Category Archives: Politics

Female Trouble

Posted on by

Looking back, we had, in the person of Teddy Roosevelt, the finest President in the history of this country. He had the spirit and determination that matched the times and the land. Then the women got the vote, and everything went to hell. While our boys was overseas fighting the Kaiser, the women got Prohibition put in. Drinking and gambling and whoring were declared unlawful. All those things which come natural to men became crimes.

–The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean

One of the more obvious aspects of the modern lynch mob is it is almost always composed of women. Sure, there will be men tagging along, maybe throwing in some shots of their own, but the organizers are always women. Maybe a homosexual male will start it with a point and shriek, but 99 times out of 100, the person organizing the lynch mob is going to be a woman. She will sound the alarm and the rest of the coven will arrive, ready to set fire to the wicker man.

The social justice warrior phenomenon is mostly a product of Facebook and Twitter, as these services made it easier for stupid people to get on-line and blast their idiocy worldwide. As a result, unhinged young women now have easy access to a megaphone. Whenever one of them gets the boo-hoos or feels slighted by a man, she can give a couple of blasts on the horn and before long we have #gamergate or some other nonsense controversy.

That’s the most striking feature of the social justice warrior phenomenon. It is young, unattached females. Put #gamegate into a google machine and the third hit is a blog run by a lonely, unstable female. In fact, feminism today is just that, lonely unattached females looking for a purpose to their lives. Instead of snagging  a husband and having kids, they kit themselves out like extras from the freak show and scream at men for not loving them. Instead of tending to children, they talk endlessly about their unused female parts.

Much of what is going wrong in the West is some version of what we are seeing with the endless hashtag campaigns run by women. The female of our species has a biological purpose. That’s to find a suitable mate, bear children and raise them to sexual maturity. That’s nature’s assignment to women. Anything else is either in support of that purpose, frivolous or in opposition to biological necessity.

The result of a century of feminism is a society that works against the interests of women. Young men are no longer obligated to get married and be family men. In fact, being a traditional male is routinely mocked by popular culture. All the pressure on men is to not get married. Instead, males have easy sexual access to females, to whom they have no obligation, other than cab fare to the abortion clinic.

It’s not just young females who are suffering from a century of feminism. Middle-aged women have always faced a difficult time. The kids leave and the mother’s purpose expires. Every man over the age of 40 understands that women often go bonkers at this stage of life. They get into weird causes or begin to obsess over trying to look young. Because we live in an age where so many women made it to this age without bearing children, we now have a surplus of women like Melissa Click.

At the risk of sounding like a neanderthal, Mx. Click should be somewhere doting on grandchildren right now, not out making a nuisance of herself. Instead, the self-defeating religion of feminism guides her into self-destructive behavior that has led to a life of frustration. That frustration comes from pursuing an endless list of causes and movements that can never satisfy the biological urge. Her life is an endless itch that can never be scratched.

We are learning the hard way that Aristophanes was right all along. A society run by women can never work. And the West is run by women, make no mistake. This pic of the defense ministers of Europe is a regular on twitter. The most powerful country in the EU is run by an old maid. The US could very well install an old lesbian as president this fall. Liberal men spend their days watching cuckold porn and trying on sundresses, while writing angry posts about bathroom laws.

This is not a stable arrangement, which is why the West is struggling to perform the basics of a human society. The women of Europe are demanding open borders, which drives up their mating opportunities. That’s biology. The trouble is the young men arriving see the women as utterly useless as women, beyond momentary sexual release. That’s the rapefugee crisis in a nutshell. The Muslims are right. The West is run by whores and homosexuals.

This will not end well.

The Prison Vote

Posted on by

The corrupt governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, announced the other day that ex-cons will be granted the vote just in time of the presidential election. His assumption is that identity politics being what it is, the ex-con vote will naturally flock to Hillary Clinton, supporting someone they see as their own. There has always been an assumption that convicts, if given the chance, will vote for people like themselves.

That is the assumption. The reality is something different. Ex-cons tend not to vote at all. Those who would be inclined to vote are those who have gone the other way with their lives, embracing religion or social advocacy to help ex-cons get on the right path. It is a small club that will not make a difference in an election. Their party choice will most likely be along racial lines. The honkies voting for the Christian Republicans and the blacks voting for Liberal Democrats.

What is really going on here is an attempt to energize the black vote, particularly the female black vote. There is an assumption among white plutocrats that because so many black men are in prison, black women are naturally soft on crime. Liberals have done the math and realized that Obama won states like Virginia the first time on the overwhelming turnout among black women. Without black women voting in large numbers, he may have lost in 2012.

The image of the wailing black woman, as her son is led away to prison, is what they have in mind. They think by being soft on crime, they can appeal to that voter. Of course, that same black woman will be the first one yelling that the police do not do their job, so it is more complicated than the rich honkies understand. That and the last time I checked; Hillary is not a charming black man. That is what these black women saw in 2008, not a cackling hag promising treats.

