Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Cars

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This post on Sailer’s site the other day struck a chord with me. I’m beginning the process of buying a car so I have been thinking a lot about cars of late. I truly hate the car buying experience for a number of reasons. The biggest one is that it feels like a waste of time. The dealership model is a carryover from a bygone era when a man would spend a lot of time on purchases. Most of us buy on-line now so walking car lots looking for the right car just feels like a time suck to me.

That last bit reveals a bit of reality with regards to how societies work. The car selling business has been immune to change and it has a lot to do with the political power of car dealers. Tesla found that out when they wanted to sell cars in New Jersey. The state had a law requiring car makers to have a dealership in the state in order to sell cars. Tesla finally got the state to yield, but they had to bribe half of Trenton to do it. Car dealers are a powerful lobby in every state and they use their influence to make life tough on anyone with new ideas.

That Sailer post reminded me of something I have noticed among my friends and acquaintances, as I have got into car shopping. It is a very emotional subject. For instance, I’ve asked people for their recommendations and to a man they have refused. I always get something like “You need to test drive them and pick the one you like.” The alternative to this is to just change the subject entirely. It’s as if there is a taboo against giving anyone advice on cars.

I think the reason for the reluctance is two-fold. One is people still view their car as an extension of themselves. If they recommend a car and you reject it, it is as if you told them they have bad taste. On the other side of it, thinking it is an emotional experience, people don’t want to talk you into something you may come to hate. Alternatively, the people I know may not give a damn about my new interest in cars or they simply don’t like me very much. You can never be sure about these things.

The other thing I see, something that turns up in the comments of car posts like the Sailer one, is the car scold. Whenever someone starts showing enthusiasm for buying or owning a car, car scold comes along to tell them he thinks owning a car is a great burden that he suffers through for the good of mankind. This guy has a lot in common with TV scold and music scold. It’s as if enjoying life is such a great sin that the righteous must always be letting everyone know they are in constant pain.

There are, needless to say, a lot of these vinegar drinkers on the right. It is an affectation and a silly one in my opinion. You have but a short time on this earth. Making the most of it, including the fun bits, strikes me as the heart of conservatism. It is the ultimate acknowledgement of reality. Every man has his tastes, but if owning a snappy car brings you pleasure, best of luck with it. I may not share your passion, but I do share your desire to make the most of our time on earth. What’s wrong with that?

The root of this, I suspect, is the dominance of the Left in American culture. The neo-Puritan hags have been screeching at us about how form must always follow function for so long we have lost our sense of style. You see that in cars where the goal of designers is to make them more aerodynamic and pack them with useful functions. The result is a fleet of well-built cars that look like they came from East German film noir during the Cold War. Our cars are ugly because inside, we have become an ugly people.

If you doubt this, look at pics of parking lots from 40-50 years ago. They were a carnival of colors, shapes and sizes. A person’s taste in cars said something about him, a form of advertisement. A people embracing life and its potential were out buying all sorts of cars in all sorts of colors. We are now a people marching to the inevitable end of our miserable existences so we buy cars that are suited for the task. The top three car colors in America are black, grey and white, with dark gray the top interior choice.

Now, one aspect of this self-loathing has been a focus on the engineering of cars and that has resulted in some fantastic options. The cars of my youth were better looking, but they were in no way better built or better engineered. I test drove a Camaro SS the other day and it was like flying a jet. It was fast as hell and so packed with technology it is not accurate to call it a car. It is a transportation platform. Last year I rented a Cadillac on a trip and I needed ten minutes to figure out how to operate it. It is an amazing age.

Even so, we have become a cautious and frightened people, like herd animals waiting to be processed. The sports car buyer in 1965 was looking for risk. He wanted to rocket down the road in something that was probably not entirely safe, but that was part of the thrill. Today, sports cars are packed with safety features intended to let the buyer know he can have the kind of fun that is permitted today. It is part of the overall feminization of the West. Engineers today care about you like a mother.

I saw the other day that a company now sells an add-on for cars that allows parents to spy on their kids and even take control of the car, from their smart phone. The ad is not all that clear on the particulars, but it appears to be a GPS system that also provides some ability to disable the car, sound the horn and flash the lights. That way, if your son is out enjoying himself, you can put an end to it from your couch. Nothing says freedom like having mom watch you as you make out with your girl in the backseat.

The ultimate expression of this is the self-driving car. The quest to take all the fun out of life, and all the risk, leads inevitably to the nanny-state providing a ride service so that you not only get to your destination safely, you get to the correct destination. People naturally think the surveillance state will be Orwellian. No, it will be run by Google and Apple, sold as a market solution to public safety. After all, when it comes to your safety, we can’t let things like freedom, pleasure and privacy get in the way. You’re too important to us!

In the end, that’s why I will be buying some sort of hot rod in the coming weeks. I look around and see that the fun cars are only for the Cloud People, while the rest of us will be stuck with the dreary conveyance units. There are not many mid-priced sports cars on the market. Toyota does not even have a fun car on offer. Neither does Honda. I figure I better get a sports car before I’m too old and the before the state decides, for my own good of course, that they are no longer safe for Dirt People.

 

 

2017 Predictions

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It’s here! It’s finally here! That’s right, here is my annual prediction post. Last year’s post can be found here. Reading it over, I’m surprised to see I got a lot of them right or at least close enough to pretend I was right.  Looking back on it, I was ahead of the curve on what was going on with Trump in the election. I also got the Fed strategy right, but the timing a bit off. I was hilariously right about the North Koreans and the Muslim diaspora into Europe. In both cases, those outcomes were so obvious there should be a penalty for not getting them right.

