Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

Materialism’s End

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Note: Tonight at 8:45 PM EDT I will be on a Twitter Space with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow, Harrison Smith, Dan Lyman and Jared Taylor. The topic will be how best to remove the alien invaders.

There is a famous movie line that says, “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” The line does not originate with the film but much earlier, most likely by Charles Baudelaire. In the 19th century, the line turns up a lot and was used to mean that people often stand by and do nothing when terrible things are happening because they fail to appreciate the great struggle with evil that must define life when one acknowledges the existence of it.

Something similar persists to this day with something we can pin on Karl Marx and others regarding the nature of human society. Marx argued that oppression and inequality were the result of economic relations. Therefore, if you want to get a society free of oppression, then you need to get the economic relations right. Later, libertarians took up the same claim but arrived at a different path to liberation. Ever since, the West has been sure that nothing exists other than economics.

The story of the last century or so in the West has been the spread of materialism as the defining feature of Western thought. Getting the economics right has been the center of all political debate. The left-right axis found new poles with socialism on the left and libertarianism on the right. One side sees equality as the equal distribution of goods, while the other side sees it as the equal distribution of liberty. Both assume that once the economics are right, paradise must naturally follow.

The reason for the “cultural revolution” of the last decade or so is that a portion of the left began to see the error in this view. In the middle of the last century, they embraced the claim that Marxism failed because people were incapable of transcending their cultural conditioning. Therefore, the inevitable progress toward egalitarianism can only happen when the cultural restraints are removed. That required taking control of the centers of cultural production.

This is why the leftists in this age are perfectly comfortable working for wealthy oligarchs or even being oligarchs. They deliberately entered corporate life as they saw corporations as a center of cultural production. Similarly, they entered and then took over the vast, sprawling networks of the administrative state and then the managerialism system that directs it. All the people and things the left supposedly hated were turned into tools to bring about the revolution.

Ironically, that project is foundering for the same reason that its predecessors persisted long after reality made clear that Marx was wrong. The public embrace of economics as the standard against which everything is measured meant that the cultural revolution would be measured against its practical utility. The escapist phrase, “go woke, go broke” was factually incorrect, but it had a kernel of truth. In a purely materialist age, culture takes a back seat to the price of eggs.

The corrosive power of materialism is clear in the ongoing destruction of college sports where “reform” is about getting the money right. The reason college athletics is a thing at all is tradition, but everyone involved is willing to throw tradition into the furnace if it helps fire the economics. Everyone is sure that all they need to do is get the economics of the sport right and everything will follow. No amount of evidence will convince them that some things are too important for the marketplace.

You see it with libertarian cranks over the immigration bill. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” is in trouble because weirdos like Rand Paul are able to rally the clown horn gang to oppose it on money grounds. Rand Paul is literally making the argument that your society is only worth saving at the right price. It is a great example of the expression, “A man who puts a price on everything values nothing.” This is the life motto of all those who embrace materialism.

The people siding with Rand Paul are psychologically incapable of understanding why a people can survive bankruptcy but not demographic replacement. For them, the holy crusade is to get the economics right. Their version of the egalitarian paradise may be different than that of the Marxists, but it is just as powerful. For them, the imagined Hell is the long promised fiscal collapse, whatever that means. Staving that off is the purpose of their life, so they cannot be persuaded.

Therein lies the small bit of good news. There is a growing number of people who see that there are some things too important to subject to the marketplace. This is the dissident view, which is the old conservative view. It is the very heart of the left-right concept that has haunted the West for centuries. The left says the truth lies with the people, while the right says it lies outside the people. For today’s dissident, the truth stands in judgement of the marketplace, not the other way around.

All the evidence tells us that material prosperity, the key to the materialist worldview, is not the roots of a healthy society. Instead, it is one of its flowers. In the West, we have reached material prosperity, but all of the measures of happiness are in decline, with some in rapid decline. The demographic collapse that comes with material superabundance is not a problem to be managed, but a warning that the logical end of materialism is death. We used to know this.

Again, there are signs that this old knowledge is not dead and buried, but simply in hibernation and now starting to spring forth. You see it in the hostility to the libertarian cranks on social media. You see it in the jeering at socialist cranks. Safety first commentators like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk are now repeating dissident things that used to be disqualifying for them. Perhaps in the end, the last materialist we hang shall be the one who sold us the rope.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Temporarily Successful Paupers

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about bugmen, a post about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

A basic rule of complex systems is that within them, you get more of what is rewarded by the rules of the system and less of what is not rewarded. In the case of human systems, this manifests as status. High status people will possess many of the qualities favored by the rules, and low status people will have fewer of those things. The stars of a sport are those who are either great at some aspects of the sport or very good at a wide range of favored skills in the sport.

Culture is the word we use for the complex system of rules and properties that define the societies in which we live. Like all systems, culture rewards some things and not others and punishes some things and not others. Status in the culture is determined by the overall quantity of these things. Some qualities are disqualifying, as the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein learned. He was very good at making profitable films, a highly prized quality, but he had habits that were eventually disqualifying.

This basic rule of systems can help explain why the United States finds itself in a crisis that, on the surface, seems easy to solve. The finances of the American empire are not so dire that they cannot be remedied. Some sacrifice would be needed, but with sound leadership, the fiscal house could be set right quickly. The same is true of the foreign policy challenges. The demographic and cultural issues are more complex, but the answers are known. It is a question of execution.

The most vexing problem of the current crisis for most people is why nothing gets done to address the known issues when the solutions are fairly obvious. On the one hand, there is an industry that exists to explain why the politics of each issue is such that the right answer can never be considered. On the other hand, there is libertarianism and conservatism that offer escape from the reality of the problem. These are the people who start every sentence with “all we need to do is…”

The corruption and escapism surrounding the question of why the issues that plague the country are never addressed are not explanations. They are part of the set of things that are caused by the core issue. We have gotten a hint of this in the first months of Trump’s second attempt at the wheel. He simply did things, like void longstanding executive orders on affirmative action. Suddenly, a man with the will to act was acting on a problem of politics, and the problem stopped being a problem.

