Category Archives: Greatest Hits

Inside Out

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Human beings evolved over a very long time in small groups of related people. They hunted together, foraged together, ate together, slept together, and did all the other things one does, in front of everyone else in their group. In all probability, all of the things we consider to be private were public for most of human existence. It’s only when you can live behind walls, away from the sight of others, that you can have privacy.

Did privacy evolve with settlement? Did the need for privacy influence settlement? Was it both, like language and religion. For as long as we know, settled humans have maintained some degree of privacy. Northern cultures seem to maintain a greater divide between public and private, but every settled society had the concept of privacy. Romans may have used communal toilets in the open air, but they did not have sex in the streets or discuss their family matters in the open.

Privacy is the key to one’s identity. It’s why militaries march recruits around naked so much in their initial training. Criminal gangs, like some motorcycle clubs, will do the same thing to prospective members. Take away a person’s privacy and they can no longer stand apart from the rest. It’s hard to hold yourself distinct from others when they know even the most intimate things about you.

Today, the big challenge is keeping your financial life and medical life out of the hands of crooks and ne’er do wells. Unlike 50 years ago or 100 years or 500 years ago, a man on the other side of the globe can now peer into your life and learn things about you that you prefer to keep private. The people who signed up for Ashley Madison are now discovering that those privacy notices are not the safeguard they were promised.

It’s getting much worse than that. If you get a Google thermostat for the house, Google can now data mine your environment and they will. Your phone, your car, your TV, and your PC are all reporting on your behavior. We have gone from passively guarding our private lives to having to aggressively protecting our privacy. It’s a losing fight.

What happens when it is no longer possible to keep any of your life private? What if anyone with a curiosity can go on-line and find out whatever they like about you? It’s not just going to change how you think of others, but it is going to change how you think of yourself. Imagine a world where everyone has the circumspection of a B-list TV personality, always whoring for attention.

That’s one possible outcome. Another possible outcome is a bandit existence where on-line pirates rob people by first stealing their secrets. The Ashley Madison hack is a good example of how a small number of dirt-bags can take down a business. Granted, the business in question caters to dirt-bags, but that’s just a coincidence. The next time it could be a clinic that holds sensitive patient data.

In such a world, you will be forced to employ a combination of deceptions to build a zone of privacy around your life. Most people already have dummy e-mail accounts for signing up to websites. People use proxy services to surf the web. Imagine a world where everyone lies about everything in order to make it impossible to assemble the mosaic of their life. A world in which no one can trust anything about anybody is not one that can have much in the way of social cohesion.

I think we are seeing a case where technology has outpaced our ability to evolve the corresponding cultural and psychological traits. For a few thousand generations we have maintained some degree of privacy and now we may be suddenly thrust into a world of none. Similarly, we evolved in a world where communication was slow and personal. Now we are swimming in an ether of mass media.

Maybe the end is that of John the Savage.

 

Post-Christian West

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On this day 1374 years ago, give or take, A Northumbrian army assembled on a field in the West Midlands, which is on the west (left) side of England. North Umbria was in the northern most territory of England, bordering Scotland. Their leader was a man named Oswald and he was the king of Bernicia. He was the most powerful king on the island, the Bretwalda, and the man often credited with the Christianizing the north of England.

On the other side was King Penda of Mercia, one of the other kings of the heptarchy. Mercia covered the area that is now called the Midlands, which is conveniently located in the middle of England. Penda was a pagan, the last pagan king of England. Mercia was not very powerful, but they stood in the way of Oswald dominating the south, so they were a natural target for the Northumbrians.

On the day of the battle, Oswald, no doubt, stood before his men and prayed to the new God for victory over their pagan enemies. The custom of the age was to promise gifts to the Church and maybe a daughter or son to the Church in exchange for victory. This was one of the many pagan habits the Church tolerated in order to bring the people slowly into the Church.

On the other side, Penda most certainly made offerings to the old gods, along with promises of additional sacrifices if they were victorious. The origins of King Penda are a bit murky, but we do know he was a pagan, and the pagan faith of Britain was Wodenism. It most likely came over with the Saxons and there’s some evidence that Penda was a Saxon.

The Battle of Maserfield probably lasted just a short while. The “armies” of the day were warbands under the command of an Althing or head chief. No one really knows, but the consensus is that armies were at most a few thousand men and probably numbered in the hundreds. In the end, Penda was victorious. Bede describes the outcome as a field made white with the bones of the saints. Oswald, when the battle was lost, is claimed to have knelt and prayed for the souls of his soldiers. Penda had him chopped into pieces and displayed on stakes.

