Category Archives: Culture

Culture and Cycling

Posted on by

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.

The Great Transition

Posted on by

Back in the 90’s, the set of things called conservative began to merge with the set of things called Republican. By the time George Bush the Minor was crowned, the two words were interchangeable. Liberals would start hooting “extreme right-wing Republican conservative” as soon as you mentioned Bush. It was not just liberals doing it. The Conservative Industrial Complex was happy to make the two things synonymous. It made it easier for them to raise money from GOP donors.

At the same time, the folks who had been the core of American conservatism were pushed out of the set of things called conservative. There was lip service paid to things like abortion or homosexual marriage, but traditionalism was reduced to a marketing concept. Big foot conservatives and the GOP no longer cared about social issues. Instead, they were obsessed with globalism and making war on the Muslims. “Conservative” became Frank Meyer fusionism without the traditional social conservatism.

I have written a lot about how Buckley Conservatism is exhausted. It existed primarily as an argument in favor of a tough line with the Soviets and secondarily as an argument against 19th century socialism. It was a reaction to American Progressivism, not an independent intellectual movement. The Soviets are gone and no one, not even Progressives, think the worker’s paradise is a worthy goal. Conservatism no longer has a dance partner so it staggers around looking for a reason to exist.

Buckley Conservatism is now a collection of slogans mostly, but it is also a massive money making racket. The collection of monasteries around Washington DC are still cranking out policy papers and think pieces for the political class. On the Left there is nothing to write, but their monasteries are still in place, just looking for tenants. They busy themselves now with Democratic party politics, but the rickety state of the party reflects the Left. It is an old woman clutching at power.

The result is we have a strange period in American life. The old binary style of politics that has been with us since the Civil War now has a vacuum on both sides. The Left has no economic arguments and the Right has no cultural arguments. The reason the two sides scream bloody murder at one another over trivial stuff is they have no other way to distinguish one side from the other. Both sides are a straw-man for the other.

That does not mean we are headed for the singularity. The neo-cons are still with us and they may be ready to make the return trip from neo-conservative to neo-liberal, by moving out of Republican politics into Democratic politics. Intellectually, the Left has been an abandoned building since the fall of the Soviets so there is a vacuum to be filled. The coalition of groups on the Left are emotionally hostile to traditionalism, but they are open to the authoritarian globalism favored by the neoconservatives.

That Tevi Troy piece is worth reading and is probably more wishful thinking/veiled threat at this point. We are not going to see the American Enterprise Institute change uniforms overnight. That is not how these things work. Instead, it will be a slow evolution as we see guys like Jonah Goldberg, for example, transition from conservative to moderate and then liberal or whatever label they settle on at that point.

I’m picking on Goldberg because he is already laying the groundwork for his break with the Republican Party this fall. You can almost see the wheels turning as he tries to figure out how to argue that sitting out the election is the “conservative” position, despite arguing against that same position for two decades. Many of his fellows in the Conservative Industrial Complex are struggling with the same dilemma.

Now, Trump and the groundswell carrying him to the nomination is not an intellectual movement. It is not really a movement at this stage. It is simply a reaction to the fundamental contradictions in the globalist world view. You cannot have national governments beholden to their citizens in a purely global economy. If national governments are not beholden to their citizens, there is no point in being a citizen. More important, there is no reason for people to remain loyal to their rulers.

That said, ideological movements always start this way. Most peter out or become narrowly focused on achievable ends. Still, we see a lot of very smart people writing out on the fringe. If you are curious about the world and are looking for arguments about what is happening, you are not reading the mainstream guys. You are reading the weirdos of the Dark Enlightenment. That is where the action is now.

Political and ideological realignments happen in fits and starts so Trump could fizzle out only to be replaced the next time by a more polished version that is more complete as a political leader. Alternatively, the Conservative Industrial Complex could go through a counter-reformation and tilt back toward the traditionalist-conservative side. There is a large and growing mass of people rejecting the status quo. It is a market that will be met by someone.

Crime & Punishment

Posted on by

I’m not a fan of the death penalty. I’m not absolutely against it, as there are times and places where it is a necessity. Poor societies cannot afford to house and feed monsters so they have no choice but to execute their violent criminals. It’s a matter of self-defense. If they try to segregate killers, there’s a good chance the killer gets loose and kills again. Or, the killer harms a fellow prisoner or guard.

