Category Archives: Weird Stuff

Sunday Ramblings

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On libertarian sites, I’ve seen the following quote attributed to Gandhi. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” I took it on faith that Gandhi said it. I don’t care that much about Gandhi so his sayings don’t move me in any important way.  I looked it up and found that Gandhi never said it. Instead it was some middle management type named Nicholas Klein. But hey, it could have been said by Gandhi….

I was web surfing and stumbled onto this post by Rod Dreher. I have vague recollections of Rod Dreher writing for National Review and then going crazy for a while about environmentalism. I may have the facts wrong, but I recall reading a column by Jonah Goldberg saying goodbye to his crazy former friend. He did not call him crazy, but it was implied. According to his Wiki page, he wrote a manifesto, which is the sort of thing you do if you’re the Unabomber or starting a cult.

His views don’t strike me as unusually weird, but maybe I have a very generous definition of what it means to be weird, at least in the realm of politics. Dreher is now a regular at The American Conservative, which is a fairly mainstream site, even if they are shunned by Conservative Inc. Unlike the National Review crowd, they are not on MSNBC all day, but their writers turn up at establishment sites once in a while, so Dreher is not exactly wring for a fringe publication now.

The point, I think, is that dissident thinking, as in the general questioning of the status quo on the Right, is making headway into respectable places. To be clear, I have my doubts about how much realism can be tolerated. What John Derbyshire calls race-realism has plenty of merit, but there are too many people in the race-realism club who are just racists. At some point, the immune system of Conservative Inc. will kick in and start purging anyone with incorrect opinions on the blank slate and egalitarianism…

While I was over at TAC, I consumed this story about the schism on the Conventional Right. One of the things I want to go into more one day is the ridiculousness of the right-left model of framing political philosophy. In America, Progressiveness is a well-defined cultural, political and economic movement. Putting American Progressives on the Left, using the European model, is informative, but not authoritative.

On the Continent, the Right-Left dynamic is centered entirely on nationalism. Marxist-Leninism in an internationalist creed. Socialism, particularly Fascism, is a nationalist creed. Hitler is on one end, Stalin is on the other. Their disagreements on economics were trivial compared to their cultural differences. With the collapse of communism, even the Left in Europe is now pro-EU, while the Right is slowly forming into a populist and nationalist bloc. Same divide, different roles for each side.

Using the old Left-Right model for America is ridiculous. Putting the Reason Magazine crowd on the same side as Hitler is laughably ridiculous. In America, it has been the Left that has embraced fascist economics. Communism never got much of a purchase, other than the cultural variety after the war.  A political spectrum that somehow has American Progressives at the opposite end of people with whom they largely agree is a pretty weird spectrum. It’s not very useful, other than for partisan rhetoric.

Then you have the people who are not Progressives. Pat Buchanan and William Kristol agree on very little. They also hate one another. Putting them on the Right together is a category error. In the American Conservative article you see how the Right-Left model falls to pieces. Paul Gottfried remains trapped in the model, which fouls his assessment of Strauss. He’s spending so much time trying to make sense of the model, he mangles Strauss in the process…

Steve Sailer thinks the Open Borders crowd is carrying the day. That’s true for now, but it is a long game. Politics is the portion of the culture war above the waterline. Sometimes, it looks like one side is winning, but underneath the water a massive force is building that will become public. That’s what the immigration looks like right now. The people pushing open borders control the media. They think they are winning, but in reality they are building an opposition that will crush them at some point…

Someone took me to task for grammar and spelling mistakes on this blog. My response was that I don’t worry too much about those issues as this is a blog. Spelling should always be correct in public writing. I really should run these post through a spell check before posting them, but I’m often writing on the fly, so I miss stuff. This is a blog, which means it is like a public diary. I doubt anyone has ever spell checked their journal or their personal diary. Maybe they do, I’ve never kept a diary.

Now grammar is another story. My first contact with a rigid grammarian was when I was in college. He had, as far as I could tell, nothing to offer the curious mind. Instead he occupied himself with grammar, particularly the grammar of others. Ever since I’ve thought writers should feel free to go wild with the rules of grammar if that allows them to easily make their point. The point of grammar is to make communication easier, not more difficult. That means some degree of flexibility is required…

Happy New Year

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It seems the thing to do with blogs at this time of year is to make some predictions about the coming year. I’ve been reading up on and studying the prediction business for a while now, so let’s see if I can put some of it to work. My interest in the prediction business is mostly for amusement. Go back and read old predictions and they are not only wrong, but hilariously wrong. My bet is people in the futurism racket are mostly interested in attention, so they tend to be willing to make bold claims about the future.

