Category Archives: Culture

The GOP’s So-Con Problem

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This post by Steve Sailer is good reminder that social conservatives are not small government people. In fact, they are not even conservative in the modern sense of the word. To be a conservative today means being in favor of small government, low taxes and free markets. You can throw in a bias toward global corporation over national small business. Social conservatives are none of those things. Some social conservatives are in favor of those things, but most are not all that interested in these issues.

I’ve always suspected that a major defect of the Republican coalition is that the social conservatives are in favor of big government, when it comes to their issues. They want the state to ban abortion and put prayer back into schools. That’s why they are engaged in politics in the first place. In the 1980’s when Farewell and Robertson were going strong, the argument they made was that good people will lead to good government. If they could get their guys in office, government would enact their agenda.

The trouble is the social conservatives are largely ambivalent about the small government, pro-business stuff, so they are not engaged in those issues. This allows the GOP to play a double-game on a major segment of the base. They promise to address the social issues and fight the culture war, but only after they take care of the tax cuts, sweetheart deals for business and so forth. Throw in the warmongering agenda from the neocons and the GOP is basically a long con by neocons and the chamber of commerce.

The Bush years proved that this formulation can’t work forever. Even social conservatives eventually figure out they are being conned. They got one of their own, George Bush, into the White House. He was the first Evangelical since Jimmy Carter and unlike Carter, he made his politics conform to his religion. He was supposed to be the final piece of the puzzle. Instead, the Bush years were nothing but giveaways to big business and trillions spent attacking half the world. The social conservatives got nothing for their support.

We are seeing it again with immigration. Evangelicals, Mormons and Catholics think the ticket to filling the pews is to bring in 30 million Mexican peasants. I see vans all over my part of the world for Baptist churches painted with Spanish and English writing. The local Catholic church does a service in Spanish now. Immigration is good for business if you’re in the church business.  At least they hope it is, just like they hoped Bush would fill the bench with pro-life judges. The Evangelicals are now for open borders.

The trouble is, open borders are suicide for the party and probably suicide for the religious establishment. When the church members are seeing their towns ruined by immigration, they will have little patience for sermons in favor of open borders. The result will be what happened to main line Protestant churches once they sold out to the Democrats. Their pews are full of degenerates and the clergy is gays and lesbians. The Evangelicals are headed for a world where the pews are full of peasants looking for free stuff.

Egypt’s Conflicts

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Here is a well done and very interesting piece on Egypt from the Weekly Standard. It is one of the few articles I’ve seen on the recent happenings that is based somewhat in reality. That’s a bit surprising, given the publication. Bill Kristol is a forever war guy and his stable of writers fit comfortably into the neocon warmonger bucket. Kristol still argues for the Freedom Agenda, despite 12 years of miserable failure. I guess part of the appeal of the article is that it is from an otherwise delusional publication.

The interesting bit is the observation that liberalism is exclusively an Occidental import to the countries of the Maghreb. That’s true throughout the Arab world. There are no native liberal traditions. More important and something the author skips is that the essence of Arab culture is antithetical to liberalism. Islam rejects the foundation stone of Western thought and that is the contract. Everything springs from the concept of people freely entering into an agreement with one another and being held to it by society.

Islam rejects the idea of a covenant between God and man. Muslims believe that God is unknowable and unpredictable. It is called occasionalism. This permanent uncertainty is thoroughly baked into the character of the Arab people. If you have ever done business with Muslims, you know how crazy it is to nail them down to a contract. In Islam, the contract only exists in the moment, the time in which to deal is made and all parties are present. When circumstance change the contract is no longer valid.

Sharia contract law is pretty much whatever the local Imam thinks is best at the moment, which usually means that which either keeps the peace or satisfies the powerful. You cannot have liberalism if you don’t have contracts. There’s also the concept of private property, which is mostly alien to the rest oft he world. In a place like Egypt, property rights largely only exist with regards to personal property. What you can carry is yours, but real property is not protected. Intellectual property, of course, does not exist.

