Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Non-payment of BBC License

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Here’s the difference between America and Europe. In the States, a TV tax would never fly. Instead, the government taxes the TV makers, the cable guys, the content providers, etc. Then they force the providers into including channels no one would ever watch like PBS or CNN. All of this shows up in the monthly bill. We like our taxes hidden so we can pretend to be free.

In Europe, they prefer their authoritarianism straight. In the UK, the man taxes you for TV service, regardless of your type of service. That tax goes to fund government agit-prop pumped out by the BBC. If you don’t pay the tax, they throw you in prison. That’s right. They don’t cut off the service. They throw you in jail. Over 10% of criminal cases are for failure to pay the TV tax.

The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine.

Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.

Several newspapers have had reporters visit magistrate’s court to describe what goes on. They all tell harrowing stories of frightened, distressed people, mostly women, facing fines they cannot pay under threat of imprisonment if they do not. Many are single mothers, many on benefits. They have not paid the licence fee because they cannot afford to. The sum of £145.50 per year is huge for a young mother struggling to feed and clothe children. Many weep in court, unable to pay the fine for the same reason they couldn’t afford the licence fee; they don’t have the money.

Everyone with a TV, except the over 75s, has to pay, whether or not they watch BBC programmes. If people fail to pay for other services, such as a Sky subscription, for example, the service is withdrawn without them being taken to court and fined.

The reason for this, of course, is to make sure every citizen is getting their instructions. The BBC is about crowd control. TV serves the same purpose in the US, it’s just funded indirectly. Still, I can cut the cord and not pay anything. As an American, I will not be thrown in jail for not watching the agit-prop beamed over TV.

America! Yeah! We’re number one!

Maximus! Maximus! Maximus!

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San Francisco Sheriff’s Deputy ring accused of pit-fighting inmates

San Francisco sheriff’s deputy Scott Neu is accused of leading a ring of corrupt jail guards who coerced prisoners into gladiatorial combat with threats of rape and violence.

Neu serves at County Jail No. 4 at 850 Bryant St despite having settled claims that he raped a woman prisoner and two transgendered prisoners while working at the jail. He sports a tattoo reading “850 Mob,” believed to describe the name used by the corrupt deputies to describe themselves. At least four other deputies are implicated in the program of sexualized torture.

The San Francisco Public Defender’s Office had undertaken an investigation into Neu’s behavior, in cooperation with an independent private investigator, and had planned to issue their report only after the prisoners who came forward were released and safe from retaliatory violence. However, Neu had reportedly planned a fresh round of fights, leading to a hasty release of their findings.

Neu and his co-conspirators gambled on the outcome of fights. One fight pitted the smallest inmate in the jail against the largest, and the fighters say they were threatened with rape and beatings by the guards if they didn’t spar. Neu is also said to have coerced prisoners into training for the fights with threats of rape and violence. Neu has a reputation for sadistic practices overall, including making prisoners gamble to receive their food, clothes and comfort items. Even when prisoners won the games Neu forced on them with the red dice and the deck of cards he carried, he would sometimes take away their “winnings” and give them to other prisoners.

The Deputies’ Union attorney Harry Stern claims the Public Defender is making a big deal out of nothing. He says that the prisoners were encouraged to “wrestle to settle disputes about who was stronger,” and were “encouraged” to work out. He dismissed the entire affair as “little more than horseplay.”

The rape business is the great unspoken horror in modern America. The number of prison rapes of men is higher than all female rapes. It is a barbaric aspect of the prison system that is quietly and not so quietly tolerated. Think of all the times you’ve heard someone make a joke about a guy getting raped in prison.

The other aspect of our prisons that does not get mentioned is the guards. Most prison guards are sadists. Many are criminals. It’s the most obvious example of how poorly we handle the criminal class in America.

Cinderella With a Riding Crop

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This article the other day got a lot of traffic. The weirdness of third wave feminism is that the new model broads are as tough as any man and so dainty they could very well die if they hear a discouraging word.