My view on the death penalty is a libertarian one. The state derives its authority from the people and the people have a right to self-defense. As a matter of self-defense, the state can kill enemies, but only enemies that are a threat. A man in chains is no threat so hanging him is murder. It is no different than a man shooting a burglar in his home versus hunting down the burglar and shooting him in the back.

That said, I get why people are in favor of the death penalty as a matter of vengeance. A guy who kills kids, for example, commits the worst possible offense against society. Hanging the guy simply as an act of vengeance brings some satisfaction to the people. The trouble is the state gets stuff wrong all the time so vengeance could very well lead to hanging an innocent man. You can let a man out of jail, but not out of the grave.

That’s the theory. The reality is a case like this one in America’s Paper of Record.

A follower of Charles Manson who participated in his cult’s infamous 1969 massacre has won approval for parole.

Leslie Van Houten, 66, the youngest member of the so-called Manson Family, “was granted parole suitability today by commissioners of the Board of Parole Hearings meeting at the California Institution for Women in Corona,” according to Luis Patino, a spokesman for the California Department of Correction.

“We’re really ecstatic,” Van Houten’s lawyer, Christie Webb, told The Post. “Leslie is an individual. She can’t change what she did, but she has tremendous remorse.”

The parole board will review the judgment for up to 120 days and, if its members uphold the decision, the matter will be forwarded to California Gov. Jerry Brown.

Brown “will have a maximum of 30 days to either uphold, reverse or modify the decision, or send it to the full board of commissioners sitting en banc for review,” Patino said.

Van Houten was convicted in 1971 for the savage murders of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca in their Los Feliz home on August 10, 1969.

She later admitted that she was whacked out on LSD when she stabbed Rosemary 14 times with a knife.

The double murder came one day after several other Manson disciples killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate – who was married to renowned director Roman Polanski in her Benedict Canyon home. Several of her friends were massacred.

These crimes were monstrous. The people who committed them admitted to the crimes, even bragged about them. There’s simply no way to argue that they may have been wrongly convicted. The best you can do is claim some mitigation like insanity or excessive drug taking. Even so, this woman was given life with a chance at parole. Now, she may be released after spending 40 years in prison.

This is why people support the death penalty. This woman should never be free, but she is old and the government is broke so they are letting criminals go free. There’s also the fetish among our rulers for committing outrages against the people. Letting a monster go free is a way they can feel hip and edgy by outraging the squares out in the suburbs. The death penalty closes off this stuff. If Van Houten had been hanged, this is not a story. Instead, she will be released and probably be invited to the White House.

This is why I think we should get back to having penal colonies. The Cloud People are simply too greedy and self-absorbed to run a proper criminal justices system. They will always look for reasons to set monsters loose on the rest of us. At the same time, wholesale execution of violent predators is never coming back in the West, until the Muslims take over.  A compromise is to setup penal colonies to house people like this women.

The monsters can be dumped on an island with ample food and water, but otherwise they must self-organize. Maybe a facility to dispense food, water and medical care is run by the state. If they kill each other, so be it. The non-violent, who simply cannot stop committing crimes, can be dropped into a more regulated colony. They live out their lives with no chance of return, unless they are exonerated. Maybe we setup a court for them on the island to help regulate the colony. We can call it Australia, just to make it fun.

The point is we have, at any one time, about 500,000 or so people in jail that we never want out of jail. The billions spent doing this, and the endless criminal proceedings that come with it, can be solved with penal colonies. That would free up resources to run a sane prison system for the petty thieves, errant losers and young knuckleheads. A Leslie Van Houton would be sent to Murderer’s Island out in the Pacific, never to walk our streets again.

The Third World Experience

Posted on by

My first brush with the third world was in Mexico and it was one of those random sorts of things that remind foreigners they are no longer on familiar ground. I was getting some food and I could not help but notice that there were far more people working than the task required. In fact, they were banging into one another. In order to make up for it, they were frenetically jostling with one another, trying to get food to the customers. This was my first brush with the Latin Way.

In most of South America, and big chunks of North America now, activity is mistaken for work. Employees are always rushing about in a chaotic manner as they want to look busy. You see it in government bureaucracies as well as with the private business. Everyone always wants to look busy, which means working harder, not smarter. In fact, they may very well work dumber as that creates more work, which makes it easier to look busy. There is a strange logic to it.

