Category Archives: Culture

The Death of Christianity in America

Posted on by

Something I could not help but notice over the holidays is the near complete purging of Christ from Christmas. This has been a topic of debate for years now, but the steady retreat of Christianity from the public space is remarkable. Not too long ago, America had a president who was overtly Christian. He talked about Christ in public and regularly attended services. Within living memory, public figures would take time during Christmas to proclaim their faith and wish their fellow Christians Merry Christmas.

Today, we have mainstream news sites debating whether we should move Christmas to a weekend, rather than its traditional date. I had exactly zero cards this year with the word Christmas on them. Instead it was happy holidays, as if there were a variety of holidays from which to choose. When I said “Merry Christmas” to people, they looked at me like I was a heretic. Not everyone, some people brightened up and return the favor, but the fact is, the bad guys have won on the issue of Christmas.

According to Wikipedia, 43% of Americans attend church regularly. Without digging into the statistics, I would expect some large portion of the 57% to be “C&E” Christians. That is, people who attend at Christmas and Easter. That’s significant compared to other first world countries. France is at 12% and Canada are at 20%. These are two nations with historically high religiosity. Parts of central Europe have attendance rates in the single digits. In the West, Christianity is just about dead, but America remains a hold out.

The signs, however, point to that changing. One of those signs is the near perfect elimination of Christianity from Christmas now.  Within living memory a mainstream publication would have avoided publishing an article about moving Christmas. Today it gets a shrug. A lot of that has to do with the elites abandoning Christianity for multiculturalism and various Progressive fad. They have also decided that Christianity is for the bad people, so it has become a mark of goodness to not be a Christian.

The regional breakout on church attendance is interesting:

The lower rate of church attendance seems to correlate with the embrace of Progressive politics, but it also tracks with regionalism. At the bottom is the ancestral home of the American round heads, while the top is where we find the cavaliers. The one exception is Utah, which was founded by heretics from the old New England Protestantism. Even so, there are not a lot of Republican states in the bottom half of that chart.

There are exceptions, but those exceptions seem to be so-called battleground states like Florida. I cynical eye would say these states are slowly sinking into the same morass as the low-marriage, low church attendance states. In a decade they will go from states that trend against the Left to states that are reliably Left like Pennsylvania and Michigan. Every four years the non-liberals would get their hopes up and think they have a shot to win there, only to find out the Left rallied enough of their supporters  to carry the day.

Why Libertarianism Fails

Posted on by

Now that legalizing the weed is the new thing, it did not take long for business to jump on the trend. Spirit Airlines is now offering Get Mile High fares to Colorado.

Spirit Airlines is known for jumping into the political debate with it’s irreverent advertising and it certainly wasn’t going to let a golden opportunity like marijuana legalization in Colorado slip by.

“The no smoking sign is off,” an advertisement on the airline’s website reads. “Get Mile High with $10 off your next flight. Fares so low they’re barely legal in some states.”

On the offer’s landing page, Spirit says, “If you want to make a beeline for Colorado right now, we don’t blame you — but we’re up to take you to plenty of chill destinations. … Book today … and be sure to pack some munchies.”

Colorado citizens who are 21 and older are now permitted to purchase recreational marijuana.

Spirit has been known to push the envelope with some of its ads. In 2011, Spirit capitalized on the Anthony Weiner Twitter photo scandal by offering “The Weiner Sale: With Fares Too HARD To Resist.”

In 2012, the airline capitalized on the U.S. Secret Service prostitution scandal by offering “More Bang for your Buck” for flights to Cartagena, Colombia.

This was entirely predictable. Once you legalize weed, there is money to be made in selling weed. There is money in expanding the market for it and that means normalizing the selling and consumption of it. The vast commercial machine used to sell everything from airplanes to pencils will swing into motion to spread the use of marijuana. That is the hidden value of prohibition. It prevents the massive marketing machine that is American commerce from promoting the thing that is actively prohibited.

While you may not care about this, lots of middle class parents do care. They will begin agitating for new rules to end the “marketing of weed to their kids.” A politician, looking for an angle, will propose rules to curb this stuff. No one will dare fight it because no one wants to be seen as in favor of selling weed to kids. Before long, we end up with what we see with cigarettes  or worse. I doubt we see a rollback on the legalization process, but the rules on weed will make the cigarette laws look mild by comparison.

