Author Archives: thezman

What To Do About Islam

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Terrorism from the Middle East got going in a serious way in the 1960’s and was allegedly spawned by the creation of Israel. Having failed to destroy Israel militarily, the Arabs set off on a policy of targeting civilians outside the Levant. The main actors at the time were Palestinians, but the rest of the Arabs, including Arab governments, eventually got into the act. Now, of course, we have these amorphous criminal organizations that exploit the global telecommunications system to recruit and direct lunatics all over the globe.

At the same time, Western involvement, and particularly US involvement, in the Muslim world has steadily increased. In the 70’s a handful of Americans worked in these countries, mostly in the oil business, but also as defense contractors. Today tens of thousands of Americans, plus equal numbers of Europeans are in these countries. That is on top of the saturation of Western culture via the internet and television. Then there is the military aspect. America has been dropping bombs on Muslims since the 80’s.

No sane person can conclude that relations between the West and Islam are on the upswing. Thirty years ago, the typical Westerner had no reason to care about the Muslims. Today, it is all we think about, because every other week a Muslim goes bonkers and kills a bunch a people. To make matters worse, the flood of Muslims into Western countries is threatening the social fabric of the West. Think about it. We now have political candidates running on explicitly anti-Islamic platforms.

What is to be done?

The first thing to do is to ban all immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. Banning Muslim immigration is impossible as you cannot implement it, but you can halt immigration from countries like Afghanistan and Iran. The United States actually runs recruiting drives in these countries via something called a diversity lottery. There is no patriotic reason to be importing these people. The West is not short of low-skilled, low-IQ people so importing more of them makes no economic sense. Importing people violently hostile to the West is suicidal and it must end.

That still leaves the problem of illegal migrants. The West used to have no qualms about rounding up illegals and sending them back, but fear of being rude to strangers has paralyzed Western governments. There is no reason to think this will change, but governments can make migration less attractive. Cutting off welfare benefits is the most obvious point of attack. Every Western country is creaking under the weight of social welfare programs. End all welfare programs to non-citizens.

Obviously, there are millions of Muslims living in the West and many have been here for a couple of generations. The Orlando shooter was born in America and his father was a naturalized citizen. America has about five million legal Muslims, while Europe has over forty-four million. Germany is 25% the size of the US and has far more Muslims. Given current fertility rates, these are dangerously high populations of people with an extremely poor history of assimilation. The West needs to think hard about encouraging reverse migration.

One way to do that is to offer cash bribes to leave. Some European countries are already doing this. It is a form of Danegeld, but sometimes that is what must be done. Many of the recent arrivals will jump at the cash bonus, figuring out that the party is over and they are better off going home. That is a big part of all of this. The West needs to make it clear that Islam is not welcome in the West. Cutting off the welfare and paying them to leave sends that message and it discourages others from making the trip to the West.

Another tool that can be used to discourage Muslim migration is a hard ban on cousin marriage. Most Muslim countries continue to marry off daughters to family members. First and second cousin marriage should be banned and heavily fined. No marriage of this type should be recognized. We have DNA tests to check this so it is cheap and easy to enforce. This is one of those things that sends a clear message, “You’re not welcome” to the Muslims.

All of this is incandescently obvious to anyone who has been paying attention. What is remarkable about the age in which we live is that the things people have known and understood for thousands of years are now suddenly heretical. This is due to the fever that has gripped our rulers, but normal people fully understand the sensibleness of limiting Muslim migration into the West. We owe Muslims nothing and are under no obligation to destroy ourselves to accommodate them.

What is not obvious is that our good intentions have done a lot of harm to the Muslim world and as a consequence invited these manufactured problems to our door. The culture and habits of the West evolved in the West. The people of Europe evolved in Europe and in the culture they created. Exporting our culture around the world to people, wholly unprepared for it, has had the same impact as exporting smallpox to the Americas. What has made the Mohammedan go crazy is the endless assault on his culture by Western culture.

The West not only needs to stop bombing the Muslims, but we also have to stop flooding their world with our culture. Western governments, especially the US, have to halt the export of Western culture to the Muslim world. Guys like Sergey Brin will fight it as he wants to control the world via Google, but maybe it is time for Sergey to take two in the hat anyway, but that is a post for another day. For now, the point is to halt the export of Western culture into Islamic countries via TV and Internet.

This also includes technology. What we fail to appreciate is how toxic Western technology is to these countries. They are not built for it. Our technology is like an infectious disease that seems harmless at first, maybe even beneficial, but then curdles into something that destroys the social fabric of these cultures. It is why we have observed initial periods of great progress, followed by a shift to tyranny and then total chaos. It is the pattern all over the Muslim world and the main driver is technology.

What happens is technology results in a material improvement in the lives of the people. They get better food, better medicine, better entertainments and better stuff. But then, this material improvement starts to disrupt the social arrangements and the ruling class uses the better technology to clamp down on dissent in very modern ways. As we see with the Turks, the result is authoritarianism. All over the Muslim world, the only stability comes either from despotism or backwardness.

Secular authoritarianism, however, sets off a counter-reaction where cultural elements begin to take on the secular authorities, the Islamic movements in the Middle East are not just religious in nature. They are counter arguments to Westernization. They are the response to tidal waves of foreign culture that are sweeping over Muslim lands. The West thinks it is helping by demanding democracy and shoving our values onto these people. Instead, we are creating fanatics who are dedicating themselves to fighting against what they see as an invasion.

Since this is going too long, let us summarize it this way. The solution to the West’s Islam problem is a version of containment. The goal is to keep the Muslims bottled up in their lands. Limit their access to the West physically, but l also limit their access culturally. Cut them off from our TV and the Internet. Let them drift back to their traditional ways, even if that means living in tents and riding camels. The Muslim Middle East needs to be a reservation for the Muslim. The only role of the West is to make sure they do not wander off the reservation.