If you were alive at the time, particularly if you were a Mercian, you probably thought Christianity was on the run and the old gods were reasserting their dominion. Certainly, Christians had their doubts. But, a dozen years later Oswald’s brother killed Penda at the Battle of Winwaed and a dozen years after that Oswiu presided over the Synod of Whitby where the secular and Christian authorities codified Christianity for the whole of England, including Mercia.

The point of this blast from the past is to illustrate how the culture can seem to shift very quickly. Even in the slow moving medieval period, a nation could switch religions within a generation. One day you’re helping your father burn the Christian missionary, the next day your son is packing wood under your pagan feet at the behest of the local priest. In a world where the religion of the king is the religion of the people, things can change quickly.

A little closer to our time is the matter of homosexual marriage. In the US, as is usually the case, the rulers impose their fads on the people through the mockery of the court system. That makes it easier for the people to pretend they are a conservative people with a liberal government. The reality is Christianity is dead in America so the people in charge know they will face no resistance.

In Ireland, a place to played up by Hollywood as an austere Catholic country, the people rushed to the polls to vote for homosexual marriage. It’s not that they really cared about the gays or that they were smiting the Church. They simply stopped being Catholic. In 1990, 80% of the people went to church each week. Today it is half that number so voting for homosexual marriage was just what the cool kids were doing.

The point here is that what you see happening today is a lot like what happened with the spread of Christianity through Europe. It was slow and proceeded in fits and starts. Early Christianity in Britain, for example, was hilarious due to the heavy drinking and fornicating of the priests. The commoners could hardly be held to account by such men, at least on moral issues. Over time, a critical mass of true believers gained the upper hand and Christianity became a defining force in English life.

That’s what we’re seeing with the New Religion. It’s not ready to wipe Christianity out completely. It’s simply too ridiculous to be taken seriously by enough people. But it is making steady progress. If you look at this post from a blogger with a name that is too hard to spell, what you see is the steady erosion of Christianity in America. A third of people under 30 have “no religious affiliation” which means they are not Christian.

About half the country does not attend church at all. In New England, the home of liberal fanaticism, church attendance has collapsed, now resembling Europe. The number of church closings in America suggests that self-reporting of church attendance is wildly inflated. Even in the South, which has always been the most religious part of the country, there’s been a decline in church attendance.

The Battle of Maserfield seemed to stall or even possible signal a rollback of Christianity, but it was just a blip. Similarly, the eradication of Christianity by people of the New Religion has stalled from time to time, but it is winning and will win in time. Today Christians are stripped of their property for disobeying homosexuals. In a generation they will be banned from public. Like Wodenism, Christianity will be a weird part of the past for future generations.

The Leverage Candidate

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Like a lot of people on the fringe, I’ve been enjoying the Donald Trump show. Watching the panda-men of Conservative Inc. gasp and faint over the latest Trump statement is great theater. As Nate Silver from 538 puts it, The Donald is the world’s greatest troll. I get the sense Nate must read my blog as I made similar points two weeks ago. Maybe the shadow of this blog is longer than I think.

Anyway, I was thinking about Trump the other day when he lit up Caitlyn Graham and Rick Perry. That stunt with the phone number was pure gold. It both amused the crowd and shamed Graham for being a hypocrite. The line about Perry now wearing glasses was close to genius. When you can shift the focus from yourself to your critics in an amusing way, the critics get scared and usually pipe down.

Trump is our first leverage candidate. For two decades now we have seen loads of leverage companies and leverage financial institutions. The crash of 2008 was brought about by a leverage industry toppling over and taking the economy with it. The entertainment businesses, especially sports, are all levitating on warm gusts of leverage carrying them into the heavens.

The real estate business has always been about leverage. In normal times, someone with equity in a rental property could borrow against it to buy another rental property. The rule of thumb was that 80% of rental income had to cover 100% of the debt service. In simple terms, if the property generated $10,000 a month in rents at its peak, the mortgage could not be greater than $8,000 a month.

Clever real estate men like Trump would figure out how to push up rents to increase cash flow, which in turn drove up their asset base, allowing for more borrowing which they used to buy more properties. As principle was paid and the asset value increased, the difference in asset value and leverage could be turned into a tax free windfall. In Trump’s case, he would often liquidate properties he had made famous thus cashing out at their peak.

