Ungovernable Costs

Posted on December 28, 2023 by thezman

Over Christmas, when people are not paying attention, the oligarchs have been busy updating their terms of services. These are “agreements” you must accept in order to use their service, which in most cases is a monopoly. In those rare cases when there is more than one supplier of the service, they work together in order to have identical terms of service agreements. The terms of service agreement is slowly becoming the constitutional order of the country.

One of the noteworthy changes comes from Amazon, which announced they would start packing ads into their video content. Until now, subscribers to their service did not get ads in video and audio content as they paid an annual fee. Now Amazon Prime users will get to pay the annual fee and get to see ads in their content. No doubt that for this additional service, Amazon plans to raise their annual fee in 2024. After all, it costs money to pack those ads in your content.

This is a familiar pattern. Cable television came with the promise that in exchange for a monthly fee you would not get ads. That remains somewhat true for premium services, like HBO, but with the end of over-the-air television, all of the ad-based channels are on a pay-for-view services now with their ads. If you want video content you pay for a service like Hulu or Apple TV so you can watch the content you used to have on your cable service, with all of the ads.

Sporting events are now ad platforms where a small portion of the presentation is the game you are trying to watch. An American football game is officially one hour, but with stoppages it lasts about ninety minutes. With ads and long breaks for proselytizing about the latest thing, the games take over three hours. Even the calling of the games is now packed with ads and lectures. “This description of what just happened is brought to you by our good friends at Pfizer” is a real thing now.

It is not just video content where we see this. It used to be that stadiums were named after a local famous person or the place where they were built. Maybe the owner of the thing named it for himself. Now they all have stupid names for fly-by-night companies that disappear once the suckers get wise. Three Rivers Stadium in Pittsburgh is now something called Acrisure Stadium. According to the company, “Acrisure is a fast-growing fintech leader that operates a global insurance broker.”

This tendency to tax you this way, and it is a tax, will soon be into every nook and cranny of your life if you let it. Agree to a lease on a new car and the entertainment system will soon require you to watch a video ad or take some sort of survey before you can start the car. When the car makers transition to options as a service, they will come with ads you must endure to use them. Turn on the heated seats in winter and you will be hit with ads for the latest sexual dysfunction drugs.

The people on the other end defend this dynamic on the grounds that their costs go up, so they have to find new ways to generate revenue. Amazon could keep it honest and raise their annual fee or separate it from the bundle of services they call Prime, but that would risk information symmetry. Their users could then decide if the fee is worth the content, rather than thinking about the free shipping or other stuff. Packing in ads muddies the waters and thus makes the user easier to fleece.

That is why it is best to think of the service economy as a tax economy, rather than a traditional marketplace. Like the government, these firms are deliberately entangling you in their service so they can take a little here and little there. Government is a protection service that is always adding fees, levies, and new taxes to the cost of the service in the same way we see with technology services. Like government, these services always first seek to be a monopoly.

Of course, this is why governments are supposed to prevent monopolies and oligopolies like we see today. Part of the protection racket that is government is to prevent privateers from preying on the people. It used to be that these terms of service agreements were limited by the courts. The one-way contract was always assumed to be the powerful preying on the weak, so the courts stepped in on the side of the weak to make sure the deal was fair. That no longer happens in America.

Putting all of that aside and just thinking about this process as a form of taxation, the question is why are these taxes rising? Inflation is one possible answer, but this process predates the rise in inflation. For a long time, they said we had low inflation, under two percent most years, yet the system is flooded with new taxes and new ways to tax people through new methods. Fifty years ago, ads were easily avoided, but today it is nearly impossible to live an ad-free life.

One way to start thinking about this is to look at the government in terms of per capita spending in constant dollars. Fifty years ago, the federal government accounted for about $4,500 per person. Today it is $20,000. Again, this is in constant dollars, so expansion of the money supply is included. That extra government comes with secondary and tertiary costs. It means millions of pages in new rules, which means millions of new expenses for complying with those rules.

Then you have the cultural effects. All of these new fads that are religiously enforced by these massive corporations are not free. It cost money to rearrange all of the video services to promote black content during the George Floyd campaign. It cost InBev real money to associate their brand with pedophiles. In other words, the cultural revolution as currently fought by the managerial system is packed with hidden costs and those hidden costs and paid for by thousands of hidden taxes.

When you start to think of these small changes cumulatively, they point to an inherent defect of the managerial system. The point of the system is to expand control of society which means ever expanding costs. This starts to crowd out other things, productive things like making stuff in factories. This requires new ways of raising revenue, which brings its own costs. Most importantly, the raison d’être of the system needs constant maintenance, which explains the culture war.

In other words, managerialism slowly crowds out the productive elements of society in favor of those that serve the system. This means the cost of the system grows while the effective tax base shrinks. Before long you end up with a society in which everyone is spending their productive hours either watching ads for penis pills or producing new ways to force people to watch ads for penis pills. At some point it must reach a crisis where the costs exceed the ability to tax.

In the small scale this happened in many American cities in the middle of the last century with the first waves of the cultural revolution. Progressive governments shifted from providing protection to social experimentation. This led to chaos, so business and taxpayers moved out of the cities. The shrinking tax base meant the only choices were to roll back the experiments or raise tax rates. They always chose the latter, so taxpayers continued to feel until many cities were insolvent.

What we are seeing now is those city experiments conducted on a continent sized country, enlisting the oligarchical power of corporations. The result must be the same as you cannot have an economy based on people lecturing one another on the latest thing any more than you can have an economy based on protecting people from muggers and drug dealers unleashed by the state. Just like the cities, the country will reach a point at which everyone agrees it is ungovernable.

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Unfrozen Caveman Conservatives

Posted on December 27, 2023 by thezman

The remarkable thing thus far about the 2024 presidential election is that the so-called conservatives, and therefore the Republican Party, have gone into this process without having prepared for it. They have experienced two presidential cycles that went entirely against their interests, yet they have not done anything over the last eight years to prepare for this cycle. Their plan, if you want to call it a plan, is to pray the other party eliminates Trump for them via lawfare.

