Electric Boogaloo

Posted on January 6, 2022 by thezman

In the history of motoring, no owner of a sports car has ever said, “This car would be perfect if it sounded like a washing machine instead of a sports car.” In fact, a common complaint from sports car enthusiasts over the decades is that their favorite model does not have a sexy enough exhaust note. A big part of owning a sports car, even a budget model, is the sound it makes when driving. Watch a car show or YouTube car channel and exhaust sound is always mentioned.

Even if you are not into sports cars, the sound of the engine revving is something everyone associates with a sports car. The sound of the car shifting gears, the echo of the exhaust in a narrow canyon, is a big part of the experience. Similarly, driving enthusiasts prefer manual gearboxes to automatics, even though they will tell you that computer controlled automatic transmissions are far superior. The manual gearbox allows the driver to feel like he is part of the machine.

With that in mind, the world’s premiere sports car makers are promising to take all of that away in the coming years. They say they will stop building internal combustion engines and go completely electric. Most have already abandoned manual gearboxes and the rest promise to do so shortly. The supercar makers are investing all of their time in electric motors and self-driving technology. Their goal is to make the elite sports car into something close to an autonomous vehicle

That means the sports car driving experience will soon be like sitting in front of your laptop to the sound of kitchen appliances. Car shows will have soft looking men and women climbing into futuristic vehicles then sitting there in silence as the vehicle goes about the business of being a car. Presumably, the sports models will come with a VR system so the driver can pretend to be driving an actual sports car or maybe it will just have a screen to see what it used to be like.

The question is why? Again, no one can find a Ferrari owner saying he wishes his supercar sounded more like the kitchen juicer. No one has ever daydreamed about driving his blender through the countryside. People into motoring do it for how it makes them feel and it makes them feel alive. It reminds them that life is for living, not ticking boxes on a spreadsheet dreamed up by a sadist with a graduate degree. That’s the thrill of driving a fast car to your limit.

Granted, there is a group of people who claim to be sports car enthusiasts who think electric sports cars are a great idea. They like telling people that electric cars have a flat torque curve, meaning they can accelerate faster than a normal car. BMW has made a lot of money selling them Z-series sports cars, the ones that look like a clown’s shoe, because these are people who are dead inside. Their enthusiasm for sports cars is superficial and performative.

Of course, there is the environmental angle. The Gaia worshippers claim that electric cars are better for Mother Earth. These are the people who tote their groceries home from the market in grimy canvas sacks. These are the people who wear ornamental face gear thinking it wards off evil spirits. The people who have made a childish fear of the bogeyman into both a science and a religion love electric cars. They also think everyone should live in pods and ride the bus.

Putting aside their superstitions, electric cars are not eco-friendly or a more efficient use of natural resources. Electric comes from power stations. The most common powerplant fuels are coal, natural gas, and uranium. In the United States, only 20% of electricity comes from so-called renewables like solar. These “good” sources of electric like solar are a blight on nature and environmentally toxic. The long term costs far outweigh the costs of conventional energy production systems.

Then there is the practicality of electric cars. Fueling a normal car takes a few minutes while charging an EV takes hours. Again, no one is sitting around saying, “I’d like to spend hours at a roadside station talking with people who tend to loiter at rest stops while my electric car is being charged.” Then there is the fact that you have to install a charging station in your home. Imagine buying a car and being told you have to install a filling station in your backyard in order to use it.

In other words, the natural demand for electric cars was zero and remains low even with the push to manufacture demand. There is a novelty factor, for sure, but if no one had bothered to push the production of electric cars, they would not exist. Tesla exists as a way for Elon Musk to hoover up billions in government money, not because he found an unexploited niche in the automobile market. What he found was a clever way to become a rent seeker and the P.T. Barnum of the technological age.

It would be easy to go through all of the arguments in favor of electric cars and show them to be ridiculous or plain wrong. That is not the point. The point is despite the obvious, Western elites are hell bent on forcing us into electric cars. Those super car makers are not marketing to the hoi polloi. They cater to the global elite and they think the global elite believes in the miracle of electric cars. They are catering to their audience and their audience is our ruling class.

The point of this exercise is not to argue against electric cars, but to point out that practicality and self-interest are not what motivates the ruling class. All of them mouth the platitudes of Gaia worship because that is the prevailing orthodoxy. It is a way for them to signal their adherence to the faith. The local officials installing charging stations at the local school, yet ignoring the broken pipes and boarded up windows, are not thinking practically or responding to the demands of the people.

The electric car grift is useful in thinking about how partisanship in a liberal democracy becomes ideology then something closer to theology. The old partisan divide of the last century, good whites versus bad whites, has become a basket of beliefs untethered from practical reality. That basket of beliefs now forms a religion that bounds and defines the ruling class. The managerial class now has its own religion to control and define the members.

The crackdown by the oligarchs on dissidents has had the happy result of a proliferation of new ways to support your favorite creator. 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!

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The Real Supply Chain Crisis

Posted on November 17, 2021 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door is a long post on the Star Trek franchise. I have been watching these off and on for a couple of years and have some thoughts on how the series evolved foreshadowing today’s events.

A popular plot in science fiction shows is that the human stars of the show discover technology from an ancient race. In trying to figure out how it works, they set off a reaction that puts them at risk. They realize they have to figure out the ancient alien technology in order to save the day. Usually, the moral of the story is that humans are infants in the universe. They may have conquered interstellar travel, but they are nowhere near ready to handle the complex stuff.

It is a popular storyline in science fiction shows because it allows the writers to cook up exotic technology without thinking about how it works. The technology can operate like magic to make the plot happen. It also lets the writers do some finger wagging at the enemies of Hollywood. The white cast members are humbled to learn that they are not at the top of the humanoid hierarchy. Mostly it is just an easy way to grind out a script for a television series like the Stargate franchise.

