Right-Wing Marxism

Posted on by
457

There was a time when conservatism was defined as a lack of ideology, by which Russel Kirk meant ideology in the Marxist sense. The Marxist defined ideology as a set of beliefs that were assumed to be true, but were, in fact, the product of economic and social conditions of the time. The ideologue, whether he knew it or not, believed in a collection of things he assumed were true in all times and all places, but were only true in his time and place. Conservatives rejected this argument.

That was a long time ago. For generations now, conservatism has succumbed to that old Marxist understanding of ideology. What that usually meant is the so-called conservatives would figure out the position of the Left on some issue and then take an alternative position. Not necessarily the opposite, as they have always been careful to avoid being called reactionary by the Left. This is, of course, evidence that they are reactionary, but reactionaries have some self-awareness.

A good example of this is this piece in the American Conservative. The writer is someone calling himself Charles Marohn, but his friends call him Chuck. He is the president of something called Strong Towns, which promotes itself as an advocacy group in support of rebuilding local community. Of course, it is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization. Here is their tax filings. Their language and choice of media outlets suggest they are conservative or right-leaning.

The best one can say about it, however, is it is a mix of misguided libertarianism and Breitbart-tier reaction. Consider this line. “After all, there is no greater distortion of the market than local zoning codes, and there are few bureaucracies doing more harm to property rights and freedom than local zoning offices.” This is right out of libertarian market worship. An actual conservative would ask, “Do these local zoning laws reflect the attitudes and customs of the local community?”

Nowhere in the piece is there any discussion about what the local people may want or how these zoning laws fit in with local customs. Instead, the author is frazzled over the prospect that the market, peace be upon it, may be vexed with these laws. Even more vexing, suburban voters have somehow managed to get the Federal government to back these zoning laws. In this case, it means rules against building tenements and trashy commercial development in white suburbs.

In other words, his definition of conservative simply means opposing anything that impedes the marketplace. Further, he points out that these sorts of zoning laws started in the New Deal years. There’s where you see the Pavlovian aspect of modern conservatism. Instead of judging the thing in question against a set of accepted principles, they just ask if Democrats were for or against it. Conservative Inc. better hope the Left never takes a strong stance against suicide.

That’s where you see that conservatism, rather than being a rejection of ideology as the Marxists define it, has become an ideology, one that compliments and supports the prevailing ideology of the Left. In the case of single-family zoning laws, there is no consideration of their efficacy. The writer does not bother to ponder why these laws exist in the first place. Instead, he just assumes they are bad because the Left once supported them and they violate market absolutism.

Of course, he does not address why we have zoning laws prohibiting the demolition of the suburbs with tenement blocks. The Left destroyed those old white ethnic neighborhoods in the cities, by unleashing a black crime wave starting in the 1960’s that drove whites from the urban areas. Twenty years ago, the legendary quantitative blogger, La Griffe du Lion, pointed out just how quickly blacks began to prey on urban whites as their population grew.

At least with the Obama administration, they were honest about why they wanted to destroy the white suburbs with tenements full of blacks. They hated white people and they hoped to reclaim some urban real estate. The game is to change the zoning laws in these white suburbs, so builders can erect apartment blocks. The Federal government, coordinating with the local Democrat machine, then fills them with blacks from the nearest city, using Section 8 housing vouchers.

Toward the end of the piece, he writes, “The progressive left has discovered that single-family zoning has racist underpinnings. That’s great, because we should now have no problem finding common cause for repealing this most distorting of regulations, one that the federal government never should have forced cities to adopt to begin with.” Instead of using this observation to discuss why these zoning laws exist, he falls victim to the fallacy of Chesterton’s fence.

There is another part to the Marxist definition of ideology. Once one accepts that beliefs are shaped by conditions, you no longer have to think too much about the truth content of political beliefs. Your opponents are simply the victims of false consciousness, while your ideas reflect the interests of your side. This inevitably leads to both close-mindedness and fanatical zeal. Any questioning of your side is heresy, while the other side’s arguments are assumed to be without merit.

This is where conservatives find themselves today. They are confined to a moral ghetto created for them by the Left. On the one hand, any new ideas, especially those from the Right, are rejected out of hand. On the other hand, they are completely defined by their opposition to whatever the Left is doing at the moment, but snugly within the confines of the moral orthodoxy. Conservatism has been completely stripped of the ability to question and debate political reality.

