Author Archives: thezman

You Will Not Live Forever

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“The ordinary modes of human thinking are magical, religious, social, and personal. We want our wishes to come true; we want the universe to care about us; we want the approval of those around us; we want to get even with that s.o.b. who insulted us at the last tribal council. For most people, wanting to know the cold truth about the world is way, way down the list.”
–John Derbyshire

We like to believe we are past the time when wizards and shaman can make a living telling the future and conjuring miracles. We’re not like those primitives in our history books. We’re all about facts and logic. We rely on big data and analytics to tell us who won a ball game. No relying on the scoreboard for us. After all, who among us has not told our Facebook friends how much we bleeping love science!??

That’s all nonsense, of course. We’re just as prone to magical thinking as the people of prior eras. Instead of the court astrologer, we have economists. Instead of guys promising to make lead into gold, we have guys like Ray Kurzweil telling us we will live forever.

Ray Kurzweil, Google’s chief futurist, laid out what he thinks the next few decades will look like in an interview with Playboy.

Kurzweil is one of the biggest believers in The Singularity, the moment when humans — with the aid of technology —will supposedly live forever.

He’s chosen the year 2045 because, according to his calculations, “The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will reach a level that’s a billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today.”

But even before 2045, Kurzweil thinks we could begin the deathless process.

“I believe we will reach a point around 2029 when medical technologies will add one additional year every year to your life expectancy,” he told Playboy. “By that I don’t mean life expectancy based on your birthdate, but rather your remaining life expectancy.”

As the boomers move closer to the grave, the market for life extending miracles grows. Inevitably that means the charlatans move in to fleece the desperate and stupid. Kurzweil has been working this racket for a number of years now and he is good at it. So good that he has a multi-million dollar perch at Google as “chief futurist” which sounds like something I’d write if I were making fun of someone like Ray Kurweil.

My observation is that forever life is a male thing. Most men I know started fretting about their health once they hit their middle years. They quit drinking, smoking and started exercising. The neologism MAMIL does not exist by accident. I see these guys every weekend in the summer, kitted out like they are on the Tour. P. D. Mangan is making a living popularizing research on anti-aging. My guess is his audience is all male.

My hunch here is men used to seek glory as the way to live forever. Die in battle and spend the afterlife with the gods. Alternatively, go out as a hero to your people and be remembered forever. In the Christian era, heaven waited the men who were defenders of the faith. Today being a hero or dying in battle is not in the cards and no one believes in an afterlife, so men want to literally live forever.

Women, in contrast, don’t seem to be into the living forever stuff. They want to look good forever. That makes some sense biologically. Females of our species are wired to gain the attention of males. Looking young and sexy is therefore the biological goal from the start. Extending that out into middle and later years would extend the “life” of the female. I’ll allow that I could be all wrong about this.

The funny thing about this is that science knows very little about aging, in terms of why our bodies age. But, there’s money to be made in pretending we’re close to figuring it out and arresting it. From that Kurzweil article:

A lot will have to happen in the next 30 years to make that a reality, but Kurzweil isn’t fazed: He predicts that nano machines capable of taking over for our immune system (to fix problems like cancerous cells and clogged arteries) and connecting our brains to the cloud will be available by then.

He likens that change as the next step in our evolution, the same way our ancestors developed to use the frontal cortex 2 million years ago. The benefits, according to Kurzweil, will be significant.

“We’ll create more profound forms of communication than we’re familiar with today, more profound music and funnier jokes,” he tells Playboy. “We’ll be funnier. We’ll be sexier. We’ll be more adept at expressing loving sentiments.”

Notice the future is always a scaled up version of what the futurists think is cool. Many of my neighbors would like to create more profound forms of killing rival drug dealers, more profound gangster lyrics, etc. The funny part of Kurweil’s future is that most of us will not be in it. His paradise will be more highly selective than Allah’s. Maybe the rest of us will just have to be satisfied being re-animated zombies.

The Great Transition

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Back in the 90’s, the set of things called conservative began to merge with the set of things called Republican. By the time George Bush the Minor was crowned, the two words were interchangeable. Liberals would start hooting “extreme right-wing Republican conservative” as soon as you mentioned Bush. It was not just liberals doing it. The Conservative Industrial Complex was happy to make the two things synonymous. It made it easier for them to raise money from GOP donors.

At the same time, the folks who had been the core of American conservatism were pushed out of the set of things called conservative. There was lip service paid to things like abortion or homosexual marriage, but traditionalism was reduced to a marketing concept. Big foot conservatives and the GOP no longer cared about social issues. Instead, they were obsessed with globalism and making war on the Muslims. “Conservative” became Frank Meyer fusionism without the traditional social conservatism.

I have written a lot about how Buckley Conservatism is exhausted. It existed primarily as an argument in favor of a tough line with the Soviets and secondarily as an argument against 19th century socialism. It was a reaction to American Progressivism, not an independent intellectual movement. The Soviets are gone and no one, not even Progressives, think the worker’s paradise is a worthy goal. Conservatism no longer has a dance partner so it staggers around looking for a reason to exist.

