Author Archives: thezman

No Footprints

Posted on by

In the 1980’s, companies like Lotus Development Corp were “growth” companies, which meant they could not sell their products fast enough. The PC revolution was in full swing and Lotus 1-2-3 was the killer, must have, application. If you walked into their Cambridge headquarters, it looked like a bomb went off because no one had time to be tidy. It was all hands on deck to get product out the door. There were not a lot of rules either. The game was to grow and that’s what mattered. All the other corporate stuff was secondary.

That did not last. By the mid-90’s, the desktop computer market was established and the default platform was Microsoft Windows, which meant Microsoft Office. It was around this time that IBM was making a hostile takeover bid, not because they wanted a growth company, but because Lotus was becoming an asset company. That is, its value was no longer in sales of its products, but in the value of its patents and technology. IBM bought Lotus in order to squeeze every drop of juice from it and then, eventually, toss it away.

That’s the modern economy in a nutshell.

The Technological Revolution is often compared to the Industrial Revolution, because of the cultural impact. After the steam engine, people did not just have better stuff. People were different. They lived different and had different relationships to one another and their rulers. A similar process is underway in the Technological Revolution. Mass migration, the elimination of the middle-class and the end of popular government are three obvious examples of changes wrought by the technological age.

One difference between the Industrial Revolution and the Technological Revolution is the trail of breadcrumbs each left behind, as it worked its way through society. Today, Americans still drive over roads and bridges built during the peak of the industrial age. Even though our consumer goods are made by foreigners, they still use the same practices the West developed for industry. Even in blighted cities, you can still find old factory buildings that remind us of the past.

The technological age is a different animal. It tends to erase its own footsteps. Lotus Development Corp is a good example. It was not just that it lost the competition for desktop productivity software. Everything about it was consumed and recycled. Walk around Cambridge today and you cannot tell that Lotus even existed. The tech economy is a soylent green economy. Once the utility of its creations are exhausted, everything about it is consumed, erased from existence, as if people are ashamed of it.

The billionaire, Mark Cuban made his first million selling software. He worked as a salesman for a software store and then started his own company, which he eventually sold. Then Cuban founded  Audionet, which he sold to Yahoo for $2.6 billion. None of the companies Cuban started exist. The companies that bought his companies are all gone now, with Yahoo about to be swallowed up in a fire sale. Even the technologies he championed are now long forgotten.

Unless he uses his billions to have his name carved onto a mountain, Cuban will leave this world with nothing to show for himself, nothing anyone can point to and say, “Mark Cuban built that.” It’s unlikely that Cuban or any of the tech billionaires care about this. It is the way they want it, or at least it appears that way. That explains their zeal to erase our culture and replace it with a throw away version based in nothing but a desire to squeeze a few more drops from the societies they intend to throw away.

 

Whether you call it the technological age or the global age, these are just polite terms for cosmopolitanism, scaled to the supranational. In the city, you don’t build, you hustle. You don’t own, you rent. Nothing is permanent because a stationary target is an easy target. Instead you make what you can and you move onto the next thing. If you can shift the burden onto someone else, all the better. That’s how the game is played because in the city, everyone is a stranger.

That’s the new economy we are experiencing. No one thinks about the long term, because that’s a sucker’s play. The money is in the short hustle, You make your money and move on. The game is to pick the fruit, squeeze out all the juice and then toss away the rest, leaving it for a sucker to clean up later. The housing bubble is a good example. Everyone involved knew it was a grift. They are too smart to not have known. The game was to make money and not be the sucker left holding the bag.

I used to know someone who worked at Lotus in its heyday, so I had an interest in the company from the early days. I recall the owners turning up in local news a lot  and they were brimming with confidence. I wonder if those folks from the glory days of Lotus don’t look back with sadness at what happened to their company. They are rich men and did very well for themselves after Lotus, but still. I bet they would trade a lot to be able to walk past their old building with their old sign still over the door.

I could be all wrong and maybe they have long forgotten about their old firm. Maybe all those people simply made their money and moved on to the next thing. Men have lived their lives in order to be remembered since the dawn of time. Maybe as the Industrial Revolution resulted in different people and different social arrangements, this age is doing the same and the new man of the new economy is just a stranger passing through, uninterested in leaving footprints for future generations to examine.

Rule By Poser

Posted on by

Way back when the Bush administration launched the invasion of Iraq, the prevailing assumption among those who were in charge was that it would be a cakewalk. The people would embrace us as liberators. People who had some clue about how the world works knew it would be an ugly mess, as is the case with all wars. War is, by definition, the ugliest of human activities. It’s purpose is to kill and destroy.

Inevitably, stories turned up about abuses. One essential way to prepare soldiers for war is to dehumanize the enemy. Men, even trained killers, are not going to kill people they see as sympathetic. There’s no way to finely calibrate the mind of a soldier so in every war there are abuses, even when care is taken to avoid them. That’s why things like the Abu Ghraib prison incident happened. War is and always will be an ugly business.

That knowledge should lead Western governments to use their technological and economic advantages to avoid getting into wars with the barbarians on the edge of civilization. Instead, they start wars they never intend to win, so they can preen and pose about their virtue and morality, when something terrible inevitably happens. It means some guy in uniform gets to be strung up in order to please the vanity of our rulers.

Sergeant Alexander Blackman shot dead an insurgent on September 15 2011 after he had been injured by Apache helicopter gunfire.