On the down side, the Red Sox did not win the World Series and the Patriots did not win the Super Bowl. Even worse, the Yankees did not go 0-and-162. Looking back, the one area where my predictions are never right is in the area of sports. That’s not a surprise as I actually care about sports. The rest of the stuff is just what I do between watching my teams play sportsball. But, The Olde Towne Team had a good year, a great Hot Stove Season and the great Tom Brady is leading America’s Team to another title this year!

So, what are the goat entrails telling me this year?

Part of the return to normalcy in America will be Washington reacquainting itself with economic matters. Trump knows he needs something big to goose the economy and give his presidency a boost. The way forward on that is to start with a big sweeping tax reform package. Given the make-up of the House, expect a package that simplifies business taxes, cuts the corporate rate and offers a big bag of goodies for companies that make stuff and employ people. That means big deductions for capital expenditures like machine tools and heavy equipment.

The signs also point to an effort at peeling back a thick slice of the regulatory state. Trump is a guy who remembers the Reagan years and he knows the impact of deregulation had on the economy. He’s also a guy who has spent his life dealing with government functionaries enforcing bureaucratic regulations. Republicans have been plotting a big rollback for over a decade and now they have their shot. ObamaCare is an obvious target, but look for this to be part of a larger rollback of regulations in an effort to boost the economy…

This is the year we see the floor fall out of the climate change rackets. Most Americans think global warming is nonsense and one of those Americans is Trump. There will be a concerted effort to depoliticize the climate science business by running off some of the fanatics and opening the field back up to sensible skeptics. The main driver will be turning off the money spigot to the fanatics and shifting funds to the honest science.  When the money goes away, the grifters go away…

The problems in the Chinese political economy will become more obvious to western policy makers as the boom times come to an end. There’s not much left the US can outsource to China, even if there was desire to do it. The Chinese know this and they have been feverishly trying to adjust by boosting domestic consumption. The trouble is it will require a vast restructuring of the Chinese society. The ChiComs are not intimated by such a task, but that does not make it less daunting.

China has a lot of smart people, but they have never figured out how to protect themselves from tyrants. That’s the limit on economic growth. When the government can arbitrarily take your property, there is no incentive to invest, unless you have political power. That breeds corruption and it breeds a bandit mentality. That’s the challenge for the ChiComs and what will stymie their efforts to move from a mercantile economy to a market one. This is the year when the problems start to become obvious…

Syria, Turkey, Iraq and maybe even Jordan become less stable over the next year as the West cannot agree on a coherent policy for the region. One reason for the chaos is no player has the resources to impose its will on the rest. The Russians have enough to keep Assad in power, but not enough to wipe out the Saudi and GCC sponsored rebels. The Saudis can keep the kettle boiling, but they cannot do much more without the US. Israel is happy to see her enemies fighting with one another so they will not be pushing for a resolution…

The alt-right will fall prey to infighting and squabbling and slowly burn itself out over the next year. The fighting between Cernovich, Treadstone and Spencer has all the familiar features. On the one side will be the guys who dream of riding their fame as rebels to positions within the establishment. On the other will be those who see legitimization as treason. One side goes one way, the other side goes the opposite and the “movement” splinters and dissolves. This is a common dynamic in radical politics and it will happen with the New Right…

Gene editing will become a very serious topic of conversation among the chattering classes. Ten years ago, no one in science really thought it was going to be cheap and easy to edit the human genome anytime soon. All of a sudden, CRISPR/Cas9 promises to make genetic engineering a reality. Researchers have already done things like edit bone marrow cells in mice to treat sickle-cell anemia. The Chinese have used this technology to edit the genome of human embryos.

We’re still a long way from creating designer humans, but the path is suddenly open to solving a whole host of diseases. The Chinese will rush ahead with human testing, but the West will most likely start on more mundane things like creating disease resistant plants and treatments for insect borne viruses. Tinkering with mosquitoes so they no longer can carry the Zika virus has fewer moral obstacles than tinkering with humans. Even so, the brave new world begins this year…

The coming Trump immigration push will reveal that we no longer have two parties, but one party with two sides, one on each end of the immigration issue. Paul Ryan will lead the open borders wing in opposition to Trump and the nationalist wing. This will be seen as the first steps in the great realignment of the parties as a big chunk of people currently in the GOP camp begin to make their way over to the Democrat side. American politics will begin to resemble Israeli politics, where one issue divides the parties…

That’s it for this year. It has been a banner 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.

Happy New Year to one and all.

Happy Kwanzaa!

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Video has been updated to play in all countries

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajg8QrSsr_A

Here is the late great Tony Snow’s legendary column on Kwanzaa:

BLACKS IN AMERICA have suffered an endless series of insults and degradations, the latest of which goes by the name of Kwanzaa.

Ron Karenga (aka Dr. Maulana Ron Karenga) invented the seven-day feast (Dec. 26-Jan. 1) in 1966, branding it a black alternative to Christmas. The idea was to celebrate the end of what he considered the Christmas-season exploitation of African Americans.

According to the official Kwanzaa Web site — as opposed, say, to the Hallmark Cards Kwanzaa site — the celebration was designed to foster “conditions that would enhance the revolutionary social change for the masses of Black Americans” and provide a “reassessment, reclaiming, recommitment, remembrance, retrieval, resumption, resurrection and rejuvenation of those principles (Way of Life) utilized by Black Americans’ ancestors.”

