Author Archives: thezman

The Economics of Unreality

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One of the stranger things about modern life is the rise of economics as a quasi-religion in the West. In another age, the rulers would run to the local witch doctor or oracle before making a big decision. Closer to our age, leaders would pray for guidance, maybe talk with a holy man. Today, the pols run to economists for advice on everything.

What makes it particularly humorous is the shamans of economics are more wrong than the old witch doctors. The reason is the modern economist really thinks he is a man of science, while the old witch doctor knew he was a fraud. Of course, the witch doctor also knew he faced the sword if he went too far out on a limb, so he was careful to never get carried away.

Economists have no such fear of being wrong as being wrong is good for the guild. The more things get screwed up due to their bad advice, the better the employment prospects for the profession. Lucky for them, they get most everything wrong, so the racket is a serpent eating its tail.  A good example is here in this Wall Street Journal article.

Federal Reserve officials this week are expected to raise interest rates for the first time in nine years on the expectation that employment and inflation will hit targets reflecting a healthy U.S. economy.

But Fed officials face a troubling question: Jobs are on track, but inflation isn’t behaving as predicted and they don’t know why. Unemployment has fallen to 5%, a figure close to estimates of full employment, while inflation remains stuck at less than 1%, well below the Fed’s 2% target.

Central bank officials predict inflation will approach their target in 2016. The trouble is they have made the same prediction for the past four years. If the Fed is again fooled, it may find it raised rates too soon, risking recession.

Low inflation—and low prices—sound beneficial but can stall growth in wages and profits. Debts are harder to pay off without inflation shrinking their burden. For central banks, when inflation is very low, so are interest rates, leaving little room to cut rates to spur the economy during downturns.

Full employment? No one walking around America thinks we are anywhere near full employment. Anyone older than 40 should remember the booms of the 80’s and 90’s when employers were offering bonuses to new hires and employing headhunters to poach workers from other firms. That has not happened in a long time.

Of course, the labor force participation rate is at a 38-year low. Some of it is certainly due to demographics. We have more old farts on the dole due to the boomers hitting retirement, but that’s just starting as the first boomers hit retirement. The stunning truth is there’s an employment boom among the geezers. It is the young struggling with the stagnant job market.

That’s one bit of unreality. The other bit is the zero inflation stuff. I’ve gone around and around with economists about chain weighted inflation and the logic applies here. Granny may have substituted dog food for ground beef, but that does not mean inflation is flat. Similarly, every retail container has shrunk over the last decade, even though the prices are generally stable. Shrinkflation is a real thing we all see every day of our lives.

Putting aside those two complaints, which are always dismissed by economists as ridiculously based in observable reality, there is the confidence they have even in the face of being wrong. Exactly no one in the economics profession saw the crash coming and now they can’t figure out why they can’t re-inflate the world economy. But being wrong is juts proof we need more economists!

The site where I saw this story linked had a comment from someone mentioning The Modigliani–Miller theorem in rebuttal to some other comment. For those unfamiliar with that particular tarot card, here’s the definition:

“The basic theorem states that under a certain market price process (the classical random walk), in the absence of taxes, bankruptcy costs, agency costs, and asymmetric information, and in an efficient market, the value of a firm is unaffected by how that firm is financed.”

Therein lies the fundamental problem with economics and why it is not a STEM field. The entire profession is based on “all things being equal” or “in the absence of observable reality” statements that would get you laughed out of an empirical field. The only field that is close in the use of hothouse logic is climate science.

None of this is to say we should dismiss economics out of hand. In fact, the statistical study of human behavior should be a part of public policy debates. Where every economist goes wrong is in thinking he has found the philosopher’s stone once he finishes his first statistics course. As a result, the field never gets better. But when there is good money in being wrong, why be less wrong?

It is a pity because we will probably have to go through a near death experience before we figure out the mistakes. The Great Depression finally taught the West that the money supply also includes outstanding credit. The modern economic profession is not learning anything new, despite the fact we have experienced the greatest technological leap forward since the wheel on top of a revolution in credit.

Will They Miss Me When I’m Gone?

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A while back I posted about my plan to dump my TV subscription. One obvious reason for cutting the cord, probably the one most cited by surveys, is the expense. Americans are seeing their TV bills jump every year averaging something close to $150 per month in some areas. There’s simply no way to justify it so people are cutting the cord and relying on services like Hulu and Netflix.

Another reason, I suspect, is cultural. The great upheavals we are seeing in politics across the West are over a common divide. On one side are people who wish to maintain their traditions and customs. They embrace material advances, but they also embrace the cultural heritage that has made those advances possible. For us, the past is not a foreign country. It is our country.

On the other side are the people who hate everything about the present, seeing it as an impediment to their quest for the glorious future. The past that produced this horrible present is a nightmare from which they can never awake, which is why they seek to smash it all to bits. Tradition is their cage and they want out, even if that means destroying themselves and everyone else in the process.