This is also why conservatism has turned into a racket. The people inside this maze of right-wing institutions have been imprinted by ideology. They can only see the world in terms of partisanship, a term coined by Lenin, by the way. Of course, the same is true of left-wing institutions. They treat their enemy as an indefatigable foe that is always right there ready to pounce. In reality, both Left and Right are exhausted ideologies and exist like two drunks leaning on one another for support.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Covid Update

Posted on by
335

As the inner party feverishly tries to create enthusiasm for a second panic over the coronavirus pandemic, it is a good time to take a look at what has actually happened with the virus to this point. It is easy to forget, given the fire hose of nonsense that comes at us every day, but we were all supposed to be dead by now. Maybe not all of us, but a lot of us, a lot more than actually died. Instead, most of us are here, social distancing and wearing humiliation masks to please the rulers.

In fairness to the people who made the initial projections, the only way to get any attention in this age is to make outlandish claims. Everything about the modern media culture has evolved to reward the freaks, the crazy and the outlandishly dishonest, so the model makers probably felt they were doing the right thing. They wanted the rulers to treat the virus as a serious threat, so they were okay with rolling out doomsday predictions that were not grounded in reality.

That has not stopped so-called experts from putting out nonsense studies to feed the demands of alarmists. The under-counted fallacy will probably be with us through the election, as that promotes second wave fantasies. In realty, the death toll from the virus is probably overstated, but it is going down quickly nonetheless. That’s because of two things that we see with all pandemics. One is the most vulnerable die first and the other is herd immunity. Covid is following the same course.

A good example of the power of mass media to warp the truth is how the phrase “herd immunity” was quickly turned into an epithet. Even now, alarmist sneer about herd immunity as if it is voodoo. The fact is, the way forward for this thing was always going to be reaching an infection level that slowed the spread of the disease. The only question was how quickly it could happen, without creating problems in the health care system like shortages and overcrowding.

That was the whole point of the lock downs. There’s never going to be a vaccine and there was never going to be an eradication of the virus. We’ve been trying to come up with a vaccine for a coronavirus for a long time. Nothing has come close to working, so planning for one is foolish. Instead, the best approach is to get the young and healthy out there infecting one another and building up their immunity. By young and healthy, it means under 60 and free of serious diseases.

In other words, the lock downs were a dumb idea. Perhaps they were understandable in a panic, as politicians are stupid and like mischief. Now they make no sense at all, at least in terms of dealing with the virus. If there is going to be a second wave, it will be an economic wave. The inevitable Covid flare ups in pockets of the country this fall will simply be the result of slowing the natural spread of the virus and delaying the progress toward the Herd Immunity Threshold.

As an aside, herd immunity does not mean the entire herd must be exposed and develop antibodies. It can mean that, but it can also mean that everyone who could get sick and die from a disease, gets sick and dies. In this case, however, it simply means an infection level where the odds of an infected person contacting a non-infected person falls below a certain threshold. The virus, not having a ready supply of new hosts dies out before infecting the whole population.

For those interested, the panic over Covid is a useful primer on why mass democracy coupled with mass media is a suicide pact. If America was run by a dictator or even a junta, the first step in fighting the disease would be controlling the flow of information about the disease. The media would be tightly controlled and prevented from spreading fake stories about overrun hospitals and people dying in the streets. In fact, we may not even know there was a pandemic at all.

Second, and probably more important, attention whores with outlandish claims would have no platform to spread their nonsense. Instead, the people who know about these things would give their advice to the rulers, who would then make policy. The loons and cranks would be sent to a camp if they got out of line. No one making policy or advising on policy would have an incentive to get attention from the mobs. There would be no market for crazy talk and fear mongering.

That’s what we have seen with Covid. The sober minded virologist advising caution in public policy gets pushed aside in favor of TV clown with dubious credentials. Millions of innumerate people are on social media chattering with one another about facts that they don’t understand. The result of America’s Covid response has been an increase in the levels of stupidity in the public. Everyone is now dumber for having had to put up with months of ridiculous claims about the virus.

The fact is, this brilliant post from March was right all along. Months ago, it was clear that the lock down strategy would not do what was claimed. Even if it did slow the spread of the disease, that was not a good thing. The cost of locking down a country would be prohibitively high. If we lived in a just country, the curve benders would be rounded up by the ruler and executed. The right answer was to prepare the public and the hospitals to tough out what would be a very bad flu season.

That is the one bit of good news in all of this. The public is increasingly cynical about everything they hear from the ruling class. The lies and sadistic punishments in the virus panic moved a lot of people from partisan to hostile. The effort to gin up a phony second wave panic to help Joe Biden in the election will probably be met with a second wave of hostility, much bigger than the first. The ruling class spent what was left of its legitimacy on this virus panic.

