Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

The Great Divide

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If you are one of the tens of millions who voted for Trump in two elections, you are probably a bit puzzled by what is happening in “right-wing” media. If you have made the journey to this side of the great divide over the last decade, the distance between where you are now and those old voices on the Right seems much greater. It is one of those undiscussed aspects of the war in Europe. The great divide between the Cloud People and Dirt People has grown wider.

Right-wing talk radio which largely serves the over-sixty crowd now sounds a lot like it did in the 1990’s during the Balkan conflict. Back then they were demanding troops on the ground rather than the limited use of air power by Clinton. He was Neville Chamberlain and Slobodan Milošević was the new Hitler. Today the Sean Hannity types are demanding an invasion of Russia because this time Joe Biden is Chamberlain and Vladimir Putin is Hitler.

It is not just mainstream conservatism that has pulled out the old outfits from yesterday in order to indulge in nostalgia. Populist Inc., which formed up during the Trump presidency, suddenly sounds like every neocon nutter, demanding no-fly zones and full-scale economic war. In many cases, they are racing to out-crazy the neocon crazies on this issue. It turns out that the America first rhetoric was just a public relations campaign for the same old conservative grift.

What this reveals is that the people inside the political bubble never learned anything from the last decade. It brings to mind the famous quip misattributed to Talleyrand but written by a French naval officer. “Nobody has been corrected; no one has known to forget, nor yet to learn anything.” A little more than a year after the great danger was purged from their ranks, the Cloud People are carrying on as if the world is right back to where they left it in the fall of 2016.

One of the things forgotten is that people care about practical things like the condition of their roads, their living standards and the safety of their communities. They will respond to abstract concepts like patriotism, for sure, but only if the call to act is in defense of where they live and how they live. The reason a TV pitchman won the 2016 election was that he spoke about the things that mattered, while his opponents blathered on about “who we are.”

It seems that the disconnect between the Cloud People and the Dirt People has managed to grow during the last decade of troubles. This post by one of the zombies of Conservative Inc. is illustrative. Even though he uses a profile picture from thirty years ago, Kyle Smith is a middle-aged man. He should be aware that all around him is raging a weird 1980’s nostalgia. He should also be aware that there has always been a strong isolationist strain in American politics.

In fact, the default American position until the 20th century was to not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. America was the well-wisher of those seeking their freedom, however they defined it, but otherwise, the American creed said that the goal of foreign policy was to avoid getting involved in the affairs of other nations. To go around trying to set the world right would mean the “fundamental maxims” of our policy would “insensibly change from liberty to force.”

Put another way, Kyle Smith does not seem to know much about the country or the American Right, of which he claims to be a part. He is not alone. The flagship site of Buckley-style conservatism is equally ridiculous. Jim Geraghty is their main guy now and he seems to get all of his information from far-left news sites. This post reads like some sort of weird Ukrainian fan fiction. For him and his fellow travelers, the whole “fake news” thing is long forgotten.

It is not just the right-side of the political class that has learned nothing from the last decade of populist tumult. Progressive Inc. is now willing to tolerate ten dollar gasoline and bread lines just so they can show their solidarity with Ukraine. They have suddenly got over their fear of fascism in order to support actual fascist like the Azov Battalion fighting in Ukraine. Maybe they will start offering amnesty to J6 prisoners if they agree to wear a Ukrainian lapel pin on TV.

Again, you see people who have learned nothing from the past. In 2016 the people voted for the ultimate protest candidate. Donald Trump was the anti-candidate who crudely mocked Cloud People values. That was when gas was under three dollars, the grocery shelves were stuffed with cheap food and no one had the sniffles. Will the people be more willing to go along with this lunacy when they now have to worry about paying their bills every month?

Again, from this side of the great divide, the madness now gripping the beautiful people with regards to the war seems so alien and strange. Many can remember getting emotionally drawn into the war fever of the Bush years only to learn that it was all a big lie perpetrated by people who were never on your side. To see the same people selling the same lies from media platforms is confirmation that there is no bridging the gap that lies between the two sides of the great divide.

The war in Europe and the reaction to it is revealing a truth about the great divide that is the final step for the dissident. There is no bridging the gap because there is no reforming the Cloud People. All that can be done is prepare for the point when reality finally comes calling for the ruling class. That moment may be upon as prices soar due to the gears of the New World Order grinding to a halt. Soon, rule by expert is not going to sound very appealing.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Haunting

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Note: The Monday Taki post is up. I was not sure about this one, but sometimes you just have to go where the original thought takes you. Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door and it is all about the big story.

General Hastings Ismay famously said that the point of NATO was “to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Since the 1950’s this has been the commonly accepted view of the alliance. After the war this made perfect sense as the Western nations faced off with the Soviets. There was also the well-understood fear of German nationalism. Britain and America had just gone through a terrible war in order to defeat the Nazis.

This sentiment carried on through the Cold War, even though it should have become obvious that German nationalism was no longer a real fear. The generation that fought the Cold War, however, was haunted by the past. NATO was just one example of an institution that evolved around the fear of nationalism in general, but that special nationalism in particular. The added threat of communism, which was often described in the same terms as fascism, only added to the fear.

This fear was obvious after the collapse the Soviet Union. The reunification of Germany was the central concern, as Europe reorganized. Margaret Thatcher was opposed to German reunification on the grounds that she was still not sure the Germans had been cured of their desire to conquer the world. The Russians, of course, had other reasons, in addition to her ancient fear of German nationalism. The post-Cold War period would also be haunted by those old fears.

This specter continues to haunt the minds of American foreign policy elites, who have transferred old fears of German nationalism onto Russia. NATO probably should have been dissolved or replaced after the Cold War. As a practical matter, it existed to check the Warsaw Pact, which no longer exists. Russia was flat on her back after the collapse of communism and the rest of Europe was rushing to embrace liberal democracy and American consumerist economics.

Most important, it was obvious to anyone engaged with reality that Germany was long past nationalism, especially that special form of nationalism. In fact, fascism in general existed only in the fevered minds of oddballs out on the fringes and the professional antifascist on the Left. As a political force, political fascism was less relevant than monarchism in Europe. The only role left for NATO was to keep America engaged in Europe, which could be done economically.

Of course, those old fears have proven to be far more important than observable reality among American elites. Since the 1990’s it has been a relentless drive to expand NATO to the edge of the Russian frontier. First it was the old members of the Warsaw Pact then it was Balkan nations. Then it was the scheme to add the former Soviet republic of Georgia, a nation thousands of miles from the Atlantic. Then, of course, it was the scheme to add Ukraine to NATO.

