Category Archives: Politics

The FUD-Packer’s Ball

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Throughout the Cold War years, it was a standard claim from the people called the left in America that the intelligence services manipulated domestic politics. This did not come from the mainstream left, but the fringier left-wing activists. For its part, the right in all its forms simply ignored the claims. Eventually, the mainstream right became the primary defenders of the intelligence agencies. They were viewed as the first line of defense in the Cold War and thus were lionized.

Of course, the claims about the intel agencies were not without some merit. In the late 1960’s a communist student publication called Ramparts reported that the National Student Association, which was a federation of student governments, was funded and controlled by the CIA. Later it was revealed by the Church Committee that many newspapers were cooperating with the CIA. Operation Mockingbird was one of the CIA programs used to manipulate the media.

The Church Committee is an interesting bit of history as it might be the last time Congress did anything useful in terms of oversight. The final report was massive and you can still access it on the Senate website. One reform that resulted from this event was the establishment of the permanent US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which has been thoroughly captured by the CIA. Members of this committee participated in the Russian collusion hoax, for example.

Putting that aside, the headline item at the time was that the intelligence agencies were spying on Americans, experimenting on Americans, and manipulating the media by placing assets at media companies. In the fullness of time, the important revelation was that this practice was thoroughly normalized in the agencies. The intel agencies saw nothing wrong with what they were doing. That means we can assume they continued doing it despite the revelations.

Again, the Russian collusion hoax is a good starting point. If the intel agencies were comfortable in trying to overturn the 2016 presidential election, then it is safe to assume this behavior is normalized inside these agencies. That returns us to the Church Committee and the scale of operations fifty years ago. In the analog days, the intel agencies were comfortable with subverting newspapers, so what sorts of things will they be comfortable doing in the digital age?

For example, would the intel agencies pay social media influencers? If they were paying student groups in the 1960’s how opposed would they be to paying social media characters to push certain themes? It is not as if anyone bothers to look into the background of bigfoot influencers. These characters seem to appear from nowhere, gain a big audience and join the ranks of influencers. Inserting intel agents into this space is a low-cost, high reward activity.

Look at someone like Michael Tracey, who is a bigfoot influencer on Twitter with over a quarter million followers. According to Twitter, about 15% of their users have more than one thousand followers. Only one percent of American users have more than three thousand followers. That means someone with a quarter million followers is in a ridiculously small club of users. This assumes the follower counts are accurate and the followers are not purchased from a bot farm.

Michael Tracey has no job and no obvious source of income. He lives in New York City, one of the most expensive places in America. He regularly travels the world to pester government officials at press gatherings. His Substack mostly gathers dust, in terms of readership, and he never posts monetized content on Twitter. Maybe he has a rabbi that underwrites his activity, which is not unusual, but maybe that rabbi is tied to one of the intel agencies, which would not be unusual either.

Note that Tracey spends most of time doing FUD-packing. FUD stands for Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt. Right now, he is flaming the Trump world right now with claims that Trump is responsible for the war funding bills. It is a weird claim, but coming from a major account it does seep into the public consciousness. This is new for him, as he usually spends his time attacking progressives. In fact, he built his following on the right by FUD-packing the people on the left.

Now, Michael Tracey is probably on the level, but there is no way of knowing it, which is the point of this example. In a world where people are more likely to get their information from anonymous and unexamined characters on social media, how hard would it be for the intel agencies to manipulate this system? Build up a network of influential FUD-packers and you can control the unhappy portion of both political parties by saturating them with misery.

Here is something else to consider. These days, the intel agencies do not have to actually buy the FUD-packer. They can simply manipulate him though the various donations options most people have these days. When they like the FUD-packing from an influencer, they can send a bunch of small donations. They can also use their bot farms to boost that guy’s FUD-packing. In other words, a FUD-packer could be compromised without even knowing it.

The point of thinking about FUD-packing is that we live in an age where it is much easier for the intel agencies to do what they habitually were doing fifty years ago, so it is wise to assume it is as common now as it was back then. The digital information space is now a wilderness of mirrors manipulated by people who are drawn to the work because they love FUD-packing. As a result, our information space is a FUD-packers ball where nothing should be taken at face value.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

Escape From Talos IV

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One of the underappreciated aspects of political discourse is that the person arguing for a particular theory or ideology starts with a set of assumptions. Often, the assumptions are part of the arguer’s conditioning to the point where he no longer thinks about them, so he never mentions them. Progressives, for example, now assume equality is a morally good thing and an obvious goal of policy. They never bother to mention this, as from their perspective, it is manifestly obvious.

The exceptions to glossing over the assumptions are always on what passes for the political right in America. You see it in the back and forth between Christopher Rufo and Curtis Yarvin in that IM1776 post. Early on in his reply to Yarvin, Rufo states, “My conviction is that there is a logical structure to human nature and, consequently, a structure of political order.” This is a familiar claim to those familiar with the natural rights argument popular in some circles.

The basic argument is that there is human nature, by which they mean things that are true and observable about all human beings. Therefore, there must be things that are universal and true about how human beings interact with one another. Therefore, if we tease these truths out about the human condition, we can fashion a political order that results in the least amount of friction between the citizens. The assumption is that the closer we are to our nature, the happier we will be.

Like most assumptions that form the basis of a political theory, this assumption about human nature is never examined. Are there objective, quantifiable behaviors that are universal to all humans? Obviously, this is true. All humans, for example, work together for food and safety. We do not have written records for the hunter-gatherer phase of human development, but what we have tells us that humans cooperated within kin groups to collect food and defend the group.

It seems obvious that there are not only physical properties of humans that are universal, but that there are behaviors that are universal. Of course, this is also true of canines or arachnids, but no one would make these observations the basis of a political theory or a moral framework. In other words, even at this level, there is an unexamined assumption that we can create a list of things you ought to do from the things we can observe about the general nature of humans.

Putting that aside for a second, think about the things that are true about canines that define domestic dogs as a species. While there is a collection of properties that define the domestic dog, no one would confuse a Doberman with a Poodle. Everyone can quickly understand the difference between a border collie and a similar looking mutt from the local shelter. Even though the herding dog has the physical properties of a domestic dog, it is different from the other dog breeds.

