Category Archives: Politics

They Think We’re Stupid

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Politics is mostly theater to keep anyone from noticing that the people in charge are not the people you see on your televisions. It’s not the tin-foil hat deep-state stuff, but the politicians all report to their donors. Still, the reason the media exists is to put a professional gloss on the whole thing. The people working for the New York Times are supposed to be good at the propaganda stuff. Instead they post stuff like this.

The New York Times Web site was unavailable to readers on Tuesday afternoon after an online attack on the company’s domain name registrar. The attack also forced employees of The Times to take care in sending e-mails.

The hacking was just the latest of a major media organization, with The Financial Times and The Washington Post also having their operations disrupted within the last few months. It was also the second time this month that the Web site of The New York Times was unavailable for several hours.

Marc Frons, chief information officer for The New York Times Company, issued a statement at 4:20 p.m. on Tuesday warning employees that the disruption — which appeared to be affecting the Web site well into the evening — was “the result of a malicious external attack.” He advised employees to “be careful when sending e-mail communications until this situation is resolved.”

In an interview, Mr. Frons said the attack was carried out by a group known as “the Syrian Electronic Army, or someone trying very hard to be them.” The group attacked the company’s domain name registrar, Melbourne IT. The Web site first went down after 3 p.m.; once service was restored, the hackers quickly disrupted the site again. Shortly after 6 p.m., Mr. Frons said that “we believe that we are on the road to fixing the problem.”

The Syrian Electronic Army is a group of hackers who support President Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Matt Johansen, head of the Threat Research Center at White Hat Security, posted on Twitter that he was directed to a Syrian Web domain when he tried to view The Times’s Web site.

You see? It’s not a normal system failure that happens every day. It was a super-sophisticated crew of hackers who live in a war torn land without running water and electricity. There’s no question that the people charged with writing up this stuff probably believe it. They are dumb and don’t know any better. The people running the company certainly know better, but they go with it anyway because they think we’re dumb.

It is long past time to stop with the scary hacking stories. The reason they got hacked, assuming it happened, is incompetence. A properly designed and managed site like a news site should never get hacked. In most cases, the site is not even hacked. The hosting service is what goes down and that’s seldom a real hack. Usually it is either a stupid IT guy leaving a door open or an old fashioned hardware failure. There’s also the fact that the New York Times is not exactly a high value target

Of course, the point is to keep beating the war drums over Syria. The same media that spent the entire Bush administration in hysterics of his wars is now out promoting war in Syria. The reason is magic black guy. War in Syria is even dumber than war with Iraq and that was pretty dumb. At least there was some chance of finding a local strong man to take over fro Saddam. Topple over Assad and it is chaos for a generation or longer.

Failing Up

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In the 17th century, European elites told themselves and their subjects that it was providence that put them in charge. For most of human history, blaming God for the rulers has been a popular option. The alternative is some system where rulers are determined through merit. Exceptional warriors have often risen to the top of their society. Wealthy merchants would graduate into the ruling class either through bribery or marriage.

In modern times, western elites have no use for God and they are allergic to discussing nature as it applies to humans. Instead we have this make-believe meritocracy. The first step is to go to the right prep schools so you can get into the right college. Then it off to graduate school for networking and rubswabbery. Once those credentials are obtained, then it is getting the right jobs to fill out the resume and make the right friends.

Finally, if you worked the system correctly, you get into that top tier, where all of sudden the floor becomes impenetrable. You have made the club and unless you harm the reputation of the club or call into question the logic of the club, you are in the club for life, no matter what you do. That’s why government service has become the ticket to great wealth. It’s like having your own private toll booth on the highway. You get paid by simply being there. The managerial elites is a collection of toll takers.

Today we have this story about the perpetually wrong Larry Summers possibly getting the job of Fed Chairman. This was the guy who did the hatchet job on Brooksley Born over derivatives. She was the person who tried to blow the whistle of Long Term Capital, a trillion-dollar hedge fund that was about to go bust due to creative accounting. LTC had powerful friends in the managerial class, so they were saved by the government and the whole matter was swept under the rug. Again, that floor never gives way.

