Category Archives: Culture

A Post With No Title

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Looks like the Man is going to throw FedEx in jail.

FedEx Corp. (FDX:US) was accused in a federal indictment of delivering prescription pain pills, sedatives, anti-anxiety drugs and other controlled substances for illegal Internet pharmacies. A conviction could be “material,” the company said today in a regulatory filing.

The operator of the world’s largest (FDX:US) cargo airline was indicted on 15 counts of conspiracy to distribute controlled substances and misbranded drugs and drug trafficking that carry a potential fine of twice the gains from the illegal conduct, alleged to be at least $820 million for it and co-conspirators. FedEx delivered drugs to Internet pharmacies that supplied pills to customers who filled out online questionnaires and were never examined by doctors, knowing these practices violated federal and state drug laws, according to the federal indictment.

The company vowed to fight the charges, saying it can’t be responsible for the contents of the 10 million packages it transports daily and that policing customers would violate their privacy.

“FedEx is innocent of the charges,” Patrick Fitzgerald, a spokesman for the Memphis, Tennessee-based company, said yesterday in an e-mailed statement. “We will plead not guilty. We will defend against this attack on the integrity and good name of FedEx and its employees.”

Well, FedEx is not getting a free pass because they tried to protect the privacy of criminals engaged in criminal behavior. That’s called aiding and abetting. That said, it is unreasonable to hold a shipping company responsible for the packages. Unless there’s proof FedEx knew about it or should have known about it, the Feds are spinning their wheels.

FedEx said yesterday it repeatedly asked the government for a list of illegal pharmacies so it would know which ones not to do business with. The U.S. never gave it such a list, it said.

The company knew it was delivering drugs to dealers and addicts, with couriers in Kentucky, Tennessee and Virginia expressing concerns circulated to senior managers that FedEx trucks were stopped on the road by online pharmacy customers demanding packages of pills, according to the indictment. Some delivery addresses were parking lots or vacant homes, prosecutors said.

“This indictment highlights the importance of holding corporations that knowingly enable illegal activity responsible for their role in aiding criminal behavior,” U.S. Attorney Melinda Haag in San Francisco said in a statement.

The illegal deliveries began in 2000, Haag said, and FedEx continued to do business with one Internet pharmacy whose manager had been arrested for violating drug laws. She said the company also served a fulfillment pharmacy that supplied Internet pharmacies that were shut by law enforcement, with their owners and doctors convicted of illegally distributing drugs.

OK, that sounds bad. If the Feds can back it up with proof, then it is clear the company engaged in illegal conduct that they knew to be illegal. But, there’s a problem. The “company” did not do anything. People working for the company made these decisions. Why are the Feds going after the share holders? Surely, they could press the employees to dime out the people who made the decision to commit these crimes. Conspiracy to distribute class A narcotics is a big crime carrying big time.

It is the fundamental problem we face as a country. We no longer arrest and prosecute rich people. In the 80’s, the S&L crooks went to the can in big numbers. Even Michael Milken did time. In the Clinton years that stopped and the law no longer applies to the ruling class. Exactly one guy from the Enron scandal went to jail. No one from the dot-com scam went to jail. No one from the mortgage meltdown went to jail.

If we get back to sending rich people to the can when they screw up, a lot of what ails us will fix itself. Want to see the ruling class get religion? Send a few of them to Angola State Prison. They get serious about the law in a hurry.

America’s Colonial Class

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I’m fond of saying that America has been colonized by pod people. They look like us and they make noises that sound like us, but they are not us. They are, at the minimum, foreign and alien. They don’t want what we want. They don’t love what we love and they don’t see the world as we see it. Our political class may as well be from Kenya or Indonesia. They look at us like foreigners in our own lands. This editorial from the Times is a good example.

There is a reasonable way to confront the influx of Central American children at the southern border, and the White House is getting it mostly right.

No rational person believes this. You have to be divorced from reality to think the White House is handling this well. Yet, the lunatics at the NYTimes print such nonsense without even bothering to acknowledge the alternative.

It has asked Congress for $3.7 billion in emergency funds to pay for more immigration judges, for legal assistance to children and parents, and to help care for tens of thousands of children in shelters in Texas and elsewhere.

