On my morning run, the local temperature read -3° F. That’s an unusually low temperature for this part of the world, but not unprecedented. Modern times makes extremely cold weather not much more than a curiosity. Everyone has shelter and plenty of heat. Even the poor have central HVAC in their homes and plenty of resources to get their energy bill paid for by others. The local bums had to be rounded up, but there are shelters for them as well. Otherwise, it is something to chat about at the office or experience at a distance.

This was not always true. Not long ago, extreme cold resulted in a lot of death and damage. A hundred years ago, deaths from cold were not uncommon in the northern parts of the world. Some of it was due to disease spreading quickly among people huddled together indoors. There was also the poor nutrition that came from not enough food in the winter months. Even so, people did not have what we have now to deal with the cold, so it was not uncommon for people to die when a serious cold snap hit the region.

Go back further and the problem gets even more perilous. A thousand years ago, humans living in areas that got extremely cold, or had long winters, were faced with unique challenges. This required long term planning in order to have enough food, heat and shelter for the winter. It also required a different type of cooperation. Specialization increases productivity so a people facing long winters would be more dependent on one another. Many hands make a light load, but many different skills make it even lighter.

It is generally accepted that humans migrated out of Africa about 60,000 as genetically modern humans. Most likely this meant following a path along the Red Sea and then into Asia and Europe. As the ice sheets receded, humans followed them north to settle into northern Europe and Asia. When the ice sheets began to expand again, these more adaptable and resourceful people moved south, conquering and displacing the people to their south. The slightly improved people became the stock of settled civilization.

Most of this is speculative, but genetics is slowly filling in a lot of blanks. The implication has always been the that harsh environment selected for more resourceful people, who figured out large scale cooperation, burden sharing and so forth. That sounds good until you consider that settled societies did not first start in the north. They began in the mild climates of the Middle East. The data says that the first settled farming communities were in Mesopotamia, which is why it is called the cradle of civilization.

Further, when the Egyptians were building the pyramids, the people in the British Isles were building Stonehenge. That’s an interesting structure, but it was built by people who were barbarians compared to the people of the Middle east. When the Sumerians were writing down things on clay tablets, Europe was lightly populated by people. who had just barely mastered stone tools. Even into the late Roman Empire, the tribes of Europe were hard pressed to do much more than organize a primitive village surrounded by farms.

Of course, all of this has changed. A great puzzle to the blank slate crowd is why it is Europeans rocketed ahead of the rest of the world, in terms of technology and organizational might, starting around the late Middle Ages. When Europeans arrived in Africa, they found a people, who had yet to master the wheel. The ancient civilizations of the Middle and Near East had fallen into squalor. In the new world, the Incas were about where the Egyptians had gotten 5,000 years prior.

It is widely understood that modern humans, homo sapiens, emerged from the speciation phase of sapient humans in Africa about 100 000 years ago. The genetic record supports this conclusion and it provides details in support of the dispersal. Not only are all modern humans walking around today descended from those original humans, a baby born today is not very different genetically from humans of 100,000 years ago. While there is genetic variation in modern humans, significant physiological evolution ended 100,000 years ago.

The archaeological record, what there is at least, says that humans dispersed around the world over the next 50,000 years without much change in behavior. Then seemingly all of a sudden, humans began to change culturally. The first agriculture appears in Mesopotamia and soon after large scale settled societies. New technologies spread in fits and starts as people figured out how to contend with and modify their natural environments. This is the period, up to today, that science refers to as the tectonic phase.

The sapient paradox is the puzzle as to why it took so long for humans to go from hunter-gathers to settled people. The genetic evidence and lots of wishful thinking say that people in Africa 50,000 years ago were not much different from people 10,000 years ago in the Tigris River area. Why did the people in Mesopotamia figure out how to plan and organize large agrarian societies, while the people in Europe were still living off the land in small tribes? Most important, why did it take so long for humans to accomplish it?

The tectonic paradox, a term I just made up, is the puzzle as to why modern Africans were never able to master the wheel or build a structure taller than a man. When Europeans were conquering the globe, the people in sub-Saharan Africa had yet to adopt a written language. At the same time, how is is that the English, who were no more advanced than Arabs in 1066, were the ones to lead the Industrial Revolution? The great gap in material and cultural progress between the big races is recent and unmistakable.

Genetics is starting to unriddle this great puzzle. Even though the genetic difference between human groups is tiny, it turns out that small difference can have huge downstream consequences, particularly with regards to cultural evolution. The high risk environment of northern Europeans, for example, is most likely the root of the wide variety of hair and eye colors that don’t appear anywhere else on earth. A small difference results in people who look like a different species from their close cousins in sub-Saharan Africa.

What this means is that human evolution is not just recent and local, but the behavior differences between populations is not amenable to social engineering, at least not in the short term. The Arabs flowing into Europe are going there because like all mammals, they seek safety and easy access to food and shelter. They are not Germans, however, and no amount of proselytizing will change Mother Nature’s mind on the subject. We may not know exactly why people are different, but we know they are and there’s no changing it.

