Author Archives: thezman

The Pornification of Conservative Inc.

Posted on by

Way back in the olden thymes, access to pornography was limited. When I was a kid, there were magazines sold from behind the counter, books sold from the backs of those magazines and smoker films that came from sleazy vendors in big cities. Women had bodice rippers, the soft porn of romantic novels, which were sold openly in grocery stores. Otherwise, it was your imagination when it came to titillation.

The result of this was a tiny porn industry. Magazines like Playboy were “big time” in that they had a large subscriber base and were able to work from swank offices, but they were still relatively small. They maybe used three or four girls in each issue and some women would appear repeatedly so the pool of women, who made money in men’s magazines, was tiny. The same was true of smoker films and the money they made was tiny as well.

Public morals played a role, but it was mostly technology that kept the porn business small. They were barred from the mass media of the day, television, and public morals meant porn had to be sold discreetly. I recall a store in our town mistakenly putting skin mags in the regular magazine shelf. My mother and some other women went to the owner and probably threatened to nut him. The mags went back behind the counter.

The big change for porn was the VHS tape. This was the first way to distribute video that anyone could play at home. All of a sudden, the porn maker could reach a much larger audience. When video stores popped up, they inevitably had a back room for adult films. With a bigger audience, the industry blossomed. Suddenly there was big money in porn so the San Fernando Valley became the Hollywood of porn, making films on a scale never imagined.

Those of you on-line in the dial-up days know where I am headed next. Porn was the first to truly exploit the internet. They pioneered the use of images on-line and then the use of video. The technology for putting video clips on-line was an obvious boon to the industry. The same is true of credit card processing. The porn guys were the first to adopt this technology. The first commercially successful websites were for porn. The joke back in the day was that a lot of code was written one-handed because it seemed like the porn sites were driving innovation.

The point of this walk down memory lane is that technology changed the porn industry. Demand was always there, but rarely met. The people on the supply side exerted enormous power because the cost of creating and distributing the material was high. Technology suddenly dropped those costs, thus allowing a wave of new suppliers into the business. It also wiped out the old suppliers like the old smoker films and skin magazines. It was a classic case of creative destruction.

That is not the end of the story. The internet lowered the barrier to entry so much that anyone can be in the business now. Amateurs make films and post them on-line for peanuts. Low-cost operators in Eastern Europe can sell porn to Western consumers for pennies. Porn is now free and ubiquitous. As a result, the porn industry has collapsed. There is simply no money to be made making sex films or selling pics of naked people. It is a classic case of the tragedy of the commons.

Something similar has happened to the pundit-ocracy, and specifically the Conservative Industrial Complex. In the 70’s, you had a few “conservatives” like Bill Buckley and Bill Safire showing up on TV and writing for major newspapers. Otherwise, the supply of conservative opinion was tightly controlled by technology and the liberal morality police. As a kid, my local library had one copy of National Review and unlimited copies of the liberal rags.

Then talk radio burst the damn, in the same way the VHS opened the porn industry. All of a sudden local radio was allowing right-wingers to talk about forbidden topics. Cable TV started to open up more channels to non-liberal opinion and the Conservative Industrial Complex began to flourish. Instead of booming in a valley north of Hollywood, it boomed in the Acela corridor, running between Washington and New York City. I guess you could argue that Rush Limbaugh was the Seymore Butts of right-wing punditry.

Like the porn industry, the conservative opinion rackets are now under assault by the internet. Specifically talented amateurs who know how to cheaply reach a broad audience on-line and, most important, say things the professionals are afraid to say. Playboy did not just collapse for business reasons. It is content was overtaken by a wave of providers willing to do anything. National Review is being swamped by a wave of talented bloggers, twitterers and commenters willing to say what NR is afraid to say.

One difference is that being an insider has value. The price for access has always been the keeping of confidences. The big shot reporter who had a lot of friends in government could lever that into high paying TV gigs. He just had to be trustworthy with the secrets shared with him. Bob Woodward got rich and famous leveraging his confidences. That is not something that is easily replaced with technology. But it does limit the insiders and connected because there are things they cannot say that the bloggers and twitter guys can say.

The other obvious difference is the government was never shoveling billions into the porn industry via tax schemes and subsidies. Plutocrats were never bankrolling porn shops like we see with the pundit rackets. There is a great disconnect between compensation and audience share in the chattering classes. S.E Cupp has a six figure salary despite the fact you can count one hand the number of people who pay any attention to her. That is because billions flow into the TV chat shows via government regulation.

Even so, the Trump phenomenon is a good example of how technology is collapsing the political industry in the same way it collapsed the porn business. It is simply not that hard to be a chattering skull on TV or a political writer on-line. There are millions of people out there good at selling candidates and positions. Trump’s volunteer meme army is crushing the pros in both parties because it is just not that hard to be clever with this stuff. When lots of people can do something and the barriers to entry fall, the market collapses.