With open borders and a flood of third world people into America, I am seeing this sort of thing locally. I had to get my prescription refilled the other day and the pharmacy I use is staffed by H1B’s from Lord knows where. Rite Aid is known for abusing the H1B program to hire cheap labor in their pharmacy. Every time I go in there, I see sub-Saharan Africans scurrying about, looking busy, getting nothing done. Invariably they screw up my prescription and it requires lots of hand gestures and mangled English to get it resolved.

That is the other thing about the third world. The dimwits you deal with at the retail level are both the cause of and cure of the inevitable foul ups. At the pharmacy, they usually lose my prescription, but sometimes they just forget to fill it. That means huddling around a terminal, walking around with their serious face on and then they finally figure it out. They are so proud of themselves and they expect me to be grateful for their help. I play along. It is the way it works. They waste my time and I thank them for it. Welcome to America.

Of course, things do not always work out for the best. I was in Texas last fall and when I returned my rental car at the airport, a surly, dimwitted mestizo scanned the car, mumbled something in Spanglish and then handed me the printout. The bill was $1100 for five days. I protested and he insisted it was right because the machine said it was right. I tried to explain the impossibility of it, but he just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I can do nothing for you. It’s what the computer says.”

Luckily, I was in a sporting mood at that point, having dealt with some third world zaniness on the way into the airport. An Amerind flag man was waving cars into what looked like a detour. It was a dead end. So, about ten cars were stacked up, needing to back out. I heard some irritated guy demand to know why the flag man was waving people into a dead end. He just shrugged and said his boss told him to do it. He had that stupid smile suggesting you should be happy that he answered the question correctly.

Anyway, I eventually tracked down a pleasant young woman who was happy to fix the billing problem. That is the big difference between a Western culture and the third world. In the West, we expect even the front-line employee to solve problems. The girl that helped me was happy to help and felt good about doing her job. Jose with the scanner was happy to do only that which he was trained to do and he felt good about staying out of my trouble. One is motivated to find problems to solve, the other is motivated to avoid problems.

That is the other thing about the non-West. There is a narrowness, a practiced obtuseness, that you see even in the professions. South Asians are hilarious with this. They are creative with quick fixes, often producing a solution that is both comical and practical. This seems to be a way to avoid anything resembling a confrontation. They call this “Jugaad.” This love of the quick fix means systemic problems never get solved. They just carry on forever with an elaborate array of cheap fixes and workarounds.

Here in the ghetto, we get to experience local blacks dealing with the third world customer service reps. Blacks are trained from conception to assume everyone is here to wait on them. The sense of entitlement is bone deep. Watching a welfare queen play the race card against a Kenyan pharmacy clerk is hilarious. Africans really dislike American blacks so I suspect there is some deliberate trouble making, but it is a good time, nonetheless.

Anyway, I suspect the valued social skill in the future will be the ability to manipulate people in a multi-cultural society in order to get anything done. The person who can finesses these people into doing useful work will have a high value, while the red-faced Texan I saw screaming at the flag guy will live a life of perpetual frustration. Or maybe it reaches a tipping point and it ends in a tribal bloodbath.

The News Biz

Posted on by

Way back in the early days of the dot-com boom, I had a conversation with a publisher of a small sports magazine. He published twice a month, actually doing the mailing himself. He had something like 10,000 subscribers so the mailing was no small task, but he had more time than money. He would pick up the issue from the printer, it was a small newspaper style magazine, and then apply the mailing labels.

Obviously, he hated this task and figured he could eliminate it by going on-line. Newspapers were already shoveling their content on-line and all the smart people said it was the future. The logic seems impenetrable. The savings from printing and mailing would more than make up for the lose of ad dollars. Eventually, on-line ads would add more revenue to the mix.

That’s not what happened. The number of people who made the switch was about 10% of his subscriber base. I think he said he peaked at about 1200 on-line subscribers. These were all subscribers to the dead tree version. He picked up only a handful of new readers, even when he started giving away free content as a teaser. For reasons he could never explain, the digital audience was smaller than the analog audience.

This story on the newspaper websites offers similar data.

For a long time, people assumed the web was the future of newspapers.

They figured readers would transition to papers’ websites when they began abandoning their print editions. They thought audiences for papers’ digital side would soar.

But just as newspaper advertisers don’t appear to be replacing their print ads with digital ones, print newspaper readers aren’t transitioning to newspapers’ websites in this digital age.

A new research paper finds that over the past eight years the websites of 51 major metropolitan newspapers have not on average seen appreciable readership gains, even as print readership falls.