In the end, what we have is a very expensive lesson in the folly of mass democracy and mass media. Both are based on the premise that the more stupid people you add to the mix, the greater the collective intelligence of the whole. It’s as if group intelligence works in series, rather than parallel. In reality, the more people participating in politics, the faster dumb ideas are created and allowed to zoom around the system. We’ve reached a point where our society is no longer able to perform the basics.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Cotto-Gottfried Talk

Posted on by
150

In an effort to enjoy a little time off this week, the regularly scheduled post will be replaced with a prerecorded item. A re-run, of sorts. My conversation with Joe Cotto and professor Paul Gottfried is up on YouTube. It was probably my favorite one of these I have done. Paul is a brilliant guy, of course, but the topics were just about ideal for the both of us, so it made for a good show. Some technical glitches slowed things down a bit, but even with those, I think it came out pretty well. Enjoy.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

And Don’t Come Back!

Posted on by
492

In another highly coordinated effort, the tech oligarchs ritualistically banned a bunch of people and groups from their platforms yesterday. Of note, Reddit banned the Donald Trump fan club from their site. YouTube banned American Renaissance and Stefan Molyneux from their platform. Something called “Twitch” banned the Trump campaign team from its site. All of these people and groups have been accused of impiety by the people in charge of public morality, so they have been punished.

Of course, many of the proscribed have responded according to their role in the great morality play of the Left. They found somewhere on social media to express their outrage and hurt over being kicked off a left-wing platform. There were the denunciations of left-wing hypocrisy and the calls for free speech. The chorus played its role, amplifying the outrage of the proscribed. At this point, the only interesting thing about these rituals is the targets they select for punishment.

Reddit, for example, made an example of the TERF community. Those would be radical feminists who exclude men in sundresses. They were purged for the crime of accepting biological reality. Stefan Molyneux, who has refashioned himself into a street corner philosopher, was banned from YouTube allegedly for advocating violence. In reality, he was selected because YouTube has run out of popular heretics. They have so broken their site that even heretics are losing interest in it.

The important part of this is not the targets, but the ritual. As you see with Molyneux, they will claim a milquetoast libertarian actor is Hitler in order to fill the role in the morality tale. It’s not important that he is not actually Hitler. What matters is they have someone to parade around as a heretic on whom they can ritualistically heap their scorn and then chase from their midst. For all it matters, these recently proscribed people could be macramé enthusiasts or bird watchers.

That’s what people outside the halls of the one true faith fail to grasp. The people deciding to ban Jared Taylor spent no time listening to what he has to say or examining his videos for violations of their morality codes. They are physically incapable of being around those who dispute the tenets of the faith. Jared is just a blasphemer, an agent of the great evil against which they fight. The same is true in varying degrees for all of the people thrown off these left-wing sites.

For the people doing this, the only time they bother to listen to the damned is after the fact, when the condemned are complaining about their banning. Progressivism is a sadistic faith, fueled by the suffering of its enemies. You can be sure the various committees and working groups tasked with finding this round of heretics were replaying Moly’s Twitter performance over and over as they gratified themselves. He was playing his role like a legendary thespian at the peak of his ability.

It is the biggest problem facing those opposed to the new religion. Instead of accepting it as a religion, opponents insist on imposing their own sense of logic and reason onto the actions of these people. “They are banning us because they are afraid of what we have to say!” No, the people conducting these rituals have no idea what someone like Molyneux says in his videos. He could be speaking in tongues for all they care. He is not a person to them. He is a character in their morality play.

The rock heads and cranks on this side will dispute this, because that is what makes them rock heads and cranks. They will keep imposing their sensibilities on the other side, despite generations of evidence to the contrary. Worse yet, they will insist that these left-wing platforms are vital ground. We have to exhaust ourselves fighting to get on these platforms. Of course, that just means a steady supply of people ready to play the role of the damned in the next morality play.

The proper response to all of this is to simply leave these platforms. The argument is that these platforms are the public square, but that’s not true. No one goes on Twitter to have their mind changed about anything. People go on Twitter to have their opinions confirmed by people they already like. The same is true of YouTube. If you really enjoy Moly’s performances, you can always go to his site. This is how it worked up until about ten years ago. It’s how this site works.

Further, the proper response to de-platforming efforts is to ignore them. When you go public and moan about the attacks, the Left is exhilarated. They see the suffering as a trophy that keeps cheering for them. Sure, it is no fun to go through. No one wants to waste time moving servers or changing domain registrars, but publicly complaining about it does not make the burden lighter. It just encourages the people doing it to keep looking for fresh victims. It stimulates them.

Ultimately, our side joins the fight when we finally wake-up and accept the other side for what it is. The Left are not reasonable people. They are not operating from a set of fixed rules that can be mastered by an outsider. There is no beating them at their own game or on their platforms. These are evil people who are only motivated by the suffering of decent people. They feed on your frustration and your complaints. When you engage with them, you are giving them oxygen

The way forward is to reduce the number of contacts between them and us. Instead of going inside the walls of their domains to be fed upon like cattle, make them scale the walls of our domains. No, that does not mean building a new internet. It just means not going onto their platforms. Sure, they can attack Molyneux by going after his registrar or hosting company, but that is time consuming and often futile. It makes them work hard for the dopamine rush of tormenting the condemned.