Big Fat Phonies

Posted on by

Like most people, I became aware of Jonah Goldberg in the Clinton years. I’m going to guess and say it was during the Lewinsky stuff, but I could be mistaken. He was the guy who started the Corner on National Review and that’s where I started reading him with any regularity. His act in those days was as the slacker conservative, a sort of proto-hipster who wrote about TV shows, comic books and right-wing politics.

It worked for him because most conservative writers to that point wanted to be Bill Buckley so their style was dull, humorless and unnecessarily complex. I grew up on Buckley too, but by the 90’s his writing was incomprehensible at times. Goldberg went a different way. He was like Seth Rogan if Seth Rogan could read and write and had the slightest idea what was happening outside.

Jonah’s goofy and accessible style made him the Bart Simpson of the commentariat. In fact, he used a lot of references to the Simpsons when writing about politics, which was part of his hipster-doofus act. In the 90’s, the cool kids made Simpsons references. It’s hard to remember back that far, but in the 90’s the Simpsons were the leading edge of cool kid comedy. If you quoted lines from the Simpsons, you were cool.

That was then. Two decades on he is no longer the snarky Bart Simpson. He’s more like the bloated has-been, Krusty the Klown. He’s long past being funny, but he has been around long enough where he feels like a fixture. Instead of the cheeky prankster, he is the jaded hack. It’s not hard to imagine that the guy who wrote this did so after yelling at the neighbor kids about making too much noise.

The Alt-righters. The less said about these creatures, the better. Mostly composed of Twitter and comment-section trolls, this coprophagic phylum is convinced Trump is the tip of the spear of some new white-nationalist takeover of the party and the country. They think it’s hilarious to bait Trump’s critics with Klan-vintage racism and Nazi-style anti-Semitism. Probably my biggest complaint about the benighted is the degree to which they make apologies for the bigots or don’t care that the bigots speak in their name.

Goldberg was an original anti-Trump for petty personal reasons. Trump used to make fun of him on twitter and guys like Goldberg don’t take criticism well. The carefully cultivated funny guy act he does on TV hides a thin-skinned narcissist. Goldberg earlier went full-on David Brock and participated in a smear campaign run by National Review, claiming Trump was in the KKK. Goldberg has made the trip from goofy conservative to sneering social justice warrior.

The panic over Trump is not just petty and personal. Trump by himself can be dismissed, which is what they were all prepared to do a year ago. The issue is his success, because it reveals things about the Right they would just as soon not face. The truth is, guys like Goldberg are not all that interested in small government, traditional solutions and cultural stability. Those are just lines in his script for his role as the Seth Rogan of TV conservatism.

Goldberg popped out of college and landed in a job at American Enterprise Institute assisting Ben Wattenberg making PBS specials. He then went over to National Review, which, as I a pointed out the other day, is like every political magazine in that it lives off tax deductible grants from rich people. That got him into cable news, which exists solely off its right to tax every home in America a buck a month, whether they watch or not and 95% don’t watch.

The point here is that Goldberg has spent his life living off government. The million dollar home in the swank DC suburb is paid for by government in that his livelihood is entirely dependent on government. His wife, Jessica Gavora, worked in the Bush administration and you can be sure the two of them were rubbing their hands together thinking about her next gig in the third Bush administration.

Big sprawling government has given Jonah a 1% lifestyle. How serious is he about shrinking government? Put that reality next to the results of the Bush years and the conservative response to Obama and people can be forgiven for thinking guys like Jonah are just big fat phonies. These are cocktail party conservatives who were toted to the party by their traveling buddies, the limousine liberals.

Washington DC is Hollywood for homely people. It is a company town and everyone works for the company in some capacity. They may bitch about the company, in the same way actors and writers bitch about the big studios, but they will defend it to the death in the same way Hollywood tries to choke off independent film. The #nevertrump loons are the circus performers of DC baring their fangs, warning the rest of us to stay away from their turf.

Inequality

Posted on by

For generations, Americans, who rejected liberalism, were trained to screech and run out of the room whenever the topic of inequality was raised. After all, anything other than a natural distribution of wealth was socialism and if nothing else, conservative means not being a socialist. It’s fundamentally the problem with all reactionary ideology and why Buckley Conservatism has degraded into a shabby libertarianism, lacking anything resembling a coherent worldview.

The issue of inequality is a perfect example. That French economist wrote a big book on the topic and the response from the Right was to dismiss it without having read it. The libertarian wing thumbed through some reviews so they could pretend to have read it, before dismissing it in a shower of platitudes. They have to pretend inequality is not a real issue because to do otherwise means confronting the contradictions in their ideological safe space.

The fact is, having a small number of people or corporations controlling the nation’s wealth ends in tyranny. This is the lesson of history. If one man owns everything then you have Africa. If a cabal of men control everything through a bureaucracy you have China. The West figured out that a broad distribution of ownership cultivates human capital and maximizes individual liberty. It’s not perfect, but there is a reason we never speak of the African Renaissance.

