An old paleocon gag, which I think was coined by Sam Francis, is that America has two parties, the Stupid Party and the Evil Party. I recall hearing it in the 80’s, but I could be mistaken. It is one of those pithy expressions everyone wants to take credit for because it becomes more obviously true every day. The budget bill the GOP just passed is a reminder that “stupid” in this context is too kind.

Read the comment sections on news stories about the deal and the general theme is “why did we bother to vote Republican?” The whole point of putting the GOP in charge of both houses was to reign in Obama and begin rolling back his excesses. Instead, we got the opposite. The Republicans have done more for Obama in six months than his own party did in six years.

Most people assume that smart politicians are on the right side of their voters. Stupid politicians go against the wishes of their voters.That makes sense as a practical matter. Scale it up and political parties should be careful to never get sideways with their constituents. Otherwise, the party has no reason to exist. The GOP is the Stupid Party because they keep finding ways to piss off their voters. It’s like they have a death wish.

In 2010 they put an emotionally disturbed drunk in charge of the House after the voters put them in charge. Boehner was a good soldier, but you can’t have your leader sobbing in public. In 2015 they finally had enough and replaced him with a Wisconsin Progressive, who has now declared war on the people that vote Republican. Frankly, calling them the Stupid Party is too kind. They are the Suicidal Party. Even Rush Limbaugh is calling for a third party now.

What we’re seeing is not a two party system, but a single party system. What looks like political debate is really just the call and response one would see in a black church. The Progressive wing does the call and the Conservative wing does the response. Anyone who has been inside a black church understands how the latter half of this relationship is judged. It’s not on rejecting the call.

What we call the two parties are nothing alike. The Democrat politicians are ideologically in tune with their voters and work hard to deliver on their shared goals. They fail a lot, thank goodness, but it is not for a lack of trying. When the Democrats strayed too far from the mission of the Cult, the Green Party sprouted up as a reminder about who is the boss. The Democrats quickly fell in line.

Republicans are a different animal entirely. They exist not as an ideological alternative to Progressives, but as a mild critique of the Progressive wing. That means they can’t exist as a standalone entity. Their existence as a party is ectosymbiotic, defined by their dependence on the other party. The opinion of Progressives is vital to the psychological well-being of the Conservative wing. It’s their food.

As I’m fond of putting it, the GOP is a Southern Party with Northern leaders. In my post yesterday, I compared the American ruling class to the ascendancy class that owned the farm land of Ireland. In retrospect, the analogy holds better with the GOP and its voters. The GOP leadership holds their voters in contempt to the same degree the English held their mick tenants.

That is where the stupidity, or what appears to be stupidity, comes on scene. On the one hand, the party needs to win elections and that means appealing to those rubes they detest. On the other hand, they are compelled by tradition and sentiment to appeal to their analogs in the other party. As the Chinese say, a man who chases two rabbits catches none. In the case of the GOP, they just look like feckless idiots.

An hilarious example is conservative media darling Marco Rubio. He is being flayed over his open borders fanaticism and the deep suspicion he is Chuck Schumer’s rentboy. He’s being whipsawed by the phony-baloney adulation from “conservatives” and the hostility from the rank and file, who despise his open borders treachery. To use a crude expression, he does not know whether to shit or go blind.

Compounding his dilemma is the fact that he is as dumb as a goldfish. I’m fond of calling Rubio Ms. South Carolina with a penis. No, that’s not a link to Lindsay Graham’s website. Rubio gets by on his looks and charm, which is fine if you’re selling Cadillacs in Boca Raton, but it is a liability when trying to run for President in these crisis times for the party.

That’s why Rubio skipped the vote on the budget bill. There’s no safe answer so he spent the day playing Halo and listening to hip-hop. That non-vote just ended his career as a politician. Who will vote for him now? His presidential campaign will now collapse and he has already decided to give up his Senate seat. He’ll land in some lobbying gig or in a no-show Wall Street job, but he is finished as a politician.

That is the fate awaiting his party.

The policy of containment, with respect to the Soviet Union and the Cold War, evolved at the end of World War II and into the post-war period because the other options were not practical. Sending the US army to push the Russians out of eastern Europe would have been an impossible sell to the American public, assuming it was even possible. Dropping a nuke on Moscow would have been a public relations disaster.

On the other hand, simply letting the Russians dominate Europe was out of the question politically, even though many within the American ruling elite were communists. There had to be a way to keep most of Europe free that did not result in a war with Russia. Containment was the near perfect solution. It kept the Russians in check, created thousands of jobs for the Yankee elite and fed the military-industrial complex.

That’s not intended to imply that the people who crafted and developed the Western response to the Soviets thought all this through in advance. It just evolved into the best solution. At the onset it scratched the itch, the need to respond to Soviet aggression, but over time it proved to be flexible enough to accommodate the needs of various constituencies within the ruling class.

The funny thing about the Cold War is it preserved the American ruling consensus long after the facts on the ground justified it. The public was not going to support overturning the apple cart as long as the threat of nuclear annihilation was very real. That naturally made anyone advocating great change a threat and they were easily painted as a hothead or commie.

