The NBA season has kicked off this week and if you are a white guy, you most likely don’t care all that much. That’s not to say that no white people follow the NBA. It’s just that basketball, particularly the NBA, is the sport for black people. My guess is 90% of black people would list the NBA as their favorite sport, while 90% of whites would have the NBA down on the list or not on the list. One reason for that is the league is dominated by black guys. As this site details, the honkies are thin on the ground in the modern NBA.

According to The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the NBA was 74.3 percent black during the 2015-16 season and 81.7 percent were people of color. The study said that the NBA was 18.3 percent white last season, which was 5 percent less than the season before. The league was also a record 22.3 percent international last season.

That 18.3 percent of whites in the NBA from TIDES also includes non-Americans such as Europeans, Canadians and Australians of white descent. Entering the 2015-16 season, the NBA had 42 white American-born players. The NBA had its inaugural season 70 years ago with a league full of white players. As of Sunday, there were 43 white Americans on 30 NBA teams with the season starting Tuesday. Eight teams didn’t have a white American player entering last season, while seven teams don’t have one now.

Unsaid here is the fact that the stars of the league are all black. The last prominent honky was Dirk Nowitzki. Before that, it was Larry Bird. Before that it was John Havlicek in the 70’s. In my lifetime I can count the white stars of the NBA on one hand so it is reasonable to say that the league has been dominated by the brothas since forever. Despite all the preaching and browbeating from our rulers, everyone knows that basketball is the black man’s game. Like a lot of reality, though, it remains unsaid.

The first bit of unintended humor in the piece is when the writer asks the honkies what they learned about black culture as tokens in the black man’s world.

“I like hip-hop, yeah.”

“I like to listen to hip-hop”

“I have definitely picked up on slang, music and food”

“I listen to more rap, hip-hop in the locker room.”

Not a word about peanut butter.

Anyway, the truly hilarious part is when the writer asked the honkies why there are so few white guys in the NBA. J. J. Redick’s answer suggests he had a mild stroke when asked the question:

It does seem there are less and less white Americans. I’d like to know with [Kirk] Hinrich and Steve Blake out this year, how many white guards are there this year in the NBA? Are there even five? If you’re 6-feet-10 inches, can walk, are skilled and can chew gum and all that, defend the rim, you’ll have a job. It doesn’t matter what your skin color is. You’ll have a job.

I don’t know if it’s other sports. Part of it is the game is faster. Players play in space. There is more of an emphasis on shooting. Maybe they are not being taught in suburbia. I don’t know. I don’t know what the answer to that is.

The rest of the answers from the other players range from gibberish to some version of “Please God let this end before I say something stupid.” You can’t blame them for it as the surest way for a white guy to end up in a public struggle session is to talk about race. The one guy, who said what everyone knows is true, is some guy named Parsons. He said, “The NBA is a collection of some of the most athletic guys in the world. And white guys just aren’t that athletic.”  Yep, there’s the answer.

The NBA altered the rules of their game over the years to make it a running and jumping sport. Whether or not this was intended to make it a black guy sport is hard to say, but given the demographics of the league’s ownership, it is a safe assumption. This is also a league that embraced gangster rap and the hip-hop lifestyle in the 90’s so it is fair to assume they really want to be a black league, except for the ticket base, which remains conspicuously white. Going to an NBA game for these people is an act of contrition.

The lunacy of the modern age is on full display here. Baseball get grief because the makeup of their players matches up pretty well with America. About 13% of baseball players are black. There are loads of Hispanics, both local and foreign, as well as Asian players. Even the management positions have long looked like America, in terms of racial makeup. The NBA is nothing like the demographics of America and it is celebrated as a model of diversity. In modern America, this is diversity, while this is racism.

How long people refuse to notice this is the question of our age.

In the middle of the 19th century, European politics was about the role of the monarchy, nationalism, democracy, capitalism and the emerging political consciousness of urban working classes. The latter is where communism found its opening. In America, politics was about slavery, sectionalism, the territories and protectionism. Monarchism was obviously not of any interest to Americans, but neither was communism. It is a good reminder that politics is always local to both time and place.

It does not always feel that way though. If you were a Frenchman in 1970, the big debates were about the same stuff as they were in the 1940’s. Sure, the Algerian question was a hot topic in the Fourth Republic and not so much in the Fifth Republic, but the ideological landscape was the same. Similarly, US politics settled into a center-left consensus after World War II and remained so throughout the Cold War. The topics changed from decade to decade, but the ideological landscape did not change very much.

I picked these two periods for a reason. The Revolutions of 1848, or the Springtime of Nations, was a time when old ideological frameworks were collapsing and new ones were emerging. The remaining feudal arrangements were being toppled in favor of nationalist arrangements.The post-war period a century later was a time when the new arrangements, the Pax Americana, were settling in across the West. The point being is that all epics have a start and a finish, with the former beginning in the latter.