Of course, the idea of a social contract is completely alien to the Arab. They view government the same way people viewed the Mafia. It is merely the way the rich and powerful enforce their prerogatives on the rest of the population. Every Arab country operates along feudal lines. In Egypt, the military has the monopoly of force. Business has the capital. Together they have ruled Egypt since King Farouk. In Iran, the clerics have taken the country back to feudalism completely by declaring their rule the will of God.

That brings me back to the central problem with The Weekly Standard column. There is nothing we can do to change the Arab culture. Most of our troubles stem from their hostility to our trying to change their culture. Arab terrorists are not springing from nothing. They have reasons for doing what they do. The fact that every election in Muslim world has been won by Islamic parties is what we call a clue. The garden variety Muslim is not interested in liberal democracy and western culture. In fact, they are hostile to it.

Just because they like some of the technology that comes from the West, does not mean they want western liberalism. The truth is, they despise most of what defines western social democracy, including the democracy. Mohamed does not want to see a transgendered fruitcake writing for their major newspaper. If the way to prevent that from happening to his society is to stick with the old ways, they are willing to make that trade. Therefore, the answer to our terrorism problem is to leave the Mohammedan alone.

A Looming Revolt?

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A good thing to ponder is how America has gone this long without falling into an autocracy of some sort. That is the natural end of democracy and it is something the Founders understood. They were educated men and that meant knowing their Greek and Roman history. The Greeks would regularly appoint a dictator to deal with emergencies like war or social unrest. The Romans eventually succumbed to autocracy. The French Revolution eventually gave us Napoleon. The Germans gladly accepted Hitler as the Fuehrer.

The natural course of popular government is to give way to some form of authoritarianism, either supported by the masses or imposed by the elite. Even today, we see European countries slowly turning over their national sovereignty to an un-elected bureaucracy. The strange truth of democracy is it eventually votes itself out of existence. The people, it would seem, simply tire of the responsibility. Perhaps it is just a phase societies go though as they swing from disorder to order. Maybe people are just incapable of keeping it.

In a June 21, 1788 speech urging ratification of the Constitution in New York, Alexander Hamilton said, “It has been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience has proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.” This attitude was representative of the Founders as a whole.

The puzzle is how has America slowed this process and still maintained some sense of self-governance. One reason is the constraints of the original Constitution. Today, it is the Bible of conservatives or maybe the Ten Commandments. It is a “who we are document” for the civic nationalists. In reality, it was a strongly anti-democratic documents that sharply limited popular participation in the federal government. The early American republic was much closer to Sparta than it was to Athens and that was deliberate.

The Spartan nature of the document a natural hostility to power within the ruling elite of America into the 20th century. In other times and places, the strong man arguing against democracy, promising to cut through the clutter and solve the problems, had no emotional barrier like that to overcome. American rulers have to swear to live within the Constitution to get a purchase with the public. Opponents of the “man of action” promising fix things in a hurry, therefore had a ready weapon to check their path to despotism.

Another reason, at least in America, is that the Progressives always gets ahead of themselves and anger the public. The Right never wins by their own accord, but the Left does lose from time to time. The first example of secular madness in America was the abolitionist movement. The fanatics of the North agitated for the end of slavery ending in the slaughter of 600,000 white people in order to free 3 million pieces of farm equipment. Reconstruction foundered because the public grew weary of the fanatics.

Another useful example of this phenomenon is the Wilsonian Era. Many on the Right have declared Wilson as history’s greatest monster, but that’s nonsense. His opponent was the blood thirsty Theodore Roosevelt, so Wilson was not all bad. Still, he was a true believer and convinced he could redesign American culture. He was probably our first technocratic ideologue. Maybe he is best described a proto-fascist totalitarian.  Of course, he went too far and the reaction to Wilsonian Democracy was the Return to Normalcy.