There is also an HBD assumption in the weeds here. Lefty will call you a racist for noticing that blacks commit an enormous amount of crime, but they base their political calculations on it. They make assumptions about blacks that would make the Aryan Brotherhood blush. Even the AB understands that not all black people think alike. That has always been the thing with Lefty. He talks like MLK but lives like the KKK.

Whether or not ex-cons should be allowed to vote is a tricky subject. On the one hand, we have the idea of paying your debt to society. You break the law and you pay the price for it. Once the price is paid, your rights are restored. Including the right to vote makes a lot of sense. The argument here is that we want to encourage ex-cons to become good citizens and the promise of a second chance is an incentive. Either you paid your debt or you still owe, there’s no in between.

Of course, the right to own a gun should also be restored, but you can be sure no one will ever ask Liberal Democrats about that issue. That is the reason the Wuss Right is in trouble. They simply refuse to go on offense. They should be attacking the Left on this very issue. Make it about the Left’s gun grabbing. That is how you win at politics. Always be on offense and force the other guy to defend his positions. But they are called the Wuss Right for a reason.

Libertarians would go even further and say we should not maintain public crime records. Once a person has fulfilled their obligations to the criminal justice system, they should not have to carry the burden of a criminal record. The argument here is a youthful indiscretion can haunt someone for the rest of their days and that is not in the public interest. Sealing the criminal records after the punishment has been served lets the offender rejoin society with a clean slate.

Keeping this stuff a secret, however, is now impossible. Put a name into Google and you can quickly find their criminal history. The Social Justice Warriors and the people who fight them use this basic tool all the time to unearth damaging information. Stop exposing criminal records to the public and a private firm will step in and do it. Imagine Apple running a criminal database. Tim Cook would expunge the records of the sodomites, but enhance the records of Christians.

Putting that aside, I am somewhat sympathetic to the argument in favor of restoring all rights to ex-cons. I have met more than a few men who lost their franchise due to being knuckleheads in their youth. They got into the drug game and eventually got busted. They went onto live normal productive lives, but were barred from voting and had to explain their criminal record to every potential employer. How that serves the public interest is hard to explain.

On the other hand, giving murderers and child molesters a clean slate is against the best interests of society. Sex crimes arise from deep psychological defects that can never be fixed. Murder is a crime against the very nature of human society that can never be truly forgiven. Housing these people in cages may not be practical, but ostracizing them via the scarlet letter is something the public will always demand. This is where my penal colony idea looks fairly good. Sex offender island would solve this problem.

The Great Transition

Posted on by

Back in the 90’s, the set of things called conservative began to merge with the set of things called Republican. By the time George Bush the Minor was crowned, the two words were interchangeable. Liberals would start hooting “extreme right-wing Republican conservative” as soon as you mentioned Bush. It was not just liberals doing it. The Conservative Industrial Complex was happy to make the two things synonymous. It made it easier for them to raise money from GOP donors.

At the same time, the folks who had been the core of American conservatism were pushed out of the set of things called conservative. There was lip service paid to things like abortion or homosexual marriage, but traditionalism was reduced to a marketing concept. Big foot conservatives and the GOP no longer cared about social issues. Instead, they were obsessed with globalism and making war on the Muslims. “Conservative” became Frank Meyer fusionism without the traditional social conservatism.

I have written a lot about how Buckley Conservatism is exhausted. It existed primarily as an argument in favor of a tough line with the Soviets and secondarily as an argument against 19th century socialism. It was a reaction to American Progressivism, not an independent intellectual movement. The Soviets are gone and no one, not even Progressives, think the worker’s paradise is a worthy goal. Conservatism no longer has a dance partner so it staggers around looking for a reason to exist.

Buckley Conservatism is now a collection of slogans mostly, but it is also a massive money making racket. The collection of monasteries around Washington DC are still cranking out policy papers and think pieces for the political class. On the Left there is nothing to write, but their monasteries are still in place, just looking for tenants. They busy themselves now with Democratic party politics, but the rickety state of the party reflects the Left. It is an old woman clutching at power.

The result is we have a strange period in American life. The old binary style of politics that has been with us since the Civil War now has a vacuum on both sides. The Left has no economic arguments and the Right has no cultural arguments. The reason the two sides scream bloody murder at one another over trivial stuff is they have no other way to distinguish one side from the other. Both sides are a straw-man for the other.

That does not mean we are headed for the singularity. The neo-cons are still with us and they may be ready to make the return trip from neo-conservative to neo-liberal, by moving out of Republican politics into Democratic politics. Intellectually, the Left has been an abandoned building since the fall of the Soviets so there is a vacuum to be filled. The coalition of groups on the Left are emotionally hostile to traditionalism, but they are open to the authoritarian globalism favored by the neoconservatives.

That Tevi Troy piece is worth reading and is probably more wishful thinking/veiled threat at this point. We are not going to see the American Enterprise Institute change uniforms overnight. That is not how these things work. Instead, it will be a slow evolution as we see guys like Jonah Goldberg, for example, transition from conservative to moderate and then liberal or whatever label they settle on at that point.

I’m picking on Goldberg because he is already laying the groundwork for his break with the Republican Party this fall. You can almost see the wheels turning as he tries to figure out how to argue that sitting out the election is the “conservative” position, despite arguing against that same position for two decades. Many of his fellows in the Conservative Industrial Complex are struggling with the same dilemma.