Buckley Conservatism is now a collection of slogans mostly, but it is also a massive money making racket. The collection of monasteries around Washington DC are still cranking out policy papers and think pieces for the political class. On the Left there is nothing to write, but their monasteries are still in place, just looking for tenants. They busy themselves now with Democratic party politics, but the rickety state of the party reflects the Left. It is an old woman clutching at power.

The result is we have a strange period in American life. The old binary style of politics that has been with us since the Civil War now has a vacuum on both sides. The Left has no economic arguments and the Right has no cultural arguments. The reason the two sides scream bloody murder at one another over trivial stuff is they have no other way to distinguish one side from the other. Both sides are a straw-man for the other.

That does not mean we are headed for the singularity. The neo-cons are still with us and they may be ready to make the return trip from neo-conservative to neo-liberal, by moving out of Republican politics into Democratic politics. Intellectually, the Left has been an abandoned building since the fall of the Soviets so there is a vacuum to be filled. The coalition of groups on the Left are emotionally hostile to traditionalism, but they are open to the authoritarian globalism favored by the neoconservatives.

That Tevi Troy piece is worth reading and is probably more wishful thinking/veiled threat at this point. We are not going to see the American Enterprise Institute change uniforms overnight. That is not how these things work. Instead, it will be a slow evolution as we see guys like Jonah Goldberg, for example, transition from conservative to moderate and then liberal or whatever label they settle on at that point.

I’m picking on Goldberg because he is already laying the groundwork for his break with the Republican Party this fall. You can almost see the wheels turning as he tries to figure out how to argue that sitting out the election is the “conservative” position, despite arguing against that same position for two decades. Many of his fellows in the Conservative Industrial Complex are struggling with the same dilemma.

Now, Trump and the groundswell carrying him to the nomination is not an intellectual movement. It is not really a movement at this stage. It is simply a reaction to the fundamental contradictions in the globalist world view. You cannot have national governments beholden to their citizens in a purely global economy. If national governments are not beholden to their citizens, there is no point in being a citizen. More important, there is no reason for people to remain loyal to their rulers.

That said, ideological movements always start this way. Most peter out or become narrowly focused on achievable ends. Still, we see a lot of very smart people writing out on the fringe. If you are curious about the world and are looking for arguments about what is happening, you are not reading the mainstream guys. You are reading the weirdos of the Dark Enlightenment. That is where the action is now.

Political and ideological realignments happen in fits and starts so Trump could fizzle out only to be replaced the next time by a more polished version that is more complete as a political leader. Alternatively, the Conservative Industrial Complex could go through a counter-reformation and tilt back toward the traditionalist-conservative side. There is a large and growing mass of people rejecting the status quo. It is a market that will be met by someone.

Ouroboros

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If you have been reading this blog regularly, you’ll know I’m skeptical about the long term prospects of the managerial revolution. It’s not just that technocrats have a poor history. Even allowing for the miracle of the meritocracy to correct past errors, the very nature of technocracy is antithetical to nature. It requires constant care and maintenance to keep it running.

As with anything that requires constant repair and defense, the cost of maintaining it eventually consumes all benefit. At the point of diminishing returns, it becomes a question of when, not if, it collapses. The most obvious example is the Roman Empire. Once they ran out of profitable people to conquer, they were left with the expense of empire, but no new revenues to offset those expenses.

To quote Gibbon’s summary of the decline of Rome:

“The number of ministers, of magistrates, of officers, and of servants, who filled the different departments of the state, was mul­tiplied beyond the example of for­mer times; and (if we may bor­row the warm expression of a con­temporary) ‘when the proportion of those who received exceeded the proportion of those who con­tributed the provinces were op­pressed by the weight of tributes.’ From this period to the extinction of the empire it would be easy to deduce an uninterrupted series of clamors and complaints. Accord­ing to his religion and situation, each writer chooses either Diocle­tian or Constantine or Valens or Theodosius, for the object of his invectives; but they unanimously agree in representing the burden of the public impositions, and par­ticularly the land-tax and capita­tion, as the intolerable and in­creasing grievance of their own times.”

I’m offering that up for the new readers, of which there are many, so you can know where I’m coming from when critiquing stuff like this from Ramesh Ponnuru, who is the dean of the “reform-o-cons.” To be fair to Ponnuru, he is one of the few in the Buckley Conservative ecosphere that has not made a fool of himself over Trump. He has been rather sensible in his opinions and forthcoming about his motivations. The sad fact of modern life is most public men do not come upon their opinions honestly.

Even so, Ponnuru is a technocrat who spends his days imagining technocratic solutions to the problems of the technocracy. Therefore he focuses on the technocratic stuff like moving commas around the tax code or crafting new regulations to fix prior regulations. For the men of the managerial class, every answer is a recursive solution that aggregates more and more to the managerial class, at the expense of those outside their class.

The result is a weird myopia that seems to come naturally to the bureaucratic mind and it is on display in this bit from the column.