Of course, most predictions about the future are wrong because people tend to predict things they wish come true. Since most of what we wish for never happens, it follows that such predictions will tend not to happen. Then there is the fact no one ever remembers the failed predictions. The finance guys love promoting people who got some even right in the past, but they never mention that the same guy got fifty other things wrong. No one in the prediction business reminds us of how many things they got wrong.

The bigger issue is the the appearance of randomness. A problem with several constants and one variable is easy to solve. Human affairs have many more variables and few constants. Human affairs have millions of variables. The example of the double pendulum is a good one. We can predict the movement of a pendulum easily using basic math. Put a hinge in the middle and the movement appears to become unpredictable. There are videos on YouTube you can look up if you are unfamiliar with this example.

Then there is the issue of time. I know, as a matter of mathematical certainty, that the Fed policy of dumping a trillion new dollars into the system will have to end. The bears think hyper-inflation is right around the corner and the program will crash. They may eventually be right, but it could be next year or five years from now. Right now, the world economy is soaking up these new dollars and stuffing them into assets like stocks. Eventually, that ends, but knowing when is the mystery. A good prediction is mostly about timing.

That said, years ago I got interested in betting sports games. American football betting is really just a game of  figuring out how the crowd is going. If you can find example where the conventional wisdom is out of phase with reality, you can make some money. I came up with a model that allowed me to beat the spread 59% of the time. That sounds good, but 57% is the break even point. Bookmakers charge vigorish. The book maker strives to set the line so that he gets equal money on each team. The losers pay the winners and the bookie takes his cut. If he does his job, he makes 5% of the total money bet on the game.

With that in mind, here are some predictions for 2014 about things I care about a little:

1) Florida State will beat Auburn and it will not be that close.

2) Denver will not make the Super Bowl. Peyton Manning will not join Earl Morrall and Jeff Rutledge as quarterbacks to make it to the Super Bowl on two different teams. The NFL playoffs comes down to defense. Great QB’s running great offense can win a game or two, but eventually, it comes down to defense. If the Patriots had a decent defense, Tom Brady has two more rings and an undefeated season. The Denver defense is one of the worst in the playoffs this year.

3) The US economy will remain in neutral, growing at about 2.5% after all the adjustments and revisions. The great slow down from health care will not appear as predicted. There’s some evidence that the economy was picking up in the last half of 2013, but certainly not booming. Unemployment, however, remains the primary drag and there nothing in the latest numbers to suggest things are changing on that front. ObamaCare will put downward pressure on the labor market. Continued exploitation of existing technology will offset much of this as companies get better at doing more with less, but you still need people with money buying stuff to make an economy grow. We remain at the edge of personal debt limits. That all adds up to more of the same in 2014.

4) Obama will fall below 40% in Gallup and remain there until the summer, but bubble back up into the low to mid 40’s in the summer. Americans want to like him, even if they hate his policies right now. There’s not a huge difference between 44% and 38% but it will be encouraging to the administration and his party. As noted above, people see what they want to see. The liberal media will break into an early version of Obama nostalgia this summer as a last gasp to salvage his second term, but the limits of reality mean he remains in the 40’s for the rest of the year.

5) The stock market will finish ahead of where it is today. Specifically, the DOW will be above 17,000 by year end, but not by much. There’s no question that the market has had a great run, but it has no basis in reality. Facebook, for example, has a P/E of 140. Twitter is worth $40 Billion, despite having no profits and no chance to make a profit in 2014. The P/E of the Russell 2000 is 87. The major indexes are better, the DOW is 19 and the NASDAQ is 21, but those remain high historically. The average P/E is 15 going back 100 years. Still, a trillion in Fed money will counter any pull back in 2014.