Everything Summers said back then turned out to be completely wrong. The single biggest economic event of the modern era and he was totally wrong. Yet, he is held up as an expert. Granted, it is economics, a profession with no right answers, only models of right answers. Still, you would think getting the one big thing wrong would have some impact on his career. That’s never how it works in the managerial state

He’s far from being an exception. In fact, he is the norm. There are whole professions that now have become inoculated against their own failures. The intelligence community got it all wrong at the end of the Cold War and they totally missed the rise of Islamic extremism, but they just get more money and power. We are rocketing toward a police state, because the people in charge are staggeringly incompetent. They just keep failing up.

Higher Ed

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One of the more frustrating debates in modern America is the one over student debt. It seems like the mere mention of the subject turns smart people into blithering idiots. The president has come forth with a “new” proposal to address student debt. The gist of it is a laundry list of government created metrics that schools will have to post for public view.  The assertion is that this will “empower” students to make better choices, thus avoiding debt for worthless degrees.

That sounds nice and maybe would impact student choices at the fringes. Without proof that students are making mistakes because they lack this knowledge, it falls into the realm of wishful thinking. I think it is easy to prove that this information is easily attainable. Thirty years ago when I was a student we were regularly given information about future earnings, job prospects and debt consequences. Only willful ignorance kept English majors from knowing they were not going to get a six figure job out of college.

Today, the Interwebs makes it easy to know just about anything about everything. Not only can you easily learn what you can expect in salary with a given degree, you can break it down by region and get some sense of lifetime earnings. Granted, that takes effort and it people have a way of gaslighting themselves on these things. But, they would do that with whatever the government is going to provide. You cannot get around the fact that white people have to be brainwashed into believing college is a requirement.

Now, it would be nice, if like calorie counts on menus, the realities of college were printed on the front of the brochure. Everyone loves convenience. Like those calorie counts, however, there’s no evidence it changes behavior. That’s what makes this post from the former Half Sigma blogger so weird. His enthusiasm is misplaced. His casting it as a “conservative idea” is the sort of sloppy thinking we see on the Left. There are plenty of dumb ideas with the conservative stamp of approval.

Yuval Levin offers some good questions in this posting at NRO. He does not mention it, but government standards turn the regulated into rent seekers. It is axiomatic. In this case, the universities suddenly need to bribe politicians to get the standards they want. As Levin points out, it is not clear what should be measured and by whom. That opens up the door to all sorts of shenanigans. The best way to ensure rational markets is to eliminate the number of intermediaries between the supplier and consumer. Another government agency to set standards is just going to make this more dishonest that they are now.

That’s the fundamental problem with higher education debates. Everyone is trapped in the old paradigm of government financing. No one ever asks why tuition has risen at five and six times inflation since the government got into the student loan business. The two markets that have seen the greatest amount of government intervention are higher ed and health care. In both prices have rocketed up, basic service levels have declined and massive amounts of debt have been accumulated. That’s called a clue

The Opiate Of The Elites

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A topic that will come up here regularly is that the American Right has never understood the nature of the American Left. In fact, using the terms Left and Right in the political context is a category error. The American Left is nothing like the European Left . It is a radical religion that seeks salvation by purifying the community of heretics. That’s why they are immune to facts and reason. There’s not talking a fanatic out of his fanaticism, anymore than you can talk a Muslim out of his religion. This post is a good example.

Nevertheless, the president of the United States is not amused. We read our government is secretly “reviewing” our support of Egypt. They are urging the Egyptian military to negotiate with the Brotherhood, the same religious fanatics who evidently just told 24 Egyptian policemen to lie face down in the Sinai desert and summarily executed them, the same madmen who are running all over Egypt burning down Christian churches.

What is the explanation for this absolutely self-destructive, even idiotic, policy on our part?

There can be only one — the president of the United States is actually psychologically disturbed. He does not react in a normal manner. I know that’s a vicious and importunate thing to say, but the reaction to Egypt (and to Benghazi, for that matter) is not one of a psychologically healthy human being.

