There is a concept in physics called the wave–particle duality. The current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature. A simple way to think of it is light can be the flashing you see from a signal lantern, but also a range of colors depending upon the wavelength. Similarly, history can be described as the great forces sweeping men along like corks bobbing around the sea, the wave nature, but it also can be described as events, set in motion by great men, the particle nature.
The fact that both are most likely true, is probably at the root of our inability to learn from the past. People in the present will naturally look for figures in history to emulate, thinking if they act like them, they will get the same results. The trouble is the forces that acted on men in the past were different from those of the present. Similarly, people often assume they are riding historical forces that have an inevitable end. They foolishly ignore serendipity and the actions of important figures.
Consider what has been going on with the FBI scandal that appears to be heading to some sort of denouement this summer. On the one hand, the managerial inertia of an agency that has come to see itself as the policemen of the ruling class, drove all of these people into something close to treason. There are simply too many people involved for it to be viewed as just a conspiracy. James Comey is too dull to have followed along with a conspiracy. He was dragged along by events.
On the other hand, this crisis has come to a head due to the actions of men. If Trump were a slightly different guy or had better advisers, this crisis would be at a different stage at this point. Similarly, if the oleaginous Rod Rosenstein had fallen down a flight of stairs on election night, the events he set in motion after the election, most likely would not have occurred. While all of these men are being pushed along by social forces much larger than them, they are not without agency.
Interestingly, this crisis has a lot of similarities to what happened with Soviet espionage in the last century. In the early 20th century, being a communist or some sort of boutique socialist was a fashionable thing for ruling class types. That is what it was though, fashion. At least that is what people in the ruling classes assumed. The problematic communists were the trade union organizers. During the war, the main concern was with those sympathetic to the fascists.
The people who decided to become spies for Russia in the last century, were largely drawn from the elites of America and Britain. These were not people drawn from the lower classes, bitter at their condition. Alger Hiss had a great life. What for him and many others like him started as an immature fascination with communism developed into a group identity. These people were pushed along by a sense of communal identity that took on a life of its own. Spying was affirmation.
The same thing is on display with this burgeoning FBI scandal. The intelligence community still selects from the best and brightest of the American elite. This sense of elite status seems to have metastasized into a belief, in many of these people, that they are a class of priestly warriors. Like the people who spied for the Soviets almost a century ago, the people in this present conspiracy truly believed they were acting honorably. Comey called his book “Higher Loyalty” for this reason.
Where the comparison with Soviet espionage breaks down is that the spies did not represent a threat to the intellectual underpinnings of the system. Granted, the people in charge could no longer trust people from their own ranks to be loyal to the state, but that was manageable within the system. This FBI scandal is a direct threat to the very structure of the managerial state. Replacing the people is not going to fix the flaw in the system. The managerial state is devouring popular government.
History is not simply the playing out of a great narrative, even though it fun to frame it that way. The people involved have agency. They will do things that shape the forces acting on them. Sometimes serendipity changes the course of events. Ögedei Khan got drunk and died unexpectedly, thus forcing the withdraw of the Mongol army from Hungarian plain, rather than sweeping into the heart of Europe. The course of Europe was forever changed because the Mongol ruler had a drinking problem.
That may be what we are witnessing with this FBI scandal. The great paleoconservative thinkers saw the managerial state forming up half a century ago. They could imagine it slowly swallowing up the institutions of American society, including the state itself. They could not see the unexpected. Trump’s election and the popular revolt going on may be revealing things to the political class that truly frightens them. This FBI scandal could be that bit of serendipity that changes the natural course of events.
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As a physics teacher, I appreciate that analogy – quite an interesting way to look at a situation outside of the normal science framework.
I disagree that the FBI is hiring *the best and brightest* considering Page, Strohk, Mueller, Comey, Rosenstein, McCabe, et al hiring at the very top of the food chain are all either corrupt or bungling dunces.
Unless the plan was to f*ck up the Anthrax investigation, or the Pulse nightclub, Cruz in Parkland, the Boston bombing, the San Bernardino terrorists, the Pamela Gellar Muslim drawing contest, the Hillary emails, and on & on.
Now, if the intent was to let those events happen, or to purposefully muddy the waters & let some people off, then I guess they *are* the best & brightest, because well, spectacular.
I’d trust a pack homeless meth addicted negroes more than the FBI, to do the right thing.
With Affirmative Action hiring, the rank and file of the FBI are probably on par w/your avg. HUD, DMV or VA administrator.