6) There will be no legislative changes to the health care law in 2014. Nothing will be passed out of the Senate. Right now, this thing is a gift to both parties. The Democrats scare the Left about how the Right wants to repeal it. The Republicans promise the Right they will repeal it. At some point, repeal becomes the stuff of the fringe and both parties take turns promising to repair it. For 2014, we have the repeal/defend dynamic so nothing changes.

7) The Red Sox will not make the playoffs. They caught lightning in a bottle and will fall back to being an 85-win team. The lost a key player in Ellsbury and the rest of the division got better. Repeating is always hard and the margin for error is small. Losing ten more games knocks them out of the playoffs and that’s certainly seems reasonable.

8) The Republicans will pick a net of nine Senate seats in 2014 and have a working majority. The House will see the GOP gained a dozen seats. The GOP establishment is revved up to prove a point to the right. That point is safe candidates can beat democrats in toss-up states. Put another way, they want to show the Right that wackos are not welcome in their club. I think the result will be a strong effort to field competent alternatives to at-risk Democrats and a solid election for the GOP. The Democrats have a dozen highly vulnerable incumbents and the GOP has none this time.

9) The sale of eBooks will continue to stagnate and people will begin to ask if they will displace hard books after all. Sales have been flat for a year. The novelty of tablet computers is cresting and that will put more pressure on sales. The fact is the reading universe is static. People consume a predictable number of books. Weird innovations in the free money era caused a spike (Mega book stores, Amazon, tablets), but there are no more novelties coming to boost sales. The mega book stores are closing. Amazon is flat. Tablets have been driving novelty interest in eBooks, but that’s coming to an end as the tablet market matures. The eBook may be a solution looking for a problem.

10) Tablet prices will fall significantly. They are on the cusp of becoming a commodity. As penetration peaks, the race to the bottom of the price curve will begin. Korean and Chinese makers will begin to flood the market with cheap Android based tablets. The fact is, these things should be cheap media consumption devises. The first HD TV’s cost $3K and now are a tenth of that in some sizes. Tablet prices will drop as the market for what they do best solidifies. Microsoft’s attempt to make them mini-desktops will fail. There’s no need for an $800 mini-laptop when you can get a real one for the same price.

11) Cheap tablets will begin to erode the smart phone market. The reason the smart phone exists is it give you a portable media consumption devise. A 7″ tablet is just as portable as most phones. Wi-fi is nearly ubiquitous now. A lot of people, particularly business people will begin to opt for a cheap mobile phone on a cheap plan and a cheap tablet for surfing the ‘Net.

12) 2014 will see the beginning of the end to the old mobile phone model. The market is maxed out now. The way for the carriers to compete will be with the plans, instead of the devices. The fact is, most people rarely leave their local area. That means small carriers can begin to chip away at the lower end of the market. That will lead to more lower end choices from the major carriers. It will also mean less bundling.

13) The first glimpses of a la carte pricing in cable and satellite will appear this year. The cost of cable is way out of hand and the alternatives are getting better. I can subscribe to Hulu for $8 a month and get more content than I could ever watch. I can get shows from Netflix and Amazon. Apple is ramping up their video content and Microsoft is unleashing hell with XBox One. Cable will begin to experiment with offer customers the ability to opt out of some channels to save a few bucks.

The Language of Fantatics

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Fanatics not only deal in absolutes, they have a binary view of life. Everything is either completely one way or completely the opposite way. For example, normal people have a wide range of reactions to homosexuality. At one end are people who hate the gays and at the other are people who think the guys are great. Most people lie somewhere in between those two polls. The fanatic sees only homophobes and homophiles.

As a result, fanatics have a range of words they use to describe the undifferentiated other on the other side of the wall from them. People who agree with them, are inside the wall, while the people who don’t completely agree are on the other side of the wall. As a result, they have a lot of ways to describe the people outside the wall, but only one way to describe the people in the inside. They are the righteous, the anointed.

You see it in this article from Reason magazine about the Duck Dynasty guy. Even they call his comments “anti-gay.” In other words, because he does not fully embrace the latest fads with regards to homosexuals, he must hate homosexuals and wish them harm. he’s anti-gay. His brand of Christianity, like 99% of Christianity, considers sex outside of marriage a sin. Therefore, gay sex is a sin. That’s a statement of fact.