Watch American television for any length of time and you can’t help noticing the proselytizing in favor of the wrecking ball. I turned on the NFL yesterday and it was endless chatter about the wonderfulness of Cam Newton, the Carolina Panther QB. Despite being a mediocre player, his team is undefeated, due entirely to its defense. But Cam is black so he must be hoisted onto our shoulders and paraded around as a hero.

What’s galling about this nonsense is people, who know better, play along because they fear losing their career if they are not sufficiently enthusiastic. Instead of pointing out that Newton is just not screwing up as much as usual, but is otherwise mediocre, they lay on the praise as only a fearful supplicant can do. Sporting events have been turned into preaching moments and I’m sick of it.

Having had enough of the preaching, I wheeled around the dial thinking I should see if there is anything I’ll miss when I drop TV. I saw a commercial for a show called Supergirl. The 30 second ad made clear it was aimed at people with the IQ of a goldfish. It also made clear that it was just more proselytizing. We are endlessly barraged with agit-prop telling us how wonderful 20-something white women are at everything and how hard it is for them because of the Pale Penis People.

I can probably ignore that nonsense, but you can’t even see a decent movie because they keep insisting on making Vagina Power movies like the Hunger Games and now Star Wars. Yep, Star Wars will now make the hero a gal who defies the laws of physics by beating up all the men. It is one thing to suspend disbelief but being asked to accept an 80-pound girl throwing around a 250-pound man without the use of magic is a bridge too far.

What I find intolerable about this trend is not that the female is the action hero. It’s that all the men are now pussies. According to our cultural overlords, the ideal white man is a bisexual wimp who is led around by the nose. I’ll grant that foppishness is more common today, especially with the young, but that’s a result of the Progressive kulturkampf. Television is not a reflection of the culture, it’s the whip used on the culture.

I think what has put me over the edge is the new habit of ad makers to feature mixed race couples. I guess they think every white man in America dreams of bringing a black man home to the old lady. They never feature a white guy and a black woman. It’s always a black guy and a white woman and it is most certainly on purpose.

The most egregious example is the Audi ad where the old white man is puttering around the house listening to the weatherman telling him the storm is shutting down all the roads. The visual tells us he is waiting for his family, but the storm means he will be left alone to eat cat food. Then the family bursts in because their Audis let them brave the snowstorm and see grandpa.

It looks great until we see that the grandkids are black and the son-in-law is the reason. The message they are sending could only be clearer if the son-in-law was speaking a foreign tongue. Audi is telling all the old Pale Penis People out there that their day is done. If they want to have a peaceful death, they better lie back and accept it.

Yesterday, I saw an ad where a couple, black man and white woman of course, is camping with their kids. One kid is black and one is white. Maybe this is supposed to be the new Brady Bunch. Maybe the ad makers are unfamiliar with the basics of biology. Then again, the howling at the moon lunatics producing this stuff think biology is a social construct. What matters, the only thing that matters to them, is the message.

It’s not the mixed race stuff that bugs me. It is the ham-fisted proselytizing that sends me over the edge. At least make the kids look like the product of a mixed race marriage. If they were honestly trying to sell their vision of the future, I could at least pretend it is negotiable. But that’s the point they are trying to make. It’s not negotiable and you better get used to it.

That’s really what has done it for me, I guess. The people in charge are so smug, so arrogant, they don’t even try to make their case anymore. It’s just a non-stop blaring of the megaphones. In North Korea they have a PA speaker in the center of every village, screaming out propaganda. In America, we have installed these things in our homes. It turns out that the hippies were partially right. It’s time to drop out.

They will miss me more than I’ll miss them, now and in the glorious future they imagine without me.

What Comes Next

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Read a lot of history and you’ll notice that wars are more often than not blamed on a few factors. One is aggression by one state, lusting after territory or resources held by another state. The other factor leading to war is the lack of foresight, the failure to look beyond the moment. The Austrian Ultimatum to Serbia is an example and one to keep in mind when watching what is happening in the Near East.

It’s impossible to know, of course, but by 1916 I would bet the Austrians deeply regretted sending that ultimatum to the Serbs. By that point in the war, the Austrians were exhausted by the cost of war and ready to throw in the towel. Even though it should have been obvious, no one imagined what industrial age war was going to do to Europe. They learned the hard way.

Because the Great War was a long time ago, no one remembers it or cares much about it these days, but the lessons of that war are instructive today. At the dawn of the last century, the newly industrialized Europe was still trying to make pre-industrial political systems work, despite the obvious problems. Just as important, the great powers were trying hard to maintain an international system that worked fine in the age of sail but was inadequate for the industrial age.

That’s what comes to my mind when thinking about the friction between Russia and Turkey over the conflict in Syria. The Turks and Russians have had reason to make war on one another for over 500 years. In 1556, the Astrakhan Khanate was conquered by Ivan the Terrible, who had a new fortress built on a steep hill overlooking the Volga. In 1568 the Ottomans sent a force of Turks and Tatars to lay siege to Astrakhan, with the idea of taking it from the Russians.

