As I think I’ve mentioned here before, my internet start page is the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung’s website. I switched from CNN back in 2006. That was, if one will recall, when that network willingly showed, and re-showed, and then showed some more, the Al Qaeda films of American soldiers being shot by snipers in Iraq and elsewhere. They’d announced they’d made and released the films in the hope of influencing the outcome of the 2006 mid-term elections. And CNN enlisted in their goals (successfully, too). I also wanted to use the newspaper to keep my German skills from atrophying to the vanishing point.

Among the many things I find interesting about reading the articles on that site (unfortunately I seldom have time to read more than one or two in a day) is that from time to time they’ll have an article on some theme or issue that’s also current here in America. Only it will not be examined from the reference point of anything having to do with America. Principally this means that their treatment of these issues is pretty much free from distracting baggage like the racial implications of Issue X or Solution Y. There’s no such thing as a surviving aboriginal population in Central Europe to raise all the issues that ours does. While there are immigration issues over there (and boy howdy! are there ever), they’re by and large not illegal immigration issues, and so you don’t have this enormous group of people who, by their very residence, constitute a criminal class (by “class” I mean “a group discernible by its commonly shared attribute X which is not shared by people not of that group”). 

I recall once reading about a study – and it’s been so long now I can’t recall whether it was just within Germany or Europe-wide; I seem to recall the latter – that was done to ask and answer the question of what varying measurable inputs correlated positively with measurable results in the school classroom. It was fascinating. They found that most of the nostrums advanced by the “education” establishment, like smaller class size, higher pay for teachers, more teachers per student, overall spending per student, longer school years, longer school days, spending on gee-gaws in the classroom, and so forth, had nearly no identifiably positive effect on measurable student achievement. Wow. I mean, just wow. Unless you accept that European children are biologically wired to learn differently than Americans, what does that say about the incessant demands to pour ever-greater sums down the public “education” rat hole here at home? 

Reading that site also serves the glumly-encouraging purpose of reminding one that we do not blunder alone, nor are we necessarily the inventors of every crazy notion that boils to the surface. 

At any rate, I also recall reading, within the past year or so, an article about the feminization of the school systems. By which is meant a systematic hostility to males and male behavior, and the effect that this shift in outlook has had on its targets. My antennae went up when I saw that article for two reasons. The first is that there is increasing attention being paid to the growing observable tendency of the structural and normative environments of the American school to treat as quasi-criminal common behaviors that I grew up in the 1970s recognizing to be ordinary male juvenile behavior. The Blogfather regularly links to articles, interviews, and books treating of this problem.  Let’s be clear that it is a major problem.  The more hostile the school environment becomes to boys, the worse they do and the further they fall behind.  The further behind, the less they’re able to achieve later in life and the lower their chances – given the female behavioral fact of not just assortative but hypergamous mating – of forming stable families to raise the next generation, the males of whom then not only have to grow up being told they’re psychotic violent sexual predators because they made the mistake of standing in the Penis Line, but also will so grow up without positive male role models, and so forth. 

The other reason I read that article carefully is because I have three boys. Right now they’re eleven and a half, just over ten, and seven and a half. They’re all in the same private, Roman Catholic school, at least for the time being. As a Catholic school this one is pretty laid back. Nominally we’re Protestant, and there are Jewish and Hindu children there as well. I’d suppose a majority of the children are in fact R.C., but I’d be surprised if it were a large majority. At any rate, from an instructional standpoint we’ve been absolutely thrilled to bits with the place. Our oldest especially presents some challenges to traditional lock-step instruction, and being free from the strictures of government regulation the school has done a splendid job accommodating him. We are both profoundly grateful for the chance they were willing to give him, when no one else would.  I mean that.  No matter how the story I’m about to share plays out, I will always recognize that school for what it was willing to do for my family

Our middle child has a pretty pronounced case of Middle Child. He feels very close to his older brother (they’re just barely seventeen months apart), sometimes we suspect to the point of near-idolization. That’s not to say they don’t get good and pissed off at each other, from both directions, every so often. But when No. 2 is deprived of No. 1’s company he really feels it keenly. No. 2 is also close to No. 3, even though there are almost exactly 30 months between them. All three brothers play with their Legos and other toys together, they engage together in sundry imaginative play (and narration, too; they can go on and on and on about these perfectly imaginary and incredibly detailed worlds; the ancient bards who could recite hours of Greek poetry from memory don’t have much on my boys), and . . . they rough-house. All three of them get into it from time to time, but the most frequent dyad is what we can call the 2-3 split. It’s hard to tell sometimes who the instigator is. Sometimes No. 2 just seems to get bored and figure it’s time to come off the turn-buckles onto No. 3. But a great deal of the time No. 3 will go out of his way to stir up his next older brother. It’s not at all unusual for me to be awakened on a weekend morning by the concussion of our house’s frame as someone’s body slams onto the floor. No. 3 will usually end up howling to the heavens about whatever. To listen to him you’d think he was being torn limb from limb. And then you look at his face and he’s smiling through it all. Go figure. But from time to time they get undeniably out of hand, someone passes a serious lick, and when they do it’s time to squash things. Mommy tends to negotiate a peace process with them; daddy goes for the Carthaginian Peace approach to matters. Twenty minutes later they’re sitting side-by-side in the same armchair, collaboratively playing MineCraft. 

By any measure it’s fair to say that No. 2 is very physical in his expression of “What’s Going on in My Head.” He’s affectionate, and it does a father’s heart great joy to see him roll around on the floor with his grandparents’ dachshund getting his face polished. As with all our family’s dachshunds, she’s extremely affectionate herself (we’ve only had one who ever met a stranger), but even by that standard it’s obvious that No. 2 is Her Special Boy. And he just laps that stuff up. Unfortunately, he’s also very physical in expressing “I’m upset,” or “I’m bored,” or “I’ve enjoyed about enough of your presence.” He also has a pronounced speech impediment. We’ve ruled out any structural difficulty; he’s just got a lisp and problems with his “r.” I grew up with other children and I know what has to go on when the adults aren’t there to stop it. No. 2 also has been diagnosed with dysgraphia, which is a difficulty in expressing oneself coherently in words. It’s not dyslexia, although the two almost invariably are found together; in a way it’s the opposite. Dyslexia results in the printed word making a jumbled impression on the mind’s receptors; dysgraphia results in the words you want to say coming out a jumbled mess. So let’s add some serious frustration issues to his speech impediment, and filter all that through a physical kid who just happens to be a Middle Child. 

After several “incidents” at school involving other children (I’ll observe that most of them seemed to be mostly-manufactured “incidents,” in which the seriousness of, you know, what actually happened was more a function of adult hyperventilation than any serious conflict issues between the children involved), last year we put him on Concerta. I was opposed at the time, largely because God only knows what the long-term effects of this drug are on a child’s developing brain. For the time being, however, it seems to have the desired effect of making him much less apt physically to express what’s eating at him.

At least, it did until one day a couple of weeks ago. The boys were in after care (their mother picks them up after she gets off work; I work 35 miles away and it’s just not a realistic option for me to make a habit of it), and the boys had been there by that time for getting on for two hours. No. 2 got a little bored and decided it was time to mix it up with No. 3. So he goes and seeks out his brother and they end up where little boys on playgrounds have ended up since time immemorial: on the ground. No. 2 has No. 3 on the ground, and at some point got his hands about his neck. No. 3’s hollering that he “can’t breathe,” which one knows to have been untrue because he was able to say it. That evaluative process is beyond your typical first-grader, however, and on this occasion it was beyond the first-grader who is No. 3’s buddy and who was witnessing this scuffle. So – and you’ve got to hand it to him; his motivation was simon-pure and his guts beyond reproach; it was his judgment that let him down – this kid decides he’s got to rescue his friend. And so he passes a lick on No. 2. 

Now, let’s freeze-frame this vignette for a moment and examine it from No. 2’s perspective. There he and his brother are, disporting themselves as is their wont. No. 3 is howling to the world and possibly even half-laughing while doing it. “Oh! I’m dying! You’re killing me! I can’t breathe!!” You get the picture. And then suddenly along comes some stranger and jumps No. 2. What is the normal reaction? Why yes, one defends oneself. He put a scratch on this kid’s face, which I actually find the most alarming part about the whole story. No. 2 is old enough to know how to make a fist and use it as designed; scratching is for girls. 

I will here observe that there is a legally-recognized term of art for this little kid who thought he was doing a good turn: officious intermeddler. Two of the first rules of survival on playgrounds are (i) if it’s not your fight, stay out of it; and (ii) never get between two family members. If you really must get yourself mixed up in it, do so in the context of Going to Get Adult Assistance. 

Cue the Concerned Adults. Mommy gets called at work to come pick up No. 2, which she does. But from here it gets worse. The other child’s mother goes stooging into the principal and assistant principal, demanding that Something Be Done about this Horribly Dangerous Child. Yes. This mother truly believes No. 2 presents an imminent danger of severe physical harm to his fellow students. So the powers that be call in my wife and they have a Great Big Meeting about what to do about No. 2. The obvious step of kicking him out of after-care for the balance of the year is already done. They want a Formal Written Plan.  What else is expected, short of kicking him all the way out of the school? That is, of course, what Intermeddler’s Mommy is effectively demanding. The assistant principal, who used to be principal of a parochial high school up north, told the wife that while he’s familiar with the roughness of boys, he’s never seen a child so “persistently violent” as No. 2. If he was able to hang around a high school of boys and not see it, then either he was teaching a bunch of nancy-boys, or he was singularly unobservant, or he’s looking back with rose-colored glasses. By high school most boys of average or better intelligence have sense enough to settle matters out of view of the authorities.  And do so.