This concept is not without some parallels in this world. There were people in the early Middle Ages confronted with the same issue. They inherited things like aqueducts from the Romans but lacked the social capital to keep them going. The ancient Greeks assumed the Mycenean ruins were built by a race of giants. They could look at the ruins and imagine what they were at their peak, but they had no idea how they were built or who had built them. It was beyond their knowledge.

America may be entering a similar period. One of the growing complaints in the dreaded private sector is the lack of talent. The mass media notices the labor shortage in things like retail and hospitality, but the real scarcity is upstream. Finding people with the cognitive ability and work ethic to fill important roles is not easy. Often the choice is one or the other. The person has the talent but is unreliable or they are reliable but maybe a click below what the position demands.

The main driver is demographics. The Baby Boomer swan song is upon us, and it is showing up in the payroll registers of American companies. The first wave Boomers are in the prime retirement range. Covid has led many to clock out early. The second wave is in their early sixties, so they are planning to wrap things up. Generation-X is a much smaller cohort, and the Millennials are not ready for prime time. The talent – work ethic dichotomy is very obvious with Millennials.

Of course, it is with Millennials where the glories of diversity appear. They are the second least white generation. The Zoomers are mostly nonwhite. That talent – work ethic dichotomy is exacerbated by “the tax”. The cost, in terms of human capital, in hiring the younger generation is much higher, which means the talent for other things is decreased even further. Basically the private sector is facing a smart fraction problem that promises to get much worse in the near future.

This talent shortage is showing up in strange places. College football coaches are not considered super-smart guys, but it is a challenging job. They run what amounts to a mid-sized business with hundreds of employees. They also have to master the complexity of a game that has reached its peak in complexity. Here is an example of one part of a college football playbook. Finding men with the required skillset to run a college football program is becoming increasingly difficult.

The solution in sports like football is to simplify things. This is the new trend in the game to reflect the demographic reality. Instead of complex passing plays the offense just gives the ball to a fast guy and lets him run around with it. One of the top young quarterbacks in the NFL is Lamar Jackson. He scored a 13 on the Wonderlic test, which is what you would expect from a janitor. Lamar is not working a Rubik’s cube in his off hours nor is he studying a complex offensive system.

The dreaded private sector is going the same way. Automation is the way to reduce the need for talent. Using robots is one way to do this in manufacturing. Another way is software systems to atomize and control the required tasks. In the office, software is doing more of the analysis and decision making. Dispatchers, for example, are being replaced by software that routes field personnel. Those people in the field have mobile devices that fill in the blanks of their knowledge.

Part of what is driving the ruling class is the belief that technology can replace those retiring white Baby Boomers. The dream of the multicultural paradise, free of white power structures, assumes the robots will take over from the white people. No one thinks much about who is going to code, operate and maintain the AI. That is the fatal flaw in the plan. There will never be a time when the machines become self-sufficient and anything but super-racist.

The fact is, there is no escaping the ramifications of the cognitive decline. We have created a society that requires an average IQ of about 97. The distribution of smarts provided sufficient talent at each layer of society. The smart fraction was large enough to carry the rest. Now that IQ has dipped below that threshold, we are starting to see problems like the supply chain issues. This is just the beginning of a systemic collapse brought on by the lack of social capital.

That is the real supply chain crisis. Each generation is supposed to build on the next but starting in the middle of the last century this system started to break. The Baby Boomers did not create enough replacements. Worse yet, they did not train them to take up their positions. The waves of immigration have watered down the system further, creating shortages that will only get worse. Soon, Americans will be like those humans in the sci-fi shows, unable to operate ancient technology.

Corruption Of The Soul

Posted on October 27, 2021 by thezman

One way to measure the health of a society is to look at how the ruling elite of that society protects the things that are important to the society. Just as the management of a company cannot micromanage every aspect of the firm, the ruling class cannot make sure every rule and custom is strictly enforced. It has to focus its energy on the big items that make the society possible. From there this attitude will flow down to the lower levels who will enforce the smaller rules.

What the ruling elite of a society does by enforcing the big rules, especially those that manage the affairs of the ruling class, is set the tone. A disciplined ruling class reinforces the idea that the rules matter, and they must be respected. This attitude becomes a habit of mind for the people. On the other hand, a ruling class that has no respect for its own rules helps foster a culture of cheating. If it is okay for the bosses to cheat, then only a sucker follows the rules.

The easy example of this is the Roman Republic. When the families at the top of the social order strictly abided by the rules that governed patricians, the plebeians followed their lead in the minor things. The republican virtue that was necessary for their society was a habit of mind. Once the people at the top stopped enforcing their rules, the rest of the culture followed. Caesar was simply the logical end point of a process of decay that began long before he crossed the Rubicon.

In this age, things like the rule of law, the orderly transition of power and the respect for rational inquiry are the big items of society. Liberal democracies are supposed to be rule-based societies that seek to progress by advances in knowledge. That is done by allowing people to investigate the natural world looking for better solutions to the problems of life. These investigations are to follow a set of rules and ethics that reflect the general morality. Progress is orderly and open.

Recent events make plain that the rule of law has broken down across all levels of American society. The rich always have advantages in the law, but now they operate under a different set of rules entirely. America is now ruled by a pirate class that is free to do what they like to the people. Similarly, the orderly transition of power through the mechanism of elections has become a farce. No one involved has any respect for the rules of democracy and no one can trust the results.

Those seem like things that could be fixed once the geezers at the top of the political system are replaced by a new class of people. There is no guarantee, and the odds are not great, but it seems to most people that there is some hope of fixing these problems through a renewal of the liberal democratic spirit. On the other hand, the respect for rational inquiry and debate appears to be hopelessly lost. We are rapidly reaching a point where dissent is explicitly forbidden in America.

That in itself could be lumped in with the other bits of the system that need reform, but the corruption has gone beyond suppression. It is becoming clear that the culture of mendacity that plagues the political class has become the norm within the realms of science and medicine. A culture of rule breaking at the top of society has fostered a culture of dishonestly within the academic community. Even in the hard sciences the willingness to cheat and lie has become quite common.