KATHERINE BYRON, a senior at Brown University and a member of its Sexual Assault Task Force, considers it her duty to make Brown a safe place for rape victims, free from anything that might prompt memories of trauma.

So when she heard last fall that a student group had organized a debate about campus sexual assault between Jessica Valenti, the founder of feministing.com, and Wendy McElroy, a libertarian, and that Ms. McElroy was likely to criticize the term “rape culture,” Ms. Byron was alarmed. “Bringing in a speaker like that could serve to invalidate people’s experiences,” she told me. It could be “damaging.”

Ms. Byron and some fellow task force members secured a meeting with administrators. Not long after, Brown’s president, Christina H. Paxson, announced that the university would hold a simultaneous, competing talk to provide “research and facts” about “the role of culture in sexual assault.” Meanwhile, student volunteers put up posters advertising that a “safe space” would be available for anyone who found the debate too upsetting.

It’s tempting to think this is some sort of attention seeking gag, but it is something you can observe in the wild. Nancy Pelosi, for example, almost had a stroke watching Bibi Netanyahu speak in front of Congress. She was physically pained just sitting there. The psychic torment of hearing someone say things she does not like became physical agony.

The other day, I had to drop my office manager off to get her car from the mechanic. She is an old communist. We were making small talk and I made a passing reference to Whittaker Chambers. Old lefties are still vexed over the Alger Hiss affair. She was so upset I thought she was going to hurl herself out of the car.

If that were the extent of feminism, I think we would be OK. But, crazy does not work that way. This hilarious story from the Wall Street Journal provides the whip hand of feminism, so to speak.

Hillary Clinton seems to be preparing to run for president, and the former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina may yet enter the race on the Republican side. Whoever wins the White House in 2016, today it seems easily possible that within the next decade, the U.S. will follow Britain, Germany, Brazil, Argentina, India, Israel, Thailand, Norway and dozens of other countries in electing a woman to our most powerful office.

Can we predict the consequences? Yes, we can—and the news is good.

Research has found that women are superior to men in most ways that will count in the future, and it isn’t just a matter of culture or upbringing—although both play their roles. It is also biology and the aspects of thought and feeling shaped by biology. It is because of chromosomes, genes, hormones and brain circuits.

And no, by this I don’t mean what was meant by patronizing men who proclaimed the superiority of women in the benighted past—that women are lofty, spiritual creatures who must be left out of the bustle and fray of competitive life, business, politics and war, so that they can instill character in the next generation. I mean something like the opposite of that.

All wars are boyish. People point to Margaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir as evidence that women, too, can be warlike. But these women were perched atop all-male hierarchies confronting other hypermasculine political pyramids, and they were masculinized as they fought their way to the top.

Despite everything we know pointing to the contrary, the future will be run by the gals. Hey, it could happen. Of course, the smart ones at our elite colleges could end up brain damaged with all that fainting at the sound of discouraging words. So, maybe the meek will not inherit the earth.

Articles like this and his book are not intended to be serious science or commentary. The whole point is to titillate the feminists. That will sell some books and get him some speaking gigs. Who knows? Maybe he can get a TED Talk out of it. I wish him the best with it.

Looking at the CV of Melvin Konner, the author of the Journal piece, I can’t help but notice his age. He came of age when his field was ruled by blank slate fanatics. The action now is in genetics and biochemistry. I would imagine there’s more than a bit of friction between the two sides now. Guys like Konner have to sit and watch the young guns in the lab do all the exciting stuff.

How Come These White Bigots Won’t Talk Race With Me?

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Unintentional comedy. “After an Uneasy Start, Finding Common Ground to Discuss Race Relations at Work

Carl Jones brought it up over lunch in the company break room: the news of the shooting death of an unarmed black man by a white police officer. “Did you read about it?” Mr. Jones, a software engineer who is black, remembers asking his colleagues. “How could this happen?”

He told his white and Asian-American co-workers about his feelings of outrage as they ate Korean takeout at the lunch table at their technology company in Manhattan. He described the waves of anger and anxiety sweeping over him.