It’s more than the narcissism of which he is often accused, as bad as that is. It’s a form of extreme neurotic attraction to (notably Islamic) religious fascism. Obama is not a Muslim, but he has these deep feelings about it (some of them related to imperialism, others to his absent father, no doubt) that allow him to overlook, or rationalize, all that hideous misogyny, homophobia, and jihadist fanaticism, that loathing of democracy and freedom, even when it could not be more obvious. To Obama, those abhorrent — monumentally illiberal — behaviors and ideologies almost seem irrelevant. But they are the most relevant of all.

There you have it, The President, in the face of all those facts and arguments still embraces radical Islam, so he must be crazy. What passes for the Right in America is trapped in this mode of thought that says the Left is rational, so if they embrace rationality, it’s not their liberalism, but some mental disease or possible diabolical plot that has yet to be revealed. In other words, Simon simply rules out the possibility that Obama believes what he says and is motivated by a moral framework that structures these beliefs.

The Left in America is a religion. They have decorated their religion over the years with stuff from Continental radicalism and, of course, Jewish radicalism, which is the source of the rabid anti-nationalism. That was the lesson from the two last wars, allegedly, was that nationalism, German nationalism specifically, but nationalism in general, is the source of war on the continent. The American Left imported that idea in the 1960’s, first as anti-colonialism and now as a hostility to the very basics of citizenship and country.

Obama is a prime example. Every normal person has a copy of their birth certificate out of necessity. They have a social security number issued in their youth that they used for an ID number since kindergarten.  They know their religion, even if they never have attended church. Of course, they know the place and circumstances of their birth. Obama has none of those things. He has never seen a reason to have them. He is a citizen of the world and his identity has nothing to do with his nation of origin. His tribe is his class and status.

It is why Obama struggles so much with odd subjects like how many states there are in America. He has said Hawaii is in Asia. He has mistakenly said he is a Muslim. These are not things that have been important to him. He was raised to eschew these proletarian interests. To American liberals like Obama, the idea of a nation and a national people is as outdated as the buggy whip. He sees himself as a holy man, whose task is is to usher in the age when there are no borders and no national governments.

Therefore, when he looks at the anarchy and chaos of Egypt, he does not see the things Simon thinks are important. He sees people he generally admires, engaged in the same task in which he is enraged. Islamist dream of world after the fall of countries. Their vision of the future is not a lot different from some Italian fascists, who imagined their political cause was linked with the restoration of the Catholic Church in Europe. For the Islamist, “Egypt” is an outmoded concept, so toppling it over is a service to their cause.

For dilettante like Obama, and he is fairly representative of the modern Left in that regard, he has not thought much about what comes next. The post-national paradise is just going to be better. Further, his innate hatred of white people and what he imagines as white culture, motivates him to oppose those things he associates with the West. For Obama and the modern Left, the glorious future is something like a college campus run by women and non-whites, with white males on the lowest rung of the social ladder.

The point here is that there is no reasoning with these people. That’s where guys like Roger Simon slam into a brick wall. He simply cannot accept that Progressivism is free of rationality. it is a secular religion that is esoteric and mystical, especially to the adherents, who are drawn to it out of self-loathing. Marx allegedly said religion was the opium of the masses. Progressivism is the methamphetamine of the American ruling class. The more they use it, the less rational they become and their craving for the drug only grows.

The Republican Party Ghetto

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There are many reason for the ineffectiveness of the Republican Party, but the primary cause of their failure is they are not a real political party. Instead, it is the off-Broadway version of the liberal party. Instead of offering a compelling alternative to the liberal party, based in real ideological differences, the Republicans assume the liberal moral order is the correct one. They just try to work within it to placate different constituencies. Their first instinct is to bend the knee to the Left. You see it in this post at National Review.

“The group is there, believe me, and it’s growing by the day, maybe by a factor of 50 times more than what it was in 2011,” Langone tells me. “He’s getting traction with people because people want to win. After 2012, it dawned on a lot of us that we need to have a better candidate, somebody who can connect, and Christie is the person who can do that.” Langone doesn’t make much of criticism of Christie’s handling of Hurricane Sandy: “I know some people say [Christie] got too close to [Obama], but it wasn’t a time for politics and pandering. It was a crisis! I saw it firsthand at NYU’s medical center, and people who get that aren’t unhappy with him.”