A few days later this mother and the wife had a prolonged telephone conversation, which is why I know so much about the position this woman is taking and why. I heard my wife ask her whether her boys (very awkwardly, her older boy happens to be No. 1’s only real friend in school) ever fight. No. Well. Ain’t that just sweeter than all get-out? This mother expressed the opinion that her children “ought to be able to go to school without having to be exposed to what her child saw” going on between No. 2 and No. 3 that day. She allowed that this school “is not a special-needs school.” Huh? Two brothers getting straight on the playground makes one of them a “special needs” child? What color is the sun on this woman’s planet? By the way, she’s a doctor and very successful at it, so she can’t even claim stupidity as explanation for her over-reaction. She already several months ago put the ka-bosh on her older boy coming to stay the night with No. 1, on the stated reason (No. 1 got this out of his friend) that she was afraid that her precious little chickabiddy might be harmed by No. 2. She also told the wife that she’s been “documenting” these things about No. 2.

Really. You can’t make this up. This woman who’s got a family to raise and a medical practice to attend to can’t find anything better to do with her time than play NKVD with my child. Assemble a dossier on him. Maybe I should get on Amazon.com and order her their largest size Dick Tracy Sooper Sleuth kit. Let her prowl about our back yard with an oversized magnifying glass and note pad.  Jesus Christ and General Jackson!  This gal’s got issues. 

I started school in September, 1971 at a tiny Catholic school near here (there were six children in my third-grade class, and two grades per room). Most of my classmates were pretty rough-and-tumble. The overwhelming majority of them lived on farms, had been up for several hours before school doing chores, and the boys not infrequently came to school still smelling a bit like cow shit and diesel fuel. By the fourth grade most of the boys had been given at least one shotgun for Christmas (most frequently a .410, although the .22-cal. was also a favorite). Back then recess was a big chunk of the middle of the day, unless it was actually coming a tornado outside. Fighting was a big part of what went on. Some of it more in earnest than others, but you know what? We learned to take a lick and pay it back, with interest where appropriate. I still remember one of my most glorious shots, ever. This group of little peckerwoods, most of them a grade behind me, had been all over me all day long. This one was actually standing behind me and must have been confused when I started my wind-up from a full back-turned-to-the-target position, because he took no evasive action at all. I caught him right under the eye socket and literally lifted him off the ground. Not bad for a fourth-grader.  That wrapped up proceedings for that day. And you know what? I went on to graduate from an Ivy League law school and he’s got a Ph.D. in microbiology. One of the other little boogers that day has been a state park ranger for decades and adores it. 

I know a family of four brothers. They’d get into fights that lasted all afternoon long. Fights that involved people’s heads going through sheet-rock. The oldest went on to serve two tours in Delta Force, was a ranking officer in the 5^th Special Operations Group when they took down the Taliban in 2001, and retired as a Lt. Colonel. His next younger brother is a full-bird Air Force flight surgeon and was recently personal physician to the Air Force chief of staff. The third brother is a surgeon in Indiana. The youngest brother, after a very rough spell, settled down and is now a lawyer. 

I know two other families of brothers who lived right next door to each other. They’d get in BB-gun fights, both in teams and every-man-for-himself. Ditto with roman candles.  They’d play chicken with darts (the object being not to dodge until the last split second; occasionally someone took a dart in the pectoral . . . and so it goes). Yes dear, I know all that was stupid, and not something as a parent you’d permit if you caught wind of it. But my point is not that it wasn’t dangerous; my point is that having done so was neither evidence of, nor did it accurately predict, a violent, warped personality in any of them. One is now a Baptist minister. One is an elder in his church (granted, he went through a spell when he was rougher than a cob; I once drove his car home for him after he’d been stopped for his ninth D.U.I; he much later married his high school sweetheart and she jerked a knot in that ass for him). One is a senior manager with the IRS. One is very a successful commercial and industrial insurance agent, the chairman of our local water and wastewater utility, and a very successful (and highly inspirational) coach of youth basketball teams. In fact his teams of half-pint little redneck boys used to go up the road and routinely kick the shit out of teams of snotty little rich kids like this doctor woman’s. A twenty point margin was a close game. 

Another couple of brothers I knew were wild as bucks growing up, as they say. One was such a frequent customer with the city court that the local force didn’t even have to ask for his license number when they’d pull him over. The younger brother was truly off the reservation. He’d disappear into the woods (this is while he was still in junior high, by the way) in the middle of the night with a bow-and-arrow and a bottle of whiskey. They too would get into epic battles with each other. The older is now a principal in one of the largest health insurance agencies in the state; the younger has not had the occupational success of his brother, but he’s a more-or-less law-abiding guy and is precisely the kind of person you’d want by your side in a foxhole. 

We grew up playing Army. As in bang-bang; you’re dead. I’m going to sneak around the flank and wipe you out. This stick is my flame-thrower and you’re toast, son. And so forth. Interestingly enough, we never played Vietnam, even though it was on the news every night. It was always World War II, and we had to take turns being the Germans because no one wanted to be them. When the city ran public sewer service through our area of town in the early 70s, the whole place was trenched up, with enormous piles of stinking red clay to match. So we had dirt clod wars. 

In the winter (this was before Geo. W. Bush, so we got to have winters back then, dontcha know), when school would be out for weeks on end, with all the streets coated in several inches of hard-packed ice and the entire state out of salt, we’d go sledding down the enormous hills that are a feature of our part of the world. And we’d have sled fights. Loser ends up in the ditch, and everyone goes for hot soup afterwards. When it wasn’t snow and ice we played football. Sometimes touch but not infrequently tackle. In the fall when the ditches were full of mountains of leaves we used to play a game where one kid would have the football, and the other two or three would try to keep him from getting from one end of the ditch to the other. 

This woman, with her irrational hang-ups, is determined to destroy my son’s life. Get kicked out of this private school and he’ll never get into another. Put him in public school and, with his educational needs and speech impediment, he’s going to sink. There’s no way a public school system can be set up to address his needs. She’s determined to do this not because of anything he’s done (so she says) but because of what she’s afraid he might do. Might. As in, might not. I wonder what’s going to happen to her own children when they’re out beyond the playground and they’ve got to “be exposed to” a great deal of things much more significant and profoundly disturbing than watching a couple of brothers adjust affairs between themselves. 

I really want to write a letter to the principal (they call him a headmaster, if memory serves), outline my recollections of growing up wearing a penis, and point out to him that, using males raised doing things my way (and my sons’), we (i) won our independence; (ii) fought and won a civil war to end chattel slavery; (iii) fought and won two world wars and a cold war; (iv) built the world’s premier transportation system; (v) broke to the plow a virgin continent; and, (vi) put men on the moon. When they can point to similar achievements by several generations of constructive eunuchs who’ve been raised to think and act like fourth-grade girls, then I’ll accept that their standards of behavior for my sons might have some validity.  Until then, I vote for my way. 

Of course, if I were to write that letter the result would only be all three of my boys get uninvited back for next year, and as badly out of water as No. 2 would be in a public school, No. 1 would be destroyed by the experience.  By a small irony, it would be No. 3 who would grin and go on.  He’s a born politician.  When he was in pre-K at this school, it seemed like almost everyone in school, all the way up to the 8th graders, knew him by name, and he them.  He’s just a happy-go-lucky kid, and his wild mop of hair and flair for whimsical language (he nicknamed chicken marsala, which my boys love, “chicken marsupial,” as a four-year-old) perfectly capture his personality.

What kind of men are we teaching our boys to be?

I’ll start this post with a confession: Until yesterday I’d not paid a great deal of attention to precisely what Bitcoin is or how it works. I ran across a link on Instapundit, however, to a Colorado representative’s tongue-in-cheek response to Sen. Joe Manchin’s call to ban Bitcoin because it’s hard to track and is widely used in certain criminal enterprises. The Colorado fellow’s response was to call for a ban on dollar bills, because they’re hard to track and are widely associated with criminal activity. I shared the post to my Facebook page and got a comment from a very good old friend of mine who now lives in Colorado and – let’s just say it politely – isn’t bowled over with admiration for this congresscritter. He’s also forgot more between breakfast and lunch about the details of how computers work and talk with each other than I’ll ever hear, let alone understand with any reliability.

I’ve seen for several years now references here and there to Bitcoin, and to the consternation it’s causing among those who are in the business of buggering us around watching out for our health, safety, and welfare. Since I’m not in a position to invest in a new set of brake pads for my Chrysler minivan with 269,700+ miles on it, I’ve never taken the trouble to learn how it works or why it’s so nefarious or wonderful (according to who’s in your ear at the moment). Thanks to the miracle of Google I’ve now patched, somewhat, my Ignorance Gap on that subject. 