I had a segment in the podcast on the situation with Jews in Europe. The flood of Muslims into European cities has brought with it all the things we have come to associate with modern Islam. The new arrivals are assaulting Jews, beating up homosexuals and harassing women in western dress. What’s interesting about this is Jews in Europe have been the biggest supporters of open borders and allowing so-called refugees to come into Europe. This raises the prospect that European Jewish leaders are insane.

The general view on the alt-right is that Jews are clannish and they put the interests of Jews above all else. You hear that all the time from alt-right people when they talk about current events. They rely heavily on Kevin McDonald’s work to create a framework in which Jews are a super clever, alien group that seeks to undermine the majority population in order to benefit the Tribe. They can make a compelling case, as long as they leave out big slabs of observable reality, like European Jews supporting the Muslim invasion.

In America, the obvious smart play for Jews is to oppose immigration and support nationalists and populist causes. American nationalism has always celebrated the fact that the population is a mix of people from the Old World. Therefore, it is soul and soil nationalism, rather than blood and soil. This works to the benefit of highly successful ethic groups like Jews and Asians. Yet, the greatest opponents of even a very mild form of American nationalism are Jews. Many are nakedly un-American.

If the alt-right could conjure bogeymen to go around social media, as examples of the great nemesis facing white people, they could do no worse than someone like Jonathan Weisman, or any of the neocon nutters. These people are straight out of alt-right central casting. The only thing they don’t do is post pics of themselves, rubbing their hands together. The impression they give is that they know it and they are deliberately playing this role in the hope of conjuring a response, so they can be victims, like great grandpa.

The self-destructive instinct is most obvious when it comes to Trump. No president has been as pro-Israel and pro-Jewish as Trump. He has literally married his daughter into the Tribe and embraced his son-in-law as a son and close adviser. His business partners are mostly Jewish and his chief business adviser is Jewish. It is not possible for a President to be better for Jews, but Trump’s loudest and most enthusiastic antagonists are all Jewish. They even accuse him of being an anti-Semite and white nationalist.

Of course, much of this lunacy has its roots in the Russia lunacy. The “Russian Hacking” nonsense hit the g-spot of the neocons and NeverTrump loons, who have a deep paranoia about Russia. For reasons that defy easy explanation, the neocons are convinced that Tsar Alexander III has been reincarnated as Vladimir Putin and he is about to initiate pogroms against Jews in America. Therefore the only way to prevent this is to restart the Cold War and maybe initiate a nuclear exchange with Russia.

Way back in 2017 Steve Sailer had a go at explaining this stuff in a Taki post. He covers a lot of familiar ground, if you are a Sailer fan, but it is an interesting read nonetheless. His point is that Jewish paranoia may simply be the result of success. Jews in America have come to dominate the culture. As the new ruling class, they are naturally anxious to retain their position. Sailer also makes the case that the weapons of multiculturalism used by Jews in the 20th century could easily be turned on them, hence the bizarre paranoia.

The thing is, most Jews are not anywhere near as crazy as Max Boot or Bill Kristol. In fact, there is a decent sized wing of the Tribe that views this stuff the same way as everyone else views it. Paul Gottfried has been working this side of the street for decades. Go to a Mencken event and the room will be full of Jews highly critical of neocons and paranoid Jewish intellectuals. The madness we see on display from prominent Jewish leaders does seem to be exclusive to the most successful Jews.

Maybe the answer is that in addition to getting high levels of numeracy and literacy, elite Jews also come equipped with high levels of tribal paranoia. So much so that they begin to sound like paranoid schizophrenics once they reach the highest ranks of society. This would explain why Jewish leaders in Europe support the importation of Muslims. They are so paranoid about the locals, they are blinded by the threat of Islam. Similarly, American Jews who reach the top are sure Richard Spencer is hiding under their bed.

Alternatively, maybe the self-ghettoizing instinct is the result of tribalism in an open society. For centuries, clannishness was a great survival mechanism for Jews in Europe, as it allowed them to survive as a distinct population on the fringes of society. In America, where barriers to success are minimum, clannishness is not all that useful and a detriment to the ambitious and capable. Perhaps in an open society, clannishness mutates into a paranoia. After all, many of these people are also anti-Jewish.

This is the first podcast of the year and my first podcast with any serious audio editing. I decided over the holidays that I needed to tighten things up a bit and that means learning how to edit the podcast after recording. I believe this is what the professionals call post-production. That’s when things are cleaned and unnecessary pauses and weird background noises are edited out of the show.

