Author Archives: thezman

Dismal Quackery

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The other day, I made a crack about the soft sciences, psychology, sociology and so forth, comparing them to astrology and economics. It was in the context of the replication crisis that is roiling fields like psychology. The soft sciences are trying hard to pretend it is problem in all science, but that is not true. Anyway, someone gave me grief for slandering astrology, because the early strides in astronomy and even astrophysics were due to people trying to improve astrology. If you believe in that stuff, precise measuring of the movement of stars and planets is important.

I think most empirically minded people have long ago concluded that psychology is quackery. When I was a kid, talk therapy was the rage. The schools were hiring “counselors” and having kids sit down and talk about their problems. Even as a kid I knew it was nonsense. Talking someone out of being insane or depressed is slightly less nutty than slaughtering a goat and reading the entrails. Imagine if someone claimed they could talk you out of a broken leg or cancer. Quackery seems to stick around much longer than logic says it should.

That is the pattern we are seeing with economics. The colossal errors in the field should have discredited it a long time ago, but economist are still the court magicians of the modern state. This post by Tyler Cowen is a good example of dressing up uninformed opinion with the jargon of economics to make it sound like science. As Steve Sailer pointed out in the comments, economists have yet to offer a plausible explanation for how the post-nationalist world could operate. The only possible answer is that it would be based on force.

Europe is a great example of just how wrong modern economics has been about pretty much everything. The totality of mainstream economics has been cheering the Euro project for decades, even when it was pretty clear that the single currency was a disaster for many of the members. It has all the cyclical defects of hard money and none of the benefits. The open borders part of the project has resulted in a flood of non-Europeans, who have upset the social order, threatening the stability of the Continent.

This is not the first time modern economics has been outlandishly wrong about Europe. This post by Greg Cochran is a great reminder of just how absurdly wrong the field was about the realities of communism. The best estimates by the court magicians overstated communist economic output by two or three times reality. This despite the fact they had firsthand observations of the state of these communist countries. Westerners, including western academics, traveled throughout these countries and could observe the squalor firsthand.

In the 80’s, an acquaintance was getting sent to Moscow on government assignment. His family held a going away party as he was expected to be there for two years. Everyone was asked to bring something he could use in Russia. He got things like cartons of cigarettes, blue jeans and small bottles of liquor. The Russians turned a blind eye to this type of smuggling because they wanted the stuff too. The customs agent would take something for himself and maybe set you up with his cousin Yuri to sell the rest. Everyone, except economists, knew the score.

Of course, the birth of economics as a distinct field from political-economy was roughly one hundred years ago, with the publication of an economic textbook by Alfred Marshall. Economist were just as wrong about reality then as they are today. Prior to the Great War, globalism was all the rage, just as it is today. A 1910 best-selling book, The Great Illusion, used economic arguments to demonstrate that territorial conquest had become unprofitable, and therefore global capitalism had removed the risk of major wars. A few years later Europe was murdering itself in the worst war in human history.

Science gets lots of things wrong. The scientific method assumes this, which is why test results are published, along with the methods, so others can challenge the results. Negative results are still results and add to the stock of human knowledge. In economics, they get fundamental elements of their field wrong and manage to subtract from the stock of human knowledge in the process. The problems facing Europe today are problems people understood well 50 years ago. Thanks to economics, policy makers are now forced to relearn what their grandparents took for granted.

The root of the problem is that statistics are not science and economics is pretty much just statistics applied to commerce. It is not worthless, but it is limited. Probability and correlation can point real scientist in the right direction, but they do not explain the mechanics of cause and effect. We know that smoking correlates with emphysema, but biologists figured out why one causes the other. Per capita chicken consumption correlates with US oil imports and only an economist would suggest one causes the other. Know what is happening is different from knowing why.

Calling back to where we started, most quackery manages to have some benefit, even if it is to just some make people feel happy. Astrology is right about the movement of the stars, at least as far as charting them. Horoscopes are stupid, but a harmless way for people to feel good about the uncertainty of life. Alchemy was a confidence racket, for the most part, but it eventually gave us chemistry. Even climate science has some utility, despite the massive fraud. Economists are fond of calling their racket the dismal science, but that is not fair or accurate. It is really just dismal quackery.

The Wuss Right

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In the chattering classes, the line dividing the Left from the Right is over means, not ends. Watch cable news for a while and inevitably they will have one of those mini-debates they like staging to illustrate the two extremes of what is acceptable opinion on some issue. After the Dallas shooting, for example, a liberal and conservative would offer their take on the incident. What we are supposed to take away from these exchanges is that your opinion better fall somewhere between the two offered on TV. Otherwise you’re some sort of fringe weirdo or worse.

The acceptable window varies from station to station, but there’s not a lot of diversity within the dominant political culture. The liberal channels set the window closer to their preferred opinion while Fox is slightly to the right of them. The thing is, everyone agrees on the ends. You never see two people debating an issue where one has an entirely different goal in mind. Both sides always start from the same premise and have the same ends in mind. By “ends” I mean esoteric concepts like world peace, racial harmony or economic equality. They both talk about “solutions.”

If I were to describe what it is that drives those on the dissident right away from conventional politics, into the arms of various alt-right groups, I think I’d start with the ends in mind. People in the various refusenik camps, on the fringes of society, simply reject the ends that the conventional Left and Right accept as their starting point. It’s not that the trouble makers want the opposite of those Utopian goals. It’s that they reject the assertion that those goals are possible. Humans are imperfect and there is no solution to that bit of reality.