The military governor of Astrakhan drove back the besiegers using local militia and then a Russian army counter attacked and drove off the Turks and Tatars. On their way home, up to 70% of the Ottoman soldiers froze to death in the steppes. In The Great War something similar happened to the Turks at Battle of Sarikamish. The retreat left 90,000 Turks dead, most of them freezing to death in the mountains. This crushing defeat was blamed on the Armenians, which lead to the Armenian Genocide.

Stories like this one should give everyone one pause, as these are two people with a long, long memory of reasons to hate one another. It’s not going to take much to whip up support in either country for going to war with the other. There’s also the fact that both Putin and Erdogan have strong domestic constituencies in favor of bellicose and aggressive foreign policies. That alone is enough to precipitate hostilities.

There’s also the fact that like the Great War, the West is laboring under a treaty system that no longer fits the current age. The Pax Americana made perfect sense when the Soviets were aiming a bunch of tanks and missiles at Europe. NATO was a logical and practical response to the Soviet threat.

Today it makes no sense for a country of 300 million to defend a continent of 500 million, when that continent is no longer facing a real military threat. The modern Russian army would stall before it made it to Oder–Neisse Line, due to the lack of supplies. There’s simply no reason for America to have troops in Europe and there no reason for NATO to exist.

Another comparison to the Great War is the overall stupidity of key leaders in the West. President Obama makes Kaiser Wilhelm look like Bismarck. Look around Europe and it is hard to find anyone that you would trust in a crisis. This invites the sort of mischief we have seen from Russia in Ukraine, the Baltics and now the Near East. Of course, like Tsar Nicholas, Putin could very well be standing on a rotting pedestal of authority.

Comparisons to the Great War are worthwhile, but now is not then and we have new challenges today for which even the savviest leader is unprepared. As we saw in the Ukraine, asymmetrical war is a new breed of cat. Those “little green men” who turned up in Crimea have no obvious analog in the past. That’s why the West was caught totally unprepared for it.

Then there is the use of unconventional warriors, like Muslim terrorists. Russia may not be able to invade Poland, but they can facilitate the movement of ISIS suicide bombers into your kid’s grammar school. The commodity war that the Saudis have been waging against Iran and Russia is yet another facet of the new brand of total war. You can be sure the Saudis will have qualms about funding Chechen terrorist either.

The wild card, the thing that makes easy comparisons to Europe’s past difficult, is the collapse of Islam. We don’t think of what’s going on in the Muslim world as a collapse since it serves our ruler’s interests to pretend it is something more malign. The endless propaganda painting Islam as Nazism is so the public will sign onto forever war. Drive around the Imperial Capital and you find thousands of firms getting rich off dropping bombs on the muzzies.

Islam is not ascendant, no matter what the rulers claim. Islam is in collapse, a collapse similar to what happened to Christendom in The Thirty Years War. The various sects within Islam are at war with one another over a dwindling amount of influence over their culture. Western materialism is shrinking the pie, as it were, and the tribes of Islam are at war over who will get the lion’s share of what comes next.

And no one comes next.

A Million Words Or Less

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This morning I noticed that I’m approaching one million words. I have a widget that counts posts, words, comments and so forth. I’ve never paid much attention to the total word count until I noticed the odometer was about to turn over somewhere in the next post.

Allegedly the word count excludes the quoted texts from links, so those million words are all mine. That sounds like a lot, but the math says it is roughly 700 words per day. I don’t post every day, but I often post more than one thing in a day.

This is the officially the millionth word: Hurray!

I try to keep my essays at the 1000 word length on the theory that most people have the attention span of a gnat. The internet has damaged our brains, making long pieces unreadable. I still read long form essays, but I do so in stages. I’ll read a chunk and then put it aside and then read another chunk. Part of it is the medium, but like everyone, my attention span has shrunk thanks to the internet.

Looking through the activity logs, it appears I have about 25,000 regular readers. There’s a gizmo on the site to tell me how many non-robot visitors I get every day, week, month and so on. I never look at it as I’m not running a storefront. If I ever tried to make money from this, then maybe it would mean something to me. As it stands, I have 25,000 readers who come by multiple times a month.

I’m a little surprised by the number as I have done nothing to promote the blog. The readership is entirely word of mouth. Most of that mouth is Gerard Van der Leun from American Digest. I also get a ton of traffic from Maggies Farm. Both are great sites by the way. Doug Ross also sends a lot of people my way. There are others, of course, but those are the top three referrers.

I get most visits from US readers, but number two on the hit parade is Britain. Someone sent me a message claiming to be a UK based reader and thanking me for my efforts. They said they have to read US sites for this type of content as it is largely banned in Europe. Strangely, I get very little Canadian traffic. Maybe they have enough domestically produced vitriol and bile. Maybe they are too drunk to work the internets.

As has been pointed out, I’m starting to cast a shadow. My Overton Window bit with regards to trump turned up in a lot of gentile places, suggesting some good thinkers are slumming it with the bad thinkers like me. That makes this site like the slave quarters in the bad old days. Instead of coming here for the hootenanny, the beautiful people come to the ghetto for ideas and insights. Z is the new black!