The average reach of a newspaper website within the paper’s market has gone from 9.8 percent in 2007 to 10 percent in 2015. So in your typical top-50 market, the leading daily’s online audience would average just 10 percent of the market’s readership.

At the same time, print readership has fallen from 42.4 percent in 2007 to 28.5 percent in 2015

That’s a steep decline for sure, but it shows just how much larger print readership is versus online.

I think part of this is due to the difference in what is required of the reader. Newspapers and magazines delivered to your door are actively engaging readers. It turns out that those delivery fees and print costs drove revenue. The customer did nothing but pay the bill. The content was delivered to him via the miracle of the delivery boy or postman. Until it is consumed, it’s right there in your house, reminding you to read it.

On-line content is a different experience. You have to go get it. The news site does not have a cheap way to grab your attention when you’re heading for the morning constitutional or having lunch. Plus, there are a billion sites to distract you while you are thinking about what to read. Websites rely on you, the consumer, to find them. They are not finding you. The result is fewer readers.

That’s part of it. The other part is newspapers in America have been awful for a long time. Our news media, in general, is crap. I read the British press because they do a better job covering America than the locals. I have found interesting local stories in the British tabs that are nowhere to be found in my local media. If you make a crap product, you’re not going to have a big audience.

The argument from newspapers is they are losing out to cable, but that’s baloney. They used to blame talk radio. Before that it was network news. The fact is newspaper circulations have been falling for over forty years. The birth of New Journalism seems to have ushered in a general decline in the America media. Jamming the facts into a narrative turns into propaganda quickly and people can tolerate only so much of it.

There’s a also a market issue. In the 1950’s, a small town would have two or three papers. New York City had something like 20 daily papers. Then you had multiple editions of the paper. In the 60’s and 70’s we saw a consolidation and many cities ended up with one paper. Monopoly enterprises always decline in quality and eventually succumb to runaway cost problems. That’s what happened to newspapers. Paying a columnist six figures for three columns a week is absurd.

The ironic thing about the technological revolution is we may see some “dead” technologies rise from the grave simply because there’s no better way to do things like sell news or music. A new British paper just started and it has no website. It is an old-style dead tree paper. If this works, how long before musicians start selling their songs on vinyl again, forgoing the digital format entirely?

A Long Ramble On Time & Memory

Posted on by

I was listening to something the other day and the guy talking made a point about public attitudes toward homosexuals. His point was that attitudes have changed quickly. He said something along the lines that just a few years ago homosexuals were treated as bad as blacks in the south during segregation. The implication being that just last week we maintained separate accommodations for the homos. I just laughed as I am used to the Progressive Timeline.

I was not fully engaged, but my recollection is that the person talking was young-ish, maybe 30’s. For a white male born in 1985, for example, the Civil Rights Movement is as real as the French Revolution. These events are just items from his history text in high school. His teacher probably had no firsthand recollections and no one he knows has an emotional connection to it. Therefore, he has no emotional connections to it. It is just something from long ago.

Gay rights, on the other hand, are in his timeline. Picking a side and defending it was a big part of how young white males defined themselves in the 2000’s. The fact that his parents most certainly laughed at comics like Paul Lynde or watched Liberace perform on TV is unknown to him. He does not even think about the implications of his belief that a generation ago homosexuals were kept on lavender plantations. That would mean his parents were monsters by today’s enlightened standards.

He does not think of those things and it is not unique. Steve Sailer likes to point out that people have trouble keeping relative numbers in their head, like the actual number of homosexuals they see in their day. I would point out that people struggle understanding time, beyond the present day. There is now, the past you experienced and the way way back, like when Adam and Eve rode dinosaurs around Eden. It is why people struggle to accept evolution. It takes too long.

When I was a boy, my grandfather would talk to me about Russia, the Bolsheviks and the Cold War. Having escaped the Bolsheviks, he had a keen interest in them and wanted me to know what he knew about communism. I will never forget one conversation I had with him when he said the Cold War is forever and there was no winning. The best we could do is keep them from conquering the world.

I was a kid, but the idea of anything lasting forever sounded a bit dodgy. More important, a society run by blood thirty fanatics trying to impose an illogical social order would run afoul of reality eventually. I was young so I could not see things through the eyes of my grandfather, but it always stuck with me. I thought of that day while watching the Berlin Wall topple over as Europe celebrated the end of the Cold War.