The way to think of it for the purpose of understanding Trump’s campaign is this. The savvy real estate man is always looking for a way to leverage his assets so he can jump on the next opportunity before the next guy. If you look at Trump’s career, you see he has moved from one project to the next, very often leaving suckers holding the bag as he walked away with a profit. Trump’s not a builder. He’s an opportunist.

That’s what’s happening in his campaign. He took stock of his assets. He’s famous and he is rich. He’s also nearing the end so he can afford to piss off other famous rich people, unlike regular candidates that have to suck up to the rich. Trump also has a way of connecting with the common people. He’s been doing improvisational television for a long time and he is good at it.

Those are the assets he has to leverage. The opportunities he is exploiting are immigration, the media culture, discontent with the Republican establishment and widespread angst about the culture and economy. My guess is he never had strong views on any of these things. He may not even have had opinions about them until now. He’s just a guy who is good at seeing and exploiting opportunities.

I think this is why the GOP is looking so silly trying to swat away Trump. They are used to dealing with people who fear nothing more than separation from the heard. Trump is not knocking on their door asking to join the club. He’s out on the lawn throwing rocks through the window because that’s where the opportunity lies. John McCain leaning out the window in his nightshirt and cap, yelling at Trump to get off his lawn is what Trump wants. It plays to his advantage.

Similarly, Trump is not builder. He does a deal and moves on. His whole life up to this point has been geared to winning the moment. That makes him uncommonly good at moving past a problem, a gaff or a misstep. He takes the loss and moves onto the next item. To be successful in his line of work, you have to have the conscience of a burglar. You can be sure Trump remembers every win and not a single loss.

That makes the conventional political attack ineffective because he is so good as brushing it off and re-focusing on his next opportunity. When he gets grief for being mean to McCain, he brushes it off and takes a shot at Caitlyn Graham. When the press howls about that, he points out that Rick Perry has a two-digit IQ.

As with everything, there is a limit to leverage and you eventually have to settle up and show a profit. Trump has made a lot of people a lot of money which is why people do business with him. But, he ruined more than a few too. It remains to be see how his presidential run will end, but the insiders are betting/hoping he is unable to deliver more than pithy lines criticizing his opponents.

That said, he is a smart guy and he likes winning. What started out as a vanity candidacy is looking more like a real campaign. Beppe Grillo started out as a gag too. Most people, especially the smart people, thought it was ridiculous to think a divorced actor could be president. Similarly, no one picked a degenerate from the Ozarks as a s serious candidate at this stage of the 1992 election.

For now, it is a good show.

Death of Europe

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The other day I made the point that the the Greek drama was about erasing countries from the map of Europe. Everyone is going to pretend for a while that Greece is a real country, but eventually even the dumbest Greek will figure out that their national government is meaningless. The real power lies much further north and they are not all that interested in what the Greek voters have to say about anything. You don’t have citizens without countries.

The question is how exactly society is going to hold together without the glue of national sovereignty. You can be loyal to your family, your tribe and your countrymen because you share a history, biology and destiny. Loyalty to a committee of technocrats in a glass and steel office complex in another country seems implausible.

The dreariness of that last paragraph made me think about something else. That is the fertility rates in Europe. Men have children because they want someone to remember them and carry on their name and their ways. I can’t imagine anyone thinking that about the global technocracy. Looking at the Total Fertility Rates of the Euro nations, I see I’m not alone.

Euro Member TFR Euro Member TFR
Austria 1.43 Latvia 1.35
Belgium 1.65 Lithuania 1.29
Cyprus 1.46 Luxembourg 1.77
Estonia 1.46 Malta 1.54
Finland 1.73 Netherlands 1.78
France 2.08 Portugal 1.52
Germany 1.43 Slovakia 1.39
Greece 1.41 Slovenia 1.33
Ireland 2.00 Spain 1.48
Italy 1.42

To put those numbers into perspective, the populations to the south in Africa and to the east in the Muslim world have TFR’s double the typical European country. In some case it is four times higher. Demographers put the replacement rate at 2.1 so France is the only country planning to stick around for a few more generations. But, those numbers are inflated by immigrants so the TFR’s are probably lower across the board.