If the domestic dog world ever produces the dog equivalent of Thomas Aquinas, he will have to contend with the fact that the herding dogs will be scandalized by sheep wandering around unattended, while the hunting dogs will think this condition to be the best way to order dog society. Even though both groups share a common dog nature, they will have naturally different views on the sheep question. This is a silly idea, but you can probably see where it is going.

This gets to another assumption that you see in the Rufo response. He asks, “What is the telos of your political system?” The assumption he is making is that any political system and therefore any political theory must include as a foundation item an explanation for the purpose of human society. This is an unexamined assumption inherited from Christianity. Humans have a purpose so human society must have a purpose and this is a measure of any political system.

What science tells us about human nature does suggest that there is a purpose to all human societies. That purpose is to increase the odds of the individuals in that society making it to sexual maturity and reproducing. Cooperation is all about safety so that the young can one day reproduce and pass on their genes, the genes shared by the group, onto the next generation. The cause and purpose of human society is the preservation and propagation of our genetic material.

How that is done is not universal. Again, this is observationally true. Humans around the world have evolved different ways of organizing themselves to increase their safety and security, just as their physical form evolved to their environment. Africans do not have black skin for no reason. Just as the environment selected for certain physical features over others, it selected for different organizational behaviors. The telos was the same, but the implementation cannot be the same.

There is something else science can tell us about human nature. Once humans started to settle down and distinct groups started to cooperate with one another, the selection pressures changed. As Greg Cochran explained in The 10,000 Year Explosion, settled life rewards and punishes different human behaviors than pastoral life and especially hunter-gatherer life. That means the organizational behavior is not entirely learned, but a part of our genetic code that defines every human.

This is the logical defect of the natural rights argument. The fans of this make assumptions about nature that are counter to what we actually know about nature and what we know about nature argues against their universals. Therefore, the assumption upon which they rest their arguments are false. This leaves them with denying biology, replacing nature with the Christian idea of God, or arguing in favor the strict segregation of people based on race.

Note that the egalitarians face the same dilemma. Whether it is Marx or the new head of NPR, their assumptions about the natural equality of man run counter to what science tells us about human nature. The communist got around this by blaming economics for oppressing some and elevating others. Today’s woke crowd takes a much simpler route by defying biological reality. The transgender stuff is a way of denying biological reality by denying fundamental properties of humans beings.

Also note that natural rights arguments should be placed alongside things like Marxism, libertarianism, and anarchism. What all of these share, in addition to the denial of biological reality, is the egalitarian assumption. Lurking underneath all of these political systems is the assumption that all men are naturally equal. They also assume that something unnatural is the cause of the inequality. The point of their systems is to restore equality by restoring the “natural” order.

The final point to be made here is that all of the political theories of the last three hundred or so years suffer from the same defect. The theory always rests on assumptions that either go unexamined because they cannot be evaluated, or they go unexamined because the result would negate the theory. The last three centuries of Western thought has been a game of finding a suitable replacement for God as the telos of human society and the results have been as predicted.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

A Lesson In Managerial Imbecility

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It appears the end times have been avoided as Israel has been forced to take no for an answer and not escalate her war with Iran. The Iranians put on a show of force, apparently as part of a deal with Washington, as their answer to the Israeli attack on their consulate in Damascus. Israel has been making noises about “retaliation” but for now it appears they are not getting any support for it. At least for now, it seems the prospects for a regional war have ended.

On the surface this looks like a rare occurrence of realpolitik from Washington, as they used diplomatic channels to head off a major conflict. That or the hotheads who always want war were finally told no by the few remaining sober minded people left in the foreign policy establishment. Alternatively, it could simply be that Iran had other motivations in addition to avoiding war. In other words, dumb luck saved Washington from a catastrophe in the Middle East.

Evidence for the latter was on display during and after the attack. The first thing that was reported was an impressive number of drones put into the air from a variety of locations in Iran, northern Iraq, and Yemen. Israel had no trouble taking out these drones, but that is not the point. The point is Iran can fill the sky with cheap targets for the extremely expensive Israeli air defense system. Modern war is fought on the balance sheet and Iran can now fight on that front.

It was not just a drone attack. The Iranians launched a variety of cruise missiles mingled in with their drone swarms. This is a tactic the Russians used to deplete the Ukrainian air defense systems last year. They filled the sky with drones. This often overwhelmed the air defense systems, but also exposed the location of radars and launchers, which were targeted by missiles. The Iranians demonstrated the ability to coordinate this sort of attack, which is an ability they lacked to this point.

The third interesting bit from that attack was the use of liquid fueled ballistic missiles, which were able to penetrate Israel air defenses. These were the strikes that hit the airfield in the Israeli desert. To this point it was assumed the Iranians did not have the technology for this sort of missile. As far as anyone knew, they had solid fuel rockets, but now they seem to have taken the next step in rocketry. It also means their chemical industry has also made big strides.

The final item of interest is the accuracy of the attack. To this point it was assumed the Iranians did not have the ability to precisely target their missiles or guide them in flight, but it appears they now have the technology. Presumably, they now have access to GLONASS, which is the Russian GPS. It also means they have the ability to use this information in real time to adjust flight paths. The Russians most likely supplied this at some point over the last two years.

This is why the “dumb luck” option makes the most sense. The reason the Russians are willing to help the Iranians with this is the gross mismanagement of American foreign policy over the last decade or more. In the past, Russia and China avoided these sorts of technology transfers, in order to avoid sanctions. Now that the West has imposed every conceivable sanction on Russia, the Russia are free to act in ways that they never would have considered five years ago.

Of course, the fact that sanctions failed to dent the Russian economy has made the threat of sanctions into a barking chihuahua. The Chinese have been transferring technology to Russia, despite the threat of sanctions. The reason is they see how the Russians got around those sanctions. This also means the Chinese could be helping the Iranians with their missile program as well. Iran, after all, revolutionized the drone game with the Shahed 136, so have things to share too.

