Author Archives: thezman

Thinking About Iran

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The hand-wringing and high-fiving over the Iran deal has me a bit puzzled. No one really knows what’s in the deal. Even the parties to the deal are at odds over what is in the deal. They only agree that the deal is an agreement to strike a deal at some point in the future. The Americans take this to mean “soon,” while the Iranians have no understanding of the concept. Persia, in one form or another, has been around for five thousand years. “Soon” is measured in decades.

That has not stopped the 24×7 clown show that is the American media from having a food fight over the deal to make a deal. The Progressives are hailing the deal as the greatest achievement of man since the wheel. Conservative Inc is condemning the deal and calling Obama Chamberlain. They have a Nazi fetish, comparing every Muslim with a bad attitude to Hitler. I watched a bit of Fox yesterday and it was clear that none of them knew more than my cat about this deal, but they were certain they were right.

That’s how things work in a democracy. The people running things employ persuasive morons to sell their position to the persuadable morons. Arguing through a megaphone leaves only one option. The side that is the loudest wins. It’s why Progressives will work free of charge for a turn at the megaphone. They get it. Own the megaphone and the people will obey you. It’s why Jeb Bush is the smart bet in 2016. Everyone in the press says he is the frontrunner.

Putting all that aside, I looked up the deal in the foreign press and the best I can tell it is an agreement that slows down Iran’s quest for a nuclear weapon and lifts the sanctions on them. The fact that every energy firm on earth is lining up to make a deal with the mullahs says the sanctions are sure to be lifted, no matter what Iran does or does not do. Western governments are the tools of their rich people and their business interests. Western business loves groveling to despots. It is their natural state.

From the point of view of Iran, negotiating with the great Satan is an easy call. There is little downside. The hardliners in Iran have a lot of power, but they have no constituency outside the ruling elite. Iran’s rulers have to respect their sensibilities, but that still leaves plenty of room to deal. Since they have no intention of abandoning their nuclear program, they only stand to gain. In short, if the West is willing to accept Iran’s terms, why not make the deal?

The West has different motives. The Europeans want that natural gas pipeline from the gulf to get done. The preferred pipeline around Iran to the west or east is simply unrealistic. Afghanistan will never be pacified and the eastern route runs into the Israeli problem. The most practical route is through Iran. While the Europeans are not in love with the idea of giving the Russians more leverage over their gas supplies, they can use that as a carrot in trying to fend off Russian aggression in the Baltic states and Ukraine.

The Americans are the key and Obama really wants this deal. It is easy to forget that Obama and his cult see him as the anti-Reagan. They used to pitch him as the Progressive Reagan back in 2008. The narrative did not work out as they planned, it never does, but this deal gives them a shot to fulfill part of the fantasy. Having Obama give a speech in Tehran would be the rejection of the Reagan policy toward Iran. It would also finally heal the wound to the pride of Progressives over Carter’s handling of the hostage crisis. The subtext of the Left’s celebration right now is “Carter was right after all.”

There’s also another bit going on here. The American empire is exhausted and most in Washington know it. Trillions have been spent trying to conquer the Muslim lands and we have nothing to show for it. Conquest only works if the booty exceeds the expense. The early expansion of Rome during the Republic was financed by the booty of the conquered. Once the Romans ran out of rich people to conquer, expansion ended and decline immediately started as the economics of empire reached the point of diminishing returns.

America is a rich country with a huge reserve so the blunders into Iraq and Afghanistan may not be as costly, but they could be and the more savvy people in Washington know it. They have looked around at the Middle East and determined that the entity with the best prospects over the next several decades is Iran so they are making a deal with them. The US will back off and the Iranians will keep the oil and gas flowing. If the Iranians decide they need nukes to do it, that will be worked out when it happens.

In theory, it is not a terrible plan. America needs out of the Muslim world. Whether or not it is a good idea to turn things over to the Persians remains to be seen, but history is on their side. They have been the dominant people in the region for 5,000 years, give or take. How the rest of the region responds is an unknown, but you can be sure the Saudis are in Pakistan offering whatever it takes to get a nuke of their own. The rest of the GCC is there with them.

There are also the demographics to consider. The last three American presidents have so badly bungled things in MENA, Europe is now facing a great wave of barbarian invaders to her south. Europe is as weak today as she was prior to the Muslim conquests. Maybe even weaker. There are a billion poor people to her south ready to head north. Iranian help in rebuilding the buffer zone in the Maghreb would go a long way toward forestalling the collapse of Europe.

