Author Archives: thezman

ISIS in America

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The Left has a lot in common with Islam. Progressives and Muslims have different traditions and a different vision of their desired future. The point of the comparison is not to prove they are the same. It is simply to explain by comparison. Multiculturalism has made comparison a taboo, but it is a useful way to understand things. It used to be the main way we studied cultures, but that was a long time ago in another country.

Anyway, consider this story the other day from the heart of Islam:

ISIS fighters have destroyed two ancient Muslim shrines in the oasis city of Palmyra, the Syrian government confirmed Wednesday, the latest act of cultural vandalism by the Sunni extremists.

ISIS seized control of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site dating back 2,000 years, last month, prompting fears for the site’s survival.

An email sent on behalf of Syria’s antiquities chief, Maamoun Abdulkarim, head of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums, said the body had heard four days ago from people in Palmyra of the shrines’ destruction.

“ISIS has blown up two ancient Muslim shrines in Palmyra, and has published photos of this awful crime against the Syrian cultural heritage on Facebook,” the statement said.

One of the tombs destroyed is that of Mohammed bin Ali, a descendent of Ali bin Abi Taleb, the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin, the website DGAM said. It’s in a hilly area 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) north of Palmyra.

Now, consider this story from the heart of Liberalism:

The Thomas Jefferson Memorial, which has stood near the banks of the Potomac River in Washington for more than 70 years, is a classical tribute to the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president.

This week, the Jefferson Memorial was drawn into the national debate about race following the shooting deaths of nine people in a predominantly black church in South Carolina last week. It joins other public statues depicting Southern or Confederate figures, including Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, that some are arguing represent the country’s racist past and should be removed.

CNN anchor Ashleigh Banfield this week questioned whether the Jefferson Memorial should be taken down because Jefferson owned slaves. “There is a monument to him in the capital city of the United States. No one ever asks for that to come down,” Banfield said.

Fellow anchor Don Lemon responded by saying Jefferson represented “the entire United States, not just the South.” But he added: “There may come a day when we want to rethink Jefferson. I don’t know if we should do that.”

Now, it is easy to dismiss the chattering skulls on CNN because no one watches CNN and these are two idiots with the IQ of goldfish. They are not demanding we blow up the Jefferson Memorial because it is blasphemy.

I’ll just point out that twenty years ago fringe idiots on TV were talking about men marrying men. It sounded absurd then, but now you can have your property taken if you laugh at gay marriage. Twenty years from ululating liberals could very well be blowing up the Jefferson Memorial because it offends the one true faith.

 

The Left At War

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A day will come when sacred Troy shall perish,
And Priam and his people shall be slain.

I’ve always found the Third Punic War to be a deeply instructive period of Roman history, one that helps us understand much of the modern world. What allowed the Romans to survive and then dominate their neighbors was their implacability. They never quit fighting even when they were beaten. The only ways to gain peace with Rome were surrender or defeat. No matter how many times you beat Rome in the field, they would keep coming back until they figured out how to win.

I think the reason for this is explained in the Punic Wars, particularly the final chapter that ended with the sack of Carthage. Rome was more than a place and a people. Rome was an idea, an animating force that defined the people of the city. Being Roman was more than just about lineage or location. It was a way of life, the way of life for righteous people. To accept defeat or compromise would be to reject the essence of being Roman.

It’s this nascent nationalism that drove the Romans to keep fighting. It is what drove them to sack Carthage and later Corinth. It was impossible to be Rome if these cities existed as anything other than subjugated provinces of Rome. This implacability is what carried Rome through the third century crisis period. Even when maintaining the empire made no military or economic sense, they did it anyway. It was who they were. Keep in mind that in the third century, Rome was led by men from the Balkans known then as Illyricum.

If you were an enemy of Rome, you knew there could only be two outcomes. You could surrender and hope for good terms or you could fight and eventually lose. Sure, you could win some battles and have a good run of success, but the Romans would never stop coming. Eventually, they would gain the advantage and win. Just as important, Rome did not just extract rents from conquered people. They Romanized them. Rome was the first iteration of The Borg.

This comes to mind now that we are in yet another Confederate flag debate. The first one of these was in the 90’s, but I seem to recall the Left in a snit over the flag in the 70’s when Southern Rock started using it in their stage shows. Regardless, the Left tried to stamp it out in the 90’s, the 2000’s and now again in this decade. Ever since that lunatic shot up the church in South Carolina, the Left has been buzzing about that stupid flag as if it is the cause of something.

As we saw with Obama’s birth certificate, the only people who care about this flag are liberals and lunatics, the distinction between the two is impossible without professional training. The rest of us, a group professional demographers call normal people, simply don’t care. But, we live in a country run by a quasi-religious cult and they do care, so the rest of us have to care – or else. That’s how it works in a theocracy.

What’s instructive here is we see the same implacability on display as I described with the Romans. In the 70’s and 80’s, I used to see Rebel flags on sale at convenience stores – even in Boston. Now, only outcasts display them and the occasional red neck. Most red necks have decided it is not worth the hassle. But, the Left is still determined to sack any city that flies the flag in any way shape or form. The Left never quits and never settles. They declare peace only when they have won completely and permanently.