A good recent example is the Elizabeth Holmes trial. Everything about her career and the company she created was a fraud. This was plainly obvious to many, but they remained quiet as there is no reward for enforcing the rules. Breaking the rules can make you very rich, so lots of people break the rules. The fact that the state is struggling to put this woman in a cage speaks to the legal corruption. The fact that she exists speaks to the corruption in the academy.

She is not alone. The chief executive of biotech firm Athira Pharma was forced out of her position when she admitted to faking her research. When she was a graduate student, she falsified her findings in a number of studies. Those studies set her up for funding to start the company. They were also used to obtain patents. Despite the fact she is a fraud and her company a sham, she only had to resign, and the company will continue on as if nothing important happened.

The elephant in the room on this topic is Covid. The idea of science has been so corrupted that it is now warping the language. Because the vaccines do not actually work as promised, the language is being changed to fit the crime. It used to be that vaccines provided immunity from infection by a specific virus. Now immunity means a sense of happiness that comes from compliance. You may still die from Covid, or you could become immortal. Who can tell anymore?

Science and its practical application have been the gift from the gods that has allowed man to move beyond his primitive existence. In modern societies it is the thing that is supposed to provide the limits on excess and steadily improve daily life. It is fair to say that trust in scientific and technological progress is the bedrock of modernity. It is the thing that we all trust to keep society anchored to reality. It should be the thing the ruling class protects at all costs, but that is no longer true.

In a world where you cannot trust the important things, the little things become nothing but a matter of opinion or convenience. If the people at the top have no respect for the rule of law, then the people at the bottom will have no reason to follow the law other than fear of punishment. The culture will become one where evading the spirit of the rules is the natural habit of mind. This corruption of the soul of society will corrupt the soul of the people, as we are witnessing today.

Great Debate

Posted on August 23, 2021 by thezman

Note: We have a cornucopia of new content this week. The Taki post is about our new moral imperative to love strangers over our friends and family. Then there is the Sunday podcast up behind the green door. There is a bonus post up this morning on the cult sci-fi move The Matrix. This has gone out to Buy Me A Beer patrons as well.

Almost twenty years ago, John Derbyshire reviewed Kevin MacDonald’s book Culture of Critique for American Conservative. It has one of the best headlines ever written for a right-wing publication. The review itself was not favorable to MacDonald’s theory on Jewish evolutionary strategy, so it has been condemned by anti-Semites, which is a shame because it offers an important insight. For some, the “Jew thing” is a debilitating neurosis that cripples the victim’s ability to reason.

An example of this was on display Saturday night when Jared Taylor debated E. Michael Jones on the question of race. Specifically, the topic was “is race real and does it matter?” Taylor was on the side of race realism and Jones was supposed to be on the side of race denialism. It did not quite work out that way as Jones quickly shifted the conversation away from race to his own theories about the Jews. E. Michael Jones has a very serious case of the Jew thing.

The format was for each man to give a 20-minute opening presentation and then they would take turns responding to one another. Taylor was in the affirmative, so he went first and put on a near perfect presentation explaining the biological reality of race and the societal implications of racial differences. Even for those very familiar with the human sciences, it was an entertaining and informative presentation. It is the sort of thing you can send around to people curious the topic.

Jones opened up with a strange story about daylight savings time in Indiana in order to establish what he calls categories of the mind. These are definitions we invent that have no relation to physical reality. It appears he was trying to reformulate the logical positivists tripartite classification of knowledge. There are things that are tautologically true, things that are true because of an agreed upon set of logical rules and then things that are cognitively meaningless.

Jones reformulates it to be things that are categories of the mind and things he thinks ought to be important. For example, race, regardless of the biological realty behind it, is a category of the mind. It matters only because we think about it, like daylight savings time or the time of day. Catholic dogma, on the other hand, matters whether we think of it or not, so we ought to think about it. Of course, anything that Jones does not like is declared a category of the mind and he dismisses it.

There is an argument that much of what gets put into the category of race is contextual, a result of history and culture. This is the basis of biological denialism on the Left, where they claim differences in the races and sexes are cultural artifacts. The problem with this is that it conflates two related, but cognitively different things. Biological race, in this case, is different from social concepts of race. By conflating the two, biology is made to disappear in the fog of social criticism regarding race.

This was the game Jones was playing. He made a lot of noise about how race is used to harm white societies, so he agued race must be ignored. Here he commits a second logical fallacy. Even if discussions of race are engineered to harm white interests, it does not logically follow that white people should deny the reality of race. This is where the Jew thing begins to pop. Jones asserts that Jews invented the concept of race to harm white people, so the Jew thing requires him to oppose race.

After the opening statements, the second hour was mostly Jones ranting and raving about Jews, even dropping some epithets along the way. Whenever the moderator would return the conversation to the topic, Jones would go off on a rant about how the Jews were the great enemy and we must pretend race is not real in order to defend the white race from Jews. Along the way he conceded everything Taylor said about the reality of race, but Jones kept insisting it should not matter.

In all the noise and distraction what became clear is that Jones knows very little about race or race realism. He also made bizarre claims about the subject. For example, he claimed race was introduced in America by Jews. He also claimed the ancients had no concept of race. This is left-wing nonsense that has no basis in fact. His comments about intelligence revealed he knows nothing about the topic. His claims were the sorts of things that work on stupid people who share his beliefs.

This is the tragedy of the Jew thing. Once the victim is afflicted with it, they can think of nothing other than the subject of their obsession. The debate was supposed to be about race, but Jones kept trying to make it about Jews. Not just about Jews in the racial context either. Like a dog returning to his vomit, Jones kept returning to his pet theory that Judaism is a conspiracy against the world. Not Jews, as according Jones race is not real, but Judaism, which is like a magic spell that he fights alone.