Anyway, thank you to all the folks who spread the good news and thank you for being a reader. I appreciate it greatly. After the revolution, your contributions will be noted.

The Battle Cry of the Ruling Class

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For a couple of decades now, Jonah Goldberg has fashioned a lucrative career for himself as the man with two hats. One hat lets him be a man of the managerial class, writing books and long winded articles on the wonderfulness of the status quo, as well as the people in charge of it.

The other hat lets him be the proletarian every-man who likes bad movies and throwing food at the screen when a ruling class type comes in the scene. This act has got him a spot in elite conservative media, a perch at a conservative think tank and a big house in one of the richest counties on earth.

Way back when Jonah Goldberg was still working on the act, he used to do mixers where he would show up at a bar and mix it up with the readers of National Review Online. This was late 90’s early 2000’s or thereabouts. At the time, Goldberg was still approachable, so I approached him and we chatted a bit. I mentioned in passing something about VDare, I don’t recall what anymore, but the reaction from Goldberg is what I do remember clearly.

He went from being a jocular dufus to being a serious scold. His exact words were “You should not talk about that or any of them. Trust me. Don’t even read it.” The serious look of panic on his face has always stuck with me. I’ve never been a VDare reader, then or now, I just knew it from John Derbyshire and that was the context in which I mentioned it. If Jonah’s fear had mass, a black hole would have opened up and sucked everyone into it.

I bring up this incident as a bit of a follow up to my post the other day on the weaponization of race by the left side of the ruling coalition. Peter Brimelow and the people that appear on his site have been declared un-persons due to their lack of faith. Even associating with them is cause for expulsion. Bob Weisberg was ceremoniously fired for having been in proximity to these un-persons. You’ll note the extra effort to signal to the left side that the official position of the right side is no different from that of the left side.

It’s also a good lead-in to another topic, the Trumpaphobia that is breaking out like hives on the flesh of the conservative media. Jonah Goldberg has this column up today, which is a column length version of “This Is Not Who We Are”, the new anthem of Conservative Inc. All week one version or another of “this is not who we are” has been trumpeted by those brave heroes in conservative media., who when wearing the proletarian hat, claim to be fighting the good fight on our behalf.

At first blush, it appears Goldberg is just repeating the same chant we have been hearing for a year now. “Donald Trump is no Conservative!” The use of abracadabra words is not just a peculiar tick of Progressives. The Professional Right does it too. Anyone who threatens their comfortable lifestyles like Bob Weisberg mentioned above, gets excommunicated from the Church of Modern Conservatism. Trump exposes the conservative media racket for what it is, so they hate him for it.

That’s what is often missed. The way it is supposed to work is the GOP works with National Review, Fox News, “grass roots” organizations that have K Street offices and so on. That way, these folks can make some money, get relatives jobs in the bureaucracy and look like players in the “arena of ideas.” In return, these groups go to the megaphones and rally the voters by declaring the GOP candidate the next Ronald Reagan.

Trump, obviously, is having none of that and he is winning. That’s a big problem if you make your living selling GOP product in conservative media. The folks at Fox News used to think they were the gatekeepers, the king makers on the Right. Now they look like chumps because the guy most likely to win the GOP nomination treats them like human footstools. The ditsy blonde they sent out to whack Trump in the first debate came back in a shoe box and they have never recovered from it.

The other thing Goldberg is up to here is signaling to the other side of the managerial class that he remains a good thinker. He closes with this:

And I would argue that his “very conservative” followers aren’t supporting Trump because he’s a conservative but because he’s a walking, talking thumb in the eyes of “elites” in the media and both parties. The claim that Trump is a committed conservative is not very believable. Until recently, he was for higher taxes on the wealthy, taking in Syrian refugees, and single-payer health care. He almost never talks about the Constitution, faith, or liberty unless forced to. In 2012, Trump condemned Mitt Romney for being too harsh on illegal immigration. In May of this year, he attacked “publicity seekers” who needlessly provoked Muslims.

Put another way, Goldberg is telling his coevals in the media that “real” conservatives just talk about stuff and never offer any resistance to the status quo or the dominance of the American Left. Anything that smacks of real resistance or an alternative to the moral superstructure of the status quo is off-limits. These columns emanating from conservative media are no about Trump, immigration or popular Right. They are loyalty oaths.

If it comes down to it, if the choice is between the bad thinkers and their racist, fascist Islamophobia, Jonah and all “good conservatives” will lock shields with their Progressive brothers and defend the status quo to the death if necessary. Egalitarianism, Multiculturalism and Antiracism are the raison d’etre and cri de guerre of the ruling class.

Visitor From Another Planet

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Spend anytime around an American politician and you are often confronted with what seems like a paradox. On the one hand, they are clever and socially agile enough to rise in politics, win office and get rich without going to jail. On the other hand, they are astoundingly clueless about the lives of their fellow citizens. It’s as if they have learned about America from a book on their way here from another planet.