The request seeks more money for the Border Patrol, and for speedier prosecutions and deportations of adults with children, repatriating migrants and addressing causes fueling the exodus in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. And it includes an ad campaign to urge parents there to keep their children at home.

The request would be a good step toward tackling the problem, though it should have included much more for immigration lawyers and humanitarian aid, and less for agents and drones at the border. Congress should swiftly approve it, since it contains pretty much everything that lawmakers — even President Obama’s Republican critics — have been demanding.

But instead of supporting the package, Republicans are throwing up roadblocks. And through dangerous overreaction, some are urging actions that would make the situation worse. They want to make the children’s deportations speedier by amending or repealing the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act, a 2008 law signed by President George W. Bush that gave new legal and humanitarian protections to unaccompanied migrant children from countries other than Mexico or Canada.

If this were posted to the Onion, you would not have to change a word of it. These people really believe this stuff. In order to believe such nonsense, you cannot be living in America and keeping tabs on the news. That, or you are suffering from mental illness. Yet, these people are in charge of our country. How is this different from the attitudes of the French royal class during the reign of Louis XVI?

The Red Team keeps chanting about how the solution to immigration begins with securing the border. That’s self-delusion. We face the dilemma colonized people have always faced. The solution begins with buying the wood for the gallows to be built on the Mall in Washington. It’s only then that we have truly faced up to what we have to do to fix our country.

An Island of Pedophiles

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The word “pedo” gets thrown around way too much, but there is question that there are a startling number of people who are kid-diddlers. At least they aspire to be kid-diddlers, butt hey only traffic in child porn. There also seems to be some correlation between degenerates and the ruling class. Maybe we just notice it more among the rich and famous, but there are a lot of them in elite society This story from Britain about a sweep of pedos among the professional classes is stunning.

Doctors, teachers, care workers and former police officers are among more than 600 suspected paedophiles arrested following a massive nationwide police operation.

The unprecedented investigation, involving every police force in the UK and coordinated by the National Crime Agency (NCA), took six months to complete.

The operation initially targeted people suspected of accessing indecent images of children online, but some of those arrested have now been charged with a wide range of offences, including serious sexual assault.

A total of 660 people were arrested as part of the operation and spokesman for the NCA said more than 400 children throughout Britain had been safeguarded.

Many of those arrested were people who had access to children in the course of their work. The majority had not previously been on the police’s radar and had not previously been arrested for sex offences.

The way this story starts, you can’t be sure if the people arrested were actual pedophiles or merely thinking about it.

Phil Gormley, deputy director general of the NCA, said: “This is the first time the UK has had the capability to coordinate a single targeted operation of this nature. Over the past six months we have seen unprecedented levels of cooperation to deliver this result.

“Our aim was to protect children who were victims of or might be at risk of sexual exploitation.

“A child is victimised not only when they are abused and an image is taken, they are victimised every time that image is viewed by someone.”

A spokesman for the NCA refused to reveal the methods used to track down the suspects so that the same tactics can be used again in the future.

The NCA said suspects included doctors, teachers, Scout leaders, care workers and former police officers.

In total, only 39 of those arrested were registered sex offenders known to the authorities.

As part of the investigation, officers searched 833 properties and examined 9,172 computers, phones and hard drives.

While Mr Gormley refused to discuss the tactics used to snare the suspected paedophiles it is believed many of those arrested had been operating on the so-called Dark Web, a part of the internet, which has in the past been extremely difficult for the authorities to monitor and police.

But Mr Gormley said sex offenders should realise that they cannot avoid detection while using the internet, even the dark web.

Interestingly, looking at a forbidden act is now the same as performing the act. Human society has enough criminals and degenerates without the need to create them. Britain, it seems, wants to declare itself the pedophile capital of the world. Teasing the numbers out of the report, it looks like they found 39 real sex offenders in this operation. The other 561 people were just found to be looking at naughty pictures on-line.

The other thing that comes to mind is how proud the police are that they ransacked over 9,000 computers and 800 homes. The implication is that the state is watching you at all times and you better stick to the straight and narrow. This is becoming more and more common, despite the fact the state is failing to do the basics of government. Britain can’t prevent hoards of Muslims from entering their lands, but they are hell on the perverts getting their jollies looking at naughty images.