We know with a fair bit of certainty that the party told the collection of munchkins showing up at debates that they expected Trump to be disqualified. In the first debate, the zombie-like Asa Hutchinson blurted this out during the questioning. In the last debate, Ron DeSantis said something along the lines that the option for voters is what was onstage due to Trump’s legal troubles. It was long rumored that he decided to run based on the assurance that Trump would be eliminated.

Now, that is a plan, of sorts, but only if you think the only problem you have as a party is this one man wrecking your fun. Get rid of the bad man and the party, along with the so-called conservative movement, can go back to the old times. They are even bringing back the neocon nutters to promote a dingbat. It is as if they think they are just one more court ruling from going back to 2000 when they could pass off a simpleton to their voters as the updated version of The Gipper.

Of course, Trump is not an isolated phenomenon. He exists because of what the so-called conservatives did in 2000 with George Bush. The populist revolt within the Republican Party is the response to the bait and switch, along with massive amounts of lying, by the party and so-called conservatives. The reason millions continue to support Trump, despite all of his well-documented flaws, is that the “party of Lincoln” thought they could fool all of the people all of the time.

The reason the party is unprepared for 2024 is their intellectual engine ran out of fuel back in the Reagan years. In retrospect, the 1980’s were the last gasp of the old bourgeois liberalism that defined America into the 20th century. Buckley style conservatism was a bug fix, a cumulative patch, to the progressive software of the 20th century and once that work was done, conservatism had nothing left. It was a room full of people trained to fix something that was about to be replaced.

It is why conservatism looks like a collection of unfrozen cavemen unaware of the time that has passed while they were frozen. National Review still puts out nonsense about how progressive cultural production is actually conservative. That is when they are not swearing that blacks will start voting Republican any day now. The reason that so-called conservatives are locked into the 1980’s is they evolved for the moment and once the moment passed, they no longer had a purpose.

In retrospect, conservatism of the Buckley sort was a reaction to one narrow set of claims made by progressives in the 20th century. Put another way, it was a delayed response to the reforms of the FDR generation, who were sure that government could right the wrongs of American society. Through force they could fix race, poverty, inequality and the trade-offs of the marketplace. Conservatism was a response to the failure of this project to achieve its aims.

With the end of the Cold War and the arrival of the Clinton machine, the old left of government reformers was replaced by a new generation of reformers. These were the sons and daughters of the managerial elite who were marinated in the ideas of post-Marx culturalism, once called political correctness but now called woke. It is the totalitarian project to cleanse the world of whiteness by harnessing the power of the institutions, like a team of horses pulling the reformers.

Conservatism has no answer to this because conservatism was evolved to fix the bugs of the old progressive software. As a result, the Bush years were not spent addressing the cancer unleashed by the Clinton machine, but instead poured trillions of new dollars on federal agencies as they ramped up the cultural revolution. White people sensed things were getting worse as a result of the Bush presidency. The Obama years confirmed this and thus the populist revolt began with the 2010 election.

What white people in America faced in the 1970’s was a government that was terrible at the basics of government, but focused on righting the wrongs of the world. The antidote was conservatism that promised to reverse this. What white people face today is an army of antiwhite bigots running the centers of cultural production and protected by the federal government. They need a movement and party that promises to reverse all of this, but instead they get unfrozen caveman conservatives.

That is what you see on the debate stage at these debate shows. With the exception of Vivek Ramaswamy, who is a Trump catspaw, the rest are some versions of what you can see at the Reagan Museum. They skim over some of the cultural issues, but refuse to address the racial issues. If any of them noticed that there are no more white people in television ads, he would rocket up the polls. None of them mention these things because for all of them, the present is a foreign country.

Nature abhors a vacuum, which is why Trump exists. The system is lucky in that Trump is not very good at politics. A more skillful political animal with Trump’s instincts would be the Red Caesar the system fears. The inevitable failure of Trump to scratch the itch that has needed scratching for decades will not make the itch go away. It will simply lay the groundwork for a more skillful and more cynical version, because in the end no political system can survive making war on itself.

Liberal Intolerance

Posted on December 26, 2023 by thezman

There are certain assumptions about the world that modern people take for granted, without thinking about in any detail. These assumptions are about how things ought to be arranged in a modern society. Things like the rule of law and freedom of speech are just assumed to be social positives. Deliberate violations of these liberal principles are a sign that a society is in trouble or corrupt. No one ever wonders why this is the case as it is just part of the shared reality of modern life.

You see this in this essay by Paul Gottfried, which is a response to Canadian historian Ricardo Duchesne, who has taken Gottfried to task for his defense of the old bourgeois liberalism of the past. It is a good essay on the general topic of liberalism and whether or not it is to blame for the current crisis, but of interest here is the assertion that things like religious inclusiveness, individual freedom, and constitutional government are in of themselves good things and signs of progress.

Gottfried does not spend any time arguing these points, as he just assumes them to be good things that a good society ought to seek. This is not peculiar to Gottfried, as most everyone assumes the same thing. Go around a public area in the West and ask people if they favor more or less freedom and they will always pick the former. The same is true for the rest of the principles we associate with liberalism. The moral framework of the West is just assumed to be right and reasonable.

Now, we do not wonder about gravity or the sun rising in the east and setting in the west because these are settled. Few people know why objects fall to the earth when dropped and even fewer know that they accelerate toward the earth at thirty-two feet per second squared, but they know about gravity. Like the sun rising in the east, gravity is a settled matter, so there is no need to debate it. The same is generally assumed about the basic principles of liberal democracy.

What would go unnoticed is the inclusion of religious tolerance in there with reasonable things like individual liberty. Most of the liberal project can be justified, as much as possible, by reason. We can make logical arguments in favor of a rights-based society and limited government. You can make a rational argument in favor of parliamentary rule over a king or dictator. The same cannot be said for religious tolerance, which is something taken for granted, but never examined.

Western societies are moral societies. Instead of being bound together by kinship or force, as we see with most of the world, what holds Western people into political entitles is a common morality. Sure, blood, soil and history play a big role, but every European pollical entity has included significant minority populations. At the dawn of the French Revolution, most people in France did not share the same language. They spoke various local dialects, and in some areas, deferent languages.