A story I often tell to illustrate this is the time I was helping setup for a party at a Congressman’s home. The landscaping guys failed to show up so someone would have cut the grass around the back patio. No one knew how a lawnmower worked. The staffers, the Congressman and his kids were baffled my a Toro push lawn mower. They spent an hour examining like it had fallen from the sky.

Anyway, this all around otherness was on display when Bernie Sanders dropped in on the hood this week.

Hoping to reach African-American voters nationally in his bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday toured the West Baltimore neighborhood where Freddie Gray was arrested — and likened the poverty he observed to that of the Third World.

The independent senator, who describes himself as a democratic socialist, walked the streets of Sandtown-Winchester for about 20 minutes, joined by community leaders and a swarm of cameras that mostly blocked his view of boarded rowhomes and crumbling marble steps. A handful of residents joined the spectacle, and occasionally broke out in chants of Gray’s name.

The scene provided dramatic visuals of the economic inequality Sanders has made the center of his campaign, offering a new backdrop from which to argue for a higher minimum wage, tuition-free public college and tougher federal regulations of the nation’s banking sector.

“Anyone who took the walk that we took around this neighborhood would not think you’re in a wealthy nation,” Sanders told reporters later at the Freddie Gray Empowerment Center in Bolton Hill. “You would think that you were in a Third World country.”

I would imagine Bernie was thinking, “Holy crap! Look at all these…abandoned houses.” Sanders is from Vermont, but he spends little time there as he is the consummate Washington hack. Even so, his home state is one of the whitest places on earth. It has about 6,000 black people according to the last census. In other words, Bernie saw more brothers on Tuesday than there are in his entire state.

The funnier part is Sanders was probably being honest in his astonishment at seeing the ghetto. The last time he had any proximity to the ghetto was over 50 years ago when he lived in Brooklyn. After that he was off to college and a world of socialist white people debating about how to help those brown people they saw through their telescopes. The ghetto was a place that existed in theory for a guy like Sanders.

Even so, it’s amazing that a man could be on earth for 70 years and not have some idea of life in the black ghetto. It’s not like Vermont does not have television or newspapers. Yet, there was Bernie, flabbergasted at seeing blown out houses, broken streets and throngs of jobless blacks milling about with nothing to do other than mill about the neighborhood. Even a  chump like Sanders had to sense he was way out of his league.

As Sanders toured West Baltimore, the trial of the first of six police officers charged in Gray’s death entered its seventh day in a downtown courtroom.

Before Sanders arrived in Bolton Hill, a campaign aide asked a group of about a dozen supporters not to cheer him.

The group, which included a woman who held a large banner that read “Bernie Sanders for President,” obliged; as a result, his arrival was more somber than a typical campaign appearance.

Sanders began the tour at the CVS at North and Pennsylvania avenues that burned during the riots. He walked to the corner of Presbury and North Mount streets, near where Gray was arrested, and looked up at a large mural of Gray.

Sanders then met with prominent faith leaders in Bolton Hill.

Residents yelled as Sanders passed by, and some joined the media throng. One shouted “He’s the only candidate without a super PAC!” — repeating a point Sanders has often made.

“We don’t want Trump,” shouted another.

Some held signs pointing to long-standing complaints with the city’s public housing: “We deserve safe and livable housing.”

“I’m impressed,” said Michael Williams, a West Baltimore man who described himself as a Hillary Clinton fan. “There has never been a person running for president to come to our neighborhood.”

The distance between the people and their rulers is never more obvious than when a guy like Sanders visits the ghetto for a photo-op. Baltimore has been governed by men like Sanders for half a century. The reason it is like a third world country is it has been ruled by third world men. Eventually, the only people left were third world too.Everything Bernie thinks is a great idea has been done in Baltimore and it is a third world shit-hole as a result.

Sanders, however, can’t see that. Fanatics have no concept of the past. As far as he is concerned, he has been “fighting to fix the ghetto” his whole life. He really believes it. That’s the paradox. Sander is a smart guy, but he is consumed by a religious zeal that blinds him to that which is obvious to most people. Instead of sporting a black hat and beard, Bernie’s religion is Progressive politics. He’ll die before giving it up.

Fear of the R

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In my most recent post in the series, “My Theory of Everything” I got into the weaponization of race by the dominant half of the ruling elite. The three-legged dog that is the dominant orthodoxy of America relies excursively on the moralization of race to point where noticing anything about race is dangerous. Egalitarianism, Multiculturalism and anti-racism are the three legs, but it is anti-racism that is both the cause and consequence of this worldview.

The Right, what’s left of it, is so fearful of the race issue that they invest all of their time inventing ways to achieve some of the results that flow naturally from freedom of association, but in a way that inoculates them from the race issue. In some cases, they invent externalities that get them off the hook so they can avoid the wrath of the Left. In America, the worst thing that can happen to you is to be tagged a racist.

