Category Archives: Badder Thoughts

The Dead Enders

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When it comes to not getting it, there are few that can challenge the modern conservative for his obtuseness and proud indifference to the facts. For going on 30 years now, conservatives have refused to notice that America is rapidly changing in the exact opposite direction they predicted. That’s a remarkable run of wrongness that even the libertarians struggle to match. Whatever it once was, conservatism is now a fantasy camp of escapism, disconnected from reality.

A good example is this recent post on a once popular conservative website called National Review. The writer, like all so-called conservatives, is happily dreaming of the day when the terrible Donald Trump is sent packing. That’s when they can come out of hiding and everything will be put back to the way it was. The Janus Party, one face Democrat and one face Republican, will be back to the way it was before that mean old orange man stirred things up with his meanness.

The writer, like most so-called conservatives, has never thought too much about why Trump won in 2016 or why we have a crisis on our hands in 2020. Somewhere back in the 1990’s, after the end of the Cold War, they imagined what the world would be like in the future and reoriented themselves to it. They have not bothered to revisit that worldview since then. They have not thought much about why they instinctively embraced cosmopolitanism in the first place.

Like a long serving house slave, the conservative pundit never troubles his mind about his arrangements. The role of conservatism has always been the same as Dabny described a century ago. “Conservatism is merely the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition. It remains behind it, but never retards it, and always advances near its leader.” This is a role the conservative was born into and he resents those who question those arrangements.

That is the atmosphere around conservatism these days. They hope this is finally the end of Trump and what he represents. Like that house slave after a revolt has been put down, they look forward to serving the master of the house again. In this case, it means they have that old 2012 postmortem out, thinking about how they can embrace the new diverse America. That has always been the hallmark of conservatism. They accept what the Left says about them at face value.

Of course, with any post from so-called conservatives, the first thing to do is hit Ctrl+F on your keyboard and start typing the word “immigration.” There are two hits, one for an ad and the other a mention about executive orders. The fact that immigration was what put Trump in the White House, or at least one of the things, has never registered with conservatives. Trump was the first candidate to speak frankly about the subject and it is what legitimized his campaign.

Immigration is also why the Republican Party is headed to permanent minority status in the very near future. Virginia is solidly Democrat because close to 15% of the population is foreign born. That’s the official number. North Carolina is following Virginia for the same reason. It now has an 8% foreign born population. Georgia is at 10% and will soon be a solidly Democrat state. Helping the Left import a new people was a bad idea, but conservatives never think about it.

A search on the words “race” and “white” yields a similar result. White people in America have been subjected to an unprecedented assault over the last year and this does not rate a single mention. Instead, it is blather about being the “party of Lincoln”, a phrase intended to tell the Left that conservatives will not be any trouble. Note too that Lincoln killed many of the ancestors of the GOP coalition. Peddling Lincolnism in the South is like selling Hitler memorabilia to Jews.

Now, the linked post does provide some insight as to why conservatism is a museum piece, sitting next to whiggism and the free silver movement. The writer makes the same call as other conservatives about the future of their thing. They need to be “a coalition of work and probity.” Later, he quotes Lincoln’s Independence Hall address to add authority to the claim. “In due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.”

Right there is why conservatism has never conserved anything. Probity requires honestly, which requires a sober minded acceptance of reality. To assert that there can ever be a world in which everyone has an equal chance is to deny the fundamental reality of the human condition. Nature does not distribute her gifts equally, so in the context of the social order, equality is a dangerous fantasy. Probity requires a frank acceptance of this reality of the human condition.

Obviously, in the mouth of the modern conservative, probity simply means adherence to the highest of ideals. In the context of modern American politics, that always means the ideals of the Left. Those are never questioned. As Dabny pointed out a century ago, conservative principles are always yesterday’s Progressive fad. When they say they seek to be the “party of Lincoln” that simply means they intend to be the party of whoever was the last Progressive icon.

Sadly though, conservatism does reflect the sentiments of white people, especially the older generations. Facing the promise of marginalization and possibly extermination, they seek to embrace those promising their demise. That slave’s mindset is so strong, no amount of beatings will break their loyalty to the master. In the case of whites and conservatives, the master is that 19th century radical dream of universal equality and fraternity between all men.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Mediocre Man

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Notes: I have a new post up behind the green door. This time it is deep thoughts upon viewing the movie Timecop. Well, not exactly deep thoughts. Just some thoughts.

When trying to understand what has gone so terribly wrong with the Occident, observers often point to intelligence as the main driver. The populations of the West are getting dumber, so they are less capable than in the past. This is not to say there are no geniuses today or that there are fewer of them. It’s that their proportion of society is smaller than in the past. It is the smart fraction that is getting smaller. As a result, the progress of the West has slowed and may be in reverse.

The typical way this is explained is this way. Imagine a man dragging a sack of rocks down a road. If he is a large man and the sack has only a few rocks, he can drag the sack as fast as he could walk without it. If on the other hand, he is a small man and the sack has many rocks, he will move much smaller than his capacity. This will show up most prominently when his path is not clear. He may even come to a halt when he comes to a hill or a long incline.

Now, one reason for this decline in intelligence, is the mass invasion from outside the Occident over the last fifty years. Minneapolis is now a dysfunctional city because of the importation of sub-Saharan Africans. The sorts of people who think Ilhan Omar is a great leader will struggle with modernity. The reason these people are trapped in the Neolithic age is they lack the cognitive ability to go much further. California looks like Mexico because it is now full of Mexicans.

Another reason, and most likely the reason for the mass invasion from over the horizon, is white people are getting dumber. A quick look at what average students did in school a century ago makes that clear. Most college freshman would flunk this eighth grade exam or be so offended by it they would need counseling. Ed Dutton has written a book on this issue and continues to do videos explaining the topic. The short version is that white people have been in decline for a long time.