He said the same thing about bestiality and drunkenness. No one is upset at him for being anti-animal or anti-booze. The reason, of course, is those things lack a band of dedicated fanatics defending them. Sodomites have a phalanx of Progressive lunatics willing to attack anyone that gets too close to the walls. They don’t care why he does not embrace their position, they just see him as the ultimate evil because he is on the other side.

That’s the way it must be with fanatics. You are either with them or against them. There’s no room to be indifferent. It try to stake out some middle ground or you really are indifferent, they will force you to choose sides. It’s why their language becomes stark. You are either in favor of “gay rights” or you are anti-gay, a homophobe, a bigot, etc. You’re either on the side of the righteous or you are an enemy of all that is good.

The reason for this is, in part, psychological. The fanatic is most likely biologically driven to be a fanatic. As Eric Hoffer noted, the true believer will jump from one fanaticism to another, often participating in many at the same time. For instance, an environmentalist will also be a member of some Marxist group, a vegan and an animal rights nut. In other words, the cause is unimportant. it is being in a cause that matters.

Then there is the fact that the fanatic is often driven by a sense of self-loathing, which is why they seek to completely submerge themselves in the cause. They swap their hated sense of self for that of the group. You really can’t be too extreme when trying to cleanse yourself of that which you hate, which is you. What the fanatic thinks is worth doing, they will always assume it worth overdoing. It is what makes them feel free.

The fanatic probably has a use evolutionary use to humans. The rules of society need to be enforced. Society needs to be defended. Sacrifices need to be made for the good of the group. The fanatic can ensure his genes pass on by defending his group. In settled society, this trait probably adapted to settled life. Every society has its fanatics and every society has some use for them. That’s not an accident.

The Fat Diet

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For a very long time the American government has been telling people to cut fat out of their diet and eat grains and vegetables instead of meat. The Standard American Diet is not based on anything but some casual observations about who has heart disease and the proselytizing of food fanatics. People who actually think about this stuff have long argued that the government has it backwards. People should cut the carbs and not worry about dietary fat, but the nutrition establishment persists.

Now it looks like the Swedes are breaking ranks.

Butter, olive oil, heavy cream, and bacon are not harmful foods. Quite the opposite. Fat is the best thing for those who want to lose weight. And there are no connections between a high fat intake and cardiovascular disease.

On Monday, SBU, the Swedish Council on Health Technology Assessment, dropped a bombshell. After a two-year long inquiry, reviewing 16,000 studies, the report “Dietary Treatment for Obesity” upends the conventional dietary guidelines for obese or diabetic people.

For a long time, the health care system has given the public advice to avoid fat, saturated fat in particular, and calories. A low-carb diet (LCHF – Low Carb High Fat, is actually a Swedish “invention”) has been dismissed as harmful, a humbug and as being a fad diet lacking any scientific basis.

Instead, the health care system has urged diabetics to eat a lot of fruit (=sugar) and low-fat products with considerable amounts of sugar or artificial sweeteners, the latter a dangerous trigger for the sugar-addicted person.

This report turns the current concepts upside down and advocates a low-carbohydrate, high-fat diet, as the most effective weapon against obesity.

The thing about carbohydrates is they make you hungry. It is why Chinese food does not stick with you. It is loaded with carbs and often simple carbs like sugar. The calories are not the issue. It is metabolism and blood sugar. Humans evolved over a million years eating meat, bugs, fish and edible wild greens. When available, fruits and vegetables were eaten by our ancestors. Even into recent times, meat was the main part of the diet. We were designed, if you will, to eat meat because it is packed with energy.

A nice hunk of blubber can keep you going through the worst winter. It is not hard to see why humans that were good at digesting meat and fat would thrive, especially in harsh climates like in Europe and Asia. The people who could survive on game and fish were the ones who thrived in these areas. Evolution can work quickly when there is strong section pressure. The point being, we are probably better off eating like our ancestors. If you’re black, then eat like an African. If you’re white, eat like a European.

 

Banned From National Review

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It took a while, but they finally banned me from posting at National Review. It seems my accurate portrayal of the execrable Ramesh Ponnuru finally did it. I called him Rich Lowry’s house boy, which must have finally forced their hand. The fact is, all of these people are just hired pens. Ponnuru is a hack who gets paid because he is willing to lick the boots of whoever pays him. Lowry keeps him around mostly for color. If Ramesh were a white guy named Smith he would be waxing Lowry’s car, not writing for his magazine.