Yesterday, Jim Geraghty posted a panicked response to Trump’s proposal to ban Muslim immigration. In it is he makes the absurd claim that everyone has a right to migrate and settle in America. After all, that is the only way to read the claim that preventing Muslims from immigrating is unconstitutional. If the charter of the nation prohibits immigration, then only Hitler would be against immigration!

The poor man is so afraid of the race issue that he is willing to sign onto dissolving the nation, if that’s what it takes to avoid the “R” word. Even after people with some knowledge of the Constitution and American history explained to him that he was hilariously mistaken about the constitutionality of it, he still clung to his belief like a drowning man. “Better dead than racist” is the mantra.

Today, Roger Simon has a similar trip down loony-tune lane looking for a way to avoid the scarlet letter, while remaining serious about the problem of Sudden Mohammedan Explosion.

As half the world knows by now, Donald Trump has gone “Full Monty” on Muslim immigration, calling for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.”

That’s our Donald — never a master of understatement! (But he certainly knows how to make monkeys out of the media — kudos for that.)

Like most commentators, however, I don’t agree with him — I support the Constitution and its freedoms — but to deny we have a gigantic Muslim problem in this country and in the world is to be a troglodyte of epic proportions.  Something has to be done, domestically and internationally, even if it’s not Donald’s “Full Monty.”

First he makes sure to put lots of space between himself and the bad thinker. Then he tries to cuddle up to the audience by laughing at how silly the media has been over Trump. Finally he makes clear he is a good thinker who rejects the bad thinker because he supports the Constitution and its freedoms and puppies, he loves puppies too.

Unlike Jim Geraghty, Roger Simon is not a blockhead, but he has the same fear of racism and so he decides to find some non-racist way to do the same thing. His proposal is to ban Sharia, which makes Trump’s plan to ban Muslim immigration sound modest and sober. Simon apparently thinks banning Muslim immigrants is a horrible crime against “who we are”, but it is OK to unleash the police state to root out people who want to change the laws to match their beliefs.

Now, it is possible that Simon is just as dumb as Geraghty, but my sense here is that fear of the “R” word is so intense it warps the thoughts of otherwise sensible people. The narcotic of the ruling class is anti-racism. They chew it like the khat. If you want to be a part of elite culture, you better chew on it too. Otherwise, you will always be under suspicion and eventually evicted.

The fact is, Trump’s idea is not preposterous; it is impractical. We can’t screen for Islam, but we can close up the migration programs bringing in people from Muslim countries. There’s no upside to bringing in Afghans or Somalis. If Americans want grace by helping these people, planes fly to these countries, not just from them. Let the grace seekers hop a plane to Marrakesh and help the Mohammedan in his native land.

But then, saying that means casting doubt on the whole moral structure of the ruling class. If Mohamed is not going to workout as a potential citizen in a modern technological society, then that means not all men are the same after all. If that’s true then universal equality is false. At that point the whole rationale for the modern American ruling elite unravels. A ruling class without a raison d’être is going to have a short shelf life.

After a Mohammedan went bonkers and shot up a military base, General Casey came forward and said, “Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that’s worse.” Most thought he was just a pussy-whipped groveler, but he really meant it. They all mean it. They see regular Mohammedan mass murder as the price we pay so they can remain in charge.

My Theory of Everything: Part V

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After The Yankee North destroyed the South in the Civil War and assumed the dominant position in America, the first President following Lincoln was a Southerner named Andrew Johnson. He was born in the Tidewater but raised in Appalachia so you could say he was not really from the Deep South, but he was certainly not a Yankee.

Regardless, the ruling majority hated him and never trusted him, so they did everything to scuttle his presidency, even trying to remove him from office. When you hear Progressives talk about the worst presidents, they always include Johnson on the list, either by the transitive property through Nixon (Impeachment) or as a benchmark.

Johnson left office in 1869 and the next time a man of the South dominated the political culture of the nation was never. Benjamin Harrison was from Indiana, a state settled mostly by red necks from Appalachia, but Harrison was a proto-Progressive. Wilson, of course, was a man from the South, but no one in their right mind would consider him a man of the South. Most consider Wilson the model for modern Progressive politicians.

Wilson is an interesting topic for a lot of reasons, but for my purposes here his participation in the founding of The Presbyterian Church in the United States is instructive. Wilson went from being a Private Protestant to a Public Protestant, from a Cavalier to a Roundhead. His accent to the top of Progressive America was arguably the result of his conversion. Wilson was an inscrutable man and that is mostly due to him being a Yankee convert from the South.

Anyway, the point here is that American political and cultural life has been dominated by the northern regions, particularly the old Yankee region. The political culture that developed was explicitly exclusive of the defeated regions of the country. Instead, it was a battle between the more conservative midland culture on one side and the more activist Yankee culture on the other. German Protestants on the one hand and English Protestants on the other.