What the first months of the new Trump term show is that leaders can simply act, and their actions can change the rules of the system. The racial rackets are suddenly in crisis because one man signed his name on some paper. We are seeing the same thing with immigration, where the political center is now speeding so quickly in the direction of the patriotic position that people are struggling to keep pace. It is as if there is a revolution going on in elite opinion.

This returns us to the question of why the same thing has not been done with regard to the main issues of the current crisis. The reason is systemic. The system rewards certain types of men and not others. That means our elites are high in the qualities that are rewarded and low in the qualities that are needed to solve the problem. The fact that Trump is universally hated in Washington speaks to the fact that he is high in qualities that the political system abhors.

An example of how this works is Mark Cuban, the billionaire who used to own the Dallas Mavericks and now agitates people on social media. He is a billionaire and therefore a member of the elite. The difference between Mark Cuban and the people in the stands at an NBA game wearing a team jersey is only about money. In fact, Cuban was one of those people as the owner of the team. He was not just the owner. He was the number one superfan of the team.

John Steinbeck coined the phrase “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” to describe the attitude of the typical American. The American Dream says that through hard work and determination, you can become wealthy. There is also the sense that serendipity plays a role in getting rich. You increase your odds of getting that winning ticket to the upper classes if you work hard. In this regard, Mark Cuban is the manifestation of this concept, as he got rich through hard work and serendipity.

There is a flip side to this that is clear with Cuban. Our elites think of themselves as temporarily successful paupers. The same turn of fortune’s wheel that made them rich could easily make them poor again. This is why American elites are so desperate to imitate the ways of the lower classes. It is as if they feel they must be penitent in order to prevent the hand of fate from sending them down the economic ladder. This is why rich celebrities are so fond of playing the victim.

Of course, it is not merely dumb luck that explains success. Hard work and determination play a major role, but the main driver is the relative quality of those things rewarded by the culture. America is a materialist society that rewards those who are good at our peculiar form of economics. Mark Cuban got rich because he was able to fob off onto tech billionaires a company that turned out to be worthless, but at the time looked like a goldmine.

Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by flattering the political class that his businesses were holy crusades. If they invested public money in those enterprises, they would not only bring salvation to society but also be seen as virtuous. Without hundreds of billions in public money, Musk is just an eccentric weirdo. His love for Donald Trump now looks like opportunism. It was a chance to run the same game on the MAGA movement that he ran on the left for so long.

The recent public feud between Trump and Musk is useful in understanding something else about our elites. Musk feels like Trump used him, but he should not be shocked, as to be an elite means being a tool. Success in economic endeavors is never about higher values or transcendent beliefs. It is about making the mechanics of the economic system work in your favor. At every level, the people involved are nothing more than tools to be used by those above them.

This makes the people at the top the most successful tools in the system. They are the tools the system uses to exploit the rest of the tools. It is no wonder then that the political elites use the economic elites as tools for their success. Trump’s relationship with Musk shows that Trump has learned how to be good at politics by using members of the economic elite like Musk as tools in his new trade. In a society of tools, everyone is eventually used and then discarded, even the elite tools.

This brings us back to those vexing problems of the current crisis. The solution is clear, but the execution requires men with the will to do it. Such men are never mere tools of the system, but men with a sense of nobility. They are men who understand why old men plant fruit trees. They have a higher purpose than the mere collection of things, and they do not see themselves as temporarily successful paupers. Their nobility is independent of their utility.

The American system does not produce such men because it does not reward the qualities that such men must possess. In fact, having a higher purpose is disqualifying in most areas of life. The businessman who sees his company as part of the social fabric will be ruined by those who can think only in money. The politician who speaks of sacrifice will lose to one promising free money. Materialism demands that you live in the present, so you can never transcend the present.

It was not always so for America. It is the transformation that occurred in the twentieth century that resulted in a system that produces our current elites. It is the failure of those elites that will bring about the end of the system that created them. Perhaps what comes next will once again reflect the essential American character, but this assumes there will be enough of those essential Americans to make it possible. That is the great question at the heart of the current crisis.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Signs In The BBB

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Note: Last night Paul and I talked about what it means to be a dissident and why the people we call the left believe the weird things they do. Watch here.

Most of the week has been talk about the “Big Beautiful Bill” that is winding its way through the gauntlet that is Congress. The hold up, as is always the case, is the Republicans are devoting their time to how best to use this opportunity to screw over their own voters. To be a Republican means looking for opportunities to remind your voters that the political system is hopeless. It is now looking like the Republican Senate will hand their president a major loss.

While many of the oligarchs have swung to the side of angels, the donor class in general remains locked into the old nation wrecking model where both parties are focused on undermining and destroying the majority population. The cultural atmosphere in Washington is radioactively hostile to the average American. The broad support for Trump and his policies is simply seen as proof that the people opposing Trump are the good guys in this long twilight struggle.

At some point, the effort will shift to peeling off some Democrats in the Senate to get the votes for the bill, which means giving even more away to the forces of darkness than was already in the bill. The end result will be something that has a few crumbs for the majority and mountains of stuff for the bad guys. The result of the “sausage maker” that is Congress will be a mighty turd sandwich with those few crumbs for the majority sprinkled on top like sesame seeds.

In fairness, some of those crumbs are good crumbs. There is $46 billion to build the wall Trump promised a decade ago. Given how incensed both parties were over this idea when it was proposed, this should be viewed as progress. There is a bunch of money in the bill to expand the forces and facilities needed to expel the invaders. The claim is that the additional resources will let the government expel up to one million invaders every year, not including the people nabbed at the border.

That is one of the many lies Washington has fed us over the years. They claimed that every year one to two million people were deported, when the number was actually around three hundred thousand. The additional million or so were people refused at the border for any reason. If Boobingo from Ghana did not have the right stamp on his passport and was rejected at the airport in Ghana, then that was counted in the deportation numbers.