It is generally assumed that we are living in an age where the old order is under pressure and new challengers are rising up to offer an alternative to the status quo. Is this just the the Pax Americana unraveling as the United States staggers along into decline as the world’s remaining super power? Are we seeing the emergence of a post-liberal consensus built around supra-national organizations controlled by global elites? If so, is the nationalist reaction just a rearguard action? Or is this the end of the liberal era entirely?

One thing seems clear and that is American Progressivism is dead as an ongoing ideological movement. The managerial class still uses the language and tactics of the Left, but they are fully committed to global capitalism. Hillary Clinton is the face of the Left and she is wholly owned by Wall Street. Her embrace of open borders cuts what is left of the cord linking Progressives with the labor movements out of which they grew in the prior century. A liberal from the 60’s, looking at the current Left, would be horrified.

The remaining radicals on the Left are just posers. These are the people who embrace things like structural racism, gender identity, sexism, climate change, and economic inequality. Guys like Ta-Nehisi Coates are just ornaments for managerial class types to decorate their cultural institutions. Since most of what these people say and write is nonsense, they can be indulged. Again, a Hillary Clinton can be seen with a copy of a Piketty book, on her way to give a speech at Goldman Sachs.

Similarly, the European Left is a dead man walking. The British Labour Party now looks like a comedy skit from Monty Python. The Lib-Dems have collapsed entirely. The two main British parties are the SNP and the Tories, both embrace technocracy. It is a similar story on the Continent as the the main stream parties, both Left and Right slowly fuse together in defense of Europe against the rise of nationalist parties. As in America, the European Left is married to global finance and managerial authoritarianism.

What the 19th century made clear is that constitutional monarchy was just a transition phase, from aristocratic rule to liberal rule. Something similar may be true about social democracy. The Left has always dreamed of one-world global socialism. Communism was always intended to obliterate national borders. Socialism, in its various national manifestations, may simply have been a transitional phase. Once the nations of the West are ruled by like minded technocrats, the next logical step is merger.

Alternatively, this could be the end phase of the radicalism born in the French Revolution. The rise of traditionalist, reactionaries and nationalists all over the West could be a classical liberal reaction to the restoration of a new aristocratic system of rule. Instead of a ruling elite selected by magic blood, the restored aristocracy will be a mandarin system based on the acquisition of credentials, only attainable by the sons and daughters of the managerial elite. Instead of inherited titles, they have legacy admissions to elite colleges.

This is all idle speculation, of course, but like the people of the mid-19th century, in the midst of the revolts, we are witnessing a great transition away from the old system to something new. The Left that has been a feature of the West, the cornerstone of the ruling consensus, is going away. Socialist economics are dead. Communism is a museum piece. National liberation, a staple of post-colonial radical politics in the last century, has been thrown down the memory hole. All that’s left of radicalism is nostalgia.

In the Communist Manifesto, Marx described the periodic crisis of capitalism in terms of “the enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces.” Marx argued that the productive forces unleashed by capitalism eventually get out of hand and the result is excess, thus collapsing the value of the means of production. The capital classes remedy this by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces, the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of existing markets.

Marx gets blamed for the 100 million or so murders committed in his name, but he did make a few insightful observations. For instance, the nature of business to ruthlessly exploit existing markets in pursuit of growth, even when it becomes self-defeating, is still true today. Similarly, business will bankrupt itself in pursuit of new markets, all in the name of growth. Much of what plagues us these days is the result of global business desperately searching for a new market to exploit. It is also at the heart of what is ailing the NFL.

A lot of people are blaming the idiotic and offensive antics of the players for the sudden drop in ratings. Football players have short careers and most end up broke soon after leaving the game, but most men envy them anyway. Boys grow up wanting to be a sports star and that admiration carries over into adulthood, long after we know the reality of sport. Colin Kaepernick disrespecting the fans and the country by kneeling during the anthem grates on people. Normal people think he is an ungrateful prick.

That may be part of the problem the NFL is facing, but my sense is the impact is trivial. Maybe it is the last straw for some people, but if you are a sports fan, you are willing to overlook the antics of the meat heads wearing your team’s colors. The individual players are not all that important to the drama. The point of professional sport is to simulate the tribal warfare for which all of us were born. Instead of defeating the neighboring tribe’s men and stealing their women, we watch our team beat their team at a ball game.

The real issue that is plaguing the NFL is they have run out of ways to separate their customers from their money. In fact, they ran out of sensible ways to do that a long time ago. That’s why they have started holding games in foreign countries. They think they can maybe find new customers to exploit. The games they hold in London, for example, cost the league millions, but they hope that Brits will get hooked on the narcotic of the NFL and cough up millions for the product. So far, no good.

As Marx observed, they are also ruthlessly trying to exploit their existing market. Go to an NFL game and you come away feeling like you have just been mugged. It’s not the absurd prices for everything. They constantly bombard the fan with marketing, because they expect the fan to commit his life to the corporate entity known as his team. Go to a Dallas Cowboy game, for example, and you are treated to a long pre-game ceremony about how you are not just a fan, you are soldier in the army of the Dallas Cowboys.