As the defeated parts of the country, we brought back into the fold, the two warring halves of the political elite fought over the new constituencies. Similarly, as the frontier populations of the West emerged as states, the ruling elite battled to bring these cultures into their coalition. These coalitions have never been fixed as we saw with Grover Cleveland, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

As times changed, the coalitions changed, but the organizing ethos has remained the same ever since the Reconstruction. One side is the Grover Cleveland wing and the other is the Teddy Roosevelt wing. They assemble electoral majorities from the scraps of the other regions of America. At one point the South was formally in the Democrat camp but had no voice. Now they are in the Republican camp and have no voice.

From Reconstruction through the World War II, one wing used moral crusades to force the other side into going along with their proposals. Prohibition, for example, was mostly about the old Yankee scolds trying to reign in the Catholic immigrants. Women’s suffrage was a tool to expand the voter base of one side at the expense of the other. This dynamic has been with us for over 100 years. One side starts a revival and the other cleans up after it runs its course.

In mid-century, what we now call the Left landed on the ultimate moral cause – race. Instead of hustling votes with promises to give the Negroes free stuff, Progressives figured out how to make race a moral issue that can pry open other areas of American life to their meddling. More important, as a moral issue, it forced the other side of the ruling coalition into a partnership.

The most obvious example to see this is with public education. From the founding, this was a local issue. The race angle allowed Progressives to make it a national issue on moral grounds. Blacks were not getting a proper education because of racism so that meant a federal takeover of the schools. Those who opposed them were immoral racists and therefore excluded from the debate.

This new weapon had the immediate effect of gutting American conservatism by taking freedom of association off the table. At its core, American conservatism has always been based on the idea that you have the right to be left alone. That can only be possible if you have the absolute right to associate or disassociate with whomever you please. Once racism became a mortal sin, freedom of association was lost.

The secondary impact was to permanently make “the south” morally inferior and therefore prohibited from joining the ruling elite. The sin of slavery and then segregation has forever stained the soul of every southerner and every conservative. In order for a man of the right to gain acceptance he has to grovel endlessly and abandon most of what it means to be a conservative. Racism as the highest sin made certain that The South could never rise again. At least that’s the theory.

The denouement of this historical cycle is coinciding with the unraveling of the ruling coalition. Part of it is the collision of the prevailing orthodoxy with biological reality. It turns out that all men are not equal after all. More importantly, diversity and proximity do not mix. Another part is demographics. The number of people without representation in the ruling elite outnumber the number of people with representation in it. There’s no avoiding mathematics.

Trump: Dragging The Overton Window Our Way

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A year ago, the great frustration of the Dissident Right was that the “I” word was pretty close to being the “N” word in politics. The only time members of either party discussed the issue was when they were preaching the glories of open borders and flooding your neighborhood with foreigners. Mitt Romney actually said he wanted to throw you out of your job in order to make room for a foreigner.

Then Trump came along talking about building a big beautiful wall along the southern border. The political class howled, but the public applauded. The interesting thing about the last six months is that the Republican Party has avoided going after Trump on immigration, instead attacking him in crude personal ways. Even the insulated elites felt the ground shifting on the issue.

The thing about Trump is he is the ultimate opportunist so he has drifted from the immigration issue of late, taking shots at the other candidates as the opportunity presented itself. I called him the Leverage Candidate back in the summer, because he invests everything into the next deal he thinks he can win.  It’s his mentality so he is going to meander from topic to topic.

The other thing about Trump is he is a risk taker, but he is not foolish. He saw how Carson picked up support after he said honest things about Islam. I suspect he saw that and wondered how he could use it. Then the muzzies went bonkers and shot up Paris and then California soTrump is about to drag the Overton Window a few clicks in the right direction.

Donald J. Trump called on Monday for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on” after the terrorist attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., an extraordinary escalation of rhetoric aimed at voters’ fears about members of the Islamic faith.

A prohibition of Muslims – an unprecedented proposal by a leading American presidential candidate, and an idea more typically associated with hate groups – reflects a progression of mistrust that is rooted in ideology as much as politics.

Mr. Trump, who in September declared “I love the Muslims,” turned sharply against them after the Paris terrorist attacks, calling for a database to track Muslims in America and repeating discredited rumors that thousands of Muslims celebrated in New Jersey on 9/11. His poll numbers rose largely as a result, until a setback in Iowa on Monday morning. Hours later Mr. Trump called for the ban, fitting his pattern of making stunning comments when his lead in the Republican presidential field appears in jeopardy.

Saying that “hatred” among many Muslims for Americans is “beyond comprehension,” Mr. Trump said in a statement that the United States needed to confront “where this hatred comes from and why.”

“Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life,” Mr. Trump said.

This is horrifying, of course, to the ruling class, but most Americans will think it blazingly obvious. We can’t seem to figure out which Muslims are going to blow, so why import millions of them into the country? Again, the number of people walking around saying “We need more Muslims” rounds to zero.

The beauty of this move is it not only shifts the conversation, it will flushes out the lunatics in the GOP. Trump is not just moving the window of acceptable discourse, he is trolling the meatheads and nitwits that pose as statesmen.

