Author Archives: thezman

¿El Presidente?

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News brings word that Juan Eduardo Bush is officially running for Emperor President of the Western Administrative District United States.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush has officially launched his US presidential campaign, promising to “run with heart” and “take nothing and no one for granted”.

Mr Bush, the son and brother of two former presidents, spoke in his hometown of Miami, Florida.

Recently released campaign branding leaves behind his surname, which some see as a political liability.

Polling suggests he has yet to dominate a wide field of Republican candidates.

Speaking in both English and Spanish, Mr Bush used his speech to appeal to a broad swath of the US electorate – of which minorities have become increasingly more important – not just the Republican’s conservative base.

“In any language,” Mr Bush said, “my message will be an optimistic one because I am certain that we can make the decades just ahead in America the greatest time ever to be alive in this world.”

Not mentioned in the news is that Bush promises to legalize the tens of millions here illegally, as well as open the southern border to all comers. He doesn’t say it that way, but he has made that clear for a long time now. His constant yapping in Spanish is what more sophisticated observers would call signalling. “Vote for me and your village can join you here in America.”

Listening to his speech today, it occurred to me that there are three possibilities with regards to the Bush campaign. It’s pretty clear that Jeb has been plotting this campaign for a long time and he is not just winging it. He is a political animal from a political family. Legend has it he was the Bush son groomed for the presidency, not his brother. The cards just fell the right way for W and not for Jeb.

Regardless of how I feel about another Bush in the White House, there is a strong possibility he is right. He thinks American wants a multicultural, bilingual globalist as an antidote for the malaise that has gripped the nation for close to a decade. The Republican voters, sensing a winner, will rally to his message, despite the fact they don’t speak his language, and he will win the nomination and the presidency.

That’s one possibility. The other is he is right about the country, but the GOP is, as usual, late to the party and not ready to nominate a citizen of the world. Back in 2008 this was exactly what all the experts claimed was Obama’s advantage. The country was moving away from the old fashioned provincialism toward a worldly cosmopolitanism. That would mean a Democrat win in the general as the GOP would nominate a yesterday man of some sort.

The final possibility is that Jeb is simply out of touch with reality. He does sort of sound like a Contract With America Republican when he talks about being optimistic and inclusive. All that big tent happy talk was popular in the Clinton years as the GOP searched for a way to recycle the Reagan material, without all the mean stuff about liberals. You just know that Jeb wants to use “compassionate conservatism” in his pitch.

My hope, of course, is that the nation rises up as one and smashes his campaign, chases off his supporters and bans the use of the Bush name within our borders. Barring that, then my hope is Jeb is simply out of touch with reality having spent the last decade removed from politics. That at leaves some hope for the country. In the fullness of time, people will be able to drag their leaders back to reality and put things right.

I’m too much of a pessimist these days to think that is the case. Instead it is one of the first two options. The polling suggests it is probably the second choice. The nation is ready to embrace the post-nation state, but the GOP is lagging behind. Of course, history says GOP voters are desperate to catch up with the Democrats so maybe Bush is just a little ahead of his time, but not so far ahead that he cannot win the nomination.

Either way, it is hard to be optimistic about the coming elections.

The New Religion

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The Rachel Dolezal story is hilarious for a boatload of reasons. There’s the obvious comparison to people who insist we pretend they are of another sex. If you can pretend to be the opposite sex, why not another race? More precisely, if sex is a social construct, then why is race not a social construct? Of course, for decades the war on white people has been based on the assertion that race is a social construct.

It used to be that we need not worry about such things. Biology was real and people accepted it. Those who did not were deemed mentally ill and treated accordingly. Rachel Dolezal was not fooling anyone, I suspect. People are not that stupid. They are that polite, however, and no one wants to get in a spat over race, even if it involves someone fraudulently using race to game the system. Elizabeth Warren pulled the same stunt and got away with it for the same reasons.

It’s fun to make sport of the internal contradictions, but it is even more fun to watch the Cult attack itself over something like this. Rachel Dolezal believes all the right things and has literally committed her life to them, but in doing so she has made a mockery of the one true faith. But, condemning someone for not being black enough sounds a lot like the paper bag test or the one drop rule.