Until now, I have just made some notes for each segment and rambled on for about ten minutes or five minutes, depending upon the bit. I would then edit out the obvious stuff, but that was it. One of the strange side effects of doing a podcast is you spend a lot of time listening yourself. My gross lack of professionalism and all too frequent hemming and hawing have started to bug me so I’m determined to up my game this year.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00:00: Opening
• 02:00: Baby, It’s Cold Outside (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 12:00: Bro Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 22:00: Immigration (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 32:00: Operation Ajax (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 42:00: Elite Madness (Link) (Link)
• 47:00: Serendipity (Link) (Link)
• 52:00: Forever Young (Link) (Link)
• 57:00: Closing (Link)

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

In the coming decades, Western nations are going to be faced with a number of problems stemming from the technological revolution. Some are already with us. We are now post-scarcity societies, where we have more than enough food, medicine and housing for our citizens and even some non-citizens. The pruning force of scarcity is no longer doing its magic to keep the population fit or even sensible. The next big problem is what to do with the tens of millions of extra humans, no longer needed to contribute to society.

The hardest part of the automation wave coming in the next decades will simply be language. What do you call people who no longer have any purpose, in terms of producing goods and services through their labor? For as long as anyone has been alive, the very small slice of the population that has fit this definition could simply be dismissed on moral terms. The underclass is assumed to be lazy or anti-social. Trying to fix this has been a good way to keep the useless off-spring of the middle classes busy is social work.

When the numbers swell as automation eliminates the need for human labor in wide swaths of the economy, it will be impossible to dismiss the idle. When many of the idle are people who formerly occupied office jobs or semi-skilled laboring positions, blaming their condition on a lack of ambition is not going to be possible. The current labor participation rate is about 63% right now. This is about where it was in the Carter years. In the coming decades, that number will fall below 50% due to automation and demographics.

The other challenge is how to support the swelling ranks of the useless in a way that keeps them from causing trouble. The hot idea currently is the universal basic income, which is being experimented with in Finland. In the US, some states are talking about how to replace their welfare programs with something more simple like the UBI. Libertarian economists like the idea of the UBI, because it theoretically allows the under classes to participate in the market economy, unencumbered by the state.

The trouble with this idea, one that they can never overcome, is math. If all citizens have a floor, in terms of their basic income, whatever that floor is, will be the new zero. The only possible way to have a negative income, in real terms, is if someone is paying their employer for the right to work. There may be some bizarre situations where that exists, but in the main, zero is the smallest number that can appear in box #1 of your W2. If that number is bumped up by the UBI, that becomes the new zero, the lowest possible.

Think of it this way. Imagine the government decides to help BMW sell more cars, so they offer every citizen $5000 if they spend it on a BMW, rather than some other car. BMW is now facing a wave of people coming into American dealerships toting a $5,000 check payable to BMW. The logical thing for BMW to do is raise the price of their low end models by $5000. That way, they don’t increase production costs, but they increase the profit per car. In effect, the floor for entry level buyers was just raised by $5000 by the government.

There’s a pretty good real world example of this. The government decided to do something to help working class people get into college. Since many need remedial help, before taking on college work, the scheme was to offer a subsidy to be used for community colleges. The students would use the money to prep for college then head off to a four year university, presumably using loans and aid at that level. The result, however, was the community colleges just raised their tuition by about 65% of the subsidy.

The Universal Basic Income would most likely follow the same pattern. By guaranteeing that no one would earn less than some amount, in lieu of traditional welfare payments, the absolute floor becomes the subsidy level. In effect, the new zero becomes the subsidy so all other wages would be based off that, as the price of goods and services would correspondingly adjust. It is really no different than printing up money and dropping it from helicopters into the ghetto. The UBI would be as inflationary as debasing the currency.

The truth is, the zeroes that our rulers will be forced to address are zero population growth and zero TFR among the surplus populations. For example, you could fix Baltimore in a generation with mandatory Norplant for the underclass. A generation of childless females means the last generation of 80 IQ residents with a propensity for violence. The reason Baltimore is a violent city is not an excess of hard working, college educated STEM workers. The reason the city is a violent mess is the surplus of violent stupid people.

It also means zero immigration. When 80% of today’s immigrants end up on public assistance, the immigrants of tomorrow will be nothing more than useless people to police, feed and house. Japan is the model to follow. They have no immigration and their population levels are about to drop in the coming decades. They are the only nation on earth that is truly ready for the automated future, as they have the demographics to meet a shrinking demand for labor. They also have the cultural confidence to pull it off.

There’s one other zero the West will have to tackle and that is zero participation. The fact is, free-market consumerism and mass democracy work when the right answer is not obvious. As automation takes over more and more tasks, the number of issues that need to be hashed out collectively will diminish. Rule by robot means exactly that, which means voting and popular government will have to be reconsidered. What’s the point of being mayor when there are no more patronage jobs to dole out to friends and family?

Over the holidays, this was a topic on one of the e-mail lists I read. Oddly, it is a list about statistics, but the topic got a lot of replies. Apparently, lots of people worry that America is headed toward a civil war of some sort. Perhaps people with an interest in statistical methods worry about civil wars, in addition to methodological wars. It could also be that people fond of math know that society is fragile and it would not take much to topple it over. The distance between us and Somalia is not a big as we like to pretend.