It is assumed that the sole reason to keep adding nations to NATO is to contain the Russians, but that old fear of German nationalism is still there. Germany is now the dominant economy of Europe and the leader of the European Union. It is the German relationship with both Russia and Ukraine that is at the heart of the current crisis that had led to war in Europe. Germany has been developing stronger ties to Russia, especially economic ties, and Washington hates it.

This is why Washington has refused to even consider peaceful solutions to the crisis in Ukraine over the last ten years. Those disputed eastern provinces have been racked by a civil war for close to a decade. Estimates vary, but the consensus is that twenty thousand people have died there since 2014. The Ukrainian government has been supplying those militias with weapons, which come from the United States through the Ukrainian military or various NGO’s.

Obviously, one driver in all of this is corruption. War is good for the war business, so the usual suspects have been happy to provoke all sides in this conflict. Zelensky has been for sale since day one, so he has been easy to manipulate. The greater issue has been the number of important Americans on the payroll of the Ukrainians. Hunter Biden is just one example. Many others have been taking bribes from Ukrainian interests seeking to profit from the turmoil.

None of this would be possible, however, if Washington were not haunted by the shadow of long gone figures. The old joke was that the foreign policy establishment wakes up most nights to the sound of hoofbeats. While certainly true in many cases, it is also true that they live in the shadow of antifascism, which has become something of a cult among the American ruling class. Who they are now is defined by the fear of and opposition to that long gone political movement.

This strikes the practical minded as implausible, but people are not willing to sacrifice for practical things. That should be obvious now. The Russians are risking economic isolation in order to restore their pride and sense of identity. This war will cost them economically, but it will all be worth it to feel that ancient pride again. The Ukrainian soldiers who know they are fighting a hopeless battle, will fight to the end because there are things more important than stuff.

The crisis in Europe that promises to plunge the world into depression, revolt and possibly nuclear war is not about stuff. It is about that old specter that should have been consigned to the history books long ago. It is the apparition of fascism that has driven Western elites to the brink of madness. Their desire to free themselves of this haunting is driving them to try and reorganize the world in opposition to it. Instead, they are driving the world to organize against the madness of the West.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Bug Men

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Imagine one day you wake up to see that some people, but not all, just the beautiful people, are now wearing flowerpots on their heads. You first see it on the television while making coffee. Then you see people with the flowerpot things while on your commute into the office. They are not wearing actual flowerpots, but hats that look like a pot holding a shrubbery. Not only are they wearing these ridiculous hats, but they are also acting like it is perfectly normal.

This is the world most Americans woke up to last week when news broke that the Russian army had crossed into Ukraine. Suddenly, as if they had received orders from the hive queen, all of the beautiful people were Ukrainian nationalists. They were all saying “keev” as if they had developed some new mental disease. They were sporting Ukrainian flag lapel pins. At the Biden state of the union show they were dressed in the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

This is not just a partisan marketing campaign either. The mouth breathers of conservatism are right there with their masters on the Left waving the yellow and blue of their new homeland. The same people who were wearing the angry face about being called a Putin shill a few years ago are now calling anyone skeptical of this new fad a tool of the evil Vladimir Putin. The same people who tell us nations no longer matter now sound like white nationalists in their support of Ukraine.

It is easy to dismiss this as the sort of superficial sincerity that we have come to expect from the beautiful people. A big part of the gulf between the Cloud People and the Dirt People is the Cloud People lack normal human emotions. Instead, it is these programmed responses to programmed questions. You get more authenticity from an ATM machine than from Jen Psaki. While this Ukraine fetish is part of the programming, it reveals something else about them.

These are people who lack all meaning in life. The reason they all swarmed to the Ukraine stuff is that it allowed them to experience what they imagine is normal human emotion and community spirit. Their conjured image of the brave Ukrainians taking up arms against the aggressor reflects their own lack of purpose. Many Americans have been reduced to the bug-man existence of consuming product but the Cloud People are the pinnacle of the bug-man lifestyle.

This is why they are so fond of using analogies drawn from comic book movies and children’s books. You will notice that the people comparing Putin to Lord Voldemort from the Harry Potter movies are childless. They did not pick up the reference from watching the shows with their kids. They are the primary consumers of this material. This fantasy material has become folklore for people who lack the cultural structure that provides an adult frame of reference to understand the world.

Dissidents are fond of pointing out how the modern age consumes the normal social capital, converting it into cash to fuel the consumer economy. This process has slowly obliterated the natural community of America. The result is endless miles of generic housing developments named after whatever it is that was destroyed in order to build these crimes against nature. We are slowly being converted into pod people who experience the world via the internet.

The thing is this process is complete among the Cloud people. They are cutoff from the rest of us, living in a fantasy world that operates by its own rules. It is why they think it makes sense to lecture working class people about white privilege while Mexican drug gangs flood working class neighborhoods with narcotics. It is why Joe Biden’s programmers think Ukraine is more important than food prices. In their world, what matters is what gives them meaning.

That is the thing though. Their lives have no meaning because they are living the fully atomized and transactional life. These are people who will slit each other’s throat for a better spot on a cable channel. They have no loyalty, no code, no sense of decency because they are just particles in a system that exists for its own purposes. It is why the image of Ukrainians taking up arms is so enthralling to them. Our bug-man rulers long for even the hint of such a life.

This is why they hate the Dirt People so much. Despite it all, normal people still try to form and maintain community. They may not be able to articulate it, but they sense that having beers with a neighbor as they watch the kids play in the backyard matters more than anything they consume on-line. The Cloud People hate the Dirt People because for the Dirt People, Harry Potter will always be entertainment for their kids, not a guidebook for understanding the world.

Also note the solipsism in all of the Ukraine love. The people wearing the colors of the Ukrainian flag have only the most superficial understanding of the people and history of the region. It is why they embraced the most superficial and meaningless part of Ukrainian identity, the flag. It is a cheap decoration that lets them feel like they are a part of something. They are standing with Ukraine with the same sincerity they do everything else in their hollow and pointless lives.

You also note that they frame the Ukraine issue as brave innocents defending themselves from the dark forces. This comes from people who deliberately lock themselves inside razor wire fences guarded by armed troops. Their emotional isolation from normal human experience now manifests as a physical isolation from the people they supposedly rule. For the Cloud People, Ukraine is a metaphor for how they see themselves in relation to the Dirt People.