Brexit

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On Thursday, which I think the EU requires the Brits to call quartidi, the subjects of England vote on whether or not to remain in Europe. The vote to leave, in theory, will compel the British government to negotiate an exit from the EU and paddle the island further into the Atlantic. The timing of the exit and the terms of the deal are not contemplated in the text of the referendum. There may be something in British law that determines these things, but I can find nothing to support that claim.

That is not an unimportant bit in this discussion. It is no secret that the ruling class of England not only wants to remain in the EU, but they dream of a day when Britain is just another administrative zone of Europe, sort of like how the Romans treated Britannia. It is not just that the idea of separate countries has become a heresy. The ruling elite seems to think the time has come to exterminate the British people entirely, at least as an identifiable tribe. As former Lord Chancellor Jack Straw put it, “the English as a race is not worth saving.”

Looking at the polling, the way to bet is that Brexit falls short. There has been a surge in support for leaving and English nationalism bubbling under the surface often goes unnoticed in polls. On the other hand, vote fixing and browbeating do not always show up in the polls either. There is also the fact that people perceive the status quo as the safe choice. Humans are funny that way. Any change meets some natural resistance, even when there is no logic to resistance. Roll it all up and Remain most likely carries the day.

Let us assume, by some miracle, that Brexit wins, what then?

In theory, the British government will begin negotiations with the EU on the formal withdraw of Britain from the EU. In reality, there has to be some political theater first. David Cameron will come under pressure to resign by members of his own party. He staked his reputation on this referendum so a failure to deliver would damage his standing. Plus, the people that really run things may want a scalp to send a message. As the saying goes, kill the chicken to scare the monkeys.

Of course, ousting a Prime Minister is no small thing and it could lead to all sorts of turmoil in the ruling party. Usually when this happens there is a group within the party that has coalesced around a new leader, they are ready to install, once they have  deposed the old leader. But that is not always the case and all hell could break loose once the Cameron is gone. Britain could end up having early elections, which would put things on hold until after the election. In effect, Britain would have a do-over referendum on Brexit.

If we assume that the political fallout is limited to the theatrical, the next step is the process of implementing the intent of the referendum. That will most likely take years as neither side will be in much of a hurry to get on with it. Parliament will surely pass some legislation as a stop gap to keep the current arrangements in place until a deal is done. The EU will set off on a long drawn out process of forming a committee to study the process of forming a committee to appoint a board to review Britain’s exit request.

The hope for all concerned is that the English people, having blown off some steam in the referendum, will go back to their affairs and forget all about it. From time to time the public will be notified that negotiations have taken place in the south of France during the winter or in the Alps during August, but otherwise nothing much will happen. There will no doubt be tales told to the British press about the long hours required to address the millions of details involved in actually leaving the EU.

Polling outfits will be surreptitiously dispatched to keep measuring public sentiment regarding the EU and the referendum. The hope being that opinion will swing the other way and Parliament can then pass an act overturning the referendum. The pressure to reverse the results of the referendum will slowly build over time until either the opposition is worn down or some crisis allows the rulers to act. A recession will be blamed on Brexit and it will be quickly “fixed” by overriding the referendum.

This probably seems like cynicism. After all, Britain is a liberal democracy where the will of the people, as expressed at the ballot box, is respected by the politicians. Our rulers invest a lot of time telling us this and then spend even more time getting us to come out and vote. Then there is the bizarre obsession with getting foreigners to vote in their own lands and come to our lands so they can vote in our elections. You can be forgiven for thinking that voting is important and respected by our rulers.

That has not been the pattern in Europe, or anywhere else in the West, over the last few decades. The voters vote and the political class does whatever it likes, coincidentally in line with the will of their donors and sponsors. The French people voted against the EU Constitution and the rulers promptly ignored them. Other EU countries then cancelled their referenda. The Greeks kept voting for change, only to get more of the same after each election. Despite the rhetoric, voting counts for little.

The reason for this is that what we keep calling liberal democracy is actually corporate democracy. The political class serves the function of the management group in a corporation. The buccaneering billionaires of the global elite are the board of directors, who hire and fire the politicians, based on their performance. The voters are just the minor shareholders who are mustered every once in a while, to endorse the actions of the board as represented by management. The vote is never binding.

Whenever there is shareholder revolt, the board takes it out on management. In theory, the shareholders could overthrow the board as well as management, but this always requires leadership from a large shareholder who is, in most cases, on the board. It may feel like the shareholders are taking control, but in reality, the board is always in control. It is just that the individuals members of the board may make war on one another.

In the case of Britain remaining a sovereign state, the board is of one mind, regardless of what the minor shareholders do tomorrow.

The Court Loon

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History is full of men who somehow managed to be wildly successful, only to be revealed as lunatics, madmen or incompetent. It is an incredible thing to read about Caligula or Nero and think about what it must have been like to serve in the Imperial government during their reigns. According to Seneca, Caligula was presiding over games and ordered his guards to throw an entire section of the crowd into the arena during intermission to be eaten by animals because there were no criminals to be prosecuted and he was bored.

Imagine being in the next section over.

The thought that always comes to my mind is how it was possible for such lunatics to get into power. In most cases, it was simply the result of a faulty system of succession. A favorite example of this is Christian VII of Denmark. He became the king of Denmark because he was the next in line, despite his mental illness. Christian was a chronic masturbator who made visiting dignitaries play leapfrog with one another. He also would slap people in the face for no reason.

In the case of legendary madmen like Caligula and Nero, their madness came on after they assumed power so maybe it was just bad luck. Tiberius, Caligula’s predecessor started out as a perfectly sane and normal ruler, but slowly became a paranoid tyrant. Of course, there are example of men who rise to power simply because they are devious schemers. They finally get to the top and find they have no skill for the job.

The madmen and lunatics get all the attention, but history is littered with examples of mediocrities managing to thread the needle somehow, ending up on top, only to be undone by their own stupidity. In my lifetime, Jimmy Carter is the most obvious example. Carter was a smart man in an extremely narrow sense, but he was a terrible politician and he suffered from delusions of grandeur. His four years as president featured a series of unforced errors that still boggle the mind.