This is why the Republicans have been called the “stupid party” for decades. The people in it always make unforced errors. Almost always, those errors stem from their habit of taking advice from the liberal party. A Democrat uses a crisis like a hurricane to attack his political opponents. Republicans use a crisis to embrace their opponents and concede all sorts of things to them in an effort to make friends. That’s Chris Christie. He thinks hugging on Obama will score him friends among the Democrats, but it never does.

This is why the Republican Party always loses. The other guys never permit one of their own to wander off the reservation. They never excuse it. They know that only encourages disloyalty. That’s a basic organizational technique. You enforce all of the little rules dogmatically and the big stuff takes care of itself. The young liberal knows he is done for if he does not toe the line. By the time he gets to leadership, he is invested in the cause completely. So much so he is willing to ruthlessly impose those rules on the junior guys.

The Republican Party has it backwards. Their junior members are always competing with one another for who can get a pat on the head from Lefty. In fact, it is how they rise through the ranks. By the time they become senior guys, they are invested in nothing but stabbing their fellows in the back to score points with liberals. The party is like a life boat and the game is to keep tossing people over the rail to make room for new people throw off the liberal cruise ship. The result is guys like Christie becoming Republican leaders.

“His early moves have been good,” says Steve Schmidt, a veteran Republican operative who managed the McCain-Palin presidential campaign. “He’s now looking at a decisive reelection victory this year in a blue state, and then he becomes chairman of the Republican Governors Association next year, which will enable him to build all of his relationships to an even greater extent than he has done already. There will always be commentary about [the Sandy controversy], but I don’t think a photograph from five years ago will be an issue in a primary that’s driven, as almost all Republican primaries have been, by electability over ideology.”

In 1992, every said pat Buchanan was not electable, even though most conceded he was right about things like immigration and trade. In 1996, the argument for Bob Dole over Buchanan and the libertarian Steve Forbes was electability. In 2000, Bush was electable and he ushered in eight years of government expansion and endless war. In 2008 McCain was the electable choice and was crushed by Obama. In 2012, Romney was the electable guy and it was his turn to lead the party. He lost to a badly wounded Obama.

That means in the last two decades the GOP is 2-for-5 and their one winner was a complete loser in terms of policy. If you are a small government conservative, a social conservative or a libertarian, the success of the Republican Party means you lose in a slightly different way than when the GOP loses an election. To people on the Right, and let’s face it we’re are talking about white people here, politics has been a heads they win tails you lose proposition for a couple of generations, maybe even longer.

Frankly, I hope that Christie wins the nomination and gets clobbered by that old crook Hillary Clinton. The problem we have is that about 40% of the voters want something not offered by either party. About 80% of whites would prefer something to the Right of the most extreme conservative. In America, the GOP keeps these voters in a ghetto, so they can make deals with the Democrats. The way forward for the American Right, and again, we’re talking about white people here, is to destroy Conservatism Inc. and the GOP.

The Slow Detroitification of America

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Whenever the topic of America’s decline is raised, it is almost always in the context of the size and scope of the state. That usually leads to the stats on dependency. A sad aspect of the modern age is everyone has been conditioned to think happiness can be quantified by some government statistic. It’s not that these numbers are unimportant. It’s that they always assume that material well being is the only thing that matters. The white suicide rate in America is the highest ever, despite the country be rich and at peace.

Putting that aside, there’s another aspect to what is happening in America, one that the great Sam Francis often discussed. That is the government gets so large, promising so many things, that it is no longer capable of doing much of anything. In the 1960’s, when the Federal government was a third of its current size, adjusted for inflation and population growth (Yes that’s right), the government could start a space program and put a man on the moon within a decade. Today, the government struggles doing the basics.

This institutional failure would no doubt happen in a country with a non-diverse population, but it seems to accelerate in diverse societies. Look at Detroit. It was the envy of the world in the middle of the last century, when it was a white city. As the white population fled, in the face of a growing black population, basic services like crime control, water treatments, sewer systems and so on went into decline. The reason Detroit became Detroit is the city government could no longer perform basic government services.