The 42-year-old was originally known as Marine A to protect his identity from terrorists.

He grew up in Brighton and has two sisters and a brother, according to the Justice for Marine A website.

The keen sportsman is a skilled canoeist who competed at national events.

He joined the marines aged 23 and married his wife Alex in 2010 after the pair met in the Somerset town of Taunton.

At the time of the 2011 killing Blackman was serving in Helmand province with Plymouth-based 42 Commando.

Blackman was ”dismissed with disgrace” from the Royal Marines after serving with distinction for 15 years, including tours of Iraq, Afghanistan and Northern Ireland.

He was handed seven years for manslaughter, but having already served almost three-and-a-half years since his conviction for murder, he could be free within weeks of the sentencing on March 28.

Sgt Blackman shot an injured Taliban insurgent in the chest in 2011 before quoting Shakespeare at him.

He said: “There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil you c***.

“It’s nothing you wouldn’t do to us”.

He then told soldiers: “Obviously this doesn’t go anywhere, fellas. I just broke the Geneva Convention.”

The shooting was captured on film but has not been released out of fears it could be used as terrorist propaganda.

Dramatic footage that has been released shows troops cheering as an Apache warship fires some 139 rounds at militants trying to sneak up on British positions.

Another clip shows Sgt Blackman and Jack Hammond, known as Marine C, find an AK47, a hand grenade and spare ammunition next to the injured fighter.

Blackman ordered colleagues to move the enemy fighter out of sight from British Army surveillance cameras mounted on balloons.

Blackman was convicted of murder in November 2013 by a court martial in Bulford, Wiltshire, and sentenced to life with a minimum 10-year term.

It was the first such conviction of a serving British soldier since the Second World War.

Judge Jeff Blackett told Blackman at his sentencing: “If the British Armed Forces are not assiduous in complying with the laws of armed conflict and international humanitarian law they would become not better than the insurgents and terrorists they are fighting.”

There you have it. He handed down a sentence as a public act of piety, signalling to the other lunatics in the ruling class that he is some sort of special snowflake for throwing the book at this soldier. It’s also why the West has not won any wars in a long time. Instead of focusing all energy on killing the enemy and breaking their stuff, all energy is put into maintaining moral superiority, even if that means losing.

The point of war is to kill the enemy and break up their stuff. The hope is they quit before you kill all of them and break all of their stuff, but you plan otherwise. If the Afghans knew all along that helping Osama bin Laden was most likely going to mean their cities and large towns would be flattened, they would have chose differently. Let’s assume they played it the same and Bush had firebombed Kabul, what would have been the result?

Yeah, there would have been a lot of hand-wringing and pearl clutching in Washington, but every other nutjob in the Middle East would have been re-calibrating his plans. A lot less death and destruction would have come as a result. Instead we have decades of killing to no logical end. We have an endless war of attrition just so Western leaders can have chances to let us know that they paragons of virtue.

What’s truly insane about all of this is the people in charge seem to care more about the opinion of the enemy than they do their own people. Maybe Sgt Blackman should have been punished, but the only reason to punish him is to maintain good order in the ranks. It’s not that he killed a wounded man. It’s that he violated the rules of engagement and encouraged others to do the same. It should be ZFG about what the terrorist think.

But, that’s not the world today. Our rulers care more about foreigners than they do their own people. If it were otherwise, the rulers would be quick to paper over these sorts of incidents, defending their fellow citizens against these sorts of accusations. Given their policy preferences, and the way they conduct foreign policy, it is safe to say they truly hate the rest of us. We have to hate them back.

I Am Invisible

Posted on by

For as long as I have been alive, I’ve felt different. It was one of those things I only noticed when the other kids did not notice it. Their lack of noticing is what make it so clear to me. I could never come up with the right words so I kept my thoughts bottled up, knowing that no one would notice, hoping I could ignore it. The other kids did not notice it because I’m invisible. That’s right. I’m one of millions of Americans who are invisible.

The opaque community takes their opacity for granted. They just think the fact that they reflect light is normal, while not reflecting light is strange or weird. They just take it for granted that others can see them so they pretend to see us. This attempt to normalize the invisible by insisting we can be seen has gone on for too long. It is time for the invisible community to be seen, so to speak. We have be living without shadows for too long!

This is nonsense, of course, but is it any more ridiculous than men in sundresses demanding the rest of us pretend they are girls? Bruce Jenner is not a female. He is a male. He can dress up as a girl and have himself mutilated so he looks like a girl, but he is a man. Humans come in one of two sexes, male and female. This is a matter of genetics.

The veracity of my claims to invisibility are just easily tested. You could hold up a mirror and see if I have a visible reflection. If so, then I am not invisible. Alternatively, you could put a light on one side of me and check to see if the light passes through me. If I blocked the light, then I am opaque. This is basic physics and a debatable topic.

The question is why are we forced to indulge the lunacy of one denial of reality, but not other forms of reality denying? One reason is that burly men in sundresses appeals to the flat earth society types, who insist humans are born as amorphous blobs. Claims to invisibility don’t further the cause of the blank slate. That and forcing the rest of us to ignore the invisible would be counterproductive for attention seekers.

There’s also the fact that the lunatics promoting this stuff truly believe it horrifies the sane, normal people out in squaresville. A big part of radicalism from the French Revolution to the present, is the desire to be shocking and outrageous. Radicalism, political or cultural, is mostly a temper tantrum by people who can accept the world as it is. Just as a spoiled child throws tantrums in public, the radical seeks to offend those they see as normal.