Aside from the humor, it does reveal the basics of the New Religion, at least at this stage of its development. The New Religion is based on three principles: egalitarianism, multiculturalism and anti-racism.The order is important as the first two principles are the oldest and most important. Egalitarianism goes back to Rousseau and is at the root of all radical movements since the French Revolution.

If all men are the same, logically all cultures are the same. Multiculturalism is not logically possible without accepting egalitarianism. On the other hand, like Marxism, multiculturalism is a solution to the obvious problem that people will notice that not all cultures are the same and not all people seem to be equal. By ennobling the embrace of all cultures and condemning ethnocentrism, noticing becomes a defect in the noticer, rather than in the noticed.

If everyone is the same and no cultures are better than any other, inequity must be due to something other than biology and culture. Since white societies are the richest and most dominant, they must doing something to upset the natural order. That’s where anti-racism comes into the mix. The sin of racism is what allows whites in particular and white society in general, to rule over the rest of the world.

Therefore, white people of the New Religion jostle with one another for who can be the most ethno-masochist. The ultimate expression of that is to change ones race from white to black. We can all agree that Rachel Dolezal is nuts, but her choice here is not entirely irrational from the perspective of the true believer. Some white women marry black men, but she went even further and converted to blackness!

You see the same thing happening with trannies and homosexuals. In the mythology of the New Religion, women have been oppressed by white men almost as bad as blacks. This cult is, after all, a female cult. That makes white men the ultimate evil. How better to address that than proving maleness is a choice. If Bruce Jenner can choose to be female, then all of those terrible white men are choosing to be terrible white men.

All religions work backwards. By that I mean they begin with an endpoint and layout what must be done to reach that endpoint. For Christians, getting into heaven is about following certain rules and “living a Christian life.” For members of the New Religion, the goal is the earthly utopia where everyone lives in a paradise of equality. Therefore, the anointed are those who work to achieve it, through any means necessary.

Religions also always have a certain amount of hypocrisy and irrationality, too. They are human institutions, after all. The New Religion will ignore Elizabeth Warren’s trans-racialism because she is in the elite. Rachel Dolezal is just a provincial in flyover country. That means the good folks at NPR and the NYTimes can make sport of Rachel Dolezal, while celebrating Elizabet Warren.

It’s why cases like this will not have a lasting impact on the evolution of the New Religion. Hypocrisy, it turns out, is a great adaptation. It solves a lot of problems for human religion. Whether it is Catholic Bishops living like royalty while railing against earthly pleasures or Progressive pundits championing Bruce Jenner while condemning Rachel Dolezal, hypocrisy lets the faithful get past the internal contradictions and outright lunacy of their faith.

What’s a Conservative?

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The other day, James asked about this line from one of my posts:

“On the other hand, people like me no longer describe ourselves as conservative because we are at odds with everything the modern conservative supports.”

His questions was:

“Two questions: 1. what specifically are the things the modern conservative supports? 2. In what respect are you at odds with each of these things?”

Large books have been written on the subject and I could easily write a small book on what I find objectionable with what we currently define as “conservative.” Since I don’t have the time to write a book at the moment, I’ll nibble away at it here. This post by one of Tyler Cowen’s grad students is a good place to start.

The latest from Louisiana is that taxes are going up, but in a strange way that won’t be called a tax increase:

One of the most critical parts of the budget plan, and the part that attracted most of the debate, would raise no revenue and lighten no one’s tax burdens. But because of a complicated arrangement of tax credits, this plan could, by some interpretations, allow Mr. Jindal, a Republican, to say that despite millions coming in from cigarette tax hikes and tax break rollbacks, the state had technically not raised net new tax revenue.

Read the whole article, it is even weirder than that sounds.  Combine that with the recent fiasco in Kansas, where the strongly Republican state government will be reversing earlier tax cuts.

It seems to me that, whether we like it or not, fiscal conservatism has been stymied at the state level.  No, that’s not true for Illinois, New York, or California, but it does seem to be true for many other states, especially those governed by Republicans.  (And yes, state pension obligations still do need to be reigned in and made subject to proper accounting.)  More concretely, trying to cut taxes at the state level doesn’t seem like a useful or productive way forward.

I’m old enough to remember when the people saying they were “fiscal conservatives” were almost always in the Democrat party. That phrase was a lot like “path to citizenship” or “secure the border” is today. It meant something different than the literal meaning. The Congressman I worked for was a fiscally conservative Democrat and that meant he was a deficit hawk.