There is another aspect to this that does not get mentioned. That is, the smart fraction in the West may not have changed that much, but the middle fraction has grown rapidly over the last century. Better nutrition and education have swelled the ranks of the mediocre, changing the nature of our societies. Men who used to be supervisors on job sites now run offices. Women who volunteered in the community and kept a good house now run the nation’s human resource departments.

In other words, that man dragging the sack has not changed much. He is not as big and fit as before, but he is pretty close. His sack is larger and heavier, but he also has modern tools to mitigate much of it. He’s not moving anywhere near as fast as he could, but it is not the burden in the sack. It is the regulatory burden he must navigate to even pick up the sack. Around the superior man is an army of mediocrities with a myriad of rules and regulations governing the dragging of sacks.

Everywhere you go in the West, you are confronted with rules and regulations that make little sense at face value. Every business has to have people who spend their days keeping up with the rules, which change constantly. The “compliance officer” has taken the role of the ideological enforcer. Instead of making sure everyone is properly enthusiastic for the latest truth from the party, the compliance officer makes sure everyone is enthusiastic about following the rules.

These rules, of course, are the domain of the mediocre. Now, don’t confuse mediocre with average. Average people know they are average and accept their limitations, while the mediocrity imagines himself as an elite. Every “policy expert” in Washington is sure he knows more about his subject than the people who actually do the work. Every lawyer thinks he is Blackstone. Every politician thinks he is a great historical figure. The mediocrity does not know what he does not know.

This is the reason mediocrities love complex rules. The Mediocre Man loves rules for the same reason small children love large bulky toys. Just as the child lacks the fine dexterity and spatial awareness to manipulate small objects, Mediocre Man lacks the cognitive ability to act independently. He is a man who grasps the rail when going down a few steps, because that’s what you do. His mastery of the rules is proof that he is the smartest man in the room.

This is why the West is so burdened with elaborate and complicated rules that have no obvious point. It’s why Massachusetts now has a curfew to fight Covid. It’s not just that they think Covid is a night stalker, but that an army of mediocre men came up with a plausible sounding, but ultimately absurd, reason for the curfew. The mediocre men in politics, being mediocrities themselves, embraced it for the same reason a toddler picks up the big toy. It’s what makes sense to them.

Mediocre Man and his love of rulemaking is why we have a war on reason and observation in the West. Mediocre Man sees the rules against reading Table 43 of the Unified Crime Report and assumes anyone mentioning its contents broke the rules, which the worst possible crime. There are rules about what you can say about Covid, peace be upon him, so anyone not in full compliance, even if he is right, must be hounded out of polite society. The rules demand it.

None of this is to say that the mass invasion of stupid people and the decline of native intelligence are not factors. In fact, the domination of Mediocre Man may be another result of the Occidental decline. For the same reason we have allowed millions of barbarians to enter our lands, we have allowed Mediocre Man to take the controls of society and drive us into a jungle of rules. It is why Mediocre Man has locked himself in place by a form of regulatory capture.

Just as regulatory agencies are dominated by the industries or interests they are allegedly regulating, Western societies have been captured by those rule loving mediocrities they should be controlling. The smart fraction, like those in the classic science fiction story, find themselves the slaves of stupid people who think they are the masters of the universe. The problem in the West is that it has been taken over by Raskolnikov, who thinks he is Petrovich.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Popular Fanatic

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Note: I have a new post up on Taki today about the Church of Covid. Good to see the headline writer finally took my advice. I also have a new post up behind the green door on the 80’s comedy Back to School.

An old criticism of liberal democracy was that the system would inevitably become less stable, as each election would result in a wild swing in direction. The people would support position X in one election and then support position Y in the next election, with X and Y being opposite positions on some issue. We are getting a sense of that now with Biden’s handlers promising a reversal of Trump’s policies, which were allegedly a sharp break from the policies of predecessors.

One reason for this is that liberal democracies are bourgeois societies, in which the old instinct to dress up interests in objectivity and civic virtue remain strong. It is considered immoral for a group to press their interests in a purely partisan way, so everyone insists that science and the public good are the motivations. The deliberate destruction by the elites of the civic life of societies is not just a naked attempt to remake the world in their image, but an effort to build back better.

Bourgeois objectivity, however, does not work as a brake on the partisanship that comes with democracy. Instead, it works to magnify it. Every issue, instead of being a fight between interested parties, is a fight for eternal truth and cosmic justice. Voting for party X is not about where your bread is buttered, but about where you stand in the moral hierarchy, relative to the people in party Y. The polarization we are seeing today is not about practical politics, but about good versus evil.

Of course, in order to arrive at the point of bourgeois partisanship, you first must arrive at a post-scarcity society. When the threat of extinction is no longer obvious, the people are free to indulge in fantasy and leisure items. In the Cold War, the West avoided this state because the threat of nuclear war was real. The sober-minded had the primary duty of keeping the frivolous under control. Once that was removed, the frivolous and insane were free to run wild through society.

The result is a strange paradox. The issues that rise to the top are increasingly trivial and ridiculous, but the partisanship around them becomes more intense. Two men playing house is a fact of life going back to the dawn of man, but suddenly the embrace of this became a defining issue. If that was not ridiculous enough, what followed was a parade of men in dresses demanding we play along with them. Then it was people with a list of bizarre pronouns demanding validation.

At some level, the bourgeois partisan knows this, but instead of acknowledging the obvious, the demand for public judgement becomes more intense. In the Cold War, the Left had get out the vote drives, by which they meant rigging the voting in major urban areas. Otherwise, there was a quiet understanding that voting should be left to those who pay attention. Today, voting is a moral duty and we are endlessly reminded of it in the months before an election. The truth must be decided.

This is probably the only thing about liberal democracy that makes sense. If everyone votes, then the winners can claim a mandate. If Trump voters, for example, realized the vote was being rigged and boycotted the election last week, the winners could not legitimately claim a mandate. This used to be a tactic in low-trust societies ruled by an elite seeking legitimacy at the ballot box. In modern societies, everyone assumes the truth is fifty-percent-plus-one, so everyone must vote.