My grandfather’s tales are real to me. His father’s tales are unknown to me because I never knew him. I never heard him tell those stories. The result is my historical framework starts around the Great War. My sense of the past starts at that point and becomes increasingly clear and intense as we move closer to my age. I feel like I know the Reagan years completely, even though I have probably forgotten most of it, but I lived through it so it looms large in my mind.

This is why Hitler remains a specter that haunts the imaginations of the people of today. The average age of Americans is thirty-seven so that means most people know someone who knew someone that experienced Hitler. If you are thirty-seven your parents are probably in their 60’s and their parents, your grandparents, lived through Hitler. In 20 years, the number of people who knew someone who knew Hitler will be much smaller. In another generation, it will be no one and Hitler will be just another face in the history text.

The other side of this is how the Cult of Modern Liberalism shuffles the past so easily to fit their current agenda. Utopian cults are obsessed with the future as it is the locus of their belief system. The promise land is just over the horizon so all effort must be made for the final push to reach it. This obsession with the future not only prevents seeing the world as it is but forces the believer to rearrange the past to fit the narrative. This is easily done when the past feels like a foreign country.

At the dawn of this current period in the West, Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” This was from his book, The End of History and the Last Man.

Looking back at this, it seems laughable, but smart people really thought the long twilight struggle was over and the folks from the Mayflower had finally won. After all, their entire intellectual life was organized around the struggle for liberal democracy against the great enemy of totalitarianism. In fact, it was this struggle that defined western liberal intellectual life. Once the struggle was over, then it only made sense that history was now over.

This historical amnesia is a not permanent feature of man. Bronze Age people knew they were an old people. So much so, in fact, many Bronze Age rulers would commission research on how their ancestors dressed and decorated their palaces. The idea was to not forget the past. Egyptian rulers dressed the same way for 1500 years for a reason. The past was what you were so to forget it was to die, in a way, by killing those who came before you and made you.

We are in a strange age in that respect. Mass media has some role in it. Huge news today is forgotten tomorrow, because we are buffeted on all sides from media bullhorns demanding our immediate attention. It is not that people can no longer remember the past; it is that they do not have time to remember it. Instead of fitting the present into the timeline, it is tossed over our shoulder so we can rush off to the next thing.

Where this all leads is hard to know. There’s some data to suggest we have become increasingly dumber since the 1800’s. This could simply be demographics. In 1800 the population of England was roughly ten million, while all of Africa was ninety million. Britain now has sixty-five million people while Africa 1.2 billion. The population of the lowest IQ population has grown at twice the rate of one of the brightest. This trend is accelerating so the average IQ will drop with it.

But the mass culture has something to with it too. There is really no reason to remember a lot of things when they are easily looked up on-line or off your phone. Being smart today is about knowing where the information is located or how it is associated with other known information. Remembering stuff is just not very useful. History, after all, is just formal remembering so it makes sense that history is dying as any sort of remembering is giving way to technology.

Then there is the fact we are on the verge of a great automation of work that will make remembering the past even more pointless as the life of man becomes pointless. Children have no reason to dwell on the past or think of the future. Instead, they enjoy the day playing with their toys. Perhaps the growing amnesia in the West is just part of the slow infantilization of man. One day people will loom at their surroundings and wonder how they got there and who made them. Perhaps even imagine the machines were made by gods.

No Country for the New Men

Posted on by

Going by my own experiences, my sense is Europeans fall into three groups with regards to the Muslim invasion of Europe. There are those who are moderately xenophobic about the whole thing and are not afraid to say it, even if they are called Hitler for their trouble. These are people who have long ago grown tired of explaining the basics of human behavior to their betters so they no longer bother. They just oppose immigration. These are the Old Europeans.

The second group are those who are emotionally moved by immigration to the point where they seek out positive immigration stories in their news so they can feel good about it. They see a story of a European being kind to a migrant and they are filled by a warm glow, like the feeling you get when you drink liquor on a cold day. Like the first group, these people no longer bother explaining their position. If you do not get it, you are probably a racist so who cares what you think?

These are folks who call themselves New Europeans, but like everything else about them, that is a lie. Their imagined future does not include Europeans. Instead, it is a mythical world where dusky fellows speaking gibberish operate the machinery of Western civilization, without any of the hard work and intellect that is required to maintaining it. The European is just an avatar, forever basking in the grace of the world he created for the benighted.

There is a third group that never gets into the news, because they do not participate in the great debates over the Muslim invasion. At least they do not show up on the street waving banners or on the television screaming at members of the other group. This is the silent majority, so to speak. Most Europeans are in this group and most would just as soon never discuss this issue. These are the New Men of the New Europe.

