The Shadow Banking System and The Return of Risk

Several articles in the Financial Times have highlighted how the political response to risk in the financial system, and indeed in society, have driven risk into a "shadow system" of institutions and individuals that are largely unregulated or known, driving risk, both financial and otherwise, in ways beyond control of any social institution. This is because risk does not simply disappear by fiat. Indeed, Western societies depend on risk, and need risk, for the regular social transformations that since 1000 A.D. have made Westerners ever more inter-connected, more specialized, more inundated by change, and more wealthy and secure. But now, risk is being pushed into the shadows, where it operates beyond the ken of our social institutions, including in areas beyond finance, in unhealthy ways that promise a terrible reckoning when inevitably, the costs of that risk come home to the West in bets gone bad.


The Basel III regulations, reported by the Financial Times, are complete. And while they deal with risk in banks, raising requirements for the amount and quality of the capital banks hold, much of the risk is simply being pushed into largely un-regulated hedge funds, private equity groups, energy companies, and agribusiness. The graph at the top of the post (courtesy of the FT) shows just how much money is at stake.

Most fundamentally, the practice of pure proprietary trading – whereby banks bet their own money dealing in anything from gold to Greek bonds – is being outlawed in the US within two years.
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Yet a nagging worry is expressed by some regulators, bankers and other experts within the financial services industry that these reforms, like others in the past, risk backfiring. What if those taboo, high-risk businesses cannot be stopped in their tracks as regulators and politicians would like? What if, instead, they just move to a new home – within the sprawling mass of hedge funds, private equity firms, trading houses, even energy companies, all of which are largely unregulated and free of the capital requirements imposed on the banks?

Few are prepared to talk openly about the issue for fear of seeming disloyal to the campaign for concerted action against the banks but in interviews conducted over several months the Financial Times has pieced together a picture of mounting unease that the focused crackdown on banking could just push risk out of the reach of the toughest regulation and into fast-growing “shadow” areas.

“I think this is a real risk,” says one influential European bank executive on condition of anonymity. “I don’t buy the argument that if it’s a hedge fund it doesn’t matter because it’s a bunch of rich people’s money and so the government isn’t going to have to bail it out if it fails.” With hedge funds growing far bigger, and being increasingly backed by big pension funds and insurance companies, it can be systemically important whether these funds fail or not. “Who says a hedge fund can’t be a systemic failure? Then you’ve just shifted the problem from the banks to somewhere else where you can’t really get at it.”

There is a pretty powerful precedent for the theory that a “shadow” banking system can cause or compound a crisis. The fall of Lehman, Bear Stearns and other banks around the world in 2008 was made possible because the financial risk that stemmed from the US subprime mortgage lending was being recycled around the market via shadow banking structures. These entities, from money market funds to investment products such as collateralised debt obligations, hid the real risk because they were not properly regulated.

It is impossible to know how another shadow banking market will evolve, but even top regulators suggest lightly supervised non-bank financial services companies could be the next accident waiting to happen.

The biggest concern probably surrounds the growth of prop-style trading operations within hedge funds and private equity companies. “Private equity and hedge funds could be winners, taking on more risk,” says Kian Abouhossein, banks analyst at JPMorgan. “Through derivatives, for example, you can imagine them taking on very big positions. This is all about risk fragmentation, which could be a good thing. But if you then get risk concentration within hedge funds, that’s the real danger.”

Simon Gleeson, an expert on financial regulation at Clifford Chance, the law firm, is clearer still. “There is a real danger that risk moves out of the regulated system – out of the bit of the industry that regulators can see. Non-banks – funds and insurers, for example – will have a significant cost advantage under the new rules on bank capital. It’s a third more expensive in regulatory capital terms to do business with a bank than with a non-bank. This is a powerful incentive to use non-banks as counterparties.”

As the FT reports, Goldman Sachs, BNP Paribas, and Deutsche Bank have seen traders set out for hedge funds as the opportunities end at their old institutions and the action (and money for traders) moves to the hedge funds. Or private equity, or energy companies, or agribusiness.

Nervousness also exists about the volumes of trading being done within energy companies and other commodity trading houses. Oil companies and trading houses have been steadily extending their reach beyond their traditional focus on physical commodities into exotic over-the-counter derivatives to serve customers, a trend that some expect to accelerate now that their capital advantage over banks is widening sharply.

Oil companies such as Total and BP and traders including Cargill and Vitol are in effect shadow banks for the commodities industry, replicating the services that the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley monopolised for years. That might mean selling an oil swap to an airline or an OTC corn option to a farming group.

Trading and oil company executives see their move towards derivatives as a natural extension of their business, saying the OTC deals help their clients to hedge price risk. But some analysts say the activities, which are largely unregulated, bring big risks to the system. Without the capital requirements imposed on banks, a default becomes more dangerous, they say. The shift also awakens unwelcome memories of Enron, the failed US energy company whose traders severely disrupted the California energy markets in 2000-01 as well as costing investors billions of dollars.

Recently, some trading companies have withdrawn from providing commodities derivatives services to customers after losing large amounts. Japan’s Mitsubishi Corp is to close its oil derivatives business by March 2012. The unit made heavy losses on jet fuel hedges related to the collapse of JAL, the Japanese airline.

As the world becomes far more interconnected, and herd-like behavior by the class of professional investors who control about 75% of the money invested globally (there are about ~100,000 of these investors, a small group globally, according to Michael Lewis in "the Big Short"), even savvy investors can get steamrolled by herd behavior. As pretty much every asset class, from equities to bonds to commodities, is correlated. Because the same few people trade them to make money. This is the downside of the global connectivity. It enables "smoothing" of global shocks such as food shortages by allowing US and Australian farmers to send grain out to the world when Russia has a terrible harvest. But it also connects said farmers to the global financial system, and can amplify shocks as well as mitigate them. By magnifying the effect of a bad bet.

The US housing market collapse, had CDOs and the like, not been sold globally, would have been a US concern only. But when the customers of the CDOs the writers of CDS were institutions like the German Landesbanken, then the US disaster threatened not just the wider US economy by potentially bringing down AIG (and much of the insurance it wrote) but German banks which needed to be bailed out by the German government, or UK institutions, or French ones, and so on.

The response of the regulators, particularly with the Dodd-Frank Financial Reform Law in the US, has been to over-regulate, areas without risk, and leave the "shadow system" untouched.

Insurers are facing uncertainty created by sweeping definitions in the Wall Street reform act, which leave open the possibility that their products will be covered by the new swaps regime.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission has the power to use the ambiguity of wording in the Dodd-Frank financial reform act to extend its reach to financial products that share some of the characteristics of derivatives, lawyers have said.

Gregory Mocek, former director of enforcement at the CFTC, said the very wide definition of swaps – derivatives in which two counterparties exchange benefits – in the legislation left it “unclear as to how insurance will be covered”.
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“The most lethal thing about Dodd-Frank is that a lot of market participants don’t even know that they could be impacted,” Mr Mocek, a partner at law firm McDermott Will & Emery, said. “There are people out there trading metals or agriculture or energy who could be regulated and historically have never been under regulatory oversight on a daily basis.”

What is striking about the West is how risk has become the enemy of society, and has been pushed into the shadows. Part of that is the response to the two world wars in the Twentieth Century, destructive beyond belief. And, of course, the risk inherent in the Cold War duopoly, later joined by China, of dueling ICBMs staring down at the planet, ready to launch upon warning. Risk then, was very, very bad.

Risk of course, tends to destroy social institutions, or even familiar commercial institutions. Changes to marriage, family, and the like strike many as unnecessary and indeed, harmful changes, risk for little reward. Making marriage and family "gay" might indeed help a tiny few gays and lesbians seeking to raise children in a monogamous, life-long commitment, but tends to act very destructively upon heterosexual family formation. "Gay" marriage being not very attractive to men who are straight. The disappearance of say, Pan Am or Saturn or Pontiac, seems change with little benefit. Indeed, the people who lost jobs as corporate institutions fail, or disappear, generally find fewer opportunities even as good, let alone better, as most White and Blue collar workers are in an endless competition with lower-cost workers in China and India. Even Harvard Law is no longer a golden ticket, as most low level stuff can be outsourced to India for pre-trial preparation:

Many bloggers paint a similar picture, noting that even lower-ranked law schools still charge more than $100,000 for a three-year education and don’t prepare graduates to be competitive in the current job market.

They note that while there’s a glut of laid-off associates, more law firms are getting their basic legal work, such as document review, completed by contract attorneys who are paid hourly for temporary jobs with no benefits. This is the type of work that in flush times was handled by the new associates hired by firms. Those firms also are increasingly turning to India for cheaper document review.

Temporary Attorney blogs about the struggles of attorneys working hourly temp jobs. The author draws a contrast by posting law school profiles that show deans even at low-ranked schools are paid handsomely, as much as $500,000 a year.

“There are legions of underemployed document reviewers slaving away in unventilated basements so that morally bankrupt individuals [at law schools] can continue pulling down half a mil a year by scamming unsuspecting college graduates,” the blogger states.

The content isn’t all flaming hyperbole. The blogs link to mainstream media news stories about the harsh realities of the legal industry, and the plight of recent graduates who can’t find legal work or perform temp jobs for wages such as $10 or $20 an hour in places like Chicago and New York.

“Thirty people [working as legal temps] are absolutely miserable, but nobody has the courage to stand up and say anything,” one blogger stated, noting that the air conditioner in the room was set uncomfortably low. “The market is so rotten, so-called professional attorneys are afraid of rocking the boat and being frozen out of low-rate $20 an hour temp gigs.”
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“Does babysitting count as employment?” queried a third-year UConn law student who asked to remain anonymous. UConn reported this year that 89.9 percent of its 2009 graduating class found employment, but that figure includes temporary jobs and positions outside of the legal industry. Other law schools, such as Quinnipiac and Western New England, also count those jobs toward employment figures.

