Author Archives: thezman

The Africa Problem

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In 793 the first Viking raid of any note took place at the monastery at Lindisfarne. It was quite a shock to the Christian people of Britain, but it was just a taste of what was coming. This was the dawn of the Viking age and warriors would be pouring out of Scandinavia for 250 years.  In a short time, a piracy problem would turn into a threat to civilization, forcing the people of Europe to organize themselves in defense of their lands and people against the Norse raiders.

The problem over the horizon today is the population explosion in Sub-Saharan Africa. We get hints of it in the news from time to time, but policy makers in the West try hard to pretend it is not a problem. On slow news days, the state media has someone write a “think piece” on the topic, but otherwise, Africa may as well be Mars as far as public policy. As Steve Sailer is fond of pointing out, the math says this must change.

Sailer has a post up on this and he offers some ways to address what will be the defining issues of the next half century or more.

The solutions for the African threat to world peace and prosperity appear to me to require a threefold approach:

– Perimeter and in-depth defense of the West to shut off the magnet justifying guys with three wives and 17 children feeling optimistic and unworried about their selfishness.

– Strong campaigns promoting family planning in Africa.

– Outside investment in sustainable economic development in Africa, such as better agricultural practices that don’t contribute to desertification.

These will be expensive, but the cost is minimal compared to the alternative of turning Europe into a banlieue of Africa. The main problem is ideological: we need to break the taboo against talking about the need for Steps #1 and #2.

His first proposal could work and would certainly limit the flow of economic migrants into the West. The fantasy version of migration is that these people come to work. In reality, they come to go on welfare. Politically, this would be an easy sell to populations facing financial pressure due to bloated welfare systems and excessive government. But, politicians appear to be allergic to this notion. They would rather see the whole thing collapse than be thought rude to the invaders.

Math is not a social construct and the math says the West cannot afford to feed and clothe a billion Africans, plus the millions of others who wish to have the material benefits of the West without the work. You can choose to accept reality or be forced to accept reality. There is no third option so the West will eventually have to halt the flow of migrants into Europe..

The second proposal strikes me as odd, given Sailer’s views on human biology. The West has been flooding the Dark Continent with condoms to fight HIV for a couple of decades now. George Bush made a big deal of fighting AIDS in Africa. The thrust of the effort was the distribution of condoms. Even so, the population explosion has gone on, suggesting that the locals are not all that interested in birth control. Biological reality is not amenable to wishful thinking.

The last proposal has a similar problem. The West has been investing in Africa for as long as anyone has been alive. Ethiopia, for example, gets 90% of its government budget from foreign aid. Hundreds of billions have flowed into Africa through government, charity and combinations of the two. In many parts of the continent, the result has been worse than doing nothing. The book Dead Aid details how aid to Africa has mostly made things worse.

That leaves us with option one as the starting place. A million or so Muslim migrants into Europe has radically altered politics. Ten million more and instead of “right wing parties” the news is full of violent revolts and coups. Whether the current political class snaps out of their delusions or they are replaced with more practical men, Europe will put and end to the great migration.

There’s something else. The West is broke. That reality is going to become more apparent as we head to the denouement of the credit money age. That means economic development programs in Africa come to an end. They may not end dramatically, more like a slow winding down as economic reality makes aid to Africa less fashionable. Decades of delaying the inevitable means decades of facing the inevitable.

Africa is a fragile place. It does not take much to plunge it into anarchy. Think of Yemen but continent scale without rich neighbors willing to provide food aid. The inevitable result is famine and then plagues as the population starts to shift around looking for food. Throw in civil war and a massive spike in violence to the mix. That’s horrible, but it would fix the population problem in a decade or two.

That assumes the West has the willingness and ability to hold the line against mass migration. It’s not hard to see the math. The current migrant crisis leads to political instability in Europe. That retards food and medicine shipments to Africa, which puts pressure on the population to seek relief across the Mediterranean. Suddenly, the Viking age is looking pretty good.

The Third World Experience

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My first brush with the third world was in Mexico and it was one of those random sorts of things that remind foreigners they are no longer on familiar ground. I was getting some food and I could not help but notice that there were far more people working than the task required. In fact, they were banging into one another. In order to make up for it, they were frenetically jostling with one another, trying to get food to the customers. This was my first brush with the Latin Way.

In most of South America, and big chunks of North America now, activity is mistaken for work. Employees are always rushing about in a chaotic manner as they want to look busy. You see it in government bureaucracies as well as with the private business. Everyone always wants to look busy, which means working harder, not smarter. In fact, they may very well work dumber as that creates more work, which makes it easier to look busy. There is a strange logic to it.

With open borders and a flood of third world people into America, I am seeing this sort of thing locally. I had to get my prescription refilled the other day and the pharmacy I use is staffed by H1B’s from Lord knows where. Rite Aid is known for abusing the H1B program to hire cheap labor in their pharmacy. Every time I go in there, I see sub-Saharan Africans scurrying about, looking busy, getting nothing done. Invariably they screw up my prescription and it requires lots of hand gestures and mangled English to get it resolved.