There are tax cuts that actually favor people who work for a living. There is the “no tax on tips” change, which is a big deal. It also rolls back the reporting requirements from services like PayPal. Currently, if you get more than $600 through PayPal, you get a 1099 and then it is up to you to prove to the IRS that the money sent to you from a friend was not income. The “gig economy”, people who make money a few bucks at a time, will get serious tax relief.

One thing not mentioned in the media, because it requires a high school education to understand, is the planned rollback of energy regulations. The point of these changes is to allow the administration to kill off the Gaia nonsense in the energy sector to pave the way for new energy production. In one of his pressers, Trump casually mentioned the goal to add 400 GW from nuclear by 2050. That would mean quadrupling the amount of electric we get from nuclear power.

Along with the immigration measures in the bill, this is where you get a hint of what is vexing the oligarchs who are backing Trump. They look at AI and see the cubicle farms in their businesses being filled by robots instead of humans. That means they will need vastly more electricity than they currently have, and it means they need to find something to keep these unemployed people busy. The army of Indians stashed around the country will have to go back.

It is a bit ironic, in a way, as for decades people have argued that we do not need more people as automation is reducing the value of labor. Normal people in the regular world could see it, but the oligarchs did not see it. Instead, they saw the need for armies of Hindus to cheaply write code and administer the vast financial skimming models used by the financial sector. With AI, they can now see what automation means in their lives, so they are swinging around to the moral position.

Of course, the fact that even with oligarch support this bill is struggling speaks to the problems of the political system. The massive amounts of new spending and the failure to include the savings found by DOGE is a good reminder that the system cannot be reformed though the normal means. It will take a fiscal crisis and then emergency powers to fix the government’s finances. Most likely it will require a Robespierre to pave the way for genuine reform.

In the end, despite the Republican perfidy and conservative cuckery, the existence of this bill hints that some powerful people are serious about avoiding disaster. It is one of those tiny steps in the sane direction on some issues that will either be viewed as too little too late or the start of the great reordering. Of course, either way, there will be a great reordering no matter what. The question that hangs over all of this is whether it comes by the pen or by the sword.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Death Of Experts

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Note: Tonight at 8:00 EDT, Paul and I will be talking about what it means to be a dissident in this age. The show is on Twitter, YouTube and Rumble.

A strange thing developing in pseudo-intellectual circles is the defense of expertise, by which is meant the defense of credentialism. People long on credentials, but short on practical knowledge and experience, are demanding they get the respect they deserve as experts in their respective fields. Nathan Cofnas is the latest to get in on the issue by demanding we respect his authority as an expert. Dick Hanania has also used to the issue to get attention online.

It is not a new issue nor one exclusive to the sorts of people who seek attention online as “influencers.” Credentialism produces a class of people who have no practical knowledge, so they have no experience. The lack of experience means they have no tangible results to back up their claims to expertise. This produces a class of people who defend credentialed experts. The anti-Trump crank Tom Nichols is a good example of the type. He even wrote a book defending credentialed experts.

Credentialism itself is a sign the system has entered its denouement. It signals the capture of the system by people who are motivated by class consciousness rather than a genuine expertise in a specific field. The group of people devoted to genuine expertise are shouldered aside by those devoted to defending the privileges that come from claiming expertise. To solidify their hold, they create arbitrary barriers of entry into the domain of expertise, which are called credentials.

This is the flaw in Peter Turchin’s concept of elite overproduction, at least as far as it applies to the managerial state. It is not that there are too many elites for the available positions, but that the nature of elite degrades over time. The builders give way to maintainers who are then displaced at the top by people who are good at institutional politics, to the exclusion of practical knowledge. The definition of elite then changes from practical things to the abstractions we see within credentialism.

That aside, for those interested in seeing how the defense of credentialism manifests with the next generations, this video is a good start. Dave Greene, the man behind the YouTube channel The Distributist, debated Nathan Cofnas, the person who gained some notoriety attacking Kevin MacDonald a half dozen years ago. Cofnas is now trying to create a new career defending credentialism. Cofnas then defended his performance with former pornographer Luke Ford.

Without knowing it, at least as a front brain process, Cofnas is engaging in a group activity in his defense of credentialism. He is appealing to the people who may or may not allow him to remain in the expert class. He is not trying to convince the rubes to respect his authority. He is signaling to his betters that he is a reliable candidate for admission into the club. His thumbless way of doing it is his undoing, but it the behavior elicited by the selection mechanisms of credentialism.

A more nuanced example is this post on Zero Hedge about the plan circulating in the West to cut themselves off from cheap energy products. The origin of the post is the site OilPrice.com, which is a clearing house of postings about the energy markets. The author of the post is someone calling himself Cyril Widdershoven. That is not a fake internet name, but a real person. Here is his CV on LinkedIn. He is an anthropomorphized example of credentialism.

If you read the postings of Cyril Widdershoven at that site, what you see is that he is usually wrong in his predictions. His analysis in the case of the pending energy sanctions rests not on an understanding of oil markets but on an understanding of the prevailing opinions in the expert class. That is the key to his wrongness. He is always wrong in the same way everyone else in the expert class is wrong. In managerialism, being wrong along with everyone else is better than being right.

That is the thing about credentialism. It selects for people who preternaturally understand the prevailing attitudes within the group. It is why the range of opinions is so narrow in every field. Once any group hits a critical mass of people whose instinct is to be in the center of the group, the group is then defined by the fights to be as close to the center as possible. The expert class becomes a collapsing star. This is why our expert class now sounds like a chorus rather than a debate.

You see the problem in that video of Cofnas debating Greene. Cofnas cannot distinguish between error and a lie or understand why one is better than the other because for him they are not moral issues. Both are simply means to an end, much in the way a sociopath views the truth and a lie. In the case of credentialism, error and lying only matter insofar as they move you closer to the center. The practical impact is of no importance to the people inside the expert class.

Managerialism, of which the expert class is a part, rests on the social capital of the people over whom it rules. The accumulating errors of the expert class, which contributes to the dysfunction of the managerial system, is eroding the social capital of society and thus we see the collapsing trust in experts and the state. Counterintuitively this is seen as proof within the expert class that they are not just experts, but members of the elect, chosen to rule over the non-experts.