 

The Struggles of Conservative Inc.

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The war on Christian pizza makers has the professional Right sorely vexed. I think most of their outrage is legitimate. They truly are offended by this latest assault on normal Americans. The fund raising by the pizza joint in Indiana suggests normal Americans are growing weary of the lunatics and their causes. Still, I think a part of what vexes the professional Right is their fear of stating the obvious conclusion.

That conclusion is you cannot have freedom of any sort without freedom of association. If you must get permission from the state to associate or disassociate from others, you have no freedom. The state may allow you some options, but everything you do must come with a permission slip. Otherwise, putting two people who hate one another in the same room ends up with blood on the walls.

Here’s a recent screed from National Review struggling to avoid stating the obvious.

Policies come to us with principles attached to them, and when debating public policy we should consider the principles not only of legislation that has passed but also of legislation that has been rejected. No one to my knowledge is discussing where the principles implied in the Left’s rejection of the RFRA lead. Responsible statecraft entails an examination of a principle’s logical conclusion. In the case of liberalism, the conclusions to which its principles lead help us see just how deeply opposed those principles are to the constitutional order we’ve inherited.

When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites compelled speech. When photographers are forced under threat of fines to shoot weddings or religious services that they believe are immoral, the assumption is that we are sometimes legally bound to participate in certain kinds of speech, and the state becomes the arbiter of what that speech is in specific instances.

Well, no. Forcing someone to work for someone else is not forcing them speak. It is forcing them to participate. Put another way, it is compulsory association. The state is saying to the photographer, “We really don’t care about your opinions of these people. You must do what we say, act as we say or else.”

Of course, the reason Andrew Walker of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the guy who wrote the piece in question, must fetishize speech is he cannot mention association. To do so, to draw the obvious conclusion from the events in Indiana and elsewhere, would risk his job and career. Rand Paul almost saw his career come to end in 2012 because he dared utter this conclusion.

The reason, ostensibly, is that letting stores refuse service to homos would lead to stores not serving blacks. That has things exactly backwards. Separate public accommodations in the South were falling apart on their own. Basic economics makes such practices self-limiting and self-destructive. The reason Progressives pushed through laws against private discrimination was to eliminate private association.

It’s rather amazing how easily Americans were willing to surrender their liberty, but there it is. Now, there’s no reason to think things like Christianity, private clubs, fraternities, etc will hold up much longer. After all, if you cannot deny admissions based on your own peculiar criteria, why have an organization at all?

The thing I think is vexing to the professional Right is the mounting proof that they were wrong about the Left. They were convinced that the “other side” (as if there are only two sides) was acting in good faith, but just need convincing. Recent events show that to be nonsense, but Conservative Inc. can’t bring itself to admit it.

Which leads to my final point. When the Left rejects the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it invites the imposition of state-enforced morality. The Left requires obedience and punishes dissent. It insists that all citizens must, against their will, act only in a manner that liberalism judges to be accommodating and politic. Anyone acquainted with progressive thought knows that it is founded on unexamined assumptions, but seldom until now have we seen its unhinged hostility unmasked, as the Left reacts to our defense of a cherished freedom written into our Constitution.

There’s no evidence from Progressives that they see any of this as a flaw or even unintentional. Yes, they fully expect to impose their morality – at gunpoint if necessary – on the rest of us. That’s how political cults operate. Hell, it’s how Christianity operated for over 1,000 years. But, admitting this is the case would point out that Conservative Inc has been wrong for thirty years now.

The Price of Being Right

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On occasion, I like to read old books about taboo subjects. I developed the habit as a student, when assigned the task of writing an essay on the 1948 presidential election. We were permitted to use one source and that was the NYTimes archive at our library. That meant staring through a device, resembling a peep show machine, at film on which the archives of the paper were stored.

What I found fascinating were the horribly taboo things written in the Old Gray Lady about blacks, Jews, Catholics, women, etc. The want ads were hilarious. “Two Irishman wanted for painting crew.” Or, “Negros wanted for ditch digging.” Newspapers used the language of the man on the street and reading those old papers gave me a sense of what it was like to live in that age.

The thing is, mass media must respect the sensibilities of the buying public, even if those sensibilities are insane. American newspapers in the 40’s, for example, could not criticize America’s conduct of the war, even in cases where it was warranted. The people simply would not tolerate it. A decade later when passions had cooled, papers could indulge in revisionist history.