In fact, the pattern that started with the expansion of the franchise in the early 20th century has been periods of liberal fanaticism followed by periods of normalcy. The FDR/Truman years brought excesses and a snap back with Eisenhower. Then it was the Johnson years, that brought more excess and then a corresponding revolt by the “silent majority” in the election of Nixon. Democracy in America has been spasm of progressive excess followed by the long hangover, which is then followed by another binge of excess.

This phenomenon is well documents and called the ratchet effect. The nation moves toward despotism, then takes a small step back, followed by another great leap toward despotism and some small drawback. Maybe the reason America has not collapsed into despotism is that we’re only into a century of democracy. Maybe we’re just a few more turns of the wheel before the public demands a strong man to impose order. Perhaps the Progressive fanatics have just not gone far enough or crazy enough to break the system.

The other thing worth noting is the compression of the cycles. The pendulum is now swinging wildly between radical change and modest reform. When every political institution has an approval rate below 50% and the most democratic one, Congress, is down at 15%, the path is clear for a strong man to take over. When the lawlessness of the Obama administration is finally revealed, it is possible the public will simply throw in the towel on democracy. Black triumphalism could very well portend a looming snap back.

There Goes Another Amendment

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This story is getting plenty of run in the nerd and conspiracy communities. The short version is that a company running an encrypted e-mail service has shut down due to some involvement with the government. Edward Snowden reportedly used the service in his cloak and dagger work. The assumption is the Feds have forced the guy to reveal his encryption keys so they can rifle through the mail sent and received through his service.

Some people think the Feds may have tried to bully him into letting them read his traffic going forward. The owner chose to go out of business so we can assume the government made it so he had no choice or they were prepared to shut him down if he did not do something he is not free to discuss. It’s hard to know, but it is a good example of how the government is “partnering” with Silicon Valley to stifle alternatives to Big Tech.

This is not new. Way back in the olden times, there was an anonymous mail server in Finland. You did not need an account to use it and it had no logs. The way it worked is you sent the server an e-mail. The first line was the address you wanted to reach. The rest of the body was your e-mail text. The system would forward it to that e-mail and strip away all evidence of your identity.  Here’s the Wiki on it, which is mostly correct.

Even further back when encryption of internet traffic got going, the governments of the world began to freak out. The US government banned strong encryption or limited its use because they feared they could not spy on people otherwise. The United States classifies cryptographic products as munitions, believe it or not, and therefore bans the export of such technology beyond a certain strength. That’s how serious they take the subject.

Since the dawn of time, governments have wanted to prevent private conversations among the citizenry. There’s a reason why The Founders had a fetish for private association and freedom of assembly. When citizens can keep secrets from the state, they can be free. More important, when they can speak outside the ear of the ruling class, they can conspire to overthrow the ruling class. Privacy is the seed corn of revolution.

The fact is the real bad guys know how to avoid the Panopticon. They use strong encryption for electronic communications, but also deploy old fashioned techniques that are impossible to thwart. Government is always a blind giant swinging a mallet. The men and women at the NSA think they are the smartest kids on the playground, but that’s not the case. They simply have the force of the state to magnify their efforts.

That said, the giant swinging the mallet can cause a lot of damage. There’s a crazy Arab sitting in the Obama administration needed to conceal their shenanigans in Libya. On a fairly regular basis cops break into the homes of innocent people because they think they are dealing weed. Thousands of honest people are on terror lists, spending enormous sums to get their names cleared so they can get on a plane. The Giant wrecks a lot.

Now, the provider of an e-mail service is out of business because the Feds can’t force him to violate your Fourth Amendment rights. No one is going to shed a tear for this guy, because most people are either blindly patriotic or they don’t understand the issues involved in technology. There’s going to come a time though, when it becomes clear to most Americans that the partnership of Big Tech and the Deep State is very bad for us.

The End of Citzenship

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This Steve Sailer piece on the looming amnesty of 30 million invaders touches on the heart of the amnesty push. Western elites have largely abandoned the notion of citizenship. That’s because they see pride in national heritage as the same as Nazi xenophobia. Seventy years after the end of World War II and the West remains haunted by old Adolph. Perhaps is a matter of projection or fear of their own tendencies.

