Author Archives: thezman

Ruminations on People I Hate

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This post on Quora reminds me of something I’ve noticed in myself and I suspect is common with humans. That is, we decide whether we like someone within a few minutes of meeting them. In many cases, we strongly like or dislike the person for no obvious reason. On the other hand, there are times when we know exactly why we have the strong reaction to the stranger.

An example that comes to mind of the irrational reaction is Newt Gingrich. The first time I laid eyes on him I detested him with the intensity of a thousand suns. When he opened his fat mouth and started talking in that nasally whine, the urge to punch him in the face was almost overwhelming. Even though he was saying things that I should find agreeable, the only thought in my mind was of him being hit by a bus.

Later, I was proven right, but I also figured out why I had such a strong reaction to him. That is, my bitter weirdo theory of human organization. The first order of business when organizing your society is to make sure the bitter weirdos have no power or authority. Newt grew up as an annoying fat kid picked on by normal kids. He turned out to be a bitter weirdo with a chip on his shoulder. His life is consumed with settling petty personal scores.

An example of someone who I never liked, but instantly knew why, is Ann Coulter. In fairness, I have softened on Coulter as she has matured. When she first got on the scene, her act was just an act. It was plainly obvious. She was the precocious daddy’s girl getting the attention of adult males by saying impolite things. It just seemed like a made for TV act.

That Quora piece got me thinking that maybe there’s something else at work. The human mind, to my observation, is a pattern matching mechanism. It’s what makes artificial intelligence so daunting. It’s not the speed of our synapses; its the nature of them. Our brains have a massive catalog of concepts through which we instantly sort to find the one that closely matches anything new.

Imagine a four dimensional database in which one dimension is time. The new thing is compared to the closest thing in the database, then the next closest and so on at the speed of light. Once we land on a match, that’s where we start to place this new thing in our database of knowledge.

It’s why deception is so effective and so disdained. It violates the innate rules of the human mind. This new thing that looks like this known thing suddenly turns out to be different is alarming. Alternatively, that thing we had put into its proper category that suddenly turns out to be something wildly different is scary. Deception causes us to doubt the very thing that makes us tick.

It’s tempting to assume that we react to strangers strongly because at some level they remind of us someone we know. That strikes me as simplistic and not a very useful adaptation. There’s enough variation in people where we will meet people who are not much like anyone we have known. Children are innately fearful of strangers because their catalog is small and most everything is foreign to them.

My hunch is that in the case of Gingrich, I was picking up on the minor deceptions in his demeanor. His carefully cultivated presentation lacked authenticity and that’s what triggered my dislike. This was a smart guy really good at lying to people. That makes him very dangerous. Ann Coulter, in contrast, was just a TV phony, not dangerous or threatening, just annoying.

As I said, I’ve softened on Coulter. She can still dine out on her looks, but that’s not the sale these days. She can say what she wants as she has her own money so she is more relaxed and honest. Her fake laugh still bugs me, but that’s more than balanced by her ability and willingness to punch a hippie.

Of course, there’s something else that may be specific to me. I detest phonies. I can get along well with people who are what they are, even if what they are revolts me. Here in the ghetto, there’s a lot of social pathology, but it does not bother me as these people are what they are. In SWPL-ville, most work hard to conceal their intentions, which I find intolerable.

 

The Mighty ISIS

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The news brings word that ISIS has sacked Palmyra and Ramadi. To what degree they control these cities and their populations is disputed. There are reports that Ramadi is mostly in the hands of the Iraq government with some terrorism from ISIS fighters. I’m not sure it matters a whole lot as the main story is the collapse of Iraq into anarchy and sectarian war.

If you look at a map, it is not hard to see why Iraq is nearly ungovernable as a single state. Arabs are highly clannish, with primary loyalty to their lineage-based tribe and a natural hostility to those outside the tribe. Layer on this map and you see that Mesopotamia is additionally riven by deep religious differences. Those Sunni – Shia difference may seem small to us, but they are everything to them.

Just to make things interesting, according to this post from HBDChick, Iraq has very high levels of cousin marriage. They have cousin marriage rates as high as 50%, including double cousin marriage, which is when the children of one man marry the children of his brother. That may explain why Iraq has a national IQ of 87.

The assumption of most Americans, including the people in charge, was that Saddam was a ruthless dictator because he was a sadist or evil. Saddam simply liked doing horrible things to his people, like using poison gas on them. Reality, of course, was more complex. To run Iraq requires overcoming the tribal and sectarian hatreds, along with the limited smart fraction. That means murderous force.