The third-year student said “it’s terrifying” to think where she and her classmates might end up after graduation next year. “The competition for crappy jobs is amazing,” she said. “The anxiety over getting jobs is palpable.”

And it reaches into the most prestigious schools.

“I have a friend from Harvard Law School who summered at a firm and didn’t get an offer last year,” she said. “If Harvard isn’t a golden ticket, then there’s no golden ticket anymore.”

By contrast, people in their twenties and thirties happily slaved away at fairly crummy jobs in the Dot-Com era, hoping that they could trade insane hours, and terrible pay, for a chance at the brass ring at the new Microsoft or Apple Computer. Risk in the start of the internet era was socially acceptable, now an attempt to tamp down risk has at least in part, led to a leveling of wages, globally, even in law. If Harvard Law is not a golden ticket, nothing is.

Indeed, the picture of risk in professional graduate schools, from Business to Law, is a few superstars earn considerable amounts of money, and everyone else gets next to nothing. Corporate clients and law firms alike can mitigate their risk in taking on higher cost employees, by outsourcing work to India or India like boiler rooms, but the long term cost, the transfer of risk, is the (mostly) White professional class becoming enraged at the lack of opportunity, suddenly, for upward mobility.

Some of the risk aversion shows up in cultural spheres. Movies and TV shows depicting male heroes who "risk it all" to restore moral order, from "Dirty Harry" to "Death Wish" to "Batman," are becoming increasingly rare, particularly in female dominated TV. In the 1950's and 1960's, Westerns were common, along with shows like "Hawaii Five O," and even in the 1970's, shows like "Streets of San Francisco" did not shy away from showing male heroes, loners among other men, leading efforts to clean up a city, or a town. From "the Rifleman" with Chuck Connors to Karl Malden in "Streets of San Francisco," TV did not find risky male efforts to restore a sense of order and justice something that lacked appeal to the audience.

But, as noted in When Did TV Get Girly?, TV changed to a female centric audience in the late 1970's, and was very female by the late 1980's. As Sonny Crockett and Hannibal Smith gave way to Jerry Seinfeld, the approach of risk in cultural spheres became a thing of the past. This is why the essence of male heroism has been driven out to big budget comic book movies (re-incarnated Westerns and Action movies). Male risk is inherent in the heroism, and women by and large don't like risk that much.

Risk of course, properly understood and managed by society, is critical to maintaining the West's social cohesion and civilizational advantage. Risk, if properly mitigated, allows young men to move up, advance themselves, and more and more risk is required for young men who are the equal of young women, to make themselves attractive, in a stable and prosperous society. Much of the risk taken by young traders, seeking to roll the dice on big bets, can be seen by pushing risk out into the financial sector, and away from the traditional venues of male risk-taking. The military, entrepreneurship, and the like, all entail very significant risk, but relatively little reward. Men do not come back from military service respected and honored, only as "victims" and those deserving of pity. Entrepreneurship, is difficult and pay-offs few and far between. Even those who hit it big, like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, lack social cachet and dominance, the way say a grade Z actor like Jared Leto would.

Much of the risk, and social changes, that would have been channeled in times past into more productive avenues (think the Wright Brothers or the birth of Television), has now moved into the financial realm. With mostly disastrous consequences. Paul Volcker famously opined that the only real financial innovation worth anything in the last fifty years was the ATM. High frequency trading promises rich returns to a few highly capitalized proprietary traders, but increases systemic risk (the "Flash Crash") without much reward for everyone else. Most of the ownership of Equities is in big, institutional hands.

Moreover, lack of social wealth building by properly managed risk in manufacturing, or energy extraction, and the like, have made all sectors of society "greedy" for risk. Bob Citron, former OC Treasurer, was not alone in taking on insane risk to get insane returns for a county strapped for funds to manage its obligations, from retirement to special projects. Naturally his bet, egged on by astrologers and Merrill Lynch alike, went bust. But the larger lesson is that from German Landesbanken, to pressed County Treasurers, when money cannot really be made by any other means, people of all stripes will seek it in financial markets. Where the risk is poorly understood, often sold to unsuspecting customers, and only a few insiders reap the rewards.

As "the Big Short" confides, America's smartest young men (and it is almost always young men) seek out big rewards by moving, now to hedge funds and private equity groups. Where they can make big money by making big bets, with mostly other people's money. "I'm short your house" is just another aspect of seeking risk in the only venues allowed.

But that risk takes place in the shadows. Poorly regulated, but even less understood. The Dodd-Frank law will simply push the risk out to places like Singapore, or Hong Kong, or Geneva, where the risk will be largely unregulated, but even worse, in the shadows, unseen, until disaster strikes and the risk, inevitably, transfers to Main Street. But the problem is not just "greedy bankers" and the like. Greed is a basic human emotion, you might as well exterminate the human race to get rid of it. So too is the desire for risk. Not everything can be regulated, certainly not by laws and regulators. There is too much money, in too much of the globe, and too many resources stacked against the regulators. We'd need a virtual army of tens of millions of regulators, paid top-dollar, just to winkle out every bit of risk and slap regulations and rules upon it. The cost of the regulation would be punishing, and like Canute's shield-wall, simply push the water around the shields as the tide came in.

What is needed is first, open-ness and social agreement, broadly in the West and particularly in America, about what risks society will and will not take. Loosening of the rules for risk-taking, in some areas where social benefits are large, and promoting the risk-taking culturally. Making entrepreneurs, or military men, or scientists, or technologists who take considerable risk at times, in one way or another, respected for their risks and accomplishments. Moving risk taking into these areas and away from financial areas. This is as much a cultural arrangement as one of regulation.

As even the Financial Times acknowledges, risk-taking cannot be simply outlawed by fiat, and regulation alone merely pushes it into the shadows. It is time for Western society to stop pushing risk into the shadows, and bring it out into the light, where it will continue to transform the West, for both good and ill, but maintain the critical advantage the West has always had: better appetite and adaptation for change. As technology shapes society to new heights of wealth and power.

Famously, both Oliver Stone and Michael Douglas were shocked to find young men admired Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street," even though the character was supposed to be a villain. Gekko was active, was important, his actions made him matter. Instead of passive victim-hood and status mongering, that does not get a young man the girl or much of anything else. This is not surprising.

Nor is the largely female-centric castigation of "male risk preference" in Wall Street, the City, or hedge funds. Women get overwhelmed by choice, so it is no surprise they'd want a system where men are static in status and power, where today's pauper could not be tomorrow's prince, and vice-versa. Indeed, people of both sexes get overwhelmed by choice, and prefer actions to narrow the choices. Women of course have far more choice in mate selection than men (men propose, women dispose). It is not surprising that an overlay of female-centric risk-avoidance, that mitigates risk that can be quite harmful to women (in childbearing and child rearing) and enhances accuracy/simplicity of mate choice, runs right up against the male preference for risk. To be Gordon Gekko, after all, is preferable to being the blue collar throw-away man of Charlie Sheen's character's father. Those guys don't matter, especially to women. In turn, the relative equality or even superiority in earning/status among professional women vs. men in their twenties, when it matters the most (when people choose mates in one way or another), unsurprisingly drives even more risk-taking among young, male traders like the "Fabulous Fab," Fabrice Tourre, of Goldman Sachs. Who famously boasted to his girlfriend in e-mail messages about just how fabulous he was, in being "the only survivor" of the deals he was pushing.

Guys like Fabrice Tourre will always want risk. It is up to culture and popular entertainment (which shapes culture) as much as regulators, to push that risk-taking in socially beneficial ways.
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Vampire Sex and Violence: True Blood and the Bubble of Female Hypergamy

Recently, a writer for Pop Matters blogged his reaction to the extreme sex and violence of the HBO series "Tru Blood," a show watched apparently only by women and gays. The blogger even calls the combined sex and violence scene (where the vampire "hero" desired by the female audience does some pretty nasty things) misogynistic. Tellingly, the female audience didn't think so, and in the comments, women write about how "artistic" it was and construct various excuses about why the scene was OK. [Which boil down to female morality in the age of Hypergamy: the guy was Alpha, it was OK.] But just like the moment when as Steve Sailer noted, a 500 square foot home in Compton sold for $340,000, this stunning display of female value for male Alpha dominance, to the exclusion of everything else, may mark the height of the female market for men ruled by Hypergamy. This may not be the beginning of the bubble. But it may, as Roissy argued, mark the beginning of the end of Hypergamy above all else. In other words, the top of the market for Alphas.


Famously, Charlie Sheen held a knife to his wife's throat, on Christmas Day (because nothing says the holidays like "Honey I'm going to kill you!"), and was rewarded not by being fired, after feminists and female fans picketed "Two and Half Men," but a raise, to nearly $2 million per episode. Women (as a group, in general) forgive pretty much everything if a man is Alpha. The Petersons, Drew and Scott, one convicted, the other charged, in their wives murders, had no problem attracting female attention, while nerdy cubicle dwellers go back to their porn collections and X Boxes. Drew Peterson, aging, over 50, was the favorite of local college girls in bars. Scott Peterson not only drew Amber Frye, while married, but dozens of marriage proposals behind bars. Johan Van Der Sloot, in his travels through Asia, drew plenty of female admirers, both Western female expatriates and locals, in his fame of being accused of killing Natalie Holloway. Reputedly, the girl Van Der Sloot killed in Peru, was fascinated by his past, and willingly went to his hotel room alone, late at night, after flirting with him at the local Casino.

The market for men, set by women, is dominated by well, Alpha dominance. Nothing else matters, other than pure, violent potential and aggressiveness, adjusted for socio-economic status. Thus Mr. Big is an A-hole, but does not kill anyone. In fantasy, however, the big shot guys do indeed kill people, because it's sexy. You can see this reaction in novels like the Twilight series, or the Sookie Stackhouse novels upon which "Tru Blood" is based, the "Anita Blake" series by Laurel K. Hamilton, and of course, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and the spin-off Angel. Even "Dexter" with the sexy, rule-bound serial killer (he only gets off by killing other serial killers) follows the pattern. All the novels and TV series were popular with women, some exceedingly so, and all fall various rules.

