Author Archives: thezman

Unnecessary Toughness

Posted on by

I finally finished watching the series Justified. Binge watching is my preferred method of watching these things nowadays, but it still took me two months to watch the whole series. I guess I am a slow watcher. Admittedly my taste in TV shows is pedestrian. I just do not expect TV shows or movies to be art or anything close to art. They are intended to entertain the average person. Against that standard, I would rank the series highly. It was not quite as good as Breaking Bad, but it was better than Sons of Anarchy, which went on too long and ended ridiculously.

I somewhat expected the same result as I entered the final season of Justified, despite the particularly good writing of the first five seasons. These long form dramas seem to lose their footing at the end for some reason. My hunch is the creators produce a great idea that works over a single season. They get picked up and put together a few more seasons and then run out of ideas or they cannot figure out how to bring it to a close. That was not the case here as the writers wrapped it up in a sensible way that worked with the rest of the series.

I do not want to give anything away, in case I am not the last person on earth to have watched the series, but what struck me about it was how the main character was a man from start to finish. By that I mean he was what we used to expect from leading men on TV and in movies. He was not racked with guilt or morally compromised. There were plenty of forks in the road where the main character had to figure out the right course, but there was none of the brooding and self-doubt we see in the modern leading man.

That is not typical today. In fact, it is rare. I mentioned Sons of Anarchy and that is a good example of the modern leading man. The hero of that series is always racked with guilt, doubt and Lord knows what else. The rebooted Batman, the one I watched anyway, is mostly about the hero’s battle with mental illness, instead of his fight with the threats to society. That is the model for the modern leading male. They are emotional cripples struggling to keep from leaping off a roof. Even James Bond has been turned into a head case. The last one I saw had him dealing with mommy issues.

Of course, male leads today almost always look like a pillow-biter’s wet dream. Steve Sailer has pointed out that most casting directors in Hollywood are effeminate gay men. The others are middle-aged women so the casting of male leads tends toward the fantasy male that appeals to old maids and queens. The result is steroidal freaks, who look like they spend all their time at the YMCA working out, among other things. That is something else that is changed. It used to be that a male lead lacked the sort of vanity that leads someone to steroid up and use “product.”

Tastes change and styles come and go so it may be nothing more than that, but I was struck by how out of place Justified seemed compared to modern dramas. The main character is a normal looking man, middle-aged with some gray around the temples. He is not a cartoonish looking brute or a mentally unstable pretty boy. His physical confrontations happen within the laws of physiology, as well as the laws of physics. The striking thing is that he is a genuine tough guy in the old time sense. When it comes time to face off with the bad guy, he faces off with the bad guy.

The classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, addresses the issue of traditional male in the modern world. John Wayne is the classic tough guy who operates on the edge of society, protecting society, but never quite part of it. Jimmy Stewart is what passed for the beta male hipster back in the day. Wayne settles things the old fashioned way. Stewart settles things in court arguing the law and morality. The movie never resolves the tension between the two male roles in society, suggesting there is no resolution, just a balance and a tension.

The near total lack of traditional male leads today probably reflects the fact post-scarcity America has lost the will or ability to do the hard work of civilization. Maybe it is simply no longer necessary. The people making TV and movies seem to think that is the case. Hollywood is, after all, the agit-prop of the ruling class. The people in charge want docile males, who are willing to be bossed around by women in Lycra jumpsuits. For the same reason the schools dope up the boys, Hollywood promotes the ideal male as being the Stepin Fetchit for the womyn’s studies department.

The End of the Revival

Posted on by

Because America is run by a religious cult that rewrites history to suit the current fads, it is easy to get history wrong. A good example is the Temperance Movement. Today children are taught that unhinged Christian fanatics banned alcohol. It was the good and liberal FDR, who beat back the lunatics and rescinded prohibition. The truth is the lunatics banning alcohol were on the Left. Crusades against vice are the stock and trade of the American Left, but history is written by the winners and Northern Liberals won the Civil War so we get an altered history.

Another example I like to use is the Great Awakening. It is thought of as a Christian phenomenon and it was in the first iterations, but it was a northern phenomenon in America. It had a major impact in reshaping the Congregational church, which was the seedbed for Progressivism in America. One of the many things the American Left inherited from their spiritual ancestors is the frequent spasms of spiritual revival that result in fevered attempts to cure some societal ill. Even though they have dropped the language of their ancestors, Progressives are still moralists.

If you look at Progressive history in the context of the Great Awakening, you produce a more complete narrative than when you look at the Left as a European import. Progressives go through periods of moral revival during which they make war on one bogeyman or another. These periods of revival are followed by a dormant phase in which the rest of society cleans up the mess and tries to get back to normal. The 1920’s, for example, were called the Return to Normalcy after Wilson’s excesses.

This current period of Progressive fanaticism got going in the 90’s, when the GOP won the ’94 election and Clinton tried to throw the Liberals overboard. The Green Party gained traction and the rumblings of discontent on the Left for the direction of the Democrat Party grew louder. The election of George W. Bush was the match that set the Left on fire. They saw Bush as a traitor to their kind. After all, his family is the bluest of true blue Yankees, but W rejected that and made himself into a Texan and an Evangelical Christian. “Witch!”

