How The Tea Party Was Murdered

It's not often that I rerun pieces I've written in the past, but I think I have good reason. 

Blog Brother Borepatch (one of those of you who got me started) put up a piece this morning auspiciously about how Charles Martel turned back the caliphate but that was really addressing what 2A supporters - especially in Virginia and other states where rights are under attack - need to do in the wake of Monday's rally against Governor Jolson Klanrobe's anti-gun antics (Jolson Klanrobe is the memorable name Kurt Schlicter at Townhall.com used today - paywall warning). 

His punch line, repeated several times, was “Yeah, this is hard and not as much fun as a rally.  Campaigning to win is hard.”

This immediately brought back thoughts of the Tea Party and the perception it was brought down from the inside.  That's only true if you think of the inside as much broader than it was.  The Tea Party was killed by organized political operatives taking advantage of the naivety of Tea Party members.  Here's where I quote from a piece I put up in 2016, How the Tea Party Was Killed Off.  This is a lesson everyone in Virginia, here in Florida, New Hampshire, and anywhere else a rally is being held should keep in mind.  Presented here with some word smithing so it makes sense to me, the author, over 3 years later.

How the Tea Party Was Killed Off

Remember the Tea Party?  They were a political force to be reckoned with in the 2010 elections, but by the 2012 elections had been rendered ineffective.  It turns out it wasn't a natural occurrence and it certainly wasn't that they ran out of things to do.  At least according to this operative, who says he was involved, the tea party was killed off; murdered.   What killed them was the very corruption and cronyism they rose up to fight. 

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause.

The tea party actually started to rise during the last years of the W; so it absolutely didn't start as reaction to Obama (the reflexive reaction of the media and the left was, of course, to call the tea party racist).  Instead, the impetus was a reaction to the profligate spending along with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  When Obama swept into office, of course, both of those things continued.  Add in the passing of Obamacare, the only major social program in history to be voted in by one party, along with the lies that went along with it ("if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor", "we have to pass the bill to see what's in it" and more), and anger at Washington exploded.  Tea party rallies started happening.

As Peggy Noonan noted in 2010, the tea party wasn't a wing of the Republican party, as the left wing media thought, so much as a critique of it.  The tea party wasn't a national organization and it originally had little or nothing to do with the idea we saw widely displayed on signs, "Taxed Enough Already".  It was an organic uprising; a leaderless system, or starfish organization as they're called.

Republicans inside the Beltway reacted to the burgeoning Tea Party with glee but uncertainty about how to channel the grass-roots energy usually reserved for the left. A small group of supposedly conservative lawyers and consultants saw something different: dollar signs. The PACs found anger at the Republican Party sells very well. The campaigns they ran would be headlined “Boot John Boehner," or “Drop a Truth Bomb on Kevin McCarthy.” And after Boehner was in fact booted and McCarthy bombed in his bid to succeed him, it was naturally time to “Fire Paul Ryan." The selling is always urgent: “Stop what you’re doing” “This can’t wait.” One active solicitor is the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which received $6.7 million from 2013 to mid-2015, overwhelmingly from small donors. A typical solicitation from the TPLF read: “Your immediate contribution could be the most important financial investment you will make to help return America to greatness.” But, according to an investigation by POLITICO, 87 percent of that “investment” went to overhead; only $910,000 of the $6.7 million raised was used to support political candidates.

I don't think I get many uninformed readers here, so you know that as a rule in life, when someone talks to you with the urgency seen in those examples ("stop what you're doing"... "this can't wait"), you're being hustled.  Walk away or ignore it.  It's like the slimy car salesman who hits you with, "what can I do to get you into this car today?" 

Personally, I've always been suspicious of the Tea Party Patriots and a few other groups that put themselves forward as leaders of the leaderless organization.

Today, the Tea Party movement is dead, and Trump has co-opted the remnants. What was left of the Tea Party split for a while between Trump and, while he was still in the race, Ted Cruz, who was backed by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In 2014, the Tea Party Patriots group spent just 10 percent of the $14.4 million it collected actually supporting candidates, with the rest going to consultants and vendors and Martin’s hefty salary of $15,000 per month; in all, she makes an estimated $450,000 a year from her Tea Party-related ventures.

Folks, have you ever heard of Charity Navigator?   No, they don't - can't - have a file on every group that's going to ask you for money, but it's a good place to start.  I Will Never Give a Dime to an organization that puts 10% of what it collects into its stated purpose, like the Tea Party Patriots.  That's even worse than the 13% cited for TPLF in the first quote by POLITICO.  Another good place to go is OpenSecrets.org.  You can view a group’s track record in minutes. How much goes toward candidate contributions or so-called independent expenditures, which are supposed to be spent on the candidate (though even those can be thinly veiled solicitations if the "ask" or landing page directs to the PAC and not the candidate).

I'm not going to cite the whole article, you should definitely read the whole thing, but I will leave you with the author's summary of what happened.

But any insurgent movement needs oxygen in the form of victories or other measured progress in order to sustain itself and grow. By sapping the Tea Party’s resources and energy, the PACs thwarted any hope of building the movement. Every dollar swallowed up in PAC overhead or vendor fees was a dollar that did not go to federal Tea Party candidates in crucial primaries or general elections. This allowed the GOP to easily defeat or ignore them (with some rare exceptions). Second, the PACs drained money especially from local Tea Party groups, some of which were actively trying to grow the movement electorally from the ground up, at the school board and city council level. Lacking results five years on, interest in the movement waned—all that was left were the PACs and their lists.

It's really common to hear people complaining about what a corrupt place DC is (you've heard "Den of Criminals") is.   I say that and think that.  I didn't know anything compared to what's in that article.  To grab a quote from Walter Hudson at PJ Media, where I first saw the link to this story:

This is where our attention needs to be. This is the real establishment, not elected leaders in Washington, but a swirling flock of vultures that feed on the corpses of great expectation.

These PACs, that preyed upon Tea Party supporters like a flock of vultures feeding on an injured but still-living prey animal, are the real reason they're gone.

Google is Not Just Going After 2A Sites

They're not just trying to shut down responsible pro-2A voices.  They're going after anything that has to do with liberty and freedom of choice.

A couple of weeks ago, I reported on a story that the single biggest correlation with living past 100, supercentenarianism, was living in a place that didn't have birth certificates and documentation of age.  Studies of these people found no correlations with the conventional wisdom we're all fed, such as following the Mediterranean Diet, consumption of red wine, legumes, or constant walking built into their lives.  The biggest correlation was pension fraud, not health effects.

This week, the story shifts to Google.  The story went by in the news that Google was going after "alternative health" sites and directing web searches away from them to the conventional medical sites.  This week we get some numbers posted by Robb Wolf on Instagram, via the same source as the previous story, Mark Sisson's weekly email.
 

You will note that traffic to Robb Wolf's site is down 89.89%, while traffic to Mark Sisson's Mark's Daily Apple is down 65.86%, and the only two health sites with increases as presented here are WebMD and the Mayo Clinic - the conventional medical establishment personified. 

Google is in that strange position of being such a strong brand that their name has become the alternate verb for "to search", so the way they're shunting traffic around these voices is going to drive some of these small businesses out of business.  I know a few of these sites, though not all, but that's not the point.  Why does Google get to decide who stays in business and who doesn't?