Similarly, the mass media of every society must live within the constraints of the ruling classes. They must promote and support the legitimizing ideology of the day. A newspaper man in Nazi Germany could not celebrate diversity. A cable news talker today cannot question the joys of diversity. To do so puts your job and career in jeopardy.

Just as those public sensibilities can be insane, the legitimizing ideology can belch forth its own brand of crazy. Homosexual marriage, for example, is nonsense, but sacred nonsense. Go against it and you reap the whirlwind. Point out the suicidal nature of diversity and cultural Marxism and you will be condemned to a life of penury or worse. Unlike the public, the people in charge can throw you in gaol so you’re wise to tread lightly.

I was thinking about this the other day reading Steve Sailer’s latest Taki column. Sailer is a very smart and a very well trained person. There are maybe a handful of people who possess his social science skills. He also possess the sorts of credentials that lead to riches in modern America. An MBA from UCLA is no small thing.

Sailer also writes and says things that violate the taboos of the ruling class so he is unwelcome in the places run by those serving the ruling class. He maintains a blog and lives off donations. Maybe his wife has a job, I don’t know. Instead of selling books, getting paid by a think tank and doing TV, he begs for donations.

Sailer thinks he is right. So much so he has condemned himself to a life of penury, despite possessing the credentials and intellect to be highly successful. Presumably, he has chosen this path because he values being right over making money. Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about most everything and probably knows it, but he likes money so he has gotten rich uttering nonsense in public.

Sailer is certainly not a martyr or even unique. He made his choices for his own reasons and was surely aware of the consequences. The dissident right is littered with guys and some gals who write interesting things about interesting topics, but do so on the fringe, banned from the respectable salons that dominate public life.

It’s not a new phenomenon. Galileo got himself in trouble not because he challenged dogma, but he refused to play along with the rules and customs of the ruling classes. Copernicus first laid out the heliocentric view long before Galileo, but he played by the rules and avoided challenging the established order. You can say anything you want as long as you don’t threaten the established order.

That’s what you see with a guy like Kevin Williamson at National Review. He’s smart enough to know that Charles Murray is right, for example, but he knows it takes credentials and talent he lacks to walk up to that same line. Instead, he lets Robert Putnam draw the lines and is willing to live within them. Williams has a habit of describing cultural issues precisely, only to avoid drawing the only logical conclusion.

This column from a few months back is a great example. Without freedom of association, you cannot have any freedoms at all. Williams clearly gets that, but also knows that it is a lethal point to make if you earn your living from a legitimate publication. So, when faced with the reality of his observations, he springs for the safety of equivocation. It’s left to commenters to fill in the blanks.

Many on the fringe take comfort in the belief that reality does not go away when you stop believing in it. Eventually, the lunacies of our day will have to give way to math and science. That assumes there will be anyone left capable of sorting fact from fiction. It is axiomatic that you get less of what you punish. Another generation of punishing heretics and who will be left, capable of recognizing reality, much less articulating it?

The Trouble With Mob Justice

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I hope I am over wary; but if I am not, there is, even now, something of ill-omen, amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law which pervades the country; the growing disposition to substitute the wild and furious passions, in lieu of the sober judgment of Courts; and the worse than savage mobs, for the executive ministers of justice. This disposition is awfully fearful in any community; and that it now exists in ours, though grating to our feelings to admit, it would be a violation of truth, and an insult to our intelligence, to deny. Accounts of outrages committed by mobs, form the every-day news of the times.

–Lincoln at Lyceum

In their ongoing obsession with destroying the Pale Penis People, the Left has been tub thumping about domestic violence. I keep seeing these bizarre commercials featuring athletes warning that at any minute, you could be a wife beater. Of course, every sports team and college now races to get ahead of the mob when they have an incident.

Like the proliferation of rape hoaxes, these mob frenzies encourage the worst behavior. Young women have been stalking famous men since Grog got famous for besting Trog in the poo flinging contest. In modern times, every hotel hosting a team is littered with girls trying to bag an athlete. Giving them the right to cry rape with impunity is just asking for trouble. Giving them the right to cry “domestic violence” is even worse.

The Tuscaloosa (Ala.) Police Department announced Wednesday that the 24-year-old woman who told police she had been assaulted Saturday by now-former Alabama defensive tackle Jonathan Taylor has recanted her statements and subsequently been arrested herself.