For the uninitiated, Bitcoin is a “crypto-currency,” meaning: (i) It’s not issued, backed, or regulated by any constituted government or any agency or instrumentality of any such, but rather was cobbled together out of thin air (much like the Fed’s “quantitative easing,” when you get down to it) by some fellow who until literally the last couple of days had successfully preserved his anonymity (or not? according to this report in the FAZ, the Dorian Satoshi Nakamoto whom Newsweek outed as the inventor now denies any involvement at all . . . although given his previous statements I’m going with Newsweek on this one); and, (ii) Its individual units are created (in the slang, “mined”) by applying fairly substantial computing power to the solution of very difficult mathematical problems and protocols. Every time your computer (or more frequently, group of computers, as the computational power now required has long exceeded what’s available on single machines, at least desktops) solves one of these problems, it’s rewarded with the issue of a number of bitcoins. Each bitcoin, which is divisible up to eight decimal places, has a lengthy numeric key associated with it, and possession of that key, along with possession of the private key of the current possessor, allows the bitcoin to be transferred. Now, here’s the part that makes the whole system tick (and how it ticks is what generates a great part of the controversy): The mathematical problems required successfully to “mine” new bitcoins are intentionally made increasingly – exponentially so – more difficult, and on top of that, the number of bitcoins you’re issued with each successful “mining” is reduced. The system is set up so that a total of 21 million bitcoins can be issued . . . or at least that’s what is claimed. Is there anything out there to prevent jiggery-pokery to dump bazillions of bitcoins into the system? Nope. There’s nothing out there to prevent the powers that be behind Bitcoin from doing what the Fed has been doing for years now, namely just making the stuff up. 

So are bitcoins backed by anything at all? Nope. They’re backed by precisely what the federal reserve notes in your wallet are backed by: thin air. Seriously. Try going to a federal reserve bank and demanding anything for that C-note on your hip other than a spanking brand-new C-note, and see far you get. Likewise with Bitcoin. There’s nothing there; there are no assets at all; no collateral; no enterprise; no brand name; no goodwill. A bitcoin is “worth” only (i) what it costs you to acquire one, or (ii) what you can acquire with bitcoins. 

Whenever anyone anywhere completes any transaction involving bitcoins, there is supposedly updated a master, public database showing where every bitcoin has been traded thus far. This list is alleged to be run on multiple, decentralized servers, none of which is beholden to any governmental authority. So theoretically, if I’m understanding this correctly, everyone and his cousin can track precisely who’s got how many bitcoins. 

How much is a bitcoin worth? Well, that’s pretty flexible. The schoolhouse answer is that it’s worth whatever people are presently willing to pay to acquire one. Recently the price has been north of $1,100 per; it’s also within the past month or so crashed to below $300, and it’s been everywhere in between. The problem is that, as the computing power required to “mine” each issue of bitcoins gets more demanding, and therefore more expensive, the effective “purchase price” of each new bitcoin increases massively relative to all the previously “mined” bitcoins. Now, if you’re someone who’s looking to acquire additional bitcoins, you can either attempt to “mine” them yourself, or you can buy them off someone who’s already “mined” some (or that person’s assignee). Why would you pay more money to “mine” than you could pay to buy? And if you’re selling bitcoins, why would you sell at a price much less than what your putative seller would have to spend to “mine” his own? Thus all else being equal there ought to be some convergence between what the trading price is and the “mining” cost. 

Bitcoins are traded and warehoused, for want of a better expression, on exchanges dedicated to the purpose. They’re unregulated, uninsured, and (as recently demonstrated by the implosion of Mt Gox, one of the largest), not terribly secure. I’m not too sure about the mechanics of the trading/cash-out procedure, but there are – politely stated, again – some issues there as well. If you have your bitcoins housed at an exchange that goes belly-up . . . well, you’ve lost pretty much everything you have. Sort of like if you have more on deposit at an FDIC-insured bank that goes bust than the FDIC will cover. These exchanges, by the way, aren’t set up on Main Street in your friendly mid-American home town. They’re run out of places like Bulgaria and Rumania, notorious for having very fuzzy notions of the distinctions between meum and tuum, and also widely known for spawning armies of computer hackers. Just the winning recipe for the security of your investment in Bitcoin, in other words, right? More to the point, the entire system is no more secure against massive theft than the security mechanisms at these places. I’m not sufficiently computer-savvy to understand the precise sequence, but once the hackers get at the bitcoins’ keys and the private keys of the current owners, it’s only a matter of a few keystrokes to clean the place out. As in fact happened, it seems, at Mt Gox to the tune of many millions of dollars. 

What can you buy with Bitcoin? Well, pretty much anything that’s for sale by people who are willing to accept payment in Bitcoin. The concern arises from the fact that prominent on that list are things like international shipments of illegal drugs and weapons. This makes Bitcoin a burr under government’s saddle. 

Bitcoin is nearly ideal for things like “money laundering” and other “financial crimes.”  In pondering those, it’s helpful to bear in mind that those don’t necessarily mean “theft,” “wire fraud,” or other activities in which an innocent private party is separated from his hard-earned through force or trick.  In fact, “money laundering” is nothing more than making illegal proceeds ape in appearance those of lawful commerce.  The proceeds are not evidence of the crime itself, and if you look, for example, at the definitions of drug-smuggling crimes you won’t see that “possession of a boat-load of cash” is an element of any of them.  If you’re caught with $23,000,000 in $20s and $100s, and the man’s got nothing more on you, you’re not getting convicted of anything.  Rather, most of what falls under those concepts relates to doing the government out of what it has decided it’s entitled to . . . from you.  Viewed that way, government’s objection to crypto-currencies comes down to tax evasion. Government’s real dog in the hunt is tax revenue.

Demonstrating the truth of my last assertion above, consider how vanishingly small is the scale of money that needs to be, and is susceptible of, the kind of large-scale “laundering” that allegedly has governments all a-twitter.  Folks, the U.S. economy is cooking along at something like $14 trillion annually.  Even if every last dime made in an illegal operation of any sort, anywhere, by any person were successfully “laundered” that would still be a grain of sand in a very large ocean.  Add in the economies of all other Western countries and you rapidly figure out just how unimportant the supposedly monkey-shines in Bitcoin actually are to the proper functioning of the world. The trumpeted fear of “money laundering” and paying for coke and RPGs in bitcoins is a red herring.

So those are the results of my afternoon’s rambling through the Google results on “how does bitcoin work”. Here’s a description that seems pretty up-beat about the whole deal, and here’s a write-up that describes it as a “scam” and a “ponzi scheme.” All things considered, I think the stronger argument is the scam and ponzi scheme take, at least for the time being. So long as Bitcoin is not widely accepted and therefore not readily convertible into either “hard” currency (you have to try not to blow a snot bubble while describing the Fed’s funny-money as “hard” currency) or other tangible or intangible property, you as the owner of a bitcoin are sort of trapped in the system, and the later you got in the less likely anyone is to be willing to pay you a price for your bitcoin that gets you out whole. Your only likely market is the ever-fewer owners of later-mined bitcoins. And in fact that’s one of the defining characteristics of the classic ponzi scheme.  Adding to that aura of hucksterism is the fact that most of the early-mined bitcoins are not being actively traded.  So the price is being manipulated by hoarding as well, and a good deal of that hoarding appears to be by the inventor himself (his “worth” in bitcoins is estimated at anywhere up to $400 million).

But what if one day you really can take a card, or a flash drive, or some other storage mechanism out of your pocket, and swipe it, plug it in, or scan it down at the hardware store? And get ten bags of mortar mix for some decimal fraction of your bitcoin? At that point you’re not trapped in the system and what you have is a non-regulated medium of exchange. Government hates that notion. Very simply put, the modern income tax system cannot abide the existence of a competing medium of exchange. If Bitcoin outlasts its ponzi-scheme phase (and the writer at Market Sage does not think it will; I’m willing to accept that he may well be right) then the Internal Revenue Code blows up. 

So what, other than its structural flaws, can keep Bitcoin, or any other exchange medium, from achieving that result? Well, the answer starts with two little words printed on that C-note in your pocket. Remember that it’s worth more than the paper it’s printed on only because someone says it is – that is, after all, the reason it’s called “fiat” money. The two little words that make that C-note “worth” what the Fed says are “legal tender.” As in, tender of that C-note is a legally sufficient tender of performance of a monetary obligation up to $100. And no one is legally permitted to dispute that. If I assert that you owe me $100, and you toddle along and shove your C-note across the table at me, I am no longer entitled to deny that you performed your obligation. Your handing me that scrap of paper extinguishes $100 of your duties to me. Period. Bitcoin and its like will never enjoy the same status as “legal tender.” 

A further advantage that “government money” enjoys over the Bitcoins of the world is that they have the coercive resources of government behind them, theoretically to stabilize their values. Of course, anyone with any more than a fourth-grader’s understanding of history knows good and well that the stability function is not at all an inherent attribute of government money, or a necessary outcome of its being “government backed.” In fact currencies have been intentionally debased since ancient times, and they’re at it to this day. One of the perennial knocks on Red China is that they intentionally manipulate the “value” (meaning the exchange rates) of their own currency to make their products artificially “cheaper” to foreigners and domestic markets alike. Closer to home, since 2008 the U.S. economy has been about as anemic as it could be without actually collapsing. It’s “grown,” but it’s barely grown enough to keep up with population increase . . . which means it’s not really grown at all. During all this time the Fed has been dumping trillions of dollars of “money” into the economy in the form of buying Treasury debt. At one point the Fed was buying 91% of all new long-term debt issued by the Treasury. To borrow a line from Mitt Romney during the 2012 election, “At that point you’re just making it up.” He was right. How many trillion dollars can you dump into an economy that’s effectively not growing at all without destroying the value of each individual unit of it? 

