointing out that the correlation between the mobility of an Apple product and its popularity. The great innovation of the iPod was not the technology. It was the marketing. Having an iPod made you hip, youthful and edgy. Don Imus spent a year asking every guest what they had on their iPod as part of his act. The iPod quickly became a fashion statement.

Apple CEO Tim Cook summed up the problem during a conversation with sales staff at a London Apple Store: “We’ve never sold anything as a company that people could try on before.”

With the expected launch next month of the Apple Watch, the company’s first new product in five years, Apple will be stepping into new territory.

To conquer the marketplace, the watch will have to appeal not only as a gadget but as a fashion statement, a fact tacitly acknowledged by Apple’s decision to launch its advertising campaign with a 12-page insert in the March issue of Vogue.

The company isn’t talking about plans for marketing the Apple Watch in advance of it’s much-touted “Spring Forward” event on Monday, but it clearly intends to keep a tight grip on initial sales and distribution, leaving many retailers guessing about when — or if — they’ll be able to sell it.

Sources with direct knowledge of the matter said that Best Buy Co Inc, one of the largest sellers of Apple products, may not get the watch at launch time, though the company wouldn’t comment on the situation.

Other large retailers, including Macy’s, Saks 5th Avenue, Bloomingdales and Barney’s said they had no immediate plans to carry the watch. Target and Nordstrom,along with all the major phone carriers, declined to comment on their plans, though a source with knowledge of the situation said Nordstrom has engaged in discussions with Apple.

“Apple is being cautious. There are too many unknowns around how this product will perform,” said Van Baker, research vice-president, technology research firm Gartner Inc.

Another one of my themes is the fact that the big returns from the communications revolution have been realized. What’s left is marginal stuff like making the phone smaller or giving it a snazzier exterior. Turning it into a watch is another example. This is a device with no practical application so it has to be a fashion item. Apple is about to become ironic.

The reports I’ve read suggest the response may not be as expected. Even diehard Apple users have to be wondering why they need a smart watch. Most probably gave up wearing a watch a long time ago. Putting their current apps on a watch makes little sense. Apple has been humping this thing as a fitness tool, but that space is pretty crowded. A bunch of these things that sync with cloud apps to track anything you want to track already exist and are popular. All of which is a waste of time, by the way. Unless you’re an elite professional athlete, you have no need for these things, but for $100 they are fine toys.

That leaves fashion statement.

Some Good Advice

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Avoid hanging around people with names like Dreekius Oricko Johnson.

Dreekius Oricko Johnson

Former New York Jets and Tennessee Titans running back Chris Johnson is in stable condition after being shot in the shoulder during a drive-by shooting that occurred at 4 a.m. Sunday at an intersection in Orlando, Florida, according to police.

The driver of the vehicle, Dreekius Oricko Johnson, 28, was killed by gunfire, according to the Orange County sheriff’s department.

Johnson and Reggie Johnson, 29, were passengers in the Jeep, per the sheriff’s office. The latter Johnson suffered gunshot wounds to his shoulder, hand and leg. He, too, is in stable condition.

No arrests have been made in what police are calling a homicide investigation.

According to a police report, deputies arrived at the scene to find a Jeep with one deceased man and two others with gunshot wounds on the sidewalk. The victims said an unknown vehicle pulled up beside them at a red light and opened fire.

The sheriff’s office said no further information will be released at this time.

A a general rule, if the first result on Google for your name is a link to mugshots.com, you have made some bad decisions. Of course, frivolous ninnies like Alex Tabarrok blame it on excessive parking violations, but there’s a reason no one, including a university, lets guys like Alex Tabarrok have any responsibilities. To paraphrase a commenter there, libertarian chatterboxes can afford the luxury of maintaining an adolescent worldview well into adult life.

For those of us in the real world, a good rule of thumb is to avoid spending time around guys with names like Dreekius Oricko Johnson. His mother would have done better by him if she named him Food Stamp or Government Cheese. At least then he could pass himself off as the child of dope smoking artists. instead he came into this world with a ghetto name and left this life in a ghetto fashion.

Looking Up From The Ghetto

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I used to think that the fraying of American society was due to the elites letting down on their responsibilities as elites. For instance, rich people used to discourage divorce through the law and through public morality. The rich, of course, could afford to get divorced, but they did not promote it. Divorce was seen a failure for a man, which is why FDR stuck with his lesbian wife, rather than divorce her. It was a burden elites were expected to bear in order maintain order amongst the lower classes.

