Category Archives: Culture

Trouble Brewing

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One of things you cannot help but notice is that pretty much everything in America is some sort of scam run by the managerial class to extract money from the rest of us. The most common way to do this is via cost shifting and you see it in the so-called non-profit rackets. Everywhere you look, non-profits are working the tax code so that Cloud People can live self-actualizing lives, while we get to pay for it. It looks like that scam may be reaching its end.

When New Haven Mayor Toni Harp gazes out her office windows, she can see across the street to Yale University’s idyllic buildings and grounds — none of which are on her city’s property tax rolls.

Yale, a nonprofit despite its $25 billion endowment and sprawling property (it owns about half the land in the city, Harp says), doesn’t pay property taxes. And some officials in Connecticut, including Harp, would like to see that change.

They aren’t alone. City and state officials in other parts of the country, including Maine, Massachusetts and New Jersey, also are questioning whether they can continue to allow wealthy schools like Yale, or big nonprofit hospitals, to remain off tax rolls while they scramble for money to pay for police, fire, streets and other infrastructure and services.

In some cases, they are looking for ways of taxing what until now have been tax-exempt sacred cows.

For a long time now, the Federal government has strong armed states into going along with policies they would never implement on their own. They do this by threatening to withhold Federal funds for thing like roads and education. The result is state budgets have swelled as they take on the burden of the the Progressive fantasies, while the Washington politicians strut around like heroes for having cooked up these programs. The states are now running out of money to pay for this crap, so they are look for new taxes.

Of course, these colleges are working the same rackets. Yale could offer free tuition to its undergrads. They could expand their undergrad population and thus reduce tuition costs. Schools like Yale have the same sized student body they had after WWII, when the country was a third of its current population. Instead of doing those things, they have turned Yale into a five star resort whose primary purpose is to be a money laundering operation for the super-rich, looking to avoid taxes.

All of these cost shifting schemes have something in common and that’s leverage. State governments have been able to hide the cost of social programs through debt issuance. Colleges have become luxury resorts by passing those costs onto graduates in the form of student debt. Young people are holding north of $1 Trillion in debt at the moment, with close to 20% of it technically in default. What that is telling us is that this form of cost shifting is reaching its end as well.

There’s a Assembly of Notables vibe to stories like this because what we are seeing is the beneficiaries of the system desperately trying to keep the plates spinning. The people in power, the members of both parties, all know that either government spending at all levels is sharply reduced or that taxes are sharply increased. In all probability, both will be necessary. The trouble is the people with the money to be taxed are rich and powerful. Yale does not want to pay taxes and it does not want its patrons to pay them either.

As was the case in the French Revolution, what we are seeing in America is the use of debt to perpetuate a system that was evolved for a bygone era. Social democracy, which is what we have in America, is a 19th century concept implemented in the 20th century. Big parts of it are no longer useful, but no one knows how to reform it. There are millions still making a nice living doing busy work in the system and they will fight anything that resembles reform. The result is endless haggling over how to make 2 + 2 = 5.

The most likely outcome of this is we first see state governments begin to buckle. California is, for all practical purposes, insolvent. Illinois is probably going to be the first state to face defaulting on its pension obligations. All but a handful of states are facing very serious debt problems that will require doing what they previous assumed was unthinkable, like taxing hospitals and colleges.colleges. Next up will be a push to get rid of the tax breaks for charitable deductions. That’s when the whole non-profit racket collapses.

What will be interesting to watch is what happened when the people on the fringe of the managerial class start to be cut loose to save money. When hospitals need to cut costs, they will not be laying off nurses and doctors. They will go for the diversity coordinator and the patient liaison officer. Colleges are not going to drop the football team, but they will get rid of the Transgendered Studies people. A whole lot of people in self-actualizing careers will find out they are luxury items, not necessities. That’s when things could get fun.

The Others

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The phrase “third world” is one of those terms that will probably fall out of usage over the next decade. The Cloud People never use it these days as it is dangerously problematic for them. It is one of those terms that is now freighted with a lot of bad thoughts and bad memories. That and the term made the most sense in the Cold War days when the civilized world and the fringes were divided between the Americans and the Soviets. Most people under 40 have no idea what the “second world” even was so having a third world today probably seems like nonsense to them.

The term was coined by a guy named Alfred Sauvy, a French demographer. He wrote an article comparing the countries no one cared much about, with the Third Estate. It was an idiotic and ridiculous comparison, but it stuck and was eventually embraced by banana republics and African potentates. It got picked up by American radicals as a cause and the term became associated with the ass-backward crap-holes almost always south of the equator. That bit of noticing is what’s now very dangerous.

The term still means something to geezers like myself and whenever I have a reason to experience the third world, I call it the third world. The thing that distinguished these societies from the advanced societies is the disorganization. Pretty much everything is a disorganized mess, especially the traffic. P.J. O’Rourke once observed that the degree of chaos in a country’s traffic correlates to the general chaos and lawlessness of its society. I no longer recall why he said it, but it has always stuck with me.

The reason, of course, is trust. Large scale social organization requires a relatively high degree of social trust. If you want to build a building, for example, you have to trust that the people in charge are not going to change the laws halfway through your project so that you capital has been wasted. You have to trust that the laws will remain pretty much the same, with regards to property and contracts. Otherwise, you are leaving your investment to chance. Contract law and private property are rooted in social trust.