That is the other thing about the third world. The dimwits you deal with at the retail level are both the cause of and cure of the inevitable foul ups. At the pharmacy, they usually lose my prescription, but sometimes they just forget to fill it. That means huddling around a terminal, walking around with their serious face on and then they finally figure it out. They are so proud of themselves and they expect me to be grateful for their help. I play along. It is the way it works. They waste my time and I thank them for it. Welcome to America.

Of course, things do not always work out for the best. I was in Texas last fall and when I returned my rental car at the airport, a surly, dimwitted mestizo scanned the car, mumbled something in Spanglish and then handed me the printout. The bill was $1100 for five days. I protested and he insisted it was right because the machine said it was right. I tried to explain the impossibility of it, but he just kept saying, “I’m sorry, I can do nothing for you. It’s what the computer says.”

Luckily, I was in a sporting mood at that point, having dealt with some third world zaniness on the way into the airport. An Amerind flag man was waving cars into what looked like a detour. It was a dead end. So, about ten cars were stacked up, needing to back out. I heard some irritated guy demand to know why the flag man was waving people into a dead end. He just shrugged and said his boss told him to do it. He had that stupid smile suggesting you should be happy that he answered the question correctly.

Anyway, I eventually tracked down a pleasant young woman who was happy to fix the billing problem. That is the big difference between a Western culture and the third world. In the West, we expect even the front-line employee to solve problems. The girl that helped me was happy to help and felt good about doing her job. Jose with the scanner was happy to do only that which he was trained to do and he felt good about staying out of my trouble. One is motivated to find problems to solve, the other is motivated to avoid problems.

That is the other thing about the non-West. There is a narrowness, a practiced obtuseness, that you see even in the professions. South Asians are hilarious with this. They are creative with quick fixes, often producing a solution that is both comical and practical. This seems to be a way to avoid anything resembling a confrontation. They call this “Jugaad.” This love of the quick fix means systemic problems never get solved. They just carry on forever with an elaborate array of cheap fixes and workarounds.

Here in the ghetto, we get to experience local blacks dealing with the third world customer service reps. Blacks are trained from conception to assume everyone is here to wait on them. The sense of entitlement is bone deep. Watching a welfare queen play the race card against a Kenyan pharmacy clerk is hilarious. Africans really dislike American blacks so I suspect there is some deliberate trouble making, but it is a good time, nonetheless.

Anyway, I suspect the valued social skill in the future will be the ability to manipulate people in a multi-cultural society in order to get anything done. The person who can finesses these people into doing useful work will have a high value, while the red-faced Texan I saw screaming at the flag guy will live a life of perpetual frustration. Or maybe it reaches a tipping point and it ends in a tribal bloodbath.

Unimaginable Math Problems

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In 1980, the US government owed, in one fashion or another, $909 Billion, which was about 35% of GDP. Federal spending that year was $591 Billion. If you adjust these numbers for inflation, the 1980 spending was $1,700 Billion and the debt was $2,615 Billion. Today the government spends over $3,000 Billion and the national debt is $19,000 Billion. The current estimates say the debt-to-GDP ratio will be close to 90% this year and will break 100% sometime in the next administration.

I use 1980 as a benchmark because Reagan ran on the debt issue, making it a popular topic in politics ever since. In that time, Republicans have controlled the White House for 20 of those 36 years. They have controlled the House for 18 of those years. The point here is both parties have had chances to arrest the growth of spending and debt accumulation, but neither team has bothered. As long as the Fed can monetize the debt, the politicians keep spending.

Another reason to think back to 1980 is that no one thought the current debt levels were possible. The NYTimes first used the word “trillion” in the 1970’s. The rationale behind Reagan’s tax plan was that making high taxes politically impossible meant spending would have to decline. After all, who in their right mind would keep buying bonds, even at the elevated rate of 10% for the 10-Year Treasury?

The future turned out to be a very different place than the planners of the 1980’s imagined. That’s important to keep in mind when you see stories like this regarding the nation’s public pension systems.

The US public pension system has developed a $3.4tn funding hole that will pile pressure on cities and states to cut spending or raise taxes to avoid Detroit-style bankruptcies.

According to academic research shared exclusively with FTfm, the collective funding shortfall of US public pension funds is three times larger than official figures showed, and is getting bigger.

Devin Nunes, a US Republican congressman, said: “It has been clear for years that many cities and states are critically underfunding their pension programmes and hiding the fiscal holes with accounting tricks.”

Mr Nunes, who put forward a bill to the House of Representatives last month to overhaul how public pension plans report their figures, added: “When these pension funds go insolvent, they will create problems so disastrous that the fund officials assume the federal government will have to bail them out.”

Large pension shortfalls have already played a role in driving several US cities, including Detroit in Michigan and San Bernardino in California, to file for bankruptcy. The fear is other cities will soon become insolvent due to the size of their pension deficits.

Joshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank, and professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who carried out the study, said: “The pension problems are threatening to consume state and local budgets in the absence of some major changes.

“It is quite likely that over a five to 10-year horizon we are going to see more bankruptcies of cities where the unfunded pension liabilities will play a large role.”

The Stanford study found that the states of Illinois, Arizona, Ohio and Nevada, and the cities of Chicago, Dallas, Houston and El Paso have the largest pension holes compared with their own revenues.