All of this is the result of mismanagement by Washington. The sanctions war on Russia was poorly conceived and executed, but the biggest mistake was not considering the downstream consequences. Iran now has the ability to make anti-ship missiles that the American navy cannot defeat. No one knows if they have taken this step, but now we know they can take that step. This would most likely not have been possible if not for the sanctions war on the world.

This incident between Iran and Israel is a good example of how the decline in aptitude accelerates in a managerial system. The selection pressure inside the foreign policy establishment has been in favor of conformity to orthodoxy over strategic thinking, which has resulted in an ecosystem in which people like Victoria Nuland rise to the highest reaches of the system. Like everyone else, she rose up the ranks due to her fidelity to established orthodoxy in spite of her incompetence.

You can be sure the collection of dullards and mediocrities that run the Biden administration are celebrating themselves for defusing this situation. Instead of recognizing what really happened, they come away thinking they are master chess players on the international stage. That is another thing about managerialism. Every failure is somehow turned into confirmation of their expertise. The result is a system packed to the gills with overly confident imbeciles.

The question that arises from this is when will these imbeciles run out of luck and do something from which they cannot be saved? The Soviets had the Afghan war debacle and then the Chernobyl meltdown. Taken together, these failures by their managerial class drained all trust from the system. Most likely it will take something similar to collapse American managerialism. People might want to look up the nearest nuclear power plant and make sure you are not downwind.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

The End Is Nigh

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Since it became clear during the 2016 election cycle that Conservative Inc no longer had any influence on the Dirt People, there has been an effort to reconstitute a New Right that will fill the void left by the now Old Right. This being the mass media age, one part of that effort is to promote certain online personalities as spokesmen for a particular point of view. You see an example in this debate organized by a site called IM1776, which is “a magazine of cultural and sociopolitical analysis.”

It should be noted that IM1776 is the product of a not-for-profit called The Art & Literature Foundation, which appears to be the brainchild of an Italian guy named Mark Granza, who had his political awakening in 2016. You can read a lengthy interview of him in this English language Hungarian site. For the sake of clarity, IM1776 is financially supported by Claremont. It is always wise to know how someone pays his bills before assessing his political opinions.

That aside, what you see in this back and forth is the same specter that has haunted Western political thought since 1789. That is the specter of ideology. Both men are in their own way ideologues. They have an image of how society ought to be organized based on how they think men ought to act toward one another. While their ideal society is something of an end point, it is, in fact, the starting point for them. In other words, they begin with the end in mind.

For Curtis Yarvin, the end is a form of monarchy not because he thinks it is the best in the abstract sense of the best society, but that only through an absolute ruler can the things he likes about Western society be defended from the dark forces that seek to unsettle our cultural norms. Rufo, on the other hand, is a natural rights republican, who thinks the ideal society is based in individual rights. It is only through reaffirming our natural rights that we can restore the republic.

While there is a lot of overlap between what both see as the ideal society, they clearly have different visions for how to achieve it. Yarvin thinks we have to wait for the great man to emerge and topple the present order. Alternatively, the present orders collapses, and a great man emerges. Rufo thinks the way forward is to nibble away at the civil rights order by attacking it fruits. His current project is to hold the diversity hires in the academy to the alleged standards of the academy.

For most people this sounds logical. You start every project with the end in mind and you see that is the Yarvin – Rufo debate. In fact, that is the primary appeal of both Chris Rufo and Curtis Yarvin. They hold up this image of a possible future and if you like what you see, you support their program. This has been how political debate has been framed in the West since the French Revolution. You are presented with two images of the future and asked to pick one of them.

The problem with this, the reason that ideology must always fail, is that it never considers if the end is possible or even plausible. This is not because the ideologue is incapable of doubting the ideology. It is because ideology must always rest on the assumption that all societies are intentional societies. What we see is the product of human labor, therefore the goodness or badness of society reflects the goodness or badness of the people who made it.

Good people not only follow a certain code, but they must constitute the telos of the society of which they are a part. No ideology ever concludes that the ideologue must disengage with society, other than if it helps him engage with fellow ideologues in plotting to overthrow the present order. Ideology assumes you must be engage in the project of moving society toward the desired end. Otherwise, you are assumed to be working against those who are doing so.

To think that society is anything other than the fruit of human labor would be a nullification of ideology. If society is the product or random chance, for example, then what we ought to do to improve society is meaningless. It makes no difference what we think we ought to do, as the result is just a random walk. If what we see is the best we can muster from the material at hand, then the ideal, what we ought to seek, is actually a hindrance to creating a harmonious society.

As an aside, this explains the rejection of biological reality. The popularity of the trans business is one way of denying biological reality and the limits it must place on what is possible for human society. The New Right rejects biology as it undermines their claims about the nature of man. As soon as you accept biological reality, most arguments about how we ought to live become superstition. You are left with the question of what can we do with the material at hand.

Another thing you see with all of the participants in the New Right project is that none of them are looking forward in the sense that some novel vision of the future is leading them to question their own assumptions of the past. Their prize is something like what the French philosopher Jacques Derrida called hauntology. The New Right is sentimental for a promised future that never materialized. It is why they focus so much on the “wrong turns” of the past.

What all this leads to is the fact that we are seeing the end of ideology. It is easy to forget, but ideology is a relatively novel thing in the history of man. The Franks did not have a governing ideology. The Greeks were not ideologues. Rameses did not govern with a vision of the future in mind. For all of human history, how we ought to organize society was a practical question, not a moral one. Ideology is an invention of Western man, the weeds that grew out of the rubble of the Thirty Years War.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

Taxes & Conservatism

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Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about the classic comedy, Dr, Strangelove, in which I reveal that I am a humorless dullard, a post about how O. J. Simpson was framed by the Clintons and the Sunday podcast. Subscribe here or here.

Today is Tax Day in America, a day when millions of Americans drop tear-soaked checks into the mail, along with their many tax forms. Of course, for most Americans it is now just another day. Their taxes are simple, and their tax is paid by their employer throughout the year. The resulting decline of Tax Day and the tax issue is a good entry point for examining how our politics have changed over the last decade and a good place to start when thinking about the death of conservatism.