Then there is the Theodore Dalrymple observation from years ago:

“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”

That’s the lesson from this story about a good, progressive mother of small children, having to stand silently as a burly man, claiming to be a women, uses the lady’s room at Disneyland.

So yes… there were women and small children using the restroom and this man was walking around knowing no one would say anything.  So here I am…writing this blog, because honestly I need answers. We can’t leave this situation ambiguous any more. The gender debate needs to be addressed… and quickly. There have to be guidelines. It can’t just be a feeling. I’m sorry. I wish it could, but it can’t.

A society in which no one knows the rules, except the rulers, is a society that cannot self-organize. It must fall into authoritarianism. In fact, it must embrace authoritarianism, because there must be order. Even the madness of North Korea beats anarchy, where it is a war of all against all. To no small degree, the people pushing the denial of biological reality are doing so in order to expand their authority over the rest of us.

There’s another angle here though, one that is not reductionist. Progressives have been in control of America since the Civil War. The great industrial wars of the early 20th century, then the long Cold War, worked to restrain some of the worst impulses that are let loose when a person or group has unchecked power. Those restraints are gone so all of the reckless tendencies of Progressives can be indulged, seemingly without consequence.

In other words, this reality denying madness we see going on with Progressives, has a late phase degeneracy vibe to it. Most of this nonsense is happening in well insulated compounds like the college campus. The Progs have total control so all of their worst instincts are free to run riot. It’s not some new phase in the long civil war, but the final burst of maniacal lunacy before there is the knock on the door and reality bursts in.

Essential Knowledge: Part VIII

Posted on by

The great inflection point in Western history is probably the Renaissance, which was the start of the great flowering of European culture and intellectual life. There are endless arguments to be had on this topic, but there is no denying that in the 16th century, the West began to rocket past the world, moving from the “dark ages” into the modern intellectual era. When people talk about the Western canon this is the starting point.

It is impossible to be an educated man without having a familiarity with the important figures and events from the Renaissance through the 19th century. I say familiarity, because you can, and people do, make a career out of studying just one man or one period. The Scottish Enlightenment, for example, produced a library full of important texts that still resonate today. The Scots, arguably, gave the world empiricism, which is no small contribution.

Unless you intend to be an academic, a familiarity with the important people and texts is enough. One way to dive into these very deep waters is to examine the intellectual traditions in which our modern intellectual movements are rooted. A good place to start is with old Karl Marx. He was not some evil weed that sprang from the void. He was, in many respects, a result of the intellectual revolution that begin with the Reformation.

The first proto-Marxist book on the list is Utopia by Thomas More. In addition to getting himself executed by Henry VIII, Moore wrote one of the great works of political philosophy. It casts a very long shadow, having influenced works like New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, Erewhon by Samuel Butler, and Candide by Voltaire.  It’s also why we have the word “utopia” in our vocabulary and why we have science fiction today. That’s right. Modern science fiction has its roots in the works of a 16th century priest Lawyer.

Another work that influenced Marx and many other communists and socialists is an almost forgotten work written during the age of Cromwell. The Commonwealth of Oceana is not an easy book to read, even in its day. Harrington was, but all accounts, a terribly undisciplined writer. But, like a lot of the great books in the canon, the struggle pays off, even if you just sample it. It offers insights into the fevered mind of the radical egalitarian, that continues to wreak havoc on civilization to this day.

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu has one of the greatest names in the Western intellectual tradition. He also wrote one of the great works of the Western canon. The Spirit of the Laws has been relied upon by radical republicans and radical Marxists. Montesquieu introduced two key concepts. The separation of the powers and despotism. He also introduced a different reading of history, one that explains great events in terms of mass movements, rather than just the deeds of men.

Despite what you may think, Marx studied the same political economist that allegedly influenced the free market economists of today. The first name on the list is, of course, Adam Smith. His massive, two volume The Wealth of Nations is actually not bad reading, even for the the short attention spans of today. For those libertarians obsessed with legalizing drugs, Smith’s discussion of the English corn laws is priceless. You can literally do word substitution with “corn” and “drugs” and get a great legalization argument.

Anyone who knows anything about Marx has heard the phrase “labor theory of value” even though Marx never used the term. That’s because the guy who did coin the phrase is David Ricardo. He not only gave us the labor theory of value, he gave us theories of rent, wages, and profits. He’s also responsible for the phrase “comparative advantage.” Ricardo is a giant in political economy, along with Smith, Mill and Malthus. The Principles of Political Economy and Taxation is the book to read.

Marx was not just focused on economics. Read the Communist Manifesto, and no, you will not burst into flames by holding it, and you see it is more than just an economic manifesto. Marxism, like communism and socialism, uses the vehicle of economics as a way to reach the just society. Of course, Marx was heavily influenced by Rousseau so reading The Social Contract is required. You can also read his Discourse on Inequality as it is short and popular with the modern Left.

Rousseau was building on the work of two of the most important philosophers in the Western canon. Thomas Hobbes gave us the term “leviathan” in the book conveniently title Leviathan, which established social contract theory, that has served as the foundation for most later Western political philosophy. To a modern reader, it is a tough slog, but worth it in the end. It’s also important to note that Marx largely rejected social contract theory in favor of utilitarianism.