The point is life is big and complicated with lots of variables. Under the right conditions, the dice can land the wrong way and we end up with a lunatic on the Supreme Court, which is why we have an impeachment system. if a nut winds up in the White House or on the bench, they can be removed. It does not happen often, but it’s a remedy, just in case we end up with someone like, say, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor submitted a racially-charged dissent in a Fourth Amendment case on Monday, which commentators hailed as a “Brown/Black Lives Matter manifesto.”

The case, Utah v. Strieff, was occasioned when police stopped Salt Lake City man Edward Strieff on leaving a house suspected to quarter drug activity. The state of Utah concedes the initial stop was illegal, as the officers in question had no probable cause to seize and search Strieff.

During the course of the stop, officers discovered Strieff had an outstanding warrant for a small traffic violation, and methamphetamine in his pocket. The Court was asked to decide whether the exclusionary rule — which prohibits police and prosecutors from using evidence obtained illegally — applies when an officer learns during an illegal stop that there is a warrant for an individual’s arrest, and finds additional contraband while executing the arrest on said warrant.

The High Court ruled 5-3 that the arrest, and the evidence obtained during the arrest, were legitimate, even if the initial stop was not. Justice Thomas wrote the majority opinion, joined by the Chief Justice, and Justices Kennedy, Breyer, and Alito.

Sotomayor filed a peppery dissent, joined in part by Justice Ginsburg.

“The white defendant in this case shows that anyone’s dignity can be violated in this manner,” she wrote. “But it is no secret that people of color are disproportionate victims of this type of scrutiny. For generations, black and brown parents have given their children ‘the talk’— instructing them never to run down the street; always keep your hands where they can be seen; do not even think of talking back to a stranger—all out of fear of how an officer with a gun will react to them.”

“We must not pretend that the countless people who are routinely targeted by police are ‘isolated,’” she continued. “They are the canaries in the coal mine whose deaths, civil and literal, warn us that no one can breathe in this atmosphere.”

Elsewhere in the dissent, she characterizes the United States as a “carceral state,” and pillories the “civil death” endured by those subject to arrest, a process she describes in vivid terms. She also accused the Court of treating minority communities as “second class citizens.”

The dissent’s citations are as interesting as the text itself, which read like a survey of the American black literary tradition. At various points, she cites “The Souls of Black Folk,” by W. E. B. Du Bois, Michelle Alexander, a law professor who has written extensively on over incarceration, and the more radical works of James Baldwin and Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Where does one start with this? This is a Supreme Court Justice, not a college freshman writing her first college paper. The nonsense about blacks being the victims of police harassment has been debunked so many times, even race hustlers have dropped it. The facts on black crime are simply too easy to lookup. Here’s a study from the Obama administration that tells us that young black males are 3% of the population but commit 27% of homicides. You would think a judge would know about this.

Of course, that misses the elephant in the room. Sotomayor is launching off on a Black Lives Matter rant over a white guy, who was the alleged victim. A fanatic is someone who cannot change their mind and will not change the subject. When you layer in the references to guys like Genius T. Coates, it is not unreasonable to wonder if this woman has not lost her marbles. She may not be randomly slapping people or demanding members of the gallery be fed to the lions, but she is acting just as nutty as those legends I mentioned at the start.

How did we end up with a mentally disturbed dwarf on the high court? The same way Christian VII landed on the throne of Denmark or Caligula donned the purple. The process for selecting judges means ticking the racial boxes and a willingness to catch spears for the One True Faith. Obama nominated this woman because she was a Latin lesbian. Finding someone who checks those boxes and is competent in the law is impossible so he just took a loyal fanatic. The result is we have a mentally disturbed woman on the high court – for life.

The Ruling Elite

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Sine the usual suspects began to control popular culture, the image of the ruling class has been the WASP. The caricature was of a horse faced, toothy guy named “Prescott” that liked to wear a tennis sweater draped over his shoulders. Alternatively, it was the old guy sitting in a leather chair at his club, reading the Financial Times while smoking a pipe and drinking brandy. The point of these caricatures was to highlight the ethnic and cultural divide between the people in charge and the rest of us.

Like all stereotypes, the origins of this are rooted in fact. For a long time, the ruling elite of America was WASP and somewhat inbred. A relatively small number of ruling clans out of New England ran government, finance and foreign affairs. The Brahmins were folks who traced their roots to the founding. They went to the best schools, knew the best people and accepted their duty as the caretakers of the nation. They were of course, almost always Episcopalian.

This is no longer reality in America. It remained a popular stereotype because it is comforting to people. The rulers are not there because they are better. They were born into it or they had connections that allowed them to gain access to power. The ethnics still carry on like the world is run by guys named Pemberton. Jews, of course, love this social construct and are endlessly reminding us that they were kept out of golf courses by the WASP elite.

Despite the mythologizing, the fact is we no longer have a WASP ruling class. The real ethnic nature of the ruling class in America is Jewish. As I pointed out in my Mokita post, Jews are smart and we live in an age when being smart counts for a lot. The stereotype of the Jewish banker or Jewish lawyer is obviously true. The titans of global finance are all Jewish guys. The US Supreme Court is 30% Jewish and Obama has a Jewish guy warming in the bullpen to replace Scalia.

The argument has always been that Jews dominated banking because of historic discrimination and that’s not entirely false. Catholic prohibitions against usury allowed Jews to dominate the lending business, but that does not explain why Hollywood has always been dominated by Jews. It does not explain why 30% of the Fortune 1000 are people of Jewish descent. Jews are one percent of the population, but represent 47% of major American sports team owners.

Sport #Owners Jews Blacks Asian Whites Other
NBA 51 34 3 1 12 1
MLB 30 10 0 0 17 3
NHL 32 15 0 1 14 2
NFL 32 10 0 1 20 1
Total 145 69 3 3 63 7
47.59% 2.07% 2.07% 43.45% 4.83%

Ownership of sports teams is a great metric because it requires more than just money to own a team. You have to have connections in the elite. These sports leagues are clubs and they don’t just let anyone join. These are clubs for members of the American elite to show they are at the top. It’s the ultimate trophy for the most connected. The fact that close to half the people in sports ownership are Jewish is a reflection of the new American ruling class. It’s guys named Herb, not Prescott.