The Devil finds work for idle hands and that is what we see with our rulers. Much of what ails the West these days is the result of a ruling class without much purpose as a ruling class and without much meaning as people. The crisis in Ukraine is the fault of people who use children’s books to provide meaning to their lives. We not only have an excess of elites, but we also have a shortage of reasons for them to exist. It is why they are now decorated with Ukrainian flags. They have nothing else.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Worst Case

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It is assumed that the worst case scenario for the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is the direct or even indirect involvement of NATO in Ukraine. If NATO forces came into direct conflict with Russian forces, the result would be total war and total war could easily and quickly lead to nuclear war. This is a remote possibility as NATO has been adamant about not getting militarily involved. The West is content to use the economic weapons at its disposal that it assumes the Russians have anticipated.

While there is nothing worse than nuclear war, the fact that it is the least likely outcome means it is not the worst probable outcome. The fact is, the Cold War was a good lesson in the use and non-use of these weapons. Nuclear weapons are last resort defensive tools. A nation will use them as a last gasp at survival. This is why Israel stole the technology from America in the last century. It is why North Korea is developing the ability to deliver a nuke to North America.

If nuclear holocaust is off the table and a wider scale war in Europe is off the table, then that leaves the softer, less predictable outcomes. We are already seeing big ripples in the financial markets as people try to figure out the downstream consequences of the economic sanctions on Russia. Despite what the media may claim, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are not hermit kingdoms. They have a lot of economic links to the rest of the world and are a vital part of the global supply chain.

For example, one bottleneck in the chip supply chain is in Ukraine. The world has just started to turn the tide on the chip shortage, but now a vital bottleneck has been closed due to the war. Optimistic predictions said the chip shortage would be over by the end of 2022, but now that date is pushed well into the future. Everyone in the dreaded private sector knows the mischief caused by the chip shortage. That mischief is now going to play out for a much longer period than expected.

That last part is where to focus. Economics is about expectations. People will stock up on something, for example, if they anticipate a shortage or price hike. On the other hand, people will take risks in good times, risks like starting a business, buying a new home or hiring new staff. A massive amount of risk has been dumped into the global economy as a result of this war and the response from the West. For the first time in a long time everyone has a reason to not take any risks.

On the more tangible side, energy prices are spiking at a time when we have spiraling food prices globally. The last time this happened there was civil unrest throughout the Middle East and North Africa. The so-called Arab Spring was marketed as a quest for freedom but it was a revolt over food and fuel shortages. It is good to remember that the same people who sold those results as a positive are the ones responsible for the mess in Ukraine and responsible for managing the fallout.

Ten years ago, the Arab Spring was watched in America during a time of historically low inflation and interest rates. The population was fairly content. Today, America has double-digit inflation and is now about to get an energy cost spike. The population is also at each other’s throats because the people in charge are sure one half of the population are evil insurrectionists. A global depression is not going to help sooth the social tensions that exist in Western nations.

Wide-scale supply chain and financial disruptions is probably the rosy scenario end of this conflict in Ukraine. Shippers are already hesitating to take on Russian products, even those products are not sanctioned. It is conceivable that deliveries of vital natural resources like fertilizer, food and energy from Russia, Belarus and Ukraine will be delayed for the next several months. These countries ship a lot of food to the global south, so it is a profoundly serious problem.

If that is not enough to consider, think about the last time waves of men flooded into Europe from the south. That was largely driven by economics. Given the socio-economic mood in Europe right now, how well will they handle a million men marching into the heart of Europe from the Middle East and Africa? Who will be blamed this time for the demographic calamity that would follow? Far-right candidate Eric Zemmour could end up sounding like a moderate.

The global order that the West, led by the United States, has evolved over the last several decades assumed certain things. For example, populism was assumed to be impossible in a system that efficiently delivered quality consumer goods. It assumed that price shocks were a thing of the past. Similarly, inflation was assumed to be controlled by the judicious control of the money supply. It assumed the free flow of goods, capital and information.

The system struggled to contend with the populist revolts of the last decade. Two years of mismanagement of the Covid crisis have brought populism back to the fore and called into question key economic axioms. We have labor shortages all over the place, despite rising wages, but we also have spiraling inflation. This is at a time of historically low interest rates. Prior to the war, this combination was assumed to be impossible and now it will only get worse as a result of the crisis.

When the axioms of a system begin to crumble, people quickly begin to doubt the system that rests on those axioms. Confidence in the socio-political order was already falling as a result of demographics and mismanagement. The banging of war drums by the geriatrics ruling Washington is not going to change this. In fact, it is clear that the public blames those geriatrics for the Ukrainian mess. We are entering uncharted territory with regards to public confidence in the system.

It very well may be that the worst case scenario is upon us with regards to the Russo-Ukrainian conflict. A fragile system that was already wobbling due to demographics and mismanagement is now about to receive a series of economic body blows. Europe may be getting a new wave of demographic reality. The worst case scenario may be a revolution in public consciousness about the socio-economic order. The elites may be blowing their world up the old fashioned way.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

AFPAC III

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Note: The normal Taki post is up. This week it is not tied into the Monday post here, but rather to a special post over at American Greatness. I read and reviewed Paul Gottfried’s latest book, Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade. If you can drop a positive comment over there, that would be good. Fair warning, the comment section there is a full SD below what you get here. I also have some notes about my trip here.

Conferences are an American past time. We have conferences for serious things like business issues and community topics. We also have conferences for less serious issues like politics, social issues, academics, books and hobbies. The conference industry is big business in America. There are people who make their living organizing the details of conferences. Every decent sized venue has people dedicated to managing and directing conferences.

You can rank these things by their production values. The more important the event the better the production values. The well supported operations can hire good people and a first-class facility for the conference. At the other end, the conference is put on by volunteers who have a passion for the topic. They rent a ballroom at one of the hotels near the airport and hope to get enough attendees to cover the cost. In the end it is just people with the same hobby in a room having hotel food.

AFPAC III was near the top-end of the conference spectrum. It was not at the level of CPAC or global corporate events, but it was just below. There was well over one thousand people in attendance. The facility could hold a few hundred more, but beyond that this event will be moving into the big-boy size facilities. To give some perspective, if you were in the back of the room, you needed the giant video screens to follow the speeches as you could not see the speaker.