For Progressives, the Bush years were a provocation. Bush was not only a traitor to his people, but he also committed the cardinal sin of appropriating the ideas of the Left and then running with them. Bush spent extravagantly on education and the environment. He never stopped yapping about the wonderfulness of the “religion of peace” and the moral imperative of bringing democracy to the Mohammedan. This sent the Left into a purple-faced rage, in the same way that giving into a social justice warrior only makes them angrier.

To the Left, Bush was Fort Sumter all over again and it had to be answered. It was what they rallied around after the 2000 election. It is also how we ended up with Obama. The bad whites, who put the apostate in the White House, had to be taught a lesson and what could be more horrifying to the bad whites than a black guy from a mixed marriage with a Muslim name? It is why the Left never quotes Obama or pays any attention to his opinions. His utility is as a symbol, the Chi-Ro of the Progressive legions.

The last year strongly suggests that this Progressive Awakening is running out of steam. Participation in Democrat primaries was way down compared to 2008. The party was only able to muster two geezers to run for their nomination. Liberal support for Clinton is tepid, as they see her as a criminal loser. She was, after all, the person who tried to prevent them from spiting the bad whites in 2008. As far as the Left is concerned, Clinton is as a bad as those who sympathized with the South or sided with King George.

There is also the fact that the Left has stopped mentioning George Bush. It is not that they have forgiven him, or the Bush clan, for the 2000’s. It is just that even the fiery passions of Progressive hate burn themselves out eventually. They inflicted homosexual marriage on the country. They allowed deranged men in sundresses to stalk little girls in public toilets. They toppled over the Confederate statues and angried up the blacks, to the point where they are killing cops. Like children throwing a tantrum, they have reached the point where they no longer remember why they are angry.

This is terrible news for Hillary Clinton, who imagines herself riding a wave of enthusiasm for old crones, into the White House. There may be some residual passion for finishing off the country, but the return to normalcy appears to be underway. The global revolt against globalism seems to be superseding old movements like American Progressivism. It turns out that puritanism is just as tied to national identity as everything else. In the post-national paradise, Progressivism becomes just another thing for the custodial state to regulate.

That may be the hidden strength of Donald Trump in the fall election. The New Right that is emerging is nationalist, but the old American Left was always nationalist. His appeals to national renewal resonate just as much with Progressives as they do for the alt-right. Hillary could very well be leading a party of sterile technocrats, who thought Mike Dukakis was sexy. A future run by colorless bureaucrats sounds wonderful to the managerial class, but it does nothing for voters, on the Left or the Right. People always vote for something over nothing.

The Restoration

Posted on by

The reaction to Trump’s acceptance speech was predictable but illuminating all the same. The Left is in a panic because they have evolved into a bizarre identity cult that no longer cares about the practical aspects of politics. Trump’s talk of jobs, trade and culture may as well have been in a foreign language. The so-called Right has evolved into a wish list of policy positions dreamed up by government spongers living in the Imperial Capital. All of the boys and girls of Conservative Inc. are shrieking in terror at the Trump speech, yelling some version of “See? He is no conservative!”

Because Conservative Inc. insists they own the trademark for “conservative,” they insist they get to define what is and what is not “conservative.” Conveniently, everything Trump says is defined as outside the bounds of conservatism, while everything they say is within the bounds of conservatism. Professional conservatives pretty much spend all their time proving they are inside the lines as currently drawn. The death rattle of every mass movement is when they begin to turn all their efforts to rule making and enforcement.

The one thing the Buckley-ites have right is that Trump is not one of them. He is no libertarian and he has no interest in kissing the ring of the identity politics crowd. Trump made clear in his speech that he thinks the globalist fantasies about the glorious future are nonsense. Trump is a nationalist in the old school sense. That is, he thinks separate countries, governed in the best interests of their people, is the right model. Those best interests are defined by the people and implemented by their representatives. Hardly anyone on Team Buckley holds these views.

That does not make Trump a conservative. In order to evaluate that, we need a better definition of conservative than what has evolved over the last three decades. The place to start for that is Russell Kirk. He is a good example to use when understanding what went wrong with conservatism. Kirk fell out of favor with the Fusionists that make up Team Buckley and he was detested by the neo-cons. As a result, he gets little run in conservative circles these days, outside of some geezer paleo-cons like Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried.

Despite having been thrown down the memory hole, Kirk’s conservatism is looking like it will be what survives the current ructions on the Right. Most Americans are what John Derbyshire calls “gut conservatives” in that they are instinctively attracted to tradition and skeptical of the latest utopian fads. Many reading this have been trained by our current elites to be skeptical of their neighbor’s judgement, but the everyday tasks that are essential to an orderly society are carried out by average Americans using their best judgement.