Another explanation is it stems from self-loathing. These people hate themselves, they hate the society that produced them and they hate the antecedents that make society possible. They busy themselves trying to scrub away anything that looks like nationalism, in the same way someone tries to wash away a stain. Of course, This means your moral standing is then defined by how far one is removed from a national culture.

That’s why dullards like our president insist on pronouncing foreign words with a foreign accent. They think it makes them sound worldly. Obama struggles with English, yet we’re supposed to take pronunciation lessons from him. It really is amazing that a man with so many opportunities to master another language at a young age never learned a word. It’s almost impossible for children raised in other lands to not pick up some of the language.

Anyway, I think it is something else. Americans are always late to the party. For instance, church attendance is still common in America. In Europe, the churches have been turned into museums or turned into mosques as no one bothers to attend. American church attendance is declining here in the liberal strongholds and they regularly make war on the religious. But, we are a few generations from reaching European levels of religiosity.

The same seems to be true of post-nationalism, but we are working hard to catch up to our kinsmen across the sea. The Republican Party still does the flag waving stuff, but the Democrats pretty much hate America. They always have hated Americans, but now they hate the very idea of America. It’s why Obama ran on fundamental transformation. In his mind, America was always a rotten idea, so it needs to be eliminated.

Europe has had a different experience. The reformation and the collapse of Catholicism as the unifying force in Europe resulted in a series of wars, collectively known as The Thirty Years War. The war left much of central Europe in ruins. Parts of Germany were reduced to cannibalism. Noble families were destroyed and vast wealth was squandered, in an effort to either restore the Church or find some suitable replacement to unify Europe.

The fact that the world was set on fire by a lunatic, who ate his own poo, had to resonate with the rulers. What replaced universal Christianity as the organizing ethos in Europe was nationalism. It was given a good Christian coat of paint, thus allowing the hoi polloi to believe they were God’s favorites and their rulers were God’s elect. By the 18th century, The Church was a side show and nationalism was the faith of Europe.

The result was the The Peace of Westphalia that largely ended the wars of religion, but it set the stage for endless territorial wars and wars over monarchical succession. In the 18th century alone there were over 40 wars on the Continent. Then the 19th century brought the Napoleonic Wars, followed by endless wars of rebellion, annexation and consolidation, as the borders of Europe were reshaped. Endless war was the default.

Fast forward to the 20th century and we see the ultimate clash of religions. Within a 30 period, the powers of Europe had destroyed one another, slaughtering tens of millions of people and plundering the West. Like The Thirty Years War, it was a matter of belief that set brother against brother in a near suicidal conflict. Fascism, Nazism, liberalism, socialism and Bolshevism were the driving forces of the world’s first ideological war.

The lesson European elites drew from the bloodbath was that nationalism was no way to run a society. They set about erasing it from their ranks. The slow development of a pan-European super state, the end of trade barriers, a single currency and free movement of people are all about erasing national identity. They are trying to create the unified Europe of Christendom, without the religion, in order to maintain peace on the Continent.

American elites have slowly absorbed these ideas. The trouble is, they don’t fully understand the point of post-nationalism, so their version has become anti-nationalism, which means anti-Americanism. The result is a race to overthrow everything that defines a nation, like language customs, borders. The selling off of the manufacturing base, for example, means they get to buy and use products lacking the words “Made in America.”

Military policy has been warped by this, putting the health and welfare of foreigners ahead of our servicemen. Of course, wholesale immigration is aimed at diluting the population. All of those pesky natives and their demands on government will be replaced with third world peasants happy for the hand outs. More important, being an American citizen will lose its value. The elites can be citizens of the world and the rest of us will just be the peasants.