In fairness to all of the neo-cons who championed the Freedom Agenda in the Bush years, getting rid of Saddam sounded good and was well intentioned. They truly believed that they could arrange things in such a way that the Arabs of Mesopotamia could join the modern world with modern governance and modern economics. Their analysis was not all wrong, in this respect. It was simply naive.

But, they were wrong and removing Saddam was a terrible mistake that resulted in the current mess. Maybe we should have kept troops in country longer. Maybe we should have blown up more stuff and killed more of their males. No amount of who struck John arguments will change the fact that the region is a disaster and mostly because of American policy the last 25 years, particularly the last 15 years.

Note that the timelines here are becoming generational. Assuming a generation is 20 years, we are now into the second generation of mucking about in this region. The typical Iraqi is 27 years of age, which means he has known nothing by the US dropping bombs on him. That’s a long time to engage in any public policy. At some point, people expect to see some positive results and that’s not the case with the Near East.

That’s what I found a bit strange about the reaction to Rand Paul’s latest riffs on ISIS. This bit from Roger Simon jumped out at me because he has always struck me as a level headed guy. In this case, he appears to have thrown his dress over his head and ran screaming into the night.

Alas Rand (I had higher hopes for him), like father Ron, has a mega-chauvanistic view of the world.  The USA is so big and strong it causes everything, including, at one point, 9-11, and now ISIS, if you can believe that. Never mind that the Islamic State is just another avatar of Islamic imperialism’s desire for a world caliphate that has been going on for centuries, long before our country was in existence — the Battle of Tours (732), the Siege of Vienna (1683) and on and on. The violence has been there forever, too.  As any literate person knows, it’s in the Koran and the Hadith.  Beheadings were part of Mohammed’s game plan. It’s what he did and what he called for. This was not invented by a cabal of neocons in Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 2003.

I take a backseat to no man in my disdain for libertarianism and I’m no fan of Rand Paul. His comments on ISIS are not measured, but they are not outlandish or even wildly incorrect. They are simply incomplete. A long series of mistakes and general stupidity by US policy makers gave us the current mess. No one intended for it tot happen. No one intends to hit a tree with their car, but we accept blame for it when it happens.

That’s what makes Paul’s comments incomplete and careless. He leaves the impression that it was intentional. We did create a Muslim force in Afghanistan in the 1980’s and it did become Al Qaeda. That’s indisputable. It was not, however, the intent of guys like Clarence Long and Charlie Wilson who pushed for arming the Afghans. They simply could not see over the horizon and know where their schemes would lead.

Similarly, breaking up and disbanding the Iraqi military sounded like a good idea. No one thought about what would happen when all of those paranoid and unemployed Sunnis who used to work for Saddam decided on what to do next. No one thought about how the new Shia government would react to those Sunnis. No one imagined ISIS or anything like it.

Lack of foresight, however, is not a blameless act. If I don’t know what is behind door number two, I am obligated to consider the possibilities. If I just blunder through it, I have no one to blame but myself for the results. We expect our rulers to look down the road and consider the possibilities. Very serious men cautioned that removing Saddam would lead to chaos.

Team Bush and the mainstream conservatives rejected those warnings and ran off the old paleocons from the Reagan years. The great schism that plagues the American Right to this day was caused by the rift over Iraq. It is what causes Roger Simon and The Weekly Standard crowd to fly into hysterics whenever one points out that this mess in Mesopotamia and the Near East is due to the mistakes of American policy makers, primarily the hawks in the GOP.

Now, none of this should be taken to mean I don’t think ISIS is a problem. It is a problem and a significant one. How much of this problem we need to address and how to address it starts with understanding why this problem exists in the first place. That means owning up to our own mistakes and avoiding a repeat of them going forward. That also means putting the light on the hawks who were so terribly wrong and knocking that smug look off their face.

That’s really what the hysteria over Rand Paul is about, I suspect. Any discussion of the past means revisiting the predictions and polices of those who turned out to be all wrong about Iraq after Saddam. It’s hard to remain in the debate if you are, to some degree, responsible for creating the mess. Roger Simon, I suspect, would like to everyone to forget he was all wrong about this.

The result is a strange moral panic on the Right anytime the issue is raised. If you are not fully on-board with forever war, then you get labeled a Neville Chamberlain who is insufficiently tough on terrorism. In other words, it is all about shifting the focus away from the errors of the past and onto the lack of faith of the person trying to discuss the past. Simon even resorts to the old Progressive trick of projecting their racism onto others.

Rand, again like father Ron, is essentially racist in blaming this on America and not recognizing other cultures have belief systems to which they truly adhere and that those belief systems may be dangerous, even evil.  America did not evolve Islamist ideology anymore than it did Nazism, but the Islamists have the potential to wreak just as much havoc if they are not stopped.