Of course, Jones has his fans. That is the other side of the Jew thing. People with it will overlook anything in those who supply them with content. His mad hatter act is lost on his fans, who only hear the J-word when he speaks. You get the sense that those with the Jew thing will become physically ill if they are not constantly hearing anti-Semitic material, so they need it constantly pipped into their brains. As a result a bellowing crackpot like Jones gets their full attention.

There are people who have reasoned critiques of Jews in Western societies. There are lots of Jews who have addressed the issue. It is a legitimate question, but one gets the sense that the mission of E. Michael Jones is to make it impossible to have a reasoned discussion on the topic. After all, who would want to be lumped in with a mad man who screams at the Passover display at the local grocery store? Jones manages to give bigotry a bad name, which is quite accomplishment.

All of that said, Jones has a point that he may not understand or simply not care to discuss and that is the reality of race is insufficient on its own. If being right about the facts of life mattered, this world would not exist. The radicals would have been routed a long time ago. Public discourse in all human society is about morality. Who are we and what defines us is what matters. Repeating the facts of biology can only matter if they have an impact on the morality of the people.

This has always been the failing of the Right. They have always assumed that once they proved their case, the other side would have no choice but to throw down their weapons and embrace them as brothers. This is not reality. Unless one can connect biological reality with morality, they exist in two separate domains. The race realists have yet to attempt this connection. This should be where the militant Christians step into the breech, but people like Jones make that difficult.

Finally, Jones made a big issue of Taylor’s unwillingness to address the question of Jews within the context of race realism. This is a fair point, but Jones then asserted it was because Taylor is part of the global Jewish conspiracy. This is where you cannot help but wonder if Jones does this to avoid defending his position. It is a distraction to deflect attention from his faulty logic to something else. This could have been an interesting gambit, but the Jew thing got the better of him.

The fact is, race realism makes a lot of sense when comparing Africans with all other human groups. Africans are the great outlier in the human family. It starts to break down when you compare other groups. East Asian are different from Europeans, but they bring none of the social pathology of Africans. What is the argument against mixing Asians with Europeans? What about West Asians and Europeans? This is a valid line off attack on the race realist position.

In the end, the debate is worth watching, if only for Taylor’s opening. It is a pity that Jones is not a more honest and balanced person, as it would be interesting to see someone approach this topic from traditional Christian ethics. If we are ever going to make the leap from facts to values, this is a debate that needs to be had. Otherwise, biological reality will remain ignored, even as we careen into the abyss. Maybe this debate will inspire someone to ponder the subject.

The Modern Prison State

Posted on March 3, 2021 by thezman

One of the unexpected consequences of the information age is that we have less reliable information, despite have vastly more data. We have facts about the world now that were unimaginable a generation ago. The facts of our society are stashed in massive searchable databases that are accessible to most everyone. You may need some skill to access them, but the data is there. Even data that should be private is available if you are willing to pay for it.

In contrast, the information about our world that we can trust has collapsed into the set of things we can verify on our own. Information is not the same as data, which is a collection of facts. How many miles you drive to work every day is a fact. Information is what we can derive from those facts. If your commute takes an hour and it is 50 miles, we can conclude that you mostly use the highway to get to work, based on some simple math using those two data points.

In theory, information should be value free, as it is facts plus testable logic, with the result being subject to comparisons with the reality. If the information you derive from someone’s driving data indicates he is breaking the speed of sound on his way to work, we know your facts or logic are wrong. The trouble here is that information is not readily testable against reality. We tend to rely on the reputation of the person providing the information and how it fits within our own observations.

That’s the other important distinction between data and information, at least regarding the way in which these words are used in popular discourse. While they are often used interchangeably, data is an objectively true fact, while information is true according to a set of logical rules. Since those rules can be conditional, information can be valid and invalid, depending upon those conditions. “All bachelors are unmarried” is true as long as the word “bachelor” is defined to mean “a man who has not married.”

This may seem a bit esoteric, but it gets to the heart of the crisis in the West. For most of human history and all of Western history, the relationship between data and information was different than we see today. For medieval man, there was never a lot of data about the world, but he could trust the information about it. This was not just the natural world. He could trust the truths about his society, his gods, the people in charge of his society and the sources of his information.

In the modern age, and really just in the last generation, this relationship has flipped around the other way. We have all the data we need for any question. We know more about world than we really want or need to know. What we lack is information and more important, trustworthy sources of information. Medieval man could rely on the Church or the local lord to maintain the rules of society. The only thing modern man can know about his sources of information is they are wrong.

Modern man is now awash in both misinformation and disinformation, in addition to false information. Misinformation is deliberately inaccurate information, which is intended to deceive. Disinformation is deliberately inaccurate information, but from an institution like the state or the media. Of course, false information is information that is inaccurate due to bad data or logic. Compounding this is the current campaign against misinformation and disinformation.

The first thing you should notice is the people most responsible for the tsunami of disinformation are claiming to be at war with disinformation. Unless this results in mass suicide by media and entertainment, it means they are lying. Note also the use of the term “expert” in that piece. There is no such thing as a disinformation expert, outside of the institutions promulgating disinformation. One cannot be an expert at doing something unless you are actually doing that thing.

Note also how the primary sources of both misinformation and disinformation talk about this phenomenon as if they are the victims of it. The managerial class is the single source for the flood of false information. Pranksters may post gags on line to fool people, but the practical joke has been a part of life since the stone age. The online version is just an extension of the flaming bag of dog poo. What the managerial class is doing is a firehose of falsehoods with the stamp of authority.

Put another way, the new phase of the misinformation/disinformation tsunami is the managerial state crying out in pain as it strikes the society over which it rules. The next front in the crisis will be agents of the state arresting people on trumped up charges, for imaginary crimes against the state. This is the Douglas Mackey case. An entirely powerless person is arrested for a crime that does not exist, because the disinformation system says he was passing misinformation on-line.