Of course, the flag is not really the issue. That’s why normal people are caught off-guard whenever the Left starts waving it around and ululating like lunatics. The real issue is the long War Between the Whites that started in the 19th century and continues to this day. We call this the Civil War and that’s a good label, but I prefer my label, as it is more precise. Civil War implies both sides were equal or the same or viewed one another in that way. They never did and they still don’t.

In the 19th century, northern whites of mostly English ancestry used slavery as an excuse to attack and kill as a many Southern whites as possible. Those southern whites were of mostly Scots-Irish ancestry. The northern whites were ready to join their European coevals in the industrial, global age and they did not want those backward agrarian crackers holding them back. Slavery had to go and the people responsible for it had to be punished.

Abolitionists cared more about punishing southern whites after the war than the welfare of the freed slaves. The squabbling between northern lunatics and more reasonable minds over how to go about the post-war reconstruction is largely responsible for the failure of reconstruction to resolve the issue of freed slaves. That was left to the South to figure out on its own.

Like those Romans 2,000 years ago, the Left never quits or accepts defeat. For 150 years northern whites have been trying to finally eliminate their eternal enemy. Over the decades the Left evolved from an English Protestant thing into a full blown post-industrial theodicy. They still have a special hatred for southern whites, but they have expanded their field of vision to include what Obama called “typical white people.”

That’s what was missed when he made that comment. Everyone thought race, when Obama was thinking class. This is a guy raised by elites in elite culture. His grandparents were low-class compared to his coevals in prep school. They were typical Americans, which the Left identifies as middle-class, white and embarrassing. While normal people in the South have no emotions about the rebel flag, it means everything to the Left as it has always been, in their imagination, the flag of their enemy – core Americans.

If you follow the logic, so to speak, it makes perfect sense for the Left to go on jihad against the rebel flag after the white guy shot up the black church. The Left’s idealized image of the enemy is white, male, southern and poor. His flag is the Confederate flag. Therefore, the logical response to this shooting, from the perspective of the Left, is the same as the Romans when Carthaginian traders ripped off Roman merchants. That’s a policy of the extirpation.

Techno-Feudalism

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Since the dawn of human settlement, being rich has been a process, not an end point. In order to accumulate capital, you need to figure out a way to organize people in such a way that their extra becomes your extra. Ideally, you leave a little for them so they think helping you grow rich is to their benefit. But, 1,000 years of feudalism proves it is not a requirement. With the right system, you can grow rich and powerful at the expense of others.

That’s the other part of the process though. To keep the peasants, slaves, servants, workers and associates from revolting, you either invest some of your extra back into them or you invest it in men with weapons who will keep the order. Recently the former has been the preferred method, but the only proven way to keep order is the latter. That’s why gun laws are enforced by men with guns.

This is not how most Americans look at economics. I’m sure a few reading this are thinking I have been reading too much Marx. But, that’s the thing. Marx was not wrong about everything. He made some excellent observations. His recommended solutions were insane, but many of his observations were spot on and hold up well even today.

Marx observed that capitalism, as he defined it, destroys and reconfigures previous economic orders, but also that it must ceaselessly devalue existing wealth. We see this today with Uber. The old order of state run cab companies is under assault from the new order of distributed contractors linked by a public information network paid for by people who don’t use it.

Joseph Schumpeter argued that this process was not pure destruction as Marxist claimed, but a reordering that eventually added value to the old stock of capital. The automobile did not entirely obliterate the horse and buggy industry. The carriage makers moved to the car business. The property employed in keeping and raising horses did not go away. It was re-purposed for car maintenance. While some value was lost from the end of horse travel, much of it was retained and a whole new layer of value was added onto it.

Both men were working from the perspective of rapid material progress. Events seem like they favor Schumpeter as opposed to Marx as we have seen whole industries grow up in one generation, displacing an old industry from our parents’ generation. The example I love using is the fax machine. In my lifetime, I saw it created, dominate and then replaced with something different. My parents could not imagine it and the kids today have never heard of it.

When I see stories like this one, I wonder if rapid material progress has reached an end or at least a lull. This looks like techno-feudalism to me. Amazon is trying to arrange things such that they can get writers to work for the benefit of Amazon, rather than their own benefit. Amazon gets the benefit of being the world’s largest bookstore, without incurring any risk. Get halfway through some book and decide you don’t like it? No problem. The author will refund you the difference! Amazon looks like a hero and the writer is looking for food in neighborhood dumpsters.

Amazon is not the only billionaire operation running these scams. Apple is trying to screw performers out of royalties. They backed off this time, but you can see where they are headed with this. These new “rental” services are about locking up the pipeline between the creator and the customer. Once they gain that edge, they will stop paying royalties. The next step will be that small acts get nothing but the benefit of “advertising” themselves on Apple or Amazon. It’s classic rentier behavior.

These are two recent examples, but the entire financial system is nothing but feudalism these days. Banks charge people for savings accounts. That forces everyone to put their savings into equities where smart people charge fees on investment funds. This arrangement means that when the economy is strong, everyone gets richer, but the rich get very rich. When the economy falls, everyone gets poorer, except for the rich, they keep getting richer. It is heads they win tails you lose.