The undeniable fact is the forever war types like Simon cheered on the Iraq invasion arguing that Arabs were just like us, loving what we love and hating what we hate. Implicit in their claims was a denial that there is even such a thing as being Arab or Muslim. The whole point of the invasion and occupation was to erase the Arab identity and replace it with a Western one.

For that reason I hope Rand Paul continues his critique, but polishes it up a bit by dropping the conspiratorial tone so common amongst libertarians. It was not a conspiracy by the Deep State, the military-industrial complex and the Israel lobby that caused this mess. It was a combination of ideological irrationality, triumphalism and misplaced American optimism. I’d throw in a failure to appreciate the diversity of the human animal.

The only way to arrive as a solution is to cast the spotlight on guys like Simon and their wrongness with regards to the region going back two generations now. Otherwise, they will keep hooting down everyone that wishes to try something different in an effort to put the lid back on the cauldron that is Mesopotamia.

Life Imitating Steve Sailer

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I saw this on National Review Online this morning:

Jonah is sorely vexed over the deliberate exclusion of the non-PPP in the GOP field, but that misses a much better point about Progressives. If one were to portray the power brokers of America preparing for the election, it would be Elizabeth Warren holding a fundraiser on the Harvard campus, attended by the glitterati of the billionaire class.

Instead, the Left maintains the fantasy that the Pale Penis People, with their Anglo-Saxon culture and stubborn traditionalism operate out of exclusive country clubs, while the revolutionary vanguard bangs on the door in the name of the people. As Sailer is fond of pointing out, even the banal image of the WASP country club is at odds with history.

It is an interesting aspect of the New Religion. Fundamental to Jewish identity is being the outsider and the victim. Jews see themselves not just apart, but excluded from the main. Unsaid is the fear that at any moment the main will take note of the fringe and push it further away from the core or worse. The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a lot of people rich by frightening Jewish widows with stories of secret Nazis living next door.

This otherness has become enmeshed in modern Progressive thought and identity. Elizabeth Warren certainly started the Indian nonsense as a way to advance her career, but she did so by advancing her status as an outsider at the most elite training center of American power, Harvard University. Think of that. In order to reach the top, one must pretend to be on the bottom.

It is a strange delusion. The American Progressive imagines a world where David always beats Goliath, but the results are always the fault of Goliath, thus demanding a rematch so David can beat Goliath again. The WASP ruling cast has been dead for a century, but Progressives keep them alive so they can pick a fight with them. Since the enemy is imaginary, they will always have them as a rallying point.

It’s why I’ve taken to calling the new religion “faculty lounge Kabbalah.” It’s a mysticism based on the trinity of egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism. It’s not hierarchical or dogmatic. Instead it blends the Jewish sense of otherness and outsiderness with the revolutionary fervor of Rousseau-ism, into a religion of perpetual culture war. Progress is not a linear journey to a promised land. It is a process of perpetual turmoil leading to enlightenment.

Rambling About NRx

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From time to time, I have been checking in on this blog, which I’m led to believe is a popular neo-reaction site. This site, from what I gather, is a clearing house of some sort for what is lumped into the NRx bucket. I have not followed the neo-reaction thing closely for a while, but I try to pay attention to it.

I can’t say I was ever a big fan. That’s not to say I’m against it. I just don’t have strong opinions about any of it. I’m not even sure “it” is a thing or just a catch-all term for opinion that does not fit the popular templates. Put another way, anyone who thinks egalitarianism is ridiculous and is not all that concerned about being called a heretic, gets lumped into the neo-reactionary bucket.

Years ago I found  Mencius Moldbug and decided his thing was probably not for me. The main reason is I am not sitting around reading 16,000 word blog posts. I’ve been doing this internet thing in one fashion or another since the 80’s and I’m not easily impressed. In the early days there were a lot of young males thinking they were going to change the world. They’re old men now and the world has not changed. That and I’m not much of a joiner.

I’ve written before that there’s a Dungeons and Dragons quality to a lot of it. Maybe it is the endless fascination with the return of monarchy that has me thinking that many of these guys watch Game of Thrones dressed as their favorite character. Maybe it’s that there’s so much overlap with the Vox Day world. I don’t know, but stuff like this is so common with the self-professed neo-reactionary types I think I’m on the right track with the D&D angle.

Recently, there’s been some sort of disruption in the NRx universe. I don’t know enough about it to comment on the particulars, but it appears that they had formed some sort of little club or secret society and now there is a power struggle within that club. Free Northerner reports on it here and Nick Land comments on it here. I have no idea what any of it means, but there it is.