Anyway, it is a good brain teaser. What would a civil war in America be like this time around? The country is a vastly different place than the last time. The north is still richer than the south, but there’s a Midwest, Southwest, West and Northwest now. More important, nothing is made in the Northeast anymore, other than trouble. The North is also the oldest part of the country, lacking a robust male population. By the standards of the last civil war, the North would be at a demographic, cultural and material disadvantage.

But that was then and this is now. Civil wars tend to be territorial and the regionalism of America is not what it once was. Lots of people from New England have moved south to the Carolinas, for example. Florida is full New Yorkers and is the retirement home to much of the Northeast. Northern Virginia is a region full of strangers, brought together by high paying government work. In event of war, people could move back to their home turf, but it would mean millions of people moving from one part of the country to another.

There’s also the fact that civil wars are almost always between the elites of the host society. The people are dragged into it by the warring factions at the top. In modern America, the elites have never been more unified. In fact, they are so united we now have one political party, the Bipartisan Globalists Fusion Party. In all seriousness, the reason that you can’t tell the difference between the political opinions of Jonah Goldberg and Ezra Klein is that ideologically they are the same guy, with the same paymasters.

If there was to be a civil war in America, it would first have to start as a revolt and gain enough steam to be a genuine threat to the status quo. If a revolt grew into a serious threat to the interests of the ruling classes, then you might see some elements decide to throw in with the rebels. In all likelihood, it would be the younger, lower level members of the elites, looking for an opportunity to leapfrog their superiors. Alternatively, the revolt could quickly grow an elite of its own, like the Marxists did, to challenge the elites of the status quo.

Of course, there is the racial angle. It’s funny in a way, but the two groups convinced of the coming race war are blacks and white nationalists. The trouble with this idea is the time for a race war was fifty years ago in the Civil Rights Movement. There were plenty of young black males thinking they had nothing to lose and plenty of young white males thinking they had everything to lose, Today, the only people thinking race war are mentally unstable black guys and white nationalists. Hispanics have little interest in racial politics.

There’s also the technological issue. The lesson of the two great industrial wars on the early 20th century was that conventional warfare was no longer a plausible option for settling disputes. Putting aside nukes, conventional weapons had simply become too lethal and too destructive. Prior to the great war, winning a war meant gaining useful territory or shaking down the loser for money. Modern warfare means destroyed cities and fractured economies for both sides. Nukes make conventional war even less appealing.

That reality would be even more salient in a civil war. New Englanders would love to re-enact Sherman’s march to the sea, but they would end up killing more allies than enemies and the economic cost to the North would be devastating. The degree of integration in a modern society would work against the instinct to destroy the other guy’s stuff. Throw in the regionalism issue above and conventional warfare with set piece battles and troop formations is not going to serve the interests of anyone in the next American civil war.

There’s also another problem. The US military is about 1.3 million people, but about 80% are in administrative and support roles. We have more people in uniform pushing buttons at a keyboard than carrying a pack in the field. Of that fighting force, about two-thirds are deployed at any one time. It is not an accident that our political class is not a fan of keeping large numbers of combat ready troops on US soil. In a civil war, the US military would probably disintegrate early and be reduced to guerrilla units for all sides.

Now, America has been waging non-lethal war on the world for a long time in the form of financial war and now information war. Economic sanctions are a form of warfare intended to create unrest in the target society. A big motivation for North Korea’s quest for nukes is the economic war we have been waging against them for two decades. The Bush people took steps to cut them off from the banking system and thus starve the regime of hard currency. That’s made the elites of the regime much poorer and weaker as a result.

In a civil war, the tools of finance would come to bear. Assuming the civil war began as a revolt, the ruling class would first attempt to squeeze the rebels financially, by cutting them off from the financial system, making it hard to raise money. In this age, that means shutting down their PayPal accounts and booting them from crowdfunding systems. Credit card processors would be pressured to discontinue service. When that failed, banks would be forced to close accounts and the seize assets of trouble makers.

This would also discourage members of the elite from getting any ideas about supporting the rebels against the senior elements of the elite. This would be augmented by the use of information war to undermine the moral authority of the rebels, thus starving them of ability to gain popular support. Humans are social animals and they instinctively seek to distance themselves from those the culture has declared taboo. That would mean using mass media organs to evangelize against the rebels, while cutting them off from media access.

If all of this sounds familiar, it should. America, and the West, is teetering on the verge of civil war, but a modern, technological civil war. On the one side is the globalist elite, who have purged their ranks of anyone skeptical of the project. The brewing revolt is mostly the people willing to question the prevailing orthodoxy. The panic we saw last summer by the tech giants was motivated by a fear that the internet revolt was becoming a revolt in the streets. The financial war on dissidents is a part of this effort to suppress dissent.

This is the face of modern civil war.

