Category Archives: Culture

The Vice Economy

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Casino gambling is going to make for a good book one day. I’m sure lots of books have been written on the subject from all angles, but the one containing the epitaph is still unwritten. Way back in the olden thymes, Las Vegas was the one place to legally gamble. That meant that most people did their gambling illegally.

Now we are up to our eyeballs in legal casinos, often run by the state. The argument being that it raises money from a bad thing to be used for a good thing and it cuts down on crime. Whether any of that is true is debatable, but what is certainly true is the casino business is in trouble. This story from Atlantic City is a pretty good example.

The Revel Casino Hotel warned its staff Thursday that it will shut down this summer if a buyer can’t be found in bankruptcy court.

In warning letters given to employees and obtained by the Associated Press, Revel said it is seeking a buyer for the struggling $2.4 billion casino, but can’t guarantee one will be found. If not, employees could be terminated as soon as Aug. 18, Revel said in the letter.

“If Revel is unable to complete such a sale promptly, Revel expects to close its entire facility,” the letters read. The company also said it plans to stay open while it searches for a buyer.

Shortly after distributing the letters, Revel filed a Chapter 11 petition in federal bankruptcy court, its second in as many years. Revel said it hopes to find a buyer quickly.

“We will work to reach an agreement with a new owner who will help ensure Revel’s long-term financial stability and who shares our commitment to providing Revel’s guests and players an exceptional experience,” said Scott Kreeger, Revel’s president and chief operating officer.

He said the casino has obtained a $125 million loan from one of its existing financiers so it can operate during its stay in bankruptcy court.

If you have never been to Atlantic City, here’s a quick primer. Imagine a bombed out ghetto city like Detroit or Newark. Place it next to a decent beach with a boardwalk and then plop some tacky casinos and you have Atlantic City. This particular casino was built far from the massive ghettos that bound the boardwalk area. In theory, it should be thriving, but it is not. In fact, all of the casinos in AC struggle.

One reason is the surrounding area. The big mistake was not pushing out the locals when they built the casinos in the 1970’s. But, that was before liberals figured out how to use gays and Mexicans to clear out a neighborhood and gentrify it. Back then they still thought they could fix the ghetto. The other reason for the failure of AC is the casino boom. In fact, we may be reaching peak casino.

Racetrack casinos used to contribute as much as $240 million a year to Delaware’s tax coffers. But as the Northeast becomes saturated with gambling venues, the state’s casino revenue has tumbled, prompting a new industry request—for a tax break.

“It’s a different world for the Delaware casinos,” said Democratic Gov. Jack Markell, who supports reducing the tax burden on casinos by $20 million a year to help them compete.

More casinos have opened in the Northeast over the past decade than in any other part of the country, and the expansion is causing upheaval in the region. States that adopted gambling earlier than their neighbors, such as Delaware, New Jersey and West Virginia, are watching dollars drain away, and new projects have some wondering how many facilities the area can support.

Twenty-six casinos have opened since 2004, fueling a 39% increase in total annual gambling revenue in the mid-Atlantic and New England, according to a study by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Within 100 miles of Philadelphia, there now are 24 casinos, a big shift from the early 1990s, when Atlantic City, N.J., enjoyed an East Coast monopoly. At least a dozen more gambling spots are in the pipeline from Massachusetts to Maryland, raising fears in states such as Rhode Island that their casino tax windfall is at risk.

This is a familiar pattern. A truly new product pops up creating a new industry. Once it is clearly a winner, others rush in to get a bite of the apple. Supply shoots up, prices collapse and the product becomes a commodity. That’s followed by a culling of the supply herd. Cheap money fuels consolidation so eventually you end up with a handful of suppliers of the product, who can make low margin businesses work on volume.

The question is what comes next. In every other business a few operators emerge as the apex predators to gobble up the rest. That can’t happen with state run gambling parlors. Some will go this route where private operators run the casinos and pay a special tax to the state. That either means the state takes a smaller cut or they find a way to turn the operator into a utility, which seems unlikely.

There are two other models that could be the end game. One is the nationalized business model. In the old days it was popular in Europe for the state to take control of whole industries like steel and energy. By the 1970’s these industries were money losing disasters threatening to bankrupt the state. They were privatized and in many cases sent overseas. Decades from now states will probably be unloading these white elephants for pennies on a dollar.

The other model is pornography, which has followed an interesting path. The Internet gave new life to an industry largely run by degenerates and gangsters. It suddenly got cool and it got rich. But, the same tools that opened it up to professional business people opened it up to global competition. Revenues collapsed as amateurs started giving away their porn on the Internet. The “adult bookstore” followed Blockbuster Video into the great abyss.