The Deep State?

Posted on by

I’m not a big believer in the alleged “deep state” that runs the country. I do think the rich and powerful exercise a great deal of influence over government. In fact, it is reasonable to say that the rich run the country and the political class is mostly their servants. That seems obvious. Rich guys parade in and out of the White House every day. The fact that these folks have a commonality of interests also seems obvious. Look at the push by rich people to flood the nation with peasants. Open borders favors the rich.

There’s a long way from that reality to the idea of a deep state, but when you see stories like this you have to wonder. Then only reason any of this is out in the public is the Snowden affair. Big bureaucracies like the NSA start making comical blunders like this when they reach a certain size. Still, it suggests the permanent ruling class is not the life-serving Congressmen and Senators, but the life-serving hacks in the bureaucracy.

The life-servers in the intelligence blob are the kings of the hill because they hold everyone’s secrets. It is not a big leap from that to thinking the rich guys telling Congress what to do also are pulling the strings at the NSA. On the other hand, maybe the security services have enough dirt on the rich to control them as well. Maybe it is just a weird balance of interests that keeps the whole thing running. The one thing that unifies all parties is making sure the public never gets what they want from government.

Coaching While Black

Posted on by

Charlie Strong, the head football coach at Louisville, will be the next head football coach at University of Texas. The Longhorns are part of college sports royalty, maybe even the top of the list of elite programs. They generate more revenue than any other school. They have the biggest facilities, the biggest fan base and the biggest egos. Other big state schools like Ohio State and Michigan can claim to be the top of the list, but most people consider Texas the NY Yankees of college sports.

Their decision to hire a black guy obviously has cultural meaning, mostly because the mass media is obsessed with race. In fact, the media will care more about the race angle than the fact Strong has a very good resume and is actually qualified for the job. Coaches tend to kick around for 20 years as assistants and head coaches at small programs. Eventually, they get a shot at a major, but not elite, program to show they can compete with the best. If they win, they get a shot to man one of the elite programs.

Strong has done all of those things. The fact that he is black should be an enormous asset to him, but that has not been the case. Instead, he struggled to get his first head coaching job.  The rumor was college presidents fretted over his race, thinking the fans would not embrace a black man as coach. Even after he got the job at Louisville and there were no white riots, the attitude among college presidents persisted. They were sure their racist fans would burn the school down if they dared hire a black to coach the football team.

In fact, that’s been the argument for decades now. There’s no evidence the fans care about the race of the coach. They just want to win. Boosters, who fund a lot of this stuff, would embrace a space alien if he could win games. If Strong was a bisexual, transvestite black Nazi, the Louisville fans would cheer him anyway. It’s fair to say sports are why America has as much racial peace as it does. White sports fans care more about winning than the realities of race, so they overlook it in order to have their sports.

Despite this, white college presidents still think their fans hate blacks. There are a growing number of black athletic directors, who would be eager to hire black coaches, but the number of black coaches remains very low. The fans actually think black coaches are a benefit dealing with black players. Again, the boosters just want to win so that leaves the school presidents as the primary obstacle to hiring clack coaches. That and the fact it is a long apprenticeship and blacks tend to have very high time preference.

These presidents are overwhelmingly white and liberal. They live and work in the least diverse parts of America. Anyone thinking the campus is diverse has never been to a McDonalds in the South. They also live and work in the most radically left-wing parts of America. Yet, they walk around thinking they are the friend of the black man and those others, those rowdies in the stands, black and white, are the bigots. It is a remarkable bit of cognitive dissidence. These people are strangely delusional.

It should also be noted that it is the southern schools that are leading the way with the hiring of black coaches. Here is where winning trumps all else. Vanderbilt is paying their black coach $3 million a year. Mississippi State had a black coach a decade ago. Charlie Strong started in the SEC and then went to Louisville. Miami had a black coach a few years back. The assistant ranks are ghostly white the further north you go, while the sidelines in the South have much more vibrancy.

Of course, the cognitive dissidence is not limited to the lily white leadership of American colleges and universities. When the Left sees all of these black coaches at southern schools, they believe it due to their heroic efforts to fix those bad whites in the south, even though the schools in the north remain ghostly white. It’s a reminder that for bad whites, race is a real issue to be dealt with in a serious way. For good whites, race is entirely about moral posturing in juxtaposition with the bad whites they detest.