The result was a self-policing where the Left kept their commies in the lower ranks and the Right kept their hot heads out of sight. Within living memory a ridiculous fop like Barak Obama would have been kept in the community organizing department where he could not cause trouble. Of course, fear of nuclear annihilation kept the public from questioning the arrangements, even if meant keeping the black man down.

Since the end of the Cold War a quarter century ago, the ruling elites have lost their footing, staggering around like drunks. In Europe, the main parties are imploding into a single party relying on skulduggery to overcome a lack of purpose. The recent French elections demonstrate their willingness to lock shields to preserve the status quo, even when they can’t come up with  reason for maintaining it.

In America, the Democrats are a party for men in dresses and women in muumuus. The Republicans are the land of misfit toys, politicians just not weird enough for the other team. The ructions in the GOP primary reveal the party establishment to be hollow men with no reason to exist beyond habit. The Democrats look like God’s waiting room, an old pinko in a pantsuit versus an old an old pinko in pants.

For the past few decades, there’s been no real cost to excess, but that’s changing as the demographic explosion on the fringes of civilization threaten the West with an invasion of barbarians from over the horizon. Islam presents both a cultural and demographic challenge. Africa presents a demographic and biological challenge. So far, the ruling elites have failed to come to terms with this looming threat.

It strikes me that the rise of “far far far extreme right wing” parties in Europe and the rise of the “extreme right wing racist Donald Trump” in America may turn out to be a catalyst for how the ruling class responds to the next great challenge to civilization. While abandoning anti-racism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism is unthinkable, all three can be shoehorned into a new policy of containment.

Keeping the Mahommedan bottled up in his own lands, a new policy of containment, has obvious practical benefits to the West. Capping off Africa by making the Mediterranean a real barrier to entry (and maybe bribing the countries of the Maghreb), helps solve the African explosion as well. The Arabs would simply refocus their attention on making the Sahara a natural barrier again.

At the same time, containment means not mucking about in the affairs of the Mahommedan. In the Cold War, the West left the Eastern Bloc to the care of the Soviets. They had their sphere of influence and we had ours. The new containment would follow the same model. Let the Mahommedan manage his lands as he sees fit, but keep him bottled up in those lands, behind a technological, cultural and military curtain.

The benefit to the ruling class is it gives them a natural reason to exist. They are holding back the tides and sensible citizens will not want to risk that by supporting fringe candidates. It also brings back the natural self-policing that comes from permanent war. The Left will suppress their one-word fanatics, while the Right will keep their invade the world nutters under wraps.

Of course, the military and the diplomatic core will have plenty of reasons to get money and jobs for their people. Muffy Pemberton can pop out of Harvard and take a job in the diplomatic core, while Dwayne Haskins can make a career out of standing guard at the boarders. The Yankee ruling class gets the band back together, just focused on a different enemy. They can even, wink-wink, argue about which side has the best approach.

The sales pitch can center around the fact that it is more effective to send aid to these people than it is to resettle them in the West. There’s also the benefit of keeping their best and brightest in their home countries so they can help develop their societies. There’s the obvious safety angle, keeping the Mahommedan from exploding in your local coffee shop.It’s an easy sell with obvious benefits.

Containment. It’s not just for commies anymore.

If you pay any attention to American politics and you can look past the shouting and hand waving, you’ll notice that both parties are strikingly similar. In the House, the leader of the Democrats is an old woman from the most left-wing congressional district in the country. The Republicans are led by a strange little man from one the most liberal states in the country. Wisconsin is the ancestral home of the Progressive Movement.

As I pointed in my award winning post on the voting nations and America, the Republican Party is a southern party with northern leaders. Those northern leaders are thoroughly disconnected from their voters, but thoroughly connected to their analogs in the other party. America has been run by a Yankee coalition since the Civil War and we are now in the midst of a Yankee Crackup.

The ructions in the primaries are entirely due to the yawning chasm between the people and their rulers. Donald Trump is leading in the polls because he is a rebuke to the party leadership. A long time ago I compared him to Beppe Grillo, who was similarly dismissed as a clown and a publicity stunt until his party started winning elections. Even now, the European political elite dismisses these populist movements.

Dismiss is not really correct, though, is it? In Europe, Merkel is making war on the native population by actively encouraging a Muslim invasion. Whole German towns have been turned into Arab ghettos overnight. The reason seems to be nothing more than spite. The evidence is as clear as day that the people do not want this, so what other reason is there for pushing a policy that the people despise?

Now we are seeing something similar happening in the US. The budget pushed through by Paul Ryan is not just bad politics. It is a contradiction of everything he promised just a month ago when he got the job. It’s as if he deliberately assembled a bill that contradicted everything he promised just to stick a finger in the eye of his own voters. The reason to think the point of this point is to spite his voters is the immigration stuff. How else can you interpret such an outrageous betrayal?

Anyway, this latest insult to the people by their “representatives” got me thinking about the Irish Potato Famine. In America this event has largely been flushed down the memory hole because the Irish-Americans find it embarrassing. An estimated one million Irish died from famine within half a decade. Millions more simply fled the country for the rest of the English speaking world. Ireland lost 25% of its population in five years.