But, that’s how it goes with the managerial class these days. It is all appearances and gestures. The fact that an empty suit like Lowry is in charge of National Review shows how pointless it is to support these organizations. To quote Eric Hoffer, “all movements become a business and then a racket.” National Review is now just a money raising racket for managerial class mediocrities. It’s why they are so ineffective. It’s all a long con on ordinary people, who just want to have a normal country.

It will be interesting to see how long National Review stays afloat. Buckley bankrolled the thing as it never made money, even when it actually stood for something. Well, that’s what he allowed people to believe. In reality, he was a great hustler who got rich people to not only finance the magazine, but his extravagant lifestyle. Buckley’s family was very wealthy, but old Bill had expensive tastes. Regardless, he’s gone now and the people in charge of his magazine lack his connections and media skill.

Rich Lowry has no money of his own and limited ability to raise it from rich donors. Maybe Buckley set things up before he croaked so they could carry on, but that never stops the next generation from screwing it up in time. Their recent fundraisers have been disasters, forcing them to extend their deadlines. The quality of the product has also declined sharply as they have purged anyone curious or insightful. Kevin Williamson is the best they have, but he is a gold-plated phony. That will eventually be his undoing.

I will wear my banishment as a badge of honor. In the years ahead, I have no doubt I will be banned from many other platforms. The people who rule over us assumed the internet was going to be an amen chorus praising them. Now that they see the opposite, they will move to shut down speech on-line. First it will be the comment sections and then social media. Anything that contradicts the secular religion will be treated as blasphemy.

Appeasing The Gods

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At various times in the 19th and early 20 century, drought would threaten to wipe out whole towns, even states. The Dust Bowl is the most famous to modern Americans, as it drove tens of thousands from the land and to the west coast, looking for a new life. Of course, people often look for reasons beyond the natural, so many of the people who stayed, hoping for a miracle, looked for all sorts of ways to make it rain. That, in turn, made them easy prey for con men and charlatans promising to bring relief from the drought.

It seems rather primitive, looking back from this vantage point. Droughts still happen, but a big complicated technological country like America can work around it. The idea of some guy showing up promising to make it rains sounds nutty. It was not that long ago. In fact, there are plenty of people living today who knew Okies. Many old folks in California were the children of Okies, maybe even having made the trip as small children. The point is that it was not so long ago that appealing to nature or the gods was no considered crazy.

Anyway, that came to mind when reading this strange story from the UK. The Europeans have a primitive fear of nature these days. The Brits are leading the charge on ”climate change” which is just a modern form of nature worship. Watch BBC America and the shows always have some mention of green this or earth friendly that. The car shows are most humorous because they always stop at some point and provide a lecture to the viewers about recycling your oil or coolant at the “council dump.”

The fact that they are spending money to ward off a cataclysm that will never come is a reminder that we have not advanced as far as we think. The rituals and magic of 100 years ago just have new names today. There is a veneer of science to this stuff now, but at its core, it is the old fear of the super natural. Modern people worry that they are somehow at odds with nature and at some point, nature will get mad about it. The fact that the science is beyond anyone’s comprehension makes it more scary.

The religious angle to climate change is easy to see for those who have read the Hebrew Bible or had some religious training. We stopped teaching religion in public schools and church attendance has been dropping for years, so most modern people are ignorant to the religious aspects to climate change. Al Gore, for example, had some sort of nervous breakdown in the 2000 campaign. After a trip into the wilderness, he recovered and returned as the Prophet Al to warn the public about God’s pending wrath.

If you had read the Old Testament, you saw it right away. No one in our ruling elites attends mass or has religious training so it was lost on them. Gore went to divinity school, so  he may have done this on purpose, but it is entirely possible he does not know he is playing the role of Old Testament prophet. The fact that he made a few hundred million from this crusade suggests it is an act, but Gore never showed himself to be a grifter in the past. He’s always been a fanatic and he happened to hit it big this time.

What the Europeans are doing is a bit different. They abandoned Christianity a long time ago. Instead they threw their lot in with secular religions that promised earthly salvation, without the sacrifice demanded by the supernatural. Communism, fascism and socialism are nothing more than attempts to immanentize the eschaton. That is, arrange things in such a way to bring about plenty and relieve suffering. They still believed. It’s just a question of what they believe. Now it is a modern form of nature worship.