Similarly, John Locke is a major influence, even to this day. Locke gave us republicanism, the theory of the mind, the concept of the individual, self-derived identity and the big one, the blank slate. Locke maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience. This is now known as empiricism, but it should be easy to see where this eventually led. That’s right, John Locke is responsible for trannies in the bathroom and female Marines.

Locke is a big deal so you have to read a few of his works to appreciate his contributions. Fortunately, Locke was also brief, so his works tended to be more like pamphlets. A Letter Concerning Toleration, Two Treatises of Government and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding are required reading. Luckily, you can get these free on Kindle or for a few bucks as paperbacks. It’s ironic that the most important works in Western history are usually available for less than the price of a trip to Starbucks.

There were have an introduction to political philosophy via proto-Marxism.

The Null Culture

Posted on by

Tyler Cowen is one of those guys worth reading in the same way Thomas Friedman used to be worth reading. There’s nothing about his arguments or analysis that is new or interesting. In fact, when he ventures into these areas he reveals a mediocre mind. The value is that he provides an insight into the thinking of the Cloud People with regards to the issues of the day. He’s a weathercock for the Cloud People.

Maybe this is intentional or maybe it is accidental. That can be debated and many of his most loyal fans start from the assumption that it is intentional. They believe his cryptic writing style is to encourage a hermeneutic reading of his posts and columns. Cowen indirectly encourages this by constantly referring to Strauss as if he is a deity. Many of his posts have a “read between the lines young grasshopper? vibe to them.

Another way to look at this style is that it is intended to mask the fact that he has no new insights or ideas to offer, so he puts the focus on the alleged game of expository cat and mouse. In the same way female pop stars dress like whores to hide their lack of talent, writers like Kevin Williamson, for example, rely on bloated prose to mask their lack of talent. Maybe that’s Cowen’s game.

Regardless, his latest column on Bloomberg is an example of his usefulness as a window into the hive mind of the Cloud People.

Since the 1960s and ’70s, food has replaced music’s centrality to American culture. These are invariably somewhat subjective impressions, but I’d like to lay out my sense of how the social impact of music has fallen and the social role of food has risen.

In the earlier era, new albums were eagerly awaited and bought in the hundreds of thousands immediately upon their release. Diversity in the musical world was relatively low, as genres such as rap, heavy metal, techno and ambient either didn’t exist or weren’t well developed. It was also harder to access the music of the more distant past — no Spotify or YouTube — and thus people listened to the same common music more frequently.

One of the remarkable things about the Cloud People is they have a non-linear timeline that has more holes than the fossil record. For most of them. the world started in the 1960’s. That’s because the Cloud is dominated by Boomers, but it is also when the Cloud started to form up as a social force. The result is they have two versions of the past. Their past, the 60’s and 70’s, and the long ago past, when Lincoln defeated Hitler.

This ahistorical world view is why they reflexively compare every foreign leader to Hitler and every problem in world affairs to Munich. It’s even more present tense for domestic matters. They have never stopped fighting the Civil Rights Movement. T.N. Coates makes $50K a speech because his kid brushed up against an old white women on an escalator once and that was just like the cops attacking the blacks at Selma.

Anyway, Cowen is obsessed with food and the so-called foodie culture. He correctly points out that this is a common obsession in the Cloud. He does not phrase it that way as that would require a degree of self-awareness he does not posses. Many of his posts and columns are about his trips to find something new to eat. Whenever he is preparing for a tax-payer funded junket overseas, he posts a bleg for restaurant tips.

So-called foodie culture is interesting in that it is not really a culture. It is the result of lack of culture. The people endlessly searching for a new dish or new cuisine do so because they have nothing of their own or at least nothing they wish to hold up as their own. The endless search for some new exotic cuisine is a distraction from facing the fact that their own culture is dead and its artifacts are now just museum pieces.

Culture is the spirit of the people. Their customs, foods and social structures are the result. The moveable feast that is foodie culture is not a celebration of something holy or sacred. It is shiva for people who no longer have any attachment to the rest of us or our share past. They see themselves as rootless visitors, sampling life in the hope that it will provide their lives with meaning, or at least make them mildly interesting to others.

Foodie culture is a null culture, the abnegation of culture. The Cloud Person going on about the food stalls they visited in Thailand is someone trying hard to not be from here, to not be of here, to not be a part of you. It’s why fusionism is so popular in the foodie world. It lets every person have their own thing, so they can avoid sharing their thing with others and therefore avoid the burdens and responsibilities of shared culture.

It also is why the managerial state and the Cloud People society dependent on it is brittle and fracturing. It has nothing to offer. If culture is old men planting trees in whose shade they will never sit, the managerial state is the burning of those trees in an outdoor fire pit so the imported cook from Thailand can prepare traditional dishes from his homeland. The former outlives the man, while the later cannot outlive the fire.

The Skins Game

Posted on by

There’s a popular quote from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, where one character asks another character how he went bankrupt. The response is “Gradually and then suddenly.” It’s funny because it is true. The great upheavals in human affairs seldom happen without warning. They are always part of a long process that was plain to see, but people preferred not to notice it so it rolled along until a crash or revolution.

A generation or two from now, people will look back at America and wonder how racial conflict broke out after what many thought were years of social progress. After all, the good whites had atoned for all the bad things done by bad whites. In reality, those years of “progress” were just accumulating bad habits and bad decisions, disguising an underlying rot. American society is headed for a bad place and you can see it here in this story.