But if some reform-conservative premises have been vindicated, reform-conservative policies have played almost no role in those primaries. Senator Rubio did the most to embrace those ideas. In mid 2014, he started echoing reformist themes: the need to apply conservative thinking in fresh ways, the potential of conservative reforms to reduce the cost of living and thereby make a difference in people’s lives. He came out for an Obamacare replacement that made it possible for nearly everyone to purchase at least catastrophic coverage while deregulating the system. He sponsored legislation allowing people to finance higher education in new ways. And he advocated tax relief for middle-class parents, not just high earners (although his plan also gave high earners very large tax cuts). He did not talk about these initiatives very much, however, perhaps viewing them as helpful in a general election rather than in a Republican primary. Rubio talked about his tax plan twice in the debates, both times in response to criticism. He was more associated with his 2013 immigration bill and a very hawkish-sounding foreign policy than he was with any domestic agenda. He came across less as an innovator than as a younger, more articulate, and Hispanic version of George W. Bush. He ended up doing well among affluent, college-educated Republican voters but not connecting with the more economically stressed and disaffected voters he needed.

That bit of self-delusion is probably popular with most members of the managerial class. It also shows why this phenomenon is inherently unstable. The only acceptable responses to the challenges facing America are those that require a massive jobs program for the members of the managerial elite and those seeking entry into the system. Reforming or reducing the managerial class is off the table, even when it is the source of social dysfunction.

Therein lies the central defect of the managerial revolution. It is a headless version of Diocletian’s innovation. Instead of a bureaucracy in support of the emperor, it is a bureaucracy in support of itself. It commands no loyalty outside of those it serves, which is strictly the managerial class. Policy proposals have as their underlying motivation the desire of the writers to send their kids to Princeton. If anyone else benefits, that’s a happy accident.

Class awareness brings with it the myopia you see in the Ponnuru column. The Left side has dropped their interest in economics because they can no longer imagine what it is like to be subject to the rhythms of the economy. They have no need to know. The right side has dropped the flag waving and calls to patriotism because they no longer know anyone who cares about those things. All that matters is advancement within a system that has no top. It is a snake eating its tail.

Brother, Can You Spare A Tubby?

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One way historians and anthropologists piece together the historical timeline is by looking at official documents, seals, inscriptions on buildings and money. If ancient scribes suddenly stop mentioning a king, for example, a look at documents from the era can shed some light on what happened. If all of a sudden the king’s brother is signing charters and grants, then followed by a new king, it’s fair to assume the king died or was incapacitated, leaving a period of uncertainty.

Alternatively, if the coins from that period suddenly changed from having the king’s seal to having something generic or the image of a rival, then it probably means the king made a very serious blunder and was not just killed, but erased from the record. In the case of muddled time lines, the coins can often help date when one guy’s rule ended and his successor’s rule started. If the written record is hazy,the coins can fill in the gaps.

It is not science, but the study of money is a specialty. Numismatists are not just coin collectors. The academic side is much more than than the simple cataloging of coins and currency. The money people used can tell a lot about the people. The debasement of Roman coins in the third century, for example, helps explain what was happening at the street level in that era. Put another way, the changes in the coins tell a parallel story to what histories tell us about the civil wars and changes in imperial rule.

Somewhere, in a far off future, the robot historians will be picking through the rubble of our current age and puzzling about today’s news from the Imperial Capital that they are changing the money.

Alexander Hamilton has been spared an ousting from the front of the $10 bill, and Andrew Jackson will instead be bumped from the $20 to make way for Harriet Tubman — a historic move that is helping quell a controversy over Hamilton’s legacy.

“Today, I’m excited to announce that for the first time in more than a century, the front of our currency will feature the portrait of a woman, Harriet Tubman, on the $20 note,” Treasury Secretary Jack Lew told reporters during a conference call Wednesday afternoon.

Lew also announced a set of changes that include putting leaders of the women’s suffrage movement on the back of the $10 bill and incorporating civil rights era leaders and other important moments in American history into the $5 bill.

Obsequious rump-swabs, like Dan McLaughlin from National Review, were immediately seen out on the street, in tears, thanking Obama for this critical change. Look through the comments on that post and you easily understand why the epithet “cuckservative” cut these people so deep and why they were so offended by it. Reading that post, I get the sense that the only disappointment from McLaughlin was that they did not put a strapping young black man on the twenty.

Maybe Jackson should be replaced, but there are dozens of far more important people who could take his place. There are more important women than Tubman, who is a trivial figure in American history. The only reason we know about her at all is that Progressive fanatics plucked her out of obscurity to be a heroine of their cause. Most of the Harriet Tubman mythology is exactly that. She was illiterate and left no written records nor anything in the way of proof to substantiate her claims.

As is always the case with Progressive fanatics, nothing they say should be taken at face value. This move has nothing to do with Tubman, blacks, Civil Rights or women. It’s about spiting the the bogeymen that haunt the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Progressivism is defined by hatred of southern white males. It defines everything they believe and do. It’s pretty much all they are now. Striking the southern white guy from the money in favor of a black women is a deranged act of vengeance.

Of course, the weenies of Conservative Inc are claiming this is an attempt by Democrats to erase their association with Jackson. Maybe, but the more plausible reason is it is another step toward erasing the South. These are people who hate NASCAR, hunting, guns, fried food, WalMart, the Rebel flag and football. The common theme is anything white southern guys like, liberals hate and want to destroy. The people digging up Confederate generals are now throwing a southern president off the money.