That’s ultimately the battle we face. There’s no defeating the Left in the conventional sense of a fight. Instead, the goal is to exhaust them. Since a big part of what sustains them is the attention they get from their victims, not giving them that attention increases their cost of operation. The trouble is, many on our side is like a battered wife. They can only feel love when they are being pummeled. They have been conditioned to take the beating and then come back asking for more.

When our side sits it out, the results are impressive. Look at the riots. The Left was sure these riots would draw out “right-wing extremists” they could then use as a foil. When that did not happen, they tried inventing them, but failed to make it work. It’s hard to convince people that the black guys beating a white guy with a skateboard are actually white nationalists. It just underscored the fact that the only people in the streets are left-wing agitators and their pets from the vibrant community.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but that is why they have started banning people from their platforms again. The riots have been a terrible disaster for them. They fully expected a dozen Charlottesville-style events, with lots of bad guys they could parade around on their media platforms. Instead they got semi-literate savages and potheads claiming part of Seattle as a new country. This should be the model for all future interaction with the Left. Engage them in the shadows, never in public.

Note: The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

GE: The Story Of America

Posted on by
251

If you were to pick one company that symbolizes how America has changed and been changed over the last half century or so, it would be General Electric. The company founded by Thomas Edison is in many ways a microcosm of the American economy over the last century or more. It rose to become an industrial giant in the 20th century, the symbol of America manufacturing prowess. It then transformed into a giant of the new economy in the 1990’s, a symbol of the new America.

Today, General Electric is a company in decline. After a series of problems following the financial crisis of 2008, the company has steadily sold off assets and divisions in an effort to fix its financial problems. In 2019, Harry Markopolos, the guy who sniffed our Bernie Madoff, accused them of $38 billion in accounting fraud. The stock has been removed from the Dow Jones Industrial composite. Many now speculate that GE will end up in bankruptcy in order to reorganize.

For those interested in a longer discussion about the history of General Electric, Myth of the 20th Century did a podcast on the company. One aspect they did not cover is how General Electric transformed from a company that made things into a financial services company that owned divisions that made things. Like the American economy in the late 20th century, the company shifted its focus from making and creating things to the complex game of financializing those processes.

Like many companies in the late 20th century, General Electric found that their potential clients were not always able to come up with the cash to buy their products, so they came up with a way to finance those purchases. This is an age-old concept that has been with us since the dawn of time. Store credit is a way for the seller to profit from the cash poor in the market. He can both raise his price and also collect interest on the payments made by his customers relying on terms.

For American business, this simple idea turned into a highly complex process, involving tax avoidance strategies and the capitalization of the products and services formerly treated as business expenses. Commercial customers were no longer buying products and services, but instead leasing them in bundled services packages, financed at super-low interest rates and tax deductible. Whole areas of the supply chain shifted from traditional purchases to leased services.

For example, a local supplier of industrial goods used to own a warehouse to hold the products he supplied to clients. Inside would not only be the products, but material handling equipment like forklifts and shelving. Outside at the loading docks would be a fleet of big scary trucks used to deliver the products. Of course, to make it all work would be a staff of people loading and unloading trucks, moving product around the warehouse, making deliveries to clients and so on.

All of this would require a lot of money to acquire and maintain. That small local distributor would have millions tied up in assets. This is where the magic of cheap credit came into the economy. Companies like GE could go to these suppliers and unleash that capital tied up in those assets, by converting them into leased services. The trucks, for example, would no longer be purchased, but leased from a GE division that paid the taxes, did the repairs and provided spares in peak times.

As an aside, another aspect of this new leased economy is what happened with the people inside of it. That local supplier could not only lease his trucks and material handling equipment; he could lease his people. The building, the warehouse people, the administrative staff, the trucks, all of it, could be turned into a single lease payment for larger operators. This allowed the big players to muscle out the small players in just about every aspect of the supply chain.

What really made this new form of store credit work was both super-low borrowing rates for big players like GE, but also changes in the tax laws that allowed these lease payments to be treated like depreciation. The customer not only got the benefit of holding his cash he would normally use for asset acquisition; he could also get favorable tax treatment on the lease expense. To no one’s surprise, the big lobbyists for these changes in the tax laws were the financial services firms.

That is what GE became in the 1990’s. It was no longer a company that made stuff and financed it for select clients. It was a financial services firm that owned manufacturing facilities that supplied products it could finance. GE Capital became a massive commercial bank, not entirely regulated like a commercial bank and free to invent new financial services to meet its needs. They bought up manufacturing and commercial services companies, in order to monopolize their financing operations.