Historians blame the famine on a number of factors, but it was the political arrangements that set everything in motion. Oppression of Catholics by the English resulted in a system where the farm land was owned not by Irish, but by English landlords who lived in England. These absentee landlords relied on middlemen to collect rents and enforce their rights against an indigenous population that was trapped in a feudal system.

We live in a different age, but we are facing something similar in America where the financial elite are entirely divorced from the rest of America. They flit around between financial and political capitals without much contact with the people. They are the new ascendancy class and their middlemen are the political parties, who enforce the rules and guard their interests.

The Irish Famine was directly the result of a potato blight, but what should have been a minor disruption in farming was turned into a disaster by a break in the normal feedback loop in a society. The ruling class were slow to react and indifferent to the initial suffering, because the Irish were not their people. They may as well have been Bantus living in an African jungle. Politics then, as now, was local and all the politicians were across the sea, instead of talking to their people.

America is not going to be struck by a potato famine, obviously, but we are being hit with an immigration disaster and a looming financial disaster. The ruling elite is plundering the country and indifferent to the people. Instead, they rely on politicians like Paul Ryan to enforce their orders and collect their rents. The rents in this case are indentured servants brought in to displace native workers. Instead of being throw off the land, Americans are being thrown out of their jobs.

Historical analogies are never perfect. There’s no sign of Ribbonism or Whiteboyism breaking out in America, but who knows what tomorrow will bring. In some respects, the websites and podcasts of the dissident right are filling the role of those Irish secret societies. Our rulers and their middlemen are hardly aware that we exist. What they do know about us tells them we are trouble and must be suppressed.

If you lived in 11^th century London around the time when Harold Godwinson was making the mistake of leaving too many troops in the north, your life was rather shabby compared to the life of a man living in Damascus or Samarra. This was the Golden Age of Islam. The Muslims were on the cutting age of commerce, math, science and economics. If you were looking down from above, Islam looked like a winner.

Granted, the Muslim advance into Europe had been halted, but they still controlled large parts of Europe and controlled the Mediterranean. As a practical matter, just in terms of peace and prosperity, Islam looked like a superior model to what existed in Christendom and Asia. It was not just at the top either. Literacy rates, and life expectancy were much higher in the caliphate than anywhere else.

Fast forward 200 years and life in London would not have changed much. The typical peasant would have had a life similar to his ancestors under William the Conqueror. To the East, however, little guys on ponies had defeated the armies of Europe and were poised to drive all the way to the Atlantic.The armies of the Batu Khan had smashed the Rus and were ready to ride to Paris.

To the south, those same guys from Asia were sacking Baghdad, burning its libraries and murdering most of the male citizens. They tended to just impregnate the females.  Historians estimate that a million citizens of Baghdad were killed in one week. The destruction was so massive, the population of the region did not recover until the 19^th century. The Mongol Invasion ended the Golden Age of Islam.

By the 14^th century, Islam was still dominant in what we call the Arab world, but it was not producing or even augmenting an ascendant culture and people. In fact, as the culture of the Near and Middle East collapsed, it took Islam with it, turning it into a tool for jostling between clans and tribes. The Muslims held on militarily through the 20^th century, but that was largely due to the Turks and their long involvement in Europe going back to antiquity.

Even so, by the late Middle Ages, life in the typical European village was not that much better than life in the typical Muslim village. If you just looked at the top, the Ottoman Turks looked strongest, but the seeds of decline were apparent. While the West was on the cusp of great technological, cultural and financial revolutions, the Ottomans were still running a system Diocletian would have understood.

As the West moved from the Middle Ages into the Early Modern Period, it was about to rocket ahead of the rest of the world technologically, financially, culturally and military. The typical villager in Europe was living a vastly more prosperous life than his contemporary in Baghdad or Tripoli. The religion, the culture, the demographics and even the climate all came together to produce what we know to be the modern world – in Europe.

Islam never made it out of the Middle Ages until Western prosperity overflowed its cups and brought material wealth to the Arab world. Even so, Iraq is still a Medieval society equipped with satellite dishes and mobile phones. Their culture, economics and politics remain locked in the amber of a bygone age. Even their revolutionaries sound like extras from a B-movie about the Crusades.

That’s not just a reality we in the West accept. It is a reality that every Muslim from the Arab world faces and grapples with every day. The culture that produced him lost to the culture that confronts him. No one stands in line for the latest Muslim mobile phone. There is no Muslim Silicon Valley. The armies of Allah throw rocks at the space ships and lasers of the infidel. To be a Muslim is to be a loser.

That daily reality is in his pocket when he looks at his cell phone. It is on TV where all the actors wear Western clothes. It is in his house where his sister demands to wear makeup and live on her own, dating men outside the family. Even at mosque he is reminded that he is on the losing side of the fight. He rides a Western made bus or drives a Western made car. He texts his coreligionists on an iPhone, not a Mohammad Phone.