Driving is one of those large scale things Westerners take for granted, but the whole enterprise relies on social trust. As a driver, you rely on the other drivers to operate their vehicle by the conventions of your culture. You assume the other drivers are going to act in a predictable manner. In low-trust societies, it is every man for himself on the roads, because no one assumes anything about anyone, other than they are out for themselves. The result is YouTube videos dedicated to insane drivers.

Anyway, I get through the airport and make it out to where I can catch a cab. The driver has one of those great Caribbean names, Vladimir Sanchez. For some crazy reason, a lot of Caribbean mothers named their kids after Tolstoy characters. There are a lot of Puerto Rican girls with German first names like “Heidi” for some reason. I once knew a Puerto Rican girl named Olga. Vlad was chatty, but I barely understood him as Caribbean Spanish is loaded with slang. But, he was cheery and helpful.

He also drove like a maniac and came close to slamming into a few cars on my short trip from the airport to the swank Miami hotel. That’s when it occurred to me, as my life flashed before me, that we will need a new term for the world that is about to be forced upon us. Calling some country south of the equator “third world” is not going to make much sense when most of American is operating much the same way. Instead, we will have terms for the “other place” and the “other people.” We’ll need a name for those not like us, but allegedly still “us” according to our masters.

For example. A Cloud Person heading to Miami for a meeting with other Cloud People will talk about being amongst the other people. Maybe Miami will just be one of the many “other places” that exist outside the fortified Cloud cities of Washington and Manhattan. Similarly, the Dirt People will talk about those almost ethereal people, who are mostly seen on their TV’s, but once in while are seen touring the favelas of America. Persians have a word, “biganeh” that literally means an unknown person or person of alien origins. We will all be biganeh to one another.

This may seem bleak, but the future always does. It is the way things are headed as the people in charge tear apart what took centuries and millions of dead to construct. When you come into a place like Miami, you see see why the Cloud People want this for everyone. They see the polyglot beef stew culture around their swank hotel and think that it is the glorious egalitarian future foretold in the prophesies. They never see Liberty City or Miami Gardens. They have no reason to care as that is an “other” problem to be managed by other people.

Carnival of Nonsense

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The other day, I was on a conference call hosted by a youngish women who spoke mostly in riddles. She actually said, “intrinsically customize distinctive relationships” in a non-ironic way. She may have said other nonsense like this, but my eyes had glazed over and I was working on a revenge fantasy, not paying attention. That goofy phrase woke me from my daydream and that’s why it stuck in my head. I spent the rest of the call trying to unriddle what that could possibly mean and why anyone would say it.

Anyone familiar with life in large organizations is familiar with this sort of gibberish that seems to have started about two decades ago. My first recollection of creeping neologisms is in the 90’s when everyone and everything had to have the word “synergy” attached to it in some way. I can still recall a particularly good looking power-skirt enthusiastically telling a group of us that “synergy” was our key to success. I was sure then and I am sure now that she had no idea what it meant.

Echolalic babbling has become so common now that we tend not to notice it. This article on block chain technology I ran across the other day is a good example. I have an interest in the topic so I read these things when I find them, but “read” is not really what I do. Instead, I scan them looking for word combinations that are in a real language conveying actual information. I naturally filter out nonsense like “the diversity of such vertically connected organizations” because it is meaningless pap that just fills space.

The excessive use of jargon is not new. Pointless fields of study like the soft sciences are packed to the gills with jargon. Read a psychology paper and you have to keep stopping to think about the meaning of some word or phrase that more often than not has no real meaning, outside the narrow specialty within the field of psychology. The word is a signal that lets the reader know if they belong. For those who don’t belong, they are intended to scare you off so you don’t look too closely and discover the study is mostly nonsense.

That’s what happens in the corporate world where there are layers and layers of “managers” that only exists because the state has created the need. Companies fear being sued or being whacked around by the state, so they have elaborate processes to comply with the law. The army of do-nothings in the bureaucracy are there to make sure no steps are skipped. They just clog up the works, by forming committees and process management teams that try hard to keep the remaining productive workers from getting their work done.

There’s a chicken and egg issue here. Is this the result of women now dominating the workplace or did this evolve so that women could dominate the work place. Much of the jargon and gibberish we see is attached to elaborate processes, which naturally appeal to women. Males are results oriented while women are process oriented. Get a gander at how federal grants are doled out in the cognitive sciences and you see an elaborate process staffed almost exclusively by women. Perhaps the Muslims are not wrong about everything.

That aside, no one wants to believe their work is meaningless so it is natural to try and make what you do seem important to yourself and others. Larding up these busy work jobs with mountains of nonsensical jargon makes the people doing these jobs feel important. Mastering the corporate pseudo-language allows them to feel like experts and insiders, much in the same way academic jargon works. So, armies of middle managers go from meeting to meeting speaking in tongues to one another, proud that their calendars are full of meetings.

Theodore Dalrymple thinks there is something sinister to this descent into echolalic babbling, but I’m not sure. Orwell’s Newspeak was a part of an overall program of the state to oppress the masses. The proliferation of jargon we are seeing does not strike me as such. Instead, it is closer to what you see with small children on a playground. They have a limited vocabulary and lots of free time so they make up silly words and word games that sound pleasing, but mean nothing.