In order to deal with the large funding shortfall, many cities and states will have to increase their contributions to their pension funds, either by raising taxes or cutting spending on vital services.

That’s one possible future. The important thing to remember is the US government has no money of its own. It either taxes, borrows from foreign sources or creates credit money through the machinations of the Federal Reserve. Given the state of the federal budget and projected debt, it’s unlikely the Feds could bailout the state pension systems completely. The CBO says the total debt could hit $30,000 Billion in ten years.

The other possible future is the pensioners don’t get paid. When a company goes bankrupt, the creditors don’t get paid. At least they don’t get paid in full. When cities and towns can no longer make their pension payments, they will stop making those payments. The old retired employees will sue and petition their legislatures, but you can’t get blood from a stone. The best case is the pensioners take a hefty cut in benefits.

The thing no one discusses is why these funds are in trouble. The reason for the trouble is the artificially low bond rates we have seen for two decades. In order to finance Federal spending, borrowing rates have been driven down to near zero. The biggest buyers of treasuries used to be pension funds. They could expect a return exceeding their target of 7.5% and not carry much in the way of risk. Being a pension fund manager used to be the easiest job in finance.

Olivia Mitchell, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, told FTfm last month that US public pension plans face “grave difficulties”.

“I do believe that US cities and towns will continue to suffer, and there will be additional bankruptcies following the examples of Detroit,” she said.

Currently, states and local governments contribute 7.3 per cent of revenues to public pension plans, but this would need to increase to an average of 17.5 per cent of revenues to stop any further rises in the funding gap, the research said.

Several cities and states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey, Chicago and Austin, would need to put at least 20 per cent of their revenues into their pension plans to prevent a rise in their deficits, while Nevada would have to contribute almost 40 per cent.

Mr Rauh’s study claims the “true extent” of funding problems in US public pension system has been obscured because plans calculate both their costs and liabilities on the assumption they will achieve returns of between 7 and 8 per cent a year. The academic believes this rate is “wildly optimistic and unlikely to be achieved”.

Mr Rauh said a more realistic return rate, based on US Treasury bond yields, was around 2-3 per cent a year.

Ultra-low bond rates have forced pension funds into higher risk investments as they try to hit their target of 7% per year. This is fine when the market is performing at or near its historic averages and the fund managers are smart enough to bet the broader market. It also assumes that cities and states pay their pension obligations, without actually borrowing from those same pension funds. Now we know why the pension system is in trouble.

This is just one small aspect of the daunting math facing the United States over the next decade. Again, no one imagined the current math was even possible 35 years ago. If you told 1980 people that the Federal debt would be $19 Trillion, they would have laughed in your face. Maybe ten years from now $50 Trillion is no big thing. The math is unimaginable, but today’s math was once unimaginable. Alternatively, perhaps what’s coming is unimaginably awful. I don’t know, but the math problem facing America beggars the imagination.

The Eco-Struggle

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Way back in the 1980’s I was working for a Democrat Congressman and Al Gore was a first term senator.  Even then there was talk that he could one day run for president. I was just a kid so I naturally assumed it was true and paid attention to his career. When he ran in ’88 for the Democratic nomination, my impression was that he was a very weird dude. He reminded me of a distant cousin who came back from Vietnam with a heroin problem. Even after he got clean, he was still screwed up.

When Gore ran for President in 2000, I was pretty sure he was having some sort of nervous breakdown around the time of the debates. In the first debate he carried on like a child, making weird noises and faces trying to distract Bush. He was criticized for it, especially after the VP debates, which everyone thought were great. What made me think he lost his marbles was that he dressed like Dick Cheney and aped his tone and mannerisms in the second debate. Al Gore had become Zelig.

Of course, any doubts about his sanity were settled after the election when Gore dropped out of sight and went on some sort of spiritual pilgrimage. He got fat, grew a beard and walked the earth like Kwai Chang Caine, only to come back as an Old Testament prophet, instead of a Shaolin master. His preaching about global warming is, aesthetically, right out of the Hebrew Bible. Al Gore is Ezekiel telling you eco-sinners to repent or face the wrath of Gaia. Instead of idolatry, the sin is enjoying modern conveniences.

If you listen to Gore’s sermons on global warming, you can’t help but see them as sermons. He is preaching a faith that is not based on science, even though it borrows jargon and concepts from legitimate science. This TED Talk is a pretty good example.

We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: “After the final ‘no,’ there comes a ‘yes,’ and on that ‘yes’, the future world depends.” When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women’s Suffrage and Women’s Rights Movement met endless no’s, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final “no” comes a “yes.”

When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we’re going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource.

Even if we assume anthropogenic global warming is a real thing, an assumption that is increasingly dubious, “solving” it is an engineering problem, not a moral one.  To be a moral problem makes assumptions about the future that are matters of preference, not moral certainty. The Mesozoic Era was much warmer than today, with little difference between winters and summers on most of the earth. The planet was teaming with life, including the dinosaurs. Life, including humans, may flourish in the balmy future.

The science is not the point, of course. This is a crusade for guys like Gore and the others in the New Religion. The point of the crusade is to fail, which is inevitable with something like climate change. There is no “perfect” climate or even a correct range. Climate is by definition a dynamic thing.  No matter what happens to temperature data, the weather and government policy, the global warming cult will be out on the streets, banging their pots and pans, telling us to repent. For these people, we are always eco-sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia.