Gambling can be done on-line. Not all of it, but poker, sports books and other, as yet uninvented, games can be done effectively on-line. Prohibitions against on-line gambling will work for a while, but getting around these limits is getting easier. I know poker players who belong to private on-like clubs, using gaming consoles. It will not be long before a clever guy figures out how to “monetize” this.

Gambling has been a part of human societies since at least settlement. The thing is, there’s little value added opportunities in it. You can build a four-star hotel on a beach and make big money. Other than offering drinks, safety and volume, a casino is not offering a lot to the gambler. They are not there for the shows or the atmosphere. They are there for the action. That means these state gambling parlors will see their margins drop to the absolute minimum, with many going bust in the next decade.

There’s always been something dodgy about government running the vice rackets. In America, the Federal government runs the alcohol business. They make more from it than the private players. Alcohol is taxed at over $20 per gallon. The states run the cigarettes business and are now getting into the drug rackets. They own the gambling rackets in most places. The only thing left is prostitution and porn. Making money from vice makes you a pimp, no matter what you do with the money. Seeing the state fail at it is pleasing at some level.

More important, it underscores a criticism from the old right that has long been dismissed. That is, you cannot have an economy based on doing each others laundry. You have to make thinks and you have to invent things. That creates real jobs directly through employment in factories. It does so indirectly for all of the support services. It also props up the tertiary economy, like gambling and entertainment, as people use their surplus on leisure. You can’t have a real economy very long when it is based on selling off your assets to pay for leisure.

 

A National Disgrace

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The foundation of western style liberalism is that the law applies to everyone equally and the law operates by a certain logic. A citizen does not have to memorize the laws in order to avoid violating them. The represents the habit of mind of the people. That’s the ideal and there are exceptions, but the general concept is what matters. The further away from the ideals, the more corrupt the society. You see that here.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office canceled six federal trademark registrations for the NFL’s Washington Redskins on Wednesday, saying the nickname is “disparaging to Native Americans” and cannot be trademarked under federal law that prohibits trademark protection on offensive or disparaging language.

The team has been under fire for the past year, with many groups, including the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation, wanting the nickname changed.

Last month, the team hired a lobbying firm to help with the public backlash after senators sent a letter to the National Football League saying they also wanted the name changed.

 “We decide, based on the evidence properly before us, that these registrations must be cancelled because they were disparaging to Native Americans at the respective times they were registered,” the Trademark Trial and Appeals board wrote in its opinion.

Redskins owner Dan Snyder has repeatedly said that he will not change the nickname despite the opposition.

The Trademark Trial and Appeals Board said the “Redskins” name is the subject for cancellation for “entertainment services -namely, football exhibitions rendered in stadia and through the media of radio and television broadcasts.”

The team’s cheerleading squad, the “Redskinettes,” are also subject to the cancellation, for “entertainment services, namely, cheerleaders who perform dance routines at professional football games and exhibitions and other personal appearances,” according to the board.

This jihad against the Redskins is led by one of the most corrupt humans on earth, Harry Reid (D, Organized Crime). This is a man who entered politics penniless and is now super-rich. He made his money shaking down contributors and making land deals with organized crime figures. Dan Snyder may be an odious speck of a man, but he made his money honestly. He has a right to live in a land of laws and he has right to expect those laws will be respected by his government.

This is a national disgrace. Whatever your views on the name or the people involved in the dispute, willy-nilly stealing the owner’s property for political reasons is how banana republics function. What’s next? Will Reid send in thugs to break up Snyder’s house and threaten his family? We have allowed our country to be taken over by criminals, deviants and lunatics. We should be ashamed of what we have done.

The Stupidity of Fanatics

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For many people, the last decade or so has been a transition away from conventional politics into something outside of that narrow realm of Left versus Right. Whatever one wants to call the new sort of politics emerging outside conventional politics, it is largely driven by the fanaticism of both Left and Right. Both of those camps are convinced they can solve the problems of the human condition. The result is this.

The electoral upset of Eric Cantor last week — partially blamed on his squishiness about immigration, along with stories of immigrant children streaming across the US-Mexican border — have seriously dimmed the prospects of legislating immigration reform anytime soon.

That’s a shame, because normalizing the status of our millions of illegal immigrants, while clearly benefiting them, is also essential to the economic and social welfare of the country as a whole.

The writer claims to be a conservative. He is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, which bills itself as right-wing, but in the current context that simple means slightly to the Right the Left. Regardless of ideology, you would think someone sporting the title “senior fellow” could get the facts right. Cantor lost because he favored amnesty and open borders. That’s not a fact in dispute by people who pay attention to these things.