Since the first humans began to settle into large communities, human organization has relied upon social trust, enforced by a code. Social trust worked in two directions, vertically and horizontally. People could trust their neighbors because they were like them and accepted the same codes of conduct. People trusted their rulers because those rulers enforced the code and attained their positions based on the logic in that code of society. Trust was side-to-side and up-and-down.

Modern economics is turning the horizontal trust of American society into cash equivalents and hauling it away to the pirate coves of finance capital. Americans are living in a world of strangers. The disinformation campaigns intended to distract from this realty are eating away at the vertical trust. Americans no longer trust the people in charge of their society. That distrust is quickly morphing into a distrust of and contempt for the system itself.

Smart people look at the economic model of America and wonder how it can keep going on as it is. The fact that it does go on suggests it can keep going on, but it seems to be violating the rules of the universe. The same can be said for the collapse of social trust and the growing contempt for the system. How long can the people in charge expect to remain in charge when the people over whom they rule are increasingly convinced the rulers and their system are evil and corrupt?

Perhaps that is the final trick of financialization. The first trick was to subvert the basic rules of exchange between people. All of those rules we learned from economics no longer make any sense. The final trick is to subvert the rules of logic themselves, making it so no one can believe or trust anything or anyone. The disinformation age is the final part of the modern prison. Everyone is alone, no one can trust anything, even the laws of the universe. You just have to do what you are told.

A new year brings new changes. The same is true for this site as we adjust to the reality of managerial authoritarianism. That means embracing crypto for when the inevitable happens and the traditional outlets are closed. Now more than ever it is important to support the voices that support you. Five bucks a month is not a lot to ask. If you prefer other ways of donating, look at the donate page. Thank you.

Doctor Stupid

Posted on December 22, 2020 by thezman

There is an old line about how some things are so stupid that only educated people are willing to believe them. Sometimes it is phrased as the smartest are the ones who believe the dumbest things. It is one of those aphorisms that is often used to dismiss arguments or ideas that are unpleasant. Most clichés and sayings are conversation enders, not conversation starters. On the other hand, there is a kernel of truth here and you see it in this gem from a Dr. Rachel Pope.

As we know from the great Doctor Jill Biden, there are a lot of very stupid people walking around with the label “doctor” in their profile. Another good rule is that when confronted by someone insisting you call her doctor or she puts that title in her social media profile, you are most likely dealing with a stupid person. It is not always the case, as there are smart jerks in the world too, but people who wave around their titles like this tend to be narrowminded and remarkably insecure.

In this case, it appears to be warranted. The claim that there is no genetic basis for skin color is laughably ridiculous. There is a genetic basis for all observable human characteristics like skin color and eye color. That is why we have no cases of two Irish parents giving birth to a Chinese baby. Children look like the people who made them, because they inherit the genes of the people who made them. Things like skin color, eye color, facial features and so on are all genetic.

This is not complicated stuff. Five minutes on a search engine gets you hundreds of studies explaining what is basic high school biology. If Dr. Rachel Pope is so haunted by multicultural taboos that she cannot bear to think of race differences, she could find studies like this one that examine the genetic basis of African skin color. You see, all of the gene combinations for skin color were present in humans from the start, so she could claim that skin color is a genetic response to environment.

If that first tweet was not embarrassing enough, she follows on with a truly deranged claim that there are no indigenous people in Britain. By her definition, there are no indigenous people anywhere. Humans did not spring from the soil by magic and they did not stay in one range. The story of humans starts with populating every nook and cranny of the planet. When people with an IQ about room temperature say “indigenous people” they mean those who settle a place first.

Of course, where Dr. Rachel Pope and her coreligionists in the denialist cult reveal the depth of their stupidity is when they insist race is skin color. The only people who insist this are the people in the science deniers cult. People familiar enough with the human sciences to accept the great diversity of man know that race is a general shorthand for a large basket of measurable human traits. These baskets of traits largely conform to the big geological divides on our home planet.

That last bit may sound awkward, but it is a good way of understanding how it is we have so much diversity in the human animal. If one hundred thousand years ago a group of aliens scooped up a few thousand humans and transported them to another planet, those humans would have adapted to their new world. They would no doubt have evolved unique characteristics because their world required it. No one would pretend that they are not different from earthlings.

It turns out that humans are the product of mating decisions made by their ancestors going back a very long time. Evolution worked on humans just as it does on everything else on the planet. When people migrated to a new environment, they quickly began to adapt to that new environment. The reason Africans have a genetic defense to malaria, but Scandinavians do not, is malaria is not present in the north. Thousands of generations of adaptation are why we have so much human diversity.

What makes this strain of stupidity carried by Dr. Rachel jaw-dropping is the people afflicted with it never shut up about diversity. From the comfort of their whites-only enclaves, they harangue the rest of us about diversity. The term “white privilege” has become a passphrase for these people. Yet, if race is not real, then white is not a logical construct, as it assumes race is real. Similarly, diversity cannot exist if there is no genetic basis for the human differences, we call race and ethnicity.

This brings us back to the beginning. The denialist is always someone who is educated, but also strangely stupid about the obvious. They tend to have inflated credentials in fields that are not particularly taxing. Archeology is a little better than education or psychology, but it is not a STEM field. There is a sense that their credentialism is a defense mechanism rather than a trophy case. That is also why they fall for every nutty fad popular with the modern intelligentsia.

Biological denialism, the refusal to accept the observable and measurable differences in humans, may be the ultimate expression of the aphorism at the start of this post. It is an idea so stupid that only pseudo-intellectual poseurs believe it. It signals to the rest that the person believing it is willing to accept on faith whatever nonsense is running through that particular subculture at the moment. It is an act of submission, showing that the person will never question the tenets of the subculture.