That’s what the boys and girls in the managerial state are doing when they cook up neologisms. It’s nursery rhymes for adults, who live and work in what often resemble daycare centers for adults. Instead of wrestling with the Legos to build a house, they spend their days wrestling with Excel to make a cool looking pivot table. Instead of memorizing rhymes, they invent bizarre word combinations like “monotonectally transform multimedia based channels” and put them into PowerPoint presentations.

It is another example, I think, of how Huxley got it right and Orwell got it wrong. The authoritarian model imagined in 1984 could never last because it had to rely on force and the math always works against such a system. The violence required to hold it together eventually exceeds the systems capacity for violence. The Huxley model of a world populated by infantilized adults, cheerfully engaged in busy work requires much less coercion from the state and it has a higher carrying capacity.

It turns out that the future is not “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” The future is a conference call on which a cheery 30-something says things like “progressively coordinate functional strategic theme areas” – forever.

The Death Wish

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A few times a month, I get an e-mail soliciting my opinion on Israel or on Antisemitism. Often, these queries are in the context of a question about one facet of the ideological landscape. “Why do you think Jews support liberals, even though liberals hate Israel?” I have not tabulated the results, but my guess is I get more questions about Israel than any single topic, despite the fact I never write about Israel. I’d have to check, but I don’t think I have ever posted about Israel. If I have, it would most certainly be in the context of the Arab world.

My limited interest in the Jewish people is purely biological and cultural. By that I mean I find it interesting that the Ashkenazim have wildly out-performed their numbers in the United States. Jews are about 1% of the US population, but they dominate the law, academics, entertainment and finance. When 1% of the population is 30% of the richest people in the country, that’s phenomenal. There’s also the fact that you really cannot understand the world without understanding religion and that means understanding the role of Judaism and Christianity, particularity how the former made the latter.

The preceding is just a little background for the new readers who may not be as familiar with my work as others. That way I can talk a little about this segment on John Derbyshire’s latest broadcast.

I’m not an anti-Semite; I never have been; and I don’t have much time for anti-Semites. I’ve written a couple of million words of opinion commentary this past thirty years, all of it archived on my website, and I defy you to find any evidence of anti-Semitism in it anywhere.

However, I’ve turned against the word “philosemite,” for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere. Basically, it’s patronizing. If pressed on the issue, I call myself an anti-anti-Semite. I cherish my Jewish friends, and I have publicly—and again, I think, more than once—expressed gratitude in print for the positive contribution Jews have made to our civilization, way out of proportion to their numbers.

I have been reading and listening to John for decades and I think he captures his, as well as most people’s attitude, perfectly. I’m not fond of rank anti-Semitism, any more than I’m a fan of racism, but my definitions are more narrow and specific than they are today so maybe John is correct to say he is an anti-anti-Semite. I don’t know a word for being an anti-racist that does not imply lunacy, but maybe there is one. My view is people are tribal and they will have tribal prejudices. There’s no hectoring that away.

The whole segment is best listened to rather than read, as John’s intonations convey additional meaning to the words. The reason for my interest here is what he has to say at the bottom regarding the anti-Trump phenomenon.

All four debaters were Bigfoot American journalists. Both sides of the debate were anti-Trump; the debate was over whose fault it was that Trump had gotten the GOP nomination. For the motion, arguing that it was the fault of the elites, were Ben Domenech and Timothy Carney, both Gentiles. Against the motion, arguing that it was not the fault of the elites, wereJennifer Rubin [email her]and Bret Stephens both Jewish.

That tells you something by itself. That atavistic style of Jewish paranoia that I spoke about, when it hears the word “elites,” at once flies to the thought:They’re talking about US! … and the hoofbeats of the Cossacks are heard drumming in the distance.

At some mental level Rubin and Stephens read the title of the debate as: “Blame the Jews for the Trump Phenomenon.” That’s why they’re arguingagainst the motion. No, no, it’s not our fault—it’s those damn peasants!

As someone without much of an interest in Semitism or Antisemitism, this struck a nerve. I too have noticed that the people opposing Trump most viciously all have familiar last names. Lots of gold and silver in the #nevertrump clown car. This has always struck me as illogical. Trump is our most Jewish presidential candidate in my lifetime. He has always been a big supporter of Israel and he is more than a bit famous for socializing and doing business with the Jewish business community in America.

It is a good reminder that there is always a portion of every population that has a death wish. They agitate for things that are against the interests of their ethnic group and they are more concerned with strangers than their own family. Jews are no exception. Progressivism is increasingly anti-Semitic and anti-Israel. Trump and his voters are very much the opposite. Yet, that causes the Jennifer Rubins of the world to hate him even more intensely than one would consider rational. Self-loathing is a powerful drug.

There is a temptation to assume there is an anti-Christian vibe to what we are seeing from people like Brett Stephens and Jennifer Rubin. That’s not the case as they reserve special hatred for orthodox and ultra-orthodox Jews. This is where the self-loathing becomes more clear, These people sneer at the guys in the black hats and tzitzit hanging out. If there is any anti-Christian sense to this, it stems from the fact that American Christians are enthusiastic supporters of Israel and virulent anti-anti-Semites.

The point here is that John is correct that these people are haunted by the hoof beats, but they also wish they would return. The longing for death, the death of their people, is what makes them tick. There’s some element of this in all people. It’s just that Jews have been wildly successful in America so their death wish gets played out on TV, while the self-loathing Poles have to nurse their death wish in private. Luckily for all of us, most Jews are not crazy and the smart ones understand which way the wind is blowing.