The reason for wondering if these are symptoms of systemic stagnation is that when the pie is expanding, the rich guys are rushing to get the lion’s share of the new pie. When the pie is not growing, they look to expand their share of the pie at the expense of the weak. The new business from expansion is always the most profitable. Cannibalizing the existing market is low margin. When big players like Apple and Amazon are slumming this way, it suggests they have nowhere else to turn for profit.

It’s what appears to be at the heart of the massive new trade bill that just passed. The point of it is not to expand the US market, letting a rising tide lift all boats. No one believes that anymore. This bill is about making it easier for global players to loot the American middle class. William the Conqueror imposed feudalism in the English speaking world after the Battle of Hastings. Silicon Valley and Wall Street are imposing it on America a millennium later.

The Crisis Period

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John Derbyshire regularly makes the point that in Europe, what defines Right and Left is not economics, but immigration. The only reason they continue to use the old terms of “right” and “left” to describe the mainstream parties is habit. While there are some differences of opinion on economics, foreign policy and regulation between the German CDU and the SDP, for instance, those differences are trivial.

The real difference between modern mainstream parties in Europe is the aesthetics. This is expressed in the leaders they choose. It varies from country to country, but usually one side prefers a Cavalier and the other a Roundhead in terms of presentation. Otherwise, the parties agree on all the big stuff, particularly immigration.

What’s happened in Europe and starting to happen in America is the rise of a new Right. These new voices are all over the map in terms of economics, social liberty and foreign policy. What unifies them is patriotism and immigration. The Danish People’s Party is a bunch of old style socialist and pro-EU, but they want a halt to immigration. The Swiss People’s party is libertarian, Eurosceptic, but anti-immigration. These parties simply want to maintain and preserve their countries.

The whole left-right political spectrum is itself a relic of a bygone era. It arose in the French Revolution when members of the National Assembly divided into supporters of the king to the president’s right and supporters of the revolution to his left. This divide was more than aesthetic. On one side was the future and on the other the past, as far as how the French would be organized as a people.

What’s important to keep in mind is this binary view of politics arose when one form of social organization was collapsing. The divine right of kings made a lot of sense when people accepted the divine. By the end of the 17th century, the ruling elite of Europe was not all that sure God existed, much less cared all that much about who was in charge of each country.

Now, nothing springs from nothing. Just as the right-left politcal spectrum grew out of the French Revolution, the EU and other extra-national organizations did not magically appear for no reason. Individual countries competing for advantage nearly snuffed out western civilization in two great industrial wars. The whole point of the EU is to keep the peace in Europe.

The trouble is it is rests on the new organizing ethos that I call the New Religion of egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism. In the EU, there’s no difference between a Frenchman, a German and a Greek. In fact. all people are the same, regardless of national origin. Further, all cultures are the same and arguing otherwise is racist.

The problem with that is two-fold. One, people outside the West are not the same as Europeans. The millions of them trying to head north into Europe pose the greatest threat to Western Civilization since Abd-al-Raḥmân was defeated at Tours. Current estimates say there are at least 500,000 migrants in Libya planning to cross the Mediterranean this summer. Given our inability to count, that number is probably double or triple and it is just the start. Tens of millions more are behind them.

As if having millions of Africans pour into your lands is not enough, it turns out that all Europeans are not equal after all. The Greeks are about to usher in another financial crisis, which could very well invite the Russians into the south of Europe. The Italians, Spanish and Portuguese are not far behind. It turns out that the people of the Mediterranean do not share Germany’s sense of frugality.

When explaining the revolts that led to the French Revolution, historians will point to the intellectual rumblings of the Enlightenment or the changing class structure of Europe. While important,the precipitating events were more mundane. Europe experienced extremely cold weather where springs came late and summers ended early. Crop failures followed and then starvation.

In the book The Collapse of Complex Societies, Joseph Tainter explains how human societies develop complex systems for solving the problems they face. That includes complex economic systems, social systems, war fighting systems, etc. These systems buckle and collapse in the face of new threats when the cost of reforming and modifying them exceeds the benefit of preserving them. When their value exceeds their cost, people invest in reforms.

In the case of the French Revolution, the highly complex economic and social systems that evolved out of the feudal period were all wrong for the emerging post-Enlightenment world. The financial crisis, bad harvests and mistakes by the ruling elite were just the final grains of sand to bring the old system down. There was no value in preserving Ancien Régime so it collapsed.

The point of this walk down memory lane is to point out how societies can evolve down a cul-de-sac. The Greeks, the current ones, invested a good chunk of their national wealth in an attempt to join Europe. They even borrowed to pay for it. That has turned out to be a disastrous decision. All of those arrangements they made are now useless to them in the current crisis and arguably part of what plagues them now. The cost of reform exceeds the benefit of reform so there will be no reform.

Circling back to where we started, the reordering of the politics of the West is in response to the stresses faced by the people of the West. The people working to form the new Right in response to the present crisis could very well be in the same tradition as the men who met at Rue Saint-Jacques. When the current arrangements are no longer able to secure the rights and prosperity of the citizens, people begin to think about what comes next.