Calling amnesty “normalizing the status of our millions of illegal immigrants” is dishonest even by the standards of the usual suspects. Of course, the fanatic first deceives himself, which is why he can so shamelessly try to deceive others. That’s what makes “conservative” an useless label these days. This guy calls himself a conservative, yet he is every bit as deluded and fanatical as a lefty.

Let’s start with what is not going to happen — no matter who is the House majority leader. Most illegal immigrants will not be leaving the country, either voluntarily through “self-deportation” as suggested by Mitt Romney, or involuntarily through actual deportation, notwithstanding the current administration’s aggressive efforts in this direction.

So, we have only two options in dealing with these 11 million American residents: We can keep them in their current marginal status with all the negative effects that entails for them and their communities or acknowledge their ongoing presence among us and legalize it.

Peter Salins is an unbalanced fanatic. Unless he has been in a coma for the last decade, waking up only to pen this column, he most certainly has heard the many other suggestions to deal with the invasion from the south. We have lots of options, but open borders fanatics like Peter Salins are incapable of hearing them. That’s the nature of fanatics. They see only that which feeds their fanaticism.

Both they and the country will be much better off if we pursue the latter course.

For the opponents of immigration reform, there appear to be three major concerns. Illegal immigrants: 1) broke the law, and thus shouldn’t be rewarded with “amnesty”; 2) are harming the American economy by displacing American workers and burdening American taxpayers; and 3) are a threat to American culture and values.

There are two other reasons why many Americans would like to pull the plug on immigration. One is we simply don’t want a bunch of foreigners in our towns. As citizens, that is our right. The other is men like Salins made these same arguments in the 1960’s and the 1980’s. In both cases, they were all wrong. Prudent people will wisely suspect that the third time is not the charm. Gis arguments are the same well-rehearsed nonsense we have heard for years.  He concludes with this bit:

If congressional politicians in both parties can craft a tough and realistic “grand bargain” on these terms, they would be unleashing a human capital windfall not only for the affected immigrants but for all of American society.

Well, if we can conjure leprechauns riding unicorns with gold bars flying out of their butts, we can solve all of our problems! My goodness. How can you make it to old age and still have such silly nonsense in your head?

Ruminations on Iraq

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Reading reports about Iraq like this one, I can’t help but return to the old formulation I liked to use back in the Bush days. “The trouble with Afghanistan is it is full Afghans. The trouble with Iraq is there are not enough Iraqis.” Even at the height of the Iraq war, you never could find many people who identified as Iraqi first and all the other stuff second. They were always Sunni, Shia, Christian, Kurds, etc. An accident of history had them born on the lands we call Iraq.

Men will fight and die for their brothers. That’s why armies are built on small groups of men under the Dunbar number. Successful street gangs and terror groups also rely on small units. Small units mean the members have emotional bonds to one another. In our urban reservations, street gangs are made up of young men who grew up together in the neighborhood. More sophisticated gangs like motorcycle clubs have very elaborate bonding rituals to make sure the clubs are cohesive.

Of course, the natural formation of small units is through blood. Early man existed in groups of 150 or so people. Everyone was related by blood. Once a group grew so large that blood relations stretched beyond second cousins, they split up into two groups and went their separate ways. In the Arab world, this is still how people naturally organize themselves. Talk to any Arab and before long they will have mentioned many “cousins” that are members of their extended family.

That’s what comes to mind when seeing stories like this one. We have a small force of mercenaries knocking off a professionally trained (allegedly) military, equipped with modern weaponry. Even if the numbers are exaggerated in that Vox story, you’re still seeing a 10-to-1 advantage having no value on the battlefield. The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria is wining both the moral war as well as the tactical war, despite their lack of equipment and people. Fighting spirit matters.

The historian John Keegan argued that wars are determined by culture. Arab culture is not like Western culture so their way of making war is different from that of the western nations. “War without battle” is the preferred mode in the Arab world. That means insurgencies, terrorism and social disruption are where Arabs excel. This makes perfect sense for a culture where blood relations trump all else. Kin based societies are low-trust societies so large armies are hard to muster.

Arab societies are low trust societies, which is why they have never been good at the civilization stuff that requires large scale organization. If you can only truly count on blood relatives, scaling beyond 100 or so people is nearly impossible. Even when you expand the circle of trust beyond second cousins, you limit the number of people capable of working as a unit to a few hundred. Arab societies are collection of sub-societies dominated by a master society.