The woman initially told police an argument with Taylor had become physical with officers observing “minor injuries” to her neck that the woman said were a result of the altercation. Taylor was arrested and charged with domestic violence third-degree assault and domestic violence third-degree criminal mischief. Nick Saban later announced that Taylor, who had already been dismissed from Georgia following still-pending domestic violence charges, was removed from the Alabama football program.

Per al.com, a TPD statement says the woman contacted police Monday to recant her earlier statements, telling officers Taylor had not harmed her. She was interviewed by officers Tuesday and again said she had lied about being injured by Taylor. The woman was arrested and charged with false reporting to law enforcement before posting bond and being released.

The TPD statement indicates the charges against Taylor will be reviewed. An Alabama spokesperson told al.com Wednesday he was “unsure” if the development might allow Taylor a chance to rejoin the Crimson Tide.

Look, we can’t know what happened here. What we do know is you should not be punishing people before you know if they are guilty. Mobs don’t accept that and that’s how you end up with the wrong guy swinging from the tree. It’s worse than that, of course. It threatens the very idea of civilization.

When men take it in their heads to day, to hang gamblers, or burn murderers, they should recollect, that, in the confusion usually attending such transactions, they will be as likely to hang or burn some one who is neither a gambler nor a murderer as one who is; and that, acting upon the example they set, the mob of to-morrow, may, and probably will, hang or burn some of them by the very same mistake. And not only so; the innocent, those who have ever set their faces against violations of law in every shape, alike with the guilty, fall victims to the ravages of mob law; and thus it goes on, step by step, till all the walls erected for the defense of the persons and property of individuals, are trodden down, and disregarded. But all this even, is not the full extent of the evil.–By such examples, by instances of the perpetrators of such acts going unpunished, the lawless in spirit, are encouraged to become lawless in practice; and having been used to no restraint, but dread of punishment, they thus become, absolutely unrestrained.–Having ever regarded Government as their deadliest bane, they make a jubilee of the suspension of its operations; and pray for nothing so much, as its total annihilation. While, on the other hand, good men, men who love tranquility, who desire to abide by the laws, and enjoy their benefits, who would gladly spill their blood in the defense of their country; seeing their property destroyed; their families insulted, and their lives endangered; their persons injured; and seeing nothing in prospect that forebodes a change for the better; become tired of, and disgusted with, a Government that offers them no protection; and are not much averse to a change in which they imagine they have nothing to lose. Thus, then, by the operation of this mobocractic spirit, which all must admit, is now abroad in the land, the strongest bulwark of any Government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectually be broken down and destroyed–I mean the attachment of the People. Whenever this effect shall be produced among us; whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, and burn churches, ravage and rob provision-stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunity; depend on it, this Government cannot last. By such things, the feelings of the best citizens will become more or less alienated from it; and thus it will be left without friends, or with too few, and those few too weak, to make their friendship effectual. At such a time and under such circumstances, men of sufficient talent and ambition will not be wanting to seize the opportunity, strike the blow, and overturn that fair fabric, which for the last half century, has been the fondest hope, of the lovers of freedom, throughout the world.

I’m not a huge fan of Lincoln, but he knew the risks of letting fanatics gain the upper hand.

Non-payment of BBC License

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Here’s the difference between America and Europe. In the States, a TV tax would never fly. Instead, the government taxes the TV makers, the cable guys, the content providers, etc. Then they force the providers into including channels no one would ever watch like PBS or CNN. All of this shows up in the monthly bill. We like our taxes hidden so we can pretend to be free.

In Europe, they prefer their authoritarianism straight. In the UK, the man taxes you for TV service, regardless of your type of service. That tax goes to fund government agit-prop pumped out by the BBC. If you don’t pay the tax, they throw you in prison. That’s right. They don’t cut off the service. They throw you in jail. Over 10% of criminal cases are for failure to pay the TV tax.

The BBC is responsible for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions. Culture Secretary Sajid Javid reports that 10% of magistrate court cases are for non-payment of the BBC licence fee. Non-payment is a criminal offence, punishable by a fine of up to £1,000. Every week about 3,000 people are fined for non-payment, and about one person a week is jailed for non-payment of the fine.

Women make up about 70% of those prosecuted and convicted, and half of those jailed for not paying the fine. When people fail to pay other utilities, such as energy companies, they are guilty of a civil offence, not a criminal one, and they cannot be prosecuted and fined for falling behind with their payments. Civil action can be taken for recovery, but without fines and jail terms.