Mark Sisson puts his corporate view like this:

Some of this is due to Google weighting their algorithms toward "expert" advice, toward opinions and articles written by people with MDs and PhDs after their names. I've tried to overcome this by changing the way I cite research. I've always cited and linked to tons of medical studies, far more than the "experts" like Mayo Clinic and WebMD ever have, but now I'm actually listing a "References" section with those proper citations in the proper academic format. You've probably noticed. It's helped a bit, but the drop-off has been larger than this can account for.

In my opinion, this development just means that people like me and Robb are over the target. We're a threat, and institutions are worried. We've already had a huge effect on the way people eat, live and exercise. Grandmas are going keto. Grandpas are doing CrossFit. Your kid's school teacher is IFing. Large multinational food corporations are buying boutique avocado oil-based mayo brands for large sums of money. It's an interesting time. Conventional institutions are feeling the heat, and this might be one way to try to stem the tide.

You see it in the big, concerted, coordinated effort to push fake meat substitutes, switch the entire world over to a diet consisting of half a burger a week, and promote silly conspiracies like keto crotch—often all involving the same players.

I'm not saying it's nefarious, but it's very curious. 

If there's a nefarious aspect, it's that across everything we see about them, Google seems to be behaving in such a way that cries out for regulators to crack down on them.  This is something that big companies like because they have the resources to meet the expenses that the laws cause, while smaller competitors are less able to.  It's sometimes referred to as the successful "closing the door behind themselves."   

Let's put it this way: consider a small startup that has come up with some sort of search algorithms that can threaten Google.  Do you think Google would return the potential Google-killer in searches? 

The DC Corruption Never Ends - Special "The Squad" Edition.

Thanks to a report from an online journal called FreePressers, we get a look at some facts and figures about The Squad that are a little interesting.  The Squad, if you've been ignoring the news, is the four freshmen congresscritters who have taken over media coverage wall to wall, Representatives AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Pressley. It starts with an interesting tidbit about Occasionally Coherent.

According to FEC data, for the period of Jan. 1 to July 30 of this year, Ocasio-Cortez raised a total of $1,607,957.22 in unitemized individual contributions and $334,401.45 in itemized contributions. 

I believe that those two are added, making her total contributions  $1,942,358 (and 67 cents if you want to be anal).  Nearly two million dollars is good for any representative, let alone a first year kid making far more "sound and fury" than legislative impact.  She received more money than all 87 other House newcomers.

There's another interesting aspect to this.  Contributions from donors in her New York City district 14 was $1,525.50, which is 0.08% of her total.  There was a grand total of 10 itemized contributions from her constituents.  She has the second lowest donations from her district in the entire congress.  Democratic Rep. Sylvia Garcia of Texas was the lowest. Garcia’s re-election campaign reported itemized contributions of $14,400 in total, 0.74% of AOCs total donations, and none of it came from people in her district.

With contributions from non-constituents 1272 times contributions from people she's representing, you have to wonder who exactly is giving her the money.  It adds credence to the idea that she's not popular in her own district but the big money globalist leftists love her.  It's worth reminding everyone that AOC's Chief of Staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, left her team recently and is under investigation for massive campaign finance violations.

[Rahsida] Tlaib reported receiving $470,430.11 in itemized contributions in the first half of 2019, but less than 2 percent came from individuals living within her district.

[Ilhan] Omar reported $717,831.22 in itemized contributions to her re-election campaign so far in 2019. Just over 4 percent came from her constituents.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley far outperformed the others. The Massachusetts Democrat received more than 30 percent of her $248,280.78 itemized contributions from her constituents.

Of the four "squad" members, it seems Rep Pressley has the most legitimate claim that her constituents support her.  She brought in the least amount of total contributions, but a much higher percentage from constituents and not global donors.

(Image source) 

New Florida Laws: You're Only Permitted Severe Pain for Three Days

July 1st means new Florida state laws usually go into effect, and we've had a few notable laws.  The state passed 105 new laws.

The title is a jab at the legislature; they'd like to pass such a law but clearly can't, so they did the next best thing: they've ruled a doctor can only prescribe three days worth of narcotic pain medication except for unusual circumstances.

Opioids: Physicians will be limited to prescribing a three-day supply for acute pain unless strict conditions are met for a seven-day supply. Physicians and pharmacists will also be required to consult the state's database to review a patient's history. Healthcare professionals also will need to take some courses on responsibly prescribing opioids.

Seems a ridiculous burden on doctors' offices - who seem to be pretty busy all the time, even here in small city USA.

Last July, I wrote a couple of pieces on trying to make sense of it all (first, second).  Aesop at Raconteur Report did a similar look in a few articles and came to more or less the same conclusions I did.  Short version: I think there's a deliberate attempt to conflate prescription opioid problems with illegal heroin overdose.  We don't have prescription drug problem, we have a "junkies shooting adulterated heroin problem".  So why the public ruse?  The old advise to "follow the money" leads me to the company that makes naloxone, the anti-narcotic drug administered to people in overdose.  It was being pushed that virtually everyone should carry it everywhere as a lifesaver; it was even pushed on librarians to have it available for the library junkies who OD while watching internet porn in the library (do you have that where you are?).  The price of naloxone had gone up 17x.  Going down that rabbit hole led directly to Hillary Clinton and the Obama administration.

But we have to "do something" - right or wrong - "for the children".  As I always say, if you don't ask the right question, you'll never get the right answer. 

Another law they passed was to raise the legal age of marriage and put a legal limit on the difference in age between people entering a marriage.  I had no idea that was a problem so serious it demanded legislative attention. 

Marriage: Anyone under 17 will not be allowed to marry. Anyone marrying a 17-year-old must be no more than two years older, while minors will need parental consent. The old law allowed 16- and 17-year-olds to marry with the consent of both sets of parents. There was no minimum age if a judge approved and a pregnancy was involved.

People whose mugshot was shown on a website or other public place and were not convicted have the right to get it taken down.

Mugshots: A person may request the removal of their arrest booking photo from a website or anywhere else where it can be publicly accessible if they were charged but not convicted. The law also prevents websites and publications from charging for the removal. Removal requests must be sent via registered mail and include proof of identification.

One of the things many of have been saying about this "we can't separate the illegal alien parents from their children" outrage is that we separate parents from their children all the time.  It's called breaking the law.  Whenever anyone goes to prison they're separated from their family.  Why should illegal aliens be a special class?  Florida passed a law along those lines that's one of those "I didn't know that was not already the way it's done" things.

Incarcerated parents: The Department of Children and Families will be required to involve the incarcerated parent of a child who receives child welfare services in their case planning and progress.

There are many more, and worth a look if you live in the state, just in case you need to check to make sure they didn't change something important in your line of work.  I just noted something that makes it seem the SJW contingent in the state is still pushing things.

Statuary Hall: The state's request to replace the statue of Confederate Gen. Edmund Kirby Smith with civil rights leader Mary McLeod Bethune in Washington, D.C., becomes official.

and there's always time for the legislature to do the really important things:

State symbols: The Loggerhead Turtle permanently becomes the official state saltwater reptile and the Florida Cracker Horse (Marshtackie) the official state horse. Florida Cracker Cattle has also been designated as the official state heritage cattle breed.

 Florida Senate - stock photo.