The 1960’s is when things changed. Elites not only stopped enforcing the old codes, they actively promoted every sort of deviancy they practiced in private. Divorce was now a moral imperative of a liberated woman. Black men were encouraged to take drugs, abandon their families and live like animals in the streets. The resulting anarchy was both predictable and sudden. Whole cities collapsed as the poor went bonkers and the middle-classes fled in terror.

I never throught of it as intentional. It just seemed to me that it was the confluence of two trends in America. One is the spread of Frankfurt School philosophy that has enraptured the intellectual class of America. The people in charge swapped out Christianity for Cultural Marxism, as their organizing creed. The other trend was a rapid advance in the nation’s material wealth following the war. America was suddenly crazy rich and like lottery winners, we indulged in all our worst fantasies.

I was at the market today, my Sunday ritual. I do my shopping at the rich man’s grocer, rather than the stores serving the ghetto. I cook my own meals and therefore prefer fresh meats and produce. Ghetto Lion, for example, has mostly prepared foods that are popular with ghetto dwellers. Anyway, at the checkout, a dough-faced fat girl with a pin in her nose address me with “wassup.”

I’m led to believe that the pin in her nose signals her availability to black men. Almost always, the pram-faced girls in the ghetto have caramel colored kids, along with the nose pin. Perhaps it is a coincidence. Her sing-songy language told me she was a ghetto girl. White people talking black always sound odd to me. It’s like hearing a Chinese guy speak Spanish. There’s something unnatural about it. I speak some ghetto so we got along fine enough as she rang up my purchases.

it got me thinking about how it is this lower-class white girl has decided to adopt this way of life. We’re told that racism is for the lower classes. Only rubes engage in it. All decent people avoid ever saying or doing anything that could offend a black person. It’s fair to say it is a national obsession. Yet, the greatest mixing of race in America occurs in the ghetto, not the country club. The poor have become truly multicultural.

I used to think that the collapse of the working class into an underclass was mostly due to the welfare state and maybe just general degeneracy. Thinking about pram-face on the way home, I think the poor are no different today than in another era. They are aping what they see the rich and famous do on TV. In another era. lace curtain Irish aped the ways of the Brahman class. That meant putting on airs and acting like the rich people they saw in their community. There was a pulling up by the upper classes.

Today, the elites preach one thing, but live another. On television they preach about the evils of racism and the need to worship black culture. In private life they live like a blend of Victorians and the Ku Klux Klan. In public they rail about Ferguson. In private they engage in ethnic cleansing to make NYC and San Fran whites only enclaves for liberal elites. The lower classes never see the reality, just the show, and they act accordingly.

This being the 50 anniversary of yet another Civil Rights event, the NYTimes has been sending out hundreds of tweets about it. Obama has made a trip to Selma Alabama, a once thriving community now decimated after the Civil Rights Movement. Millionaire former soldier, Colin Powell, is on television moaning about racism on TV this weekend, despite never having experienced meaningful prejudice in his life. If you are the 85 IQ checkout girl at my market, you can be forgiven for thinking that worshiping black people is what the beautiful people do.

We’re all hypocrites, of course, but not all hypocrites are the same. The private prude that preaches public lasciviousness, is consciously doing harm. The public scold who engages in private vice harms only himself. Post-reality America is society run by the former. A ruling elite that makes war on that which allows it be an elite has a short future.

Evolution Versus Mass Media

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Evolution is all about adaptation. A species gets better and better at exploiting its environment over time. If the environment suddenly changes, the species may not be able to adapt quickly enough to survive. Ice ages are a good example. Or droughts. Humans are unique in that we can change our environment by design. What makes us even more unique is we are our environment. Culture works on humans in the same way nature works on all species.

It’s a big complicated subject which is why progressives have decided evolution stopped in 1968. That way they don’t have to struggle to get their head around the recursive relationship between man and nature. They can just put the white hat on nature and the black hat on man. Complicated things like science are bad for ideology.

It also leaves more time for the war on the PPP, but that’s a subject for another day. The topic for now is how we as modern humans have changed our environment. Specifically, the creation and dominance of mass media. Modern America is marinated in mass media. Everyone’s opinion on everything is controlled by the magic boxes in their life, TV, PC and mobile phone.