Now, Trump and the groundswell carrying him to the nomination is not an intellectual movement. It is not really a movement at this stage. It is simply a reaction to the fundamental contradictions in the globalist world view. You cannot have national governments beholden to their citizens in a purely global economy. If national governments are not beholden to their citizens, there is no point in being a citizen. More important, there is no reason for people to remain loyal to their rulers.

That said, ideological movements always start this way. Most peter out or become narrowly focused on achievable ends. Still, we see a lot of very smart people writing out on the fringe. If you are curious about the world and are looking for arguments about what is happening, you are not reading the mainstream guys. You are reading the weirdos of the Dark Enlightenment. That is where the action is now.

Political and ideological realignments happen in fits and starts so Trump could fizzle out only to be replaced the next time by a more polished version that is more complete as a political leader. Alternatively, the Conservative Industrial Complex could go through a counter-reformation and tilt back toward the traditionalist-conservative side. There is a large and growing mass of people rejecting the status quo. It is a market that will be met by someone.

Unimaginable Math Problems

Posted on by

In 1980, the US government owed, in one fashion or another, $909 Billion, which was about 35% of GDP. Federal spending that year was $591 Billion. If you adjust these numbers for inflation, the 1980 spending was $1,700 Billion and the debt was $2,615 Billion. Today the government spends over $3,000 Billion and the national debt is $19,000 Billion. The current estimates say the debt-to-GDP ratio will be close to 90% this year and will break 100% sometime in the next administration.

I use 1980 as a benchmark because Reagan ran on the debt issue, making it a popular topic in politics ever since. In that time, Republicans have controlled the White House for 20 of those 36 years. They have controlled the House for 18 of those years. The point here is both parties have had chances to arrest the growth of spending and debt accumulation, but neither team has bothered. As long as the Fed can monetize the debt, the politicians keep spending.

Another reason to think back to 1980 is that no one thought the current debt levels were possible. The NYTimes first used the word “trillion” in the 1970’s. The rationale behind Reagan’s tax plan was that making high taxes politically impossible meant spending would have to decline. After all, who in their right mind would keep buying bonds, even at the elevated rate of 10% for the 10-Year Treasury?

The future turned out to be a very different place than the planners of the 1980’s imagined. That’s important to keep in mind when you see stories like this regarding the nation’s public pension systems.

The US public pension system has developed a $3.4tn funding hole that will pile pressure on cities and states to cut spending or raise taxes to avoid Detroit-style bankruptcies.

According to academic research shared exclusively with FTfm, the collective funding shortfall of US public pension funds is three times larger than official figures showed, and is getting bigger.

Devin Nunes, a US Republican congressman, said: “It has been clear for years that many cities and states are critically underfunding their pension programmes and hiding the fiscal holes with accounting tricks.”

Mr Nunes, who put forward a bill to the House of Representatives last month to overhaul how public pension plans report their figures, added: “When these pension funds go insolvent, they will create problems so disastrous that the fund officials assume the federal government will have to bail them out.”

Large pension shortfalls have already played a role in driving several US cities, including Detroit in Michigan and San Bernardino in California, to file for bankruptcy. The fear is other cities will soon become insolvent due to the size of their pension deficits.

Joshua Rauh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, a think-tank, and professor of finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, who carried out the study, said: “The pension problems are threatening to consume state and local budgets in the absence of some major changes.

“It is quite likely that over a five to 10-year horizon we are going to see more bankruptcies of cities where the unfunded pension liabilities will play a large role.”

The Stanford study found that the states of Illinois, Arizona, Ohio and Nevada, and the cities of Chicago, Dallas, Houston and El Paso have the largest pension holes compared with their own revenues.

In order to deal with the large funding shortfall, many cities and states will have to increase their contributions to their pension funds, either by raising taxes or cutting spending on vital services.

That’s one possible future. The important thing to remember is the US government has no money of its own. It either taxes, borrows from foreign sources or creates credit money through the machinations of the Federal Reserve. Given the state of the federal budget and projected debt, it’s unlikely the Feds could bailout the state pension systems completely. The CBO says the total debt could hit $30,000 Billion in ten years.

The other possible future is the pensioners don’t get paid. When a company goes bankrupt, the creditors don’t get paid. At least they don’t get paid in full. When cities and towns can no longer make their pension payments, they will stop making those payments. The old retired employees will sue and petition their legislatures, but you can’t get blood from a stone. The best case is the pensioners take a hefty cut in benefits.

The thing no one discusses is why these funds are in trouble. The reason for the trouble is the artificially low bond rates we have seen for two decades. In order to finance Federal spending, borrowing rates have been driven down to near zero. The biggest buyers of treasuries used to be pension funds. They could expect a return exceeding their target of 7.5% and not carry much in the way of risk. Being a pension fund manager used to be the easiest job in finance.

Olivia Mitchell, a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, told FTfm last month that US public pension plans face “grave difficulties”.

“I do believe that US cities and towns will continue to suffer, and there will be additional bankruptcies following the examples of Detroit,” she said.

