Category Archives: Weird Stuff

A Pointless Ramble About YouTube Stars

Posted on by

Every week, I get e-mails from the social media platforms suggesting ways to promote my podcast. Spreaker sends out something a few times a week. Mostly these e-mails are tips about metadata, topic descriptions and video features. They seem sensible, but I cannot help but wonder if it matters all that much. A professionally done, cleverly described and expertly distributed video on model train collecting is still going to be a video of interest to people into model trains. Ultimately, content is the determining factor in this stuff.

That said, it is useful to wonder why some YouTube people have huge audiences and why others have small audiences. Until recent, PewDiePie was unknown to me, despite his having fifty-nine million subscribers. He is the #1 YouTube personality. Having watched some of his videos, I sort of get it. Young people are wired to imitate one another, which is why pop culture is a young person thing. PewDiePie plays video games and tells naughty jokes that very gently and subtly lampoon modern piety. Kids like seeing that stuff.

On the other hand, someone like June Nicole Lapine has close to a million YouTube subscribers. She pitches herself as a liberal anti-feminist and her videos are intended to be satires of social justice warriors. Not being an unmarried millennial woman, I am probably hard wired to not get her appeal. I watched some of her videos and she is annoying and her act is trite. The earnestly stupid female who really, really cares about stuff has been done to death. At least I thought so, but apparently not.

While reviewing the above videos, this channel was suggested to me by the gods of YouTube. The assumption is they recommend channels based on prior viewing, which means some portion of June Nicole Lapine’s audience is into husky lesbians. The star of that show appears to be a carny, who bills herself as a lesbian comedian. She has half a million subscribers and seventy thousand Twitter followers. After watching some of her videos, I am reminded of why the phrase “jolly lesbian” does not exist.

Now, half a million subscribers is not big by YouTube standards. To crack the top-100 you need twenty times that number, but most of the top channels are professionally produced music channels, backed by global corporations. Given that there are (maybe) four million adult lesbians in America, it suggests that Arielle Scarcella has figured out how to tap into this audience, so to speak, that is not easily understood by watching her videos. The people watching and enjoying her work, are vastly different people from anyone I know.

It is easy to be puzzled by the popularity of alien performers, but in researching this post, I did learn that Filipinos share the American distaste for the Speedo. That aside, I was made aware of a popular alt-right YouTuber named Andy Warski. His channel has over 250 thousand subscribers. He hosted a marathon debate between Richard Spencer, Sargon, Styx and some others, which is how I learned of him. His live show set some sort of record for viewers, but I do not have numbers on it. He mentioned it in his show.

Now, I follow the alt-right and listen to some of their bigger personalities. I never heard of the Warski guy until last week. Watching some of his videos, I am thinking he smokes a lot of weed and has a drawer full of hacky sacks. I am not getting the popularity, but maybe I am simply too old to appreciate bro talk anymore. There was a time in my life when my peers used the words “dude” and “whatup”, but that was a long time ago. As with PewDiePie, young bros probably like listening to other young bros talk bro stuff.

I watched some of the Spencer – Sargon battle on that Warsky show and I kept wondering how Sargon got popular. In fact, it was the genesis of this post. Every time he said something stupid, which was pretty much every time he spoke, I thought, “why would anyone like this guy?” He is just a portly British version of Goth Fonzi. Yet, he has 750 thousand subscribers to his channel, most of whom are probably Americans. According to his Patreon page, he makes $8,000 per month as a YouTube star.

Like many of these popular YouTube stars, Sargon’s gimmick is assurance. He soothingly repeats the platitudes his listeners desperately want to be true. Americans always assume a British accent means intelligence, so Sargon’s fans are being told they are right about the world, by a smart British guy, who sounds confident and reasonable. It is why his clash with Spencer was a disaster for him. He was revealed to be a petulant, argumentative airhead. His act only works when he is unchallenged and scripted.

It is a good reminder, though, that the audience for libertarian self-flattery is much larger than realism. People like easy answers and magical thinking. It is why the number one right-wing Progressive is Ben Shapiro. His podcast is number one in terms of downloads, according to those claiming to know these things. I am always suspicious when rankings are used in lieu of hard numbers, but a search of YouTube reveals his Daily Wire stuff gets about 250 thousand views. His channel has half a million subscribers.

All of that said, the people popular in their YouTube segment all have a couple things in common. One is their presentation is calm. Internet video is like television. It is a cool medium. Shouting and craziness on video, come off like shouting and craziness in person. You can be a crazy Mark Levin, screaming like a madman on radio, because radio is a hot medium. The better YouTube people could just as easily be doing their show from your bedroom. Most shoot their shows from their bedrooms and living rooms.

The other thing they do well is they make no effort to imitate the legacy media. YouTube is not public access TV or a poor version of cable. The authenticity of the presentation seems to be what works. People like hearing people like them confirm what they think about the world. Watching a polished TV airhead repeat threadbare platitudes, even soothing ones, is not as effective as hearing a friendly voice, which sounds like you, saying the things you think in private. YouTube is a collection of mirrors that clap.