The Motor City is one example, but it is hardly an outlier. This story about Baltimore shows it is something we will see more of as we slide into the abyss. Baltimore, like Detroit has had half of its citizens flee to the suburbs. The primary reason is crime and failing schools and the reason for that is racial. Whites don’t want their kids getting stabbed in the public schools, so they either put the kids in private schools or flee to the suburbs. Either way, they are unwilling to support a city government that does not serve their interests.

The assumption has always been that white flight was mostly driven by quality of life stemming from declining government services. People got tired of being mugged and seeing trash pile up on their street, so they left. Others will claim that white racism is what drove white flight. It really does not matter, as the whites fled and will flee again if the state tries to transport blacks to the suburbs through public housing schemes. The cause is unimportant. Whites flee diversity and take their tax dollars with them.

This is an issue of academic curiosity as long as America has a relatively low population density and is majority whites. Places like Detroit and Baltimore are disasters, but they are avoidable ones. For most people they function as urban reservations where the uncivilized are kept away from the rest. Large swaths of these cities are no-go zones that are clearly identified. The cops even patrol the borders, warning off the lost and the curious. In other words, in small doses, failures of diversity and institutional failure are tolerable.

The question that no one wants to face is what happens when America is a diverse country, where whites are a minority? Detroit scaled up to the country level is what we see in Africa. California is a great example of what happens to a white state that gets turned into a brown one. Whites can flee, the brown tide is threatening to swamped the whole nation. What happens when the managerial state that rules America is asked to rule a population that is majority non-white? It’s Detroit at a continent level.

A curious thing you can find, if you dig around in newspaper archives from the 50’s and 60’s is that white Americans used to be very different. In the 60’s, when black riots broke out in Baltimore, the cops were just as worried about white mobs taking matters into their own hands, as they were black mobs. Of course, in Los Angeles, when the blacks rioted over Rodney King. the roof top Korean was born. In other words, people used to be more tribal and territorial, but suburbanification provided an outlet.

What happens when that is gone? The most likely outcome when the managerial system tries to regulate a highly diverse America is a combination of the anarcho-tyranny predicted by Sam Francis, the collapse of local institutions we see in places like Detroit and a rapid return to tribalism and territorial defense. The unknown is just how the anarcho-tyranny will impact it. So far, this ruling elite seems determined to set the world on fire, so that could mean the future gets chaotically violent as a result.

Cruzin’ the Stupid Party

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I saw this on NRO the other day. Normally I’d have skipped it, as I don’t like Michael Walsh very much. He is one of those comics who likes to borrow material from other people and then pretend he came up with himself. When I used to comment over there, he would lift lines from me without attribution. There’s nothing wrong with repeating stuff you see on-line without attribution, since so much of the good stuff is done anonymously, but when it comes directly from comments in your posts, it feels different.

I don’t really care that much, but it just means that he has the morality of the guys who cheats at golf. Those sorts of people are not obviously dishonest, but you are wise to make sure to keep your wallet in your front packet when around them. They are the type of person that spends all night drinking with you at the bar, before the bill comes he throws down a twenty and heads for the door. They always operate in that space between honest and dishonest, forcing you to be the bad guy who polices their behavior.

Anyway, enough of that. I like Ted Cruz as a senator, but he has no chance to be president or even the GOP nominee. The Republican Party is headed to the dustbin of history, because it is not a real political party. It’s juts a dumping ground for people who reject the other party. A third of GOP elected officials wish they could be in the Democratic party. Guys like McCain, Graham, Rubio, Christie and Paul Ryan look at the cool kids on the other side of the aisle and turn green with envy.

Many GOP officials would switch parties in a heartbeat, but they either cannot win as a Democrat in their state (Graham) or simply took the easy road early on and it is too late to turn back (Christie). Another third just want to keep their snout in the trough and be left alone. They are not interested in rocking the boat or risking their career to do the right thing. Cruz is one of those guys who causes too much trouble, by trying to make a name for himself picking fights with the establishment, so he can never be President.