If you look through that list of ten conservative principles, you can make a fairly good case for Trump on a few of them. As is always the case when judging a man through the television, you end up projecting upon him things that say more about you than about him. For instance, Trump is not an Evangelical Christian, but he is not hostile to religion either. Whether or not he believes in a transcendent moral order is impossible to know. He has said nothing to suggest he does, but he has never said anything to suggest he does not believe it. We are left to guess and that means guessing wrong.

Similarly, it is easy to say Trump is imprudent. His critics claim he is proto-fascist because he speaks forcefully about what he will do as president. Maybe it is just ego or maybe he believes it, but Trump certainly does not seem like a guy in awe of his own limitations. On the other hand, his statements on foreign policy sound a lot closer to John Quincy Adams than anything we have heard since the end of World War II. As with his spiritual inclinations, his prudence is not particularly clear.

Determining whether or not Trump is a conservative in the Kirkian sense is further complicated by the fact that he is a natural pitchman. Trump is a self-promoter, in the old fashioned sense. He uses hyperbole freely and amusingly. You know he is polishing the apple and he knows you know he is polishing the apple. In the political realm, this makes it hard to pin him down on specifics. It’s an effective political tactic, in fact, it is a great tactic, but it makes it hard to know exactly how Trump will attempt to govern.

In all probability, Trump is a transitional figure, like Nixon in 1968. The still young Buckley movement was winning arguments, but not ready to win elections. Nixon should have been a bridge between the unhinged liberalism of the 60’s and a sober conservatism, but it never quite worked out that way. The New Right we see forming up in the form of the alt-right, dissident right and so on is not ready to be a full fledged political movement, but it can energize a candidate. Trump could be the shake down cruise for a restoration of the conservatism of Russel Kirk.

Life in a Theocracy

Posted on by

In Saudi Arabia, getting caught with alcohol can get you the lash. Maybe. It sort of depends upon where you are in the social order and who is determining your guilt. In Iran, listening to western music can get you sent to prison or perhaps cost you a job in the government. Again, it all depends upon who you are and who is judging your violation. It can also depend upon who is accusing you too. This was true in colonial New England where accusations of witchcraft were arbitrary and the trials mostly based on things other than religious doctrine.

We have the image of theocracies as places with long lists of precise rules governing morality, public conduct, social relations and so forth, but the reality is always the opposite. Written rules can be debated by anyone with the ability to read. There is not much fun in being a priest if anyone can read the rules and render a judgement. In a theocracy, the religious order educates the public, handles the violations of morality and makes sure the laws comply with the official religion. The result is a high degree of arbitrariness for those who live in the theocracy.

Going back to Saudi Arabia, members of the royal family regularly head off to Dubai to drink, do drugs, fornicate with women, fornicate with men and otherwise live like rock stars. Everyone in the Wahhabis world knows about this, but they like living more than they like Allah so they say nothing. On the other hand, if you are a foreigner, who can be a bargaining chip for the royal family, then you can get jammed up for some pruno. Anyone that is a nuisance to the government can expect to have the religious police snooping around in their life, looking for a reason to send them to jail.

Theocracy is arbitrary. It is this arbitrariness that encourages neighbors to spy on neighbors, associates to rat on each other and even children to report their parents to the morality police. Being a rat brings grace. You see that in this story about the George Washington men’s basketball coach.

In early April, shortly after his team celebrated a postseason championship, a George Washington men’s basketball player visited a campus Title IX coordinator to log complaints about Coach Mike Lonergan. Lonergan, the player believed, had created an offensive, intolerable environment, evidenced in his mind — and in the minds of many of his teammates — by the spate of transfers during the coach’s five-year tenure.

The first thing to notice is the code words for morality. Title IX has become holy writ in the Progressive faith. Like the Bible, it is a mysterious source of authority to the adherents. Most Christians never bother to open their Bible and few Progressives can tell you anything about Title IX. They just know it is the highest of law on the holiest of sites, the college campus. To be the Title IX coordinator is no different from being the Mutaween in Saudi Arabia. This person is the supreme moral authority on campus.

Then we have the complaints lodged against the coach. Notice the vagueness here. On the college campus, “offensive” is the same as blasphemous. Any word or deed can be called offensive if it is deemed to have violated some tenet of the faith. Since these tenets are arbitrary, just about anything can be offensive, as long as someone in good standing with the religious authorities is willing to say they were offended. Again, you will notice that it matters who is accusing and to whom the accusation is being leveled.

Read the whole 2400 word article and you struggle to figure out what exactly the coach had done to warrant being thrown off the roof by the PC enforcers. That is probably why the writer resorts to quoting various shaman in the Title IX sect.

“They have an obligation to make sure the school is operating an environment where there is no sexual harassment,” lawyer Nancy Hogshead-Makar, a Title IX expert and a former Olympic gold medal swimmer, said when apprised of the players’ complaints. “He is sexually harassing both the athletic director and the athletes.”

Notice the language again. They never say who is obliging us in this quest. The God of Puritanism is now just a mysterious blank space, a void that can never be mentioned, but must always be acknowledged. In other words, if you know you are obligated to enforce the one true faith, you are an elect. Of course, the quest to which we are supposedly obligated is equally mysterious. What does “an environment where there is no sexual harassment” look like? How do we know we are in one? The answer is one of the priestesses of the faith will tell us.