Mr. Jones, the only black employee in his department, had always talked with his work friends about sports, movies and current events. But this conversation last summer was different. One white colleague challenged him, asking: “How do you know the shooting wasn’t justified?” Others averted their eyes and finished the meal in silence.

He knew then that he had crossed an invisible line. The discussion of race that day changed the social dynamics at the table, chilling his co-workers’ camaraderie.

“Everyone did their best to avoid the conversation,” Mr. Jones, 33, recalled last week as he described the day that he discussed the shooting in Ferguson, Mo. Race is often the elephant in the room, he said, and “a lot of times people feel uncomfortable talking about it.”

The reason they are uncomfortable would have nothing to do with the fact you can quickly get fired, if you are white, by talking about race. It has nothing to do with how guys like Razib Khan get sacked by the NYTimes for talking about race. Nope. Nothing to see here.

The universal attribute of all cults is a lack of self-awareness. The Times enforces a strict and ruthless set of speech codes at its offices. It works hard to enforce those codes outside its offices, by slandering people who violate those codes. Yet, they run stories like this one, totally unaware of how ridiculous it makes them look.

Sunday Miscellany

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To keep this blog interesting, I clip stories from Twitter and other places and save them for later use. Often, there’s simply not much that needs to be said about them so I thought I’d clear out the attic today and combine a bunch of them into a single post. There’s no theme here, other than I happen to notice them for some reason.

I saw this posted on Maggie’s Farm yesterday. I know a few people in the drug and alcohol treatment rackets. To a man, they say that their methods are entirely useless on people lacking the will or capacity to stop using. They also report that almost all addicts are more than a bit nuts and their drug and alcohol abuse is a symptom of that.

The question, of course, is whether these programs are anything more than a clearing house for addicts. Eventually, their drinking or drug taking gets them into trouble and they head off to treatment. Those with the will and ability to get sober do so and those lacking it fall down further. In other words, the treatment is irrelevant. It is the idea of it that works as a sorting mechanism…

The founder of Green Peace is a heretic. I was told by a Jewish friend that Jewish men naturally become more religious as they get older. He jokingly refers to Temple as God’s waiting room. It seems to me that Gentile men go the other way and become less religious in old age. Not only that, they become less tolerant of social codes and taboos.

British men seem to be famous for this last part. Something snaps and their words come raw and unvarnished. John Derbyshire is a good example. James Watson is another. Patrick Moore is Canadian, but either English or Irish ethnicity. I suspect that’s what is happening here. He has hit that stage where he is no longer willing to pretend and out comes the unvarnished truth…

I find the comments are often better than the content of news stories. Steve Sailer’s blog is mostly a comment magnate. Sailer seems to have figured out that he can throw some chum in the water and get a bunch of great feedback. It makes his blog one of the best on the Interwebs. Comment #13 in this thread is a good example.

It’s funny how most men are fine with homosexuals being homosexuals as long as they agree to the unwritten rule that they keep it out of public life. This seems to be our natural and default position and it’s the claim that “the personal is political” that is new and alien. A look at the origin of the word “idiot” is instructive:

Idiot is a word derived from the Greek ἰδιώτης, idiōtēs (“person lacking professional skill”, “a private citizen”, “individual”), from ἴδιος, idios (“private”, “one’s own”).[1] In Latin the word idiota (“ordinary person, layman”) preceded the Late Latin meaning “uneducated or ignorant person”.[2]
[….]

An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs.[6] Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education.[6] In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot

“The personal is political” is a post-1960s concept that seems to be killing itself via Twitter as we speak. Give every silly girl the ability to broadcast her every passing thought via Twitter and the demand that we accept the personal as political drowns in its own waste.

I’m fond of pointing out that people join mass movements out of self-loathing. They seek to swap their natural identity for that of the group. It’s why the members of a movement compete with one another as to who is the most committed. Inevitably this zealotry contest ends with purges and maybe worse.

