Author Archives: thezman

The Low-Trust State

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Social trust is one of those things that we know is important to economic growth, sound government and social stability. When the people of a society generally trust one another and wish to be trusted by others, their society prospers. The question that always arises is over causality. Some would argue that altruism is a biological trait that scales up to social trust. Others would argue that good government and the rule of law encourages positive economic growth, which in turn increases social trust. It is one of those topics that keeps academics busy.

The distinguishing characteristic of low-trust societies is a near total lack of trust in the state by the people. Russians, during the old Soviet Union, understood that everything that was said by the state was a lie of some sort. In fact, the only thing they could trust from the Bolsheviks was that whatever they said was untrue. This amplified the natural distrust of Russians as they did not have an authority to which they could appeal in order to arbitrate disputes. Contracts have to be enforceable before anyone will enter into them.

The point here is that you can debate the causality of social trust, but a society with a corrupt and untrustworthy state is going to be a low-trust society. Alternatively, to use the language of the pseudo-sciences, social trust correlates with public corruption. The causal arrows may point one way or both ways, but public corruption is a good proxy for social trust. There are measures of public corruption and the most popular is from these guys, who publish downloadable statistics every year for the pseudo-sciences.

Trust in the state is always going to drift over time, but you can spot some trends. Just take a look at the US over the last few decades. In the 1980’s, the savings and loan crisis put a lot of people in prison. Even some politicians got dinged for getting too cozy with the crooked bankers. A decade later we had the dot-com bubble and the accounting scandals, but no one went to jail. They just lost money. Less than a decade later we had the mortgage crisis and the crooks got bailed out by the government with taxpayer funds. This is a trend worth noticing.

Now, look around at what we are seeing today. The Clinton e-mail scandal is so outlandish, it is now threatening the rule of law. In the 70’s, Nixon was run from office from 18 missing minutes of tape. Clinton erased 17,000 emails, some may have been under subpoena. It is blazingly obvious that she and her cronies violated Federal law by mishandling classified information. The most logical explanation for all of this is they were selling it for cash through that ridiculous charity they run. A charity that has systematically violated the law with regards to accounting for donations.

How is it possible that this woman and her flunkies are not in jumpsuits waddling around Danbury FCI?

The first problem is the head of state appears to be a pathological liar. This Iran story is the sort of thing that used to bring down governments. It was certainly the sort of thing that should have administration officials hiring lawyers in preparation for the FBI visit. That would require an FBI that is not equally corrupt. Of course, the FBI is a product of the political class and ours is proving to be astonishingly corrupt. Today we learn that the politicians are conspiring to rig public hearings, which are the bedrock of popular government.

A certain amount of public corruption is to be expected. Politics will always attract shady characters, but it should also attract honest characters too. These are the folks that enjoy the boring work of good government. They police the system, enforce the rules and make public appeals for cleaning up the problems. Today, those people either do not exist or they have become too afraid to speak up. The American political class looks a lot like a corrupt police precinct. The crooks are in charge and they have inverted morality so that the honest fear detection by the corrupt.

It is not unreasonable to think that we may have passed the point where the political class can be expected to reform itself. Their unwillingness to even try to thwart the rise of these vulgar grifters from the Ozarks suggests the the political elite has lost the capacity to feel shame. Anyone willing to defend Hillary Clinton to the public is someone, who will lie about anything, violate any law, violate any taboo. That is a person lacking in anything resembling a soul. A political class populated with such people is a ruling class at war with itself, the very definition of a low trust state.

The truly frightening thing is that the only institution the public trusts is the military. Take a look at what is happening with the sports ball players protesting during the national anthem. This coming Sunday is 9/11 and even the most reptilian of Progressives are saying such a protest on that day would be a slap in the face to the men and women who serve the country. When no one trusts the ruling class, and the military is the only institution in which the public has faith, there is always one result. It does not have to be that way, but that’s the way it has always been.

At some level, some portion of the public understands this. The Trump phenomenon is not about Trump in the conventional sense. There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform.

Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse.

Travelogue: Dubliners

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On the plane ride into Dublin, I sat next to an older man, who was from Kilkenny. He consumed half of the flight boasting about his hometown and his country. The Irish are very proud of being Irish and they are not ashamed to boast about it. People with a strong culture are prone to this and I find it appealing. He was coming back early so he could watch his hurling team in a big match. This allowed him to tell me that the national game of Ireland was the greatest thing in the world. I feel the same way about baseball so I could relate.

The other half of the flight, the back half, he spent asking me about American politics. I got the impression that he wanted to talk politics from the first moment he saw that I was an American. The glories of Ireland stuff was just to butter me up. Of course, he wanted to know about Trump. My assumption was that he thought Trump was terrible, but he was going to be polite until I revealed my allegiances. There was an Ivy Day in the Committee Room quality to our conversation, when another person joined in the discussion of Trump.

The Irish love their politics and I got the sense they were mystified by Trump or maybe mystified as to why Americans are considering him. Alternatively, they may simply have been wondering why a country as big as America is unable to find better options. That’s not an unreasonable question, but there is no answer. Every country can ask the same of their political leaders, so size has nothing to with it. For some reason, politics attracts the sort of people no sensible people should ever want involved in politics. It’s a paradox.