171,000 Manufacturing Jobs "Reshored" to the US Last Year

In a report released by the Reshoring Initiative called its 2017 Reshoring Report, the group shows data on U.S. reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI) by companies that have shifted production or sourcing from offshore to the US.  According to Design News:

The report notes that last year, combined reshoring and related FDI announcements surged, adding over 171,000 jobs—up 2,800 percent from 2010. The report also shows upward revisions of 67,000 jobs from prior-year data, bringing the total number of manufacturing jobs brought to the US from offshore to 576,000 since the manufacturing employment low of 2010. The report claims that the 171,000 reshoring and FDI jobs announced equal 90 percent of the 189,000 total manufacturing jobs added in 2017.

It seems that the first mention of the word "reshoring" in this blog as back on February 12, 2013, so I've been following this trend at least since then (it links to an article here a year earlier).  The Reshoring Initiative (RI) includes data going back to 2007.  The factors involved in the decision to produce something offshore or here are wide ranging.  In the report, they question companies for the reasons of moving back (or investing in the US).  RI then ranked those reasons from 1 to 23 as factors against offshoring and factors favoring reshoring.

They're all instructive, but the top few are the ones that the most survey respondents cited.  292 respondents said that the quality of the imported goods combined with the amount of warranty cost and the cost of the rework they had to do to make the products usable was the biggest disadvantage.  The top five disadvantages were that, freight cost to ship goods to the US, the total cost, delivery and inventory problems.   The top reason for reshoring to the US was government incentives to move back, but that barely edged out the next two reasons: proximity to the customers and the availability of a skilled workforce and training for them.  Rounding out the top five were brand image (a desire to say "Made in the USA" to look better) and "eco-system synergies".  I have no idea what they mean by that, but it's generally a good idea to beware of people saying things like that.

Also, note how the numbers on the right column are greater than 100 much farther down the chart than the left column, and how the right column has bigger numbers in general.  It's a rather unified group of respondents.

RI noted that one of the reasons jobs are returning is that the cost differential between home-produced goods and landed goods from overseas has been shrinking for years. RI founder Harry Moser said:

“We know where the imports are by country, and we know the price difference between the foreign price and the US price. The total cost of foreign-made goods delivered to the US is a full 95% of the cost of US-produced goods,” said Moser. “We know how much you have to shift it to make the US competitive with China.”

Those who haven't worked in manufacturing probably don't understand how intense the pressure is to always do more with less.  In manufacturing, time is money and getting the job done right with minimal waste, and then always getting better is the mantra.  Maybe because of that, managers chase fads that promise better performance or lower costs.  The cost advantages of going offshore have to be much bigger than they are to overcome that column of reasons not to offshore.  

From Design News.

The Net Neutrality Argument Goes 2010 SEIU

My reference is to a protest covered here in May of 2010 in which SEIU hired goons showed up at the home of a Bank of America executive to protest loudly outside his house.  There were reports that the thugs were escorted by police, or at a minimum, the police were not willing to do anything to stop them.

The banker whose home was attacked had been at his child's baseball game.  Another, older, child was at home terrified and had locked himself in the bathroom.  Picture yourself in this situation; your child is home afraid and needs to be protected.  You're with a child that you just can't leave to fend for himself either, what do you do?  You don't have backup.  You aren't  a professional security guy or special forces operator.  You're a dad with two scared kids, and you're probably pretty scared yourself.

Dad parked some distance away, left the younger kid in the car and managed to force his way into the house.  Got older kid and escaped.  All was well.

The Net Neutrality protests crossed this Rubicon last week when protesters showed up at the home of FCC Chairman Ajit Pay, calling out his children by name and threatening them all with injury or death.  Dollars to donuts nobody protesting understands net neutrality, which is too complicated to put in a five second chant. 

Pai is now flanked by a Homeland Security protective detail everywhere he goes because of a deluge of specific, credible threats of violence toward him and his young children. He's also facing an onslaught of racist smears and attacks too obscene to quote – including an image asserting that Pai is Osama bin Laden after shaving his beard.

Members of Congress are coming under similar attack for supporting Pai's signature proposal. The most outrageous example resulted in a criminal indictment after Congressman John Katko received a message threatening: "I will find you and your family and I will kill you all. Do you understand? I will literally find all of you and your progeny and just wipe you from the face of the earth."

Death threats over arcane FCC rules? I think it's time to say, "Srsly?  WTF?  Why the rage over some law that hasn't really been in place more than a couple of years and was illegally passed to start with?"  In addition to not bothering to follow the Administrative Procedures Act that they're required to follow, starting in 2010 the Congress told the FCC they didn't have the authority to pass these rules.  In true Obama administration fashion, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski did it anyway.

Look, the Internet has been around since the late '80s/early '90s.  In the intervening 27 years, I've gone from accessing with a 14.4 kbaud dial-up to a 50 Mbit/second cable rate with no federal intervention.  The number of people connected is probably 10 million times the number connected back then.  Sounds like the market is working pretty well.  I think I remember hearing about the Net Neutrality concept in the '90s.  Seems like we did OK without it.  Quoting from the Townhall article linked above:

Nonetheless, in 2015, ultraliberal advocacy groups (fueled by $196 million from the Soros and Ford Foundations) and Silicon Valley giants like Google (which cycled a shocking 250 personnel through the Obama administration and saw regulating ISPs as a way to guarantee themselves access to below-market-rate downstream bandwidth) succeeded in getting the FCC to reclassify ISPs as regulated public utilities.

This was done under a Depression-era law designed for the old Ma Bell telephone monopoly. Thousands of requests to micromanage every aspect of the Internet piled up at the FCC Enforcement Bureau and the commission was set to adopt a sweeping new broadband tax to replace the private investment it scared off – with strings attached of course – during a Hillary Clinton administration.

The liberal organizers of the phony scare campaign had even bigger plans; Robert McChesney, the founder of Free Press – the group that was cited 46 times in the Obama net neutrality order – openly bragged: "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies. We are not at that point yet.  But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control." [emphasis added - SiG]

"Free Press"?  Like most Marxist organizations, Free Press is dedicated to the exact opposite of what its name implies; they don't want a Free Press, or Free anything; they want government-run press.  Think Pravda and Izvestia of the old Soviet Union and you're right there. 

Somewhere else on line, I noticed a statement from Borepatch who I consider a pretty well-informed guy, saying that fully 50% of traffic on the 'net is from two services: Google (mostly YouTube) and Netflix.  The Foundation for Economic Education adds:

Net Neutrality had the backing of all the top names in content delivery, from Google to Yahoo to Netflix to Amazon. It’s had the quiet support of the leading Internet service providers Comcast and Verizon.  Both companies are on record in support of the principle, repeatedly and consistently, while opposing only Title II which makes them a public utility – a classic "have your cake and eat it" position.

The opposition, in contrast, had been represented by small players in the industry, hardware providers like Cisco, free-market think tanks and disinterested professors, and a small group of writers and pundits who know something about freedom and free-market economics.
...
Here’s what’s was really going on with net neutrality. The incumbent rulers of the world’s most exciting technology decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. The imposition of a rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo.

I can hear some people saying they figured Netflix and Amazon would want Net Neutrality but why Comcast and Verizon?  The answer is what the FEE says in that third paragraph, the same answer whenever you see industries lobbying congress over rules that cost them money: they're big so they can afford the expense much better than a smaller startup so it prevents competitors coming up and challenging them.