Why can’t these guys manage this level of “unprecedented cooperation” to round up terrorists before they blow up the subway system? Why were they unable to apply this power to stopping the Muslim rape gangs? We know the answer. This story is part of the larger pogrom against white people. They will arrest people for viewing content on-line, which may be revolting, but it is not the same as being a pedo. On the other hand, they let non-whites ruin wild in the streets.

Suicidal Maniacs

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I’m fond of calling Progressives “lunatics” and “fanatics” whenever the opportunity arises. In comment threads, I do it to irritate the lunatics and fanatics. Here, it is about clarity. Someone who thinks we should “do something” to help the poor or needy is often just soft hearted and soft headed. The former is admirable and the latter is forgivable in most cases. Usually, these are people who will accept limits and logic when pressed. You can explain to them that shoving a bunch of tax dollars into a program will make things worse, not better.

Then there are people who cannot be reasoned with or bargained with, not matter how strong the argument. These people are fanatics who believe what they believe and will never stop believing those things. Their dedication to the cause is so tangled up in their sense of self they can no longer distinguish where the causes ends and they begin. Asking them to give up the cause is akin to asking them to commit suicide. Lunacy is is when the fanatic is ready to destroy everything in order to achieve their aims.

As thousands of illegal immigrant children are crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, House Democrats pushed for more amnesty, guest-worker visas, $3.7 billion in funding, and more lawyers for illegal immigrant children during a Tuesday Twitter town hall on immigration.

Their message to illegal immigrants was, in the words of Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), “our doors are open.”

“We are all connected. We can’t just build a wall or a fence and say no more,” Lewis said. “This is America. Our doors are open.”

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who has said she would rather pass amnesty legislation than become Speaker again, and Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) urged House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) to bring an amnesty bill to the floor so it can pass with support from Democrats. Boehner told Obama after House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) was ousted for his embrace of amnesty that Congress would not vote on an immigration bill this year. Boehner did suggest, though, that Congress could pass amnesty legislation next year.

House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-MD) claimed America already has “extensive border security” while Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said the well-being of the illegal immigrant children “must be our first priority.”

Theses lunatics don’t care about the migrants. How can they? Many of them are gangsters and criminals. Others are just dead beats looking for welfare checks. Still others are being thrown out of their native lands as they are a burden. What these lunatic politicians do care about is breaking the back of traditional America. They hate you and they want you dead, even if it means blowing the whole country up.

Reps. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) and Steve Horsford (D-NV) pushed for more guest-worker visas, which are coveted by big-business and high-tech interests, that would lower the wages of American workers. Numerous scholars and studies have concluded that America has a surplus – not a shortage – of high-tech workers.

There’s a great example of the fanatic. The facts say we don’t need to import foreign workers, yet they persist in demanding more cheap labor for the robber barons of Silicon Valley. The fact that they also rant about evil corporations makes the whole thing nuttier than it should be possible.

Rep. Judy Chu (D-CA) said taxpayers should pay for more lawyers for illegal immigrant children, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) went further, saying “every” illegal immigrant child should get legal representation.

Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-NY) insisted that amnesty legislation would “raise wages” even though the Congressional Budget Office determined that the influx of more foreign workers would lower the wages of American workers. For that reason, U.S. Civil Rights Commissioner Peter Kirsanow wrote a letter to the Congressional Black Caucus urging them to vote against amnesty bills that would detrimentally impact black Americans at the lower rungs of the economic ladder the most.

The contempt these people have for you is breathtaking. Rangel hates you so much he is willing to put his House seat at risk in order to fill up your community with Latin American peasants. Think about that for a second. How can anyone bargain with a madman willing to die for his cause? Maybe this is the inflection point and we are headed for a crack up. I don’t know. Maybe normals will wake up and begin treating Progressives like the Chinese treat Falun Gong. Maybe the illegals will get to the lunatics first and do the job Americans refuse to do.

Two Americas

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Even mendacious degenerates can say something useful on occasion. John Edwards, a guy of low morals even by the standards of politics, used to campaign on the idea of there being two Americas. His formulation had one America for the lumpenproletariat and the other for the giant lizard people he promised to slay with his bare hands if only he was elected president. The lizard people were enslaving the rest of us with capitalism and false patriotism.