Of course, most people consume their sports via the television and that’s where you see the ravenous appetite of the NFL as they ruthlessly exploit their market. It used to be that the NFL games were played at one o’clock on Sunday afternoon. Now, there are games all day on Sunday. There’s a game on Sunday night and Monday night. Now we have a game on Thursday night. If that is not enough, there’s the NFL package for your phone, tablet and whatever else you use to consume media.

The games are now more advertising than games. As the linked article points out, the games themselves are only about 10-15 minutes of action. The rest of the presentation is fluff and most of that is advertising. There’s a play and then the refs have to hold a meeting about it. That means a break to sell product for three or four minutes. They get back to the game for a few plays and then it is time to have a break for more commercials. It’s why the Red Zone Channel is so popular. It has no ads.

The NFL is in many ways emblematic of the modern credit economy. Rich guys buy the teams on borrowed money at artificially low interest rates. They don’t really care that much about the cash flow, like a normal business. Their game is to inflate the value of the franchise over the duration of their investment. To do that means maximizing the “brand” and that costs money, which is why they load up their product with ads to the point where it is more ads than product. The NFL is a big bust out.

What’s happening to the NFL is their endless pursuit of growth has put the live product out of reach for most people. The TV version is exhausting the viewers with marketing and advertising. In an effort to fully exploit its market, it is destroying the desirability of the product. This is not exactly as Marx imagined the crisis of capitalism, but it is a good lesson on the fantasy of endless growth. The whole point of the NFL as a business is to get bigger and that cannot go on forever.

This does not mean the NFL is about to go out of business, but it serves as a useful lesson about the limits of the asset model. The modern credit economy is based on the idea that asset values can grow forever, therefore the credit base can grow forever. The NFL is based on the same premise. In both cases, the effort to keep the fantasy alive in the face of objective reality, is doing more harm than good. The question is how long does it take the people in charge to figure it out.

Imagine you are in a room with six sides and each wall has a door. If you leave the room through one of the doors, you end up in another six-sided room with doors. Assuming no obstacle, you can move in a straight line in any of six directions. If there obstacles, then things gets more complex. Anyone old enough to remember the Avalon Hill war games from the 70’s will be familiar with this concept.  The idea was to simulate the 360-degree movement of the real world, but with segmented game space.

Now, imagine yourself in that first room and let’s assume it is filled with sights, sounds, smells and all sorts of other things that you can experience with your senses. So much so, in fact that you can’t quite experience and remember all of them. You spend as much time as you want, studying as much of the room as possible, before moving to the next room. Let’s say you master 80% of what there is to master. Then you move onto the next room to experience whatever lies within.

Here’s the thing though. You can only remember so much before the memory begins to fade and you forget some things. When you get into the new space, you have new stuff to process and organize in your head. Making room for the new stuff means forgetting some of the old stuff. Let’s say you forget a third of what you tried to remember of the first room by the time you get to the 80% point in the new room. Your head now contains 66% of 80% of the first room and 80% of the second room.  You can do the math. I’ll wait.

If you move into the third room, you forget even more of the first room. You can see where this is headed. Keep moving from room to room and before long you only have vague recollections of what happened in the first rooms where you started. Even if you write stuff down you’re recollections are bound to get out of whack. When it comes to why you picked one door over another or what you were thinking at the time, well, your memory will be clouded by the present. It’s called recency bias.

Now, instead of you moving from room to room, imagine it is generations of men. The first generation operates in the first room. The next generation moves onto the second room, taking with them as much as they can recall being taught to them by the first generation. Then the third generation moves onto its phase of existence, having only second hand memories of their grandparent’s age. It does not take but a few generations before the people in the present are thoroughly detached from their ancestors. All they have are recollections of recollections.

That’s where the modern conservative finds himself in this age of turmoil. I was listening to someone on the radio the other day, lamenting the fact that no matter what happens in the election, the “conservative movement” is mortally wounded. The Trump insurgency has forever marginalized those rock-ribbed conservatives and their dreams of managerial technocracy. They did not put it that way, but that was the flavor of it. The person saying this clearly had no recollection of where the Right started or the road it had taken to end up at what some think is its terminus.

The fact is, Official Conservatism is so far from where it started, it is a crime against the language to call it “conservative.” The traditional American Right was always an individual liberty cause, which starts and ends with freedom of association. Everything that can be “conservative” rests on the basic idea that you have a basic right to associate with whom you like, when you like, on the terms you like. No one on the modern Right has talked about that in so long it is now forbidden knowledge.

The people writing at the big foot conservative publications never think about such things. Most of them came into the world of political ideology thinking that conservatism was about cutting taxes and losing wars of choice. The geezers came along when conservatism was focused on fighting the Russians and trying to figure out how to get around Roe in order to curtail abortion. The neocons are pretty much just hyper-violent globalists with a bizarre grudge against the Russians.