It’s also why Cultural Marxism so aggressively attacks the private space of citizens. Privacy is a challenge. Someone who wishes to maintain a private life has something to hide and therefore he may be a heretic. You never know until you turn him inside out and look. Islam has a similar suspicion of privacy, which is not a coincidence…

One of the things I love about Roman history is just how many incompetent rulers they were able to muster, yet survive. People on the rise accumulate a lot of cultural capital. In periods of bad rulers, they live off that excess capital from a previous age. The Roman Republic and a few early emperors accumulated a lot of cultural capital.

America is another story. The rulers from the Civil War through WW2 built a huge gap between America and the rest of the world. Conquering Europe and Asia in one shot is no small thing. But, it does appear the subsequent run of bad emperors is frittering it away. Obama will be remembered, I suspect, as a man thrust into a position for which he was unqualified, thus hastening the decline of the empire…

If you want to see how it ends for the Occident, it is right here in this story from Sweden. The religion of the West is a worship of the other. So much so the other now has a veto over the daily life of the European. In America, the cuckoldry is focused on black males, but in Europe it is the Mohammedan…

The following tweet was in my twitter feed for some reason:

I have never heard of Pharrell Williams. I’m always amazed by the number of famous people out there that are unknown to me. I bet I know no one who knows who this is either. But, someone does  as he has become fabulously rich at something…

Finally, the Cult has been tub thumping about this story for a week or more. Indian Wells has finally been redeemed as the steroidal Williams sisters made their triumphant return to the place formerly filled with black-hearted racists. I could not fathom why this was a such a big deal to the NYTimes. They have been covering it like an election.

Then it occurred to me that anti-racism has turned a corner. It is no longer about chasing after the blue-eyed devils. It is about the worship of black people now. They have become the chosen people of the American Left. The triumphant return of the Williams sisters is symbolic of the triumph of this weird new cult built around the worship of black people…

Christianity and ID

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I generally think of Christians in America as being on “my side” of things. By my side I mean opposed to Cultural Marxism, socialism and so forth. That’s not always true, of course. Many Evangelicals are socialists. Many are simply religious and will vote for anyone who is “born again.” Jimmy Carter won a big slice of the Evangelical vote thus allowing him to carry the South and win the election. I’ve known many Evangelicals that think the only issue that matters in politics is the religion of the politician.

American Evangelicals are interesting to me in that I’m not entirely sure the current version is, strictly speaking, Christian. They certainly share much with traditional Christianity, but they have some big differences too. The focus on the text of the Bible is one obvious departure. Traditional Christians understand that the Bible, as we know it, evolved over centuries. Translations have errors and never fully capture the nuance of the original. Therefore, a literal interpretation is not possible.

This leads to some rather strange circular reasoning when talking with an Evangelical about scripture. Pointing out what I just wrote above about the trouble with translation is met with a quote from the Bible. If you make mention of the fact that the Catholic Church selected the books of the Bible and you get some other quote from scripture. The Bible is proof that the Bible is literally the word of God. It is a tautological defense that only makes sense to those who already believe. It’s many skeptics think Evangelicals are a cult.

That does not mean Evangelicals are a cult or way outside the definition of Christian, but it certainly sets them apart from the Christian tradition. I’m painting with a broad a brush here, so bear with me. I’m thinking mainly about the narrow strains within the Evangelical movement. The followers of Joel Osteen, for example, are a different breed of cat from the old ladies at First Evangelical. Watch one of Osteen’s preacher shows and the word “cult” comes to mind. In another age, Osteen would have been burned at the stake as a heretic.

What got me thinking about this topic is some posts I saw recently, railing against evolution. There is a sub-culture in the self-taught Christian sphere that seems to be an off-shoot of intelligent design. It’s not that they believe in ID or creationism, but they think you’re crazy for “believing” in the false god Darwin or his false religion, evolution. It’s mostly anti-Darwinsim, if there was such a thing as Darwinism. It’s as if they created a secular religion they can criticize. Anyway, it go me thinking about what ID’ers believe.