“Priestess” is the right word. In the America theocracy, women run the cult. Take a look at the bio of Nancy Two Names in the Post story. The hyphen is the first clue. She is or was married to a cuck. People assume that hyphen indicates feminist, but it is a gang symbol within feminism to indicate the adherent has bagged and tamed a male. Second, her bio tells us she went from college into the order and has spent her life as a professional nuisance. Hassling men is her all consuming passion. It is what defines her life.

As with Iran or Saudi Arabia, the accused in the America theocracy often make the mistake of thinking they can beat the charges. After all, if they have done nothing wrong, what do they have to fear? In a theocracy, however, the unwillingness to submit and confess is proof of guilt. Coach Lonergan is a dead man; he just does not know it. He will play by the rules, or at least the rules written down, but the Inquisitor is not bound by rules so the coach will be broken on the wheel and cast out of the campus.

That is life in a theocracy.

Whither the Fanatic?

Posted on by

Churchill supposedly said, “a fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.” I think of that almost every time I visit National Review Online these days. As I’m writing this, the featured article is by the unhinged lunatic David French. He is the kook who thought about running for president on Bill Kristol’s Trotskyite party ticket. There is another article by French on the sidebar, which is a rant about Trump. Above that is a tantrum about Trump by Jonah Goldberg.

If you were new to the scene, you could be forgiven for thinking that National Review is some sort of leftist site that was created for the sole purpose of howling about Trump. I have not counted, but others tell me that more than half the posted articles over the last year have been about the terribleness of Trump and Trump voters. Someone told me they went back a few months counting posts on their blog and the anti-Trump posts outnumber the anti-Clinton posts five to one. I am not going to test the assertion as it seems in-line with what I have observed.

National Review is the flagship operation of Buckley Conservatism and it has given itself over almost entirely to anti-Trump lunacy. For over a year now they have been pumping out anti-Trump content to the point where there is no point in reading any of it. The striking thing is not the volume so much as the total lack of content. Their rants fall into one of two categories. There are the base personal attacks, calling Trump a big meanie that makes them cry. Then there are the rants claiming Trump is not a “movement conservative” as if that has any meaning.

That is really the issue at the heart of what is happening. I have often argued that Buckley Conservatism was just anti-communism with things like small government and social conservatism as decorations. Buckley-ites were fine trading authority for those decorative items over to the Left so they could have the whip hand on foreign policy. Once the Cold War ended and intellectual communism fell out of fashion, the Buckley-ites were left without a purpose. They were a mass movement without an enemy. To quote Hoffer, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.”

Thinking back, the fall of the Berlin Wall was in ’89 and then Clinton won in ’92. All the smart people at the time were wondering what would come of conservatism, but then the Republicans won the House in ’94 for the first time in fifty years. Republicans were able to impose spending limits on Clinton and for the first in generations and it appeared that the ratchet was going to click the other way. The smart people suddenly shifted gears and started wondering what would become of liberalism. Even Clinton thought the era of big government was over.

Rolling back the welfare state was going to be dirty work and there is not a lot of fun in it. The Buckley Conservatives had been bred for generations to trade away authority over domestic policy so there were few with a real desire to get into the trench warfare that would be required to claw back the concessions of the previous generations. The ugly fight over welfare reform “taught” the Buckley-ites that there were no parades for the party that cut spending and shrunk government. Fighting wars was much more fun and less risky, to them at least.

I used to say that the worst thing to happen to Buckley Conservatism was the Bush family, but the death blow was actually 9/11. The Buckley-ites went all in on the Bushism because they were sure they had found the successor to the Evil Empire. It was like old times. They eagerly gave the Left whatever they wanted on spending and government, just as long as they could wage the great crusade against the Muslims. It was rank boosterism, devoid of anything resembling principle, but the movement had finally found a new devil and that is what really mattered.

Now that making war on the Muslims is out of the question, the Buckley-ites are once again in search of a devil around which they can base their movement. Anti-Trumpism for fanatics like David French is not going to be a fulfilling cause in the long run. Trotskyites like Bill Kristol and the other neo-coms can probably busy themselves with it for a while, but even they will tire of it eventually. Maybe they go back to being Progressives or maybe they just go away. Pat Buchanan thinks (hopes?) they will just go away, having been rejected by the public.

That is not the way to bet. Fanatics will always be with us. The lesson of the Clinton years was that the ideologues would eventually adapt to the post-Cold War world. The Progressives dived headfirst into the cesspool of identity politics while the Buckley-ites launched a crusade to pacify the Muslims. Now that the Coalition of Weirdos is blowing apart and the Buckley-ites are reeling, we may enter a period of cultural sobriety, but it is hard to know. Perhaps neo-nationalism will the next big thing to sweep the West. Maybe it will be something else, but the fanatics will eventually find their causes.