That is the other thing you see at the higher end of these things. There was a stage with the podium, in the middle and two massive video screens. The room is setup with a first-rate sound system that lets the people in the back hear the speech, without the people in the front going deaf. The video screens had the graphics and video shorts you see at these things to keep people excited between speeches. Again, it was not at the CPAC level, but they can feel the breath of AFPAC on their neck.

Therein the lies the second observation about AFPAC that is important. There is something happening here. CPAC gets all the beautiful people in their finest to tell one another everything if going to be okay. AFPAC draws the Dirt People in their finest, who know everything is not going to be okay. CPAC only lacks the smell of fresh cut flowers to feel like a well attended funeral for a rich man. AFPAC has the smell of revolution in the air and the energy that comes with it.

The energy is the third thing worth noting. On a personal note, I have been to a lot of conferences for all sorts of things. I have never felt like I was in the middle of an electrical storm until AFPAC. Most of that is due to the youth of the audience, but even the geezers were ready to spit on their hands and hoist the black flag. Rock concerts are not this fired up. If you are showing a bit of gray in the beard and want to feel good about the future, attend AFPAC IV.

The show itself was much better than you normally get at these things. The speakers know they are standing in front of a young crowd hungry for red meat. A Catholic priest opened the show with a prayer, then Nick gave the crowd a short talk, which was the signal to strap in and enjoy the ride. Marjorie Taylor Green spoke first. She is a fountain of political bumper sticker quotes. That is politics today. Then it was a run of famous live streamers with a few other politicians mixed in.

The speaker list and its arrangement are where you see the growing pains for AFPAC as it was a bit too much red meat. Pols are always going to be a fountain of applause lines as that is their business. Live streamers are not the sort of people used to organizing a speech around a topic or set of themes. As a result, they fall back on the zingers and conversational style they do on their show. The effect is something like a motivational seminar rather than a political conference.

In future events, they would be wise to bound this with two professional speakers who know how to deliver a speech that people remember the next day. The big boys will have a speaker open with a speech that gets the audience thinking, then a series of speakers to pump up the crowd. The next to last speaker is the closed parenthesis to the first speaker. The star, in this case Nick Fuentes, comes out to close the show with a speech that binds the energy with the message.

The same can be said for the security, which was done by lots of young men volunteering for the job. Like the speeches, they had tons of energy, but not the structure people come to expect at an event this size. They got the job done by being wildly overzealous, not terribly efficient. In the future, a professional team to manage the young men would be wise. It is not that they did not get the job done. It is that they missed a chance to impress with it.

The final criticism is that it went too late. The event started with a cocktail hour where the special guests mingled with about two hundred attendees. Inevitably, these go on too long, which was the case here. Then it took too long to get a thousand people seated, so the first speech started at 8:00 PM. Of course, in a room pulsing with energy, the speeches went on longer than scheduled. By the time Fuentes closed the show it was pushing 1:00 AM and the crowd was running low on energy.

Again, this is the bucket of great problems to have if you are the organizers. It is easy to remedy going forward and offers something new in the future. They should probably have a VIP dinner on Friday night for three hundred people. They meet the guests and get a dinner speech from Nick. The next day is a full day event with breaks to let people rest up, socialize and all that stuff. It should build up to the evening portion that gets everyone pumped up to conquer the world.

Of course, that is only possible if the numbers grow and that does not seem like a problem, given what has happened thus far. AFPAC I was a small affair held in the third-rate motel in Northern Virginia. Maybe 150 people were in attendance. To go from that to ten times the crowd at a major facility is special. That is the right word for what is happening with this youth movement. It is not without some challenges and it will hit some bumps along the way, but something special is happening.

That is the question that I had as I packed up for home. I chatted with many young people and I have some knowledge of the people organizing it. I have followed Nick’s career since I met him four years ago. Right now, this is just a thing that is happening, but no one can define. That has its benefits, but it comes with risk. At some point soon it has to be more than just a lot of young guys looking for something that welcomes them as young men in a world hostile to young men.

In the near future, this thing will need a superstructure of ideas to hold it together once the blows start coming from the establishment. The blows will not be name calling from the simpleton army of the SPLC. One day soon, senior Republicans will be told by their handlers to denounce this movement and its leaders. It has to have the strength to withstand that sort of assault and answer back. That comes from having a superstructure of ideas and objectives.

That has always been the problem with populist politics in America. It has the numbers and the energy, but it always lacks a positive message. People will sacrifice for only so long in opposition. Eventually, they cut deals in their mind to accommodate that which they oppose in order to get on with their life. On the other hand, people will sacrifice their lives for a dream, a dream for their children. Populism tends to live in mere opposition, so it tends to fade.

That is the unique opportunity of AFPAC and the movement it represents. Nick Fuentes comes in for a lot of criticism, but he is smart and committed. He is not the same man he was when I met him. He possesses a self-awareness you rarely see in anyone that gets famous in politics. It is extra-rare in outsider politics. Being the big fish in the small pond tends to make people feel like gods. They wake up every morning wondering who has been talking about them since they went to bed.

Fuentes, in contrast, is thinking much bigger than being the big fish in a small pond and he knows he is a big fish in a small pond. He also knows he will not be allowed in the big pond, so he is committed to building a bigger pond. If Pat Buchanan and the paleos had possessed this degree of self-awareness and realism, we might not be in the situation where we have to hope the youth will solve the problems left to them by their parents and grandparents.

A sign that these guys have the right stuff to build a genuine opposition is something Fuentes did in his speech. He gave a moving tribute to Jared Taylor that was heartfelt and sincere. Fuentes is loyal and you could see that in his tribute to Taylor. This is a young man with a code. He sticks by those who stick by him. That is not always good in politics, but that is the problem with our politics. No one in it has code. We are ruled by sociopaths, not men with a code. We need more men with code.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The End Of Empire

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At the end of the Cold War, the American empire was at the height of its global influence and power. The verdict of history was that it had the best economy, the best military and the best political culture. Thirty years on and no one looks at the American economic model with envy. China is viewed as having the best economy. While the military has amazing weaponry, its culture is looked upon as increasingly bizarre. Of course, the political culture has become coarse and unstable.

The sharp decline in the competence of the Global American Empire is where the decline is most evident. The place to start is the blunders in the Bush years, where they miscalculated at every step in the crusade against Islam. One can argue about whether they should have anticipated the 9/11 attacks, but the response was poorly conceived and poorly executed. Like a sports team that takes a far weaker opponent lightly, the empire survived the encounter with Islam. It did not win.

