Silicon Valley Redneck

Prediction (or, no matter who you vote for, the Government gets elected)

The Donald's first official act as President - he'll have the papers to hand at his inauguration, all ready to sign - will be to pardon Hillary.

For all you who fondly believe that Donald will clear the gouk's nest cleverly, forget it.  He's the Clinton family's backup plan.  (Johnson is their backup, backup plan.)  His set of government-connected cronies will prove to be the same as theirs, and if he actually tries to make any significant changes, the Deep State will interpret him as damage and route around him.

Bender's second-favorite catch phrase applies here.

Now, let me get this straight...

Financial markets were high ahead of the Brexit vote, as polls showed a certainty of Remain.  OK.

After the Leave result, markets took a dive, what with the unexpected outcome and proclamations of impending doom.  With ya so far.

But, the world having entirely failed to come to an end, markets have more than made up their losses in the last few days.  Aaaaand?

The central bankers are now talking about even more stimulus and lower interest rates in order to bolster market confidence in the post-Brexit era.  Wait, what?

When all you have is monetary policy....

Oh, well.  This crazy inflation of asset prices benefits me, as long as I get out before the music stops.

0225. Mnfxt.

Sometime around 0130, Huckleberry declared Playtime.

He was very persistent about it.

After half an hour of that, I decided I might as well crawl out of bed for a while.  Not sure that was a good idea, really.

Oh, well.  Looks like global financial markets are perking back up a bit.  Speaking of which:

I noticed a headline yesterday to the effect that Soros hadn't shorted the Pound this time.  Really?  So he was so wrapped up in the globalist ruling-class bubble that he truly believed that Brexit was inconceivable?

Funny how the overlords in their shiny palaces never quite get the message that the undifferentiated plebs resent having their lives micromanaged from afar by people they don't know and didn't vote for.

And, closer to home, that (and of course Identity Politics) is how you get things like the Traditionalist Worker Party.  Look at the front page of their web site, and their platform seems almost reasonable in the current political context.  (Mostly wrong, but reasonable.)  Dig a little deeper, and you get to the part where America is for White People, and I'm not White, and they want me to wear these parentheses, just so they know who We are, mind; there's no mention of putting me on the train to Happy Fun Camp.  Yet.

Enough randomness.  Back to sleep.  Maybe.  (Playful fuzzballs aside, I think my metabolism has shifted recently, and maybe I'm burning some fat and liberating stored caffeine.  Yes, I know caffeine isn't traditionally considered fat-soluble, so it's probably something else.  It's 0248, you expect me to make sense?)

Hm. The misreporting was worse than it seemed.

Details here.

The story that was making the rounds yesterday, wherein a purported journalist described in detail his experiences in visiting a gun shop and firing an AR-15, was obviously bogus in many respects.  Smell of sulfur?  Really?  And, while it's been a couple of decades since I fired one of those things, I'm quite certain that the recoil of an AR-15 won't bruise your shoulder no matter how wrongly you hold it.  Seriously.  The effective recoil is practically in Daisy BB gun territory.  His terrifying account was clearly fantasy.

Well, it turns out he was lying about pretty much every other aspect of his visit to the gun shop, too.

Flashback.  Early 1990s.  One of the columnists for the San Jose Mercury News told of his experience with a group of local shooters.  They took him somewhere out in the hills to shoot at a variety of targets, including balls of aluminum foil tossed in the air to be shot at with rifles.  When he asked where the bullets were ending up, the guys gave him a blank look.

On the BBS (this was the pre-Internet days) a couple of days later: an account of the same outing as told by one of the shooters.  Basically, everything after "some guys took me shooting last week" was a lie.  They had in fact taken him to the Los Altos Rod and Gun Club, where there's a range staff, and they're very particular about safety; the shenanigans he described would definitely not have been tolerated there.

When contacted for an explanation of where this bizarre fantasy account had come from, he explained that he'd initially written it up just as it had happened... but the editors had made him change it.  Because the honest account didn't fit the paper's official perspective.