“Unless the plan was to f*ck up the (“investigation”)”- nailed it. Totally nailed it.
This FBI scandal could be that bit of serendipity that changes the natural course of events.
Good God, I hope so. I’m too old to soldier.
The anticipatory attribution commonly given to the subject of history probably arises from Old Testament notions of God’s plan for the world. As Z points out, serendipity, or to stay with the physics metaphor, entropy, means that there is no foreordained path from which events force deviations. History has neither sides, courses, nor arcs; it is merely a recollection of what happened. It was our supposition that Mr. Comey and the cast of characters surrounding him are jerks. Their actions, which have fully confirmed our suppositions, will provide fertile material for today’s historians.
https://youtu.be/WIyTZDHuarQ?t=36
Always been a fan of pilot wave QM interpretation. Gets rid of some of the spooky stuff.
Z: “There’s simply too many people involved for it to be viewed as just a conspiracy. Frankly, guys like James Comey are too dull and mentally fragile to have followed along with a conspiracy. He was dragged along by events.”
True ‘n funny. Comey is catty-clever like a vindictive woman playing her role solemnly but cackling inside. I have a special hatred for him as a man. I literally cannot hate McCain, Hillary, Netanyahu, Castro, Colbert or Pelosi or ANYONE as much as I loathe Comey. My almost irrational reaction to him tells me how much someone acting like a man really matters. And this was our FBI director? THIS guy? My countries top FBI guy. wow. No wonder I don’t fly the flag anymore. This fairy fuck. I really hate him.
at least Hoover kept his effeminate side in a closet, not acting out on it.
I was going to say “Now, be nice”, but realized you were right.
Liberalism isn’t a mental disease.
It’s a processor switch.
Talking to my virulently anti-Trump bestie, I realized his style of argument, his way of seeing things, his rationale…
He was the psychobitch girlfriend from hell.
In liberals, the hamster hindbrain is dominant. That’s why frontal cortex dominant like Trump, like Rush, like me, sound so wrong now. Both sides, hearing the other, have a gut reaction, and start shouting at the radio.
I think this dominance is true across populations, some examples, city ain’t farm, Arabs are crazy, Heinlein’s minority is hated by all right-thinking people.
I think it’s why we form sides.
My best friend is a master at women- “you have a Black mind” one black woman told him- he can read them like books. He speaka da lingo.
(“Hush,” he said, “she knows we’re watching, she’s going to bend over in 3…2…1…” and magic happened.)
Women come to outnumber men in our modern urban environment, and the screeching begins. They excel at watching people up close, vying for advantage, but the wider world is, meh, vague, who cares really.
Hoover’s worldview, his social calculator, was not predicated on his sexual self image/preference nexus (“I’m a man, I desire men”). Men ran things in his world.
Cognitive dissonance is a stall between processors, as they try to sort incoming- emotive or informative? Pushing stupid, wierd things is a way to unsettle the enemy, pushing them into emotive states suitable for manipulation. Into female thinking.
Tranny bathrooms, miscegenation ads, Comey weeping? Man-thinkers like Hoover have been pushed to the outskirts of the African village. We are ruled by harridans of both sexes in the Capitol. The monkeys in the lower branches hear the screeching by those above and emulate their betters.
When the front-brain thinker understands this, and the hind-brain thinker does not, it astounds me that the ones with less understanding of how it all works have become so dominant. One would think that being armed with useful knowledge, that many others don’t have, would constitute an unfair advantage. Instead the red-pill leads to being pushed to the margins of he culture, and often to the black-pill.
The emotives will always outnumber the cortex guys. Emo signaling (and emo speech) is how primates (and mammals, and birds) organize our groups, for millions of years.
Cortex thinking and neutral informative speech, a more recent development, is comparing notes and recognising patterns to make a prediction about a potential threat or a useful trick. It is used by individuals serving the larger group bound and ranked by emotion.
How can this help the Z-right?
You can understand the barbarians- but they can’t understand you. They can only react.
“How can this help the Z-right?
You can understand the barbarians- but they can’t understand you. They can only react.”
Cool angle.
It appears to me that the big danger of AI is that it will allow the manipulators of the hind-brain thinkers (such as the Soros crowd) to augment their persuasion with massive amounts of neutral data to fine-tune their manipulation techniques.