My response when asked why Trump might win was , “Because what comes next would be much worse.” At first I assumed this would elicit questions, but people seemed to understand. Perhaps they were simply being polite, but I came away from every political discussion with the impression that the Irish are fully aware of the dangers that loom just over the horizon. Something has gone wrong and no one knows exactly how to make it right. Tossing out the people currently in charge is simply the option available.

The puzzle they left me was that they never once spoke of Hillary Clinton. They both agreed that Trump was a typical American, by that they meant big and boisterous, as well as a bit silly by their reckoning. Even so, Hillary Clinton has been in politics for almost three decades now. Her husband was president and made a big show of coming to Ireland and pretending he was Irish. I would have expected them to be pro-Clinton and dismissive of Trump. Instead, all they cared about was how a TV guy could become President.

I chewed on that mystery a bit as I walked around the city. Dublin is an old city that does not like being old. All over the city you see efforts to show that Dublin is a modern, hip city, equal to any of the hipster cities around the world. The young people are fully engaged with their phones and seem to be divorced from their past and the past of the city. All over people were quick to tell me that Dublin had the latest of whatever I was inquiring about at the moment. Maybe the locals simply get tired of stupid Americans asking them where the Shire is located.

The the thing about Dublin that will stick with me is the whiteness of the place. There were about 25 thousand Americans in the city for the college football game. In the pubs, you could hear them marveling at the whiteness of Dublin. In America, cities are very diverse and some are dangerously diverse. Portland Oregon is the whitest city in America at about 65%. Dublin is probably 95% white as their immigrants are mostly from eastern Europe. The only blacks I saw were tourists from America.

That is, of course, why you don’t see the police presence you see in other cities. I was at a pub and noticed that the street was packed with young drunk people, but I could not see any cops. As a cab driver told me, if you want trouble you can did it in Dublin, but you have to look for it. In more diverse cities, trouble is always on the prowl so the cops have to be out showing the colors in an effort to keep the peace. I would be lying if I said I thought for a minute that Dublin needed more diversity. It manages to get along just fine without it.

The funny thing I noticed in Ireland was how the city had turned itself into a tourist trap. By that I mean everyone is hooked into Ireland Inc., a community enterprise to sell everything Ireland in an effort to boost tourism. I saw this in Iceland too. I was told by a cabby that after the bust, they figured it was the best way to make money, so the local economy converted quickly to tourism. In fact, the cab drivers were all hilariously over the top in their tourism pitch. Everyone of them I encountered sounded like he was working for the department of tourism. Perhaps they had all been real estate agents.

One of those cab drivers said a funny thing to me. He was pointing out a section that caters to students, when he said it is the one thing he dislikes about driving a taxi. He has to witness the debauchery of the young. “It’s as if they have no respect for themselves, particularly the men. They treat women like whores. How could they ever marry one of them?” Every city, every country, is a city of the dead. We live in the shadows of those who came before us. What spurs on progress is the desire to get out of those shadows and make our lives our own. It’s not without its consequences though, as often the past is where the future lies.

My taxi driver was one of 14 kids. His best friend was one of 18 and his father had a second wife with whom he produced a handful of kids. The taxi driver, a man in his fifties, had four children, but his kids were childless. The Irish fertility rate remains the highest in Europe, but it stands at 2.02. The average age of new mothers is close to 30. The young, those in their 20’s, are not getting married and that is of concern. When you tease out the births to immigrants, the Irish youth seem to be following the same path as the rest of Europe.

A people without children is a nation of dead people, soon to be a forgotten people. It is not a guarantee with the Irish and perhaps the debauchery of their youth is just a temporary phase, but I wonder if I had not just visited a museum without realizing it. Joyce supposedly said Irish history is a nightmare from which they never wake up. That’s no longer the case as Ireland is prosperous and free of the sectarian violence that came to define them for close to a century. Even so, they may have woke from their nightmare to find the future does not include them.

Travelogue: Diversity

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Iceland is a barren moonscape created by tectonic plates rubbing against one another on something called the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. The result is a beauty you see nowhere else, but it also means not much can be grown on the island. The natives have to deal with a limited food supply from the ocean, thus developed a form of cannibalism in which the dead are processed into a product called Skyr. I’m kidding about that, of course. There are no cannibals on Iceland, but food is expensive and lacking in the sort of diversity we are used to seeing in the West.

The consequence of this is the range of desirable flavors in their food is very narrow. I was given a ham and cheese sandwich and surprised to learn how they eat them. Warm without any adornments or condiments. In the States, you would have more “other stuff” on the thing than the main ingredients. Most people would also have mustard or maybe mayonnaise as a condiment. Chatting with a couple of local women, they told me Icelanders think Americans make weird food that tastes funny.

That’s nature at work. Iceland was populated by Nordic males, who brought Celtic women with them. Recent DNA analysis suggests that around 66 percent of the male settler-era population was of Norse ancestry. The female population was 60 percent Celtic. They arrived, we think, in the year 874 AD, so this population landed on the island very recent. Inevitably some strong selection pressure was at work. You had to be within a small group, who would want to give it a go on Iceland. You had to have a certain constitution to thrive there.