This explains the prevailing madness in our politics. The motivations inside the system are now divorced from practical necessity. The rooms where decisions are made are full of people with resumes littered with the word “consultant” or letters indicating admission to various subgroups in the expert class. Nowhere is there anyone who knows how anything works. The only thing they know for sure is that you should respect their authority as experts.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Blackrockistan

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Note: Tonight at 8:15 EDT, I will be on with Paul Kersey, Peter Brimelow and Harrison Smith from Infowars to talk about remigration. I may also announce, with a great flourish, that I am officially off the Trump Train. Tune in here.

A question that is never asked in official circles, or even much in unofficial ones, is why Western leaders seem so desperate for war? For the last three-plus years, they have been scheming to start a direct war with Russia. The rhetoric has been so crazed it suggests they have a death wish. It is not just Russia. They want war with China and Iran, which would mean a regional war in the Middle East. The one thing the West seems sure about is the need for a big war.

Of course, given the increasing separation between official narratives and reality, many are sure they are at war. The current Prime Minister of Britain is telling his party that the country is now at war and must mobilize the country. Emmanuel Macron has spent the last year flitting about the continent as if he is leading Europe in a war against Russia, despite the fact the official position of his government, and NATO, is they have no direct role in the Ukraine war.

There is a Little Rascals quality to Europe at the moment. None of these countries have an army capable of fighting beyond their borders and many could not defend themselves against a well-armed militia. Europe has relied on the American military for so long most have forgotten how to fight. Instead, like the old television program, they dress up like big boys and girls and put on a show. Watching the girl bosses of the EU make threats is as absurd as the old television show.

That does explain one reason for the rhetoric. To be a European head of state is to be powerless, other than the power to put on a show. France, for example, relies on the EU to control its economy, trade policy and immigration policy. NATO decides what France can do with its shrinking military capability. The typical American governor has more sovereign authority than the head of France. While not entirely ceremonial, this is the direction for the “leaders” of Europe.

If you are allowed to do only one thing after reaching the highest office in your country’s political system, that is the thing you will do, and with gusto. Keir Starmer, for example, understands that the Bank of England overthrew the Tory government and put Labour in charge of parliament with a minority of public support. Every EU leader knows the EU rigs elections and overthrows governments. Every European “leader” knows he is an actor hired to play a role, so they play the role.

That gets to who is doing the hiring. Starmer is in office because the Bank of England saw him as a suitably complaint puppet. Macron remains in power, despite losing the last election, because Blackrock wants him in power. Germany’s new puppet is in charge for the same reason. BlackRock is the world’s largest asset manager controlling more than nine trillion dollars. That means it has real power, the power to pick who wins elections and who controls public policy.

Blackrock invested billions in Ukraine prior to the war, because it believed Ukraine would fall into the Western orbit, which would mean Blackrock would control trillions in natural resources. The reason the Republicans were suddenly desperate to get sixty billion in new money to Ukraine after the 2022 midterm victory was to get Blackrock and others some of their money out of Ukraine. The proxy war with Russia was sold to the bankers as an opportunity to loot Eurasia again.

Now that the war has turned against the West, the rhetoric has become shriller for political reasons, but also as a way to sell arms. Blackrock and other massive private asset holders have large stakes in companies like Raytheon, Lockheed, Rheinmetall and many other arms makers. Another reason the political class of Europe is carrying on as if Genghis Khan is about to cross the Dnieper is they think it builds popular support for rebuilding their militaries.

There is another element to this. The Western oligarchy is based on the assumption that the United States is the global bank and the global mint. It performs this dual role by controlling the global reserve currency, which is made possible by controlling the most important global assets. To this point, that was made possible by controlling oil via the petrodollar agreement with OPEC. If energy must be priced in dollars, the demand for dollars can never be challenged.

The technological revolution, which is largely responsible for creating this new oligarchical class, has also undermined this arrangement. There are now other things in great demand to meet the needs of technology. Simply skimming from the oil trade is no longer enough. America needs computing power and that means energy production, which means a massive increase in energy consumption, along with the consumption of other natural resources needed for big computing.

The trillions in natural resources underneath the Donbas were seen as a quick and easy answer to the Western hunger for natural resources. Of course, it was just the first domino in the eventual exploitation of the rest of Eurasia. The technological revolution has turned the West, particularly America, into a ravenous beast that must find new sources of food to maintain itself. Big Tech and Big Finance have created a vampire economy that is always looking for a new neck.

They say all wars are banker’s wars and this has been true since the spread of popular government in the 18th century. Once who controls the assets is divorced from how those assets are used, there is no longer any control over how those assets are used by the political system. We see that in the modern West. The people vote, politicians are picked to fill the offices, but policy is made by those who own the assets because the Golden Rule states, the men with the gold make the rules.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Asabiyyah

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the death of college athletics, a post about building a workbench, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

If you were to imagine the ideal human community, you would probably assume “ideal” meant peaceful and cooperative. There may be people who think the ideal society is one that it is something like a prison exercise yard, but most people think of the idyllic society as one in perfect harmony. Everyone cooperates with one another in order to overcome the natural challenges that come with human society. Disagreements are worked out through the free exchange of ideas and compromise.

Everyone understands that even on a small scale, such a thing is not possible, but it has always been a useful metric. We often measure society against this standard of what we conceive of as the ideal society. It is why every year there are studies posted listing the happiest countries or the least corrupt countries. These are ways to see how the country stacks up against that ideal. Happy people have less crime and corruption than people in quarrelsome, uncooperative societies.

This is not a Christian concept as many assume. People have noticed since the ancient times that societal health correlates with cooperation. Aristotle talked about the concept of philía, which roughly means friendship or affection. It is the glue that holds a people together, which is a requirement of the polis. It is the natural desire to cooperate with others, not just from personal interest, but for the sake of the polis. The “politics” of a society, therefore, arise from friendship and affection.