Currently, states and local governments contribute 7.3 per cent of revenues to public pension plans, but this would need to increase to an average of 17.5 per cent of revenues to stop any further rises in the funding gap, the research said.

Several cities and states, including California, Illinois, New Jersey, Chicago and Austin, would need to put at least 20 per cent of their revenues into their pension plans to prevent a rise in their deficits, while Nevada would have to contribute almost 40 per cent.

Mr Rauh’s study claims the “true extent” of funding problems in US public pension system has been obscured because plans calculate both their costs and liabilities on the assumption they will achieve returns of between 7 and 8 per cent a year. The academic believes this rate is “wildly optimistic and unlikely to be achieved”.

Mr Rauh said a more realistic return rate, based on US Treasury bond yields, was around 2-3 per cent a year.

Ultra-low bond rates have forced pension funds into higher risk investments as they try to hit their target of 7% per year. This is fine when the market is performing at or near its historic averages and the fund managers are smart enough to bet the broader market. It also assumes that cities and states pay their pension obligations, without actually borrowing from those same pension funds. Now we know why the pension system is in trouble.

This is just one small aspect of the daunting math facing the United States over the next decade. Again, no one imagined the current math was even possible 35 years ago. If you told 1980 people that the Federal debt would be $19 Trillion, they would have laughed in your face. Maybe ten years from now $50 Trillion is no big thing. The math is unimaginable, but today’s math was once unimaginable. Alternatively, perhaps what’s coming is unimaginably awful. I don’t know, but the math problem facing America beggars the imagination.

The New Normal

Posted on by

A feature of modern life is the public act of grief after a “mass casualty event” like a flood or an Exploding Mohamed Occurrence. Once things settle down, the people in charge gather up for a parade or a ceremony at which they show everyone just how upset they are at what happened. The media makes a big deal of it and the public is encouraged to pretend it is a big deal. Then everyone goes back to what they were doing and we forget all about it.

In the Bronze Age, public acts of piety were common. In fact, they were a necessary part of the life of the polity. The ruler would participate in rituals in order to show the people he was in good with the gods and that he was sufficiently pious. It is argued that Cyrus the Great was able to defeat Babylon because the Babylonian king, Nabonidus, was not participating in these rituals, therefore his people welcomed the conquerors.

Today we don’t have our leaders slaughter a bull to the gods or do something interesting with virgins. Instead, our rulers invite barbarians onto our countries to slaughter us, so the rulers can then come out and show their piety. After the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence in Belgium, the European “leaders” had the typical ceremony.

Brussels Mayor Yvan Mayeur has led a minute’s silence in Paris with his French counterpart Anne Hidalgo.

The memorial for victims of the Brussels and Lahore attacks came exactly a week after explosions at the airport and on the metro killed 35 people in the Belgian capital.

“There is no more normal,” Mayeur warned. “This is a concept that needs to be redefined. We are in a different era and we need to live in this dimension and keep believing that our model of an open, multicultural city such as Paris, Brussels, London or New York, this is what we want to be. This is the future and that is the message I wanted to bring.”

Notice that expelling the Muslims is not an option? Notice that repelling the Muslims is never an option. Instead, we have to just accept this “new normal” where strange men with beards suddenly explode in public places. If Volkswagen made cars that exploded at the same rate as Muslims, the president of the company would be in jail and the company in bankruptcy. But the religion of multiculturalism overrides everything, including civil defense.

We are well past the point where this reckless behavior by the elites can be explained as simply mistaken. That quote makes clear that even the dullest politicians understand that a world of open borders is a future where the Exploding Mohamed Occurrence is going to be like the Windows game Minesweeper. Tick the wrong box and it is game over for you and your family. But you being blown to bits or having your daughter raped is the price you pay so they can have their public vigils.

Increasingly, this is where the evidence points. The Revolt of the Elites has as one manifestation a compulsion by the managerial class to create technocratic solutions to social problems. Given that the big issues of scarcity have been conquered, they are unconsciously creating new life threatening problems so they can solve them. I suppose we should be grateful that it is just Exploding Mohameds and not a new form of the Black Death.

The one thing George Bush said that was correct was that the job of government is to keep the people safe. Ultimately, settled people have tolerated hierarchical government where a minority rules the majority because of safety. For the overwhelming majority of people, a peaceful life of poverty beats a turbulent life, even one of prosperity. Most Americans would choose to be pets to a race of super intelligent chimps if it meant safety and comfort.

The bet being made today by the people in charge is you will accept a world of Exploding Mohameds. They will build out the custodial state, cameras on every block, even in homes, cops reviewing your twitter feed and the elimination of personal privacy, all in the name of safety. Every time a Mohamed goes off in a public space, the rulers will rush around acting like it is something they wish to prevent, while using it as a reason to slowly slam the cage door shut on the natives.

The problem here is that history has no example of this working. In every case where the people in charge have failed in their basic duties, the people in charge ended up dead oir fleeing for their lives. Maybe the technological revolution is allowing a break from historic trends. Maybe the people in charge can play this weird game of human chess and remain immune from the consequences. It is, however, not the way to bet.