Icelandic women are notoriously beautiful and that’s true, assuming you are a male from west of the Hajnal line. I could be wrong about that, but that’s my guess. The women are tall and thin with angular faces. You don’t see many fat women in Iceland, but that may be due to the cost of food. The other thing is the women do not wear much makeup, but when they do it, it is to accentuate their eyes. There is a great diversity of eye color with most being a shade of blue, but brown and green are common too.

I found myself staring at their eyes, registering the different colors and patterns. This was true in Ireland, but not so obvious. Many Irish women have let themselves go so they are not, on average, as beautiful as the Icelandic women. The Irish say the Icelandic settlers carried away the most beautiful Irish women. That’s a fun legend and probably a little true, but the numbers involved make that a bit implausible. What has ruined Irish women is alcohol and excess calories, but that’s true all over the West.

Diversity of eye color is a European thing. Africans and Asians lack this diversity and it is a good question for science to ponder. Humans evolved to be social animals and a big part of that starts with the eyes. There are something like 200 species of monkeys and apes with humans the only one with a visible sclera. That’s the white of our eye. In humans, it makes our eyes a signal. From any angle, we can perceive the thoughts, to some degree, of another humans. We can see where another is staring and infer something of what they are thinking.

This feature did not evolve for no reason and it is assumed to be a part of how we evolved as a social animal. Further, the diversity of eye color, as well, as hair color and texture, in European populations, is not an accident. If it had no value, it would not have happened. Clearly, diversity of hair color, hair texture, eye color and the features around the eyes began to have a reproductive advantage at some point. A purely social feature like eye color that is so strikingly different in Europeans, than anywhere else, suggests that European sociality may have evolved down a different path as well.

It is an example of what you hear from the more sophisticated in the HBD community. Early man in Europe was faced with much more difficult challenges than in Africa. As a result, males would have been at higher risk of death when hunting and traveling. When the sex ratio ceases to be balanced, when too many of one sex are competing for too few of the other, sexual selection intensifies. So a surfeit of females, relative to the male population, could have resulted in the diversity of eye and hair color, as women competed for the attention of males.

Put another way, environmental pressure changed the people, but then the people changed their environment, that is, their culture. Diversity of eye color, for example, resulted from nature killing off more males than females. That preference for diversity by mates would ripple through the population. People got better at being around people that did not look like them and better at having kids that did not look like them. Nature changes people, people change their culture and then the culture magnifies or mitigates the forces of nature.

It is what makes the Diversity™ rackets so craven and shallow. People are more than their skin, but that’s not what the grifters and charlatans would have us believe. According to the prevailing orthodoxy, people are all the same with pointless physical differences. Such thinking is anti-science and anti-human. It has been a long and complicated road for humans. No all of us went down the same roads or faced the same complications. Appreciating that is truly appreciating diversity.

Travelogue: Open Borders

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Whenever an American is required to go out into the provinces, he is inevitably forced to hear some harangues from the locals about the doings in the Empire. Europeans believe themselves to be worldly sophisticates and they invest a lot of effort into maintaining that delusion. At this point in history, it may be the only thing Europeans are good at doing. They really are a bunch of ridiculous posers and they are so endlessly smug about it. This suggests it is a studied and cultivated habit, not just a weird quirk.

In Iceland, I was subjected to a long boring lecture by an Icelandic woman over the wonderfulness of open borders. She was unaware that I am a FOP (Friend of Pepe) so she was operating under the impression I was sympathetic. It was hard to keep a straight face, given that Iceland is a rocky island in the North Sea. Even if they welcome the world, the world will not be moving to a barren moonscape that is cold in the dead of summer.

Open borders is a strange religion with many in Europe. The news is a pretty much just a non-stop celebration of open borders. They talk about it with such reverence, you could be mistaken for thinking “open borders” is the new name for God. Today the news is celebrating the first anniversary of Alan Kurdi, the hoax perpetrated by the Western media to help sway public sympathy for allowing in a billion Muslims. The news, of course, still maintains it was a real story, which is like watching people talk seriously about Big Foot.

On SkyNews they had one of the typical panel discussion things that American news channels like so much. It was, of course, a multi-culti festival of virtue signaling. All of them had on their serious face as they competed for the title of most pompously pious on the subject of migration. One of the people was a middle-aged honky with the title “comedian” which was the only thing funny about him. The others were brown women representing both diversity and girl power

The moderator, to his credit, brought up the fact that most people just saw it as virtue signaling. The unfunny comic looked as if he was about to have a stroke. If he did fall over, it would probably have been the only time he had made anyone laugh. The African woman next to him then explained that she did not understand the phrase virtue signaling, so she went into a speech about her virtue.

The backdrop to much of this is Brexit. In the run-up to the Brexit vote, the remain side was at great pains to show the issue was about economics. Now that they lost, they are sure it was about xenophobia and racism. They carry on like Brexit is going to return the world to the Dark Ages. One of the Girl Power! Trio on the set went on a rant about how awful it was going to have to show her passport when traveling to Europe. She made it sound like customs was the showers at Auschwitz.