The Left, of course, is convinced they are the vanguard of the revolution, pushing social evolution toward the promised land. They view the rise of these parties as a reactionary rearguard action by yesterday men afraid of the bold new future. In the abstract, they may be correct, but people don’t live in the abstract.

The Greeks stashing money under their beds only know that the people in charge have failed. The Dane seeing his taxes propping up a growing community of Africans in his ancestral home wonders why the people in charge permit it. Western elites are facing a crisis of legitimacy because they cannot contend with the basics people expect from their rulers.

Periods of crisis are defined by their precipitating events and their resolution. The current crisis has been brought on by mass immigration and economic stagnation. Its resolution will be one of two possibilities. One way is the existing arrangements reform and adapt in order to mitigate the migrant invasion and economic stagnation. The other way is they are wiped away and replaced by something new. There is no third option.

Shape Shifting

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One of my recurring themes here is how political liberalism operates more like a religious cult than a well thought out set of public policy opinions. In the latter, people sort through the available data updating and adjusting their opinions in order to arrive at a solution for a problem. Those opinions may be built on a set of beliefs about how society should be structured, but they say nothing about the people that hold them or the people who oppose them.

For example, the Weekly Standard crowd has a well defined set of positions, with regards to what we think of as the Middle East and North Africa. For twenty years they have insisted on heavy US involvement in these countries in order to impose Western liberal democracy and consumerism. They don’t think Obama is evil for not accepting their opinions. They don’t think Rand Paul is evil for rejecting their opinions. They are convinced these people are wrong.

Modern liberalism does not work this way. Obama and the Left were convinced Bush was evil for embarking on polices in the Middle East with which the Left disagreed. There was nothing that could dissuade them from this opinion. It was so strong that when Obama gained office, he reversed the Bush polices by evacuating from Iraq and ratcheting up the war in Afghanistan. The logic behind these decisions was simply a reaction to what they believed to be the polices of evil men. Doing the opposite of evil men, in their thinking, must be good.

Cults are always obsessed with the borders. The line between those inside the cult and those outside the cult is what defines the cult and therefore the people in it. People do not join mass movements in order to celebrate their individuality. People are attracted to mass movements out of self-loathing. They seek to exchange their identity, which they despise, with that of the group, which they believe is good or noble. Therefore, knowing that line between those who are inside and those who are outside is paramount.

This bright line between the good people inside and bad people outside frees the good people to think all sorts of things about the bad people on the other side of the walls. It’s why Progressives use words like “conservative, Republican, right-wing and extremist” as synonyms. These are all words that mean “outsider” which is just another word for bad. When I did not have a television I was often accused by liberal friends of getting my information from Fox News. They knew I did not have a TV, but they said it anyway.

People in a cult see those outside as an undifferentiated other. They are just eyes peeping out at them from the void surrounding the light of their movement. It’s why liberals will throw guys like Kevin Williamson, Nick Gillespie and Steve Sailer into the same bucket, despite the fact those three men disagree more than they agree. I’m regularly called a conservative, even though I agree with very little of what is labeled conservative these days. These distinctions do not register with Progressives.

This is on display with the Left’s reaction to the shooting in South Carolina. Progressives did not wait for the bodies to drop before pointing a finger at their enemies. They insist that the bad people are celebrating this shooting because that’s what bad people do. Progressives are largely silent on the victims and instead have invested all their time insisting this lunatic is just another member of the people outside the wall.

Small caliber opinion writers on what passes for the Right struggle with this, insisting that the debate is over facts and reason. Predictably, they spend all of their time rustling facts to disprove the claims of the Left, believing this is how one counters these attacks. I say predictably because this is another feature of how cults operate. As a defense mechanism, they look for ways to keep the people outside the walls focused on something other than the walls. It is not a conscious thing; it is an instinctual thing. People avoiding themselves naturally want to avoid notice.

Think of it this way. Imagine a herd of zebra on the plain. No single zebra wants to be an individual. They all struggle with one another to avoid the edge of the herd. The worst thing that can happen to a zebra is to be noticed by the lions. The individual instincts of each zebra become the herd’s natural group instincts. The defense mechanism of the herd is to be an amorphous blob. Just as the zebra uses stripes to fool the lion, herds of zebra uses shapelessness to fool the lions.

Modern Liberalism works in a similar way. The people who join these things, as I said before, do so in order to swap their identity with that of the group. The worst thing you can do to a Progressive is ask them questions targeting their opinions. They will try everything they can to shift the focus away from them onto something else, usually some defect they imagine in their questioner. The worst imaginable thing for a Progressive is be standing alone facing their true nature.

As an example, consider any discussion of homosexual marriage you have had with a liberal. The first bullet out of their gun is to demand why you are denying gays the same rights as straights. You see? They are not making an affirmative argument in favor of their new policy. They are not even saying their position is new. Instead, they are shifting the focus onto you, demanding you explain yourself to their satisfaction. By the time you give them the history of marriage the conversation is over and they have successfully avoided exposure.