It’s why Trump’s talk about law and order, for example, sounds so alien and weird to the modern right-winger. To their ears, it almost sounds like Trump is hostile to government, which is crazy talk on the Right these days. That’s because the modern conservative is so far removed from the time when conservatism stood for ordered liberty that it is no longer even a recollection of a recollection. It is no longer part of their mental landscape so it falls outside their definition of conservative.

One can go on forever about the wrong turns the Right has made over the decades. Lord knows I’ve written enough on the topic. None of which really matters all that much, as the modern Right is where it is, in this time, a time when it no longer has anything to offer those outside the statist ideology of modern globalism. The alternative to post-national managerialism cannot be a different version of post-national managerialism. That’s why people, particularly young people, are turning their back on it, heading off to other rooms.

I read a book years back titled Banana Sunday by a former Telegraph reporter named Chris Munnion. The book is a memoir about his career covering Africa for the British papers. Munnion was an old school reporter. By that I mean he did not subscribe to narrative journalism where the reporters collect up facts to fit the pre-written story. In his memoir he covers the rise of that form of journalism and why it was and is totally insane. That’s not the point of the book, but it is an interesting side bar. Otherwise, the book is about Africa.

The book is full of a great observations about the Dark Continent, but the part that stuck with me is on the fall of Rhodesia. There are two schools of thought on what happened in Rhodesia. One says it was inevitable, as Africans would eventually revolt against their white rulers just on racial grounds. We don’t hear this sort of argument much these days, as it is just politely assumed. The fact that what came next for what is now called Zimbabwe is not exactly the ringing endorsement for the claims of the multiculturalists.

The other school of thought says that Zimbabwe is the inevitable end of multiculturalism. The elevation of non-whites to preferred status is simply viewed as a surrender by whites to non-whites, who do what victors always do in ethnic conflict. They slaughter and subjugate the vanquished. In 1960 Rhodesia was 4% white, with the prosperous portion in the south being 7% white. The total population was 8 million. Today it is all black with a population of 15 million. It is also one of the poorest countries in the world.

The thing about these competing theories is they are not really in competition as they both accept the inevitable conclusion. In the West, the people in charge are possessed with a bizarre fatalism about migration out of the south into the north. Exactly no one makes the claim that importing millions of Muslims into Europe, for example, is good for Europeans. They simply claim that it is inevitable and since the mystery forces of history will it, it must be the morally correct thing to embrace. Right side of history and all that.

You see this in the increasingly bizarre acting out by America’s PC elites on the college campus. This story from Emory University is one that caught my attention, because it shows that we are a long way from the old Civil Rights days of equality and integration. There’s little doubt that the organizer spends his free time nursing anti-white revenge fantasies, where his tribe rises up and smashes the Pale Penis People. After all, if your organizing principle is hatred of the honkies, what else are you dreaming about?

If these sorts of things were organized by fringe minority nutters, it would be of no consequence. The truth is multiculturalism shrivels up in an instant without the support of white elites. They invented it and they sustain it. It is their religion. Non-whites are vastly more practical, but they play along as this is their ticket up the social ladder. Fifty years ago black elites named their kids after Founders and preached the Protestant work ethic to one another. Today, they give their kids nonsense names and preach hatred of whitey.

When you read about Rhodesia the thing that jumps out is that many of the whites in charge of the country were just as delusional as their superiors back home. Both assumed things about the black population that have proven to be completely false. The people on the ground, however, had enough of a survival instinct to work their way through reality to a solution. The European elites were simply too drunk on multiculturalism to see what was happening and anyway, they were isolated from it.

There’s a similar vibe going on in the West today. The overgrown boys and girls romping around the campus kindergartens of America are just high on the fumes of their own sanctimony. They can indulge all of their fantasies because they are inoculated from reality, at least for now. They can rail against white males and turn them into lepers on campus because there’s no risk. Even if public pressure thwarts these efforts, guys like DeLa Sweeney suffer no personal or professional consequences.

The big difference between what happened in post-colonial Africa and what is happening in the West now is there is no escape. Instead, the elites, based on and around the campus, both corporate and academic, imagine a world like New Haven. Yale is a safe, secure world where the modern Eloi can live self-actualizing lives. Occasionally one of them is eaten by the Morlocks living down the hill in the rough parts of New Haven, but otherwise they are immune to the reality of daily life. That’s the future our elites dream for themselves.

I’m sure it will work out just fine.

Yesterday, professional conman David French posted this ridiculous sob story, where he nails himself to the cross, claiming he was sent to save mankind from Donald Trump. The result of his efforts has been a journey of suffering. It’s all nonsense, of course. Put yourself or your opinions out into the pubic and you will attract all sorts of nuts. I get on-line stalkers and weirdos all the time and I’m just running a blog. Go on TV and the pool of potential jerks and meanies goes up exponentially. It’s one of the trade-offs.