In the old economy, the credit system existed to serve the broader economy. In the new economy, the broader economy exists to serve the credit system. That which can be turned into a credit instrument increases in value, while that which cannot be bundled into a financial instrument loses value. Small players that provide specialized services lose value, while global players with easy access to credit increase in value. Everyone and everything serves the global credit system now.

This is what happened with General Electric as its credit empire grew. It was first and foremost a finance company. Since the flow of cheap credit was unlimited, the need to find new places for the credit became the point of GE. They bought companies in order to have new clients for their financing arm. They expanded the realm of that which could be leased and financed. By the end of the Jack Welch era, the point of General Electric was to grow bigger in order to supply more credit.

This financialization of the economy also allowed companies like General Electric to maintain implausible growth rates. This is where that credit machine at the heart of the company came into play. They could finance acquisitions with cheap credit. They could structure the purchase of a company in such a way as to realize its revenue now, while amortizing its debt and expenses. Suddenly that new division was wildly profitable through the miracle of off-balance sheet transactions.

The last financial crisis broke General Electric, by exposing a reality of the modern credit-based economy. Without new ways to move credit through the system, the credit system begins to seize up. Since the profit in this system is entirely through the skim, the slowing of credit means a collapse in profits. Once those profits disappear, the ability to make interest payments declines and that slows the system further. GE was close to insolvent within days of the mortgage crisis in 2008.

That is the real lesson of General Electric. The company became something like the old Mafia bust-outs. The whole point of the business was to squeeze every drop of value from clients and divisions. Instead of running up the credit lines and burning down the building for the insurance, General Electric turned the human capital of companies into lease and interest payments. They were not investing and creating, they were monetizing and consuming whatever it touched.

GE came close to collapse in the financial crisis, but they were bailed out. They stagger on, despite having lots of divisions that make high quality products. The cost of unwinding the company back into a normal company will be high, maybe too high for them to survive. The same can be said of the American economy. It will have to be unwound, but there will be no bailout. Instead, it will have to unwind quickly and painfully, in order to become a normal economy again.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

Letters To The Underground

Posted on by
382

We live in an odd time. It is not just what is beamed to us by the media, but what is happening in the more mundane areas of life. Drive around the typical business park and the parking lots are empty. Even as the lock down stuff lightens up, people are not returning to work. According to the government, over 40 million people have been furloughed over the last two months. That would explain the empty parking lots, but it does not explain the busy streets. Lots of people are on the roads.

The working theory is that the people laid off from their work are just enjoying the extra benefits from the Federal government. The $600 per week check along with the normal unemployment means they have no disruption in their lifestyle. Covid has been a very long government financed vacation. That’s why the parking lots in the business parks are empty, but the streets are busy during the day. It would also explain why we don’t have a rush hour in the morning or the evening.

That theory will be tested in August, as the Federal checks are supposed to run out in July, assuming no extension. Another angle here though is the people still working are busier than ever. Despite the massive layoffs, work still goes on and the people not granted the extended holiday are either working from home or back in the offices doing more than they did before the shutdown. It is a real life example of the plot for a science fiction story. The term “working class” now has new meaning.

In my case, I am busier in the day job than ever. So much so that I’m taking next week off from the podcast just to get caught up. The last full day I’ve taken off was back in April and I’m not sure of the day. You make hay while the sun shines as a small business man, so I have no complaints. It is just another part of the mystery. Forty million out of work, whole swaths of the retail economy closed for months, but the people working are busier than ever. No one seems to notice this either.

Even crazier is we have been told since forever that mass unemployment leads to civil unrest, as people blame the government for the job losses. The civil unrest we are seeing, however, is people who have never worked and never intend to work. They are bums, layabouts and parasites. Their complaint is mostly toward the people who make it possible for them to remain alive. It is always popular to say the world has gone mad, but this time it may be more than a figure of speech.

Regardless, I will be taking a week off from the show. That will give me some time to get caught up on the day job. We are coming up on White People Independence Day, which is always a slow time for the site. In fact, the next two weeks have always been the slowest for traffic and comments. I’m hoping I can get caught up on the day job, so I can then get back on some other projects I have going. This week I cleared out the mail bag and inbox, so I’m clean for another month.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00 Opening
  • 03:00 Lawfare
  • 11:15 One Point No
  • 15:00 Music
  • 18:30 Trump
  • 27:30 Peaceful Separation
  • 34:00 Crazy Relatives
  • 41:00 Perpetual Revolution
  • 47:00 Generational Politics
  • 50:00 Social Media
  • 51:30 Do Nothing
  • 54:00 Thank You

Direct Download, The iTunes, Google Play, iHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Bitchute

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

The Flynn File

Posted on by
211

The General Flynn case, after years of judicial stalling, may be finally coming to an end, as a Federal appeals court ordered the presiding judge to dismiss the case. The presiding judge could appeal the ruling to the full court or even take it to the Supreme Court, but his chance for success is negligible. Most likely his appeal would be refused, but it would buy some time. He could also refuse to comply with the writ of mandamus or stall for time so his prosecutor can file his claims.

