Monthly Archives: March 2015

Looking Up From The Ghetto

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I used to think that the fraying of American society was due to the elites letting down on their responsibilities as elites. For instance, rich people used to discourage divorce through the law and through public morality. The rich, of course, could afford to get divorced, but they did not promote it. Divorce was seen a failure for a man, which is why FDR stuck with his lesbian wife, rather than divorce her. It was a burden elites were expected to bear in order maintain order amongst the lower classes.

The 1960’s is when things changed. Elites not only stopped enforcing the old codes, they actively promoted every sort of deviancy they practiced in private. Divorce was now a moral imperative of a liberated woman. Black men were encouraged to take drugs, abandon their families and live like animals in the streets. The resulting anarchy was both predictable and sudden. Whole cities collapsed as the poor went bonkers and the middle-classes fled in terror.

I never throught of it as intentional. It just seemed to me that it was the confluence of two trends in America. One is the spread of Frankfurt School philosophy that has enraptured the intellectual class of America. The people in charge swapped out Christianity for Cultural Marxism, as their organizing creed. The other trend was a rapid advance in the nation’s material wealth following the war. America was suddenly crazy rich and like lottery winners, we indulged in all our worst fantasies.

I was at the market today, my Sunday ritual. I do my shopping at the rich man’s grocer, rather than the stores serving the ghetto. I cook my own meals and therefore prefer fresh meats and produce. Ghetto Lion, for example, has mostly prepared foods that are popular with ghetto dwellers. Anyway, at the checkout, a dough-faced fat girl with a pin in her nose address me with “wassup.”

I’m led to believe that the pin in her nose signals her availability to black men. Almost always, the pram-faced girls in the ghetto have caramel colored kids, along with the nose pin. Perhaps it is a coincidence. Her sing-songy language told me she was a ghetto girl. White people talking black always sound odd to me. It’s like hearing a Chinese guy speak Spanish. There’s something unnatural about it. I speak some ghetto so we got along fine enough as she rang up my purchases.

it got me thinking about how it is this lower-class white girl has decided to adopt this way of life. We’re told that racism is for the lower classes. Only rubes engage in it. All decent people avoid ever saying or doing anything that could offend a black person. It’s fair to say it is a national obsession. Yet, the greatest mixing of race in America occurs in the ghetto, not the country club. The poor have become truly multicultural.

I used to think that the collapse of the working class into an underclass was mostly due to the welfare state and maybe just general degeneracy. Thinking about pram-face on the way home, I think the poor are no different today than in another era. They are aping what they see the rich and famous do on TV. In another era. lace curtain Irish aped the ways of the Brahman class. That meant putting on airs and acting like the rich people they saw in their community. There was a pulling up by the upper classes.

Today, the elites preach one thing, but live another. On television they preach about the evils of racism and the need to worship black culture. In private life they live like a blend of Victorians and the Ku Klux Klan. In public they rail about Ferguson. In private they engage in ethnic cleansing to make NYC and San Fran whites only enclaves for liberal elites. The lower classes never see the reality, just the show, and they act accordingly.

This being the 50 anniversary of yet another Civil Rights event, the NYTimes has been sending out hundreds of tweets about it. Obama has made a trip to Selma Alabama, a once thriving community now decimated after the Civil Rights Movement. Millionaire former soldier, Colin Powell, is on television moaning about racism on TV this weekend, despite never having experienced meaningful prejudice in his life. If you are the 85 IQ checkout girl at my market, you can be forgiven for thinking that worshiping black people is what the beautiful people do.

We’re all hypocrites, of course, but not all hypocrites are the same. The private prude that preaches public lasciviousness, is consciously doing harm. The public scold who engages in private vice harms only himself. Post-reality America is society run by the former. A ruling elite that makes war on that which allows it be an elite has a short future.

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.

And the Loop is Closed

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When the Tea Party got going, a lot of people thought this was it. The normal people of America were going to first wrestle the GOP away from the donor class and then use it to wrestle the country back from the lunatics. I recall seeing a guy walking around my office building wearing a little tea bag lapel pin. He was typical. An older and less vibrant fellow, properly aware of his  own backpack of privilege, but rightly concerned with all the vibrancy going on around him, or whatever.

Those were heady days and all for naught. The bipartisan fusion party has carried the day.