Steve Sailer often points out that fringe movements are often cluttered with misfits and weirdos. The reason is these people have no home in more stable movements so they are available for recruitment by the new thing. There’s also the fact that new mass movements are by their nature opposed to the orthodox and mainstream. That means they are the natural home to the unorthodox and the strange. Some of those people will be crazy.

That’s probably why I’m getting a Judean People’s Front –  People’s Front of Judea vibe reading about whatever it is that’s going on with these people. Inside these movements, the issues loom large, dominating the minds of the participants. Outside the movement these fights seem weird and comical in their triviality. It’s like watching ants fight over a crumb. Entertaining, but wholly unimportant.

The funny thing is the great wave about to sweep over social science and therefore political science is biological realism, driven by genetics and processing power.Technology is cracking open the secrets of human biology and big data is casting a light on the dark corners of social behavior. This should be a the salad days for a philosophical movement that rejects the Standard Social Science Model.

As I said at the start of this post, I don’t follow it closely enough to understand the details of their struggles. My guess is they are running into the problem that all fringe movements face and that’s a lack of agreement over most everything, other than enemy. They all agree that multiculturalism and globalism are unworkable, but that’s where the agreement ends. Building a coherent philosophy from that is impossible.

That’s the challenge that awaits biological realism. The kabbalistic new faith that has emerged around the principles of egalitarianism, anti-racism and multiculturalism may be irrational and at odds with observable reality, but it fills the spiritual void of the ruling classes. You don’t defeat a spiritual movement with facts and reason. You offer an alternative.

Maybe that’s why obscurantism is so common amongst NRx bloggers. Moldbug was maddeningly long winded and often incoherent. He invested a lot of his time in creating an aesthetic, rather than making points. Like the Beats and their clove cigarettes, NRx spends a lot of time signalling to one another. It is the sense of belonging that makes them tick, not the intellectual rigor of their arguments. It’s church for dorks.

Sanders-nistas

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Bernie Sanders is now running for president. First he tied an onion to his belt because that’s what they did back when his ideas sounded fresh and original. Soda pop cost a nickel and you could get a good haircut and a shave for two bits. Back then, the Party stood up for the working man against the syndicates, dadgummit!

Listening to clips from his  announcement, I could not help but think that Michael Savage is right and liberalism a mental disease. Bernie Sanders is an old man, 73 to be exact. That means he has seen every idea of the American Left tried multiple times, all of which failed exactly as predicted. Yet, he’s still demanding we spend more money on roads and bridges, the poor and the environment.

His big idea is to spend a trillion dollars on road building. That’s a about what we spend in seven years on roads. Bernie claims that will create 13 million jobs. Assuming those jobs pay roughly $40K per year, that means his big new roads program will keep those 13 million people working for two years. Of course, most of the money would be stolen by local pols, just like the stimulus money was stolen, so those numbers are all mythical.

It’s something an old man should know, particular an old man who has lived off the state for most of his life. That’s the thing with his cult. These guys are always arguing from the position that their ideas have never been tried and their cult has never had political power. The big lefty stimulus bill was just a few years ago, yet no liberal ever mentions it. Instead, they talk about the need for a stimulus spending program.

It’s easy to dismiss a fossil like Sanders. After all, his schtick was tired in the 1970’s when Phil Donahue was a big deal on TV. Forty years on he’s like seeing a guy in a denim leisure suit with a perm. The thing to remember, though, is that the middle-aged harpies on the cable news channels will one day be old commie fossils like Sanders. No amount of failure will ever change their minds. There’s no cure for this form of madness.

The news coverage is worth noting. Sanders has no chance of winning and 90% of America thinks he is a nut, but he gets the favorite uncle treatment. I guess that would be Uncle Ho. If a similarly fringe candidate announced for the GOP nomination, the media would be giving him the business and claiming it is proof the GOP is lurching into madness.

Anyway, Sanders will get some votes. The wool socks and sandals crowd now has an option on the menu. These are the people who think Ralph Nader would have been a great president. Given the state of the Democrat party, that’s probably worth 10% of the vote. That’s coming out of the voter pool to be divided between O’Malley and Clinton. My guess is those are votes that would have gone to O’Malley so Team Clinton has to be happy.

The real benefit to Clinton will be the debates. O’Malley is young and smooth, which would be big trouble for a run down old bat like Clinton. Having Bernie on stage will make Clinton look young and sane by comparison. It will be hard for O’Malley to draw easy comparisons between himself and Clinton. The worst thing for a challenger is a crowded stage, especially when one of the crowd is a crazy old man from another century.