The Left Side of the Bell Curve

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One fun way to scandalize most decent people is to tell them half the people in the world are below average in IQ. Americans hate the idea of IQ and fixed biological traits. The reason for this is free will is tightly wound into the American creed. We have rights and we are judged by how we exercise those rights. The multi-billion dollar self-help industry exists,m because Americans are sure you can improve on what God gave you. It is a central part of the American myth that we can be anything we choose to be.

It is also what drives so much of social science and government policy. No amount of evidence to the contrary will convince us that you can’t get better and smarter. It’s why the  phrase “Flynn Effect” has become an involuntary response from liberals whenever the subject of IQ is raised. Whenever the topic of IQ comes up on-line, the comments will have people swearing the Flynn Effect means IQ is malleable. That means the reason little Matumbo is dumb is not nature, but an insufficiently funded school system.

The fact is, though, IQ is real. Most of every population falls into the category of average IQ for that population. Then there are some that are dimwits and others with above average and even genius level IQ. Every population of humans has an average IQ, just as they have an average height. Europeans tend to be smarter than other populations, on average. This is one reason why Europeans raced ahead of the rest of the world starting in the 15th century. Not the only reason, but an important one.

European societies have a relatively large number of above average IQ people compared to other populations. This advantage did not count for a lot until technology permitted enough extra to support a leisure class. Once Europeans societies were able to afford a leisure class, the smart fraction was able to accelerate the progress down the road to modernity. On the other hand, the societies lacking the human capital to create a leisure class, also lacked a large enough smart fraction to overcome scarcity.

This is and interesting paper on how technology is changing our labor markets. The fact is, technology works great for smart people. It offers all sorts of new ways to make a living and make life easier. Even credentialization has not limited this. Every business has a need for smart people. I know lots of people who have changed careers a few times, because the demand for their smarts changed. The demand for IQ is constant. Even those with professional degrees have adapted in a similar fashion.

For the people on the left side of the bell curve, it is a different story. Their skills are narrow and they acquire new skills slowly. Technology is often making their skills obsolete. That’s one reason why we see stagnant wages and unusually high unemployment rates among the unskilled and semi-skilled. It’s not the only reason, but technology also makes it easier to plug on foreign low-skilled labor, thus making open borders more attractive. Many fall into a condition of chronic under employment.

The question is what to do about it.

Pat Buchanan Was Right

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I fully admit to falling for the Bush-Cheney “Freedom Agenda” stuff in the 2000’s. I did not fall for it entirely, as I assumed they were lying about most of it. I figured their talk of spreading democracy was just cover for getting rid of troublesome dictators they did not like anymore. Given the rising tide of Islamic terrorism and the failure of other options, I was willing to give it a shot. After all, fighting the lunatics over there was better than fighting them over here. It seemed like the best option at the time.

The build out of the surveillance state was always a problem for me, but that was mostly for economic reasons. I just saw DHS quickly turning into another EPA. We would end up with a costly, blundering bureaucracy that accomplished nothing good. I also assumed the Left would hamstring all efforts to make the surveillance state effective, as they did with the CIA during the Cold War. It turns out I was mistaken on both accounts. The neocons really meat what they said and the Left never bothered to oppose the surveillance state.

In fairness to most everyone back then, the Left was out of their mind with rage after the 2000 election and then went nuts over the response to 9/11. A good rule for over a century is the assume that the Left is up to no good and going against their program is the way to truth. Seeing one Progressive after another ululating in the streets over the Bush foreign policy made it much easier to support. That and there was no alternative. It was the Bush plan or incoherent craziness that seemed to be rooting for the Muslims to win.

That was then. We have now seen a number of Muslim counties get the vote. In every case they voted for Islamic parties. It turns out that the majority of Arabs are deeply religious and they want to live in a country ruled by their coreligionists. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood garnered the plurality of the votes. The second place party was even more Islamic. In other words, the typical Egyptian saw the Brotherhood as the moderate option. The same thing happened in Iraq when we held their elections.