Outrage has grown at Walter Reed Middle School in North Hollywood, as the school faces layoffs and increased class sizes due to a law limiting funds for schools with a higher white student body.

The Los Angeles Unified School District provides more funding for schools where the white population is below 30 percent.

In a letter to parents, the district noted the highly regarded middle school had been above the percentage for the past couple years.

The racial formula was a condition imposed by court decisions dealing with desegregation in the 1970s.

Los Angeles has a form of misery sharing in their school system. Since people vote with their feet, they naturally tend toward self-segregation. This means the schools tend to reflect this as kids go to the schools closest to where they live. To remedy this, the good schools are punished as a way to “even the playing field.” It’s an insane effort to implement the Kurt Vonnegut story Harrison Bergeron.

A look at the makeup of this particular school offers a glimpse of the future. The first thing you see is the school is 47% Hispanic, which in Los Angeles is going to mean Mexican, with a sizable chunk of Central Americans. It is roughly 30% white, 11% Asian and 7% black. The test scores, across all races, are above average for the city. This means the school can have a decent basketball team, but still do well in the math bowl.

The North Hollywood area is not a slum, but it is slightly downscale. The demographics, as of 2000, were Hispanics 57.7%, whites 27%, Asians 5.7%, blacks 5.6%, and others at 4%. Gentrification is underway so those numbers will begin to change as the renters are priced out of the market. In other words, the local schools will either have to import diversity or build private schools. Otherwise, they will be de-funded by the city.

The sound you hear is the ratchet clicking. As these sorts of incidents happen, everyone begins to think in terms of race. The honkies can accept writing checks to the blacks, maybe, but the Hispanics? The Asians, of course, see no reason for cutting checks to anyone. The Hispanics are in a bind as they try to work out whether it is better to be on Team Honky or Team Black, but they are not going to cut checks to the blacks.

The Cloud People imagine a world built like a sports league. The rich successful teams write checks to the poor, unsuccessful teams. That works in baseball as the Yankees and Red Sox need opponents for their games, so they agree to pay Tampa to field a team. In real life, people don’t think that way. The Asians are never going to think they need a really good hoops team, so they will hate writing checks to Team Black.

As the racial spoils system settles into society, new types of response develop for each group to maximize their slice of the pie. One example is gentrification. This is where rich white liberals buy up parts of the ghetto and then drive the hues away with high rents and heavy policing. This way they can have nice urban playgrounds for their kids to enjoy the cosmopolitan lifestyle, without being stabbed by a junkie.

What we have going on is a racial undertow, where the current at the top appears to be flowing in, but underneath, a stronger current is flowing out. In a society with one defined minority group, the majority will go along with helping the minority. When you have nothing but minority groups, which is where America is headed and where LA is now, you end up with the skins game and that is always a zero sum game with winners and losers.

A popular quote in the hate-think community is from this interview with the Lee Kuan Yew. “In multiracial societies, you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.” That is the example of history and it is why Singapore has always been an authoritarian society. It is the only way to keep peace. Men with guns have to supervise the skins game.

It is why humans across the globe instinctively reject multiculturalism and diversity. Even the lunatics preaching this nonsense avoid diversity and multiculturalism. They always live in rich white neighborhoods and send their kids to private schools. They like diversity and multiculturalism from a safe distance. Humans know another thing that is popular in the hate-think community. That is, Diversity + Proximity = Violence.

 

Stranger Danger

Posted on by

I don’t have a television subscription anymore. I use the Amazon Fire for my video entertainments. It’s a useful device for those who have cut the cord. One of the apps on the thing is for SkyNews, the Murdoch propaganda platform that is the retarded little brother of the BBC. It’s pitched as the “conservative” alternative to the government run BBC, which means it is pretty much just a ruling class echo.

I was working on a small project in the living room so I put on the television to see if there was something worth watching. SkyNews had a program on about the latest Muslim mayhem in London, so I thought I’d give that a go. It was some sort of panel show, hosted by a guy who looked like a homeless man. He was an old guy kitted out to look like a college professor, but he was so shabby, he looked more like a bum than a professor.

The Mr. Chips routine remains popular on television news. They take a stupid person, dress him up to look like a college professor and then have him say his lines with an avuncular voice. Hilariously, the actors they have playing these roles on the news are almost always as dumb as hamsters. I guess a degree of dullness allows the actor to play the part without any self-regard. Maybe it is just one of life’s little ironies.

Anyway, the old gasbag droned on for a few minutes at the start, reminding us of the proper way to virtue signal about these Muslim attacks. He was also careful to make clear that no one, under any circumstances, is to speculate about why Muslims keep going bonkers and attacking people in Western cities. In fact, he was careful to not use the word “Muslim” and even suggested that the man’s identity remained a mystery.

Then, it got ridiculous. It was a panel show so the hobo went around and introduced his panelists. It was four women, all in their prime powerskirt years. These are the years when a powerskirt is still feeling the biological clock so she is not entirely without hope of being a women, but she is at her maximum anger at reality for not yielding to the latest feminist pieties. Of course, one was black and another South Asian, because that’s who we are!

The first powerskirt to speak sounded like a JohnRivers parody on Gab. She opened with how much she cares about the victims and how passionate she is for victim’s rights. Powerskirts are always passionate about stuff, just like Hitler. She then lurched into a tangle of sentences about how this incident opens the doors for hate and how any assault on London’s multiculturalism is far worse than a few white people being murdered.