Here is where we stumble into another paradox of liberal democracy and another source of partisan anger. All human societies have elites and those elites control the institutions of the society. In theory, popular forms of government either check the power of the elites or place real power into the hands of the people. In one variation, the powerful propose and people dispose. In the other variation the people both propose and dispose. Democracy is about the public will.

In reality, voting is entirely meaningless in a liberal democracy, as the elites control public policy exclusively. The winning side in 1992 thought they were getting a folksy John F Kennedy, when they just got a skeevy Bush I. Bush voters thought they were getting a dim version of Reagan, but got Lyndon Johnson. The people celebrating Biden think they will get reeducation camps and proscription lists, but instead they will end up with a less coherent version of Bush II.

As the researchers in this 2014 study found, those elites that are a permanent feature of all societies control public policy in a liberal democracy, just as they do in every other form of government. In liberal democracy, however, the people are blind to this reality, instead believing that the market place of democracy decides. If elite opinion tracked public opinion, no one would mind, but when elite opinion is at war with the public, it becomes another source of partisan rage.

This leads to the final paradox of liberal democracy. The most rational strategy for minority interests is to withdraw consent, as this strips some legitimacy from the winner of the democratic process. Instead, partisans become more intensely partisan after each electoral defeat and every betrayal. In two years, those red MAGA hats will be a bloody shirt inspiring partisans to vote for the GOP, who will promptly betray those voters at the first opportunity. The anger will keep rising.

The reason that the world appears to be going mad is that liberal democracy, without the brake of thermonuclear war, is a runaway train of partisan fury. Instead of disputes being settled at the ballot box, each election intensifies the dispute. Haldane famously observed that fanaticism is man’s greatest invention. That’s because it is his greatest weapon. As partisan fury rises in liberal democracy, the fanatic becomes the most valued participant. It becomes rule by fanatic.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Partisans and Objectivists

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One way to describe the great divide within mainstream politics is that one side is the partisans and the other side objectivists. The partisans are focused on their objectives and what they think is good for their side. They just want to win and don’t worry too much about how they win. The objectivists are focused on facts and think that truth will prevail eventually. The partisans are what we call the Left and the objectivists are what we call the Right in America.

The partisans are an ends justifies the means mode of thought. They are unconstrained by rules or convention. In fact, they are not limited by what they said last week, as last week was a different time with different goals. In a world where winning is the only thing that matters, everything else bends to serve that end. If being seen as on the science is useful in the moment, they love science. If treating science like magic is useful next week, then next week they will mock science.

Objectivists, of course, find this mind boggling. They look at these contradictions as the Achilles’s heel of their opponents. They spend a lot of time pointing out how the partisans are contradicting what they said last week. Often this is effective, as the public tends to side with the objectivists in most things. The climate change stuff is a good example of how the partisans harm their own cause. Their flexibility with the truth is a liability when asking the public to take their word on science.

For the most part, though, this willingness to transcend facts, and even reality in some cases, is a great advantage in a democracy. Politics in a democracy is immediate, rather than deliberative, so that first impression counts for a lot. If in the fullness of time those initial arguments are found to be full of lies or simply wrong, it does not matter as everyone is onto the next thing. It is rare in a democracy for the debate to circle back and address an old argument or have a do-over.

A good example of how this works is the term “gun show loophole.” This remains a popular catchphrase on the Left. They know gun control is wildly unpopular, so they talk about ending gun show loopholes. The fact that there is no such thing as a gun show loophole does not matter. It sounds good. People don’t like loopholes of any sort as they seem dishonest, so they support ending gun show loopholes. The Left can appear reasonable, despite perpetrating a fraud on the public.

Of course, this summer we got to experience another example of how the truth is no constraint to the partisan. The people burning, looting and attacking people in the streets have been labeled peaceful protesters. Just this week, as video comes out of massive looting and pillaging in Philadelphia, the governor of the state called it a mostly peaceful protest. That strikes the objectivists as insane, but from the point of view of the partisan, it helps their cause and that’s all that matters.

As violence spread around the country this summer, the chant from the rioters was often something like “silence is violence.” In other words, if you did not vocally support them, they could rightfully assume you were plotting violence or supported violence against them, so they were justified in using violence. In other words, to the partisan, their violence is speech, while your speech is violence. The objectivists are stymied by this sleight of hand, so they have remained dumbstruck by it.

This willingness to transcend the rules of language was on display this week as democrats threw a choreographed tantrum over Judge Barrett. They claimed that Trump was packing the court, a term that goes back a century to when FDR tried to increase the number of judges, so he could get his guys on the bench. The fact that Trump was not actually doing anything like that was not a constraint on the Democrats bleating about court packing all week.

Just as their violence is speech, while your speech is violence, the logic of the situation is being turned on its head. They now claim that their plans to pack the court are a justified response to Trump packing the court. You see, when their enemy scrupulously follows the rules it is a gross violation of procedure, but when they overturn procedure it is restoring order and balance. This is not mere hypocrisy. This is the natural detachment from objectivity that is a predicate for the partisan.

This is why the partisans tend to prevail in a democracy. They have a wider range of options because they are not limited by facts and reason. Additionally, the objectivists are self-limiting, often ceding the field because they think the rules require it. One side gets to play dirty, while the other side tries to talk them out of it. The truth is, there is no reasoning with a partisan. There is no way to reason with someone who will not stipulate to the basic facts of life. They exist beyond reason.

This is the story of the last 30 years. As the partisans have become increasingly partisan, which means less constrained by reality, the objectivists have become more certain that reality will step and do the job they refuse to do. They imagine a time when the partisan suddenly realizes the truth of his situation, throws down his weapons and embraces the objectivist as a brother in logic. For the objectivist, reason has become escapism in order to avoid what must be done.