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection. Through the study and analysis of a system’s components, a design theorist is able to determine whether various natural structures are the product of chance, natural law, intelligent design, or some combination thereof. Such research is conducted by observing the types of information produced when intelligent agents act. Scientists then seek to find objects which have those same types of informational properties which we commonly know come from intelligence. Intelligent design has applied these scientific methods to detect design in irreducibly complex biological structures, the complex and specified information content in DNA, the life-sustaining physical architecture of the universe, and the geologically rapid origin of biological diversity in the fossil record during the Cambrian explosion approximately 530 million years ago.

The implication here is that the designer, willy-nilly, chooses to rearrange the natural world as he/she/it sees fit. They carefully avoid discussing the designer as that would raise some uncomfortable issues, I’m assuming. Instead, they focus on the claims that certain natural phenomenon could not happen naturally and therefore must have been created by a designer for unexplained reasons. That last bit is important. The designer’s reasons are not only unknown; they are unknowable. Therefore, there is no need for inquiry.

The term for this is occasionalism. It is also explicitly anti-Christian. The foundation stone of Christianity is the fixed nature of God. When God makes a deal, he sticks to it and when he created heaven and earth, it was by fixed and discoverable rules. This idea, first promulgated by the Hellenized Jews, is a big deal in the evolution of religion. Instead of the super natural acting cynically and capriciously, God set the rules of nature and they are permanent. A rational God and a rational universe is the basis for Western civilization.

Now, creationism and intelligent design are harmless beliefs. Outside a few areas, people’s understanding nature is meaningless. Creationism is certainly inside the realm of traditional Christian theology, but intelligent designs seems to fall outside of it.  With creationism, God can be viewed as the watchmaker, who set all of the natural processes in motion. Young earth creationism is nuts, but the more common form is what the Church taught for a thousand years. Intelligent Design, in contrast, does not fit inside Christianity.

Forever Young

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My plan to live forever was pretty simple. I sat for a painting of myself and then set off on a life of hedonism. It looks like I was not the only guy working on this. Google is pouring money in the quest to defeat death.

Here’s where you really figure out who Bill Maris is: on his bookshelf. There’s a fat text called Molecular Biotechnology: Principles and Applications of Recombinant DNA. There’s a well-read copy of Biotechnology: Applying the Genetic Revolution. And a collection of illustrations by Fritz Kahn, a German physician who was among the first to depict the human body as a machine. Wedged among these is a book that particularly stands out to anyone interested in living to 500. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, published in 2005, is the seminal work by futurist Ray Kurzweil. He famously predicted that in 2045, humankind will have its Terminator moment: The rise of computers will outpace our ability to control them. To keep up, we will radically transform our biology via nanobots and other machines that will enhance our anatomy and our DNA, changing everything about how we live and die.

“It will liberate us from our own limitations,” says Maris, who studied neuroscience at Middlebury College and once worked in a biomedical lab at Duke University. Kurzweil is a friend. Google hired him to help Maris and other Googlers understand a world in which machines surpass human biology. This might be a terrifying, dystopian future to some. To Maris, it’s business.

This is where he hopes to find, and fund, the next generation of companies that will change the world, or possibly save it. “We actually have the tools in the life sciences to achieve anything that you have the audacity to envision,” he says. “I just hope to live long enough not to die.”

Unsurprisingly, I’m skeptical. Since the great leap forward in medicine and diet, particularly for the treatment of infections, life expectancy has crept up slowly. In 1930, the typical white male lived to 62. Today the typical white male lives to 79. That’s a nice increase, but it has been a slow steady increase. It suggest the big increases in health and longevity have been realized.

That’s not to say there’s not some great leaps coming soon. Genetics offers up some opportunities to understand aging. There may be some ways to slow the process and extend lifespan. Cancer treatments, oddly enough, are adding greatly to our understanding of how cells age and die. Some cancer drugs are slowing aging in mice so there may be some quality of life things coming shortly.

Of course, this is being driven by the Boomer generation. Twenty years ago the rush was on to fix baldness and limp noodles. Now the rush is on to fix decrepitude. It’s not just Google pouring money into it. All of the big pharma companies are rushing to find the next big drug and that drug will be to ameliorate the effects of aging. If you were thinking the boomers were about to start dying off, you may be disappointed.