For established firms, a rule like net neutrality can raise the costs of doing business, but there is a wonderful upside to this: your future potential competitors face the same costs. You are in a much better position to absorb higher costs than those barking at your heels. This means that you can slow down development, cool it on your investments in fiber optics, and generally rest on your laurels more.

But how can you sell such a nefarious plan? You get in good with the regulators. You support the idea in general, with some reservations, while tweaking the legislation in your favor. You know full well that this raises the costs to new competitors. When it passes, call it a vote for the “open internet” that will “preserve the right to communicate freely online.”

If you're Google, Amazon or Netflix, the last thing you want is some garage-based innovator to have a level playing field and become a threat.  Can't happen?  Remember MySpace?  Remember Archie, the first search engine?  Too far back?  Then do you remember Altavista?  Lycos?  Kids, ask your parents.  Google was a startup from a couple of precocious college kids; at some level they have to know that if they do get knocked off their throne it will be by a couple of kids like they were.  They want to prevent that and Net Neutrality may be a part of keeping their throne. 

Looked at this way, Net Neutrality is probably the ultimate bait and switch; the ultimate con game.  People think they're going to get ultimate streaming rates for everything every time, but nobody can do that without spending tons of money on infrastructure.  The big ISPs can do something but they don't have to knowing that startup technologies will never take their tidy little profit away if they managed the government well enough.  Marxists like Robert McChesney of Free Press, and George Soros will get their wish of destroying the "capitalist media", and the useful idiots protesting or threatening murder for net neutrality get their little government teat to suck on, since they think if the wise and wonderful gubmint is in charge everything will be wonderful.  Everybody's happy except for the people who understand and value free and open markets - meanwhile, development of the Internet slows and the expression "Internet Speed" goes away.  As Ajit Pai said in 2015 (quoting Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars universe), “Young fool … Only now, at the end, do you understand.”  At the moment, Pai is standing up for a return to free and open markets.  It is, after all, what voters seemed to vote for when they gave power to Trump and the Stupid Party.

(generic artsy picture of optical fibers - source)

As I've said before, you have to admire the way the left controls the message.  Ask any typical person and they'll reflexively say the idea is wonderful because the ISPs are screwing us and want to slow all our net feeds down because they're evil.  Pissing off your customers is such a successful business strategy.  I see similar arguments like this from people claiming to be in the industry, so they must not understand the business aspects.  There never seems to be the thought that the market brought them the continuously improving and faster computers, tablets or phones, and that the same market is also continuously trying to build out faster and faster internet infrastructure.  There never seems to be the realization that the heavy hand of government could grind that to a halt.  There never seems to be a realization that the reason they're pissed at their ISP is exactly because their ISP is a state-regulated utility.  No recognition of any of these at all.

How the Tea Party Was Killed Off

Remember the Tea Party?  They were a political force to be reckoned with in the 2010 elections, but by the 2012 elections had been rendered ineffective.  It turns out it wasn't a natural occurrence and it certainly wasn't that they ran out of things to do.  At least according to this operative, who says he was involved, the tea party was killed off; murdered.   What killed them was the very corruption and cronyism they rose up to fight. 

What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause.

The tea party actually started to rise during the last years of the W; so it absolutely didn't start as reaction to Obama (the reflexive reaction of the media and the left was, of course, to call the tea party racist).  Instead, the impetus was a reaction to the profligate spending along with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.  When Obama swept into office, of course, both of those things continued.  Add in the passing of Obamacare, the only major social program in history to be voted in by one party, and the lies that went along with it ("if you like your doctor you can keep your doctor", "we have to pass the bill to see what's in it" and more), anger at Washington exploded.  Tea party rallies started happening.

As Peggy Noonan noted in 2010, the tea party wasn't a wing of the Republican party, as the left wing media thought, so much as a critique of it.  The tea party wasn't a national organization and it originally had little or nothing to do with the idea we saw widely displayed on signs, "Taxed Enough Already".  It was an organic uprising; a leaderless system, or starfish organization as they're called. 

Republicans inside the Beltway reacted to the burgeoning Tea Party with glee but uncertainty about how to channel the grass-roots energy usually reserved for the left. A small group of supposedly conservative lawyers and consultants saw something different: dollar signs. The PACs found anger at the Republican Party sells very well. The campaigns they ran would be headlined “Boot John Boehner," or “Drop a Truth Bomb on Kevin McCarthy.” And after Boehner was in fact booted and McCarthy bombed in his bid to succeed him, it was naturally time to “Fire Paul Ryan." The selling is always urgent: “Stop what you’re doing” “This can’t wait.” One active solicitor is the Tea Party Leadership Fund, which received $6.7 million from 2013 to mid-2015, overwhelmingly from small donors. A typical solicitation from the TPLF read: “Your immediate contribution could be the most important financial investment you will make to help return America to greatness.” But, according to an investigation by POLITICO, 87 percent of that “investment” went to overhead; only $910,000 of the $6.7 million raised was used to support political candidates.

I don't think I get many uninformed readers here, but they should know that as a rule in life, when someone talks to you with the urgency seen in those examples ("stop what you're doing"... "this can't wait"), you're being hustled.  Walk away or ignore it.  It's like the slimy car salesman who hits you with, "what can I do to get you into this car today?".  

Personally, I've always been suspicious of the Tea Party Patriots and a few other groups that put themselves forward as leaders of the leaderless organization. 

Today, the Tea Party movement is dead, and Trump has co-opted the remnants. What was left of the Tea Party split for a while between Trump and, while he was still in the race, Ted Cruz, who was backed by Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder and national coordinator of the Tea Party Patriots. In 2014, the Tea Party Patriots group spent just 10 percent of the $14.4 million it collected actually supporting candidates, with the rest going to consultants and vendors and Martin’s hefty salary of $15,000 per month; in all, she makes an estimated $450,000 a year from her Tea Party-related ventures.

Folks, have you ever heard of Charity Navigator?   No, they don't - can't - have a file on every group that's going to ask you for money, but it's a good place to start.  I Will Never Give a Dime to an organization that puts 10% of what it collects into its nominal purpose.  That's even worse than the 13% cited in the first quote by POLITICO.  Another good place to go is OpenSecrets.org.  You can view a group’s track record in minutes. How much goes toward candidate contributions or so-called independent expenditures, which are supposed to be spent on the candidate (though even those can be thinly veiled solicitations if the "ask" or landing page directs to the PAC and not the candidate).

I'm not going to cite the whole article, you should definitely read the whole thing, but I will leave you with the author's summary of what happened.

But any insurgent movement needs oxygen in the form of victories or other measured progress in order to sustain itself and grow. By sapping the Tea Party’s resources and energy, the PACs thwarted any hope of building the movement. Every dollar swallowed up in PAC overhead or vendor fees was a dollar that did not go to federal Tea Party candidates in crucial primaries or general elections. This allowed the GOP to easily defeat or ignore them (with some rare exceptions). Second, the PACs drained money especially from local Tea Party groups, some of which were actively trying to grow the movement electorally from the ground up, at the school board and city council level. Lacking results five years on, interest in the movement waned—all that was left were the PACs and their lists.

It's really common to hear people complaining about what a corrupt place DC is (you've heard "Den of Criminals") is.   I say that and think that.  I didn't know anything compared to what's in that article.  To grab a quote from Walter Hudson at PJ Media, where I first saw the link to this story:

This is where our attention needs to be. This is the real establishment, not elected leaders in Washington, but a swirling flock of vultures that feed on the corpses of great expectation.