Karenga postulated seven principles: unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity and faith, each of which gets its day during Kwanzaa week. He and his votaries also crafted a flag of black nationalism and a pledge: “We pledge allegiance to the red, black, and green, our flag, the symbol of our eternal struggle, and to the land we must obtain; one nation of black people, with one G-d of us all, totally united in the struggle, for black love, black freedom, and black self-determination.”

Now, the point: There is no part of Kwanzaa that is not fraudulent. Begin with the name. The celebration comes from the Swahili term “matunda yakwanza,” or “first fruit,” and the festival’s trappings have Swahili names — such as “ujima” for “collective work and responsibility” or “muhindi,” which are ears of corn celebrants set aside for each child in a family.

Unfortunately, Swahili has little relevance for American blacks. Most slaves were ripped from the shores of West Africa. Swahili is an East African tongue.

To put that in perspective, the cultural gap between Senegal and Kenya is as dramatic as the chasm that separates, say, London and Tehran. Imagine singing “G-d Save the Queen” in Farsi, and you grasp the enormity of the gaffe.

Worse, Kwanzaa ceremonies have no discernible African roots. No culture on earth celebrates a harvesting ritual in December, for instance, and the implicit pledges about human dignity don’t necessarily jibe with such still-common practices as female circumcision and polygamy. The inventors of Kwanzaa weren’t promoting a return to roots; they were shilling for Marxism. They even appropriated the term “ujima,” which Julius Nyrere cited when he uprooted tens of thousands of Tanzanians and shipped them forcibly to collective farms, where they proved more adept at cultivating misery than banishing hunger.

Even the rituals using corn don’t fit. Corn isn’t indigenous to Africa. Mexican Indians developed it, and the crop was carried worldwide by white colonialists.

The fact is, there is no Ur-African culture. The continent remains stubbornly tribal. Hutus and Tutsis still slaughter one another for sport.

Go to Kenya, where I taught briefly as a young man, and you’ll see endless hostility between Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya and Masai. Even South African politics these days have more to do with tribal animosities than ideological differences.

Moreover, chaos too often prevails over order. Warlords hold sway in Somalia, Eritrea, Liberia and Zaire. Genocidal maniacs have wiped out millions in Rwanda, Uganda and Ethiopia. The once-shining hopes for Kenya have vanished.

Detroit native Keith Richburg writes in his extraordinary book, “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa,” that “this strange place defies even the staunchest of optimists; it drains you of hope …”

Richburg, who served for three years as the African bureau chief for The Washington Post, offers a challenge for the likes of Karenga: “Talk to me about Africa and my black roots and my kinship with my African brothers and I’ll throw it back in your face, and then I’ll rub your nose in the images of rotting flesh.”

His book concludes: “I have been here, and I have seen — and frankly, I want no part of it. …. By an accident of birth, I am a black man born in America, and everything I am today — my culture and my attitudes, my sensibilities, loves and desires — derives from that one simple and irrefutable fact.”

Nobody ever ennobled a people with a lie or restored stolen dignity through fraud. Kwanzaa is the ultimate chump holiday — Jim Crow with a false and festive wardrobe. It praises practices — “cooperative economics, and collective work and responsibility” — that have succeeded nowhere on earth and would mire American blacks in endless backwardness.

Our treatment of Kwanzaa provides a revealing sign of how far we have yet to travel on the road to reconciliation. The white establishment has thrown in with it, not just to cash in on the business, but to patronize black activists and shut them up.

This year, President Clinton signed his fourth Kwanzaa proclamation. He crooned: “The symbols and ceremony of Kwanzaa, evoking the rich history and heritage of African Americans, remind us that our nation draws much of its strength from our diversity.”

But our strength, as Richburg points out, comes from real principles: tolerance, brotherhood, hard work, personal responsibility, equality before the law. If Americans really cared about racial healing, they would focus on those ideas — and not on a made-up rite that mistakes segregationism for spirituality and fiction for history.

Exporting The Capital

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Sitting in traffic on the Capital Beltway, I started wondering at what point the city just seizes up due to the overload. I was at one of the well known choke points that is just about impossible to avoid, but there are few spots around the beltway that are ever moving at maximum speed. The snarl I was in was at 7:30 PM, which is not all that unusual for DC. The fact is, the major highways around the District are well beyond capacity and there is not much that can be done about it.

It’s not just the beltway or inside it. Northern Virginia has traffic that reminds me of Los Angeles. In fact, the area is a lot like LA now. They say Washington is Hollywood for ugly people and the residential areas now have a similar vibe. It’s that feeling that the people who laid out the roads and neighborhoods were always in crisis mode, putting down streets and houses in an effort to keep pace with the flood of new people. The result is large scale suburban chaos.

Hassling through traffic, I started thinking about the new idea liberals have to reconnect with the little people in flyover country. They want to relocate chunks of the government to the hinterlands.

America’s post-industrial Midwest is far from being the country’s poorest region. To find the direst economic conditions in the United States, one generally has to look toward Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta region, the Rio Grande Valley, and a smattering of heavily Native American counties in the Southwest and Great Plains. What the Midwest’s recent economic struggles bring, however, is not just large-scale political salience but a particular kind of fixability.

The poorest places in the United States have been poor for a very long time and lack the basic infrastructure of prosperity. But that’s not true in the Midwest, where cities were thriving two generations ago and where an enormous amount of infrastructure is in place. Midwestern states have acclaimed public university systems, airports that are large enough to serve as major hubs, and cities whose cultural legacies include major league pro sports teams, acclaimed museums, symphonies, theaters, and other amenities of big-city living.