Aside from the entertainment factor, those of us outside the Left will get a chance to see inside this fall. Cankles is the candidate of the aging boomer crazies. These are the folks who cut their teeth in the late sixties and early seventies. Butch O’Malley will be going for the younger moonbats. I’m on the mailing list and it is already clear he plans to be the white Obama.

The difference is O’Malley is probably more authentically black than Obama, given their backgrounds, but O’Malley will have to run as a pale penis person. Cankles is older now and her voters are older and crankier. Eight years of watching the young whipper-snappers run things has been tough.

Sanders is sure to throw some hay-makers at both camps, hopefully working as a catalyst for full-on moonbat-on-moonbat violence. Imagine the Democrat convention of 1968 except with walkers and middle-aged fat guys in cheap khaki shorts screaming about Fox News. The riot will need to be wrapped up by four so the Cankles supporters can make it to the early bird.

I welcome the man from the past into the Democratic race.

The White Man’s Lead Burden

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One of the more ridiculous claims floating around the Cult of Modern Liberalism is the claim that lead makes black people stupid and violent. Kevin Drum has been peddling the idea on lunatic websites for years. The claim is that lead poisoning makes people stupid and violent, particularly when exposed as children. Poor people are most likely to live where lead content is high, thus explaining why they have higher crime rates and lower IQ’s, if IQ was a real thing, which it is not.

The theory resonates with the Cult because it has an almost mystical quality to it, much in the same way climate change has an unsaid supernatural element. Gaia is vexed about your lawnmower so she is causing floods in Texas. It can’t be proved, but it can’t be disproved either. In the case of lead, it also solves the problem as to why black crime rates are off the charts. Racist whites have packed blacks into lead saturated ghettos.

The theory suffers from a number of problems. No one can explain why this effect is race specific, without dragging in a bunch of things that could be better explanations for the data than lead. Then there is the failure to replicate any of the studies purporting to show a link of any sort. Even taking Drum’s assertions at face value, lead is responsible for at most 20% of the increase in crime.

Think of it this way. If the ghetto in question has a murder rate of ten per month prior to the invention of crack by the CIA and a murder rate of 20 after crack, only two of those murders are due to lead. The other eight are, presumably, due to crack. But, that also means those two lead murders needed another element, in this case crack. In other words, lead alone is not a cause.

That does not stop the Cult from trotting out science! to make the case for environmental factors explaining away what everyone knows, but no one is allowed to say. America’s newspaper of record has a story on a new study that purports to prove that air pollution makes poor minority people stupid.

The city’s air is polluting children’s brains.

Big Apple kids exposed to high levels of airborne filth and economic hardship have lower IQs that will haunt them into adulthood, according to an exhaustive, first-of-its-kind study by Columbia University.

Or maybe their parents being low-IQ people end up living in crappy areas that have high levels of airborne filth and economic hardship.The one thing no one ever mentions is that the poor are clean freaks. The reason is they tend to be dirty.

“The findings are a concern because, as has been shown with lead [poisoning], even a modest decrease in IQ can impact lifetime earnings,” warns the report published in the medical journal Neurotoxicology and Teratology.

Researchers reached the alarming conclusion by tracking the development of 276 minority children from Harlem, Washington Heights and the South Bronx for seven years — starting while their moms were pregnant.

The kids who were exposed to the most pollutants and came from the poorest families scored 6.6 points lower on the overall IQ test than others in the group.

The average score on an IQ test is 100.

What does not appear to be in the study is the IQ of the parents. Tracking down the fathers would be impossible, but testing the IQ of the mothers would not be hard. But, that would lead to uncomfortable subjects so better to leave that alone.

In addition, the kids scored 8 points lower for “working memory,” which is what people use to plan and carry out behavior, and 5.7 points lower for “perceptual reasoning,” which allows people to visualize solutions to non-verbal problems.

Following their births, researchers examined blood from each baby’s umbilical cord for biological markers that reveal exposure to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH), toxic chemicals created by the burning of gas, diesel, heating oil and other products.

This is why these results are never replicated. Within the underclass, the slightly brighter lights will perform better in life’s little tasks like not inhaling diesel fumes. You can control for that by making sure the cohort of mothers represents a representative range of IQ’s, but that could lead to trouble so lets not go down that road.

The moms also carried air monitors in backpacks during their third trimesters, and were later interviewed repeatedly about their ability to adequately feed, clothe and house their kids. The groundbreaking study stemmed from ongoing research that has shown how prenatal exposure to PAH is tied to a host of childhood ills, including developmental delays, reduced verbal skills and symptoms of anxiety and depression.