In a conversation with an Irishman and another Icelander at breakfast, I was told that nationalism was the worst thing since the other worst thing and that open borders has made the peace in Europe. The absurdity of this was amusing for a bit as the two of them competed with one another as to who was the most ridiculous person in the room. Finally, I had enough and reminded them that Europe was at peace because the US kept the peace.

That went over like a Hitler salute and the reason is many Europeans have come to define themselves by their relationship to America and Americans, or at least what they imagine to be America and Americans. The median age in Europe is 38 so few living Europeans have known anything other than life in the American Empire. As a result, the culture has changed to reflect this reality. Dependence eventually creates a dependency culture and that’s the culture of Europe today.

Talking Monkeys in the Robot Future

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By the time this is posted I will be with the bog monkey somewhere in Ireland, mesmerizing them with tales of indoor plumbing and a diverse diet. Since there is some chance I may be tricked into having an adult beverage or two and thus be rendered unable to post, the following has been pre-recorded.

–Z

A favorite theme here is the consequences of the post-scarcity world. For as long as modern humans have been modern humans, people organized to mitigate against the consequences of scarcity. Hunter-gatherer societies worked out systems of cooperation so they could hunt, protect their women, defend territory, rear children and so forth. It is largely assumed that human settlement was a cooperative effort in response to scarcity. People figured out that they could work together in larger and larger groups to increase and stabilize their food supply.

All of that is speculative, but we know there has never been a time when there was plenty of food, shelter, safety and access to women. The story of history is, in part, the competition for resources. It’s not that there was never enough in aggregate, although that has been the norm. There have been societies with plenty, but the distribution of the plenty has never been equal so there were plenty without plenty. This observation is how we got communism and roughly a 100 million dead trying to make it otherwise.

The West is well into a post-scarcity world. In America, our poor people are fat because we provide everyone unlimited calories. Even the poorest of the poor get government money so they can buy massive amounts of calories. You can argue that a ten pound bag of frozen chicken nuggets is unhealthy, but you can’t deny they possess loads of calories. Go into any ghetto grocery store and you see the locals filling carriages with mounds of processed food that provide vastly more calories than they need, but it beats the alternatives.

All of this is familiar ground if you read blogs like this one. We no longer have poor people in the way in which we think of poverty. There is another angle to this that does not get much attention. The robot revolution is not just going to give us even more plenty with less human labor. The robot revolution will also strip away many of the positional goods. Robot cars, assuming it happens, turns the car into a public utility. Most likely robot cars will require banning human drivers so there will be no reason to own a swank ride to impress the neighbors.

It does not stop there. Putting the slack-jawed yokels out of work by automating the widget plant still leaves Cletus and Junior at the bottom of the social order. Instead of working, they will be provided a stipend so they can sit around all day playing games and taking drugs. When the plant managers and accountants are sent home with the stipend because robots took their jobs, something else happens. Suddenly, the old rules of status fall apart. Vast parts of the professional classes can be eliminated with automation, according the futurists.

Frankly, this is the one area where automation is most likely to have an impact. Automating manufacturing has been going on for decades and we could be bumping up against the point of diminishing returns. Automating office work is another matter. Lots of that can be automated. The law is a great example. We could automate a lot of it know, but the profession has always been slow at adopting technology. That’s changing and we’ll see whole areas of the law turned over to software in the next decade

If you hate lawyers or office workers, this may sound great, but there’s another side to this. Humans are hierarchical. Take fifty people at random and put them on an island and before much of anything gets done, they will begin to arrange themselves hierarchically. The males will compete with one another in some way to establish dominance. By the time they figure out how to get fresh water and build a fire, someone will be in charge and he will have lieutenants. That’s right, it will be a male in charge. That’s how it works.

In the modern world. The social order is determined by one’s choice of work. Doctors have a higher status than garbage men or college professors. They may not make more money than the garbage man, but they have higher status. Usually though, status and income correlate closely so we know the guy in the high status job because he has the Mercedes and lives on the hill. The low status guy has a jalopy and lives in a rundown part of town. This is how we assess one another and ourselves. It is as much a part of our nature as left handedness.

How this works in the robot future is not easy to figure. Right now about 63% of adult Americans are in the workforce in some way. This includes part-time work. That sounds good, but it is around an historic low and all the data suggests it is going lower over time. Obviously, the robot future promises to throw just about everyone out of work in time so defining social status by work is going to become less useful. In fact, the people still working will begin to envy the vast majority sitting around, taking drugs and watching television. The Marching Morons is funny, but unrealistic.

We’re probably seeing the beginnings of a replacement status system in the managerial class. They covet credentials to the point of absurdity. More than a few times I have run across someone with what appears to be an eye chart under their name. It is the list of credentials they display so others can assess their position in the hierarchy. In the robot future, humans will have all the same stuff, but they will compete for meaningless credentials so they can decorate their chests with ribbons and medals. The robots in charge of the robot future will pretend the guys kitted out like third world dictators are in charge, based on their chest full of medals.