The Road To Equality

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If your culture believes, as an article of faith, that the gods control the weather, you will always assume the gods are behind the changes in the weather. If it rains, it is because the gods want it to rain. Naturally, you will want the right weather at the right time. For example, you will want rain in the spring, but not too much rain. You will want just enough to have a good planting season, so you and your people will come up with ways to please the gods. Maybe that is some sort of offering or a certain ceremony held at a special place.

If you do all the rituals and make all the right sacrifices, but the weather sucks, you will naturally assume the gods are angry, meaning something is wrong. Maybe the rituals were not done properly or maybe someone in the village has been secretly committing some sin that is angering the gods. After all, what else could it be? The gods make the weather so if the weather is bad, the gods must be angry. Therefore, someone or something must be making them angry. The solution is to find the witch!

Modern people tend to laugh at the rubes from the past, who believed such things, but the people in charge of our modern world pretty much believe the same sorts of oogily-boogily. This story from Florida is a good example.

Duval School Board Chairman Ashley Smith Juarez issued an “open letter” to Superintendent Nikolai Vitti on Tuesday that lays out the reasons she asked him to resign last week.

She has also called a special meeting of the School Board on the district’s future this Friday.

Vitti, in a news interview, made it clear that he wants to continue working with the School Board on the issues she brought up, though he does not know and wouldn’t predict if he will get that chance Friday.

“I just hope it doesn’t end,” Vitti said. “There’s a lot of work still to do, and we’ve gone too far to stop now. We’re at a significant place where stopping doesn’t make sense.”

Smith Juarez’s letter says her reasons for seeking Vitti’s resignation lie in strategic plan targets Vitti recently proposed for the school district at recent board meetings and in the growing achievement gaps between minority and non-minority students.

Smith Juarez likened the continued acceptance of an achievement gap between minorities and their white peers to racism.

“All students deserve a high quality and equitable education; these results do not meet that standard,” she wrote. “To accept these results is to accept the racism that has plagued our district for decades; that is unacceptable.”

How is blaming racism for the test scores any different than blaming the gods or evil spirits? In all of those cases, the cause is some mysterious force that you just have to accept on faith. In this case, the article of faith is not that the gods cause weather. It is that all people are born with the exact same abilities. Even though no one can point to actual racist acts, racism has to be the reason for why the black kids score below the white kids. After all, what else could it be? The kids are the same so it must be the school!

It is is not irrational for this airhead school board woman to say these things. This is the inevitable end of the blank slate egalitarianism preached by our elites. If everyone is born the same, capable of everything everyone is able to do, then the differing outcomes must be due to the process. What else could it be? Further, if the black kids are always scoring at the bottom, then the schools must be unfairly shortchanging the black kids and that’s racism. Again, it is all perfectly logical as long as you believe the magic in the premise.

It is, to no small degree, the root of the war on white males, particularly in the schools. Despite all the efforts to get girls into STEM fields, for example, males and particularly white males seem to take up most of the spots. Yeah, Asians do well too, but they do so despite the lynch mobs chasing them down the streets of San Francisco. No one is chasing the honky boys, so they must be cheating and the only way to remedy that is to give them a penalty. Again, it is not crazy, as long as you accept the madness of the premise.

It is this lack of doubt, the unwillingness to accept any doubt, that led the commies to murder so many people. After all, their system was the model of perfection. The reason it failed was the people, so the logical solution was to get rid of the people gumming up the works. The evangelical egalitarians that rule over us are heading down the same path as the old commies. Instead of murdering the enemies of the revolution, they just destroy their careers and reputations. Whether or not we end up in a place imagined by Kurt Vonnegut in Harrison Bergeron is doubtful, but they will try anyway.

I’m All Blacked Out

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On my way home last night, I saw a couple of young black women on a corner, holding signs that had “Black Lives Matter” on them with some other writing. I think one of them had something about Charlotte, but I don’t know for sure. They were hoping to get the attention of drivers, but it seemed like no one was paying any attention. As traffic slowed, I did not see any heads turning their way, but in the city, drivers look straight ahead out of habit. That way the bums and panhandlers are not encouraged to molest you.

I caught the light so I was sitting at their intersection with a chance to observe for a few minutes. They stepped into the street and starting taunting the white drivers by holding their signs up against their windows and chanting something. When young black women get worked up, their voices reach a pitch close to a dog whistle. It’s just high pitched echolalic babbling, that is intended to annoy, rather than convey information. I had my windows up so I could make out nothing. My guess is it was just some gibberish they saw on-line or on TV.

Before they got to me, the light changed and they had to retreat back to the curb, which was a surprise. In the ghetto, you run into this behavior a lot. Black females will wait for the light to change and then saunter into the cross walk, giving drivers the business, making them wait as they stroll across the street. It is just one of the many hassles that comes with dealing with people in the ghetto. At some level, they know the rest of us would just as soon ignore the ghetto entirely, so they spend their energy making that impossible.

Sitting there watching their antics, I felt a bit of rage welling up. All this effort to be a public nuisance, to make demands on me, and yet they put little to no effort into managing their lives. Even if they have a claim, harassing drivers on their way home is not going to win them any friends. They have to know it, which means they are not there on the street corner with good intentions. They are there explicitly to be a public nuisance. They just like hassling white people, purely out of racial animus.