The latest study concluded that the effects of PAH were exacerbated by poverty, calling it the latest evidence of how “socioeconomic disadvantage can increase the adverse effects of toxic physical ‘stressors’ like air pollutants.”

“This report adds to the growing literature on the vulnerability of the developing fetus and young child to the toxic effects of environmental pollutants,” the study says.

One of the fascinating aspects of modern times is the two tracks on which social science is discussed. The one track, the dominant track, is all about environment. Any discussion of heritability is ruled out of bounds. Even the most slapdash study that “proves” the environmental model of human behavior is waved around by the press. Those minority kids are victims of the white man’s pollutants!

Then there is the other track where real science is conducted. The massive amount of genetic data coming out is reshaping anthropology, biology and history. Every day something new comes out changing our understanding of nature and human history. But, little of it reaches the mainstream. If you want to know about this stuff you have to read hate thinkers on obscure websites.

At some point, the fantasy version of human relations will have to be brought back into line with reality. Whether it happens by force or by choice is unknown to me. I suspect the way to bet is the former. The new religion is based on the belief that man is a blank slate and people tend not to give up their religious convictions without a fight.

Charm City

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George Soros spent $33 million trying to incinerate Ferguson Missouri, but the little city is still there. The problem is that he bet on a weak horse. While Ferguson is a vibrant example of post-racial America in the era of Obama, it lacks the sort richness and diversity of other cities. Try as they might, the locals just can’t take down a city, even a small one.

Soros should have invested more heavily in Baltimore where the locals really know how to put on a show. Since the police have went on an unofficial strike after the Freddy-Poo Gray incident, the locals have been celebrating diversity with a vengeance. This long weekend has seen 26 shootings and and 9 murders. Granted, it is a three day weekend, but it has been unseasonably mild of late so the murdering season is late starting.

What no one wants to say, but everyone knows is that the cops are now in their cop houses filling out paperwork and doing as little as possible. They see no reason to risk prison for a city government that would rather arrest cops than criminals. The gangsters know it is open season so they are doing what they do and that means taking over the streets, without fear of the cops.

Fundamentally, this is the problem with race relations in microcosm. Blacks did best when whites were completely intolerant of black culture. The talented tenth took the lead in keeping order in the black community, but quietly welcomed help from white society. It was not ideal, but black crime rates, literacy rates, illegitimacy rates and addiction rates were their best in the years before the Civil Rights movement.

Once those constraints were removed, all of the worst instincts of black America were unleashed, mostly on other blacks. That’s what’s happening in Baltimore right now. The cops were doing a good job keeping the problem contained to the ghettos. They were having some success policing the ghettos, lowering crime rates over the last decade. Now, the cage door has been swung open and all hell is breaking loose.

Greek Drama

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I often wonder what it was like to live in third century Italy, say a city like Milan. For the first half of the century or so, emperors were a dime a dozen. A general would win a battle, his men would proclaim him emperor and he would go kill the the current emperor. This went on for roughly half a century from the death of Severus Alexander. There were 22 emperors between him and Diocletian.

There were also endless wars, invasions and re-invasions during this period. Most people find this period of Roman history dull, but the fact that the Western Empire did not collapse in the third century is one of the great lessons of history. Human societies have great momentum that can carry even the most inept ruling elites along for generations before the energy of society is drained.

There’s also the fact that without a plausible alternative, people tend to bugger along as they have always done, despite their terrible rulers. This is true of the ruling elites as well. Rome stuck with the old ways long after those ways no longer made any sense. The cost of maintaining domination of Gaul and Germania far exceeded the benefits, but that’s all they knew so they exhausted themselves maintaining it.

That came to mind when reading this story about the latest act in the Greek drama. This thing is now in its sixth year and no one has the slightest clue as to how to resolve it. The Euros are stuck in a mode of thought that says the Greeks must be brought into alignment with the Frankish core of Europe, no matter the cost to the Greeks. The Euros will consider no other option, because they can imagine no other option.

The Greeks, to their credit, understand that this can never happen. But, they are locked into a mode of thought that says they must have their debts forgiven so they can start over, while maintaining their traditional social welfare state.  In other words, they will be Greek and there’s no other alternative they can imagine, much less consider.

This stand-off will eventually reach some sort of conclusion. The betting seems to be that the catalyst will be a default and then either the Greek people yield and submit to their European rulers or the Germans yield and let the Greeks walk away from some or all of their debts. Strangely, no one ever discusses a middle option between the two. The only alternative mentioned is catastrophe, however you wish to define it.