Follow The Money

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By the time this is posted I will be somewhere over the Atlantic on my way to Iceland. I will then move onto Ireland where I will spend a few days with the bog monkeys. Since there is some chance I may be tricked into having an adult beverage or two and thus be rendered unable to post, the following has been pre-recorded.

–Z

One of the benefits of reading lots of history is you often see the same catalysts, causes and dynamics turning up in the story. The Roman Empire had a lot of problems toward the end, but a big one was their financial structure. Their lack of money led them to do things that made their situation worse. Similarly, the French Revolution had a “want of money” angle to it. The crown was broke and did a lot of very stupid things, as a result of being broke, that compounded the many social problems brewing in the country,

It’s tempting to wonder, for example, what would have happened if Louis XIV had been a bit more prudent or showed a bit more foresight with regards to the financial system of his country. Alternatively, what would have happened if his heirs had better advisers, who would have pushed for mild steady reform in order to slowly bring the French financial system into line with the emerging modern world. Heck, what if Louis XV had simply avoided the mistake of hiring economist John Law.

The best historians, I think, look at the men of the time and ask why were they unable or unwilling to do the necessary things to avoid catastrophe. In almost all cases, there were plenty of people advising the rulers that were making a blunder. In many cases, the rulers knew they were blundering, but events constrained them from acting. In the decades leading to the French Revolution, many smart and influential people knew reform was necessary. They just did not know how to go about it or what they were able to do, within the limits placed upon them, made things worse

Anyway, that’s the vibe I get when reading these stories about the Fed and their deliberations on the economy. Due to the sensitive and precarious nature of their positions, they tend to speak in riddles, but if you are careful, you can tease out some meaning from their public statements. They are very guarded and they reserve their more candid opinions for private conversations, but they rely on the broader financial public to put pressure on policy makers. These staged events are an esoteric form of lobbying.

The United States has a Federal debt that rivals what we had while fighting two empires in World War II. Current debt is close to 100% of GDP and that was the peak during the war years. The difference is we are not battling two empires in a shooting war. Now we are maintaining a global empire. The financiers understand this difference and they certainly recognize the danger it poses. The costs of fighting Hitler and Tojo were temporary and extraordinary. The cost of empire is permanent and ordinary, at least for a while longer.

These debt levels are only possible in the artificially low interest rate environment created by the central bankers. The trouble is they appear to have gone beyond the point of diminishing returns with interest rate policy. We are effectively in a no-growth economy now, despite historically low borrowing rates at all levels. The West is not in recession nor is it facing collapse, but it is exposed. There are no financial tools left in reserve to face the next unknown financial calamity and the bankers know this.

The trouble is the cost of reform is so frightening, no one is willing to face up to it. Interest on the Federal debt is about 6% of annual spending. If borrowing rates returns to historic norms, debt service will grow rapidly. Some estimates say it would exceed 20% of the annual budget within a decade. That’s based on the assumption the economy would not collapse, but rising rates would throttle real estate, tip over bank balance sheets and send the equity markets into free fall. All the attempts to keep the plates spinning have made artificially low borrowing rates the norm. Everything is now based on it.

The Federal government is not about to go bankrupt anytime soon. Federal outlays are about 20% of GDP right now, which is more than manageable. State and local government account for another 20% or thereabouts. Government spending in Germany is at 44% at the moment. It is 44% in Britain and 52% in France. In other words, the US has the same problems we see with all social democracies, but we’re not Zimbabwe. The US dollar is also the world’s reserve currency so that gives the US a much bigger margin for error.

Still, there is a sense you get from theses statements from central bankers is that they know these artificially low borrowing rates cannot go on forever. The longer they continue, the worse it will be when they finally return to normal. It’s just that no one knows how to fix it. The political costs of inflating our way out of debt are too high. Letting rates go up means recession and political panic. A continuation of debt monetization limits the freedom of action of central banks when the next crisis arises and there will always be another crisis.

That is what most likely worries the more sober minded bankers. A decade of 4% inflation would be unpleasant politically, but not end times bad. A slow rise in interest rates would not collapse the world economy either, but it would usher in a long recession similar to the 1870’s, where asset values tumbled for a decade as the Second Industrial Revolution came to an end. The real danger is the unknown crisis that does threaten the foundations of the system and the central banks have no tools to face it.

That’s where the West is at the moment. Things are plodding along, but there’s nothing in reserve in case of a crisis. The US economy is stagnant at the moment, but if it falls into recession, there’s nothing the Fed can do about it. Negative rates are unlikely and probably not effective anyway. The Fed balance sheet is already bloated so further monetization is going to be hard. The financial system is a citadel whose walls need rebuilding, but no one has a clue as to how to go about do it.

The Tan Man’s Burden

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When I was a young man I had a job washing cars for a car rental place. Mostly the job was two or three guys vacuuming up the inside, shooting it with the deodorizer and then hosing it off. It was part-time work so there was a gang of part-timers working in shifts. For a young honky in the big city, it was an interesting experience because most of my colleagues were from the third world. There were a few other honkies and some American blacks, but most were immigrants from the third world.