It is why Arab countries are authoritarian. The people will never willingly go along with the leader, if he is not at least from their tribe. That means coercion is the only way to rule a large number of people. You never hear Arab leaders talking about “their people” with any degree of pride, like you hear in the West. They don’t even have the concept a nation in the way we understand it in the West. Instead, “us” is almost always defined by blood, which means their tribe.

This what you see going on with the Iraqi army. None of them have loyalty to Iraq. Their first loyalty is to their family, followed by the extended family of the tribe. Sectarian loyalty is as far as it goes and even there it is frayed. Followers of one Imam may detest the followers of another, despite both being in the same sect. The Iraqi soldiers are not going to fight and die for something that does not exist, unless they have a bayonet in their back, as was the case under Saddam.

The other interesting thing is all of this was predictable. The American military spent billions designing and training a military for Iraq along western lines. The trouble is they left an Arab culture that is still an Arab culture. Eventually you end up with the same old Arab army with a bunch of American gear they can barely operate. A guy named Norvell B. De Atkine wrote about this 15 years ago in a paper called Why Arabs Lose Wars. He noticed that Arab countries are full of Arabs.

The one potential upside to the break up of Iraq is the Kurds may finally get their own place in the world, at least officially. The Syrians are too weak to do much about the Kurds and the Turks are too disorganized now. Iraq falling apart opens the door for the Kurds to press their claims. Interestingly, the Kurds may be the one group in the region the West could do something with besides sell arms. They are more like Jews than Arabs, according the genetics.

Over the last 15 years, they have weathered the unrest better than any of the other people in the region. They seem to possess the ability to self-organize beyond the small unit. They have a national identity in that the Kurd living in Turkey sees himself part of Kurdistan in the same way as the Kurd living in Iraq, Syria or driving a cab in New York. Why we have ignored these people is a mystery, but maybe they have been better off as a result. Our results elsewhere are not encouraging.

The Ghetto Time Warp

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Spend time in or near the ghetto, and you can’t help but notice some things. When you live and work across the social spectrum, you get a daily dose of comparisons, which makes noticing things easy. It is a dangerous game these days, of course. On the other hand, people get in trouble in the ghetto when they don’t notice things. Modern times is full of these weird, inexplicable juxtapositions.

White people know to avoid certain areas, even certain streets. Give a white person directions that include Martin Luther King Boulevard or Malcom X Avenue and they ask someone else for directions. They know those names are never used for places that house people like them. On the other hand, make a comment about it around them and they will harangue you about your racism and narrow mindedness.

I do not suffer from this malady, despite being white. I’ve learned to speak three languages: SWPL, normal and ghetto. I’m most fluent at normal because I try to hang around normal people as much as possible. On the other hand, living on the edge of the ghetto, I have picked up the tongue, which is mostly what normal people said before the lunatics took over. Watch any old 1970’s TV show and you get my meaning.

The other day I was on the way home and remembered I needed cat food. On the edge of the ghetto is a Food Lion, which seems to target the lower classes as a business strategy. They have a big sign announcing they accept EBT and WIC. I’ve stopped there many times, but rarely after work. In my work clothes, I stand out like a sore thumb. Social class is one of those things people notice instinctively, even though we pretend it does not exist. In jeans and a tee-shirt, it is not so obvious.

I get my cat food and get in line. I was in a hurry, being the end of the day, but I should have known better. In the ghetto, time works differently than everywhere else. The employees of the Food Lion are mostly black. They work on CPT. That’s Colored People Time. Start talking about CPT at your place of work and they fire you. Mention it around black people and they laugh, surprised that a white person would know the term and bother say it in public.

What CPT means is not just slowness. It is also a certain deliberate tardiness. Black people will tell you that black people are always late. That’s when you’re most likely to hear them break out the term CPT. The lateness is not meant as disrespect or even something done on purpose. Blacks have complicated lives and events just get away from them. As a result, they struggle to be on time for anything. At the same time, they are not in a great hurry to get anything done.

The two cashiers working that evening were chatting with one another, hardly paying attention to their work, which they were doing at a snail’s pace. The customer in front of me had a mislabeled product so the girl just stopped working and waited for a manager to solve the problem. It’s not laziness or attitude. The two girls were just working at a pace based on their own weird internal metronome. That’s CPT. Things just take the time they take and no one thinks much of it.

For reasons I’ve never understood, the deli counter at this Food Lion is manned by Latino males. They are a beehive of activity, but you still wait in line for an hour to get even the smallest thing. Standing there in line, I watched four or five Latinos buzzing around in a flurry of activity. There was one lonely customer patiently waiting for whatever he ordered. He was still there when I left, which is not surprising. he was experiencing something called the Latin Way.