Major Waste

Posted on by

Way back in the tyranny of Bush the Minor, I read a funny article in one of the news magazines, while waiting for a haircut. This was in the early days of his administration when the accounting scandals hit and the tech bubble burst tanked the economy. The liberal media was sure it was all the result of the gods being angry over Bush getting elected over Gore, so they filled their pages with horror stories about the economy. The story was a tale of woe about Ivy League grads unable to find work.

The one example I always remember was about a girl who had graduated from Harvard and was unable to find a job she deserved. Instead, she was reduced to waiting tables (gasp!) and doing temp work in offices. The story went through her struggles to get interviews and her process of considering alternative career options. Finally, she landed a job as a social worker for the city. The piece wrapped up with a quick summary of her story and it was revealed that she had majored in folklore at Harvard.

Whenever the topic of college majors comes up, I always think of that story. I have made a hobby of rooting around in the course catalogs of liberal arts colleges, looking for bizarre classes and majors. Nothing so far has topped the Harvard Folklore and Mythology degree. Our colleges are full of lunatics doing useless work, but there is some effort to dress it up as legitimate academic work. There is no way to dress up a major in folklore. Exactly no one has ever said in an emergency, “We need a folklorist!”

Anyway, this post on Greg Cochran’s site brought all that to mind. His post links to this cool graphic put together by NPR displaying the majors over time, relative to other majors and college graduates as a whole. It is one of those things that could be done with charts or traditional graphs, but it is a lot more fun hovering over that thing. I learned that there is such a thing as a fitness major, which sounds a lot like gym, but my bet is it has lots of “queering” and race stuff to it. Pointless majors tend to go hard for the crazy.

Another interesting tidbit is the fact that zoology has just about disappeared as a college major. It looks like the annual numbers are in the hundreds now. Maybe colleges have re-branded it as something cooler. Biology has not had a ton of growth over the last few decades either, so maybe not. It does suggest that young people no longer have an interest in the natural world. My guess is the number of young people experiencing the natural world is at an all-time low. Kids are not into hunting, fishing or farming.

The volume of business majors is the eye opener. Greg asked in his post what readers thought was the least valuable degree. That is a loaded question, but objectively business has to be on the list. Most of the course work is stuff you never need in the business world. Accounting courses are useful, but few kids retain any of it. The math courses should be helpful, but many business majors never take more than the minimum of math required for graduation. The SAT scores for business majors explain the popularity.

The truth is college is a major waste of time and money for most of the students. Only 59% of students graduate from college in six years. Some fraction of the rest goes back and get their credential, but by that point it has lost its market value. This assumes it has a market value. An Ivy League diploma still carries weight. A Stanford degree opens secret doors that most do not know exist, but in the case of the elite, it is not the degree so much as the connections. Mixing with tomorrow’s rulers is the real value of the degree.

Outside of STEM fields, it is hard to judge the value of a college degree. The constant refrain from the college industrial complex is that college graduates earn eleventy billion more in their lifetime, compared to non-graduates. There is a lot of fun with numbers in those studies. People with “some college” tend to earn about the same as people with four-year degrees, suggesting IQ is the real issue here. If you are bright enough to get into college, you are as bright as the people who get out of college with a degree.

The only way to measure the value of a diploma is on a case by case situation. If your goal is to be an engineer, then you need the paper. On the other hand, if you are walking out of college with $80,000 in debt, by the time you pay off the loans, the real cost is 30% more in interest and opportunity cost. Your lifetime earnings probably justify that initial investment. On the other hand, if your goal is to be a medieval folklorist, you are probably better off playing a lot of Dungeons & Dragons or World of Warcraft.

All that aside, the college rackets are another example of how social trust has declined in America over the generations. There’s little doubt now that colleges prey on the angst of middle-class families. The declining value of a college diploma corresponds with the skyrocketing cost of getting it. It is a bust out, the sort of thing predators do to people they view as strangers. Just as the college campus is a collection of grifters pretending to be colleagues and academics, America is a land of strangers pretending to be citizens.

 

The New Zeros

Posted on by

In the coming decades, Western nations are going to be faced with a number of problems stemming from the technological revolution. We are now post-scarcity societies, where we have more than enough food, medicine and housing for our citizens and even some non-citizens. The pruning force of scarcity is no longer doing its magic to keep the population fit or even sensible. The next big problem is what to do with the tens of millions of extra humans, no longer needed to contribute to society.

The hardest part of the automation wave will simply be language. What do you call people who no longer have any purpose, in terms of producing goods and services through their labor? For as long as anyone has been alive, the small slice of the population that has fit this definition could simply be dismissed. The underclass is assumed to be lazy or anti-social. Trying to fix this has been a good way to keep the useless off-spring of the middle classes busy in social work.

When the numbers swell as automation eliminates the need for human labor in wide swaths of the economy, it will be impossible to dismiss the idle. When many of the idle are people who formerly occupied office jobs or semi-skilled laboring positions, blaming their condition on a lack of ambition is not going to be possible. The current labor participation rate is about 63% right now. In the coming decades, that number will fall below 50% due to automation and demographics.