One lesson I learned was that outside of America, the world is not black and white. In the States, race was always about blacks and whites. In the rest of the world, there are a lot of shades in between. There’s also a fair bit of tribalism too. The African guys had a low opinion of American blacks. One guy from Ghana used to tell me that only the stupid were caught by slave traders and shipped to the new world. The smart Africans stayed in Africa. West Indians also had a tough time with American blacks. They put a great deal of effort into separating from them.

The one guy I always remembered was a guy named Maurice, who was from the Caribbean and of mixed race. He was obsessed with his mixed race too. He never stopped talking about it. If he did not tell you he was mixed race, you would have assumed he was Spanish or maybe Cajun. In parts of the South like Louisiana you run into guys who are white, but they have some Indian mixed in, or maybe even a black or two way back in the family tree. They used to tick the white box, but now they tick the black box.

The thing about Maurice was he talked about his mixed race all the time because he was a man without a race. The blacks did not accept him as black and he just assumed the whites did not accept him as white. In all likelihood, no one cared. I know I did not care, but he cared very much. At the time, I just thought he was a guy with hangups, but looking back, I see now that being a mulatto is a strange curse. While it has no real social drawbacks in the modern age, especially for women, for whom it is an asset, the person of mixed race imagines it is a huge burden.

It may be a burden too. This story about Rodney Harrison calling out Colin Kaepernick for not being authentically black is a good example. Until this controversy, my guess is exactly no one cared that Kaepernick was half black, except Kaepernick, who appears to obsess over it. So much so he went overboard trying to prove he belonged in the black world, by affecting everything we would associate with black culture. His wigger act really is over the top and most likely the result of feeling like he has to be extra black in order to pass for black. He is a tanned and tatted Vanilla Ice.

It has been noted that Obama’s closest advisers are mixed race people who identify as black. Obama, of course, is of mixed race. He also has the added burden of having been raised abroad. His connection to the black American experience is theoretical, at best. Yet, he puts a lot of effort into being not white and one could be forgiven for thinking that maybe he nurses a grudge against whites. He did dedicate a book to his delinquent father, but has never had much to say about his white mother and white grandparents who raised him, other than a disparaging remark about them.

Being black in America has its own unique challenges. Being white in America is no guarantee of happiness either, but black people have some special challenges that are made easier on an individual basis by black solidarity. Talk to black professionals and one of the things they lament is the lack of black middle class institutions. The cookout with Ned Flanders is nice, but they want to be around other black people who share their outlook. It’s why the black middle class has struggled to cut off the black underclass. Racial solidarity is powerful stuff.

Mulatto man does not have anything like that as the mixed race people are roughly 3% of the population. The black-white portion of that is less than a third so the number of people with a black parent and white parent is very small. There’s never been an identity group for mulattoes so there’s no history or shared experience around which to build a racial identity. The result, at least for now, is a class of people with no tribe to call their own. They are not authentically black and they don’t believe they are accepted as white. That disengagement probably feels like a great burden to the person carrying it.

What Comes Next

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I was listening to the James Miller interview of Greg Cochran the other day and at the end, Miller stated that he would not post an unedited version of the interview for fear of repercussions. The unedited version was six hours, but Miller cut it down to two hours. Cochran is not a PC guy and he says what he thinks, which can get you fired these days. Miller is a young man, who needs his job, so he has to be careful. It was an act of bravery for him to do the interview. Miller works on a college campus and there you can be declared a heretic simply by association.

A hobbyhorse item around here is the comparison between modern America and theocracies like Iran. In both countries, the ultimate authority is in the hands of a class of people charged with maintaining public morality. In both countries, those rules are arbitrary and capriciously enforced. In Iran, someone accused of heresy cannot appeal to the law. They must appeal to a cleric. In the US, someone accused of hate think cannot appeal to the courts or the ordinary rules of society. Instead, they are reduced to groveling at the feet of social justice warriors, hoping for leniency.

America is not a theocracy, of course, but it is a useful comparison. The PC enforcers on the college campus or in the corporate HR department are filled with the same self righteousness as the enforcers of Islamic law in Iran. In both cases, they feel they are entitled to commit monstrous acts, because they do so in the name of some great cause. The PC enforcers are not acting in the name of an anthropomorphic deity, but their justifications are just as supernatural. The endless war on abstract concepts like racism, sexism and so on is just as mystical as making war on lust or greed.

The reason to contemplate this is that at some point, people get tired of being pushed around by lunatics. Much of Donald Trump’s appeal is due to his dismissal of the PC piety that has come to dominate politics. A vote for Trump is really just a vote for the big old middle finger to the people in charge. The reason the alt-right was so happy to have Clinton engage them was so they could tell her and the rest of the Cloud People to go fuck themselves. There’s a lot of pent up “fuck you” out there after decades of preaching and scolding from our betters.

The thing is, Trump is probably going to lose in November. It’s not because the majority of voters are not down with the middle finger movement. It’s that most people are afraid of risk. Trump is a wild man and that makes him a wild card. Most men prefer the certainty of slavery than the risk of freedom, so rolling the dice on Trump is a lot to ask of voters. That does not change the fact that most people are sick to death of the PC enforcers. It’s just that they can’t quite bring themselves to defy their masters. Staying home, voting third party or knuckling under and voting for Clinton is safe, for now.