My congressman was no one’s idea of a conservative back then. He was fine with New Deal style government programs, as long as they were paid for through taxes. Like all other fiscal conservatives in both parties, he preferred broad based taxes to pay for government. Today, exactly no one in politics is a deficit hawk. Borrowing is a given and no one cares how much or from whom the government borrows money.

The innovation Reagan brought to the debate was the idea of cutting taxes in order to force spending cuts. That’s what it meant to be a conservative. They agreed with the deficit hawks about not borrowing so cutting taxes naturally meant a restraint on spending. If you slow the growth of government to some level below inflation and population growth, the relative size and scope of the state shrinks.

In other words, conservative meant small, financially responsible government. That meant the aversion to borrowing of the deficit hawks and the desire to shrink government. The novelty of using tax policy to force spending restraint was a means to an end, not an end in itself.

There were objections to this on the Right. The old-school conservatives preferred to fight the spending fight on its own terms. They contended that the inevitable deficits from tax cuts would not force spending cuts, but normalize chronic borrowing. The fact that they were proven correct has been lost to the mists of time.

There was also another “conservative” principle in the use of tax cuts and that was simplification. The Progressive view on taxes was as another tool to shape behavior. The myriad of loopholes, shelters and breaks was a way to force behavior that otherwise would not occur, without the carrot of tax breaks. Conservatives always rejected that and pushed for simple tax systems.

Today, what passes for a conservative holds views no conservative would recognize forty years ago. For starters, demanding trivial reduction in taxes as some sort of great goal is just silly. The tax cuts of Bush, for example, had no impact on the lives of 90% of Americans. If twenty bucks a week is making a difference, you’re not paying taxes anyway. For most families, the Bush tax cuts were a rounding error.

Worse yet, today’s “fiscal conservatives’ are in favor of all sorts of social engineering through the tax code. The credits and breaks demanded by conservatives could fill a warehouse. The Reform Conservatives are calling for a proliferation of breaks and credits making tax lawyers rich and further entangling the state in the lives of citizens.

Tinkering with tax rates and expanding the complexity and scope of the tax code is what defines the term “fiscal conservative” today, along with an embrace of reckless borrowing to finance a metastasizing welfare state. I’m old enough to remember when moderate Democrats would mock that as woolly-headed liberalism.

That’s one example of where I am at odds with the modern conservative. Taxes are honest when they are frictionless. They should have as little impact on behavior as possible. They should be clear and in plain site. Hidden taxes are a crime against the free citizen. Taxes should also be universal. Citizens pay taxes.

The tax level is whatever is required to finance government. If the people want a lot of government, then they pay a lot of taxes. If they want lower taxes, then they have to cut spending. The core principle of conservatism is that public policy is about trade-offs. Borrowing conceals these trade-offs and deceives the public, just like hidden taxes and special tax breaks, thus making deficits at odds with a free society.

Thinking about the Post-National World

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In other forums, I’ve gone around and around with people about the future of extra-national entities like Europe or the North American Union. Everyone alive has grown up in a world of countries and nations. They think that’s the natural order and anything that runs counter to it is doomed to fail.

People believe the nation is the natural end point of human societal evolution. European history was taught this way in American schools when we still taught history so maybe that’s the reason it is embedded in people’s minds. More likely it is just the fact that we have known nothing else. Even places where “country” is barely recognizable like the Middle East, we insist on maintaining national boundaries.

My contention is that history shows a steady evolution toward larger and larger organizing entities. Britain is a good example. When the Romans arrived, the people were organized into tribes. When the Romans left, the island was organized into small kingdoms. By the middle ages they had the Heptarchy.  Eventually, all of Britain was unified under one banner and one identity. In a few years, Britain will be absorbed in the EU as a province of Brussels.

That seems to be the way to bet. Europe is becoming an amorphous blob of people from all over creation. What was once thought of as countries are becoming administrative districts. When the German district runs low on people, they import more from Turkey or the Balkans. The French district imports people from Algeria and Tunisia. Being a French citizen has the same value to the local government as being a citizen of Swaziland or Jupiter.