Tea Party Republicans contemplating a bid to oust Rep. John Boehner (R-Ohio) shouldn’t count on Democrats to help them unseat the Speaker.

And without their support, there is no chance to topple Boehner in this Congress.

A number of right-wing Republicans, long wary of Boehner’s commitment to GOP efforts attacking President Obama’s policy priorities, have openly considered a coup in an attempt to transfer the gavel into more conservative hands.

But Democrats from across an ideological spectrum say they’d rather see Boehner remain atop the House than replace him with a more conservative Speaker who would almost certainly be less willing to reach across the aisle in search of compromise. Replacing him with a Tea Party Speaker, they say, would only bring the legislative process — already limping along — to a screeching halt.

I love that line, “Democrats from across an ideological spectrum.” Yeah, all those pro-life, families values Democrats are making a difference.

“I’d probably vote for Boehner [because] who the hell is going to replace him? [Ted] Yoho?” Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) said Wednesday, referencing the Florida Tea Party Republican who’s fought Boehner on a host of bipartisan compromise bills.

“In terms of the institution, I would rather have John Boehner as the Speaker than some of these characters who came here thinking that they’re going to change the world,” Pascrell added.

Liberal Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.) agreed that, for Democrats, replacing Boehner could lead to a worse situation.

“Then we would get Scalise or somebody? Geez, come on,” said Grijalva, who referenced House Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.). “We can be suicidal but not stupid.”

Boehner, who has grappled with dissent from the Tea Party wing since he took the Speaker’s gavel in 2011, has seen opposition to his reign grow this year, even as he commands the largest GOP majority since the Hoover administration.

That’s led to talk of a new coup, something that is more difficult to pull off after the election of a Speaker on each Congress’s first day of business.

Any lawmaker can file a motion to “vacate” a sitting Speaker, a move that would force a vote of the full House. The effort would almost certainly fail, as the conservatives would need the overwhelming support of Democrats to win a majority. But it would be an embarrassing setback to Boehner and his leadership team, who entered the year hoping their commanding new majority would alleviate some of the whipping problems that had plagued them in the past.

The new push back against Boehner began in the earliest stages of the new Congress when 25 conservatives voted in January to strip him of the Speaker’s gavel.

Boehner’s troubles have only mounted since then, as conservatives have thwarted a number of his early legislative priorities, including a border security bill, an anti-abortion measure and a proposal to limit the federal government’s role in public education — all considered by GOP leaders to be easy-pass bills that would highlight their new power in Obama’s final two years in the White House.

More recently, Boehner’s decision this week to pass a “clean” bill funding the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has exacerbated conservatives’ concerns about his leadership.

As proof of the discontent, 167 Republicans bucked their leadership by opposing the DHS package. Their votes protested Boehner’s move to strip out provisions undoing Obama’s executive actions shielding millions of immigrants living illegally in the U.S. from deportation.

Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) called Boehner’s capitulation “a sad day for America.”

“If we aren’t going to fight now, when are we going to fight?” he said Tuesday just before the vote.

Every Democrat joined 75 Republicans in passing the bill.

In the midst of that debate, a number of Tea Party Republicans warned that they’d consider an attempt to topple Boehner if he caved to Obama’s demand for a clean DHS bill.

“If it happened, conservatives would be outraged,” said one such conservative who voted against Boehner in January. The lawmaker predicted that the coup attempt might not come immediately but warned the Speaker, “It’s a long year.”

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), chairman of the conservative Freedom Caucus and a critic of Boehner’s legislative moves, said recently that no coup is in the works.

“That’s not the point,” Jordan said on CNN’s “State of the Union” program. “The point is to do what we told the voters we were going to do and do it in a way that’s consistent with the United States Constitution.”

Citing Jordan’s comments, top Democrats have punted on the question of whether they would support a coup. Rep. Steny Hoyer (Md.), the Democratic whip, acknowledged that there are “some disgruntled people who are talking about it,” but predicted that no such effort will materialize.

“If Jordan’s not talking about — he’s the head of the Freedom Caucus — it’s not going to happen,” Hoyer said this week.

The casual way in which the Democrats discuss GOP party politics is the big story here. It never goes the other way. The Liberal Democrats are a black box. No one knows what’s going on in their deep state. But, the GOP is an open book because they are essentially the straight man in this show. They are the Washington Generals to the Democrats Harlem Globetrotters. Theirs is a is a supporting role.