Half a century ago, the run-up to Tax Day was a big party for the people we call conservatives, as it gave them an excuse to go out into the streets, banging their pots and pans about the unfairness of the tax code. Taxes were not only too high, but they were also far too complicated. Rarely said, but often implied, was the claim that a complex tax code allowed special interests to game the system and avoid taxes or bribe their favorite politicians to get special tax breaks.

You never hear this sort of talk now. Taxes were the bread-and-butter issue of so-called conservatives since Barry Goldwater, but no more. One reason for that is tax simplification was passed under Trump. For most Americans taxes are a few clicks on the computer and that is it. Business owners, rich people and the self-employed still have to go through the game of guessing what the IRS says they owe, but the typical suburban peasant is now free of this burden.

Interestingly, a central theme of so-called conservatives in the 1970’s and 1980’s regarding taxes was that if people knew how much they really paid in taxes they would revolt against the welfare state. There were schemes back then to make taxes a quarterly affair, so everyone was always be aware of their tax burden. Instead, they went the other way and made taxes simpler, so that their voters no longer cared about the main issue for the so-called conservatives.

Of course, the main reason so-called conservatives have forgotten about the tax issue is they have done with it what they have done with so many other issues and that is embraced the position of the people they oppose. The fiscal conservative is like a guy wearing a denim leisure suit in Washington. It is so rare to hear anyone talk about the nation’s finances that when it happens it brings back memories of those halcyon days when the Gipper was shaking his fist at the Soviets.

This raises another truth about so-called conservatism. They were sure that if you starved the system of taxes, it would have to cut spending. Despite history saying otherwise, they were certain of it. Instead, they habituated their minds to ever growing deficits and an incomprehensible national debt. Per capita debt is about five times higher than under Reagan and about four times higher as a percentage of the GDP, so it is safe to say they were all wrong about this one.

There is a demographic aspect to this as well. When the baby boomers were in their prime working years, it was good politics to promise them lower taxes and greater returns from their investments. Now that they are retiring in droves, the tax ploy no longer works, so no one discusses it. Instead, it is good politics to create more money from thin air to pay for the entitlement programs. Like everything else about conservatism, taxes were nothing but a good marketing ploy.

This raises another tax-related issue. Tax collections are at record highs, but the deficit is also at all-time highs. The federal deficit in 2023 was $1.7 trillion. The rosiest of rosy scenarios says that federal budget deficits be $20 trillion over the next decade and federal debt held by the public will reach 116 percent of GDP. Given that these projections always turn out wrong, it is not hard to see why no one in Washington is talking about taxes or the state of the budget.

This is why so-called conservatism is headed to the dustbin of history. It was never really a conservative political movement, but more of a money laundering scheme masquerading as a political movement. The response to progressives promising to rob your neighbor and let you have a piece was so-called conservatives promising to rob the progressive and let you have a piece. Taken together we got a half century of systemic looting of their American economy.

For the last half century, the white middle-class has been the kid getting bullied at school for his lunch money. Progressives, representing the financial elites, threatened to shove the suburban peasant into a locker. So-called conservatives kept upping the lunch money they had to pay to avoid the wedgie. Now those suburban peasants are too old for school, so those financial elites are looking to prey on their children and grandchildren to keep the plates spinning.

Another legacy of the so-called conservatives with regards to tax policy is the sacralization of rich people. Part of their sales pitch for tax changes was the claim that our noble rich people were paying more than their fair share in taxes. This was always nonsense, but it convinced most white people that it is immoral to question the motives and behavior of the rich. One result is a perfidious and destructive ruling class that seems hellbent on pulling the roof down on all of us.

In the end, the disappearance of the tax issue from public debate is a good reminder that we are at the end of a long cycle. That means we are about to start on a new political cycle, so the past framing of things is of no use to us. The old ideas and arguments from the last century, things like tax fairness, need to be sent to the dustbin of history along with the people who championed them. In some future Tax Day, no one will have a reason to think of so-called conservatism.

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

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

A Very American Scam

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For fifty years abortion was a part of the national political debate due to the fight to overturn Roe v. Wade. Those who opposed abortion sought to overturn this court decision, thus returning the issue to the people. The pro-life side assumed they could win the argument and get laws passed to end most abortions. The pro-abortion people obviously fought to prevent this, even though they always claimed the vast majority of the people saw abortion as a holy sacrament.

Abortion was always a good money maker for Conservative Inc. because on the one hand, they only had to pay lip service to the moral issue. It was not as if they could pass legislation or change a regulation to meet the demands of their voters. The courts would just strike down those changes. On the other hand, the only path to victory was getting a majority of pro-life people in office, especially the White house, so the courts could be stocked with pro-life judges. That meant voting Republican.

The way the two party grift has worked since the middle of the last century was that the Democrats conjure novel ideas and find creative ways to normalize them with the progressive segment of the population. Once these ideas gain circulation, the Republicans pretend to oppose these new ideas. Both sides squabble over it, thus narrowing the options to their preferred positions. Then they aggressively fundraise off it as the novel ideas are slowly implemented.

The genius of this arrangement is the elites get what they want, while both parties protect themselves from outside threats by sucking all the oxygen out of the room in their endless media debates. With the oxygen comes the money, which keeps both camps in the lifestyle they think they deserve. Just as important, none of that money goes to anyone who has a third opinion. The political rackets rest on every issue being reduce to a binary choice.

Here is where you can see why the ruling class hates Trump. When he ran for office, he went to the pro-life crowd with a rational offer, rather than the old offer they have always got from conservatives. He told them he needed their vote and even though he was not one of them, he would deliver for them because he needed their vote. Social conservatives, outside of the professional ones, saw this as a rational offer and maybe better than what they have gotten for the last fifty years.

In office, Trump did what he saw as the rational thing and set about appointing pro-life judges up and down the system. From his point of view, this made perfect sense as he would need the support of these people in the next election. If he could show he delivered, then they would come out in droves. His good fortune was that things broke in such a way that the court finally overturned Roe. Both parties hate him because of things like this that disrupt the political rackets.