That is an important aspect of the modern intelligentsia. Membership is not just about holding the right beliefs. Those are important, but they change quickly, so what is most important is the willingness to accept the most absurd beliefs. The man who starts wearing a dress, claiming he believes he is a woman must be met by his fellows with absolute acceptance. That is the point of the pronoun stuff. When you address the guy in the sundress as “them” you are a true believer.

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The Plague Jab

Posted on December 9, 2020 by thezman

Note: Last night I watched the classic bad film Reefer Madness. The review and commentary is behind he green door.

In ordinary times in ordinary countries, the prospect of a vaccine for even a nuisance ailment like the Chicken Pox would be welcome news. After all, one measure of society is the technology to improve human health. In a technologically advanced society, members not only live longer, the quality of life is better. An extra 20 years as a feeble old man is not exactly a reward for a life well-lived. Therefore, the promise of a Covid-19 vaccine next year should be welcome news.

As with everything else, it seems, the news of a possible vaccine just reveals how deranged and bizarre life has become in the West. The majority of Americans are highly skeptical of the vaccine. If people were honest, you would find large majorities unwilling to take the vaccine at all. Even in the medical professions, where faith in their own skill is beyond reality, close to half distrust the vaccine. It does not help that the rulers feel the need wrap the vaccine question in their racial madness.

That is the first gate in the vaccine story. Since few people have the knowledge or aptitude to assess the risk involved in a medical treatment, it comes down to how much they trust their doctor, the drug companies and the system. If your doctor has always been prudent and reliable, then you trust his judgement. If your doctor has an unpronounceable name and looks a lot like the guy working at the convenience store, you are less likely to trust his judgement.

In the case of the vaccine, there is no reason at all to trust the government. They have simply lied too often about too many aspects of this virus. Compounding it is their communications organs have been staffed by demented sociopaths who lie for the sheer pleasure of it. The only way anyone we could trust the media is if they are the first to be inoculated. Even then, it would probably be a fake vaccine, so we would need some way to ensure they are getting the real jab and not a fake.

This is why the vaccine will be mandatory. Another aspect of liberal democracy is the rulers respond to well-founded distrust of them with coercion. In this case, we will be getting the Orwellian freedom passes. In the U.S. they will have some bland bureaucratic name because our managerial elite is functionally illiterate, but the Brits retain their pithiness, despite it all. As a result, these new internal passports proving you are up to date on your Covid jabs will be used to compel compliance.

What does this mean as a practical matter? What they are plotting is a system where everyone is issued an innocuous looking card with a vaccine stamp and date. When you get your booster shot, you get a new stamp with an expiry date. Oh, you are unaware of the regular booster shots required? You see? This is why this vaccine is a miracle. It will require you to give Big Pharma a check several times a year. Your doctor at Acme Hospital System Inc. will also be getting her beak wet.

If you think you can just blow this off, think again. For starters, there will be a massive public relations campaign to shame skeptics. Old people will be shown lining up for the jab and famous people will demand you get the jab. Soon, private business will demand proof of the jab before they accept you as a customer. Want to fly on a commercial airline or ride public transport? Papers please. Want to attend a public event like a sporting match? Papers please.

What this will become is the terms of service for citizenship. In fact, it will probably be baked into terms of service edicts. If you want to use Netflix you will have to prove you are up to date on your jabs. Of course, Big Tech will be there to make this simpler with tracking software for your now mandatory smart phone. That paper card they will be issuing will be replaced with an app for your phone that will be required if you want to function like what passes as a normal adult.

If this sounds a lot like fascism, you would be right. This idea vexes the anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, because they demand fascism only mean cool uniforms and camps for people they don’t like. In this age, it will mean dreary clothing styles and camps for the people the managerial class does not like. It’s also going to mean the implementation of technology to control every movement of the population. You cannot organize a proper resistance if you cannot organize at all.

One novel aspect of managerial fascism is the promotion of cranks and kooks to discredit legitimate opposition. Over the next six months, the media will promote kooks insisting that the vaccine is a mind control devise or that it alters your DNA in order to make you docile and compliant. These paranoids will be promoted, because most people will dismiss them. This tarnishes all resistance to the new regime. It is a tool of managerial fascism that works every time.

What the Covid-19 panic has revealed, and continues to reveal, is the managerial elite has no respect for things like the rule of law, individual liberty or any of the other foundation items of consensual government. To protect democracy, they will rig the election process. To keep us free they will strip us of our rights. In the name of inclusion and diversity they will exclude anyone who disagrees. What we are seeing is that the real plague on our society is the ruling class.

How Fake Is It?

Posted on October 31, 2020 by thezman

An old expression in the collectibles world is that anything that has value will eventually be faked or stolen. Art is faked so often that certain types of art have lost all value, because no one can tell the fakes from the genuine items. It’s not just crooks trying to beat the rules of the game. The people responsible for policing the fraud are often the people perpetrating the fraud. The truth is, anything that does not have objective value, but relies on insiders, will be subject to fraud and theft.

It is something to keep mind when thinking about the future of internet properties like the big socials and media sites. They rely on traffic to generate revenues from advertisers and those interested in their traffic data. Twitter does not make much from actual ads on the platform, but they sell user information to those interested in tracking your whereabouts on-line and in the real world. That traffic data is essentially what makes it possible for internet properties to thrive.

That brings up that old maxim of the collectibles business. Who is authenticating the data and appraising its value? There are sites that claim to measure web traffic. Like the ratings services for radio and television, they claim to have a secret way to sample traffic and then estimate over all traffic. Obviously, the sites themselves have their traffic, which they use to pitch advertisers, investors and in the case of politics, the donors that keep these operations running.

Of course, the ratings systems for radio and television have been subject to shenanigans for the same reason art is faked. Those ratings have value, so if you can fake those ratings, it’s like having free access to the bank vault. The ratings themselves are published so the unscrupulous can make bold claims. “We’re number one among left-handed Korean midgets” becomes “we’re number one in our segment.” It is a bandit market and the ratings help facilitate it.