The thing is, these hacks and hustler did not get into office by trickery. They won fair and square. The majority of Americans want a custodial state. They want the state to make all of the important decisions for them. Anything tougher than picking which breakfast cereal to eat is asking too much. The majority of human history is not some form of servitude by accident. As America fills up with peasants from socialist countries, the center will keep shifting from self-governing republic to technocratic oligarchy.

Marx appears to have been right about this. The natural march of history is toward socialism. He just missed on one key element and that is the ruling elite would be locked in place. Instead of a dictatorship of the proletariat, the vanguard of the revolution becomes a ruling elite that ruthlessly defends their power. In the West, that means a managerial state of highly educated flunkies who do the bidding of a small financial oligarchy. The majority of the public is fine with it as long as they get their stuff.

That’s not to say that Cruz has any intention of challenging that arrangement. He just as much of a conventional politician as the rest of them. It’s that Cruz is a guy who criticizes the system, while benefiting from it, by posing as an outsider. He’s the guy in college, who brings a guitar to a party. He’s not there to help the party or oppose the party. he just uses the party as a prop in his act. That’s ted Cruz. He’s a guy who poses as a critic and outsider, but everyone inside knows he is full of it, so they hate him.

The GOP is not a real party, so a guy like Cruz can cause a lot of trouble for them just by being himself. That’s why I like Cruz. He is the sort of guy to rally conservatives against the party establishment. He’s not the sort to lead a takeover, but he can lay the groundwork for someone else. Maybe one day a real outsider will come along and take advantage of the discontent created by guys like Cruz. Or maybe the party just splits apart from the stress of constant criticism. It’s a long shot, but that’s all we have now.

Weiner Goes Limp IN NYC

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I saw this posted on the former Half Sigma blog. If you were hoping Anthony Weiner would win the democratic primary, it looks like you will be disappointed. There’s a month to go and people tend to forget quickly that one of the candidates is a mental patient, but even New Yorkers have too much self-respect to give Weiner a third chance. The next mayor will be the dreary socialist, the dreary bureaucrat or the flamboyant communist. The New York Times is backing the communist, to no one’s surprise, so he is the pick

The fact is the forces that drive the fortunes of a big city are beyond the control of the political class. A city is measured by its crime rate, public school system, unemployment rate, property values and culture. There’s some other stuff that we judge a city by, but that’s enough. Demographics drive the crime rate. San Francisco is 43% white and 33% Asian. Both groups have very low crimes rates so San Francisco has a low crime rate. Detroit is 80% black and has a crime rate commensurate with the black population.

Schools are similar, but median income pops up here. Areas with a solid middle class composed of families will have good public schools. Areas with a big underclass full of baby mommas and absentee fathers will have crappy public schools. You can’t fix that with good policy. These class and race issues are beyond the reach of government. Even if you gave city government dictatorial power, they could not fix the broken families that make up most of Newark or Camden or Baltimore. Government is not God.

Of course, the local economy is entirely driven by serendipity. If your city is lucky to be based on industry with a future, your city has a future. Cities in New England, for example, that depended upon making shoes or paint were looking good 100 years ago. When the banks sold off those industries to foreigners, those cities collapsed. Lowell Mass was a great mill town into the 20’s and 30’s, but textiles moved South and Lowell went down the crapper. No amount of good government was going to fix that problem.

I could go on, but the fact is the big things affecting a city are out of the reach of politicians, unless they are willing to be immoral or corrupt. For example, Giuliani gets credit for reviving New York by lowering crime. What he really did was ride the financial boom to push out the blacks from Manhattan. The newly rich were willing to look the other way as the cops hassled young black males with the policy of stop and frisk. They also agreed with polices to drive off businesses that cater to the lower classes.

The great credit boom that blew up Wall Street filled NYC with rich people and rich people like a nice places to live. Rudy did fix the police department, but he could not have done it without the support of the army of bean counters filling the ranks of the booming financial houses located in the city. The next mayor will have no impact on the city. As long as the free money keeps flowing and the demographics keep going this way, the next mayor will do just fine, regardless of their ideology. Even a commie will not screw it up.