More and more, that’s the sort of thing that creeps into my mind when I see blacks acting up. I have a great deal of sympathy for black people, particularly underclass blacks. Despite what you see on TV, most black people in the ghetto are decent people. They just lack the cognitive tools and opportunity. They are my fellow citizens and I want the best for them. I just don’t know what can be done to change their lot in life. The Civil Rights Movement was over 50 years ago, but here we are with young black girls full of hatred for the honkies.

I got home and decided to see what the news channels had to say about the riots in Charlotte. On a Fox show, some old white guy was trying to explain to Juan Williams that the reason blacks get shot by cops is that blacks commit an outlandish amount of crime. He tried to explain how 3% of the population, committing 40% of the crime, is going to have a disproportionate amount of police interaction. Juan Williams is innumerate, so he could not grasp the math. He just kept insisting the cops like shooting black people.

There was something about the irritated look on the face of Juan Williams that bugged me. The old honky was trying to respectfully explain the mathematical reality of crime in America. Blacks are 13% of the population, but they account for more than half of all crime. Most of that crime is against black people. This is public information that is easy to verify. Yet, Juan had a look on his face like the old honky had just farted. You could tell that he was thinking, “How dare this guy say such things?”

Instead of getting angry, I flipped over to the sports channel and, of course, they were celebrating the asinine and insulting protests by black athletes. These pampered babies owe everything they have to white America, yet they have the gall to claim they are victims. They are living lives few humans have had the privilege to live and it is not enough. That’s what’s so damned galling about these protests. They are a reminder that it is never enough. There’s no way to pay off the debt, assuming there is one. It never ends.

That is, of course, something white people used to know. When I was a kid, the old people would often says, “We’ll never hear the end of slavery. We’ll be paying for that forever.” The point was that there’s no point in trying. All of us have done something to someone for which that person will not forgive us. No man keeps going over to his ex-wife asking for forgiveness. You just accept the fact that there is no making it right and you get on with your life. That’s the reality of race relations. There’s no fixing it so there’s no point in trying.

Even so, I’m increasingly pissed off by what I’m seeing and I resent the people behind it. Guys like Juan Williams should be on TV demanding the cops round up every last Charlotte rioter and pack them off to Africa. The rich black guys on TV talking sportsball should be mortified that their co-ethnics are embarrassing their race with these antics. If the roles were reversed and it was whites making asses of themselves, you can be sure the honkies on TV would be furious and embarrassed, demanding a halt to it.

That’s not how it works and that’s what is getting tiresome. Those two black girls get the idea in their heads to make a nuisance of themselves in the street and I’m supposed to feel guilty about it. Frankly, Glenn Reynolds was right. Let’s have a few motorists drive over these people and then we can talk about feeling guilty. Let’s have the cops unleash the dogs and water cannon on these rioters and then talk to me about feeling guilty. I’ll be happy to feel guilty as long as the streets are clear.

I’ve simply had enough. I’m all blacked out. I’m tired of the blame shifting and excuse making. I’m tired of seeing people, who know better, lying to me on TV. Those rich sportsball talkers ain’t living in my neighborhood. They are as far away from the Black Lives Matter types as possible. They live in gated communities with the honkies. Their honky cohorts on TV are not even driving through my neighborhood. They are despicable hypocrites, who deliberately say things on television that make our lives worse.

Black America does not have a race problem. It ain’t honkies robbing, looting and killing in the ghetto. They don’t have a cop problem. The cops shoot fewer black offenders than white offenders. They don’t have a gun problem either. Black America has a black guy problem. They have far too many black guys robbing, looting and killing, almost always doing so at the expense of blacks. They won’t let me fix that problem, so stop demanding I feel bad about it. I’m done. I’m all blacked out.

The Neo-Liberals

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Jeff Jacoby describes himself as a conservative columnist. He has written for the Boston Globe as the house broken “conservative” since the early 1990’s. According to his Wikipedia page, he is “the region’s pre-eminent spokesman for Conservative Nation,” and a columnist who had “quickly established himself as a must-read.” Also according to Wiki, he takes a paycheck from the radical left-wing TV station WBUR, one of the many government run NPR affiliates in New England. He’s also been on the payroll of the Progressive cable outlet CNN.

It’s fair to say Jacoby is typical of Official Conservatism™ the last two decades, which is to say he is a neocon. There used to be time when there was a big enough distinction between Official Conservatism™ and the Trotskyites that migrated from the Left in the 70’s, but all of them are neocons now. Jacoby was gonzo for the Bush policy of invade the world – invite the world. He continues to say the Iraq War was a success and he is endlessly going on about the Czar and how Trump is a tool of Russia.

If opposition to the Soviets defined the neocons in the Cold War, opposition to Trump is what defines them now. You see that in this Jeff Jacoby column from the other day. The gist of the piece is to remind the reader of America’s past terribleness and then to tie that history of terribleness to the rise of Trump. You’re supposed to come away with the belief that voting for Trump is the same as forming a lynch mob and hanging some coolies. Just as all good thinkers look back with disgust at America’s past, future good thinkers will be revolted by Trump voters.

Logically, of course, this is nonsense. It is the fallacy of the undistributed middle. There’s nothing connecting today’s voters with the lynch mobs of 150 years ago. More important, no sane person would define America of the 19th century by these rare outbursts of violence. In every age, there are examples of people acting savagely to one another. That is the human condition. What we have here is a rather sleazy attempt to slime the people of the past, and by extension the heritage of everyone alive today, in order to disparage current Americans.