As with all iterations of the New Religion, the struggle is a central part of the cult of climate change. The truest believers are all members of the ruling elite, yet they carry on like they are plucky underdogs fighting mysterious dark forces that secretly control society. The strange thing you see with guys like Gore is the sacralizing of suffering on behalf of the cause. The whole climate change racket is shot thought with whining about the need to give up the comforts of modernity.

Even weirder, they have no intention of actually suffering for their faith. Instead, they want to make you suffer. Al Gore can buy “green credits” like indulgences because he is worth close to a billion. That means he gets to live like a royal, enjoying your suffering as you try to work the new gas can. His mansion is lit up like Versailles, while you squint in the florescent haze of your eco-friendly CFL. It’s suffering by proxy, where they sacrifice their time to watch you suffer as a result of their policies.

What strikes me about it is the utter pointlessness of it. The endless posing and posturing has no end because it has no end point. A faithful Christian at least has the serenity of his communion with God. The Muslim, at the click of the detonator, knows he will be with Allah. Climate change fanatics have nothing but a hopeless misery. Even if all of their policies are enacted, nothing comes of it.

The cult of climate change is a church with no sanctuary, so everyone assembles in the nave for no reason other than to be seen by the other believers. These are people suffering from a form of phantom limb syndrome. Instead having had a leg chopped off that they can still feel, it is their sense of the divine that has been amputated. The result is this weird nature cult run by billionaires.

The News Biz

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Way back in the early days of the dot-com boom, I had a conversation with a publisher of a small sports magazine. He published twice a month, actually doing the mailing himself. He had something like 10,000 subscribers so the mailing was no small task, but he had more time than money. He would pick up the issue from the printer, it was a small newspaper style magazine, and then apply the mailing labels.

Obviously, he hated this task and figured he could eliminate it by going on-line. Newspapers were already shoveling their content on-line and all the smart people said it was the future. The logic seems impenetrable. The savings from printing and mailing would more than make up for the lose of ad dollars. Eventually, on-line ads would add more revenue to the mix.

That’s not what happened. The number of people who made the switch was about 10% of his subscriber base. I think he said he peaked at about 1200 on-line subscribers. These were all subscribers to the dead tree version. He picked up only a handful of new readers, even when he started giving away free content as a teaser. For reasons he could never explain, the digital audience was smaller than the analog audience.

This story on the newspaper websites offers similar data.

For a long time, people assumed the web was the future of newspapers.

They figured readers would transition to papers’ websites when they began abandoning their print editions. They thought audiences for papers’ digital side would soar.

But just as newspaper advertisers don’t appear to be replacing their print ads with digital ones, print newspaper readers aren’t transitioning to newspapers’ websites in this digital age.

A new research paper finds that over the past eight years the websites of 51 major metropolitan newspapers have not on average seen appreciable readership gains, even as print readership falls.

The average reach of a newspaper website within the paper’s market has gone from 9.8 percent in 2007 to 10 percent in 2015. So in your typical top-50 market, the leading daily’s online audience would average just 10 percent of the market’s readership.

At the same time, print readership has fallen from 42.4 percent in 2007 to 28.5 percent in 2015

That’s a steep decline for sure, but it shows just how much larger print readership is versus online.

I think part of this is due to the difference in what is required of the reader. Newspapers and magazines delivered to your door are actively engaging readers. It turns out that those delivery fees and print costs drove revenue. The customer did nothing but pay the bill. The content was delivered to him via the miracle of the delivery boy or postman. Until it is consumed, it’s right there in your house, reminding you to read it.

On-line content is a different experience. You have to go get it. The news site does not have a cheap way to grab your attention when you’re heading for the morning constitutional or having lunch. Plus, there are a billion sites to distract you while you are thinking about what to read. Websites rely on you, the consumer, to find them. They are not finding you. The result is fewer readers.

That’s part of it. The other part is newspapers in America have been awful for a long time. Our news media, in general, is crap. I read the British press because they do a better job covering America than the locals. I have found interesting local stories in the British tabs that are nowhere to be found in my local media. If you make a crap product, you’re not going to have a big audience.

The argument from newspapers is they are losing out to cable, but that’s baloney. They used to blame talk radio. Before that it was network news. The fact is newspaper circulations have been falling for over forty years. The birth of New Journalism seems to have ushered in a general decline in the America media. Jamming the facts into a narrative turns into propaganda quickly and people can tolerate only so much of it.

There’s a also a market issue. In the 1950’s, a small town would have two or three papers. New York City had something like 20 daily papers. Then you had multiple editions of the paper. In the 60’s and 70’s we saw a consolidation and many cities ended up with one paper. Monopoly enterprises always decline in quality and eventually succumb to runaway cost problems. That’s what happened to newspapers. Paying a columnist six figures for three columns a week is absurd.

The ironic thing about the technological revolution is we may see some “dead” technologies rise from the grave simply because there’s no better way to do things like sell news or music. A new British paper just started and it has no website. It is an old-style dead tree paper. If this works, how long before musicians start selling their songs on vinyl again, forgoing the digital format entirely?