The Obama years brought new failures. The administration started with the goal of resetting relations with Russia, which had been soured by the behavior of the Bush administration in the Russo-Georgian war. They sent Hillary Clinton to cackle with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The Obama administration ended with Hillary Clinton’s election team manufacturing a smear campaign and conspiracy theory around the now famous Russian collusion hoax.

The Trump years were mostly filled with noise, but the fact that Trump was president at all suggested the competence of the empire was cratering. The system left to the current ruling class was supposed to prevent both Clinton and Trump. Worse yet, when the system failed and Trump was selected, the people in charge engaged in a four year tantrum rather than making the best of it. For his part, Trump spent his four years giving the Israel lobby a blank check.

The Biden regime has ushered in a new era of bungling. The exit from Afghanistan was never going to be smooth, but it had to be done. This was known in the Trump years but the system refused to cooperate with Trump. A competent system would have let the hated orange man own the ugly exit. Instead, they left it to Biden and then proceeded to find ways to blunder no one thought possible. The sight of Afghan herdsman sitting in abandoned Blackhawk helicopters was a poignant symbol.

Now we have the Ukraine debacle, which threatens global stability. This crisis is a long time coming so it is not all the fault of the Biden administration. The Empire has been trying to encircle and destabilize Russia since the Bush years. The overthrow of the Ukrainian government by the Obama people and the installation of a puppet government was just one step in a long process. Biden does own the attempted coup in Belarus and Kazakhstan.

Ukraine is a complicated place with a tragic history. That history has mostly been defined by great armies marching through its territory. Modern Ukraine is the product of the communists committing genocide, then the Nazis committing genocide then the communist returning to impose three generations of communism. Since the end of the Cold War, Ukraine has been defined by corruption and a massive brain-drain as its people head for the rest of Europe.

Ukraine is the counter to the old De Maistre aphorism about government. He said that every country has the government it deserves. This has always been interpreted in the West to mean bad government is the fault of the people. This is not how De Maistre meant it, but even if he did, Ukraine shows the idiocy of that sentiment. No people deserve the governance Ukraine has received over the last century. It is proof that government is a ruling class tool of control.

It is the corruption that has come to define American policy with regards to both Russia and Ukraine recently. Senior members of the political elite have had family members put on the payroll of Ukrainian oligarch. The most famous of which is the drug-addled son of President Biden, who was put on the board of Burisma Holdings, the energy conglomerate owned by Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky. Ukraine has been buying a lot of influence in Washington this way.

Now we have the Russian military moving into Ukraine on the pretext of protecting both the large Russian population in Ukraine and the two breakaway republics in the east of Ukraine. This could have been avoided if the Global American Empire had recognized the reality of the situation. They could have hashed out a deal with Putin on the issues at the heart of the crisis. Instead, we got months of bizarre hysteria that only served to undermine peaceful solutions.

The fate of Ukraine is not particularly important. What matters in this crisis is the display of staggering incompetence by the empire. They managed to turn what should have been a minor diplomatic matter on the fringe of Europe into a global crisis. The result is soaring energy prices in a time when the global economy is still staggering from two years of incompetent Covid polices. We have double digit inflation now. Just wait until massive spikes in energy prices hit the system.

The incompetence does not end here. We are now seeing a parade of experts from the imperial chattering class compare Ukraine to the Sudetenland, Putin to Hitler and Biden to Neville Chamberlain. Some are just yesterday men looking for one last grift before they exit the stage. Most are people locked into a blinkered mindset bounded by their ignorance and self-regard. To people with any knowledge of the issue, they sound like idiots because they clearly do not know what they do not know.

Much of this public relations campaign is aimed at shifting the focus from the failure of American foreign policy. The Russia hawks blaming Biden is a way of shifting the blame from the permanent foreign policy establishment. That too is another example of the incompetence of the system. Instead of learning from their error, they are shifting the blame to a convenient target, so they can continue in error. Thirty years of failure since the end of the Cold War has taught them nothing.

Put side the armchair diplomacy and what we are seeing is the world slowly adjusting to the reality of the Global American Empire. It is the sick man of world politics and the world knows it. Putin easily outmaneuvered the empire on this issue. The Europeans made sure to not make any enemies on the Russian side. The empire is left with talking tough from a distance. This is what the end of empire looks like. The question now is just how quickly it reaches its inevitable conclusion.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

The Anti-State

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Since the Greeks, educated men have pondered how it is man came to live in societies governed by political institutions. By the time societies reached the point where they could have men sitting around thinking about this stuff, rather than farming and fighting, the answers had been lost to time. The state, in one form or another, has been a thing that exists since the “memory of man runneth not to the contrary.” For just as long, men have been debating the form of government.

A core assumption, for as long as anyone has known, is that government has a practical purpose for society. For example, it is the job of every form of government to defend society from external and internal threats. The government adjudicates disputes between members of society. It is the state that deals with the rulers of other societies on the matters that concern them. Since private government has been the norm, the state defends the interests of the king or ruling elite.

These are obvious things that everyone accepts, but there has always been another purpose to the state. The welfare of the people has always been one of the duties of whoever is in charge. Again, private government has been the norm, so the king or the aristocracy is supposed to look out for the people. For most of human history this has meant economic interests. A good ruler gets powerful because his policies allow his people to grow rich through trade and commerce.

A new wrinkle was added in the 19th century with the growth of liberalism. The state was not just about practical things, like war and trade, but also had a duty to protect and promote freedom and opportunity. The state needed to be organized around the principle of liberty and equality. This meant that the law was neutral in that everyone was equal before the law. It also meant that the people were free to do as they pleased as long as it did not cause direct harm to others or the state.

That is a big leap when you stop and think about it. The role of the state has evolved from the private interest of the rulers and the economic interests of the people to cultural and spiritual interests. A government dedicated to preserving the liberty of the citizens is different than a government dedicated to protecting the interests and privileges of the rulers. The state is now in the business of securing the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of the people.

Various forms of socialism take this a step further. Instead of the government getting out of the way of the people and making sure no one interferes with their pursuit of happiness, the government needs to make sure no one is being exploited and that everyone can achieve their potential. This requires the state to take an active role in shaping the lives of the people. The state is now charged with making sure you are able to maximize your potential.

This very brief summary of government is useful in thinking about what is currently happening throughout the West. Until now, government existed for a positive purpose, to accomplish some goal or promote a set of ideas. Communism may be irrational, but it had a rational, positive purpose. Communism promised a world where everyone is equal and free of exploitation. Liberal democracy was supposed to deliver a world free of coercion and limits on your liberty.