The implication is that discussing immigration is off-limits, because to do so risks being just as bad as those imaginary bigots that haunt our past. We can debate how much we bomb the Muslims, but we cannot have a public debate about how many foreigners we allow to settle in our country. Incinerating half a million Arabs over the last twenty years is perfectly fine, but hurting the feelings of would-be migrants from Mexico would make us worse than Hitler. It’s as if Americans don’t have a right to define what it means to be an American.

At the same time, neocons are forever prattling on about how America is not a blood and soil country. Instead it is a propositional nation. In other words, all you have to do is sign onto the bargain for what it means to be an American and you are an American. That sounds good, until they follow that with the argument that Americans don’t get a say in what it means to be an American. The proposition, according to guys like Jacoby, is that they get to use Americans as cannon fodder for waging pointless wars of choice and they also get to replace those Americans with foreigners of their choice.

You can be forgiven for thinking that guys like Jacoby really don’t like Americans very much. When he is not comparing us to blood thirsty, xenophobic murderers, he’s insisting we lack the moral authority to have a say in how the country is run. That’s what passes for conservatism these days. It is a laundry list of complaints about the American people. When they are not rooting for the death of working class whites, they are twisting themselves into pretzels in an effort to prove they are nothing like the savage Dirt People carrying Trump through the election.

It is a good reminder that neo-conservatism was always a Progressive heresy and never had roots in Anglo-Saxon conservatism. Modern Progressivism has curdled into a list of hatreds, offering nothing but an increasingly dark vision of society. The neocons are following the same path. Guys like Jeff Jacoby can only tell you what they are not, and increasingly that sounds like “not American.” To be a neocon today is to do little more than spew venom at normal Americans for not supporting wars of choice and unlimited immigration.

What we are seeing is the transformation of the neocons into neo-liberals. Maybe it is simply a return to their natural home, but the modern Right sounds pretty much like the Left, except they want to kill Muslims and reduce the tax on carried interest. They embrace the unhinged anti-racism that the Left now preaches and they fully embrace multiculturalism. Now that the Bush Crime Family has decided to back Hillary Clinton, the way is now open for the neocons to become neo-libs and take most of Official Conservatism™ with them.

Godspeed.

Honky Ball in Bodymore Murderville

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I had the chance to attend a sportsball game last night in the city of Baltimore. My Red Sox were in town to play the Orioles, so I got a chance to see the Olde Town Team in person. I don’t attend many live sporting events these days. It was a nice change of pace, even if it meant the hassle of getting into the downtown area at rush hour. Baltimore has a reputation for being gangland, but people still do work in the city and that means traffic at the predictable times. The downtown area that caters to tourists, both local and foreign is easy to navigate so it is not too bad.

Many on the alt-right are encouraging normies to boycott sportsball and I get why they say it. It used to be that a normal man could get a few hours away from the preaching of the loons by watching a baseball game or football game. That’s no longer the case in football, as they have filled the broadcasts and the games with proselytizing for the New Religion. The players protesting the anthem may be at the heart of why the NFL is suddenly having a TV ratings problem. It would be nice if that were true, but we’ll never know as the media will cover it up.

Baseball has so far been immune to the efforts of the loons to turn it into an instrument of the New Religion. The reason for that, according to one of the players, is that baseball is the white man’s game. That’s true in many respects. The players are mostly white and Latin. Just 8% of MLB players are Afro’d Americans. The NFL is 70% black and the NBA banned the pale face years ago. Further, baseball is a turn based, rules game that does not favor running and jumping. There are few opportunities for attention getting antics during the games, so it tends to appeal to honkies.

Still, the Cult of Modern Liberalism is trying hard to ruin baseball for the white man. ESPN has destroyed their Sunday night broadcast by having a screeching powerskirt as part of the announcing team. She pretends to have played the game and have the same depth of knowledge as a former player, but does so in a way that reminds every man of his first ex-wife. A TV series has been created featuring a female baseball player making it to the majors. Of course, she’s black, because, well magic. Taken together, it is a warning that the crazies are coming for honky-ball.

Then again, the Cult has been at war with baseball for a long time. When I was a kid, they tried to make us play soccer, instead of baseball. That flopped as bad as the metric system. Soccer became the sport for effeminate white kids, who lacked the athletic ability to do anything else. Then they tried to force boys and girls to play together, but girls, and their parents, liked softball much more and that effort failed. Finally, the last two decades have seen a PR campaign to tell us that baseball is dying and basketball is the future, despite the the facts on the ground.

Even so, baseball has held up pretty well. In the 70’s, when the culture war began, even the most popular clubs struggled to attract fans to games. Today, even bad teams can get 15,000 to a weeknight game. Some clubs do better than others, but overall, baseball remains well attended compared to the past. A lot of it has to do with the excellent ballparks and the family friendly atmosphere at the games. A bigger reason, I suspect, is the ballpark is one of the last places where old weird America still exists.

The players look like us, the crowd looks like us and the customs are the same as they were when we were kids. The game starts with everyone standing for the anthem. There is the seventh inning stretch. The players embrace the customs and unwritten rules that have defined the game for generations. I walked in the park and I remembered my dad taking me to my first game. I could remember my grandfather, as if it were yesterday. That’s not something that happens at football or the human flea circus that is the NBA.