A third advantage that government money enjoys over a Bitcoin is that the government is able, willing, and in fact diligent about deploying its coercive power to punish the kinds of monkey-shines that scuppered Mt Gox. I’m not aware that the computer security at the First Bank of BLANK is any tighter than at Mt Gox. What I do know is that if you hack your way into that bank and make off with several million dollars, Uncle Sugar will spend an enormous amount of resources to lock your country ass up for a very long time. That effort will never be expended to preserve the integrity of Bitcoin. 

So if the Bitcoins of the world are subject to wild fluctuation in value, and are not legal tender, and you’re pretty much on your own in protecting the integrity of the system, why would anyone with any large amount of skin in the game choose to do business in Bitcoin? The answer has already been mentioned, up above: taxes. As government grows ever larger, ever more expensive, ever more intrusive, it has to siphon an ever-increasing share of its population’s wealth to fund itself (just by way of example, since Dear Leader took office, U.S. federal spending as a percentage of GDP has been at levels not seen since 1946, when we’d just finished fighting and bankrolling a world war). In plain English that means the taxation system must become ever more burdensome and, in the dynamic of modern larcenous politics, ever more exploitative of precisely those actors who will have the greatest ability to choose the medium in which they conduct business. I mean, some Joe on the swing shift is probably never going to find it worth his time to plop down $500+ for a bitcoin. He’s already just barely taxed at all (at least to his knowledge; his actual indirect tax burden is pretty massive, but he’ll never realize it which is the entire purpose of making it an indirect burden, right?), his income covers his living expenses, just barely, so he’d be significantly exposed to a major slump in his bitcoin’s value (in the submarine service they call it an “uncontrolled depth excursion”), and he probably is not going to be doing business with third parties who are going to accept payment in bitcoins. So Joe’s got very little incentive not to support a tax system that loads ever more onerous burdens on “the rich,” “the 1%,” or whatever the demagogues of the day label them. A lumber supply house dealing with a French mill for several hundred thousand board feet of red oak? That’s a different story entirely. Congress is constitutionally prohibited from taxing the exports themselves. But it can tax the proceeds. But how do you document what the proceeds were, or are, if they’re paid in bitcoins?  The same attributes that make Bitcoin an ideal medium to “launder” the proceeds of your 250 kilos of smack also make it a really neat way to disappear the proceeds of that lumber.

And this, ultimately, is the core of government’s objection to Bitcoin: The existence of a viable medium of exchange over which it has no control is the final check on its ability to plunder its population. 

All of which suggests the question of why the government ought to have a monopoly on the medium of exchange. It’s not as if that’s always been the case. In colonial Virginia the standard medium was tobacco. On the frontier it was (among other things) whiskey. In post-World War II Germany cigarettes served the same function. Until 1913 there wasn’t such an animal as a federal reserve note. There was gold and silver coinage (and by the way, Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech was in favor of the free coinage of silver, which would have had the effect of devaluing the currency), and there were rafts and rafts of private bank notes, all trading at greater or lesser discounts from face value. A great deal of where you banked depended on how current your bank’s paper was. In all those cases the informal exchange media existed even though the respective governments of the time and place had “hard” currencies established. 

What is interesting is that existence of these private (that is, non-governmental) media was largely a function of the lack of adequate levels of hard currency. In some instances that was very much a consciously pursued policy goal. The British government intentionally starved its colonies of specie. In other cases it was a result of the government’s inability to keep up. Once the War of 1812 was over there was nothing to bar the American population from exploding, both numerically and geographically. And so it did. There just wasn’t any way to coin enough currency to satisfy demand. My, how times have changed. Now government is flooding the world with fiat money so fast that only the economically destructive policies being pursued by the same administrations can destroy wealth fast enough to avoid hyperinflation. In other words, people resorted to things like paper issued by the Second Bank of Nerts because they couldn’t do otherwise (the SBUS jerked down the house, sparking the Panic of 1837, by suddenly demanding payment in specie only . . . which then drove its corresponding banks to do likewise, which then drove their debtors under because they didn’t have it and couldn’t get it). Given the choice people would take hard currency in a flash. 

So why would human behavior change so drastically? Why would people nowadays willfully abandon what they so eagerly sought for generations? Once more I suggest the answer is in how government taxes its population now versus how it used to. Until the rise of what we can call the Ideal Gas State (that is, a state which expands to fill every crevice in human existence), there was little or no penalty to participation in the government’s exchange medium. Sure, you had taxes, but they were typically low and were mostly excises and imposts on identifiable things which, within very broad limits, you could choose to possess or not, at your pleasure. For example, at one point a popular way to impose property taxes was on the number of panes of window glass in a structure. One of the reasons that you see in old mansions a large number of tiny panes of glass is what Thorstein Veblen described as “conspicuous consumption.” On the other hand, you were also frequently taxed based on the number of rooms you had in the house, so those very same mansions typically had no built-in closets (and thus fewer rooms). Cynical, isn’t it? Show off how much you can afford to pay in taxes with hundreds 5×7 window panes, but clutter your living quarters with a forest of free-standing cabinets. All those things were, however, not taxes on the exchange of money itself. The income tax changed all that. Suddenly your tax burden was being driven not by what you had or did not have, but on your receipt of compensation for your economic activities. Add in the voracious appetite for spoil of the modern kleptocratic state and you have exactly reversed the incentives of 200 years ago.

I will humbly offer a few predictions: Bitcoin and those like it will prove to be most widely adopted in those countries which have the most larcenous tax regimes and the most corrupt governments. And in those places where such media are most widely adopted, we will see rapid spirals into something resembling anarchy. It is, after all, a characteristic of government plunder that the more people it drives out of the above-board economy, the more it must exact from those remaining. And no one will stand there and endure indefinite robbery. Modern governments can build things like the Berlin Wall and the sundry apparatus of the Iron Curtain, but all that does is ensure that when things do break loose, the result is catastrophic collapse. 

For us here in the U.S., Bitcoin and its cousins are going to prove canaries in the American coal mine. I am interested, and not a little alarmed, to see how it all works out.

Yesterday I had lunch over at my parents’ house, mostly to commune with their dog.  My father was watching CNN.  They were reporting on the recent revelations that some official in the Christie administration seems to have induced the Port Authority (which has jurisdiction over the George Washington Bridge between Manhattan and New Jersey) to close several lanes of east-bound traffic back in September.  The result, as anyone who’s ever driven across that bridge can understand, was utter chaos on the New Jersey end of the bridge.  Massive traffic jams for three days.

It seems the lane closures had nothing at all to do with any operational or maintenance requirements of the bridge.  Rather, it appears that the closures were politically motivated and were intended to cause exactly what they did cause.  E-mails and text messages have come to light that show this.  Some of those e-mails and messages, which dealt with official government business, went out over private e-mail accounts and cell phones, which is a no-no.  It’s such a no-no, in fact, that Lisa Jackson, the former head of Dear Leader’s EPA, felt obliged to set up an entirely fictitious e-mail persona under the surname “Windsor” to conduct official business that she wanted to screen from Freedom of Information Act requests.  Several of her underlings did the same thing and for the same reason.  All highly, highly illegal under federal law.

A few days ago the assertion was made that Chris Christie as governor approved of or at least knew back in September, at the time, what was being done and why.  Yesterday he holds a press conference, nearly an hour and a half long, in which he announced that no, he had no knowledge at the time, and not only that, but he’d been mislead by his senior staff about the status and revelations coming to light in the New Jersey after-the-fact investigation.  He’s already fired his deputy chief of staff who, he says, lied to his face about matters.  Other heads either have rolled or are in the process of rolling.  Christie’s line was much like Reagan’s after the Beirut bombing:  It happened on my watch; I’m responsible.  I am in the process of holding accountable those who have done wrong.

You’d think that would be about the long and short of the matter.  The point has already been made that shutting down lanes of traffic to cause massive traffic snarls as an act of political revenge is remarkably similar to shutting down national parks as an act of political retaliation.

I mentioned that CNN was covering this “story.”  What I didn’t mention is that’s all they were covering, during the whole 45 minutes or so I was at my folks’ house.  As in:  They talked about nothing else.  They dragged Congressmen out, they had lawyers on there talking about potential criminal prosecution of . . . whom?  They had video of some shmuck at a legislative hearing pleading his Fifth Amendment privilege repeatedly.  On and on it went.