First, the vampire protagonist must be much, much older, but look young. Second, he must dominate the female protagonist, and also protect her against his own violent desires (to hurt or kill her). Third, he must overtly humiliate nice-guy ordinary rivals who are the same age as the female protagonist, and make them look like pale imitations of his dominant masculine energy. Fourth, he must be "hot" and of course, hairless. Fifth, he has to kill a lot of people. Sixth, he must have a past of killing a lot of people, which the heroine must harness for her own ends to "change him." Finally, the vampire hero must dominate and often rape his female heroine, with sex so violent it leaves brutal marks.

This is particularly true in the climax of the best known vampire series, beloved by tween girls, teen girls, and their moms, the Twilight books. Where the vampire Edward Cullen takes his human teen bride and has sex with her, so violent that every bone in her body is broken, as she's transformed into a vampire. A teen girl, young and beautiful, forever! In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampire hero Spike rapes Buffy, which makes her love him even more. But she truly falls for him when he tells her of how many young girls, the age of her younger sister or younger, he raped and tortured before killing. In an earlier arc, Buffy finds her love for her other vampire boyfriend Angel unshakeable even while he's killing and harming friends, acquaintances, and teachers. Very tellingly, Buffy loses all interest in her human boyfriend Riley, when he loses the status of super-soldier and becomes just a decent guy without powers.

The Anita Blake series follows the same basic template (clearly Twilight author Stephanie Meyer ahem "borrowed" the structure of vampire-vs-werewolf, with the werewolf a doofus good guy), and the Sookie Stackhouse novels do as well, with the female protagonist rejecting the good guy suitor who is human, for the dangerous and much older (but young looking) vampire Bill.

Clearly, what is at work given the extraordinary popularity of some of these (Twilight in particular) and the sheer breadth of their copiers, is the desire for most women to have the ability in fantasy to have the violent, dangerous bad boy Alpha, without consequence. Because the proxy-doll protagonist has powers herself (Buffy) or will get them (Twilight) or what have you. It is also true that this stuff is nearly exclusively the province of very feminist men, openly gay men, and women. No "manly" guy's guy would dream of reading or watching the stuff, let alone writing it. It takes a very womanly view to come up with this stuff. And it is clear, women in the main, love it. You might even say they love, love, love it!

Which brings us to the Pop Matters writer Benjamin Riley and his objections:

The final scene of “It Hurts Me Too”, the third episode of True Blood’s third season, depicts some of the most horrific violence I have ever seen on screen. In the scene, Bill, the vampire antihero played by Stephen Moyer, has been arguing with Lorena, played by Mariana Klaveno, who is his ‘sire’—the vampire who made him a vampire. Lorena has manipulated Bill in an attempt to rekindle their romantic relationship, in part by attempting to have Bill’s current girlfriend killed.

After Bill tells Lorena that he will never love her, the two kiss before Bill pushes Lorena down onto his bed and begins to penetrate her. Bill is on top, Lorena is on her back. The aggression and intensity of the sex builds until Bill grabs Lorena’s head, twisting it around 180 degrees. He does this slowly and deliberately, and accompanying a shot which visually leaves nothing to the imagination is the sound of the bones in Lorena’s neck snapping. Next, a long shot shows Bill continuing while Lorena’s head is twisted completely around, facing the floor. The next shot is from below her, of her face. Apparently still alive, blood bubbles up out of her mouth as she says: “I still love you.” Bill keeps at it until the credits roll.

Just check out the comments on the site. The female audience LOVED IT. First, they found it "hot." Second, they justified the action (Bill was Alpha, all is forgiven for an Alpha). Third, the girl who "got it" was the romantic rival and "ex" of the doll-like female protagonist, cunningly written to be almost any girl wanting a dominant, violent boyfriend in fantasy. Of course women found her come-uppance satisfying. Nor did they object to what amounts to cheating, after all if another woman has the guy, it just validates he's worth having. And besides, Vampire Bill is Alpha. Women forgive anything in a man who is Alpha. Alphas being so desired and rare.

Writer Riley is just shocked at the true nature of female desire. When you boil it down, violence is no turn off, indeed is arousing, to most women, particularly those most desirable. As anyone who has observed the amazingly hot and often intelligent women around even the most pathetic lowlife who has a streak of violence. Indeed, the easiest way to be successful with women is through successful violence, as the winner, which is one of the major reasons the Ghetto and Barrio are so ridden with crime and cannot get out of it. When some "senseless" amount of violence, a shooting of a good kid with no gang ties, or a grandmother, or an infant occurs, rest assured some gang member will be having sex that night. Its guaranteed! Increasingly as Theodore Dalrymple argues, White British Chavs echo this same behavior, and of course White British Chav women find the men that beat them irresistible. As Dalrymple puts it, they find ordinary, decent men who would treat them well, boring. Sexless. In Chav Britain, the Barrio, and the Ghetto, this is normal female preference. Its shocking when a woman does not choose a violent thug. Even more when an attractive woman does it. Women have always found killers arousing, Geronimo when imprisoned at Pensacola, reputedly cut a huge swath through his jailers wives. Even though at the time he was a wizened old man, his body count made him sexy.

Roissy argues (though he does not use the term bubble) that tough times are a bounty for betas, as women will trade off against sexual excitement to find security. I am not so sure this happens rapidly though I agree with it in general.

In my view, when survival and survival alone is paramount, then yes, a beta who will stay and protect a woman, is better than the fleeting attentions of an Alpha, who will always have other, prettier and younger women to occupy him. Even the most mild beta in normal circumstances can kill, and the presence of a man is better than his complete absence, against other marauding men. Often the least impressive of betas can make the most astonishing killers, witness Alvin C. York, who was initially a conscientious objector and temperance pacifist. York killed at least 8 men (likely more) and took 132 men prisoner.

But most of the time, survival in tough times is not paramount. A Depression is not the Siege of Leningrad. Or the Thirty Years War (let us be grateful for that). Thus, women don't need a man that much, as a provider. They can make do, without him, and rely on the sexy dominance of an Alpha, even if he's not around much. It will cost, but most women most of the time will happily make the trade-off of sex for security.

Furthermore, it takes time for the "sexual marketplace" as it were, to reach a clearing price for men. Female Hypergamy, the desire for the Alpha male (often to the exclusion of all else), requires either sustained and long-standing social pressure to avoid it, mostly by other women, through extensive shaming and shunning (which in turn implies stable social networks, little anonymity, or physical mobility), or sheer survival. Nothing much else seems to control it.

Even Jane Austen, in "Pride and Prejudice," tellingly has her heroine Lizzy fall for the "cad" but Alpha male Wickham, though the social conventions of her day will not allow her to consummate it, and Wickham is the market for a wealthy wife, or a simple mistress. Unlike Darcy, who has far more wealth, Wickham is by contrast, agile and well spoken, an excellent dancer (where Darcy is stiff), easy-spoken, charming, outgoing, and a very convincing liar. No wonder Lizzy and her sister both fall for the man (though Lizzie finally sees through him as Wickham's mercenary intent becomes clear). This from the most self-controlled female heroine in literary history, a character moreover written by an 18th Century woman.

Of course, today, marriage is for Kitchen Bitches, beta males so unmanly they take over household chores (women don't really want men to do this, they'd rather they just be sexy and dominating) to the point of making themselves so umasculine their wives lose all sexual desire for them. Today's Lizzie would rather live like Samantha from "Sex and the City," and when she can no longer turn heads, even with botox and plastic surgery and pilates, she can have a "fabulous" set of gay friends. And many memories.

The genie of what women really want, when times are good, and they can express it, is out of the bottle. A man needs only to look at Twilight, at Buffy, at Tru Blood, at the Anita Blake series, at Dexter, at any Rom-Com, where the heroine must avoid the attentions of the best friend (who is not manly enough to win her) and snag the commitment phobic, wanted (and had) by other women, Alpha male.

Couple that with most women now out-earning men, particularly in the largest mating/population/job markets, and the ability to be a beta provider is in question. In New York City, women outearn men by 17% in their twenties (ages 22-30). Indeed, women beat men in the same age group in 39 of the 50 biggest cities and match them in another eight:

Single, childless women in their twenties are finding success in the city: They're out-earning their male counterparts in the USA's biggest metropolitan areas.

Women ages 22 to 30 with no husband and no kids earn a median $27,000 a year, 8% more than comparable men in the top 366 metropolitan areas, according to 2008 U.S. Census Bureau data crunched by the New York research firm Reach Advisors and released Wednesday. The women out-earn men in 39 of the 50 biggest cities and match them in another eight. The disparity is greatest in Atlanta, where young, childless single women earn 21% more than male counterparts.

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"They don't need marriage as much," says Stephanie Coontz, who teaches history and family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. "They're likely to be pickier, and they're likely to delay marriage." Coontz dismisses the notion that successful single women intimidate men and can't find husbands. They just marry later in life, she says.

"One day, I'll get married and have kids. But I'm in no rush," says Rebecca Loveridge, 27, a Washington, D.C., magazine marketing director who also writes a restaurant blog. She likes dining out, attending concerts and checking out art galleries with her friends. "Now is the time to be single," she says.

And why wouldn't a woman want to delay or avoid marriage? What does a Kitchen Bitch Beta husband have to offer? Slightly more income to buy a second sofa from Ikea? Versus exciting, thrilling sex with a dominant, demanding Alpha that other women want and have (therefore marking him as desirable in the first place).

Even in a recession, the "market clearing price" for beta men has not reached its level where women would actually give up exciting sex, with dominant Alphas, that they know they cannot gain exclusivity over, for the entire devotion of a beta guy. Particularly not when they are young, fertile, and desirable. Able to form families.