 

In other news, more young people now get their news from social media than from TV.  This, presumably, is meant to be a Bad Thing.  But, given that newspaper news has been wildly inaccurate (even when not outright dishonest) for decades, and TV news is even worse... maybe this is an improvement?  At least there isn't a cartel controlling the content, no matter how hard Facebook and Twitter may try.

Some animals are more equal than others

As hinted at in the previous post, the rulers of California regard the property of the Important as more worthy of protection than the lives of mere commoners.

Another fine example of the stratification of society currently in the news is the tale of the Stanford Rapist.

You can't punish an up-and-coming member of the aristocracy as you would a common thug!  Class solidarity forbids it!

Equal protection of the laws?  A republican form of government?  Mere words!  The ruling elite must be protected at all costs!

(And, should you cast a critical eye on the words and deeds of the elite, you'll quickly come to the conclusion that most of them are quite stupid, and incapable of managing their own lives competently, never mind the lives of everyone else.  But they're the ones who know all the right people.  Plus, they have the dirt on each other.)

Ruling-elite privilege is hardly a new thing; look at any society in any era.  But this is mighty blatant, for a society which was founded on the rejection of royalty.

The Stanford incident puts me in mind of the Moriarty of that novel I'm not writing.  (Back in the summer of 2011, I thought I might have a go at the NaNoWriMo thing. I had a Concept for a short, snappy, brightly-colored textual comic book.  Trouble was, when I started outlining it, I ended up with many pages of bullet points calling for vast, sweeping back-story arcs that wanted to grow into a 600-page Victorian novel even before the actual story could get started.  Also, that November ended up being quite a busy time.)  The villain, like the hero, is 42 years old, and went to the same high school, though they'd been completely unaware of each other.  The highlights of his character and early development:

---

Portrait of the Villain as a young man.

•  Jack was everything Charlie was not.  Captain of the football team, voted most likely to succeed, always got the girl, football scholarship to an Ivy League school, degrees in business and in law.
• Not only did Jack always get the girl, rumor had it that on some occasions the girl had taken exception to this.  The college administration had hushed up the first incident because there was an important game coming up... and once they'd covered up the first rape, Jack had all the leverage he needed to get anything else hushed up, too.
• All through his life, no one had ever said no to Jack and made it stick.
• Jack had an uncle on his mother's side who had been a long-serving U.S. Senator, until he died about two years ago.

---

It goes on from there, to his career in Mergers & Acquisitions, and his dealings with international crime syndicates.  Inevitably, at the conclusion of the story he escapes to plot another day.  Thing is... when I wrote that, I assumed I was just picking up on an exaggerated stereotype.

But, for all the exaggerated statistics, false rape accusations, and spurious claims of "rape culture"... there are very real predators out there.  All too often, it turns out the community was covering for them.  This case springs to mind.  Then there's the sudden outbreak of allegations regarding that guy at the onion-router project.  Also: one local community with which I've been out of touch for several years suddenly developed a case of what sounded, at first, like SJW safe-space babble.  Came a clarification: over the years, there had been cases of actual sexual predators hanging out with the group, and a recent incident had highlighted the need for dealing with behavior that was almost, but not quite, in call-the-police territory - rather than carefully pretending it didn't happen, as has been the custom.

And need I mention the Clintons?

But never mind how the Important People are largely above the law.  We must combat White Male Privilege, such as that enjoyed by the guy who picks up your garbage on Monday morning.

Oy.

Eurasian financial markets way down this morning.  No bounce yet.

My assumption has been that the Secret Masters would try like tanj to keep the headline numbers propped up until the 2016 election, and that they'd have a fair amount of success.  But you can only haul back on the stick for so long before you run out of airspeed, and once that happens you begin rapidly losing altitude.

Old assumption: if the Democrats were halfway smart, they'd throw the election, and blame the post-election crash on the Republicans.