Checking In On The Encyclopedists

Posted on by

For those new to this site, I have taken to calling Bill Kristol the Hari Seldon of Republican politics. For much of the 90’s and 00’s, Kristol basically ran the Republican Party. In the Bush years, he was largely responsible for crafting the Forever War strategy that came to define the Bush administration. That disaster seems to have landed him in exile, or maybe he is just re-charging his batteries, it is hard to know, but he is very much back in the game now.

Kristol is leading the charge to stop Trump from gaining the 1237 delegates he needs to secure the nomination. The first part of the plan was an organized media blitz through the usual conservative media organs. The last two weeks has been a steady stream of hysterical rants about Trump and his racists extreme alt-right extremist supporters. The idea is to not only to paint Trump as a racist, but to keep him from making his points. It is the classic game of playing defense by going on offense.

The second part of the plan was to pour all available resources into the Wisconsin primary. They had two weeks to buy off every pol, talk show host and newspaper writer. Wisconsin is one of those weird breadbasket states where being nice counts for more than being right so Trump was always going to be vulnerable there. Cruz would be the nice version of Trump and thus win the primary. The hope was that a big win would deflate Trump’s support elsewhere, thus preventing him from reaching the 1237 delegate number.

The Encyclopedists are smart so you should never underestimate them. Kristol did not become the Hari Seldon of American politics by being a fool. He is also ruthless. A man with no loyalties outside his narrow group, who believes he is chosen by fate to orchestrate the Great Plan, is not a guy prone to letting emotion get in the way. That is why he is willing to back Cruz for now, even though he hates Ted Cruz more than he hates Trump.

That is the genius of this scheme. Cruz will never be the nominee. He is just about eliminated from gaining the 1237 he would need to win the nomination. That means he has to figure out how to win a second ballot convention. Kristol has been working on that since last fall and is way ahead of Team Cruz. All the talk about horse trading at a brokered convention is nonsense. The party controls the bulk of the delegates, well more than is needed to pick the nominee. The rest is just theater.

The results thus far look fairly good for the Foundation. Kristol is surely pleased with the outcome, but he now faces the big hurdle. In April, the primary schedule is NY, CT, DE, MD, PA and RI. These are states where Trump has a massive edge over Cruz. The holy roller stuff really turns people off in these states. A month of Trump winning will inevitably beat down the Cruz support as he begins to look like a fringe candidate and a tool for the NeverTrump idiots.

I am no Hari Seldon, but I am having a tough time seeing how this Wisconsin win carries through a month of losing to give Cruz a chance at being competitive in May. The math says Cruz will be eliminated by April 26th, baring a miracle. His rationale for remaining in the race at that point, is to be a dick and keep Trump from winning. Maybe that is enough for him, but I wonder if his voters will agree. History says support drops off once a candidate is no longer viable.

That means the Foundation has to think they can ignore April by shifting the conversation from Trump winning primaries to some other topic, like his inability to beat Clinton in the general. The flaw in this plan is that the Democrats suddenly have a Sanders problem. Kristol would be fine with a Clinton presidency. The Conservative Industrial Complex could raise money of it and they largely agree with Hillary anyway. Sanders winning complicates the math a bit.

Regardless, it strikes me that everything is now pointing to California. The game between now and June 7th will be to create a narrative around stopping Trump from the nomination, thus making California an important primary. To do that means two months of Trump bashing that will make the last two months look like a Trump rally. The only way the Seldon Plan can work is to marginalize Trump to the point where he cannot win the nomination so we should expect a tsunami of sewage coming from so-called conservative media.

This is where being smart beats being right. Trump is running a tightwad campaign, spending very little on TV and social media. In California, the voters expect and demand a massive air war of ads. Kristol will launch a $50 million ad campaign against Trump in California, starting in May. Trump is too cheap and stubborn to run a TV campaign to match it so the Kristol people have to be optimistic. Reagan won California in 1976, keeping Ford from getting the necessary delegates to lock up the nomination. Ford lost to Carter in the fall.

That is the plan, forty years later.

The End of Mass Democracy

Posted on by

In modern America, it is impossible to know if what appears in the press is real news or some made-up nonsense intended to trick the public. The increasingly important site Conservative Tree House posted up a sampling of entire fake media people and operations the other day. When you are paid to write on behalf of a party, you’re not a journalist. You are an advocate. When you are an advocate posing as an independent media, you are a fraud.

Even though much of what is in the press is agit-prop, there’s information to be gleaned from it. This story in Bloomberg the other day about how the GOP is preparing to end popular selection of their nominees is a good example. Ostensibly, the “report” is about how they will navigate a brokered convention. What they really want to do is introduce the idea of ending the primary system or at least severely curtailing it.

The Democrats have largely made their primary system a beauty contest. The super delegate system lets party officials put their thumb on the scale to the point where Clinton could lose the rest of the primaries and still win the nomination. Of the 2382 delegates at the Democrat convention, 712 will be controlled by the party. In other words, Sanders will have to have own 71% of the delegates in the primaries to win the nomination.