Repudiation of Mr. Trump’s remarks was swift and severe among religious groups and politicians from both parties. Mr. Trump is “unhinged,” said one Republican rival, former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, while another, while another, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, called the ban “offensive and outlandish.” Hillary Clinton said the idea was “reprehensible, prejudiced and divisive.” Organizations representing Jews, Christians and those of other faiths quickly joined Muslims in denouncing Mr. Trump’s proposal.

The thing we’re seeing with Trump is that there is no benefit in playing along with these people. The better course is to keep pushing the boundary and force the Social Justice League of America to defend their position. In a weird way, Trump is doing to the ruling class what Progressives have done to traditional Americans for fifty years. He swings the wrecking ball and says, “Tell me why I shouldn’t do it.”

Experts on immigration law and policy expressed shock at the proposal Monday afternoon.

“This is just so antithetical to the history of the United States,” said Nancy Morawetz, a professor of clinical law at New York University School of Law, who specializes in immigration. “It’s unbelievable to have a religious test for admission into the country.”

She added: “I cannot recall any historical precedent for denying immigration based on religion.”

Times change Nancy, times change.

The War On White

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Living in an area dominate by the Cut of Modern Liberalism. I get to see some hard thumping moonbat politicians up close. Liberal politicians are a lot like Muslims in that they will try hard to blend in when they are a minority. Progressive taqiyya allows the adherent to adopt positions contrary to the one true faith if that’s what it takes to win office. Bernie Sanders, for example, is pro-gun.

In their natural environment where they feel they can be open in their faith, it is a different matter. In a state like Massachusetts, for example, you can’t be too far to the Left, so you end up with hilariously crazy congressmen and senators. Right now, one Mass senator is a fake Indian and the other used to be an ice cream truck driver, earning him the nickname Mr. Frosty.

Liberal politicians in the Imperial Capital have been running ads letting us know how they have “stood up to the NRA” as if that means anything. They are working with the White House on a choreographed effort to take away white people’s guns. To do that, they are working hard to make owning a gun the moral equivalent of owning a black guy.

Tonight, the Head Nitwit In Charge is giving a speech blaming inanimate objects for making those wonderful Muslims go bonkers and shoot up a Solstice party. This is supposed to be the cherry on top of the media blitz the White House has orchestrated in their push to take guns from white people. The Daily News had this last week. The New Yorker had this cover and the NYTimes ran an unhinged op-ed on their front page. Again, this an orchestrated campaign.

One interesting aspect to this is Team Moonbat is pretty much playing to every stereotype people have of Progressives. The only thing missing here is for Obama to start wearing wool socks and sandals, while sporting an earring. Back pew mnoonbats probably think this is a great strategy. A lack of self-awareness is a feature of all cults. Meanwhile, gun sales are at record levels and keep breaking monthly sales records.

The other interesting part of this, and somewhat related to the above, is that this is a standard tactic from the Progressive playbook. First, they pronounce on some issue drawing a line between what is and what is not morally acceptable to them. Then they demonize someone or some group they see as representative of the bad think. At this point, the Conservative Inc. is trembling, unwilling to take on their masters, but forced to defend the victims. This is where they are relied upon to find a way to surrender.

Homosexual marriage is a good example. Twenty years ago, it was a joke. A man marrying a man was a standard gag in comedy. Then, it was ruled out of bounds as the Cult geared up their assault on marriage. This is where Conservative Inc. came up with “civil unions” thus ceding the point, while pretending to stand up for normal people and their traditions.

Then all of a sudden, anyone holding the traditional opinion on marriage was hooted down and declared out of bounds. Today, if you are found to be insufficiently enthusiastic for two dykes playing house, the state takes your property away and threatens you with prison. Every baker in America now lives in fear of the local buggery society.

That’s the plan here with guns. The Daily News piece flat out says Nicholas Thalasinos deserved death because he was a fan of the NRA. The NYTimes declares, “It is a moral outrage and national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency.” In other words, owning a gun is immoral, unless you guard the NYTimes building, then it is OK. Otherwise, there can be no defense of gun ownership.

One way to look at this is that the cult thinks they will win on this as they have every other issue. They have made gun ownership immoral now so the Right will tremble and then find a way to surrender to the Left on guns. It’s tempting to think they are nuts, given America’s love affair with guns, but these are the same people who passed Prohibition. Progressives tend to get what they want even when the public opposes them.

I’m not sure that’s all of it. There’s a sense of panic with the Cult these days. Integral to their worldview is the belief that they are at war with a great evil. Progressives are forever knocking over traditions in search of monsters to destroy. Since Obama was elected, the prophesies have said white racist America will try to take him out. Normal people may joke about The Backlash™, but to the Cult, it is real and they truly fear it.

In order to keep the coalition of weirdos and deviants pulling the Progressive wagon, the Cult is declaring war on white people and their guns. In other words, they are preempting The Backlash™ by apply extra helpings of The Frontlash™ by declaring gun ownership immoral. It remains to be seen whether they are prepared to go to war over it, but religious fanatics trying to immanentize the eschaton are not known for their restraint.