Along those lines, a genius element of Trump’s style is the masterful combination of hind-brain agitation techniques, married with a good intuitive grasp of the neutral front-brain data processing and calculations of probability sets on the fly. Not really 4D chess, but an appearance of such.
Frip, buddy! I’ll hold ‘im for ya!
Chaos Theory. It doesn’t always take great men or the inexorable tide of human events to change the arc of history. Sometimes a small stone set in motion really does bring down the whole mountain. The guy who could of shot Hitler during WWI, Abd-ur-Rahman deciding to go to bed early instead of pounding a few more back with his buddy. Or even an obscure guy writing an obscure blog. You never know (and probably can’t know) which butterfly is going to bring the storm.
I am the stone that the builder refused.
“The FBI scandal” is useful shorthand, I suppose. But this whole mess also involves the CIA, State Dept, media, DOJ, FISA court, Obama administration…ummm…am I leaving out anyone?
IRS
It was quite obvious all the intelligence agencies were in on it. CIA, NSA, FBI, NSC. When all four agency walked into Trump Tower after Trump had won and handed him the dossier hoping he would resign then and there.
All four of those men should have been executed for that and all their subordinates fired on the spot.
The only reason Trump is even breathing is because those spooks and others are scared Trump’s supporters would probably declare war on them. You really don’t want to piss off guys who can shoot you at 500 yds all day or know how to turn a city into a charnal house.
Last night’s excellent news – the latest Fall of the House of Usher self-victim, I mean of New York’s leftist elite – in the form of arrogant, power-mad anti-Trumper, Mueller co-conspirator AG Eric Schneiderman aka ‘the slavemaster’.
I went over to the ‘Official Twitter Account” of this criminal, I mean “New York’s Top Law Enforcement Official” to see if it was down yet. Nope, a mere 19 hours earlier this foof was still bragging about … well whatever lawless grasping he was doing for The Clintoons … to stop energy harvesting in our State, celebrating “New York’s Mexicans” … and of course, his signature message ‘for the ladies’.
With one Spitzer, one Weiner …. and now one Schneiderman … self-immolating with illicit activities, criminal activities, flat out weirdos …. here in my State of New York, seems like we are just one Cuomo shy of a full load … to run out on a rail.
Top law enforcement officials turning out to be Kakistocracy poster boys? Please, must be tinfoil hat time.
Except it isn’t. And news of the fall can come suddenly. As it will with this Mueller … glancing at wristwatch…
There are only two ways forward if you ever want your country back:
– a Soviet style purge where the Clintons, the Comeys, and pretty much all the democrat traitors are made to disappear
Or
– a return of those institutions to doing their jobs rather than serving the elite. Traitors are publicly tried honestly and fairly, and punished fairly in a way where people can see it being done so that their faith and trust are restored.
I’m predicting a civil war first.
I’m predicting a civil war first.
So are you gathering an army and do you have the logistics to defend your area? Many people have said that exact same thing but by their actions they really don’t believe it or they think they can sit it out or hide from it… What is your thoughts on solutions for what you predict…
A fantasy: “Everybody got their target selected? The balloon goes up at 0200 November 22. It’ll all be over by the morning news.”
Indeed. If America goes to war with itself, it all comes down to what the military does. Even though America’s civilians are heavily armed – they won’t stand against a serious military. Think of Falleujah – where every second moslem mutt carried an AK47 or an RPG.
Having said that, leftists and liberals hate the military and have taken every opportunity to prove it. For their part – America’s best have gone off to war while pacifist turd stains like Bill Clinton dodges the draft and boffs their girlfriends here at home.
All it takes to start that is one angry shot. Like the one where the gov’t oversteps it’s bounds, and sends the BATFE to confiscate your firearms. Or force your kids to attend schools that advocate homosexuality and pedophilia.
No, a more invasive gov’t is not a guaranteed outcome of revolution. The Revolution of 1776 springs to mind. As for me, you can call me a particle or a wave or a cork bobbing along with tides of history. All I ask my of my Maker and the fates is that if I must fight and die, that I take a couple of my enemies with me.
The US military has lost every insurgency its fought and it will have to have rather tight rules of engagement by any standards in order to keep from making more and more insurgents on all sides (its a polygonal battlespace at the very least) and to avoid essentially destroying the US completely
If war happens with that single moment Glen mentioned the US will end up in a dirty multi-ethnic civil war where things like La Raza guerrillas kill ap developers because they are White and Asian or the standard tactic are shutting down the highway with caltrops (a single box of nails drooped accidentally from a truck can cause two hours traffic delays in So Cal) or acid attacks on people or house burnings
Small scale warfare suddenly spreading everywhere into as WRSA puts it Bosnia x Rwanda
Its why the dissident right is working so hard to prevent a war. As much as purifying the place would be good, the human cost is much to high to be the one that didn’t try to stop it much less the one to start it
I pay that we do and the election or President Trump is a sign we might, might have an undeserved bit of luck.