Putting that aside, the overturn of Roe was a disaster for Pro-Life Inc and the elite of the social conservativism rackets. They no longer had this issue to use in their fundraisers, other than to wage battles at the state level. Since the leaders of these rackets live in swanky homes around the imperial capital, heading out to the wilderness to help the Dirt People wage political fights is horrifying. This idea is equivalent to Pol Pot sending the intellectuals out to the rice fields.

Since the court sent the issue back to the states, the people running for national office no longer have a reason to primp and preen about abortion. If the national candidates stop talking about abortion, the associated money rackets no longer have a reason to raise money to help “their candidates.” That means the money givers no longer have a reason to give money to these guys. Suddenly, thanks to Trump, a billion-dollar industry is threatened with extinction. What to do?

This is why we now have the mass media claiming abortion is the most important issue on the minds of voters. If a Democrat wins a race for dog catcher in East Podunk Missouri, the Washington Post has a pic of young females standing in line to vote, with the claim they are there because of abortion. The political experts, who are always wrong about everything, rush in to explain how this is a threat to Trump as women too busy in their cubicles to have sex are furious about abortion.

It is all nonsense, but despite the fact the media is nothing but a firehose of lies, people still fall for these tricks, especially people who call themselves conservative. Integral to being a conservative is accepting without question the opinions of your enemies while endlessly tone policing your supporters. If the New York Times announces that the cool kids are now wearing flowerpots on their heads, conservatives will swear it is true and produce the conservative case for flowerpots.

This is where Conservative Inc. has swung into action on abortion. Their new scheme to re-nationalize the issue is to champion a national ban on abortion. You see, their big idea now that the courts sent the issue back to the states, something conservatives argued for since Roe, is to take it back from the states and pass a bill that bans all abortion at the federal level. Of course, they cannot do this without your support so make your check out to Conservative Inc.

The only way such a scheme could ever happen is if the Republicans had a huge majority in the House, a super-majority in the Senate and had a pro-life president in the White House. Thanks to Republican support for open borders and election rigging, this is now impossible. Even if it did happen, the Bush years tell us that they would fink on their voters anyway. Remember fake evangelical George Bush nominating pro-abortion Harriet Miers to the court?

Abortion is a good example of why moral issues cannot be decided through any sort of democratic process. Even if the process is legitimate and the participants come to the issue in good faith, you will not get universal agreement. If such an agreement were possible, it would have happened organically and then the only politics around the issue would be about the best policy to support the moral consensus. Otherwise, there is no debating someone out of their sense of right and wrong.

This is why the scam that is the American political system loves moral issues like abortion, because they can never be solved politically. This means they can frame it as two sides with neither side ever having a chance to fully win. Roe was manna from heaven for Conservative Inc., but now the overturning of Roe is manna from Gaia for the aging spinsters running the feminism rackets. They can finally stop talking about men in dresses waving their genitals at children.

If one is looking for a white pill in these dark times it is that the abortion issue has finally returned to its natural place. Like all moral issues, it is one that must be decided by the collective agreement of likeminded people. This means it is a local issue. States and localities can then treat abortion the same way they manage other thorny moral issues like the location of gentlemen’s clubs. In the end, sanity prevailed, and abortion has become something for communities to resolve on their own.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

The Real World War

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Note: As everyone probably knows, VDare has been under assault by the regime for years and may finally be forced to close down. They have been de-banked so the only way to send them money at the moment is GiveSendGo. If you can spare a few bucks, they could sure use it.

Over the last two years most people who bother paying attention to the world have figured out that the American Empire is waging a proxy war on Russia. The primary proxy is Ukraine, but lesser proxies are also involved. Armenia used to have good relations with Russia but has now been turned into a Western catspaw for the purpose of stirring up trouble in the region. America overthrew the government of Pakistan two years ago so they would not cooperate with Russia.

We could be seeing another front in the war. Israel made the outlandish decision to bomb the Iranian embassy in Damascus. Reportedly the target was a high-ranking Iranian general who was at the facility holding meetings. It could be the other people were the real targets or it could just have been a target of opportunity as Israel tries to draw Iran into a war. Regardless, targeting an embassy in a third country violates centuries of precedent and custom.

Embassies are technically the territory of the country operating them, so this attack on the Iranian embassy is the same as an attack on Iran. That is how the world will view it and certainly how Iran sees it. The Middle East is a dirty place and all of the players, especially Israel, are dirty players, but this is well beyond the norm. There is also the fact that Israel is bombing the capital of Syria, even though there is no state of war between the two countries.

The way to think of this is to imagine if the Russians hit the American embassy in Poland with a missile. Russia is not legally at war with Poland or America, even if both countries are aiding and abetting Ukraine. If the Russians attacked Poland, then it is war, and everyone understands this. Somehow, Israel and her supporters in America seem to think this rule does not apply to Israel. Both China and Russia have come out with strong statements condemning the attack.

One of the worst kept secrets on earth right now is that Israel wants a war with Iran, and they assume this will draw in the United States. The Israelis wanted this war back in the Bush years during the Iraq war. They assume Iran would lose such a war and the regime would be toppled as a result. Israel foreign policy is based on the idea that if the Arab world is in chaos, there will be no organized resistance to Israel. Of course, Iran is also working on getting nuclear weapons.

The question now is what happens next. The Biden administration does not want a war with Iran as the military is stretched thin. Presumably, they will try to make some sort of backroom deal with Iran to defuse things. Russia is the chief sponsor of Syria and has air defense systems in the country. To this point they have not shot down Israeli jets, but that could change now. Russia is also a partner with Iran so the Russians will need to do something to show support for both countries.

China has been making inroads into the region, primarily by helping to facilitate a reproachment between the Saudis and Iran. The peace that now exists between the Houthis and the Saudis is largely a result of this effort. Iran sponsors the Houthis, and they agreed to make peace with the Saudis as part of this warming relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Note the Saudis have not allowed America to use its airspace to attack the Houthis.

In other words, this is not twenty years ago when Iran was alone and largely isolated from the world due to American sanctions. Iran now has two enormously powerful allies, and it is slowly rejoining the Arab alliance led by Saudi Arabia. Iran now has options that it did not have two decades ago. Instead of retaliation we will probably see an effort to win a diplomatic war against Israel, with the help of China and Russia, as Israel is, for all practical purposes, a tentacle of the American Empire.