Because no one wants to look at old hags, TV is dominated by young hyper-attractive people. Most of whom are as dumb as a goldfish, but they can read from a teleprompter without moving their eyes. The job is to grab and keep the viewer’s attention. Similarly, the Interwebs is run by the young and those who pretend to be young. Therefore the language is geared for a high school level viewer. Again, it’s about getting and holding the attention of the people.

The problem, of course is that you end up with former mall cops pretending to be experts. They are interviewed by guys like Brian Williams, who are lost in a fantasy world and probably in need of psychiatric help. From the perspective of TV, it makes no difference if the opinions and experts are batshit crazy, just as long as they get and keep an audience. MSNBC had a nice run with this model.

This may not seem like a thing until you consider that public opinion is set by mass media. Handsome popular goldfish says something wacky on TV and it rattles through the sea of megaphones we call the media. Rather quickly, people are walking around convinced that biology is a social construct or that women should be allowed to vote.

In fact, there is a bias toward the stupid and against the correct answers. Here’s a good example I saw in Tyler Cowen’s site today.

A decade ago, when the golf course was a de facto playground for the professional set and a young Californian named Tiger Woods was the world’s best player, golf looked like an unassailable national undertaking, and corporate players were champing at the bit to get in.

But the business behind one of America’s most slow-going, expensive and old-fashioned pastimes has rapidly begun to fall apart. TaylorMade-Adidas Golf, the world’s biggest maker of golf clubs and clothes, saw sales nosedive 28 percent last year, its parent company Adidas said Thursday.

“A decline in the number of active players … caused immense problems in the entire industry, and as a market leader, this hit us particularly hard,” Adidas chief executive Herbert Hainer said on a call with analysts.

The sporting-goods giant has taken “some painful measures to restructure and stabilize” its golf division, Hainer said, including listing its slow-selling golf gear at deep discounts and postponing new launches. The coming years, Hainer had previously warned, present even more “significant negative headwinds” for the game.

It’s been years since the increasingly unpopular sport of golf plunked into the rough, and the industry now is realizing that it may not be able to ever get out. All the qualities that once made it so elite and exclusive are, analysts say, now playing against it.

The game — with its drivers, clubs, shoes and tee times — is expensive both to prepare for and to play. It’s difficult, dissuading amateurs from giving it a swing, and time-consuming, limiting how much fans can play. Even what loyalists would say are strengths — its simplicity, its traditionalism — can seem overly austere in an age of fitness classes, extreme races and iPhone games.

What you see here is common in our media. They take what is a boring industry story and lard it with their favorite crackpot theories to make it more interesting to readers. The real answer for golf’s decline to its traditional place in the culture is white people are getting old. Golf has always been a sport for middle-aged white guys. When the boomers were in their peak golf years, golf peaked. Now that boomers are aging out of golf, golf is declining.

This is a boring answer, but the right one. Golf is a sport you pick up in your middle years. You spend money on gear, lessons and trips. By the time  you hit 60 you’re starting to slow down. You still play, but you no longer spend money on the latest clubs. Instead of golf trips around the country, you play courses near home. Of course, many golfers past 60 give up the game because they are dead.

The American baby boom ran from roughly 1945 -1964. That means the front end is now 70 and the tail end is 50, with the bulk in the 60 range. In other words, if you were at the Summer of Love or Woodstock, you’re spending more on your prostate than your golf game.

That’s a boring answer so the chattering skulls in the media will trot out their favorite fantasies about social trends. The result here and everywhere is a public walking around with crazy ideas in their heads. Take a look around and it is hard to see anyone under the age of 50 not attached to a media consumption device, getting instruction from the chattering skulls. It has to have an impact.

I wonder if humans can adapt quickly enough to thrive in this world. I get the sense we are in the hot soak period of the technology age. When you shut your car off, the engine actually gets hotter for a few minutes before rapidly cooling down to air temperature. That’s what’s happening with modern societies. Technology is advancing, but the ending has been shut off.

Humans evolved for 200,000 years for a world of face to face communication. Therefore, we got good at it. It took a long time to get good at it. We have had no time to adapt to a world of megaphones blasting nonsense at us. Maybe homo sap is just reverting to a natural norm. For most of settlement, a small number of smart people ran societies of illiterate morons. Perhaps the future is the past.