Part of why both parties are being swamped by what they like to call the fringe is stories like this one.

The rising cash holdings of U.S. corporations are increasingly in the hands of a few U.S. companies, with just five tech firms having grabbed a third of it. And nearly three-quarters of cash held by non-financial U.S. companies is stashed overseas, outside the long arm of Uncle Sam.

Apple (AAPL), Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), Cisco Systems (CSCO)and Oracle (ORCL) are sitting on $504 billion, or 30%, of the $1.7 trillion in cash and cash equivalents held by U.S. non-financial companies in 2015, according to an analysis released Friday by ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service.  That’s even more cash concentration than in previous years, as these five companies held 27% of cash in 2014 and 25% in 2013. Apple alone is holding more cash and investments than eight of the 10 entire industry sectors.

Corporate America’s rising pile of cash is becoming increasingly important to investors as profit growth and the stock market stalls. The amount of cash held by U.S. companies rose 1.8% in 2015. Unfortunately for U.S. investors, 72% of total cash held by all non-financial U.S. companies is stockpiled outside the U.S., up from 64% in 2014 and 58% in 2013, as companies try to avoid paying U.S. tax rates.

There was a time when Democrats would make an issue of this based on old school appeals to class. “Look at these fat cats robbing the working man!” The Right was not mute on this stuff either. Wholesale tax avoidance was not always a conservative principle. Conservatives would also note that these firms are run by progressive, nation wrecking wackos. But, that was when conservatives still thought countries were real things.

The reason Faceberg gets to summon media whores like Glenn Beck to his lair and demand they stop talking about his censoring of opinion is because he has 40 billion dollars. He is also allowed to have free access to the internet by the state. The reason for the gross corruption of the popular media is that those concentrated billions can be funneled into operations that buy news reporters and outlets, in addition to politicians.

It’s something I’ve been repeating for a while now, but I enjoy repeating it. Buckley Conservatism was always about anti-communism first and foremost. The whole point of their ideology was to shape the defense of the West against Soviet communism. Reagan is a perfect example. He was willing to concede domestic policy to the Democrats in order to have a free hand on foreign policy. The result was a continuation of the welfare state in exchange for a military buildup.

The problem for the Buckley types is the Cold War ended. Generations of conservative “intellectuals” have been trained to cede cultural issues to the Left. Their default response on domestic issues is to surrender so they can get back to talking foreign policy. It’s made them incapable of fighting a culture war. Those principled conservatives are too busy planning the sack of Carthage to be bothered by the Left’s assault on decency.

It’s why they are being swamped by what we’re calling the alt-right. Talking about special treatment of carried interest to a guy who is watching his town be overrun by foreigners is insulting. That’s why Trump was able to shove everyone aside and win the nomination. Watching those debates, I was reminded of the movie Pleasantville. In this case, Trump was the only guy in color and the rest were in black and white.

Conservatism used to focus itself on maintaining and defending the culture and traditions of the country. Allowing a handful of financial buccaneers, who got rich plundering the economy while riding a sea of credit money created by the state, is the antithesis of conservatism. It conserves nothing. Dealing with these extremes is something the Right cannot cede to the Left or you end up like Venezuela.

Time to Forget

Posted on by

Certain events have a warping effect on the culture long after they have any practical impact. The sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols permanently altered the trajectory of Islam. The English Civil War is another great example of a single event casting a shadow over many subsequent generations. Regular readers will know I reference it often, because it plays such a big part in American history. America would be a much different place if the Mayflower had sunk in the North Atlantic or the Wampanoag had done the right thing and slaughtered the Pilgrims.

The reason we have the word “penumbra” is that every shadow has a limit, beyond which it has no influence. In the history of man, those seminal events that cast the shadows, shrink with the passage of time and their shadow correspondingly shrinks. In time, they cease to exist. We can joke about Genghis Khan because he no longer casts a shadow any of us can feel. One day, people will joke about Hitler in the same way because his deeds will have no impact on the minds of the living.

We are living in an age of receding shadows as the big events that have shaped our present fade from our collective memory along with the people who lived through them. Hitler is an obvious example. Let us assume the youngest one can remember back is to when they were around five years old. That means the youngest person to remember Hitler is seventy-six right now. It means the youngest person who could have fought Hitler is pushing ninety right now.

In my lifetime, the Holocaust and the Civil Rights Movement are the two issues that loomed largest in politics. I do not remember an election that did not have some racial component to it. The Democrats try to use the race card to turnout the black vote. At the same time, support for Israel has been a defining issue of foreign policy debates. Republicans are so hawkish on defending Israel; they often sound like they are running for Prime Minister of Israel.

For generations, the worst thing you could ever be called was an anti-Semite. A close second was racist. One of the things that we see in what we are now calling the Alt-Right is an indifference to the charge of racism. In fact, many make sport of being called a racist and spend hours on Twitter trolling Lefty in order to elicit the racist charge. The reason is the charge has been so overused that it is laughable. When you get called a racist for quoting FBI crime statistics, the charge has no meaning. It is simply another way for the mob to scream “witch!”