I’m not sure how I feel about living to 500. Men in my family live into their 90’s and in good shape until the end. I don’t recall any of them wishing they had more time, but I have no way of knowing what they thought in their last blinks. I suspect they missed their friends who had all gone before them.

That’s a big part of it. If I was going to live to 500, I don’t want to be the only 500 year old. That could have some advantages, but it would also be lonely. I find talking to someone half my age a chore and that’s decades. Imagine have a few centuries of experience on everyone else. I’d probably be the world’s biggest asshole.

Evolution Versus Mass Media

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Evolution is all about adaptation. A species gets better and better at exploiting its environment over time. If the environment suddenly changes, the species may not be able to adapt quickly enough to survive. Ice ages are a good example. Or droughts. Humans are unique in that we can change our environment by design. What makes us even more unique is we are our environment. Culture works on humans in the same way nature works on all species.

It’s a big complicated subject which is why progressives have decided evolution stopped in 1968. That way they don’t have to struggle to get their head around the recursive relationship between man and nature. They can just put the white hat on nature and the black hat on man. Complicated things like science are bad for ideology.

It also leaves more time for the war on the PPP, but that’s a subject for another day. The topic for now is how we as modern humans have changed our environment. Specifically, the creation and dominance of mass media. Modern America is marinated in mass media. Everyone’s opinion on everything is controlled by the magic boxes in their life, TV, PC and mobile phone.

Because no one wants to look at old hags, TV is dominated by young hyper-attractive people. Most of whom are as dumb as a goldfish, but they can read from a teleprompter without moving their eyes. The job is to grab and keep the viewer’s attention. Similarly, the Interwebs is run by the young and those who pretend to be young. Therefore the language is geared for a high school level viewer. Again, it’s about getting and holding the attention of the people.

The problem, of course is that you end up with former mall cops pretending to be experts. They are interviewed by guys like Brian Williams, who are lost in a fantasy world and probably in need of psychiatric help. From the perspective of TV, it makes no difference if the opinions and experts are batshit crazy, just as long as they get and keep an audience. MSNBC had a nice run with this model.

This may not seem like a thing until you consider that public opinion is set by mass media. Handsome popular goldfish says something wacky on TV and it rattles through the sea of megaphones we call the media. Rather quickly, people are walking around convinced that biology is a social construct or that women should be allowed to vote.

In fact, there is a bias toward the stupid and against the correct answers. Here’s a good example I saw in Tyler Cowen’s site today.

A decade ago, when the golf course was a de facto playground for the professional set and a young Californian named Tiger Woods was the world’s best player, golf looked like an unassailable national undertaking, and corporate players were champing at the bit to get in.

But the business behind one of America’s most slow-going, expensive and old-fashioned pastimes has rapidly begun to fall apart. TaylorMade-Adidas Golf, the world’s biggest maker of golf clubs and clothes, saw sales nosedive 28 percent last year, its parent company Adidas said Thursday.

“A decline in the number of active players … caused immense problems in the entire industry, and as a market leader, this hit us particularly hard,” Adidas chief executive Herbert Hainer said on a call with analysts.

The sporting-goods giant has taken “some painful measures to restructure and stabilize” its golf division, Hainer said, including listing its slow-selling golf gear at deep discounts and postponing new launches. The coming years, Hainer had previously warned, present even more “significant negative headwinds” for the game.

It’s been years since the increasingly unpopular sport of golf plunked into the rough, and the industry now is realizing that it may not be able to ever get out. All the qualities that once made it so elite and exclusive are, analysts say, now playing against it.

The game — with its drivers, clubs, shoes and tee times — is expensive both to prepare for and to play. It’s difficult, dissuading amateurs from giving it a swing, and time-consuming, limiting how much fans can play. Even what loyalists would say are strengths — its simplicity, its traditionalism — can seem overly austere in an age of fitness classes, extreme races and iPhone games.

What you see here is common in our media. They take what is a boring industry story and lard it with their favorite crackpot theories to make it more interesting to readers. The real answer for golf’s decline to its traditional place in the culture is white people are getting old. Golf has always been a sport for middle-aged white guys. When the boomers were in their peak golf years, golf peaked. Now that boomers are aging out of golf, golf is declining.