Otherwise Glen is pretty spot on
The US Will never win another war as long as leftists have a say in military affairs.
I wasn’t thinking of the military.
Let them sleep.
Let the cops sleep too.
“No plan survives first contact with the enemy”.
Government militarys have (almost) infinite resources to come up with all sorts of contingency plans – and then spend YOUR money trying to prepare for them. Even then – their plans often get thrown in the trash bin as soon as the real shooting starts.
I’ve seen an awful lot of internet warriors make the same statement you just made: ” so you believe civil war is coming – what are you doing to prepare?”.
I *USED TO* spend a lot of time and money reading, analyzing, and preparing for the shit-show I was almost certain was coming. Problem is: it hasn’t come yet. And I simply cannot spend my entire life and wealth preparing for an event I’m certain is coming in *some form* – but can’t seem to predict accurately the how, when, and why of. And because of that whole ” no plan survives first contact with the enemy” dynamic – it’s actually a bit foolish to “prepare” at all – given that you are highly likely to be completely wrong on what you prepare for.
The fact that there are people out there who recognize that something bad is likely to come – still puts them quite a bit ahead of those who prefer to keep their heads firmly embedded in their asses on what is going on.
Adaptation is likely a more useful skill than preparedness. Being “prepared” leads to a false sense of security. When the plan falls apart – and the preparations are shown to be useless – then most of these “prepared” individuals will fall apart too.
Returning to institutions that have already demonstrated that they will fail–worse, declare as your enemy–is not a good model. There is no education in the second kick of the mule. Second, revolutions always result in increased power of the state. Keep looking. Not having a plan is unsatisfying, but it does not blind us to what ways forward present themselves. Like Trump. Exactly like Trump. He opened a door, and it wasn’t even his own. We’ll see what else comes through.
I agree on waiting though I’m not a Libertarian or a minarchist
Automation and computers mean you will have more State if only to prevent some moron with CRISPR from mutating people just for fun or for that matter automation suddenly making labor so low value your national economy collapses
The trick is building your own local if possible institutions and staffing them with your people.
You don’t get to run away to Monticello 2.0 , you can’t opt out or ruling and until the situation gets back to sane, you and yours will have to be big government
There are ways to avoid mission creep and things you can do without but even somewhat libertarian states like Texas have taxes, game wardens, environmental and labor laws oh and state run rest stops too.
In the part of Democracy in America where he discusses the drift of democracy toward a soft despotism Tocqueville mentions that the dichotomy of democracies is that the people want to be led but think of themselves as free. The desire to be led brings about the formation of a guardian class hoping to fill this hopeful demand, while the desire to be able to think of themselves as free fights against this tendency to have, as you say, popular government devoured by the managerial state.
It is perhaps a whiggish thing to say, but the guy that wrote the book on popular government, H. S. Maine, said that the progressive trend in history was the movement in society from status to contract. If this is true, eventually the guardian classes will have to go, because they will be a constant threat to freedom.
On the other hand, it may be that the guardian classes are the particles to the wave of individual agency.
One other question for folks who worship science: believing that waves and particles both decribe the same phenomena seems to violate the principle of noncontradiction. Einstein himself struggled with this, and it was the driving force behind his search for a general field theory. If it so easy to believe in this, why is it so hard to believe in other seemingly contradictory things that explain other phenomena just as well?
“Philosophic systems that destroy human individuality will have secret attractions for men who live in a democracy. The more social conditions become equal and the less power individuals possess, the more easily men drift with the crowd and find it difficult to stand alone in an opinion abandoned by the rest.
However the powers of a democratic society are organized and weighted, it will always be very difficult for a man to believe what the mass of people reject, or to profess what they condemn. What concerns me in our democratic republics is not that mediocrity will become commonplace, but that it may be enforced.”
(Your last paragraph is a fine example of the limits of semantics as a tool. I’m whispering because Off-Topic.)