Over the holidays, I saw this floating around social media. It’s not a new story, but I guess it was relevant to whatever was being discussed. What caught my attention was a comment someone made along the lines of “Stowe is the quintessential New England town.” I think the person meant it looks like what people think of when they think of New England towns. It is a picturesque little town and it is a wonderful place to live, not just for the architecture. The the von Trapp family thought so, which is why they settled there.

Lifestyle sites love putting together lists like this. Cooking sites will have an annual “50 Best Restaurants” or “10 Best Overlooked Dining Towns.” I have an old copy of a cycling mag that lists the best ride in each state. I keep it in case I find myself in an unfamiliar state with some time for a ride. In the olden thymes, popular magazines like Time would do special issues on America’s best towns or best school towns. These sorts of articles are popular, because they mostly flatter the sensibilities of middle-class white people.

Anyway, looking at the list from Architectural Digest, I recognized many of the towns, but others were new to me. I’ve been to about half of them. Reading over the list, the thing that struck me as that all of them are very white. More precisely, they have very few blacks. The first one on the list, Traverse City, Michigan, is 94.4% white. Native Americans and Asians have bigger numbers than the blacks. Doing a little math, there are roughly 100 blacks in this town. This town probably has more left-handed lesbians than black guys.

Jacksonville Oregon is the next town on the list and it has more people describing themselves as “other” than calling themselves black. Here’s a pic of the local high school basketball team. I’m guessing they don’t win many games. My first thought was that it was a town full of middle-aged divorced woman, but the census tells me that the median age in the city is 54.9 years, with 65% of the population over 45. It seems that Jacksonville is a quaint little town for retired white people and some of their less ambitious kids.

Now, Oregon is a state roughly as white as New England, so I looked at the next town on the list, Dahlonega Georgia. The Peach State is the fourth blackest state in the nation, with a black population of 40% and a sizable Hispanic population. The most charming small town in the state is 5% black. It is 90% white with a respectable number of Hispanics, but they are most likely laborers and service workers, as Dahlonega is now “the heart of the North Georgia Wine Country.” Many locals claim Cherokee ancestry, so it is all good.

Figuring that the good whites at Architectural Digest would be painfully aware of their whiteness, I took a look at the towns on the list in heavily Hispanic areas. One of the tricks Progressives use to get around their aversion to black people is they point to the Hispanics or Asians in their towns and claim the maximum diversity points. I have an acquaintance who swears he moved to Arlington Massachusetts for the diversity. This is a town that is 2% black, but there are plenty of Asian professors and Hispanic maids.

Taos New Mexico is one of those towns that Boomer women like visiting, because they have warehouses full of turquoise dangle ear rings and dream catchers. The last census says it is 61% white, but only 40% non-Hispanic white. Taos is less than one-percent black, which means there are 30 black people in the whole town. The high school basketball team is probably not very good. This is a funny town though, as it is more of a resort town, that serves whites who fly in for skiing and the southwestern arts scene.

That’s the common theme with all of the towns on the list with relatively low white populations. Marfa Texas has become a funky little arts town that is mostly Hispanic, but has a small white population to run the tourism business. Bisbee Arizona became a hippie attraction and is now is fully gentrified. You can be sure the readers of Architectural Digest are not taking trips to see the run down neighborhoods where the mostly Hispanic servant class lives. Still, the trend continues. None of these towns have many black people.

The blackest town on the list, interestingly enough, is Berlin Maryland, on the eastern shore of the state. It is 68.8% white and 23.3% black. The town started out as a trading post for the Burley Plantation in the 18th century. This part of the state was tobacco plantations until the Civil War. The interesting thing about the black population, though, is it is declining quickly. In the 80’s the black population was close to 50%. By the 2000 census it was down to 30%. Gentrification follows the same pattern, even in small towns.

All of this is very interesting for race realists, but it does speak to the great divide in the American culture. The sort of people reading Architectural Digest are the sort of people who enjoy lecturing the rest of us about race. These are the people telling us that diversity is our strength, yet when it comes to where they live and where they visit, diversity is the last thing they want to see. Baltimore has some spectacular Federal architecture, but you can be sure Architectural Digest is not telling its readers to visit Charm City.

The challenge before us in the Dissident Right is not to shake our fists at the gross hypocrisy of the good whites. That’s been done to death by Buckley Conservatives and Civic Nationalists. The good whites simply don’t care. My acquaintance in Arlington Massachusetts will forever hate me for pointing out to him that his town is as white as Reykjavik. The challenge is to convince the good whites that the rest of us want the same things they want. We want our towns to have the same complexion as their towns,

That would be mighty white of them.

This post has already been linked to 3666 times!

I had not looked at last year’s predictions since I posted them, so I was a little surprised by how many of them turned out to be right. The prediction about Trump and Republicans pushing through a big tax bill was pretty spot on. Trump has also attacked the regulatory code as I predicted. I did predict the GOP would do some rollback on ObamaCare, which did not happen, other than repeal of the mandate. I was also right on the climate change stuff. Trump has reversed Federal policy on climate change and faced little resistance.