Of course, people who think the planet is plotting against them are not optimistic about the future. That’s why fertility rates have plummeted all over Europe. Many countries are actively recruiting Muslims to settle in their lands and wipe out their culture. of course, there is the endless quest to make materialism fill the void where Christianity once existed in the hearts of Europeans. The result is a vicious cycle, where the more they embrace neo-pagan religions, the more they dread the future and hate their past.

These new gods will not be appeased.

In China Everything Is Fake

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One of the weird things you see in illicit drug markets,  is the intolerance for a specific form of fraud. Just about anything goes in the drug game, except for fake drugs. If a dealer gets caught passing off baby laxative as cocaine, he is going to be dead. It is not just that he ripped off his customers. It’s that he cheats his fellow drug dealers. The guy selling fake stuff raises everyone’s costs and risks. The faker gives everyone a bad name.

It is one of those truth about the marketplace that everyone just accepts. No matter how rough the trade, every deal is based on trust. It’s why pawn shops willingly cooperate with the police to counter theft for similar reasons. Their customers are not going to solicit a business that supports burglary. Antique dealers try to uncover fakes as it undercuts their business. Why spend big money on an original when you can get a fake?

None of these measures stop the fakers, of course, but part of every organic market is an organic mechanism to police the market. Counter-intuitively, highly distributed markets can do this better than centralized markets. It’s why industries like music and movies lobby the state to crack down on forgers. Unlike the drug dealer, the record company cannot kill a downloader. Hollywood cannot go around breaking skull in movie theaters when they catch a guy pirating a film. They turn to government for that.

There is a vast middle ground where most of us live and that’s where fakers can cause the most trouble. For example, a site like National Review will post something like this in their article queue. It is not an article, but an advertisement dressed up to look like an article. National Review agrees to place ads like this in their article queue in order to trick people into clicking on the link, thinking it is legitimate content.

Magazines now have multi-page advertisements made up to look just like one of their normal stories. Even more strange is the ad in question here is itself full of fake stuff. The whole xenoestrogen stuff is largely nonsense, at least as it relates to organic food. Plants have all sorts of tricks to ward off pests. That’s just one of the many ways life has evolved over millions of years. Calling something organic has come to mean “good” and in morally good, but it is important to remember that cobras are organic too.

Putting that aside, this is deception. it is just as much a forgery as the guy printing fame art or selling fake drugs. The market place for ideas is a marketplace like the drug trade or the art trade. It relied on the participants acting in good faith and maintaining a high level of intolerance for fraud. When the creators of the market for conservative ideas are embracing wholesale fakery, it calls their integrity into question.  In the case of conservatives, it simply confirms what everyone has suspected for a long time.

It does not stop there. According to this story in the Economist, academic papers are also being forged. The market for fake term papers is well developed. Even before the internet, there was a market for term papers, and essays among undergraduates. Today, the internet makes it a thriving market, so colleges now employ software to combat it. You can probably outsource your thesis if you are so inclined. Since few of them are every read, who’s going to notice if your thesis is mostly recycled from prior work?

To no one’s surprise, the epicenter of this new fraud is China. There’s always been an embrace of banditry among the Chinese.  We get the term “sand bag” from China. In the colonial days, Chinese tea merchants would put sandbags at the bottom of casks to defraud the British. It is a bandit culture with no history of integrity. There are companies that have to use special coding on their boxes to distinguish their product from the fakes, as the Chinese will fake even the most mundane things.

Like the fake news story, fake research has a terrible trade off. If no one can tell the real stories in a magazine from the ads, people stop buying the magazine. If we can no longer distinguish real research from fake stuff from China, we no longer do research because no one can trust it. This is the great challenge to the West posed by China. If they are to remain a part of the developed world, they have to play by Western rules regarding fraud and theft. If they can’t do that, then they have to be isolated and excluded.

That’s not so easy when China can offer Western counties access to a billion cheap workers and unlimited ecological degradation. Making batteries in China is cheaper than making them in California, because the Chinese government does not care if the workers die and the land is poisoned. The battery maker is willing to tolerate some theft, but can the rest of us tolerate it?  Is that a good trade? What’s good for business is not always what’s good for society. Otherwise, we would still have slavery.

