Travelogue: Airports and Stuff

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Travel challenges your assumptions about many things. People who have traveled a lot tend not to hold provincial ideas, for example. It’s hard to think your town is unique once you see that every other town is pretty much the same. It also gives you time to think and maybe look at things with a fresh set of eyes.

For instance, I was in the airports on Friday and I now think the greatest American alive is the guy who invented yoga pants. My goodness. I looked him up. His name is Ryan McLatchy and he is credited with the spread of this wonderful trend. May his descendants multiply and become many nations! It makes being a dirty old man so much better…

Anyway, the thing I was puzzling over was why terrorists target airlines and airplanes. In America, the place with the maximum amount of government and the least amount of freedom is the airport. Everyone is watched and filmed everywhere except the bathrooms. Even there, they film you on the way in and out.

Security people are constantly watching for anything out of the ordinary. They now have K-9 units sniffing passengers in the terminal. They also have security people randomly stopping people and asking them questions. I was stopped at Logan by a nice young fellow who politely asked me a series of questions about my life. This is a tactic used by El Al Airlines and others.

It seems to me that there are much better targets than airports, but for some reason the Muslims keep attacking them.

I think part of it could simply be habit. Back when the Muslims started making trouble in the 60’s and 70’s, airports were great targets. You had lots of people in small areas and the chance to make it on the world news. There were loads of strangers at the airport, so being out of place was not a big deal. A  Muslim wandering around with bad intentions was just another guy at the airport.

Obviously, security was not what it is today. If you wanted to do something big, an airport job was a great choice. That’s no longer true. In fact, it is the exact opposite. I’m a smart guy and I can do the security math. Getting passed the initial security check is not that hard, but all the random checks is where you leave things to chance and those odds are not great.

The other motivation, I suspect, is stupidity. A thousand generations of cousin marriage have not done the Mohammedan any favors. The regions where we see the bulk of the Muslim terrorists have mean IQ’s in the mid-80’s, which is at the bottom of the human family. Throw in the cultural and religious issues and you have some uncommonly stupid terrorists….

Airports are why libertarians and central planners should never be trusted. Five minutes at an airport shows you that people do not naturally self-organize. Left to our own devices, the mob gets out of control until someone imposes some discipline. People like order and expect it, which is why no one ever complains about signs telling you where to stand or where to go.

That’s obvious. What’s not always obvious is the general awfulness of central planners. Our airports should look nothing like they do and they should not be giant money pits, but they are and there’s nothing to be done about it. In the 1950’s the people who knew best designed the American airport system and we have to live with it.

That said, it is a miracle that we can live with it and do so quite easily. The reason air travel works so well in Europe and America, despite the volume and inefficiency, is the smart fraction. A dozen times I saw some low level types struggle to make something work, only to have a smart person come over and help them through it. Our world may be a house of cards, but we have a lot of people good at keeping it going…

That’s the difference. In places like sub-Saharan Africa, the smart fraction is tiny. There’s not enough of them to supervise the rest so the result is the wacky keystone cops quality to their public services. Socialism works only where you have enough smart people around to make it work, despite the infinite number of internal contradictions.

Reading about Greece while I was waiting around for planes, I kept hoping to see someone note that Greece is the way it is because it is full of Greeks. German-style socialism is simply never going to work in Greece, even at gunpoint. Western-style democracy will never work in Arab lands. Central planning results in horror when applied to big man cultures in Africa.

In the future, something historians and possibly archeologists will puzzle over is the strange mania for homogeneity that has swept western elites.  The demand that everything and everyone be the same in all places, in the name of diversity no less, is as close to mass insanity as you get and still remain functioning as societies.

Greece has no place in the Euro. For that matter, the Spanish and Italians have no place in the Frankish economic system either. Liberal trade, open borders with the rest of Europe and economic help when necessary should be enough to keep everyone happy. Instead, the European keep making war on their own history by demanding everyone be European….

Gluten Free Vegan Magic

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This goes up as I am cooking for a big party. I will be making three to four deep fried turkeys, the corresponding amount of side dishes, as well as appetizers and specialty items. I have been doing this on Super Bowl Sunday for decades now. There is a long and not terribly interesting origin story behind this tradition, but that is not important. The point is I have cooked for a large number of people many times over many years, and I have noticed some things about people and food that I thought would make a good post.

We live in the golden age of man when it comes to food. We have more than enough to feed all of us, even the poorest of us. We also have every variety of food imaginable. In addition to turkey, I will make an authentic Mexican dish with material from Mexico. I will have sides and appetizers with ingredients from around the world. Despite this bounty, everyone is now afraid of their food. Food allergies, moralizing and whack-a-doodle dietary fads has everyone looking at their plate with suspicion.