This is a boring answer, but the right one. Golf is a sport you pick up in your middle years. You spend money on gear, lessons and trips. By the time  you hit 60 you’re starting to slow down. You still play, but you no longer spend money on the latest clubs. Instead of golf trips around the country, you play courses near home. Of course, many golfers past 60 give up the game because they are dead.

The American baby boom ran from roughly 1945 -1964. That means the front end is now 70 and the tail end is 50, with the bulk in the 60 range. In other words, if you were at the Summer of Love or Woodstock, you’re spending more on your prostate than your golf game.

That’s a boring answer so the chattering skulls in the media will trot out their favorite fantasies about social trends. The result here and everywhere is a public walking around with crazy ideas in their heads. Take a look around and it is hard to see anyone under the age of 50 not attached to a media consumption device, getting instruction from the chattering skulls. It has to have an impact.

I wonder if humans can adapt quickly enough to thrive in this world. I get the sense we are in the hot soak period of the technology age. When you shut your car off, the engine actually gets hotter for a few minutes before rapidly cooling down to air temperature. That’s what’s happening with modern societies. Technology is advancing, but the ending has been shut off.

Humans evolved for 200,000 years for a world of face to face communication. Therefore, we got good at it. It took a long time to get good at it. We have had no time to adapt to a world of megaphones blasting nonsense at us. Maybe homo sap is just reverting to a natural norm. For most of settlement, a small number of smart people ran societies of illiterate morons. Perhaps the future is the past.

How To Fix The Money

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I read ZeroHedge on a regular basis. I think I would be very rich if I could bet against their predictions. As the old joke goes, they have predicted five of the last three recessions. They are not entirely off base, but the world has not collapsed and its not going to collapse, most likely. What they get right is that most of our troubles are linked to the currency arrangements. Floating fiat currency has unleashed all sorts of new forces that policy makers cannot comprehend.

Money is a store of value. Going to the market with my goats to trade for shoes is a big hassle. I have to find someone who wants goats, but also has shoes. The ability to store the value of those goats into coin makes the whole thing easier. Giving central banks the right to arbitrarily alter the value of the coin is, in effect, the right to arbitrarily alter the value of my goats and by extension, my labor. That’s another way of saying the Feds get to alter the value of me. That’s a terrible weapon with unknown unknowns. Sorting through all of these unknown results has befuddled our rulers for several decades now.

Even so, the world has not changed all that much. The currency manipulation is due, in large part, to the need for governments to raise money. The corporatist state needs a lot of money to buy off interest groups, satisfy grievance groups, pay for cradle to grave custody of the citizens and empire maintenance. Normal taxing is limited by economic growth, which is about 5% per year after inflation. US debt has grown ten percent a year since 1980, so it is not hard to see what has been happening.

Instead of exponential credit growth, how about the government sell ads on our money? They could offer Walmart, for example, the chance to sponsor the twenty. Instead of Jackson on the front, it could the Walmart logo with “Brought to You By Walmart!” Singles could be festooned with ads from small companies. Since each run could have different sponsors, your handful of singles would have a bunch of different ads. Given the booming strip club culture in America, these ads would sell like crazy. “This pole dance brought to by the Federal Reserve and the good folks at Budweiser!”

Of course, another way to do this would be to let big companies offer their own currency. A big reason central banks are forever fiddling with currency values is to satisfy the demands of global corporations. Europeans have always preferred authoritarian government, but Americans would rather have global corporations to the shoving around of the citizens. That way we can pretend to be a self-governing republic. That means the state has to “do a lot of favors” for the global operators.

The truth is, we are breaking up into corporate camps anyway. The MacCult calls themselves “Apple families”so letting them have their own currency is not a great leap. Look at how irritating they are with ApplePay and that has been out for just a few months. That would make it easy for the MacCult to spot “haters” because those would be the people using GoogleBucks or MSMoney. It would have to be backed by stock or other assets, but it worked in the 19th century during the free banking era.