The case has been a microcosm of what is going on with our ruling class. The sheer pettiness of the process reflects a cultural attitude that exists in the ruling managerial elite that is not seen among the commoners. This meanness is all over the current revolutionary spasm. Mel Gibson was just cancelled again for something he may have said 25 years ago. No people hold a grudge like the chosen people and that sensibility is now an identifying feature of the managerial class.

In the Flynn case, whatever insults he committed against the Obama administration appear to be so minor that no one is sure they exist. Even the neocons are struggling to manufacturer an explanation for this years-long jihad against Flynn. Note that the torments they have inflicted on him were designed to keep the torment going for as long as they could do it. Instead of putting him in jail for a year, they were seeking to keep his case alive forever. Our ruling class is full of sadists.

Of course, there could be other reasons for trying to keep Flynn in limbo. This case has revealed the breathtaking corruption of the ruling class. We now know, for example, that Joe Biden and his son were extorting the Ukrainian government. Biden admitted as much several times. He threatened the Ukrainian government with loss of support if they did not allow his son to work a grift with their energy monopoly. Another feature of the managerial elite is shameless personal corruption.

There are other hints here that the delaying action in the Flynn case is an effort to cover up other things. The recently released notes from one of the conspirators in the seditious plot to overturn the 2016 election point the finger at Obama. Maybe keeping Flynn in legal jeopardy is part of a scheme to keep him quiet. That’s the other thing about this rotten ruling class. Nothing is ever on the level with these people and no grift is too small. They see us as suckers and chumps.

Another feature of current year America is on display here. That is the complete and total corruption of the law. General Flynn was framed. That is abundantly clear, but it will happen in any legal system. The issue here is that the judge has deliberately and maliciously dragged this case out as a form of torture. Judge Sullivan is more like an inquisitor, trying to extract a confession. The system bankrupted Flynn and ruined his life, mostly because he has come to be viewed as a heretic.

All over the court system we are seeing judges not only abandon their role as neutral arbiters of the rules, but aggressively promote their ideology. The judge in the Roger Stone case, for example, is an ethnocentric sadist. Compounding it, the managerial class is celebrating this new judicial temperament. The Wall Street Journal, an allegedly conservative operation, is celebrating the rise of racial paranoia and vengeance among the black members of the judiciary.

The Flynn case is not all bad news. It costs money to fight the system the way Flynn has done, which means someone is paying his bills. They are not just paying his lawyers, but also supporting him while he is in limbo. Since he has been de-platformed like every other enemy of the state, it means a rich guy is underwriting this long battle with the system. Not every plutocrat is happy with what is happening. A balkanization of the ruling class is slowly underway.

There’s also the fact that the people running this particular scheme and many of the others associated with the scandal are not very smart. The prior generation of rulers would have found a more efficient way of dealing with a problem like Flynn. They probably would have bribed him with a position in the system. No man is so virtuous as to refuse the highest bidder. The Keystone Cops now running the FBI and CIA are simply too stupid to be effectively crooked.

Of course, as is often the case, this issue reveals the yawning divide between the commoner and the ruling class. The commoner looks at this and sees it for what it is and is happy the appeals court upheld their rules. The ruling class, in contrast, thinks the application of the law is a violation of the rule of law. In the madhouse world of the managerial class, the consistent application of the rules is somehow a violation of the rules, undermining the principle of the law.

It is a good and necessary reminder that the ruling class is well beyond reform, because they have been afflicted with a strange new religion. They are angry at the Flynn result on moral grounds, not legal ones. For them, those laws written on paper are your laws and subordinate to their laws, their moral laws. In this case, they just see a heretic and blasphemer escaping punishment. That must be wrong. The managerial class is becoming the domain of howling lunatics.

Finally, what the Flynn case reveals is the fragility of the elites. Their constant lashing out at the public is driven by a deep fear that they sit atop a house of cards. Their lunacy is really just a manifestation of this constant terror. The managerial elite is a bourgeois elite; thus, it suffers from bourgeois angst. That angst has now metastasized into a neurosis masquerading as a moral code. The Great Panic we are witnessing is another indication that the managerial elite is in crisis.

That’s why the book White Fragility is an instant success with the ruling class. On the surface, the message to white people is “stop being so insecure and face up to your own racism.” Below the surface, there lies the fear, “My good, if they ever find out the truth, we’re all dead.” The endless white-lashing is a defense mechanism by people who see themselves standing on the trapdoor of the scaffold. One day, perhaps soon, their fears will be realized and the trap door will swing open.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Noosening

Posted on by
386

For those on this side of the great divide, the NASCAR noose hoax played out in an unexpected fashion. Instead of the fraud going undetected for a month until some clever sleuth uncovered the truth, this time the hoax was revealed in real-time. Usually the Left is better at concealing the truth long enough for another hoax to come along and push the first hoax down the memory hole. That way, anyone talking about the old hoax is charged with being a racist conspiracy theorist.