Vox Day has a recap of a twitter exchange between himself, Jonah Goldberg and Milo Yiannopoulos the other day. A point Milo and others are now making is that the charge of anti-Semitism has gone the way of racist. No one takes it seriously because it has been so overused. There is also the fact that no one alive has any clear recollections of the Holocaust so it has no emotional impact. That is why telling jokes about Jews is no more meaningful to young alt-right types than telling Irish jokes.

There is certainly some truth to their claims. When not spending the $400k salary he pays himself from the magazine his father created, John Podhoretz spends his days calling people anti-Semitic on Twitter. When he gets bored with that, he runs around demanding to see the bar mitzvah pictures of Jews he does not like, so he can accuse them of not being authentically Jewish. There’s only so long that festering carbuncles like John Podhoretz can do this before people no longer take any of it seriously.

The Holocaust has cast an exceedingly long shadow over American public life and it may be starting to recede. Like the tide going out, we are now seeing a lot of surprising things that had been covered by the water. One of those is that there is not as much conformity and unanimity within the Jewish community as has been assumed. The blood libel against all gentiles has forced a degree of solidarity on Jews in America, but as that loses its power to scare the goy, it also loses its power to unite the Tribe.

I think that’s what we are seeing with the feud between Bill Kristol and David Horowitz. Solidarity is losing its value so it is beginning to crack and a guy like Horowitz is fine with having a nasty public spat with a fellow Jew. Yes, what is good for Israel is a part of it, but that is not the defining issue for Jews in America. Evangelicals care more about Israel than most Jews. The core issue in this dispute is patriotism.

The yesterday men on the Right like Podhoretz and Goldberg will cling to the old slurs until the last man, but this is probably a positive development in America. You can meet Italians who are liberal and you can meet Italians who are libertarians. In other words, blood does not dictate politics for 85% of Americans. The exceptions are blacks and Jews and we may be seeing that fall away for the Jews.

That is probably a positive development as it means Jews can fully and publicly integrate into American life in the same way the Irish or the Italians have blended into the fabric of American culture. No one ever talks about Irish solidarity in the way we talk about Jewish solidarity or black solidarity. No one worries about offending Italians or Poles. There is no stigma attached to it. Just as important, the rest of us can stop tip-toeing around the obvious.

By obvious, I mean the fact that Jews have been the most successful ethnic group in America. In fact, no country has been better for Jews than America. Here, the Jewish people have been free to reach their maximum potential. That is something all Americans should take some pride in, but Jews should be extremely proud. Instead of viewing themselves as oppressed losers, American Jews should be confident winners, celebrating and enforcing that which allows them and everyone else to be a winner, compared to the rest of the world.

David Goldman comes down on the side of Horowitz and I sense he is viewing this as a positive as well. He does not address it head on in his column, but the fact that he chooses sides based on patriotism is a bit of tell, I think. What is good for America trumps ethnic solidarity. As a Jew you can be pro-Israel, but you have to be pro-American more than anything. That is the way every other ethnic group is expected to view things. You can cheer for Ireland over England in soccer, if you are Irish, but you do not root for Ireland over America.

For as long as I have been alive, the key phrase with regards to the Holocaust has always been “never forget.” That is a wonderful rallying cry for an abused people who feel they have to fight their way inside. It is self-defeating for a successful people who are already inside and often in positions of authority. Whether guys like John Podhoretz like it or not, people do forget and that is often a good thing.

A Totally Different Head

Posted on by

One of the ironies of the information age is we are probably dumber as a result of the sea of information in which all of us now swim. Some of it is due to the volume of information coming at us. It’s just too hard to sort the nonsense from the truth. At the same time, publications are so desperate to get our attention, they are willing to post the most outlandish click bait. People naturally assume there is some effort by publishers to vet their stories.

Mass media seems to have encouraged the production of bullshit too. Social science stories are a pretty good example. The researchers slap on a press release that wildly overstates their results, because they know the stupid people in the media will run with it. The result is we get, often on the same day, a report saying coffee causes cancer and coffee prevents cancer. In reality, the studies are crap and don’t pass the laugh test, but that no longer matters.

Anyway, that’s always important to keep in mind when reading any medical story these days. This one about head transplants is a good example.

After more than a year of deliberation, the controversial Italian has set a date of “around Christmas 2017” in China to perform the first ever human head transplant.

He said that his team of Chinese scientists and the technology are now ready to perform the operation, and that the only obstacles needed to be overcame now are funding and, perhaps the most problematic of all, ethical approval.

Dr Canavero said: “We’re looking at a date around Christmas 2017 to perform the transplant in China.

“The Chinese team has already experimented on human cadavers to hone the technology.”

He added that the patient, who will be Chinese, could make a full recovery within a year of the procedure.