The TPP that Republicans are hell bent on passing for Barak Obama will create an extra-national organization that will decide immigration, trade, tariffs, taxes, environmental issues, etc. Just as with the EU, this organization will absorb more and more of the duties national governments used to manage. Over time, the US government will simply be an enforcement arm of various world governing authorities.

That sounds like bad theater, but it is already happening in Europe. The EU recently passed a rule requiring cars to have tracking devices. The responsibility for enforcing such a rule will fall to what we used to call national governments. Those government will, in turn, delegate some portion of their duties to provincial and municipal governments. Those governments don’t get a say in it. They just enforce it on whoever happens to be coming through their administrative zone.

You can vote yourself silly in local and national elections, but all you will be doing is picking the people responsible for enforcing the rules. You will have no say in the writing of laws and formulation of policy, because the people for whom you are voting will have no power to write laws. That’s on display in Greece right now. They can have an election every week and the facts on the ground remain unchanged, because the decisions are made in Brussels.

This means citizenship goes away, for all practical purposes. Citizens participate in the management of their societies because they share a language, customs and history with the people of their society. If you no longer share these things and have no way to participate in the management of your society, why have any loyalty to any of it? Why bother calling yourself a citizen? You’re just someone who happens to live in an administrative district named after what it used to be.

Of course, humans are not atomized, transactional creatures. We are social animals. Even when we find ourselves randomly dispersed, we coagulate into groups based on our natures. There’s a reason that in every school cafeteria in America kids self-segregate by race, sex and age. Kids have to be forcibly integrated, despite being marinated in multiculturalism.

So, people will still group together and have in-group loyalties and out-group hostilities. How the global elite figures on managing that is anyone’s guess. It works now as most people remain patriotic and participate in civic life thinking it makes a difference. Everyday, however, more people come to the realization that citizenship is a suckers game. At some point, the legacy institutions will be abandoned by even the most romantic and a new way of controlling the population will be required.

The most likely solution is the soft authoritarianism you see in the ghetto. The dependent class is kept in-line by a mix of the lash and the leash. When you rely on the state to supply your house, your food, your entertainments and your drugs, even the dumbest ghetto dweller figures out how to play by the rules. Those who can’t behave are rounded up by the cops, if they don’t shoot one another.

Maybe some new organizing ethos will fill the void, allowing people to rally in support of their rulers like we had with patriotism and tribalism. It’s hard to imagine what it could be, but maybe nationalism was unfathomable before The Hundred Years War. Alternatively, maybe the future is just a cleaner, more orderly version of the ghetto where everyone is running a scam, loyal only to their circle of confidants.

The Birthplace of Multiculturalism is Dying

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The word “why” is one of the more abused words in the English language. Today, the primary abuse comes via over caffeinated twinks from the millennial generation demanding the rest of us explain reality to them. Over the last half century, the word has been used as an excuse to overturn large chunks of Western Civilization in pursuit of an earthly utopia.

The real pity, it seems to me, of our era is no one seems willing to use the word “why” in the attempt to learn anything about human affairs. What I mean by that is right here in this story on German’s demographic collapse. The article details the drop in fertility and how that is playing out over multiple generations. The writer also covers the problems with regards to a custodial state suddenly overwhelmed with geezers.

What you will not find in that article is why, after a 1,000 generations or more in the middle of Europe, these Germanic tribes decided to stop having kids. It is a conscious decision as there’s no evidence that women are suddenly infertile. Contraception sales are better than ever. Men and women of these tribes have simply decided to not have children. If reports like this one are correct, Germans are not even willing to have sex, despite the mountains of free contraceptives.

It is telling, I think, that no one thinks about this in the same way we look at fertility of other species. Armies of humans are involved in understanding why the giant panda stopped reproducing. If the population of the long-nosed fly gorilla ant drops even by one percent, the full force of the federal state swings into action to find out why. People across Europe have stopped reproducing and no one is the least bit curious.

The closest we get to an answer is the old trope about educated people having fewer children, as if self-extinction was the height of genius. Never mind that the smart fraction used to have loads of kids by custom. Then you have the hooting lunatics claiming that what worked just fine for thousands of years is suddenly killing off the species. Otherwise, no one thinks it is important to know what is causing Europeans to die out.