And increasingly, beta men are becoming aware of this deep, nearly unstoppable preference. That at best, they can in their thirties, find a woman who will settle for them as a boring, near "gay best friend" to shop with while they dream of the man who really excited them. And express not so secret contempt for their Kitchen Bitch husband. The only women as a group seemingly exempt from this are Mormons, who have tellingly a massive and very stable family network, with overt mentoring by older women of younger ones, and intense pressure among Mormon girls to select a nice guy relatively early instead of pursuing many, many Alpha men in the anonymity of urban job centers. A young Mormon woman may often be married by age 25, while her non-Mormon SWPL female counterpart is reaching her twentieth or even thirtieth partner. Nearly all Alpha dominant males. This as much as the "affordable family formation" of Steve Sailer's writings, accounts for the low fertility of Whites (i.e. much delayed marriage and childbirth). Often, a woman who "settles" for a boring beta guy will find that he's not even worth having a kid with, which would require fertility treatments anyway by age 38 or so. Increasingly, sperm donors are the rage, as in the romantic comedies "Back Up Plan," and "the Switch." After all, if any woman wanted this guy in the first place, he'd have been married decades earlier. Much better to get a better genetic material from a dominant, masculine guy who is a sperm donor!

Increasingly, beta men are finding that women, in their late thirties, have too much baggage to visibly settle themselves for merely being the accessory in a big wedding party. Hence the annoyance of older women at men who having been sitting out the relationship game in their twenties, unwillingly, find no incentive to settle for their age peers (though they would for younger women).

But the key is women themselves. Who would seem to require, several generations of growing up impoverished and desperate, as times turn increasingly grim, and single-motherhood poverty outweighs the sexy desire and tingle of Alpha dominance, in favor of Beta dependability. After all, despite rising gas prices, and periodic price crunches, America's love of big vehicles has not gone away. Periodically, small cars like the Toyota Corolla in the early 1970's, and again in the late 1970's through mid 1980's, find favor. Only to be shoved aside by bigger, more roomy and more horsepower blessed vehicles that provide excitement not reliability and economy. The big muscle cars have staged a modest comeback, but the roomy and powerful cars of yesteryear have merely morphed into SUVs and Trucks as cars.

Female fantasy reveals what women really desire, in the scheme of things. Which at its ultimate, is a violent, dangerous man they can control through being sexier than other women. This is why Vampire Bill, breaking the neck of his lover as he has sex with her, is not shocking but arousing. The openly gay Alan Ball, creator of "American Beauty," and also "Six Feet Under," knows his female audience. There have been no outcries, no calls for cancellations. No feminists protesting. They were too aroused themselves. The silence by women and feminists to this scene, in a show watched almost exclusively by women, is telling. As are the many, many comments defending the scene and the character by female viewers.

While the deep-rooted preference for sexy, and violent men (the two are synonymous with most women) can never be erased, young women who grew up poor, and knew their mothers grew up poor, alone and abandoned, can rapidly prefer a reliable beta to a life of raising kids on poverty wages.

Because hidden in the sexual marketplace is the power of incentives. Men now are discovering, and indeed cannot avoid it, that being a beta provider is no longer possible, and that the quickest way to female desire is successful violence. This is a huge incentive to create a brutal, unmoderated competition for available women along the lines of British Chavs, the Black Ghetto, or Mexican Barrio. Close off beta provider status, by continually declining wages, and female advantages in wages where it matters most: the twenties when men and women find mates, or decide to play the market (basically until they age out of attractiveness) and see what happens. One can hardly be a beta provider and be the equal of a woman in earning power, much less her inferior. She might as well just work another part-time job, or improve her career, and have a really sexy man. The key to beta provider status is as much the man bringing much more money to the table than the woman, otherwise he's just a Kitchen Bitch, as unmanly as Rosa the part-time cook or maid.

But just as compelling, is the knowledge that women respond to violence. That as long as they don't suffer from it directly, themselves (and even that is negotiable, witness Rihanna and Chris Brown), violence if successful (getting away with it) is the path to a woman's desire, if not her heart. And if a man has her desire, her heart will soon follow anyway. This is the incentive at work:

Be violent and successful at violence. Get the girl. And another. And another.

Winner take all (literally). Loser ends up dead (or alone).

Enough of this, good and hard, in a sustained effort, and it might not even take two generations. Particularly if men become far more aggressive, in almost every aspect of life, to the point of frequent fights and killings, to gain status and women. Nothing more deliberate could be constructed to make all of America, into a version of South Central LA or East Los Angeles, or Westlake Village. THAT sudden transformation, as young men arive at young adulthood, unable to compete for women in any other way but through violence, could spark a massive shift in the market, as women seek to escape a cycle of violence and poverty through overt, self-knowing repression of their innate desire for violent and dangerous men.

Which might shift back again as with vehicles (from small and reliable to big and powerful), or might not, as in the housing market.

But in the interim, it would seem that it is Alan Ball's world. The only question that remains, is the hyper-explicit sex and violence in "Tru Blood" the excess that marks the top of the market for Alphas, the moment that valuation of men has gone so insane that it cannot go on, or are their higher peaks of insane valuation of violent dominance still to come?

My own feeling, admittedly as man not a woman, is that the current market in men set by women is not sustainable. That the value put on dangerous and sexy men, in fantasy and reality, is just not something that can go on much further. Something, if only men responding massively, in a sudden way, to these obvious incentives: "be violent and I'll have sex with you!" is likely to happen.

And when it does, women might well find that the line between fantasy and reality is blurred, as the Roman people, gorged on sadistic spectacles of death in gladiator games, public executions, and animal fights to the death, found at the fall of the Western Roman Empire.
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Burn the Koran: the Collapsing World and How to Earn a Million Dollars!

Rev. Terry Jones, of the Dove World Outreach Center, now says he will not burn the Koran on 9/11, because he has a "deal" to move the Ground Zero Mosque. The Imam who is behind the Ground Zero Mosque, Rauf, says there is no deal and the Mosque is a go. Donald Trump has offered to buy the property at a 25% markup from the Rauf offer, to end a divisive situation. The offer has been rejected. And Fred Phelps, of the "God Hates Fags" brigade that crashes soldiers funerals, of the Westboro Baptist Church, now plans to burn the Koran. Obama and Bob Gates, Secretary of Defense, have directly called Rev. Jones to ask him not to burn the Koran.


Two things come to mind. One, is that the old world of Muslims and Christians, largely separate, have collapsed under modern technology and either non-Muslims will destroy Muslims, or Muslims will effectively rule the world under semi-official Sharia. The other, is that threatening to burn the Koran, publicly, in the US, is a good way to earn a million dollars, Doctor Evil-style.

Obviously, if you want media attention, threatening to burn the Koran is an excellent way to get it. Even better, you can ask say, the President or Secretary of State, to pay you a million dollars! from your "Dr. Evil Headquarters" (complete with Starbucks inside) to make you not burn the Koran. I'm surprised no one has thought of this before. Announce publicly a Koran burning. With extensive video on your website. Then say you'll be happy to sign a contract not to burn it, if you're paid. Yes its blackmail, but blackmail based on the desire of Muslims to use violence to enforce Sharia world-wide.

Americans don't threaten to kill Muslims if the flag is burned, or the Bible, or copies of the Constitution. Muslims, and Muslims alone, world-wide, threaten to kill people if they get offended by cartoons, or episodes of South Park, or Korans being burned. While constantly killing (in particular) Christians and Jews, as well as their fellow Muslims, and burning plenty of Korans themselves in attacks on rival Mosques and the like.

A media storm and terrorist frenzy would not have been possible in 1850. Or 1950, for that matter. It has only been with the advent of the internet, cheap cell phones capable of browsing the internet (and available to the Muslim masses), and the collapse of the separate worlds, that Muslims have made a concerted effort to enforce Sharia through violence.

Karl Rove has argued on Fox News that the Ground Zero Mosque must be built, to allow Muslims to celebrate 9/11, or Muslims will kill people. Andrew McCarthy says that Muslims go from "moderate" to nasty in a hurry, rejecting Trump's offer to moot the whole issue.

As McCarthy further notes on "the Corner" at National Review, Rauf has implied violence if the Ground Zero Mosque is not built. McCarthy further notes:

According to Obama, Jones’s “stunt” (a fair description) is already “a recruitment bonanza for al-Qaeda.” That’s absurd. No sensible person joins a terrorist organization dedicated to mass murder simply because somebody torches a Koran.

If the president, who is principally responsible for American national security, actually believes what he says, what is his excuse for not confronting Islamist regimes? These are not Looney Tunes pastors with followings smaller than the First Lady’s traveling caravan; they are governments that confiscate and destroy Bibles, crucifixes, Stars of David, and other articles of profound religious substance and symbolism to non-Muslims. That goes on, systematically, every single day — although still not as often as you’d imagine, because Islamic societies are so innately intolerant that there aren’t a lot of non-Muslim religious items to be found in, say, Saudi Arabia.

Jones is going to burn a Koran; sharia calls for killing human beings who renounce Islam. Does the president have an explanation for why Christians and Jews are not forming terror cells with the bonanza of recruits that must come forward on a daily basis given the “stunts” that, in Saudi Arabia, are known as law enforcement?

Terry Jones is a jackass. I wish Americans would trip over themselves with a fraction of the zeal on display here to condemn the torching of the American flag — a symbol of freedom and sacrifice. But that’s beside the point. Burning a book sacred to Muslims is a stupid, provocative thing to do. Yet it is conscious avoidance — okay, willful blindness — to claim that Jones is causing the threat to our troops, in addition to the threat of other attacks and riots by Muslims (of the sort we’ve seen with the Danish cartoons, the false claims of Koran-flushing at Gitmo, the school teacher who named a teddy bear Mohammed, etc.).