This is even more true today as the elites of the West preach open borders, pluralism, and democracy as the holy trinity. The only way this can work is if all the new people agree to the old moral code or the moral code is adjusted to accommodate the new people coming into these old societies. The new speech and thought laws are all about policing the new moral code which prohibits the old stock from thinking anything but happy thoughts about the newcomers.

This is the basis for pluralism. Anyone can be an American if they embrace the American creed, which is a secular way of saying they can be an American if they embrace the religion of Americanism. Vivek Ramaswamy and Ben Shapiro have based their lives on this assertion. They are just as American as the descendants of Quakers or 19th century German immigrants. They say this because they embrace the religion of America and therefore meet the moral criteria to be American.

The problem here should be obvious. If Americanism is the moral code of America and by extension the West in general, and it insists on a general universality, then there can be no tolerance for alterative moral codes. Not only can American liberalism not tolerate alternative moral codes internally, but it must be intolerant of alternative moral codes external to the West. If you want to know why the West has waged war on Islam and now Eurasia, there is the answer.

The reason that Western societies now function like secular theocracies is liberalism has evolved into a religion. It has crowded out Christianity from the public square because no society can have more than one moral framework. Just as science replaced religious explanations for the natural world, liberalism has displaced the explicitly supernatural basis for societal morality with an esoteric moral code based vaguely on things like equality and openness.

What this means is that the assumption that religious tolerance is a liberal principle or could ever have been a liberal principle is false. The opposite is true. Liberalism must drive out or suppress any alternative moral framework, because it is the moral framework that evolved to replace the old moral order. That means it is not just intolerant or Christianity, but any morale framework that places itself above the morality of the liberal order. Everything must submit to the liberal faith.

The question, of course, is why has the liberal project that started at the end of the Middle Ages evolved into something like a secular Gnosticism? Gottfried looks for things outside of liberalism, like Protestantism, while Duchesne looks for things within the liberal tradition like pluralism. In both cases and in most critiques of liberalism the assumption is there is a worm in the apple. The apple being the liberal project and the worm being some sort of corruption.

In reality, the problem may simply lie in the fact that you cannot have a moral order based on reason. Reason cannot be the authority for how people ought to treat one another or how government should be organized. Reason can only take us to the point where the people need to sort these issues for themselves, because the great diversity of man means there is no universally right answer to these questions. How we ought to act is up to us or our gods.

When the gods are removed and tradition is discarded, something that must happen when all things are subjected to the acid wash of reason, there are no standards against which to measure moral claims. That leaves force as the determining factor, which means the moral order is decided by people who see it as their purpose to impose their sense of the moral order. Liberalism must end with a ruling class of secular clerics engaged in a never ending sermon.

Divorce Court

Posted on December 20, 2023 by thezman

Anyone who has been through a breakup, whether it was a personal or professional relationship, can probably think back and recall the moment when it felt like something changed in the relationship. Your mind went from one mode of thinking about the other party to another way of thinking about them. Maybe the change happened on the other side, and you noticed it, but could not quite explain it. Eventually this realization led to a change in how you viewed the relationship.

It is one of those weird things where you go from not thinking about some potential future, like a divorce or a business breakup, to contemplating it and then all of a sudden it feels like an inevitability. People who quit their jobs always quit in their mind before they quit the actual job. There is a period where you can tell they are no longer committed to their work, even though they go about it as usual. That person is going through that shift from one normal to another normal.

Such a thing happened to the American people in the 2020 elections when the results miraculously changed in the late hours. Millions of people went from thinking that such a thing could never happen in America to realizing that it was actually happening, to now accepting it as a part of the new normal. In a way, those people went through a divorce and on the other side was their idea of old America. They are now in an apartment, perhaps dating new America, while old America got the house.

The same sort of thing may be happening with this election. For a long time now, a few weirdos have been predicting a new round of shenanigans. This time the regime’s schemers would keep Trump off the ballot, rather than risk him overcoming the election schemes to win the general. Some even suggested that the GOP would collude with their friends across the aisle to get Trump jammed up legally to the point where the party would have no choice but to disqualify him.

Your typical middle-class white person, the real core of the Trump voting bloc, dismissed these claims, but now they watch as the system slowly wraps itself around Trump like an anaconda. He was just removed from the ballot in Colorado on the grounds that the judges think Hitler is under their beds. The ruling is a blend of bourgeois hysteria and ideological madness. There are cases like this in other states that will surely end the same way.

Spend time on social media and the MAGA crowd is sure that the Supreme Court will knock these cases down. After all, this is still America. The courts removing parties and candidates is something that happens in the third world or Russia. Like the man who still thinks things can be patched up with his wife, these people are not ready to contemplate the reality of the situation. Old America just moved in a black guy, while Trump supporters keep hope alive in the apartment.

As this process rolls along and the walls close in on Trump, the people still lighting candles for old America will slowly reach that inflexion point where they go from one phase to the next phase. Just as they have come to accept mass election fraud as a feature of the “system” they will come to accept that the system is itself a grotesque mockery of self-government. You get to vote for the regime stooge you like, as long as the permanent ruling party approves her.

This transition in the American divorce will depend upon who the regime decides will “win” the Republican nomination. The biggest of big liars are trying to sell the big lie that voters like Nikki Haley. You would think that these people would have learned by now that the big lie strategy ends poorly, but they persist. It is safe to assume that the majority of the people the GOP expects to vote in November despise Haley, so declaring her the winner will be interesting.

Alternatively, the party could “recruit” Glenn Youngkin, the Gomer Pyle-like governor of Virginia who got some positive media last year when he made pleasing noises about the rage heads peddling pornography in the schools. He is Mitt Romney without the magic underwear problem. The regime loves him. The neocons would get to run his foreign policy and his aw-shucks presentation would fool enough old white people to convince the regime it could work.

Regardless of who the party selects to be the figurehead, the people who vote Republican, especially those Trump loyalist, will enter into that phase where they come to terms with that which they thought was impossible. Not only do the Democrats play fast and loose with election laws, but the Republicans coordinate with them to rig their own nominating process. The last holdouts of old America will suddenly have to accept that old America is gone, and divorce is inevitable.