We’ve seen this across Europe. The countries in deep trouble has seen their main parties just about fuse into one. In Britain, the Tories are in government with the Liberal Democrats, allegedly their ideological opposite. The result is every election gets the same result. In America, giving the GOP control of Congress has changed nothing. Voters can be forgiven if they might conclude it was all a big scam.

It’s Always About Money With The Left

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I’m fond of pointing out that the Left has a strange and predictable opposite rule of rhetoric. Whatever they are accusing the bogeyman of doing, you can almost always be sure it is the exact opposite of the truth. In almost all cases, the thing they are accusing the bogeyman of doing is what they are currently doing. It is a wonderful bit of deception and a great group adaptation. While the non-believers are examining the bogeyman’s actions, the Left gets to operate unfettered. Shifting the focus is one of those individual traits that scales up very well.

So it is with the Left and foreign policy. They are always accusing the neo-cons or the plain old regular cons of trading blood for something, like oil. Iraq was allegedly about oil. Afghanistan was about Halliburton and the defense industry. A lot of time was spent examining these claims only to learn that it was ideology and sloppy reasoning, not money, at the root of these adventures. The Bush people really thought they were spreading democracy.

The Cuba deal, on the other hand, was a pure money play. Obama’s money men see opportunity in Cuba. It may be a poor country, but it can be a resort colony, medical colony for health care tourists and a source of cheap labor. To the average America, Cuba is a wart on the face of humanity and should be allowed to sink into the sea. In other words, the Right is motivated by morality, while for the Left, Cuba is just another place to feed.

The pending Iran deal is similarly about money. The usual suspects on the professional Right are trying to make it about Obama the Muslim or Obama the Jew-hater. Obama is most certainly pro-Muslim and he hates Jews, but that’s not what it is about. It is about money. I have a friend in the region who works in the oil and gas sector. He reports that American firms are sending top level delegations to Tehran in anticipation of a deal. The head of Ceva Logistics was just in Iran trying to cut a deal. They are a prime for Halliburton and Schlumberger.

The American Left is not Marxist. That strain died out in the 50’s. As David Horowitz has explained in great detail, the modern Left rejected the old commies early on as has-beens and opportunists. The modern American Left is very comfortable with global capitalism. They made their peace with it in the late 80’s and have since evolved into a movement Mussolini would easily recognize and envy. In some respects, the Clintons get away with their shenanigans because their coevals envy their prowess. Obama and the Wookiee hope to follow their model and become super-rich after his term in office is complete.

This sort of cynical self-dealing has its limits. In the banana republics, it usually ends in a bloodbath. In a nuclear world, a bloodbath is a good result. Sane people who follow Iran think the rulers truly believe their rhetoric. The Iranian mullahs think they are ushering in the end times and they will be triumphant in the final great clash. Maybe they don’t. Maybe they just say all that stuff because they think they have to keep up appearances, like American politicians wearing flag lapel pins. No one can know, but it is a big risk for a little cash.

Thoughts on Millennials

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When I was a young man, we used to hunt the mammoth and pray to the sky gods for guidance and forgiveness. When not doing that, we were trying to find our way in the world. I was not much different from my coevals in that I had no patience for the lectures of old men about how I should live my life. That did not mean I thought they were mistaken. It’s just that I wanted to drink liquor and chase women, even knowing that it would lead to a bad end. Life is for living.

Of course, I was a knucklehead who thought he knew more than he did about most things. Again, that just means I was like everyone else my age. I always appreciated, however, when adults treated me as an equal. I never liked to be patronized. As I grew older, I tried hard to never patronize young adults. I figured if I hated it, I should not do it. That’s worked pretty well. In the rare cases when a young person has asked for advice, I was happy to offer what I could. Otherwise, I avoid playing the old man card.

The point here is that I like to joke around about being the Clint Eastwood character from Gran Torino, but I am pretty much the opposite of that guy. I don’t look my age, I sure as hell don’t act my age and most important, I don’t think anyone should act their age. Live your life as you see fit and enjoy your time. It goes by quickly and you never have enough of it. Letting others tell you how to live is a sure way to not live and, life if for living.

That’s the Tao of Z.