Those are all pretexts. The cause is Islamist ideology, which is dehumanizing of non-Muslims (or, in the case of the Ahmadi, even of Muslims who reject parts of mainstream Islamic doctrine). It is the ideology that puts the world’s Muslims on a hair trigger.

What Jones is doing is a desecration, not a national-security threat. It merits derision, as any desecration does. And it may indeed provoke a spike in violence that will go on, spike or no spike. But the security problem is not Koran-burning. It is a civilization indoctrinated by an ideology ever on the prowl for any excuse, real or imagined, to make mayhem. Wouldn’t it be nice if, while they publicly chide an American citizen for striking the match, our public officials took the occasion to chide the ideology that turns cultures into dynamite?

McCarthy, a former US Attorney who convicted the "Blind Sheik" Abdul Rahman of attempting to blow up with others, various New York landmarks, subways, and of course New Yorkers, has been excellent in commenting on the situation. And McCarthy is correct. The real issue is that Islam demands submission to Sharia, everywhere, all the time.

This was not a problem, in the 1950's, or 1960's, or even up through the 1980's. Because Muslims were mostly a separate people. Not only were there not many in the West, but the Muslim world and the non-Muslim world were not intimately connected by the current web of decentralized, sound-video-text, internet available to anyone with the money to rent a computer at an internet café or browse the web on a cheap web-enabled smartphone. Even rural villages in Pakistan or Indonesia possess this technology, and everything and anything the West does gives offense.

Because the West is unwilling, at the moment, to use force to keep Muslims in line. No one respects weakness, least of all Muslims, who idolize strength (see Osama Bin Laden's strong-horse and weak-horse analogies) above all else and make a fetish of despising weakness (not the least of which is that they themselves are weak in everything but jihadist killing).

If the technology of the world had remained that of the 1950's, centralized, and easily controlled, television, radio, all one-way mass communications, the semi-literate at best Muslim population would remain in blissful ignorance of their own culture's massive failing to produce anything like the prosperity in the West, and the West's unwillingness to adopt Sharia in everything. The Muslim masses and elites would both dreamily believe they dominate everything in the world, the flip side to the famous New Yorker cartoon of the Upper East Side of Manhattan occupying 9/10 of the globe.

But decentralized, two-way communications allow an obscure Florida pastor with no more than 50 followers, or even wackier, and more lunatic, Fred Phelps, to seize the attention of the entire Muslim world and US government, the Vatican (which has condemned Koran burning) and the rest. And so showcase that for the American people, Muslims tell them what they can and cannot do.

Muslims dominate, now, through fear and intimidation of reasonable expectations of mass casualty terrorism, the ability of Americans to object to a Ground Zero Victory Mosque celebrating 9/11 as a "great victory" (which is exactly what the Mosque is, all BS aside). Muslims are allowed to burn US flags with impunity, at home and abroad, and Bibles, and Torahs, and every other sacred symbols of other religions (most famously the Afghanistan Buddhist statues blown apart by Muslims). But Americans are not allowed to exercise their free speech, because Muslims will kill them if they burn the Koran.

This whole exercise has shown ordinary Americans (and Westerners) that Muslims are right with them, intertwined through modern communications. The world is not flat, its tiny. With Muslims in Pakistan and Iran and Indonesia right in the living room with ordinary Americans. Ordinary Americans, for the most part, resent the hell out of it.

Since Koran burning is only the start. Next up, no more Christmas celebrations. Muslims object. Mandatory celebration of Islamic festivals and holidays. No eating or drinking in public during Ramadan (or Muslims will kill someone). No alcohol allowed at all, in the West. Or Muslims will start killing. No Jews allowed, or Muslims will start killing. No Christianity allowed, anywhere, or Muslims will start killing. Burquas for every woman, robes for every man. Because Muslims demand it, or they'll start killing.

This is the price of modern telecommunications. Nothing, including the Web's many, many benefits, comes for free. This is just one cost.

The only solution, is to either submit to Islam, totally, or deter threats of violence by real, demonstrable, and fairly hair-trigger counter violence. The West, and America in particular, must be feared. For it will never be loved unless it is totally Islamic, to the point of Iran or Afghanistan or Pakistan. And who, really, would want to live in Pakistan? Even Mexico, with its criminal collapse, is preferable to Pakistan. So inevitably, one way or another, America must move towards demonstrating (by nuking a convenient people out of existence) its resolve not to remain Muslim. China, and Japan, must do this too, they also as does Russia face threats from jihad to adopt Sharia or face death. The perceived more harsh response has so far prevented the worst threats and actions, but ominously Jihadists claim that they too are "weak" like America and the West.

Fred Phelps or Rev. Jones may or may not burn the Koran. The FBI may arrest them and show, explicitly, that free speech ends when Muslims get offended (making Islam the official State Religion, which it practically is already). Proving the Constitution is nothing more than a dead, outmoded document devoid of any real meaning, like the Holy Roman Emperor.

But inevitably, someone in the West will offend Muslims. Drinking alcohol, unveiled women, open worship of Christianity or Judaism, petting dogs, indeed keeping dogs as pets, all offend Muslims world-wide. They way eating pork such as bacon, or not observing fasting during Ramadan, even if you are not a Muslim, offends all Muslims worldwide. And when Muslims are offended, they start killing people. That killing will eventually rise to the death of a Western city over a cartoon, or drinking beer in public, or unveiled women.

And to preserve the very way of life, America will have to kill a nation of Muslims. Very visibly showing the limits of what the West will tolerate. Responding to aggression (which is what the Muslim demands in the Ground Zero Mosque and Koran burning are) with appeasement only ups the butchers bill later.
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Will LA Have Another Riot?

The recent shooting of an illegal alien, a Guatemalan day laborer, who menaced passers-by (mostly women and children) with a knife while drunk, and got shot when he attacked a police officer, has drawn protests and violent skirmishes. The question is, will LA see another riot?


Westlake, which generations ago used to be a nice, gentrified area, is now completely controlled by Central American gangs, mostly MS-13, and is the site of frequent Communist / Black Block agitators. The same folks who gave you the May Day riots a few years ago. The new Police Chief, directed by illegal-alien panderer Antonio Villaraigosa, LA's "Latino Mayor" has offered "community meetings" and dialog (instead of arrests and cracking heads). As a result, LA seems poised for a riot.

The vitriolic response to the shooting has surprised many department and elected officials. With the knife recovered at the scene, eyewitness accounts allegedly supporting the authorities' claim that Jamines advanced aggressively toward the officers, and no racial overtones to the shooting, the incident did not seem to be one that would cause such an eruption of anger.

In an interview Wednesday, Beck blamed the unrest on outside groups that, he said, seized on the killing as an opportunity to foment anger toward the police.

The area's large population of immigrant day laborers, who have struggled to find work during the city's financial collapse and have grown frustrated with the LAPD's aggressive stance against the neighborhood's ubiquitous illegal street vendors, may have been particularly receptive to the calls for upheaval, Beck said.

"It has been a bunch of agitators pushing the envelope and using individuals as their pawns," he said.

At least some of the disorder seemed to have been fueled by such groups. About a dozen people who appeared to be affiliated with the Revolutionary Communist Party handed out literature about the group's beliefs and other cases of officer-involved shootings, and chanted messages over bullhorns about a communist revolution. Among those arrested Tuesday night was Jubilee Shine, 40, of South Los Angeles, who heads a group called the Coalition for Community Control Over the Police.

Hernandez, the officer who shot Jamines, remains ineligible for patrol assignments, police officials said. An officer involved in a shooting is kept off the streets until the chief has received a formal briefing on the incident and the officer is cleared by a department psychologist to return to full duty.

Note: the officer who shot the Guatemalan illegal alien day laborer (who was completely drunk at the time) is himself, Hispanic.

Stupidity abounds:

Carol Sobel, a civil-rights attorney who has clashed with the LAPD over the use of force, echoed several protesters and residents in the area who questioned why Hernandez had not been able to shoot Jamines in the arm or leg.

"I can understand if the person has a gun, that the officer should shoot to kill. But, in this case, with a knife, it seems to me this could be excessive," she said.

Deputy Chief Sandy Jo MacArthur, who oversees training for the LAPD, said officers are put through simulation machines that mimic real-life scenarios in which the decision to use deadly force must be made in seconds.

Officers are not taught to "shoot to kill" or to "shoot to wound," she said, but are trained to aim always at an aggressor's "center mass" — roughly the belly or chest — to stop the person from advancing. If that does not stop the person, officers are trained to aim at the suspect's head, MacArthur said.

What this is about, really, is control. Control of the Westlake area, with the Gang members, day laborers (often the same people), and the Communist/community agitators (again often the same people) wanting to use the incident to push the Police out and seize control. If a riot breaks out, all the better to loot the area completely (and burn the remaining evidence). Above all, it is a statement of dominance. Central American gangs and illegal aliens control the city, not the Police. Certainly not the White Westsiders or those in the Valley.

Reportedly, attempts were made to attack the Rampart Station, and rush inside, the previous night (that of Sep 8-9). It seems likely this stand-off will grow only more intense, until one side breaks. All it will take, is a political call by the Mayor to withdraw from certain areas and streets, and the crowd will gather enough force to create a mob. One that can attack with impunity (on live TV). Once control has been ceded, it will take the National Guard to return it.

LA is a powder keg. The illegals here feel no affection for LA, it is not their home or homeland. It is merely a place to be looted. Eventually, it will be.

What the fall-out from that will be is another issue.
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UCLA Goes Private: The Start of the Higher Ed Bubble Popping?

UCLA is Going Private. Akin to the scene in "Robocop" where a character shouts excitedly, "We're taking this city private!" UCLA's Anderson School of Business wants to give up state funding and rely on private donors. This just might be the inflection point of the Higher Education Bubble popping.