The West is now reorganizing away from these sorts of positive purposes to an entirely negative purpose. Antifascism is becoming the organizing ethos of the ruling elite and that naturally means the government. By fascism, they mean a collection of ideas and concepts they think are integral to fascism. Things like racial discrimination or opposition to men wearing dresses. The point of the state is to eliminate all of these precursors to fascism from human society.

What we are seeing is the evolution of the first anti-state. Instead of being organized around a set of aspirations linked to the nature, culture and history of the people, the state is organized around exterminating ideas and concepts associated with the nature, culture and history of Western people. In order to eliminate these things from humanity, the state must use every tool at its disposal. It also means leveling existing society in order to rebuild the antifascist state from scratch.

This is why something like structural racism now takes up so much space in the discourse of the ruling elite. They look around at the inequality of man and conclude it must be systemic. Then they look at history and see that Western societies were created by Western people. They conclude that society was created to benefit Western people, so they must exist to the detriment of non-Western people. The solution is to tear down the system in order to eliminate structural racism.

It is tempting to think that communist societies were similarly organized around opposition to a concept, but that is not true. Communism promised something at the end of the struggle against capitalism. Since there was no practical path to that promised land, fighting the imaginary enemies of the revolution was a way to deal with the resulting disconfirmation. Blaming the wreckers for why the promised bounty of communism had not materialized was a coping mechanism.

The antifascist state, in contrast, is not making any promises about what comes after the struggle against the basket of “isms” they oppose. Justin Trudeau is not talking about the glorious future. He is seizing power in order to wage war against the concepts he and his coreligionists believe are lurking around every corner. That peaceful protest by the citizens was seen as Kristallnacht. Screaming “never again”, the forces of the antifascist state have swung into action.

Since the purpose of the antifascist state is to oppose fascism, it is vitally important that fascism exists. That is another main task of this new model. There is a lot of time invested in proving that the threat to “our democracy” is real. This is not done to convince the public to support their actions. This is done to maintain their own commitment to the cause. A main task of antifascism is manufacturing fascists as proof that it is a real thing that must be opposed.

The result is one side of antifascism justifies any means necessary to fight fascism, while the other side conjures a never ending supply of fascists. Unlike the terror that was unleashed by the Jacobins or the Bolsheviks, the terror of the antifascist state is not a defect of ideology. The growing terror is a feature of the system. Since fascism can never be defeated, the war against it is permanent. The price of antifascism is the permanent terror campaign against incorrect thoughts.

Antifascism is irrational and immoral, but it does solve a serious problem for the managerial elites in the West. Strip away the political theory and managerialism is essentially management by committee. This is horribly inefficient and we see the results all over society. Roads are crumbling, schools are a mess, public services are increasingly sclerotic and inept. The system is failing to deliver the basic services people expect from their political and social systems.

This new civic religion of the ruling elite is providing both a purpose and a justification for defending itself against the complaints of the people. All dissent is quickly labeled racist, fascist, white supremacist, etc. Not only does this justify the abuses were are seeing, but it also justifies the unresponsiveness of the elites. They no longer have to dignify the complaints of the people, because those complaints are white supremacy and therefore illegitimate.

In the end, government is a set of compromises to solve the immediate problems that come with large-scale human organization. A god-king is not the ideal form of rule, but it solves the problems that need to be solved. Popular government brings its own unique problems, but it solves the problems of inherited rule. Communism failed primarily because it could not solve the problems it promised to solve. Those compromises that came with it became intolerable.

The antifascist state is a solution to a problem that does not exist. Instead, it is a luxury good for a swollen managerial elite disconnected from reality. Unlike communism, it is not promising a new tomorrow. Instead, it promises endless struggle. There is a limit to how long any society can struggle, even against a real enemy. At some point the West will exhaust itself in the struggle against this imaginary enemy. The question is how much damage will it do on the way out?

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Apartheid States

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For as long as anyone has been alive, whatever we have defined as the Left in America has always come with a healthy dose of hypocrisy. They have one set of rules for themselves and their allies and an entirely different set of rules, often the opposite set of rules, for their opponents. The cry of hypocrisy from their opponents are met with accusation about bad faith or dishonestly. The Left in America, since the middle of the last century, has been defined by partisanship.

This is another aspect of the crisis in Canada that tells us something about what is happening in the managerial elite. The Right has been largely silent on what is happening and the outlandish hypocrisy on display. Look through the few posts in Conservative Inc. about the crisis over the last month and you do not see their favorite catch phrase at all. The main takeaway is that the so-called conservatives are mostly on the side of the government in this matter.

This is not just an American phenomenon. In Canada, the people who supposedly speak for the conservative voters have been struggling to produce a reason to oppose Trudeau’s power grab. You get the impression they are ashamed to be lumped in with those dirty truckers. The is true all over the English-speaking world. The Brits, who should take a special interest in Canada, have been giving the crisis a good leaving alone, while focusing on Ukraine.

What we see happening in Canada is the normalization of the double standard that has always been a feature of left-wing politics. On multiple occasions Trudeau has said that certain types of protests are permitted. The grounds for determining this is who is protesting whom. BLM protesting, for example, is always acceptable, because they exist to fight the white power structure. An Antifa riot over the behavior of the police is acceptable, as long as they wear their masks.

What we just witnessed in Canada is more than the implementation of this stated policy but the formalization of it. The point of making this a permanent emergency, which is what they are doing, is to make permanent this new double standard for political participation in Canada. A Sikh truck driver honking his horn to protest vaccine mandates is not allowed because white supremacy. A Sikh truck driver plowing through a group of white kids, because white supremacy, is okay.

Of course, this is not some out of left field manifestation in Canada, but a continuation of a process that started in 2016. The people protesting Trump were allowed to assault people and damage property. The thousands of rioters who set fires and smashed windows during his inauguration were never charged. Douglas Mackey, the man behind the Twitter character Ricky Vaughn, is awaiting trial for the crime of making fun of the anti-Trump people online.

The model for what Trudeau is doing is January 6th. Left-wing rioters disrupted the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings for a week. Nothing happened to any of them, but hundreds of Trump supporters face long prison terms for the crime of disrupting official proceedings, despite no official proceedings at the time. Trudeau is simply following the lead of Washington. The fawning praise from the media as he seizes control of Canadian society is confirming his understanding of the new rules.