Back when this annual event started, it was easy to cook a bunch of food for a bunch of people. Besides the turkey and sides, we had beer and some store bought deserts. Then vegetarians started to show up followed by vegans. That meant adding dishes for people who do not eat meat and those who do not oppress their food, whatever the hell that means. Of course, beer was no longer enough so a variety of wines and cocktails were added to the menu. All of which came with a lecture from the food cultist about the morality and science of their new thing.

Recently everyone has become gluten free, swearing they have an allergy to bread. All those years stuffing cakes and sandwiches into their trap was part of some plot by big food to make them tubby. Statistically, I now have 25,000 friends. The reason is simple math. Science tells me that 0.2% of humans have the genetic defect for gluten intolerance.  I know at least 50 people claiming to have Celiac Disease. Divide 50 by .002 and you get 25,000. That or I have a lot of delusional friends.

The truth, of course, is bread has a lot of calories that the human body can use quickly. That is why humans make bread. It is a great way to feed a lot of people. The trouble comes when we eat too much and exercise too little. Modern humans simply do not get enough physical exercise for the amount of food they consume. When you stop eating bread, magically you reduce your calories and begin to lose weight. You lose weight so you feel better and more confident. That makes gluten evil, at least in the mind of the maniac.

My read on this faux-allergy stuff is it is mostly women. The yogurt makers have figured out how to capitalize on their psycho-somatic stomach discomfort by claiming “probiotics” are the cure. Slap a new label on the old yogurt, double the price and you have a whole new revenue stream for the Acme Yogurt Company. I wish I had thought of it.

That said, men have their own food superstitions these days. I know guys who swallow dozens of supplements every day, believing they are the key to losing weight, staying young, getting a boner, living forever, etc. If the label says good things with words containing “-trophic” then they will shell out fifty bucks for a bottle. The more made up words the better. I read some of these bottles and start laughing as the neologisms are usually nonsense.

Modern times are all about the search for the magic pill or the magic food. This site I added to the blog roll has a bunch of stuff on supplements. Most supplements like daily vitamins are a waste of money at best. Some have some benefit, depending upon your lifestyle. A few have real science behind them like fish oil and vitamin D. But knowing what real science is and what is nonsense not so easy. The linked site appears to get that and take a critical view of the research offered up by the pill makers. But I have not spent enough time there to know for sure so do not take my word for it.

That is the thing that I find fascinating. It is not just that we do not know that much about human dietary needs. It is that we have so much bad science floating around. My guess is there is more money in bogus studies that help sell miracle drugs than in studies that debunk them. The result is a mountain of junk science, burying the good science, if it even exists.

Maybe that is the point of all of this. Science is boring, but believing nonsense is fun. Believing that your cheeseburger is out to get you is more interesting than knowing you cannot live on cheeseburgers without getting fat. If your choice of food can also be a way to elevate yourself on the moral scale, then eating becomes more than a bodily function. It is an act of piety.

My own view is less grandiose. I eat a minimum of carbohydrates because otherwise I would weigh 300 pounds. I stick with poultry, eggs, and some dairy. That way I can eat tasty things, like eggs and bacon, without worrying about my weight. On the other hand, life is for living so having pizza once in a while or a bag of chips (crisps) is not going to kill me. If it does, so be it. At least I had fun with the time I had. That is the point of life. Use the time you have and enjoy it as much as possible. Hell is for people who denied themselves pleasures thinking it was their ticket to heaven.

Enjoy the big game and may your balls never go flat.

Double Reverse False Flag-a-Rooney

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I like what Ron Unz is doing to support the Dissident Right. Ron is very rich and very smart. He allegedly has an IQ over 200, but I have no way of knowing if that is true. Still, his business career supports the argument that he is an exceptionally bright man. Having super-smart people in your corner is almost always good. Having smart rich people in your corner is even better. Having smart, rich curious people is ideal.

That’s what strikes me about Unz. He is not doctrinaire, as far as I can tell. His site has all sorts of political and philosophical points of view. Steve Sailer is what we used to call the mainstream Right in the 1980’s. Noam Chomsky is a socialist circa 1968. It takes self-confidence and a high degree of curiosity to open the doors to such a wide range of opinion. It is something I try to cultivate in myself and therefore admire in others.