The odds of those numbers turning around are low because of this:

Euro Member Median Age Euro Member Median Age
Austria 44.3 Latvia 40.4
Belgium 43.1 Lithuania 39.7
Cyprus 34.5 Luxembourg 39.3
Estonia 40.2 Malta 39.7
Finland 43.2 Netherlands 40.8
France 39.7 Portugal 39.7
Germany 46.1 Slovakia 37.3
Greece 43.5 Slovenia 43.5
Ireland 35.4 Spain 41.6
Italy 44.5

Again, Africa and the Middle East have median ages half that of Europe. The demographic collapse that is looming over Europe is not going to be arrested by men wielding spreadsheets. It can only be arrested by men wielding something else, but the men of Europe are too old to wield much of anything these days. That and they don’t seem all that interested in it anyway.

This old Greek proverb comes to mind. “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” Europe is at peace and is as prosperous as ever. It’s growing weak because their old men look around and wonder if it would have been better if they had never been born. Given the massive wave of migrants hitting Europe, it’s fair to wonder if the Europeans are just giving up.

Techno-Feudalism

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Since the dawn of human settlement, being rich has been a process, not an end point. In order to accumulate capital, you need to figure out a way to organize people in such a way that their extra becomes your extra. Ideally, you leave a little for them so they think helping you grow rich is to their benefit. But, 1,000 years of feudalism proves it is not a requirement. With the right system, you can grow rich and powerful at the expense of others.

That’s the other part of the process though. To keep the peasants, slaves, servants, workers and associates from revolting, you either invest some of your extra back into them or you invest it in men with weapons who will keep the order. Recently the former has been the preferred method, but the only proven way to keep order is the latter. That’s why gun laws are enforced by men with guns.

This is not how most Americans look at economics. I’m sure a few reading this are thinking I have been reading too much Marx. But, that’s the thing. Marx was not wrong about everything. He made some excellent observations. His recommended solutions were insane, but many of his observations were spot on and hold up well even today.

Marx observed that capitalism, as he defined it, destroys and reconfigures previous economic orders, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth. We see this today with Uber. The old order of state run cab companies is under assault from the new order of distributed contractors linked by a public information network paid for by people who don’t use it.

Joseph Schumpeter argued that this process was not pure destruction as Marxist claimed, but a reordering that eventually added value to the old stock of capital. The automobile did not entirely obliterate the horse and buggy industry. The carriage makers moved to the car business. The property employed in keeping and raising horses did not go away. It was re-purposed for car maintenance. While some value was lost from the end of horse travel, much of it was retained and a whole new layer of value was added onto it.

Both men were working from the perspective of rapid material progress. Events seem like they favor Schumpeter as opposed to Marx as we have seen whole industries grow up in one generation, displacing an old industry from our parents’ generation. The example I love using is the fax machine. In my lifetime, I saw it created, dominate and then replaced with something different. My parents could not imagine it and the kids today have never heard of it.

When I see stories like this one, I wonder if rapid material progress has reached an end or at least a lull. This looks like techno-feudalism to me. Amazon is trying to arrange things such that they can get writers to work for the benefit of Amazon, rather than their own benefit. Amazon gets the benefit of being the world’s largest bookstore, without incurring any risk. Get halfway through some book and decide you don’t like it? No problem. The author will refund you the difference! Amazon looks like a hero and the writer is looking for food in neighborhood dumpsters.

Amazon is not the only billionaire operation running these scams. Apple is trying to screw performers out of royalties. They backed off this time, but you can see where they are headed with this. These new “rental” services are about locking up the pipeline between the creator and the customer. Once they gain that edge, they will stop paying royalties. The next step will be that small acts get nothing but the benefit of “advertising” themselves on Apple or Amazon. It’s classic rentier behavior.

These are two recent examples, but the entire financial system is nothing but feudalism these days. Banks charge people for savings accounts. That forces everyone to put their savings into equities where smart people charge fees on investment funds. This arrangement means that when the economy is strong, everyone gets richer, but the rich get very rich. When the economy falls, everyone gets poorer, except for the rich, they keep getting richer. It is heads they win tails you lose.

The reason for wondering if these are symptoms of systemic stagnation is that when the pie is expanding, the rich guys are rushing to get the lion’s share of the new pie. When the pie is not growing, they look to expand their share of the pie at the expense of the weak. The new business from expansion is always the most profitable. Cannibalizing the existing market is low margin. When big players like Apple and Amazon are slumming this way, it suggests they have nowhere else to turn for profit.