This is where the real war is being waged at the moment. The American Empire is based on the assertion that the post-Cold War world is a rules-based one led by the United States, who enforces the rules. The repeated violations of the rules by Washington are what drives both Russia and China. Their argument in favor of a multipolar world is that Washington cannot be trusted to follow the rules, so Washington letting Israel violate important rules is a proof of sorts.

There is also the obvious fact that Washington can no longer control Israel. You get to be the lone superpower when everyone has to obey. Israel thumbing its nose at Washington over Gaza is a problem. Israel bombing embassies in third countries is a humiliation of Washington. The Washington led order rests on everyone, including Israel, accepting that order. If Israel does not respect that order, then it will not be long before the rest of the world follows suit.

Of course, what we are seeing in this new world war is chaos all along the borders of the American Empire. Washington’s plan for Russia for the last three decades has been to create chaos around the borders of Russia, believing this would slowly sap her economic and political strength. This is what is now happening to the American Empire, which is forced to race around the world dealing with crises, many of which are the result of its own actions, like we see in Ukraine.

This is what may prevent a regional war in the Middle East. Russia and China know that time is on their side. As a result, Iran also can play the waiting game. At some point, the American Empire will have no choice but to give up on the region. It has largely been driven out at this point. There are American troops in Syria and Iraq, but the cost of supporting them will soon be prohibitive. Instead of Iran retaliating against Israel, she can wait and deal with Israel at a later date.

What we are seeing is the world organizing not for a great final war with the American Empire but the world organizing to manage the decline of the empire. Washington stirs up trouble hoping to preserve itself by unsettling rivals and Israel hopes to start a regional war before her patron is too weak. Meanwhile, the rising powers of the world are trying to avoid a real war with the declining American Empire. The real world war is a war to survive the end of the last empire.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

After Left And Right

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Note #1: Behind the green door is a post about Gen-Z being raised on the internet and a post about failing up in managerialism. The Sunday podcast was cancelled due to Easter and nothing happening. Subscribe here or here.

Note #2: For those he need to hear my voice as much as possible, there is my appearance on the Killstream last week. I also recorded a show with a young YouTuber who asked some interesting questions.

Note #3: Some may have noticed that I did some experimenting with the comment system over the weekend. It was not without its bugs, so we are back to the basic setup for now. From time to time you may see things like this as I experiment with ideas for the new site that is in the works.

Over the last decade, “conservatism” in America has declined reputationally largely due to the failures and embarrassments of professional conservatism. Depending upon your disposition, the Bush years either sent the conservative movement over a cliff or exposed it for being nothing more than a financial hustle. There are other views of the failure of professional conservatism and all of them are right in their own way, but there is no denying that the Buckley project has failed.

As a result, the last decade has seen various efforts to create a “new right” to replace the Buckley project. Remnants of the alt-right went so far as to call themselves the “new right” for a while, but they had nothing to offer but new slogans. The Claremont collective has fumbled about trying to create a new conservatism, piggybacking on the populism of Donald Trump. Yoram Hazony has tried to preach a new form of nationalism to take the place of conservatism.

So far none of these efforts has made much progress, outside of creating some interesting debates at times. Most recently Claremont published a long essay on its main site attacking the contradictions within Hazony’s nationalism. On their American Mind site they posted a response from David Goldman, formerly known as Spengler in the Asia Times, coming to the partial defense of nationalism. Less rigorous minds have also waded into the topic with echolalic babbling.

One problem that all attempts to fashion a new right face is something Kesler touched on in his essay about Hazony’s nationalism. America is and always has been a multicultural country. Even putting aside the race issue, the thirteen colonies that came together to form the United States were composed of people with unique cultures and histories, which were often at odds with the other states. These differences pre-dated the colonies themselves, coming over from the Old World.

This presents an obvious problem for nationalism as by definition it assumes a common people with common ancestors. Nationalism is exclusive to a particular people, which cannot work when the people are a mixed bag of various people from different parts of the world with different histories. The story of the Tidewater is different from the story of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Framers understood this which is why they settled on a federal system of government.

As Samuel Goldman explained in his excellent little book, After Nationalism, what has held America together since the beginning is a combination of the covenant, the crucible and the creed. The covenant being a mission to build the city on the hill, the crucible being the shared struggle that binds our various people together and the creed is the statement of shared principles. To one degree or another, these concepts still turn up in our political rhetoric.

Early in his book, Goldman quotes the historian Wilfred McClay, who wrote, “Ties of blood, religion, and soil are not sufficient to hold us together as Americans, and they never have been. We are forever in the business of making a workable unity out of our unruly plurality.” This is the problem with nationalism as a defining force in America, but it also presents a problem for anything calling itself conservatism. Which is why the covenant, the crucible and the creed have shaped conservatism.

Like nationalism, conservatism is strongly tied to the past. You cannot have nationalism without a shared history or at least an overlapping history. Different parts of Germany may have unique pasts, but they share enough of a common past to feel a part of the greater concept of German. Similarly, conservatism seeks to preserve social order by maintaining historical continuity. Conservatives do not oppose change, but instead seek to contain new ideas within the framework of the past.

Central to conservatism is the notion that some things are too important to be put up to the scrutiny of reason. Questioning a tradition, for example, should be resisted even if the logic of tradition is no longer obvious. Conservatives assume that the shared habits of a people exist for a reason. Altering or abandoning the old ways risks unknown and unwelcome consequences, so change must be gradual and cautious. Traditions are the result of trial and error over many generations.

The specter that haunts conservatism, however, is who decides that certain things are not to be questioned? Traditions and customs do not fall out of the sky onto people, but are the product of people, a specific people. The reason they are traditions is they have been handed down to you by your ancestors. They are part of your cultural inheritance that comes from those with whom you share blood. Again, this is something the Framers understood as they debated the new Constitution.

What this means is American conservatism must limit itself to defending the political order as defined by the Constitution. Since that order allows for unlimited changes to the document itself, not to mention unlimited interpretation of the plain text, conservatism is committed to defending a moving target. It is why American conservatism has always been, as Robert Lewis Dabney observed a century ago, “the shadow that follows Radicalism as it moves forward towards perdition.”