This scales up by assigning any terrible event to the people on the other side of the wall. A lunatic shoots up a church and it is the NRA. A Muslim tries to set off a bomb in Times Square and it is probably an ObamaCare opponent. Blacks riot in Ferguson and it is white racism. The result here is the people outside the Left invest all of their time explaining why they are not to blame. That’s where the focus lies and therefore the Left avoids having the spotlight on them. It’s why they are so good at this tactic. It is integral to how mass movements function in the minority.

Bitter is the New Black

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I saw this linked on Drudge the other day and it caught my eye because he labeled it “Millennials Are More Racist.” That struck me as at odds with my own experience so I got curious. Generation Snowflake is afraid of everything especially race.

It was in the section with the stories about the South Carolina shooting, which I would normally skip, as I’m not into race porn. This is the modern phenomenon where dandies from the leisure classes wallow in misery over some racist act, real or imagined, past or present, for the entertainment of others.

The link takes you to an essay by a woman named Karen Attiah. According to her resume posted on-line, she is a graduate of Northwestern and Columbia, receiving a bachelors in communications from the former and a human rights degree from the latter. Putting aside the fact that communications is a click less rigorous than a physical education degree, both schools are training centers for members of the elite and their attendants. Graduates of those schools wait on the movers and shakers in the cultural and political elite.

Further, it says she has killed time between schooling at elite organizations like the World Bank and Duke University. She is now starting a career in media at the Washington Post as a contract worker of some sort. Even though she is pushing 30 and has yet to settle into a paying career, she sports the type of credentials one sees these days in the managerial class. Life in America has been very good to Miss Attiah and promises to be much better, assuming she avoids costly errors in judgement.

Now, her article:

America should be shaken to its very core by what happened in Charleston.

The gruesome massacre of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a historically black church in Charleston, S.C., may amount to the worst racially motivated terror attack of our generation and a deeply violent reminder that racism and white supremacy continue to course through America’s veins. One cannot help but draw comparisons to the firebombing of a black church in Birmingham, Ala., almost 52 years ago.

Shaken to its core? This is a particularly ghastly crime, shooting people in a church, but is it really so heinous that we have to question the very existence of our country?

One would expect that a graduate of elite colleges would know the word for something that happens every fifty years. That word is “rare.” In fact, “unusually rare” would be accurate. That’s opposed to something that happens every day, like black kids shooting innocent people of all races, but mostly other black people. That’s what we call “common.” So common, in fact, that hardly anyone bothers to notice.

The shooting suspect in Charleston has been identified as Dylann Roof, a white 21-year-old. He was arrested (peacefully, one should add) at a traffic stop. Many will argue about what words we will use to describe Roof, whether he should be described as a mentally disturbed kid (a description rarely applied when the alleged perpetrator isn’t a white male) or a rational adult responsible for his alleged actions. His age matters, but not for the reasons you may think.

Here’s where the bitterness shows its teeth. We see this with Obama, Holder, Jarrett, Lynch and the rest of the mulatto mafia in the White House. We see it all over the country. Blacks who have done spectacularly well, by any standard, in America run around bitter and resentful of the country that has raised them up to high status.

When Obama was born, the safe bet was to assume his mother had ruined her life and condemned her son to a life of despair. Instead, the culture changed so much and so fast that he rose rather easily to the ranks of the elite. Instead of being thankful, he is bitter.

We see it here with Miss Attiah. Her writing suggests she is qualified to cover high school softball games for the Podunk Free Press, not writing essays for the Washington Post. Given her resume and pictures on-line, it’s a safe bet that she is working the system with things other than her intellect. I don’t hold that against her, but she should be grateful she lives in a country where that is possible. In a post-racial meritocracy, she’s cleaning floors for a living.

Roof, who was born in 1994, violently shatters one particularly entrenched myth that society holds about racism — that today’s millennials are more tolerant than their parents, and that racism will magically die out as previous generations pass on. We think that millennials should be lauded for aspiring to be “colorblind.” There is the belief that tolerant young people will intermarry and create a post-racial, brown society and that it will be “beautiful.”

But the truth is that the kids are not all right when it comes to racial equality. Studies have shown that millennials are just about as racist as previous generations

I’m quoting this section in case you think I’m being unfair to Miss Attiah. Here we have one white lunatic out of tens of millions and his actions are treated as emblematic, despite being a glaring one-off. Even third rate minds can sort through this stuff. The numbers here contradict the point she is claiming. Again, things that are rare are things that don’t often occur. Miss Attiah appears to be confused by the words, “rare”, “few” “many” and “often.” How is that possible?

Of course, this sort of spaghetti-minded reasoning gets published because the editors at the Post don’t need the hassle of spiking a piece by one of the chosen people. If the editor is an old white guy and he sends this back pointing out the logical errors, his next meeting is with the human resources people to discuss his termination. So, Miss Attiah floats through life unmolested, writing nonsense others are too polite or too afraid to correct.

Way back in the olden thymes, one argument against affirmative action was that it diminished the work of those with real talent. A black guy who was smart and worked hard would look over at the black guys who got there on affirmative action and resent the people who allowed it. At the same time, blacks promoted into areas beyond their ability would resent it because they would live a life of frustration. At some level, Miss Attiah has always known she is in way over her head.