David Goldman, also known as Spengler, wrote a book called How Civilizations Die in which he tried to answer the question. His main argument is that the West has lost faith in itself by losing faith entirely. People who truly believe that there is a reward in the next life for living well in this life will inevitably be optimistic about the future and willing to bring children into the world.

The West, in Goldman’s formulation, sees nothing but a pointless dance to the grave and therefore sees no purpose to life. Not having children is the same as saying you wish you had never been born. I doubt anyone thinks of it in those terms, but the old Greek saying is true. Societies grow great when old men plants trees in whose shade they will never sit.

At the same time, Islam’s violent response to encroaching modernity is a reaction to the spiritual nullity that is modern Western consumerism and materialism. Muslim leaders talk about this very fact. They see their own sudden downturn in fertility as a consequence of Western materialism destroying their traditional societies.

The book is well worth reading, even though I’m not entirely convinced. The biological imperative is what makes life possible. Men will not suddenly decide to overrule their most basic desires just because their churches have fallen to rubble. Even in the darkest days of humanity, people still got it on and made new people. There’s a reason why September is the most common birth month in the northern hemisphere.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if Goldman is not mostly right about what’s driving this trend. The inspiration has died so the aspiration has died too, replaced with the cold, transactional ethos of the modern technological state. Orwell may have been wrong about the brutal austerity of the future, but the custodial state imagined by Huxley is just as sterile.

There’s also the central tenet of multiculturalism which has infected the West. That’s the argument that no society is better than another and to think so, much less say so, is about the worst thing you can do. Pride in your people is a big part of that biological urge. Men risk their lives for their people because to do so means their essence will carry on through others.

If “your people” are no better or worse than any other people, there’s no reason for you to sacrifice in anyway for “your people.” At the same time, if you cannot count on your people to look after your descendents or even associate with your descendents, why bother having descendents? The egalitarian, multicultural society is one where no one has any regard for anyone, beyond the material transactions of daily existence.

In politics, the electorate always has the option to not vote. Often, it is the next to last resort. Millions of white people have stopped voting in America because no party represents the interests of traditional core Americans. That scales up to people declining to show up for the future when the direction of their cultures is headed to a dead, sterile end. The future belongs to those who show up and the West has decided the future is not for them.

The Church of Climate Change

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One of my themes is how belief warps how people process information. The old line about how the fanatic only sees that which confirms his fanaticism is obviously true. Fans of Manchester United will believe anything horrible about fans of Liverpool. At the same time, they will never believe anything bad about the boys on their team. Fans of Tom Brady think he is innocent, while fans of the New Jersey teams think he is in some way responsible for killing Kennedy.

In public affairs, it works the same. Republicans think Democrats are secretly plotting to make Karl Marx our new god and Democrats think Republicans want to bring back slavery. This week the MYTimes went after Marco Rubio and every conservative is rushing to his defense. A week ago many of them thought he was  bum due to his open borders fanaticism.

It also has another manifestation. If you are convinced some event is inevitable, then all signs point to that inevitability. Read Zero Hedge for a week or two and you see what I mean. They are convinced the apocalypse is upon us and every news event is spun into the sign that the end is near. Some variation of “the coming zombie apocalypse in three charts” is a daily staple.

I think that’s at the heart of the Global Warming cult. “Cult” is the right word at this point, since the people passionate about it have deranged themselves to the point where those outside suspect sinister things about the movement. I have liberal friends who send me thousand word e-mails filled with links and graphs claiming that any day now the tipping point will be reached and we’re doomed. They are so sure that Gaia is angry and ready to punish us, it is axiomatic.

What this means is the looming disaster is a certainty in the minds of the adherents, beyond dispute in the same way no sane person disputes gravity or the laws of motion. It is a fixed thing now and forever, like arithmetic. If the data  shows that maybe Gaia is not all that angry, it is assumed to be wrong. It has to be. So they go back and refine the data and massage it so that it is “corrected” to comport with what they know must be true.

NOAA faking their data is not deception in the way in which we normally think of it. They’re simply correcting what they believe must be a mistake. Imagine measuring a stone falling to earth and the results show it falls at rates well outside standard gravity. We know objects near earth accelerate toward the earth at 9.80665 m/s. That’s axiomatic. Any measure outside that must be due to human error.