The other challenge is how to support the swelling ranks of the useless in a way that keeps them from causing trouble. The hot idea currently is the universal basic income, which is being experimented with in Finland. In the US, some states are talking about how to replace their welfare programs with something simpler like the UBI. Libertarian economists like the idea of the UBI, because it theoretically allows the under classes to participate in the market economy, unencumbered by the state.

The trouble with this idea is math. If all citizens have a floor, in terms of their basic income, whatever that floor is, will be the new zero. The only possible way to have a negative income, in real terms, is if someone is paying their employer. There may be some bizarre situations where that exists, but in the main, zero is the smallest number that can appear in box #1 of your W2. If that number is bumped up by the UBI, that becomes the new zero, the lowest possible.

Imagine the government decides to help BMW sell more cars, so they offer every citizen $5000 if they spend it on a BMW, rather than some other car. BMW is now facing a wave of people coming into American dealerships toting a $5,000 check. The logical thing for BMW to do is raise the price of their low end models by $5000. That way, they do not increase production costs, but they increase the profit per car. In effect, the floor for entry level buyers was just raised by $5000 by the government.

There is a fairly good real world example of this. The government decided to do something to help working class people get into college. Since many need remedial help, before taking on college work, the scheme was to offer a subsidy to be used for community colleges. The students would use the money to prep for college then head off to a four year university, presumably using loans and aid at that level. The result, however, was the community colleges just raised their tuition.

The UBI would most likely follow the same pattern. By guaranteeing that no one would earn less than some amount, in lieu of traditional welfare payments, the absolute floor becomes the subsidy level. In effect, the new zero becomes the subsidy so all other wages would be based off that number. It is really no different than printing up money and dropping it from helicopters into the ghetto. The UBI would be as inflationary as debasing the currency.

The truth is the zeroes that our rulers will be forced to address are zero population growth and zero TFR among the surplus populations. For example, you could fix Baltimore in a generation with mandatory Norplant for the underclass. A generation of childless females means the last generation of 80 IQ residents. The reason Baltimore is a violent city is not an excess of hard working, college educated STEM workers, but a surplus of violent stupid people.

It also means zero immigration. When 80% of today’s immigrants end up on public assistance, the immigrants of tomorrow will be nothing more than useless people to police, feed and house. Japan is the model to follow. They have no immigration and their population levels are about to drop in the coming decades. They are the only nation on earth that is truly ready for the automated future, as they have the demographics to meet a shrinking demand for labor.

There is one other zero and that is zero participation. The fact is the free-market and democracy work when the right answer is not obvious. As automation takes over more and more tasks, the number of issues that need to be hashed out collectively will diminish. Rule by robot means exactly that, which means voting and popular government will have to be reconsidered. What is the point of being mayor when there are no more patronage jobs to dole out to friends and family?

2018 Predictions

Posted on by

I had not looked at last year’s predictions since I posted them, so I was a little surprised by how many of them turned out to be right. The prediction about Trump and Republicans pushing through a big tax bill was pretty spot on. Trump has also attacked the regulatory code as I predicted. I did predict the GOP would do some rollback on ObamaCare, which did not happen, other than repeal of the mandate. I was also right on the climate change stuff. Trump has reversed Federal policy on climate change and faced little resistance.

I did not get the China stuff right. Of course, it is hard to know as the ChiComs are good at hiding their systemic trouble. The fact that no one is talking about China’s economy these days suggests the boom times are over, so maybe I was just a year early. I missed on the Middle East stuff, but there is no shame in that. I did hit a home run on the gene editing prediction. I was also prescient on the alt-right in-fighting. In fairness, which was so obvious I cannot take credit for that one. Pretty much the only thing they do well is squabble.

So, what are the signs telling me this year?

The Trump agenda will trundle along with the negotiations over DACA amounting nothing, as the Democrats find that there is no constituency for the program. Instead, it will be allowed to expire and Trump will be painted as the bad guy, but no one will care, including Trump. Instead, the focus will be on the infrastructure bill, which will turn into a massive Christmas tree that both parties get to decorate. In that bill will be some sort of second chance provision for DACA, along with money for that wall and other immigration items.

On the domestic political front, the Mueller investigation will keep taking on water as it becomes clear that the real issue is not Russian meddling in the presidential election, but FBI meddling in the election. Trump may even appoint a new special prosecutor to dig into the FBI, Uranium One and the DOJ shenanigans. This will begin to spill into the midterms, as the Republicans figure out that this is a chance for them to blunt Democrat gains. The Democrats will pickup some seats in the House but lose some seats in the Senate.

This will be the year that gene editing in health care moves to center stage. Researchers in California used a new technique in 2017 to alter a patient’s DNA in an effort to treat a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome. Health care is about to make a tremendous leap forward with respect to treating genetic disorders. Similarly, micro-technology is about to revolutionize medical testing with trackable pills that collect information about a patient throughout their day. The morality of new medicine starts to get serious attention.

One of the consequences of the big GOP tax bill will be the impact it will have on Europe’s not so robust economy. The disparity in corporate tax rates was a boon to Europe, but now the roles are reversed and companies will begin to repatriate cash and jobs to the United States this year. This will put more pressure on the EU and on pro-EU parties, as the nationalist parties are just starting the become organized. This will also cause the Brexit negotiations to fail and it will bring down the Theresa May government.