And the Loop is Closed

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When the Tea Party got going, a lot of people thought this was it. The normal people of America were going to first wrestle the GOP away from the donor class and then use it to wrestle the country back from the lunatics. I recall seeing a guy walking around my office building wearing a little tea bag lapel pin. He was typical. An older and less vibrant fellow, properly aware of his  own backpack of privilege, but rightly concerned with all the vibrancy going on around him, or whatever.

Those were heady days and all for naught. The bipartisan fusion party has carried the day.

Tea Party Republicans contemplating a bid to oust Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) shouldn’t count on Democrats to help them unseat the Speaker.

And without their support, there is no chance to topple Boehner in this Congress.

A number of right-wing Republicans, long wary of Boehner’s commitment to GOP efforts attacking President Obama’s policy priorities, have openly considered a coup in an attempt to transfer the gavel into more conservative hands.

But Democrats from across an ideological spectrum say they’d rather see Boehner remain atop the House than replace him with a more conservative Speaker who would almost certainly be less willing to reach across the aisle in search of compromise. Replacing him with a Tea Party Speaker, they say, would only bring the legislative process — already limping along — to a screeching halt.

I love that line, “Democrats from across an ideological spectrum.” Yeah, all those pro-life, families values Democrats are making a difference.

“I’d probably vote for Boehner [because] who the hell is going to replace him? [Ted] Yoho?” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) said Wednesday, referencing the Florida Tea Party Republican who’s fought Boehner on a host of bipartisan compromise bills.

“In terms of the institution, I would rather have John Boehner as the Speaker than some of these characters who came here thinking that they’re going to change the world,” Pascrell added.

Liberal Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) agreed that, for Democrats, replacing Boehner could lead to a worse situation.

“Then we would get Scalise or somebody? Geez, come on,” said Grijalva, who referenced House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). “We can be suicidal but not stupid.”

Boehner, who has grappled with dissent from the Tea Party wing since he took the Speaker’s gavel in 2011, has seen opposition to his reign grow this year, even as he commands the largest GOP majority since the Hoover administration.

That’s led to talk of a new coup, something that is more difficult to pull off after the election of a Speaker on each Congress’s first day of business.

Any lawmaker can file a motion to “vacate” a sitting Speaker, a move that would force a vote of the full House. The effort would almost certainly fail, as the conservatives would need the overwhelming support of Democrats to win a majority. But it would be an embarrassing setback to Boehner and his leadership team, who entered the year hoping their commanding new majority would alleviate some of the whipping problems that had plagued them in the past.

The new push back against Boehner began in the earliest stages of the new Congress when 25 conservatives voted in January to strip him of the Speaker’s gavel.

Boehner’s troubles have only mounted since then, as conservatives have thwarted a number of his early legislative priorities, including a border security bill, an anti-abortion measure and a proposal to limit the federal government’s role in public education — all considered by GOP leaders to be easy-pass bills that would highlight their new power in Obama’s final two years in the White House.

More recently, Boehner’s decision this week to pass a “clean” bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has exacerbated conservatives’ concerns about his leadership.

As proof of the discontent, 167 Republicans bucked their leadership by opposing the DHS package. Their votes protested Boehner’s move to strip out provisions undoing Obama’s executive actions shielding millions of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. from deportation.

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) called Boehner’s capitulation “a sad day for America.”

“If we aren’t going to fight now, when are we going to fight?” he said Tuesday just before the vote.

Every Democrat joined 75 Republicans in passing the bill.

In the midst of that debate, a number of Tea Party Republicans warned that they’d consider an attempt to topple Boehner if he caved to Obama’s demand for a clean DHS bill.

“If it happened, conservatives would be outraged,” said one such conservative who voted against Boehner in January. The lawmaker predicted that the coup attempt might not come immediately but warned the Speaker, “It’s a long year.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus and a critic of Boehner’s legislative moves, said recently that no coup is in the works.

“That’s not the point,” Jordan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “The point is to do what we told the voters we were going to do and do it in a way that’s consistent with the United States Constitution.”

Citing Jordan’s comments, top Democrats have punted on the question of whether they would support a coup. Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the Democratic whip, acknowledged that there are “some disgruntled people who are talking about it,” but predicted that no such effort will materialize.

“If Jordan’s not talking about — he’s the head of the Freedom Caucus — it’s not going to happen,” Hoyer said this week.