Glenn Reynolds, Instapundit.com blogger and University of Tennessee Law prof, has predicted this bubble bursting. So has Michael Barone. The Seeking Alpha blog has predicted this as well (no, not the Roissy style Alpha, the Alpha indicating active return on an investment, usually associated with a benchmark index like the S&P 500 Index). The American Enterprise Institute Blog has also predicted this. The chart at the top of the story is courtesy the AEI Blog at the link.

It is worth noting, a year at the UCLA Anderson School of Business MBA program costs roughly the same as a year at Yale as an undergrad, around $50,000 a year. Yale is a little more. An MBA student graduating from Anderson, without any scholarships, can expect in excess of $100,000 in student loan debt. Most will never pay this off.

But it is worth noting what Top Tier schools like UCLA's Anderson School of Business is all about. Anderson is 15th in the US News & World Report ranking of business schools. UC Berkeley is seventh, and Harvard, Stanford, and MIT are the top three respectively. These schools are not selling unique learning. Accounting, Finance, and Marketing are the same at Harvard, as they are at say, UCI or Chapman University or any number of schools. What these schools are selling is exclusivity, for rich White people, and the exclusive social network (like a pricey Yacht Club or Golf Club) that allows for power-brokers to form backscratching arrangements. Prospective donors like the folks from Blackrock or Pimco, don't give charitable money for nothing. They expect things. Such as exclusive access to a social network comprised of only the most exclusive business school students (read: rich and connected) in the world.

First, the ugly details from the Financial Times:

A leading business school in the University of California system is preparing to forgo public funding amid increasing uncertainty about the state’s economic health and California’s ability to pay for higher education.

The UCLA Anderson School of Management plans to fill the funding gap with money from private donors, bolstering a roster that includes business figures such as Larry Fink, the founder of BlackRock, and Bill Gross, the founder of Pimco.

Its decision to opt out, which is awaiting the approval of Mark Yudof, president of the UC system, is a clear indication of the broad changes that lie ahead for the network, which was established in the 1960s with a public mandate to provide world-class education to deserving students regardless of their ability to pay [Emphasis Added].
…
California faces a budget deficit of more than $19bn while the UC system itself has a funding shortfall of $800m, forcing schools and colleges in the network to cut classes and raise tuition fees. This has prompted a wave of protests on campuses across the state.

Judy Olian, dean of UCLA Anderson, told the Financial Times that opting out of public funding was a “creative solution” that would allow the UC system to reallocate the money to UCLA’s underfunded undergraduate programmes.

“The UC system is arguably the greatest public university system in the world,” she said. “But we’re not going to keep it that way with the old model.”

About 18 per cent of UCLA Anderson’s $90m budget currently comes from state coffers, which includes the tuition students pay to the school. Tuition costs will rise as the school opts out of public funding but Ms Olian said the increase would be in line with previous years: tuition fees at UCLA Anderson have steadily risen as money contributions from the state has fallen, she said. “That train left the station a long time ago as state support declined.”

Tuition at UCLA Anderson costs $41,000 a year to California residents and $49,000 to non-residents but is likely to rise to a rate comparable with top-tier private business schools such as Wharton and Stanford when the school opts out of public funding. The move is set to come into effect by next summer.

Public funding for higher education in California has been squeezed in recent years. Thirty years ago, 10 per cent of California’s general budget was spent on the UC and California State systems and 3 per cent was allocated to prisons.

But in the past three decades spending on prisons has risen to 11 per cent of the state’s revenue, while higher education’s share has slipped to 7.5 per cent

Note by the way, the change from the mission of the original UC system, built by Pat Brown, and the old-style Liberal Democrats, to educate the mostly White middle and working class sons and daughters, regardless of ability to pay, to one of already, without the changes, skyrocketing fees. A full $41,000, and nearly $50,000 for out of State Residents (yes, Illegal Aliens pay in-state fees and benefit from Affirmative Action). The UC system, built for the White Middle Class, now aims to keep them out as much as possible.

Increasingly, an MBA from a "good school" i.e. one of the top twenty schools in the US News & World Report, or Businessweek rankings, is mandatory for management positions (those that are left) in marketing and corporate finance, accounting, and the rest. A few employers may tap regional schools that dominate their area (Notre Dame comes to mind, as does Emory, or University of Miami), but for the most part, it is Top 20 or bust, just as in Law Schools.

As Law has become something that is really, forbidden as a profession to make living wages for most of America's White Middle/Working class, so too is Business Management slipping away. Salaries at Ole Miss range from $66,000 to $47,000, with the lower end being more likely (it is the government vs. private sector salary, considering most graduates take the Mississippi Bar Exam and government is the only major employer in the state, well the lower salary is the most likely one).

The LA Times has a similar story:

Anderson, which offers master's degrees and doctorates, hopes to wean itself off state funds by 2015 and to replace that $5.6 million a year with additional private donations and tuition levels closer to that of private business schools. Under the plan's projections, annual tuition for California residents in a full-time master's program at Anderson would rise gradually from $41,000 now to about $53,000, including a $5,000 discount for in-state students.
…
Some critics say that Olian's plan, coming after several rounds of UC-wide fee increases, is another step toward privatizing the prestigious public university system. Olian and her supporters deny that, saying that Anderson would remain under UCLA's academic governance and policies, including its tenure and pension rules.
…
Business schools at two other public universities, the University of Michigan and the University of Virginia, have successfully implemented similar plans, and others are considering it, experts say.

Those schools "want to control their own destiny," according to Jerry E. Trapnell, executive vice president of the Assn. to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the schools' main accrediting agency. In addition to seeking more stable funding, they hope to respond more nimbly to market demands for new programs, Trapnell said. A major challenge would be to ensure enough financial aid to maintain the income and ethnic diversity [Emphasis Added] of public institutions, he said.

Anderson is not the only UC graduate school to consider doing without most public funding.

UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law explored a similar plan several years ago and could be a candidate for such changes in the future, along with other UC business and law schools. But officials said relatively few departments or schools in the UC system could forgo state support because of limits on what students in many programs are willing to pay and the difficulties of tapping alumni donations in many less-lucrative fields.

Anderson enrolls about 720 students in its full-time master's programs, which receive state support, and about 1,100 others in several part-time and executive MBA programs, which do not. There is also a small doctoral program in management. The school recently placed 15th in U.S. News & World Report's national rankings of graduate business schools, which put Harvard, Stanford and MIT in the top three spots. UC Berkeley's business school tied with Dartmouth's for seventh place, and USC's Marshall School placed 20th.

At Anderson, about a third of the tenure-track faculty are paid salaries higher than $200,000 a year, campus officials said. If the new plan is approved, the business school would be free to raise salaries even higher, without seeking approval from the university's central administration.

Officials say the plan is feasible because the school, which now has an annual budget of about $96 million, would keep all fees and tuition revenue it generates while forgoing other state funds that have been shrinking. The business school would continue to pay UCLA for facilities and other shared costs, and UC would still compensate Anderson for teaching undergraduate courses in accounting.

The plan assumes that donors would be more willing to support a self-sufficient school and that private gifts and endowment income would grow from about $10 million to $14.5 million annually. Olian also hopes to eventually triple the school's current $102-million endowment, which is much smaller than most of its public and private competitors.

Note three interesting things. Other public universities, including University of Virginia and University of Michigan, both elite Business (and Law) schools, have implemented similar plans. UC Berkeley may yet implement a similar plan. Next, the plan also allows payment of faculty at really, alarmingly high salaries, with no public input or check. Are a third of professors on tenure track really worth more than $200,000 a year? Certainly not for teaching, MBA professors being notorious for the most part for being relatively poor teachers (Grad Assistants do most of the teaching and exam preparation and grading). For research, perhaps, but who would gain access (preferential at that) to the research, and where would the research be directed? For the benefit of the State of California? The students in the program? Or large donors?

Lastly, note that "A major challenge would be to ensure enough financial aid to maintain the income and ethnic diversity." Or code words for "no working or middle class Whites need apply." Only rich White folk, and non-Whites (mostly Black and Hispanic) as non-threatening blocking pieces and nascent Barack Obama's to use as political favor banks.

This I think, is the inflection point. Where there are not enough students to make Graduate Schools profitable, not even with massive credit (student loans are not forgivable, nor can they be discharged in bankruptcy like mortgages). Unless massive fund-raising efforts concentrated on a few, fabulously wealthy donors, provide and indeed, produce a privileged social network, basically a country club with a research arm and a place to make deals.

This is not the end of the Education Bubble. But it certainly marks an inflection point. And a major challenge, politically, culturally, and socially.

Are voters (mostly White, middle and working class, even in California, where Mexicans just don't vote, mostly because many are illegal aliens) going to support a UC that excludes their sons and daughters? That has become, a country club for Rich Whites and privileged non-Whites, with a research arm attached? Can the state or indeed the nation afford the end of the California and larger American Dream? What kind of changes will the sudden, massive dashing of upward mobility for most White men and women in America, and the massive display of privilege by both rich White folks and selected non-Whites (smarter Blacks and Hispanics) do to the simple cohesion of America and California?

Are voters going to be OK with Professors at schools where their sons and daughters can never go, making over a quarter of a million dollars a year? For essentially, part-time work? Will citizen gadflys and Glenn Reynolds "Army of Davids" expose the inevitable sweetheart deals that UCLA Anderson and other schools do with major supporters like Blackrock and Pimco? Will this be another Bernie Ebbers, or Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski related scandal (appropriating resources, in this case public ones instead of shareholder resources for private gain?)

Neither Meg Whitman or Carly Fiorina (being part of the wealthy, corporate elite that believes keeping the great White unwashed, as opposed to selected non-White unwashed) are likely to make this an issue. This is the price of RINO-ism. But yes, inevitably even in California, someone will make this an issue. The betrayal of the California Dream. The death of middle and working class White aspiration. The closing off of the professional managerial ranks to non-connected, non-wealthy, White boys and girls. The rise of the new, connected Black and Hispanic elite. A nation of Barack Obamas, or Tony Villaraigosas, and a few Kennedy types, or children of corporate masters, and a nation of suddenly poor, angry, and resentful folks denied upward movement? Because they are White, and middle to working class? This bodes ill.