Those warnings turned out to have been prophetic. In modern America, blacks are close to being an object of worship. In another generation we will paint the Washington Monument black and make it a shrine. If you are a reasonably well behaved black person with anything on the ball, an army of white people is ready to carry you to the heights of society. Yet, those blacks on those litters resent the people carrying them and the country that permits it to happen.

Bitter is the new black.

Five Star Trump

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When I was writing this post a couple of weeks back, I had a section on how much I despised Donald Trump. But, the post got too long so I cut it out. He’s one of those people that I heard speak a few sentences and decided I did not like. That was back in the 1980’s when he was peddling himself as a master negotiator. I read his book and thought it must be some sort of gag because Trump’s advice was ridiculous.

Trump has always struck me a gold-plated phony. His real estate deals seem to always involve someone going bankrupt. He reminds me of an uncle I had as a kid. Uncle Jack had the bluster and the vanity you see with Trump. Uncle Jack always settled for the very best, even when he was broke, which was all of the time. He ended up doing ten years in federal prison. To his credit, he did his time and kept his mouth shut.

That’s probably why I never cared for Trump. My uncle Jack was not an evil man. He was just one of those assholes you always regret having met if you hang around him long enough. There are guys you meet who are never on the level. They also have some angle so you can never turn your back on them. Because you can never let your guard down, they wear you out just being in the same room with them.

Anyway, Trump running for president was not exactly welcome news. Our elections are ridiculous when they try to play it straight. Having a guy who is a click away from being a carnival act in the race means it is going to a joke until he finally gets tired of it and quits. That was my first reaction when he announced. I just assumed this was going to be another publicity stunt that would last through the summer.

Then I heard him on the radio talking with Howie Carr. For those unfamiliar with Howie Carr, he is a local Boston talker who has been around forever. He’s a cynical old newspaper guy who does not take a lot of guff from anyone. He hounded the Bulger family as a reporter when Whitey Bulger was loose and killing people with the protection of the FBI, so he is not afraid to give guys like Trump the business.

If you listen to the interview, Trump is not quite as clownish as usual so he may be serious about running. He did not say anything that struck me as smart or clever, but he handled the questions in a more honest way that you typically hear from politicians. His answer to why he gave money to Democrats was actually pretty funny. Without saying it, he made clear that you have to bribe these guys to get them off your back.

The thing that kept coming to mind was that Trump actually sounds like a normal person compared to the average politician. I was somewhat blown away by the realization that a bullshitter like Trump is more authentic than the most down to earth politicians. Carr later made the point that Trump gave a speech he did not even bother to write down before giving it. Jeb Bush had a team of fifty that spend months writing his speech.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ll never vote for Trump and I think I’d rather have Hillary Clinton in the White House than Trump. What I think he may do is force the rest of the field out from behind their force field of consultants. He’s quick on his feet and used to yelling at rich people so he will have no problem yelling at the collection of technocrats on stage with him. A guy like Trump looks at them as servants, not peers.

The other thing is he is going to talk about the taboo topics that are important to most Americans. Immigration, trade, the economy and corruption are at the top of the list for Americans, but the pols refuse to talk about them. It sounds like Trump sees that as his angle and is only talking about those issues. His ideas are not my ideas, but making the technocrats talk about these issues could be helpful.

Trump is going to be our Beppe Grillo. He’s not a serious candidate in the sense that anyone seriously wants him in office. He’s a serious candidate because he can talk about the serious issues without anything to lose. Trump is rich and his act is what it is. He’s got nothing to lose by running. Grillo has raised all sorts of hell in politics because he is barred from holding office in Italy so he has nothing to lose.

It’s not a perfect analogy. Beppe Grillo started a political party that is now challenging the main parties. Trump is not doing anything like that and he lacks the political savvy to be anything more than one guy raising hell. Still, a guy raising hell is a dangerous man if you’re one of the technocrats in the GOP field. While its sad that we have to rely on clowns to shake up the political elite, it’s something.

Rambling About The Passive-Authoritarian State

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Here is a strange article in the Telegraph that touches on a popular theme. That is, there are never any consequences to failure these days. In fact, failure has become a weird status symbol in the ruling classes. The bigger the screw up, the more likely it will redound to your favor in the future. It’s as if we have fallen into an alternative universe where all of the normal human structures are upside down and backward.

The most obvious example is in finance. In the 80’s, the S&L Crisis resulted in a lot of people going to prison for fraud, theft and violations of various banking rules. I knew a guy who spent a few years in the can after running a New Hampshire S&L into the ground. A lot of people went to prison, including rich people. Further, a lot of rich people were wiped out, losing their money or having it confiscated as punishment.

Fast forward to the accounting scandals of the late 90’s and count up the number of people who went to prison. That number is one. One guy went to the can after Arthur Anderson collapsed. The number of people who faced criminal prosecution after the dot-com bubble burst was tiny and limited to the low-lifes running boiler room operations for organized crime.