The Truth About Bitcoin

Posted on by

Tyler Cowen has yet another post up about Bitcoin. The topic is becoming an obsession with a certain type of libertarian academic. The mere mention of it has them thinking about how great it would if they were John Galt, just without all the hard work and danger that comes with it.  Whenever the topic comes up, they began chanting the all of the usual lines, like they are incantations. The comments sections of Bitcoin stories always have a weird cult-like vibe to them, but libertarianism is pretty much a cult now anyway.

The basic thrust of Cowen’s post is that Bitcoin is like any other commodity. Once a sufficient number of others get into the crypto market, the price for all of these currencies will fall to cost plus some tiny profit. In other words, he sees crypto as something like trading sheep or shiny rocks in the market place. Since the currency has no intrinsic value and there is no authority to set the value, the market sets the value based on utility or popular fads or some large manipulator buying or selling large quantities.

Putting aside my complaints about Bitcoin as a currency, the main problem with these digital-currencies is the same problem we saw in the Free Banking Era. Central governments hate the idea of a currency they cannot easily manipulate. That has been true since Pheidon. If you control the money, you control the people. Naturally, ruling elites will seek to control the money as a top priority. There’s also the issue seigniorage, which is no small thing. Wars have been fought over control of a single mint.

It has nothing to do with economic efficiency and everything to do with order. Order is what allows the best citizens of the polity to rise and remain at the top of the status system. It is also what allows the less talented to live something close to a sane existence. Order is how humans guard against the anti-social fraction that exists in every human population. Despite the fevered dreams of libertarians and anarchists, you cannot have a society without order. There has to be rules and enforcement of rules.

This natural desire for order naturally leads to a ruling class that is the final authority on everything, including the value of money. That authority, in order to be an authority, needs a method to control the people and thus the society over which they rule. Controlling the money is a great way to accomplish this. Controlling land or monitoring individual transactions is unworkable over the long haul.  The cost exceeds the benefit.

One simple way to control the populace is through the coining of money. That makes taxing easier for the authorities and it gives them control of trade and labor. It allows for the authorities to audit the citizenry to ensure compliance. There’s also the issue of seignorage, which has always been an important aspect of rule. Wars have been fought over control of a single mint. Having a bunch of competing currencies works against order and against efforts to impose order, therefore can never be tolerated.

Think about it this way. Let’s say I come up with a digital heroin. That is, a drug that can be transmitted on-line that you load on a flash drive, shove up your bum and get amazingly high for eight hours. Obviously, I’m not getting a lot of takers initially. The lack of customers means I’m losing money every time I make a batch. I manage to get a few takers to try it and begin to build a client base through word of mouth. I hit the same spots at predictable times and sell my digital heroin the old fashioned way.

This goes on for a while and no one is the wiser. The cops don’t care as it looks nothing like criminality from their perspective. The drug gangs don’t care at first because I’m not doing business on their turf. They are unaware of the threat I pose initially. But, they notice a drop in sales eventually as I build my business. Eventually they will figure out that someone is taking their customers. They may figure out it is me before they figure out what I’m selling or it may be the other way around, but at some point they put it together.

The drug gang will have three choices. Obviously, they can kill me, but that will require knowledge they may lack. They may know I exist, but not exactly where I exist. I could have advanced to the point where I’m selling my drug on-line. Drug dealers are not fools and they will recognize their lack of knowledge and see that as a risk in itself, perhaps a bigger risk. Killing me could create unknown problems. After all, I could be part of some much larger enterprise as unknown to them as the magic drug I sell.

The second choice is to figure out what I’m doing so they can either muscle in on my business or come up with a better way to compete. There is a reason we have such an array of street drugs. A clever guy creates a new product and the drug gangs eventually take it over and add it to their portfolio. The same guys controlling the weed sales in one area control the heroin sales too. Maybe they cut their prices or find some way to improve their product. Maybe they invent a new drug that is better than my drug.

The third option is to enlist the state to take out my business. I’m conducting business and that means taxes are involved. It also means a mountain of rules and regulations. My drug may be legal, but not paying taxes on sales is illegal. Not filing for a business license and not abiding by the laws governing record keeping are against the law. If I have employees, then I need to pay them and that means taxes, workplace laws, social security, Medicare and unemployment taxes. As any small businessman knows, there are a lot of rules.