Several newspapers have had reporters visit magistrate’s court to describe what goes on. They all tell harrowing stories of frightened, distressed people, mostly women, facing fines they cannot pay under threat of imprisonment if they do not. Many are single mothers, many on benefits. They have not paid the licence fee because they cannot afford to. The sum of £145.50 per year is huge for a young mother struggling to feed and clothe children. Many weep in court, unable to pay the fine for the same reason they couldn’t afford the licence fee; they don’t have the money.

Everyone with a TV, except the over 75s, has to pay, whether or not they watch BBC programmes. If people fail to pay for other services, such as a Sky subscription, for example, the service is withdrawn without them being taken to court and fined.

The reason for this, of course, is to make sure every citizen is getting their instructions. The BBC is about crowd control. TV serves the same purpose in the US, it’s just funded indirectly. Still, I can cut the cord and not pay anything. As an American, I will not be thrown in jail for not watching the agit-prop beamed over TV.

America! Yeah! We’re number one!

The Final Rounding Up of the Christians

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The always restrained and sensible Ross Douthat has a restrained and sensible response to the latest moral crisis over the sodomites. The equally sensible and restrained Ed Whelan has a response to that column. From what I can gather, the folks on the Right are racing to get out into the public their very best restrained and sensible opinions about the latest outrages from the Cult of Modern Liberalism.

As is always the case, the comments are where you find the interesting bits. This from the NYTimes is a good example:

Religious views about sexuality are inconsistent with the reality that gay people are human beings who deserve the same rights and privileges as other people. The fact that they are sexually attracted to their own gender is clearly biologically based. Gay people have been abused for centuries because of ignorance of biology, and because the majority of straight people, unable to imagine not being straight, assumed that the gay minority was in diabolical cahoots with the prince of darkness, or some other such theological nonsense.

When the religious view of the world congealed centuries ago, it did so based on many wrong assumptions that were the result of profound ignorance of the true origin and nature of human beings. We now know better, and a tipping point has been reached in which people suddenly realized that gay people were not perversions, but were our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and our families.

The answer to every question that Mr. Douthat asks is the same. No person, no gay person, no black person, no female person should be treated with disdain because of their biology. Those who might do so are acting out of ignorance. They will now have to experience the social pain and rejection they they’ve inflicted with impunity on others. They will lose their relevance, their dignity and their tax exemptions. They will become what they have abused and hated. I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I will enjoy their pain. But I’ll get over it.

The person who wrote that echoes what was commonly said during the French Revolution about the aristocracy. The person who posted that would be perfectly fine with banning the religions they don’t like even if it meant killing the adherents. That’s always been the point of homosexual marriage, to give moral authority to the wrecking ball smashing through the churches.

You’ll note that “No person, no gay person, no black person, no female person should be treated with disdain because of their biology” explicitly leaves out white males. The person writing that could be male or female, black or white. It really does not matter because they have given themselves over to the cause so thoroughly, they no longer “identify” with their own biology. They are now The Borg.

The restrained and sensible people on the Right who post their replies to people like the commenter I quoted are going to a gun fight with the intent of talking the other side into surrender. It’s why we have gone, in a little over a decade, from “civil unions” to throwing people in jail for “treating the anointed with disdain.”

If you are a church going person, my suggestion to you is this. Disband your church and give up your faith. Run and hide. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, then you better get used to the idea of shooting back – literally. There’s no talking the other side out of their vision of the future, which does not include you.

The Great Realignment

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It’s been obvious for a long time now that the American political elite is undergoing a transformation. In the post-war period, the threat of global thermonuclear war froze things in place for a generation or more. One party was the coalition of novus civis, the newly minted members of American society. They were led, of course, by patricians like Roosevelt, but the foot soldiers were the ethnics who had arrived in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The other party was for the patricians. These were the core Americans who were white, Protestant and identified with the old Anglo-Saxon order. This party was, of course, led by patricians, like Rockefeller. Bush and Lodge. Their foot soldiers were the middle-class burghers who dominated the merchant classes.

The sixties saw that come apart as the ethnics became prosperous enough to join the middle-class. Once the ethnics could afford a house in the burbs and send their kids to college, they started to re-think their membership in the Democrat party. Once it was clear that the Progressive wing of that party was ready to start shooting the ethnics, it was not a long walk to the GOP, which is what happened in the 1970’s. The Archies were chased off by the Meatheads.