The thing you have to guard against, however, is falling for crackpot ideas with which you are unfamiliar. I’m a natural skeptic so this is much easier for me than most. My default assumption, when confronted by a new answer, is to assume that it must be wrong. I then set out to disprove it. I’m a natural puzzle solver so reverse engineering an idea or argument to see how it works is second nature. That wins me few friends, but it avoids stumbling into this sort of stuff I see on Ron’s site.

Philip Giraldi had a long career in the intelligence business as a CIA agent and later as a private dick for international clients. Therefore, his words carry an authority that most do not. He’s also a dedicated Israel hater. Here’s a quote from him:

“The Israeli government is a rogue regime by most international standards, engaging as it does in torture, arbitrary imprisonment, and continued occupation of territories seized by its military. Worse still, it has successfully manipulated my country, the United States, and has done terrible damage both to our political system and to the American people, a crime that I just cannot forgive, condone, or explain away. “

Giraldi’s opinion of Israel is popular in Europe and, obviously, dominant in the Middle East. Arabs, fond of conspiracy, have created an elaborate mythology around Israel, international Jewry, the United States and their own plight. Westerners, who spend long periods in Arab lands, tend to pick up this habit of mind, along with a suspicion of Israel. They often return home sounding like retired Nazis to American ears. Giraldi has a bit of that to him and I would assume it comes from many years posted abroad.

Regardless, his obsession with Israel borders on the pathological. To suggest, as he does in that post, that the Israelis were behind the Paris shooting is simply nuts. All of the evidence points to two unstable young men who probably spent too much time on-line fantasizing about being the great Arab warrior. It’s not al-Quaeda or the Mosad. It was two disaffected Muslims. Instead of shooting an aging rock star to win the heart of a woman, they shot up a newspaper to win a place with Allah. But, the conspiratorial mind can never accept such banal explanations.

In his essay In Search of Anti-Semitism Bill Buckley laid out the turf that lies between criticism of Israel and/or commentary about Jews and anti-Semitism. This has remained an unresolved dispute between various factions of the Right since it boiled over in the 1980’s. The result, in my view, is that the folks chased out of the mainstream Right over the issue of Israel have never gotten over it. Their non-personhood haunts them even after all these years. The result is a deep paranoia about Israel and their neo-con supporters on the American Right.

I think Giraldi’s paranoia about Israel is simply weird. Israel is a country that does what it can to advance its interest. If it were located in the heart of Europe, it would be a Hebrew Lichtenstein, a commercial center with a big Temple. Instead it is surrounded by Arabs and it must adjust to deal with them. Americans have a romantic view of Israel so that is reflected in our foreign policy. Israel does not exist to undermine America. It acts in its own interests as it views them.

Three Cheers for Death Taxes?

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I saw this the other day on Maggie’s Farm. I can’t recall how many times I have had debates with people over death taxes. Everyone is always shocked by my position on the issue. I guess it is just assumed that Progressives like inheritance taxes so anti-Progressives must be against them. That’s generally the assumption on all taxes and tax policy. Once again, we see how the Left’s hive mindedness shapes public discussion.

Taxes are necessary if you wish to have a government. Government is necessary if you wish to have a state. Even libertarians get this. The question is, what do you tax in order to fund government? The amount of taxing should always track the amount of spending. The great disaster of late 20th century American conservatism is the uncoupling of taxes from spending. The modern Right is just a different brand of liberal, offering a free lunch in exchange for a vote.

It seems to me that taxing the dead is a great way to fund the state. After all, the dead have few spending needs. They have no rights and no claims on the living. Taking the property of the dead is well within the traditions of western people so it’s not like we are breaking new ground. Throughout history, failure to properly name an heir meant your property was awarded to the state upon your death. To date, the dead have never petitioned their government for redress of death taxes.

The only snag is when it comes to property held in association with others, like a business or jointly held lands. If your business partner dies and the state takes ownership of his shares in the business, you now find yourself in partnership with the government against your will. Worse yet, the state could auction off that ownership stake and you end up out of business entirely. But, key-man polices have been around a long time so there’s a remedy.

A key-man policy is a type of insurance policy. If one partner dies, the policy pays off so that the other partner can acquire the shares of his partner from his estate. Putting that into law so that the state gets the insurance money rather than the company stock is not terribly difficult. It would protect the rights of the living without giving rights to the dead.

The thornier problem is property or a business sort of owned by a family. The patriarch builds up a company and has his kids join in the business. Before they are ready to gain a share of the business, the old man gets hit by a bus. There’s no insurance policy to cover the business so the tax obligations would wipe out the family business. Again, this could be addressed with minor changes in the law such that life insurance could cover this sort of calamity.