(AP Photo/Ben Margot - from PJ Media article)

Techy Tuesday - FCC Targets Set-Top Boxes

Last week, the FCC released a statement saying they will start the regulatory process to require cable companies to abandon the proprietary formats used in their set top boxes.  In essence they want to make these formats open source so that app writers and competing hardware makers can provide alternative ways to view cable TV offerings.  This is being done in the name of providing more choice to consumers in how the access programming and even what programming they have available. 

Sounds good, right?  I mean, who could be opposed to more consumer choice and more access?  At times like this, I resort to an old mental model of mine that first gelled in my mind in the 1970s: think of the Fed.gov as a retarded giant.  The giant may want to help you, but it's just as likely going to step on you and kill you.  It's going to be slow to move, and when it does move, it's going to be clumsy and dangerous. 

In a counterpoint editorial, Michael Powell*, who was the FCC Chairman under W and is now chairman and CEO of the Cable industry's trade group the NTCA,  points out the obvious: it seems that what Chairman Wheeler at the FCC wants to regulate has happened already without gubmint intervention.  They're going to assure "more consumer choice and access to programming?"  Has the FCC heard of Netflix?  That Netflix and Amazon have won awards for their programming?  And he wants us to be able to stream TV onto any device?  Our local company is Bright House Networks, and I have a free app they provide to stream cable programming onto my iPad (not to mention they run commercials every 20 or 30 minutes encouraging people to stream more). Powell points out:

Contrary to Wheeler’s assertion, cable content can already be watched on iPhones, iPads, Xboxes, Rokus, smart TVs and more. Pay-TV companies offer apps of their services for millions of customer-owned devices, as do most major TV programmers. HBO Now, anyone? But irrespective of real progress, no good market seems to go unregulated these days.

Chairman Wheeler wrote an op ed for a site called re/code arguing that consumers spend too much money on set-top boxes. 

Today, 99 percent of pay-TV customers lease set-top boxes from their cable, satellite or telco providers. Pay-TV subscribers spend an average of $231 a year to rent these boxes, because there are few meaningful alternatives.

He points out, and is accurate as far as I know, that the companies make back what those boxes cost them and then continue to collect the monthly fees.  In counterpoint, Michael Powell says

What the FCC fails to make clear is the cost of leasing a cable box will be replaced with the cost of buying and using a retail box. Retail boxes in the market today are no bargain. The latest Tivo box will cost you $299 to buy, and after the first year, you will pay a $14.99 monthly subscription fee (forever). And to get any new innovations in boxes, you will have to toss yours out and buy a new one.

It's time for me to fill in the details on the asterisk above, next to Michael Powell's name.  See, I personally detest the guy because I (and every other ham radio HF operator) have been injured by him.  He's the guy, who as FCC chairman, allowed the abomination of BPL or Broadband over Power Lines.  Thankfully, the system never really showed up in my area, but the FCC authorized BPL at interference levels 40 dB - 10,000 times - greater than other "unintentional radiators" they regulate.  When hams complained, the FCC effectively said, "sue each other".  I think he's a crooked "crony capitalist" who used his power and position as FCC chairman to funnel money to some companies to sell BPL systems, presumably to get some return from those companies.  Perhaps this job at the NTCA?  On the other hand, going by the "takes one to know one" theory, he may be well qualified to recognize Wheeler doing the same thing!

Sadly, the real benefits of the FCC’s proposal tilt decidedly to the commercial interests of a few well-heeled tech companies. What’s in it for them? In short, they get to create their own video service on the back of others. Rather than negotiate and pay for content — like all video streamers do today — they want the government to mandate its free availability. Why negotiate and pay for ESPN, Food Network or TV One, when the government will create a mandate that lets you build a box and fill it with top-value content without paying a dime?

I kinda hate to say it, but while Michael Powell may be a corrupt scumbag, I think he's right on this one: no good market seems to go unregulated these days.  I think the FCC action is the classic Washington DC idiocy of trying to legally mandate things that have already happened and take credit for creating them.  Throw in some corruption, money under the table, and it's whole DC package.  They're never as fast and as good as the free market and they're out of touch with reality.  I find I actually trust an industry trade group more than the government - unless they're trying to lobby the Fed.gov, in which case I want a pox on both of them.

(from re/code)

The Paris Climate Conference

Was a colossal waste of time and money, producing an agreement that will have no discernible effect on the global temperature.   The bottom line is that a bunch of self-impressed politicians and diplomats flew there to be seen with each other, stay at expensive hotels, eat expensive food, and pose for pictures, just so they can feel good about themselves.

Over five years ago, May of 2010, I posted an article called "Imagine There Is Man Made Global Warming".  In it, I took some published numbers from the global warming folks and did some calculator button pushing to show that nothing they were suggesting would make any difference.

That's our magic number-1,767,250 million metric tons of CO2 per ºC.  To the precision we know such things, that's more like 1.8 million mmt (million million metric tons).

So let's say you wanted to reduce your carbon footprint.  Being a fanatic little greenie, you decide to give up your car.  According to some online sources, if you stopped driving your average mid-sized car for a year, you'd save about 5.5 metric tons (or 0.000055 million metric tons, mmt) of CO2 emissions per year. Divide 0.000055mmtCO2 by 1,767,250 mmt/ºC and you get 3.11 * 10^-12 degrees C (3.11e-12 in calculator-jockey jargon).  If you took every car in the USA off the road, roughly 150 million, you've only changed the temperature .000466C per year. 
...
There has been talk about reducing the US CO2 output to 80% of its current levels - at one time that was in the Cap and Trade bill that has been in congress off and on for the last year. The 2005 carbon output was about 6000 mmt, so 80% below that is 6000-4800 or 1200 mmt. 4800/1,800,000 is .0027C. So if you took 150 million average mid-sized cars off the road and reduced the power generation and other carbon uses, those add up to a whopping .003C! In other words, nothing. In no statistical test could you distinguish that result from zero. Bupkis.
...
And that's the dirty, stupid little secret.  Imagine there really is man made global warming.  Use their numbers.  Calculate how much effect you would have on temperatures by virtually destroying everyone and everything you now know or ever have known, and it has no effect at all.

Today I stumbled across a link to a calculator at the Cato Institute (H/T to 90 Miles) that will allow you to calculate the change in average global temperature from reductions in CO2 emissions from just the US or the whole industrialized world, with your choice of four different Climate Sensitivity numbers.  A few minutes with this calculator confirms everything I said in that old post.  90 Miles links to the Daily Signal for this wisdom: 

Paul Knappenberger and Patrick Michaels [at Cato - SiG] estimate that the climate regulations the Obama administration are imposing on the energy sector – costs that will be passed down to households – will avert a meager 0.018 degree Celsius of warming by the year 2100.

What’s worse is that if you included 100 percent cuts from the entire industrialized world in their modeling, then you would only avert warming by 0.278 degree C by the turn of the century.

I have my doubts that an average global temperature change of 0.018 degrees C could be determined with today's technology.  When you consider all the uncertainties involved in predicting 85 years into the future, along with how poorly the Global Climate Models have been doing and all the other arguments, I maintain they not only couldn't determine if these numbers are correct, but can't even tell you if the temperature is going to change.  Furthermore, I link to a video in that previous post where an insider at the Chicago Climate Exchange says exactly this. 