The 14th-century Arab historian and sociologist Ibn Khaldun wrote about this thing he called asabiyyah, which is something like social cohesion or group solidarity. It is the natural desire to cooperate that arises from family and the tribe, which allows for the construction of increasingly complex social structures. The more asabiyyah a society possesses, the more it is able to accomplish. This, Khaldun noted, is also why complex societies inevitably collapse.

The thing that makes it possible for one people to dominate other people is that which eventually erodes their social cohesion. It is social cohesion that facilitates cooperation, which increases the prosperity of the society. That prosperity then brings expansion and the incorporation of new people, who begin to drain that social cohesion. The cost of acquiring new people is the loss of social cohesion. This then raises the cost of governing the society, which further erodes asabiyyah.

There are many famous theories as to why human societies rise and fall, but all must contend with this central truth of human society. It can only exist when people are able to trust and cooperate with those outside their kin group. The greater the distance from that kin group, the more it costs to maintain cooperation. The reason empires always fall is they end up including people so distant from one another that they are unable to form any sort of cooperative relationship.

Look around the West and you see two things. One is the cost of the state is spiraling upward as it becomes increasingly incompetent. An unsaid truth of many American cities is they lack a genuine police force. The police are just a state sponsored gang that keeps the less organized gangs in check in order to maintain some safe areas for the elite and the tourist areas. Parts of cities like Baltimore can no longer be included in the concept of “civilized society.”

European cities are struggling with the same issue, but for different reasons. Instead of an unassimilable population from an old economic model, they imported millions of people who are genetically distant from the native population. Many of these people are hostile to other people imported into Europe. This alone has eroded social cohesion, but the efforts to maintain order are also eroding social trust. Every man jailed for speech crimes is a loss of European asabiyyah.

This may explain the sudden lurch in elite opinion in the United States away from unlimited immigration to what may be open hostility to it. Every day the window on the issue seems to move from the long-held position of open borders to what is now called remigration, the return of migrants to their homelands. The State Department has announced it is opening an office of remigration to facilitate this. A year ago, uttering the word “remigration” in many places could get you jailed.

This change is elite driven, which is what matters. Instead of an elite responding to public opinion, it is the elite now trying to drive public opinion. When the CEO of JPMorgan Chase speaks dismissively about immigration, as he recently did on the left-wing cable channel CNBC, something big is happening in the clouds. Conventional wisdom among the elite on immigration has swung to the opposite side. There is a reason for it, and it is not a sense of shame.

This gets back to those old concepts about what makes society possible and how best to measure the prosperity of a society. Decades of mismanagement due to the needs of the American empire have drained the West of its asabiyyah. As a result, the cost of maintaining order in the West is reaching a danger zone. All one has to do is look at the budgets of Western governments and then look at the condition of society. In many places, no government at all would be an improvement.

Therefore, it should not be surprising that it is the money men who are the first to sense something is seriously wrong in the West. They may not understand the cultural issues, but they see the gap between the cost and the results. The world’s richest man was not tasked with finding trillions in waste by accident. With $19 Trillion in debt rolling over in the next year, the money men are right to be worried that they have drained the last drops of asabiyyah from the Western world.

While it is tempting to see this sudden realization as a positive, Ibn Khaldun was not optimistic about a society’s ability to rebuild its asabiyyah. This is a theme with all writers who examined societal decline. Once a society hits that inflection point, it no longer has the capacity to reform itself. Social cohesion is not something that can be rebuilt, not even through shared struggle, as it is something that naturally occurs. Once it is drained it is gone and the society it produced is gone with it.

Perhaps this is a necessity as the West finally escapes the age of ideology. The decline of the West will open the ground for new social cohesion to form organically among the European populations that remain in Western lands. The new, post-ideological societies, growing up in majority-minority lands, will place social cohesion and asabiyyah at the top of their social hierarchy. The new asabiyyah will grow out of the wreckage of the ideological society.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Return Of Elites

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Note: This is the five year anniversary of the death of George Floyd, peace be upon him, so I will be part of a Twitter space discussing the life and legacy of one of our nation’s greatest heroes. You can listen here.

This is the time of year when entertainers, politicians and famous rich people are asked to deliver commencement speeches. Inevitably they deliver tirades against normal people and in favor of the latest trends. This season, the popular chant with this sort is the “rule of law” which is ironic given that the people chanting it spent the last decade obliterating the concept. The question that is rarely asked is why is it that rich people are so eager to support this stuff?

It is not just the ditzy actors who are prone to this. A part of getting rich in America is adopting the politics of the rich, which is hostile to normal things. Rich people, until very recently, were solidly behind open borders. They backed the street violence and chaos of the last decade through donations to the thicket of not-for-profits. The billionaires underwrote the entertainment content that preached the bizarre social theories at the root of their deranged politics.

On the surface, it makes little sense. If you are a rich person, you should not want to undermine order, as it is the rules that make you rich. You got your wealth because of the system, so the system is your friend. Think a little further, however, and you can see why the rich might want to make the rules more opaque. It is a form of pulling up the drawbridge behind them so new schemers cannot get in on the action. They got theirs, so it is time to keep you from getting yours.

In this regard these strange opinions about how we ought to act and how we ought to organize society function as a selection mechanism. The rich use the willingness to adopt these opinions as a test of your willingness to obey. This is very clearly how they select politicians. The more suggestable the person, the more likely they are to find success in politics. No master has ever wanted a slave who thinks outside the box or is willing to question authority.

That said, many of our rich people believe in this stuff. For actors, the answer probably lies in the fact that merit plays a small role in their success. Pretending to be someone else, singing a catchy tune and being funny are not uncommon skills. Restaurants in Los Angeles and New York are full of people capable to being good at those things in movies and television. Taylor Swift does not possess skills uncommon in her trade, but she is a megastar and everyone else sings for their supper.

Randomness plays an enormous role in carny life. Hollywood is full of stories about women who were spotted by a talent scout and turned into a star. Then you have the many actors who landed a role in a film that turned out to be a huge success, despite the studios thinking otherwise. Sally Field hit it big in Smokey and the Bandit, for example, despite the studio not wanting her or the film. Carny life is more about random chance than talent and hard work.