Apartheid came to mean racial discrimination, but in reality, it was an authoritarian political culture that created a hierarchy of citizenship. In the case of Africa, it was the white founding population that sat at the top. It was not particularly different from the caste system on the Indian subcontinent. Instead of culture defining the layers, the African system was based on definitions of race. What is shaping up in the West is an apartheid system based on perceived political beliefs.

In the case of Canada, Trudeau and the rest of the political class are committed to the post-Marxist ideology that has evolved in the elite. That is at the top of the new political order and those who worship at that alter have full privileges. At the bottom are those who hold what are defined as the most dangerous ideas, things like nativism, patriotism and nationalism. Those people will have the least privileges. As Macron made clear during Covid, these people are not even people.

Again, notice that the limited commentary in the conservative space is not using the old lines about hypocrisy. The reason for this is the so-called conservatives do not see hypocrisy in these actions, because they fully approve of the new order. They agree with their friends on the Left that those old liberal values are part of the basket of ideas associated with who Hillary Clinton labeled deplorables. Their quibbles are with small issues like the implementation and the optics.

January 6th and now the trucker protests are stops in this great transformation of society by the unitary hive mind of the managerial elite. Derek Chauvin goes to jail for life for the death of George Floyd. Kim Potter gets two years in jail for shooting an unarmed man in a traffic stop. Mohamed Noor got four years for executing a white woman trying to flag down the police. Everything is now defined by this new hierarchy as conceived by the hive mind.

There is no one inside the hive mind to object to this transformation, because that risks being ejected from the protection of the collective. The random cruelty of the system against its perceived opponents is as much about defending itself from internal dissent as it is from external threat. If the police are laughing about trampling old people with their horses, they are not going to question the order to drag a party member from his home in the middle of the night.

This is the new world order. At the top is this uniformity of opinion rooted in two assumed truths about the world. One is the people at the top have a duty to root out the enemies of the system. The other is the enemies of the system lie in the populations over whom the system rules. Like the old apartheid system, it is a system organized around a permanent threat. In such a system internal dissent can never be tolerated as it threatens to weaken the defenses.

This is why the conservatives are so muted. It is also why the far-left in Canada voted to support the power grab, despite their alleged opposition to such things. The far-left instinctively knows how partisanship operates. There is no equivocation on their part, because they understand the game. The conservatives will need to purge a few of their members to finally get themselves in the good graces of their colleagues. In the end, they will support the new apartheid system.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Managerial Menticide

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Note: The Monday Taki post is up. The subject of it and today’s post is the new way to look at the system ruling over us. Of course, Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those needing audio stimulation. Much of it is about the situation in Europe and the evolving Canadian dictatorship.

One of the problems with the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is that it relies on the old Left-Right dichotomy of American politics. This framing persists despite the fact that it is a vestige of a bygone era that no longer works today. The political divide is now between those who adhere to the basket of ideas called Western liberalism and those who defend the post-Marxist managerial state. The latter group is made up almost entirely of members of the ruling class.

In other words, we now live in a world divided by those in the system of control that hovers over the West and those who live under it. The Dirt People versus Cloud People framing is a much more honest, if a bit sarcastic, framework for the world. The ruling system is like a miasma that hangs over society, infecting the minds of the people and their relations with one another. We can see the elites at the top, just barely, but the system they control is all around us.

A big part of what ails society is this sense that things are not as they seem, but it is hard to get a read on why. That noxious miasma that lingers in every aspect of society often leads people to doubt their own senses. Their experience tells them things about the world and people in it, but everywhere they look they are getting messages telling them that what they think they see is not true. Instead, they are to believe something that is often the opposite of what they experience.

This is where the Opposite Rule continues to work. Those who are aware of the contradictions of daily existence can apply the rule to the information stream that comes from the system, filling the area around them. Whatever is in the air at the moment, start from some version of the opposite, and the truth will be near. The Opposite Rule of Liberalism is best restated as the Opposite Rule of Managerialism. This organic, self-aware system that rules over us is the opposite of truth.

A useful example comes from the daily barrage of “information” from the system about the crisis in Ukraine. Here is a story from the New York Times headlined, “Russia has been laying groundwork online for a ‘false flag’ operation, misinformation researchers say.” Note that this story is not behind the usual paywall, as they want wide circulation of it. Note also that the writer is one of the infants they employ to copy and paste material into “news reports.”

This news report starts with a news report from a European based group called European Expert Association, which is described as “a research group that focuses on security in Ukraine.” When you take a look at who these people are, it becomes obvious that they are Ukrainian activists. These are not neutral observers searching for the truth about the crisis. More important, when you look at their resumes you see all the familiar NGO’s that are pushing for war with Russia.

Of course, this is the New York Times, the first draft of history and the leader in the American news media. They do not just take this at face value. They hand it to a group called the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit “research” group. These are the go-to guys for the Times reports on misinformation and disinformation. To the shock of no one in the Times offices, the researchers at Global Disinformation Index confirmed everything said the European Expert Association.

The reason the Times was not surprised by what they heard back from the Global Disinformation Index is the person running it is Anne Applebaum. She is a notorious warmonger and neoconservative. Here she is advocating for the liquidation of the Afghanis and the Syrians as a “solution” to those problems. Applebaum is a big believer in what Stalin supposedly said about people causing problems for the regime. No man, no problem. Applebaum just scales it up.

Her partner in this enterprise is a Ukrainian activist named Peter Pomerantsev, who is probably on the payroll of a Western intelligence service. His biography does not pass the laugh test. His role in life has been to seed Western media with anti-Russian information dressed up as Ukrainian nationalism. The rest of the staff of the Global Disinformation Index all have an axe to grind with some enemy of the neocons, past, present or in the future.

The point of this walk through the swamps behind the ministry of disinformation is to illustrate how the new rule works. If a media outlet is claiming to root out disinformation, you can be sure they are not doing that. Instead, start with the assumption that they are waging a disinformation campaign. That is what you see in the New York Times story and any story containing the words “Global Disinformation Index.” Then you can begin to figure out what is really going on with the story.

Of course, the entirely new obsession with misinformation and disinformation by government and mass media is a big lie. Since forever, people have known that governments lie all the time. They have known that the media is partisan, a form of activism more often than not. Yet suddenly we are being told that the media and the government are now declaring war in false information. Since they are the only possible source of disinformation, this means war on themselves.