The Latin Way is a term you hear from Latinos. Like CPT, they are surprised to hear a blanco say it. Unlike blacks, Latinos are oddly proud of it and quite open to talking about it if you ask them. They fully admit that the disorganized chaos is just the way they do things, even though it makes no sense. It’s like how the Irish are proud of being alcoholics. Or Italians proud of their gestures. It’s a part of what makes them who they are and they are mostly proud of it.

Unlike CPT, I find the Latin Way to be rather amusing. I guess it pleases my Anglo-Saxon sensibilities to see people rushing about trying to get their work done, even if they are mostly spinning their wheels. They may not be getting things done, but they seem to care about getting things done. Blacks don’t get anything done and they seem to take pride in their idleness. Latins seem to know they should be getting something done, which counts for a lot while you are waiting.

While I’m cataloging the denizens of the ghetto in this way, Hindus are an interesting case. We have a lot of them around here for some reason. My guess is they work at the engineering firms located in the suburbs. I’ve had some Hindus work for me over the years and they move at their own pace too. maybe those old school observations about people close to the equator are true after all

Judging from what I see around town, I’m thinking it is cultural. In the Food Lion, I always see the old women wandering around in their brightly colored saris. They never seem to buy anything, but they are fat as hell so I know they’re not skipping any meals, but I just see them looking. Then again, I don’t feel the need to watch them as much as the other denizens of the ghetto.

Anyway, the whites are not models of Anglo-Saxon efficiency and alacrity. The difference is when motivated, they move as fast and efficiently as anyone else. It’s just that they never seem to be motivated. On summer afternoons they sit on their front step or loiter in the parking lots. Poor people of all types are happy to while away their time doing nothing but chatting with friends.

Smoking is still popular in the great white ghetto, along with Oxycontin. You see the fat girls waddling behind strollers, while the males sit around shirtless. The idea is to show off the collection of ridiculous tattoos they love so much. Nothing tells the world you are a violent felon like a neck tattoo. In all of the retail stores on the edge of the ghetto, you never see whites working.

That’s the thing about poverty and the underclass. SWPL types think it is education, but it is time that keeps people in the ghetto. They have no sense of it. Middle and upper class people are obsessed with time. Being on time is an essential part of being a respectable person. The efficient use of time is how one is measured in their job. If you’re good at what you do, you get an assistant at work to help you make the most of your time. The rich have personal assistants to make sure no one wastes their time.

Like father’s day, I doubt watches are of much use in the ghetto. When you have no place to go and no reason to get there, knowing the time is pointless. People I know who hire entry level labor tell me the biggest challenge they have is figuring out how to tell ghetto types how to show up on time and work at a decent pace. That’s why they hire Latinos. They may be a circus of disorder without supervision, but they show up on time and at least look like they are in a hurry.

Anyway, I think that’s the dividing line in modern life. The great class line is is time preference. Conventional wisdom says the poor lack impulse control. They buy cheap crap now rather than save for better things later. They don’t understand the value of putting off today’s pleasure for something better tomorrow.

I don’t think that’s right. I think it is the lack of time preference. The middle class person understands how to comprehend the discount function, at least conceptually. The poor have no idea about any of this. A bag of weed today is just a bag of weed today. Saving for a bigger bag of weed tomorrow is inconceivable because tomorrow may as well be next century.

Anarcho-Tyranny

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The stoners over at Reason have themselves worked up into a lather over this story from Georgia.

Members of a northeast Georgia SWAT team are “devastated” after a drug raid in which a flash-bang grenade landed in a 1-year-old’s playpen, seriously injuring the child, the Habersham County sheriff said Friday.

The police officers involved have been called baby killers and received threats following the incident, Sheriff Joey Terrell said.

“All I can say is pray for the baby, his family and for us,” he told CNN.

The SWAT team, made up of six or seven officers from the sheriff’s department and the Cornelia Police Department, entered the Cornelia residence Wednesday before 3 a.m.

A confidential informant hours earlier had purchased methamphetamine at the house, the sheriff says. The informant told police that there were men standing guard outside the home, and it was unclear whether they were armed, according to CNN affiliate WGCL.

Because the suspected drug dealer, Wanis Thonetheva, had a previous weapons charge, officers were issued a “no-knock warrant” for the residence, Terrell said.

Wanis Thonetheva is being held without bond.

When the SWAT team hit the home’s front door with a battering ram, it resisted as if something was up against it, the sheriff said, so one of the officers threw the flash-bang grenade inside the residence.