Despite this amazing dominance, Jews still act as if they are a put upon minority, scrambling to make a go of it in the teeth of ethnic hostility. The show Mad Men, from what I understand, is based on the myth that the Jews were kept out of advertising until last week. The guy that invented the ad business in America was a Jewish guy from Chicago back in the 1920’s. Then there is the whole golf club business that Steve Sailer writes about a lot.

It’s a powerful bit of mythology that probably works as motivation for young Jewish kids setting out in the world. Every ethnic group in America, except Germans and the English, has a similar sort of mythology. The Irish swear that their uncle Seamus was denied jobs because he was Irish. Italians claim they have been forever slandered by the whole Mafia thing. Poles work the Catholic angle. East Asians are quick to remind everyone about Fu Manchu and coolies.

Someone has to be the ruling elite in every society and having Jews in charge is probably not the worst choice. A ruling elite that nurses a grudge against the society over which it rules, because of past discrimination, sounds a lot like Syria where the Alawites angrily rule over Sunni majority. America is a not Syria, so there will not be a violent uprising against the ruler sect, but it does mean Jews will have to stop whining and accept their role as the ruling elite.

It also means that Americans will have rework their idea of the aristocrat. The Talmud is a best seller in South Korea because Koreans want to be successful so they are setting out to emulate the most successful ethnic group. Eventually, Americans will do the same thing. Instead of a striver changing his name to “Blake Ashcroft” and claiming Mayflower ancestry, the ambitious will change their name to Murray Goldblatt and claim Holocaust ancestry.

This is already happening at the fringes. Guys like John Podhoretz are constantly demanding to see Bar Mitzvah photos because they believe people are faking their Jewishness in order to gain access to the club. Whether or not people are “trying to pass” is tough to tell. Podhoretz is an evil little slug. He could just be trying to damage his betters in the community. Still, it is not far-fetched. There used to be a time when you had to prove you went to Choate before gaining access to the elite.

On the other hand, Jewish fertility rates in American are around 1.9, with the highest being among ultra-orthodox sects at 4.1. The Jews in charge are not breeding and it only takes a generation or two of these sorts of TFR’s before Jews in America begin to look like the Amish. Then there is the inevitable out-breeding and falling away from the faith that challenges all religious minorities. It is entirely possible that Jews in America are at their peak and are about to experience a slide into oblivion.

Father’s Day in the Ghetto

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When you live in or near the ghetto, you cannot help but notice the fact that family life is nothing like it is out in Honkyville. Dave Chappelle used to do a bit on how his limo driver took him through the ghetto once and he saw a baby on the street corner selling weed at one in the morning. What made it funny is the truth of it. In the ghetto, you will see little kids running around at all hours. Seeing an unattended toddler standing on the corner is not common but seeing small children without their parents is not rare.

I was riding through a section 8 area on my bike once, it was mid-morning probably, and I saw a small kid standing next to a running car. The car had both doors open. The townhouse it was in front of also had the door wide open. Presumably, there was a mother inside, maybe watching the kid and the running car. I did not stick around long enough to get the answer, but I was not shocked by it. This is just a feature of the underclass, especially the black underclass.

Father’s Day around here is always a bit amusing because I imagine the black guys all looking for a place to hide, not entirely sure which kid is technically theirs and which baby momma is looking for them. It is terrible, but I blame Maury Povich for making me cynical about these things. That and the black illegitimacy rate in America is 75%. In the ghetto it is 100%. It is why today the local grocery store is staffed entirely by black people. Whites take off and blacks gladly pick up the extra shifts.

It was not always this way. Black illegitimacy was at 12% before the Civil Rights Movement. Social justice and the welfare state destroyed the black family. By the mid-60’s illegitimacy among blacks was in the 40’s and then exploded with the introduction of recreational drug use. On the one hand, you had young blacks destroying themselves with drugs. On the other hand, you had a warlord culture evolve around the sale and distribution of street drugs. Thug life is not family life.

In the ghetto, black people do not have any concept of fatherhood because no one grew up with a father. Often, the mothers do not even know who it was that knocked them up so the biological father does not even have a name. It is as if the women were impregnated by ghosts. As a result, the black underclass is entirely matriarchal to the point where men live separate lives. The better mothers hope their boys get out of the ghetto, but most just accept they will end up on the corner.

Hispanics have gone a different way with illegitimacy. All the blather about Hispanics being culturally conservative ignores the fact that 53% of Hispanic babies are born to unwed mothers. The difference here is that Hispanic males are not invisible. They stick around and try to take a role in child raising. They may not marry their baby-momma, but they at least make a token effort to take care of the babies. There is still a shame component that compels even the male to pretend to be a responsible father.

The underclass whites are a lot like the Hispanics in that regard. Dwayne may not have bothered to marry Brandy when he knocked her up, but little Randy will grow up knowing Dwayne is his daddy. This is just a carryover effect from when American culture served the needs of the lower classes by enforcing basic rules of conduct. There are still some poor whites around who remember when you did the right thing, but in a generation or two that will fade into the mists of time.

Jerry Springer Nation is the end point for all of it.

It does not have to be this way, of course. In fact, the current conditions are an anomaly in America. This is a new problem created by our betters over the last couple of generations. Bored with the post-war prosperity of the 50’s, they decided to experiment on the poor by blowing apart the traditional institutions that gave some structure to the lower classes. Nature does not dispense her gifts equally. Some in every generation, born with the right stuff, managed to climb out of the under-class.

That is nearly impossible now. Kids coming out of the tough neighborhoods in American cities never learn the basics of behaving in a civilized society. The schools do not bother teaching them much of anything. With no useful role models, even kids with something on the ball are condemned to life in the urban reservation. For boys that means crime and then the cemetery. The unlucky head off to prison. The girls are just baby mills and a conduit to send tax dollars into the ghetto, so white liberals can feel special.