Iran, of course, has been down this path for 30 years. Despite the economic and political problems in Iran, the majority of the people actually support the ruling mullahs. They want to live in a country run by the tenets of their faith. Turkey is steadily moving toward becoming an Islamic state, rejecting western style liberal democracy. Again, the majority is in favor of Islamic rule. It really does not matter what the neocons hoped would happen, they should have know that Muslim countries would vote for Muslim government.

That’s what makes this post bothersome. A lot of of us have learned a lot about the Arab world and Islam in the last decade. Our intellectuals, however, have remained stubbornly ignorant. They desperately cling to the unsupported assertion that there is a constituency in these countries for liberal democracy. They see the young people on TV with their mobile phones and think that’s reality. That’s not reality. Those people are maybe 20% of the population. The rest see them as emblematic of the problems with liberal democracy.

It’s like the word “democracy” now means a whole package of economic, political and cultural institutions, rather than a political system. If the people vote for their traditional way of life, somehow that is anti-democratic. On the other hand, if our neo-liberal rulers rig an election to thwart the will of the people, that’s democracy in action. It’s hard to know if this is the result of anti-Western hostility among out elites or simply ignorance. It is probably a product of both. Anti-Western hatred has cultivated a generations of stupid intellectuals.

Either way, we are the first people on earth to have a ruling elite that loathes the very culture over which they rule, the culture that makes it possible for them to exist. This was Pat Buchanan’s insight thirty years ago. The American idea of a moderate representative republic that looks out for the interests of the people is revolting to the people who rule over us. So much so, they have revolted against everything associated with it. The result is a weird secular religion that they think they can spread around the world.

Detroit & Debt

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This post on ZeroHedge reminds me of something that never gets much discussion these days. That is, how can you create a system of governance that prevents the state from borrowing? The gold bugs and libertarians are the only people who see borrowing as the source of all trouble. The people in charge never think about it, as borrowing makes it possible for them to be in charge. Easy money allows the worst elements to dominate a democracy, because it makes it possible for the unprincipled to buy votes.

The outlandish growth of the Federal government is due to debt. There’s no way the public would tolerate the tax burden to pay for it. Instead, the rulers found subtle ways to tax the people, always through debt. In order to mask the erosion of purchasing power, they allow banks to create  unlimited credit for the public to use in lieu of earnings. State and local government uses debt in lieu of taxes to pay for expanding unionized workforces. Of course, public pensions are just taxing future tax payers for present vote buying.

Public debt is a type of Ponzi scheme. Like all Ponzi schemes, this one will eventually run out of new money to pay off old money. At the peak of the baby boom, for example, the Feds will be paying 78 million Boomers to sit around at about $50,000 per year. That’s $4 Trillion a year in welfare payments. No one has the slightest idea how to pay it. State and local pension obligations are something like a trillion a year short of being solvent and that may be a polite fiction. No one really knows how broke pensions are right now.

Within the next two decades, the money runs out. It will happen with cities, then a state and finally the Federal government will run out of money. There’s also the fact that global debt has reached levels never seen in human history. There has to be some upper limit to debt creation. The world is based on never ending debt growth, so what happens when that limit is reached? People talk about peak oil as when growth in demand out-paces the growth in supply. That never happens with oil, but it has to happen with debt.

Then what?

The end of one era is the start of a new one. The new one is always about addressing the errors of the old one. If the end of the credit economy is ugly enough, serious people will have to come up with a solution to debt. That means some hard limits on borrowing. This assumes a soft landing from the financial crisis that comes from the end of the credit boom. if it ends in a world war, then maybe what comes next does not matter. The challenge for the post-collapse rulers will be keeping the bread lines peaceful.

Assuming the ideal denouement to the credit boom, how would nations put safe limits on public borrowing? State government have limits written into their constitutions, but those are often circumvented. A currency based in something useful like energy stocks could achieve a mix of gold’s limit’s ion credit growth, while allowing for a growth in the money supply as energy becomes more available and cheaper. It’s a hard puzzle to solve, for the simple reason people love spending today on the promise to pay tomorrow.