New assumption: the Democrats will be frantically blaming the Republicans for the pre-election crash, despite the Administration's habit of completely ignoring the R-controlled legislature.

And: the crash will (as always) be blamed on free markets and the distressing lack of government intervention and regulation.  Nothing short of full-on Fascism can protect us from trade cycles amplified by central-bank policy!

(Fun suggestion: if you want to stimulate the economy without amplifying market distortions, there's always the helicopter-drop approach.  Except that when Chimpy tried that one, it was foiled by debt; Joe Sixpack, instead of spending his $600 on a shiny new big-screen TV, sensibly and responsibly used it to pay down his credit-card balance.  The easy-debt regime creates problems on so many levels....)

Update: Mid-morning, there's a bit of a bounce, or at least the market indices are only down about 1%-ish at the moment.  Amalgamated Fuzz is actually up substantially, after starting way down... but it was down all last week, and is far below its early-spring peak.

Update 2: Half an hour past closing, Yahoo Finance and Google Finance can't agree on the closing price of Amalgamated Fuzz.  Yahoo shows $26.25 at closing, $26.54 after hours; Google shows $26.50 at closing.

Meanwhile, all the indices are down between 3% and 8.5%.  Is it time to start another war yet?

(I should really be getting some work done, but what with one thing and another I've been running on too much caffeine and not enough sleep, and my brain won't focus.  All I've managed to accomplish today is to establish that the half-ziggurat waveform my portable oscilloscope was showing me yesterday wasn't real (I moved the gadget under test to the lab and used the real scope, and it shows the expected square-wave burst), but now I can't remember why I was looking at that signal in the first place.)

Immigration 'n borders 'n stuff

All the rage these days.

Quick summary of some of the (R) positions here.

Let's see, now.

Wall across the southern border.  Lefties will freak, of course, and invoke the Berlin Wall... completely missing the difference between a wall meant to keep people out and a wall meant to keep people in.  (And if they were really bothered by the latter, they should be protesting the exit tax, no?)

Tightening up H-1B visas.  Well, maybe.  But how about prosecuting some executives for the egregious abuses of the existing system?  Surely there's at least perjury involved in the current use of H-1Bs by the megacorps and their labor suppliers.

Ending birthright citizenship for children of illegals.  This gets sticky.  Yes, there's an argument that "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" gives enough wiggle room... but haven't we had enough Constitutional reinterpretation already?  Are we really going to go for an amendment to fix the problem, or just ignore it?

Nationwide E-Verify, yadda yadda.  Now, here's where The Donald pushes one of my buttons.

See, immigration and border security are two very different issues, which are somewhat connected often conflated in uninformative ways.

Border security is inherently a national-security issue.  Immigration policy is somewhat related to national security, but is mostly driven by other considerations.

The various employer-based enforcement schemes create the illusion of Doing Something, and increase the power of the central government over workers and employers, but as far as national security goes?  Really, now: making it harder for illegal immigrants to find gainful employment helps how, exactly?

Yeah, next time a bunch of red-suited "undocumented workers" sneak across the border in a giant wooden moose, we can keep them from taking wheat-picking jobs on their way to burn down the White House.  I'm sure that helps a lot.

My position?  We should make it harder to come here illegally in the first place (border security), and easier to come here legally (especially for citizenship-track immigrants).  And, if we're going to have a guest-worker program, we should darn well enforce the rules for it, and lock up corporate execs who violate them, regardless of whose campaigns they've supported.

Update: Thoughtful piece on immigration here.  And: Patterico points out that the case for birthright citizenship not applying to children of foreign nationals is stronger than I'd thought.

A note on the drone menace

One of the current fears is that some evil person will use a hobby-grade toy aircraft to deliver a small but powerful bomb made of some military-grade explosive.

This seems somewhat along the lines of using readily-available materials to construct an oscillating mount for an M60 machine gun.  (Unless you can buy an M60 at the local hardware store; is Albuquerque an NFA sanctuary city?)