This is not a Jacksonian moment. It is likely to be far more severe, and far-reaching, in the inevitable White middle-working class reaction.

If the elites wanted to create their own White middle-working class revolution, they could not do more to provoke it than killing the UC system for White middle-working class people.
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Stieg Larsson and James Lee: Fantasy Enemies of the Eternal Childhood

Both Stieg Larsson, the late author of the "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo" trilogy, and now deceased Discovery Channel hostage taker James Lee, exhibited a fantasy ideology. The complexity of the modern world disturbed them, and so, seeking a simplistic solution, they chose a childish fantasy instead of embracing reality. Lee's fantasy, ended in terror for people just doing their jobs at the Discovery Channel, and death for Lee. Larsson's, gave him some minor fame, his estate some minor cash, but both cases illustrate the complete failure of people on the left to grasp the innate reality of mankind. We are NOT going back to hunter-gatherer days and the menace stalking Sweden is NOT Swedish Nazis. Yes, Lee was merely a nut, an obviously mentally deranged man. But what of his inspiration, Author Daniel Quinn, and his two books, Ishmael, and "My Ishmael"? Both novels were published by Bantam Books. The first novel won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award. Both novels have inspired everything from Pearl Jam, to the film "Instinct" with Anthony Hopkins, the Peace movement. While Lee was a marginal nut, Quinn is a major published author, with prizes to prove it. The Turner Fellowship Award netted him half a million dollars, the most awarded for any literature prize.

For Larsson, the mentally ill Lee, and Daniel Quinn, the question is, how deep has such lunatic ideas really gotten into society? You can read Lee's entire manifesto here at inmalafide.com, it reads straight out of the Peace Movement, New Tribalists, and a good part of the Democratic Party. The sentiments expressed are not that far off from what James Cameron has said, who wants to ban DVDs (but only after you buy all three special editions of AVATAR), or for that matter, Barbara Boxer, Senator from California. All three are deeply embedded in fantasy, to avoid real questions and real solutions. "Invent, Humans! These are the demands, and sayings of Lee!"


For Larsson, his main themes are the need to root out the ever-present Swedish Nazis. And the "abuse" of Swedish women … by figures sadly resembling his father. Both are childish fantasy enemies instead of the real ones facing Sweden today, and in the past.

Sweden, after 1934, was ruled by Social Democrats. Who preferred to spend all the government money possible on social welfare, instead of defense. By May 1940, with the Allies firmly defeated, Britain in shambles, fearing invasion itself, and Norway occupied by the Germans, Sweden had no choice but to cooperate and make itself useful to Germany. Otherwise it would be invaded and occupied by the far superior forces of the Germans. Of course Sweden, under Social Democrats, supplied Hitler's War Machine with raw materials and weapons. So too did Larsson's beloved Stalin, and the Soviet Union, from 1938 and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, up until the June 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Stalin even regarded Hitler as a close friend, and refused to believe news of the invasion for several days. Stalin, as much as Sweden, before Hitler's invasion, provided the Nazis with raw materials, weapons, helped them pursue Jews, and betrayed local communist rebels to the Nazis. Stalin in 1952, with the "Doctor's Plot" planned his own final solution to Jews in Russia. Something that Larsson, a life-long member of the Communist Party, and journalist (but I repeat myself), conveniently ignored in his writings.

The lesson of Sweden in WWII was that a small nation must bend to a hostile, and much larger, better armed one, unless it has powerful defenses of its own. Defenses that require massive mobilization of society, spending large amounts of money, and forgoing social welfare for military spending. Sweden could have defied Hitler, had it spent nearly all its money on a Navy, an Air Force, and a strong Army. It would have had to have fought Hitler, and many Swedes would have died. Stockholm would have been pounded into rubble, along with many other beautiful Swedish cities. As was East London, Coventry, and many places in Britain. But it is likely that the Swedes could have held out. German manpower was not unlimited, and a strong Navy, Air Force, and Army could have made things very costly for Germany.

But it would have cost Sweden too. Life is not a choice between chocolates and strawberries.

Nor did Sweden become "rich" off seizing assets from fleeing Jews, and betraying them to Nazis. Or selling to the Nazis. For the former, there were not that many Jews, who got to Sweden, and by the time they got there, they did not have much money. At any rate, the party of the Left, not the Right, ruled Sweden. The materials sold to the Nazis generated little wealth, Sweden not being in the position to dictate terms. No, Sweden's wealth, came AFTER the War, when with Switzerland, it was the only nation in Europe with both a large industrial infrastructure and no war damage. Unlike British, or French, or Soviet, or German factories, Sweden's factories (and Switzerland's) were untouched. Their cities pristine. No massive demographic hole, either. Russia and the Soviets lost 20 million or more, the Germans around 9 million, and the French and British around 5 million a piece. There were plenty of people to do the work, that needed to be done.

As for Swedish "misogyny," well, Stanley Kurz at National Review has a few items on Sweden's Feminists demands:

• A man tax, levied only on men, to pay for battered women's shelters, because all men are "guilty" of rape.


• Changing rape laws to make all men who do not formally ask for permission for sex "guilty of rape."


• Comparable worth laws to force all women to get the same pay as men, even across male-dominated and female-dominated professions, for example secretaries making as much as telephone linemen.


• Forcing fathers to take as much time off from work as mothers.


• Gender quotas for daycare workers (excluding men)


• Forcing androgyny by making boys wear dresses in Kindergarten.

Now, some of these went nowhere, though many were eventually successful, and state support for lesbians wanting artificial insemination, and gay marriage, were eventually enacted. Indeed the youth wings of the left party endorsed polyamory. Later, as Kurz notes,

In the midst of all this feminist success, trouble struck with the broadcast of a televised documentary called The Gender War. This close-up look at Sweden’s feminist movement exposed a degree of radicalism that shocked even Sweden’s socially liberal public.

The documentary featured prominent feminist academic and activist, Eva Lundgren, claiming that half of all Swedish women are victims of male violence. Lundgren went on to assert that a network of male Satanist groups had carried out hundreds of ritual baby murders in Sweden. (A formal inquiry by Uppsala University has since discredited both claims.) Another segment of the documentary featured Ireen von Wachenfeldt, chair of the government’s women’s shelters. Von Wachenfeldt’s remarks set off what soon became known as the “men are animals” controversy.

Under Von Wachenfeldt, the government’s women’s shelter network had printed excerpts from the “SCUM Manifesto” (Society for Cutting Up Men), penned by a radical feminist in the late 1960s. The SCUM Manifesto urges women to “destroy the male sex” by using modern science to insure that only female children are born. SCUM goes on to say: “To call a man an animal is to flatter him: he’s a machine, a walking dildo.” Asked by the film-maker if she agreed, Von Wachenfeldt said, “Yes, man is an animal. Don’t you think so?”

Lundgren and Von Wachenfeldt’s televised statements set off shock waves in a Sweden perhaps soon to be governed by a coalition that would include FI. After all, the “man tax” would fund a shelter system run by a woman who appeared to despise men. The government’s new Equality Minister, Jens Orback, seized on the controversy to criticize Von Wachenfeldt’s “separatist” decision not to work with or employ men in government shelters.

Thrown off-balance by the controversy, the Feminist Initiative tried to find a “male feminist” to place on its governing board. Unfortunately, their chosen male candidate declined the honor.

Dogged by the “men are animals” controversy through the spring and summer, the Feminist Initiative headed into its critical September 2005 convention determined to emerge with a winning platform. Yet the convention saw divisions emerge. After a bitter power-struggle, several “moderates” resigned from FI’s board. They complained that a “broad-based” program (focused, say, on business quotas and compulsory paternity leave) was being pushed aside by a radical coalition dominated by homosexuals, bisexuals, and the transgendered. One erstwhile FI board member said she’d been “bullied for being a middle-class heterosexual.”

Determined to transcend “patriarchal norms,” FI decided against having official leaders. Yet now the purged “moderate” feminists complained of a “democratic deficit” on the board. The Feminist Initiative had become “much worse” than the traditional patriarchal organizations it was meant to replace, said one. In other words, “man tax” advocate and de facto leader, Gudrun Schyman, was in control, purging the “moderates” (themselves quite radical by American standards) and siding with the radicals. The entertainment at the conference further radicalized the party’s image, particularly the rapturous applause for a song that went, “F***ing man, we’re going to chop you to bits.”

FI’s victorious radical faction was led by Tiina Rosenberg, a feminist professor who made a badge of her lesbianism. Rosenberg raised public hackles for reportedly calling women who sleep with men “traitors to their gender.” And shortly after her triumph at the convention, Rosenberg announced the Feminist Initiative’s new proposal: the abolition of marriage and its replacement by a system of gender-neutral partnership legislation that would allow for multiple partners. Like the youth parties the previous year, Rosenberg touted the proposal as freeing the family from “heterosexual norms.” “The history of marriage is not about love and living together,” she said, “it’s about ownership.”

Sweden, far from being a nation filled with natives who are "Men Who Hate Women" (Larsson's Swedish title for "Girl With The Dragon Tattoo") is a nation apparently filled with man-hating (but I repeat myself) lesbians and gays and transgendered individuals.