Those robot historians will probably be just as puzzled as we are as to why this bizarre cult maintains a hatred for one region of the country. But, the joke, in the end, will be on the lunatics. It won’t be long before the hip-hop boys start calling the new bill “tubbies.” They call the twenty a “double” now and “tubby” is easier to rhyme. Given the nature of hip-hop, they will probably come up with a far more crude name for the new bill. Still, I look forward to asking lefty if he can spare a tubby?

Girl Power

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The men of our species (I’m assuming you are human) are bigger, faster and stronger than the females and it is not even close. I speak “on average” here. There are small, frail men and big brawny women, but those are both outliers. Even wimpy men are bigger, faster and stronger than the typical woman. That’s why the best women’s college basketball team scrimmages against frat boys, rather than male athletes.

There was a presidential commission on the topic 25 years ago when the push for women in combat was first broached by the usual suspects. They published a report that you can buy if you’re interested. In that report, they concluded that the average female in her early adulthood is as physically capable as a typical late middle-aged man. They found that just 3.4% of female Army recruits could score at the mean for male recruits. After basic, that number fell to below one percent.

The above is a hate-crime, of course, and not intended to be taken literally. Let’s just say it is a theoretical construct in order to evaluate this story coming out of the Marine Corp this week.

Marine leaders have proposed a new physical fitness test that would still allow women to do the flexed-arm hang — but they’re not likely to earn a first-class score without pullups.

A new plan for the PFT would require most women to do between eight and 10 pullups to net a max score on that portion of the test.

The potential change is in response to a fitness review ordered by Commandant Gen. Robert Neller. Marine leaders found that “some current [fitness] standards are either not relevant, not challenging or not attainable,” according to a briefing obtained by Marine Corps Times. The plan was presented to Marine leaders last week.

Women would still be allowed to do the flexed-arm hang under a new proposal, but would be given little incentive to do so. Points for the flexed-arm hang would max out at 50, while one pullup would be worth 51 points.

In the PC age, the people in charge have to engage in all sorts of weird processes to work around the limitations placed on them by the lunatic cult in charge, but do so in a way that flatters the lunatics. In this case, the Marines have to have effective combat units, but do so in a way that permits them to pretend they are enthusiastic about having females in those units, even though that means degrading those combat units.

The lunatics insist that females are smaller, slower and weaker because of the patriarchy. Years of oppression by the pale penis people forced women into these “gender roles” that cause them to be smaller, weaker and slower than men. The solution is to get a bunch of people killed trying to prove this point and magically, our women will all look like Armenian males. It’s human sacrifice to please the gods, if there was such a thing as gods. Why this is good for anyone is never explained, but shut up.

This is not just a denial of observable reality. It is a denial of biology as a science. One of the big reasons humans rose to the top of the food chain is the division of labor. Most evolutionary biologists think one reason Neanderthals failed is there was no division of labor between the sexes. Having females specialize at things best for producing and rearing children, and men specialize in hunting and defense, was a huge edge for modern man, compared to previous smart monkeys.

Behavioral science also argues against women in combat. Men have evolved for combat. We’re literally built for it and not just physically, but cognitively. Our competition for mates is about denying the rival a chance to mate and the surest way of doing that is to kill him. Female competition for mates is about gaining the attention of males, not slaughtering the other females. Anyone who has been around children knows you have to train males to be civil; it comes natural for little girls.

Since we live in the age of hating the pale penis people, reality is no longer a limit to this sort of lunacy. Like the Air Force, the Marines will hunt around for a gal they can pretend is Audi Murphy so they can load her up with medals and display her as an example of their progressive enthusiasm. Everyone will pretend this is typical, even normal, in order to keep the religious police from hustling them off to a re-education camp.

This is the price we pay for allowing a cult to gain control of our country. The Stupid Tax is the price we pay for making every safe for the dumbest members of society. A few pennies are tacked onto shampoo bottles, for example, so that a warning can be placed on the outside telling the stupid not to drink shampoo. When the stupid person sues, the shampoo maker can say he did his best to warn the stupid about the dangers of drinking shampoo. Billions are siphoned from society to accommodate the stupid in this way.

What the military is facing is a Lunatic Tax. They can still drive off the dangerously stupid, but they have to accommodate the the whims of the  lunatics. That means re-engineering their combat units so they can have a sprinkling of girls in them. When the angry bull-dyke Senator visits, they can show her how enthusiastic they are for girls in combat. This also requires a catalog of euphemisms and esoteric rules to game the theocrats. Everyone in the military now speaks in tongues.

This will not end well.

Car Shopping

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I’m in the market for a new car. I don’t really need a new car or even a newer car. My current vehicle is 15 years old, but in near-new condition. I’m one of those people who takes meticulous care of my things, especially cars. I get all the maintenance done on time and I have broken things fixed as soon as they break. That last bit is the key. Leaving broken things unattended seems to age a car.

I’m a bit of a clean freak so I make sure my car is always spotless. My current vehicle lacks a new car shine and has a few paint chips, but is otherwise pretty much as I bought it new. Inside it is exactly as new, not even a smudge on the carpets. I’m a bit lucky there, I guess, but it really is quite remarkable how long a modern auto will last if properly maintained.