That said, I do think the millennials are a departure from American culture. They were raised in the communications revolution. They were educated in schools awash in Cultural Marxism. They have never known tough times as the economy has been relatively strong for thirty years. Yeah, young people have record unemployment and many still live with mom, but there’s zero pressure on them to get a job and move out of the basement. As with so much else, that’s different with the millennials versus everyone who came before them.

What got me thinking about this is a post by Razib Kahn the other day that had me laughing. Kahn is a super smart guy and very serious young man. His choice of subject matter may be why I forget he is so young. But, the sacramentalizing of the iPhone is one of those generational markers that jumps out at me. If you think it was an inflection point in human evolution, you’re a millennial. If you once owned a Palm, you’re not. If you once owned a Merlin then you’re probably near death or should be or whatever.

Anyway, it got me thinking about millennials a bit this week. Last summer I did a post on millennials, but it is not a subject I write about very much, beyond the wise crack here or there. What sprung to mind reading Razib’s post is that millennials appear to have adopted the Left’s non-linear sense of time. Some past events are talked about as if they just happened, while other recent events are treated as if they happened in the Middle Ages. In other words, events are not sorted on a time line. Instead, positional relevance on the time line is driven by emotional awareness. The iPhone looms large so it just happened. The iPod is irrelevant so it was like a million years ago.

It’s easy to write this off to solipsism, and there’s a fair bit of that. This is a generation raised in front of a mirror, but it also the first generation to be thoroughly immersed in Cultural Marxism. There we see the non-liner timeline as an integral part of ideology. Vast parts of the timeline and its events simply disappear, while other events, those of importance to the movement, are talked about with the same emotional zeal as if they happened yesterday. Events are positioned on the time by emotional relevance. I wonder if millennials have internalized this as a habit of mind.

Something else I see is a strange need for validation. Again, I suspect this is a product of the schools. It’s easy to forget that schools changed a great deal starting in the 70’s when the Boomers started taking up spots in education. The modern school looks a lot like what the Soviets or Chinese practiced. The teacher is elevated to the level of moral and spiritual guide. In China, teachers are often treated as minor deities. In the Soviet system, the teacher was also an ideological guide to make sure the pupils were coming up in the orthodoxy.

The result is a student that is focused on the pat on the head and the gold star. Learning the material for personal satisfaction is irrelevant when everything is judged in relation to the teacher’s affection. I saw this at Yale a few years back. The grad students looked at an old person like me as someone to preen for in search of that pat on the head. It was very weird and I just wrote it off to Ivy League social skills, but I now think it is a generational thing. Millennials are a generation of suck-ups.

The flip side of that is a fear of being judged. In fact, millennials seem to obsess over judgements. In that Razib post there’s a comment using the magic phrase “value-laden.” That’s an abracadabra phrase for young people. Again, this goes to the immersion in Cultural Marxism. Noticing differences is treated as a a mortal sin. Therefore, anything that even hints at comparison causes sphincters to knot up, thus making value-laden words and phrases taboo.

Finally and related to the allergy to comparison is the nasty response to anything resembling a slight. This also touches on the validation thing. In royal courts and petty dictatorships, like the classroom, one’s rise to the top is really a rise to number two. No matter how smart and capable, you are not going to be king. Similarly, the best student will never be the teacher. Therefore, there are no winners, just degrees of loser. The guy closest to the top is just less of a loser than his rivals.

The result is a eery lack of empathy. Business people I know report that dealing with millennials as a vendor is strange and often unpleasant. You do a favor for them and they feel no obligation to return the favor. At the same time, they expect you to do them favors. I know a few business people who have dropped accounts because they find dealing with a 30-year old sociopath intolerable. Anecdotes are not data, but that Navy paper alludes to this as well. Transactional relationships are no way to build a society at least not one that can maintain large scale organization.

That Navy paper suggests the institutions of America will have to adapt. That’s probably true, but I wonder if it is entirely possible. A society of ruthless attention seekers sounds pretty awful. A nation of transactional people with little empathy for one another is going to need something else to prevent it from descending into madness. What that is, I don’t know, but that does not mean it does not exist. Maybe the millennials are the first generation to usher in the new era of humanity. The rest of us could be the Neanderthals of this age. Or, things will get much worse in the coming decades.

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.