The only sensible objection, it seems to me is one of equity. The guy who works hard, saves his money and builds up a fortune ends up paying a greater tax than the bum who never bothered to save. Bill Gates, according to some, should have the right to give his great fortune to his children if he chooses. It should not be confiscated by the state.

There’s nothing to prevent Bill Gates from giving his fortune away. He would just have to do it while he is alive. If he wants to set his kid up with a billion dollar gift, that’s his choice. That option exists now. Whatever is left upon his death will go to the government. People have been doing this sort of planning for generations.

The counter to this is the modest, middle-class family cannot take advantage of these laws. The folks who have their wealth in their primary home, maybe a vacation spot and the family business cannot be expected to liquidate before death and give away their money. As a practical matter, it must be done at the time of death. At the risk of sounding callous, life is unfair like that sometimes. No tax is without its unfairness.

That’s the thing I come back to when it comes to the death tax. No one likes paying taxes. There is no tax scheme that makes everyone happy or everyone equally miserable. Every tax irks someone more than others. The dead have bigger problems than the disposition of their property so taxing them strikes me as the least harmful of the possible taxes.

Unlike most other taxes, death taxes have the benefit of breaking up large fortunes. Concentration of wealth is the number one enemy of civilization. There’s nothing wrong with someone getting fabulously rich through his own initiative. There’s an assumed link between the fortune and the talent. Inheriting a fortune and the power that comes with it is hitting the lottery. Worse yet, it subjects the rest of us to sortition, thus pegging the fate of society to the mating choices of the long since dead.

In conclusion, taxes are about paying for the current operations of government. The best taxes are those that retard the normal functioning of society the least. No one escapes death so taxing it will not get less of it. It’s not perfect, but no tax is perfect. It is the only tax that has any plausible social benefit.

 

Virtual Nuisance

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When I was a boy, the adult women were much more sensible than the corresponding women of today. Back then, the moms and aunts were in their late-20’s to mid-30’s and they struck me as the most practical adults in my world. They did all the work for family events so that’s probably why it seemed that way to me.

One of things I recall hearing as a kid was how a family weirdo “always had to get involved in stuff. “ As a kid this made no sense to me, but looking back on that time from the perspective of this time I get it. The weirdo in question was into causes. It was always something to do with poor people somewhere very far away. I think she was into some weird church too, but it was a long time ago.

I thought about that when this turned up in front of me the other day. I use one of my many fake Yahoo e-mail accounts for travel sites so I saw it when printing off travel documents. I clicked on the story because I foolishly thought that maybe someone was going to finally call bullshit on the college rape nonsense. I was wrong, of course.

The article is complete nonsense. The vibe that comes through suggests the author is struggling with mental illness. I looked her up and my suspicions were confirmed. As soon as the word “jezebel” comes up you know you’re either dealing with Bible study, Hebrew school or crazy people. Her twitter feed makes clear she is not one of the first two choices.

It used to be that women like Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy, the authoress of the Yahoo article, had to work hard to be “involved in stuff.” If she wanted to be a pest, she had to do it retail. That meant going to a public place and handing out mimeographed rants or making a nuisance of herself in some way. Airports were popular places for Moonies and Hare Krishna’s. I recall our family weirdo making a scene at the local grocery store once over something unknown to me.

It used to be that the mall in Washington was the weirdo bug light. Every weirdo with a cause showed up in DC and went to the mall to “make their voice heard.” Well, it seemed like every weirdo with a cause. If you walked from one end to the other, you would see just about every brand of nutter this country could muster. I used to know a guy, who had a scale for the degree of crazy on the Mall that day.

That’s no longer the case. Today, Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy can be a pest from her bedroom. She can sit around all day texting other lunatics about lunacies they share in common. They can coordinate their efforts and “make a difference.” Because they don’t have to worry about getting punched in the nose, they can be as vicious as they like. The technological revolution created the social justice warrior by breaking down the fences society had used to keep the nuts penned up.

I don’t have answer for this. My sense is technology has turned 50,000 years of evolution against itself. For as long as man has been man, we had ways to deal with our defects. The best way was to arrange things so that it was hard for any one person to make too much trouble. Technology has obliterated those old limitations. I know people with the IQ of a goldfish with a smartphone and social media accounts.

The upshot, if there is any, is that I will be dead before lunatics like Jennifer Gerson Uffalussy have reduced the whole thing to rubble.