I agree with your comparison of wave/particle duality in reference to the changes in society as we see throughout history. Anyone who espouses that it is only the single actors who change the course of human history has NOT read or understood much of our history. And it is the same for those who contend that the wave of human events can overcome any heroic (or despotic) figure.
BUT, we should all be sensitive to the change in what people (meaning the societal norm) believe.
At the founding of this nation I would propose that the societal norm believed that not only can an average man serve his country as a representative for his community or even as the President of the nation.
Today our societal norm believes that it is only the select few who has the ability/intelligence/breeding that qualifies them to be one of our political royalty.
This belief is in my opinion what enabled, enforced and doomed the incestuous cult we see within our government today.
While President Trump is a flawed human being, his flaws as well as his obvious exclusion from the approved ranks of people who “deserve” to be President is what uniquely enables his to threaten the “swamp”.
This unique threat is what has drawn the cult to expose itself in it’s revulsion and haste in trying to destroy President Trump and all who are seen as supporting him and/or his administration.
Those who play at politics or who are faint of heart should leave this arena as quickly as possible. Those who have have believed and been told of their own superiority since their Great-Grand Parents were babies will NOT observe or follow the rules of war that they demand of all lower life forms.
May God protect our country and give us the strength and wisdom to do what is right so that our children may once again live with the blessings of liberty.
MSG Grumpy
Today our societal norm believes that it is only the select few who has the ability/intelligence/breeding that qualifies them to be one of our political royalty.
It’s called the Hegelian Dialectic and most of society falls for it…The problem also though is those that don’t fall for it don’t know how to counter it which is start a parallel system… Hopefully people will wake up to that fact before it’s to late…
Originally trained as a historian. History doesn’t give a shit about “arcs” or bending towards good or evil. Your dual nature analogy is spot on…and then think of the players as randomly drawn from the periodic table. Only we don’t get to know in advance where on chart they come from…stable as AU or something toxic and with a vanishing half life from the actinide series…
My point is that the bad guys win out for a while, then the good guys do better for a while. At the individual level, all sorts of unjust persecutions or the ignoring of crimes goes on, but at the big picture level, things have a way of evening out over time. The bad guys overreach, and the good guys get a break. Case in point, the #metoo and “sexual abuse of women” thing was a trap set by the bad guys to catch Trump. Instead Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Tom Brokaw, and now Schneiderman got caught up for bad doings. Things have a weird way of self-correcting. It is not really any kind of formal “history”, in fact I don’t know how one would label it, but it is just how things play out over time.
Case in point, the #metoo and “sexual abuse of women” thing was a trap set by the bad guys to catch Trump. Instead Weinstein, Charlie Rose, Tom Brokaw, and now Schneiderman got caught up for bad doings. Things have a weird way of self-correcting. It is not really any kind of formal “history”, in fact I don’t know how one would label it, but it is just how things play out over time….
“Or they are fishing for bringing down the Patriarchy and they don’t give a crap who gets caught in their net as long as at the end the Patriarchy falls so a new era can be brought about…Just a theory I’ve had for a while now…”
I’d say it’s because most particles are not evil sinful sinners, born for Hell, but actually a pretty decent bunch who want to get along and do right.
We can only digest so much.
Schooling behavior appears directed, but each fish is actually only watching the asshole of the guy in front of him.
(Which shows that groups themselves are another level of intelligence, an aggregate of parallel processing.)
The do-gooders of the 19th century unleashed this central government hell on us. Conveniently, they are now dead. Too bad we can’t shock them back to life and show them where their progressive ideas led.
Dig em up. Hang them. Hey, if these idiots can do it with statues, mascots and the names of structures, why don’t we just go all chips in?
Try them first. In the past it wasn’t that uncommon to do this though the Christian West would find it barbaric
More importantly and less silly embrace collective punishment. If this was just a few individuals acting badly, those people should be punished but this is tribal warfare and as such just as in the Middle East the entire tribe gets held accountable
In this case substitute institution for tribe but its the same thing
Truth is every problem we have is simply caused by our weakness. We could send every migrant home, all 30-50 million of them in a few years and make sure that the nation sending them would be afraid to sen more by simply applying precise force with only modest risk to ourselves
Sob Sister Leftists Money Men, Globalists, Cheap Labor and Civ Nat Cucks even though they make up a small part of the actual population though prevent actual Americans from having or wielding power
That needs to change and a regime that was authoritarian during an interregnum could solve nearly every serious problem in the country.