A byproduct of this dynamic is that most people have no voice in the media, government or any other area of public life. The partisans advance their positions on behalf of their cause, while the objectivists fret about factual accuracy. In a democracy, objectivity is not a constituency, so the objectivists end up representing the interests of abstract concepts, rather than genuine people, which means the bulk of the people have no representative.

Another old saying relevant here is that in war, truth is the first casualty. The reason for this is war is a conflict between two sides, neither of which has a reason to see things from the point of view of the other side. It is the ultimate partisan conflict. If there is ever going to be a force to topple the current Left, their first task will be to eliminate those more concerned about truth and reason than the welfare of genuine people.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Oogily-Boogily Men

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A foundation item of modern Gospel scholarship is something called the Q-document, which is a hypothetical manuscript of Jesus’ sayings. The gospels of Mathew, Mark and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels, because they include many of the same stories, which suggests they share the same source document. There is a theory that all three writers relied upon this unknown source document. The Q-document is the collection of common stories in all three of these Gospels.

It is an interesting theory because it rests upon some things we know about human behavior, in addition to the textual evidence. For example, we know that the first written texts were based on oral traditions. The stories and legends that were passed from one generation to the next were written down at some point. We know the Gospel writers were not firsthand witnesses. The Q-document allows scholars to fill in some missing pieces of the puzzle based on what is known.

A similar sort of detective work can be used in this age to try and understand the beliefs of our ruling class. At first blush, the things they say and do run counter to the normal explanations for political behavior. Often, what they say runs counter to their own interests, suggesting some unknown motivation. Of course, many of the popular fads with the great and good are best described as superstitions. They have no justification other than a primitive fear of the unknown.

The place to start is with the Russian conspiracy myth. What started out as a ham-fisted way for the Clinton campaign to shift the focus from the e-mails being leaked on-line, quickly manifested into a raging conspiracy theory. The FBI and CIA knew there was nothing to it, but it was a useful cover for their shenanigans. This patina of authority, however, allowed it to become something of a cult phenomenon among the chattering classes and their followers. Russia was the bogeyman.

What no one stopped to consider is what it was the alleged conspirators were plotting to do way back in 2016. Supposedly, they were interfering in the election, but how exactly was that supposed to work? No one ever said, but what we can infer is that the plot was designed to prevent the Left from getting something important. It went well beyond Hillary Clinton, as the plot is an ongoing enterprise. The conspiracy is part of a great hidden battle between the forces of light the forces of darkness.

Now we have the panic of the QAnon phenomenon on-line. The various tentacles of the Left are trying to remove all references of it from the public square. People into this hobby are being thrown off social media platforms. Media airheads are demanding politicians denounce QAnon. The Left has anthropomorphized QAnon into a sort of super-villain running a secret army. In fact, Q is now an international super-villain, organizing the bad guys all over the world.

Like the Russian hoax, they never explain what they think this is or why anyone should be concerned about it. To normal people, it is just one of those weird things like believing in space aliens that people do for some reason. To the Left, it is the gathering of all the dark forces in the world into one great heathen army. This dark army intends to stop the Left from achieving their goals. This is why the Left has always been at war with QAnon and must defeat him in the end.

A goofier version is their obsession with the Boogaloo Boys. This is supposedly a secret cabal of men wearing Hawaiian shirts, no kidding. They are supposedly plotting a second civil war for some reason. Of course, the government dutifully feeds into this nonsense, but never bothers to explain how supposed Boogaloo Boys turn out to be members of left-wing groups like Antifa. The power of the Hawaiian should never be underestimated.

The same thing happened with the Proud Boys. The left has been obsessing with these guys for years now. This fan club for Gavin McInnes has been transformed into an invisible army the Left is sure is lurking around every corner. Amusingly, the group is full of gays, Jews and non-whites, but they are called white supremacists. Like the power of the Hawaiian shirt, mere membership in this group can turn a gay Puerto Rican into a Neo-Nazi terrorist. That’s some powerful juju.

Slightly different, but related is the Covid panic. The public’s initial concern was warranted as the media exaggerated what was happening and the government was as inept at handling it as they are at fixing the roads. People were wise to be a bit cautious and take steps to limit their risks. Then, as the reality of Covid became clear, normal people relaxed and the Left turned it into a supernatural force. The same people living in fear of Gaia now check case numbers three times a day.

The Covid panic on the Left combines strains from the other items mentioned into something of a morality play. You see, Covid is not just a manageable virus like so many others that are a part of our world. It is a sign, perhaps even a punishment, sent to cleanse the land of evil. The Left is convinced that voting out Trump will relieve the land of this great plague. Covid is now another manifestation of the great evil opposing the great and the good in their quest to reach the Promised Land.

What these items and many others have in common is a belief on the Left that they are in a great end-time struggle with a mysterious and sinister force. It has the ability to change how people vote and turn them into enemies of their own interests. Like George Soros, ironically enough, it uses its power to turn small groups into powerful armies in the war against the great and the good. The great enemy of the one true faith is not people with different ideas, but evil itself.

Eric Hoffer said, “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” Having conquered all known enemies on earth, the Left is now without a natural opponent. It is forced to invent supernatural ones in order to maintain that necessary fiction required of all mass movements. Having rejected Christianity and Western tradition, they are creating an ad hoc set of myths and legends to explain the world and their role in it.

Interestingly, this new oogily-boogily is mystical in an oriental way. The great evil at the center of it is never spoken of directly. It’s as if it is taboo to mention it. Instead, they focus on the manifestations of this evil. What gives the dark forces such power is they cannot be quantified with language. Instead it is just assumed to be the origin of all that they fear. The Left is now bound together by a mystical belief in something they cannot describe, but they are sure exists.