The Future Will Be No Fun

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I was reading a story the other day about the geezers who pulled the great Hatton Garden heist. It is a fun read, but what jumped out to me was how the cops caught these guys. London is so thick with surveillance cameras; you simply cannot escape having your every move documented. In this case, they traced the movement of the car involved via CCTV and figured out who was involved. Then they listened in on their conversations via electronic surveillance.

The thieves had some understanding of this, but as the one detective said, “They were analog criminals operating in a digital world, and no match for digital detectives.” In this case, they managed to knock out many of the cameras, but missed one and that was their downfall. The data from that one camera along with the data tracking the movement of all subjects in Britain now, was enough to solve the crime.

We are just on the cusp of the surveillance state. The looming end of cash will mean all of your financial transactions can be quickly harvested by the state. We have been conditioned for this via the television for years now. Every cop show has the earnest detectives rummaging around in the suspect’s financial affairs without a warrant. Most people think it happens now so when it comes on-line no one will squawk. After all, public safety requires it and who could possibly be against it?

The end of cash has another implication. Without cash, all transactions will be above ground. Implementing block-chain technology means that the history of every bit of currency will be carried with that bit of currency. The black market will have to be a barter economy. The above ground economy will be a permission based system. Fat people will not be allowed to solicit ice cream shops, for example, unless some thin person pays their way. In effect, everyone will be on allowance.

I was watching a show on the Norse the other day. The show was about how researchers are using new technology to figure out where to dig for Norse settlements. Specifically, they use satellite imagining that can “see” in near–ultraviolet. The satellites can also pickup variations in the electromagnetic radiation along the surface of the earth. This lets the researchers identify what is under the grass, noticing old stone and even mud walls. The accuracy of modern satellites is feet so they can just about pinpoint exactly where to dig.

The next generation of satellites will be even better and cheaper. The new Google satellites will be able to see faces at street level. Looking inside structures with the use of the full light spectrum is just around the corner. In the not too distant future, the state will have 24×7 eyes in the sky that can see and hear anything that is happening above ground. Coupled with expanding use of technology like the “Stingray Tracking Devices”, everything you say and do will be in a database at a government agency.

That is the other bit people do not think about right now. You walk around with your mobile phone and it is now reporting your whereabouts to the phone company and the app developers for those things you downloaded. Google has been keeping tabs on you for a long time. In a cash free society where you have to carry a device in order to conduct basic commerce, mandating this sort of tracking is too easy.

Soon enough, everyone will be able to track everyone, thus making all of us agents of the state. That is the genius behind all of this. Organized social pressure is the way populations will be controlled, much in the way cattlemen manage their herds. Once you realize everyone knows what you are doing and saying, even in private moments, you will act in a way that is “appropriate” even when no one is looking.

The brave new world will be safe, at least, unless you say the wrong things on social media. Then you can expect men with guns to bust down your door and haul you off to jail. Even if they only haul away the hard core haters, you can probably expect to have social media audits where you will have to explain your tweets, posts and so forth. You may not have to sit through a tax audit, but you will be sitting through struggle sessions over your internet activity.

That is the thing Huxley could not see clearly, but he had some inkling of this. For those who read the book, you will recall that people, in the future he imagined, were always under scrutiny. Bernard Marx was exiled to the island of non-conformists for what we would today call trolling. Bernard Marx was a contrarian and a jerk, which is pretty much everyone on-line these days. It is also why our betters are berserk over policing the internet. It is easy to see how this will end.

At least in the World State, everyone was high on soma most of the time. Soma is a hallucinogenic similar to peyote. I write most of these posts micro-dosing mescalin so I can tell you the future will not be too bad, except for the giant spiders.  Then again, the future promises to include an inoculation against drug use. The day when science can “cure” drug abuse and alcoholism is a lot closer than people realize. Imagine a time when you can drink all the beer you like and never get drunk.

That may sound far-fetched but look at the way our keepers treat vice today. They are endlessly hounding us about our diets, our drinking and our exercise. My fondest memories of my father are of him with a Marlboro in his hand. Today, a gaggle of angry lesbians will assault you if you light up in public. All the things that come natural to men will be banned. That is what awaits the toddlers crawling around on the floors of Western homes right now. No wonder white men are offing themselves at record numbers. The future will suck.

The New Normal

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A feature of modern life is the public act of grief after a “mass casualty event” like a flood or an Exploding Mohamed Occurrence. Once things settle down, the people in charge gather up for a parade or a ceremony at which they show everyone just how upset they are at what happened. The media makes a big deal of it and the public is encouraged to pretend it is a big deal. Then everyone goes back to what they were doing and we forget all about it.

In the Bronze Age, public acts of piety were common. In fact, they were a necessary part of the life of the polity. The ruler would participate in rituals in order to show the people he was in good with the gods and that he was sufficiently pious. It is argued that Cyrus the Great was able to defeat Babylon because the Babylonian king, Nabonidus, was not participating in these rituals, therefore his people welcomed the conquerors.

Today we don’t have our leaders slaughter a bull to the gods or do something interesting with virgins. Instead, our rulers invite barbarians onto our countries to slaughter us, so the rulers can then come out and show their piety. After the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence in Belgium, the European “leaders” had the typical ceremony.