The oleaginous sociopath tacked on all sorts of nonsense, but the idea actually got some traction, despite it all. People feel the country is coming unglued and anything that speaks to that, gets their attention. Charles Murray has a whole big book on the idea of the country coming apart. The rapid changes in the country’s demographics means the old culture and politics must give way to a new culture and politics. Politics is downstream from culture and culture is the byproduct of biology.

When it comes from a guy like John Edwards, this talk is intended to trick people out of something, like their vote. Even when it comes from less revolting public figures, it is wise to be a little skeptical. America is a big country and that means lots of weirdness and that means lots of natural friction. The South has been vastly different from New England since the founding. California will always be a bit strange compared to the rest of the country. Diversity always brings conflict.

That said, stories like this should give everyone pause. The gun grabbing fetish will not go away, because the people behind it hate the sorts of people who own guns. The great gap in culture is now becoming a physical separation.  Guns are now associated with downscale whites who hunt and shop at WalMart. Guns are southern, like Christianity and NASCAR. Odds are, most of Connecticut is happy that Gun Valley is moving south.

It is convenient to think guns are an outlier, but there are a range of issues where the country’s regions are going in different directions. Military service is one example. According to people who study these things, Southerners are much more likely to enlist than Northerners. Marriage rates and divorce rates are following a similar trend. Church attendance is the one that jumps off the page. But what strikes me about the gun issue is that people are actually moving around the country to get away from those with whom they no longer agree. We are physically self-segregating on the national level.

Maybe it is just temporary madness and it will pass. Maybe something else will come along to jam us back together. Maybe we were always this different and mass media is making it more obvious. I’m not that smart. On the other hand, maybe John Derbyshire is right and we are balkanizing. In a generation or two we will go our separate ways. Pat Buchanan has been talking about the crack-up for years.

Again, perhaps it has always been so, but it sure feels like we are coming unglued. If Texas broke away, I’d probably move there and become a Texan, rather than American. The same is true of the Old South. If New England decided to join Canada as a province, I’d shrug and wish them the best. It’s not that I’m rooting for it. I’m just tied of being around and being ruled by people who hate me. Sometimes, divorce really is the best answer.

This Week In Lunacy

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Steve Sailer has a great post up on his site about this hilariously deranged story in the New York Times. Since the onset of this hysteria, the lunatics are crafting an imaginary past in which homosexuals were kept on lavender farms in the south. Like blacks, who Progressives claim to have liberated, homosexuals were forced to slave away on the lavender farms as chattel. That makes the obsession with homosexuals today an analog to the Civil Rights Movement.

Glenn Burke was 27 when he walked out on Major League Baseball, his promising career as an outfielder undone mostly by the burden of being a semicloseted gay man. It was 1980, and it was more important, Burke later explained, to be himself than to be a professional baseball player.

It turns out he sucked at baseball too.

Glenn Burke

When you hit .237 over six seasons, the game walks away from you, not the other way around. He was not the first washed up ball player to blame the unfairness of life for his busted dreams. The barrooms of America are full of guys who never got over washing out of sports. They never made it to the bigs and have a million reasons for it other than they were not good enough.

You would think a reporter would look up the stats, but that’s not how the modern media works these days. First they create the narrative and then they fill in the facts. It’s not a lot different from how the Soviets would airbrush people in and out of photos. When you think everything including observable reality must be bent toward reaching the promised land, silly things like facts are not going to stop you.

My Advice: Tattoos

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Here’s a tip for young people. If you are planning a life of crime, avoid getting face tattoos. It makes it easy for the cops to find you.

Richard Magnan sports many of them. The one on his forehead announcing “F— the World” may just emerge as the prosecution’s exhibit A in his upcoming trial. Perhaps the defense will enter the St. Louis Cardinals and Chicago White Sox insignias on his face as evidence of a dangerous split-personality disorder.

A judge ordered the illustrated man held on $3 million bail on involuntary manslaughter charges on Wednesday. Chicago cops arrested Magnan on Monday for killing a friend over the holiday weekend. The rooter of the White Sox in the American and the Cardinals in the National–Is it a crime to hedge your bets and back a team in both leagues?–allegedly shot a fellow member of the 2-6 gang in the stomach in a Walgreens parking lot at the intersection of West 63rd Street and South Austin Avenue. The convicted felon, who now maintains it was a mistake (the shooting, not the righteous ink), fled the scene. There’s no word yet on how any potential witnesses described Magnan to the police.