I’ve been pointing out for  along time that French is a nutter.  He’s the sort of guy that lives by the credo, “whatever is worth doing is worth overdoing.” These sorts of people can never dabble in anything, They get into something and it becomes all consuming. They begin to organize their lives around the obsession. Then all of a sudden, they lose interest in it and find some new obsession. You see that with French, who lurches from one fanaticism to the next. In every case, he goes well beyond what is reasonable.

Glenn Beck has this same defect. He could not be just a guy at the bar, he had to be a legendary drinker. Then it was drugs. Then it was religion, politics, history and I think now he is working on the details for his planned Utopia. The thing you see with Beck, that you see with French, is that their obsessions are not internal. They get into things that they can make a grand show of in order to impress people they see as their betters. Beck’s Blaze operation is an obvious attempt to replicate what Roger Ailes did with Fox News.

Whether or not nutjobs like French and Beck possess the self-awareness to know what they are doing is debatable. My hunch is the guys with the religious aspect to their lunacy secretly see themselves as the second coming. Beck and French both pitch themselves as prophets sent to save mankind. It’s not explicit, as that would get them locked up, but it’s just under the surface. If Beck’s thing ends like The People’s Temple, no one would be surprised as he increasing sounds like a cult leader.

The only reason I’m aware of French piece is Jonah Goldberg was flogging it on Twitter last night. Goldberg used to wave Beck around like a Medusa head back in the day. Before that he was fond of using Rod Dreher as his spear catcher. The fact that both were becoming religious nuts at the time suggests something. Now he is using French to step on mines for him, suggesting it is getting near the end of French’s run in the big foot conservative press. Maybe Beck has an extra purple shroud for him.

Anyway, what I pointed out on Twitter is that this is pretty much a classic response from a conman when his scheme falls apart. They also play the victim card. Their whole raison d’être is to exploit the virtues of others. They prey on the trust of good people. When that runs aground, they prey on the sympathy of good people. The game here is to shift the focus away from the traitorous behavior of the NeverTrump loons and onto a few potty mouthed villains on Twitter. It’s just another grift intended to victimize good people.

One of the responses had a pic of French on one of his TV appearances. This was on MSNBC and it occurred to me that a good lesson for the alt-right, one the Left learned long ago, is to punish collaborators mercilessly. All of the big shot “conservatives” have a habit of working for media outlets at war with decent Americans. If you are working for the enemy, regardless of your reasons, you are working for the enemy. After liberation, the French shaved the heads of women who slept with Nazis.

That’s the lesson from the failure of Conservative Inc. They sold their collaboration as part of their clever plot to convince the enemy of the rightness of their cause. They were not collaborating. No! They were going into the lion’s den to confront Lefty in his own lair! We know now that that was always bullshit. They were paid actors in league with Progressives to fool decent people into quietly going along with the madness being foisted on us. It’s why these rocked ribbed conservatives are now on the side of the Left opposing Trump.

The alt-right and affiliated movements are suddenly getting many new recruits from the disbanding armies of the Official Right. With a bigger audience, the opportunities to make money inevitably creep into the minds of the entrepreneurial. There’s nothing wrong with making a living, but anyone doing so by going on the cable shows or collaborating with the major media should be assumed to be a collaborator. If Mike Cernovich wants to sell books and videos, that’s fine. When he starts turning up on Fox News, he should be assumed to be Cypher.

All wars are media wars and all wars require sacrifice. If the people offering themselves up as leaders of your thing are easily tempted by offerings from the other side, you can never trust them. No man is so virtuous that he can resist the highest bidder. If being on TV is your goal in life, you will sacrifice your cause for it. That’s what happened with National Review and the rest of Conservative Inc. Like petty nobles bribed with a few extra acres of land or merchants bought off with title, they decided it was better to live a lie than suffer for the cause.

One of the things normal people don’t get about Hillary Clinton is how seamlessly she fits into the moral universe of the ruling class. For instance, to normal people, lying is a bad thing. It lowers your status among the other Dirt People. In the Cloud, lying is a conditional concept. Lying to the Dirt People is fine. It’s what Cloud People must do to maintain order and assert their superiority. Lying to rivals while wrangling for power can be acceptable, as long as it does not reflect too poorly on the managerial class.

Another way to see how Hillary Clinton is emblematic of the managerial class is to examine her motivations. Normal people assume she is running for the White House as a power grab. It is assumed that politicians have big egos and winning office is driven by those big egos. That used to be true, but not in the modern managerial state. The real motivation is money. Most of the people in the managerial class are always aware of the fact they are not rich, at least not as rich as they deserve, and they hate it.

Hillary Clinton has always been obsessed with money. In Arkansas, she would complain constantly about not having enough money. Some will recall how she used to moan about how they were not rich enough when they left the White House. Presumably, that’s why they stole the furniture. All of her capers have been about turning her position or her husband’s position into cash for the family business. In the managerial class, credentials and connections are to be monetized. That’s their purpose.