What’s striking about watching these modern lunacies acted out with British accents is it makes the lunacy so much more obvious. What the hell does “open the door for hate” even mean? I bet the stupid twat who said it has no idea either. It just appeals to the fevered female mind. Similarly, they have deified the word “multiculturalism” as if it is a real thing, when in fact, it is just a word for the nullification of culture.

The funny thing about her little performance was that you could see her nostrils flaring and her cheeks getting a bit flushed. Maybe she is well-trained, but my take was she really meant every word of the nonsense she was saying. That or she was sexually aroused by it. Who knows, maybe the thought of being slaughtered by Muslim savages is arousing to these people. It’s not entirely out of the question, given the state of men these days.

That really is the issue. The men of our ruling class have no pride or self-respect. They got to where they are, largely untested as men, so they have no sense of achievement. As a result, the women have no respect for them or the culture they are supposed to symbolize. Consequently, we have a ruling class populated by hand-wringing pussies and terminally pissed off women, looking with envy at those swarthy guys on the border.

I snapped it off, thinking that it would probably be a good thing if an Exploding Mohamed walked into the station and ended things for all of them. Frankly, if I was walking outside the studio and Mohamed came running toward the entrance, I’d offer to hold the door for him. The people inside are hostile strangers to me. The only thing I know about them is they hate me for reasons I cannot address. Otherwise, I don’t know them.

That is the the final resting place of multiculturalism. A people without a shared past cannot have a shared future. The Muslim invader cannot look around the landmarks of London and feel pride. His people did not build these things. His ancestors were on the wrong end of a bayonet charge by the people who built Big Ben and London Bridge. The people who made these things are strangers. Their descendants are strangers to him.

Men cannot live as isolated, transactional economic units. Nature abhors it. It’s why the gray featureless world our rulers imagine is so horrifying to the Mohammedan. It’s why populist movements are sprouting up all over the West. Man is a social creature. In order to have strong bonds with each other, we must share strong bonds with our past. The people who rule over us must share those bonds too. They cannot be strangers.

It’s why, after every one of these attacks, the powerskirts and hand-wringing pussies rush out to fret about The Backlash™. At some level, they know that the real threat to their position is not the random muzzie, strapped with explosives screaming “Allahu Akbar!”, rushing into the offices of SkyNews or into Parliament. The real danger, what they truly fear, is that guy deciding to hold the door for Akmed. Then it’s all over for them.

The Truth About Health Care

Posted on by

Humans live in a finite world. The universe may be infinite, but the world of man is finite. There’s only so much stuff. Because there is only so much stuff, there’s always going to be a shortage of the stuff that people tend to like or need. It’s not always a desperate shortage, but there’s never enough so that everyone can take what they want. There’s always going to be one more hand reaching for the last item just after it is gone.

This is a basic axiom of life and one of the foundation truths of economics. It’s even a foundation truth of communism, which assumes scarcity can only be mitigated, but never fully eliminated, by the elimination of profit. Economists of all stripes work from the assumption that scarcity is an immutable fact of the human condition. The question they wrestle with is how to increase supply and distribute the results.

What this means is that all goods and services must be rationed. Since there’s never enough to meet the maximum demand, there has to be some way to say “no” to people demanding the goods or services. The most common way to do this is price. The poor guy who wants a Mercedes is told he cannot have a Mercedes by the big numbers on the price tag. This is how the supply of luxury cars is rationed.

The other way to ration goods and services is for men with guns to take control of the supply and create rules for who can and who cannot have access to the stuff.  Rocket propelled grenades are not very expensive. An RPG can be had for around $500 and the rounds are about $100. The government, at least in America, controls the supply of RPG’s and determines who can have them. In other words, the government rations the supply of RPG’s in America.

This is an iron law of economics. All goods and services are rationed. This is true for health care too. There are no exceptions to this law. Thus, the First Truth of Health Care: No health care plan or system can ever be taken seriously unless it addresses, up front, how it will say “No, you cannot have it” to people who want it. At some point, someone has to tell the patient they cannot have whatever it is they want or need.

In America, rationing is mostly done by price, but increasingly the state is taking over this role. In Britain, most people are denied services by the long lines for those services. The long wait times for basic services is a form of rationing. If you can deliver X per day and the demand is for 2X, you solve this by giving people numbers and having them wait a long time until their number is called. This is socialized medicine in nutshell.

The fact is, most people could pay out of pocket, for their health services. It is only when poor people get old or have accidents when they need someone to pay for their medical care. Most middle-class people should be able to put away a little every payday to reserve for their later years. That is, if they were not being taxed into poverty by the current system in America that has seen prices rise five times the inflation rate.

Thus, the Second Truth of Health Care: The current insurance model is just a wealth transfer from the middle-class to the health care industry, in order to cover the cost of poor people and the metastasizing layer of people who live off the system. Those is really just a tax. Most people use about 5% of their plan for themselves, the rest is used to pay for poor people and the army of people who work in the system.

That’s the thing politicians never want to discuss, which is the whole reason they are talking about health care in the first place. How does a modern society pay for the poor, who cannot afford needed medical services? How to we address the free riders on the system? More important, how much are we willing to pay for the health services to the poor? There’s a limit to all of this and that’s the question that always has to be answered.