I did not get the China stuff right. Of course, it is hard to know as the ChiComs are good at hiding their systemic trouble.The fact that no one is talking about China’s economy these days suggests the boom times are over, so maybe I was just a year early. I missed on the Middle East stuff, but there’s no shame in that. I did hit a home run on the gene editing prediction. I was also prescient on the alt-right in-fighting. In fairness, that was so obvious I can’t take credit for that one. Pretty much the only thing they do well is squabble.

So, what are the signs telling me this year?

The Trump agenda will trundle along with the negotiations over DACA amounting nothing, as the Democrats find that there is no constituency for the program. Instead, it will be allowed to expire and Trump will be painted as the bad guy, but no one will care, including Trump. Instead, the focus will be on the infrastructure bill, which will turn into a massive Christmas tree that both parties get to decorate. In that bill will be some sort of second chance provision for DACA, along with money for that wall and other immigration items.

On the domestic political front, the Mueller investigation will keep taking on water as it becomes clear that the real issue is not Russian meddling in the presidential election, but FBI meddling in the election. Trump may even appoint a new special prosecutor to dig into the FBI, Uranium One and the DOJ shenanigans. This will begin to spill into the midterms, as the Republicans figure out that this is a chance for them to blunt Democrat gains. The Democrats will pickup some seats in the House, but lose some seats in the Senate.

This will be the year that gene editing in health care moves to center stage. Researchers in California used a new technique in 2017 to alter a patient’s DNA in an effort to treat a metabolic disease called Hunter syndrome. Health care is about to make a tremendous leap forward with respect to treating genetic disorders. Similarly, micro-technology is about to revolutionize medical testing with trackable pills that collect information about a patient throughout their day. The morality of new medicine starts to get serious attention.

One of the consequences of the big GOP tax bill will be the impact it will have on Europe’s not so robust economy. The disparity in corporate tax rates was a boon to Europe, but now the roles are reversed and companies will begin to repatriate cash and jobs to the United States this year. This will put more pressure on the EU and on pro-EU parties, as the nationalist parties are just starting the get their act together. This will also cause the Brexit negotiations to fail and it  will bring down the Theresa May government.

At the same time, the various nationalist parties on the Continent will continue to grow their support due to the intractable migrant problem and the establishment’s inability to formulate a coherent response. Emmanuel Macron will push through a set of immigration reforms that will legitimize the nationalists parties and increase demands for reform in the rest of the EU. Even more frightening to the European establishment, Sebastian Kurz, the new Austrian Chancellor, will start talking with the Visegrád Group about cooperation.

While electric car sales will continue to grow, they will remain a toy for the upper middle-class. The real growth in electric vehicles will be at the lower end. Electrically assisted bicycles, self-balancing one wheel scooters, powered skateboards and hi-tech mobility scooters for old people will become the next big thing. Electric cars face all sorts of obstacles, but new battery technology will open the door for micro-travel devices that are relatively cheap and meet the demands for old people and urban residents.

The much anticipated IPO of Saudi Aramco will not be done publicly. Bankers in London and New York have been maneuvering to get what many think will be the biggest IPO ever. Instead, the Saudis will opt for a private offering and it will not be the trillion dollar event everyone expects. This will lead to speculation about the stability of the kingdom and questions about the future of the House of Saud. Saudi Arabia is basically a hedge fund with a country attached. Aramco’s stock price will be the measure of Saudi health.

Finally, the New York Yankees will be the first team in baseball history to lose all 162 regular season games. The embarrassment will cause city officials to evict the team, forcing them to move to New Jersey. The enormity of this sporting catastrophe will be eclipsed by the sudden bankruptcy of the English Premiere League. The death of professional football in England will have a domino effect, resulting in the collapse of all professional football leagues, even the NFL, which is a different football.

That’s it for this year. It has been a another great year for the blog, adding tens of thousands of new readers and many new commenters. I appreciate everyone taking the time out of their day to read and respond. It has also been a great start to the podcast, despite the fact I have done very little to promote it. As has been the case with the blog, the podcast audience grows by word of mouth. I appreciate everyone posting links on social media and recommending me to their friends and enemies. I truly appreciate it.

Happy New Year to one and all.

This post has already been linked to 10784 times!

I decided to do the very first New Year’s podcast while stinking drunk and staggering around outside with strangers. It is the tradition, after all, to get obliterated on December 31st, waiting for the calendar to change. Well, I can only assume, as I have not been outside, much less partying, on New Year’s Eve in decades.

In fact, I don’t recall the last time I was up past midnight on the big night. I’m not really sure why I have no interest in the custom. I like drinking and I like staying up late, but I never got into ringing in the new year. In my youth it just seemed like a lot of work to accomplish very little, so I was never interested in it. Instead, I’d watch some Three Stooges reruns and make it an early night..