In a world where success and failure are random chance or perhaps decided by hidden forces unseen by the players, it is no surprise that these people are in the sort of paranoid politics that define carny life. It is not a huge jump from thinking shadowy figures behind the scenes determine your fate as an actor to thinking that an invisible army of Hitler fans secretly control society. Their lived experience tells them that the rules are a facade for the real power structure.

Randomness explains carnies and politicians, but what about the oligarchs? Why are so many of them fond of these paranoid politics? The last ten years of woke madness would not have been possible without the support of the oligarchs. In fact, the story of Trump’s return to power cannot be understood without noticing how the nation’s richest men lined up behind him. Most opposed him just five years ago, but then they changed teams and now support his reform efforts.

Here is where we see chance again. Look at the oligarchs and what you rarely see is people with unique talents for anything other than exploiting a bottleneck or monopoly that was often the result of chance. The PayPal mafia, the fifty or so people who founded PayPal, got super rich by exploiting special access to the banking system in order to facilitate online payments. Many went on to exploit new bottlenecks and monopolies to get even richer.

This is not a novelty of this round of oligarch formation. The oligarchs that emerged in the industrial age were similarly fortunate. A common story of that period was one where the guy who got super rich from a new idea was not the guy who came up with the idea, but the guy who bought the idea and then exploited it. The industrial oligarchs were good at gaming the system of the time, much in the same way that the modern oligarch was the product of gaming the system.

One of the truths about capitalism and market economics is that it does not select for virtue or even talent in the conventional sense. It selects for the ability and willingness to find gaps in the rules and the ability to ruthlessly exploit them. The tech barons found a gap in property laws, for example, that allows them to steal your information and then sell it to government and business. Without this loophole, the giant social media platforms collapse overnight.

The result of this system that randomly awards people with opportunity and then lavishly regards those who are willing to ruthlessly exploit the opportunity is an oligarchy composed of sociopathic lottery winners. The weird social politics that defines the attitudes of our elite are both a defense against similar lottery winners lurking below and a justification for their position. They are not just lottery winners, but members of an elect, fated to hold positions in the elite.

It has been noted that the creation of new oligarchs of the industrial era ended in the early 20th century. This came with the rise of managerialism, but also with a narrowing of the economic class. The overclass faded from the scene, retreating into philanthropy and public service roles. From the perspective of the typical American, the gap between the rich and poor narrowed and the middle-class came to dominate. Getting rich came to mean doing slightly better than middle-class.

This current revolt against managerialism led by some of the oligarchs is coming when the fruit of the technological revolution has been harvested. There are no new billionaires being minted from new technology. Similarly, the financial sector that experienced a parallel boom has consolidated as well. The one exception may be AI, but this is why the current oligarchs are desperate to wrestle control of it from the managerial class.

What we may be experiencing is another period of consolidation similar to what happened after the industrial revolution. The weird social politics are no longer useful as a defense of the oligarchy, so they are seeking to reorder the managerial system to lock in their positions and marginalize the sorts of politics that come with the boutique beliefs that define the woke phenomenon. They are tapping into populism as a useful way to pressure their fellow oligarchs into compliance.

The bulk of the 20th century was determined by elites who acted like elites and operated from the shadows. That was peak America, from the perspective of the typical American in this age. There was strong family formation and a strong middle-class that defended moderate morality. A nation full of normal middle-class people happy with the rules is not going to cause any trouble for the elites. Perhaps that is what the current elites are trying to recreate in this age.

This could explain the growing war on credentialism. The managerial class is festooned with people with little practical knowledge but festooned with credentials that they think make them a genius. This is why they think they can tell the rich guys what to do and where to do it. Breaking the spine of the managerial class will necessarily mean breaking their belief system. The sudden anathematization of woke culture is an effort to kill their gods and therefore their sense of authority.

In the end, the thirty or so years of bizarre social politics that have proliferated among the elites may be ending due to the consolidation of the oligarchy. Whatever benefit there was to these luxury beliefs has been consumed. What is left is a rallying point for members of the managerial class who refuse to bend the knee. Restoring normal social order is another step in shoring up the position of the oligarchs by removing any of the remaining threats to their position.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

Science Fiction

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Note: Behind the green door, there is a post about the classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, a post about conservative corruption, and the Sunday podcast. On the Substack side of the green door, there are now weekly videos. Subscribe here or here.

When you look at lists of the best science fiction movies, what you see is a mix of recency bias and popular nonsense. Star Wars gets placed near the top because the lists are usually targeted to people who consume corporate slop. Back to the Future is another one on these lists that does not qualify as science fiction. It is a comedy where time travel is the MacGuffin. Of course, this raises the question as to what qualifies as science fiction and what makes for good sci-fi.

Science fiction is speculative fiction that relies on science to create scenarios where questions about the human condition are more easily explored. Artificial intelligence, for example, is useful in telling stories about what it means to be human. We instinctively know a computer program is not human, even if it is able to speak with us like a real human being. That gets to the issue of what separates flesh and blood humans from the artificial versions we are creating.

Heinlein said that science fiction takes what we know now, what we thought we knew before now and then speculates about the future based on a solid understanding of how science advances. Asimov famously said that science fiction is about how humans react to changes in science and technology. Together they make for a good definition of science fiction, which is as much about the science as the fiction. In other words, it is not just drama in space or in the future.

That is why Back to the Future is not science fiction. The time travel business is just a way for the main characters to be funny in unusual situations. The point of the film is to make people laugh, not challenge their views of humanity or technology. Time travel is a MacGuffin, which is a thing or event that moves the story along. The point of the time travel business is to put Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox in wacky situations so they can be wacky and funny together.

Similarly, Star Wars is not science fiction. This has become a controversial statement because the adult children who consume the modern iterations of the franchise like to imagine themselves as science geeks. George Lucas has always described the franchise as a space opera, because it is space opera. Star Wars is consciously melodramatic and formulaic. It could just as easily be set in the Middle Ages or the Old West, but he chose to set the story in space.