That’s where things would have stood if not for the end of the Cold War. Fear of a nuclear holocaust forced both parties to police their worst elements. A general agreement in the political class was that dangerous or reckless men must never be in the White House. Kennedy took two in the hat before he could blow up the world and that was as close as anyone was willing to get. The presidents from Kennedy forward may not have been great, but they were not loose cannons or reckless men unwilling to abide by the rules.

That changed when the wall came down. Bill Clinton was and is a vulgar degenerate and quite possibly a sociopath. He was nominated and elected because everyone felt it was safe to indulge in our worst instincts. Similarly, George W Bush was just spite for knocking off his old man eight years prior. Obama was the end of a long Progressive cuckold fantasy about the solution to race problems in America.

This coincides with the changing roles of the parties. The Democrats are now a purely ideological party. They seemed to be wholly disconnected from the normal operations of a political party in a liberal democracy. Obama pushes forward with polices that are not only unpopular, but positively dangerous to the country. For instance, the Middle East is on the brink of a regional war entirely due to his polices, that do nothing to advance American interests.

Coalition parties are the natural home for the religious. That’s why the American model has worked. You could be a Christian and a Democrat or a Jew and Republican. Allegiance to a party was about policy preferences, not group membership. Ideological parties require complete fidelity to the ideology. You can’t be a Progressive, for example, and oppose abortion or sodomy. That’s why Christians have been purged from the Democrat Party over the last two decades.

Jews are about to face the same dilemma, but from a slightly different angle. First there is the issue of Israel. Obama and the Progressives are about to give them the South Africa treatment. You can be sure that the word “apartheid” will be bouncing around the fever swamps and into the liberal press. The Jews are about to be declared the black hats and Netanyahu will be Die Groot Krokodil.

The other issue is the fact they are white, at least from the perspective of the coalition of the dispossessed. The Progressive cult awards piety points based on one’s distance from the evil white man. The typical Jewish male looks like a garden variety white guy to everyone else in the cult. More important, they are closer than the Muslims so the choice is easy, as far as Progressives are concerned.

Its why, ultimately, ideological parties are bad for Jews. There’s simply no getting around the ethnic loyalty problem presented by Jews in an ideological movement. One can stop being a Catholic, a Christian or a Shriner. You’re born a Jew. It’s the only religion that is also an ethnic group. For ideologues, Jews can never be trusted because they can never fully break from being Jewish. As the old Bolshevik saying goes, a man cannot chase two rabbits.

It is tempting to think that the Jews will just follow Archie Bunker over to the GOP. Maybe that will happen. I know a lot of Jews who are repulsed by what they see from the Left. But that assumes the GOP itself is not changing in response to what’s going on with its dance partner. The evidence suggests the GOP is, at the minimum, been destabilized, even as it is the majority party now.

The American system has always worked on the basis of two parties representing competing coalitions. Those coalitions agreed on the big stuff. They disagreed on the small stuff and how best to administer all of it. For the first time we now have a party that explicitly disagrees on the big stuff. In fact, one party appears to be defining itself as explicitly un-American.

The struggles you see with the GOP trying to formulate a response to the behavior of the Democrats is what you would expect from people trying the old tactics only to see them fall flat. The software of the GOP is built for a different age to face a different opponent. That means the GOP will have to change to match the Democrats, but into what?

History does not provide reasons to optimistic.

Our Grim Sterile Future

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I saw this posted on on Maggie’s Farm yesterday. What struck me was the images. The future as imagined by our rulers is always the same. Lots of glass and stainless steel. Everything is mechanized and intimidatingly efficient. Most important, it looks better without people.

Imagine those white tile walls and floors marked up by the zig-zag graffiti of the local street gang. Think about the vibrant types lined up in the black hoodies and New York Knicks lids on sideways. The people who imagine these things certainly don’t think about it because in their imagined future, there’s no vibrancy. Everything is monochromatic. It’s Blade Runner after all the bad people have finally been removed from the gene pool.

That’s the thing about what has happened in these hotbeds of gentrification. Social movements arise in response to some problem, real or imagined. The systematic removal from sight of the unwanted by liberal white people is quickly followed by the creating of living space fit for their kind and not the other kind.

The weird fascination with white and stainless, I suspect, part of the subtext of gentrification. There’s also the Potemkin recreations of the glory days of urban life as imagined by modern Progressives. Central Square in Cambridge Mass has be refitted to look like late 60’s Berkley, the last time and place it was cool to be an urban white person.