This time it was different, as the FBI flew in an army of investigators to hunt down the racist before he could noose again. Why they responded with 15 agents is a question no one will bother to ask them. Did they really think this was true? Do they swing into action like this for every noose warning? Did Bill Barr suspect a hoax and send the FBI in to expose it before it could be forgotten? All of these reasons seem unlikely, but the FBI responded with overwhelming force for a reason.

Putting that aside, the absurdity of this hoax bears some examination. The supposed cause of the panic was a garage door pull-down that had been there probably since the last garage door pull-down was replaced. The old one, most likely, looked a lot like the new ones as it is a common thing. Whoever claimed it was a noose was either extremely stupid, insane or so filled with a sense of entitlement that he just assumed everyone had to accept his story about the noose.

There is a strong possibility that the truth is something different. These facilities are not open to the public. They have lots of security. In this age that means cameras recording everything that moves 24-hours per day. There is a good chance the footage made clear that there was never a noose in the garage, so they quickly came up with the story about the garage door pull-downs. It’s better to be thought a moron than to having to admit to being a fraudster. Just look at Jussie Smollett.

That is a useful comparison for lots of reasons, but the one to watch here is how Wallace reacts to being outed as a fraud. As of now, he is taking the Smollett approach and demanding you believe him rather than your lying eyes. It is one of those examples where you see how extreme entitlement is what is driving this stuff. Wallace has lived a charmed life, but he assumes he is entitled to more. So much more, in fact, that anyone who dares say “no” to him must be evil.

It is an unexpected result of the Left’s weaponization of blacks against normal white people the last 70 years. They have always expected blacks to be a pit bull on a chain they can use to terrorize white people. For the most part that has been the case, but blacks have been internalizing Progressive race speech to the point where they have come to see themselves as a sacred people. The endless doting and fawning has convinced them they are exempt from the rules.

This is most evident with successful blacks. Every black athlete walks around with a chip on his shoulder. NBA players carry on like they are being forced to work the fields, when in reality they live like nobility. No group of blacks complains more than NBA players, despite having so much. This is something you see to vary degrees with all high achieving blacks. The endless adulation from their masters on the Left has led blacks to obsess over their own blackness.

It is that sense of entitlement that keeps the hoax game going. That and there is rarely any consequence to the people promoting these hoaxes. The pint-sized pundit, Ben Shapiro, will never have to explain himself. He got to feel like a hero when he instinctively condemned all white people. Then he gets to be smug, while pretending he was never fooled by the hoax. He’s not alone. All of Conservative Inc. plays the same role in every one of these hoaxes. It’s their job.

The Left, of course, needs these hoaxes to feed the engines of the rage machine, so they are more than happy to indulge black fantasies about oppression. They will be out their washing the feet when some NFL team is forced to sign Colin Kaepernick to a contract this summer. They will get to feel vindicated. Then when he can’t play, they can blame racism for his benching. In the skins game, the Left is the house and the house always wins, which is why they never close the game.

That brings us back to Wallace. Like Kaepernick, he is destined to be a mediocre performer in his sport, who got a big leg up because he is black. In other words, his best asset has always been white guilt. The path forward for him is the same as with Kaepernick, which means militant anti-white agitation. Look for him to start issuing demands to NASCAR and other drivers. He will expect exemptions to the rules and when they don’t come, he will cry “racism!”

The irony is we will end up with something close to what the Left calls white privilege, but it will be for blacks. The Left has claimed for years that white people out-perform all others because they get to play by a different set of rules. This was always nonsense, but it is what we will get with negrophilia. Blacks will be given a pass on the rules and loaded with benefits and praise. They are quickly becoming a race of spoiled children, around whom society is organized to keep them happy.

Whether or not such a world can last is another matter. NASCAR has done everything it can to placate the blacks. Will their fans find a way to swallow the humiliation and stick with the sport? Will the NFL be able to humiliate its fans and survive. There are plenty of broken white people, so it is possible, but there does seem to be an awakening among whites too. Whether they know it or not, the race hoaxers have opened a debate among white people about what it means to be white.

For those on this side of the great divide, this is the way to see it. For the first time in generations white people are thinking about race, rather than emoting about it. Lots of white people are wondering if they want to live in the same world as people demanding they wash the feet. Many will kneel, but many will not. This is something that always had to happen. If it means the death of sports entertainment, it is small price to be paid for the freedom to decide for ourselves.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!