That’s what’s happening with the constant fiddling with temperature data. Everyone knows that the earth’s climate is warming. The data coming in from various instruments must fit into the the accepted model or those instruments are defective. It has to be, otherwise the very foundation of reality is in doubt. More important, the very identity of the people in the field is in doubt.

The assumption is that data disproving the belief will somehow shake them out of their faith, but it does not work like that for most people. Look at the number of people who can walk into a natural history museum and still believe in young earth creationism. Glaciers could cover North America and the AGW people will say the planet is overheating. It’s why they have started saying climate change rather than global warming. It’s not a conscious effort to deceive; they are simply adapting to dis-confirmation.

Think of it this way. If you are a climate researcher today, you not only have the pressure to produce proof of global warming, you are surrounded by colleagues who believe deeply in the issue. Even if you know the data contradicts the prevailing “consensus” on the issue, it would take herculean will to publish it and face the wrath of your friends and colleagues. When you already are inclined to agree with them, the default assumption will be to dismiss the contradictory data and “correct” it.

There is an old idea called Social Comparison Theory that tries to explain why we tend to emulate those around us. The short version is that humans constantly compare themselves to others around them as a form of self-evaluation. If everyone else thinks pink flamingos on the lawn is gauche, then you are unlikely to install them on your lawn. This applies to opinions, styles, religion, etc.

It’s not hard to see how this is a great evolutionary adaptation. Cooperation scales very well. Two people working in tandem will beat two people working independently. Ten people working as a team will beat two people working in tandem. There are no examples of high status males, for example, whose lives prove the customs of their society nugatory. Rather, status is based on confirming that which society holds dear.

One of the things I find fascinating about third century Rome is how the Empire lost transcendent purpose. Everything was aimed at keeping the band together, so to speak. It’s argued that the Empire bankrupted itself trying to preserve the empire. In this period is when all sorts of odd cults and mystics popped up throughout the Empire. Sol Invictus and, of course, Christianity got going strong during this period as well.

In this post-Christian Era in the West, I think we’re seeing something similar. Oddball mass movements like climate change and its implicit millenarianism are only possible when no dominant ideology exists. The field is clear for people who no longer believe in anything to fall for everything. The Romans carried on a long time after they no longer had a reason to carry on, but eventually something replaced the old gods. Something will come along to be the dominant faith of the West, but I doubt it is climate change.

US Women Led By A Lesbian And A Lunatic

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Imagine if the US men’s soccer team went into the World Cup led by a wife beater and a flamboyant homosexual. The news, of course, would be all about the wonderfulness of the homosexual, because they are our gods. We would know nothing about the other players, other than than the degree of wonderfulness they display while embracing the sodomite.

We know this because we have two good examples. In the NBA, Jason Collins, a bench player at the end of his career, announced he was gay. For the next twelve months ESPN was unwatchable because it was a 24×7 marathon of stories about the homosexual basketball player. Similarly, the college football player, Michael Sam, got hundreds of hours of air time, simply because he acted gay on TV. He even got a shot in the NFL.

The US Women’s soccer team is led by Megan Rapinoe. If you put her name into a Google machine you see the usual stuff about an athlete. This despite her best efforts to make money off of being a lesbian. Before the Olympics she all but went door to door telling people she liked muff. Yet, the news has no stories on the poor girl, other than the fact she is trying to win her first World Cup.

Of course, if anyone dares mention that Mx. Rapinoe is a dyke, they will be fired so you can’t blame the airheads in the media for leaving it alone. They are not terribly bright, but they know how the game is played. Mention Rapinoe is a lesbian and the SJW’s pounce on you demanding to know why you care about her sex life.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m fine with the silence on this women’s private life. I think this is proper. In fact, there should be a penalty on those who keep putting their business in the street. The absolute worst thing to happen in modern times is people sharing their private lives with strangers. Mx. Rapinoe’s private life is none of our business and she should keep it that way.

The point is, a homosexual male athlete means everyone all the time must talk about how wonderful it is that he likes the penis sampler at the club, while a female homosexual athlete means everyone better not notice – or else. I can’t help but feel sorry for the dykes. It seems that liking muff in modern America is the one unforgivable sin, whether you are a man or a woman.

Now, let’s look at the lunatic on the team, Hope Solo. Her biography reads like a cautionary tale told to parents about the dangers of letting your daughter play sports. “If she plays soccer, there is a 70% chance she will turn out to be white trash on a reality show.”