Anyway, aside from the question of someone with good explosives using a toy to deliver them, shall we consider the practicalities?

Those toys have limited flying range - especially if burdened! - and, even in the absence of jamming, limited control range.  The best-case useful range would be, oh...

...Maybe less than the effective range of a spud gun?  So why not just fashion a potato out of C-4, add a detonator of some sort, and deliver it ballistically?  Or find a suitable tree, a bunch of rubber tubing, and a dog dish, and build a giant slingshot?

But the prospect of high-tech toys (or other unfamiliar items) being put to naughty uses is grounds for moral panic, so "drones" are the worry of the day.

Key escrow, again?

Yes, the Feds are trying to persuade Congress that the existence of secure commercial encryption is a total disaster for national security, and that a back door for government access should be mandatory.

Which would put us back the the Fun Old Days of downloading PGP from a server in Finland, maybe.  Or at least that's what evil people would do, right?

And then I guess those evil ones could be sent to prison forever on a charge of Not Making The Government's Life Easy, which is what the whole "structuring" thing is about, no?

And, as in the bygone days of Clipper Chips, there's the question of who exactly will have access to the back-door keys, and under what conditions.

We already know the answers, don't we?  Edward Snowden, the Chinese, and a 14-year-old hacker in Bulgaria; and whenever they feel like it.

I'm totally certain that, for example, the IRS will never get the back-door keys for the communications of groups that engage in political advocacy.  And that clerk at the FBI could never, possibly, sell your key to your creepy ex.  It's inconceivable!

Afterthought: Maybe this time around the U.S. will bully Finland into restricting crypto export... so if your business wants non-backdoored crypto, you end up downloading something from Moldova.  What could possibly go wrong?

Beware of investigatin' Feds

Well, now.  Seems the scumweasels of Prenda Law are suspected of having seeded torrents of the content over which they would subsequently sue torrenters.

The FBI is now sniffing around The Pirate Bay for evidence of this.

Thing is, once an Investigation is opened, it takes on a life of its own, and can lead in all manner of interesting directions.

For example!  I have a dim memory of a case back in, oh, musta been this past spring or thereabouts.  The Feds started investigating suspicious financial transactions that could have been evidence that a certain Great Old One, sorry, ex-Congressbeing was being blackmailed.

And, somehow, despite the evidence of blackmail turning up, it was the victim of the blackmail who ended up being prosecuted.

So the maybe-criminal sleazebaggery of Prenda gives grounds for the investigation... but who knows where stray bits of evidence will point, and who'll end up in prison?

Life imitates Gary McGath!

OK, so maybe that's not altogether new.  This particular example just came to my attention.

Alarming headline: This stimulant can kill, yet you can legally buy it online. Why? Fear! Fire! Foes!

Yes, you can buy caffeine online!  In pure form!

He would concentrate and reduce it to caffeine powder,
and then sell it to ghetto kids to wreck their brains.

Alas, the lyrics aren't online, or at least not anywhere indexed.  Here's a performance (words vary from what I remember from some long-ago convention tape).

You can buy pure DHMO even more easily, and that has a far deadlier record, even when not taken internally.

Or, shifting the burden of proof...

A follow-on to the preceding post.

Y'know, if I were running a business that sails as close to the wind as a towing company - one in which basically every operation is a felony but for specific conditions being met - I'd make damn sure to keep detailed records to show that said conditions were met, every single time.

Because you just never know when generally-applicable laws will suddenly start applying to you.

For towing, you'd think a respectable company would, at minimum, have records of make, model, color, license, location, time, and reason for towing (red zone, no permit, or even "dispatched by AAA for burst upper radiator hose"), plus photos showing the vehicle and the appropriate context (the red curb, the expired meter, the spot on the car where the permit should have been).

And you might even think that the authorities that license such companies would require those records as a condition of the license.  Because, otherwise, it's pretty much a license to steal.

If enough angry voters got up on their hind legs and demanded that the authorities rein in the racketeers... maybe it would happen.  Maybe.