Fake War Nerd

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I would not consider myself a regular reader of the War Nerd blog. I probably check in once a month or so when I am regularly reading it. In fact, I went a long time not reading it until John Derbyshire mentioned it a few months back. The fact is there are too many sites and too many writers to keep up with all of them regularly. I have a lot of interests so I’ll drift away from a site or a writer if they are not writing about what is interesting to me at the time.

Anyway, Derb’s mention of the War Nerd brought me back to it. The other day this entry got my attention. Reading it, my bullshit detector was pegged to eleven. Right out of the shoot, this struck me as very weird from someone claiming to be living in Kuwait.

I read a long article called “My Terrifying Night with Afghanistan’s Only Female Warlord” last month. It was utter crap, and so similar to a lot of utter crap I’ve been reading about the women fighters of the Kurdish YPJ militia in Syria that I realized it’s time somebody called foul on the offensive, ignorant crap going around about what the media likes to call “women warriors.” I don’t particularly enjoy the role of progressive scold, and it don’t hardly come natural to me, but somebody’s gotta do it.

What happens, in every case where writers and TV reporters with no background in military reporting try to describe “women warriors” is that they sexualize everything, ignore the real context, and betray a deep misogyny in every word they write or speak on camera. I mean, to the point that it’s surprising, at least to me, because a lot of these people make a big deal about being progressive. I’m kinda shocked, actually, how crude their gender bias is. Nobody seems to be even trying to hide it.

That’s not the voice of the usual guy writing about the drinking in Kuwait or the bureaucratic insanity of the American defense procurement system. Instead, it sounds like a middle-aged white women from a typical American state college. The word “sexualize” is the thing. You only ever hear that from lefty scolds in the academy.

Then there is this:

I’m an American, and it wasn’t until I’d lived in the Middle East for years that I could see just how American I was, above all in my notions about gender and bodies. Americans see everything as a sexual hierarchy, and that seems so natural to us that you have to work very hard to realize it’s not a universal human pattern of thought, but a particularly American one. Percy hasn’t taken that time, doesn’t even know she needed to if she was to see what this Tajik matriarch is doing. The results…well, they’re pretty durn funny, and then infuriating, by turns.

That’s the sort of thing a young writer pens when they are trying to write travel fiction from their parents vacation house. It’s the sort of thing a non-traveler thinks experienced travelers have learned. It just sounds fake to me. The bit about how Americans “see everything as a sexual hierarchy” is right out of the womyn’s studies department of third rate state college. It’s the sort of line I write when making sport of feminism.

That led me to consult wiki. The Wiki on the blogger is fascinating and I feel confirms my suspicion. This bit is what I mean:

Gary Brecher is the pseudonym of John Dolan, author of The War Nerd, a twice-monthly column discussing current wars and other military conflicts, published originally in the eXile, then NSFWCorp, and currently in PandoDaily. A collection of his columns was published by Soft Skull Press in June 2008 .

When you look up John Dolan you get this:

John Dolan was born in Denver, Colorado in 1955. Dolan taught and studied at UC Berkeley, where he completed a PhD thesis on the literary writing of the Marquis de Sade.

He has published poems in many US and New Zealand literary journals and his first collection won the Berkeley Poetry Prize in 1988. In 1993, he moved to Dunedin, New Zealand, where he lectured at the University of Otago. During his time in Dunedin, Dolan contributed regularly to the Otago literary journal Deep South. In 2001 Dolan resigned his academic post, and moved to Moscow to become co-editor of the eXile, a bi-weekly English-language publication based there. He was the first reviewer of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a bestseller featured on Oprah’s monthly bookclub, to correctly expose this alleged memoir as fraudulent years before that was officially brought to light (the title of Dolan’s review was “A Million Pieces of Shit” and the first line was “This is the worst thing I have ever read”) . He is married to his former student, Katherine Liddy. Dolan relocated to Canada to teach at the University of Victoria in Canada in 2006. He claims to have been fired for encouraging students to criticize George Monbiot in 2008. Until spring 2010, Dolan was an associate professor of English composition and literature at the American University of Iraq – Sulaimani. He was fired in 2010 and wrote a lengthy article on his experience there.

I don’t want to belabor it, but it seems pretty clear that the guy behind the War Nerd blog is mostly full of baloney. He had a brief time in Iraq a few years ago and has created a fictional character as the blogger “War Nerd.” That’s my sense of it, least ways. The reason some of the posts sound like the howlings of a third wave feminist is they are probably written by his wife and former student.

Maybe this is old news and I’m late to the party. Like I said, I’m an infrequent reader. Still, just goes to show that you can’t take anything at face value.

Hot House Flowers

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Steve Sailer had this up on his site with some comments. It’s short so I’ll post the whole thing below.