Here we ultimately see the problem with Bitcoin. Disruptive technology is not ignored by the folks at the top of the established order. In the drug example, the established authority is the drug game, which served as a proxy for the state. In the above ground world, the state will defend itself from the threat posed by Bitcoin and they have many tools at their disposal. They also have tanks, planes, missiles and other military goodies. Bitcoin can only exist as long as the state allows it to exist. That means it will have to serve the interests of the state to survive, which brings us right back to where we are now.

Reconsidering The Drug War

Posted on by

For most of my life, I have been a drug legalizer. I came to this conclusion while sitting at a campus lounge reading Adam Smith’s treatment of the English Corn Laws. It struck me at the time that if you replaced “corn” with “drugs” you have a nearly flawless argument against prohibition. It was the sort of revelation common when you’re that age. It seems so obvious, you assume you are super smart for having noticed it for the first time.

You get older and see that damage that comes from the drug trade and you start to understand it is more complicated than libertarians believe. In fact, the drug issue is the best way to understand why libertarians are hopeless. They cannot see the larger social issues involved in wide-scale drug taking. They think it is a free lunch, where legalization results in all good and no bad. Nothing in this world works that way.

Still, I have stuck with the idea of legalizing drugs.  The cost of locking up a million drug offenders is high. Layer on the courts, cops and social service stuff and the war on drugs probably costs us a hundred billion a year on the conservative side.  These guys say that’s a good number, but this site puts the number much higher.

Put a million people in jail at $50K a man and you get 50 billion. The basic numbers alone have always struck me as proof enough that the drug war is a scam and a failure. It’s not as if prohibition has worked. Drugs are everywhere, cheap and increasingly exotic. Even accepting there is a cost to legal drug use, it has always seemed to me that the scales tip in favor of legalizing as Milton Friedman argues here.

There is another argument, one I’ve often used against libertarians when I don’t feel like hearing them go on forever about weed. That is, people are all for legal drugs until Walmart has a sale on their extra special brand of heroine. That’s when the women start mobilizing for the children. All it will take is one mother hearing that ad and the days of legal drugs are about to come to an end. Drug legalization is an idea that appeals to men, not women.

Libertarians hate that argument, because it is true. Libertarians, like liberals, have an uncomfortable relationship with the human condition. Their view of the world works perfectly, so they don’t want to hear any of the inconvenient stuff, because they throws off their model of reality. Libertarians are like all materialist in that they can’t change their mind on anything, but they won’t change the subject either.

This piece by Peter Hitchens gets to the heart of the matter. What sort of society do you want to live in as a free man? Do you want one where drug addicts fill the parks and drunks fill the doorways? Or, do you want one where the drunks and drug addicts find it hard to be drunks and drug addicts? If it is the latter, then the question is not about how we legalize. The question is how we come up with better forms of prohibition.

In that regard, Hitchens is correct when he argues against addiction as a disease. This exchange is good stuff. Drug addiction is not a disease. You don’t choose to get cancer or have a high blood pressure. You may have a predisposition to drunkenness or addition, but you still have some control over your actions. Addicts get sober, because they learn how to control those urges. It may be genetic, but there is still some control.

The fact is, in a healthy vibrant society, this is not a debate that is necessary. Wide scale drug taking, legal or otherwise, is a symptom of a society in decline. That’s another thing libertarians cannot face, so they stick to making specious arguments about the benefits of legalizing weed. I think if given the choice, I’d rather fight to keep drugs illegal, as a defense against decline, rather than give up and go gently into the darkness.

The Language of Fantatics

Posted on by

Fanatics not only deal in absolutes, they have a binary view of life. Everything is either completely one way or completely the opposite way. For example, normal people have a wide range of reactions to homosexuality. At one end are people who hate the gays and at the other are people who think the guys are great. Most people lie somewhere in between those two polls. The fanatic sees only homophobes and homophiles.

As a result, fanatics have a range of words they use to describe the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall from them. People who agree with them, are inside the wall, while the people who don’t completely agree are on the other side of the wall. As a result, they have a lot of ways to describe the people outside the wall, but only one way to describe the people in the inside. They are the righteous, the anointed.