The Doctor Shortage

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Imagine you are presented a few career options early in your life. The first option is one that will require years of study and a high IQ. You possess a high IQ, but there is some risk that yours is not high enough. You cannot know until you get far along in the process. The eventual end point of the process is a career that may be spiritually fulfilling, but has decreasing social status and only an above average salary. In other words, by mid-life you can have a big house, the sports car and the trophy wife, but you’re going to spend more than a decade slaving away in poverty.

That’s option #1.

The next option is one that requires about half the study time as the first option and far less of an apprenticeship. You have to be smart, but not genius level smart. Standard test scores will tell you if you have what it takes to make it in this path. By the time you have established yourself, you will surely make an upper-middle class income and could easily be making much more. It’s a high status job and a lot of fun, but not spiritually fulfilling. It just lets you live a 2% lifestyle and get going at it by the time you’re in your middle twenties..

That’s option #2.

Now, we have the final choice. This is path that does not necessarily require a high IQ, but it helps. There’s really no way to wash out so you go as far as your skills will take you. It is never going to be high paying or high status, but you can have a nice middle class income. There will be times when you have to scrimp and save. You will have to do without some things. But, the spiritual and psychic rewards are limitless. This career will be your sanctuary from the world and bring you a lifetime of happiness.

This is option #3.

In medieval times, these options would have been the choice between a high ranking clergyman, an aristocratic soldier and a monk. That’s if you were born with magic blood. Nobles had these choices, but even then the choices were often made for you by the patriarch or by circumstance. If you were born a commoner, then you spent your life harvesting filth and complaining about the violence inherent in the system. But, we live in an era in which there is still some effort to try and scoop up the talented from the lower orders.

That means young men and women take standardized tests so colleges and universities can begin to sort out who is and who is not managerial class potential. We’ve not yet reached the point where career paths are assigned and that may never happen as it is contradicts the interests of the managerial class, who pride themselves on being a self-selected meritocracy. Choosing your own path is a big part of their class identity so that is something that will likely remain a feature of their ideology.

The question then, getting back to where we started, is which of the three choices would most people choose. In modern times, physician is clearly option #1. Advancing far in the medical rackets requires a high IQ, a long time in school and a very long and unpleasant apprenticeship. The reward at the end is pretty good, but no better than option #2. In fact, bankers and banker’s lawyers usually make vastly more than comparable doctors. It is only at the low-end do we see doctors and nurse practitioners compete economically with lawyers and brokers. At the high end, no doctor can compete with a VP at Goldman.

The final option is the lifestyle option. You’re a smart guy from a good family, but you like smoking weed and surfing so you open a surf shop. Alternatively, you have what it takes for the first two options, but have a passion for some new business that is many years from taking off, but you’re going to be on the cutting edge, even if it means a long struggle. Think Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream or custom bike frame makers. There are, of course, trust fund types who have the money to be as weird as they like. John Heinz IV is a blacksmith and Buddhist.

That brings us back to those first two options. We have made becoming a doctor impossibly difficult. Worse yet, we have made it unrewarding. Socialized medicine has this habit. The result is the native talent opts for the second option. Being a hotshot lawyer is just an all-around better  life than being a doctor. It’s why share holder meetings are packed with attorneys now. In the fifties, they were packed with doctors. In Britain, a quarter of physicians are foreigners. Not foreign born, but foreigners.

The same is happening in the US.

The United States faces a shortage of as many as 90,000 physicians by 2025, including a critical need for specialists to treat an aging population that will increasingly live with chronic disease, the association that represents medical schools and teaching hospitals reported Tuesday.

The nation’s shortage of primary care physicians has received considerable attention in recent years, but the Association of American Medical Colleges report predicts that the greatest shortfall, on a percentage basis, will be in the demand for surgeons — especially those who treat diseases more common to older people, such as cancer.

In addition to the growing and aging population, full implementation of the Affordable Care Act in all 50 states would increase demand for doctors as more people are covered by insurance. But Obamacare’s impact will be small — just 2 percent of the projected growth in demand, the organization said. The supply of doctors also will grow but not nearly as quickly as the need, officials said.

“An increasingly older, sicker population, as well as people living longer with chronic diseases, such as cancer, is the reason for the increased demand,” Darrell G. Kirch, the AAMC’s president and chief executive, told reporters during a telephone news briefing.