The contrast was too great.  I wondered how much time CNN had devoted to this non-story (unless you’re one of the people who actually got caught in the traffic jams) relative to how much time they’d devoted to the ooze seeping out of the IRS over the past 200-plus days.  You know, the revelations that someone from very, extremely high up in Dear Leader’s administration directed the IRS to use its investigatory and regulatory powers to shut down an entire segment of the U.S. political spectrum in the run-up to the 2012 elections.  Here we’ve got the IRS senior counsel — one of the exactly two political appointees in the entire organization — spending huge amounts of time visiting the White House.  Huh?  Why does anyone in the White House need to meet with the IRS’s lawyer?  I can see meeting with the commissioner; that makes sense and there’s a huge amount that could legitimately be discussed that a president would want to hear directly from that person.  But the lawyer?  We’ve had revelations of conduct with is flagrantly criminal: Lois Lerner, a senior IRS official, turning over taxpayer information to the FEC.  The division of which she was head turning over taxpayer information to private political organizations known to be hostile to the taxpayer(s) in question.  And those are just the things that have come to light in the past three or four months.  How much air time has been devoted to those crimes?

At any rate, we now have a partial answer to my question.  Alas it does not relate to CNN but to its broadcast competition.  Comparing the networks’ coverage within 24 hours to their total coverage of the IRS scandal over the six months since July 1 reveals . . . the story of someone setting out unnecessary traffic cones got 17 times the amount of coverage in one day that criminal conduct which threatens the entire American polity got in 6 months.  Seventeen times the amount of coverage in one day.  Update:  It’s not as if everyone is asleep at the switch, of course.  Right over here, at TaxProf Blog, Prof. Paul L. Caron remains on watch, daily compiling coverage of a scandal which in its implications cuts at the very heart of the American experiment in self-government.  So you see, Lamestream Media, it can be done.

Now here’s another compare-and-contrast question:  How much time have the broadcast media devoted to Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi scandal in the past sixteen months, relative to those horrible traffic cones?

Stand by to stand by.  The 2016 presidential campaign has started.

It’s a truism in the world of power politics and big money nothing ever happens by coincidence.

So here we find two newspaper articles, many miles apart, yet which are (dare one speak it?) closely related to each other.  The first is from The Globe and Mail, and reports an interview with one of the most powerful men in the world.  No; it’s not President Mom-Jeans but rather a Saudi prince who is worth several billion dollars not only by senior membership in the kleptocratic Saudi ruling house, but also through his successes in investment in the Real World (you know: the world the Saudi government actively subverts through subsidizing the most extreme forms of West-hating, Jewish-blood-craving Islamofascism).  He makes the mistake of honesty.  “The missive [a letter he sent to his kinsman the Saudi oil minister] warned that the American shale oil boom would soon threaten demand for crude from members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.  New shale oil discoveries ‘are threats to any oil-producing country in the world,’ he says. * * *  ‘It is a pivot moment for any oil-producing country that has not diversified,’ he says. ‘Ninety-two per cent of Saudi Arabia’s annual budget comes from oil. Definitely it is a worry and a concern.’”

Why is a Saudi prince, who just bought a five-star hotel in Toronto, sitting there talking about shale oil, fracking, and similar matters?  Well, you see, even though the U.S. now produces domestically 89% of the oil it uses — up from 70% just a few years ago and all thanks to the fracking boom — it’s Canada that is our largest source of imported oil.  Not only is Canada the U.S.’s largest foreign supplier, but now that Dear Leader has, in part to accommodate Warren Buffett’s railroad interests in hauling North Dakota’s production via inefficient rail car rather than efficient pipeline, scuppered construction of a south-bound Keystone XL pipeline, the Canadians are just going to build it westward to their coast and sell their oil to Red China.  So Canada has an enormous economic interest in continued production from its oil sands.  And if anything, its political stake is even higher.  At the risk of understatement, the U.S. has taken its neighbor much too much for granted for far too long.  Establishing a highly lucrative relationship with countries other than the U.S. will enable Canada to act with much less looking southward over its shoulder.

Canada’s drive for economic and political leeway beyond the U.S. orbit is Major Super Dooper Bad News for the oil tyrannies because it renders everyone to whom they ship that much less dependent on the Islamofascist regimes.  Which is why the Saudis have been funding, very quietly, a huge amount of the “green” opposition to the Canadian oil sands.  One would like to know how much of the U.S. “green” opposition to Keystone XL and fracking in general is being funded from Saudi and similar sources.  Recall that the major players in the “green” racket aren’t exactly forthright about their funding sources.  Recall also that Geo. Soros has an enormous financial stake in that super-deepwater Petrobras field off the coast of South America.  A field that will never be economically viable at $90 a barrel.  Recall that Soros was among those pushing very hard to keep Gulf oil production shut down in the aftermath of the BP spill.

And how do the Saudis, Soros, and their ilk fight against U.S. energy independence?  By funding every “green” opposition group they can find to engage in lawfare, fear-mongering, and disinformation campaigns.  Don’t get me wrong:  I’m not suggesting that they’re not entitled to their opinion or to attempt to influence public opinion in their favor (spoiler:  I think Citizens United was spot-on accurately decided).  I do object, however, to their vilification of every attempt to wean the Western world from subsidizing the continuing rise of Islamofascism through petrodollars as being just toadying to “Big Oil” and those favorite bogeymen, the Koch boys.

And that gets me to the other newspaper article.  From AP (via ABC News) we have this article on how four states have confirmed contamination in wells.  AP went to the four states and asked for years’ worth of public records relating to well complaints, contamination confirmations, and so forth.  A good part of the article is about the patch-work response they got, and the active push-back from some of the states (apparently Pennsylvania was like pulling teeth, whereas Texas — you know, them mouth-breathing rednecks — immediately coughed up a 90-plus page spreadsheet with extremely detailed information).  The core of the article, however, is about insinuating that all them eeeevvilllll Big Oil shills have been Proven Wrong About Fracking, and that accordingly . . . well, you’ve heard the rest.

The lead sentence, in good newspaper practice fashion, sets the tone for the rest:  “In at least four states that have nurtured the nation’s energy boom, hundreds of complaints have been made about well-water contamination from oil or gas drilling, and pollution was confirmed in a number of them, according to a review that casts doubt on industry suggestions that such problems rarely happen” (my emphasis).  And how much doubt is cast?  Well, there’s this:  “And while the confirmed problems represent only a tiny portion of the thousands of oil and gas wells drilled each year in the U.S. . . .”  A “tiny portion” of the thousands of wells drilled each year seem associated with contamination.

In the next few paragraphs, the AP gets even more specific, using Pennsylvania’s data.  In 2012, a total of 499 complaints of water well contamination was made; in 2013 the number was 398.  And how many turned out actually to be contaminated?  Well, let’s quietly move the goalposts a bit by expanding our field of vision.  “More than 100” cases confirmed contamination.  Sounds like a lot, doesn’t it?  Yes it does . . . unless you read the rest of the sentence, which (using words, not numbers, so the eye that has been caught by numbers like “499” and “398” is going to have to re-calibrate) reveals that those “more than 100” (actually 106, a number which you have to keep reading substantially into the article further to find) confirmed contaminations were spread over five (5) years.  The actual 2011 and 2012 numbers were five in the first two-thirds of 2012, a total of 18 in all of 2011, and 29 in 2010.  So the number of complaints concerns a “tiny portion” of the thousands of new wells drilled each year (over 5,000 new wells in Pennsylvania during those five years) and even among the complaints that are actually made, only just over 2% of the complaints turn out to be actual contamination.

And by the by, most of the contamination involves methane, a gas which at atmospheric pressure will not remain in solution in water (according to a friend of mine who happens to enjoy a Ph.D. in chemical engineering, and has spent over ten years in water treatment and related fields).  In other words, if you want to get the methane out of your water, it’s scarcely rocket science to remove it.

The more you read, the more diluted becomes the suggestion that the AP’s research legitimately “casts doubt” on “industry suggestions” that such problems “rarely” occur.  Fracking isn’t the only kind of drilling occurring, you see, and “some conventional oil and gas wells are still drilled, so the complaints about water contamination can come from them, too.”  So we really don’t know how many of that 2.12% (max) of confirmed contamination is even actually associated with a fracking well.  Over in Ohio, out of a mountain of six — count ’em — confirmed cases of contamination, the state department of natural resources allowed that, “None of the six confirmed cases of contamination was related to fracking.”  In West Virginia over four years, 122 complaints were made, of which all of four were genuine enough that the driller had to take action.  In Texas, out of “over 2,000 complaints,” only 62 even alleged drilling-related contamination, and of those, they were able to confirm . . . exactly zero, over the course of 10 years.

If you keep slogging through the article all the way down, you get to this nugget:  “Experts and regulators agree that investigating complaints of water-well contamination is particularly difficult, in part because some regions also have natural methane gas pollution or other problems unrelated to drilling. A 2011 Penn State study found that about 40 percent of water wells tested prior to gas drilling failed at least one federal drinking water standard.”

All of which is to say that the AP article’s author wrote a lead paragraph for an entirely different article than the one he actually wrote.  Here, let’s try to help him out and match the introduction with the substance:

“A survey by AP of four states shows that well-water contamination associated with hydraulic fracturing — “fracking” in common parlance — is in fact extremely rare, as oil and gas industry companies and organizations claim.  Just how rare remains difficult to determine, because even confirmed contamination in water wells may be traceable to conventional oil or gas wells or even to entirely naturally occurring sources.  AP surveyed up to five years’ data about complaints of alleged well contamination, confirmed cases of well contamination, and determination of source of contamination in Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Texas.  The data show that of the complaints of contaminated wells — up to 499 in Pennsylvania in 2012 — only a minuscule proportion reveal actual contamination — a total of five in the first nine months of 2012, or almost exactly 1%.  In Texas, despite hundreds of complaints over the years, not a single case of driling-related contamination has been confirmed in the past ten years. In comparison to actual or potential drilling-related contamination, natural contamination is a much more serious problem.  Over 40% of Pennsylvania wells tested pre-drilling failed at least one federal drinking water standard.”