Magical Food Thinking

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Food fetches always seem to be a part of various types of cults. Sex is another thing that is common, but food is almost a universal in cults. The ancients had all sorts of dietary rituals tied to piety. The first known vegans were in Ancient Greece. Pythagoras was a zealous vegan, believing it was beneficial in all sorts of ways.  He would fit right in with the modern vegans of today. The Jews, of course, still have weird food rules, as part of their cult. Until recently, Christians had rules on what to eat when it could be eaten.

Today, the food fetish is mostly a thing for Progressives, which is another reason ti is a religion, rather than an ideology. There are vegetarians and vegans, but those are not all that popular on the on the Left. instead, being a foodie is the thing. This is a very feminine thing, as the act of enjoying food becomes a performance that is supposed to draw attention to the eater. Women are always posting pics of themselves drinking wine or having some exotic meal. Women love seeing themselves eating and drinking.

Then there is the food fetish by proxy, where liberal women demand their kids eat certain things or not eat certain things. Kids are calorie burning machines yet the scolds are trying to make them eat like an Ethiopian. Worse, they don’t want them eating meat or fat and instead give them carb laden diets. While you can pretty much feed kids anything not poisonous, growing bodies should have plenty of protein and fat. The former is integral to muscle growth and the latter is a source of energy. People used to know this.

Instead we see the opposite as the the food crazies are convinced that only through self-denial and even self-punishment can one be truly pure. There’s no science to back up any of it. In fact, the science points in the opposite direction. Low fat, high carb diets are not healthy at all. Low carb diets are not just beneficial, but more in line with our body’s food processing systems. Again, for kids, volume is what matters, along with plenty of physical activity, but if you going to skip anything, it is the carbohydrates.

On the other side of the coin, we get rants from people in favor of all sorts of extreme diets that are supposed to purify the soul. A lot of this is what gym rats call bro-science, but people want to believe in simple miracles. This stuff is not entirely without foundation, but the people pushing ti sound like evangelists. It’s not just about losing weight or maintaining a healthy diet. Being “keto” or some other regimen is supposed to indicate a purity of mind and good character, form dietary discipline.

People also want to believe their food is out to get them.The bread allergy stuff is a great example. A whole pseudo-science has built up around the gluten free fad, where people swear they gave up bread and their suddenly changed for the better. The reason people feel better when they cut out bread is they eat less. The reason for that is carbs burn quickly, so you eat more, because you are hungry more often. it’s why people always complain about being hungry after eating Chinese food.

The whole gluten free fad is looking a lot like a food racket, just like the organic food business. Neither are new. Big Food turned their waste product into margarine, when people were suddenly sure butter was bad for their heart. When preliminary data from the Framingham study seemed to show a link between high fat diets, high cholesterol and heart disease, Big Food was right there to cash in on it. There’s not a lot of margin in food production, so they are always looking for a way to sacralize the product.

Another funny thing about food fetishes is the current aversion to counting calories. It used to be an article of faith that the only wya to lose weight was to count calories. My mother was always writing down what she ate and looking through a calorie guide to avoid over eating. It was a nice hobby for her. Today, the food zealots rail against it as if it oogily-boogily from a primitive era. The fact is, counting calories will work, but most people today can’t handle that much reality, so they prefer the new oogily-boogily over the old.

Uncreative Destruction

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Libertarians and conservatives love tossing out Schumpeter’s gale, the observation that new stuff destroys and replaces old stuff. The automobile destroyed the buggy whip business, but created whole new industries for the repair of cars. That’s fine and largely true, but Marx, from whom Schumpeter stole the idea, was also right. Capitalism will, if allowed to operate unfettered, destroy itself. It’s why Buckley said “The trouble with socialism is socialism. The trouble with capitalism is capitalists.”

We are seeing this maybe in the cable TV business. Every home in America has cable or satellite now. There’s no growth in that business. The cable companies and content providers are trying to wring out more money by raising fees and charging more for the product. The response is people cutting the cord. News reports claim that the number of homes dropping TV has gone from under two million to over five million in the last few years. I know a few people who have pulled the plug. I’m considering it.