This article is part of New Money, a new section on economics, technology, and business.
But industrial decline has left these cities overbuilt, with shrunken populations that struggle to support the legacy infrastructure, and the infrastructure’s decline tends to only beget further regional decline.

At the same time, America’s major coastal cities are overcrowded. They suffer from endemic housing scarcity, massive traffic congestion, and a profound small-c political conservatism that prevents them from making the kind of regulatory changes that would allow them to build the new housing and infrastructure they need. Excess population that can’t be absorbed by the coasts tends to bounce to the growth-friendly cities of the Sunbelt that need to build anew what Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland already have in terms of infrastructure and amenities.
A sensible approach would be for the federal government to take the lead in rebalancing America’s allocation of population and resources by taking a good hard look at whether so much federal activity needs to be concentrated in Washington, DC, and its suburbs. Moving agencies out of the DC area to the Midwest would obviously cause some short-term disruptions. But in the long run, relocated agencies’ employees would enjoy cheaper houses, shorter commutes, and a higher standard of living, while Midwestern communities would see their population and tax base stabilized and gain new opportunities for complementary industries to grow.

Now, the idiocy of this lies in the general snottiness of the article. Matthew Yglesias is known for being one of those smug stupid people the managerial class is so good at producing. Even so, it would be a good way for solving what is becoming a critical problem in the Imperial Capital. There’s simply no more room. We’re full. In fact, we’re beyond full. Shipping out some of the agencies to places without a lot of people would fix two problems.

Obviously, it ships the people out of the capital, alleviating some of the congestion. Sending Housing and Urban Development to Detroit would be good for Detroit and good for the capital. Detroit has a need for urban development so putting the urban developers right there in the Motor City would be a marriage made in heaven. Even better, Detroit has lots of slums that were in no small way created by the idiocy of the Department of Housing and urban Development.

Now, a lot of government is already spread all over the country. Social Security has a huge facility outside Baltimore. West Virginia is dotted with Federal buildings thanks to former Klansman and US Senator, Robert Byrd. Alaska also has a lot of government due to the vast amount of natural resources that need managing. Still, some states, like Maine, have almost no big Federal installations. Putting the Department of Interior in Caribou Maine would be great for the state economy.

The major benefit of distributing these departments would not be economic. The real benefit is they would lose their value as nesting places for the army of tax eaters and their private sector analogs. If a middle management job with the government meant a posting in Caribou Maine, current temperature -18° C, I’m thinking many of those jobs would go unfilled. Even better, if that department secretary had to phone it in for cabinet meetings, I’m thinking Congress loses interest in them.

Let’s hope the Progs get their wish and we ship the plague of Washington out to the rest of you!

Forever Young

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Greg Cochran has a short post up soliciting opinions on what will be the next big thing in science and technology. He is not fishing for the next smartphone app or medical cure. I think he means the big new field of study or technological advancement. It is one of those posts that is not intended to be interesting, but to get the readers noodling over the question. Judging from the comments thus far, that is the way his readers have read the post. It seems to be another stab at the topic he started the other day.

It is an interesting question as we do seem to have reached the point of diminishing returns with the microprocessor. E-mail was a huge game changer. The mobile phone was another big leap into the unknown. The web probably comes in third, but it still had an enormous impact on humanity. These inventions have changed the way humans interact with one another and continue to put stress on the organizational systems we have had in place since the Enlightenment. Donald Trump just won an election by mastering Twitter.

We have reached peak chip, so to speak. The low hanging fruit has been picked and we’re well on the way to commodification of technology. That’s not to say there is no more work to be done in tech. It’s just that the boom years are over and the industry is now mature. The next big ideas, the stuff that could alter society, will be coming from somewhere else. The temptation is to think it will be some new technology like genetics or nanotechnology. Those fields have the futuristic vibe futurists like.

Genetics does have the prospect of being highly disruptive. Just take a look at how 23andMe or Ancestry.com sell their products. Implicit in their pitch is that race and ethnicity are in your DNA. That means race is not a social construct. Ancestry disguises this by using multi-racial actors, but the implication is clear. Similarly, the ability to predict things about people at an early age, based on examining their DNA, could be very disruptive. Imagine what happens to insurance when you can test for risk of heart attack.

The thing is, a lot of this information has been available to us through other means. Humans have known for a long time that people are not the same across race or ethnicity and most people still know it, even if they don’t say it. Even so, it has no impact on public policy or on the howling of the multiculturalists. We’ve also known that the apple does not fall far from the tree. If the kid is born to losers, the kid will probably be a loser. How the kid is raised has little to do with it, but we still preach the morality of parenting.

A more promising area where something game changing could come is in the field of aging. Humans live longer and are healthier than ever and it has already had a huge impact on society. All of our pension and insurance schemes are broken mostly because people live too long. Long living has resulted in children maturing more slowly, in terms of social status. A century ago, a man went to work as a teen and had a family by the time he hit 20. Today, men live at home until 30 and start families well into their 30’s.

Imagine what happens if science finds a way to push the expiry date out a few more decades. Imagine if 100 becomes the new 65, in that the 100 year old is as vigorous as the typical 65 year old. Imagine that the golden years of retirement start at 110. This is standard stuff in science fiction, but it may not be too far off in reality. British researchers have figured out how to drastically slow the aging of mice. That opens the door for not only slowing the process, but arresting it. Forever young may not be too far off.