But they won't, because Martin Niemöller got it fundamentally wrong (I have an essay on that subject vaguely fermenting: in short, when they came for the X, I cheered, because I've always believed that X are somehow icky).  Tribalism trumps all, as we see in the current foofaraw.

See, what's got predatory towing in the headlines this week is not the predatory towing per se, but a video of a skinny blond celebutard abusing a hapless two-company employee.  Said video was apparently shopped around for some time by the tow company, and has been trimmed to avoid showing whatever provocation went before.  Also, I don't see the company providing the detailed records showing that the tow in question was legit.

So instead of calling attention to the problems of predatory towing and government-licensed racketeering, it gets reactions such as:

• Oh, a skinny blond celebutard abusing a working stiff?  She's a horrible person!
• A suspension isn't enough!  She should be fired, and no one should employ her again, ever!
• She deserved to have her car towed! [Assumes facts not in evidence.]  How dare she be mad at a mere accessory-before-and-after-the-fact?

Yup.  It happened to a skinny blond celebutard, therefore it didn't happen at all.  Just as Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown were harmless children, or Eric Garner and Walter Scott were dangerous criminals who needed killin' (pick your tribal position).

We can't unite for the common good, because people we don't like might also benefit.  And besides, this time the bad thing happened to a member of that other tribe, and we don't want to prevent that, now do we?

You may gather from this that I'm not a member of the skinny-blond-celebutard tribe, and from other posts that I'm not a member of the rich-and-politically-connected tribe.  Doesn't mean I want 'em all rounded up and sent to the camps... just the ones who do stuff that would get us commoners locked up.

Hmmm, product idea.

Predatory towing companies being in the news at the moment... and still being a thing after all these years... I find inspiration striking.

Once your car has been removed from its parking space, it's just your word against the towing company's as to where it was parked... and any accusation of Grand Theft Auto on your part will be cheerfully ignored by the Authorities so long as the pirates have kept up on their Thieves Guild dues.

Ergo, a standby-mode black box.  A datalogger that keeps operating for a few days (not forever; don't want to drain the battery) after the car is parked.  Records GPS data (there's a module out now that claims 1.4m accuracy), motion (3-axis accelerometer), and engine on/off status.

So, in the event of your car being towed, the hidden black box records exactly where it was parked, when it was taken, and where it was taken.  Evidence!

And, even with the high-res GPS, this dingus could sell for quite a bit less than a towing charge (though installation, if not DIY, might run a fair bit more).  Isn't it worth it, for the chance to send a scuzzball to prison?

For those with a bigger budget, add a cellular data modem and send the data To The Cloud.  That way, you don't have to retrieve your car to retrieve the location data (and this works even if it's been stolen by unlicensed thieves).  But surely this is already a product, right?

Hm.  Assume it stores, oh, 64 bytes/sec on average when in motion, and much less when stationary.  A modest 8Mbyte flash chip would hold 36 hours worth of while-moving data.  A 64Gbyte SD card would hold enough for 33 years in motion.  I'm thinking either a largish SPI NOR flash part, or a small eMMC.

Always believe the accusations!

No matter how absurd....

Remember the (literal!) witch-hunts of a few decades back, with tales of satanic ritual abuse of children at day-care centers?  With all the secret goings-on in a room hidden from passersby on the sidewalk by giant glass windows?  And the networks of tunnels so secret that they were never found?

Well, one front of the current many-pronged assault on due process is in the area of sexual misconduct, with no evidence required and unwelcome glances being conflated with forcible rape (remember: if you make a distinction between those things, you're minimizing).

This is scary stuff, and I'm having a flashback to a puzzling incident some time ago.

It began on a Saturday (?) night at a small local sci-fi convention, when I was in my early 40s.  Making the rounds of the parties, I found myself increasingly in the company of a pleasant young woman, who was nice, and attractive, but (a) awfully young, and (b) rather drunk*, so I kept my hands off, and eventually we went our separate ways.