That’s my effort.  Let’s see how ThinkProgress re-writes the article.  Actually, they do a better job, I think, in summarizing the data than the AP.  And they do come on out and say, “It’s unknown what sort of pollution caused the complaints that were confirmed to have been due to fracking,” and in the lead sentence of its paragraph no less.

Further on in the ThinkProgress article they mention a study which is alleged to shed some light on the overall effects of oil and gas drilling.  The study, yet to be published by some organization of economists, is represented to have found that “living close to a fracking operation increases the risk of low birth weight in a newborn baby by more than half, and doubles the baby’s risk of a low Apgar score, a scale that summarizes of the health of newborns.”  Here the reader is asked to confuse the concept of actuarial “risk” with causal “risk.”  The economists are plainly talking about the former, as (again, to their credit) ThinkProgress makes clear:  “However, water contamination wasn’t the likely culprit in the study: the mothers in the study who had access to monitored public water had babies that were of similar health as mothers who relied on private wells, which are more likely to be affected by fracking.”

In other words, about all you can truthfully say about oil and gas drilling is that people who live near them tend to have babies with low birth weights and Apgar scores.  Was any multivariate regression done to account for other known correlates of those measured outcomes?  Like smoking, female-headed single-parent household, failure to complete high school, or so forth?  Because oil and gas extraction is heavy industry, and people who can afford not to live near to heavy industry tend not to live next to heavy industry.  And curiously enough, they tend to experience lower rates of low birth weight and/or Apgar scores.

[Update 31 Jan 14:  For a further item on the don’t-jump-to-conclusions list, here (note: at the website of what appears to be some energy-industry organization) we see a response to a study from Colorado which alleges to find positive correlation between natural gas fracking and sundry birth defects.  This study is apparently popularly cited by opponents of fracking.  The Colorado Department of Health is not impressed with the study’s design, however.  Among its other shortcomings (like failing to distinguish between active or inactive wells, conventional vertical or fracking wells, or even oil and gas wells), the Colorado health department’s chief medical officer pointed out:

“For birth outcomes with very few cases, such as neural tube defects, the authors  did not consider the effect that other risk factors may have played (examples: smoking, drinking, mother’s folic acid intake during pregnancy, access to prenatal care, etc).  For these rare outcomes, such as neural tube defects, they only considered the effect of elevation. The personal behaviors of the mothers are very important risk factors for all birth defects. Without considering the effect of these personal risk factors, as well as the role of genetic factors, it is very difficult to draw conclusions from this study.

As the authors noted, they don’t necessarily know where the mother lived at the time of conception or during the first trimester of pregnancy, when most birth defects occur.  This makes interpretation of their study difficult.”

Ask whether momma was doing crank or popping pills?  Confirm whether momma actually had, you know, any sort of proximity to an oil or gas well when the defects are most likely to have occurred (seriously, check out the paper’s title; it contains the expression “maternal residential proximity”)?  Nah; that might cloud the issue, and the issue is to defeat the Koch brothers, rights?  The full text of the statement is at the link.]

To illustrate that last point a bit further:  Let’s say that you do a study on people who wear bicycle helmets and neck injuries.  You find that lo! people who wear bicycle helmets while riding experience a high number of neck injuries.  So you conclude that wearing a helmet increases the “risk” of neck injuries.  Well . . . no, it doesn’t.  Helmet-wearing correlates very strongly with (a) youth, whose parents make them wear helmets, and (b) sport bicycling, which involves high speeds and low tolerance for mistakes.  Young riders make more mistakes; mistakes made by competitive or sport riders occur at higher speeds, on rougher terrain, and produce more severe injuries.

I seem to have wandered from my original point:  Fracking is held up as a bogeyman.  The people who are holding it up as a bogeyman are receiving funding from people who have a very important — in some cases, life-or-death — financial and/or political stake in maximizing the dependence of the U.S. on imported oil.  The truth is that while it is true that “fracking can cause contamination of water wells,” that’s not really the appropriate question, is it?  That question is, “Given the rarity of contamination of water wells by fracking, is the U.S. — and for that matter, are other countries as well — better or worse off starving the Islamofascists of petrodollars by promoting an extraction technology that in a tiny number of cases may be causing a remediable problem?”

Ask yourself:  Who benefits from each of the answers that can be given to that question?

Update [27 Jan 2015]:  This just in.  Seems the Russians have been bank-rolling the anti-fracking movement here in the United States.  This is obviously because their environmental concerns are so acute.  After all, oil and gas extraction in Russia is done so much more cleanly than it is here.

For quite a few years, some time ago, I subscribed to The Economist.  I liked several things about the newspaper (they describe themselves as a “newspaper,” which I also find charmingly old-fashioned).  I liked that they don’t have bylines, so while I have to assume their writers are no more immune to pride and vainglory than anyone else, at least they don’t indulge in the kind of fashionable byline that, for example, The New York Times does (I mean, seriously: would anyone with more than just bare walking-around sense pay attention to a column written by Paul Krugman if it didn’t have his name on it, trying desperately to steal the credibility that comes with a Nobel?).  I liked that they weren’t afraid to stake out a clear position, and didn’t hide behind a false façade of impartiality (like most of the lamestream media); I still recall their cover back in the late 1990s when Clinton got caught committing perjury.  It was a picture of him, and the legend, “If It’s True, Go”.  Mostly I liked that they still held to the basic outlines of their founding world view from 1834: classical liberalism.  Their reportage, their opinion leaders, their whole package seemed to take a presumption in favor of human liberty and the ability of private persons, voluntarily organized as they see fit, working through the mechanisms of the free market wherever possible, to address the restrictions and failings of the human condition.

And then things seemed to change.  Looking back I can no longer recall just when I first noticed it.  It might have been when they decided that George W. Bush really was as stupid as all the Deep Thinkers made him out to be.  Or when Bush refused to apologize for wanting to win the West’s war on terrorists (notice I did not say “terror”; you cannot wage a war against an ideology; you can only exterminate as many of its exponents as you can lay hands on).  All I distinctly recall is that by the time ol’ Hopenchange came along, The Economist had truly drunk the Kool Aid.

One of my partners now subscribes, and so the gents has a healthy supply of back issues for reading.  I predictably get to read about how wonderful socialized medicine in the U.S. will be (presumably because it’s worked out so damned well in the U.K.), or how U.S. politics is now “polarized” and both sides are at fault (although curiously acts of polarization are only mentioned in any detail if it’s just the one side going partisan) as if it’s unreasonable for a huge slice of the American population to react badly to years’ worth of being slimed as stupid, racist, parasitic leeches by the other party and its adherents. 

Islam comes in for a healthy dose of kowtowing.  A socio-economic system that — and here I’ll go out on a limb — has Absolutely Bugger All to offer the West in terms of advancing either the moral stature of mankind or his physical circumstances of existence is routinely presented as something that we here in the West are just going to have to understand and get along with.  Those few who are willing to characterize them by their actions, as opposed to their activists’ words, are painted as beetle-browed would-be SA thugs who just don’t like people with darker skin (ignoring that the African slave trade is still alive and well, with Muslim lands a principal destination for the captives).  A recent low point was reached in their opinion leader on how wonderful it was that Dear Leader has effectively blessed Iran’s race to acquire nuclear weapons.  No, seriously; as the Blogfather would say, Read the Whole Thing.  The Economist thinks it’s wonderful because, if you assume that the theocracy of Iran, which has as its stated public policy objective to “wipe off the map” the nation of Israel, suddenly makes nice, then . . . well, nice will be made.  “But the deal matters mostly for what it heralds. If Iran shows restraint and the world rewards it, the negotiators might generate sufficient goodwill to reach a more durable and comprehensive agreement.  And that would open up the possibility of America and Iran co-operating more, or at least feuding less, in the world’s most troubled region.”  And so forth.  Transpose a few names and dates, and it might have been an opinion leader ghost-written by Neville Chamberlain in early October, 1938.  If Hitler is satisfied with the Sudetenland, and he says he is, then this might open the door to more comprehensive agreement on re-armament in Central Europe.  Pathetic.

But mostly I get to read, with the regularity of one of the magnificent wristwatches they advertise, about how “climate change” is right up there at the top of what ought to be Everyone’s Agenda.  Really; it’s as though they can’t let an issue get out the doors without shoving something in on how vitally important it is that we hand unparalleled powers over to multinational bureaucrats (you know, because they’ve done such a bang-up jobs running the EU and — in their free time from running drugs, narcotics, and sexual slavery rings — as “peace-keepers” all around the world) in order to stave off “climate change.”