You see it in this article from Reason magazine about the Duck Dynasty guy. Even they call his comments “anti-gay.” In other words, because he does not fully embrace the latest fads with regards to homosexuals, he must hate homosexuals and wish them harm. he’s anti-gay. His brand of Christianity, like 99% of Christianity, considers sex outside of marriage a sin. Therefore, gay sex is a sin. That’s a statement of fact.

He said the same thing about bestiality and drunkenness. No one is upset at him for being anti-animal or anti-booze. The reason, of course, is those things lack a band of dedicated fanatics defending them. Sodomites have a phalanx of Progressive lunatics willing to attack anyone that gets too close to the walls. They don’t care why he does not embrace their position, they just see him as the ultimate evil because he is on the other side.

That’s the way it must be with fanatics. You are either with them or against them. There’s no room to be indifferent. It try to stake out some middle ground or you really are indifferent, they will force you to choose sides. It’s why their language becomes stark. You are either in favor of “gay rights” or you are anti-gay, a homophobe, a bigot, etc. You’re either on the side of the righteous or you are an enemy of all that is good.

The reason for this is, in part, psychological. The fanatic is most likely biologically driven to be a fanatic. As Eric Hoffer noted, the true believer will jump from one fanaticism to another, often participating in many at the same time. For instance, an environmentalist will also be a member of some Marxist group, a vegan and an animal rights nut. In other words, the cause is unimportant. it is being in a cause that matters.

Then there is the fact that the fanatic is often driven by a sense of self-loathing, which is why they seek to completely submerge themselves in the cause. They swap their hated sense of self for that of the group. You really can’t be too extreme when trying to cleanse yourself of that which you hate, which is you. What the fanatic thinks is worth doing, they will always assume it worth overdoing. It is what makes them feel free.

The fanatic probably has a use evolutionary use to humans. The rules of society need to be enforced. Society needs to be defended. Sacrifices need to be made for the good of the group. The fanatic can ensure his genes pass on by defending his group. In settled society, this trait probably adapted to settled life. Every society has its fanatics and every society has some use for them. That’s not an accident.

End of the Free Money Era?

Posted on by

It is easy to forget that the way things are now is not the way they have always been, which means the way things are now is not how they will be in the future. For instance, the giant book stores that are going out of business never existed forty years ago. For most of the post-war period, there were mall shops to sell best sellers and popular stuff and there were boutique book shops for the stuff aimed at serious readers.

Then with the invention of free money from the global financial system, every town in America suddenly had a massive book superstore. Barnes & Noble started out a rickety old warehouse in Boston. With free money, they built book warehouses all over the country. The story is similar with Borders Books, which started in Michigan. Now, they are going under as people remember that they don’t really read that much after all.

The same is true of casual dining. Thirty years ago, casual dining meant a local joint run by local people, often foreigners. Immigrants could start a restaurant, because it required more labor than capital. They could make it a family business. Then all of a sudden we are flooded with massive chains like Olive Garden and Red Lobster. Now it appears they may be following the path of Borders and Barnes & Noble.

In a move sure to set the culinary world and classy guys everywhere reeling, Darden has announced that it will either sell or spin off its Red Lobster restaurants.

Adding to the devastation, the company, which also runs Olive Garden and other fine-dining establishments, said it will suspend the opening of new Olive Garden locations and slow down new locations for LongHorn Steakhouses.

Why, you ask? Dear God, why??

Because Darden isn’t doing so good. It seems that consumers are turning their noses up at hoity-toity sit-down places like Red Lobster and Olive Garden these days in favor of cheaper chains like Chipotle.

Darden is one of the largest companies in the casual dining industry, with a market value of $6.7 billion, but its core chains have had stagnant growth, according to The New York Times. Last quarter the company experienced a 31 percent drop in net earnings. “The reduced unit growth will lower capital spending by at least $100 million annually,” the company said in a statement.

Red Lobster has 705 restaurants in the United States and Canada and had annual sales of $2.6 billion in 2013, but we guess that wasn’t enough for ol’ Scrooge Darden.

Putting aside the millennial snark from the writer, there could be a bunch of reasons for this that have nothing to do with the economics of chain restaurants. For example, Red Lobster is awful. It’s everything that is wrong with the American diet on the same menu, but made worse somehow. Olive Garden is better, but they tend to be over priced for what you get. Paying $25 for spaghetti seems wrong. In other words, whatever novelty there was to them has worn off and people now realize these places are not very good.