Two groups who I think share a lot of unappreciated similarities are liberal gentrification critics and conservative immigration critics. Both want to take a dynamic and free society and freeze it in time, because they like it how it is now. And both assume we have a high level of ownership over our neighborhoods and our country.

It’s true both neighborhoods and the country overall exist within democracies and so we have some legitimate say in what happens there, but it’s simply not the case that we own it. Both contain homes and property owned by others, which you don’t own. As a result, your neighbors are free to sell their homes to whoever they please, and for gentrification critics and immigration critics this can be a problem. The United States is not our shared property, but a free country and free society where we have various rights.

Perhaps all the existing residents could decide that to the best of their abilities they want to legally freeze everything in time and keep it just how it is. But remember that the country looks how it does today because past residents were willing to accept change. The desire to freeze it now, to block new entrants and stop change, is a selfish act that denies future generations the right to see their country and neighborhoods evolve, just as they have evolved to this point.

Imagine if every neighborhood from the 1950s remained frozen in place, and strict laws managed to mandate static relative socioeconomic status and ethnic and cultural makeup. In retrospect of course it seems silly and hubristic to pick a singular point in time, -say 1955- and declare that everything is perfected now compared to all prior states and all possible future states. Of course when we’re taking about now instead of then, many find the right to preserve current conditions to be obvious and not silly at all.

Maybe this message is wholly unneeded for the sophisticated readers of the blogosphere, but I think for sure it is broadly under-appreciated. The only reason we have have gotten to this current state that you wish to preserve forever is that past generations resisted that impulse. It’s a free country, and that means we don’t own it.

The bit of commentary that got my attention and made me laugh is this:

I’m always amused by how people congratulate themselves on how sophisticated their simplistic ideas are. The concept of diminishing marginal returns appears to be unknown to them, for example, but that doesn’t dent their self-confidence.

Sailer is not a wordsmith or a humorist, but sometimes his dry wit is pretty funny.

Modern times means you can Google the writer and learn a lot. Adam Ozimek, according to his LinkedIn profile, has spent most of his life in college. He has had a short tenure at a consulting firm that sells expert testimony to trial attorneys. That sounds terribly dodgy to me, but everything to do with civil litigation is dodgy. Otherwise, Adam Ozimek has spent his life either in school or doing school work for hire. Nothing wrong with it, but nothing that would strike a normal man as work.

That’s the thing you always see with economists. It is rare to see one with any experience in the practical world. Most are career academics. Others bounce around government and private think tanks. In some respects, economics has become a guild like the law. It has its own language, credentials and hierarchy. The law is the marshal profession of the managerial class. Economics is the priestly order of the managerial class. If your kid has an abrasive personality he goes into law. If he is socially awkward he goes into economics.

Years ago I was involved in a lawsuit. During discovery, the topic of billing consulting fees came up. I forget the details, but there was a question about fees billed to the other party. The attorneys were flabbergasted by the idea of marking up fees billed to a client. At first I thought it was some sort of lawyer gag, but I realized they were serious. They simply had no idea how a business makes a profit. In this case the business hired consultants and billed for their time.

Similarly, I had a discussion with a German doctoral student at Yale over beers about business topics. He was an interesting guy and his specialty was currency markets. I have an interest in the history of money so that’s how we fell into conversation. Once we moved to more mundane matters like balance sheets and financial statements, the guy was completely lost. He expected to leave college and head into finance. I could not help but wonder how he would manage without knowing something about how a business functions.

The political class now draws its members from the managerial class. Ted Cruz was a lawyer, for example. Jindal was a consultant for McKinsey. Tubby from New Jersey was a lawyer for the government. The staff in Washington is chock full of guys with resumes similar to Adam Ozimek. It is fair to say that the people who run the government have little in common with the rest of us. They are brimming with self-confidence as they look through the glass of the terrarium at us.

The Cloud People

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This story from the Beeb, as the Brits call it, is an excellent example of how globalism is eroding the nation state.

The Islamists who committed the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris should be not be described as “terrorists” by the BBC, a senior executive at the corporation has said.

Tarik Kafala, the head of BBC Arabic, the largest of the BBC’s non-English language news services, said the term “terrorist” was too “loaded” to describe the actions of the men who killed 12 people in the attack on the French satirical magazine.

Mr Kafala, whose BBC Arabic television, radio and online news services reach a weekly audience of 36 million people, told The Independent: “We try to avoid describing anyone as a terrorist or an act as being terrorist. What we try to do is to say that ‘two men killed 12 people in an attack on the office of a satirical magazine’. That’s enough, we know what that means and what it is.”