We’d still produce men without chests and soy boys (unless you can unfermented soy which is a good idea) and there would still be issues but the big essentialist problems of surviving as a nation would be gone
Done with care we could even avoid raping the Constitution to death
Getting there won’t be easy though. It may not even be possible.
Reparations! Their kids are rich- that was likely no accident, either. Or we could just hang the descendants?
No. Nope. I so totally did not just say that.
Damn. I really want to delete.
Punishing the son for the sins of the father is something we all should be against.
Everything good in our civilization is the result of moving past that barbaric mentality.
Inability to learn from history is a uniquely Modern/Postmodern phenomenon. It results from (a few cranky Spenglerians aside) essentially universal belief in Whig history – the idea that all of history is a progression toward a better world and a perfected state of mankind. In this vision of history (a few temporary aberrations aside), tomorrow is always better than today, which is always better than yesterday. If this is true, then learning from history is positively counterproductive – why would the better bother learning anything from the worse? To Whig history believers, the past is a dark and horrid place, filled (the work of a handful of hopeful visionaries of the Voltaire mold aside) with nothing but cruelty, pestilence, ignorance, backwardness, superstition, and error, not to mention (of course!) racism/sexism/homophobia/transphobia/hate.
No civilization that hates its own history – not to mention its own ancestors – this much can survive. Then again, we all knew already that liberalism (of all stripes) is a death cult, didn’t we?
Learn from history? Do we even teach it any longer?
Europeans fought tooth and nail to stay out from under Islamic rule for 1200 years. Then, after a few decades of blissful ignorance, they decided that the Muslims who had been trying to conquer them for centuries were victims of something – and invited an invasion.
Well, no, no we don’t. After having to re-teach my daughter the entirety of the AP US course this year can say that with absolute confidence. Because discussing any context is now politically unacceptable they learn virtually nothing.
“Women go to college to learn what the rules are and how to enforce them.”
The Zman
(Women of both sexes, now)
Wow, great line by Z. Great freaking line.
If it is uniquely modern what is the basis for Cicero saying that those who remain ignorant of history remain forever a child?
Sorry friend, but you’ve forgotten to consider some old books named Judges and Kings. There’s nothing new under the sun, and people having their head in their ass and forgetting Harsh Lessons is still on the list.
Kiplinger said that, in multiple poems, much better.
It’s a principle that’s been proven since the time of Sun Tzu to Ray Leonard’s rematch with Roberto Duran: To humiliate a man is much worse than to kill him. The intelligence community, Deep State, whatever you want to call it, has been experiencing a massive, protracted “Al Capone’s Vault” embarrassment with all the resources they used (and laws they broke) to try to destroy Trump with Russiagate. They’re a bear, but they’re being stung by ten thousand bees while trying to get at honey that just isn’t there. There’s a book I read about a Russian scientist who defected to the West, in which someone asks him, “When did you know it was over for the Soviet Union?” He talked about one experience, being part of a Russian inspection team that came to the US, insisting the Americans were hiding a newly-engineered poison gas in a massive storage tanker they’d heard about from spies. This Russian inspection agent, the scientist, and some Americans went to inspect the “weapons’ facility.” And it turned out to be a local water tower in a small Midwestern town.
Have had the pleasure of working with several Russians who came here as young adults or older children during the Soviet era. They are an endless source of wonder on these topics. On recent business trip, one was discussing his shock at discovering at age 13 in his first year of US schooling the scope of US/British involvement in WWII. In all fairness, his family survived the siege of Leningrad and our texts gave short shrift to the Russian experience.
The world is a messy and chaotic place, and humans are messy and chaotic too. “Master plans”, such as the FBI scam, often fail because there are too many moving parts, and the chaos of the real world intrudes in unexpected times and ways. “Serendipity” is the world’s way of cleansing itself of evil doers and their designs.
If things were different, they wouldn’t be the same. Playing out alternative histories is a parlor game. The real world treats individuals capriciously and arbitrarily. But the big picture generally seems to play out in a good and just way, ultimately. Justice gets served, perhaps not in the form or timeframe that we would prefer, but it gets served, all the same.
You: “the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice”
Ok, Obama
Don’t mock. Perhaps he knows a lot about bending.
Ouch, that hurt!
Most of these elites believe what they do because it has never occurred to them anything could be different. They live in a bubble, and anyone who has been to the Imperial Capital can attest to that. They were raised in sheltered enclaves, went to the best schools and never have had to work a hard day in their life. Some of them are getting a hint of what is outside the wire. The election of President Trump truly scares them because it is completely outside of their mindset.