This brings me back to Iran. In 2011 protests erupted after the government rigged the elections. Students mostly, went to the streets and within days a full fledged revolt was underway. Given what had been happening with the so-called Arab spring, there was a hope that the mullahs would be forced out and something close to sanity would be restored to Persia. If you are going to pick a country that can join modernity, it would be Iran. That’s not what happened. President Obama came to the defense if his coreligionists and the protests were eventually crushed.

It is an important lesson. It is assumed that the reactionaries always lose and maybe they do in the fullness of time, but in the case of Iran, there’s no sign of that happening just yet. The reason is they have a firm grip on all of the social and political institutions and they are willing to do what they must to maintain power. In America, the Progressives have a similar hold on society and they are every bit as ruthless as their counterparts in Iran. They may not yet be sending trouble makers to labor camps, but they are willing to ruin careers. Has anyone seen Milo Yiannopoulos or Robert Stacey McCain on twitter recently?

The point is the Persian Awakening fizzled out mostly because the people in the streets were unwilling or unable to do what was necessary to break the will of the rulers. When the Soviet Union collapsed, it was because the people in charge had lost the will to fight. In Iran and America, that will to fight must be broken before the enforcers begin to yield to the people. Simply voting for Trump is not enough. Even putting him in the White House will not be enough. Twitter memes and mockery from comment trolls is not going to break the will of the lunatics.

In April 16, 1963 Martin Luther King wrote an open letter that came to be known as The Letter from Birmingham Jail. The letter addressed the particulars of the protests going on at the time, with regards to the Civil Rights Movement. The contents of the letter are no longer relevant, but the lesson is relevant today. What King was up to was giving the white majority a choice. They could go to war with the black population or negotiate a full integration of blacks into American society. The white world deal with King or the guys setting cars on fire and smashing windows.

Whether they know it or not, that’s the choice facing the ruling class. There is no doubt they nurse fantasies about crushing the hate thinkers after the election. Corpulent gasbags like Sloppy Williamson and Jonah Goldberg have written extensively about their desire to run people like you out of the country. The Left, of course, is chomping at the bit to stack the courts with authoritarians, who will vaporize the Bill of Rights and anything resembling citizenship. There were plenty of Bull Connors 50 years ago too.

Just as the Persian Awakening was crushed, the alt-right will probably be crushed, but these things don’t go away. They go underground and regroup. They learn from the defeat and come back better and more prepared to take the fight to the enemy. What comes next is always worse than what the ruling class imagined the first time. In retrospect, they always wish they had taken the first offer and loosened their grip every so slightly. Whether of not the Cloud People recognize what is on offer is hard to know, but the way to bet is they invest everything them have in crushing their opposition.

What comes next, however, will be much worse.

Science and the Alt-Right

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One of the stranger aspects of some corners of the alt-right is the hostility to science. I don’t want to say it is a rejection of science, but something like an extreme skepticism about it. I was reminded of this reading Vox Day’s 16-point manifesto the other day. The part that jumped out to me is this one:

The Alt Right is scientodific. It presumptively accepts the current conclusions of the scientific method (scientody), while understanding a) these conclusions are liable to future revision, b) that scientistry is susceptible to corruption, and c) that the so-called scientific consensus is not based on scientody, but democracy, and is therefore intrinsically unscientific.

Vox seems to be trying very hard to declare himself the Pope of the alt-right so perhaps he is just getting carried away with himself with these posts, but he has made a big deal about being an anti-evolutionists that regularly kits himself out in the Don Quixote suit and runs around tilting at imaginary concepts. Usually, people opposed to evolution are coming at it from the perspective of self-styled Christians¹. That’s not the case with Vox as you see in this post titled The Crisis in Science.

There is no crisis in science. The soft sciences like psychology and sociology are certainly in trouble, but people have known that for a very long time. It’s not just the bogus studies either. It is the hard sciences, particularly biology, that are collapsing soft sciences like psychology. Once you arrive at a biochemical explanation for mental illness, there’s no need for guys in turtlenecks, smoking pipes and asking about your mother. Genetics is rendering many of the soft sciences meaningless, by exploding blank slatism.

The replication crisis that is bedeviling the soft science is not a problem in chemistry, physics or even biology where speculation is more common. The reason there is a replication crisis is the empirically minded from the hard sciences grew tired of the bullshit coming from the sociology department, showing up in the news as real science. It is science policing itself by enforcing the rules of science on those who seek to appropriate science for their own ends. This is a normal part of the scientific process.

What’s puzzling about the anti-science elements on the alt-right is they are not really motivated by religion, like we see with most Progressives. Rejecting science because it violates your deeply held beliefs is not irrational. It may be wrong, but it is not irrational. The anti-science people in the alt-right seem to be responding to the identity politics of the Left, which often waves the flag of science to justify their crackpot ideas. Since it takes too long to refute the Progressive pseudo-science, some on the alt-right simply reject science, or at least large parts of it.