The phase change one experiences in a breakup happens both fast and slow, in that it feels like a switch has been thrown, but then there is a long slow aftermath. Once you realize the relationship cannot be repaired, there is the process of unwinding it, which is often quite ugly. A terrible truth of the human condition is that it feels good to hate, especially when you need someone to blame. White America’s divorce from old America will be as acrimonious and eventful as any divorce.

The difference here is that half the country is not going to pack up and move to another part of town. Instead, the number of people who accept that it is who is in charge is what matters, rather than how they rule, will continue to grow. The amount of noticing we see online is a great indicator of what is happening. There are things on social media that would not have been uttered in private a decade ago. Again, another sign that old America is never coming back.

Predicting the future is a mug’s game, but it is reasonable to think that in the long run 2024 will be thought of as the year when national divorce became real. An idea that kicked around the fringe suddenly entered the mainstream. One side, the people who want to live in orderly societies, will come to accept that there is no living with the people on the other side. Even if it is possible, they do not want to live with people who think this is normal. They want a divorce.

White Authority

Posted on December 19, 2023 by thezman

Was the founding generation of America full of white nationalists? This is a claim popular with some white nationalists. They argue that North America was settled by white people who set out to create a new society for white people and once they achieved independence from England, they created a white society. They will point to statements and actions that suggest that early Americans consciously and deliberately planned a society exclusively for white people.

Oddly, this is the exact same claim made by anti-whites in support of the demands for reparations and what they call “restorative justice.” The starting point for understanding the anti-white argument is their take on the social contract. They claim that because civilization was created by white men, it must have been created to serve the interest of white men, which must have come at the expense of non-whites. In other words, they agree with the white nationalists on this point.

Putting aside the claims by the anti-whites, which are all ex post facto arguments to support their current thirst for vengeance, are the white nationalist correct when they claim the Framers as their own? There is no disputing the fact that the European people of the 17th and 18th century had little interest in other races. They certainly did not think the races should mingle. They thought it perfectly normal to own human beings, so their views on equality were, at best, narrow and rhetorical.

The best argument in favor of the white nationalist claim about the intention of the Framers is the preamble to the constitution. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The word “posterity” is critical. Then as now, this word means future generations of the current people and the people who chose that word were white. They chose to capitalize it, which in that age was a form of emphasis. They were making clear to the people of the states that the point of the new government was to protect and promote the people and their descendants. The Naturalization Act of 1790, one of the first acts passed by the new government, drives home this point.

The problem here is that Congress repealed this five years later in favor of the Naturalization Act of 1795. They kept much of the original bill, but then three years later they modified it again with the Naturalization Act of 1798. More changes followed as Congress wrestled with how best to solve the main problem, which was the lack of human capital to exploit the country’s natural resources. 18th century America was rich in natural resources, but short of people.

In other words, the point of these acts was not to protect white people or keep out non-whites, but to manage the problem of how to bring in new settlers – and that is what was needed – but to do so without undermining the current population. Race and ethnicity were not the primary reason for these acts. In fact, the people of this age could not image what we think of as a multi-racial society. Such a thing not only did not exist, but at the time it could not exist. It was simply not a consideration.

That brings us to the main problem with this line of reasoning. The people of this time had different conceptions of race. This is not to say race is a social construct, but that the meaning of words change over time. For 18th century man, words like “white”, and “race” were used differently from today. For the Framers, white often meant English, while race meant ethnicity. Our modern idea of “white”, meaning broadly European, would have seemed strange to Thomas Jefferson.

Further, the concept of white nationalism would have puzzled the people of this age because it is a solution to a problem they could not imagine. If you went back in time and told them that millions of non-whites would be flowing into the country every year, they would have thought you were insane. The movement of millions of people, regardless of race, was inconceivable. There were only four million people in America when the Constitution was being debated.

Now, the white nationalist would no doubt argue that if the Framers could understand the problems that modern Americans face, they would certainly embrace the concept of white nationalism as a solution. There is no way to prove or disprove it, so it is merely a gratuitous assertion. It is fair to assume that the Framers assumed and expected, therefore would have wanted, the country to look like them in terms of race and religion, long after they were gone. They wanted this for their posterity.

There is a deeper issue at work here. Like the anti-whites who claim original sin as justification for their present behavior, the white nationalists pointing to the Framers are looking for a moral authority. They think that the Framers are unassailable, in moral terms, so if the Framers were white nationalists, then it follows that white nationalism is a moral good. What are you going to do? Take down the statues of the Framers and strike their names from the history books?

That aside, the mistake is to assume a person can be a moral authority. The Framers were not gods or God’s representatives. They were just men sorting through the challenges of their age with the knowledge of their age. They were not moral authorities then and they cannot be moral authorities now. The challenges of this age will need to be sorted by the men of this age. Their moral authority is simply their collective will to create a safe and prosperous society for their posterity.

Maybe white nationalism, however it is defined, is the right answer. Pinning white nationalist down on what the term means is not always easy, but maybe in there is the right answer for the plight of white people in North America. That will be determined as all such things are determined. Can it actually meet the challenge and are the trade-offs acceptable to the people adopting it? This is not a question for the dead, but for the white people living in the here and now.

Ukraine Intrigue

Posted on December 13, 2023 by thezman

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Determining what the regime is plotting is often a guessing game, as the regime has turned itself into the father of lies. The people in positions of authority lie even when the truth would serve their interests. As a result, we are left to look at what is going on around the regime, how various players are reacting, in order to guess at what may be happening inside the black box that is Washington. We just got a dose of that this week when Zelensky arrived rattling the tin cup.

Everything about the trip was weird, compared to what has been the norm regarding Ukraine over the last two years. His arrival was not met with a big ceremony and the media was not flooded with Ukrainian agit-prop. The closest we got on that score was a press release to C-level crazies in fringe media. Six months ago, these stories were regular features in regime media. Instead there were grim stories about Ukraine at a cross roads militarily and politically.

Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Zelensky was not invited to Washington, even though his trip was certainly arranged by the Kagan cult. They first had him show up in Argentina at the swearing in of their new ruler. Since he was in the neighborhood, he decided to swing by Washington just as the Biden administration is begging Congress for more money for Ukraine. This week is the last week to get a package passed as Congress goes on an extended break.