On the one hand, generations of hectoring by the beautiful people have made these folks instinctively fearful of being lumped in with the xenophobes and racists. They do not think about it. Like trained animals, they simply react to commands. Their logical parts can hear the arguments against immigration, comprehend them and agree with them, until they hear the cry “racism” and they hit the panic button, erasing everything they have in their mind on the topic.

On the other hand, these folks look at the trial of Geert Wilders and they know this cannot end well. Whatever one wants to say about his positions or how he goes about stating them, you cannot have a civilized country while throwing people in jail for holding an opinion. The only difference between what the fascist did and what is happening now is the fascists were honest about it. The Dutch authorities are slathering on a frosting of lies to go along with their thuggery.

The New European has grown accustomed to working out these contradictions. It is what defines him. There is always a good reason for not joining on one side or the other. Generations of abuse by their betters have left them unable to look their betters in the eye. At the same time, generations of groveling have made them too weak in the fight against the xenophobes. They are dispensable Europeans.

And they are being dispensed with at an accelerating pace. When European leaders are not coming up with news reasons to snuff out their own people, the Muslims are taking a more basic approach to clearing out towns and villages they would like to occupy. Set off enough bombs and those still alive get the message. That message is, “You’re not welcome. This is our country now.”

There are dozens of families who will never see their loved ones again, thanks to the leaders of Europe. They created this. They invited this and they refuse to address it. They want that warm feeling so bad they are willing to sacrifice as many of their people as is necessary to get it. Like heroin addicts, they cannot get enough of the opiate of multiculturalism. It is always more and more, while life gets worse and worse.

The New European Man will read these words and wave them off. “Our leaders will figure it out eventually. They are just trying to do the right thing, the humanitarian thing.” That is what is called wishful thinking, the thing you cling to when you got nothing else or you are unwilling to consider anything else. It is why the New European Man will not be a part of what comes next for Europe. They may not even be in the stands for the big game.

The Muslims have figured out that European leaders are paper tigers. They will not fight. Eventually, the xenophobes will figure this out as well. The guys joining Pegida, Sons of Odin and similar groups will learn the same lessons the Muslims have learned. Then they will adopt the same tactics. This is a civilizational disaster unless the New European Men figure out that the future belongs to those who show up.

President Napster

Posted on by

Over the weekend I checked in on the news and saw that a Soros rent-a-mob was causing trouble in Arizona, trying to disrupt a Trump rally. I did not see this on TV. I saw it on Twitter. I then went to Drudge who had some links. I then went to some other sites and then finally back to twitter to see and join in on the snarky commentary. I still have a TV subscription, but it did not occur to me to turn it on for the news.

I am a big sports fan and I will watch just about anything. I used to joke that I would watch ants wrestle if they put it on TV. There was a time when that was true, but as you get older the endless hype and proselytizing in games is tough to take. ESPN has become unwatchable because of it. The solution for me is I follow games on-line via various score sites and, of course, twitter. Once the game gets to crunch time I can watch it, often on-line.

The NCAA tournament is a great example. I used to love watching this thing and I still do, but I do not watch it like I once did. Instead, I have it on-line so I can keep tabs on the games and jump to the one that is going to have a tight finish. That way I skip all the nonsense hype and I can do other things while tracking the games. Again, part of it is age, but the bigger part is technology. I can now easily filter out the proselytizing and hype so I do.

In the political realm, I have not watched the Sunday chat shows in so long I no longer know their names or the performers they have playing the various roles. The evening shout shows are just about unknown to me now. I can consume all the political news I need on-line from sources that are more intelligent and interesting than anything conventional media has to offer.

There is one other little thing to ponder before I get to the point. I have a vast music collection. Much of it came from the days when Columbia House would send you ten CD’s just because you filled out a card and gave them a fake name. Another big chunk came when “sharing” music got hot in the 90’s. I have also bought a lot of music too. I still do through Amazon, but as individual mp3’s, not physical disks.

I am a Pandora user so when I hear a song I like, I will add it to my list and either buy it from Amazon or rip it from YouTube. I prefer to buy it, but if it means buying a whole CD then I steal it like a normal person. The only exception is classical or maybe some old blues where you want the digitally mastered quality, but otherwise I buy songs, not bundles of songs. I do not want or need the extra. If it adds no value, I do not buy it. Music has become commodified.