In the study of collapse, there are few fixed rules. The one thing on which everyone seems to agree is the ruling classes are no longer able to cope and adjust to changing circumstances. Why this happens is tough to fathom, but simply being wrong is a good starting point. The Athenians were wildly wrong about the Syracuse campaign, despite warnings from respectable members of society. Wrongness has inertia.

With regard to health care the majority of the managerial class is locked into 19th century ideas about how to micromanage an economy. No one in charge can imagine anything other than a micromanaged system so they deploy all available resources in the effort to perfect their system. The more they try to fix the system, the worse it gets. We’ve reached a point where the inputs result in unexpected outputs. A few more cycles and the inputs have no result. The system seizes up and then it collapses.

 

The Undoing of the Political Class

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I’m fond of pointing out that the Roman Republic began to crumble when the Roman elite stopped enforcing their own rules. It’s the broken windows theory of policing applied to the over-class. When the ruling elite is punctilious about its rules, customs and prerogatives, the system has low amounts of corruption. Once they start to let little things slide, then it is bigger things and before long it is a free-for-all, until the strong man crosses the Rubicon and imposes order.

Way back in the 90’s, we saw the erosion of the rules begin to gain momentum. The Clintons, exemplars of their generation, seemed to love lying and double dealing. Nothing is ever on the level with them and no deal is too small. The failure to crack down on their behavior has encouraged much more of it. The Obama administration makes Nixon look like a boy scout troop. Now we see that Hillary Clinton did on a grand scale what is about to send General Petraeus in prison.

The computer server that transmitted and received Hillary Rodham Clinton’s emails – on a private account she used exclusively for official business when she was secretary of state – traced back to an Internet service registered to her family’s home in Chappaqua, New York, according to Internet records reviewed by The Associated Press.

The highly unusual practice of a Cabinet-level official physically running her own email would have given Clinton, the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate, impressive control over limiting access to her message archives. It also would distinguish Clinton’s secretive email practices as far more sophisticated than some politicians, including Mitt Romney and Sarah Palin, who were caught conducting official business using free email services operated by Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc.

You see here why this will end badly for the country. The AP is a lunatic propaganda organ so they are looking to run interference for one of their own, even if they are not sure Clinton is one of them. What Clinton did is not “highly unusual.” It’s never happened in the history of the nation. This is an outlandish breech of the law and of custom. Further, Palin and Romney were never “caught conducting official business using free email services.” Their private accounts were illegally accessed liberal fanatics while they were private citizens. Comparing the two is an obvious attempt to explain away a crime.

Most Internet users rely on professional outside companies, such as Google Inc. or their own employers, for the behind-the-scenes complexities of managing their email communications. Government employees generally use servers run by federal agencies where they work.

In most cases, individuals who operate their own email servers are technical experts or users so concerned about issues of privacy and surveillance they take matters into their own hands. It was not immediately clear exactly where Clinton ran that computer system.

Clinton has not described her motivation for using a private email account –

hd***@cl**********.com











, which traced back to her own private email server registered under an apparent pseudonym – for official State Department business.

Operating her own server would have afforded Clinton additional legal opportunities to block government or private subpoenas in criminal, administrative or civil cases because her lawyers could object in court before being forced to turn over any emails. And since the Secret Service was guarding Clinton’s home, an email server there would have been well protected from theft or a physical hacking.

The professional Right is trying hard to explain this away, but there’s no getting around the obvious. Clinton was at the head of a conspiracy to circumvent disclosure laws, record keeping laws and Congressional oversight. The unwillingness of the political class to police their own will be their undoing. If Clinton gets away with this, what’s next? An off-the-books army? Banking system?

This will not end well.

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.

 

Compulsory Diversity

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One of my hobbyhorse issues is the erosion of the right of association. For as long as I’ve been alive, the right of association has been under steady and subtle assault. The ObamaCare legislation, for example, has all sorts of rules that make life more difficult for the religious to be religious by limiting association.

Businesses, for example, are required to pay for things that are against the religious beliefs of the owners. In effect, the owner is now required to hire people that hate him and he has to subsidize their efforts to destroy his religion. In a sane world he would simply refuse to hire people his religion found unacceptable.