One reads, well nigh week in and week out, the mantra that “the science is settled” (I’d also remind them that at one time the theories of Gobineau were “settled science”) that the world is warming up and it’s pretty much all humans’ fault and what we really need is to siphon trillions of dollars away from productive uses (you know, the stuff that’s got to keep 6-plus billion humans housed, clothed, and fed for the foreseeable future) in order to stave off something that computer models say will happen 100 or more years out.  These would be the same computer models that cannot explain the last fifteen years of minimal if any “global warming.”  The writers there also don’t seem to bear down much on the extent to which the “science” being “settled” was the result of a highly orchestrated effort among the one side to suppress publication of any contrary views or evidence.  By the way, this was after having so thoroughly cooked the evidence that their own computer guru, after something like three years’ effort, eventually threw up his hands and stated, in precisely so many words, that the raw numbers had been so manipulated and compromised that there was no way to reconstruct what the data had originally been.

Here we’ve got their leader for the 2013 holiday double-issue.  This year is the centenary of World War I’s outbreak.  The Great War happens to be a fetish of mine, and so for the next four-plus years I’m going to have a great number of anniversaries to contemplate, both on their own merits and for what they have to suggest to us today.  And what does The Economist have to say to tee it up?

“The most troubling similarity between 1914 and now is complacency. Businesspeople today are like businesspeople then: too busy making money to notice the serpents flickering at the bottom of their trading screens. Politicians are playing with nationalism just as they did 100 years ago. China’s leaders whip up Japanophobia, using it as cover for economic reforms, while Shinzo Abe stirs Japanese nationalism for similar reasons. India may next year elect Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist who refuses to atone for a pogrom against Muslims in the state he runs and who would have his finger on the button of a potential nuclear conflict with his Muslim neighbours in Pakistan. Vladimir Putin has been content to watch Syria rip itself apart. And the European Union, which came together in reaction to the bloodshed of the 20th century, is looking more fractious and riven by incipient nationalism than at any point since its formation.”

The only place the Religion of Peace even gets a mention is that some Hindu politician has refused to apologize to them, and might get into a nuclear exchange with a Muslim state that — of course it’s not mentioned — is among the most unrepentant sponsors of violent religious-based warfare out there.  Really.  Apparently a nation that sits atop a vast fund of fossil-fuel wealth and has for its stated objective killing every Jew it can lay hands on, and has now been given the go-ahead to pursue its nuclear ambitions is not sufficiently disturbing to enumerate among the things about which people ought not be complacent.  The Economist isn’t complacent about it, after all: they’re whole-heartedly for it (q.v.)

Not to worry, though.  There are two things suggested that will head us off from going over the cliff like the grandparents and great-grandparents of The Economist’s writers and editors.  “One is a system for minimising the threat from potential dangers.”  The two specific instances that are mentioned are (i) China and the U.S. figuring out how to address North Korea’s eventual collapse, and (ii) figuring out how to defuze China’s regional aggressions.  Dealing with a nuclear war of extermination against Israel (and the Sunni peoples) again doesn’t make it onto the radar screen.

“The second precaution that would make the world safer is a more active American foreign policy. Despite forging an interim nuclear agreement with Iran, Barack Obama has pulled back in the Middle East—witness his unwillingness to use force in Syria. He has also done little to bring the new emerging giants—India, Indonesia, Brazil and, above all, China—into the global system. This betrays both a lack of ambition and an ignorance of history. Thanks to its military, economic and soft power, America is still indispensable, particularly in dealing with threats like climate change and terror, which cross borders. But unless America behaves as a leader and the guarantor of the world order, it will be inviting regional powers to test their strength by bullying neighbouring countries.”

It’s hard to know where to begin unpacking this nonsense.  It was a “more active” foreign policy, of going after the Islamofascists where they live and breed, rather than sweeping up the wreckage and burying the bodies after attacks on our home soil, that turned The Economist against the U.S. and freedom.  Dear Leader’s “interim agreement” with Iran is going to turn out pretty much precisely as well as Chamberlain’s “interim agreement” on the Sudetenland.  And precisely what about illegally bombing Libya and then abandoning it to the Islamofascists, hectoring a U.S. ally from office and then rejoicing when the Muslim Brotherhood takes over, and then gratuitously mixing himself into Syria (only to get his mom-jeans-wearing ass handed to him by a leader — Putin — who knows how to play hard-ball beyond the kind of bullshit ward-heeler politics of Chicago) is “pulling back”?  No, he’s getting in, in over his head.  He’s “done little” to bring China into the global system?  Really?  China?  The joint which has pretty much bought out the U.S. economy?  The place which is eagerly buying up every drop of oil from whatever kleptocracies and anti-U.S. Islamofascist dictatorship it can?  The ones who just launched an aircraft carrier?  Short of having the Politburo over for a fish-fry on the South Lawn, exactly what more needs China to become part of the “global system”?  Or India, the world’s largest democracy and one which is bursting at the seams with human capital and entrepreneurial spirit, all of which it gleefully either exports to the far reaches of the free world or brings in-house to its own educated class?  I have an idea:  Why don’t The Economist’s writers call up the technical support lines for their laptops and see what sort of English they hear on the other end of the line?

But Cato saves his tired exhortation for last.  Yep, the U.S. needs to squander what little influence is left after five years of insulting our allies, accommodating our enemies, making a pig’s breakfast of pretty much everything we try overseas, and taking dead aim on blowing up our own economy . . . on fighting “climate change.” 

He’s just phoning it in at this point.

A couple of months ago (October 20, in fact), a post appeared on Thought Catalog, authored by someone identifying herself as Rachael Sacks. Miss Sacks describes herself as being a 20-year-old college student fortunate enough to have been born to fairly well-off parents, and even more so to parents who like to keep the girl who is the apple of their collective eye in a manner to which most of us would like to become accustomed. I have to assume that her self-description is accurate.

Miss Sacks lives in New York City, in the West Village. Comfortably, we are given to understand. She enjoys shopping at swanky clothing stores, but will admit to enough humanity to let on that she also enjoys getting a deal at such places (at least to the extent that paying only several hundred instead of many hundreds of dollars for – just by way of example – a hand-bag can be called a “deal” by any reasonable standard). So far, so good. 

The subject of her post was a brief encounter she experienced in the check-out line of a store near where she lives. As she approached check-out, the cashier (also a young-ish female) was chatting with an acquaintance (ditto), and one of them observed to the other that she had gone to college in-state in order to save money. The other agreed that was a good idea. Miss Sacks interrupted the chat with her purchase. Let’s roll audio and hear (so to speak) Miss Sacks tell it like it was:

“I get to the checkout and there’s this girl in front of me probably a little older than I am talking to the cashier. The girl says to the cashier, ‘I went in-state to save my parents money for school.’ The Cashier then replies, ‘That’s smart.’ They then both glare at me with my shopping bag and my Coco Lite snack cakes and Diet Coke as if to say here’s daddy’s little princess wasting money, that little piece of shit. They exchange words and then the girl leaves. I try to be chipper and ask the cashier how her day is and she doesn’t answer me. She just looks down and scans my items not saying a word or even glancing in my direction. I say have a great day, as happily as I can and walk out feeling like a turd.” 

At this point in her essay Miss Sacks begins to sin. And also to dole up what is very likely a heaping plateful of unintended irony. I use the expressions “sin” and “very likely” carefully, because my irony sensors went off so spectacularly in response to what is after all an assumption about Our Author. You see, unless Miss Stacks is among the fewer than one-in-five of her age, sex, marital status, and socio-economic stratum who voted for Romney this last time out (I just typed and then deleted “McCain”; Miss Sacks at 20 is too young to have voted for the grumpy old guy), then she proudly pasted Hopenchange slogans about the place, pouted up her (attractive, from the pictures that have since appeared online) face in disgust at the very thought that someone could be so [insert term of derision] as not to be heart and soul for Dear Leader, and generally wore herself a callous on her own shoulder congratulating herself on her own Intelligence, Tolerance, Enlightenment, Sophistication, and Moral Superiority, all just by virtue of rooting for a political candidate. Who knows? She might even have “liked” him on Facebook, re-tweeted the most current Soros-sponsored talking points, and have proudly held up a union-printed sign demanding that the low-skilled unemployed be kept out of work by artificially high wages for those with jobs. Or something like that. I could be completely out to lunch on my supposition, but just by random selection there’s something like an 80% chance I’m right about her political preferences. 

And that’s what makes (assuming I’m correct) her essay ironic. Because she tilts her shapely chin back and emits what can only be described as an enormous belch in chapel (or temple, in the event she happens to be Jewish . . . which of course has even less to do with the merits of her thoughts or how she expresses them than how she chooses to get her jollies (q.v.); I just don’t want to place her out of her element, f’rinstance at a stock-car race). She doesn’t think she ought to have to pretend to be poor in order to be thought well of by people like the cashier and her friend. She thinks that people ought to be able to spend their money as they please, without being judged by the world around them. “People shouldn’t make others feel bad about their own personal finances. How people spend their money is their own choice.”  She bristles at what she perceives as hatred, contempt, and/or envy welling up against her solely by virtue of the fact that she’s carrying a shopping bag from some swanky retail store. She goes so far as to suggest (O! the horror, the humanity of it all!!) that people ought not be judged by the thickness of their wallet.  “It should not be made to define who people are, even though we do it all the time.”