Even so, I figure I have one more new car in me before they take my keys away so I have been thinking about spoiling myself and getting a nice new ride. Here in the ghetto, having a nice ride is pretty much required if you want to be respected. I see guys who have never filed a tax form in their life rolling around in E-series Mercedes. Whenever I see one of the fellas riding around in a high end vehicle, I always imagine the scene at the dealership when L’Trelle pays cash in crumpled tens and twenties.

I have not settled on what I want or even if I want to go big or small. I’ve always liked the look of an the Audi, but I’m told they’re brutal to maintain. I know someone with an A6 and he tells me he spent close to a grand having the brakes done recently. My last brake job, which included brand new front rotors and an alignment, was $450. I think I’d have a stroke if I got a bill for brake pads that had a comma in it. Maybe the driving experience makes it all worth it, but I’m skeptical.

The other end of the spectrum for me is an SUV. I’ve always thought it would be fun to own a Jeep with a lift kit and big tires. Maybe do some off-roading. Every Jeep owner I’ve met loves the things. It’s probably a lifestyle thing that may or may not work for me, but it is something I’m considering. If not a Jeep then maybe a different model SUV. Too bad they stopped making the Hummer. That would work perfectly in my neighborhood. I’d be the top honky in the hood for sure.

A good way to understand how social institutions evolve, sometimes into dead-ends, is to spend time at car dealerships. If you were starting with a clean sheet of paper, designing a way to distribute and repair cars, the modern dealership system would not be the model. Instead, you would probably come up with something like CarMax or maybe Amazon Cars, where users spec their car on-line and it is delivered to their home.

This was not a possibility in the dawn of the automobile age in America. Instead, manufacturers sought out local businessmen to represent their brand in their part of the world. Even 50 years ago, America was a vast country with lots of local variation. People did business with people they knew and the local dealership model solved a problem for car makers. Buying a car from the guy who sponsored your kid’s little league team was the American thing to do.

Today, people prefer doing business with robots. Retail is dying all over the country as people would rather shop through their PC. I just bought a new bed frame through Amazon. It will be delivered next week. Rather than spend all weekend at furniture stores, I went on-line, relying on the reviews of strangers. The transaction required an hour or so of my time and I did not have to haggle with another human.

Go into a car dealership and it is an elaborate system of time wasting and confrontation. The car salesman immediately starts asking questions and trying to lead you to a car you are inclined to buy. He’s there to sell cars so he works to narrow your focus quickly, often making assumptions about people based on their age, sex, race and appearance. Car dealerships are the ultimate in profiling.

Of course, this system of selling cars evolved over a long period of time and the men who have millions committed to their dealerships are not about to let it be replaced by another system. In almost every state, dealers have bribed local pols into passing laws protecting them from alternative modes of selling new cars. Some states even have laws forbidding warranty work by independent repair shops, forcing you into dealership repair shops.

The car business is also an example of how automation can be minimized. The software systems used by car dealers are crude by modern standards. Even the Japanese and German dealers rely on clunky old software to manage the dealerships. There are still loads of people pushing paper around in order to buy and sell cars. That’s on top of the government bureaucracy for keeping track of your car and taxing it. The economy of spoons comes to mind.

Another thing that strikes me about the car buying experience is just how ugly modern cars have become in the last couple of decades. Walk around a car dealership and it is like being on the set of a film noir movie. The most popular colors are black, gray and white. The alternatives are muted, depressing metallics that strongly suggest the owner is suicidal. Interior colors range from black to gray. It’s as if all of our cars are designed by former East German bureaucrats.

Way back in the olden thymes when car makers first started using wind tunnels for design work, someone I knew at the time said eventually all cars will end up looking the same. That’s pretty much what has happened. To break out of this and get something funky and weird, you have to spend a king’s ransom. When I was a kid, cars said something about the owner. It was an extension of his personality so variety was everywhere.

That’s still true, except the guy driving is no longer a free man driving his own car. Instead, the car is leased to him and he is permitted to drive it by a gaggle of faceless bureaucrats, who spend their lives in committee meetings. That’s why our cars look like extras in a funeral procession. An optimistic people buy weird looking cars in bright colors. A society marking time leases gray sedans that go back to the dealer when they are done for.

 

The Sick Man of Europe

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One of the great challenges the next US president will face is how to manage the decline of Turkey. The Turks under Recep Erdoğan are an unreliable partner and becoming a source of instability in Europe. The great neo-conservative dream of having NATO extend to every country on earth except Russia will not come to pass. Instead, it will either go away entirely or become something else, something that does not include Turkey.

The news that the Germans will prosecute a comic for making sport of Erdoğan, has all focused on Merkel, but that’s not the real story. This is all about Erdoğan and internal Turkish politics at a time when he is not very popular and the Turks face some very serious threats to their south and east. Pushing around Merkel is mostly about Erdoğan looking tough and important. In his part of the world, that is still how the game is played.