The big lie, for those unfamiliar, is a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. This is now the default tactic of the managerial state. They tell us that Eskimo truckers protesting vaccine rules are white supremacists. Then they bring in a “hate expert” to claim that freedom is a form of violence. These outlandish whoppers are then signed off on by new experts who sagely tell us the moon is made of cheese.

Unlike normal propaganda techniques, this new tactic is not to further a cause, although it can be used that way as we see with Ukraine. The neocons are simply taking advantage of a defense mechanism that has evolved since the Cold War. By flooding the zone with outlandish nonsense, the system prevents cogent analysis of what it is doing or contradicting it in any way. It is a form of menticide to paralyze the people by suspending them in a solution of false narratives.

This is the utility of the Opposite Rule. It helps clarify the new relationship between the leviathan and the people. Instead of viewing society as a hierarchical structure that is responsive to the will of the people, you see that it is an adversarial relationship between a ruling organism and the people. This ruling organism is the vast administrative state made up of government, corporations, the academy, non-profits and the mass media. It is a fully integrated organism.

The endless waves of information, mostly false information, is its primary defense mechanism against what it sees as a threat. That threat is the people over whom it hovers like a noxious cloud. The point of the false information is to keep the people in a fog of confusion about who really rules over them. You cannot rebel against that which you are not even sure exists. Menticide is the primary defense mechanism of this system of social control we call managerialism.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.

Performative Democracy

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One of the striking things about the Canadian trucker protest is that we have been able to get a good look at Justin Trudeau. To this point no one outside of Canada has had a reason to care about him. Sure, he is a ridiculous person who likes wearing funny outfits in public, but that is democracy. Until now few people outside of the great white north have grasped the depth of this man’s ridiculousness. The whole world now sees that Canada is ruled by a feckless airhead.

In fairness, Canadians can point out that while Trudeau is a ridiculous person, he is not wearing diapers and unsure of his own name. In the theater of the absurd that is western liberal democracy, Joe Biden has to be the headliner. The Global American Empire has a dementia patient in charge. Not only that, when Joe Biden was at his peak fifty years ago, he was considered one of the dumbest men in Washington, so he is a dunce with dementia now.

Most people tend to write off these examples as exceptions. After all, the system does produce some serious people. At least that is the hope. What keeps people voting is the belief that someone will come along who will actually do the people’s bidding and be reasonably good at it. In the daily life of most people, there are plenty of capable people doing important work. In a nation of three hundred million, we should be able to find enough competent people to fill these offices.

The trouble is the system is stuffed with people who are probably worse than Justin Trudeau or Joe Biden. Is Mitch McConnell or Nancy Pelosi an upgrade over Joe Biden in terms of cognitive ability? Is Justin Trudeau more ridiculous in his role than Maxine Waters or Ocasio-Cortez. Allegedly the most important legislative body on earth has a bag lady and ditzy barmaid. You can probably find one hundred members of Congress who are more ridiculous than Justin Trudeau.

It is not just at the top of the system either. Again, the habit is to think of the people as exceptions rather than the rule. The rest of the system has decent people who can be elevated to the national stage if people just vote harder. Then again, one of those people is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She is supposed to be the antidote to someone like Ocasio-Cortez, but in reality, she is just another flavor of the same thing. Silly people are the one thing that both parties embrace.

When you look down at the entry point of politics, what you see is the system seems to select for these people. Here is a young women with a bright future. She is currently in the Nebraska senate. Her Twitter profile reads, “State Senator in Omaha’s District 8. Vice Chair of Urban Affairs. Bi queen. Abolish ICE. She/her.” It is not hard to see her getting elevated to Congress at some point and then becoming a national figure as the first pronoun American in Congress.

Her web site says she is an “entrepreneur and small business owner” but that is a gross exaggeration. When you dig into her business career you learn she owned a boutique for a short time and then founded “Safe Space Nebraska, a nonprofit organization that protects bar patrons from harassment.” That is not the work of an “entrepreneur and small business owner”. That is the work of a public nuisance. She is why in a better age the scold’s bridle was popular.

Gormless dingbats like Megan Hunt are not an exception. She is the rule in modern politics, up and down the system. In fact, when you look down the ranks what you see is that demented old men like Biden and feckless airheads like Trudeau really are the best the system can produce. When you look at the actuarial tables, it is clear that a guy like Trudeau will be remembered as Canada’s Pericles in a few years. Joe Biden will be the Zoomer generation’s Patrick Henry.

The Founders, of course, were opposed to democracy because they assumed the people would be manipulated by craven opportunists. Ambitious men with little regard for the common good would play on the passions of the people. This would inevitably lead to factionalism. The people would care more about the narrow pursuit of their faction’s interests rather than the public good. Democracy becomes mob rule, where different mobs take turns ruling over the other mobs.

We are certainly seeing that in modern America, but what the Founders never imagined is that the craven opportunists would be stupid and ridiculous. Justin Trudeau is a simpleton, but he also possesses a rare set of social skills that has allowed him to rise to the top of his government. Joe Biden was a stupid crook, but somehow managed to stay in the Senate for generations. Even in his current condition, he was able to manipulate the system to win the White House.

What the results are telling us is that mass democracy in large technological societies selects for moronic sociopaths. The most likely reason for this is that democracy quickly becomes pointless in a large technological society. It is just window dressing for the managerial elite that operates the vast administrative state. The system can tolerate Joe Biden, because the president is a ceremonial position. In fact, all of the elected offices are ceremonial, just part of the performative democracy.

Circling back to where this started, the trucker rebellion in Canada is probably the first real test of this system. Thirty years ago, Justin Trudeau would not be tolerated because the Cold War required serious men in these positions. Three decades of easy times has allowed the system to evolve into the absurdity we now see. Reality, however, is coming back from holiday. This will be the first real test of performative democracy and the actors and actresses that populate it.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar 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 to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: We have a new addition to the list. Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start. If you use this link you get 15% off of your purchase.

The good folks at Alaska Chaga are offering a ten percent discount to readers of this site. You just click on the this link and they take care of the rest. About a year ago they sent me some of their stuff. Up until that point, I had never heard of chaga, but I gave a try and it is very good. It is a tea, but it has a mild flavor. It’s autumn here in Lagos, so it is my daily beverage now.

Minter & Richter Designs makes high-quality, hand-made by one guy in Boston, titanium wedding rings for men and women and they are now offering readers a fifteen percent discount on purchases if you use this link. If you are headed to Boston, they are also offering my readers 20% off their 5-star rated Airbnb.  Just email them directly to book at sa***@*********************ns.com.