In the internet world, capturing web traffic is a bit more complex. That’s where services like SimilarWeb and Alexa step in to provide hard data. Well, it is supposed to be hard data, but where they get their data is not easy to know. They are a bit cagey about how they arrive at their numbers. Alexa claims to rely on a browser plugin and site owners installing their script. SimilarWeb claims to get data from a panel of hundreds of millions of web users, as well as a sample of websites.

How accurate is the data? Probably not very accurate at all. Consider the British political site Unherd. The Alexa rankings don’t give us overall traffic, but the SimilarWeb ratings tell us they get 1.6 million visitors per month. Is that real? There’s no way to know based on the data provided. It looks like a lot of their traffic comes from aggregators, rather than real people. Then again, how many of their readers would install an Alexa browser plugin? Probably very few.

For small sites that deal in politics, traffic is not that big of an issue, as their donors are not targeting a mass audience. What about other types of data like YouTube views or Twitter followers? If that data real? It’s clear that Twitter is loaded with fake accounts, but how many are their fake accounts? It could be millions by now. How many are used by Twitter to boost users they like? No one can know, but it is not hard to see how that would be something they do for public relations reasons.

Think about it. Twitter is the preferred social media platform of the establishment media, so it is Twitter’s interest to make them happy. That is, in part, why they are feverishly scrubbing anything that vexes the gentle souls in the press corps. How hard would it be for them to ramp up the follower counts and likes on those same media accounts with their army of robot user accounts? Follower counts have value, so it is a safe bet those follower counts are being faked by all interested parties.

It is not just fraud, which is probably rampant in all of these measures of internet activity, but incompetence plays a role. YouTube views will go backwards, because thousands of accounts have been purged. This happens on Twitter as well. Of course, Google breaking its own search algorithm to prevent you from seeing what you like has probably crippled the view counts on YouTube. In other words, One type of deception is colliding with another type of deception.

The big players who make up the bulk of ad buying are starting to figure out that web traffic is not all it is claimed to be. Placing ads on a social media platform is worse than a waste of money. If a company made a video of the executive burning piles of their cash and then posted it on YouTube, they would get more sales from that video than running a regular YouTube ad. Eventually, this becomes obvious to everyone and the ad market on-line begins to dry up for these sites.

The real value in these internet properties, obviously, is in the data they steal from users and sell to governments and corporations. Like the ad business, the fraud in this data will eventually become an issue. We very well may be seeing the high water point for the big social media players. Like the market for certain types of art, the inability to tell the real thing from the fakes will collapse the market. In the end, it will not be public contempt but their own shenanigans that ends their reign of terror.

The Great TikTok Game

Posted on September 22, 2020 by thezman

For months now, the company TikTok has been in the news, and not just because it is the preferred video sharing service of portly nurses. The company has been at the center of both a strange bidding war and a controversy over its ties to the Chinese communist party. TikTok is owned by a Chinese firm and like all Chinese firms that means it is controlled by the communist party. The American government has said the parent company is a national security threat.

It is the national security issue that has created the bidding war. The Trump administration said the parent company, ByteDance, must sell the service to an American firm or the company will be banned from the US. Trump has issued a couple of executive orders banning the app from phone stores. The claim is the Chinese communist party is using the videos of chubby nurses dancing in empty hospitals to undermine the American people’s faith in their rulers.

The national security issue is a bit ridiculous. China is spying like crazy on western companies and western governments. Nothing is too small or too trivial. They will steal anything not nailed down. It is not just industrial and military espionage. A New York City policeman has been arrested for spying on behalf of the Chinese. They say he was reporting to officials at the Chinese Consulate in New York on the activities of other ethnic Tibetans in the New York area.

The fact is, if the rulers really cared all that much about Chinese espionage, they would treat China the way they treated the Soviet Union. Travel would be highly restricted and business ties would be highly regulated. Instead, American firms are free to be plundered by China in exchange for a quick buck. Chinese nationals pour into America and every Western country. They are given free access to whatever they like. TikTok is a tiny issue compared to all the other problems.

In fairness, Trump is the first president to take the Chinese threat seriously and he has faced a wall of opposition from the usual suspects. While this TikTok deal is small potatoes, they may see it as a useful bit of symbolism. It brings the issue of Chinese spying into the public debate. It also touches on the immigration issue. Why are we importing people to work in American companies and research labs from a country actively engaged in wide-scale espionage against us?

Putting that aside, there is a bigger question. Why are the oligarchs fighting with one another over a chance to buy a piece of this company? So far, Oracle, Walmart, Microsoft and Twitter have been the most aggressive. Twitter makes some sense as the TikTok videos made by chubby nurses are usually posted on Twitter. Microsoft makes some sense, as it lets them get back onto people’s mobile devices. That way they can harvest their data and sell it like other social media firms.

What makes no sense is why Oracle or Walmart would be involved. What makes even less sense is why the price is $20 billion for a tiny slice of the firm and no access to their proprietary technology. What could Walmart gain from owning a piece of this company, other than a small return on the investment? What would Oracle need from a silly application like this? They make business applications like database systems and enterprise software. Why would they want this?

Then there is the media fascination with it. State run media in America is a bit different than in China, in that it represents the permanent ruling class and its servants in the bureaucracy, not the figurative leaders of government. They have been following this story like a pennant race. The New York Times has done hundreds of stories on this since it started. The same is true of the Washington Post. Even the Wall Street Journal has been obsessed with the bidding war for TikTok.

An added bit of mystery to this story is the fact that the proposed deal with Oracle does not include the company’s secret technology. Everyone understands that the app itself is worthless, but the secret technology has value. Supposedly, TikTok has cutting edge facial recognition technology and their behavioral analysis algorithm is better than anything Silicon Valley has created. That’s the real value, but the proposed deals with American firms excludes that technology.