The immediate issues are the geopolitical problems the Turks face. Syria has collapsed, sending refugees into Turkey. This further destabilizes the Kurdish regions, which is exactly what the Turks do not want. Kurdish nationalism is probably the thing they fear more than anything. With neighboring Iraq a host for ISIS, their southern border is essentially a state of nature populated by homicidal lunatics with military gear they got from America.

They used to have influence in Syria and Iraq, but that’s no longer the case. Instead, Iran is fast becoming the regional hegemon. The Turks know their history and they understand that the Persians have always been the dominant player in Mesopotamia. The Iranians are not going to be happy just controlling the Gulf. They are not involved in Syria and Iraq as a hobby. The Mullahs of Iran imagine themselves as the heirs of Cyrus the Great, without the philo-semitism.

All of this is why Erdoğan is working the Europeans so hard. First he turns on the migrant spigot and then he makes Merkel grovel to have it shut off. This latest stunt is entirely for domestic consumption. This makes Erdoğan look tough to his people, which makes it easier for him to deal with the problems to his south. The game here is to extract as much from the Europeans as possible so he can be as aggressive as he needs to be with the problems to the south.

The problem for the Turks is they can’t make all of this work. The deal they made with Merkel included a provision for Turkish citizens to travel in Europe without a visa. Every young Turk with anything on the ball will find work in Europe. At the same time, those Syrian migrants are going to keep coming and those Kurds are going to keep breeding and dreaming of the day they have their own country. Turkey has the European disease and the Muslim disease. That’s going to be lethal.

That bit about the Kurds is something the West does not fully grasp. The demographics of Turkey present a very serious long-term threat to the stability of the country and the dominance of the Turks. Turkish TFR is at 1.5, while Kurdish TFR is 4.5. The math says Kurds will outnumber Turks in 20 years. Erdoğan does not talk about this all the time because he is bored. The Turks, unlike the Europeans, understand that the future belongs to those who show up.

It’s hard to know, but the noises coming from Erdoğan suggest he thinks he can solve his European disease by embracing his Muslim problem. The ruling party gets its support from the more rural parts of the country, which is the very Muslim part of the country. Turkey becoming more Islamic means becoming more hostile to the West. History shows these things have a way of spiraling out of control quickly.

Then there is the elephant in the room.  NATO is a legacy organization without a reason to exist. The Soviets are no more and there is no threat of the Red Army roaring into Germany. Whether the treaty is scrapped or redrafted, the next president is most likely going to preside over a radical redrawing of America’s military commitments to Europe. There’s a pretty good shot that part of it will include dropping Turkey from the deal.

The irony here is that we have the expression “Sick Man of Europe” because of the Russians. Tsar Nicholas I said of the Ottoman Empire “We have a sick man on our hands, a man gravely ill, it will be a great misfortune if one of these days he slips through our hands, especially before the necessary arrangements are made.” If the West has not thought about this with modern Turkey, they will be thinking about soon enough.

The challenge for the next president will be in letting things play out on their own. Here’s where the lesson of Libya comes in to play. Like Quaddafi, Erdoğan may simply be a guy you do business with because he keeps a lid on the Arabs to the south. That may require bribery and a lot of looking the other way as he suppresses the Kurds, but it’s the cost of keeping millions of migrants flowing into the Balkans. What Turkey will never be is part of Europe.

Bush and Bandar

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This story in America’s Newspaper of Record on the post-9/11 scramble to protect the Saudis is going to lead a lot of people to take the red pill, as the cool kids say. Most people assumed the administration covered up some fringe involvement by some Saudis in 9/11. Most people think our government has looked the other way on Saudi financing of terrorism. The claims here go well beyond that.

In its report on the still-censored “28 pages” implicating the Saudi government in 9/11, “60 Minutes” last weekend said the Saudi role in the attacks has been “soft-pedaled” to protect America’s delicate alliance with the oil-rich kingdom.

That’s quite an understatement.

Actually, the kingdom’s involvement was deliberately covered up at the highest levels of our government. And the coverup goes beyond locking up 28 pages of the Saudi report in a vault in the US Capitol basement. Investigations were throttled. Co-conspirators were let off the hook.

Case agents I’ve interviewed at the Joint Terrorism Task Forces in Washington and San Diego, the forward operating base for some of the Saudi hijackers, as well as detectives at the Fairfax County (Va.) Police Department who also investigated several 9/11 leads, say virtually every road led back to the Saudi Embassy in Washington, as well as the Saudi Consulate in Los Angeles.

Yet time and time again, they were called off from pursuing leads. A common excuse was “diplomatic immunity.”

Those sources say the pages missing from the 9/11 congressional inquiry report — which comprise the entire final chapter dealing with “foreign support for the September 11 hijackers” — details “incontrovertible evidence” gathered from both CIA and FBI case files of official Saudi assistance for at least two of the Saudi hijackers who settled in San Diego.

Some information has leaked from the redacted section, including a flurry of pre-9/11 phone calls between one of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego and the Saudi Embassy, and the transfer of some $130,000 from then-Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar’s family checking account to yet another of the hijackers’ Saudi handlers in San Diego.

An investigator who worked with the JTTF in Washington complained that instead of investigating Bandar, the US government protected him — literally. He said the State Department assigned a security detail to help guard Bandar not only at the embassy, but also at his McLean, Va., mansion.