Mr Kafala said: “Terrorism is such a loaded word. The UN has been struggling for more than a decade to define the word and they can’t. It is very difficult to. We know what political violence is, we know what murder, bombings and shootings are and we describe them. That’s much more revealing, we believe, than using a word like terrorist which people will see as value-laden.”

This is an inevitable result of globalism. The BBC used to be a British company funded by British taxes. Now it is a global concern (still collecting British taxes) with more customers outside of Britain than within it. The elites running it naturally have little reason to be loyal to Britain or any other country in which they operate. Like their company, they are citizens of the world, which is a polite way of saying citizens of nowhere.

The global elites are the cloud people. They float above us, detached from language, culture and history. They have no loyalty to a country or the people and traditions of a country. It’s like the British Raj. The people in charge are fine with the rest of us engaging in our quaint customs, as long as it does not interfere with their looting of the resources. When the ground people cause trouble, then the cloud people step in to remedy it.

I suspect it is why our elites are berserk for mass immigration. At some level, the fact that clusters of people with a common ethnicity and common heritage exist is a challenge to the new post-national ideology. If Europe can be turned from a patchwork of peoples and cultures to a gray, featureless slurry devoid of cultural diversity, the elites will feel justified in their indifference to toward the people.

At other times I have used the word neo-feudalism to describe this new arrangement. The financial support of our elites comes primarily through government sanctioned skimming operations. The BBC would not exist without the British government and the British taxpayer. Much of the modern economy is simply socializing costs and privatizing profits with the former falling on the middle-class and the latter bubbling up to the elites.

Mere greed does not explain the berserk behavior with regards to immigration. It does not entirely explain why the BBC is willing to indulge in linguistic acrobatics in order to avoid describing reality. It turns out that Georg Lukács was right, but he was looking in the wrong direction. It is not the proletariat that achieved class consciousness through reification. It is the modern global elites.

The alienation that Marx and Lukács imagined as the natural result of a mechanized, material society never materialized as the lower classes always had other primary identities that trumped all else. The neighborhood, the gang, rooting for a particular football team are all ways working men give their lives meaning. No amount stuff can change that, particularly in a welfare state.

The modern global elites are formless and their dealings are entirely transactional. The rich and powerful of the Industrial Age used their wealth and power to build the cultural and political institutions of their country. They could look around them and see the envy and admiration of their tribe, they people, their country. Today’s elites hang out at Davos comparing Rolex watches and eating $50 hot dogs.

The class identity that our elites have realized is really an anti-identity. They hold the rest of us in contempt. That’s why the BBC looks for ways to poke the common Brit in the eye. It is why the NYTimes roots for whoever is fighting against the American service man, wherever he is sent to fight. It’s why elite academies keep retrograde companies like Chick-fil-A off their campus. They are who they are because they are not us.

The Reactionaries Take Greece

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It looks like the Greeks have decided to bugger the world by voting in Syriza. I don’t know enough about Greek politics to know if they can govern alone. According to news reports, they are just shy of a majority so they need partners to form a government. Presumably they can find a few small parties to give them the seats they need, but that’s just my guess. The AP says they won 149 of 300 seats in parliament. Looking at the WSJ chart, it appears the communists got 15 seats so they will probably join Syriza in a coalition of the crazy to run Greece.

I would assume that average Greeks will now pull the rest of their money from the banks and stop paying their taxes. The Greek banks are on the knife’s edge due to the quiet bank run leading up to the election. All of them have reportedly applied for emergency liquidity from the ECB. The noises coming from Yanis Varoufakis, the incoming Finance Minister, suggest Alexis Tsipras is spoiling for a fight that creates chaos. It is an axiom of radical politics that crisis creates opportunities.

The crisis they seek now is with Europe. Reading the international news tells me the first step is to break out of the spending restraints placed on Greece by the troika. That should force a confrontation with the rest of Europe, particularly Germany. If not, then the next step will be to demand a restructuring of current debt. Syriza seems to think the Germans would rather be bled dry than let the Greeks walk. That’s the way to bet, given the way European politicians have turned themselves into pretzels in order to keep the project afloat.

The fascinating thing to me is that Alexis Tsipras is basically the young version of every current European leader. The typical Eurocrat was saying all the same stuff, when they were young, as Tsipras is saying today. It’s like time has folded on itself and the Eurocrats are now fighting their juvenile selves over a project they would have opposed in their youth. That should work to the advantage of the geezers, but so far the advantage seems to be with the young radicals.