Next morning, she seemed to be Avoiding Me.  Hm?

Next time we crossed paths at a con, same thing**.  Was she mad because nothing happened that night, or had she gotten too drunk to remember that nothing had happened?  Or did she just Definitely Not Have a Thing For Older Men, except when she was drunk?

A year or so later, she turned up at another con with a boyfriend in tow... and he seemed to have a ready-made, powerful grudge against me.  WTF?  Is this a reaction to "I met that guy over there at a party once, and we had a nice time, but I was drunk and he kept his hands to himself"?  Or had she been telling him some other tales?

If that went any further, it never got back to me, but: suppose she'd taken her irritation with me (whatever the heck it was) to someone in a position of authority, in today's climate?  Given a chance to present my case, I could certainly have found witnesses as to what happened (or didn't) at the parties, but I would have had no evidence that she hadn't subsequently followed me home.  Against a whispering (or shouting) campaign, with a strong presumption of guilt?

Guys: if there's any way whatsoever for the Social Justice Warriors to have power over you, you must pretend ISIS has won.  Never associate with women other than close family members.  Don't allow women in your workplace.  Don't attend mixed parties.  Never smile at a woman on the street.  These things only attract trouble.

 

* The alert pick-up artist would realize that her ability to buy alcohol from the official bartender implied that she was technically legal, but I've never been very good at this stuff, and I still figure young + intoxicated = off limits.

** The avoiding bit, that is.  Not the making-the-rounds-of-the-parties thing.

Am I missing something here?

That incident with the two drunken Secret Service agents who drove into a barricade... yeah, you know the one.

Every single story I've read regarding that has said, in one way or another, that both of them were driving.

Were they in separate vehicles?  Do Secret Service cars have dual controls?  Was one sitting in the other's lap?  Were they both midgets, and driving Calvin-and-Hobbes style?

"Honesh', ossifer, nobody wuz drivin'.  We wuz all inna back, shingin'!"

It's not the policy, it's the uncertainty.

Stocks having been down the past few days on speculation as to what The Dzhanit would say today, and whether improving economic statistics (notably, the lying headline unemployment rate) would "force" a (vastly overdue, and now impossible) increase in interest rates... the words were finally spoken, and this happened:

Headline:

Fed opens door for rate hike even as it downgrades economic outlook

So... admit that the numbers are appalling and the years of stimulus haven't worked, and maybe it's time to think about eventually maybe nudging interest rates a little closer to reality?  What a concept!

But I think the real factor here was: no surprises, and the money spigot will remain open for the foreseeable future.

Because, after so many years of insane policies, and the past several years of "We're losing altitude!  Pull back on the stick!!  Harder!!!", the interconnected financial institutions and governments of the developed world, as well as a great many individuals, have all fallen into the debt trap, and any detectable increase in interest rates at this point would trigger many waves of highly-visible failure.  So, count on it: it'll be stimulus all the way down.

In the meantime, so long as the ruling class promises not to rock the boat too much, the run-up in asset prices will continue.  Because all the money has to go somewhere, right?

Still more trouble ahead

Not so much for me, but for the younger generation.

See here: the employment scene is moving to short gigs, piecework, and the like, and away from nice predictable incomes from steady corporate jobs.

Add this to the concerns I mentioned here, and factor in the easy-debt economy that's grown up since the 1980s.  What do we have?

A generation or two conditioned to the Industrial Age steady-job paradigm, carrying a heavy debt load (college loans, credit cards, E-Z Credit on that new car), facing the old reality of irregular cash flow.

Kinda makes it hard to keep up the payments, huh?

I've basically been living in the gig economy since the 80s (when I started working for a small consulting company with irregular cash flow), except for summer 2000 through summer 2004 when I had that job in Corporateland, so I'm used to this sort of thing.

For those who adjusted their lifestyles to the good times, and have never lived in the unpredictable world of small business, it's a likely disaster.  And for those institutions that have been lending them all that money?