Even if that is beyond the pale, think about the impact of Viagra. Invent a pill to keep the needle pointing north and the world beats a path to your door. Imagine a pill to end gray hair or crow’s feet. Even if people don’t live to 150, just being healthier and more vigorous late into life could have a huge impact on society. Retirement, for example, would make a lot less sense if you had plenty of juice well into your senior years. Of course, retirement would become something radically different too. Our view of aging would radically change.

The reason to think that life extension and aging is the place to see great innovation in the near term is mostly economic. Penis pills made their makers very rich. A gray hair pill or a wrinkle cure would similarly make their makers billions. Just look at the number of men seeking out HGH from black market sources. The market for anything that extends life or extends youthful vitality is the market of all people. Is there anyone who would not buy a pill that makes you look as good as you looked in the flower of youth?

Fat People

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Last month when I was in line waiting to vote, I spotted an extremely fat woman. She was so fat, her ankles rubbed together. Judging by the three gallon bucket of soda pop in her hand, I’m assuming she was not the victim of elephantiasis or some other disease. Everything about her was fat, even her head, which was the size of a bowling ball and covered in pink-dyed fur. How she was able to get around with hundreds of pounds of fat attached to her is a mystery. I would think the mere act of toting around so much weight would result in weight loss.

Last week, I stopped at the ghetto market for a few items and spotted a couple in the snack aisle. The man was something like a large ball with arms and legs. I estimated his diameter was close to 24 inches. That would mean his belt was 75 inches. His wife was of similar size. My first thought was how they were able to, you know, enjoy the marital bed. Is it even possible that they find one another attractive? I suppose it is possible that all of their energies are focused on moving around their girth and finding enough food to maintain their weight so sex is a non-issue.

Anyone familiar with American poverty knows that our poor people are fat, very fat. There are exceptions like drug addicts or those spindly ectomorphs you see loitering on street corners. Black woman, of course, are almost always fat. This is something most everyone knows. The ancients drew images of African women with giant stomachs and buttocks. In all probability, this is a genetic issue with West Africans. Even so, across the ethnic spectrum, American poor people are fat. Even our Mexicans are fat now.

In fact, Mexico is the world’s fattest country. This is mostly likely due to the fact that food is cheaper now than at any time in human history. It’s extremely hard to starve your people these days. Food is just too cheap and plentiful. Even basket case countries like those in sub-Saharan Africa have more than enough food. That’s most likely the cause of the population boom in Africa. The Malthusian limit has been pushed much further out so the population has exploded.

Public health officials tell us that obesity is a crisis in America. Being fat supposedly results in an exploding number of maladies like diabetes and heart disease. This drives up health costs thus collapsing the technocratic schemes cooked up by the managerial class. It’s important to remember that public health officials are usually wrong. For example, they said AIDS would jump from the bathhouse and heroin den into the middle-class suburbs. That never came closer to happening.

Even if obesity is a public health problem, it’s unlikely that there can be a public policy to address it, other than deliberate starvation of the people. Our Germans probably have the same obesity rates as Germans in Europe. The same is true across the ethnic landscape. We’re forbidden to notice that blacks and Mexicans are very fat, compared to everyone else. That means we’re forbidden to note that honky obesity rates are not too far off from Europeans rates. That would be racist and everyone knows race does not exist.

The point of this observation is to note that biology is beyond the reach of public policy. If fatness has some serious detriments to the population, then it will sort itself out over time. If fatness becomes associated with low status people, then there will be cultural pressure to not be fat. Smoking rates have declined not so much due to public policy, but from the fact famous people stopped smoking. It stopped being cool with famous people. Fatness will follow a similar path. We are seeing that with black actresses and singers.

Still, humans have never had to deal with the problems that come from too much food and too much free time to consume it. We really have no idea what will come from it and how it will hurt or help society. There could very well be a huge upside to having lots of fat people. Perhaps when the zombie apocalypse comes, the zombies will eat the fat people and be satisfied, leaving the rest of us to regroup. That’s unlikely, but nature tends not to reward that which is deleterious to a species. Nature is self-correcting.

There’s no reason to think that public policy in a liberal democracy would be capable of addressing problems that stem from excess. Liberal democracy evolved in an age of great inequality and scarcity. Having a super rich aristocracy could not work while the peasants were starving. We now have a mega-rich aristocracy while the peasants are munching snacks and playing video games. They are doing these things at public expense. The bottom half of America is receiving direct and indirect public assistance these days.

Would the super-rich aristocracy of today have the will to impose rules on the bottom half, with regards to their welfare? Mayor Bloomberg came the closest with his soda and salt bans, but they went no where. Even his peers snickered at his prudery. Would these same people be willing to back exercise requirements and fitness exams in exchange for welfare benefits? Probably not. A feature of the modern aristocracy and their attendants in the managerial elite is a fear of confrontation. Hence the passive-aggressive culture of the rich.

We’ll just have to rely on nature to solve the obesity problem.

Crapped Out

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Every year around the Solstice, I buy myself something I would never buy for myself during the year. It’s not a present to myself, but more of a way to remind myself that life is for living. A little frivolity is a good thing. I live to work, not work to live, but there is a lot of life that falls outside the joys of labor. if you enjoy working, you can easily forget that there are many other things outside work that you enjoy equally. I a disciplined moderation in life helps to maintain the proper perspective.