There is an argument that Islam is on the rise. As we see Muslims pouring into Europe and even America, the argument goes, Islam is like rising flood waters, about to wash away the West. That misses what’s happening at the roots of Muslim culture. Every one of those Muslims is on a journey that will end as it did for John the Savage in Brave New World.

The Muslim defines himself by his family relations. He is everyone who came before him. His culture is their culture and their culture defines him. Those Muslims on the road to Berlin can either abandon themselves and their identity in order to join their new world, or, they can embrace death. The self-detonation phenomenon is just a dramatic way of choosing the latter.

The thing is, both choices have the same implication, the death of Islam as an organizing philosophy. Just as the Muslim is faced with the reality of assimilation, Islam is faced with the same choice. Islam can cut itself lose from its past and embrace the material world of Western culture or it can blow itself up in a last final act of vengeance against the victor. Either way, Islam is dying.

The Sunni-Shia war that is centered in Syria is perhaps the way forward so Islam can evolve and become a workable mode of thought in a modern technological world. Like the Thirty years War, maybe old Islam is burning itself out and what comes next is a lighter, personal version of Islam. The Thirty Years War left large chunks of central Europe depopulated and others reduced to cannibalism so these transformations carry a heavy price.

Islam is collapsing and it could very well take the rest of us with it. The central challenge to leaders of the West is how to manage this civilizational collapse, which primarily means containing it. The past year has been about piety contests over who can invite the most Muslims in for settlement. The coming decade will be about who can keep the most Muslims out of the West.

One of the stranger things about modern life is the rise of economics as a quasi-religion in the West. In another age, the rulers would run to the local witch doctor or oracle before making a big decision. Closer to our age, leaders would pray for guidance, maybe talk with a holy man. Today, the pols run to economists for advice on everything.

What makes it particularly humorous is the shamans of economics are more wrong than the old witch doctors. The reason is the modern economist really thinks he is a man of science, while the old witch doctor knew he was a fraud. Of course, the witch doctor also knew he faced the sword if he went too far out on a limb so he was careful to never get carried away.

Economists have no such fear of being wrong as being wrong is good for the guild. The more things get screwed up due to their bad advice, the better the employment prospects for the profession. Lucky for them, they get most everything wrong so the racket is a serpent eating its tail.  A good example is here in this Wall Street Journal article.

Federal Reserve officials this week are expected to raise interest rates for the first time in nine years on the expectation that employment and inflation will hit targets reflecting a healthy U.S. economy.

But Fed officials face a troubling question: Jobs are on track, but inflation isn’t behaving as predicted and they don’t know why. Unemployment has fallen to 5%, a figure close to estimates of full employment, while inflation remains stuck at less than 1%, well below the Fed’s 2% target.

Central bank officials predict inflation will approach their target in 2016. The trouble is they have made the same prediction for the past four years. If the Fed is again fooled, it may find it raised rates too soon, risking recession.

Low inflation—and low prices—sound beneficial but can stall growth in wages and profits. Debts are harder to pay off without inflation shrinking their burden. For central banks, when inflation is very low, so are interest rates, leaving little room to cut rates to spur the economy during downturns.

Full employment? No one walking around America thinks we are anywhere near full employment. Anyone older than 40 should remember the booms of the 80’s and 90’s when employers were offering bonuses to new hires and employing head hunters to poach workers from other firms. That has not happened in a long time.

Of course, the labor force participation rate is at a 38-year low. Some of it is certainly due to demographics. We have more old farts on the dole due to the boomers hitting retirement, but that’s just starting as the first boomers hit retirement. The stunning truth is there’s an employment boom among the geezers. It is the young struggling with the stagnant job market.

That’s one bit of unreality. The other bit is the zero inflation stuff. I’ve gone around and around with economists about chain weighted inflation and the logic applies here. Granny may have substituted dog food for ground beef, but that does not mean inflation is flat. Similarly, every retail container has shrunk over the last decade, even though the prices are generally stable. Shrinkflation is a real thing we all see every day of our lives.

Putting aside those two complaints, which are always dismissed by economists as ridiculously based in observable reality, there is the confidence they have even in the face of being wrong. Exactly no one in the economics profession saw the crash coming and now they can’t figure out why they can’t re-inflate the world economy. But, being wrong is juts proof we need more economists!

The site where I saw this story linked had a comment from someone mentioning The Modigliani–Miller theorem in rebuttal to some other comment. For those unfamiliar with that particular tarot card, here’s the definition:

“The basic theorem states that under a certain market price process (the classical random walk), in the absence of taxes, bankruptcy costs, agency costs, and asymmetric information, and in an efficient market, the value of a firm is unaffected by how that firm is financed.”

Therein lies the fundamental problem with economics and why it is not a STEM field. The entire profession is based on “all things being equal” or “in the absence of observable reality” statements that would get you laughed out of an empirical field. The only field that is close in the use of hothouse logic is climate science.

None of this is to say we should dismiss economics out of hand. In fact, the statistical study of human behavior should be a part of public policy debates. Where every economist goes wrong is in thinking he has found the philosopher’s stone once he finishes his first statistics course. As a result, the field never gets better. But when there is good money in being wrong, why be less wrong?