I think the recruitment standards have fallen. Page and Strzok had to know their texts would be archived on their government phones and apparently they left traces to their burner phones. This is just rank incompetence and stupidity, especially from a supposed COIN agent (Strzok). It would appear that ideological purity tests override competence and intelligence. Fanatics and True Believers are the worst operatives.
I’m a big fan of Strauss-Howe Generational Theory. The last 4th Turning saw truly global industrialized war, the use of nuclear weapons, the foundation of the modern financial order, and another stab at the beginnings of global government among other things. The approaching cycle change will no doubt feature completely unforeseen developments and changes but at least we have a fairly good idea who will be the big actors. The Uniparty can’t leave Russia or Iran alone but who could have foreseen the detente with the Norks?
This is just my $.02 but it seems that one of the major failures in learning from history is the lack of candor and scientific rigor. Teachers will say how much Lincoln wanted to help the oppressed negroes and fight the evil institution of slavery. They never mention all the speeches and letters that indicate he felt quite the opposite. The Emancipation Proclamation was a diplomatic stunt to keep France and England from helping the CSA. Until we can demand a thorough account of events and deal with reality in an objective manner that allows people to draw their own conclusions, nothing will change and the past record will continue to be twisted for agendas rather than allowing us to minimize the damage from the pendulum swings.
BTW, Z, you have a great gift for metaphor and analogies. The dual nature of all matter is just spot on for the topic.
I would say part of it is people aren’t really capable of looking at these things critically, nor do they want to, The left seems particularly prone to seeing themselves and everything else as players on the world stage, grand gestures and all.
As Z says, the great men make waves. But as with the Romans, how much of what happened between Marius, Sulla and the others was a symptom of the Republic simply being unable to cope with the Empire it has amassed as it was ambitious, capable men with the opportunity to have it all.
Recruitment standards for law enforcement in general have dropped. The State wants thuggish enforcers who’ll shoot dogs and troublemakers without hesitation,
I hadn’t realized that drop had reached the FBI, but you are right. These people are clowns.
At the state and local level, training standards have dropped, for use. Cops get a ton of grief, but a lot of the trouble stems from a lack of training and support from state and municipal government. That and we ask cops to do things that they should not be doing.
The FBI has lowered standards. It used to be a true elite, but for all the usual reasons, the standards have declined.
“The intelligence community still selects from the best and brightest of the American elite.”
This is probably true, and the fact that these ineffectual, politically correct buffoons are the best that the elite has to offer gives me more hope than anything else. I mean, to be honest, you could pick better people than this off the street. Just more proof that PC makes you stupid.
The great philosopher Eric Hoffer said it best: “‘Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
I don’t remember the author or the title now, but there was a good book published in the ’70’s about the CIA culture written by a retired CIA executive of Italian heritage who wrote that the Company was an insular club for Ivy League old money and their progeny, like State but worse. They were bad on the big picture because they were lords of the world and there was nobody to tell them differently. The FIB was not cut from the same cloth but no organization survives morons at the top, chosen for their willingness to do their masters bidding.
And Ivy League educations are very good at teaching you where you are in the pecking order.
Guys like Comey and Kerry wind up ‘serving’ because they’re directed there. Covering for the Man is as natural as breathing. It’s just getting out of control now as the Elite edifice moves further out on the unsustainable tail.
“BTW, Z, you have a great gift for metaphor and analogies.” I agree. Hadn’t thought of the particle/wave analogy. The catalyst analogy is more obvious. Catalysts can make a reaction go faster, but they’re not underlying reagents. There was a serious desire to address trade, immigration, and PC culture in the (unofficial) air, Trump knew about it from talk radio, and he got the reaction going. The left, blind to what people were thinking but not saying, blames Trump for creating that desire rather than expressing it.
A good way to explain the preference cascade is the room full of mouse traps and ping pong balls. It’s also a good way to explain a nuclear reaction.
You have already killed Schrodinger’s cat, must you persist with the physics illustrations?
Cat dead. Need lotsa mousetraps.
“I think the recruitment standards have fallen. Page and Strzok had to know their texts would be archived on their government phones and apparently they left traces to their burner phones. This is just rank incompetence and stupidity.”
Disagree. They were positive Hillary would win and none of this would ever see the light of day.