There is another problem for conservatism in America. The thing they wish to defend, even if they dismiss the centuries of innovation since its creation, is itself the product of the radical idea of the intentional society. The Framers started from the assumption that they could create the society they wanted because society is, as John Locke understood, the result of human labor and intention. Maker’s knowledge lets man create a society as he would make anything else.

If it is perfectly moral and possible to create a nation out of the wilderness, then it is perfectly moral and possible to recreate that nation, even create a new nation from the old, to meet the demands of the present. In other words, American conservatism must defend that which it claims to oppose, because what it defends is the radical idea that we can make our society into anything we choose. America is, after all, a radical experiment in self-government.

There is a way out of this that some conservatives proposed. Pat Buchanan, for example, argued that the Constitution was the result of British people living in the New World for two centuries. The final organizing document by the Framers was simply the only option possible for the American people. Defending the Constitution is a defense of the people and history behind it, not whatever abstract political theories some people claim as the inspiration for the Constitution.

That may be true, but it runs into that same old problem. The people who created that world and the political order that sprang from it are long gone, along with their sense of history and identity. That America was not just European. It was almost exclusively British and Protestant. America will soon be majority-minority and the founding stock is down to ten percent of the population. Defending something that no longer exists is no more possible than defending a moving target.

All of this brings us to why there will not be a “new right” that emerges from the wreckage of professional conservatism. There never was a right in America, at least not since the North conquered the South. Once the last bits of hierarchy were washed from the continent in the blood of the Confederacy, conservatism ceased to be a thing that could take root in the New World. America is and continues to be a radical experiment, a perpetual revolution seeking to reach the end of history.

This is not all bad news. Conservatism in America has always been a reaction to the peculiar ideology of progressivism which emerged in the 19th century. Conservatism sought to create an alternative ideology as an antidote to progressivism. The failure of conservatism may lead to a greater understanding that the antidote to ideology is not ideology but the anathematization of ideology. In its place there may grow a chemotherapy to the cancer of ideology.

This could be helped by the fact that we seem to be reaching the end of the ideological age, as what we call liberal democracy, but is the mature version of American progressivism, reaches its end. The last ideological states are all in a crisis, which has put the ideology in crisis. Just as failure anathematized the other great ideologies, the failure of Western liberalism may do the same for progressivism, perhaps opening the way to an organic organizing ethos.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

Bridge Thoughts

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In the 18th century, planners did not have to worry too much about ships smashing into bridges because ships were small and made of wood, while bridges and seaports were massive and made of stone. If a captain made an error and hit a bridge support, his ship would be damaged, but the bridge would be fine. The worst case is it would take a few days to clear the debris of the ship from the waterway. In other words, the seaways were somewhat error resistant.

The news of the Francis Scott Key bridge collapse is an obvious example of how this is no longer the case in the modern world. That ship is massive, relative to anything that existed a century ago, much less the 18th century. The bridge, in contrast, was a slim wisp of thing compared to bridges in the past. When it was completed half a century ago it was the third longest truss bridge in the world. Now, of course, it is a pile of scrap iron after having been knocked off its moorings.

People will naturally rush forward with their favorite pet theory about how this could have happened. None of these claims are about the accident or why it happened, but rather a way to use the event to promote their favorite theory. Steve Sailer has decided to avoid the usual answers and instead go with an insane theory about bombs being squirrelled away on the ship. No doubt the usual suspects are working on a plot where Putin is responsible for the accident.

For those who know how ports operate, especially an inland port like the Port of Baltimore, the most likely answer is more mundane. These ships are piloted by a harbor pilot in and out of the upper bay. These are men who know every inch of the waterway and rely on a large support staff to pilot the vessel. That means the cause is a failure of that system, most likely the ships navigation systems. It lost power and the crew was unable to restore power before hitting the bridge.

Putting that aside, the port is the ninth largest seaport in the country and has certain specialties like the import of cars, which cannot be easily replaced. Until the bridge debris is cleared from the waterway and the waterway is inspected, the port will remain closed, which will create supply chain problems throughout the year. Of course, the bridge is a vital part of the local ground transportation system. Baltimore is surrounded by a beltway system and this bridge was a key part of it.

Replacing the bridge has been debated over the last ten years, but the will to do it has never been enough to overcome the sclerosis that plagues state politics. A project that will not be done until most of the people voting on it are dead or retired is never going to get a lot of support in the modern age. The things that get pols trending on social media is what gets the support, even if the reason to be trending on social media is the ghetto has just lost track of one of its simpletons.

Now they will have no choice but to replace the bridge, but that will take years to debate and then years to get approval and then more years to build. The people who make the economy work will figure out ways around this new obstacle in the meantime, so there will be no sense of urgency to address the bridge problem. In fact, it is entirely possible that the bridge is never replaced. A generation from now people will look at the remaining pillars the way people look at old Roman aqueducts.

If you want to contextualize this accident into something bigger, the best approach is from the angle of complexity. Like everything else in the American economy, our ports have become extremely complex systems with many points of failure. There are millions of people with the word “logistics” in their job title who make sure that some point of failure does not fail in the complex system of moving goods in and out of the country and around the country to your store.

One reason for that is the berserk quest for efficiency. Every manager in the system dreams the dream of that box of Cheerios arriving on the shelf just at the moment you decide to reach for it. Everything in the economy is now geared to reduce the shelf time, warehouse time and transport time of every item. Every bit of extra is cut from the system to maximize profit, but the result is often fragile systems that work well when there are no problems but fail miserably in a crisis.

The complexity problem is turning up in the Ukraine war. Russia, with its massive industrial base and redundant systems, now outproduces the West in terms of military supplies at a fraction of the cost. Western countries with massive GDP’s are faced with impossibly complex economies that cannot be quickly modified to address the need to make even simple things like artillery shells. Like the now collapsed bridge, solving this problem will probably never happen.