The pumpers in $5000 suits on CNBC faced no punishment. They did not lose their jobs as TV fluffers. Most went on to hype mortgage stocks in the following decade. Jim Cramer remains on TV despite recommending Wachovia stock the night before the bank failed. This is the same guy who defended Bear Sterns a week before it collapsed. He also has a long list of scandals involving his days as a trader. Yet, there he is on TV.

There are, of course, plenty of excuses for why we no longer see anyone of importance face consequences. In the case of the bankers and their fraudulent mortgage practices, the excuse was that the law compelled them to do it. That and forces no one truly understood, like magic or evil spirits. The consequences of lending money to people with no ability to pay was repackaged as a “black swan event.”

The Iraq Invasion mentioned in the article is another one of those magical events that no one could have foreseen. After all, everyone knew Saddam had secret super weapons and was about to use them on the West. No one, of course, knew that Iraq would fall into tribal and sectarian chaos once the strong man was toppled. It was all just an inevitable chain of events no one could stop or predict.

Probably the best example of this consequence free world of the ruling elite is what we have seen with Obama. I’m old enough to remember when Nixon was run out of town for asking about whether the IRS could be used against his enemies. Team Obama co-opted the agency as a part of its election campaign and harassed hundreds of citizens. The agency then repeatedly lied to Congress about it and still refuses to turn over their records.

That’s a great example to use to show the break down of lawful order in the ruling class. Forty years ago the people in charge vigorously enforced their own rules on their own coevals. Today it is anything goes. No one follows the rules, no one enforces the rules and no one is the least bit troubled by any of it. The same people who cut their teeth howling in protest over Nixon now defend Obama to the death. They don’t do so on principle. They do so because they can.

If you want to dismiss this on partisan grounds, you can as that requires no evidence, just wishful thinking. You cannot dismiss what’s going on with Team Clinton on partisan grounds. Even her own people are pointing out that they are running a blatant money laundering operation. Their foundation is a way to process tens of millions in shake downs and bribes. This is something on which the partisans agree.

Yet, no one dares do anything about it or even make much of a fuss about it. The NYTimes and Washington Post report these stories and the people in power shrug. There’s even a sense that many are privately laughing at the audacity of the Clintons. Just when it seemed like they had plumbed the very bottom of public ethics, they find some new lower level of corruption.

This sort of lawlessness at the top is not without precedent. The third century saw the Roman elite at war with itself. A general would be raised up as emperor, only to be killed a month later by the same men in favor of some new general. From AD 235–284 the Empire was convulsed by economic and political crisis primarily due to a near total lack of order amongst the ruling elites. It was finally ended by Diocletian.

Sticking with Rome, the years preceding Julius Caesar saw a breakdown of the old order and the old customs. Rules regulating advancement through the ranks were increasingly ignored.  War and crisis were used as excuses to ignore prohibitions on holding positions beyond one term. Eventually, Caesar rode into Rome and imposed a new order on the city and the Empire.

It’s tempting to think we are seeing something similar in our current age. Maybe it is, but it could also explain why national and global elites are so hot for extra-national organizations like the EU, WTO and IMF. Instead of inviting a strong man into impose order, they invite in bureaucrats from an international organization to impose order on their behalf. The Greek government tried exactly that with the austerity program.

That may sound farfetched, but look at the effort being put into this Obama trade deal by the Republicans. A year ago they were promising to string Obama up by his junk and now they are murdering their own to pass this deal for him. Packed in the deal are things that will allow some international panel of bureaucrats to force things like amnesty, gun control and increases in immigration on America, that could never pass the legislature.

The future will not be authoritarian in the Orwellian sense. It will be passive-authoritarian, where the elected officials stand around helpless as their designates in the TPP or IMF force rules on the people against their will. The inevitable abuses and corruption will result in everyone standing around, carrying on like it is an act of God. Maybe there will be some finger pointing at the alphabet soup organization, but no one will ever be held to account.

Uber Screwed

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At various times here I have ranted and raved about Uber and other “sharing economy” companies. My contention is that they are just clever ways to dodge existing laws and regulations in order to undercut exiting providers. It’s not a new technology or a new way to provide a service. It’s technology used to evade the law. It looks like the law is slowly coming around to that position.

It would appear that the California Labor Commission has ruled that at least one Uber driver is an employee.

As it stands now, Uber employs its drivers as third-party contractors, operating as a logistics company that provides access to customer demand and directions, transactions, etc. for the drivers. Uber has argued repeatedly in various courts that it is not a transportation or taxi company, but rather a software platform that matches customer demand with supply.

This ruling changes all that, turning Uber into a transportation startup instead of a logistics software company. That puts the company in a position to face a number of legal obstacles, as well as rising costs of employing those drivers directly and offering them benefits, etc.

As BI points out, one of Uber’s main costs is its full-time employees that work out of Uber corporate offices. If Uber drivers are deemed employees, the business model shifts drastically.

Uber is not the first company to try this trick. Most states have laws to address the use of “part-time” and “contract” employees. That’s because companies tried to shift their employment costs onto their employees by classifying full-time employees as contractors or temporary. In most states, an employee counts as an employee as soon as they reach a certain number of hours.