That is the other bit of weirdness. House Republicans suddenly grew a spine for the first time in generations and have refused to give Biden more money for Ukraine without getting significant concessions on immigration. In fact, they are holding up Israel money in the process, which is no doubt angering the usual suspects. The administration refuses to separate out Israel money from Ukraine money and the House refuses to consider a bill that combines the two.

The final bit of weirdness to the drama is they had Zelensky make the rounds in order to guilt Congress into relenting. The thing is, he only met with the Senate and reportedly the meeting did not go well. He did not meet with House members, presumably because they would be even more hostile. He closed his trip with what was expected to be a tongue bathing from Fox News zombie Brett Baier, but the producers gave Bair some real questions to ask, which ruined the effect.

Taken in total, it was a disaster for Zelensky. It is not just being cut off by Congress but the way it was done. He now has to go back to Kiev empty handed and with the impression that Washington no longer loves him. His main card in Ukrainian politics right now is he keeps the money flowing. If he is not keeping the money flowing and he is not on good terms with Washington, then what is his point? Why keep him around if all he does is strut around in gym clothes?

That may have been the point of this trip. Back in Kiev there is a power struggle between the Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces, Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, head of the secret police Kyrylo Budanov and Zelensky. Some generals are siding with Zelensky, and no one really knows where Budanov stands, but the bulk of the officer corps backs Zaluzhnyi. What really matters, of course, is which faction is backed by Washington and that is why this trip matters.

It is possible that the Kagan cult has determined that Zelensky is a liability, and they need to find a replacement. If it appears that Zelensky has fallen out of favor and that is slowing the flow of cash to Kiev, then there is a good chance that the anti-Zelensky factions will come together and topple the government. In this context, a military junta run by Zaluzhnyi makes some sense. He is on good terms with the Western war machine, and he has credibility with regards to conducting the war.

On the other hand, this may be a bit of 2-D chess. By now everyone in the White House has to know that Ukraine is lost. The question now is how to manage the endgame, especially in light of an election in eleven months. The last thing the regime wants is scenes of Russian tanks entering Ukrainian cities this summer. If the army overthrows Zelensky, the administration can claim the failure is due to Republicans cutting off funding which resulted in a coup and then collapse.

This sounds a bit farfetched, but keep in mind that Washington overthrew the Ukrainian government in 2014. Everyone in Kiev knows this. That is why stories like this one in a CIA front operation are important. The Kiev Post is not in Kiev. It is one of the many nodes of disinformation operated by the regime. Stories about a third coup in Kiev coming from such a source are intended to send a message. Zelensky’s palace could soon be the closing scenes of the movie Scarface.

One always has to consider ineptitude in these matters. It could simply be that the Biden people have poorly managed all of this and the botched trip to Washington was just one more self-own. Mike Johnson is as green as grass, so he is trying to earn some street cred by holding the line on Ukraine money. The Biden people handed him this gift of trying to tie Ukraine money to Israel money, so he is using this impasse to make pleasant noises about immigration.

Taken as a whole, the best we can say for certain is some elements of the regime are now moving into the endgame phase of project Ukraine. Whether or not they have internalized how this will end is hard to know, but clearly some elements are thinking about how to manage the inevitable defeat of Ukraine. Given the implacability of the Kagan cult, this suggests Zelensky brought the gift of palace intrigue to Washington, as the tribes duke it out over how to manage Ukraine.

In the end, none of it really matters. Moscow has ruled out negotiations with Kiev and is in no mood to do Washington any favors. For the Russians, Ukraine is one part of a larger war against the Global American Empire. That means they will continue to manage the Ukraine war in light of that larger conflict. The fate of Ukraine is no longer in the hands of Washington. Once important people in Kiev understand this, the war ends along with the current Kiev regime.

Belief And Democracy

Posted on December 12, 2023 by thezman

The willingness to accept something as true, without evidence to support it, is the essence of belief. Someone tells you something and you can either accept what is said as true or reject it, without having much to go on because people rarely layout factual cases for the things they say. Your buddy at the office tells you he heard layoffs are coming, but his only proof is where he heard it. You have to decide whether to accept what he says or reject it, based on other factors.

Belief is the thing at the center of religion, culture, and ideology. You grow up learning about Wotan and his wandering. You accept it as true, even though there is never any evidence to support the existence of Wotan. You became a communist because you learned about historical materialism, and it explained everything. You continue to celebrate Christmas, despite being a pagan communist, because you were told it is what your people do regardless of their religion.

Biologically, belief is assumed to be one of modern man’s oldest traits. Belief, which is often confused with religion, probably co-evolved with language. Taken together it allows for humans to pass along complex and abstract ideas from one place to another and one generation to another. You can read the Epic of Gilgamesh today, in your native language, and learn something about the people who produced it. The abstract concepts traveled over time and place to you.

To get a better sense of the power of belief, think about a race of humans that is devoid of belief so all claims must be backed by proof. Children grow up demanding proof of everything said by their parents. School children demand proof of every assertion made by their teachers. The boss of the corporation is required to prove that diversity is the company’s greatest strength. Humans would never have made it out of the trees without a willingness to believe what they are told.

Like most human traits, belief seems to operate on a spectrum. Everyone knows a gullible person who trusts everyone. Then you have the devout person who accepts everything about her particular religion. On the other hand, we have the skeptic who is willing to question claims that seem a bit over the top. This person is different from the cynic, who assumes everything is a lie. The bulk of people lie between the serious skeptic and the generally trusting.

Belief is probably why democracy ends in disaster. The point of democracy is to have policies that reflect the general will of the people. In theory this means figuring out what most people will accept. You cannot make everyone happy, even in a small group ordering in lunch, but you can make most people happy and those outliers happy enough so they do not revolt. In theory, democracy is ordering pizza for lunch because no one hates it and most people like it.

In reality, democracy quickly turns into a game of convincing the majority to go along with whatever benefits the few. If you and your conspirators can get fifty percent plus one to agree to your scheme, it will be very good for you. Of course, others have their schemes so that democracy quickly moves from understanding the will of the people to persuading the majority. In reality, democracy is ordering Chinese after having convinced the majority that it is the right choice.