Hillary Clinton did not weasel her way into the State Department gig because she wanted to burnish her foreign policy credentials. It was not about staying in the game. There was always a money angle. At State, she could travel the world, shaking down the rich and powerful for cash to her money laundering operation. Her husband could charge outlandish fees to give speeches on behalf of the foundation and maybe put in a good word, for the foreign potentate, with his old lady at the State Department.

Clinton’s run for the White House has a similar angle. This story about Clinton’s scheme for American retirement plans is a classic managerial class rake. Getting picked as one of the firms with a license to “manage’ these new accounts is a license to print money. The government will have to “supervise” this process, which means the bankers will now have a billion reasons to be on good terms with the government. Put another way, Team Clinton is planning to build a giant graft machine .

Now, Team Clinton will not benefit in the long run, but they are getting tens of millions in contributions now, because they are promising to push through this new plan. If Wall Street wanted to bring back slavery, Hillary would be talking like Colonel Sanders and singing Dixie during her speeches. Her political motivations are a manifestation of her financial ambitions. All over the managerial class, the game is to monetize access, power and prestige. It’s why Hillary fits in so well with these people.

For about twenty years, the managerial class has been trying to figure out how to get their mitts on American retirement funds stashed away in 401K’s. Talk to any Progressive and they will tell you how terrible these plans are, while they drone on about the terribleness of Wall Street. They floated a scheme in the 90’s called the Guaranteed Retirement Account that was like a 401K, except all funds were invested in US treasuries. This never got far as it was just a complicated tax and the math could never work.

This new scheme is simpler, but potentially much more lucrative to the managerial elite. If every American is required to have a retirement account, administered by a fund manager, that’s billions of new money siphoned off the real economy into the pockets of the financial sector. Better still, those funds will be controlled by Wall Street. They will put those funds into investments good for Wall Street. What’s good for the bankers is to be on good terms with the government. You see where this leads.

This is the way the managerial class works the rake. In less sophisticated countries, like say France, the politicians just raid the pension funds. It’s legal plunder. In the managerial state, the plunder is more nuanced, tarted up with soft feminine language like “inclusion” and “coming together for a common cause.” You can be sure that this plan will be sold as a way to bring the country together to solve our retirement problems for those who “play by the rules and just want a fair deal.”

What will happen, of course, is the same thing we saw with health care and pretty much every other part of the economy these days. It will be a bust out. The billions that pour into these new funds will be “invested” in things that benefit the rulers. Politicians will get advance notice on some new move so they can cash in their privileged status. The fund managers will kick back a piece of their rake to the politicians for the right to manage these funds. It will be systematic robbery of the middle class.

You would be forgiven for thinking that this sounds a lot like organized crime. That’s because it is organized crime, except the criminals write the laws, thus legalizing their plunder. This is a feature of the managerial state. It is the big rake. Instead of the criminals eluding the state in order to plunder the people, the criminals acquire credentials, which are a license to skim off a portion of middle class wealth. The whole point of winning office or gaining access is so you can get a taste of the skim.

Recently, I was involved, in a limited basis, with a bankruptcy. The company that went belly up had over a million dollars in debts and no assets. Most of their debt was in the form of accounts receivable, but they had some loans and leases as well. Up until the point they filed for bankruptcy protection, they had paid all of their bills on time. In fact, they paid most vendors in ten days, something that is just about unheard of these days. This prompt payment is what led their vendors to be so generous with them.

This story reminded me of something that happened years ago. There was a house party at a mansion (are there mansion parties?) and many party goers were out on a balcony of some sort that extended over the pool area. The balcony was large enough to hold dozens of people, but it started to give way due to the mass of people. Panic set in and that made things worse as the frightened party goers scrambled to get off the balcony. The whole thing collapsed and took a bunch of people down in the process.

The connection here is that it is human nature to observe the actions of others, trust those actions and to infer things from them. The vendors extended terms to that business saw that they paid in ten days and that others were more than happy to extend credit, so they did the same. The party goers saw everyone else out on the balcony and just assumed it must be safe. They never stopped to think that maybe it was not built to hold a hundred people. In both cases, when reality came rushing in, there was a rush to the exit.

That’s something I think about when I read stories like this regarding the global economy. The entirety of the world economy is built on one thing. That is the rock solid belief that the US government will never miss a debt payment and never devalue the dollar to arrest its debt. The entire global economy is built on the asset value of US Treasuries. If there ever comes a time when people begin to doubt the security of that debt, the panic will plunge the world into a new dark age or possible something worse.

The people in charge of the Federal Reserve understand this. The people running the ECB know this. The PBOC knows this. The masters of the universe all agree on one thing and that is they have to protect the foundation stone of the world economy. Guarding the underlying stability of the financial system is their overriding concern. That means they are willing to risk recession and maybe worse in order to protect the asset system. It’s not unreasonable from their perspective, but it does reveal the bigger problem.