An example of how this works is in this piece from The American Conservative on the problems of Baltimore City.

From near and far, too many people who felt qualified to offer an opinion or exercise power to help didn’t take the time to appreciate the history that has shaped West Baltimore or the variety of people who have been working for decades to improve this place. Accounts of a place like Sandtown have to start with policies forged decades ago regarding redlining and lead paint—policies that handicapped the value of many residents’ homes or did likewise to their children’s brains. The harm is ongoing: conservatives can easily recognize how the welfare state disinclines people to work, but it is hard to blame recipients when most of the wealth transferred through government goes straight to property managers and hospitals, not to the people themselves, who have little opportunity to accumulate wealth. The institutions that are accessible to people in West Baltimore—primarily churches and gangs—are trusted because other institutions don’t maintain any reliable order or support.

Ask any liberal why Baltimore is a dumpster fire and they will make the exact same claims. They blame it on magic. Redlining, as a real practice, never really existed. In fact, banks have been under pressure for generations now to lend to unqualified minorities. Even if we pretend it was a real thing, it ended two generations ago. Blaming long dead bankers for the problems of today is the same as blaming ghosts. No one ever tries to explain how not getting a mortgage causes T’Quan to murder Terrelle for his sneakers. Blaming redlining is no different than saying Allah wills it.

There’s a similar problem with lead paint. It was banned in 1971 and government has been removing it from housing for two generations. There’s also the fact that there are no studies showing increased levels of lead in the residents of Baltimore, compared to the surrounding areas. It’s an interesting theory, but that makes it a good example of how statistical correlations can lead you down a blind alley. But, blaming magic means not facing reality so the Left and Right embrace crackpot theories like lead paint as the cause of black crime.

Rebuilding institutions requires local leadership as well as outside aid. Great hay was made of some $130 million spent on a public-private partnership in the late 1990s and early 2000s to revitalize the neighborhood. Much of this money can still be seen in the homes that were rebuilt. You can walk around whole blocks that were vacant 30 years ago and that now have clean sidewalks, no drug traffic, and the sort of neighborliness that New Urbanism celebrates. As deep as the problems of Sandtown are, much good has been achieved using outside investment directed by people from within the community.

This is the sort of stuff black radicals like the Black Panthers used to demand back in the 60’s. They wanted no-strings attached money from white people so they could build their Afro-paradise. When they got it, they stole most of it and used the rest to build out their criminal enterprise. Well intentioned white people supported these groups because they assumed the fairy tales were true. If you just gave black people money, they would create a black version of Mayberry USA. It was just assumed that all human capital was the same, because after all, all humans are the same and only racists would say otherwise.

West Baltimore is what it is because it is full of West Baltimoreans. The people who built and maintained the city’s institutions left a long time ago for suburbs. The current residents moved in, like animals taking up spots in abandoned buildings. They did not build it. They could not maintain it. The result was that nature took its course. The institutions decayed and collapsed. The habits and ways of the new inhabitants took over. There’s no solution to this reality. You don’t fix human biology with a government program or pseudo-prayers to the gods of diversity.

The line dividing the New Right and the Buckley Conservative is between those who accept the reality of the human condition and those who don’t. The writer of that piece thinks all people are the same and that the observable differences are due to various forms of magic like racism and lead paint. It’s why they are called the Wuss Right. They inevitably give into the Left because they share all the same assumptions about humanity as the Left. They share the same goals. Convergence in the form of orchestrated surrender is the inevitable result.

In The Cloud, You Never Have To Say You’re Sorry

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After the Brexit vote, Prime Minister David Cameron announced he was stepping down from his position and leaving Parliament. He was on the losing end of the vote so he took the traditional approach and stepped aside. He did not have to do it as it was a referendum, not a parliamentary election. He also had plenty of support in his party for sticking around after the election. Instead, he chose to follow protocol and retire from politics. It is an acknowledgement that no man is indispensable and that there must be consequences to losing.

America used to have a similar tradition. When one party lost an election, they changed their leadership and maybe put new people in charge of the party. That is not the case anymore. Nancy Pelosi presided over a historic defeat for her party, but she refused to resign and remains as leader of her party in the House. Similarly, Harry Reid remains the leader of his party in the Senate despite leading them to disaster. Of course, losing an election is no longer a reason to retire from politics. Instead, it is a reason to make millions on Wall Street preparing for another run.

A big part of what ails America is the near total lack of accountability in the managerial elite. President Obama made a long list of claims about his health care bill, all of which proved to be false. There’s strong evidence that he lied about much of it. Yet, nothing happened. No one resigned from his team. They just laughed, shrugged and went onto other things. Jonathan Gruber, the man credited with designing the thing, laughs about lying to the public about how the program would work and what was expected. He got to keep his perch at MIT.

It is not just Democrats who never have to say they are sorry. Paul Ryan was the most embarrassingly incompetent running mate since Admiral Stockdale. Yet, he was rewarded for this by rising all the way to be Speaker of the House. Reince Priebus took the reigns of the GOP after the 2010 election and presided over the stunning defeat in 2012, only to stick around as head of the party. He is responsible for this battle plan crafted after the 2012 election. Everything in that document has proven to be wrong. Trump is the nominee because he did the opposite of that plan.