That is the other angle to this accident. That bridge was built in 1976 and was out of capacity twenty-five years ago. A second span should have been started at the turn of the century with a third span or another bridge up stream in the works, but these sorts of projects are not popular with modern politicians. Half a century ago, the political class was not obsessed with media attention, so they could think longer term about projects that would benefit those who followed them.

It is popular to blame “democracy” for our present ills, but our political system has not changed in fifty years. If anything, we are less democratic today. What has changed is the explosion of media. We now live suspended in a media solution. As a result, even the lowest person measures himself by likes, follows and media exposure. This has warped the political class the most, turning them into ridiculous carny acts that do nothing but find ways to get attention in the mass media.

In the end, none of this matters. The bridge story will dominate the news for a few days this week, but then the media will be onto the next thing. By the end of the summer the port will be reopened, and the bridge will be forgotten. The bridge is a symptom of a much larger problem for which no one has any answers, at least not answers that get you trending on Twitter. Maybe the remains of the bridge will one day be a warning that a people that does invest in its future has no future.

If you like my work and wish to kick in a few bucks, you can buy me a beer. You can sign up for a SubscribeStar subscription and get some extra content. You can donate via PayPal. My crypto addresses are here for those who prefer that option. You can send gold bars to: Z Media LLC P.O. Box 432 Cockeysville, MD 21030-0432. Thank you for your support!

Promotions: Good Svffer is an online retailer partnering with several prolific content creators on the Dissident Right, both designing and producing a variety of merchandise including shirts, posters, and books. If you are looking for a way to let the world know you are one of us without letting the world know you are one one is us, then you should but a shirt with the Lagos Trading Company logo.

The Pepper Cave produces exotic peppers, pepper seeds and plants, hot sauce and seasonings. Their spice infused salts are a great add to the chili head spice armory, so if you are a griller, take you spice business to one of our guys.

Above Time Coffee Roasters are a small, dissident friendly company that roasts its own coffee and ships all over the country. They actually roast the beans themselves based on their own secret coffee magic. If you like coffee, buy it from these folks as they are great people who deserve your support.

Havamal Soap Works is the maker of natural, handmade soap and bath products. If you are looking to reduce the volume of man-made chemicals in your life, all-natural personal products are a good start.

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

Work Until You Die

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There seems to be a secret plot to inject the idea of cutting Social Security into the national debate for the looming presidential election. This plot is among the slithering lizard people known as the conservatives. It started with the oleaginous Ben Shapiro demanding that white people work until they die. He then went to Twitter to gin up more talk among the mouth breathers in favor of cutting Social Security. Now the Republican Party is promoting the idea in Congress.

It is an odd coincidence that once Trump secured the nomination, his alleged allies started talking up an idea that has no constituency. No one wants to throw their granny into the street, and no one wants to throw their parents into the streets. More important, the tens of millions of retired white people do not want to be thrown into the streets, especially in the name of sending their last pennies to Israel. It is the third rail of politics for a reason, so why are these reptiles bringing it up now?

The most popular reason is they hope to slime Trump with this issue, thus undermining his general election campaign. They assume, and probably correctly, that the mass media will claim he wants to murder your granny in the promised bloodbath this autumn, no matter what Trump says about the subject. So far, Trump has mostly ignored it, only mentioning the problems of fraud in Medicare. Fraud is a massive problem with Medicare, but fraud is a defining feature of America now.

Another reason for this sudden interest in poisoning their election chances is that idiots run the Republican Party. The reason the party has been called “the stupid party” for generations is it is run by stupid people. They are clever and scheming, necessary skills for democratic politics, but they are not as cynical as the the other side. As a result, Republican leaders are the forever Charlie Brown, sure that this time the Democrats will let them kick the football.

Then there is the fact that the Republican Party and American conservatism evolved in the 20th century as losers. The GOP’s natural role is as the cleanup crew for the Democrats, who run around smashing things. For their part, the so-called conservatives busy themselves racing in front of speeding trains yelling “stop” while the rest boast about how their principles forbid them from winning. Conservatism evolved to be the consolation prize for the politically inept.

You can probably take a little bit from each column and produce a mix that explains the sudden interest in snuffing out granny. There is nothing about any of these possible answers that contradicts the others. Ben Shapiro is a skeevy little hobbit man who hates Trump with the intensity of a thousand suns, but he is also a mediocrity who has a habit of stepping on rakes. There is a reason that his handlers make sure to never expose him to adults during his public appearances.

There is another element to this and that is the desire of many people, no doubt many people from the loser party, to get back to debating issues. The United States does have real problems that could quickly become catastrophic problems if they remain unaddressed by the political class. For example, there is a pre-French Revolution vibe to the government’s finances. This post in Chronicles is a good explainer and a good example of the desire to return to real issues.

Now, “experts” have been predicting doom over the national debt for generations and doom is always twenty years off. It is like the collapse of “fiat money” or affordable solar energy in that it is always twenty years away. Unlike the other two, math says there is a limit to how much debt the government can issue. At some point, the appetite for new debt will decline as everyone will be holding as much debt as they need. At that point, new debt comes with new, much higher costs to the government.

As far as how to avoid this debt cliff, the only answer is the one answer everyone agrees must never be debated. That answer is ending the Global American Empire and returning to normalcy. That means reducing the military budget by ninety percent, deporting the tens of millions of freeloaders, and cracking enough rich people’s heads, maybe even lopping off a few of them, to get the economic elites inline. None of that can be debated, so they talk about killing your granny.

For the most part, Social Security runs reasonably well. The big problem, as far as old people programs, is Medicare, which is riddled with fraud, but Social Security is largely free of fraud and waste. Suring up its finances during the great baby boomer retirement should not be a great challenge. If life expectancy continues to decline, then it will be a self-correcting problem. In other words, if you are worried about the looming debt crisis, there are better places to look for answers.

That is what really gives this topic the French Revolution vibe. A big reason for the revolution was the gordian knot of royal finances. France desperately needed financial reform, but the rich people opposed it because they saw no profit in it. The Global American Empire faces the same problem. All the best people agree that we face a looming financial crisis, and they all agree that they will not sacrifice a hair on their heads to avoid it. Instead, they think you should work until you die.

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