I recall the administration flying the Bin Laden family out of the country right after the attack. That made some sense simply as a practical matter. What is coming to light now is that the administration decided to give the Saudis a pass before they knew anything about the attack. Put another way, their default position was to protect the Saudis above all else.

Former FBI agent John Guandolo, who worked 9/11 and related al Qaeda cases out of the bureau’s Washington field office, says Bandar should have been a key suspect in the 9/11 probe.

“The Saudi ambassador funded two of the 9/11 hijackers through a third party,” Guandolo said. “He should be treated as a terrorist suspect, as should other members of the Saudi elite class who the US government knows are currently funding the global jihad.”

But Bandar held sway over the FBI.

After he met on Sept. 13, 2001, with President Bush in the White House, where the two old family friends shared cigars on the Truman Balcony, the FBI evacuated dozens of Saudi officials from multiple cities, including at least one Osama bin Laden family member on the terror watch list. Instead of interrogating the Saudis, FBI agents acted as security escorts for them, even though it was known at the time that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens.

I’m not much for conspiracies, but you can see why people think the Saudis were behind 9/11 and that maybe the Bush people were OK with it. After all, it gave them the excuse to invade the world. At the minimum, there’s a distinct lack of anger on display here. Bush is an American and this was an attack on his people, his country. A thirst for vengeance is what one should expect. Instead, he’s smoking cigars with Bandar.

This is post-nationalism. When the rulers no longer feel any connection to the people over whom they rule, they are free to treat the people as furniture. The cost of 9/11, the death and destruction, was a small price to pay for booking the multi-trillion dollar boondoggle to come after it. A whole lot of people got rich off Afghanistan and Iraq. There’s a reason seven of the richest counties on earth are around Washington DC.

The Surrenderess

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Until about an hour ago, I had never heard of Ekaterina Jung, now calling herself Cathy Young, a writer for something called Newsday and the website, The Federalist. This link was in my twitter feed along with a bunch of snarky comments. The article is another tantrum about the growing army of people who have had enough of so-called conservatism and went elsewhere for their arguments.

The phrase “alt-right” has become an abracadabra phrase for the commercial Right, in the same way that “extreme right-wing” is a magic phrase for the loonies of the Left. The theory is that if the good-thinker says the phrase three times, their tired old excuses and arguments are declared the winner and they can dismiss their critics. The hacks of Conservative Inc now call everyone to their right, “alt-right” so they can avoid debating them.

The Cathy Young tantrum is fairly typical. She spent an hour breezing through some sites like VDare and Unz looking for “evidence” she could use to pad out her claim that the bad-thinkers are all racist Hitlers and stuff. I’m old enough to remember when Lefty used to write these sorts of columns about Buckley Conservatives, using National Review as the source material. That’s how far the Overton Window has moved left.

Anyway, two things are interesting to me. One is the bio of the writer. According to Wiki:

Born in Moscow, the capital of what was then the Soviet Union, Ekaterina Jung was 17 when her family emigrated to the United States in 1980. She became a naturalized citizen in 1987 as Catherine Alicia Young, and graduated from Rutgers University in 1988.[1] At Rutgers, she wrote a column for the student newspaper The Daily Targum and worked as a student writer for The Detroit News. She also completed her autobiography, Growing Up in Moscow: Memories of a Soviet Girlhood, published in 1989.

Continuing her association with The Detroit News, Young was a regular columnist for the newspaper from 1993 to 2000 and worked as a freelance journalist for a variety of publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Newsday, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator, National Review, Salon.com, The Weekly Standard, and Reason.

From 2000 to 2007, Young wrote a weekly op-ed column for The Boston Globe. In 2008, she began to write a regular column for RealClearPolitics.com. In 2012, she became a weekly columnist for Newsday. Over the years, Young has had a close association with Reason, where she is a contributing editor and was a monthly columnist from 2001 to 2007. Since 2014, she has regularly contributed to Time.[2]

Young is a research associate at the Washington, D.C.-based libertarian think tank Cato Institute, for which she co-authored a 1996 policy analysis paper, “Feminist Jurisprudence: Equal Rights or Neo-Paternalism?”. Her writing covers a variety of topics in politics and culture, with particular focus on gender issues and feminism, reflecting an individualist feminist perspective (c.f. Wendy McElroy), frequently agreeing with men’s rights activists, while criticizing them for emulating the identity politics associated with some forms of feminism. In addition to appearing on a number of radio and television shows, she has spoken on college campuses and, during 2001 and 2002, taught a 3-week gender issues course at Colorado College.

Young supports legally recognizing same-sex marriages.[3]

Young is basically a liberal woman who likes money so she defends the people who give her money. Today, that happens to be the Koch Brothers so she is a libertarian. You don’t write for those hyper-progressive publications without having been cleared by the Cult of Modern Liberalism. Throw in the middle-aged woman’s obsession with her vagina and you have a Cato endorsed social justice warrior.

That’s the thing with libertarians. They agree with the Left on all the important stuff. Their quibble is mostly over who gets sent off to the camps and by what means. Liberals want the state running the camps while libertarians think Elon Musk should get the contract. Over 50 years ago, Whittaker Chambers pegged these people and nothing much has changed, other than the fact the Buckley Conservatives surrendered to them.