Aaah, don't worry about the institutions.  They'll get bailed out.  Again.  And bailouts are good for the economy, right?

Drone attack at White House! ZOMG panic!!!!

Seems some diabolical thingy landed on the White House lawn.

Possibly a drone.  Or a toy airplane.  Or a frisbee.  Or a model rocket carrying a frog in a silver suit.

The reaction, naturally, is total panic.  Because it could have been a hostile act!

Uh, right.

Yes, there are certain chemicals and pathogens which could be nasty when delivered by itty-bitty toy aircraft.  They're not that easy to come by, and effective delivery is another question entirely.

But the allergic reaction to this sort of thing - that is to say, an overreaction, by the immune system, which does far more damage than the outside threat ever could have - points up the ease of using the security state itself as a tool of disruptive terrorism.

I'm reminded of an incident in the Bay Area back in the 1990s, before the emergence of the Homeland Security monstrosity.  One of the bridges, if memory serves, was shut down for several hours after someone spotted an unidentified white powder on the bridge.  Turned out to be flour, but doctrine dictated a full-on HAZMAT response.

And if some group of uncouth smelly hippies decides to shut down capitalism with a coordinated flurry of "unidentified chemical dispersal" strikes in the world's financial districts?  Or "drone attacks" with COTS toy airplanes at high-profile events and sensitive facilities?

Yup.  Totally overload the emergency services, and get streets and airports shut down, at very little cost to the attackers.

Only they won't do that, of course.  Two reasons.  One, the smelly hippies are a lot less smart than they fancy themselves to be.  Two, their strings are pulled by the Establishment, to provide a channeled outlet for outrage and to make the Establishment look good by comparison.  So they won't do anything effectively disruptive, nor will they show up Homeland Security for a bunch of hysterical clowns.

Worldview-dependent interpretations

Staid establishment publication The Economist goes on at some length about the distressing emergence of a durable American aristocracy based on the heritability of braaaaaaains.  Because human evolution operates meaningfully over a span of a couple of generations, and is rapidly producing the New American Übermensch.

Uh, yeah.  The aristocrats are intelligent?  And well educated?*

Pull the other one, it's got bells on.

Meanwhile, it's left to the knuckle-draggers, e.g., here and especially here, to hint, in their subtle fashion, at the true heritable trait for success: insider social connections.

Yes, it's all very well that you can get an education at Harvard or Yale.  But!  You can also build up a social network while you're there.  And, given that a degree in a soft subject (no math required, please!) from one of those two institutions has become a prerequisite for being taken seriously as a presidential candidate?  That's the kind of social network that can make a big difference in your career, especially if you're basically a social animal and your parents taught you how to buy a suit**.

Then figure that if one or both of your parents attended a given university, you'll be given preference in admissions... especially if the ancestors have been making large donations to the alumni fund... and the opportunity to acquire the particular social connections needed to succeed in a crony-corporatist economy looks very heritable indeed.

The progeny of Davos are destined to rule the Universe not because they're particularly clever (they're not; any given one is easily outwitted) but because they form a closed group, don't regard anyone outside the group as being the same species as themselves, and give each other jobs in highly influential positions.

Throw in the ability to retire at 35 from the more lucrative positions (to go off and spend the rest of one's life doing something Socially Meaningful), and we end up with the New Silicon Valley decision-making class, which includes no one who was an actual adult during the Dot-Com Bubble 1.0.  Hence, no lessons learned, and we get the same investment and planning mistakes writ larger.

But they all have the social connections.  And that's what matters.  At least, to the important people***.

 

* And the "grown-up alternative" for President is "another Clinton or yet another Bush", forsooth!

** Go to one of the approved tailors, and throw money at him.

*** "Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor – at least no one worth speaking of."

Who is this "Charlie" person, anyway?

The whole "everybody claim to be Charlie for 15 minutes" thing reminds me of Dean Ing's story, "Very Proper Charlies."