One example last night was the response to a rookie the Orioles just brought up from the minors. The crowd was mostly Oriole fans, naturally, but there were many Red Sox fans too. Everyone cheered loudly, knowing that the kid was getting his first at-bat as a major leaguer. When he hit a home-run in his second at bat, the whole place stood until he came out to tip his cap to the crowd. Even the Sox fans stood as that is the way it is done. The cycle of life has always been a part of the game, so you cheer the rookies and honor the veterans, as they pass out of the game.

If you want to understand what went wrong in America, walk around Baltimore, where you see what it is, what it should be and why it is not what it could be. It is a city where the people that know better are vastly outnumbered by those largely incapable of maintaining modernity. There are pockets of beauty and excellence, but they exist in a sea of degradation. Baltimore is what is happening in South Africa. Civilization has retreated into pockets the tourists see, hoping to hold out until the world comes to its senses.

But, the Olde Town Team carried the day, with the legendary Big Papi hitting a three run blast to seal the game. The Red Sox are headed for the post-season for the first time in a few years, and they have a good shot of winning another title. I get why the alt-right kids reject sportsball, but for old guys like me, who still remember when normal people had hope that this craziness would pass, it is a nice reminder of how things used to be. Perhaps the kids sitting there with their fathers and grandfathers will carry with them the seeds to restore the world long after I’m gone.

A Moral Philosophy of HBD

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Pubic policy in the West is argued on many fronts, but the roots of all of our debates are in the Enlightenment. Arguably, the three most important men of the Enlightenment are Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau. They are the giants whose shadows are still felt today. When Progressives, for example, proselytize on behalf of equality and inclusion, they are relying on Rousseau, and to a lesser extent Locke, as the foundation of their argument. Libertarians root their ideology in the ideas of Locke, specifically with regards to property.

The starting point for the men of the Enlightenment was man’s natural state or how they imagined humans acted before civil society. Hobbes imagined that man’s natural state was a “war of all against all” and civil society was imposed to protect men from each other. Locke imagined that man was naturally cooperative, looking out for one another and that civil society was a natural outgrowth of man’s nature. Similarly, Rousseau imagined that man in his natural state was virtuous and altruistic.

Obviously, that is an absurdly generalized version of three of the greatest thinkers in human history. The point I want to establish is that the foundation of modern Western society is rooted in notions about man’s natural state. The men of the Enlightenment did not have access to detailed studies of hunter gatherers. They did not have the fossil record or an understanding of evolution and genetics. They were simply conjuring the possible starting places by working backwards from where they stood in the timeline.

And they were wrong.

While we don’t know the nitty-gritty details of early modern human society, we have some rough contours of how our ancestors lived before settlement and writing. We also have loads of studies of our nearest relatives that allow us to understand what pre-modern man must have been like before we split off on our own evolutionary branch. Even if you reject evolution, we have examples of hunter gatherer populations in the modern age that live, most likely, as our ancestors lived at one time in Eurasia.

What we know, with a high degree of certainty, is that humans were never in a state of nature as Hobbes imagined. We were always in cooperative groups, most likely kin based groups. While conflicts between groups of humans over territory and resources would have been common, these groups exchanged women and food with one another too. Marrying off women from the clan to men of the neighboring clan would have been an important way to keep the peace, settle disputes and bind people together.

Similarly, human societies were not egalitarian paradises as Rousseau imagined. Human beings developed compassion for one another based on familial relations. Trog guarded the interests of Grog because it was good for both. Similarly, they were hostile to strangers for the same reason. Compassion for others is no more or less natural than hostility to others. In both cases, they are driven by biological necessity. One group of humans would share scarce resources internally, but gladly let strangers starve to death

The point here is two-fold. One is that we know a lot about the biological nature of man that the men of the Enlightenment did not know. Genetics is opening up vast new areas of understanding. Continuing to base our moral philosophy on vague speculation that has proven to be incorrect does not make a lot of sense. For instance, we know with certainty that nature does not bestow her gifts equally, but she does so predictably. Continuing to operate as if we are born a blank slate is rather foolish, given what we now know.

Further, we know that human evolution was local and on-going after humans spread out from Africa. Asians have physical characteristics that are unique to people from Asia. Northern Europeans have physical features unique to them. These variations must extend beyond the physical, into cognitive areas as well. Assuming that moral codes, for example, are universal is as nutty as assuming that people everywhere have red hair. The way in which people see themselves, there relationship to one another and their place in nature is not universal.

An assertion like “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights” works great if by all men you mean all the men of your tribe, your ethnicity or your lands. It falls on its face when you apply it to all humans everywhere. Similarly, the political economy of Sweden works great when it confined to Swedes in Sweden. It does not make any sense to the people of Syria because they are different people with different natural abilities and cognitive skills.

The Enlightenment came along with the revolution in commerce. The West was suddenly rich and the old feudal order was no longer workable. The industrial age gave us intellectual movements that built on the Enlightenment and attempted to create a moral philosophy to match the industrial world. We have just gone through a technological revolution and we are in the midst of a revolution in the understanding of human biology. Accordingly, a new moral philosophy is certain to develop and evolve to match our new understanding.

The next big thing in public policy will most likely be based in Human Bio-Diversity, unless the good thinkers go the Muslim route and begin to slaughter the men of science. Heading off down the road of mysticism and magic is not out of the question, but the more likely option is the people preaching equality and inclusion follow the Shakers into the history books. What comes next will be a public debate rooted in biological reality. How best to manage the bone-deep differences in human populations.