Promotions: 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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Our Gang

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In the Depression era Our Gang comedies, a recurring gag was for the kids to get adult sized costumes and put on a show. The joke was the sight-gag of the kids wearing the oversize clothes, but trying hard to play the roles in their show. It was made in a time when there was a clear line between childhood and adulthood, so the audience understood that it was not just using kids for cheap gags. It was also a way to make sport of current issues without being too obvious.

The man behind the Our Gang series was credited with using children in a natural way, so they came across as real kids, not adult actors playing children. The authenticity of the roles, a group of poor children in the depression, often pretending to be adults or what they imagined it was like to be adults, allowed the adult audience to laugh at themselves and the foolishness of adult pretensions. The best comedy is that which allows the audience to approvingly laugh at themselves.

It makes for an interesting contrast to the modern day. The most popular movies in this age feature adults dressing up as children’s comic book heroes. They engage in the sorts of fantasy stories featured in comic books. These movies are not made for children, but for adults. The median age of the American comic book consumer is 34. The point of the movies is for the adults to escape anything resembling adulthood and engage in the sorts of flights of fancy normally associated with children.

Movies have always been escapism. In the Depression, people went to the theater to get some relief from the daily grind of hard times. During the war they went to be reassured that they were on the winning side. In the Cold War, movies often reminded people that they were on the side of angels in the great struggle with communism. Alternatively, they were a cautionary tale about the foolishness of war in a nuclear world. Movies reflect and shape the shared public consciousness.

That’s what makes those old Our Gang skits about kids in adult clothes relevant in the age of comic book movies. We live in an age in which fools and knaves dress up as serious people and perform serious roles. The typical politician is a dangerously stupid simpleton, but he can play his role well, so he gets the part. He is no different from the kids dressed up in adult clothes. The difference is you could laugh at the kids, but the modern version is nothing but horror.

Just look at the absurdity of the Covid panic. All over we see adult children cast in the role of political leader, playing a real-life action fantasy game where they are heroically fighting the Covid monster. Mario’s Cuomo’s oldest, currently staring as Governor, commissioned a book about himself fighting the Covid. It’s a wonder he did not have it titled My Struggle. Like so many other reckless idiots holding high office in this country, he lives in a fantasy land where he is always the hero.

Not to put too fine a point on this, but much of the outrage over Trump is that he is an authentic human being, not some airhead hired for the role. The long arc of our presidential candidates has reached the point where the Inner Party candidate is a man who could very well be dead right now. He stays locked in a basement. We are a click away from the next candidate being a concept or maybe a holographic image created by the special effects people in Hollywood.

That’s probably why the super hero genre has become so popular. In an age of mediocre men dressed up to play important roles, it is natural for the common fantasy to revolve around some great leader emerging to transcend the dreary blandness of the age and carry us forward into a heroic age. The foil for these heroes is always a group of people who are too small minded to appreciate whatever it is the hero is bringing to society with his super-natural or super-human skills.

It’s also not surprising that these emergent heroes are psychologically flawed in some way that will prevent them from fully realizing their power. The audience is supposed to see the foolishness of anyone trying to transcend this age. In the end, there is no escaping the dreary blandness of the egalitarian age. The subtext to these films is that only mentally flawed people think anyone should seek something more than material prosperity and temporary happiness. It is nihilism for a nihilistic age.

Another juxtaposition worth considering is that in the dawn of Hollywood, movies were a break from the labors of life. The audience was serious people engaged in the serious struggle of life. Today’s audience is composed of grown up children escaping the boring drudgery of life to pretend for a little while to be serious adults. They don’t desire a great leader to carry them to something better. They just think it would be cool to fly around in magic underwear for a while. Small men. Small dreams.

Joseph de Maistre said, “Every country has the government it deserves.” It is a popular quote with modern critics of liberal democracy, but they miss the larger point. The government is the reflection of the society’s elite, which in turn is a reflection of the people and culture that produced that elite. It is no wonder that modern leaders are grown up toddlers dressed up in adult clothes. They are the elite we deserve, because we are no longer able to demand more from ourselves.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

Insurrection Then Revolution

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A popular fantasy among the more edgy conservatives is that one day, the Left will get the civil war they claim they want and then they’ll get it good and hard. In this fantasy, those gun-toting, constitution-loving conservatives will show Lefty why the right to bear arms was enshrined in the Constitution. It is a popular fantasy on-line, because revenge fantasies are fun and they provide relief for well-founded frustration. In reality, the great conflagration will never look like the fantasy.

Civil wars are when two sides in the ruling class cannot find a middle ground and refuse to give into the other side. The English Civil War, for example, was a fight between those elites who supported the King and those who supported Parliament. Sure, commoners were in the mix and rose in status, but it was largely a war between two factions within the elite. The same was true of the American Civil War. Slavery was the pretext, but it was largely an extension of the English Civil War.

Revolutions, on the other hand, are when a new elite overthrows the old elite, because the old system offers no way for the new elite to join the elite. The French Revolution is often framed as a peasant rebellion, but the Jacobins who led the revolt were educated and capable men, a new elite for a new age. The Bolshevik Revolution was similar, except there was competition for who would be the new elite. The communists won, so they got to name the revolution after themselves.

In modern America the ruling class is as unified as it has ever been. Look around at the high ground of Imperial life and it is hard to find any dissenters. The revolt within Washington against Trump is a good example. Factions that have claimed to be opponents work naturally together to thwart the people’s choice. In fact, genuine dissidents are presented with a shield wall guarding the high ground of the empire, a sign of elite unity that is deliberately intimidating.

That said, no ruling elite is as unified as what is being presented. In fact, these histrionic demands for unity are a sign they fear a lack of will and unity. The tech oligarchs censuring a mainstream media site is one of those signs that maybe all is not well on the other side of the walls. The elite media may be focused on defeating the evil orange man right now, but they see the danger in what is happening. There are frictions on the other side that could one day be fissures.