It is a pity because we will probably have to go through a near death experience before we figure out the mistakes. The Great Depression finally taught  the West that the money supply also includes outstanding credit. The modern economic profession is not learning anything new, despite the fact we have experienced the greatest technological leap forward since the wheel on top of a revolution in credit.

A while back I posted about my plan to dump my TV subscription. One obvious reason for cutting the cord, probably the one most cited by surveys, is the expense. Americans are seeing their TV bills jump every year averaging something close to $150 per month in some areas. There’s simply no way to justify it so people are cutting the cord and relying on services like Hulu and NetFlix.

Another reason, I suspect, is cultural. The great upheavals we are seeing in politics across the West are over a common divide. On one side are people who wish to maintain their traditions and customs. They embrace material advances, but they also embrace the cultural heritage that has made those advances possible. For us, the past is not a foreign country. It is our country.

On the other side are the people who hate everything about the present, seeing it as an impediment to their quest for the glorious future. The past that produced this horrible present is a nightmare from which they can never awake, which is why they seek to smash it all to bits. Tradition is their cage and they want out, even if that means destroying themselves and everyone else in the process.

Watch American television for any length of time and you can’t help notice the proselytizing in favor of the wrecking ball. I turned on the NFL yesterday and it was endless chatter about the wonderfulness of Cam Newton, the Carolina Panther QB. Despite being a mediocre player, his team is undefeated, due entirely to its defense. But, Cam is black so he must be hoisted onto our shoulders and paraded around as a hero.

What’s galling about this nonsense is people, who know better, play along because they fear losing their career if they are not sufficiently enthusiastic. Instead of pointing out that Newton is just not screwing up as much as usual, but is otherwise mediocre, they lay on the praise as only a fearful supplicant can do. Sporting events have been turned into preaching moments and I’m sick of it.

Having had enough of the preaching, I wheeled around the dial thinking I should see if there is anything I’ll miss when I drop TV. I saw a commercial for a show called Supergirl. The 30 second ad made clear it was aimed at people with the IQ of a goldfish. It also made clear that it was just more proselytizing. We are endlessly barraged with agit-prop telling us how wonderful 20-something white women are at everything and how hard it is for them because of the Pale Penis People.

I can probably ignore that nonsense, but you can’t even see a decent movie because they keep insisting on making Vagina Power movies like the Hunger Games and now Star Wars. Yep, Star Wars will now make the hero a gal who defies the laws of physics by beating up all the men. It is one thing to suspend disbelief, but being asked to accept an 80-pound girl throwing around a 250-pound man without the use of magic is a bridge too far.

What I find intolerable about this trend is not that the female is the action hero. It’s that all the men are now pussies. According to our cultural overlords, the ideal white man is a bisexual wimp who is led around by the nose. I’ll grant that foppishness is more common today, especially with the young, but that’s a result of the Progressive kulturkampf. Television is not a reflection of the culture, its the whip used on the culture.

I think what has put me over the edge is the new habit of ad makers to feature mixed race couples. I guess they think every white man in America dreams of bringing a black man home to the old lady. They never feature a white guy and a black woman. It’s always a black guy and a white women and it is most certainly on purpose.

The most egregious example is the Audi ad where the old white man is puttering around the house listening to the weatherman telling him the storm is shutting down all the roads. The visual tells us he is waiting for his family, but the storm means he will be left alone to eat cat food. Then the family bursts in because their Audis let them brave the snow storm and see grandpa.

It looks great until we see that the grandkids are black and the son-in-law is the reason. The message they are sending could only be clearer if the son-in-law was speaking a foreign tongue. Audi is telling all the old Pale Penis People out there that their day is done. If they want to have a peaceful death, they better lie back and accept it.

Yesterday, I see an ad where a couple, black man and white woman of course, is camping with their kids. One kid is black and one is white. Maybe this is supposed to be the new Brady Bunch. Maybe the ad makers are unfamiliar with the basics of biology. Then again, the howling at the moon lunatics producing this stuff think biology is a social construct. What matters, the only thing that matters to them, is the message.

It’s not the mixed race stuff that bugs me. It is the ham-fisted proselytizing that sends me over the edge. At least make the kids look like the product of a mixed race marriage. If they were honestly trying to sell their vision of the future, I could at least pretend it is negotiable. But, that’s the point they are trying to make. It’s not negotiable and you better get used to it.

That’s really what has done it for me, I guess. The people in charge are so smug, so arrogant, they don’t even try to make their case anymore. It’s just a non-stop blaring of the megaphones. In North Korea they have a PA speaker in the center of every village, screaming out propaganda. In America, we have installed these things in our homes. It turns out that the hippies were partially right. It’s time to drop out.

They will miss me more than I’ll miss them, now and in the glorious future they imagine without me.

Read a lot of history and you’ll notice that wars are more often than not blamed on a few factors. One is aggression by one state, lusting after territory or resources held by another state. The other factor leading to war is the lack of foresight, the failure to look beyond the moment. The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia is an example and one to keep in mind when watching what is happening in the Near East.