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur has led a minute’s silence in Paris with his French counterpart Anne Hidalgo.

The memorial for victims of the Brussels and Lahore attacks came exactly a week after explosions at the airport and on the metro killed 35 people in the Belgian capital.

“There is no more normal,” Mayeur warned. “This is a concept that needs to be redefined. We are in a different era and we need to live in this dimension and keep believing that our model of an open, multicultural city such as Paris, Brussels, London or New York, this is what we want to be. This is the future and that is the message I wanted to bring.”

Notice that expelling the Muslims is not an option? Notice that repelling the Muslims is never an option. Instead, we have to just accept this “new normal” where strange men with beards suddenly explode in public places. If Volkswagen made cars that exploded at the same rate as Muslims, the president of the company would be in jail and the company in bankruptcy. But the religion of multiculturalism overrides everything, including civil defense.

We are well past the point where this reckless behavior by the elites can be explained as simply mistaken. That quote makes clear that even the dullest politicians understand that a world of open borders is a future where the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence is going to be like the Windows game Minesweeper. Tick the wrong box and it is game over for you and your family. But you being blown to bits or having your daughter raped is the price you pay so they can have their public vigils.

Increasingly, this is where the evidence points. The Revolt of the Elites has as one manifestation a compulsion by the managerial class to create technocratic solutions to social problems. Given that the big issues of scarcity have been conquered, they are unconsciously creating new life threatening problems so they can solve them. I suppose we should be grateful that it is just Exploding Mohameds and not a new form of the Black Death.

The one thing George Bush said that was correct was that the job of government is to keep the people safe. Ultimately, settled people have tolerated hierarchical government where a minority rules the majority because of safety. For the overwhelming majority of people, a peaceful life of poverty beats a turbulent life, even one of prosperity. Most Americans would choose to be pets to a race of super intelligent chimps if it meant safety and comfort.

The bet being made today by the people in charge is you will accept a world of Exploding Mohameds. They will build out the custodial state, cameras on every block, even in homes, cops reviewing your twitter feed and the elimination of personal privacy, all in the name of safety. Every time a Mohamed goes off in a public space, the rulers will rush around acting like it is something they wish to prevent, while using it as a reason to slowly slam the cage door shut on the natives.

The problem here is that history has no example of this working. In every case where the people in charge have failed in their basic duties, the people in charge ended up dead oir fleeing for their lives. Maybe the technological revolution is allowing a break from historic trends. Maybe the people in charge can play this weird game of human chess and remain immune from the consequences. It is, however, not the way to bet.

Checking In On The Encyclopedists

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For those new to this site, I have taken to calling Bill Kristol the Hari Seldon of Republican politics. For much of the 90’s and 00’s, Kristol basically ran the Republican Party. In the Bush years, he was largely responsible for crafting the Forever War strategy that came to define the Bush administration. That disaster seems to have landed him in exile, or maybe he is just re-charging his batteries, it is hard to know, but he is very much back in the game now.

Kristol is leading the charge to stop Trump from gaining the 1237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination. The first part of the plan was an organized media blitz through the usual conservative media organs. The last two weeks has been a steady stream of hysterical rants about Trump and his racists extreme alt-right extremist supporters. The idea is to not only to paint Trump as a racist, but to keep him from making his points. It is the classic game of playing defense by going on offense.

The second part of the plan was to pour all available resources into the Wisconsin primary. They had two weeks to buy off every pol, talk show host and newspaper writer. Wisconsin is one of those weird breadbasket states where being nice counts for more than being right so Trump was always going to be vulnerable there. Cruz would be the nice version of Trump and thus win the primary. The hope was that a big win would deflate Trump’s support elsewhere, thus preventing him from reaching the 1237 delegate number.

The Encyclopedists are smart so you should never underestimate them. Kristol did not become the Hari Seldon of American politics by being a fool. He is also ruthless. A man with no loyalties outside his narrow group, who believes he is chosen by fate to orchestrate the Great Plan, is not a guy prone to letting emotion get in the way. That is why he is willing to back Cruz for now, even though he hates Ted Cruz more than he hates Trump.

That is the genius of this scheme. Cruz will never be the nominee. He is just about eliminated from gaining the 1237 he would need to win the nomination. That means he has to figure out how to win a second ballot convention. Kristol has been working on that since last fall and is way ahead of Team Cruz. All the talk about horse trading at a brokered convention is nonsense. The party controls the bulk of the delegates, well more than is needed to pick the nominee. The rest is just theater.

The results thus far look fairly good for the Foundation. Kristol is surely pleased with the outcome, but he now faces the big hurdle. In April, the primary schedule is NY, CT, DE, MD, PA and RI. These are states where Trump has a massive edge over Cruz. The holy roller stuff really turns people off in these states. A month of Trump winning will inevitably beat down the Cruz support as he begins to look like a fringe candidate and a tool for the NeverTrump idiots.

I am no Hari Seldon, but I am having a tough time seeing how this Wisconsin win carries through a month of losing to give Cruz a chance at being competitive in May. The math says Cruz will be eliminated by April 26th, baring a miracle. His rationale for remaining in the race at that point, is to be a dick and keep Trump from winning. Maybe that is enough for him, but I wonder if his voters will agree. History says support drops off once a candidate is no longer viable.