It's a scam; the insiders know it's a scam, the only people who don't think it's a scam are the useful idiots in the parties and the press that vote for these guys.  The insiders, Kerry, Obama, and the crooks  selling carbon credits are just in it to fleece us.  If it's not the largest criminal enterprise in history, that's only because they haven't gotten everything they want.

IMF Warns of Financial Instability

Last week, the International Monetary Fund issued warnings of global economic slowdown and instability.

True to their nature as central bankers, they stressed worry about deflation, and presented comical inflation numbers to make their point.

“I worry about deflation globally,” new IMF Economic Counselor Maurice Obstfeld said in an interview ahead of an annual IMF research conference that focuses this year on unconventional monetary policies and exchange rate regimes. “It may be time to start thinking outside the box.”

Weak—and in some cases falling—price growth has plagued Japan, Europe, the U.S. and other major economies since the financial crisis. Plummeting commodity prices are exacerbating the so-called “lowflation” and deflation problems that curb investment, spending and growth.

According to their data, shown here, the advanced economies in the world are showing mere 0.3% inflation, a level not seen since the depths of the '08/'09 crisis, while their goal for the world is 2%; doubling prices on everything every 36 years.

The IMF is talking about "thinking outside the box" and then goes on to suggest... wait for it ... permanent Quantitative Easing!  Because what they've done so far has worked out so well. 

So, what would be thinking outside the box for Mr. Obstfeld? One option is a proposal by Adair Turner, a member of the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee, for central bankers to overtly finance increased budget stimulus with permanent increases in the money supply. By contrast, the increased money supply resulting from recent central bank bond-buying programs is meant to be temporary.

The problem is that all that money they created through QE went to banks who propped up housing prices for their own reasons, and corporations who found it was so cheap and easy to borrow money they could go on a spending spree, buying other companies, and doing minimal investment in more lasting things, like modernization and improvements.  As the Guardian puts it:

Massive monetary policy stimulus has rekindled growth in developed economies since the deep recession that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008; but what the IMF calls the “handover” to a more sustainable recovery – without the extra prop of ultra-low borrowing costs – has so far failed to materialise.

Meanwhile, the cheap money created to rescue the developed economies has flooded out into emerging markets, inflating asset bubbles, and encouraging companies and governments to take advantage of unusually low borrowing costs and load up on debt.

The distortions created by the central banks has been a central problem.  The other problem is that we never really fixed the problems of '08.  The problem in '08 was too much borrowing and too much leverage throughout society .  Too many institutions are over-extended on free credit.

Meanwhile, the failure to patch up the international financial system after the last crash, by ensuring that banks in emerging markets hold enough capital, and constraining risky borrowing, for example, means that a new Lehman Brothers-type shock could spark another global panic.

“Shocks may originate in advanced or emerging markets and, combined with unaddressed system vulnerabilities, could lead to a global asset market disruption and a sudden drying up of market liquidity in many asset classes,” the IMF says, warning that some markets appear to be “brittle”.

Bayou Renaissance Man points to an issue of Porter Stansberry's newsletter saying we are already in the opening phases of this “financial instability”.

We are in the early stages of a great debt default – the largest in U.S. history.

We know roughly the size and scope of the coming default wave because we know the history of the U.S. corporate debt market. As the sizes of corporate bond deals have grown over time, each wave of defaults has led to bigger and bigger defaults.
...
Default rates on "speculative" bonds are normally less than 5%. That means, less than 5% of noninvestment-grade, U.S. corporate debt defaults in a year. But when the rate breaks above that threshold, it goes through a three- to four-year period of rising, peaking, and then normalizing defaults. This is the normal credit cycle. It's part of a healthy capitalistic economy, where entrepreneurs have access to capital and frequently go bankrupt.
...
Six years after default rates normalized in 2003, they suddenly spiked up to almost 10% in 2009. But thanks to a massive and unprecedented government intervention, featuring trillions of dollars in credit protection, default rates immediately returned to normal in 2010. As a result, only about $1 trillion of corporate debt went into default during this cycle.
...
What happens next should be obvious to everyone: The big debt-clearing cycle that was "paused" in 2009 will make the next debt-clearing cycle much, much larger – by far the biggest we've ever seen. When will that happen? Six years after default rates last returned to normal. In other words... right now.

As Peter says in the BRM post just linked, it's worthwhile reading to go read Stansberry research, and it's worth the time to read the original BRM post.  The IMF has posted the entire report excerpted at that top in a variety of languages and formats.  Final quote back to the Guardian story on the IMF:

Yet the failure of the world’s policymakers to get to grips with the shortcomings of the international financial system over the past seven years, despite the long shadow cast by Lehman and its aftermath, suggests that any measures enacted now are likely to be too little, too late. The message many may take home from Lima is, “batten down the hatches”.

30% Of Millennials Would Sell An Organ To Erase Student Loans

According to the website InvestmentWatch, 30% of Millennials said they'd sell an organ to pay off their student loans.  They link to a survey at MyBankTracker, saying that's not the most questionable part of it.

...38 percent would agree to take part in a questionable medical study. These are two of the findings released by the website MyBankTracker which surveyed 200 of its readers this past summer to determine how far they would go to erase their school-related debt. In terms of other extreme measures, 55 percent would turn their lives into a reality show. However, the participants had their limits, as only 43 percent would be willing to sell half their belongings. And sixty-eight percent would reportedly refuse to join active duty in the military.

30% would be willing to sell a kidney, while 43% would be willing to sell half their belongings?  "You can take part of my liver, but you can't take my smartphone"?  The last line, 68% would refuse to join active duty military, is probably selection bias.  Anyone who would accept going into active military duty to get educational benefits probably isn't part of this population, because they did it already. 

The kicker is that of the population they surveyed the median age of the respondents was 32, and their student loan debt averaged about $34,500 per person.  According to the Project on Student Debt, this is well over the $28,400 national average for student loan debt.  We've all heard stories about students ending up over $100,000 in debt; these are probably the expensive, private schools, and an outlier number.

Maybe, on second thought, don't buy the liver.    

The Coming Crisis In State and Local Government Finances

There seems to be a common thought that since states and local governments are required to balance their budgets, that they're relatively fiscally sound.  Folks seem to think the states should be relatively unaffected by the coming collapse of the dollar.  A little thought should dispel that idea: everyone knows that the feds essentially blackmail the states by handing over money for the Feds' pet projects, as long as the states/locals do something else the Feds want; this helps finance the states' expenses.  Unfortunately, it's worse than that.

Charles Hugh Smith "Of Two Minds" blog takes a look at the coming crisis in state and local government finances.  As he puts it, "Strangely enough, every easily foreseeable financial crisis is presented in the mainstream media as one that “nobody saw coming.” No doubt the crisis visible in these three charts will also fall into the “nobody saw it coming” category." The first chart may tell the whole story, or at least most of it:

State and local government debt, excluding employee retirement funds (which everyone was talking about a few years ago) and a few other line items, has gone up 150% since 2000.  Nominal GDP rose about 77% since 2000. So state and local debt rose at double the rate of GDP. That is the definition of an unsustainable trend.

At some point, borrowing becomes impossible (or prohibitively expensive) and the only trick left is to raise some taxes.  Unfortunately, that well is empty, too.  Taxes have gone up at essentially the rate of GDP growth: 75% instead of 77%. 