Never Hire a Powerskirt

Posted on by

Looking back, we had, in the person of Teddy Roosevelt, the finest President in the history of this country. He had the spirit and determination that matched the times and the land. Then the women got the vote, and everything went to hell. While our boys was overseas fighting the Kaiser, the women got Prohibition put in. Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.

–Judge Roy Bean

A quarter century ago, I was sent to my first reeducation camp. The company I was with at the time had been infected with the virus so everyone in a management position was sent off-site to be hectored about the importance of tolerance in the workplace. We did not yet have the word “diversity” to throw around as we were still in the “tolerance” stage of multicultural lunacy outbreak. At least that was the case in my part of the world so they called it “sensitivity training,” which everyone said using air quotes.

The people responsible for starting the sensitivity training were the women in the human resources department. They had changed the name of it to something stupid like “people and relationships” but it was an HR department. For reasons I’ll never understand, the men in charge of the company decided to pack the HR departments with women who immediately started making mischief. Talking to friends at the time, this was happening all over the business world. HR departments full of hens were morphing into sensitivity department full of bitter shrews.

Not long after I had returned from the reeducation camp, I was informed by HR that one of my charges had been making one of the women uncomfortable. She did not like the way he was looking at her. This woman dressed like a street walker and had to be told multiple times to stop showing off her smoking hot body at work. That made no difference. I was told I had to write him up, which I refused to do. That got me in some trouble and forever on the HR hit list, but it was the shape of things to come. My policy was going to be zero tolerance for this sort of terrorism.

That was a long time ago and things have only grown worse. The implosion of Fox News is a great example of why you should avoid hiring women.

Blogger Matt Drudge put up a headline at the top of his popular aggregation website The Drudge Report this afternoon that Ailes will exit the company with a “$40+ million parachute.” There is no link to a story, but a source subsequently told Deadline that Ailes is in exit talks, saying terms of the settlement are being hammered out tonight.

“With internal allegations mounting, it was deemed time for him to go,” the well-placed source said.

21st Century Fox, however, said in a statement: “Roger is at work  The review is ongoing. And the only agreement that is in place is his existing employment agreement.”

Ailes’ ouster comes after Fox News hostGretchen Carlson filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him on July 6 after her contract was not renewed.

Ailes, the architect of the Fox News as a ratings behemoth and political force, in of June 2015, signed a multi-year contract to continue running Fox News, Fox Business Network, and Fox Television Stations.

Earlier this morning, Drudge linked a headline to today’s New York Magazine story,alleging Fox News star Megyn Kelly had told 21st Century Fox’s investigators that she had been the recipient of unwanted sexual advances from Ailes about a decade ago when she was a correspondent in the Washington bureau. But Drudge used a headline saying Kelly was twisting the knife into her boss.  That post, and headline,  from the wildly popular and influential conservative blogger got media reporters to sit up and take notice.

Perhaps I am more cynical than most, but how did Ailes not see that Megyn Kelly was trouble? There’s nothing wrong with hiring bimbos to read the news on TV, just as long as the bimbos are fine with being bimbos trading on their looks. Women like Kelly trade on their looks, but they are forever bitter about it. That bitterness curdles into a viscous nastiness that almost always leads to claims of discrimination or sexual harassment, when they don’t get what they want. Once again, the facts of life are turning out to be Trumpian.

The lesson here, of course, is to never hire women like Megyn Kelly. It’s like inviting Dracula into your house. No matter how much garlic you have around your neck, you still have a bloodthirsty vampire in your midst. A good rule of thumb is to hire homely women for positions of responsibility, preferably older women. They have no illusions about how males view them. For entry level work like clerks and paralegals, hire mothers as they need the job more than they need to strike a blow for the sisterhood. They are too practical to be feminists.

Otherwise, never hire a powerskirt.

Intellectuals Versus Ideologues

Posted on by

I think if I were to produce a defining characteristic of a true intellectual, I would say it is someone willing to consider possibilities that are not already on the table. When I say “true intellectual” I mean to distinguish the real thinkers from the pseudo-intellectual posers. The truly smart and curious are not constrained by or extremely interested in the current fads. When presented with a puzzle, they first try to imagine all of the possible solutions and then begin eliminating the impossible.

One of the useful lessons of mathematics is that there are some problems for which there are many answers. If you are presented with x – 3 = 0   or   x – 4 = 0 then you know x = 3, 4. In other words, X has more than one possible solution. A surprisingly high number of allegedly smart people struggle with that basic concept. When you get into more complex areas like human sciences, the range of solutions to a problem may include a combination of factors interacting to cause the observed phenomenon.

Therefore, the intellectual is someone that starts with the set of all solutions and narrows the list to those that are possible. The religiously minded, on the other hand, reverse the order of things. They first eliminate all the possibilities that fall outside the limits of their faith. A Christian, for example, will never consider the possibility that his faith is nonsense and Jesus was a fictional character. The Muslim will never consider that Mohamed was simply a medieval L. Ron Hubbard.