It’s impossible to know, of course, but by 1916 I would bet the Austrians deeply regretted sending that ultimatum to the Serbs. By that point in the war, the Austrians were exhausted by the cost of war and ready to throw in the towel. Even though it should have been obvious, no one imagined what industrial age war was going to do to Europe. They learned the hard way.

Because the Great War was a long time ago, no one remembers it or cares much about it these days, but the lessons of that war are instructive today. At the dawn of the last century, the newly industrialized Europe was still trying to make a pre-industrial political systems work, despite the obvious problems. Just as important, the great powers were trying hard to maintain an international system that worked fine in the age of sail, but was inadequate for the industrial age.

That’s what comes to my mind when thinking about the friction between Russia and Turkey over the conflict in Syria. The Turks and Russians have had reason to make war on one another for over 500 years. In 1556, the Astrakhan Khanate was conquered by Ivan the Terrible, who had a new fortress built on a steep hill overlooking the Volga. In 1568 the Ottomans sent a force of Turks and Tatars to lay siege to Astrakhan, with the idea of taking it from the Russians.

The military governor of Astrakhan drove back the besiegers using local militia and then a Russian army counter attacked and drove off the Turks and Tatars. On their way home, up to 70% of the Ottoman soldiers froze to death in the steppes. In The Great War something similar happened to the Turks at Battle of Sarikamish. The retreat left 90,000 Turks dead, most of them freezing to death in the mountains. This crushing defeat was blamed on the Armenians, which lead to the Armenian Genocide.

Stories like this one should give everyone one pause, as these are two people with a long, long memory of reasons to hate one another. It’s not going to take much to whip up support in either country for going to war with the other. There’s also the fact that both Putin and Erdogan have strong domestic constituencies in favor of bellicose and aggressive foreign policies. That alone is enough to precipitate hostilities.

There’s also the fact that like the Great War, the West is laboring under a treaty system that no longer fits the current age. The Pax Americana made perfect sense when the Soviets were aiming a bunch of tanks and missiles at Europe. NATO was a logical and practical response to the Soviet threat.

Today it makes no sense for a country of 300 million to defend a continent of 500 million, when that continent is no longer facing a real military threat. The modern Russian army would stall before it made it to Oder–Neisse Line, due to the lack of supplies. There’s simply no reason for America to have troops in Europe and there no reason for NATO to exist.

Another comparison to the Great War is the overall stupidity of key leaders in the West. President Obama makes Kaiser Wilhelm look like Bismarck. Look around Europe and it is hard to find anyone that you would trust in a crisis. This invites the sort of mischief we have seen from Russia in Ukraine, the Baltics and now the Near East. Of course, like Tsar Nicholas, Putin could very well be standing on a rotting pedestal of authority.

Comparison to the Great War are worthwhile, but now is not then and we have new challenges today for which even the savviest leader is unprepared. As we saw in the Ukraine, asymmetrical war is a new breed of cat.Those “little green men” who turned up in Crimea have no obvious analog in the past. That’s why the West was caught totally unprepared for it.

Then there is the use of unconventional warriors, like Muslim terrorists. Russia may not be able to invade Poland, but they can facilitate the movement of ISIS suicide bombers into your kid’s grammar school. The commodity war that the Saudis have been waging against Iran and Russia is yet another facet of the new brand of total war. You can be sure the Saudis will have qualms about funding Chechen terrorist either.

The wild card, the thing that makes easy comparisons to Europe’s past difficult, is the collapse of Islam. We don’t think of what’s going on in the Muslim world as a collapse since it serves our ruler’s interests to pretend it is something more malign. The endless propaganda painting Islam as Nazism is so the public will sign onto forever war. Drive around the Imperial Capital and you find thousands of firms getting rich off dropping bombs on the muzzies.

Islam is not ascendant, no matter what the rulers claim. Islam is in collapse, a collapse similar to what happened to Christendom in The Thirty Years War. The various sects within Islam are at war with one another over a dwindling amount of influence over their culture. Western materialism is shrinking the pie, as it were, and the tribes of Islam are at war over who will get the lion’s share of what comes next.

And no one comes next.

This morning I noticed that I’m approaching one million words. I have a widget that counts posts, words, comments and so forth. I’ve never paid much attention to the total word count until I noticed the odometer was about to turn over somewhere in the next post.

Allegedly the word count excludes the quoted texts from links so those million words are all mine. That sounds like a lot, but the math says it is roughly 700 words per day. I don’t post every day, but I often post more than one thing in a day.

This is the officially the millionth word: Hurray!

I try to keep my essays at the 1000 word length on the theory that most people have the attention span of a gnat. The interwebs has damaged our brains, making long pieces unreadable. I still read long form essays, but I do so in stages. I’ll read a chunk and then put it aside and then read another chunk. Part of it is the medium, but like everyone, my attention span has shrunk thanks to the interwebs.