Solo has been arrested multiple times for things like beating up a minor, disorderly conduct and public drunkenness. If I were being charitable, I’d describe her as a handful and every man reading this would know exactly what I meant. In addition to being a handful, she is not the most gifted liar, despite working hard at it.

Every week, male athletes involved in drunken brawls, grand theft and domestic violence lose their careers. Ray Rice lost his career in the NFL and a multimillion dollar contract because he slapped his old lady in an elevator. Greg Hardy, another NFL player, remains out of work because of a domestic violence beef.

The ESPN article is the only thing you see about Solo from the media. They have decided that it is old news and there’s no reason for you chauvinistic cave dwellers to talk about it. Instead, her story will be a tale of redemption. Since we can’t talk about the lesbians and no one watches women’s soccer, the narrative will be Solo’s triumph over adversity!

This is where American women find themselves after a century of feminism. The role models for their daughters are lesbians and lunatics, but no one is allowed to mention that these women are lesbians and lunatics. They traded in one set of double standards for another set, the former being based in biology and the latter at odds with it.

Post-Democracy In Action

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I tried to make the point the other day that the primary role of elected governments is to fool the public into going along with that which is against their interests. Increasingly, the management of national affairs is in the hands of extra-national organizations like the EU. The people can vote themselves silly, but public policy will be determined by the unelected elites of the global managerial class.

It’s not just the global elite dodging the will of local populations with the aid of national governments. There’s a degree of spite in much of what we see going on these days. The EU could probably make some concessions in Greece to smooth things over, but they really want to rub the Greeks nose in that turd sandwich they are making them eat.

Pat Buchanan said thirty years ago that America is the first country where the elite openly despise the people and culture that puts them into the elite. He was wrong in that the Euros have reached that point first, but America is trying hard to catch them. That’s blazingly obvious as you see in this story breaking from Breitbart.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)
67% is pressuring House GOP leadership, particularly Majority Leader Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA)
47%, to delay plans to muscle Obamatrade through the House of Representatives quickly. In in a letter to McCarthy obtained exclusively by Breitbart News, he’s asking leadership to slow down and consider the ramifications of what it is doing.

“I write to you today to request that you delay any vote on fast-track authority for the Executive until the President has made public all text and information pertaining to the new economic union known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership Commission, as well the ‘Living Agreement’ authority,” Hunter wrote to McCarthy, his fellow California Republican. “My concern is that this allows the President and the members of the union to change the agreement and its membership following adoption.”

Hunter’s concern is well founded.

Despite claims from some Obamatrade proponents to the contrary, if Congress approves Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) which would fast-track and all but ensure the approval of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) Pacific Rim trade deal, the “Living Agreement” inside the TPP would allow President Obama and the other TPP nations to add China or any other country for that matter to the deal without seeking approval from Congress.

I’m a pro-trade sort as are most people in America. Most of the GOP are rabidly pro-trade. This is not a trade deal, however. It is way to circumvent the voters and obscure future evasions from them. You can feel the sneering contempt for the voters in the reaction of leadership to attempts to make the details of this bill public. It’s as if the GOP is deliberating spiting their own voters.

Do they hold the people in contempt? Many of them surely do. Nancy Pelosi would hold random beheadings of commoners on the mall if she could get away with it. Most simply have decided that representative government no longer works for them and their paymasters. The men and women in Congress serve the people who pay them and it is not the guys reading this wondering who to vote for in the primaries.

Speaking in Tongues

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You can’t help but notice that the New Religion is developing its own language. It sounds like English and much of it is understandable to English speakers. Much of it is a weird jumble of sounds that have magical properties for the faithful, but sound like nonsense to normal people. Check out this letter to the editor in the NYTimes.

To the Editor:

We are militant about justice, but the justice we seek and enact looks like healing, reparation and care. We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.

College students are volatile, and if our “safe spaces” seem more for hiding from ideas than for shelter from oppression, it is because we occasionally confound structural injustice (which hurts, badly) with being-in-the-world (also hurts). We are obliged as social individuals to fight the first and weather the second, and also to help others do the same.