It is not just the politicians and party officials escaping responsibility. David Frum was humping this story on Twitter the other day. The story is nonsense, but what got my attention was the author. Franklin Foer used to be the editor of the New Republic back in the Bush years. He was the guy signing off on fabricated stories by a guy using the pen name “Scott Thomas”, claiming to be deployed in Iraq. It turns out that the writer was not in Iraq at all. It was also revealed that he was married to one of the fact checkers. The whole story is here if you have an interest in it.

Now, editors can get fooled by writers or by fake sources. Most anonymous sources in modern journalism are made up anyway. These fabricated stories were so outlandish, only a complete boob or a lunatic could fall for them. Regardless of the reason, he embarrassed his profession and his employers. In most lines of work, this means finding a new line of work, but that’s not how things work in The Cloud. Foer gets to write for big-foot publications and work at a think tank. Short of getting caught on video beating a Girl Scout with a puppy, there is no way to get fired in journalism.

Conservative Inc has a similar policy of shielding their worst elements from responsibility. The publisher of The Federalist is a guy named Ben Domenech. He also co-founded the RedState group blog. He also worked for the Washington Post until it was revealed he was a serial plagiarist. When caught he lied repeatedly until it was impossible to maintain the lies. He was also caught in a payola scam where he secretly accepted payments from agents of the Malaysian government to write editorials promoting Malaysian interests. Like Foer, Domenech could murder a nun on national TV and face no consequences.

The rest of The Cloud enjoys the same risk free existence. Look at all the people who pushed the Iraq War. They remain in their positions as experts at think tanks and government agencies. Karl Rove has grown rich on Fox News being wrong about everything. Bill Kristol is a millionaire based on being wrong for the last three decades. The Bush administration nearly destroyed the Republican Party and yet all of the principles escaped any consequence. Many have been recycled into new government positions with others waiting to join the next administration.

One of my favorite idiots is Jamie Gorelick, who has been a colossal screw-up at everything she has touched. In every position she has held, she managed to screw up in ways no one imagined. She was instrumental in the mortgage meltdown and collapse of Fannie Mae but walked away with close to $30 million. People thought it was impossible to break Fannie Mae, but she managed to do it. She even managed to screw up Duke’s handling of the phony rape scandal. It’s fair to say the woman is as dumb as a post, yet she was close to being named FBI Director by President Obama in 2011.

We could spend days listing the people in economics and banking who were disastrously wrong yet suffered no consequences. Being a Cloud Person means never having to say you are sorry. It means never paying a price for failure. That is the job of the Dirt People. They pay the price. The result is our ruling class is packed to the brim with credentialed fuckups who flit from one disaster to the next, usually because they created them. It is why Obama was able to rise through the ranks so quickly. Merit no longer has any meaning in The Cloud.

The fact is we are ruled over by irresponsibly reckless idiots paid for by a global elite that has no concern for the governance of our countries. They are global pirates riding a sea of credit money, as they sack the Western middle class. They have no interest in good governance because competent people in government may do something about the financial pirates like George Soros. Rule by hired moron means rich guys can crater the mortgage markets and escape with billions. It means you can lose two wars of choice and keep your sinecure.

That brings us back to where we started. David Cameron was on the wrong side of the Brexit vote and resigned. That is what an honorable man is supposed to do. Theresa May was on the Brexit vote and not only stayed on, but she also fought to get the top job and will be the next Prime Minister. The guy who was probably most critical to mustering support for the Leave campaign, Boris Johnson, was not only passed over for the job, but he was also shived in the yard by his fellow inmates in the party. He is out of politics while the losers get to be in charge of the country.

The common theme here is sex. In the wild, males fight males for females. It is winner take all. the loser either dies or flees. Females compete with one another for the attention of males, but it is not winner take all. The loser simply hangs around hopping to lure the male away at some later date. The Cloud is feminine, dominated by women and the habits of women. The pirate class out there on the sea of credit money is exclusively male. In effect, our national governments are literally the kept women and common night walkers, for the global billionaires.

Aristophanes was right. This will not end well.

Barak X

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Way back in the olden thymes, there was a guy named Kurt Schmoke, who was the hottest thing in black politics since Martin Luther King. This was the late-70’s and early-80’s so most black politicians were like Jesse Jackson. Schmoke was different. He was charming and smart with credentials from the Ivy League. Most important, he was not standing on ghetto corners yelling about the honkies. Instead, he had moderate political views, worked in the legitimate economy as an attorney and he participated in mainstream politics. He was the sort of well-behaved black guy white liberals love.

Schmoke was supposed to be the example of how Progressive race polices would succeed. He went to public school, but got into Yale, went onto a Rhodes Scholarship and then Harvard Law School. This was how race policy was supposed to work. Given the opportunity to be free of white racism, blacks could rise to the very top of society and compete with whites. No one talked about affirmative action and it probably never played much of a role. Schmoke was a genuinely smart guy, but that did not stop white liberals from taking credit.

Schmoke eventually won office in ’82 and then became mayor of Baltimore in ’87. Everyone assumed he would be governor one day and then who knows. Instead, the politics of Baltimore devoured him. He went into office as a cerebral, race neutral technocrat. He was going to fix the city and avoid the racial politics. By the time he left office, he was wearing a dashiki and waving the flag of the African National Congress. Instead of being the sort of black politician that made white liberals proud, he ended up the sort that made them ashamed.

Twenty years after Schmoke was written off by white liberals, they had found a new great black hope. Barak Obama was a “new breed” of black politician. He was the product of the best schools and, according to Joe Biden, “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy.” Even better, he had an exotic back story with a white mother, a Kenyan father and a youth spent in Indonesian madrassahs. Obama’s 2004 speech at the Democratic convention made him a star in the party and punched his ticket as the next big thing.