There has never been a time when poverty was fun. It was always hard, but the promise of America was always that even the poorest had hope. “Behave, do the right thing, work hard and anyone can grow up to be president.” That promise has been rescinded by the black-hearted sadists who rule over us. In the future, the robot historians will puzzle over why Americans did not rise up and hang the bastards long before they could do so much damage. Every time I ride through the ghetto, I wonder the same thing.

The Reactionary Left

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The word “reactionary” has become synonymous with the Right entirely due to the Left applying it to anyone they hate. The Left does not use it much anymore, as new abracadabra phrases have taken its place. Read radical writings of the 60’s and the word turns up all over the place. The claim is that the opponents of the Left are not working from a basis of facts and reason. Instead, they are merely reacting from emotion and therefore they can be dismissed.

It is why I tend to think the people embracing the label, calling themselves neo-reactionaries, are making a critical mistake. They are dismissing their own thoughts as nothing more than a hysterical reaction to the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. That is not their intention. They are reaching back to an older definition, but that is not how anyone outside their movement is going to take it. Like it or not, the Left controls the language, or at least they have for a long time, so they get to define the terms.

It is just another example of the dominance of the Cult of Modern Liberalism in American life. Everything, even the thoughts of its adversaries, has been warped by it. Vast bits of history have either been lost or retconned to the point where they tell a story in direct contradiction to the facts. The reactionaries used to be the people in charge, facing down the rebels of the radical Left. Today, reactionary conjures an image of a thoughtless old man unwilling to change with the times.

Thinking of the Left as the establishment is hard because the narrative of the Left always features them as the plucky underdog, facing off against the reactionary philistine. The concept of the struggle is integral to the creation myths of liberalism, as well as to the ongoing narrative of the faith. Like all cults, Liberalism can function without a leader, but it must always have a devil. As a result, even the harshest of critics can be forgiven for failing to appreciate the Left’s hold on society.

This altered reality obscures the fact that as an intellectual construct, the Progressive project in America has collapsed. That is evident in the Democratic primary for President. Bernie Sanders ran on the old time theme of economic equality and sounded like a stock character from the 1950’s filmstrip on the Red Menace. It was not what he said, but how ridiculously out of place it sounded compared to modern Progressive rhetoric.

Clinton, in contrast, chants the slogans of identity politics, which are all just in-group signaling. Her campaign to run as a slightly-out-of-the-closet lesbian is what liberalism is today. Talk to a modern liberal and ask them why they are supporting Clinton. Most likely they will change the subject, saying something about Trump. Otherwise, you get a shrug because they do not know. It is just what they do. It is what they are supposed to do.

Something else that has been obscured by the howling from the Left is that it is an entirely reactionary movement now. With nothing to offer a modern technocratic society, other than a post-modern form of nostalgia for the glory days of the Cult, the Left is mostly focused on stamping out bogeymen, real and imaginary, past and present. Listen to a liberal today and what you hear is a litany of things they oppose and those things are more often than not fictional.

It is why the college campus is so weird now. They are dominated by liberal women and minorities, yet they are engaged in endless witch hunts for dangerous white males. The Rolling Stone rape hoax featured a guy named Haven Monahan, a name intended to conjure an image of a toothy, horse faced WASP brimming with entitlement. College has become live action role playing for paranoid Progressives, with the quests set as morality tales based on Progressive piety.

It is what critics of Obama miss when railing about his refusal to say, “radical Islam.” They assume it belies a hidden agenda or a naive ignorance. It is neither. Obama is a reactionary. Whatever his adversaries are for, he is against. His reactionary instincts are mostly just a moldy form of anti-colonialism that was popular with his parent’s generation, but still exists in Afrocentric circles. Obama is defined by what he hates, not what he loves.

It is why his first act as President was to have the bust of Churchill removed. African anti-colonials hated Churchill, seeing him as the symbol of British imperialism. Right out of the gate, Obama was showing us he was a man defined by his hatreds. He was for nothing and against just about everything. In this regard, he is the quintessential reactionary. His only interest is in maintaining the Progressive order. Whether or not it is good for the country is irrelevant.

The entirely of Obama’s presidency can be explained in the reactionary framework. Like most successful blacks in America, he is consumed with a hatred for whites so a lot of what he does is just spite against the honkies. The more substantive acts read like a laundry list of Progressive revenge fantasies. His rapprochement with Russia was styled to be a rebuke of Reaganism, not a diplomatic strategy. It is why it failed. After the point was made, he and his flunkies laughed and move onto other topics.

The big health care push was never about health care. Instead, it was about revisiting the liberal defeat in the early 90’s. That is why it quickly devolved into score settling over issues like abortion and religious liberty. The Left has not the foggiest idea how to reform health care and they are not interested in it. They just wanted to exact some revenge against Christians and the middle-class. The point of that is to remind everyone they are in charge and it is the natural order.

Obama’s refusal to take obvious steps to address the Muslim problem is just a form of trolling. He knows it pisses off the squares and that is why he does it. It is not that he is a secret Muslim or that he has a secret agenda of some sort. The truth is the opposite. He as no plans and not interest in forming a plan. What consumes him is poking a stick in the eye of the people he detests, which so happens to be normal Americans. In this regard, he is our first foreign President, but he mostly just a reactionary President.

Ultimately, reaction cannot exist as an intellectual force on its own, as a simple matter of logic. Just as Buckley Conservatism curdled into a weird Corporate Libertarianism without the menace of Soviet communism, the Left has evolved in reaction to the void where it is old enemy once existed. The radical project was always based on the assumption of scarcity, a zero sum game where some had extra and some went without. It is why communist states never try to arrest scarcity. They need to survive.

Today, no one goes without, as a practical matter. It may be an illusion build on credit money, but a whole generation has grown up with too much of everything. When the poor are suffering from obesity, scarcity is no longer a problem. Instead of promising a future where poverty and inequality are banished, the Left is now a paranoid power cult lashing out indiscriminately in a vain quest to hold power. They are like meth addicts fighting the imaginary spiders, except they wield real power and do real damage.