IQ and the Big Heist

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I heard about this the other day so I looked it up. I have a thing for true crime. I guess those years in Boston when the Bulgers were active got me hooked on true crime. Who knows. I think what interests me in these sorts of stories is their rarity. I remember a time when robbing an armored truck was more common. At least in seemed more common. I went looking for some annual stats to see if robberies are up, down or otherwise, but there’s not a lot of great data on armored truck robberies.

This story from an industry site suggests the number of robberies has declined, but it is short on statistics. Digging through the FBI crime tables, I don’t see where they track armored car robberies. There’s a category under bank robberies, but the numbers are so small I think that’s for robberies that occurred at a bank getting a armored car service. The robbers hit the truck while it was at the bank. This story indicates there are only about 35 armored car hits a year.

From the story:

Shortly after dusk along a lonely stretch of Interstate 95, armed robbers hijacked an armored truck, tied up the two guards and disappeared into the night with 275 pounds of gold bars.

The guards working for Transvalue Inc. of Miami reported pulling off to the side of the interstate about 6:30 p.m. Sunday after their vehicle began having mechanical problems in eastern North Carolina, according to the Wilson County Sheriff’s Office.

The guards told police they were surprised by three armed men driving a white van who ordered the guards to lie on the ground, tied their hands behind their backs and then marched them into nearby woods.

The robbers then helped themselves to barrels filled with about $4.8 million in gold before making their getaway. Transvalue said its employees were not injured during the heist.

Transvalue chief executive officer Jay Rodriguez said the truck carrying the gold bars left Miami about 4 a.m. Sunday. The load was headed to Attleboro, Massachusetts, a town south of Boston nicknamed “Jewelry City” for the large number of manufacturers based there.

There’s some chance the robbers just got hilariously lucky, but that seems unlikely. It also seems unlikely that the truck broke down as stated. It’s possible, but it would be an amazing coincidence. I would not be shocked to learn that the guards were involved in the heist, maybe taking a bribe to tip off the robbers.

That would be the weak part of the plan. In these cases, the authorities will submit the drivers to intense examination, including a polygraph. You don’t get the job without  thorough background check so these are not men used to dealing with cops. That’s why amateur crooks get caught. They don’t know how to handle cops and they eventually talk themselves into trouble. Once the Feds can put the pressure on the guards, whatever they know the Feds will know.

Even so, the planning to take out a truck like this requires an above average IQ. It also takes big balls and some experience in crime. The robbers had to pick the right truck on the right day. They had to be willing to put a bullet in the guards, who are armed and trained to shoot first. They also had to know the route and have scouted the highway to know the best place to pull the job. It may have been a whole lot of dumb luck, but I’m betting this was not a job pulled by hillbilly meth heads.

That’s probably why these jobs are rare. In the 70’s you had college kids pretending to be revolutionaries robbing armored cars. You had organized criminals pulling complex jobs. Then you had bank men who were not members of crime families, but they were familiar to organized criminals. Anthony Shea, a mutt from Charlestown Mass, was not good at anything other than robbing banks and armored cars. In other words, you had more smart people in the crime business forty years ago so maybe that’s why there were more big jobs being pulled.

When you think about it, there are maybe 10% of males willing to commit a serious crime if the circumstances are right. By serious crime, I mean the sort of caper that gets you a long stretch in the penitentiary or requires you to use violence. Research says 40% of males get arrested by 23, but the overwhelming majority of those crimes are petty. It’s a different breed of cat robbing armored cars from the guy selling a few joints at his high school. I don’t feel like getting into the numbers, but my guess is 10% is a good number.

Of those, half will have a below average IQ and incapable of doing complex jobs. Given the vibrancy of the criminal population, I’m being very generous. Two thirds are probably on the left side of the bell curve. What percentage of those are well above average in IQ to the point where they can plan a big job like the gold heist above? My guess is a very small number and only some of them are willing to risk life in prison to pull the big heist.

That’s what makes this stuff interesting. The crooks are either very lucky or very rare examples of high IQ, risk taking professional criminals.