In fairness, the Star Trek franchise can also be called space opera. The stories in the television series are the definition of melodramatic and formulaic. While the original series tried to think about the impact of interstellar travel on humanity, subsequent series were standard televisions dramas set in space. The main appeal of the original series was the relationship of the three main characters. That could just as easily have been done on a pirate ship in the 17th century.

That goes to what Heinlein said about science fiction. It has to try to  project scientific progress into the future in a plausible way. We can assume we solved the problems of humans in space, for example, but it must do so in a way that is plausible. For example, we figured out how to shield spacemen from radiation and mitigate the effects of zero gravity on his muscles and bones. That means the humans still struggle with limitations, just different limitations than current humans.

This is why the girl boss phenomenon has killed modern sci-fi. The demand that the main character be a girl boss who never has to struggle to get what she wants and is never allowed to fail defeats the whole purpose of the genre. If science makes it so that girls can beat up men three times their size and they are able to solve every problem with minimum effort, there is no story worth telling. The girl boss turns the genre into a lecture on gender set in space.

That comes to the other part of the formula. It is not enough for the science to make some sense, leaving humans in a familiar conflict. The story has to be compelling. It is why Blade Runner can be called great sci-fi. The science is compelling as it suggests that material progress does not guarantee human happiness. It also delves into the question of what it means to be a human. The ambiguity of Deckard’s true nature and how his story plays out is gripping storytelling.

Of course, films have another aspect and that is the visuals. World building with the written word depends heavily on the reader. With movies, the maker has to do all of the work in order to get the viewer to suspend disbelief. This is another area where the girl boss ruins the project. By definition, girl boss lives outside the physical constraints of the world created for her. This makes that world absurd and pointless. The film becomes a study of girl boss rather than storytelling.

The visuals are why films like Blade Runner and 2001: A Space Odyssey are always at the top of these lists. The science is great, and the fiction is great, but they are also visual masterpieces that have come to define the genre. Many of the common things in space shows were invented by Kubrick. A film about a dystopian future will always mimic the visual sense of Blade Runner. It is why Star Wars works. The look and sound are great, despite being formulaic drama.

One final piece of the puzzle is what the stories are telling us about the current mood regarding science and culture. When Kubrick make 2001: A Space Odyssey, America was optimistic about space on the surface, but also anxious about the ramifications of technological advance. By the 1970’s, that anxiety had subsided only to return in the 1980’s when the microprocessor revolution hit normal Americans. Good science fiction holds a mirror up to the age in which it is produced.

In the end, what matters most is that Star Wars is not science fiction and anyone who argues otherwise should be sent to a camp. Further, there is a debate as to whether Blade Runner or 2001: A Space Odyssey is the best science fiction film, with some room to argue for Alien. The argument against Alien is that it is also a monster movie, so there is a category dispute. Otherwise, your choices for the greatest sci-fil film are down to two and there is no point in debating it.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Banality Of Biden

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Hannah Arendt coined the term “banality of evil” while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. She noted that Eichmann was not the cartoonish villain one expected, given the accusations against him. Instead, he appeared to be a normal man who performed the tasks assigned to him, without having any ideological or emotional attachment to them. This led Arendt to argue that evil could be the result of the work of ordinary people who were not inherently malicious.

Her formulation turned out to be useful to generations of evil people who used this framework to accuse ordinary Americans of being evil, for the crime of living their lives as white people. That was probably why the line became so popular, but that does not strip it of its truth value. Human systems are capable of turning the ordinary acts of the people in the system toward evil ends, even though the people themselves may not be evil in the ordinary way we think of it.

This is the subtext to the broad indictment of managerialism. The fascists, understood through the lens of managerialism, created a ruthless machine, animated by ideology, that dehumanized their society. The Soviets were close behind in creating a communist machine that forced everyone into the moral framework of the ideology. Those who could not fit into the ideology were destroyed. This is what made fascism and communism evil. They mechanized and normalized brutality.

Of course, that view of fascism and communism was from the perspective of people on the cusp of post-liberalism. The paleocons, sensing that America was succumbing to the same managerial forces as Europe, were warning about what lies ahead for managerialism as an organizing political order. They were wrong in their analysis, as America ceased to be a liberal society in the 19th century. Progressivism, the unique American ideology, was filling the void in the 20th century.

This turned out to be the great innovation of progressivism. It appropriated the language and forms of liberalism in order to present itself as the antithesis of ideology. It was the broad conclusion of reason. Progressivism, repackaged as liberalism in the Cold War, was not about how the world ought to be, but about how the world would be if only people allowed it to be so. Man, liberated from superstition and ignorance, would naturally settle into liberal democracy.

The result, however, was what the paleos predicted. The managerial revolution that began in the first quarter of the 20th century got going for the same reason it got going in communist and fascist societies. Ideology is not enough. It needs a practical application that takes the moral claims and turns them into an ethical system administered by a priestly class. The role of the priest in a Christian society is filled by the manager in an ideological society.

It is why America is awash of moralizing. Every politician eventually turns himself in an Old Testament prophet, warning that we must comply with the tides of history or face certain destruction. Every product is sold as a sacrament. Buy this widget in order to tell the world you are a righteous man. Middle managers in corporations are sent off to leadership class, so they can properly evangelize to their cubicle jockeys. The most trivial things are attached to great moral crusades.

This brings us back to Arendt’s observations about Eichmann. The crimes against civilized life we have observed over the last years were done by people, who like Eichmann, did not present themselves as evil. They could not imagine themselves as evil because they were on the right side of history. The proof of that is everyone they know is on the same side and everyone they know is a good person striving to make the world a better place.

It is this system of thought that made Joe Biden president. He was the smiling face of a machine that rewarded affable, useful dullards, as long as they served the needs of the system, which was the endless hunt for enemies of the system. The peak of the woke terror produced President Joe Biden, the guy who was supposed to normalize the terror by making ordinary people accept it as normal. How can “Working Class Joe” be a bad guy when he is always telling jokes and smiling?