Even worse, the Expenses have gone up more than the taxes, 82% vs. 75%, making the situation worse every day.  When the housing bubble popped in '07-'08, that reduced property tax revenues, squeezing the local governments harder.  The real problem though is the decrease in household income to pay those taxes; the taxpayers are getting squeezed. 

As Charles Hugh Smith puts it:

Wages and salaries are barely keeping up with inflation, real household incomes are down 8.5% since 2000 and state and local government taxes and spending are rising at twice the rate of inflation--where does this lead to?

1. The bond market may choke if state and local governments try to "borrow our way to prosperity" as they did in the 2000s.

2. If state and local taxes keep soaring while wages stagnate and household income declines, households will have less cash to spend on consumption.

3. Declining consumer spending = recession.

4. In recessions, sales and income taxes decline as households spending drops. This will crimp state and local tax revenues.

5. This sets up an unvirtuous cycle: state and local governments will have to raise taxes to maintain their trend of higher spending. Higher taxes reduce household spending, which reduces income and sales tax revenues. In response, state and local governments raise taxes again. This further suppresses disposable income and consumption. In other words, raising taxes offers diminishing returns.

At some point, local government revenues will decline despite tax increases and the bond market will raise the premium on local government debt in response to the rising risks.

When borrowing become prohibitive (or impossible) and raising taxes no longer generates more revenues, state and local governments will have to cut expenditures. Given their many contractual obligations, these cuts will slice very quickly into sinews and bone.

State and local governments have to balance budgets, but they're not all in strong financial shape.  What we have here is another one of those situations that just can't keep going the way that it has been going.  Continuing to spend more than income is the very definition of unsustainable.  And we all know things that can't go on won't go on. 

Catching Up

It has been a bit quieter than usual around here, so allow me to explain that Monday night I was doing "something close to nothing" (as Prince once sang) and when I got up, I could feel pain starting in my lower back.  Both Monday night and last night I couldn't sit at this keyboard and type - and that's not exactly strenuous.

Not sure what it is, but it's definitely sore to the touch on the right side, and I think it's muscle soreness, not a bad disk or the bone itself.  Close to the iliac crest.  Standing up and sitting down are the worst things.  Once I'm standing up and past the painful part of motion, I'm OK.  I can move fairly well once I get past that stiffness, but getting upright and moving is really not pleasant at all.  Like everyone, I've had some back pain before, but never missed a lot of work because of it.  I know this means I should be doing more situps and other back-strengthening exercises, but I haven't been keeping up with them, so it's my own fault.

That sort of discomfort tends to focus one's attention, so I haven't been watching the world as closely.   I see more from the Planned Parenthood Shop of Horrors, yet the Senate couldn't come up with a vote to shut down their funding.  I'm beginning to see them as doing the same corrupt tricks as the SEIU and government employees' unions in general.  They give money to Evil party members to get elected and once they're in place, the Evils give the money back to PP.  Each party skims some off the top of the pile; don't worry, you're paying for it.  Of course, this is exactly how the government employee unions work with their cronies in the Evil Party.

Mark Steyn has had some of his usual excellent observations on the Little Shop of Horrors.

If abortion were the respectable medical procedure its proponents insist it is, there would be no such thing as "Planned Parenthood", anymore than there is a Planned Hernia megacorp. We are told constantly that abortion is a very teensy-weensy, barely statistically measurable, all but undetectable micro-sliver of the wide range of "women's health" services Planned Parenthood provides. So it only does an estimated third of a million abortions per year - or about as many abortions as the combined total of half the remaining G7 nations (Germany, France, Canada). It is the single biggest aborter on the planet.

So the "right to choose" has facilitated the rise of a characteristically American racket: a billion-dollar "non-profit" that gets over half its funding from the US taxpayer and pays its eight top executives an average of 300 grand in order to serve as the paramilitary wing of reproductive liberalism. Planned Parenthood is an abortion-industrial complex: America is, alas, the abortion mill of the western world, and Cecile Richards' organization is its Standard Oil, US Steel and American Tobacco combined. Its ministrations fall disproportionately on minority women, so in that sense it is still true to the racist and eugenicist theories of its founder, Margaret Sanger: among blacks in New York City, there are more abortions than births - a grim ratio one otherwise has to go to Russia and its satellites to find.
...
Among developed nations, only America kills on this scale and in this manner. You can't do it and retain your humanity.

I think too much of you, dear readers, to go into details on the false arguments for how much women need PP.  Many sources have covered this information in the last couple of weeks.  I thought a purpose of Obamacare was to provide any service any woman wanted.  We also fund something like 9000 community health centers, several times the number of PP clinics in the country. 

The US Has Too Many Zombies

At least according to Bill Bonner.  Bill likens our perma-ruling class to other Nobility classes, whom he calls Zombies in Suits.  The Zombies are threatening to take down our society as has happened so many times before.   

Archaeologist Arthur Demarest explains that we’re not the first society to be brought low by zombies. They caused the decline of the Mayan civilization too:

Society had evolved too many elites, all demanding exotic baubles […] all needed quetzal feathers, jade, obsidian, fine chert, and animal furs. Nobility is expensive, non-productive and parasitic, siphoning away too much of society’s energy to satisfy its frivolous cravings.

But that was long ago and far away.  Surely things have gotten better in more cultured societies, right?

King Louis XVI of France must have been a decent fellow. But he was surrounded by zombies.

Almost the entire First and Second Estates – the clergy and the nobility – lived off of privileges, tariffs, taxes, grants, rents and other entitlements.

After they took their share, there was hardly enough national output left to support the working classes.

And you think America’s hedge fund managers have a nice tax deal with their “carried interest?”

France’s elite was practically exempt from taxes.

But with so many zombies, 18th-century France struggled to stay solvent. A couple of bad harvests… and people began to starve.

And so began the French Revolution.

I hear a lot of nasty speak about "banksters" and bankers in general.  Remember all the "Eat the Rich" talk from the Occupy Whatever pigs?  Banks are the obvious target; frankly they are getting a lot of special treatment from the Fed (bankers giving taxpayer money to other bankers?  Why, who woulda thunk?).  People seem to forget that the central bankers couldn't do a single freaking thing without the complicit allowance of the government.  Central Bankers couldn't be manipulating the world to the point where global collapse is a virtual certainty without government complicity.  The minute the government got so big that it was the place to get special treatments and special deals, all of what we see today became inevitable. 

I think the big quote in Bonner's column is this one, however:

Follow these easy, proven 13 steps to financial well-being…
1. Don’t get married to her
2. Use your mom’s address to get mail sent to
3. Guy buys a house
4. Guy rents out house to his girlfriend who has two of his kids
5. Section 8 will pay $900 a month for a three-bedroom home
6. Girlfriend signs up for Obamacare so guy doesn’t have to pay out the butt for family insurance
7. Girlfriend gets to go to college free for being a single mother
8. Girlfriend gets $600 a month for food stamps
9. Girlfriend gets free cellphone
10. Girlfriend gets free utilities
11. Guy moves into home but uses mom’s house to get mail sent to
12. Girlfriend claims one kid and guy claims one kid on taxes… now you both get to claim head of household at $1,800 credit
13. Girlfriend gets disability for being “bipolar” or having a “bad back” at $1,800 a month and never has to work again

This plan is perfectly legal and is being executed now by millions of people.
A married couple with a stay-at-home mom yields $0.00 dollars.
An unmarried couple with stay-at-home mom nets:
$21,600 disability +
$10,800 free housing +
$6,000 free Obamacare +
$6,000 free food +
$4,800 free utilities +
$6,000 Pell grant money to spend +
$12,000 a year in college tuition free from Pell grant +
$8,800 tax benefit for being a single mother
= $75,000 a year in benefits

We haven’t verified the details above… But if they’re correct… $75,000 a year is not chicken feed.