As presented, nothing about this story makes a lot of sense. If this company was a serious national security concern, the government would just ban it from American mobile devices. Apple and Google have no trouble banning apps from their platforms for political reasons. Twitter could block all TikTok videos, thus collapsing the chubby nurse TikTok market. There’s no need for all of this drama if national security is the real reason behind this story.

A more likely reason is the Silicon Valley oligarchs see China as a threat to their interests around the world. Unlike American competitors, Apple and Google cannot just ban China from their devices. The Chinese would then flood the world with second copy phones and ban these companies from the Chinese market. What they are doing is getting the US government and allies like Walmart and Oracle to do their bidding for them, so they can keep their hands clean.

Then there is the Indian factor. Silicon Valley is slowly being taken over by South Asians, who have an ethnic interest in opposing Chinese tech. India would like to see the US reposition itself in Asia, by moving manufacturing and technology from China to India, so a cold war with China works for them. The people who put Kamala Harris on the Democrat ticket are certainly capable of engineering this TikTok story. This is how ethnic politics works in an empire.

The most salient issue is that nothing about this drama has anything to do with what is best for the American people. Trump makes some noises about Chinese espionage being bad for America, but what he really means is bad for the military industrial complex and the private sector oligarchs. If it was good for those interests, the American government would allow China to conduct human sacrifices on American college campuses. That’s another reality of the empire.

Of course, there is another angle here. Judges keep stepping in to block the government from banning this service from American phones. Yet, when it is American owned tech, like Gab, getting banned from phones, no one blinks. The political class falls all over themselves to explain why that form of censorship is good. The Chinese communist party has more first amendment protections than Americans. Maybe Gab should relocate to Beijing.

In the end, the TikTok story is mostly about China. On the one hand, social media players see China as a competitor and a partner. They want access to the market, but they don’t want to compete with Chinese tech in America. Walmart, Microsoft and Oracle get to play the white hat with this and curry favor with the Chinese. The Indians get to use the US government as a weapon against their competitor. This is now the great game in the late stages of the American empire.

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Death From Above

Posted on September 1, 2020 by thezman

Imagine a small kingdom that is faced with a disease outbreak of unknown origin and unknown severity. The king, upon being briefed by his staff, gives a speech to his people informing them of what is known and what efforts are being made to determine the severity of the disease. He asks his people to take reasonable precautions, as they would during the cold and flu season. As more information is gathered, he will inform the public so they can act accordingly.

As it becomes clear that the disease is hard on the very old and very sick, but not much of a threat to everyone else, efforts are made to insulate the very old and those in nursing homes. The public is informed of this and told to be extra cautious around the very old and very sick. Resources are made available to those charged with caring for the very old and sick. Otherwise, the public is asked to go about their business as they would in the cold and flu season.

This probably sounds completely insane to most people, but it used to be the way rulers handled public health matters. In the Asian Flu and Hong Kong flu outbreaks last century, the public was informed and reasonable precautions were taken by local government to limit the impact. Schools might be closed for a few weeks until the wave passed through a community, for example. The flu came and went, as they always do, with a varying degrees of impact on communities.

Of course, this was not the case with the Covid pandemic. Instead of doing what has always been done, our rulers rushed to the nearest television camera and told everyone they are going to die. Hairy old men in sundresses were sent out to scare the public and not just over the idea of mentally disturbed men in sundresses being put in charge of public health. No, their job was to convince the public that this is the end times and that everyone must lock themselves at home.

Not only was it not the end times, but it is looking like what skeptics have been saying all along, a tougher than normal flu season. The CDC has updated their kill data, adjusting the death toll down a modest 94%. Just six percent of deaths can actually be attributed to Covid. That’s about ten thousand people. The rest were afflicted with other diseases that were likely to kill them. Covid may have hastened their demise, but that is speculation. William Briggs has a good summary of the new data.

The long and short of it for those looking for the condensed version is that Covid by itself is not much of a threat to most people. Even old healthy people are not particularly vulnerable to this virus. It is the very old and the very sick, especially the very sick, who are at risk of this disease. In fact, the man-made panic may very well have killed more people than the disease itself. Think about all of the health care not being done due to closing hospitals and doctor’s offices.

Now, the obvious push-back will be that we did not know six months ago that this disease would not live up to the promise. The panic was a necessary precaution against the possibility of a much more lethal disease. The implication here is that we must assume the worst-case scenario in every instance and react accordingly. The fact that the worst case is also the rarest case, means we have to operate as if the natural world is nothing but exceptions, a world of miracles.

Even if one wants to turn the precautionary principle on its head this way, we had enough data early on to know it was not going to be the Black Death. Data from Italy and China showed that Covid was a killer of the very old and the very sick. The early models used to justify the panic were invalidated from the start. as far back as April, the justifications for the panic were undermined by what we knew. There was never a good reason to do what has been done in response to Covid.

The bottom line in all of this is the man-made panic has done more damage to American society than the virus. There are the unnecessary deaths and suicides that were caused by the panic. There is the massive transfer of wealth from small business to corporate giants. This will accelerate the decline in social capital, accelerating the decline in local community. The Covid Panic is not the Xhosa Cattle Killing cult, at least not yet, but the comparison is too obvious to ignore.

Perhaps the most important take-away from this man-made disaster is that none of the people responsible for it will be held accountable. In a sane world, there would at least be a truth and reconciliation commission, where the people responsible would explain themselves and ask for mercy. Instead, these people peddling panic will face no consequences and no doubt profit from their crimes. They won’t even have the decency to admit they were wrong about the severity of the disease.

Finally, this is example six million that the people in charge of America are too corrupt and incompetent to perform the basic duties of rule. In order to live something close to a normal life, Americans have to navigate around a thicket of pirates, bandits and incompetent bureaucrats all looking to rob the public. Slathered onto that is a ruling class ham-handedly addressing problems of their own creation. American are being strangled by an anaconda of incompetence from above.

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