That’s the stuff in the news. On the street, Greeks go about their lives, arranging their affairs around the machinations of their rulers, real and de facto. That means moving money into foreign accounts, hiding it under beds and scheming around the tax system. In other words, Greeks go on being Greeks, regardless of what the people in charge have to say about it.

That, I suppose, was the way thing were in the third century, to circle back to where I started. The average guy in a town on in the fields was largely immune to what was going on in imperial politics. Young men joined the legions because that was what you did. It afforded a chance at a better life than as a peasant in the fields. Then as now, people choose from the options available to them and live their lives accordingly.

That’s not without consequences. Once people stop caring about the legitimacy of their rulers or even the identity of their rulers, there can be no law, just the strong ruling the weak. The Western Roman Empire collapsed when there was no one left to defend it. Once being a Roman went from being an asset to being a liability, the die was cast, so to speak.

Something similar seems to be happening in Greece. Being a citizen has no benefits. Being in the Euro, a citizen of Europe, still has value because the money has value, but how much longer that remains true is open to debate. Whether or not the Greeks have the will to riot, much less revolt is the big question.The evidence suggest they lack the will to govern themselves so revolt does seem unlikely.

That’s what brings me back to thinking what life was like in third century Italy. Did the average person suspect the end was near? Did they know their culture was in decline? Was there a pervading sense of foreboding that haunted the people? The evidence suggest not. Just as today, it appears the people just went about their business and the rulers did as they always did, trying to keep it all together.

The Inevitable End of Lunacy

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One of the least discussed big stories in American politics has been the transformation of one party into a purely ideological party. Anglo-Saxon politics has generally resisted ideological parties entirely. The few that have turned up have been short lived. The pattern has been coalition parties with an ideological wing.

We tend to focus on the ideological wing of parties and define them as such, but the people running the parties have always sought to broaden their appeal. The result has been that the major parties differ very little ideologically. That’s not to say there is no difference. It’s just that the difference are much smaller than the hooting and hollering would suggest.

The most obvious example of this is in Britain. Up until the last election, the Tories, supposedly an extreme right-wing party of the most right-wing kind were in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, allegedly a collection of Marxist hippies. If the things said about these parties were anything resembling the truth, there’s no way they could cooperate on anything.

In the US, the two-party system has always been between two coalition parties with just a blush of ideology. Democrats were the home of Progressives, but included blacks, Jews, urban ethnics and rural whites. Up into the 80’s there were plenty of pro-life Democrats, socially conservative hawks, along with the liberal urban voters. I’m fond of pointing out that Ted Cruz would have been a typical Democrat in the 1980’s.

The Republicans have always been the party of business, traditional Americans and monied interests. Even today there are very liberal Republicans who are pro-abortion and homosexual marriage. Despite the rhetoric, Mitch McConnell has done more in six months to advance Obama’s legislative items than Harry Reid has done in six years.

That changed in the 1990’s. One of those quirks of history, where attempts to stem a great sea change ended up advancing it, was the election of Bill Clinton. He was heralded by Progressives as their generations JFK, but he was also the leader of the DLC, a group trying the free the party from the ideologues.

Instead of re-centering the party, the Clinton years saw the Progressive wing take full control of the party and transform it into an ideological party. The election of 1994 wiped out the moderates from the South and Midwest. That left the field clear for howling fanatics like Pelosi, Reid, Schumer et al. Inevitably, anyone not fully committed to the one true faith was purged making the Democrats the first purely ideological party in American history.

I guess because the American media is universally Progressive this transformation has not been noticed. Instead it was cast as a triumph of the light over the darkness. It’s easy to forget that Obama said at his inauguration that physical reality would be altered now that he was on the throne. The natural world, according to him, would suddenly change in response to the triumph of the one true faith.

Ideological parties have a problem, which is why they tend not to have long lives. That problem is narrowness. Piety is defined relatively speaking. One is pious in relation to others. Imagine a herd of zebra all competing to be in the center. Those at the fringe are sloughed off after every reshuffling. Before long, you run out of zebra.

That’s what happens to ideological parties and what appears to be happening with the Democrats.

One of the most underappreciated stories in recent years is the deterioration of the Democratic bench under President Obama’s tenure in office. The party has become much more ideologically homogenous, losing most of its moderate wing as a result of the last two disastrous midterm elections. By one new catch-all measure, a party-strength index introduced by RealClearPolitics analysts Sean Trende and David Byler, Democrats are in their worst position since 1928. That dynamic has manifested itself in the Democratic presidential contest, where the bench is so barren that a flawed Hillary Clinton is barreling to an uncontested nomination.