An important thing to remember about America politics in the technocratic era is that there is only one party. The Bipartisan Fusion Party comprises the elites from technology, politics, culture and finance.  Republican and Democrat are just the two faces of the party so that we can keep up the appearance of being a popular republic. It’s not a lot different than what Augustus did in Rome when pretending to include the Senate in decisions.

Unlike Rome, this system evolved organically. The parties have become play things for the mega-donors, like sponsoring champions in tournaments. Team Red is paid to beat Team Blue. It’s their reason to exist. It’s why public policy never changes, regardless of which team wins. They are no longer competing for the right to set policy. They are competing for the right to hire their friends and relatives. Washington DC is a global Tammanay Hall.

The lesson Team Red drew from the 2008 and 2012 election is that white people are their biggest liability. They have to shed the image of being the party of white people. That’s why they tried every trick in the book to get Marco Rubio the nomination. He was going to be their Obama. It’s also why they appear poised to blow up their own party to stop Trump. In their view, destroying the “white party” may be the only way to save their party.

This bit from the story is a good indication of what’s coming:

“Donald Trump may well end up having the most votes anyone has ever gotten in a Republican primary this time. That was true for Mrs. Clinton and she didn’t get the nomination,” in 2008, said Ron Kaufman, a member of the RNC’s rules committee. “The thing that the party has to do is to make sure the voters believe their votes matter to keep them in the party for November.”

That’s a a classic bit of double-speak. On the one hand, the guy who gets the most votes is not going to be the nominee. On the other hand, they are trying to figure out how to convince the rubes that their votes matter. They don’t have to con all the rubes, just enough to keep up appearances, which is what we are seeing in the Democratic primaries. Low turnout, but enough to keep up appearances.

My bet all along has been that the GOP will eventually allow Trump to have the nomination, but only when they know they can undermine his campaign enough to keep him from winning the general. If they believe they can hold the House and Senate, but starve Trump out in the general, they will let him win the nomination at a contested convention. It’s the intermediate game.

If they cannot be sure of that, and Trump’s political savvy so far makes this a tough sell, then they have to go all in on the long game. That means dumping Trump and Cruz and going with a party man. Karl Rove is out trying to work this angle now by claiming that Trump and Cruz have no chance to beat Clinton in the fall, as if she is this wildly popular rock star in the view of the public.

The short term is getting a nominee, but the long game here is to avoid this ever happening again. Both parties face the same dilemma. They represent the interests of about 20% of the public. They augment this with lip-service to various ideological groups, but that’s wearing thin. If you are a pro-life Christian, for example, you have to know the GOP thinks you’re an idiot. If you are a union guy, you know the Democrats don’t care about you in the least.

The way around it is what we see with the Democrats. They have conditioned their suckers to accept the primary as a beauty contest. The GOP will follow the same path. There will be new ballot rules to keep trouble makers out of early primaries and a super delegate system to let the party pick the nominee from a slate of pre-approved options. The primaries will just be proof of concept exercises. Your vote will no longer count much at all.

Exploding Mohameds

Posted on by

The other day HBD Chick posted this link on twitter. It is an article about how the Exploding Mohameds (henceforth referred to as EM’s) in Brussels had detailed floor plans to the Belgian Prime Minister’s residence and his offices. The implication is that the EM’s were at least considering an attack on the head of government. We will never know as the EM’s are dead and the security state will never tell us anyway.

My thought when reading it is that I am a bit disappointed, but I am mildly hopeful. It is too bad that the EM’s did not go ahead and blow up the official offices of the Belgian government, rather than an airport. The people at the airport are mostly innocent. The people in the Belgian government are the ones responsible for the Muslim invasion so they should be the ones paying the price for it.

It will only take one EM to go off and kill a politician, I suspect, for opinions to change. The EM’s in Paris went off near the place where French President Francois Hollande was watching a soccer match. He suddenly got religion, so to speak, about cracking down on the Muzzies, at least for a little while. Have a few pols actually blown to bits and my hunch is we see official attitudes change. It is easy to preach sacrifice when someone else is picking up the tab.

The window for putting a halt to the invasion and driving the Muslims out of the West is closing. A committed minority population goes from too small to worry about to too large to do anything about in the blink of an eye. Just look at America. About 20% of the population belongs to the Cult of Modern Liberalism, but they run the country and have done so for a few generations now. They have a veto over what can be said in public, which grants them total control of society.

Let us look at Germany as an example of the Islamification of Europe. It is a population of eighty million with a fertility rate of 1.47. To understand how this works, let us pretend that in 2010 the whole population was of childbearing age. Their fertility rate means the eighty people produce fifty-six million children. That population will produce thirty-nine million children. One more turn of the wheel and you are down to twenty-seven million children. The point here is that once fertility rates drop below replacement, the population drops quickly.

Now, the population of Germany is not all of childbearing years. The median age is forty-seven and that includes the five million non-Germans Muslims who are in their 20’s with fertility rates over 4.0. The number of actual Germans under the age of twenty-five is twenty million. Throw in those who will possibly have children into their 30’s and you have roughly twenty-five million Germans with a chance to make new Germans. That 1.47 fertility rate looks pretty grim all of a sudden.