Years ago I was involved with a union campaign in Massachusetts. The company used part-time drivers and got into trouble when they let the part-time drivers work full-time hours. They were working 40-50 hours per week, but classed as seasonal temps. Sensing an opening, the Teamsters tried to organize them promising better wages and benefits.

Anyway, there’s no mystery to any of this. Operating a car service has well known costs. The car, its maintenance, gas and taxes are not costs that can be mitigated with a phone app. Similarly, licensing and regulatory fees are set by the state. There’s never been a lot of room to cut costs or increase efficiency. It is a basic business made more expensive by government.

The only way Uber and Lyft can be offering a better cheaper service is to avoid the government imposed costs or transferring some of their costs onto others. It turns out they are doing both of those things. On the one hand they dump their fleet costs on their drivers. On the other hand they dodge local regulations and licensing. Add back all of those costs and Uber is just another taxi company.

The interesting thing about this line of attack on Uber is the potential liabilities. Once the states start calling those Uber drivers employees, they can go to the local labor boards and get back wages, benefits and possibly damages. At the very minimum, Uber will be hiring a big shot law firm charging big shot law firm rates. Those costs will show up in the price of the product.

As I’ve said in the past, I’m not against Uber or Lyft. I’m against the idiots claiming they are creating “disruptive technology.” That offends me. Uber and Lyft are not building a better mousetrap so much as they are just exempting themselves from the laws the rest of us must follow. We have a lot of stupid laws governing banks, but I’m still against bank robbery. Most taxi laws are probably stupid too, but that does not mean Uber is a great way to mitigate those laws.

 

Wall Street Versus Americans

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Back in the Clinton years, a main paleo-conservative argument was that Wall Street had bought both parties. The tradition counters to big business were unable to compete with the vast amounts of money pouring into the parties from global corporations and their bankers. The old conservative aphorism, “the trouble with capitalism is capitalists” had given way to unanimous support for Gramm-Leach.

At the time, I was a little skeptical as it seemed to me that the rich and powerful would always have the whip hand in politics. It has always been thus so why should the future be any different? If America was transitioning from an industrial power to a financial and technological power, then the people in charge would the titans of finance and technology.

I think that the thing that no one saw coming is the class awareness of the global elite. For all of human history, the rich and powerful were tied to their country of origin by blood, language and tradition. The rootless cosmopolitan was a fringe character, never to be trusted. The new elite are different in that they are much more like the rootless cosmopolitan, with infinitely more money and, consequently, power.

The consequences are becoming apparent to many grassroots Republicans. They rallied to give the GOP majorities in both houses only to see the GOP embrace the Obama agenda with an enthusiasm of a fanatic. If you trundled out to vote in 2010 and 2014 and you don’t feel like a fool right now, you’re not paying attention. Just wait until the court rules against ObamaCare and the GOP rushes a fix through both houses. Maybe then you’ll see.

If not, the people with the whip hand are about to make sure you know who is running things now. Business Insider reports that the paymasters have grown tired of appeasing the provincials and their primitive customs.

For years, when it came to presidential candidates, Wall Street made huge compromises in order to support the Republican Party.

The money men in New York City set aside their socially liberal views in order to support fiscally conservative candidates because that was the only way to get on the same page as the GOP base.

The result has been a series of candidates Wall Street’s big donors didn’t really want.

It seems those donors are getting tired of that outcome.

Hedge fund billionaire Leon Cooperman recently vented his frustration with this arrangement on an episode of Wall Street Week.

“I tend to be more Republican in my views, but socially very liberal. I’m going to have trouble with any Republican that does not disavow a fixation with social issues,” he said.

“Republicans have to understand that because young people in our country are not grabbed by those issues.”

“Republicans have to understand that because young people in our country are not grabbed by those issues.”

Republican candidates are not getting the message.

In fact, some social conservatives are actually hardening their stances before a new wave of younger voters has the mass to make a difference at the polls.

A recent Pew Research poll found that Republican Conservatives are the only group in America who have become less accepting of homosexuality over the last two years.

This is not what Wall Street wants to see.

As an aside, the obsession over young people is a strange psychosis that you don’t see in the history books. Up until the birth of mass culture, people just assumed young people did not know enough to be trusted so they had to be taught. Suddenly, that got flipped on its head and everyone claims to be living on a knife’s edge over the choices made by teenagers.

Anyway, the old crime thinkers who were run out of conservative politics decades ago are being proven correct about the culture war. Culture trumps everything. The plutocrats living off the financial system will do business with the either party, but they will favor those who share their worldview. Leon Cooperman will give money to Elizabeth Warren over Ted Cruz because Warren is better for the gays.

If you look at how the people who invented Christianity converted Europe, you’ll see it was not a bottom up approach. They went for the top guys, knowing they would compel their people to convert. That’s exactly how Augustine went about converting the Anglo-Saxons. He baptized Æthelberht, the king of Kent, assuming the people would follow.

That’s a lesson to consider here. The people in charge of the two political parties are wholly owned by the financial class. That financial class is culturally at odds with the people, but they control the means of public expression, as well as the dominant cultural institutions. History says they win, no matter how many times you vote Republican.