Eyewitness accounts are often tough to support at trial. People make mistakes and forget things. Even public defenders can get an ID tossed in many cases. When the perp has a “Fuck the World” tattoo on his forehead, it’s hard to claim he was misidentified. It’s one thing to have the attitude, it is another to make it an easily recognizable image of your identity to the world. of course, criminals are not the smartest people in the world.

Our Progressive Future

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Imagine it is the year 2050 and mobs of lunatics are pulling down the Washington Monument on the grounds that Washington was a racist slave holder. Earlier they had stormed the National Archive and burned the Constitution, Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights. These were deemed to be unwelcome reminders of the nations patriarchal past and violation of the new America. All around the country mobs are destroying symbols of the evil past.

It sounds crazy, but erasing the past is a popular past time with the lunatics. The Soviets would airbrush people in and out of the the past whenever it suited them. The Nazis tried hard to recreate things like Christmas to fit the official Aryan narrative. The 18th century has been rewritten to read like a first draft of Roots. Currently, our lunatics are creating a mythological past where homosexuals were enslaved on lavender plantation in the South, thus making them vicitms.

America is becoming a different type of Iran. Their lunatics believe in flying carpets, invisible imams and sorcery. Our lunatics believe biology is a social construct, everyone can be above average and humanity can be saved through mass extinction. The point of comparison between various types of lunatics is their belief in utter nonsense and their willingness to kill for it. That’s why the Left is obsessed with a rapprochement with Iran. They see themselves in the eggplants.

The scenario above sounds crazy at the moment, but look at what lunatics will do if given the chance. These sites they are destroying are harmless to normal people. They are important historical sites that help define the people who live there. That’s what makes them so dangerous to the lunatic. Anything that contradicts the narrative, the prevailing orthodoxy, must be destroyed. If that sounds familiar, it should. Look at the list of people destroyed by PC fanatics in the last few years.

It was not so long ago when Arabs were proud of their cultural history. Western archaeologists and researchers were invited to these countries to dig around and find stuff, even Christian stuff. That was one generation ago, give or take. Most people reading this were alive when that was common. Here’s a picture of Afghan women at university in the 1970’s:

In the 70’s, a whole lot of Muslims looked at the lunatics and thought they would burn themselves out eventually. The more sophisticated Muslims understood the threat, but were sure they could deal with it. Others were convinced the people would never let the lunatics gain dominion over them. Everyone had a reason to think it would all work out in the end, even the lunatics. The difference is the lunatics had a plan and everyone else had wishful thinking.

It’s Always About Race With These Guys

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If you pay attention, you cannot help but notice the blatantly racist attitudes of the black sports reporter. Some are worse than others, but all of them wear they’re resentments on their sleeve. Michael Wilbon is a notorious bigot. He must have been told to tone it down after the Rush Limbaugh imbroglio, but he is still pretty racist. Kevin Blackistone is a click short of being Louis Farrakhan. J. A. Adande is far from the worst, but his slip shows from time to time.

If I could get a meeting of my own with LeBron James, I’d ask him how he could even consider compromising his values and stepping down from the moral high ground he ascended to during the playoffs by weighing an offer from Cleveland Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert.

LeBron produced the sharpest and most noteworthy criticism of Clippers owner Donald Sterling after TMZ made Sterling’s racially offensive diatribes public, saying “it’s unacceptable in our league.” No one has accused Gilbert of holding the same misguided racial perceptions as Sterling. With Gilbert, it’s about the personal attacks on LeBron’s character, and his diametrically opposed views on the business of the NBA.

For black sports reporters, the black icons are untouchable. Until his Thanksgiving meltdown, criticizing Tiger Woods was forbidden by black reporters. Saying Bird was better than Jordon was racist. Saying anything bad about LeeBong is treated like a cross burning. Conversely, saying bad things about Donald Sterling is required, because he is a racist. Similarly, the owner of the Cavaliers is the great Satan because he said bad things about Leebong.

Gilbert, for those who never bothered to read his unhinged response to The Decision in 2010 before the Cavaliers recently purged it from their website, called LeBron’s departure to the Miami Heat a “cowardly betrayal” and said LeBron was a bad example for the children of Cleveland. This wasn’t just a critique of the televised announcement; it was a tantrum about the very premise of free agency, as if anything other than a career-long commitment to the team that drafted a player constituted treason.