Usually my annual indulgence is a gadget or technology item that I really have no use for, much less a need for. I have a closet full of old electronic toys. Some years I’ll upgrade something I do need to a version I really don’t need. Last year I upgraded my home PC for one with high end sound and video. I’m typing this on a high end laptop I bought two years ago at Solstice. The old laptop was fine, but the new one has surround sound and HD video! I’ve watched exactly one movie on it and never played a single game.

This year, I’m at a loss. I’ve searched around for new gadgets and nothing jumps out to me. The hot new item is the Amazon Alexa. A few people have suggested that to me. That strike me as a stupid and pointless bit of nonsense that would just aggravate me. The hip young people in the commercials strike me as the sort of people I will send to the labor camps once I’m ruler of these lands. Having the fine people at Amazon spy on me like a doting mother is not something I will ever accept.

I thought about getting a new tablet, but there’s nothing new in tablets that excites me. I hate reading books from them anyway. I tried various versions of e-readers and I just don’t like it. My 7-inch model I got a couple of years ago works fine and does what I need it to do, which is let me goof off on twitter from the couch. I also wonder if staring at tablets close to your face is good for your eyes. I notice that I suffer from eye strain if I use the thing for more than an hour. Maybe it is just me, but that’s my suspicion.

Looking around at the other tech on the market for Solstice, I get the same vibe. It’s mostly polished up versions of stuff that has been around for a while. The new XBox I see advertised looks like the old one, but in a different color. The one item that looks cool is the heads up display for exercise that you can attach to your glasses. But, I looking like a douche bag is not a good idea. if you are an elite athlete, you can do it, but otherwise guys running around with gadgets on their heads are viewed as idiots.

Part of what plagues me these days is getting old. Once a man hits his middle years, the frivolous things lose their attraction. TV people know this, which is why they target kids and women. Men will watch sports and some shows with the wife, but otherwise, older men are not into TV. The same is true of movies. Even when it comes to sports, men lose some of their enthusiasm as they get older. Again, it is why they market jersey and caps to the young guys. they have the passion for it.

That said, I’m not an acquisitive guy and I don’t place much value in material possessions. I’m not quite Amish, but I am a plain person. Possessions come with obligations and often those obligations vastly outweigh the utility of the item. I’d like a boat, for example, but then I think about the work it takes to keep a boat. It is not just the cost of it. You have to be constantly fiddling with the things. An acquaintance in Florida has a boat. A two hour ride means an hour prep time and two hours after cleaning it up and hoisting into the dock. No thanks.

The point being that owning stuff usually means taking on obligations. In modern times, that means most people have credit card obligations they will never pay down. The result is they have fewer choices in other areas of their life. This is especially true of the lower classes who lack impulse control. They see, they want, they buy it on credit without much thought about the long term ramifications. That XBox in the living room can be quite demanding when it is sitting on the Visa bill at 23.9% interest. Heroin is less demanding than the material culture of our age.

Even so, I’m hunting around for some toy to buy this year and I’m coming up empty. I wonder if we have maybe hit some sort of dead end on the gadget front. The low hanging fruit of technology was picked long ago. The mobile phone and e-mail changed our world. Angry birds on your smart phone has not changed much of anything. Most people have a phone, a tablet and a PC. Everyone has a flat screen TV and some sort of console for games or movies. On the electronic gizmo front, we seem to have hit a dead end.

That may not be a terrible thing. Looking for some sort of gadget to buy, it occurred to me that I may find more pleasure in something else. I have been talking about cord cutting for a year. I should get on with it. I’ll need to upgrade my internet from DSL to cable if I want to do on-line video. That means wiring the house, which would be a nice weekend job. Alternatively, the guy down the road is selling an old Jeep that is a project car. Maybe that’s a better use of my Solstice money. Perhaps a return trip to Europe this winter, to gloat about Trump to the Euros.

There very well may be an end point to the materialist culture that blossomed in America last century. I could just be an old man with narrow interests, but it does feel like we have all the crap we need. If so, then perhaps a return to other pleasures will be the next big thing. It would be ironic that the politics of overthrowing the old hippies, currently in charge, ushers in one aspect of hippy culture – anti-materialism. Maybe the alt-right will adopt the old hippy mantra, “turn on, tune in, drop out” popularized fifty years ago by Timothy Leary. Maybe Amazon has a book on that…

A Post About Pussies

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I’ve had all sorts of animals as pets over the years. As a boy, I had dogs, lizards, turtles, fish and birds. The birds were rescues that my dog would find. Every spring he would find at least one baby bird that fell from its nest and stand over it, howling until I helped save the bird. We raised quite a few birds that way. One of them became my father’s Woodstock. The stupid thing would follow him around outside and sit on his shoulder. Most times, the bird would get healthy enough and we would let it loose.

The main pet was always a dog and I’m still partial to dogs. The trouble is that I travel enough that owning a dog is difficult. About 25 years ago a woman I was seeing suggested I try a cat. I did not think I’d like a cat, but the first one turned out to be a good pet. It was some sort of Siamese hybrid thing that had very long legs and could jump about eight feet in the air. I was surprised to learn that you can train a cat and it is not all that difficult. Me and the cat leaned a bunch of tricks to keep us both entertained.

As a result, I have had cats for going on three decades. The upside is I don’t have to worry about walking them so I can keep odd hours and go away for a few days without a problem. Shoveling litter is not much fun, but picking up dog crap is no better, so that’s a wash. Otherwise, cats are like any pet, in that they are what you make of them. I enjoy having pets so I invest in the cat and I get a decent return on the investment. That’s why you can tell a lot about someone by watching their pets.