At the same time, the various nationalist parties on the Continent will continue to grow their support due to the intractable migrant problem and the establishment’s inability to formulate a coherent response. Emmanuel Macron will push through a set of immigration reforms that will legitimize the nationalists parties and increase demands for reform in the rest of the EU. Even more frightening to the European establishment, Sebastian Kurz, the new Austrian Chancellor, will start talking with the Visegrád Group about cooperation.

While electric car sales will continue to grow, they will remain a toy for the upper middle-class. The real growth in electric vehicles will be at the lower end. Electrically assisted bicycles, self-balancing one wheel scooters, powered skateboards and hi-tech mobility scooters for old people will become the next big thing. Electric cars face all sorts of obstacles, but new battery technology will open the door for micro-travel devices that are relatively cheap and meet the demands for old people and urban residents.

The much anticipated IPO of Saudi Aramco will not be done publicly. Bankers in London and New York have been maneuvering to get what many think will be the biggest IPO ever. Instead, the Saudis will opt for a private offering and it will not be the trillion dollar event everyone expects. This will lead to speculation about the stability of the kingdom and questions about the future of the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia is basically a hedge fund with a country attached. Aramco’s stock price will be the measure of Saudi health.

Finally, the New York Yankees will be the first team in baseball history to lose all 162 regular season games. The embarrassment will cause city officials to evict the team, forcing them to move to New Jersey. The enormity of this sporting catastrophe will be eclipsed by the sudden bankruptcy of the English Premiere League. The death of professional football in England will have a domino effect, resulting in the collapse of all professional football leagues, even the NFL, which is a different football.

That is it for this year. It has been another great year for the blog, adding tens of thousands of new readers and many new commenters. I appreciate everyone taking the time out of their day to read and respond. It has also been a great start to the podcast, despite the fact I have done little to promote it. As has been the case with the blog, the podcast audience grows by word of mouth. I appreciate everyone posting links on social media and recommending me to their friends and enemies. I genuinely appreciate it.

Happy New Year to one and all.

Happy Thanksgiving

Posted on by

The first time I heard this song in full was on the way back to Massachusetts. It was the day before Thanksgiving and it was snowing. Driving through Stockbridge, I came upon a cop who had pulled over a car full of hippy looking degenerates. I stopped and offered to help him beat the hippies. He was more than happy to let me join in on the fun. Before long there was a whole gang of us, beating hippies and enjoying good fellowship. There’s really nothing like the holiday season to bring out the best in people.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

Is Drudge On The Level?

Posted on by

The first time I heard of Matt Drudge was in the 1990’s. I was living in Virginia and I would listen to Mary Matalin in the car. I think her show was syndicated, but it was broadcast from a station in Virginia. Matalin would have Drudge on her show to talk about the gossip in his newsletter. This was before he had a website. Not long after, he started a website and then the whole Monica Lewinsky thing blew up and Drudge became a household name. Like many people, I visit his site daily to see what is happening in the world.

In 2012 I started to wonder if Drudge was on the level. He promoted so many pro-Romney stories, it felt like he was working for him. I get that Drudge is right of center in his politics, so he does a lot of “counter programming” in his choice of stories, in order to keep his mostly white middle-class audience. Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan were the dream team of SWPL-ville civic nationalism. Therefore, it made some sense to tilt toward Romney against Obama, but his promotion of Romney struck me as a bit deceptive.

The truth is mainstream news is 100% access journalism. If a reporter wants to get stories handed to them – and that is how all news is done now – they have to play ball with the people making news and their appointed gatekeepers. That is how Harvey Weinstein kept his troubles out of the news for decades. His people would give reporters gossip on celebrities so they would not spill the beans on Harv and his love for potted plants. A site like Drudge is just as beholden to that system as any other news site.

The thing with Drudge though, is he made his bones playing all sides of the street. He was willing to promote anything that was newsworthy. That meant that the Prog media was willing to dish him inside stuff on their own people. The Bezos Blog and Carlos Slim Times love it when Drudge links to them. He sends tens of millions of eyeballs to any site he links to, even if it is a side link. As a valuable promoter, in theory, he is getting all sides sending him tips on politics, current events and the happenings in Washington.

I am starting to wonder if that is still the case. In the last election, he was not pro-Trump. For a tabloid guy, Trump should have been manna from heaven. Instead, he tilted toward the company line about Trump. Every time the RNC howled about how Trump violated some sacred taboo, Drudge was out there with fake news stories about how the end of the Trump campaign was near. It got to be a running joke in my office. Every time Drudge had stories about how Trump went to far, you knew Trump’s polls had ticked up again.

Maybe it was a coincidence, but two elections in a row and Drudge was out pitching the RNC line. It is almost as if someone inside the RNC is feeding Team Drudge the narrative now. That is very obvious in the Roy Moore flap. From the start it looked like a Mitch McConnell hit job. That is mostly because it was so ham-fisted. McConnell is not head of the Stupid Party because he is a brilliant tactician. Yet, Drudge was posting links to all the RNC sourced stories, in a way that started to look choreographed.