The other interesting bit is this at the end of the Young’s tantrum:

Today, the excesses of the “social justice” movement have brought us to a point where reasonable conservatives, libertarians, and liberals are ready to join forces against quasi-totalitarian identity politics. We need to start reclaiming the principles of common humanity, freedom, and universal values, not put a positive spin on a different brand of divisive identitarianism.

Progressivism is based on the claim that all humans are the same. Egalitarianism is the foundation stone of the Left. Their coat of arms is decorated with the phrases “common humanity” and “universal values.” These are not conservative expressions or sentiments. They are antithetical to traditionalism, conservatism and biological reality. What Cathy Young finishes with is a call for total surrender.

That’s why the Buckley Right is collapsing. Decades of surrender and excuse making have sapped them of their legitimacy. What’s the point of following these guys if all they do is lose and blame you for it? You may as well throw in with these new guys, who may be nuts, but they are spoiling for a fight. If your culture and people are going to be erased from the book of life, you can at least put up a fight on the way out.

Crime & Punishment

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I’m not a fan of the death penalty. I’m not absolutely against it, as there are times and places where it is a necessity. Poor societies cannot afford to house and feed monsters so they have no choice but to execute their violent criminals. It’s a matter of self-defense. If they try to segregate killers, there’s a good chance the killer gets loose and kills again. Or, the killer harms a fellow prisoner or guard.

My view on the death penalty is a libertarian one. The state derives its authority from the people and the people have a right to self-defense. As a matter of self-defense, the state can kill enemies, but only enemies that are a threat. A man in chains is no threat so hanging him is murder. It is no different than a man shooting a burglar in his home versus hunting down the burglar and shooting him in the back.

That said, I get why people are in favor of the death penalty as a matter of vengeance. A guy who kills kids, for example, commits the worst possible offense against society. Hanging the guy simply as an act of vengeance brings some satisfaction to the people. The trouble is the state gets stuff wrong all the time so vengeance could very well lead to hanging an innocent man. You can let a man out of jail, but not out of the grave.

That’s the theory. The reality is a case like this one in America’s Paper of Record.

A follower of Charles Manson who participated in his cult’s infamous 1969 massacre has won approval for parole.

Leslie Van Houten, 66, the youngest member of the so-called Manson Family, “was granted parole suitability today by commissioners of the Board of Parole Hearings meeting at the California Institution for Women in Corona,” according to Luis Patino, a spokesman for the California Department of Correction.

“We’re really ecstatic,” Van Houten’s lawyer, Christie Webb, told The Post. “Leslie is an individual. She can’t change what she did, but she has tremendous remorse.”

The parole board will review the judgment for up to 120 days and, if its members uphold the decision, the matter will be forwarded to California Gov. Jerry Brown.

Brown “will have a maximum of 30 days to either uphold, reverse or modify the decision, or send it to the full board of commissioners sitting en banc for review,” Patino said.

Van Houten was convicted in 1971 for the savage murders of Leno and Rosemary La Bianca in their Los Feliz home on August 10, 1969.

She later admitted that she was whacked out on LSD when she stabbed Rosemary 14 times with a knife.

The double murder came one day after several other Manson disciples killed pregnant actress Sharon Tate – who was married to renowned director Roman Polanski in her Benedict Canyon home. Several of her friends were massacred.

These crimes were monstrous. The people who committed them admitted to the crimes, even bragged about them. There’s simply no way to argue that they may have been wrongly convicted. The best you can do is claim some mitigation like insanity or excessive drug taking. Even so, this woman was given life with a chance at parole. Now, she may be released after spending 40 years in prison.

This is why people support the death penalty. This woman should never be free, but she is old and the government is broke so they are letting criminals go free. There’s also the fetish among our rulers for committing outrages against the people. Letting a monster go free is a way they can feel hip and edgy by outraging the squares out in the suburbs. The death penalty closes off this stuff. If Van Houten had been hanged, this is not a story. Instead, she will be released and probably be invited to the White House.

This is why I think we should get back to having penal colonies. The Cloud People are simply too greedy and self-absorbed to run a proper criminal justices system. They will always look for reasons to set monsters loose on the rest of us. At the same time, wholesale execution of violent predators is never coming back in the West, until the Muslims take over.  A compromise is to setup penal colonies to house people like this women.

The monsters can be dumped on an island with ample food and water, but otherwise they must self-organize. Maybe a facility to dispense food, water and medical care is run by the state. If they kill each other, so be it. The non-violent, who simply cannot stop committing crimes, can be dropped into a more regulated colony. They live out their lives with no chance of return, unless they are exonerated. Maybe we setup a court for them on the island to help regulate the colony. We can call it Australia, just to make it fun.

The point is we have, at any one time, about 500,000 or so people in jail that we never want out of jail. The billions spent doing this, and the endless criminal proceedings that come with it, can be solved with penal colonies. That would free up resources to run a sane prison system for the petty thieves, errant losers and young knuckleheads. A Leslie Van Houton would be sent to Murderer’s Island out in the Pacific, never to walk our streets again.