The other thing of interest to me is what happens elsewhere with their radical parties. In a healthy social democracy, the main parties represent the core of the nation. What we’re seeing all over the West is the main parties are losing support from the core as they defend the privileges of the elites over all else. The people will have their tribune, so eventually a fringe party finds a way to make its case to the disaffected core. That’s what has happened in Greece and is in process throughout Europe.

The future is not written so there is still time for the more stable countries of Europe to reform and maybe what’s happening in Greece will be the wake up call they need. I’m not terribly optimistic about that possibility.  The main parties of Europe are now built on the idea of a single Europe with open immigration, a single economy and a single political class, independent of the people. I don’t think people realize just how radical the idea of Europe is in the history of man. There’s never been anything like it and the mainstream parties are all married to it.

That’s what brings me back to the irony of the young radicals facing off with the old radicals. Europe has been stuck in this endless loop for two centuries now. Each generation comes along with their plan to prove Rousseau right. When they inevitably fail, the next generation gets their shot to show the old fools how it is done. Alexis Tsipras talks like a college professor circa 1968 or 1848.

The endless loop of feudalism was eventually broken by the Black Plague. As an economic system it could not survive the massive disruptions brought by the plague so something else had to fill the void. But that was an economic arrangement, not an ideological one. It took the massive devastation of central Europe in The Thirty Years War to discredit the idea of a universal European church.

Rousseau-ism has proven to be much more resilient and adaptive. Christianity eventually broke on the wheel of science. Rousseau-ism keeps mutating. The European project is a radical adaptation of fascism – transnational fascism, but it is still the same old songs, just sung to different tunes. In one of life’s ironies, Syriza is reactionary, a demand to return to old school Rousseau-ism of a century ago.

My sense is we have entered a new phase. This will be marked by the slow bleeding of the core in order to buy off the fringe. The core is intellectually and spiritually exhausted. Success within the core is about managing decline. There’s no man on a horse riding in to reform and reinvigorate the core. Like a once rich family selling off the furniture to pays their debts, the core of Europe will keep printing and borrowing to pay off the fringe. Until they can’t do it anymore.

The Limits of Selling Me Crap

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I was paging through Twitter and saw this posted by Gavin McInnes. The story itself is not the point of this post. It is an example of how race is covered in America. If a white guy executed two black guys, the major news companies would devote all of their coverage to it for a year. That’s because it fits into the mythology that animates the liberal narrative. But, that’s a topic for another day.

I was thinking about writing something about it when sound mysteriously started coming through my speakers. For some reason I was using Chrome rather than Mozilla, the former not having the array of pop-up blockers, script blockers and flash blockers installed. I hunted around and found the offending video and stopped it. If you have clicked on the above link, you will be doing the same thing in a few seconds.

The story was actually blocked until you took a survey. The page is plastered with ads, in addition to the video crap in the middle. Just doing a little estimating, I’m going to say that the page is 60% advertisement. The story takes up maybe 10% of the page. The rest is promotions for the site and other features on the site. They are perilously close to the point where the story is so hard to find in the clutter that we’ll need an app to help find it.

This is happening all over and not just on the Internet. Websites have no way to make money other than ads and even then the money is small. They have no choice but to pack their pages with ads. The weaselly tactics some use is not wise, but maybe they are desperate. Breitbart is a useless site, as far as I’m concerned, because it is so cluttered with ads and embedded audio. I really hate the embedded audio.

I was talking to a friend the other day after one of the football games about how a 60 minute game is now a five hour event. A football game is a three hour commercial with a football game woven into it. The promotion of it and other games before and after the game is just more marketing, disguised as content. Even replays have sponsors now so that we end up with “this replay brought to you by Viagra shows…” I’m all for the NFL making money, but do they really need to sell so many ads?

I read the other day that the NBA will start placing ads on the uniforms. It will not be long before technology allows them to have rotating ads on the uniforms. The courts will soon be plastered with ads. The NHL is using video technology to digitally place ads on the ice for TV viewers. During World Cup, they had ads crawling on the screen because there are no breaks in the game to run ads. That means the rules of the game will be changed so they can run ads during games. “This water break brought to you by…”

Getting back to the web page ads, there’s a limit. I don’t go to Brietbart because I hate the ads. Even if they don’t care about old hate-thinkers like me, there is a limit to the number of ads they can post on their site. Similarly, there’s a limit how much crap they try to sell us on our phones and TV’s. What happens when the limit is reached? The whole economic system of the west is based on never ending growth and that includes advertising.

What happens when there’s no more room to grow?