On the other hand, those five million Muslims are all young, median age of thirty now. The million or so who have poured in recently are in their 20’s. The history of migration tells us that first the men arrive, then they bring in their wives and children. With a 4.0 fertility rate, those five million Muslims can produce ten million children, which leads to twenty million grandchildren. That fertility rate of 4.0 suddenly looks like a very powerful weapon.

The point here is the math is now working against the German people. They have about a decade or so to figure out how to end the Muslim invasion and de-Islamify their current foreign population. Given that the German political class is emotionally committed to the destruction of the German people, there is no reasoning with them. No reasonable people would invite these problems so it is irrational to think reason will have effect on them.

On the other hand, if Exploding Mohameds start going off in swank ruling class areas like restaurants, offices and government buildings, which could change some minds. Have a few high level pols feel the full force of a nail bomb like those poor folks at the airport in Brussels and suddenly the people in charge will have to re-evaluate their situation. As is the case with all aspects of multiculturalism, it looks great from a distance, but when it explodes in your office or at your kid’s school, it is not so much fun.

This will not end well.

Richard Milhouse Cruz

Posted on by

One of the strange parts of the modern mass media age is that the mainstream is vastly more rigid and doctrinaire than in the prior age. Everyone assumed that the burst of new media platforms would broaden the scope of what is acceptable discourse. In the 90’s we were endlessly hearing about how “new voices” and “new perspectives” would change the conversation. Instead, it was one purging after another as the Overton Window swung left and became increasingly narrow.

The most obvious example that comes to mind is the treatment of Mark Steyn by the Conservative Industrial Complex. He made some glib comments about how homosexuals were discussed in the old days and was pilloried by the hysterical homosexual activist editor of National Review. Eventually, he was driven off the site as a heretic. His crime was being funny and interesting, which is always a problem for the ideologues.

Anyway, one result of this weird narrowing of the range of acceptable opinion is that decent writers have to figure out how to take the fringe ideas and make them respectable. It is often an impossible job as so much has been deemed unacceptable. We live in a land where you can be fired from your job because you noticed that guys named Mohamed have a habit of exploding in public.

Still, the fringe is the incubator of interesting thought these days. A theme with the Red Pill Right, for example, is that we are in a similar phase as we were in the late 60’s and early 70’s. The Left is running out of steam as its ideas become increasing absurd and dangerous. Disorder and malaise are causing the silent majority to look around for someone to restore sanity to government and put things back into their proper order.

That’s what bleeds through here in this Ross Douthat column about Ted Cruz. It is against the law now to mention Nixon as anything other than the Hitler of the 1970’s so comparing Cruz to Tricky Dick is, as they say, problematic. Instead, Douthat has to rely on a reference to a fictional character most of his readers have to pretend to know. It is not a great way to get into the essential character of Ted Cruz, but it opens the door a bit to historical comparison at the root of it.

I wrote the other day about Cruz being a sigma male and that is not a terrible framing, but a more useful one is to look at Cruz as the modern incarnation of Dick Nixon. Cruz, like Nixon, is a guy you instinctively want to avoid. There was an alien aspect to Nixon that even his friends found to be off-putting. His enemies, of course, pounced on these things, hence the name “Tricky Dick.” Cruz has this same problem. His friends are not enthusiastic about him, but his enemies are very enthusiastic.

Nixon, like Cruz, was never embraced by the GOP. Eisenhower picked him as his VP but treated him like bad odor. Ike was universally revered, but Nixon, despite his talents, was despised by the WASP elite of both parties. Democrats hated him for Alger Hiss and Republicans hated him for being low-class. The fact that Nixon was smarter and more knowledgeable about international affairs made things worse as he could not be dismissed as a rube.

That seems to be a similar issue with Cruz. He had few friends in the Bush administration, despite checking all the boxes and being super smart. Of all the candidates running, on paper he should have been the first choice of the GOP elite. Instead, he was the last choice. Even now, he is not really an option, just a useful weapon against Trump. It is quite remarkable how much the party establishment hates the guy.

Of course, like Nixon, Cruz hates the establishment just as much as they hate him. A big part of Nixon’s ambition seems to have been driven by his rejection by the elites. We are seeing that with Ted Cruz. He got the senate seat and they treated him like a hired man so he went rogue, calling out the leadership. He even accused McConnell of lying to the caucus, which is unheard of in Washington. His entire campaign is built on his personal animus to his party’s leaders.

Historical analogies are never perfect. Cruz will never be the GOP nominee. He is just being used right now as a vehicle for the Stop Trump folks. They hope Cruz can prevent Trump from getting 1237 delegates. If that happens, the convention goes to a second ballot, at which point the party leaders step in and dump Cruz and Trump for one of their own. If they cannot pull that off then they will make a deal with Trump, maybe having one of their guys as his VP. Either way, Cruz will never be the nominee.

That is another point of comparison with Nixon. Ted Cruz is a very smart guy. He is also a very clever guy. Nixon was one of our smarter presidents, but he had a huge blind spot at times when it came to his enemies. He never fully appreciated just how much they hated him. That seems to be the defect of Ted Cruz. He thinks he can win and there is no way in Hell the GOP will let him win. He is failing to appreciate just how much they hate him.