That means the Foundation has to think they can ignore April by shifting the conversation from Trump winning primaries to some other topic, like his inability to beat Clinton in the general. The flaw in this plan is that the Democrats suddenly have a Sanders problem. Kristol would be fine with a Clinton presidency. The Conservative Industrial Complex could raise money of it and they largely agree with Hillary anyway. Sanders winning complicates the math a bit.

Regardless, it strikes me that everything is now pointing to California. The game between now and June 7th will be to create a narrative around stopping Trump from the nomination, thus making California an important primary. To do that means two months of Trump bashing that will make the last two months look like a Trump rally. The only way the Seldon Plan can work is to marginalize Trump to the point where he cannot win the nomination so we should expect a tsunami of sewage coming from so-called conservative media.

This is where being smart beats being right. Trump is running a tightwad campaign, spending very little on TV and social media. In California, the voters expect and demand a massive air war of ads. Kristol will launch a $50 million ad campaign against Trump in California, starting in May. Trump is too cheap and stubborn to run a TV campaign to match it so the Kristol people have to be optimistic. Reagan won California in 1976, keeping Ford from getting the necessary delegates to lock up the nomination. Ford lost to Carter in the fall.

That is the plan, forty years later.

The War On The Alt-Right

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One of the things few notice is the level of coordination in the media. The writers and talkers are often conspiring with one another to push some agenda, usually on behalf of moneyed interests or one of the political parties. The most recent example is the Michelle Fields hoax, facilitated by Ben Shapiro, who is a kept man of the guy financing the Ted Cruz campaign. The whole thing was a setup by “reporters” with an agenda, one purchased by the Ted Cruz campaign.

The Fields hoax is an exception, but there is a lot of media coordination. The JournoList scandal a few years ago revealed that many left-wing writers and reporters were coordinating their efforts via a secret e-mail list. They would promote each other’s work and coordinate how they would cover certain people and events. They imagined themselves as the guys meeting at Rue Saint-Jacques, except they were working on behalf of the king, despite imagining otherwise.

It looks like Buckley Conservatives have learned from their betters on the Left. This article appeared on the collaborationist website The Federalist, yesterday. Today, National Review has a different version of essentially the same article. Ian Tuttle feels no shame in plagiarizing the Federalist piece, suggesting this is a coordinated effort. Then again, there are only so many ways to hoot the word “racist” in a column so plagiarism is probably not the right word here.

Tuttle can be forgiven for not understanding the material, but still trying to please his bosses. He is a child trying to start a career as a chattering skull. Children do what they are told. The old fat guy from the Federalist is just a nobody so this is a way to make some money. We can expect more from the Buckley Right, as it finds itself decreasingly relevant and increasingly under assault.

Ideological movements enter into decline at the same point they turn inward and focus on a narrowing set of doctrines that define the cause. That’s the point they lose faith in the future, their future. They turn their tools to the task of maintaining the status quo, often at the expense of the movement and the benefit of the leaders. Today, Buckley Conservatism is mostly a Reagan Mystery Cult with a gift shop for their books, magazines and television programs.

There is some continuation here with the tradition of Buckley, as far as the war on the people to their Right. That has always been an essential element of Buckley Conservatism. Like Progressives, they hate the people to their Right and curry favor with those on their Left. By casting the people on their Right as unacceptable, so the theory goes, they position themselves as the sensible alternative to the Far Right and the Far Left. Buckley cut his teeth purging Burchers and Randians.

The whole point of Buckley Conservatism was to fight the Soviets so this strategy of self-legitimization made some sense. The Left was hoping to emulate the Bolsheviks, not counter them. In order to prevent that from happening, the Right had to be a legitimate counter argument. So, Bill Buckley was willing to throw anyone over the rail if it made him and his cause look good. A lot of people went over the rail as a result.

The Cold War is over. What’s left of Buckley Conservatism is the weird half of Frank Meyer Fusionism and the purging. Over the last 25 years the list of people purged reads like a who’s who of important writers of the American Right. What’s left of Buckley Conservatism, as an intellectual movement, is the sophomoric libertarian nonsense and angry tantrums about the traditionalists of the Old Right, who refuse to play along anymore.

The Buckleyites still run the Reagan Mystery Cult and the adjoining gift shoppe, the latter being the critical piece. Jonah Goldberg lives in a million dollar home in the Washington suburbs. To maintain that lifestyle means keeping the gift shoppe open. Even if he wanted to entertain alternative opinions, he has a mortgage to pay and a college fund to finance. He lacks the talent of a Mark Steyn and the courage of Ann Coulter so he cannot go it alone. He has to remain a clerk in the gift shoppe, writing copy about the wonderfulness of Buckley Conservatism.

The problem for Buckley Conservatives is they have nothing to offer. People see 25 years of failure and naturally begin to look elsewhere for answers. The alt-right has loads of problems and parts of it are a bit like heroin, offering momentary relief at the expense of long term happiness. To the person suffering in the present, however, the momentary high from joining a white identity group, for example, feels like salvation.