Once inside the house, the SWAT team realized it was a portable playpen blocking the door, and the flash-bang grenade had landed inside where the 19-month-old was sleeping, the sheriff said.

A medic on the scene rushed the baby outside to administer first aid, and a nearby ambulance was summoned. Authorities wanted to transport the baby via Life Flight to Atlanta’s Grady Memorial Hospital, 75 miles southwest of Cornelia, but weather conditions wouldn’t allow it. The baby was driven to the hospital.

Just in case you were wondering what someone named Wanis Thonetheva looks like, cause you’re one of those lookists or noticers, here is his mugshot.

Wanis Thonetheva is being held without bond.
Here’s his Facebook page where you can see him flashing gang signs.
The stoners at Reason are in a lather because the story involves drugs and that’s pretty much the sole cause of libertarianism.
Terrell has insisted his officers and those of the local police department did nothing wrong and blamed the target of the warrant (not found at the house that was invaded) on the attack on the toddler. A chief assistant district attorney for the county, J. Edward Staples, says the target of the warrant could in fact be charged for the injuries the sheriff’s deputies caused the toddler. In an obvious attempt to immunize himself and his office from liability, the sheriff has claimed the situation was unavoidable even as he attempted to offer reassurances that his SWAT team would be more diligent in the future. He told CNN that his officers “obviously would have done things different” (IF they knew there was a child in the home), like go in through a side door or not use a flash bang. Until using violence to crack down on non-violent “crimes” becomes politically untenable for “public servants,” it won’t matter how much ass-covering law enforcement does after the fact, these kinds of incidents will continue to happen.
Of course, the elephant in the room is the fact we have a story about Laotian drug dealers in Georgia. Was there ever a time that the people of Georgia were longing for Laotian drug dealer to move into their neighborhoods? I doubt it. Wanis may be a fine man and perfectly innocent, but he has no business in America. He should be back in his own lands where he will fit in with his people.
Then we have the paramilitary units we comically call law enforcement. We refuse to enforce the basics of the law like keeping foreign invaders out of the country. Instead, they blast down doors and play army man at the expense of the citizenry. Whatever the circumstance that brought a bunch of boat people to Georgia, it does not justify having armed gangs terrorizing the people with authority of the state.
It is the epitome of anarcho-tyranny.

Teacher Delusions

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I don’t have a strong interest in education policy. I tend to agree with John Derbyshire’s analysis of American public education. The very short version is the schools are run by an unassailable cartel and no reform is possible. Critiques from the conventional Right all miss this point, which is why they go nowhere. Reform efforts from the Left are largely based in Rousseauist nonsense and therefore doomed from the start. That leaves it a pretty dry subject as far as I’m concerned.

That’s why I could not restrain myself from commenting on this post by Nick Steves at Handle’s Haus. Steves is a sharp guy with some interesting things to say. There’s too much Moldbuggery for my taste, but that’s a topic for another day. It’s a well reasoned technocratic reform plan that has no chance of adoption. I tried to point that out, but Steves is a prickly guy and there’s little point in engaging him. I bring it up only to point out that education policy seems to make people crazy. I don’t get it, but I don’t understand the fascination with a lot of things.

The people it makes most crazy seems to be teachers. It is the one thing about education I find fascinating. Teachers are some of the most deluded people you will find in modern America. Years back I had a conversation with a gal who was fresh out of college and in her first teaching job. She was complaining about the pay, the hours and the fact that she was taking work home. It was one of those times when you feel old, listening to a young person complain about reality.

I tried to explain to her that lots of people take work home and they also work during the summer too. I also pointed out that most college grads were not making $55,000 per year for eight months work. She tried to argue back on these points, but there’s not much that can be said. Most jobs in America are tougher than being a teacher and pay a lot less, but I got no where with her. Of course, this was not the first of the last time I had this conversation with a government worker.

I thought of that when reading this post at Sailer’s new shop. The post was actually a post from Education Realist, someone I assumed was somewhat realistic about education. Again, we see the delusions about the realities of teaching. It is a really good gig compared to most jobs. The pay is good, the benefits are outstanding, the hours are excellent and you get summers off. Yet, teachers think they have it tough. Even when this is pointed out that still carry on like Job.

I pointed out that the retention rate for teachers is pretty high compared to all private sector fields. If you look at this table from the DoE, teachers just about die in their jobs. The average age is 40 and the average tenure is 14 years. That number is only going up based on demographics. Over 40% of teachers have been on the job for more than 15 years. Generous pension plans means they are not walking away for late life career changes. Reveal;ed preference says teachers have it quite good.