No matter how unified a ruling elite may be, they have certain duties they must perform in order to remain in power. The reason people allow themselves to be pushed around is the order provided by even the worst rulers ensures they have shelter, food and a predictable amount of safety. Freedom ain’t worth a damn if you cannot attain the essentials to sustain your life. The big talk about preferring liberty to safety is just that, as people always choose safety over freedom, if those are the choices.

When people begin to sense that the invisible bargain between the people and the ruler is breaking down, that the ruler is not holding up his end of the bargain, that is the beginning of an insurrection. After all, if the ruler cannot provide the basics, like food and safety, what’s the point of having a ruler? Those rooftop Koreans during the Rodney King riots were the stirrings of insurrection. The militias guarding property in Kenosha were the flicker of insurrection among the middle-class.

Every ruling elite relies on legitimacy. The people over whom they rule must accept them as the sovereign. Otherwise, the ruling elite must rely on force and that is the most expensive form of rule, draining both the elite and the subjects from whom they extract that which sustains them. Rule by force is unsustainable. It is why the ruling class must maintain its legitimacy. The crisis we see today is a crisis of legitimacy, where a growing portion of the public questions the legitimacy of the system.

If we are ever to get to anything close to that fantasy of those gun-toting, constitution-loving conservatives, it will first start as an insurrection. Here and there, people will look around and realize the state cannot or will not perform its basic functions. If the cops, for example, refuse to do their job, then people take up arms. If the state cannot run the schools properly, people pull their kids from them. Individually these acts are trivial, but collectively they change the public consciousness.

It is not just among the Dirt People that we are seeing signs of insurrection. We see states refusing to abide by federal law. We see cities in open revolt against the national and state government over policing. Federal judges are refusing to abide by the rules of the court, over ruling legitimate actions by the President. This revolt of the elites is more like an insurrection within the elite. They no longer accept the legitimacy of the system that allows them to be an elite.

This is the soil of revolution. On the one hand, you have the people seeing a breakdown of that invisible bargain between themselves and their rulers. Basic things like road maintenance, policing and public order are not being done. On the other hand, you have members of the elite who no longer accept the authority of the system in which they function, causing that system to further breakdown. American is a machine that is breaking down and no one wants to repair it.

There is a small caveat to that. There is a core of heritage Americans who do want to fix the machine, but they are now treated as an enemy by the elites. The civic nationalists calling for reform are treated as subversives, enemies of the state, by the people controlling the apparatus of the state. Increasingly, the people are viewing them as fools for thinking there is any way back to the old normal. The civic nationalist is quickly becoming the royalist of this age.

Not all insurrections result in revolution. Insurrections are quelled either by the firm smack of authority from a unified and confident ruling class or through the careful reform of that ruling elite in response to the insurrection. This is the crossroads in which America now stands. Will the elite unify and crack down on the people or will they begin the process of imposing long overdue reforms on themselves? Or, has that ship already sailed and we headed for insurrection then a revolution?

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Awakening

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When Finnish nationalists get together every year to socialize and organize, they call their event The Awakening. It is a great term for them to use as it has multiple meanings in this context. One is the obvious awakening among Finns of their long dormant nation pride and identity. The other is the growing awareness of what globalism and multiculturalism means to them as a people. It can also mean the growing awareness of liberal democracy and what it is doing to the people.

The image of a man waking up or snapping out of a daze is a good one to use for all Western people, especially Americans. In the provinces of the Empire, there has always been a bit of skepticism about America, so they never fully succumbed to the narcotic effects of the American empire. In the heart of the empire, the combination of American mythology, civic nationalism and patriotic nostalgia have kept most Americans in a narcotic fog, unable to fully grasp what is happening to them.

There’s also a very American aspect to this concept. The Great Awakening is a cycle in American culture that dates to the founding. A mostly northern phenomenon, these periodic spasms of moral and civic reform have defined our politics. The ruling class may have abandoned Christianity generations ago, but the people are still controlled by those same biorhythms. Therefore, Americans are still prone to periods of excessive moralizing about the fallen state of society.

Amusingly, the current ruling class has bastardized the term to use it in their current anti-white pogroms. The “woke” people waging jihad against white people claim to be suddenly aware of white supremacy, white privilege and male privilege. In reality, they just gobbled down the latest batch of hallucinogenics issued from the global human resource departments. The full expression of false consciousness is middle-aged childless women claiming to be woke on the patriarchy.

As an aside, it is rather symbolic that the ruling class would embrace the concept of an awakening to decorate their latest enforcement efforts. It is the hallmark of the global ruling class to take naturally occurring phenomenon and destroy them in an effort to squeeze a few dollars from them. It is appropriate for a parasitic class of rapacious vermin to try to monetize and politicize the awakening concept as they try to prevent people from waking up to the reality of that parasitic class.

All that aside, there is an awakening going on outside the big stages and production houses of America popular culture. No one in corporate media is allowed to mention it and most are happy to comply with that edict, but it is a real thing that will define the near future, possibly the election. Like most social change, it is happening slowly in many little ways, so it is not obvious. Even for people on the edge of the awakening, the changes can be frustratingly subtle, but it is happening.

People are waking up to the reality of race in American politics and culture. You see that with the collapse in sports viewership. Before the Left unleashed the latest anti-white pogrom, white people loved their sports. Then it went away and then it came back decorated with the latest political slogans. Suddenly, what it was, what it always was, was clear to many people and they have abandoned it. It’s not just the politics in the games, but the politics around all of us.

Another area where people are becoming more aware of the reality behind the illusion is in the mass media. The “fake news” stuff is a nice partisan chant, but even the most partisan Trump people have been clinging to the belief that the media going woke would cause them to go broke. The Biden corruption story is waking many up to the reality of our mass media. It’s not a business at all, but one of the many tentacles of the ruling class, used to keep certain people in power.

The thing that the people behind this story probably don’t get is how this puzzle piece suddenly brings into focus a picture that was not all that clear for many. The media claiming this Hunter Biden story is Russian propaganda is like a bucket of ice water on the heads of many people. The outlandish dishonesty at work here cannot be explained as mere partisanship. The whole Biden story, his dementia and now his corruption, is a stunning eye opener for many Americans.