The 2008 presidential was one long sales pitch about how Barak Obama was the salve to what ailed America. Obama was the quintessential example of what post-racial America was going to be. He was a post-racial healer, who would close the books on America’s racist past. The way the Obamasoxers carried on in 2008, you could be forgiven if you thought Obama was the leader of a new cult. They honestly believed he was the fulfillment of prophecy. He was the one to bring about the end to the long civil war in favor of those on the winning side of history.

The Magic Negro stuff was never going to last. It is not how the world works and it is certainly not how things work with the American Left. Obama was always a prop, a pitchman, an actor hired to play a role written for him by old white lefties from the 1960’s. His job was to freak out the squares. People forget that in 2008, the chatter from the Left was that whites feared nothing more than an intelligent, articulate black man. They believed it which is why they hired Obama in the first place. That was the point. They did not care a whit about Obama’s ideas. His job was to read from the teleprompter.

Things did not go as planned. The debacle of health care led to the midterm disaster and the Left decided Obama had to be scarier. The Henry Louis Gates flap was where the shift began. Obama the racial healer could have turned that into a chance to close the books on the bitter racism of Gates, but that would not have freaked out the squares in the suburbs. Instead, Obama made it clear that when the choice was between a black and a white, particularly a white authority figure, the weight of his government would back the black guy.

Here we are at the end of his time in office and America is looking worse on the race front that it has since the late 60’s. Instead of the post-racial leader of a unified America, we have a bitter black guy shaking his fist at the honkies, while homicidal blacks run wild in American streets. All the talk of the new black political leader seems like a long time ago. It is also reminiscent of the end for Kurt Schmoke. The reason Schmoke rose to be a star was that he was black. In order to remain a star, or at least remain in office, he had to keep getting blacker.

That has been the story with Obama. He has gone from the Magic Negro to Barak X.

It’s The Bogeymen’s Fault

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When the Vikings sacked the monastery at Lindisfarne, the Anglo-Saxons, trying to figure out what happened, came to the only logical conclusion. God was angry with them over something did or did not do.

“In this year fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky. These signs were followed by great famine, and a little after those, that same year on 6th ides of January, the ravaging of wretched heathen people destroyed God’s church at Lindisfarne.”

–The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle

What followed in Britain as well as the rest of Christendom was more than just a military response to the Vikings. There was a spiritual revival. The secular authorities contributed to the Church and invited the bishops and priests into the granular management of society. The Church reformed religious orders and cleaned up the monasteries and nunneries. The role of women in religious orders was also diminished at this time. In other words, Europeans responded to a pagan assault by getting right with the Almighty.

Oliver Cromwell was pretty sure he was in God’s good graces. After all, he went from minor political figure to the head of the parliamentary army to the Lord Protector of God’s people, the English. After the disastrous military expedition into the Caribbean and a Royalist revolt, Cromwell came to the obvious conclusion. God was not happy with him and the English people. He set off on a campaign to restore liberty of conscience and promote both outward and inward godliness throughout England.

In the early 19th century, Abolitionists were sure that slavery was an offense to God and its presence in the new world would bring an end to the America Experiment. The people of Yankee New England were convinced that America was the city on the hill, the savior of mankind. They still believe this. The lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic make this quite clear.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword: His truth is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal”;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel, Since God is marching on.

The winning side of the Civil War blames the war on the siege of Fort Sumter by the evil white men of the evil South. The truth is the Abolitionist fanatics were spoiling for a fight. They truly believed that slavery was an offense to God and the only way to get back in the good graces of the Almighty was to end it by any means necessary. American Abolitionists grew out of the Clapham Sect, a group of evangelical Anglican lunatics.

We are now fully in the post-Christian era so the schools no longer teach kids the religious origins of the present lunacies. Instead, an array of bogeymen and evil spirits are conjured as replacements. Blacks are where they are, despite three generations of Progressive programs to help them, because of the mysterious demon called “white privilege.” No one can describe how this works, but our betters are sure this demon travels in the book bags of college students.

Sometimes bad juju is the cause of trouble as we see in this article about the George Soros funded attack on Dallas cops.

When the shots rang out in Dealey Plaza in 1963, their reports ricocheted off the tall buildings surrounding the green park. One bullet caught an innocent bystander. One found the governor of Texas. Two more, of course, struck and killed President John F. Kennedy, and in those few seconds frozen in time, the city of Dallas was instantly branded: the City of Hate.

A little more than 50 years later, the shots have rung out in downtown Dallas again, just a short stroll from infamous Dealey Plaza. There are some eerie circumstantial similarities, to be sure. But this time the target was not a president—it was police officers. And the political obsession of the moment was no longer the Cold War but racial division, the remaining scar of America’s greatest sin: slavery.

Notice the residual language. Sin is a Christian concept so if there is no Christian God, there can be no sin. That’s too complicated for the modern lunatic so they appropriate the language of their spiritual forebears, without thinking much about the implications. In this case, the modern lunatic thinks we have not fully atoned to the invisible forces of nature, for the sin of slavery, so we are having another spasm of black rage. How one can get right with the Great Spirit is never explained, but it means punishing the bad whites for some reason.