Sigma Male Versus Alpha Male

Posted on by

Out on the fringes, far away from polite company, exists a place called the manosphere or androsphere. This is place where somewhat normal men, unconstrained by PC thought police and buttressed by behavioral science, write and talk about how to score chicks. They write about other topics, but it is mostly about manly stuff, which biology dictates must revolve around scoring chicks. That is biological reality.

Anyway, most of this stuff is not new or even very creative. Men have been making money “teaching” other men how to get laid for a long time, probably since the first settlement. Skin magazines like Playboy used to have regular features on how to succeed with the ladies. What is somewhat new and useful is the borrowing of behavior science, particularly of primates, and applying it to modern social dynamics.

Of particular use are the terms to describe male status within a group. Researchers who study behavior of social animals often refer to the most dominant individual as the “alpha” male. The second most dominant is the “beta,” the third is the “gamma”, and finally the “omega” is at the bottom of the male hierarchy. The manosphere has taken these terms and created a useful set of sketches to describe modern western males.

It is why Donald Trump is so often referred to as the alpha male in the debates or even in the campaign. Trump has all the features one would associate with the top dog in a social group. He is loud, brash, confident and he attracts the best women. By best here I mean sexually attractive, not the ugly feminists majoring in penis chopping at Oberlin. Trump walks into a room and he is the boss. Everyone knows it, especially the women.

Jeb Bush was quickly called a beta male by people who do not understand the lingo, but he was probably a gamma, as he had no willingness to take on the big dog. Jeb was happiest in the submissive role. That is the thing people fail to grasp about this stuff. Beta males are not necessarily losers. They just happen to have been beaten by the winner. In a different setting, Rubio could be the top dog, but Jeb is always submissive.

Way back when the Republican primary started, it feels like years ago now, the conventional wisdom was that the Republicans needed their Obama. They needed a magical minority to bring them grace which in turn would bring them electoral success. ¡Jeb! Bush changed his nationality to Mexican, hoping to be the first trans-national president. Marco Rubio jumped in, figuring he ticked all the boxes to become the Republican Obama.

It did not turn out that way. The Alpha Male started talking about things of interest to the voters and he jumped up in the polls. Then he laid waste to the Bush campaign and then put down the Rubio campaign, thus leaving the hated Ted Cruz as the only alternative around which the party bosses could rally. As it stands, the only guy with a shot to stop Trump is Cruz. Instead of getting their Obama, they are now hoping to get their Clinton.

I do not mean the lesbian grifter in the weird pantsuits. Not that Clinton. I mean Bill Clinton, the grifter from the Ozarks who enjoyed lying almost as much as he loved shagging interns. At least that is what the grandees of the GOP are hoping people believe. In reality, they detest Cruz and are just hoping he keeps Trump from hitting 1237 delegates. Then they can dump both men at the convention and nominate invertebrate like Paul Ryan or maybe Marco Rubio.

Meanwhile, we have a month or two to watch something interesting and that is a battle between a sigma male and an alpha male. Labeling Ted Cruz a sigma male works in the context of the managerial class. There, the normal masculine traits like physical courage, aggression and risk taking are off-limits. The managerial class is a highly feminized social structure, where females can compete with men for status.

Therefore, the dominant males display credentials and positions of authority in the bureaucracy, much like some birds display their plumage to warn off other males. Bill Clinton could be the “big dog” because he held the top job in Arkansas, thus making him the alpha in any political setting. It is why he had no interest in being a senator. Bubba always had to be the big dog in the room and you cannot do that when you are one of one hundred powerless jerk-offs in the Senate.

Cruz, in contrast, is aggressive and forceful. He likes to flash his credentials, but he has little interest into being the dominate figure. He has not problem locking horns with others, but he is not trying to climb to the top of the existing social order. Instead, his nature is to remain on the fringe, taking shots at the people in charge. He revels in being the rebellious bad boy, relative to the group, in this case it is official Washington.

This is why Trump is struggling to put Cruz away at the moment. Rubio was willing to concede defeat because he really wanted to win the top spot. Cruz instinctively does not want the top spot; therefore, he has nothing to lose. Instead, he can stand out on the fringe defining himself in opposition to Trump. The Cult of Never Trump is basically for Sigma males and the women who love them.

That does not mean Trump cannot eventually crush the Cruz campaign. It just means he will have to employ different tactics. Beating Bush was simply about dominating him physically. Trump seemed to be giving Bush a wedgie in every debate. With Rubio it was just a matter of confronting him. Like I said, Rubio wanted to win and was willing to accept defeat if he was beaten so Trump just had to win.

Cruz is a different problem. Trump will need to avoid responding to Cruz. That is the first rule of handling these guys. They want to be the guy instigating the fight on their terms. Instead, Trump should find a surrogate like Chris Christie to attack Cruz. That will let Trump focus on bigger topics that one would expect the top dog to be discussing. It also means Team Trump can focus on the weird ticks of Ted Cruz. This a proven way to unman a sigma male.