Serendipity will indeed play a huge role in the unraveling of this FBI mess. For most of 2017, the scandal played out the way all these phony Government Party scandals play out: a false accusation is leveled, a
“special prosecutor” is appointed, that person’s job is to investigate whatever they feel like and damage the President as much as possible. The investigation is the news unto itself, whether it produces results or not (see also: Valerie Plame). HOWEVER, what the Government Party did not anticipate was that the DOJ Inspector General would actually do his job and investigate the Clinton email investigators. Even that did not produce much…until serendipity intervened giving us…
Peter Strzok.
Yes, my friends, the text messages of a married man to his mistress containing their unbridled hatred of the duly elected President happened to make their way into the hands of the DOJ IG. In them, we learned among other things that there were people in the FBI openly talking about “back up plans” in case Trump won. And, of course, one things leading to another, we learn that Peter Strzok was at least partly behind that phony dossier making its way into the FBI. AND, he was the lead interviewer for the Flynn investigation (in which a man plead guilty to a crime he clearly did not commit – lying to the FBI – about something he did which was 100% legal: talking to the Russian Ambassador including about the sanctions).
So, who is Peter Strzok? Well, up until last summer when he was removed from Mueller’s investigation, he was head of Counterintelligence at the FBI. What is RULE #1 they teach you at Counterintelligence School? Don’t have extramarital affairs because they expose you to blackmail. So, naturally, Peter Strzok decided to screw some low-level DOJ Attorney and together they cooked up some ways to damage Trump. Of course, this is the same Peter Strzok responsible for counterintelligence assessments of Hillary Clinton’s illegal email system begging the question of how a guy responsible for “counterintelligence” who cannot keep his pants zipped was investigating Hillary Clinton’s illegal email server.
But, it does explain why he LET HER OFF THE HOOK. Because he was doing something 100x worse and (up to that point) getting away with it.
It also explains why Mueller refused to disclose the reason for Strzok’s firing for 3+ months…until just after Flynn plead guilty. And by “just after”, I believe it was the very next effing day.
He (Strzok) is now assigned to HR. That’s Government-speak for “cooperating with investigators”. They didn’t fire him. They put him in a corner and told him he’s going to jail if he doesn’t cooperate.
And from that guy’s floppy zipper, an entire cabal of lunatics is being uncovered. Comey was caught in yet another lie today with the release of his supposedly-classified Congressional testimony. (Andrew McCabe, fired from the FBI, also says Comey is lying. So their little party is falling apart.) This, as the Congress and White House execute a pretty smart plan to declassify reports that aren’t really classified at all…they are scare-quote “classified” which means they do not contain national security information. They contain information damaging to the FBI and DOJ.
These are heady times for the stalwart patriots out there. About a dozen FBI and DOJ officials have been a) fired, b) removed from their jobs / reassigned, or c) resigned in disgrace. And it’s only May. More heads are going to roll. The best part is that other than Comey, all of these heads have rolled based on the DOJ IG investigation. And even better than that, these are very senior agents, which means the DOJ IG is pulling no punches while giving Trump excellent political cover.
It’s a good day to be an American. It’ll get immeasurably better once Muller is shit-canned and a few of these people start going to jail.
As an example of how sloppy these people can be, an interesting thing happened to me last summer. I started receiving text messages consisting of pictures of what were obviously people under surveillance. The pics would show them entering or leaving buildings, pics of their cars, license plates, and pics of the street signs. All shorthand forms of documentary evidence. These were also sent to a string of other numbers that I could see in the texts. I was getting so many of these that I texted STOP and sent this to the entire group. The texts, of course stopped. I wonder what happened with this investigation. Was it called off because of possible compromise? I will never know. All I know for sure is that someone got a phone number wrong.
You missed a golden opportunity to funnel that data to someone like James O’Keefe.
Ho-o-lee Shiii*….!!!
For what it’s worth, there is speculation that Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were not engaged in an adulterous affair. They were scheming against Donald Trump. No lovey-dovey texts have been released – perhaps there are none. Also, claiming that they were lovers is a way to conceal genuinely damning texts on the grounds that they were irrelevant love messages.
As I understand it, the more “personal” texts related to their romantic entanglements have been withheld. Whether they actually did the adulterous deed, I do not know. But all the reporting I’ve seen, even in media sympathetic to their cause, has said they were at best romantically involved.
Love this.
This sense of elite status, within the managerial state, seems to have metastasized into a belief, in many of these people, that they are a class of priestly warriors.
But add this.
Who are being beheaded by The Highlander