The casual way in which the Democrats discuss GOP party politics is the big story here. It never goes the other way. The Liberal Democrats are a black box. No one knows what’s going on in their deep state. But, the GOP is an open book because they are essentially the straight man in this show. They are the Washington Generals to the Democrats Harlem Globetrotters. Theirs is a is a supporting role.

We’ve seen this across Europe. The countries in deep trouble has seen their main parties just about fuse into one. In Britain, the Tories are in government with the Liberal Democrats, allegedly their ideological opposite. The result is every election gets the same result. In America, giving the GOP control of Congress has changed nothing. Voters can be forgiven if they might conclude it was all a big scam.

It’s Always About Money With The Left

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I’m fond of pointing out that the Left has a strange and predictable opposite rule of rhetoric. Whatever they are accusing the bogeyman of doing, you can almost always be sure it is the exact opposite of the truth. In almost all cases, the thing they are accusing the bogeyman of doing is what they are currently doing. It is a wonderful bit of deception and a great group adaptation. While the non-believers are examining the bogeyman’s actions, the Left gets to operate unfettered. Shifting the focus is one of those individual traits that scales up very well.

So it is with the Left and foreign policy. They are always accusing the neo-cons or the plain old regular cons of trading blood for something, like oil. Iraq was allegedly about oil. Afghanistan was about Halliburton and the defense industry. A lot of time was spent examining these claims only to learn that it was ideology and sloppy reasoning, not money, at the root of these adventures. The Bush people really thought they were spreading democracy.

The Cuba deal, on the other hand, was a pure money play. Obama’s money men see opportunity in Cuba. It may be a poor country, but it can be a resort colony, medical colony for health care tourists and a source of cheap labor. To the average America, Cuba is a wart on the face of humanity and should be allowed to sink into the sea. In other words, the Right is motivated by morality, while for the Left, Cuba is just another place to feed.

The pending Iran deal is similarly about money. The usual suspects on the professional Right are trying to make it about Obama the Muslim or Obama the Jew-hater. Obama is most certainly pro-Muslim and he hates Jews, but that’s not what it is about. It is about money. I have a friend in the region who works in the oil and gas sector. He reports that American firms are sending top level delegations to Tehran in anticipation of a deal. The head of Ceva Logistics was just in Iran trying to cut a deal. They are a prime for Halliburton and Schlumberger.

The American Left is not Marxist. That strain died out in the 50’s. As David Horowitz has explained in great detail, the modern Left rejected the old commies early on as has-beens and opportunists. The modern American Left is very comfortable with global capitalism. They made their peace with it in the late 80’s and have since evolved into a movement Mussolini would easily recognize and envy. In some respects, the Clintons get away with their shenanigans because their coevals envy their prowess. Obama and the Wookiee hope to follow their model and become super-rich after his term in office is complete.

This sort of cynical self-dealing has its limits. In the banana republics, it usually ends in a bloodbath. In a nuclear world, a bloodbath is a good result. Sane people who follow Iran think the rulers truly believe their rhetoric. The Iranian mullahs think they are ushering in the end times and they will be triumphant in the final great clash. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they just say all that stuff because they think they have to keep up appearances, like American politicians wearing flag lapel pins. No one can know, but it is a big risk for a little cash.

Thoughts on Millennials

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When I was a young man, we used to hunt the mammoth and pray to the sky gods for guidance and forgiveness. When not doing that, we were trying to find our way in the world. I was not much different from my coevals in that I had no patience for the lectures of old men about how I should live my life. That did not mean I thought they were mistaken. It’s just that I wanted to drink liquor and chase women, even knowing that it would lead to a bad end. Life is for living.

Of course, I was a knucklehead who thought he knew more than he did about most things. Again, that just means I was like everyone else my age. I always appreciated, however, when adults treated me as an equal. I never liked to be patronized. As I grew older, I tried hard to never patronize young adults. I figured if I hated it, I should not do it. That’s worked pretty well. In the rare cases when a young person has asked for advice, I was happy to offer what I could. Otherwise, I avoid playing the old man card.

The point here is that I like to joke around about being the Clint Eastwood character from Gran Torino, but I am pretty much the opposite of that guy. I don’t look my age, I sure as hell don’t act my age and most important, I don’t think anyone should act their age. Live your life as you see fit and enjoy your time. It goes by quickly and you never have enough of it. Letting others tell you how to live is a sure way to not live and, life if for living.