As I said the other day, the ruling class is developing a language of their own. They are also creating a new aesthetic. The NYC subways will look like Logan’s Run, while the above ground shops will have an ersatz bohemian grittiness. Looming over all of it will be the glass and steel towers. Maybe that’s where they will mount the Eye of Soros.

Death Spirals

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Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

So said Eliot and he was certainly correct. Much of what we take for human culture is an elaborate defense mechanism allowing us to avoid facing the reality of our existence. I suppose there’s nothing wrong with it. Our species has carried on a good while now so there must be something of value to the trait. Still, it is not without its downside.

An example is in this story on US health care.

The Supreme Court decision in King v. Burwell, the case challenging the Obama administration’s decision to award tax credits for health insurance sold through federally established exchanges, could turn on the question of whether a ruling that ends the tax credits on federal exchanges might cause something known as a “death spiral” in health insurance markets.

The good news is the answer is probably no, but the bad news is that’s only because the death spiral has probably already started.

A death spiral generally occurs when insurers are forced to raise premiums sharply to pay promised benefits. Higher premiums cause many of the healthiest policyholders, who already pay far more in premiums than they receive in benefits, to drop coverage.

When healthy policyholders drop coverage, it leaves the insurer with little choice but to raise premiums again because they now have a risk pool that is less healthy than before. But another premium increase means many of the healthy people who remained now drop their policies, too, and this continues until the only people willing to pay the now-very-high premiums are those with serious medical conditions.

Europeans, to their credit, have accepted the fact that the laws of supply and demand apply to health care, just as they do every other product and service. That means there must be a rationing mechanism. Europeans prefer their authoritarianism straight so they turn the rationing over the to the state. Americans can’t accept that supply and demand applies to health care so we keep inventing new crackpot schemes that promise to suspend the laws of nature.

Health care reached the point of diminishing returns about fifty years ago. 100 years ago America spent 3% of GDP on health care and people lived to about 60. Today we spend about 15% on health care and people live to about 80. A good portion of that increase in life expectancy is due to better food and less violence. It is axiomatic that as things like health care improve, the cost of further improvement escalates. The marginal return on investment declines.

This is true in all areas of human endeavor. The initial burst of productivity from the Internet was cheap. The phone lines existed and most Americans could read and write. As we have gone on, the cost of further productivity gains have escalated as new infrastructure has to be built out and new skills mastered. Again, this is phenomenon that social science has documented for a long time. Marx, while not framing it the same way, was talking about it in the surplus value of labor theory.

The fact is, we have about as much health care as we need. Until genetics begins to offer up solutions that reset the baselines, spending more on current health care is a negative investment. That’s the defect of the central planning model of Europe. There’s no hope for new technologies to reset the baselines and spur new high return investments. It’s why all the heavy lifting is done in the US these days.

This brings me back to the supply and demand aspect. Rationing is best done by price. People want BMW’s more than they want Dodge Darts and that is reflected in the price. No everyone can have a BMW so the clearing price determines who gets a BMW. In the American health care system, this process is retarded by government intervention. The result is rising prices and diminishing services. That’s the real death spiral, the death spiral of the monopolist.

America has the greatest health care system on earth. It is super cheap, with lots of options and a high degree of customer satisfaction. It is called veterinary medicine. American pets get better health care that 95% of the world population for pennies. The reason is there are few barriers to suppliers so there are many options along the price curve. There’s also incentives to innovate. My Vet has world class lab equipment because it helps attract business.

But, we would rather pamper our pets and starve out children than accept the reality of the human condition.

The Great War Comes to the Middle East

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Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant and well informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations, after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

-Will and Ariel Durant

Reading about the collapse of the Middle East is depressing stuff. Of course, the collapse has been going on for some time. The latest phase is just a continuation of a process that started with the end of the Cold War, which provided a framework for the Arabs to define themselves as separate from the West without rejecting the West. Arab nationalism sprung up after WW2 and was a defining characteristic of the Mohammedan lands for close to fifty years.

The Cold War kept the lid on a lot of problems that we’re rediscovering. One is the fact that the national boundaries in the land of the Muslim are meaningless. The other is that the Mohammedan is incapable of living under anything resembling western style liberalism. Authoritarian rule by hereditary clans is the natural order. Saudi Arabia is the model, not the exception. That may take the form of military dictatorship (Egypt), theocratic dictatorship (Iran) or the palace system in the gulf states.