That bigger problem is we have reached the logical end point of the credit economy. If the US economy does lurch into recession, the world economy will follow. The central banks will not have many options as they have used all of their big tools to prop up the asset base over the last decade. The Fed can lower rates a bit and maybe restart their Quantitative Easing program, but they will have little or no success in blunting a recession. The world will just have to wait it out and hope for the best.

That is not how the world ever works. A 2017 recession will cause the new US president to propose “solutions” and new governments in Europe will demand relief from Brussels. Bad economics always leads to worse politics and the politics of the West are already fairly rotten. The rise of nationalist and populist parties in Europe will only complicate an already fragile set of arrangements. Imagine if something like a Syriza were to take over the Italian government just as the world is headed to recession. Fun times.

The fact is, there’s a limit to how much the world can borrow from the future. We are probably near that limit. With recession looming, the ability of central bankers to blunt it with credit issuance is limited. That means it becomes a political problem. The record of politicians coming up with useful reforms in times of crisis is not good. What’s needed is a sustained and organized retreat from a money system that has outlived its usefulness, but that is probably impossible. Instead it means a disorganized and haphazard retreat.

As Evans-Pritchard concludes in his story, the possible outcomes are mostly grim with some of them very grim. If the central bankers get it wrong and plunge the economy into a deep recession, the politicians will most likely respond with massive spending of money that does not exist. That could unleash price inflation and a collapse of asset values. It’s not guaranteed, but the fact that it is one possible outcome is grim news in itself. The future is grim and things will mostly likely be worse than we expect.

The coining of the term “social media” was not the observation of a new phenomenon or some new way for people to interact. Bulletin board systems had been around since the early days of the internet. By the early 1990’s, there were millions of people posting on these systems. Newgroups and e-mail lists were also around in the early 1990’s, as cheap modems rolled out to the public. Message boards came along in the mid-90’s and soon took over as the dominant community platform on websites.

The new term to describe what was happening was the signal that new controls were coming to discourse on the internet. Something that is social, community owned, must have community standards. Those standards must be enforced and that means people must be given the authority to enforce those standards. In other words, it was the starter’s gun unleashing the totalitarians and pink skits to goose step in and start pushing people around on-line. Now, everywhere you go, there are posting rules and moderation.

What was fun about the internet in the olden thymes was the lack of rules, at least in terms of what you could say and how you could say it. Debates on bulletin boards or news groups were viscous vicious (It was late and one “slipped” through editing) and no holds barred. The term “troll” used to mean a poster who trolled for attention by posting provocative things. That’s what made these things fun. The early on-line communities were experiments in social dynamics, without the usual social limitations. This old list of Usenet types gives you a flavor of it.

Un-monitored and unregulated arenas for people to speak freely are a danger to the established order, so it did not take long for the usual suspects to start looking for ways to put an end to it. There was also the fact that millions of people were getting on-line, without knowing that internet culture was a bit rough. Polite always triumphs over right and before long all but the underground sites were heavily regulated. Sites like Faceberg and Twitter were built on the idea of pleasing the easily offended.

The trouble with policed communities, is the old saw about who will police the police. The sort of people that go in for being site moderators, are exactly the sort of people you never want in those positions. It’s not long before they start abusing their power and people start getting banned. It’s why Faceberg is mostly for old people to view pics of their grandchildren. It’s also why Twitter is imploding. When milquetoast users like Instapundit are deemed out of bounds, it’s a matter of time before all the interesting people are gone.

It’s also why alternatives to the mainstream options are growing up all of a sudden. Gab is the first alternative to Twitter with any chance of succeeding. Quitter is actually a better platform, but it has not caught on with English speakers. Gab is targeting the alt-right and troublemakers like me, promising an anything goes environment. They are also improving on the concept, rather than trying to please the managerial class. Longer message lengths and a better interface are the two obvious improvements over Twitter.

Vox Day is behind the alternative to Wikipedia. It’s called Infogalactic and it is intended to be the non-PC version of an on-line encyclopedia. Like Gab, they are using better technology to improve the user experience, but the real point of the effort is to be an alt-right alternative to Wikipedia. To quote the associated blog, “The single biggest problem with Wikipedia isn’t Jimmy Wales or its outmoded 1995 technology, but the fact that it is patrolled by 532 left-wing thought police who aggressively force their biased perspective on the rest of the world.”

My bet is someone is plotting an alternative to Facebook or simply something better, that serves a similar purpose, but without the social justice warriors. The fact is, Facebook is not doing anything all that clever from a technological point of view. There’s also the alternative media sites with open comments, that are the intellectual engine of the rebellion. This story in the neocon magazine American Interest about the boom in high brow sites catering to heterodox opinion is worth a read.

I think what we are seeing is two things. One is the Progressive enforcers have squandered their legitimacy enforcing rules that are unenforceable. People get tired of being treated like children by depressed women taking revenge on the world as forum moderators. So, there is demand. There’s also the fact that people trafficking in the ideas popular on the fringe want to debate with others into the same things. There’s nothing more dull than reading a comment section filled with mainstream drivel.