Looking through the activity logs, it appears I have about 25,000 regular readers. There’s a gizmo on the site to tell me how many non-robot visitors I get every day, week, month and so on. I never look at it as I’m not running a storefront. If I ever tried to make money from this then maybe it would mean something to me. As it stands, I have 25,000 readers who come by multiple times a month.

I’m a little surprised by the number as I have done nothing to promote the blog. The readership is entirely word of mouth. Most of that mouth is Gerard Van der Leun from American Digest. I also get a ton of traffic from Maggies Farm. Both are great sites by the way. Doug Ross also sends a lot of people my way. There are others, of course, but those are the top three referrers.

I get most visits from US readers, but number two on the hit parade is Britain. Someone sent me a message claiming to be a UK based reader and thanking me for my efforts. They said they have to read US sites for this type of content as it is largely banned in Europe. Strangely, I get very little Canadian traffic. Maybe they have enough domestically produced vitriol and bile. Maybe they are too drunk to work the internets.

As has been pointed out, I’m starting to cast a shadow. My Overton Window bit with regards to trump turned up in a lot of gentile places, suggesting some good thinkers are slumming it with the bad thinkers like me. That makes this site like the slave quarters in the bad old days. Instead of coming here for the hootenanny, the beautiful people come to the ghetto for ideas and insights. Z is the new black!

Anyway, thank you to all the folks who spread the good news and thank you for being a reader. I appreciate it greatly. After the revolution, your contributions will be noted.

For a couple of decades now, Jonah Goldberg has fashioned a lucrative career for himself as the man with two hats. One hat lets him be a man of the managerial class, writing books and a long winded articles on the wonderfulness of the status quo, as well as the people in charge of it.

The other hat lets him be the proletarian every-man who likes bad movies and throwing food at the screen when a ruling class type comes in the scene. This act has got him a spot in elite conservative media, a perch at a conservative think tank and a big house in one of the richest counties on earth.

Way back when Jonah Goldberg was still working on the act, he used to do mixers where he would show up at a bar and mix it up with the readers of National Review Online. This was late 90’s early 2000’s or thereabouts. At the time, Goldberg was still approachable so I approached him and we chatted a bit. I mentioned in passing something about VDare, I don’t recall what any more, but the reaction from Goldberg is what I do remember clearly.

He went from being a jocular dufus to being a serious scold. His exact words were “You should not talk about that or any of them. Trust me. Don’t even read it.” The serious look of panic on his face has always stuck with me. I’ve never been a VDare reader, then or now, I just knew it from John Derbyshire and that was the context in which I mentioned it. If Jonah’s fear had mass, a black hole would have opened up and sucked everyone into it.

I bring up this incident as a bit of a follow up to my post the other day on the weaponization of race by the left side of the ruling coalition. Peter Brimelow and the people that appear on his site have been declared un-persons due to their lack of faith. Even associating with them is cause for expulsion. Bob Weisberg was ceremoniously fired for having been in proximity to these un-persons. You’ll note the extra effort to signal to the left side that the official position of the right side is no different from that of the left side.

It’s also a good lead-in to another topic, the Trumpaphobia that is breaking out like hives on the flesh of the conservative media. Jonah Goldberg has this column up today, which is a column length version of “This Is Not Who We Are”, the new anthem of Conservative Inc. All week one version or another of “this is not who we are” has been trumpeted by those brave heroes in conservative media., who when wearing the proletarian hat, claim to be fighting the good fight on our behalf.

At first blush, it appears Goldberg is just repeating the same chant we have been hearing for a year now. “Donald Trump is no Conservative!” The use of abracadabra words is not just a peculiar tick of Progressives. The Professional Right does it too. Anyone who threatens their comfortable lifestyles like Bob Weisberg mentioned above, gets excommunicated from the Church of Modern Conservatism. Trump exposes the conservative media racket for what it is so they hate him for it.

That’s what is often missed. The way it is supposed to work is the GOP works with National Review, Fox News, “grass roots” organizations that have K Street offices and so on. That way, these folks can make some money, get relatives jobs in the bureaucracy and look like players in the “arena of ideas.” In return, these groups go to the megaphones and rally the voters by declaring the GOP candidate the next Ronald Reagan.

Trump, obviously, is having none of that and he is winning. That’s a big problem if you make your living selling GOP product in conservative media. The folks at Fox News used to think they were the gatekeepers, the king makers on the Right. Now they look like chumps because the guy most likely to win the GOP nomination treats them like human footstools. The ditsy blonde they sent out to whack Trump in the first debate came back in a shoe box and they have never recovered from it.

The other thing Goldberg is up to here is signaling to the other side of the managerial class that he remains a good thinker. He closes with this:

And I would argue that his “very conservative” followers aren’t supporting Trump because he’s a conservative but because he’s a walking, talking thumb in the eyes of “elites” in the media and both parties. The claim that Trump is a committed conservative is not very believable. Until recently, he was for higher taxes on the wealthy, taking in Syrian refugees, and single-payer health care. He almost never talks about the Constitution, faith, or liberty unless forced to. In 2012, Trump condemned Mitt Romney for being too harsh on illegal immigration. In May of this year, he attacked “publicity seekers” who needlessly provoked Muslims.