Meanwhile, Sweden DOES have a rape epidemic. From Muslim immigrants. As blogger Fjordman reports:

Becirov runs the Islamic Center of Malmö, on the outskirts of Sweden's third-largest city. Some immigrant neighborhoods in the city have (official) unemployment rates exceeding 50 percent. Swedish authorities have failed to lift up the area, and seem to be giving the Islamic Center of Malmö a great deal of leeway in attempting to do so. An article that appeared in 2003 noted that "a few" of the 6-to 10-year-old girls were wearing headscarves. On a visit in January 2005, fully 80 percent were covered in class--only a handful were not. In a fit of absent-mindedness, Sweden has suddenly become as heavily populated by minorities as any country in Europe. The percentage of foreign-born is roughly equivalent to the highest percentage of immigrants the United States ever had in its history (on the eve of World War I). Rosengård appears to be all-immigrant. The public schools have virtually no ethnically Swedish children. There are stories--familiar in other parts of Europe where immigrants from the Muslim world have recently settled--of students harassing Jewish teachers and defacing textbooks that treat Jewish themes. Crime is high.

Rapes and assaults against Swedish women and girls are at an all time high. And perpetrated almost entirely by Muslim men. Who regard Swedish women as "whores." As Fjordman reports in Brussels Journal, a full 85% of convicted rapists are Muslims from foreign lands, or the children of such. Sweden is rapidly becoming the Bosnia-Serbia of Northern Europe. Fjordman notes the Muslim rape wave in Sweden, link here, with the chilling news that two young Swedish women invented an anti-rape belt (requiring two hands to get it open).

Some Muslim immigrants admit their bias quite openly. An Islamic Mufti in Copenhagen sparked a political outcry after publicly declaring that women who refuse to wear headscarves are "asking for rape." Apparently, he's not the only one thinking this way. “It is not as wrong raping a Swedish girl as raping an Arab girl,” says Hamid. “The Swedish girl gets a lot of help afterwards, and she had probably fucked before, anyway. But the Arab girl will get problems with her family. For her, being raped is a source of shame. It is important that she retains her virginity until she marries.” It was no coincidence that it was a Swedish girl that was gang raped in Rissne – this becomes obvious from the discussion with Ali, Hamid, Abdallah and Richard. All four have disparaging views on Swedish girls, and think this attitude is common among young men with immigrant background. “It is far too easy to get a Swedish whore…… girl, I mean;” says Hamid, and laughs over his own choice of words. “Many immigrant boys have Swedish girlfriends when they are teenagers. But when they get married, they get a proper woman from their own culture who has never been with a boy. That’s what I am going to do. I don’t have too much respect for Swedish girls. I guess you can say they get fucked to pieces.”

Now, who seems to be the men who hate women? Emasculated, polite, Swedish men who seem to have all the testosterone drained out of them by lesbians and gays of their own native people, or Muslim men from places like Morocco, or Algeria, or Pakistan, who bring the attitudes towards women from those places and pass them on to their sons? As shown in the quote above.

Larsson adopted a fantasy enemy, one not even as entertaining as Sauron or Lord Voldemort, because dealing with the reality of Sweden was too difficult. Social spending on welfare by Sweden's Social Democrats left the nation no choice but to cooperate with the Nazis in WWII. Or be conquered. Even fighting them, with a military that had a chance of standing them off, meant destruction of Sweden's cities and factories, and the deaths of millions of its people. Meanwhile, the real people who hate are the lesbians and gays waging a war on native Swedish men, and standing silent (as Larsson accuses Sweden's power structure of doing with abuse of Jews in WWII and women today) about the rape and assault of Swedish women by Muslim men from other countries, let in because Sweden is ashamed of being … Swedish.

The real future of Sweden is not some glorious anti-capitalist crusade against racism and violence against women. It is instead, Bosnia on the Baltic. With rape, murder, mass-killings, mass graves, ethnic cleansing, as Swedes and Muslims fight to control Sweden. Only one can win. The fight of course, will draw in Muslim nations determined to protect Muslim countrymen, and conquer one more part of Europe, and those parts of Europe determined to resist, and prevent a Muslim Caliphate from being put on the Baltic. Eventually, those Swedish men with nowhere left to go will simply have to fight, as Fjordman notes, the Army consists of less than 5,000 men and the police are totally useless. Germany, Finland, Russia, are as all likely to be drawn in as Sweden's Gustavus Adolphus was by the Thirty Years War in Germany.

Thus dies the glorious colors of Benetton. As Bosnia on the Baltic begins.

But what of Lee, and his inspiration, novelist Daniel Quinn? After all, can't a telepathic gorilla guide us to a new tribalism, where we all live like furry blue cats in James Cameron's Avatar? What, you say we can't go back? Yes.

Actually, a gifted journalist (back when journalist actually meant something) and science writer, James Burke, said just that in 1978. When he dissected the idiocy of Quinn (Lee was obviously a lunatic) and Cameron in the TV series that ran on PBS, "Connections." Youtube now has the series available, and in the last episode, he talks about how we cannot go back. In the last few minutes of the first clip, and the first few minutes of the second clip, Burke shows how and why we just cannot go back:






For those unwilling/unable to watch the clip, Burke notes it all began with the plow. The plow, more than 9,000 years ago, gave man food. A lot more food. Which could support more people. Which needed to be stored in clay jars, begetting the potter's wheel. And needed writing, so you knew who owned what. And irrigating the fields required geometry, because they'd flood every year, and irrigation to channel the floods, and grow food even when the river wasn't flooding. Which gave architecture. Which needed metals, for more food, and weapons to defend the food you'd got. Which meant more, and more, and more innovation, and technological change.

Because, at their core, people want more. More food, so they don't go hungry, and their kids get more protein, so they grow taller. More clothes, so they have more comfort, warmer in the winter, cooler in the summer. More shelter, so they don't sleep rough, or in a giant hall, all in a bundle. More energy, so more things can be made, so that everyone can have nice things. Not just really rich people. More energy means more clean water, so more poor people don't die of disease, and their children don't die of disease. More energy means more communication, so people can exchange ideas, which drives change even faster, and more entertainment, which spreads ideas more, which creates even faster change that way.

People want more. They need more. And they are determined to get more. Indeed, our genes have been selecting, for more, and an ever desire for more, and change itself, for more than 9,000 years. And it all started with the plow. If we were all to suffer some terrible Hollywood disaster, civilization would restart, because of the plow. The plow was the one tool, a very simple one, that started all the others. Everyone knows about the plow. Its not going away. So neither is civilization.

Whether a telepathic gorilla can shame rich guilty Westerners about Nazis, or not, is beside the point. Just as guilt over Sweden not fighting the Nazis to a stand-still until its cities were in ruins and people half-starving is beside the point. No matter how much rich, near billionaire film-makers exhort people to buy their DVDs and burn down society (but not their mansions, please), or authors rage against Swedish men for not being born lesbians or gay, the real issues press on.

China will industrialize because it has no other choice. Africans will exploit their natural resources, because they have no other choice. Latin America will exploit its resources, because it has no other choice. To feed its people's demands for more. More food, and better, safer food. More water, and cleaner, safer water. More roads, and better ones. More physical safety, from bandits and guerrillas (not the kind in zoos), or militias, or even safety from abuse by one's own government forces. Not a theoretical in the Sudan, or the Congo, or many other places. All of this requires energy, resources, money. Which can only come, from exploiting resources. These resources can be exploited wisely, or foolishly, by informed consent, or whoever can be the slickest or strongest (or both). But they will be exploited. Because 6.5 billion people all want more. And why wouldn't they? Lower class, middle class, and upper class Western Women told they can't have makeup, cosmetics, clothes, decent food and water, cars, shelter, botox, decent medicine so they don't die in childbirth, or their children in infancy or early childhood? The silly (botox and cosmetic surgery) is inexplicably intwined with the serious: modern medicine that lets women not die of infection after giving birth. You can't have one without the other. Poor, Third World people will not accept being told, "Sorry, your children have to die of disease, to save the Polar Bear. And the froggies." This is a non-starter, for the world, as is the fantasy that carbon emissions will be reduced to "save the Planet" because Chinese and Indian peasants won't accept being poor forever, nor will Western women (the swing vote) give up the life they lead, nor Western men for that matter. Professional sports, rock music, movies, NASCAR, are all going nowhere. Neither are nylons, designer dresses, expensive shoes, or trips to the mall. The television screen is as close as Westerners want to come to tribal life, on National Geographic channel.

Much of the Western World, and in particular the Left, has been reduced to idiotic infancy.



Indeed, as the professional Left has become more degreed, it has become more childish. The Wiki entry for "Ishmael" reads like the novel was written by a ten year old, one prone to emo-fits and goth tendencies. This is in contrast to the old-line Environmentalists, like John Muir or Teddy Roosevelt, who made the argument, that some wild lands should be preserved for their beauty, so that future generations of people could enjoy them. Now, we have History Channel's "Life After People" series. If people are not around, who cares? The entire modern environmental movement can be summed up as one giant temper tantrum against "daddy." "Daddy" being defined as the modern industrial world that gives so much wealth to so many people, at a cost, to be sure, but does indeed make humans far richer.

In the same manner, fantasies about the ever-present lurking menace of Swedish Nazis abusing Swedish women, is ultimately childish. The temper tantrum of someone unable to deal with the complexity of modern humanity, wanting unalloyed good in their people and culture and history, and declaring it all garbage when finding human beings instead of Angels from Heaven in Sweden. So too, the idea that male heroism is easily replaceable by kick-ass female heroism, is a fantasy that is childish. Ignoring human physiology and fundamental interests.

In both cases, it is wealth and removal from consequences that create the childishness. John Muir, unlike the crying hippies, or the fatuous self-loving camera hogs on "Whale Wars" actually hiked the Sierras extensively, and mounted a sustained public campaign to convince people and politicians that some places were worth saving. He did not win every round. But he did help save some of the most spectacular and beautiful places on Earth. Actually being responsible for something, including his own life (he often hiked alone) created an adult responsibility. Acting as a trustafarian as in "Whale Wars" or crying hippies, posing for others and the camera, creates a childish fantasy.

A fantasy that detracts from the real business at hand: dealing with the choices and trade-offs in making exploitation of resource decisions, and addressing the looming battle for much of Europe over who will rule: natives or foreign Muslims?





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