This reality has been impossible for American elites to accept. Egalitarianism, consumerism and materialism are the three legs of their religion. They looked out over the Muslim world and had the same reaction they get when thinking about Appalachia. The two decade war to set things right in the Muslim world have brought us to the point where region-wide war is the most likely outcome. Yemen is looking like the Balkans of the Persian Gulf.

This old article from the American Thinker offers some useful background.

What is happening in Yemen is symptomatic of the whole Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. The population was semi-starved until oil production began in the 1980s, when oil production began and wheat imports rose to feed a population doubling every 25 years. The situation now is that oil exports will cease in the next couple of years, the capital is being besieged by rebel groups and Islamists of various types, and groundwater is close to complete depletion because of kat production.

Saudi Arabia has been ponying up to keep the Yemeni population fed. But a day will arrive when the Saudis will be sick of that, or there will simply be no administration on the Yemeni side to handle the aid. The Saudis are still building a 1,100-mile-long fence to keep the Yemenis out. Completion of the border fence will give the Saudis more options on when to stop feeding the Yemenis. The fate of Yemen is to break up into its constituent tribes and for perhaps 90% of the population to starve. That is more than 20 million people and it is likely to happen in the next few years.

The Dissident Right likes to blame the messianic spasm of the Bush years for what has gone wrong in the MENA and they have some points. Bush blowing up Iraq was a foolish decision. You never replace the known with the unknown. That’s what they did when they broke up Iraq. The unknown was an attempt to impose Western democracy on them. Instead they got a sectarian war that rippled through the Muslim world.

The true cause of that ripple is what American planners can never confront. In order to accept that the Arabs do not want and cannot accept the combination of egalitarianism, consumerism and materialism we call “liberalism” calls into the question the very nature of the western project. If “liberalism” is not universal, it is not perfect. If it is not perfect, it can be debated. If it can be debated, it can be rejected at home, as well as abroad. That’s simply impossible so the West refuses to accept the Arabs as Arabs.

The errors of the Bush years could have been patched over without going down this road. The Obama people could have backed a suitable strong man in Iraq, provided the means, money and weapons and then pretended he was just a proto-democrat. That would have allowed the region to fall back into a familiar pattern. Instead, they set off on a course that is strikingly insane. The results thus far are chaos in the Maghreb, particularly Libya. We have a breach with our only reliable ally in the region. Now, it appears our other allies are about to be swept away by Iranian backed lunatics.

Part of this is due to the people in charge. Anyone who has watched a vibrant American city government do business knows the pattern. Today they have policy X. Tomorrow it is policy Y, which is contradictory to policy X. Every day is a new day with new plans, often in conflict of with previous plans. It’s big man government jammed into an Anglo-Saxon political structure.

Another aspect is the central defect of American Progressives. Their singular focus on reaching the promised land leaves a huge blind spot, which the rest of us call the past. They never ask why things are as they are. They just assume the current arrangements happened randomly and therefore they are free to re-arrange them in pursuit of current fads. It’s why their cult ends up murdering people. They can’t imagine why the people are not going along with the new scheme so they assume it is malice. What else could it be?

In the case of the Middle East, Team Obama started with a policy of reversing the Bush policy, because Bush was Hitler and bad so they had to reverse all that. That meant abandoning Iraq to the Iranians. Then it meant undermining the despots in the Maghreb. Of course, they ramped up our involvement in Afghanistan for no other reason than the Bush people did not want to do it. The result was six years of fighting for no reason.

Once they ran out of Bush polices to reverse, they set out to re-arrange the region as if they were starting with a blank sheet. They looked at the alliance of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the GCC and Jordan and decided this did not make sense to them. if they could start over, they would have an alliance with Iran as the regional hegemonic power, with Iraq as the second. Why this is preferred is unknown to me. Shia are the minority sect in Islam so maybe that’s the connection. It will be an alliance of the oppressed. Who knows?

The result is this all out push to make a deal with Iran, no matter the cost. So far the cost is a breach with Israel and Saudi Arabia. The general destabilization of the region is a direct result of America suddenly changing sides. The fact that the president’s team is acting with the consistency of the Detroit city council only adds confusion to the mix. As a result, we are on the brink of all out war in the region. The price of incompetence in the White House could turn out to be very high if the House of Saud is toppled or Israel strikes Iran.