The Italian had said that he would perform the controversial operation on Russian patient Valery Spiridonov – a sufferer of a rare muscle-wasting disorder, but he said that he could not find a donor in China due to biological reasons.

Despite the obvious high-risks associated with the surgery, which will see Canavero remove a person’s head and put it onto another body, he says that he has established a way to perform it successfully.

He will cool both the donor and recipient to 12C so that cells don’t die due to a lack of oxygen.

He explained: “This’ll give enough time to cut the tissue around each neck and link the majorblood vessels through tiny tubes.”

The recipient will then be kept in a medically induced coma for several weeks “to limit movement of the newly fused neck, while electrodes stimulate the spinal cord to strengthen its new connections.”

That last bit is where I get off the bus. Medicine has been stymied by this for a generation which is why they have had no success treating spinal cord injuries. As of now, there is no way to reattach a severed spinal cord. It’s why we have protocols for handling suspected spinal injuries. It is to prevent further damage that could come from a broken vertebra. If these head transplant guys have figured out how to reattach a spinal cord, that would be a huge breakthrough for medicine.

The technical aspects are just one part of it. The human brain grows and develops with the body. This proposed procedure is not a head transplant; it is a body transplant. The brain would have to instantly figure out how every cell in the new body works without making a mistake. We know from stroke victims that “re-learning” basic functions can take years. Your brain would take a lifetime to figure out how to use a whole new body.

That said, it does bring up an interesting subject. Our sense of self lives in our consciousness, but is intimately tied to our physical self. The new body would most likely trigger a degree of madness that is unimaginable to us. Even schizophrenics can rely on their fingers moving as expected and their eyes blinking without any surprises. Imagine ever conceivable sense being foreign and relentlessly assaulting the patient’s mind.

That would be the great challenge for the singularity guys. Uploading yourself to the grid assumes you can digitally recreate all of the sensory inputs that make up your sense of self. You may be able to upload your mind to the internet, but the result is you go insane and are erased by an anti-virus program. Since you can’t know these things in advance, the singularity could very well be nothing more than a brief period of madness before death.

The Stupid Party Way

Posted on by

Whatever the merits of Buckley Conservatism, it is utterly worthless as a political one. Since the whole point of ideology is to shape politics, an ideology that utterly fails in politics is worthless. Pretty much the only thing they can do well is explain why they lost and even there they manage to screw up. Somehow, the great conservative minds managed to convince themselves that the reason Romney lost was that he was not mushy enough. People can be forgiven for thinking it is deliberate.

News brings word that the House Republicans were stymied by the tiny minority of Democrats over the Zika response. The bill is to fund a response to the Zika virus that is spreading north from South America via mosquitoes and immigrants. The liberals demanded abortion provisions in the bill, which has nothing to do with abortion, but the Left never takes its eye off the ball. They attach abortion provisions to everything knowing the Right is too stupid to stop them.

The Left knows how to play the game. They know that the Right will want to look like good citizens and eventually cave on the abortion provisions just to get the Zika bill passed. Even if they don’t, there are a thousand other bills they will do the same thing with so eventually they will get what they want. The Left never takes a break, They are always pressing forward. There’s no deal you can strike with them that will end their attacks. They are like Muslims in this regard.

Another example is this stupid flag bill the House just passed. What on God’s green earth are this idiots thinking? This bill does nothing for Republicans and helps Democrats. On pure politics alone, the bill should have died in some no name committee. If the Democrats really wanted this bill, then the smart play is to attach a dozen poison pill amendments that lets the GOP vote for it, but makes Democrats vote against it. That’s how a majority handles the minority in a parliament.

But that’s not how the Wuss Right thinks. They are always seeking to curry favor with the Left. Paul Ryan would drop to his knees and beg Obama for forgiveness if he thought there was some chance he would give it. He spends more time plotting to derail those to his Right than he does trying to stop the Left. These are small issues that garner no attention in the media yet Ryan and his fellow “principled” conservatives can’t summon the courage to tell the Left to pound sand.

What’s maddening about this and why voters have thrown in the towel on these guys, is that they don’t seem to know the basics of politics. These men and women somehow managed to get elected without understanding how parliaments work. It’s tempting to think, as many in the Dissident Right claim, that it is deliberate. That’s the Moldbugian thesis. Republicans are the outer party and Democrats are the inner party. The conservative commentariat are just the fluffers for the stars of the political theater.

The argument against that is if they were truly so clever as to perpetuate this elaborate ruse on the public, they would do it so no one noticed. In reality, the Republican Party is just the land of misfit toys. The “conservatives” are just guys who tick the boxes they are told to tick, but don’t think much about it. There are exceptions, but most could just as easily be Anarcho-Syndicalists or Whigs. They just like the lifestyle and they are not very good at anything other than toadyism.

Paul Ryan has been in politics his whole life, He has done nothing else. We live in the age of mass media where everyone knows about everything instantly. He has to know he is about as popular with Republican voters as testicular cancer. He has to know his party is under the microscope. Yet, he can’t figure out how to score some small victories to maybe claw a little credibility back in time for the elections. That’s not a conspiracy. That’s stupidity. That’s the Stupid Party way.