What I find very weird about teachers is they seem to think they lack respect. You never hear this from people in the dreaded private sector. Lawyers take more abuse than almost any profession. You never hear them bitch about it. Car sales has to be at the bottom of legitimate work and they joke about that fact. Public sector employees always worry about status and no group frets over it more than teachers. Any criticism is treated like an assault upon their person.

All of this nuttiness is most likely due to an absolute avoidance of several truths about human biology. One is that not all people are equal in IQ. The goal of making everyone above average is madness. Then you have issues of race that were not a lot to talk about in public. Sex differences are another thing we are not supposed to notice. When you exclude large chunks of reality from your view of the world, you are bound to end up in a very weird place.

Badass

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Americans have an odd soft spot for outlaw biker gangs. Lots of movies and TV shows get made where the bikers are the good guys. Not always, of course. often the bikers are the really really bad guy. The outlaw biker is a truly American thing. The Hell Angels are badass dudes who do a lot of bad things, but you gotta admire them for their fierce non-conformity. This story from Canada is pretty cool.

Provincial police are searching for three inmates with previous ties to the Hells Angels who escaped from a Quebec City detention centre using a helicopter.

A Sûreté du Québec spokesperson confirmed to CBC News that the prison break occurred at 7:45 p.m. ET from Orsainville Detention Centre and the inmates fled westbound in a green helicopter.

“We are talking closely with the detention centre to figure out exactly how the escape transpired,” said Ann Mathieu. “The priority number one is to find the helicopter.”

Police are now searching for Yves Denis, 35, Denis Lefebvre, 53, and 49-year-old Serge Pomerleau.

In 2010, Lefebvre was arrested by provincial police after a drug operation bust known as Project Crayfish that led to dozens of arrests. He was reported to have had ties to the Hells Angels.

Quebec has a long a bloody history with motorcycle clubs. The Biker Wars in the 1990’s resulted in hundreds of murders, dozens of bombings and general mayhem on the streets of cities like Montreal. Eventually the Canadians had enough and pretty much arrested every Hell’s Angel in the province. They even arrested people not really a part of the biker wars just to end the violence.

During the bust police seized multiple weapons, 41 vehicles, a plane, a helicopter and $905,000, CBC Radio-Canada reported.

The three who escaped were being held at the detention centre waiting to stand trial, but it was not immediately clear what charges they were facing.

Police are warning anyone who sees the men not approach them and to call police immediately.

Last year, there was a daring escape at St-Jerome prison in Quebec involving a helicopter where a pilot was forced at gunpoint to pluck two inmates from the facility on a Sunday afternoon.

The thing about the big clubs like the Angels, Banditos and Mongols is they are sophisticated operations with a lot of intellectual fire power at the top. They’re not just guys with beards swinging chains in bar rooms. There’s plenty of that, but the further you go up the hierarchy, the greater the sophistication. The reason the Feds have had little luck infiltrating these clubs is they are very smart about how they organize themselves and interact with the wider world.

The daring and sophistication to use a chopper to get guys out of prison is what you see from former military guys. Of course, a big source of recruits for these gangs has been the military since World War 2. A whole bunch of guys with military training are mustering out as we wind down the War on Terror. That means the gangs will get a shot in the arm from new recruits. Throw in the general unhealthiness of normal society for young white males  and the gangs will see a boom in membership.

Beta Male Rage

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This story on Drudge says the under-30 set are flocking to a movie about a beta male, rather than the sci-fiction action flick. This is nothing new. Cruise has seen his fortunes decline over the last decade, but he is not alone. The traditional male lead has been fading for years. Movie tough guys are long gone. Instead we get cartoon characters like Batman or Spider-man. Then you have the cartoonish guys like Hugh Jackman and The Rock. Otherwise, male leads are wimps now.

Trends and fads are what they are. People live in their time and young people lack the perspective to stand outside themselves and see their time in context. They think things are the way they are because they have always been the way they are. The past is stories told by old people about a country that no longer exists. That’s the benefit of youth, but also the curse of it. That means the trendy beta males of today are only just becoming aware of the fact they look a lot like the pussies and wimps of yesteryear.

Of course, there’s something else going on beyond silly fads. Starting in the 80’s, there has been a  campaign against the traditional white male. Boys in school were loaded up with mind altering drugs so they would be more like little girls. Male characters on TV were portrayed as stupid, foolish, emotional and helpless. On the other hand, female action heroes (hilariously) were pushed on the culture in movies. The results are what we see today, a rising gynocracy.

Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/assorted-links-1149.html#comments
Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/assorted-links-1149.html#comments
Americans no longer like male leads that are men of action. They prefer the soft, sexually ambiguous beta males. Look at the number of female action heroes. It is why every male under the age of 30 is trying to look like a young George Michael. The movies reflect the tastes of the customers. – See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2014/06/assorted-links-1149.html#comments

Democracy

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John Derbyshire has a piece up starting with the anniversary of Tiananmen Square, moving into the strengths and weaknesses of the Chinese model and finishing with this.

Universal-suffrage democracy may have been a good idea 120 years ago, when most adults did productive work into their sixties, then died. In today’s top-heavy welfare states, it just empowers tax-eaters to loot the national wealth.

Tomorrow’s politics will be the art of providing make-work for as many as possible of the employable minority while pacifying the un-employable majority with a state dole. In that world, universal-suffrage democracy will be untenable.

Already, unconsciously, we are making appropriate adjustments. Our universities, after a few aberrant decades of experimenting with open inquiry and the advance of knowledge, have reverted to their medieval purpose (the purpose that Chinese higher education always had): to train an intellectual elite for the propagation and defense of the state ideology. Then it was Christianity (in China, Confucianism); now it is utopian egalitarianism—“political correctness,” the Narrative. The advance of knowledge can go hang.

Since we are already making cultural adjustments to the inevitable future, can the political adjustments be far behind?

There’s a branch of the dissident that holds a view of the intermediate future that is a mix of District 9, Elysium and Terminator. They think most of us will be thrown into camps without regard to race, sex, age or ethnicity. We’ll live on garbage from the other group of humans, the elites. The elites will rely on super smart robots to keep their position and keep the rabble in their camps. Some small servant class will exist to maintain the robots and tend to the elite.

Some put greater emphasis on the robots, while others underscore the camps. There are surely others who have a combination of favorites, with some other elements added into the mix. Either way, the future is Hell, as they imagine it. Nordic people imagined Hell as barren and cold, while south people imagined it hot and fiery. People’s sense of the horrible future is a reflection of what they imagine to be a horrible present. The future is what you fear now, not what you’ll fear tomorrow.

One common thread that runs through the various subcultures that make up the dissident right is a rejection of democracy. Most people outside conventional poltics styart with the assumption that democracy is a terrible idea.  Seeing people you know are struggling with the basics of living, in-line to vote makes plain that democracy turned self-government into a lottery. The capable have to hope the incapable tick the right box or they are tricked into it by the parties.

That said, you can’t argue with the results. Life in Europe and America is vastly better now than 1900. People are healthier, better fed and we live much longer. Outside of the urban reservations, violence is no longer a factor. In 1900 a person traveling alone cross country needed to be armed and prepared to kill. Today, a person traveling cross country only has to worry about what sights to see on the way.

Rule by dimwit seems to be working out, despite it all.

On the other hand, to the people in a car heading for a cliff, the ride may seem like it is going very well. Democracy in America is a relatively new thing. The 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. The woman’s vote did not emerge as a force until after the second world war. Minorities were prevented from voting until the 1960’s. Our experiment in universal suffrage is only a couple of generations along. Maybe it just takes  a few generations for democracy to nuke itself.

The real problem is what it does to the governing institutions and the ruling class in  control them. In the 19th century, both political parties catered to the property holders, business men and the educated elite. That’s where the votes were so that’s where the politicians went looking for votes. The result was the parties were representative of the nation’s various interests, all of whom had the same general goals in mind. As a result, national politics was regional, not tribal.

Once you flood the voting booths with millions of people lacking an ownership stake in the country, politics becomes tribal. The parties seek to assemble collection of tribes, even though they may not have shared interests. This attracts a different class of politician. In order to get white union guys to vote with black welfare queens, you have to be cunning and persuasive. The appeal is emotional, not logical. The result is what we see. Both parties are dominated by sociopaths.

Democracy has its place and it is a requirement of civilized governance. It must be tempered and that’s what we lack. Returning the Senate to the states, for example, would cripple the federal welfare system. States would never tolerate the meddling in their affairs we see now. Of course, the Senate would attract a different class of politician. Low-life grifters like Chuck Schumer and John McCain would be of no use to their respective state legislatures.

The conditions under which we re-apply the brakes to our run-away democracy is the mystery. Maybe that’s where the doom and gloom set has it right. History is not exactly full of successful reformers steering their society away from the rocks. Instead, it is the story of one crash after another. A societies are boon, prosper and then die. It is the cycle of history that has been observed over and over. Maybe it is not doom and gloom, but a fatalistic acceptance in the arc of history.