Of course, one of the paradoxes of modern life is that you can get very rich off the poor, which is why liquor stores and furniture rental shops dot the ghetto. In the social welfare game, the point is to lay a massive guilt trip on the public, and grease the right political palms, in order to get the middle class to look the other way as their money is siphoned off for one program or another for the poor, always administered by a rich guy coincidentally.

Thus, the Third Truth of Health Care: Health services are a massive skimming operation. Today, the one area of the economy that “grows” is the health care industry. Every year, more and more people pile into that wagon, mostly in administrative roles. The number of nurses and doctors does not grow very much, but the number of bureaucrats grows like a weed.

Then you have the pill makers, machine makers, research people and lawyers. There are always lots and lots of lawyers. The health care industry is massive and government dependent. It’s why rub rooms are now called message therapy centers. They are angling to get it on the racket, by having their service declared an essential health care service. That way, you will be paying for some guy to get a happy ending.

That’s why reforming health care has become an impossibility. As soon as anyone makes any noises about fixing the system, the army of lobbyists, hired by every vested interest, shows up to bury the reformers. If they are not able to kill the idea of reform entirely, they set about corrupting it into another grift that their clients can use to get a free shot at your wallet. The only people not represented in these efforts are the voters. They get no say.

This is the main reason Trump’s efforts to address the problems of ObamaCare failed last week. What Ryan and the other crooks in the GOP were hoping to do is pass a bill that made it easier for their paymasters to skim money from the rate payers, while providing fewer services. Ryan’s bill was just an attempt to help the people feeding at the trough get a little fatter off the middle-class. Its failure suggests we have reached the end phase.

Talk to anyone responsible for paying health insurance premiums and they will tell you that the rates are reaching the point where they cannot be paid. When premiums are going up by multiples of inflation, there can be only one result. Once rates pass a certain level, people stop paying those premiums. You get black markets, non-compliance and a system that can only persist through brute coercion. Soon after you get collapse.

South Africa

Posted on by

Back in the 1980’s, “ending Apartheid” was the celebrity cause of the Left. Every Hollywood nitwit was slobbering over the ANC and babbling about how the internal affairs of a country, on the other side of the globe, were the most important thing in America. In many movies, the villain was made to be an Afrikaner, giving work to all the actors, who used play Nazis in the previous era. Eventually South Africa buckled under the pressure and Apartheid was ended in 1991.

Sober minded people made the point that eventually, the blacks would do what they have always done and murder all the whites. It was a process that was well underway in the former Rhodesia. The white farmers were being harassed, having their lands seized and in some cases getting killed for being white. But, the good thinkers in the West claimed it was exaggerated and anyway, Nelson Mandela was black Jesus so nothing but good would come from the end of Apartheid.

Of course, Zimbabwe is a complete disaster under black rule as the white farmers were chased off and the economy then collapsed. Now, South African appears to be headed for a similar fate, maybe worse, as the lunatic running the place declares war on the white population. Jacob Zuma is all but authorizing genocide against the white population and other prominent black leaders are running around, openly advocating war against the whites. The result of this is inevitable. It will be a race war.

Today, whites are about 9% of the South African population. Fifty years ago they were just over 20% of the population. Those are important numbers. A well organized minority that is 20% of the population can defend itself pretty well, as long as they have the intellectual firepower to maintain discipline and a willingness to fight. Once a population falls below 10%, they can only survive by appealing to some faction of the majority for protection or by moving out to the fringe.

Jews in Europe are the most obvious example. They carved out a space on the fringe where they could survive as a tiny minority. They also had the cognitive skills in demand by the ruling elite, so a semi-peaceful existence was possible, despite their numbers and outlier status. Gypsies are a variation on this, except they have to exist even further out on the fringe, as they have nothing to offer the ruling classes. They exist as a semi-tolerated parasite population that is always on the move.

That’s not realistic in Africa, where the moderate black leaders are just a bit less homicidal than Pol Pot. Anyone familiar with sub-Saharan Africa knows that tribal politics still dominate the culture.That precludes peaceful alliance between out-groups. The best you get is a hostile stand-off. The questions for South Africa are a) How long before the blacks decide it is time to kill all the whites, b) How many blacks will the whites be willing to kill in order to survive? and c) How will the West respond?

The most likely answer to the first question is soon. Zuma will follow the Mugabe formula and keep ratcheting up the violence incrementally. Given that he is the moderate at the moment, he will play the triangulation game where he will promise to hold off the more insane elements of the black leadership, in order to get concessions from the white population. This will roll along until Zuma is killed, or decides he has to go for it in order to maintain his position.

Talk to a typical South African and they have a bizarrely optimistic view. Many just assume they will find refuge in English speaking countries if things get bad. That means there will be a large cohort of Afrikaners who will prefer working with Zuma. This is just paying the crocodile to eat you last. The answer to that second question is “no where near enough nor soon enough.” By the time it dawns on the Afrikaners that it’s fight or die, it will be too late to fight. Math and modern morality have sealed their fate.

That’s where the third question gets interesting. Barak Obama, of course, would never have allowed mass migration of whites from South Africa. If anything, he would have shipped arms to the black government along with a wishlist of whites he wanted killed. That list would have had one item, “all of them.” Similarly, a squirrel like Trudeau in Canada would block any escape for all but the trans-gendered Afrikaners. Australia would take them and Trump would probably accept them, but Europe? It’s no guarantee.