This is to some degree understandable, as the alt-right is mostly a reaction to the extremism of the social justice movement. The unhinged assault on normalcy is often dressed up in the language of science. A degenerate in a sundress, who wants to watch your daughter pee, is excused as transgender, as if such a thing exists. People with Ph.D’s step forward to tell us how biological sex is a social construct and that there are unlimited number of “non-binary identities.” It perfectly understandable that normal people will get a little skeptical of scientists.

The interesting part of this is that big part of the alt-right is rooted in the growing fields of genetics, evolutionary biology and the cognitive sciences. Guys like Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire have been intellectual heavy weights of the movement for two decades, largely due to popularizing research in the cognitive sciences that contradict the Progressive faith. More than a few evolution guys have been “Watsoned” for promoting ideas from evolutionary biology.  Frankly, there would not be Vox Day if not for the science guys and their wild tales about evolution.

That’s the other interesting strangeness about the thing the press is now calling the alt-right. There’s a wide diversity of opinion within it and a wide diversity of opinion about what it is. Greg Cochran, I’m guessing, would laugh off the assertions of Vox Day, but guys like Richard Spencer would dismiss people like Razib Khan. Yet, there would be broad agreement among all of them when it comes to critiquing the prevailing orthodoxy. That suggests the anti-science stuff is just a way to make magic fit reality. Self-delusion is powerful stuff and not always a bad thing.

¹I’m sympathetic to creationist because they are harmless and their beliefs tend toward the sort of positive outcomes that make for a healthy Western society. You can be a great engineer and still believe Adam and Eve rode around on dinosaurs in the Garden of Eden. On the other hand, I have no tolerance for intelligent design people. They paganize the Christian concept of God, turning him into a fickle teenager, who alters the laws of nature for no reason. Intelligent design is not just anti-science, it is anti-Christian.

I Want A Thank You

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News brings word that one of the hyper-violent meat-heads the NFL hires to entertain us on fall weekends is making a nuisance of himself over the custom of playing the National Anthem before games.

San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has willingly immersed himself into controversy by refusing to stand for the playing of the national anthem in protest of what he deems are wrongdoings against African Americans and minorities in the United States.

His latest refusal to stand for the anthem — he has done this in at least one other preseason game — came before the 49ers’ preseason loss to Green Bay at Levi’s Stadium on Friday night.
“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in an exclusive interview after the game. “To me, this is bigger than football and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Kaepernick was born to a destitute black white mother¹ in Milwaukee, who put him up for adoption. His father was a deadbeat from the neighborhood. In other words, he was born into the typical black environment, but unlike most black children, he was saved by a nice white couple who adopted him and raised him as their son. This got him into good schools, sports and a middle-class lifestyle. Later, nice white coaches helped him with his sports career, first at college and then in the NFL. Jim Harbaugh made Kaepernick a legitimate NFL player.

Kaepernick has decided to respond to this amazing run of good fortune, almost exclusively the result of generous white Americans, by giving his middle finger to his fellow Americans. Specifically, he is his flipping the bird to white people so he can pretend to make common cause with the black people from whom he was saved as a baby. You would think that someone living this wonderful life would be grateful to the country and the people who make it possible, but that’s not how things work in a grievance culture.

The 49ers issued a statement about Kaepernick’s decision: “The national anthem is and always will be a special part of the pre-game ceremony. It is an opportunity to honor our country and reflect on the great liberties we are afforded as its citizens. In respecting such American principles as freedom of religion and freedom of expression, we recognize the right of an individual to choose and participate, or not, in our celebration of the national anthem.”

There are people paid lots of money to come up with statements like this. They sound pleasant, but say nothing. Exactly no one is saying this guy should be forced to stand during the anthem. No one thinks he should be barred from staying these stupid and nasty things about his countrymen. It’s a another way to shift the focus from the front lash to the backlash. Let’s not notice that Kaepernick is an ungrateful d-bag. No, let’s fret over some imaginary people who seek to oppress the ungrateful d-bag.

The people in charge think this type of response is safe and they may be right. To come out and say, “Our player is an ungrateful, spoiled meat head with the IQ of a goldfish” would be accurate, but probably cause more trouble than it is worth. Everyone would know it is true, but everyone also knows you can never say anything bad about the black guy in these cases. To do so gets every bean pie eating black media guy howling for your head, calling you a bigot.

No, the honkies are expected to just wait it out. Eventually, Kaepernick will have his big interview where the black interviewer will yuck up it up with him, cause you know, they’re brothers in the struggle and all that. This is why TV networks hire guys like Steve A. Smith. These two-person performances are intended to send a message to the honkies at home. “See, we can be reasonable, but we can also be unreasonable so you get to choose. Either go along with what we reasonably demand or else.”

Like a lot of people, I suspect, I’m going with “or else” this time. Bring it on. Black people have some legitimate complaints, but they need to be directed at their fellow blacks. Whites in America have been incredibly generous and accommodating to blacks over the last half century. It has not been perfect, it never is, but there’s nowhere on earth you would rather be black than in America. There’s a reason the Back To Africa Movement has no members. I don’t want to hear any more complaining. I want a thank you.

¹I mistakenly thought his birth mother was black.