America, like the rest of the West is entering a crisis of legitimacy due largely to the fact the Left decimated the intellectual battlefield. In the zeal to pull down all competing social constructs, they forgot to build one of their own that can hold up in a modern technological society. What passes for mainstream moral philosophy today is a vast moonscape littered with the remnants of old ideas. The Left is reduced to settling old scores and lashing out at imaginary bogeymen. This is the age of Liberal Reaction.

Dear Homosexuals

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Most likely, you are looking at the title of this post and prepared to dismiss it as homophobic, whatever that currently means. I get that and I’m used to it. I’m a white heterosexual male so I’m used to being called a racist, a bigot, a misogynist, an anti-Semite, an Islamophobe, an extremist, a homophobe, a sexist, a cis-genderist and every other epithet. That’s right. We honky dudes have been accused of discriminating against everyone, so as a straight white male, I’m used to it. Despite the fact we created civilization, everyone dumps on us these days. That’s gratitude for ya.

Just to get it out of the way, I’m mildly intolerant of homosexuals. Specifically, I think female homosexuality is ridiculous and I think male homosexuality is disgusting. As a point of comparison, I think lima beans are disgusting, but I’m not out at night waging war on legume farmers. What you people do in private may revolt me, but as long as you do it in private and don’t hurt anyone, it’s none of my business. It’s a big world and there is plenty of room for all kinds as long as we make reasonable efforts to respect each other’s point of view. It’s not that hard to be polite.

That’s the problem, of course. For the last few decades, you guys in the Alphabet Soup Community (LGBTQQIP2SAA? Really?) have not been holding up your end of the bargain. Instead of respecting the sensibilities of the majority, you have gone out of your way to offend normal Americans, particularly those of us in the honky community. Turning a St. Patrick’s Day parade into a gay St. Patrick’s Day parade may seem like a hoot to you guys, but it really does piss off the rest of us. You surely know it, but you do this stuff anyway, suggesting the point of it all is to piss of the squares, more than anything else.

Even so, what happened down in Orlando was a terrible thing. As an American, I hate that my government is importing these people into our country. This is both predictable and preventable, but here we are anyway. I’m now seeing news stories reporting that you guys are rethinking your alliance with the Left, particularly when it comes to immigration and guns. Listening to Milo Yiannopoulos, I’m getting the sense that gays may be ready to change teams, so to speak. Having figured out that you have been nothing more than pets to the Left, you are going to join the other team, at least for this election.

That’s a good idea, as the Left is going to keep importing Muslims until the Left is dethroned and purged from society. The Official Right is not much better, but they are a bunch of feckless wussies so no one cares what they think. The Left is the butch side of the ruling class and they love Muslims. The census says we have 3.3 million Muslims as of 2010, so that means the number is probably closer to 5 million now. At a rate of half a million per year, the goal according to Paul Ryan, Muslims will outnumber homosexuals by the end of the decade or thereabouts. Either this changes now or you guys better learn to fly.

Here’s the reason for my note. I’m getting the sense that we in the straight white guy community are supposed to celebrate this change of heart by America’s homosexuals. Gavin McInnes was just out creating a big scene, making out with Milo Yiannopoulos for some reason. Gavin is just a hang around on the alt-right, but he often claims to speak for white guys in the generality. I see some familiar faces embracing the change on twitter so there’s some effort, at least, to figure out how to welcome the gays into the army opposing the Left. No enemies on the Right and all that.

That sounds nice, but I’m not sold. I know more than a few Muslims and they may be crazy, but it’s a crazy I can deal with as a white guy. We white guys are not going to have to worry about the kids seeing guys in assless chaps down at the Ramadan parade. Not having screeching harpies call us sexist because we refuse to pretend biology is a social construct sounds pretty attractive. To be honest, the thought of Muslims pitching the faculty of the Womyn’s Studies department off the roof is not so bad. Yeah, that makes me a bad guy, but I’m used to it. It’s been a long war.

That’s not to say I’m not amenable to welcoming the gays into the revolution. It’s just you guys have to bring more to the party than a fashion sense. The Christian bakers would like a little breathing room. The Boy Scouts would like to be left alone. The guys at the office would like to tell a salty joke without fear of being fired, or worse, being sent off to a reeducation camp. In other words, if you want help with Mohamed, you’re going to have to give some stuff back to us. Otherwise, I think I speak for most straight white guys in saying we’ll roll the dice with Mohamed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d really rather not have to convert to Islam. I look like shit with a neck beard and I can’t ululate worth a damn. Giving up bacon and beer would really suck, but the Muslims are not wrong about everything. I’m not saying you have to go back in the closet or put up with cops busting up your clubs. Just meet us half way. Show some respect for the majority, leave the Christian bakers in peace and respect the fact that not everyone enjoys seeing a man walking down the street in a gold lamé thong. Maybe stop making us pretend you’re married.

Anyway, if you made it this far, think about it. Keep in mind that about 500 Muslims were imported since Orlando so don’t take too long.

Toodles,

Z

The Custodial State

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When I was a kid, the police I knew looked something like this picture. I think this is a sheriff’s department photo from the Midwest.

SecondShiftPatrol2014

The cops back then were local guys who often had done a stretch in the military and then got a job as a local cop. Maybe they had ambitions to be a state trooper. Most were fine working as a county or town cop because they got to stick close to home and the job was not all that difficult. City cops had it tougher because they had real crime, but city cops came from the city so they knew the score before they signed onto the force. For many, the action was the attraction.

It was not an idyllic age. There was plenty of real crime and plenty of real criminals for the cops to apprehend. Take a look at homicide rates over the last century and you can see that we live is a relatively safe time. Crime has ticked up a bit recently, but nothing like we saw in the 70’s, 80’s and 90’s.

United_States_Homicides_and_Homicide_Rate

back then, the cops had radios, revolvers and fast cars for traffic duty. When I was a kid, radar was becoming common for traffic duty and it created a lot of friction between citizens and cops. Suddenly, the cops felt like highwaymen to a lot of people. CB radio probably got popular in the 70’s because it was a way for motorists to warn one another about radar traps. I don’t know that for certain, but someone once told me that and it jives with my memories as a kid in the 70’s.