It’s what appears to be at the heart of the massive new trade bill that just passed. The point of it is not to expand the US market, letting a rising tide lift all boats. No one believes that anymore. This bill is about making it easier for global players to loot the American middle class. William the Conqueror imposed feudalism in the English speaking world after the Battle of Hastings. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are imposing it on America a millennium later.

Mokita

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A recurring theme outside the fever swamps is the growing collection of things that everyone knows, but we’re not allowed to discuss. I think a lot of it is simply due to the emerging religion of the post-national West trying to work out the orthodoxy. It’s hard to hail the triumph of egalitarianism when clearly most people are not equal. While that’s being hammered out, you’ll not notice it – or else.

On the other hand, every human society has things it carefully places in its blind spot. Reality is simply too big and complicated to be anything other than messy for self-aware mammals. Religion used to solve this by blaming the gods, but now we just politely refuse to talk about those intractable or inconvenient aspects of human existence. Just for fun I thought I’d make a post of some of them.

Black people commit a lot of crime: The recent unrest in American ghettos has been great material for the TV news channels. The only thing better than burning buildings is seeing people loot the building first then set it ablaze. If they are doing it during the day it is even better as you can then get great closeups of the rioters.

The trouble is all the people doing this are black. In America, everyone knows black people commit an outlandish amount of crime. If you see black males on the street, everyone, including black people, assume they are up to no good. It is something everyone knows, but we choose not to discuss. When we are forced to talk about it, some other unrelated issue is brought into the discussion so we can talk about that, rather than the crime figures.

No one wants their kid to be gay. All parents say they are just happy if their kids are healthy. That’s mostly true, but no parent wants their kid to turn out to be a happy healthy homosexual. All of those pious Progressives haranguing us about the gays privately hope they never have to be in the same room with a gay, much less have one in the family. There’s a reason for all of the gay ghettos in places like New York, Boston and San Francisco.

Gay men are mostly assholes. Life for homosexuals is not a lot of fun. Unlike everyone else, their pool of potential mates is infinitesimally small. A normal man makes a pass at a women and it is not big deal if she is offended. A man makes a pass at a man and it is big trouble if the other guy is not into dudes. Life for gay people is not a lot of fun and that’s what makes them so unpleasant. We all know this, but what’s the point of saying anything about it? They are what they are and that’s punishment enough.

Lesbians are surly and unattractive. The pornography industry has convinced a lot of men that lesbians are hot super models or the girls down the hall, if you can just get them drunk. Of course, lesbians in the press avoid the normal kit as they know how TV works. Viewers want to see attractive people. That means lantern-jawed men and model quality women.

In real life, lesbians look like the guy who paved your driveway. They have bad haircuts and wear men’s clothes. For some reason, they like wearing men’s jeans and flannel shirts. Younger ones will have a face full of fishing tackle and tattoos. To add to the unpleasant visage, they are surly and miserable people. I’ve trod this earth a long time and I have yet to meet a sunny, bubbly lesbian.

The apple does not fall far from the tree. Education policy and all of our debates about crime, poverty and the underclass are all based on something we know is nonsense. That thing is the belief that the kid will grow up to be something different than his parents. The fact we all know is that almost all kids turn out to be, more or less, like their parents.

Public policy is based on the belief that the right teacher, the right program, the right social worker will magically overcome biology. We all know this is nonsense, but we go along with it because it beats the alternatives. The rare exception of the kid overcoming bad parents makes us feel good so we go along with the lie, even though everyone suspect it is a mistake.

Men are not all that interested in what women have to say. Here’s another biology issue. Males are programmed to seek mating opportunities. We fight one another, fight strangers, perform in public and do all sorts of things to increase out chances of mating. Whatever it takes to bag a female we will do. That includes pretending to care about what a woman has to say on most subjects.

The hard cold truth is women are bred for having and raising children. Men are bred for battling other males for the chance to reproduce. It’s why we used to say that men will trade money for sex and women will trade sex for money. The biological ends of men and women are the same, but the means are vastly different and neither side can offer much in the way of advise to the other, with regards to the means.

My guess is women don’t care what men have to say either, but most men assume that anyway. Women seem to think we are supposed to care what they have to say so we have all of these rituals where men pretend to care what the hot women in the office is saying about sales, but he is really just thinking about banging her.