There will also be a degree of magical thinking as that helps grease the wheels of society, but the disaster of multiculturalism, the memory of it as well as the residue on the ground, will mark it in the same way the Holocaust has marked fascism. Instead, debates about what to do for X people will be bounded by the debate over the limits of compassion for out-groups. Many of these arguments will be just as wrong as the arguments in favor of inclusion are today, but they will be wrong in a different direction.

Mao Was Right

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When I was a kid, it was part of the holiday season to see politicians participating in the rituals of Christmas. The President would show up at a church somewhere to participate in a Christian mass, even if he was not a member of that particular sect. The exception was that non-Catholics would not take communion at a Catholic mass, out of respect to Catholics. Otherwise, it was considered a sign of respect for leaders to show up at a church at times like Christmas.

Similarly, political leaders would show up at a military memorial on veterans holidays to lay a wreath, say a prayer and demonstrate a proper reverence. On the 50th anniversary of D-Day, Ronald Reagan made a week out of showing his respect for the men and women, who saved Europe from herself. Even communist mayors of progressive American cities knew to show respect to veterans on those holidays. The point was for the people to see that these public figures were pious and shared our fidelity to the cultural institutions of society.

Public acts of piety by leaders are a part of settled society and an integral part of political leadership. Scipio Africanus, the great Roman general, is famous to modern people for defeating Hannibal at Zama. In his day, he was famous to his contemporaries for his great displays of public piety and his use of them to win the support of the people in order to defeat his political enemies. Roman emperors invested a great deal of wealth and time into public acts of piety, building great temples and holding elaborately expensive public events. Public piety is a feature of human society.

That’s an important thing to keep in mind when watching our public figures perform in public. In almost all cases, these performances are carefully considered and choreographed. They are intended to win support for the public figure. If they are attached to a cause, the way to bet is the public figure cares little for the cause, but is simply using it to curry favor with the public. The point is for you to walk away thinking the public person is moral and good, and therefore deserving of your support.

This is the case with the Atlantic Coast Conference announcing that they will be pulling their sportsball tournaments out of the state of North Carolina in protest of the state law banning deranged men in sundresses from stalking women in public toilets. For those unfamiliar with American college sports, our colleges run billion dollar sports leagues for some reason. How this happened would take a long to explain, but imagine if your football leagues were all owned and operated by your colleges and universities.

Here’s the statement from the college presidents:

“As members of the Atlantic Coast Conference, the ACC Council of Presidents reaffirmed our collective commitment to uphold the values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination. Every one of our 15 universities is strongly committed to these values and therefore, we will continue to host ACC Championships at campus sites. We believe North Carolina House Bill 2 is inconsistent with these values, and as a result, we will relocate all neutral site championships for the 2016-17 academic year. All locations will be announced in the future from the conference office.”

Clearly, an army of public relations people worked on this statement for weeks so that it is packed the most pious punch possible. It has all the abracadabra phrases the Cloud People love. “Collective commitment” is one of my favorites. Cloud People love that phrase. Pol Pot was fond of that phrase too. The Cloud People never shut up about the glories of unity and collective action, while at the same time yapping about diversity and tolerance. Mussolini would be proud.

Similarly, the “values of equality, diversity, inclusion and non-discrimination” are not values anyone in the Cloud actually follows, but they like the way it sounds so they say it a lot. Show up at a faculty meeting with a Trump hat on and these people will run screaming for security. You will be arrested and thrown in a pit, all in the name of tolerance and inclusion. The words no longer have a literal meaning for the Cloud People. They are magic words and the point of using them is make you shut-up so they can boss you around without having to explain themselves.

The insanity of this is not in the fact they are on the side of mentally ill men in dresses stalking little girls in public toilets. That’s crazy, but what’s really nuts is the fact they think this appeals to the general public. “I support men in dresses watching my daughter pee” is something said by exactly no one ever. Dirt People feel sorry for transvestites and would support mental health services for them. Normal people would be against throwing trannies off rooftops, as is preferred by the Muslims the Cloud People are importing.

Otherwise, it is an ugly part of the human condition that normal people tend to ignore. If the man down the street likes to wear something pretty, that’s his business as long as it remains just his business. If he goes outside like that, he better be extremely respectful of the rest of us. The same is true of swingers and other fetishes like furries. Normal people have always understood that privacy must be respect and publicity should always be used carefully. Keep your private affairs private and respect the privacy of others.

It is just another example of the great gulf that lies between the rulers and those over whom they rule. Not so long ago, the rulers would have known this and showed their goodness by defending the little girl from the deranged man in the sundress. They may not have done much about it, other than make a speech, but they would have made the effort to show they are on the side of angels, with regards to men in sundresses stalking children in toilets. The North Carolina law is perfect example of this practice.

Today, they expect the fathers and mothers of those little girls to cheer them for unleashing perverts onto the public. It is the worst sort of grace on the cheap, because it inflicts a heavy cost on the public. The Cloud People ruthlessly enforce their codes of conduct in their world,, while denying normal people the right to do the same. One can be forgiven for thinking that maybe there is a sadistic pleasure at work. The Cloud People humor themselves by immiserating their subjects.

Again, it is easy to see why Mao sent these people to the rice paddies.