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. YouTube has the four longer segments from the show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones.

This Week’s Show

Contents

• 00:00: Opening
• 02:00: The Corruption Timeline (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 12:00: Xirl Science (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link) (Link)
• 22:00: The Hedge Fund State (Link)
• 32:00: George Lincoln Rockwell (Link) (Link)
• 42:00: Health Care (Link)
• 47:00: The War On White (Link)
• 52:00: Bodymore, Murderland (Link)
• 57:00: Closing

Direct Download

The iTunes Page

Google Play Link

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

Is North Korea about to collapse?

That’s the question Don Surber asks in this post last week. He is looking at the recent defections of soldiers and civilians. We have at least one soldier, an elite soldier no less, who simply walked across the border unmolested. Maybe this happens from time to time, but the impression from news reports is that the Norks guard that border ferociously. The Norks have special units that do nothing but roam the border looking for anyone trying to flee. Here’s a recent video of them shooting a guy trying to escape.

Surber is looking at these recent incidents where North Koreans have managed to escapade unmolested and compares it to the last days of the Soviet empire. There’s also the fact that the one soldier was from an elite unit. That seems unusual. There was also the solider that escaped and was found to be infested with parasites, suggesting the regime is struggling to care for even the soldiers that protects it. The Kim regime can only survive if it has the absolute loyalty of the military, so they have to make sure they are fed.

I think we can also wonder if the recent Chinese cooperation may be another signal that all is not well in the hermit kingdom. It’s reasonable to assume that the Chinese know the most of any outsiders about what is going on inside the country. The assumption in the West is that they were willing to prop up the Norks, in order to avoid dealing with the collapse. Maybe they have decided that Kim’s days are numbered, no matter what they do, so they are now looking to turn the inevitable into an opportunity.

American military intelligence probably knows a great deal about what is happening inside North Korea, but it is tightly held information. As a result, the public defense experts have no idea what’s happening. Trump’s dramatic ramp up of pressure is reminiscent of what we did with the Russians in the 1980’s. Reagan’s great insight, and it was truly his insight, was that the Russians simply could not compete with the West, if we got our act together economically. That proved to be correct. The Russians were spent as an empire.

Maybe that is what Trump is sensing. A generation ago, standard operating procedure in the US was to try and negotiate with the Russians. It was done on the assumption that the Soviets were strong. Reagan’s insight was that they were weak, so he abandoned appeasement. Trump seems to be going down the same path with the Norks. He has said that negotiations are a waste of time. That would explain the build up of assets in the region, along with the moves to cut off the North’s access to hard currency.

It’s all speculation, but we can tease out some things from what we do know about the Norks. Countries have a finite amount of resources. Some portion are used for the necessities of maintaining society. Some portion are used for defense. Some other portion is used by the ruling class to maintain their positions. Similarly, the ruling class will use some portion of their available capital to expand their position, both internally and externally. A country is not a closed system, but about 90% of its resources are internal.

It is assumed that the Norks have a lot of human capital, relative to rogue regimes in the Arab world. This is based on the unspoken assumption that Asians are smart, while Arabs are dumb. The Norks have split the atom and developed respectable missile technology, which is more than Saddam was able to do and more than the Persians have mustered to this point. The Norks have also shown themselves to be very resourceful in gaining access to the global arms market and the global drug trade. The Kim regime is clever.

That said, we know that most of the population is living with barely enough to eat and the bare minimum of health care. So much so that the North Koreans are shorter than the South Koreans. We know from Western history, that as nutrition improved in the West, Europeans got taller. People also got smarter. The Flynn Effect is most likely a result of nutrition and health care. The Norks are probably experiencing a reverse of this, where starvation and poor sanitation are lowering the average IQ of the population.

Then there is the math of every extraction regime. North Korea is closer to a feudal society than a modern country. Every level of society sees the excess from its labor siphoned off by the layer above it. This not only stifles productivity and innovation, it encourages corruption at all levels. This was the experience in the Soviet Union, where trust in institutions fell to zero. That was the joke among Soviet workers. The government would pretend to pay the workers and the workers pretended to work.

The point here is that the sum of human capital in North Korea is probably an order of magnitude less than many assume. They have a large enough smart fraction to build crude nuclear bombs and launch some long range missiles into the sea. They don’t have enough of a smart fraction to do that, feed their people and provide the basics of health care. Throw in the fact that Kim may have been forced to kill off many of the regime’s best people in order to solidify control, and North Korea could be very weak right now.

In fact, the saber rattling may be an attempt to get South Korea and China to put pressure on the US, in order to get some food and medical relief. That has worked with past presidents. Clinton, Bush and Obama were all willing to cut a deal. Trump calling the bluff may be why the Nork solider was allowed to just walk across the border to the South. He is carrying antibodies for anthrax, suggesting he has been exposed to it. That could be intended to send a message that the Norks have it and will use it in a war.