The modern era is riddled with these sorts of bogeymen and evil spirits. The Southern Poverty Law Center exists for the sole purpose of scaring old Jewish widows with stories about Hitler. Adolph is no longer a flesh and blood historical figure. He is a permanent spirit-force that takes the form of man, usually a Republican politician. Similarly, the KKK has become the Eye of Sauron, watching every dusky fellow in the country. If a brotha is not on his toes, a cop will pop out of thin air and shoot him for no reason.

Our current ructions are over who is to blame for angering the Bogeyman.

Cloud People Blues

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Steve Sailer has a post up on this story. Steve does his thing highlighting certain passages and commenting upon them. The point of the NYTimes article is an attempt to explain why the Dirt People are so angry over things, particularly immigration. Michael Ignatieff is a professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard and former leader of Canada’s Liberal Party. It is entirely from the perspective of the Cloud People, which should surprise no one.

That’s the thing you see from all of these “think pieces” in the media and commentariat. They are written by strangers, foreigners who are observing us through a telescope, trying to make sense of what we are doing. They are not interested in our opinions any more than a myrmecologists would want to know the opinions of his ants. Reading these articles, I always come away with the sense that the Cloud People spend so much time studying the Dirt People that they have not bothered to notice much about themselves.

Here is a representative example:

According to his argument, what we’re seeing is, in part, an ideological split between cosmopolitan elites who see immigration as a common good based in universal rights, and voters who see it as a gift conferred on certain outsiders deemed worthy of joining the community.

Cosmopolitan elites like to kid themselves about their love of universal rights and the common good, but it is total nonsense. Just take a look at their strongholds. These people talk like MLK, but they live like the KKK or like a KKK fantasy world. Our elites live in hyper-white exclusive communities. Many are gated and walled. Often, they have their own private security forces. A modern college community, for example, operates almost like an autonomous zone with their own government and police.

On the college campus, just like in the elite neighborhoods, minorities are decorations, not parts of the community. Professor Boobingu from Ghana is not there for his intellectual contributions. He is there as a decoration so the white people can feel good about diversity. On the home front, guys like Tyler Cowen get to visit the ethnic restaurants in your neighborhood or maybe in the Potemkin “arts section” near the campus, but he is not living anywhere near the people who work in that ethnic restaurant.

The swank urban hipster areas are examples of how modern ethnic cleansing is done. Harlem, which had been close to 100% black for a century is now mighty whitey-ville. San Francisco is no longer the land of Dirty Harry chasing black gangsters. Instead, its Ice People as far as the eye can see. As Steve Sailer put it, they have their housing costs discriminate so they do not have to. Everywhere you see gentrification, you see whites moving in and nonwhites moving out.

This near total lack of self-awareness by the Cloud People even effects their ability to observe the Dirt People. I am sure Michael Ignatieff is a peach of a guy, but what in the hell can he possibly know about what is going on outside the walls of his mansion? Sure, he has his telescope and peppers the domestic staff with questions. Perhaps he even has his butler read to him from the Internet. Even so, he is an unlikely person to have any insight into the Dirt People.

Reading that NYTimes article, it is not hard to imagine what it must have been like inside the aristocratic houses during the French Revolution. The people inside were not just baffled by the people outside. They were baffled about themselves. They had invested generations of intellectual resources into a mythology about themselves and their position, to the point where they were invisible to themselves. They could not rationally evaluate their own culture. They were not just strangers to the people; they were strangers to themselves.

The authoress of that NYTimes piece is a person calling herself Amanda Taub. She is the authoress of this piece in Vox. The point of the article is to scare the readers, not inform them. If Mx. Taub had any interest in understanding the Dirt People, she would talk to one of them. There are thousands of writers and bloggers that would be happy to answer her questions. Instead, she finds Cloud People to add authority to her theories about how the Cloud People are on the side of angels and the Dirt People are evil.

One of the things about the French Revolution that is most intriguing is that the people in charge never gave much thought to how it would end. They were always focused on maintaining the status quo and beating back the revolt. Similarly, the Cloud People do not seem to think much about how their multicultural wonderland is going to work. How do they expect to remain on top as a ruling minority with no means to defend themselves from the dusky hordes outside the walls of their communities?

Instead, they seem to be obsessed with punishing the Dirt People for making a racket. How else does one explain the plan to revive the Gang of 8 scheme? How else can you explain the Cloud People siding with the cop killers in Dallas? The Cloud People think they have done a masterful job of running the world and they see the Dirt People as ungrateful rubes, who must be punished. If Michael Ignatieff and Amanda Taub want to know why the Dirt People are revolting, they should stop thinking the Dirt People are revolting. Maybe even talk to some of them and ask their opinions.

Low IQ in the Information Age

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Watching the cable news channels Thursday night as they covered the attack on the Dallas police by the George Soros funded Black Live Matter, I was fascinated by some of the “man on the street” segments. The blacks they interviewed were not angry ghetto rats ready to break out with chants of “kill the pigs!” Instead, they were articulate, middle-class blacks more concerned with posting their selfie on Faceberg than the shootings. They went to the riot because it was the cool thing to do and all of a sudden it was really cool so they captured the moment with a selfie.

That is the thing you cannot help but notice about this black anger spasm is that it is almost exclusively among middle-class blacks. In fact, it is among the blacks who are the greatest beneficiaries of the Civil Rights movement. The angry black guy today is most likely to be a mulatto at an Ivy League college, or in a government position, by the magic of affirmative action. Barak Obama, instead of being thankful for having not been born in Africa, walks around with a chip on his shoulder about race. He and the Mulatto Mafia that surrounds him are largely responsible for BLM.