But, it’s not just the crowding out of liberty that is the inevitable result of limits on association. We accept all sorts of limits on liberty as long as the trade-off is acceptable. Prohibitions on speech, for example, are welcomed by fee societies in order to buttress public morality. We don’t allow men to copulate with their sisters because we don’t want a bunch of pinheads running around. Public policy is about trade-offs and we often trade away a little freedom for something we find beneficial.

The big issue for me is the irrationality of ceding our right of association to a central authority. This case before the court is a good example.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. on Wednesday warned that “this is going to sound like a joke,” and then posed an unusual question about four hypothetical job applicants. If a Sikh man wears a turban, a Hasidic man wears a hat, a Muslim woman wears a hijab and a Catholic nun wears a habit, must employers recognize that their garb connotes faith — or should they assume, Justice Alito asked, that it is “a fashion statement”?

The question arose in a vigorous Supreme Court argument that explored religious stereotypes, employment discrimination and the symbolism of the Muslim head scarf known as the hijab, all arising from a 2008 encounter at Woodland Hills Mall in Tulsa, Okla.

Samantha Elauf, then 17, sought a job in a children’s clothing store owned by Abercrombie & Fitch. She wore a black head scarf but did not say why.

The company declined to hire her, saying her scarf clashed with the company’s dress code, which called for a “classic East Coast collegiate style.” The desired look, Justice Alito said, was that of “the mythical preppy.”

Ms. Elauf recalled the experience in a statement issued after the argument.

“When I applied for a position with Abercrombie Kids, I was a teenager who loved fashion,” she said. “I had worked in two other retail stores and was excited to work at the Abercrombie store. No one had ever told me that I could not wear a head scarf and sell clothing.”

“Then I learned I was not hired by Abercrombie because I wear a head scarf, which is a symbol of modesty in my Muslim faith,” she added. “This was shocking to me.”

Putting aside the fact this Muslim woman is a liar, why in the world should anyone be required to accommodate her religious beliefs? More important, why should this be a court matter? The court is wholly unequipped to adjudicate these matters. The judges are not businessmen and they have no way of knowing if this company’s dress code is good business. They have no way of knowing if this woman is just a nut causing trouble.

Ms. Elauf, now 24, works at an Urban Outfitters store in Tulsa. A spokeswoman for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which sued Abercrombie on her behalf, said Ms. Elauf was declining interview requests.

A spokesman for Abercrombie & Fitch, Michael Scheiner, said the company “has a longstanding commitment to diversity and inclusion, and consistent with the law has granted numerous religious accommodations when requested, including hijabs.”

The Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed sympathetic to Ms. Elauf’s position, which is that she should not have been required to make a specific request for a religious accommodation to wear a hijab. The company’s position is that it should not have been made to guess that Ms. Elauf wore a head scarf for religious reasons.

In response to Justice Alito’s question about the four hypothetical applicants, Shay Dvoretzky, a lawyer for the company, conceded that some kinds of religious dress presented harder questions, but he said the court should require applicants to raise the issue of religious accommodations.

Several justices suggested that an employer should simply describe its dress code and ask if it posed a problem. That would shift the burden to the applicant, they said. If the applicant then raised a religious objection, the employer would be required to offer an accommodation so long as it did not place an undue burden on the business.

This is the problem created by the state’s encroachment on our freedom of association. It turns all of us into lying weasels. Most American companies know that is not a great idea to hire Muslims to deal with the public. They should be able to not hire Muslims or Hindus or Gingers or whomever. Ms. Elauf would be faced with a choice. She can assimilate or head back to the home country. In other words, she would retain her freedom of association and the business would retain its right to hire as it sees fit.

Instead, the state tries to craft more and more laws to meet every possible condition. Assortativity, the natural inclination of human beings, therefore requires everyone to come up with clever ways to dodge the rules. In response, the state comes up with ever more rules that are often in conflict with other rules. We now live in a country where a Christian store owner is prohibited from exercising his religious inclinations, but must allow his employees to advertise their religious affiliations in his place of business. That’s simply madness.

That’s ultimately the problem with all of this. It is fundamentally at odds with human nature and it is riddled with internal contradictions. Worse yet, it fosters a subtle hostility between people, forced together against their will by rules that make no sense. As the saying goes, things that cannot last eventually end. In the case of crackpot social engineering schemes, the end tends to be very messy.