Our Broken System

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Here is an interesting article on the tax reform debate that is part of a larger push to pass a big tax reform bill after the next election. Congress is trying to be serious about fixing the tax system, rather than just grandstand on it. They may even be willing to tackle such touchy things as the mortgage interest deduction, corporate welfare and so forth. The hint that they are serious is that the Democrats are playing nice on the issue. The truth of American politics is that nothing gets passed without the blessing of the Democrats.

Old bulls like Max Baucus on the Democrat side are actively looking for big ideas to fix the tax system. House Ways and Means Committee chairman Dave Camp is having his staff draft bills for consideration this fall. When you have big shots in both parties in both houses working on something, it usually means there’s been some deal making done to get past the regular nonsense. When the old bulls are waging their fingers or carping at one another across party lines, you know it is all theater, not a serious effort.

It sounds promising until I get to this:

On the Senate side, Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) asked colleagues in both parties to submit recommendations on which tax preferences should be preserved, starting from a “blank slate” where all current benefits are eliminated. To provide senators political cover and deniability, the committee put all recommendations under a 50-year top-secret classification, and restricted access to them to just 10 staff members.

Dullards like Kevin Williamson picked up on this claiming this is why the public seems to be siding with Edward Snowden over the rulers. It is a variation of the Old Testament warning from a prophet about how death is coming because the people have turned away from God. The conservative version of this is that the gods are angry because we have turned away from our constitutional principles. It’s circular reasoning. We are losing our republic because we have abandoned the basics of republic government. No kidding.

It misses an important point. The people in charge resort to these sorts of remedies not because they don’t rust the system They do this because they no longer trust themselves as a ruling class. That’s why they are employing the Cone of Silence. They know if this stuff gets out, members will use it against one another. Put another way, they are afraid to be candid with one another, because they fear their candor will be turned into a weapon against them in the future. Everyone assumes everyone else is a liar and a knave.

They also know the army of lobbyists will start pounding the war drums in order to get their special deal in the final bill. With a man in the White House willing to sell his daughters into slavery to score ideological points, no one can trust that there will be an honest debate or even a discussion if it is held in public. The result is that the elected representatives of the people have to abandon the fundamentals of self-government in order to get anything done in Washington. Is there any wonder they have so little respect for the Constitution?

An essential point that people on our side have to understand is that constitutions and political ideology are the result, not the cause. Principles are the rules the winning side imposes after they win. The constitution was written by the victors of the Revolutionary War and the post-war squabbling among the elites in the former colonies. The mercantile class of the North allied with the planter class in the South, came together to impose a political system on the new country that worked for them as a ruling elite.

The R Word

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The evidence that Progressivism is a cult is all around us. The main bit of evidence is how they engage in the most blatant of group think. In the clip below the nation’s second most famous lesbian thinks she is being clever by refusing to say the name of the football team at the heart of this terrible scandal. Of course, She has no idea why her cult is angry at the sports team. My bet is she has never seen a football game. She just hears the other loons howling about the team, so she starts howling so she can be part of the group.

Maddow, of course, is obviously struggling with mental illness. The disjointed mannerism, the inappropriate facial expressions and odd smirking are familiar to anyone who has been around people using heavy duty psychiatric drugs. Medication can make them functional, but they are never normal. She has discussed this in interviews, but I suspect she struggles to keep it together every day. Watch the clip and then imagine such a person working in your office. You would assume she is seeing a shrink every week.

http://youtu.be/DAs1-NAfDJI

Of course, this is an example of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, which is a mental disorder where a person pretend another is ill, so they can care for them. The other version is where the caregiver is actually making the person sick, so they can then care for them. A fireman who starts fires so he can be the heroic guy putting out the fires is another variation of this. In the case of childless lesbians like Rachel Maddow, they find victim groups to champion, so they can feel needed. Same idea, different victims.

That is the thing you see with Progressives now. They no longer deal in the practical, like economics, or even the temporal, like real people. Instead, they invent victims and then conjure ghostly causes like racism and privilege. The goblin that haunts the minds of Progressive women is always the heterosexual white man, so they imagine what evil white man must hate and then invent a victim group. From there it is search for proof, like the hunt for ancient aliens or Sasquatch. Here we have imaginary bigots and fake Indians.