This incentivizing of broken families is the root that leads us to Baltimore, Ferguson, and so many before them. 

I Hope They Didn't Pay Too Much

This is one of those studies you come across where you say, "I hope they didn't pay too much for that one".  You know, seems every week there's some news story about a study on something that everybody with a pulse and two brain cells ought to know.  In this case, maybe not that generally known, but I'm sure everyone in the industry knows it.  There is no widespread discrimination against women in STEM career fields. 

A new study by two Cornell professors suggests faculty in several different STEM fields actually favor women by a more than 2-to-1 margin over identically-qualified men.

As the Daily Caller article (first link) says, that women are discriminated against is doctrine to the left.  The two researchers approached this study by creating a group of resumes and randomly assigning male or female identities to the resumes, so that each resume was assigned to both males and females.  They then mailed out these as fictional job-seekers in four fields: Biology, economics, psychology and engineering.  They sent slates of job candidates to more than 800 faculty members at 371 colleges in all 50 states, asking them to rank them in order of hiring preference.

We ran five national experiments with these otherwise-identical female and male candidates, systematically varying their personal attributes and lifestyles in a counterbalanced design. Every time we sent a given slate of candidates to a male faculty member, we sent the same slate with sexes reversed to another male faculty member, as well as sending both slates to two female faculty members. Then we compared the faculty members' rankings to see how hirable each candidate was, overall.

What we found shocked us. Women had an overall 2-to-1 advantage in being ranked first for the job in all fields studied....In some conditions, women's advantage reached 4-to-1.

While this was specifically aimed at college professorships, it applies everywhere I know of.  Maybe it's only in companies that have some government contract hiring, but every Technology company I know wants the diversity points so badly they would hire a woman over a marginally more qualified man any day of the week.  I get both Electrical and Mechanical engineering news magazines and the annual salary surveys in both fields have said for years that when adjusted for age and experience, there is no wage gap between men and women.  In general, when pay rates are looked at in any field, this is the case.  The old sound bite about women earning 77 cents for ever dollar a man earns is based on studies that didn't compare men and women doing the same jobs with the same experience.  They end up comparing completely unequal jobs, like entry level day care workers vs. entry level oil field workers; of course the pay rates aren't the same. 

(source) 

And just as a point of interest, while electrical engineering has quite a lot of women in it, the percentage of circuit designers who are women is extremely small (in my observation, of course).   And I've met only three women in my specialty (RF design) over the last 35 years.  I currently don't work with any women who are circuit designers at all. 

Techy Tuesday - DRM: When Protecting Your Assets Hurts Them

Most of you are familiar with the Keurig coffee makers.  Keurig introduced a convenient, easy (if not "brain dead") system for making coffee: single serving portions of coffee in plastic cups which drop into a coffee maker that does everything else for you.  It made making a cup of coffee and cleaning up after it easy for many folks.  The tire shop I go to has one for people waiting, and I'm sure it's cleaner and easier for them than running a drip coffee maker.

The knock on Keurig, though, was that those little packages of coffee, the K-cups, were expensive.  More than most people thought reasonable.  Plus coffee is more than a drink to many; it's a personal luxury, a personal diversion; part of their rituals.  Maybe there was no Keurig mix that tasted exactly the way people wanted it to.  This prompted a parallel industry creating second sources for way to get coffee into your machine.

I can imagine people in some meeting room at Keurig, sitting around a conference room table, going over numbers on how other companies were cutting into their revenue streams.  This is where Keurig screwed the pooch (to borrow the aviation phrase).  They decided to make sure no one else could put products in their machines.  They released the Keurig 2.0, which incorporated Digital Rights Management into the coffee making process.  Unless your K-cup was Genuine Keurig (it seems like the phrase has to be capitalized that way), your coffee maker won't recognize it.  Buyers were not happy.  Amazon reviews went thoroughly negative: more one star reviews than fours and fives combined. 

And it’s not just the Amazon reviews that are taking a hit — Keurig reported a 12% decrease in brewer sales last quarter. And while the vast majority of their profit comes from the cups, and not the brewers, a 12% hit is a big one. Keurig says that getting 2.0-compatible cups onto store shelves faster would’ve helped, but the consumer reaction is clear: “we hate DRM.”

From Keurig's viewpoint, though, this where they screwed the pooch a second time.  They took a bad idea and implemented it poorly making themselves look like idiots.  Tech bloggers MakeUseOf pick up the story with a good summary:

If you’re familiar with the story of the Keurig DRM, you’ll know that a workaround was found very quickly. Not only is it incredibly easy, but it also makes the DRM guys at Keurig look pretty stupid. All you have to do is tape a used K-cup cover over the sensor so it reads the 2.0-compatible code no matter which cup is in the brewer. Which means you can use the Keurig 2.0 with any cup you want, as long as you’ve used one 2.0 cup and saved the lid.

While this video shows a simple fix, there are more.  Many more.  Lots of folks are all over this.  

MakeUseOf is a tech blog and has more to say about DRM in general, so go there if you find that the most interesting aspect. 

Of course, Keurig isn’t the first company to anger its customers with DRM. Amazon’s Kindle books have been the target of a lot of vitriol over the past few years, and people have gotten really good at removing the DRM from Kindle books. Still, if you aren’t aware that it’s an option, you’ll likely be stuck with Kindle DRM. Printer companies have been doing it for a long time, too — they make a ton of money when you buy their ink, so they make it hard to refill cartridges and try to keep third-party ink producers from making compatible cartridges (with some success).
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Kindle DRM, though pervasive, is a bit of a joke. The DRM originally used for Blu-Ray discs was cracked quickly. A number of people claim to have broken iTunes and Netflix rights management. And Keurig’s DRM has been countered with a single piece of tape.

The thing is, most people think that when they buy something, it's theirs.  For example, when TIVO first started selling their recorders, I remember running into articles where people said they wanted to upgrade the hard drive and TIVO wanted way more than the local computer shop; when they bought the cheaper drive and went to install them, TIVO said they were breaking their end user agreement and dropped their service.  People thought when they shelled out a few $hundred for the TIVO, it was theirs, not TIVO's.  Similarly, when folks buy a coffee maker and then buy an accessory for it, they  expect it to keep working.  When the company says, "no, you can't", people don't like to hear that and will try to find ways around it. 

We've done a couple of long discussions about patents here, and while I believe that intellectual property exists and inventors should be allowed to protect their invention for a while, I also pretty firmly believe that companies can be pretty stupid in how they conduct business.  In an attempt to recoup sales they thought they were losing, Keurig pissed off and alienated customers.   That's never a good business practice. 

(Obligatory coffee snob statement: I wouldn't have a Keurig.  Everything I've tasted out of one was swill.  I have a Mr. Coffee drip maker in my office.  I regularly have newcomers to the building stop by my office to inquire what the wonderful smell is.)