That’s the Tao of Z.

That said, I do think the millennials are a departure from American culture. They were raised in the communications revolution. They were educated in schools awash in Cultural Marxism. They have never known tough times as the economy has been relatively strong for thirty years. Yeah, young people have record unemployment and many still live with mom, but there’s zero pressure on them to get a job and move out of the basement. As with so much else, that’s different with the millennials versus everyone who came before them.

What got me thinking about this is a post by Razib Kahn the other day that had me laughing. Kahn is a super smart guy and very serious young man. His choice of subject matter may be why I forget he is so young. But, the sacramentalizing of the iPhone is one of those generational markers that jumps out at me. If you think it was an inflection point in human evolution, you’re a millennial. If you once owned a Palm, you’re not. If you once owned a Merlin then you’re probably near death or should be or whatever.

Anyway, it got me thinking about millennials a bit this week. Last summer I did a post on millennials, but it is not a subject I write about very much, beyond the wise crack here or there. What sprung to mind reading Razib’s post is that millennials appear to have adopted the Left’s non-linear sense of time. Some past events are talked about as if they just happened, while other recent events are treated as if they happened in the Middle Ages. In other words, events are not sorted on a time line. Instead, positional relevance on the time line is driven by emotional awareness. The iPhone looms large so it just happened. The iPod is irrelevant so it was like a million years ago.

It’s easy to write this off to solipsism, and there’s a fair bit of that. This is a generation raised in front of a mirror, but it also the first generation to be thoroughly immersed in Cultural Marxism. There we see the non-liner timeline as an integral part of ideology. Vast parts of the timeline and its events simply disappear, while other events, those of importance to the movement, are talked about with the same emotional zeal as if they happened yesterday. Events are positioned on the time by emotional relevance. I wonder if millennials have internalized this as a habit of mind.

Something else I see is a strange need for validation. Again, I suspect this is a product of the schools. It’s easy to forget that schools changed a great deal starting in the 70’s when the Boomers started taking up spots in education. The modern school looks a lot like what the Soviets or Chinese practiced. The teacher is elevated to the level of moral and spiritual guide. In China, teachers are often treated as minor deities. In the Soviet system, the teacher was also an ideological guide to make sure the pupils were coming up in the orthodoxy.

The result is a student that is focused on the pat on the head and the gold star. Learning the material for personal satisfaction is irrelevant when everything is judged in relation to the teacher’s affection. I saw this at Yale a few years back. The grad students looked at an old person like me as someone to preen for in search of that pat on the head. It was very weird and I just wrote it off to Ivy League social skills, but I now think it is a generational thing. Millennials are a generation of suck-ups.

The flip side of that is a fear of being judged. In fact, millennials seem to obsess over judgements. In that Razib post there’s a comment using the magic phrase “value-laden.” That’s an abracadabra phrase for young people. Again, this goes to the immersion in Cultural Marxism. Noticing differences is treated as a a mortal sin. Therefore, anything that even hints at comparison causes sphincters to knot up, thus making value-laden words and phrases taboo.

Finally and related to the allergy to comparison is the nasty response to anything resembling a slight. This also touches on the validation thing. In royal courts and petty dictatorships, like the classroom, one’s rise to the top is really a rise to number two. No matter how smart and capable, you are not going to be king. Similarly, the best student will never be the teacher. Therefore, there are no winners, just degrees of loser. The guy closest to the top is just less of a loser than his rivals.

The result is a eery lack of empathy. Business people I know report that dealing with millennials as a vendor is strange and often unpleasant. You do a favor for them and they feel no obligation to return the favor. At the same time, they expect you to do them favors. I know a few business people who have dropped accounts because they find dealing with a 30-year old sociopath intolerable. Anecdotes are not data, but that Navy paper alludes to this as well. Transactional relationships are no way to build a society at least not one that can maintain large scale organization.

That Navy paper suggests the institutions of America will have to adapt. That’s probably true, but I wonder if it is entirely possible. A society of ruthless attention seekers sounds pretty awful. A nation of transactional people with little empathy for one another is going to need something else to prevent it from descending into madness. What that is, I don’t know, but that does not mean it does not exist. Maybe the millennials are the first generation to usher in the new era of humanity. The rest of us could be the Neanderthals of this age. Or, things will get much worse in the coming decades.