There’s something else going on with big retail. The rise of massive chain stores is due in large part to the credit boom. When you can get money at 2%, you will make different bets than when the money costs 10%. More important, you can make money from things with 2% money that you can’t with 10% money. Big capital projects like restaurant and bookstores can’t exist at borrowing rates at or above historic averages.

Cheap credit allows for a form of pump and dump that cannot exist under normal borrowing conditions. Cheap money allows for massive expansion, where revenue is realized today, but the cost of expansion is pushed off into the future. That draws in more money, allowing the original investors to get their money out with a profit. The chain expands until it runs out of room and then those costs come home.

Interest rates remain artificially depressed, but lending is not as free as we saw for two decades leading up to the crash. Giant corporations can get plenty of credit, but their customers are a different story. The Fed keeps pumping money into the system hoping the clogs eventually break free, but no one know if that will happen, before the consequences of loose money turn up in other parts of the economy.

Even assuming the smart Jews running the global finance system can keep the plates spinning forever, there’s another aspect to this problem. Cheap money allows for cost reductions by eliminating competition. These chain restaurants have killed off the local dine, for example, but rigging the supply chain so they get much lower costs. That works for a while, but there is a natural boundary. Costs never fall below zero.

The free money era feels a lot like a bust out. The boom and bust of giant bookstores, for example, left us with no bookstores. One company, Amazon, now controls 80% of the book business. The boom and bust of chain restaurants is about to leave us with no local restaurants, but soulless chain stores owned by some global capital group. It’s one company operating under a dozen brands, selling the same food.

Rule By Girls

Posted on by

As I grow older, it is clear that the most supercilious and ridiculous cohort in modern society is single young females. Young women with anything on the ball have snagged a husband and are on their way to becoming mothers. They may lack experience, but they have a grip on biological reality. The single girls are stupid and they have heads full of feminist nonsense, convinced the world wants to hear from them.

That comes to mind when I saw this this morning. Jennifer Lawrence is probably well intended, but she is a clueless dimwit who hit the lottery. As she makes clear, we know about her because her name was picked out of a hat. She and a bunch of other young girls willing to sleep with a director for a job are a dime a dozen in Hollywood. She got lucky and slept with the right guy. That does not make her a genius.

Anyway, you see this sort of nonsense turning up all over the culture. Commercials for TV shows are full of the “strong woman” playing the role of the man. The ideal modern woman is the leading man of the fifties in a Lycra jump suit. The leading men are the sorts popular with middle-aged homosexuals. The feminization of American society is just about complete. The only thing left is to have an openly gay president.

This will not end well.

The Death of National Review

Posted on by

Mark Steyn’s response to Jason Lee Steorts may be the end of his relationship with National Review. While not explicit, he is clearly making the point that Steorts is both a homosexual and a homosexual activist. Rich Lowry will most likely side with his editor and Steyn will be sent packing. Lowry is a mouse of a man, who is allowing himself to be bullied by a belligerent homosexual. If he was a man, he would fire Steorts and be done with it, but that would take self-assurance, which Lowry lacks entirely.

At this point, there are only two reasons to read National Review. One is Mark Steyn and the other is Kevin Williamson. Williamson is phony in many ways, but he will take an unpopular position on occasion. His writing style is a bit ponderous, but it is better than most of what you get these days. It is just a matter of time before National Review looks more like the Nation than anything Buckley imagined. It is another example Conquest’s second law. Then again, conservatism was always just right-wing Progressivism.

The decline of National Review is a bit shocking in its speed. Rich Lowry has proven to be a ridiculous person and a coward. It was always clear that his main skill was in snuggling up to Buckley and O’Sullivan. That type is familiar to anyone who has worked in a organization of more than three people. Usually this type is quite ruthless once they get power. Instead, Lowry is turning out to be quite incompetent. Again, he is a ridiculous mouse of man, who has no business being in charge of anything.

The interesting thing to watch is whether the people controlling the money figure out that NR is in a death spiral before it becomes impossible to reverse. The current conservative movement is dead and it is about to be replaced by something new. We are headed to a demographic age, where your position on race determines your politics, not your position on economics. Will NR figure this out or will it still carry on like it is 1985? History says the latter and that the publication will be gone in a decade, maybe sooner.