Throughout history, we have examples of the priestly class convincing the people that the calamity that has befallen them is due to their deviation from the faith. When the plague ravaged Europe, the religious were convinced it was due to God’s wrath. What else could it be? The English blamed the Viking invasions on the faithful falling out of favor with God. Revolutionaries blame the inevitable bad results of their revolution on enemies of the revolution.

Just to be clear, religion is vital to every society. Most people should not be thinking about all the possible causes of what is around them. Islam may be useless to Western civilization, but it serves a needed purpose in the East. Christianity was vital to the development of Western Civilization. In fact, it was what preserved the stock of human knowledge that was the foundation of the modern West. Today, the West would be better off if our leaders were Christians, instead of insane.

Even so, the difference between the intellectual and the ideological enforcer is all about the possibilities. A good example of that is in this post on NRO the other day from someone calling himself Mario Loyola. He is one of the thousands of public intellectuals living off the taxpayer at foundations around the Imperial Capital. His CV is here and you see the word “fellow” turn up a lot in his work history. Most of our “conservative” intellectuals have credentials from the liberal of institutions.

Anyway, his post is about black crime rates and the causes of those crime rates. This bit got my attention. “When America is ready for a real conversation about race, it will start here. It will ask honestly what the causes are. There is not the slightest doubt in my mind that race has absolutely nothing to do with crime rates, and that government policies such as welfare are the real culprit, creating the urban blight and broken families that lead directly to crime.”

Let us first start with the phrase, “have a conversation.” When you want to kill time, you have a conversation about the weather. When you want to let someone else know things about yourself, you have a conversation. When you want to find answers to problems, you do not have a conversation. That is how you get fired. You are fooling around having conversations instead of doing work. In modern America, when a Progressive says she wants a conversation, you better run.

Putting that aside, the first thing Mario does in his “exploration of causes” is eliminate those that fall outside the permitted. In fact, he makes clear that he is not interested in that conversation at all. If you already have the answer, there is no need for further discovery. Once you find the answer, the next job is to tell the world about your wonderful insight. That is why scientists post the results of their experiments. It is how the stock of human knowledge increases.

Of course, Mario is not offering any evidence of his assertion. For this type of Progressive, race falls outside the set of acceptable causes so it is eliminated without further discussion. Because he is from the shadow end of the faith, he also feels the need to eliminate racism so he can focus on the welfare state. His post is not intended to start a conversation or begin the search for the causes of black crime. It is testimony in support of his particular brand of Progressivism.

It is not a great surprise that our public debates are echo chambers. Biology has become forbidden knowledge. So much so that few know anything about it. That is because biology is at odds with egalitarianism, the foundation stone of the Progressive faith. Once you accept that nature does not distribute her gifts equally among all men, Progressivism is untenable. It is akin to saying Christ was fictional or Mohamed was a con-man. That can never be allowed, no matter how many people die.

Mobile Phones

Posted on by

I have had a mobile phone since the early 1990’s. I was provided the Motorola bag phone when it came out and I think that was ’90 or ’91, but I may be off a year or two there. Before that I was provided with a model that was the size of a cinder block, when you added in the case, battery and antennae. The funny thing was that the early phones were so unreliable we had a pool of the things. That way when one was broken you could use one of the spares. Before long no one had the number they were assigned.

That was forever ago, of course. By the end of the ninety’s everyone had something small they could put in their pocket. Over the last 25 years I have been through all sorts of phones. I have always been an early adopter so I had the first flip phones and then the first pocket sized models. When Palm released the Treo, I had to have one. According to the stories, Steve Jobs invented the smartphone, but that’s nonsense. Palm created the smartphone. Somewhere in a drawer I probably still have the old Treo to prove it.

Since the Droid hit the streets, I have been an Android user and I stopped being an early adopter. I think by the second iteration of the Droid I decided I had gone as far as I needed to go with the smartphone. Having e-mail and text was great. I will use the GPS when I get lost and I do listen to podcast when traveling. The millions of apps are lost on me. Since something like 90% are never downloaded, I am clearly not alone in that. As a practical matter, the mobile phone topped out for me about six or seven years ago.

Anyway, I had to buy a new phone as the old one was starting to become unreliable. I started with the assumption that I would buy another Android model or maybe try an iPhone. The cost of the things got me thinking that maybe it is time to downsize and go back to a basic phone. Spending $700 for a smart phone that mostly sits idle on my desk strikes me as a waste of money so I went looking at other options. Even with the zero interest financing from the carrier, it seemed like a waste.

I decided to break form entirely and buy a Windows phone. I know one person with one and they love it. I was skeptical, but I saw one on-line for $200 at the Microsoft store so I got less skeptical. You have to try new things and new things that can save you $500 are worth trying. If it were a crappy phone, I figured, it would be a $200 lesson. I have learned much more expensive lessons so the risk seemed small. Plus, the phone was unlocked so I could shop plans.

The hardware is actually a Lumia 650, but it is branded Microsoft and loaded with the Windows 10 OS. It turns out to be a great phone and the OS is vastly better than I expected. The interface is better than Apple and Google. I never would have guess that in a million years, but that tile interface is a great idea. It is stupid on a desktop, but it works really well for a phone. I use mine one handed so using larger tiles for the upper left and small ones at the bottom right means I can reach everything with my thumb.