Put another way, Goldberg is telling his coevals in the media that “real” conservative just talk about stuff and never offer any resistance to the status quo or the dominance of the American Left. Anything that smacks of real resistance or an alternative to the moral superstructure of the status quo is off-limits. These columns emanating from conservative media are no about Trump, immigration or popular Right. They are loyalty oaths.

If it comes down to it, if the choice is between the bad thinkers and their racist, fascist Islamophobia, Jonah and all “good conservatives” will lock shields with their Progressive brothers and defend the status quo to the death if necessary. Egalitarianism, Multiculturalism and Antiracism are the raison d’etre and cri de guerre of the ruling class.

Spend anytime around an American politician and you are often confronted with what seems like a paradox. On the one hand, they are clever and socially agile enough to rise in politics, win office and get rich without going to jail. On the other hand, they are astoundingly clueless about the lives of their fellow citizens. It’s as if they have learned about America from a book on their way here from another planet.

A story I often tell to illustrate this is the time I was helping setup for a party at a Congressman’s home. The landscaping guys failed to show up so someone would have cut the grass around the back patio. No one knew how a lawnmower worked. The staffers, the Congressman and his kids were baffled my a Toro push lawn mower. They spent an hour examining like it had fallen from the sky.

Anyway, this all around otherness was on display when Bernie Sanders dropped in on the hood this week.

Hoping to reach African-American voters nationally in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday toured the West Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested — and likened the poverty he observed to that of the Third World.

The independent senator, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, walked the streets of Sandtown-Winchester for about 20 minutes, joined by community leaders and a swarm of cameras that mostly blocked his view of boarded rowhomes and crumbling marble steps. A handful of residents joined the spectacle, and occasionally broke out in chants of Gray’s name.

The scene provided dramatic visuals of the economic inequality Sanders has made the center of his campaign, offering a new backdrop from which to argue for a higher minimum wage, tuition-free public college and tougher federal regulations of the nation’s banking sector.

“Anyone who took the walk that we took around this neighborhood would not think you’re in a wealthy nation,” Sanders told reporters later at the Freddie Gray Empowerment Center in Bolton Hill. “You would think that you were in a Third World country.”

I would imagine Bernie was thinking, “Holy crap! Look at all these…abandoned houses.” Sanders is from Vermont, but he spends little time there as he is the consummate Washington hack. Even so, his home state is one of the whitest places on earth. It has about 6,000 black people according to the last census. In other words, Bernie saw more brothers on Tuesday than there are in his entire state.

The funnier part is Sanders was probably being honest in his astonishment at seeing the ghetto. The last time he had any proximity to the ghetto was over 50 years ago when he lived in Brooklyn. After that he was off to college and a world of socialist white people debating about how to help those brown people they saw through their telescopes. The ghetto was a place that existed in theory for a guy like Sanders.

Even so, it’s amazing that a man could be on earth for 70 years and not have some idea of life in the black ghetto. It’s not like Vermont does not have television or newspapers. Yet, there was Bernie, flabbergasted at seeing blown out houses, broken streets and throngs of jobless blacks milling about with nothing to do other than mill about the neighborhood. Even a  chump like Sanders had to sense he was way out of his league.

As Sanders toured West Baltimore, the trial of the first of six police officers charged in Gray’s death entered its seventh day in a downtown courtroom.

Before Sanders arrived in Bolton Hill, a campaign aide asked a group of about a dozen supporters not to cheer him.

The group, which included a woman who held a large banner that read “Bernie Sanders for President,” obliged; as a result, his arrival was more somber than a typical campaign appearance.

Sanders began the tour at the CVS at North and Pennsylvania avenues that burned during the riots. He walked to the corner of Presbury and North Mount streets, near where Gray was arrested, and looked up at a large mural of Gray.

Sanders then met with prominent faith leaders in Bolton Hill.

Residents yelled as Sanders passed by, and some joined the media throng. One shouted “He’s the only candidate without a super PAC!” — repeating a point Sanders has often made.

“We don’t want Trump,” shouted another.

Some held signs pointing to long-standing complaints with the city’s public housing: “We deserve safe and livable housing.”

“I’m impressed,” said Michael Williams, a West Baltimore man who described himself as a Hillary Clinton fan. “There has never been a person running for president to come to our neighborhood.”

The distance between the people and their rulers is never more obvious than when a guy like Sanders visits the ghetto for a photo-op. Baltimore has been governed by men like Sanders for half a century. The reason it is like a third world country is it has been ruled by third world men. Eventually, the only people left were third world too.Everything Bernie thinks is a great idea has been done in Baltimore and it is a third world shit-hole as a result.

Sanders, however, can’t see that. Fanatics have no concept of the past. As far as he is concerned, he has been “fighting to fix the ghetto” his whole life. He really believes it. That’s the paradox. Sander is a smart guy, but he is consumed by a religious zeal that blinds him to that which is obvious to most people. Instead of sporting a black hat and beard, Bernie’s religion is Progressive politics. He’ll die before giving it up.