Send in the Clowns

Posted on by

One of the many reasons so many have abandoned the Buckley Right in the last two decades can be seen at the nation’s airports. Immediately after 9/11, Progressives were out screaming for a new Federal bureaucracy to run airport security. The bodies were not even cold and the Democrats were proposing bills for a new Federal security force. You got the sense they had these bills ready to go, just waiting for the right moment.

Of course, that new agency would hire tens of thousands of dues paying union employees, who could be counted on to vote Left. Millions in union dues would flow into Democrat coffers and Democrats would work hard to expand the agency in the future, thus guaranteeing themselves another revenue stream. Like with the schools, any useful activity coming from this new agency would be coincidental.

A sign of just how awful the Bush years were going to be was in the response to this craven attempt by the Left to exploit the death of Americans. Instead of fighting they proposed an even bigger government agency. We not only got the Transportation Safety Administration, we got the staggering monstrosity called the Department of Homeland Security. Fifteen years later, our airports are grinding to a halt because TSA can’t perform its one job, which is to molest people before they enter the terminal.

With mounting delays around the country being blamed on Transportation Security Administration cutbacks and increased passenger traffic, airports are turning to musical performers and free sweets to keep travelers’ tempers in check.

And some airports are getting a little more creative.

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport is now inviting miniature therapy horses and their handlers from the non-profit Seven Oaks Farms Miniature Therapy Horses program in Hamilton, Ohio to visit the terminals several times a month.

“Animals help reduce stress and anxiety levels and put smiles on people’s faces,” said Mindy Kershner, a spokeswoman for the airport.

“Unlike service animals, who are working and should not be touched, therapy animals can be patted and hugged.”

And while many other airports have therapy dog programs in the terminals, “We figured this is Kentucky, after all, so we need horses,” Kershner said.

This is how third world bureaucracy works. Instead of fixing the problem, they use the problem as an excuse to expand the department. It will not be long before we learn that some Senator slipped in funding for a new division of miniature horses and clowns at the TSA, along with its own director and staff. That also means expanding maintenance budgets to pick up after the horses crapping all over the terminal.

It’s not just miniature horse keepers who will benefit. Senator Chuck Schumer, a well regarded airport engineer and security expert, is demanding dogs be unleashed on the people standing in line. You’re standing in-line and a miniature horse just took a dump on your sneakers and then a pack of hounds trailed by fat guys in blue shirts starts chasing the horses through the terminal. Maybe that’s where the clowns come in. Like at the rodeo, their job will be to distract the animals.

In all seriousness, Chuck Schumer is a genius, but he does not know the first thing about running an airport or running airport security. In fact, no one in the TSA has the slightest idea how to do any of this stuff. The proof of that is this bit from a CNN story on the subject. The TSA has 45,525 employees and they claim an additional 768 people will alleviate the problem. That’s roughly adding half a person to every airport the TSA covers. There’s simply no way that a 2% increase in staffing can have the claimed benefit.

Inevitably, we will learn that this is a carefully choreographed slowdown by the TSA so they can get more money. The media will play up the lines and people will write their congressmen. This being an election year, everyone will want to be the solution so that means a boost in funding for more hack jobs and more miniature pony rides at the airport, while you stand in line hoping the pervy looking TSA guy does not put his hand in your daughter’s pants.

This is, of course, anarcho-tyranny. The self-serving security bureaucracy is only good at harassing honest citizens. A trip to the airport involves at least three glaring apparatchiks giving you the business. That’s the tyranny. Standing in line for half a day to take a one hour flight to Philly is the anarchy. In the managerial state, the basic functions of government grind to a halt or are simply abandoned.

The obvious solution is to let the airports run their own security like they used to do before we lost out minds. TSA never would have stopped the 9/11 hijackers. Private security firms have much better training and methods. Augmenting this should be restrictions on travel to and from Muslim countries. Sensible limits on letting Muslims travel to America would cut threats by 99.9999999%. No system is perfect, but I’m willing to take that chance for the ability to walk unmolested in an airport.

The Faceberg Six

Posted on by

One of the stranger aspects of the current ructions is the willingness of members of the professional Right to gleefully and publicly stab their colleagues in the back. Politics is an ugly business, where men squabble over trivial slights, but the custom is to avoid making it nakedly personal and to avoid being overtly craven. This last bit is especially true with the Buckleyites, as they love carrying on like Victorians. For as long as I’ve been alive, conservatives have railed against putting “politics above principle.”

Like most of what the Buckleyites preached, that was all bullshit, but they did try hard to keep up appearances. That’s not been the case during the Trumpening. National Review turned itself into MoveOn.org last fall, posting daily rants about how anyone supporting Trump is Hitler. Then we got the #nevertrump stuff, which was pretty much just people taking cash from donors to pretend to be a grassroots resistance to Trump.