This is not just a black thing. One of the distinguishing features of “homegrown” Muslim terrorism is that it is usually perpetrated by second and even third generation Muslims. The parents came here, got jobs and were grateful to be able to give their kids a better life. Those kids, on the other hand, are filled with resentment at their “fellow citizens.” They embrace radical Islam because they are filled with hate toward the society into which they were born. Islam does not make them crazy. They went bonkers on their own and found radical Islam to be a convenient vehicle.

One possible explanation may be IQ. Being the smartest guy in the black family means you are about as smart as the average white guy. Similarly, being the smartest guy in the immigrant Afghan household puts you somewhere around the IQ of a tow truck operator or office clerk. Being the smartest guy in the Chinese family means you teach computer engineering at the local university. Being the smartest guy in a Jewish family means you win a Nobel Prize in physics. This is a deliberate exaggeration, but the gaps are well defined and documented.

These Black Lives Matter types grew up in middle-class homes and did well in school. Because they scored at the top-10% of their race, they were eagerly recruited by the better colleges, where they suddenly found themselves struggling to keep up with their fellow students. The Chinese kid sitting next to them in chemistry is a full standard deviation smarter and can breeze through his course work, while Yolanda needs endless hours of tutoring just to clear the freshmen requirements. That results in a lot of resentment and high dropout rates among affirmative action beneficiaries.

People like Michelle Obama and Loretta Lynch have found themselves struggling to compete with their coevals their entire adult lives, which is why they have a chip on their shoulder. Their credentials are meaningless and at some level, they know it and they know everyone else knows it. Instead of being grateful for the opportunities, they are resentful of the daily reminders that they are where they are because someone decided to put them there as a trophy. High achieving blacks often feel like pets, because they often are the pets of sanctimonious white liberals.

Muslims have a similar dilemma. Their parents come here happy to have indoor toilets. They left squalor and violence to live in relative comfort. They may harbor their own resentments, but their life in the West has largely met their expectations. The kids, on the other hand, come in with the same expectations as the Italians, Irish, Asians, etc., but they are not equipped with the same cognitive toolkit. The average IQ in Iraq is just under ninety, which places them in the “uphill battle” portion of the bell curve. They are looking at a top of being a security guard or warehouse worker.

This is not just a problem for blacks and Muslims, of course. There are plenty of stupid Italians and Irish. Townies in Boston are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain their social standing because the world no longer rewards a work ethic. America, like most of the West, is a technological society and raw IQ is a required ingredient for success. There is also the social component. Increasingly, you need a narrow set of social skills to succeed and these are cultivated in private schools and upper middle-class neighborhoods.

President Obama is a good example. He is top-5% for his race in IQ, maybe even top-2%, but that was only good enough to get him through the affirmative action door of elite colleges. His upbringing gave him the exotic, international charm that is highly valued among our national elites. No matter what you think of his politics, Obama is a very charming guy in a way that is appealing to the sort of people running Western governments and institutions. Needless to say, most blacks and immigrants lack the social skills and they have no way to attain them.

Uncharted Territory

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Historical analogies seem like useful tools for understanding current events. Everyone has heard, “Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it” a bazillion times. Of course, our analogies are always to past disasters. Most people reading this can probably name a dozen people that have been compared to Hitler and another dozen examples of Western leaders being compared to Neville Chamberlain. For the most part, our analogies to the past are always warnings of pending doom. No one ever compares the present to some tranquil time in the past.
Humans have limited information processing capacity so nature devised ways for us to quickly process information. Pattern matching is one fast way to locate danger in a very crowded scene. If a current event resembles a past event in some way, then maybe they have other things in common. The logical shorthand is AX:BX::AY:BY, with X being the commonality we know and Y being the commonality we inferred. This sort of reasoning is really only useful in avoiding danger, thus the salience of the Santayana quote. Otherwise, he would have said “blessed” rather than “doomed.”
The thing about Hitler, Genghis Khan, Attila the Hun and so on is that they had no obvious analog in the past. The events in Germany after the Great War were incredibly unique. In fact, there is no good example from the past to which they compare. Similarly, the world had never seen the likes of Genghis Khan, which is why the Mongols had so much success. One big reason Attila was so scary to the Romans was that he was clearly a different breed of Hun. Because he was not like his predecessors, he was unpredictable and therefore a very frightening figure to the Romans.
Of course, this is why comparing every petty dictator to Hitler is silly. Saddam was not Hitler. Qaddafi was not Hitler either. Obama cutting a deal with the Iranians may be stupid, but that does not make him Chamberlain. In other words, our attempts to understand the present by finding scary analogs in the past has led to one blunder after another in the Middle East. Our pathological need to remember the lessons of Vietnam made success in Afghanistan an impossibility. Because we remembered the past, we made entirely new and avoidable mistakes.
The point of this is that the upcoming election is being compared to 1980, 1968, 1932 (you know who) and Trump has been compared to everyone from Hitler to Andrew Jackson. Everyone is groping around for a useful historical analogy in order to make sense of this highly improbably election. The most important political office on the planet will either be filled by the wife of a former President or filled by a billionaire real estate developer. It is not exactly Henry Tudor versus Richard III, but the consequences are probably going to be much more important.
This election is looking like an extreme outlier. Hillary Clinton is the only presidential candidate to have been accused of violating espionage laws. She may have beat the rap but name another candidate that had even a whiff of traitorous intent. Trump is the first novice to run as a major party candidate since Wendell Willkie in 1940 and that is not a great comparison as Willkie was involved in politics his whole life. Other than stroking checks to candidates for favors, Trump has not been very political.
Then there is the fact that both parties are a mess at the moment. The Democrats have a collection of geezers at the top and no bench. Their “young guns” are still in college. No one really wanted Clinton, but there was no one else so she is the nominee. On the GOP side, Trump is hated by the party and some segments of the GOP voters. He is the nominee primarily because the rest of the party is a dog’s breakfast of globalist fantasies and 1980’s romanticism. The sense of betrayal among conservative voters is at revolutionary levels.
What is most incredible about all of it is the extreme disconnect between the party elites and their voters. Most Democrat voters would prefer less immigration and better polices for the middle-class and working class. Similarly, most Republican voters would respond to similar appeals, with an emphasis on the more business friendly stuff. Yet, neither party is offering much of anything on these issues. Instead, they are obsessed with weird fads like transvestites or globalist esoterica that no one outside the global elites finds interesting.
We do seem to be in uncharted territory, which may not be a terrible thing. Historical analogies are often wildly mistaken, resulting is disasters like the endless wars in the Muslim lands. The battles of the Great War were mostly due to the generals clinging to lessons of the past, despite the carnage they were witnessing. Much of what plagues American politics today is a layer of Baby Boomer politicians who cannot stop reliving the 1960’s. A break from the past could be the palate cleanser society needs. Or we may be rocketing over a cliff.