Well, y’know what, Miss Sacks? You are absolutely, 100% correct. Seriously. You have now the experience of having been spot-judged by purely superficial criteria, and you find that it rankles. [N.b. I’m the last person to read body language and non-verbal cues correctly, but there’s always the outside chance you mis-read Cashier’s and friend’s.] You may well be the kindest, most personable, biggest-hearted, most inquisitive, even-tempered person we all could hope to meet. But because you don’t choose to hide one aspect of your existence – the relative freedom from financial worry and the relative ability to choose the objects with which you surround yourself – you perceive yourself to have been damned for all time by people who do not share that one characteristic with you. You are in their eyes unredeemable. You are for them The Eternal Other. 

If my hypothesis about your political leanings is correct, then what makes your essay deliciously ironic is that this cashier’s attitude towards you is the very essence of your own politics. You think people ought to be able to spend their money as they choose? Guess what? At its most stripped-down, the politics of today’s elite – including the bulk of the people you share your island home with, who just voted overwhelmingly for ACORN’s knight in shining armor – come down to the assertion that they may tell you what you may or must spend your money on (individual mandate, anyone? illegality of catastrophic coverage insurance policies? someone else’s birth control? compact fluorescent lightbulbs? trans fat bans?  magazines that allow you fourteen chances to defend your life against a violent criminal rather than only six?  vast amounts of wasteful “biofuels” subsidized by artificially high gasoline prices? intentionally bankrupted coal industry?). What’s more, they assert the right to tell you when you have enough money for any purpose at all, and to expropriate from you the “excess.” The fellow behind whom you choose to march (again, if I’m wrong about your politics, please forgive me) has done little more than preach the doctrine of hate and envy you felt washing about your knees in that check-out line. You’re buckled firmly by your own petard; stand by to hoist away. 

Don’t feel badly about your situation, though. You’re far from the first to have sensed that things aren’t working out for you quite as you’d thought they would. The Russian aristocracy that had supplied the Bolsheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries for all those years with money, guns, safe houses, and social respectability probably went through most of the feelings you have. Only they were waiting for their turn in the Cheka’s execution cellars as they pondered how anyone could hate them for having too large a house. All you had to endure was a snotty interlude from someone who feels herself no more superior to you for her poverty (relative to yours, of course; if you want to see truly grinding poverty, take a spin through southern McDowell County, West Virginia) than you likely do to those slopey-headed in-bred mouth-breathers in fly-over country by virtue of your political enlightenment.

It gets better. Miss Sacks’s essay is not useful just for its own substance and its merits. What’s every bit as delightful (at least for the cynic) is the hateful tenor of the comments she smoked out. She’s excoriated for poor writing (guys: it’s an internet post, fer cryin’ out loud). She’s damned for being “arrogant.” She’s damned for being rich in the first place. And so on. I’ll just go on record and state that I didn’t find her reaction to her experience to be arrogant at all (assuming she “read” the cashier’s reactions correctly; if she read those reactions into the situation, that might be different, but then of all the people who’ve weighed in on this subject, exactly one of them – Rachael Sacks – was present that day). Oh sure, she might have expressed her experience and her own reactions to it more artfully or gracefully. But hell’s bells; she’s 20 years old and admits that she’s got growing yet to do. That degree of self-knowledge alone sets her apart from the run of humanity at that or any other age. 

Miss Sacks might have spent her creative energy pondering the implications of class hatred for the future of America. Twenty-four years ago, when Paul Fussell led off Class: A Guide Through the American Status System with a chapter entitled “A Dirty Little Secret,” you could still joke about it. [Per Fussell, when asked and he confessed that he was writing a book about class in America, people looked at him as if he had just said, “I’m writing a book advocating beating baby whales to death with the dead bodies of baby seals.” That’s still one of my all-time favorite lines, anywhere.] For decades European socialists fretted about the relative impermeability of American politics to class hatred as a organizing principle. If Miss Sacks’s cashier is a bellwether, their dreams might be close to realization. But the essay wasn’t set up as a disquisition on such things. It was her relation of her own experience in a specific time and place. 

All in all, the blistering Miss Sacks has taken from her commenters and the media puts me in mind of a retort a friend of mine gives under such circumstances: “Thank you for making my point for me.” 

Not only has Miss Sacks got to see up close the street-level application of politics which may well be her own, but she’s also got to experience the special sort of viciousness she maybe laughed off, five years ago, when directed at this guy known to history as Joe the Plumber. Remember him? He made the mistake of asking the Anointed One an awkward question on camera. And the next thing you know, within hours nearly, non-public financial information about him, available only to people with access to official records and computer systems, had been fed to the press. Or consider for a moment a certain former governor of a northern state. She got to have someone literally move in next door and peer into her back yard (again, literally), hoping to see something titillating, or prurient, or embarrassing. Did Miss Sacks cackle with glee at the hectoring of those stupid knuckle-dragging Tea Partiers? How about when the union thugs come to demonstrate in front of the homes of corporate CEOs? Did she puff up and sniff, “Serves ‘em right!” when she read about how the IRS targeted groups so retro-grade as to suggest that only people lawfully entitled to vote be permitted to do so, and then only once?  Did she vote for Bill DeBlasio for mayor?  Did she? Whether she did or not, what’s happened to her since October of last year is just a tiny little slice of how the present administration and its allies conduct business. Someone dug up pictures of Miss Sacks on Facebook (which is how I can state that she appears fairly attractive); they hunted up her childhood home and put pictures of that up on the net. Reporters began to moon about the front door of her apartment building in the city. 

To her credit, she doesn’t back down on the basics of her original essay. Which is good. To borrow another favorite quotation from history, she has done no more than “make a plain statement of an obvious truth,” and no apology is called for. And as mentioned, she admits her comparative lack of life experience and perspective, and that her acquisition of same is likely to change how she perceives and thinks about things. Again all to the good.

After another few months of getting the Full Treatment from the thought police, Rachael weighs back in.  This time what annoys her is that no one mentions how she gets her jollies. You see, Miss Sacks identifies herself as homosexual. As if that had a damned thing at all to do either with the merits of her original arguments, the vitriol hurled at her from the sidelines, or the inappropriateness of the invasion of her privacy. I have to say I fail to understand her objection. Her original essay and the points she makes in it have nothing to do with how she disports herself in her bedroom (and she points that out). I didn’t notice in any of the excoriation she took anything substantive that relates at all to whom she prefers as a bedmate.

What’s interesting, and where Miss Sacks sort of gives away the game, is precisely by pointing out how the mention of her preferences would have politicized the public reception of her essay. The lamestream media would have leapt to her support, because the homosexual lobby is so influential. And the troglodytes would have emptied their magazines (metaphorically speaking) of every cacophemism they have, precisely because of those same preferences. It would have become a sliming match based on what she does with her genitals, instead of a pissing contest about her comparative wealth, how Us Proles react to her not feeling obliged to hide it, and what those reactions have to say about us individually and as a society (which is to say, about the substantive merits of her essay). Miss Sacks sure gives the impression of being disappointed in the missed chance to drag her amorous predilections into an argument where they had no place. 

Rachael objects to the media making hay of her background, her family, and the physical circumstances of her existence, but of omitting to mention her homosexuality. Errmmm . . . Rachael, those sorts of reference points people have dug up are precisely illustrative of the central point of your essay: People judge you (negatively) because of the financial circumstances of your birth and your parents’ willingness that you should at age 20 reap the tangible benefits of that. Yes, it was tacky (and by the way I’m proud you used that word correctly in your follow-on essay; so few of y’all Yankees know how to) of everyone to jump all over your personal circumstances. But it wasn’t so because they were personal but rather because they didn’t affect the validity of your argument one way or the other. Put differently, suppose you’d been, not the girl with the swanky shopping bag, but the next cashier over, making your rent on damn-near-nothing-net-of-taxes-per-hour, watching the girl with the swanky shopping bag and how your colleague treated her, and describing what you saw. What exactly about your observations would have been either more or less valid? What about the discussion we could have about what you saw would be more or less pertinent to life in today’s United States? 

Not good enough for Miss Sacks. “While my sexuality is irrelevant to the topic of my article, it is still part of who I am and should not be ignored.” If, she bemoans, they could delve into where she grew up and where she lives, why can’t they trot out her sexual habits? She thereby goes a long way towards giving up match point: She wants the personal to be political, as and when she wants it to be so, on her terms, not the cashier’s. Which gets us right back around to the irony of the first essay. People should mention that I’m homosexual, because then some would be more frightened to attack me, others would more readily leap to my defense, and in any event I could deflect criticism by pasting the label “homophobic” (whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean) on my detractors. But people should be able to spend their money as they choose (which of course necessarily presupposes that they should have their money as they choose in the first place). People should not think badly of me because I’m rich; rather they should consider me sacrosanct because I like to sleep with other women. Either the personal is political or it’s not, Rachael. You can’t have it both ways. You chose to put up an article about something that is extremely important, and you are disappointed that a triviality – and by your own statement, an irrelevant one at that – was not made part of the centerpiece of the controversy. 

In closing, let’s hear it one more time for the Decalogue: “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife, nor his servant, nor his maid, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor any thing that is his.” Couldn’t have said it better myself. Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.

[Updated 14 Jan 13 to correct some stoopid typos.]