Unlike dogs, cats have a greater range of behavioral traits. By that I mean a dachshund is going to be a dachshund. There are some quirks, but otherwise all dachshunds are the same. Cats, on the other hand, can have wildly different temperaments within the same littler, much less the same species. The most likely reason is humans have had less of a hand in developing the traits we associate with a cat’s personality. We literally created the dogs we have, but cats are more of an accident.

One thing I’ve noticed about the cats I’ve owned is they seem to create a mental model of their environment. Whenever I’ve moved, the first thing the cat would do is walk the perimeter of the new place. Not just the outer walls, but all of the furniture and closets too. Just for the hell of it, I have moved furniture around while the cat was locked in another room. Sure enough, he re-maps the room to account for the new arrangements. I suspect it is why they investigate every new box or parcel that comes home. It’s being inventoried.

Having a mental map of the territory would be a useful thing for a predator. Cat eyesight is not very good in the daylight. Their night vision is well known, but it is gray-scale and mostly for detecting movement. Having a mental model of the hunting grounds would be a low cost way for the animal to have an edge on its prey. It would also come in handy for detecting threats. Any change in the environment would be noticed and that would signal danger.

There’s research that the human mind creates a representation of the world which makes it easier for us to navigate. It’s sort of our own private matrix. This may be why we always feel at home back in the area where we were raised. That mental model of the world was imprinted on our minds and is never fully erased. The model could also allow us to delude ourselves in order to make life more bearable, by filtering out things that are particularly vexing.

The other thing I have noticed about cats over the years is they seem to have a linear memory. Hiding the mouse always results in the cat going from one place to the next in the order it found the mouse in previous games. The words “where’s your mouse” starts a process in which the cat starts at the first hiding spot, then the second and third and so on. That could be some sort of subtle training on my part, but maybe there’s something else. I’ve noticed this with multiple cats.

Humans do this to some extent when we lose something. We rewind our timeline and retrace our steps. It reduces the number of possible places to look to a manageable number. Perhaps a small predator like a cat does something similar to locate possible prey and water. There’s also the possibility that the cat is just trained to think this is a game. It does appear they are built to appeal to us in many subtle ways, so the cat could just be humoring me when I ask about the mouse.

Keeping any sort of animal in the house is a strange thing, when you stop and consider it. This is commonly explained on utilitarian grounds. Dogs make good hunting companions and good sentries. Cats keep rodent populations down. But, there’s something else. We make strong emotional bonds with our pets and anthropomorphize their behavior. Pets have no utilitarian value to modern people, but we have more of them than ever, spending billions on them.

It is another reminder that economic man is a nonsense idea made up by dull-witted people to make life seem simpler. We are motivated by more complex forces. Spiritual belief is one of modern man’s oldest traits, perhaps the oldest behavior trait. It most likely co-evolved with language. A desire to be on the right side of whatever it is behind the world has been at the heart of all of man’s endeavors. Our pets are most likely some part of that desire.

Now you have it, a post about cats and yes, it is an extended metaphor for something else. In America, Thanksgiving is upon us and I will be taking a much needed break from life’s travails. For those in the states, Happy Thanksgiving and thank you for reading. For my international readers, enjoy another day at the salt mine and thank you for reading.

Blog Update

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It was my plan to do one of these on a monthly basis like other sites, but time gets away from me and I forget to do it. I think the last one of these was in the summer, but I’m too lazy to look. It was well before the election so I’m guessing summer. Most sites seem to do these monthly to go along with fund raising, which makes sense. If you are asking for money, providing readers with some idea of what they are supporting is a good idea. Anyway, with the election over it feels like a good time to do it.

There are many new readers and new commenters since the last time. According to the traffic stat gizmo, my estimated readership is just shy of 80,000. That’s close to double in the last few months. It has been a steady rise too so it is not as much of an election effect as I would have guessed. Then again, I did not do a ton of stuff on the election. This also corresponds with the growth of my twitter and Gab accounts. I’m an infrequent tweeter, but I do link my posts there so it is mostly organic growth.

Speaking of twitter and Gab, JohnRivers, who comments here from time to time, promotes wackos like myself regularly on twitter and he has a big following. Well, had a big following. They whacked him this week as Twitter purges all the icky mean speakers in order to make twitter a safe space for snowflakes. Gab is getting better and better and I highly recommend joining and following JohnRivers. Following RickyVaughn is a must, mostly because the kid is hilarious when he starts in on a gentle little snowflake.

Interestingly, the number one way in which people are coming here is Google. I guess people see links on twitter or Facebook, google the blog and then land here. These are direct hits on posts too. Facebook is the second most popular referrer, which means someone is linking my stuff there. I have a Facebook page, but only so the little buttons at the top of posts work. I never go on Facebook and I have not visited my page since I setup the account. In fact, I may not have logged on since I set it up.

Interestingly the most popular post remains this one, which says a lot about the number of alt-right and alt-right sympathizers. The next most popular post is this one and that says a lot about what was on the minds of sympathizers in the run up to the election. I’ve always suspected that some portion of the electorate looked at Clinton and wondered if the woman was not so much corrupt, but just not very bright. The crooks and grifters surrounding her saw an easy mark with access to power. I don’t know and I no longer care. The witch is dead.

The volume of comments has gone up and and we have new faces since the summer. More than a few times I have seen posts on twitter about the quality of the comments here. In fact, one of my twitter followers says the comments are often better than the blog posts. I do not take that as an insult. Another follower told me that my comment section is a bit intimidating. I’m not entirely sure I follow, but I suppose some people refrain from commenting when they see a regular that is on top of his or her game.