In the story, it was the terrorist (every terrorist) who was Charlie.  With a cartoon depiction worthy of a Charlie Hebdo cover.

Mock them, deny their identity, pretend that their attacks failed utterly (and humiliatingly).

Still seems like a pretty cool idea.

Instead... well, look just how effective these attacks really are.

The mainstream press seems to have adopted a strict policy of never publishing anything that's in any way offensive to any group whatsoever.  Except that, in practice, there's plenty of grossly offensive material expressing bigotry against, e.g., businessmen, Christians, the Tea Party, and many other groups outside the urban Democrat identity group.  In short, it's perfectly fine to offend any group that isn't represented among your friends and that won't burn your offices down nor call you a racist.

(Take a moment to ponder the depictions of NRA members in the mainstream press.  Now tell me: if the editors who decide to publish these things really believed them, would they be publishing them, when they so carefully censor anything that might possibly be offensive to actual terrorists?)

Meanwhile, as the ruling elite carefully makes excuses for terrorists, an alarming number of loudmouths are proclaiming that all Muslims are at war with us, and that, in order to survive, we must wage ruthless war against all of them.

I don't know about you, but to me the notion of going full Dalek on a significant fraction of humanity, for the offense of not renouncing the faith of their ancestors, is utterly repugnant.

(The crazy isn't limited to comment sections; it's coming to the attention of at least some portions of the public.  Yesterday I spotted a Sikh wearing a baseball cap, something I hadn't seen since '02.)

C'mon, guys.  We all know people who identify with religions that they don't follow all that fervently.  The Christian for whom church is a social club; the Jew who can find fins and scales on a lobster; the Hindu who wears leather; the Linux user who has a Windows VM for running Word.  They're... kind of the majority, aren't they?

So how are "Muslims" a monolithic group, all fanatical about every last word of the Koran?  Yeah, so maybe the Koran says they have to be, but isn't that one of the easiest aspects to let slide?

As so many have noted these past several years - recently and notably, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi - Islam desperately needs a reformation in order to avoid a vastly destructive clash of cultures.

(Note that, in the absence of "leadership", ordinary Muslims can get along with others just fine.  It's those leaders you have to watch out for.)

That reformation becomes all the more difficult if Western Civilization has announced its intention to eradicate Islam.  It gives the radicals an external enemy.  Well, we're already their external enemy, but proving them right about that seems counterproductive.

No, I don't have a solution to the big problem.  But: actual terrorist groups need clobberin'.  Incitement to terrorism should be treated as such, and not allowed to hide behind freedom of religion (any religion, and any flavor of terrorism).  Distributed threats require distributed defense (when seconds count, the police are only minutes away, but the intended victims are already on the scene).  And: ordinary people, of whatever faith (or of none, for that matter), must enjoy equal protection of the laws, and have the confidence to report criminal threats.

This last point is problematic with regard to two groups: ghetto-dwellers and immigrants.

Somehow, our society has come to tolerate the existence of ghettos where police don't go and the rule of law doesn't apply.  There are black ghettos, Muslim ghettos, and rich-white-people gated ghettos.  (There's even a Swedish ghetto not too far from here, but that's boring.)  Within these enclaves, the strong rule as they please, and there's no protection for the weak or merely ordinary.  When the ruthless have taken control, much of the population can be coerced into lawless conduct, against the outside world if that be the rulers' whim.

And, immigrants: Surely we've all heard the phrase, "Ve know you haff relatives living in Europe!"  Whether it's the Nazis, the Mafia, or ISIS, a vast criminal enterprise with a stronghold where a lot of immigrants to your country have relatives has a lot of leverage, and your government can't do much to protect those relatives in the Old Country.

So, again: I don't have answers.  It's a tangled knot of difficult problems, and anyone offering One Big Answer is a crackpot.  This web of problems will require a web of partial, imperfect solutions... as does nearly everything in life.

But let's try to leave genocide off the table, shall we?