The little noted fact of the Leebong move to Miami was how blacks viewed it as an escape from bondage. Leebong moving from one team to another was the seminal moment in the game, when the black players finally took control of their league from the Jewish owners. That last part is another seldom discussed aspect of this story. Blacks harbor a deep resentment of Jews. That’s because Jews tend to be landlords and business owners in black communities.

A year later, Gilbert was among the group of owners holding to the hard line when the NBA locked out its players, willing to sacrifice games to institute a new collective bargaining agreement that limited player earnings and hampered the formation of superteams.

A return to the Cavaliers by James would be a tacit endorsement of all he rejected. It wouldn’t represent just a swallowing of his own pride — it would be a surrender in the battle for self-determination for NBA players.

We see it again. Gilbert is leading a conspiracy to keep the black man down.

There’s an undercurrent to this summer’s free-agency period that makes it more than just a reshuffling of rosters. The proceedings are a referendum on the labor conflict fought in 2011 and perhaps the grist for a new battle in the next round of negotiations.

I’ve interpreted reports that LeBron will take nothing less than a maximum contract as his way of rejecting the premise that it’s incumbent on players to make the financial sacrifices to win, as if the owners don’t also have the option of paying the luxury tax to assemble a championship team. To play for Gilbert would be to reward a man who wanted it this way. It would also mean leaving Heat owner Micky Arison, who made it clear on Twitter that he didn’t approve of the way collective bargaining negotiations were headed in 2011. (Arison also showed he had no love for Sterling, responding to a tweet criticizing Sterling in his mentions with an “lol.”)

Adande is a reasonably level headed reporter compared to most. Still, his column is dripping with racial hatred of the Jewish owners, merely because they will not let the black players do what they want without repercussions. Owners in all sports try to drive down the cost of labor. That’s what they do. In basketball, the black man’s game, that’s treated as the ultimate sign of disrespect. Of course, they pretend the owners are white, rather than Jewish, so the Jews in the media are fine with it.

That’s the great paradox of modern times. Whites in America would happily go along with a race blind society. In fact, most whites still think the goals is a color blind society, you know, like Martin Luther King wanted. In reality, non-whites will never stop hectoring whites about race. Here you have two groups, Jews and blacks, who owe everything to white people in America, but they can’t let the race issue go. It is what defines them, so it must always be about race, particularly the white race.

A Generation of Sociopaths

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Humans are wired to distrust outsiders. In the very early days of man, about 50,000 years ago, humans lived in very small bands of territorial hunter-gathers. The reason for this is the species was hyper-violent and hyper-aggressive. In a world where every ape that looks like you could and would crush your skull with a rock at any minute, identifying friend and foe was vital. The easy solution was to stick together in relatively small kin groups. Trust your family and no one else.

The mechanisms for identifying friends evolved over time along with our complex relationships with one another. The mechanism for identifying foes was much simpler. If you are not a friend, it is assumed you are a foe. Evolution does not pick the best solution. It picks the simplest ones that work.

People who study these things tell us that altruism was one of the first modern human character traits to evolve. Trusting strangers is a big deal in human evolution. You cannot have much of a society without the capacity for trusting unrelated people. Males in particular have to have a way to trust unrelated males. Otherwise, you have to guard your women all the time. Figuring out how unrelated males can coexist was a big deal in human evolution. It made settlement possible. A bunch of dudes who are unrelated, but agree not to bang each other’s women, working in concert is a force multiplier.

Without getting too deep in the weeds on evolution stuff, the point is that civilization is about trust. That encompasses a lot more than just being able to leave your house without worrying about your old lady getting it on with the mailman. It is about willingly taking on obligations, even when the payoff is not obvious. It is about agreeing to settle disputes within a set of rules, administered by the rest of society. It is about preserving today for those who have yet to be born.

Anyway, what got me going on this is this post from Jim Geraghty. Most of it is nonsense, but there’s something of value lurking in it. That would be my great comment.

Well, the next generation is more transactional. This is something business and the military are struggling with as they hire, train and develop millenials. This generation puts lifestyle and personal goals ahead of all else. They are not interested in work that is uninteresting or routine. They need constant positive feedback either from superiors or through participation in a team.