The point of this trip down memory lane is to point out that it was not so long ago when cops were just guys in the neighborhood. The only people who saw them as an adversary were up to no good. That’s not the case today. This is what the cops look like in the typical American town.

deadstate-conspiracies-in-reality

Every time Donald Trump has a rally, we see employees of the DNC and George Soros out attacking people and we also see cops in battle gear. They look like extras from a Star Wars movie, kitted out in black and Darth Vader helmets. The point of the outfit is to be intimidating and look dangerous. These are not citizens hired to enforce the law. These are agents of the state ready to crack heads.

This is a scene from the Trump San Diego rally a few weeks ago:

TL_Trump_Protests_San_Diego_Stone_160527_12x5_1600

Now, you can say that riot control is dangerous stuff so the cops need to be dressed like storm troopers. The fact that we managed to control mobs for generations without having militarized cops is the obvious counter argument. We could also arrest the people financing these riots, which would pull the plug on all of this without having a massive display of force. But, where’s the fun in that? No, the state wants the display. That’s the point.

It’s tempting to call what we are seeing an “emerging police state” and there is an argument in support of that claim. It used to be the politicians feared the people. They could be voted out of office and if that did not work, they could dragged from their office and hanged from the nearest light pole. They have no fear of that today. Those guys with the gas masks, body armor and full-auto rifles stand between you and the rulers. That’s right gun grabbers, the cops now have mil-spec automatic weapons.

The West is not East Asia so “police state” is the wrong way to put it. The security forces in America will not be opening fire on peaceful crowds. They will not be driving armored vehicles through protest camps like we saw in China. Instead, it will be beanbags, rubber bullets and other non-lethal crowd control tools. It will also be endless surveillance from the state and corporate partners.

Sept, 29, 2015. San Diego, CA. USA| Cameras in the alley by the Hi-Lite Theater where police shot and killed a manI.|Photos by Jamie Scott Lytle.Copyright.

Sept, 29, 2015. San Diego, CA. USA| Cameras in the alley by the Hi-Lite Theater where police shot and killed a man.|Photos by Jamie Scott Lytle.Copyright.

If you read this interesting story on the geezers who pulled the Hatton Garden Heist, the thing that should jump out at you is the causal celebration of the custodial state. The robbers were, in part, caught by the use of CCTV. Like most cities now, London is under 24×7 video surveillance by the authorities. On my way to the office, a two mile drive, I pass 12 security cameras and two speed cameras. They are watching us all the time now.

It’s why the people in charge increasingly talk to us like we are pets, barely able to understand them. They see us as zoo animals. It’s also why they are increasingly cavalier about bucking the will of the people. Paul Ryan laughs at so-called conservatives as he helps Obama push through his agenda in the remaining months of his rule. Angela Merkel is indifferent to public sentiment because, well, what are they going to do about it? How many divisions do they have?

At some point, maybe sooner than we realize, the pols in Washington will decide they have had enough with the voters. It’s simply too much of a hassle. Some excuse will be trotted out so they can pretend to one another that it is necessary or temporary, but voting will come to an end. The people will protest, but the state will have men in body armor pouring out of APC’s holding MP-5’s. In the name of public safety, the protests will be broken up and the people put back in their enclosures.

Welcome to the custodial state.

A Culture of Lies

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

I’ve often wondered if it were possible to devise a metric for the measure of madness in a society’s ruling class. We know that the people ruling Canada, for example, are much further from reality than the people running Poland right now. You can tell that by the things they say. Justin Trudeau says things that suggest he is a schizophrenic, while the ruler of Poland says sensible things about the troubles facing Europe. The former ruler of North Korea often made announcements so outlandishly crazy, it’s hard to believe they were intentional.

If you could create a scale measuring the distance between the things the rulers say in public and reality, you could then compare one regime to another on the crazy scale. North Korea would probably be the gold standard of crazy so the “nork” could be the measure of ruling class lunacy. Turkmenistan would be seven “norks”, while France would be three “norks.” It’s an impossible thing and maybe a bit batty, but if I ever have the time, maybe I’ll try to work it out just for fun.

There’s little doubt, however, that the Dalrymple quote relies on the observation that authoritarian regimes rely heavily on spouting nonsense at their citizens and having the citizenry repeat it. Every society has “pretty lies” that help grease the wheels, but authoritarian societies almost always jump into that other category, where clearly false things are declared official truths. It’s not a matter of degree. It is a category difference.

I was thinking about this yesterday listening to the coverage of the Orlando shooting. The facts are familiar at this point. A second generation Muslim goes bonkers and kills people in the name of Jihad. In this case, the killer had a deep hatred of homosexuals and blacks so he shot up what is usually a gay club, but on this night it was Latin night so it just looked like a gay club. This is now becoming a familiar pattern and we all know the general reason for it. The contours of Islam are now familiar to everyone.

That’s the reality of this event. Barak Obama, on the other hand, blames it on Magic Shape Theory™. He claim this man was exposed to metal and plastic formed into mystical shapes that imbued them with the power to take over the mind of this one guy, turning him into a murderer. Therefore he is calling on his chief sorcerer to cast a level three wishing spell to prevent this particular shape from forming again. That way, no one will ever be possessed by this shape and turned into a killer.

OK, he did not mention a sorcerer, but calls for gun control are about as honest and fact based as calling for the Court Wizard of the kingdom to cast a healing spell. It’s utter nonsense. Obama knows it is nonsense and everyone in the media repeating it knows it is nonsense. The proof of that is they refuse to even talk about the obvious issue in this case. When that’s mentioned, Obama declares it immoral to even discuss it and the press is directed to spend their time talking about how Trump is firing up Christian bigots.

Lying used to be something that damaged reputations, even with politicians, but we have reached a point where lying in public is so common, it is considered part of the normal. Everyone knows Hillary Clinton is lying about the pay-for-play scam she was running from the State Department. We have video proof of her lying repeatedly, but no one in the press bothers to press her on it. After all, lying is just the new normal and only weirdos care about the truth when it comes to politics or anything else for that matter.