Why American Media Is Dying

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This story is a great example of what is wrong with the American media. First off, everyone knows that autograph brokers are grifters. They operate on the same moral plane as drug dealers and pimps. You just assume they are lying. Now, let’s assume ESPN does not know this going into the story. When the dirt bag tries to sell them the video, that should be the point when the reporter and editor realize they are dealing with a person who lies a lot.The fact it was done secretly makes this undeniably obvious.

Now, the press reports on shady characters every day so that’s not a big deal. What is a big deal is they decide to partner with the low-life by helping keep his identity concealed, so he can scam future athletes. By keeping his identity concealed, that’s what they are doing. If this guy’s name gets out, no one will deal with him. ESPN is helping him by keeping him anonymous. In the law, this is called accessory. ESPN is not directly robbing athletes, but they are facilitating it by helping this guy stay anonymous.

There’s another issue here. Why is ESPN making an issue of this? No one gives a crap what this kid is doing to make side money. The NCAA may care, but that’s their business at this point. of course, ESPN would never do this with the black athletes. They move heaven and earth to excuse the bad behavior. If this was a black kid, the story would be about how he is being exploited by the evil whites. Everything the media does is tailored to fit the anti-white narrative,m because the people running the media hate white people.

Putting aside the anti-white agenda, the problem with the media is they have an adversarial relationship with their alleged customers. Instead of challenging the people in charge on behalf of their readers, the media thinks they need to challenge their readers on behalf of the people in charge. In time, someone is going to figure out that attacking the media is a win-win scenario and that’s when the public turns on the press. Politicians sort of know it, but they never take it all the way. One day, some will figure it out.

These are the Good Times

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Everything is relative. When I was a boy, by grandfather would tell me stories of his youth in the second decade of the last century. He was born in 1910 and came over here at some point from Russia. That was always a mystery. The family was dirt poor, but he remembered it fondly. He told stories of the Depression too. Of course, he had stories from the war years. Again, all were fond memories despite the fact he and his family survived great deprivations. All of us tend to romanticize our youth when old.

Our younger years are the best of times, even when those times are terrible. The reason is youth. Being young means having hope because everything is in front of you. Even if the present is terrible, it’s all you know and tomorrow is another day. I have fond memories of the 1970’s, even though my family could barely keep the lights on. I was a kid and did not care. I had fun anyway. The turmoil in the greater society did not touch me and I have no way to compare my circumstances with the alternatives, so I enjoyed my youth.

Anyway, this post by Ashok Rao is interesting and a bit scary. Fake unemployment is at ~7.5% right now. Real unemployment is something closer to 11%. Some claim the figure, when backing out the part timers, is probably over 15%. I’ve always hated such games, but the government keeps playing games with the numbers. This WSJ article is a good read on the subject of part-time workers. What jumps out from Ashok’s post is that job gains have flattened out now. We see that in the weekly numbers and the monthly NFP.

The reason for the troublesome labor numbers is that employers are filling jobs with temporary workers when possible. There are lots of incentives for avoiding any permanent increases to their work force. There also the availability of indentured servants from abroad. No one ever talks about the fact that the labor pool keeps growing at the same pace as job growth and this is due to the flood of foreign workers. Instead, the government just keeps pushing their fake employment numbers, hoping no one notices.

What this means, form the perspective of present workers, is that we are in the bets of times. if you are a boomer looking to retire, you don’t care. The good times are gone anyway. The 20-somethings, on the other hand, are getting screwed and are going to get even more screwed. This economy, with all of them living at home and hustling part time work, is as good as it gets for a while. Looking at the recent economic data, we are headed into a period of near zero growth, when you net out money creation.

Of course, the employment numbers are largely worthless, as they assume things have not changed since the 1960’s. When the labor force was domestic and its growth was organic, the statistics meant something. Now that employers are permitted to import ringers from abroad to drive down wages and get around labor laws, those numbers are meaningless. The only number that counts for anything is the workforce participation rate, but that is never advertised as it reveals the truth of the current labor markets.