The trend, of course, dates back much further but 1994 was like so long ago and stuff. The ’94 election wiped out most of the Southern Democrats. The 2000 election solidified the Democrats as the party of coastal urban areas. The 2006 election was one last attempt by Rahm Emmanuel to bring authentic populists back into the party, but that collapsed in 2010 and 2014.

But less attention has been paid to how the shrinking number of Democratic officeholders in the House and in statewide offices is affecting the party’s Senate races. It’s awfully unusual to see how dependent Democrats are in relying on former losing candidates as their standard-bearers in 2016. Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, Pennsylvania’s Joe Sestak, Indiana’s Baron Hill, and Ohio’s Ted Strickland all ran underwhelming campaigns in losing office in 2010—and are looking to return to politics six years later. Party officials are courting former Sen. Kay Hagan of North Carolina to make a comeback bid, despite mediocre favorability ratings and the fact that she lost a race just months ago that most had expected her to win. All told, more than half of the Democrats’ Senate challengers in 2016 are comeback candidates.

The irony missed here is that Progressives like to pitch themselves as the young hip party fighting the old squares, but take a look at the presidential candidates. The favorite is an old white dinosaur from the 60’s and the dream candidate is an old white dinosaur from the 70’s.

The rest of the piece is worth reading. What is not discussed is that demographic collapse is what looms around the corner for Progressives if they don’t quickly arrest this trend. A lack of qualified candidates means a surplus of unqualified candidates. The result is an increasing number of people representing the one true faith who are viewed as crazy or stupid.

I’m fond of comparing Progressives with Islamists, but in this regard they are opposites. Islam is surging because they have a surplus of young people. The Cult of Modern Liberalism has a dearth of young people and as a result is hollowing out as the boomers begin to age off.

Nothing lasts forever so even if this version of the one true faith fades, something will replace it. Most likely the Democrats revert back to being a coalition party of some sort once the GOP detonates itself in the coming decade. The new religion will evolve once again into something less toxic. What seems to be clear is this Great Progressive Awakening is reaching its end and a return to normalcy is upon us.

Nazi Art Racket

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I suspect if I live for a thousand years, I will see Nazi stories right up until my demise. No man has had a greater impact on the Western world than you know who. Even though his youngest followers are now well into decrepitude, governments are still putting them on trial for the gratification of the usual suspects. None of it has anything to do with justice. It is all propaganda at this point.

I wondered the other day what happens when we run out of Nazis to hunt. The actuarial tables tell us that day is coming soon. Even anti-racist loons will have a tough time putting an old guy on trial, who was enrolled in the Hitler Youth when he was five by his parents at the end of the war. With the youngest former Nazis in their 80’s now, the only living example left in a few years will be those who were children in the 40’s.

I think I have the answer and that will be the centuries long hunt to find the Nazi art and return it to the “rightful owners”, as long as they are Jewish, by returning it to their decedents. There’s no expiry date on that game as almost all European art was touched by the Nazis at some point. That means the provenance of just about every piece can be disputed if you try hard enough.

What got me thinking about it is this story about Nazi art from last week.

A Dutch art sleuth best known for identifying works looted from Jewish owners by the Nazis said he helped German police recover two massive bronze horse sculptures crafted for Adolf Hitler, as more details emerged Friday about an amazing trove of Nazi-era art seized by authorities this week.

Arthur Brand provided tips to German detectives who made the stunning discovery in a series of coordinated raids, capping a long investigation into illegal art trafficking. Berlin police spokesman Michael Gassen, who confirmed authorities worked with Brand, said so far some 100 tons of art has been loaded onto trucks in the southwestern spa town of Bad Duerkheim where they were found in warehouses.

Eight suspects, whose identities have not been released by police, are under investigation on suspicion of dealing in stolen goods and fraud, Gassen said.

But Attorney Andreas Hiemsch, who represents the Bad Duerkheim man who was in possession of the art, denied the allegations, telling The Associated Press that his client had rightfully obtained the pieces from the Russian army more than 25 years ago.

Apparently, possessing art created by or for the Nazis is against German law. Given that the Nazi were nuts about creating display items, all of which could be construed as art, that means hunting for Nazi art is a never ending racket. There can never be a time when all of it has been recovered.

The real selling point here to the fascist loons in charge of the West is that they can also rewrite history in the process of “righting those historical wrongs.” That means taking the gaudy display items like these horses in the story and hiding them away from public sight. Before long it will be extended to books and personal items in private collections. The real Nazis will be erased and replaced with the mythological ones.