It’s impossible to know the true state of affairs in North Korea. One feature of all authoritarian regimes is a high degree of secrecy and deception. The same skills used to lie to the people, are used by the political factions inside the regime to lie to one another and to the outside world. The one thing low trust societies are good at producing is gifted liars. Still, the fundamental math of society strongly suggest the Norks are much weaker than they wish the world to know. That may explain the shift in US policy under Trump.

Emmerson Mnangagwa has taken over Zimbabwe, by outmaneuvering the 93-year old Robert Mugabe and promising immunity for Mugabe and his family. By the standards of Africa, the transition has been smooth and orderly. Mnangagwa is taking over without having to fight a civil war and he will not be killing his political opponents. The Mugabe faction has aged off and the remaining elements are willing to take a payoff to retire from politics. It has been one of the more peaceful transfers of power in African history

Zimbabwe is of interest here, because of its history, but also because it has been a great case study of what happens under African rule. When the country was born, following the Lancaster House Agreement and subsequent elections, Zimbabwe was one of the wealthier countries in sub-Saharan Africa. This was despite a long 15-year civil war between white Rhodesia and two black guerrilla movements, both backed by the Soviet Block and independent black nations. The new nation was born with a lot of advantages.

Zimbabwe’s first president, after independence, was a guy named Canaan Banana, no kidding, but he was just a puppet. Robert Mugabe’s ZANU party had won the nation’s first election, making him Prime Minister and Head of Government. His first act was to send the Fifth Brigade, a North Korean-trained military unit, into Matabeleland, the home of the main opposition party. This unit slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians accused of supporting dissidents, which meant supporting the wrong side in the election.

In the first ten years of independence, Zimbabwe’s economy grew steadily worse as Mugaba grabbed land from white farmers and stole anything that he could steal. The decline in the economy and the spread of HIV, resulted in civil unrest and strikes by the civil service. The answer to this was repression and more land grabs. The interesting thing about the land reform efforts is they were pretty much the opposite of what the nation needed, but they were exactly what Mugabe needed. It helped him keep power.

Of course, no summary of Mugabe’s policies can skip past his debasing of the currency in an effort to inflate away the nation’s debts. As is always the case, this produced a vicious cycle, where each round of money printing warranted another round of money printing. In a few years locals were carrying around billion dollar banknotes. By the end of the last decade, the largest note was 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollars. They were useless, as locals used American dollars, but they did make for funny gag gifts and novelty items.

The new regime in Zimbabwe takes over a busted country. In constant dollars, per capita GDP is a third of what it was at independence. The agricultural sector is flat on its back and even mining, which is run by European firms, struggles due to the violence and general chaos. Mnangagwa takes over promising a new era and he says that rebuilding Zimbabwe is the top priority. More important, he is hinting at political reforms to bring in all of the factions of the country, including the remaining whites and exiled non-blacks.

That last bit is a main point of interest. The best way to describe Mugabe’s treatment of whites is as a decades long act of revenge. The best way to describe Mugabe’s rule was as a decades long proof that Ian Smith and his supporters in the West, we right all along about the realities of African politics. The fact that white farmers are being asked to return, and many are returning, is the first flicker of hope for the country in two generations. It means that the country may not be forever condemned to squalor.

It’s easy to be overly optimistic about Africa, as the Africans have an uncanny habit of finding the bad option and then making it even worse. There’s also the fact that Emmerson Mnangagwa is not exactly a break with the past. He is a ZANU party insider, who was an integral part of implementing Mugabe’s policies. He is not called the “crocodile” because he is a sentimental lover of a free and open society. People who get too close to Mnangagwa, like people get too close to crocodiles, usually come to bad ends.

Even so, Zimbabwe has a lot going for it. Like Botswana, it is not fractured into a bunch of different tribes. The Shona are about 70% of the population and the Ndebele are about 20%, with a distinct homeland. Also like Botswana, it has a lot of natural wealth and the willing support of neighboring countries, like Botswana and South Africa. If the government re-institutes property rights, it would see a flood of English speaking companies and tourists, coming in to spend money and invest in the economy.

The comparisons to Botswana are important. It is the one nation in sub-Saharan Africa that has not been a disaster. It has a per-capita GDP of $28,000. More important, it has a highly diverse economy, so the median is higher than the rest of Africa. It has also enjoyed relatively peaceful politics, holding elections and avoiding civil war, revolts and genocide. It also has one of the lowest violent crime rates on the Continent. The murder rate is a fifth of Baltimore. By the standards of Africa, Botswana is a paradise.

Why should anyone care?

Well, the most important graph in the world is going to make everyone care in the coming decades. While it is unreasonable to think that most of African countries can sustain a modern economy, some of them can be much better than they are now. That would mean better civil control and more responsible government. They may never be Athens, but they can be assets in dealing with the more dysfunctional Africa societies. At the minimum, there can be a few less African countries dependent on the white world for survival.