There’s a lesson here for the people currently in charge of the West. There are no right answers when it comes to biology and culture. The blacks in South Africa are not going to be talked out of genocide. There is no reasoning with them. They want what they want and it is not about wrong and right. it is about their will to do and their ability to do it. Similarly, the Muslims dynamiting Europe are not motivated by facts and reason. They are doing it because they want to do it and they can do it.

Humans have always been hierarchical, tribal and territorial. That means there is competition within the group for status and competition between tribes for territory. Your tribe does not hold what it has because of some piece of paper or the airy notions of dead ancestors. You hold what you have because you hold it against all challenges. That’s the iron law of life on this planet and we will get to see it play out over the next decades in South Africa. The winner will be the side willing to kill as many of the other tribe as it takes to win.

The Political Class Murders Itself

Posted on by

The point at which the Roman Republic moved from republic to empire is generally placed at the point when the Senate granted Octavian almost unlimited power and he adopted the title Augustus. Some historians argue it was when Caesar crossed the Rubicon or when Octavian defeated Antony at Actium. The implication is that once the transition was started, there was no turning back. The more useful analysis is to think of it as a process, with roots in the Republic, that evolved to the point where dictatorship was inevitable.

The die was most likely cast when the Republic began to compromise its own rules for limiting and distributing power. The system they had created was a reflection of the tribal realities of the early republic. In order to keep any one family from gaining too much power, they systematically limited the time anyone served in office. The system also forced an apprenticeship on those who went into public life. This had the benefit of making public men buy into the system. Therefore they were willing to defend it.

That meant the system had a policing mechanism to sort out enemies before they could cause trouble. An ambitious young man could not skip any steps on his way up the ladder, so once he got up the ladder, he was not agreeing to any changes in the process. Defending the system was a way to defend one’s prerogatives, but also a way to defend the system from lunatics. Verpus Maximus may be smart and talented, but he was not only going to wait his turn, he was going to do all the jobs necessary to prove his worth.

This system started to break down with the rivalry of Sulla and Marius. Sulla was the first man to hold the office of consul twice. He also got away with marching an army on Rome itself, in order to defeat his rival, Marius. Both of these acts were supposed to be disqualifying, but exceptions were made for expediency. Sulla sided with the Senate so the Senate bent the rules to serve themselves. A good case can be made that this is the point when it was all over for the Republic.

It was just a matter of time before someone used Sulla as a precedent.

It is a good lesson to keep in mind as the politicians in the Imperial Capital wrangle over what could be a very dangerous scandal for them.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes declared Wednesday that members of Donald Trump’s transition team, possibly including Trump himself, were under inadvertent surveillance following November’s presidential election.

The White House and Trump’s allies immediately seized on the statement as vindication of the president’s much-maligned claim that former President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower phones — even though Nunes himself said that’s not what his new information shows.

Democrats, meanwhile, cried foul.

Rep. Adam Schiff of California, the top Democrat on the intelligence panel, cast doubt on Nunes’ claims in a fiery statement and blasted the chairman for not first sharing the information with him or other committee members.

Schiff also slammed Nunes for briefing the White House on Wednesday afternoon given that the Intelligence Committee is in the middle of an investigation into Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election, including possible collusion with the Trump team.

The political class chased Nixon out of town for talking about the use of the FBI and CIA as weapons against political opponents. The rule in politics has been that the use of the IRS or the intelligence agencies was expressly prohibited. There could be no exceptions for obvious reasons, as it would give these bureaucracies dangerous power. That was the lesson of Hoover. If the CIA or IRS are allowed to use their powers to gather dirt on elected officials, then they can control elected officials. That’s the end of democracy.

Of course, there’s another reason to take certain weapons off the table in politics. That’s self preservation. In prior ages, where the winners had the losers killed, the challengers would always have as their goal, the death of the current ruler. That prompted the ruler to get ahead of the curve and have any potential challengers killed, before they could be any trouble. This was Stalin’s game and he just about gutted the the intellectual and political elite of Russia in the process. They still have not recovered from it.

That’s what makes this so dangerous. It’s now clear what happened. The Obama people started spying on Trump once he had the nomination or perhaps even earlier. They may have started earlier with an eye on helping the Republicans knock him off in the primary, but that’s not clear. They figured that Clinton was a lock so they were not careful about covering their tracks. The Clinton people are as dirty as it gets so they were not going to be ratting on anyone over it. If anything, they would expand on it.

This is where the Russian hacking story comes into the picture. Once disaster struck and Team Obama realized they had a problem, they needed cover, so they started with the Russian hacking nonsense. They would then claim that it was all an accident and they were just trying to prevent Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale from attacking our democracy! It’s also why Obama signed a retroactive Executive Order giving cover to the intel agencies for their domestic spying activities. They were creating a cover story.

The complication is that it appears that at least one person has perjured himself over this and that one person is FBI Director Comey. There’s no way to square his testimony with these new revelations. The best he can do is split hairs and claim he was not part of the spying effort. Of course, there’s no way to touch him as he runs the FBI. In fact, there’s no way to investigate any of the intelligence organizations. This is the point where many of the robot historians of the future will say the American political class murdered itself.

Unless there is some will to address it, and that’s highly unlikely, we now have a new normal where highly politicized intelligence agencies are used by both sides to discredit one another and discredit any attempts to reform the system. It’s no longer a game of rules. It is a zero sum  game of power and that cycle only ends one way, with someone marching their army on the capital and taking control. As with Rome, whoever emerges as the dictator will not have murdered the system. The system will have murdered itself.