Since I was going rogue, I figured it was time to walk away from Verizon and try the low cost guys that the local drug dealers use. Mobile phones are a vital part of ghetto life so there are all sorts of low cost carriers catering to the poor. The average hopper is not leaving the five block area of his gang’s turf, so quality of service is not an issue. What is important is that you can get a good deal on a burner and the retailer does not ask too many questions.

So, I went with T-Mobile. I do not know if they serve the black community or it was just the miracle of local demographics, but I was the only honky in the phone store. I suspect I was the only person with a job, other than the clerks. But the lack of an income is no longer a hindrance to participating on the modern consumer economy. I saw two gals who I know have not worked a day in their lives buying new phones on whatever payment plan they offer. Maybe they were signing up for Obama phones before he leaves office.

I have a theory that most of the airtime on wireless networks is used by stupid people talking to other stupid people. Watching the sad sacks at the T-Mobile store I could not help but wonder what they talk about to the people on the other end. If their conversations in the store were representative, millions of minutes are consumed with people saying “yeah” and “you feel me” to one another. It is not like they are coordinating meetings between business trips.

Of course, keeping the people down at the bottom busy is an increasingly important issue in a modern society. The bottom is creeping up as the demand for low-skill labor and low-IQ laborers declines. This is a problem that will only get worse over the next decades. Giving them enough money to buy game consoles and mobile phones means they have plenty of toys to fill their day. Consumer electronics are the Soma of the technological age. The iPhone and Xbox are what gives meaning to their lives.

Thoughts On Turkey

Posted on by

In my youth, military coups and revolutions were not common, but they were not unheard of either. Real countries like France or Canada did not have coups, but banana republics in South America had them with some frequency. Then you had the intrigues in the Soviet Bloc. A leader would suddenly stop showing up at public events and that meant he was sick or he had fallen out of favor. Africa would have revolutions with some frequency. We called them revolutions, even though nothing ever changed, but that’s Africa.

The general assumption was that a real country did not have military coups or revolutions because they had democracy of some sort. If the people were unhappy, they could vote in people they liked. If elements of the ruling elite were unhappy, they could appeal to the public for change. The military, instead of being an instrument of the ruling class, was subordinate to the civilian government and excluded from politics. That is not a bad place to start when defining a modern country. Real countries have elections, not revolts.

I think this is why the western news services were having so much trouble fitting the attempted coup in Turkey into their standard narrative. Turkey is supposed to be different from the rest of the Muslim world. Turkey is a real country with elections and globalism. Sure, the political leadership sounds a lot like the lunatics from the Arab world, but that is just an act. It is their version of boob bait for the bubbas. Instead of guns and abortion, their rednecks want to hear about Allah and the Jews. Turkey is a real country, not a banana republic.

Following along via Sky News, the BBC and CNN, I had to laugh at the confusion of the news people covering this thing. They did not know which side they were supposed to support. Initially, they were just baffled, as they do not know anything about the world that is not fed to them through their earpieces. They were reduced to stuttering through live images of people walking around the streets waving flags. Then Obama came out in defense of the Islamists and the rest of NATO followed suit. Instantly, the new media was anti-coup.

Another thing I thought was humorous about the news coverage was the repetition of the claim this coup was not a “21st century coup.” I first heard this said on Sky News and then all of the news services were saying it. Whether this was “monkey see-monkey do” or the official word from the party is hard to know. What I found amusing about it is Turkey is not a 21st century country, but it is in the middle of a 21st century civil war, of which this was a part. The fact that this is not obvious to the alleged experts, who rule over us, does not bode well for our future.

In this civil war, Erdogan is the Oliver Cromwell of Turkey and this attempted coup was something analogous to Penruddock’s Uprising. It is not a perfect analogy, but it helps explain what is happening in Turkey. The army is the defender of the secular legacy of Ataturk and the defender of the old order. Erdogan is the leader of the new order, the Islamists that believe they can have a modern technological society, under medieval Islamic moral codes.

Everyone seems to agree that this event makes Erdogan stronger, but Turkish politics are so opaque that outsiders can never really know what is going on in the country. This could have been an operation run by the secular military to get the Gülen cult removed from their own ranks. The Gülen Cult is thought to have a stronger presence in the police than the military so this could be something more complex. In other words, this may not have been a revolt against the AKP but a revolt within the AKP.

There is also the fact that ethnic Turks are a majority in Turkey for now. Kurds are the future, demographically. That is a big part of what has put the AKP in power. The Turks view secularism as the cause of the demographic decline. The organization of the Kurds into a single political party, denying AKP a majority in the last election is a glimpse of the future and the Turks know it. That is why the AKP sent in the army after the election to persecute the Kurds. It is a part of what is driving the Turkish involvement in Syria.