The music industry was collapsed by the mp3 and gnutella. Suddenly, the layers and layers of expense around the single song could be stripped away, unless it brought value. Most of it did not so it was slowly sloughed off. It did not happen without a fight, but it eventually happened. Performers are back making money performing and the music business is much smaller. The songs are now the marketing expense for the live shows in many cases.

We are seeing something similar with the news media. A 40 minute podcast from John Derbyshire can be consumed anytime and anywhere. John is a super smart guy with a real talent for podcasting. He works out of a tree-house. Anthony Cumia is running a radio network from his basement now. Adam Corolla is a millionaire from podcasting. A lot of what is on new media is crap, but the best parts are vastly better than anything offered by traditional media. Most important, they are cheaper.

That is the thing. The cost of reaching each customer is collapsing, which in turn is dropping the barrier to entry. Fox News exists because it can tax you through your cable bill. Cord cutting and ad hoc, on-demand video is the response to that, which drives up their cost of reaching each customer. On the other hand, a guy like Mike Cernovich can quickly raise money for a media project, because his costs are collapsing.

This brings me to Donald Trump. He posted something on twitter over the weekend about Obama’s trip to Cuba. Every news personality retweeted it and it probably reached ten million people in an hour. Donald Trump has 7.1 million twitter followers. The echo effect means he can reach tens of millions of people from his phone, blowing past the media industrial complex. In fact, he has enslaved them with twitter, turning them into his PR firm.

In some respects, Trump is the Napster candidate. He may not win, but he is blowing a hole in the system. The layers of barnacles on the news industry are a lot like the layers of waste in the music business. Technology is going to force a scraping off of these barnacles for the underlying entity to survive in the new mass media age. If you are one of these barnacles. Trumpster is Satan, just as Napster was the great evil of the music business. But when it comes to technology, the news always displaces the old.

It’s Not Us, It’s You

Posted on by

In 2000 I was living in Virginia and not terribly interested in the upcoming election. The reason was twofold. I was not a big fan of Bush and all of the down ticket candidates were uninteresting, but harmless. I think my state rep had been in office for decades and was running unopposed, because no one had a reason to throw him out. He was harmless and sensible, a rare thing in politics.

Even so, I went off the morning of the election to my polling place and I was surprised to see a line. It was one of those times when you suddenly realize you are wrong about things. Clearly, people were not like me and indifferent to the election. They were engaged, because they thought it was important. Bush won Virginia, but not as handily as one would have expected.

What came next was eight years of Progressive crazies screaming at us that Bush was a mix of Hitler and Satan. On the other side were conservative media defending everything Bush said and did, even the stuff that was contrary to conservative dogma, which was most of it. It was in the Bush years that “conservative” lost all meaning and became a brand label to sell the GOP, as well as ties, coffee mugs and so forth.

Part of the reason Donald Trump has risen to the top of the GOP field is he has largely run against conservative media. It has been an article of faith among media conservatives that the public hated the liberal media. Michelle Malkin has said “lame-stream media” so many times it could be her nickname. Much of what Fox News and talk radio do everyday is rail about the liberal media, seeing that as red meat to their fans.

It turns out that the public actually has grown to hate all political media equally. It is why the screaming about Trump has backfired. The conservative public has been doing a slow burn for eight years over the Bush debacle. They feel they were sold a pig in a poke. The people selling it were the folks in conservative media, who tried peddling Mitt Romney four years ago. They were ready to sell Jeb Bush this time.

It appears that conservative media may be slowly figuring it out as we see in this article by the neo-con pundit John Podhoretz. He cannot bring himself the admit the invade the world/invite the world ideology of his people is the real problem, but he does inch toward blaming Bush for the current ructions. Now that Hari Seldon’s top lieutenant has said it is OK, I suspect others will begin to plow this ground over the summer.

The gist of the Podhoretz article is that the bank collapse and mortgage meltdown still haunt the GOP because no one was ever brought to account for it. Instead, Republicans blamed Clinton and Democrats blamed greedy bankers, who were never charged. Instead, they were bailed out with borrowed Chinese money. The argument is that this “revolt” of the Dirt People is a delayed response to this.

Well, that is some of it, but the 2008 nonsense was part of a larger trend we have seen for decades. In the 80’s, many people went to jail over the S&L Crisis. In 2000 hardly anyone went to jail for the dot-com fraud and the accounting scandals. People have been watching the rich and powerful avoid the law for a long time now so the mortgage collapse was just part of the larger mosaic.