The Paradox Of The Market

Posted on by
391

An axiom of liberal democracy is that the more open the system the more choices there are within the system. A market for widgets, if it is an open market, will have the maximum number of widget makers and widget suppliers. The marketplace of ideas, if it is open to all, will have the full range of ideas. Similarly, as long as the demand side is unrestricted, the full spectrum of demand will be represented. Every widget buyer will have the chance to demand his type of widget.

This is the starting point for modern societies. It is no longer a point to be debated and certainly not questioned. This is obvious in the non-debate over tech censorship. Any effort to discuss what is going on with companies like Google and Twitter is met with a wall of sound about the sanctity of private firms operating in the market. “Build your own platform” has become the top single in the amen chorus. The marketplace is now a god that provides what the people need and deserve.

In theory, the chorus should be right. If everyone who wants to make widgets is allowed to make widgets, then there should be a widget maker for every type of widget demanded by the public, assuming the widget can be produced at a profit. Even people wanting free widgets could be supplied by charity. Outside of the extremes, if there is a way to make a profit by meeting even the most bizarre demands for a product or service, someone will find a way to meet that demand.

Something similar should happen in public discourse. If the public space is open, then everyone can present their ideas. If everyone is free to listen, or not listen, to those ideas being offered up, the marketplace should develop in the same way as it should with a product or a service. The insane ideas will have a small audience, while the sensible ideas will gain a larger audience. The marketplace of ideas will sort and stack the ideas on offer based on the preferences of the audience.

This is a bit redundant, but it is important to think about this axiom of liberal democracy while considering current reality. If the market place for goods and services functioned as believed, then we would have more than two mobile phone makers. There would be more than one search engine. We would have lots of small car makers, rather than a handful of global operators. In fact, General Motors should have gone out of business decades ago based on market principles.

In the realm of ideas, we should have a dozen political parties flourishing to one degree or another at the state and national level. For example, there is no obvious reason why there should not be political parties that operate just as the state level. According to the axioms of liberal democracy, there should be state parties that focus just on state and local issues, maybe operating as a feeder to a national party. Yet, we have just two parties that are really just two faces of a single party.

It is a paradox of markets that the internal dynamic of the market leads to fewer choices and maybe even no choice. Take the desktop computer market, for example. The only choice is the color and the label of the Chinese slave camp that produced it. Inside, the parts all come from the same source. Alternatives to the standard PC are fringe options that exist for hobbyists and weirdos. You see this everywhere you look around the marketplace. Our markets are oligopolies now.

It goes beyond market consolidation. Another aspect of this is that as some dominant players emerge, they begin to insulate themselves from demand. In fact, it is possible that the quest for market domination is actually an effort to insulate the supplier from the pressures of the marketplace. The players initially experiencing success shift from competing for clients to competing to wall off their share of demand in order to prevent others from competing for that market share.

You see this with sports. The NASCAR phenomenon is assumed to be driven by the edicts of this weird new religion that has gripped the great and good. That may be one aspect of it, maybe even the primary aspect, but there also seems to be a desire to get rid of their own audience. That is, NASCAR would be fine with not having a live crowd and depending entirely on television money. Then they no longer have to be responsive to the demands of the customers.

The temptation here is to say that the fans will not watch, but in the realm of television these days, ratings matter very little. ESPN, for example, gets the bulk of its revenue from mandatory cable fees. If you have a TV sub through the local cable monopoly or a service like Hulu, you pay ESPN eight dollars per month. It does not matter if you watch, you pay the fee. All cable channels work off this model. Once again, the glory of the market place is to result in a monopoly and no market.

This dynamic where the dominant suppliers seek to eradicate the demand side is evident in politics. Both faces of the uniparty are now onboard with vote by mail, for example, which eliminates the pesky demands of the voters. This form of voting makes for unlimited fraud, so we will end up with Stalin’s maxim. “It’s not the people who vote that count. It’s the people who count the votes.” Since picking one party or the other has no effect on policy, voting will soon be entirely ceremonial.

It is always tempting to confuse a paradox with a contradiction. Critics of modern capitalism, for example, will claim that the oligarchs are not really capitalist in the free market sense. They are corrupting the system. Similarly, people will claim that the problem with politics is that a small group of highly corrupt people are subverting the democratic system. In other words, the axioms of the market place are true, it’s just that the current systems are not adhering to them.

The trouble with this line of reasoning is it suggests that the marketplace itself selects for the sorts of people who seek to subvert the marketplace. Everywhere we look, the great experiment in open markets has had the same result. Whether it is finance, technology, ideas or politics, the result is small club that controls everything, not only to their exclusive benefit, but to the detriment of the people they allegedly serve. It is almost as if the market selects for sadists who despise their customers.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte at Starbucks. Thank you for your support!