That’s part of what the ruling class finds so horrifying about Trump. He exaggerates for effect, but he does not say things that anyone can see as outright lies. You may disagree with his opinion on the Orlando shooter, but he’s not out there blaming it on Christian bakers or Magic Shape Theory™. It’s why they call him a bully. He’s not playing by the rules. We have reached the point that Orwell called the time of universal deceit. Trump is a radical merely for stating the obvious in public.

As a geezer, I’m old enough to remember a time when things were different. In my youth, homosexuals were still kept on lavender farms in the South and Muslims were kept over in their territories, so things like Orlando were impossible. I also remember when Trump’s plain speaking was not uncommon. Politicians exaggerated, for sure, but they were not competing with one another for who could tell the most outlandish whoppers in public. A folksy candor was a popular way for politicians to distinguish themselves from the crowd.

I’m going long here, but maybe this is a byproduct of mass media. The only way to break through the noise is to be outrageous and what is more outrageous than telling outlandish lies that everyone knows are lies? The foundation of Western civilization is social trust. The ultimate affront, the ultimate outrage is to be thoroughly and complete untrustworthy. To point out the obvious, to acknowledge the real means getting lost in the noise. Instead, the only way our rulers can get our attention is by embracing a culture lies.

Who Killed Conservatism?

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Many normal people would flinch at the assertion that conservatism and the conservative movement is dead or even dying. Instead, the normal person would prefer to say it has been betrayed by politicians, as well as their flacks in the so-called conservative media. Of course, all of this assumes one can get three people to agree on what it means to be a conservative.

There’s also an age issue. Someone in their 70’s will have a different sense of how to define conservative from someone in their 30’s. The 70-year old will have come of age when Eisenhower was the definition of conservative or maybe Goldwater. The 30-year old is walking around thinking Newt Gingrich is the archetypal right-winger. All of us are trapped in our piece of the timeline.

If we narrow the scope a bit and just look at professional conservatism in America, the type we associate with the modern Republican Party, then it is fair to say it is seriously wounded, if not dying. The action these days is out on the fringe. The term “Alt-Right” seems to have taken over as the popular label, but it is pretty the same people who have been purged from conservatism.

Before you can finger the people responsible for killing conservatism you have to figure out what went wrong. Buckley Conservatism ran out of reasons to exist. It was first and foremost a defense against communism, specifically Soviet aggression abroad and communist infiltration at home. Once the Cold War ended, communism collapsed and Buckley Conservatism was left without a reason to exist. The dragon was slain and there was no need for a champion.

Buckley Conservatism was supposed to be a fusion of libertarian economics and politics with traditionalism and social conservatism. The Right would be for free markets, but also defend traditional institutions and the social consensus that promotes stability. Ronald Reagan ran on this platform in 1980 and National Review, the flagship publication of the Right, was the intellectual home of fusionism.

That combination of traditionalism and capitalism should have been a solid foundation for a post-Cold War conservatism, but that’s not what happened. Instead, official conservatism quickly became something closer to Corporate Libertarianism. The guy to blame for that is probably Newt Gingrich. He emerged as the leader of the baby boomer conservatives in the early 90’s and made it into technocratic managerialism.

Newt redefined the Official Right in the 90’s, steering it toward Jack Kemp’s managerial conservatism, with its emphasis on making government better. Instead of rolling back the welfare state, the goal was to direct the power of the Federal government toward “conservative” ends. If you look at the Contract with America, the thing reeks of managerialism. It’s the sort of technocratic agenda guys like Ramesh Ponnuru are still trying to sell, mostly because it means jobs for their friends and family.

Eventually, the Gingrich Revolution gave us Big Government Conservatism and Compassionate Conservatism, both just marketing programs for embracing statist solutions in place of traditional conservative solutions. Instead of leaving families and communities to manage their affairs, government would nudge them along with an array of tax schemes and regulatory gimmicks. Need more kids? Turn the knob for child tax credits to get the old baby makers heated up out their in flyover country!

Fundamentally, conservatism is a cultural perspective. It’s a philosophical outlook rooted in ones traditions and heritage. Managerialism is the obliteration of culture and tradition, in favor of sterile technocratic governance. Once the Official Right surrendered to this it ceased to be conservative. No conservative ends can ever be achieved at gun point. Political liberty, after all, is the minimization of the use of coercion by the state in its essential role of preventing one person’s freedom from intruding upon another’s.

That’s why Buckley Conservatism is dying. The challenges of this age are all cultural. Globalism marshals the monopoly of force of each state against the local communities trying to hold onto their traditional way of life. Mass migration disrupts the demographic balance that makes for social stability. You can’t address these forces, much less oppose them, with programs that promise to expand the role of the state in the affairs of the citizens.

The Contract with America promised to eliminate 95 specific government programs. None of those programs were eliminated. Welfare reform was passed and offered the first substantive alterations of these programs in a generation. Even so, the budget for these 95 programs during Gingrich’s time as Speaker grew by 13%. That’s the story of post-Cold War conservatism. Lots of Five Year Plans and artfully labeled agendas, but the result has been a 25 year run of expanding government and retreating liberty.

Newt’s brand of conservatism was all about avoiding the schoolyard bullies by either currying favor with them as a flunky or quietly submitting to them, pretending to maintain his dignity. It’s why the modern conservative endlessly prattles on about his principles. For them, dignified submission is a principle. The result has been a generation of failure. The Left has gone from one triumph to the next in the culture war, beating the country so out of shape a man of 1990 would hardly recognize it.

Newt is not history’s greatest monster and he may very well have been sincere in his efforts. Regardless, the embrace of credentialism, the creeping mandarinism that comes with the managerial state and the preference for technocratic solutions over traditional responses is what killed Official Conservatism. The flowering of all that was in the early 90’s when Newt and the other “Class of ’94” types seized the party and redefined conservatism. Two decades on and it is now headed for the ash heap of history.