That phrase “right choice” is critical. It is never about facts and reason, but about the morally correct choice. Democracy rests on the assertion that the morally correct choice is that which satisfies the needs and demands of most people. Therefore, the way to persuade someone is to convince them that the majority already believes whatever it is you are pitching. In practice, democracy is telling each person that everyone really wants Chinese, except those troublemakers in the pizza party.

This is where belief comes into the room. In such conditions, the true believer will always have an advantage over the skeptic and especially the cynic because the fanatic shares the language and thought processes of the typical believer. Since most people are generally willing to believe what is told to them, as long as the source has some trust capital, the fanatic shares with the typical person that willingness to believe, even if it is in the extreme. The fanatic speaks the common language.

The skeptic, on the other hand, lacks the ability to naturally communicate with the typical person because he questions what is asserted. The skeptic is not trafficking in alternative beliefs but in the lack of belief. This naturally means the audience willing to hear his questions is smaller than that of the fanatic. The cynic is trafficking in the denial of belief, so his market is the smallest. It is why the word cynic has a negative connotation in our democratic societies.

In the game of persuasion, the true believer starts with an enormous advantage because the majority is tuned to believe. There are enough skeptics to force the fanatics to make their case, but they get to make their case in moral terms, rather than factual ones, which is why they so often carry the day. Humans would rather do the morally right thing than the empirically right thing. This reality of the human condition is why democracy falls prey to fanatics and charlatans.

There is another piece to this. Humans in the main are believing machines so they will believe in something. This provides another advantage for the fanatic. In the absence of a better belief, the typical person will still listen to the fanatic, despite his many factual errors, until a better set of beliefs come along. Since the skeptic is never selling belief, but merely questioning it, he never reaps the rewards of his successful questioning of the fanatic. A new fanatic always steps into that breech.

It is why fanatics and charlatans have come to dominate Western countries. Since the Cold War, the West has embraced the idea of democracy, which has unleashed the fanatics and charlatans, who in turn promote democracy as the only moral choice, because it is the manure that fertilizes them. The death spiral of the West is the death spiral of every democracy. Without hard limits, the people will follow fanatics promising salvation until there is nothing left to save.

Justified Paranoia

Posted on December 11, 2023 by thezman

Note: Behind the green door I have a post about the wackiness of the real estate rackets, a post about the classic western High Noon, which is probably both overrated and underrated as a film. Then there is the Sunday podcast. You can sign up for a green door account at SubscribeStar or Substack.

If someone says something that is wrong or crazy about a topic in which you have no interest, you are most likely going to ignore them. Similarly, if the person saying these wacky things is someone you do not think has any credibility, you will not bother rebutting what they have to say. It is when someone says something incorrect or inaccurate about a topic you think is important that you respond. If you think that person has influence, you want to make sure to rebut them.

Politics in the age of the internet violates this rule as people engage with anonymous weirdos online over abstract topics all the time. There is an old meme where a guy is up late at night and his wife asks him why he is not in bed. He says, “There is a guy on the internet saying things I don’t like.” Most people are not like this, but the weirdness of this new thing depends on that reality at the start. You are not supposed to care about the words of anonymous weirdos.

That is the place to start with yet another example of the regime losing its mind over people holding the wrong opinion about the 2020 election. Here is a breakdown of the charges the Biden administration is bringing against Trump over the peaceful protests on January 6. The first thing to note is the prosecutor is using the crackpot idea of stochastic violence, which was cooked up by mentally unstable people on Twitter who thought mean tweets would cause them physical harm.

Note also that the core of the case against Trump here and in all of the January 6th persecutions is that the offenders are election denier. In many of these cases, the judge, as a part of the punishment, makes the accused say in open court that he now believes Biden won fair and square. You can be sure that the main goal of these charges against Trump is to get him to do the same. The regime and its volunteer army of toadies is obsessed with this idea.

The question is why? Since Trump came down the escalator these people have told us that Trump is a clown and his supporters are lunatics. If they genuinely believe it, then they should not care what they say. Granted, politics causes people to lose their minds, but the allegedly serious people in positions of power should not be going Daffy Duck over politics like they are a blue-haired harridans on Twitter. Yet it is important people in the regime that are berserk about this issue.

The other angle here is that if you think Biden won fair and square, then you have no reason to care about the fraud claims. Lots of far-left people swore Karl Rover rigged Ohio in 2004. They wrote books about it. No one took them seriously because their case was obvious nonsense, and they are nutters. Normal people spent five years laughing at the Russian collusion hoax for the same reason. In other words, normal people do not care about nutty claims from nutty people.

The most obvious and likely reason for this obsession by the regime and its toadies is that they think the election was rigged too. We have the hoary chestnut, “the laddie doth protest too much” for a reason. We suspect that when someone goes to great lengths to disprove an accusation that they are motivated by a fear that people will see that there is some truth in the accusation. The response should always be proportional to the accusation and the person making the accusation.

That means the root of all of this is the regime knows they went too far in the 2020 election they have now put the credibility of the system in question. They now feel the need to hunt down anyone who casts doubt on the results. This would also explain why you can still get banned from YouTube for mentioning this. Until Musk came along, Twitter was aggressively hunting down election skeptics. Three years on and the regime is still hunting people down for election skepticism.

This does not quite explain it all. By now they could have dropped it as we are deep into the next election. The trouble is, they are plotting to repeat the 2020 shenanigans, but this time they want to put Trump in jail in advance. If people were skeptical of the midnight vote counting the last time, they are going to see through any scheme to remove Trump from the ballot in 2024. Perhaps they think ending 2020 skepticism will somehow inoculate them this time.

A better answer or perhaps a companion answer is one that also explains the inappropriate response to January 6. Not only did the regime wildly overreact in the aftermath, but they have also been conducting what now looks like an elaborate coverup of wrongdoing before, during and after the event. These missing tapes have that Watergate feel to them. We could be in one of those times when the aluminum foil hat guys are the reasonable people in the room.

What explains January 6 and the kooky election denial stuff is the genuine fear that the system is far more fragile than the public knows. The people inside the black box that is Washington fear that they are sitting atop a house of cards. If the public really knew what they know, January 6 would be a day at the beach. The reason they are hunting down skeptics is they think any questioning of any aspect of the official narrative could cause the whole thing to unravel.