I’ve received inquiries about donations and I have no plans to do anything on that front. I like money as much as the next guy, but there’s a level of effort involved with setting up donations and I don’t have the time. If I was looking to make this a full-time paying job then it would be different, but that’s not the plan. That’s mostly because I don’t see how anyone makes a living as a blogger. Honestly, I always wonder how people like Steve Sailer and Stacy McCain make it work. There’s a bit of economics there that eludes me.

My hate mail has gone up as well. Before the election, I was getting a regular stream of claims that my sort was finished. The right side of history was coming for me. After the election, not so much. In the last few days the hate mail has mentioned Steve Sailer and Steve Bannon. I read the former and never heard of the latter until this week. I see there’s some sort of conspiracy theory involving the two being peddled by that crackpot Glenn Beck. I must be stepping up in the world. I welcome my inclusion in the conspiracy.

That’s it for this update. I thank everyone for reading, linking and mentioning the site.

Hillary Clinton and the Cinderella Syndrome

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if you examine the record of Hillary Clinton in any detail, what jumps out is the staggering incompetence of this woman. There’s nothing on her resume that stands out as a success, other than her ability to stay married to that skeevy pervert of a husband, despite the serial humiliations resulting from his infidelities. In every other endeavor, small or large, she has been an astonishingly failure. Even in simple capers, she has found a way to bungle things that should have been easy.

The one that always stands out in my mind is her ham-handed influence peddling caper in Arkansas with James Blair, the Tyson Food guy. Even small town mayors understand that you have to have a cutout in these things. Otherwise, it looks too obvious. You find “an investment guy” to act as a firewall, so he gets to pretend to be a shrewd investor and you get to pretend to not know what he was up to all along if things go bad. Hillary could not be bothered with that.

This is Public Corruption 101. They teach this at orientation for your town council seat. The FBI never bags people for this sort of stuff anymore because even the dumbest politician knows how to run this scam. These days, the Feds have to dig harder to unearth this kind of self-dealing because of the common use of cutouts and bag-men to insulate the players from the game. How is it possible that Clinton did not understand or was not told how this works?

Back when this was coming to light, there were several theories offered to explain Hillary Clinton’s serial brushes with the law. Her defenders, of course, claimed she was a Job and suffering for her righteousness. Honest people pointed to her arrogance and sense of entitlement, while others argued that she simply likes crime so much, the law of averages says she will bungle some of it and get caught. The last option is probably the most likely of the three, but not persuasive.

The thing with the Clinton Crime Family is there has always been two sides to it. The Bill side is all about sex. The guy has a serious problem. His dozens of trips to the Dominican with Jeffrey Epstein for the purpose of gaining access to underage females is about as reckless as one can get. That’s the one thing about Bubba that we can probably say with certainty. He is living the Tony Montana lifestyle to the fullest. His entire life has been organized around getting laid.

Hillary is different. All of her capers somehow involve her putting cash in her purse. Back in Arkansas, she was the one involved in the phony land deals, bank jobs and influence peddling. Today, she is the one running the money laundering operations, that necessitated the secret e-mail system and all of the shady characters like Syd Blumenthal. It’s always a money scandal with her. Even her big health care initiative back in the 90’s was designed so she could shake down interested parties.

There’s another aspect to Hillary’s capers though. Her weird relationship with Bill has always been assumed to be loveless and transactional. They are imagined as two sociopaths with converging interests. That’s plausible to a point, but she would be vastly better off without him now and he would have always been better off without her. If this were merely a business relationship, their partnership would have foundered a long time ago.

What normies don’t get about the ruling class is they are often bloodless in their dealings with other humans, but they are not entirely bloodless. Bill and Hill have a political marriage for the purpose of advancing their common and individual interests. Even so, there is some emotional bond between them. Otherwise, they would have traded up a long time ago. These two are most likely sociopaths so calling their thing love is a category error, but it is emotional.

That’s what I suspect is behind Hillary’s criminal career. She is the business manager of the partnership, but she wants to please Bill. The result is she is always reaching beyond what is reasonable for the next payday. Watch that video detailing her capers over the years and the thing that ties them all together is the lack of restraint. All she had to do was be a little less greedy and she would have walked away unscathed by these things.

The other aspect is when she gets jammed up in one of the scams, it is always Bill who has to come to her rescue. What Hillary lacks in charm and guile, Bill makes up for in spades. He’s not terribly smart, but he is extremely clever. He can wiggle out of anything and make his pursuers look bad for trying to do their jobs. The one sure way Hillary has to gain Bill’s attention is to have the law chasing after her over some shady deal she has pulled on behalf of the crime family.

It’s the Cinderella Syndrome modified for a criminal enterprise. Hillary Clinton is not helpless and dependent in the way in which bitter feminists imagine. She simply has some of that normal female quality of wanting the attention of her mate. Since her mate is her business partner, as well as a serial sexual predator, disinterested in her physically, screwing up is how she gets his attention.Look back at all of her scandals and what ties them together is they tie her and Bill together on defense.

You can be sure that more than a few times he was in the middle of assaulting a woman and the phone rang or an aid knocked on the door, telling him that he had to attend to Hillary over some scandal or some deal gone sour. If the hundreds of secret service agents and state troopers are to be believed, their fights are always over business that has interrupted his stalking of women. This is all amateur psychiatry, but it does tie up all the facts better than the other options.