The most bigoted people in America are black. In fact, blacks are actively encouraged to wear their prejudices on their sleeve. Every black comic does bits on white people. Famous black people put a lot of effort into “keeping it real” so they can be clear that they are not down with the blue-eyed devil. How many times have you heard a black guy say something like, “It is a black thing, you wouldn’t understand”?

What makes this most absurd is we also pretend that blacks are biologically incapable of being racist or prejudiced. No one, for example, ever says that Al Sharpton is a racist, because that’s not permitted. We all know that he is a hate-filled carbuncle of a man, but he’s black so we don’t say he is a racist.

Jews do run things. If you look around, it is not hard to notice that men of the tribe occupy a disproportionate amount of the nation’s high ground. Hollywood is run by Jews. The media is all run by Jews. Finance, obviously. Look at the list of richest 1000 and you see that 30% are Jews. It’s not a conspiracy or part of some master plan run from a secret location in Israel. Jews are just a wildly successful people.

Western societies reward intelligence and Jews are the smartest group of humans on earth. That means more of them will be equipped to succeed in a modern society, relative to their numbers, than we’ll see with other groups. Having smart people in charge of your country is a good idea so everyone goes along with it and never mentions it. The last time people noticed the Jews were in charge, a lot of bad things followed so we pretend not to notice.

Most people should not be allowed to vote. Paying attention to public affairs is tough stuff. First off, it’s boring. Thinking about the big game is a lot more fun than thinking about tax policy or abortion policy. Even if you have an interest in it, there’s so much bravo sierra in the media it is hard to keep track of things. Even smart people fall into lazy habits of rooting for Red Team or Blue Team without thinking about it.

Most people are not smart. In fact, most people are average to below average. We’re a country that lets retarded people vote. We all know this is a terrible idea, but we go along with it anyway. We hope that when it matters the serious people who know the right answers will also have the ability to convince the dumb people to pull the right lever. But, most of us suspect it would be better to just let the smart people vote, but we keep that to ourselves.

My Brief Against Chav Ball

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Way back in the olden thymes, when the World Cup was held in the United States, I went to the games played on Foxboro. I happened to be at the airport when the Greek team arrived, so I got to see them buying Marlboros at the gift shop. Seeing a bunch of swarthy guys chain smoking outside the terminal is my main memory of international soccer. That and how all of them were glaring at every women in sight. It was as if they just got out of prison. Little dogs and little men have no control of their sex drive.

That said, it was a good time in Boston during the World Cup and I had fun at the games I attended. Soccer is boring, dull and tedious on television. The fake injuries are so absurd and embarrassing it is hard to tolerate. In person, the game is better. When Raul collapses in a heap, acting like he took a cannon ball to the knee, the crowd roars in unison, thus making it more like a stage play than a sporting event. You lose that watching on TV, so it comes off as absurd.

Watching soccer live is also better than TV, because you get to see the players that are not involved in the play. They are often chatting with one another like they are old friends bumping into one another on a stroll. On TV, the camera follows the ball and the players all look busy. Live, you also get a better sense of what’s really happening. The strategy comes into focus sooner than on TV. Since most of the games are fixed, it all makes more sense when you get to see all of the action.

World Cup soccer and Olympic soccer are fun because so much is at stake. The Little League World Series gets big TV ratings in the U.S. for the same reason. People don’t watch little kids play baseball, unless it’s their kids. Put the same kids in an international tournament and suddenly the nation gets interested. There’s also the fact that the World Cup features the best players in the world. The fact is, Mesi and Neymar kicking a ball around will always seem more thrilling than two unknown guys.

Now, what has always turned me off about soccer is the cultural angle. When I was a boy, our betters in America tried to force soccer and the metric system on us. The people doing it were all loathsome snobs. Worse yet, all of them were the children of working class people who should have known better. But, their parents sent them off to the state college and they came back thinking they were sophisticated citizens of the world, so they loved soccer. Yep, soccer was a Boomer fetish.

Even all these year on, I still think of those smug assholes of my youth, whenever soccer comes to my attention. I associate it with the ridiculous poseurs who turn up in every Progressive cultural fad. I’ve probably heard “it is the most popular sport in the world” a million times in my life. That is the sort of thing stupid say when they want to sound sophisticated. In most of the world, soccer is the sport of the poor and lower classes. That means our bourgeois bohemians are aping the mores of chavs.