Some like to argue that the new services are driving the cord cutting. Why pay for cable when you can get Hulu or Amazon? Well, those services are pretty crude, so it’s unlikely that they are driving the trend. Instead, it is people responding to the declining quality and rising cost of cable television. There’s also a cultural element. If you are white, television is now an endless assault on your dignity and patience. You can only be called a racist for so long before you accept it and turn off the television.

The reason you need government to prevent consolidation in the marketplace is to not only protect customers, but to protect markets. In the case of natural monopolies, like power and gas, the state has to provide the role the market would play in setting prices and protecting consumer rights. By allowing cable companies to bundle channels and monopolize whole areas of the country, the cable business is in trouble. In other words, the market needs to be protected from itself in order to survive.

Another area where uncreative destruction is creeping into the discussion is cell phones. This is a huge scam based on cheap credit. That iPhone really costs something like $800, but the phone company finances it over the two year contract. With the juice you pay $1500 a year to send pointless texts to friends. You also get to carry around a devise that tracks your every movement and sells that data to marketing companies who beam ads back to that phone.This is good for Apple and Google, but very bad for you.

Some call this late stage capitalism, but I think they just think the term sounds clever, so they say it without thinking about it. In reality, this is late stage democracy. Once the voter rolls expand to cove all adults, the system becomes a bust-out. The elected officials no longer care about voters or public good. They are hired men paid for by a donor class who controls politics, by controlling the parties. It’s not an accident that politicians that lose election end up in cushy six figure jobs as lobbyist and consultants.

Sports Radio IQ

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For a long time I did cognitive testing for companies evaluating applicants and current employees. Modern people associate this sort of thing with evil Nazis who view humans the same way farmers look at their livestock. That said, there is a strain of this in the human sciences that dates back to the the Efficiency Movement. The industrial revolution did result in the widespread believe that technology and science could improve the stock of human capital, often by eliminating the stupid and dangerous.

That said, the work I was doing had nothing to do with eugenics or genocide. It was about evaluating employees and applicants with regards to fit within the firm. The idea was to create profiles of the various roles in the company. Everyone including senior managers were tested and then a profile was created for each area. There was the marketing profile, for example, which was used to assess sales applicants. The closer some one was to the ideal profile, the better the fit. It was not determinate, just another evaluation tool.

One of the things I eventually learned is that management often selected against people with a high IQ, particularly for certain sales and management roles. It was just assumed, for example, that a super smart person would be unsatisfied in a sales position, unless the position requires problems solving. Managers looked for simple minded, but outgoing people to sell commodities. For technical sales or sales engineer positions, problem solving was more important than personal skills or aggressiveness.

In other words, before testing, people naturally arrived at some rather sensible assumptions about human behavior. A guy with a high IQ is going to go mad sitting ina  toll booth eight hours a day. On the other hand, he can work out fine in a position where he can kill hours reading a book, while waiting for some process to run. Einstein famously worked in a patent office. Faulkner wrote at least one novel working in a boiler room, as a maintenance man. He wrote while waiting for alarms to ring, telling him to do something.

Certain professions certainly seem like they are better served by a certain kind of stupid person. I was listening to sports talk radio the other day and they were discussing Tim Tebow and it was the usual blather. They wanted dumb sports fans to call in and say bad things about Tebow. When the callers did not materialize, the jabbering sports jocks filled the void by saying stupid things. It occurred to me that being a sports talk radio person requires a combination of stupidity and a misplaced sense of self.

In other words, the good sports radio guy is not very bright, but he is sure he is smarter than the callers, which may be true, but the differences are small at that level. Yet, the people running the sows think they are brilliant. it’s possible that the callers think the exact opposite, that they are the smart ones and the radio guy is the dummy. The bulk of the listeners tune in to hear dumb people argue about sports. If the sports jock was smarter and more self-aware, the whole thing falls apart and is no longer fun for the rest of us.

It is assumed that stupid people fill menial jobs like carrying stuff, picking fruit and stocking shelves. It is further assumed that robots will replace these people and we will have a population of idle nitwits. The truth is, the demand for stupid people may be much higher and their roles may be more difficult to replace. If the robot future also comes with a eugenic component, the result may be fewer middling IQ people, rather than fewer dumb people. The bell curve may be inverted, so it is the smart leading the very dumb.