Again, it is easy for even the most cynical to miss it. “Oh, normie will go right back to his sports ball” was what we heard months ago from the most cynical. That did not happen and now seems unlikely to happen. The spell has been broken. The same is happening with mass media. The center of gravity for normal people moved from the assumption of bias to an assumption that what is in the news is a lie. There is a palpable breakdown in trust between the people and the ruling class.

This Hunter Biden story may be another inflection point. Many people are looking at this and wondering just how deep the corruption goes. After all, the FBI has had this material for months and never followed up on it. In fact, they appear to have been actively concealing it from Congress. Were they planning to blackmail Biden with it if he won the election? When people can plausibly start to wonder such things, they have lost all confidence and trust in their ruling class.

Like most things, cultural awakenings are not neat and tidy. The pedantic cannot appreciate that these things happen in fits and starts. Often the real action is happening in private conversations between friends and family. A catalyzing event brings those private conversations into the public, but it was a series of minor little things that nudged people along in the private deliberations. In the fullness of time, 2020 may be known as the year of the American Awakening.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Management Problem

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Media Note: I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around 9:00 PM eastern and runs for a couple of hours. Are you into midgets? Westerns? Maybe midget westerns? Well, I watched Terror of Tiny Town and posted a review to my SubscribeStar page.

A defining feature of the managerial state is that it creates problems that require it to then fashion complex solutions to solve. A group of experts from the managerial class made some reform, which then created unintended problems. The solution is to draft a new set of experts from the managerial class to solve this new problem. Inevitably, this creates new problems and the process continues into forever. A good current example of this is what to do with the tech monopolies.

The reason we have tech monopolies is Congress drafted laws that allowed the firms to turn into behemoths. In gratitude, these firms then showered their favorite politicians with cash, in order to avoid getting the Microsoft treatment. This allowed the firms to get bigger and turn the thank you cash into threats. It is not unrealistic to think these firms are now able and willing to blackmail politicians with information gleaned from their social media, e-mail and mobile devices.

The starting point for this problem is Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996. Section 230 says that “No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.” This means that on-line intermediaries cannot be held accountable for what passes through their network or platform. Specifically, the intent was to protect them from libel claims.

At the time, this made sense for two reasons. One was the government did not want the internet service providers walling off the internet as a collection of private domains that they policed as a private space. They wanted the internet to be open. Second, they were told that it was practically impossible to monitor what was posted on-line in real-time, so it would cripple this new industry to treat them as publishers. To let the industry grow, it had to be the wild west on-line.

So far, so good, but like everything else done by the technocrats, they created new problems they could solve at some future date. This immunity from libel claims, for example, has made it possible for the big social media companies to operate as regulators of the public square. It has allowed domain registrars to violate individual rights under the cloak of immunity. Even banks are getting into the act, claiming their web portals are covered under section 230.

This brings up another feature of managerial state. It is a strange version of Chesterton’s gate that is baked into their thinking. Once their creation is set loose, no one ever looks back to understand why they created it and what it was intended to do. It just becomes this thing that sprang from nothingness, like the organic institutions for which they have so little respect. We see this with Section 230. It’s just this thing that is either treated as a force of nature or a thing that must be destroyed.

The thing is, much of what ails us could be solved by simply going back to the original intent of the law. The tech companies argued that they should not be treated as publishers because they could not regulate what was on their platform and most important, they did not want to regulate the content. They just wanted to act as facilitators that allowed people to come together in the public square. It was not their job or intention to tell anyone what they could say on-line.

Right there is a solution to much of what is happening. If Twitter, for example, is regulating speech on its platform, then it is no longer covered by Section 230, because it is clearly able and willing to act as a publisher. We call a dog a dog because it has all the characteristics of a dog. Twitter is a publisher because it now has the vital characteristics of a publisher. Applying the original logic of the law to Twitter means it either stops censuring people or it transforms into something else.

Another simple remedy that exists in the law is property ownership. It is well established that when ownership of something is in doubt, the law starts at the creator and then establishes a chain of custody. Stolen goods for example, are returned to the last person who can establish ownership, either through a purchase agreement or proof there are the originator of the item. If you made it, it is yours until you agree to sell or gift it to another person, who then becomes the legal owner.

If we treated your information the same way we treat all other property in the western world, the tech companies would no longer be allowed to harvest this information without your permission. They would have to get your permission every time they sold your information. Most people, of course, would refuse and the business models of these firms would more from rentier to retail. They would have to charge you for the service they provide, like every other business.

Way back in the 2016 election, the liberal pundit Mickey Kaus observed that the Republican party could have cut Trump off early if they just adopted some of his ideas, especially on immigration. If they more gracefully advocated for some limits on immigration and maybe a new attitude on trade, Trump would have lost. They did not, so we will never know, but the implication was that they refused to go down that road because nefarious forces behind the scenes were preventing it.

We get similar argument about the tech monopolies. Congress is now conveniently split on how to address the problem. Bill Bar has initiated what will no doubt be a glacial process to file anti-trust claims against the tech giants. We’ll all be dead long before any of these turn into results. The assumption is that it is all just a show, while behind the scenes the pols bath in cash from the tech giants. It is certainly a useful and satisfying conspiracy theory, but it is mostly wrong.

The truth is, the managerial state turns the ruling class into children, always living in the moment and searching for a present distraction. Instead of taking the prudent and mature view of the problem, tracing it back to its origin and then simply applying the law as intended, they turn it into story time. In this story, they are once again cast as the strong female lead, taking on the sinister bad guys. You go girl. In order to defeat the bad guys, they must create a super complicated solution.