The civil war among the Turks is about what to do about the future, a future that will have more Kurds than Turks if something is not done to arrest the low TFR of young Turks. Turkey has the Western disease, but it is still an Eastern culture. In the West, civilizational death is celebrated in the form of open borders and multiculturalism. In the East, it is met with religious revivals and bloodbaths. David Goldman makes the argument that the Iranian revolution was driven by similar forces.

The Turks are faced with a choice. They can be fully Western and go quietly into that good night. Alternatively, they can be Eastern and fight against the dying of the light. The former means modern technology and prosperity, for a little while at least. The latter means men in robes ordering homosexuals thrown off buildings. That is what is happening inside Turkey today. It is a version of what is happening in the West, but only in a country that culturally is closer to Byzantium than Brussels.

Low Energy

Posted on by

The glorious future is always just over the next mountain. The older you get, the taller that next mountain becomes and the further away it seems. It is this realization, this understanding, that young people often mistake for cynicism. They think their elders, poo-pooing their excitement for some new innovation, are just cranky old people unable to appreciate the dawning of the new age and unwilling to adapt to it. In reality those grumpy geezers are tired of sitting through the same film, never getting to the end.

I often feel that way about energy policy. Every decade we have a re-run of the same film, but never get to the end. Instead, everyone gets bored and walks out before the final scene where the utopian dreamer is fed into the woodchipper by a couple snaggletooth rednecks from coal country. Instead, the movie is cut short so it can be retooled for a new audience a decade later with the promise that this time, there is a new and improved ending. That is the catchphrase of every new plan to replace fossil fuels. “This time, things will be different.”

Here is a quote from Jerry Ford’s 1975 State of the Union speech, in which he laid out his energy plan: “I have a very deep belief in America’s capabilities. Within the next 10 years, my program envisions: 200 major nuclear power plants; 250 major new coal mines; 150 major coal-fired power plants; thirty major new [oil] refineries; twenty major new synthetic fuel plants; the drilling of many thousands of new oil wells; the insulation of eighteen million homes; and the manufacturing and the sale of millions of new automobiles, trucks and buses that use much less fuel…”

The only thing he got right was that cars use less fuel per mile, but that had nothing to do with the big dreams of the energy futurists. Fuel economy has steadily improved since the mass marketing of cars back in the stone age. That is due to better engineering. The cars not only get better fuel economy today, but they also ride better, they are of better quality, they use better components. A new car off the lot in the 1950’s suffered from rattles, wind noise, poor fitting components and it needed constant maintenance. In other words, fuel efficiency is mostly just a byproduct of better engineering of cars in general.

The rest of Ford’s agenda never happened. Later, Carter got on the solar bandwagon. In the late 70’s, everyone new that in the future, cars would be electric and be charged by solar panels. Every house would have a rooftop solar generator. Fossil fuels would go away entirely. The fact that none of this happened did not stop the dreamers from dusting off the solar fantasy again in the 2000’s. I am not sure, but I think the last big solar panel plant in the US shut down last year. If I eat right and exercise, I will live to see it re-opened again under another government free energy scheme.

What brought this on is this story in Scientific American last month. You would think that a publication with “science” in its name would be less inclined to fights of fancy, but that’s not how it works. It’s not how anything works these days.

The United States, Mexico and Canada will make a joint pledge tomorrow to draw half the continent’s power from non-emitting sources by 2025.

President Obama, President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada will announce the ambitious target at the North American Leaders’ Summit in Ottawa, Ontario, which will also address security issues and other concerns to the continent’s three governments.

White House climate adviser Brian Deese described the pact as a sign of the growing bonds between the nations on climate and energy policies. He told reporters yesterday that the trio are cooperating more on those issues now than at any time in recent history.

“We find ourselves now at a moment where the alignment in terms of policy goals and focus on clean energy between our three countries is stronger than it has been in decades,” he said.

None of this will happen. The big non-carbon power generation facilities are nuclear and hydro. We are not building those anymore. The people who swear Gaia is vexed with us because of our cars are the people that killed off nuclear and hydro decades ago. Then as now, the problem is Gaia. She did not like nuclear energy and she did not like us blocking fish from swimming downstream. According to the Gaia worshipers, she is not happy with solar or wind either so the odds of those technologies getting anywhere are close to zero, even before you get to the science problems of both.

That is the irony of the green energy movement. Even if the significant scientific hurdles can be overcome for things like solar and wind, the greens will scuttle the projects anyway. The same people banging their tom-toms over coal and oil are out blocking the so-called green alternatives. Nuclear, which has the most promise in terms of “clean” energy, has been stalled for generations now. Gen-IV reactors are extremely safe and productive. If not for the greens, we could have all our electric from nuclear, but that will never happen.

No one reading this will live to see the day when America is getting the bulk of its electric from nuclear. Your children and grandchildren will not live to see it. The most optimistic estimate puts the window for the change to nuclear well past mid-century. The most optimistic window for wind and solar is somewhere around the time we discover the warp drive. Instead, every decade or so we will have another round of nonsense about how some new green energy will finally ween us off of oil and coal. Billions will be squandered on it; the dogs will bark and the caravan will move on.