A recent development, one that I find most irritating, is the fake passion of cosmopolitan men for Premiere League teams in Britain. They saw videos of Euro guy with his hands on his head in agony over a soccer match and now they are pretending to have had a lifelong passion for a soccer club in England. I have a friend who used to call soccer “fag ball” until about a decade ago. He became a vegan and started following soccer and he now wears a Man U jersey. He says “footie” now.

It is all a pose, of course. What’s odious about the poseur is he turns his self-loathing into your problem. The poseur apes the styles and attitude of others because he hates himself and cannot stand the sight of himself. His comical pretensions force everyone else to play along, in order to be polite. Everyone knows the poseur is full of crap, but the guy who says what everyone thinks, risks being castigated for being rude. These people turn our virtues into vices. They deserve to be hated.

One other thing that turns me off is the “you don’t understand the complexity of the sport” line from people who probably don’t understand the sport at all. Soccer’s appeal is based in its simplicity. Real fans know this, but poseurs prattle on about the complexity in order to shift the focus from their misplaced and irrational love for a foreign sport, onto the skepticism of their critics. In other words, they don’t really like soccer, they just want to signal their membership in a group they believe is superior.

Anyway, that’s my problem with soccer.

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.

Corporate Bullshit

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A long ago, there was a movement called the “Plain English Campaign.” It is still around, as you can see by their website, but I don’t know if they have had any effect in the UK. Here is the colonies, things have gone horribly wrong, in terms of plan language. Corporate jargon is the most obvious. Clever guys have made corporate jargon generators like this one to mock the bizarre pseudo-language popping from B-schools and HR departments.

Yesterday, I got en e-mail for a job opening. I’m on so many distribution lists for corporate announcements I have a separate e-mail account for them. I usually just delete this crap, but this one is a classic. The abundance of bullshit is amazing. This is for a Senior Vice President:

Overall Accountabilities:

Your mandate as Senior Vice-President, Application Support will be aligned with the Chief Information Officer’s objectives of developing and integrating the IT strategy with IFDS. organizational-wide objectives, including exploring new business opportunities, defining a viable and effective technology road map and establishing priorities for fundamental organizational transformation to sustain competitive advantage.

What does “aligned with the Chief Information Officer’s objectives” mean? My guess is it means you will be told what to do by your boss, like every other employee. I like “viable and effective” as a goal. Having tried doomed and ineffective a few times, it all makes perfect sense. A big part of corporate jargon is restating the obvious in neologisms and inventive word salad. It’s passive aggressive pandering.

 As a critical member of the IT Senior Leadership team, you will play a

key role in aligning IT programs to corporate goals and strategies. You will be accountable for oversight and quality of all facets necessary to the successful delivery and sustaining activities required to provision and support integrated, sustainable, and secure software applications in addition to development or enhancement of IFDS systems and products on a global level.

More aligning! You will be aligned!!

You will have meaningful impact, leading transformational change and leveraging talent through creation of a global, innovative, high-performing team, focused on delivering quality solutions that facilitates business success. Your technical aptitude, business acumen and experience at the senior management level, will empower you to articulate this technical vision and influence business leaders to

ensure exceptional client centric solutions and future growth.

A guy shooting up the place will make a meaningful impact too. It’s weird how modern managerial types think these emotive words are always good. Transformational could mean burning the place to the ground. Focused? Hitler was focused! Pol Pot was hyper-focused. How’d that work out?

 Competencies: Behavioral & Functional:

Strategic & Systems Thinking: Understand the connections across functions/enterprise and look at issues from multiple perspectives. Anticipate and look at downstream and cross-functional implications, articulating how technology can transform the business

I dare anyone to explain what the hell that means.

Results Focus & Team Leadership: Drive organizational initiatives beyond delivering the IT project component. Set and adjust priorities effectively; remove barriers and act with an appropriate sense of urgency. Infuse the team with a sense of purpose and create clear accountabilities and metrics. Energize team to excel, continuously improve and develop hi-potentials.

Another magic word is “beyond.” You know, like when Stalin went beyond collective farming and starved millions of Ukrainians. I suppose “energizing the team” has something to do with cattle prods and the lash.

Business Acumen and Intellectually Curiosity: Use financial and technical data to accurately diagnose business strengths and opportunities. Pick up cues from around the organization to be able to raise awareness, simplify and solve complex business and technical issues.