In many areas, this is not much of a concern. The issue of tech censorship is one that can largely solve itself. In order for Twitter to exist, they need the state to keep their competitor out of business, but those same children playing make believe in response to the problem are unable to maintain their end of the bargain. People will find a way to meet on-line and exchange ideas. The result will not be ideal or even very good, but it will allow people to communicate on-line.

This is not happening with important stuff like building roads and keeping the hospitals open. All over the country, technocrats agree that we need more new housing, so builder need more power to build developments. That results in the need for more road and more schools, but building roads is boring, so the children of the managerial state use their time dreaming up smart communities and smart transportation plans. They get to pretend they are smart and popular while the rest of us sit in traffic jams.

The observation about bureaucracy is it becomes sclerotic over time. The people inside the system stop caring about the purpose of the system. Something similar happens with the managerial state. The people inside become hyper-educated toddlers, unable to grasp the concept of time. They spend their days trying to impress each other with their highly complex public policy solutions. Governance becomes a giant parlor game where the more ridiculous the idea, the more the children cheer.

Promotions: 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 like a tea, but it has a milder flavor. It’s hot here in Lagos, so I’ve been drinking it cold. It is a great summer beverage.

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.

For sites like this to exist, it requires people like you chipping in a few bucks a month to keep the lights on and the people fed. It turns out that you can’t live on clicks and compliments. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you don’t want to commit to a subscription, make a one time donation. Or, you can send money to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. You can also use PayPal to send a few bucks, rather than have that latte.

The Day After Tomorrow

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Media Note: I was on the Counter-Currents livestream Sunday. Here is the recorded version of it for your listening pleasure. I will be on the Killstream this Wednesday to celebrate the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. The show starts somewhere around 9:00 PM eastern and runs for a couple of hours. I’m now posting content to my SubscribeStar page. I’m trying my hand at movie reviews.

The general consensus regarding the future of the American Empire is that it is headed for demise like all empires. The rapidly declining quality of the ruling elite in general and the political class in particular is the biggest sign. Then there is the changing demographics, which will reach a point where the human capital of the empire can no longer support empire. Then there is the life cycle of all empires. This one, while short lived, seems to be in the late phase of that cycle.

Most people focus on the question of when the empire will collapse, as that provides the most thrilling scenarios. The truth is though, empires collapse in slow motion, rather than in a bang. It is like a fall down a long flight of stairs, in which the empire hits some long landings where it seems to right itself for a period. Then it is another tumble down the stairs until it hits another landing. It is only in the fullness of time that the decline and fall of the empire looks like the familiar arc.

A different question worth pondering is what will the decline and fall look like for the average person living in the empire? For the people living in the provinces, it will look like the past, in that Europe and Asia will simply gain their independence. France may become a vassal of Germany or Russia, but that is just the same condition with a different management team at the top. Europe will get poorer and more violent, but that will mostly be due to massive migration from Africa.

In North America, we have some hints as to what post-empire America will look like for the typical person. This post on American Greatness goes into the third world nature of large swaths of current year America. California now looks more like Sinaloa Mexico than the old America of the young empire. There are nice modern parts for sure, but there are backward primitive parts, as well. Just like the Roman Empire, it is the infrastructure that is the leading edge of decline.

Empires that can no longer maintain their borders tend to attract large peasant classes, because long after the empire’s peak, it remains a better place to be poor than outside the empire. America lost control of its borders a generation ago, so something like fifty million people have relocated to America. There may be that many more operating inside the country illegally. The fact that no one knows or cares about the illegal population is one of those signs of collapse.

Another vision for post-empire America, is post-empire Spain. One of the interesting aspects of that period is how power devolved to local power centers. The Visigothic Kingdom ruled over what is now Spain. They were central Europeans who had moved west from the Danube Valley, first under the protection of the Western Roman Empire, but then by conquest after the fall of Rome. The kingdom maintained independence for about three centuries.

The thing is though, the kingdom was a polite fiction in many ways as the Gothic rulers had limited control of their territory. They were dependent on those local power centers that evolved in the late Roman empire. The emerging Catholic Church was one power center, but so were local ruling elites located in cities like Seville and Toledo. This is the root of antisemitism, by the way. Jews were powerful players in Gothic politics, a rival to the Church for influence over the secular authorities.

That’s probably the future of North America. The federal government will carry on long after it can exert control over the whole of the country. We see that today with the inability of the political class to do the obvious with the tech oligarchs. Today, global enterprise, finance and technology are outside the scope of government authority and often the whip hand in the relationship. We’re seeing states and cities in open revolt now, refusing to abide by federal laws.

One question no one in power thinks about is whether or not these new oligarchs can survive without the national government. The oligarchs that emerged from the Soviet empire were rooted in practical things like oil and gas. American oligarchs have power over abstract concepts that exist only because the state protects them. Both finance and technology are able to siphon off the wealth of the middle-class, because the middle-class supports the state, which protects this racket.

Put another way, Bolshevism made the Soviet empire artificially poorer, as it compelled inefficiency in the economy. It also proved to be a costly form of rule. Collapse freed the economy of the empire, allowing the new oligarchs to emerge. Liberal democracy makes the empire artificially richer, as it relies upon financial legerdemain to pull forward the proceeds of labor and capital. The cost of rule is subsidized by the social capital it consumes to perpetuate itself.

Is it possible for local power centers to emerge in North America, when the regions no longer have an identity of their own? Is it possible for local rule, when the local elites are just as inept and corrupt as the national elites? It is hard to imagine California lasting very long as an independent state. Its ruling class is clownish and stupid, a collection of petulant children. How hard would it be for the drug cartels to push them aside and turn the state into another narco-state?

The Soviet system rewarded cleverness and intrigue but it was founded on force, so there was always a role for those willing to act. The American system rewards guile, but increasingly has no role for assertiveness and force. It is why America has become so bad at waging war. It is possible that we now lack the required lions to push aside the foxes, even when the foxes die. It means a long period of chaos in which a new generation of lions can emerge to seize control.

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