The topper was the fake poll leaked by the RNC and the Gloria Allred stuff. The poll was laughable. Even Democrats snickered at it. Yet Drudge had it up on his site in red for two days. Then the Allred hoax collapsed and he had nothing on it. In fact, now that Franken is the top story and it is clear the hit on Moore backfired, Drudge has suddenly forgotten the Alabama senate race. This comes as the Republicans are now hiding under their desks, wondering when the harpies will be coming for them over a sex scandal.

Now, it has to be mentioned that Drudge is a homosexual. He is also one of the fussy sorts of gays, like Lindsey Graham, who are attracted to gentry conservatism. A southern firebrand or someone opposed to homosexual activism is going to come in for criticism by Drudge. His coverage of the South and Christians has always reflected his homosexualist sensibilities. A guy like Roy Moore, who is overtly Christian and vocally opposed to the normalization of homosexuals, is not going to be popular at the bathhouse.

Even so, in the age of access journalism, succumbing to temptation is to be expected. I have written before about how access journalism has turned sports reporting into company public relations departments. The same thing has happened to mass media. This is most obvious when mass media tries to cover the alt-right. The “reporters” now working in mass media do not know the basics of news reporting. That article on Anglin is embarrassingly written and riddled with easily checked factual errors. It is bad reporting.

Modern media people are stenographers with a social media strategy. They do not know how to do traditional news reporting. Some are story tellers who leave gaps in their tale to place some cherry picked quotes, while others just wait for someone to hand them a story they can type up for their employer. It is most obvious in sports reporting, but it is true all over. There is no upside to being curious or inquisitive. That may be what has happened with Drudge. He has a good gig so he plays ball with the “news makers” now.

A Rambling Car Shopping Post

Posted on by

I have been looking at new cars for a year or so. I started thinking about getting a new car a few years ago, when I realized I was getting to the age where owning a sports car might be a now or never proposition. To enjoy a sports car means driving fast in places where you are not supposed to drive fast. That means having the reflexes and risk tolerance to take chances. There really is nothing sadder than seeing an old woman driving a Porsche or some old guy putt-putting down the road in a Corvette.

I have yet to pull the trigger on the car buy. The main reason is I hate the hassle of buying a car. The way cars are sold in America has never worked for me. I do not want to develop a rapport with the car salesman. I do not want him (her) to help me develop a relationship with the car that will tell the world about me. I am not interested in having a self-actualizing experience with a car. I guess I am a weirdo, but I do not think the way I live my life needs to make a statement. I just want to enjoy the time I have.

There is also the fact that I cannot seem to make up my mind. I am not a car guy, in that I do not get into the car culture. A part of owning a sports car is being a part of the social life around owning it. I think a car is, for the most part, a necessary item of life. I want my car to start in the morning, warm up quickly and have a cold air conditioner. I never listen to the radio, but Bluetooth is a nice feature so I can listen to my favorite hate-thinkers on road trips. Otherwise, a car is like the toilet. I only notice it when it does not work.

Still, I feel like I should buy a sports car before I am too geezerly to enjoy it. I have looked at a number of them over the last year. The last sports car I owned was 30 years ago and it was used when I got it. It was fast and fun to drive, but compared to what is on offer today, well, there is no comparison. Modern technology has made affordable sports cars that are vastly better than the most enthusiastic drivers. A modern sports car is not a machine you control. It is a technology platform and the driver is just one part of it.

Something that I did not expect when getting into this is the class issue. I grew up country poor, but I am not country poor now. I have been all over the world and I have been around very worldly people. I retain my working class sensibilities, but I am not going to lie and say I prefer the proletariat to the bourgeoisie. Whether I like it or not, the car I buy will say something about me. Am I a man who prefers an Audi or a guy who thinks a Camaro ZL1 is the right choice? I never had a reason to think about it until now.

Having driven a number of different cars over the last year, I have come to believe that the professional auto journalists are just public relations flacks for the car industry. For instance, I drove a Mustang and a Camaro on the same day. I was in the muscle car mood and they are the two premier options in the category. I read the reviews of them on the popular car sites. I was expecting one model to be refined and the other more brutish, as that is what all of the reviews indicated. Both cars felt pretty much the same.

That is probably the biggest obstacle to me pulling the trigger. There is a weird sameness to all of the new cars. A few weeks after the muscle car testing, I did a day of driving European sports sedans. The sameness of the cars, at least in terms of driving them, is the one memory. I found I had to keep a list of the small differences between, say, an Audi and a BMW, as they were otherwise indistinguishable. There is no quirkiness or originality to set one off from the other. It is like the car makers are all aiming for the same goal.

This sameness is due to the fact the car makers are global companies now. Instead of the British car makers building cars mostly for Brits and the German makers building cars for Germans, car companies are rootless cosmopolitans, making cars for the world. That means they think they need to avoid the quirky, local flavor, as much as possible. It used to be that America cars were utilitarian and made for the open road. European cars were sophisticated and built for tight corners. Now, they all do the same things and look alike.