Thug-ocracy

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Yesterday the FBI Director detailed the many crimes perpetrated by the Hillary Clinton Gang at the State Department. My expectation has always been that this investigation would peter out over the summer, as that would be best for Team Clinton and Team Obama. The press could then bury it and be counted on to marginalize anyone who dared mention it. This is a familiar pattern in American politics. Plus there is the whole “Arkancide” issue where opponents of the Clintons die under mysterious circumstances.

Instead of watching it on television, I went to twitter and followed along as media people tweeted their impressions. The interesting thing was that the first wave of tweets were all about the hundreds of rather clear violations of the law that had been in the press for months. Then there was a wave of tweets along the lines of “my goodness, I think the FBI is going to announce an indictment.” Even liberals were struck by the weight of the evidence and the tone of the presentation.

Then there was a wave of gasps when he said he would not be calling for Clinton to be charged with the crimes he just listed. Even over twitter, you could feel the disconnect as people tried to wrap their heads around the bizarre contradictions. The man just detailed a mountain of crimes and then pivots around and says that no one would ever be indicted for these crimes. Yesterday was one of those times when even the most grizzled cynic was astonished at the craven cynicism on display.

History is full of events we look back upon as turning points. In some cases, the people involved in the events were unaware of their significance. The Marian Reforms changed the course of Roman history, but the people at the time had no idea what was coming as a result. They seemed like much needed reforms in response to previous military disasters. Having politicians raise volunteer armies and then lead them against enemies was simply not working. No one imagined that these reforms would result in Sulla’s march on Rome.

The events of the last week or so, around Independence Day no less, feel like a big moment, like something has changed in the country. It started with Bill Clinton showing up for a private meeting with the Attorney General. That was followed by a long weekend interrogation of Hillary Clinton by the FBI. Then we have the Attorney General hinting that Clinton would not be charged and the President suddenly deciding to campaign with her. Yesterday the FBI detailed a long list of crimes and then says they will not seek charges.

At one level, it seems like the people in charge are rubbing our noses in the fact they are beyond the reach of the public. They are no longer going to pretend to be citizens of a republic, beholden to the voters. They are above the law and the proof of that is one of their own has committed hundreds of crimes and will not be required to step aside, much less be prosecuted. The law is for the Dirt People and it will be enforced by the Cloud People, but the Cloud People will do as they please.

There is another way to look at it. That is, the ruling class has lost control of the reigns and they can no longer police themselves. Hillary Clinton has no business being president. It is absurd even without the massive corruption and criminality. Hillary’s crowning achievement was marrying Bill Clinton 50 years ago. Even a deeply corrupt and incompetent ruling class should be able to filter out the likes of Hillary Clinton. The fact that they cannot bring themselves to flush her from the system when they have an iron clad criminal case against her is ominous.

There is another angle here. The whole “Arkanside” thing is a fun gag, but it does appear that the ruling class is playing much tougher with one another. Judge Roberts was either blackmailed or threatened into reversing his opinion on ObamaCare. That is incandescently obvious. FBI Director Comey’s erratic performance yesterday suggests there is more here than just a man suddenly changing his mind about law enforcement. He has prosecuted many others for these exact same crimes.

A lesson of history is that when ruling elites become unstable, they become thuggish. Rivals are no longer content to play by the agreed upon rules with the winners and losers showing grace to the other. Instead, politics becomes a blood-sport, where there are no limits on what one can do to win. The men who assassinated Julius Caesar probably did not think murder was a great idea. It is just that it was better than all the others. They convinced themselves they had no choice because that was the only way to win.

There is a byproduct to this. The ruling class loses the moral authority to rule. Once the ruling elite stops abiding by the laws, their only reason to rule is force. That is not just an internal reality within the ruling elite; it is a reality within society as a whole. If Hillary Clinton were to become President, only fools would continue to abide by the laws. It would be a war of all against all within the ruling class and eventually, within society. The last few centuries of the Roman Empire featured endless warfare and revolts for this reason.