We do have a settled philosophy. It combines an understanding of power structures with the golden rule. Do unto others as you would if you wanted to heal the pain of injustice. We ask no more than David Brooks does: to defer to the complexity of reality, and to find in our deference the kindness to care for one another’s vulnerabilities and to be honest about our own. HANNAH McSHEA

Durham, N.C.

The writer is a student at Harvard.

I understand that I’m just an unfrozen caveman lawyer, but this confuses and frightens me. I do like the implied threat in this bit:

“We do have demands, but not that you submit to our “etiquette,” rather that you join a culture of compassion and acknowledge vulnerability.”

How can that be read as anything but “join us or die”??

That’s the thing with new religions. When they can’t convert the heathens, they settle for killing them. Fortunately the little princess who wrote that letter and her coevals lack the stones to do it, but that will not always be so.

Altered Reality

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If you want to know a society, study their money. I no longer remember who told me that, but I always circle back to it when noodling through the issues of our day. We think of money as the bits of paper in our wallets, but money is simply a store of value that is easily transferred. For most of us, money is electronic bits of data these days. Almost all of my transactions are done electronically.

We live in the information age and that means information has become a form of currency. It always has been, but it has not always been very portable. Fifty years ago the guy who knew something big about a publicly traded company could trade that with a small circle of people, mostly in person. Today he can sell it to the world in seconds. Just as sound societies have sound money, sane, well run societies have sound information.

In the Cold War, the Soviets routinely told lies to their people. They did this to devalue information, to make it useless. If the people cannot trust their currency, they don’t use it. If they can’t trust information changing hands, they won’t act on it. We don’t think of information as currency, but it is probably our chief currency today. Most of our labor is put to the task of creating information.

It’s why I’m surprised governments have not become much tougher on this sort of stuff we see going on with public companies.

Those record profits that companies are reporting may not be all they’re cracked up to be.

As the stock market climbs ever higher, professional investors are warning that companies are presenting misleading versions of their results that ignore a wide variety of normal costs of running a business to make it seem like they’re doing better than they really are.

What’s worse, the financial analysts who are supposed to fight corporate spin are often playing along. Instead of challenging the companies, they’re largely passing along the rosy numbers in reports recommending stocks to investors.

“Companies are tilting the results,” says fund manager Tom Brown of Second Curve Capital, “and the analysts are buying it.”

An analysis of results from 500 major companies by The Associated Press, based on data provided by S&P Capital IQ, a research firm, found that the gap between the “adjusted” profits that analysts cite and bottom-line earnings figures that companies are legally obliged to report, or net income, has widened dramatically over the past five years.

At one of every five companies, these “adjusted” profits were higher than net income by 50 percent or more. Many more companies are in that category now than there were five years ago. And some companies that seem profitable on an adjusted basis are actually losing money.

The stock market is vitally important to modern societies. In fact, it is the tent pole holding everything up now. It used to be said that Main Street is not Wall Street, but no one says that anymore. Everything counts on the equity markets, often in ways no one understands. The mortgage bubble is a great example. Even the pros did not fully understand what was happening. As soon as it faltered, however, everyone knew it had to be fixed no matter the cost.

That may be why the Feds are turning a blind eye to this. When they can no longer keep the plates spinning, maybe they put someone in jail for faking their numbers. As long as the lying works to keep the markets levitating, there’s no reason to clamp down on this stuff. Like it or not, the business of America is to keep the plates spinning.

Of course, the Feds could very well be faking their numbers too. Every month they tell us that unemployment is low, but that record numbers are not working. The BLS does this thing where they report numbers that seem good compared to last month, but then adjust those numbers down so that the next month’s figures look good in comparison. It’s a maddening game of whack-a-mole.

Regardless of the motivations, it is increasingly difficult to accept the official data at face value. Is inflation really averaging 1.9% since the crash? Is the unemployment rate really just 5.5%? Has the economy really been growing by 2% a year since the crash? I have no idea and I don’t know many people who would take those numbers at face value and most of the people I know are Progressives, who worship the state.

I think that’s what is at the heart of these record low public trust figures. It is assumed that the low trust ratings reflect dissatisfaction with public policy. Maybe it simply reflects the fact no one can trust the information we’re supposed to rely on as a society. Everything is a con where disinformation is peddled to the public so some sharp insider can profit. We are becoming a low trust society buried in bullshit data.