This sameness extends to how they sell cars. The last time someone tried to re-think the retail sale of cars was when Saturn was rolled out. Their pitch was the “no-haggle” price and a limited set of options. It never really worked as people have been conditioned to haggle over the price of a car. That and they rolled out the no-frills option idea just when technology was allowing everyone to have a bespoke experience buying everything. The “customized experience” is a great sales tool as everyone wants to feel special.

Look at the car dealers today and they all do exactly the same things. Even their website is cookie cutter. Other than some aesthetics, it appears that maybe one or two website companies have built every dealer’s website. That is realistic. There is one main software maker for car dealership software. I no longer recall the name of it, but one software package was used by something like 90% of all new car dealers. It is realistic to think that they or someone else is doing the same thing with the websites.

Despite the uniformity, the other thing that strikes me about the dealership websites is their uselessness as sales tools. I have noticed that the cars on the site, often do not exist on the lot. At the same time, the cars on the lot are often not listed on the site. Dealers are famous for the bait and switch tactic, but this just looks like sloth. Spending time in the dealerships, the vibe I get is that the business remains hostile to technology. They just want to sell cars to the people who walk into the showroom.

As far as the car purchase, I am still weighing my options. I am down to one of the muscle cars or one of the German sports sedans. I have always liked the look of an Audi, but I fear the repair costs. BMW’s are known for sturdiness, but I am told that is not longer true, so maybe a Mercedes. Having driven enough of them, I am sure I would enjoy owning any one of them. But I still cannot get over the thrill of driving that Camaro ZL1. It was like being strapped to a rocket sled. I could get used to that in a hurry.

The Death of Hollywood

Posted on by

I was listening to sports radio off the internet the other days and I kept hearing ads for the fall television lineup from CBS. The sport station is affiliated with CBS Sports, so they do cross marketing of their content. Like most people, commercials of all kinds are just background noise to me most of the time. Maybe radio ads have some sort of subliminal effect, but my suspicion is they are just a waste of money. I barely listen to the content. Like most people, radio is just background noise for me.

Anyway, I was about to turn off the radio and do something else when they were going through the “great new shows” on CBS. Having dropped television, I stopped to listen to the promos out of curiosity. I cannot remember the last time I followed a network TV show like a sitcom or serial drama. Probably Seinfeld 20 years ago. Anyway, the ad was long and ran through a list of shows, describing each one in exited tones. What was striking is that each sounded more horrible than the next. Here is the list.

I cannot help but notice the number of shows dedicated to defending the realm. Some of the shows could be anything, but twelve are clearly about agents of the state defending the state against the bad people. Most of these are shows about the sorts of people our social media overlords are trying to create on-line. That is, they use their super goodness powers to magically identify the crime-thinker. Rather than having a tough guy doing the hard work of policing the streets, its a dork using brain waves to zap the bad thinkers.

Looking at the other networks, it is a slightly different trend. ABC shows are mostly about unconventional families, non-whites and women. Fox is full of blacks and race mixers, but with a low-brow comedy theme. NBC is heavy on the fire department shows for some reason. Maybe they struck a deal with CBS. Again, these are shows about defending the realm against threats. If you were observing America from another planet, just using television, you would think America is riddle with crime and fire bugs,

As a cord cutter, I have no occasion to see any of these shows, so I could be all wrong about the quality and content. I just know that the only network show I hear mentioned in my daily life is Big Bang Theory. I do hear plenty of people talk about shows they follow on cable or service providers like Amazon and Netflix. Maybe the people I interact with on a daily basis are not the typical network TV viewers, but my guess is the audiences for network shows have shrunk quite a bit over the last decade.

My other hunch, and I may be off base on this, but I suspect these shows are written by women or at least have lots of female writers. Shows like The Good Fight and Madame Secretary are obviously aimed at cat ladies. The latter was clearly an infomercial for Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign. It is a safe bet they had shows written about how the main character wins the White House, so they could retool the show to be about the wonderfulness of having the first female President. Thank you, Donald Trump.

On the other hand, the apparent crappiness of television shows could simply be a part of the general crappiness of the mass media culture. The movie business is suffering from a season of awfully expensive flops. So much so the whole business model is being called into question. Bad movies are getting yanked from theaters and the theaters are offering incentives to people to watch the bad movies. Maybe it is just a blip, but the big studios are treating this like a sea change in the business. Something big is happening.

Maybe it already happened. The last time “everyone watched” a network show was probably the 90’s with Seinfeld or maybe the Simpsons. When was the last time you heard someone use a pop culture referenced to a sitcom or network drama? What is happening to the movie business, may have happened to network TV and no one noticed because of the cable shows and cord cutting phenomenon. Put another way, the root cause of all of these phenomena may be a change in who runs the media business.

It could also be the radical feminization and politicization of the business, rather than the product. The sexual harassment hysteria gripping both Hollywood and the news entertainment rackets suggest the cat ladies are staging a final takeover. Someone named Mark Halperin is the latest male to be hurled into the void by the ladies. The general awfulness of our mass media could simply be the result of diving off the talent and replacing it with social justice warriors and their crazed enablers.