Another hoary chestnut that applies here is “just because you are paranoid it does not follow that no one is out to get you.” The people, including the election skeptics, may think the system is sound. It is the people running it. The people running it, however, may see it the exact opposite way. They may think they are fine, but the system itself is about to tip over and if it does, there will be hell to pay. That could be why they saw January 6 as something like Bloody Sunday.

Add to this that the people running the regime view themselves as revolutionaries in the line of the Jacobins and Bolsheviks. They were nursed on revolutionary talk and committed their lives to the slogans of the Left. They may run everything, but they still see themselves as plucky underdogs fighting the man. They know every revolution is a near run thing, so they are always in fear that their project will go sideways, and they will end up on the gallows or in the gulag.

In the end, what all this tells us is that the system and the people running it are probably not as stable as most want to believe. The system itself is no longer functioning as the users expect and the people running it are increasingly paranoid. The American political system is software that is full of bugs, run by a support staff that is shooting users who register complaints about the software. At some point you run out of users, or the users demand a new system.

The Night Of The Cobra

Posted on December 7, 2023 by thezman

The fourth and allegedly final Republican debate was held last night, featuring the final four contestants for the right to be the party nominee. The plot of these shows is to showcase the alternatives to Trump. The subtext is the not-so-secret plot by Washington to have the party remove Trump from the ballot, so one of these losers will get selected to fill the slot. What we have been getting instead is a fairly good example of systemic incompetence by the political class.

Last night’s show is a perfect example. To this point, Vivek Ramaswamy, the King Cobra, has been the glib youngster, making fun of the old squares on stage. He is glib and smart, but most importantly, he is plugged into the on-line criticism of the Republicans Party and official conservatism. He pithily says on stage what people say on Facebook and Twitter about the party. He has been the Hindu Muhammed Ali mocking the party at its own shows.

Last night was a perfect example of the staggering incompetence that has come to define not just the party by the political class. No one, including the moderator, was prepared for what the Cobra unleashed on the other three people. At the last debate he gave War Karen, Nikki Haley, the Sean Connery treatment. It was the story of the debate, but this time no one was prepared, so the Cobra rhetorically gave her a good paddling while she purred like a kitten,

The whole point of having War Karen on the stage was to make her the spokes-zombie of the Kagan Cult and thereby re-legitimize their madness as a feature of the Republican Party establishment. Instead, the Cobra has used her as a prop in his general critique of neoconservatism. Most Republican voters never heard the word “neocon” but now they know they are bad people. Like their other project, the War Karen scheme blew up in the neocon’s face.

Another character in this theater of the absurd is Fat Ann Coulter, Chris Christie, who sounds like every man’s ex-wife. His reason to exist in these shows was to be the fat loudmouth from New Jersey who could out-crude Trump, while repeating everything Ann Coulter posts about Trump on Twitter. He came into the show assuming he could fat guy bully the Cobra, but instead he got the Ned Beatty treatment. The only thing the Cobra did not do was make him squeal like a pig.

Where you really see the systemic incompetence is in the campaign of Ron “Bootsy” DeSantis, who was supposed to be Trump’s mini-me. Everything about his campaign has been terrible, because he made the decision to hand his campaign over to party hacks and Washington insiders. As a result, he has spent this year transitioning from the mouthy Italian from Florida into Mike Dukakis. He is so boring dust forms on your monitor whenever someone mentions him on-line.

Last night was a perfect example. DeSantis was programmed to attack Haley, who the dullards think is “surging in the polls.” This gave the green light to the Cobra to unleash his most furious attacks yet on the field and the party itself. His challenge to them to name a single providence in Ukraine, after they chanted the neocon lines about the war, was a thing of beauty. War Karen and Fat Ann Coulter were poleaxed, while Bootsy looked like he was about to poo himself.

The point here is this should never have been allowed to happen. A modestly competent party would have never allowed the Cobra on the stage, much less allowed him to eviscerate their candidates. Of course, even the Stupid Party would have turned Trump 2016 into an asset. The party of Reagan would have co-opted Trump and had him sign off on all of their pet projects. The modern party is run by girls and homosexuals so it is getting shredded by a call center supervisor.

To this point the Cobra has been an amusing warmup act to the big show featuring Trump as the main attraction in 2024. Until these last two debates it was inconceivable that the Cobra could win the nomination. His thorough humiliation of the other actors on the stage suggests anything is possible. Imagine the party eliminating Trump only to get out played by the Cobra at the convention. In a world run by increasingly stupid people, the safe bet is the dumbest idea you can imagine.

From the dissident perspective, we have to hope that Trump remembers why he had urinals installed at his villa in Florida and picks the Cobra to be his running mate after the first few primaries. This would be the ultimate mind rape of the Borg we call the mass media, and it would make for a great show. Trump would unleash some boomer jibes and the Cobra would amplify them with millennial online jargon. It would be like 4Chan became a pollical party and ran for office.

It is a terrible way to run an empire, but given the collection of sissies, entitled women and simpletons that is the alternative, having a collection of shit-posters run things will at least provide some laughs as we careen into the void. Otherwise, it means the collapse is managed by the same people who thought it was a good idea to promote a ball-shriveling shrew like War Karen as an alternative to Trump. Everyone will be praying for sweet death as the empire collapses.

Sadly, that is not the way to bet. There is a reason our literature is not filled with amusing tales of the end of prior empires. The end of the established order is never a good time for the people living it. Collapse is never fun, and the collapse of the American empire will be no exception. It will be War Karen, Fat Ann Coulter, and the rest until the men of the West have had enough, spit on their hands, raise the black flag and begin splitting throats.

Orphan Child

Posted on December 5, 2023 by thezman

After the Bay of Pigs debacle, John F. Kennedy supposedly said, “Success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan.” Whether or not he actually said it is unknown, but the expression has been with us ever since. Supposedly it was an updated version of the Tacitus line, “It is the singularly unfair peculiarity of war that the credit of success is claimed by all, while a disaster is attributed to one alone.” Kennedy was pithier but Tactus captures the truth of the matter.