The alt-right, in all of its manifestations, is not growing in number and confidence because they made a pact with the devil. There is nothing supernatural at work here. It’s not a coherent intellectual movement, but simply a refuge from the endless assault on ordinary people, who see their traditions, their customs, their ancestors and their progeny being ground up in the meat grinder of technocratic managerialism. The alt-right is not offering anything but shelter from the storm – for now.

Mass movements are always attractive to the disaffected, which is why responsible people must always work to limit the number of disaffected. It’s this failure of Buckley Conservatism, and the failure of the managerial class as a whole, that has grown the number of disaffected. The whole reason to be loyal to the Left or the Right was always patriotic interest. Neither side bothers to make patriotic arguments, thus leaving patriots with nothing.

When people who have been loyal to conservative causes and conservative politicians their whole life find themselves being called racists and bigots by those people they supported, they start to feel like they have been conned. When ruling class organs publicly argue that vast parts of the culture must be destroyed, that traditional America must be wiped out, people hear a declaration of war. The response is not going to be “yes sir, may I have another.” The response, to quote the late Andrew Breitbart, is going to be “Fuck you. War!”

Magic Honky Theory

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For as long as most people reading this have been alive, the cult in charge of America has preached the need for full integration. This has led to endless campaigns to “desegregate” the schools, housing, jobs, sports clubs, etc. These campaigns are often insanely self-contradictory. Fire departments are sued for discriminating against whites, while also being sued for not discriminating against whites. The inherent truth revealed in these contradictions is ignored.

Domesticated conservatives put on their serious face and point out the hypocrisy and idiocy of these efforts. The habit of blacks, for instance, of creating domains exclusively for blacks is politely ignored, while the similar habit among whites is attacked with the fury of the state and state run media. Imagine trying get White Entertainment Television on basic cable. Remember the horror when kids pretended to create white student unions?

The folks out on the fringe, the people who refuse to be house broken by the Left, make sport of this stuff. There’s little point in taking it seriously as the people promoting Magic Dirt Theory are incapable of rational thought. After all, if you think putting D’Shawn and his half dozen baby mommas out in the suburbs will magically transform them into middle-class burghers, you’re immune to reason. It’s better to leave the pointless debating to the kept men of Buckley Conservatism and have fun making sport of the them.

In fairness, the people promoting Magic Dirt Theory will say they are operating from reason. Humans are a blank slate and if trained properly, by growing up in a properly structured environment, they will turn out properly structured. If D’Shawn happens to murder a nice white girl out in the suburbs, it is the price that you must pay so that D’Shawn’ eight kids will turn out better than their parents.

This is where the “appeal to reason” by the Cult is just way of deflecting the unwanted gaze from what they believe onto other topics. After all, if they really thought they could mold these people, they would be in favor of building black-only towns in which to provide the proper structure and training to D’Shawn and his cohort of bastards. That way they would avoid the problem of hate thinkers and bad whites screwing up the project. It is the logical end point of their blank slate arguments.

The way around this has been to argue that “diversity” makes everyone better somehow. This proximity effect only works in your neighborhood, of course. The bunkered enclaves where our betters live are almost all white. Like so much of what these people say in public, it is intended to obscure, not explain. Ask these people why diversity is good and they start mumbling about their favorite Ethiopian restaurant. Western civilization did OK without having a single Ethiopian restaurant for a few millennia, but we’re to believe it is now a necessity.

Anyway, this story from state controlled media gets to one root explanation for the Cult’s integration fanaticism.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development is making it easier for people with criminal records to find housing.

In new guidance, released Monday, HUD tells landlords and home sellers that turning down tenants or buyers based on their criminal records may violate the Fair Housing Act.

Because of widespread racial and ethnic disparities in the U.S. criminal justice system, criminal history-based restrictions on access to housing are likely disproportionately to burden African Americans and Hispanics.

New HUD guidance on criminal records and the Fair Housing Act

People with criminal records aren’t a protected class under the Fair Housing Act, and the guidance from HUD’s general counsel says that in some cases, turning down an individual tenant because of his or her record can be legally justified.

But blanket policies of refusing to rent to anybody with a criminal record are de facto discrimination, the department says — because of the systemic disparities of the American criminal justice system.

What’s going on here is pretty simple. In the suburbs, landlords use credit and criminal records to keep out people who don’t fit the neighborhood profile. They don’t want their property values collapsing anymore than the local homeowners. A bad tenant can consume the profits of a rental property before you can evict them so the landlords try to use good judgement when screening their tenants.

The Cult hates this because they are convinced that if they can situate non-whites within close proximity of whites, the special magic that allows whites to run civilized communities will transmit to the non-Asian minority and transform them into good citizens. In the case of ex-cons, putting them in with the law abiding will magically rehabilitate them. This is the Magic Honky Theory. Stand close enough to the white guys and you start to act white.

As is the case with everything the Cult says, it is riddled with contradictions. If Whites are the racists monsters they claim, then why in the world would anyone want to send blacks to live with whites? That’s like sending Jews out to Idaho to live with skinheads. Of course, there’s no explaining how it is the honky got this magic stuff that lets him dominate the non-honky, but also oppress the non-honky. What if the non-honky gets this magic and begins oppressing the honky?

Of course, we all know the answer to that question and ultimately, that’s the whole point.