The downside of this, and the inevitable consequence to the current social unrest, is a balkanizing of social media. Gab will be Twitter for hate thinkers, while Twitter will be the home of the establishment, assuming Twitter remains in business. There will be those who get their news and analysis from hate thinkers like Sailer and those who read establishment sites. The internet will be a world of fractured reality and that will inevitably show up in society as a whole. To some degree, that already exist in terms of who watches which cable news channel.

The downside of this process is it means the alt-right, Dissident Right and whatever else this thing we’re doing is called, is going to self-ghettoize. The people who still read National Review, for example, will not see comments from hate thinkers like me. At the same time, hate thinkers will stop reading the mainstream press and lose perspective about the greater world around them. Instead of “bringing people together” social media will end up amplifying the balkanization of American society.

Imagine the space-time continuum gets scrambled and you find yourself in a world where the coming election is between a crazy old cat lady, an old hippie, Hitler and Mussolini. Hitler is leading one major party and Mussolini is leading another major party. The hippie and the cat lady have no party and very little support. As a practical matter, your choice is between Hitler and Mussolini. More important, you know the ramifications of both choices. The former is murder and mayhem and the latter is authoritarianism and long speeches.

To anyone with a soul, the choice is clear. You vote for Mussolini. It’s a terrible option, but so is chemotherapy. No one enthusiastically opts for chemotherapy, but it beats dying from cancer. If you told your doctor that your morals prevented you from choosing chemo, so you were going to visit some guy with magic crystals, your doctor would try to have you committed. Similarly, no one would wants Mussolini as the ruler, but he is a vastly better option than Hitler. You do what you must, even when it is unpleasant, to stop Hitler.

To continue this a bit further, imagine if someone came up to you are said “I’m Susan Wright and my principles prevent me from voting Mussolini, even though I know Hitler will murder millions, so I’m voting for the goofy hippie guy.” You would have dark thoughts about that person. They are willing to stand aside and allow something truly horrible just so they can avoid doing something unpleasant. To make it worse, they demand that you pretend that their cowardice and treachery is high minded.

Further, you would look at those people investing all of their energy ridiculing Mussolini as pro-Hitler partisans. After all, the successful end of the efforts can only mean one thing –  Hitler wins. They could protest all they like that they hate both Hitler and Mussolini, but you would know them by their deeds. They are working to pave the way for Hitler, regardless of their reasoning. If successful, they would be, in part, responsible for what comes next. Blood would be on their hands and you would feel justified in holding them responsible.

Alternatively, if someone came up to you and made the case for Hitler, along with pointing out the faults of Mussolini, you would not feel the urge to punch them in the face. They may be horribly mistaken, but at least they are being honest. They are pro-Hitler and they take responsibility for it. They own it. Who knows, they could be right and Mussolini is worse in the long run. In theory, at least, you can debate this with the Hitler fans and maybe in the process sway some undecided voters to your side.

Obviously, you see what I’m doing here. Replace Hitler with Clinton and Mussolini with Trump and we have the debate between the Cult of Never Trump and the rest of us. No one thinks Trump is the ideal candidate. Many of us think he is a awful candidate, but he is orders of magnitude better than Clinton. Her election means the nation lurches into authoritarianism. What comes next will be unfathomably horrible. If you have a soul, you do what you must to prevent evil from triumphing. Susan Wright has no soul.

This twitter exchange I had with her is the genesis of this post:

@TheRealZBlog @IngrahamAngle @RedState @SeanseiHannity I own my principles. You should try some, sometime.

— Susan_Wright (@SweetieWalker) October 18, 2016

Red State, of course, has gone full-on moonbat. Their only reason to exist these days is to bash Trump and Trump voters. A moral nullity like Susan Wright also takes time out to bash other Dirt People like Sarah Palin. Even loopy liberals have moved on from Palin-bashing, but as a dog returns to its vomit, the degenerate social justice warriors of the Never Trump Cult go back to Palin-bashing when they need material. Reading her posts, you could be forgiven for thinking she was a writer for Salon.

To return to my analogy, Susan Wright is the sort that would spend all her time harping about the defects of Mussolini, then claim she is standing on principle, as Hitler rounds up the Jews and packs them off to the gas chambers. She would rather something horrible happen, than get her hands dirty doing the hard work of opposing evil. Of course, that assumes she thinks Clinton is a bad choice. Again, reading her posts, it’s hard not to think she is related to the old bag, not just a supporter.

After the war, many Germans tried to say they did not know what was happening so they should not be held accountable for supporting the Nazis. The question in those cases was whether or not the person should have known or could have known. The Clinton Crime Family has been a known quantity for 25 years. Susan Wright and her ilk know exactly what comes from a Clinton victory. Blood will be on their hands. “I did not know” is not going to be an acceptable excuse when the time comes.