The bigger issue is that conservatives were told for generations that the only way to roll back the welfare state and restore order was to get control of Congress. That happened for the first time in 50 years when the GOP won the House in ‘94. They did some good things and slowed spending considerably, but Clinton was still in the White House so rollback was off the table.

That was the argument for Bush from conservative media in 2000. Bush with a GOP House and Senate could pass real reform and big parts of the conservative agenda. Instead, we got wars of choice that staggered on endlessly and a massive expansion of government not seen since LBJ. To top it off, we got the start of the security state in the form of the Department of Homeland Security.

This crap was sold and defended by conservative media for eight years. The warmongering has been defended throughout the Obama years. All the big-shots in conservative media were preparing to sell the voters on Jeb Bush until the Dirt Monster showed up and busted up the party. It is why the screaming and hooting from conservative media has fallen on deaf ears. No one believes them anymore.

To add insult to injury, the surge of Trump has been cast as racist and prol by the pajama-clad social justice warriors of conservative media. If you are a rank and file conservative, you cannot help but wonder if conservative media is just a big fraud run by the DNC. Browse through National Review and you can only assume it is a well coordinated and financed attack on the voters.

People who work with numbers have an old gag, “quantity has a quality of its own.” That is what is happening to conservative media. They can be clever and smart and have access to the best media tools. That is not much use when 99% of the people no longer believe them. Unless and until conservative media comes to terms with the fact they are on the wrong side of their customers, their star will continue to fade.

It’s Not That Complicated

Posted on by

On Friday a jury in Florida ruled that Gawker Media harmed famous person Hulk Hogan by publishing a sex tape that featured Hogan. The news accounts are all over the place about the legal issues, mostly written by people with zero understanding of the law. From the best I can tell, the case was about whether or not Gawker had the right to post the video. If not, then they harmed Hogan and are liable for damages.

The answer as to whether they had the right to post the video is obvious. Gawker does not own the video so they cannot possibly have a right to post it. All the blather about the First Amendment simply does not apply. There is no constitutional right to theft. The video is the property of the woman, Hogan or the person who filmed the two. This is not a complicated issue.

There’s well established law on this matter. The video was of two people engaged in a private act. They had an expectation of privacy. They either gave permission to the person that recorded them or they did not. The burden of proof is on the filmmaker who would have had both “performers” sign a release. If he failed to do that, then he does not have ownership of the video.

Unless Gawker could prove they bought the video from the rightful owner, the performers or the filmmaker, they were in possession of stolen property. It is no different than if Gawker sold Hogan’s car or his personal belongings that they had stolen from his home. It is not their property so they have no right to profit from it. When they decided to publish the video, they were liable for the consequences.

The usual idiots are wringing their hands over this case, claiming it is a chilling of the press. They are wrong in that the press does not have the right to steal or the right to harm people for a profit. Gawker had every right to report the existence of the tape and the events surrounding its creation. That is legitimate journalism and protected by the First Amendment.

Further, Gawker could have reported what they saw on the tape. If Hogan has a micro-penis, for example, they could have made jokes about his micro-penis. They could have said he was a terrible lover or wore socks to bed. If Hogan sued, he would have to show that Gawker lied or misrepresented him in some way. Those are loser cases, assuming the news outlet did not deliberately lie or manufacture facts.

This is not about press freedom. This is about theft. Frankly, Gawker should have been charged with theft. After all, if Nick Denton were found to be driving around in Hogan’s car, he would have been charged with possession of stolen property, unless he could establish had the permission to possess the car. In America, you have a duty to establish the provenance of property when you take possession of it.

This is why pawn shops have to take reasonable steps to make sure you are the rightful owner of whatever it is you are trying to pawn. They get your ID and run your property through the hot sheets, if available. The risk is that if the property turns out to be stolen, the pawn shop forfeits it without compensation. That is because no one has a right to stolen property. That includes news organizations.

As far as I can tell, Gawker never tried to establish their legal ownership of the tape. They were never required to disclose how they obtained it. Frankly, this is a bigger problem than the so-called chilling effect on the news. We do not want to live in a world where some weirdo can record your private doings and then sell the video to a website. They are starting to be people in jail for this now. Reporters should not be exempt.

Now, it is probably better that Gawker will be shuttered and the owner ruined. From what I understand, he is personally liable for some portion of the judgement. He will be a great example to remind other tabloid sites that they have to follow the law. Even if Hulk Hogan has a micro-penis, he has rights like everyone else.