I watched the HBO series Rome recently. It was on about ten years ago and covered the period from the rise of Julius Caesar to the triumph of Octavian over Antony. It was a big budget affair with lots of well done costumes. The story, on the other hand, was mostly about the catty women and their intrigues. That and overly long sex scenes that were unrealistic and stupid. Feminists love this stuff, which is why every tackle-faced cat lady in America camped out to see the film adaptation of 50 Shades of Gray.

I have argued on and off for a while now that we are at the end of a great cultural cycle. The old culture that was born and flourished in the 20 century is dead. We still have the structures and institutions from that era, but they are husks of themselves. There is no cultural energy to animate them and give them vibrancy. The collapse of Hollywood may be a sign of it. Movies and TV are artifacts of the last century. Like zombies, these institutions shuffle along, searching for brains, but they are finally collapsing into dust.

LA Confidential

Posted on by

A popular topic of conversation on the Dissident Right is the imagined future the Cloud People have planned for us. The word “Brazilification” gets thrown around a lot. Going by mass media, the future will be populated by hairless, caramel colored mulattoes and Asians. That’s unlikely, but the majority-minority future is inevitable. That means America will be a very different place in another generation. Just look how fast Los Angeles went from being surf city to a sprawling version of Tijuana.

Digging around in Baltimore City arrest data last week, I got curious about what other cities had exposed their arrests data to public download. There’s not a lot of consistency, as this appears to be a new project. My guess is some company has figured out how to game the Federal grant system and they are helping cities upgrade their IT systems with Federal dollars. Anyway, I found a data set from the Los Angeles police department that is pretty big. It is their arrest data going back to 2010.

Los Angeles is a city of 3,884,307 people. Since the start of 2010, the LAPD has made 1,146,393 arrests, which is roughly 450 arrests per day. That’s an interesting figure, given that LA has a relatively low homicide rate of 6.7. Baltimore has a murder rate nine times higher, but an arrest rate just 10% higher than Los Angeles, when adjusting for differences in population. Maybe it is just the nice weather that makes people less inclined to homicide one another. Or, it could be the population mix. Here are the demographics of LA.

Los Angeles not only has a relatively small black population, it has a much larger Asian population than you see in most cities. In fact, Los Angeles is an interesting mix, because it is one of the few majority-minority cities. It’s also a large city so the sample size is very big. A boutique college town with lots of diversity is not going to tell us much about our multicultural future, despite what the Cloud People may think. Here’s the break down of arrest per population group.

The law abiding Asians make up for a lot of black crime when you look at the data. The cool thing about the Los Angeles arrest data is they go further than most cities in identifying the ethnicity of the offender. That’s probably something we will see everywhere as America gets less white. The old way of counting white and non-white only made sense when America was mostly white. In the Cloud People paradise, every group gets a classification in the system. Here’s a break down of Asians into their known groups.

Of course, the fun begins when we start to look at homicide numbers. Here’s the break out of murder related offenses by race

What’s interesting is that Hispanics are not over represented in overall arrest data, compared to their share of the population, but they are over performing in the violent crime area. That’s probably due to the drug trade, but that is a guess. The arrest breakout also helps when trying to parse Hispanic whites from non-Hispanic whites in national crime figures. Of course, the old familiar pattern of black violent crime is present in the LA numbers. Blacks are 10% of the population and 36% of murder related arrests.

Here’s the break out by age.

Here’s the arrest by day. It seems that warmer areas have a flatter curve on this for some reason. Maybe cold weather alters police behavior in some way or maybe criminals prefer mild weather. At some point, once I have a enough data from different regions, I’ll do a degree day calculation on arrests to see if there is a correlation. That would maybe say something about police habits.. Doing the same day for day of the crime would maybe say something about the behavior of criminals. Or maybe not.

One interesting thing in the LA data is the number of old people in the arrest data. There are 48 arrest records for nonagenarians. Two were homicides, which is incredible. Even more amazing is 15 arrests were for drunkenness. Maybe this is not so odd, as alcohol related offenses are the third most common arrest code in the system. Drugs are number two with Miscellaneous being the top reason to arrest someone. This is a pattern I saw in the Baltimore data. The arrests codes are not well maintained or enforced.

Here is a break down of arrest codes.

What becomes clear when looking at the Los Angeles crime data is that de facto segregation is a fact of life in a majority minority city. When you break it out by race and area, you don’t have to know a thing about LA to see the pattern. The other thing is Hispanics bring elevated levels of crime, but not the rates you see with black. It’s one reason the Cloud People like Hispanic migration. They get all the benefit of a servant population, without the headaches that come with Africans.

The other interesting thing about Los Angeles is that it is majority-minority, but whites control the political system. Look at the city council. It’s mighty white for a place with just a 30% white population. The truth is, Hispanics are not a group with a real identity. That’s just a made up thing by Progs. Mexicans from the north have little in common with Guatemalans or even Mexicans from the south. This makes forming a unified coalition that can punch commensurate with its weight nearly impossible.