We are seeing this with the Ukraine war. The news from the battlefields is uniformly bad for the Ukrainian army. The West is slowly coming to terms with the reality of the much publicized counter-offensive, which ended in disaster soon after it was launched, but the West spent the last few months in denial. Ukraine does not publish numbers as far as casualties, but independent guessing suggests they lost between seventy and one hundred thousand men in the counter-offensive.

As the overall condition of the Ukraine military comes into focus, the recriminations are beginning to turn up in Western media. This long story in the Washington Post is a good example of the general tone. Washington is looking to place the blame on the Ukrainians, while the Ukrainians are placing the blame on their Western backers or on one another as the situation warrants. Europe has yet to join the blame game, but in time they will no doubt blame the Ukrainians.

Another pithy expression that is useful regarding the Ukraine debacle is “You learn more from your failures than your successes.” Washington never learns from its failures, which is why they have the Ukraine debacle, but the rest of us can gain some insight into how our pollical leaders stumble into these disasters by looking at some of the major blunders in this war. How they managed to reach this point speaks to how they view the world and their role in it.

The first major blunder was getting into a land war with Russia. This is right up there with “Never getting into a land war in Asia” and the slightly less well-known “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” The Russians are bad at many things but when it comes to fighting a land war, they are exceptional. When they view the land war as an existential threat it quickly becomes a great patriotic war and the whole of Russia organizes to defeat the enemy.

This is what the West managed to do in what should have been a low-grade border conflict between Russia and Ukraine. The West made this into a game of the world against Russia and the Russians accepted the challenge. The sanctions regime was clearly intended to hurt average Russians, which made it easy for the Russian leadership to recast this conflict as this generations great patriotic war. That war is with the West, not just the Ukrainians.

The question is why did the West do this? The reason is they assumed Russia was too weak to fight an actual war. They came to this conclusion not based on observable facts but on the power of their own rhetoric. They kept saying that Russia was a “gas station masquerading as a country” so often that they believed it. Instead of looking at what was happening in Russia, the West told themselves appealing stories about what would happen if they blew hard enough on the Russian house of cards.

This gets to the second colossal error of the West. The Russians crossed into Ukraine with a force of about one hundred thousand men with the assumption the West would demand a peace meeting. They were not prepared for an actual war. Ukraine, on the other hand, had an army of over three hundred thousand regular army troops and another three hundred thousand reserves. Russia, the attacker, was outnumbered three-to-one one by Ukraine, the defender.

In the spring of 2022, the Ukrainians had a chance to smash the Russian army if they went on the offensive. It would have come at a price, but they could have pushed the Russian back into the Donbas and maybe out completely. Instead, the Ukrainians dug into defensive positions along the line of contact. This gave the Russians time to reorganize their lines into more defendable positions and begin the process of building a much larger force to take on the Ukrainians.

The reason Ukraine did this is they were repeatedly told by their Western backers that Russia could never sustain an army in the field for long. The best people ran to their favorite media outlets predicting an imminent Russian collapse. The intellectual everyone in the West considers a seer claimed early on that Russia would not just lose but disintegrate as a result of the war. The fact that Fukuyama has not been right about anything in his career has not lowered his status in the West.

Here again we see that the West blundered into a catastrophic mistake not because they misread the evidence but because they confused their own magical thinking about the world and their role in it with reality. People with what passes for impressive credentials in the managerial class spun fabulous tales about the imminent collapse of Russia and those tales became reality for the war machine. Meanwhile, the Russian army used this time to prepare for what we see happening now.

This brings up the third colossal error. Having figured out that Russia was not going to disintegrate in the face of what amounted to an internet cancel campaign, the West prepared Ukraine for a big arrow offensive. They conscripted close to one hundred thousand fresh troops, trained them in NATO tactics and supplied them with NATO weapons for the purpose to driving the Russians out of the Donbas. This was the great spring counter-offensive that kicked off in the summer.

In the early hours of the offensive, columns of Western armor barreled into the Russia outer defensive lines in the south with the aim of driving to the Sea of Azov. Instead, they bogged down in massive minefields. The mine clearing equipment provided by the West turned out to be useless for the task, so the armored columns were trapped in the minefields and obliterated by Russian artillery. A large area in the south is called Bradley Park because it is full of destroyed Bradley fighting vehicles.

It is impossible to overstate the failure here. The Ukrainians not only lost the entire army assembled for the task, but they stripped their lines in order to supplement this army on the expectation that it would smash through the Russian defenses and those reserves would then flood into the breech. Instead, these reserves were thrown into what was called a meatgrinder. Tens of thousands of Ukrainians were killed and maimed in order to capture one tiny village in the south.

What is even more stunning than the enormity of the failure is the fact that Western military planners were so slow to accept reality. Even as it was clear that the Russian defenses were too strong, General Milley was talking like it was just a matter of time before they collapsed and Ukraine rolled to victory. Even after thousands of videos appeared online of burning Western tanks, Western generals kept saying that things were on schedule for a glorious victory.

The result of this catastrophe is Ukraine no longer has offensive capabilities and is struggling to maintain its defensive positions in key areas. The massive losses of men and material cannot be replaced. Ukraine is running out of men to conscript for the war and the West is out of equipment to send them. This is why we are seeing reports in Western media talking about who is to blame. No one wants to be the father of what is going to be a collapse of Ukraine in 2024.

The theme throughout this two-year debacle is that the people making the decisions have substituted a preferred reality for actual reality. These are the type of people John Derbyshire once described in another context as those who are “awfully good at creating elaborate, plausible, and intellectually very challenging systems that do not, in fact, have any truth content.” For the last two years their version of reality has crashed into a reality that rests on the truth, not narrative.

The Ukraine debacle is a microcosm of what plagues the West. The people in charge are long on credentials that are meaningful only within the artificial reality that is the managerial class. The result is an echo chamber populated with credentialed idiots who compete with one another to produce the most pleasing sounding narrative to describe what they imagine lies outside their reality. They live in a simulation but seek to impose what they experience on the world around them.

These are the same people now operating the court system based on their paranoid fantasies about invisible enemies and staffing the air traffic control system to match their image of the inclusive society. What lies ahead for the West is what we are seeing in Ukraine which is the fantasies of a delusional and deranged ruling class smashing into the reality of the world, all paid for by the common man. Reality is that thing that does not go away when you stop believing in it.

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