The result is this generation has little emotional investment in work. They will walk away from a job if they don’t feel it is satisfying, even if that means leaving co-workers and friends in a difficult position. Anyone watching millenials take over a family business has seen them cut ties with long term employees and vendors on a whim.

How this will play out in society is seldom discussed. The military is spending a lot of time and money trying to get ahead of it. Retention of young officers is an enormous concern right now. Politically, we may be a facing a generation of sociopaths incapable of seeing past the immediate value of policy. These are not the sort of folks likely to carry a heavy burden to finance their parents retirement.

I’m not the first person to pick up on this. In fact, the military has been spending a lot of time and energy trying to figure how to adjust to the new generation. This paper from the Navy on the challenges they face in retaining young officers is very interesting. If you scroll down to page seven you get this:

Numerous studies have been conducted that evaluate the differences between significant workplace demographics, most notably between Baby Boomers (1946-1964), Generation X (1965-1980), and Millennials (1981-1995). One of the most concise is a recently concluded study jointly conducted by PricewaterhouseCoopers, University of Southern California, and London Business School. This 2011-2012 joint study collected data from more than 40,000 respondents, including a set of 13,150 PricewaterhouseCoopers employees (9,120 Millennials and 4,030 non-Millennials) at the same point in their career. Some notable differences between Millennials and their Non-Millennial counterparts include:

    • Millennial employees are unconvinced that excessive work demands are worth the sacrifices to their personal life.
    • Millennials say that creating a strong cohesive, team-oriented culture at work and providing opportunities for interesting work—including assignments around the world—are important to their workplace happiness, even more so than their non- Millennial counterparts.
    • While the same basic drivers of retention exist for both Millennials and non-Millennials, their relative importance varies, with Millennials placing a greater emphasis on being supported and appreciated

Addressing retention, the report notes “Generational differences do exist among Millennials and non-Millennials, and should be taken into account by organizations that include employees from both groups. For example, Millennials are more likely to leave if their needs for support, appreciation and flexibility are not met, while non-Millennials are more likely to leave if they feel they are not being paid competitively, or due to a perceived lack of development opportunities.” This has alarming implications for senior leadership, since the traditional top-down approach and differences in generational perspectives are likely to hinder cross-generational communication.

Another concern is the Millennial’s perspective on employment, which takes a more “transactional approach” than that exhibited by Baby Boomer or Generation X officers. In general, this younger generation is not emotionally invested or tied down by 4-8 years of naval service. Instead, Millennials are more willing to vote with their feet if they feel their needs aren’t being met, forcing the service to adapt or subsequently fall victim to a lack of talent as disenfranchised service members leave – reducing the talent pool that will produce our future senior leaders.

Anyone who has seen a Millennial take over a family business has probably seen the behavior described in the Navy paper. Long time employees are jettisoned and vendor relationships are broken. It is not a money grab. it’s just a weird need to personalize everything, even to the point of self harm. The Millennial will cut loose the old trusted option and replace it with something novel, because it makes them feel special or empowered. Their emotions count for everything.

Employing this generation is a challenge to every business owner. I know of a few companies that quietly avoid hiring this generation. They will hire a college grad, but they avoid hiring the 25-35 year old. The reason is they are, as one guy I know put it, “lazy clock punchers that make more demands than they are worth. I’d rather hire a retired guy or a single mom. They may need time off, but they work hard and are grateful.” The guy I’m paraphrasing is not a geezer, but a guy in his forties.

A generation that has no loyalties and no concept of loyalty is going to be a problem in a welfare state with staggering debt obligations. Throw in the fact that these folks are only interested in that which elevates their self-esteem and you have a serious problem on the horizon. A generation willing to say “fuck it” and walk away from a good job, leaving friends and colleagues to struggle, is not going to be paying high taxes for granny. They would very likely support turning granny into dog chow if that’s more convenient.

That leads me back to where I started. This is a low-trust generation. They have to be. If you’re willing to cut loose a long time employee because you feel like it or send granny to the dog food plant because you can’t be bothered, no one is going to trust you.

A generation of perpetual toddlers unwilling to commit to anything that does not make them feel like special little snowflakes is hardly going to bite the bullet for societal obligations. I don’t think we’re looking at Late Bronze Age collapse, but American society is about to veer off into a low-trust direction. History says that brings consequences not good for civilizational progress.