It is why it is right to think about Joe Biden as the Eichmann of woke. Just as Eichmann and many men like him were the banal face of the underlying evil of the system, Joe Biden was the avuncular, jovial face of the American managerial system. He is not unique, but typical, the good example of the type that has come to dominate the political class, which is the fig leaf for the managerial class. The smiling, backslapping pol is what stands between the citizen and the machine.

Stripped of the charming rogues and pitchmen, the evil of the machinery is made plain and therefore easy to resist. That is the part of Arendt’s observations about Eichmann that applies to us now. Even if neither man can be accused of evil on the individual basis, their talents were put to use by an evil system. Even if one can show that their intent was not evil, it does not matter. They helped normalize evil and that is arguably worse than the evil itself.

It is tempting to think this is an inappropriate comparison, given the death sentence that has been handed to Biden. In 1961, however, when Eichmann was given his death sentence, the system which he served was long gone and the damage it wrought was gone with it. Joe Biden is still causing damage. His cancer diagnosis is now removing the last bits of trust in the system. The life of Joe Biden and now his looming death, has been in service to the destruction of social trust.

It was hard to hate men like Eichmann, even after their actions had been universally condemned, because they were not obviously evil men. That was always the point of Joe Biden and why the managerial class loved him. He was a simpleton and braggard, but he would ruthlessly execute his instructions and do so in a way that was hard for the people to hate. He normalized evil by making it feel like the way things were done and had to be done. Joe Biden is the banality of evil.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!

The Ukraine Game

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The professional commentators and amateur experts have been highly critical of the Trump foreign policy, but despite his unorthodox approach, Trump seems to be making progress that those experts claimed was impossible. The recent trip to the GCC countries is the most recent example. Lost in the shuffle is Iran stating they are ready to do a deal with Trump on their nuclear program. Today, the Russians and Ukrainian will meet in Istanbul to talk peace.

This meeting is remarkable mostly because a key element to Project Ukraine from the start was that there could be no negotiations with Russia. Without saying it, the Biden admin and the Europeans would only accept the unconditional surrender of Russia and even then, the terms would be harsh. The Ukrainians were happy to say the quiet part out loud, going so far as to declare it unlawful to deal with the Russians. In a few months Trump has them talking in Turkey.

It may be dumb luck that has got Trump to this point. A week ago, the Europeans were scheming with Zelensky on a set of ultimatums. The Russians either surrender and withdraw from Ukraine or else. On top of that, Keith Kellogg was peddling his scheme to insert Western troops into Ukraine as part of a peace keeping force. The Russians offered to meet with the Ukrainians in Istanbul and Trump seized on this to pressure Zelensky to agree to talks with the Russians.

Again, it may be dumb luck, but success is mostly about making the most of the available opportunities and Trump took advantage of the Russian offer to get something that everyone agreed was never happening. Again, not talking to the Russians has been a central pillar of Project Ukraine. It is the key to keeping the project running and that pillar has been toppled. Even if the talks do not produce much of anything immediately, this meeting changes everything.

The main thing it changes is it forces Zelensky and his European backers to abandon their maximalist position. Once you agree to negotiate, you have to be willing to offer something in return for what you want. Zelensky, of course, cannot concede anything because of the internal politics of Ukraine, so the new framing of the war is one side, the Russians, willing to make a deal, and the other side, the Ukrainians, unwilling to negotiate in good faith to end the war.

Zelensky understands the problem. He has now been put into a very dangerous position, which is why he chose to lead the delegation to Istanbul. He is not there to make a deal, but to orchestrate some way to blow up the process. His life literally depends on keeping the war going in such a way that the West remains engaged and supportive of Ukraine. He cannot reject talks outright, but he cannot engage in them in good faith, so he needs to find a third way.

The Europeans understand this as well, but they also have the added problem of the reality on the ground. The Ukrainian army is in serious trouble right now. They are steadily being pushed back while losing men and material at an alarming rate, one that is not sustainable for much longer. This write-up on the condition of the Ukraine army is about as positive of a spin as you will get before going into fantasy land and the author gives the Ukrainians six months to a year.

This is why Keith Kellogg, and the Europeans programmed Zelensky to demand an immediate ceasefire before negotiations. The plan is to get the ceasefire and then drag out talks while the Ukraine army is reorganized and reequipped for what they hope is the next round of the war on Russia. It is also why the Russians have rejected the idea and instead offered the talks in Istanbul. One way or the other they plan to finish Project Ukraine within the next year.

This is why Trump wisely jumped at this opportunity. No doubt his people are telling him how things are for Ukraine. If Trump can broker a peace deal, any peace deal that avoids images of Russian tanks in Kiev, it is a win for him. He will declare himself the savior of Ukraine. On the other hand, if Zelensky and the Europeans prevent a negotiated settlement, then Trump can lay the blame for those Russian tanks in Kiev on Zelensky and the Europeans.

What Trump has managed to do, perhaps without realizing it, is wriggle free from the trap left for him by the prior administration. He was left with two choices. One was continuing the proxy war by sending money and arms to Ukraine and take the blame when Ukraine finally capitulated. The other was to end the support for Ukraine and get blamed for “losing Ukraine” to the Russians. Now that he has brokered peace talks, he can shift the blame to others when Ukraine capitulates.

Again, much of this may be luck, but serendipity plays an enormous role in human affairs, so it is always part of the result. The reason for the expression, “Chance favors the prepared mind” is for exactly this reason. In order to succeed, it often means being prepared to take advantage of unexpected opportunities. When the Russians offered direct talks with Ukraine last week, it was a rare chance for Trump to change the order of things, and he jumped on it.

All of this now signals the start of the end game for Project Ukraine. What Trump has wanted from the start is to end the war and withdraw from this proxy war with the Russians and now he is one step closer to his goal. The question now is whether it is an orderly end or a disorderly end. If it is the latter, then the question is who gets the blame and judging by the maneuvering, the White House is betting it will be a disorderly end and so they are maneuvering to lay the blame on Europe.

If you like my work and wish to donate, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar or a Substack subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars through the postal service to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 1047 Berkeley Springs, WV 25411-3047. Thank you for your support!