A couple of weeks ago it was revealed that the lone Trumpette on Fox News, Andrea Tantaros, was dropped from the network. The official reason was a contract dispute, but the grapevine says the midget tag-team act of Greg Gutfeld and Dana Perino got her fired over Trump. The internet says both are unpleasant people in private, despite their TV act, but I have no way of knowing if that is true. I do know it looks terrible to dump the only conservative on the network.

Today brings word that the traitorous Mark Zuckerberg is recruiting some of the more deranged Trump haters to help him do a better job suppressing dissent on Faceberg.

On Wednesday, billionaire Mark Zuckerberg will hold a meeting with “leading conservatives,” embattled The Blaze head Glenn Beck, and former George W. Bush Administration official and co-host of Fox News Channel’s The Five Dana Perino, at the website’s Menlo Park headquarters to discuss Facebook’s conservative media suppression and censorship scandal.
Last week it was reported that “anonymous sources at Facebook’s news team have confirmed to Gizmodo that, in addition to suppressing conservative news sources, the company suppresses stories about itself while artificially promoting stories about the Black Lives Matter movement.”

In spite of this, Zuckerberg denies any wrongdoing, stating “we have found no evidence that this report is true.” He is instead planning to hold a session Wednesday where he will essentially “pat conservatives on the head” with a photo-op that is a direct testament to the fact that nothing has changed. It is also quite telling that he has reached out to Beck, who is struggling to remain relevant in the conservative media sphere.

Beck announced the meeting in a Facebook post on his page early Sunday morning. Beck and Perino will be joined by Arthur Brooks of the American Enterprise Institute, CNN’s S.E. Cupp, and Mitt Romney’s former digital director, Zac Moffatt.

Glenn Beck is a nut and desperate for cash now so it is no shock that he would come running when Zuckerberg calls. One of the true benefits of the Trumpening has been the near destruction of Beck and his lunatic cult. The others have always struck me as being sensible enough to avoid stunts like this. S.E. Cupp is a C-list talking head, who should avoiding making enemies. Her drunken bar slut routine would make her a favorite of red pill types if she went that way.

The weird thing about this is the public nastiness of it all. Trump is not a Buckleyite, but they could easily do business with him if they were willing to play ball. There are worse things than having Trump selling your pet project. Unlike most Republicans, he could possible get some things done in Washington. Even if you hate the guy, smile and pretend and make the best of it. Smart politics says it is better to have a guy like Trump inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in.

It’s not just about Trump with these people. There’s a sneering contempt for the public in their Trump hatred. The Trumpening has been revelatory in that regard. Most of these people in the Conservative Industrial Complex are just in it for the cash. They could just as easily be peddling Marxism if it paid better. They don’t like you or your country and they don’t believe in anything but making a buck. Zuck is passing around cash so they will sell his brand of nation wrecking lunacy and say bad things about Trump.

Time will tell if this is part of some larger strategy that has yet to reveal itself. Six months from now, being #nevertrump is going to be the mark of Cain, regardless of the election outcome. If Trump loses conservatives will blame these traitors for the defeat. If Trump wins, the #nevertrump loons will be packed off to the labor camps. Well, we can dream. Still, life is not going to be fun for these people if Trump is in the White House. There’s just no obvious upside to this #nevertrump nuttiness, other than the craven cash grab.

Hillary’s Dilemma

Posted on by

In the run-up to the 1968 presidential election, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the country was tipping into the abyss. Liberals had waged war on the normal people for most of the decade. A vast expansion of the federal government, race riots, nation building in Asia and the cultural revolution left normal people wondering if America was going to survive. In less than a decade the country had gone from the middle-class prosperity of Eisenhower to the madness of LBJ.

Americans have a habit of using elections to address previous electoral mistakes. In 1960, a peaceful and prosperous country decided it was time to pass the torch to a new generation and passed on Dick Nixon, the sitting Vice President. Three years later Kennedy got two in the hat from a communist, putting LBJ in the White House. Mostly out of grief for the death of Kennedy, the public elected Johnson in a landslide the following year.

Whether it was suicidal guilt or a desire to gain respect from the Yankee elite, Johnson set off on a five year rampage through the American culture. The massive expansion of the welfare state, the unleashing of black violence, degenerate youth culture and nation building in Southeast Asia had many people thinking it was a colossal mistake voting for Kennedy over Nixon. Who knows how things would have unfolded if the Chicago mob had not fixed the 1960 election, but it could not have been worse.

Nixon was no one’s idea of a popular figure. Buckley conservatives hated his social liberalism and liberals hated his red baiting. Yankees hated his decidedly downscale tactics and aesthetic. Even so, Nixon was willing to punch the hippies and he represented a line in the sand middle Americans could respect. He was also a staunch anti-communist, but willing to put an end to the pointless Vietnam War. Tricky Dick was a low-risk chance to stop the bleeding so he won in a landslide.