That’s another reason the Cloud People have no fear of migration. So far, it has not cut into their authority. If anything, it makes it easier for them to deal with blacks and troublesome whites. Progs are diluting black influence in their coalition with Hispanics and they are replacing the white working class with them. The Hispanic laboring class makes fewer demands and is far less organized. They may not be reliable voters, but they are cheap voters, relative to working class whites. That’s the way it works for now.

Suicidal Prog Boomers

Posted on by

Whenever there is a man-made mass casualty event, to use the term of art, there are a finite number of narratives. There is political terrorism, lone crazy guy, disaffected youth, political crazies, religious crazies and finally, the conspiracy. The 9/11 attacks were well planned political terrorism, while the Orlando gay club shootings were just a religious crazy. Columbine and the black church shooting were the work of disaffected youth. The Connecticut school shooting was an example of a nut getting loose with a gun.

One interesting thing about the recent political crazies is the perpetrators have been acting in defense of the establishment. The BLM murders were blacks motivated by President Obama to kill whites and cops. The guy who shot Congressman Scalise was a Bernie Bro. The knife wielding crazy out west was a Bernie Bro too. Even the hoaxes are done by people who are trying to defend the status quo against dissent. The last anti-government act by political crazies was the Federal building in Oklahoma.

The other interesting thing is that the stuff getting called terrorism is almost always done by crackpots and lunatics, using religion or politics as an excuse. The well organized terror attack by competent political actors is rare and increasingly rare. The West suffered more from this sort of terrorism in the 60’s and 70’s than today. The so-called “lone wolf” stuff the authorities worry about is always a lunatic getting into Islam or Progressive politics, then deciding to start killing people for the cause.

Another thing worth noting is that after Columbine, we were told by experts that this was the coming trend. Disaffected white youth would be going nuts and shooting up public places. That never happened. Shootings at schools tend to be adults and those adults tend to be known lunatics. The Columbine style event never became a trend. The closest we got was Dylan Roof. It is an example of how the people running the media have a ready supply of ways to blame white men for everything.

The thing about all of our recent massacres is the narrative was quickly revealed, even with the media trying hard to lie about it. A Muslim nutter goes crazy and the media will write endlessly about how the motive is unknown, but the truth gets out pretty quick. The same is true of the random lunatic. In all of these cases, we quickly learn that the perp was under medical care and had a long history of serious mental illness. The political crazies like the BLM guys make their reasons known on Facebook and Twitter.

That is what makes the Vegas shooting interesting. This is an outlier case in many ways, but the fact that no one seems to know why he did it is the biggest clue. This is a guy with no social media presence. In this age, which is exceedingly rare for anyone his age. For political or religious nuts, it is an impossibility. That is the thing about these events. They are almost always the denouement to a cycle of madness. The shooter becomes increasingly deranged and then finally moves to do something big.

Similarly, political terrorism is salient only when the reason is made public. The IRA took credit for every single bombing, even some they may not have committed, in order to get their message attached to the news of the bombing. It is why ISIS, and before them Al-Qaeda, took credit for every death on earth. One of the truths about most of the stuff reported as Islamic terrorism, is that it is just random lunatics who know Arabic. They find a reason to go crazy and attack the infidel on-line and then act on it.

What we have here is a guy who was financially successful, old and boring. The weirdest thing about him, beside the fact he is a mass murderer, is that his brother appears to be nutty as a fruitcake. Otherwise, the guy is a semi-retired boomer, spending his days playing video poker at a local watering hole and tending to his real estate investments. If not for his corpse at the scene, this guy would be on no one’s list of suspects. Maybe there is much more to the story, but for now, this guy is the extremist of extreme outliers.

The one thing we know so far is the guy was a careful planner. He apparently had his wits together enough to spend months planning his work and working his plan. He studied up on firearms, learned about shooting from an elevated position at a distance. The police found notes he made calculating drop and distance so he could increase is killing rate while shooting into the crowd. This is a guy who spent a long time thinking about this and planning for the right event on which to unleash his attack.

The other thing we do know is he decided to kill white people. Even taking what the media reports at face value, this guy spent all of his planning time in order to kill white people. If he had shot up a hip-hop show, one that did not shoot itself up, everyone would have made the connection right away. There are few places as white and middle American as an outdoor country show. White people go to these things to celebrate being a honky with fellow honkies. They are one of the few black-free zones in America.

The conspiracy theorists will run wild with this, but the real story behind this thing may simply be that it is another disaffected Prog Boomer. James Thomas Hodgkinson, the guy who shot Congressman Scalise, was a 66-year old Bernie Bro. Stephen Paddock was a 64-year old, who ticks many of the same boxes. His brother looks like the sort of guy who spends his days listening to NPR and ranting about the Republicans. Given the way the media tried to hide the motive of Hodgkinson, it is reasonable to think this is similar.

The news was full of cranks and quacks after Columbine, telling us that disaffected young white males were going violently crazy. That never happened because young people are very rarely so cynical about their future that they become suicidal. Old people, on the other hand, have lots of reason to fear the future. They not only face the grim reality of the actuarial tables, but the grim reality of present failures. For old Bernie Bros, these are the worst of times. Maybe the future of mass shootings is the suicidal Prog Boomers.