America is not the Roman Empire and this is not the Iron Age. It is entirely possible that yesterday will be the point at which the American ruling class recoils at the madness they face. There has not been the series of victory laps in the liberal media we tend to see when Democrats pull a fast one on the public. The old school liberals have been down on Clinton for a long time and this only confirms their opinions. The ship does not always slam into the iceberg. A Thug-ocracy is not inevitable.

That is not the way to bet, however.

The Corporate State

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Independence Day always leads to an outbreak of stories about the glories of democracy from the usual suspects in the media. One of the stranger things in my lifetime is the fact that when I was young, democracy was a fetish of the Left, while the Right scoffed at the wisdom of the masses. Today, it is a fetish of the Right and the Left is making ominous noises about the foolishness of elections and democracy. The result is the so-called conservative media turns July 4th into a saccharine celebration of democracy.

Most everyone reading this is bright enough to know that America was never intended to be a democracy and it is not a democracy today. The Founders imagined a republic composed of sovereign states that would do the bulk of the governing. The Civil War obliterated the sovereignty of the states, thus allowing the Federal government to assume most of the governing. Our state governments perform administrative tasks on behalf of the Federal government, often financed by Federal tax dollars.

It is tempting to think America is on a long path toward Caesarism, where the institutions of republican government are hollowed out as power is transferred into the hands of an authoritarian. The trouble with that is the modern nation state is too complicated for that sort of autocratic rule. The nation state is a vast bureaucracy today with a semi-permanent staff loyal only to the bureaucracy. They take direction from the executive, but the scope of the government is too massive to control in a fine detail way.

Consider some numbers from the US government. Health and Human Services has about 150 employees who report directly to the president. These are appointees usually brought in the by the Secretary of HHS. The department has 78,000 employees that are civil servants. Most of what HHS does on a daily basis is unknown to the White House staff. Most of it is unknown to bureaucracy itself. An organization of that scale and permanence takes on a life of its own. It is a giant blob that absorbs what it touches.

This is why we have elections and not much changes. The rhetoric changes and maybe the way the bureaucracy is sold to the public changes a bit. Otherwise, the only thing that changes is the overall size of the state. It always gets bigger. Fifty years ago, the Feds spent about $4500 per citizen and today they spend close to three times that. This is in inflation adjusted dollars. That is a lot of elections with nothing ever changing, suggesting something else determines the size and scope of the state.

A better way to think of the modern nation state is as a corporation. The modern publicly traded corporation is setup to profit the owners, who are the stockholders. The people running the corporation, the CEO, the CFO, the senior managers and so forth, are put in place to run the enterprise in the interests of the owners. You, as a stockholder in Apple, want to see the company make money so your stock goes up in value. You do not get to set company policy, but you have a vote at a shareholder meeting.

Now, the major stockholders have some say in the management of the firm. These are the people who sit on the board and decide who is put in as a CEO or push for a shakeup of the management team when necessary. They are not running the daily operations, but they get to decide who is running the daily operations. Like the small stockholders, they want to see profit so presumably they have the same interests as those small shareholders. Sometimes they have other motives, which are at odds with the shareholders.

The modern state is similarly arranged. The super rich are not bound by the state any more than a major shareholder is bound to the company. They sit on the board as major political donors and fixers, but they may perform this function for many countries, just as a rich guy sits on the boards of many firms. Sheldon Adelson is just as involved in Israeli politics as he is US politics. George Soros is involved in the politics of a dozen countries, including countries that are in competition with one another.

The voters of countries are the small shareholders. They have some say in things, but only at the fringes. When the board puts up two candidates for the CEO position, the voters get some input on which one gets the job, but usually both choices are offering the same thing. Whenever there is a shareholder revolt and an alternative option is presented, the members of the board close ranks to fight it. They do this to protect their prerogatives as major shareholders. Even if the people are right, they cannot be allowed to dictate policy to management, much less the board. After all, the corporation is not a democracy.

That is the state of the West. The nation states are now just corporate states, run by a relatively small number of global billionaires. The small shareholders get to show up at shareholder meetings and pretend to have a say in things, but the management is not beholden to them. The managers in the corporate state are the politicians and their accessories in the political class. These people answer to the board that put them in their positions. It is why no matter who wins an election, the results are always the same.

It is also why we are seeing attempts at merging the nations of Europe into a single conglomerate. Consolidation is the natural dynamic in the corporate world. It is why we are down to three PC makers when 25 years ago there were dozens. It is why there are two mobile phone players when there used to be a dozen. Corporations must always grow to survive so when growth is no longer possible, they merge with others or acquire smaller firms. Global governance is really just Google streamlining the corporate states to make them more efficient for the purposes of the major shareholders.

It is tempting to say this has always been the arrangement, but it was not always thus. Within living memory, it was impossible for a guy like George Soros to play in domestic politics across borders. Countries were like family business and the owners were covetous of them. The credit age has allowed every nation in the West to go public and turn themselves into formless corporate blobs, slowly loosing their original identity. The planned merger of Europe into one big soap ball is intended to cleanse national identity.

How this ends up is anyone’s guess. The history of the equities markets is the story of bubbles and busts so the credit money era will do to nations what it has done to many businesses and industries. Of course, every corporate entity goes through tough times and must downsize. That usually means layoffs and terminations. The application of that to the corporate state should be interesting. Maybe that’s why both parties in Washington suddenly want to take away all the guns.