Look, I’ve hired a lot of people in my life and I never wanted any of them to be intellectually curious. That type goes through your briefcase when you’re in the restroom. They tend to waste time doing things other than their job.

Leading Change: Champion change in self and others, build a compelling vision and act with urgency to drive change across the enterprise.

Another magic word. Change is not always good. For instance, if the new guy “champions” the idea of working in the nude, that’s not a change anyone would welcome. The hilarious thing about these ads is they are all lies. This firm wants a female to run customer service. That’s what all the emotive bullshit is signaling. The fact that the word “diverse” is not used says they are not hiring a black guy this time.

President Mugabe

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Martin Luther King is treated like a saint these days. According to popular mythology, he was the Progressive version of Jesus, sent to cleanse the sins of the white man. The truth is, he was far from a saint. By most accounts, King was a lot like Al Sharpton. He was personally corrupt and a degenerate. His great gift was a talent for manipulating upper middle-class whites, while at the same time appearing to oppose them on behalf of the blacks. Whites believed they could deal with him and blacks trusted him.

King had was a sixth sense about the ruling class whites. He knew that they lacked the appetite for confrontation and were generally in favor of dismantling segregation. Northern whites wanted it gone because they hated southern whites, but upper class southerners wanted it gone too. These whites wanted to be accepted in the national elite and saw segregation as an obstacle. King understood this and played on that divide as you can see in his Letter From Birmingham Jail.

The subtle point, made in the context of the events that got him locked up, was that whites had a choice. They could negotiate with him or fight with the brothers on the street. At the same time, the message to northern whites was that blacks would not submit, so it was safe to back them against southern whites. This two cushion bank shot had the desired effect of weakening the resolve of southern elites, who were put in the same impossible position as South African whites a generation later.

In the end, King’s great gift was not his ability to rally and uplift blacks, but his ability to pit one groups of whites against another. The faction willing to fight would be abandoned and used as a scapegoat. Later, guys like Jackson and Sharpton turned this trick into a racket. They would threaten to riot outside a corporate headquarters until they got paid. Jackson became a millionaire shaking down large companies. Sharpton is less rich, but he certainly lives well scaring white liberals into paying his way.

In post-Colonial Africa, there was a similar phenomena, but in a different context. The white colonials were looking to put a black face on their possessions and went looking for the best and brightest Africans. The Brits went so far as to send them back to England for training and education. Eventually, some rose up and took control as the colonials withdrew. The story over and over with the new African leaders was they all possessed an ability to sooth the fears of the whites, while appearing as authentic Africans.

Time after time, the colonials were lead to believe that these guys were more like them than the typical African. They held no ill will toward them and would continue on the policies established by the whites. Ian Smith of Rhodesia, a skeptic of British policy, was even won over eventually. Once they gained power, however, the new black rulers set about slaughtering anyone they thought was a threat. Eventually, that meant turning on the white farmers and administrators and eventually genocide.

We are seeing something similar with Barak Obama. It turns out that his only real skill is the ability to make upper-middle class white liberals do stuff for him. Otherwise, the guy is incompetent. You see it in this story from the LA Times, of all places.  This is the basic stuff of governance. Governments spy on one another. They get caught. They are always prepared for both so as not to look foolish. Yet, this administration is incapable of this basic duty. This is statecraft 101 and the administration can’t master it.

As an aside, a trouble pattern seems to be emerging with regards to the use of the intelligence services in this administration. They seem to have a flagrant disregard for the normal protocols. The reason those protocols exist is to avoid these sorts of diplomatic blunders. The story makes quite clear that the White House deliberately broke the rules in order to spy on European leaders. That suggests a cavalier attitude toward the limits of the state. Who else are they spying on and what other rules are they breaking?

Anyway, pick an item and the only thing Obama has been able to do well is rally upper-middle class white liberals to defend him from his critics. Everything else has been a mess. He had an opportunity to radically alter government in his first two years and blundered so badly little was accomplished. Even his most slavish fans grumble about the blown opportunities. It turns out that replacing whites with non-whites has a real impact on the basic functioning of western-style governments.

Americans are now getting see up close why Africa has failed. We elected the Robert Mugabe of America politics as President. He’s not threatening genocide, at least not yet, but there are trouble signs that his administration is about to unleash a torrent of anti-white rhetoric. His talk about going “Bullworth” is all about taking the gloves off with regards to race. The last thing America needs is race talk from the mulatto president. That could very well be the price of incompetence. A simmering race war.