I’ve often compared Hillary Clinton to Dick Nixon. In 1968, Nixon had been a public figure for over three decades. Here in 2016, Hillary Clinton is now halfway through her third decade in public life. Of course, the ethical comparisons are obvious, even though Nixon was a boy scout compared to the Clintons. Tricky Dick played rough when it came to politics, but he was never a crook. Still, like Nixon, the Clintons play rough in politics and are willing to cut deals with anyone.

If you look at the broad outlines of the Clinton campaign in 2016, you see some hints of the Nixon campaign of 1968. She wanted to run as the solid, stable choice that would curb the excesses of the Obama years. Hillary may be a crook, but she was going to get the race mongers and foreign weirdos out of government. Whatever her ethical and moral defects, Clinton would have been the better choice in 2008 when the country, high on the narcotic of racial justice, elected Obama

The problem is that Hillary is attached to the weirdos and lunatics that have been running wild the last eight years. Her cynical attempts to position herself as a restoration of sober governance is ridiculous, given that she worked in the Obama administration for six years. There’s also the fact that Obama’s Attorney General is the only thing standing between Hillary and an orange jumpsuit. It’s simply laughable to think of Hillary as anything but a fun house mirror version of Obama.

It’s why they have shifted gears and decided to run Hillary as the defender of female virtue against the boorish womanizer, Donald Trump. The campaign is now selling vagina cards and the liberal media is running stories about Trump’s wildly successful sex life. The hope is they can pivot off Trump’s alleged hostility toward woman and make the election a referendum on the awfulness of white men. Instead of a charming black guy promising vengeance, it will be an old lesbian.

That’s the irony of this election. Hillary started her life in politics as a minor staffer on a Congressional committee hounding Nixon. Like all liberals of her generation, she defined herself in opposition to Nixon. Now she finds herself as a post-modern caricature of Nixon, but at odds with those same forces. She’s both the square representing the status quo and the radical weirdo that freaks out the squares. She is the worst of both sides of late 1960’s politics.

Compounding her dilemma is the fact that Trump is a master at deflection. In the primary, he made the campaign about one candidate after another, rather than a referendum on Trump. It was Bush, then Fiorina, then Rubio and finally Cruz. Worse yet, Trump’s critiques reinforce his general theme of being a restoration of commonsense over the deranged fads of an out of touch ruling class. This makes him the worst possible candidate for Clinton.

As the saying goes, a week is a lifetime in politics and we are five and a half months from the election. The Trotsky wing of the GOP is still plotting a third party candidate to try and derail Trump. The Progressive media will coordinate with the Clinton campaign on the war on women nonsense. Trump has made blunders so he is capable of saying or doing something stupid this summer. Still, all of the trends are working against Clinton and she has proven to be a fantastically bad candidate.

She’s going to need a miracle to win.

Blog Update

Posted on by

This blog crossed a traffic threshold in the last month. In fact, every month since I started this has seen an uptick in traffic, but somewhere in the last month the average traffic crossed the 35,000 mark. That means the readership is now averaging just a tick over 35K. I have no idea how that stacks up to other blogs, but it seems like a lot given that I am not famous and I have done nothing to promote myself. You’re here by word of mouth and I am thankful for the interest.

The volume of comments has ticked up as well and I’m seeing more long debates than in the past. That’s to be expected. I ended moderation so that allows for more back and forth, good and bad. In that regard, I’ve thought about adding a discussion forum to the site. It’s a simple thing and it allows for readers to get long winded, if they choose, in response to a topic. There are many free message board systems so I may add one to the site when I have some free time. We can form a Witenaġemot!

On a related note, I’m working on adding a subscription feature. The normal WordPress feature is terrible and gets filled with spammers. I have ten thousand subscribers but my bet is nine thousand are Ukrainian robots. I’ve noticed that when I subscribe to other WordPress blogs, nothing seem to happen so something is broken with the subscription module that comes with the blog software.

As far as who reads this blog, it is mostly Americans according to the stats tracker. The UK and Canada are the next most popular countries. Interestingly, I have a lot of readers in Poland, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. I have no readers from Mexico. Similarly, the people who link back to me are mostly American sites, with a sprinkling of Canadians and Europeans. I get a lot of links back from car and firearm sites for some reason.

I’m also getting media requests. I started this blog as a hobby and I never thought much about it being more than a hobby. I’ve had some podcasters and radio people contact me about being on their shows. The trouble is I don’t check the e-mail account here that often so I was unable to respond in a timely fashion. I may add something here for media requests, just to see if it is worth my time.

Finally, I’ve been asked about donations and I have no plans at the moment to setup the stuff you need to take donations. Maybe when the readership reaches 50K I’ll do it as it may makes sense at that point. I don’t know enough about how it works to know if it is worth the effort. Steve Sailer and Kathy Shaidle seem to make a living from their blogs this way, but I have no way of knowing this. They could be living on dog food for all I know. But, I’ll jump off that bridge when the readership gets bigger.

Thanks for reading, commenting and tweeting me!